After James

by Michael Helm

  She had suffered common ailments. Irina.

  There was something growing here, growing near. She was failing to react self-defensively. She knew this and yet she just stood.

  She wanted to swallow the foreign word. Or Alph wanted it. She had always believed there was a genius at work in the chemicals themselves to combine and play toward a final balance. A compound of well-being. Imagine a state in which one might know about the way of things, of cruelties and neglect, and still feel well, feel joy, even happiness. Fear could always come over the top, but there were glints of evidence in the research and in her of something like calm amazement. She had thought that the final word, the name for this shared solid state, for our dreamed-of one lasting knowledge and belief, would be peace. But maybe the word itself was a compound, some mix of native and foreign characters and the histories trailing them. Line up the letters in just the right way. Train the palate to say it. Repeat.

  She turned from the counter and looked into the living room where they’d shared tea, an empty room, a sense of contained design, trying to locate herself. What did she know for certain? Her father lived in California. She’d come here from Vancouver, where she was born. But where had she arrived? She pictured the map of it fading even as she saw herself heading east, ducking down into the Dakotas, through Chicago, Michigan. Then, as she followed herself along, the forests and fields ran to a kind of empty, unnamed space. She was forgetting the present. As in a dream, she didn’t even know what country she was in.

  Days ago, crossing the continent. She could see herself from some elevation. She held both views in mind, looking out from her skull here in Shoad’s house and looking down at herself as if through a transparent ceiling. A part of her was in a tree, maybe a redtail hawk on a limb. Then the hawk flew off and she was almost where she was.

  Look how alive, these walls at the end of the world. Even at the end we imagine some other ending.

  This house. She really had to get out of here.

  She thought of Crooner’s collar. Now she understood. The discolourations were burn marks.

  A presence was moving behind her. It cast its tall shape on the wall.

  She couldn’t turn to face it but then did. There in the window, standing up inside itself, was a silhouette against the low sun. From behind the barn the column of smoke rose higher than she could see. He rounded the corner in stride. He was coming across the yard for her.

  7

  She’s lying in a room and she’s running. There’s a TV playing in the corner. She’s cold and wet, her feet stabbing along the streambank. The light in the ravine, in the room, is dim. The stream is more than a stream, she’s running against it. The screen, at an angle, plays old footage, some black-and-white interior. The sense of someone else in the room, watching the screen, the sense of the top of a head above a chair back.

  The oncoming water bends before her. Her feet are numb, she’s sliding stride to stride. The waterrush covers the sound of her breath but she feels it leaving her in explosions in the air, the need to cry out and the need not to. As she runs she remembers lying in a room, a TV, a memory so sharp it’s semi-actual, lying there remembering running here in the ravine, but she can’t remember what happens next.

  A man on TV standing on a stage in black and white with curtains behind him and she hears now distant laughter, entertained-audience laughter. He disappears or becomes a war scene slanted away from her in green spotted colour and she feels greatly fatigued. A man with a rifle crouches on-screen. The head moves in the chair.

  She’s having to scramble more than run. The water has claimed the flats and shelves and forced her up the bank so that she’s crossing slopes of mud in a continual fall and climb, and when she’s highest above the water she sees its strength, the rapids formed along the rising verges. All is pure duration. She allows no full thoughts, no language for thought. The run west has slowed to nothing. She needs to make it higher, to the narrow strip of woods, but she can’t get enough purchase. How far has she really come? The bank draws her back down and she hooks her elbow around a young tree and wedges herself there, resting.

  The first sharp report. A dull cracking bores through the sound of the current. Then it comes in twos and threes in tight succession, and too late she looks upstream to see the wall of water high above her, breaking off the young trees on the slopes of the ravine, snapping them with the force that meets and covers her and no wonder she can’t remember.

