Moth

by Thomas Heise

  Oslo, Summer 2010

  Month by month things got worse, which in retrospect was for the best. By the late summer of 2010, my desire to travel to Barcelona to see the Museu Sentimental bequeathed by the eccentric collector of curiosities Frederic Marès took on the quality of an obsession that began to impede my ability to think clearly. Upon waking, I would devote a portion of each morning to cataloguing the luminous items that had appeared in my imagination the prior night: Roman and Medieval keys laid out on red velvet; scissors; hairpins fashioned from porcupine spines; a taxidermied white rabbit in a bell jar; vases encrusted with seashells, birds, wax fruit, insects, or some combination of all; bills of exchange; licenses; one hundred canes with handles scrimshawed with the figures of reclining animals; mechanical dolls; stereoscopes; magic lanterns to entertain in the evening; a nineteenth-century French table clock of marquetry and gilded bronze but most notable for its face with moving eyes; compact powders kept in small embroidered purses, bouquet holders, mother-of-pearl cameos, earrings made of peacock feathers, decorative items from the feminine world of the bourgeoisie for any event or emotion that may arise unexpectedly, including mourning; miniature paper theatres by the eighteenth-century engraver Martin Engelbrecht featuring courtesans and the Massacre of the Innocents at Bethlehem; rows of daguerreotypes of the Catalan seaside, circa 1845, and of clergymen and artists with the kohl-eyed stare of the dead; battalions of colonial armies composed in tin; twelve lockets of curled hair — all sisters — preserved under glass. Which objects, these remnants of a departed man or woman, were in Marès’s possession in the fortress of the Royal Palace of the Counts and which in the galleries of my sleep I had invented, I could never say, but the inability to draw the distinction, to tell for sure what was real and what was mere speculation, or which belonged to Marès on his shelves and in his cabinets and which were mine, if only as wisps of dreams in the lit-up neural circuitry in my brain where I held things I could not hold, was of little matter. In the depths of my fascination with Marès, when I was recuperating for several months on Halsnøy, I could be found most mornings as a fixture at the end of the pier, observing the deepwater fishing boats return through a blue antediluvian light on the horizon, nearly sinking under the weight of their nets quivering with trapped life hauled up from regions where submarines travelled. A few seagulls alert as centurions. A line of elderly women practicing tai chi, redirecting the ocean breeze around them like slow-moving fans. As I recall it now, I would wait nearly paralyzed with expectation when the nets dropped to the deck and spilled millions of translucent arctic krill, each with a thumbprint of fire near the head, crackling back and forth in a huge pile as if shocked with electricity. I remember in the hills behind me in a small apple orchard owned by the monastery where, for a modest fee and the promise of silence I was a welcomed guest, towered a thirty-foot statue of Our Lady of Grace whose arms, by some trick of the weather, were perpetually wrapped in clouds, though in the prior century she must have served as a lighthouse of sorts for boats that had lost their way. I cannot claim to comprehend the nature of this scene, but it has been burned permanently into my retina so that the ghostly afterimage of the Virgin reappears if I stare for too long at a white wall. In the film version of my life, I would have boarded the Thursday tour boat to Barcelona and on it met a middle-aged woman named Ms. Q. with a tiger-eye ring, the first thing I noticed, and one or two facts I learnt about her as we left the fjords behind was she had taken to living on the ocean and would not disembark when we arrived at the port and the palm trees and the possibilities of La Rambla. Because, she said, the enclosed and impeccably well-mannered society of the deck with nearly every personality and profession represented, together with the elliptical route of the voyage which amplified each moment while bringing time nearly to a standstill, so after awhile the conversations with the accountants from Milwaukee or the historians from Paris she had and the meals consumed during the prolonged fortnight, to say nothing of the open expanses of water upon which motion appeared to cease for days, or the sensation that the boat itself seemed to stay anchored in one place while the ocean moved around it until at last the narrow inlets and coves of Costa Brava filled with snorkelers appeared, were, she insisted, perfectly sufficient. What was to be gained, she said, if everyone will depart happy to return to a world precisely as they left it, unfamiliar and virtually incomprehensible? As we sat in silence before a plate of sardines flecked with parsley and grains of sea salt, I did not believe her, but wanted to. On the route back, she was nowhere to be found. In another life, I may have known her further, if only momentarily, but in the real world that I once thought held me captive, I came to understand over time and with the accumulated evidence each day provides that my recursive imagination and my desire to be free of a past that doubled back on itself like a serpent consumed with its own tail, were my true shackles. I had to learn to see the wonders and the loveliness of the base world before us as I broomed leaves and green flies turned up on their wings in the cloister’s shaded arcades where I loitered at my duties prior to retiring to my cell. I would shut the door with the knowledge that the world was inside too, between the walls and the vaulted ceiling, and out of honour for it I would start to write minor notations I would never complete, the number of slate tiles on the floor (one hundred and forty-four), the spell for which the desktop’s copper stain was illuminated by fading sunlight (nine minutes), the cobwebs weighted down with motes of dust, a whole universe lost every day — and upon closing my eyes on my cot I would recall the hooded monks singing the Liturgy of the Hours from earlier in the morning, beautifully together in their separation, and I would feel instantly and without fail as if I were being hoisted, suspended in my disbelief, on invisible strings toward the black ceiling slowly beginning to brighten with the first stars of evening.

