Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  Flashbulbs

  Her migraines came in a way that was not unlike my seizures. This was my prototype. The weather affected her, certain foods, or a mysterious presence made her turn inward, away from the light that stung. Curtains were drawn, and the room took on the quality of a cave and the walls turned damp. I could stand in the doorway and feel her breathing as if the room itself were alive. Her body curled on the bed with her back to me, her hair over the pillow, the nodes of her spine visible if it was summer and she was wearing a halter top or a bathing suit. I would lie down with her when she allowed it, press myself along her back, but often she refused me, saying I was hurting her. Just the presence of me was another kind of knife, my voice, even if soft, was a biting thing. She flapped her hand behind her, waving me away in the darkened room. No choice but retreat.

  * * *

  My father retreated also. He is a phantom, slides through far-off doorways and windows almost ghoulishly. He vanishes. I call to him, but it doesn’t make him properly live. The glimpse of him is like a scarf in a breeze, dark blue perhaps because of a shirt he once wore, or the veins of his arm where there was scarring along the crook, the marks of whatever drug could be shot through a needle. He had stopped using, however. They were a remnant of something gone, though he continued to smoke and drink.

  My parents were believers in a certain directness, one that could obscure the things they did want to hide, and so my father spoke to me plainly, when I was just five or six, about what the marks were. They meant nothing to me, which was part of the point. He spoke to me as if I were an adult and could comprehend that kind of desire, but it was just another cloak.

  The two of us sat on the front steps of the house on a cold day as he told me about that rapacious want and the head of a needle, and it was meaningless. The only treasure was the jewel aspect of the scars, their compact opalescence. I couldn’t decide which they were: ugly or beautiful. When I was older it seemed to me that both could be true. It seemed to my childhood self to have something to do with an adult in the throes of telling one truth while hiding another. He was done, he said.

  Ignition Switch

  He stood in the night with a bottle that once contained gin and now contained lighter fluid, and a rag hung from the mouth. He didn’t hold matches or a lighter, however, and had nothing in his other hand but the cold air of spring at night. I was the one lurking, vanishing, hiding in various places while watching him, moving quickly from one stack of boxes to another. I listened to his breathing, which was noisy, and I watched his back, his shadowy form in the dark with the light that was coming in from the full moon. The full moon, which my mother always took to be trouble, and the cause of whatever wildness, good or bad, that was moving through. The full moon was responsible for crime, for lovers’ breakups, for bad decisions, or for lottery wins. She would have been one of the people, centuries before, convinced that the epileptic was affected by the moon. Maybe I had angered its goddess. Either way, when I told her what I had witnessed, her words played on the dream: Could have been anything. Something strange in the moonlight. Neither of us could pin down or define.

  * * *

  He is mostly gone, though this one part of him remains to the exclusion of the others. I have not understood this murkiness at all, where its edges are, where it begins. How he came to find himself in the living room this way. The grandfather clock says it is 1:17 in the morning. My feet are bare, digging in. I am the watcher for something that doesn’t want one. The simmering inside him hasn’t made him more electric or alive but instead obscures him. Erasure moves over him like a cloud of bees, and I watch as it eats him. The consuming form has an undulation of delight.

  The Temporal Lobe Is a Witchy Thing

  The seizures take memories and tear them up. Flick the pieces into a light that scorches. Déjà vu comes on, the assertion that I’ve created these dance moves before; I’ve met this person before; I’ve seen the ocean exactly this way from the ferry, with a man in a striped hat to my right and a tantruming child to my left.

  Exactly that way, I’ve been here before, I know that I have. But I have not. Which is just one kind of knowingness followed by another. Lost in the dream, awakened, lost again. I have known that dripping tap, the drawing that Stella brings to me, Raf standing naked with a half erection near the end of the bed with an unlit cigar stub between his teeth, smacking the magazine he’s holding up and laughing so hard at what someone wrote about his work that he can barely tell me the story.

  I’ve seen this before.

  I’ve done this before.

  This is all exactly so.

  * * *

  I have seizures, and sometimes the seizures have me. They have me in the waiting, in the in-between, which is a distilling of life in general: we wait for death, not knowing the exact moment, only the inevitability of something we don’t, at present, believe in. So we wait, and the waiting is resplendent, almost grand, in the way of cathedrals and views from mountaintops, because it is not only waiting, but a drama. Waiting is expansive and becomes, at some point and inexorably, the thing you’re waiting for. Possession.

  * * *

  In the ancient writings about falling down, not much distinction is made between seizures and similar events induced by hysteria. The lines blur. The seizure was a result of spiting the moon goddess or wading into someone else’s dark magic. It was assuaged by gulping the blood of a gladiator, or nibbling the gladiator’s liver nine times, or the use (mysterious) of seal genitals, or hippopotamus testes or the blood of a sea tortoise, or by avoiding the following: onions, quail, red mullet, eel, goat, deer, and pig. An amulet containing coral, peony, and the root of Strychnos might be worn around the neck as the moon grew smaller. If you were not the one with epilepsy but the observer to the seizure and concerned about it leaping from the victim to you, then you would spit.

