an aubade

i never liked it when you laughed. you had a horrible way of snorting that you weren’t ashamed of but which i was, for you. you said you didn’t mind, you thought it was cute. when you sang and went suddenly off-pitch i cringed and my eyes watered. these were things i could not control. i wrote about them in a journal that i kept online. i try to remember the things about you that i like but i keep coming back to the ones i don’t. you leave your clothes on the floor in the bathroom when you’re done with your shower & you always throw the empty tins of cat food in the sink. you’re in a rush on your way to work. you don’t like to talk in the morning but when you come home in the late afternoon you’re bursting with conversation like an overripe tomato, squirting rumor and the daily happenstances like juice. all i want to do is get high and listen to music, because the last thing in the world that i ever want to do is talk about work when i return from it. i learned to do this from my parents, who kept the two worlds of work & home disparate from one another and said it was for my benefit. it worked up until my mother got fired for blowing the whistle, which is the night she locked herself in her bedroom but i could still hear her crying.

you hate your hair and always want to cut it really short. you know i like it long. you confide to me that the day we break up is the day you cut it all off. i make some vague allusion to samson & delilah and you tease me with that term of endearment you know i hate.

we’ve been together now for long enough that we live together. you leave the top off of the jar of honey and sometimes i think you do it on purpose. i hate the feeling of sticky things and protest most uses of tape or glue. i prefer staples and paperclips, you like rubber cement & adhesive. i’ve tried to read into this but you say it isn’t true and giggle behind one hand whenever i bring it up.

we get high together and sometimes when silence falls i enter into the loquela and i start aiming questions at myself about you. i watch how you shift in the chair and chew at a fingernail, then jerk your head to the side when you hear someone on the street outside passing by loudly. our cat mimics you and flees the room with wide, panicked eyes. the way you sit, twisted on top of one leg, hand straddling the armrest as if ready to heave yourself out of the chair at a moment’s notice. i remark on it and you laugh uncomfortably, resettling in a different position. sometimes when i make my observations you look hurt - your eyes darken & you go somewhere just inside of yourself for a small while. you always make the effort to return, though, and smile sunnily as though it never happened.

i worry about you when you’re drinking. you can hold your liquor but any one thing can happen and send you flying, teetering, in a flurry of expressive nonsense punctuated by wild gesticulations and the occasional snorting laugh. you like to hug when you’re drunk, and it’s all right by me but i fear sometimes my irritation is on display. i’m not a very good liar, and you still don’t know this after all this time.

and then we’re someone, the two of us: we get referred to as a singularity, a meiotic cell stuck in metaphase. our hands are fastened together like old baucis & philemon’s trees, firmly, forever, and, like all men, i get nervous at the notion of eternity.

o

i’m changing my name & you’re all for it, enthusiastic & gung-ho. you even fight those little skirmishes for me when friends neglect to heed the shift in nomenclature, standing up like a stormcloud & reminding. there is usually a form of apology or honest recrimination: names are a hard thing for people to remember. once you are who you are, there’s no sideways motion. this morning i was reading about the sun & how it works when it began to rain, and you came in with a mug of coffee and the cat innocently obstructing your path. i could smell the tequila on your breath before you came into the room. i said something about how i felt like i experienced differential rotation even though i was matter and not plasma. you took me seriously for once & we talked about coronal ejections & the magnetic shield of the Earth; of the heliopause & its termination shock; and of the silent, electric whispers of the solar wind. we fell quiet & you laid your head on my shoulder. you have scars on your arm: raised, perfect cicatrices laid like railroad ties near up to the inside of your elbow. a tattoo does not hide them, as was your self-confessed intention, and instead draws attention to them. i kind of love seeing the reaction on strangers’ faces when they notice your handiwork.

sometimes i imagine you like a museum that i am leading a tour of. we are in the bar and you are by my side, drinking with great haste through a plastic straw a very stiff pint of something with bourbon. i am nursing a beer and watching you throw yourself to the conversational wolves again.

o

lately you drink bourbon and i drink gin. we go to the same bar every night, or every other night. you get drunk a lot lately and it makes you amorous. we clamber into bed and fall all over one another, unable to manage our breathing. there’s a lot of quick, flurried laughter that abates once we busy our mouths with each other's lips and tongue. in the hours toward the morning you tell me how you laughed at your aunt’s funeral and how your family hated you.

you think i’m overly aggressive sometimes. you say i can be an asshole and i like it. you like it too. you wear a goofy grin and punch me lightly in the shoulder by way of both admonishment and flirtation. i have conversations with other girls who are bombed on red bull & vodka, who teeter on their heels and ask for a light. explosions of chatter while they twitter on their iPhones and BlackBerries. take pictures of their martinis and post them on their FaceBook. i am making fun of them and they are too wasted to recognize it. you don’t approve, but you don’t disapprove.

