Transcendent 2
Page 9
The steam on the mirror didn’t streak to life with words or finger-drawings.
Si wasn’t, precisely, disappointed.
Dear Cordelia,
That seems like an appropriate name for a ghost. I feel like if I’m going to keep writing you it’s too weird to do it in the generic.
It’s not that I’ve never experienced loss. When I was a kid my dad left. Two years ago, my grandpa died. It hurt. But this is so far beyond hurt I can’t explain it to you. It’s like being skinless, having your eyes put out, I don’t know. Something you should die from. To be honest with you maybe I’m a ghost too. I am dead and this has killed me. God only fucking knows why I’m still walking around staring at birds.
C. was a part of me. I came out because I had him to lean on, because there was one person in the world I could bare myself to like that the first time: hey, this is who I am, I know it’s fucking weird, can you deal? And yeah, of course he could deal.
His whole business was dealing. We dealt.
And then he maybe killed himself, and I don’t know what to do with that.
It’s absurd: your other half, your significant other. I had one of those even if it wasn’t the kind most people think—C. didn’t have to be my goddamn boyfriend to be the thing I most cared for. Binary system, self-supporting, closed loop. Then it goes and ruptures, one day to the next, and you’ve got nothing and no one. Because you’re a weird motherfucker and—yeah teenage angst whatever, but really—nobody else gives a shit about you and nobody else understands you.
I don’t even know if I can feel betrayed.
The last half of the letter was jagged, words crawling over lines and sliding sideways off the page.
There was a time limit in place, si reflected, slouched on the chair with one bare foot propped on the windowsill. The rising and setting of the sun ticked one more day off—one more day where the rent was paid, gone; one more day with food to eat, gone. The time limit was some comfort, though, a guarantee that this state of purgatory was not and could not be permanent, that si wouldn’t find hirself still mourning and half-alive in the tiny studio in three years. On the ledge, the pigeon was preening. Si hadn’t seen it feeding the chicks yet, but assumed it must be. Those birds had time limits, too, whether or not they knew about them. So long to grow feathers, so long to learn to fly, so long to live, then—nothing.
Si took up the notebook again, finding a fresh page.
Dear Cordelia,
Here are some clichés and some truths or both:
(1) I don’t know how to live without him.
(2) I am lost and alone.
(3) I miss C. so much I could die.
(4) Life is too short.
(5) Life is meaningless.
(6) I am a coward.
(7) I just want some answers.
(8) Ghosts can’t move on properly.
—J.
The notebook slapped to the floor, the pen clattering next to it. Si tipped hir chin up and wobbled the chair on its back legs, playing at risk. The chicks made the softest yelping chirps outside, barely audible, crying out at the wide blue sky.
No answers.
Dear Cordelia,
I’m starting to really identify with these birds. Probably a sign of my oncoming psychological collapse. I write letters to ghosts and I spend all day watching pigeons grow up. That’s what I have left.
The question is: did he kill himself?
I don’t know, maybe, maybe not on purpose. Keeps me up nights. Haunts me even. I can’t say that you’re haunting me. I think I might be haunting you. Probably why you won’t respond to these letters. There’s a good enough mirror to write on if you wanted to.
—J.
Dear Cordelia,
The pigeons are getting bigger—they’ve got fluff and feathers. They wobble around in their nest and headbutt each other seemingly by accident a lot. I’ve lost track of what day it is, or what else I’m doing but lying around in the bed or watching the birds. That should worry me, and it doesn’t.
Maybe I don’t need answers. Maybe I just need to man up and make a decision. It’s a big world out there and it seems to chug along just fine without me.
One more thing: there’s nobody left to tell me how much I have to live for.
Thanks, C. You’re the best friend a person could have.
