Which brings me to Telesporus himself. He was my protector as a child, my right-hand guardian angel in the flesh, and later, when I was an adolescent, he also became a poetic presence, a guide, and now you might say even he is a psychotherapist of sorts, when he speaks with Emily. Telesporus knows more than anyone, just about everything. When I brought Blumenfeld my paintings and my box, he hovered over Blumenfeld (was he crying that day?) to comfort him. He also steps in and saves Emily when Blumenfeld does not even seem to know that she exists. Telesporus is an angel, a mythic being, the one who came to me as if in response to Rainer Maria Rilke’s first elegy: “Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?” He was, in a way, Blumenfeld’s precursor, and before Blumenfeld’s arrival in my life, the one I counted on most for my sanity.
I leave this particular session less intact and yet stronger. My suffering does not pass unnoticed. My connections to Emily and Telesporus, and to Blumenfeld himself, ensure that this time my suffering will not pass without meaning.
But it is by now the third week in July, and Blumenfeld will soon be going away for his vacation in August.
80
At home, I enter Macbeth’s world, where night and darkness are inseparable from the hauntings of battle on the wild Scottish moors, and the dreams that abuse sleep are indistinguishable from the lives of the characters who dream these dreams:
Now o’er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep.
I try to sleep in the humid July heat. When I drift off, Melanie comes and looms over me, as animal as the unbearable longing for succor, for comfort. I remember the soft flannel of her shirt against my cheek. I hear her voice in my ears, her full laughter. Her hand stroked my hair. When she seemed most dead, most hopelessly lost from my life, it had always seemed to me that in my despair she would come to comfort me. I wake up, unable to shake off the dream of her: more a presence than a dream.
It occurs to me that the dream is an omen that Melanie will call me or she will come back fully, as herself.
After hours of waiting, I am stunned into recognizing that she might be gone from my life forever. The hours pass, and nothing enters my wordless longing except the desire for escape, death, oblivion. I remain wide-eyed awake—restless and exhausted. Everywhere I turn it seems as though there is no way out of the terror of loss (which persists, as if I have not lost the person I most loved already), except through death. Emily is alive within me, and I feel her presence vividly.
Telesporus is nowhere to be found.
Late in the night, I sit up on my little green sofa in shorts and a gray T-shirt, making my death plans and writing out my handwritten will. These acts of finality will finally, I imagine, bring Melanie back into my life.
But what would it mean to Ben to have me leave him forever without any goodbye? I promised him that there would be time to say goodbye.
The phone rings, a wrong number. I thought it would be Melanie calling. I lie down, still waiting for her phone call.
Gloved hands come into a place enclosed by glass. The hands are huge. They drive needles under my skin. Cold, I am so cold. Yet I am burning under bright lights. The hands come into the glass where my skin burns to be soothed, where my body trembles to be held. The hands are cold and they hurt. I lie naked and exposed, my skin burning, watching light reflected on glass.
I get out of bed and draw a warm bath, climb into the tub and slide under the water’s surface, trying to sooth the burning on my skin. I lie in the water by the soft light of a single candle and listen to Handel’s Water Music. Finally, my skin stops burning. I towel dry myself and move under the cool, smooth sheets, naked. Any layer of clothing would hurt my skin too much to sleep. The cool sheets soothe me just enough to fall asleep.
81
The following day I see Blumenfeld. Waiting for him for just a few minutes in the waiting room is extraordinarily difficult. I wonder if he has moved away, gone away early on vacation, or if I have come at the wrong time. Then he pokes his head around the corner and says, “Hello, Annie.”
I sit down in my chair. It lifts my feet lightly off the ground. “Last night I kept waiting for Melanie to call me, but she didn’t. She’s not going to call, is she?” I don’t pause for an answer, but go on: “If only I had admitted that what happened, I mean my part, the gun and the knife and everything that followed, was really my fault, just mine, maybe she would have been different.” I am willing to undo the knowledge of yesterday this quickly.
“Maybe she would, and maybe not, Annie,” Blumenfeld says.
“That was not the woman I knew and loved all those years,” I say, thinking of the Melanie in my dream.
“Yes, Annie, she was,” Blumenfeld says. “And do you know how I know that?”
“How?”
“You’ve brought her to me, in your journals, a really remarkable record, Annie. You were constantly trying to make a particular woman appear, and trying to make another one disappear. Then, and right now too, Annie.” My perception of this is hidden so deep, I can hardly find it, but I feel it as Blumenfeld speaks.
“Last night, very late, I had this terrible burning on my skin, when I was waiting for her to call. The phone rang and it wasn’t her, and I wanted to die, to kill myself, thinking that then, no, being quite sure, that then she would love me again.”
“Once you lived in a world where it felt as if everyone wanted you dead, and maybe they did sometimes,” Blumenfeld muses. “If you fulfilled their wishes and died, then maybe they could love you. You’ve toyed with this way of being loved, very dangerously, for a long, long time. This isn’t new, is it?” he asks.
