The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  This is what these letters do to me.

  It’s surprising how many of the letters become lost along the way.

  I suspect letters are now so uncommon that anyone encountering them cannot resist the compulsion to touch. It begins with turning the paper over, feeling the paradoxical oily crispness of its skin.

  The translucency.

  The temptation that enough handling can provoke a sentient response in the envelope—as though the proper caress will cause the glue to soften and yield, the flap to curl up slightly at the edges, and then with a gasp, the sheet of writing paper within will begin to simply swell out of the opening.

  All of it happening with a fluid muscularity.

  A year of waiting for another letter. For months my patience was my testament of valor. This my monument to trust.

  And now, a year—I have seen the sun glisten off the bodies in the water, and how hard the ships must work to overcome that beauty, much less the surf at water’s edge. Perhaps the letter never left the island.

  What else could be the cause for this delay?

  A shipment of lemons waiting on the tarmac in Miami, flies on their stems, soon to become citron pressé in Dijon, and at the bottom of the crate is wedged my letter. An indigenous rind fungus has eroded much of the paper. The pulps mingle and rot.

  My letter sits in a stamp shop in Tangiers, being fondled by the inventory auditor.

  There is saliva there that is not my own.

  I am betrayed.

  The letter arrives—a full year has passed since the last, and I had assumed the letter lost. And yet here it is.

  Initially I am delighted by relief, but soon I sense a coldness at my periphery.

  It creeps up closer and closer toward my heart, closing its trapdoors in my veins along its way.

  There is no hope for thawing this one out.

  The thought of betrayal has created a spiny matrix, rather like a window screen, and the sweetness I knew before bats its wings against the barrier in vain.

  There is no entry here.

  I write:

  Where have you been? I waited for you.

  My landlady has begun sidestepping any introductions to new tenants. She used to like to make matches among us—arrange for petty romances and gallant rescues in one direction or another.

  I hear her whisper:

  For quite some time now, Apartment 42 has been having an affair with a woman in the Antilles.

  I’m not sure what’s wrong.

  They never visit one another.

  The phone is silent.

  Sometimes months go by between letters, and it’s nothing but gloom and despair in there.

  No need to worry. It’s surely harmless.

  I suspect there is a moral issue that stands in the way.

  People can be so small-minded.

  Another letter arrives. Inside, she says:

  Yesterday, I ironed all the tiny pleats in the indigo blouse, your favorite one. Due to the humidity, its encounter with the iron was erotic.

  I write back:

  Yes? But did you repair the button?

  I already know her answer. And before I have mailed my response, her reply arrives.

  Inside, she says:

  I refuse to repair the button. I am adamantly opposed to all indications of time’s passage. Instead, I sleep with it between my teeth.

  She writes as though ours is her second language.

  I worry that she is skating across the surface of what really matters: survival, accomplishment, security. She is adapting her brain to fit this attractive new reality, rather than adjusting reality to fit her understandings and beliefs.

  I worry that her lifestyle of sun and shade renders her little more than an incarnate sundial, telling the hours of the rest of our life.

  Silent, immortal witness.

  She sends me unrequested advice, willing me to take it to heart.

  To make changes.

  To alter course.

  I worry that while she continues her life in the Antilles, seeking guidance from her crustaceans, the two of us are on divergent paths that intersected only briefly that winter.

  I worry that our trajectories are tangential.

  That if we ever meet again, she would be disappointed in who I have become.

  Or perhaps at who I have continued being.

  What if I were to become quite ill? The details of this sickness would be dull, but rather unpleasant to experience and observe.

  I have little here that I would miss—a solidly admirable life, fulfilling, but surely not essential.

  It’s just the thought of her letters arriving at a destination that is no longer accurate. There would be no forwarding address.

  I cannot imagine how I could get word to her.

  She writes of the most recent epigrams of the sibilant crabs:

  Above all else, cease from worrying.

  Stop these tricks of the mind.

  This, the greatest disease that prevents humans from evolving as a species.

  It is worry that conjures weapons.

  Recently, I was riding in a taxicab.

  One of those weary, bleached afternoons that pretends to be a dawn. For a moment you indulge the light’s charade—fine, yes, you are morning, I believe you. But the curtain closes on the game, and night surprises you with its applause.

  That is the perfect moment for a taxicab.

  I ducked my head. I climbed inside.

  Oh, the beauty of that dark and greasy womb.

  The foreign driver was listening to a contraband radio broadcast on a dashboard shortwave. It had audio subtitles that created a riptide of meaning—the reporter’s fluid syllables slipping past the harsh rocks and reefs of our native consonants with disarming sanguinity.

