The Carving Circle

by Gretchen Heffernan

  She has thought about this, about flowers and what they need, about sun, and about soil and about rain, stems, and petals. How we exchange breath with plants and how, we, too, shrivel without sunlight, and hide in winter. How our hair can be the color of a marigold, a hyacinth, our skin, pale to the shade of hibiscus, or dark as bark and orchids, our lips, when pressed, become the tight folds of an unopened rose. How we can die screaming, but without a voice.

  It is how they killed him. How they were killing her.

  She has seen this, she has seen unnamed, undocumented, unborn flowers in the eyes of the silenced, their eyes and their pupils like seeds. Their fingers, roots, reaching in the dark, waiting, her child and countless quiet ones before her fertilizing the ground with their bodies, for others to plant in.

  She did not want to recite verse or sing. She just stood, listening, for a long time. She listened as far as she could until she could hear the drone of silence. Goodbye, she said to the silence, goodbye. Goodbye. Then she started walking. Birdie was waiting in the car.

  46.

  Chicago, Illinois 1955

  After the fire she took a fresh look at herself and what she saw there she kept hidden. Birdie got her a job as a waitress at Stan’s diner and moved her into an apartment in Lincoln Park.

  She thought she needed to be around people. In the beginning, she’d stand in the center of a busy sidewalk and let the people cut around her like a tide, people splashed against her, people roared at her and tried to pull her down. The people were angry. She put her arms out, she wanted to touch them as they passed, to contact anger, to let her own anger out; she did it to feel. The people stormed and crashed into her, they bruised her, but it was just the thing she needed; a good long scream.

  Thank you, she said to the people, I hate you, I love you.

  After that, she climbed to the top of her stairwell and out onto the flat black roof of her apartment building where brick chimneys stood in a thick collection of bird crap like tall red trees with white flowers growing at their bases. The buildings reminded her of gray stalagmites; all around her drains dripped, gray water swirled into gutters, down pipes and calcified crevices as if the city was melting. She pretended to be a bat hanging from the top of a cave looking down at the cement stalagmites.

  Spring stretched into summer and still, each morning, she returned to the roof where the clouds hung in the low, gritty heat. On the street below the pigeons cooed and picked through garbage bins with mangled, broken feet and she’d crouch there, watching them, blowing into her coffee cup, waiting to hear the footsteps of the first morning commuter. Usually it was the same blonde woman, whose passing caused the pigeons to flare up and flap like a quite applause.

  Eventually more people began to trickle down the sidewalk. Two people walking side by side, two here, one there, a handful of people, multiplying until their footsteps became one giant footstep and the street was full. Pigeons dove in and out of the crowd.

  The people moved like a shoal of fish and the pigeons were pushed to the side or suffered broken toes. The people were in unison but remained unattached, only the birds communicated, cried their small warning cries. After a while she felt the need to nullify and disappear inside human cohesion. So she stopped climbing to the roof of her building and learned to walk a city street, shoulders square, quick paces, head down.

  She knew nobody. Not really. Nobody knew her.

  That’s the way she wanted it and for a while it worked, but Stan’s small and friendly diner was not the type of place where you could remain invisible.

  *

  Having the loss of Jacques and her child was like having a cat in a bag at the bottom of herself. It was there kicking and gasping, yet she knew she needed to let it die, so trained her brain to shove it down and press and press it into the deep excess of her mind. But always she thought of it, carried its claws, she dreamed it awake and dreamed it asleep, as though her juice, her acid, had liquefied the creature and it had become her and she’d sink into the details.

  A whippoorwill, an eyelash seen and then blown from a fingertip, rain on tin, wood and rivers. All these little details, glistened like sweat on skin, were the exterior and did not represent the whole. The whole was something else. Something she couldn’t make out, but felt huge and unimaginable, a beast, and her person was simply the wind its thrashing disturbed.

  The photographs helped. While taking the photographs she hovered in the balsam-like wilderness between sleep and coherence where the mind exchanges dreams for reality.

