she is, tethered to the wall, that cable.
Come back.
Come back, I need you, she says, and that too becomes real. That too is real. Like it’s real that she will forget him every day, as she has already forgotten him. He is inside her, no matter how far away he travels on her money, his own; that’s how it is. Can you miss something that’s in the flesh. Maybe you can, she thinks. Or else it’s meaningless to talk about missing or not missing, maybe it’s more a question of wanting home. Whatever it is; the look in his eyes, mostly, his eyes on her, evoked in that way, in his eyes.
That’s how she thinks about it.
Is that a problem, she asks herself. With all that delay, all that displacement. Out of body and back again, the look of an eye, the sewing together of two who are dead. So that the heart may nonetheless pump sufficient blood; and then again the image of a beech tree, drawing water ten meters into the air, upward into a lush green crown that cannot keep itself together and yet defies all guidelines as to what colors actually are, what you can expect for your money, your blue eyes. She is not with him yet; she is alone, walking beneath the lilacs, on the path toward the church. She sits down there and is seven years old, eight perhaps. Toes cold, as toes always are cold in churches, the way you can always find someone to grieve for. The dead, or those who survive them. The dolmen in the field, a plough edging ever closer, ten centimeters a year. Yet still it is there, and snow may fall. You think about all those years, and then that snow rumbles in, leaving the face of the landscape immaculate. A face seen for the first time. This is what snow does. On top of everything living, everything dead.
He sighs, and says: I’m tired.
She nods, and stares out the window. In the building opposite, the lights are turned off in two different apartments simultaneously. It’s like the building is given a face. As if a face can ever be symmetrical. She has a tooth missing on the left side of her jaw; it never came out, all that appeared was an angular gap. Her nostrils, too, are different. A conception of symmetry where there is none; an eye, drooping; your eye, drooping as you drink. Terrible, crooked faces: all there is.
She exhales against the pane, as if the night could be expelled, as if the night could be extinguished.
Are you there.
Yes, she answers. I’m still here.
Do you miss Agri, her mother asks her one day; she is seven years old and they are on holiday. Captured on film. You see the child’s face change: yes, she says, her face a moon of pale bread. On someone’s tongue, a wafer dissolving, someone else’s body, someone else’s notion of homesickness slowly absorbing into the body.
Yes, she said.
What do you miss about Agri, the woman with the camera asks.
The answer never really comes. Everything, she says. By then the camera had been switched off.
THEY ARE SPLITTING the bill at the restaurant when her friend asks her who she grew up with.
No one, she says.
It hangs in the air; they laugh.
That’s why, she thinks. I never grew up with anyone.
Her friend’s eyes gleam with something that looks like sympathy, but is something else instead: recognition. When something alien is no longer alien, because it is voiced, that’s when you understand. The coming home in that, laid bare in the world together.
HE IS STRONG, and she wishes they were more like each other. Something other than always the opposite—the reverse. But then: that’s not how I see it at all. They’re waiting for word, her mother is sick. There’s been a long break, and she can hardly remember him. Always these breaks, crushed pearls in between, well, other crushed pearls, broken teeth. My dead man, she whispers. That’s what she calls him now. That’s what he is, even though he’s standing right there. Picking his clothes up off the floor; they are exactly as he left them, as if the trousers still contained his legs, as if putting on clothes becomes more difficult by the day, having to share the space inside them with himself, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Clothes too tight, so much body having gone before.
He doesn’t hear.
She is envious of him; his strength, if only she had his strength, dogged to the point of trembling, and always tired.
At the same time, it frightens the life out of her.
That kind of strength. Arbitrary. It’s there, and then it isn’t. She thinks: it’s like his strength isn’t his own. It comes, and may leave him, without predictability, without any rhythm besides: utterly rampant. His strength comes with anger, it assails and consumes him. Besides that—the X-rays show nothing. Strength as a tumor, a shadow, with arteries and veins, issuing out into the body and leaving again, leaving him behind. Looked at in any other way, it has nothing to do with strength at all. She just wants the same option of staying. Remaining in one place.
You always had to smoke.
I don’t know.
There is a pause, and in that pause she and her two sisters are seen moving about the parking lot in front of the hospital, mechanically, in the pull of magnets stroked beneath the asphalt. They are without arms. There is a trace of cigarette smoke in the air. There is a trace of sound, drawn as waves in the air. Green and red waves, rising and falling. Her older sister, stifling her anger at seeing her sister smoke.
They share far too much history, it reaches too far back. Together and apart. He gets out of the car and takes her hand. The two other sisters keep wandering, while she has ground to a halt there, with her dead man, ground to a halt in front of the car.
It’s kind of you to take us here. It’s kind of you to . . . be here.
He looks at her, the way you look at something broken.
A broken face.
We share no history, I don’t know you. That is what he thinks. That is what he says.
She says she doesn’t understand what he means.
She wants that cohesion, the cohesion of language and what is.
But there is none. The agreement isn’t there.
An abandoned house collapses, an abandoned tree topples in the woods, without a sound.
A broken landscape, lifeless expanses, the dead themselves, stone walls under snow. Maybe that’s how it is. I’m not sure I understand what you mean, she repeats.
THE RAM LIES twitching, a pounding heart in the grass. It forced its way through the electric fencing because she forgot to give them water. The chain-link fence of before is gone, no longer cutting up the world in its steely rectangles. They sit in the tall grass at the hedgerow, and stare across the field. The sheep, the way they used to poke their heads through the metal eyes, ear tags or horns contriving to get them stuck, a head wrenching back, ear tag in the wire, the image of an ear torn in two. Now the fencing is electric, a current directed through four taut wires, a regular current, the tautness of the wires, a staff for musical notation running through the landscape here. And still the sheep strive for the grass on the other side, and still they may get stuck, become entangled.
Frightened animal eyes; the tremble of the beast, blue-tongued,
