Wild Gestures

by Lucy Durneen

  My dreams were mostly textbook; teeth, naked attendance at conferences—there was one about a big cat, a lion I thought, stalking the rooms of an unfamiliar apartment, that made the dream analyst consult a colleague. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else?’ he asked, exasperated. ‘Something we can work with?’

  The fourth time I visited there was a new and unexpected thing. I told him how… I told him, at night I imagined myself a lover, the fire of the southern hemisphere scalding my cold and silvered skin. A weight low in my belly, something in other circumstances you might call pain but here I understood to be... to be… Okay, this is what I imagined, I told the analyst. The bridge of limbs; one, wild current between them. The force of the sea. The light, and the deep water. The low ocean moan. I meant to say the word sonorous but what came out was something different, something that made the analyst sit straight, as if now he was listening, now he was involved. ‘That’s better,’ he said, catching his breath, adjusting his tie.

  The scale measured me at ablative, surging with something but resisting thaw, which made it sound as though even my unconscious wasn’t trying to help. ‘Why the southern hemisphere?’ the dream analyst wanted to know. ‘The body remembers,’ I started to say, but I couldn’t think what it was remembering, given that all I had done that day was stand talking to Luiz at the Xerox machine. I had the urge to fall back inside my sleeping self, suddenly seeking the dream analyst’s permission to speak of the things it could see.

  More than once I caught the analyst staring at his lap, as if there the answers were hidden. He seemed to think it was significant, the fact I was distancing my dream-self to the other side of the world, to a place I had never been. ‘But what is this?’ I kept asking him, meaning the wild, agitated blur in my chest that was starting to come at inopportune times. I had no words; it felt a little like the stomach ache you get before an exam, a little like the thing that divers get, the intoxication that comes from being in a world that is doing everything it can to get you to leave.

  ‘Progress,’ the dream analyst replied, but he looked doubtful, knowing all the things I didn’t.

  Consideration

  There seemed no logical reason why I could think only of mountains. Or not mountains but the air moving through certain valleys like gun smoke, the way it did nowhere else in the world. Luiz showed me photographs of skyscrapers and watermarked skies. Even though these things were not mine, I missed them like a world I had left without meaning to. I noticed the spaces where he had been, not understanding it, the way I had a sudden eye for absence, the way presence now felt like something large inside a very small space. Something as simple as a staircase could now be measured in terms of he was there, or he was not.

  I asked the light therapist if she had something... I searched a moment for the word. I thought the word was pelagic but I didn’t want to give anything away. She could offer St. Ives, or St Tropez, there were other beatified towns. Mostly what was in the bottles was azure, turquoise, hard-and-bright; I avoided those marked ‘sparkling’. I was intrigued by one labelled ‘Finistere; rough, wet’, but this was reserved. Giverny I could send away for—marbled and lenticular, still and moving, both—but the wait was long. The Impressionists liked that one, the therapist reminded me, showing me pictures of gold-dusted fields, the light rich and fatted with flowers. Evening light was the hardest to come by. The catalogue presented a pale violet kind, pierced by the Southern Cross, but this was out of stock with no expected date of return. With the suddenness of sunset, I felt lost, remembering Luiz’s hands on my shoulders. Then my mouth at his, my back at the office door, surprised we had found our way there so soon and with such certainty.

  You were supposed to use the light sparingly, that was the first thing to understand. The therapist seemed bewildered, or perhaps unused to such particular requirements. She concentrated on getting the right proportions, one eye closed to aid the immersion in her craft. ‘But,’ I asked her, suddenly unsure of the consequences, ‘what happens if this works?’

