A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  “I killed her?” he asks me. When I try to interpret his question as a question about his mother, he does not understand. I return to the metaphors of his play. What he wants to get rid of, kill, is only the bad mother, the one who left him. Attentive now, he listens, hears, nods. What he still has is the good mother, in me, and in others.

  Rachael makes some comment here about new introjects, a light comment, one that does not take over my interpretation.

  Ben believes in his play so much that it follows him indoors, in the form of an invisible mama bear and two baby bears. This is an act of assimilation; he takes back into himself the bad and the good mama and the lost baby. Interestingly, he also rids himself of the instrument of his cruelty, throwing it down the drainpipe out of reach, the same drainpipe where he knelt and tenderly called one of the baby bears out to him. Rachael likes this interpretation. She is smiling.

  My part in the therapy is changing these days too. As I play with Ben, I not only take my cues from what he has said or done, but also help him understand some of the possible meanings of his play by interpreting it for him. In this I am careful, mindful that I may be inaccurate. But these interpretations, if they are accurate, will become an enlarged perspective, to be acted out again and again in his play —until they become more fully Ben’s meanings.

  Rachael agrees that Ben is now playing out for me the key themes of his early abandonment and trauma: loss and recovery, vulnerability and independence, cruelty and love.

  She hands me another piece of candy, and turns on the lamp, as the room has grown dark while we were talking so intently.

  25

  The playroom is dark. I see that it is after five, and I must have been sitting here for over three hours. I wonder where all this time has flown, as if time could fly up on wings, a winged clock.

  I go out into the dusk, to my car, reinventing Rachael again, but now I’m not sure who she is—she could still be Rachael or maybe she’s become the old Melanie I loved, or Sarah at my party, or my sister, Mary, or the little girl I saw in the library grown up and now grown old—angels do enjoy their disguises.

  There in the car, in the rapidly expanding time of my future, Rachael returns as the one who tucked in the stray strands of my braids with her knotted fingers. I remember how she stroked the bitten-down cuticles of my fingers. I remember, in the rapidly expanding flight from my present, the white spaces in time where she held me, those white spaces that burned her hair white, a fire in her mind, and that’s where she got her feathered body too, from the black cormorants who flew around us as time flew ahead of us. Those cormorants took our fearful songs out to sea and dropped them down on jagged rocks so that she and I could be fearless and still full of song. Now she corners me, moving in with her “Ah, ah, ah, I’ve gotcha!”—making me laugh in that tease that sounds like sneezes, and down we go into that tickling laughter, and I kick against the air and spit out splintered bones of despair. Most nights, I curl up by her side, under the feather comforter and under her wing, and I sleep well, except for the nights when she goes out flying—then nightmares haunt my bed. But sometimes a little circle of dancing light spins over my bed, and I know she is there, only younger. In the early morning, the wind blows over us and wraps us in harmonies and blows out the strands of my braids and blows out the white feathers of her hair, blows us into the far-flung skies, two minds on fire. If I could get home now, I would find her there, I’m sure she’ll still be there, waiting to chop cabbage heads and dice little green onions, preparing my past for me in the billowing time of my future, my new life, where I am now going out into the orchard to gather apples from the eye of green darkness.

  It is already dark. Am I still in my car, in the parking lot at Glenwood?

  When I finally get home, I put my briefcase of notes by my desk, exhausted. I flick on the kitchen light and look at the clock on the wall. It is now 10:00 P.M. and I cannot account for nearly eight hours of this day.

  26

  The snow begins to fall and it falls as if no one can stop it. It covers the back fence. It flings itself outward, like a lost thing, it covers the whole world, erasing time and memory in its great silence.

  II

  SILENCE

  Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty’s nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear.

  -RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies, 1

  With silence only as their

  benediction,

  God’s angels come—

  where in the shadow of a great

  affliction,

  The soul sits dumb ...

  -JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, from a letter to a friend on the death of his sister

  But one human heart goes out to another, undeterred by what lies between.

  .—WILHELM GRIMM, Dear Mili

  27

  In late February, abruptly, I no longer come to see Ben.

  28

  I cannot stop crying. My face breaks like an egg yolk and sobs shake my whole body. Then the tears turn to streams on my cheeks, and I wonder if they will freeze because my face feels so cold and stiff. But my face breaks again, and the sobbing comes like an invasion. This goes on all day, until by twilight it is difficult to carry on any conversation at all. Sarah and Patricia and my sister, Mary, pack up some of my clothing and drive me to the hospital—not the one I remember—not the old castle on a hill with woods and an apple orchard I knew as an adolescent, but one newly built on the outskirts of the city, a place bearing the same name but not the same place. The old one was condemned.

