Where was that puff of air now? In the same place as my unwritten book, a small pause between tangibles, something meant to go unobserved, yet sustaining. Necessary.
The quantity of energy in the universe is fixed, they tell us, endlessly transformed and transferred. That puff of air, the flutist’s furtive intake of breath, long ago wended its way across continents in who knows what guise, yet was not lost like Marcel Duchamp’s casual breaths. Preserved. And multiplied hundreds, thousands of times on tape: immortal spirit, or art, as Duchamp the surrealist would have it, challenging the laws of physics.
And the quick opening of the throat, the little rise of the chest—all this was done by cells sloughed off by now, yet they too lived on. That the music should be preserved was not startling: that was music’s life, to be heard again and again. But this preservation of the solitary, secret breath between notes seemed a true miracle. When the flutist was dead, the breath that flew through the aperture of his throat, infusing each cell with spirit to animate his song, would remain. More powerful than a voice preserved on tape, this was the thing behind the voice, as my unwritten words might be the book behind some other book waiting to be translated.
It was then that I remembered Q.’s story about his father bringing the old radios back to life. I felt the same excitement, the same warmth. And this time the fever focused, like concentrated heat erupting into fire. Like a green flame springing from the dark carcass of the earth, a familiar impulse rose with the force of a command, and I knew exactly what I must do. Write it down. Write down everything he said about the radios. And more. Write it all down.
If the sounds humming over the radio wires were Aldo’s lifeline, slim strands binding him to the world, then all the words borne on the telephone wires or vibrating face to face these last months were mine. I would make them—clothed in the human voices of loved ones bringing the news—the story of my life, tinkering, restoring and refining. I would write for my life, a life lived through the air and the ear. Too late to save Ev’s.
The course of the illness, traced and punctuated by the voices, would take on a shape. Whatever possesses a shape is less terrifying than the amorphous and unbounded. Not the comforting, self-possessed shape of a weathered Cape Cod house near the sea, but one of those unsettling latter-day buildings which in a fit of aesthetic despair exposes all its dynamics and private parts—pipes and plumbing, supporting beams and electrical lines—like a crude Madonna of architecture.
I would put despair to work, using a pen the way prisoners use a spoon—stolen at great risk from the cafeteria—to dig a tunnel through the dirt barring them from freedom. Slowly, how slowly, a few scoops every night while the guard is nodding. And as the prisoner’s digging toward daylight becomes a passage out, writing through the sickness meant it would have an end. When I came to the end of the book, the sickness would be over. Or when I came to the end of the sickness, the book would be over. Whichever came first. Until I could say, It is over, I am well, like a Taoist prayer, vibrations on the air becoming a declaration of what is.
I would have pulled off the road and begun right then, but I was too eager to get home. In my reverie I’d been doing over eighty. The light was just fading as I pulled up. Luke, folding his chair for the day, waved and came to the car window.
“Laura, where’d you disappear to? You done took that kiddie car and gone off without a word.”
I told him about the Cape. “How’re things here? I’ve missed it.”
“Here? Nothing much. No big crimes, fires, or accidents, so we’re calling it a good month. They’s diggin’ up part of the Drive to shore up the retaining wall. I’ll fill you in on the gossip later—I want to go watch the ball game. You’re looking mighty good. Darker.”
“How can you tell in this light?”
“I can tell. You’re gettin’ there, Laura.” As he left he pointed out a better parking space, under a streetlight. The air was muggy and sweet. Home.
Up on the Cape I had rarely thought about the squirrel and when I did, I felt indifferent to his fate. I was even a bit proud of my detachment. But the sages tell you never to be proud. Enlightenment itself is to be taken in stride and not marveled at. The goal is a leveling of emotion. Indeed, with enlightenment even great natural wonders cease to amaze: it’s simply their nature to be wondrous, as a famous old Chinese poem shows:
Mount Lu in misty rain; the River Che at high tide.
