Above Us the Milky Way
Page 1
ABOVE US THE MILKY WAY
AN ILLUMINATED ALPHABET
Fowzia Karimi
Deep Vellum Publishing
Dallas, Texas
Deep Vellum
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © 2020 by Fowzia Karimi
First printing, April 2020
ISBN: 978-1-941920-82-4 | eISBN: 978-1-941920-84-8
Support for this publication has been provided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture’s ArtsActivate program, and the Moody Fund for the Arts:
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Karimi, Fowzia, author.
Title: Above us the Milky Way : an illuminated alphabet / Fowzia Karimi.
Description: Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054603 (print) | LCCN 2019054604 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646050024 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646050031 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Refugee families--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3611.A78337 A63 2020 (print) | LCC PS3611.A78337 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054603
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054604
Design by Fowzia Karimi | fowziakarimi.com
Interior Layout and Typesetting by Kirby Gann
Text set in Baskerville, a typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
For my mother, my father, my sisters.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Prologue
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to the book, that perfect and abiding form, and to its devotees, among them: Will Evans, Kate Johnson, Kirby Gann, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Sebald, Kepler, Christian, Micheline, Meilan, Renee, Muthoni, Allison, Lorraine, Dan, Jodi, Jeana, Merritt, Kendra, Kim.
PREFACEIX PROLOGUEXII A AIRPLANE4 NEAT TRIBE5 TIDY FORCES6 THE MILKY WAY7 THE ALPHABET9 B THE SOOTHSAYER13 CLOCK15 THE TALISMAN15 IN THE BEGINNING: QUESTIONS17 THE SCRIBE 19 COMPANY22 BIRD, TREE, MAN22 READERS23 IN THE BEGINNING: TEA24 IN THE BEGINNING: WONDER25 BEST MAN25 THE DISAPPEARED29 BLOOD29 CONFIDANT30 MONSTER31 DENOUNCER33 MIDMORNING34 DOG AND JACKAL34 C FRIENDS39 MOVABLE40 THE RECORDKEEPERS42 TWO42 IN THE LAND OF THE SUN45 THE HAND45 WHOLE48 NUMBERS48 SEA, TREE, SKY49 FATHER, MOTHER49 FIVE53 ART54 TIDY59 UNTIDY60 D MOORED66 ONE66 FAMILY67 MANY69 GUESTS69 SON73 SEED75 IN WINTER, THE SUN76 THE WIDOW-BRIDE76 E DIVISION84 THE DRIFTER84 ENTER AND EXIT85 RICE86 THE FIRST RIVER86 THE SECOND RIVER89 WINTER HARVEST92 F HOLIDAY98 DIFFERENTIATION103 BIRTH105 TYPE106 UNBIRTH106 THE GRANDFATHER TREE108 MIRROR SISTERS112 G GRAVITY121 THE CAT121 ANGER124 SCENE127 BROTHER, SISTER127 COIL130 THE SISTERS DID NOT FIGHT130 LIKE CATS, LIKE CATS134 EYELID139 BROTHERS140 GEM142 PRIDE142 TENDERNESS143 H THE BEGETTER149 RECORD151 FATHER, THE BOY151 UBIQUITOUS157 THE IDOLATER158 THE MOURNERS159 OLD WOMAN169 CELERITY170 GHOSTS170 I THE POND179 THE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET180 ALCHEMISTS180 TIRELESS184 CONVEYANCE184 BOY186 LOOK OUT!186 THE LIBRARY186 WIND/UNWIND187 J CONFETTI192 MOTHER, FATHER193 THE VALLEY194 TWO195 AND MOTHER198 MADNESS204 SIGNPOST205 THE STALKER206 HERITAGE206 K ARDOR—BIRDS210 ARDOR—THE SEA213 ARDOR—PICTURES216 ARDOR—THE DEAD219 ARDOR—NUMBERS221 THE SISTER 223 L THE DAYS WERE ONE226 M UNSLEEP—THE INSOMNIAC230 OUTSIDE, THE RAIN233 ROCKET234 LOSS238 EYES238 N