  Berlin, Summer 2011

  Through the chandeliered corridors upholstered in shadows and bevelled mirrors of the Grand Palace Hotel I walked in search of Ms. M., my footsteps keeping time with my pulse. Along the baroque frieze of angels in an arbor, under recessed ceilings painted in a trompe l’oeil of clouds, dark oils, rope tassels, voices on cellular phones retreating into an alcove, waiters and maids glimpsed briefly behind columns, into the atrium in which wind always blowing originated from nowhere. The fuel of all elegance and allegiance is delay. And so each time I caught sight of her descending the staircase, I contemplated the instant from every angle I could think of while still inside of it, even as I waited for the moment after, when the scene would be processed and filed away. The clink of her bracelet on marble, which catches the attention that has begun to wander, is followed by a close-up of the birthmark on her right ankle partially concealed by a strap so it appeared that censored letters in a seriffed font were peeking through. Had I approached through the columns of the eastern corridor, I would have noted that the point where the black seam of her dress expanded at her hip was her hand holding Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and her pause on the stairs that coiled like a shell about to release her was due to the door revolving, though no one was in it. It rotated slowly, delivering from the outside voices of children, those who were about to depart, perhaps even her future self who, though gone, would continue to live on within her. Later on a bridge in St. Petersburg when I wondered if a butterfly has any instinctual recollection of its terrestrial life before the long, deep sleep of its transformation I knew the thought had come to me in a montage in which the final image was this one: her hem rustling in a light breeze was a shimmer of red. For what other reason than change in the midst of permanence did I see the world through a lens that would allow me to alter the sequence of events even if the knowledge gained was not that I knew her more, but understood myself less? Was that not the probable outcome of any true encounter, the kind that renders even the most familiar strange — a tree with all of its leaves removed? My encounters with women left me altered and perplexed not only by what I wanted, but also by the sheer notion of what it me
ans to want. Years from now when (not if) I happen upon her again in this same hotel or another exactly like it, deserted but for the two of us, I will, despite my best intentions, have almost no point of reference except little ellipses of memory, the archipelago of my desires in the great wash of time. It is as if my desire, which by its very design cannot be fulfilled, has led me to perpetually build a new self around it while discarding the old shell. What stays with me is this: the beads of sweat I traced in a constellation of thoughts on her lower back while she read, the sun reaching its final efflorescence in the park. In retrospect, it was an image of tenderness we could agree upon from our half-dozen clandestine assignations. The road to the hotel was lined with conifers all the way to the horizon into which I stared as birds materialized in the sky, pouring out of a funnel in another dimension, so the whole tone of the afternoon darkened in an instant that would soon bring upon us a storm of beauty. Thus it came to be certain moments we shared, even if the sharing had been illusionary, carried extra weight that I refused to be divested of and would, in fact, infuse with more meaning I would retreat into as I sensed the very density of our encounters, however brief, were evaporating. Consider for instance the silk ribbon she purchased for pennies in an Indonesian market where the locals wore them around the wrist to curry favour with the gods of good luck and, curiously, as a reminder to forget the harms visited upon one in the prior year. She twisted hers into a question mark to bind her hair, which I unravelled by simply pulling