Intimations

by Alexandra Kleeman

  It seemed like so much had happened, but still nothing had changed. I was back in the banquet hall, covered in fake blood, feeling left out, and looking for something to hold. Andrew was in the middle of the room, watching me, and I closed my eyes and thought about the meadow. This time, I would keep the sheep clean and snowy white. I added a stream and a large oak tree, birds coming to rest in its boughs. It was afternoon there, late afternoon, growing later.

  I heard a noise, and I opened my eyes. Andrew was down. Another ax.

  The rules had changed: the banquet hall was no longer safe. And with Andrew gone, there was no longer any reason to stay.

  “We have to move,” I said loudly to the room. “We have to move on.” The hall had only two doors: one led to the dining room, which was certainly unsafe, and one to the basement, which really seemed like a bad idea, but at least uncertainly so.

  “I’m going to the basement,” I said. “We can barricade ourselves in there.” Nobody else said anything. I looked at them all one last time, balled up in their respective corners, and walked down the stairs.

  The basement was both larger and cozier than I had expected. The ceilings went high, and the fluorescent lights far above buzzed in a way that reminded me of the outdoors, the outdoors during warmer months, when the air and the ground seemed bright all over with the lives of insects and plants. The space was cavernous, but it was full: there were piles of objects all around me, large piles reaching ten, twelve, fifteen feet into the air. They looked like they had been collected and sorted by someone very patient, someone with a lot of time on his hands. Or her hands. There was a large heap of flannel shirts, mostly plaid. A pile of Time magazines. A pile of athletic equipment, mostly football helmets. Wedding dresses. Gerbil cages.

  By the time I found the pile of bloodied nurse costumes, almost nothing would have surprised me. This one reached nearly to the ceiling, hundreds or thousands of white vinyl dresses crumpled and stacked, strewn and sprawled, covered in blood. White nurses’ caps stuck out at odd angles, studding the heap with crisp red crosses.

  I found the costumes and I felt, for the first time since this whole thing began, that I truly belonged somewhere. I could crawl into this mountain of white and red, I could hide in it until the danger passed, or at least until the danger came to find me. All the mistakes I had made this night, everything from my nurse outfit to the way I had left things with Andrew: all of it seemed justified, purposeful, in light of this gigantic pile of bloody clothing.

  I eased myself in, with some struggle and much noise. The vinyl surrounding me squealed against the vinyl on my body, making a sound like a thousand balloons rubbing together at once. The center of the pile was dark, slippery, and wet with blood, either real or fake. I hardly noticed the distinction anymore: sweet or salty, warm or cold, it was all horrible, and I curled up in it.

  I thought about the events upstairs, and who the killer might have been. I thought about Andrew and how nice he had been to me, and how incredibly, unbelievably nice he probably was to people who were dressed normally in normal situations where nobody feared or resented them. What had he been thinking right before he was axed? Had he been thinking about me?

  It was horrible, like I said, lying like a dead nurse among a pile of bloody costumes. It was horrible, but at the same time it was not so bad. It was not so bad, and at the same time it was horrible. But there was a feeling building in me now that I hadn’t felt since I’d shown up at this stupid party: I was excited. Something was going to happen. Either this would work, or it wouldn’t. Either I would be spared, or I would die. Either death was something that could be fooled, outwitted, outplayed, or it was not. However things ended, I would learn something about the world in which, for the moment, I continued to live.

  Hylomorphosis

  Because they have seen angels, and other divine numina, represented by painters with a certain splendour and light, and have heard that these are spirits and are so called by theologians; so that in consequence they think that the spirituous stuff in our bodies must be similar.

  —JOHANNES ARGENTERIUS, De Somno et Vigilia, 1556

  An angel faces the painting of the famous angel with sword looming above a battle. Figure blurred out, scene blurred out. The painted angel’s face like a thumbprint, darkened by two depressions, one above and one beneath. The difficulty with describing an angel or its movements: they lack organs of sense or motion. Their bodies defined by absence. The angel facing the painting reaches up toward its own body. Its fingers grope the tranquillity of that perfect head, smooth as a plate. It finds the middle of its face and pushes in. The question is: Can an angel become anything it has not already been?

  The mouths of an angel are threefold: With one, he breathes of the pure and refined air of glorious realms, the light of God filling his body with lightness. With the second, he eats of the meat of the spirit and drinks in long drafts the clear water of the soul, both of which make heavy the banquet of God, and are eternal and immune to spoilage. With the third, he utters words of truth, handed down to him from the highest order. In man, however, the functions threefold are merged in one organ, and hence his purposes and the ends to which he applies himself shall always be indistinct, unintelligible.

  The angels sit and weep. Just as suddenly, they stand and laugh. They are testing out their new-made mouths. The angels stick fingers in their mouths, one by one, and root around in them, scratching at the top, the soft yielding sides that bulge when tried. The angels scratch until they pierce membrane and nothing seeps through. The angels discover a funny sound made by squishing the cheeks in, then forward, so that the lips purse at the front in imitation of a fish. They lack respect for the bodily ideal, for its integrity and originary form. They heal before the wound can weep. The angels practice a self-mortification of such innocent clumsiness that it cannot carry any redemptive value: and, in any case, what have they to atone for? Virtue weighs upon them like a coat made of air.

