The Blazing World

by Siri Hustvedt

  Quickly, E opens the window, gathers up the disembodied suit in his arms, and brings the garments inside, all the while sensing that the clothes contain an unseen person and that he has rescued this invisible man from being blown away by the wind. E feels relief as he rocks the suit in his arms back and forth. He notices a piece of paper protruding slightly from the jacket pocket. As he looks more closely, he sees that the pocket is unusually large and that it bulges outward. He pulls out the long white paper and reads a name: Sophus Bugge. Then, without any transition that he is conscious of, E finds himself no longer holding the suit but looking down at it, and, disturbingly, it is no longer a suit. It seems to have produced a fringe of ruffles and, on the whole, developed a flimsy, diaphanous quality that had not been part of it before. It looks suspicious. As he stares at the transformed suit, he feels more and more irritated and is convinced that he has mislaid or forgotten something important. Just as he asks himself what that thing might be, the article of clothing begins to jerk upward, as if there is an animal beneath it. Terrified, E opens his mouth to cry out, and he wakes up, his heart beating. He is back in his apartment in Williamsburg on North Eleventh Street, and the morning sunlight has come through the cracks in the blinds. E’s heartbeat slows. He doesn’t stir but reviews the dream in his mind. He is working on dream material for his fiction. He knows that if he acts too quickly, the dream will evaporate. He knows he must rehearse the dream rooms in his mind. The actual Park Avenue apartment and the dream Park Avenue apartment are not identical, but they share common traits.

  After coffee and a slice of pizza he finds wrapped in tinfoil on the second shelf in his refrigerator, E types the above version of the dream to study it. He also picks up the book he was reading the evening before, Jesuit Reports on Indian Missions in New France, 1637–1653, and finds the following passage he has underlined. In 1648, Father Paul Ragueneau wrote: The Hurons believe that our soul has desires other than our conscious ones that are both natural and hidden, made known to us through our dreams, which are its language. E remembers that before he went to sleep, he was reading another Jesuit priest’s report, which described the Hurons’ ritual enactments of dream narratives during the day, performed so that the soul’s hunger can be satisfied. The priest related that one day he found a man rummaging wildly through his camp, throwing objects in what appeared to be a desperate search for some object. When the priest asked the man what he was doing, he answered that he had killed a Frenchman in a dream and was looking for some object to appease his soul. The priest gave the man a coat, telling him it had belonged to a now-deceased Frenchman. The offering calmed the man, and he went on his way. E asks himself if this story is the origin of his own dream’s flying coat.

  E isolates the dream elements to propose possible soulful interpretations

  Place: E’s old bed in the old apartment, where E spent his childhood and adolescence, and which he visited during his early adulthood. Domain of mostly silent parental struggles.

  Strangling bedsheets: Why strangling? Possible reference to a sense of oppression felt by E in household while growing up and to E’s childhood tantrums and, later, his panics, during which he felt he could not breathe. Every once in a while, E still feels threat of breathlessness and carries around two lorazepam in his wallet just in case.

  No. 2 filter : ambiguous. In life E uses a no. 4 filter for his coffee machine. Why the number two? E thinks of doubles, twins, reflections, and binaries of all kinds. He hates binary thinking, the world in pairs. Is this a reference to father and mother in residence at 1185 Park Avenue? E begins to feel the dream in his bones. He has read about sleep research and how the scientists wake up their “subjects” for their dream reports. “I dreamed of no. 2 coffee filters,” he imagines himself telling a man in a white coat. And then he thinks to himself, coffee and tea, two for tea and you for me. He remembers A at the Neo-Situationist evening with her serious face and her presentation, “Technoculture Capitalism, Its New Currency, Information, and Strategies for Resistance Through Subvertising.” He had talked to her for half an hour and the words were in his head, “Would you like to have a coffee or tea sometime?” But his mouth refused to move. Coffee. Tea. Two. The silences happen often. His disappointment in himself is acute.

  Filth in cupboard like a face: chaos, shit, unorganized material. E admits that he frequently finds himself in a state of dire confusion about the way forward in literature, in politics, in love. He writes every day, slowly, slowly. The sentences crawl out of him. He has tried automatic writing. He has tried acrostics, lists, even villanelles. Now dream narratives. He is reading Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. E wants to be Georges Perec. He would like to write a book without the letter e or a or t. He has tried, but it is maddeningly difficult. Still, he needs forms. On some days he does not leave the apartment. He writes and then he reads and then he gets confused, and he makes charts of no interest whatsoever. Maybe it is his own crappy moldering face he does not recognize in the cupboard.

  Suit of clothes suspended in midair: E owns one suit and one tie. The suit pants are now too short for him. E’s father wore a suit and tie to work every day. He had rows of suits in his closet, where E used to hide under the leather belts because they smelled good. E’s father was often away. E hid in his father’s closet and inhaled its father smell and played with his men on the cool wood floor. He always kept the light on. He hated closets when he was outside them, so his strategy had been to go inside them. Inside, the closet changed. It was comfortable. Sometimes he would stand up and rub the suit fabrics a little, not too much because he thought he would leave marks or wear them out with his fingers, but some of the hairier materials he hated and would not touch. He called them his touch enemies. E can feel the back of his head against the closet wall. He remembers his hot, bad feelings, his lacerating anger, when he thought about school. E remembers pressing his head into his mother’s stomach as hard as he could to relieve the pressure. She let him do it.

