The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Page 29

  Khrushchev took a crystal submarine

  down to those iron cupolas

  where the boy under the sea wore his

  only suit

  and made salt tea in a coral samovar

  for the Premier

  who wanted to talk about his coin collection

  and the possibility

  of a New Leningrad under the Barents pack ice

  by 2002.

  The truth is,

  I loved the Incredible Hulk

  with a brighter, purer love.

  I, too,

  wanted to turn so green

  and big

  no one could hurt me.

  I wanted

  to get that angry. But when the time came

  to bust out

  of my Easter dress and roar

  I just cried

  hoping that the villains I knew

  would melt out of shame.

  The truth is,

  I wasn’t worthy of the Hulk.

  But the boy under the sea

  the one with four colors

  and his own animated series

  said:

  Hey, girl. Being six in 1985 is no fucking joke.

  You’ve got your stepmother

  with a fist like Black Manta

  and good luck getting a job when you’re grown.

  Any day now the Russians might

  decide to quit messing around

  and light up a deathsky for all to see.

  Sometimes I cry, too.

  Or.

  Down in the dark,

  a skinny boy from Ukraine looks up

  and his wet, silver neck pulses,

  gills like mouths opening and closing. He gurgles:

  Did we make it to Venus?

  There were supposed to be collectives by now

  on Mars and the moon. I would have

  liked to see them.

  Everyone

  is an experiment, devotchka-amerikanka. To see

  if a boy can breathe underwater

  and talk to the fish.

  If a girl can take all her beatings

  and still smile for the camera.

  It’s 1985 and I’ve never seen the sun.

  Sometimes I cry, too.

  By the nineties,

  the boy under the sea

  (Orin, Robert Loren Fleming 1989)

  had wealth and a royal pedigree

  a wizard for a father and a mother

  with a crown of pearls.

  I didn’t even recognize him

  with his water-fist and his golden beard.

  His wife

  kept going insane

  over and over

  like she was stuck in a story

  about someone else

  and every time she tried to get out

  her son died and the narwhals

  wouldn’t talk to her anymore.

  Or.

  The revolution came and went.

  The records of those metal domes

  and rusted bolts

  and a boy down there in the cold

  got mixed up with a hundred thousand other files

  doused in kerosene

  pluming up into the stars.

  That’s okay.

  the boy in the black says.

  I don’t think the nineties

  are going to be a peach either.

  We do what we’re here for

  and Atlantis is for other men.

  Once there was a boy under the sea.

  I dove down after him

  when I was six, fifteen, twenty-six, thirty-two.

  Down into the dark,

  a small white eel in the cold muck

  and into the lake of my father’s boat

  I dove down and saw:

  brown bass hushing by

  a decade of golf balls

  the tip of a harpoon

  rusted over, bleeding algae

  and a light like 1985

  sinking away from me,

  dead sons and lost wives

  narwhals and my hands over my head

  under my 2nd grade desk

  too small and never green enough

  to protect anyone.

  We move apart,

  two of us

  two of them

  one up toward grassy sunlight

  and the escape hatch

  a narrow, razor-angled way out

  of the 20th century.

  The other

  distant as a lighthouse,

  a lithe blue body flashing through heavy water

  heading down, into a private,

  lightless place.

  The Room

  There is a room and it moves through the world. The door of the room is black. The ceiling is blue. You have probably never seen the room—it is shy. Do not feel that it is a personal slight. The room moves according to its own unfathomable imperatives, on a schedule too long and hoary to sketch out on any flickering dark board. Once the door lived on a snowy beach in Norway for five years. It gathered ice on its lintel. A woman in a grey dress and shiny heels went in. Identical twin children came out, each holding a purple balloon with silver stars on it. The local council had just begun to charge admission to see it when it demurred, and migrated elswhere. For exactly three quarters of a second, it lived in Buenos Aires. A man saw it, but he told himself it was nothing.

  I will tell you because we are close, and there can be no secrets between us, that it lived in my house for an hour, when I was seven and a half. It lived on the back wall of our garage, between moldy Stephen King paperbacks and a golden tower of National Geographics. I sat in front of the door cross-legged, and ate a cherry popsicle. It had an iron doorknob, with paisley copper flowers raised on it. I watched it. The sun went down. In the grain of the wood, I saw stars. I was very quiet in the presence of the room. It inspires silence. I didn’t go in. I was not a brave child. When I say it disappeared, I mean that the garage remembered that it did not have a black door in it, and was embarrassed.

