by Maria Mutch
“What’s happening?”
“She’s having a fit. Some lady’s having a fit.”
V
The boy is lost and hasn’t seen his mother in several minutes. I understand something of this space, having lost my own mother, and my father, when I was twelve—though I lost them permanently. He doesn’t seem to mind his status. His body is still, but his energy hovers, hummingbird-like. His socks, which show below his too-short pants, are melon coloured. I want to talk to him, convey something of what I’m seeing. He understands shadows and animals and secrets, he is full of them. His fingers are as fine as those of a much younger child. His eyes have minky lashes that make his lids appear to be in slow motion when he blinks. He understands time. He makes me think of Augustin, but Augustin is robust and always hollering or running. Stella is much the same, though she is attuned to the outside environment in a way that this boy would comprehend. She has, at times, the same fluttery heart, and a lightness, until she is angry. At which point she is volcanic and a tiny bit monstrous, a tiny bit like her mother.
I would like to shut out my children. Make them vanish, just for an instant. But they are everywhere in this atmosphere, this part of the city, this sidewalk, where we’ve walked so many times. They gather with the people around me as if they are ghosts or vibrations. They have never in their nine years seen me exactly this way. They’ve only witnessed the lesser angels and absences that flicker through. I’m an expert at covering up the moment when consciousness returns or alters, and can smooth over almost any conversation that has been temporarily lost. But they are glossy-eyed and watchful, always picking up the slightest ripples in the energy around me. They understand things, I think, that I haven’t understood myself.
But I’ve seen the boy before. People are more connected in the city than you might imagine. I know his face. His name tastes like graham crackers, and something silver, and I feel grit, too, though I think that it was shoved in my mouth when I fell. The falling involves twists and slams that I often don’t recall, scraping the mouth as if to eat the ground and take in a surprising amount of dirt and sand grains. No one will have seen it happen. What they see is the toppling, shaking body and a mouth holding grit of a mysterious origin. How did it get there? they say, to the person already on the ground. I feel in some strange place.
* * *
Come back. Someone followed me, and was familiar and not. At first just an energy in the city that gradually emerged, developed a colour, and rose up, as if out of a sea. The shape followed me along streets, through crowds, through little parks, under awnings and the bare branches of lindens and silver maples. Maybe it floated over the heads of the people striding or moved through them, even beneath them. Over the blocks, I kept the same pace, and never looked back.
I think of the uncanniness in certain relationships, the ones to do with sex, what some might call love, how connection is sometimes there even when the love is no longer practiced and absence has come to stay instead. Prescience doesn’t leave, the ability to know the unknowable, the sense of the other person in the hordes and traffic, or the perpetually lighted ether. I knew he was there without looking back.
VI
This was the late nineties, before cell phones were everywhere. The towers still stood, blinking sleepily at the sky. I called him from an oily pay phone whose plexiglass was printed with the fingers of countless others. Desperadoes who had stood in this same spot, watching the falafel truck unfold itself.
I said, “Don’t make me beg,” into the receiver, and then I said it for real when the line was connected and he was at the other end. It was a form of begging I had never envisioned. I would have said I simply wasn’t capable of forming the words, I didn’t possess the DNA, the molecules, the chemistry, until suddenly I did. I almost started to laugh, so startled was I by the sound of it. No, I did start to laugh, which made him hang up.
I sank another quarter into the phone’s slit of an eye and spoke into its mouth. “It seems to me that we’ve left kindness at the curb.”
“It’s a packed curb, then, because we’ve put some other shit there as well.”
“Start again.”
He sighed.
I sighed. “Unwind the film to before the dysfunction.”
“Doesn’t work.”
“No, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Neither of us said anything for several moments, so the city filled in with its huffs and sirens and honks. The distant murmur of a jackhammer. Something clanged. Two neurons, ones that have been tickled or exploded or inverted by him. My body was suddenly tired. Perhaps it was changing its mind.
“I want to hear you say it,” he said.
“This is a negotiation.”
“This is a fucking negotiation, Molly.”
“You want to hear it,” I said.
“I want you to work for this.”
I watched an Italian widow dressed in black amble along the sidewalk with a plastic bag of library books. Her thick ankles protruded over the top edge of her shoes, which were heavy-heeled and also black, and I loved her deeply. Everything about her. I could have put the phone down and walked up to her and wrapped my arms around her. The whole prospect was wildly tempting.
He whistled a show tune while he waited. Something from Phantom of the Opera. I started to laugh. And then I started to cry.
“Close enough,” he said.
* * *
He had come to track me down on my way to my doctor. A pursuit set to the tune of Thelonious Monk. He followed me along streets and streets, and I lost him in elevators and brilliant corners.
The previous night he had held me close while we lay in bed, and I begged my brain to quiet its campaign, to let me sleep under a roof that didn’t shake and rattle. Be still, I thought. And he understood that I was in some nameless distress, and he held me with his whole body, with a completeness that made me ache, while he stroked my hair.