  My icebound heart blew a sudden blackness, a familiar chill that I welcomed like a night breeze. Everything I knew was about living with it, not living without. I waited to hear what the light therapist advised. You sink or swim, she said, setting down the bottle, which was the shape of something you’d imagine buying from an old perfumery in Cairo if you were the kind of person who liked to imagine things in terms of their comparison with places and times where they didn’t belong. I hesitated. It wasn’t a recommended blend, or as popular as the romantic, desert island kind—but there was something. I touched my forehead to the glass, breathed in cypress and the dust of the Highlands. I didn’t know if the light therapist had given me all this or if I was already part of it, if I was being changed, atomically. ‘You wanted heat and fire?’ she said.

  I drank it down, bathed in it, rolled and swallowed and twisted and sang. The light poured down from the bottle neck and took with it everything it touched, the stopper, the label, my dress, my fear. I wanted to plummet, I wanted to dive. I sucked at the last drops. My legs opened and twitched, remembering fins.

  Later, sticky and light-drunk, exhausted by shining, I found the label curling at the foot of my slipper: River of January, looking two ways.

  Terms

  For two hundred pounds the flyer promised we would learn the one word that was required to achieve our heart’s desire. Seduced by language, we filed into a hall crescent-mooned with plastic chairs, our breath damp, our cardio-vascular systems giddy with anticipation.

  To begin with, as a group, we couldn’t decide: did our hearts desire love, or success or… the something else, the wordless thing, was heavy and unspoken across the room. There was an uneven split between love and whatever the things were that money could buy. We were not sure whether happiness counted as anything, or whether that was a by-product, not something we could aim for straight off, if we even had a right to ask for it anyway.

  It was an old hall and we felt the facilities did not match the price of our ticket. While the convenor was fixing the projector I asked the woman next to me what she had come here to find. ‘All the things,’ she said, like it was obvious. ‘I tried everything else. Past life regression. Those little blue tablets that look like M&Ms.’ Her tone was hushed. ‘Dildos. Did you try that?’ I hadn’t. I thought of the joke about the man who didn’t care how he was reincarnated as long as he had a huge cock, which made me think about what it is like to sleep with a person, really sleep with them, the pressure of their foot against your foot or the fact that sometimes you are knitted together and other times it’s like you have forgotten who the other is, only to turn, startled—you, yes!—and I felt a brief, rushing, fluid surge before it hardened inside me again, before wisps of condensation iced my breath, which made the woman next to me raise her eyebrows as if to say, yes, this is what it’s like, all the time. A quiet girl in the back row looked away, afraid of what we could do.

  How would we know when we had found what we most desired? Would it be obvious, unequivocal, like matching the numbers on the lottery? The convenor seemed exhausted by the questions. It was like, he said, nobody had read the posters. It was as if none of us were serious about wanting to know. A number of us, a separatist group, seemed to doubt the requirement for just one word. It stood to reason that we were the talkers; more than one of us worked in academia. An hour in we revealed other, unexpected difficulties, including the fact that most of the women in the room were also the kind of people who assumed every man to be a potential axe murderer. We challenged the convenor; what we desired was complicated, a constant vacillation between desire itself and the fear of death. The quiet girl at the back spoke up for the first time. ‘You think it’s that,’ she said. ‘But what you’re really caught between is death and the fear of desire.’

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking about this. I say we; how was I know to know what the group was thinking? In the dark quiet of the hall I remembered how Luiz told me to walk a
way as soon as I thought I wanted to stay. I let myself hold that thought for a moment longer than I needed. I braved it out. I have a word, I told the convenor. I picked up my bag. I didn’t speak it. I held the word in my mouth instead. Um beijo, two feelings at once, of being cast away, and longing; a feeling of being shipwrecked and also of sighting land.

  Performance

  Luiz told me the story of a man who came home to find his wife fucking the neighbour on the couch. How what the man thought was: well, I can sell the couch. I wanted to explain that here we are not so different in our denial. It would just be that we were less entrepreneurial. All the couches of the world could be moving in the room behind us but still we would wait the four minutes that is the proper requirement to steep a perfect cup of English Breakfast tea before springing to action.

