by Maria Mutch
Others could see it, too. I saw her unexpectedly at the deli down the block. I watched her from a window seat as she walked in with her mother. While her mother ordered, Chloe stripped the outer chocolate layer from a candy bar with her teeth. A paunchy man beside me, midforties maybe, made his eyes small and regarded her with an intensity that rivalled mine, and about which, she later told me, she was entirely aware. She wore our school uniform, rolled at the waist to make the skirt shorter, the white blouse, mostly untucked, with wrinkles and a vague stain on the back. Her necktie loosened to midchest. Knee-highs and forbidden black combat boots. The man simmered in the no-escape of his personal lobster pot. I wanted my video camera badly, but the scene broke apart, as every scene does. Chloe winked when she spotted me as she and her mother were leaving. The simmering man took the wink to be for him. I watched for the next fifteen minutes as he sat, slit-eyed, in the inertia of a supine shark, paralyzed by it all.
Three Pounds
For a time, medications helped and then they didn’t. They were the source, depending, of agitation or heaviness that interfered with my body. Through my reading I became a connoisseur of the ancient methods and approved of their lushness and violence: crocodile feces, seal genitals, the blood of a gladiator who has just been stabbed. I came up with a tamer voodoo of my own, which involved sleeping as much as possible or, as I got older, avoiding alcohol, but the quiet periods never last, as quiet periods never do.
* * *
In my twenties I visited Daniel on the weekends and drew the brain in my college notebooks; I shaded the amygdala in mauve, the primitive pons in orange, the corpus callosum in blue, all of which had a tendency to flatten and simplify the territories. The brain is all about the curvature and the fold—its complications.
“The brain feels like jelly,” the neurologist told me as I sat in his office. He was a broad man, six and a half feet tall, and yet he had an airiness, a dryness, as if he were a stuffed creature, full of old straw or cotton. Something that could catch fire. I imagined brain tissue sagging between his large absorbent fingertips. I wondered how he could operate with those hands. He told me the incisions were often small, but I pictured him opening the skulls of his patients as he kept them conscious, making them lidless. There was no greater discrepancy, I thought, between the territory and the map than the brain and its diagrams, the pastel regions never revealing the mutinous nature of neurons. The drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal were the exception, however, and I had sometimes wept over their beauty, the intricacies and stains and branching networks. They reflected what I knew to be true but could not observe myself when I went to museums to see preserved brains in large jars. The secretly roiling selves were not there at all.
“Eighty-six billion neurons,” he said, “and yet it weighs just three pounds. Three pounds that take twenty percent of your blood supply.” He turned a plastic, unjellylike brain in his hand as a tiny snot swung in his cavernous nostril. I ground one of my thumbs into my thigh to short-circuit the anxiety in my chest. I watched the enormous curve of his left ear. He wanted, I felt, to beguile me with facts so that I wouldn’t cry in his office about the rogue brain I had somehow ended up with. But I hadn’t cried in many years and wasn’t about to start, so I concentrated on the oscillating mucus.
“I don’t think anyone knows much at all about the brain,” I said. He allowed the moment to pass unacknowledged. I think he knew by the folded arms that I would refuse his treatments. I went home and drew another brain on a fresh page of my notebook, a diagram that did not have the ferocious delicacy of a Cajal drawing but did have regions of neon pink and yellow. I could make it glow as if irradiated.
* * *
I went to meetings in a church basement where I could hold a paper cup of warm lemonade in the presence of my secret tribe. I was there only to please Daniel, however, because he felt I needed something like comrades. The truth was that I didn’t feel the meetings or the lemonade got to the crux of the issue. On the other hand, a man I liked stood with his hands jammed down his front pockets, leaning against one of the pillars. Three rows of chairs separated us. His hair was sparse on top, though we were both twenty-five, and this interested me, the merging of young and old. Eventually he met my gaze and smiled. He moved closer to me, casually touching the chair backs one by one in a way that was suggestively tactile. When he got within a few inches of me, he cleared his throat. “Temporal lobe, huh?” It was as simple as that.
