The World Is the Home of Love and Death

The rhythm of illness and shock and the truth of death are the original terms of my life, and they make a faery music. The glamour and finely made tunefulness of so much oddity line the inside of my eyelids and the inside of my ears and the inside of my mouth with an unfamiliar sensation of newness as home, as the familiar thing now. The sound of water in the tub has, then, its own infinity for me which this woman notices.

“You like water, do you? Are you an Arab in the desert, are you a little sheikh?” The faithless and farcical little gambler stares—and listens.

I did not speak, because speech refers to absent things, and I could not tolerate absence: whatever is real is here, near me. Words are a category of extreme failure in these kidnaper-rooms, chambers of time unexpectedly askew. I was astounded to feel that any pardon extended by me toward the wrong woman caused a certain amount of cure. A state of pardon is unlike a state of illness. But I knew it was blasphemy … I knew it was violently wrong.

The paradoxes of observation heartbreakingly start with dissimilarities. I am wrenched into observing things; this woman is not the same as before. Something has killed me but I am not entirely dead: I have a seed of life in me. The mind’s limits are very clear in childhood. Madness and my mother are perched and gorgeous; one is a horrible bird outside the window and in the mirror about to fly redly in the room. And the other is a strange woman pretending to be the most familiar part of the world for me—this is farce, this is the farcical underpinning of my reality—my reality, such as it is.

Splashingly enormous, the water noise transports me. The sound in the earlier house was never like this. I begin to topple from the sink.

She is not looking at me; she is saying, “See how calm I’m being; some people would say that’s a miracle.” Then she looks and she cries out, “Whoa! Hold your horses!” She half rises and reaches; she restores my balance; when her hand touches me, the mood of prettiness from before makes her touch incandescent. The complications of her identity unlock me, and my openly thumping heartbeat authenticates the circumstance as interesting to me.

She glances at me, and she shoves me—settling a doll in place on a couch. “Now, let’s have a little hot water on the subject. Watch my dust … as they say. Listen, I think you’re just too cunning for words; now it’s your turn to flatter me and be nice and just keep your balance, Mr. Rag Doll,” she says as she tests and alters the proportions of hot to cold in the water.

The noise of the water is louder and steadier than anything I had ever heard; it makes me heave with excited vomit. “You don’t have to throw up; count to ten; put your head down.” But I don’t know what she means.

Still, her voice has ten thousand times the power of my sleep and of my blinking and of my thoughts to think and see and to change things. I listen to her before I think, if you know what I mean. “I have no talent as a nurse, I’m no good with plants, either.” I simply stare at her. And the heaves stop. Her voice is a mixture of brilliant little tones; it is bruisedly soft. “But I’m a real lifesaver, many have said so, and I tend to agree; I don’t mind tooting my own horn: I’m not the worst person to have in your corner.”

I’m a child: I don’t know very much. I can have very odd forms of truth.

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