The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  *

  That night she dreamed a highway lay across her body. It began on her forehead, spread over her nose, lips and chin, and then ran across her chest and stomach. At her throat and her pelvis it branched into two and stretched down her arms and legs. In her dream she kept driving and driving along herself. Above her, bulbous cartoon clouds sped across a blue sky, a cartoon sun and moon exchanged in seconds, and day quickened to night and back again. Time rushed outside her window and she was alone in her car whizzing down the empty highway with grass-bending force. A steel finger parting hair.

  56.

  The birds were singing when she woke. She got up and put on her jeans, white button down shirt and stood in front of the window. She stretched her arms towards the warm sun like a plant and the sun streamed into her as if her body were a shot-up target the light shone through. She was hungry. She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth, grabbed her hotel key, slipped on her loafers and left.

  The hotel was attached to a small café and Elora quickly slid into a high-backed pleather booth by the window and spread the map out on the table. It was flabbergasting how close Jacques had been. Two days drive away. She could easily reach his house by this evening, but had decided to back track to Callisto and photograph Arlo. There was spilled salt on the table and she threw a few grains over her shoulder.

  “Superstitious, huh?” said the waitress arriving with a cloth to wipe the table.

  “It’s an old habit,” said Elora. She noticed the waitress’s name was Sandy; she was probably in her forties.

  “That’s better. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Coffee and water please.”

  “Are you ready to order food too?”

  “I think I’ll just have a slice of coconut cream pie.”

  “Sure thing; be right back.”

  Across the road was a fenced field like any other. Cattle stared at her while they slowly chewed, their jaws constantly grinding, turning. She had missed the infinite expanses of land and sky. The unevenness of the pulled apart clouds as if the sky were denim too long in the sun and bleached along its creases.

  The sky in Chicago was always spiked with metal’s posture, building, bridge, crane, all screaming a separation from the natural world. She knew the buildings to climb that offered the most uninterrupted views, like steel and glass pedestals of restoration. Lake Michigan had offered an indifferent respite, but it was tidal and crashed, whereas the Mississippi rolled. She had always been a sky and river person.

  She had died alongside the Mississippi. The thought of Arlo and her old life no longer asphyxiated her. The woman who had sung beside the river and even the thought of Jacques, had begun to recede into the obscure briars of her memory.

  She had also been reborn alongside the Mississippi. For better or for worse, Jacques had wanted her to live, so here she was, inside this strange, hollowed body for which she documented emotion.

  Photographing Arlo would chronicle justice.

  57.

  When she reached the turning for Callisto, she drove off the main highway and down the back roads towards the side entrance to her father’s old land. She drove until she saw an iron gate at the top of a grassy hill. She parked the car alongside the road and began to climb, swatting mayflies from her face. Crossing the field and following the track would take her to the other side of the river, where there were trees, rocky outcrops and coves full of fish. During this time of year, she would certainly find Arlo. Photographing him on the Mississippi seemed appropriate, plus he was trapped on the boat and wouldn’t be able to reach or hurt her.

  The abandoned house was long gone but the rhubarb was growing wild as anything. Elora sat on a stagecoach stump at the top of the hill. It was another five minute walk to the river and she could see it snaking through the trees. It must have been a beautiful spot to settle.

  Beside the house was a little cemetery surrounded by a rusted gate and fence. Cemeteries like this could be found up and down the wagon trail. Elora knew to look for the telltale iron gate poking through a grove of scrappy pines planted to keep the soil from eroding. Not many were this lucky of course, most had only wooden crosses or just stones to mark their passing. Elora pictured the wind whipping off the layers of soil covering their frail bones like sheets, lost in the wind they disintegrated, funneled and swirled like insects in a current, then vanished. Time is lost in places like this; time means nothing.

  She thought of her old life and herself as a child.

