Creature Read online

  This evening after dinner I hiked up past the solar panels with one of my friends. It’s more of a climb than a hike, actually. On part of the trail is a rope so you can pull yourself up and also keep track of where you’re going; the trail starts to disappear. My friend was wearing sandals and I think it was hard for him, harder even when we were coming down. There are small prickly buds on the ends of the dry grass that get stuck on my clothes whenever I hike here. They got stuck to my socks and dug into my legs. Every time we sat down for a rest I tried to remove some of them, but I always collected more. I thought I could sense the ocean by the color of the sky, but my friend told me I was looking in the wrong direction. It still seems as though the ocean is in that direction.

  On the way down, we became covered in dirt and had to go to the bathhouse. There, the lanterns shone softly. I hardly ever go when it’s dark out and I could barely see the other women around me, could barely see myself, when, after bathing, I combed my hair in front of the mirror.

  I like picturing that.

  Really?

  Yes.

  Do you feel distant from me?

  Yes, I do.

  The densho is calling me to evening zazen. Now someone is hitting the han. I love the han, the way the mallet sounds as it strikes the wood. The path is dark and someone is wearing a headlamp.

  I’m sorry.

  Why?

  That we’re distant.

  If we stop talking to each other, I’ll have to find a different way to communicate with you.

  Will it really be me, if I’m not there?

  I’m not sure, but I don’t know what else to do. Sometimes I feel close to you when you aren’t there.

  In the zendo, we sit. Someone clears her throat, and the person next to me carefully changes his position. My shoulder blades are tense and I want to relax them. They are usually like that when I sit zazen. Outside, I can hear a person walking across the gravel, and even farther away, a person in the dining room, talking.

  The land in this place is reminiscent of the desert. I think I needed everything that grows here. I’m happy, and I don’t know what to think about that. I know there isn’t a goal to find happiness, and yet I find it, even when things are hard. I don’t really want to leave.

  What do you think will happen then?

  That I’ll go back to being anxious.

  Isn’t that part of what you are doing there, to be okay with whatever is happening?

  Yes. What’s it like where you are?

  It’s hard. Someone I love is sick.

  A few weeks ago, a visiting Benedictine monk who was giving a talk in the dining room spoke for a few minutes about reading. I might get this wrong, but I think I remember him saying that in his tradition the word is supposed to send a person into the great silence. Just a little bit of reading is enough. When I read I usually want to do so for a long time, but to read a little and then to be with that reading in silence sounds very nice.

  Something about him reminded me of you, or what you might be like when you are older; I think the ways you both move around in your bodies.

  I WILL FORCE THIS

  Lately I’ve been having a hard time knowing what’s good. I don’t even know how to write. Maybe I am only a reader. I try to force things, force stories. I have to work on a story for many, many months before it makes sense.

  Still, someone gave me the opportunity to copy a piece of writing onto the wall of a gallery. I’d never done anything like that before. I called it a hunger text, because it was about a woman who didn’t have enough money for food. On the day I painted my hunger text on the wall, I wore an old-fashioned lace shirt that had once belonged to my aunt. I also wore a long wool skirt. The text was projected onto the wall, and I painted on top of it. I found it both relaxing and exhausting to do this all day.

  I will write about this experience, I thought. Now I am writing about it, but I’m not sure what there is to say, and whether or not saying it will be interesting for anyone to hear or read. I felt comfortable painting the text while wearing the old-fashioned shirt and the skirt. I wanted to make a costume for myself, even though I wear this costume at other moments too, like when I go to the grocery store, or to a restaurant. Maybe I wanted to be another kind of writer, one who performs putting her text on a wall, as if it would be fun for someone else to see me do this.

  Now she is painting an “A” on the wall, and now an “e.” Now I have painted the word “foot.” And now “pleasure.” The woman in the text is projected onto the wall too, limping across letters, eating bugs. Can you see her? What am I doing there, leaning across her, leaning across those letters, while standing on a ladder, with the text projected on my back, and my arms, as my shirt is white, and see-through, and when I am there the woman is on my back and arms as much as she is on the wall.

  Here, I have put a hungry, abject woman on the wall for you to ponder; a woman who still feels pleasure. If you read part of this text, you’ll only know a little about her. If you read all of this text, you’ll still only know a little about her.

  I walked across the floor of the gallery, dragging my foot. No one else was in the room; this part of the performance was only for me. This must have been more interesting than seeing me paint letters on a wall. Watching me paint letters would only be interesting for someone who has some special attraction to me. I suppose if I were attracted to a person I could watch him or her paint letters on a wall all day, or at least for a part of an afternoon. I am in a relationship, but I am sure the person I am in a relationship with would be bored by having to watch me paint letters on a wall for more than ten minutes. This is understandable. But it felt good, the dragging of the foot. I liked doing it.