  The homeopath explained the final stage of rehabilitation. There would be a series of shots, each one building a tolerance based on the idea of triggering the natural system of healing, treating like with like, a small dose to ward off something bigger, influenza, or some unnamed lovesick fever. I gave her my arm. It was an insurance policy. What my head might forget, every cell in my body would become programmed to fight.

  I wanted it to be my legs that swung to the floor as the couch was sold from under me. When I told the homeopath this she looked interested. She asked me what it was I was looking for. Someone who eats, I told her. Someone who shouts my name when he comes. The ice slipped into me, drop after drop. I held my breath. Nothing changed. My blood continued to move, tepid, following an ancient rhythm it recognised, understood. ‘Does that feel ok?’ she asked, slowing the flow.

  ‘Yes,’ I breathed. ‘Yes. Yes. And, yes.’

  The homeopath suggested we could be cautiously optimistic. Still, relapse was the big worry. ‘You’re afraid of something, you embrace it,’ she said. ‘You pick up a tarantula. You climb the biggest goddamn tower you can find.’ I understood what she was saying. The only way to tell if the treatment had worked was to overdose.

  That night I went out. I touched everything I could, pulled it close, breathed it in. I walked into bars, called out men’s names, gave them my coat without waiting to be asked. I left change in the hats of homeless people. I stared in the windows of expensive shops and let kim chi run down my chin. Still the warmth rose, still nothing stopped it. I felt it building, the pressure, the furious wave in my cunt, and it was hard to know what to do with it, too much of everything; I wouldn’t say the one word it was not allowed to become.

  I returned to the treatment plan, devoured the advice leaflet. There was a small chance, it said, of basal slippage, a sudden internal, fluid movement that would accelerate the longer term shift towards warming—disconcerting in the immediate, but ultimately, safe: ultimately, a step in a permanent right direction. It was the very opposite of everything on which the future of humanity depended. It was the disaster all the scientists of the world were trying to prevent. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t noticed this before. Such a basic question not to have asked: what was worse – the memory, or the unknown? It seemed unfair to expect words to describe how that felt any more than asking what we see of a star to tell us how fast it burned.

  I knocked on Luiz’s door. I climbed the stairs, got into bed, let it flood out of me; the run-off, tears, salt, the sea. All the things I had no use for. Who cared if I cried. Who cared if we drowned. I let myself break the dark pools of his eyes, allowing the cliché because what the hell. I swam in him, pulled him down and up and in until there was nowhere left to go but inside each other’s scars; there was a fierce pulse at all the places he had been. Oh, I wanted to shout to the shuddering air. Oh. Oh. When Luiz slept, I kicked off the blankets, restless with the heat of another person’s skin. Maybe it was that or maybe it was the heat of my own skin. I didn’t have to decide. I thought of the writer who said that sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human, and felt a savage ache along my soaking wet thighs. I touched his hand. He did not touch mine back.

  This is why you read the small print, I thought, although even if you did... Even then.

  Uncertainty

  I visited the doctor in the morning, thinking: enough. Without the heavy wall of ice in my chest, I had no ability to process comparisons. Enough is just a word in the same way the sum of the three angles in a triangle will always equal 180°. Little things were lodging in the places that had once been glassed over; a preference for old cartoons, certain sandwiches. I thought of the woman who was looking for all the things and realised; there was no middle ground. You wanted it all or you didn’t.

  Was there a counterweight? Was there some kind of retainer that a person could fit—there—holding in place what was just right, no more, no less. I knew the answer already, before I even sat down. This was the risk you took. This was the palm tree, swaying tall in a formerly barren plain. You wouldn’t wish it away if it meant returning to tundra. But you wondered if you could live with it, that feeling of life in you, photosynthesis or whatever scientists wanted to call it, could you live with it if there was no-one to–

  –no-one to–

  You tell yourself you can, because that is the only way. ‘Tell me,’ the doctor said. ‘Anything you want to say.’ I said his name. I said it like a promise, like a person trying to find faith. I heard the word, at first thrilling and then it was clear that all along it had been nothing more than a sound.

