Each morning she left the constricting comfort of the forest canopy and caught the bus to Antarctica. She threaded the laces into her black veined, dingy vinyl high-tops, strings frayed, about to snap. She imagined herself as a bearded explorer, her yellowed white shirt and faded black pants became furs insulated with walrus blubber. Instead of the crumpled brown lunch bag, she carried a weather worn oak tripod that would stabilize the instrument that would take the measurement that would reveal a minor secret about the desolate land of penguin and caribou that would influence the final understanding of what it’s all about.
She’d never really been to the underside of the earth, but decided the frozen continent looked a lot like the inside of a freezer, bulging structures of loose packed crystals, long nights and murky grays, infrequent flashes of daylight. It was a continent defined by unknown monuments, crystalline and shady. The Antarctic ice plateaus would occasionally offer the surprise of a sparkle, but so did the stone surface of the building she worked in.
She didn’t understand how a continent, a space much larger than the edges of everything she knew could be kept frozen for hundreds of years. A long summer heat should melt anything, she felt certain. And if the sun didn’t melt it all away each year, then the ice age must be creeping ever so slowly toward her, and she was afraid of frostbite, haunted by the image of Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining—even the blanket was frozen stiff. An incredible ridge of mountains contained the shores of the continent, held in the cold, blocked out the sun, kept the white animal inhabitants in the dark chill they understood. That’s the only way it could work.
She was familiar with ice crystals; they were harder than light. Somewhere between the speed of a Ford and a jet plane was the speed of light. At this pace photons would travel from sun or star, and fracture as they struck a cold and rigid body of ice. White light was transformed into ricocheted glints of grayish blue and dull magenta. She saw these same colors break off of flecks embedded in the surface of architecture. She knew that the stones had a special relationship to ice, quarried in the cold, or perhaps it was something more sinister. The freeze-box was a model for a world that had no relationship to anything she knew, except maybe some half forgotten memory of a claymation Christmas program: low resolution movements with brightly colored accents.
Antarctica: the north pole, a blanket of snow walled in by a collection of giant ice chunks dotted with white fur and red pointed hats, each tipped by a single golden bell and worn by an elf whose thick, calloused feet were filled with blubber and jiggled awkwardly, making them unsteady on their feet. The hearts of the elves raced at three times the rate of a human pulse; the rapid flow of blood prevented freezing.
Icebergs and skyscrapers were just huge, bright monoliths that conspired against nature, rejecting the sun’s heat. On the brightest days those tall buildings remained cold and damp. On the hottest days of summer, in the heart of weeklong heat waves, if she leaned against the stone surface of an office building while waiting for her bus, she’d freeze until she shivered. The moisture in the air collected in her clothes, passed through her skin and settled inside her bones–focused on her knees.
In an intense freeze constructed in a laboratory to achieve the temperature of deep space, thick steel blocks were shattered with a gentle tap. The cold makes things brittle. Solid steel bars behaved like candy canes and chicken bones. She felt that same deep freeze accumulating in her knees as she walked to the bus to the city. The chill met her after work and followed her home at night. Just by leaning against a building her blood was infected by an agent, an enemy of the sun. Solar rays would fail to warm her after an exposure to the pathogen of the cold. She could see the light bend, leaving her in slight shadow, so she was a little darker, a little hazier than others. This thin aurora flashed against her immediate space, disturbed the image of things very close to her, structures wavered in the warped light, text blurred on its page.
The cold focused the freeze at the center of the meal or marrow, chilling from the inside out. As she walked, she worried that the bones in her knees were chipping away at each other. Each step felt grittier than the one before. She walked with the understanding that her joints were slowly sharpening the blunt stumps of her bones. She knew that one day they would jump their sockets, gouging their way into the light of the world.
There was no reprieve in an afterlife, only removal, a complete deceleration within a wordless space. There were no more pictures to collect, just a black stop.
