Family

by Micol Ostow

i will never, ever know for certain. because for all that Henry is an endless well of love, He is just as much a vault, airtight, snug with His own secrets of an unknown, never-to-be-known, before.

  still: saved by “an uncle.” this is what shelly says. she lays a small, tanned hand flat against the picnic table with the quiet, calm confidence of an insider’s knowledge.

  i think of “uncle” jack, who was not, is not, will never be my uncle.

  it is nice to know—comforting, like a glass of ice water at midafternoon, like the confidence of an insider—it is a relief, really to know:

  to know that uncles can be good for something.

  a pitcher of beer.

  a pitcher. of beer.

  you wouldn’t believe the sorts of things that some people throw away.

  human beings waste all kinds of things.

  singer

  the singer is a living doll, the human embodiment of barbie.

  she possesses the sort of flawless, breathless, intricate beauty that pulls like a fist, sucks at you with wonder, leaves you mute with dazzlement.

  she is ethereal.

  she is perfection.

  she is

  doomed.

  the singer is also alone.

  it isn’t that she has no family. no, not quite.

  but rather: her husband, someone blank and important, is away. he travels often, the burden of being blank and important.

  while he is gone, she sets about preparing for everything that is to come. for their life together. for their sometime family.

  her husband is a music manager. he fulfills other people’s fantasies. he makes his money by spreading other people’s messages, their love.

  their house is new to them, a gift from husband to wife. a nest for her, for the singer—to feather, to fill with light and sun and warmth.

  while her husband is away, the singer sets about preparing.

  she has friends who look in on her. many friends: gentle, caring people, people who stop by for an afternoon, an evening, or a week yet. there is room for them, so much room in the house. so much love and space and everyone.

  she isn’t lonely, feels connected and cared for even in the void of her husband’s absence. she spends late afternoons smiling, stretched out across overstuffed sofas, sipping at warm, comforting, innocuous things like herbal tea. communicating soundlessly with her houseguests, luxuriating in her exquisite everything. feeling secure, sound, safe.

  i don’t know the singer—beyond what i’ve seen in magazines, that is—and i certainly don’t know her husband. her houseguests. i imagine if i’d thought about it, i would have recognized her life, her orbit, as something far-reaching. magnetic.

  something like the something for which Henry searches.

  for now, though—

  in the now—

  Henry’s spotlight still skates the boundaries of her universe.

  for now.

  for now, her infinity, her everything, is light-years from my own, from any i’ve ever experienced. her house is sprawling, feathered and fluffed, stuffed to the brim with love and light and so much.

  so. much.

  i don’t yet know, think i might never know, how Henry came upon this house, this woman, this parallel universe. this in-between space, where warmth is a welcoming bath rather than a raging fever, where gentle friends weave themselves to you just when you are feeling frayed. where wire gates block out the ugliness of the outside world.

  where there are steel barriers to press up against the vortex, the orbit, the black hole.

  where there are fences, systems, codes of security, and soundless safety. where there are endless, infinite, effortless means.

  where there are countless ways to hold the undertow at bay.

  Henry says: everything belongs to everyone.

  Henry says: there is no i. no ego. no need for parents.

  Henry says: there is only family. our family.

  but:

  Henry has a message, of love and light and music.

  and He is searching for people, for open, yielding souls

  to spread His word.

  Henry is the one who found the singer.

  after

  the singer struggles.

  she strains, breaks, thrashes against the current, digs her heels into the now.

  she heaves, hiccups, twists with pain, bright and swift.

  she bleeds.

  i listen to sounds.

  they come to me, unbidden.

  choked, thick, drenched with helplessness, they come to me.

  unbidden.

  the singer pleads, cries, begs. wants to live.

  she moans.

  her voice is soft, but somehow still unmistakable amidst the deafening mayhem. it rises above the screaming, gaping, oozing chaos. i hear her. shelly hears her. there is no way to not-hear her.

  she seeps. from somewhere deep, someplace inescapable.

  she is, suddenly, everything.

  i shudder, stagger, heave. i shut my eyes, open them again.

  i take in shelly.

  my sister, my secret, inside self—shelly.

  i see her. take her in.

  she is hovering, poised above the singer, who is little more than a husk of herself, really, little more than her own half-life.

  the singer is emptying out. hollowing.

  maybe shelly is, too. maybe we all are.

  maybe this is our now, the now that we have finally come to, collectively, pedaling furiously, foolishly.

  paddling directly into the eye of the storm.

  shelly pauses, wipes the back of her palm against her forehead, leaving a streak of rust-colored blood stark against the blank expanse of her pale skin.

  she is marked. she is endless. she is forever.

  she is now.

  i want. i so want:

  i want to take the entire broken, bleeding household. the singer and her friends, her family.

  i want to scoop up all of the bodies—gentle bodies, now rendered limp and life-drained. to close the chasm between here, now, and infinity. to ground them. to keep them afloat.

  i want.

  inside.

  my hands are streaked with blood that is not my own.

  inside, past the threshold. but still, somehow apart.

  my hands are streaked with blood that is not my own, and the horror-movie sound effects persist.

