Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  And so the earth and the human, each half-oblivious of the other, singe the other’s brow or spill the other’s blood. Cities, even in their sanitary nascence, arising out of desert sand or ocean mist, have their ruin written across the walls of their towers from the first moment of erection. Like tulips they push out of the soil, ever skyward, their feet ever bound, only to fall under the pressure of their own grandeur into the earth again. Towers, built on silt or on rock, crumble back to earth. From dust rise the cities, to dust they return. It is all that the child’s hands, the little engineer’s tools, can fabricate: the temporary spire, the pining spire, which hides its skyward obsession beneath the mark of dwelling and tomb. And so the two, parent and child, practice the gesture, lift their gaze from horizon to sky, from land and sea to stars. And the one forgets about the other, does not realize that it shares a common goal with the other. The human child fights against the earth’s gravity to build his cities; the earth acquiesces, then erupts. Two forces battle selfishly across the earth’s revolutions and over the child’s many generations.

  But from underneath the same silt or rock of felled cities, something else pushes: a third pressure. This pressure from the buried dead, those who have fallen but have not given up the yearning and who practice still the single gesture, the arcing of the head, searching skyward, clearing earth. They who push upward saturate the earth with their bones and their singular desire. They are many who fell in centuries or millennia past, after the way of the grand towers, and have been there, underground, keenly awaiting the day when the dust storms, the cleansing winds and salts release their forms from their too-early graves: for the arcing chin accomplishes little underground but to clear the space around the skull. And the gemstones they wore heavy once around their necks, they now wear in their mouths. Gemstones lining the jaw like many-colored teeth and filling the sockets of the eye with splendor. But in the mouth, the jewels speak of underground truths that the living child’s mind aboveground cannot fathom, truths hidden in the earth’s burning heart, cooked there over billions of years by that singular and repeating gesture—the head tilting from horizon to sky, horizon to sky—truths unknown to the spinning sphere itself. And it is that mineral eye that charts a course home: the ruby eye housed in the skull of the human child that once was and ruled the earth and inherited from its mother the need that death would not sate. This gem child now finds his way out again. The ancient child returns in newfound glory, rises to bring with him his daughters and their sons and the many generations that joined them there beneath the earth’s surface in death. And it is with an awful lease on life, with the coiled hunger of hundreds of thousands of years, that they come back to take what is theirs and to eat the fruit on the distant boughs of their own tree in order to make the ascent. The jewel-mouthed mother takes from the earth that was her tormentor and her tomb the fruit of her own loins and eats also the earth’s fruit, fertilized and harvested by her own living descendants. She and her brood eat the earth out of bread and blood and leave not the rotting flesh of the fallen apple, nor the steady breath of the sleeping child. And the twinkling twice-born with the ripe fruit of the earth reflected in their jeweled eyes and firmly clutched in their jeweled mouths return, blood and brood, to the sky. Having at last charted their course home, the dead return to the dead.

  V

  Vowels. Such a small handful of them, and yet they do what no consonant would dare, or could, do. They are openings. To   what,   you   ask? Openings. They are like your eyes, your nostrils, your mouth, the orifices leading into and out of your body, which let in and let out the world. How far have you traveled into the interior? How far do you dare? What are you willing to ingest? Take   a   vowel.   Take   two.

  automata

  The sidereal yearnings of the sisters drew their eyes upward and upward, skyward and skyward. Performing the single gesture, drawing the singular arc with their small chins across the backdrop of schoolteacher and blackboard, or breakfast nook and stove hood, or car interior and indistinct fleeting cityscape, or flowers and fence—wherever a window or other opening presented itself—they were like automata, preset to perform their function: to love the sky and the stars that dot it with the ardor of a child. And did the astronomer/poet/mathematician not dream them, these five sisters, nearly four centuries prior and in a distant land? Was it not he who drew up the plans, envisaged their silhouettes, and calculated the arc of the chin in its motion from horizon to stars? Searching for the perfect geometry, in agony and discontent, he worked at the mysteries, he pored over observations and numbers, he drafted papers and letters, year after year, there in his laboratory. Nightly, he peered into the sky, pen in hand, and traced the courses of bodies, measured their distances, and recorded their peculiar motions. And while war and pestilence raged outside, he remained inside, steadfast. There at his window, the astronomer dreamed the sisters. And dreaming them, he came to see that there is a force in the mind that causes the eye to shift in the ascendant direction. And this nameless force draws curves even as it draws objects directly to itself and holds them there in perpetual orbit. In the archives, among his papers, you may find the drawings: the small nose precisely depicted in silhouette, lips set, lashes curved upward over an open and bright eye, which reflects the stars above and etches their forms onto the mind within. In the drawings, the automaton is sitting at a desk, or on a park bench or, like a giant, with her legs draped over the curvature of the earth, always gazing skyward. In her hand she holds a pen, or a compass, or a paintbrush, or some other crude implement with which she is meant to depict her devotion to the sky.