on its loose thread and tied to the headboard as she drew the curtains closed and which now subsequently lost may indeed be used by the Dutch maid as a bookmark. I admit I can summon nothing of the original seller’s face except her extraordinary blue eyeshadow that created the disturbing sensation that she was looking at me, even when her eyes were closed. The images — the Indonesian’s eyes and Ms. M.’s — could not be spliced, but would remain, like horror and love, juxtaposed so the differences threw into distressing relief an underlying similarity. From the southern corridor of the hotel, an eye catches her attention so her hand slips as she looks left in mid-step on the stairs in Fibonacci’s sequence, clinks the banister with her bracelet, while a waiter walks out of a mirror on the wall and the camera follows him through the hallway’s telescoped arches receding in time all the way into the atrium balancing a tray of drinks, like a crystal city. Its refracted essence — a sensation of stillness and classical reassurance we could see through but like a Chardin painting believe in anyway. In this particular cut, I am in the corner taking notes on the two pale scars, like commas, on her temple and the graceful palm tree over my shoulder casts a shadow. Those whom fortune neglects is given a glimpse of something that surpasses all expectations, at least this is what I thought when I saw her leaving in the lunar, spectral light with her suitcase on whose right corner she had affixed an image of a nautilus cut away to display the whorled interior of its former life, the gloomy chambers marking a year at each turn and on whose left she had placed a decal of a fleur-de-lys and the French flag. In the hotel room, she turned and took two photographs: one of me striding across the carpet to her and the other of my hand on the lens. Out in the hallway, the wainscoting was carved with egrets, tropical flowers, colonial homes, a baroque frieze of angels, there were rumours of a garden, and the ceiling of clouds beginning to roil. I lay atop a florid duvet listening to her favourite music a year later and as I fell asleep I could feel dream liquid siphoned out of my brain through the coiled tubes of the headphones where a machine converted each drop into words in my journal. In my dream, she was at the same time as I in a high-ceiling room whose burgundy wallpaper had begun to peel and now formed a recursive loop with a damask pattern of leaves and pomegranates on the underscroll. Duras’s book perched on her pillow like a bird, and as she slept completely enciphered in the perfect distributions of her body, she dreamt of me thinking of her, as if we were intertwined by a neural circuit in the suspended animation of sleep, its beautiful sentence that when it finally comes to an end drops us back onto the earth in a plume of dust. In my billfold is the out-of-focus photo of me crossing the room, the bed, the lamp, even the light from it elongated, streaks of energy emanating from all things stretched like a wire between two coordinates in space. It was evidence in the end of my wish to remain in the past and to be in the future simultaneously, which when overcorrected was certain to cause new issues in this attenuated life for the next lover, if there were to be one. The last time I saw her she was in a hat at dusk, looking like a woman about to board a train, and out of nowhere a shower of linden leaves. The streetlamps had come on but the air was still ignited with light, an ethereal quality as when you are awake inside a dream. I thought I could stand at this intersection for hours, the sun setting like a placebo. The effluvia of cars through the streets like lines of data. The sky was the colour of my anxiety. And pinned to her jacket a boutonnière — a dot in time that signaled a time beyond it — comprised of three small flowers arranged in a spiral of red, white, and yellow, a vertigo of enfolded petals that I gazed into until they began to spin.

  Berlin, Late Fall 2011

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