The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR

  Copyright © 2015 Quintan Ana Wikswo

  Cover and interior photographs © Quintan Ana Wikswo

  Cover design by Kelly Kofron

  Author photograph © Eric N. Grush

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

  Wikswo, Quintan Ana.

  The hope of floating has carried us this far / Quintan Ana Wikswo.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-56689-406-7 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3623.I49A6 2015

  811’.6--dc23

  2014033361

  FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “My Nebulae, My Antilles”—first published in Gulf Coast

  “On the Sofa in Vilnius”—first published in the Kenyon Review

  “The Delicate Architecture of Our Galaxy”—first published in Conjunctions

  “Cap Arcona”—first published in the Drunken Boat

  CONTENTS

  The Cartographer’s Khorovod

  Aurora and the Storm

  The Anguillidae Eater

  Holdfast Crowbiter

  My Nebulae, My Antilles

  The Kholodnaya Voyna Club

  On the Sofa in Vilnius

  The Delicate Architecture of Our Galaxy

  Cap Arcona

  The Double Nautilus

  Notes on Methodology

  Acknowledgments

  THE CARTOGRAPHER’S KHOROVOD

  When she writes to me as she did before, at first there is the incomprehensible sound of crickets, and then there is my familiar smell, a scent released from my pores as dark and full of longing as they were before.

  She will not allow me to write the first letter of a certain month anywhere in my correspondence to her, she says, because that letter always reminds her of the month that followed December.

  But she says I can talk to her of anything else.

  I write to her:

  So be it then. Rules being what they are and what they become. Knobs have been twisted, settings recalibrated.

  I don’t know how to refrain from reference to that month, from employing the letter that brings me closest to her. It is the darkest one, the longest, the most bereft. Frozen. Perhaps because here in the far north, it is also black: we rise to the dark, we labor to the dark, we yearn to the sound of the dark without stars. The sky releases snow, as though it has run out of light and can only produce the temptation of constellations, descending to touch us with a silent ice that bites.

  I remember the glow of red coals singing in her fire.

  She is not here because I chose otherwise. Existence is the consequence of consequence, a nested series of events that unfurl themselves with all the inexorable exuberance of spring. This is what you planted; this is what now springs from your soil. And each year I must look on, aghast, as the lonesome bright-green sprout leaps forward from the blackened soil to remind me of the seed I cast there long ago.

  It was the darkest month, the one she forbids me mention. People speak of prison, and they mean an enclosed internal space with no exit, and all is hushed with apocrypha of insanity and solitude, the slow, sharp shock of punishment for crimes. But mine was real: it had bright lights and restraints, a concrete cot bearing a load of inconsequential mattress, wire mesh and iron bars and an enameled toilet, an aluminum plate and mug. In the hallways, howls or laughter.

  In the daytime, questions. In the nighttime, questions. Some from others, most from myself.

  What did you do that brought you here?

  Whom shall you betray?

  It was rumored that I had entered, and that I have never left.

  I met her in December. That month is allowed to me. The letter D, followed in succession by E and C and E and M and B and E, then R. Again, a chain of action and reaction, a studied progression of letters that carry meaning. I walked down the street alongside the Baltic Sea. There was a night fog. I had risen to the dark, labored to the dark; I yearned for the sound of light, of stars. My friend said: look up, there she is, standing at her door. She was clothed inappropriately for the weather. A thin dress the color of frozen skin. Her hair was wet. She was tall but small; she was slight but immense, a naked tree in winter—all dark, half-broken branches in fierce defiance. She was emptying a teapot into the gutter. She looked up and, fingers stained indigo with ink, swept her hair from her face, and it was a December face stripped of leaves. She was bare. Luminous. I was one hundred paces from her, and I stumbled. She tipped the teapot and scattered its contents in the street. She looked down at our fate and it was winter, and then spring, then on with the sorrow of late autumn turning golden flesh into a scattering of dust. One hundred paces later, and we arrived at her door: sweaty and soot black and wrapped in winter wool, and already repentant.

  Inside, singing, and the glow of red coals in her fire.

  The consequence of consequence.

  Her establishment, everyone said, was a place of easy pleasure. I was told we were stopping there for a meal, a drink, a turn at the piano, some tobacco, a body to flip over, enter, and toss back. Yet in the fetid swamp of war, she commanded a more distant island, unassailable, within a larger body of water.

  Upon arriving it was clear to me, at least, that hers was an ancient place, some Sapphic temple defying exorcism, an immanence of incantations designed to alter the course of the engagement.

