Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  new lover

  on the hook of the h just as it leaves the body

  Ha

  Ha

  coughs it

  laughs it

  ha

  ppy

  and so

  you happy

  round as a berry

  or a bug

  the color happy

  hanging on a branch

  in blue

  you

  haul happy around

  like a log

  Wounded Room

  Gwyneth Merner

  1.

  At last bowed into vinyl sag, steady cranking, incremental tilt of dentist’s aged examination chair, the patient’s eyes listed. Above him the attic ceiling slope adorned: a portrait boy, small as a postcard and copper framed. Such a perfect, spherical head against a square of black. A brooch-wearing little lord, ermine-cloaked overlooker with benign features. Does his content smile bend for gems, his strands of pearls? No, that’s not it. A little egg of a boy, centered just so, to sway the patient—ignore the trilling tooth, the drill’s burr, the metal hook, the dentist’s index finger, coated in a bittersweet latex powder. Reflect on roundness and something princely: an ebony recorder on a velvet cushion, a toy drum with a leopard-skin strap, a croaking frog inside a silver-filigree cage.

  The patient lifted his head and the dentist alligator-clipped a dimpled paper bib around his neck. He untangled cold bib chain from a curl of gray nape hair and asked the dentist if the portrait on the ceiling bothered him.

  “Though I share the office with three others, the portrait was my addition,” said the dentist. “He’s my patron saint: the young tsar, Peter the Great. I am intimate with his expression, and mean for my patients to commit it to memory.” The dentist rolled toward the patient on his white plastic stool. The patient could still see the dark shape of the dentist’s mustache beneath the teal mask.

  “You may have heard some awful things about Peter the Great. He was an amateur dentist and hardly reformed a young discipline, thoroughly barbaric.” The dentist paused and probed the stub of the patient’s buckled molar with a blunt tool. A whimper. The pain unraveled down from the tooth through his jaw; it was sewn in under his right collarbone, gathered up and billowed at the hair of his armpit. The dentist sighed.

  “His mentor was the consummate anatomist Frederik Ruysch. Together, they started with rotten teeth—pulled them from the mouths of the tsar’s servants and advisers with an iron tooth key, the grip of carved ivory ornamented with a bar of mother-of-pearl. In his journals, the tsar said his mentor extolled his gentleness and the smooth and quick grace of his extractions.”

  The patient lifted his hands off his thighs and waved them. He tried to speak of his discomfort over the hiss of the suction tube and the precise clicking of the pick on his undamaged teeth. The dentist set down his tools.

  “Please.” He pushed the patient’s hands down. “I want you to appreciate what I’m telling you. It’s appropriate to your condition, that molar I cannot save.”

  The tsar, the dentist explained, honed his art in the depleted mouths of his adversaries. Each man was meant to understand the tsar’s mercy as he screamed and spat blood into a pewter goblet. His allies lost healthy teeth too, but with the succor of opiates. The teeth the tsar took—he studied them carefully. He called them the seeds of the new empire.

  The dentist rubbed a bitter numbing gel on the inflamed gum of the patient’s injured tooth—the crown lost when the patient was felled by heatstroke. The patient’s tongue folded away from the taste. A pretty arc of saliva; it issued from the underside of his tongue and onto the dentist’s white sleeve.

  “I have something; it will help me administer the anesthetic.”

  The dentist opened a drawer and placed heavy padded headphones over the patient’s ears, the coiled cord stretching taut. No music, not a sound. When the dentist spoke again, his voice was undampened by mask and headphones.

  “Imagine a room piled high with burlap sacks. Mounds of teeth, a treasury of teeth. Peter the Great kept his favorites in specimen drawers, each tooth tied to each neighbor with a pale blue satin ribbon.”

  The dentist claimed he had seen them during a pilgrimage to the tsar’s Kunstkamera. An incisor of pure white with dark amber roots, a black tooth shaped like the head of a horned devil, a piteously small molar from a deceased child, a heart-shaped premolar from a cousin the tsar wished to marry. The voice, parted between padded foam and covered mouth, puckered chorally.

