The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  “I love you, C.”

  “I know. Hold my wrists.”

  ______

  “Yesterday a Palestinian woman approached me in a square,” Claire writes. Lebanese postmark. The letter has taken a month to reach me. “Azziz had attached a pipe-bomb to the French ambassador’s limo (a warning only – not much punch) because the night before, in an address to Israel’s Knesset, he said Europe’s children would sleep better at night if our group stopped impeding the humanitarian efforts of Western governments. I led the woman out of the square, to a safe spot several blocks away. She asked me who I was, what I was doing in the Middle East. When I told her I’d come to save her children, she laughed. ‘Here, the women have no wombs,’ she said. What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Babies die as babies, or as young soldiers … our poor withered cunts are open graves,’ she said, and spat a wrinkled prune seed onto the street.”

  Mobile home kids have trampled my squash. The car lot is encroaching. Claire continues: “As for you, silly Will, I’m worried – out there all by yourself. I agree, American cities are hideous, but isolation isn’t the answer. You could choose exile, as I’ve done.

  “The mind does funny things when it’s left alone to feed on itself. Get into town. Ask your girlfriend – Dalene? – to take you to the movies. God, what I’d give for a movie …

  “Or go roller-skating. Play softball. You’ll dwindle away to nothing if all you do is watch.”

  ______

  The pain of steady seeing.

  If, as Sartre says, consciousness is an insatiable hunger, then those who wake at night and turn their eyes toward the hard-to-find are starving.

  Insomnia, sensibility (that is, uneasiness at finding oneself in the world) struggling for clarity of expression.

  Wretched instant coffee.

  Stars as round as cups and saucers.

  Tonight my mirrors glisten in the light of the quarter moon. Nebulae, as delicate as a young girl’s aureoles, grace my lens. Slight kiss of a crisp wind. A candle burns on a table next to the ‘scope. Taped to the pyramid’s warm inner wall, a slip of paper – Lévi-Strauss: “What I see is an affliction to me, what I cannot see a reproach.”

  ______

  On my fourth cup of coffee tonight (my thirtieth birthday, alone), I decide to sculpt the lights in the trees, the ones I’ve arranged to flash on in tribute to – in sorrow over – your self-immolation.

  Setting down my thermos, I scale a thin pine and rehang the Christmas bulbs I placed here last week. No pattern in mind, but Form, limited only by the number of lights and the shape of the woods, will sooner or later suggest itself. Nothing as obvious as an insignia, stripes, Star of David, stylized fork-and-spoon which your commando friends have adopted as their symbol. (“We drop them – little paper cutouts – in the name of the world’s hungry children, wherever we go,” Claire writes.)

  Variations on a structural theme, balance, off-centering: a few of the ways to proceed. But my favorite (employed in putting together the observatory), because most challenging, is to eliminate, as I go, individual parts of the construction.

  ______

  3/15/88. “The postmark’s misleading. We’ve tightened our communications network, so we’ll be even harder to trace.

  “I’m here in ——— to join the crews of cargo flights chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. They don’t know I belong to an alternative political organization. They think I’m still with the Peace Corps.

  “Anyway, I’m studying the ICRC’s methods so we can become more effective; unfortunately, they’ve got troubles of their own. The C-147s they’ve chartered belong to the Nigerian government which, until recently, has loaned the planes free of charge as long as they were used for relief efforts. Now the Nigerians have decided they want five thousand dollars per run, a minumum of eight runs a day. The ICRC can’t afford it. In addition, some of their food has been sabotaged by armies eager to counteract any Western influence. Our group opposes the economic motives of capitalistic governments but approves of government agencies designed to aid children. It’s a contradiction but we live with it.

  “I’ve been in Christian cities, Muslim cities, Buddhist cities. Cities strafed by gunfire. It’s exciting, Will. I’ve sunbathed topless in Tunis, on the roof of a building two blocks from Arafat’s stronghold.

  “I miss Dr Pepper and (never thought I’d say it) People magazine. I haven’t fallen in love.”

  ______

  Poverty and oppression naturally feed rebellion. All right. But it’s not at all clear to me, Claire, why terrorist acts erupt in one area and not in another, or why a middle-class American woman wants to involve herself in the violence.

  Because you had a miscarriage? You fell out of love with me?

  (She met some people at the “Soup Bowl,” where she worked. Old Peace Corps volunteers. On their advice she made a plane reservation. This much I know.)

  “The movements of small particles in politics as in physics often deny any explanation” (Walter Laqueur).

  Physicists now admit that the smallest particles in the universe are even smaller than they thought.

