Dear Friends,
I woke up today wondering, is working a narrative to death really death to the narrative? Maybe not. But somehow the narrative fades as I sharpen my focus on it.
A theme of this post is time. Here is my favorite poem about time, Big Clock, by Li-Young Lee.
This will probably be the last excerpt of fugue I share. But I will keep posting writing and writing about it here on a regular if 🐌-paced basis.
Not much plot to relay for ease of following the excerpt below the image. Rae’s waiting in the waiting room of a hospital to see Elliot after his parasuicide.
Even as her eyes were open, he had not departed the room where she waited to see him. The paramedics, in a gesture that fell somewhere between “halt” and “please be seated”, had parked her in this hospital purgatory, before sequestering Elliot away someplace deeper in their custody, although he remained with her, in all but the flesh.
By the time her phone displayed, Rae could tell how long she’d waited (too long), but how much more waiting was in store, she’d be the last to know. To the naked eye, she sat alone, but the sliding doors were her witness. When a passerby stepped too near they opened, pausing to let in a gust of wind stagnant with possibility stretching from the devil’s blue-veined tongue to Saint Peter’s pearly-white teeth. Then the doors would close, leaving hanging all around her a miasma of unassigned souls plagued by time even in the hereafter.
The room, with its walls painted the color of mold on a mushroom, its modular furniture in a continual state of disassembly, had all of the ambiance of a way station, someplace you wanted to leave just as soon as you got there, only valid for plotting the distance between your point of origin and your destination. Sitting in it, Rae had the sensation of having misplaced something while not knowing what. Though a chord was struck between her inner and outer landscapes. Inside, the contents of a lustrous oblong capsule slow released into her gut a rainbow-colored mist, her beige depression having forgotten its own composition, muddling a spectrum of color, reflecting the fearful prospect of erasure by way of embrace.
There was nothing to do but gaze out a pair of jaded eyes at the languorous female bodies, balmy and beaming from the covers of the beauty magazines laid out on a table beside her. Nothing to do but thumb through the pages filled to the brim with unctuous fertility, the model women pushing life at life like it were a novel solution, waving away the faint scent of formaldehyde like mortality were nothing but a housefly acting a nuisance, a withering reversible by a sprig of gardenia laid atop the grave.
It was as a little girl, wandered into a space she had no business being in, Rae first perceived the balm of female skin. Before the word titillating had entered the vocabulary, she’d happened upon tits round as ripe pink cantaloupe scoops, pinned up all over the walls of Kathleen’s daddy’s toolshed. The man had once been a baby! it had dawned and, to some extent she cognized the man, never outgrown the original pacifier, still groping at the memory of warm milk, building environments that would have in them, foundational if hidden as a soft insulation material, his mommy.
But now, in the hospital waiting room, the place anticipating suffering, the tranquilizing imagery of female sensuality, the shapely figures only pointed to the shapelessness of Rae’s longing, departing from the first conical structure as it took on the barren solidity of writer’s block, the words stillborn by the time they issued from the void.
“Rae,” a voice spoke her name, in the friendly world-weary tone of someone who got to be on a first-name basis with strangers as a direct consequence of their bad karma and decision-making.
Rae looked up from her Mademoiselle and turned to see standing in a doorframe a woman who looked to be a nurse, in scrubs a washed-out sea foam billowing from her shoulders and hips. The woman’s appearance spoke to that of a good carer, that is to say, one whose time and energy were used up by others and so who had none left to put into appearances. Her fingers wrapped around a clipboard seeming to keep her hands from getting idle, wrung or examined with the pained detached look of a medical professional whose desire to do something with those hands only grew, the more it became clear there was nothing that could actually be done to rectify a situation.
Rae put the magazine down, got up and followed the nurse through the door to a hallway where scant natural light reached, and tubes in place of it cast a livor-mortis tint on everything. It was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioner on at full tilt, and Rae got a chill thinking of the temperature it took to sterilize a thing made safe by having its essence boiled out of it. The poison rebranded as cure when it killed only what it was supposed to. Heavy-duty polyethylene tarps like flaps of callused skin set patients apart from one another, and Rae wondered if they had split off from the body and entered the mind of the hospital, the ward where patients dispossessed of sharp objects were still free to wield their imaginations turning those objects into weapons. Only the vague movement behind the tarps transmitted physical form, where patients raised on examination couches stirred, otherwise undetectable.
The nurse stopped short and eased back a cloth partition so it slid with a metallic ring across the rail it was strung on, and there sat Elliot, upright, as if on a plane coming down too fast but already with perfect hindsight, lifetimes ahead of those in the brace position, having seen the future bent to his razor-sharp will. One leg crossed over the other, the foot aloft bobbing as if out of a boredom born of low stakes, dangling a flip-flop. His papery hospital gown gaped to reveal skin normally clothed, but he wore it without a trace of self-consciousness bespeaking a feeling of exposure.
There was no place to sit and so Rae stood to one side watching the nurse tread, light-footed among Elliot and his accouterments, checking levels and such. A hearty vein ran up along the inside of his good arm turned upward, like a blue earthworm writhing just beneath the surface of his skin. There was something sad about the needle stuck in it, about youth hooked up to a machine, intent upon its own destruction while it would still have so much life to live, and while Rae was not prepared to furnish the apology she knew Elliot felt she owed him, she could tap into his buried shame and this felt nearly penitential. If her presence gave rise to any emotion in him, he was careful not to show it. On the other hand, she knew nothing would’ve made him more pleased than to see her crack. The more violent her loss of composure, the more he could leverage keeping his. It was her narrative of innocence he stood to gain, and it made her queasy to think about, though she knew she’d never indulge him in so much as a spark; she’d gotten too practiced at flipping the fuse board switches down, so they were all stuck in the off position.
The nurse finished whatever she was doing and gave Rae a look like it had come time for her to do the hard thing that was dealing with the patient’s human attachments. She said, “You can’t stay,” and with that, the nurse left, as if to show Rae how it was done. There were visiting rights and rules attached to them now. New laws governing the state of her failed relationship.
Then Elliot and Rae were alone, and the atmosphere felt changed but the same as if they were back at St. Mark’s. She half expected to see him lean his upper body forward to ash a joint, arms pinned effeminately to his sides, as if to make space for his mind to empty out its contents into. He had that vaguely pensive look about him that made her want to obliterate any thoughts left in his head. His silence might have been a sign of peace, a sign he didn’t feel any need to break it.
Before she knew what she was doing, Rae leaned down and put a hand on Elliot’s head. She felt the DIY handiwork of his haircut, the locks grown out piecey, still with a manic quality to them, of something improvised in compulsive haste. She remembered his beanie that by now must have been confiscated among sundry other bloodstained articles posing a risk to public hygiene, in a receptacle labeled CAUTION HAZARDOUS WASTE. It occurred to her he might’ve employed the same blade to cut his hair and his arm. She could not have known how much time he’d taken to deliberate the one action following the other, but the two felt connected.
Elliot looked at her, his eyes suddenly pleading. He said, “If you leave me here, I’ll never speak to you again.”
She hadn’t known she’d had a choice until then.
She removed her hand from his head and stood there feeling him stare at her staring at the floor, gray speckled, fissured like a broken eggshell. She felt the cinching of his double bind. If she stayed, she would only inspire more contempt in him: for himself for needing to gauge the power he still had over her; for her for emboldening him in this, pardoning him all of the crimes he’d not yet ventured to commit, the fullness of his darkness without repercussion. If she left, he might follow through with his ultimatum.
She turned and went.
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