  On a broad, stained table in the back, she drew maps in perfect ink on spotless paper, and their confidence felt ominous. She insisted she merely held the pen. She insisted hers was a simple teahouse, even as her skinny, steady hand marked the lines of what was and what is, what had been and what could be, and what might and what will never change.

  Huddled in the candled pools of table, those I knew through the highest levels of diplomacy and intrigue consulted her scrolls of paper, remorselessly inscribed with thick etched lines of mountain and ravine.

  How to traverse the untraversable.

  How to surmount the insurmountable.

  Double agents, assassins, provocateurs: for these denizens of insurrectionist associations, her teahouse led to plots of rebellion, victory, or defeat.

  She lived thusly with these combatants and she recognized me immediately.

  In wartime, there are but a few roles: champion, coward, enemy, ally, fraud. There are merely a few places: field of battle, hospital, brothel, grave.

  She seemed at once to know me for who and where I was.

  Today I receive a letter from her. It’s difficult to sense whether she writes now in search of reunion or remuneration. I owe her something, but it’s impossible to pay the bill: a debt whose compound interest accrues in decades must perhaps remain eternally unsettled.

  She writes to me:

  The coastline of this island is more than six hundred miles, and there is much to be explored. Often, both rescue and recovery expeditions alike require cartographic innovation in celestial navigation. The sextant measures the distance between any two bodies in a field: it can be of use whether or not bo
dies are stilled, or still moving.

  She is not here because I chose otherwise. She is on a distant island, in a larger body of water than mine.

  She continues:

  Like your clockmaker, Hanuš, and his astrolabe, sometimes blinding is the consequence for leading a mission off the map.

  They are relentless words, springing forward from the spotless paper to remind me of a seed I cast there long ago.

  I admit: I wrote to her first, late this past summer. I sent a message to her by a courier who knew a courier who had heard a rumor of her assignment. At first, she did not respond.

  I had written:

  I think of you often, and am surprised to discover you are still alive. A new level of surprising: strange things happen. I hope you are and have been fine.

  Surely it was inadequate. As though she were ever fully alive. As though she could have been killed.

  Five months later she wrote back, on translucent vellum inscribed in a portentous brown ink, which she suggests is distilled from the oils of local nuts. I can envision her, the augural stork of her body plunging knee-deep through the frozen forest on a distant island, wrenching nuts from the desolate birch trees and crushing them amid the glow of red coals in her fire, extruding their sap as her emissaries.

  A research expedition: wherever she is, surely there are scheming men or the massacred, inert bodies of them. Hers is the consequence of consequence.

  I write to her:

  Snow is falling here again, the sky quickly shifting from light, wintery blue to steel gray, and then a wall of snow, a snow cannon as they call it, a snow cannon from Russia. The language, as always but even more so in this case, speaks for itself.

  I live in a house these days, outside the city, too close to the North Pole, so the snow that falls here stays. It covers the ground, the houses, the bushes, the trees. Everything is swept under a blanket of pure-white snow. Sounds become muffled and indistinct, and the cold makes people hesitate.

  In the mornings, I take my sons out into the field to teach them the prints of winter prey.

  We smell the air and it smells of her—it reeks of the consequence of her.

  Sweat gathering in the hollows of my arms and back and chest—a sharp, sour scent of a sacrifice I long to make.

  I teach my sons to recognize the marks of the wolf, gull, musk ox, owl. Hers are not here because I chose otherwise.

  But for a moment, I think of showing the boys how to identify her print in the snow: toes like the points of knives.

  Sole of her foot like the flat of an eyeless fish, steam rising from the mark as though a pot of tea had been emptied into a gutter.

  It was her husband who first brought me to her house.

  On leave from the front, his bar was the first stop for soldiers of discernment. His offerings were not insulting, but neither did they present onerous demands of any kind.

  He attracted commissioned officers, well-placed plunderers, ambitious clerks—those with a need to feel elite, yet of the earth.

  To feel the reek of something small beneath one’s nails and then wash it off, and know oneself superior to it.

  He was connected in the highest places. He could not be crossed.

  Mercenaries came to him and gave what he instructed them to give.

  She had already left him by that time, of course—many said she had tried to kill him with a butcher knife. That she had hunted him for days, her steel blade glittering for his blood, her fingers slashed with marks of her own making. That he locked his door against her, expecting her to break it down, chop it up, burn it away. But she pitied him, and moved on.

  For others, the prevailing belief was that she had done this thing because he tried to beat her. That he needed to be master of the key and the lock as well. That she had risen up in refusal and rebelled.

