Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  Morgan went out into the hall, shrugged his coat on, looped his scarf around his throat. I heard the door close behind him, saw him go past the window, his chin tucked down. He looked ordinary. Harmless.

  I waited half an hour, tried not to pace. Drank my coffee, made the bed, tucked the pages I had rescued, and the notebook, into one of my own folders, packed the folder into my satchel. Every person that passed the window could be him. Every set of footsteps lurched into my throat and stomped shut my breath. My head pounded. I rinsed my cup and put it in the sink, put on my coat, tucked a blank notebook into my pocket, wound my scarf around my neck, picked up the satchel. I walked in the opposite direction to the way Morgan had gone, crossed the first bridge and plunged through the streets. I saw him everywhere, his collar turned up against his white cheek, his dark hair ruffled by the breeze. The flash of his orange scarf. I turned down streets I didn’t know, rushing over the bridge and through the endlessly turning streets until I saw a gate I recognised and ducked into one of the hidden gardens – the Zuiderhofje. I sat on a damp bench facing the gate. The windows of the houses facing the garden glowed with warm light. A couple sat reading together. An old woman was knitting. A young man was hanging Christmas lights around his fireplace. I took out the notebook, hunched over it. Damp spots fell and puckered the page. I wrote. Nothing sensible, just words. The words I remembered – flashes of them – with long gaps in between. I had to do it straight away, while the words were still fresh. I tried to dredge up the image of a page. The scrawl of my handwriting. Nouns, verbs, images, phrases. Anything. Anything at all. There wasn’t much. A page and a half. I kept going, getting down what I remembered. My questions, my doubts. The things I had to research; the things that had been difficult to write. The things I worried nobody would want to read. I was drawing water from a dry well, laying words on paper like the muddled remnants hauled up from a mass grave. A clipped coin, a broken necklace, a hip, a tooth.

  The British Library has a collection of sixty fragments written in the ancient language Kharoşthī. The fragmented remains of twenty-five birch-bark scrolls and an ant hill of debris have an uncertain provenance, though they are said to have been discovered on the Jalalabad plain of eastern Afghanistan, just west of the Khyber Pass. Some of the pieces of birch bark are so fragile that any handling of them, even for the purposes of translation and preservation, is a threat to their existence. Before the library acquired the fragments, they had been dug up by looters, squashed into pickle jars, and soaked in a mysterious liquid intended to preserve them: to consolidate them, according to one of the unnamed dealers who sold the fragments to the library. They were then packed with cotton wool and sealed into the jars with brown adhesive tape.

  Once the British Library had acquired the smuggler’s hoard, removing the fragments from the jars without further damage was difficult. One of the first documents to be translated – fragment 5B – was the Rhinoceros Sutra, or the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra. Some of the pieces of bark on which it was written were so broken, so corroded, that only a single letter could be identified. Nevertheless, the scholars slaved to piece together what they could, discovering an antique version of a sutra familiar from several Buddhist traditions. The sutra contains a plaintive, almost comic, refrain, translated as the imperative advice: [one should] wander alone like a rhinoceros. The refrain is a concise evocation of the sutra’s lessons on the virtues of solitude, and the dangers of attachment. Giving up your children and your wives and your money, [one should] wander alone like a rhinoceros, it advises. Casting off the marks of a householder like a mountain ebony tree shorn of its leaves, leaving home, wearing the saffron robe, [one should] wander alone like a rhinoceros.

  The preservationists, curators and translators worked to piece together the sutras from splinters and dust, from bits of wood eroded by centuries of neglect, storms, war and dangerous affection. They had been patient, and careful: aligning the fragments, preserving them under glass, taking note of the text that survived and furnishing the gaps with discussions of other sources, likelihoods, possibilities.

  My work had been destroyed by fire. Each fragment was scorched. Whole passages were burned away. Pages were deckle-edged with ash, spotted with cindered scars, but they were virtually worthless. There was no team of preservationists, no curator, no translator to help me piece the work together. It was my job to preserve what I could, and to work productively, gently, without causing further damage or distortion, in the gaps between what remained.