SLEEP—THE FORGETTER243 THE TWIN STARS246 FATHER, ILL246 SUIT247 LOSS249 O UNSLEEP—THE SOMNAMBULIST253 OUTSIDE, THE WIND256 POLICEMAN257 IMMOVABLE259 BEFORE, SO259 P SLEEP—THE IMAGE-MAKER262 REVOLUTION266 MOTHER, ILL267 LOSS270 THE LODGER270 OUTSIDE, THE MOON272 Q SLEEP—THE DREAMER276 TAXICAB DRIVER281 SPEECHLESS284 R RELEASED288 THE IMMIGRANTS290 NOCTURNAL291 THE UNINVITED291 EARS, EYES292 ENGRAVING292 ONCE UPON A TIME293 STILLNESS293 SLEEP297 LAUNDRY297 SHADOWPLAY298 IN SUMMER, THE SUN301 THE SEA302 OPEN303 13304 LEAVES308 THE STRAW ROAD308 S ONE312 SUBTRACTION312 RIVETED314 IN THE FIRST LAND, CHILDHOOD314 ORBIT316 IN THE BEGINNING: INNOCENCE317 SHELTER317 THE RETURN318 MIRROR319 TWILIT320 ANTIDOTE320 T STRAW AND SILVER324 RED TULIP325 THE BEGOTTEN326 THE EMIGRANTS328 SHHH…LISTEN328 THE SISTERS WILL MARRY329 NEBULAE329 SCENE330 NOT-HOME331 BALLOONS332 DARKNESS334 THE DANCING DEAD334 WITNESS335 OFFERING336 A THOUSAND TALES336 U THE THREE ASTRONOMERS340 TENDER342 BELOW343 ROTATION, REVOLUTION343 VOYAGE344 CANOPY344 THE DREAM345 CENTER348 THE ASTRONOMER’S BOOK348 FIVE349 AND THE READER DREAMS.349 MOON350 AND THE DREAMER READS.352 JEWELMOUTHS352 V AUTOMATA358 MOTION359 THE MYSTERIES359 SUNDAY361 PLENTY361 INBORN362 ENTER WAR363 THE FIVE363 A, E, I, O, U366 SHE366 LAUNDRY370 SYSTEM370 THE VISITATION370 WAKE373 CHILDHOOD374 AND WATER374 W DUST380 STONES380 ARC381 HOW LONELY, HOW EARNEST382 FORBEARANCE383 BIRDS383 THE GARDEN384 …385 LAUGHTER387 X WANDERERS390 ABOVE US,391 BOOK391 BRIGHT STAR392 THE LIVING-ON394 LONGING394 BANISHED396 CORRESPONDENCE397 RECOLLECTION399 TOMB = TOME399 IRREDUCIBLE401 Y IN THE BEGINNING404 BIRTH405 KALEIDOSCOPE406 SO, LIFE408 MESSAGE409 ABOVE410 IN THE BEGINNING:410 FLOWERS410 IN THE BEGINNING: A FLOWER412 IN THE BEGINNING: A STORY412 THE CHARACTERS412 EXIT413 DREAM413 THE SISTERS, OUTSIDE413 Z416
Preface
Where memory is housed and where it is experienced are two distinct places in the mind. The first is orderly and immense, holding countless and myriad recollections. The air here is cool, still. Where memory is played for the viewing, the space is warm and close. It is furnished with a single chair and the screen takes up the entire wall. During the curious and all-consuming act of calling up the past, consciousness narrows down, excluding the external and the immediate, to focus on a single and earlier moment. And all biological systems join in the act. Is nostalgia not a somatic experience? Does the body in this closed space, in this act of narrowly viewing the past, not heat up? Do the pulse, the breath not quicken? Do the eyes not shuttle left to right, scan top to bottom? The act of remembering requires the participation of skin, nerve, bile and blood, as well as mind. It draws emotion from the body up into the mind, into that intimate screening room, even as it requests one or another recording from memory’s extensive vaults over the mind’s expedient pathways. My own nostalgic nature and urgings, and my Eastern upbringing in a Western land have pushed memory back and forth across these pathways from one center to the other, from where it is stored, to where it is re-viewed and re-lived. Growing up, I was at once memory’s cataloguer, deliberate and careful, and its instrument, playing and replaying what I had gathered and stored, regularly wistful to the point of tears.
