Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  I was still rooted to the ground.

  Take off your shoes, she said. Maybe they’re too heavy.

  She had a point. My vintage Gagarin boots weighed at least a couple pounds. I took them off and still, nothing.

  What are all those switches for? she asked.

  It doesn’t matter anymore, I said, glancing at the hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene gauge, now that you’re up there, so far away.

  Stand up on the chair, she said. See if you can reach me.

  I had come through on my promise and now she wanted to reward me with proximity. I could feel the love brimming inside me, strong as nausea and just as terrifying. My testicles were tingling, my little planets, as I called them. I imagined us making love with her arms around my neck, choking me, our bodies quivering in the air like branches before a storm, her voice a whisper that slowly bloomed into a shriek: My poor little bird, my unfortunate little bird! Perhaps she’d even let me call her Luna.

  I climbed onto the chair and swiped at her foot, grasping it easily. I could have had her knee if I’d tried. I don’t want to pull you down, I said.

  Don’t worry, she said. You won’t.

  I started clambering up her body, and sure enough, she stayed right where she was, floating. When I reached her waist, I laid my face against her side while she played with my hair. I reached into her shorts.

  Hey!

  Her shirt came untucked and blew upward, hovering around her chin. There were Band-Aids patched over her side, stretching from her waist to her breast, overlapping, covering every inch.

  What happened? I asked.

  Nothing.

  Come on. You can tell me.

  I don’t want to.

  I pulled on her breasts to hoist myself upward. One of her nipples was hard in my palm, the other was not. Don’t you trust me?

  How bad do you wanna know? Real bad?

  I was trying to get her other nipple hard.

  How bad? she repeated.

  Bad, I said.

  OK then, since you wanna know bad: It was a boating accident. A terrible, horrendous boating accident. My father was drunk and lost control of the boat. It was a huge boat. They had to remove my spleen. How’s that?

  A boating accident? Is that the truth?

  Maybe. Yeah, sure. Whatever floats your boat.

  She started laughing.

  I want to know the truth, I said.

  Oh shut up. You’re just horny.

  Did your father hurt you?

  Big-time. Ripped my spleen right out with his bare hands.

  You can joke all you want, but mothers and fathers are serious business. They can ruin us.

  You think so?

  Our parents brought us into this world, I said, without our permission. That means they owe us. It means we deserve all the love and sanity they can muster.

  She shook her head. Guess what.

  What, I asked.

  By now the soft nipple had hardened and the hard one had gone soft.

  You’ve got it all wrong, she said. Your mother’s not the problem. It’s your spleen.

  My spleen?

  That’s what’s weighing you down.

  She unsheathed her cleaver. Her face was full and pale. I stared hard, trying to imagine what her cheeks would look like cratered.

  Fine, I said. Go ahead. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.

  You have, huh? She started rolling up the bottom of my shirt, her fingertips cold. She rolled it up to my armpits. Hold it right there, she said. I’m gonna lighten your load.

  The blade shined like a nova. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists.

  Five, four, three, two, one, she said, and then, a quick gust of air.

  When I came to, I was lying on the floor of the handicapped bathroom. She was cupping water from the sink and splashing it on my face.

  I felt lighter. I felt good. Maybe she was right.

  Did I float?

  Like a stone, she said.

  I looked at my stomach. I was still encased in skin, no gaps or tears.

  Where’s my spleen? I asked.

  Same place it’s always been.

  I felt all over my body like it was someone else’s.

  Guess I missed, she said, and helped me to my feet.

  She had me drive her back to the Save-Way even though it didn’t open for another hour and a half. She got out of the car, didn’t say goodbye. I drove around the block, wishing my erection would go away, then wishing it wouldn’t. When I came back, she was gone. I parked my car in the empty lot and walked the perimeter of the Save-Way looking for her, passing a wayward grocery cart. It might be fun for her to give me a ride, I thought. I could squeeze in with my arms and legs dangling out like a big boy and she could push me until she started to love me or one of the wheels broke.

  I found her sitting with her back against a Dumpster, shirt off, head down, cleaver in hand. There were slashes of raised, uneven flesh on her stomach, beneath her heart, where the Band-Aids had been, a bright red webbing of scars.

  I watched while she cut herself, drawing the blade across the skin under her ribs, biting down on her lip, the scream still getting through.

  When I got home, I called my brother. I asked if he could help me find a job.

  Hospice

  Thalia Field

  just as suddenly it was time to practice dying, a Buddha in slow wave sleep

  bottomless, weak against the synchronous pull of the stream

  (last offering: a meal, then pain

  tasted—refused)

  mind the mind

  walking the last six miles to Kusinaga

  She is the most important one, and now she’s leaving

  He’s the most important one and he’ll be leaving

  I won’t let you!

  and the Tathagata gave Ananda

  the elephant’s look

  breathing

  not breathing

  a body following the eye around

  FIRST WATCH OF THE NIGHT

  Train for confusion and old age. A bed wired to the wall, and a wall-mounted TV. Dirty floors and mauve curtains, and waking in another’s bed.

