At the Edge of Waking (25 page)

I lie in the narrow shade at the back of the house where I cannot see the detritus of her days. The dead grass by the tap is damp from all the splashes I made getting clean. I cannot be clean, of course, my clothes are brown with filth, but I have rinsed hands, arms, face, neck. Lying down, my belly dips toward my spine, my shoulders quietly ache. I can feel the hairs stand up on my arms as they dry. I should be hungry but the water is cool in my stomach and requires no company.

A phrase my mother used when I tried to get her to eat: Thank you, love, but momma’s tipple requires no company just now. She only called herself momma, I never did. When I spoke to her it was never as anything but mom.

She never hit me. She never failed to know when I came home, unless she was unconscious. She always asked how was I, how was school. I walked in one morning, having spent the night elsewhere (I knew a hundred places to sleep. Most of them would have surprised the people at school who only saw me in the library.) and found her sitting in the kitchen wrapped in the soft blue robe I had given her the Christmas before. Her glass was orange, so she was still working on her hangover, but she smiled at me, so the cure was nearly complete. There was a pack of cigarettes at her elbow, one lit in her hand, the box of matches by the bottle of gin with its cap screwed on tight. She always screwed on the cap between drinks.

She smiled, squinting through smoke to see my face, and said, quite sweetly, Hello, love. You’re not home from school already, are you?

It’s Saturday, mom.

Well, come give your old momma a kiss. She held open her arm, gesturing me in, and I stepped into her embrace.

Lord, aren’t you a bony thing? she said. With a rusty chuckle she added, Better hope it lasts.

I gave her shoulders a squeeze and pulled away to go to my room. That was when I discovered her rages, the first time she had vented them on my things. Perhaps she had been looking for money, perhaps she had only noticed I wasn’t there, I don’t know. I was fourteen years old.

The flies have followed the furniture outside, or followed the flavor of water on the breeze. They light on my hands, my hair, the damp scarf I put to dry in the sun. The touch reminds me of the chore I have been avoiding. The bed with the coffin-shaped stain. I could put it off until the pickup man arrives, the double mattress is legitimately unwieldy, but I won’t. The bottles still line the walls.

Even though they’ve been given the run of the house and the outer air, the flies still crowd together on the stain. I find myself easing my way around the bed, as if I won’t disturb them when I shift the mattress. I know without looking that the blue-patterned fabric is crawling with maggots. I mean to avoid this horror by tipping the mattress from the far side, and carrying it with the underside next to my body. I must be calm and unhurried, strong and exact in my movements, for loathing writhes beneath my skin and panic rattles its hooves against my ribs.

But the mattress is too large. The steel bed frame takes up the center of the floor. And when I trip, and flail, and catch myself, I kick a bottle. A hundred gleaming cylinders roar beneath my feet, shattering the sunlight though every one of them is whole. Blind with light, bathed in sweat, battered by the hurtling wings and clinging, pattering, ubiquitous feet of flies, I

I can’t tell the rest.

chaos fire the lamps are spilled the lamps

are spilled and the djinn

is free

The odd-job man has brought a friend, or perhaps it’s his son, to help. When he sees all the furniture he says, “Sure you want me to take it all to the dump? Some of this is still good.”

“No,” I say. “The dump.”

He looks at me, while the younger man scuffles his feet. “You should of told me you were shifting it all yourself. That’s too much work for a girl, and in this heat.”

“You’ll need to do two trips,” I say.

He looks at me, at the furniture, at his friend. “At least,” he says.

I can see the messages they’re passing one another. They mean to sell what they can. Double the wage they’ll earn from me: a forty-pounder of rye to go with the case of beer.

I say, “That’s everything,” and go back inside. It’s dusk, and I take the shades off the ceiling lights so I can see. Dry insect corpses spill out, covering my bare arms with the dust of their wings, but this scarcely troubles me. I am numb, now, like a soldier in combat. No, like a resident of hell. No. Like a daughter of this house. While the men curse their load into the truck and drive away, I sweep the living room floor. Dust rises, sepia as the walls. I sweep, cough, herd the dust bunnies into the center of the room. My mother called them ghost farts, something that never failed to make me laugh. I can remember sweeping when the broom was so tall I could barely control it. I rapped the handle twice against my forehead, but I kept on. The clean house was to be a surprise for my mother on her birthday. The only present I had to give her. When she came home.

When she came home I was asleep on the rough orange couch. I woke to hear her trying to tiptoe around the house. She was looking for me, in my room, in her room, not finding me. When she finally teetered into the living room I squeezed my eyes closed and pretended to sleep. She leaned over me, dark mother warm, and I could hardly breathe in her umbra of cigarettes and gin. Still, I did not stir. She stroked my hair off my forehead with the hand that held her cigarette. Ashes stung. She kissed me, and then groped her way to the recliner by the window. I heard her sit, and cough, and sigh. She fell asleep. When I got up in the morning I found the butt of her cigarette on the floor beneath her dangling hand. The coal had burned a black spot into the wood.

There is a galaxy of black spots on the floor revealed by my broom. Their constellations sketch out where the furniture used to be. This is the blue chair. This is the vinyl. This is the end of the couch. Stains make nebulae blurred by the atmosphere of dust. My head seems to drift high above me, orbiting the light bulb sun with the flies. The flies are only flies, restless in all this space. But their shadows dart near then far across the walls, waltzing to the music of the spheres. I myself, sweeping, can hear nothing but a distant ringing of bells.

presence, movement, life stirs up all the dreams

the djinn begins to stalk and I

crawling from my scattered womb

begin to stalk the djinn

Scrubbing out the bathroom I make a discovery: once I fail to distinguish my clean self from the rest of this place, it becomes less horrifying. It takes me in, and within it, I begin to transform. Washed by night breezes, rinsed by ammonia and sweat, the air slowly loses its heavy burden of rot. Moving the furniture probably also helped. The rooms echo like the inside of drums. I don’t understand why, bright and empty, they seem smaller than they had dark and full.

