The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  “I’m barely thirty-eight,” I said. The flame burned higher, angrily. “Look, am I living or am I dying? You know, I work right near the World Trade Center, maybe that bad dust—” That fucking blue devil, I didn’t say. I should have known when she cut me the first time. And what about my bid?

  The oldest better doctor didn’t flinch. “I can’t say about the dust. Today you’re living. But I won’t lie to you, Gabriel. Cancer, even the laziest cancer, is like a lion. Lions spend enormous amounts of time sleeping, did you know that? If you go on safari, all the lions are usually asleep in the shade. But then sometimes they wake up. That’s what we’ll be watching you for. To see if the lion has woken up.”

  All the other better doctors smiled, as if this was a brilliant metaphor, except for the one with the stylish glasses, who turned her head to look out the window at the night. I wondered what the river was doing, if it was gold or already black. In the glare of the overhead fluorescent light, the room was stark and dull. The windowsill was piled with papers and laptop computers. Oh, I thought. So this is what it’s like. This is how it starts. “So it’s neither, then,” I said. “I’m not living or dying.” Maybe I was blooming. I wanted to peek under the gauze and see if the blue flowers were still there.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Janos. “We’re all dying, everyone in this room is dying, we begin to die the minute we’re born—we’re like butterflies.”

  “No,” said the oldest better doctor. “You’re being metaphorical.” Clearly, he would be the chief maker of metaphors in this room, and it would be lions, not butterflies or flowers. “Gabriel has a real medical issue.”

  “Sort of real,” I said.

  “Not ‘sort of.’” The oldest better doctor frowned, beginning to grow visibly impatient. “It’s very real, I assure you.” He patted my blanketed foot in a kind way that made my heart sink. “They’ll do a bone marrow test to confirm in the morning, but I don’t plan on being surprised.”

  My visitors began gathering their things, sliding their laptops into their clever cases, zipping the cases shut. Janos kissed me on the forehead, which was cool now. Nothing hurt anywhere on me. All the better doctors in their white coats fluttered out behind him to be put in taxis. I was alone in the room with my lion inside me, which might or might not wake up at any minute and eat me. I tried to believe what the oldest better doctor had said about my lion being sleepy, but I kept seeing the downcast eyes and the carefully folded arms of the doctor with the stylish glasses. Staring at the light green floor as if it were her job to keep an eye on it.

  Late that night, lying awake in my hospital bed, I saw things. The fever must have come back. I saw colors, as when you press your fingers over your closed eyelids: red, blue, lines of super-bright white. My mother dancing in a circle, her long, wavy red hair sticking straight out behind her, as if pulled by a fierce wind. That swamp tree flying up toward the sky. The crested head of Tereus, looking spiky and electrified. I got tangled, snared in the sheets. Sarah used to shout in her sleep now and then, and I heard her cursing out ghosts, the way she used to. I saw her sleeping on her back in the summer, her belly large. I saw a ruined house somewhere, maybe on an island. The ruined house was made of stone; huge windows cut from the stone, now glassless uneven rectangles, looked out onto an emerald-green sea. Fleur stood in one of the windows, smiling, young. My mother stood in another, Caroline in another, Sarah in another. They looked like four face cards, four serious queens hanging in the air, bordered by stone. There was another window on the side. A sad bear appeared in that window and then loped away. Goats ran over what was left of the stone walls and windows and dug around in graves behind the house. They stood on top of the tombs. They were kind of joyous.

  I saw a long bolt of pale yellow fabric burning. I saw a black man who walked a white dog. A tiny, cloaked figure crossing a stretch of desert. The elbow of a river where it opened into the emerald sea. A sand-colored lion with a flame-colored mane asleep under a tree. And birds, flocks and flocks of birds, mostly large and black, but some bright blue, a silver one, a gold one, two that could have been the Tweeties, though they were larger and more muscular than the Tweeties, a flock of dancing swans, five or six seagulls, and one bird that looked like an egret, white and long-necked and intent. The birds were everywhere, they filled the hospital room, they flapped at the windows, they skimmed the ceiling and roosted on the veneered wardrobe in the corner, they crowded together along Caroline’s outstretched arms, making a dreadful noise. But I knew, with a mix of terror and happiness, why they were here. They were the vast thing I had been waiting for. Finally, all these years later, they were coming for me, to change me once again. I didn’t need to wait for all the better doctors to get all their better heads out of all their better asses. I knew what was happening to me. I could feel the feathers moving under my skin, pushing their way up.