  * * *

  This is no small thing, the spitting. The custom of which becomes the burnishing of otherness, a shorthand for fear, disgust, abhorrence. Rejection, formed in the mouth, let go.

  * * *

  I have a theory, which has to do with faces, how we trust them or don’t, love them or hate them. So much resides not only in the eyes, but the type of nose, the position of the lips, number of wrinkles, the teeth. The face of the person in full embrace of a seizure is a face found to be so primal in its urgency, its turned-inwardness, and its remoteness that the person is set further adrift by those watching. Death, we think, is right there with that voltage. We shove them away.

  * * *

  “She’s not stopping. Where’s the fucking cop?”

  “My sister-in-law had this—she’ll be okay. You just have to wait for them to stop.”

  “Were you fucking filming her?”

  “Stop swearing. She can hear you. There’s a kid, too.”

  “Hear us? Look at her!”

  “I read they can still hear.”

  “Just, you know. Be quiet. Quiet.”

  “Quiet? This is New York, man. Go upstate you want quiet.”

  “Ma’am? We’re here. You got lots of folks around you.”

  “You’ll be okay. Ambulance is coming. Maybe you hear that siren. Be here real quick.”

  “Yeah, it’s coming. You hold on there. It’s coming.”

  “Ma’am, you hold on. You be okay.”

  “People around.”

  “You hold on now.”

  “Her breathing—”

  “Better than not at all.”

  “Crazy, right?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Just another day in New York, man.”

  “Just another day.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Molly

  I watched him wait. This was different from the usual sort of observance. I sometimes watched the people, for instance, outside Penn, trawling for cabs. The expectation, the boredom, the checking of watches. The burden of luggage and unwieldiness of plans. The bobbing heads of pigeons ticking off
the seconds. Everything becomes a clock. A clock in your breath. I watched people waiting and wondered where they were going, how they would spread out from this spot into the city, traverse the synaptic gaps between here and there, between desire and arrival. The movement tidal, surging, epileptic. This was 1999.

  * * *

  I stood outside the café, early by twenty minutes, maybe because the plan was forming in my mind without a full awareness of what I was doing, about to do. My body knew, however, as it does; it brought me here. I looked at my watch. A man pushed me aside on his way into the café, glared at me. I even had my hand on the door before I understood that I wasn’t going in. I was drawn backward onto the sidewalk, where I nearly toppled an old woman. “I’m sorry—so sorry!” There, you see: remorse, little flecks that can be ground out like pepper. I made sure she was fine before she walked away and was taken up again by the stream.

  I took another step away from the café, and another, pulled away. Litter blew between ankles. I felt the surliness of a baby in a passing stroller, gripping the edges of its knit hat as if to corral its brain. I took in that dark as easily as air. I crossed the street, ignoring the mail truck and bicycle. Crowds and traffic can be parted with the right gaze. I saw the doorway I wanted, with interior stairs for a Greek restaurant on the second floor, one with windows that looked onto the street and the café. It also happened to have an open table with exactly the right view.

  * * *

  A waitress took my order. Tea and lamb kabobs. Something about the lamb seemed apt, sacrificial. I spent a few minutes lining up the flatware and finding just the right placement for the bud vase and candle with a blackened wick. I felt a silkiness in my stomach, that softly rising wave, and I thought briefly about leaving, but the promised spectacle of waiting kept me in place. I felt hot and took off my sweater, hung it on the chair back. I shook the little sugar packets to dispel the tension gathering in my hands. Somewhere, I thought, a rat wiped its snout with its paws as a subway ground to a halt and released Seth. I folded my napkin into a fan and unfolded it. Instead of checking the time, I watched the street below, people’s gaits, how they moved. I filled in the dialogue for a couple who appeared to be arguing. I guessed at the occupations of a dozen or so people.

  * * *

  Seth appeared, stage left. He dodged a little pug with a pink frill that darted toward him before it was reeled in like a trout by its owner. He stopped at the corner and dug into his pockets for money to place in the paper cup of someone slouched against a wall. He kept walking, but when he grew close to the café he seemed to slow. He looked around. I worried for a moment that he might see me in the window, but then he went inside the café and the shapes on the sidewalk changed, closed in. Someone locked up their bicycle and strolled away. I counted a few people talking on their phones before I stopped and took up hats instead. A striped awning over the café suddenly released on one side, right as I was looking at it, swooping downward and causing a scurry of people. Two café staff came out to ponder the fabric. I began to wonder if I had somehow caused it, the intensity of my stare had loosened fasteners or caused a wind gust to rush across the street. It actually gave me a better view. Seth remained inside, and I could just discern a shape inside the window, not far from the door, that I knew to be him. The right smudge of colour for his jacket, his slouchy posture with his elbows on the counter that stretched along the windows. He turned into a kind of painting. I watched him wait.

