The Folded World

by Amity Gaige

  Then he had gotten out of bed and showered and shaved and went to the concrete high school at which he taught English. And he took many rights and many lefts to get there, and he ceded many rights-of-way, and he taught as he was supposed to, and read essays by students who wrote as they were supposed to, and he would’ve killed himself that afternoon, that very day, in the teacher’s lounge, with a penknife across the throat, if the kid hadn’t come up to him in the hallway.

  Excuse me, the boy had said. I’m in your fifth period. I was wondering … Could I show you something?

  The boy was a wrestler, the star of the team, and the red hood of his team sweatshirt formed a red corona behind his plainly handsome face. He had wide, saucer-sized hands, with which he touched his teacher’s arm with surprising gentleness.

  I’ve been writing … he said, haltingly … poems. Like we read in class. Will you tell me if they’re any good?

  He drew his fingertips across his black sketchbook and opened it. Underneath his fingers were drawings of thunderclouds and shadows, done neatly with a pencil, and short axiomatic poems written in the tiniest lettering:

  “Poetry is directions on the box of your thinking.”

  The poet stared at the book. And there, with the boy, the rest of the students draining into their classrooms, he became wild with happiness. What a mistake it would have been to kill himself in the teacher’s lounge, simply because he had broken up with a wonderful girl and wrote sane poetry, when boys like this would keep coming, keep bearing him up from below, just as perhaps when he was young and beautiful somebody had been borne up by him. Was he not, after all, the boy’s teacher?

  Yes yes, he had said to the boy, laughing. They are good.

  The boy looked up at him with his handsome look. Should I make corrections?

  No! shouted the poet, his voice echoing in the empty hall. Don’t make any corrections, dammit. Just write. When you’re my age, you can make corrections.

  Laughing, he grabbed the boy’s elbow, this boy much larger and stronger, and drew him over to the light and wrote down a list of poets for the boy to read and study. He was ecstatic. He pressed the piece of paper to the boy’s cottony chest and the boy took it and looked at it, and the poet could perceive the curves of a smile on his lips. He would tutor the boy. He would read anything the boy wrote.

  Just don’t make corrections and don’t worry what they’ll think of you, he told the boy in confidence. It doesn’t matter what they think of you. Prepare to be misunderstood.

  The boy nodded and walked away.

  Several months later, the boy had a nervous breakdown.

  The news was all over school. He was in a psychiatric hospital. He was nuts. The state championship would be lost. No one could believe it. No one but the schoolteacher, gasping for air in the teacher’s lounge.

  Now, he coughed and sat up in his chair. The couple had progressed to throwing things. It was upsetting. He could hear the man yelling, and the woman yelling back and then pleading, like a child. Something heavy (a chair?) fell onto the floor.

  He arose. He cleared his throat. He went to his apartment door and opened it and stood in the hallway. From there he could hear their shouting more clearly. Paint me a picture, why don’t you! He climbed a stair, the voices dropping again, then rising: Don’t! Don’t say that! He hoped they would stop soon so that he wouldn’t have to do anything like call the police. It wasn’t his business. It wasn’t his fault they got married to each other. Look, he hadn’t gotten married because of exactly this sort of crap. He had spared the world his graceless venture.

  Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage—he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher—he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation.

  Just then, the door to the second-floor apartment flew open and the husband came thundering down the stair. Pulling on his coat as he came, he almost collided with the poet in the darkness of the foyer. They stared at one another for one moment. Mumbling an apology, the husband pushed through the front door. It slammed behind him. The sound reverberated in the hallway.

  The poet turned. The wife was standing at the top of the stairs, watching. Her shining, dark hair was mussed, and she held a glass globe in her hand, as if just having used it to defend herself.

  “Are you—” said the poet.

  She stared at the closed front door behind him. Absently, she touched her finger to her lip and looked at it.

  He cleared his throat. “Are you all right?”

  The young wife blinked slowly. She tamped her hair back with the hand that held the glass globe. It glistened and snowed in her hand.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not all right.”

  And then, without another word, she disappeared back into her apartment.

  Well, thought the poet. So that’s that?

  He liked the couple. He didn’t have anything against them. He didn’t even mind dreaming about them. He would continue to watch her through the peephole, and to dream of long conversations they would not have together. Surely they would work it out between them somehow. For there had to be some upshot, didn’t there? There had to be some persuasive reasons to fall in love, or else nobody would do it. Surely love had to hold some secret wonders that he himself was not gifted to see. Perhaps he himself was not desperate enough to find the wonders. Perhaps he himself lacked the gift or the madness or the talent. But if no one could find the way, and we all began to die alone, our brittle, discrete worlds dying with us, surely love itself would have to take pity on someone—one last survivor, one remaining prophet, false or true, to go forth into the next civilization with these rumors of paradise.

