The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  Now she is again vivid and present, so fully formed I could walk over and actually touch her if only I could muster the willpower to move. We are at the bottom of an ocean or maybe the moon, because the space is dark and heavy, the sand or surface is chalky-looking and grey, and in front of me is what I took at first to be an astronaut. It is Rachel Carson, without her shaman disguise this time, like an astronaut in her old diver’s suit. It is loud with bees, she is humming and nodding along to the bees but I can’t see where the bee noise comes from until I get near to her and realise that I have found the bees: they are inside the fish bowl of her diving suit.

  Her voice has a new strange quality to it, as though it were song. It was always her voice in many guises, many mouths to help carry it along. Many layers all at once instead of one pulse. How do I explain it? As though the air moves with it, as though when she speaks the trees rustle and a hundred birds sing with her and the air blows leaves across the room, only the windows are shut and everything is still, no pages rustle on the desk, but I feel it in my temples, this vibration. She was a witness for them and they now a witness for her, reanimating her. Like her bees, tiny mouths in unison. And if it comes from inside my head, her thoughts, my thoughts, what does it matter? I am contaminated.

  Why is my reindeer trying to kill me?

  Why would you think that?

  Because it led me into the river, and I nearly drowned, and now I don’t know if I am awake or asleep or dead or what. My hands and feet are blue and my head is filled through the ears with ice water.

  It was not trying to kill you. It was trying to show you something. Then why would it go where it knew I could not follow?

  Precisely.

  I stare at the ceiling some. She goes shimmery, shimmery in the corner of my vision. My head starts to fizz, like it actually starts to fizz as though it is full of fizzy pop. The ceiling spins a vortex. It goes round in a swirl like a galaxy. Like the shape of a galaxy that is also the shape of a hurricane and a shell, it is a recurring shape, a pattern repeated throughout nature, also found in the ratio of your uterus. What does it mean? The Golden Ratio. It is a cosmic constant. It might make up space-time itself. I think I am fainting.

  ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

  Waking up I was cold and confused. For a whole five seconds I took in the sound of the hammering rain, smells of damp wood and glowing ash, with dust in my nostrils and grit on my face, and had no idea where I was. I lifted up my head and figured my position on the floor of the cabin, next to the fire, and registered that I must have been unconscious. I rubbed the dirt from the floorboards off my face. The bites on my forearms itched and my skin and my scalp especially tickled with the hundred tiny bits of plant and animal from the river. Where I scratched grime collected under my nails.

  My head throbbed and was heavy to lift like it had taken in the water. Memories of the river came back to me and I laughed in the sudden appreciation that I was still alive. But then as quickly I felt stupid and vulnerable and vastly under-prepared. Apart from being gluey with cold and maybe some mental scars in the form of future dreams of cold dark rushing water I did not have much to show for my nearly-death. But so easily I could have been another stupid kid Stan’s uncle had to fish out the river with a wooden pole and wire noose. I coaxed the fire up again to heat some coffee.

  And now I am back everything is okay again. As in I am a normal colour if a little pale and my fingers are their usual dexterous selves. But I can feel her now like anti-matter. I can feel her lack like an invisible density.

  I like the way the plaques talk about the beliefs of the Eskimos like they are truth, because they are. They are narratives as science is a narrative and is both belief and truth also. Animist or mystical, i.e. non-linear, non-absolutist, ‘truths’ and knowledge are reduced to the feminine, seen as inferior, irrational, a cloud system knitted into being, induction over deduction. This is pitted against the masculine Mountain Man’s absolute foundational Truths. But a feminine mystic knows it is lying to say ‘I know that Truth’ when you can’t. That it is more accurate and honest to say that opposites are complementary. It does not matter if she is real or not. I am a mystic because owning a vagina is mystical.

  What next? There is one more thing, a small envelope with Damon’s name on. I hesitated over it for a while because I thought I knew what might be in it and it felt just that little bit more intrusive. But then I reasoned I had gone through with it so far I might as well see the whole thing to its end. So I read the letter that his mother left when she built her shrine for him, all the things she wanted to say to him but could not because he was dead.

  My son, my parasitic twin.

  I stare up at the cobwebbed ceiling and feel hollow at the futility of it all. His mother’s voice reminds me of mine and now I miss her terribly. I feel a whole new size of emptiness, it amazes me I even have the processing space for all these feelings. For the very first time appreciating that I am like a Russian doll she made inside her as every baby girl is to its mother, each a little like the preceding but different, with the potential to birth another if she wishes, and my mum has watched me grow, warily, into her mannerisms and her image and then away from them, until eventually I abandon her and become less her and more myself. And this is a transmigration and I carry many shards of her with me always, as she does me.

  And all her hopes and dreams and expectations for me are something that I am leaving behind, but to her they will always be there. And she had a mother that she came out of and that woman I hardly even knew but I am sure had similar sorts of feelings, because that is what can happen when you give something so many parts of yourself. This is a contamination also, and you can’t be mindful of it and still find an intact apartness. Even in death you are still felt in tremors. Even Damon’s purest act was not entirely pure, because he left his negative imprint with his mother.