  I sat all day in that stranger’s garden, trying to remember what I had written, and trying to forgive Morgan for making me destroy my work, and myself for doing what he had asked. Trying, even, to be grateful to him for showing me how attached I had become to something that did not – could not – matter. I couldn’t understand the power he had over me – where it came from, how he wielded it. I imagined going back to our apartment and packing up the few things I owned. Walking away. I went over it and over it: folding up my shirts and pants, rolling my socks into balls. I made mental lists of what to carry with me. What to do if he was there; what to do if he was not there. I was almost thirty years old, and everything I owned could be contained in a backpack.

  This was something I was proud of. Something I could hold on to.

  All my life – but particularly since my father’s death – I had worked to divest myself of things. Of attachments to objects, people, places. When my father died, I learned a hard lesson in the damage that wanting – needing – anything or anyone could cause. I had returned home, to Gouda, not expecting to feel his loss any more keenly than I had when I first heard about it. I had left home many years earlier and, though we had kept in touch, our correspondence had been fitful. I had believed that he was no more important to me than any other distant acquaintance. That my dreams of him, and of home, were indications not of my affection for him, but of the complex ways my unconscious worked to signify deeper, more ambiguous needs for connection. When I received a call from my father’s neighbour – and old friend – telling me that my father had died in his sleep, I felt nothing. Almost nothing. A faint, abstract regret. A sense of freedom, of being let loose from something that I had never felt constrained by.

  Returning home, and seeing the tower of Sint Janskerk for the first time, devastated me. For weeks I could barely lift myself from my bed. I spent my days drinking and sleeping, my nights wandering the streets, drunk and angry. I started fights with strangers, slept with men whose names I didn’t know. I stole things – bicycles, books, key rings and candles – and hurled them into the dykes. Days, weeks, months passed when I could do nothing. I slept in my father’s abandoned bed, ate his food, read his books. The sheets grew musty with grief but I felt no consolation. He was gone, and I could not journey back across the distance I had placed between us.

  Since then, I had been determined not to feel so lost again. I had made a small, compact and personal thing out of my life. Everything within it was mine – my body, my thoughts – and everything else I was willing to give up. At night, I tested myself, listing the things I was prepared to lose, feeling the hurt of losing beloved books, clothes, friends. It was like placing one’s tongue in the space where a tooth has fallen out. A mild pain – a sting or a throb – but the absence was satisfying. The sense of space. The comfort of having lost something so seemingly essential, only to discover one is still one’s self.

  I wanted to make the loss of my work a mark of my strength. I wanted to see Morgan’s demand that I burn my writing as a lesson in the value of letting go, a test of the vigour of humility, but the rage I felt was overwhelming. It set my teeth on edge. It was a ball of pounding, burning, expanding cells in my gut. Every time I closed my eyes I saw my pages curling up in the flames. The flakes of soot rising, the words darkening and swelling into nothing. Into ash. The Rhinoceros Sutra teaches: Shattering fetters … like a fire not coming back to what’s burnt, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

  I walked home in the dark
. My bare hands like icicles. So cold and sharp I imagined greeting him with a kiss while I used them as blades, plunging them into his gut. Instead, when I entered the apartment and found him sitting waiting for me, I thrust his mother’s letters into his hands – all of them open, roughened and spotted with rain – and said I would not speak to him again until he’d read them.

  I went to bed. I don’t remember whether I dreamed.

  At midnight he woke me and said, ‘Come out,’ and in the dark there we saw the sky of September.

  Morgan lied to me about everything. Your parents, his age, his home, the scars on his body. He lied when it was not necessary to lie. He lied even when he knew I would find out the truth. He lied because he loved me, despite himself, and because he knew I didn’t love him. He might have told me the truth about you, and his mother. He might have told stories about his childhood, about going out on the boat with his father, about the sea and the town and the birds. About your mother’s endless, terrible kindness. And about the betrayal he could never forgive her for.

