I follow the sound of the faucet, ignore it. I imagine a room, wallpapered with skin from the back of MY LOVER’s neck, empty except for a bed, one chair. I am in the hallway; I am not standing there.
The pill box is sitting where I’d left it. Each day is filled. There is an apple on the table, and two bad oranges.
Look at what she did! says FRANCES’ HUSBAND, pointing towards THE CHILD’s worksheet.
There are two columns. In the first, a typed sentence: Se viste. In the second, THE CHILD’s translation, in blue pen: She hangs herself.
She points to the previous sentence, pleading innocent.
Ella cuelga el vestido. She hangs the dress. A word had gotten lost, one changed. It was only natural she’d get confused. THE CHILD smiles, her hair a dark, ratty nest. It taunts FRANCES’ HUSBAND. He balls his hand into a fist.
She knows what she’s doing, says a voice, but it turns out to be that of THE SECOND AIDE, driving FRANCES with a broom, away from where THE AIDE is trying to replace the catheter.
FRANCES shakes her head.
Just because she knows what she’s doing doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
So clean his piss, THE AIDE hisses, her tongue curling eagerly. The SECOND AIDE holds the broom toward FRANCES.
I pat THE CHILD on the head and follow the voice.
I stand at the doorway, looking hard and away. Early afternoon light sharpens the naked branches of the oak into tiny knives. On the neighbor’s side of the street, two trash cans, a holey piece of pink plastic, lid bitten. Behind the cans, a white fence, newly painted.
Don’t treat her like child, says THE SECOND AIDE, but nobody is speaking. HORSE’S WIFE is on all fours, peering under the bed.
MY FATHER is standing in the corner, causing death to appear.
THE AIDE walks by me. She doesn’t meet my eye.
From the pocket of THE AIDE’s pajamas, a single dollar has fallen. It is folded into quarters. I unfold it and place it on the dresser. I’ve never seen so much private money, says a voice I can’t place. Repeatedly, I run over the bill with my index and middle finger, smoothing it.
To the room in my mind, I introduce a small lamp.
***
A dream I tell to MY LOVER, which she retells to me some time later:
A bug, perhaps a cockroach, dies upon his shell on the concrete where a lifeguard spends each day. What is he dreaming about? she asks.
Well, I suppose that all which is real fits in the space of a pool.
Ever since I could remember soil, I say, as THE LIFEGUARD, I’ve never understood why there is never enough, enough—
In the booth, she says, the lifeguard jerks off into the bright nothing, casting into wax somebody’s heat-baked confession.
I didn’t see that, I say.
He reads the tarot of the world, she says, and it is blank.
On the beach, distance curdles between us as some biting thing.
I figure myself a hero. I call it something that needs protecting.
Nothing is worth protecting, she says, only the things you own, but once you own them, they are no longer worth anything at all.
I say: You should have been a bible salesman. I piss off—
What I mean is, it’s a different motion, she says, gesturing outwards. She sits un-changing as a tree, her pants stiff with rain.
I do like what she has said. Meaning I find myself wanting to say it too.
So I pit myself against the tree, the consequence being that I cannot seem to send myself in her direction. By which I mean that suddenly there is no direction towards which to send myself.
***
FRANCES’ HUSBAND is rubbing his stomach with his mannish hands.
He takes off his sweater, nervously, revealing a cotton t-shirt. His shoulders are bony like bird feet.
When HORSE’s room begins to feel like a sauna, I revel. I call it an interruption, time taking the shape of a conversation, between those who’d become aware of it, and those who pretended not to be.
I remember a small boy who entered a steam room. He made some of our heads turn, because he was the only one clothed. I remember the way his shirt stuck to his kid chest, like a balloon. Eventually we forgot he was there.
Another person was so still it was hard to tell if they were asleep or un-conscious. When I caught myself trying to decide, I began to leave. On my way out, I could not resist. I turned around and looked at the boy. His eyes were wide, and it was possible he was weeping, or else he was sweating. They were wet, his eyes. Whose aren’t?
Perhaps this is how it went, I say to myself. Outside the window the world is white and dirtying.
FRANCES’ HUSBAND walks through the hallway and into the room.
It is the point in the dying in which we create events from inside ourselves. A collection of small scenes playing out from inside the hollow of some chest, just blood in the shape of dirt, whatever flowing becoming one ground, cracking if only to reveal a system of roots, a map that clarifies the pressure –specific and entirely ordinary.
