The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  And you will wake in the night to see your pillow alive with roaches; another night rats; another night a pair of keen scissors gleaming in the streetlight.

  You are at seven weeks, nine, eleven. Twelve. The wax model claims the young one looks like this, but you know from your reading that it looks like that. You think you know, but you are wrong.

  And you will wake in the night and see nothing, but hear a dark conversation. The bodiless figures talking to each other in the hallway, plotting hurt to your child. Get up to drive them out of your house and come back to yourself walking down the hallway, naked, on the way to check the front-door dead bolt. Trying to secure the house.

  I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.

  —Revelation 1:10

  I was not in the Spirit. I was in the body.

  Tradition holds John the Beloved Disciple to have been a virgin. So this story is not for him. Even though The Golden Legend, a medieval collection of the lives of the saints, tells us that the name John means “one to whom a gift is given, and in John’s case this gift was the revelation of secrets. For to him it was given to know many profound secrets.” This particular mystery he never knew.

  This story is for you, woman. Will we know each other at a glance, see in each other something we recognize? Some invisible mark on our foreheads? Maybe you, too, woke in the night and saw a dark figure standing in the hallway. Staring at you as you slept. Gesturing with one hand for you to come along. Come and see.

  No, you tried to say, but silence clotted your mouth. I will not come with you.

  For the time is at hand.

  —Revelation 1:3

  As in a dream, as in Revelation, just when you think things can’t get worse, the torments begin afresh.

  And perhaps the perspective can shift.

  Wake early on a Monday in April and find a drop of blood. Over the phone, the midwife will ask, Dime-sized or quarter-sized? Quarter, you will say, taking down the address for the ultrasound office, deciding to believe nothing is wrong.

  Lie on the paper sheet and turn your head to one side. Acoustic ceiling tiles above measure a foot square; this room is twelve by twelve. I just want to know if the baby is alive, you will say. The technician snaps the video screen to black and mutes the sound. That’s all I want to know, you say from your place on the table. The technician’s mouth is a firm line. She keeps her eyes on the screen, says, I can’t tell you anything.

  This is the only time they’ll behave for you, jokes the man at the reception desk. Close-up photographs of angelic infants cover the waiting-room walls. They stop listening soon as they’re born.

  And you will go to sleep that night still believing there can be some other explanation. But when morning comes and you wake tasting blood, warm river smell rising from your skin, you will know. Why go to work? Because you crave routine; because you are a woman of habit. Because you do not know how bad this will get. During your first class, the contractions start, sharp pains forcing you to pause as you instruct your students. They’re sweet girls, and they work hard all hour, pausing to whisper intent suggestions to each other about thesis statements and transitions.

  Things deteriorate quickly. Walk down the hallway, where your colleague insists on driving you home—a good thing, because you nearly black out in the car.

  Okay, you’re not yourself. Lying in the bathtub, currents of blood beating out, room spinning as you try to sit up, head between your knees. Something not recognizable as a baby, but something you instinctively know was once alive and now is not, caught halfway outside your body. Oh nobody speaks of this, do they? Grieved by it and somehow shamed, but this is labor’s dark double, like what you went through to bear your living daughter, yet worse: the pain, nausea, and weakness, yet no joy at its finish. No finish. Lying on the floor, the afternoon wind singing through the half-opened window, and sunlight that pains your eyes gleaming on the skin of your hand. Observe the fine mesh of lines and creases there; you are porous, the image comes unbidden of grasses shivering in the pink light past 3:00 a.m. Three in the morning is the hour of the wolf but three in the afternoon is the hour of the curtain rending in twain, top to bottom. The body wrings itself dry with pain and nobody knows but you.