  Because of her sibilance, one might be tempted to jump into conversation with a vulnerability and earnestness one would never reveal at home.

  It’s dangerous.

  One ends up pinned down somewhere, gasping, unable to breathe water instead of air. At best, one ends up carried away from where one entered, exhausted and very far from shore.

  Nonetheless, as I sat in the taxicab, I listened to the reported scandal of the day, which pertained to the government postal service:

  Its procedural manuals have not been updated since the third dictatorship.

  The key postal facilities are replete with arcanery that calls itself equipment: cancellation machines whose pulleys are fabricated from human hair; slits and holes and slices in conveyor belts whose apparatus itself is suspended across a crevasse, at whose bottom holiday spelunkers claim to have found parcels containing scientific specimen trays of species long since extinct.

  These irregularities have been going on for quite some time.

  The journalist says:

  A surplus of neglected mail so overwhelmed the postal service that it dumped more than a thousand bags into the water, creating a dam of undelivered correspondence dating back several decades.

  Several large Fascist-era high-rise apartment blocks were flooded when the river leapt its banks.

  The journalist says:

  A rather magnificent New Year’s Eve celebration was halted by state police when the confetti was discovered to consist of shredded holiday cards, chosen from the outgoing mail bins on the purely festive basis of colored envelopes.

  Communist times.

  Children crying.

  Lovers irrevocably suicided along the nation’s perilous embankments.

  If only the letter had arrived, everything could have been different.

  Would have.

  I lie in bed at night and think of her.

  I brush my teeth in the morning, and I think of her.

  I know she found some sort of sextant and compass necessary for optimal navigation.

  Everything that is missing in my life here in the North.

  In the last letter, she provides me with the following:

  There is a second meth
od for foretelling the future.

  It is as dangerous as it is accurate.

  Precisely at midday, while the sun can cast no shadow, carefully mark your coordinates by drawing two perpendicular and intersecting lines.

  Then—equally carefully—split oneself in two.

  One is to wait in place.

  The other is to go on ahead.

  Through this method, it is imperative to maintain close and regular correspondence.

  She is a buttonhole, and I am the button. There is nothing else.

  THE KHOLODNAYA VOYNA CLUB

  It is the first meeting. Our gaze is bleak, austere, and focused, yet our fingers chatter, skeletal, around crude ceramic cups: the force field of combat discipline weakens at our appendages at the farthest distance from our hearts.

  Already the physiological deployment of resolve and commitment has begun to falter, has become less certain.

  Our enemies are despair and shallow breathing.

  The light in the room has shifted to glacier tints of ice and water, sky and eye. Our skin glints silver—more trout than human.

  The coffee is tepid, and we barely sip it. It is our 342nd meeting.

  There is a green gelatinous murk to the light, and our fingers only loosely wrap our coffee mugs, a drape of slimy flesh that suggests a grip.

  At the crests of our heads, each bears adipose fat and the beginnings of fins.

  The admiral strikes his fist against the table, and we snap into shape again: ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders emerge from sinuous spines, and we once more resemble ourselves, our former selves.

  The forms that we recall, we rebuild.

  We reach up with real fingers to feel our skulls, and find these sites reassembled. Sharply razored hair appears—snipped into a brush of platinum or ebony or gold, obeying appropriate military affiliations.

  We clench our memories of torso and leg, and blood pulses at our jawlines.

  This is the tactic we learned to keep from blacking out.

  Although we could as easily seat ourselves by branch of service or by aircraft, in our earliest meetings, we instinctively calibrate ourselves according to ideology.

  Geopolitical affiliation is at first divisive. There are sharp disputes, often erudite. The North Koreans confront the French. The Americans accuse the Cubans. Confusion mixed with cultivated hostility forms the basis of aggression. Repartee is offensive and unflinching. Often, we have killed one another—either directly or through a causal chain of events—and that escalates the tensions.

  Most questions we cannot answer, and, stymied by the inexorable failure of dialectic, we begin to hit each other.

  Our wounds get in the way.

  We shyly coalesce into groups corresponding to fatal injury: skull fracture, stroke, drowning, asphyxiation, hemorrhage, burns.

  This is what starts us talking about women.

  We first remember arguments. Stubbornness, selfishness, recalcitrance, and dishonesties on both sides. Lies told and retold, polished and honed to a state of purity that felt like truth. Disappointments.

  It’s not as simple as recalling a name, a breast, or five proud, blue bruises on a thigh gripped tight to facilitate lovemaking—the memory of specificity intrudes.