  ______

  6/5/88. “I’m feeling sad these days. Melancholy. My time’s so short. I told Azziz about my decision. He thinks I’m brave. He’ll be my ‘stage manager,’ in charge of the kerosene and the matches. We figure Thanksgiving is the prime time to do it, when the emphasis in America is on eating. I have five months.

  “I kissed one of the girls – one of the teens in our group. It’s been a long time. That summer, after I met you, when I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit myself to a man … since then, I haven’t touched any women. Until now. I liked it, Will. I’d forgotten how much it excites me. I was going to practice celibacy over here, hone my mental strength, but … it’s so gentle with women. No thrusting or pounding or feeling held down. The male body is such a forward-moving … well, no wonder so many men equate sex with force.

  “I like your twinkling trees. It’s sweet of you, Will, to commemorate my sacrifice. I miss you. I miss your gaze.”

  ______

  Rewiring the lights: though bulbs like these are usually reserved for Christmas, the holiday effect is strictly to be avoided here. I have no hope of making a statement with a simple string of lights – I’m merely attempting to show solidarity with you.

  You’ll go up in flames.

  I’ll light the leaves of the trees.

  Do you remember how dense the swamps are, C? In the heart of the woods, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, steaming ponds thicken with chemical paste. PROPERTY OF U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, signs say. KEEP OUT. Once a place for backseat lovers in beat-up Chevies and Fords, the Thicket’s swamp areas are now a breeding ground for crocodiles and birds who’ve fed on toxic waste since birth, and are immune to it. Yellow swamps, red swamps, black swamps. The heat and light of the nearby refineries bore through the woods. Mist swirls in front of my flashlight whenever I come out here at night to wire the trees. The ground sucks at my shoes, bulbs clink in the bag on my back.

  Last night I heard a rustling in the high grass next to the tree I was climbing. The pasty swamps curdled and popped, the sky burned orange with refinery smoke and fire. Macon’s men? I know they’re watching me. I slid down the tree, clutched my string of lights and walked slowly through the Thicket. I tried to keep calm, to think of pleasant things. I remembered seeing once a television commercial for a local utility company. A bowl of light bulbs arranged like pieces of fruit. Pineapple shoots made out of green neon tubes.

  A twig snapped behind me. Something like a whisper. I ran through the dark.

  ______

  6/15/88. Claire, here’s my blind belief: you’ll soon join the heroes and martyrs in the stars. The search for you will become the sole purpose of my observations. Any fuzzy object in the sky, any strange new phenomenon, I’ll know what it is. Just remember: my southeastern aspect is blocked by lights from the mobile home park.

  T
onight, Coma Berenices (according to myth, the hair of an ancient queen) blazes vigorously in my ‘scope. The American astronomer Garrett Serviss, describing the constellation in one of his books, says it has a

  curious twinkling, as if gossamers spangled with dewdrops were entangled there. One might think the old woman of the nursery rhyme who went to sweep the cobwebs out of the sky had skipped this corner, or else that its delicate beauty had preserved it even from her housewifely instinct.

  Well. Talk of domesticity makes you nervous, C, I know. But I remember your scattered hair, how you cut it the day you left to impress on me the seriousness and severity of your new life. How you left me to sweep it up. Now I wish I’d saved it, some little piece of you to touch.

  ______

  6/29/88. I met a woman who looked like you. Last week Dalene took me to a party (my first trip into the city with her; we kept to the shadows so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed all at once by the wild profusion of lights) and this woman, a foreign exchange student at Rice University, dancing with her husband, astonished me. I couldn’t eat or drink. I sat in a chair overcome with desire, and watched her eyes, her lips, her hands. Later that night, making love with Dalene, I saw this woman’s face, which was of course your face, in my mind … and pushed deeper and deeper toward you as far as I could go.

  ______

  I carry an image of you in my head. I say I “see” you in my dreams. But creating and gazing at images is not the same thing as seeing. Image merely records/replaces what is absent.

  ______

  7/20/88. “We were almost caught today. Azziz and I had stopped in a little town for tea. The hills all around us were being shelled – moderates versus extremists, though who can tell them apart? – but the city seemed safe. We sat in an outdoor café. I was reading the menu when someone shouted and pointed in our direction. A man in a market across the road. He’d recognized our faces – we hadn’t realized that the local authorities had printed up posters. We ducked through the restaurant and escaped out the back. I was terrified.

  “So I went ahead and bought the kerosene, Will. I’m going to perform my act sooner than I’d planned, while I still have the chance.

