Do no harm
was the mantra by which she finally put herself to sleep, curled into herself in misery, Marbl—steadfast and concerned—perched on her hip. It didn’t occur to her to think that her plans were actually to do good, to act, to be active. Even if she weren’t too tired to think of it, she would not have allowed herself that hubris. At the moment humility was a fetish she had hung around the overblown neck of her recalcitrant ego as the carcase of the duckling is hung around the neck of the predatory farm dog: she understood nothing of its worth or its distortions. She was tired, she was invisible—
She was asleep: and she had no dreams.
Morgan’s brother stood beside her through the brief ceremony. At one point he buried his face in his hands, then shook himself and stood upright again.
“Go ahead,” Morgan whispered automatically. “You’ll feel better.” She herself was far away, thinking about Asam in his little room, the machines pumping. She had to think that machines can keep some life going.
The twin white coffins were grotesque and macabre. She wished her aunt had some good taste. Then she thought, with cunning and detachment,
well, it’s so people can mourn better.
The waxed faces were arid. She walked almost past before she realized she had better look while she could. Standing beside her father’s coffin, she gazed at the face, trying to find something. The skin was tight over the fine bones, but of course he was the color of bad stage make-up, and nothing was left of his integral tension, what made him real. Not a new thought, but what could she think? She had had no practice in last words.
She turned to her mother’s body, put her hands on the side of the coffin, leaned over slightly to look at the frail skin bolstered by make-up for the last time. She wanted to make some final gesture but she only managed to fumble and drop her damp, crumpled handkerchief into the coffin where it lay flamboyantly on the red silk. Her mother would have laughed at that. Morgan had for herself too an insane desire to laugh, insane because she knew if she laughed she would never stop, they would put her in a little room like Asam’s but softer, where she would scream and pound her thoughts out on the padded hinges and never get anywhere any more. She must stay in the void where it was safe. She picked up the handkerchief and put it in her pocket.
She had to get out of there. The rest of the relatives were waiting to file past. She turned to her brother. He was unself-conscious now about the tears that rolled down his face.
“I’m going now,” she said curtly. “I can’t stay here. I’ll call you.”
He reached a hand for her in protest but she walked away, out of the perfumed chapel into the dull sunlight. The forest fires in the north were sending a pall of smoke across the city. She thought,
that’s appropriate for the burning-day
.
Home, she looked around the modern apartment, where she had taken comfort in its increasing emptiness, then walked to the basement storage room to get her suitcase. It was big and made of leather; it had belonged to her mother, who used to travel on business. She quickly packed the few belongings left there. Her trunk and furnishings had already been picked up by the shippers; the cat now went into the carrier, she handed the keys in to the manager with no regret. Morgan took the bus to the hospital, a route she had ridden twice or more every day for longer than she liked to think. The driver knew her and nodded sympathetically.
“Sorry to hear about your folks,” he said. “You must be feeling pretty bad.”
She nodded wordlessly. He can’t tell, she thought. I suppose it doesn’t show. She supposed it was melodramatic to believe she didn’t exist any longer but she in fact knew that was true.
At the hospital she left her suitcase, and Marbl in her carrier, with the porter, went up to Asam’s room. The machines were silent, rolled back and hooked to nothing. The carbolizing team was making up the bed. The maid knew her, looked for a moment at her, then jerked her head aside.
Gone
, she meant.
There was only one place he could go. Morgan had just sent her parents there.
The supervisor was surprised to see her, and solicitous. “Are you all right to be back at work so soon?”
“No, I quit,” Morgan said.
There were a few more words but she thought as they were said,
that’s the end of
this
story
.
“Bye-bye, Connie,” the porter said as Morgan hefted the suitcase.
Bye-bye Connie,
thought Morgan. She thought the smoke must have been irritating her eyes more than she knew, because she felt tears start. She walked toward the bus stop, her body twisted with the unevenly balanced weight of the luggage, her tears out of her control. She thought,
I have come to the end of the route;
she thought,
there’s no transfer
. Still she had considered somewhere else to go, had decided she would go somewhere, so she snorted at the foolishness of her own melodrama.