  4

  The Sun and the Moon

  She strikes so deeply, when she strikes, that you can’t remember having been struck. It is as if you have always been like this, that this was how you really were all along, gasping, wounded, endlessly bleeding.

  And even now I wonder, did I stumble into the wrong grove or did I rush into it? Or was it a different sort of motion altogether? Sometimes if you get on the subway going the wrong way, you can go quite a few stops before you notice. The rhythm is so familiar, the opening and closing of the doors, the other passengers with their bundles and children, the tourists with their bottles of water and their guidebooks in other languages; you know this place, these orange plastic seats, this forward motion. When you finally hear the announcement of a stop with the wrong name, at first you think the conductor has made a mistake, and then you realize with a shock that no, it’s you, and you jump up and run for the closing doors as if your life depends on it.

  ***

  Caroline and Carsten came tumbling into my apartment on a Saturday morning like a merry-go-round crashing through the ceiling.

  “Why are you here?” I said, standing at the old door in my bare feet.

  “Janos called us,” said Caroline. “Gabe. Oh, Gabe.” She hugged me tightly. “Have you told Mom?”

  “I’m busy,” I said. I was still holding the calculator.

  “We’re coming in,” said Caroline, releasing me. “You look awful.”

  She and Carsten carried in their many pieces of black luggage, all of which were zippered, with complicated closures and peculiar bulges. Carsten began stacking the bags in one corner of the living room. He pulled a cable out of a side pocket. “We need a converter,” he said to me, though this was the first time we had met.

  From Caroline’s e-mails, I had imagined a tall, thin, serious man. But Carsten turned out to be short, in his late forties at least, with a wandering right eye, Ben Franklin hair, and a dense sexual charge that hovered around him like a cloud of buzzing bees.

  “Gabriel,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Yes,” he said, shaking my hand brusquely, as if we were businessmen sent by our superiors to sign a deal. His palm was quite warm. His right eye, gazing off, seemed like it was looking into the fourth dimension. I liked him. “You are having an eclipse,” he said, wagging the cable.

  “No, it’s just a health scare—”

  “No. This city. It is having an eclipse. We are going to shoot it and then fractal it. But we need a converter.”

  “What?” I said.

  Caroline waved her hands, said something to Carsten in German, then, to me, “We’re here for you. There is going to be an eclipse next week, but that’s not why we came.”

  “How long are you staying?” I tried not to sound alarmed.

  “As long as we need to be here,” said Caroline, taking off her thin red gloves. “Shut up.” She took off her coat, glancing around. “We’re ridiculously jet-lagged. Can I smoke in here?”

  I shrugged. What did it matter? And when were they leaving?

  Caroline lit up. She’d long since bobbed her m
ane of black hair to chin length; it scribbled interestingly, in sprung black and gray curls, around her face. There were lines at her eyes, her mouth; her face had gotten thinner with age. Over the years, she’d acquired an odd gravitas—where had she gotten that? Had the birds brought it to her in the swamp? She wore a long, straight skirt, like a twenties bluestocking; a leather belt with a large silver buckle; big clunky shoes you could tell were stylish and citational in Berlin, though one of the shoes had a patch on the side. She wore glasses now: delicate, rimless. The left earpiece slanted a few degrees, giving her thin face a tilted, vulnerable cast. I brought her the antique brass ashtray from the windowsill, the one with the gryphon’s head with diamond eyes. I was pretty sure the diamonds were real; Fleur preferred real jewels in everything.

  “I can’t believe you still have this chair,” said Caroline, sitting down in it and stroking the frayed arm. “I bought it from the guy who used to live upstairs,” she explained to Carsten, who had stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes. “He was an actor.”

