Prose

I like to be left of centre when it comes to consciousness. To be poor in spirit, even health, but not without faith since the sun has risen for me from the east every morning. And it’s not a grandiose sight or manifestation, just an everyday occurrence like going into the garden and watering the orchids, not pruning them because pruning them kills, then binds, and marks their recoil from the other branches. It’s a forest orchid I own. Its name escapes me, not that it matters. It climbs like a vine, its blooms like architectural trefoils or quatrefoils depending on how you look at them. I’ve named the plant Napolean as if it was a conqueror. At seven, Salvador Dalí wanted to be Napolean. A year before, he only wanted to be a cook. He was tracing his ambition, and look how he turned out. I wonder if Dalí ever travelled to Corsica, and sat down quietly to dig into a big trout filled with brocciu, the same ewe milk also used for a cake once. Brocciu is ready to eat, sort of like those Dalí reproductions on postcards and calendars. Already readymade when the original work was simply visionary, larger than life and imagination and all that. I wanted to be Napolean too, but I ended up temping as a book clerk, no less an angel to humanity. I wanted to be invisible – no one would see me, but they would feel my presence – like the morning light. I did make myself invisible, and skulked beside the magazines section, in the north corner of the town square too, or simply walked where people walked, without anyone ever noticing. The sun at dusk seems a bit lonelier nowadays, its orange more sallow, as if it was saying: “I want to be the crescent of an emotion, and simply ride on that.”
 
***
 
“The police aren’t happy, Matthieu. About this note, they’re going to make their way here in a day or two.” Chhean Dupont said this plainly, looking around the small apartment. The living room was spartan, with two wooden chairs flanking a sideboard. No television, no ceiling lights, the flooring an unvarnished pine that creaked. It seemed as if no one had really lived in the space.
 
Matthieu Byrne came out from behind the kitchen wall in a loose pair of dress shorts. His chest caved in as if he had no sternum or lungs, but his arms were big, with large hands. He had answered the door in a towel, rushed out from the shower. And now held a paper plate of meatloaf between his thumb and forefinger, a soup mug dangling from his middle and ring fingers. The soup mug he intended to fill with red wine from Corsica.
 
“If you could make yourself invisible, why didn’t you just vanish to get decent? In any case, I’m here to conduct our final session, and then they’re taking over from here on. This is serious, Matthieu, are you hearing me?”
 
“So, this is work for you. You want some of this meatloaf? It’s leftovers but still good with some mustard or yogurt.” When Chhean returned a blank stare, he pulled up the wooden chair for her, and sat himself down on the floor, cross-legged.
 
“They’re taking this note seriously after you assaulted the policeman that night at the esplanade.”
 
“He was trying to cuff me after I explained myself. He obviously didn’t believe me.”
 
“You were naked. In public.”
 
“Yes, I was. And?” Matthieu looked at Chhean, without expression.
 
“And you told him you were an angel, and had he picked up his kids from school as he should have, both of you would never have met.”
 
“That was true.”
 
“That’s ridiculous, and you know it. I feel like I don’t know you anymore. And what was it with the note, delivering it by hand to the police station, and actually signing off on it? When the old chap opened your note, he hit the roof, flew into a rage, that’s what they told me.”
 
“And?”
 
“And he’s going to make sure they lock you up, for a good number of years even, till the smug chap’s satisfied, that pig bastard.”
 
“For what? What have I done, what’re the charges?” Matthieu looked up, seemed intrigued more than frightened.
 
“Harassment? Stalking? Malicious intent? Plans to do actual harm, what with the previous mention of his kids. That you’re bipolar or schizophrenic, and your psychosis should have you committed. Anything he can grab onto. He isn’t the nicest man, anyone at the station could tell you that. But somehow, you’ve managed to push all the wrong buttons, and he’s coming at you like a truck.”
 
“The question is: Do you believe me, Chhean? Do you believe my story?”
 
“Which part? The part about sleepwalking or being able to walk on air? The part about how birds talk to you – do you hear yourself – how birds actually talk to you, and that you understand their language? That feathers are both a symbol and a materiality. And for most part, an incorporeal force, like gravity and how it affects things even if we can’t see it.”
 
“At least you’ve been listening,” Matthieu said this softly, looking away.
 
“You told the policeman you felt like you were cursed and blessed at the same time. An unwitting voyeur, an accidental tourist to all human life. You told them you were an angel! Don’t you know how crazy that makes you sound? And the note. I’m telling them these are all allegories or metaphors, all that poetic shit. Just to get you off the hook.”
 
“You once believed in Gabriel and Michael, had a name for your own guardian angel. The Sufis think angels can be everywhere, and anything. Even the light reflected off the waves of an ocean.”
 
“You’re talking about another me.” Chhean put out her cigarette on the side of her chair, bold and aloof as if taking a statement. “The note, we were talking about the note.”
 
“Yes, so they think the note is….”
 