If there is a place in the mind where memory is housed and a place where it is experienced, and if there are pathways of travel between the two, then this book comes not from memory’s catacombs or from its screening room, but from the networks over which memory passes. In my life, memory has passed so often across these networks that they have drawn to themselves the ghosts of my recollections, which coat them as ice in winter, or dew in summer, will coat an electric line. And these ghosts, which are not memories entire or lucid but their residue or thei
r shadows, have in places crystallized and in places condensed on these lines. The stories in this book are not autobiographical in the true sense; they relate my history as well as ice, coating a telephone line, might relate the conversations that have passed through that line. The stories here are memory condensed, not whole or linear, but distilled over the many years of my nostalgic life. And as water crystallizes around dust, so my stories would be nothing without many grains of untruth embedded within them. In the end, these are works of fancy born of remembrance.
The work in this book has little to do with the realities of the moment and neither does it desire to be placed in too close a proximity to today’s cultural or political landscapes. As it does not espouse or aim to teach some particular moral or to explain the state of affairs in one or another part of the world, it is best to pry it, difficult as that may be for the reader, from the jaws of today’s ever-hungry information machine, and to read it in the spirit in which it was written: as a tale. If there is a reality to be found here, then it is the truth of the interior, where story is born and brewed.
I left the land of my birth at a young age. It is an enchanted place, occupying the heart of an old continent, traversed by ancient roads that have conveyed commerce, culture, and conflict over the millennia. The life I was born into was vibrant with story and legend, and warm with family and communion. Not long into my childhood, the country was devastated by war. Though I lived there only a handful of years, I gathered and absorbed much, as children do. I brought the specters and the ruins of my native land to this one, America, the land of few shadows and much sunlight. And it is these ghosts and these ruins, from another place and an earlier time, swallowed whole to protect them from the glaring light, that have informed my life. The pieces in this book are a collection of remembrances, dirges for the dead, and fairy tales—life experienced early and brought forth only after many years of distillation. Let me remember.
Prologue
Inside the house, five sisters, a mother, a father, and always a cat, occasionally two, with one coming, the other leaving, and the two for a moment indistinguishable, the same. Outside, in the yard, always a tree, resplendent, regal, the tallest on the block, whichever block the house was on in that particular year. And he, the tree, a grandfather to the five sisters, in place of the one none but the eldest had met years before in another country. And in the dry soil of that first country, their first grandfather remains buried in a tomb of marble—which some, but not all, of the sisters can remember—in a cemetery of dirt and stone and a handful of slender leaning trees that afford the ancestors a dappled shade at the noon hour and make his tombstone cool to the touch. Five girls and a cat hiding in the tree’s evergreen canopy, year-round hanging from its limbs amid the buzzing of bees, beneath a shifting sky of clouds wispy and clouds swollen, scoring into the tree’s trunk names and symbols that hold meaning, with depth of score to depth of meaning in perfect proportion, in golden ratio. And the girls peeling off layer after layer of bark to lick the tree’s white living bones underneath. Hours spent playing hide-and-seek or magician, tying one another to the tree’s trunk using rope from the garage and knee-high socks to cover the bound sister’s eyes. Hand-feeding the prisoner salted cucumbers or pink strawberries (because we had too much heart or maybe just stubborn Eastern hospitality that refused to be bred out of us). And celebration all around when the magician finally loosened the rope knots and stood up to shake bits of bark or leaves from her hair.
Outside, the undoing of things. Beneath the grandfather tree, always grass, endless and forgiving of pounding feet and poking fingers and prying faces. In the grass: the tree’s knobby knees coming up through dirt. Exiting the grass: a parade of ants that march and march and climb and climb up and around the tree’s waist and continue up its many arms, to its very fingertips. The tree: a deity; the grass: a prayer rug; the sisters: joyfully oblivious. Among the blades of grass: bugs, the true kind with two sets of wings and red markings on black. Beneath the green carpet: glistening worms, cold and dry to the touch, and moist, brown earth, which packs beneath digging fingernails and there remains for the day.
Outside, the undoing of things: of hair ties, of shoelaces; of ripe grapes or plums or pears off vines and tree branches; the unraveling of rules and conventions; the unwinding of tongues that release laughter and disparate languages, mixed and broken, and which only the girls and the cat, the same one/many, understand; the unfolding of arms and legs, which gracefully taking to climbing and jumping and hanging, erase millions of years of evolution in a second or show that it too is fixed in time, like the house and the tree and the cat that remain always the same though the neighborhood or the city shifts every few years.
