The World Is the Home of Love and Death

WAKING

When I was a child, at a certain moment, I woke in a different house made of wood. The slow movement of my eyelids, whispering and scraping, in tiny lurchings, tickled me. A sense of the disorder of the wicked vaudeville, the foul inventiveness of pain kept me uneasy, so that I was as if crouched. I have been ill.

It is almost light. The child is in pain; he lies half in, half out of an abominable breath-bag. The ill child watches in a feverishly illiterate way the slow oozing of the increase in light. Inside the delicacy of the uneducated stare, soft, opened, lightly fluttering, the pallor of consciousness, tampered with by pain, observes, anyway, the shimmer of the advance of the light.

After a while, cool and flighty, mindless cousinhood to sense breaks out—the first time in weeks, but then after a while it passes into spasms of sweaty apprehension, of waiting for the pain—of madness—in its criminal mysteriousness to return and blind me. This continues and doesn’t worsen: that it doesn’t worsen puts a weird and private jollity on his face. The recognized thump and rattle of a window frame, a dull, tremulous bass, and the rapid soprano twitterings of the glass panes in the mullions make the child twitch; then the noise takes on a weight of the familiar; it is beautiful with monotony; it persists.

Then pale-gray and yellow and pink fragments of light appear and slowly unbud, until I am embiered by rose after rose of unlikely light in a room filled with morning. The light is palpably warm. It warms and regulates my soul ungeometric with madness. The child gags and stutters in his breathing. My hand, a childish hand, burns and aches; it has a wind inside it, under it; it moves; it unfurls. The child stiffens in uneasy dominion over this phenomenon of his unfamiliar body. See, he has been ill a long while. The hesitations of thin, unstable, brown-papery, rustling minutes are a matter of steep consciousness for him. Mother-shoulders of air hold pinkish and silvery dabs of light aloft—prismatic dust—and the child persists in his truancy from grief. In the blurred flourish of mind in naming this light as light, as if it were the light in the other house, the child unmovingly romps, dizzied with illness, in a marvelous fluster of intellectual will. Consciousness does not dare call the roll of who is living and who is dead, because the disorganized child-life behind the blindly seeing spy holes of my face is so shaky.

My dead mother was fond of me. Which one of us is lost now? Lila, my adoptive mother, will someday say to me, I used to wonder what was wrong with you; you didn’t die when she did. The penalties are in place whether I die or not. Exhaustion in any act of extended will becomes panic and grief: Many, many times, I’ve thought something was wrong with you, you lived when you shouldn’t. No one thought you would live after she died. When she was alive, she kept you with her every minute; she said, “Why should he be sad? He likes to be with me. I’m strong, I can do two things at once. “ You wouldn’t let anyone touch you but her. No one could see her without seeing you hanging on her like a monkey. You was a pair, let me tell you: anything in you that’s good, it comes from her. If there’s a mind in you, you got it from her. It’s sad she died, but that’s how things are. What can you do about it, I ask you.

The lion breath of grief stinks. The infant is a co-traveler of the light, mad and swift, glancing and unrooted. Is your life grotesque? Are you a grotesque creature, Aaron?

Wiley?

I can’t insist that I am human, that I am licensed. The stale and cruel stench of vomit. I lay stinking and half mad in excrement, in vomit and in tired, perhaps secretly tireless grief and rage … peeking at life but still lost in vileness.

The room, my room, my shell, my outer identity (I did not name it “room”), it ticked and creaked, hummed and tinkled in the wind.

