The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  “When you do, just ask her to call me, okay?”

  Bien sûr.

  “You won’t forget?”

  At the suggestion, the brows lifted and a smile broke across his face in a thousand creases. N’ayez crainte, Docteur Abend! Have no fear!

  For what, for whom, had I been speeding home? A vast aimlessness engulfed me, deposited me hours later on a park bench, another lost man, eyed sidelong by a pigeon on the pavement. Long minutes passed before I realized—without surprise—that this was the same bench where I’d opened the earlier envelope, the one that disclosed the first photograph of Jessica Burke, alone in her bathtub.

  Clementine gone, the apartment is empty, a single dwelling for a solitary man.

  But (you will ask, Father) why must I despair?

  For all I know (you will say) she is not missing but—as the officer said—merely somewhere else.

  For all I know, she may return. For all I know—

  But no, it is not completely empty. For company now, I have the gray stranger who leans toward me out of the mirror. I have my typewriter. I have whoever it is I imagine you to be, Father.

  And, of course I have my faithful correspondent.

  Could it have been my correspondent who provided Clementine with the mimeographed clipping? I wondered. How else could she have found it? And yet, why should she not find it herself? Why shouldn’t a daughter undertake to learn all she could about her mother?

  Now that she had found the article, had she found what she needed? The revelation that Miriam had taken her own life, was that enough for Clementine? Or had the discovery awakened in her a desire for more, a hunger for raw detail, for the naked facts of the gendarmes’ or coroner’s reports, so that she too could construct and reconstruct the events, just as they have made and remade themselves in my memory?

  Miriam had died without fanfare. She had not leapt from the bridge. When the divers finally found her, it was clear that she had waded into the water from the bank, downstream from the bridge, just as the picnickers do in the summer, though she had done so at night, her body weighted down with several meters of chain. The length of chain would have been heavy enough by itself, but she had secured the chain through the hub of an iron flywheel, increasing the burden by another thirty kilos at least. “Elle ne rigolait pas,” an old man had said in a Nevers café, standing beside me at the bar, when this update was announced on the evening news. She was not kidding around.

  “Kidding?” said the proprietress of the café. “I’ll tell you who wasn’t joking: whoever trussed her up and chucked her in, that’s who!”

  The old man flicked his hand as though to swat away the suggestion. The proprietress had heard the news, just like everyone. Miriam had mailed the padlock key to the police the day before so they would know where to find her, along with a note saying what she was going to do—or, rather, what she had already done.

  Again and again I imagined Miriam at a postal box, the envelope balanced for an instant on the lip of the slot before she let it fall. Did dread threaten to overtake her? Or had all misgivings departed? By then she would have purchased the chain already. The owner of a hardware store had come forward to say that a young woman had bought the remainder of her stock two days before. As for the flywheel, God knows where she found it. Had anyone remarked a young woman rolling an iron wheel along the road? Had she somehow transported it along with the chain, or had her preparations required multiple trips as she built up her little cache of iron in the bushes along the sandy banks of the Loire?

  How often have I worked it out, the process, each step contemplated, weighed, the first step, the next step, what material, where to find it, how to move it, how to use it, just as she must have worked it, reworked it, figured it out, a way to thwart the body’s agonal panic, limbs pinned, wrists bound, the lock shut, its key far away in a post box or mailroom, sealed in its envelope, as yet unopened….

  It must have been a kind of satisfaction she felt, however awful, satisfaction to know that the key was on its way to its destination, perhaps there already. Was it satisfaction, the sensation of the chains now tight around her, metal warming with the heat of her last exertions, a satisfaction to bear the weight, to carry it down to the water and out into the stream, bearing it up just a little longer, out a little into the current, the water now taking some of the weight, some of the warmth, from the chain, the chain taking some of the warmth from her body, the body from which shortly all warmth should dissipate in the cold flow of the river?