  When I got home, my partner was eating an egg. This is what he does when I’m not around. He also eats fish. I was harsh to him, but without speaking. I expressed myself through the violent putting away of a pan. Later I sat on his lap and dreamed about the future. This was together alone.

  In our reveries, we both forgot the other was there. I was very far away. I was thinking about how dark it was getting outside, but I clung to his neck, which must have meant that I was also very much in the room. When I told him what I had been thinking about, he didn’t believe me. “How could you look so far away and be thinking about something so mundane?”

  “But darkness is never mundane.”

  “I need to work now,” he said gently, nudging me off his lap.

  I wanted to wash my face and my feet. I wanted to be invited somewhere.

  “This is evil,” I said out loud.

  The days went by and I occupied myself with reading and writing and lying around on the porch. In my mind I was very close to the days before when I had written my hunger text on a wall. Every moment felt charged with a thing that had just happened, or a thing that would happen once something else had ended. Lying around on a porch sounds lazy, but it doesn’t have to be. It depends on how you feel about it. Because my wrists hurt, I was still charged with the copying of my piece of literature.

  Finally I did start to feel lazy, so I walked a few miles along a surprisingly empty road to a university library, though I have no affiliation.

  I collected the books I wanted to read, and then found a comfortable place to sit, so I could read them. This place happened to be next to an elevator, but that’s not what made it comfortable.

  “I want to see myself here,” I said out loud.

  The woman in the chair next to me jerked her head around.

  “This is a library,” she said incredulously.

  “I know. That’s why I said it.”

  “Look in a window. At your reflection.”

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Study your arm.”

  “You don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

  The woman stared at a row of books for a few minutes. They were hardbacks. Then she got up to watch a documentary about a writer. I could see the screen, but I couldn’
t hear anything. The woman was wearing headphones.

  I will force this into a story. I got cold when I thought this. I started shivering. I was in a place where I couldn’t control the temperature, which upset me. I wanted to be comfortable so I could focus.

  I moved into a sunnier part of the library and continued reading. Right away I was able to see the specter of the story. Now I am moving through literature, I thought. I would like to move through something abject. Like when you touch something warm and you get warmer. But, I am abject myself. I don’t need to touch another to feel this way. I possess it inside, like a little clamshell.

  I was tempted to move in a way that would make the others in the library think of me strangely, the way I had moved when I was in the gallery.

  I looked at my hand. How can I re-imagine you?

  This can not be a portrait. The page is the size of a mirror, but that doesn’t mean anything. Once I looked at my arm and wanted to write about that. Write about the arm when the whole body is being abused.

  Tonight, the night I am writing this, I am sick and tender. My body is warm and it hurts my throat to swallow.

  Not knowing what is good for anyone, I start writing.

  I want to make another costume for myself. I want to perform another thing on a wall, like truth, but I don’t know what truth looks like—I haven’t experienced it yet.

  I remember a moment in winter when snow was stuck to the grass, intimately. One light thing moved through something that was solid, darker. In that moment, someone had asked me to help host a festival of literature.

  “Yes,” I had said.

  “It will be about memory.”

  I was admiring what was underfoot.

  THE BEAK OF A BIRD

  Sometimes I forget the names of books, the ones I like the most. My memory is bad, and I’m also ashamed of what I think about literature—I can only open up to a few people in this way. I work in a bookstore, so this isn’t a good quality.

  After work, I walk home in the dark. Sometimes on the way I stop at a gourmet food shop, knowing I don’t belong there, and yet feeling that I do. I buy a small jar of something, like pumpkin butter, and I have a friend, a cousin, who likes to come over after she’s finished working at the hotel. She’s young and so working at the hotel doesn’t bother her. I am already too old to be able to work at a hotel, though I did work at one once, and I am only a few years older than her. We come from a long line of women who have worked in hotels.

  I clean my apartment until it’s immaculate so that it feels like a good place to be, a kind of nest for when my cousin comes to visit. A place safe from this rich city, though we play at a certain kind of richness. Once I slapped my cousin so hard she fell down. It was because of something that had happened in our family, and I know now I was wrong. She forgave me. In our family we are good at that.

  When I was a child I thought no one had experienced the world like I had. I would sit next to the ocean and think, no one knows the ocean like I do. No one has ever been this close to it. I didn’t actually say these things in my mind, I just knew them to be true. My connection to the ocean; my walk through the tropical night. If I walked long enough I came to farmland.

  One night when I was working in the bookstore my cousin called to tell me she had hurt herself at the hotel.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I cut myself with a pair of scissors. One of the customers left them under a towel on the bathroom floor. I didn’t know the scissors were there. Now my hand won’t stop bleeding.”

  “Clarice, tell your manager. Don’t just let your hand bleed.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell him.”

  “There must be a first aid kit at the hotel.”