& there is always something missing between the two of us. you think it’s dissatisfaction & i think it’s boredom. this town is too small to hold our interest. we make plans to go away, to leave for a proper city. we have been doing this for months now. sometimes you tell our friends that we’re leaving and they express polite surprise but know we’ll do otherwise.

a terrible thing happens somewhere in the world & you are heartsick at it. you volunteer to help in the relief effort and urge me to do the same. this, i fear, is the change that could wreck us. i do not have your level of empathy, but i respect it. i idle in circuitous forms of conversation regarding the terrible thing, i hypothesize on it. i do not have direct conversations regarding the facts, and beg off when it surfaces in the stream of conversation. it is the same with politics and religion. when pressed, i invoke an old scrivener’s paradigm: i would prefer not to. you make your disgusted face at me and ask my opinion: should you go? you explain you’ve never felt so strongly about something in your life - ever. i accept and understand, and everything tells me to tell you to go, go because you know it’s going to make you feel good about yourself and who couldn’t do with a little of that these days, right? but i don’t say that, i don’t tell you those things, i just shrug and say that it’s up to you. it’s your decision.

but it’s your decision too, you say, and your voice feels like an invisible fingertip pressing on my forehead. don’t you want me to stay?

of course i do, i am replying. of course i do.

then i will, you sigh.

you end up going, two weeks later. you leave a note on my pillow, like a movie. it’s brimming with apologies, thorny with your moral agony, and finally resolves itself with a firm dictum of stated intent. you’ve signed it with a heavy hand. at the terminus of the last looping L, the ballpoint of your pen (never pencil) has pierced the thin paper. it looks like you were writing it on your thigh.

you have a terrible habit of misspelling “enviroment”.

o

you are writing a screenplay about it, you are endlessly typing away in the next room. the weird plastic chatter of your laptop’s keyboard. i am watching the rockford files and drinking a Narragansett. while you were gone i had a fling with an old girlfriend and i am fat with the guilt of it. you are absorbed with the clippings of newspapers, your journal entries, the photographs. you talk about it constantly, what it was like, and all of our friends listen. some of us have heard it more than twice now. we allow it but it is wearing on us. or perhaps it is only me.

i lie in bed. you are typing. i pull out my laptop and type, too. to drown out the sound of you with my sound.

you are tired all the time now. you’ve cut coffee out of your diet and i hear constant remarks on how ‘subdued’ you seem. your sleep is at awkward hours, and never for very long. the bulb on the desk lamp has burnt out and been replaced. it was an old bulb. you come to bed at sunrise and seem physically wracked. some nights you sit on the edge of the bed and stare out the window at the world outside blinking its eyes and stretching.

you don’t talk about it anymore. you close the door when you go into the other room and i do not hear the sound of your keys. i go to the bar alone more than i used to. my friends urge me to ask you about it, to talk it through. i don’t know how to tell them i don’t know what to say. the cat and i have become better friends. it used to hate me.

o

you’ve finished your script. it’s terrible. i tell you otherwise. you tell all of our friends that you’ve finished and they congratulate you but when you continue talking about it they go slightly blank and have to maintain their smiles. you don’t know what to do next. i recommend a book i’ve just read and you say you don’t want to read anything right now. you take up painting for awhile. our house is filled with easels and canvases. they’re all violently blue - all you’ve bought for oils are deep prussian and viridian, cadmium white. you are uncontrollably painting the ocean, over and over, from near-benthic to littoral. i am surprised at how good they are. you leave your palette to one side, still smeared with the mix of hues. one morning over breakfast you tell me you’ve been dreaming of the ocean. you don’t know what it means and i tell you it doesn’t matter what it means, it matters how it makes you feel. you confess that it scares you.

reports are still coming in about the terrible thing, and you refuse to listen or hear about it. you shut off the television or walk out of the room or leave the table. you are unhappy inside, and it’s beginning to show.

o

i am talking to you across the kitchen table. you are pretending to be listening to NPR. the cat is nowhere to be found. the television and the radio are both on. i am talking to you about dinner plans. you tell me to stop and i do, but suddenly you start yelling. you snap in a million places. you are white-fisted fury & froth. i am afraid you might hit me and a part of me wants you to. i let you roil for as long as you need to. the bells in the Polish church down the street are ringing for Saturday Mass.