  She tied her dressing gown around her waist and walked into the kitchen. Coffee. Coffee monster, black river of sanity. Last night had been difficult and long.

  She lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the third story of a redbrick building. The walls were white and covered with her photographs. Her bed was in the living room because she used her bedroom as a darkroom and studio.

  Apart from a few kitchen essentials and a round wooden table with two chairs, there was little else. She loved the apartment because of the tall window that overlooked a canopy of beech trees planted in a row alongside the pavement. Stan normally rented it out to students and she was lucky that it was empty when Birdie drove her to Chicago. To decorate she pushed the table in front of the window and bought a geranium in a terracotta pot. That was five months ago. Starting a new life was challenging.

  The sound of children was a surprise, like a good omen, she thought, that’s what children should be. She hadn’t even realized there was a school across the street until the new year began. That’s how preoccupied she’d been with forgetting where she’d come from. She struggled to release her past. Every day she had to push memories out of her head like steering a cloud of hysterical bats through a hole the size of an eye socket. It was difficult and exhausting and some days, some nights were better than others.

  She looked at the empty bottle of wine and single glass posed like conscience on the countertop. She knew she’d been drinking too much lately, but it seemed the only way to deaden her dreams. She had frequent nightmares, where she felt like she was drowning in the river, where she feared Arlo was close. She dreamed of wooden women and hands around her neck.

  Last night she was lucky. The thought had left as quickly as it had come, as if it were a red ribbon of ticker tape that she had to pull from her mind until it ran out and plunked her fears down like shiny pennies on the table. Where she could see what they cost her.

  Last night’s heat was stifling. Her body had searched for coolness. She pressed her cheek against the white wall and opened the window. The smell of hot asphalt was a gel through which sounds dropped like bricks through the night’s air: a motorcycle’s engine, a car horn, a dog’s bark. Sound was a rock in her throat. Was this anxiety?

  She felt the urge to flee, so grabbed her keys, her camera and walked into the street. There had been a short burst of rain and a moon floated inside each puddle like a white petal in a fishbowl. She took a photograph. A police car sped past; its blue siren was a frantic bird flapping against the sky, her chest. She watched a street of watery moons shake.

  She walked to the river and stood expectantly at the bridge. She put both hands on its cement railing, leaned over and breathed in the deep water. It smelled muddy and sour, even putrid, but she needed to see natural movement, she needed to see something flow its natural course. She looked up. The moon was low and hanging between two buildings like a silver portal that extended its rippled arrow, its path across the river towards her. She felt as though she could jump into the moon, become a myth, retold, reinvented and time enhanced. She looked down at the water and saw her reflection, like a trembling black thumb that white shards of light lapped against, then closed her eyes, two moons burning through her pupils and out the back of her skull like headlights.

  She clicked the shutter down and captured herself, again and again, until she made it through.

  47.

  Apart from her own shadow, she resisted photographing l
iving forms and concentrated on movement instead. The empty carriages of the L, the waves of Lake Michigan, flags, trucks.

  Her ongoing series titled Hanging Smoke, where she suspended a black metal hanger with fishing line attached to a curtain pole. She dangled the hanger above the chimney stacks and waited for the smoke to curl around the shoulders of the hanger like a bolero, a dress, a scarf, a necklace. Ghosts. When she developed the photos she could see the current of a person inside the space, arms, neck, chin, because that’s what her mind expected of the view. And when that happens, when we see only what we expect, truth becomes its own deception.

  All the while, something was waiting inside of her like larvae underground, every photo she took felt like the process of scratching out, where she was becoming stronger and stronger, until finally, her gift was revealed. She didn’t notice her transformation at first.

  One of Elora’s neighbors kept homing pigeons on the rooftop. Elora was eating a sandwich and waiting for the furnace to release its steam around her wire hanger, when the neighbor asked her to photograph his birds. She took a bit of bread and fed it to them as she circled the pigeon loft and photographed them preening. They had just returned from a flight and each cubby hole was full.