  “There is. I’ve seen it. Once I had to get a band aid for someone.”

  “How bad is your hand?”

  “Not that bad. It just startled me. I didn’t know I was going to get cut when I picked up the towel.”

  “Should I come get you?”

  “When your shift is over.”

  At nine o’clock, after I had closed out my register and put the money in the safe, I left the store and headed north toward the hotel. It was a cold night and I crossed my arms in front of me, trying to keep my body warmth close. The streets were dark until I got to the one the hotel was on. Then everything was bright. My cousin was standing out front, cradling one hand in another. She was wearing a puffy beige coat that came down to her knees, a coat I had never seen before.

  “Are you okay?”

  “One of the other maids wrapped my hand for me. It isn’t bleeding anymore.”

  I looked at Clarice’s hands. The one on top looked thick under its thin glove. “Do you need stitches?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s take the bus tonight.”

  The bus was bright too. We went to the back row and spread ourselves out over four seats. No one else was riding, but after a few stops two people got on, and then every few minutes a few more. One woman was wearing a coat like Clarice’s, except that it was falling apart.

  When we got into my apartment, Clarice leaned against the kitchen wall and stayed there.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m okay. It just feels good to stand here.”

  I made up a bed for Clarice on the couch, and then climbed into my own bed. I could hear the music she turned on in the living room, but it sounded very far away. She must have only wanted to hear it quietly. I lay in bed, listening. I fell asleep. Then it was time to go to the bookstore. When I got up, Clarice was already gone.

  It didn’t take long to see her again. That night we were less tired, and we decided to eat at a nice restaurant, one that serves crepes. Clarice went on and on about her injury and about one of the other maids, and I recounted my time as a child when I had visited the tropics.

  “I am on someone’s farm,” I said. “You can imagine how strange a farm seems, especially when it is tropical. The air is so warm that I don’t need to wear a flannel shirt or a sweater. It’s so beautiful I don’t want to go to sleep.” Clarice stared at me. Because we were cousins we could go on and on about things that other people would ignore or object to. “I was an only child,” I said. “Clarice, is it funny the way I talk about these things? It must be boring.”

  “I don’t mind it.”

  “It was my consciousness I was aware of. I was always looking at things, like my own body. When I was walking I would touch my body in amazement because I could walk. I would touch the muscles in my legs.”

  “I know you were an only child,” Clarice said.

  “It means something to me.”

  “What does it mean?”

  I paused. Then I went on. “I was alone more of the time. I was alone much more than you were.”

  “That’s true. When I was growing up, I was always with my brother.”

  “What’s it like having a brother?”

  “Can’t you imagine it?”

  “I guess I did see you together. You seemed tense.”

  Clarice stared down at her soup. Then she ate some of it. Her orange soup. “I don’t think I told you, but last week I saw a performance.”

  “Do you go to performances?”

  “One of the other maids took me.”

  “What was it like?”

  “There were four dancers, and it seemed like they didn’t actually know how to dance.”

  “You don’t really know what dancing looks like, do you?”

  “Not contemporary dance, but I know what ballet looks like.”

  After that conversation, I think we both needed a break from each other. I spent a whole day reading a book in my kitchen. I knew I would never be able to talk to anyone about it. I washed the dishes. While I was doing that, I finished the conversation in my mind that I had had with Clarice.

  “What were you doing on the farm?” she asked me.

  “I had gone there because of the ocean. Also, I am an only child.”

>   “What does being an only child have to do with it?”

  “You find you must do what you want.”

  “Do you? I don’t know very much about only children.”

  “We’re very aware of everything, and also sometimes afraid.”

  I made myself stop the conversation. I sat down at the table and started reading again so that the words I read would fill my mind.

  The next morning I went to work and it didn’t stop raining. In between shelving books I would stand in front of the large windows and stare out at the parking lot. People came and went, running from their cars to our store, or sometimes to another store across the street.

  “Don’t forget where you are,” the assistant manager said to me.

  The hours crept slowly by. When a customer asked me a question I answered it quickly so I could be alone again.

  One customer got angry with me because I was reading when she walked up to the cash register, and I didn’t notice her. She said to one of the other employees that it didn’t even seem as if I cared about books. I thought this was odd because I had been holding a book and looking down at it when she saw me. But in a way she was right—I didn’t care.

  At the hotel, Clarice found a piece of something that looked like a miniscule rock or a piece of gray coral. She took it to a natural food store because she wasn’t sure how else she could find out what it was. It wasn’t food, but people who worked in a store like this might know.

  “It’s a fulgurite,” she later told me. We were on the bus again, it was night, and I felt like we could have been anywhere.

  “How do you know?”

  “The food store. And then I looked it up online. It’s formed when lightning hits sand.”

  “Everything in this city is so ugly that I can’t focus on my life.”

  “There are things here that are beautiful.”