Jacob More (cont.)

the sky: flat black, like the belly of a leviathan passing over the town, sounding out the depths.

his hands like wrens, swooping.

he eased a sigh. "you grow tired of your own voice." his smile, brittle and sad. "silence became my God, but also a devil that plagues me. how terrible it is to be confined to the lower registers of sound!" he dabbed at his brow with a pocket handkerchief and glanced at the splotches, mouth twitching with regret. "i was born and bred in silence - wrapped in it, clothed in it. my father took hold of my hand and led me through its frozen wilderness. we snapped no twigs, crunched no leaves. we passed through this world as though invisible, barely disturbing a thing." he paused, looked at her face, assessing it for the possibility of understanding. she was quiet, though not with curiosity. perhaps that was the moment when the old man felt it, seeing the interest glowing. "i would love you more if you spoke," he said tiredly. "even if it did kill me."

"i have no wish to hurt you," she said, and he jerked back as if struck by lightning, raising his handkerchief to his mouth. he trembled, as if fighting with an earthquake rooted deep in his spine. the shaking calmed, and he opened his eyes. in their depths was a golden ecstasy.

"thank you," he whispered. his voice sounded like sandpaper. "i will treasure that sound."

she smiled, and made a motion with her hand for him to continue.

"my poor, poor mother..."

he took to writing, just like his father had, years before. his adolescence was a forest of notebooks & a landfill of looseleaf pages. he lacked the orderliness that had seemed to plague his father - his room was a constant shifting dervish of frenzied pages, in no particular order. where Jacob More had taken to philosophy & theological study, Adolfo More took to poetry. he kept a small black address book by his bedside and did not fill it with addresses, but rather words - extraordinary words, the shape of them on the page, the space they filled. each was written carefully, transcribed from the place he had discovered them - for example, from a sheaf of typewritten pages found in his father's collection, the word "apotheosis."

it was from this wild and unruly obsession with language that Adolfo learned poetry, combining words that somehow fit together. he became a tailor of words, stitching them together over and over again, discovering their patterns and how they fit together. at night, under the covers, he whispered them to himself. he was thirteen years old, and just starting to feel the drop in his throat, not understanding why his voice kept splintering on certain sounds. this was his private reverence, his only joy - but still, something was lacking. he felt empty, hollow, after he had finished, and sometimes would weep miserably into sleep, always eventually drifting off with a wet place beneath his cheek. there was a missing place in his eyes when he looked in the mirror in the mornings, checking for the evidence of a beard like his father's - and that's when he remembered. he'd seen that emptiness before: in his father's eyes, a same pitiless darkness. though worn & weathered, he recognized it across the breakfast table that morning, shrouded in silence save for the clinking of silverware against the plates.

"Father," he said, "why are we silent?"

his mother flung her hands to her ears, blood rushing to her face. he had never seen anger as he saw in his father's face at that moment - it bloomed within him like a volcano's gouting lava, accumulating, hardening, and piling atop itself until it reached his mouth - he opened the gate of his teeth and abruptly snapped them closed again. he laid the silver down, knuckles clenched around them, and stood, raising himself with both hands like a thundercloud. he did not speak, but fixed his eyes on his son - terrible and disappointed eyes. he came around the table, slow steps towards Adolfo, and laid his hand on his son's shoulder, pressing down hard before clenching into a fist, hauling him upright and nearly knocking over the chair. the last thing Adolfo saw before he was dragged out of the kitchen was his mother's mute, pleading eyes, fixed on her husband's back, and the seed of fury somewhere deep within her, banging around like a fireball inside of her.