“A threat. A suicide letter at best.” Chhean looked at her former lover with little sympathy. It was Sunday, and today hadn’t been particularly memorable. Some politician defended a new economic bill. Some singer started dating some actor, both names familiar but forgettable. The stock market seemed to weaken into a steady flux, nothing Chhean couldn’t handle as she checked her iPhone. Chhean was a good narrative therapist, good working with runaways or the homeless, but not with something this close to becoming a crime.
 
“Reading your note was surreal, let me tell you,” Chhean said, less flustered. “I thought to myself: What orchid? He doesn’t have an orchid. What’s with the Dalí obsession, and that bit about Napolean? You actually got me worried with the angel and invisibility bits. Because it didn’t sound like you, at least not the you I knew from a year ago.”
 
“What’s the best thing you’ve done for yourself recently?” Matthieu interjected, as if reluctant to listen further. He gazed down at his bare feet, a Franciscan tan because he walked around in sandals too much.
 
Chhean got up from her seat, walked to the sideboard. “Buy a new dress, I guess. A halter, one you tie at the back of your neck. For cocktails. A few dignitaries there, some bankers, lots of businessmen. It was vulgar, but work demanded it. You wouldn’t have liked it. Maybe the dress you might have liked.” Chhean smiled softly.
 
“Yes, you would have looked nice in a dress.”
 
“What’s the best thing you’ve done for yourself recently?” Chhean echoed.
 
“Buy cotton swabs for my ears. For a dollar. What a wonderful feeling – such a simple but important invention. I managed to unearth Kafka’s Letters to Milena in a used book cart once, and that was exactly a dollar too.”
 
Chhean knew the story well. Matthieu was ecstatic to stumble onto such a steal, and remained happy the rest of the week. Better yet, at a library giveaway, he pulled off from a hulking stack of books V. S. Pritchett’s The Living Novel, Carl Dennis’ Ranking the Wishes, and a Crofts Classics paperback that contained Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Frogs. Now they lined his sideboard, a small collection. Chhean ran her finger across the tops of the books like a trellis. In a picture frame was a small photograph, black and white, neatly cut with scissors from a catalogue of Denver Art Museum’s European Collection.
 
“You never told me about this picture,” Chhean said. The photograph was of a wool tapestry designed by a Flemish artist, Lucas Van Leyden, one that was known to have graced the walls of the Barberini Palace. There was a country manor in the backdrop, and people skating on a pond in front of it. Many looking sort of uppity and turgid. Right at the back, there was one skater who seemed fiercely independent. He seemed to be making a slide chasse into the manor’s open gateway.
 
“I like thinking about what might have been just around the turn,” Matthieu said. “For the skater. Maybe a whole hallway of alabaster and bronze statues. Maybe the castellan and the sentry and the innkeeper, and they’re playing tonsil hockey.” Matthieu cupped his mouth to stop chuckling to himself. He had always liked the idea of the mock-heroic.
 
“What will you say to the police when they arrive, Matthieu? You can’t evade their questions, or go on with this fantasy of being able to walk among people unseen. They won’t go easy on denial, or be patient with your desire to be left alone, or ignored. They won’t ignore this.”
 
Chhean stepped out the bay window into the small balcony. Matthieu followed close behind. It was the 57th floor, the mist in the air actually a low-lying cloud. The balcony was just over three feet deep, barely enough space for two persons. Framing the oblong space was a plain parapet, grey like Dalí’s embankments in “The First Days of Spring”. The painting was made in 1929, and today seemed as faraway as that, the parapet as empty.
 
“Was the scullion frying up some mussels in butter and garlic?” Matthieu responded, almost in a lilt. He leaned over the parapet, to look down. The sun was dimming into an early evening. “Did he find his way into the pantry, rustle up for himself a Brussels waffle and beer? Did he die? Did he take off, or just dissolve into nothingness? What happens behind every picture, what happens outside these frames we build around things?”
 
“What are you trying to say, Matthieu?” Chhean looked at him squarely, with genuine concern.
 
“Did he discover a secret door that opened into a secret passageway? All the unanswered questions, all that absence of knowledge, and it didn’t cost me a thing. How cool is that.”
 
“Will you be okay?” Chhean asked warmly, as she placed her hand on Matthieu’s forearm, more comfort than reassurance. And he slipped out from under her soft grip very quickly, as if dissipating into the shaft of light, ephemeral, and vanishing into its odd shape on the parapet and floor.
 
There was nothing on the balcony. Except for some feathers, sticky in a bit of blood. In the corner was an empty wine bottle and several milk cartons, and yellow paint that had come off the corbel above. It was as if someone liked to come here some days, to sit next to the sky, to look at the grove two balconies away, lush like a rooftop garden. Maybe to dream of flying or what it’d be like to leave this place. She looked into the mist, its wetness on her cheek. To the left and right, there was no one beside her, and no one on the ledge.
 
And now began a different kind of affliction, like an aching distortion or inquisition.
 

* This piece first appeared on Bluethumbnail, having placed on the shortlist in the Limnisa Short Story Contest.