Oslo, Winter 2011

 

    For two seasons, I was struck by migraines that would come without warning and with such extraordinary force the air would ripple in concentric circles pushing out from any light source. Often I would find myself on these occasions propelled backward into crowds on the sidewalk, which in a gesture of common humanity would catch me. And once whilst midway over a bridge in St. Petersburg, where I was intently focused upon an ephemeral white butterfly with three wings on a branch illustrated in a field guide I held as I walked, I heard a high-pitched whistling in the clouds turn into a roar with such a shock it catapulted me against the guardrail and shook loose scenes from an unremembered life that began to melt across the dome of my closed eyelids. My mother’s flickering face downturned under a lamp as if refusing to be acknowledged, while with tweezers she carefully placed a pair of lashes, like two tiny spiders, into an envelope, the camera panning over a map of Europe, vignettes from a rugged seashore where in the grainy Mediterranean sunlight circa 1970 three women, beautiful but unfamiliar and incomprehensible to me, were laughing without any volume and when I opened my eyes I found the city had appeared to pause — the barge below loaded with blue Toyotas parting the stalled waters only now had begun to move again. As if repeatedly watching a film for details I might have missed, I would in subsequent years replay these scenes, but was panicked to find in this most unstable of mediums — memory — the scenes were degrading with each view, as if merely looking could set off a chemical corrosion that could not be reversed and would one day leave me with nothing more than a handful of rust-coloured powder for what was once life, captured. As I watched in my mind at night, I would zoom to inspect the delicate script on her envelope but would find it indecipherable or I would pause on a silhouette of a face on the wall to her left like a cameo (was it a lover’s unannounced arrival?), or I would roam over a faded house in the lower frame that looked artificially aged. And the small oval floating in the back of the sky, no larger than a fennel seed, was a dirigible from which Italy was a single unbroken stem of a flower. Or had an atom of dust momentarily landed upon my eye, it was impossible to say. Each time I would recall these memories, the realities of where I was sitting, in the atrium of the Grand Palace Hotel in Berlin or on an aeroplane bound for New York, would calmly dissolve, leaving me with the sensation of being underwater and in the presence of something mysterious and protean, as if I were within an enormous school of sardines in the Aegean, swarming around me, turning from aluminum to black depending on the angle of the fluid geometries they formed and dispersed from instant to instant with each wave of my hand. When I think back to the other unaccountable hours in the grip of a migraine, time irretrievably lost except for a creased movie ticket or a hotel receipt for an unremembered sleep as evidence of my whereabouts in the arterial backwaters of a minor city where the black and white sky looked like a QR code, I recall how in the blotting pressure of those episodes I felt another consciousness attempting to access my own. In those days every keyhole, every telephone, every bottle of medicine glowed, as if lit with energy from within, the way ripe lemons are, and this led me to dwell on the inner radiance often found in saints depicted in medieval altarpieces or on the electrical fields of green light that envelope German children and livestock in the countryside during summer thunderstorms. In those days, I would fall silent at the apex of the pain when the tectonic plates of the past and present collided in my cerebellum and suddenly each man in the crowd erupting from the metro into the white noise of the city was my father, whose face had never been imprinted upon mine and thus could be anywhere, suddenly like an actor’s began to appear whenever I hazarded a glance at a billboard or a side of a bus. The mere possibility of such an encounter made a monotonous life more urgent, and yet I ask, who does not want to be pursued, to be laid claimed to, knowing that one’s existence was a matter of dire consequence for another? I would shield myself with an umbrella and depart into a stream of storefronts on Rue de Rivoli in the rain dropping pointillist dots on the sidewalk or slip into a bookstore and amongst the maze of shelves find a dusty and hidden corner favoured by amorous couples where I would begin scribbling notes on the back of a magazine retrieved at random, only to tear out the page as proof when I next awoke what had befallen me was not a product of my paranoid imagination, a fabricated world made from the things the mother brings and the things the father takes away. How else to restore those pirouettes of memory, hours walking the deslivered air? Thunder in the imagination. Those overwritten pages, where my writing rendered the print under them nearly illegible, were a ramble of words in ruins. That October, I relocated to the outer ring of Rome on a deserted street with a Poste Italiane and a crumbling osteria with irregular hours haunted by the owner, a man of sixty but already deep in the crow’s autumn of regret from which few reemerge, who would watch football for hours on a silent monitor as the ceiling fan turned listlessly. I noted the lines etched on his ancient face were tributaries found on those who lost children at the onset of middle age. As if waiting for someone to appear out of elongated shadows of a forgotten past that kept growing, I watched what were seemingly the neighbourhood’s only other residents, the widows who had taken the black in a show of devotion and were now, for all intents, married to each other. I would pass them in the fish market in the mornings and in the early evenings as they stared at me, like I was a rumour, as I made my way to the café, where I sat a week without relief before my journal, a failed clairvoyant with a flame and a circle of hair. Each nightfall, as the blue wind dropped on the villa’s blank side, as in a de Chirico, a dozen Chinese garment workers, whom later I read were deported, filed noiselessly through the alley beneath my window. Each held a plastic bag orange as a floating lantern that I could see until the last of them turned a corner and was gone.