— Dad, visit me, come on, it's my wish, tell me about being dead. Come close, I will it. I can't do this. Dad, visit me, stand beside me. I can't… this is stupid.
Green, moldy bodies in morgues, inflamed, bloated, white faces, mutilated corpses, half-blown-away bodies, maggot-ridden, in blue uniform, Gettysburg, lynched black bodies hanging from a despicable tree. Terrible death, I fear you, I have to get out of here, it's sane fear, I answer it, I'm a coward, I should stay, I want to hear them again. My head splits in two.
Did I speak this aloud or is it internal?
I don't think I'm talking in my darkness. I can't halt these alien sensations. I place my hands over my eyes and press hard, scrunching my eyes closed again, so that their veins radiate bloody patterns, garishly colored shapes, pale ashes, the papers I burned this afternoon maybe, everything recognizable is ablaze, like my family's Eames chairs. I can't hold onto an image, so I tell myself, in a stately manner, Mark this now, fire burns complacent things, and in a flash it occurs to me why I take things apart, and I want to remember the reason but can't. Another gust of arctic air makes me shiver, there's nothing to think about, I open my eyes, it's all gone, I shut them again.
I hear my name, "Helen, Helen," so I turn toward the Magician, who stares at me and directs me, "Follow my hands," which I do, I can see his hands waving in front of his face, but suddenly his head belongs to my friend who disappeared. I can hardly breathe. Then the Magician's head enlarges, his eyes expand, enormous like universes, much larger than my mad cat's just before he gouged my left calf, and I follow his agile hands, how they weave in the air, like weavers' hands at looms, my head drops onto my chest and rolls around, or from side to side, oddly enough I recall this because while my head feels detached and airy, I'm still holding on, so a question about consciousness wings by, about how markedly it can differ from self-consciousness, when it emerges from a consciousness aligned to a self, then questions disappear. I'm not con cerned about fainting, I worry I'm dying, even if my skin still itches, my arms, chest, legs, and maybe my dead friends or their ghosts leave messages on my back.
Against my will-I have no will-while the Magician mumbles something, my skull empties, and the inside of my head becomes dense. I enter a deeper trance, or I might still be in a hypnogogic state, but I do believe the Magician may have hypnotized or entranced me, because from now on what I am certain of is negligible, what I remember is beyond description in ordinary terms.
I'm near the ocean, because I hear waves, I ask someone, my father, or my friend taken by AIDS, the question I'd asked my mother as a child: Is life worth it, even though you die? She said then, Yes, because you have happiness when you're alive, you have a lot of good times before you die. I didn't accept what she said then. I don't get an answer now. I breathe in the green ocean, fall headlong into a whitecapped wave, let it consume me, I'd been hungry for its endlessness, the hot sand, the summer wind's raw perfume, the innocent exhaustion after swimming. I take off my itchy sweater and walk unsteadily toward the windows, calling desperately for a birdman, and then Moira, who is apparently clearheaded, throws my sweater over my head, puts my arms through the sleeves, and leads me back to my chair. Moira whispers in my ear, "Did you know my name `Moira' means destiny?"
Hearing the word from her mouth shocks me, and I jump back, exclaiming, "No, I had no idea, I didn't know." Moira's face transforms, it contorts grievously, and, if that is destiny, it's an ogre, so I slap her. I suppose I never really liked Moira, though her oddness and inquisitiveness attracted me from the first. Moira smiles and transforms into my young wild cat, but I'm in a chair, looking down on myself from above, an outof-body experience, and in it I feel estranged from the world, but long for it, wanting to return and to live forever. In scarlet ink, fluttering on my eyelids, "Live the life you have imagined," but soon I perceive the closeness of the ogre, destiny, snarling like my mad, dead cat, but destiny can't be put to sleep, the way he was, it doesn't go away, and, worse, death wouldn't. Death stops everything. It's unfair, but not unjust, since everyone suffers its democratic tyranny. Things flow along, whole and disintegrated, I have at least two minds, so I exhort one, maybe aloud, "Don't stop, don't stop. I wish… I wish…"
Then my father appeared, I think he did and I also think he didn't, and my best friend killed in a car crash showed up, with her young, toothy grin, "You haven't changed," I exclaimed, and there my brother stood, dead the way I thought. "Everyone wishes to speak to the dead." I heard that again. My father wore his dark brown trunks, I saw him swimming behind the breakers, far from shore, swimming farther and farther away, until he disappeared.
The Count produced fearsome yowls, I reclaimed my body and wondered if he were possessed by the devil, but didn't accept that could make sense. The Count enunciated disconnected words and phrases" tiny second hand, poison ivy, Descartes, lacquer and jade, the antichrist"-with many long pauses, as if completing his sentences in an interior monologue. I waited for more revelation, but if it came, I missed it. The Magician hushed him and snapped his fingers, and the Count's seizure, if it was, halted miraculously, and then the Magician sang or chanted, I don't remember the lyrics, though I usually have extremely good recall of conversations and dialogue, but none of his words stayed with me. Yet with them, we woke up from our sleep or trances, conscious of leaving one peculiar world for another. And so, the sitting reached its end, the way everything does, and, slowly, one after another in an orderly single file, we walked from the Rotunda Room, all but the Count, who, after his outburst or seizure, vanished. No one said a word. It was a few minutes past 1 a.m., so only an hour had passed, but it seemed, as they say, an eternity.
The storm had also passed, and remote, brilliant stars littered the sky. In my room, I stripped, my skin was exceptionally dry, the largest organ of the body stretched to its limit, I slathered on creams and worried about the scaly spot on my leg. Not surprisingly death, or mortality, hung about after the seance, especially when the pressure around my heart turned into sharper pain, heartburn, or an event, as cardiologists call an undetermined episode, and, since my father died of heart disease, I worried, but the pain left in no time, and anyway I'm not prone to hypochondria.
I slept fitfully, awoke twice, walked to the bathroom, hardly concerned about waking the two disconsolate women, since they might occupy other beds, and the third time I awoke, I gazed at the Fabric Monolith, at its hidden potential, its unleashed energy, and imagined I'd unfurl it one day, but only in my imagination. If my bed were covered in Egyptian 600 denier all-cotton sheets, I'd sleep better, but the seance, whatever it is or was, carried novelty's unruliness and disturbed my rest; the sleep of orphan children, the sleep manual reports, is "made more restless when they leave the institution to see a motion picture in the evening," so it exhorts readers to "make their mind as blank as that of a wartime flapper," the Great War, that is, the manual came out in America in 1937, when rationalization, bureaucratization, the New Deal were the rage, like liquor, hard-boiled novels, Communism. With age, it's said you need less sleep, though my mother, who's very old, needs her sleep and often drops off in a serviceable reclining chair, covered in light brown naugahyde, in her living room, watching a movie on TV, but not when she is reading, which she does with near-perfect eyesight and in a state of total concentration, her head craned to the book on her lap, its covers lovingly cradled in her small, white hands. She has a little arthritis, but it's not disfiguring and doesn't keep her from knitting, though as her neurological condition deteriorates, her once-skilled fingers lose their way and trip, she drops a stitch, a line, then complains that it's the fault of the wool-too thin, she says-but it's not. Soon, knitting wearies her, but her skin glows, translucent and smooth, free of wrinkles, though not as plump and lush as her older sister's, who used Jergen's Lotion only, and whom she envied and outlived, but my mother's greatest rival was her husband's mother, whose ancestors emigrated from Egypt, whose green oval eyes and beauty captured him, and whose impetuous, incessant demands he always met. Now my mother envies only youth and worries that her brain will fail her completely and she will not know herself.