by Maria Mutch
The Blue Girl has been coughing and has had enough. She steps away. She is a regretful prince and exits backward, stage left, slowly, then faster, before turning to face the remainder of her day. We have lost her.
The boy crunches the snow underfoot and switches between looking at me and the other people, and examining his feet.
* * *
On the ground not far from my head is a mark in the snow. The sidewalks have been cleared, but along the edges snow remains, and the corners have blackened crusts, as if burned. But the area I’m talking about, maybe eighteen inches by fifteen inches, is pristine, with none of the ashy flecks that ride the air currents and settle. No yellow stains, no red (apparently a good number of people with nosebleeds or cuts or punctures trickle in this way, largely unseen, until the snow shows the leaks).
In the centre of this area, where the snow is only about two inches thick, lies a single print. The end of a cane. The cane is the metal kind (I’ve seen it and the old man who belongs to it) with a rubberized tip. The print, about an inch and a half in diameter, is a series of circles, one ring inside another, so that the snow is embossed like water after a pebble has been dropped in it.
The man usually has a large black hound with him on his walks, and the hound is docile but giant. Their movement along the sidewalks is always careful and patient, or rather the dog is careful and patient, and the man is brooding, wanting to be home. Despite being one of the least vulnerable of the sidewalk, thanks to his dog and his grumpiness, he feels the closeness of his end, which seems near but not near enough. He wants the depression of his armchair, the cane resting against it, and the light of the television that moves like a flame or a tongue; he can be licked by it, as the hound sometimes works the taste of sausage from his fingers, and therefore consoled. Not the sort of thing he can form into words. The idea rests at the edge of his mind. He has never noticed the bottom of the cane, or its prints in the snow, how he marks down infinity with each of his steps.
* * *
I have seen a seizure of mine only once, on a bit of video that captures a point when I was talking to a few of the dancers in the studio. I’m backlit by a glow from the windows. I seem to move through a shadowy space that takes my shape. Melanie, Jon, and Staale are watching me intently in the video, which is soundless. I’m gesturing, and they’re watching, waiting to catch the movement I’m trying to show them, a twitch of the hand I want them to make, and suddenly I can see, when my face emerges from the shadow, what they can’t, that my temporal lobe is gorging on a bad current. The video captures the gestural language of a complex partial seizure, almost elegant, and an opaqueness that draws across my face, another skin or mask. Otherworldly.
They watch me with the same expressions, thinking that my gaze and the way my hands reach for my side, so smoothly, is the exact thing I want them to do. Their gaze, so attentive, wanting to get it, their bodies miming what I’m beginning to unfold and taking on my absence so that it appears to spread out among them.
Moments pass. On the video, about twenty seconds (but I may have wandered lost inside that absence for weeks, in another realm been reported missing). Finally, I’m arriving, slamming doors behind me, making an entrance when I want them to think I’ve never left. My eyes meet theirs again as I shake my head and try to recall my last sentence and obscure the trip I’ve taken. I can’t tell from their faces if I succeeded or not, or if they said to one another later that I had seemed so strange, and did that seem funny to you?
Others have described my seizures, but they miss the mark. My classmates said the unimaginative: a flopping fish. The movements I’m told I make are sometimes antithetical to what shows up inside my head. My body and the territory I inhabit often don’t correspond. Sometimes I find a void, or hot or cold, sometimes a prickling terror in the stomach. I become enormous, without boundaries, a me without me, a will without a will. Language is a vanishing thing, and therefore thought also, leaving only a watcher, still and receptive. Sometimes I feel ecstatic.
The drawings of Cajal point to the source of what I experience. When Cajal depicts the olfactory bulb of a dog or the cerebellum of a rabbit, he also draws the ecstasy and terror and the spectrum in between. A retreating perception shows itself in the combination of lines and colour washes, the alphabet labels. The purple circle on many of the drawings, made by a rubber stamp and which reads Museo-Cajal-Madrid, sits like a moon in orbit. Sometimes the diagrams are kitten neurons, or lizard, chicken or rat; sometimes they are human. The lines are dendritic and sizzling, and form axons and synapses and glia. I have thought, The other side of this is silence, and that is the language for it. Our big eye pressed to the magnifying window. We see the particles, and the particles within particles, though we never get to the end of it all. A presence lies either darkly or brightly just beyond the veil of the drawing, and Cajal has made it seem that if we simply wait long enough, we’ll see the veil pulled to the side.
The Point Is Not to Win
“You there,” Seth said.
“And you there,” I said. Another dropped thread of ours, several months long. I couldn’t refute his assumption that I was alone and not meeting someone, because it was true. I had spent much of that day at a workshop in the south end of town for a piece I was trying to set, followed by missing an appointment with my doctor who had been dangling the prospect of a new medication. The lapse had also been a lapse in taking the pills that made me feel, more than ever, the misaligned layering of one reality over another. A diptych of me.
“You look well,” he said.
