(I don’t want to think about this now. Why must I think about it now?)
Looking down at her mother’s pages, my eyes, by chance, landed on these words:
“Treated like a creature of another species, I began to envy and at length to hate.”
I read them only to myself. Read further:
“the very air I breathed tainted with scorn.”
Then:
“I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature. I had no one to love me. I was an egg dropped on the sand. I belonged to nobody, despised since my birth.”
And:
“To be cut off from human converse was to wander a ghost among the living.”
I felt she knew me, but how could she know me? I was reading the words of a dead woman
(My hands so cold—the barricades—the storming—)
but suddenly I had no tongue to speak them. The air turned hot and swelled and filled with waves. My skin breaking into curving, beating waves.
(William, there are so many deformities … and walls to tear down and where is my writing desk, my …)
The girl still waiting. The plain intactness of her face. Her eyes. Slow pull of the river. The graves.
I knew she expected me to read, but how could I read? I had no voice, could think only of her mother’s book and the detested creature. The more I tried not to think the more I thought. Of your horror of me, how it feels to be hated. That night I dreamed I was in an old, abandoned garden. A vine-covered trellis stood about three feet away. I could see her on the other side, a large white bandage over her mouth, her eyes bandaged also. I started to read but when I opened my mouth a stream of blood came out. Then I was walking in an ice-field. There was no sign of anything alive. Why can’t I at least see a mirage, I wondered, would that be so hard? I felt your eyes on me though I couldn’t see you. I tried to give you the bloody handkerchief I’d used for my mouth, but when I reached into my pocket it was gone.
She came and waited the next day, and a few days after that. But I read nothing, or rather, read silently and only to myself, words distant planets on the page.
Can thoughts build and stab themselves at once? My mind frightened me—thoughts of you, of how I’d lived and what I was.
And she—she was still waiting—ignorant, protected.
My throat an ugly flower poisonous to the touch. I couldn’t heal its torn stem, its clenched, red blossom.
William I can’t see you anymore—Am I at home have I just had a daughter?— My limbs are heavy, it’s dark, I’m walking through a London street I’m stealing whatever I can—bread, books, jewelry, money. I feel such hatred and I don’t know why. I hide in an alley with my books near the hospital where the doctors are experimenting on the poor—You’ll finish my sentences, you’ll—Something monstrous in me. I crouch in rags—In the poorhouse the women are mocked for the smell of their dirty linen—My body no longer female nor male my limbs large somehow, awkward—No law governs what I am—I’m nameless you can’t find me. I watch your walls from outside, always from outside, snow falls on me, a girl drowns herself in a well, a dog overturns a garbage can, I’m stealing whatever I can—My skin a covenant of what?—But I have no body, and skin is alien, opaque, un-meaning. A form of misunderstanding only— Why do we need to despise? What is it in us that has no country?
Claire,
Of course one day his voice stopped as I’d feared. Suddenly, without explanation. After a while I didn’t wait for him. I’d sit in my room, pick up a book, read from it out loud, imagining I was him: “Meng Tian is credited with the introduction of the Chinese brush pen, which is made of sable, fox, or rabbit hairs, set in a bamboo holder. He died in 209 B.C. and is worshipped on his birthday by pen-makers.” Or: “If rubbed on the lips and tongue Chinese ink is considered a good remedy for fits and convulsions.” But all the while something in me hardened. As if each word contained a harsher, stricter word-braver, unforgiving, more alert. Keener, cold. Each word isolate at its core like him, mysterious, unknown like him, making chains all over me like him. I sat at my desk writing