Inside the house, the doing of things: of homework, math and science and reading; of drawings of flowers or mountains or boats on far-off seas; the cutting of vegetables and of fat off the legs of dead lambs and chickens; the rinsing of rice; the stewing and baking of these things and afterward the consuming of them with Father and Mother, now home in the evening; the drinking of tea, always the sharing of tea; the washing of dishes at night while the television sings; the drawing down of lids over tired eyes; the drawing up of blankets over cold shoulders; the splashing of water over slumberous faces in the morning; the tying of braids and ponytails; the pulling closed of backpack zippers; the shutting behind of doors.
Inside, the family always building a fire, not real but not imagined either. A
center, a hearth, and the family around it, its members creating not a circle but
a spiral of movement, of heat, at once chaotic, at once bound, burning with
friction and love. An upward curling fire always pulsing, pushing always
upward. A whorl of voices, of things said and things unsaid—which
weigh more—of things whispered and things understood, of
laughter which is light, and laughter which is heavy with the
burden of remembering and the toil of forgetting. Inside
the house and in its center, always a fire, a spiral,
like an upside-down cone, shifting,
turning, and buzzing with
seven voices, six female,
one male, and the
purring of the
cat/s.
ABOVE US THE MILKY WAY
A
The alphabet. A set of letters arranged in a particular order. A set of letters that combine endlessly to form words on the page. What books are made of. What the sisters are made of.
And these letters are set in their particular order as if a strong force runs through the alphabet, locking the symbols in place. And yet, the letters rearrange in inexhaustible combinations to write the words that give positive form to the formless. Like little magicians, the letters are forever in two places at once: bound in their fixed positions—for who could reorder the sequence of an alphabet?—and leaving their posts to form this or that word. The five sisters are also lined up in a precise order, oldest to youngest, held in place by a logic and a force born of nature and chance. And like the letters of the alphabet, the sisters arrange and rearrange themselves in endless amalgamations to give form to what is unspoken, and meaning to the ordinary.
A, the land where I was born.
A, the shore upon which I landed.
A, for ALL: for a story in its entirety. For how it begins, for how into it chaos or pain or desire enters, for what ensues within it, for where it takes us, for how all falls into place at its conclusion, and for the state in which it afterward leaves us. I too am a reader and I understand the need to consume all. I have this appetite. Moreover, I respect the boundaries set up by the two covers. And yet here, in this book, they are no more than lids, no more than two soft curtains opening on a scene. Yes, I too crave the arc. But you will not find one here. The only way forward is through the alphabet.
airplane
When they left the old land,
the sisters kissed their grandmother’s spotted hands and did not pull away their faces from her moist, uneven breath. They hugged their many-aunts, kissing three times their warm cheeks; they bowed the crowns of their heads to their many-uncles’ hands and lips, nodding respectfully as the uncles listed the do’s and do-not’s; and they spoke timidly and in whispers with the cousins they knew as intimately as they did each other, avoiding their eyes and their questions, secretly holding the same unanswerable questions in their own minds. The flight of stairs to the mouth of the waiting airplane was steep, the metal cold, and the lofty view it afforded them indifferent to their many-questions: why, where, how long, and what for? The sisters looked down silently yet intently at the gathered tribe who stood twelve long and three deep, in heels and in coats, lipsticked and combed, smiling awkwardly with relief or with confusion, collectively willing back tears. When waving goodbye from the platform at the top of the stairs to the neatly assembled relatives standing down below, the sisters did not neglect their own reflected images: five small girls dressed in clothes and wearing expressions identical to their own. The mirror-sisters stood inside the terminal and looked back out onto the airstrip from behind ten-foot high windows, not knowing to question, not understanding the airplane, the overpacked suitcases, the flowers in the departing-sisters’ arms. The sisters leaving waved and waved again from atop the stairs at the mouth of the airplane, blew kisses and shouted promises to the family who would remain and endure, shouted over the noise of the airplane’s roaring engines, and waved again from the belly of the airplane, their small faces plastered two and three to a small window. But the sisters behind the glass within the terminal stood with arms immobile, chins tilted, and did not know what to make of the strange assembly on the tarmac