In the bed, constrained by taut sheets and tucked blankets and by chairs set around the bed, I wait. The people here have not yet invested in a crib. Somber conceit: the nearly silent sweeps of sight, the slower blotting up, the sending out on expeditions of sight, the brushing past the sides of sight by things, things in their rays, things brush against or flutter or scurry tickingly by the sides of sight, sight is an imaginary finger or nose: palpings, hesitations: a set of physical hypotheses ranging through the room; things press back, insectlike, itchy, ghostly, real. For a while, any shadow is a wall. That it is my bed …

The woman came to the door of the room, to the edge of the shallows of breath and stink and harsh light and sickness where I am. The confusion of light and the window sounds and wind noises held her and me in the invalid’s observation. The Lost Woman now was shorter and had different eyes. I assumed her prettiness was kindness. I felt the clenching and the whirring of the possibility of the return of madness, because this woman (I thought) had let me suffer and go mad, a single second’s flicker of (mistaken) fact on a tiny fulcrum of a lunatic child’s absurdly clear reasoning. The child was not careful. He said inwardly, Momma. The small boy was rigid and racked with the pulse of diarrhea then.

Lila Silenowicz said, “Oh, my God, you’re worse than a pigeon.” She made a joke for her own amusement.

The woman does not look at the child closely. Around her is a space, a blankness, of coolness, the border where the too difficult heat of shape and identity in someone stops and outline takes over.

Lila has an air of submission to tragedy—this has a domestic tone, scary and alert. I am not exactly visible. I am a sick child. Lila’s tragic and clear-eyed air has a blustery, softish heat, and an immeasurable quality—an absence of boundaries except for her outline—this is part of what identifies her to me as my mother.

My body’s feelings of recall, my body’s interpretations of people are shudderings that seem like magical nonsense to the mind, but they have a profound quality of unarguable sense. Her presence is heavy with heat like real sunlight; my mind manages my body’s uproar by narrowing itself—it is the mind squinting.

Lila sniffed at the shit-odor, pursed her lips, and, holding her breath, came near and looked at me from the other side of the chairs—over the wall of chairs—a sultry and yet airy scrutiny, flirtatious, self-conscious, proddingly clever.… She is sadder than anyone else who tends me. She leans forward, one hand on a chair arm, and she pulls the sheet that’s over me away from me and takes a towel, one of several, set out on one of the chairs around the bed, “I’m not good at this,” she says.

That remark silences me with its absolute strangeness. She earlier (the other woman) and other women—my nurse now (a fat woman), and Lila’s twelve-year-old daughter—were (are) proud: they boast and dance-in-a-way (when they hold me, when they touch me). Lila’s apology startles the child with its illegality: it is illicit and part of her heartless awareness. I might be incurable. There had been no limit to her absence and none to my dying—well, some suspicion had slowed the process of my dying. Being placed openly first by someone, being close to someone in certain ways, and being lawless when you are alone with someone—these are roughly equivalent for the child as life-giving.

The child: there are no words for how blackly thorny he is.

Lila has a quality of being indomitably obscene, guilty, blameworthy, unrepentant. She stares at you and does what she likes.

I could not successfully blackmail either of my mothers. Neither was merciful. All that worked with either of them was me being secretive.

Lila, cleaning up some of the mess with the towel, watches her own clumsiness. I play to myself in the balcony is a remark of hers. She is nosy and yet, this morning, she is dream-stained, quilted or padded or tufted with night heats. Her odor, her dark eyes, the rhythms and manner of movements of her hands gave the child the un-Euclidean turmoil of doubt. Nothing matches from before. She ostentatiously holds her breath, she disgustedly mops at the bed, she throws the towel into an open hamper—its lid is off; it is a woven, basketlike thing—and she takes another towel from the chair seat and wraps me in it. She plays her eyes on me, self-reflexively; she is contemplating the dangers before she lifts me: “Don’t throw up now,” she says.

Her eyelids blink rapidly. This softens her stare, makes her very pretty—greatly pretty. Lila says, getting ready—she is very hesitant—“I can’t let it simmer on my back burners all day. I’m the last of the red-hot mommas. My motto is ‘strike while the iron is hot and get things done.’ I’m the executive type.” She moistens her lips, squints blindly, pushes her hair behind her ears. She stands flat-footed. She sets her breasts with her left hand. Her breasts have a powdery largeness. A constant nervousness is worsened if she has to touch someone. She bends near; her shadow is an imported dusk; her arms are around me; she lifts me, the giant woman, owl-fluffy Momma and her large, owl-soft breasts. And then, over that, the nearness to her is a moonish glare that tugs tidally at my breath and at my mind.

