Michael Ryan

Wanting leads to worse than oddity. The bones creak like bamboo in wind, and strain toward a better life outside the body, the life anything has that isn’t human. Feel the chair under you? What does it want? Does lust bend it silly, like a rubber crutch? Tell a tree about the silky clasp of cunt. It won’t shift an inch. It won’t ache to touch. Let me not cruise for teens in a red sports car, or glare too long at what bubbles their clothes. Let me never hustle file clerks in a bar. Keep me from the beach when the hot wind blows. If I must go mad, let it be dignified. Lock me up where I’ll feel like wood, where wanting won’t send me flopping outside, where my bones will shut up, where I’ll be good.

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California, having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot to “go with a guy” in a green truck, and all Christmas Day volunteers searched for her body within a fifteen-mile radius, and her father and grandfather searched and spoke to reporters because TV coverage might help them find her if she were still alive, and her mother stayed home with the telephone, not appearing in public, and I could imagine this family deciding together this division of labor and what little else they could do to do something, and the kitchen they sat in, the tones they spoke in, who cried and who didn’t, and how they comforted one another with words of hope and strokings of backs and necks, but I couldn’t imagine their fear that their daughter had been murdered in the woods, raped no doubt, tied up, chopped up, God knows what else, or them picturing her terror as it was happening to her or their own terror of her absence ever after, cut off from them before she had a chance to grow through adolescence, her room ever the same with its stupid posters of rock stars until they can bear to take them down because they can’t bear to leave them up anymore— on this day, which happened to be Christmas, at the kind of holiday gathering with a whole turkey and spiral-cut ham and beautiful dishes our hosts spent their money and time making to cheer their friends and enjoy the pleasure of giving, in a living room sparkling with scented candles and bunting and a ten-foot tree adorned with antique ornaments, the girl’s disappearance kept surfacing in conversations across the room while I was being cornered by a man who said his wife was leaving him after twenty-one years of marriage, then recited his resumé as if this couldn’t happen to someone with his business acumen; and it did again after I excused myself to refill my punch glass when someone at the punch bowl said what she had heard about it from someone else who had played tennis that morning with the girl’s mother’s doubles partner, while I filled a punch glass for somebody’s dad brought along so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas, a man in his eighties with a face like a raven’s, his body stooped, ravaged by age and diseases, who told me he was amazed to still be alive himself after a year in which he had lost both his wife and son, then, to my amazement, began telling me how important he is in his business world just like the man I had just gotten away from, that he’s still a player in international steel involved in top-drawer projects for the navy, and I was selfish enough to be selfless enough to draw him out a little, and the younger man, too (who appeared at my elbow again and started talking again), but not selfless enough to feel what they each were going through because my own fear and hunger cloud how I imagine everyone, including the bereaved family of the missing girl, and the girl herself, and certainly her murderer, although I know what it is to hate yourself completely and believe all human community is lies and bullshit and what happens to other people doesn’t matter.

What a fuckup you are. What dumbshit you do. Your father's voice still whispers in you, despite the joys that sweeten each day. Your Genius it isn't until, dying away, it worms back through the sparkling dream where you drown him in an inch-deep stream: your knee in his back, your strength on his skull, it begins singing praise for your skill.

For John Skoyles My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent, line drawings that suggest the things they represent, different from any drawings she — at ten — had done, closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in. For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem; for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one. She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card, and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard. Such love is healing — as you know, my friend, especially when it comes unbidden from our children despite the flaws they see so vividly in us. Who can love you as your child does? Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss owning you now — yet you would be this generous to think of my child. With the pens you sent she has made I hope a healing instrument.

Most of the past is lost, and I’m glad mine has vanished into blackness or space or whatever nowhere what we feel and do goes, but there were a few cool Sunday afternoons when my father wasn’t sick with hangover and the air in the house wasn’t foul with anger and the best china had been cleared after the week’s best meal so he could place on the table his violins to polish with their special cloth and oil. Three violins he’d arrange side by side in their velvet-lined cases with enough room between for the lids to lie open. They looked like children in coffins, three infant sisters whose hearts had stopped for no reason, but after he rubbed up their scrolls and waists along the lines of the grain to the highest sheen, they took on the knowing postures of women in silk gowns in magazine ads for new cars and ocean voyages, and, as if a violin were a car in storage that needed a spin around the block every so often, for fifteen minutes he’d play each one— though not until each horsehair bow was precisely tightened, and coated with rosin, and we had undergone an eon of tuning. When he played, no one was allowed to speak to him. He seemed to see something drastic across the room or feel it through his handkerchief padding the chin board. So we’d hop in front of him waving or making pig noses the way kids do to guards at Buckingham Palace, and after he had finished playing and had returned to himself, he’d softly curse the idiocy of his children beneath my mother’s voice yelling to him from the kitchen That was beautiful, Paul, play it again. He never did, and I always hoped he wouldn’t, because the whole time I was waiting for his switchblade to appear, and the new stories he’d tell me for the scar thin as a seam up the white underside of his forearm, for the chunks of proud flesh on his back and belly, scarlet souvenirs of East St. Louis dance halls in the Twenties, cornered in men’s rooms, ganged in blind alleys, always slashing out alone with this knife. First the violins had to be snug again inside their black cases for who knew how many more months or years or lifetimes; then he had to pretend to have forgotten why I was sitting there wide-eyed across from him long after my sister and brother had gone off with friends. Every time, as if only an afterthought, He’d sneak into his pocket and ease the switchblade onto the bare table between us, its thumb-button jutting from the pearl-and-silver plating like the eye of some sleek prehistoric fish. I must have known it wouldn’t come to life and slither toward me by itself, but when he’d finally nod to me to take it its touch was still warm with his body heat and I could feel the blade inside aching to flash open with the terrible click that sounds now like just a tsk of disappointment, it has become so sweet and quiet.