  The patient felt a dissociative pain: a ticklish, malformed channel he could not follow from jaw to heel. This procedure, this dentist—he did not understand what the man wanted beyond uprooting the tooth. Ceilingward, he sought in the face of the child tsar some split, some ill fold or misalignment. Nothing. He cupped one hand against the other hand. Unseen weight touched his palms: a cold pear shape.

  2.

  The wounded room, a seed bank, has a doorway, four walls, and a ceiling of comforting height. The room is storage, the visitor is storage, and the ceiling, lenient to the state of accumulation, retreats imperceptibly. A man could be said to be a seed; a woman a seed. But a man and a woman are not the seeds they want.

  Where is the seed? They say the one they want does not yet exist. A seed may come when the visitor yields to the room.

  They want the visitor—a woman, or sometimes a man—to sit and wait. The floor is best. It has recently been refinished and polish shines on the narrow planks. They would like the visitor to touch the planks and admire the texture. Is it not soft? A superior floor, a floor sanded by hand, is neither overwaxed nor perfect plane; the fingers and the soles of the feet detect subtle ridges, the old scratches, the character of the wood.

  Uncountable interiors contain one wounded room, sometimes more. Does it come as a surprise that the wounded room is common? No primed space alone will produce a seed. A wounded room requires a visitor and witness—an uncommon meeting. They keep a large map with pins in it—black-headed pins for wounded rooms, blue-headed pins for the visitor—and on idle evenings, emptied of pins, the sheet of worn paper manifests a network of small cavities. They wish for more success but have grown circumspect.

  They would like the visitor to sit comfortably, but not to feel at home. The last seed surfaced in a wounded room without a visitor, observed by a witness in her kitchen. Did she feel like a guest in her own home? It is a rarity, rare as a seed. Will the seed be fruitful? Will the seed mature into a bell? They do not know. I think they are scared to plant it, fearful that it will push from the earth unsound.

  The room where they store the rare seed is off-limits to visitors and witnesses. It is no longer a wounded room. From the outside, the room has a blue-trimmed window with darkly stained wooden shutters. On the inside, the window has been secreted behind plaster and new paint. Someone has hung a handsome old mirror edged in gilt-carved acorns. Tell me, what good ever comes from an obstruction?

  3.

  His climbing lines dangle. An inventory of knots: sliding knots, anchoring knots. In his harness, Eric’s knots and carabiners suspend him high in the barbered crown of the old ginkgo. The botanical garden officials have ordered this removal; they cite stinking fruit, branches that fall dangerously close to joggers when winds are forceful. He used spurs and a lanyard for his ascent, unafraid of scarring a tree he would topple by the end of the day.

  A survey from above: An ambulance idles in the shade of a cypress copse. Eric can tell the paramedic is eating lunch, hands and mouth moving. A sandwich in front of the air-conditioning vent, so lucky to be insulated from the sickly heat. He doesn’t like the term “tree surgeon,” but it strikes him now that he and the paramedic share certain commitments, responding to what in these temperatures the forecasters call vulnerable.

  He lowers his chain saw i
nto a branch thick as his own body, and buries the dry earthworms, plum skinned on the sidewalk, in a spray of sawdust. The branch and trunk uncouple and brown-cankered leaves thrash the ground in the yellow-taped perimeter. He releases the stilled chain saw at his side and it sways heavy on a neon strap. A mouthy rot at the core of the bough—it could fit his arm up to the shoulder. When he touches the ragged rim of the hole expecting sap, he feels clammy moisture, not tacky at all. A fibril extends down the hole. A parasite’s roots? No, it looks like pale green twine. One frayed end knotted around a recessed peg. Impossible. He lifts the cord, feels a weight bob, hears the thing at the end of the line bump the interior of the tree. His body is rigid in his harness. Sweat seeps from his forehead to the bridge of his nose and he swats, knocking his safety glasses to the ground. The two lines twist.

