Blue Woman Burning--, page 12
Zyx w vut srq ponml kjih gfed cba
The words warmed around the edges, took shape:
Ztik wr vut srix pomond jill get by
Resolved into focus:
Stick your foot slick upon kill get by
Made sense:
Seize protons with skill to get through
Instructions. Yes, that was how it was done, that was how you separated the electrons, just grab them between their silver interstices and—
Something nagged at him, a buzzing sound that brought him back to the rooftop. The rooftop? How did he get to the rooftop? Where was the Altiplano? He looked down at the tarred roof, and that buzzing sound was someone calling him, reminding him of something he didn’t want—
“Ovid!” he thought he heard someone scream.
Blue, that goddess, grabbed his hands, her grip like steel, and pulled. She ran in a circle, and he stumbled after. The buzzing went away as he fell into step. They ran faster and faster, becoming a silver ring, a spinning wheel, faster than light, faster than thought.
“Ovid!” he thought he heard again. But their speed thinned and distorted the sound, raking it out of his mind. He was spinning so fast now that Blue became one with him as a vortex sucked them in. Finally, he understood. If you spin fast enough, faster than the atoms spin, you could do it.
Out of wild nowhere and the silver far interstices of space between ancient molecules, his storm began to rise. All along it had been possible. Eustacia could have told him how to do it. Which means she had left him by choice. Betrayed him. A cry rose up from the desert floor, the stone depth, the tangled labyrinth. A cry rose up from inside him at such a steadily accelerating decibel that every atom of his body shot screaming toward the sky. It was a never-ending cry, an outraged and joyous cry, the cry of a man who had finally cracked the code, passed the test, and aced the exam that all along his mother had set for him, knowing that his atomic call could summon the force to part the fabric of life and step through.
He flew. That was what it felt like to break through, flying and falling and buzzing so fast that he was dispersing into a million silver specks and joining his universal mother.
Fallon drove to the hospital full speed and came screeching to a halt at the edge of the parking lot, transfixed by the sight of Ovid on the hospital roof. He ran full tilt at the short wall that rimmed the hospital’s flat roof, and she gasped, but he just jumped onto the wall. The sun was up, having just let go of the horizon, and it was directly behind him so she could barely make out what he was doing. He was walking on the ledge, teetering, crouching, hopping, gesticulating. She jumped out of the car, leaving the door wide open.
“Ovid!” she screamed. “Ovid!” She waved her arms at him, but he didn’t notice her. Even shielding her eyes, she couldn’t see him clearly between the stabbing rays of sun. But she recognized the posture, the gait, the way he held his hands. Was there someone up there with him? Something flickered in and out of the light behind him. She called and called, but he didn’t listen.
She couldn’t say what happened next. She was caught up in a roaring wind, a cry so loud that it twisted her intestines by the roots and splintered her nerve filaments, a shriek that thrust a flexible metal blade between her scalp and her skull. She covered her eyes.
What happened? She wasn’t sure. She had an image of him on the ground, running in circles over the blacktop in a rage just as he had run over their mother’s remains on the Altiplano. As he ran, his fists became stones, the stones jumped, and the ground trembled. His grief toppled, his anger cracked, and his tears split the blacktop hot and hissing. He threw himself at the ground so hard that he became the ground, went into the ground, spread himself out and upon and through and beneath the ground, because only the ground knew how to handle so much rage and grief, only the earth could receive it and send it down, down through the rocks, through its molten center, until all that was left was liquid metal. And Ovid no more.
But Fallon, who had seen this before in the opposite direction, who ran to the spot where Ovid had once been—who ran in circles over the cracked blacktop searching for some entry for herself—Fallon remained just a body above the stones. Just the body of one who had lost herself, to find herself, to lose herself again.
Fallon stopped breathing—or realized that she had stopped and tried to breathe again, finding the air so long gone it scraped her lungs like sand when it returned. Then she ran.
