You said that you could not find anyone to help. With dignity, with integrity, please allow me to do this. Without changing my words.
Without changing.
What happened, it is important that others know. And now what is happening, that these days it is hard to trust anyone. Even those people who I thought of as friends, things seem so different between us. From moment to moment, everything is different.
Again I beg you, do not alter what I am saying now. I want to do what I can. I can only tell you what I know. Do not break my heart and change my meaning, when both of my hands are open.
You, Mini, did not go to California, like I did. Was it wise to stay away? Was it wise to leave? I know that you must have been there. It must have not been long that you were there. Is it that you felt it wiser to flee? Not even a day before I arrived, you left. I know it. When I arrived, when I entered the room that was supposed to be mine, I found, "Oh, not even a day that someone left his room like this." I have found out that it was yours, long after the fact. In fact, not long after I have sent you things personal to me, my voice, my secret pains, I found out that you had been sleeping there. I found out only this year. Your room. Your slept in sheets, that I washed, for there was no one to wash them. What I washed.
Laurent begged me, "Come where I can see you, from North Carolina, please come," and so I told Q, "Come." But he was still hoping Jackie would come home. The more years went by without Jackie, the more Quinn anticipated his return. He kept saying "What if he comes home now?" whenever I asked him. He was mad with hope. He tore at my clothes, he swore oaths against me, and so I went alone. I did not know if I would ever see him again, but what could I tell him? I told him everything about the sense of danger. It was not as important as staying there, for him. "What if I am killed?" he asked me. "What about it? Huh?" In anger.
Whenever I am without him, really he is with me, in my mind, but even more, knowing that he might not be safe, I was not able to be myself. There was not any thinking straight, for me, existing in a cloud. On the plane, I tried to write to him, but I have never been good at writing. I could not find the right words and could not remember how to spell a lot of them properly, and so I thought that I would call him when I got to the house.
When I arrived at the airport, in my sunglasses, I looked for someone I might know, anyone, or at least a boy with a sign. No one. I was tired. To find myself alone in the airport left a faintly bitter taste with me, and I felt a little savaged. In the taxi, I made little angry conversations with myself. "Why did I come? Why did I come? Why beg me? Why listen? Why so much fighting? Why did I leave mon homme? Can it be so urgent then? Why do this to my man and myself, to make us feel badly?" An hour away, I picked up my cellphone, and heard D asking me, "Maintenant, ou est-tu?" Right now, where are you? He told me to stop in front of a museum where he would come and take me to a hotel. I told him, "A hotel? Mais non? Why cannot I stay at home? And wait? Outside? Alone? At this hour?" I could not believe that he called me to say so, but by the time I arrived, the anger had left me. Why anger? And yet the bitter taste, spreading into my throat and into my heart.
I found myself absorbed with myself, with being sad in a way that was self-satisfied. Perhaps I think so now, and really it was true sadness, and worry, but I did not see Laurent in the house right away. To think that I ever felt real despair. Did I?
I sat down in the sitting room as it grew dark.
For a long time, Laurent and I had been growing apart. Things between us felt distant. In the house, there seemed a lot of tension. In the room, I did not want to look up much, or explore. In the dense atmosphere, among so many who I did not know at all, I felt exposed and vulnerable. That feeling of nakedness I had been feeling so often, whenever I was with Laurent in those last years. How he looked, how he would not look at me. I looked at myself and I felt ashamed.
He came into the room, so slowly, so quietly, that I noticed him in a way I would not have if he had moved more quickly. I saw him the way that a predator sees a wounded animal. I looked away and I covered my face with my hand, so that he could not see me so against him. I did this because he had so often done it for me, turning away his anger and his pain so that he could love me.
I looked away.
His frailty. His voice was so quiet. The way he touched me, how he brushed my skin as if it were me who would fall apart, like a transparent corn husk or a butterfly's dry wings. He drew my hand from my face and held it with both of his, without a word. Silence between us.
"Why are you asking D to put me in a hotel?" I demanded, unable to hold myself back.
The way he tenderly touched my hair, tried to pull me towards himself, to rest my head against his belly. I resisted. He didn't have strength, or he wanted to be weak for me, I do not know. He was himself. The one I loved, touching me.
"Do not cry, ma moitie," my half, he said, softly, gently. "You are so sensitive."
"Tell me why. Is it because there is someone else? I do not care if there is someone else," I told him. "If they lie between us in our bed, I do not care. I will caress them. I will not crumble."
"I thought it would upset you to be here."
"You are calling me and telling me, 'come it is dangerous, press your head to my breast. If you do not come I will go mad with desperation,' but I am an hour away and you tell me to away from you? What have I done? Is there not danger? Why are there so many here?"
"A threat has been made that could not be ignored."
"I will tell you that I am confused," I said, beginning to gesture.