When I had not been there, no rest from the pain of longing!
I went there and returned. ... It was nothing special:
Mount Lu in misty rain; the River Che at high tide.
But I wasn’t indifferent at all. I dropped my bags and went straight for the window ledge. Could he possibly be alive, waiting for me? Or would I find his decaying body? Broom, dustpan, paper bag, trip to the basement.
Gone. Nothing but the familiar curved hollow in the tamped-down bed of ivy. I missed him the way you might miss an old friend who’s moved unexpectedly with no forwarding address. I felt almost slighted, and yearned to know his fate. Had he gone off to die elsewhere or recovered? Would he be back? In the meantime, I packed up the messy nest and brought it downstairs.
The spell of clear inner weather I felt on the beach hadn’t lasted. Fog and weariness were settling in again, thick as ever. Outside, a car alarm yelped in the gathering dark. No matter. I found a fresh composition book—exactly the kind in which I’d written my first stories while the teacher explained long division on the blackboard—and obeying the command, I recorded my conversation with Q. about Aldo’s radios, writing with the surreptitious glee I knew in school, the glee of writing what I was not supposed to, what was not the work assigned to me. I transcribed our dialogue using the reliable and efficient mechanism lodged in my ear, a faculty like Aldo’s inborn skill with the radios that allowed him to revive aerial connections otherwise fated to dissolve in the world’s great heap of transience, making old filaments transmit new, living vibrations.
But unlike Aldo who liked strange tongues on his ham radio, I wanted words in a language I could understand, even words which might seem useless on first hearing. In the transcribing they would yield up a pattern. A design made of scraps of memory, disassembled then cleaned, varnished, and reconstituted. And like the unwritten book about the seaside town, this, too, would have its regular yet unpredictable tides moving across the landscape, with now and then sudden gales.
I would have no design but make opportunity my design. I wrote quickly, almost illegibly, dropping the pen and routinely picking it up. If I stopped I might forget. Memory loss, Hortense had said. What I lost might be the best.
The pen rushed across the page, leaving segments of ransomed conversations. Q.’s sister Gemma and her doomed love affair. Evelyn’s snatches of old songs. Llamas, breeding, females expensive, trip around the world, meditation, tie it to a tree, wool for a sweater, manure dry and cohesive, Santa Fe shit. There, I had it. Never mind Hortense. Possibly what memory retained was meant to be included, while the forgotten was ill-suited for the unknown design: a survival of the fittest theory for the scrappy story.
Above all, what I wrote must not be too determined. Like being sick, the story made in its image must be a marriage of submission to data and management of it. And wrought in the dark, like the prisoner’s tunnel. He might dig along a number of possible paths. It hardly mattered so long as he dug past the fence and up into the light.
Do I bless the fact of Q. or curse it? A capricious muse, he’d given me another book.
AT LAST THE IMPETUS RAN OUT and I stopped for the night. My bed received me warmly, forgiving my long absence as generous lovers do. And I sank into its embrace with the ardor of a prodigal. One can be promiscuous, but home is best.
I had a splitting headache as once more I climbed the stairs to the witch’s office, the pungent faux-pot smell drawing me on. I had burned a moxa stick, too, lying in bed. I couldn’t vouch for its healing properties but it smelled nice and warmed me
at the points the witch had marked on the diagram. Below the navel, alongside the knees and ankle bones, near the big toe: I felt like a priest administering the last sacraments in blasphemous places.
The door was open. “Come on in, Laura,” her voice bubbled from within. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
In the waiting room I studied the chart of the five organs—liver, heart, spleen, lungs, kidneys—and their corresponding elements, seasons, colors, and emotions. A complete metaphorical system, the body as microcosm with its procession of climatic moods. Suddenly from behind the closed door came a series of small yelps. Silence again, then more yelps, and the witch’s soothing murmurs. What if I heard piercing screams? Do I call 911? What did I know about her, anyway? Did she really believe in the network of arrows moving clockwise on the chart: wood makes fire makes earth makes metal makes water? Just as I was tensing with doubt, the door opened and she emerged, followed by the couple I’d seen on the stairs last time. The man held the small black terrier, who seemed subdued and peaked, his head lowered despondently.