She ran from the parking lot, down the street, past houses, fields, and trees, out into open space. She flew over rock and walls, ditches, and streams. Branches beat her face and briars tore her legs, but still she ran, until she too might disperse, ran until the air ripped her lungs with fire, ran herself to exhaustion, ran until she dropped, senseless and heaving onto the quilted forest floor between tree roots, waiting for her own apotheosis. But she remained accursedly solid. Above ground. Whole, yet halved.
A world of fatigue dropped on her and crushed her to sleep.
13
FUGUE
In the days that followed, Fallon sat on the gray bank of a long black river, looking at the people walking on the other side. Her side of the river was the land of the dead. The people on the other side were far away and no taller than her thumb. Their muted voices pushed through cotton. Policemen, lawyers, and morticians came and went, talking and sitting, but the river carried off their words. She sent words over the river toward them in boats made of leaves, hoping her words would stop theirs from crossing.
Walter came to talk to her as she lay on her bed in her original childhood room, the one she had shared with Ovid and Terry. She tried to focus on the shapes Walter’s lips were taking, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. She felt vaguely sorry for him but wanted to slap him at the same time. Nausea sloshed somewhere far away. She nodded her head to make him leave.
It was unseasonably warm, and it rained and rained and rained. When it didn’t rain, the air itself swelled to the point that it was hard to walk through, so she lay down most of the time. But her bedspread absorbed the water from the air and stuck to her skin. The rain saturated the cells of her skin, bloating it. She wanted to scrape it off with her nails to get down to the bone-clean quick of it all, the hard, white, mindless core. Silence. She craved silence but then found it horribly long and boring, so she had to get up and move.
Days passed in jumbled images with no connective tissue. She tried to watch TV, but the words moved too quickly, and she couldn’t follow the pictures. She tried reading, but her mind slipped off the words like water off plastic. She stared at a chunk of chicken on the end of her fork and thought how much it looked like wood. It tasted like wood. No saliva formed when she chewed. How strange the word “fork” was. Such an absurd sound. Fork. Fork. Fork. No logical connection to the object.
No object is solid, said Eustacia’s voice. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that every object was too solid, too grubby, too grimy, too sticky, too full of every thought and feeling that anyone had ever invested in it. At the furthest edge of her vision, Ovid’s tools sat in their boxes, the oil of his hands still fragrant upon them. But she couldn’t think of that now.
And still it rained. Endless rain. Rainingly endless. Doors swelled so that they were hard to open and close. The air was laden with water, more like July than October, and it saturated even the floor so that it grew dark in patches where the varnish was thin. Rugs, walls, and woodwork filled beyond capacity with water and wept. One morning she woke up to find her right hand was swollen like a rubber glove filled with water. She could barely move her fingers. When she reached for a coffee cup, she knocked it over. When she reached for a doorknob, she jammed her fingers.
Another day, she found herself standing in front of Eustacia’s green Dodge Dart. Her body remembered how to drive, though she didn’t. She took the car out in the rain. For a time, it was comforting, as it sailed and bobbed over hill and vale. But then, through the blurry windshield, just outside of town, something black reached up from the road ahead of her. She slowed her car. There it was again, a black hand reaching up out of the asphalt and disappearing. She applied the brakes. She wasn’t imagining it. The world really was like this. Something was coming to take her. She was ready.
She pulled over and got out of the car. No one else was around. Shielding her face from the rain, she darted into the road. But it was only a dead crow. The wind was blowing one of its wings into the air. Its black feathers fanned upwards and out, then fell back to the earth.
Sanity was a cliff, she suddenly realized, from which she was almost ready to jump, to be free, to be free of logic, of reason, of responsibility, to be free of the exhausting possibility that there was a right way to put the puzzle pieces back together that she just wasn’t seeing.