  Sometimes it happens (usually when I am at the edge of sleep, but not only then) that her final image visits itself upon me. It is subdued to a flatness outside of time, her image like a saint’s set in stained glass, the stiff form wreathed in chain, the wheel held against her side, as a martyr holds in expressionless triumph the weapon of her execution. Without recognition, without acknowledgment, her gaze passes through me, just as the light passes through her own body.

  FIFTEEN

  That Brazilian woman, what was her name? Fernanda? Ana Clara? I do not remember. She was my patient when Clementine was a baby, before we had returned to the States from Paris. She had come to analysis because she was, as she put it, “ruining her children.” Her English was better than her French, so she had chosen me to be her analyst. “But you are so frustrating,” she said. “I want you to take something away from me, and you keep giving it back.”

  And what, I asked, was that “something” she wanted to give away?

  “The pain. The crazy,” she said. She said there was a little shrine, somewhere in the north of Brazil. The land was dry, the town impossibly poor, but people would travel for hundreds of miles to get there, to leave candles, gifts, and ex-voto offerings thanking the saint for answered prayers, for healing, for having rescued them from distress.

  “I bring you my worries. I bring you my tears. I bring you the dreams I have. I want to leave them here. I want to hang them on your wall and return home healed. But everything I give to you, you give back. You say, like you just said, ‘What is this “something” you want to give away?’ ”

  Years later I looked it up, the shrine. There were many like the one my Brazilian patient had described. One of them was a kind of cave or grotto, where pilgrims would leave little body parts carved from wood or wax: a foot, a breast, a head. From time to time the priest collected the wax objects and melted them down, making candles to be sold to other pilgrims. The walls and ceiling of the shrine were black with candle smoke and crowded with these suspended offerings.

  I think now that my Brazilian patient managed at least to give that away, the conjured image of a blackened shrine, hung with a jumble of body parts. I think that in the soul of each psychoanalyst such a place must exist, in spite of what we profess about our neutrality, our professional detachment. Perhaps something of what we receive can be melted down and sold back as candlelight—our costly illuminations—but other elements remain just as they appeared, the dreams nailed to the walls, the abandoned hearts and limbs, the soot of inextinguishable longing.

  * * *

  —

  Today I wonder: Could it be that you are praying for my soul?

  Before now, it has never occurred to me that someone might pray for me. An odd sensation all the odder because I no longer know what a soul is. One would have thought after a lifetime of listening to them, treating them, peering into them, I would understand better. I have said it to student analysts under my supervision, and I have said it to myself: that everything Freud wrote was an attempt to accord the soul a rational form, a credible image. Did he succeed? Did anyone believe him? Did I? I no longer know. Is the soul one of those necessary fictions we cannot, in the end, do without? I have thought God to be such a fiction too, as surely you must have, Father. Sometimes it is impossible to believe what we believe.

  I should confess that I have been praying, I who belie
ve nothing. Not for Clementine, or Miriam, or myself, but for Jessica Burke. One session in particular returns to me, again and again, the sole session in which she described her artwork. Of course, she had mentioned her work often: her difficulty getting started, her inability to know when to stop, doubts about whether her work was any good. Was it good? I never saw anything she made. Had I been curious, the protocols of my profession would have prevented me from seeking it out. Now that she is dead, an obscure probity prevents me still, a desire to preserve that invisibility, as though it were a nakedness from which I must avert my eyes.

  I’m no good at talking about my work, she said.

  Everything about it is all so un-thought-out.

  But I want to think it out, think it through, that’s the thing. I just can’t.

  How am I going to write an artist’s statement, assemble a portfolio, apply to graduate school, if I can’t say what I am doing?

  Perhaps (I suggested) she didn’t want me to know what she was doing.

  For a long moment she was silent, then said suddenly: The thought of your appearing at a crit or an opening makes me want to run out of the room.

  This room? I asked.

  The figure-of-speech room.

  It sounds like you don’t want me showing up at your show.

  I didn’t say that.

  No. Those weren’t your words.