There was no more milk. J. stood in the chill wafting from the open fridge door, sweat prickling hir scalp, and stared at the empty shelves. The box of cereal on the table was the last of the actual food that remained from hir initial and only trip to the corner grocery. Si realized with a sick swooping sensation that si had not left the studio since that day. The grey wash of preceding mornings and afternoons and nights blurred, indistinct—countable only in terms of the dwindling supplies. Hir hair was a nest not unlike the pigeon’s; toenails grown out; clothes unwashed. Si closed the fridge and took a calming breath before wandering to the spill of still-possibly-clean laundry from the tipped-over trash bag next to the empty closet. Si found a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, despite the summer swelter, and tugged them on. A glance out the window revealed a bustling afternoon crowd passing on the street below.
Si walked to the door and put a hand on the knob. Hir fingers shook. Hir guts cramped—equal measures hunger and terror. There were, of course, people down that narrow staircase. There would be more at the grocery, and more at the checkout, and yet more on the walk back. Each would have their own manners of seeing and judging, their brief cruelties and petty aggressions. With C., there were certain possibilities: a reckless bravado, a bolstering effect—the crowd of two, ready to put backs together and fight. C. knew hir and needed hir, would be there to the end no matter bodies or pronouns or the harshness of strangers. Alone, J. was—si let go of the knob and banged hir head twice on the door—vulnerable. The shape and not-shape of hir had mattered less, before. Before, si had armor. Before, si hadn’t felt raw as bone and dangerously visible.
But this was now.
Si picked up the box of cereal and poured a glass of water from the tap, then went to sit by the window. The pigeons, grown plump, cooed and wittered at each other and their parent. The three of them could no longer all fit in the nest together. J. ate fistfuls of the dry cereal, washing them down with lukewarm iron-tasting water. Dear Cordelia, si thought, I am fucking terrified.
J. paced, slept, ate the dwindling box of cereal to quiet an aching stomach. Life had come down to those simple but ineffably complicated behaviors, and the ticking of a phantom clock, the pressure of a phone that held more and more unanswered messages juxtaposed against the frightful silence of the void. In hir bones si felt it, the coming to a close.
The ghost had been neglectful, invisible; the pigeons were growing to look like their parent, no longer so devastatingly helpless and delicate. The rent would be due, soon. The food was nearly gone. C. was still as dead as he’d been weeks before, and would be for the rest of the weeks in the world.
Footsore and stiff from pacing tight cage-circles for hours, J. sat down to the red sun of evening in the chair by the window, notebook balanced open to a fresh page on hir knee. Si took in the stifling warm air of the apartment in one long inhale; let it out slowly. The city, their city, moved through life below.
Dear Cordelia,
If you were the real C.’s ghost, there would be some things I’d want to tell you. Some things that need to get said, I guess—I feel like doing it now.
So: Dear C.,
I should have said it more, that I loved you. I should have said it into the stupid mess of your hair when we sobered up at dawn in the backseat of your car. I should have made you understand what I would have sworn to fucking god you did understand: without each other we’ve got nothing, because you’re the whole world and all I wanted out of it.
You left me.
You made some promises, to me, and you broke them.
I don’t care. If I could have you back for five minutes, just five forever, so
I could say goodbye—it wouldn’t be enough but it would be something. It wouldn’t be my stupid text “sup” and you not responding. It wouldn’t be almost blacking out at your funeral and your fucking parents not caring, not understanding, that I had lost half of me.
I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. You heartless fuck.
I don’t know how to go on, how to go do the shit we should be doing together—you should be in this apartment with me, crammed into that tiny bathroom in the morning and maybe having to get a second bed or just a bigger one we could share or whatever felt all right.
Nobody else had to get us, what we were for each other. I thought you thought it was funny, when kids couldn’t decide to call us faggots or what. I got us. I thought you did.
You should have thought of me.
What would you tell me to do, without you? Couldn’t even leave me a fucking note.
I loved you.
J. trailed off, silence overtaking the scritch of pen on paper, and heaved a chest-cracking breath. It felt as if the ink had crawled up from hir guts and ripped free onto the page, splattered there in a horrorshow of anger and need and pain. This was what it was like, in words—insufficient, flat, a belly-shaking cry distilled into a page of symbols. This was what it was like to yank at the edges of the gash and look at the insides.