  Inside the room there is a thermostat. The old kind, with a crystal dial and a red arrow. It is set to 59 degrees. This is rather cold, of course. Perhaps it was hot, where the room was born. There is a double bed—the room is generous. The bedspread is deep red, with swirls and ferns in the same black as the door. The floor is wood, blond, slightly uneven, polished as if by many feet. The room also owns a silk rug that has seen better days, once indigo and figured in gold, now pale blue, figured in nothing. There is a porcelain washing basin, and a mirror with an ebony frame, a small bathroom with a clawfoot tub. A slip of rose-soap waits for dirty hands. There is a folding screen with a moonrise painted on it, and a velvet chair with a little footstool. A mahogany secretary sits redly in the corner, bearing three blue pens, a stack of very fine paper, (17 sheets), and a rotary telephone. The room has a window, but the curtains are always drawn. I do not know what it looks out on, no one who has drawn back the butter-colored curtains has come out again. On the wall is an oil painting of a black door—the room is self-regarding. And the ceiling, the deep, endless blue of the ceiling, slightly arched, with silver rafters, and silver stars painted with a tiny brush, constellations and chaos and the beginning of space.

  There is another door in the room. I heard a man in Port-au-Prince say over cream-soaked coffees that once it was part of a hotel, and came loose of its moorings, and that is why there are two doors. One into what was once a long hallway of identical, elegant rooms. One into the adjoining room—which is now the world. I cannot confirm or deny that, but I remember the smell of plantain trees and how he wore two wedding rings. Hotels are unnatural, he said. Nature is offended by them.

  All of these descriptions I have taken down from various men and women who have spent time in the room. It feels old, they say. Like someplace from a hundred years ago. But not two hundred, no—after all, there is the telephone to consider.

  Did you call anyone? I ask.

  It
doesn’t dial out, they all say. But there is a message. In French. It is garbled. I heard only:

  They don’t all say it’s French. When the room lived in Marseilles, the message was in Sanskrit. Sometimes it’s Finnish. Sometimes Vietnamese.

  A woman named Martine lived in the room for several weeks in 1974. She had been practical enough to pack a basket of bread, pickled onions, a hard cheese, dried apricots. It was a risk, taking the time for basket. The room might have slipped away. But the practicality of Martine is profound, and speaks from her even, shining nails to her square glasses. If she could not bring supplies, she would not be venturing into the unknown. Martine said that after the first week, it was as though she had always lived there, as though the washing basin and the slim rose soap had been hers since she was a child, as if she had written seven novels at that desk. She did not miss home, or wonder if anyone worried about her. The room takes care of that sort of thing, she told me. It is solicitous.

  Did you look out the window. Did you go out the other door.

  You wouldn’t understand. I was completely content as I was. I did not even see the other door, or the window. My heart was tremendously at peace. But I did turn up the heat. And as I slept, warm at last, I felt though I could see nothing, a man standing over me, looking at me with piercing eyes, eyes like keyholes. In one of his hands was a bouquet of peonies. A small one. Made of shadows. In the other he held my rose-soap. I cannot explain how I saw all of this while asleep in that perfect bed, but I did and it was not a dream. In the morning the thermostat read 59 degrees again, and I knew in the way that you can know these things, with total certainty and utter sorrow, that it was time to leave.I still had several apricots left, and the rind of the cheese.

  Did you try to take anything from the room.

  Yes, a sheet of paper. How could anyone miss paper, I thought. But now I think the room is a body, and you would miss any part of your body. A finger, even if it’s small, would be missed. When I opened the door the room had traveled to Madagascar, and I opened it onto a deep, swollen night-forest, alive with the red, shining eyes of lemurs. I felt the door latch behind me, and I wept unexplainably. It left immediately. I looked down, and the paper in my hand had become a peony. It looked black in the shadows.

