The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Yeah. Right. Whatever. And anyway, where did you even come from?

  Oh, I think you know. I’m from your father. Now open the goddamned door.

  My father. Whose mind curled around art and architecture and classical music and film. Whose intellect I carried in my blood rivers. That’s when my two mes had it out. The me I’d forged to leave a family and body batter my way into the world, and the me I’d never met, or even knew existed, except perhaps hidden in my hands, hiding like the crouch of dreams in my fingers. My father’s daughter.

  “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”

  The night after I jumped from the train of things, at the computer my heart raced. My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt - bruised and cut from falling from a train - or a marriage - or a self in the night - I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book.

  Until my very skin made screamsong.

  Short Story

  SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print. I got published by an independent press. One that did not care about how far I’d paddled outside the mainstream. I called the book Her Other Mouths. In every story, intense things happen to a body. Because, well, they do. Did. And I knew how to tell it. Words the body of me.

  I did finish my dissertation though. It felt like walking through fire. A crucible. I called it Allegories of Violence. By some bizzaro twist of fate it got published too. I still think it happened to someone else. But something weirdly good came from it. The two mes? We began to get to know each other. Intellectual me and blood bodied me began to hang out. Brush each other’s hair. Take bubble baths and draw soap pictures on each other’s backs and clink glasses late into the night.

  But there was a cost.

  I was in my eleventh year of marriage with the Devin. I was a teacher of things, having achieved a doctorate and publications. But that woman I’d let into the house ravaged who I had been. Her zany brain force would not go. I didn’t want to fuck. I wanted to read. I didn’t want to go numb every night. I wanted to travel the country of ideas and feel thoughts and blast open the top of my head. I didn’t want to drink until I dropped. I wanted to write. A whole other book. My husband became like a willful unruly child to me. A submerged one. And though my love did not leave, it went down into deeper darker places.

  Devin’s life moved bedward, fueled by alcohol and woman need. On one of his travels to another country for the first time without me, he found a foreign bed. While he was in Vietnam I waited for the word “husband” to come back. Days and nights. Then weeks. Then one morning I didn’t get out of bed. Days and nights. When I had to pee, I did. When I was hungry, I cried. When I was awake, a white nothing. At night I ate small white sleeping pills. Something I learned well from my mother. More and more of them. When I slept, I hoped to die.

  Finally a gentle friend broke into my house because he was worried about me. He and a bull dyke named Laurel broke down the front door of my house when I stopped showing up at work. He put me in the shower. Then he wrapped me in blankets. Then he fed me. Literally. Then we watched old movies for three days until I looked at him and said, OK.

  I thought of Brody and his clarinet and beautiful black kid hands. I thought of my best friend in Florida, the one my mother had outed out of my life. Of my arch angel, Michael and how we both left the Lubbock and made up lives. There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you.

  Devin did come back, but we were never again together.

  He drank himself ever womanward. I entered my female family lineage - a suffering that once I again claimed it, felt as familiar as a mother. Daughter. Sister. Home. Her name, depression.

  In that long thick underwater I lived the life of a devalued woman. Not a wife. Not a mother. No one’s lover. No job or book gave me value to myself. I felt like a pointless woman sack. I lost pounds of flesh having no one to share a body with. My clothes began to hang off of my body as if I were someone else. Other women would compliment me on my supposed intentional feminine metamorphoses, and I’d smile, but I felt like an insect. In the morning I’d lose interest in washing my hair or brushing my teeth partway through, and find myself standing naked dripping in the bathroom staring at the floor or holding my toothbrush in the air, foam dripping from my mouth.

  When I wasn’t teaching or driving to and from teaching, I was at home. No, not home. An empty woman in a house. I’d sit in my living room alone grading student papers and stare out the large window onto the street. There were always more papers. I could picture a forever like this. Thoughtless and small and requiring me only to perform tasks with a pen. I’d drink only enough to not feel. Every day. About a bottle a day, roughly. Evenly. Sometimes wine, sometimes vodka. At night I’d watch T.V. until sleep saved me. Or didn’t. This is my life is what I felt. It is slow like still water. There is a dull hum in the ear and a softheadedness best used for napping or making coffee. There is a neighborhood and a house and a refrigerator. The comfort of appliances and going to the gas station. There is a car in which I ride to work and then come home. There is a linear and accessible story to follow. You don’t have to do anything. Or be.

  But then there was another woman on the other side of the glass.

  Staring numbly out the sanctity of the living room plate glass window one day I saw a woman with ashen skin and dirty blond hair walk by in denim cut-offs and a tube top and cowboy boots. Her arms looked like maps. The circles under her eyes weren’t shiners but could fool you. She had a jerk to her right shoulder every third step or so. Walking by woman. Then I saw an emaciated man in jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt walk after her. He hunched. He had darty eyes. He smoked. His hair hung down in a rat tail to the middle of his back.

