small solace (this is story lyric -- still working on it)

 

Small Solace

Both my brothers refused to read. It wasn’t that they didn’t read entirely. It’s that they refused to read any fiction at home. No novels, no fairy tales, no stories, not even comic books and mysteries. They shuttered up what they picked up – imprisoned in what was absolutely necessary for school. And the fiction or poetry they had to read for their English teachers they managed to confine to our school library, hunched over the wooden tables scored with names, cradled in the voluminous books that were stacked up along the walls of that room.

I read everything and anything. It didn’t matter what it was. On my way back from school I would persuade whoever was bringing me home to stop at the David Sassoon Library so I could hurry in, turn to/stand before whatever magazine came to hand that had short stories, novellas or lyric somewhere along its pages. I gathered each phrase, each metaphor, each allusion, each ellipsis in my school bag, carefully tightening the buckle, and caressed them so that I could call upon them at will between my fingers, garnish a sentence with their sounds.

 I became a storyteller. None of us found it easy to fall asleep. We never spoke of it, but when we tucked hands on our hearts, lying side by side at night each of us knew that something unspeakable was on its way and there was nothing we could do. I was the Shahrazad spinning scenes, episodes that jumped with creatures drawn with limbs too big, hands that soothed, possible death stalking the character I knew they would love. Like Dickens who I also read at the time, and who I had learned serialized his novels, I always closed up with a sentence that portended the unexpected the next evening. Years later I have come to see, as I calm myself with serial murderers, that knowing that death was on its way and that the scythe could be held back with sound was a small solace for all three of us.

None of these stories remain now. I have only shards, sharp and probing, I have metaphors, allusions rolling against my skin, but I have them. I have what my mother gave me -- a few sentences. Neither of my brothers recall much. One brother, the one my mother told me about, begins his life as he left India.  When I’ve asked him about it, trying as the eldest to lead him to what we shared in openings of joy, he looks at me puzzled. It’s not even a fog I think, those moments are just not there. I don’t even think he has emptiness, because that would mean that the emptiness was contoured. The other retreats so deep when I probe that he’s nowhere to be found. Both of them after years of fussing and fuming at my father have learned to love him again. Not in the way of forgiveness, where one can be tender to something so hurt. In the way of turning back to someone to whom one went so one could belong to a terrified past. Neither of them remembers, but perhaps that return is the only sort of memory they can offer or afford for themselves.

Trauma lives in allegory, that is where one can remember, leave even as one stays. Serial killers and dreams are my allegories.  The thing I’ve learned about trauma so acute that it slithers though one’s bones, the thing many years of therapy finally helped me see is that one has to release one’s attachment to trauma to dream that it could float away like ashes poured out on a stream. Pain is after all what so much of my childhood was (I’m not ready to cede all my memories to it). And I had to understand that I could have my memories in whatever shape, plot, ghost or image  came to hand, and yet not have them sticky cling to the insides of my thighs. I’m not quite ready to let go of the allegories though.

But when I finally began to let go of my father it was as a realist allegory. A dream-story. My friend Maureen told me she’d always wanted to write a symphony. As she was going to sleep, she asked for it. She awoke in her dream space sitting at a piano she couldn’t play; a symphony sang to her. That night I was being chased by a wraith, a miasma, who, knife extended winnowed me into a parking lot. Juggling through layer after layer of cars, knowing that once I reached the top all I had left to me was to jump. And I thought to myself – Maureen did it. I turned, stopped. Reached into my pocket and felt the edge of a knife. Let the knife bleed my palm open; punch it into my pursuer. As dreams and films are wont to do, and in the same odd ways in which I would lay out the culmination of each night’s stories for my brothers, I jump cut. To a hospital. Looking through a window at my father’s face shrunk on the pillow, I think – I’ll go to jail, does it matter.