'You know how people say you're only as old as you feel?' The hair of his chest was grey and curly, thick. His torso covered in a pelt of down, I slept clinging to him, my head on his stomach. He liked that. 'If you're only as old as you feel than I'm the adult here.'
A conversation we had often. It made him laugh, his belly bubbling, his shoulders bouncing, and his head thrown back. No sound, a silent laugher, his eyes closed, the wrinkles carved deep into his face, crevices from his eyes past his cheeks falling in line with the canyons caused by his smile. My whole foot fit in his mouth. He liked that, too.
***
That's not where this started, though. I was on my own when we met and had been for maybe too long. I won't bore you with what came before. I left home when I was fifteen.
Maybe everyone died, my whole family, a big fire. It was Christmas Eve, the tree, a real one, was covered with all kinds of ornaments: tinsel, gingerbread men, three kings, sleighs, bells, misteltoes, Santas and Mrs Clauses, a few elves, all colors of lights, the big ones, bulbs that fit in your palm, not those tiny pointy ones that never really made any light. I counted the presents underneath, seven for me, seven for my sister. We wanted a dog, pleaded for one for months, but it didn't look like we were getting one that year. Even still, it was Christmas. We were so excited and there was no way we could sleep. Mom and dad told us around midnight that we needed to get to bed. We shared a room so we lied there in the dark whispering to one another. She was eleven so Christmas was still a big deal to her, not that I had outgrown it, because I never really have, but, being older, it seemed the part I was to play, not caring as much, but, when it was just us two in the dark, I let loose. She loved that about me, my sister. She wanted to know everything about life, about sex and boys, and that's where we shared it all, whispering our lives back and forth across the black space in our room. I think I usually fell asleep first but sometimes it was her, still mumbling questions in her sleep. That was a game, too, getting the other to talk to you through their dreams. It worked sometimes, that is, if we believed the other. Dreamtalk's like nothing else, the things people say, a mix of reality, imaginary, an answer to your question, and words that mean so little they have to be important. I didn't sleep that night and I guess most people in the neighborhood didn't either, but that was my fault. Maybe it was an electrical fire or those lights on the tree just burnt it right up but the tree was definitely the start of it. Makes me glad we didn't have a dog under there because my conscience couldn't handle a puppy on top of everything else.
Or maybe my daddy molested me. It started back when I was young enough to think it was a game but old enough to know I was feeling something important, something beyond words and my small world at the time. At first it was just kisses in the wrong places when he was supposed to be reading me a story, my mom just across the hall with my sister. My sister slept with them until she died too young. At least she was spared the indignity. Bright side, sometimes it's all that keeps me going. After she died, though, there was a lot more than kisses and my childsize laughter. Sometimes I'd say No, tell him it hurt, But I love you, he'd say, his face sincere and sad. Can't I love my daughter? Being young, it doesn't feel the way it does later. I didn't think about it the way I think about it now, either. Mom never knew so maybe she's not to blame but it's not that easy. Ignorance doesn't deserve absolution. He'd come into bed later. I played with his hair and laughed at him and how he was jealous of boys in my class. Do you like him, he'd say, Do you like him more than me? I loved him as my daddy and maybe more than that. I didn't know. Don't know. Inappropriate doesn't enter a relationship from within but from without. I thought it was normal but I knew it wasn't, that there was something different about my daddy, the way he looked at my friends and not at my mom. I got older, my body changed early, but it never slowed him down. His appetite grew but I didn't want him as my lover anymore. I just wanted my daddy. Everyone outgrows their parents and I was no exception. It hurt him and he came into my room every night, sometimes crying, You don't love me anymore. I held him, my hand through his hair, but I didn't say anything, just pushed away his hands that reached everywhere. I saw him, then, for what he was, a sad despicable man. So I left.
Or maybe I never had a family, grew up in an orphanage. Maybe I killed the whole lot. It doesn't matter which you believe or even which happened. Where the story begins is here, with me all alone riding a bus west because it's better to run from the sun in the morning and chase it at night than the other way around.
