Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  * * *

  I felt the muscles of his back harden in response to my silence. The nonresponse of my response. He was transforming into another sort of animal, one with a shell. I knew he itched for a drink, but I stayed where I was, my thighs clenching him in a paroxysm of hate, in a fit of Who dares to look at the queen? Affronted. Pinning him to the bed with a rage that made me giant. The bourbon he wanted was on the desk several feet away, and he wanted it more than he wanted the colossus straddling his back, the one who didn’t return his love.

  * * *

  Except that I did. Love! screamed the betrayer in the temporal lobe, steeped in its feelings and perspectives, while that primitive amygdala, clearly threatened, took out a machete and with one swipe cut the word to ribbons. What I said was:

  “I can’t stay.” Or some such.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I have a class to teach,” I said. I no longer taught classes.

  “Okay.”

  “You shouldn’t talk of love,” I said.

  “Agreed.”

  “Why did you, then?”

  “I’m a simple man.”

  I could not abide the lie. “You know what a simple man doesn’t say?”

  “What?”

  “A simple man doesn’t say that he’s simple.” I wanted him to buck with rage, I wanted to ride a bull so intent on jettisoning its human that in order to fix my place I would have to nearly choke him. I wanted something that frothed at the mouth. He wanted, I knew, that bourbon. He waited for me to leave. “You are the least simple person there is,” I murmured.

  * * *

  I disembarked as if I wore robes. As I gathered up my pants and shirt I didn’t recognize my own heart breaking, and neither did the man who was about to say that I didn’t have a heart to break. You’ll be back, I thought. And so will I, and both of these things were true.

  * * *

  Oh, but the utter sweetness of leaving.

  Beckon

  Maybe two months passed before I felt his shadow. And I wanted to feel it, I wanted him to haunt me. In my prayers I asked for it. I said, Come and get me. The body, having made its decisions, wouldn’t have anyone else. No other seemed to fit, not the way he did, or the way I imagined he did. If someone—man or woman—tried to pull at my hair or pin me down, it did worse than enrage me. It left me stone-cold. I killed people with my withdrawals and silence. How I wouldn’t allow. I became a phantom, a ghost, who coasted away from various lovers in those eight weeks, having stuck them between practices and creative sessions and performances. I couldn’t abide whatever creature they seemed to be. They didn’t do it right, they had everything to prove, and I was monstrous, relishing my exits. It was a form of murder, I think, drowning the sods in that well of disdain that ran over and filled the city.

  Come and get me, I whispered to his shadow, this can’t go on much longer.

  We found each other on a subway platform, the Chambers Street station with its extravagant decomposition, as dilapidated and frail as the skin of a shedding snake. Puddles formed at our feet, the lights barred down. It was like an abandoned place, except that it wasn’t. It was unbelievably beautiful. The M train came and the wind with it, and we stayed on the platform, letting it go on without us. We stared at each other, and I saw in his face that he had been treating people as I had. Anguish is a thing you carry, though sometimes it belongs to someone else.

  “And,” he said.

  “And,” I said.

  We were hot and sweating, because it was mid-July, and he had been running to catch the train perhaps, and I was coming from practice. We were filthy, in other words, dilapidated creatures, smudged and torn, ridiculous orphans with a newfound capacity for cruelty and for love. I looked at him and shook my head, but he understood.

  “I think it is problematic,” he said piously.

  “Things often are.”

  “You were wrong about the meaning of life being the cochlea.”

  “That’s disappointing,” I said.

  “You just had the wrong snail.”

  “Oh? How could that be?”

  “There’s one that makes its shell out of iron. It’s even magnetic.”

  “Magnetic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “Exactly.” He raked his damp hair with his hand, looked down at the ground. I had, unconsciously or not, inched closer to him. Our fingers brushed. “Take me home,” he whispered into my hair.

  “No,” I said. But I was lying. I want you to weep, I thought. And he did.

  Kickbox

  Perhaps nine months later, a gestational period in which disdain could once again grow, but in the opposite direction, he became taciturn and morbid. And I wanted to fight. Physically. An inexplicable urge that I would place over and over into my work, causing dancers to box each other and rip and tear at the unseen membranes between them. The practice sessions were a mess while these sorts of moves were honed. But they fascinated me, and the faces fascinated me, too. I could peel away the costume of the monster and place it upon someone else.

  He came to the studio and watched, standing near the doorway with his hands in his jean pockets, his hair in its studied disarray, his sinewy body. He would have made a good dancer, I had often thought. A heated, glowering look, but no, it had changed and become something else. I squinted from my spot in the middle of the room where I had been showing the dancers how to really unravel. I squinted to see him better and what the expression meant, and the posture, but I knew already. I called for a break and strolled over.

  He said nothing, but turned and walked out. He was sober.

  Wait

  You get used to the weight of the city over your head, you learn not to feel it, or the crowds, in the same way that you can ignore the millions of particles absorbing the urine and rain and spilled coffee on the sidewalks and platforms. The subway stairs go up and down forgettably. You can even unsee the rats, and their spectacular tails, both stiff and slithery, and those magnificent, weird little hands.

