At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  crawling from my scattered womb

  begin to stalk the djinn

  Scrubbing out the bathroom I make a discovery: once I fail to distinguish my clean self from the rest of this place, it becomes less horrifying. It takes me in, and within it, I begin to transform. Washed by night breezes, rinsed by ammonia and sweat, the air slowly loses its heavy burden of rot. Moving the furniture probably also helped. The rooms echo like the inside of drums. I don’t understand why, bright and empty, they seem smaller than they had dark and full.

  The pickup man comes for the last load and I pay him for his time. He offers me a ride again, but there are two of them already in the cab and I know how filthy I am. Besides, what would I do but lie on the motel bed and think of cleaning? I might as well clean. I want this done. The pickup man shrugs and drives away, and I stand on the sidewalk for a moment. The sky deepens from blue to blue without ever quite becoming black. Neighbors’ open windows reveal light, movement, talk. A television plays a happy gameshow tune. The streetlight at the end of the block wears a tall halo of moths. I turn and go back in.

  I am lost

  lost

  where have all my landmarks gone?

  only the walls remember me and I

  cling to them

  I would dream but the djinn is here too

  lost and also clinging

  we swallow each other

  two snakes with a single tail

  (but there is light

  I am afraid the lamps are shining)

  I have discovered fanaticism. As if burning eyes are watching me, I kneel, bow to the floor with my scrub brush in hand. My jeans are wet with brown sudsing water, the skin on my knees begins to chafe. My neck is stiff, my back aches, my arms and shoulders burn. I should rest. I should eat. I have an image in my mind, from some movie perhaps, of a woman in black scouring a vast stone floor. Penance, I think, but the word is not relevant. What is relevant is that the floors are coming clean.

  I was sixteen when she finally learned to hate me. It was more than just the destruction of my things, my room, I learned not to take these things personally. But her rages were a mystery that struck when I wasn’t there. So many times did I come home to be welcomed with a smile, a kiss in the heart of disorder, I began to wonder if it was really her doing. I invented a companion for her, someone she invited in and then sent away again before I came home. The thought of her befriending someone (a man, of course, in my mind) who could wreak such destruction in my home infuriated me far beyond the possibility of her guilt. I searched for clues to his presence amid the wreckage: cigarette butts of a different brand in the ashtrays, a ball cap left behind, a scribbled note, even, God help me, condoms in the bathroom trash. Even bruises on my mother’s skin. Nothing. He was a phantom. A poltergeist. An absence.

  And then one day I came home from school and she threw her glass at me. Get out, get out out out! It was a parrot’s shriek, a trapped coyote’s yell. Spittle wet her teeth, her chin. She pounded the kitchen table with her bottle, unable to stand. A knot of bruise on my forehead, my hair wet and stinging with gin, I left. Only for two days that time.

  There is a thriving ant farm under the kitchen sink. I flood them with Mr. Clean and wash them all away.

  if we had claws this djinn and I

  would be piercing each other’s skin

  we share eyes with which to see

  we mingle

  this is not unfamiliar to me

  this is not the first time

  we have both been set free

  together we watch the spaces

  we wait for the living to come near

  no need to wrestle

  yet

  Before I can clean the floor of her bedroom I have to carry out all the bottles. They are cool, smooth, heavy. They chime, two in each hand. Their juniper sting is stronger than decay even in the death room now; beyond the door it quarrels with the sweeter chemical scent of cleaning. I rank them in the center of the living room floor, two by two, four by four, gleaming rows. They are shockingly clean. Thick white glass, bright as ice, hoards the light. The labels are all gone, and I remember how she used to peel them away, incrementally, while she drank. She would run an absentminded fingernail underneath the edge, run it under, cutting not the paper but the glue, one stroke, then a drink, a pull on a cigarette, a strike of a match, then another stroke, another. She paced herself, matching the speed of her peeling to the frequency of her drinks. Only the last glass was poured from a pure bottle.

