And I said thank you and asked her how much. She said it was a gift. And then she played a Violent Femmes air-guitar solo.
I bought the Cape Sundew and found you holding a wordless congress with the evergreens. “Christmas starts early around here!” you said.
—Harry
* * *
From: Morgan W. Jamwant
To: Harry Najinsky
Date: January 30, 2015 4:34:15 p.m. est
Subject: Calm today. Drifting.
The seeds glow at night through the paper bag by my bed. Clusters of emeralds disguised as seedpods. They don’t talk, but they whisper. Though I shall never grow old, they tell me, I shall be an elder. (Bad pun, emeralds! For shame.) They say that when an elder dies, be it from drought or disease, it becomes a dragon. And dragons never die.
So I promise you, Eliazar, Keeper of Cape Sundew, I promise you I shall live forever and never die. Just like you wanted. I shall live forever and devour death. But first you must plant me.
The flowers of the elder tree are edible. We will practice this most secular transubstantiation together. This is my petal you eat. This is my elderberry wine you drink. Make a pipe from my branches and play me on a windy day. I love the idea of you playing music with my bones.
Lourdes is a mighty sorceress. Did I remember to thank her? Bring her gifts of my body in flowers and in wine. How long does it take an elder tree to grow? Dragon elders grow swiftly, don’t they? Dragon elders grow overnight if planted on a hallowed site. You must water me with your tears and ask me any favor. I will speak to you from the tree.
May
* * *
From: Morgan W. Jamwant
To: Harry Najinsky
Date: January 30, 2015 5:21:05 p.m. est
Subject: You know what? Screw calm.
“No, calm doesn’t interest me.” (IMHO, the best line in The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes. Other than the sex scene.)
Harry, goddamn it, if I had ever been a pretty young actress, I’d’ve at least gotten to play Antigone, Saint Joan, Electra. Now I’m to be shored up and sacrificed and bricked in, and all I’m saying is that it would’ve been nice to have gotten some practice in.
Roles I will never get to play, roles that I merited, that were my right:
1. Hedda
2. Lady Mac
3. Phaedra
4. La Marquise de Merteuil
5. Medea
* * *
* * *
THE LAW OFFICES OF
LORIMER, NGUYEN & NAJINSKY
HELPING YOU KEEP CONTROL
OF YOUR GREAT IDEAS SINCE 2011
696 North Main Street
Rutland, VT 05701
Tel: (734) 389-7473
E-mail: [email protected]
February 1, 2015
To the Most Honorable Morgan “May” Jamwant:
We have an old electric typewriter here in the office, since sometimes we have to fill out legal forms on triplicate carbon paper. This letter is being composed on said carbon paper. I will keep the bottom (pink) copy for my records. The other two copies are for you.
I know what you’re doing. You’re making me write it out. Because this is the last chance for you to read it. And because I’ve been a coward all these years, even though you forgave me. So be it. I am your memory now. Let this be the affidavit of how I failed you, and how you would not let that failure stand, and how we were reunited.
I was married for eight years to Cathy Berd. You told me not to marry her because, you said, Cathy was a soul-eater. You literally said “soul-eater.” You said she would make demands and run things her way and erase my identity and turn me into her hunchbacked Igor.
I said I wanted to be her Igor. That it was nice to feel needed, to be loved. That I didn’t believe in souls, so Cathy would have nothing to eat.
You couldn’t stand it. You said you’d stand up at the wedding; no fucking way you’d forever hold your peace. You’d write all the reasons we shouldn’t get married on a scroll, and the scroll would be really long, Jack-Kerouac long, because there were a million reasons we shouldn’t get married, and it would be obvious to everyone what a huge mistake this marriage would be, and even Cathy, in a weird Shakespearian reversal, would agree, and she and I would part friends and we’d have the reception anyway, just as a celebration of life.
A scroll!
So I uninvited you to the wedding and kicked you out of my life. And everything happened just the way you said. By degrees, I lost my friends and my hobbies. I quit being a public defender and joined a private practice because the family “needed” money. The sex went away four months into our marriage and never came back, but that was okay; there are more important things than sex, right? I loved her. I would do anything for her.
And then she left. She wasn’t even having an affair or anything. She was just bored. She’d feel less bored alone, she said. The divorce papers said “irreconcilable differences,” and I couldn’t help wonder if boredom legally qualified as one.
Over the next two years, I considered killing myself eight different times. The first seven times I was able to talk myself down. The eighth time I called you.
Within five minutes we were fighting over who would make a better replacement for Satan: Nero, Erzsébet Báthory, or Jigglypuff. WHICH OF COURSE JIGGLYPUFF.
The only one. You’re the only person I could have had a conversation that stupid with. It saved my life.
