by Melanie Tem
I didn’t see it happen, but I heard it. I was talking to one of the other drivers when somebody shouted, “Slide!” Part of the rim was giving way. I ran with the others away from the site until I remembered that Rae was operating an augur out near the edge. By the time I had turned around, there was a tremendous roar and red swirling dust had climbed into an impenetrable wall. It was a long time before I could get any closer, and we never did find her body. Matchhead had swallowed her.
I think I hear snatches of Song now and, though that’s unlikely — our huts are soundproof, dustproof, encapsulated — the illusion makes me hurry. My boots are by the door where I left them. I shove my feet into them, clamp the fastenings shut. My need for the Sing makes my stomach roil, my head swim. The Sing will remind me of all I haven’t admitted, and there is still much. It will fill me, fill the empty spaces where pain lies in wait.
I’ve been Singing ever since Rae left me, and that was a long time ago. The first time, when I thought I’d go crazy and thought maybe I wanted to and thought I’d stumbled into the Sing by accident, the Cleer welcomed me — not with words, of course, but they made room. I understand now that I’d been expected. And when the time came to open my mouth and let the sound come, I didn’t hesitate. I’m not a good Singer, even yet, but it’s impossible to Sing badly. The collective music pulled my own weak voice along, rounded and amplified it, until I couldn’t believe the beauty of my own voice and then, at last, I stopped searching for the sound of my own voice and lost myself in the Song.
Walking out into the blinding Matchhead morning, raising a hand in greeting to a fellow miner whose face I can’t see for the sunshine, I reflect that I’ve become a little like the Cleer, or like what I imagine the Cleer to be. I don’t talk much these days. I think a great deal, though not often in words or sentences. I remember a great deal. I Sing as often as I can. I don’t really know what happens when I Sing, but I know that I’m part of — something. And it’s better then.
I’ve done well on Matchhead. There’s a lot of money in my account. I’m a better foreman than miner, actually; my workers seem to like me and they listen to what I have to say, although I have no friends among them and I know they think I’m odd. I can tell when the newcomers have heard stories about me: they begin to look at me as if they can see through my skin to the workings of my mind and body and still find me baffling. That’s all right. My loneliness is as flat and barren as the Matchhead landscape, as rich in potential for pathetic fallacy, and I know how to live in it now.
The ships still come; some Cleer leave and others are left behind. Now I can see their hurts, their losses, their deformities, and I’ve wondered if somewhere an endless battle is being waged, and the injured come here to recuperate. And to grieve.
I suspect we are the lucky ones, these Cleer and I.
I still don’t know why the Cleer mine. I don’t know why I do, either. But I remember that mining is not the important thing.
This is a place to Sing. A spiritual place.
I walk to the amphitheater through the bright morning dust. As I step down into the midst of the Cleer, relief and sorrow bring tears to my eyes and the Song trembling into my throat. I look around once, before I close my eyes and open my mouth to Sing. Their heads are thrown back, their mouths open, filling me, lifting me, so that I too can Sing, my face, their faces, streaming with tears, demanding my attention, a presence, oval faces, stick figures writhing and dancing, Rae coming to me, I’m making the same sound, my Song, a living creature, a shared recollection, combined memories, my sorrow, my injuries, their injuries on display, I feel one with them, unreal, out of my body and a part of them, this Song ….
RESETTLING
When Hannah found herself kneeling on the bed screaming hateful things at Perry and punching at his stomach through the tangled bedclothes, it didn’t occur to her at first that the house had anything to do with it. Perry, who was her life, whom she’d waited for all her life and lived in fear of losing. Later they made frantic love with all the lights out; it was very late at night, and it was then that Hannah first felt without question the absorbing presence of the house.
She had lived in the neighborhood for nearly ten years, before and since Perry and Ashley. She’d looked at the house for all those ten years and wanted it for most of that time. At first, she remembered, it had seemed overwhelming. It sat on a hill in the middle of a crowded residential block. Not a very high hill, not much higher than the lots of its neighbors, but it seemed to tower over them. Dark red brick with black trim, ivy encrusting all the south wall, high, narrow windows that seemed to reflect any kind of light. Just around the corner Hannah had been amazed to discover a twin, a house clearly built at the same period and from the same design, probably by the same builder, but, for reasons she could never quite determine, a friendlier house, lighter, more open, with white trim and a wide, sunny porch and half a dozen tall bright trees. A far less interesting house. Hannah found herself drawn to the house on the hill.
Routes to the bus stop, to the grocery store, to the cleaner’s could, if she went just a little out of her way, take her right past it, and those soon became her regular pathways. She saw the house then in all kinds of weather, at all times of the day and night. In snow it hulked like a Minotaur guarding its treasure. In morning sunshine it seemed cool and impenetrable, and it cast a tall triangular shadow all the way across the street. At night black clouds scudded breathtakingly behind its peaks.
“I hate you!” she heard herself shouting at Perry, the man she loved more than anyone else in the world. “You’re not the man I married! I am not going to live like this!”
Perry was crying. She’d seen him cry before, in fact, his emotional openness was one of the things that endeared him to her. But now, for an awful moment, she was repulsed, as if he had turned into a monster. “So leave!” he shouted, and pushed his fist against her chest so that she sprawled back across the bed. “We’d all be better off without you!”