What kind of delusion are you under? The life he hid just knocked you flat. You see the lightning but not the thunder. What God hath joined let no man put asunder. Did God know you’d marry a rat? What kind of delusion are you under? His online persona simply stunned her as it did you when you started to chat. You see the lightning but not the thunder. To the victors go the plunder: you should crown them with a baseball bat. What kind of delusion are you under? The kind that causes blunder after blunder. Is there any other kind than that? You see the lightning but not the thunder, and for one second the world’s a wonder. Just keep it thrilling under your hat. What kind of delusion are you under? You see the lightning but not the thunder.

The love we’ve defined for ourselves in privacy, in suffering, keeps both of us lonely as a fist, but does intimacy mean a happy ending? I’m afraid of marriage. Driving past them at night, the shadows on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives: a father stuck in a job, his daughter opening her blouse to strangers. And your hands, for example, like a warm liquid on my face don’t evaporate as you take them away. Nor are our betrayals silent, although we listen only in passing. We’re learning how to walk unlit streets, to see threats instead of trees, the right answer to a teenager opening his knife. The answer is yes. Always we couldn’t do otherwise.

From embarrassment, I made statements. My icons—tight caves and mouths—stuck together briefly like dry lips, like a lover’s insults. The fact is they were ugly to all of us. I said, How painstakingly personal! Here are the words for this, Relentless as insects! I was hysterical. Every tone became artful, the worst urges nuzzling like housepets for someone to feel them, each real subject demanding more real context for remarks. Then abstractions insinuating their sharp edges, asking to pry open privacies alone in the bathroom at bedtime then with strangers in elevators, at stop signs. Even then, I knew you’d shun them, because who would choose such intrusions? I learned to love this isolation as a woman who appears to listen. All night I’d talk about my life anticipating her dramatic relief, believing her affectionate gestures filled in what wasn’t spoken. At those times she seemed so genuine and friendly, a voice from inside my own body describing my shameless surrender as our first kiss, perfect as gravity.

They slept and ate like us. Feral they were not. The intricacy of their handiwork bespoke a fineness we’d be taught. Yet we wiped them out. It was eerily easy to do, although they knew we were coming and knew we knew they knew. Not only did they not resist our guns like bloody hacking coughs in their libraries and hospitals, their bedrooms and their schools— they would not acknowledge us. We felt like fools. There was no keening. Even the children did not cry. It was as if meaning inhered so deeply in their daily lives we could not touch it; nor would they quit living to be slaughtered, it was so inviolate.

The ward beds float like ghost ships in the darkness, the nightlight above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse with a little man inside who wears a sailor cap and tells good old stories of the sea. The little man is me. Perhaps I have a dog called Old Salt who laps my hand and runs endlessly down the circular stairs. Perhaps he bites like sin. I dream of ships smashing the reefs, their bottoms gutting out, the crews’ disembodied voices screaming Help us help us help somebody please and there is no one there at all not even me. I wake up nervous, Old Salt gnawing my flesh. I wake up nervous, canvas bedstraps cutting my groin. The night nurse, making the rounds, says I bellow in sleep like a foghorn. * Nothing moves at night except small animals kept caged downstairs for experiments, going bullshit, and the Creole janitor’s broom whisking closer by inches. In the ward, we all have room for errors and elbows to flail at excitement. We’re right above the morgue; the iceboxes make our floor cold. The animals seem to know when someone, bored with holding on, gives out: they beat their heads and teeth against the chicken wire doors, scream and claw The janitor also knows. He props his heavy broom against his belt, makes a sign over himself learned from a Cajun, leaves us shaking in our bedstraps to drag the still warm and nervous body down from Isolation. * I have a garden in my brain shaped like a maze I lose myself in, it seems. They only look for me sometimes. I don’t like my dreams. The nurses quarrel over where I am hiding. I hear from inside a bush. One is crisp and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push them each somewhere. They both think it’s funny here. The laughter sounds like diesels. I won’t come out because I’m lazy. You start to like the needles. You start to want to crazy.