by Matt Bell
MEMORY AS NEW MONTHS SPENT alone: To again be without companionship, except for the ranks of foundlings waiting at the tree line, whose stern bodies would no longer let me pass, and who would not bring me word of my wife, no matter how I begged. To again live in a world of unfaithful wives, a world where mothers chose their children over their husbands. To complain aloud and to no one of this unfairness, to pretend that there was no deeper person in her than what I gave her back, and yet, and yet.
To admit that no matter how I wanted her to be my wife first, still she had not been just mine, not since the moment of our first conception, all those years ago.
To admit defeat, because she never would be mine alone, not ever again, and it was I who had failed to join her, to become some true father to complement her endless motherhood, instead remaining only her husband, that insufficient shape to which always I stubbornly clung.
FROM MY STATION ON THE dirt I kept my vigil, watching for my wife’s return from just outside the woods. Whenever I was not weeding our garden or keeping straight our house or maintaining some other part of what world I had been left to steward, then I would return to my chosen spot, close enough to toss the foundlings whatever fruits and vegetables had ripened that day, and each time I fed them I grimaced to watch their hunger grow, but if there was never enough to feed them all, then what other option existed but to provide for some? Afterward, I laid my old bones upon the hard dirt, then waited, waited and watched as they resumed their previous activities, their actions as varied as their faces, their shifted shapes. I memorized the different foundlings that came to the edge of the woods, the ones that kept me from walking beneath its trees, and again I made some catalogue or listing, some roll call unscrolling—and by their differences I knew I named them, even if I had not meant to.
In one foundling, I heard my wife’s laugh and, in another, her sigh, some exclamation.
And in this foundling, I saw my wife’s features most complete, the boy’s face like her face, her raven hair long and flowing upon his shoulders.
And in this foundling, her touch, smoothing back the hair of a brother covered in mud and dirt, hungry and hurting, for what food there was was never enough.
And in this foundling, a game I remembered her teaching him, as she had been taught, as he now taught the others.
And in this foundling, a voice like my wife’s, singing some snatch of the song I sought. And in this one, some other part, and in this one, a third.
And in this foundling, a look like she had given me, like she gave me often, a look that could mean one or a dozen things, and how it pained me to remember each one, and also them all.
And in this foundling, I saw the bear, her long limbs, her dense muscles, and I saw her apartness, her knowledge that she had given up much to become what she was. I saw this and more, all on the face of one child, who could not understand from what lamentations he was made.
And in this foundling, an angry lesson, scarred into a face burned not here but somewhere far above us, far behind. A face never resung into beauty, belonging to this boy holding down one of his brothers, poking fingers into the younger boy’s eyes and nose and mouth. He pinched and folded the flesh of the other’s face ugly as his own, and even then he did not stop, even though I cried out to him, even though I pleaded from the dirt, and as always it was as if my words could not cross the thin border between my domain and theirs, and as always it was only as if.
And in this foundling, the kindness of the mother, rocking some smaller child to sleep, cooing all the while, as if mere sound were enough to wish the wicked world away.
And on this foundling, a suit of skin, torn free from another brother, left to wander more naked than naked. And how the skin was sewn with hair. And how it was stained with his brother. And how it kept the foundling warm, so that while the others shivered in the almost dusk, this newly clothed killer stood tall and proud, stupid and unafraid, despite all the world around him, the cold and the tired conspiring to bring him low.
And in this foundling: again, the bear, and now more of her in each new brother.
And so in this one: clawed hands at the end of too-long limbs.
And in another: a hump of muscle twisting his back, giving strength to shoulders and fists.
And in another: a mouth so filled with teeth the lips couldn’t fit over what they contained, that jutting sharpness.
And in another: a body covered with snarling fur, thicker than any yet seen, but not thicker than what was yet to come.
And in this foundling, again more of the first: His high, lilted voice. His strange way of standing, cocked sideways, unsure upon his legs. His small hands, his crowded teeth. His hair, thick and curled, like no one else’s, at least no man’s. His way of playing, often alone, often at some distance, as if every game required no other player, and also his eyes, dark and accusing, set in a dozen and then two dozen heads, all looks landing on me, lingering hard and long and suspicious, and it was no mystery to me that these gazes remained unfooled, untricked by what gentler old man I had tried to become, had pretended I had.
I kept one last watch at the edge of the woods, and when morning came still there was no sign of my wife, just these dozens of worsened children, and again they refused to part, to make way for me to enter. Even the smallest were like standing stones against me, and the oldest shook their sticks and lifted their fist-sized rocks, barked threats, and there was no peaceful way to pass their barricade. I stepped back, gathered my breath, then let loose nearly all the sound I had in me, emptied it against their own loud voices until they were culled into silence, until all the air was mine.
Every eye was watchful upon me, and to their attention I said, I am coming through you, and then I am going to my wife, to bring her back or else to stay at her side.
I said, You will not stop me.