  She is waiting and she has the knife. She is waiting and the knife is here. The knife is waiting. The knife is her wife. The knife is a life. The knife is a slice of light. Turn it this way, turn it that. You can make a rhyme out of it. You can sing it in a round. You can marry metal. You can marry earth. You can make a rhyme out of it. There is reason inside it somewhere. You can knock and no one comes to the door; you can stand there not knocking and someone comes. You can be—as she has been—invited. (She stopped and hesitated, for sometimes her thoughts burst apart like a field of quail at a gunshot, the quail taking even bits of the field with them, the field which was her mind falling to puzzle pieces with the gunshot.) Because what she wondered now was, Can you be disinvited? Can you disinvite yourself? Can you refuse to make a rhyme out of it? Does the universe get mad at you? If you change direction? If—like a bird in the sky that tacks sharply away for no known reason—you change your mind? She knew the universe to be wrathful (night is only a cover for the witchhunt). There is a strict order. You can only fall into it. You can fall out of it, but it will still be there and will always be. Just as you can tumble out of your crib but you’ll still be a baby. You can tumble out of your coffin but you’ll still be a corpse. You can say “that’s not my coffin!” but they’ll bury you in it anyway. Blind, unhappy men read books in every doorway. You want to tell them, You might as well go along with it. Be the baby or t
he corpse or blind like you are. You might as well accept the invitation.

  So you understand! You understand! cried the nighttime. Will you obey?

  She was lying on her new bed. Well not on her bed but on the floor next to her new high bed. She knew it was time for sleeping but since she was not asleep she made the gesture of lying on the floor. She was trying very hard. She was a Hard Worker. She had Good Intentions.

  She’d been invited to take up the knife. She was asked to take the knife and wait, there in the dark, like a burglar in her own house. She felt flattered to have an invitation, but beyond that.… The ink runs in her mind. She is Good. She has Good Intentions. But beyond those the ink runs. You can make a round out of it. How do others take actions and how do they reply to invitations? She was not used to watching civilizations. She did once have a friend Bethany and was invited to the lake with Bethany for a week and she said yes and it was a success—logs and bogs and singing in a round and those round rubber rafts you drift down rivers in. She had said yes, then, even though she was scared. But had she ever been invited and said no?

  She sat up, feeling suddenly nauseous, spinning, enclosed. She heard footsteps crunching outside. Was it him? She got all excited until she remembered the knife. She picked it up and held it in front of her pointing out. He was not going to like it. She knew the knife was not good for him. But it was his. It was special like he was.

  She listened—nothing.

  Nothing but, So you understand!

  No, she could not remember ever saying no. Maybe no thank you, as in no ketchup thank you. But not ever when she was commanded. Not when it mattered. All anyone ever had to do was get mad and she would say yes, yes! And the universe was furious now. Maybe if God had just once asserted His or Her gentle existence over the course of the evil of her life, she would not fall to pieces whenever somebody raised his voice:

  Will you obey?

  A soft knock at the door.

  She sucked in her breath.

  The witchhunt has begun!

  Opal? his voice was strangely slurry. You there?

  A soft knock at the door.

  You can make a round of it.

  You can marry a knife. You can marry earth.

  You can marry a ghost too but with whom as your witness?

  She was dallying. She was wasting time!

  Sparks flew all around; time was afire.

  Will you obey?

  She gripped the knife hard with soldier-like zest. She rose to her knees.

  A soft knock at the door.

  Opal?

  And suddenly, her body rigid, she understood that she was going to change the universe. She was going to yank the universe inside out like a shirt. She would NOT rise from the floor. She would say NO. She would NOT accept, as she should have done years ago, the concrete cast still wet. NO! she might have said. No, no, no. Don’t!

  The disappointed knife clattered to the linoleum.

  Speak for yourself, she said to the knife. Do it yourself if it matters so much.

  She collapsed to the floor.

  She was glad. She knew the universe was right there, waiting with its greasy brown lunch bag of punishments. Once he left, she would be alone with it. The hot opened mouth. But she didn’t care.

  That’s right, you heard me! she hissed. I said no dammit!

  After a moment, she got up, remembering, and ran to the window. She parted the curtain.

  No one.

  No—there. There was someone. Staggering away. Look at him! So skinny and without a coat on. Walking in a zigzag as if fate were still fighting over him.

  He struck the door again.

  “Open the door!” Charlie cried, his voice breaking. “Open the door!”

  He felt no pain, but the butt of his left fist had blood on it. He listened, tilting over on his toes.

  Suddenly he was on his hands and knees, staring at concrete.

  The intricacy of concrete! The most solid thing made out of the littlest pieces. Shattered glass. Rock. Horsehair. Colored sugar. Broken pencils. Irregular verbs. He spread his hands across the rough surface of the concrete. He realized he was now kneeling upon it like a penitent. Was he praying? Or had he dropped something? Was that why he was down there, examining the concrete? He raised his head. Through his damp parted hair he saw a door. Still shut. He hiccupped. Was he having an idea? Was he trying to peer through the mail slot? Because that was a good idea! Still on his hands and knees, Charlie raised one arm to the mail slot. But this disturbed a certain balance, and he fell forward softly upon a hairy, flat thing.

