58

There must be a vocabulary in the body that we never have to learn. Even in a coma there must be a monument-lined avenue, a capital city—what we really are. The executive mansion, its empty windows. The obsolete automobiles are few, the cars of our childhood, of all childhoods. Because when I was not a body anymore, was barely a skeleton, I still felt that there was something left, a trellis within the ivy, bones within the bones.

But of course I had always known this story, always known how it would end, even as I felt it not ending at all, a new chapter falling open, ancient—new only to me.

I had the dimmest sense of what was happening. Dr. Opal was consoling a weeping woman. He was telling her that the more you know the less you understand. I tried to take solace in this dream, my life leafing open before me, a collection of postcards.

Here was a street. Here was a sycamore, the patchy beige and green of its bark. How could I know this? I couldn’t see, I could not walk. This was one of those last visions, what my life was like.

Water rose up around me. I lurched on tattered stilts, and fell. I lay at the bottom of a spill of running water. My bones disarticulated in the gentle flow. The sharp pebbles and the jagged minerals of my body intermingled.

Let me imagine that I remember sirens, fire trucks in the distance. It may be true. But it was impossible for me to receive any sound clearly, there was too little of me left. Minnows probed me, finding some nourishment in residue, in char. They were hungry. Their mouths were like the ends of mechanical pencils, the lead drawn in, leaving the hard, round holes.

There must have been some reason the early recordings were manufactured in the form of black disks, plates fused by craftsmanship into circles. Recordings on cylinders could have been practical, but it was a general consensus that these black dishes of music were more appealing.

I think it was because you could see the entire piece of music at a glance, or feel it with your fingertips. Here was the groove where the song began, and here, at the label, was where it ended. And there was that circle around the label where the needle could spiral inward and bump and bump until the hand freed it, the circle of jittery silence that begins and ends all music.

How many nights passed? How many times did I seek and find what I needed from the living?

I always returned to the creek, the sandbag-lined bank, the horsetail reeds, the drainage pipes, all of it familiar to my touch even though I could not see.

This blindness was a familiar country. The sound of a ’possum’s tail dragging as the animal crept through the reeds to its burrow was as clear to me as a spoken word. Each whisper named itself.

The sandbags had been filled with a mixture of sand and cement long ago. Now the canvas sacking was season by season wearing through, the inner core of concrete all that was left.

One evening I could see again.

I did not know what it was I was looking at, only that soon it would resolve itself, like a screen supervised by an absentminded projectionist. There were reeds. Reeds and a creek, and a family of marsupials, their pink snouts, their pink eyes, gazing back at me.

The ’possums were too hungry to be shy. The larger one crouched over a corn cob. But they were curious, and did not move. I found myself able to speak. First a whisper, “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.”

They didn’t even know enough to be afraid, these pink, snouty creatures. But perhaps they sensed something in me, some harmlessness that was a part of their landscape, like the water and the reeds. They began to share the bare cob, gnawing it into chunks.

I wandered back to the site, the black scribbles that had been a house. A few scraps had been raked from the blackened geometry, a rind of carpet, electronic equipment fused and glittering. I whispered Rebecca’s name over the last place I had seen her, where the poplar roots were exposed above the trampled, ashy lawn.

But I did not linger there beside the snaking branches of the daphne, the trowel still in place, thrust into the mossy ground. I had somewhere to go.

I did not remember these streets—but I knew where I was.

These thoroughfares were oddly familiar, short, steep driveways, houses with painted wooden shutters that would not close, ornamental, and gardens of neatly clipped lawns and ferns. It was a street of ferns, fuchsias, rows of begonias.

I crossed a lawn, and found my way up the front steps to a door with a pleasing, tongue-and-handle door latch. The brass was warm, familiar. Closing my hand around it filled me with happiness.

This was a house I had never visited. But I knew exactly where to turn, where to find my way across a hall, my footsteps hushed by the firm nap of a carpet Bookshelves, an African violet, the walls uncluttered, everything simple, spare, tidy.

I knew this place.

Only the piano surprised me. I had expected a spinnet, a compact, handsome piano of no great musical quality but the sort of instrument for which one develops affection. Instead, here was a baby grand, a Steinway.

I nearly laughed out loud. Of course, the spinnet had been sold years ago, and this Steinway had been here ever since. I could find my way here with my eyes closed.

It’s easy to forget the beauty of a piano, the cream, the black. The hand almost does not want to interrupt the perfection. The pond is still. The fish sleep. The fingertips try to break the surface without flawing the peace.

Before I made a sound I warned myself that I could not do this.

I began to play, my hands finding the keys, my feet the pedals. I remembered the Fantasie only as I caused it to sound. It was like waking the music from a long sleep, from a coma, from a silence the music itself always resides in, a room beyond human habitation.

But I was in that room, playing the music I had been afraid I would never perform again, my hands knowing—a little stiff, but losing the stiffness with each heartbeat.

I played the music that would awaken my parents. I sensed them stir, sensing their disbelief, their love. They woke, and came through the house to the room where I sat playing Chopin in my sky blue gown.