A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  And he and I are both willing to try this. I hand over my rabbit for him to nurse her, and though he does not know how to nurse her, he does find a way to hold her that brings her to life for me, as a baby girl, as myself. But Blumenfeld is a man; he does not have breasts to feed her, and he hands the rabbit back to me. He also confuses her gender, twice calling her “him.” Both times I gently correct him. I not only know the difference between a mother-person and a male analyst, a baby girl and a baby boy, but also know how hard it may be to teach a man how to be a mother. But we are very patient with one another because we both share the same wish.

  56

  The following week I begin to drive again. I visit my apartment and relish my solitude. On Friday, I move from the house where I have been staying during the three weeks since my release from the hospital, into my apartment again. On the back sunporch I set up my drawing table and paints.

  On Monday morning I discover, by the front door, a shoe box and a manila envelope with a set of paintings. I wonder if I somehow forgot to unpack these things. I look in the envelope and find a series of terrifying images and stuff them quickly back in. I don’t remember painting them. I open the shoe box cautiously. In it I find a bar of soap, a can of grape juice, a baby bottle, some cinnamon graham crackers, an enema, pieces of rope, my little gun, and a kitchen knife. I know, instantly, that someone intends for me to take all this to Blumenfeld.

  57

  Driving myself to Blumenfeld’s office for the first time, then carrying the box, the envelope and my rabbit (in a new red-and-blue gym bag) into the waiting room, I feel removed from myself and a bit groggy. I peek into the envelope and shoe box, and see immediately that some of the paintings are gone and some of the things that were in the box are also missing. When Blumenfeld calls me, I am distracted and a little frightened.

  Once inside the cool dimness of his office, however, I relax. I pull the rabbit out of the gym bag and sit back. I find myself thinking thoughts that seem to come from nowhere, unbidden, almost inserted into the stream of my thinking:

  Rabbit out of a hat, paintings in blue, blue into red, a red enamel chair and yellow table, low to the ground, the smell of burning, of soap, at the kitchen table my chin comes up to the table, just; I am watching my mother cut vegetables with a knife. Somewhere off to the left of the table Telesporus hovers.

  “I’ve brought some things today,” I tell Blumenfeld, ignoring the distinct impression that Telesporus, the tall, blond, Viking-sized angel whom I’ve known since I was about six, is in this room, behind me and to my left.

  “The box, that’s not for today,” I point out to Blumenfeld. “I just want to put it in your closet now. There are things in it, and there are things missing from it.”

  Blumenfeld nods.

  “Is there any room in your closet?” I ask.

  “There will always be room for your things and your missing things in my closet. Why don’t you look for a place on the top shelf?”

  I get up and open the closet door, stifle the impulse to search the inside for all sorts of missing things, and look up.

  “It’s too high. I can’t see that far up. I mean, I can’t reach that far up.”

  Blumenfeld gets up from his chair slowly and takes the shoe box from my hand. He places it neatly on the top shelf.

  I begin: “I don’t know where these paintings came from. I must have painted them, but they are strange. And they make me afraid.”

  Blumenfeld waits, leaning forward, his wrists hanging off the arms of his chair. I notice a painting on the wall at the foot of the couch —a man and a child walking down a road. I notice a set of dictionaries lined up on a low shelf, as if the smallest child had to have easy access to them. Words. Little black squiggles on a page with all their lived meanings, all their long lives, past and future. An avid reader of the Oxford English Dictionary, I wonder about the place of these dictionaries in Blumenfeld’s life.

  I bend down and pick up my envelope of paintings, open it up, peer in, and stop myself.

  “I don’t understand the paintings,” I explain.

  “You don’t know what they are bringing to you?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “Yes. I don’t even remember painting them. There were paintings and collages I made in the hospital I don’t remember clearly either, but they were much cruder than these, and I think I threw most of them away.” I pause, puzzled. “Or someone else threw them away.”

  I hand four paintings to Blumenfeld, one by one.

  The first, all in shades of blue, is of a mother holding a baby, and a second baby, bigger, standing and leaning against the little one. I can tell as I look at my painting that it was painted in different blues on wet paper originally, because all the lines of the figures blur. In the foreground there are a series of delicate blue and purple dry washes.

  The second painting is almost all bars—the bars of a crib. You have to look twice to see that there’s someone in the crib at all. The painting is done in sepia, black and red, with a bit of blue around the crib itself. “It makes me feel uncannily alone,” I tell Blumenfeld.

  The third of this series terrifies me—long knives, a small yellow table, a small child; toddler-size, a little red chair, ropes. The colors are sepia, red and black, with just a hint of blue around the red chair. Things float in space, disconnected.

  The fourth painting is different from the others: the light in it shifts in different layers. A blond girl rides the back of a great lion, right down the center of the page. Below this pair is darkness, a darkness penetrated by little green faces, howling or screaming, I can’t tell. Above them, eerie yellow light, too bright, almost electric, searing, seeps down the page slowly into the upper layer of the dark area.

