by Maria Mutch
“I wanted you to know. I figure, even with all these years, it still matters.”
Molly said nothing for a moment. “Naturally. Of course it matters.” She turned away slightly.
“Yeah, it’s been a long six weeks. No, seven.” The weeks were air-filled, desiccated structures now.
Molly nodded and appeared to be thinking.
As Sabine watched her and the change in her face, how her stance seemed to calcify, she realized that something had been unwittingly but satisfyingly transferred. In saying that Seth was gone, she had somehow passed to Molly the weight of the body, or a limb of it, or the unwieldy skull at least. In its place was the paradoxical aliveness in the giving of bad news, a black delight. Seeing Molly’s stricken face, she realized it was that exact expression that she had wanted to witness. Why she had come. She smiled for the first time in days.
She noticed suddenly that the paper from the breast pocket of her coat was now on the floor beside the chair. Molly saw it also, and picked it up.
“That’s for you,” Sabine said. Molly looked at her questioningly. Sabine smiled again. Then she laughed, almost explosively, brokenly. She coughed and covered her mouth. She took a small handkerchief from her pants pocket, embroidered with an E for Ellena, and wiped her face with it. “Sorry,” she said. She gestured at the folded paper that Molly held lightly in her hand. “You keep that. It’s yours.”
The Documentary
In the documentary, volunteers sit in a cramped office with bulletin boards covered in papers. The volunteers have pledged their spare time to recover the unwanted, and the particular woman being discussed has been gone for seven years. She was last seen wandering barefoot along the embankments underneath a bridge, close to the water, her hair matted, her arms and ankles pricked with scars. Her words, though, possessed a clarity that the few people who came forward each remarked on, so that the volunteer named Angela says to the interviewer:
“At least three people said they heard her reciting poetry. All three mentioned an older man, who claimed to be her father, coming up to her and saying he was taking her home. But we learned down the line that her father was already dead. Nobody cares, though. She wasn’t in a penthouse or beautiful, and her skin wasn’t the right colour. Not only was she a prostitute, she was a crackhead, and bingo: Who gives a fuck? She mattered as much as the garbage.
“The reliability of the witnesses, you know … questioned. Nobody wants to spend the time on somebody who don’t matter. People say there aren’t resources, or real evidence that anything untoward”—Angela says untoward with emphasis and almost smiles, takes a drag of her cigarette—“happened. That some people don’t want to be found and maybe it’s just as well, they say. She fell in the river, oblivious, high as fuck, or she put herself in there on purpose, you know?”
The phone rings in the background and she stops talking to look at the man who picks it up, then starts to talk again. “The thing is, she started out like everybody does, right? A baby. Precious for a minute, and then … she believed the worst voice she heard.
“Who knows, right? Downward spiral from there. We could analyze this to fucking death. A person goes missing in Texas or Alberta or Timbuktu, and we have search parties—like hundreds of people and dogs and choppers even—lots of coverage, the media goes apeshit, and then somebody else goes off the end of the earth and you can hear the proverbial pin drop. You want to know what the difference is between those two people?”
Angela leans back in her chair, takes a long haul of her cigarette, blows out the smoke, and says, “If you find out, please let me know. Here’s the fucking number.”
Luna
People don’t seem to see her. She stands in the park and feels the gazes that pass over her, as if she is a gap, in some way undetectable. If people look at her, they do so reluctantly. She has read that, somewhere out in the world, scientists have made a material so black that the brain can’t see it. Partly, she thinks, she is unseen because she wears so many layers of clothing. She appreciates the self-sufficiency in the clothing on one’s back.
Also, she keeps papers under there, tucked between a man’s denim jacket and a mustard-colour woolly sweater, pages from the Times, 2001, when ash and people fell from the sky. The paper reminds her, not just with the images, but the substance of them, of the fleeting nature of all things, most especially the newsprint itself. But tucked between her clothes the papers have lasted years, even if crumpled and separated in spots and glued down in others because of moisture (the time she woke in a puddle; the time a man doused her with his hose as she walked by on what he considered to be the sidewalk belonging to his store, therefore to him).
So the paper has turned to pulp in places, then hardened and has weathered, as she has, the fullness of the changing seasons, borne witness to her time, even though the articles are stamped with dates and headlines. The paper has evolved in this way along with her. The names are typed out with the faces of those long gone. The fallen. The falling. She herself had been nowhere near the nucleus but had entered those rolling clouds of ash godlike and straight on. It was important, she felt, to attend the process. Dissipating humans had to be witnessed. She hoped that someone would do the same for her when it was her time.
She loves her shoes the most. The sturdiest boots she has ever owned, a deep red-brown like a third-day scab. They came straight from the people who hand out sandwiches or blankets. She keeps a matchbook tucked into the top of one, and chewing gum in the other, though they get exposed to weather in that location. Still, she doesn’t want to mess with a system that says how things are, and speaks a kind of truth, that objects and people go unprotected. We wait to become, she says, when we already are.