  I glance at the small room with its examination table and strip of paper, its beige metal cabinets, the fake-wood desk. It reeks of antiseptic. A nurse takes my temperature and pushes up my sleeve to wrap my upper arm in blood-pressure cuff. The tight band on my arm becomes tighter and then the slow hissing release. A little girl in the corner points out my tears and asks why I am crying, but no one knows. My face is frozen again and I wonder if it is possible to build a small fire behind it, behind the bones of my face, to warm it.

  Now there is a doctor in the room, just a few years older than I, awkward and gentle. “What brings you into the hospital?” he asks. His tone tells me he has memorized this question.

  “A green car,” I think to say, and frown, knowing this is not the answer he expects, and when I frown, my face does not move.

  “You must have some idea of why you are here. What is it?” he asks, as if I have not answered his question.

  I feel suddenly wary. Everything within me is about to be named, boxed, contained and controlled. My hands rest on the arms of a green chair, but I feel as if they could lift up and lift me out of here. But they are still, lifeless. The top of my head lifts off (a strange sensation), and with it my answers to his questions lift and float out of me into the street where they mingle with the smoky breaths of passersby. There is no need to explain anything, I realize.

  The earth is covered with snow. It has always been snowing and it will go on snowing for a long time. No wonder I am so cold.

  I find myself sitting on a bed in a light-blue gown two sizes too large, with white socks on my feet, not mine. I am shaking violently. A gray blanket is wrapped around my shoulders and a nurse sits in the room with me. She holds me tightly yet softly, and rubs my back. She speaks to me as if she knows me. I tug at the plastic wristband and begin to scratch at the insides of my arms, where my skin is burning despite the extreme cold. A second nurse enters the room and takes my blanket and turns me facedown on the bed and gives me an injection. The liquid burns into me, black dots cover the walls of the room, and then, through the roaring darkness, the longest white silence I can imagine.

  29

  Behind the bones of her face, in the caverns of her soul’s face, a blue eye is weeping. Tonight one angel will go out into the desert, to search for her
among the white bones of rabbits.

  In radiant light, he appears in the hospital ward asking for lemonade, of all things! No one hears him, but when the atoms in the room rearrange themselves and he moves among them, she sees his familiar shape. Not many stand over seven feet tall. He moves in close to her with his thoughts, but can’t get through, so he rubs his cold hands together as if to light a fire near her, and cries out to see her so broken.

  Darkness comes into the room. It presses down and spreads itself flat against her chest. The hammering in her mind goes on and on. Outside, she can see—even through the dense mesh of the window and the static in the air—those strong women folding their ladders and going away. They cannot quench the burning, and in the courtyard below the air fills with a blue haze.

  As he speaks to her, she is happy to see his lips moving, although his words make no sound. That he is alive is enough. He has come back to her in that unnoticed way of his, and aligned himself with everything, everyone—touching the afflicted lightly with the length of one dazzling wing.

  30

  I drop down into my body for a few moments as I stand in the shower, fully clothed. The water pours over my head and whole body. It soothes the burning on my skin and the long burning under my skin.

  31

  The light of a soft lamp touches the leaves of the rubber tree in the dayroom. She sits, half in shadow, in the midst of a burning smell—a terrifying smell—once she ran into a creek in the winter to stop it, long ago. The rubber plant sheds a dry shell when a new leaf comes out. One has fallen to the floor, dried, twisted; it’s something singed, not burned, and because it’s not burned, it is able to cry, to chant, to howl, and to sing—no, it is not burned too badly. The leaf, singing, makes her want to cry.

  The water is open and wide, dangerous. That monster-bird, the barn, can’t go skating on the lake now. It’s not frozen.

  Words come into her mind as if from someone lost. They are not really her words, she knows.

  On her tongue, a thick glue, and the words, almost hers, yet unspeakable, tumble into her mind—“Please come back, oh PLEASE.” A shadow moves. She arches one shoulder and crouches in her chair. A fly lights on her arm. A television blares and buzzes overhead.

  32

  I slip into my body briefly as my sister tries to take my music tapes and Walkman and headphones out of the wastebasket in my room, where I have just thrown them. She says, “Annie, you’re going to want these later. These are important to you.” I try again to throw them away. For some reason, I don’t want music.

  Mary takes my tapes and my art supplies, so that I won’t throw them away or destroy them, and hands them to a nurse.

  33

  There are others within her. They speak to her as she sits on her bed. They’ve spoken to her often, but she doesn’t remember them. She will remember only a fraction of this.

  On her right is a girl with dark-brown hair and bangs, and on her left a blond young woman with two little girls. The brown-haired one says, as if to reassure her, “You will remember almost nothing about this.”

  Then—confusion—she is different sizes and different people as time runs swiftly backvvards-she is lifted up and up, terrified—she is taken into a closet and released and she runs toward one end—she pushes hands away, “No, please no,” she cries—she is chased around a basement—the man in these scenes keeps changing.

  A voice in her left ear says, “That’s because we’ve disguised him.”

