The Laboratory of Love, page 9
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“Requiem for a Friend”
Rorschach II : The Black Hole
It’s time to achieve the top of a giant tree rooted deep into America. Lofty in your sixth summer sky, a halo of white cloud circling your head. Sweet cherry already rich in your mouth; further fruit tempts nearby, a branch breaks as it’s grasped. The roar past your ears, the drop faster and faster. Falling feels long and dark, though your eyes are open and your heart beats just six times before you thud onto East Africa. A white cast on your left arm rusts the same red as the dirt beneath blazing bougainvillea. When Dorothy descended from particular sky, she learned how the world can change completely in the blink of an eye. In every Oz, colours are too brilliant and smells too pungent, and light falls in angles unknown to either Canada or Kansas. Stare at the scar on your elbow that promises to fade but never to disappear; will misshapen bones float until they reassume a perfect shape. Stars drip from the heavens, stones sink through sea. Only some elusive, obscene wizard can lift you back through time to the top of the sky, where you viewed the New World before the fruit was plucked.
The black hole lacks the dimensions of time and space; it is without darkness or light, warmth or cold. Existence inside this void resembles deep sleep induced by a field of poppies, except there are no dreams or even nightmares to remind you that an undistorted world waits nearby. It is the blankness that stretches between losing consciousness in a bland suburban house and waking in some cage without a key. Between injecting the needle in Sacramento and withdrawing it in Winnipeg. Once you enter the black hole, cackles the wicked witch, you will never escape it entirely. (Back in her drab farmhouse kitchen, prairie dust sifts upon Dorothy as she gazes out the window, across flat fields of corn, hoping and dreading to be torn away by another tornado.) You will always walk carefully upon the earth, peering at ground that can suddenly open like a hungry mouth to swallow you up and then spit you out, nearly whole, beside the Sphinx, on the Equator, inside Hollywood, upon the lonely moon. Or say the globe is mined with spots as fragile as the kind that decorate a newborn baby’s skull. Turn a corner of any unassuming street to find yourself inhabiting a different city, another year, a distinct skin: you are Rick or Rickie, Richard or Reeves; he is ten or twenty or thirty; this may be Salobreña, Sidi Ifni, Santa Cruz. You learn not to seem surprised by the most abrupt change: it has always been like this; it will always be this way.
Once I tried to touch the top of the sky, you mumble to your smirking shadow on Santa Monica Boulevard, on ghastly Geary Street, on any number of forlorn sidewalk strolls. It slides away in fickle search of a more substantial form to follow. Sailors who’ve lost their dog tags huddle in doorways, drift unanchored through slick night, whistle as you trickle past barred-up bodegas and burned out streetlamps and madwomen dancing in rings in the rain. In the distance, another siren shrieks its lullaby; one more alarm punctuates the Tenderloin’s bitter bedtime tale. Each splattering drop further rusts your metallic skin and corrodes your tin-man joints: by dawn you will creak and groan your way through vacant lots littered with fetuses butchered then abandoned among the gaudy debris, all the blooming weeds.
Wake cautiously at morning’s aborted birth; with suspicion open eyes. What room emerges from darkness into daylight? Who is this sad scarecrow leaking straw beside you? Do the lines and angles of his cloth face draw the map of a continent you know, a landscape you love? On your skin are fresh marks of damage, betraying how hard you crashed to the ground this time. Beside the bed, next to the bloodied syringe, are clothes that fit. Feel in a pocket for the slip of paper printed with a name and address. You’ve learned to hang onto this scrap as fiercely as you clutched the broken branch during the first dizzying descent, the original journey to alien earth. In another pocket hide dollars, keys. You prowl the unfamiliar rooms in search of enlightening evidence; but you are no longer a confident detective; there will never be sufficient clues to solve this puzzle perfectly. To seam the crack yawning between the jungle of the western slopes and junkyards of queer cities. To explain how and why you ended up within these generic walls, these anonymous cement embraces.