The pickup man comes for the last load and I pay him for his time. He offers me a ride again, but there are two of them already in the cab and I know how filthy I am. Besides, what would I do but lie on the motel bed and think of cleaning? I might as well clean. I want this done. The pickup man shrugs and drives away, and I stand on the sidewalk for a moment. The sky deepens from blue to blue without ever quite becoming black. Neighbors’ open windows reveal light, movement, talk. A television plays a happy gameshow tune. The streetlight at the end of the block wears a tall halo of moths. I turn and go back in.

I am lost

lost

where have all my landmarks gone?

only the walls remember me and I

cling to them

I would dream but the djinn is here too

lost and also clinging

we swallow each other

two snakes with a single tail

(but there is light

I am afraid the lamps are shining)

I have discovered fanaticism. As if burning eyes are watching me, I kneel, bow to the floor with my scrub brush in hand. My jeans are wet with brown sudsing water, the skin on my knees begins to chafe. My neck is stiff, my back aches, my arms and shoulders burn. I should rest. I should eat. I have an image in my mind, from some movie perhaps, of a woman in black scouring a vast stone floor. Penance, I think, but the word is not relevant. What is relevant is that the floors are coming clean.

I was sixteen when she finally learned to hate me. It was more than just the destruction of my things, my room, I learned not to take these things personally. But her rages were a mystery that struck when I wasn’t there. So many times did I come home to be welcomed with a smile, a kiss in the heart of disorder, I began to wonder if it was really her doing. I invented a companion for her, someone she invited in and then sent away again before I came home. The thought of her befriending someone (a man, of course, in my mind) who could wreak such destruction in my home infuriated me far beyond the possibility of her guilt. I searched for clues to his presence amid the wreckage: cigarette butts of a different brand in the ashtrays, a ball cap left behind, a scribbled note, even, God help me, condoms in the bathroom trash. Even bruises on my mother’s skin. Nothing. He was a phantom. A poltergeist. An absence.

And then one day I came home from school and she threw her glass at me. Get out, get out out
out
! It was a parrot’s shriek, a trapped coyote’s yell. Spittle wet her teeth, her chin. She pounded the kitchen table with her bottle, unable to stand. A knot of bruise on my forehead, my hair wet and stinging with gin, I left. Only for two days that time.

There is a thriving ant farm under the kitchen sink. I flood them with Mr. Clean and wash them all away.

if we had claws this djinn and I

would be piercing each other’s skin

we share eyes with which to see

we mingle

this is not unfamiliar to me

this is not the first time

we have both been set free

together we watch the spaces

we wait for the living to come near

no need to wrestle

yet

Before I can clean the floor of her bedroom I have to carry out all the bottles. They are cool, smooth, heavy. They chime, two in each hand. Their juniper sting is stronger than decay even in the death room now; beyond the door it quarrels with the sweeter chemical scent of cleaning. I rank them in the center of the living room floor, two by two, four by four, gleaming rows. They are shockingly clean. Thick white glass, bright as ice, hoards the light. The labels are all gone, and I remember how she used to peel them away, incrementally, while she drank. She would run an absentminded fingernail underneath the edge, run it under, cutting not the paper but the glue, one stroke, then a drink, a pull on a cigarette, a strike of a match, then another stroke, another. She paced herself, matching the speed of her peeling to the frequency of her drinks. Only the last glass was poured from a pure bottle.

I have numbed myself to powerful smells. Though her room is heavy still with rot and gin, and soon lemon-fresh scent, it seems not much different to me than breathing a coastal fog, only warmer. A warm weight inside my lungs. It is late now, the neighborhood has gone quiet beyond the open windows, and even the flies seem slumberous, butting the nicotine walls. They are fewer than they were. Some have escaped, some, as I discover when I sweep, have died. Black freckles I took for burn scars scatter in the wavefront of my broom. Maggots, too, mark the edge of the mattress, writhing bits of rice. Some remnant of horror tugs the skin of my back. I bare my teeth, breathe across my cringing tongue as I harry them into the dust pan with the corpses of their forebears.

How many generations, it occurs to me to wonder, have bred in the two weeks since she died?

she is here she is here she is here

the djinn knows her almost

as well as I do

his dark excitement burrows

through me we are too close

even now two dragons

mating on the walls

I nestle I cling I

will not let him go

not now

that she is

finally here

She didn’t entirely hate me. The mornings were still safe.

But instead of the sweetness of earlier greetings, she was often sad when I came in. Where you been, love? And I still could not find it in me to hate her, although I now kept all my books and clothes at school. She became, her house became, like the seething store of the subconscious, sheltered from my waking mind. I found an after-school job, I read in the library at lunch, I slept wherever I could, and only sometimes, only sometimes did I dream of going home. Where you been, love? Her voice drowning deep in sorrow and gin.

I have cleaned us into a corner, my bucket and me. Wet floorboards smell darkly of wet dog, patchily drying under the bare bulb. Cruising flies give the peripheral illusion that the light dangles from a swaying cord, but it is set into the ceiling socket, secure. To get the last crevices clean, I lean my forehead against the wall and, two-handed, scrub. I had been thinking accomplishment, completion, but the house conspires otherwise. So close, even the ammonia cannot disguise the odor arising from the plaster wall. Cigarettes and rot, rot, rot.

What a rotten mother you must have had, someone once said to me.

Not really, I said in reply.

But now I know the walls have to be cleaned as well.

now

now we fight

yes djinn is strong

desiring to be free but

I have death on my side

and I will not let him go

we tangle together our