  And anyway, I hardly know what you look like. I never look at you. She paused. I mean, what I’m saying is, I can’t imagine it, I can’t envision you actually there.

  It is painful to imagine me there. Maybe it is painful to imagine me here. You’ve made the very possibility run out of the room.

  I don’t think I would even recognize you on the street.

  Am I invisible today because you want your art to be invisible?

  She hesitated. She didn’t think so, but there was one thing she would think about when she was high, one thing she would feel: that she was transparent, not invisible, but transparent. But this was the thing: she wasn’t see-through, she wasn’t transparent to light like glass or air, she was transparent to the dark.

  She said that’s what heroin did, it brought her down to the seafloor, the floor of an ocean trench. Relieved of the need to see, relieved of the need to breathe, she belonged to the darkness completely. It possessed her, moved through her unresisted, as though she herself were made of nothing more than water and darkness, as though she herself were nothing more than a place, a place where the current turned on itself a little and moved on.

  Sometimes, she said, that’s what she wanted her art to be—and she gave a rueful little laugh—transparent and in the dark! Not very promising, is it? Maybe that’s why she’d been doing what she called her smears, these paintings on long strips of paper. She would load the left edge of the strip with a charge of paint, then drag the paint out with a knife or a block of wood or a ruler until the streak was exhausted and the line went blank. She’d tried all kinds of straightedges, all kinds of inks and pigments, some thin, some viscous, papers of varying thickness and stiffness. The effect of the smear was always different, always engrossing to her. But perhaps only to her. It was, in any event, the only thing lately she found she could make. What she was looking for was a kind of transparency like that feeling she used to get when she was high. She found it there, where the straightedge dragged out the pigment until it thinned to nothing.

  No, she corrected herself, she hadn’t found it, but maybe that was as close as she had gotten. Maybe that was as close as she was going to get. Maybe you had to spend your life working up shadings with varnish and glaze, old master style, to get that kind of light into your work. Maybe she just needed more skill than she had.

  She was quiet for a while, maybe a minute. Or maybe it’s only there, in the junk, or at the bottom of the ocean, in a place where you can’t stay. Where you can’t survive.

  I said that was it, the big question she carried around in her, the question whether despair was the only way out, whether the only thing she could really make was her escape.

  That makes sense, she said, just as she said whenever she didn’t agree with my interpretation. But…there’s a frustration…a jealousy. What I’m doing to the paint is what I want to have done to me.

  What do you want to have done to you?

  This is not a sexual thing….

  Did I say it was?

  I want to be smeared out like that. I want to be clear, perfectly clear.

  You want to be free to stop hiding things.

  God, if that’s true, she said with sudden coldness, then all of this is just a load of shit.

  I knew then that I had overstepped and had ruined something, that I had spooked her and she would make her escape into an anodyne or trivial association. To my surprise, however, she countered and pushed ahead. You are wrong. It’s not that I want to stop hiding. It’s not that I want to come out and say the thing I have to say. Don’t you see? I want there to be nothing. Nothing to hide, and no place to put it. No things, no places. Do you see what I am saying? Can you understand that? Jesus, how could you?

  Another long minute ticked past before she began again.

  Have you seen the northern lights? Here’s what I’m wondering: Are they made up of many individual threads or ribbons, each thread like a single northern light? I saw them once; I was camping in Newfoundland. At first I thought they were sheets of rain, lit from below by a city to the north. But there was no city to the north. They were like curtains in the sky, streaky curtains, made out of light but with a kind of fibrous look, like they’d been combed, like smooth threads. If they are threads, that’s what I want to be—I want to be one of them, a single thread, a single northern light….

  I wanted to know what she meant by that, not just because I was her analyst but because I myself needed to know. But the session was over, and she was gone.

  That desire has returned to me, the same question, only slightly modified. Now it is the desire to know what has become of her and whether her wish has been granted. Nonsense, I say. I say to myself that nothing has become of her, that she has become nothing. And yet—I find myself wondering—what kind of nothing? I want it to be the kind she described, a darkness, a depth of space, where a current passes, where a filament of solar wind hums to a glow. That is what I want for her. That is what I pray, I who believe nothing.

