The Blazing World: A Novel

by Siri Hustvedt

  Aven is my number girl. She is seven, and she tells me her sevens are green. Her threes are yellow. She is my mathematical child, a child for whom the equations glow. The Radish is long forgotten. Maybe I am the only one who thinks of her anymore. My granddaughter has had her hair cut very short—a compromise. She wanted a Mohawk, but her father and mother refused. Hair grows, I, the indulgent grandmother, said to Maisie, but she said, Oscar is afraid she’ll be teased. She’s already strange. And I remembered my girlish strangeness.

  You’re still strange, Harry, strange and estranged.

  I eagerly await my coming out. It will happen. I am tense with excitement. It shall work. I bid you good night, whoever you are.

  May 5, 2003

  I believe Rune is the Barometer’s angel. The Barometer has drawn me another image of the intruder he claims he has seen coming and going at night. He likes the phrase the dead of night. And then he plays, Dire night, wee hours, hours of wee and woe, our wee, woeful hours. Wee Willie Winkie goes through the town. Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown. We chanted it together. His drawing is of a huge muscular man with wings. When I looked into the Barometer’s eyes as he held out the paper to me, I imagined I was seeing Alan Dudek, the Barometer before he was the Barometer. I thought it was Alan for a moment because his gaze looked unclouded. He has moments of clarity, of a consciousness undiluted by madness. He is part theater, not all theater, but there is a piece of his illness he plays and plays with. This must be acknowledged. After all, we all play parts. We shouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that insane people are incapable of dissimulation. My mad friend has his masks, too, his games and subterfuges to avoid the all-important weekly bath or shower. But he also has access to the rumblings underground, a psychotic gift. He feels what we have suppressed, what we fear but cannot say. Isn’t this a kind of weather we make among us? I have studied the drawing. The longer I look at it, the more it looks like Rune to me. Bruno thinks I have joined the ranks of the mentally ill, that I’m in the grip of a paranoid fantasy.

  I used his old name. Alan, I said, did you let him in? Did you let the angel in?

  He looked surprised. He dug his nails into the skin above his wrist. I told him to stop scratching and repeated the question. He shook his head and said, He will cut out my brain and boil it for a stew.

  Did Rune threaten him? If you tell, I’ll boil your brain and eat it. The idea is too vivid for Rune and its expression too precise. Rune’s diction rarely moves beyond the borrowed and the banal because Rune uses words to create a public being that hides what others would hate if they could see it. His language must socialize the treachery beneath. Beneath! The Barometer, on the other hand, is an ambulatory high tide of verbiage, but those waves of words include the occasional oracular insight. The problem is how to extract the prophesy from the verbal flood.

  You must complete your Maskings without anyone to help you. There is R.B., after all. And there are the others, your several secret other ones.II The game is not over.

  * * *

  I. Ethan Lord, “Less Than Me,” The Paradoxical Review 28 (Spring/Summer 2003).

  II. R.B. must refer to Richard Brickman. The question of “others” remains open, but it seems possible, even likely, that Burden published articles under other names in various journals.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook O

  September 23, 2003

  The summer people are gone, and the island is chill and brown with patches of burning reds. The surf frightens me these days, and I keep my distance, staying close to where the beach meets the grasses that bow down in the hard wind. Today it made a noise that made me think of a great hoarse animal calling out to no one in particular. I am alone. I have lost Bruno now, too, lost him to my schemes and my rage and my failure. I wanted to bite the world bloody, but I have bitten myself, made my own poor tragedy of things.

