His voice splinters in the altercation at street level below. Shouts, the crush of metal. Everything neither real nor unreal. I am reminded of how he is not bound by common standards of love or morality. He brings beauty to the room, as he always has. I love him for this alone.
His hands on my ribs. Impossible to stop. Burrowing my whole body toward him. Our hands, our feet. Engraving bodies to bone. His body is so close to mine, I can almost forget him. I am used to getting silent quickly with him. There is no need for me to alter anything now, he is worth the torment. Everything vanished in this moment alone. We lie in each other’s arms.
Lev. You must know, I tell him, heart shaking, when we first enter my room, that I can never see you again. Promise me.
I move my eyes to the cracks in the wall. His head on my thigh. How odd that the sun should be shining and mourning doves singing. Receiving their songs, silver and necessary. The source of light high above this room. The sun’s light down the length of his back. He knows how to love. He has a talent for it. There is a woman on the other side of town who waits for him across this blue distance, in an extravagant hotel room. There is no order to this. It is not possible to love completely and not lose your identity. I have shattered once. I will not do it again.
He watches me dress. I pull on my stockings and sit on the edge of the bed, reach over and touch his scars. New ones. Two on his shoulders. Shining, unknowable. I move toward the window, my hand shading my eyes, his eyes on the line of my body through the thin dress.
I will make it right, he says. Let me.
You don’t understand, I say. He knows how to make anything, I think, but how could anyone fix something like this?
What don’t I understand?
He looks at me, his eyes filling with emotion. He knows everything. He knows nothing.
I foundered. I am just barely back into being. I unclasped my heart. You had every part. What has happened fixes us to this outwardness, to a place where neither of us now are.
All I say is, I am someone else. What I don’t say is that I do not altogether know who I am.
He gets up and walks toward me. I rest my face against his chest. He speaks to me but I do not answer, shaking my head.
Sounds collect below. Here there are electric lights, food, shopping. People at parties. Prostitutes along docks and alleys where the mist rolls in after dark. Filthy men. Crooked agents. Aristocrats gambling at the casinos. Money dwindling at cafés and restaurants from all the waiting. Thin-armed women hollowed out from hunger, hipbones like axeheads. Bribes for tickets to get on the crowded filthy ships. One visa expiring while waiting for another. They are running out of rooms.
Is she an artist? I finally say.
No. A collector.
Good. That will be good for your work.
He takes my face in his hands. None of it matters.
He looks at me. Immemorial. Say something.
Your taxi is here.
He says he will tell the woman that we have seen each other. I imagine her tilting her head when she receives the news. They will speak in low tones. They have their own serious conversations. This thought alone inflicting injury. I make a pact to extinguish any further thoughts of him. Anguish inlaid with intention. We don’t even say goodbye. He just walks out the door and closes it behind him. I marvel at how simple it is. This precise gesture. A door closing. I listen to the sound of him walking down the stairs, slowly growing faint. Abandonment is not enough, I think. You must stay gone.
He will tell me that the woman who has been waiting is pained. She feels ridiculous, like something cancelled. But she offers to buy me a plane ticket, which I think noble, though I say no. Thank you. I will take the ship. Set sail. We will see each other on the other side, he says. And I think, If there is one word for Lev, I know what it would be. It would be survivor.
The light jerks in my eyes. Love makes space. Love takes it away. Though I have witnessed everything going, and too soon, I still feel bound to him. With him, I discovered what people were capable of. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.
—
Why didn’t you—
I shake my head.
But you could have—
I could never have been anything if I remained with him. Don’t you see? Who wants to be a helper, merely? But I don’t say this. It sounds cold when in fact the opposite is true. He eclipsed everything. I handed myself over to him and he lived in me. I found it almost impossible to do anything in his presence. It occurs to me, only now, what he gave me by not saying he loved me. My solitude. He wanted what was at the heart of me to remain my own. Being with him required all my thinking and loving and force, all the time. Everything I had. It was not pure awe, because somehow it oddly gave me strength. To see into the centre of him and then into the centre of me. But now I think, Why centre?
And after all this time, I say at last, I’m not sure if I never mourned him, or if I’m mourning him still.
BUTTERFLY
Asterope, a butterfly genus. Asterope, a main-belt asteroid. AsteRope, a pair of parallel circumferential tethers circling an asteroid to enable improved extra-vehicular activity.
THROUGH THE OPENING of the cave, Skeet can see a man’s legs step out of a car. There is a dangerous flicker of energy to him, his sharp, impatient movements, though when he gets to the front door his knock is quiet, polite. He says my name several times and then gives up and tries the name of the American. His accent, I recognize it. Is it American? I whisper to Skeet. I can’t see him.
No.
We both say nothing. Do nothing, frozen like deer, and eventually the knocking stops. We hear the car door slam. The tires rip at the gravel as the car pulls away.
God, Frame, how did you, his voice low across the cave, recover?
