by Maria Mutch
* * *
I picked the new name Luna, because she was a moon goddess—of Roman origin; also Artemis, in the Greek—when they had such a thing. The moon disappears in parts, and sometimes the whole is gone. I suppose you can find comfort in a lack of substance, but it depends on who you are. I got to talking with a person recently about the limbo after death. She said, “Do you think there’s a bardo?” and I didn’t say anything, so she asked me again. Then she asked me a third time, “Do you think there’s a bardo, Luna?” and the third time is what does it.
* * *
“We’re in it,” I said, and she looked at me, gobsmacked. Then she ran her fingers over her arm and said, “You made my hair stand up.” And I nodded and said, “That’s good. You still have some of your faculties.”
* * *
I did bring my watch, which does have heft, though you could argue that time doesn’t. The tall, thin man who turned out to be my husband also turned out to have an invention or two up his sleeve. He came up with a better snow shovel—which is interesting because it barely snowed where we lived. He said he got the idea in a dream on a hot night, which was the beginning of being what they call well-off. He sold the patent for a lot of money, and he stopped by a jeweler on the way home to buy me a watch, an expensive one. He didn’t understand my wrist size, but I never had the watch fixed, because I liked it swinging around. Liked it so much that I brought it with me. You can’t have a nice thing for a minute here, but no one has stolen it from me because everyone assumes it’s a knockoff. A man two blocks over sells them.
* * *
In Heidegger, guilt shows up in different forms. I wrote that down, too. I have a notebook that I keep in a pocket. They aren’t hard to find, as there are a lot of unfinished notebooks in the world. When I fill one I pick a spot, a subway stop maybe, and leave it there. Lincoln Center, Kew Gardens, Ditmas, Kings, Castle Hill. Even Rockaway. But mostly in Midtown, and sometimes on a bench, or sometimes I actually bury them. Or take out a few pages at a time and distribute them. I’ve left them at the libraries, too, and sometimes I do research and get photocopies and sometimes there’s a person who helps me. The library is a second home, though I don’t have a first home anymore, unless it’s possible to reside in places you don’t understand, which I contend it is.
* * *
I hadn’t been to this city before, but you can know a place before you get there. Maybe we have collective knowledge, and you know what you’re supposed to do, even if they say you shouldn’t be doing it. Not everything has a cause and effect that you can see.
* * *
The city has vastness, which I call a baroque emptiness—which is not the same as nothing. The most acute form of ownership, I think, is when you’ve lost all the things. If you can see the emptiness, then the place is yours in a way it won’t be for other people. You can see what they don’t and possess knowledge that isn’t expected.
* * *
That tree by the red fence is what many consider to be a weed tree, a royal paulownia. They say it’s invasive. Legend goes that the seeds were used to pack shipments coming from China and that they fell along the railroad tracks in this country and began to spread. This is how a story unfolds, or that’s the inference, anyway. You land here or you land there, and really it’s your own business if the roots form or not.
The Twins
When Stella thought of the missing man, she wondered what he looked like. If she should ask her mother for a picture. Or if she might find one in Molly’s study, and so, while their parents were out, Augustin kept watch at the door and Stella stood in the middle of the floor, looking around. She and Augustin both knew better than to waltz in unannounced, and so they always rapped softly on the door if they wanted to say something, lurked on the fringes as if the room was cordoned off from their use, which it was. They understood the unspoken qualities of territory, this one in particular, the violation of which was unexpectedly thrilling. Stella stood up taller. Somewhere in there, she could feel it, was a remnant to do with the missing man: a photo, a name, an article clipped out, a file even.
She looked at the photographs on the walls, the framed ones of the various dance groups and productions over the years, examining the men’s faces. She tried to imagine each one vanishing, leaving holes in the visual arrangement. She went to Molly’s desk, opened drawers and rooted around. She ran her fingertips underneath the top, because that was what the spies in movies did, and then selected a few books that she shook in case something fell out. But nothing. She studied the masks on the wall, before deciding to lie down on the floor to see if that vantage gave her the answer. But she quickly jumped up.
“Gus!” she whispered. “Are they coming?”
“Nope,” he said.
She went to the desk again and sat in Molly’s swivel chair, spun it gently. When she came around to face the papers stacked up there, she decided to hunt through them. She sighed, folded her arms, and leaned back in the chair, putting her knees against the desk—which jarred it slightly, waking Molly’s computer. The black screen vanished and was replaced by the face of a man.
“What is it?” said Augustin. “Why’d you gasp?” He stopped, and they both peered at the face. “Who the heck is that?”
Stella shrugged. She had never seen any face quite like it, because the one staring out had reddened skin, eyebrows and beard fringed in ice crystals, and the eyes were widened, as if in fright; the mouth was open slightly, though Stella could tell that it wasn’t making any sound. Only the rasping of breath. The man’s hood had been pulled back and his goggles pushed up on his forehead. His knitted hat was off to one side, ready to fall. She couldn’t tell where the man was, but the place appeared to be very cold and windy. A clump of his hair went off in a strange direction.
