by Sam Michel
Unto death, I think she meant. She meant, Nothing has happened until it has happened. We could pay off, I think she meant, we might escape ourselves, whatever accident we seem here to have suffered, it is possible we might recover from it, we could be coming into something larger. She said, You never know, and she might have seen me, years into our future, seated, mothy, paunched, an ineffectual reminiscer, content to have my wife become the ready confirmation of myself, seated in a chair we chose for comfort and compatibility beside me. We did not speak; we agreed. We addressed our television, our papers and our magazines. The little news came into us and we embraced it. Perhaps, then, she had foreseen the graders scrape the brush off from our lot on O Street, seen our walls raised and our roof capped, heard us bless the safety and the peace we could enjoy from petty crimes and natural disasters, the advertisements for the thinner, richer, freer, cheaper, faster lives we propped our feet up to regard and to assure each other we were glad to see were falling well enough behind us. Perhaps she saw us shrunk down in our lives to repetitions, secondings, not’s and no’s, a honing down in us toward a life confirming for itself an evenly eroding scope, and she told herself, she said to me, You never know, meaning we might change; that house might never come to us, not that roof, not those walls, not that shrinking confirmation.
She stretched out her arms as if awakening from a good night’s sleep, looked up at the sky as if to know how much daylight would be left to her, scratched herself and yawned and said, “What next?”
To this end, I decided not to look. I trusted in the livelong, sunny day. Even after we had put my clothes back on, I kept an ear out for an invitation from my wife for sex, though I might have known I could have saved us from the course our lives have taken, should I have had the courage to invite myself. How often and how thoroughly, I wonder, in sexual crises, have we been made a child of the subjunctive mood? How often have I thought our teachers might have talked us out of might and would and should, had they given us a clearer feeling for the purple ache rewarded to engorged, hypothesizing genitalia? No lingual rhetoric, to my mind, engages so severely as that rhetoric ascending from the testes. There ought some day to be a way of corresponding more completely with the testes, a drug, perhaps, a cream our teachers might apply that would direct and satisfy our sexual persuasions, a probe an expert might insert through the urethra, a microphone that might be fitted to the probe to monitor the prostate, an earhorn for the labia majora. What secrets might she shout at us, I wonder, should we lend our ear to her, what joys? Glans penis, Grand Lamentable. Too often in my life, an anticlimax there reiterates: I might, it goes, I should, I would, too late. Surely, had we better understood each other, myself and my Lamentable, the life we might have made up for ourselves and those most near to us must be an unimaginably harmonious creation. Who could imagine? How many live according to a smoothly integrated partnership of self and sex? Violence and mishap, these are the precedent creators of our histories as humankind; in the beginning was not the word, but the rape, and from the rape descended slaveries and holocausts and myths we tell ourselves to help us to transcend them. Someone, somewhere, somehow ought to spare us please the myth, give us back into our flesh, before the rape, redeliver us to that initial wash of urge and faith we want to know is love.
Says my wife, “We should have fucked.”
This is how we talk about that day today. An oil pan cracks, the boy is bruised, and there we find ourselves, our days done, our sleeps to come, retired to our chairs to bicker.
“You idiot,” says my wife, “I was asking you at least to fuck me.”
Neither one of us, I think, must be to blame. We were becoming increasingly, equally middle-classed. We believed in the same sun. We believed in the word, thought we talked, were determined to inject some say in how our lives unfolded. We made our way out of the desert, tried to scale ourselves back, sold the Olds, took our suppers at my father’s suitcase. We were “getting back to basics.” On our porch we kept a box in which we were to put those items least essential to ourselves, any garment or appliance undemonstrative of our simple wants we might deliver to Good Will. We would be honest. We must not be rash, but recognize ourselves from time to time by way of reason. If we sometimes found we missed the Olds, or were soon back in the habit of the chair and table, we told each other this was nothing hostile to our simplemost desires, but rather was an indication of our having met with “human nature.” It was “only natural” to sit in chairs, only natural that when my wife would hold a dress up to herself we both agreed that she should keep it. I found within my nature reason to retain a pair of snakeskull cufflinks, my first phonograph, a leaky innertube, a broken compass, a bit, a wing, a wire, a map describing Union maneuvers at Antietam, a sketch I made when I was very young once of my dearest rock. Naturally, we might have seen in the advance of so much reason a retreat from nature. We might have doubted our integrity, I think, when we discovered we were able in the end to give up nothing to Good Will. Here we are, we might have said, the same old sledge and garlic press away from finding what we ever really wanted.
