Oslo, Winter 2011

 

    With my awakening, there was a buzzing in my left ear — the static sound of an itch — as if a code in a last desperate measure were being whispered. A secret I suspected I was meant to die with. The magnified sun zeroed in my eyes. Sat up, shaking my head no, no. My mind a miasma of thoughts. In the eaves hung silence and a single light bulb at the end of a knotted cord swayed slightly. The A-frame quavered in thunderstorms and the day would come when it would tumble into the sea. I envisioned it many times when staring from under my umbrella in the garden amongst the lightning strikes and lilies. Through the alcove window, beyond the decaying walls of this small, desolate estate, I saw the bright smoke stack of the incinerator on the hill, which fumed night and day without end from the moment I can remember first laying my eyes upon it and saying the word incinerator, emit a blast of saffron fire straight into heaven and then, to my wonder, it ceased. A fly on the windowpane shook its wings, rubbed together tiny hairs on its front legs in irritation. I did not know and did not want to know how long I had been asleep, but I suspect it was longer than I could imagine, longer than I could have ever dreamt. I lay nude, washed ashore in a tempest of rain and leaves, regurgitated back into the world for another go-around. I had been at the tail end of a dream that came frequently in different forms to me for the past year but whose meaning loitered faintly on the edge of my apprehension. It was a dream that seemed to trail me through my waking life, yet hanging back like a small child, as if it had something it were afraid to tell me. I suspect the dream has been dormant in my brain from my earliest days when I was found riding in a red wagon pulled through the streets by a sheepdog. The woman who would soon assume the role of my mother lifted me up into the air, held me against the sky, and said simply Ahhhh. Though my analyst, Dr. T. R., called this a lie, I remember the moment precisely, for it was the first time I had seen the world from what seemed to me then a great height and the sense of awe that emerged out of my wordless mouth was equal to that of my new mother’s. For a year now, I have had dreams of this memory and of other memories I can no longer recall and dreams of memories of a city of minarets I seem never to have visited and of people whom I seem never to have met, though I am sure these are real memories and not the fabrications of my imagination. For a year now my waking life has itself assumed the quality of a lonely dream. In the sanctuary of sleep I have made my cathedrals. When I close my eyes, those I once knew, whose faces are erased more each receding day, fly to me for a little while in companionship and in terror. Before I woke that afternoon, an aged man in a white frock was bent over me, wearing a cap with a spotlight and about his ears a stethoscope like a pair of deflated horns. He wore a squinted expression of sad curiosity, as if I were a son he never knew and now found too late he fathered one night in an alley with a whore under a trellis of moonlight and afterwards wept, as the moon climbed higher into the sky. This is how it would be: my real mother, the woman of debauched flowers. My fictional mother, a suffocating nurse and a dreamer. Like a priest, father crying downward to death, upward to ecstasy and death, death from above, the whole world sin sin sin. He stared at me with his white eye, pressed the stethoscope against my heart and wept, as if listening intently to an old radio program from the war. In his face I could see planes soaring above London in holy flames as he penetrated her amongst the garbage and wharf rats. The entire time he stood over me, I knew I was in a dream, but his sorrow was real and to comfort him, I summoned grief home to my heart, but it was gone, both grief and my heart replaced by reports of a world besieged, and as I searched I could not even find the word sorry. And the word sorrow, well, that is another story. He daubed his worried forehead for a moment with a handkerchief monogrammed H.E.I., paused. A perfect world is right around the corner, and far, far away. Mother, your hair of attic and old coat comes to me on a breeze. The room burnt rose. The red letters of a monogram descending, a branding iron. It was winter, the whole Christian earth buried in a graveyard of snow that fell and fell. A deer with eyes dark as plums looked in through the window. My father began to intone my name in a solemn tongue but it sounded dubbed, as though when he mouthed my name another word emerged. Our shadows stretched, grew larger on the wall. Then in sudden pain, his mouth scrapping mine, there poured from him in a whoosh a storm of fireflies, a golden rain lighting the room in an immolation of tiny loves. He slumped against me and onto his back, a cyclops. Through a lambent hole in the dark, a ray of a film projector on the ceiling. And then, on a grainy Super 8 reel, I saw myself, as I had so many times before, an infant crawling on all fours through long grass following my mother’s yellow hair slipping through a crack in the murk, luminous with pinpricks of light and the falling leaves of a dead autumn that would cover her and these words if I failed to save them.