  “Wel-come,” Charlie read aloud.

  He rolled over onto his back.

  “Why, thank you,” he said.

  Was everything more true or less true when you were drunk and lying on a sidewalk? For now the stars were twinkling, but they did so out of order, and they signified nothing. The night sky was meaningless, Charlie decided. Completely without meaning.

  “Wallpaper the whole damn thing,” he advised God.

  Some time later, he woke up. He did not know how much later it was. It could have been seconds. He did not know how he had gotten from wherever he was before to here. The wind was picking up in the trees and vermin crashed in the underbrush and he was staring at the multitudes of grasses, the vast gathered masses trying to see the felled giant. He turned onto his side. Again and again, he felt liquid running up and out of him. He was malfunctioning. He was felled. The force of his gut expelling was so great that it busted something in his eyes. He gripped the grass, trying only to survive. He didn’t want to die here. He wanted to die, just not right here. He opened his mouth and gagged, but only sour bubbles came up.

  Someone had him by the collar now.

  “Don’t,” he said to the figure in the darkness, “—touch me.”

  He wanted to tell the person that he was going to die after this so could he just please wait? He wanted to tell the person he thought his neck was broken and don’t touch him because did he want to accidentally end up with manslaughter charges? He wanted to say, Don’t waste your crimes on me, Buddy. I’m already going. I’m going willingly.

  “Good God, Charlie,” the figure was whispering.

  He felt the cottony brush of cloth on his face. A hairy breastbone loomed overhead, exposed by an open robe.

  “How the hell did you get here?”

  Charlie reached up, fingered the robe.

  “Dad?” he whispered.

  All went completely black.

  The pain was astonishing. It was a killing cramp. A cramp that began just under her ribs, in her seed, where she was born. The pain parted her lips. Her fists loosened. She felt her ribs split and bloom open like a fruit. Frozen, her back arched, she was now completely submissive to the pain. It was something like a rape. The rape of oneself by death.

  How fitting, the grandmother thought, for death to enter into one sexually. Eighty-nine years old and sex a distant memory. The touch of her husband had once made her radiate like this. The windows blew open. The larks on the wallpaper flew out into the night crying. Next, though it did not seem possible, the vice tightened.

  “Luddy!” she cried out at last, unable to bear it. “Luduina!”

  But even as she cried out, the grandmother knew she would not be heard. Her daughter was asleep with her eye mask and cucumber cream down the hall. The old woman would have to die alone. In the middle of the night. In the middle of the island of her bed. At the end of the twentieth century. Yes, it was all coming due, converging, her own death the only one she had not troubled to envision.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  Wait, she thought. But what had they done to him? To Charlie?

  She struggled to sit up, but lacking the strength, only fell back.

  Where was Charlie? Was he alive? Or was he, just moments ahead of her, flying to God? Charlie. Her first grandson, her spiritual and eternal favorite. The world’s most beautiful child—if beauty is measured by the relief it brin
gs—with fine golden hair and a pure face like an open aperture, Charlie running in between tomato vines, the child who had healed her of her widowhood. The curse of her life was that she had spent so much of it with his death, knowing he would die, die so horribly, so unnaturally, and young, she had seen his cut body. She had waded in the bloody grasses. She knew this. How long and how silently and shamefully she had known this! Sitting in church, clutching her purse, she only hoped that her thoughts were not transparent, with Luddy singing beside her, happy and young and muscular.

  She had seen him buried in the garden, she had smelled a violence in the air that winter, presaged with the first frost. But now, dying herself, it seemed not to be; it seemed some great reversal had taken place, some merciful, mysterious bowing out, some unhappening …

  The wallpaper larks, impatient for her, had returned and perched on the sill. The whole cosmos was still.

  Could a man turn about his own fate, that enormous ship coasting into port with its engine off? She loved him dearly, but knew not even he had the talent. So?

  Well?

  Did the cosmos have an explanation for her?

  She listened. All she could hear was someone slathering honey on her toast in a distant country. The grandmother paused there, hanging from death by a silken thread knotted to her sternum. There, arms out-flung, she smiled.

  Fool, she thought. What did you know? For you are dying. Nobody’s dying but you!

  Hurry, she thought, Hurry!

  She rejoiced. She wanted very much to step into the straightforwardness of death. She was relieved to let go of the folly of being. She was, at last, relieved of her dark talent. For death was the teacher, the defrocker, the eraser, and would ask of one at the last—of course—that single, remaining conviction, the thing one is so convinced of that one does not recognize it as completely arguable—all this so that she could stride out to God lacking all assumption. She could go to Him now with a face like a sky, never having heard of Him, His newborn baby.