CRUSTACEAN

Dirty green. Noisy. Sounds produced by tapping, scraping, bending, clicking, or rasping
parts of their exoskeleton.

TIME DOESN’T BLUNT ALL MEMORIES. Some grow edges sharp as knives. I thought I was past everything, out of everything. But I find I have only sealed things off. A pain ripens anytime these things come in uninvited, as they do, in the form of a simple question, or rain falling at a certain angle, or the smell of a solvent. Lev’s painting alters the order of things. Realization flickers through. Not the great sweeping kind, but the miracle of this one small thing. The great revelation never comes, because how could there ever be just one? It is all the things that strike, unanticipated, defiantly outside of reason or emotion.

I now see why old people live in the past, I say to Skeet. It saves you from surprises because it tricks you into counting on what comes next.

But all the wisdom of age—

I see his brown hands, pale eyes. He is also someone who shook off one life to find another, left mostly alone. I am certain he doesn’t subscribe to some cliché of a wise old woman, just as he wouldn’t to an old rattled one, gathering frustration. There is a part of me that wishes none of this had ever surfaced. That he didn’t know. It took so much effort to keep it away. I never wanted to be one of those women who cling to their past. To the sad, hard facts of war. You talk about work, they talk of hunger. You mention joy and they tell of hardship. They deny their lives by staying in the past. Their suffering asks for witness. And now they are almost all gone. I have avoided witness. It is almost funny. Someone who has spent life observing, to understand only now that a life, any life, needs witness. I remember how, in painting, you can only know what you’ve made once it has been contemplated by someone else. And now Lev’s painting, here, sending the anguish through me all over again. It is too late, too messy, too fractured to be put back together, in this rented house, in the middle of these scorched fields.

Frame, he says, eyes down. I wait. Do you miss him?

There is no need to ask who he means. I wonder what Skeet must feel. He would never tell. Looking at him reminds me of the losses I must negotiate. Of fieldwork that I will never conduct again, Skeet and I staring quietly as the sun dropped, pink light washing over us. Packing up recorders, microphones, and walking back to the truck, senses quickened, ears pricked to every sound, for days after. Of all the work that will not be carried on. Skeet moves as though there is no clear truth or falseness in anything. He prefers questions over answers and always takes himself out of the equation, which, I see, is exactly what I do. Have always done.

I sit, thoughtful, for a moment. Every morning I wake, I smoke, I work. The sounds connect me to the world. And when I am in a state of pure discovery, when I am completely unaware of everything else, that’s when I am most alive. I am not unlike the birds I’ve observed, who have their own private world. Their own sense of light, and comfort and purpose.

Yes, I finally say, I do.

Frame?

Skeet, I don’t know how to tell. Essential things are too far inside to have an obvious language. I’m older, everyone gets older, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you gain anything from it. Everything becomes more daily. More urgent. But at some point you have to be able to find the truth of the time you’ve taken up. All the living—the value of it.

What about the knowledge from the dictionary, from all this work. I mean, why do it? Why the compulsion to organize the unorganizable?

I place my cigarette, glowing, in the shiny ceramic ashtray. God. I never thought of it that way. As a compulsion to organize. Like Mother. I always think of it as documenting the present for the future. This is what art does. It allows for a continuous present. It encapsulates what cannot be known until something is lived. When Lev painted, I saw how he truly existed out of time. He was articulating what was beyond his own ability to know.

I want to show you something, I say to Skeet, getting up from the table, slowly, with difficulty.

Skeet picks up his bag and ducks his head under it, the leather strap across his chest like a newspaper boy, and takes my arm. We walk through the front door, the gravel making small rips underfoot, brush past the lavender down the stone steps and out through the archway. The cave walls gleam white. I see that one of my taped notes has fallen down. Nine thousand years of protecting ourselves from nature, now we must protect nature from ourselves. For the longest time I had a William Blake quotation above my desk. There is no difference between the whole thing and one thing, was what it said. It both made sense to me and confounded me intermittently. But seemed as sturdy a philosophy as any to live by. My pages weighted under stones. There is little breeze down here, and it is surprisingly arid. I wrap my shawl around me. The sight of all the work a small thrill that grazes me still.

