Chase Twichell

What etiquette holds us back from more intimate speech, especially now, at the end of the world? Can’t we begin a conversation here in the vestibule, then gradually move it inside? What holds us back from saying things outright? We’ve killed the earth. Yet we speak of other things. Our words should cauterize all wounds to the truth.

Whenever I look out at the snowy mountains at this hour and speak directly into the ear of the sky, it’s you I’m thinking of. You’re like the spirits the children invent to inhabit the stuffed horse and the doll. I don’t know who hears me. I don’t know who speaks when the horse speaks.

I want you with me, and yet you are the end of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms have become public? How we glance to see if— who? Who did you imagine? Surely we’re not here alone, you and I. I’ve been wandering where the cold tracks of language collapse into cinders, unburnable trash. Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold of meteors before their avalanches of farewell. If you asked me what words a voice like this one says in parting, I’d say,I’m sweeping an empty factory toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia. I’m just a broom, sweeping.

My bonsai teacher says to quit doing it like a girl. I’m pruning the root-ball of a Podocarpus, or Buddhist pine, trained semicascade. The first time Dad fell, the femur broke in eleven places due to his artificial knee (titanium and steel). A rod screwed to the bones in thirteen places didn’t work, and the graft stayed weak. For two years he fought his wheelchair into near submission. The grand finale was him riding it down two flights of stairs without tipping over or falling out. The nurses loved him. The last time I called tech help I got George in Salt Lake, at work at six in the morning their time. He was very helpful. I offered to write a note for his file, but he said,It’s OK, Chase. Your compliment is enough.

There’s something in me that likes to imagine the things I’m afraid of, for example, the future. I don’t mean the celestial fireworks from melting reactors, or New York under six feet of sea water, but the future in its most intimate, most probable forms—vignettes subversive enough to slip through the radar. That’s how I come to be crouched behind a stripped car wondering would it be too dangerous to piss in the street? It would, I’m a woman. So I go on holding it, distracting myself by trying to remember every fruit I’ve ever eaten, their exact textures and flavors. So far the most exotic is the custard apple. I use up a whole hour of daylight and then another—apricot, blueberry, plum— calves cramping from having to stay low, waiting behind a car pitted with the acne of automatic fire. There are still too many guns walking around out there, and no one I know, so I’m waiting for twilight at least. Is everyone alone now? The wind says so. It says a winter is coming without oil. It bites to get my attention and scatters a few leaflets, pictures of a blackened car, a city that seems to catch on fire every sunset, though there’s little enough to burn. Stone only chars. This isn’t a likeness of the future, is it? Every person in the street a stranger? Will a word like ‘neighbor’ survive this? I fired a gun once. It smelled rancid, sour, like bad food. It hurt my shoulder and left a wound of oil on my shirt. My mind is thinking of sleep again. Sleep lets things escape—my pocket-knife vanished through a knife-sized hole. There’s nothing to cut, no guava, nectarine, winter pear, and nothing left of the car at all, not even the rear-view mirror I was counting on, hoping my face could tell me it was safe to go home, and where is that? A place with a bed and a desk where I sit and plot next year’s garden on graph paper. The skin of a tangelo is faintly pebbly, easy to peel, but the sweetest citrus is the satsuma, then the clementine. If I had to choose between natural disaster and a firing squad, I’d take the river of lava any day. Hurricane, tidal wave, tornado, drought. I want the earth, which is waiting under the sidewalk, to be the one. Not any of these human shadows sporting their silhouetted guns. There were gun shadows before, but the two worlds overlapped, guns and the amber waves of grain. It’s hard to say whether bramble fruits actually have skins. Does a raspberry? Does each tiny globe have its own? How will I live without the earth? In a stripped car, unable to piss when I want to, all the time cold? Maybe weapons interbred with humans, and a strain of hybrids was born, half metal, half flesh. I know there’s an enemy— look at all the damage it’s doing. Maybe it’s still a baby, its weak neck wobbling as its carriage lurches over the broken pavement. But probably by now it’s a sulking adolescent starting to look like serious trouble, with a silky little shadow-moustache and a gun. Who’ll kill it? Will I? What if it doesn’t look like the enemy? What if it comes disguised as a savior, or resembles nothing so much as hunger, so that everyone has his own private piece to kill? Will we do it?

