Thanatographies, p.8
Thanatographies, page 8
His eyes follow her words. They will only be able to see each other for a few hours. Time has spun them around. They are riding backward on the head of a bull, but instead of colliding with others, they master this gallop of hours, this dance of now. Every relation continues, even after it has been declared over, he has recently learned. Life moves along a trajectory of losses, she believes. A woman is watering a grave. The stone in front of me reads: Anna Maschke 1899–1918. Is this Rosa Luxemburg’s grave? Or of her pseudonym doppelgänger? I remember a sunrise, but he is quick to say that nostalgia, overindulgent reminiscence, is an evasion of the complexity of what surrounds you most immediately. She is wearing a skirt. Something beneath her bulges. They are recounting the previous months to each other, or maybe only he is.
I take a stroll to see if I can detect any famous graves. Berlin, where this must be, judging by the quality of swampy ground, buried so many. As I walk aimlessly, I also sense a longing to return to the pair, their approach of each other. I worry a little that I might have missed their departure and I am now alone in this graveyard. What exactly is the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery? Do walls encircle them both? I see them in the distance, her white legs shine on the grass. He lies stretched out next to her, holding his head in his hands. Insomnia sometimes about indefinable heartbrokenness. But why does a heart break whereas trees stand sovereign even when momentarily dead in winter? Cemeteries have for a long time been a refuge for fugitives. I wonder if they will become lovers here.
There is something in the silences that betrays the scene. He wants to get up, get going. He wants her to stay with him. The trees have manacled them to asters below the ground. She is just passing through. They haven’t seen each other in years. Their eyes mark the clouds and inside each of their hands at least one lie. Tomorrow will come without the other. She will leave on a train. He will sleep late into the morning. The frogs croak from the pond. Gates will soon close. I am tempted to make a first move, but as some uninvited witness, I am bound to a larger arc even though my stomach is rumbling. The garden, as I think of the place now, is suddenly overcome by tenderness, the impossibility (or is the word I mean implausibility?) of these buried unknown lives. It is in this impossibility that I wish the man and woman a shared rest, a finality together from which neither will be taken nor called up again. Their love is one of radical loneliness. I can already smell their old age, their regrets beneath the hunter’s moon. It is only in dreams that they can know each other. In time, they will not become anything. He has stretched out his hand to help her get up. They brush the grass from their skins. Legs are the first to ameliorate the loss to come and begin in a quicksand step to walk toward the walls. An understanding of the other’s existence as part of one’s own, slowly dissolving below the beech tree. I watch them grow smaller, off to another time, another space. The grass, flattened from their bodies’ weight, is already recovering. I stay behind and search for a shape beyond the gravestones.
THE WORD SULFUR MOVES OVER MY TONGUE. A taste of old coffee creases the gums. Sheets are crumpled and a little moist. The unnamed woman points out that it is time for the parade. This always signals a kind of end, night’s gorging almost complete, and toward which I must give up and let the men come to me. I sigh and open my mouth.
Their silhouettes cast different sizes and shapes. No man alike. They pose and dangle for a moment before approaching. One by one the men come, suckle, and squeal, frown and turn mute. I accumulate unwillingly their gestures, temperature, and will. Their shrinking cisterns of luck. Men have uplifted me in appropriate and inappropriate ways. This is not an argument or a stance, but a protocol of release.
Here come your arms wrapped around my knees, your doubt in my voice. Here comes a long wail. Here your dead mother, your call at two a.m. in times when letters were long and common. Here fall the fingers, you never touched me right. Your body has bloated, no children, not yet. Inside a year of your phone calls, arguing our way out of Casablanca. Here, your murderous forefathers, your hand on my back, thirty minutes on my back. You approach with your proposition amidst knee-high grasses. Malina unfinished. Here, your gift wrapped in expensive cloth, your intimidation, a wagon of love rolling down uneven hills. Bats above chained restaurant tables. Where you touched me the yellow to mauve passing of time.
I must call you “you” for this is the only way I can address both the memory and its disappearance.