Occasionally, at work, she felt soothed. When her head buzzed along with the ambient noise of the kitchen, she could lose herself in the totality of it all. The steam of the dishwasher made her sweat and the earthy textures of sauce smeared across the white face of a plate gave the sensations of art. Her mind was moved beyond the itch of a rolling sweat drop and the smell of mustard diluted in bleach. There was a strange freedom in that moment, perspiration, fatigue, it was what people pretend to get from sex or might get from drugs or surely find in death.
Only a single pan hung from the scratched and yellowing white plastic rack in her own kitchen. The cracked black bottom of the pan showed a silver web of tin beneath the burnt crust, and its tan exterior walls matched the grease covering the rest of the kitchen. She kept a shelf of owls there as well. One day, her grandmother asked what she collected. She was startled by the question, so trivial, but presented with such gravity. Her main passion had been collecting handkerchiefs left unattended by the neighbor’s handyman. She didn’t know his name but knew that admitting these petty thefts wouldn’t satisfy her grandmother. She’d seen racks of figurines in most homes, but she never wondered what sort of nick-knacks would one day compose miniature scenes along her own walls. Her grandmother said that everybody collects something: geese, pigs, frogs. Its how a woman makes her own space in his home, how she marks a space to retreat. A man’s collection consisted of beer cans and ammunition.
At age 13, she was asked to define herself, to pick something that would forever be associated with her, an inalienable quality that would highlight both Christmas and Birthdays. “Owls.” It was said, forever in an instant. This strange scene with her grandmother had the same awkward pressure as a marriage proposal, though perhaps more intense, because marriage offers the possibility of divorce.
Her collection of ceramic, stuffed, google eyed and head bobbing owls arrived in semiannual installments from up and down the family tree. With the arrival of each new piece, she carefully covered her resentment with hugs and thanks. It eliminated the pretense of pretending to know her. Perfect social relations involved finding an owl whose price reflected personal interest and delivering it on an appropriate day. Yet there they were, so many wide eyes staring, long after her grandmother died, after she cut contact with her mother, so many addresses since the last Christmas card, so long since she thought about herself.
The porcelain shapes collected a fuzzy dust over the suffocating layer of grease. The nap of the cloth toys clumped into spikes, stained by the kitchen air. But this was it, the kitchen, it’s where she worked, what she came home to. The water in her home never got as hot as the steam that constantly wafted in her face as she raised and lowered the stainless door of the dishwasher. The cracks in the sink, the path worn into ancient linoleum, the once white walls told her that everything was OK.
Her occasional boyfriends sat at the table she rescued from the garbage during a remodel of a restaurant two jobs before. It was a printed plastic veneer covered with sputnik dingbats in both robins egg and gold. It was obviously a restaurant table, supported by a central pole nailed to the floor. The base was supposed to be covered by a chrome plate, but that had been either lost or mangled. After installation, she scrubbed the table top with a green pad and an abrasive cleaner until most of the print had worn white. She tried to scrub away the angled letters that had been gouged by a midnight customer with a dripping steak knife. She had no luck. All her guests would know immediately that “DEBBIE SUX”.
Men usually asked who Debbie was, and then she’d feel pressure to live up to the reputation or allegation. On her knees, under the table, her ass would hit the support column and her head would rock the table top. She sucked diligently but without inspiration at some version of cock, while the usually bearded, usually pot-bellied, smelly drunk or junkie picked through the mess of hamburger and noodles on his plate. Most guys wondered if her son ever walked in on these scenes, and if he did was it a turn on or off. She didn’t enjoy these episodes, but they were a means to an end, so she didn’t necessarily mind. Sucking dick kept her from talking, and the less she spoke, the longer they stayed. If she opened up, they’d call her a crazy bitch, so she saved her thoughts for the break-up, when she was ready to be pushed from the car, ready for that crestfallen walk back to solitude.
She had theories. Science and paranoia achieved tentative cohesion inside her head. She had difficulty understanding conversations, but she could hear the syllables and repeat them, provide approximate meanings for individual words. In groups, the sounds were more slippery. Language was a scattered mess of colors that were too abstract to function. The bumpy bus route into town always made her think of words, jumbled by the force of the ride.
