I looked up from myself. My companion was still watching me, intent on every expression I didn’t know I was making, every small sound of astonishment I unconsciously uttered. I wondered if he could talk.
“Shake hands?” I offered, sticking out my right hand experimentally.
He automatically stuck out his left, a mirror image. We did a funny sort of hand clasping, all backwards. His ink-puppet hand didn’t pass through my river hand but rested atop it, light as a water strider. I was aware of his touch but not as pressure—more like an event, a series of infinitesimal ripples spreading from the dimples his fingers made on the surface of my fingers. I sat as still as possible, feeling the repercussions of contact for a very long time.
The bank where we were sitting was ankle-deep in white stones, like the quartzes of his strange teeth, or the stuff I had been vomiting. The white incline rose steeply to the woods. These were not the woods I’d left, with those four clear paths marked by paint and tamped down in pine needles. The Preservation Trust Town Forest was small: mostly birch, hemlock, and beech. Some swamp maples, not many, drops of scarlet in the garish gold like grenadine in orange juice. When I’d left those woods, they were only just starting to shake out their summer clothes, folding them away to put on autumn, becoming what mamita calls “The Yellow Wood.” Enough leaves had already fallen to make a lacework of the upper canopy, white diamonds of sunlight twinkling in the gaps.
Here, I wasn’t sure that the sky was the sky. It might have been the surface of the river, high above me. The trees were white-on-silver, or conversely, silver-on-white, like trees etched on plates of glass, pressed between other plates of glass etched with more trees. Things darted through the branches, but they were not birds.
I blinked. An eel slithered across the thin water-skin of my closed eyelid, tucked itself shyly behind my ear.
“Am I a ghost?” I asked my companion, who shook himself like the glass-etched birch above us was doing. He seemed pleased to be asked, and answered immediately.
“No,” he said. Then, “No, not ghost… precisely. Not ‘ghost’ like we’d once thought, when we were alive. What is ghost? A malfunction of memory, doomed to repetition, utterly dependent on a living—or rather untransformed—witness for validation of its existence. No, we operate independent of those strictures. We have passed beyond any need of witness. So we are not ghost, I think. Spirit, maybe. Yes—a spirit—a sprite, a wight… Spirits to enforce or to enchant?” He opened the inkblots of his palms, half sheepishly. Finger-like shadows unfurled. A many-winged moth. A horned sumo wrestler.
Ah! I thought triumphantly. The gentleman—or gentlething anyway—hath quoted the Sh’peare! So he as well must have been human once, whatever he was now. Like me.
I asked, “Did you drown too?”
His flyaway eyebrows flew away from him again. His mouth opened in a clown’s O, then pronounced the “Oh!” out loud as an afterthought.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “It occurs to me that that may be a very personal question?”
His shoulders heaved, instigating a vast, full-body shrug. “Drowned? I don’t know. We seem to have, with practice, an ability to curate our memories here, and I’m afraid I…curated my own rather too vigorously the last time I… So, as to drowned, I cannot say. But dead…”
I waited.
“Dead, yes,” he said. “Or something else.” He shook his long-eared head. The ragged crest of his hair-feathers whipped to and fro. A look of disquieting tranquility settled over his face. “Can the dead do what we do?”
Then he sang something in a voice that came not only from his throat, but clapped out from him bodily. A sharp shockwave. The white pebbles—or crystal teeth—upon which I sat rose up beneath me and formed a throne. There were little armrests and everything. Delighted with this turn of events, I applauded enthusiastically. Between the splashing wetness of my palms, a tiny rainstorm played out.
“Did you always know how to do that?” I asked. “Or did you have to learn?”
“I learned. When I came. It took me…” He waved a hand. “A while.”
“It’s so cool! I never expected it. And now I don’t know what to expect!”
He nodded. “That is a good start. Strong. First, to shed assumptions. And then…” A starry, tar-black flush stood out upon his cameo-cut cheeks. But he also smiled, bold as a little boy who having drawn something in crayon that pleased him, knew full well that praise was his due. “Then,” he said softly, “to commence invention!”