“Phew, you stink, pretty baby,” she says.

Her voice is troubled, vaguely storm-lit, spotted with lurid light: she has an innate melodrama.

She ferries us past the obstreperous transparency of the windows—mostly a curious shine but still knowable as part of the outer, widening morning.

“Well, another day, and you’re still sick, don’t you know it? Don’t you always know it?”

She is sad; she is out of breath; charmingly, conceitedly, she is drudgery-minded. She picks on me: “Hold your head up; don’t let your head do that; straighten it; stop looking like an idiot: I warn you, I’m not good with idiots—once you lose my sympathy, you lose me.… Listen, I’ll tell the world: I’m not a nursemaid; that’s not what I’m good at.” Heavy-fleshed, small-town Lila walks, and I shake with the rhythms of her body. Her movements are interfered with by me—my weight and looseness and indiscipline of posture.

In the bathroom, she sits me lankly on the sink. My feet are in the white basin; she props me with her shoulder and unwraps the outer towel, shifting me, and slipping it out and throwing it on the floor. And then she unpins the other towel, the one that I slept in, the diaper towel: “What a mess: don’t look innocent; you do it, you’re the mess: you’re worse than a horse. You’re lucky you don’t get thrown out with the diaper. You could learn to handle your bowels: it wouldn’t kill you. I hope you’re listening. Cooperation, they say, is the mark of a leader. Don’t make me wear myself out.” Her fingers are clumsy but neat, shy then bold—she has a glidy, pinchy, nervous touch. It is a touch that seemingly can easily be frightened off, like a fly. My eyes have grown flimsy with nerves—an obscure physical crowdedness of sensation in skin and mind.

“Are you looking at me? I can’t tell what you’re up to; you’re one of the crazy ones; you’re a crazy little meshuggener, a meshuggener sheikh. Are you getting better? I think you’re improving. My guess is you’re sitting there and you know what I’m saying: tell me if I’m right.”

She’s bluffing, partly bluffing, mostly bluffing. As she speaks, she stops believing herself, because my eyelids are so unblinkingly dulled—I am masked in lostness in the vividly glaring bathroom light. She has turned on the lights, a bulb overhead, and bulbs alongside the mirror so that reflected everywhere on the white walls are melted foil, blurred gilding, moonish flares. The mirror shines outward, and morning light bulges in at the window. Against my back are her breasts, sleeping, stirring animals, slick lambs vaguely furry with sensations; and, as in a dream, like masses of very pale pigeons or piles of silent whitish leaves.

Her large, moonish female face, with lines and vistas focused with her curiosity about my illness, about me, has a foreign meaning, like paths in a strange garden. She unpins and strips me down below.

I am a half-lifeless drowsiness and limp and boneless, but I am an inward mass of tense amazement. Moving my head, my chin into my chest, I cannot understand what I see down below—myself or her hands.

I am too ignorant, too embarrassed. Sightless with embarrassment, perhaps with rage among unreadable meanings. Although I don’t move, the woman says, “Hold still …” Life and consciousness are hard to bear.

The terrible preliminary sensations of nakedness, tickling birdlike glitter of the nerves, cut the moment into strange shapes and spaces; Momma’s eyes are as large as a sparrow, the sparrow being at an unreadable distance from me in meaning if not in real inches. Fluttering bird breath. Eyelid-bird-wings. A thin fabric shimmer-noose followed by a tube rises over my face and wraps my head—it is smelly; and light pierces the web that, as it ascends, hauls at my eyelids, blocks my nose, and opens my mouth so that I breathe a forced indraft of air—silvery, silent, shiny, bathroom air.