“Hi, Laura, good to see you. These are my friends Seth and Pat. And this is Beaver. Isn’t he sweet?” As the witch spoke his name, the dog looked up and leaned toward her the way a baby will stretch out to the arms of someone he trusts. “Ah, yes, come here, come on,” and she took him from Seth like a baby. Beaver perked up in her arms, barking with what eagerness he could muster.
“What’s wrong with Beaver?” I asked after they left.
“He has arthritis. I’m treating him.” She sat down opposite me on the mat.
“With acupuncture?”
“Yes.” She laughed, then sipped from a mug of the foul-looking tea she brewed in the kitchen. Black twigs and dried leaves floated at the top. “Seth and Pat are old friends of mine from college. They begged me to treat him. I’d never treated a dog before, but the only other recourse was to put him to sleep. He was in a lot of pain and the vet said there was nothing to do. He had no energy, no chi. I couldn’t refuse. I’ve been treating him for two months now. He’s gotten used to me.”
“How do you keep him still for the needles?”
“At the beginning he was so listless that he just lay there. It seemed to calm him, the way it does with people. Then later, as he improved, he got more frisky, and Seth or Pat might have to hold him down. But most of the time he let me do it quite readily. I’m so pleased. If not for the treatment he wouldn’t be here. I saved him. I only wish I could do as much for my AIDS patients.”
“You treat AIDS patients?”
“Oh, yes, that’s the main thing we do here. A group of us run a free clinic twice a week. The patients see Western doctors, too, but the drugs usually make them feel worse, so we try to relieve some of the symptoms. The acupuncture stimulates the immune system and regulates the whole body, so the organs function better. Anyway, Beaver is almost finished with his treatment now. It’s great—he looks at me with such infinite love, more, actually, than any person ever has.” She chuckled again—a witch with a sense of humor—and took a swig of her muddy brew. “Do you know, the vet wouldn’t believe it when Seth and Pat told him he was better. He had to see for himself, so they brought him in. He thought there was no hope. There’s always hope.”
“How did you know what to do for him? Were dogs part of your training?”
“No. I played it by ear. I figured it out the way I would with any patient. The first time, Seth and Pat told me he was eating feces.”
Feces. Anyone else would have said “shit.” Very professional, this witch. Performs her role to the hilt.
“Eating shit?”
“Yes, his own and anyone else’s he could find. Any dog’s, that is. There’s a word for that, I can’t recall it at the moment.”
“Coprophilia,” I said. “Love of shit.”
“That’s it. You writers know everything. Well, I gave this some thought. It’s very unnatural, and when an organism exhibits unnatural behavior there’s usually a logical reason. I looked it up in my books and wouldn’t you know it, it turns out there’s a component in certain feces that cures arthritis. In other words, he was trying to cure himself. If left to themselves, all sick creatures instinctively seek a cure. So I read some more and found that there’s something you can make up from silkworm feces, and I called someone and had it made for him. ...”
She has a network, I thought, a coven. One weird sister gathers the herbs, another distills the oils, another hones the needles to the thinness of a hair. . . .
“The first week or so there was no change. So I decided to administer it the way homeopathic doctors do, in minuscule doses. For a few days nothing happened, but that’s not unusual—it can take the body that long to register when something new is being taken in. Then sure enough, he started to improve. In a couple of weeks, Seth and Pat told me, he stopped looking for feces. Meanwhile the acupuncture was helping as well. And there we are.”
“This could be a first in medical history. Curing animals with acupuncture, I mean. You could write a book about it.”
“Oh, no, it’s been done since way back, in China. You can do it for plants also.”