  Walk down a narrow hall again and into the room labeled OSTETRICA, where the woman they call Venus lies on a silk sheet edged in silver embroidery tape. This silk, torn from age and dry rot, says nothing lasts forever; it once was dyed a brilliant green but now has bleached to white. Wax purling down the cold candle in sooty drops. The silent wick. Her teeth are less convincing than her lips, which gleam with varnish that looks like saliva. She lies naked on the table, waiting these past two hundred years to bear her child. The child that will never grow larger than this, whose lungs will never swell with breath and whose voice will never rise in a cry.

  Woman, will you go through this alone, or will someone you love stay in the room with you? Will he cover you when you shake, read you psalms when you ask? Will he carry you to the car and drive you to the hospital? The bliss of lying in the backseat, rocking back and forth as the big car slows for stoplights, letting go. Nothing more you can do. There is a crease for grief in any day but usually we turn from it. It is a narrow room into which your body will just fit.

  You can take Venus apart, lift her belly out by the satin tabs, but don’t do it. I want to cover her; she can’t do this for herself. At the hospital your teeth will shake, your knees will shiver, the patella looks like this when replicated in wax, you will retch, here are the trachea and the root of the tongue. Tears will edge from your eyes. You will call down blessings on the orderly, a saint performing daily kindness, who unrolls the warm blanket over you, starting from your toes, up your legs and your belly and your heart and under your chin.

  What do we say?—if we say anything at all. How far along were you? Seven weeks, twelve, twenty. We say, Sometimes bad things happen. We say, It’s a bullshit thing. We spare each other the details but we know them by heart. I go over them again and again.

  The ultrasound, which the technician had muted, reveals the baby had been dead for a month by the time the miscarriage began.

  I thought you were with me but I was alone.

  I can’t tell you anything, the technician had said. And for a long time I couldn’t say anything either.

  Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered. In those days my living daughter would pull away and I believed it was because she could sense death on me.

  And he saith unto me, Write. Write the thing which thou hast seen.

  —Revelation 1:19-20

  Take a step back.

  Another April, many years ago. Middle school. We sat cross-legged on the gymnasium floor. Blond hardwood laid down in narrow strips, thick with lacquer and dotted with tiny frozen bubbles. A red mark on my ankle when I shifted. The speaker had come to talk to us about staying in school, maybe, or staying off of drugs, something so obvious as to not need repeating. But here’s what I remember:

  He had worked in a slaughterhouse. Every day he waded across a factory floor flooded ankle-deep with chicken blood. The blood was a by-product, used to produce makeup. The floor was slick from the rendering operation, and when clumps of fat stopped the floor drains, the speaker unclogged them. There’s blood in in everything, he told us, urine too, disguised under clinical-sounding names. Like in shampoo it’s “urea.” Read the side of the bottle when you go home. We sat and listened, totally silent. Outside, the pear trees’ new leaves shivered in the bright spring morning. The fire door stood wide to let in the breeze.

  Sometimes, walking with the rest of my class to the lunchroom at our appointed time, we’d see a line of eighth-grade girls waiting outside the locker room. I held my breath as I passed. These girls knew something I didn’t. They knew about blood, as I myself would soon, drops of it falling in the bowl and spreading into overlapping rings, skeins of it purling from their bodies and slipping heavily into the drain.

  Wom
en knew these things. They knew how to put on their faces, dabbing foundation on their cheeks with fingertips or triangular sponges, the foam oozing oily drops. Women slicked their lips with lead and copper. Women darkened their lids with ashes ground fine and stretched their lashes long with tar. Blood was at the root of it all. Blood with the red drained out so you could forget what it really was.

  The man walked out of the slaughterhouse each night and left dark boot prints on the asphalt of the parking lot. Working there was the worst thing that ever happened to him, and he used the story of it to try and scare us straight. What must our teachers, women young and old, have thought as they listened to this man who was paid special to come share? They didn’t say, not to me and maybe not to each other.

  Take another step back.