***
The ghosts, though. Those've always been with me. Talking to shadows, playing with phantoms, that's what matters about my childhood. It wasn't that I was imaginative or anything like that. They were with me, really. Not an imaginary friend but a real one, a long dead one that came back to where she grew up only to find another little girl that knew she was there. The ghosts, they told me secrets about their lives, the things they were too afraid or too ashamed to let be known in their living life.
Delilah came to me often. Born blind, she preferred being a ghost.
I can see everything now, she said, Even the things no one else can.
She never told me what those unseeable things were that she was watching but that image sticks with me.
She died when she was barely three, drown in the bathtub. At least that's what she told me. Her ghost looked older than that but she said ghosts could look like anything they wanted to because ghosts can't be seen by the living.
'I'm alive.'
You just think you're alive, she said.
After that, I avoided Delilah. Not so much because she scared me but because she was a liar.
Mrs Dolier was my favorite ghost. She was lost and trying to find her way back home.
I know he misses me, she said. Her husband was still alive, or at least she believed he was. She hadn't seen him in ages and, she said, If he was dead then we'd be together by now. I didn't think death worked like that but I was just a girl then with kneescrapes and dirty hair. She was from Delaware but I didn't know where that was. I showed her maps but she said the world of the dead doesn't look like maps and charts. It looks like caves and meadows, lights and darks, cold and warms, assonance and dissonance.
'How'd you get so lost?'
I don't know, dear, she said, Nothing looks the same once you die.
I always thought she was afraid of her past. Being dead suited her. She was kind.
Ghosts are hard to explain. None are the same and I can't really see them. Not with eyes. But I know where they are. Taste them, even, in the air.
Every star is tied to a person. There're so many because each one is for a newly dead person. Their life slips from their body, binds to the birth of a star, and watches over everything. Shooting stars, no one's been able to explain that to me. Same with supernovas or blackholes but those must mean something. If ghosts can die they don't like to talk about it. Rooms darken when I bring it up, how one stops being a ghost. Sensitive area, I guess.
I watch the sky often, even when it's not dripping into the earth. I search for his star because I should recognize it. Something about its glow or its place amongst the others should make him appear to me. I draw him in the sky with my eyes instead hoping that one of the many dots I connect will be his and will maybe, I don't know, glitter extra bright to let me know he still thinks about me and is looking for me.
Ghosts are like people, both good and bad, angry and sad, confused and crazy. Something about dying turns them, makes them, I don't know, malevolent. Sometimes it's just the way they lie or the things they don't tell you. But some of them, the ones who've been dead too long, spent too much time away from the living, they grow jealous, angry with those who are alive and, well, everyone's heard of hauntings and all that.
That's another reason I went west. Ghosts, for some reason, are always heading east.
***
When I close my eyes he's here with me. In my bed, wrapped around me, he massages my breasts and
kisses my neck. He smells like damp basement, musk and mold, the sweetness of his house, of all those dying books, of all the rotting carpets, and I can't open my eyes. He explored me with his tongue and his hands memorizing every inch, tasting every orifice, every sweatgland.
I'm his and always have been, even before I knew him, from the first time I laid eyes on his work, when I finally saw him drinking coffee by himself, unnoticed, alone, his face long and puffy. He was the walking dead, swollen red nose, dark heavy bagged eyes, white hair that somehow kept its lustre. He adjusted his glasses, wiped off the fog caused by steam, and drank such small sips, afraid to burn his tongue. He was sensitive of his tongue, always.
'It's my greatest organ,' his yellow toothed smile that stretched from sunrise to sunset. It really was.
'I have not smiled like this in years, my dear,' he said after the first time, 'I was afraid I'd forgotten how.'
***
I never had a destination in mind the whole time. I just went and figured I would know when I got there. I'd step off the bus and think, Yeah, this is the place. I thought of my whole life as a dream then, the ghosts, the past, just something I was waiting to awake from, and when I woke up I'd be able to dry the tears, wash away the hauntings of the dead and the living. Of course, life isn't like that.
