The Chamber of the Enigma
“You tell me,” Buzzard whispers in my ear. Buzzard and I made a baby, but that baby ain’t anything like we’d ever expected. Think of a doll the size of a boy. Think of a mannequin plucked from the children’s section: vague and featureless. Buzzard and I are small and soft, malleable and hand-powered. Where had this blank and stiff being come from?
“Buzzard,” I say, “you better pony up the cash to get this boy to the doctor. I don’t know how to care for a thing like this.”
Buzzard’s eyes sweat rhinestones as he stares at me. “We’ll love him,” Buzzard says, raising his hand and gesturing to the boy, making a toast to the con man of his sadness.
“Snap out of it, Buzzard!” I say. “I’m gonna need your help here. You can’t be glazed and spilling for all eternity. You can’t let your head circle round and round. You gotta land.” I slap him hard and he finally focuses.
The doll-child is hard to read — he makes no sound and moves not a muscle. It is hard to know if the doll-child is even alive. If he is living, he is an invalid, and he must be lonely inside himself.
Buzzard stutters around the room, watching the doll-child. I sneer and chase my own tail, trying to think what to do. I swaddle the doll-child in several of my tulle dresses. The child is already at least three times my size. I’m starving, but my needs aren’t the thing to think of anymore.
I look at Buzzard, but he’s not looking at anything. Then I look at the doll-child and think, “The first thing we’ll need is something to call him by.” He has a head of fine black hair all curling around itself. I look deep into the child’s eyes and wonder if there’s anything in them. I wonder where the key is to this iron box. I wonder when everything that he’s made of will well up and surprise us all. Finally, I say his name like I’m saying “thank you.”
Things don’t get easier. We call the doll-child Bluebird. When I try to talk to him, my mouth tangles like rosebushes. The thickness of my tongue dances slow, like pushing stones. I feel deaf and late. Bluebird lies listless. I never hear him laugh; his focus, control, stillness are constant. Even his breathing is just a measured ripple. I enter his room, burnt and swinging. I trumpet and crumple, trying to get a rise from him. I am collapsing-tired on the sidelines of him. He is daytime television. He is silly profanity. He is a white gardenia that blooms too long, brown on the edges and sweet in an uninvited way.
I ask my mother what I need to do, and she says his needs should attack me like a bear. When I smell him, I change him. I flush with the effort of rolling water and soap down his body. I grow used to the sound of the old sand through the hourglass and his silent refusal to sleep. I read him stories of countesses and counts dressed in rich, blue velvet. My mother visits and stares as she watches me care for him, declining her turn to speak. Buzzard does just what he said he’d do: loves him. And that’s about it.
I tell myself over and over that I don’t mind all that I give up for Bluebird and wonder, with my weak brain, if the Lord is sarcastic. Bluebird grows bigger, his skin stretches over new bones, the growing pains pulling him beautiful and awkward.
He smiles like an anchorman for a while, and I wonder what’s better: his blank slate or this horror.
I try to rouse him, but his fatigue is spotless. I try to drag him through the small knot of the doorway, out into the world. I gasp nervously when people ask about him. I seek advice in private, and everyone has a different thing to say. To let him ghost if that’s the stage he’s in. To try and light him like a cigarette. To pop my own laughter outside his door to lure him out.
People ask what worries me most, and I say the fear isn’t really sorted out that way. I wake and retrieve the pressure I shed in my sleep. I keep checking on him and expecting things of him. My Bluebird, a grumbling stump, his hands hid, his mouth shut, convinced all of this something is a nothing. My eyes jangle, my cheeks dry and show lavish tilts of salt. Every day more and more crashes into the walls. I want to go too far, I want a neon sign to let me know this is worth waiting for.
The Colleens
The Colleens cruise their shadows again along the window-sills, discriminately in the nightshade alone. They peek in. The Colleens, though? You won’t see them back. They deviate from any usable light. Their straight golden hair stretches artfully over one eye like an invisibility cloak. A band of pretty girls, unnaturally menacing, becomes unnoticeable. Their fingers spin at their waists like Turing machines. The equation is never solved; the digital dervishes gain speed.
Piloting these Colleens is a gentle North Light, dispatching them like the couriers of some repeatable secret message. Again and again they meet the approach of the night but never recognize the falling of the watery darkness as a stop sign. The calm and legible way the Colleens ride their feet through the evening presents them with the immense time hidden in sleep. Good hour after hour takes them on mental journeys. Every bit of their interiors has been raided, and so they wander like the Burghers of Calais, willing yet not wanting to give themselves for the good of the people. The Colleens want, without pursuing their desire, to wear the hats of others but proceed not able to recognize anything beyond the pattern of steps they take.
The Colleens shepherd the night into each small town, and when it is safe, when a sufficient amount of time has passed, the light will brutalize familiar streets again.
Engrossed
We is preoccupied and headless. We takes the open invitation of mirrors and stares without eyes and the pressure thins to a prop. We wheels the piano into sun showers and watches the warp and hustle. We pains and flashes with strange gestures. We cannot be love that works. That suicide be stopping in a residual and curtsying way: it are cute like thumbs and nipples and unexpected swelling. We bites your will like a ball of wool. Your body flood us and we rocks and fogs, delivering. The climate outside our body are a busy woman. We takes a nap every hundred feet. The silence realizes again and we is water-hungry. We drinks our brothers and the frame are everything we can’t forgive, driving and tricky. We likes your language with exceptions. We clicks and zippers through this light rain. You can memorize our mind in one go. We kittens down empty roads like old winter. There is floods and glass eyes and nothing that resembles what you knows to look for in the middle of the day. We cushions your head, delicate and crested. Desire wills itself through muscle and moist dreams dusts our arteries. We started out less human than this. Our lips was pink and amphibian. No bruise is as real as the one wrought by the engine in our chest. Ruthless green interruptions truth my starving blood. Instead of “we am,” say “we will.”
The Direction of Forgetting
To travel the incense road requires a man to lay down his longing in favor of the will for adventure and wealth. He must put aside the scents of his lover and let the turmeric grow comfortable deep in his lungs, easy as breath. One must prepare to find threads of saffron clinging to his cloak and pluck them thoughtfully away, as if they were strands of his wife’s golden hair.
In Java I lose the details of my wife’s skin when I plunge my hands deep into a sack of weaver bird feathers. I trade, with a plastered urgency, a surplus of cinnamon we’d been carting since Aden for the sack of plumage.