  I bought Martine a bottle of wine. It was the least I could do. By calculations of those far cleverer with numbers than I, the room moved only once while Martine lived in it, and while it moved her shadow man stood over her, as though making sure she would not be hurt by the transit. Because I believe the room is benevolent, whatever the Icelandic gentleman says on the subject.

  His name is Kaspar, and he entered the room on March 4th, 1989. I was interested in that date, because it means he was likely inside it when the room lived in my garage and I ate my cherry popsicle. Kaspar would not then have been much older than I, and I would like to think if I had opened the door, he would have been on the other side, his hand raised just like mine. Kaspar drinks iced gin and has very black eyes, hair the color of water, and one hundred and one black suits. I switch to the present tense because Kaspar is still all of these things, and we have been living together for two years, so the past tense is unnecessarily estranging.

  It took me by force, from my parents, from my breakfast. I was having biscuits and jam.

  But you opened the door. That’s consent.

  It moved seventeen times while I was inside it. Like a dog on a chain, trying to shake its master free. In quick succession, one after the other, and every time the lights flickered and the water in the basin ran by itself in a torrent—so hot the mirror steamed instantly. The papers riffled, and the phone rang. I cried and cried, I was so frightened. I heard footsteps and saw no one, and the curtains fluttered, fluttered—and under the fluttering I glimpsed a kind of light like a weight, and I shuddered, I hid under the bed until the shaking stopped. Once it did, for a whole hour. I thought I was saved. I went to the door and put my hand on the knob, and the metal was warm, as though it had been baked gently. I froze there, with my hand on the knob, and I could not open it. I don’t know why. Where would I end up? But a kind of awful contentment flooded through me like poison, and I did nothing. Eventually I grew so hungry that I stumbled out anyway, starving, half-blind with terror. I was in Budapest. A baker gave me chocolate. I almost bit his hand. The room made me feral.

  Did you try the other door?

  Kiss me, and I’ll tell you.

  And that was how it started between us. Bargaining, guarded. We went to his apartment, whose door he had painted black. Everything in it was simple: a double bed, the bedspread deep red, with dark swirls and ferns in it. A silk rug that had seen better days, once indigo and figured in gold. A porcelain washing basin, a mirror with an ebony frame. A slip of rose-soap waits for dirty hands. A mahogany secretary in the corner. Three blue pens, a stack of paper, (17 sheets), and a rotary telephone. It was a room like the room, and the door latched like the door, and he opened me like a second door, leading into something dreadful, something radiant, a light like weight, and in my ear he whispered that there was only desert beyond the room, desert forever, salt and sand and a moon like death.

  Sometimes I think the telephone message must be the room talking, desperately, intimately, trying to match language to listener and always failing. I know I will not get another chance. Kaspar’s apartment will never suddenly show a door like a bruise. This sort of thing only comes around once. In Kaspar’s bed I dream of him standing above me, made of shadows, and he puts peonies on my lips and bends to whisper in my ear, through a crackle of static.

  I wake. There is no door. We live in the room but it does not live here. I make biscuits and jam for Kaspar and read over my notes. It is only morning, nothing else. Quietly, as if not wanting to be heard, the water rushes from the faucet into the basin. The mirror fogs—the papers shuffle softly, and the phone rings. I put out my hand to answer it.

  Silently and Very Fast

  Altogether elsewhere, vast

  Herds of reindeer move across

  Miles and miles of golden moss

  Silently and very fast.

  —W.H. Auden

  Part I: The Imitation Game

  Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.

  —John Webster

  The Duchess of Malfi

  One: The King of Having No Body

  Inanna was called Queen of Heaven and Earth, Queen of Having a Body, Queen of Sex and Eating, Queen of Being Human, and she went into the underworld in order to represent the inevitability of organic death. She gave up seven things to do it, which are not meant to be understood as real things but as symbols of that thing Inanna could do better than anyone, which was Being Alive. She met her sister Erishkegal there, who was also Queen of Being Human, but that meant: Queen of Breaking a Body, Queen of Bone and Incest, Queen of the Stillborn, Queen of Mass Extinction. And Erishkegal and Inanna wrestled together on the floor of the underworld, naked and muscled and hurting, but because dying is the most human of all human things, Inanna’s skull broke in her sister’s hands and her body was hung up on a nail on the wall Erishkegal had kept for her.