I know I promised to stop talking about her, but I was talking to myself. The truth is, she’s a child who stopped growing, so I’ve always allowed her to tag along, and when she brings her melancholy close to me I comfort her. Naturally you’re curious; you want to know how she became a gnarled branch veiled in diminutive blooms. But I’ve told you all I know. I was sure she had secrets, but she had no secrets. I had to tell her mine.

The first night at the monastery, a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight, long after the first frost. A short stick of incense burns thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine rising through the old pine of the hours. Summer is trapped under the thin glass on the brook, making the sound of an emptying bottle. Before the long silence, the monks make a long soft rustling, adjusting their robes. The deer are safe now. Their tracks are made of snow. The wind has dragged its branches over their history.

Ice on the puddles, in the cups of fallen leaves. I’d walk with Dad and a handful of other men, the setters working the fields, the underbrush. It was my job to carry the birds. I’d have them all plucked by the time we got back to the car. On the walk out I’d look for puddles I’d missed and break them. Though many moonless nights have fallen on the grave like a negative of snow, Dad’s wheelchair sometimes flashes in my mind, and I hear the bleating down the hall, a voice berating its god, his worthless anodynes, and the doctors who were at that very moment increasing his morphine, having failed to note the word alcoholic on his chart, meaning that his damaged liver routed the opiates straight to his brain, his beautiful fragile brain, which I had not yet finished loving. My father, who still had manners, who was a hardwood, a tough tree. That was his first death.

I like to think about the monastery as I’m falling asleep, so that it comes and goes in my mind like a screen saver. I conjure the lake of the zendo, rows of dark boats still unless someone coughs or otherwise ripples the calm. I can hear the four AM slipperiness of sleeping bags as people turn over in their bunks. The ancient bells. When I was first falling in love with Zen, I burned incense called Kyonishiki, “Kyoto Autumn Leaves,” made by the Shoyeido Incense Company, Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine a consciousness ignorant of me. I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl, which had been empty for a while, a raku bowl with two fingerprints in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate, the massive door demanding I recommit myself in the moments of both its opening and its closing, its weight now mine, I wanted to know what I was, and thought I could find the truth where the floor hurts the knee. I understand no one I consider to be religious. I have no idea what’s meant when someone says they’ve been intimate with a higher power. I seem to have been born without a god receptor. I have fervor but seem to lack even the basic instincts of the many seekers, mostly men, I knew in the monastery, sitting zazen all night, wearing their robes to near-rags boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread, smoothed over their laps and tucked under, unmoving in the long silence, the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled, field of sentient beings turned toward candles, flowers, the Buddha gleaming like a vivid little sports car from his niche. What is the mind that precedes any sense we could possibly have of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance? I thought that the divestiture of self could be likened to the divestiture of words, but I was wrong. It’s not the same work. One’s a transparency and one’s an emptiness. Kyonishiki.... Today I’m painting what Mom calls no-colors, grays and browns, evergreens: what’s left of the woods when autumn’s come and gone. And though he died, Dad’s here, still forgetting he’s no longer married to Annie, that his own mother is dead, that he no longer owns a car. I told them not to make any trouble or I’d send them both home. Surprise half inch of snow. What good are words? And what about birches in moonlight, Russell handing me the year’s first chanterelle— Shouldn’t God feel like that? I aspire to “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it. So who shall I say I am? I’m a prism, an expressive temporary sentience, a pinecone falling. I can hear my teacher saying,No. That misses it.

She was always elsewhere. That’s what Mom wants carved on her stone. When did she first realize there was an Elsewhere, and that she was in it? What baby songs did she sing from wherever she was down to me in my crib? The lullabies of   Elsewhere. On birthdays she filled little flowerpots with chocolate ice cream and a real zinnia, chocolate jimmies for dirt. I tasted the cold chocolate, I opened the gifts. If  they were real, I was real. I was in the Elsewhere too.