by Sara Veglahn
The light begins to fade and the clouds roll in and we gather our things. It has been another afternoon that was both pleasant and uncomfortable.
They have heard of the woman who walks the riverbeds, who paces the bridge. Some say they have seen her with other women who wear long flowing gowns. Some say they do not believe she is real, say she’s made up, that her feet have never touched solid ground. They say she’s a vision, a shade, an appearance, unknowable. Believers are thought to be deluding themselves, wasting their time by the river, but superstitions always arise from truth. The ones who believe are affected. They make pilgrimages to the water. They bring jars in which to put the river. A river of their own to keep them safe. They believe she keeps them safe.
Her emergence into the world was aided by the encouragement of her ancestors, who appeared for the occasion wearing forget-me-nots in their hair and lapels but who remained unnoticed by the parties involved as there were too many other things happening at the same time. For example, her father was busy throwing the dozens of snakes out the window that had appeared out of nowhere.
“So, you thought you were drowning?”
“I couldn’t be sure. It was unclear which way was up, how to move, where to go. It was a strange perambulation. I heard some sort of water bird, I saw many gliding along the periphery. There was an undertow; I knew this from what everyone said about moving bodies of water. The currents seemed to me like a train or bus you would wait for and get onto. But of course it wasn’t like that. I was seeing all kinds of blue, I was trying to emerge.”
“How did you get away?” Her ladies leaned forward. They held their chins in their hands and sat cross-legged on the floor in dresses made from pale chiffon.
“To leave a place is difficult. I understand motion, but am unclear about how to ignite it. Most places are like others. I often feel as if I were somewhere else. As if one city grid were placed on top of another, inserting its atmosphere as well as its architecture. I’m not sure how else to explain it. It’s not me that is displaced, but the landscape.”
Place a loaf of bread with a quantity of quicksilver within. Place a loaf of bread with a lit candle embedded within it. Place a shirt there. Listen for the change in the sound of the drum beat. Float chips of wood. Wear an earring. Row in a boat with a rooster. Place a straw or bundle of straw. Insert a paper with the name written upon it. Throw a lamb or goat there. Fire a cannon. Ring the bell. You’ll hear her voice before a storm: a crier who returns as a bird. Use a fetish of fishbone, wear a ring of coffin nail, wear a ring of seahorse teeth, a fillet of green rushes tied to the calf. Carry a knee bone, a black key. Come into the world at the rising of the Dog Star. To appease, to make sure, throw salt into the river.
I do not know what it is I am waiting for, if I am waiting for anything. It seems I am. I have been here so long. There was a time I was elsewhere, my dwelling a private district of gravel. Solid ground. A frame house. Windows and curtains. Eggs and tea. I appeared alone in the meadow, ran reckless through the prospect. My outlook was extensive and naïve. At night, the river whispered and I was its likely customer. Whichever direction I faced was water. It was inevitable.
If they could see her, they would feel something sharp between the eyes. A bright blue light emanating from what could be her face. If they could see her, they would see a dripping costume of wings. She is covered in mud, surrounded by air. She is surrounded yet invisible. If she is invisible, she hovers and spins and moves towards the river. If she is not invisible, she will walk to the river slowly.
She dreams that she finds herself inside a large white Victorian house where everything is carved from bone. Someone, a servant, keeps filling her glass with very thin mud which she then pours onto the floor and grinds into the carpet with the heel of her shoe. There is a fern in the window covered in tiny mirrors. They do not reflect her face when she looks into them. Outside there is a walnut tree surrounded by tall faceless statues and an elaborate fountain. She sits at the edge of the fountain where she attempts to fill a metal bucket with water using only her fists.
I had been expecting it since birth. This conclusion, the blinding light, the end of movement, everything finished. I knew I was not meant long for this world and so paid particular attention to the inevitability of my demise. Every day, I looked for signs—a variation in bird song, mail delivered to the wrong address, typographical errors in the newspapers. Yet, each day: nothing. I remained alive.
Then the day came. I knew it upon arising. The sun was so bright I could barely lift the curtain. There was a loud hum. I couldn’t believe the pain in my head. It was like nothing else. After, I knew I had crossed over. Yet I remained where I was. Standing at the window in my nightgown.
Small bodies. The dock and night. Weeds on the riverbank, casting in. Windshields and other junk stranded on the shore. You couldn’t drive into the river, you could only bob softly. Headlights and the lagoon when no one was there. Everything transfixed and the water was motion, veined and transparent, you could take a small boat to the other side and there was something tiny between the nearness. If dark and heavy, if hatched and watching, if you were there, you would see.
There are ghosts in the world she cannot see because they don’t belong to her, but she can see them in the photographs she finds and collects in an album. A lot of people take photographs of ghosts, but they don’t know this until later when the film is developed.
There is one she especially likes. It doesn’t look like a person. It looks like fabric, tulle, something sheer. It is a picture of a veil descending a staircase. It is the most famous picture of a ghost. The picture was taken somewhere in England, where ghost belief is more common than in other places.
