Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Maybe it’s a matter of having proper lighting, happiness. Light should not impede the ascension of dreams.

  Yet one day it did. Happy, I was lying on my back, preparing for a nap. I gazed up at the ceiling, and instead of river light flowing past, I saw a brittle, jagged kind of light, more knife than light. I could not look at it without feeling as if my teeth were going to crumble right then and fall out of my head.

  Lucky I have been, and Lucky I no longer am, I thought.

  I went to the hatch and looked down at the river.

  So long, easy sleep. Good-bye, happiness.

  River? No. That mass of cracks was not what a river was.

  Time to find new names for everything. Despair. Apocalypse. Old Tomcat yowled. He hissed. He moaned. He grunted. He lay down on the ledge outside the hatch and let loose a litter of kittens.

  So. Old Tomcat was neither Old nor Tomcat. Figured. She would need a new name too.

  And these mewling things beside her, they would need names. She licked their heads between their blind eyes. She laid her head back and let them feed on her milky body.

  Below lay the broken bones of what used to be called River.

  Despair, I named the kitten with a white stripe between black eyes. Apocalypse, I named the one that looked vaguely at me. Two-Headed, Nobody, and Sheila were the other three.

  I fed Not-Old-Not-Tomcat some of my fish ingredients. She ate them scavengingly while Despair, Apocalypse, Two-Headed, Nobody, and Sheila mewled and sucked on her. Not, I shortened her name to. She seemed to have diminished considerably from her Old Tomcat days.

  I called myself Un. The Undoer. Undone.

  Not ate the eyes one at a time. I let my hand reach out and pat her head. She ate a few brain stems.

  My thoughts turned then to the ocean.

  *

  Sometimes things just dry up—that might make a nice, stupid ending.

  Not,

  Despair,

  Apocalypse,

  Two-Headed,

  Nobody,

  Sheila,

  and me, Un. We were a company.

  In my den our business was doing nothing. Making nothing. Going nowhere.

  The cracks in the mud of the river sometimes looked at me. Sizing me up. Why don’t you come with us, they said in a masked voice coming from somewhere under the cracked earth. Sometimes things just dry up.

  Get over it.

  Two-Headed developed a strain of apathy that made him want to devour me.

  He would sleep on my neck. Always this led to chewing. Even his dreams were hungry. Well, so were mine, when I managed to have one.

  I sprinkled fish scales on the rug when I wanted to see pure appetite’s teeth. Pure appetite’s claws. Quite a lot of cat blood was shed because of my boredom.

  Two-Headed always got the most of whatever it was. I named him Chief Executive Officer of Discorporation.

  I made a little sign. Wrote it in cat’s blood, hung it above the door to the den. DISCORPORATION.

  Things were becoming squalid. Things were, shall we say, in a state of drastic decline.

  The cracks would laugh sometimes. Why don’t you … they said one morning. Their voice sounded like a platter heaped with pancakes dripping with syrup. Help us, Un, they dripped. Only the syrup was blood.

  As a souvenir, I kept a little bit of fish lining in a small glass box. Blue sparks still shot through the lining. I would watch them through the walls of the box. At night I would hear crackling like the static between radio stations. It was the lining, searching for a body to light with life.

  How about a song, I would hear a voice within the lining ask itself. This would be in the middle of the night. The cats of Discorporation around me howling in their sleep. This one goes out to … and then the static would begin crackling again, this time to a different rhythm.

  The fact that Two-Headed actually had two heads did not change anything.

  I imagine the lining of an antelope or a dog would behave in much the same way fish lining did.

  I could not have been a maker of mountain lions or of humans—I only cared about making fish.

  The lining of a hawk—it would make an elegant jacket. Dark and fitted.

  I am old, but I still consider the possibilities.

  Though mostly what I do is look back, I still see:

  Sometimes there’s even someone new coming toward me.

  Who will she be this time? Or he. Long nights, little sleep—I’ll take just about anything. Even if it’s only my own past coming back. (There is only so much future. Only so much raw material for time to make its designs upon.)

  Sheila was becoming more and more stunning. One of those objects that exist only once they have disappeared. Her fur had begun to shimmer. Colors undulated along her back. Would not let me pet her. Crouched all day at the hatch looking down. Did not even come down to fight Two-Headed for a bit of brain.

  The less she behaved like a cat, the more stunningly beautiful she became.

  Suspicious, Two-Headed would hiss at her. She was not being enough of a cat to satisfy him.

  Look at me, she said one morning.

  I was still in bed, static lining my drowse with its shifting frequencies.

  I looked toward the hatch. I had recognized the voice as Sheila’s. It sounded exactly the way I expected Sheila to sound, like a piece of purple velvet wrapped around sunflower seeds, tied off with jute thread.

  Look down, Sheila’s voice said.

  There in the riverbed sat an old boat, decrepit, DELIVERANCE in faded paint on its keel.

  A woman sat in the captain’s nest. Hair black as it gets. Purple shimmer wafting off the waves of its hanks.