Baptize yourself with the name on the slip of paper. Take a taxi to the address printed there. Open a door with keys that fit the lock. Enter bare rooms as strange as those just left. Home? The word echoes without end inside this vacuum; repeats until it garbles beyond meaning into only ironic noise. Empty space sucks at memory, hollows your hurting head. Outside the window, leaves spin in autumn wind, whirl through the pale Portland sky. A splotch of black ink stains a wall that might have been blank white yesterday. A souvenir of the same intruder who during your absence leaves hieroglyphics in the notebook—signs and symbols you attempt to decipher into language that might explain how to escape the haunted forest? Your mind skips over a question without an answer, ponders the mark upon the wall instead. Inspect it closely then lean nearer, until air whistles past your ears again. Once more you plummet through darkness. One day, hope’s bad habit stubbornly believes—foolishly insists—you will emerge from the black hole as another brave explorer who has patiently been waiting to be born.
Peggy Lee in Africa
At night three children float in bed and listen to their father play Peggy Lee records at the other end of the latest house. This one is built of cinder blocks and a tin roof; instead of glass windows, there are wire-mesh screens to let in breeze and to keep out snakes. The cool voice slips through another hot Tanzanian night, I know a little bit about a lot of things, silencing crickets, hushing cicadas. For a moment, the music mutes. Maybe the father no longer revolves around his room like the record, no longer sits on the edge of his bed, large hands curved around knees, head bowed, listening. Maybe he has finally switched off the light to drown in darkness like his children. Then Peggy Lee begins to croon again, over and over incanting the same spell upon a man who is fearful of snakes and who won’t ride roller coasters and who feels faint at the sight of his own blood. Tangled jungle pours scent down the Ngondo hills, poisoned perfume wraps around the house.
Sometimes during the day, when only the houseboy is home with him, Donald tiptoes into the father’s room. On the record covers, Peggy Lee’s face is pale and smooth beneath short waved hair that is more white than blonde. Her lips are painted deep red. Donald last saw his mother two years before, during a June picnic in the yard behind a relative’s house in Canada. Cousins and aunts and uncles balance paper plates of cold fried chicken and potato salad, ride coloured blankets that hover like magic carpets just above the grass. “Look!” cries Madeleine, his father’s oldest sister, pointing upward. Behind the fenced yard rises the hill with the hospital on top. A woman in white stands on a balcony high up there and waves to everyone below. Donald believes he can see her short blonde hair, her deeply red mouth; it will be years before he learns how distance can distort or damage vision, transforming any coiled length of rope into an asp. Someone also wearing white appears behind the ascendant woman and leads her back inside. A game of croquet begins at the picnic, bright balls are sent spinning across the lawn, there’s a hollow sound of wood knocking wood.
Soon Lily and MJ are asleep. Donald can hear his sister and brother breathing in their nearby beds, oblivious to the messages still transmitted by Peggy Lee through the Morogoro night. I know a little bit about biology, she confides. “She’s not here,” the father once replied to Donald, running one hand through short black hair, squinting at the sisal fields in the valley below the cinder-block house. Lily squirms in her sleep; something’s always trying to get her. Now the father has stepped with a flashlight from the kitchen door. A weak beam plays through darkness, searches for danger undulating nearby. Tentatively, the man takes several more steps forward, retreats back inside. Peggy Lee sings on until dawn.
“That old snake in the grass,” Lily will write to Donald twenty years later, from inside visions of vipers. “‘Honey, what does Peggy Lee have to do with anything?’ Mitch asked, the last time I saw him. Apparently, Mitch still thinks MJ will be found; he says he’s doing everything in his power to make sure his boy is brought back home. Of course, he never mentions you,” writes Lily from the clinic in Canada that Donald pictures poised high on a hill, with innumerable balconies from which hosts of mothers and sisters wave to people playing summer games below. “You’re smart to refuse to step foot back on our native soil,” adds Lily. “Don’t return, it’s not safe, venom abounds.”
The father is clear-eyed and energetic during daylight. He changes out of his teaching trousers, white shirt, and thin tie; in an old pair of shorts, he throws a basketball at a hoop fixed to the side of the house. The children sit in the shaded doorway and watch the father’s skin darken to the colour of an African’s. He dribbles and dodges past an invisible opposition, scores two more points. “How many does that make?” he asks excitedly. Inside, the houseboy prepares food; when it’s ready, he goes home to the village for the night. Supper cools and hardens on the table, unpacked crates from Canada loom in dimming rooms. A moment after bright sunlight rules, it is nearly dark. The father attempts one more lay-up. The children can no longer make out his leap toward the hoop, his drop back to earth. It doesn’t matter that they’re no longer able to see something round spinning between his palms. They know already that he holds the world in his hands.