“And you,” I said. But we were ragged at the edges. “Sit.” I wondered if he could see the shimmering of my brain, how it was gathering its constituents, beginning to murmur. Each time the café door opened I heard the traffic and the voices, and something beyond them. The flinty scrape of leaves—pin oaks and callery pear—as they tumbled on the concrete. The air being disturbed, a change in the weather. Something galactic being consumed.
I thought about leaving, but as the waitress took our order I could see her writing. She didn’t join the tops of her o’s, instead leaving them open, like cups. Which pricked in my brain all manner of possibility, decisions and destiny, the movement of bodies. I felt Seth’s knee against mine, but simultaneous with the urge to put my hands on him was an arterial hardening.
The waitress filled the coffee cups of two men playing chess and asked them who was winning. One looked at her through the hair that covered his eyes and said, “The point is not to win but to annihilate.”
She asked if they wanted cream, but an answer didn’t come. Questions rattled the air, important ones, but went unregarded. Seth looked at me and smiled, but I felt the tensions of the room. Inside the pattern of our comings and goings was the imprint of our parents, how they appeared and vanished.
I told him about a man I saw once. He was an expert in the data concerning missing people, giving a lecture at the library. I was there to view old dance films and had come across the room where he was speaking just as I was leaving. I ended up sitting in one of the chairs near the door in order to hear the last twenty minutes. The man, who was middle-aged and had carefully combed his hair to the left, made a lot of little jokes to which the listeners responded enthusiastically. He talked about the kinds of things a missing person tends to do, the behaviour they exhibit when they aren’t yet missing but are about to be. The person faces a transformative moment when a course of action has to be decided. They become wrapped in a chrysalis of options, erroneous and otherwise, for long enough that they emerge, fully formed, as one who is now lost.
Seth studied my face. “You think you’re making a bad decision.”
I stirred a spoon in my cup of tea, listening to the sound of the metal against the ceramic. Desire rose into the high ceiling of the room, up past the cascading spider plants and vines on the walls and the false windows, and with nowhere to go came back down.
* * *
The mugs were replaced, the
plates taken away, the chess game completed. We were there for two more hours, as people came and went, and leaves tumbled in the footpaths of oblivious people, the ones who knew where they were going.
Somehow the sea entered in. “This place will flood,” he said. “If either of us has children, it will be in their lifetime.”
“A flood that’s just passing through, or one that stays awhile?”
“A permanent attraction. It won’t be an island anymore. Manhattan will turn into words, memories, film. It will be mythical.”
“It’s already those things. It’s already mythical.”
“It will disappear,” he said, or perhaps he said that he would disappear. “And what we can’t see anymore becomes something else. Something bigger.”
“Hence, a mythic place.”
He wasn’t concerned, however; contemplating the demise didn’t fill him with dread, it seemed. And when he talked about this, our thighs pressed together as we sat in the very centre of the place we were discussing. I found myself saying Okay. Okay.
* * *
We drove his car out of the city, not to flee the ocean but to head toward the eastern coast that pinned it back. I already had a change of clothes in my bag from the workshop, and he kept his gear in his trunk so he was always ready to leave the place he couldn’t seem to escape permanently. We were prepared, we thought, and unbothered by our lack of a clear destination, by the presence—far away but pulling us toward it—of the roiling autumn sea. We drove for several hours and, just after dark, pulled into a hotel driveway. The surrounding buildings were squat and shuttered, and closed for the season. A huge moon hung in the sky. The hotel, grey in daylight, appeared warm and amber, and we grinned as we got out of the car. We were enveloped in a briny wind that rushed unimpeded over the sea and didn’t yet contain the stops and starts of enormous buildings and their people, their breath, their sorrow.
“Did you know this was here?” I said, and he shook his head.
The hotel lobby was unevenly lit with some table lamps and pot lights, leaving the rest of the room mysteriously formed. A man in a brown suit gave us the key cards and we walked to the elevator through piped-in, incongruously driving dance music. The seismic oscillation of my brain made me enormous, too big for the elevator, and then too small; I would slip into the gap, vanish.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“More than,” I said. But it was the floors that vanished, instead, and time, and the doors opened to the fifth storey. I looked at Seth, though nothing showed on his face except the terrible focus of the ravenous.
* * *
We turned the lights on in the room, put down our bags. What, then, to do with each other. I want to get this right, what happened.
* * *
We were hungry and ordered room service. I wanted oranges, and sacrifices. I saw the cruelty in even the most conciliatory forms of desire. He stood close to me and spoke into my skin. It was possible to think one thing and do another, to believe in a mode of symbolic carnage. To invite it. To filter the rage of this place through the interstices of two bodies. Dr. Chen had said, Look death in the face. She said this with the inflection of aliveness. Something or someone, it seemed to me, waited to be born.