“I like him,” she said suddenly, and Augustin looked at her. He wanted to agree with her, because their likes and dislikes were often entwined, germinal, but Stella was sometimes fast to love in a way that mystified him. He narrowed his eyes at the man, but the man stayed the same, frozen in a fathomless existential crisis on his mother’s computer. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Is he skiing? Is he lost? Is he on a mountain? Why does she have this—who is this guy?”
Stella touched his arm to stop his questions. She watched the face, and the familiar aspects gathering there, how the man seemed to know he was already gone—the exact dark shade in the expression she had been expecting to find, a telltale thing. She didn’t say anything for a moment. The concept forming before her was too unwieldy and strange to speak aloud, so she kept it only in her mind, hoping that her brother would know. The thought was along the lines of, He is us.
Molly
You thought, I imagine, that you had miscalculated.
* * *
I have wondered if you encountered a bear with her cubs partially hidden by tall grasses as you crested a hill, or a mountain lion slithered up behind you, hugged you with teeth and claws. I have shut my eyes against the fur and felt my own body folded in. But the human brain can’t configure the devouring, which we thought was ours to do.
* * *
I imagine another version of you; that you deliberately settled into a wild place, tucked yourself into your tent and sleeping bag like a good explorer, swallowed some pills and waited to be overtaken by a cold that no amount of gear could assuage. Perhaps you wrote in a notebook, intending to write some kind of message, or snapped a few photographs of the light coming through the nylon over your head, or intended to do those things but then decided, no, there is nothing to be done. The lists are nothing now. The stacked imperatives, the collated desires. The small wiggles and symbols representing such. All of them ideas, all of them air.
* * *
The world is full of messages now, they pelt our skins.
The Struggle to Breathe
Stella’s face appears on the screen, and she pushes her face forward in the attitude of a kiss, draws back, and says, “You won’t believe it!�
�� She claps her hands once and begins to tell me something that starts with “Augustin—!” when he comes up behind her and clamps his hand over her mouth. She is half laughing, half struggling to breathe.
“She’s got nothing to tell you except that she’s a pain in the butt!”
Stella shrieks, “Yes!” through his fingers. “I do!”
Stella
Stella imagined the missing man to be in a place of lost things and people. He could be anywhere in there, though whether she thought it was wild or urban, she couldn’t decide. She remembered when her mother had created a piece around the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, called The Intent to Be Lost. The people onstage moved in a world that was entirely their own and unreachable. Perhaps the man had placed himself inside a city no one else could see. He walked around in it not knowing who he was. Maybe he chatted with the other missing people and they remarked on their curious circumstances, or they wept with wanting to be home. She herself would want to be where her parents and brother were.
She had been lost once, when she had taken too long to follow her parents and Augustin off the subway car. She had been looking at the feet of passengers, as her mother often did, and when she looked up, the doors were gliding shut with uncharacteristic smoothness. Through the fingerprinted windows she saw her family swallowed by the crowd because they hadn’t noticed yet that she was still on the train. She felt her stomach drop as the subway jolted and they were on their way. She glimpsed, just before the train disappeared into the tunnel, the face of her mother. It was registering both surprise and—could it be?—amusement. The space outside the train window turned black and reflective, and the sound of the wheels on the track filled her ears. She hadn’t been so aware of being in a tunnel before, though she had been in this exact one many times. How the world was held overhead and how badly she wanted to be out in it with her family. A ghost version of her, a doppelganger, had peeled off from her body, was moving up onto the street in the way the rest of her was supposed to be doing.
She felt the hand of an older man tap her shoulder. He smiled down at her and asked if those were her parents who had just gone through the doors, and what could she do, she finally decided, but admit to him it was.
“I’ll get you back to them,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
She clung to the steel pole and watched the man carefully, the unsettling neatness of his fingers, which were nothing like the stained hands of her father. He peppered her with questions, before he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m enquiring about too many things.”
The train rocked, made the known world tilt. “We’ll figure out what to do. We can go to the ticket agent at the next stop or I can put you on the train going back. Which do you think would be better? Maybe your parents are waiting for you on the platform …”
Stella continued to watch, saying nothing. The train rattled on, and the next station seemed like it was never going to come, and she would be endlessly inside the metal box, inside the tunnel, watching this man and feeling the sway of the car. Suddenly, light filled the windows, and when the train arrived and the doors opened, there was the station platform. On the other side was a waiting train in the opposite direction, though she couldn’t know if it was the right one, if it would stop where her parents were possibly standing, waiting for her.