She would go where she had planned to go, to live in the basement flat of her parents’ house until the estate was executed, and then to this strange new home the Universe had thrust upon her. It was apparently huge, big enough to share with other orphans and failures. She would subject herself to service, and routine, and she would ignore herself as much as possible. After all, she thought, there must be a reason she was still breathing. Every thought told her to stop, every instinct perpetuated breath. She put one foot in front of the other.
She had nothing left to do but that.
It Should be,
she thought,
all I desire.
Now, Morgan was a fugitive from the war with life. She had escaped from the world of the damned, the red brick hospital where the twisted bodies and tortured souls of the gargoyles and other ruined ones were sent to live and sometimes to die. She had escaped the wake of torment after the death of her parents. She had escaped the minor needs—to care, be cared for, to live with happiness. They were all irrelevant to her: she, her suitcase and her cat fading away into the distance rather romantically, although really it was more than a month before she could put herself on a Greyhound bus, and the journey was mundane, even ridiculous: infants crying in their mothers’ arms, large countrymen with their tractor caps cocked back on their balding heads, fussy old people insisting on the seats near the driver, pre-teenaged children with a gross sense of importance traveling alone for the first time, and Morgan.
Morgan can see that she is not human. It is clear. She has kept the external shell, but everything has been scraped out, there is a void there, an alien void, outer space made internal, and she wonders whether she will ever have the courage, or energy, to explore it. As the poet said,
the energy needed to live / alone is so great.
A house is not a home
Morgan dragged her heavy suitcase out of the car while the driver unloaded the cat carrier, and stood looking at the huge house. It looked like a mansion; in fact, it had not been a family home since before the days of her grandparents’ school, and they had told her it had most recently been used as a monastic community of some kind. Morgan hoped that the peace still lived there, even though the godly did not. She was so tired. The weeks of dismantling her parents’ lives were over now, the estate divided, and her share (both realized and expected) sunk almost completely into the essential refurbishing of this great shaggy lumbering Edwardian dormitory, a shabby relic a hundred years old and counting, where she hoped to do some good, eventually.
The house stood inside an overgrown yard surrounded with a rusty wrought-iron fence. It faced south, fronting onto a cul-de-sac avenue along the edge of the riverbank. Morgan left her suitcase by the gate, took the cat carrier and walked across the narrow street to the ribbon of grass boulevard. In front of her a dramatic drop two hundred feet to the river was staged by a small shelf of greenery alongside the water, where bicycle paths and picnic tables attested to the urban parkland vision—but the picnic tables were weathered from green into grey, and up on the grass, the bench overlooking the river had been carved deeply with graffiti. She showed Marbl the view, but the cat was complaining loudly, and turned her back like Gertrude Stein.
Morgan smiled without humor. “Guess you’re telling me not to avoid it any more,” she said, and the cat was silent at last. They returned to the gate and Morgan lifted the latch. It was stiff, and caught briefly, then released with a musical pop. She kicked the gate shut behind her, climbed up the three stairs to the wide veranda, and unlocked the heavy wood door with the leaded-glass central oval.
The house was still entirely empty but for the jumble of her belongings, stacked haphazardly in the living room by the moving company. She left her suitcase and Marbl’s carrier in the sundrenched hall where the stained glass and prisms of the door panel cast rosy blocks and rainbow patterns over the scratched wood paneling and chipped plaster.
The huge living room was on the left of the door. A dining room mirrored it on the other side. Both were separated from the hall by leaded-glass doors. Behind the living room, a smaller room, completely wood-paneled up to a picture rail, and with piano windows of stained leaded glass, had been converted to an office with telephone and data lines. Morgan nodded. This would be hers, a kind of household command center.
The dining room was separated from a huge kitchen and pantry by pocket doors. Behind the kitchen was a mud porch, a utility room, and a small bedraggled greenhouse with broken panes. Two other doors led toward the center of the house. Hearing Marbl’s howls begin again and echo in the empty hall, Morgan left these rooms unexplored, returned to her annoyed pet.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said soothingly, “we’ll find a place to sleep.” She made sure the door was latched.
In the back of the hall there was an ancient brass-fitted elevator with a telescoping metal door. She walked up the stairs behind it.