  And I feel even older alone. My belly is always bloated, even though I am thin. I eat alone, and the food doesn’t look as good as when he is with me. I have pains, vague abdominal aches that I wonder about. Sometimes at night they scare me, but in the morning I chide myself for hypochondria. My wrinkled face surprises me. I don’t know why. I know it is wrinkled. Knowing is not seeing. I have tried to work here, but I cannot. It is as if all the worlds in my head are dying now, my blazing worlds, which I have clung to with my whole being, are slowly being snuffed out. And I sit in front of the fire wrapped in blankets reading Paradise Lost again, slowly, slowly, taking in the dense language I know so well. This afternoon I arrived at Eve’s dreadful meal, the big turn in the old story. The flawed, stupid, vain woman has eaten the damned fruit. “Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint.” She has done it for knowledge, to know more, to be illuminated. How I understand it. Yes, light up my head. I will do anything to know, to know more. Adam is horrified, but he cannot leave her. “Flesh of flesh, / Bone of my bone, and from thy State / Mine shall never be parted, bliss or woe.” And it was like my own fat man speaking to me, and I cried on the old paperback edition I’ve had here in the house for all these years. No one has loved me better than Bruno, and yet, it cannot work between us.

  I have become hard.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook D

  Rune is inundated with my messages. He has agreed to see me. He wants me to stop “the harassment.” He refused to see me in Manhattan. He wouldn’t meet me in a restaurant. No, he wants to collide here in Red Hook in the open air where no art world types will see us, no tongues will wag. Fine, I said. Fine.

  I have lost. Rune will never let go. He will never tell, and without him it is over. I can hold tight to Phinny’s words in Art Lights, to the Brickman piece, but I see how little people care. Somehow my story doesn’t interest them. I wanted to turn Rune back into a whining Ruina, to ruin him, to make him pay; but he owns the game now and makes the rules, if there are any rules anymore, if there ever were any rules. My hand is a swollen, purple mess. I hit him so hard. And I found Bruno. No, that’s a lie. Bruno found me. There he was, as if by magic, to pick me up off the ground. Today he made me chicken soup and watched my face closely as I spooned it into my mouth, and I made all the right sounds to please him.

  October 18. I read it in the paper. Rune is dead.

  He has made the last move, and he has done it in a contraption that steals from Beneath, and now he is sanctified. How the world loves the artist suicide, not old artists, of course, not old bags like me. No, they must be young or youngish. Thirty-eight is the perfect age to die if you want to cement your fame, to summon the throngs to feast on your beautiful corpse, to chew on your luminous legacy, made more poignant by the now-impossible future. Ah, Rune. Checkmate. And if he didn’t mean to do it? He would have gotten around to killing himself sooner or later. He wanted a beautiful death, didn’t he? And such a death must be planned. It don’t come natur’l. Celebrity is life in the third person. Ethan is right. Some people are better at living the third person than others.

  But I sabotaged myself without knowing it, didn’t I? It was as if I had to follow the game to its end, to wind up in that room with Rune and the dead Felix to be threatened, slapped, and humiliated, to be turned back into a cowering, ashamed child who cannot speak up. I was pulled toward it, as if time were nothing, and the past had become both present and future, and the dead could walk again. They tramp through the furrows of your mind, Harry, in that rumpled wilderness of gray matter, the two men you wanted but couldn’t have, your father and your husband. It was not just love. That’s where you went wrong. You know that now. It wasn’t just about love and wanting to be loved. You were not that eternal plaintive female bleating over the ages, I love you, and I want you to love me, and I will wait for you, my love, with my hands folded and my head down. I am not that paragon of virtue, Penelope, waiting for Odysseus and turning away the suitors.

  I am Odysseus.

  But I found out too late.

  I hate you, Father. I hate you, Felix. I hate y
ou both for not seeing that truth, for not recognizing that I am the clever hero.

  And Mother, you bent your head and you took his punishment. He shut you out and he shut you down. He did not speak to you. He acted as if you did not exist, because you wanted to speak.

  And you, Harry, you bent your head and you took his punishment, and you cannot bear it, can you?

