***
No one came to tell Astrid about the fear.
Simon’s body had disappeared, but it had disappeared before—for months at a time when he was traveling with Doctors Without Borders. The idea that his body had really disappeared held only an abstract quality for her, something gossamer and misty that would clear of its own accord. But then the image of Simon, the familiar picture of him that she carried in her brain, began to slip away in the twenty-four hours after the visit by Manthus and Son. One minute, she could recall his face with perfect clarity. The next, it would play hide and seek, peering just over the horizon of her mind where she could sense his face but not fix a clear image. She spent the day ransacking the house, gathering all the pictures of Simon she could find and placing them in every obvious area. She pasted his office brochure above the washing machine, their wedding photo on the bookshelf above the bed, the one with Simon heaving an exaggerated sigh at Astrid wearing donkey’s ears on the refrigerator. Peter, their best friend, took that picture the day after they got engaged, the day he christened them “Sigh and Ass.”
During her mad hunt for pictures, she came upon the red and black onyx necklace that Simon had given her on their first anniversary. “A reminder,” he said, “that you look best when dressed in onyx and red.” As she lifted it from the drawer, a black onyx came loose from its setting, hit the floor and rolled under the bed. She scrabbled about, moving her hand in arcs across the dusty surface, and when she felt the jewel under her palm, she scooped it up and brought it out into the light. It lay black and wrapped in gray dust against her pale palm. Before Simon’s death, she would have felt horrid that the necklace broke. And now? It was just a paler shade of dust. Like the paper that floated down into the streets after the towers fell on 9-11. For days, people were finding ledger sheets, desk calendar pages, and handwritten notes that had escaped the crush of the building, things that were a top priority at 8:45 and a morbid triviality by 9:15.
She closed her fingers over the onyx and thought about where she left the tripod and the timer. Her mind roved the room to find the perfect spot to set up the shot, but nothing clicked. She couldn’t see it. She closed her eyes and she couldn’t see Simon’s face. She tried to conjure the image, to recall the wedding picture of them together in the frame just a foot away from her. She could just open her eyes, she told herself, but she stamped her foot in response. She wanted to do this herself, but no matter how hard she tried, his face wouldn’t be found. She opened her eyes and looked at the picture, at his face so close to hers, the great grin stretching her thin cheeks and his subdued smile like a small flower with long, long roots. Like onyx and red, they went together. They were together. The picture said so, and pictures always caught the truth. Pictures always tell the truth.
In twenty minutes she had the tripod set up in the bedroom doorway, the timer’s gears crunching away the seconds. Astrid stood beside the open bedroom window with a scarlet scarf around her head waiting for the particular tick that marked three seconds before the shutter snapped. When she heard it, she took a breath and tossed the onyx out into the empty space as the shutter snapped. The processed shot showed her shrouded head gazing at the onyx as it began its three story fall to earth.
She titled the picture: “Cutting Onyx From Red.”
The Myths of Living Page 3