  <…>

  interference

  white noise.

  torrents of skin and bone.

  skin and bone, and blood. so much blood.

  rushes, tidal waves, well-deep reflecting pools of blood, raging everywhere, catching in every corner, flickering and taking hold like a thick, coppery fever.

  i burn.

  i melt.

  i sink.

  i drown.

  bodies.

  there are bodies everywhere. and the bodies are broken.

  we are all broken. we are all supernovas. black holes, disintegrating.

  we are all crushing, pulling, recoiling, unraveling.

  we are all collapsing in on ourselves,

  like dying stars.

  part II

  never

  i never did believe in heaven.

  if i had, after all, perhaps then, then, i would have embraced my own infinity, once upon a time back home, in my mother’s anti-fantasy; perhaps i wouldn’t have welcomed the cascade, the tidal wave, the rushing torrents of pills.

  perhaps then, i would have let go of the now.

  but.

  to me, afterlife has always sounded like an oxymoron, like the type of dirty trick the

  cloud-shapes,

  the cloud-shifts—

  the creeping, smothering cloud covers—

  the type of trick they play on your mind during those moments.

  during those brief interludes

  when you dare to let your guard

  down.

  afterlife is little more than the broken pr
omise, the unfulfilled premise of something intangible,

  something ephemeral.

  something like a wisp, a whisper;

  something like the unfathomable suggestion

  of a whole and perfect day.

  a blink. a hiccup. imperceptible.

  a violation of the tidy, tidal, either/or.

  afterlife is like the undertow:

  always pressing, churning, roiling.

  but never now. never realized.

  never, not ever, something to rely upon.

  i never did believe in heaven.

  i am still not completely sure of what i think of hell.

  after

  “it’s time, mel. get dressed.”

  my eyelids flutter.

  i struggle, briefly. thrash against the hour. strain to pierce the eggshell-thin, frail, fragile veil between conscious and light, between coma and wake.

  between now and infinity.

  i have a stupefying moment of who/where/how, and then realize all at once, in a dizzying rush, a flood of yes.

  oh. yes.

  a barrage of come to now.

  i realize:

  it is time.

  i cough, press my palms hard against the open-slatted floor, feel the ridges, the grooves and indentations, feel so much past-life, history, so much before, burrowed, carved deep beneath the surface.

  i stretch back from my mattress, rise. my bones make a hollow, creaking sound as i stand, shaking off sleep.

  the creaking, the pops and hiccups, they startle me. they are the sounds of my skeleton snapping into place, the sounds of my skin, bone, sinew, settling. of my pockets, my pieces, my shadow spaces, expanding and contracting with my every bated breath.

  they are the sounds of my body reshaping itself, readying itself.

  reeling.

  they are the sounds of the opposite of solid.

  it is time.

  it is late. it is the witching hour.

  junior’s face hovers, inches from my own.

  i sense him, feel the edges of his skin ooze, radiate, pulsate with energy, with anticipation, with yes, now, always.

  junior wants.

  it is the type of want you could clutch, you could grasp; the type of want you could wind around a crooked finger.

  through the tar-thick, viscous cover of night, i can feel it, the want, constricting across my shoulders, weaving about my collarbones like a frayed noose. i can inhale and breathe his want into me so fiercely that i can almost taste its rancor.

  can almost pretend it’s my own.

  almost.

  it has been too long, here on the ranch. here in ersatz-everything, here without windows, without edges, without

 

  far too long.

  so much so, so long, that it has begun to feel that our infinity, our collective orbit, might be fading. losing shape, strength, elasticity.

  might be fraying.

  might be washing away like an etching in the sand as the tide comes in and slowly, steadily—but irreversibly—erases what once was. leaves only the now. unwinds, unravels infinity, indefinitely.

  i am not surprised to realize this.

  after all, infinity has always felt impossible to me.

  there is nothing, after all, that doesn’t end.

  concert

  Henry is our preacher, our anchor, our window.

  He tells us the gospel, according to

  Him.

  (as if there were any other version than His. as if there could ever be.)