In another favorite, a tiny triangle of a small boy’s foggy face peers out from a framed portrait of Jesus hanging on a paneled wall behind a family posing for their Christmas portrait. They smile widely. They don’t know he’s there.
She thinks that taking pictures in graveyards hoping for a picture of a ghost is cheating. She prefers the ghosts who turn up in the background or foreground, who hover off to the side or behind the subject of the photo. Where it seems as though they are too bashful to appear fully, but too lonely not to appear at all.
She wakes feeling ill after a dream in which she eats too many hardboiled eggs at an expensive restaurant. The restaurant was a medieval city, with narrow passageways and cobblestone paths, low arches and thick walls, the smell of eternity and the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of church paintings and carved figures she had ever seen. Everything was enclosed and ancient, the inhabitants gliding past her in long brown robes. Angels, saints, dragons, prophets, and devils looked into her eyes as she navigated the narrow streets. Thousands of insects followed her, all in formation. They changed their pattern at each small noise—a cough, a sneeze, some distant music. Near the river, she took off her shoes to put on a pair of tall rubber boots. Almost immediately her shoes were run over by a large street sweeping machine. Upon waking, she tells herself to remember this.
I was a woman scorned. My ladies placed an ancient headdress atop my curls. Mornings I stood by windows, waiting. I understood the movement of planets, comets. All of my gardens were different colors. I kept track of things. Winters, ice fell from the sky making everything slick and shiny. I wandered bareheaded out the door.
I swallowed swords and fire, my body glistening with oil. Webs of taut silk were stretched above me when I slept at night. I investigated my insides and made a hollow place. When the fire and swords came to rest in me, it was calming. To be filled up like that. My ladies dressed me in spangles, they anointed my limbs with perfumes. They watched me perform, their eyes shining, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, swaying.
All of my paupers were bent and shaken, mowing my fields full of glowworms. Pink silk draperies surrounded my throne of mahogany and finch-bone where I waited. I was an important king. There were several ladies who came to
call, they brought gifts of olives and once, the tiniest hummingbird buzzing like an angry bee. I made many lists. Each day I arranged my attributes.
I was damp, my hands rough from milking. I was always pouring cream from a red pitcher, its stream steady, the brown basin never filling. The bread I made cooled near the open window when the weather was warm. I worked in a room where paint flaked off the walls like fish scales. All of my ladies tittered when they saw me coming. They hid their pretty eyes in their sleeves. They gathered together near the lake and watched the clouds fall. Then they followed me and watched how I carried their baskets full of goods, my back breaking beneath their heavy load.
So many lines to follow through. So many worlds to understand. A cartographer’s work is never done. I render dragons beneath the ocean. I call them by name and hurry them through tides. If you watch me, with my compass and needle, you will see me pausing, taking breaths of deep blue air. My ladies come with tea. They hold up their skirts to avoid the floor covered in pencil shavings. Then they each place a cool hand on my forehead and neck and they tell me to go on.
“I was always drowning. I felt at sea in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. I had nowhere to be. And soon a box was filled and unfilled. And soon another box and another. Then I would be arranging objects in a room again, hoping to be weighed down.”
My ladies looked stricken. After a long silence they said, “There are many ways to find your way out of a cove, a cave, a landslide.”
“I’ve set aside the dark, my fear of it. I move ant-like through the terrain. All of the sounds stop and I am alone with the moon. Some landscapes are entirely of my own making.”
There is a catastrophe.
She goes to see a fortune-teller who sits inside a cabinet, hunched over and small.
But she has forgotten, while she is waiting to talk to this fortune-teller, that she was supposed to go to a different one. So she leaves this place with the woman in the cabinet and walks the nearly deserted streets among the old warehouses by the river.
The further she walks, however, the more she senses that the information she seeks is with the first fortune-teller. She stands stranded on the sidewalk. Finally, she turns around and heads back. The fortune-teller in the cabinet is waiting.
“I knew you’d come back.”
She places a package into her hands. It contains information about her day of birth, but although it is the correct day, it is the wrong month and year.
She is in the parlor, sitting on the hard velvet sofa. Her hands are gloved and folded primly on her lap. She wears a light blue silk dress. It is brand new but too thin for the weather, which is cold and threatening to snow. For the occasion, she has styled her hair in the new way, just like the movie stars wear—short and wavy—and her lips are painted dark red. She is waiting for the photographer to come and take her portrait. He is late. She prepared all morning for this event, making sure every hair was in place, every seam straight, and now she wonders if it was all in vain.
When the photographer finally arrives, he is distracted and rushed. He sets up his camera and tripod in front of her. She thinks it looks like a huge insect. She is not ready when he clicks the shutter. The moment he takes the photo, he accidentally bumps one of the legs of the tripod with his foot. He hopes the image isn’t ruined as he doesn’t have time to take another. He has one more appointment across town and wants to get back to his shop before the snow starts to fall. He packs up and leaves with barely a word.