  In her childhood bedroom there had been a single window. On stormy nights the wind softly rattled the oval mirror above her wooden dresser. Apart from her bed she had no other furniture, just a denim rag rug and a gold hook on the back of her door. Every other inch of space was covered with magpie objects, feathers, sticks, acorns, rocks, egg shells, a piece of foil she’d found on the grass like a fallen star. Objects man had named inanimate, bones. But it’s not true, for if she stared hard enough, mindfully enough, the inanimate became animate. Became a song. The rock grew a face and the chipped bone, a new skin. She digested their curves and they charted one another, became maps of the same landscape, kin. In black marker she wrote her favorite words on the walls. Then she sang them alive.

  Now she could do the opposite.

  She remembered the day her father returned home from hospital. The doctors had told him his cancer was irreparable. The afternoon light had already begun to muddy the stark yellow of morning. She watched the air thicken, watched the shadows lengthen in silence. Silence was everywhere and it filled her. Her eyes shifted through its coating like two stealth swimmers parting water, she pored over things: a white door handle, a glass vase on the dresser holding pheasant feathers, a watermark in the ceilings right corner that looked like a starfish or a smudged handprint. Outside a gust of wind shook the dust from the leaves thin backs. A branch scraped the window. The knowledge that life was impermanent filled her mind like lungs inhaling air. He died within a year.

  In Chicago, she sat at the window and watched the city hit against the night like a shine across black leather. She’d stare and listen to sounds trickle through a darkness haloed by streetlights, damp headlights and a few other yellowed windows. Pure black existed only in patches, in parks, down alleyways and corners, black crevices where sound and light slowed and labored as if rolling through tar, a cough, a pair of lit eyes, cold cardboard. Elsewhere light burned through black, fusing and reinventing black as watered-down amethyst, dark gold and army green bruises. Sometimes she’d light a candle just to see her shadow pulse. To remind her of her power. Sometimes the wind blew her shadow, banging like a dark hand against the wall and she’d stare at things until she no longer reacted to them. All night stripping objects of their names.

  In the city she spent summer afternoons in the park under a particular tree; she’d sit watching its pale green leaves oxidize to gray. She always left at dusk, so never saw the leaves turn black with night, but pictured them often just before sleep, saw their yellow light draining to uncover an opaque figure, like a sunlit puddle evaporating to divulge its solid mud bottom. The person she had become.

  It was time to say goodbye to her old self now.

  She followed the track to the trees, sat on the riverbank and waited for Arlo’s boat to appear. The reeds harped inside the mud and swallows dipped and caught early evening bugs. Across the water, the skeletal remains of Jacques burnt-out house settled into the landscape like a rotting corpse. In the distance, Birdie’s house and the grave of Lorelie. She took a photo of the grave. A shot from a distance was best, and then Elora closed her eyes and revelled in the synchronization of knowing that she was putting events to rest.

  Before long, Arlo’s boat retched through the air. Geese flapped up in warning. She stood to face him. The engine oil was pungent as he motored into view. Look at me, she beckoned him, and he did. When he saw her standing there, like a ghost, he cut the engine and lunged forward, but the boat nearly capsized and forced him to steady hi
mself. She smiled, waved and brought the camera up to her eye.

  She took photo after photo, capturing him inside the negative. He shook his head to remove her image. There was nothing he could do to hurt her now. He looked as silly as a toad. It was stupid how simple it was. Stupid. To make it ceremonious would add a gravitas he didn’t deserve. Within minutes, the current floated him downstream and out of view. She put the camera down and walked back to the car. The sunset now was thick and red as flayed muscles through the trunks of trees. This is the first life she has truly owned.

  58.

  Back in the hotel, she stood in the bath, the water was so hot that she had to enter inch by inch, her ears were the last to submerge. The water cupped her face like two steaming hands. She could hear her body digesting, gurgling, she heard what her blood heard. She heard what her child had heard. Few noises are as indiscriminately human.