  A dispute in a rowboat at the park after eating a tin of spoiled oysters, the pilot and the lover both heaving over the sides into the path of an astonished mother and her summer ducklings.

  She was going for a test at the doctor. Worried, the lover rewired the house and her hairdryer shorted out. She would never be authorized for another and changed to braids, which smelled of chamomile and licorice.

  It was raining in Pyongyang, and the pilot went to buy her tampons—so expensive and difficult to find. She wore galoshes.

  The pilot shared the same dreams with her at night, unconscious. Autobiographically accurate, yet identical. They had even dreamed them at the same hour, and woke together, crying. She drove the pilot so crazy, sometimes it seemed possible they were the same person. Perhaps a single schizophrenic.

  Sun coming through the leaves in patterns. Buttercream frosting on her nipples for the pilot’s twenty-seventh birthday. Pushing the old bones of the car home—the pilot shirtless, she barefoot. Mockingbirds. Lost keys.

  It is the precision of love that startles the pilots. All the training at instrument panels and aeronautics controls—the muscles remember, but not the mind.

  Our minds are mobiles strung with counterbalanced points of desire.

  To wake with the smell of her under my nails. To hear her cursing in the shower. To find her short, dark hairs on my pillow.

  For seventy years, the Cold War test pilots have avoided such sentimentality, but now we have exhausted all other agenda items for our meetings.

  We have waited long enough.

  We all went down in water.

  With each meeting, the suggestion of gills becomes more prominent.

  We seem increasingly ectothermic.

  We call another meeting.

  One pilot says:

  It must be a question of where the body thinks it is. We are half human, suspended between spirit and purpose. At the moment of death, on impact with the sea, the wet itself seemed to want to take us and make us some other sort of species.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, but it was love that held us back.

  Why must we die, yet retain a mortal’s desires?

  Another pilot says:

  Our final days as human ghosts are drawing to a close. Like radiation, there must be a finite period of time elapsed before our atomic matter is called upon to form some other thing. Fish are to water what pilots are to air. The transformation is as simple as that. Nature adores a pattern.

  We must leave our loves behind.

  We drink from our crude ceramic cups of unsatisfying coffee, and hide tears.

  On this we all agree: We are fading away. We are lonely and far gone, and our true loves have doubtlessly moved on.

  We have been training heavily. We can now pass through the air unimpeded.

  No longer suspended in armature of aluminum and steel, we move without fuselage.

  Without weapons.

  We know we will soon fly blind.

  We must now navigate by other senses.

  At our next-to-last meeting, we find it increasingly difficult to make eye contact, or to successfully maneuver the exchange of coffeepot from one pilot’s hand to the next.

  Everything is bleached white and overexposed, with refractions of pale pink and lavender obstructing the crucial functions of our corneas.

  It seems unduly cruel for our eyes to fail us; we are test pilots.

  Or were.

  At our final meeting, we certify one another good to go: we have done this before, when there were other vessels at our command.

  Now there are no insignia.

  No diplomas or medals or sashes or stripes.

  There are no new hats, no special helmets.

  Gloves and scarves and boots are useless. Goggles, throttles, thrusters. No bombs or rockets now. We counsel one another on the voyage: The Cold War is over. There will be no red borders, no blue. No orders or directives.

  In all lands, the citizens will have left their fallout shelters to go shopping.

  We descend in the night. Our women are sleeping—a shoulder above the sheets, a toe exposed. Hair tied up, or loose and tangled.

  It is night, but the eyes of the pilots see only white and periwinkle gray.

  We find our women by their scents alone: nicotine, citrus, rose attar, shoreline, lotion. There are nightgowns, or a ratty chemise, or nothing.

  We slip through the windows, then along the walls and across the floor to stand there, dripping slightly by the bed.

  The poor blind pilots.

  When our women wake, they press their hands to the cold, flat flesh of these apparitions and cry out—they are guilty, lovesick, torn.

  We the pilots make knees of bone and flesh again, and press the
m up between our women’s legs.

  We raise our women off the ground, pendent.

  We are airborne.

  I’m not dead, we the pilots say.

  Speechless, our women find their tongues. They count every tooth before speaking, but find they cannot speak.

  I’m here, we say to them. I was never dead. I was never gone. I’m alive. We’re together.

  It’s a dream come true, and yet a nightmare. For we are dead, and our women have met others and moved on.

  We follow our women’s scent as they return to bed, as they entwine themselves with the living limbs of the peacetime beings who have replaced us.

  One day, whisper we the pilots, you will be dead.