Interlocutor

She walked toward the open chair and sat down in it.

I was only just thinking about the prairie behind my elementary school, and those red torches that dropped from the sumacs, all covered with red ladybugs. Heavy cones of red ladybugs feeding on the red fruit of the sumacs, she said. It has never been an easy thing to live in the world, she said. There is no thinking back to a kind of time before this kind of time, because there is none. Still, I can’t help but think of the prairie. We burned it every year – sat and watched until it was only a charred mat. She shifted back and raised the front legs of the chair a little off of the ground, balancing. The sumacs should not be ignored, she said. They have a definite shape, a definite upward motion, a definite trajectory into time and space. Their fruit, which is to say the red torches that bend their boughs and impregnate the earth with such aggressive efficiency, is consumed by the only insect that does not frighten children. Some trees are poisonous, and those should certainly be taken seriously, she said, but only inasmuch as we should regard anything taller than twenty feet as worthy of our serious consideration. I was raised, she said, near a ravine of moderate proportions. But, as a child, there is no moderation: all objects and events are shuttled, quite immediately and transparently, between extreme endpoints. Color stabs at you, noise coats you, motion is insufferable. Categories are blossoming in the brain like it’s springtime, and there are infinite reasons to continue living. It is only when you find that the categories through which everything is filtered and made familiar are impossibly inadequate, appallingly limited, that you must question the rationale of living in a body through which recognition and communication – your only tools for coping with the corporeal world – are unsound at the outset, she said.

I was the only person at my grandfather’s funeral who did not look into the casket, she continued. All of the cousins, dressed in their tedious best, took first and second turns standing over the body of our once mobile relation. In fact, there was a lightness of step and an excitement that I had never before seen at any family gathering. They went up to the body, arm linked in arm, giddy as though having just completed something satisfying, a nice peach or a long novel, and inspected the box and its contents. They fairly skipped up to the body, nearly leapt into the coffin. Death offers everyone the opportunity to feel connected to what is still living, falsely connected to anything that manufactures its own heat. For all that my grandfather was hidden from me in the room where he lay open to public examination, to the scrutiny of family, she said, I could see him very clearly. I could see that no one had filled out the sunken places below his eyes. I could plainly see that his nose was too thin and beaked: a bizarre adornment attached to his skull, post-mortem. It is his face, my grandfather’s face, that I can see has been disfigured – not by death, but by the work done to counter its appearance in him, she said. All of the work we do is to counter death, though most especially its appearance in us. What we call aging is just mud slung at us, it’s just death sticking to us like mudsplatter. At first we are sprinkled in it; we delight in it, because it glistens a little and prepares us for being in the world among the dying. But finally it coats us full on. It steals inside to take our organs. It severs our cords, cuts off our living, turns us to rock. No, worse than rock! she said, it turns us to a paste in which other animals breed.

I’ve never been able to stand the idea of multiples, she said. My sister was born on the shortest day of the year. Carried home in a sack. No daylight for her. She set the chair back on the floor and crossed her left leg over her right.

It’s always been this way with families. First they want one thing, and then another. They drive through town, picking up all of the pieces their bodies have created. They make up activities just to have a place to put the pieces. It is grotesque nonsense. I need a second pair of glasses, I’ve lost mine somewhere, I’m nearly blind without them, she said. It is nonsense, though maybe not all grotesque. Making new pieces means dying a little, too. It’s no easy thing. It was not just the prairie, she recalled, there was a farm there. Or maybe not a farm so much as a place where young animals gave themselves up for milk and meat, but on a small scale. I would go to see the calves. I’m not sure if I ever got to touch them. I always imagine that I touched their noses, that I’m touching their noses and they’re flat and warm, not at all like a dog, but flat and warm and they cross their eyes trying to look at your fingers, big clouded eyes. Those same eyes you’re made to slice open a few years later in school. When I sliced mine, she said, the juice shot right into my partner’s mouth; he took a long time rinsing it out at the sink. All of those ladybugs, she said.

All of those red torches. All of those cousins. All of the treaties we made with the Indians and never kept. Never intended to keep. In truth, my prairie was just a patch of grass. You could see around it, walk around it. It was for preservation’s sake and nothing more. It was a living diorama. That we watched it burn was more a miracle of the school’s naiveté than of science or nature. But it might have been vast. Creeping up to it on your belly, it might have seemed an endless undertaking, the walking through it all. Should I be waiting for something – I feel like I’m waiting for something. She looked up. It must be nothing. Sometimes, you can be riding the train home, maybe reading a book, maybe reading the advertisements and trying to make sense of the language – its shape, its use, the desire it wants to instill in you – and on a particularly long stretch, you can feel that you are not in that train, you never boarded the train, you are most likely still where you were, waiting for the train, waiting to be in a capsule, an orange capsule, waiting for the conductor to give you a signal, say something to you over the loudspeakers, something about an avenue, it doesn’t matter in the least. It’s the shape of the words you want to follow, not their meaning. Of course, you are on the train. You are headed homewards. Food still travels through your bowels. The plum is still blooming in the thicket, as they say. Absolutely everything about the prairie will have changed by the time you get back to it. There is no prairie now. I don’t even have a ghost to offer it, no ghost of me to sit and watch the ghost of it burn down to invisible ashes. I must tell you that this is serious, she said.