  I feel a change has come because even a few months ago I would have found these thoughts unacceptably sentimental. I am not sure if I am crying on my cabin bed and missing my mum because I am a girl and I was never going to be able to hack this odyssey of solitude for that reason, if it was always biologically determined, or if I have figured out truths about my life by my own will.

  And they are all laughing, all of the Mountain Men of history laughing and chanting DARWIN WAS RIGHT, WE TOLD YOU SO, WE TOLD YOU SO, their voices echoed by the mountains, giving them a god-like veracity, and for them I have no answer. Did I cast out or did I just get lost and does it matter either way?

  THE THIN VENEER

  I can’t get to sleep tonight although I am exhausted. Not from the wakefulness that has kept me up often here; when I get that I can be content just reading or writing or toying with thoughts, because I know it does not matter too much when I do or do not sleep what with the days being all wrong anyway.

  This time I can’t sleep from a feeling; that the sky is too big and the space between it and me is heavy like deep water; the deeper down you swim the more pressure there is pushing you down and up at the same time, and the more I think about how far there is between me and the sky the more my head feels the same pressure on it. And the space between me and the road, me and Fairbanks, me and every place underneath a big red arrow stretching from here all the way round the world and back again like on some old public service animation where I go black and white and zoom out and out until the tower is just a speck on a cartoon image of the world and the arrow makes a noise as it elongates like ‘vrrrraaaaawm’ going up in pitch with onomatopoeic tautness.

  For almost all the times I have slept in my life until these weeks, that is around 6,935 sleeps, I have been comforted by the thought that in the room next to me are my parents sleeping, in the houses next to me are my neighbours sleeping, in the town around us people are sleeping, in fact the whole of England is sleeping and the Australians are keeping the world running by doing the day shift.

  Sleeping with someone does things to your trust. As in by sle
eping in close proximity to other people you are making yourself your most vulnerable for them, and maybe the proximity of trust could extend to all the people asleep in all the houses around you. It is a thing I am very aware of lacking right now.

  But if I concentrate I can invert the deep pressure feeling, can make it feel safe and still and like the space is filled with Styrofoam. Because sometimes when I lie in the centre of suburbia falling asleep I have other thoughts. That lying down en masse to sleep makes you gravely vulnerable, a whole flock of sitting ducks, and it is then that I start to think in particular about nuclear dawn.

  Everyone still and asleep and so much trust being channelled around, seeping out of pores and windows as a gaseous thread and into nostrils and mouths connecting them like string on a tin-can phone. And no one is thinking to look at the sky where an object is getting closer and closer silently. And then it happens and at ground zero most people do not even know any better because they are vaporised before the electrical signals even reach their brain to tell them so, but maybe some come to for just an instant of absurdity, to be confronted with a helix of colour and pain while their soul or their energy or whatever it is departs and then that is it, snuffed out, nothing.

  To feel like I am in a box of Styrofoam here is to feel like safety-in-singularity. It is to not be afraid of all the crazy shit that I badly wanted away from, that affects me for being part of a macrocosmic world, that I do not conceive the complexity of because here I am in a world of my own, all on my own.

  Really suddenly, like the clunk of a clock’s first chime, this makes me feel deeply sad. A night bird makes a noise outside and a small rodent probably scurries away from it and a shadow passes the gaping windows and the trees are hushing and maybe back home everything could already be blown away. My head throbs and my teeth will not fit together properly. If I try to keep them slightly apart they feel like magnets yearning for each other.

  I could be the last person on Earth, or I could be the last person in my vicinity with any hope of ever finding the other last people in their vicinities, all of us running around frustratingly like little bugs that are lost and you want to yell at them ‘IT’S RIGHT THERE’ until you think about it and actually they are worlds away from the place you plucked them out of, from their perspective, which means the same thing anyway when you have no way of knowing any better.

  And I realise if it is all gone I want to be gone with it. I want to throw myself onto the sand like a dolphin embracing death on the beach with its family by dehydration and the suffocation of its own chest crushing its lungs under the pressure of gravity. I want to be blown up in the big stupid mess that it is. I do not want to be a Born Survivor.

  I could take my phone from the bottom of my bag, just try to call Mum, just to check the world is still there. We do not even have to talk. I could just get her on the phone just to hear her say ‘Erin?’, then hang up and turn it off again. Just to hear the sound of her alive and speaking.

  It must be around midnight at home. She is probably asleep. Although she is my mother so there must be that thread connecting us, although we might not be so consciously aware of it. Like mother bonds and sister bonds and dolphin bonds. Like we are spooky action at a distance. And it is not New Agey if you are thinking analytically Jungian. Girls are just a little more aware of the secret power of bonds because being connected to them is part of being woman. Jung’s anima was a lady, not because the anima has a vagina but because she is an archetype we all agreed on.

  And besides we observe something like it in other animals. A connection to something that is not what you would call direct experience. Like water buffalo in Thailand that looked out to sea half an hour before the 2004 tsunami hit, and just bellowed like mermaids with conch shells, and ran for higher ground, with villagers scrambling after.