  She thought of the city and how dawn played it like a beautiful tragedy. She remembers moving through it. She would leave her apartment like entering an empty theater, the play over, the forgotten applause still cracking its speechless noise in the air. She could hear the slightest shift, her eyes drew long gazes, her breath lengthened. The first thing she always noticed was the waste, so much waste. Garbage bins spilled over like leaky bouquets: uneaten food, piled, picked through and rat nibbled. The homeless with red cauliflower noses, thick blue ankles, some with clothes stuffed with bags to soften the night’s blows, like forgotten ragged teddy bears, or others like stick insects with skeletal feet inside large shoes, wrapped in dirty blankets and dogs – she could feel them awake, waiting, needing.

  And then, a reminder of love.

  Some mornings she would walk to the park and sit on the same bench with coffee in hand, watching ordinary humans rush to work. One morning a couple appeared around the corner, laughing. They kissed in front of the duck pond before heading in different directions. It was a deep kiss, it was not a kiss that was meant to shock, it was natural and true, when all around them everybody pushed and frowned.

  She knew it was voyeuristic and odd to watch, but she found it so promising how they dissolved the anonymity of the city like salt on a slug. To witness their open intimacy felt encouraging and soon she began to notice the things that made them uniquely beautiful, like how his tie was tied too short or how her shoe scuffed, her nose was flat, his ears were big. That’s how love was meant to be. She had never loved in the open. Until now, her heart had lived in secrecy. Photography allowed her to expose herself.

  What is beautiful, what is human, is unpolished and visible.

  It was not a new idea, but as it entered Elora, it felt fresh, even comforting. She understood that there were only a handful of truly meaningful ideas, but what she found miraculous was our ability to continually feel them anew.

  Jacques had wanted an entirely numinous life. But that was just nostalgia for a time lived or unlived, for he never understood that what lasts as beauty is incredibly normal. Falling down, scraping your face, being late for work, cooking, screwing, crapping, eating. Normal humans are traitors, dreamers, wasters. They envy, scheme, long, forgive. He only wanted what shimmered, but there must be a balance, otherwise the shimmer is too bright or the mundane too burdensome.

  Could they share a life with their respective abilities or were they destined to live alone?

  Could she forgive him for how he had created her?

  She pulled the plug out with her toe and lay still while the water drained. By the time she reached for her towel, the skin on her stomach was cold and dry. She dried her hair and crawled into bed, like any normal person she thought, in the unreal world and dreamed.

  *

  A dream of a frail girl with hair chopped and uneven as a head of lettuce. She stood on a flat rock in the middle of a pond. Dragonflies with slick aquamarine backs slide through the air around her in giant, then small, then giant circles. They flicked their prehistoric bodies towards the sun with blue phosphorus and brilliant flashes, then withdrew, became invisible but for steady hums in the air.

  The girl was naked. In each hand she held a bucket, her pale muscles strained, her skin was crimson from the sun. Elora called out to her. Take this shirt, she said, take this blanket. Then the strangest thing happened, the girl began to yodel, high and loud and echoing. Elora could see the sounds, the music notes as they left her mouth, swirling cartoon notes, red and rising, they pierced and bent the bones in Elora’s ears. She screamed for her to stop, but the girl sang louder and louder until her voice cracked. The bones in Elora’s ears snapped and a warm liquid slid down her neck.

  Her skin began to deepen with color, the sun was relentless with its glare, the sun stared at them, beat them, when suddenly the girl let out one string of laughter and then burst into flames. Elora screamed for her to jump. Jump in the water! Jump in the water! She begged her to jump into the water. She did not, so Elora started swimming towards her but she couldn’t swim hard enough, fast enough. The flames crackling, cracking, were taking her. Elora could no longer see her face, could no longer see the contours of her body, it was melting, her body was melting off her and Elora was afraid to look, but kept swimming, kept swimming, kept trying to swim.

