Michel took a hit to get started, leaving the flat more immune to the day. He felt he could easily go to the post office, post the letter, get the bus to Chatelet, and buy some credit for his mobile. He clenched his fists and sensed that confidence arriving.
On the bus after that post office thing, which he handled admirably with a minimum of fuss, he watched his right leg jumping and couldn’t make it stop. He heard a baby babble behind him. The other passengers included an old man and two old women, and they looked to him so happy, touching each other’s arms as they spoke. He watched with his natural discretion, and wondered in awe whether they were always like this, or had something incredible happened for them today. It was nice to believe in the former.
At Chatelet he got off, and the air-hiss let the door close. The engine revved and was distant. He stood on the street and then entered a tabac, emerging afterward with phone credit. He could do with another quick snort.
He was very near the Pompidou, and he debated dropping by Johnny or leaving it till later. Maybe leave it until later. He walked north up rue Saint-Denis, and pushed through the curtains of one of those outlets, their gaudy facades and porn-strewn windows rendering him helpless. He went straight to the toilet, snorted, and began browsing.
These were girls with elastic bodies – stretched and contorted and their pubic hair cropped. They were many, but the same. He picked up and replaced magazines and videos, and you could only tell the difference by the colour of their hair. There were all kinds of tastes accommodated.
Other men shuffled around him, maybe ten in the shop, and it stretched back a little. It was easy to pretend they weren’t there. He hadn’t looked at any faces, hadn’t noticed any items of clothing, and he was comfortable in the knowledge that they were likewise aloof. He took a quick peek at the sex-toys.
Later when he did go to Johnny, he approached him from behind, and startled him by sitting. He drew up alongside, coughed, and flopped down. Johnny had broken a string on the guitar, the B string he was saying, and Michel watched as he unhooked it, throwing the two parts away. They were all coiled up and fraying.
Johnny strode off to replace the missing string, his weird charisma still present when he was not. Michel was fatigué on the piazza. He scanned lazily about, the scenery essentially a constant, some other tourists replacing the last day’s group. He thought for a time about Karen.
Johnny returned and popped a champagne bottle, a far from quality smell escaping when he did. They drank and the cold liquid made them shiver. Johnny shifted and some condoms fell out of his pocket, and he hissed in annoyance as he quickly placed them back. Michel was going to laugh but then didn’t.
“I recall in the summer and we did the English.”
“Of course you recall,” spat Johnny. “It was only a few fucking months ago.”
He had bought a whole new set of strings, and he was busy ripping out the old ones. Michel watched him discard them.
“Yes, in the summer and we did the English.”
Johnny raised his eyes up to heaven.
Michel stood and yawned theatrically, and Johnny turned the pegs to stretch the new strings. They’d wander out of tune for about two days now. He listened to the ascending pitch, wrestling the pegs around, so caked were they in rust. The instrument rattled and moaned.
“I’m like a bird,” sang Michel. “I don’t know where my home is, I don’t know where my phone is.”
Johnny stared at him, horrified. It sounded like a cat in a blender, and those weren’t the lyrics anyway. Plus, he couldn’t remember what song it was.
Michel continued singing, and Johnny tightened the strings. Together the sound was unbearable. People were gaping with pained expressions on their faces, and a beggar who was passing stuck his finger in his ear. Pigeons took off in a hurry.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, screeched Johnny. Like a motherfucking bird.
He twisted the pegs and clawed at the strings like a lunatic, a cacophonous racket blundering into being. Michel kept singing as he had been. They now had the attention of probably everyone on the piazza, no one particularly welcoming of this din they were inflicting. A dog began howling like a wolf.
They kept at it for about five minutes, and, when they stopped, the silence was total and eerie. It was life with an absence of volume. Gradually, people started moving and speaking again, looking in their pockets or playing with their phones. For that five minute period of noise pollution, Michel and Johnny had controlled the square. They smiled and returned to their drinking.
March 25, 2010
Part 6: Things As They Are (scene 5)
March 24, 2010
Part 6: Things As They Are (scene 4)
Laura dusted the apartment. It was a cold but sunny morning, and she lifted and replaced glasses and CDs, getting at the nooks and crannies with her duster and cloth.