I think that we had listened to a story told too young to us. The story was too big for us, grew as we grew, moved faster as we aged and overwhelmed us. I think we told each other, “We are naked,” and believed it. Hadn’t we said the sky was lacquered? Hadn’t we worn our summers in the winter? Look at us, we said, we still fuck in change-rooms. We never bought ourselves a papered Lab. No, no, not at all. Ours was a pound dog, an anti-Lab, a squeezling of a failing Pomeranian concocted by a roguish Pug. Beverly, we called him, in broad daylight, and nights did not discourage him from lapping us where we were coupled. These cannot have been the teachings that our papas and our mamas urged; the story anybody told on us must be distinguished by unprecedented style.
Who, in Winnemucca, had preceded us? Certainly, we were the first inhabitants of O. To get to us a person drove a dusty road through creosote and shadscale from the last developed block at D. Ours was an outpost, a visionary overleap of E through N. We held hands, walked the chalky lot, praised the dust, forebore the sun, ignored the threats from family and friends that nothing green on earth could grow there. We bought cheap. We drew up plans on grocery sacks, discussing innovative ways of making shade from canvasses and tin, cinderblock and thatching. If it wouldn’t grow up green, we said, then we could paint it green; if the wind would not stop blowing dust, then we could redirect it. We submitted our desires to an architect, who submitted his translations of our desires to the city. Then we raised our walls, shingled our roof, installed a garden. Against all senior, native counsel, we had a go at growing ivy on the chainlink, we strove to grow an oak. When our building days were over, we stood at our window and gazed across the roughly virgin land through waves of heat to those few waterslides and swingsets marking out the farthest prior reaches of our settlement at D. We kissed, happy to perceive ourselves as pioneers.
Hooray for us, we said, how happy now; see how Beverly rejoices!
Yet how did we sustain ourselves? When we observed how closely subsequent translations of desire from citizen to architect resembled ours in style, what story had convinced us of our stylistic independence? When D Street filled its lots, and E Street, and when ground was broken up the road on O, and we received our first few calls from neighbors having cited Beverly harassing bitches down on J, then where were we to find our pioneer’s perspective, what visionary distance did we trust we carried in us which would be forever undeveloped? We all raised lawn. The north sides of our streets would have their trash collected every Tuesday, the south sides every Friday. We all agreed to pavement. Security lights. A neighbor was appointed “watchdog” to investigate the distribution of the city’s tax. We all paid equally, relatively, the man who lived in the house on the streets named after trees was no better or no worse than those of us who lived in houses on the streets named after letters. Under the law, by common sense and human decency and under Washington and Jefferson and God, w
hat single person’s life should we demean in standing next to any single other’s? The king was dead. The Bi Rite offered each of us the same imported fruits. We breathed the same air. We spread the same virus. We consented to be similarly ruled, stopped at reds, went at greens and hunted autumns; we each of us, we all agreed, deserved to have his roof put out if it was burning; K deserved to be policed as thoroughly as Maple.
Here, here! Here, here! I said, with all the rest, yet when I left the hall where we had gathered—its high, bright corners, scents of health and sickness, aftershave and lanolin, intimations of a near-familial longing, its wool, its plaid, its cobbler and its scalded coffee and innumerable plastic cups of ladled punch—when I left this place, and I was outside, on the sidewalk, and the night drew wide and cold and darkly starward, I was mercifully recovered. To myself. For the moment, several steps, a block or two, I felt a rapid, upward surging forth from me and felt I had been saved. This sky, I thought, those stars, I felt, these rushing, depth-charged cells here in my chest must be my equal. I passed my neighbors’ leafless plantlings, trees and one-day hedges, and I recalled myself among them and was able to believe that it was me to whom they had aspired; I told myself that it was not my money, nor my vote they wanted of my brief attendance in their halls, but my idea. I meant what they meant to mean. I talked this way. This is how I felt. I saw myself again as my idea of myself, as I was able to believe my neighbors must have seen me. I loaned myself. I went seemingly. I could not be wholly touched. I was where anybody wanted to be. Going home. I was going home. I felt able to foresee myself from any neighbor’s window. I could hear them. They said, If I could only look in plaid the way that Lincoln Dahl looks. If my lawn could be that shade of green. I wanted my neighbors to borrow tools, solicit my opinion, covet my entire wife. They stood at their sinks, wrist deep, congealing and demeaned. They said, How do they do it? They kiss, they said, they’re too old for holding hands in public. Nor was I alone then. It was my wife, after all, who understood the charm in holding hands. She was a modern woman, she explained, she had always guessed a ladle would refute her; she would not have seen herself confirmed in soup. Look at us, we said, look at us, and we were able to recover for each other blessed tendrils from our early days in rapture. Look at us, we said, and paid a mortgage. Look at us, we said, and smiled at strangers. Look at us, we said, and made a child. And what a child! We knew the hour of his conception, were alert to his unparalleled development, made plans for him to share in our unprecedented future.