I wrote a letter to you once in another language. It will always be the first letter and this its cheap copy. The original letter begins with the last sentence you said to me on a patch of grass just after midnight. The last sentence you said to me, before getting up quickly to walk away, as if offstage. When I think of this moment, I realize that it takes a certain confidence to get up and vanish into the night, the kind of confidence that will not die for someone else.
The nameless women interrupts, and asks, who would actually die for someone else?
When you left, the sky was oddly raised, summer heat oiling the air. I did not want to believe that I had to vacate an entire world, stumble out of the park, as if shot in the heel, and begin immediately to both remember and forget you. That I would have to find a taxi to get home, bleeding heavily, and then try not to faint in the elevator. I did not turn around to watch you melt into the dark. There was no one to call. This was the unnamed end of an unnamed beginning, or it was the night finally having its way.
I try to retrieve the specifics of leaving. Sad? Hesitant? Relieved? It’s a blank. You are no longer you but more a holy brutality, and the moon has this twofold radiance. Through the bamboo I watch the sickle light travel, the madness of this travel where we obliterate the words of those who say nothing.
Every love story is a ghost story.
All the silhouettes have disappeared. To remain formless is to remain precarious. To remain attached despite no future. Your face I can no longer raise. I catch a faded shadow in the corner. I am glad to know you are not dead, but this fact also makes me anxious. What we must fulfill before we die. Or what we must tell each other. Memory injects its poison, and the nervous ego rummages through the trash. The body wants what the body wants.
Swallows the bitter taste, the acrid petals.
The nameless woman tells me to get up and wash out my mouth, find an exit. She will not hold me.
The whole house smells of old flower water, and when you are not used to anything happening and then something happens, it pervades the air. Amusement is now in the realm of plants, and the ticks swim through my water glass. It is difficult to measure one’s need to tell someone everything and the equal need to maintain at least a dozen secrets. I am overwhelmed and underused, and they are related. Listen to the thoughts that will not come again. The spider parachutes along the window. I begin this map of disappearances to feel what has left and is still with me, unlike extinctions, which are another haunting. Living things that I no longer live with maintain conversation. Dead things, mass death, are the auguries I keep taking personally. I take it personally, this loss of language, and yet it’s a symptom of other erasures. I must not abstract too much, for my brain flares and then withers. I am a woman, whatever that means. I mean it simply. I am a woman in a world. I am a woman in the world, but the world doesn’t exist. So it must be my world inside of a disappeared world and a becoming one. It is not easy to talk about anything anymore. When I say, I will give my best, I mean my least. I am overwhelmed and underused, and they are related. I am underused elementally, abandoned really, while functioning in ways I was never intended for. What I am intimate with I become psychic to: electronic communication, a text message I will receive in a few minutes.
The deadliest of all feelings covers me. A tiny solitary cell keeps bobbing around. With nothing to say, the room grows a little pagan and morose. I have left behind the voices and wonder about my average condition and the intensity of feeling it maintains.
The hairy fly and the books I never read lie next to the bed. I try to recite the names of friends, even those who are not my friends anymore. I am anxious and decadent for the absence to become my friend. Then the feeling, out of this humidity, the excretions between myself and the fly good, more than anyone can hope for. A crow looks at me from the pole. Black and then pink cherry blossoms and then the neon light of my computer.
I sit upright; the fly loudly traverses the screen. I swat and it is silent for a few moments. I can feel my stomach beat, heart is in the gut. Then the fly dances back into view. It is not dead but can no longer make that sound. I swat again and this time it falls to the sheets, then bounces off the mattress and lands in the water glass on the ground.
It is true, I feel either hassled or abandoned.
In the bedroom, which resembles the insides of a book, walls turn into scrolls. I hear laughter. The nameless woman laughs. It is funny. Maybe funnier than you think. To be alone. Sometimes the funniest part is that you know what makes you laugh: sure death! Every night at four it’s rendezvous with the hangman. Or the way that I can feel destroyed upon waking and then suddenly gain an anonymous whiff of confidence from nowhere.
