by Lucy Corin
I’d run and run, but I couldn’t catch her.
I could feel her, though, filling the walls of the house.
In the dark, in the kitchen, I breathed for an amount of suspended time.
After a while, my wife hovered in my mind, illuminated in darkness like a dessert in the dramatic display cabinet of a very self-important restaurant where I remember being taken, as a child, to eat.
What would she say if she said something?
She said, “I’m trying to protect you.” I suspected she was full of shit, but I couldn’t tell. I said she could not possibly be doing any such thing because what she was doing was killing me. She said,“I am protecting you in a small way, because, trust me, you don’t want to know. And I’m protecting you in a big way too, because I am doing the right thing, and you are part of the world.”
I wanted to shake her, to move her physically, as if that would move her mind. I tried to remember what she had been before she allowed the world to take over our house and I wanted to strangle her, as if I could squeeze something real from her throat and her lips, because even in my mind she continued to give me nothing. But then all I did, even in my mind, was put on an insolent voice and say, “Angela’s part of the world!” and then Angela appeared, so that my wife could pick her up, spin with her in the spotlight, cuddle her, and say, “She is!”
Angela, imaginary, opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out except bubbles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I didn’t say anything.
In madness there is conviction, a direct and mechanical thing that comes from visions. I had witnessed this in literature even if, as yet, I had not been acquainted with the phenomenon in my literal life. It hurt a lot to picture all this, and I was so confused, but then I pushed it to a considered distance. From this distance I thought about it—my wife, her perspective, the life in her arms, the certainty of madness, the impossible things she might actually do—turning it into a cookie and then into a flat stone in my mind, then turning the stone over as if in my hand, looking at it with eyes of glass. I thought, Dear God, the problem is I think she’s right.
When the room ticked into dawn I rinsed my face in the sink, dried it with a dish towel, and pulled my shoes onto my feet. Something had happened between night and daylight, something physical, from science, the way that at the far edge of the big bang theory the universe returns. In this way, microcosmically, I’d changed direction. I’d sucked every aspect of myself from the rooms of the house I lived in and back into the cave of my body. This allowed me to do what I did next, which is that I took my wallet and my phone and I left.
I did the very thing I would never think possible.
It’s just what I did. I went out there. To look. As a camera would look.
Out there, morning air glittered with sprinkler water. I squinted at my neighbor’s basketball net, a giant insect with one compound eye. Mailbox after mailbox wasn’t breathing. Then I watched my feet walk. I filled my frame of vision with my shoes and the slope of the curb. I followed the curb, which could have been moving in any direction but as usual was moving forward, as I was moving forward through the world, not flinching when a car passed blowing tingly particles. I followed the curb forward through morning.
When I reached the burned field at the edge of town, I lifted my eyes and moved them across its speckled pattern of golds, taupes, grays, blacks. With a tilt of my head I could shift the whole acreage from two to three dimensions and then back. The act relaxed me. I entered the stubby field with easy strides. Grasshoppers leaped in an automatic rhythm. I saw hares, and I saw mice. Mice smell of old straw, and old straw smells of mice, and the field smelled of burned straw, burned mice, fire and mice, I was able to think without laughing. That day, though, no crows; someone must have lifted the negative spaces they’d made and tossed them away, so that I walked through the simple space of the air that had been behind them.
In the center of the field I turned myself around. All directions appeared equal. Then I took out my phone and called Mike. Nothing happened on the phone except it was as if he already knew what I was doing, which is a lot to happen, because it’s inexplicable. I think I thought something like, Oh, this must be what they mean by magic. But I was a camera, so I let it go. “You bet,” he said. “I’m on my way.” I continued across the field. My shoes crunched and animals sprung around me in arcs. I fell into a rhythm that included all my senses and then, as I approached the cement on the other side, Mike’s triangular silver car pulled up.
Take me home, Mike, I could say. Take me home because this is not within my nature. But I got into the car. Even though it was so small, I slipped right in.
In the car Mike wore a sympathetic frowny face that I believed entirely. He was all surface, honest through and through. I got in and he handed me a styrofoam cup of high-quality coffee. “I thought you might need this,” he said. “And this!”Then he handed me my passport, also magic, and I slipped it into my back pocket. I watched the field in the rearview mirror and for some time it filled my vision and didn’t move, until slowly the road appeared above it and then filled the screen. Soon the view in the mirror and the view through the windshield were very much the same. Mike started humming, trying, I realized, to soothe me. I thought of the burned field back when it was just a field, and then I thought of the woods the fields were before they were fields. I thought of the woods Mike grew up in, where, as a child, with an arrow, he’d shot his brother. I noticed that I didn’t know if the brother had lived.
“Mike, am I ugly?” I asked. “And if so, what kind?”
