skein of nightmares
and I no longer know where
he begins and I
end
Seen close to, the yellowed plaster walls are not uniformly stained. There are gradations both gradual and stark, punctuated by dents as regular as hailstones. Working on my feet, scouring the walls, makes a change, but my shoulders burn with fiery wires along the bone. Wetness streaks the nicotine, paints vague shadows as wide as my brush. I cannot tell if I make anything cleaner, and the damp only seems to release the smell. The night meets a climax where time stills, stalls, stops. I move from kitchen to bathroom to living room to spare room, but time stays where it is, bound to midnight’s back. Drowsy flies are caught in the bristles of my brush and drowned in my bucket of foam. Dark water slides down my arms to soak my shirt. It itches on my skin.
I never told her to stop drinking. I never asked her. I never begged. It would have been like asking the sun to stop setting. But no. Who ever asked the indifferent sun for anything? It would have been like asking the air not to fill my lungs. I had never known her sober. If she had quit she would have died.
bound, struggling, we
follow her from room
to room we cling
as intimate as plaster
and paint
It occurs to me that I have never known pain before. Not like this, not really. The casual acquaintance of a lifetime has become an intimate friend, a lover, even, inhabiting my body, conquering muscle and bone. But still I work, at the edges of the army of bottles and then, last of all (to let the floor dry, of course) her room.
Nose to the plain of plaster, my head flirts with vertigo.
Flies caught in my bristles leave traces of themselves in my wake.
I did not mean to leave. I was anyway half gone, my best loved things in a locker at school. For many years that is how I have measured my life, by how much of it could fit in a high school locker. Green steel door with a ring for a padlock and tilted vents for air. It has made for a light, if somewhat cramped, existence. But I did not mean to leave.
intimate as tooth
and grin as blood
and skin as body
and breath as weeping
and death
Except that of course I lied when I said she never hit me.
My arms quiver in the air, rattle the brush against the wall. The last wall in the last room and I am almost done. I let them hang for a moment at my side, enraptured by the shape and surge of fire along my limbs. I am heady with fatigue. The last wall in the last room. I lift my hands and begin again.
When I was seventeen, only three months from graduation, I spent a rare night at home. She was almost too far gone to say hello when I came in. I can’t remember why I did, now. Did I, for once, have nowhere else to go? I don’t know. I went into my room, that was almost empty but for the mattress on the floor, and lay down. I was tired. I must have been tired, because the known hated smog of tobacco smoke and booze and vomit and piss did not keep me awake, though I have always been sensitive to smells. I was asleep when she fumbled open the door, only slowly waking when she grabbed my hair, my arm, and dragged me up.
She was raving. Her split nails dug my scalp.
Get out get out now now
now
!
I remember how she hauled in her breath with a smoker’s wheeze.
Out he’s out he’s out
he’s out
!
I remembered the secret man I had searched for but never found.
OUT
she howled and spat and drove me, staggering, both of us, down the hall, her fist on my back, my sides, my head, pistons, hooves, pummeling through the kitchen, into the table, glass shattering, cut my foot, through the door
out.
I remember the blank, simple surprise I felt when she shut the door and locked it. I remember the damp cold of the spring night on my bare legs and arms. I remember the gradual realization of pain, and of the shirt that was my only covering, and of the prickling damp of the bloody grass against my cut foot. I remember how long the hour was that I stood there, how slow the understanding that she was not going to let me back in.
I remember sitting on the front step with nowhere else to go.
I remember waiting for her to pass out so I could jimmy open my bedroom window and collect my clothes.
I remember everything, but I still don’t know why.
Why?
The wall is done.
when she begins to weep I
forget my strength I
forget death I
let him go oh yes
the djinn
is free
I stand in the middle of the floor and through my tears I see the shapes my wet brush has made. Made, discovered, disinterred. There is a creature, a fly/dragon/genie who pours upward from an open bottle, no feet, many grasping claws
and a woman
a tiny tiny ragdoll woman
caught between his jaws.
when she begins to weep I
forget my fear I
forget pain I
let him go oh yes
the djinn
is free
and so
am I
I have not been back to the house since that night. In the meantime, my mother’s corpse, what the heat and flies had left of it, was cremated, her ashes enclosed inside a brown cardboard box and given to me. I paid fees I couldn’t really afford and signed papers at the lawyer’s office. The house was everything, and the lawyer explained about probate, about how, with certain restrictions, certain clauses, I could put it on the market even before the courts had proved my mother’s estate. She had, astonishingly, left almost no debts at all. An unpaid electricity bill, property taxes for the year before. Once my checks were cashed, I would be broke, but I would be free of obligation, and whatever the house realized was mine.
I called the real estate agent, and she asked me to meet her there with the key. Easier, she said, to give me her opinion on the spot, and she would have more documents for me to sign. So here I am, earlier than I meant to be. At first I think I will meet the agent outside, but though I wait on the crumbling sidewalk for pain, for grief, nothing comes. There is just this house, this yard, this street. There was rain two nights ago, but now the sky is bright. Across the street a robin flirts with a sprinkler, chasing a bath and a meal. For no reason (of course I have a reason) I take out the key and go in.
The place is empty and, though somewhat battered, clean. It will only take some paint to make it new, and maybe some rugs. My footsteps echo off the walls as I walk from room to room. Even to my sensitive nose there is no trace of smell. The bottles are all gone, hauled away by the odd-job man for the cost of the deposit, and the three that were still full of gin.
And on the bedroom wall, there is nothing. Nothing. Except, perhaps, hidden in the traces of my cleaning, the delicate remnants of wings.
Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom
The woman from the embassy called again this morning, as she does every morning. The negotiations are continuing, she said. They had not been apprised of any changes.