Naked. My amazement and dullness are aflame. I am all hurting pleasure and nauseating pain. My no-longer puritan mother, a lawless sensibility, neat-handed and oppressively new, says, “Are you playing tricks? You’re hiding something from me—believe me, boys playing tricks are not news to me.” This one has a dark-and-light face, a fanatic’s fervor: a form of nervousness: she quivers with distinct but distant shamelessness—like a bird. This is especially distant from me, and is as if holy and wrapped in light, in speculative mercy, this thing of sharing a moment of life.… The only meaning one knows lies in the distinctions between mercy and the limitlessness of mad, veering pain. She is electric and unbridled and she is acuity and an impatient will-toward-mercy, a fanatic of uncertain persuasion.

She is tentatively and then recklessly fearless: she has a fearless prettiness. She is being a disciplined other self—other from her usual self—maternal: of course, a challenge. I do not recognize it, but I can hear the ticking of her waiting for me to recognize her. I have never been seduced before.

My mind moves into and out of thickets of shadow—the changing complexions of liking and not liking are sickly in the motions of the moment: this woman bristled with prettiness; her thin and mobile wrists, the lacquered fingernails, the shaped lines of eyebrows plucked in a very round curve jabbed like love before there was love: I spied on her; I could not look; at moments I did not even spy. I submitted and was angry and mocking and interested, but perhaps only another child would have known that I was interested. I mean, the dictionary had been torn, and while all the words remained, nothing was attached in the same way to anything else, up and down, Momma or me. Meaning was a sharp and even a tearing issue.

The child starts to tremble. The sudden life in his ears, and in his mind, as well as the crawling and swarming creature-thing—things, sensations—on his skin (the porcelain beneath his feet, the shift, geometrical, not fractured, of glare in the mirror when he shifts his head), makes him pale and shuddery—he is a tense shuddering and a fixed pallor.…

“I know you’re sick. See, I’m being careful. I know I’m not real careful: you make me nervous, I admit it: I do things too hard. I pulled your shirt too hard, didn’t I? See, I know what I’m doing—you can trust me. I admire good nursing. You don’t know me, but charity is my middle name. I know some very, very good nurses. They say that with some people you have to treat them like being sick is an honor. I know you’re in the right, but I want you to know I’m not a good nurse first thing in the morning. I just want to know on my own hook, Are you lying to me? Listen, I like your looks—you’re a Baby Sheikh. You’re pretty. If you ask me, it’s a shame what happened to you. I’m all ears—I’m sympathy itself, on a monument.… Tell me, are you snapping out of it or not? I know you’re better. I know you’re a little better.”

The child didn’t know what she meant; he didn’t know her intentions. He sagged immediately; he meant to hide in his illness.

“Be a nice child—don’t play tricks on me,” she said. “Are you back in the land of the living? Tell me. Let me know if you are. Are you going to throw up? You look like it. You better give me some warning. I’m not good about people throwing up. Listen, I’m starting a fuss with you: don’t throw up.”

But she says this in a voice of such intense melody, so supple and enticing, that the child is torn open … He has no formal means for knowing anything about her. His mouth opens wide—it is distorted. No ease controls his reactions. He is as if pushed and yet caught—a small madman in a new galaxy.

“If you throw up, I will, too—” her voice is large and echoey in the bathroom but it curls down into smallness and music, hooks him and then, as an aftereffect, yanks him. His ears hum—his skull shivers. Little packets of skin on his chest vibrate. Bits of his mind explode daintily—he is close to convulsions.

She stops. Blank-faced, this mother, here, has some fear: a sense of shame, calculations about scandal, the aroma of female apocalypse. The garish light and suffering, in the child, the sheer final violence of his disorder in the white, cubelike room, with its chill and pallors and half heats, are convulsed; only his illness-weakened body’s shyness halts the progress of the convulsions. Shyness saves him.

“You look like you’re going to run amok,” she says, getting it wrong. “I’m not good at boys; I hope you’re not too wild.” She used to be, earlier, someone of almost unshadowed strength of opinion. Now she is evasive and blown about, uncertain, subject to fate, playful. Embarrassed.

