One of the scariest parts about turning from child to older is the expectation that you will know where you are going. One monster leaves her legs behind before flying. Another can be kept from finding itself again by a sprinkle of salt.
Spend long enough studying these things and eventually you stop asking whether they’re real and start asking different questions.
Where is the nearest river? How much water is left? Where are the birds going now?
The Vetala prefers fresh bodies because they still know how to speak. Fill the bathtub before the water pressure drops. Kelpies cry before storms. If lost, leave footprints in mud or snow.
Distress signals come in threes. Most demons look ordinary. Emergency flashlights are hanging from the shower hooks.
Turn your ears toward distant sounds like a cat. Three syllable words work best. Project your voice:
i wanted to offer once upon you i wanted to give you time of which you were always saying i don’t know where it went now there is a city on fire, and there the burn scar, and there the wild white sun again eating the distance between dream and despair and it is the smell of you i miss now when i leave, afraid you will wander off, walking into the flames to see their dancing because it really is so much more up close than what any aerial view can tell you or high budget film they miss the terrible now grace of those licking tongues you can only see this when they are right outside the window-wall, with only the glass between you for now i wanted for you an hour you could not lose like your keys your glasses the moment we were almost inside now i lost it, too, waiting like come here and after a certain point getting out is no longer an option so you watch the flames through the glass knowing that if it were the glass of another time it would have shattered by now but not knowing how long this new stuff will hold out
You forking paths, tongued by seekers who pose over volumes, boring into our flesh read the sins of fathers in our pages, see me a harlot waiting to happen, a hope unleashed are binding us––feet, knees, waists, necks you stitch the skins of us tight, fisting the pages certain you know what you’ve read, certain you know us, that we may unleash what dreams may come to the unfettered flesh, unbound, to understand the soft-footed silence, treading near my unshed pages saved from the burn, awaiting language to make ourselves into all that you fear will–– ?
* The first word in each line comes from a sentence in Andrew Hurley’s translation of Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” (“You who read me, are you certain you may understand my language?”).
In one account, she is the wine-dark carrier of iron-laden sons to strange shores of inscrutable speech. Often, she swallows them whole. In another, she is moved by strong wind through the night to become a wall. Then she falls and swallows them whole.
The yet-to-be swallowed write of dreaded creatures in her waters, of her treacherous subtlety, and speculate that what she is keeping from them is surely a clue to their deaths.
When they get like this, she sighs another tide and wonders with a bright bloom of red, if any of these can remember beyond the tales of monsters and bewitchers, how once she beheld him from below where he stood, looking, and offered back to him the shine of his own face.
The small trembles before the great, a learned response, essential for survival. What happens when the small is so puffed up with the air of his own invention that he forgets trembling, dismissing all capacity for awe of anything beyond his mirror?
But who guards that language, nourished by fairy tales and fastened to swinging vines of the monster’s rough hair, enough to clear the hungry bog when the timing and the wind is right––and who only barely makes the crossing, for now?
You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.
I don’t like to think about Lonesome George, the last of his species wandering his island home, about the baleful way he must have looked through those ancient eyes and whether he made a sound in the hopes that another of his kind would hear it. They took him into a center in the end and studied him until he died.
But here I am anyway, perhaps because of how often I see a certain kind of look, the way its eagerness seems haunted by a particular fear, the way so much of the moment seems to be wandering, making sounds.
***
Before his death in 2012, Lonesome George was considered the rarest creature in the world.
She said, child, you may know a thing or two one day, but that won’t be anytime soon, so you will have to muddle through. For now, it’s going to be like driving in a rainstorm in the dark, when all you can see is the tiny patch of blur lit by the headlights, and no taillights to guide you, and the actual road will be poorly marked or not at all.
She said, child, I want you to know this, so that you will not be taken by surprise and swerve offroad. But of course, we are always in a state of disbelief, because who can resist keeping company with the secret hope that driving a dream would be an adventure story? This is not necessarily untrue, but most of us get the genre wrong.
When you’re raised on those feel-good films that validate the trope of the noble quest, with anthem music and sidekicks and breaks for humor, when the going gets rough, it can be disconcerting to realize that you’re actually in a David Lynch film with a blue filter and the sort of musical score designed to remind you––not that you need it––that something is a little off but you won’t be able to put your finger on it and there isn’t any chance of it letting up.
But this is what she told me, child; she said, Listen. When it gets like that, and you are driving in the dark and the weather and the unmarked roads say go back, only then can you know you are getting somewhere. It isn’t like any of the places you’ve seen before, I promise you, but keep going.
There will be others coming, child, more frightened and uncertain than you are now, and when they find the glow of your taillights before them, they will suddenly remember to breathe. They will think, Okay, and hang on.