Skeet’s hands touch the pages, his eyes move around the space. I didn’t picture it like this, he says, looking up. Eyeglints in the absence of light.

What did you picture?

I don’t really know.

He looks at all the work, piles of papers, my drawings of parabolas translated into shapes, then mapped as expanding webs of glissandos. Writing pinned to the walls, digital recorders, a box of batteries, a stained teacup, pencils, huge stacks of vertical files, stiff large paper covered in symbols, crates of hard drives full of data, tapes, fieldbooks, several headphones, fieldnotes scrawled on slips of graph paper, broken-down recording equipment from various eras, empty packages of cigarettes, photographs, yellowed notes, spectrographs.

This— He stops. I forget how much you’ve seen, he says in a solemn voice that requires space around it.

First, I lost myself, I say to Skeet, and then I saw it clearly and began the conscious work of construction. And after all these years I see now that it comes from a devotion to life.

But where, he wants to know, does that devotion come from? Is it outside of you or inside of you?

It is bigger than me.

That night in the south of France, there were no more stars, the sky was black. There was a low rumble when the sun still shone. When I was out walking by the river. First there was a short rain. And after I went back to the house, after I saw that Lev was gone, the true rain began to fall. The earth calling for it. I stayed inside and listened to the sudden violet storm, counting the seconds between lightning flashes. I sat outside on the slippery stone steps. Lightning moving closer. Strike me.

There is no edge between the sorrow and the rain. I run out into the storm and feel its sullen chaos. Rain pricks my skull. Already this rain between us, erasing everything. Your dry footsteps. Sun glimmering through the spaces between every leaf, a cache of ancient gold. High larks filling the silverblue dawn. Ditches red like the first poppy you ever saw, dark-hearted and delicate. Your paintings so heavy I can’t even hold them in one hand. It’s all paint, you say, squinting in the sun. Paint upon paint, no money for new canvases. And they completely change. In the morning I wake up and everything that was dark is now white. Everything that was white is now black. You say that over time black on black becomes white on white. The edges are an archaeology of colour. The whip of white paint trailing along the foreground, the brush flicks from your hand like another perfect finger.

The truth is, no matter how close you get to another person, it will never be close enough.

We need the spaces in between, Lev says. The not-knowing. In between, the world is real.

But the most important thing is the thing we will never know.

I look around the large room. How an open door and upturned papers can contain violence. I oscillate between numbness and a wretchedness that comes in waves, the kind that can pull you under. I am vile and old. Cracked, dull, lined, hollowed. Though when I flash in the mirror as I move by the front door, dark as a crow, this is not what is reflected back. I am a rain-ruined figure, but it is only my eyes that look off. It is only the old who look older in tragedy.

I wanted to see Lev go. That he has vanished makes no sense. I understand now why people want to see the dead. The open casket, the body dressed in finery for the angel of death. Glasses on unseeing eyes, jewellery, a bloodless decoration outlasting skin. Hair combed—untidy is diabolical. We so obviously want to witness the goodbye. As though our observances will lessen the fact that people can just vanish. But where do they go? The child’s question and the adult’s question are the same.

Lev’s cries in his sleep, warning calls. The one sound the recorder of sounds refuses to recognize. In rapture there is no room for anything else. Not even like a storm where there is calm in the eye. Rapture is a place where beauty rests entire. But I am reminded that everything is temporary. Nothing lasts. I try to picture his hands. I can see them perfectly. I know how he’s boned. The things that cannot be led away without witness. Still, the rain falls.

What are you thinking about? Skeet asks.

Weather, I tell him.

We don’t have a lot of time, he says. At the same moment we both realize how absurd this is. Like wrongly timed laughter that comes when moving furniture. Or at a funeral. Skeet’s laugh is low and infectious and makes me laugh.

I’ve lost my sense of time.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

I remember strange things, I say.

Like what?

I don’t know. Ridiculous things, like houseflies buzz in the key of F. Crustaceans are instrumentalists. Or during social moments in unusual surroundings, seahorses turn bright colours. Then I think of my father, for instance. I never had much time with him as a child, but sometimes we would say the same thing at the exact same moment. Something uncommon like, Through the din.

There is a sound above. Hold that thought, he says.