  Suppose that archangel Gabriel intends to have cognition of his fellow angel Raphael, but also of human beings, trees, and other things in the material world. To do so, he cannot simply observe or encounter the objects aforementioned: without organs of sense or action, he must instead adopt his habit, a habit unique and individual, the fulfillment of which shall grant access to all things simultaneously, in their essence. In this manner, a knowledge perfect and unequivocal is achieved without returning to the problem of access, which is an issue only for beings of bounded material.

  1.The mouths of angels are soft and sweet: Awake, they give off a scent like new leaves. Asleep, they smell of upturned roots, still moist with clinging soil.

  2.From the mouths of angels come healing waters, light, the peace and quietude of early morning. Also numbers of things less lauded: water tasting of metal or lead, wax and string, small brown moths that turn to powder when crushed.

  3.The mouths of angels are useless, a sort of inscription or sign, built in the shallowness of an inscription or sign, and serving no known function, as angels speak in a visual language of their own, one borne through gesture as an effect of and within the air.

  4.If angels are creatures, they are of matter and form compounded. If they are spirits, they are of form set in motion. If they are matter, they possess the principle of change. If they are form, they possess the principle of destruction or preservation.

  5.Their indivisibility, perishability.

  6.The mouths of angels are a hoax made plausible by our own mouths, which we crudely attach to entities that possess neither body nor extension.

  A round yellow sun hangs over the landscape dotted with unshapen stones. Either the arrangement of the stones is random, or else it is of an incomprehensible order. A blue sky stuck through with clouds the size and shape of boats. Since angels do not have bodily organs, Alexander of Hales qualifies the word of angels as a “spiritual nod.” It is a nod insofar as it makes apparent what was previously hidden. In this regard the angel’s nod shows
a certain similarity to the exterior word of man, as the nod, in a certain sense, is the vehicle of the angel’s inner word. In the distance, figures cluster on the earth like resting birds, tucking a seeping radiance within the folds of a garment radiantly plain.

  The silence is bright blue, and everywhere. An angel arranges angels by order and ranking, a luminous line. They regard him with the round gaze of cattle. One at a time, he brings them forth with a movement of the hand, a hand extended toward the newer angel, the fingers of the senior angel each turned in toward the palm, forming a fist extended toward the newer angel, a fist that looks as though it might open up.

  One at a time, he leans over each, pressing its head to the stone, back from the neck and deeply onto the surface of the stone, and with his thumb he creates an absence in the center of the face, a thumb-deep breach. The solid flesh moves like dough beneath the heavenly fingers: if it is of matter, it possesses the principle of change.

  He digs two thumbs into the hole and opens it up, sideways, outward. And then their bodies too are penetrated by air. Their bodies too take a portion of the air away from itself and hold it within a chamber. That part of the body foreign to itself and capable, suddenly, of speaking in its place.

  In 1258 in Siena, Italy, an angel is said to have appeared in the town’s central square during a festival honoring the sacrifice of Saint Catherine. The angel, shrouded in a pure and glorious light, is reported to have consumed in curiosity a single grape from the well-stocked banquet, and fallen over immediately, killed.

  A mouth is a tear in the wholeness of a being. From this moment on, he will find his breath leaking out from him continually, his body filling with the bodies of others, a circulation of others stepping in and out of the bounds of sensation. He will form the air into shapes with a meaning not his own, and he will hunger for the matter of others, transformed in the mouth into material raw and ready for reuse. In some accounts, a self comes into being with its first cry, its first utterance or gasp into a surround unmarked by its own voice. In others, a self is marked out only when it consumes living matter for the first time, asserting its own body upon the body of another and folding its life into that of its own. The mouth is a site of transformation at the boundary of inner and outer; it crushes the others up so that their thingliness can become someone else’s own.

  The silent angel, his face smooth and markless as a piece of marble not yet shaped into statue. He sinks a whole fist into the mouths of the angels, twisting it this way and that, until the hole is large enough for the sounds of human language, for the words and full sentences. The wrist and forearm protrude from the heads of angels as he turns his fist around, creating space, and then opens it up slowly within the heads, making room for the teeth and tongue he will form from their matter.

  The sun is quiet over the stones and the angels as they undergo their transformations. It will never again be so quiet in this field. The angelic mouths unmade, they have no way to gasp as the holes are put into them, as the pure and liquid tears collect around their eyes. All around them the stones are silent, the stones in the shape of whatever, in the shape of things that have no name but could, someday. Their necks each fit flush to their chosen stones, their stones cradling the necks that they may look up and out into the sky.

  A Benedictine in 1120 AD testified that he was visited nightly by an angel who came to bear witness to the consumption of his simple meal of apples and bread. Questioned by his abbot as to the moral purpose of these visits, the man had nothing to report, save that his observer grew angry if an attempt was made to cover up or otherwise conceal his rations, particularly if the monk strove out of modesty to obscure the view of his mouth.