She drinks a root beer that she purchased at 11:07. Her enormous watch swings on her wrist if she pushes her numerous sleeves up, and is a part of her survival. The numbers have meaning, tell her when to cross a street, head uptown, eat the half sandwich she has hidden in an alley or a park, find the remedy for a certain ill or ache. Take three sips of brandy at 3:11 or 5:56 exactly or not at all. The brandy is good, too, not cheap. She doesn’t keep the bottle on her person but rather tucked in a secret location. Too secret to tell. It is always there, silent and waiting, until she finishes the one and finds its replacement. She likes the right balance of numbers and doing and fate.
Her process is a reckoning of accounts, a result of endless tallying—another use for her watch, which keeps track of the souls. Always so many. And the seconds keep going by.
She scoops a beautiful rumple of blue paper from the trash bin and moves to a bench to sit with it, smooth it out in her lap. But the lettering is unreadable, and the paper was better when it was bunched up, so she balls it and places it in the loose outer pocket of the outermost jacket. Clothing in this way is a psalm of the galaxy; there are layers and rings and regions, planetary orbits in the pendants that hang from her neck. She feels, as ever, the movement, the entropy, of all things. The atrocious urge to expand and keep going.
She herself has a small space in which to live on certain nights, to be confined, though she is never sure of how she gets there. She simply arrives. Always she finds the same configuration of bland terrors—the nefarious others—alongside the offerings of food and water. They give her something for the cough, which they note and discuss among themselves. One or two of them tell her she is stubborn if she refuses. She takes the paper mask with elastic ear-bands and wears it like a hat while her face remains stoic, and always it fools them. She dissolves into the city night. She tells them before leaving that she is a construction of ashes.
3
Cells
Where do you locate loss in the city? Or in the brain. The neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield poked around a live brain with electrodes and the patient heard a piece of music, long forgotten, and actually sang along. Another neuron is touched and another scene opens, a park bench, a street sign, the taste of an apple. Inside the cells the molecular imprint of wh
at we have devoured or what has been forced on us, brought back to life by that electrode. Molly locates the neuron that contains her mother’s hands, another for her bracelets, another for her saying the word vase, another for her face backlit by the sun.
Molly could hide Seth, too, in this space, this city of doors and alleys and nooks. She could leave the ideas of him, here and there, until he was so dispersed that she didn’t have to worry about coming upon him anymore. The problem of other people was that they sometimes resembled him. Not the hair, exactly, but the shape of the head, or not that, but the rolling walk or the guttural laugh. Enough like him to make her stop and stare. The first time they met it was at a party, years ago, and she noticed, along with the slight stain over his right cheek, the ghost of something, though he smiled.
She holds a small scar of him there in her left hand. A thin wishbone shape in hard gristle along the Mount of Venus. It is a kind of knowledge, ever present, though it edges an absence.
* * *
See the Japanese man, for instance, who after losing his wife in a tsunami learned to scuba dive to try to locate her remains in the ocean. He dove again and again, imagining perhaps that she was still the same. Still whole, still her, still locatable. An older woman went to the shore and placed lunches in the water daily for her daughter who likewise did not survive, an offering that attempted to stave off forgetting, how details themselves become lost. As a result of not being found, the missing person becomes an inhabitant of that larger, more nebulous space. They reside in a sea.
* * *
People forget the foundation, she thinks, now that she has the time and this particular upward view, that all cities are essentially the same, in spite of cultural assertions and type of buildings and linguistic quirks, which religions and races are grouped where and why. The ego is in love with its lines and borders, and wants to render the separations as absolute; it’s always bawling about how individual it is. But the dirt on the subway platform is hybrid, polyglot, even galactic. She wishes to point out that the human body is stuffed with the Milky Way, that’s how foreign it is. How far people have travelled, first as particles shot from the rage of dying stars, reassembled here as bones, skin, muscle. Teeth. Permanently alien and yet unequivocally like each other. She loves this place, even this sidewalk with its faint smell of urine, human or canine. Her affection doesn’t discount, however, the city’s avaricious side. The edges and forbidding creases, the manias that erupt at frequent intervals (and is she afflicted with one of these, she wonders), the din. The city also has a preference for newcomers who are eager and robust, attracting them with its garbage-strewn sequins, because it requires a large pool on which to feed. The city, she wishes to say, eats its young.
Molly
“Ma’am, you gotta breathe!”
* * *
A Musketeer grabs at my shirt, before he retracts in surprise. We are all undone by our motions. None of us are who we used to be, who we say we are. That snowflake two stories up has been replaced by another one, equally delicate and astonishing. A crystal palace within the width of a human hair.
One of the Crones strokes, momentarily, the Musketeer’s black puffer jacket. Revenge turns to see who might be coming, if the source of the sirens is visible. Blue Girl has been unconsciously holding her breath. Suddenly, in concert, she and I take in the salty, chilled air, bring into our lungs those ashy, harbour-tinged, construction-razed, galaxy-sourced atoms.
* * *
“Like she heard you, man—”
“That was a big one.”
“Fuck me, I can’t—”
“Where’s the ambulance, man, when you goddamn need one?”
Blanks
I’m trying to find home, but there isn’t one.
* * *
Nothing to return to. The house is missing. The parents. The dog. The furniture and the boxes, the stockpiles—vanished. The polished banister and the ancient refrigerator. All of it, lifted off in a blink. Turned to an ash so fragile it could be entirely wiped away. Nothing left but the ground and its scar, now covered and therefore also absent.