  “Stand next to them,” she said to the neighbor, but he declined.

  She took a single group shot of the birds before she heard the furnace kick on and release its steam across the shoulders of her hanger.

  In the evening, as she was developing the film in her darkroom, she could hear the birds plucking seed from the rooftop. It was distracting and as she dipped the paper into the chemicals she beckoned the birds to be quiet, then clipped their photo up to dry.

  A cry reverberated from the pigeon loft and she ran up the fire escape. Her neighbor stood helpless with his head in his hands, a few birds lay lifeless at his feet. Elora looked inside the loft and saw the other birds dead inside their nests.

  “What happened?”

  “They just died,” he said. “All at once. They dropped dead, as if their hearts stopped beating at exactly the same second.”

  She knew she had silenced them.

  The following day she walked to the pet store and bought two mice in separate cages. She had three pictures left on the roll of film inside her camera. They rattled inside their cages on the kitchen countertop. She photographed the brown mouse once and the white mouse twice.

  Inside her darkroom she tried to clear her mind and think of nothing as she shook the developing tank. She sat in the dark and waited for the chemicals to activate. Show me who I am, she asked. I want to know who I have become. When the timer rang, she opened the tank and cut the film. She submerged the photo of the brown mouse into the solution and summoned it to die. She sank one of the white mouse’s photographs into the dish and bid it to live. Then she clipped the photos onto the string and studied them. There was no difference between the two. The brown mouse’s photo hadn’t begun to fade or change in any visible way, as she imagined it might do, yet when she left her darkroom and entered the kitchen, the brown mouse was dead in his cage. The white mouse, however, was scurrying along happily.

  “I’m sorry little one,” she touched the white mouse’s cage. “Don’t take it personally.”

  Back in her darkroom, she dipped the second photo of the white mouse into the developing solution and told it to die.

  In the kitchen the mouse lay in a ball of white fluff, still warm, but completely dead. Awestruck, she removed the two mice from their cages and laid them out on the table. On their backs with their paws touching as though they were brothers. Their small stomach’s were still soft and white. The light from the extractor fan was artificial and perfect. She reloaded her camera and took a single photo, then scooped the mice into the trash can.

  There was no remorse to feel.

  This was her true nature.

  And the world that she had once been a victim of, now seemed as vulnerable as a small throat inside her clutch. She could make the ultimate decision. Power was the first feeling to come back to her. This must be how Jacques feels; she thought and remembered the words he had whispered to her. Now, we can both escape.

  It wasn’t the existence she expected, but she had certainly escaped, and now that she was beginning to understand her new ability, she felt responsible for providing a particular type of justice.

  She had a reason to live.

  48.

  The first human ritual she performed was on a man she met at the diner. It was an accident and she can’t remember his name, so titled his photograph Penicillin, which seemed appropriate as he started out as bacteria but strangely ended up as a healing remedy.

  He had the mouth of someone who had smoked for a long time. When she turned to get his coffee she feared he might pinch her bottom. His laugh was obnoxious and practiced. He took up a four-person table for two hours during the lunch rush. He only drank coffee with free refills. His eyes followed her wherever she went.

  “Pathetic. Fucking pathetic,” Ros, the other waitress, said as she placed an order. “I mean, he’s not even hiding the fact that he’s mentally undressing you. Seriously you should get Stan to walk you home tonight.”

  “I doubt he’s dangerous,” Elora said, and he certainly can’t kill me, she thought.

  “You never know. He gives me the creeps.”

  “Humm. Maybe I will speak to Stan,” she said.

  “Did I hear my name? 27 cheese steak and fries is up. That’s you, Ros,” he handed her the plate and turned to Elora.

  “What’s up?” He flipped a burger.

  “That guy over there,” she nodded in Penicillin’s direction.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Touching me with his eyeballs.”

  “Ah. Here’s 28 burger, jack cheese and no pickle. Want me to fix him?”