I patted the armrests of my throne. “Well, this invention is so totally faboosh!” I used the word mamita had invented for my more outrageous outfits. “A throne suits me, don’t you think?” He nodded vigorously. I went on, “Mamita says I have an imperious nature. She doesn’t mind—although she does refer to me as ‘Lady Jane’ from time to time, whenever I take too much to the tyrannical. The threat is implicit,” I reflected, “as Lady Jane was eventually beheaded.”
My companion snuggled down at the foot of my throne, leaning against my thigh to listen contentedly. Minnows swam up from my feet and ankles to explore the contours of our connection. I began petting the shining oil slick of his hair until it gleamed wetly. He practically purred; I knew the feeling.
“Mamita likes to pretend she’s my lady-in-waiting. Helping me with buttons I can’t reach, painting my nails, braiding my hair—I get so impatient with hair—things like that. Zippers. Mending. You know. Everything I’m not good at. I’m better at time. Organizing. Herding. Planning ahead. Making snap decisions.”
I looked around, remembering the swan boat: my last snap decision. Some decisions, I thought, were better left to rot under the sweet pepperbush tree where they’d been sensibly buried. And some realizations came too late.
If we could indeed curate our memories in this place, I could probably just forget about the swan boat. Right now. Forever. It would be less embarrassing that way. I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life, or whatever this was, with bruised pride and a smarting dignity. I toyed with the idea of erasing the events leading up to my death, starting with Rugger and the Flying Wedgies and ending with my last revelation in the middle of the swollen Pawcatuck.
But almost as soon as I considered it, dread at the thought of discarding what so closely concerned me caused a small quake at my epicenter. Quick as tossing salt over my shoulder, I scooped up a handful of small white stones (or teeth) and flung them back into the river, thinking that they could join the swan boat there, at the bottom—as assurance of my continued remembrance. But they merely clattered and skipped across the water’s surface, went skidding and sliding, stopped at last at the far side of the embankment. Never sank below the foam. The river rushed solidly by, as if its surface were covered with a thin sheet of glass or ice.
I brushed a few more baroque pearls off of my face and lap. They joined the white stones, slightly pinker and shinier. My companion’s hand came once again to rest on my arm in gentle understanding.
“I… I had a tower, once. I built it with my… She was… I was…” Another of his shuddering shrugs. “Someone else was here. I forget her name. I remember she left. So I made the tower fall.”
“Hm.” I splashed a smile his way. “Exile,” I said with great wisdom and greater pomposity, “is often a common denominator in friendship. At least, if my memories of surviving parochial school still serve me.”
He looked up hopefully. I bent down and reached for his hand. “So is kindness. You were kind to me first thing. I won’t forget that.”
“I won’t forget this,” he said.
That was the first promise we made to each other, the shadow of his hand under mine, my fingertips flickering with the silhouettes of tadpoles. He opened his palm, and I rested my current upon it. My hand held its form, only sometimes over-spilling the edges. He let me pour over him, and I heard him breathe out, breathe in. If you can call it breath. Like a desert breathes after it rains.
“Let’s build another tow
er,” I said. “I like to live high up.”
The tower he sang up from the ground was drawn from a substrata of black rock deeper down than the toothy white quartz of the riverbank. Where it arose, it left a trench in a wide circle all around it, which dove down bottomlessly. While he rested—which he needed to do from time to time—I took over, singing tentatively. At first, I only spat out more pebbles, more shards of smooth glass. But as I grew bolder, better results attended my efforts. The first time a whole sun turtle crawled out of my face, it headed straight up one of the incomplete walls of the tower, where it settled in and became a small, translucent, turtle-shaped, green window that seemed not only to let in light but to produce its own luminescence. Encouraged by this, and by my companion’s delight upon waking, I sang louder, with even more vigor. I sang like I used to sing Sondheim in the kitchen while making popcorn for weird indie movie night. I sang Leonard Cohen (everything) and Joni Mitchell (likewise) and Hamilton—well, everything but Lafayette’s rap from “Guns and Ships,” which I’d never managed to memorize and couldn’t now recall—and random AC/DC lyrics I remembered from my Zombies, Run! workouts, and “O Mio Babino Caro” and Pete Seeger’s “One Grain of Sand,” which I’d come to via Odetta.