  Then the fire abruptly ended. She was gone. She had vanished. Small bits of ash fell gracefully from the sky and landed on the rock. It was silent enough to hear the trees stop and stir and stop again and the water rippled with the wind. Like a circle growing larger and larger a wave gained force and threw itself over the rock cleaning it of her ashes. The buckets the girl had held floated to a marshy cove, branch covered and cool with moss. Elora looked and saw hundreds and hundreds of white buckets stacked upon one another, resting, with wet frogs jumping in and out of their white round mouths. She did not belong here. A silent terror surged though her. The world was terribly quiet, but for the sudden splash of frog and the hit of each wave. Spatter spray spatter spray. There were no birds.

  She did not belong here.

  The mere shape of her body was loud, the pale color of her skin was intrusive. She climbed up on the rock and noticed her clothes were missing, noticed that she was holding two buckets, unable to move and petrified of speaking, of making a sound, of burning, she looked inside the buckets and was blinded by the white flames they contained.

  She opened her eyes and sat up in bed. On the walls, the hotel paintings hung, lonely as dark ships. The headlights of passing cars lapped against each canvas. The bed was a soft white island that she sunk back into; it was only a dream, a dream.

  Everything has changed and nothing at all.

  She had just begun living on the outside, but the altering, the real work of turning the heart around, had occurred months ago, years, had begun a thousand years ago, perhaps had not stopped its churning, its blending of lost and gained. The truth had been spoken and a grip released. Suddenly she had found herself a loose balloon in the wind. She could see her red self floating. She knew she could end up anywhere, this was the danger; the danger was the ecstasy.

  59.

  She stops the car in Lake Itasca, sixty miles outside of Pine Creek. The road is empty all the way to the mountains. Lake Itasca is the headwater of the Mississippi. She leaves the car and walks to the edge of the glacial lake where the river begins. Thick pines along the sides and boulders rolling all the way to the shoreline. She sits on a large rock and dangles her feet inside the cold water. The clouds are mirrored across the waters surface. She holds the cigar box in her lap, removes a silver locket from its contents, and fastens it around her neck. It had been her mothers.

  She wishes for a child to inherit it.

  Everything else inside the box belongs to another woman. She folded her map to fit, placed it inside with a few heavy rocks and shut the lid. To keep yourself open is on some level to submerge to a close, like coral closes inside of water, and is most beautiful when left undisturbed. Life, love are disturbing, inspirational, yes, but disturbing all the same. Maybe he had never loved
her enough to be interrupted. Maybe he only wanted to interrupt. Well, she was the result of his interruption.

  The moon was a small C in the sky. The air off the water smelt like cool wet leaves. The mountains perched in the far-off distance like hawks.

  She removed a piece of rope from her pocket and tied the rope tightly around the box so that it looked like a present. A present for the river. Then, she pitched the box into the air as hard as she could, it flew for a second before cutting straight through the water, and it barely made a ripple. In her mind she watched it sink quickly to the bottom and lodge firmly in the brown mud, and once the cloud of mud and a few scared fish cleared away the box looked as if it has always been there.

  That is what her body would have done before the gas of her decay rose her to the surface. That woman needs to stay here now, she tells herself, here below the mouth of the river is where she belongs.

  Above it the river moved on and on and she sat there for a long time breaking back to nothing.

  She thought back to that night. She would have died alongside the river. She did die alongside the river, but then she rose from it again. The first step, he had orchestrated, but every other step had been of her making.

  Her thoughts scattered like gulls. Her seagulls, the birds he had heard. She let them. She let them go and watched as they disappeared. She could feel, inside of herself, a silence pulling down like a root, a quiet knowing. Sometimes a need will go on so long that it becomes a grind that must turn itself out of you like a screw, like this, twisting through tailbone and out the balls of her feet. The resulting pattern is a coiled cavern where a new trust, like a cool stream begins to lick the splintered edges smooth. She let herself feel it and closed her eyes, and breathed into herself.