The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  She said: We are all needed in our way.

  Silence fell between our mouths. Yet in the basement her printing press rattled, heavy with ink, duplicating rudimentary field maps of existential insurrection. Instructions for the revolutions that must surely come. She seemed next in line to be arrested, yet perversely unassailable.

  I said: I can tell you everything, afterward.

  She said: I believe in you.

  It was the last day of December; the streets were slickened with sleet. All warmth was snuffed out, extinguished, as though in retaliation for its impudence.

  I told her: I want to marry you. I will return when the war is won.

  She said: I love you. I will wait for you. We are all doing what must be done.

  Her husband arrived at our doorstep at dinnertime to take me away. He and I walked to his saloon. I sat down, and he served me soup and spread the cards. I laid my money on the table. The girls arrived, and the beer.

  This, then, was my call back. These my enemy lines.

  He said: I will send you home to your duty.

  Not to my children, blond and fat; not to my mate, loyal and kind. I thought of poison. I thought of lies. I thought I should be punished and then forgiven. I imagined my death behind enemy lines, more filled with longing for myself than for this spouse. Broken, forgetful, demolished, I imagined a distant victory, ascending into the matted tangle of my true love’s hair, streaks of black on her face from eye to eye, two narrow shoulders cold as bone, a pale face with a thin slash of mouth, her half-blue cartographer’s paw that touches who and what I am and beckons me: Come in.

  I said: I would rather go home to yours.

  The glow of red coals in her fire.

  She is not here, but we would have chosen otherwise.

  And then he summoned his men and they arrived, and he showed me to them for the spy I was, and I was gone in a flash of detention.

  Prison, through four more long years of war.

  This, then, was my call. These my enemy lines.

  The consequence of consequence.

  I sat down in their house of chains, and they served me an ominous soup and spread the questions on the chamber’s table.

  Who are you? they said.

  What is this you have done?

  What did you do that brought you here?

  Whom shall you betray?

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

  I write to her:

  There’s a constant smell of burning wood in the air; someone somewhere, or rather everyone everywhere, is trying to make the winter go away. A kind of delayed khorovod, but with fires for the living rather than the dead.

  Let the dead fend for themselves, it seems. They can light their own fires.

  Perhaps they do.

  She writes to me:

  In the far east, sailing the waters on a recovery expedition, in winter—snow on the shores covers the depressions in the surface of the sand. When walking on the shore, the snow looked strong enough to hold until suddenly—up to the ankles, the knees, the hips in these holes, plunging down into these deep, elongated holes. So soft, one couldn’t resist falling over, then lying down, a good six feet below the surface of the frozen winter shore. As if buried, a body, snow blinded, below the shore. The perfect length for a body lying down, these long, soft holes. Lying there, in the snow in the graves, snow covering the long-moldered bodies of our dead.

  But it was white, very white, and quite soft.

  I gather her letters together in a string and keep them in a place where no one will look. These secret specimens of lost worlds, of cartography and discovery and longing.

  After I was taken from her, I intended to return.

  At first, captive by her husband, a blackmail master. His raven on a bar, its thin claw wired to the post. A chain on the money box, locked beneath the table. His wedding ring, speared by knifepoint to the headboard.

  And then second, held captive by his connections. Arrested as a spy. Months in prison. Stalactites on the bars, bats above my bed.

  It was rumored that I entered, and that I never left that prison, but—broken, forgetful, demolished—I quit it, and my promise to her, and I went back to what had been before: my sweet blond lover in the far north, our two young children, the fermenting honey of my beer, not knowing tea, or gutter, or the sound of narrow hips shivering in the winter.

  My sons enter the room, half frozen with the cold. They complain: there is a crust of chalky gray in the fireplace. I blow on it, and there is no red beneath. It is dark here.

  I write to her:

  You are not here, but I would have chosen otherwise.

  There are wild birds here, despite the cold.

  In the mornings, I play with my sons. Ten years have passed, six since the war ended. Once again, it is the month whose first letter she will not allow me to write, because that letter always reminds her of a certain month, this month—the month that flees December, the month I was to return to her, but instead went north.

  I write to her now:

  I will return when the war is won.

  I cannot speak to her of the months that followed our December. It was the month the war ended. It was the month she waited, and I did not arrive. Now I am a winter creature, blind in the far north: I rise to the dark, I labor to the dark, I yearn through the sight of a dark without stars.

  She writes:

  The graves so soft and bright, I suppose the soldiers couldn’t resist falling over. Falling over, then lying down. Broken, forgetful, demolished: behind the enemy’s front lines is an infinity of possible paths that a moving body follows through space.

  A curve that a body describes. When they fall in battle, the bodies are stilled. The consequence of consequence. I find the point of light reflecting off their bones in snow and sun, and I mark it on my map.