  And didn’t you wait at home like Penelope, without any suitors, sadly, just two children? And were you not faithful? And were you not kind? And were you not long-suffering? So are you not Penelope? No, because she did not want to be Odysseus, at least as far as we know she didn’t, but who would want to be Penelope? You did not want to wait, and yet you nearly went mad waiting. And now your son, too, keeps his distance from you, as if you are contaminated. If he identifies with you, he is emasculated, such an old drama; my feminist son is terrified of maternal stench.

  I am Odysseus, but I have been Penelope.

  But how he loved you back in the day, little, intense, hypersensitive Ethan, whatever he says, whatever he has forgotten. You have that passionate story in your memory fields. And your daughter is with you still. You have Maisie. And you have Aven.

  And Rune? He is the sign of your hatred, your envy, your fury, isn’t he?

  Did he start it, Harry? Or did you? What did he want from you? Did he only want the pleasure of hurting you through Felix?

  “He liked to watch.” That’s what Rune said, that Felix was a voyeur. Does it matter that he rubbed his cock to ecstasy while he looked at others humping on the floor in front of him? No. And does it matter that when you imagine it you feel sad? But why sad, Harry? Didn’t you enjoy tormenting Ruina in the game? Didn’t Rune know it filled you with sadistic joy? Isn’t that why he turned the tables on you? He knew that you played both parts. There’s the rub. And knowing is power. Elementary Freud, dear Watson. A child is being beaten.I

  But I didn’t know about Felix. All I knew is that there were secrets and that some of the secrets had names. I wondered what was in his head when we grappled in bed. I wonder if it was Harriet Burden. Was it ever Harriet Burden, wife and helpmeet? Sure it was. In the beginning it was. Rune might have lied about Felix, but even if he were lying, it wouldn’t make much difference now. Rune became the sign of all the boys who studied their Quine and mastered their logic and smoked their pipes and looked at your father with worshipful eyes, the boy you might have been, Harry. But for a twist of fate in the womb, you might have pleased him and triumphed. And Rune became the sign of all the boys Felix showed and Felix loved and Felix made famous and Felix bought and Felix sold. That gets close to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? What do you say, Dr. F.? Am I getting close to the heart of the matter? Rune, Mr. Third Person, Mr. Swagger, Mr. Glib—the one who counts, the one who wins. And isn’t it just that quality of knowing, of assurance, of entitlement that you detest, Harry, that you find so hard to imitate, the quality they all had? And did they not all condescend to you, Harry? Did they not regard you as an inferior, you who could out-think, out-work, out-do every single one of them?

  Yes. They did. And they are all dead. I cannot believe that they are all dead.

  November 1, 2003

  I am back to my blazing mother Margaret. Margaret, the anti-Milton. She gives birth to worlds. It is not God who speaks here, but Nature:

  All paines I can take,

  Will do no good, Matter a Braine must make;

  Figure must draw a Circle, round, and small,

  Where in the midst must stand a Glassy Ball,

  Without Convexe, the inside a Concave,

  And in the midst a round small hole must have,

  That Species may passe, and repasse through,

  Life the Prospective every thing to view.II

  Mad Madge had no children of her own, no babies to raise up into adults. She had her “Paper Bodies,” her breathing works, and she loved them dearly.III

  “So do I likewise not persuade myself, that my philosophy being new, and but lately brought forth, will at first sight prove master of understanding, it may be, not in this age, but if God favour her, she may attain to it in after times: And if she be slighted now and buried in silence, she may perhaps rise more gloriously hereafter; for her ground being sense and reason, she may meet with an age where she will be more regarded than she is in this.”IV

  I will leave my bodies behind me, too. I am making them for hereafter, not for the bruising present with its cold, dismissive eyes.

  The witch hides herself in her castle by the sea with the bear, her friend and lover. That is how the fairy tale has ended. The old witch and the old bear live happily and sadly together ever after.