  “Do you really not know why I’m doing it? Or are you trying to force me to face it? I can hear you now: ‘Tell me, Claire … tell me what you want.’

  “All right. I’ll try. Yesterday in camp I was washing clothes with Selena, a beautiful sixteen-year-old who joined our outfit in Turkey. She has trouble pronouncing my name; I helped her practice. When she finally got it right, the word sounded urgent on her lips. Claire. I took her hand and put it on my breast. She squeezed me. I thought I’d faint. My knees shook, Will, no kidding.

  “Me, the old woman of the group, utterly helpless in the hands of this child.

  “She knew it, too, and whispered in English, ‘You’re mine now, Claire.’ She grasped me hard by the arm and pulled me into her tent. Led me like a slave. And I loved every minute of it.

  “It’s not just with men, Will. That’s what I’m trying to say – what you want me to say. With men I had an excuse – I was taught to bow to them. By my father, my crack-boned culture – encouraged to court their violence. But now I’m sure it’s deeper, something in me – a desire to be erased. I’ve always felt it. You know I have. It frightens me. It gives me a thrill.”

  ______

  Skywatch, with the radio on. Coffee worse than usual.

  Antares, the brightest star in Scorpio. A binary. Hard-to-find partner.

  Heat waves rise off the ground, distorting what I see – soil and rocks, still warm from the sun, won’t cool until ten. Lignite and natural gas swarm deep into the Thicket. The oil refinery’s all the violence I want.

  ______

  8/1/88. “This will be my last letter to you, Will. My task has been enormously complicated. For the past several weeks Azziz has been sulking because I’ve paid more attention to the women than to him. Then this morning I discovered I was pregnant. I’ve been queasy at dawn, feeling weak. This local doctor told me … never mind. The point is, Azziz – the only possible father – is ecstatic. He’s asked me to forget my plan and to marry him.”

  (Our child, C, the little angel – last night I thought I saw him near the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. A faint object, I couldn’t be sure … he dimmed, then disappeared …)

  “I’ve decided to stick with my convictions.”

  ______

  I try to imagine what you’ll look like – to extrapolate what I can’t yet grasp from things I have experienced. Flames. Your body.

  A mathematical model of fire. It must take into account the following variables:

  1) The heat combustion of the volatiles.

  2) The thermal conductivity of the char as a function of its mass retention fraction and temperature.

  3) The specific heat of the char.

  Where do you fit in this equation?

  All that remains of the human body after cremation, I’ve read, is the canine maxilla, fragments of the parietals, occipitals, facial and palatal bones, ribs, vertebral drums and spine, the calceneum, the talus, and perhaps the tibial and humeral shafts.

  ______

  To see a faint object, look away. It’s there in the corner of your eye.

  ______

  9/3/88. You feel dead to me, Claire. Are you dead? Solid in memory, no longer fluid as you were when your letters still came. The certainty of your presence, even at a distance from me, meant that the circumstances of our being together – past as well as future – could be changed, just as you could alter your appearance or opinions any time you liked.

  Your death, on the other hand, illuminates – no, contextualizes – the past. Wrongly, perhaps. The cold, opposing currents that ran in you always can now be seen as a kind of order. A conflux of passions impelling you to sacrifice yourself as you did.

  ______

  You stand in the middle of a square. Noisy brown children, chickens, dogs. One or two American cars. Slowly, you remove your dress, pulling it up over your head, revealing first your knees then your belly and breasts. You shake your short black hair. White skin, lightly tanned in the sun. Azziz hands you the kerosene. Lifting the can, you douse your face and shoulders. Rivulets run down your back, pool at your toes. Sad smile. Look of resolve. Then you open the matchbook, tear out a stick.

  ______

  Two A.M., pyramid dark, I throw the switch. For a moment nothing happens – I fear a short in the circuit-then red lights, blurry in the mist, ignite the leaves of the trees. The woods sizzle, then flash. Houston dims, the chemical swamps simmer and boil. Barbed-wire melts, smoke begins to billow from the trailer home park. Families pour out, sweating. Macon’s men run, steaming, from the bushes where they’ve hidden. The car lot bubbles and pops. Rust softens and flakes from tankers anchored in the shallows, mosquitoes spark into flame in midair. I’m peeling off my shirt. The bay’s drying up. Come back to me, Claire, come back, my garden is charred, the beets have withered, the potatoes have burst. I close my eyes, my eyes, C, my goddamn open eyes –

  ______

  The stars won’t settle down until ten tonight. It takes that long for the ground to cool. Patience, more patience is what I’ve learned.

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