  They show her more of this on a TV screen and in sharply framed pictures, saying, “Let it unfold.”

  Later, she remembers only the words “Let it unfold,” and “That’s because we’ve disguised him.” Nothing else. None of the people.

  34

  I drop into my body more often now, coming and going as if in is out, and the way out is back in. Around and around I go, through a swinging door that pushes me into a room, whisks me out, and pushes me back in. I have been making collages, apparently—I suppose because they have taken away all my painting materials. And I see these collages in various stages.

  I cut people out of magazines with a child’s blunt scissors. Women with long flowing coats, women in dark glasses and hats that shade their faces, women holding rolls of toilet tissue against their cheeks, women standing beside dryers by open windows with birds flying in. I cut out girls too. Girls in baseball hats in the rain, girls climbing up stairs and whispering, girls with schoolbooks in plaid dresses and black Mary Janes. I watch myself carefully cut off their heads.

  I see it again after the composition is finished. I notice that the heads of the girls are on the women and the heads of the women are on the girls. You can’t tell who is who. You can’t tell their ages either. This worries me.

  Another time I am the turning pages of Time magazine. A voice in my left ear whispers, “That’s because we’ve disguised him.” A voice in my right ear is saying, “Let it unfold.”

  These words, not the voices themselves, but the words, make me afraid. They don’t make any sense. I no longer look at magazines or make collages.

  35

  A body of light comes to her through the walls until a fine membrane of light covers everything, and even in semidarkness this light is blinding. Her own body is another body of light, tapping out messages in freezing and burning codes to unseen presences.

  She lies still under the covers, huddled on one side in a little heap, waiting for hands to move her, lift her up, perhaps set her on her feet, get her going. In this white place of great light, she wonders—where are her mother’s dark eyes and breasts, her father’s light eyes and gentle hands?

  The back of her throat closes and it is hard to breathe. Is death a long sleep, not being able to wake up, to move, ever?

  Someone is standing over her, “Can you move now? Can you talk to me?”

  Over the public address system she hears her own thoughts answering—“No, I don’t want to talk,” a little pause, then her questions blaring through the hallways, “Am I going to die? Am I dead already?”

  Bathed in intense light, with her thoughts heard all over the world, she discovers there is no privacy, not even under her blanket.

  36

  Dr. Michael Connelly sits on the edge of the bed, holding a chart. He is speaking to my sister about trying more Stelazine, to get me moving again, and perhaps electroshock therapy.

  I move into my huddled body, and with a tremendous effort speak one clear word: “No.”

  37

  The morning sun shines down on the sea, a silver light on the breaking waves, it blinds the young woman sitting on her bed in a dark room. Where do the leaves in the sand come from, she wonders. Brown heart-shaped little leaves, but here there are no trees. She feels she is continually being watched. She turns, turns again—there is no one there.

  The night before, she threw up her dinner and coughed up blood, shaking. What is this world she is about to enter?

  Looking out to sea, a blinding silver, she shivers. The sun glares down a judgment on her. Little birds of thoughts die in her throat. The sand is soft, pocked with rain, soft under her bare feet, and difficult to walk on. She shuffles along.

  Suddenly it is clear to her that someone has died, perhaps someone has been killed. No, someone is about to be murdered.

  She enters the sea fully, knowing it is she—the murderer and the one soon to be murdered.

  38

  I am lifting a spoonful of mashed potatoes to my mouth. A round table. Glaring lights. Others eat too. Patients?

  We eat with spoons, not forks, and we are watched. The mashed potatoes are glue and butter, hard to swallow.

  I wonder how long I have been here, and who these people are.

  I remember something about murder. She? I can’t place her. I wave my spoon to the world of the living and speak aloud in tumbling words: I ask her to wake up funny you should ask me it’s mirror bright too light I’m afloat like Ivory Soap boat sick? bare bones bare headed bare bum c
rack open the light is too hot a hat tips up this tastes of glue who is murdered? auk the furnt glue who is gibbled?

  39

  She wraps her hands around her head at the table and weeps beneath the weight of it. “How can you talk like that when you know it’s my fault?”

  A dark-haired girl-woman moves farther out into the sea. The weight of the waves pushes her toward the shore, lifts her up and pushes her and sets her down, hard.

  “How can you talk like that?” she cries toward the breaking waves and bobbing head, still sitting at the table while standing on the shore.

  The weight of water is heavier now, a stronger push by far, and the waves go over her head. A lighthouse searches the night sky, and there are other islands of thoughts that reach the girl still on the shore. “Will she ever exist beyond arm’s reach?” Black cormorants circle overhead. She searches for a face, close in the dark water.

  On the shore, she listens to every sound in the perilous night, and quickly goes into a house all lit up. She locks doors, closes windows, even the ones up high. She jumps from a ledge, thumping down to the hard wood floor. There are steps outside, walking, quiet, walking again.