  motion

  There is a force in the _______ (fill in with larger being/object in the center of any system, e.g., sun, earth, mother, mind), which causes the _______ (fill in with smaller being/object that is in orbit around aforementioned being/object, e.g., earth, moon, daughter, eye) to move.

  the mysteries

  It seemed as if the atmosphere, that thin gaseous blanket enveloping the globe, was where understanding lived, and the mysteries of the world lay cavernous beneath and vast above. Between the forces of the sky and the forces of the earth: the atmosphere: a thin bright line, like the opening in a door left ajar at night. This opening just wide enough for measured breath and measured thought, which might draw meaning from the great mysteries. And the inquisitive sisters, living in that measured space, reached into the earth up to their armpits in the day and stared piercingly into the sky at night to extract knowledge. But the mysteries retreated. And the earth was cold at shallow depths. And the eye looking upon the beauty in the sky misted with liquid emotion and with longing that rose from the body’s interiors. Yet the unknown called and spoke to the sisters, sometimes in dreams, sometimes through the distorted words that effervesced from their lips when the two languages the girls spoke faltered, blended, and metamorphosed on their tongues. The line where the two languages met on the tongue was not unlike the thin line of clarity in which the girls lived, not unlike the line between the mussel and the barnacle on the intertidal rock, a line that draws stories from the deep-wide ocean about the moon and the clock. And in that bright space, where the two mysteries rushed one upon another, a third was born. And out of the tension between the forces of sky and the forces of earth, a soundness evolved. In this space, the sisters were happy to put on hold their search for an answer to the lack of correspondence between the two forces. In this space, they were happy to play, to laugh, to be children. And there were boundless moments when though the mysteries called, the sisters did not listen, would not heed. Boundless moments when they gathered the bright azure line about their shoulders—as the earth gathers it around its girth—comforted by its clarity and its independence from the two forces that gave it rise. And perhaps the greatest mystery was that life could prosper and proliferate, could shift and evolve on its own in that luminous space, despite the tension. And in spite of the tension, life could use the great fuels from
above and the great fuels from below to churn new life in that slight opening, so that the arm that reached into the earth brought it out in handfuls to craft bowls, towers, and telescopes, and so that the eye, when at night, looking out on the vast dark open, instead reflected the great vast internal.

  Sunday

  Father tinkers in the garage, hums the old folk songs to himself. Outside, in the shade of the grape arbor, the two youngest build a wedding cake for their bride-cat and the neighbor’s groom-dog out of mud, vines, tendrils, leaves, flowers, grapes, and shells. The middle child, unseen, unheard, sits in the treehouse, chewing gum, reading a book of fairy tales collected in distant lands, in distant times: she is transported. Inside, the second girl paints her nails with the five colors she has collected over the past year. She paints snowfall across the fingernails of her left hand and a bonfire over those on her right. The eldest has her bedroom to herself and sits against its closed door gossiping, giggling with her best friend. She has stretched, and uncoiled, the telephone cord its full length from kitchen, across living room, down hallway, to just inside her bedroom door. Mother, in the kitchen, listening to the melodic film songs, drops the filled dumplings into the boiling water, stirs the pot of simmering lentils and ground meat, mixes the yogurt, crushes the dried mint leaves. One by one, the others arrive, wash their hands, set out the plates, pull out the chairs, fill the teacups, and fill the air with their chatter.

  plenty

  Yes, the sisters know that they are stories, points of light bob-bing-embedded in the ever-undulating, ever-swelling sea that is the cosmos. Points of light, like myriad others, blinking.

  inborn

  And does the child who has thus far lived the peaceful-joyful-safe life know what terror is when war arrives? When war emerges, seemingly, as from a void, begotten yet motherless, does the girl recognize it for what it is: a god of Chaos and Bloodletting? Does the thus-far-sheltered child know to feel dread at war’s approach and appearance? A guest is coming! Sweep the rugs, fluff up the cushions, put on the tea, set out the sweets, fix your hair. The girl senses the excitement in the air. But does she absorb the vibration of the exploding bomb a mile away? Can she decode the adults’ cipherous speech? When her eyes meet the cold gazes of the foreign soldiers lining her neighborhood streets, can she read in them the story unfolding? Does terror rise in her small frame when she watches the news alongside Mother and Father, aunt and uncle, neighbor and milkman, as all sit around the television set and listen to the newscaster describe the many and precise methods and instruments at the torturer’s fingertips? Or does she look to the adults, study his and her face to read and apprehend fear? Does she wait for Father and Mother to return from the prison yard, from the graveyard, from the countryside, and from the government office building in order to study their dusty shoes, their bent-haggard shoulders, pale faces, red eyes, dry lips, in order to know terror? Look how Mother’s hand twitches, then freezes, then sets the teacup down again, lips trembling, tea unsipped. Or is terror a thing innate in the child? A thing fecund, ready to rise up, as from a void, to meet war eye to eye when it arrives?