I said, I love her and am her true husband, the only one there ever was, and the truth of that will grant me passage against you, all you ghosts.
The foundlings did not speak then, my bravado provoking no response from either their brightest and oldest, nor from their youngest, those who might not know better than to speak to one such as me. And smartly so: for silence was a better answer than words, and a harder one to take.
I was disappointed by this result but I had hardly expected more, had been foolish to hope: Mine was not the power of voice, had never been that.
My power, always it was something else, and it was a thing more terrible than even the worst awfulness these shades had imagined. And as they would not give me what I wanted, so now my anger would be brought upon them without further warning, a sudden storm from unclouded sky.
6
LONG AGO, I GIRDED MYSELF against the woods with an armor of fur, with a trap chained to my skin, with one knife upon my belt and another swallowed into my heart. Now there were no such arms available, and so when I returned to the house I had to search again for some other method to clothe myself, some other way to make my intentions known. Most of what was in the house was mere domestics, but in our closets there hung one apparel that might serve, that had served me first, on my best day: My wedding suit, white as it was once white, remade again by my wife’s memories, its original purpose as forgotten by her as anything else.
I stripped naked, scrubbed my body in the boil of the last bucket of water, brought earlier from the lake. Washing myself with that captured gallon, I could feel my capacity for transformation in its wetness, dormant but never gone, and when I was clean I shaved my face bare, and when I was shaved I took my wife’s scissors to my hair, cut it in the ancient fashion of our wedding year. I trimmed my nails with the same blades, then brushed my teeth, scrubbed at their squares with my fingers, with soda and salt.
Then the suit, then the pants and the shirt and the jacket, then the tie that my hands had nearly forgotten how to knot, that took too many efforts to hang right.
I did all the things I did the morning of my wedding, and when I was finished
I was as close as I could come to what I once was, and what sad and sallow shadow I made, and in our mirror I saw all my ruin made more obvious by its scrubbing: My cataracted eye, hung low in its socket; the many scars of forgotten origin. How my one shoulder lifted lower than the other, how my one leg dragged so that even standing still I looked to limp. How even with the same haircut I did not have the same hair I’d had, its peak upon my forehead higher and thinner than when I was young.
What I saw in the mirror was my dying, and how at last it was near, so near I could always smell it, could put my fingers to my skin and feel it moving beneath, beneath and also within.
I was failed father, failing husband, failure in every role, and still I went on, up and out of that house and toward the tree line, my dragging steps dredging the dusty dirt, that ground bereft of the rain my wife forgot to add to her last world, our deepest house. As I walked I corrected my gait until my hips ached, then I let my body move again in the manner its turned nature wanted, ankle sideways, arms outward, good eye leading my leaning face, pointing me toward what I knew awaited me beneath the first trees, a roaring column of her worst children, some naked and howling, bear-faced or not, and all united in how they would not let me pass.
To recognize the impossibility of hiding my approach from the foundlings, so not to try.
To keep my gaze pointed past their small faces and their wild expressions, into the long woods beyond.
To maintain that the foundlings were no children, no prize, only horded distraction.
To make believe—to make a belief—that I could prevail against them, and that if I did I might find now some recent-made cave farther into the woods, a cave not there before my wife came to dig it from the earth.
And as I crossed the tree line the foundlings fell upon me, and in their haste one another too, their sound swarming, and together they punished me with their sharp bodies, and then they ripped my wedding suit, and then all the man that lay beneath it.
MY FLESH, MARKED WITH A topography of anger.
My hair, torn from my scalp in clumps, my scalp torn.
My eyes, poked and pried, until both the good eye and the cloudy saw only tears, a lasting sparkling.
My ear twisted, then a finger pulled back and back and broken, then enough of that, enough damaging the surface; then the tearing of my skin, the breaking of what was within, and then my crying out, my begging for mercy, mercy, and how I did not deserve it, and then my saying my wife’s name, saying it almost voiceless for there was so little voice left, begging that from wherever she had gone she might remember me and so call off the children she had made, and then, at last, something new to hear, something come through the growls and screams, the hackled roars of these piled children, a sound heard not in my good ear, but in my bad one: A series of notes, not quite like a song, coming from beneath the floor of the woods, up and out of the earth, a sound high pitched at first, and then a noise so low its tone was felt only in my vibrating organs, my jumping spilling blood.
The foundlings unpiled themselves from atop my bones, stood to howl some response, stamping their feet against what frustration the sound brought, and while they were occupied elsewhere I tried to look down and around at my twisted shape, my broken structures, then struggled to turn over, to put hands and feet beneath me—and despite my felt efforts, no change in position happened, no muscles responded. All my bones seemed unconnected to any other, and perhaps they were, for when my right hand and then my left hand returned to my control, all they found was blood, and then everywhere I placed my knees and elbows and head was blood too, and the worst pain was across my belly, and when I put one hand there it slipped right through, into the strung-out hurt of my stomach, the long guts surrounding.
