At the Edge of Waking (24 page)

They say smell is the surest trigger of memory. I am ready for tobacco smoke, old cooking and booze, the atmosphere my lungs had to readjust to every time I came home—
home
—The stench that greets me is so powerful, so heavy with decay, I stagger off the step. Cold saliva floods my mouth. I let the door hang open and run to the fence, where I lean on a post, wet with sweat and spitting.

My mother’s corpse occupied the house for five days before the mailman reported a full mailbox and an unpleasant odor to the police.

The steel fence post is really a pipe, shaggy brown with rust inside, an unconvincing layer of silvery protection painted over blisters without. It is threaded at the upper end. I prop my forearm across the opening and think vaguely of spiders while I pick at flakes of silver and wonder about all the things a postman might discover on his rounds. A warm June breeze touches my face with the smells of cut grass and an early barbecue somewhere distant. I could just close the door and walk away. Why close the door, even? I could just walk away. Or take the bus to the hardware store at the strip mall on the highway, the new place that wasn’t built back when I still lived here. I could buy a jug, take it to the gas station and fill it with gasoline, and come back here (walk, maybe, or hitch a ride saying my car was out of gas) and unscrew the cap and heave the whole thing in, light a match (I’d have to get matches at the hardware store, too, long wooden ones you could strike anywhere, the kind she used to light her cigarettes) and toss it in.

I could.

The windows are like blank screens inside the darkness of the house. The white blinds are drawn. I walk around, breathing through my nose because I don’t want that stink inside my mouth, and open the blinds, the windows, the back door. The kitchen has dishes everywhere, tin cans black with mold, the living room the same only with dirty clothing. The bathroom is a nightmare of crusted hairs and vomit. The bedroom—I look at nothing, only stumble to the window and raise the blinds. Darkness persists: cardboard over the glass. I heave at the sash, which will not move. The smell is killing me. Flies bat against my face, my arms, my mouth. My ears sing and I think, quite clearly,
I’m going to faint.
I claw at the cardboard and old tape gives way, freeing a square of light and air.

Blankets twisted together on the floor. Clothing and shoes piled into chaos in the doorless closet. The mattress, bare, with a brackish coffin-shaped stain down the right-hand side.

Died in her sleep, the lawyer had said. Choked on her own vomit was more likely.

With the window clear, the room is cheerful with the glitter of glass. There must be a hundred bottles prisming rainbows against the yellowed paint of every wall, and even through the miasma of rot I can smell the juniper tang of gin.

sunlight tears a web of woven silences and I

I

there was a dream of sleep

a terrible dream but all the dreams were terrible

djinns released from bottles hand-polished into lamps

heavy with light

cold though with heat hanging in the clarity

dreams

oh but once there was rest inside the perfect night

(there is no night more perfect than the darkness hidden

in the chambers of the heart)

peace before the light came storming in

before the flies

before I

died

I find a motel on the highway, a place where no one remarks on the absence of luggage or car. It is neither quiet nor clean, but there is a laundromat almost next door. After I shower and change into my one spare set of clothes I walk over and put my shirt and jeans into the wash. The place comforts me with its dryer heat and hot-cotton smells. Big and bright, a double line of washing machines set back to back down the middle, dryers on the walls, signs warning of laundry theft and the illegality of smoking. The rumble of trucks on the highway and six dryers running soothe me; the chirps of two brown babies in a double stroller sound like birds. Their mother sits dozing over a magazine, and though I can’t stop the comparison (my mother sleeping off a hangover cure, cigarette a long tube of ash between yellow fingers, the old place a linoleum cave strewn with linty socks) it is a distant one. Everything is distant. Or I am distant from everything.

Yes. That seems true.