  If you were going to suspend the treatment, there were things you had to understand. It wouldn’t be like it had never happened, the doctor explained. It would be like, like–.

  A burn, which changed the layers you couldn’t see even after the blistering had settled and the new skin grew. At a place you couldn’t measure, or even touch, the change would be irreparable, but you could bear it, that was the assumption, the statistics were good, at least in those who had kept up the programme in other ways. Was that what I wanted?

  Was it what I wanted? It was now or never. It was sink or swim. I was sitting on the cot, my feet under me like a child about to listen to a story. I felt a mild panic, unsure for a minute if I had ever wanted to be cured. Hook me up, I told the doctor. Now. I watched the lines of my heart gather on the monitoring screen, bunch together, separate, press again together, together, together. The movement where there had been nothing, not even paralysis. My body called. My heart had responded. Are you sure? the doctor was saying. Are you sure?

  How can I tell you? It was like this, like when you are in control of something, a food blender, a car, and you have to learn to balance the pressures of too much and not enough. I pressed down. I felt the roar, pulled it back, waited to find the bite. I could go under. I could raise my hand, cut it down through the water, pull it back, stroke forward.

  ‘Swim,’ I whispered, fiercely, feeling the fire, willing it to keep burning.

  It wasn’t Stockhausen’s

  The ward is lit like the sky before a thunderstorm and from his bed Bill Hare can see right to the end, but only in the one direction, towards the nurses’ station. The other side is as unknown to him as the dark side of the moon. He tells his consultant oncologist this as a joke, and two days later she puts a book on his bedside locker: A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin. Her hands make brief, doubtful movements while she tells him how her job takes her to conferences all over the country, the whole world, in fact, because even in the rainforest they still get cancer. She says that it’s hard to be apart from her family and Bill knows she is only pretending to read the charts that confirm his urine output is low today.

  ‘My husband is funny,’ she says. ‘He calls me up at whatever hotel I’m in and tells me to open the window and look at the moon.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He looks too, from the window at home. Doesn’t matter where in the world you are, it’s still the same moon.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘It connects us, see?’

  ‘What? You both–? Oh. Okay. You look at the moon.’

&
nbsp; The consultant oncologist blinks fast. She is offering him the moon as palliative care where chemo and radiotherapy have failed, but this is something a woman of medicine cannot say aloud; this is something Bill must come to understand for himself. Bill thinks what the hell? but the gesture is nice. Still, it is not reassuring to know that away from his hospital bed she is a person who misses her family and cries because some of her patients will die and her medical training cannot help them, although books might. A man, he thinks, would have kept this hidden. It is because of this that Bill feels compelled to pat the consultant oncologist’s hand when she sets the book on his locker, but in doing so he makes things impossible. When it comes to the miracle of denial, whatever happens from this point on, he has overtaken her.

  Bill is actually not much given to reading but he believes in good manners and here is the thing: once he lets go of the old scepticism a funny restlessness starts to waken in him with each new page. He inhales the raft of smells that must come from the fingerprints that have touched this book, hundreds of them, perfumed, nicotine stained, antiseptic, all impressed on the paper. It’s good, maybe even a little addictive. He could put the book down but he could also read just one more paragraph. This new compulsion is prompted not by morphine but a wild ecstasy for the unknown and it is genuine, oh how it’s genuine! Bill hasn’t had a true feeling like this since he can’t remember when. He isn’t sure he understands it all correctly but still; faithfully he reads about the Gemini reconnaissance missions and how the moon’s gravitational field meant the Eagle landed four miles from its aim point. The lunar surface is like a dirty beach, he learns, but also perfect as plaster of Paris, lonely and forbidding, or brilliant, the astronauts can’t seem to decide. In many ways the consultant oncologist is a genius, but she is also wrong about one important thing: it is not the same moon wherever you are in the world. It is not even the same Earth.