  Otherwise, the city is a sledgehammer at the mind. The concrete becomes a blank, some folds for steps, the person and the rat next to you a smudge. The train a blur.

  I try to resist this, the flattening of everything into nothing, because I’m afraid of missing a detail that could be born again in choreography. The slinky movement of a stranger along the platform, up the stairs. Someone running to squeeze between the doors before they shut, the scream of whistles, and a toddler excoriating the passengers. The people shuffle en masse, like figures in a Pina Bausch piece.

  * * *

  Ecstasy has happened, too, during seizure. I would say crystalline or brightness or joy, but an emptiness falls open when I do. So I don’t mention it, or that I sometimes feel the storms out at sea days before they stumble into the coast. Sergei at the studio had asked me if I was feeling all right. What do you mean, I said, and his response, You look … your eyes …

  And I simply waved him off, thinking that if I did he would forget what he saw. The ghosting in the irises, the storm in my brain.

  A Teenage History

  My grandmother gazed out, poised and handsome, from a photograph in the living room. Her smile was gentle and ungraspable. She was a warning to us all about a certain capriciousness, as she had died of a stroke when she was barely in her fifties. Daniel had placed her image on the windowsill beside a potted calathea that blocked the view of her from much of the room. Beside the plant, there were tall bookshelves, the fireplace I would never allow him to light, and across the room, his one piece of taxidermy, a failed and deranged-looking fox. I never learned where the fox came from, but it sat like an aberration, its expression faintly amused, human. I worried that if I touched it, it might burst.

  * * *

  We took in a cat from a nearby alley, after I had wept about him. It was the first and only time Daniel ever saw me cry. He simply hadn’t the will to argue with me, his granddaughter who no longer
had a mother and a father. We called the cat Lucifer and bought haddock for him, cut the fur balls from his gnarled coat, and let him have the run of the place. He was tameless, prone to inexplicable growling in the dead of night, and he slept on my feet, which I didn’t dare move. Eventually he located the fox and mauled it open, his ears pinned back in a fit of black-eyed delight. I didn’t stop him. Daniel carried the fox remains down the hall and dumped it unceremoniously down the garbage chute.

  * * *

  I told him that death was everywhere. My legs were folded under me as I sat at the dining table and picked at my dinner. He had enrolled me that day in dance classes with a teacher who would toss out my shoes and expose me to Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown and Pina Bausch. Whatever elation I felt didn’t hold for long. I sat brooding with a nearly raw steak in front of me, because that was the only thing I claimed to want. I was all bones and thigh muscles, and my feet had scabs and sulphurous old bruises, and a soiled bandage unraveled from a baby toe. I even had dirt on my face.

  “So is life,” he said. “Life is everywhere, Molly.” He marveled that I sat before him, so like my mother, except filthy, and entirely alive. I was proof of the miracle of timing in which previously he had had little faith. But I had been mostly silent since he had brought me to the city and at last I had said my view of things. He had something to respond to. What he couldn’t see, however, was a rage so capacious that furniture seemed to rumble in my presence.

  * * *

  The first seizure happened at the new school, during assembly. It was a charge down the rabbit hole in front of the entire student body. Later on, the energy would manifest as a blip in consciousness as though tuning out, or sometimes a sideways gesture like checking my pockets, but the first one came as a detonation. I crashed against folding chairs, tore my chin on the metal edge of a table, smacked against the gymnasium floor, and rattled there as blood streaked my face.

  When I opened my eyes I saw the ankles and calves that lined an empty arc around me, a space into which the students and teachers appeared to lean, held back by an invisible railing. The phys ed teacher burst through and asked me something. Her words weren’t words at all, but a substance like silt, and nothing I could answer to. I had become concrete, then fluid, over and over, outside of my own consciousness and with legions of teenage witnesses. I had relinquished myself to a force so large it could collapse me to the ground, but was so specific that it would avoid hundreds of other people and come only for me. I hadn’t yet entered private school, where all the shoes were the same, and so I stared at an array of winter-denying footwear: running shoes, stilettos and pumps, leatherette ankle boots and beach thongs. A fine grit was against my cheek as someone dabbed at my chin. How was I, then, now that I understood the question.

  I slept for days, burrowed into my bedcovers. I thought I could feel the creep of my nails growing, and my hair, too. My body renewed and expanded and stretched out of itself, like molting. Then here, instantaneously, the tuft of new pubic hair which had been late to arrive, as had my period. I balled the soiled sheets and hid them from Daniel, twirled myself back into the quilt cocoon where I planned to sleep until my brain and body behaved. Blood, too. Always it leaked from me, and yet I felt a fondness for it. How had I lived?

  Daniel brought me a soup filled with barley and promised, when I begged him, to keep the secret of my seizure, even as its appearance could not have been more public or dramatic. What he referred to as the sordid eloquence of my brain. Deep down, I think he was unsurprised, both by my seizure and my plea for concealment. He saw me, in spite of whatever optimism kept him going, as a broken and patched-together creature. He read to me from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, the parts where Prince Myshkin has complex seizures with ecstatic preludes. Myshkin even has one seizure, perfectly timed, that prevents his own stabbing.