  Confusion says reach up, and then bad for reaching up. Confusion says wake up again.

  The bending down and then bad for bending down.

  The saying “stand up” and then yelling “no standing!” The saying “sit” and “why are you sitting?” The situation of being in the charge of order, the order for the direction, the overall authority, the otherwise inversion of orders. Write the letter and wait. Why did you write the letter and wait? Don’t say anything. Why didn’t you say anything? Try to unfold the map and step on it. Wait a few days. I told you to do it the next day. Why did you step on it?

  To be host, guest, stranger, enemy, is to derive from the latin hostis. A hostile welcome in a house of illness. Hospitality.

  543 BC flowers and birds gather in monk’s robes. The pains from Cunda’s generous meal grab from the gut, and the Tathagata’s mind sees pain as pain.

  The Tathagata reclines in the lion’s posture on his right side, his mind a perfect mirror. Mara enters. Another old age might be less prepared. Mara would like to empty the trash.

  Patience.

  REM sleep waves turn short and frantic in this bardo’s dream-mirror. Guard against views from every line of sight; every hearing already an echo—make the most of it? Is this still a life? Enough world to hang yourself.

  Mara offers an open pen.

  Books make me feel like it’s OK to die, someone says.

  But the child makes me afraid. To leave something that needs you? An unfinished book needs me, and makes me afraid. I haven’t said what I was saying. Just look at autumn flames in the window. The teacher goes and the teachings go on. After an hour of having nothing to do, I could just blow away. This wind, even a few moments of it, says, “Pass on.”

  Mara looks around the room and says, “Pass on.”

  The Tathaga
ta knows Mara’s tricks. “No thanks, I’ll take three more months.”

  He tells Ananda about his death.

  “But how can you die, what will be left?”

  The students make haste with truckloads and feasts.

  SECOND WATCH

  Three months ago she announced, “I’m dying” and birds chipped crumbs from the snow. I will let go at the timely hour, she said. Mara came but I made no claim on self-preservation, no final craving for life. Like an old cart, the body is fastened with weak string and makeshift parts. Be a refuge unto yourself. Eighty years make the body frail. Three months hence the Tathagata will utterly pass away. Mara comes to offer a room. Lunch. Ice water. To seduce the mind to taste the tasteless.

  The Tathagata hung his bed in two trees and went for a last drink from the river. In silence, he refused any more food and all other things. His visitors’ grief consumed their minds; they tangled their hair and withdrew to the side. Dying is active work. To be born is too. But one can practice being tired of working.

  A great earthquake an hour later.

  NEXT WATCH

  The last characters in the dream are not necessarily significant, but minor characters without many names who wet the lips and adjust the pillow. They lean or stand where others step back, a warm place filled by cooler air, causing a breeze.

  When visitors push open the room divider, clocks pause. Blossoms drop in winter.

  Papers scatter, clearly disordered. Tissues ball up.

  Ananda listens to the Tathagata’s silence, and the only children sob, “We can’t lose you.”

  The ones who have not gone far into the stream worry it’s too late.

  “How can you not lose me?” the patient asks. Ideas separate and change

  shape. Practice getting lost in sleep; practice not arguing with dreams.

  FOURTH WATCH OF THE NIGHT

  breathing

  not-breathing

  Make the map from the beginning, from the first rehearsal, a blank cloth spread from point to point and held in the running edge by the wind on one side, flapping as we wrestle it to a surface. To paint the map, the second rehearsal, to train for it, to start with “here” and work our way outward, to find other references and jot them in, even with small indicators, a color or house shape, something to remember and locate it by. So this way we can begin at birth, just as we learn where food comes from, and the breast, the smile, to map the face we call family, not just “faces” but the one we remember and want, the specific face that makes a map possible. From there we move to lines, edges, the corner of a room. What’s inside the room, and what’s not, or the doorway and the lines of the door, leading the eye beyond the door to a space between lines, possibly a larger house, a small hospital, or a large forest. Someday the map will tell us if it’s small or large, depending on its scale to the neighborhood and something like a cultural average. Mapping toys, lunches, the way to school, the storms—the path gains thick lines, the first to be followed, first lost.

  To rehearse everyone as your only child, take a blurred photo. A sick room. Faded flower patterns—and the bed, table, and wall TV. There are machines and echoes of machines. Plastic ice bucket. Yellowish gown. She turns eighty at the calendar’s pace. There are waves of activity, and brains torn off.

  Patience; the clear light bardo in the deepest sleep.

  The specialist reads the blood and you’re not to move.

  On the right side, death rests. On the left, blood flows toward birth.

  And you become the puppet. And you submit by the throat.

  When the signs of dying are full, there is no reason to force. Sit up, Madame.

  Shaking the body does not return consciousness. Madame, swallow.

  We will not lose you when you lose yourself. You give up your feet, your voice, your hands.

  You give up your plans, your time, your year. And all the photos

  which must be labeled. To finish the archive means sorting time.