  You believe in God. You mentioned in your eulogy for Jessica Burke “what it is to know God, to be known by Him.” Is that knowledge a theory, a premise, something you believe in order to believe other things? Or is it a feeling, like hunger or sadness or fever?

  The more I brood upon this, the less I understand. Certain plausible interpretations, of course, make their bids: she was expressing a desire to be open to someone, perfectly, transparently so, but because such a desire is terrifying, she needed to remain hidden, invisible, secure. Or alternatively, she was expressing a desire—primitive and archaic—for merger, the desire for resorption, to be compounded anew into a body of formlessness and dark. That, I think, is how I would have explained her remarks had I presented the case to colleagues or candidates in training. How credible these interpretations, how persuasive. How pitifully beside the point.

  What has happened to me? What has happened so that I credit her words as witness to a vision? It could not happen that I, a psychoanalyst, an interpreter of desires, an anatomist of fantasy, could succumb to such a belief. And yet the belief is mine, or I am its. It has claimed me for its own. Tell me, Father, if you can, while there is still time: Is that how God sees the soul, all at once, a streak, a smear, a ribbon, its beginning and end, future and past, flaring like a northern light, illuminated by His invisibility? Can you tell me?

  SIXTEEN

  Time now does not pass so much as it wears away. Spring ground down into summer. Old Itzal retired in June.

 
The building threw a party for him, the venue my office on the ground floor. Eight or nine residents showed up, avoided the couch, spoke among themselves. Cheese cubes sweated on a platter, and Itzal stood in the corner, hunched like a crow in his ill-fitting uniform, a plastic cup of sherry undrunk in his hand as though he were holding it for someone else.

  “So, Itzal, I hear you’ve bought a house back in the Basque country,” I said in an effort to relieve his awkwardness.

  “Oui, Monsieur Docteur. It is the house of my family.”

  “Do you have much family there?”

  His shrug seemed to say, at once, “Of course not,” and “Years ago, maybe, I did,” and “I couldn’t begin to count them all.”

  “Tu as de la chance, Itzal,” Lucky man, I said, settling on the optimistic interpretation.

  “As you wish, Doctor.”

  “I’ll encourage Clementine to look you up in France,” I said.

  “Comme vous voulez, Docteur,” he repeated.

  “Pour toi, Itzal, un souvenir,” I said, and gave him an old Baedeker guide to the Basque country I’d found in a used-book store.

  “Je vous remercie, Monsieur Docteur,” he said with the hint of a bow as he slipped the little volume into his loose coat. Minutes later he’d vanished from the room, and I did not see him again. The new doorman is a mountainous, sweating Chechen named Bworz.

  * * *

  —

  No word from Clementine. Six weeks since her graduation, four weeks since she left, going on five.

  I force myself to walk the park or up and down the avenue, to keep myself from checking my answering machine, although the longer I am gone, the more I feel the hope burning within me, that in my absence Clementine will have gotten in touch.

  Nothing.

  After her departure, what felt like a terminal agony took hold of me. I was a hospice patient hooked up to a PCA drip, except that instead of a morphine pump, I clutched my cellphone and dosed myself with the redial button. Clementine’s number would ring several times before the connection switched to her voicemail; from this I assumed that wherever she was, she was still charging her phone. Eventually, however, her voicemail started answering immediately, and her message changed from her brisk “Clem here—leave a message” to a synthesized recitation of the telephone number. And yet I continued to call. Finally, a small package arrived at the apartment building. At first, when I saw the French postmark, I thought that the package must be from my correspondent, that he had taken to tormenting me where I lived. It made sense: Why not strip me of the two-block buffer that separated my home from the postal box? Why not revoke the possibility that I could somehow, someday, simply stop checking it? But then I noticed that the handwriting on the envelope was Clementine’s.