At home, more people from the hospital came to talk to her. Nobody on that side of the river knew what it was like to be on her side of the river. Christo would know; with his psychotic mother and schizophrenic brother, didn’t he live on this side? He would never call. And Will? The river was too wide to even think about Will. Will belonged too firmly on the side of the living.
The rain finally stopped one day. It was November. The sky was still overcast. She went out to what was left of Ovid’s vegetable garden and lay down. The wet of the cold earth soaked into her clothes. How tenderly he had staked the tomato plants, now gray, hairy stalks. How thoughtfully he had mixed the compost. The sweet smell of leaf rot surrounded her. The broken beehives lay abandoned at the edge of the garden. She looked up at the sky and could not tell if the dim ball in the gray sky was sun or moon. The moon might be a nice place to live, so far away, so quiet, a great big zero in the sky, a cipher to climb into and feel nothing.
A tiny movement on the ground caught her eye. One ant maneuvered a dead spider over its head into an anthill. All its brothers and sisters streamed around it, carrying grains of sand out, bits of food in, endlessly building and cleaning and storing, as they had built and cleaned and stored for thousands of years. They were all ants, the townspeople, the hospital workers, herself, her father, all working tirelessly, buying and selling, building and destroying. The whole noisy planet was humming and spinning, a ball of dirt and water hanging in space with no top and no bottom, no beginning and no end. Exhausting.
14
EMERGING
As Fallon stared at the bark of the sycamore tree, her feet touched ground for the first time since the unnamable event. That was how she knew she had crossed the river back to life. The sycamore tree, with its puzzle-work bark of gray, green, and brown, towered over her. Be like me. Just be. Like me. Its crooked, bushy branches arched skyward and dipped earthward, like a mother reaching down to pick up a child. Weeks of rain had combed all the leaves from its branches, but it stood there more beautiful for its bareness.
Beauty hurt, so she waded back to the shores of death.
Some immeasurable time later, she found herself on the life side of the river again, washing a cup at the kitchen sink. The warm, soapy sponge circled the mouth of the cup and infused her with calm. It was as if her body had a will to life all its own. That’s when she heard a voice in her head say distinctly, “Call Terry.” She stopped washing the cup. Whose voice was that? It was gone. But it was enough. Her mind became clinical. She watched herself look up Terry’s number in the family phone book. She stood outside herself as she dialed, noting how vast the blank space inside her was. After two rings, an ear-splitting tone sounded, and an automated voice spoke: “This number has been disconnected. No further information is available.”
The library was a place of information, her brain told her. But the library was overwhelming. All those books, all those names. It would be easier to drive to California. The simple physicality of it. Just putting one foot in front of the other. Her mind began to tick off items she would need to assemble for the trip.
However, as she stood in the middle of the basement, staring at the layer of dust and crumbled cement that covered the moldy suitcases she’d pulled out around her, she was sucked back to the death side of the river and went to bed.
A few days later, the insistent sound of voices rising and falling woke her, an indefatigable argument. The 6 o’clock news.
She followed the sound to the living room, where Walter sat in his usual chair, long legs crossed, boots neatly polished and tied, one hand resting in a bowl of Spanish peanuts. The news anchor was saying something about a “Miracle Mud Baby.”
“You’re up,” he said. “Feeling better?” He looked grayer. Older.
“What’s going on?” she asked, looking at the footage on TV of a sheriff holding a muddy child in his arms. The camera had cut off the top of his face. He spread his jacket on the top of his squad car and sat the child upon it, her back to the camera. Her muddy arms reached out to him reflexively, and he picked her back up.
“There was another tornado in Oklahoma,” Walter said. “Ripped this child right out of her mother’s arms as she hid in the closet. But this sheriff found the child face down in the mud a hundred feet away, unharmed. They’re calling it a miracle.” The word hit her stomach like tainted food.
“I want to go find Terry,” she said in a monotone, not taking her eyes off the TV.
“Yes. That’s what I’ve been saying. I didn’t think you heard me.” He also kept his eyes on the TV.