  Blumenfeld looks at me. I feel myself bite my lower lip. I don’t say anything.

  “You look like you know a lot about these paintings, Annie,” he says.

  I look away. The silence grows around us. My breathing is fast and shallow. Blumenfeld’s breathing, however, is deep and regular, a comforting sound.

  I find myself looking at his couch, all black. Up until this time, I’ve never considered it for my own use. It is just part of the room, like the lamp, the books, the dictionaries. I am suddenly tired, really exhausted, and the couch seems like a possible place to rest, a place to lie down and breathe more freely.

  “I’m so tired. I just want to lie down and sleep, forget everything for a while.”

  “You can lie down, of course,” Blumenfeld says. “I suspect that you really want to lie down and wake up and remember a little.”

  As soon as his words come into my ears, I feel washed with relief, but as soon as this little wave washes over me, a second wave of the fear comes up, much bigger.

  “But what if I lie down and I get lost?” Task.

  “You won’t get very lost because I will be right here.”

  “What if you aren’t? What if I can’t find you?”

  “I will sit where you can find me right away,” he says.

  I move to the couch and lie down, putting my rabbit on top of me, so that she covers my whole chest and belly. My head is slightly raised. Blumenfeld pulls his chair up to the middle of the couch. I turn my head slightly to the right and find that I can see his face.

  I close my eyes. There is a drifting-out-to-sea feeling, a little rocking motion. The room is cool and dim.

  The room is cool and blue and dim. I am covered with a light blanket, lying face up. Blue light surrounds me. There in my crib, I turn, arching my back, and roll over onto my stomach. Startled by these impressions, I open my eyes. I look at Blumenfeld. “This is a very drifting position, like being in a boat,” I tell him.

  He puts one polished black shoe up on the side of the couch. “I’ve got you well anchored. I won’t let your boat drift away.”

  I close my eyes again. The room grows cool, and then cold.

  The blanket has fallen off. My arms and legs are cold. I squirm and shiver. I feel like cry
ing. Hands pull up the blanket—blue warmth in a cool blue room.

  I open my eyes and smile at Blumenfeld’s polished black shoe. “Blue,” I say aloud.

  “Blue was the color of your mother? Of comfort?” I nod. He continues, “And then, the blue got poisoned, love got mixed in with something nearly lethal to you.”

  I nod again. Tears fall suddenly, flowing out of the sides of my eyes and down into my ears, an odd sensation, but I don’t move. Finally I ask him, “How did you know that?”

  He laughs lightly. When I look at him, he is perfectly serious. “From your paintings,” he says. “The blue gets mixed in with other colors and with terrifying objects-the chair, the rope, the knife-and then it gets crowded out, almost entirely, but not quite.”

  When he says this, I remember the blue in each of the paintings —at least a hint of it.

  He looks over at his desk. “It’s almost time to stop,” he says, and I’m surprised. The session has passed by incredibly quickly. Then I smile, remembering that I said those very words to the little boy Ben. I tip my feet over the side of the boat, and the room swirls. I steady myself. Blumenfeld puts his foot back up. The boat holds still. I get up, pack up my rabbit in my gym bag, and leave Blumenfeld without a word.

  As I open the door, I look back. I have the impression that Blumenfeld is crying. He is softly weeping, and I can see Telesporus, the great guardian angel of my childhood, bending over him, as if to embrace him.

  In the place where there is no memory, words terrify. Thoughts come to me fully formed, as if dropped down into my ordinary stream of consciousness.

  In the place where there are no words, images terrify. I find a series of paintings that I don’t remember painting.

  In the place where there are no images, even fleeting sensory impressions terrify.

  Blumenfeld is making room for terror. The things I bring into his office seem disconnected from one another and from me. There is no coherent present or past. In terror, the present as well as the past are obliterated. Yet Blumenfeld makes room for past and present when he says, “There will always be room for your things and your missing things in my closet.” I notice that he places my box up on a high shelf, out of my reach. Perhaps he knows I am not ready to talk about these things—the baby bottle, the enema, the grape juice and graham crackers, the gun and knife. Perhaps he senses that I do not want to have them within reach. Or perhaps he is not yet ready to have them within my reach, for reasons of his own that I don’t know about.

  After he puts my box in his closet and I look at my paintings, I notice his dictionaries. I know that words have a past and a future. Words are essential to a coherent world, and so must be available to the smallest children. I also know that words can be used to deceive, and so I try hard not to lie to Blumenfeld about my confusion, even when I don’t want to acknowledge to him or to myself just how confused and terrified I am about missing memories. I have brought Blumenfeld paintings I do not remember painting.

  Through this series of paintings which I have discovered by my front door, paintings I treat as my own, I enter memory. Lying down on the couch, the black couch that becomes a boat anchored by Blumenfeld’s foot, without any formal trance, I drift into memory. Protected from getting lost by Blumenfeld’s near presence and by Telesporus, I slip easily into the colors of memory. The color blue is the color I begin with, and I discover the meanings of the paintings through the words and associations about my mother that Blumenfeld brings back to me: blue—comfort—love—mixed with something almost lethal.

