Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  correspondence

  The sisters scanned the sky and the sisters dug as deeply as they could into the earth. The earth let in fingers and bodies but denied the eyes their faculty. What it hid, it hid deeply, covetously from the eyes. The well-watered lawn beneath their feet teased the sisters, promising them a return to the internal, promising a peek into the mysteries that lie deep. But their digging in the valley floor yielded, at best, seashells that told of an ancient receding tide, which captivated their imaginations, but did not sate their longing. They dug up old nails, washers, buttons, marbles, and occasionally a small bone, and used these finds to make dolls, instruments, and jewelry. Still they longed. They used the stiff, slippery mud to shape beads and urns, and still longed. They painted their faces with the brown slip, dressed their hair in leaves and berries, but could not erase enough history to return to the beginning.

  Unlike the earth, the sky was amenable to the eye (and other lenses). So, longing for a return back to the vast internal, the sisters looked up to the boundless sky. While the tender earth kissed and warmed the soles of their feet, provided them with minerals, flora, and fauna to satisfy their busy hands and feed their imaginations and hearts, it would not quench the longing. So, practicing the gesture, scanning the sky from horizon to zenith, they began to see patterns. Across the many nights, they saw the sky repeating. The fixed stars became familiar, the restless planets spoke to the restless girls, the plummeting meteors flashed, then faded, then flashed again across the domes of their minds, thrilling them. There in the sky, they sensed harmony and order. They nodded. The sisters used no charts, tallied no integers, kept no records, but they found correspondence in the sky. What was above was also within.

  recollection

  And the eyes, when they alight on the stars, locate in the sky the harmony lost through exile.

  tomb = tome

  And will you judge the sisters when they rise in the deepest hours of the night, file out of doors in flip-flops and pajamas to collect Father’s shovels and picks from the garage, and, by the dim, orange light of the streetlamp, dig the graves into which they might transfer the dead from their own small casings? Would not the manicured suburban yard—rather than the child’s busy, grimy, gawky form—be a more suitable home for the weary war dead? Will the warm earth not be a more restful bed? Do you not see that the dead are made nauseous by the sisters’ twirling and skipping, their climbing and swinging, their laughter and their fickleness, day in and out? They need to rest, the dead. And these new beds the sisters dig will sprout grass over them again; they will be daily watered and weekly mowed by the industrious girls. Father, unknowingly, will plant more roses, more fruit trees over the graves, and these roses and fruit trees will produce as never before. Mother will be delighted! The neighbors will share in the bounty. Is this not a solution for all—the sisters, the dead, Father, Mother, the birds and insects who will no doubt arrive from near and far to partake of the cornucopia? No? Reader, you say no? This is too uncanny, too morbid for your palate?

  No, say the dead, whose bodies lie elsewhere, already. It is the dead who counter. (My dear reader, I have misjudged your sensitivity again. I asked the question and heard a clear answer, firmly in the negative, and, looking up, mistook the shadow for you.) It is the dead who say no. They will put up with the twirling and the climbing yet, the dead who occupy the living. They have mastered equanimity and patience. In time, they will lie in the pages of books, and there will find the restful sleep. This is what the dead dream of when the sisters close their eyes at night. The promising dream is what they await the day through. And the sisters, like narrow, teetering tenement houses, conscious/unconscious of the restless occupants within their slight frames, are themselves eager to assume the horizontal position at night. After the girls have completed the last of their homework, washed the dishes, swept the kitchen floor, finished watching the game show and the news, brushed their teeth, braided or unbraided their hair, let out or let in the cat, kissed Mother and Father goodnight, slipped into bed, and immediately or by-and-by fallen asleep, the war dead will follow suit. They will turn out the lights, lie prostrate, and dream about the still tomb, the quiet and the final sleep, the dark between the pages of the book on the library shelf.

  irreducible

  Their longing led them to search. Their searching, which grew out of a need, became in time a vocation for the girls: a systematic study of the nature of the world about them.

  And the aim of their science was to locate what is irreducible:

  The earth

  The sky

  The story (born of earth and sky but no more divisible than its parents)

  Having discovered these, they drew their lids closed.

  Y

  Yesterday,  and  all  it  holds  in  its  deep  pockets.

  in the beginning

  In the beginning: tanks, soldiers. Fire in the sky, limbs in the trees, blood in the streets.

  No, in the beginning, before the visitors: silence. A silence born of nothing, arriving from nowhere. Though perhaps it descended from above, for it reached the adults first and cleared the world of talk. Then suddenly, how crisp the birds’ chitter, how full the chorus of turning leaves, fluttering wings, scuttling feet! And the full song of nature in the city brought all of the children out of doors. How bright, lovely, and lively the world became for a brief moment in the middle of winter. Until the hum of the tanks, the beat of the soldiers’ boots, the sigh of the rockets, silenced the animals too. And then, the children.