Through science, possibly, an immersion in the Universal Grammar, through an early introduction to the classics, maybe, mosaic, paints and sculpted stone, perhaps, I believed that I could etch into his brain those several contours whose extensions through his life might find for him a haven in the Everlasting long forsaken by his cohorts. I believed his life could “matter.” His death, as I conceived it, would be the tragedy to raise against the deaths of tens of millions. I believed that where his cohorts saw an outrage or irrelevance in Shakespeare, my son would see an invitation to a greatness. His learning from Pasteur would not conclude itself with milk. He would not be bound by Newton, nor would he mistake himself in Einstein’s relativity, nor the color-coded lachrymals and dentines or the various articulations he would see depicted in his Gray. I studied up for him. I had fun. I clipped jewels I robbed from dictionaries of quotations, thought to paste them to his nursery walls and ceiling, build a mobile I might hang above his crib, loose assemblages of pith and time-entitled moment. The name of the slough was Despond. Life is too short to be small. Anybody can be good in the country. The wink was not our best invention. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. Every stink in the ventilator thinks it’s Don Quixote. Some things aren’t funny.
I devoted mornings to athletics and the manly arts. I hung a backboard in the driveway. I learned at last to know for certain which was meant by horsehide, which by pigskin; I learned a balk from a pickle, a pop-up from a routine fly to right. By November, I could troubleshoot a chainsaw. This was the fall when it was possible for me to enter any Sunday beerhall, belly-up and cheerfully extemporize the virtues of a worm-driven motor. I asked questions: Was Carnegie a great American? What went wrong with Caesar? I read the life of Beethoven, and learned how Beethoven, on his deathbed, had thought of his precursor, Haydn, and I hoped that there might come a man as great as Beethoven to think upon the monuments to life recorded by my long-dead son. Think of it, I thought, a man of genius and passion, come to marvel at a picture of my son’s house—my house!—just as Beethoven had marveled at a picture of the house of Haydn, saying, “See the little house, and such a great man was born in it; here was once a great man’s cradle.”
These were the times I last surprised myself, and was surprised I could surprise myself, and I believed that my paternity would reinvigorate my faith in life’s white promise to surprise, its infinite occasion to remake me.
Whereas my wife stuck closer through this time to home. The singularities she saw for us and for our baby lived within the passage of a lunar month. Week by week she read to me from books we thought had somehow used my wife as their example. Hers, we thought, was the premiere stigma, hers the premiere Mittelschmerz; together we impelled the premiere blastocyst to journey up the uterine canal, where it would burrow into the wall of the uterus and undergo each weekly possibility of growth my wife had read to me through its trimestral days as fetus. Can anyone have known, before our son, how early on in life the neural groove is sealed? In my wife there were developing the Optical Vesicles of optical vesicles, the Limb Buds of limb buds; right now, we said, right now, we were the distant witness to the fusing of the heart tubes; we believed that through my wife we heard the Heart of hearts’ first murmurous contractions. It beat. It lived. It endured through threatened and inevitable, incomplete, habitual, and missed abortions. One week it accrued to itself spina bifada, other weeks it suffered cystic fibrosis, toxoplasmosis, Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s chorea. It grew hair. It grew eyebrows and eyelids, its pancreas grew competent of rendering sugar. It swallowed. It heard. It quickened. It was Lincoln Dahl, the junior. All tests placed it at the apex of the norm. Its arrhythmia was exceptionally standard. My wife’s became the pregnancy to which the questions bothering all other pregnancies throughout our county were directed. How much should a woman worry blunt thracymia? What risks did she invite by lunching on irradiated meats? What made a woman glow?
