Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Then we went down to Christ Church. I’m embarrassed to say that for all the times I’d passed it in the decade since we’d moved down from Brooklyn so my wife could go to law school at Penn I’d never actually set foot inside, though I knew that Kenneth at the bottom of our block worked as a docent there.

  It was a revelation. Our eight-year-old sat in George Washington’s pew, Benjamin Franklin’s. Franklin was buried somewhere out in that centuries-old yard. We might have been standing over his remains at any time, in the neighborhood of Franklin’s ghost. The tour guide told us about how this was where the Episcopal Church itself was started in the early eighteenth century. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had sat in one of those pews.

  I’d never really given a care about American history. I know this isn’t something to be proud of. That afternoon as my kids crawled over the pews of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, slipping over the partitions between their boxes like silverfish over the drain in our bathtub, all I could think about was Rosie. Standing in Christ Church that afternoon amid the haints of the early leaders, the wraiths of Rosie and her MRI liaring ringing in my ears, I felt out of sorts. We walked around Christ Church and I tried to put the nights of Rosie out of my mind. In the gift shop there was a display of little Declarations of Independence in little glass bottles sitting in racks. When I wasn’t looking, my eight-year-old accidentally pulled the box of miniature documents off the table. It landed on the floor, where all the fragile bottles smashed to shards. My eight-year-old was red in the face as I knelt to the floor to help clean up all the broken glass we’d left. I looked up to see that the docent at the place was our neighbor Kenneth.

  “How old are you now, sweetie?” he said to my daughter. I couldn’t tell if she recognized him or not. “Well, you might not know this, but do you know that the first generation of Americans ever to exist, they all came to this church?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  “Well, how many generations do you think there have been in America?” he asked. He looked at me too, and I didn’t have an answer. “Twelve,” he said. “This building seems so old, I know, but it’s still young, my friends. It’s a young country. It’s a country that once had bison grazing everywhere you looked, wild turkeys gobbling about. From George Washington himself to you, only ten generations total have spent their days in this place—and he and you are the other two.”

  He continued to sweep up the glass and I told him of course we’d pay for what we’d broken.

  We weren’t even home, we weren’t even in the state, when the decision was made to commit Rosie. Every summer we drive our kids up to coastal Maine, where my parents have a house. We’d been up there for a couple days when I got a text late one night from Mikey Jr. He’s a serious animal lover, wanted to be a veterinarian but didn’t pass the tests, and he always watched our cats when we were out of town. He’d go in late in the evening, end of his day, to make sure even someone considering breaking in would see he was there. Perfect neighbor. Wednesday of our week up in York Beach he sent me a text: “Kitties happy and fed. Rosie’s mother phone number is xxx.xxx.xxxx. Her name is Wanda. She knows you’re calling.” I might not have even tried her if it hadn’t been for the last line. I got Jen and the kids off to the beach that morning and walked back up to the street and called.

  “Who is this?” Rosie’s mom said. I told her my name, said I was Rosie’s neighbor. “Oh, got it. Michael Donatello said you’d be calling.” It took me a second to realize she meant Mikey Jr. “So Rosie’s having hard nights again.” I told her all about the MRI liaring, the way we hadn’t wanted to call the cops to begin with, but that now she was basically threatening people’s lives. Kids.

  “I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before it escalates,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to call you directly.”

  “I get it,” Rosie’s mom said. “Well, first you can call me Wanda, and second you can call me whenever. I mean, it’s not like we don’t go over there. You probably don’t see us because you’re at work. But we go during the days. When we can. We know how bad she’s doing. They always say she’s responding to internal stimuli. What a phrase.” I asked her if they’d ever tried 302ing her. “We don’t need to do that. We just take her in. They give her the Haldol, the Seroquel, the whatever. She gets better for a while. Then she stops taking it. She falls apart. You don’t think we’ve tried everything?”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “You have kids, Mr. K? Well, you’ll see. I mean, this is bad. But at some point they just do as they do. Honestly, we’re just lucky we own that house.” The conversation was coming to a natural end, if not a conclusion. I told her I was sorry I’d had to call at all, and I was sorry for what had happened in the past, and I was sorry for whatever might happen in the future. I assured her we were good neighbors to Rosie, and weren’t just looking out for ourselves but for them too.

  “Well, you all live next to her, across from her. That’s just as true at night as it is in the day. We all do what we have to to live around each other each day. You do what you have to do to live there.” From where I was standing on the sidewalk I could see my older kid being carried along with the force of the current in the water. The sun was bearing down on us. A ball popped up in the lucid blue air, then dropped. I wished I’d thought to ask her if she knew what “MRI liar” and “MRI trash” meant—had they tried to get Rosie an MRI at some point when she was previously institutionalized? Had something horrible happened at night when she was a kid, something that kept her from her bed, kept her out there all night? Was it just nonsense? But I didn’t. I was about to sign off when Wanda said, “I saw on the website that you teach at X College.” I told her I did. “My mom went there. Both my nieces too. Rosie’s cousins. Great school.” She thanked me again and we hung up.

