Water with berries in it; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov’d thee,
And showed thee all the qualities of the isle …”
Claire,
If Crusoe could give bread and milk to Friday, why would he who read to me take nothing? As if, through his refusal, he meant to starve us both—not of food but of something else I couldn’t name. Each time the bread or chocolate went untouched, a feeling surged in me that said he could vanish any time, even in mid-sentence, leaving me suddenly alone. No trace of him anywhere. With one ear I listened to his words and with the other to their threatened absence. I trusted nothing. Could absence and silence themselves be forms of hatred? I was a knife sharpening myself against that question. And then I came to wonder (though I wondered this in different words, since I was 9) is there something in the mind that needs to starve and wants to, that craves only famine and extinction?
And still I picked up each scrap or note he sometimes dropped, secret pages, maybe, he’d meant to keep only to himself. Slept with them under my pillow, then locked them in my secret box—:
“What was I? When I looked around I saw none like me. Was I, then, a monster? I cannot describe to you the agony I felt at these reflections. I tried to dispel them but sorrow only increased with knowledge.”
“Of what strange nature is knowledge! Once it seizes the mind it clings to it like lichen on a rock.”
“Under your friend’s careful tending, you slowly recovered. ‘You’ll be well soon, Victor,’ he whispered, his hand on your forehead as you woke. But who would say such things to me?”
“I cleaned and bandaged the wound I had received.”
All this in that large, awkward hand, as if written with a mud-tipped stick—
But William, does progress exist? We use the word but naming doesn’t make it exist— There are so many deformities inside each seeming freedom—I keep thinking of your description of prison, the straw mat for sleeping, the ‘detestable uniformity’ of the hours. What it was like to have no books, no pen, no paper-Underneath the water I thought I would feel the end of perplexity and disorder, but I was wrong. I felt them to the very end. And after they fished me out I felt them too but with less anger. I understood they stay the way rocks and grass and planets stay—Our human selves the things that leave—Our smallness. Why should mystery and disorder bend beneath our narrow will?—I’ve wanted to believe the human mind can be freed—but what would that mean? You worry over the ambiguities in my unfinished novel, think I would have resolved them if I’d lived—But I think they’d be there even so. In my mind, in anyone’s, so many barriers and faults of understanding—My hands so cold—Everything unfinished always—White X on a door—Faces at the barricades—The storming—
Claire,
All those words but I felt I was starving. Nights I dreamed of cattle so thin their ribs were butchers’ blades, their knees brittle twigs. Voices cut from their throats. They were stumbling through mounds of snow. Yet there were handsome bridges in Kue-lin-fu. Love made laws. Count Waldstein read Caroline’s letters and Crusoe offered bread and milk to Friday. In Kinsay one could find the most fragrant white-fleshed pears. Each day so many stories, so many words … so wasn’t I a hunger being filled? The only time I’d ever glimpsed him he looked so big and ample. Yet more and more I pictured withered limbs, sallow skin, his back hunched and fragile, eyes dully fading while his reading-voice grew plump—as if that voice were feeding off his sight, draining it as flames use air. I believed there was something starved inside his mind (but what could I know of his mind?)—Wasn’t he starving himself as well as me, willfully and cruelly? And yet could tenderness still dwell within a cruelty? Of course I couldn’t know his mind … my own more blindfold than anything, a knot tightening as I slept. I’d think, if he would just take my bread or chocolate, if he would come out again, just once … But then the cattle would come back and I knew he wouldn’t. I went to the graveyard every day, waited for his voice. The air between us burning—
Then one day I came upon her mother’s book, Maria.
(the deepest convictions of mind are cold, the deepest contradictions)
Wiped off the grime, opened it just like the others, pried apart the stuck pages.
All the while the girl waiting on the other side of the bushes.
(I don’t want to think about this now. Why must I think about it now?)
Looking down at her mother’s pages, my eyes, by chance, landed on these words:
“Treated like a creature of another species, I began to envy and at length to hate.”
I read them only to myself. Read further:
“the very air I breathed tainted with scorn.”
Then:
“I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature. I had no one to love me. I was an egg dropped on the sand. I belonged to nobody, despised since my birth.”
And:
“To be cut off from human converse was to wander a ghost among the living.”
I felt she knew me, but how could she know me? I was reading the words of a dead woman
(My hands so cold—the barricades—the storming—)
but suddenly I had no tongue to speak them. The air turned hot and swelled and filled with waves. My skin breaking into curving, beating waves.
(William, there are so many deformities … and walls to tear down and where is my writing desk, my …)
The girl still waiting. The plain intactness of her face. Her eyes. Slow pull of the river. The graves.
