by Ian Orti
28
WITH HEAVY LEGS, L MADE HER WAY PAST THE SQUARE towards the tower. She braced the pages under her arm, sped through the square leaving deep, swift prints in the snow. She felt the pavement beneath, the impact in her legs, the jarring in her knees and back. In her lungs she sucked in the cold, expelling each painful breath in gusts of warm air, which trailed behind her. She pressed her fingers along the stone exterior of the building as she passed along the street. She led herself by the tips of her fingers noting the textures that passed beneath them. Stone, iron, glass, then nothing but the silence between these sensations and the sweet uncertainty of what lurked in these empty spaces. A car. A speeding bus. A tram. She would accept any of these head on. But there was nothing.
When she reached the base of the tower she placed her bare hands in the snow and held them there, cooling the burning in her palms. The door at the base of the tower hadn’t been opened since she was last there and she kicked and then shovelled fiercely with her forearms the snow at its base. She rolled the notes under her arm. With both hands she tugged at the door until a space small enough for her to wedge herself through opened and she was able to slide inside the tower.
Inside she rested again. Tried to find air between the panic and exhaustion. This time the journey was harder. She ran her fingers along the spiral staircase, counted fifty steps, then rested, pressed her lips, as she had to Henry’s, along the stone stairwell. When she opened the door at the top, wind sliced across her face, her ears stung, her fingers hardened as the numbness set in. From the top of the tower she could see her pursuer limping through the street, following the prints she had left behind.
But she was out of fear.
She pinned the notes beneath her elbow and waited for him to enter the tower, and then began scrawling lines into the pages with the thin stick of charcoal.
When he entered the tower, the door closed behind him. He made nothing of it, ignored it in his violent ascension to the top, unable to see as mortar and stone slowly covered each entranceway. He raced up the stairs, threw his shoulder into the door. But there was nothing. He felt along the archway for a handle, but found nothing. Instead, he felt the wood petrify and harden into stone, as cracks of light clotted with mortar until there was no light, only darkness, no air, and no way out.
She knew pain in each of its forms. For her, there were only two kinds. There was the slow pain of tissue tearing. Of bones breaking. A kind of pain that could be measured in blood above or below the surface of the skin. The kind of pain that after time would disappear. But then there was the bloodless pain of loss. One she could treat, the other could bring her to her knees whenever it wanted. She knew both well. It was pain, the thread which held her together that made her what she was. To be set on fire, to be torn apart, to be anything but bound to the frontiers of the city surrounding her. This was to be her arc, her own paradoxical monument of destruction and escape. She thought of Henry, about bringing him back. To do so, he would have to find a way back to the beginning. She focused on one tiny figure, a tiny black speck walking between the buildings, which slowly lost their shape in the cloud line above. And there she could see him. She imagined he’d been walking for hours and began to write the final lines. Outside the tower, wind bit into her neck. This was Henry’s favourite view, her most despised. Clouds prevented any light but the dim glow humming above the houses on the other side of the river. From her elevated position she could feel the snow gather around her fingers and as she held the pages, felt it change to sleet as it fell into the city. Across the bank, on the other side of the river, she watched tiny figures. Snow to sleet. Sleet to rain. If it was a storm it was of no matter. She could tear right through it. When she was finished, she held the pages in her hands, palms up, and held them in front of her face, the way Henry had once shown her, and would, if her plan failed, inevitably show her again.
If all went as planned, there would be no tomorrow, and no day after that. The days to come and the days passed would lie scattered across the city like an impossible riddle never to be solved the same way again. In this city of vagrants and butchers and liars and thieves, she was free to cheat and steal. She was free to cheat even the story, and release herself from the pages that trapped her. And in this city of vagrants, butchers, liars and thieves, there were others who deserved to be free. Others who were capable of love, and one she would steal and keep all to herself before the city drew to a fiery close, if this was to be her end. If this was not to be her end and if the pages themselves conspired against her, like a reptile growing back a severed tail, it would begin again and again, it would dig its claws into her and again she would be its victim and again she would want nothing but to escape.
Her eyes were closed, her lips were moving, but it was impossible to make out what she was saying. With two fists she held the pages in her hand. Page by page by page, they left her hand. Except for a few. She would not let every page go. There were some worth holding on to and these she kept to herself before letting go of the rest. Across the bank, below the tower, autumn leaves, dry, cracked, burnt, drifted over the city, settling where they settled.
29
HE REMEMBERED HE WAS EXPECTED FOR DINNER she had arranged. His wife was entertaining colleagues from the museum, a private donor and another man who was to arrange for her the acquisition of several Renaissance masterpieces for an exhibit. He had links to famous museums in famous countries and Henry’s wife was excited about the publicity such an acquisition would generate, as it was sure to augment her museum’s status within this country. She was eager to discuss the museum and its projects for the future.