* * *
His bed had crumbs and some lint so blue that I thought of keeping it. None of my previous lovers had had seizures or rounded bellies; they tended to be dancers, smooth along the arms and legs, gristly along the spine, and self-conscious, which is not to say shy but, rather, inclined to performance. He lolled naked and soft and half asleep on the covers. My left nipple ached because he had clumsily bitten it while grazing my skin, and I examined it, compared the deepening pink to my toes, which were furious from an all-day practice before the meeting. I left speckles of blood on his sheets.
I wondered what it would be like if two people had seizures at the same moment, if another dimension would open, or two. But he had never had the tonic-clonic experience. His began with an auditory cue that was renowned in the support group for its strangeness and had been plucked from his childhood when his mother had yelled at him for running along the sidewalk. Somehow his mother’s words, her exact voice, had set up housekeeping in his temporal lobe. Each and every one of his seizures began with, “Jimmy, slow down or you’ll bust your face open,” before he would stare and smack his lips.
He began to snore, and the curtains ruffled and someone hollered for Diane out on East Fourth Street. I studied his face, watching him without affection, wanting only to be drawn into his brain and dispersed into the network of pulsations, clean and electrical. My skin tingled as I leaned toward his head, close enough that my hair fell onto his pillow. I whispered, “Jimmy, slow down or you’ll bust your face open.”
His face was a cow’s face and gave away nothing. His eyelids continued their tiny beats, and his lips seemed a bit helpless as he snored, nothing else.
By the time we were eating cornflakes in his kitchenette the next morning, I was oppressed by guilt. The walls and cabinets were a dull green, even the chairs and tabletop. Forest on khaki on shamrock on sea green. Somehow I had failed to notice it when we had walked in. Milk dropped from his chin, and he snorted as he told me the old joke about the two cannibals eating a clown: “Does this taste funny to you?”
I heard myself say in a raspy voice how much I liked him, perhaps too much, etc. How could I put it? Yes, too much. His face looked just as it did when I had whispered to him, and it was my first introduction to this particular facet of my expectations, that I could look at a face in twilight and then in the morning, hoping to find transformation, see that the face was the same, and that I was the one who was different.
4
Sabine Said
“Did he ever tell you the story? The one about Josefina? She looked after us. She had a psych degree. She liked dreams a lot, the meaning of them. She would ask us about our dreams, and how many people do that?
“Nobody wants to hear what you dreamed last night. And, you know—that sucks, man. We enter this fucking bizarre state, and we think it’s real. I mean, we fly or whatever and it’s real, or someone is trying to kill us and that’s real. But nobody is interested, they just glaze over. But Josefina did care, and then she’d say what the symbolism was. Some of it she got from reading Freud and Jung, and some I think she just invented, but she said some pretty good shit.
“I was maybe eight and had this little purse—I wasn’t a girly-girl, and no pink, but I had a purse—I think she must have given it to me, actually, because she was tired of carrying my shit around—and it was purple with an appliqué flower on it, and I loved it. I had a series of dreams that I lost the purse, though, and after the third or fourth one, she stopped saying that it was an anxiety dream and she sta
rted talking about consciousness and identity. She said maybe I was willing to see past things and into beingness. I was eight, so I had no fucking idea what she was on about. I’m still not entirely sure. I think she ended up becoming a Buddhist.
“She made up for a lot, you know? Mom and Dad were always in absentia, flying somewhere, working, whatever. They took us on vacations a bunch of times—Bermuda, Barbados, Mexico—but otherwise they were out in the ether somewhere. Mom was a teeny bit batshit crazy at that point—she would wash her hands until they bled. But she was an expert at looking like she didn’t have a care. Or mind what Dad was up to. I don’t know if he had affairs then or not, but he once got a full set of capped teeth when he was on a trip to Paris. No joke. He left one day with a missing tooth that he said happened because he fell and chipped it—which, who knows?—and came home with this bizarre white smile. You could’ve read by it. He wore Hermès cologne every day of his life. At least the ones I was there to witness. He called Mom Bets—I don’t know why; not her name—but they loved each other a lot, which is saying something. That’s what everyone says, anyway. How in love they were. Somewhat indifferent to us, right, but they really dug each other.