  Later I was not surprised to find that the lining had been lifted from my little glass box. Its lid had been tipped open. Only a few shreds of the lining were left. The work, I would recognize it in my sleep, of a cat’s teeth. Sheila.

  She turned a key; the rudder sputtered. I saw the boat had tires.

  All aboard, Sheila said.

  *

  That’s how we got to the ocean. Sheila drove.

  When we arrived, we rented a little cabin on the beach. BEACHCOMBERS PARADISE said the sign. The owners hadn’t made the S possessive. Paradise belonged to nobody.

  Which reminds me—Nobody hadn’t made it. He’d leaped from Deliverance and took off into the forest with Apocalypse. Not, Two-Headed, Despair, Sheila, and me, Un—we were the only occupants of Paradise. It was the off-season.

  Apparently other people were not interested in seeing how towering the waves can be in January.

  They want sunsets, Mel said. Mel was one of the caretakers of Paradise. The other was Holly. She was ill; dying, Mel said. They’d come here so she could do it in peace.

  I asked why we never saw Holly at the beach. Was she too sick even to sit?

  Doesn’t like to see the horizon anymore, Mel said. It makes her queasy. Ceiling and feet—those are the things she likes to see now. If you come to visit, wear nice shoes, she’ll appreciate it.

  *

  I spent days walking the beach. It is essentially a boneyard, the beach, a vast cemetery. It comforted me to be surrounded by so many possibilities. I began scheming about how I could use these washed-up pieces of life, maybe make fish again …

  I would look out at the horizon, wondering how many of my fish had made it that far.

  Mine—I still thought of them that way.

  The horizon is made of pure wondering, by the way. We make it distant merely by longing for it, since longing pushes away its object at the same time it reaches for it.

  Sheila mostly stayed in the cabin with the cats, fiddling with lids and tea. At night we would sit together on the deck, our bodies almost touching. I would feel the crackle of the lining leaping between us, arc
of energy. I wondered how long it would be before we …

  We should visit Holly, Sheila said one night.

  We?

  The woman’s dying, and we haven’t visited yet.

  OK, say hi for me, I said. I was frightened of Holly. No, I was frightened of death. Death had nothing to do with Holly, nothing to do with anything at all; it was impersonal, that’s what frightened me about it. No name can keep it away.

  The crackle of the lining I liked. Even the hiss of the fish. The look in their eyes as they began to live. Life—I craved it. I wanted to make more and more of it. Gather together all the fragments on the beach, make something that would be able to see me.

  The life in another’s eyes verified my life. But death, it took me away from me.

  No, we should both go. Out of respect. For Mel. Think of what he must be going through.

  I imagined Mel actually passing through something, Holly’s death a dark corridor, Mel blinking and crawling through it.

  We knocked on the door of their cabin the next morning.

  Mel’s face was no longer Mel’s face; it belonged to gray, like a soft, unappetizing cheese.

  We brought you something, said Sheila as Mel let us in. I thought, We did? I didn’t recall bringing anything. Yet I watched as Sheila pulled it from her pocket—the fish lining. My fish lining, from my little glass box. She hadn’t devoured it after all. She’d been keeping it with us, and from me.

  As she handed it to Mel, blue sparks fell to the floor and crackled for a moment at our feet like sparklers, then went quiet. In his hand the lining danced and laughed and leapt and threw flickers of blue into the room. I thought of the river again, its surface reflected on the ceiling of my den.

  She’ll love it, said Mel. Thank you.

  He unfolded it, then folded it, then put it in his shirt pocket. I’ll introduce you to Holly, he said.

  We followed him to the bedroom. I hoped that when he opened the door, the room would be empty except for a chest of drawers made of dark, deeply grained wood, the kind that captures light and gives the impression that it contains all of space in its surface. Each drawer would be a different size. This is Holly, Mel would say. He would open a drawer; inside, a blue marble. In another drawer, a wind-up eye. In another, one of those birds that endlessly dips its head to drink water from a dish. In another, another, smaller drawer, taking me farther from reality …

  Instead what we saw in the bedroom was a bed, and on it a woman, a real, dying one. I knew she was dying by her breath—it could hardly lift itself out of her body anymore, and the look in Holly’s eyes seemed to be falling inward toward it. I had watched this happen with the fish: As they died they would disappear into their own eyes.

  Scattered on the floor around her were yellow tissues, books, dishes that must have held Mel’s meals so that he never had to leave her side.

  Come in, Holly said when she saw us. She smiled a little and didn’t lift her head off the pillow.

  Mel introduced us as our guests, which I could tell he immediately regretted because Holly’s face drew into itself and she said, I’m sorry there’s such a mess.

  We’re not that kind of guest, Sheila said. She smiled. She knew how to have the right effect. Holly smiled and Mel said, They brought you a gift.

  Oh! said Holly. I love gifts.

  When we left, Holly’s eyes were shut. The square of lining flickered in one of her hands.