“No kind of ugly I know,” said Mike, which I believed, and which changed nothing.
At the airport we were surrounded by buses, an off-duty ambulance, a limousine, and when we stopped, I tried the door but the handle didn’t work, so Mike got out and went around. I almost panicked, as if he might just abandon me in that crappy car, but then his gentle face appeared in the center of my window, he popped the door open, and out I sprung. It’s true that I’d always held Mike in a mysteriously high esteem, but only then did I notice exactly how much tinier he is than me. I felt an urge to stroke his head, but instead I hugged him and felt his tiny arms around me. I felt him for a bit, something like an animal, something like a man, something like a spirit, and then he zoomed away.
I traveled along the airport hallways, riding the conveyor belt, watching the travel posters go by: Wyoming, New Orleans, Hawaii,Alaska. I hopped off and let the Alaska poster mesmerize me a little with its blue and white on white on white, its cute and brutal polar bear. Then I joined a heap of people waiting for sliding doors to open and took the tram to international. I did all this mindlessly. I bought my ticket, which had me fly to Los Angeles, where I ate some airport food, and from Los Angeles I flew direct to Moscow.
From within the pointy airplane I pushed through the world. I had my own row, but people swelled around their seats and surrounded me with a blur of uncountable languages. Below, continents approached, and with my mind I zoomed in on them, and could see people galloping, frantic, driven from the house, and among them, the bodies of those who’d been poisoned. I knew what would happen if I were down there with them in their markets brimming with souvenirs. I’d kick them away from myself. I’d drop radioactive pellets into their cups of tin. Look at those people at the bottom of that barrel, snuggled in the dirt of the earth.
The plane was dark, Moscow was invisible, and then it appeared, grew bigger, and filled the screen. Over the years, my images of Russia had failed to remove the big heads of men from everywhere. I was a little surprised I didn’t see them, great banners puffed with wind. I saw a river, a lot of buildings with shiny blue roofs, and I saw the airport. I continued to banish myself. I ate airport food, bought more tickets, exchanged my money. Then I flew to Khabarovsk. I waited three days for weather, then flew to Yakutsk. I waited for a helicopter and then took the helicopter to a group of brown wooden shacks that made up a town with a name I have forgotte
n. There I bought boots, a hat, and a huge coat of reindeer fur.There was nothing in the wooden shack for me to look into at myself. Didn’t matter. I know what I looked like.
I hired a guy to drive me on his reindeer sled into the wilderness of ice, of mountains, of sky, and a refracting sun of white. I sat behind his furry brown head, and he sat behind a furry white tail.This, I thought, is where lost explorers are lost. This is where men freeze timelessly.
After a day we came across a Yukat longrider on a white pony. My reindeer man talked to the longrider.They laughed, perhaps at me. They knew I was a fool, but they might not have known my cruelty. I gave the two of them the rest of my money, as well as my wallet, my passport, and my phone. The reindeer man drove away, and the longrider let me ride behind him on his fluffy white pony. I loved the reindeer, and I loved the pony. When I saw my first mirage, I poked the longrider and he stopped the pony so I could get off. The snow came around my knees, like Angela. I watched the man and the animal fade into the snow, and even as they retreated I felt I was traveling, moving closer and deeper into the world made up of all its eyes and minds, to a place from which I might be able to see something, and then I watched the trails fill until all directions unified.
This happened some time ago.
The land was like the moon—not the dull and cratered gray moon, but the glowing glazed one we see from our perspective. I remember thinking I had come to face myself, and this is what I faced, this image created by distance. I tried to look around, turning, facing myself in the snow.
I no longer felt like a monster. I felt a little inorganic, and a little divine. I felt the way I’d tried to imagine such unfeeling things might feel.
What I felt like was a lens.
What I am, I thought, is a point of view.
I felt lighter and lighter, and more and more like snow. Here, the world was so close to me that it had become entirely particulate, nothing but white. For a while I got colder and colder in the diffused light, then less and less cold. I could not resist. But after a time, there I remained, the sun forever visible, its broad disk skirting the horizon, in this land of perpetual light. And what is not possible in a place of perpetual light, blinding and infinite? In the seat of frost and desolation the future roils with possibility, and in a land of possibility nothing is irrevocable. The enormity of landscape can elevate a tiny human from all littleness of feeling, and it can make insignificance feel beautiful, like a freedom.
When I got back to my home, like magic, and gazed up at my front door, wondering if it would explode, picturing my dog’s funny nose, my baby’s sweet freckles, the rusted color of my wife’s immaculate eyelashes, I tried to remember:
What goes here in this lit land, in this space of white?
Some form of enormity that is open to beauty.