It’s serious, what is happening here. Knowing family is not the easiest thing. It should be the easiest thing. What have I not done that I should have done? she said. My sister, carried home most unceremoniously at her birth, remains unknown to me. We have lunch every Saturday and stare deeply into the blankness of each other. I have been to a few places. Some of them are underground. You’re not supposed to count the countries you’ve flown over, so I don’t. It is no great mystery to be alive. It can’t be mysterious or it would never get done, the living, it would never happen. And yet, she said, when it is snowing. She trailed off and looked toward the calendar of stock photographs hanging from a pin on the wall. All of the pictures were of uninspiring rural landscapes, with cold scenes describing winter months and flourishing fields for summer. The open page was several months behind.

Snow is the perfect shift from everything to one thing. It seems insufficient to talk about snow blanketing this and that, highlighting through the desaturation of color, but that is the truth and magic of it. Winters, we would wrap our feet in plastic. We would take all of the snow from one side of the yard and pile it onto the other side. We would stand under the icicles, because we’d heard that they might fall and cleave our brains in two. We stomped on every fresh, white platform and then nestled our faces into the bootholes, breathing like a snowfish would. My unknown sister, she said, born to coldness and darkness on the shortest day of the year, would hurl herself at the snow. Often, she would lay into it: rip papers of snow and pummel flesh of snow and break glass of snow, just to get to feel it. She wished to be blinded by snow, so she made goggles with slits, like the Inuits in the museum, and then adamantly refused to wear them. We never hunted anything in the snow like the Inuits, because there was nothing to hunt, and we didn’t use a gun, because we had no gun, so it all worked out very neatly. I saw a bear once, she said.

I was on a trip to the mountains. I wasn’t actually in the mountains, but it did get hilly. We drove through grey and green kinds of places. There were whole districts that had set up horrible little Swiss Villages merely to facilitate the vending of cheap wooden clocks to tourists passing through. The shops were the heart of the village. Really, the villages were nothing more than shops – all designed to look, in aggregate, like quaint, thriving townships. The image they wanted to project was of endless local commerce, endless greetings for endless neighbors, endless pupils reading in unison from unmarked textbooks, endless bakers and dogwalkers and whistling mechanics, endless generations of shoe-cobblers and watch-makers and family physicians and politicians. Even residences were corrupted by the aesthetic. People were always dressed in costume, posing over steaming bowls of porridge, giving each other hearty handshakes, cradling screaming infants, hammering something into something else, looking healthy and self-satisfied, if a little wild-eyed. We moved through towns like these and through country like this, green and grey and sometimes dying and sometimes blossoming. We were headed toward a certain waterway, a certain fall of water that is commonly known to be superior to others in the region. The waterway was, in my mind, falling all the time; its endless repetition pacified me, its harsh exchange with the water below deafened me. I’ve begun wearing earplugs in the shower and on the train, she said. Also at all of my meals, because I can’t stand the sound of dishes touching each other, of metal rubbing against metal, of forks scraping on teeth. These are wholly unbearable sounds and I do not have to hear them. I live with a woman, she said, who clogs the drain. She has bad eyesight, but that’s no excuse. The water was something I never did get to see. Along the way, we saw a sign for Snake and Animal. The snake was housed in a tall glass cage. One long, completely bare branch spanned diagonally across the width and length of the enclosure. The snake was on it, as far up as it could reach, head pressed against the glass on the ceiling. The woman tending the shop that surrounded the cage said that the snake had been there for years. I thought that if this were the waterway it might have been very beautiful, filling up that cage, making the snake a watersnake, the stunted zoo a stunted aquarium. We went around back to look at the animal, she said.

A concrete patio had been divided in two and fenced in. Trees were everywhere. And high grass, like prairiegrass, but only the scraps of it that had pierced through an overlay of white gravel. A black bear lay in the back of the patio’s first half, pressed against the chain link. The bear was almost fully reclined, legs spread out in front, with toes, with claws. With a brain designed to accept images through two eyes and sound through two ears. There was a stink suspended in the air. It draped all three of us. A square of sunlight slanted across the bear, marking one haunch in bright relief. The smell was remarkable. The lighted leg looked like it was separate from the bear’s body. The bear did not move, she said, and leaned forward a little from the chair.