How does anyone? You remake yourself. The studying, the learning, it filled me with certainty. My work. I shift on the stones. The animals becoming the part of my heart that he did not have. The part that allowed me to become myself. I stop. And then something passed through me.
But even things that pass clean through leave a mark, he says.
The silence is broken by a high whip of wind. I look up. Motion is part of listening. In the forest, sounds last for a long time. In most places there is so much other noise that sounds all end up dying young. Cities are obituaries of sound, I say. Did you know that urban noise complaints go back as far as ancient Rome?
Skeet stares ahead.
I know what you’re thinking, Skeet. That these sounds we are recording are obituaries too.
He looks up and squints, as though in the sun.
This whole work, the entire dictionary of animal languages, evolved out of an art project, begun with a friend who is now dead. And now it is, I realize, almost an art project again. I stop to consider. This idea like an undersong. You know, I say, if you have a point to make, I wonder if maybe art is the better route.
What the hell kind of question is that.
There is a live spark in it that few things can touch. It forces you to really look at things, and I think that really looking at things is never time wasted. You would never know until you reach an age like mine that small experiences could possibly occupy equal ground, alongside everything, even gratifying accomplishments. Even love.
Lev would often say that artists are the sum of their risks. I had once posed a question when we were walking under a chestnut tree in spring, its pale blossoms dervishes, shedding onto the pavement below. The tiny woman with a twig-ended broom sweeping them up would have been right out of a fairy tale had she not been shaking her fist at the tree, shouting expletives.
Va-t’en! Dégueulasse! Still, they fluttered down.
A wedding in the air, Lev observed aloud.
Why, I asked him, do we need art?
Because the world is terrifying. He looked up. And beautiful.
And?
And not sayable.
—
But all my experi
ments, the sketchbooks, the canvases, the sound notebooks—they all led to this. I didn’t want to paint, or interpret nature, I wanted to record it so that it could be itself.
Skeet leans back, resting his head against the wall.
You know, I’ve always felt that my work contains death and love at the same time.
If you’re talking about the conservatory, it doesn’t matter. You can take your work elsewhere. I know activists who could help.
No it’s the whole project, Skeet. Don’t you see? It came out of the wisdom of grief. If you can call it that.
He looks up.
I have learned that you must not wait for death in order to grieve for something. You must grieve for it while it is still alive. My friend Tacita tried to tell me this, but I didn’t understand what she was saying until much later. The animals whose languages we are recording. I feel connected to them. They carry a kind of disappearing inheritance. But I don’t think it’s negative as I once did. If you revere things while there is still life in them, there remains only the revelation of being.
I don’t know if I’d say only the revelation of being. I would consider the revelation of being everything.
Well exactly. What you come to know is that grief isn’t about understanding anything. You go it alone.
Skeet turns one of the smooth stones from the cave floor over in his fingers.
My friend who started the project with me was hit by a car. It was raining. They said it was an accident. Nobody knew for sure. Her husband worked for the Resistance. Accidents in those times were not always accidents.
Skeet looks so attentive, as though he’s listening to me from the kind of depth that can be accessed only from instinct.
She died, I say. And I grew old. My whole generation, gone. I suddenly realize that there will never again be anyone like us. But of course no one is like anyone else, regardless of era.
I shift on the cold ground. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve become so obsessed with pieces of sound that I’ve overlooked the value of silence. Silence does not betray experience, words do. There is a composer who wrote a piece of music interspersed with fifty-three quotations of poetry from Hölderlin meant to be sung silently during the performance. To achieve what the poet calls The Delicate Harmony of Inner Life. He even wrote notes to his performers also taken from Hölderlin:
A more secret world / in rich silence / born from ether / in the eternal silent light / emerging into air and light.
But once you are observing silence, he says, you are no longer in it. It loses its purpose.
I think it gives you a kind of spiritual power. Being able to regard yourself abstractly. I catch glimpses. The out-of-doors childhood, the musical ear, the feeling of really being in a painting, the orientation of cells. Instead of being overwhelmed by the details of an individual life, you can hold on to the patterns, the tones, the sensations of everything. I’ve seen enough to know that death always comes before the end of your story.
Frame, isn’t it you who always says that ninety-five percent of your time is spent watching animals sleep? The rest of the time they chew and spit and fuck. And that you have to really wait around if you want to witness death?
But it does come if one is patient enough. The waiting, it occurs to me, is something I have practised my entire life. First with Lev, then in the field. All for that one perfect moment to declare itself.
Skeet?
Yup, he says, not smiling.
Around the same time the vertigo spells started, I started to experience stunning, incomprehensible moments of well-being I’ve not mentioned to anyone. Experiencing things the way you do as a child, with nothing between you and the moment. Not “I am listening to this” or “I am seeing that,” but actually seeing and hearing outside of everything. As though I have direct access to all things. And in these moments I am full of such rapture, amazed at everything.
Skeet gives me a look hard to interpret.
God. Do you think it means I am about to die?
Well you can’t die now, he says, standing up and banging the dust off his legs. That would just be unacceptable.