And then they’d stared at each other in horror while the house surrounded them like a palpable spell, and they’d fallen into each other’s arms.
Hannah was determined she would keep her daughter from knowing that anything was wrong, as if she could protect her from being poisoned, too. Ashley was so precious, so fragile, and she always knew when things weren’t right, often before Hannah did. Hannah’s worry that she couldn’t adequately take care of Ashley was long-standing and persistent. And it was getting worse. She heard herself speaking more sharply to Ashley than she would have thought possible, and resolutely turning away from the small, distressed face. It seemed to Hannah that she damaged the child in small ways a dozen times a day, and that she couldn’t help it.
As her arguments with Perry became more frequent, Hannah became obsessed by memories of her life before Ashley was born. She and Perry had been alone in their first, much smaller house. Those had been their best years, with nothing but time for each other. But she had wanted children; she had no idea what that might be like; she just knew she wanted them. They had tried to have a child for almost ten years, mostly at her insistence; Perry adored his daughter but could, she knew, have been quite content living all his life with just her.
Childlessness for her was, truly, barrenness, and, after a time, conceiving became the most important thing in her life. They’d made love regularly for so long that she’d almost forgotten that sex could be anything but dutiful and charted. They’d undergone every imaginable fertility test, and the doctors could find nothing wrong with either of them. She’d taken a variety of fertility drugs, which created a variety of bizarre side effects. And every month she’d had her period, regular and painful and bloody, making her feel as if she were being emptied out.
Perry had wanted to stop. “It’s not worth it,” he’d say, or “We can always adopt.” Intellectually she’d understood him; she’d even agreed with him. It made no difference: She had to keep on trying.
And one day she was pregna
nt, and nine frantic months later Ashley Anne was born. The perfect baby, the answer to every dream, and not for one moment what Hannah had thought she would be.
Ashley, whose every smile was a miracle, whose every act was a discovery and a terror. Ashley, the repository of the family’s moods. When Perry and Hannah fought—even if it was in the middle of the night, quietly, with the door of their room shut tight—the next day Ashley would silently take their hands and draw them together. When one of them had had a bad day at work, Ashley would cry and try very hard to be good. When they were more worried than usual about money—even if they’d been meticulous about not letting her know—she’d bring her piggy bank and empty it on their bed.
Ashley hadn’t wanted to move. She didn’t like change. It frightened her. She said something awful was going to happen. But now that they were here she seemed the member of the family most taken by the house. On bright days, when sunshine streamed through the leaded-glass windows, Ashley sparkled and danced. At night she, like the house, closed in on herself.
Ashley was truly happy here. Hannah wouldn’t spoil that. Hush! Ashley will hear! It had become a kind of chant, or prayer, and served only to make both her and Perry more incensed.
In the years before the house was hers, Hannah had never seen people living there, although there had been signs of habitation—lights on at night, the lawn mowed, for a while a fierce black Doberman leaping at the wrought-iron fence. Then the house was empty for a long time, and a “For Sale” sign sat at the bottom of the hill, well away from the house itself.
When Perry sold a series of paintings for more money than they’d ever imagined, they bought the house on the hill. Just like that. It took less than a month from Hannah’s first incredulous call to the Realtor until closing. Everything progressed with an almost eerie ease: They sold their squat, cozy little house to the first couple who looked at it; their loan application was processed faster than the agent had even seen; they toured the house on the hill one time and everyone in the family—even Ashley—felt at once that it was theirs. It was as if the house, with its elegance, its concentrated energy, had reached out and claimed them, like a new mother counting her infant’s fingers and toes. After that tour Hannah found she couldn’t remember details—exactly how the rooms converged, what color the wallpaper was—but she remembered the feel of the place, the atmosphere, the sense that she had no choice but to accept the claim of that house.
“Why has it been on the market for so long?” Perry had thought to ask, adding lamely, “It’s a wonderful house.”
The realtor, a cool young woman with long eyelashes and expensive clothes, had smiled. “Who knows? Maybe it was just waiting for you.”
Indeed, there was such a sense of relief and completeness about the house now that Hannah felt as if she were part of an organic process. Sternly she told herself that this was foolish anthropomorphizing, to which she was prone anyway; when they’d moved out of their old house she’d stood in the empty living room after all the others had left and aloud she had said “Goodbye,” and “Thank you.”
But the sensation was inescapable. Struggling with the sticky front gate after a long day at work while she balanced her heavy briefcase in the other hand, reading the Sunday paper in the quiet parlor while elsewhere in the house Ashley and Perry watched “Doctor Who”; eating breakfast at the sunny kitchen table (she’d always wanted a kitchen with a breakfast nook, but it had seemed such a silly criterion for house-buying that she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone; now here it was)—in a dozen intimate little ways every day Hannah felt the house growing around her, into her, like an oyster with a grain of sand, she and the house taking on aspects of each other and becoming something new.
