Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

I walked down the corridor. I didn’t look into the room where they kept the morphine. I didn’t look into the little green cubicles with their newly made beds, their empty nightstands, their hunger to kill. That didn’t matter anymore, either. I didn’t look to the side or behind me. I just kept going toward the sunlight. There were a few last-minute details.

I stood near the bridge over Eastern Canal. I was thinking if I stood there long enough, my entire life would drift by. The toys from childhood would pop up, pulled by a slow tugging current. Miniature pie tins and starched pink smocks with the ribbons at the collar Mommy always ironed. Roller skates and sled. And peaches eaten at seven in a Philadelphia August, wet and hot and Daddy upstairs in bed coughing red stuff and shivering under woolen blankets. Brass lamps and new china plates strangers took away from Mommy. And what’s that sodden mass of cotton? My rag doll, the one Mommy sewed red spots on when I had measles. And look, there they are. Near the light green, lime green algae, there near the shadowy bridge spokes brushing beer cans and big black and brown ducks. All is returned, returned.

I looked across the canal. Spring was an undeniable eruption. I felt a sudden clarity. A light wind nipped at new branches, tasted buds, pronounced them in order and moved on, moved on. Yards exploded with pink lilies, stalks of lust and perfect tongues repeated in the water. And clusters of agapanthus, bushy-faced carnations, crepe-thin poppies, new strawberries crawling slow and pink on threadlike vines. A hummingbird churning in place, treading the air forever. Sunflowers nodded swollen balloon heads. And I wanted to shout, hey, sunflowers, your intensity has driven you mad. Your greed for sun, sun has poisoned you, gutted your brain, and you are insane now. Your unborn generations will be insane. And you will recede back into the earth. You will end as tubers, in hell, the sky sealed.

I could watch my childhood drift by in the dreamy yellow water. I could talk to sunflowers. But what could I say to Jason?

Listen.

There are possibilities. You say it’s all a matter of shape and color. You could paint anywhere. Come with me. Be airborne, windsong, starwarmed. Let’s get out of here. Venice, the canals, this city, boulevards, billboards, noise, dead ends, temptation, isolation and ruin intense and abominable. The madmen in their stucco burrows. The madmen on the boardwalk under the lame sun, that deranged turkey falling plop into the goddamned dying ocean. Can you remember when the bay still breathed fish? Before they tacked the Contaminated signs to the pier? Before they embroidered the Contaminated signs across our flesh? Once we had arms that moved surely and without blood grooves, without snakeskin imprints across our skin. And, Jason, can’t you hear that strange hissing? Listen. It is the sound of an interminable sinking in. It is the long white siesta of a race. And this whole place is a terminal ward.

Listen.

I’m tired of being Scheherazade at five A.M. This is my last story. Once upon a time there was a woman. Not a woman, really. A suggestion of woman, an approximation. I lived as a tree in winter, branches whittled and half asleep, willing to merely endure. My life was a perpetual four P.M. in a cold February. I was not yet blessed with coral orchid eyes and sea bells. I knew nothing of sailing past reefs on the sea’s ribs, the sea’s steel-girded spine, though I longed for this.

I was by madness wooed. I pretended there was a mystery. I called myself an explorer. It gave me the illusion of purpose and movement. I lived on the banks of a swollen river. I could watch the restless water inch closer. I piled sandbags in neat little rows. It gave me something to do. It even seemed important.

You took my girlhood as simply as one lifts back a sheet, revealing the naked longing and inadequacy. There wasn’t much to take. But you took it. I accepted this. I thought birth is historically a scream, a curse, a burst of blood and the long torture of sun and solitude. And you taught me. I tunneled parched ground while winds howled and stars scratched my face before the first intimation of jade banks erupting with shade trees. In a way you made me strong. The clay began to breathe. I didn’t mind being a prop. I lacked all reference points. You were a kind of compass. I learned which way led down. I learned which way broke. Understand. It is not without a certain gratitude I wish you slowly drawn and quartered.

Listen.

I understand your compulsive whittling of our life, your secret dog teeth, fear of your unknown wolf blood and your love of taking night alone like a test of strength, grace between the demonic black waves. But you will regret this. My eyes are crystal shells now and I see you as you will be, mistakes repeated. The dream part, that underbelly of invention, will dry without residue. You will be left with remnants to sift, details, objects. The hard evidence without context will prove inadequate. You will suffer. You will remember when we were black-winged through blazing dark concrete concentric whirlpools, ecstasies of spring night excesses and dancing spontaneous and naked. It will be rubble.

I stood on the bridge over Eastern Canal for a long time. Then I walked to Jason’s studio.

Jason was sitting at the table my father gave me. His small boy’s body was pale. It glistened like a certain kind of enamel. It occurred to me that the entire world was beginning to look like the underbelly of an abalone shell, a glazed white and turquoise. Blue and white. The sky with clouds. The waves with whitecaps now permanently embossed across their backs.

Jason was tying up his arm. And you know right away if you’ve hit it. Blood jumps in the needle. You let the tie drop. Halfway in and you know. You smell sweet Martian wind dancing in your ribs, behind your new plum-colored eyes. You sigh and it is moss smooth, glacier cooled. You walk on the moon as she once was young, green right to the feet of her slow lapping amber oceans. Her yellow tongues. Her just pushed up cliffs are soft under your feet. A wind unfurls. The air steams with jasmine, bewitched. The ground is moss and ferns. And you are the grand ecologist. Planet builder, what will you have? Thunder and volcanoes? A flock of singing sea birds? And icebergs, a blue-white? And always day? Or always night? Here. Take a canopy of lights, the night scalped, a kind of gauze.

Then you are memorizing the linoleum tiles. The rest is mechanical, is merely survival. Watch for air bubbles, take out the needle. You are beyond standard divisions. You wear a cosmic surgery, cloud skin. You whirl the black gulfs, the black grooves where planets come to feed.

Jason offered the needle to me.

I turned my head away. “I’ve quit.”

“How long?” Jason asked. He was running alcohol through his needle.

“A couple of days.” Was it? I stood in the deserted morphine room. Nurses scurried with their lunch trays. I held the bottles in my hand. Then I put the bottles back.

“You shake and sweat? Do you have to fight the temptation constantly?” Jason asked. He might have been taking a census.

“It’s not as hard as it was,” I said. Not hard compared to this kite season of private burials. My girlhood fossils stripped and packed into boxes. My father. My rooms breathless, sensing death. My plants in the backyard dropping leaves like severed fists. The trail of my sins.

“You take a bath yet today?” Jason asked.

I shook my head no. Outside it was late afternoon. Branches were waving, swaying sunlocked and enchanted.

“Good,” Jason said. “Come sit on my face.”

I followed him into the bedroom. I touched his shoulder lightly, the way one might touch a statue in a museum, guards watching. Jason, my rare one, skin white as porcelain. You must be kept absolutely protected, encased in a kind of glass. You are yourself the work of art. Rare as a robin building a nest in rain. Something I saw only once, will probably never see again. You are beautiful. But so expensive. And it’s survival time now. I can’t afford you anymore. I’m going the distance. I’ve got to carry less weight.