by Trisha Cull
Just then a teenage boy, about sixteen, sees us standing there looking lost. He speaks English, doesn’t bother with Italian. Perhaps it’s clear that we won’t understand. “Hello,” he says. “Do you need help?”
I exhale a sigh of relief, almost shout, “Yes!”
He laughs, asks us where we’re going. A few minutes later we’re walking through trees down a dark hillside, and I worry that he is going to mug us or kill us. Haven’t we all heard stories of tourists being killed in foreign countries? But we emerge on the other side, and Trastevere sprawls before us. We might have stumbled upon it on our own had we searched a little longer.
Marco gestures goodbye. We thank him profusely, offer ten euros, which I believe offends him, and off he goes into the night. I think, Remember this boy’s name. Forever, remember this boy’s name, though I will never again be able to recall his face.
The evening is hazy and magical. Trastevere is unlike any place I’ve seen before. People mill about around the fountain, drink beer and wine on the fountain steps. Water cascades and pools into a moat, makes the air humid. It’s still so hot. I take off my shoes and dip my feet into the moat, hike up my dress, let the water cleanse me of the filth and decay. There are musicians here, men dressed in tuxedos playing violin and classical guitar, and acrobatic clowns with white faces on unicycles. (Are they expelling fire from their mouths? I can’t remember now.) I feel like I’m inside a Chagall painting, starry skies and liquid night surrounding me. I breathe in liquid darkness, drink my beer on the steps with my feet in water.
I want to stay here in this moment exactly, for the rest of my life, because this is where I belong, this is my home, this is the place I’ve been returning to my whole life.
This is the closest to being inside a dream I’ve ever been.
I have asked the doctor to give me more Ativan, and he has.
I wash down Ativan with NeoCitran DM. Nine, ten, fifteen mugs a day. Empty pill bottles rattle around in my purse and Roots duffle bag.
I rattle as I walk down the street.
Slippery sidewalks. Technicolor sky. Menacing crows.
Is it the drugs or some innate genetic deviance that is making me paranoid?
I have begun to fear stray cats, fence posts and airplanes flying low to the earth.
One time, I duck.
I hang out in my sister’s backyard throughout the night, chain-smoke and sip Neo. My sister’s guests are roaming around the kitchen. Silhouettes pass back and forth on the other side of the white kitchen curtains.
Spaghetti is boiling on the stove, filling my sister’s kitchen with steam, fogging the window. Someone inside peeks through the curtains, clears the fog with her hand, makes a circle, looks at me and smiles.
I am a specimen.
My sister leans out her kitchen window, says, “Can I get you anything?”
I say, “No… thanks,” and take another sip of Neo.
“Are you okay?” she says.
I overcompensate, cannot calibrate the appropriate response, come across animated, cheerful even: “I’m good!” I say.
“Do you want some pasta?” she says.
I say, “No.”
“Just a little?”
“No, thanks.”
“A cube of cheese, bread, an olive?”
“No, thanks,” I say. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.
The Colosseum looms against the hazy late afternoon skyline, takes my breath away. It curves away from itself, then back unto itself on a far side I cannot see from here. I want to hold her in my arms.
But more than anything, all I really want to see are the Colosseum cats.
My sister said, “Bring cat food, those cats are hungry,” but I have forgotten, feel guilty as I look out into the hollow place inside.
All I see is dust and stone, jagged edges, look up at the broken oval and wish for completion. Although I am stunned by its magnitude, its shabbiness bothers me. I long for smooth surfaces, white marble, a sheen I can capture and keep at the back of my mind. I want it to be clean and therefore make me clean by proximity.
I long for my Vancouver Island home, the temperate rainforest, dew on leaves and lush grass underfoot. Perhaps I have come here with the wrong man.
Leigh grabs a ledge, leans over and looks inside, smiles, and looks back over his shoulder with a boyish grin on his face. “Just think, this is where men were eaten alive,” he says. And I think, Yes, this is where men were eaten alive.
I think of the poor lions, stabbed in their hearts with spears, chains around their necks. Blood and rose petals on the dirt floor.
I finally see a cat, sprawled on a ledge. She is a Roman cat, eyes set wider apart than a Canadian cat, specks of gold, wise as the Empire itself. The heat blazes upon her, and I wish I had a bowl of clean cool water for her.
I snap a picture. Later, when I get home, I’ll look at the photograph with remorse, wondering if she made it out alive. How long did she live? How long had she lived before I took her picture, stealing away one of her lives in the process?
Then another cat, younger and more agile, grey with white down her chest and on her paws. She is hunting a beetle in the shadows. The beetle is flipped on its back. I don’t know who I feel sorry for more—the beetle or her. But I can’t bear the grotesqueness of the act, cannot bear the impending crunch of the insect in her jaws, so I flip the beetle right side up again and it skitters away into a nook in the stone.
The hunt is over.
She is hungry.
She stares at me and blinks.
Caravaggio’s front teeth have begun to curl under. He gnaws carrots. His eyes weep white fluid. More scabs, more sores.
Lying (yellow-bellied) lengthwise along the cage, I say “I love my cough medicine,” and press two fingers against my neck to take my pulse. But time has become twisted and abstract.
