lists: cleft, strike, copper, kindness, carry. Heard the sounds strike themselves, strike air. (And yet when I’d glimpsed him I’d wanted to touch him, he’d seemed a hurt presence, ashamed.) All I had left were scraps of paper. Sometimes I imagined him at my window, just standing there watching—wanting what? But I knew I was ignorant, mistrusted everything I thought—
William, Do you think you can see me?—You read my words, annotate the text of my unfinished novel, write your book about our years together and the years of my life before you knew me—I can’t feel my arms, don’t know if I even have a body—One daughter will take laudanum in a rented room. No one will know who she is or even claim the body—I called her the barrier-child—You call me “incomparable,” write that I was “affectionate and compliant to the last, not tormented by useless contradiction.” But isn’t everything contradiction in one way or another? Facts are merciless—My ignorance as real to me as anything— The barrier-skin of the body, charged pathways of the brain in which we are hidden even from ourselves. I can’t tell you why the word “destroy” keeps rising in my mind, or what was in my silence when you asked what I wanted for our child—I scrawl a white X on my shoulder, stand in the poorhouse smelling of urine and old food, I lie in the hospital where the doctors are experimenting on the poor, they come near me, it’s my turn—A mind can’t look at itself, not really—Words in the wind. Rebellion. Trespass. Consequence. Disorder.
I touched my fingers to my lips to wipe away the blood, that taste of iron and salt, but each time my hand showed nothing.
One day she was no longer there.
Bandages in the air around me. Voice on the edge of Vanished. Reason’s shore.
Rough husks of lungs and yet they flowered. Monstrous. Harmed.
I didn’t know if I lay there for weeks or was it longer? I kept touching my mouth, my bloody mouth, but each time no sign of blood.
Where was she? What was she thinking?
And then one day a voice again, not mine—sharp needle through the fever carrying its single thread:
William, A storm of pages—I’m revising as fast as I can—Words spill in the margins some upside down some sideways no top or bottom anymore, the words all wrong anyway—I should keep the strike-outs but not the words—signs of annihilation—signs of needing to try again yet again—Everything’s taken away and this tracelessness in me, this not-quite-rightness—Something in me too quiet too apart—Something that hates though it doesn’t know why, feels alone though it doesn’t know why—Something harming and harmed—Once we lay so close I could taste your breath, the smell of you all over me but we are taken away even from ourselves, especially from ourselves—Inchoate—Cold—These fractured instances of what I was—
That voice. But not the child, Mary’s, voice.
My skin as if belonging to another. Wavery. Hot. The air by turns yellow, sallow green, a bluish-red. Steely, impersonal, cold, moving in and out of the lungs. Something very patient and cold inside me also.
Fever-tree, I thought, then fever-grass, fever-trap, fever-fire, fever-cooling, fever-dream.
I remembered what Aristotle said, that a chain of words would lead to the word you’re trying to remember: milk to white, white to mist, mist to moist and finally moist will lead to fall, season of mists and light rain you were trying to arrive at.
But nothing in me moved in a chain. There were bandages and x’s, pebbles, barricades, must go into the air. There was “despised,” bread, your name, walls, stealing, slaves, the poor.
Aristotle used the word soul. When affection “is implanted in the soul memory exists.” I knew I couldn’t use that word, couldn’t find a chain of words to get there.
Recollection, he said, is a form of investigation.
The air turned yellow again, then white, then the sour orange color of my skin. All the while that salt taste on my lips. No voice in me. Taste of broken words, of wrongness.
Claire,
Who could I tell? Each day his voicelessness grew louder, built in me a coarse, deserted city. After a while I wanted only to flee—not to some far, exotic sea but to a place so drearily inland no one would go there. Some flat heath with spiky grass and rock. Once, in the middle of the night, I imagined he sent me a letter: “My dear Child, I betrayed you by not keeping my distance, and so in ways you