  December 1. The Natural Mask. That’s me. I am the natural mask. It’s Maisie’s idea. I used the words for Raccoona once, and she’s adopted it for the film about her mother and now she’s letting me explain myself to the camera, me, H.B., in all my pseudonymous mania, and I’m explicating and expounding and pontificating and we’re having good fun together. Now you’ve got a hoarder, a schizophrenic, and your mother, I said to Maisie, a perfect trio. And my Maisie smiles. I can’t tell all. I must keep some secrets, of course, but the telling has almost made me feel that I might be understood. Is it such a vain hope?

  Aven looked long and tall and thin today. She has entered what I call “high middle childhood.” She examined my mischievous little people, turned red when she saw my copulating pairs, and laughed wildly at my Ursula who’s taking a shit. She let me draw her into my lap today, let her grandmother revel in the tactile pleasure of holding her young body close to my ribs. I put my nose into her short brown hair. Today, it smelled vaguely of apples.

  * * *

  I. “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 179–204.

  II. Quoted in Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 41.

  III. In Sociable Letters, published in 1664, Cavendish writes to an imaginary lady friend. In letter CXLIII, she tells her correspondent about her habit of keeping copies of her manuscripts until they are safely printed, after which she burns them: “But howsoever their Paper Bodies are Consumed, like as the Roman Emperours, in Funeral Flames, I cannot say, an eagle flies out of them, or that they turn into a Blazing Star, although they make a great Blazing Light when they Burn; And so leaving them to your Approbation or Condemnation, I rest, Madam, Your faithful Friend and Servant, CL.” Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, eds., Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (Toronto: Broadview, 2000), 81–82.

  IV. Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1668), ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12–13.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook T

  January 15, 2004

  When he told me about the CT scan, I watched his mouth move. I remember his teeth had a gray tinge to them in the afternoon light from the window behind him and that the photograph on his desk faced away from me and there was a small price sticker on the back, peeling away from the wood. The words came methodically, but now I recall only their effect—a breathless paralysis. He made sure I understood there was no cure, and that it had spread, that complete surgical resection was unlikely, and even if it were, ninety-eight percent of those patients also experienced a recurrence. Still, he wanted me to check into the hospital immediately for surgery.

  They do not protect you. Dr. P. did not shake his head sadly. He did not meet my eyes. I suppose that’s how they do it. They do it all the time, after all. I am one of thousands. This was his method, delivering information for me to process.

  When I asked him if there was a stage five, his eyebrows went up. No, he said.

  Sure there is, I said. When you hit stage five, you’re dead. That’s what you’re telling me, right? I’m dead.
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  He did not like my impudence. He did not like it at all, and I was glad he did not like it. I was going home to see Bruno, to discuss it, to register it. When I stood in the street with my hand in the air to hail a cab, I was still frozen, terror high in my throat as I looked around me amazed at what I was losing, city and sky and pavement, the swift and slow-moving pedestrians, and the color of things. It will vanish with you, every color, even the ones that have never had names but are perceived plainly enough. Incalculable losses.

  In the cab, I looked at the back of the driver’s head and at his photo plastered on the window between us. I guessed he was from Somalia, a Somalian driver, and I thought to myself, He does not know he is carrying a dead woman in his backseat, taking her to Red Hook, just a stop away from hell.

  January 27, 2004

  I read what I wrote before the knife cut me open and they rearranged my innards for five hours. My naïveté makes me howl with silent laughter. Hell is here now, and its name is medicine. I have been gutted like a fish: uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, appendix, and a part of my bowel have disappeared. They threw my diseased organs into a pail in surgery, and someone must have come along with gloves and a mask and removed them to a special diseased organs disposal area. Where do they go? I am trussed up with tape, cut vertically from my navel down. I cannot shift my position in bed without gasping in pain. I cannot sit. My ankles and feet have ballooned to three times their size, and, along with my arms and hands, they have turned to ice. I cannot eat. I am terrified of every evacuation. Every excretion brings fresh agony. And the operation was “suboptimal.” This euphemism would be hilarious if it weren’t so grotesque.