“Anyway, Josefina. Best mother in the world, even if she wasn’t really ours. She had breasts like a cliff. She was short, too, so she was all boobs. She sang songs all the time. She’d crank the radio in her room. We’d be crammed in there with her, listening to her little plastic turquoise radio. It was the best room in the house.
“Did he ever tell you about the stroller incident? When he was a baby, she’d stroll him around Lenox Hill every day, regardless, in this big-ass pram. It was family legend. I’ve seen pictures of it. He was five before I came along. It was like a navy-blue metal boat, except that it had huge white-trimmed wheels. So one day she’s pushing him along the street going toward Central Park and it’s the end of March and rain was coming down with lots of wind and—wham! This car jumps the curb, hits the pram and it crumples right up, Seth inside it. People are screaming and running over, and Josefina, she’s screaming and crying and trying to dig him out of this scrap heap. She said the pram reminded her of a fortune cookie, the way it was closed up. But there’s a space where she can reach in and she manages to get him out and she’s holding him and she’s hysterical and then she realizes that he doesn’t have a scratch on him. Nothing. He’s just looking at her as if to say, What the fuck just happened? He didn’t even cry.
“Anyway, that was why she called him Suerte instead of Seth. She always said that he must have been born when Jupiter was big and fat. And I think some part of him believes it, which is why he’s such a nihilist. I think he imagines he’s sort of invincible. And can never be satisfied. He survived something, and he wonders why. We both have the drinking gene, or the drinking habit, anyway. But I can stop and he can’t. He’s almost old-fashioned, you know? He does Vicodin the odd time, I think, or coke or whatever a friend might be doing, but he’s largely just a drunk. An old-school drunk. And a bartender, at that. How do you stop drinking when that’s your job? And he’s good at it. He and some business partners had a bar of their own, until they edged him out. On account of him being unreliable. But he’s so functional, right? Runs ten miles, kayaks, climbs, skis, all the shit that he lives for, except that—and here’s the paradox—he’s drinking while doing that shit, and how he can do that, I don’t know. The people he’s with—I don’t know if they know. They must. But I think when he’s out there, he’s just drinking less and then he gets back to the city, and it starts all over again. And so you think, if you’re a sensible person, why not move out of the city and stay where the forests and mountains and rivers are? Why go back and forth, why be so split between the two?
“When the partners kicked him out, it devastated him—that place was his idea. He named it, he talked up the crowds every night, and he was serious about his mixology. It was like science experiments to him, or an art. He told me once—we were at his place and he was making me his spin on a manhattan, and he’d made his own bitters, and I think these ones were chocolate—and anyway, he told me that making this simple thing, just a few ingredients in a glass, and having somebody drink it was like they were drinking him. I told him that sounded like he was Christ or something, but the truth is, I could sort of see what he meant. He said that people ended up ingesting—this is him talking—something that was meant to evoke a place or a time or a sensation or whatever. He said the idea had to have a kind of purity. Which sounds like bullshit, but anyway. At the bar, he had little burners set up so he could make syrups with herbs or whatever, and he infused vodkas and gin, too. He also kept a lot of bourbons—some of them were a thousand bucks for a bottle, and people actually paid to drink them. He’s got charisma, and maybe even more so when he’s drinking, and he was slinging drinks, schmoozing, and inventing concoctions that people would line up for, and somehow he was still … he was fucking up in slow motion. The purity he was talking about, well, it was like he was infested with something. With whatever makes him drink.