Caravaggio says, “You love your dextromethorphan.”
One thump, two thump, three thump, four…
“I miss martinis too, the shape of the glass, the idea of the shape of the glass.”
“Those lovely bejewelled olive skewers,” he says.
One thump, two thump, three thump, four…
“It was all so sexy-sexy in the beginning.”
“So Euro-glam, yes, I know.”
A raccoon waddles across my sister’s yard, oblivious, a wild animal in the darkness.
There is no safe exit.
I long for the recognizable anguish, that awfulness, the bad marriage. I miss my home, the familiarity, the pattern; the couch where I cuddle my bunny for an hour or so before I pass out, whiskers and fur under my chin as I drift into semi-psychosis.
The raccoon prowls grass and violets, pulling me down to reality again.
But I have nothing left for negotiation or altercation. I think, Raccoon, come on, just see me.
Dying of thirst, I approach a Gatorade stand outside the entryway to the Roman Forum. A crowd of thirsty Italians surrounds me. I am jostled to and fro, clipped at my shoulders. I wait patiently in line until I realize there are no lines in Italy. Finally, I push my way to the front of the crowd and say, haughtily, “Uno Gatorade!” I don’t say please.
I’m wearing soft brown leather sandals and a light blue knee-length dress made of stretchy spandex. It ties into a bow around the back of my neck. A dark blue applique of a bird the name of which eludes me is swathed on the front. I love this dress. I will wear this dress for several years every summer until I gain weight again and it doesn’t fit anymore. I will hold onto this dress for years, refusing to part with it, convinced there will come a day when I’ll be thin enough to wear it again.
I lean down and pick up a cube of ochre-coloured stone with a flower carved into one side. It looks like a child’s carving—a fat circle in the middle surrounded by five fat petals. A ha
ppy flower. An ancient flower, seemingly tossed aside thousands of years ago and left here, right here, for me to find.
I hold it in my hand. It rests on my palm, the size of a Rubik’s Cube. I hold it up, survey it against the sky. My hand becomes dusty, fingertips powdered ochre.
Other tourists mingle around, stepping gingerly as they go, then when no one is looking I open my satchel and place the stone inside.
Days turn into weeks, and my life with Leigh begins to fall away. There is nothing left to do now but hold on tight and hope.
Caravaggio’s ears perk up.
“I miss sipping martinis, wearing black strapless dresses and kick-ass boots,” I say.
He purrs, chatters. “A little higher.”
I press my ear against the drum of his furry belly, check his pulse too, the quick beat of a bunny’s heart.
One thump, two thump, three thump, four…
“I listened to jazz.”
“Billie Holiday… Keb’ Mo’?”
“I cracked pistachios…”
“A little lower.”
“…under great fans and tiger pelts.”
“That strikes me as wrong,” he says, “a little too colonial.”
I gently drag my fingernails over his rump, scrape away the imperfections, to soothe his itch, to make him a soft unfettered bunny again.
Journal
April 23, 2009
Writing this from another new temp job.
I have a great office, second floor, windows that open onto a cobblestone courtyard. I like being high up. I have never been in a second-floor office before.
I’m feeling dizzy. My hands shake when I sip coffee. My hands were shaking when I was trying to put on my mascara while driving to work this morning, which by the way, I did quite successfully.
I think the dizziness is from the lithium; trembling too is common or so I’ve read, and of course it doesn’t help that I hardly eat.
I saw Dr. Gheis yesterday, after waiting five months for the appointment. He was nice, asked a bunch of questions, and concluded that I am Bipolar II. My diagnosis is constantly evolving. One minute I am clinically depressed; the next, bipolar.
He explained that he does not deal strictly with mood disorders, but rather he deals with psychological disorders related to physical trauma.
He is going to refer me to a psychiatrist. I won’t have to wait long this time.
Seven
The Rabbits (September 2007)
The rabbit’s head is tilted. He’s honed in, perched, readying himself to make a move; appears to know me. We are connected; I feel it right away, this rabbit and I. Maybe it’s the peril that divides us from each other now; we are each at opposing ends of the danger in between.
How many small things are crushed in parking lots every year? It’s all that backing out, blind spots and squeaky windshield wipers—the glare of water and sunlight.
I’m so stoned. “Wait,” I say. “Don’t move.” The sky is Technicolor blue. One menacing cloud. The cloud is going to kill me.
The bunny sits on a patch of grass on the meridian, surrounded by concrete and yellow lines that mark off the faculty parking spaces.
The leaves on the maples have begun to change colour; tips dipped in ink, magenta and desert ochre. Soon the students will return to campus with their backpacks and shiny to-go cups and fresh faces. I am still staying with my sister, sleeping on her couch, wandering around her house in limbo, higher than a kite.
A seagull caws at the top of a lamppost, a shrill cry.
Was it a real cry or an auditory hallucination? Sometimes I hear voices. A voice says my name, loudly, thrust up against my ear. I actually jump out of my skin.
I feel as if I should acknowledge the bunny, tilt my head, wave, like it would be rude not to. But I don’t want to encourage him. I want him to stay there. I think, I will come to you.