At last I was finished, at last this body was going to fail and fail until it stopped failing, and how for a moment this thought ran a smile across my split lips, my broken teeth, my torn tongue, for some ever-larger part of me no longer wanted to be the one who went on but only the one who had stopped, and yet there was some slim hope left, one cowardly path left untaken: If I could turn away from my wife and leave the woods, if I could make it across the dirt upon my knees and my belly, if I could crawl the length of the dock to drop myself in the water, then I would again become the squid, relieved of my injuries, changed for the last time. I pulled my cowardice forward, felt what was loosed within me dragging against the unpacked earth, felt my insides getting dirty in hollows no longer protected by skin and fat, and then vomit spilled upward, filled my mouth and my nose, and some similar stinking liquid leaked out of my stomach, its punctured sac.
Then the sound again, and then after it the noise, and then the sound and the noise, together, and yes, then at last a song, and yes, and yes, and who sang it where, and I did not know, could not see anymore, and what was not pain was numb, and what was not deaf heard only that song, and then foundlings everywhere, all around, their hands upon me, and me not looking, not able to look and happy for it, for what more did I want of their deadly differences?
A dozen arms lifted me, a dozen more moving under to carry all of me, even the parts escaping the shattered container of my body, all those blood-let organs, and with each step the foundlings took I cried out, and the movement of so many hands made an uneven gurney, but they did not slow nor answer whatever unintelligible queries I tried to make, and anyway I asked only to lose consciousness, to fall toward the buzzing light awaiting, but always I was tasked to witness, to remember, and so I bore it, and from atop their hands I looked through the trees and into that wife-made sky, always before empty, and there I saw some stars appear against the dusky bowl, and I knew those new stars by their old names; for they were the stars my wife had called down from our sky all those longest years before, that had fallen through the lake and into the black below, and in them I saw some letters of that ancient alphabet restored, the old stories, and while they were not complete still I recognized their shapes, sky-bear and tall-tree, gold-crown and lake-whale, first-father and ever-mother—
And then my sight was gone, and then there was no more sky, only some more constrained space, and even through my blindness, some transition from light to darkness, from level to sloped. And then being carried through that darkness, down into it. And then stretches of time not stopping, unmarked by anything but the steady breathing of those many foundlings carrying me onward, and when one tired he was replaced by another, and on the back of this swarming litter I descended without stoppage, all the wreck of me carried as one thing, if a spill could be so carried, rushed onward, down into darker dark, stronger song.
AFTER THAT LONG PORTAGE, THERE was again light, but the sights that returned with it were nothing I saw with my eyes, although I opened them too, useless as they were.
What did I see then, with that other gaze? Ceiling at first, and ceiling only, from where I lay suspended, belly up atop the foundlings, now crowded close together, a press of bodies below me, keeping me aloft. We had entered a cave, and the cave was like the one my wife and I had lived in while I built our house.
To the foundlings, I said, Enough.
I said, Please, you have carried me far enough.
They had carried me, and also the tune of the song, and the song was louder here than it was in the woods or the passages we journeyed down to reach wherever here was. Now I heard how they voiced it without inflection, without tone, and yet all the notes were correct, although correct as opposed to what I did not know, sure only of their correctness. I did not think they would hear me speak, not over the volume of the song, and also of the sound, these two separate but similar things now loud together, loud even through my deafness, which like my blindness had not mitigated, only been made different, so that while it had not been healed still I could hear, and so the foundlings did too, and in one motion they lowered my body to the floor.
By that light I looked upon my body, a glance so brief it could only survey the vast damage, the irreconcilable nature of my wounds, not
sickness alone but also the crude angers of these foundlings. There was no saving myself that I saw, and so no reason to withhold any effort. I forced myself to stand, felt the breaks in my body shift around my new stance, and then I gathered my spilled self up into my arms, forced it rudely back through the hole in my belly, which no longer bled. I closed my eyes, breathed in, smelled the copper and cordite of my pains, and when I opened my eyes again, then the song stopped.
Now there was more air in the room, more unbreathed breaths remaining, and soon I saw all there was, gathered in that gloom: All the foundlings, wood-sprung, crowded close in all their wrongness, any slivers of rightness remembered encased in fault and waste and never. On their circled faces were formed all the expressions that together might have combined to make one lost boy’s face, but once separated those features made no sense, nothing any whole person would mistake for the same articulation, and yet I knew my wife had so mistaken, and in their swarmed faces—their hundreds of faces, arrayed in every direction, from wall to wall, point to point in the darkness—I almost missed hers, hung there in front of me, a glowing moon of skin set atop her long neck, her graceful shoulders, her slim body not standing above the foundlings but sitting among them, rested in some rocking chair, so much like the one I had made her that it returned pain to my body, which had been numb to such sensation—or rather, pain returned to me, floating around and through, my body nerveless, barely present.