While waiting in the blind beneath the ledge for Esther to be released, I recalled the four-year-old perfectionist who flew into rages, the eight-year-old who’d taken modesty to such extremes that she wore a robe over her clothes, the Esther new to her teens who was so disturbingly pretty that her mother and I fell silent when we saw her.
How could a girl so striking tolerate the wretched people her parents had become?
Oh, of course. She couldn’t.
While waiting in the blind for Esther’s release, what I failed to picture was a gray-faced Esther, as if prepped for entombment, an Esther who was recumbent and dry-lipped with iced-over eyes. I had not planned for such a helpless body, erased of the Esther I knew, much like her own mother when the quarantine was announced. The illness had rendered Esther anonymous, and I found it better not to look too closely.
Still I tended to her. I boiled a broth, filtered it through a cone of flannel. With the residue I made little pills for her to suck. From the larder I flayed a choker of cured meat, and when her fevers surged I worked with cloth to keep her face cool and clean.
Esther did not thrive with me huddled over her, staring, dabbing. If she seemed to see me, it was with a scowl, but scowl does not describe a face that shows disappointment and irritation mixed with something that a father might read as his child’s relief. Or maybe he only wants to see relief, and the desire, projected strongly enough, nearly changes the face of the young woman in the bed. I registered the small winces of distaste at my attentions, and, when I was certain Esther was disgusted by my hovering, repelled and annoyed and altogether bothered, I quietly celebrated. When I saw these grimaces I felt more sure that, yes, this was my Esther. Get away from me, I could almost hear her say. This was displeasure that I knew. A comfort to see something that I remembered. This was my girl. Finally I grew sure I had brought her home.
After that I draped a woolen wall over the cot, a blanket hanging from a wire, so Esther would not suffer any added distress. No need to punish her with my presence. Esther prefers privacy. I do understand. She deserves what personal space I can provide.
She deserves a little house of her own, too, and maybe when she recovers, and when her mother returns to us, Esther can choose the site herself, so long as it’s not too far from this hut. So long as I can get there easily, even in darkness.
47
Not so far off in the sky, the odd bird tours the valley. Birds seem to prefer the speechless world. If you lived here you’d have to be buried alive not to notice the superior joy they demonstrate overhead. Victory laps inscribed in the air. Rubbing it in. Admiring the way their shadows crawl over the salt below. Perhaps you require no convincing. Perhaps such sights are available where you live as well, and you, too, look from your shelter at this airborne gloating.
When I picture you examining this account, dangling each decaying page aloft with a tweezers, I wonder if you are alone, barricaded from someone with whom you once spoke freely. Are you reading this with assistance, an inhibitor cutting into the folds of your mouth? Does some cold, salted tonic sluice through your blood to give you shield, if briefly? Or is your protection something more, shall we say, bitter and problematic, achieved at a greater cost?
Perhaps a little one fell down in a great black swoon after you sucked free his assets, and the transaction has left you, what is the word, troubled.
Is there salt where you are, too? Just so much of it everywhere? Can you reckon that it is really the residue of everything we ever said, piled now in soft white mounds? It seems far too pretty to only be our spoils.
I would like to question you on your symptoms, the path you navigated to language, the choices you’ve faced. But we will never speak, as I will be dead by the time you read this. We do not get to survey the people of the future, who laugh at how little we knew, how poorly we felt things, how softly we knocked at the door that protected all the best remedies. You are monstrous and unreal to me now, it is important that you know that. You are my reader but I cannot reach into your face and pull out your secrets. Perhaps you live in a time when someone else’s harm is not bound up with your pursuit of words and you traffic easily with the acoustical weapon, the clustered scripts. Congratulations, if so. I remember those days, too. It is my true wish that you enjoy yourself.
But enjoyment is not one of the choices we have here today.
Darkness soaks these woods by afternoon, browning in so low. One must be careful in this season not to be caught past noon on too remote an errand in the woods, because after sunset a return home is difficult, even for me, who knows these trails by heart. This darkness is different. It interferes more finally with one’s passage through the woods, and one must halt all activity until the sun boils it off, if only partially, in the early morning.
I will admit that I supply some of this darkness myself, through failed eyesight, draining health. My pursuit of language immunity has come with its own dear little cost. A certain serum I use has not agreed with me. Some mornings I discover my yellowed bandages, smitten in dirt and dew, and for a minute I think there is another one like me. I see these bandages strewn around my hut like tufts of rancid snow and think I am not alone until I realize that, oh, yes, these bandages are my own, aren’t they, and I tore them off last night because they burned. I could not bear the hot wadding on my skin.
As such, I cannot accurately make a statement about some objective loss of light. I have no device to record the expiration of daylight I suspect. I’d not be able to supply evidence for such a decline, my faculties of detection are compromised, and in any case I am not a specialist on the atmosphere.
What errands I have are few. Such freedom to come and go might have been useful back when people spoke, but now it is only a bitter advantage. What an archive of hindsight I’ve grown fat on, spoiled ideas and second thoughts ripening in my body now for no one, the putrid material. I’d like a more physical way to extract all of it, memories, too, a surgery I could perform to finally release it, burn it down.
It is not clear why the ideas are put in us if we only wish they could be removed again.
Instead of errands to kill the day, I can sit in my hut and wait for my wife’s arrival, listening at the old Jew hole for the sounds of her crawling this way.
Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.
But this waiting has its challenges. It is too easy to imagine that one hears a person struggling on her stomach through a narrow tunnel, from Forsythe to here, and the suspense is difficult. When I cannot endure it, I hike up to the vacant town that has stored enough untouched goods to sustain me for years. Some of the food was looted, but only some, as if when people first stormed through, arming their new life of solitude, they found they were not especially hungry.
So for errands there is the gathering of food and tools even as the surplus spoils in my cold locker, plunder spilling down the hillside. Mostly I grab what I already have. I hoard. I stockpile. I do what solitary men in the speechless world must do.