by Maria Mutch
You might wonder where the secret’s angels are, who the publicist is.
* * *
We stood face-to-face for the last time. We had entered the hotel and been transformed, added to. Divided.
In the early days of our collisions, I had given him the bare skull of a baby bird. I had found it in the rooftop garden of the apartment building I was living in, nestled in the soil of a potted boxwood. I had thought it was a plump white mushroom. When I turned it in my fingers I found the exquisitely tiny beak and the holes for eyes. I was so taken with it that I eventually created a piece where dancers wore masks exactly like it. The skull was impossibly light, and after I gave it to him, he placed it on his desk where it was prone to taking off and blowing across the room in summer if he was running his fan. He said it was his most prized possession.
A few weeks after the hotel, I stood in the entry of my building beside the wall of brass mailboxes and opened the box he had sent to me. I found the bird skull, crisp and empty-eyed, along with a piece of paper. It was a letter in which I found his disappointment, how I had withheld from him the fact of my seizures. How, despite the years of coming and going, I hadn’t trusted him. How he had been terrified.
Humidity
I have asked my dancers to show me ecstasy with their bodies, though I’ve realized other people don’t have the foggiest. Their attempts to dig it up are painful to see, and their inevitable frustration when they can’t grasp it. They try for the sexual, a bubble shaped with their arms that is the volume of an orgasm, a scrunching of the face, a pelvic thrust. I tell them that they misunderstand me, but, then, of course they do. Keep searching, I tell them. And their puzzled faces seem so young. So unecstatic. Keep searching.
* * *
The body is in time, it is time. It shows the passage of it. Which is why dance can be hard to translate, why filming it so often seems inadequate. The body reveals space, making us aware of what we take for granted. Conversely, the camera flattens space. Movement is something you have to be in the presence of, in order to fully see how a space is rendered in three dimensions. You have to be right in front of it. Bear witness to it.
* * *
I created a piece in which men and women removed each other’s clothing only to find increasingly ragged, increasingly red layers, darker and darker shades, like a flaying of skins, set to Stravinsky. How to uncover the shadow with a balance of horror and grace, and thereby uncover its secrets.
We were good at this, the leaving and not-calling, the going on about our business as if the catastrophe of failed love hadn’t happened. My parents wouldn’t have understood us, our callous ways. Previously, I had written his name on grocery receipts and drowned them in the kitchen sink, hoping to flood out the tiny grains he had left under my skin.
I am sorry to employ the subcutaneous and the erasure of names. We were like everyone else who thinks their love is unique. And that was the problem, maybe; it was perfectly ordinary, a faint thing, and so we kept looking, waiting for the next entrance, the possibility of another Other.
Thinner
Rafael Massimo did know about my condition. He was thinner then. He was so enamoured of the body and its complications, its absence of regimentation, that he had been to see a show of mine five times. Finally he asked to see me. We had been tangling up for six months before the hotel and Seth and the white space. Neither of them knew about the other.
Raf had already seen—I had allowed him to see—a few of the subtler seizures, though none, yet, of the falling-down variety. Perhaps I recognized in him something that wasn’t there on the surface, a deeper ability to contain. Perhaps I saw, too, a man who, in spite of his own wandering allegiances, was also waiting for a family. The idea of it. When I returned from the hotel, I told him I had had the mother of all seizures. I said nothing of witnesses, and he didn’t ask.
I went to bed and stayed there for nine full days, getting up to stretch or eat, while Raf left messages or delivered takeout to my apartment door. When I let him in, he gave me the Sunday edition of the Times and told me filthy jokes. Inside my blankets, I kept my copy of The Idiot, which was soft as fabric. Dostoyevsky, fellow sufferer of epilepsy and ecstasy, wrote that the joy and rapture he sometimes experienced during his seizures was worth ten years—or more—of life. But he had had the repeated experience of that ecstasy, many times over, and I had only the hotel that day and my unwilling witness. I slept, curled around the book, with the pages of the paper layered around the bed and the paper boxes of rice, until Raf cleared everything away.
“You should know something,” he said.
“Which is?”
He offered me chips of ice in a cup, as if I had had my tonsils out, and yet it was a purely perfect gesture. I held one in my mouth and savoured it.
“I’m not afraid of your seizures.”
I said nothing for a moment. “Why should you be?”
He sat on the bed. “Listen to me.” He put his face close to mine and looked into my eyes. “Your seizures don’t scare me.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Molly.”
“Yes.” Barely audible.
“Your seizures don’t scare me.”
“No.”
He inched even closer and stroked my face. “Not one bit.”
“Not at all.”
“No.”
“You’re an asshole,” I said.
He smiled.
I put my hands to my face and began to sob, perhaps harder than I had ever sobbed. My body shook, seizure-esque. My breath in huge, staggering gulps. He held me as if my life depended on it.