She pulled her eyes from the TV screen to scan his face. It was blank. He was still handsome even in old age, with his blue eyes, hawkish nose, and broad brow, hardly wrinkled. He could have been dictating a grocery list. Nothing seemed to surprise him. For a second, she was overtaken by a wild urge to shake him, but an answering blankness inside of her extinguished the urge.
“Can I take the Dodge Dart?”
“Of course.” Eyes still on the TV.
“What will you do without a car?”
“There’s the Colt. You will need to take the Dodge Dart to a mechanic to check it out.”
She was about to return to the kitchen but hung back and peered at him.
Her wobbly legs felt almost solid on the ground.
“Dad, how…are you?”
“Me?” He pulled his eyes from the TV to look at her briefly, then off into space. “I don’t know. I’m—puzzled.”
“Puzzled?” She held the word out from her, like a dirty sock pinched between her thumb and index finger.
“Yes,” he said. He leaned forward in his chair, clasped his hands, and stared at the ground in front of him. “Life is something that happens to you. Why would anyone ever give it up?”
She returned to the kitchen. A few yellow leaves clung to a black branch outside the deep-set window. Christo. Here was a feeling she could withstand, the darkness of their embrace, the stark roundness of their mutual loss.
The phone rang. She jumped. She waited to let the answering machine pick up. When the tone beeped, it was Will’s voice. Her heart surged painfully, as if it was trying to pass a small stone through a valve. He was like that sheriff on the news. For a second, she felt like the muddy baby on the roof of the car, and she could feel the sheriff’s arms under hers as he responded to her gesture and picked her up, a reflex mapped in his DNA.
As Will’s voice sounded on the machine, Walter said, “Oh, there’s that fellow again. He’s called a few times. Said he was a friend of yours.”
She listened to the message. She didn’t move. His voice was so warm. It made her feel her blood flowing, her terrible, toxic blood that carried so many messages through her arteries. He sounded sad, caring, hopeful. She remembered the look on his face when he’d faced the shooter. He cared even for a potential murderer.
His voice paused in the middle of his message, letting the tape recorder spin a moment in silence as if he knew she was standing right there. Her heart twitched painfully again at the thought that she would lose him forever if she didn’t pick up. She reached for the phone, but wordless resistance held her fast, louder than blood, louder than thought.
“Take care,” he said, and hung up, and she could almost feel the cord that attached them ripping.
Her father went out to the porch to sweep. The screen door slapped shut behind him. The methodical swish of the broom brought the rational part of her brain back. She would need warm clothes and cool clothes for crossing the country, as well as a sleeping bag, some plastic dishes, a few pots and pans, water, a first aid kit, and spare gas for the drive through the desert. She began to assemble cooking gear. She could drop the Dodge Dart off at the mechanic in town, and Walter could pick her up.
She went out to the porch to ask him if he would. That’s when she realized the sweeping sound had stopped. He was sitting on the pavement at the far end of the porch, next to the tools. He was leaning over, his hands clasped between his knees, head bowed.
“Dad?” she said, going over to him, placing her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her, his eyes red-rimmed, watery.
“What happened?”
“It’s gone,” he said.
“What’s gone?”
“The toad that used to sit behind the shovels.”
Over the next week she developed a curious, if obsessive, energy, planning her moves down to the smallest detail to maximize efficiency. To heat a cup of coffee, she had to wash the dirty cup first so as not to make more dishes. Then she’d rush to finish other dishes while it was heating. But when the soapy sponge was in her hand, she couldn't stop washing the dishes until they were done. Then the coffee was cold. While she reheated the coffee, she would take a load of laundry to the basement, but in the basement, she found her sleeping bag, and when she brought it back upstairs, the coffee was cold again. So the week went, but this inefficient efficiency got her through, and all the while she thought deeply about Terry, about reclaiming the boy who had always been left behind, the boy who always said, “No, that’s not how it was,” and tapped his foot impatiently.
