Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

She is years dead. She is dying. I am in some airport.

Everywhere, even where there are no paved roads, still there will be an airport — a strip to portage to, pebbled or clayed, what have you, beaten grass swept of light.

The light is leaving our windows. The Naugahyde booths are dream. I draw her gown back. Our mouths are open.

No birdsong, Mother? No silver fish?

Very well, then. Very well, then.

I fixed the needle.

No fathers then, no doctors, no dogs in Tuscaloosa.

There was nothing I could do for her, nothing I could not do to her. I rouged her cheeks, teased her hair. I harvested beets from the garden.

Go on. Go on. There is not a place in you I will not work into. I work apart bone.

The bland root of me swam between her bones.

The fields are planted. The door is open. The trees are green still. Go on.

I cannot remember you.

I unremember you.

For years I do not dream of you.

Go on. I give back nothing.

The weeks, the months, they gave me something to do with myself. I had a sense I liked of myself — that I was needed, that there was a great givingness in me, a patient, damaged, holy sort of hardheaded love in me. Love. Say love. That I waited, say, since I waited — not to say or have it be said f me that what I did I did because there was not patience enough in me, enough faith, love, talk in me, that what I did I did because there was such a rush in me — there was a great hurry in me.

Come. Quickly. Come. The lights are burning. You can hear the lights still burning. I can conjure up a dream for us, the dopplered wheeze of an engine, a tire song on a paved road—

But this is easy. To conjure a dream is easy.

To upstage the dead is easy.

I take; I give back nothing. I have had my children scraped from me — accidents of fucking.

No wide swim, no brackish suck.

But the reamed cunt, the scoured earth. The Buick in flames on the highway. The breakfasts, the tea.

Love. Say love. Say something, anything more — that you are sick, or lonely, some wild boy gone to seed one night, some buckaroo I loved one night farmed apart on scag one night, one night when I was twenty. That you are oceans to cross from home, let us say. Or nothing — let us say almost nothing.

In my hands are the hands of your mother.

Let us go now. She may leave us.

Look, you. You, newborn.

Has there been no dream we meet in? No Naugahyde booth we meet in in no tawdry airport bar?

Here’s to you, love. And to you, my sweet.

The fields are burning. So, go. Go on, go on. Run tell the doctor, the children, the schools. A signal, a word. Only whisper. Light out. Winter wheat, corn counties. Cave Hill, Carthage. Caspian, Ocoee, Reelfoot, Sargasso.

There is always the next place to go to get to to light out of.

The road lapses. Snow falls — schools close, dog tracks, airports.

There will be some airport.

From the soft palm, the girth of tumor in her — let me say — let it be said of us — of myself and of my mother said — in a Naugahyde booth, in a makeshift bar, in the yellow heat of airports said — some lesser god from the greening rift — beaded, slicked, a pale sheen, a long cock broke to probe me.

Newborn, adieu. Asante.

To you, lad. And to you, my sweet. May we have a good long romp of it. For who will love what we love?

What bright house?

What reading tree?

Who will love our dead for us, the wormy dog at our feet at night, the harpooned corpse of a baleen whale we walk a day to see?

I could not hear her. I saw her talking. Mother for hours made sounds with her mouth in a voice not as loud as breathing. I leaned my head close. I felt her breathing. She was saying thank you. All along, she was saying thank you. Mother was saying thank you.

After all the months of it, the careful doses of morphine, the dressings, the scarves? The Popsicles and floating pears, the swabbed teeth, open sores, bludgeoning heat, neighbors, neighbors — for this she thanks me? She dares to thank me?

The long box we build for her, we break her bones to lie in.

Mother kept a cot at the foot of her bed certain nights I slept in. I was sleeping. When I waked up, I found her dead. I pulled the drapes shut. I closed her mouth some. I knew to close her eyes. I left them open. I untied the scarf I had found to use to tie her foot to the bed with. I had taped a needle to a vein in her foot. I took it out. I got the sheet off. I took the catheter out. She had bled from her mouth. I wet a washrag. I took her gown off. Her gown was blooded. I took her pillow. The blood was dry. I wiped her mouth off. I rinsed the washrag. I wiped her neck some. I wiped her shoulder. We had a big barrel we burned in. I burned the gown, the pillow sack. I burned the washrag. I got her arms straight. I turned her feet in. I got her rings off.

We put on lipstick. We put her rings on.

Day came. Men came. Rain.

We sat for the men with our hands in our laps with all that was ours in the parlor.

There is a poisoned mouse in the corner, under the TV stand. There are scarves on the bureau, implements, needles, salve. She is growing thinner. Even her slippers she cannot keep on. There is the TV, the lamp in the room, the things they can see by the light in the room, one another — otherwise, they see nothing. They keep the passing days in mind, inasmuch as they keep the days in mind, by the curtains, drawn, by the door, pulled to — the inevitable flaws, the incisions of light. At night, if they wake, as they often do, the light pales to a humming fluorescence.

She looks up at him from the bed. He has combed his hair back. He carries a picture of her in his wallet.

“What else do you love?” she asks him.

“Nothing.”

“Not the wind?” she says.

“Nothing.”

He carries a bowl of water to her, a razor, folds the sheet away from her, puts the lamp at the foot of their bed. He begins with the few hairs he has seen on the tops of her toes, the tops of her feet, the hollows she has always missed by the knob of the bone of her ankle. She falls to sleep. He works up her — her shin, nicked, dented, the darker skin of her knee. He slips his hand behind her knee, lifts to bend her leg up, then kneels on the bed between her legs. He shaves swaths in the hair on the backs of her legs. The TV is on. The fine coat of her belly, he shaves. There are tiny hairs on her breasts he shaves, on her shoulders. He goes over her elbows, the backs of her hands, stands up, straightens her legs. He picks the lamp up from the foot of the bed, props it against the pillow.

Then he moves off. He unscrews the handle of the razor, lifts the used blade away from the head. He runs water, holds the razor’s head under the water — his hands pale, healed, this boy’s. The hair of her hands and her shoulders, some few caught hairs of each place he has shaved, catch against the scoop of the sink or wash off into the pipe of the sink in the running water. There are no surprises. There is a used-blade slot. Probably you cannot hear it — the sound the blade makes in the wall when it drops. Still, you might listen for it. He listens for it. He picks up a pair of scissors that rust in the steady leak of the faucet. He carries these back to the bed.

Oh, the body — the tracks, the lesions, the pumiced knees.

Her lips, her throat, her eyebrows, he shaves. His cock gets hard as he shaves her. He straddles her, leaning over her body. He cuts away her hair with the scissors he has found, close against her skull. His hands are aching. Her hair is heaped on the carpet. He leaves it for the mice on the carpet. He thinks of Tucumcari, of the room they slept in there. Streets, he remembers, and weather. He snips her eyelashes — slowly, now, quietly — as though she will never know.