Words are words, and they are all I have to puncture the feelings, which graze like huge mountain sheep on my lawn. My lawn of feelings.
The night is melodramatic and way too long.
I hear laughter again, now it comes from my neighbor’s house. I am worried. I do not know about what. I remember my mother’s words. The ongoing list of suggestions for balancing my mind’s horrors. And Marina Benjamin who says, “Anxiety is women’s work. I learned how to worry from my mother, for whom anxiety is a proxy for desire: my mother knows she is alive not because she wants but because she worries.” I want to retreat to the roots of trees, the tunnels underground. To lie down and be nothing.
I let the body sink. The houseplant is certain, we will grow most favorably before losing all leaves. Just like the sea withdraws before it unleashes a tsunami. I am tired of spying on my neighbors. I am tired of spying on myself. This makes me laugh.
I LEAVE MY HOUSE FOR A SLEEP STUDY on behalf of the doctor’s advisement. To get the apparatus, I have to go to the sleep lab. The sleep lab is in a basement with no windows, a maze of doors and signs that I walk past before I notice a catacomb at the center of the structure, right by the elevators. Three more glass doors and in a small office a weary-looking nurse, who may not have slept herself in years, tells me to wait. I wait with my freak nails. Mousy walls.
While I wait, I note it down. If I don’t write it down, it will go into oblivion, a fine place, yet the amnesiac is also a damned character, always born again, falling in love again, agitated, with froggy legs, a whole list of vitals on a list and no cure in sight. There is a stack of unopened newspapers by the door. A fridge sound in the background.
The doctor has a look. Pink hair streaks that match her pink lipstick that match her indifferent mouth. The doctor rolls around on a chair, asks me a list of questions, from inconsequential to intimate. She does not look at me; tantalized by her screen, she types with lightning speed. Oh, you and your little looping world, she seems to be typing over and over again. Should I also mention my fungal skin, hair loss, crickets coming out of my joints? The headaches, thickness below my eyelids? Tingly hands and swollen fingers? The bloodletting, cake-size sheets, preceded by an evil eye?
The doctor does not get angry like the one before did. I am another sleepless patient, who cannot stop talking about her sleeplessness and all its adjacent rooms and fatalities, gorging every fiber of the waking world down to its femuric throttle. Only to forget the labs, supplements, and regimens as soon as she returns to her house.
Some say the sleepless go insane, which is another way of saying we already are no longer fully human, no longer identifiable cohesive relation. The sleepless can be in multiple places at once, have a conversation with livers and make an appearance in a war scene; simultaneously, centuries collapse in our skulls.
I am told to accept, to surrender, to cohabitate. I am encouraged to be gentle and kind and compassionate. I may be experiencing projections, narcissistic turns, self-absorption, intimacy issues, anxiety, burnout, restless leg syndrome. Don’t mess with the earwax, the first thought, the last thought, sugar levels, time. Weigh, balance, edit, maintain. No one suggests, not even in whispers, that the truth of the matter may well be that I am the root of the feeling. I am at fault and hold the worst, which even in benign forms is bad. No. It is not self-hatred, even though it is what I am told over and over again in pitying tones. I am in touch, in broad strokes, with my most elemental condition, which despite the news is not all love but an insufferable sensing.
At night, after I have received my apparatus and return to the house, I notice that the houseplant has doubled: one side angles perfectly toward the window, the leaves of the other side are blocked from light. The houseplant emits variations of sounds, variations of silence, suggesting that sleep, like seasons, like appetite, like birth, like death, like light, like water, are required in this world for flourishing.
Another hour passes. I stretch out on the bed, place the tubes into my nostrils, and turn the machine on.
Three, four, five more gasps of unsought vocation.
I read the obligatory page, and then go into that forgetfulness without end that remembers itself and gasps for air. Night’s sensorium fills the room, like water in an aquarium.
I watch from inside my eyelashes, which are tiny veins. No, wait. They are dead coral reef. Round hours, rectangular minutes. A dreaming episode.