With sincerest gratitude,
Harold Najinsky, Esq.
* * *
From: Morgan W. Jamwant
To: Harry Najinsky
Date: February 2, 2015 4:08:39 a.m. est
Subject: Thank you for your letter.
Oh, Harry. Oh, Eliazar. Thank you. Thank you for this. I’ve been wanting, for years, to … Well. But you know. You’re not the only coward here. It’s just hard. How sometimes conversation stops short of this invisible wall. And there’s no way around, no portcullis, no battering ram, and you know there’s broken glass and barbed wire at the top.
As for Cathy Berd.
Cathy Berd. Cathy Berd. Cathy Berd. No. Nothing. No story. Erased. A blank space.
Even when I was in the pink perkiness of health I had trouble remembering names. Most people just pass me by. Maybe that’s why I used to give so many of my friends nicknames. Mnemonics. Anchors. Little yellow thumbtacks pinning people I liked in place long enough for me to remember them. But I’d only pin the pretty butterflies. The ones who caught my eye.
Cathy Berd. Was she your wife? She is nothing now. I cast her and the scroll of my objections into my private oubliette. Both are rotted away to shadow. She is banished and devoured and there isn’t even a mark on your finger from the wedding ring you wore. Is there.
Now who is the soul-eater?
I’d give this to you if I could, this empty space where Cathy Berd used to be, but you wouldn’t have it, would you? You want to remember everything, keep it safe and sound in my Eco-Urn. I don’t want to be kept safe beside Cathy Berd. My grave will be roomier without your regrets. Ash and emeralds and elder seeds, yes. Cathy Berd, no. Not that faceless nothing with her Jeanne Toussaint tote and her Armani skinny jeans and her latest Amulette de Cartier.
Maybe I haven’t forgotten as much as I pretend.
You say I wanted us all to part as friends? Huh. Could be I did back then. I was younger, more generous; optimism trumped antipathy. Now I wish I could have destroyed her for you.
Do you know how fiercely I missed you? I dreamed about you every night that first year. I avoided whole chunks of city. Those places stained with you, us, whatever, stained, and even my taste buds rebelled at foods we’d eaten together, and I wrote so many e-mails and sent them to nothing, to nobody, to that place Cathy Berd has gone.
What a mess. Better hit SEND before I delete this whole damn thing. I’ve d
eleted too much in my life, in all my elaborate games of pretend.
May
* * *
From: Harry Najinsky
To: Morgan W. Jamwant
Date: February 2, 2015 4:40:25 a.m. est
Subject: You still don’t understand. Thank you for making me write the letter.
I swear I’m going to number every sentence you write from now on. A little superscripted “15” or “77” or “155.” I’m going to catalogue them by theme and make them searchable in a database by keyword. That way when some shitbag nonbeliever 15 years from now says, “Oh, come on, she couldn’t have been that amazing,” I can say “The Book of May, February 2, 2015, 22–23: ‘She is banished and devoured and there isn’t even a mark on your finger from the wedding ring you wore. Is there.’ Those two sentences defibrillated me, motherfucker.”
Promise me you will never delete anything ever again. Always press SEND to me.
—Eliazar, The One You Named
* * *
* * *
From: Harry Najinsky
To: Morgan W. Jamwant
Date: February 3, 2015 12:58:59 p.m. est
Subject: In Which May Gives Harry an Infarction
You have to understand, May. If you care about me at all, you have to remember. That “Maybe” you texted me? A sword in the chest.
Tyrell said he and the rest of the search party found you in a woods five miles away, drenched and mud-caked. No one can explain how you got there. There were no wheelchair tracks to follow the whole time, even though the ground was wet and soft. They found you in a clearing, seizing in your chair. Your face was streaked with mud and something red that I am praying to the Book of May wasn’t blood. But they didn’t find any cuts on you.
They were about to rush you to the E.R. when you suddenly stopped convulsing. Your eyes popped open. You smiled. And then you started singing. Do you remember? Tyrell sure does. He sang your song back to me: “Should all my features be forgot, and rot before I die? Yes, let them tumble from my face, if ear or nose or eye.” Poor guy thought you were about to go Poltergeist on him. He said he took ten craps and ran the other way and let the other nurses bring you back.
So yeah. That’s pretty funny, now that I write it out. This is normally the part where I start cracking up at all the shit you pull.
But it’s too scary now, too risky. You can’t go escaping into the woods. You could easily die. And if you die in the woods alone, how will I ever get your ashes in an Eco-Urn? How will we pull off our miraculous plan to make you an immortal dragon tree?
Please, just call or text me next time before you run off. If you disappeared forever without a trace that would be the end for more than just you.