So many people at the end of their life tire of all the vastly complex but banal upkeep it requires to be human. What Beckett called The Mess. All the vile little things that rattle on. They want to be done with all of it. They make their life so unlivable they actually die from it. It’s just—
What? Skeet says.
I look to the bundle of pages tied with twine. This boundless sheaf of messages. It has the look of a parcel waiting to be sent, optimistic but with an odd intensity. Like Lev’s painting, it contains the promise of something else. Whatever the differences, whatever the hardships, we both had the essential luck of being able to make things.
Curiosity glints through. It readjusts everything. Jeanne. Lou. This idea of dying when the world is in such turmoil means you can’t help worrying that you will miss something surprising that might actually happen. That maybe there is no end to life.
This dictionary—you can continue the work, I tell him. Take any part of it and go to the end of it. Think of the next step and take it in that direction. Maybe you will need new materials, new technologies. It takes so much strength to reject rejection, but you must do it without them. You must get it all back from the conservatory, I say, referencing his other skill.
Skeet is thinking of Lou. He wants to be the one to bring her to Ivory. He tracked her down from the museum’s contact, sent a message to her, and a message came back. Timorous. He felt it was impossible to know where to begin, what to say, so he sent her the fragile recordings of the man who said he could sing the sun, the ones he hummed to Ivory when they first met. She sends back an image of star fields, lunar dust written in spreading rays of light, she calls 99 Other Names for God. It feels like something scratching faintly at the invisible. Something in her note smells of resin. He feels the weight of his body and has to sit down. The response is almost an erotic experience.
Stripes of light lengthen on the gravel floor.
Skeet finishes his drink and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
You must go to Lou, I tell him. This painting is now for her. You must give it to her.
I have written her, he offers delicately.
Good, I say, looking at him with a sudden, abrupt wonder. His extraordinary honesty and wholeheartedness with everything that comes his way. The wide magnificent sweep of his brain. Aloof, to be sure. But I see that I can open something in him. That he can open something in me. He, too, has given himself over to science. But science is strange. You can get quiet in it. Unassimilated. I remained alone so no one would know who I was. I wonder now if I took it too far.
But she will come to see you.
I’m not sure there is time, I say.
He closes his eyes and opens them.
Receive the sounds quietly, as in a dream. My chest tightens with a spray of pain. Hearing has the most power. I swallow and then whisper, Don’t let them vanish.
His eyes meet my eyes. They are full of intensity.
Skeet, please. Don’t. I’m someone who has studied extinction for a long time. You can’t think I haven’t learned something of it.
I tell him to follow me.
The crunch of tires on gravel stops us.
He sees my alarm. All that I know. All that he keeps from me still. Skeet’s look says, as he stands stock-still, that he is relieved. I know what he thinks. He thinks panic means there is still something to lose. Maybe that’s the fear of dying, I say to Skeet. The simple notion of losing the only thing we really ever have.
We only ever understand things when they are truly lost, he says, tenderness flooding his voice.
Nothing we love is ever truly lost.
Low voices brush the walls of the cave. There are at least two.
The activists, Skeet hopes, with their beatific energy. He has given them the entire dictionary now. And Lou, who tells him about changing the relationship between an object
and its shadow. How the scale of the work means it is experienced by the body before it settles in the mind. This back and forth between presence and absence. She says she likes anything that loops, especially time. She has been handed a history. The immeasurable space of passing time entering through a once-closed window. He wants to bring her to Ivory, but he also knows about estrangement and invitation and what happens when they assemble too quickly. He can taste the cheap sherry, sweet and rotten at the back of his throat. He almost feels a bit drunk. He understands there has been too much history for a single encounter.
Voices tunnel down the staircase, stilled in mid-air. A panic flickers between us.
If there is a word all animals are thinking, that word is run.
My body jammed stiff but my memory freed. A shock. A reminder that another story is always possible. It has the quality of being inside a perfect dream.
Follow me, Skeet. Skeet, the only child I’ve ever known. This thought coming to me like blood back to the fingers. I will sleep, immediately after. I promise him. We walk slowly, purposefully, following the contours of the cave through a small passage that recedes at the back, until it is open overhead, as though walking through a dry riverbed, wild and twisting. And the light flashes in and out, the sides of the caves licking up skyward, darkening. Not the kind of dark that gives light but as though we are walking into a shadow without end. Though instead of dread, I am suddenly overcome by the desire for more. That even now, I want more. That there is more than what fades and suddenly disappears. That there is more to us than what is actually lived.
And then, in the air, is held the thinnest sound. A sound so singular it makes everything else seem deserted. It startles. It is resonant like the last syllable of a last word. Flapping. All the wings, flapping. They pour out from the cracks, rolling out, ribbons of black. Clouds and clouds of butterflies with small black wings. Beating and glittering and thick in the light. They keep streaming out. They form a flapping shape, its luminous ruin, a widening fragile beauty. A stampede to freedom. Filling space, creating space. Bright and brave like a beautiful secret, they go.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 26