One of the rooms had long windows looking out onto a small balcony littered with fallen leaves. Hanging against one of the windows on a leather thong was a small dusty metal ring filled with a colored glass mosaic. At the wind of the opening door, it bumped gently against the window like a moth trying to get out. Small, inside it, was the image of the prairie, with its warm clear light sky, rendered in epoxied shards with an artistry not slavish to detail but for that even more exact. Morgan, seeing it for the first time, was momentarily paralyzed. Then her eyes blurred with tears.
She didn’t know she had tears any more. She went to the hall and got her suitcase. The hollow bang as she set it down in the prairie room was a punctuation mark. This would be her place. She brought the cat carrier up, closed the door behind her, and opened the carrier. Marbl came out wondering into the empty room and, seeing refuge, dived for the closet where she crouched, her complaining
miaouw
echoing.
The stained glass was like a raindrop caught in the curve of metal, a lens making the landscape tiny. Or a teardrop? She laughed shortly at her own conceit.
The best house computer she could afford was old and clunky, with no virch and no smart-chip capability, upgrading the hundred-year-old house to the minimum standard of smart, but it was adequate. After a few days, Morgan found herself in a habit of late-night game playing: always the repetitive, patterning games to put her in trance.
The night she found herself playing the game and weeping, she took all the games off her partition and the common area. She might not have been good at grieving, but she was damned if she was going to let the machine do it for her.
Instead, she decided, she would revive and keep her journal, write in it every night. A journal on paper, not in the machine. She had enjoyed, or at least found release in, journal writing before; now it was a survival device and she approached it as a discipline, the same way she had the requirement of her previous profession to write daily report: doggedly, and with a cool documentary flavor.
She wrote about the renovations, the recurring real estate administrivia, the way the cats were eliminating the mouse problem, the motion of light on the surface of the river, or the sweep of an advertising spotlight across the sky. She didn’t include in the diary her frustration at how the constant low-level business torment that remained as the final detritus of her parents’ wills was made more difficult by the necessity to either see or avoid her brother—she chose avoid, usually—and if she mentioned it at all on the pages of the journal, she tried to be dispassionate about the cool anguish of her restless nights.
She took her duty as a recorder seriously. Some details were not important.
Morgan’s room was plain, almost barren, a habit into which she settled. A low wide platform in one corner was the bed, covered with, and with pillows of, plain-colored and Indian-print cottons. Against one wall were the desk and the short oak filing cabinet she had taken from her father’s office. A woven Cree rug near the bed covered part of the hardwood floor. The white walls were bare except for the colors cast by the sun through the tiny piece of stained glass.
Soon she was no longer completely unencumbered. In a few weeks, she gathered some moss—of the human sort. Delany, her close friend all the time in university and fitfully since then, had been living in adapted housing that had just been “discontinued”: the polite word for sold out from under her to the highest bidder. Morgan made her the first of the tenants in her penitential boarding-house. Then, by chance in the Swedish prefab-furniture store, she met Russ, back in the city from Indonesia and looking for a house to share: she recognized him despite the beard and the heavy tan—and the streaks of white in hair and beard. A friend of Russ’s, Jakob, recommended because he was a dancer and needed a studio and Morgan’s house had big rooms, turned out to be someone she had worked with years ago in an art therapy program, canceled during funding cuts.
Jakob discovered (with suitably dramatic shrieks of joy) the tiny gymnasium the school had long ago created in the attic when converting the brick house, and immediately claimed it for a practice room. At one end there was a loft which became his sleeping place. He hung it about with silk scarves and gaily-colored cloths. His bed was a pallet on the floor, spread with a brocade throw. He was putting up mirrors on one gym wall, and a
barre
, had rented a sander to smooth the floors. From his area outward, all the surfaces in the house were starting to be covered with a layer of fine wood dust, dotted with the pawprints of cats.
Russ was moving into the small room upstairs, at the back. Nothing was there right now but cardboard boxes containing the modular furniture, ready to be assembled, that he had been buying when he and Morgan happened on each other. He had gone hiking: would really move in next week, he’d said.