  One afternoon in Rome we stopped at the Capuchin monastery to see the crypt covered with bones. The walls were stacked with femurs like cordwood. Finger bones, nailed to the plaster, decorated the ceiling with kaleidoscopic patterns. The lamps dangling overhead were lightbulbs caged in bones and wire. A sign on the lintel of the door read:

  IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN:

  TO SMOKE

  TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS

  TO WRITE ON THE WALLS

  TO TOUCH THE BONES

  As we walked slowly past each alcove, it got quiet. The last room had a small skeleton on the wall, a child, holding a scythe in its bony fingers. LA MORTE NON È LA FINE MA L’ALBA DELLA VITA, the sign says. Death is not the end, but the dawn of life.

  Years ago, I used to dream of a baby who shrank tiny and vanished. Would wake myself searching the bedclothes for the lost one.

  Now I know who it was. It was you, slip of a child. All I have of you is the tale of your dying. Death at the dawn of life.

  Make me not explode.

  —Prayer written on a scrap of paper, Chiesa di Santa Maria de’Ricci, Florence

  There was no way to preserve the bodies as the artists worked. They needed up to two hundred corpses to make a single model. So the individual woman they call Venus must stand for many more.

  To tint her skin, melt grains of pigment and thin beeswax with turpentine. Paint her thigh with a series of brushes that go from stiff to soft, ox to marten to badger. Beeswax they imported from China; think how it traveled over mountains and down rivers to reach them here in the sunny rooms where they worked beside the riverbank. Traces in the wax of flowers from plants now long gone. The bees made that. In the skin of her thigh, you can imagine the sun shining through the bees’ glassine wings.

  I would lift that afternoon from her shoulders if I could. Silk faded from green to white. You didn’t do anything wrong, the doctor said, but I didn’t believe her. My anger was slippery; it threw out sharp hooks but could find no purchase, not on the doctors nor on the technician nor on the grinning man at the desk who said, They stop listening soon as they’re born. Not on God nor on those who refused to grieve with me nor on the roundly pregnant walking joyfully (as I had) down the cracked sidewalk. The maple tree whispered lushly as spring turned to summer. I knew the statistics: one out of three pregnancies ends in miscarriage. I knew the facts: many miscarriages are biology’s way of weeding out genetic problems. I knew these things and they mattered not. I had failed to protect you even from my own body. Well-meaning people said, Relax; said, Try not to worry about it too much; and I knew that swimming beneath those words was the belief that my very thoughts had strangled you.

  I see her lying on the table. I lie down beside her and whisper in her ear:

  I’m sorry. Something choked and went cold but you couldn’t feel it. Your own breathing so loud, and the blood pounding in your ears saying regret, regret or God, God, God. No answer came that I could hear.

  A measure of wheat for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

  —Revelation 6:6

  Yet it is worse than that.

  The wax woman they call Venus looks alive. All of these figures do.

  But at the Mütter Museum, the cases are stocked like a warehouse with parts that are very dead. Heart, lung, penis, ear bones of mouse and vole. A thumb, “amputated for caries,” suspended like a pendant, wrinkled and bloated white. I gasp when I see it. Venereal warts strung on floss like beads on a necklace. “The body is nature’s book,” says a sign.

  I walk those dark-paneled halls and observe many displays. Tidy hair balls of man and beast stored in tall glass jars. Dissection kits, a collection of skulls, a daily book bound in the skin of “Mary L., Irish widow, died 28 years.” Pancreas in a glass container, sealed shut with tape. In order to see the deep jar holding the conjoined livers of Chang and Eng, you must kneel. One room is filled with fetal children, some in alcohol, some splayed on wires, I turn away. The doctor checked a box on my chart. He tried to be quick but I caught him; the box said “habitual aborter.”

  I stop in front of a glass casket. People call her the Soap Lady; farmers discovered her in 1875. Back then people called her the Petrified Lady because it was believed she had turned to stone. She is an example of a rare phenomenon in which a dead body succumbs to adipocere formation, aka saponification, aka grave wax. As the years went by, she turned to wax. Her toothless mouth is opened wide; her nose is short and piglike; her jaw is broken on both sides, as though she died screaming. If an embryo develops in your abdomen instead of your womb, your body might fill it with calcium and turn it into a lithopedion, a stone baby. Sometimes even after the lithopedion is discovered, if there are no symptoms the patient will choose not to have it removed. Not long ago, a woman in Colombia discovered she had been carrying a stone baby in her belly for forty years.