—Harry
* * *
From: Morgan W. Jamwant
To: Harry Najinsky
Date: February 4, 2014 11:51:13 a.m. est
Subject: You didn’t laugh till paragraph three? Harry, you’re slipping …
It wasn’t blood, it was elderberries. Medea gave them to me. It was awesome; she rolled into my bedroom in a wheelchair pulled by a dragon the color of the sun, and she looked old and bloodstained, and her apron was full of elderberries, and she painted my face with them. I don’t know how they got through the door. Dragons are like cats; they sort of slink bonelessly through narrow spaces, then fill a room. It nudged my bed to the middle of the room, and made three complete circles of itself around it. I was so warm I started sweating. The smell was molten glass and ozone. Like when lightning strikes sand.
I told Medea I used to be a redhead too, but I lost all my leaves because I am a tree in winter. She pulled me onto her lap, saying, “Let me teach you how to drive a chariot.” I asked if I should take my anti-seizure meds with me, since I’d need them if we were gonna be gone more than three hours, but Medea just rolled her eyes.
Then off we went into the woods together.
I forget how we got out of the room. Medea has WAYS. I thought for two seconds this morning that maybe I hallucinated the whole thing, but I couldn’t have gotten out of my house alone. I can’t even go to the bathroom alone.
But that wasn’t the weirdest thing that happened yesterday. Before Medea showed up, I was vomiting, right, like you do. And I started vomiting elder blossoms. Still gross, but kind of neat. And I showed the Judy Garland nurse, and she said, “Honey, that happens at the end.” And when Tyrell came in, he said the last dude he cared for vomited up a whole hibiscus shrub the night before he died, but he’d never seen elder blossoms before.
So apparently people puke flowers when they’re about to kick it. As if we needed any more clues.
It was going to be great. It was going to be ritual. I sang all the right songs, Harry. Medea said I could go ahead and skip the gross interim; she’d turn me into a dragon right away if I liked. No muss, no fuss. But it wasn’t right, because you weren’t there. “I have to wait for Eliazar,” I said. “He’s writing a book about me.” And she shrugged her muddy shoulders and straddled her dragon’s neck and flew away into the east.
So. I guess I’ll have to do without the ritual and the dancing and the dragons. I’ll wait for you, Harry. But it’s gonna be soon. Woman cannot live on petal puke alone. Stay over tonight, just in case.
Remember that New Year’s Eve you stayed all night? Never did drink so much champagne before or since. You said that if we were both still alive at eighty, we should get married and raise hell in the old people’s home. I bit your finger and said my tooth mark was a promise ring. Remember our breath turning silver in the moonlight? That’s how I see you now when I close my eyes. Silver-sketched. Embroidered on my eyelids in thread of frost.
Some animals crawl off at the end to die alone. If we can’t have dignity, what with all the boredom and bedpans and pills we can’t keep down, at least we can be disgusting alone, singing at the top of our lungs.
Medea was pretty cool though.
May
* * *
* * *
From: Harry Najinsky
To: Lourdes Belen
Date: February 17, 2015 1:24 p.m. est
Subject:
Dear Mrs. Belen,
This is Eliazar Najinsky, but when I visited Tasseography a few weeks ago I was Harry. I’m in the process of legally changing my name. I came with Morgan Jamwant. She was in a wheelchair. I bought a Cape Sundew from you. (It’s doing great, by the way.) You gave Morgan a packet of Dragon elder seeds.
I planted them last night with Morgan’s remains. Per her wishes, her ashes were placed in an Eco-Urn, along with the seeds. She wanted her new home to be in a woods north of Rutland, but I couldn’t bear to have her so far from me. I buried the urn in my backyard.
I did it in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but the paper hospital smock she died in, because she thought it would be funny. She had asked that I water her with tears, but tear ducts just can’t produce enough fluid to keep an elder alive. So I did the best I could. I caught most of the tears I’ve cried since her death in a biodegradable kitchen sponge I bought expressly for that purpose and buried it along with her. Then I got practical and doused the seeds with my thoroughly unsentimental garden hose.
I sat for a long time with my bare ass on the grass, hugging my knees and holding silent vigil for Morgan. When I noticed I was crying I remembered myself and leaned my face over her grave so that my tears would sink into her soil. That might sound like maudlin nonsense to most people, but I thought you’d get it. I cried until I couldn’t, then sat for hours watching the newly turned soil do nothing.
Which is what is supposed to happen. It would take months to know if the seeds would take, if there would be any tree at all to help the world remember Morgan. But—oh God—what if no tree emerged? What if Morgan stayed dead forever?
I started tearlessly heaving and barking and swallowing ai
r. I tore that stupid stupid hospital gown off my body. I felt myself becoming deranged.
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