  “Oh, he’s still there,” I said. “I think he was just in a play in Rhode Island.”

  “I used to be an actor. Guerrilla political theater,” said Carsten. He was appealingly ugly, like a smiling gargoyle. He took his shoes off, sighed. “I am fried.” The word “fried” sounded breaded in his German accent.

  “Carsten used to be a lot of things,” Caroline said to me. “He’s full of stories.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m not, like, dying. Janos shouldn’t have called you.”

  Caroline gave Carsten a drag off her cigarette, then took it back, inhaling deeply, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. “Are you taking your pill?” she asked.

  “None of your business! Janos should know better. Go back to Berlin.”

  “No,” she said.

  I did my best not to give myself away by looking over to where the black bottle, like a black-clad nurse, clasping its hideous yellow pills inside, stood on the windowsill between the ancient copper Buddha ($15,250) and the Steuben starfish ($4,800)—I’d looked online.

  “And,” she pressed on, “what about the transfusion? I read up on it. They say—”

  “I don’t care what they say. I can’t afford it, Caroline. It’s not like I have health insurance.”

  Which was true. But I didn’t say the other part: that it’s a lot of work turning into a bird. I needed all my strength for it—not to be so nauseated I couldn’t stand up straight, not shitting uncontrollably, not half sleeping the day away as the light in the apartment grew dim. The ovoid yellow pill, with its dashing black thunderbolt design, exacted its price. I would pay it, but later. Meaning: after I got the house, which was, at the end of the day, the real reason I was sick. I had been sick, I had been carrying the sickness within me like a seed, ever since we left Tinker’s Way. I knew that now. I concentrated on my left femur, thinking lightness lightness lightness. I pinched the bridge of my already peaky nose, trying to increase its peakiness.

  “You need a haircut,” said Caroline.

  “I like it this way,” I said. I couldn’t go back to Sal anymore; I couldn’t face him. I felt that I had failed our pact somehow. And anyway, I liked my hair. I liked to feel it grow.

  I sat down on the sofa opposite my sister in the frayed armchair she had gotten from the excitable guy upstairs, whom, as she might have forgotten, she had slept with. And she didn’t buy it. The chair had been his love poem to her, rejected in favor of Berlin, a city that took down walls only to build others, higher and grander. I didn’t say that, either. Instead, settling in, tossing the old calculator on the older coffee table, which wobbled, I said, “So, what’s a fractal?”

  A fractal is a pattern that repeats, identically, all the way down to its tiniest incarnations. A snowflake is a fractal. So is lightning. Circles within circles, squares within squares, mirrors within mirrors—all fractals. They are infinite, which is either a blessing or a curse, depending on your mood and the windmills of your mind. Fractals can be made on the computer, using a mix of technology, math, and vision. That’s what my sister and Carsten were doing; they were part of an intense Berlin fractal/new-media art scene. They used fractals and other images made out of computer programming that moved like schools of fish; the images also reproduced and made a funny kind of atonal music on their own; Carsten and Caroline lived in a mathematical jungle with endless, secret pathways. Fractals were the most common flora there; they grew everywhere. I think that the gods are fractals—Zeus is always Zeus, whether in the form of the smallest hoofed creature or a moth or a hurricane. Cancer is a fractal. Memory is a fractal. The house on Pineapple Street was a fractal, infinitely receding in my dreams to smaller and smaller versions of itself until it was the size of a matchbox, with teensy-weensy people inside, and then it got smaller than that, until I couldn’t see it anymore no matter how hard I peered.