I also discovered that a bus won't take you in any one direction forever. I got off and the dream didn't end but instead solidified and became more real. There was no escape from my life despite distance.
I lived in libraries then. As long as I didn't fall asleep for too long or stink too much I could stay and no one questioned it. Still fifteen but maybe passing for eighteen, the librarians never said anything. I think they knew, the way they looked at me and smiled, tighteyed and closelipped. I read things at first, just picking up anything from the fiction section and reading until I got bored. I found some good things, Rimbaud, especially. Everyone has those eye opening moments in life and I think Rimbaud was a big one for me. Discovering the power of words, the beauty of images, and the art of life. I loved him, in a way, for writing the way he did, for writing what he did. He was reckless and in love. Not in love with any one person, but in love with life, with poetry maybe. He grew in the hours I spent huddled under bridges trying to not be touched or grabbed. If I was lucky I was able to hide in the library and stay over night. Other nights, though, I risked the outside, dreading the tumbling sun and what came after.
There was a cast of characters to this time but they were constantly shifting, here one day, on a bus to San Francisco the next, but this isn't about them. I'd like to say there was a trick to staying safe but there wasn't. The trick was trying to find anywhere to sleep undisturbed. It usually helped to find an older woman and hold onto her. When I couldn't, I would leave my body behind and drift with the drunken boat, tying garlands from steeples to stars, dancing across the sky, forgetting the heavy hands and clumsy writhing and the fetid reek of shit or the way the ocean stank of dead fish.
The ocean's where the dead collect. Ghosts are born here, I think, and that's why they head east, to escape the beginning they don't want to remember. Even in death there's no escape from the past but that doesn't stop them from trying.
Listening to music at the library got me through. Better than food most days and cheaper. When the only things to sell comes at a dangerous price I found I could do without a lot of things. I stole from the librarians sometimes, though, when I was desperate. They let me. I know they did and it made me hate myself more but it didn't stop me.
The music section was primarily classical. A lot of pianos and violins and the like. I didn't know what people listened to outside in the real world because I never had a radio and the things the library had weren't what I wanted to listen to. I spent a lot of time at first just flicking through cases, lots of pictures of men with white hair or ballet dancers. I stopped one day on this image of a silhouetted woman. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf and how I pictured her writing To the Lighthouse, her hands clasped staring out to sea. Symphony No. 3 was all it said on the cover and the back told me it was by Henryk Gorecki. I pulled it out and played it on one of the CD players they checked out.
It begins by not beginning. Silence that lasted long enough for me to check twice to make sure it was playing. Slowly, as if far away, the music begins, deep and resonant, building as if reaching out across the soundscape to take me. The rising strings, mournful, weaving back and forth and into, the ebb and flow as if waves of sorrow washed into me. I was motionless, caught, and, though my eyes were open, the entire world was slipping from me, not crashing down, but drowning out under this tide of death, but not an angry or violent death. A graceful and beautiful death. My death, happening with the constantly rising strings, the violins and cellos and basses climbing higher and higher, overcoming peaks on their way to me, to wrap all round me and swallow everything, my life, my past, my future, my present. The strings are not just the death but the lament of the living, of those left behind, the mourners that sing with their colossal strings. It found me, collected me, and carried me higher and higher until I no longer felt earth below my feet or sky above my head. I was in a vast ocean of noise, thousands of hands touching me, reaching for me, an ocean of sorrow that I walked on as if some deistic powers were granted and then the strings began to recede and the hands that held me fell limp and I was alone in a great open space staring into the infinite, into nothing and no one. And I felt my body begin to collapse, start to fall in on itself, and then the piano key hit, softly, and the soundscape changed, the vast absence filled by a low resonance and then a voice. A voice singing in a language I could never understand but it spoke to me so purely and I felt my body swept up by the rising ocean again, the strings returning, the voice lifting, piercing through the void and letting the smallest glimmer of light through, and then receding once more, the tide at midnight, the moon breathing through the clouds, a softness, elegance touching my body, holding me. The clouds returned and the swell of strings and voice broke high, battering against the cliffs that erupted from the earth with the tears of those violins. The tears that lasted forever though they were barely there. My body filled with their tears, with the beautiful anguished voice from the piercing cries. There was nothing solid, all things in flux, fluid and dynamic, but there was a system, a cycle like a storm that came violently and left staining the world with its pain. Then, as slowly as it came, everything disappeared as if the doleful storm has come full circle. The funeral march ended, the body brought to rest, and I stood there afraid to move, hardly breathing, my knuckles white against the CD player that I thought would snap. Alone, more alone than ever before. I sat down and put the CD player on the table leaving the headphones. I thought hours had passed but the player read twenty five minutes and kept counting but the sound emptied so fully that I thought once again that it was over.
