At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  Blankets twisted together on the floor. Clothing and shoes piled into chaos in the doorless closet. The mattress, bare, with a brackish coffin-shaped stain down the right-hand side.

  Died in her sleep, the lawyer had said. Choked on her own vomit was more likely.

  With the window clear, the room is cheerful with the glitter of glass. There must be a hundred bottles prisming rainbows against the yellowed paint of every wall, and even through the miasma of rot I can smell the juniper tang of gin.

  sunlight tears a web of woven silences and I

  I

  there was a dream of sleep

  a terrible dream but all the dreams were terrible

  djinns released from bottles hand-polished into lamps

  heavy with light

  cold though with heat hanging in the clarity

  dreams

  oh but once there was rest inside the perfect night

  (there is no night more perfect than the darkness hidden

  in the chambers of the heart)

  peace before the light came storming in

  before the flies

  before I

  died

  I find a motel on the highway, a place where no one remarks on the absence of luggage or car. It is neither quiet nor clean, but there is a laundromat almost next door. After I shower and change into my one spare set of clothes I walk over and put my shirt and jeans into the wash. The place comforts me with its dryer heat and hot-cotton smells. Big and bright, a double line of washing machines set back to back down the middle, dryers on the walls, signs warning of laundry theft and the illegality of smoking. The rumble of trucks on the highway and six dryers running soothe me; the chirps of two brown babies in a double stroller sound like birds. Their mother sits dozing over a magazine, and though I can’t stop the comparison (my mother sleeping off a hangover cure, cigarette a long tube of ash between yellow fingers, the old place a linoleum cave strewn with linty socks) it is a distant one. Everything is distant. Or I am distant from everything.

  Yes. That seems true.

  The mother gets up when a dryer dings and starts folding clothes. She’s efficient: every time she finishes with one stack, another dryer is ready. So many clothes, and her breasts and arms are like pillows. The babies must be the youngest of a crowd. I learned from women like her, watching how they worked the machines (only three quarters then), how they folded, the giant bottles of Mr. Clean they thumped down on the conveyor belt at the grocery store. Learned what they bought, read the labels, figured it out. I did that with food, too, buying packages to cook and fruit I could eat raw. I even learned which store-bought treats to take to school, to trade for lunches made by other kids’ moms. And on the days when I had nothing to trade, I sat at a library table and did my homework, or curled over a pinching stomach and slept with my head on my books.

  My washing machine shimmies to a halt. I get up to toss sodden jeans into a dryer and then hold the door open for the mother with the two babies and six big trash bags of clean, folded laundry. She smiles without seeing me, her face shiny with sweat. When she is gone and I’m alone, I sit on the plastic bench with my back against the wall, watching the dryer turn over, turn over, turn over my clothes, and in my head I make a list: trash bags, Mr. Clean, rubber gloves. A cotton scarf to cover my hair.

  In high school I called my hunger dieting, and though the councilors gave me lectures on self-esteem and videos on anorexia that I could not watch even if I wanted to on account of our television was pawned when I was ten, they never asked to speak to my mother. I’ve watched people for as long as I can remember, picking up the clues, and I was careful with my clothes, my hair, my anger. I never skipped school, except for the times when she destroyed my room and I had nothing to wear. And even then I could always get her to sign a note, once the check came and the first bottle was open, in the days before I learned how to sign her name myself.

  night comes through spaces in every room

  gaps in every wall permit a breeze

  to stir the djinn

  and the flies

  a crooked bat cries hunger outside

  as if dreams could so easily be swallowed

  digested

  gone

  see?

  I am still here

  curled inside this bitter womb

  where the djinn rested until released

  by the polishing of hands

  where there are no gaps

  nightmares linger

  and I

  Flies spin about the house, excited by drafts, dizzy on the tides of rot. A night of open windows has reduced the smell. Though still powerful, it is not a presence that can crowd me out the door. A presence I can, just barely, live with. My scarved head bowed, I drop supermarket bags full of cleaning supplies by the kitchen door and without looking up, without taking stock, I begin to clear away the trash.

  In the kitchen there is a deep drawer by the stove full to the brim with shards of china and glass. There are plastic plates, gas station cups, TV dinner trays, saucepans glazed with the remnants of overcooked macaroni, tin cans sprouting spoons, and in the dish drainer by the sink three scrubbed mugs of the kind shaped to fit inside a car’s cup holders, but there are no china plates, there are no glass tumblers, there are no teacups painted with purple pansies. Confronted by the drawer of cutting edges, I realize I must cope with a problem she could not solve. The broken pieces are too sharp to be contained by plastic bags, too heavy for paper. I don’t resist the temptation to shut the drawer again, I refuse it.

  I avoid the room crowded with bottles (the wholeness of which is now utterly mysterious). In the room that I had once slept in I find a pile of boxes. The room is otherwise empty, its uncovered windows dusty and closed. I had not thought to try that door yesterday. The first breath of air inside smells of cardboard and the fruity perfume of the liquor store, but the stench crowds in behind me along with a trio of bluebottle flies. I edge along the stack of boxes and lift the sash. The flies hover at the threshold, but decline to fly through.