He took both my hands so that I could not gesture. He took them and when I looked up, he was looking for my eyes. I wanted to seem defiant, but I could tell by the way he was gazing at me, with the patient love of the angel's face he had, that my expression was honest.
"You feel betrayed."
"Une voyante!" a psychic, I said, still trying to be belligerent.
He held me fast by the wrists. I hung my head, ashamed to have yelled at him.
"No, look at me," he hissed. "I trust you to be tolerant. That is not the matter. We are speaking of different things. We are talking past each other. You must look at me."
"I refuse."
"My Leis of Pont Marie," the bridge I had haunted while living, he hummed. "My little nameless waif. My Marie. Do not make me leave you so pouting," he said, a mischief-seeking curl in his voice. Sweet to the ear.
When I did not say anything, he said, "I thought that you are safer in a hotel."
"That is a lie," I hummed to him, still tearful in a way I could not stop. "I am only safe with you."
"You will stay in the room beside mine?"
"Is this a question?" I asked, exasperated with him, turning my head away again.
"Stop playing," he said, suddenly serious. "Look at me."
"I don't know why you are so serious," I told him, genuinely distressed. "What is this?"
He shook me by the wrists a little violently, causing me to look back, to part my lips, to feel so uncertain, and when he could have spoken, instead he dropped my hands, and he made a sound, too loud to be a put on, an "Oh!"
"Laurent."
"I am always trying to replace you," he said, already turning away. "But they do not torture me like you do. They all are different in their ways, none like him, my Leis. Stay in the room beside mine, I ask you."
"I will."
His cell rang. He let me go. He went away.
Still an uneasiness. Still an uncertainty.
And a deeper something. I do not think that I got this feeling from age. I think that all who do not know how to say "I do not feel it!" feel this thing. There is a tiny leaden weight, inside the heart, that when it beats, no oxygen can touch this part, and no breath from its beating comes complete. I sat in my chair after he left, trying to push it out. But I could not.
I rolled my eyes back and tried to breathe deeply, to regain my head.
But when I went upstairs, into that little room beside his, your room, this little weight only thickened its fastness in me, descending until it had cut a path through my insides. I stood in the open doorway of that room, looking. I hung my head, and shut my eyes, and panted like a cat.
On your bed, there was something small. Something bent. Twisted in the coverlet, curved. Discarded.
Still.
As I approached, I heard from downstairs an explosion of shouting, of noise. But I sat down on the twisted coverlet, and I said, "Excuse me, little one." My head felt a blankness, full of something like wet newspaper wadding, like waking up in the rain, a personal sense of the pathetic, the pitiable, and worthlessly insane.
When I scooped him up, the child felt stiff, and yet he fit in my arms. Less than a day dead and not at all putrid. Ten years old? Bloodless, eyes half open. Someone had left him there like a garbage thing, and I did not think anything at all.
I held him to my breast.
Downstairs, the sound continued. And it faded. Outside, a wailing.
Inside my head, a wailing.
Inside my head since then, many things that I do not know if they are real or not.
For a long time I sat there, unknowing, privately sad, holding onto the little boy, and then I said to him, "All right, my little peapod, is it all right that I will take care of you?" I set him down and said, "I am coming back. Do not be afraid."
When I went downstairs, there seemed to be so many people moving about between the kitchen and the sitting room, outside, inside. It felt as if I were in the ocean, cast about by unfeeling waves, and me only a small rowing boat in the water, trying to paddle into the kitchen. I stood awhile at the drawers, looking around. I was so unfamiliar with the place. I picked up this thing and that thing, smiling to myself and weighing the possibilities, while the shouting continued around me, the wailing, the weeping, the pleading, the begging.
I went back upstairs with my hands full, and I brought the little one into the washroom, and by then, downstairs had gone mostly quiet, so I did not shut the door. I lowered the nameless child into the tub, and picked up my knife. "Will I sing to you?" I asked him.
I cut awhile. I sang Kyrie Eleison, Lord Have Mercy, a little. I wiped my face with my hand.
I felt a touch on my shoulder. I thought it was Laurent.
"I will do this," Dasius whispered to me, clutching my shoulder, shaking me a little.
In his voice, such a sadness.
"Leis," he said.
I turned my head and looked at his hand. I looked up into his eyes.
I saw that where he had touched my white shirt, he had left a print of bright red blood.
"I hear humming in my head," I told him, my voice coming out small.
He looked away from me, his eyes shut tightly, his lips trembling but closed.
Inside of me, something despaired for resistance, like something forgotten.
"Stop it," I said, turning back to my knife, but the hand tightened on my shoulder.
Outside in the hall, the soft sound of Laurent singing to the boy in his bed, and then his familiar voice, that desperate trembling voice, only, "Where is he?"
I feel that where I used to have organs, there is nothing there.
"Ma moitie, t'es la?" Are you there? I called to him in the hallway.
Ma, moitie, t'es la? I call to him.
Ma moitie. Are you there?