“Listen: Be smart. Learn to be nice. I don’t use big words, but I like brains. I like it when people are honest with me. I’m heartless, you know, that’s what they all say. The way to my heart is to look, listen, and be nice to me. I have a nice side. I’m not one of those women who make a big thing out of sugar and spice and everything nice; everything doesn’t have to be nice; I do what I do, take me or leave me. I know something’s going on in you. Tell me what’s on your mind, why don’t you?” She asks this in a melodious voice out of keeping with the words but not as much out of keeping when you heard her as when you remembered and puzzled over what you thought she said. This one likes to fool people.

To the child the sweetness of her voice is like a bunch of robins pulling worms from him as from a lawn after a rain. She poisons my ears with sweetness. The wind inside and under my hands lifts and moves them; they shift like leaves—it is an odd, manual half-smile. And the skin on his tiny, rash-fiery chest stirs and wrinkles … He guesses that her intention is to amuse and to stir hopes and half-hopes, and the child half blindly looks at her. Her voice when it is being particularly pretty is like an odd kiss on the mind under the bone under the hair of my head and on what is in my chest.

“Look at you—you’re shaking—what’s the big idea, will you tell me, please?” She is looking at my body more than at my face, perhaps at the way the bones show. If she sees in his face the loony shifts of lit and slopping and breaking and melting and burning lights which are his mind holding for the moment his sense of her, she avoids it as too difficult to know about and to answer to. She is someone who hates to be mistaken. By looking at my body, she makes us into two people: one is an odd citizen and the other is a liar. “You want me to go ‘Rock-a-bye-baby in the tree-top’! Will you come down? I don’t know what you’re doing and I can’t tell if you’re crazy or not.”

This making a deal is new to me; it is not like before at all. It is racking. Meaninglessness and trickery seem sweet—honeyed.

I wanted to tear her open, I wanted to dive into her and scatter her as one does leaves from a pile of leaves. As one breaks a toy. This came and went in blinks.

“I’ve read that baths are calming, hot baths—they do it a lot in Hollywood. And,” she said half under her breath, “in loony bins. I’ll give you a bath; you’ll like that. Maybe I should give you a bath.

You’ll have to cooperate.” She cheated when she negotiated; it was not a joke. Propping the child with one hand, she went ahead. She says, “Hold still,” and she moves toward the tub, an arm’s distance, and finds her arm is not long enough; and she glances at the trembling child, maybe incurably deranged, and she remarks, “You have a speaking face. Hold still.” And she takes her hand, her face, her eyes, the gorgeous bird consciousness in each of them, away—I am a mass of audiences, distant and near audiences. “I think you know what I’m saying. Now stay still; don’t fall. I’m turning on the water.”

I predicted to myself the sound of water coming from a faucet—part of the continuous sequences, now perhaps partially restored, of the world. An incomplete and strange restoration. My home for a long time now has been—madness. Catatonia. Autism. The movement is open at one end—inconceivably open. Memory hides it that the three walls of consciousness in a present moment have a fourth side open: perhaps I will die now. In memory, I am a child at the door of that room, with the figures in the room mostly stilled.

But in the real moment the child was sitting on the sink and staring unfocusedly at the ghostly distance between the back of her head and my eyes. The pain (of madness) was close and granular; a suffocating delirium. It compressed part of my consciousness so that the distance between sleeping and waking was no distance at all. My mother does not smell of the real belonging of before. Her breath is not one of the decisive terms of companionship in my language. I breathe in a rhythm that I share with no one. Any gamble I made may end in my return to madness: it is part of what gambling is, it is part of the stakes. Madness is at the open edge of the moment. My childhood sense of farce was not a joke but rested on the utter faithlessness of spirit in the flatness of madness and farce: a happy ending of a terrible kind. Vile. But to accept this woman means the absolute has rejected me. I have two mothers.…

Now I suddenly focus and see her, the softened volumes of Lila’s body busying itself with the tub.

I remembered the smell of linoleum and words such as “hot wasser.” This present version of my mother in a white room did not smell like the other one in a brown room. These walls did not smell like the walls in a country house at the edge of fields of mud and snow. The woman’s hair and arms—the softness behind the shoulders (where my hands rest when I am bathed in a sink in some kind of cloth-lined basin: this is from long before) are not the same.