The space of possibility lies beyond the old morals. These antiquated forms are a parasite with deep roots which must be stamped out before natality may natalize. First and foremost, the sun burns: Until it follows that example, the aspiring phoenix is plagued by doubts that it may be just another fly-of-the-mill bird.
Imagine your grandmother. Not an abstract grandmother: What is her name, to you? Grandma, GiGi, G-Ma, G-Eazy, Nana? Focus on that name. Every time I write the word, “grandmother,” stop and replace that word with the name on which you just focused. This requires an abnormal reading rhythm. It requires slowness. Allow your reading to be slow. I will not ask much of your time.
We are trying to establish contact. Real contact, literally con-tact, a melding of the most corporeal senses, “with-touch.” This is a seance. If your grandmother—Stop. What is her name? Carry on—If she is alive, call her. Pay attention to the stacked tones of her voice: High? Low? A crackle, a breathiness where her larynx is beginning to falter after decades of faithful operation? Do not try and direct the conversation: Ask her about her life in the vaguest terms you can muster. Listen to her stories, the itemized record of her recent days or distant memories. This is love. If she lives nearby, visit. You’ll be glad you did. If she is dead, simulate this conversation in your head. Remember. Where your memory is spotty, fill it in with her remembered spirit. How does she speak? Does she have an accent? What are her idioms, the ones you have only heard from her, the ones that are now extinct? Does she hug you when she sees you? How do her well-worn shoulder blades feel? How hard does she squeeze you? What is her smell? What is the smell of her home? Only once you have completed this step, read on. Do not cut corners. Re-read pieces of this evocation if necessary, until your grandmother is with you in all senses: You see the lines in her face, the blue-green veins on the backs of her hands, the thin ponds spread across her eyes, with their red tear-ducts, her thinned hair, her smell, above all, the smell. Of old-fashioned deodorant, of a wizened eschewal of deodorant, of—forgive the terrible slip into stereotype—cookies. Does she smell like cookies?
Now the two groups—those whose grandmothers are alive and dead, respectively—will merge, and we enter fiction:
Back at your own residence, recreate the scene you conjured, but fill in the corridors and furnishings of your grandmother’s home with geometric precision: Calculate how many steps it takes, say, to move from her front door to her couch, to the first hallway. The lengths, in steps, of all the rooms—walk them. Pick up the more memorable objects, replace them, run your hands along the walls and feel their textures. Slowly, slowly, with poetic taste for the mundane. Lastly, place your grandmother herself into your simulation. Perhaps in the rocking chair with removable arm-upholstery.
You go to visit her in this memory palace, and she is in a moderately advanced state of dementia, dancing in and out of coherence yet able to perform those basic daily acts that keep her alive. You walk in the front door, and she greets you, “Martin, how I’ve missed you.”
Your name is not Martin; that was your grandfather’s name. On the wall to the left you see a photograph of him in his dress uniform, taken shortly before he deployed to Korea. You don’t look alike. You don’t sound alike. Nevertheless your grandmother trembles, “Martin, it is you, right? I’ve been confused lately.”
Knee-jerk toward truth, you want to deny, but your tongue doubles back on itself. The truth is cruel: You have encountered one of the few moments of bliss in the flow of a horrible disease, and the truth will shatter it.
You are a saint. Rather than kill dear Martin a second time, “Of course it’s me. Who else?”
With an agility you thought was twenty years behind her, she jumps across the room into your arms. “I’ve missed you so badly. They told all sorts of deplorable lies about you, but I knew you’d come back.”
You look over her quaking shoulder and see your own ashes in a dignified grey urn on the mantle. “Of course, dear, though I may not be able to stay long.”
“Do you know what I’ve missed most? You remember the night in Saint-Cloud, when you had just returned from the war?”
Martin had never spoken about anything before Reagan. He was a sensitive man, a poet by trade, and no one knew why he had enlisted. One of his poems reads,
Japanese maple
Jagged hangs my crime, lapels
Adorned likewise: Red.
If you do not remember, it will crush her. “Of course, my love. But lead me through it. I seem to remember that you led the night.”
As always. Martin could have been gouging out his own eyes, but if she was beside him, he would have been content.
“Yes, Marty, that’s exactly right. I’ve been waiting for this day for months: I have our dinner prepared. I called and got the recipes from the restaurant in Saint-Cloud.”