Changes, I said. I was deeply impressed by her choice of word; but then, I am always intrigued by people’s private lexicons. Of course I knew she meant “changes in the situation,” but that only meant there were no fresh rumors of torture, no dead men displayed for the evening news. Change. Well, yes, injury is change. Death is certainly change.
We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything new, she said.
Don’t let your life stop, was my distant mother’s advice. Another phone call, messages from another world, the real world of home. Carry on, my mother said. Carry on as best you can.
I stood in this borrowed kitchen, the glazed tiles cold beneath my feet, Ryan’s blue terrycloth robe cinched around my waist, my teacup cooling in my hand. I wanted to think about the word “changes.” I wanted to let it carve new pathways through the erosion patterns in my brain, and why not? I’m a writer. I would never say, Words are my life, because that is too extravagant, too grandiose, but it is secretly true. My vocation is to turn the nothing of dreams into books on the shelves. Magic! See me build my castles in the air! My bare feet were cold, and I decided my mother was right. I made a fresh cup of tea and carried it up the many stairs of this narrow city house to the attic that the absent owners converted to a children’s playroom, and that I have in my turn made into a kind of office. My desk is an old door propped across two piles of bankers boxes full of the manuscripts and contracts I couldn’t bear to leave behind. I turned on the laptop and without checking my email (there is no cable connection up here) I opened a new document in Word.
The white screen, the blank page. This is the novel I came here to write. No, no. I came here because I am in love, but this is the novel I could not write at home.
I had to get up again and go down three flights to the living room where a pile of Ryan’s mail waits for him to come back—come home, I almost said. I always compose in manuscript format, it’s so much easier than reformatting later, but I find the intricacies of this foreign address impossible to remember. I went back upstairs and typed it in at the top left-hand corner of the screen, then keyed down a few spaces and typed the title.
Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom
Then I looked at it again, and tried it with a “The” at the beginning, but no. Too definite. There’s something dreamy about it the other way.
Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom
A few more spaces down, and I typed Chapter One.
And then, after a while, I got up and went down two flights to shower and put on some clothes.
Like other cities, this one is composed of hidden neighborhoods—neighborhoods, that is, that look like undifferentiated city to the unaccustomed small-town eye. I have been exploring since we first arrived, although Ryan teased me, calling me a scaredy-cat and a hick Canuck. I didn’t mind. On the one hand, I was feeling cat-like then, slinking close to the walls with my sides sucked in, somewhat inclined to growl; and on the other hand I loved the sound of those words snapped together like a couple of birch twigs brittle with ice. Hick Canuck. At an embassy dinner he whispered it in my ear to make me laugh, his voice two soft puffs of air against my neck, like kernels of corn exploding. Hick Canuck. Especially delicious since, by the standards of this ancient country, so was everybody at the table, from the Ambassador on down.
But what Ryan didn’t see, being busy with briefings even before the team left with the special envoy, was how, like a cat, I expanded my territory in cautious circles. I hate to hurry these things. It seemed rash to venture out into the streets and the stores—the buses! My God!—before I even knew how the light switches worked, the telephone, the stove. I mean “know” in the intimate sense, the habitual sense that does not even register the smells and sounds of home. When I am a foreigner, I am an explorer, continually amazed at tourists who can simply visit a place like this. Eventually, though, I discovered the side streets and main streets, the children’s parks and the botanical parks and the jogging trails, the street with the bakeries, the street with the hardware stores, the street with the whores. Neighborhoods are such subtle things here I had to watch which way the neighbors turned when they left their doors, which way they came from with their string bags full of food. I thought that if I bought a string bag and filled it at the right butcher’s shop and wine store I would cease to be a stranger, or at least a foreigner, but it hasn’t worked out that way. At home the bus drivers wave even when I’m not catching the bus, the café owner teases me if I don’t get my usual decaf latté with no foam. Here I don’t know how to ask for no foam, and though I go to the neighborhood café they have yet to notice that I always scrape it off with my spoon.
At least when I go at the quiet time after lunch I can sit at my regular table. Not the one in the window, it’s too big for one person, but the one against the wall just down from the window corner. Today I came too early, however, and had to sit at a table in back. As I struggled through my order (I have memorized the words, but they still come out of my mouth as sounds) I consoled myself with the thought that really, there is no café in the world where a writer can’t open her notebook and sit, pen in hand, entirely at home.
I opened my notebook, and sat, pen in hand.
A drop of rain fell on the page, blurring the forgotten words of last week.
Keep it fresh and strange,
the notebook said. I couldn’t remember what “it” was. Something from the novel. Magic? Love? More raindrops fell, spattering on the tabletop, pinging off the saucer beneath my glass.
“Lady, you are so far out of your place I could not find you.”
I looked up to see the rainbird perched like a crow on the back of an empty chair.
“You found me,” I pointed out. “Here you are.”
“And here
you
are.” The rainbird spread his arms in a gesture at the café, the waiters, the hissing espresso machine. Crystal droplets scattered from his feathers like shining beads from a broken necklace. “I wonder why, when you have all the worlds and time.”
I ducked my head and smoothed the damp-rippled page. His black glass eyes were hard to meet. “Where would you have me go?”
“ ‘Go’, lady? You are the center. To you the worlds bend like grass in the rain.”
As he spoke more rain fell, a pattering that mingled with the roar and sigh of steam, like liquid consonants in a whispered hiss. What language did they speak? I did not know, and then I did: it was the poetry of the grass that bowed towards my chair, an invisible meadow sketched out in the gleam of spiderwebs and dew. The waiter walked by, oblivious, and the grass laughed and danced aside.