  There’s a suggestion we could make an early warning system for natural disasters based on this sense, a hotline people can call if their pets freak out. This data gets logged and if enough pets are freaking out in a particular area then the hotline sends out the warning and everyone runs for the hills. And even if it is only because the animals can ‘hear’ seismic activity in a literal sense, isn’t it the same thing really? Isn’t telepathy just listening to another plane of ‘sound’?

  I fish for the phone from the bottom of the bag. I move into the beam of the dusky light from a slither of the window that is uncovered. In my head I say her name over and over and I imagine her face and I imagine her where she might be, her present, maybe awake on her back in bed and listening to the rhythm of Dad’s breathing. I press the button to turn it on.

  I imagine her face twitch. She sits up in bed then looks at Dad to see if she woke him. She rubs her eyes then goes still, straining to hear. She slowly swings her legs out of the bed and slides herself off and moves towards the cabinet that has her phone on. It is really dark so she goes slowly, feeling with her feet and hands before bringing her body forward.

  I clench my toes to try to squeeze some of the warm blood into them. I stare at the phone really hard. Another animal outside makes a sudden whooping noise and I flinch. It powers on but no signal. I wait ten seconds then twenty, staring at the gap where the bars should be, willing them to come. Of course there is no signal in the Alaskan tundra.

  I exhale heavily and deflate. Then I turn the phone off, return it to the rucksack and crawl back into my sleeping bag. The bag is still a bit warm from my body before. I spend a few minutes fidgeting, imagining the friction of skin on fabric making heat like lots of little sticks and fires.

  On the ceiling there is a spider that always has at least three carcases wrapped in mummy bundles on its silvery web. I have noticed that it rotates them, that its oldest kill is always the one it chooses to eat and then it is usually replaced and the next-oldest is eaten. I admire the spider’s diligent forward planning. The spider is always preparing for the future even though it consistently gets new things to eat. The spider knows that the world can always change in an instant; that the future is not to be counted on. It lives in a very delicate microcosm that can be blown away also, by a gust of wind, but that does not stop it weaving.

  THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER

  Back at the tower and I am preparing for the final voyage. Like Ishmael in his spiritual malaise casting out into the ocean to escape it all or else end it for good. Because that is the only thing for it, to give yourself up to the waves. And of course I am holding out for a coffin raft yet.

  On my way to the tower I came across a sign. It could not have been more imbued with meaning if it had been written for a film, or more climactically timed, or perhaps I am weaving everything into a myth of myself. My reindeer is dead.

  Some of the flesh had been stripped or pecked off but the flies were still in the process of infesting and their maggots had not hatched yet. It could have been brought down by wolves the very day it forsook me in the river. It sat warm in the sun and all around it smelled sickly, the buzz and the smell making the air dense so that I felt it way before I saw it. The antlers sat perfectly on the eyeless head that grinned mockingly, jaw chattering, laughing to itself like it was some macabre joke, leading me on all along when really it had nothing for me.

  As if to say, ah, how easy it is to die. Just like that, so blunt and final and so very, very dead, a dead end and no clues or directions left behind. Whatever it was I was expecting the reindeer to tell me it very definitely was not going to tell it now. Its silence was corporeal and absolute.

  No companion, no comrade and no project to give me purpose and nothing to guide me, just my naked self. And with it power in a way; I am real and vulnerable; there is no one watching over me; I am a self-willed woman.

  I have never seen death so up close before. It was different to the hares, and the difference is not just scale. I would say it is familiarity and the fact that I imbued it with significance. Like in nature documentaries when David Attenborough puts a personified spin on things and you end u
p rooting for the baby tapir and then it goes and gets killed by a jaguar and it is not just the circle of life because David Attenborough went and made it personal. This is more than that still.

  I did not even see the body of our first dog when he got put to sleep because I was ushered out of the room to sit on my own in the waiting room, surrounded by sympathetic-looking people with their sympathetic pets all whimpering along with ten-year-old me until my parents came out carrying just the worn brown dog collar. That had been death to me; just a dog collar without the dog in it. And this was it in concrete; the abrupt end to mystery and innocence that I had hitherto in life mostly evaded. And then I knew that the only thing that I had left now was to climb that mountain and see what Damon saw from up there.

  I have been looking at the highest point of the range nearest to me. The ones behind look like they might be bigger and somewhere out there is Denali, the biggest of all, but the one I have been watching is tall and has snow on the very top and the clouds obscure it sometimes so that it looks like Olympus with its feet in the clouds and Olympus is plenty momentous enough for me. It just calls to me. If Damon went from here then I am sure that is the place he went to.

  From its snow and the clouds I know it must be around two thousand metres. I remember reading in the park centre that the snowline starts at one and a half thousand metres. Two thousand metres is twice the size of Snowdon but it is still not high enough for altitude sickness. That is how tame the British peaks are. I climbed Snowdon and that took us five hours. So I am hoping I can do it in two, maybe three days. That is one day getting as high as I can, to just under the snowline if possible, then sleeping for the night. Then the next day I can head out with perhaps enough time to summit, and failing that spend one night in the snow and cold. Then the descent should take me no time.