I knew she expected me to read, but how could I read? I had no voice, could think only of her mother’s book and the detested creature. The more I tried not to think the more I thought. Of your horror of me, how it feels to be hated. That night I dreamed I was in an old, abandoned garden. A vine-covered trellis stood about three feet away. I could see her on the other side, a large white bandage over her mouth, her eyes bandaged also. I started to read but when I opened my mouth a stream of blood came out. Then I was walking in an ice-field. There was no sign of anything alive. Why can’t I at least see a mirage, I wondered, would that be so hard? I felt your eyes on me though I couldn’t see you. I tried to give you the bloody handkerchief I’d used for my mouth, but when I reached into my pocket it was gone.
She came and waited the next day, and a few days after that. But I read nothing, or rather, read silently and only to myself, words distant planets on the page.
Can thoughts build and stab themselves at once? My mind frightened me—thoughts of you, of how I’d lived and what I was.
And she—she was still waiting—ignorant, protected.
My throat an ugly flower poisonous to the touch. I couldn’t heal its torn stem, its clenched, red blossom.
William I can’t see you anymore—Am I at home have I just had a daughter?— My limbs are heavy, it’s dark, I’m walking through a London street I’m stealing whatever I can—bread, books, jewelry, money. I feel such hatred and I don’t know why. I hide in an alley with my books near the hospital where the doctors are experimenting on the poor—You’ll finish my sentences, you’ll—Something monstrous in me. I crouch in rags—In the poorhouse the women are mocked for the smell of their dirty linen—My body no longer female nor male my limbs large somehow, awkward—No law governs what I am—I’m nameless you can’t find me. I watch your walls from outside, always from outside, snow falls on me, a girl drowns herself in a well, a dog overturns a garbage can, I’m stealing whatever I can—My skin a covenant of what?—But I have no body, and skin is alien, opaque, un-meaning. A form of misunderstanding only— Why do we need to despise? What is it in us that has no country?
Claire,
Of course one day his voice stopped as I’d feared. Suddenly, without explanation. After a while I didn’t wait for him. I’d sit in my room, pick up a book, read from it out loud, imagining I was him: “Meng Tian is credited with the intro
duction of the Chinese brush pen, which is made of sable, fox, or rabbit hairs, set in a bamboo holder. He died in 209 B.C. and is worshipped on his birthday by pen-makers.” Or: “If rubbed on the lips and tongue Chinese ink is considered a good remedy for fits and convulsions.” But all the while something in me hardened. As if each word contained a harsher, stricter word-braver, unforgiving, more alert. Keener, cold. Each word isolate at its core like him, mysterious, unknown like him, making chains all over me like him. I sat at my desk writing lists: cleft, strike, copper, kindness, carry. Heard the sounds strike themselves, strike air. (And yet when I’d glimpsed him I’d wanted to touch him, he’d seemed a hurt presence, ashamed.) All I had left were scraps of paper. Sometimes I imagined him at my window, just standing there watching—wanting what? But I knew I was ignorant, mistrusted everything I thought—
William, Do you think you can see me?—You read my words, annotate the text of my unfinished novel, write your book about our years together and the years of my life before you knew me—I can’t feel my arms, don’t know if I even have a body—One daughter will take laudanum in a rented room. No one will know who she is or even claim the body—I called her the barrier-child—You call me “incomparable,” write that I was “affectionate and compliant to the last, not tormented by useless contradiction.” But isn’t everything contradiction in one way or another? Facts are merciless—My ignorance as real to me as anything— The barrier-skin of the body, charged pathways of the brain in which we are hidden even from ourselves. I can’t tell you why the word “destroy” keeps rising in my mind, or what was in my silence when you asked what I wanted for our child—I scrawl a white X on my shoulder, stand in the poorhouse smelling of urine and old food, I lie in the hospital where the doctors are experimenting on the poor, they come near me, it’s my turn—A mind can’t look at itself, not really—Words in the wind. Rebellion. Trespass. Consequence. Disorder.
I touched my fingers to my lips to wipe away the blood, that taste of iron and salt, but each time my hand showed nothing.
One day she was no longer there.
Bandages in the air around me. Voice on the edge of Vanished. Reason’s shore.
Rough husks of lungs and yet they flowered. Monstrous. Harmed.
I didn’t know if I lay there for weeks or was it longer? I kept touching my mouth, my bloody mouth, but each time no sign of blood.
Where was she? What was she thinking?
And then one day a voice again, not mine—sharp needle through the fever carrying its single thread:
William, A storm of pages—I’m revising as fast as I can—Words spill in the margins some upside down some sideways no top or bottom anymore, the words all wrong anyway—I should keep the strike-outs but not the words—signs of annihilation—signs of needing to try again yet again—Everything’s taken away and this tracelessness in me, this not-quite-rightness—Something in me too quiet too apart—Something that hates though it doesn’t know why, feels alone though it doesn’t know why—Something harming and harmed—Once we lay so close I could taste your breath, the smell of you all over me but we are taken away even from ourselves, especially from ourselves—Inchoate—Cold—These fractured instances of what I was—
That voice. But not the child, Mary’s, voice.