If only I can remember. If only I can fill my body with it always. The whiteness of the whale and the mind of winter, madness, blindness, silence, and invisibility, all here, and glowing adoration, omniscience, the intricacy of attachment, the welling of love—everything—and shining castles that repeat above themselves . . .
I know what I am. Before the lusty glimmers of the eyes of lovers and rapists we might be anything, but quicker than a quark we turn out to be filled with nothing but ourselves. I know what I’m made of. Here, within the history of the banished and the searching, I could think of our family of cells—my cells, her cells, the baby’s cells, the cells of the dog, the cells of mice, and then of anyone—all round, bouncy, blank, and identical, just as they ought to appear in a person’s imagination. If only I could keep this space of white I would know what to do, because I could do anything. If only I can keep this space of white while I move through the world, then everything will be good, and true, and right.
Simpler Components
I: BLOOD AND GUTS
Inside, my mother made a series of autumnal blunders, frying the pies, pouring boiled milk on the frozen pipes. I emptied my thoughts into a bucket a mile away, and scrambled around in the woods for tinder.
I blew on my supper and ate it while she mopped the kitchen with glue. I coaxed her into her snowsuit for the showdown. She was not normally so nervous, nor I so attentive. It was a bitch being quiet people. It doesn’t matter what you do.
We trudged to our nearest neighbors, balancing on the crusty snow or falling through. We bruised our shins and our noses ran. We were having problems with the neighbor. We wanted to fix it over hot toddies. Go away, we’d say, it’s too hard, messy, eventually unkind. He wasn’t home.
We took the tractor route back, animals crouched in the trees, and I thought I saw a piece of fire in a tree but it was a star. My mother’s flashlight bounded ahead. Soon it found a carcass, the neighbor’s old dog Muff, split down his belly from an impact, his ribs open like double doors. I knelt, wallowed, tried to replace the spilled innards. My mother put some in her jacket pockets.
This is why we stay in the woods. We suffer our respective natures with gumption. My mother concocts theatricality. Occurrences reply to my tidy life.
II: A REPRIMAND FOR AFFECTION
Old milk-jug hands is trying to lace her boots again. I let her work at it because I know she will grow tired and I know she will let me help her at the moment she finds it frustrating. Then she will go outside and feed animals all day.
“A barnacle has the largest penis-to-body ratio of any documented life-form,” I tell her, because I like to keep her informed. It is difficult to do anything with milk jugs for hands. I cannot think what other point there might be to this experiment.
My mother says someone is going to slice the skin between her fingers. She says her brother did that to a frog and someone is going to do it to her, sooner or later.
She says my father lived first by the alphabet, announcing, berating, cajoling, and so on, then by numbers, one foot out of bed and then two, three minutes with the brushing of teeth, four items of clothing (socks, shirt, undies, slacks,) then, as he grew older, according to one body part at a time.
“Finally one day I found he’d been trying to hang himself. I could tell by the rope around his neck, and there he was, feet in the air, humping nothing, as usual.” She is not cruel and not crazy. In fact, I am sure it is all metaphorically speaking.
III: LIFE IN A BOX
Convinced as I am of her ineptitude, I sit my mother on a kitchen chair and make her watch television while I soak and scrub her feet. First I have the water cold in case she’s been courting hypothermia. Then I add boiling water from the kettle and Epsom salts to draw swelling.
I scrub her feet with a straw-bristled horse brush and then pumice. I think she’s been climbing the chimney again. I think the aged color her skin has taken is from soot, and I clean a whole layer away.
Onion and more onion beneath, seven layers of it are there; fat and springy at her heel and the undersides of her big coarse toes, and transparent toward her arch and ankle.
She says, “My family was so full of money they could turn entire seasons into verbs.”
“What do you want?” I say, defensive. “A cloned experience ? This is okay,” I say. “What we are. Everyone wants this. A good kitchen.”
She decides she must get her feet out of the tub and make prints on the floor, and she does. She walks out a garden of footprints, even dunks her feet in the tub as they dry. She makes the garden with flowers, vegetables, and insects, and then she stamps out a box frame around it, complete with wood grain and diagonal joints at the corners.
Exasperated, I fix my eyes on a puddle and watch it disappear. Down it goes, into the plank floor, and up into the air. By the time it is gone, she has opened the oven door and is curled in front of it, sleeping.
The television hums and drums. I look at it in order to catch up with people and the way lives go. I look at the lives, other people’s obsessions, their fruit-canning companies and sexual fetishes, the consistencies or accumulating idiosyncrasies that define their characters, and I know what w
ill happen in my life. I will fixate on a desire for my own box as I clean my mother’s, and then I will receive a reprimand for my affection. Everyone will bump along our property lines and we will continue to be the everyone of whom I speak.