I heard him rise and go to his desk. I heard him in the kitchen and ice tumble in the glass, because it was summer again and hot and I knew he longed for cold and something to numb his mind. He sweated for both of us, drank for both of us.
In the morning, I found him on the floor beside me, because it was cooler there, he said.
“Is there something wrong with you? Is there something you want to talk about? You can tell me,” he said. “Absolutely anything. Please trust me. Always trust me.”
“We’re like fireflies,” I said. “We pulse off and on.”
“You can still trust me.”
“I’m still fine.”
“Are you?”
“I’m a simple woman,” I said.
VII
Sabine made trips into the city less and less, and only to see her brother. Mostly Seth had come to her. The last time he visited, he was heading north and decided to snowshoe her mountain on his way. She had watched him load his car with the gear that he kept at her house and felt a prescient sense of loss that was strangely enervating, almost sleep-inducing. She knew somehow that he would fall or lose his way.
“People are always getting lost on those trails,” she said to him, standing there on the cold front step in her bedroom slippers and robe. “Or swallowed up the mountain, and you know what? Some of them don’t come down.” The mountain did things to skiers and hikers. It broke legs and threw bodies, or hid them in caves. She supposed it wasn’t the mountain’s fault but its nature, much as the city had a similar tendency to devour. He had various devices for being found, but she thought the beacons would fail, the signals through the air would be too thin, the batteries could leak their charges, or people wouldn’t listen.
“I’m not listening,” he said, and smiled. He kissed her cheek and hugged her. It was one of the last times, and the one that stayed with her. His face had had a diffuse, underlying hunger that suggested he might be using again. She replayed this in her mind, again and again, the warmth of him, how solid and real he had been, and how thin and ghostlike he was now.
> She herself had been drinking too much lately, and so she supposed it was cyclical. One became absorbed in the problems, and then, later, one didn’t. But he had returned, exactly on time, and grinning and exhilarated, and that worried her, too.
“I’m alive!” he’d said, arms up. Excessive, maybe, for this place, and a sign somehow. He would, in fact, disappear soon afterward, November 25, 2009, and absurdly. Even though she had predicted it, she couldn’t deny the question, once it had happened, of how someone could go missing. All the eyes and cameras and signals and trackers and beeps and lights. The planet was overwhelmed with witnesses. People were always scanning the heavens for word from other life-forms—what about their own? He had become something distinctly mysterious and other. Seven weeks ago, and no word since. No information, no trails to follow, no messages or signs. Only a curious and impossible space in the pattern of her life where he was supposed to stand or send up a flare. The void became sickeningly wider, like a gap in ozone. As the options for his disappearance grew, so did the void. His last known sighting had been in the city, when his landlord came to fix a broken window in his apartment, but he was always taking trips, could never be still for long. His phone had been left behind, but his car was missing, and possibly some of his gear, though she couldn’t be sure what exactly was gone.
* * *
She left behind Ellena, again, and the dogs, including the lame one they had just adopted, and the house they lived in. She could have done the drive from her house to Seth’s apartment in one straight shot, without having to stay the night in a hotel, but the stop was what a stop was meant to be: a barrier between her and the city. No one, apart from the desk clerk, could say who she was, and no one could say what she did and why she was there. The lobby had small trees in large containers, vines and palms that pointed to a place far from here. Possibly all the leaves were plastic, and some of the sun-bleached ones were turning blue.
She couldn’t have recalled this place, and yet the precise alignment of the sleek lounge chairs seemed familiar. She had seen it only two weeks before. Three clerks stood behind the desk, two of them helping other people. On a table, there was a towering arrangement of flowers that Ellena would have called a “derangement.” She listened to the clicking of luggage hooves on the dark tiles as people regarded each other and saw their own displacement. The hotel tried to protect the traveller from too much otherness by being recognizable at the same time as anticipating a want. She didn’t care, however, if the hotel had the usual spike of indifference through its corporate heart. She only wanted to throw her long black and tattered coat onto a chair and heave herself onto a bed where she would be comatose until morning. She didn’t mind if the bed had not been properly made up since the last people, or hair still lurked on the pillows or the bathroom floor and spittle remained on the water glasses. She did not need the erasure of others, any more than she needed a hotel genie to unbottle.
“Thank you, Ms. Stein,” said the clerk, pushing the key cards in their small envelope across the counter. “Anything else I can do for you?” The clerk’s face was pasty and too pale from all the conciliations, Sabine felt, and yet she suddenly wanted to bang a fist on the black marble and make a demand or a declaration or lodge a complaint.
Instead, she laughed a little wildly. “Can you find my brother?”
The clerk appeared alarmed. “I’m sorry? Is he registered here, ma’am?”