Tinder
No, no. Begin with the house, the one that burned. It was in a town in northern Ontario where deer and black bear occasionally wandered onto lawns and porches, and moose came to the edge of the forests to lick the winter salt from the highway. The population was only 1,207 when Molly lived there but swelled to more than five thousand in summer when people turned up at their cottages and the tourists came through to buy ice cream and pastries named for beaver tails or wolf scat. The roads and numerous lakes were lined with huge slabs of pink granite, the flesh of giants left to decompose. The woods that she ran through were filled with the black branches of hemlocks, sugar maples, and cedars, and tamaracks that blazed yellow in autumn. She was feral much of the time, and stood on the hill as the sun was going down to watch her house until her mother stood in the doorway and squinted into the gathering dark. The house was big and old, partly constructed from bricks made from local clay, with a white wooden addition. Its delicate constitution after seventy-three winters caused it to howl when the wind did and allow rain or snow into unseen, papery corners. In the summers, she was sure she felt the house swell with humidity and warmth. There were faint stains around the ceiling lights, which held the shadows of wasps and spiders inside their frosted glass bowls.
She was even more sure, however, that the old walls were shored up by the hoarding practices of her parents and the supplies they kept for a nameless destination in hundreds of boxes that were stacked, numbered, and labelled. Black ink, midnight blue. A repository that waited for something fiery in the distance. They stuffed the house like packing a musket, expressing the fear of a loss they couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate to her. Her parents’ desires did not belong to her. The boxes and stacks, the letter and number system, were meaningless except for being the physical manifestation of a nebulous, psychic darkness. She felt shame whenever a stranger came to the house and the face, eyes wide, registered the size of the collection that sprawled from room to room, around the larger pieces of furniture, and obscured the home’s interior structure. Most of the rooms, and much of the basement, were reduced to being a series of narrow walkways, such that the boxes themselves, multiplied so many times, became something of a single entity, one that waited. No doubt the visitors, if they didn’t know better, wondered if the family had just moved in or were about to leave, but the organized cartons were labyrinthian, neatly aligned and had none of the unstuffed chaos of a transition. This was an entrenchment so refined that most people, gobsmacked, made no comment about it at all. Her parents’ friends, likewise, accepted the cardboard arrangement as if it weren’t really there, except that the boxes were useful for resting a glass of beer or an ashtray.
The boxes revealed another aspect of themselves when she was eight and the family had arrived back home from a rare road trip to visit her grandfather in New York. She returned with the imprint of the city, its puzzle of lines and forms and light, and she saw the boxes differently. On the ones stacked up in the room just off the kitchen—what might have served as the dining room for a different family—she drew windows with people sketched in going about their various intimacies above other windows and store signs and the block-lettered names of theatres. She used light strands to stand in for neon signs and light poles and the lit awnings. The following year she added the forms of bankers and construction workers, dancers going to class, artists and addicts, the bumbling tourists, and finally a subway system in the basement using part of her father’s train set in the one space left and included some graffiti. She added a cellist with an open case to collect the coins, and the actual mice of the basement she considered to be outsized, zombified rats, true rulers of the underground and the city above.
Molly
Held in the breath. Just a few weeks before the fire, I ran to see the commotion in the backyard but stopped short of the doorway to watch from the shadow of the house.
My mother and father hovered drunkenly over a crate of oysters. They wore T-shirts and jeans even though it was freezing out. They didn’t know I was home from my dance lesson, dropped off by my friend’s mother, and I said nothing.
I didn’t know what the oysters had to do with anything, why there was a box of them, or why they were arguing. My mother’s long hair splayed in the wind as though she were underwater. There was a plunge in the barometer, or vodka sloshed in their veins. My father was yelling, poking the air with the shucker. He was rarely angry, and for a few moments his rage made him exquisite until it made him clumsy. He jabbed the air, then the oyster he was holding, scooping out the pulse of his hand when he missed. I might have made a sound but they didn’t hear me.
The two of them wobbled speechlessly while he bled. Silence so consuming it came for me as well and, for what felt like several minutes, I stayed where I was. Behind me was a kitchen full of crusted pots and dishes, an elderly Saint Bernard who hadn’t been brushed in years, a telephone buried in a shale of newspapers. The boxes. I was intensely aware of my body and yet couldn’t seem to move. I wanted badly to sleep, and yet red, pendulous drops fell from my father’s hand. More and more of them, as they pooled on his shoes, the ground. Finally, my skin rippled and I was released from the spell. I ran to get towels as though I were burning.
At the hospital, after his hand had been stitched, my mother ran her ringed fingers through his hair. He kissed her chest. I was born when they were only eighteen, which means they had just turned thirty. I went to sit in a plastic chair against the mint-green wall. There was a window away from the machines and wires beyond which enormous snowflakes had begun to fall. A nurse came to stand beside me. I thought she would say something about the snow, as grown-ups always seemed to do, how finally it was here or it was too bad or how long it might last, but instead she touched my shoulder and said, “Look after those two.”