  No, in the beginning, before the silence: a dream. A god’s plan folded into a child’s dream. Not one child but many children dreaming the god’s mind, seeing: where he would plant which tank, on what street, beneath what tree; from what house, which humble village, which sparkling city in the distant land he would cull the soldiers; from which mountain he would extract the minerals to fabricate the weapons to place in the sleepwalking soldiers’ hands; from what heights he would drop the many bombs; into whose beating temple he would fire the bullet; in which patch of earth he would hide the bodies. For a year, the children shivered and turned in their sleep, woke weary.

  In the beginning: the gods. Gods who would plant the future in the fertile soil of the child’s dream. Not to ready her but to steal and lock her gaze: for all theater needs an audience. And the gods who fashioned the eyeball prefer its silent steady gaze to the noisy clapping of the hands, which learned the awkward motion through fumbling, while the world was still dark.

  In the beginning: the eyelid. In the pact made between god and child, the one fashioned the firm wet orb, the other answered with the soft dark curtain—to protect the eye, to clear the stage, to open and close the ages.

  birth

  Mother says to Father, it is a girl again. Father picks up the small bundle—warm, burbling—and whispers a welcome and a prayer into her ear.

  kaleidoscope

  So the sister is once again in the dream that takes the veil from the face of the cosmos and shows the stars for what they are: mortal. Here they are, the stars, wild and acute entities, monumental forces acutely gathered into pulsing points of light. But they are not light, not mineral, not human, not animal, not plant, not god. In these dreams, the stars are vastly brighter, more colorful, beautiful, terrible, mischievous, gleeful, breathtaking!—markedly keener than what they affect at night in the waking world.

  And what is it that has allowed the stars to reveal themselves in the girl’s dream? She guesses it is her old playmate/adversary: Time. Here in these dreams, Time has wound two clocks—the earthly one and the cosmic one. And it lets the earthly clock unwind at the normal rate while it makes the other clock fly so that eons pass in the sky as seconds tick on earth. And the earth-bound child looks up and sees that the stars too coil, breathe, hunger, dream, hurtle, and expire.

  And over her head, in the dream, all the stars come together in formation to try to speak in a language the sister might
understand. The girl’s eyes, whether she is in a field, or by the ocean, or at an airport, or in a grocery parking lot, whether she is alone or surrounded by few or hordes of people, her eyes are drawn in the ascendant direction, as if raised by two strong magnets deep in the sky. And here they are again, the true stars, the stars unmasked! And in the dream, each pulsing point of light and color is a separate and ardent being who wants avidly to speak in a language the child will understand, but who knows that without a tongue, all it can do is line up with its sibling stars in formation to create first one, then another, then another picture against the inky backdrop. Do you not see?, each and all of the stars seem to ask the sister. She nods, I do, I do! I see you have something to say. They realign themselves, some moving closer, some receding, creating disks and lines, spirals and triangles, all the while pulsing intensely, able to communicate to her no more than Look! Look!

  And the dreaming sister tries just as earnestly to understand them, feels the endeavor in her toes, her gut, the palms of her hands. She tries to read the stars, but she cannot. She goes to those around her, commands them Look! Look! But they are too absorbed in kicking and chasing a ball about a field or tuning the radio in their car or cutting a cake or pushing a grocery cart. Look up! Look up! she begs of the people all about. Do you not see? the stars pulse down at her. And all she can do is wonder at their beauty, their splendor, their ferocity. In some of the stars, she senses a warmth and a joyfulness, in others a crafty playfulness and, in others still, a gaping hunger. Though they are light, they are dark. Though they are playful, they are cruel; though loving, hungry.

  And the sister dreaming understands that all that is dark is not wicked and what is bright might also feed the destructive appetite. She knows that good and evil are not unrelated; they are two parts of the same egg; they both feed the same mouth, both advance the same coiling apparatus: Life. She admires the cause of Creation and fears the appetite of Chaos. And what is this order/disorder in the universe? What is its source? It is a beautiful and a magnetic thing. It is a churning, chaotic thing. It fuels and extinguishes. It swells and contracts. It collects and packs the dust into hot twinkling nuclei or sends it hurtling lifeless-rudderless across the cold dark spaces. It is a beautiful and fathomless cosmos. It steals the gaze and palpitates the heart. She cannot turn away.

  so, life

  And in time, the horror and the banal—the distant war’s incessant clawing at their young hearts and the repetition of life’s small diurnal doings—came to rest one next to the other, and soon merged one into another, so that the two were one. And was a sister not capable of crying into the kitchen sink as she rinsed a basket of strawberries and swayed to her favorite new song on the radio? Was she not able to draw the snow-covered mountain peak while listening to Mother plan her nephew’s funeral over the telephone? The sisters were whole and wholeness was a blend of guilt and glee, humor and remembrance, great losses and small achievements, slumber and nightmare. And the sister who studies for the history exam looks at the text on the page in the book and thinks, no, that is not correct. That is not how they do it. There is no need for the blindfold on the prisoner, and the weight of his body alone is sufficient to produce the desired effect. The sister sent to call her sibling in to dinner calls out a name long-unused and now misshapen on her tongue and strange to her own ear, the name of a favorite cousin already a widow in the first land. The sisters wrestling on the floor writhe and roll, pant, screech and giggle, scramble and plead, and come to rest panting-giggling on a small pile of bills, advertisements, and a thin, creased blue envelope addressed to Father by an awkward hand in the letters of the new alphabet.