  1.Because they are made in the shape of God, which is the shape of man and because they are man’s brethren.

  2.Because they measure the distance that inheres within man himself, as do the beasts.

  3.Because the body of the word and the body of the stone are not the same thing, or because they are.

  4.Because an angel is said to perish from taking human food, when a man dies of choking we say that he has received a holy death, heralding his joyful passage into realms higher and more glorious.

  5.The saliva of an angel is said to improve the quality of matter and raise it to a state of greater perfection, much as the saliva of man is said to degrade it, and it is reported that a mealy apple thus inserted into the mouth of an angel and stored there for a time shall emerge fresh and devoid of flaws when it is drawn back out.

  6.Because the thing and the thought are not one, or because they are.

  The angels mill about in the fields, picking things up from off the ground and sticking them in their mouths. The cattle regard them in passivity, and wonder. An angel discovers a small pebble and places it within the cavity. He extracts it, and behold: a pebble of the same size, shape, and specification—but now composed of solid gold. An angel regards a small flower, and plucks it from the ground. He places it in his mouth and, lo: what he removes from his mouth is no flower, but a single word. He holds the word up before the eyes of the other angels and they rejoice, marveling in the miracle of flesh made abstract. They pass the word from angel to angel, holy hand to holy hand, turning it over in their palms and observing it from every angle. The sun weighs on them from overhead, weighs like light upon them all, as they tilt their faces up toward the source, mouths open, joyful, and light touches the backs of their mouths, the unbroken backs of their throats.

  WORKS CITED

  Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, Durandi a Sancto Porciano in Petri Lombardi Sententias Theologicas Commentarium, book 4. Venice, 1579; reprint, Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964.

  Iribarren, Isabel, and Martin Lenz. Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.

  Rabbit Starvation

  On the first day comes the new shipment of cotton balls, bundled in blocks and factory-wrapped, masses of plastic-trapped white that hit the floor with half as much sound as expected. On that day, we begin again: plunging long knives through the blocks, cutting straight lines along the top and sides. Cotton balls sputter from slits we stanch with our hands while we cut them free. The next day we sort. At the cotton ball factory they strive to make them all the same, but variation creeps into the shapes, some barely larger, some barely lacking. Their near-uniformity makes the differences more startling. We search the mounds for ugly ones, the ones whose variance disgusts us.

  This cotton ball is fine. So is the next. The next after that suffers from a deformity, a small tuft of fluff strung out like a tail. I set it aside for mending. The next is all right, and the next.

  But the cotton ball after that has something wrong with it, more wrong than we’ve ever seen. On a white table in this spotless room sits a puff of white with a bright red blotch, an urgent liquid color soaking the center of a dry nothing. We gather around, afraid to touch the spot with our gloves, afraid of the color lingering on our suits.

  Cotton ball after cotton ball, all stained, arriving on the conveyor belt and falling off into a basket with the clean ones. Color everywhere. We look toward the cotton heap growing redder. We look toward the reddening heap knowing that one of us will need to go into it and discover what is leaking.

  The rabbits are white, and when I stack them they stay put, looking back at me from a creamy vagueness dotted with eyes. Rabbits are edible. They have bony bodies beneath the fleeciest fur, like whisked clouds or something even lighter. Dozens on dozens shuffle across the floor in short bursts, hopping weakly then growing tired, making the sound of teeth sinking into marshmallow. Press an ear to a rabbit mouth and hear a soft chuffing, a machinery made of cotton.

  I tried everything else before I tried rabbit, and that is to my credit, I think. I’ve tried to eat the walls (white plaster), the floor (white plaster), and the patches of Astroturf against which their tender shapes contrast so nicely. I tried to eat dust and dew, my own fingernails and hair. As lit
tle as there is, there is enough. There is enough, and also too little, a deficit that hangs here like an overhead light. It shows the inadequacy of myself to this room, of this room to myself, of the rabbits to each other as protection or company. Even the Astroturf seems to long for something more, though what it gets is more rabbits. The sky stretches empty overhead, and I devote time to wishing something into it, a cloud or a series of them, something to watch change and improve—or rather, just change.

  This room has the look of a snapshot. It slides away day by day, though not for the rabbits, who seem to multiply mathematically rather than biologically, increasing their numbers even without nourishment. This is one of the things that leads me to say aloud, though of course there is no one to listen: Hunger is, in and of itself, an eye pointed continually at what is lacking and how badly.

  What to feed this baby? I thought to myself. This produced no results, so I said it aloud. The baby rolled around vaguely, grabbing at its own nose, swaddled in a fair number of dishrags. It burbled in an incompetent way. I thought to myself: I am better than it, both at grabbing and articulating sounds. Then I wondered again about what to feed the baby.

  The baby had been assigned to me by the government, or by a similarly well-organized group with a voice that sounded very much like that of the government. They called to tell me to come to the bus station to pick it up, and that I would have to bring my own container. They also said: clothes, bring clothes, it is not guaranteed that your baby will come clothed. My parents were disappointed in the extreme: I was only twenty years of age. “Twenty years old with a baby,” my father said, grudgingly crocheting a yellow beanie on the couch. “And with so much left unlived.”