Henry walked slowly with his hands in his pockets. On the ground ahead of him he saw a sheet of paper and as he got closer to it he focused on the elaborate black lines, which appeared to be in the shape of a woman. Henry stared for a while at the image, tried to imagine how he could frame it or if he would just hang it as he found it, a worn, damp image with lines bleeding across the page. He imagined a life inside the image, tried to impose a life behind the lines and the negative space around them. It could be a happy story should he wish to distract himself from the darkness that bent around him and which bound him to the pages of his own story. Or if he chose, he could imagine a reality much sadder and more punishing than his own. Were these lines, he wondered, drawn randomly or was this once a real person, equally as vulnerable as himself perhaps, or decidedly more assured, more visceral, more sublime.
It would be a lie, he thought, to impose or project anything but what he thought about himself upon these lines and it was in this space, in the negative space between the lines on the page and his eyes, where life existed. Anything else, any measure of imposing a punishing tax upon these lines was neither his exercise nor occupation. To try to make understandable that which lay among the dark contours of these lines was itself an act of violence. So, for Henry, who walked alone with his thoughts trying to negotiate the memory of the afternoon, which relived itself in his mind, the image he held in his hands was simply that. An image. Black lines on white paper. If he projected anything on to the image it was a reflection of his own self, and he knew that when he hung it, others who happened upon the same lines would likely impose their own interpretation upon it and this interpretation would never be anything more than a stark projection of their own image and their own misconceptions, their own hatred, their own love, or any of the other colours and ambiguities which give towns and their people their own unique textures.
Henry folded the piece of paper into four and continued walking. More discarded work from the city that could be hung along his walls. He placed his hands in his pockets, holding the paper inside as rain slid from his hair to his cheeks.
30
THERE WAS A BICYCLE. Locked to an iron gate in a street with high walls and awnings over shop windows. She knew the street well. It was aligned with the universe in such a way that once every four years, the sun would rise at the east en
d of the street and cast not a single shadow until it set beyond the horizon on the west side and darkness again cloaked the street.
She slipped beneath the plywood covering the front window. Inside, it was lush. Both the ceiling above her and the roof above it had collapsed and at the back a charred staircase led to nowhere. Wide leaves, long vines hung over the remains of the former interior, winding around cracked pipes, over tables and chairs, damaged and overturned. And they never stopped. And where once there sat customers there sat only plants coiled around the remnants of the place as though pulling the objects inside deep into the ground. Rain fell onto leaves below, forming shallow pools, which eventually overflowed and ran down stem after veiny stem, until the leaves arrived at the bar where L once sat with Henry, her elbows on the countertop holding a cup in delicate fingers, making fools of politicians on the television or speculating the fate of passersby.
She stood among the wreckage of the building. Only this was not quite wreckage. It was something entirely different. Fire had gutted the place and almost everything inside but what remained was hardly something worse than what had once stood. In the back, sitting in long grass, was a bathtub. It had fallen from the floor above but was still intact.
For some time, L sat there smoking cigarettes in the empty bathtub negotiating the lines and the space around her. Next to the tub, beneath the ash and soot she uncovered the coffee can in which she’d stored the empty tea bags. She blew soot from the can and opened the lid. She removed one of the gutted tea bags, gently unfolded it and stood it upright in her palm. She struck a match, lit the tea bag and watched it take flight.
She emptied the remaining teabags, surrounding herself with the miniature city and saved one for the palm of her hand. She lit each one on fire and then lay beneath the burning embers rising above her. It was a safe place there in the fire, among the ruins of the paper city and it pleased her to watch it burn around her as they rose, burned, then fell. As ashes fell around her, she reached her hand into the air, like a child catching snowflakes and stretched her fingers towards the burnt remains of her paper city falling around her.
And then she saw it.
An errant flame, burning a hole through the pale sky above her. Beyond the hole, darkness. For the first time in her life she could see a way out. But there was no way she could, physically at least, find a way to reach it. She would need longer arms, or a bigger fire.
L closed her eyes and let herself sleep for a while. In her dreams she drew the millennia to a single page. Days passed in seconds. The sun, the beacon which languished in waking life on days she wished would only ever end, chased the night across the sky, dividing it in two. Nights passed with the sedate blink of an eye. In her dreams, buildings crumbled. Mountains eroded. Branches stretched. Nature widened its mouth to devour the city. She opened her eyes and she was in the dark. She shivered inside the bathtub, then rose to her feet. She looked around a final time before slipping out into the street from behind the plywood. She knew there was a way out but for now there was a bicycle locked to an iron gate that needed liberating.
31
THE TABLE IS SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE Henry doesn’t know. Though they know his name he cannot recall any of theirs or if he’s ever even introduced himself to them. It doesn’t matter to him. These are not his friends and the reason they have gathered to eat at his table has nothing to do with him. There are plates half-empty, and a half-eaten carcass has won the centrepiece of the table where it lies with an apple wedged in its mouth and its eyes burnt shut. The room is lit with candles, hardening the lines around the faces of those at the table. The walls glow and almost seem to move in the candlelight. The thread of the tablecloth appears almost black on the table. He pardons himself for his late arrival and places his coat on a chair at the table. “The trains were running slow tonight.”