  I have numbed myself to powerful smells. Though her room is heavy still with rot and gin, and soon lemon-fresh scent, it seems not much different to me than breathing a coastal fog, only warmer. A warm weight inside my lungs. It is late now, the neighborhood has gone quiet beyond the open windows, and even the flies seem slumberous, butting the nicotine walls. They are fewer than they were. Some have escaped, some, as I discover when I sweep, have died. Black freckles I took for burn scars scatter in the wavefront of my broom. Maggots, too, mark the edge of the mattress, writhing bits of rice. Some remnant of horror tugs the skin of my back. I bare my teeth, breathe across my cringing tongue as I harry them into the dust pan with the corpses of their forebears.

  How many generations, it occurs to me to wonder, have bred in the two weeks since she died?

  she is here she is here she is here

  the djinn knows her almost

  as well as I do

  his dark excitement burrows

  through me we are too close

  even now two dragons

  mating on the walls

  I nestle I cling I

  will not let him go

  not now

  that she is

  finally here

  She didn’t entirely hate me. The mornings were still safe.

  But instead of the sweetness of earlier greetings, she was often sad when I came in. Where you been, love? And I still could not find it in me to hate her, although I now kept all my books and clothes at school. She became, her house became, like the seething store of the subconscious, sheltered from my waking mind. I found an after-school job, I read in the library at lunch, I slept wherever I could, and only sometimes, only sometimes did I dream of going home. Where you been, love? Her voice drowning deep in sorrow and gin.

  I have cleaned us into a corner, my bucket and me. Wet floorboards smell darkly of wet dog, patchily drying under the bare bulb. Cruising flies give the peripheral illusion that the light dangles from a swaying cord, but it is set into the ceiling socket, secure. To get the last crevices clean, I lean my forehead against the wall and, two-handed, scrub. I had been thinking accomplishment, completion, but the house conspires otherwise. So close, even the ammonia cannot disguise the odor arising from the plaster wall. Cigarettes and rot, rot, rot.

  What a rotten mother you must have had, someone once said to me.

  Not really, I said in reply.

  But now I know the walls have to be cleaned as well.

  now

  now we fight

  yes djinn is strong

  desiring to be free but

  I have death on my side

  and I will not let him go

  we tangle together our

  skein of nightmares

  and I no longer know where

  he begins and I

  end

  Seen close to, the yellowed plaster walls are not uniformly stained. There are gradations both gradual and stark, punctuated by dents as regular as hailstones. Working on my feet, scouring the walls, makes a change, but my shoulders burn with fiery wires along the bone. Wetness streaks the nicotine, paints vague shadows as wide as my brush. I cannot tell if I make anything cleaner, and the damp only seems to release the smell. The night meets a climax where time stills, stalls, stops. I move from kitchen to bathroom to living room to spare room, but time stays where it is, bound to midnight’s back. Drowsy flies are caught in the bristles of my brush and drowned in my bucket of foam. Dark water slide
s down my arms to soak my shirt. It itches on my skin.

  I never told her to stop drinking. I never asked her. I never begged. It would have been like asking the sun to stop setting. But no. Who ever asked the indifferent sun for anything? It would have been like asking the air not to fill my lungs. I had never known her sober. If she had quit she would have died.

  bound, struggling, we

  follow her from room

  to room we cling

  as intimate as plaster

  and paint

  It occurs to me that I have never known pain before. Not like this, not really. The casual acquaintance of a lifetime has become an intimate friend, a lover, even, inhabiting my body, conquering muscle and bone. But still I work, at the edges of the army of bottles and then, last of all (to let the floor dry, of course) her room.

  Nose to the plain of plaster, my head flirts with vertigo.

  Flies caught in my bristles leave traces of themselves in my wake.

  I did not mean to leave. I was anyway half gone, my best loved things in a locker at school. For many years that is how I have measured my life, by how much of it could fit in a high school locker. Green steel door with a ring for a padlock and tilted vents for air. It has made for a light, if somewhat cramped, existence. But I did not mean to leave.

  intimate as tooth

  and grin as blood

  and skin as body

  and breath as weeping

  and death

  Except that of course I lied when I said she never hit me.