She was happy but apprehensive for Aria with this new boy from Ireland. Aria spoke like she’d known him forever. Laura had yet to meet him. She paused for a second letting dust float around, and then resumed cleaning while a bird broke into song. There was a radio from somebody’s window.
Two weeks before, Aria had come home so happy, full of joy from this Frank guy. They’d met and then gone to the movies. Laura was suspicious of anyone who spoke to Aria, though she was careful not to show this, wondering whether they sensed the same sweet vulnerability she did. In bars, did she protect or stifle Aria? She wasn’t sure, but felt her intentions were good.
She dropped the cloth and knelt to pick it up, spying one of Aria’s socks half-trapped beneath a chair leg. God she felt like her mother. She fished it out and threw it in the wash pile, and laughed at herself, 20 going on 40. She suddenly felt dowdy in her flip-flops.
She was a beautiful girl and they made a good pair, out on the town getting noticed in the clubs. Aria’s French was so good now. Laura watched out but thought sometimes she needn’t, although the knowledge of what Aria had been through made her instinctively. She had been hurt, and she was younger.
Laura was the girl who made you laugh to show she loved you, but the boys she’d met thus far tended to view such girls platonically. Lukas was an exception. Her self-appointed shepherding of Aria didn’t help either. She was popular with boys, could punch and mock them easily, but sometimes there were moments when that didn’t seem enough. She’d found it hard to get closer.
That night she worked on a college assignment. The paper was due the next Monday. She yawned and stretched and started writing again, a girl in a window with a lamp and a desk. She heard bins being opened in the courtyard.
The paragraphs came easy, and it would certainly be ready for Monday. She took a break and walked slowly round the apartment, eyeing the areas she had earlier cleaned. It looked bigger with the dust gone.
She had liked Lukas, but he turned out a fool, the male equivalent of those girlies who just can’t ignore their hair. She’d been tricked by his eyes blue and beautiful. The exotic newness of his speech and his style, the detached intelligence of the Scandinavian mindset, had led her to believe she’d found a soul of depth. All she’d found was the seashell.
She sat back at the desk and drew a space monster, a small boggle-eyed creature in the corner of her notes. She gave him fur and a nose and whiskers. He smiled up at her, and she coloured in his fur with a purple felt-tip pen. His eyes got light blue irises. Settling back to her schoolwork, she would glance at him occasionally. Then laugh and resume writing.
When Aria came home they could drink wine together. The bottle sat on the shelf with the cork half jammed back in there. Laura opened the window feeling air upon her face, and then the sound of Aria’s key in the lock made her smile with joy and loosening. Her baby was back from her travels.
March 23, 2010
Part 6: Things As They Are (scene 3)
Karen was sure he took something. The summer feeling had not gone away, and by August she’d decided that her boyfriend was on drugs. This certainty played havoc with her sleeping.
She was at work with her mind elsewhere, tossing and returning to her thoughts. She spoke on the phone to her clients. Ever since she had banished doubt from the equation, she’d tumbled permanently into a stale pool of possible options. She flicked through the same thoughts, repeatedly.
Could she help him if she left him?
Would he hate her if she tried?
Did she know what she was talking about, and know what she was feeling, and was it really dreadful if her boyfriend took some drugs?
These were crashing questions often.
She walked by the river keeping distant from the bank, along the cobbles. She could hear the Right Bank traffic. The water made aching lap sounds, salivating against the rock slope, below her. She smelt the smoke from a cigarette.
Passing under a bridge with the echo of her steps, her foot struck something solid, and she stumbled for an instant. Recovering, leaning heavily on her stick, she was hit with a blast of pungent urine odour, the harshness overpowering in her throat and in her nose. She staggered shakily through the tunnel.
Out the other side, sweet air on her face again, she moved to her left to lean against the wall. She felt with her stick for a concrete bench she knew must be around somewhere, and, finding it, sat down. Her strength returned quite quickly.