It, si thought, hurts.
Yours, J—.
The ticklish swipe of a hand brushing hair back from J.’s face woke hir to wide white cracks of lightning in the outside sky and the sound of thunder. Si froze, one hand clutching the pillow, as the nearly imperceptible touch skated across hir scalp, ruffling bed-wild hair and smoothing a hank of it away from hir face. Hir heart raced. The ghost—silent for days, more figment than phantom—had been stroking hir head.
This was not a hand-print on a mirror.
It was less eerie than si would have expected, more of a comfort. Si waited a moment for another touch, amidst the thunder’s rumbling, then when none seemed forthcoming climbed out of bed and went to the window. Si looked out on the rain-washed street through the distortions of wet glass. The realization that the ever-present nest to the right on the ledge had only two occupants—and one was the adult—struck by the blaze of an arc of lightning from the sky. J.’s stomach dropped. The wind howled outside; the two birds huddled together close through the deluge. “Shit,” si whispered.
The chick must have fallen out. Si wasn’t sure how long it took pigeons to fledge; they looked big, but si didn’t know enough to judge. What if it was lying on the ground below, trapped in the runoff water, cold and alone? The constriction in hir chest tightened inch by inch. Si threw on a pair of sneakers and a sweatshirt, shivering with adrenaline, and leapt to the door. There si balked, drawn up short. The knob was cold in the warm room, somehow, as if a chill hand had held it moments before—one equally incorporeal and helpless to open the thing as si felt in this moment. Outside was outside. Si ground hir teeth hard enough to ache. Hir metaphorical clock had stopped ticking, all hands pointing to midnight.
Si turned the knob and clattered down the dark staircase, opening the metal door at the bottom onto the courtyard. The rain hissed down in sheets. Si ducked into it, head down and hands up to shade hir eyes; the downpour was cold, soaking hir to the skin in an instant. Si traced the backside of the house along the garden row with the shop owner’s flowers flattened and jerking under the assault of the wind and rain. Each step si took without finding the little bird was like a blow to the ribs.
It mattered. Si absorbed that knowledge while searching, water sloshing into hir shoes to freeze hir toes. It mattered whether or not si found the pigeon, whether or not it was all right. This was an individual act si had to perform to assure the continuation of some particular small world.
Then beneath a brambly bush that was doing nothing to protect it si found the palm-sized bird, scrunched miserably into itself as tiny as it could become. “Ssh,” J. whispered, bending down and taking a knee to reach it. It did not respond to hir looming close, its eyes closed. When hir fingers gently closed around its warm thrumming body it struggled as if to flap away, but si held it tenderly. Hunching over and holding the bird close to hir chest, si struggled back to the stairs and inside the building.
The sudden cessation of rain was like surfacing from drowning. Si wanted to gasp for breath but held the urge so as not to frighten the bird quivering in hir hands. Si bumped the door shut with hir hip and walked up the stairs to the studio. Water trailed behind the pair, pooling under J. as si stopped inside the doorway. Si slopped across the room to the pile of clean laundry and, trembling with uncertainty, sat the pigeon there, opening hir hands slowly to release it. The bird flapped, agitated, and kicked at the old shirts for a moment. J. stepped back and it made a quiet noise that seemed thankful in the dark night, settling in.
J. stood in the center of the room, goosebump-spangled and soaking, and there: the soft weight of fingers resting on hir shoulder, the lightest grip of reassurance, silent and small and whisper-faint. Si closed hir eyes against tears, thought of the letters si’d written, and knew it didn’t matter who had received them—just that, impossibly, someone had. The touch dissipated from one breath to the next, and si felt the wet and cold again, moved to strip off the sweatshirt, jeans, shoes, underclothes, each layer a weight and a symbol. Si lay down damp on the still-sleep-warm sheets then shifted, head to the foot of the bed, and pillowed hir chin on hir arms to watch the pigeon. It slept, bird-sized breaths making its body rise and fall.