  My arms quiver in the air, rattle the brush against the wall. The last wall in the last room and I am almost done. I let them hang for a moment at my side, enraptured by the shape and surge of fire along my limbs. I am heady with fatigue. The last wall in the last room. I lift my hands and begin again.

  When I was seventeen, only three months from graduation, I spent a rare night at home. She was almost too far gone to say hello when I came in. I can’t remember why I did, now. Did I, for once, have nowhere else to go? I don’t know. I went into my room, that was almost empty but for the mattress on the floor, and lay down. I was tired. I must have been tired, because the known hated smog of tobacco smoke and booze and vomit and piss did not keep me awake, though I have always been sensitive to smells. I was asleep when she fumbled open the door, only slowly waking when she grabbed my hair, my arm, and dragged me up.

  She was raving. Her split nails dug my scalp.

  Get out get out now now now!

  I remember how she hauled in her breath with a smoker’s wheeze.

  Out he’s out he’s out he’s out!

  I remembered the secret man I had searched for but never found.

  OUT

  she howled and spat and drove me, staggering, both of us, down the hall, her fist on my back, my sides, my head, pistons, hooves, pummeling through the kitchen, into the table, glass shattering, cut my foot, through the door

  out.

  I remember the blank, simple surprise I felt when she shut the door and locked it. I remember the damp cold of the spring night on my bare legs and arms. I remember the gradual realization of pain, and of the shirt that was my only covering, and of the prickling damp of the bloody grass against my cut foot. I remember how long the hour was that I stood there, how slow the understanding that she was not going to let me back in.

  I remember sitting on the front step with nowhere else to go.

  I remember waiting for her to pass out so I could jimmy open my bedroom window and collect my clothes.

  I remember everything, but I still don’t know why.

  Why?

  The wall is done.

  when she begins to weep I

  forget my strength I

  forget death I

  let him go oh yes

  the djinn

  is free

  I stand in the middle of the floor and through my tears I see the shapes my wet brush has made. Made, discovered, disinterred. There is a creature, a fly/dragon/genie who pours upward from an open bottle, no feet, many grasping claws

  and a woman

  a tiny tiny ragdoll woman

  caught between his jaws.

  when she begins to weep I

  forget my fear I

  forget pain I

  let him go oh yes

  the djinn

  is free

  and so

  am I

  I have not been back to the house since that night. In the meantime, my mother’s corpse, what the heat and flies had left of it, was cremated, her ashes enclosed inside a brown cardboard box and given to me. I paid fees I couldn’t really afford and signed papers at the lawyer’s office. The house was everything, and the lawyer explained about probate, about how, with certain restrictions, certain clauses, I could put it on the market even before the courts had proved my mother’s estate. She had, astonishingly, left almost no debts at all. An unpaid electricity bill, property taxes for the year before. Once my checks were cashed, I would be broke, but I would be free of obligation, and whatever the house realized was mine.

  I called the real estate agent, and she asked me to meet her there with the key. Easier, she said, to give me her opinion on the spot, and she would have more documents for me to sign. So here I am, earlier than I meant to be. At first I think I will meet the agent outside, but though I wait on the crumbling sidewalk for pain, for grief, nothing comes. There is just this house, this yard, this street. There was rain two nights ago, but now the sky is bright. Across the street a robin flirts with a sprinkler, chasing a bath and a meal. For no reason (of course I have a reason) I take out the key and go in.

  The place is empty and, though somewhat battered, clean. It will only take some paint to make it new, and maybe some rugs. My footsteps echo off the walls as I walk from room to room. Even to my sensitive nose there is no trace of smell. The bottles are all gone, hauled away by the odd-job man for the cost of the deposit, and the three that were still full of gin.

  And on the bedroom wall, there is nothing. Nothing. Except, perhaps, hidden in the traces of my cleaning, the delicate remnants of wings.

  Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

  The woman from the embassy called again this morning, as she does every morning. The negotiations are continuing, she said. They had not been apprised of any changes.

