Matt Bell - In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

And then my sight was gone, and then there was no more sky, only some more constrained space, and even through my blindness, some transition from light to darkness, from level to sloped. And then being carried through that darkness, down into it. And then stretches of time not stopping, unmarked by anything but the steady breathing of those many foundlings carrying me onward, and when one tired he was replaced by another, and on the back of this swarming litter I descended without stoppage, all the wreck of me carried as one thing, if a spill could be so carried, rushed onward, down into darker dark, stronger song.

AFTER THAT LONG PORTAGE, THEREwas again light, but the sights that returned with it were nothing I saw with my eyes, although I opened them too, useless as they were.

What did I see then, with that other gaze? Ceiling at first, and ceiling only, from where I lay suspended, belly up atop the foundlings, now crowded close together, a press of bodies below me, keeping me aloft. We had entered a cave, and the cave was like the one my wife and I had lived in while I built our house.

To the foundlings, I said, Enough.

I said, Please, you have carried me far enough.

They had carried me, and also the tune of the song, and the song was louder here than it was in the woods or the passages we journeyed down to reach wherever here was. Now I heard how they voiced it without inflection, without tone, and yet all the notes were correct, although correct as opposed to what I did not know, sure only of their correctness. I did not think they would hear me speak, not over the volume of the song, and also of the sound, these two separate but similar things now loud together, loud even through my deafness, which like my blindness had not mitigated, only been made different, so that while it had not been healed still I could hear, and so the foundlings did too, and in one motion they lowered my body to the floor.

By that light I looked upon my body, a glance so brief it could only survey the vast damage, the irreconcilable nature of my wounds, not sickness alone but also the crude angers of these foundlings. There was no saving myself that I saw, and so no reason to withhold any effort. I forced myself to stand, felt the breaks in my body shift around my new stance, and then I gathered my spilled self up into my arms, forced it rudely back through the hole in my belly, which no longer bled. I closed my eyes, breathed in, smelled the copper and cordite of my pains, and when I opened my eyes again, then the song stopped.

Now there was more air in the room, more unbreathed breaths remaining, and soon I saw all there was, gathered in that gloom: All the foundlings, wood-sprung, crowded close in all their wrongness, any slivers of rightness remembered encased in fault and waste and never. On their circled faces were formed all the expressions that together might have combined to make one lost boy’s face, but once separated those features made no sense, nothing any whole person would mistake for the same articulation, and yet I knew my wife had so mistaken, and in their swarmed faces—their hundreds of faces, arrayed in every direction, from wall to wall, point to point in the darkness—I almost missed hers, hung there in front of me, a glowing moon of skin set atop her long neck, her graceful shoulders, her slim body not standing above the foundlings but sitting among them, rested in some rocking chair, so much like the one I had made her that it returned pain to my body, which had been numb to such sensation—or rather, pain returned to me, floating around and through, my body nerveless, barely present.

My wife rocked, but no child sat upon her lap.

My wife, she had tested every child there, but none had fit, no one child matching that weight she missed without admitting her missing, that voice she craved without knowing what it would sound like when next it was heard. These foundlings were her wishes, her griefs manifested in all their glory and blame, and as she stood into the space between me and them I saw in her revealed shape the return of the scorched wife, the burned woman I had found upon reaching the deepest house, and for a moment I startled at the sight, for I realized that in that cave I had expected to find not a wife at all but rather a bear, a bear afire, made from the woman my wife had been.

And what had averted that fate? What had kept her from what change befell the wife before her, the foundling’s mother, my long adversary?

Perhaps only the fire within, which would abide no clothes upon her, and perhaps no fur either.

Away from my stories, she had become herself again, the woman she had arced toward whenever I was not there to tell her whom I wanted her to be; and in her absence I had also moved toward this limited man I was now, this best man I could be.

My wife’s heat blazed immense, and if I’d still had sweat within me it would have burned away, wicked from the flapping of my skin. My armful of myself dried, shrank in my hands, my mouth parched, my nostrils singed with the smell of their hair. I turned my face away, felt the prickle of her heat follow my cheek, and then I righted my gaze, held her eyes steady as she held mine: Here she was, and here I was before her, drawn as always to this woman, these women she had been, pulled through time and memory, through those long bodies of the world.

My wife, I said, and the heat from her licked at my lips, dried my voice.

I said, I have been no husband to you, and the fire ate my words, so that I had to wet my mouth, reloose my tongue.

My wife, I said, I have been no husband, and no father, but you have been a mother to these children—and that was the whole truth of it. As broken and bad as these foundlings might be, they were hers if she wanted them, and she had gathered them close, had accepted the mothering even of the most awful: Not the memories of me, or of our first lost son—my son, my fingerling—but of this foundling, this one whom she had not birthed but for whom she had done all else, had nursed, had taught, had swaddled and sang to, and it was in him that she was best to be found, in this person made lovely to her even if never to me.

Now in this cave, all the foundling’s aspects were gathered, real and otherwise, and I did not doubt she could see them all, all the possibilities of his past and present, his future.

My wife’s skin, black already, blackened again, and as she moved her head around me I heard the crinkle of her flesh, again like the pages of a book, a story crackling.

I knew I could not smell the smoke that filled the room, no longer had any sense of smell, and then through the smoke my wife said, Time and time again you have told me about our children, about all the children you see, but I do not see what you see.

Her face so and close, yes, a whiff of her old perfume, hidden behind history or else only a scented memory, and no right sense. She was so old now—we were both so old—but still I found her beautiful, and here, in this beauty, I always would be arriving, however long delayed: I did not know how much deeper the world went, how many more caves beneath caves there were, but there was no longer any distance I would not follow her, no unlit chambers that could hide her fire, and always I would seek her through the darkness, and always I would deliver my body bowed beneath my awe at what and who she was, by what more she had become and was becoming:

Here were the children I wanted to have with her or, if not the ones I dreamed, then the dreams I deserved, right for what world I had made.

Here was the foundling, now one made many, and on each one’s lips was a song or part of a song, the songs she sang of them before they came and also after.

Here was the foundling, her mothering of him: our parenting that I had barely joined, and then my withdrawal from that arrangement, its continuation in my absence.