“Humans are social creatures”
and so much so that
it’s actually quite difficult
to inflict self-harm.
Empathy or family
absorbs
and takes it on.
That is the true terror.
Isn’t it?
Even alone in a desert,
should someone hear of
your pain,
they would take it on.
That is terror.
We could not be solitary
creatures
until there was only one left.
And even then,
the moan of the toothache
would be for
oneself.
All of the judges in the park have fallen asleep even though the only three competitors left are a blind woman, a child, and a clown.
The blind woman's name is Martha and she's been craning her neck for the whole six hours, not because she can see her Archimedes screw or its high canine prancing but because the straw in her gigantic soda is periscopic in height and if her goals are 1) to stow it in the lawn chair's near-the-mouth cup holder so as to avoid handing around for it every couple of minutes, 2) to sip soda from the cup so as to hinder fatigue from seizing from her the Most Stubborn division win and its concomitant gift card-style 50-dollar prize, and 3) to buy that $49.99 Braille copy of The Kite and Its Human Lord, then she has no choice but to crane her neck. She feels minute wind-impulses in the plastic kite reel that she switches every so often from hand to hand for perspiration-wiping purposes.
The child is named Danny Junior. He is 4 and doesn't exactly know the difference between winning and losing as much as he prefers his kite in the air over anywhere else. His father is lying next to him on his back, arms and legs spread in starfish formation, body inside a compass rose of empty beer bottles. With his final conscious breath that afternoon Danny Senior had made his son promise not to sink Vanessa, their box kite, which is named after Danny Senior's ex-girlfriend. Danny Junior's mom is named Penelope and she didn't come.
The clown is named Sprinkles and aloft before him is a crepuscule-colored Bermuda with balloon animals tied all over the tail. He is a talking clown and is hard up for gigs because the children in this town no longer believe clowns that can talk are real clowns. Real clowns can't talk because they're born without vocal cords. They don't wear makeup or come from Earth. In wrath Sprinkles has wedged into the squeaking joints of each balloon animal a number of well-positioned razorblades that nobody but him can see for all these different reasons. Once he cuts down the other two and wakes the judges up he will win and get his name in the paper and then the world will see that fake clowns are real and real clowns are nothing but some nightmare that lamentably escaped its brain of origin and seeped into the children's lore.
“Real clowns can’t talk because they’re born without vocal cords. They don’t wear makeup or come from Earth.”
The judges are asleep, Martha is blind, Danny Junior is small, and his father is insensible. Of them all, only Sprinkles the clown's eyes perceive away.
Martha will feel a strange light tug as Sprinkles' Bermuda's tail's balloon animals' razorblades sink into her Archimedes screw and send it spiraling into the grass. Any second C.P.S. will probably part Danny Junior from his kite forever. Sprinkles' Bermuda will sail lonely and free through the sky of that acre in which the parks department had decided to convene the kite competition by a tense, malicious, and nail-bitingly narrow vote.
Dear Alexa,
I really wish you would come back and visit your mother once in a while. She’s awful lonely in there, and I can only make the trip so often.
When I do make it, she seems to have improved. Propped up in her chair with a thin blanket draped over her knees. Of course, she still cannot speak, but that is to be expected. We tuck a small bunch of napkins in her shirt collar to catch the spittle before it ruins her clothes. Even so, she is in high spirits. Especially when compared to her roommate. That poor woman has no one. No children or family to speak of — a true ward of the state. Some days I’m convinced no one comes in to check on her for vast stretches of time. So she’s left to wallow in her own filth, silently bracing herself for a finite and daunting future.
And that, truth be told, is why I write. I know your mother wasn’t always perfect. That sometimes as you grew up she spent more time nursing a bottle than paying attention to you and your needs. But she still deserves better than this. You always had new clothes and three hot meals a day, which I promise is more than your grandparents ever did for us. You had it lucky, in a way.