Soon our tower had many window-lamps of varying shapes and sizes. There were otters, crocodiles, boas and beetles and bats, calla lilies, cranes, frogs, toads, one hippopotamus, one pink freshwater dolphin—all of which had tumbled out of my watery integument and made their way up the walls, where their forms froze into something like glass, something like light. Later, when I was more confident and precise, I made windows even out of the very water that rushed over and through me, falling sheets of water that was as much me as the shape I was walking around in. I made walls of water. Floors of it. Water was the bed we slept in. It spilled down the edges of the tower into the trench below and filled it until we had our own moat, as turquoise-green as the canals of Venice.
When the tower was several stories tall and beginning to feel like home, my companion and I ventured together to the riverbank to explore. That was when we began our “mudlarking for spirits”—trying to find others like us, who might be trapped, either under objects, or inside them, or who had become such strangers to the way they remembered themselves that it took an outsider to recognize them for what they were.
There was a spirit we found in one of the silver-on-white trees that looked like a bird, but when my companion coaxed it into his hand, it had a human face and spoke with a human voice. Its name was Dhanvi. It did not want to live in our tower with us. The forest was its home; it had built many a palace nest among the glass branches, and had friends enough like itself. But it would, it promised, look in on us from time to time, and introduce others to our acquaintance, if we wished. We did.
There was a spirit caught in the frosty cattails who looked as desiccated as a dried sunflower, but when we extricated her and brought her home, she filled out as golden and sweet-smelling as harvest wheat, and remembered her name: Mahalia. Mahalia loved our tower; it was shortly as much hers as ours. She proved a master mosaic artist, laying down makeshift tiles that she had plucked from the tidal shallows of my belly and thighs and spine: pottery shards and old doorknobs, miniature brass muskets and tiny clay pipes and broken bone lace bobbins and false eyes and ancient shoe buckles and free-blown bottles and rare silver fanams and many more objects which she lured forth by touch and call.
More joined us. Some stayed only a while. Others merely looked in. Others kept well away from us, hidden and flinching and burrowed down. Sometimes I thought we were surrounded by invisible towers just like ours, that we were not permitted to see, and from out of a hundred invisible windows our neighbors were watching us in secret, their oyster-scraped shyness such a repelling force that it felt at times malevolent. But even these secret watchers we hoped to win over by and by. There was time. Or maybe not. Maybe there was just the memory of time, which some forgot.
My companions and I did not attempt to hide our own tower. When I’d lived with mamita we’d tried to keep an open table, for all that none of our chairs ever matched and we’d curb-picked the table itself from a neighboring house on trash day. We’d re-labeled all traditionally “family” holidays as “Feasts of the Forsaken,” in which any friend estranged from blood-ties or too far distant to claim them could come celebrate with us. Mahalia told us that when she had lived, she’d shared a house with four generations of women, and during the brief time she had lived alone, after illness and accident had claimed all of her progenitresses, she couldn’t seem to cook for fewer than six people and would always end up with a week’s worth of leftovers.
Our third companion could not remember his time from before; his “vigorous curation” had assured that. But anyone could see he thrived in company and grew more cheerful with every service he could perform on our behalf.
As we built our tower, therefore, we sang it visible, we sang it useful, and motley, with more rooms than we could possibly use, and in memory of the families we had left behind, and of those who had gone before us, we kept an open table, and we sang it home.
“Corazón!” I called from my seat by the window. “Come look!”
As our third companion could not remember his given name, Mahalia and I lavished him with endearments that made his silhouette-self blossom like a night-blooming flower. “Corazón” was my favorite and had taken the place of a name in my head. But “Sweetling” and “Loveliest” and “Noggle” and “Flittermouse” were also standards of address, along with several of my mother’s favorites: “Cariño” and “Mi Vida” and “El Aire Que Respiro,” and some in Mahalia’s Tagalog, like “Dayong” and “Irog”—though she says “Irog” is old-fashioned, and only poets use it anymore.