One small world, one inexplicable life.
“Thank you,” si whispered, not entirely alone.
In the morning, si opened the window onto the beginnings of a crisp, clean-breezy summer day. Stealthily si approached the pigeon and took it up, shirt and all, in loose hands; more than the night before, it rustled and fought. Hir heart fluttered like its trapped wings as si approached the window and leaned out, hip on the sill, to reach for the nest where the sibling bird rested. Si waited until the pigeon quieted slightly then opened hir grip a fraction at a time. It hopped onto the ledge, wobbled for a breath-stealing moment, and stepped into its nest again.
The fist-clenched tightness in J.’s chest eased, bit by bit, like hir own hands. Si closed the window and sat down in the chair to take up the notebook. Si wrote:
Dear Cordelia,
The pigeons are okay.
—J.
After a long moment, si leaned over and picked up the phone from the bedside table to scroll through the message box. C.’s name, there, and si knew what was in the thread: laughter, light, loneliness. Instead si flicked up to hir own unanswered texts and messages. Hir thumb tapped, deliberate and trembling, “return call.”
The Road, and the Valley, and the Beasts
• Keffy R.M. Kehrli •
The valley of my home is long and crooked and narrow, cut into the landscape like a knife wound. A river runs along the bottom, flooding often through the spring, drying to a barest trickle in late summer, and freezing in winter. Shadowing the river is the great old road, a broad expanse of weeds and cracked bricks that were laid by hands long since forgotten.
As a rule, we do not travel the road, as it is not ours to use.
Our town has no official name. It is merely a collection of houses rough-hewn from tree and stone for those of us who find ourselves here. There are never any visitors, and none of us ever leave, not by road, nor by river, and certainly never in the baskets of the dead. Perhaps the town had a name once, and the people who lived here before us decided that there was no need to keep a name if there was no one to speak with. Would we have names, ourselves, if there were never anyone to introduce ourselves to?
We are not born here, but here we die, and our bodies are buried in the cemetery tucked up against the eastern wall of the valley. There we rest with all those who lived here before, whether they gave the town a name or no, their own names obscured by lichens and mosses and worn away by the callused hands of time.
/>
Why is there a road if it is not used? Ah, but it is used, frequently—only never by any of us.
There is a procession of giant Beasts that travels the great road past us twice a day, in the morning traveling upriver and in the evening traveling down. In the dim light of early dawn, the Beasts walk hunched and weary, their backs laden with baskets full of the newly dead, whose eyes stare and gleam in the dark, legs and arms limp or stiff depending on how long they’ve been dead. In the evenings, the Beasts pass us again, looking strong and refreshed, their baskets hanging limp and empty. Sometimes at dusk they whistle while they travel, the fluting sounds echoing down the valley for hours.
Somewhere, far away, there is a land where we are born. Somewhere, far away, there is a land where people are not buried when they die, but are taken upriver by the Beasts.
I dream of that land almost every day, whether I’m weeding the garden that my adoptive mothers have planted, or baking bread, or washing the clothes in a shallow section of the river. There are so many dead in the baskets of the Beasts each morning that this land they come from must be full of people, more people even than are buried in our cemetery, more than have ever existed in our small town. I wonder what things they have built, towers of marble, cathedrals of glass, bridges of gold that gleam red in the sunset…
My dearest love is a girl named Ria, who was given a boy’s name when she first came here but let her adoptive father know that he was wrong as soon as she could speak. Although nearly adults, we two are the youngest living in the town, as it has been one of the longest stretches between new arrivals that anyone can remember.
In the evenings, Ria sits with me under the apple trees in my mothers’ orchard, nibbling at my ears when she thinks that I have paid too much attention to the Beasts passing us by, holding my hands against her chest when I try to cup them behind my ears to hear the Beasts’ strangely soft footfalls.