  —

  Past the way she came, past floating wooden swing seats and mailboxes, the column of smoke shunting into view and away, passing swallowing whirlpools in themselves swallowed, the highest reaches of treetops at eye level, a skunk belly-up and half cut in half by a snare loop, past the barriers to nonsense, a rumble as in train sounds, she tumbles under the surface and up again, catching discontinued scenes that seem clipped from a reel, reeling past crows hopping in branches in stark alarm, a coyote going under, its tail blooming on the surface and the cold meltwater pinching out all feeling and order. Under and up again, stunned too cold to draw breath, and her leg catches on some submerged trunk or footbridge, garbage floating past, a wind chime of seashells draped on a dead cat, tent flap, paper yard lamp, ornamental dice. The river lifts her onward again and bends her with it, sweeps the low sun into her eyes and she thinks there must be a falls ahead. The surface is not constant, it moves at varied speeds. The cold has kept at bay a knowledge now rallying to her consciousness that she’s struck or been struck by something. She’s bleeding from her shoulder or neck and when briefly the water runs deeper and flattens she sees or imagines the narrow furl of blood in the mud-brown current, loses it again when the surface folds, and the blood brings the feel of the wound, and the wound some body sense, space and volume, breath, at last, and the motions she’s been making all this time, buoying her past impossible matter, a power cord coiled on a limb, hollow plastic buddha bobbing upright in the roil, unbroken window or hothouse pane shimmed into a trunk like a serving tray, a slope-roofed birdhouse drifting by, a beak popping out of the hole. Her limbs move without her. She can see her hands but not feel them but the seeing is clouded now and for a time it seems she’s not carried at all but watching the land move around her as if out the car windows in an old flick hurtling into plot, into story, end of a story, so that now the cold is blinding and each solarized moment is beaded in her eyes, and she closes them and sees here at the end a dead man in a glass ball turning and the skull is a prison.

  —

  The through-force had released her.

  She’d washed up in the low crotch of a maple on the edge of a field. Grey muck covered her, the plugged diamond bark.

  Below on the hillside the brown water eddied against the higher trees, their trunks and limbs mudslick and heavy, a tired platoon from the trenches. The light was clean, of morning, the shadows solid on the moving surface reaching tree to tree, branches in dark connection like newly dead thoughts. She saw things in their relation and in relation to what wasn’t or once was or would come to be.

  A door rafted by, kicked off a treetop, and spun back into the current.

  A huge bird lifted above the ridgeline and turned, progressing in slow loops. As it grew closer she saw the black-and-white underside as it seemed to stop midair in the apex and became a serried portal to a world of clear, dark sense. Without the strength to form the words, she opened her mouth to call the clarity down to her but couldn’t sound the appeal.

  She thought again of the creatures unknown to her. Did one of them feel her existence? She listened to distinguish water from wind. Somewhere underneath them both was her breathing and thinking of it made all the sounds seem doubtful.

  The mud on her clothes was stiffening now. The sun was low but warm.

  She shifted her weight, touched her neck. The wound was clotted or caked. There was pain in her legs and forearms, in her hands, but they worked. She bent her knees and swivelled to face the drier ground above her, and slid and landed o
n all fours. She crawled higher and saw two fingers out of joint. After a time she was drying on dry ground and she sensed a breathing presence over her but couldn’t even gesture at escape and didn’t know if she wanted to. She curled and slept there.

  She dreams she is slumped sideways in an armchair, one leg dangling to the floor. She feels heat from a woodstove. Crooner lies against her leg, his fur, his weight heavy on her naked foot. It’s daytime. There’s something in her lap that she wants to see but she can’t make her eyes look downward. Instead she is looking across the room at an opposite wall covered in empty black picture frames, all askew. Crooner is panting in his sleep. He is running in his dreams, running or in some nightmare. Her eyes feel freer now, she looks a little lower, sees her knee, the pages in her lap, and the panting grows louder and louder and she wakes.

