Everyone Needs A Place

Elizabeth Kirschner

My lover, George, lies to me about the smallest things. Now he's dying and I'm trying to forgive him and everyone else while painting objects.

I keep saying I've never been in love. That’s not quite true, but I keep describing the same things differently, as sailboats through the locks of reversed rivers or as streaks of red across the sky, visible only in one eye.

I forget who I am and wake up exhausted. I once had a teacher who died. It was as if she removed herself into the forest where I scatter leaves to read them like pages, as if she's speaking. She was in love.

I'm choosing between two trees with two hollows. One begins breaking as I step inside while trying to sleep. I find a feather and have a thought, there must be an object. The field is empty, sloshed with gold, a hayfield thick with sunshine.

The man I love, he’s easy to desire since there’s not much to him, just light bouncing off skin thin as a peanut shell. He’s vague and smeary in his hospital johnny, which is tucked under his chin, a green bib.

Forget about his insides, his plumbing and his furnaces—put a thing in his hand and be done with it. No one wants to know what’s in his head. It should be enough. To make something beautiful should be enough, but it isn’t. It should be.

The smear of his head—I paint it in, paint it out again, like a whisper of ashes, which says, We were born before we were born.

I paint it in, paint it out again. A blur of forces. Why take more than we need? Because we can.

Deep footprint, it leaves a hole. I’d break George’s heart to make it bigger. I’d even crack his skull to make his mind swell into a thought larger than his own head.

You’re dying, I say, so why not do something?

When he doesn’t answer, but dozes off, my mind moves forward—the paint layers up: glop, glop and shellac. I shovel color into his face, shovel his face into me.

From the apple green hospital room, I see a bird and find it beautiful. The bird has a song inside, and feathers. I feel like the bird and I feel like a stone—solid, inevitable— but mostly, I feel like the bird, or that there’s a bird inside me, or that something inside me is like a bird fluttering. This goes on for a long time.

I see the bird and want to paint it. The problem, if there is one, is simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because the hows are easy—series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially, why bother, what does it solve?

And just because I want to paint a bird, I mean, I actually do want to paint a bird, it doesn’t mean I’ve accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do.

Blackbird, says George. So be it, but he isn’t a bird, he’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers. Besides, he isn’t looking at a bird, a real bird, as I paint, he’s looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless George’s heart is a metaphor, silent and upright, which it is as it stands in profile against the green wall, until looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn’t there, with a song in its throat that he doesn’t hear, but I paint it anyway.

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and because my hand wants to do something useful, I think about a sable radiance where gloom foregathers, and the stern winds brood.

Before George started dying, we looked at the walls in a cave that different men had painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black—mammoth, lion, horse, bear—things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dynamic and alert.

They weren’t animals, but they looked like animals, enough like animals to make it confusing—this meant something but the meaning was slippery: it looked like the thing but wasn’t the thing—was a second thing, following a second set of rules—and it was too late: their power was no longer absolute.

What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: nothing survives. The greater fear: something does.

The night sky is vast and wide. In the hospital bed, we cuddle close, shoulder to shoulder, paint ourselves as a herd of two, together and apart from the rest.

We look at the sky, and the stars. This goes on for a long time. To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be standing on a hill, as half a woman, or half a man, shivering in the flock of himself. These are some choices.

The night sky is vast and wide. My lover has two birds in his head—not in his throat, not in his chest—and the birds sing all day never stopping. Because they are dying. That’s what makes the singing. The dying.

When George says, One of these birds is not my bird, I agree. The lines my eyes cast braid me to his skin until I know I’m a thing that can take itself away—refined, resolved to curving inward.

Screaming isn’t looking—when my mother died, I folded time into my mouth, as if to flee into private chambers only to find an uninvited thought, whispering, It’s easier to unmake everything.

Come morning, my paintbrush takes yellow from the pewter sky while I wonder about all the rooms the sky makes and about George’s body, which is a sheet of sand and snow.

“A boy hung a dog in the playground today,” I start, “right there under the dark leaves where the birds go.”

Sharp sweet dung smell. The yelps almost digital. Above the dog, faint blue expanse, and won’t I always be closer to the falling away of George’s gaze than anyone else?

With my hands on his chest, I set the scene. When grief comes I’ll bite through it, as though it were his soft hands, these I’ll bite through as if into the bright white light of summer.

I leave George’s room, go to the playground. By the jungle gym I find the dog the boy hung. Its neck looks like a U-turn. I stop, pick him up.

Everyone needs a place. You need it for the moment you need it, then you leave and move on. Who does this? Everyone. But the dog, I carry him, like a wine bag into the woods.

I look at all the trees and don't know what to do. A box made out of leaves? What else is in the woods? A heart, closing. Always and nevertheless.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside someone else. I keep my mind on the moon. Old moon, long nights, moon.

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

Because everything casts a shadow. Even or especially the dog. Which doesn’t sing. Still it finds its way out, leaving behind it the future, dead and entirely, ours.

I go back to George, whose body is like wheat. Nothing will release us from the death of the dog, which I diapered with leaves. Unleashed into us now, the yelps that blazed from his lungs.

We are meant to ward off the desolation that bores into our blood, but what will we do without this aching chord, without the bright morning that tore the parched dirt from the dog’s throat?

I hold George’s hand, which is lamb-soft. How can I live without the dictionary of his face? How can I accept the certainty of his quiet grave?

Beneath the hospital window, girls walk past, hair fluttering like commas. And their dreams are musk, or water gently falling on smooth, warm stones.

This is what George’s dying looks like. Musk, water falling on smooth, warm stones. Something I’ll carry around like a baby.

My eyelids droop, fall, heavy with sky. Going up, slowly, is how George dies. His body exerts a last pull that drags, like a match across sandpaper, then ceases.

In the phone booth, which is caulked with soggy directories, I call all the people we hardly know while watching the morning spell his name on the cracked glass.

The sound of his mother’s dial tone smells like fire, like the sun projecting simple stories, and I wonder if I know I’m melting, if what I feel is more than empty space.

Because death sets me apart, I see George as a small boy, digging a hole so big, he can’t see the other side.

This is where his mother laid out his dog, where she made George eat his organs, like cabbages. Lonely as manure, the bones—these soiled his gums, until she tossed them into the starless hole.

It’s the hole, of course. In earth that is mink-lined.

This is place we all go back to—the color of its bones we do not know, but all of us are stationed before it, like glass sheets; we see right into it, into the dirt and dregs, silt and stones.

Eel-black. And starless.