  “See that,” Daniel said, with the book open on his lap. “Useful, don’t you think?”

  I could tell that he had immediate regret.

  I spoke through the down fill that surrounded my head. The world was merely a plate of light if I happened to tilt my head up to see it. “There was nothing ecstatic about it,” I said. “I flopped around. That’s what they told me. But I’ll give him one thing.”

  Daniel waited.

  “The part about time.”

  He turned to the pages he had marked and read out loud. “ ‘At that moment the extraordinary saying that there shall be time no longer becomes, somehow, comprehensible to me.’ ”

  Time was intrinsically connected to my body. Time as I had known it had simply closed up shop, vanished. While my peers guffawed at what they called my fish routine, I could say that I had, in some sense, contained many years in that position.

  I heard the dry pepperiness of Daniel’s breathing as he waited for me to say something. I thought, Death will come for us anyway. “Yes,” I said, “that’s it.”

  Daniel was not one to let me have the last word. “Life is long,” he said, “and the heart is big.”

  * * *

  Emmitt, another professor—a specialist in religious iconography—became Daniel’s partner. He was active in politics, and took Daniel to a pride rally one year, but Daniel preferred the subtle. He dealt in secrets and close hands and codes, which is perhaps where I get it from. Their acquaintances would begin to die, one by one, three in one year, but whatever pain Daniel experienced, he seemed to me more contented than I remembered him being when I was very small. He had lost his wife to cancer, his daughter to a house fire, and friends to a plague, and yet a peacefulness had settled around him because he was giving expression, at last, to a reality that had been present all along. Emmitt was the one who pointed out to me that my secretiveness about my seizures was analogous to being closeted. It didn’t change my mind, however. Peacefulness, I felt, was not a logical outcome of exposure.

  Chloe Comes to Stay

  I was not, for instance, allowed to leave the apartment in the middle of the night and wander the city, no matter that I had done the equivalent up north, before the fire. I was expected to go to school daily, and, finally, to bathe. These were not so much Daniel’s rules—he would have been content to see me range where I liked (he was, after all, my mother’s father)—but came from the murmurings of his friends and the school. They were, they said, merely stating the obvious. Between Daniel and I, however, the arrangement was one of compatible roommates. If I’d blown pot smoke out the window while holding a snifter of brandy and a Twinkie, he wouldn’t have said much, except that I might want to sweep up the crumbs before the mice got them. In fact, he worried about the intensity of my practice, the creative singlemindedness that settled in by age fifteen, and wondered aloud about the state of my feet, my bloody toes, that my hips ached and was I perhaps too thin?

  Emmitt was an attentive cook, and on the days that he stayed with us, he would walk in clutching groceries for feasts inspired by his visits to Italy and France. But I campaigned, always, for the bloodiest cuts of meat and picked at the vegetables. Once, I had a full seizure shortly after dinner—I remember gnocchi and the licorice scent of fresh basil—and opened my eyes to see their faces above me, Daniel’s hair utterly white and Emmitt’s utterly gone, his entire head shiny and unwrinkled, almost one hundred and thirty years between them. I felt Daniel’s hands as he gently tucked a cushion under my head. I’m alleged to have said from my position on the floor, “I would like to film you.”

  * * *

  I did film them, as well as the dancers at the studio, and whatever friends I could cajole. I began recording voices and ambient sounds, leaving small microphones and tape recorders out in the open because I discovered that people didn’t notice them or forgot about them if they did. All of this with the idea that the small choreography I had begun to develop would incorporate voices as a kind of music. The visuals I could project onto the walls and furniture, even the figures themselves. I could generate atmospheric conditions in which to place the body or bodies.
I could create a context in which the tendencies of my brain, the flicks and morphs and time lapses, could be played with as a kind of public secret. Right under their noses.

  My favourite dancer was not a dancer at all, but Chloe from my algebra class. She had a massive head of hair, the chaos of which was interesting to me in light of the pulled-back hair required at the studio, and unusual flexibility for someone who didn’t work at it. Also a willingness to do what I asked. She didn’t tire of my demands, or even question the process as we worked through sequences in the apartment when Daniel wasn’t there. The confines of the space simply created a challenge, one that caused me to see the possibilities in a small gesture, or a violent one, in a chair or a table. How they contain or confine.

  We worked together this way for months, until her mother found out that Chloe had begun to wear nothing but a pair of white cotton underwear during our sessions. It was important to see the lines, the shapes, to get a sense of her body, someone who wasn’t me, I told Daniel and Emmitt. They looked at each other over the tops of their reading glasses, then looked at me, then each other again. It was the end of filming Chloe, but we covertly continued to see each other. I worked out choreography on her that didn’t require specific expertise, utilizing instead her natural insouciance. I exaggerated her slouches, lunges, the lazy drape of her posture, hand gestures, pouts, how she could fold herself. Had she been practicing from the age of six or seven, she would have had real skill, but what she did possess was something raw and nervy.