by Trisha Cull
This is what we’ve cultivated together. These are the objects of our work—tolerance, fidelity and faith. Four red walls and space enough to move. These things are true.
In a window behind us, an elegant display of Murano glass gleams in the late afternoon sun. I will touch no glass objects this day, though I want them badly, even just one. But they are too expensive and too delicate to be transported back home anyway.
I will later learn of the men of the night, l’uomo di notte, the Glass Masters who still, after centuries, spend their hours in solitude accompanied only by their thoughts and the cultivation of their art. I will read of the work required in the process: the specific characteristics of glass in the way it solidifies, the workable thermal interval in which the Glass Master gives shape to his vision. The finished product will retain the rigidity of a solid body while maintaining the transparency of liquid. There is a chemical composition for coloured glass. It takes time and work. Refined nitrate. White earth. Red lead. When it is baked, cover it a little at a time with twenty-two pounds of copper, then add in four times another three hundred pounds of nitrate. It becomes a beautiful celeste.
A hummingbird. A flower. A ship.
There are so many versions of the truth.
The light has deepened, softened the edges of the city’s ochre walls and its milky canals into a state I can only call singular. I have, after hours of walking and sweating, acquired a sense of purpose.
“Let’s go for a gondola ride,” I say.
As Leigh’s brow crinkles with hesitation, and I see myself standing there in a posture of longing, the light sharpens and I understand for a moment why Venice doesn’t really exist. I know what his answer will be.
There are various theories as to why all gondolas are painted black, the most credible of which is a sumptuary law passed in the mid-sixteenth century to eliminate competition among the aristocracy competing for the fanciest rig. The gondola is flat-bottomed and thirty-five feet long. The keel curves toward the right, causing it to list in that direction. The oar is curved allowing the gondolier to use different strokes to turn right and left, and go forwards or backwards. Only now do I regard this as an object of perfection. Its only flaw is its inability to safely navigate open waters—it’s restricted to narrow places.
“Let’s save our money for Paris,” he says. “We have two weeks to go.”
We decide to find a water taxi instead, a more affordable method of exploration. At some point later this day we pass a local woman in a red peasant dress standing in her doorway. She tosses crumbs to pigeons in a vacant courtyard. I take her picture but it feels like a sin, a kind of conspiracy, because I realize I don’t want to know anything about her. I get the feeling only one of us is real. In another courtyard we’ll find a man dressed like a Pulcinella, who like a Harlequin is a silly servant who sometimes takes on contradictory personalities—stupid and astute, bold and cowardly. Dressed in a white coat constrained by a belt, a long hat and a black mask, he will tilt his head and extend his hand as I hurriedly take his picture too.
The water taxi takes the long route in the wrong direction into the industrial ramparts of Venice then veers back to the tourist centre, back to St. Mark’s Square, back to the proposal, perhaps in the same manner as the doge as he set his sights on the Rialto. Columns and cranes hack the sky, and a single stream of smoke dissipates into the winds above the Adriatic. The noise and activity of the tourist centre recedes as we round a peninsula. Soon there is only open water and a dark steely light on the horizon, and I think, This is not Venice, this is utterly Venice.
I wonder what’s out there.
Leigh has no sense of smell; in the early days after his separation he developed allergies and asthma. The doctors told him it could be the result of stress. Leigh believes it developed during the months he lived in the damp, mossy quarters of his father’s vacant house after his wife kicked him out. I believe his body compensated for a life crisis his mind could not reconcile. One night outside the Parliament Buildings he clutched his chest as the cold winter wind choked his passageways, and I thought he might die. I know now I will never be able to save him. I know now everyone dies alone.
But I believe I will never know what it feels like to lose everything. I will never know what it feels like to have your lifeline cut away, to become an infrequent visitor of your own estranged life—your children, your wife, your house in Oak Bay. I worry that I will never build anything worth saving or leaving.
I occupy space with him in the knowledge that he will never pick up my scent. I cannot decide, of the two of us, who is more two-dimensional because of this absence. This is both a comfort and a source of anxiety. He will never know the worst of me, my most primal scents, my feminine odours and secretions. He will never know the scent of my blood, yet at times it will envelop him beyond his knowledge. Likewise, he will never know the best of me, the scent of my skin after a hot bath, my clothes after rain. I draw circles around him in an effort to lure him in. I leave my scent in a ring. He looks through my perimeter, blinking, shocked and battered, wondering why are you doing this to me?
Not long ago I held Linden’s head in my hands as I washed her hair in the bathroom sink. “Lean under,” I said, a little annoyed, gathering her hair into a manageable space.
“Okay,” she said. Under water her head seemed suddenly small, alarmingly small, white rivulets where her scalp showed through, and she became less a girl and more of a creature, a tiny drowned mouse in my hands. She stood on tiptoes in a posture of accommodation, leaning so far over I thought she might float away.
Afterward, we all sat at the dining room table. I asked her if she liked the painting.
“Yes,” she said.
“Which do you like better, Linden, the fish or the frame?” and she shrunk into herself, smiling with embarrassment, so we gave them names instead.