  The thing is, I’d seen them before. Lots of times. For about two years. She was a hooker. He was her pimp. This was their beat. The alleyway behind my house. We’d been living this way - me on the inside with my ever safening bouge life. Them on the outside with some trace of my past in their skin and hair.

  This time when I saw her though, I felt something in my chest that hurt. It felt good to feel something for someone else. Even pain. Maybe especially pain. Sitting there as they went out of view I tasted something warm in my mouth. Then I realized I’d bitten the inside of my cheek.

  I didn’t do anything but grade papers, that day. My chest and cheek aching. That night I threw up for no particular reason. Which was not eventful for that time.

  But the next time I saw her, something very small and specific caught my eye. An important detail. A bruise at the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t the bruise. It was the bruise that let me see … her eyes, were blue. Like mine. I let the papers I was grading slide to the floor. I watched her walk by and wondered how much she weighed. I wondered her age - impossible to guess. I wondered what jobs she’d tried and failed, this walking woman in cut-offs with dangling maps for arms and a bruise and blue eyes. I tried to picture how much money I had in my wallet in my bookbag by the front door. I watched her ass hanging out of her shorts - it hung limply - two little flesh commas. Then she was around the corner. I waited for her dance partner to come into view. Without thinking I knocked on the window. Without thinking I got up and walked to my front door and opened it and walked outside and walked up to him and said “ How much.”

  In the short story I wrote about what happened next I ask her in. I tell her to sit down. She sits down. In the story she smokes and bobbing machines her left knee. Her hand shakes. In the story I say this is what it feels like to be me a woman who teaches English looking down at a woman who sucks dicks all day and all night e
very night as she sits on my couch smoking. This is what me an addict upwardly mobile given something infinitesimally small to believe in called words thinks looking at her: she looks like Mary. This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that moves the world without her body. When I see an image of christ I picture a Mary so drawn and gaunt and tired and angry to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face.

  In the story I say, what do I think I’m going to do, teach her?

  People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn’t lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn’t it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind’s powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?

  An exchange happened. Woman to woman. If she is still alive, she can back me up on this.

  Was it possible I had something to give? Out of the nothingness that was my life? Really, what the fuck did I have to give? Woman with too many holes in her. And yet there was something.

  Words.

  With this woman in me I went to my teaching job and talked to students about ideas. The ideas got into my heart some. And then my heart began to pump. The talking with students about ideas had a pulse. Some of them cared, some of them could care less, but it didn’t matter. I was so happy to get to stand in a room with words and ideas I would have talked to myself alone in a classroom. But I was not alone. I was with what youth should be. I was with artists and writers and scholars and bartenders and musicians and nurses and strippers and lawyers and mothers and some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who’d wronged us and everyone we’d been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.

  Whatever it was or was not, there were words. Not just my own. I wrote stories, I wrote books, but the more I wrote the more I saw a door opening behind me, and I saw that if I jammed my motherfucking foot in it, more of us could get through. And that we could make things. Together. What we could make, was art. How that mattered. With other people I made paintings. With other people I made performances. With other people I made stories and readings and strange outsider art events like filling the trees with bras and little raw narratives or unbooting booted cars or hooking up free cable for poor people with a friend who worked for Bell or putting haikus about earthworms and cunts on the windshields of cars in corporate parking lots.

  And I wrote my second book of stories.

  The book that came out after the death of my marriage was called Liberty’s Excess. If you pick it up, you will recognize the stories. They are the stories of people trying to perform the relationships we’ve been handed as scripts. Daughter. Mother. Husband. Wife. Marriage. They are the stories of women and men who try to love and fail. And fail. And they are the stories of people who live at the margins of this thing we call culture, mostly fucking up, but some of us, aren’t we still here? For the ones who aren’t? I wonder, is it us that fucks up? Or the stories we’ve been given?

  It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedoms will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one of your yous. It’s OK though. There are more.

  How many times do we die?

  Words, like selves, are worth it.

  Gray Matter

  I MAY HAVE BEEN A BIG FAT FAILURE AT MAKING A HOME, but I made up how to make something else in its place. Out of the sad sack of sad shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse.

  The first wordhouse I built was a literary journal. Now usually when someone says the words “literary journal,” you picture something small and white and pristine like Virginia Quarterly Review. Not that. The thing we made was huge. Nine-by-twelve perfect bound four color in your face. Counterculture. Every issue had a theme meant to deconstruct - my favorite thing I ever learned as a scholar - the “literary journal.” Themes like Obscenitydivinity. Blow. Varieties of Violence. Alien. At the helm were me and my smart as crap talented as fuck friends, exactly like a garage band except with paper and computers. We taught ourselves everything - editing, design, layout, typesetting - and then we took what we had learned and made every single page an event horizon. Image and text warred or danced with each other. Poems interrupted stories and giant photos of tits interrupted the white space and lyric line of poems. High art got under the sheets with low art - Yusef Komunyakaa’s words right next to the words of some homeless woman, or a graffiti artist, or an unwed mom you never heard of before. The page made it possible to kill the distance. Writing, we decided, was everywhere. It was whatever we wanted it to be.