  * * *

  You think of all the waiting that leaks out around us. Our waiting set to music. Your call is important to us. It’s a state of grace, a tension that can’t resolve itself. He sat there, seemingly immobilized. Presumably he checked the time, drank his coffee. Got up briefly to order a bagel. Waiting sluiced out of him as if he were a rocking cup and worsened as the minutes went by. But he had nothing to do except stay in the place, watch the door, finally grab an abandoned newspaper and begin the performance of reading it.

  Time is an idea that takes shape, becomes an insect lodged in the ear. It burrows in, creates a nest, generates hatchlings that invade the brain. Dementia soon follows. The person is stricken with the urge to end the suffering, and they begin to shift their body (the body contains the waiting), stretch their legs, check the watch again, wonder. The various scenarios play out, horrible and delicious. Perhaps I’d been hit by a car—though he, too, had long ago noticed my ability to cross against traffic and live—fallen ill, fallen, or maybe I was simply not coming. The wonder entertained and rejected, but then entertained again. And another minute snapped and gone. Time ransacked and decimated, ravaged by questions, interrogated to no avail. No answer. Your call is important to us.

  Here is where the person waiting begins to careen between logical explanations and illogical ones. They try to reason with absence in the field of others, strangers who are not waiting, not explicitly at least, but are deep in conversation with the special people who have bothered to show up, not be hit by a car or kidnapped. These others seem remarkably present; no waiting for them. Time morphs in one of my episodes, which is what happens to the person waiting. The scene is a pornography of time and waiting.

  * * *

  When he emerged from the café he looked like he’d been in a fight. Somehow, in the space of an hour and a half—which is how long he stayed there, and how long I stayed in the upstairs window watching—waiting had detonated inside him. His hair was messier than usual, his clothes askew. He walked slowly at first, stiff. Stopped and looked up the street and down it. I thought for a moment that he might look up and see me there in the window, and then it happened. I imagined that the white-blond of my hair telegraphed easily, that even at that distance I was recognizable. Perhaps I wasn’t. Perhaps he thought to himself that the shape couldn’t be me; perhaps he understood absolutely that it was. Whatever the case, after a few seconds, he turned and strode out of view.

  * * *

  The waitress brought a second dessert for me, baklava with a hundred honeyed layers. The first had been almost too glorious a thing to eat, but I had inhaled it. I could have eaten three more. I felt, watching from that perch on the second floor, like a god. Ravenous, terrible, and drunk. I felt rage or grief or something scabbish. Triumph. I ate, drank a full glass of water, drained the rest of the tea. A child with eyes dark as plums scuttled under the tables and was yelled at by her parents. I smiled at her, and stood, leaving bills under the edge of my cup.

  * * *

  Then the room was inside me, instead of me inside of it. The light from the windows, now deep in my solar plexus, broke apart. I tilted back, plunged. I was squeezed and pulled at the same time, for how long I don’t know. A few moments may have passed; possibly a year. I felt the cool wooden floor on my cheek, a buzz in my fingertips. Someone spoke to me. For a moment my eyes were open and seeing. Or my brain believed the scene as it presented itself. A hard curl of bread was a foot away. Beyond the pant cuffs and the buckled boots and the crouching knee lay a dark sprinkle of mouse scat along the baseboards. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was a notation, like dashes, or stitches, this reality being a thing sewn together.

  How About the Man?

  The one the city tucked in, though no one noticed him anyway. He was already hidden, absorbed. He moved in the way of air streams or particles of dirt or the languorous sprawl of a stain. He was the pulse from the lights, a horn blast. Molly walked—and what a walk—the cat prowl (because she was once a dancer) alternating with something cumbersome, as if she was reminded every now and again of the body’s burden—far ahead of him, vanishing and appearing. She crossed Ninth, headed north, snapped her taupe scarf over her shoulder. Snowflakes, just a few. He remembered that late autumn was her favourite time, the first appearance of crystals in the city, when snow was not yet invasive. She went inside the café and he stayed against the glass, saw that her husband was already seated inside, waiting. The husband looked through large black glasses at a newspaper, sleeves rolled up, grey hai
r messy; he may have been handsome once. Coming up behind him, she slid her hands over his shoulders, kissed his head, and, when he stood and turned, his mouth. Smiles, another kiss. They laughed about something before a woman appeared at their side, was brought into their embrace and released. He watched the three of them settle in at a round table, warm, conspiratorial. The window had a mercurial sheen because of the hour, and printed words across it mentioned the types of coffee, staff wanted, a relief effort for a distant country. He moved back across the sidewalk through two large women, little dog, hydrant, bicycles, until the subway vent and its deep breath, where he was drawn in.

  Caterpillars

  She handed me the cup of tea—not the other way around, even though it was my apartment we were sitting in.

  “Let me,” she said. She smiled when her fingers touched mine. Two of her teeth on either side overlapped with an almost unbearable symmetry. She let a hair strand cross her cheek as she bent, before sliding it behind her ear—her ear that had a chandelier earring with red stones and higher up two large studs in the cartilage. A tattoo crept up from under her collar along her neck, the tendrils of a vine. I should have been impressed, but she had nothing on me if she wanted to talk the endurance of pain. She was lovely, though, and in fact, she was just the sort I would have pursued myself not so long ago.