  Suit of clothes suspended in midair outside kitchen window: E’s father suffered a stroke at the table in the breakfast nook at 1185 Park Avenue as he sat near the window. Therefore, E has dreamed about the window and the suit flying outside it, dreamed of a bodiless man in exile. Death is exile from the body, exile from everything, E thinks. Neither E, nor his sister, M, were present when their father was struck down by the cerebrovascular accident. Their mother was present. She rode in the ambulance. When E and M arrived at Emergency on Sixty-eighth Street, the emergency was over. Emergency ends with either life or death. Schrödinger’s cat doesn’t exist in the world E knows. Life and death do not coexist in a single body. E remembers the words aneurismal subarachnoid hemorrhage. He remembers the tan-colored plastic seat in the waiting room and the zigzag ink mark beside his thigh as he sat on it. He remembers he did not want anyone to touch him.

  Flying due east: Awake, E solves this puzzle easily. Thailand is an eastern country. E’s father’s maternal roots are due east. The legs point toward his grandmother, toward Khun Ya, with her bright red, hard fingernails and big smile.

  E rescues clothes that seem to contain someone, but that someone cannot be seen: E’s dead father cannot be seen anymore. Does the son want to rescue what is left of his father that is in danger of being blown away? What would that be? E has rejected his father’s money except for a modest annual amount, but he knows he is a hypocrite. He should become a welder and write at night. He has looked into learning to weld. He even received brochures in the mail from Apex Technical School, but he never pursued the training. He is a soft, coddled philistine who will never become a welder. Does he in fact want to hold on to his father’s legacy, to his money, suits, art collection, and every other bourgeois trap imaginable? E did not cry after his father died. He has wondered many times why he did not cry. He remembers the clothes in his arms in the dream and the feelings of relief, sadness, and pity that were far stronger in the land of Nod than in the land of Awa
ke.

  Sophus Bugge in suit jacket pocket: Objects hide in pockets. All that can be seen from the outside is a bulge or a lump. In the dream E did not make anything of the name, but awake, he remembers that Sophus Bugge was a nineteenth-century Norwegian philologist famous for a critical edition of the Poetic Edda, a book of thirteenth-century heroic and mythological poems E read years ago because he discovered the book had influenced his childhood writer-hero, Tolkien. And the author of the Edda? Anonymous. Unknown. No name. E returns to Bugge. He was an avid collector of Norwegian folk songs and the scholar who deciphered Elder Futhark. E likes the sound of Elder Futhark. Lewis Carroll might have invented those words, but they are not from “Jabberwocky.” What does Sophus Bugge have to do with anything? Why is Bugge’s name in the paternal suit pocket? And now, as he writes, the solution to the riddle jumps into his mind. Elder Futhark is a form of runic script: runes, runic, and the person Rune, E’s mother’s front for her last project. E says “Eureka” aloud. E feels triumph. He is exceedingly proud of his dreaming self’s cleverness. Isn’t his mother’s maze called Beneath? Underneath, beneath, hidden in a suit pocket. Harriet Burden lies beneath Rune, who was lying beneath Sophus Bugge. Has he found his mother in his father’s pocket?

  E does not know what this could mean. He recognizes that interpretation is always multiple. He knows that associations can lead a person down many paths. There can be no single reading of a dream. He does not bother to decode the ruffles. He is still annoyed with them. They persist as an irritant. E sees the sheer, silky material moving under him, and he feels disgust, as if the two worlds of sleeping and waking have run into each other.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook D

  February 7, 2003

  Last night I saw them coming, one after the other, waiting in a long line outside the gallery and the maze, my maze. I wanted to throw back my head and howl, It’s mine! but I clenched my teeth. Dizzy, dissonant, aggrieved Harry, a ghost outside her own opening. I took my place in line for a while behind two prancing ninnies in shoes so high their knees wobbled as they stepped forward, and I listened to them carry on a long discussion on the merits of something called a “master cleanse” that involved lemonade and salt. Oh my God, Lindsay, five pounds in three days. Oh my God, that is so fantastic, oh my God.

  Patrick L. accosted me about possible auction of the Klee. Just a rumor, Harriet? Vague odor of smoked salmon emanated from him. Under the streetlights, I noticed a pimple or maybe a hive on his cheek. He had gone through the maze already.

  It’s great. Rune is a genius, a fucking genius.

  I asked him if that wasn’t going too far.

  You haven’t seen the show yet. You saw Banality of Glamour, didn’t you?

  I nodded.