  Some believed it was because she had lost respect for him: soon after the war began, when it was clear he would evade the fight—he was content, it seemed, to sit out the war as a profiteer and panderer. A purveyor of distraction, games of chance, a ready assortment of unconvincingly legal alcohols, substances unpermitted and unrationed. He was a master of diversionary pastimes. He knew people in the highest places. But she had risen up in righteousness and repudiation.

  After leaving him, she opened her own establishment.

  She was a madam, they said.

  Nearly all believed that she had opened a brothel: all dim lights and red walls and everywhere sites to recline in velvet red and soft as a vagina.

  That with the proper phrase, the knowing gesture, a visitor could unlock pleasures beyond all possible mythos or imagination.

  It was likewise intimated by a small and well-placed few that hers was a front for the resistance, a secret meeting place for strategists and tacticians who schemed with sympathetic armies to the west and east.

  She, they said, was the cartographer, making maps of what was and what had been, what is and what could be.

  All for acolytes to follow: to victory or the grave.

  Her husband told me all these suppositions were untrue. That she left him for no reason, and set up for herself a place with no name, no purpose, and no profit. That she was enigmatic, and capricious, and incompliant. But pretty.

  He rested his thick and strangely swollen hands on the bar and said, She is not here, but I would have chosen otherwise.

  Now, on the nights he was not working, he often visited her establishment. He took me with him.

  She was in Chinatown, and therefore off the northern man’s map of reason and familiarity. Streets couldn’t bother to be marked. The rules governing transportation were inevitably obscure. Dogs ran in cannibal packs, pausing under sulphurous streetlights to take a bite from their colleagues’ leg or back or tail. Headless chickens dripped limp from hooks along the alleyways, their faces crushed into some nameless, sour delicacy. Childish faces glowered from windows, laboring on uniforms and implements for the war, a few lingering outside, bent over captured crickets, creaking, tethered by silken filaments inside miniature cases of gourd and wood. Totems for bravery and resurrection.

  We hurried, and he urged me to look for the bands of yellow light streaming from her storefront windows.

  This is where I think I’ve already said all there is to say. The cracked yellow teapot in her hands, leaking its dark brew into the gutter, steam ascending into the matted tangle of her hair, streaks of black on her face from eye to eye, two thin shoulders cold as bone, a long pale face with a slash of mouth, pointed teeth, a cadaverous hand tipping the pot of tea into the gutter to release the steam into her face, a thin dress inadequate against her narrow hips, shivering in the winter alley.

  A lock of hair dripping behind her ear, she reached to tuck it back again with a half-blue claw. She looks up at me, plunging my way forward through Chinatown, and sees me for who and what I am and says: Come in.

  And I did. A safe house. The glow of red coals in her fire.

  He minded, terribly. He minded that I entered, and that I never left.

  He minded that I stood in my boots on the deep, soft sofa under the hot red lights and sang hard, sad songs to her with no purpose, to no profit.

  He minded that I drew the hair from her eyes and lit her face with curiosity and hope.

  He minded that I knew her rules.

  One week passed, and I hadn’t left.

  Then two.

  It was rumored I was on assignment, that hers was a house of espionage, that she had secrets, that the resistance was gaining strength, that we had united for some grim purpose of freedom and liberation.

  It was rumored that she had let my hand fall upon her breast, that she had let drop her knife, that she was revising her most unpromising maps, that we read to one another by candlelight from childhood legends of troll and fairy, that we threw wild mushrooms into the soup, that I allowed her to comb my hair and braid the strands around her neck, that we twined together as close as wires in a fence between what was and
what is yet to be.

  Three weeks passed, and I drew water for her teakettle and emptied it into her open mouth.

  Four weeks passed, and ours was a house of love songs, a house of pores, a house of rapturous follicle, a house of rosewater, gunpowder, secretions, and saliva.

  Ours were the secrets of specimens, of lost worlds, of cartography and longing.

  We had kindled and gained strength.

  We were united.

  It was rumored that I had entered, and that I never left.

  He minded terribly.

  He knew—for I had once told him—that I had a lonely, clinging companion in the far north, in winter, in the dark, and our two children, and excuses and disappointments and evasions and thwarted escapes. He knew my hands were vainly grasping at the edges of that lightless coffin, where the lid could fall and crush them.

  He came to our Chinatown door with a butcher knife. He hunted me for days, his steel blade glittering for my blood, his fingers slashed with marks of his own making.

  I locked her door against him, not expecting him to break it down, chop it up, burn it away.

  It opened, but I refused to fight.

  And he didn’t pity me, nor move on.

  At his behest I told her: I have been called back to the war, to behind the enemy’s lines.