“I heard the transit workers are preparing for a strike. They’re cutting back their services to threaten the city into negotiating with them. Apparently, they feel they can halt traffic and cripple the economy to get what they want. You can imagine the people who will get fired because they can’t show up for work, or the congestion on the roads this is bound to cause.” The man speaks and points his knife at Henry, waves it with each syllable as if conducting an orchestrated lament about the labour politics of the municipal transit workers.
The man has provided the pork at the table. He provides pork cooked in kitchens in five boroughs in the city. He is hoping, expecting, to have shops in each of the city’s boroughs the following year.
Henry excuses himself from the table and walks upstairs to the bathroom where he remains for some time. He looks into the mirror, bends his head forward, runs wide fingers through thin hair. When his wife enters he is sitting on the toilet, his hands covered with blood and a shard of glass protruding from his heel. She asks him if he is trying to embarrass her and he says no, says he will be out shortly and he cleans his heel and washes the blood down the drain. The bathroom smells of wine and Henry thinks of earlier that day when he discovered his wife with yet another man.
He’d followed the sounds coming from upstairs. Crept through the living room, past the kitchen where he met the pig face to face through the window in the oven door, and followed the sounds upstairs, pulling himself along a wooden railing until he reached the bathroom at the top of the stairs and with two gentle hands he pressed down on the handle and peered inside. He saw the wine bottle rattling on the edge of the sink. He could see the torsos of two bodies pressed eagerly against each other, watched as the stranger painted her with long brushes of his tongue, watched as they coiled around each other as though two trees with their trunks entwined as one.
Gently, he closed the door and walked quietly down the stairs and back towards the other side of the river. It was the hardest version of the journey for Henry. As he’d stood on the bridge, in the same place he stopped whenever he was forced to walk this way, he turned his back to the wall, slid down and sat on his heels. The occasional automobile passed as he sat there and when pedestrians neared him, he noticed they would cross the street. He laughed to himself at the idea that anyone could feel threatened by him. He’d always lacked the capacity to leave; his reaction to trauma was retreat, a deep retreat into the endless hollows of his mind. He lacked the courage to march through the streets because he lacked the courage to believe that he could change anything in his life. To hurl himself from a bridge required courage. Henry’s sentence for a life of apathy and regret was life itself.
Henry pulls his sock over his foot. When he walks, he trails marks of blood with every second step.
32
WITH A ROCK SHE SMASHED THE LOCK. SHE Wrapped her cold fingers around the handlebars and placed her foot on the pedal. It was a black bike with a bent crank and two rusty pedals that grinded like a slow hand marking seconds on a clock.
She pushed down on the pedal and the bicycle moved forward. She had only to make one stop before leaving. The bicycle would take her as far as it would take her. She wouldn’t stop peddling until the bicycle refused to do so. If a little force and a little effort spelled the possibility of tearing herself past the margins of the city, she would try. And if the city itself had no end or no borders she could find, well then, she was not above burning the bloody place to the ground. She tore through the streets, gripping the icy handlebars and when she rang the bell, the rain began to fall a little harder on her face and she squinted her eyes as water slid down her cheeks. She had only one stop before she left this place for good.
33
WHEN HE RETURNS THERE IS A WOMAN sitting at the table next to the butcher whom he presumes is the man’s wife or close acquaintance. Throughout the night, she speaks very little except once when asked how she feels about the new exhibit coming to the museum. She says it is of little interest to her. She says she can only handle so many pictures of the Madonna and the Crucifixion before they all seem to blend into the same image. The butcher apologi
zes on her behalf and says she knows little of art and the importance of displaying the wonderful pieces, whose acquisition his company was to help finance.
Henry listens attentively to the music and its methodical progression to the end. As he watches his wife and her guests laugh and tell stories and clever anecdotes, as he watches one of the men touch his wife’s hand as he delivers a punch line, or rant, or clever remark or whatever it is he’s saying—Henry will never know because he stopped listening the instant his wife pulled the record from the sleeve and placed it beneath the needle—he remembers hearing a story once of a river that travelled so great a distance that its mouth opened to what was its own source.
Henry brings the table into focus as more wine is poured into glasses. He listens as they discuss a painting recently acquired by the museum, an image of which sits before them in a book on the table. The piece in question, which the host and her colleagues examine, does not interest Henry, but he listens as they debate the seasonality of the piece and whether it was spring or fall, basing their estimation on the colour of the snow, its grey hues, the exposure of the earth beneath. Surely, it’s spring, declares a guest, and notes how the body is newly discovered beneath the snow as it melts. Another refutes that, surely it is fall, and the person sees no end to their story so they jump. How can you be sure it isn’t a murder? But there are no visible wounds; all you can see is an arm. Exactly. Proof that it is spring.