Jacob More (cont.)

the bed roiled like a boat at sea. his mind was elsewhere - she saw it recede from the forefront of his eyes like a hermit crab, tucking up deep inside the nautilus of his skull. they bucked & strained at each other, her astride him, profiled in the lightning like the figurehead on a prow. the house shuddered & moaned as the rain scourged its sides. the river down the road swelled like an orchestra & splashed over the sides, grappling with itself. the inevitable flood. the harangue of weather against the soft cheek of the earth. this is the seventh such storm in two weeks, and the land has had enough. it spits back. the thunder is little more than a rasping cough, gurgling. everything is filled with fluid.

at the same time as the hasty levee that old man Whitaker built collapses -

at the same time as the gnarled oak is rent asunder with one bolt -

she falls parallel to him, clutching her breast, exhausted. her eyes close. his gruff murmur, cadenced like a priest's during the liturgy, rising and falling. she opens her eyes and sees the ceiling - dark, seeming infinitely distant, vaulted - and feels herself become the smallest bit

heavier -

"of course," he says grandly, doffing his hat and motioning at the empty seat beside him.

"you're a gentleman." she said, somewhat distantly, and sat, smoothing her dress out beneath her out of habit, crossing her legs deliberately. composure had fled her, left her unbalanced, with water in her left ear. her dress clung to her lasciviously.

adolfo glances around. his neck cracks. "i have to warn you, there is a condition to my chivalry."

she stops in the middle of wringing out her hair. her lips are about to form words, but he continues as though he has not noticed. "the condition is this: you must not speak."

he watches her eyes tumble through the kaleidoscopic shift from confusion to rage. "and this is why: i am not human." he paused to take a sip of his tea. "my species has a unique codicil to our ... shall we say, contractual agreement with God ... and that genetic amendment is such that the voice of a human female causes us great pain."

"i don't understand," she said, staring him down haughtily.

adolfo winced and held his hand up.

a dark ringlet of blood leaked from his brow, appearing like a shiny worm from under his hair.

he took another sip of his tea and gently pushed it towards her.

Jacob More took his son into the study & pointed at the window. the night was so dark the glass could have been painted over and the difference would have been impossible to discern. a star, here or there, looking more like a flaw in the windowpane. the ferocious glitter of the Dog Star. the storms had left the valley, and fog seemed to leak from the trees like a gas, chilling the air. the river sank back into itself, grunting grayly, hissing and spitting treachery. "Home," his father said simply, then crouched by the boy & held his face towards the sky.

"Home," the boy repeated, but as soon as Jacob More released his chin, his eyes went to the walls around him, to the amber light of the desk, to the door, shut & locked behind them.

on the other side of the door, Emily crouched, her ear pressed to the smooth wood. heard nothing. pressed her eye to the keyhole. saw only the shifting black bulk of her husband. a flash of fleshy hand, darting out to grab the boy by his neck of his shirt, drag him to the window.

"Home," said her husband.

"Home," echoed the boy, dutifully.

it had been years, she thought dully, since she had used her lips for anything but kissing Jacob. or, from time to time, the pretense of healing her son's weeping scrapes & abrasions. she crept back from the door, and there, tentatively, in the dark of the hallway, hummed a single note. it was soft, and scared, wobbling out of her throat like a newborn deer-child. she clutched instinctively at her neck, to choke it, to grab the sound out of the air like a gnat or a mosquito, and crush it in her callused hands - but it escaped, slipping neatly between the ring finger & little finger of her right hand. it floated to the ceiling & vanished there in the inky corner.

she sat there for a moment, eyes turned to saucers, battling herself on the precipice of tears. she imagined it, that lame child, stuck where it was, wildly spinning a sticky web for the notes yet to come.

the lock in the door exploded like a shotgun, and she hurtled downstairs, veered into the kitchen and collapsed, barely buttressing herself against the sturdy table. the candles flickered in accusation.

she heard the heavy tread of him, descending the stairs. waited for the usual tumult of her son in tow, clamoring down - but this time, there was nothing. she seized up with the fear that Jacob had done something terrible, had exiled her son, her boy - her Adolfo -

and there they stood as she turned, stopped at the foot of the stairs, looking jaundiced in the candle-light. her eyes fluttered up like a damaged dragonfly, locking onto him feebly. he was impenetrable - a fortress of a man, the rook, the king's Castle - he stood with her son's hand firmly in his fist, and then separated from him. he knelt, and it was then - only then - that she noticed the blood trickling from her son's right nostril. "There, there," crooned Jacob awkwardly. "It's all right."

she took a step forward, apologies rushing to her mouth, crowding her teeth and tongue -

Jacob stood, abruptly, and extended his palm to her. there, in the center of his hand, was a small wound, which bled remorselessly.

she met his gaze. his eyes were boggy with the humidity of tears.

it was the only time she ever saw him cry.