“Il fait beau aujourd’hui,” offered someone.
“Oui,” she echoed back. “Il fait beau.”
She heard his footsteps receding, as he ventured on with what sounded like a small dog in tow. The water licked and sluiced.
She returned the way she had come, ascending from the quai to the roadside, and crossing at the nearby lights. She walked down what she knew to be rue des Saints Peres, took a left onto Saint Germain and a right onto rue de Rennes, and was nearly home. Two more turns until her building.
She boiled water for tea in her apartment, and realised with a start she hadn’t thought of Michel the entire time. She wished this forgetfulness would return. Trying to forget would initiate the old dance of wanting something and failing because you wanted it, so she concentrated instead on the tea-taste in her mouth. If Michel had returned than so be it.
The tea was delicately scented, a fruit and herb aroma that could clear her mind at once. She sat back and drank it slowly. Michel and her Michel options swam within her, fading, repeating, making more and less sense. She tried imagining exactly what that Beirut picture looked like.
Her cell phone rang but she ignored it, knowing today it wouldn’t be Mom, and not in the mood to talk to anyone else. She heard the buzz of a text received, someone having left a message. She finished her tea, swallowing the last of it, just the taste and the smell quite faint but still there. She placed the cup on the side table.
March 22, 2010
Part 6: Things As They Are (scene 2)
Aria saw the graveyard boy on the subway. He saw her too, but she didn’t know that. She found herself looking repeatedly, which was strange, because since that day she hadn’t thought of him at all. He looked fuller, more whole now.
She gently made him notice her, watching until he had to glance up. She wanted to show she remembered him. He remembered her too, trying and failing to conceal this in his eyes, and she studied them, and knew.
They got off the train in slow motion, her from one door him another, and sat down on Metro benches, silently. They were twenty metres apart. The station emptied like sink-water, passengers gurgling and spilling through the gates, and finally Aria’s trainers made echoing squeaks as she jigged. Frank watched her minute nervous movements.
“Tu parles francais ou anglais?”
“Les deux.”
“But English is how you were born.”
“Yeah,” she laughed, finding the sentence amusing.
He stood up and shuffled much closer.
When he was standing before her she smiled at him, and he smiled back without fear. Her beauty was anything but frightening. He wanted to feel how her nose felt, but you can’t just do this off the bat. God will grant it if it’s meant for you.
Some people appeared on the platform, scattered randomly along, and Frank and Aria stood up and passed though the exit. She was aware of her hair and her jawbone. Their arms touched as they moved into daylight, accidentally, or not. Both felt so strange and so calm.
The station they’d emerged at was St. Sulpice, and they sat on a bench on the church square, while pigeons inspected them for sandwiches. A man tuned a violin in the sunshine.
Frank and Aria listened to him – the half-escaping notes, which he would soon turn effortlessly to music. The instrument whinnied and conformed for him. He commenced a lilting waltz made from sorrow and rain, an inappropriate sound when two lovers have met. It bound their first encounter with finality, reminding of transience, and endings. It didn’t bother them in that moment.
Later in a cinema, with Aria drinking Coke and Frank ablaze with new care for her, they let their knees touch one another, through jean fabric. The actors emoted on screen. They sat by the river after, lost in the eyes lost in their eyes, while tourist cruisers passed. All was maintained by the light falling.
“So you think you’re going to stay forever?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can’t see any reason to leave.”
The purple sky wrapped the day up in night-time, leaving the American girl and the Irish boy to stand wordlessly, and depart the quai-side. A dog barked from under a bridge. Frank took Aria’s number carefully, writing it precisely, and clarifying twice. She smiled and her lips held him spellbound. As he walked home southward and her northeast, the dog by the river found a sandwich in a drain. He wolfed it hungrily, stale lettuce splatting on the cobbles. He sneezed from pepper mixed with dried mayonnaise, rubbing at his snout with his right front paw. There was a used smack needle lying next to him, under a leaf.