While the evening is still early, and MJ and Lily are playing the Canada game, the father might listen to Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. He hums around the house, practices new Swahili words aloud, interrupts the children’s activities to tell stories of when he was a boy. “I was the only one in town to swim the Columbia River,” he brags. “Everyone else felt afraid of the currents, the rocks, the undertow.” Especially perilous swims are described in detail as the children’s eyes grow heavy in their nodding heads. Later, if wakened by Peggy Lee, they’ll know that in the morning the father will be silent over his coffee, with skin swollen beneath eyes which do not turn toward children who squabble or bicker or cry.
While the father is “bringing home the bacon,” as he calls teaching history, Lily and MJ attend a makeshift school in the nunnery at the top of the mission, where the jungle begins and colobus monkeys sway the palms. Weary of following the silent houseboy from room to room, Donald walks up the road and among the scattered mission buildings. The father’s voice is suddenly close, clear. Through an open window, Donald sees rows of young men and women with dark skin and white teeth gazing at the father. He sits with swinging legs on the edge of a desk, then springs up to write on the blackboard. “If we know what took place before, we may understand what happens now,” the father explains. His eyes travel around the classroom, come to rest on the window. He continues to speak smoothly about an impersonal past, as though Donald did not interrupt his line of vision, as though his son were not there. The boy crouches between freshly watered shrubs and digs hands into damp dirt. He paints his face with the markings of a lost or extinct tribe, reels at the rich odour of excavated earth.
One night Lily finds a snake curled in a corner of the children’s room. The father pales. Gripping the machete, he stares at the intruder from a distance of several feet. “You can sleep in my bed,” he tells the children, closing the door of their room tightly and leaving the snake undisturbed, alone, coiled around itself for warmth. The children crowd into the father’s big bed; he has moved with the record player to the living room for the night. I know a little more about psychology, suggests the singer, charming the snake into lifting its head, extending its muscled length, swaying in sinuous circles. Peggy Lee performs magic until morning, when the houseboy opens the door of the children’s room to find the snake is no longer there. The father carefully inspects the window screens, fails to find flaws.
“If I could get back to Africa, I’d be okay,” Lily writes Donald from the clinic they won’t let her leave. “There, at least, the snakes are real; you can close the door against them. Peggy Lee makes them vanish in a puff of smoke. Do you remember the time Mitch suddenly decided we had to learn to swim, packed us into the white Peugeot, drove all morning until we reached the coast? ‘Anyone can learn to swim in the Indian Ocean,’ he said. ‘The water’s so salty it holds you up when you don’t know how to float. You couldn’t drown if you tried.’ He shouted instructions from shore, he refused to get even his toes wet. ‘I already know how to swim,’ he said. ‘Float!’ he called. And we did, didn’t we? We floated all afternoon in water as warm as blood, while on land Mitch turned over rocks in search of cowries. ‘I won’t always be around to save you from drowning,’ he said when we were allowed out of the water at last to wobble on legs that had forgotten how to navigate solid ground. ‘I can’t always save you from this or from that,’ he frowned, holding a shell to his ear. What faint music did he hear? I no longer hear Peggy Lee in the night. Do you? Does MJ, wherever he is? MJ would get me out of this place if he were here. I keep thinking he drowned, though I know that’s not what really happened. MJ is still with Peggy Lee in Africa. Like Sister Bridget, they disappeared into the jungle, in search of the river’s source, somewhere at the top of the Ngondo hills, which we could never find. Missing, is the official word. Not dead. Did you know Mitch has started collecting stamps since he retired? ‘Honey, I have to have a hobby to keep me busy now that my babies have abandoned me,’ he explained in a postcard from Thailand. I take it the wise Buddhists wouldn’t have him; anyway, he’s in Budapest now. Stay away, little brother. Remain in Spain. The snakes have briefly vanished, which only means they’ll be back in greater number soon. Everything would be all right if I could smell the frangipani by the river just one more time,” writes Lily in another of the letters Donald will fail to answer, not wanting a message to his sister to be read first by doctors and nurses with clean pink skin, with cold Canadian eyes.