For months. The table—and how did you not see or smell this when you created the house earlier?—is laden with what would be a magnificent French spread, were it not coated in various menacing growths: Foie gras atop mounds of wild rice with cottony grey-green tendrils, thinly sliced baguettes topped with slices of aurillacois Chantal, barely recognizable beneath tufts of creeping blue-green. She begins to work at opening a dusty bottle of merlot, and its cork crumbles at the turning of the screw.
She seems to sense that something is amiss, but nevertheless she pours two glasses of the cork-suspension and sips dreamily. She reaches for the cheese, but you grab her hand. “I’m sorry, honey, but I’m not particularly hungry. Do you mind if we wait and eat later?” You hope she’ll forget or fall asleep so that you can dispose of the biohazard. You did vow to honor and keep her, ‘til death do you part.
“Of course, Marty.” Her face slits in an impressionist grin: Topographic map of longing transposed onto memories of the French countryside. Her eyes twin tumuli, cheeks the close-run lines of steep decline to craggy valley ears. Foothills of the Alps, lines of lines, a world built to absorb you: You are the sun. Martin to matin, finally you are risen. “Do you remember what we did next?”
You match her grin as best you can and try to act like you’re playing dumb. “No, afraid not.”
She takes your hand and pulls you down the hallway. At the threshold of your shared bedroom she stops, whips around, and places both hands against your chest. “I know you, Marty, you sly old bird. You’re hungry for something else, just as you were in Saint-Cloud. You barely touched your food then, too.”
As she opens the door, a wave of the bodily dissolution of old age crashes over you with all the weight of several futures. Denture-cleaner, the odor of between teeth, same smell you find on used floss; cleaning supplies, sharp bleach, faint ammonia of window scrub; claylike musk of cosmetics; mothballs and old wood overlaid with rippled linoleum. Her bony shoulders give hardly any resistance as she drops her nightgown, but her legs are no longer flexible enough to remove her panties without the embarrassing assistance of a cane or a coathanger. “Marty, a hand?”
You know, if not exactly, roughly where this is going, but on second thought, nothing has changed: Still you must choose between rekilling your grandmother’s husband right in front of her, watching her horrified shrieks as he bleeds out into you in front of her death-filled eyes; and continuing full-tilt into her enchanted delirium. Only one choice holds anything remotely unethical: If you go along with her fantasy, you can do nothing worse than fuck your own wife. Your choice could not be clearer.
We will be the salvation the Mother seeks
Traversing in all directions
Reaching
Expanding…
Rooted in intuition,
We are the language—
Ever flowing,
Ever echoing.
She flings her panties unceremoniously onto the lamp beside her bed. Its heat diffuses their smell over the room, warm, much too human, pungent. You, now likewise disrobed, shift into your well-practiced sexual tango, pulling gently, pushing where needed, a turn of the head, a wink to the crowd. Your tongue touches the greyed tip of her clit, and she grabs your ears. “What are you doing? Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
Deftly she rolls onto all-fours, bracing herself against the cracked wooden headboard. She contracts and releases the muscles of her anus, and it blooms for you, its saggy folds of flesh transubstantiated to petals. Dewdrop sweat runs over between from out the folds...they shimmer...shards of shattered mirror...the eager rose infolds beneath your welcome breath...its bloom ascends her back, liver-spotted freckled muscles break, crest...crosslapping apices of river waves at dusk...wet leaves turning in ephemeral breeze, catch and release the sun, a trout thrown back, its scales...hoarsely she moans, absentmindedly her dentures clack, tightly her anal muscles twang a minuet around your loving tongue. You are not generous. You are not indulging her, humoring her. You self-sacrifice only selfishly. Artfully your tongue traces the contours of her winking sphincter, doodles of the angels, calligraphic cartography in arcs and melting thrusts.
Was haben wir gemein mit der Rosenknospe,
welche zittert, weil ihr ein
Tropfen Thau auf dem Leibe liegt?
“Martin, my love, how I missed you.” She nuzzles her sweaty head into your shoulder. A few thin wisps of hair tickle your gums, but you do not want to disturb her by removing them. After some moments she falls asleep, and gently you slip from under her embrace and go to sweep the crusted death from her kitchen table. The wine tastes good. Vintage 1951. Familiar. You reminisce, lounging at your table, legs crossed at the knee. You swirl the crumbled cork, the gold-leaf flakes, drink deep its timeless stench.
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