* * *
I sensed, even as early as that, habitation. The water that Raf gave me tasted better than any other water. He hovered at the edges of this unfolding territory. He understood the presence that was gathering there, the one people call fate or destiny. He couldn’t look away. Grief at my losses was dulled by the sense that as I lay on the bed, my body was surrendered to building and creating. An experience new to me, but recognizable. My body as cup, as transmogrifier. I was thirty-eight and Raf eleven years older. I knew what I wanted to do.
When he turned from me to open the blinds, I said, “I think I could be pregnant.”
He turned back in slow astonishment, as if what surprised him was that he wasn’t surprised, and then he frowned.
“Are you teasing me?” he said, and I answered, “I have no idea.”
“You are testing me.”
“I doubt it. But maybe.”
The look that came over his face was a delight so profound that it annexed any talk of logistics, lightning of the brain, or permeable condoms. It radiated from him and was so singular that I began, unreservedly, to love him. I found it painful to do so, so malfunctioning was the equipment.
I had nothing to say for everything that I had left out. My omissions were suddenly reasonable in the force of what was being created. A state of grace made me lucid in one respect. I said softly, “I think there are two of them,” but he didn’t hear me.
A Slingshot
I hardly felt the cut when it happened. My brain was busy, clamped as it was on our bodies, our sex, and I no longer had the physical knowledge of the glass beneath my chest and raging heart, that I was strong and the table weak, that it would somehow, like a horse, fold its legs to the ground. That I would try to stop my fall with my palms slamming into the shards. A single arrowhead came alive and dug in, peeling up a triangle lined with fat and a lazy glug of blood. The healing left a tenacious scar, and so I carry him with me, embedded in the skin, in the shape of a wishbone. Or a slingshot.
* * *
This is what happens to the missing, they are dispersed as pieces, as glimpses, and scars. The voice up ahead sounds like his, but isn’t. A figure ghosts through the crowds and subways and markets. The city is full of fragments, which might be sewn together to make another likeness. In this way the missing are transformed.
The Documentary
In the documenta
ry, the woman sits on the bed, the one she once shared with her wife, and talks about the disappearance.
“We’d been watching TV. Normal-like. Nothing much out of the ordinary. A little fight earlier in the day, but I didn’t think much of it. We watched TV, and she had a peanut butter sandwich. I remember that, because she didn’t eat a lot of peanut butter. And the bread was white bread, and that was out of character, too. I said I was going to bed, and I got a glass of water and went up. Something seemed different while I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. The water was running, but you know how … you know how you feel something in the house? I shut off the tap and listened. It sounded like the front door and maybe she stepped outside for a minute. So I just finished brushing my teeth and got into bed. I read a few pages, fell asleep with the light on for maybe half an hour, or an hour, tops.
“When I opened my eyes, she wasn’t in bed with me. I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep watching TV, but I got up to check. I had this feeling in my stomach. I guess you could call it foreboding, and I remember walking really quietly down the stairs. I thought at first she was on the couch, because of the way the blanket was balled up, but when I got down there, I could see she wasn’t. So I looked outside and her car was gone, and then I really knew something was wrong. She wasn’t one to just go out late at night. She liked pubs and stuff, but she was mostly a homebody and she was early to bed, you know? An early riser.”
The woman smiles, then turns solemn again. “So she was gone, and her car was gone. But she had left her phone, which I thought at first was good—it meant she’d come back. Even if she just forgot it in her rush to go out, she’d come back for it. I decided to go back to bed, but that was a bad idea. I couldn’t sleep at all. I called a friend of ours, but it was late and she didn’t answer. I sent a couple of texts to my mother. But we don’t know that many people. I don’t have many relations, not around here. I didn’t know when to call the police—how long did you have to wait? So I hung on and just kept wandering around the house. I wondered if, you know, somebody came to the door and took her. Forced her into the car. That was why the phone was left behind.
“Then finally morning came, and she still wasn’t back. She didn’t report for work, and that was helpful in terms of telling the police, because then it wasn’t just me saying something was out of character … This was all a year ago. It will be a year next week. That’s a big deal, the first anniversary. Life changes after that, I’m told, though I don’t know how. I guess I’ll know when I get there. I still put up posters—I tape them around telephone poles—and I give out fliers, and I try to keep her in people’s minds, because they forget. They move on, but I’m still here. Though they tell me to move on. I get a lot of that. People say, ‘Well, she left you is all. Don’t you get it? We don’t know her whereabouts, but that’s not quite the same as missing, is it?’ But, you know, I feel like she’s out there in the world, and maybe she needs help. Maybe she, you know, needs help coming home.”