He looks at me, like he is parsing my face for a memory that will appear, a running of light against a flat surface.
I am no screen, I want to say, but I am a screen, and so I don’t say anything.
FRANCES’ look is different than his, serious and boring. I watch her eyes glaze. I remember a feeling of adoration.
I walk to the kitchen. I slice an apple.
The air grows hot. I consider what it means to accept a life in which cutting one’s finger means one lies about it. Yes I’d serve apples, No I wouldn’t pause to think about the tree, no source, no origin. An absentminded servant is a good servant. To be unable to trace an object to its history makes it perfect, like a circle.
FRANCES puts an apple to THE BABY’s mouth, and THE BABY sniffs it. FRANCES sniffs her finger, licks it. THE AIDE takes the empty plate from me and walks it to the kitchen. I think THE AIDE has touched my hand during the exchange, but after a few seconds, I am no longer sure.
I recount a memory of a conversation.
MY LOVER is turned away from me, standing in the stream of the shower. I am cold, but willing.
I am marveling at her back. How long it is. How like a neck. These are words that stick, vibrate as an image with a pulse of its own, so I know it will follow me, not un-like a dog, or its shadow, but even an induced darkness, some formlessness of night, disappears only the edge of the image, and it remains pulsing from its center, dutiful and stupid.
She has asked me about my nearest-to-death experience.
I was in a hospital, I tell her, rubbing a shard of soap against her back. For a small thing, not anything so serious. A little scare—
An erotic pause—
Well, I say, the hospital was over-crowded. And we didn’t have rooms, or we did, but they were made by curtains. I was listening to the voices of the people beside me, the children of a woman who I couldn’t hear at all.
The doctor says: Do you consent to chest compressions in the event of a heart event? And the children say: We do!
And the doctor says: If chest compressions are to be administered, the chance of survival is close to zero. Chest compressions will be the mode of death.
I didn’t understand, I tell her. How could the actions of life and death be identical, and for the choice between the two to matter. You choose life and still death is what you get.
Yes, she says. That is what a day means.
I thought of all that made the listening possible, the over-crowdedness, the lack of hospital funding. It was the thin-ness of the curtain. It was the knowledge of a curtain, what it would let through, what it couldn’t.
It’s because we can tell a curtain from a wall, I say, which you can’t in dreams, or at certain distances, in certain lighting, and of course there are walls with holes, accidental holes, made with drills or with fists, and holes made for pleasure.
If a wall has a hole, I suppose it is more like a curtain. Is there such a thing as a bad wall? There are certain things to which bad can stick: people, ideas. Not animals, nor taxes. Not walking—
Anyway, I say, it was not then, but when they began to translate to somebody who was not in the room, who spoke a language that was not the doctor’s. And they could not find the word for chest compressions, but it didn’t matter; they gave up. This is when I knew a death had occurred, or rather that life had created a hole in its wake for words to get sucked in and spat back out, voided of their spirits. The chest compression is the hole, I say; it is the untranslatable thing, which is what bore itself through our curtain, so whatever was happening to them was happening to me, too.
But it wasn’t, she says, happening to you, or else if you were trying to speak about it, you’d be swallowing all this water—
She is right, I know, because this is my experience of love. While I realize I am acquiescing, she is shaking her head like a dog.
As it turns out, every kind of falling is suffered exactly the same.
***
In HORSE’s room the sentence fills itself with whatever feels proximate.
That unwashed plate will be the mode of death. Dry air will be the mode of death. Her brother’s—alleged—affair will be the mode of death.
The room fills with steam.
My fantasies are of a mythological nature:
To flat her back ‘til it is pasture.
To belt her hairs thin across like beams of some plow.
HORSE lets out a groan. We assume position. His lips are cracked, beyond the possibility of repair. They are broken and bleeding. A cracked lip is a small scandal. When it’s happening to you, you hardly notice it at all. It matters less to those who kiss than to those who look, those for whom your blood is surface.
Does your head feel cold? asks THE AIDE.
He didn’t suffer for nothing, says HORSE’S WIFE. It matters.
I am curious as to when language entered. Suddenly there is so much of it. Cold as stone. It separates me. Cold as stone. It separates from me. Less a memory of feeling than a memory of using, the knowing you were getting filled, that metronomic attitude. Certain hands that tick you into being, a funny sort of time-keeping object, which is what you are when the world pours through. Meaning she. Her mouth, her languidness. What was between you: an aberrant perspective. A witness to pluck a theory of distance. Making rocky music.