The mother gets up when a dryer dings and starts folding clothes. She’s efficient: every time she finishes with one stack, another dryer is ready. So many clothes, and her breasts and arms are like pillows. The babies must be the youngest of a crowd. I learned from women like her, watching how they worked the machines (only three quarters then), how they folded, the giant bottles of Mr. Clean they thumped down on the conveyor belt at the grocery store. Learned what they bought, read the labels, figured it out. I did that with food, too, buying packages to cook and fruit I could eat raw. I even learned which store-bought treats to take to school, to trade for lunches made by other kids’ moms. And on the days when I had nothing to trade, I sat at a library table and did my homework, or curled over a pinching stomach and slept with my head on my books.

My washing machine shimmies to a halt. I get up to toss sodden jeans into a dryer and then hold the door open for the mother with the two babies and six big trash bags of clean, folded laundry. She smiles without seeing me, her face shiny with sweat. When she is gone and I’m alone, I sit on the plastic bench with my back against the wall, watching the dryer turn over, turn over, turn over my clothes, and in my head I make a list: trash bags, Mr. Clean, rubber gloves. A cotton scarf to cover my hair.

In high school I called my hunger dieting, and though the councilors gave me lectures on self-esteem and videos on anorexia that I could not watch even if I wanted to on account of our television was pawned when I was ten, they never asked to speak to my mother. I’ve watched people for as long as I can remember, picking up the clues, and I was careful with my clothes, my hair, my anger. I never skipped school, except for the times when she destroyed my room and I had nothing to wear. And even then I could always get her to sign a note, once the check came and the first bottle was open, in the days before I learned how to sign her name myself.

night comes through spaces in every room

gaps in every wall permit a breeze

to stir the djinn

and the flies

a crooked bat cries hunger outside

as if dreams could so easily be swallowed

digested

gone

see?

I am still here

curled inside this bitter womb

where the djinn rested until released

by the polishing of hands

where there are no gaps

nightmares linger

and I

Flies spin about the house, excited by drafts, dizzy on the tides of rot. A night of open windows has reduced the smell. Though still powerful, it is not a presence that can crowd me out the door. A presence I can, just barely, live with. My scarved head bowed, I drop supermarket bags full of cleaning supplies by the kitchen door and without looking up, without taking stock, I begin to clear away the trash.

In the kitchen there is a deep drawer by the stove full to the brim with shards of china and glass. There are plastic plates, gas station cups, TV dinner trays, saucepans glazed with the remnants of overcooked macaroni, tin cans sprouting spoons, and in the dish drainer by the sink three scrubbed mugs of the kind shaped to fit inside a car’s cup holders, but there are no china plates, there are no glass tumblers, there are no teacups painted with purple pansies. Confronted by the drawer of cutting edges, I realize I must cope with a problem she could not solve. The broken pieces are too sharp to be contained by plastic bags, too heavy for paper. I don’t resist the temptation to shut the drawer again, I refuse it.

I avoid the room crowded with bottles (the wholeness of which is now utterly mysterious). In the room that I had once slept in I find a pile of boxes. The room is otherwise empty, its uncovered windows dusty and closed. I had not thought to try that door yesterday. The first breath of air inside smells of cardboard and the fruity perfume of the liquor store, but the stench crowds in behind me along with a trio of bluebottle flies. I edge along the stack of boxes and lift the sash. The flies hover at the threshold, but decline to fly through.

The first box I try is heavy with bottles. This stumps me. I had not thought about it—deliberately had not thought about it—and yet I must have done. Why else was I surprised? That she had not calculated her death, but let it come, or not come, as it chose. And it is still here, three bottles, exquisitely clear. Death. Or is it, in some hideous way, unrealized hope?

I cannot bear that she used my room to store her dissolution in. Yet I can. I will. I do. Where else, after all, should she have kept it? This has always been a small house. I leave the door open to the flies and carry an empty box with me to the kitchen where I pour in a burden of ruined shards. I am careful and cut myself only twice, though many slivers of glass and china wear the brown stains of her blood.