Isn’t your husband some kind of fancy doctor? Couldn’t the two of you, together, afford a single room for her at the least? A place she could move around in, with a view of the patio, instead of the parking lot? See, we would if we could, but your cousin just had another baby, and we’re helping her and her husband build a new addition on the house. Speaking of your cousin, have you called her yet to congratulate her?
And, besides, we’re the ones who visit her. We remember her birthday and bring her the pictures of the kids. You could at least kick in a little bit of the costs. Has she ever even met your little Rudy yet? Christ, he’s three years old — he should meet his grandmother before, God forbid, she passes away.
Heavens, thinking about it now, I realize we haven’t seen you in years. I know airfare can be expensive but, how long has it been? Five years? Six? Since your father’s funeral, or your sister’s? I know we haven’t always been the closest, but a family is a family, no matter what anyone says about it. Especially not those fancy therapist types.
“I know we haven’t always been the closest, but a family is a family, no matter what anyone says about it.”
And, for chrissakes, if you don’t plan on ever coming back, if you plan on severing all ties from your history, at least give me power of attorney. I’d like to take a look at her charts, and the cocktail of medication they force-feed her every day. I’m convinced she doesn’t need all of it. Because even though she’s better than most, sometimes when I come to visit, she’s in a fog. Her eyes are glossed over, while she stares at one of those hideous off-white walls. She even ignores the jazz station I put on for her, and that usually gets her dancing. It isn’t right.
I really hope I’ve changed your mind. She lights up when she looks at old pictures of you and our sister — even more so when I show her pictures of your little Rudy on the Facebook. I know that I can be dark, and even heavy-handed, but it’s only because I love you and your mother so much. I want you to remember where you came from with pride, not disdain.
Please, just come home this year for Christmas. Bud and the kids would love to see you. If only just for a day or two. It’d do all of us some good, even you, you’ll see.
With Love & God’s Blessing,
Aunt Elsa
The heat here is worse than the heat I remember every summer before. Driving in my brother’s car as we stuck our hands out the window, swimming our fingers through the thick air, pretending badly that leaving the windows down was keeping us any cooler. My legs sticking to wherever they landed — the seat, a bench, each other — and pulling away with deep red marks, striped bands, announcing to the world exactly where I’d been before.
The heat here is dry. I wake up in the mornings with my throat scratching for water, hardly able to take one fine morning breath. I kick off the sheets as I sleep, but it’s not like in New York — humid in July, welcome rain, river nights, cold forties from the corner deli. Here the sweat comes purely from you, teeming from every pore you never knew existed. Your skin produces it constantly, nonstop, and when it hits the air it seems to evaporate immediately, coaxing more sweat out. Come cool me down.
“Come cool me down.”
The heat here makes me daydream about my first nights, dancing salsa at a club and then into the street, half carried home. Spinning me around and around and around, he in a white shirt, me in that silk dress with the polka dots. A cool gold glow to the city as its inhabitants ate drank danced slept fucked smoked cheated. We cheated. The heat made me think that maybe I didn’t, but we did.
The heat here has me talking in my sleep. Has me dreaming impossibilities, you and he and she and me, all in the same room, all taking the same train, all doing the same normal thing and getting along. I wake up unaware of what’s true, what’s happened, what hasn’t.
The heat here has my hand smearing ink in my notebook, leaving thumbprints on new book pages, crisp no more.
The heat here makes cloudy smog, egg cream yellow evenings, consuming the sky while the sun takes it sweet time setting.
The heat here makes the day last until 10.
The heat here tires me out.
I turn on the fan and lay myself down on my bed, starfish my limbs so that nothing is touching. I hum to its hum, dream of the January air hitting my face with a shock as I left the airport, a final greeting, smack, punctuating the fact that she was finally gone. Think of the icicles that consumed my city, hovering, threatening instant death. The cold windowed buildings, reflecting alternate dimensions. My vulnerable neck in February when I’d forget to bring a scarf. The lady singing soleás downstairs at the club, the men calling “dale.” The man across the street who stares out of his window every day without fail at 4 p.m., watching passersby, leaning on his elbows in his white wifebeater. Tourists in shorts in bars, invitándote to tequila shots. Seeing double. Sweating.
