I must pick the way for myself through this darkness. I unstitch my body, milk my vertebrae from the earth, wringing rung by rung by rung, ‘til a spinal column hums in the black. I become from clay, sediment, a string of costume pearls, a set of false teeth, a teddy eye, lost shoes along the canal. I take the breath of a man under a newspaper, half-asleep in the cold. I drift in the Cape Doctor, am cloaked by suburban soot, and go quietly where robots and restaurant signs bruise the dark with colour. In the garden, the air is enfleshed with jasmine and cut with cigarette smoke. I climb the wall. I hear your voice, your voice, your voice, then the voice of another – his – and, distantly, shrouded in static, a third, lifted in song. The recording of the baritone, Mattei, singing the Winterreise: Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus. The noise of wandering things, of flotsam life. A stranger I arrived here, a stranger I go hence.
I cloud the stained glass, blurring the scene to its rudimentary colours. You two. In gold and obsidian. At the table, heads bowed towards each other, as if tethered together with fishing wire, bobbing over the current of sound. There is a half-finished chess game between you. Black is winning. Above the mantelpiece is a map of Oaxaca – browned with age and innervated with blue borderlines – and a building designed by Hundertwasser sketched by your hand, layers of ink suggesting the webbed confectionary overgrown with moss and ferns – a vision of a decayed future, he said once, which Nature has claimed as hers. The architect was buried naked under a tulip tree upon his death. He told you this just after he crossed the ocean, just before you realised you were afraid of his death, before you knew a phantom limb reached for him, before he sent you recordings of him playing clarinet which made you cry and before his eventual return where you found him on the steps with long hair, squinting in the bright midday light. You had placed the drawing in his sun-reddened hands then wondering how you felt about him. Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe.
I love, you say to him. You often say this word, love, but at a slant, at a remove, with that sly hope that you will not be taken too seriously, that you will be understood in the American sense – I, like, love you, said one reality TV star to the other. You hope to sound like the clean, plasticine voice in the advertisement, the one which tells you that you’ll love your new machine, the one where they peel back the grey metal to reveal the sinews of the circuit board, electrified by cobalt. I love how the piano walks. You mime footsteps, paw the air with heavy palms, as Mattei’s voice, so goes the story, winds its way through the snow, heartbroken. The voice is not his alone. It is undead, a ghost three times over, moving from body to body to body. In it rings the poet-soldier (1823), the composer dying of syphilis (1828), and the singer (2019). Elena Gerhardt, the mezzo-soprano in her crushed velvet, bowed bonnet, and Chinese pearls said, You have to be haunted by this cycle to be able to sing it. Tonight, new breath rises to walk in the voice, reedy and feminine, between your lips. You hobble your queen across the board, unsure.
When you were young, I would tug at your sleeve in the blue light of almost-dawn and we would walk outside, to the edge, where the canal hissed in summer and sang in winter and we cast pebbles, petals, and sticks into the stream, indexing the speed and buoyancy of each material, learning each sound against the water. On the last of these occasions, we heard a man’s voice, just beyond the wall, rumbling raw and dusty like a broken machine. Your heart rushed with blood and you ran so fast that your feet were cut over and over on the bricks. Under the duvet, your soles glowed white-hot with the little lacerations and frantic wings beat against your ribcage. I was the one who sheltered your eyes and swam alongside you in the dream of the tide coming in, blanketing the city, until all that remained were spires extending out of the horizon. Once I came too close and pushed you down, down, down until you couldn’t breathe, your soft, pale body paralysed, rigid. I could taste your skeleton, milkwhite, brittle metropolis beneath a tsunami tongue, the great greyblue mouth suckling the earth beneath the bridges and the storefronts, remembering, remembering. We emerged from each other, drenched and shaking, undrowned. The suburban quiet crawled back to you. The ratatat of rat feet in the roof. The sigh of the wind. A dog barking.
The next night, you placed a hand on your father’s scapula, the mountainous, barely-breathing, barely-alive back. Your voice came as barely-sound, as low and as thin as water in drought: Turn around; turn your beautiful face towards me. He remained in stone, after-the-bomb-still. Days later he left for the last time; you did not hear him. Sollst meinen Tritt nicht hören – You must not hear my footsteps— It was as if he slipped through the fissure between the two halves of the front door, the crack where the streetlight pours into the hallway and casts yellow shadows across the floor, stitching over and under the black as cars passed by. Sacht, sacht die Türe zu – soft, softly shut the doors.
Tonight, I will stay with you. I will unpick myself as you dismantle the chessboard, undress, and quiet the music. I will be in the dust on the window pane. I will watch you lying beside him, with a hand on his back, running your palm between the shards of red and brown, the fossil fragments beneath the skin. It is cartography, a commitment to memory – memory of the present in the present tense – picking your way through the darkness until slowly, slowly, sleep takes you, a soft death.