  After stillness, another attempt: He pulls the cord from the peg and gathers the slack, wrapping it around his fist. He knows so intimately the malignancies of trees, damages from pests. The ginkgo resists them all. What he draws from the heartwood hole does not look like any scourge. It is a slick-brown buoy, O-ring and all. Eric tips it carefully; the ball has a slit, an aperture into a hollow space. Bell, he says. A tree with a shaft for a ceramic sleigh bell.

  He cannot shake the bell. It would be sinful; it would be a crime. But if he did, the sound of the bell would be flawless. It would sound from the center of certainty. Feeling unsteady, unworthy, he dampens the bell under his shirt against his chest.

  4.

  Once, during his youth, Peter the Great removed an abscessed tooth from a woodsman. In gratitude, the woodsman said that he would cut down the greatest larch in the forest near his village. I will send the timber to a craftsman, and he will make you a throne that will honor your skill, said the woodsman. I have a throne, said Peter the Great. But I do need a fine cabinet to house my collections from my travels abroad.

  The woodsman found a suitable tree in early autumn, the time of year when his incessant work shrunk the fat of his thick skin, obliged his bones to suffer the cold. It took fourteen days to fell the larch, though the woodsman, roiled by his labors, did not notice the time. Whenever he paused to rest his hands and remove his rabbit-fur gloves, he put his tongue in the gap where he had once possessed a blackened canine. Oh! he said. He couldn’t think of the proper words with which to praise the slippery vault.

  After the larch groaned and tipped to beat the earth with splintered weight, the woodsman hired a team of twenty horses to drag the trunk along the soggy road to the village. A superstitious man, the woodsman remained in the forest to perform a rite his mother had taught him: If you cut down a great tree, burn the stump and bury a silver coin six arms’ lengths beneath the ashes. When the hole was deep and the dirt and ash heaped high, his spade resounded against something hard. It might not be a rock, thought the woodsman. He parted roots gently, dug with his hands so he wouldn’t harm what he couldn’t see. Uncovered, a head-sized bronze bell, green with age, steamed in a caul of roots.

  The woodsman placed the larch bell in a beaver-skin sack and sent it to the court. When the larch cabinet was complete, the topmost compartment was inlaid with lapis lazuli tiles, and the bell was closed within. Peter the Great only heard its peal once; the sound was said to have been so spirited that the tsar writhed in fits of twitching and ecstasy whenever he recalled it.

  5.

  Acquisitive space, architecture that desires, upsets the mode of how we settle in the personal and find peace in routines. That is how I define the wound. The appellation itself can be traced back to a palimpsest, the Brayer Text, destroyed in the bombardment of Belgrade in 1915. The original language of the Brayer Text was withheld—some claim it was written in Japanese; others, Urdu, perhaps Portuguese—but of three extant translations conducted near the end of the nineteenth century by a sole scholar, only one contains the words “wounded room.” But, the translator claimed in a sheaf of letters found after his death in a Kentucky sanatorium, I hadn’t endeavored to write three translations in the reading room. There was one translation and two copies. Over time all three shifted, and there are hardly any of my words left in them. The libraries they keep, some small and packed hastily into a suitcase, fail to persevere. It was at first a painful lesson, the discovery that evidence committed to paper pulped from a bell tree lends itself to addendum, reiterates the scrape erasures of vellum. Now they refrain from claiming authorship over anything. They delight in the contradictions of an over-annotated oral tradition, texts that self-reject.

  On infrequent occasions when there is time for the visitor to prepare for the wounded room, for the possibility of a seed, they advise a reading ceremony. The few of us within our small community who joined as visitors and now witness the rite, do so with a joyful ache that transcends jealousy toward the newly initiated.

  i.

  The virgins dwelled in the virgin-house, across from the unnamed-house, in view of the rot-house, the God-house, the plant-house, and the bell-house at the land edge. Guests of the rot-house carved niches into the cliffs where they placed their stone guardians. The virgins concealed the God-house mirror in the hall of the three devotees: guests of the dead, the virgins, and the marked women. The devotees ate the food of God with their eyes. Hungered during the rot-house season, the marked women entered the bell-house to eat the striking sound with their ears. Cry out, divorce-bell, cry out. And so on the cold days, a marked woman would depart the bell-house a dutiful virgin.

  ii.