  When we got back to Philadelphia it was late, crepuscular blooming of Rosie’s time outside. The only light was grainy, streetlights. Long and late as it was, I had a new strength to talk to Isabella about Rosie and all I now knew. I hadn’t wanted to walk across the street to her house for months but now I did, having talked to Wanda. I had information finally, something to try to break the spell.

  “It is awfully late to be knocking,” Isabella said. She had a look on her face I’d never seen before. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and saw it was 11:20. We’d been driving so long I didn’t realize how late it was. Or I did realize and somehow the night had become continuous with the days since all this with Rosie had started.

  “We already 302ed her,” Isabella said. “Three days ago. We’ve been asleep by like nine every night since.” She said she’d talk with me tomorrow.

  It was done.

  I avoided Isabella for a couple days, or she me. Finally we saw each other. It was early evening. August. Philadelphia swampy humidity kept narrowing in even when the sun was down.

  “The very last night was awful,” Isabella said. Her first finger was searching the hem of her T-shirt for something, worrying its way to a pocket. She had color in her cheeks. Though the sky was insulation pink with city lights you could imagine there were stars on the other side, across the street, next door. “She was slamming shit up against our common wall so hard I thought she was gonna break through. Kids were crying. Cops got here and she was still at it, they heard it. When they knocked she stopped, but they’d heard. We said we’d sign the 302. They had to forcibly remove her.” She paused on forcibly. “It was awful, but I gotta tell you—I feel better. I do. To have her done yelling at the kids, even if it’s just for a couple weeks. She needs to get better.”

  I didn’t ask any more details. Even after Rosie came back from her institutionalization—and she did, she came back subdued, medicated, quiet as night—I never asked more about what happened. I’d see Isabella, or any of the rest of our neighbors who must have witnessed it, on my way home from work or the bar. Each time I couldn’t help but wonder if Rosie slid past that porous border dividing their days from
their nights too, and entered that nighttime space where MRI bison graze free as thought, George Washington and kin riding astride them like kings.

  Four Poems

  Laynie Browne

  MOLTEN

  She marks on her silken calendar when to molt. A woman before going to

  bed, yet every night, a river

  Warm skin in skein, wanders, causal arrival

  How to wilt, in profusion—hydrangea. Glide to soil—as molten slip

  Eyelets cover her entire ideation

  Recline into silence, into the unconscious, but we don’t use that word; we

  use the name of an animal

  Night covers her like sand and silt, like water

  Every night is a session of spikes, repetition, closing of obsidian, still lashes

  An underground bird, talked into a drawer, a sleeping elevator, stuffed inside

  a sock, a trance, a garment, a tent

  Who placed her inside this vessel?

  Was it a hand small and luminous, impossible to name?

  And if she was entirely lost in the day at least when she lay down in this river of cotton, this

  river of creased and perplexed flash

  At least when she closed Saturn, at least she did not need to travel the ques-

  ion—who she was: a series of fits, permutations pierced by a seamstress,

  one could only call nascent selves

  A substance otherwise opaque as night

  AFTER DARK

  They decided the waking world was much too close and distressing. Even more than this they objected to a lack of logic among those claiming to be conscious. When they slept and dreamed they understood their situations much better. And so they decided they would cease to converse about the hours spent in daylight, with eyes open, hours in which they experienced any number of inexplicable plights. Instead, they would converse only in the language and images from their dreams. At first it was easy. He had a dream about torn and twisted sidewalks, on which he was running. And in the same sequence he crawled through a tiny hole in a tin wall and met a baby who said, I love to crawl through holes, repeatedly. And so they spoke about birth and disorientation. To be awake but to speak only from dreaming was not incongruous to their vision. He dreamed of a colleague who had never been kind, who offered him a ride but then refused to stop the car, driving many miles beyond his destination. And they spoke of navigation, of friendship, friendlessness, and trust. She dreamed of a neighbor who tried to cheer her up by offering her something baked with a little bit of bone. They laughed about devious ingredients as they cooked their evening meal. They lit candles and conversed happily. But then came several nights in sequence in which neither of them could recall any dreams. Like sleep bereft of moons. In the daylight they felt themselves unmoored. They cast about speechless and strode into their enforced silence awkwardly. They wondered how long they could continue to suppress speech in the absence of dream language to warm their tongues, as if the images they saw behind closed eyes were an indelible spectral lighting. Without dreams they were speechless and also blind.

