Letters to Dead Authors, #5

Dear Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne,

I stop by the dormitory at night to imagine the ghosts rushing in and out, in and out of the ranks of open mouths. The wind rattles the windowpanes. The whole building is dark. Even the night watchman is catching forty winks in his tiny room, as I allow him to do between circuits of the building and the grounds. Only I am awake.

My “’v’”—the girl Finster—sleeps hard, her face turned into the pillow, her jaw set, as if sleeping were a task demanding great concentration, as if the night were a ledger filled with figures she is obliged to pore over in agonizing search of a missing zero. To tell the truth she faces the day with much the same look. She is a knot of incomprehension and rage, so I expect great things of her.

Yesterday I left something on the nightstand beside her bed that I had fashioned on a walk through the countryside: a figure made of forked sticks and leaves. This was the only sort of doll I played with as a child, since my father did not hold with toys for children. It was not to be cuddled, but held secretly in the palm of the hand, and then crushed.

It was not there last night, but she was clutching something, and I bent close to see. It was not the doll, but a stuffed toy, stubbled and blind and so shapeless that its species was anyone’s guess—was that an ear or a paw? She whimpered as I pried it from her insensate fingers, but did not wake.

Though I can still see the letters that I form, it is dark where I sit on the small terrace overlooking the sculpture garden. Yet above me birds flash, as bright as sparks from a burning building. There is a rational explanation: The sun is setting behind the hills, and I am in their shadow, but the birds are not.

Today I burned Finster’s toy, while she screamed and raved. That is what we do with obstacles to our ends. Only when you have lost everything can you open yourself completely to the dead.

Perhaps I used a little excess vigor, prodding the limp form, already almost entirely consumed, until it belched enough smoke to make my eyes water.

The terrace is the last place on school grounds to catch the sun, which is why I sought it out, after this melodrama, but darkness fell sooner than I expected, and with it has come the cold that was perhaps always there, under the sunlight. From the stone bench and the flagstones the chill seeps into me.

Now the darting sparks have gone out and in their place black flecks of ash swoop and twitter against the deepening sky.

In the distance, a rectangle of yellow opens, making the surrounding darkness absolute. It calves; a light moves away from the bank of lights that is the school, winding its way through the garden. It is Clarence, looking for me. He will go to the gazebo, first. Now he is at the gazebo. Then he will go to the labyrinth. Now he is at the labyrinth. He will hesitate at the entrance. He is hesitating. He will call for me. I cannot hear him. Then he will go into the labyrinth, and he will get lost.

Next day. I left my pen and letter on the bench and went to rescue Clarence, who was very grateful to see me, though at first alarmed by my shadowy figure advancing through the shrubbery. It is strange that the domestic staff of this school, though perfectly accustomed to such manifestations of the spirit world as table-tapping, ectoplasm, and spirit voices, are nonetheless subscribers to a callow and baseless fear of “ghosts”—by which they seem to mean a white sheet on a stick, moaning.

I thought it best to guide him back inside, and so this letter camped on the terrace overnight, becoming, as you may perceive, somewhat stiff and warped, and suffering indignities from a literary slug—see its silver footprint here. Discovering my abandoned efforts on my morning constitutional, I picked up my pen, induced it once again to flow, and am now ready to return to my topic. But I have forgotten what it was.

No, I had no particular topic, only the feeling that something fanged was chewing its way up my throat.

When I was a little girl I liked to shake my head until I got dizzy, my braids rhythmically lashing my face, my lips slewing back and forth and slinging spit across my cheek. I wanted to shake some obstruction out of my throat or my eyes or my ears or all three. Later it seemed to me that what I had sought riddance of was just myself. Though still small, I was already in my way. It even sometimes seemed to work, if I remember right, and released me for a few minutes or an afternoon to a paradise of clear cold air, black sticks, berries as bright as fire, and the frozen violence of blades of grass. But later I blocked my own view entirely, and no longer even tried to clear a path to that crystal world. I perceived no obstacle, because I had become it; the Sphinx was my own self.

Maybe this is why I like the long lost better than the living. I would not want them back: I like them just because they’re lost. The dead are not quite there, and it is being there that’s what is wrong with the living. We are too much with us. The truest part of me was trained on that crystal world outside me, or even was that world. Sticks and berries . . . Why weigh them down with meat and bone? The Long Pig of the self? Too, too solid. A wasting sickness, I thought, was the way to die. To melt, to cease, to suck your own bones dry. To wear at last so thin that you can see the world through your almost unfogged flesh. Then, when you are crystal clear, to die.

But I did not die. So I turned to the ghosts. Nothing to make you feel that you’re not there like someone talking through your head. May I confess that I did not care nearly so much what the ghosts had to say, as simply that they spoke? I already suspected that nothing said in words we understand is alien to our human case. Ghosts speak like living men and women or not at all. It would have been a great disappointment had I not predicted it. But it doesn’t really matter. What I have always wanted was that empty feeling. That I wasn’t something like a steak in a dress, but a hole. And if a hole, then I could go through it, or was already through it, in the world at last.

I wrote the above with such vehemence that my nib went through the paper and stuck there (you will note the scar). The pen wrestled itself out of my hand and shot into a pile of leaves, whence I have retrieved it, but how long I crouched over the leaves I do not know. Could a leaf be world enough to satisfy a lifetime’s craving? I doubt it. Maybe. The way it crunches, to dust and trapezoids. The still-flexible spines fanning out like bones of a hand. But this, what I’ve written here, is only the description of a leaf. You know what a real leaf is. You are among the leaves. You left. You are a leaf now.

That is all,

Headmistress Joines