March 21, 2010
Part 6: Things As They Are (scene 1)
Don’t let the swirl of desire be your master. Johnny knew this, but it was easy to forget. His longed for October light was upon him again, the years slipping like sediment, his hopes and fears still with him. He watched the students up in the Pompidou library, their busy forms moving back and forth, and he down below on the tile stones. Johnny with pigeons and chill.
He waved his arm and he was just with the chill, and some moments later with Michel. Within an hour he was alone again. He stood up and rubbed his stiff legs, and picked up the guitar, figuring that was enough for today. He went to a café for a beer.
The waitress was familiar to him from a cold night, and he’d known this would be so before entering. He purposely sat with his back to her. She approached and was shocked momentarily, but then recovered, and merely took his order in sadness. Her eyes were like pools built from loss.
Johnny drank with a listlessness, breathing heavier than he needed to. He knew he was holding her interest. He felt her attention on his back and the back of his head, a laser beam of embarrassment, and disappointment, and ruin. Another waitress with tear stains.
He left as the dark became resolute, walking down Boulevard de Sebastopol with the beer buzzing. Early evenings cloaked in blackness. He stopped into one of those DVD and toy places, and bought a magazine with the legs spread. Some blond probably distant from her father. On the street with it in his jacket pocket, he waited patiently at the lights till the colour changed, and crossed to go east on rue Reaumur. He sat down to observe at Republique.
People hurried cloaked in distractions, thinking of their lover or their kettle or their bills. Johnny stretched out like a feline. He watched some kids on a makeshift merry-go-round, two Arabs controlling the motor, and selling candyfloss as a sideline. Women watched children on horses.
There was one time in Paris when he got called a nigger, by an American bouncer outside a club. Soon after his arrival. It had not hurt or surprised him, but the sensation of powerlessness was strong. He could only walk away down the queue length.
He was reminded of this for no reason, or no reason he was able to detect. He was reminded, and forgot, and it was lost again.
Things are as they are, and Johnny couldn’t sit forever. He stood up and shook himself, meandering slowly back toward Chateau Rouge. Was this city a burden to him now? It was too familiar, too known to him, too mocking of his weakness and his exiled raging heart. He knew the dogshit stains.
He was on rue de Chabrol, and then rue la Fayette, crossing over onto rue du Faubourg Poissoniere. He bought another beer in a fruit shop.
Nothing could lift his despondency tonight. These streets were boring now, and useless. They were the hunter’s net of all his failures and insecurities, the recording apparatus of his conquest born from need. They were unmerciful. He heard a domestic argument from a window up above him, woman wailing husband drunk. He spat saliva mixed with Kronenbourg.
Rain would have spoken for his misery. There was none. Crashing, smashing fucked off rain would have given voice to his anger, have bellowed where he was mute, but nothing but a breeze lived, and it was cool and gentle.
March 20, 2010
Part 5: Natural Light, Oct 2001 – Jan 2002 (scene 13)
If you invite pain and suffering into your life, they will come running. Don’t invite them, just deal with them if they come.
Djinn had seen his mother raped. In the kitchen, near a chair. He’d been young, a child only, watching wide-eyed and unmoving. When their business was finished they left. He’d run to her, held her, cried as she cried with him, on the tile floor. This was long ago.
He stands by the window on this French suburban street. He is in the town of Malakoff, next to Paris. A car goes by at a slow speed, two smiling children in the backseat, their mother driving responsibly. Djinn rubs at his eyelids.
Over in Beirut he had the sounds that helped to mould him. The familiar floating noise. Here he feels unmoved by it, the music of daily life, taking nothing from the French cars, voices, bird calls. He wishes he could block them out.
He has been living here a month. It is the second of October 2003, and he feels like he’s been here forever. The days are long and tedious. He has tramped the streets and consulted maps, pinpointed useful locations. Has surveyed the site many times. He has looked from every possible angle, calculated distances, ascended often as a tourist. The Tower of Montparnasse.
He knows it like a body part.
On their buses he stares out the window. On their trains he looks straight ahead. He ignores their old people, their words, their sinful immoral girls. He prays. On the streets his tension hurts him, muscular folds tightening in the shoulders and the back. He stretches his joints in the evenings.