  The candle flame bends with the movement of this ship. We are all needed in our way. I have raised anchor and aweigh from what was and what shall never be.

  Now I write to her:

  Ita semper. So be it then.

  Here in the north, in winter, there is a crust of chalky gray in my fireplace. And I blow on it, and there is red beneath.

  AURORA AND THE STORM

  On the first night, I set fire to the tops of the standing trees—ancient mangled things of meat and bone and torn bark. I had hoped it would bring some help, some assistance.

  I waited for the branches to burn.

  Some signal—they smoldered and released a greenish smoke of water vapor that I hoped would drag the sky for miles. Yet instead it returned to me, curled and supine in a defiant smudge. I drew it into my lungs and spoke through it, saying nothing.

  Trails of gray from my mouth summoned no response.

  Ravenous. Whatever it is, this thing, here, the leaves are all stripped from the few remaining trees.

  Seven branches of the tree are gone, and so is she.

  The second night, I continued to call for rescue, but there was no answer. I walked what’s left of the upper halls with the severed cord in my hand, speaking into the transmitter.

  In the ballroom, the crystal prisms dangle at dislocated angles.

  There will be no sun in this place.

  On the third night, the geese streaked by in a Roman phalanx.

  They are girded and from below, without weapon, I know that what lies above us is merciless. What lies below crawls hungrily inside the frozen soil.

  The birds navigate between.

  Along what’s left of the horizon, the lines of earth seem soft, but on the fourth night, the soil is burnt to dark charcoal: in the earth, branched red veins of ore that still sizzle in the damp.

  I pretend the empty openings here in the walls are filled with glass.

  That when I look out into the wilderness, I am looking through something, through a translucent pane that separates me from the beyond.

  But it is not so.

  There has been a change in p
ressure, and a collapse. A skin diver’s lung, or a chambered nautilus too far into the deep.

  There has been a shattering, and now all is softness.

  Mist.

  Fog.

  Mold.

  Snow.

  The powdered wings of weakened insects that, like me, are unable to find shelter on the inside.

  The air itself is milky white and cloaks my head in stripes of gray.

  We have been swallowed by the storm, nacreous.

  The sky is opalescent, as though I have become the pupil of some great eye, the night its lashes. Closed in a wet, close, muscular darkness that will not lift or blink until the shock of morning, when all turns opal again. My own eyes, pale and responsive, fill with the wet of salt that is not tears.

  Yesterday, I walked to the edge of the terrace of the old hotel, where it begins to crumble over the ravine and what was once the rock garden, now an ocean.

  A falcon’s nest savaged by the winds, hanging in strips of birch bark and gangrenous moss.

  That black bird an umbrella—an armature of wings upended and split back.

  The feathers floated on the water, a life raft for mites, then moored themselves on a log, or a beaver’s corpse.

  My adversary is the Norway spruce. Each needle is an antenna urging me to leap into the white, and swim. But I know it is the sky. I have seen the savaged falcon. I know the ruse.

  Each dawn, the spruce. Its unlikely tenacity through this storm means fat pods still hang from it, thick and swollen as sex organs.

  Stronger than the wind that stripped all else to root and bone.

  It says to me:

  Leave that place. Join me out here. Climb into my branches. For your pillow, a hornet’s hive. Press my sap into your blistered skin.

  Whatever will become of me, of us, in this place without mark on a map?

  As a child, my mother would unfurl the sailing maps from other ages and point to the inaccuracies of coast and continent—apocryphal places that loomed or tumbled out of reach of any vessel.

  See, she would say, they were wrong about everything. Our world doesn’t look like this at all.

  The maps were kept in a metal trunk and locked. They belonged to her ancestors. They were records of their glorious mistakes. Their vast errors in judgment. Their utter ignorance about where they were going—and also where they were. They strode out hugely into lands with the confidence of curiosity and false knowledge.

  Here will be a river. Here we will drink. Here we will find shelter. Here we will plant food for winter. Misled, unprepared, foolish, and naïve, they planned heroic feats for blood and nation, and were crushed. The first surprise was their error. The second surprise was their demise.

  Yet their coded blood passed along the lines of centuries, down to this small daughter in new woods.

  One day they will say:

  There was a woman here, Aurora, who wrote in turbid prose. She kept a journal. She wrote in a hand of decreasing size as her paper ran out, and then her pencil.

  She claimed that the pain of this land hauled itself up in a clotted wound from the earth itself and clung to her shoes, then crawled up and ever upward until it reached her heart, and then her brain.

  In the night it glowed, a crown around her head with jewels that were neither sapphires nor diamonds.