  The colors yellow, red, sepia and black also appear and reappear in each painting. Those colors do not enter my associations when I lie down. Impressions about them come to me at the opening of the session. However, these impressions arrive fully formed, as if they are not my thoughts, and I push them aside, with the sense that Telesporus, my protector, has come into the room. I don’t reveal any of this directly to Blumenfeld.

  As I drift into the blue room of my beginnings, I remain in Blumenfeld’s office, in this man’s presence. Terror opens out into memory for the first time with Blumenfeld. Memory is room—room in the closet, the cool dim of my beginnings where the love of my mother once was blue, room inside Blumenfeld himself, room for things missing—where there is no memory. And though there is time missing from my life, paintings in a sequence missing, acts I can’t remember, I begin to remember the blue love of my mother, anchored in time and space by Blumenfeld’s foot on the couch.

  58

  The sense that once my mother loved me, and that I felt that love as comfort, gives me a ground of safety I have never known before.

  I wake up one morning in early May and notice the silence. Sunlight plays on the windowsill and splashes over my blue quilt as the trees move. A rush of wind in my ears followed by silence. This silence, filled with light and bird songs and a new stillness within me, quenches a thirst I didn’t know was in me. It has its own shifting textures, as though I am running my hands over white flour, cold water, rough stone. A sense of my own well-being pervades the air, so strange it frightens me. I have experienced reprieves before, however, and I doubt that this will last.

  Blumenfeld, I know, is seeing Melanie (for free, since it’s at his request, not hers). He tells me nothing about these meetings, except to offer, “Yes, sometimes we do speak the same language.”

  I go to my office at school, explaining rather awkwardly that I have been “sick,” and leaving out every detail.

  I run in the park under a canopy of green, see friends I haven’t seen since early. February, even go out dancing. I arrange my three-day-long comprehensive examinations for the end of the summer.

  I don’t know what to do about my clinical internship, although I miss intensely the children I was seeing. I spend a great deal of my time talking with friends, who are students in clinical programs or practicing therapists, about returning to work. Everyone seems cautious. My sister, too, reminds me that only a little more than a month has passed since I was released from the hospital. Mary says, “Annie, all I can say is how frightened we were. You don’t remember, but I saw you in it—every familiar gesture of yours disappeared. You didn’t recognize us. Your speech was completely incoherent. Medication had no effect at all. The doctors were asking me about whether to increase or decrease your medications! So, just take it a little slow, OK?” Seeing my disappointment, she adds, “But, you know me, I always err on the side of caution.”

  I dream of Ben and of the other children I am not seeing.

  Hot drops of wax from red and blue crayons, melted over a candle flame, burn on my child’s hands, and cool and harden into dots. I dream of Ben painting—blue over red, he blackens it out—while I paint in every shade of blue imaginable and do not blacken it out.

  I dream of a room, half in shadow. A lamp smokes and burns, catches the curtains.

  I dream of a twisted, dried leaf that sings to me.

  I dream of a sky on fire, and my birthday party. I invite Ben and other children my age. Later, one child’s mother finds burn marks on her pelvis and vagina. She shows them to my mother. I go down a flight of stairs, and as I go, my mother keeps hitting me. I am furious and terrified at once. I don’t know why she is hitting me.

  My mother has a burn scar from her knees to her neck, and her right ear is half gone and what’s left is melted and crumpled into a familiar oddity. I dream of the lace sleeve of her nightgown catching the blue flame of the ring of fire on the stove top, when she was younger than I am now. I see her fear of fire in her dark eyes, and a cigarette, red at the tip, coming toward me. The rim of the sky is on fire and the flames are rising.

  “Put out all the fires in all the skies,” I whisper to the darkness as I go to sleep each night.

  59

  Sitting with Blumenfeld one morning, I ask him, wistfully, “Do you think I will ever be cured?” He begins to laugh and then can’t stop. As he comes to the end of his fit of laughter, he wipes his eyes and says, “Annie,
only hams get cured.” I’m not laughing, however.

  Soft yellow slits arranged on the rug from the Levolor blinds illuminate rays of dust particles extending from window to floor. I watch the dust motes stream in the dark room. I wonder if they will form a little circle. Would they take me back to the little girl I found in the library?

  “If you were cured, Annie, whatever that means, you wouldn’t have your blue lenses,” Blumenfeld says quietly.

  “If I were cured,” I counter, “I wouldn’t have to worry about going into the hospital again.”

  “Hospitals are terrible places for those who wear blue lenses, Annie,” Blumenfeld says and pauses. “They are terrible places because the people there who don’t wear blue lenses want to cure those who do. I don’t blame you for not wanting to go back.”

  “I know that,” I say with some exasperation. I wonder if he is being deliberately obtuse. “You are not getting this. I mean that I want to be cured. I want to have my life. I don’t want to keep losing time. I want time to run forward, and it just doesn’t now.”

  “You want to feel alive and be alive. You want a past that lives in your memory, not in the present,” he says.