Once a woman asked him the time. He acted like he hadn’t heard her. If he caught someone’s eye he would glance at the floor, or away, anywhere. It made his head sore. The weather was harsh on him also, filling his soul with anger and fear. Making skin crack.
He reads from his Koran and recites his prayers turned eastward. He eats silently. To control a plan one must control oneself, and this can only be done by adhering to routine. If a bird sings audibly he denies the occurrence, struggling to banish the memory of a simple, once pleasant event. The tea they sell here distresses him.
The clock is ticking on and the time is fast approaching. Patience will offer reward. In the gathering of material and the straining will of same, he senses something massive, far beyond his scope. French cars, French people, French steel and glass and skin. All will crumble, melt, burn in holy flame, just like a prophecy. Djinn feels tired suddenly.
He lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling. There is a crack with an insect upon it. The creature follows the line of the fissure, almost exactly, creeping upside down with no knowledge of the world. Djinn follows the creature with his eyes.
He will sleep later, dreaming of death. To dream of death is important. It means his heart is pure, his mind focused, his soul is free from fear. It means his will will carry him. He has to die too of course, in the building he will light. His soul must mingle with the others. He turns off the lamp in his bedroom.
March 19, 2010
Part 5: Natural Light, Oct 2001 – Jan 2002 (scene 12)
Karen met Michel at her metro station. He had bags of Christmas presents bundled in his arms, and she offered to carry one but he refused. He asked her to accompany him northward.
On the train they spoke about Christmas time, and Michel said it was his favourite time of year. The carriage rumbled and shook them. He wanted to go to Chateau Rouge, saying he had a present for a friend there. After, they could walk in Montmartre.
When they got to the station they pushed up the stairway, Michel guiding her with his voice. One of his parcels touched against her for a second, and he apologised, sounding out of breath. They emerged into bustle, and walked noisy, crowded streets at a slow pace. She knew this was near her attack site. Michel apologised again, saying it wouldn’t be much longer, and then they were stopped on the pavement, and he was shouting up at somebody.
A gruff voice answered, and came down to open the door. Karen heard a rustling interplay, the giving of the gift presumably, and then Michel was introducing her, saying this was Johnny. Johnny asked her nationality, and spoke English out of courtesy. She didn’t bother mentioning she spoke French. Michel did, saying he couldn’t understand, but Johnny ignored his pleas for a language switch, and talked so much Karen couldn’t hope to initiate one. They chatted about the weather.
She felt comfortable in his presence, temporarily forgetting Michel, and concentrating on the voice. It was rough hewn, scraped, story-filled. He said he was Senegalese, a musician, and the harsh Northern weather had sandpapered his skin. She asked where he learned his English.
“It’s like gravel my skin, can you feel it?”
Before she knew it her hand was raised, touching his face, unknowing as to whether it had reached or been placed there. She traversed his cheek.
Michel coughed out of awkwardness.
“Tu veux partir, cherie? Il est tard.”
They left. They journeyed back to St. Sulpice, neither saying very much, and she wondered in her head what fire she was feeling. It was otherworldly. Michel gave her some presents to carry this time, and they ventured up the stairs into the night.
Later, alone, her mind returned to his face. The feeling of the skin. In his voice lay authority, mystery, desperation. She had wondered then how his eyes were, and had never really dwelled on this in meeting someone before. She had learnt it didn’t matter.
She turned over and tried to sleep, and did so after a spell. But the lurching of her dreamscape awoke her. She sat up in her nightdress, the covers half falling, permitting stabs of cold. Muscles ached from positioning.
Life was the thrust of the everyday.
Death was the shrinking from life.
Rest and good food lead to peace.
March 18, 2010
Part 5: Natural Light, Oct 2001 – Jan 2002 (scene 11)
Frank began walking naturally. Unaided by the crutch he would journey around the block, moving at a pace that facilitated correct walking. If he went too fast he regressed to a form of hobbling, but at a slow gait the muscles seemed to work properly. His ankle clicked and protested.