She goes upstairs and takes off her dress. She puts on a heavy sweater and wool pants and walks slowly downstairs to make a cup of tea. She wonders how she will look in the photograph, if she will recognize herself.
Should a call from far away be heard through glass. To be struck ringing. A person is a church and heard on the day of prayer. When the body is a ringing sound, someone is expected. A river claims everyone. Human, demon, or a hole. Something needs to be offered. If doomed to float, if fortunate, the brink. The body bright with lies. A light will appear. Drowning as a cure for water. Until she plunged she remained whole. She who has gone there. What it requires.
At the séance, everyone sat at a large mahogany table. No one looked at each other. They were all waiting for the woman who claimed she could communicate with the dead to arrive. They sat with their hands in their laps, their mouths dry, their breath shallow. The idea that they were to summon the dead back into their world was both exhilarating and horrifying. She sat there with everyone else. She thought, Am I actually here? Is this real life?
Finally the medium came into the room with a flourish, covered in dark green velvet. Her skirts were of another era. She also seemed to have arrived from another time. After looking at each person at the table with a hard, serious gaze that one could have mistaken for hatred, she sat at the head of the table and thanked everyone for coming.
She asked each person to talk about whom he or she wanted to contact. She asked that everyone go into great detail—to describe all of the outward characteristics of this person—hair color, size of nose, height, weight— as well as the inward characteristics. Did this person spend a lot of time alone? What was his or her demeanor? Boisterous? Shy? Did this person die by his or her own hand? These introductions took hours.
When it was her turn, she felt embarrassed by the outpouring of emotion she had witnessed. Many were there to talk to a long dead husband or wife, a long dead sister or brother, a mother or father, a lover or friend. In each case, the person described someone whom he or she knew well, someone who was missed and mourned. She was not there to contact anyone in particular. She only wanted to see if it were possible to do so. She could not reveal this, so she lied. She described a sister who never lived, but by virtue of her description, was made to be something true, even in her own mind. This sister was frail and kind. She was thin and small. She described this fake sister as her best friend, one to whom she told her darkest secrets, things she never told anyone else. At this point, the medium asked, “Can you reveal one of these secrets, so that we might ask your sister about it when we find her?” She knew she couldn’t say no, so she said, “I don’t want to go into specifics, but ask her about the drowning.”
Another hour passed. Each person’s loved one was contacted in turn and spoke through the medium in an odd voice. The room grew darker as the candles began going out one by one. She was the last. She and her fake sister were going to communicate. The medium began her incantation, she swayed back and forth in her chair. Her assistant, a sharp-nosed woman with a severe chignon and steel-gray housedress mopped her brow and offered sips of water and ice chips. This kind of work was clearly more strenuous than she had anticipated.
Finally, the medium became still. Silent. Her voice was that of a young girl—high-pitched and squeaky. A voice she did not know. The spirit of the young girl said, I am here I am here I am here I am here I am always here I am here I am not leaving I am here. In her own voice, the medium asked, “Tell us about the drowning.” For a moment there was only a low hum in the otherwise silent room. This spirit girl, if she was one, couldn’t talk about the drowning because she didn’t know about it. The medium began screaming. She would not stop. She continued and continued and would not stop. Everyone at the table became agitated and looked at each other not knowing what to do. Some moved out of their chairs in an effort to help her assistant who was trying to shake the medium out of her trance, “Madame, Madame, come back to us Madame!”
Calmly, as though nothing were happening, she got up from the table and gathered her things. She left quickly and without a sound.
I am driving on a rocky road that cuts through the middle of the island. I drive the old car with caution. It is lush here, green and full of ancient trees. I am driving to the mainland so I can go to the post office—I have several letters to mail. One is from the woman who looks like me. She has written to an old friend. The letter is on top of the stack and is unsealed.
Dear_______,
I’m
not sure if I’m coming back. I have been on the island for a while now and it is pleasant— the isolation. It is good to be free from other people, from the business of the city, all the demands, all the unnecessary conversations. I feel as though my whole being has moved back into an elemental state—I am once again hungry for meals, I can sleep easily, I find I can spend hours gazing at a shadow. I have never felt such clear joy. In my old world, I am sure I would be completely unbearable. Please let me know your news and don’t forget about me here, surrounded by water.
She awoke in the middle of the night and felt as though she had been submerged in a pool of water. Her face was wet, the pillowcase dripping, the blankets heavy and damp— everything was soaked. She reached to touch her neck and found her hair drenched. It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of water on her. She was confused. But rather than get up, she stayed in the wetness, her dream calling her back under. Before she was waked, she had been dreaming of a long bridge inside a massive mansion. When she returned to the dream the bridge was gone and only the scaffolding was left in its place. Nothing could pass over this bridge, although everyone continued to try, which resulted in everyone plummeting to the ground several feet below. When she woke in the morning, she was completely dry. There was no trace of water anywhere.