  PART II

  Decor

  The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or of music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one will be the key.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “Coleridge’s Dream”

  The last thing my mother sent me was a picture she’d taken of a cuneiform tablet in a small museum in Anatolia. At the top, a loinclothed king or god in profile, perspectiveless, the sun and moon above, and below, columns of tiny scratchings, letters, language leaping from stone. The image was badly lit. She must have stood to the side to move the glare from an overhead bulb to the margin of the tablet. I can picture her looking into the window of her phone, taking a side step, tapping the screen. She wrote, “The work’s going well, though your father still seems to think the problems in refugee camps owe to a lack of decorum and matching eating utensils. We’re sightseeing for two days. Tomorrow off to those big old slabs,” meaning the stelae at Göbekli Tepe, site of the world’s first religious temple, which they never did see. How bluely ironic that this last dashed-off email should have attached to it an image of a language grown from pictorial symbols carved on a hard slab of reality very like the headstones that serve now as their alter-presences. And cuneiform, so beautiful. From drawings in sand to sandstone to granite, Hittite and Sumerian to Semitic symbols to Greek, ox/house/camel/door became aleph, beth, gimel, daleth became alpha, beta, gamma, delta, the signs moving back and forth from yard to shelter, nature to artifice, country to settlement. In their origin alphabetical letters had the breadth to mark both the wild and the cultivated.

  The NGO called me in Montreal, first with the news, then with the arrangements. I flew to Halifax to meet the so-called mortal remains, held steady through a small service, and saw them into the ground. When I looked up, suddenly orphaned, I decided to take to the skies.

  In time I was living with a petite Londoner in a one-bedroom apartment in La Latina, a neighbourhood in Madrid. We sampled the city cheaply, hitting the discount hours in museums and bars, attaching ourselves to English groups on architecture tours, attending street protests, chanting in bad Spanish. On TV, soap operas confused us and soccer billionaires scored goals and then tore off in some direction as if chased by guard dogs. She worked as a copy editor for a travel magazine. For a few weeks she indulged me in language games, with imposed restrictions. No definite articles over dinner (“Please pass a pepper grinder.”), only one adjective for the weekend (“Then how would you describe me?” I asked. “You are insufficiently friended.”). No one-word utterances. Responding to any question of five words with a rhyme (“Do you like this dress?” “…The hemline’s low. I’d prefer less.”). I reasoned that the games marked us as distinct, kept us quick. Then the challenge of them became limiting, like badly fitted clothes, binding the limbs in mismeasured forms. For a time it seemed we’d never free ourselves, that we’d go mad together. We stopped having sex. And so we called off the games. It took a while to break ourselves of the habit of listening a certain way, for lapses or possibilities. We went silent, hours at a time, and, on the other side of silence, broke up.

  Or that isn’t what happened. What happened was she realized she could no longer watch me sit motionless. To her I seemed to move at a great speed while reading or staring out the window at the crowds in the El Rastro flea market. She said, “You sit still the way other people run for their lives.” She thought I’d turned sitting into an act of cowardice, a way of avoiding hard truths. One day the truth was that she had fallen for her Spanish teacher and was moving in with him.

  Alone, I cut all expenses. I quit smoking, lived on pasta and butter, but in the end my means ran down. As I left for good with my duffle bag, my landlord, a sad-eyed Italian Spaniard, held open the door and clasped me on the deltoid. “You are real. Real poets do not pay rent.” He’d seen me reading poetry and assumed I wrote the stuff. In truth I am only a failed poet. A failed many things. Bartender, textbook editor, doctoral student, orchestra publicist. I have no talents but reading.