  STARLIGHT

  She didn’t want to be in this territory. She kicked and she dug but she remained a single breath stroke this side of almost. She kept nodding without moving and thinking thoughts she hoped were not visible to others. A few words kept her docile, diligent, and firmly idiotic. Here, now, she thought. Always, and then. But most commonly she thought: Further, more. Though she was well aware that these thoughts could replace almost with very. She understood danger but she did not believe herself capable of peril. Certain nouns were obviously for other persons. Disappointment, for instance, and culpability. Her idea of herself was still young. Premonition, however, startled her. She wondered: Aren’t I just circling a tree in a wood? Isn’t hesitation a marvelous prefix? When she stood beneath the sky, which was all the time, she was confident that starlight, at least in life, would be her indefinite province.

  HER STREET AT NIGHT

  She never could have planned embroidered roses, clotted chambers of darkness, the waking need for flesh, skin in mouth, suckled awake. Answers she could write—does she have your attention? You are much more attentive in dreams. This time was different, you were disarranged. You ask, how do I behave then, in your dreams?

  She answers, we meet more often, have more privacy, although we never talk. In words.

  Once we were indoors. Once we were outdoors. Once in an elevator. This last visit you seemed different. Disarranged, slightly sad. In the first three dreams we were one body. This last ethereal visit, you were eroded or lost. You searched for her outside the crowd of troubled rooms.

  She might also answer, what do you do in my dreams? Do you really want to know? Here are some nouns: street, hand, elevator, fire. Here are some verbs: roll, breathe, press. And then sounds.

  She walked on the other side of the street from mind. Or she tried. Not that she wanted to abandon her mind, but she did want distance, and more and more it seemed when she thought she wanted distance from others there was an underlying distance she needed first, or additionally, in order to take for herself the desired distance. It was the same sort of oblivion one feels when wanting to close a distance, when, for instance, one wants to be pulled closer by a person who turns away. She could understand this in books better so she tried to understand through writing. For instance, in order to explain to herself a simple occasion or series of communications (or lack of communications), she invented fictional landscapes in which to explore.

  First she wrote the street at night. Then she wrote herself onto the street and her mind onto the other side of the street. Now that her mind had no attachments to that other creature walking parallel—can a mind walk? Never mind, what did her mind look like? She resisted the urge to look but as she turned her head in the other direction she imagined a tangle of bright yarn, orange and pink, circular knots with their own logic. No legs, no face. What did it matter if thought were pretty? Was it possible to get away from expectations regarding appearances, even when considering interiors? How could minds be arranged? Would there be lines, rows, flowers dressing?

  She laughed and continued to look away from that mind, the one obsessed with the dates on calendars, paper, order, a well-stocked and particular relationship to time. But the effort it took her to keep looking away was like a storm. In this nonplace she could change the dark. She added clouds, and falling leaves, indeterminate seasons. She could keep walking in one direction without stopping or thinking about where she would eventually be. There was no end point or destination. Only breath. Her legs moved beneath her dress. She could have as many legs as she liked. Hers and others, beneath, above, sideways, and every angle. And now as the delicate questions walked on the other side she thought about several ways she might answer.

  Nycticorax Nycticorax

  Bin Ramke

  historically mistaken for whimbrel or glossy ibis, or

  yellow-crowned or green or American bittern or various juveniles

  Words are everything else in the world.

  —Wallace Stevens

  The bird is the size needed

  to be bird beside the small water

  the water and the bird beneath the moon

  share a ghost-moon at the Lagrange point

  where dust gathered between the earth

  and moon, while water we know to have

  been gathered from between the stars

  contains hydrogen, oxygen, and night;

  all stars grow unreliable and the earth

  moves out from beneath us.

  Night Heron is a tool user tossing bait

  onto the water then watching for fish to rise

  to her ruse. This intelligence belongs to

  her kind, her killing kindness a sharing

  heard by her night eye eyeing her young

  We must leave a wide noise tolling in the night.

  —Jean Le Roy, translated by Wallace Stevens

  Th
e shape of the heron head a form

  of arrogance, a tilt of eye and beak

  glitter in the light of stars, of moon

  blurred by mist

  water weary water weary water wearing

  away at the shore the water was before

  the earth was, the water within the bird

  the fish within the water corpuscular

  A fragrance of night, not to be defined that brings on an obscure doubt, exquisite, tender, comes by the open window into the room where I am at work …

  —Léon-Paul Fargue, translated by Wallace Stevens

  Night is the not-day, day is the not-night. In human

  creatures a concept rises a kind of con-

  sciousness with age: night detaches itself from

  youthful frantic revelry to isolate

  itself as an approaching silence, absence, com-

  promise of respite. The chronic repetitions

  of night replaced by one promise of identity,

  singularity, silence, the difference:

  to write, especially during periods of privation,

  requires a darkening, an approach

  to the condition of night. I have seen texts

  obliterate from the exuberance of

  the writerly condition, the passage from light

  ob (against) litera (letter). The lesson of the light.

  Crosshatched through alphabetic obsession.