HORSE’S WIFE gestures towards THE AIDE, her chin raw.
So Horse wasn’t beaten, says HORSE’S WIFE. Then what?
I don’t know – her face fogs. Our tongues dry. My speech curdles inside the room. I ring some alarm – I mean, I speak. My speech is a happening, gummed down and useless. What is happening is eaten.
The glass gets roomy, coughed up. The man in the room is being held down by that distant current.
The man’s face I don’t recognize. His ground is made of wood, then sticks. Crude tracings upon some dirt sign a path to an after space, vibrating still. I try to trace the outline of my thoughts; their edges bleed, like fountains. The vents pushing out a yellow smell. Fewer words for odor than anything else.
My ears are waxy; the heat kettles out –
Like a television, says FRANCES.
The ground softens from its inside. His eyes are wet. Nobody touches, or else they all do.
The river runs me back. The verb splits at the bone. Yes, his head is open like a clam. It is opening.
I would like to go now, mouths a voice, broken free.
FRANCES’ HUSBAND has stooped, has curved his back. He has made a uniform by tucking his shirt and pulling his pants up high. I try to punish him, but my hands betray me. They flex, curve, make animals for whom shadows are missing. Go missing.
What’s in his pocket resembles a weapon but is soft upon close looking. Has he stuffed his pants with tissues, or has the revolt of objects begun from their insides?
I close my eyes, and in the black-ness a form emerges. A body whipped so bad it goes rubber. Bounces like that.
I see HORSE waving with a flat and featureless hand, his palms free of future, at least the kind that’s inscribed.
FRANCES speaks.
Is there any other?
He is standing in the pink which is flat. I get shamed looking for MY LOVER, but the shame makes some shrub.
It doesn’t burn. When the absence of fire surprises you more than a fire itself, you are in the aftermath of a life. I mean, the rules are different.
For example, in a movie I saw once, a pig was put on trial for eating a small child. The pig was found guilty, incarcerated for a short time, then executed in the town square. The crowd watched silently. Or if they cheered, it was slight, excusable.
The pig was hung up by the thick red thread of a logic it could not conceive of. My throat— full of steam—is bent back the same.
The movie I shove into a small box. I make a label out of sallow skin. I make a name out of stray hairs. I make a lock of evidence out of a feeling I have about the way things will go. Keep going. Use it to cough myself worthy. I call the box mine. In doing so, it gets gone. I get on my hands and knees. Ready to place. Ready to snout myself back.
MY FATHER is standing by HORSE’S bed. He is rubbing his head across HORSE’S arm and into the crook of his neck.
I cough up some static. We’re crying, I say. And so we are. For a minute, which is a mountain. HORSE is being carried up, on the back of a man whose face is rubbed out, or made rubber, by a toy thing, history’s whip – of history or belonging to I can’t say. HORSE’s face is small, pink and turned upwards. The mountain is coated in snow, otherwise featureless. We look to MY FATHER, who has begun to squeal. THE BABY hiccups. THE CHILD makes no sound.
Did you consider that the only way to bury the child was to bury the pig? asks MY FATHER. He drops the whip. I pick it up.
Did you consider that the only way to bury the pig was to give him a public execution?
I use the whip to soften THE AIDE’s breast.
My gladness takes the shape of a sentence. I am glad to see her. My sentence is not a lashing but a beckoning, a hand cupped, a cup bent by the motion of my fingers towards my chest. She does not approach me, but her head tilts.
A slightest pang. I say Yes I’ll take it.
Saying yes to the tilt is to confirm the Earth. Means the Earth is in a perpetual state of self confirmation.
That is: if the world is a word, if a word is a room.
THE AIDE’s breast softens, like bread. Leavening is not my word. Neither is the leaving. The article is mine. I use it to cover myself. I make myself public. I pick myself up. Shrouded, I stand. A chorus of squeals; our voices end where we do. Or else –
It isn’t un-religious. We aren’t being un-faithful. We stand a circle, feet arrowed towards each other like those of crows.
I open my eyes. I am being redundant.
I trace the whip, and it fills out a memory of a tightrope.
If a room is a moment, says THE CHORUS, it means we can’t stay here. HORSE mumbles; THE CHORUS pries open his mouth.
Turns out death’s gate is not like the curtain of a hospital room. It’s more like the barrier of a bathroom stall.
Yes, yes. It’s a wall with a space at the bottom.
