Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“Let him in?” Irene guessed.

“Yes, or give him any money. Mom likes to keep the reins tight.”

“Shit, I forgot the ashes!” Irene jumped up off the porch swing and the chains jangled.

“Where are you going to put them?” George asked.

“I don’t know,” said Irene. “I want to get them, though.” She walked toward the car.

“We could scatter them here,” George offered. “Around in the woods, on the crystal labyrinth, down the well.”

“Down the well? How could you even suggest that?” Irene said.

“There’s no water down there!” George insisted.

“So much the worse,” said Irene. She pulled the black box out of the backseat of the car and slammed the car door.

“Sorry,” said George. He grinned at her, and she felt, looking at him, a flush of something blooming out of her face and out of her skin all over. A good feeling bubbling up through her skin, making her feel like giggling was a real thing that happens to people, instead of just something people do who don’t read books.

“How about the crystal labyrinth then?” George was saying. “That might be a nice place to get sprinkled. All those vibrations.”

“We can’t leave her here at all,” said Irene. “Why would she want that? She had no connection to this place.”

“People have no connection to the cemetery either, and that doesn’t stop them from being buried there in droves.”

They went inside, and for now Irene put her mother’s ashes on the kitchen table.

“Something about this place seems familiar,” said Irene. “Like I saw it in a movie or something.”

George frowned. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.

Irene lay next to George on a big bed. George was asleep. The bed had a curling iron frame and there was enough room on it for two Georges and several Irenes, but she was tucked up close to him, so that their bodies were touching all the way down. In his sleep, his face was turned toward her, as if they had just now stopped talking. His eyes were closed, the lashes lay long on his cheeks. His arms were thrown out wide. Her head rested on one bicep, and his other arm was up on the pillow on the other side. She leaned into him and smelled the scent of his body, feeling she had smelled it before, had been this close before to his skin, to the hair under his arms, to the three small freckles on this side of his neck. It was just hard for her to remind herself that he was new. There was no sense to the idea that he was somehow old. Irene breathed deeply and sighed. Was he dreaming? Was he aware?

She saw his rib cage stretch and deflate, a low, slow rhythm of his life, and in the soft skin of his stomach she could see his heartbeat tapping at the surface.

“This is love,” she said in her mind. “Love, love, love. This is love.”

She laid her hand on top of his stomach, as if she was planting a flag. I love you, she thought. But the thing was, unfortunately, if she were to love him, she could never sleep again. As long as she stayed away from the inside of her mind, from her mother, from her Dark House, from the spiraling center at the black heart of her, she could try this love. She could lie down with this man in the middle of the day with no clothes on and put her mouth around him sweetly, and when she was done she could let him put his arms around her and fall asleep clutching her like a life preserver, his lips pressed against her hair. As long as she didn’t sleep, this could happen again and again, every day here in the house in the woods, and she would lose her last name, and take his, and forget where she came from, and how it was clouded with piss, and gin, and unfortunate accidents.

Irene turned over and put her other cheek against George’s arm and pressed her back against him, the backs of her legs, the soles of her feet. Her eye came to rest on the box of her mother’s ashes, and she felt her heart lurch. Physically she could feel it beating, racing, under her arm.

She closed her eyes and began to put herself to sleep. She was dreaming, and aware, in her mind, of her mother’s house, of the shelf of bells, of the sound each one made, and the final ring of the bell that told her she was in.

Asleep, I see that the Hinterland is changed, has become trees and bushes, and wild grass and a blue sky of fall. Directly across from my mother’s porch is George’s country place, where I am really sleeping now, with its own porch and its rambling pieces tucked under the spreading trees and behind the bushes turning red. I run across and go inside. There in the bedroom I see him stretched out still, the quilt tangled around his knees. He is so dear, and so sweet to me. I could devour him all over again, but I don’t want him to wake up either, and anyway, my dreamspell is so embarrassing. I don’t know if he would even want to see it. I am embarrassed of how dear I find him. I am embarrassed that I find him when I’m asleep and picture the angles of his elbows, his long feet, his absolutely beautiful face.

What is love? A contract for keeping us together, making things legal, perpetuating the species, a droopy butterfly wing of invented sap for the masses, a drug for idiots. That’s what love is. I want to say that what I feel is desire, just sex, an animal firing itself up over another animal, but I know I have felt that before. Love makes me want to spread my legs. Love makes me want to put his hand down my pants. That’s my version of romance.

The box of my mother’s ashes is heavy in my dream, superheavy, like it’s going to kill me to carry this box through the house and out the door. How much did my mother weigh? How much did she weigh after her bones had been put through the pulverizer? This box is not my mother. It has her ashes in it, but it’s heavier than that, it’s heavy like heavy, dude. Meaning weighty.

I lug my mother’s box of ashes into Dark House: the parlor, the library, the theater, the back room, the props room, and I know I’m coming to the center.

There’s nothing inherently scary about a ruined room, a broken floor, and a hole that leads down. Or maybe there is. I don’t know, because what this particular broken floor has always done is push my face away, so that it is perpetually in the periphery of my vision, and just looking at it sideways fills me up with paralyzing fear. I am the girl that has a solid plan for suicide in every city I am likely to visit, involving bridges of a particular height, water of a particular depth, and gravity. I face the side of a bridge with my toes curled, my breath let all the way out, my hands open like catch me. But that broken floor, that whistling dark, those beams sticking up through the floor, down through the ceiling, that causes me a fear that goes deep, all the way back to the little child’s brain I had when I was six, and this whole thing started.

I’m afraid of the hole in the center of Dark House, but I walk straight over to it now, and I open up the box. Inside the box is a plastic bag. I open up the bag. Inside the bag is a thick powder, interspersed with bits of her. In the dream, it is the purest white. There is a wind coming at me from the back, a firm strong breeze behind me sucking straight down into the hole in the floor. The hole is big and draws everything to itself: the air, the people ground up into powder, the ideas in my head. I know that when I turn the box upside down the dregs of my mother will spiral into the hole and make a beautiful shape, like the curve of a snail shell, like the inside of a nautilus. It will spread out from my hand in a sparkling arc and make something so perfect as she floats away from me.

So I don’t do that. I throw the whole damn box down the hole in one whoosh. And it is gone.