  Changes, I said. I was deeply impressed by her choice of word; but then, I am always intrigued by people’s private lexicons. Of course I knew she meant “changes in the situation,” but that only meant there were no fresh rumors of torture, no dead men displayed for the evening news. Change. Well, yes, injury is change. Death is certainly change.

  We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything new, she said.

  Don’t let your life stop, was my distant mother’s advice. Another phone call, messages from another world, the real world of home. Carry on, my mother said. Carry on as best you can.

  I stood in this borrowed kitchen, the glazed tiles cold beneath my feet, Ryan’s blue terrycloth robe cinched around my waist, my teacup cooling in my hand. I wanted to think about the word “changes.” I wanted to let it carve new pathways through the erosion patterns in my brain, and why not? I’m a writer. I would never say, Words are my life, because that is too extravagant, too grandiose, but it is secretly true. My vocation is to turn the nothing of dreams into books on the shelves. Magic! See me build my castles in the air! My bare feet were cold, and I decided my mother was right. I made a fresh cup of tea and carried it up the many stairs of this narrow city house to the attic that the absent owners converted to a children’s playroom, and that I have in my turn made into a kind of office. My desk is an old door propped across two piles of bankers boxes full of the manuscripts and contracts I couldn’t bear to leave behind. I turned on the laptop and without checking my email (there is no cable connection up here) I opened a new document in Word.

  The white screen, the blank page. This is the novel I came here to write. No, no. I came here because I am in
love, but this is the novel I could not write at home.

  I had to get up again and go down three flights to the living room where a pile of Ryan’s mail waits for him to come back—come home, I almost said. I always compose in manuscript format, it’s so much easier than reformatting later, but I find the intricacies of this foreign address impossible to remember. I went back upstairs and typed it in at the top left-hand corner of the screen, then keyed down a few spaces and typed the title.

  Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

  Then I looked at it again, and tried it with a “The” at the beginning, but no. Too definite. There’s something dreamy about it the other way.

  Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

  A few more spaces down, and I typed Chapter One.

  And then, after a while, I got up and went down two flights to shower and put on some clothes.

  Like other cities, this one is composed of hidden neighborhoods—neighborhoods, that is, that look like undifferentiated city to the unaccustomed small-town eye. I have been exploring since we first arrived, although Ryan teased me, calling me a scaredy-cat and a hick Canuck. I didn’t mind. On the one hand, I was feeling cat-like then, slinking close to the walls with my sides sucked in, somewhat inclined to growl; and on the other hand I loved the sound of those words snapped together like a couple of birch twigs brittle with ice. Hick Canuck. At an embassy dinner he whispered it in my ear to make me laugh, his voice two soft puffs of air against my neck, like kernels of corn exploding. Hick Canuck. Especially delicious since, by the standards of this ancient country, so was everybody at the table, from the Ambassador on down.

  But what Ryan didn’t see, being busy with briefings even before the team left with the special envoy, was how, like a cat, I expanded my territory in cautious circles. I hate to hurry these things. It seemed rash to venture out into the streets and the stores—the buses! My God!—before I even knew how the light switches worked, the telephone, the stove. I mean “know” in the intimate sense, the habitual sense that does not even register the smells and sounds of home. When I am a foreigner, I am an explorer, continually amazed at tourists who can simply visit a place like this. Eventually, though, I discovered the side streets and main streets, the children’s parks and the botanical parks and the jogging trails, the street with the bakeries, the street with the hardware stores, the street with the whores. Neighborhoods are such subtle things here I had to watch which way the neighbors turned when they left their doors, which way they came from with their string bags full of food. I thought that if I bought a string bag and filled it at the right butcher’s shop and wine store I would cease to be a stranger, or at least a foreigner, but it hasn’t worked out that way. At home the bus drivers wave even when I’m not catching the bus, the café owner teases me if I don’t get my usual decaf latté with no foam. Here I don’t know how to ask for no foam, and though I go to the neighborhood café they have yet to notice that I always scrape it off with my spoon.