She touched her fingers to her lips before she answered. “Don’t worry. I can find my own brother. He’ll turn up.” Make him appear, she thought. Produce the motherfucker. She would give anything for his deep laugh, his talk of the treks that took him up mountains or along rivers or through deserts. Even if he couldn’t, as she had, wrest himself for good from the city where they were born. Make him appear. Bring him back. If the hotel could do that, she would give it her soul.
VIII
The soul being a slippery entity.
A woman who stops to watch me is pregnant with twins. Her winter coat is slung wide, black clothes underneath. She has a shining ring through her septum (she is, perhaps, the Bull) and one hand on her stomach. She pleats her brow and shuts her mouth tight when she becomes aware that it was open. She takes my voltage personally. I’m here on the ground, a thing she doesn’t have room for. She feels that spaces have been smaller lately, tightening, and two children in one uterus is a particular burden. They seem to want to push each other out. Her lover told her about the sand tiger sharks who eat their siblings while still growing inside their mother, and this information haunts her. She regards animals more highly than people, so where does this leave the creatures she’s carrying? They have taken her over. When she really considers it, she knows that she is the one they are trying to shove out, with their powerful brains and dividing cells. They become bigger, and she becomes smaller, even if she doesn’t appear that way.
She watches my body and feels pity, a separation despite the short distance between us, now just a few feet. Her hand brushes the delicate boy who is also there, the one with a lion in him. She notices that he seems to belong to no one. She is taken up once more with the feet and heads right under her heart. I make the sound that causes her to see me again, and she thinks it is ungodly. She wonders if the two creatures hear this, the folding together of worlds: one collapsing, one being born. But the twins are taken up with her beats, the slosh of her breath and the burritos she had for lunch, their own plans. She doesn’t know what to do with this scene, the grey tones, the city park and the arch nearby. She is getting smaller, she feels, so small, and there are feet and elbows and skulls that roll within her with a force she can’t explain.
I can explain it, though she won’t hear me. The body is a vessel for what happens.
IX
Even though people are missing,
hearts have been broken,
and tucked away in buildings,
and right there in the parks and on the streets,
sex and death happen …
* * *
Seven minutes, that’s all that this seizure will take. All we have. In seven minutes you can boil an egg, read a poem, produce an orgasm, or listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor. We’re always counting, but the clocks don’t allow for the incongruities. The warp. You can hold decades in your body, if you wish, or only the present moment. Set your watch, let it count down. Prove to me that your seven minutes are different from mine.
* * *
Playful, remember? None of this is serious.
* * *
Yes.
No.
2
Sabine
“No, what I want is a smoke,” she said aloud, but she couldn’t have one unless she found the hotel’s rooftop patio as she did the last time, where dirty water pooled reassuringly. She had looked out at the sprawl of wide streets and strip malls, trees that appeared to be exactly fifteen years old. The light poles straining against the open blue sky had felt malevolent to her. The elegantly dipping electrical wires, too, and the flat, garish colours of the signs. She thought she felt a finely wafting, invisible exhaust, and imagined every crevice jammed with a grit that had travelled from the distant city or even the other side of the world.
But that was during a freak wave of heat that had come through the area, melting the snow and ice for just a few days before retreating. The air was cold again. January. The month of the dead and the new. She dared to believe he was dead, though she felt ashamed to think it. And nothing was new.
* * *
She decided on the lounge instead, which was dim and had a fish tank with dark, silvery inhabitants. She took a seat at the bar, and turned to see that many of the tables were occupied. In her experience, hotel bars, the truly liminal ones, were strangely cool and deserted places, but this one contained bridal parties, people from a conference, or a guided tour. Silver-haired men and women regarded a map—the paper kind—in one corner, and someone from another group intermittent
ly shrieked with laughter.
The bartender gave her a glass of wine, and it was a heart in her fist.
“One of my favourites,” he said. He had an enormous beard and mustache so thick his lips were undetectable. His eyes crinkled up so she could tell that he was smiling. He said something absurd about the wine; amenable notes of black raspberry and bacon fat. Tiny metal spikes shot from the arc of his ear. Deep in the thicket around his mouth, the glint of a piercing or maybe a capped tooth. He waited patiently as she sipped.
She nodded. “The lust of a woman. That’s all I get. But it’s good.” She could see the gold tooth in full.
“Here on business?” he said, and she wondered if this was a bit sarcastic. Whatever it meant to be someone on business, she did not resemble it.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said, and felt immediate regret. She had a notion to never confess her plans to strangers, which was not so much for personal safety but for something existential that rattled about in her chest and needed shielding. But the words were out, so she shrugged.
“I’m looking for an old friend of mine. Not here. In New York. Just stopping for the night.” All of which was true. She wasn’t only looking for Seth, whom she didn’t, deep in her heart, expect to find. She was also making this particular trip in order to find Molly, who at one time had known them both. Loved them both, hadn’t she? If she could not find the first, she could find the second. Molly was alive and well, and finding her should have been easy, considering. Yet the old numbers and contacts hadn’t worked. She had sent an email to the last address she had but had gotten no response.