She bolted through the doors when they opened, shot across the platform banging into various people and going through the open doorway of the new train, the one that she hoped would take her back. She could hear the man calling to her, and the doors slid shut again, but this time they seemed like something vulnerable. She wanted the train to hurry up and move. She looked up and saw various passengers looking back at her. She sat down in an empty seat and put her hands under her thighs and tried to look like she knew what she was doing, and moreover that she belonged to someone. She scowled at the faces around her as if by doing so she could prevent the questions that were forming, the offers of help.
Leave me alone, she would say if they asked her. I know what I’m doing.
Though this didn’t seem true, and they surely knew it. If the train went into the tunnel again and kept going, she would need one of them to help her, possibly the middle-aged woman who was sitting opposite, in a blue suit with a briefcase between her ankles.
But the train did halt, and the doors slid open, releasing Stella onto the platform where she saw her mother and Augustin waiting, though her father was missing. She ran a few steps and then stopped abruptly, because her mother and Augustin didn’t seem worried at all, only amused and happy to see her, as if she were a visiting relative and Hey, it’s been a while!
Fury boiled up in her as her arms hung straight at her sides and she balled her hands into fists. She held her place on the platform and watched them advance, how they were smiling with relief, and possibly even laughing at her. “Are you serious?” she shrieked, as she felt her mother embrace her, and she whacked her fists on Molly’s sides.
Molly laughed, “You’re fine, you see that? Just fine.” But Stella was beginning to sob, which caused Augustin’s own bottom lip to tremble, in the utter confusion of this reunion. Molly hugged both of them to her hips. Stella heard her whisper part of Bishop’s poem, the one about losing two cities, two rivers. “These things, you know, Stella, they happen.”
The Documentary
The girl has met a grisly end, the sister knows. They had had their bicycles midway on a long road, one with grasses and in the distance the draped, almost hooded form of a willow. The slow approach of the car, the muffled music that was abruptly cut and the window rolled down. Hey, girls. His arm moving then to the metal of the door, which was hot from the sun and caused him to recoil—the momentary rage as fast and gone as a snake’s tongue. His smile again, Hey, girls. Whatcha doing? The neatness of his hair, combed carefully over, but a crowded arrangement of teeth. Blunt fingertips that did a strange little wave at them, the slow blades of a propeller. The girls stood holding their handlebars, their torsos pointed forward in the direction they wanted to go, on the gravel road where they had stopped to walk their bikes on account of a deflating tire. Their heads turned in the direction of the man. A rosary dangled from the rearview mirror, though it was partially obscured by the sky reflected in the windshield. A head of some kind jiggled on the dash, the car creeping forward until the man’s face, his body, was closer to them. Hey.
* * *
When the sister is older she will wonder at this, how easily their plans in 1982—the forward movement along the dirt road—had been disrupted, simply because this man decided it. Time’s up, here’s your ride. The younger girl wordlessly, inexplicably, absorbed into the car as if she were liquid being drawn through a straw. But they had been trained to obey. Adults were not to be trusted, but they also held belts, loosely, lazily, so that the tip rested almost sensually on the floor, or a bit of wood, casually, as they spoke. Hey. Get in. The set of the teeth was somehow the same, the tight jaw, the spare order. She watched her sister, as if hypnotized, rest her bike on the ground and then stand with her arms at her sides. Again, Get in, this time uttered so near the parental tone that it did the trick. It removed particles of her sister right where she was, the girl was already gone.
People would say to the older sister, later on, when they thought it was safe to, Why didn’t you do something? How could you just stand there? As if their questions made sense, as if the girls had agreed somehow to a fate other than the road they were on, and she to relinquish her sister. She noted the occurrence of the present tense, stand. She was still there, on the side of the road. The parents, too. They bought presents for the missing girl on each of her birthdays, and at Christmas. They left them in the original packaging, arranged around the carefully made-up bed in the room whose posters and books and records remained in their places, waiting, because, the mother said, You don’t know. She could be a good girl and come home.
Molly
She looks so much like my mother. The woman glances over at m
e, at the dozen people who hunch, kneel, stand, block, are posed at various levels. I couldn’t have arranged them better, if we’re speaking from the viewpoint of aesthetics. The view from the ground is less appealing, with nostrils and double chins and the way that skin will pouch a little when a face points downward. But the faces are a comfort.
The woman takes in the sight of me and my grimace, and she turns her head again to look ahead. She keeps on striding, her legs as firm and straight as a fascist’s. Knee-high boots in deep brown. And somehow, at the top end of that body I have put my mother’s face, attaching it with my own sutures; nothing in the rest of this woman resembles her. Only this face, a mask, which in spite of its coolness and determination to look ahead, has uncannily the profile of my mother. A softness around the eyes, a prominent nose, a bone structure that will still be noble if the face lives to be eighty. My mother, walking by, seeing me, not seeing me.
The Cell Containing My Mother
Just her voice. I couldn’t see her. I stood on a subway platform, waiting while it was hot and a pigeon that was lost underground flapped erratically into the tunnel, drunk on its fear, and there was her voice. I can’t tell when she will show up.