Such a statement finds its way within as much by silence as by speech. I am quiet for a few minutes.
“Yes, I’ve always imagined dying when I was afraid of being hated, or worse, of just being forgotten. You know, if I was dead, Melanie would miss me, then maybe she would realize ...” I look at Blumenfeld.
“No, Annie,” he interrupts. “The moment you feel your life depends upon what someone else does or does not do, that very moment, you get catapulted into another world, another time. It’s not accurate to call it the past, because it’s here, with you. And you’ve lived with this devastating, life-threatened feeling all your life. It’s hard to see into it. The pain of it is so unbearable that it surrounds you. When there are no words for this, no thoughts, then it can only be lived out.”
Listening to Blumenfeld is like driving through a very dense fog. Shapes appear only within a few feet of the headlights, and then go past. I feel Blumenfeld’s words reverberate all through me, but I can’t hold on to them.
“I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying. Not really.” I look at him as if he is far, far away—because his words are so close to my unspoken knowing.
“Sometimes words get in the way,” he remarks gently, but I am not interested in this line of thinking. I feel a grief beginning deep within and rising up over me. I want to stop it from flooding me, or at least to put up a levy, to allay it.
“Right now,” I tell him, “I just want to find Melanie again, in any way I can, and if I can’t, I’m going to die.”
“Annie, you are looking in the wrong direction,” Blumenfeld says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“When you turn your eyes out, looking for a particular response from Melanie, looking for Melanie to come back to you in a particular way right now (it’s Melanie right now, but it’s been many people), you don’t notice the ghosts dancing behind you. Turn around slowly and look.” Blumenfeld points behind me.
“Look for what? I am not going to live through this. I am going to die.” I am yelling at him as the waters rise.
“You are in a real dilemma right now, Annie. You can keep looking for Melanie, or you can know that it’s not really Melanie you are looking for. But then you would have to turn away from looking to find her, just for a moment, and if y
ou stop this terrible vigilance, then you feel you’ll die—you’ll turn away from looking and you’ll die.”
I look wildly around the room and my eyes find a statue of a little girl, a red clay statue. Behind her, the blinds on the window are opened slightly so that I can see the glass pane of the window, which I’ve never seen in this room before. The sun on the glass rivets my attention.
“I am going to die. The glass, the lights, the hands coming at me, poking things into me, and sticking needles under my skin. I’m so cold, and I’m waiting and waiting for something, for someone.”
“This is good, Annie. Your mind is starting to shape something you really must know right now,” Blumenfeld says quietly. As he says this, I feel the electricity of new connections.
“Ben. In the poem I wrote to him, there’s a line, ‘Outside the glass,’ and I was seeing him at a window, but there wasn’t a window. And now I’m seeing him in his bubble bed, but it’s all glass, he’s a baby, and the light is intense—my God, it’s an incubator.”
I get up and move toward the window, as if this would resolve my confusion, and sit down again. “The light burns my skin. That’s the feeling of waiting now. I’m going to die.”
I am thinking of a baby’s body—curled and sucking, her skin the finest silk. Eyes open and seeing everything. Her breath a little beating behind her belly button. Without secrets. Her whole life rests in that body of hers, in the hope of skin against skin—human warmth. She is freezing cold. She startles and cries, flails, startles and cries. She is burning.
I look up at Blumenfeld. “Do I matter so little that no one can remember me?”
Blumenfeld leans forward, “Tell me another way, Annie, if you can. Remember how dense I can be. Tell me another way.”
“I can’t remember exactly when, but my mother told me that I was hospitalized as a baby twice—I think the first time was at eleven months—for hemorrhaging diarrhea—or a virus—I don’t remember. The second time, this is less clear, I was eighteen months old, but I have no idea why I was in the hospital then. When I came home after the first time, I couldn’t let my mother out of my sight. She’d leave the room and I’d scream. She’d have to pick me up, carry me.” I pause, remembering my dream of Ben saying, “Carry me, carry me,” the child’s chanted terror of someone vanishing.
“The second time,” I go on, “my mother didn’t say why I went back into the hospital, but when I came home the second time, I didn’t recognize anyone, not even my family. My mother said that I didn’t even recognize my toys.”
I try to grasp that—that turning away from everything I knew and loved-that illusion of being able to turn from everything and everyone connected to me.
“And you almost died?” Blumenfeld asks.
I have tried to erase it. Even in daylight, I have erased it, and the tracks are now visible where I have left it.