6
A Word from Our Sponsor
The city doesn’t always know what to do with itself, so it invents, it makes new. You can’t step in the same city twice. It tends to covet and sometimes wants to have the tallest buildings and bridges, the land parceled and sold. The hills scraped off and placed in the lakes, with a grid on top. Or a park two and a half miles long, organized in scene after unfolding scene for the wanderers. Sometimes it wants an underworld, with gruesome murders or drug deals or forced weddings, or all three at once. It used to want crammed tenements and disease and one hundred languages and famine and wood construction that easily burned. It wanted stone mansions with society ladies and their vicious husbands careening inside, and cockroaches that polished their own pointed faces. It wanted the Dutch, the French, the English, the Chinese, the Italian, the Irish, the slaves, though none of them wanted each other. It wanted them tangled and sooty and preferably cholera stricken, at the same time that it wanted money and more people and lacquered fingernails. It couldn’t leave out theatre and art and circuses and amusing food and the world’s tallest woman and the smallest man. It wanted fires, lots of those, and riots and ticker-tape parades. Most of all it wanted jazz, its favourite thing. And the rising and setting sun to fill the aligned streets with precisely laid apricot light twice a year each. Then a little peace. But it considers peace to be a kind of sleep, which it is suspicious of, so now it wants riots again, and hurricanes, and hip-hop.
Luna
I saw a man scale up the side of a building on the Lower East Side, swing onto a balcony, way near the top, and disappear. In Koreatown, I saw a baby drop from the fourth floor and be caught by somebody on the second. I’ve seen people jump off the bridges, all of them, and one or two of them live. I once saw a woman on Fifth, nicely dressed, throw up into a paper coffee cup and place it carefully in a garbage can. Keep on walking. They all do that—not the coffee-cup part. They keep on walking, you know, regardless. Not that they’re without compassion. They give the compassion, they keep on walking. Sometimes you see them give compassion in the proverbial cup, and sometimes they do the equivalent of throw up in it.
* * *
There was that man who saw me, who gave me the theatre ticket. Shiny head and suit jacket, which told me something was up, but he said he was an arts lover who couldn’t use his ticket—had other plans or whatever—and gave it to me. Go on in, he said. Enjoy. I love the ballet, but he told me this was a different sort of dancing, modern. So I went in with my ticket and met some resistance. I told the girl, who was young and had great big eyes almost like something was wrong, that I was as legitimate as she was. I said, I’m real, baby. I told her about the inside and the outside and borders, and then I think she just got flummoxed and she let me in.
* * *
The seat was in the mezzanine, so that’s where I sat. When the lights went up there was a small building like a cage, a skeleton of a building, in fluorescent orange. When the shiny man said contemporary I figured he meant the people wouldn’t be doing much, but these dancers were acrobatic. The show was inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the women who jumped—it said so right in the playbill. The people fell, but then they got back up and jumped again. I’m still not sure how they did it, it was a trick of the eyes. And something happened in me that was transcendental, like a blown fuse, and I loved it. But how do you describe a dance in words? After that, though, there was some mayhem and a woman passed out. The problem was the images, you know, the projections of people falling from the towers. Or so it looked. You have to remember when this was, time being essential if also nothing at all. Only two years after the towers. But I was told that my presence was part of the problem. I decided to leave in case the cops were called, which they were, so I slipped out, and the lobby was full of people. I had to push my way through. When I got outside, rain was pouring and the shiny man was there, just a little way down the block. I thought maybe he saw me, but when I looked at him, he just looked back. He didn’t seem bothered at all by the rain or the siren. The ambulance was coming, and those things are always showing up in a way that is also uncanny. Then he turned and walked on.
* * *
A day later I fished a Sunday edition out of a garbage—the whole thing, pristine, too, with an apple pastry, like somebody had bought breakfast for the can—and I read the arts section first. There was an article about the show, about her, the one who made it. I didn’t see her at the theatre, but there was a picture of her. Real elegant woman. Spiked-up hair like her finger was in an electrical socket. I figured she was the sort who could take some criticism. The article talked about a riot, but it was really a kerfuffle. I’ve seen actual riots and that was just a few people getting upset. The wording suggested that she had gone too far. So, gratuitous. And too close to 9/11 and those falling bodies. They used the word callous. They also said some parts were too beautiful. I don’t know how something can be too beautiful, but there it is. You know, people and the sensitive membrane—it
’s like one of those meat-eating plants that shuts its mouth when the little hairs get bothered. They quoted her as saying she was merely delivering the news. I think she may have been what you call ironic.
* * *
The show was years ago, but I had that uncanny feeling that I might run into her sometime. You’d be surprised who you see here. The place generates meaningless connections like that’s its purpose, and you can pluck one of those bits and try to fashion something from it. A potentiality. The dream you were in gets disturbed with another dream and suddenly you notice where you are and wonder how did somebody else get over there? And that’s why the people were so mad, you know, because they preferred the dream they were in and not knowing they were in it.
* * *
I wondered if the shiny man knew something about me, because of his expression. Most days now I don’t think about my family so much. Time has changed me, and changed my face, which it does for us all. The watch has all the secrets, every right action. And every wrong one. The fragility of another body, which resides forever in the hands that move around that watch’s quiet quiet quiet face. You say it three times—very effective that way. The empirical evidence being that it keeps staying quiet. So you tend to it, in your way. And this is my tending, and what I do is move around the place and in so doing, come across. You come across the uncanny and the potentialities and the people at the end of the line, all the time.