We stood there for an unimaginably long time, a truly scientific length of time, and in that time, the bear did not move, she said, leaning back again. I told the woman that the bear was dead. She said nothing. No, that’s not true, she said. Really? she said to us, in a kind of offhand way. Really? she said to us, kind of naturally, as though she already knew, as though she had passed a message to us through the dead bear and was waiting to see if we’d picked up on it. What is the message? I’d wanted to ask her, she said, but I said nothing. Or maybe I said, There’s a smell and we smelled it, she said.

The bear was dead. It was a bear that we’d gone outside to see, and it was a dead bear that we saw. A bear of bones. A barren bear, for all I know. It may not even rightly be called a bear. When I said that the bear had a brain, that it had eyes and ears, I meant that it had had those things. A dead bear’s brain is not the same as any living bear’s. Its eyes are not the same eyes. There is no functionality in a dead brain, no operation, no impulse, and that is the difference. There is no brain, there is only gristle, dead tissue, something ugly taking up space inside of a thing that no longer exists, that never existed, she said. Of course, it is sort of a paradox – the bear’s existing and not existing at the same time. That bear produced no electricity and no heat. That bear did not happen and would soon never have happened, if memory and legacy are the only indicators of existence. But all the same, the bear was there, leaning against the wall, one leg lighted up like a torch, a great bonfire of leg burning in the sun, stinking up the air with its brightness, its decay. What will they do with the bear? I had wondered. Will they keep the bear? I had wondered. Will they take it out of this sun, out of this place? Will they burn it down to ash? There will be no rebirth from this cremation, nothing will come from what is already gone, I had thought. My grandfather looked nothing like the bear for obvious reasons, she said.

My grandfather was a wealthy man, she said.

My grandfather owned himself, she said.

I had a dream in which I was pulling watermelon rinds out of a toilet. In this dream, I was kneeling by a toilet, endlessly pulling out rinds. The dream-rinds were endlessly filling the toilet, and I was endlessly drawing them out. Drawing out the dream-rinds had no effect on the toilet whatsoever. And there was no red fruit, she said, only the green dream-rinds, already sliced and consumed, drawn out again and again, only to fill the toilet again and again, and so on. Upon waking, I wondered, What does this dream have to do with me? I cannot help but think that the violence my cold sister carried out on the snow is, in a sense, a perfect counterpart to the compliant body of the decomposing bear. The blazing bear and the ruined snow. The fires that burn our prairies destroy our bodies – bodies that are left to rot in the heat at the end of a spoiled drive to see a scenic waterway, known by all in the region to be unsurpassed in its beauty. The same snow that witnesses our sister’s birth into night covers the tracks we make while running from one set of fears to another. If the snow stopped falling, we would see exactly what was chasing us. Which is why it must continue. Which is why my own sister, a stranger to me, wanted to destroy the snow and herself with it. Which is why when we see each other over lunch, when we stare into each other, there is nothing of her left – only the blankness, only a cold space, a snow-filled space, no fire to lean into, no place to warm myself. I cannot imagine it being more serious than it is. I cannot consider more seriously that which I already consider to be so very serious. I cannot sleep in all of this seriousness, cannot make myself sleep. I haven’t slept in years or maybe I’ve never slept. We used to collect gooseberries from the bushes that grew outside of the school, she said.

Down a hill, down the slope of hill behind my elementary school, the prairie lay waiting for the day that we would, once again, burn it to the ground. The gooseberries were tart, and we never did anything but collect them. All we ever do is to collect things, though not for any purpose at all. Collecting engenders its own justification. We collected gooseberries, but we never tasted them, not a single one. The tartness is hearsay. I’m trying to think past that time, past that field, behind it, she said, but I’m cornered there. I’m always watching it burn, watching mice fly out of it like glowing meteors. It’s always spring, and my grandfather’s casket is always being lowered into that solid ground. I’m forever heading back to sit at the repulsive luncheon prepared by the funeral home. How impossible to think that I’ve ever done anything at all outside the scope of these things. But there is a world, and I am living in it, she said.