  Enter War

  So the eyes tender, the eyes bright, the eyes trustful and steady, primed by biology and destiny, the child’s eyes look on, agape.

  the five

  And how far can the small child’s mind enter the sterile torture chamber, the gaping pit of the mass grave, the cold and damp well bottom? Once in, how deftly do her eyes see, her fingers feel, her nostrils scent? What odors are there? Which notes resound off steel doors and concrete walls, off flesh and off damp-bunched clothing, off earth-soft and earth-dense, off a small disk of fathomless water? DRIP DRIp DRip Drip drip. And her eardrums are taut, they are new; they are like the goat’s skin stretched across the street peddler’s tambourines. And her taste buds line up like many eager anemones at the tide’s edge. Are there not scents that are more flavor than odor? Does the throat not swallow what the eyes take in? And what visions there, in the torturer’s tidy room, in the dank subterranean pit, in the close wet cylinder! How vividly the child’s imagination colors the scene! A pencil behind each ear, a rainbow of crayons clamped between all ten fingers, the little illustrator’s imagination sings!

  What is it the newscaster said? Shhh, listen: they shaved her head, clean. They pulled out her nails, all twenty. They clipped three of her fingers from two of her hands. They sliced off her breasts, both. What else have they taken? The newscaster interviews the young woman, the torturee newly released, who sits covered in skirts and scarves—modesty, first and foremost in the newsroom—bald head to fleshy toenail beds. The woman bows her head and speaks in muffled tones through the veils to deliver the government’s clear message to the population glued to the television screen. They lined them up, she says. My parts. On the table next to me so I might see them, hear them, count them. They kept me awake, she says. Though I tried to dream, they woke me. She hides behind her veils, broken. She hides behind, hideous. But the little girl watching the tortured woman on the television screen is able to leave her own seat on the cushion, to glide across the living room floor past the adults watching, to slide into the newsroom and past the newsman, to get underneath those garments, pull off the shoes, finger the ten fleshy beds, climb up the red lashed legs, over the wasted belly, and put her ear to the concavities that were once soft mounds. Hear her heart beating? The young woman is still alive. Hairless, sterile, clawless (and therefore unable to leave her mark on the grave’s edge), she lives; though her life was taken, she lives. Hear her heart beating? The war has only begun. The newscaster is doing his job: asking the questions; terrifying the population. Stay with us. There is more to come.

  And the sister travels where the adults dare not; the girl sees with fertile inspired mind. She holds the torturee’s twitching hand in her own. She swallows the woman’s thick coppery saliva. She feels the pliers clamp down, hears the knife blade hit the table, sees the blood pool in her lap. The child smells the flesh burned. The child smells the fresh earth turned. In the crowded grave, she feels over her belly the weight of an arm that is not her arm, feels beneath her foot the top of another’s head. She feels a hand that is not her hand cradle her face in the shared loamy bed. She feels her slight sister-weight stifle breath that is not her breath beneath her; in the space between her shoulder blades, a cyclical warmth, then a rattle. She holds her breath and counts to one hundred. These are my people. Here I lie with them in the earth, not breathing. Here I drop with them, off of cliffs, off of scaffolds. Here I float with them and with the river’s current. Here I sit huddled with them in the well’s inky dank bottom.

  Though the war started first in the grown man’s imagination, it takes root more readily in the child’s. It is she who sees, smells, tastes, hears, feels most keenly. She who cannot turn away when the curtain rises.

  a, e, i, o, u

  The sisters are five. They are openings.

  They are what, you ask?

  They are vowels, openings. Their fertile inspired minds go where the adults’ dare not.

  They are like your eyes, your nostrils, your mouth, the five senses leading into and out of your body, which let in and let out the war. See war enter.

  See war remake the children into something else.

  she

  Her husband is not at home. Though it is midafternoon, he has not yet returned home from prayer. The men do not use the front door; they kick in the garden gate. She jumps and, despite herself, lets out a sharp scream, which she quickly muffles by biting down hard on her lip. She is upstairs and from her bedroom window sees them file into the garden—six or seven men, rifles on their shoulders or loosely swinging from their lax hands. She runs downstairs, then room to room, collecting her children, rushing them upstairs and into her bedroom, into her closet and, with her eyes alone, daring them to make a sound. They have rehearsed this; the children know what is expected of them and, as their mother draws the curtain closed, each child finds her and his hi
ding place against the wall or the floor, behind dresses and coats and underneath bedding.