This heat is impossible.
It consumes you, inch by inch, until it swallows you whole.
I hear her whispering to dead people, sometimes.
“Formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, methanol, ethanol, phenol, and water. That’s all it is. There’s nothing to worry about, when you think of it that way.”
We are working late one night and I finally raise my voice enough to say: “You are very good at what you do.”
She hears me but doesn’t respond for a moment, focusing on blending the complexion hi-lite onto Mrs. Simpson’s cheekbones.
“That’s a lot, coming from The Artist,” she says, using the nickname on my apron, the gag gift from last year’s company Christmas party.
We smile at each other over tubs of chemicals and stainless steel surgical supplies, and my head feels light, and we make the unspoken decision to go home together.
I’d never really noticed how close I lived to work until I walk home with her. It is quiet aside from the ice crunching under our feet as we take the 10-minute walk past chiropractor offices and Chinese food restaurants so warm that the steam from the open door makes clouds in the cold air. The sky is awash with dark colors, like liquid swirling down the drain. When we get to my complex I feel embarrassed by the broken front gate, but she kisses me up against it anyway. Her mouth is slippery, soft. Her pulse jumps in her throat. We stumble into my apartment, shaking snow off our boots. We are surrounded by deadness all day, and now all I can feel is this: the pressure of her hand on my lower back is a hot iron.
“So this is where The Artist lives,” she says, and flicks on the light switch. And then she sort of yelps, because my mother is sitting, like some sorry old mannequin, at my kitchen table.
“I couldn’t stay home,” my mother says, looking past The Girl and me, to a point above our heads. “I saw your father again.”
My father died three years ago, and every few weeks my mother calls crying because she saw my inconsiderate father finish off the carton of milk and leave it empty, out on the counter. How she got across town to my building at this time of night I have no idea, as her knowledge of the bus system is very limited, and a quick scan of the room comes up empty for a sight of her purse. My mother is small and shriveled and I suddenly feel embarrassed for her eyes, which are sunk so comically low in their sockets. The Girl is looking at me and whispering, Should I go, should I go, and then my mother finally recognizes her presence and says, “Oh, you brought a girl home.” And then she breaks down and cries in a way that reminds me of a little bird left out to freeze.
“And then she breaks down and cries in a way that reminds me of a little bird left out to freeze.”
“I’m Brianna,” The Girl says in the voice she reserves for dead people. She walks over to the table and sits down at the chair across from my mother. I want to say: No, don’t. We do not need to know each other like this.
“I work with your son at The Home.”
I can see my mother taking in the details of The Girl sitting across from her. Dyed dark hair, sloppily cut. Kohl-rimmed eyes. The silver ring in her lip that, some nights, when I lie awake in bed, I imagine grazing with my teeth.
“Such a nice girl? Working there?” My mother looks between the two of us.
“I can still make dinner,” The Girl — Brianna — says.
I lead my mother over to the couch and Brianna rummages through the cabinets until she finds a can of ravioli. She locates the can opener and gets to work. The plop of cold pasta into the bottom of the pot makes the bile rise in my throat, and I am struck dumb by the fact that I can tear people open and suture them closed day after day and I cannot tolerate the most mundane of noises.
My mother says, “It’s so dark.”
I tuck a blanket up underneath her quivering chin, and when she shuts her eyes the resemblance to Mrs. Simpson from earlier is so strong that I have to lean in close to make sure she is still breathing.
It is after midnight when I settle into a chair and spoon lukewarm pasta into my mouth. Brianna licks sauce off of her lip ring. The moon is a shining steel basin outside the window.
I want to say: I often catch myself wondering when my mother will find her way to the embalming table.
Brianna speaks first. "At this time of night I feel most alive. Don't you?"