The dogs sometimes accompanied him, in daylight or the evening, and all the houses were festooned and joyful, with Christmas lights, Santas, mistletoe. What they call the holiday season.
In his huge security jacket and his woolly hat and gloves, Frank trudged through the snow tracks delicately. One of the dogs disappeared momentarily, only to re-emerge covered in snow. A car skidded.
In his room Frank warmed himself, rubbing his hands and rolling his neck. He smelt chicken roasting. Rachel and Jack were in the kitchen, Jack banging on a pot, and Frank listened quietly, feeling at ease.
He took the garage route to the basement, entering by the side door, and had a smoke amongst the gloominess. There were mice in the walls.
Their presence had been detected three days previously, when Frank noticed teeth marks in stored Irish chocolate bar wrappers, and had then seen three of them, scurrying across the floor. Dan was out buying poison. Frank looked around carefully, but knew it was unlikely he’d see them again. Their hiding places were infinite.
He stubbed out the joint, but remained seated. He took in the sense of this room. With his eyes closed and his head lolling, he experienced its parameters, sonically, spatially. He heard a dog padding.
“You should go out and get a Yank bird,” said Dan at dinner, and Rachel pretended to scold him with her eyes. “Fly the flag for Ireland.”
Frank smiled in politeness, feeling that this would be a tricky proposition, but unable to deny the fact his body was requesting it. Her nationality would have made no difference. He would have lain her down and turned her around, but his mind was snapped out of this when Dan hit him with a tea towel.
“Finish your chicken or I’m giving it to the dogs.”
Frank washed the dishes with the CD player spinning. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He saw them in Berlin, nearly saw Tom Waits too. He pushed suds from a Celtic-patterned hotplate.
The kitchen in the evenings had become a special time. He liked washing the dishes with music playing. His mind would drift and float from him, memories, imaginings. Thoughts like slow ponderous beings.
Tonight he was thinking of Dublin, the kebabs and the piss and the puke. Excessive smoking and drinking. Brit-esque slappers in skirts. It was English there, different in token form only. The lager, the aggression, the frantic coupling with strangers in the streets. He’d done that too, like anyone.
He finished the dishes and went to his room, then to the basement to smoke. The bag was certainly diminishing, nearly 300 dollars in his lungs. It was sweet though. It was sweet and chilled and soft melancholic, and slowing. He stretched his arms upward.
“Ah sure now, ceilings are pretty cool.” He sent this remark to the wood beams. He got a can of Old Style from the fridge, and cracked it open with a groan. Then he guzzled from it.
Jack stood up by the fireplace. Terminator 2 was on television, and he rose shakily near the dormant grate. Frank watched him curiously, feeling sure this was the very first time – an unassisted standing being accomplished. Jack waved his arms, shouted, and then folded neatly onto his bottom, like a soft internal implosion, or a tower being felled. “Silence,” ordered Schwarzenegger.
Rachel and Dan were out, and Frank the babysitter was drinking a beer. He smiled at Jack. There was a crash on the screen and Jack’s head swivelled, his eyes as wide as saucers, but not containing fear. It was just instinctive.
“That was a crash,” said Frank solemnly. Jack watched him and listened. “There was a big crash, and Schwarzenegger said ‘affirmative.’” Jack gurgled and coughed.
“This is a remarkable transition the Terminator has made,” opined Frank. “It is akin to Hannibal crossing the Alps.” Jack crawled over closer, whispering utterances to himself.
“If you cast your mind back to the first film,” Frank continued, “he was resolutely, indeed indubitably, an evil character. The truth wasn’t in him. Now however, we can observe a startling transformation, as he hereby battles to save the life of the one he was initially sent to destroy.”
He drank from the beercan.
Jack was well accustomed to this silliness, and, although he didn’t understand any of it, appeared to be enjoying himself immensely. He gripped the edges of the couch. Frank picked him up and they sat together, Jack chewing a toy. Arnie had split for commercials.
“I’m going to be leaving soon,” said Frank. I’m going to be going away.”
