of skin, no—Then you wouldn’t know whose it was, that face. Everything’s taken away, nothing’s ever really kept—I would do this to your portrait too. Gray smudge of forehead, eyes—Gray sweep over everything I wanted, fought for, ever was—
The fever kept building, but how could it go on like that? Why was it still building?
The air increasingly colder, sharp, the trees duller, bare.
Sometimes her hand coming as from nowhere, writing of Skinner Street, cattle markets, butcher shops—things I hadn’t seen. And always the feeling that if I parted my lips and tried to speak I’d hemorrhage from the mouth.
Memory is investigation, Aristotle said. But each time I remembered her, part of me went blank. As if I were meant to answer a list of questions written in invisible ink. So how could I investigate? And what was I seeking?
One may conduct investigations into absences, causation (my books had said this). One can do careful and minute research.
And still I thought: fever-tree, fever-nests, “fever-like I feed.”
One can examine systematically, in detail. “This learning… cleare, playne and open that does search or will investigate.”
The bees were “light horsemen investigating where they maie passe.”
If she returned would I read to her of bees, “light horsemen”?
Meanwhile the air continued growing splinters, scars—crevices hidden in plain sight.
Claire,
Increasingly I came to understand the mind doesn’t live in just one place. Skinner Street, Snow Hill, its butcher shops, the horrid public executions—I moved among them but in my thoughts I was often in the graveyard, that place emptied of his voice, emptied, even, of his breathing, faint rush behind the bushes. The sound of nothing there, like the sound of my mother, that’s what I heard. I craved his voice, those hunger-pangs I felt as I’d listened, even those pangs of maybe I hate him and I want to hurt him but I don’t know why. Craved the way his voice had sought me out, but had it ever really sought me? Or had it simply been indifferent all along? Maybe I had to accept that I was of no consequence, meant nothing. Meanwhile I kept thinking of that desolate place I might run off to where no one could find me. I would carry a letter from him, “My Dear Child, I should fear that if I let you regard me with less abhorrence …” I didn’t know what would come next. Maybe, “… the peace and security of your pure mind destroyed …” Something like that. I’d read it in my solitary cottage. I would be the sole depository of my own secret. I’d become as quiet and extreme as he, as voiceless. Hidden. Merciless. Proud—
Then one day the fever stopped. No blood taste in my mouth, no mix of salt and iron (though off and on for years it would come back). Touching my lips, I felt no wetness. I opened my mouth.
All around me branches were honed to extreme versions of themselves, clearer than I’d ever seen. All the edges of things gleaming. And those edges felt helpful—I didn’t know how else to put it and still don’t—they seemed just wholly themselves, far from human feeling. As if sight could cleanse itself, though I knew this would be a temporary feeling.
Still, at that moment I thought branch, dirt, river-sound, books—
The air untouched by the mind’s complications, moving in and out of the lungs. Not ghosted or complicitous or wanting. Not treasonous or fraught or haunted.
Claire,
Dr. Cline came, and Dr. Lawrence. Our father had sent for them. My skin burned, was covered with red scales and itched. My right hand hurt, my right arm felt always weak, sometimes I kept it in a sling. They said “failure to thrive” and “troubled” and “would be good to send her away for a while.” Said, “tensions in the family.” They couldn’t know the graveyard lived in me, or that the far place where desolation would be my only comfort kept looming in my mind. I was the torturer and the tortured, the one who taunted and the one who crumbled, the one who maybe even murdered (Was he alive? Had he left me or had I left him? Had my wish to hurt him landed like a poisoned needle in his brain? Had he stopped breathing?). Once after Aaron Burr visited our father, he came upstairs to our playroom and pretended to have tea, then came back later with presents of elegant stockings which he was too shy to give us—he carried them home in his