When there were no men around, photons and molecules were the invading forces that presented the greatest challenge to her daily happiness. The government, minor players—not much cause for concern. Their function was concealment, but she didn’t care, since she’d pierced the veil, stared straight into the machinations of reality, experienced the burn. It was the feeling represented by a frame of celluloid melting in a projector, and could only be explained to a certain point. In a lucid but half dreaming state, she came to understand that her difficulties with language came from years of exposure to fry grease, having worked so many years in kitchens. The molecules that compose the sound of a human voice, those specialized particles, combinations of oxygenated potassium and nitrates that represent every sound in all languages, are interpreted by the ear, become coated with a thin film of grease as they are pushed from the breath into the ear of a kitchen worker. That’s earwax. If the wax isn’t cleaned frequently enough, and there’s no way for a dishwasher to keep up, it melts from the heat of the room and slides around the brain. The passageway for the word molecules gets coated with grease, so that all words entering her ear pick up a bit of the lubricant, slip and slide within her mind. That’s why she couldn’t hold a thought. That’s why she needed a man, to keep straight the jumble inside her head.
Women leave after being hit, because it means they’ve found the limits of a man, moved him beyond the flat emotional tones of masculinity, drained him of power and reduced him to a laughable lump, covering his head in the back of a squad car. Violence escalates. Women know when composure will fail, the impenetrable and cold façade cracks against the shrill sting of a woman’s laughter. She can see his explosion in her mind and determine his next step. A gesture of her head or hand, the flick of a tongue or the twist of a curl—she decides if he’ll put the fury in to her cunt or against a wall. They want blood either way. Will he bite her tongue, neck and cheeks, or will she call him a failure, an impotent cocksucker as she blocks her face? From that semi-protected view, peeking out from between her arms, she overcomes him. Crashing dishes, broken sheetrock, pets or chairs, a sublime wonder. She made the scene and takes the credit, satisfaction in the back of her mind.
She couldn’t keep track of her son. He was wherever he happened to be and she couldn’t remember it any other way. He was too much for her to keep straight. He loved to roam, and she thought exploration was a good skill to develop, perhaps there’s another continent to be discovered. He built his own shelter, occupied himself. He was a vagabond constrained by a thin emotional connection to home. He would eat there while she was asleep or away. She knew because of the food scraps, the crumbs that were mashed between floorboards, a scrap of crust that moved from the garbage to the floor or an extra notch in the cutting board. She wouldn’t see him for months, then just glances of a fleeting figure through the distance and the trees. But the minute details or rearrangements in her kitchen revealed his proximity and safety. The nuances of the change were too fine to be the work of a ‘possum.
The television rang out announcing the shots. There was speculation of terrorism. Nobody knew. An apparent nobody was shot from apparently nowhere. A citizen, average in all respects. The police said the who and why were still very far away. The most pressing questions had the most distant answers. But when she saw the delicate architecture of the victim’s blonde hair, the lumps that composed her middle age figure, the generic blue Japanese economy car, she knew it was him. She knew her baby hadn’t just disappeared, but found his way. She was more proud than the day she tried to find him, the day she found his curtained copse in the forest behind the house. The light filtered inside through a fine network of limbs that approximated a rotunda, and cut the sunshine into a haze of rays. The doorway was a blanket, granny squares that her mother brought once on a visit, so many years ago. It glowed, and she began to understand the design of the place. It was a cathedral that provided the lessons of life and death that she had failed to provide. The atmosphere had the stink of mildew, etc. It smelled as much like rotting leaves as rotting flesh. She looked down: a corner with a filthy sleeping bag folded open, leaves crunched inside of it. His skin cells had been scraped on the edges of pieces of dried fragments of leaves, so she collected them in her hand. No pillow. Most of the floor was covered with cardboard that was wet, dense and had started to merge into the dirt. The place was strewn with pieces of broken machines, broken birds.