The air was as smooth as the inside of her mouth. Or was it that the inside of her mouth had some air in it? Yellow air, yellow mouth. When she sang everything turned daisy and yellow cake in a box. The air was sweet and her mouth was spongy. She had gluestick circles on her hips, the color of lemonade. The gluestick circles were marks that he put there. He put them there with the ease of the air. Spring, yellow, air, flowers, everything sticking together so perfectly. Like gluestick positioning. Like old glue that turns yellow after sitting too long on the skin. Like the singing from the other rooms when her room is silent. The inside of her mouth, half opened, half letting the air swish through her teeth. The yellow teeth. The brushing that the nurse does after she pees half on the seat. Halfway to the door, she leaves a bright yellow path from her bed. I followed it to the sun which collapsed when I blinked. The sun collapsed and the air was smooth, cold, stuck to the inside of a song. So perfectly glue. How the skin will stick to blood, to bone, to the old yellowing band-aids over her thumbs. How when I asked her what is your name she said that she came from a star called "No return" and drooled a little when she said it. No Return from the skin under the band-aid, the smooth wrinkles. Everything here belongs in a song. He checked on her when the beeping began, when the sun collapses into the sticky floor. The beeping sung deep into her ears no return, no return, no return like the chimes someone made from aquatic hipbones, the way a scream sounds when submerged under water.
The doctor returns to the cafeteria with a five dollar bill, which buys him a slim chicken bone plated on top of a superbly white rice. His fork travels slowly from between his thumb and forefinger toward the inside of his mouth. He is slurping Mountain Dew from a straw in a can. The can is dented from a harsh soda-machine journey. The slopes of the machine. The valleys of the tin. Both remind him of the sun, of almost reaching it, as he once stood on a steep edge of Mount Rainier and held out his hands and screamed no return! As he slurps he begins to hear a song. He puts one eye against the aperture of the straw to see the song. The song has a sucking force that makes his eyeball seem more like air than slime. The song makes him blink and the Mountain Dew tears up under his eyelid. The other doctors never watch him, never blink out of jealousy, love, or cruelty. He keeps his one eye inside the straw, bathing in the Mountain Dew. One eye is stuck on the mountain, the smooth air passing over the cornea, hitting the orbital muscles with each ejaculating gust. The other eye makes love to the chicken bone and the halo surrounding it. He thinks of her roaming around, all her bones glued together and moving. Where she's from is yellow and full of flower fields and lemonade stands. Every time she moves the airs turns superbly white, and there is silence. The doctor feels a vibration coming from his right hipbone. He is vibrating like a lawnmower and cautiously removes his eye from the straw in the Mountain Dew. He looks at his reflection in the clear parts of the chicken bone and rice plate. His eye is stained yellow from the Mountain Dew, from the sun which started on his cornea and leaked into pupil, then the lens where the white snow melted off Rainier's edge.
I couldn't tell if she had gone completely or if she was just melting into the snow. The airy, smooth hospital sheets and the snow. The smell of yellow embedded somewhere within the walls, and me. I watched her everyday, but not entirely out of jealousy, love, or cruelty. Some days I would answer that it was mostly love. And some days I would say that it was mostly jealously. And part of every day was cruel--a superbly white cruelty that crept into my cornea, leaking into my pupil, then the lens where my brain was somehow inevitably connected. I couldn't tell if it was winter in the room, but I knew that where she was from was always warm and glowing from the sun or from the mix of the sun and the rain. The doctor had told me about the sinking into the snow, and how the body prepares for the sinking with rapid movements. "Sometimes it will seem violent. Sometimes it will seem like her soul is reaching for the light above our heads." He told me that she will think that she's at a high altitude and she will stay there for maybe a few seconds or maybe for a long time--as long as a month or a year--but then she would sink into the air like a tooth sinks into the smooth inside of a cheek. Some days out of love I would cradle her head like a light bulb. Some days out of jealousy I would lounge next to her and get inside her sheets, giving myself more room on the bed than I should. Some days I would steal her socks and put them on my own feet and I'm not sure if this is considered an act of cruelty or not because where she is from it is always warm and glowing and that she would inevitably be connected to that memory of having white socks on in a field of yellow flowers.
I heard someone down the hall tell her husband that she would stick to him like glue. I heard the glue ripping apart when he sunk into the snow. She was wailing like a wife would be wailing like a wolf on the edge of a mountain, being pushed by the rapid movement of an ejaculating gust. I hear a woman running down the hallway, her shoes sound like tin, crushing the linoleum as though it were a can, making a valley into a footstep. Then I hear another woman running after the first woman, and she is running so fast that she is writing a song. All the notes are behind her trying to catch up but the rhythm is an echo and the echo is white and glowing high above each note. There is the tin valley and the sound of it gets deeper and further away, but I can't leave to see what's happening. We are watching an episode and although this is the same episode as the last one there is something compelling about sitting in a hospital bed wearing white socks, wrapped in layers and layers of sheets, and thinking about how cruel the repetition of love can be when it is based on jealously.
Maybe the air had passed though twenty or hundreds of rooms. Maybe the air was outside her very door. I wait with my eyeballs jutting out like a motor. My eyeballs hum; we sing together--eyeballs and everything else. The telephone, the vibrations in his pants, the space where the window should open, but instead is glued shut. We all wait for the snow to melt or for her. "You can tell they are coming when you stop noticing the shadows." He says this and so I wait for our shadows to disappear.
The doctor always seems like he's leaving in my memory of him.
1 comment:
Keep it going :)
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