MJ claims that she’s in a hospital; Lily insists she’s dead. “Who?” asks Donald. Lily and MJ agree that the mother didn’t really have short waved hair that was more white than blonde. She didn’t use deep-red lipstick, and she didn’t sing the same song over and over until you fall asleep. “You can’t remember,” they tell Donald. He remembers riding with her on a roller coaster, while Lily and MJ occupy the car behind, and the father watches anxiously from below. Climbing slowly, falling fast, snaking swiftly all the way to the end. The children lurch off the ride, join the father on the ground, watch the mother ride again. Her head is thrown back, short blonde hair whips; her laughter shrills above screams of other passengers. She rides a dozen more times, laughing like she will when they come to take her away. (Then Donald stays with Aunt Madeleine during the day, and the house on Aster Drive is quiet at night; the father plays Peggy Lee and prepares to take the children across the world, far from everything.) Finally descending from thrilling heights, the mother is silent in her summer dress. Her red lips press tightly together. Children and father melt cotton candy in their mouths, throw rings at gaudy prizes. Lily wins a big stuffed snake she calls Honey.
Nothing grows around the cinder-block house yet. The bare dirt is red and cracked from lack of water and too much heat, or it’s a field of mud during the rains. “It would be a waste of time to start a garden,” says the father after three years, twiddling his famously green thumbs, “since we’re here temporarily.” The Peggy Lee records have become worn and scratched; a constant hiss threatens to drown her voice out. Sometimes the needle skips over damaged grooves. Peggy Lee jumps from one unfinished phrase to another, fails to make sense. Donald has grown old enough for school, up where the butterflies are brilliant, but the convent that contains the classroom has been abandoned: after Sister Bridget disappeared in the jungle, the other nuns returned to Holland to walk in wooden shoes through poppy fields and to skate like Hans Brinker across frozen canals. Occasionally, the father gathers the children around the atlas or dictionary for an hour in the evening; more often, he retreats into his bedroom after supper. “When are we going home?” MJ asks once. “This is home,” the father replies, kneading his left bicep slowly, then saying he has lessons to prepare. His door shuts behind him; Peggy Lee starts to sing again. The children’s hair blanches beneath African sun, until it’s more white than blonde. They climb the river that rushes down through jungle, search for the source somewhere at the top of the Ngondo hills. Sometimes they believe Sister Bridget flits beyond thick vines, no longer lost. They eat green mangos until their stomachs turn tight as drums. Oldest to youngest, they file along a narrow path with grass higher than their heads on either side. This order is unfortunate for Lily. When they meet a snake, it will be too startled by MJ, in front, to bite him; it will already have had its fill by the time Donald comes along at the rear. Unlucky Lily, forever in the middle, sees serpents in the clinic. They are always long and thick and tattooed with intricate designs whose brilliant colours appear only in the jungle or in dreams. “Don’t bother,” Lily replies to the father’s last long-distance wish to visit her bare white room. “You can’t save me from the poisoned fangs. That never was your strong point.”
The father cries for help. The children find him at the kitchen sink. A knife has fallen by his feet and deep-red blood flows from his thumb. He leans against MJ. Lily runs for bandages and tape. Donald watches the father’s legs tremble. I’m a little gem in geology, boasts Peggy Lee, knowing nearly everything. “I’m bleeding and it won’t stop,” Lily tells MJ one day. “I don’t know what to do.” “Neither do I,” replies my brother.
“Dear Lily,” Donald could have written. “Peggy Lee is still alive and kicking, though I hear she no longer resides in Morogoro, Tanzania. ‘The climate,’ she murmurs, stroking her velvet throat, ‘was not good for my voice.’ Now the notes are no longer perfectly pitched; now she’s old and ill. They prop her on stage in a blonde wig and dark glasses and she snaps her fingers through “Fever” for the millionth time. Mitch wrote to me that you refused his offer to fly across the world to see you. He said it breaks his heart that he can no longer save his children from this thing or the other thing. I always thought everything would be all right as long as Peggy Lee kept singing. She could save us from anything, I believed,” Donald doesn’t write to Lily, who finally coils around herself for warmth. The clinic and Canada are always cold. Sometimes my sister unwinds her length and flicks her tongue. A slow hiss is her only language now.