  The first box I try is heavy with bottles. This stumps me. I had not thought about it—deliberately had not thought about it—and yet I must have done. Why else was I surprised? That she had not calculated her death, but let it come, or not come, as it chose. And it is still here, three bottles, exquisitely clear. Death. Or is it, in some hideous way, unrealized hope?

  I cannot bear that she used my room to store her dissolution in. Yet I can. I will. I do. Where else, after all, should she have kept it? This has always been a small house. I leave the door open to the flies and carry an empty box with me to the kitchen where I pour in a burden of ruined shards. I am careful and cut myself only twice, though many slivers of glass and china wear the brown stains of her blood.

  Nothing here is worth keeping. The trash bags bulge lumpy and black outside the door, waiting for the odd-job man who swore to have his pickup here by dark. Evening seems impossible. The buzz of flies and the hum of a lawn mower create a hollow place inside my skull where every sound I make, every creak of my joints and dry hiss of breathing, echoes. I fill more boxes.

  I sort nothing, but I cannot keep myself from noticing what passes through my hands. When I was very small and she still shopped for us both, she would buy me cheap plastic toys, the ones from bins near the check-out line. I don’t remember wheedling for them, as other children did. She bought them spontaneously, for generosity, or because she thought she should. And here they are, though I could have sworn they were all broken or lost by the time I walked away. Rubbery Santas with moveable limbs. Wind-up eggs with chicken feet. A blue monster with a goofy grin that cannot be more than a year or two old. This is a character in an animated movie I saw advertised, and I realize the obvious, that she has been buying these toys for herself. I find them under the coffee table, between the cushions of the orange couch, clotted with dust on the windowsills. Why? Why?

  I leave her bedroom for last. I am down to my final package
of trash bags and all the boxes are full, crowding the weed-cracked walk to the curb. I empty the closet with my eyes half closed, my mind a stupid tangle. I refuse to think, refuse to see, yet somehow I know when this dress in my gloved hands is torn all up one side, I know when the crotch of these trousers is stiff with urine and blood. Shaking, eyes swarming with black (flies, but I also have not eaten, nor drunk, I did not think to bring water or food, and would have swallowed none of it if I had) I fill the last of the bags and realize I have made a mistake.

  The bright bottles still line the walls, and all the boxes are full.

  When the odd-job man comes, I pay him in cash and he drops me at the motel on his way to the dump. He has promised to come tomorrow for the furniture.

  Thank God. The laundromat is open all night.

  light leaves but something lingers

  vibration warmth sound something

  something troubles the air

  flies perhaps? searching for lost substance

  (the djinn searching for hidden me)

  where am I? here nowhere

  else surrounded by nightmare

  and some walls

  lamps linger unlighted I reach

  for brightness and find

  only djinn

  (dark beacon)

  I want

  I am wanting

  where am I?

  I ride the bus in the morning, exhaustion riding me. I have not slept since I left home. (My home, that is, not hers.) It seems no matter how hard I scrub, no matter how hot the water is, I cannot rid myself of the stink of her death. The rented bed gives me no rest as I breathe, stifled, through motel sheets. There is a neon sign above my window. Light the color of beer bottles strobes in and out through the shut window with a rattle of papery wings. Last night I turned on the air conditioner for its noise and huddled under the thin blanket, shivering and wishing for day.

  I unlock the door, but before I go in I take a tour of the outside. Sunlight illustrates the balding stucco and sagging eaves. Suddenly, I hear in my mind a realtor’s phrase “project home” and recall the possibility of laughter. When I find the garden hose attachment and turn the tap to release a stream of first rusty, then clear water, I can believe I might drink from it later. It is going to be a hot day, and I have brought a box of crackers for my lunch.

  The smell seems to have abated, but it rises when I begin to wrestle with the furniture, as if it has transmuted into dust. A haze forms as I lever the couch through the doorway, and it never quite abates. I go to the tap often, drink, douse my head. Water from my hair runs down my back beneath my shirt, mingling with sweat, then drying on the warm breeze. I remember this kind of interior weather, so different from the coast where I live now, June heat lifting off the earth to spin high moisture into clouds. White cumulus drift the arch of blue, but in a day or two there will be storms. I picture myself impossibly tall, lifting off the roof and letting the rain and lightning in.

  Daylight is brutal to my mother’s things. Cheap laminate and seventies upholstery are frayed by abuse, lacquered with stains. Couch and recliner, kitchen table and chairs, battered dresser wearing a thick layer of candle wax: they hunker on the brown grass like hobos waiting for a train. Weary and ready to collapse. By noon I have cleared out everything but my mother’s bed.

  I lie in the narrow shade at the back of the house where I cannot see the detritus of her days. The dead grass by the tap is damp from all the splashes I made getting clean. I cannot be clean, of course, my clothes are brown with filth, but I have rinsed hands, arms, face, neck. Lying down, my belly dips toward my spine, my shoulders quietly ache. I can feel the hairs stand up on my arms as they dry. I should be hungry but the water is cool in my stomach and requires no company.

