Let’s say she lies all day upon the beach in the Antilles, and I embroider her until she becomes my buttonhole: a silken stitch with needle and thread of seaweed. And then I slip through her skin of sand and cashmere, as though a pearl fastened tight against the rise of her flesh.
This letter from the Antilles tells me of progress regarding her strategic plan: to wrap a series of single square concrete blocks in colorful stripes of spun sugar. To artificially inflate the price of artisanal fishhooks, and profit through controlling the market on radial netting, handspun by a sisterhood of leprotic Haitian nuns.
Her tactics remain vague. This discussion incongruous, superfluous.
What of our more sartorial conversation.
Why now this intrusion.
I wrote back to the Antilles and told her to cease clarifying her schemes for artistry and commerce:
Why now this inclusion?
What of our sartorial distractions?
Please—
Tell me nothing of what you did today, of what foods you ate, or of your fragile frustrations.
Let us go diving in a different sea. Let us stay down so long we come up with barnacles, with gills.
I once overheard one meatpacker whispering to another on an eastbound train:
When I was a small child, I was very silent. I was known for my silence. It was not known that I kept a diary. In its earliest life, it was a simple account of the day’s activities. Tally up the scabs on my kneecaps. The sixteen colors that live within a beet. As the days passed, I learned that paper listens. And later, as I became more courageous and my life took on a more uncertain meaning, I began to talk. Secrets of the kind spies are trained not to divulge from within the calibrated agonies of torture. Exquisite. You might think a young child would not have secrets of those means. That capacity to heal and to destroy. But I urge you—reconsider. There are intimacies some are inclined to pursue against the wishes of a silent child.
It became clear that my house was unsafe for the keeping of this diary. We lived in a remote area many miles beyond the nearest town—when I could escape the range of civilization, my companions were foxes and falcons, tigers and weevils. They read only the language of the senses. They lacked thumbs. Safe, I placed my diaries within a series of large glass jars, and buried them. Each week, another jar.
We were far from the cultivated fields….
Although the train car was quiet and my ears unusually sensitive, I averted my attention for some time.
Not from delicacy, but because I believe in the ethics of eavesdropping.
One false choice and the luminosity of another person goes dim.
I once overheard one meatpacker whispering to another on an eastbound train:
When I was a small child, I was very silent. I was known for my silence. It was not known that I kept a diary. In its earliest life, it was a simple account of the day’s activities. Tally up the scabs on my kneecaps. The sixteen colors that live within a beet. As the days passed, I learned that paper listens. And later, as I became more courageous and my life took on a more uncertain meaning, I began to talk. Secrets of the kind spies are trained not to divulge from within the calibrated agonies of torture. Exquisite. You might think a young child would not have secrets of those means. That capacity to heal and to destroy. But I urge you—reconsider. There are intimacies some are inclined to pursue against the wishes of a silent child.
It became clear that my house was unsafe for the keeping of this diary. We lived in a remote area many miles beyond the nearest town—when I could escape the range of civilization, my companions were foxes and falcons, tigers and weevils. They read only the language of the senses. They lacked thumbs. Safe, I placed my diaries within a series of large glass jars, and buried them. Each week, another jar.
We were far from the cultivated fields….
Although the train car was quiet and my ears unusually sensitive, I averted my attention for some time.
Not from delicacy, but because I believe in the ethics of eavesdropping.
One false choice and the luminosity of another person goes dim.
The letter—the next consecutive letter—highly anticipated—remains delayed. Weeks pass. New magazines arrive from my agent in Riga. I read them.
Latvia is only a distraction, the way home is a hole at the center.
I dislike the wind in Riga, and the sound it makes against the buttresses whose angularity and rigidity are merely concealed by the distracting romance of cleverly carved vines and furbelows. Ah, Riga, all your sands have long since turned to stone.
It was winter when I fled to the Antilles. This was many years ago. Three months I planned to stay—no more, no less. Solace.
I remember I was exhausted.
I rented a room in a house that proved unsettling. There were reasons they rented to foreigners. Even the local children knew why birds would not land on the tower balustrades. Why the floorboards had been painted, and why the cracks so very carefully filled in. Why the aloe grew thickly along lines of nonexistent pathways, and why the lizards refused to cross into those furrows. Because of this, and through the desire to change the habitual patterns in my fundamental inclinations, I spent my days and nights on the beach, or under some wide-legged leaf.
The language barriers proved significant, and insurmountable. The islanders had never heard of my country—my every attempt to gain legitimacy failed. My willingness to show them my passport only underscored their suspicion.
Despite their conviction, I had nothing to reveal: many meetings began with speaking and ended in the extended silence of stalemate.
So becalmed, there was little to do but learn to evade these predicaments altogether. I ceased all social activity. I ceased moving about the island.
With thin and inconsequential new data, my brain began to relieve itself of a lifetime of congestion.
In isolation, memory after memory unfurled itself for a mere instant—its dendritic fronds arrayed like firecrackers against my darkened sky.
And I, a slack-mouthed bystander, gaping wide-eyed from down below
In dread that these memories would rapidly re-constipate themselves within my mind, I decanted them onto paper, just as the meatpacker had suggested. But unlike the meatpacker’s urge for burial, I wished to push them from myself—set them into movement, hurl them outwards.
I began posting several of these as letters to myself.
Each day at the post, a familiar charade: the scrambling quest for communion, the ego’s thirst for false impressions. A performance pantomimed for the clerk.
These must be on their way at once
They are already terribly delayed
Someone is waiting for me back home
I had never sufficient coins in my pocket for full postage. This invoked ridicule, or pity, or censure. Someone always helped me out, as though making some oblique religious argument regarding my insolvency.Refugee, drifter, panhandler.
As the weeks passed, the claw I stretched across the government trestle was not mine: as I wrote through the winter, the skin on my hand gradually dried and cracked—a result of the climate, and the length of time spent writing near the microscopic spray from the surf. Even the fingernails were iodined, archaic.
I probably posted about four or five a day.
I endured the many long flights that brought me home and my skin again softened and smoothed out, but it was as though my travels to the equator had altered the passage of time. As though some spine had risen up inside me along which time nestled, like a dune.
When the letters first began to arrive, I had been home for nearly six months.
I found I had no memory of writing them.
I barely recognized this woman, their writer. Despite all claims of dry, hers is a damp heart, and pounding.
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