  Tidy charnel house, filled with bones neatly labeled. A heart of granite would crack for this. I have been a sepulchre carrying quiet death within me.

  And I know what I am missing. Those first mornings when our living daughter was newborn and pollen sifted in through the window screens and joy clung to every surface. Paul Simon sang, These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don’t cry baby don’t cry. And camellias exploded in bloom, and forsythia, and the weeping cherry tree released clots of pink lace that floated in the warm air. People brought us food and I tried to thank them enough and could not remember how, being confused by happiness, and people laughed because they understood.

  Instead of that there is this. These are the nights of walking down the hall in a dark house.

  When you crave black nights of no moon.

  When you become the husk the plant casts off even as the plant itself withers.

  When even the gray sun of an overcast day pains your eyes.

  Beware the impulse to seek a vision and a sign.

  You might find one. And then how to tell it. I smelled blood like wet dirt on me.

  Come and see. And I saw. Haven’t I seen what I didn’t know to beg heaven against?

  Thus, each of the good friars, in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before daybreak, as it were, and make room for another lodger.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

  I dream my throat is stitched shut with porcupine quills. I must reach back over my tongue, carefully, and unhook them one at a time from my tonsils. I lay them flat on my palm and when I wake my throat is raw and dug.

  There was nothing much to bury but we cut the clay with a spade. If I could sing I would sing Psalm 51, The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit. (“Miserere,” by Gregorio Allegri.) I was your only home and then I was your grave. Cerements a rich red, scalloped at the edge. Sleek stitch purling in the bowl.

  The descant floats above the melody in a wail. On this night someone must clear the flowers, the candles, the scriptures from the altar, yes, and the prayers left there too; sweep aside the loose pile of scrap papers, some folded, some lying open with just a word or two written there, Make me not explode, or, That I can heal my heart and feel happy again; clear it all away and leave the flat slab
, burn the prayers to ash and as the poor flame rises one should sing that song, Cast me not away from Thy presence; O give me the comfort of Thy help again.

  What does it mean to make a habit of something? Provide examples. I read my Bible every night before bed and have done so ever since I was six. I have read on airplanes, during overnight flights, in hotel bathrooms when others were sleeping, in tents, cars, bunks. Habit. The Capuchins in Rome wear habits of brown. Later I read that the bone crypts began because of an absence of space. When a monk died, he was buried in the graveyard behind the monastery, which was filled with earth brought back from Jerusalem many years before. But Rome is and was a busy city, with space at a premium, so each monk could only rest in the ground for twenty years or so before they had to dig him up to make room for the newest body. Hence the bones lining the wall. Hence the numbers inked on joint and shank.

  There was nothing much to bury but we cut the clay with a spade. Yet this belief in holy ground is a tale for the living, not the dead. How could it mean anything to you, who never breathed air nor touched ground, never felt any kiss? You had no time to find a favorite color, no time for any memory, no time to build any habit. If I find this red clay sweet, and I do, it is for me now, to think on when my turn comes.

  Is not my word like a fire, and a hammer breaking rock in pieces?

  —Jeremiah 23:29

  Listen. I had feared childbirth for as long as I had known what it meant to be female. Yet the day I bore my living daughter I saw I need not fear labor nor even death—not my own. Only hers. There could be no pain like that.

  And now I ask. Haven’t I paid out the measure of sorrow for the joy I have had? For all the light and shuddering transcendence of her birth, haven’t I drunk deep of this bitter draught? By day and by night haven’t I prayed to heaven for mercy, the end of longing, to stop the loss that blooms from me time and again?