The Highland

—Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939 Dear One, Do you have the time? Can you take the time? Can you make the time? To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring, and its land is high, dear one, each slope with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas, are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea tans on the sill. The woman beside me has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair, shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut. At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful within me:colors were infinite, part of the air. . . lines were free of the masses they held. The melon, a cloud; and the melon, an empty, oval lariat. They have moved the canvas chair from the window. Sun, enhanced by the brewing jar, threw an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit, a cloud. The fruit, a doll-sized, empty lariat. D. O., into what shape will our shaplessness flow? Dear One, Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then lifting through . . .sole,libertà. In an earlier time, the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male, half female—might place him among us, we who are thickened by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words break free of the masses they hold. Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds of a dog's throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber, feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some great-jawed, prehistoric other begin, back away, then the gill-less, the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks begin, back away, until only a wind remains, vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens. No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable that might be me. Or you. D. O., Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon— and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped leaves of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow, and I stopped in its fragile harmony, my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown striped by such weightless symmetry I might have been myself again. Through an open screen door I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps, her naked body a ghastly white, her face a ghastly, frozen white, fixed in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something out of time. As we are, D. O., here in the Highland, time's infinite, cyclic now-and-then one simple flake of consciousness against the heated tongue. Dear One, My Italian improves: sole,libertà, and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He has forsaken me.) The tea at the window gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk. All morning, I held a length of cotton twine— a shaggy, oakum filament— between the jar and brewing sun. We made a budding universe: the solar disc, the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio, that flared and died so suddenly its light has yet to reach me.