  The need now is for routine. In the journals of my ancestors, there would have been notes on the minutiae of cleaning and repair: as their voyage progressed farther off the coasts of an unwanted home, they would have compressed themselves into the dignity of work: A brass lantern to be rubbed and shined. Splinters carved from the wooden hull and fashioned into boot buttons, bored out with knife tips and threaded with string wound from their own hair.

  Yet here I sit, cross-legged, knees pulled up to my chin, wondering how high the waters will yet rise: the fire and the storm cleft this place and left it bare as bone.

  There are no tasks but this.

  I am rendered mad: some lapse in sense or wisdom must have drawn me here, rather than a valiant and unquenched thirst.

  I have followed a woman into the wilderness.

  I have crept and danced and cajoled some rigid, slender, saddened form that has vanished in the storm.

  Or was swept off.

  We arrived here together.

  We had our work. We had been assigned to a project on the dark matter detector. Our paper had to be finalized, revised, rewritten, and that is work to be done apart from the calcified structures of human civilization. We had boxes of notes and archives and conceptual matrixes of theoretical expansion points.

  We had shipped everything ahead, and everything waited in our rooms in cardboard boxes.

  In the hot damp of late summer, the boxes softened into warm shapes that promised nourishment, like brown-cottoned breasts in a nursery.

  All day we worked, each day.

  I roamed the buckling old hallways of black wood, my feet in wool socks and pencils in my hair, writing notes in my sheaves of paper. In the afternoons, I walked barefoot into the distant gardens to sit with hummingbirds and—later—fruit bats, and burrow down into my thoughts.

  Her in her room, red carpeted, windows of diamond pane, uncomfortable chair, bad light.

  A dark head bent down in an arch of neck that proved impossible to sustain: blinding headaches. A wrenching irregularity in alignment that at night I would want to rub out of her, but couldn’t.

  My body was a stone.

  It lay heavy in my bed, and no one disturbed the dust that had settled there by morning.

  Although I disguised it well, I’m certain that I hated her. She was abrupt with all whose paths crossed hers. She was thoughtless and unkind. Anyone who might advance her some slight interest or affection—no matter how mild or insubstantial—would soon recoil with the sense of having perpetrated an unforgivable violation. That to notice her was an intrusion. Yet I had arrived at our arrangement from within a state of great magnanimity: a year of professional success. A season of scientific awards, rewards and prizes, and I felt the world should profit by my gains. I wanted to pour wine, to draw out others in conversation, to elicit confidences and quiet confessions in the moonlight.

  She knew it in an instant, and recoiled.

  At the hotel, all guests were requested to dress for dinner and sit at a common table. The settings were fastidious and punitive, as though for a dour banquet or a funeral repast. The napkins: suitable for surgery, or requiem. I laid mine on my lap, half expecting that the dinner knife was meant not for plate but viscera, as though I would rise with a lap of blood and feeling faint.

  She invariably arrived late, or not at all.

  After several weeks of working together in tidy isolation, she and I had met far beyond midnight in a quiet corner of the upstairs library.

  She did not disguise her disappointment at seeing me, or her certain horror at my approach.

  I needed a pencil. She had none.

  I don’t recall why she spoke to me—it was perhaps a desultory command, or a clever condemnation of the lighting, which someone had left on for safety in the hall.

  I turned it out, and in utter darkness she began to speak.

  When I say that she spoke, I mean it was a gently thorough inquisition concerning my life up until that moment. Her questions were too perfect, too complete, with an eerie accuracy and unfailing specificity concerning the most unspoken details of my cosmos—as though she already knew the answers to her queries about my past and was merely practicing good science, meticulously cross-checking footnotes upon exposure to a new cache of primary-source materials.

  Although she was leading me through the discussion, I felt I was imposing on her closely manicured time. Yet whenever I shifted my weight to escape, she inserted another question, and the shock of its uncanny knowledge pinned me there, perplexed.

  The temperature rose in the room as the night wore on, and my clothes felt as though they had bonded to my skin.

  As
though blood had dried them into a wound.

  I next remember lying on my back in the dark. She no longer sat against the wall, in a chair, sprawled out, improbably long legs and feet penetrating the shadowed room.

  I was in the middle of the library.

  The bookcases swept up thick and tall above me, sentries arrayed along the border wires.

  In my field of vision were my knees and feet—had I fallen from a sofa and been unable to rise?

  My great-grandfather’s role in the asylum had been to split the walnuts. In between the fascia of their meat rests, a hardened, charcoaled matter that must be pulled out with a pick. That is how I felt. The fissures of my brain exposed to air, ready for consumption.

  It was morning and I felt ashen, happy, and rearranged.

  The next night at dinner, she arrived on time and sat beside me with aplomb. She poured wine. She offered a second slice of roasted chicken. She answered our companions’ modest inquiries on direct detection, dark matter, Enrico Fermi, and what lies beneath the Dolomites in gallant, expansive form.