  And the sister brushing her teeth finds in the mirror two new gray hairs at her temple. She nods and the mirror returns a foamy grin.

  So Mother says to her girls: Life, you cannot unravel it. It is not the ball of yarn, not the braid on your head, not the living room rug. It grows in on itself, coils, collects, flourishes, fuels, warps, rasps, bleeds, brims, pulses, and empties; it enters even as it exits, sighs even as it howls, bruises even as it sweetens. This. This is life.

  message

  And though the sister who dreams does not grasp, or is unable to pull through that diaphanous yet impervious veil—not the eyelid but the dreamlid—the vital dream message of the birds, or of the stars, or of the moon, or of the living and the dead left behind in the first land, she, nonetheless and unwittingly, delivers their communications to any who might be playing or reading or cleaning beside her, when, on a random date, at an arbitrary hour, in the bright middle of day, beneath a cloudless, sun-drenched sky, she opens her mouth to speak the words that are not her words in the ecstatic voice of the child momentarily unmoored from custom and from consciousness. And afterward, all within hearing, including the girl, burst out in laughter and writhe with giddiness at the rare absurdity she has delivered into their midst.

  above

  Dear reader, come, look! Place your eye here. Just here over the lens. Look at the cloud, that dense shifting mantle in the sky. Keep watching. Do you see it spiral? Look again, it begins to evaporate. And the radiance at its center: a star, at inception.

  in the beginning:

  a star

  flowers

  In the land of the sun, summer reigned but briefly disguised itself as the year went round, donning the mask of each season for days at a time, and puckishly throwing it off lest the inhabitants of the land doubt where it was they lived. During the long winter break, when Mother and Father were at work, when neighbors and shop owners went off to distant destinations on holiday, and the sisters had endless days to practice not-doing, they left the house, one after another, and entered the deserted streets with a faint intention in the backs of their minds of heading somewhere—to school or store or library or friend’s house. They walked from block to block, passing school, shut up and shrunken, or the dark and cool library, with its door half-open in invitation, or the friend’s house, which may or may not contain within its festively decorated exterior and shuttered windows the friend. The crape myrtles bloomed red, pink, and white and dusted the sidewalks with their tiny crinkled petals. Neighborhood pets lay against fences and car tires, across driveways and rooftops, imbibing the sun. The sisters aimlessly marched to the hum of pool motors and the spray of lawn sprinklers, their eyes always on something just down the next block, around the next corner. The dream called. The sun soothed and drew them round and round the neighborhood. Unconsciously, they stepped over cracks and lines while their arms lifted to pet the trunks of trees, or thrum the chains of fences. Here they plucked a rose, there a fern frond, at this corner a sprig of rosemary, from the friend’s yard a daylily. They wandered and collected under the sun’s spell. The school gates were locked but the purple asters growing along its fence begged to be picked. Birds and butterflies visited honeysuckle, hibiscus, lavender, and lantana, and the sisters followed, and plucked. From lawns and deserted parking lots, they collected golden poppies. Jasmine and clematis reached out to them through overburdened trellises. The sisters obliged. They picked and gathered. They meandered. And each in her time found her way back out of the dream, retreated into the cool house, kicked off tennis shoes or flip-flops, and headed toward the kitchen. Arms filled with color and light, each was eager to find the right vase or pot, eager to put up her feet and busy her hands composing her bouquet.

  in the beginning: a flower

  See the rose, it opens and it opens and it opens. It is all petal. All color. All fragrance. All light and mineral, captured, coded, presented. Adored reader, a flower.

  in the beginning: a story

  And if you search for the sisters, you will not find them. They are movable and have moved again. The house they lived in is that one there. See how the guava tree still blocks the kitchen window? Although, that is not the lawn on which they practiced somersaults and backbends, and that isn’t the garage in which they tinkered. No, the house is this one here, the yellow one with the
white trim. The sycamore has lost its vigor, though the screen door still squeaks. But their house did not have an attic—what adventures an attic would have afforded them! No, they did not live on this street; this is not their neighborhood. Perhaps they lived in another city. Maybe they have not yet arrived. Still, it is a good story: five sisters, a mother, a father, a tree, a cat.