I am into a white. As white as snow covering a field, stretching out toward all horizons. As white as a page. If there is a surrounding forest or mountain or city I cannot see them beyond the white.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here, or how deeply in I have traveled. I am aware that outside this place there is a room, and in the room they say a woman is not well. I think the woman is me, but I am so far away I cannot breathe language back into her, and so she rests, like a sleeping body, like a sentence yet unformed.
Sometimes I can feel my husband’s body—his physical presence—in my bones, and so I know when he has entered the room. He cannot enter the white. And sometimes I can smell my son’s breath and hair and skin, and I want to rip my heart from my chest and hurl it.
To them, I must look dead.
But I am not dead.
The white is soft. Soft against the eyes and the body, soft in your ears and throat. Not like mist or smoke. As if the air around you suddenly had dimension. You can almost touch it. This white before you. Where I am.
Inside the white I can hear things and see things. Sounds and images resolve and dissolve at random intervals. And different times present themselves—different times from my life or the lives of people I’ve known or the lives of random people, little scenes of being, all of them come and go.
The stories here move differently from the way they do out there. Inside the white, stories move backward and forward in time and appear in all places at once. Language and images split into thousands of universes. Stories and people and images connect with faster-than-light transfers of information. Many worlds coexist.
I do not feel unconscious or crazy or comatose. I feel part of the motion of all matter and energy, and thus I am a participant with agency. If I want something to come or go, it does.
I hear something now inside the white. It is a word. The name of a street: Bakszta.
The name of the street is immediately comforting. It is the street of my ancestors. The only one in the world who knows the people who lived there and their names, names that became my name, the name that began as one word and deteriorated down and down and under and across until it was utterly atomized into my American last name, the only one left: me. Because of all the daughters, some of them childless, I am the last. I am a locus.
Juknevicius. A name.
Bakszta. A street.
Through the white: a girl.
It is her. The girl who haunts me.
I go through the possibilities again. Maybe she is my dead daughter. And maybe she is me, or some relative before me. Maybe the girl is simply a metaphor for what we lose or what we make. And maybe the girl is just a girl, an imagined one, one created from the mind of a woman lost in the spaces between things.
I open my mouth to speak.
Perhaps it is the name of the street.
Perhaps it is the name of the girl.
Perhaps it is the name of my son, or my husband.
Or just a name, my name, my brother’s, a friend’s, an artist’s, a poem, a country, any name.
But no name comes from my mouth.
My voice—language—is swallowed up by the white.
I see the girl’s blond tangled hair as she walks away from me into the white, into some other story. I hear a blasting sound. I follow her.
The white turns to a scene of war. Like a movie.
I open a door in a bar in an Eastern European village. My husband and son are there too, but I am not near them. I am near other people—artists who are dear to me. My brother. The poet, the photographer, all of them. I can see my husband and my son, though. Across the space. They’ve made hats from paper cups. They are laughing. My husband is drinking beer. My son is drinking apple cider. His cheeks little apples. Someone is playing a guitar. Someone else is playing an accordion. There is amber-colored wood on the floors and walls and chairs. People seem intimately close, like in a not-American bar. Their faces warm and rosed. Their gestures swept up in song or laughter. No one is picking up on anyone, or arguing, or using money, or wearing a certain thing. No one’s hair matters. This is a not-American room, a room not made for money and action and ready-made lust thrusts, a room where people are speaking intellectually while drunk, the artists and the farmers giving each other equal weight, and leaning into one another’s bodies without concern—men leaning into men’s bodies and women into women’s—so that the air of it carries all of our hearts and loosens all of our minds and anyone could be from any country for this moment. Loving anyone they want. Saying anything.
The myriad conversations make a kind of voice-hum over the room, and I look up at my husband and my son and I smile.
But there is a war raging just outside, and the information comes to be known that we are all about to die, that a thermonuclear blast is coming. The information is coarse and immediate, as I assume it is for farm animals. They catch the smell, their spine fur shivers, they shift weight from one leg to another, feel restless, look up. The time we have left is understood. I hear it and know it and within ten seconds I make my way to the beating heart of love (my husband and son) so that we can be inside a group embrace, looking into the planets of one another’s eyes as the white life-ending cataclysm occurs.
The embrace and the blast happen at once, comfort and annihilation. Our bodies the universe.
I am in the white again.
Energy never dying.
Just changing forms.
I lie down in the white.
I know why I am here.
I’ve come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.
Is it my fault.
What happened to you.
Are you happy.
What do you want from me.
The girl is here, inside the white. When the time is right, I will ask her my questions. And then I will either go back or she will take me.
The woman in the room, the one who is maybe me, they say she is dying in a hospital bed.