Pumpkin. Smudge. Scaly.
She is her father’s daughter. One day she’ll be a wife.
This is how we live together, scentless, a little blind. We live beneath the surface of a three-dimensional world, only remotely aware of those things that make us who we are, sniffing for primordial evidence that will tell us decidedly we are not alone. We circle looking for names.
In Venice we wander the alleyways together, in love more or less, until the last night-train from St. Lucia departs for Geneva. There is no more water until we get there. We tell each other how stupid we have been. We should have conserved something for later: an Evian, an orange, a bottle of beer.
Throughout the night the train halts at intervals; the language changes from Italian to French, the French-speaking side of Switzerland. Warm wind and cigarette smoke fill the compartment of the dirty Italian train. A heavy Swiss girl patrols the narrow corridor. She has brown hair, rosy cheeks and perfect skin. I believe her life is what I see now, that all she does is travel back and forth in the night between two countries, a border in between. She has seen the sun rise from vineyards many times. Perhaps she has never been inside Lake Geneva. I feel sorry for her and smile as I squeeze past. I want her to know I’m on her side. Don’t take shit from anyone. Don’t stay on this train forever. I love you, heavy Swiss girl.
The chaos of Italy has splintered off in the night, buckled over fields of sunflowers empurpled by darkness, replaced by a familiar French dialect. It feels like my old high school French class in an alternate universe, like my old high school French class only bigger.
At one point in the night Leigh’s arm dangles from the upper cot and sways near the open window below. A young American male sleeps on the cot under his, his back shining in moonlight. Leigh’s hand teases the invisible border that separates inside from outside, teases the wind as everything we don’t know whizzes off his fingertips. I lie face down across from him, opposite but on a parallel plane, and feel so intimately connected I am for a moment an extension of him. But it’s not e
nough. I want to somehow get over there, climb on top, have him inside me as we cross the border. I want us to move together while something else moves us both at sixty kilometres per hour into neutral territory. But there’s his hand. I worry about the speed of oncoming trains, amputations, what I might now do to prevent a potentially fatal accident should another train whistle past.
I want to go back, to where my twin drifts at a precise and infinite speed toward something perfect. Lost and not lost.
I don’t know what I want. The gondolier in the Nikes?
In the end, he didn’t propose.
Journal
November 20, 2008
Leigh had the day off today, came into the bedroom at 1:30 pm disgusted. He sat on the bed. I lifted my head and rubbed my eyes, still feeling like I could sleep another ten hours.
“Trish, what are you doing?”
I said, half-asleep, “What do you mean?”
“It’s the middle of the day and you’re still in bed.”
“Yeah, I know.”
He paused. “I don’t know what you’re doing. What’s going to happen?”
I said nothing, fell back into bed again, went back to sleep.
But that struck me, that rather open-ended and ominous question, one of the more astute things he’s ever said to me. “What’s going to happen?” I didn’t know what to tell him. I have no defence except to say that I cannot seem to muster the will to get up, to look for work, and even when I have mustered the concentration to write up cover letters and send them off, the idea of actually going to work feels impossible.
I imagine the people I love the most, my mother, stepdad, sisters, brother and Leigh, and they all seem so far away. They all seem to be falling away.
I have lost my will.
November 21, 2008
I had my second EEG the other day: “the measurement of electrical activity produced by the brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp.”
I got lost in the hospital trying to find the department. The hallway walls were mint green, lots of closed doors with metal hinges and tarnished knobs, lots of chipped paint. I thought I heard a tap dripping, or water gurgling down a drain somewhere. Those hallways evoked a sense of water running slowly through rusty pipes, a sense of copper on the tongue. The lino was white with gold flecks, like my grandma’s kitchen floor when I was a kid. All old lino reminds me of my grandma’s kitchen floor.
Sometimes Grandma, who worked as an X-ray technician, gave my brother and me sheets of blank X-ray film. The films were about the same size as paper, but plastic, flimsy and dark. Grandma showed us how to draw on the film using our fingers or a tongue depressor, pressing down, creating white lines. You then held the film up against the light to see your picture glow. Your lines became illuminated against the light.
My brother placed his hand on one of the films and traced it, all his fingers, carefully around each one, and I wished I had been the first to think of doing that. I traced my hand too. Then my brother and I held up our X-ray hands to the light and compared hands in a way that connected us to each other as brother and sister, as boy and girl, as two kids with the same mother and two absent dads.
A nice Asian girl named Alicia, who was young and cheerful and had red streaks in her black hair, performed my EEG. She ran her fingers through my hair. That felt good. Alicia divided pieces of my hair, rubbed a cotton ball with solution in it on my scalp, rubbed little places clean where the electrodes would go. She did this in twenty-eight places over my scalp, my temples and a couple lower almost on my neck. As she placed each electrode on my skin, securing it with some kind of gel or cool paste, my skin tingled with pleasure.
I didn’t want Alicia to stop.
