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I am dating a new girlfriend. We share the whole love-to-write thing. It’s heady and
euphoric. Especially since I’ve just left a complicated, draining, long-term relationship
because I feared it was stunting my progress as a writer. The new girlfriend is thinking
about applying to Goddard’s MFAW program. I told her about it. So I go to the
introductory meeting with her. The whole way over I am telling myself it is way too
intense to start a new relationship by going to graduate school together, even for lesbians.
Plus, the decision to end my former relationship played havoc with my finances. I’m not
sure if I can pay the mortgage. Student loans are out of the question.
Do I really need another degree? I already have two. Each seemed to promise
answers, a perspective on truth. But the initial fire they set in me cooled. Now I work
in cancer research managing data and designing databases. Not because I love it, but
because the research saves lives and I am good at it. It’s what my family does, on
both sides. The harder the science, the better: physicists, engineers, mathematicians,
programmers. Outside of work, I write fiction. Never as well as I’d like, but maybe
that’s because I just don’t have the artist gene. I am making leaps of faith everywhere.
It’s crazy to think about going back to school again. There has to be a place where I
settle down, get practical, and draw the line.
I send off this paragraph, plus the rest of the application:
Fiction, albeit seemingly opposite from science’s robust and defined
methods of inquiry, extends us outward, toward that elusive wraith,
which, like the faintest star, can be glimpsed only from vision’s
periphery. In writing, I circle ever closer to a lifelong fascination with
both what is true and the nature of truth. In moments of sharpest
clarity, I recognize that fiction, physics, and all rigorous, precise and
exigent forms of human endeavor are reverent and bow to the same,
elementary, god.
Three weeks later I am accepted. The following week, we are at our first
residency.
Part I: A Short History of Myth
At the edge, I lower myself over. The structure that holds me is elaborate, built from
scraps of rules: energy equals speed times mass; a sentence makes both rhythm and
meaning; if you feel nervous, don’t look down. On one end, the apparatus is driven
fast into the stone ledge. Lashed to the device, I dangle over a space that smells hot and
hollow.
I keep adding on pieces. I suspect some fall off.
One afternoon, I get frustrated and climb back up the apparatus. It’s not good
enough. No matter what I add to it, I can only get so far down the hole, little by little. I
see more of it but I still don’t know what it is, why it’s there, or why I want to sit on the
bottom, if it even exists, and wait to see if something happens.1
Back home, I read this little book, barely bigger than my hand, only one hundred and
fifty pages, and on page three it wakes me up:
There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go
to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never
done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is that for which
initially we have no words.2
I stay up late that night and read to the end. I try to tell my girlfriend about it
in the morning. She smiles and listens. What I say falls short, even to me. I do not have
the words that will bring us both into the center of what is in my head. They are just
ideas so far, and not rules; I can’t yet fix them to my apparatus. If I tried, it would be
too rickety a place for either of us to stand.
One night I am reading the book again. I try again to say out loud how
Armstrong’s words hit me. When I lift my hand to make a point, the book stays there,
on my arm, attached. The part of the cover that is against me looks like it has become
part of my skin. I can’t pull it off. We have plans to go out, so I don’t make a big deal
about it. I just get ready, throw on something loose. Downtown we go into the museum.
I stand in front of a sculpture of Neptune. Lost at sea for a very long time. His limbs
are pocked where sea worms bore into the stone.
Part II: Good Morning, Midnight
I read a lot of books for school. When I write, I have to write around the shape of the
books because they are stuck to my hands and to my arms. Some slip off the desk and
land on me. The edges of them leave a line in my stomach when I sit hunched over the
laptop for long periods of time.
I get so many books piled up on me, I don’t think about trying to climb down
the apparatus anymore. I am heavy and clumsy. I could slip. Instead, I stare into the hole
between the books. It’s a little crevice that goes right down to what used to be the arch
of my right hip. I can’t see the bottom.
The more I read the more I notice how some writers tell the same story over
and over. Jean Rhys is my favorite. I read all of her books. I can’t help it. There is
something breathless and alive about them. Even when I see that she is, in some ways,
telling the same thing again and again. You would think one book stuck to my thigh
would be enough. But they all end up on me, some in various editions, some with her
life history, some with letters by Rhys attached at the end. It gets to be a lot to carry
around.
At night, my girlfriend tries to ease the volumes off by rubbing mineral oil
around the edges of where they are stuck. She thinks maybe the oil will separate the
skin from the books. But they won’t budge. The pages get blotted and yellow and where
we pull at the covers, my skin gets red and a little bruised.
In the day, maybe because of the oil, the books stop sitting on the surface of my
skin. It’s not that they fall off. They start to slip down inside. I try to keep them at the
surface. I re-read the ones that seem gigantic in my mind: Jeanette Winterson, Anne
Carson, Italo Calvino. Also Ceremony and The Stain. They’re so big I think that they can’t
possibly go under. But they do. They slip down beneath the skin and all I see is the faint
outline of the titles where I used to see veins. Within a few weeks, my legs are thick as
lodge poles and my torso like a Congo drum.3
Soon, when my girlfriend isn’t around, I try cutting the books out. I don’t bleed. Inside
of me are layers and layers of pages. I don’t know what happened to the blood. Maybe
it’s still there way down deep. I just want to get to the books, so I don’t go deep enough
to find out.