“I was staying at his place one night, and in the morning I sat on his bed to talk with him. I was telling him, actually, about Ellena, because we’d started to see each other, and he’s sitting there, listening—first thing, right? Hasn’t gotten out of bed to so much as pee, but I had brought him a cup of coffee, and he reaches over to the bourbon, which is cheap by the way, right beside his bed, and he pours some—a lot—into the coffee and it’s, I don’t know, not even seven in the morning. He wasn’t trying to hide it, or maybe it was just automatic. And I’m a coward, so I didn’t say a fucking thing. Not one thing. I didn’t blink, I don’t think. I just kept talking. Ellena Ellena Ellena. Cover it up. Don’t notice a thing, or give the appearance not to, anyway. I do believe that makes me an enabler. And you know what? I think on some level I wanted him, or Ellena, or whoever, to enable me, so I didn’t want to get in his face about it. Which is all very convenient when you think about it. Sort of quid pro quo.”
Molly
When it’s warmer out, there are people in the park who lie down. They sprawl at equal distances, and sleep so deeply that their weight can be felt with the eyes. A person lying on the ground to get some sun often does so with legs straight; a book may be open on the ground, but the person isn’t reading. Someone lying on the ground because there’s no other place to sleep will usually do so on their side or flat on their back with one leg bent out to the side, in the manner of a corpse.
This park sits over the remains of twenty thousand people, though there isn’t a sign. Nothing that says that at one time this was a potter’s field, a burial ground. Poor people and slaves were buried here, and those who had succumbed to an epidemic of yellow fever. It is a sacred place, but the pigeons fly into the sycamores and preen along the dark branches, saying nothing. The city vibrates so intensely with the totality of its souls that you can be in the park, right over the bodies and not know their presence at all. But the bones are stacked and jumbled, the skulls like chalices now filled with the soil that was poured over them. All the cloth eaten away, all the flesh transformed.
* * *
The sycamores and London plane trees have mottled bark, maps for regions that are hard to know or attain. Regions appear to shed other regions, other skins, other realities. The dogwoods hold out their branches almost quizzically, as if posing a question, or giving up.
Luna
That tree is a honey locust. One of the most common trees in this place. They used to have thorns, for protection, I imagine, which is a good idea, but nearly all the ones now are a thornless variety. Forma inermis. You open the seed pods and find sweet stuff inside, hence the name. But I don’t personally care for it, so I suggest avoiding. People don’t notice trees much here, even though there’s five million of them. Well, you get the folks who do some looking after, and the ones who form protest groups when an old one is going to be cut down, but in general, I mean, they can vanish. That one is a silver linden.
Tilia tomentosa. They provide good shade, which is not inconsequential. Temperature can be one hundred degrees, and all that cement and metal warming up creates ambient heat. I arrived here when it was just beginning to warm, so I had sort of a head start. You get acclimated to your ideas.
* * *
There’s a liminal period when you decide to leave everything and pick up in a new place. You have to decide what to bring with you. Symbolic things, too, like a name. People hiking the Appalachian Trail, they pick a trail name, or it’s supposed to be given to them, and they write it in a book. The name is a different version of yourself, maybe truer or not. Think of all the immigrants who would have a new name when they got here, maybe something supposedly easier for other people to say. But in this case it’s not about other people’s refusal to wrap their tongues around your foreignness. You become foreign to yourself, maybe, and so you find another sound, a new name to call yourself, which is easier for you to say.
* * *
I had a notebook, which I always hid. I wrote in code, but I’d still have to explain its existence. Maybe it took me five years to get up the courage to leave, once I got the idea. The problem with things, though, is that you get attached, much the same as people, and there’s a moment where you stand at your door for the last time. You look at all the symbols in the box called your house. Maybe some people bolt out the door so they don’t have to look back, but I looked. Your name stays in the house, too. If you leave right, you don’t hear it again. But sometimes I do hear my old name, because it was common, and I get a jolt.