  “Nah. I have a better idea. Can I take Smith for a walk this evening?”

  “You bet,” he said and tipped his chef’s hat.

  Stan had had two Rottweiler’s. One named Smith and one named Wesson. Wesson had died a year ago and Stan had her tattooed across his back so that her muzzle reached up and licked his ear. Since Wesson died Stan brings Smith to work. She hung out in the back alley and waited for scraps. Stan brought her in after closing time. It curbs her loneliness, he says. Smith was loving and gentle until she heard the words “sic’em” and then she became a malevolent force of muscle and jaw. The diner had been robbed a couple of times and Birdie worried about him.

  Stan and Birdie go way back. Stan was in love with Birdie. Said she was the only person he’d actually marry. He called her Parakeet or My Formica because she was classic, colorful and solid all at the same time. She called him Foolish: the best name for her was the one she already had. Birdie spoke to her briefly about their relationship on the drive to Chicago. They had been lovers, long ago, when he lived in the desert. He once wrote her a poem that compared her to a flowering cactus. She kept it in a box with seashells glued in patterns all over it.

  “He’s gentle,” Birdie had said, “and he’s a tribesman. That’s why he’ll scarify until he finds a home, an identity worthy of his tribal heart. I am a nomad. I know where I belong. But I visit him. Like a cloud. I grace the old hills of his body whenever I breeze into town,” she said with a grin.

  It was a month of pleading before Stan let Elora photograph him. She’d found the perfect chair at an estate sale. It was an old powder blue dental chair. The chair of a chieftain. At the same sale she found a taxidermy barn owl. She made Stan a crown of knives and syringes glued to a child’s bicycle tire. He refused to wear a loin cloth but agreed to wear his apron. She spray-painted the owl gold and glued it to the top of the chair like a mascot. Smith and Wesson sat obediently on either side of him and he used their head as armrests.

  Elora used India ink to circle sun rays around his eyes and on his forehead she drew the winged V of a bird. She rubbed oil along his tattooed arms and legs until they shined. He sat st
raight backed in the chair in boxer shorts and greasy apron with his feet shoulder width apart and looked every inch a chieftain. Don’t smile, she said to him, but his eyes couldn’t help it. The photo hangs in her studio gallery. It has a gilt frame. Nobility. Chief Stan it’s titled. It hangs next to the photo of the homing pigeons.

  When she developed the photo of Stan she begged it to live, live, live and he had. In fact, he admitted he had never felt better.

  She had been looking for someone to relieve the world from and Penicillin seemed like the perfect person to experiment on. She couldn’t risk Arlo seeing her without being absolutely sure that she could dispatch him. She had dreams where Arlo was holding her under the river and she couldn’t reach her camera.

  After the last customer left, she and Ros wiped down the tables, washed the dishes and counted the tips.

  “Ego the Romeo left you something,” said Ros. She took two beers from the cooler and sat down in the booth across from Elora. Elora looked up.

  “What? Money? Jewels? Keys?”

  “Nada. Behold, the Business Card of Bullshit,” Ros said and flicked it on the table along with Elora’s beer.

  “None for me, thanks,” Elora pushed the beer away.

  “Are you serious? You just worked a double?”

  “I’m cutting down. I don’t like my fuzzy head.”

  “Fair enough. Your sainthood is my gain. Can you believe that’s all he left?”

  “Who?”

  “Romeo. Hello. I cleared his table. After two hours, he leaves a business card.”

  “I know. I really want to photograph him. He’s unbelievable.”

  “He’s unbelievable? You’re unbelievable! Why would you want to photograph him?”

  “When will I get another chance to capture an asshole?”

  “Ummm. At the Hand and Spear every single Friday. Besides it sounds dangerous.”

  “I have a plan.”

  “Shit. Here we go.”

  “It’s perfectly safe so don’t look at me like that with your funky eyebrows of disapproval. I’m purely taking Smitty for a walk.”