  —

  I landed back in Montreal, living in a former professor’s basement. He was the closest thing to family I had left. A memory disorder had forced him into early retirement. Now his old students took turns going with him to medical appointments and grocery stores, looking after him in exchange for a basement room. Most hours of the day he was himself, lucid, funny, the Dominic Easley we all knew. But there were slips and lapses, especially in the evening, after wine. One night as we walked through the residential streets he tried to introduce me to his neighbour, a large woman out inspecting her garden. The neighbour and I understood even before Dominic that he’d lost my name, and as I said who I was, it was he who listened with the greater interest. That night in the basement I had never felt so unknown, even to myself. The feeling wasn’t loneliness but rather two emotions held together, one sadness, a simple word that simply applied, and the other something borrowed from Dominic, a distilled sense of being, of possibility, as if I had entered a state of perpetual, dreadful expectation.

  Contained in that dim basement I felt something in approach. Then, out of nowhere, a stranger named August Durant sent me an e-ticket to Rome and an offer of six hundred USD a week to stay with him and conduct what he called “literary-detective work.” He stressed that he wasn’t hiring me as a sexual companion. I would put my one talent in service of solving “a mystery of dimensions unknown” even to him. I was without other prospects. Either I found paid work or I’d become accommodated to the sorry view of myself as destined for still more years of drift and small failures, trying to stay out in front of hard truths. But a detective. Hack gumshoe or houndstooth or hard-boiled? Would I be figuratively armed? Would there be a good story? Would its end be mine?

  Words grow out of the world and then back into it, made of the very history they string together. An enduring one comes out of the Old English morðor, the Old Norse morð, and several related variants, meeting the line from the medieval Latin murdrum and the Anglo-French murdre. The word is there very near the origin of stories, right after first light, and now it’s all through every story, even when it doesn’t seem to belong and we imagine we don’t see it.

  Durant knew me as the author of an online rant I’d gone so far as to give a title: “The Poet at the End of the World.” There had appeared on the internet a new poetry site called Three Sheets. The anonymous host posted only his or her own poems, most short, some untitled, and yet amid all the traffic noise, the page drew a surprising aggregate of readers, for a poetry site. At first these readers were other poets and academics, who within six weeks built two new sites devoted entirely to the verse of the mystery poet who for a time was called the New Anonymous, or Nanny for short, and to the enigma of his or her identity. Theories sprung up around the names and cities and historical events alluded to in the poems. Something calling itself the Group Against Three Sheets (GRATS)
arose to attack Nanny for “a mockery of the provocateur spirit” and to pronounce Three Sheets “insufficiently political in its conception.” Another, the Group Against the Group Against Three Sheets (GRAGRATS), the name and acronym chosen, as its founding manifesto stated, precisely for their absurdity, considered the anonymity central to what came to be called the Project, and defended the poet’s choice to remain unnamed, and even insisted that there be no provisional designations, and so asked that people stop using “Nanny” to mean “the anonymous one” (uncapitalized), a corrective that somehow became widely adopted. (GRAGRATS) chose the symbol @ to designate the poet. The rest of us just called him or her the Poet.

  One morning in the Montreal basement I’d taken a stroll past the Sheets-inspired sites, read the latest skirmishes, which usually amused me unintentionally, and came away wanting to throw stones at both sides. In any country, debates among poets are comically vicious, the stakes being so low. Though I’d intended never to add my voice to the babble, I couldn’t stop from saying what no one else would say and posting it on the Sheets Project Meta-Site of Record (SHEPMETSOR). Roughly reduced, my point was that the debates over Three Sheets were being conducted almost entirely by people with no feeling whatsoever for poetry, mostly academics and bad poets, and were these people capable of reading better, they’d see that the Poet was addressing an audience in the habit of filtering out bleatings such as theirs, and that, in fact, the most coherent theme or subtext discernible in the Poet’s work suggested not a communal, consensual, or debatable set of ideas, but rather a soul’s draw toward a single, fixed mystery.

  “The mystery itself is unnamed. Is it a lost loved one? a lost god? All we find is an absence. Absence is the most present thing in the poems.” I’d fallen into a conviction and was more or less stabbing the keys. “Most of you are failing the Poet and the poems. As readers, you are thin where you should be thick, and otherwise thick through and through.”