Room service came. We stopped and retreated momentarily with the plates and metal domes, but they turned out not to contain our order and instead held the breakfast of someone jet-lagged and out of time perhaps. It no longer mattered. We abandoned their cold forms for the tangles of the arcane, leaving the trays out in the hallway so we could commiserate alone. His palms were hot, and his tongue. He smelled of the sea already. He spoke into my skin something guttural, and I felt the coherence to be my own. But sex is an obscuring thing. From inside its complications, we couldn’t know the exact depth of pain and love. Outside the hotel there was the turmoil of the sea and the moon’s wide-open eye.
* * *
I woke in the early morning and watched the room, how still it was. I knew that the sea was quiet and blue also, but a direction within me had already been set. He didn’t stir as I stood up. I watched the arrangement in the morning light, the chairs and unshattered desk, the trackless plateau underneath. We hadn’t destroyed civilization after all.
I decided on showering. I found an apple in my bag and ate it, while my heart began to race and a prescience grew in my brain, the opposite of a shadow. It was something white or a silver fish flashing. My stomach fluttered, rising, and I turned to look at him, wanting to tell him that something was wrong.
Something is wrong.
But he lay on his side like an arc of granite, his consciousness sealed inside. I went to the bathroom instead.
I stood inside the glass stall, and within moments of the water hitting my skin, I felt better. I turned the stream to its coldest setting, then hot, then cold again, and gasped as my body contracted. It was a favourite thing of mine to do, to rupture comfort in this way. Maybe I stayed there for ten minutes. Suddenly his face was Cheshire-like beside me, until he was real and touching me. He guided me from the shower, turned off the taps, and wrapped me in a towel, put his mouth on me.
“You’re awake,” I said, but he had nothing to say. He was still in the laconic setting of desire. We walked to the bed, and I had the feeling of cataclysm, but I wasn’t afraid. We were still standing—it wasn’t me who sought the ground, but a different version of me. He said something that was a denial, as though he had seen ahead and was trying to talk me out of it. The seizure came, as easily as a wave.
* * *
The point of departure, our realities bifurcating, peeling apart. He held his shock like a rifle. I fell instead. The diving down was clockless, a bright space.
* * *
There was something other than dread, my stomach scrambling for my throat, or being ground to dust.
* * *
A failure of language to fit an exploding star inside the banality of certain words: happiness, for instance, or ecstasy. Or wonder. How useless to say these things. A surge through my arms and out through my fingertips, an unrelenting supply of something nameless. I danced for him. I showed him everything I knew.
* * *
The oceanic depth of this. I didn’t feel his revulsion any more than he could see into the portal. In that distance between us, something like snow was falling. The atmosphere shed itself in rips the size of quarters. How it went on for days.
Speaking in Tongues
Time stretched and buckled for him as well. Seth saw a woman on a rack. He heard an unsettling wail, followed about thirty seconds later by what seemed to him like outrageous, terrible snores. I urinated. He ran to the phone to call for help and tripped on the edge of the bedcover, which was pooled on the ground. He badly bit his tongue. My body pulled and contracted while he spoke into the phone. We were both relentless. Perhaps four minutes, maybe six. Seven.
* * *
The shine of belt buckles, the black bags, but no sound at first. I was arriving piece by piece. The EMTs wore practical black boots. The man tilting his head as he moved the stethoscope smelled of onions and rubbing alcohol. He listened to my chest, but the portal had closed and only my heart was there. A woman held my wrist gently, while Seth told her what he saw. Language came to me as branches, as roots. The room was too bright, so I closed my eyes.
* * *
When I opened them again, I felt confusion. The legs had another order; we had skipped ahead in the film. I said I was okay.
* * *
Okay. Okay. Okay.
* * *
He couldn’t believe my words, what he said were my denials. The woman asked if I had a history, and I said yes, though I couldn’t find it. I waved my hand and said I wouldn’t go with them.
The woman leaned in close to me and said, “Are you sure?” Then she turned to Seth and said, “We can’t make her come with us.”
He bled from the mouth and they shone a light in. I could see his anger, and I closed my eyes again, though I still f
elt it.
* * *
How long, I don’t know. The EMTs had vapourized. I lay on the bed, and Seth was beside me, with a damp cloth at my face as if to fix or hide me.
He said, “I can’t believe you never told me this.”
I drank something, a type of juice that left a stain and made me thirsty. Eventually he helped to dress me, his fingers faint with pity, and then I felt it: a discharge of rage. No trace left of the joy that had been present in the diving-down space. I was exhausted—not postcoital, but postictal. This is what we don’t understand, the transmissions. Soul latches soul. Then gone.
* * *
The time inside the world of things was 8:17 a.m. It was a Tuesday.
The Skull
Secrets are always under siege. Few people, not even the keepers, will defend the existence of them, the right of that energy to take shape. Secrets edge regret, or embarrassment, or the idea of exposure. Or exposure itself.
The bearer of the secret is said to be misaligned, malignant.
In the end, unprotected.