My skin as if belonging to another. Wavery. Hot. The air by turns yellow, sallow green, a bluish-red. Steely, impersonal, cold, moving in and out of the lungs. Something very patient and cold inside me also.
Fever-tree, I thought, then fever-grass, fever-trap, fever-fire, fever-cooling, fever-dream.
I remembered what Aristotle said, that a chain of words would lead to the word you’re trying to remember: milk to white, white to mist, mist to moist and finally moist will lead to fall, season of mists and light rain you were trying to arrive at.
But nothing in me moved in a chain. There were bandages and x’s, pebbles, barricades, must go into the air. There was “despised,” bread, your name, walls, stealing, slaves, the poor.
Aristotle used the word soul. When affection “is implanted in the soul memory exists.” I knew I couldn’t use that word, couldn’t find a chain of words to get there.
Recollection, he said, is a form of investigation.
The air turned yellow again, then white, then the sour orange color of my skin. All the while that salt taste on my lips. No voice in me. Taste of broken words, of wrongness.
Claire,
Who could I tell? Each day his voicelessness grew louder, built in me a coarse, deserted city. After a while I wanted only to flee—not to some far, exotic sea but to a place so drearily inland no one would go there. Some flat heath with spiky grass and rock. Once, in the middle of the night, I imagined he sent me a letter: “My dear Child, I betrayed you by not keeping my distance, and so in ways you cant understand, though maybe even now you sense them, I harmed you with my proximity, the monstrousness of what I am. I took something from you, twisted and scarred something in you. I never should have let you hear my voice. You’ll never hear it again. Not once. Not ever. This I can promise. I ask neither for your pity nor forgiveness, and understand you may come to abhor me. Maybe you’ve abhorred me all along. I intend that no one will ever catch sight of me or hear from me again. In sorrow and with the plain, cold will of one who knows what must be done, and maybe also with remorse, I leave you.”
Why couldn’t I read even to myself?
The words from her mother’s book still reeled inside me: “hide my head,” “shall not,” “detested creature.” “Shut out from humanity,” “the severity of my fate,” “branded with shame,” “how could I be such a monster?”
Every now and then her bandaged mouth and eyes. Sky full of clouds, of voicelessness.
No chains of meaning in me.
Sometimes numbers marched, rigid soldiers, through my brain: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, then I’d start the same sequence again.
Leafy branches all around me but I saw a desolate shore.
Aristotle said remembering the future isn’t possible. I didn’t know.
Once a hand resembling hers but older seemed to leave a trail of ink across a page.
Aristotle said no one could say he’s remembering the present since at that moment it’s complete within him. But was this so?
Bandages. Salt. Voicelessness. Precipices. Seas.
The fever wasn’t florid or flowery, not gaudy or dramatic as I might have supposed. Instead, it was austere, almost modest in its ardor, stripped.
Claire,
Then we moved, remember? Father found the house on the corner of Skinner Street, on Snow Hill. You liked it there. But all I could think of was how far it was from the graveyard, and even though I’d stopped going I never stopped wondering if one day he might change his mind, read to me again, maybe even show his face, not shun me. I’d go over the letter he sent (the one I made up in the night) thinking about proximity, monstrousness, harm, forgiveness, all those words knotted up inside me, a knot I couldn’t undo. Why did it have to be that way? My mother had written “misery wanders in hideous forms over the earth,” yet her portrait on the wall looked mostly gentle, benevolent, undisturbed—and I’d sensed a gentleness in him even as parts of me recoiled. Even as, sometimes, I thought of hurting him, making him suffer for reasons I didn’t understand. Sometimes I wondered if I wanted to hurt him because he was alone, that I was tempted to try my hand against a lonely, breathing being no one loved. But I knew no single explanation would ever be quite right. It was like standing out in a storm and the storm is everything at once—bright and dark, violent and calm, fractured and intact. Our new neighborhood was filled with butchers’ shops, booksellers, prisons—the oddest combinations. (Remember the huge crowds gathering for the public hangings?) Flies in the cattle market, the fetid stench in summer. And still his apology echoed in my head, if it was an apology, or was it a way to be rid of me, vanish from my life forever, and in vanishing make me always remember. More and more my memory felt like a kind of o
perating theater, or the butchers’ shops I passed each day, their deliberate, wet dissections. Blood on the butchers’ blades. Shining knobs of leg-joints, gristle, bone.
I walk around for hours, try not to think of her.
I pass: ALLEN’S ALLEY VIDEO (WE RENT AND SELL), TOWER RECORDS, J&R MUSIC WORLD, FANELLI ANTIQUE TIMEPIECES, TRUE VALUE HARDWARE, MERCHANTS BAG & PAPER, DEGAMBA PAINT REMOVAL, AMERICAN SELF STORAGE, UBS BANK, ICON PARKING, EXPERT DATA RECOVERY, CAMERA LAND, DUANE READE.
A man stands unmoving on the corner even when the light shifts, Everything Will Be-Taken. Away stenciled in henna on his forehead.
Laurie Sheck Page 31