  We put Annie Sprinkle and Andres Serrano and Kathy Acker and Andrei Codrescu and Joel-Peter Witkin on those big white pages. We put ex-cons and recovering addicts and drunks right next to them. And we destroyed the sanctity of the literary page while liberating the noise and heat of art. Everybody had day jobs. Everybody stayed up too late making the big books. Everybody spent way too much time cursing out the blue-aproned nerds at Kinko’s. I spent my food and rent money on our big irreverent mouth. We won awards. We got grants. It really was something, though I don’t know what, and that seems right, even today. It was a fast burning supernova.

  I fucking loved it.

  Why?

  It was the first thing in my life I ever loved that I didn’t spread my legs for. Maybe you believe that. Maybe you think it’s a line. Either way it’s true.

  Something else happened through the wordhouse. Through the wordhouse I met writers who had somehow or other read my writing. Through the wordhouse I found voices and bloodsong exactly how it felt to me on the inside where I thought I was the only one. There were others like me. Um, lots of them. Breaking writing rules. Reaching for writing impossibilities. Taking their newly-found intellects into alien territories. Making things up. Maybe even a life. A self.

  I’d meet these people at conferences and readings and performances and art shows. We’d huddle in corners and drink and laugh and plot our art secrets. We’d communicate like underground societies of people who read the outsider books, stared at the taboo art until we passed out, mouth watered in the presence of writing that tore your face to shreds even as it might never see the light of day. You wanna know what the two words are that describe what these people meant and still mean to me are?

  Tribe.

  Sacred.

  I don’t need anyone to explain to me why people join gangs or develop prison societies or only trust others of their rule breaking kind. I don’t have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.

  And guess what? Turns out, I had a twin.

  Did I mention I’m a Gemini?

  When I say “twin,” I don’t mean biologically … though who knows, the way genetics travel the superhighways of blood and cells. My twin in the tribe has blonde hair. Blue eyes. Unusual relationships with sentences. Weird views on culture and storytelling. Fire in his fingers and shooting out the top of his head.

  I met my twin when I was miraculously invited to give a literary reading at San Diego State University. He had been invited as well. We had been invited together because our writing was, well, weird. There’s never been a good word for it as far as I’m concerned. “Experimental” sounds dumb, and “Innovative” sounds strangely snooty. Whatever the word i
s for taking everything you ever learned about making characters, plots, and storylines and blowing them up like putting firecrackers in the heads of Barbies as I did as a kid, well, that’s what we do. Whatever the word is for being more in love with words than with conventions and rules about words, that’s us.

  Lance Olsen and me, we are, and I say this with some authority, language bandits.

  If you don’t have a twin in a tribe I’m telling you - drop whatever you are doing in your life and go look for them. The twin and the tribe. I’m serious. Because having a bloodword tie and a tribe pretty much saved me from myself. If I had tried to live one more year trying to be like the people around me I wouldn’t have lasted long.

  If you Google Lance Olsen you will find that he’s kind of a rock star within the tribal sphere we move through. But that isn’t why I love him or why I have his back forever. It’s this: his words make my words more possible. In his language my brain stops blow up and new ideas shoot out. In his books the moment of a kiss on Nietzsche’s lips, or the seconds before a film begins in a theater in the Mall of America, or the instant before a blast that atomizes the very differences between warring hearts makes you forget the beginning, the middle, and the end as you knew it.

  And you will find that he is a Fiction Collective Two author and editor. Like me. If you Google FC2, you will find their mission statement: “ FC2 is among the few alternative presses in America devoted to publishing fiction considered by America’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu.”

  I don’t know about you , but “heterodox” sounds kinda brainy to me. So I will say this. I am a wrecker and maker of wordhouses. Me and my twin have each other’s backs. And we’re coming for your women and children.

  Secular Miracle

  NOT ALL MIRACLES COME FROM GOD OR LOOKING UP.

  To say that what happened to me in the winter of my early thirties was a miracle is puny compared to what transpired. It started so small. In my hands. In that winter, I sent a short story out as a writing sample. The short story was called “The Chronology of Water.” I sent the story four places: to the Admissions Committee for the M FA in writing at Columbia University; to the hiring committee for a tenure track teaching position; to Oregon Literary Arts as a writing sample for a grant; to Poets and Writers as a writing sample for something called the Writer’s Exchange grant.