I’m high on cough medicine, sitting under the stars on a concrete cinder block in my sister’s backyard. The block is at the bottom of a set of five wooden steps, red paint peeling off slivered wood.
The cough medicine used to calm me, but now it tweaks my mind, pinches my receptors, makes me itchy and paranoid; little bugs beetling up my arms and down my back.
I have been counteracting the beetling by taking copious Ativan, three, four, five times the recommended dosage, then a handful a day, now little handfuls at intervals throughout the day.
The crocuses that line the back wall of the house are illuminated by moonlight on one side and by the warmer glow of the kitchen window above them. Each flower tapers into a narrow tube, cup-shaped, protruding from three stamens. Its mouth, the way it curves at the stem and dips, evokes a sense of want. It is a flower of longing.
I pluck one from the dirt.
It is an apostle of desire, this flower.
There is no such thing as dosage anymore; it’s laughable. I am operating in desperation, will take anything and as much of anything as my body will endure, if it means the slightest bit of relief.
I throw down clonazepam, wash it down with the NeoCitran DM. I have no grace anymore, no dignity.
A white stripe along the leaf axis, the crocus (from Greek, krokos, related to Hebrew karkom, Aramaic kurkama and Arabic kurkem) is a humble flower. The novice naturalist would not suspect there is saffron in the stigma.
I am living in a state of shock. I still cannot believe I left my husband after so long. Only cutting makes me feel real, penetrates the numbness of shock.
A mouthful of pills inside a mouthful of Neo; the little pills (the Ativan, clonazepam, toss in an antidepressant, five little Effexors) dissolve on my tongue like bitter tablets, leave a residue in my mouth that reminds me of the penicillin I had to take for my tonsillitis as a kid.
I toss my cigarette into the grass. Embers spark in the wind, flurry across the yard like fireflies.
The bunny sees the car at the last minute, hops supersonic from behind a wheel and through a cloud of exhaust, makes it to the sidewalk.
“Oh, thank god.” Either he says this or I do.
He looks up at me, seems to think I am the person he’s been looking for. Maybe I am. “Little bastard,” I say. My heart is still racing.
He is shiny and grey, could fit in the palm of my hand, has no errs about him; a no-bullshit, direct little bunny who means what he says and wants what he wants. “Oh, here you are,” he says.
I am chosen.
I pick him up with two hands then hold him close. He snuggles into me, purrs, chatters in my hair, rests his bunny rabbit head on my shoulder, seems exhausted. He must have belonged to someone before he came to the university; some idiot dropped him off in the middle of nowhere up here.
“I will call you, Marcello,” I say. Rub. Rub. Rub. “You will be Caravaggio’s little brother.” They don’t last long in the wild, these domestic rabbits abandoned in the middle of nowhere. “You’re coming with me,” I say.
I call Leigh. “I have two rabbits now. Can I come home?”
He says, “Two rabbits?”
“Yes, I know, but we’ll figure it out, right?”
He sighs. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it. My allergies, you know.”
“Just let me come home,” I say. I relinquish any sense of self-authority, have resorted to begging. I am desperate and unable to mask my desperation with a false sense of dignity. I am giving myself over to him completely.
After a long drawn-out moment, “Okay,” he says. “Yes, you can bring them home.”
I depart immediately, leave everything: my clothes, books, scraps of bad poetry. I only take my pills and the clothes on my back. I don’t wait, not for a moment
I’ll come back for the rabbits later, I think, rushing out the front door, bounding down my sister’s front porch steps. I leap to the curb, cross the street,
turn into an alleyway that leads to the Village.
Run. Run. Run.
I haven’t eaten in days, have been living on coffee, NeoCitran and Ativan. My body seems unable to withstand the drama of this day, the magnitude of returning back to my husband, my old familiar life.
So I sit down on the curb, hold my head between my knees, and the blood flushes my cheeks again. A car rolls by, slows, keeps going. I am desperate for a cup of coffee.
I am returning to a humourless man, running fast, gasping for breath at intervals. I tell myself, Keep moving. Don’t look back. If I pause to think about it, I’ll change my mind, again, and return to my sister’s. But once at my sister’s I’ll want to run home again. This battle rages in my mind, every minute, every hour, day after day, has for weeks, no, months. Years? Is it possible that I have spent nearly a decade in romantic limbo?
What an extraordinary feat of endurance.
How did I do it?
I am fucking remarkable.
Exhausted.
Leigh opens the door, smiles apprehensively, says, “Honey, you’ve lost weight.”
I sob, wrap my arms around him. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
The embrace feels awkward. He barely hugs me back. So I hold him gently too. He feels smaller.
Being home already feels wrong, and I just got here.
This is crazy.
I need help.
“You’re home now, sweetie,” he says. “This is your home.” He mentions home several times in my first moments back. “This is where you belong.” The repetition of home and belong strikes me, even here, my first seconds in the doorway, as conspiratorial and I wonder if I was right to come back.
I take off my coat and toss it onto the umbrella rack behind the door.
Leigh draws me into the foyer, closes the door behind me. As it clicks shut, the most horrendous ordeal of my life so far clicks shut also.