The sound returns as if breathed into me. The immense absence replaced by tranquillity, a field high in mountains, the breeze light and cool. It shifts quickly, dark clouds and a far away singing, the same sorrowful woman caught with me in the storm. The field becomes ominous, impending rain, I can smell it, feel it, but the sky waits for her, for the signal she'll certainly give. The voice, though, grows, softens, almost motherly, the strings fill her wings and spread warmth once more, the clouds drifting apart, the sun sighing, her voice breaking, protecting me. She reaches high, so high, followed in every movement by the strings as if they are at her command. I see her, the tears in her eyes, her arm stretched to the sky, and the tears streak my face, and I wipe them away but they keep coming. Then the breeze again to dry my eyes, her song to lighten the sky. Her voice, so aching, so strong, so perfectly complemented by the arrangement, the tears return and I don't even bother to wipe them anymore but let them fall to the table, my shoulders slouched, and I hold myself, trying to keep myself warm. Alone again but with her. And I realise it's her that's alone, the way her voice trails and loses itself in the emptiness, far away
on her own mountain meadow, crying into the canyons. Lost, she's lost so much. Everything. Alone, so alone and empty, the arrangement slips out of existence again when her voice goes silent and I see her crumbling into the mountain, becoming the very place that she stood. All that she was disappears into nothing. Nothing.
And I can't stop crying even now listening to it.
But the music returns, the strings waving, slight piano touches, creating a surface, a place for her to stand, for me to stand with her, in place of her, or maybe the other way round. Her voice, strong and full again, but still sorrowful, lonesome. Like the tide once more, growing and falling, the piano, each touch spaced out, keeping the motion of the ocean in place. Swelling, a gradual rise, subtle but felt. Her voice louder, but not carried by the instruments this time, standing alone by herself, piercing as high as they can, fighting the emptiness, the vast absence. Alone. She fights alone challenging the enclosing space, the tide that drags behind her, the recession of instrumental expression. She's more alone than ever before but fighting more fully, with less tears and more determination. But it's evaporating and she returns pulling the instruments up behind her, now carrying the strings instead of the other way. Follow my voice, she sings, follow me to the great heights. With all of her strength, she heaves and pulls, fights the abandonment. The strings stay at kneeheight in repose, shimmering, fluctuating side to side, parabolically. She covers her head and drops her hands, then the floor gives out, the piano keys rise. Raising her hands to her breast then upward, her voice comes alive, shrugging off the pull and weight of death, stretching, reaching, groping after those piano keys, those notes that rise so high, pushing the clouds apart and caressing the glowing moon that bathes her face. Ecstatically, alone, but alive, stronger, brighter, more powerful than before. The keys press on, higher and higher, and she follows them with grace. Her song, full of life. The ghosts fall from her and she follows a path of her creation from her isolation into the world beyond. Silent now, at peace, her face serene, the keys build a stairway and she takes each step forward. And then there is nothing for a moment as if time has passed and then she returns, the clouds heavy, her steps slow and deliberate. Not following a path to life, but a path to death. Her voice strong but low, the piano leading her down, further and further. The isolation, the loneliness, it surrounds and shrouds her. Eyes at her feet, each step dragging her closer to death. And then she stops, the sound spreading, a light glows, rising. She walks on falling into the light.