  As I watched the thickets of technology grow in my living room, I thought how ridiculous—sweet, but ridiculous—my sister and her German boyfriend were. They commandeered my television set as a monitor and hooked up cables and widgets and keyboards and speakers no bigger than apples or quarters or canaries from which peculiar noises emerged constantly. When I left to go to work in the morning, the two of them were sitting close together in front of the monitor, aka my old TV set, fervently typing, speaking half in German and half in English, watching a dotted line swing like a rope across the screen. When I got home at night they were still there, or sometimes one of them was standing by the open window, smoking and looking frustrated, dropping ashes on the gold or silver swan while the other, in headphones, stared bleakly at the monitor. The smell of whatever they had cooked for lunch—meat, usually—filled the apartment. The dotted line might be stalled in the middle of the screen, or bunched up to one side, as if treed. Sometimes they gave up on the dotted line and watched their electronic fish have electronic fish sex. The fish made beeping whale sounds as they combined and drew apart.

  How the eclipse was going to figure into all this wasn’t obvious to me, but then again, I thought their whole fractal/new-media trip was basically dumb, like psychedelic black-light art. A billion dotted lines. A billion busy schools of mathematical fish. A billion eclipses. Who cared? Would it help get me that house, the house that had been growing in me since the moment we’d lost our house in Bishop? I didn’t want to watch the Pineapple Street house travel toward infinity. I wanted to have it. And I was so close.

  Alone in the kitchen later that night as Caroline and Carsten snored on the air mattress in the living room, I pulled the stopper out of the small, dark blue bottle labeled Rose of Acacia: Ebnaflorum and released three or four drops into a glass of water. I watched the color disperse, like a black veil falling through the sky. The inky swirl reminded me of the food coloring ribboning over the ice in the sink in Bishop, the melting tendrils of purple, of green. I couldn’t tell my mother, not yet. There was a tender spot on the inside of my left thigh. I touched it, oddly pleased by the pain. It felt like a pebble in a creek. I was clearly still here. The feathers on the back of my neck were new, stiff. I drank the swirl down in one gulp. Sitting at my rickety kitchen table, I imagined it swirling inside me, painting my ribs, my heart, my lungs, suffusing my blood, cleansing it. So much better than the yellow pill, so much cheaper, and it gave me a peaceful feeling, which was nice.

  I had a lot to do. While Caroline and Carsten gazed deep into the computer’s black abyss, I had everything with the house on my mind—the clock was about to start ticking again any minute—and then there was the matter of becoming a bird, which, counter to the house’s yang energy, was a yin state, incredibly dreamy.

  No transfusion could have changed me more. For instance, I couldn’t stop looking at the sky. People who say you can’t see the sky in New York are wrong. Of course you can see the sky; it’s right there. What you can’t see are the changes beginning at the horizon: rain, snow, lightning, a bevy of new clouds coming in. If you’re loo
king up as you walk—well, that’s just it. You can’t only look up. You have to glance down every few steps so as not to run into people, and between the glancing in front of you, so you don’t inadvertently kick off a riot, and the buildings framing and interrupting the sky, it can seem as if dark gray is suddenly spreading all at once, like a blot. Or that brightness is everywhere. Your view of the sky is so partial that weather, light, darkness seem to have no starting point. They simply are, now. In New York the sky doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Instead, the ordinary arc above continually surprised me, enticed me, seduced me, flickering between the buildings like a film with missing frames. It was always shifting, playfully building cloud palaces, only to dismantle them the next minute. Whenever I looked up, something up there was moving, some vast motion of which I could see only a small part.

  Mercurial though it was, the sky had come to seem so true to me, more real than a lot of what went on here below. It mattered; how had I not noticed before how much? The range of blues, grays, blacks—paler toward the horizon, richer straight overhead—was extraordinary. And there was a taste to it, an ice-cold, acrid sweetness that I craved. Something waited for me there; something leaned down to me. A sunny sky was good luck; a cloudy sky meant a day of shooting pains in my bones, hard breathing, and creeping exhaustion. Partly cloudy meant Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later. But unlike many other things, maybe even most things these days, the sky wasn’t only a barometer of my luck. It was also sanctuary. I had the feeling that I could find my way across it, like the four Stolen girls marching single file through the desert; that if I needed it, the sky would rescue me, hide me from marauders and enemies behind its seamless blue doors. It was part of my becoming a bird, of course. It was my element. After a few minutes of gazing up at it, I felt as if I was floating there, at home. It was hard to leave a place where time was different, and sound, too.