My wife believed she was the secret we were born desiring to recover. She recentered us, our orbits, hers, mine, our town’s; my wife and I declared our pity for those natives of the arctic, who must live their lives suspended in the darkness and the chill of circles turned beyond the spark of her mysterious enkindlings. Truly, we agreed, to see her coming was to see the sunrise, to see her leaving was to sorrow for the passing of another day. We remarked the several instances of persons asking whether they might rub my wife for luck. We recalled the woman who confessed to an inordinate attraction to the lustre and the body of my wife’s unribboned hair. “Makes me sick,” the woman said. “It’s scary.” Lovely, said my wife, she felt lovelier than ever, wiser, more serene. This was the word from the pharmacist who filled out her prescriptions, serene. “A mind reader,” said Grace Dendari. “How’d you know that I was wondering why you didn’t get more fat?” Intuition, said my wife, she felt completed, wholer, moved as if from undividedness to undividedness, as if she could not see without her seeing being one with comprehension. She saw and she wept as she believed that Jesus must have seen and wept. She gave a dollar to a dirty urchin selling kittens in a parking lot, baked bread for the seniors, nursed a bird, shared a plate, coaxed a grin, listened unimpatiently to ceaseless counsel from my mother. My wife converted. She asked Father Mac if he believed that Jesus would have made a Super Mom, had Jesus had a child or been a woman. She said for Father Mac to keep his chin up; she had a sense; she saw people coming back to God and Nature.
She offered herself as proof. Her sense of herself. A natural divinity. A creator. She had come back to herself, drove out to the desert once alone to build a fire and to look upon the stars and learn what dreams might come to her through several nights with nothing save the earth and sky above and underneath to interrupt her. Out there, she said, she stuffed her pillowcase with mugwort and she dreamed most memorably of a ruin. In this dream she had no child nor any expectation of a child. She walked, and when she thought what people were it seemed to her that she had never known a single person. She could not say to herself what people said or did or what a person looked like. She could not finish herself in talk. Talk fell out of her in remnants, tailings, slag she rushed about throughout her mind to rescue from a swelling heap of prior conversation. Something precious was being said. Up there, it seemed to her, away from her, in her head, past that wall and around that corner, discards, a word, an impurity, unassemblable, it fell out of her, she said, this word—eyes- and what were eyes, she said, what precious thing was being said of seeing? She could lift a brick. She could pull her finger through the dust she found on any sunsplit windowsill and tell herself, A sill, a window, here a person leaned and looked and thought what precious thing? What must a person tell herself? What could a person whisper? She pulled a finger through the dust. In this dream she picked a doll up from the rubble and she had a vivid, uncompleting sense of the child who held it. The doll was cracked and matted. The room was roofless. Sand piled high up in the corners of the room and vinous, thorny weeds spread out across the floorboards, though in the child’s time, in this dream, my wife—who had never seen a child, nor a doll—my wife could hold this doll and know the doll was once uncracked, combed and straightened, the care-thing of a caring child. My wife recalls she listened, and she did not panic, and was calm, and she heard what she could hear of caring and a child, and then she put the doll down in the rubble where she found it and she listened further and believed that what she heard were promises, bits of vow and curse and hope, a living syllable recovered from a speech the child invented for the doll where they had played together on the oval rug, on a Sunday, in a patch of winter sun, where a palsied woman rocked and muttered, and a man embraced a woman on this swing, and a woman wept here on this stone, and a warm breeze blew up from the west and brought a scent of rain across the playa to the soul who stopped to breathe it from his labors with this shovel. This ditch must be dug, he said. A rain is meant to fall. This is the sense of what my wife had heard. Not for nothing that I weep, the woman said; I cannot be this rocking, palsied body. Every day will be this Sunday, said my wife. There must always be this patch of sun and oval rug on which we meet. We will not part, we must not pass, I will comb your hair and guard against our lives and love forever. How did they say it? How was it true? My wife walked, and in this dream she said that she was calm and knew that soon the words she overheard would merge and shape in her so she might say with those disintegrated voices she collected from the ruins: This is who I am. This is what it means for me to be here.