One book leads to another. But they don’t come off of me. They must be embedded
way down. Maybe they put in roots around my bones. I try to remember what it was like
before all this, when I used to go out, when I used to lower myself down in the hole.
I wonder if that old apparatus is hanging over the edge where I left it or if it’s been so
long that it fell apart. I can’t go see because I can’t move anymore. It seems like a long
time ago that I could. And like it was yesterday. I’m getting confused about time.
Each night my girlfriend sets up the TV next to the big chair where I sit and
puts on episodes of Buffy. We laugh. Sometimes we cry. I get jostled inside. It’s almost
as good as moving.
In the daytime, I keep looking at the seam of light beneath the front door.
Sometimes I fall asleep and dream that I am awake and the seam of light under the
door splits open. Then I wake up and I’m still looking at it and I’m not sure anymore
what’s real.
Part III: The Dogs
Every day at three p.m. my dog, an old Springer Spaniel, sets her head on my lap and
whines to go for a walk. Even after all these months, she still hasn’t figured out that I
can’t move. It takes years for dogs to unlearn hope. Eventually she gives up and takes
herself out through the dog door because at least she can have a pee in the yard.
I read Brown’s The Dogs.4
Even when I read the skinniest books I have ever seen, it’s like they weigh a
ton. One day, around eleven in the morning when the moms are out playing with their
toddlers in the park across the street, my chair gives out under my weight. It makes a
terrible sound.
We are afraid, the way this is going, that some day the floor will give way and I
will fall right through. My girlfriend hires a crane to take me out through the window and
prop me up in the garden.
Being in the garden is not ideal, by any means. The morning glory pushes up between
my toes, and before we know it, it’s up around my neck. Even in the summer it rains
here. But we agree it will be OK for a little while.
Now I am on the outside looking in.
The windows of our house are small. The house is small, just a cottage really,
so that is how it should be. But it means I have to piece together what goes on inside
from within the limitations of each pane. When someone moves by - my girlfriend at
the kitchen sink, the dog barking at the post man, a neighbor dropping in - I press my
attention to the glass. It is extraordinary how what I know of what goes on inside my
house is constructed from my imagination. Every image in the pane seems lit-up by light
inside of it. Every break in action is put back in motion by what I imagine. I forget the
difference between them. They are both real, both one thing.
Part IV: The Lover
I miss being inside. It’s lonely out here even though my girlfriend comes out in the
evening, curls around me (as much as she can, I am as wide as a redwood by now), and
we talk about our day.
Sometimes, when the moon is really bright and I can’t sleep, I stretch my arms
above my head and rock from side to side, until I roll, like a log.
I read The Lover.5
The words are simple and still. So still that I think I will die if I never move
again. I roll now like it’s my last chance ever and when I break loose from the spot where
the weeds are all grown up around me, I fall flat on the ground. Bits break off. But I keep
rolling. The harder I roll, the more flies off until I’m streamlined and can really move. I
roll out the front garden, down the front steps and across the street. Until I am there, at
the hole again.
I roll closer and closer and then, with feet on one side and head on the other,
I roll right over the center, stop, and stare in. I think I see my old apparatus on a ledge
part way down. But maybe I am imagining things. One part was shaped like a copper
pipe and had a green patina. If I close my eyes, I can remember the feel of it in my hand.
What was that rule? Mass times speed.
Hot air blows up from below, through a hole that has opened in my chest and
out through another in my back, whistling through my hollow core. I lie there for a long
time listening to the sound of it.
At twilight, the sky drizzles. Everything is hushed with the fine, close rain. I hear
my girlfriend’s step crunching on the path. I roll over to see the dog pulling hard on her
leash. Then they stand and look at me. My girlfriend asks what I am doing. I tell her I
just had to see. “What?” she asks. “The hole.” “I didn’t realize,” and she runs her hand
over the opening between my shoulder blades.
She throws her end of the leash up over a thick branch of a tree and then ties it
fast to me. Together, the dog straining on her trembling legs, and my girlfriend pushing
from behind, they can almost lift me up. In the struggle, a few books fall out from inside
of me, down the hole where the wind is coming from. My girlfriend braces herself then
heaves. Not quite. Another book falls. This one is not yet bound. Pages flutter, spiraling
white. The skin beneath is pink.
They grunt and pull again, until I am standing. Then we walk home together,
the dog jaunty out in front, like this is how it always is.
Notes:
1. In my first semester, I read some of Murakami’s novels. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his
protagonist spends a lot of time sitting at the bottom of an abandoned well waiting for answers why his
life has taken a strange and surreal turn. It seems a nice idea: sitting for a long time where it is quiet and
cool. But he forgets to bring water and food. He suffers. Still, no answers come. He keeps going back to
the well for answers, as if it is not dried up, but is still connected to the center of something, or to a thing
that flows between us all. (Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. New York: Vintage, 1998).
2. Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., 2005.
3. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Inc, 1974. Carson, Anne. Autobiography
of Red. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Ducornet, Rikki. The Stain. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press,
1995. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion.
New York: Vintage International, 1988. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Grove Press, 1989.
4. Brown, Rebecca. The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998.
5. Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. New York: Random House, Inc., 1985.
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