  ‘I am an orphan,’ he told me, and though I knew it was a lie, I also knew that it was true for him. He wanted to reveal himself to me while withholding something essential. To keep things in balance. We were two halves of an unequal equation: he wanted me, and I wanted the truth.

  ‘Did you love him?’ you asked me once, turning away so that I couldn’t see your face when I replied. I wanted to tell you the truth, but the truth isn’t simple, or clear. I wanted to tell you that I had wanted to love Morgan. I wanted to tell you that now, loving you as I do, finally understanding what it means to love someone, I wish more than ever that I had loved your brother. Not for my sake, or for Morgan’s, but for your sake.

  I didn’t want you to think of your brother being hurt or angry or afraid. I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already had by coming here, by loving you, by keeping all these secrets. Did I love Morgan, you asked me that night. How much simpler, how much kinder, that would have been.

  33 Weeks: He Sleeps, Perhaps He Dreams

  You were due to be away for three weeks at that conference in Amsterdam, and the whole time I knew you would be thinking of Morgan. You hadn’t mentioned his name at all during your preparations for the trip, or asked me for advice about visiting the city in which you knew I had lived for most of my adult life. You had your own reasons, I suppose, for not wanting to pierce the fragile meniscus between our past and present lives.

  That last day, when I drove you to the airport, I knew all along what I would tell you before you left me – about the child I had been building, cell by cell, inside my body. I knew, too, or thought I knew, what it would mean. That the whole time we were apart you would also be thinking of home. That although you had to go, you would return.

  In the meantime, I relished the idea of three weeks in which I could work and sleep and ache with missing you, and get used to the idea of having a baby together. Your baby. Up until that day it had seemed like a dream. My belly was flat and firm as ever. After the last time, I was determined not to believe in the possibility of the child I was carrying until at least twelve weeks had passed. I made a pact with the universe that if – by some quiet miracle – I was still pregnant the day you left for Amsterdam, I would tell you, and that would make it real. I prayed to St Vincent – with his shepherd’s crook and guardian raven – asking him to vouchsafe our child’s safe passage into the world. Before you left, my pregnancy was an uncertain secret, but once I said the words aloud they became true. They were a solemn promise. I whispered our child’s name to the wind, and felt my breasts prick and swell, my belly soften and distend. I walked through the airport car park, opening myself up to the wind that blew his breath through my bones, beckoning our boy into the world.

  I drove home from the airport in a daze and when I got home – back to your house, which was now mine as well, and would one day be Ethan’s home, too – and opened the door there was a particular, heavy emptiness about it. I walked through the house and opened the windows and doors, put on the stereo, went into the bedroom and made the bed we had left rumpled that morning.

  I had thought I would want to sleep in sheets that still smelled of you, but once the bed was made I realised it was a mistake. The room looked the same as it usually did: the bed here, the side tables flanking it, the wide, deep-silled window with its view of trees, but without you in the house it seemed like a ghostly semblance of itself. A space of longing. The crumpled sheets, the dust beneath the bed, the spider’s web across the corner of the window underscored your absence rather than recalling your presence. The room looked the same as it had when we left it that morning. The shape and size of everything was the same. The colour of the walls, the floor, the ceiling, if not the light that illuminated them. The wardrobe door was open, and I could see your shoes pointing their toes at me, your shirts on their hangers, your coats, but they were all so empty. They looked abandoned, like the clothes hanging on racks in a charity store, worn in to the shape of the man who had left them behind.

  I stripped the mattress bare and threw the sheets in the wash. Dusted and swept the room, washed the window, polished the bedside tables and the bedhead. I got out the ironing board and a fresh set of sheets. I had never ironed sheets around you, and wondered as I did so when we would slip into that domestic familiarity. When I came to your bed your sheets were ready-crumpled, though clean. You had an idea of me that was more loose and carefree than I really am, or have ever been, and I had made an effort to allow you your fantasy. Not ironing the sheets was all part of the performance of being Ana.