  *

  Late that night, Sheila and I sat on the deck of our cabin. I was waiting for her to lift one of her hands to the back of my neck, which tonight felt too exposed. I knew the movement was coming; I could feel it weighing itself between us, making the air around our mouths ready. When we breathed, the readiness entered our heads. Now, Sheila, I was thinking. Now is the time to touch me please.

  Sheila lifted one of her hands, placed it on my knee. Are you mad? she asked. I gave away your lining.

  Stole it, then gave it away, I said. I tried to laugh, laughed a little. After you did away with one of my cats.

  I didn’t make the river dry up, at least. That one wasn’t my fault.

  I could feel the air crinkling around her smile, touching her teeth.

  Her hand was still on my knee. The weight of it on my body kept answering her question. Was I mad? Keep touching me.

  Sheila, I said.

  At night there’s no horizon; or it’s so near, everything exists within it. We walked through the boneyard of the beach and at a point in the night that had no depth, we slept.

  *

  In the morning Mel stood on our deck. His face still belonged to gray, but there was relief around his chest. Holly was dead. She had died during the night. I could tell he was breathing better now that death had left that room. Even though it had left by way of Holly.

  I wanted to invite you to Holly’s funeral, he said. It’ll just be us. Her body’s already on the boat. He gestured toward something between the back of his shirt and the horizon. Floating there was a red boat about the size of Deliverance, but eminently more seaworthy, to judge by the fact that it could actually float.

  In it, Holly lay on a simple straw mat, her hands resting on it alongside her nightgown, inside of which her body seemed to have faded to a flat white line. Sheila and I sat on benches around her while Mel navigated.

  Do you want this back? he asked once he’d stilled the engine and we were floating with the current. He’d taken us far from the beach—no more cabins, no more land. The bottom of the boat was the only sure footing, and it was never still.

  He took the lining out of a pocket of his jacket. When she died it was in her hand, he said.

  No, it should go with Holly, Sheila said. She looked at me. The look told me that I agreed.

  Mel nodded, tucked it into Holly’s nightgown. We helped him lift Holly over the starboard side of the hull. There wasn’t any pause or ceremony—once we had her up we let her drop into the water. Splash.

  Or rather the entire thing was ceremony—the water, its buoyancy, us floating upon it.

  Visiting Nanjing

  Margaret Ross

  AIR QUALITY INDEX

  You know you see it if you’re seeing

  less. The skyline peters out. High-rises

  forget themselves, go gray, then pale, then

  nothing. Horizon encroaching. You can

  see your life as something you pass through

  or something pulled through you

  while you keep still. Nothing visible a hundred

  paces forward. Smog cinches in attention

  like pain would. A fresh cut yanks

  the mind snug on the single thought “it

  hurts.” It’s now you see a stretch of pavement

  acting like a girl. All powdered up and shimmering

  and everything around it blurs. Something fine

  accumulating—

  Easy: sift breath, ash

  surface, granulate the breeze. Wanna see

  the end? Let it grow on things, a dark layer

  on your counter, screen, touch a finger

  anywhere here your finger comes up black.

  Riddle in the concrete sense means sieve.

  Death’s a pointillist, you know you see it

  if you’re seeing less add up to something

  larger than it was. One second I

  was nearly struck, I gasped, I couldn’t

  budge, then back to same old same old

  fishing for my bus pass. To inhale here

  draws grit through the lung that every later

  breath must navigate around. Thought nothing

  of it, naturally, like anyone, it’s just

  what happens now and then, but over time

  the glimpses that you get fill out a picture.

&nb
sp; Don’t breathe too deep today. Faces on the street

  walk by with mouths sealed under masks

  like baby blankets: pale blue, pale pink

  with a yellow trim, two bows at the sides

  where dimples would be if it were skin. Who’s

  getting born? Who dying? You could

  call this form of breath a form of

  reading, information parceled piecemeal

  through a clear expanse you move through

  unimpeded, only later do you realize

  certain fragments settled on your mind, they stick,

  you have to think around them, unable to

  sweep them out, they make me up, the stubborn

  bits configuring a mesh through which

  thought strains. Read it in again. “I held my

  tongue before the mediocre thing apparently

  intent to smash perspective. Vanishing point

  gone, depth expunged, still recognizably the world

  but with the old view ground into a kind of soot

  dispersed across the surface like some intermittent

  inkling of a whole.” Wherever You aren’t

  I’d break my eyes to see. Look up from it

  on the bus at a kid just starting to bleed,

  a lot of blood it seems, from the nose.

  She doesn’t notice. Doesn’t do anything

  until the man whose lap she’s sitting on

  clucks and fishes out a wad of tissue, balls a piece

  to hold up to her nostril till the piece goes red,

  he slips the dark wet pellet in his pocket,

  does it again, the kid throughout just

  staring ahead, mostly, once in a while reaching up

  halfheartedly to stay the hand on her.

  MEAT OF THE MATTER

  A woman folds her arms

  and lays her head down

  on the table at the corner

  selling meat. Her ponytail

  black running over wood

  to meet the glossy naked cut

  of pork beside her. It’s hot.

  Midafternoon. The fly