I didn’t want Alicia to stop touching me, dividing my hair, dabbing solution-soaked cotton balls on my scalp and rubbing the skin clean, placing those twenty-eight electrodes on the cleaned spaces. I wanted it to go on forever, but it never does; that pleasure, the simplest most unassuming touches, they never last long enough, always leave you wanting more.
I lay down in a bed. Alicia dimmed the lights and covered me with a blanket. She sat at a monitor and keyboard and made a lot of typing sounds on the keyboard, tap, tap, tap. I couldn’t imagine what she was typing about my electrical brain activity. She made me open and close my eyes, sometimes flashing a strobe light at intervals, sometimes with my eyes closed and sometimes with my eyes open. Then I had to flood my brain with oxygen, breathing very deeply for three solid minutes. This is harder than you might think. I got dizzy and cold.
I wish I could have seen what my brain electricity looks like on TV. I imagine blue lightning bolts, electrical static, white noise, the sound a radio makes between frequencies: my Darth Vader brain.
Three
Becoming Vegetarian (April 2006)
I am a meat-eater at heart, but today is the last day.
The chicken vein lies on the surface; as my fork lifts it up, a thought detaches from the surface of my cerebrum, flits away from the grey matter of my brain into the grey matter of the cosmos.
The breast is breaded and split open to expose the juicy white flesh. The skin is crisp and brown on the outside and slippery and pale on the underside; it’s parted now, its edges curling away from the wound it has become, like the two sides of the Red Sea, creating a passageway, a new geography of absence through which one might travel safely to the other side.
I must come to some kind of conclusion, must bridge the gap between my body and my mind.
Death has become a viable option.
I wish I could say it was strictly an ethical issue, something to do with the pamphlet that guy gave me; all those pictures of chickens crammed into wire cages with their wings hinged at right angles; piglets whose tails are clipped without anaesthetic; cows stunned but not yet dead, being skinned alive; the deterioration of rainforests to make room for grazing; hormones in the meat.
But my motives are more self-centred. I see it for what it is, lying there on the plate, its flesh and blood not so remotely foreign from my own, evolutionarily speaking. We all come from the same cosmic sludge. Still, I salivate when Leigh cooks meat. Torn: I want to bite into it, and I do not want to bite into it.
The relationship between depression and my simultaneous conversion to vegetarianism is remote, but I am convinced there must be some correlation. It has something to do with countering thoughts of death by decreasing my consumption of it. The flesh and blood of once-living animals has become surreal.
I have been popping my pills in triplicate, waiting for that cloud to lift, for the medicine to do whatever it’s supposed to do, counting down the minutes until my next appointment with Dr. Pastorovic or my psychologist, Fiona.
Dr. Pastorovic says I should not be ashamed: “This is a medical condition, no different than diabetes.”
Fiona says I am in crisis.
Is it enough to say that daylight is shocking?
I sit on our back porch watching for shooting stars and drinking Pinot Noir, thinking about death. What happens? Where do we go? The streak of light from a shooting star is a tiny particle of rock being extinguished; it’s the friction between high-speed debris and the atmosphere that makes the fire in the sky, yet we believe the star burns itself.
I like the idea of reincarnation the best, to come back as Gateau, the cat named “cake.” She lives a good life next door, lounging all day on the porch overlooking the garden. Sometimes I lean out my kitchen window, whisper in a French accent, “Allo Gateau… Je t’adore,” and Gateau stares back, uninspired. Every time I speak French to Gateau I think of my South African French teacher in grade one, Mrs. Hartley, singing at the front of the classroom, holding up a picture of a bird: Alouette, gentille Alouette… Alouette je te plumerai… Lark… lark… lovely lark… I am going to pluck you… going to pluck your head…
Something beyond rhy
thm and rhyme is lost in translation. I think of Mrs. Hartley’s fingers fluttering through the air to give the effect of feathers falling to the earth.
In my mind, the feathers are always black.
I always felt sorry for the bird.
I’m six years old. Grandma places a newborn St. Bernard pup on my lap, shows me how to nurse it by squeezing drops of warm milk from a turkey baster into its tiny mouth. I watch Grizzly Adams on TV, pretend that Grizzly is my father, and he and I and the bear all live together in the mountains. Beef stew simmers in a Crock-Pot in the kitchen. The floors smell of lemon oil. This puppy smells pink, like a baby. My knees are skinned from climbing high up the apple tree.
I squeeze milk into its mouth, one drop at a time, then two drops then three.
It pants softly, gurgles, closes its eyes.
Grandma comes in, looks down and says, “Ohhh…” takes the puppy from my lap, cradles it like a baby and disappears into the kitchen.
Later, I look in the garbage can, see tiny velvet ears sticking out from a tightly wrapped cylinder of paper towel—a little cocoon.
The body is warm, but the ears are cold.
Vegetarianism has been growing inside me for years. Perhaps it began with the dead fawn nestled into her mother at the side of that highway near Lake Louise, the faint trace of blood pooling out from under both of them, how soft and peaceful they looked—the mother in mourning, the fawn dead.