Today, Corazón was immersed in his new project and did not seem to hear me the first time I called for him. Recently, Mahalia had mentioned wanting a chair-and-a-half for her bedchamber. So, of course, our beloved Corazón had at once thrown himself into constructing one for her. Right now, he was crouched near my feet—his preferred place of rest—busily plucking out his wild black hair to stuff the chair’s cushions with. There was no lack of stuffing: the more he plucked, the wilder and wilier his corybantic crest of cormorant fluff did spring. If I looked long enough, I could see black wings of feather-hair growing and flapping out from the sides of his skull. Corazón’s mobile face expressed a reverential pleasure in this self-deracination; he looked like a dog scratching deeply at an everlasting itch. I could observe him for hours and often did; there was leisure for distraction here. But the scene outside our window tugged at me.
“Corazón,” I tried again, running a few fingers of cold current through his hair.
Grinning and shivering at my caress, he glanced up. “Yes, Luz?”
“There is something in our moat.”
“Huh.”
“It’s sort of… I can’t tell what shape it is. Do you think it’s a new spirit?”
He leapt up with that glad gawkiness I loved so well. “Maybe. They don’t usually come into the moat, though. It’s always via the river, or near it. I will look.”
I was sitting near a large, silvery-green window the size and shape of a giant manatee. Corazón came to stand beside me, peering through the paddle-shaped tail. He peered and peered. Squinted. Pressed his face to the pane. He opened the pane outward and stuck his head through.
And then he started to wail.
“Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no!”
Abruptly, he withdrew his head and slammed the window shut, as if sealing off our tower from an oncoming hailstorm. But nothing was falling from the sky—which may or may not have been the sky. However, small white stones did come tumbling from his mouth to clatter all over the floor.
“No, no, no,” he pleaded with me. “It is too soon! It’s too soon, Luz—we haven’t even—please don’t…”
At the continuing noises of his panic and distress, Mahalia glanced up from her workspace on the oth
er side of the room. She was finishing a new mosaic today: a table-top made up of found objects: memento mori love tokens, crinoid fossil stems, marbles, broken teacups—all items that had emerged inexplicably from the region of my kneecaps. It was close, intensive work, and she tended to focus on her projects to the exclusion of all else, but for Corazón’s sake, she deserted it immediately and came to investigate the new wrongness in the room.
I had thrown my arms around Corazón. He was shaking, spilling splotches of anxious ink and flakes of shadow everywhere like scattered ants. “What’s wrong?” I begged him. “What is it?” But even as I spoke, I glanced out the window again, trying to see the thing in the moat.
“Don’t look, Luz! Please.” His face was buried in my shoulder, sunk puddle-deep, as if he wanted to dive into me completely. His hands splashed into my waist like striped bass at sundown.
Mahalia enfolded us both in her large golden arms, wrapping us in bands of sentient sunlight. “Gently,” she murmured. “Gently.”
“It’s the strangest thing.” I craned for another glimpse as Corazón clung to me tightly. “At first, the shape of it beneath the moat was barely visible. But it keeps getting bigger.”
“Not bigger,” Mahalia told me sadly. “Just closer. I’ve seen this before.” She pressed a kiss to Corazón’s forehead, leaving a brand of golden lip-marks upon his lustrous blackness. “So has he.” She sighed. “It happens from time to time. It’s always so disheartening—and after all our work! After all this… happiness.” She sighed a second time. “Last time, I didn’t have the heart to try again. That’s why I fled to the riverbank. To dry up. To forget. And I did—I forgot why I fled in the first place. Because this, this,” she squeezed us both harder, like an angry Corn Queen or a cloud of swarming bees, “is unbearable.”
“But what,” I asked, “is this?”
Corazón at last emerged from the shallows of my shoulder, the woeful quartz of his eyes like heartbroken stars.
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