Delany chose the room beside the elevator. She was in angry revolution against ground-floor living after years in the handicapped-people’s-housing complex; the elevator allowed her to take this second-floor room with the big north-facing windows giving her an elevated perspective of the deep ravine behind the house. The room’s ell shape had been formed decades ago by removal of walls between three smaller rooms—in the school, it had been a common room for the teachers. In one arm of the ell was her special bed; in the other, in the light from the biggest windows, her paints and easel. The rest would arrive on the weekend, when her brothers were going to help her move. From that room, for three days, had come plaster dust and paint fumes from the renovations, while three grumpy workers had taken only an hour to install a wheel-washer for Delany’s wheelchair in the mud room at the side door.
Morgan looked into doorways at random, walking through and through the house, wearing down her paths. Occasionally she encountered one of the cats doing the same. Marbl, the one she had brought with her, was five years old, lonely and tentative. Dundee and Seville, the five-month-old marmalade twins they had all gone together to pick out at the SPCA, were exuberant and raucous. Morgan felt a kinship to Marbl, who stayed close to the walls, hissed when the twins tumbled into her full-tilt on one of their rampages. What was she doing filling with all these beings a house meant to be quiet and insulating?
Then why didn’t I sell the house and buy some solitary apartment with no room for anyone but me and my cat?
her interior voice mocked her
. Methinks the lady doth protest too much …
Morgan settled in the kitchen, where big windows looked out over calm trees in the back yard, the tumbledown garden shed, and the weathered ramshackle fence along the lane. The rain clouds that had threatened all day had loosed into a sheet of soft grey silk whipping across the greenery. The air blowing through the open screen smelled damp and alive.
Morgan knew she was alive because she slept and woke, ate and shat, still trembled at infinity. But she experienced the rain as everything else, like the cat in the hallway, looking through open doors at the real universe. She was waiting for something to teach her to go there. To invite her to go there. She couldn’t go without leave. She didn’t live there any more.
Morgan wanted the world to end. She sat on the riverbank in the clear dusk and wished the glittering buildings along the curve to explode, wanted the towers of commerce to topple, not from economic but from physical decay, a decay like that in her heart, she thought, and seeing the towers intact after all that destructive thought she smiled with the same anger at herself, wondering if she would want to be on top of such a falling edifice, thinking it might be an interesting way to die, wondering if any dying can be interesting, wanting the world to die and leave her senseless.
How maudlin of me,
she thought, and the word started her considering Maudlin and Bedlam, their close relationship, the prisons of the mad: she thought of the old English song
Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes, for to save her shoes from gravel … .
Mad Morgan,
she thought
, how I wish it were so.
The mad have an easy time of it,
she thought;
they can let go. They can let the towers of their own minds crumble with no resistance. They are free of whatever damning necessity keeps me sane, keeps me in this prison of my body, this quiet madhouse, this disguise. Where do they get the courage? Just to go crazy, to leave their old world behind, without caring who they leave there crying?
Like the dead,
she thought,
they are free to desert us.
I wonder what it takes to wake me into one of those people who just disappear one day
, she asked herself.
I quit my job, brought the cat with me, didn’t just go out to the store one night and vanish, sadly missed by loving family, only to be found ten or twenty years later, found by accident, in New Zealand or somewhere, with a new name.
Usually also they have a new spouse, more kids, another job, she remembered. Changing your life isn’t easy.
She thought about the big leather suitcase she packed in her tiny apartment. She thought about the time she spent packing her parents’ belongings, dividing them into categories, what to take, what to keep, what they wanted whom to have, what to give away, what to leave in the basement for her brother Robyn to sort when he had become accustomed to living in the house he inherited.
She thought that those who desert us leave us a terrible burden of which to dispose. She remembered the cartons and green plastic garbage bags readied for the Goodwill truck to collect, the furniture carried out to its merciful maw by two amiable, slowwitted men who knew how to be kind, so much kindness that she wondered how used they were to taking away the furniture of the dead, comforting the living. How many graveyards did they dismantle every day? She thanked them for their work, and their kindness, then left the ravaged house, put the key back through the mail slot for Robyn, and fled.
For the first time she thought of it as flight, but she sidestepped that thought too, and stood up from her cramped seat on the bench, went back to the house, where she had left the desk light burning in her ascetic room, where dusk was coming persistently in at the windows but was kept at bay by the yellow skirt of light. She lay down on the cotton-covered bed and went suddenly to sleep, like a baby.