  While I ironed, I thought about you coming home to discover a more authentic version of the Ana you had come to know: the discovery of my true self would be slow at first, so as not to startle you. You might imagine the change in me was partly the result of our pregnancy. A sudden blooming of maternal domesticity into the kind of woman who irons sheets and folds underwear and takes pleasure from the sight of spoons cupping each other in the drawer. Who throws out odd socks. Who likes to eat toast and drink tea in bed on a Saturday morning and then get up and change the sheets and peg them out on the line. Who loves the smell of sun-dried sheets: the way they snap and float on the line when they’re dry, their cool stiffness when you first get into bed. Who is ordinary, and dishonest.

  It was the first time I had imagined telling you the truth; even the dream of it terrified me.

  That night, I dreamt that you and Morgan were sitting together in an underground chamber. You were just boys, with skinned knees and pale faces like twin milk-moons. The tunnel had collapsed at both ends and you were trapped, waiting to be rescued. You had a yellow canary with you, but it died and you dug a hole in the earth to bury it. Morgan took off his shoes and you used one of them for a coffin. After you’d finished you washed your hands in the stream of black water that flowed through the centre of the tunnel and fell asleep curled up together, on a bed of black earth. You slept like two commas facing each other, top to toe, and both of you dreamed the same dream.

  In your dream I was a little girl in a pink dress with long black hair. I was sleeping in my childhood room in Gouda, with the yellow striped wallpaper and the white lace curtains, but there was a tree growing in the middle of the room, surrounded by a circle of earth, and the window was boarded up so that I could not look out and see Sint Janskerk. The leaves of the tree were glossy and green and I was sleeping curled up on the bare earth at its feet. I wanted to tell you that the dream wasn’t right, that it wasn’t who I really was, but I couldn’t remember what was wrong about it. Every time I tried to speak to you – singing across the membrane between our dreams – I felt a low, dark pain in my belly. I needed to make you stop dreaming about me so that I would not drown. Your dreaming was making the water rise in the chamber where you and Morgan slept, and the black water flowed from my dream into yours. The carpet in my childhood room grew soggy, then disappeared beneath a shallow black lake. The bare earth around the tree g
rew damp, and then the water was soaking through my pink dress.

  I woke up and felt the heavy black water lapping at my waking world. The window was open and when I threw back the sheet I could see that there was a dark smear on my thighs and on the sheets. I turned on the bedside light and colour flooded the room. I remember thinking that St Vincent had not kept his part of our bargain. That I had made the saint promise to keep our child safe once I had named him, and said his name aloud.

  36 Weeks: Entering The Cephalic Position

  I don’t know how else to tell this next part except in the form of a story. What I said, what your mother said. What passed between us while you were away. It was invisible to you, what we shared, and perhaps for a time I preferred things that way. We were mysteries to each other, you and I, in a way that women never are. Or at least, not for long. But the time for mysteries is done, Samuel, the time for dishonesty and secrets.

  I could lie to you in a letter, but I cannot lie to you in a poem or a story. A story is like a piece of wood under a woodworker’s hand. I am a writer; I hope that, for this, you can forgive me.

  There was blood everywhere. On my legs and the sheets and on my hands. I wiped my hands on the sheets. When I stood up, I felt blood run down the inside of my leg and pool near the arch of my foot. The blood was sticky and smelled like the black, wet earth you had slept on in my dream.

  For a moment I felt the rightness of it all; having a child had always been something other women were capable of. Women who had lived clear, perfect lives. I thought about how many lies I had told and, for a moment, I felt relieved that there wouldn’t be a child knitting us to each other, forcing us to go on side by side until you saw the false, perfect version of me I had created sicken and rot, shucking off my pink skin to reveal the black, feathered, clawed and toothed beast that lay beneath. I thought then that I should let our child go, sliding out of me with all the blood and bile that festered inside me. I would bury our baby in the dark, wet earth of night, and with it the dream of an ordinary life.