  A phrase my mother used when I tried to get her to eat: Thank you, love, but momma’s tipple requires no company just now. She only called herself momma, I never did. When I spoke to her it was never as anything but mom.

  She never hit me. She never failed to know when I came home, unless she was unconscious. She always asked how was I, how was school. I walked in one morning, having spent the night elsewhere (I knew a hundred places to sleep. Most of them would have surprised the people at school who only saw me in the library.) and found her sitting in the kitchen wrapped in the soft blue robe I had given her the Christmas before. Her glass was orange, so she was still working on her hangover, but she smiled at me, so the cure was nearly complete. There was a pack of cigarettes at her elbow, one lit in her hand, the box of matches by the bottle of gin with its cap screwed on tight. She always screwed on the cap between drinks.

  She smiled, squinting through smoke to see my face, and said, quite sweetly, Hello, love. You’re not home from school already, are you?

  It’s Saturday, mom.

  Well, come give your old momma a kiss. She held open her arm, gesturing me in, and I stepped into her embrace.

  Lord, aren’t you a bony thing? she said. With a rusty chuckle she added, Better hope it lasts.

  I gave her shoulders a squeeze and pulled away to go to my room. That was when I discovered her rages, the first time she had vented them on my things. Perhaps she had been looking for money, perhaps she had only noticed I wasn’t there, I don’t know. I was fourteen years old.

  The flies have followed the furniture outside, or followed the flavor of water on the breeze. They light on my hands, my hair, the damp scarf I put to dry in the sun. The touch reminds me of the chore I have been avoiding. The bed with the coffin-shaped stain. I could put it off until the pickup man arrives, the double mattress is legitimately unwieldy, but I won’t. The bottles still line the walls.

  Even though they’ve been given the run of the house and the outer air, the flies still crowd together on the stain. I find myself easing my way around the bed, as if I won’t disturb them when I shift the mattress. I know without looking that the blue-patterned fabric is crawling with maggots. I mean to avoid this horror by tipping the mattress from the far side, and carrying it with the underside next to my body. I must be calm and unhurried, strong and exact in my movements, for loathing writhes beneath my skin and panic rattles its hooves against my ribs.

  But the mattress is too large. The steel bed frame takes up the center of the floor. And when I trip, and flail, and catch myself, I kick a bottle. A hundred gleaming cylinders roar beneath my feet, shattering the sunlight though every one of them is whole. Blind with light, bathed in sweat, battered by the hurtling wings and clinging, pattering, ubiquitous feet of flies, I

  I can’t tell the rest.

  chaos fire the lamps are spilled the lamps

  are spilled and the djinn

  is free

  The odd-job man has brought a friend, or perhaps it’s his son, to help. When he sees all the furniture he says, “Sure you want me to take it all to the dump? Some of this is still good.”

  “No,” I say. “The dump.”

  He looks at me, while the younger man scuffles his feet. “You should of told me you were shifting it all yourself. That’s too much work for a girl, and in this heat.”

  “You’ll need to do two trips,” I say.

  He looks at me, at the furniture, at his friend. “At least,” he says.

  I can see the messages they’re passing one another. They mean to sell what they can. Double the wage they’ll earn from me: a forty-pounder of rye to go with the case of beer.

  I say, “That’s everything,” and go back inside. It’s dusk, and I take the shades off the ceiling lights so I can see. Dry insect corpses spill out, covering my bare arms with the dust of their wings, but this scarcely troubles me. I am numb, now, like a soldier in combat. No, like a resident of hell. No. Like a daughter of this house. While the men curse their load into the truck and drive away, I sweep the living room floor. Dust rises, sepia as the walls. I sweep, cough, herd the dust bunnies into the center of the room. My mother called them ghost farts, something that never failed to make me laugh. I can remembe
r sweeping when the broom was so tall I could barely control it. I rapped the handle twice against my forehead, but I kept on. The clean house was to be a surprise for my mother on her birthday. The only present I had to give her. When she came home.

  When she came home I was asleep on the rough orange couch. I woke to hear her trying to tiptoe around the house. She was looking for me, in my room, in her room, not finding me. When she finally teetered into the living room I squeezed my eyes closed and pretended to sleep. She leaned over me, dark mother warm, and I could hardly breathe in her umbra of cigarettes and gin. Still, I did not stir. She stroked my hair off my forehead with the hand that held her cigarette. Ashes stung. She kissed me, and then groped her way to the recliner by the window. I heard her sit, and cough, and sigh. She fell asleep. When I got up in the morning I found the butt of her cigarette on the floor beneath her dangling hand. The coal had burned a black spot into the wood.

  There is a galaxy of black spots on the floor revealed by my broom. Their constellations sketch out where the furniture used to be. This is the blue chair. This is the vinyl. This is the end of the couch. Stains make nebulae blurred by the atmosphere of dust. My head seems to drift high above me, orbiting the light bulb sun with the flies. The flies are only flies, restless in all this space. But their shadows dart near then far across the walls, waltzing to the music of the spheres. I myself, sweeping, can hear nothing but a distant ringing of bells.

  presence, movement, life stirs up all the dreams

  the djinn begins to stalk and I