  Well, this is even better. And then he leapt onto Felix, my buried better half. That is all he could think of to say. He saw me, thought Felix, thought widow, emitted loquacious stream of praise for dead husband. No one has really replaced Felix, not Burridge, certainly, as trendy and global as he is, and, by the way, as an afterthought, what was I up to these days, and lunch maybe? At the word lunch Patrick L. twinkled. I suddenly understood the verb. I nodded at him, my chin in motion. Why nod? I should have been shaking my head vigorously no, no, no. Did I smile? Oh God, did I smile? I hope I didn’t smile.

  As I talked to Patrick L., I wondered why, why am I not like them? Why am I a foreigner? Why have I always been outside, pushed out, never one of them? What is it? Why am I always peering in through the window? I felt fault lines in my torso ready to split open. I thought of my punching bag in the studio, how good it felt to hit and hit again. I had an urge to punch him. In my mind, I saw him reel backward into the wall and collapse in the gutter.

  I left the line and walked to the end of the block, and I watched. I knew Rune would be waiting for me to arrive, but I would not go in. Phinny and Marcelo bumped into me, dear Phinny, but he isn’t quite the same Phinny anymore, not my Phinny, not the man of the lodge, not my dancing, singing comrade. He’s lost to me now. He wanted me to come to dinner, but I said no. No, I said, no. I believe in no. I believe in a hard, resistant, diamantine no. No and no again. No, I will not. No and never and not. I prefer not to. I have grown sick to death of yes. Oh yes, I will. Yes, certainly, of course, yes, darling, yes, sweetheart. Yes, yes, yes. And she said yes.

  And as they walked away, hand in hand, I felt as if I could cry, but I did not. No, not. I will not cry.

  The writers must write and the critics critique and the reviewers review and the pissers piss, and they shall.

  My time has come, and whatever they say—the mostly mediocrities—is not the point. HOW THEY SEE is all that matters, and they will not see me.

  Until I step forward.

  February 25, 2003

  It is so easy for Rune to shine. Where does that effortlessness come from? He is so light. I am earthbound, a Caliban to his Ariel. And I must watch his weightless flights over my head, while I lurk underground with brown thoughts that roil my guts. “Himself is his own dungeon.”I I, Harriet Burden, am a machine of vindictiveness and spite. My whole body churns as I gorge on the reviews and notices and commentaries about the brilliant Rune’s coup. Their heads are turned. The man who has written the review in The Gothamite, Alexander Pine, does not know he has written about me, not Rune. He doesn’t know that the adjectives muscular, rigorous, cerebral can be claimed by me, not Rune. He doesn’t know he is a tool of my vengeance. No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.

  * * *

  I. John Milton, “Comus, A Mask” (388).

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook O

  Come over, Rune said on the telephone yesterday. He had something to show me, part of “our act,” and he gave me a clue: “your happiness.” And we made the date for four o’clock today, and I knew it was time to plan the revelation because there had been enough yakking in print about the show, and yes, coming out would make me happy. That was yesterday. Today you drove into Tribeca, and you see yourself now, smiling as you leave the elevator, buoyant because the whole story is almost over, and you and your coconspirator are about to let them have it, and you think to yourself, I will levitate like my masked dancer, rise up from the earth like a phoenix. You really couldn’t have taken much more of it, anyway, you think to yourself, and you sat down, and he asked you if the clue had led to a solution, and you said to him, Yes, it’s time for me to burst into bloom, to find my happiness. It’s time to tell everyone. You explained that the Open Eye piece will be published as a letter in the next issue, that it gave you a delicious pleasure just to think of it, and then you thanked him. You thanked him for being part of it. You thanked him for letting you “wear” him. You leaned over and patted his hand, and you smiled again like a goddamned idiot. You smiled.

  And he lit a cigarette and looked at you. He smoked and jiggled his knee and licked his teeth, and then he inserted a DVD into the television. I want you to see this, he said, and don’t say I didn’t give you a clue, because I did.

  I saw Felix and stopped breathing for several seconds.

  I saw Felix and Rune.

  I saw them beside each other on a sofa in a curiously empty room—nothing on the wall behind them.

  And I said, Why?

  Just watch, he said to me.

  I shook my head back and forth. This is what happened, wasn’t it? I felt shocked. And I was afraid. I didn’t want to see the two of them, but I couldn’t turn away. I watched them sitting on a sofa in an empty room.

  I watched Felix, who had been resurrected on film. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a pale gray shirt and the green-gray Hermès tie his mother had given in, the one he dripped salad dressing on at a dinner that was held a
t the Met, the one that couldn’t be saved by the cleaners, and I remembered the flowers on the table and the place cards and my boredom that evening at the museum. What year was that? I asked myself desperately. After that dinner, he couldn’t wear the tie again. I remembered that the two men on either side of me turned their backs to talk to whomever, and I was left alone with my internal narrator wondering why I had come. I looked into the eyes of my dead husband on the film and at his smoothly shaven chin and at the gray hairs near his forehead and tried to remember when his mother had given him the tie, but I couldn’t. His hair had white in it, but later, later his hair would turn all white.