“How do you know this? I’d forgotten all about it. I can’t even tell you when she told me this now, but I did almost die. I was very sick the first time, and after the first time, my father wanted to take me back to the hospital and to leave me there. My mother was teasing me when she said to me, ‘I told him babies aren’t for sale; you can’t just return them,’ but I knew she was serious too. She said that he couldn’t bear the sound of my crying and he wanted them to ‘take you back.’ I was in an intensive care nursery, my mother said, and they weren’t allowed to visit that first time, for a whole month they were not allowed to visit.”
This baby’s body cannot belong to me. My parents could not have vanished like that.
I begin to sob. “I want Melanie, I want her voice, I want her to hold me, and it’s hopeless, it’s absolutely hopeless.”
“Yes, they didn’t come and didn’t come, and out of your hopelessness you built yourself a little hope,” Blumenfeld says, as if he is telling me a story. “But you could remember them, even if they had ‘forgotten’ you—and you would wait and wait and wait for them to come to you. And if they still did not come, you could make them appear in your imagination. But this was never really satisfying, no, not really. And so you are still waiting, Annie.”
I pull my knees up to my chest and hold my rabbit and sob, feeling what Blumenfeld is saying to me, and beyond the endless present of waiting and waiting, an unspeakable grief opens itself to me and flows over my whole body.
I see the dark back of my father’s coat retreating from me the last time I saw him alive; I feel myself disappearing in the wordless cab ride with a social worker, when I was ten and my sister eleven, taken from my mother for four long years to live in a children’s home, seemingly forgotten; the film continues with friends who mysteriously left me for reasons I could never fully grasp; I see Galle and Margaret Mary move away from me; Emily goes under, a third time, and Telesporus turns away too, as he moves closer to the nameless others; and the film stops with the image of Melanie in her navy-blue suit.
“I’ve lost everyone, I’ve made them all go away,” I whisper. “And it must be like this, looking out on a battlefield and seeing, no, knowing that everyone is dead. Or watching a trainload of your friends and family taken away to the camps.”
“No, Annie, that’s not quite true—you weren’t able to make them come toward you, and you didn’t make anyone go away either,” Blumenfeld says. He moves his chair toward me a few inches. “And yes, it felt like the death of the whole world. But then there’s little Annie; she’s very much alive and with you. And that’s remarkable, because you don’t always treat her very well.”
“Yes, you’re right, I don’t,” I admit.
“Little Annie, she’s not going to be with you if you won’t listen to her,” Blumenfeld warns me.
I raise my face from my wet hands and look up suddenly. This catches my attention. “What do you mean, if I won’t listen?”
Blumenfeld smiles at me. “She’s right here with us. She’s been right here in the room listening to us the whole time. The experiences you keep having with Melanie (or whomever), little Annie just hates them. She’s exhausted from staying on this treadmill—if you had done this, if only you hadn’t done that. She wants the future, yours and hers together, to be unknowable.”
“I know the future is unknowable,” I counter.
“Do you really? Or do you believe, if only I could be this way or that way, Melanie would come to me as I want her, as I desperately want her?”
“The second way, you know that,” I reply, feeling a bit defensive.
“You bet you do! And do you know what? When your father is tearing your insides apart and your mother is attacking you from behind, you’d better be able to imagine that you can get them to do what you want. You’d better be able to believe that you can do the right thing and that it will make all the difference!”
I think of the extraordinary power of that illusion.
“Yes, and sometimes I could. Then my mother would come to me and she’d hold me, she’d comfort me. I’d actually feel like a child for a moment or so. But most of the time, she didn’t seem to know I was there. And my father, he played with me. He played as no one else ever played with me-I’d hold onto his hands and ride his shoe up and down; we’d go out and gather flowers in the big field behind the house, and once we found kittens and brought them home to surprise my sister; we played Mr. Potato Man on the floor and made the potato characters talk; and my father would sweep me up off my feet and dance with me sometimes too.”
“If only you could repeat, Annie, remember exactly and repeat exactly the steps of your part of that dance, somehow you might be able to magically make him turn into that father, the one who played and danced-when he came into your room at night and unzipped his pants and you felt terrified?”
“Yes. How do you know this?”
“Little Annie, she tells me, and I listen. She wants you to start to really listen to her. She just wants to feel and be whatever—happy, sad, mischievous, frightened, mad-whatever-and for you to let her be, and to let the people you l
ove be-whatever-because the future is really unknowable.”
As Blumenfeld says this to me, I realize that it is barely imaginable. The future has already been laid down in the vanishing tracks of the past. It is as though I have forgotten that those tracks were laid down someplace within my child’s body. This child could already foretell the future through the past.
“You know this poem, I’m sure,” I tell Blumenfeld. “It’s from Shakespeare-Our revels now are ended?”
“Yes, but tell me what you are thinking now, Annie.”
I recite:
Our revels now are ended, These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
I imagine a child’s body before words, before plays and illusions and deceptions, before she was broken. Bathed in a passionate sweetness, she is sleeping and alive. And, because death is so near, she radiates her own beauty.
A Shining Affliction Page 24