“Really? I wish I’d known you when my husband died. All his plants withered, too. I suppose you’d say they missed him.”
“That might well be. Seth and Pat were so grateful that they got me a wonderful book, Veterinary Acupuncture. I was quite engrossed, and then unfortunately I lost it. In a Chinese restaurant, I think. It had pictures of animals with all the acupuncture points clearly marked. Roosters, camels, everything. And you know something about the camels? None of the points are on the hump.”
Even with the headache, I was feeling more lively than I had in weeks, sitting on her mat, the two of us tittering like girls in a freshman dorm. “You might start a special practice, treating animals. Even one day a week, you could make a fortune. You know, those people who get their pets decorative haircuts and manicures? It could support your other work. The AIDS work, for instance.”
“I hate to spoil your fantasy, Laura, but it’s already being done. There are a handful of acupuncture vets. But as it turned out, even though I didn’t charge Seth and Pat, they made a large contribution to the AIDS clinic, so the guys have this joke about it. They say their needles are coming to them courtesy of Beaver the terrier. Let me look at your tongue now. Hmm. Not so bad.”
“What’s so important about the tongue? I don’t have a sore throat.”
“In Chinese medicine, the tongue is the one internal organ we have ready access to, and since all the organs are interrelated, you can use it to infer the condition of the others. You go by the color, and whether it’s coated, whether there are fissures and where ...”
“The last doctor who looked at my tongue asked me what he termed an odd question.”
She was amused by the story of Dr. A. “You could have told him they’re all strange.”
“Exactly.”
“Still, he probably had something legitimate in mind. You shouldn’t be too hard on doctors. They do their best, considering the context they work in. You know, in ancient Chinese medical practice, the doctor’s job was to regulate the energy through the meridians and keep the organs in balance. If the patient got sick, it was considered that the doctor had created or allowed an imbalance, and he wasn’t paid. If the patient was very sick the doctor might even be fined. So there was a certain degree of humility, of necessity.”
“But you get paid either way, right?”
“I’m afraid so. Believe me, if I had other means of support I’d be more than willing to work that way. But I’d need a sugar daddy.”
“I take it you’re not married.”
“No. I was for eight years, when I was living in France, but we divorced.”
She must be older than I thought. A broken-down crone disguised as a beautiful young woman, perhaps? A fairy tale reversal. “Was he French?”
“Yes, a molecular biologist. We met in the halls of a scientific institut
e. He was working on genetic repression in protein production and I was there studying a new theory of auricular diagnosis. It seemed romantic at the time.”
“So you must speak French.”
“Oh, sure. I make some extra money translating at scientific conferences. I just went to one in Quebec last month, on healing the environment.”
“Another translator,” I muttered. “So, you’re alone now?”
“Yes, but...” She hesitated, lowering her gaze. “There may be somebody appearing on the horizon. I’m not exactly sure. He’s a rabbi.”
“A rabbi and a witch. Together you could work miracles.”
“I think he may be living with someone, though. It doesn’t sound kosher to me.”
“I’d be careful about that.”
“You have experience in that area?” she asked.
“Sort of.”
“Let me take your pulses now. How have you been feeling?”
“Up and down. My energy was a bit better—I walked a lot up on the Cape, as you said. Here I can’t go as far, but the other day I managed four blocks without stopping.”
“That’s very good. The herbs must be starting to work.”
“But the symptoms are changing. My stomach’s been upset. I get headaches, in fact I have a headache right now. And I’ve got a rash on my stomach.”
“A rash? Really?” She seemed very pleased. “Let’s see.” I showed her the pink splotches and welts. “It itches. It’s just the last few days. At least I didn’t look hideous on the beach.”
“Oh, but this is an excellent response. I told you there was lots of stuff that would rise to the surface, but sometimes I work for months before I manage to bring out a rash.”
The Fatigue Artist Page 23