It was not long ago that I was sitting on a train, watching a man glue a fake moustache back onto his face after it began to droop conspicuously from his lip. He actually pulled a bottle of adhesive out from somewhere, dabbed it onto the moustache, and pressed it back into position. Why was he wearing a disguise? she asked. There is no reason for it that I can offer. Impressions are false. People are coats and hats and nothing else. They are moustaches and hand creams, and their purpose, the part of them that remains unseen, is ambiguous. They are lost in a forest of their own making. Forests have always frightened me, she said, they have been ruined by cinema. I’m always half-expecting something terrifying to happen to me there, even though they really are the only places, apart from deserts, where a person can see things clearly. I saw an eviscerated skunk in my walk through the woods. It was bent backwards, such that its head was laying on its tail. Its skin had been peeled, exposing a purple twist of blood vessels and a thin, white layer of fat. The ribcage was gone, the flesh was chewed. Stumps of bone stuck out from what had enclosed the chestal cavity. Two dark red lobes of liver had not been stolen, and they spilled out of the skunk like twin purses. I will get old, she said, and I will experience my own quiet evisceration. But before I am gone, I would like to be here. I would like to see myself as others see me before we both see it all the same way. I don’t know what to do with all of this time, this endless stretch of quicksand. I’m sinking into it, to be sure, but it’s slow going. It will most likely be decades before the muck floods into me, before I choke on it. And it’s then I’ll have wished that I tried harder for a branch or even a straw. My skunk. My sister. My beast, from whose gaze I receive nothing. I’m always falling away, falling distinctly away from these things. As I said, she said, the liver was perfectly formed. It’s not easy, seeing inside of things. I often feel that we are gathered together out of the cheapest material, that we are sewn together without care. That we break open for almost anything. For nothing at all. Our sleep, if we can get it, splits open the soft space that grows inside of us all day like a great grey egg. As children, she said, my arctic sister and I slept on either end of a long sunroom. The sun was on us all of the time, there were no curtains to draw against the light. In the night, I would often hear her scrape something along the length of the windowsill closest to her bed. Back and forth along the dark sill. A pencil maybe, or a piece of metal she found in the woods. I never knew what it was, because my bed was on the far side and I always slept facing the wall. I cannot sleep unless I face a wall. I also cannot sleep facing a wall. I could not sleep with the endless scraping that my dark sister exercised on the windowsill, nightly. I have never been able to sleep in unfavorable circumstances. But I did dream, and so did she, and we dreamt in unison of white tiles with clean white grout linking one to the next, on and on, a landscape of tiles, a blanket of snowy white tiles covering trees, tiling waterways, hard ceramic animals nursing their young, with nothing moving except underneath, with the water moving underneath the tiles, with the water pitched into darkness, with my sister in darkness picking porcelain gooseberries, the burning prairie blotted out, crossed out, erased by this plague of whiteness, of blankness, this evaporated panorama, this solid egg-like shape, this no-shape, this globe, and everything so white and clean, everything joined together, fastened together, and still, very still, moving maybe, but only underneath, she said.

We were children at that time, and we are no longer children. We are anything but what we were, with the sumacs looming overhead, with everything always towering over us. We were playing everything by ear, but like the fox in that poem who willfully steps in the wrong direction, we made more tracks than necessary. We were always walking backwards. Slowly and without skill, we move through these lives of ours. We drive toward the waterway, but we never wade into it. What we plant yields more than we can possibly gather, more than we could divide if we knew among whom to divide it, and we are left with the lush waste of our own making, a crippling return that will undoubtedly break us. We set about building a mountain of living only to find ourselves in the shade of its immense height. We will expire in the shadow of our own reckless creations, she said, not inside of them, but adjacent to them, never having understood the things well enough to embody them.

The reason that the prairie haunts me, she said, the reason that it still towers over me with its parched cellulose flags and seeded stalks, is because of what is underneath the tallgrass, underneath the ash of demolition and renewal. Every tiller, all of them paper torches, are allied underground in a great network of rhizomes. How can I accept that underneath the earth, in that thick choking darkness, there exists this unfathomable complex of living, this family, so to speak, of rootstalks. That every year we crushed and blasted it all back as best we could. That it burned for the edification of whispering children. That it did not die. That it was resurrected, not like a christ, but like anything that has its season, she said.

I have no doubt that the calves are dead, she said, their flat noses grated for meal, their eyes set on by children or flies. The bear, too. No longer rotting, but having rotted, having dissolved. I’ve never used a compass. I do not have a sense that guides me through this living like rats have to steer them toward garbage. But still, my life is a potent thing, and to me it has as strong a stench in its own way as the putrefaction that perfumes the noses of rats. What I want is something delicate, something breakable or perhaps already broken. On the train, I saw a man with one leg stand up and prepare to exit. I did not stare at him, because I was afraid to show everyone that I noticed any difference between us, that there was any difference between this one-legged man and me. Better to read the ads, I thought. Better to look at the legs of the seated couple. No need to gape at what is utterly evident, she said.

She sat on the chair, silent, firmly planted inside of this room, a box contained by larger boxes like every other room, within which living is carried out more or less privately.