  Listen to the fire within the old house, the heat-split log and smoke. In two cloisters by the sea lived the nuns and the marriage-traitors. They prayed to the Almighty, carved tokens for their ancestors, and housed the first mouth of sound. The second mouth of sound opened silently under a net of raw silk in the recess. The second mouth of sound reflected the faces of piety, the faces of grief, and the faces of supplication. Hungry, the second mouth of sound ate yielding bright meals: abalone, dried persimmon, boiled egg. When the seasons lapsed and the plants vanished under the earth to greet the dead, the first mouth of sound required a word: This word was severance. The marriage-traitors swung a knocker on four ropes to hit the first mouth of sound. The things that needed to be severed were severed. The things that needed to be loosened were set loose.

  iii.

  Expectant, the shell scraper wed a virgin, impatient to secure strong sons. But she brought emptiness into his home, a broken bell between her legs. He took his wife to the old persimmon woman for a remedy. The persimmon woman said no good, and gave the lack a name. Affronted, he left the lack and his wife with the persimmon woman. But the old woman had tricked the shell scraper. Your bell, said the persimmon woman, is not broken. Your fearsome children refuse to leave the wounded room; they do not wish to be animals. A bell like yours rings with an unseen flame. To release your children it must be extinguished. The persimmon woman sacrificed a small tortoise. She stripped the shell from the body and filled it with the animal’s blood. The abandoned woman kneeled with the tortoise shell beneath her bell for five days and five nights, until the blood offering reached her children in the wounded room. I am not allowed to tell you what they have become, but know that your children are sorry they have made you a solitary, said the persimmon woman. They want you to have a gift. The solitary took a hand mirror from the persimmon woman. She followed mirror rules: to keep it covered, to never let another person see it. And if she looked into it, what ceaseless pleasure: to see the immaculate room never inhabited by a person. And if she broke it, the everlasting wrath of her children forced into blood and limbs.

  6.

  It’s getting dark. The sky reminds Eric of a lurid scrape, oily abalone sheen. Yellow leaves spin as they drop from the ginkgo. Descending is simple, precau
tions automatic; the repetitions of his long career have engendered refinement and fluid speed. This dread, the urge to remove the bell from his shirt shake it until it’s only a fistful of sand, sucking his sandy fingers, it burdens him. The cicadas click, detect some long-lost radiation. Feeling for the phantom weight of his safety glasses, he touches the bridge of his nose, presses the oily indentations left by the pads. This could be the last climb. Why work well through retirement when he ruins the things he touches? All the trees he has nursed toward health have lapsed into rot.

  His ruined daughter—she could have been his apprentice, she could have scaled a lightning-scarred silver maple, chain saw over one shoulder, her gloves shedding leather dust against the friction of the ropes, the knots. She could have found the bell before he did. You won’t believe what I found, he hears her say. But she was younger the last time they spoke—he doesn’t know what her voice sounds like now. The voice he hears in his mind is the one she had as a small girl, when she said she wanted to be an arborist. But he raised his daughter with lopsided discipline. She took his money but did not spend it on her courses, her licensing fees. Her temper had been violent, her longings addled. She lived capably as a parasite.

  7.

  Unofficially, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway claims to have a bell seed. Similar in shape, they determined it to be the 130-year-old dried uvula of a New Guinea Singing Dog. A bell seed, even after centuries of storage, should be fresh and green with a nap like suede.

  They think there is a cycle at work. A wounded room was not always required for the birth of a seed. Seeds were once unexceptional—every tree produced at least one. But we collect in a different cycle now, one of uncertain duration. In North America, the last tree to produce a bell seed naturally was an oak in central Kansas. Settlers cut down the tree in 1856 to build a barn for a dairy. The patriarch of the family discovered a crystal bell within a split log. He told his wife that when he held it up to the light the clapper clouded. The bell hardly had a voice. Its tongue fractured midpeal with a light tilt of the dairyman’s wrist. All the trees in the hilly region died that summer, collapsing into mealy heaps.