Now, scarcely a month after moving into the house, Hannah heard herself shrieking outrageous and cruel things at Perry that she didn’t think she meant, and then frantically studying his reaction for something familiar. As she whispered, “I love you,” and took him inside her, her mind ejected another phrase like a many-layered pearl for her to see: “He’s not the man I married.” She didn’t know what it meant.
Hannah was a social worker, and she was very tired. After ten conscientious years, it was now abruptly clear to her that she didn’t understand human nature, that no one did, that human nature was not accessible to human understanding. That troubled her like a betrayal. She remembered as if it were a youthful foible, slightly embarrassing and endearing at the same time, how much she’d wanted to be a social worker, how she’d never even considered another profession. Things weren’t fair and she was going to change them. But once she’d entered the field, it was not what she had expected. It was almost as if by wanting it so much, pursuing it so single-mindedly, she’d changed it. The longer she worked the more keenly she saw the occupational hazards: hypocrisy, arrogance, disrespect, confusion. Coming home at night, especially to the house on the hill with its darkness enveloping the lights inside, was an intense relief, even though almost every night she bruised her hand on the front gate latch.
Hannah was clinical director for a program serving the noninstitutionalized chronically mentally ill. Over the years she’d worked with other groups—elderly in nursing homes, battered women, alcoholics, families of delinquent teenagers. Every time she’d changed specialties she’d been excited at first, eager to learn and to see what difference she could make. Every time the boredom, the sense of déjà vu returned sooner than before.
She saw now that the characteristic common to all these people was disappointment: Having gotten exactly what they’d wanted, it was not what they wanted anymore. The old man near the end of his life, the wife beaten by a man she could not leave, the drinker in search of the perfect high, the parents whose children were not what they intended them to be—all of them disappointed. As in all the cruel old fairy tales about the dangers of wishing, the thing had changed to become something evil and monstrously familiar.
The schizophrenics were the most unsettling, because much of the time you couldn’t tell the patients from the staff. Their psychosis was only an elaboration of the way everyone else lived, yet they seemed unable to perform even the simplest daily tasks without running full tilt into the truth that, more and more, seemed to Hannah the central fact of human existence: Things are not what they seem.
Sometimes when she came home at night she’d see the patients staring at her out of the shadows that clung to the odd corners of the house, stubborn shadows that would not leave even when she replaced all the light bulbs with ones of higher wattage. Their eyes and voices, the way they held their hands, seemed haunted, possessed. She was seeing that same look now in her husband. The look of those who cannot believe their eyes.
Many of the patients could feel it coming on. “I’m going to be crazy,” they’d say, and then the staff would alter medications or set up more structure, or just watch, helpless to provide more than the most minimal protection against the outside world. “Out of touch with reality,” it said on the charts. Lately Hannah sometimes found herself all but incapacitated by confusion over who was out of touch with what.
“I’m going to be crazy.” Hannah sat in the claw foot bathtub late at night and said it aloud to see how the syllables would feel in her mouth. She found them almost comforting.
“Mom,” said Ashley seriously one day when she came home from school. “Are there ghosts in our house?”
Ashley was eight. In the last month or so she’d undergone one of those growth spurts that so disorient parents. There were moments when Hannah barely recognized her.
“Why do you ask? Have you seen something?”
“All my friends say this is a haunted house. It looks like a haunted house.”
Ashley was a poetic child, aware at a distressingly early age that frequently things are not what they seem. Knowing she wouldn’t be reassured by a mother’s simplistic protest that ghosts aren’t real, Hannah explained matter-of-factly: “If a house is haunted, Ashley, it’s only by the spirits of peop
le who’ve lived there. Other people who’ve loved our house the way we do. There’s nothing to be afraid of in that.”
Ashley’s blue eyes widened with interest. “Oh, Mom, then do our spirits haunt this house, too?”
“I think so,” Hannah told her. “In a way.” Hannah suddenly felt distressed, wondering what it was she was teaching her child.
Perry was the only one of the family who hadn’t immediately felt at home in the new house, who didn’t seem to have a natural place here. Wonderful as the house was, there were a number of things to be done to it, and Hannah understood that most of that responsibility fell to Perry: He was the handyman. What she did not understand was his need to get everything done so quickly, even at the expense of his painting. Nearly every waking moment he was doing something to the house. Often he didn’t come when she called him for meals, and she was afraid to call him twice, though having the family scattered at mealtime felt to her like a potentially fatal flaw.
“I don’t know what it is,” he told her, “but I just can’t do the work until things feel right around here, and they don’t feel right just yet.”
Hannah worried. Always before, he’d been able to paint even at the most awkward times. When they went on vacation, even on overnight trips, Perry took an easel and paints along and worked, sometimes until dawn if he felt particularly inspired. Hannah had not been jealous; to deny the need to paint would be to deny Perry himself. Now it was as if something had altered Perry’s personality, and she was afraid she didn’t know him anymore.
He erected all the bookcases, replaced the broken windows, reattached separating wallpaper. She appreciated all that. His artist’s hands also were remarkably skilled at manual labor. But then he started making “improvements.” He decided to finish their enormous attic. “For guest rooms,” he explained, “and you may want your own office someday.” He repainted both stairwells. Suddenly one day he decided to add a redwood deck on the south side of the house.