Jack went asleep in his arms later, and Frank watched his innocent face, his sighs and his nasal breath-flow. His mind didn’t know of sadness. What would his life hold, what would Frank’s, and if they ever met again, would the sleeping child remember?
Was he dreaming?
Frank turned off the TV set. The walls were painted yellow, but a warm and vivid hue, and he took in the room slowly, deliberately. Jack shifted for an instant. There was pain in Frank’s body, and they had said there would be forever. There was breakage and deformation. He looked at this sleeping boy on his chest, and smiled at the knowledge of his energy. His boundless, shouting glee.
When Dan and Rachel came home the dogs would start barking. Jack would probably wake for a moment, and then sleep again. Would wake without knowing he had done so. One of the dogs ventured over, silent and wagging its tail, and Frank patted the soft dark head, two loving pure eyes regarding him. The deep eyes of dogs.
He closed his mind and relaxed. To his sensations. He was almost holding himself. He almost had his arms around his own sleeping form, protecting it from everything, everywhere. But there are no winners in that game. The barrier of protection can block good as well as ill, and if you aren’t receptive, how can you receive? He felt a pulse throbbing.
The arrival of Dan and Rachel was imminent. It was the future, then the past. Frank sat on the couch with the baby in his arms, the dogs alongside him, and his history like a trail. He had a life to live through.
March 17, 2010
Part 5: Natural Light, Oct 2001 – Jan 2002 (scene 10)
Aria cried in the changing room. Her body did not feel like hers. Laura was at her French class, always talking of Paris now, but Aria needed her in this moment. She was overwhelmed and alone. Laura was going after the SAT’s, and had been preparing for a long time. Already they were into November.
Aria wanted to go with her. She felt like maybe she could. She could run from all of this, her feelings and her life, and be whole again. New. In the changing room the other students chatted, and she covered her face with her hands. She smelt a gym smell.
June was when Laura was leaving. June 2002. Aria whispered it softly. She could push through the pain until that time, and then freedom. Was it possible? She hated seeing her mother and sister, hated how clearly they loved her, and she raged and shook and cried in her bedroom. Her mother would cry then as well.
“We should talk about this honey,” she’d plead with her. “You can tell me whatever you feel.”
Aria would scream.
She would clench up near-frozen and death-like, powerless as her father’s hands touched her five year old body. She couldn’t banish this imagery. In her room with the door locked and her heart like a stone, she lay tense limbed. She didn’t know it was an identical position.
Anna banged on the door, but Aria physically couldn’t open it. She lay paralysed. Whenever this happened she saw many things, all flashing in her mind like a dream. Sometimes she saw a pink toy rabbit. This rabbit brought a peace when it came to her, but she mentally pushed it away. And then the hands touched her.
She was paralysed there in her bedroom, the fingertips touching her hard. Why was she seeing this now? She had been five years old, an infant, and had time not rendered it void? Was it not nothing to her now?
March 16, 2010
Part 5: Natural Light, Oct 2001 – Jan 2002 (scene 9)
Karen was happy on Sunday. A smoke-smell remained on the living room furniture, but Friday night’s party could be deemed a success. There was rain falling.
She’d spoken at length with a man called Michel, and agreed to give him her number. He’d told of his upbringing in Bordeaux, his hopes, his fears, and she’d been drawn in by this openness, which was not like guys back home. Neither was his evident interest in her. Perhaps because of this, or just the buzz of a gathering, she felt so light today, remembering the feel of that night. Of friendly strangers.
Janey rang and gossiped about everyone, asking Karen’s opinions and fishing for thoughts on Michel. Karen was diplomatic. The rain hit the window pane in wind-assisted swishes. Karen said goodbye and was silent.
All she heard now was this rain-swishing, a delicate brushing cadence. Then a car passing. She got up and walked about, put on her raincoat but discarded it, not wishing to go outside. A lone bird began to screech somewhere.
She got a whiff of Michel’s aftershave, from the sensory memory bank, and smiled to herself briefly, half-embarrassed to feel so girlishly young. She felt her heart beating.
Fishing in Beirut 