I murder someone; or rather, I am an accomplice in a murder. I do not touch the body. I touch something else, which later, upon waking, remembers my complicity. Even in my dreams certain laws exist. I will not violate the body, but my mind will imagine it . . . The dog runs like a Lamborghini, half a tail missing . . . Someone squeezes my breast and calls it “Jewish milk.” It feels both violent and erotic, and my nails are polished in a velvet green . . . A leopard yawns; she has licked her spots off and then back on. A man creates fear among a group of women. I jump on his shoulders and begin to scream in a hoarse, high-pitched siren noise: “I will curse you.” Then I pull his head from his body with my bare hands . . . When I see the wide and infinite sea, I jump, turning immediately into a jellyfish tuned into the drifts . . .
The houseplant whispers: I will make you famous.
The unnamed woman eyes the houseplant. The bluish light of predawn seeps into the room. The unfavored food is in the trash. My disappearance will not be noticed because no one has been to the house for months. I lie down. A woman lies down and is carried on a flat wave, not dead, just resting. Do you know a rest from yourself? The boundaries, consequences, and treachery you must bear, and that are all over you, like a smell. I have waited very long to be shown something by the hand that is not mine. Only the night in its fury, its rampant stillness can love me now, and its love is a carelessness for time.
The nameless woman rises from my bed, draws back the curtains, and opens the window. She will never have a bio. Who loves me, might be her question. But it might also be, whose plants are you watering, whose houses are you occupying?
She becomes smaller, a familiar darkness, and then climbs outside.
The friend I have cursed is taken through the night. And the lover whose time ran out shakes. Objects of adoration are all in their nests. Objects of protection out by the trees. A storm is coming. Toward the ache of crocodiles, their wise blood, into the dregs of the Delta, the beak of the Chickadee. And in cold bathhouses women begin to shake the towels and then fold them over again. There is a sound conversing in the hollow. The cantankerous word strikes me, a bee to the wound. A fruit fly is drawn to the vinegar trap.
I open my palms. Do not disturb them.
MEDUSAS
THE MEDUSAS HAD BEEN CARRIED OFF THE SHORES from another continent and drifted in the monogamy of waters farther north toward the island. The inclination to change direction must be stealthy at first, assuming a cartographic void. A thirst that cannot be identified as such, and that, despite the dotted line it fails to produce, lifts from itself a manifestation. The island, ancient and volcanic, was surrounded by these see-through bodies, hollow, brainless. Their spherical lenses a primordial model of eyes. The polyps fed continuously. The island did not pay much attention to the bloom outbreaks due to rising water temperatures. The medusas kept following drift lines, expanding and contracting their bodies to push water behind. Certain power plants had been shut down when the swarms blocked the inflow of cooling water.
The children played on the beach. They ran naked into the waves, which threatened to smash their bodies carelessly onto the sandy banks. They yelled at the waves, argued with them, turning their backs to the beach crowd, one fist lifted. They yelled into the roar, no one answered, and they yelled until hoarse. The sea overflowed. Their mouths were foaming from air and spit, soggy bread crammed into the pockets of their cheeks in case their energy reserves ran low.
On the beach lay scattered, among trash and sunbeds, families with their beach gear. The sun mild, already disappearing, kept bodies languid. Vendors crossed the beach with large racks hoisted onto their shoulders, approaching each reclining body with cheerful amity, running their hands through necklaces and beaded armbands, addressing the children first, who said, yes, and please, pulling at their mothers’ arms waving the vendors off like flies. The vendors’ smiles occasionally betrayed a thinly veiled contempt, stubbornly blinking at the mothers who just wanted to rest. They put their hands to their mouths when the children started to eat their sandwiches. They stood in the shade of sun umbrellas longer than was polite, waiting for someone to crack and just buy the equipment, the trash from their shoulders. The children wanted whatever they had. They bit into their sandwiches with gusto, pleading with their mothers, who were losing their patience, who had no patience left, who shooed and firmly said no in a low drum voice, and then fell back onto their sunbeds shielding their faces with their phones.