  Machines mediate conversation, you don’t have to. Patience,

  Madame, can you hear your body talking? Carefully try saying nothing.

  Dying is diligence. For the elderly, the visitors’ tears feel violent, if the dying is not crying. She announces in English, “There is someone in the bed and I want to get back in. Help me, I am not in my room, and this is not my number.” She means, can she have her map back? Dying is not crying. All this hard pain feeds another wolf. The world-wolf cries when it cannot find its pack.

  FIFTH WATCH

  The Tathagata’s richest disciples cart feast-meats and fruits to the double doors, but the hospital can’t fit them. Stuff piles in the parking lot and bushes. And the Tathagata remains silent and does not accept the offerings. The visitors smash their heads and withdraw to sit at the side. The tiny only child must start there. Babies, you may not tear up maps. You offer and we, in our dreams, refuse your deaths. The world-wolves groan. The moment has passed for spiced pastries and flowers. Once born, fears clutch the babies to offer them. But the Tathagata in silence refuses the gifts and the visitors flail their arms and spit and withdraw to sit at the window. The Tathagata’s only children are having such a bad dream they are beside themselves. Practice dying in sleep or you’ll just keep waking up. Birth—he reminds them—has lost memory too.

  I observe the whole scene like a documentarian, she says. I am curious about this experience and would like to continue to watch it. How do you know where to turn, driving all these dark roads? Maybe he lived here before? Yes, but how do you know where you live? A diaspora of citizens without government or country. And in this I may still ask questions, mostly of young nurses—their sex lives, and how they feel about hospital work.

  In her shaky hands the visitor sees pictures and letters, handed to those who find their portraits shocking. I meant to return this to you, she says, shoving envelopes to the side table where pills roll along the bedpan. I’m done with the archive, now all I have to do is die. Half-joking language cut with morphine, a slur. The torment of Dorian Gray, she mumbles, racing a passing thought, wasn’t his precious portrait, but that by the end he didn’t recognize his own (story?)

  —sleep

  breathing

  not-breathing

  How long is left? the visitor grabs a doctor turning here and there.

  The Sala trees drop their blossoms at the wrong moment.

  A recent birth. What do you expect? How can a footprint hold an ocean?

  Train in being helpless. Soft foods first. Soft food last. Good teeth in between.

  Then a sudden feeling of recovery, of something taking place beforehand.

  Each death a unique work of art; a face in water.

  For the first few days she was everyone’s favorite patient.

  SIXTH WATCH

  Then a sudden impression of recovery, talking and eyes and smiles and recovering talking. The visitors sweep the curtain open; a meal with an apple. Then eyes and hands animated, sitting up and swallowing, and even some bites and a few details and a name and a picture glued together. Look, a window beyond the curtains, and warm leaves, and a sky going on. This window that doesn’t hold itself open. Speak gently to the window, let it know it’s a window and you are some wind. Reassure the wind of the window. Resume training. She begins to falter at the sight of the flowers. Do not distract the dying from dying. Die harder, you might be thinking. Die faster. Hold hands with the dying as recovery vanishes.

  Breathing

  not-breathing

  SEVENTH WATCH OF THE NIGHT

  Morpheus sleeps a baby’s sleep while seas hover, the medicine takes time to work; a new pain across the gut. It’s folding in again, nausea as a sudden absence of nausea that loads the room into focus. Relieve the bitter taste or just force more food. Eat against death. There’s a food part to every object. Swallow, sit up. Medicine, Madame, one two three. Sit up. Eat the cloth, postpone the book until they change the word order and bring in the life part. In the control stomac
h, which is outside itself, sits the nausea or rather how patient you can be. A bitter swell, increasing the patient, wires and the rolling floor as she spills on it. Fat tongue in the throat.

  Madame, what are you doing over there? The sight of other dead people won’t shock. She shouldn’t be standing up. Nurse calls in help. Morpheus always playing with shapes.

  Do not try to reorient reality for the patient.

  Mara has brought some friends.

  Mostly, the increase in hospitalization removes the long line to names. Heaving. And adds careless smells of iodine and something in the toilets that never belonged to you. Wind says, “Which way?” An adjustment of medications remains likely. Bloody gums, the death diet and baby diet of mushed foods—the brain works in the dark. The suck reflex encourages a desperate mouth. Organs shut, don’t shut up. All in the dark.

  Watch your mind as Mara and Morpheus lean close.

  breathing

  breathing

  The word for patient means be-the-baby, or the amorous part you cradled: a growing Narcissus in a forest beyond wits. Host of strangers—Ananda emerges to tell the story. Simple Echo wanders without a self to protect. Patently senseless. Even soft food, forced, hurts the jaw and chokes a “no” to stop everything and everyone from climbing into the bed.

  Morpheus opens his archive, the son of sleep, restless in this mess. Mara brings more visitors, and they too become strangers. This is the whole family now, awake in her fitful room. Old and young, it’s not easy to tell. We arrive at the scene, a wider river, the peace river through a continent divided by herds. Morphine river with mouth open and a terrible rattling from the relaxing of the larynx.