  His favorite sermons are those that tell of unity, of harmony, of a message carried by music. He pens His own lilting rifts;

  His scores reverberate,

  punctuate the rise

  and fall

  of all of our hours.

  together.

  His melodies are our hymns, and every day that we sing with Him,

  for Him,

  we are supplicant.

  we are one.

  family.

  still.

  Henry’s music, His message, it is too powerful,

  too bright and wide to be contained.

  He—we all—want to share it. to sing it to the people. to the entire vast, expanding universe.

  in concert.

  Henry loves a concert. He does.

  it is the only piece of the then, the ever-before, that

  He is willing, even eager, to dwell upon. to share with us.

  music is a collective history, a catechism that unites.

  music is Henry’s always, the way that mirror-mel and uncle jack and

 

  all of the stages of the rolling tide

  are my own.

  the way that they mark my own inner history,

  the way that they echo a refrain that only i can hear.

  Henry’s favorite story is a sunken treasure of a memory. it is a tableau that becomes more vivid with each retelling, becomes an out-loud fact, a sensory reality.

  something that envelopes us, orbits us.

  all of us.

  Henry loves the story of woodstock.

  He tells us: woodstock was an overrun concert, held in an open field on a borrowed farm.

  it was free love and music and magic.

  crowds, clouds, consciousness.

  and bodies.

  gentle bodies, tangles of hair, skin against skin as the rain beat down.

  one family, open, warm, receptive.

  and when Henry speaks

 

  i hear Him.

  see myself there.

  can see, so clearly, so sharply, why music is Henry’s message.

  i can see

  how:

  for a boy who was once traded

  for a pitcher of beer

 

 

  the notion of woodstock—

  of bodies and warmth and

  harmony—

  it must have been:

  a welcome hum

  of promise.

  a premise—

  an ancient premonition

  of how He would eventually come to

  conduct

 

  our life on the ranch.

  “woodstock was a message,” He explains, “and people heard it. the man heard it.”

  woodstock was unique, the sort of experience that created shifts,

  swift and nearly imperceptible.

  woodstock is like Henry:

  self-contained. ephemeral.

  magnetic.

  Henry has His own message, of course.

  His own music, His own magic.

  His own love.

  and people will hear it.

  love and terror

  Henry has designs.

  Henry has thoughts about being famous, being real, being

  important.

  being noticed.

 

  as though there were someone who could possibly not notice Henry.

  as though there were

  anything, anywhere, anyone

  other than Henry.

  He has ideas. one idea, specifically.

  He wants to start a band.

  not simply your standard folk music, understand; Henry’s band would be more than our mingled voices gathered at the campfire.

  more than our words, our sounds, our songs, intertwining with the plumes of smoke, the lapping flames, the spreading heat.

  the fever.

  it would be more. so much more.

  it would be His word, His truth,

  gospel.

  it would be everything.

  because Henry is everything.

  and He will always,

  always

  need

  more.

  Henry’s band—our family’s band—

  our word, our truth,

  it would spread

  wide as w
oodstock.

  wider than any moment from

  anyone’s

  ever before.

  Henry says that music is love. and terror.

  Henry knows. always. everything. He knows.

  and so.

  there is a certain terror amongst us, the members of His family; a fear that comes from the suspicion that Henry will always need more—

  more than us,

  more than we are,

  more than we can ever be.

  He needs a platform, wide as woodstock,

  wider than the infinite ocean.

  wider than our family’s orbit, we fear.

  and so

  we sing

  for Him.

  in love.

  (and fear)

  we sing.

  for Him.

  windows

  we have no windows to the outside world.

  here on the ranch, we are self-contained, like russian dolls nesting each within a larger hollow. we fill each other up, fit snugly inside each other’s membranes, each other’s open spaces.

  we link. we interlock.

  and we are all that we all need.

  for always.

  Henry says, “everything belongs to everyone.”

  still, He is the only one allowed to watch the television set.

  He is the only one of us with access, with passage, with a window to the outside world.

  He is the only one with contact, with connection.

  with interference.

  as He should be.

  we know: He shields us for our own protection. out of respect. love. like a father would.

  He shares, of course.

  (of course.)

  of course, He shares the meaningful news with us. He assures us of this. He is careful to pass along any information with meaning.

  as though there could be meaning without Henry to imbue it.

  (as though.)

  but. He does. share.

  this, we trust.

  (in Henry, we trust.)

  He is our father. our everyone.

  He is our window.

  chosen

  in our family, we are each of us special. unique. treasured.

  but.

  there is such a thing as being more treasured than the rest,

  more wanted, for a time.

  there is such a thing as being

  chosen.

  Henry’s orbit is vast.