Nothing here is worth keeping. The trash bags bulge lumpy and black outside the door, waiting for the odd-job man who swore to have his pickup here by dark. Evening seems impossible. The buzz of flies and the hum of a lawn mower create a hollow place inside my skull where every sound I make, every creak of my joints and dry hiss of breathing, echoes. I fill more boxes.

I sort nothing, but I cannot keep myself from noticing what passes through my hands. When I was very small and she still shopped for us both, she would buy me cheap plastic toys, the ones from bins near the check-out line. I don’t remember wheedling for them, as other children did. She bought them spontaneously, for generosity, or because she thought she should. And here they are, though I could have sworn they were all broken or lost by the time I walked away. Rubbery Santas with moveable limbs. Wind-up eggs with chicken feet. A blue monster with a goofy grin that cannot be more than a year or two old. This is a character in an animated movie I saw advertised, and I realize the obvious, that she has been buying these toys for herself. I find them under the coffee table, between the cushions of the orange couch, clotted with dust on the windowsills. Why? Why?

I leave her bedroom for last. I am down to my final package of trash bags and all the boxes are full, crowding the weed-cracked walk to the curb. I empty the closet with my eyes half closed, my mind a stupid tangle. I refuse to think, refuse to see, yet somehow I know when this dress in my gloved hands is torn all up one side, I know when the crotch of these trousers is stiff with urine and blood. Shaking, eyes swarming with black (flies, but I also have not eaten, nor drunk, I did not think to bring water or food, and would have swallowed none of it if I had) I fill the last of the bags and realize I have made a mistake.

The bright bottles still line the walls, and all the boxes are full.

When the odd-job man comes, I pay him in cash and he drops me at the motel on his way to the dump. He has promised to come tomorrow for the furniture.

Thank God. The laundromat is open all night.

light leaves but something lingers

vibration warmth sound something

something troubles the air

flies perhaps? searching for lost substance

(the djinn searching for hidden me)

where am I? here nowhere

else surrounded by nightmare

and some walls

lamps linger unlighted I reach

for brightness and find

only djinn

(dark beacon)

I want

I am wanting

where am I?

I ride the bus in the morning, exhaustion riding me. I have not slept since I left home. (My home, that is, not hers.) It seems no matter how hard I scrub, no matter how hot the water is, I cannot rid myself of the stink of her death. The rented bed gives me no rest as I breathe, stifled, through motel sheets. There is a neon sign above my window. Light the color of beer bottles strobes in and out through the shut window with a rattle of papery wings. Last night I turned on the air conditioner for its noise and huddled under the thin blanket, shivering and wishing for day.

I unlock the door, but before I go in I take a tour of the outside. Sunlight illustrates the balding stucco and sagging eaves. Suddenly, I hear in my mind a realtor’s phrase “project home” and recall the possibility of laughter. When I find the garden hose attachment and turn the tap to release a stream of first rusty, then clear water, I can believe I might drink from it later. It is going to be a hot day, and I have brought a box of crackers for my lunch.

The smell seems to have abated, but it rises when I begin to wrestle with the furniture, as if it has transmuted into dust. A haze forms as I lever the couch through the doorway, and it never quite abates. I go to the tap often, drink, douse my head. Water from my hair runs down my back beneath my shirt, mingling with sweat, then drying on the warm breeze. I remember this kind of interior weather, so different from the coast where I live now, June heat lifting off the earth to spin high moisture into clouds. White cumulus drift the arch of blue, but in a day or two there will be storms. I picture myself impossibly tall, lifting off the roof and letting the rain and lightning in.

Daylight is brutal to my mother’s things. Cheap laminate and seventies upholstery are frayed by abuse, lacquered with stains. Couch and recliner, kitchen table and chairs, battered dresser wearing a thick layer of candle wax: they hunker on the brown grass like hobos waiting for a train. Weary and ready to collapse. By noon I have cleared out everything but my mother’s bed.