The Death of Small Creatures (15 page)

But beneath all this are the subtle interludes that bind us into one: waves lapping upon the coral rocks below; the creaking of the gazebo and threshing of tulle; the riffling of flowers—lavender delphinium, pink alstroemeria—and rustling of thistles; and long brown grass rippling away from the sea. And deeper still, the fluted reverberation of being, that music that has neither pitch nor sound, but which resonates through us from some nebulous cosmic gleaming.

“I do,” I say.

Fine grains of sand float over my feet.

I take you for all eternity.

On the shuttle
back to the Santa Clara airport, I let my head rest against the window and absorb the vibration of my oil-dependent transport, consider the implications of my being here on this bus with my Canadian passport, my dress down there with the cargo, the delicate fabric absorbing exhaust. I wonder if years from now my gown will retain the scent of oil the way a rag does.

I think of that moment a few nights prior to our departure when at long last Sting appeared on the veranda as a Cuban orchestra played Frank Sinatra in the middle of the room, how our eyes locked for a moment; how he stared right at me. I believe we connected for an instant, before he draped his arm around his wife Trudy and they floated through the lobby like the superstars they are. Will Sting also retain in his consciousness (his whole life through) some faint recollection of that girl in the lobby, some faint recollection of someone as inconsequential as me?

The bus lurches to a halt, and I think of Uncle Sam and the stoic Cuban
. Señores Imperialistas…

As I gaze down at my hands folded in my lap and admire my manicure, I recall also the hard nip of the turtle's bite as I lowered her down into the moat surrounding the main building and whispered, “Swim away turtle… be free.”

I imagine an unexpected deviation off-course, that we toss our tourist cards out the window, turn toward Guantanamo and set up camp outside the gates of the prison compound—Leigh and Sting and me in my white dress with a sign that reads:
Gentlemen imperialists, we are absolutely not afraid of you.

Journal

April 7, 2009

Soon, I will leave. Staying has become unthinkable.

I will break it off, move back to Vancouver, settle in, get a life. This time, if I go, I will go towards something defined and planned. I will not just throw caution to the wind with neither the money nor strength to follow through with it.

I still love my husband.

We haven't spoken in several days. I have not slept in the bed with him, upstairs, in at least a week. I spend most of my time in the basement in the bunny room with my rabbits. I am becoming part-rabbit.

April 9, 2009

I am so fucked.

Marital status: bordering on unbearable.

Leigh has been content, as we have had sex lately, usually while I'm semi-conscious, unguarded. He does not realize the marital situation has become unbearable for me. I don't have the energy to resist sex anymore.

I just lie there.

This temp job is slow, hence my blogging. I am at my desk writing to you now. My hands are sweating. My body is shaking. The clock ticks on the wall. There is that quiet whir of air moving through this office. I smell paper and ink. I am sitting here smelling paper and ink, enraged, so sick and tired, wanting to throw this stapler across the room, break the window, bang my head against the computer monitor, jab my own leg with a Bic pen.

They seem oblivious to my presence, satisfied that I occupy space at this desk.

I have decided to wait on making any profound moves—departures from the marriage, fleeing to Vancouver and so on—until I have spent some time speaking with the neuropsychiatrist on my April 22 appointment.

I am dying under the pressure in my home.

April 10, 2009

Yesterday, I was a food vacuum.

Today, any sense of craving or hunger is non-existent. My appetite is swinging in conjunction with my moods. I should ask the doctor about this.

I feel nauseous. That's how I remembered I haven't eaten today.

It's 4 am and I'm still revving. Am I hypomanic? I want to stay up, keep going and going, to write more and more and more. Eventually I'll plummet, grow fatigued, start falling asleep all over the place.

I literally fell asleep while sitting in my chair at my desk at work today, just for a second, you know, when the head lolls and you flinch awake again. That happened about five times, then I went out for a break and got a double Americano.

I am a boomerang: a bent or angular throwing club typically flat on one side and rounded on the other so that it soars or curves in flight; especially one designed to return near the thrower, or an act or utterance that backfires on its originator

I am an “act or utterance that backfires on its originator.”

I have also been known to curve in flight.

April 12, 2009

I am moving away from pretty things. I am sick of pretty things and hardwood floors and Chintz couches and fancy sheets. Our marriage has been gilded by a superficial prettiness punctuated by an underlying sickness, punctuated by pretence and falsehood and pain.

But then again, would the grit and hard knocks of the world out there eat me up and spit me out?

I am not well enough.

April 19, 2009

I feel nauseous. Having such a hard time with food lately. It's a control thing. It's the only thing I can control in my life right now. If I'm not starving, I'm puking my guts out. Jesus, I'm falling apart. The other day I was high at the grocery store, looked down and realized I had puke on my shirt. I'm hardly human.

Six

The Fall of Rome (July 2007)

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.

Nothing would be what it is,

because everything would be what it isn't.

– Alice

I'm on my
knees, sorting through a pile of laundry. The carpet smells of rabbit pee, reminds me of the kitten pee in Grandma's couch when I was a kid.

Six months ago I got married in Cuba.

I worry that I am incapable of getting close to anyone, that I am the source of every problem, that I am making the biggest mistake of my life.

“Do you have any idea how badly you've fucked me over?” Leigh says.

I am high on NeoCitran, DXM. In the corner of the room, my rabbit Caravaggio twitches his ears.

Losing your mind hurts.

“I'm sorry,” I say. He touches his forehead, searching, confounded. My body is floating, filled with helium. I am a shiny silver balloon drifting around, grazing stucco and energy-efficient light bulbs. “It's not you, it's me,” I say.

He mouths, “Bitch.” No sound comes out.

I pop another pill, have another sip of Neo.

“So that's how it is,” he says. “It's the little bitch, is it?”

I blink, stricken, feel a sickle scrape my interior; the implacable core. Cut out my guts. Only a stone bowl remains.

“Please—stop,” I say. “I'm so sorry.” A sock falls from my hand, and I become a quarry.

It's 2003.

I haven't slept in over thirty hours. Leigh slept soundly on the plane. He doesn't dream. He tells me this when we first meet. He doesn't say, “I don't remember my dreams.” He says, “I don't dream.” This irks me to no end. Nor does he have a sense of smell. I wonder if he can taste or see or hear. I don't feel his hands upon me when he touches me.

I'm not there. I'm not here.

I look out the window as the plane descends upon Rome and am stricken by its plain earthen topography, its dull ochre landmarks. No green. No trees that I can see from this high up.

I want to go home.

We wait for our luggage to come out on the conveyor belt, both of us dying for a cigarette. “Let's just step outside and have one,” Leigh says. (It occurs to us only later that everyone is smoking inside the terminal.)

“Let's go,” I say.

It's blazing outside, thirty-five Celsius, no wind. The sky is cerulean.

We have our smoke and go back inside. Two
Carabinieri
stop us on the way in and raise their arms. They have shotguns strapped around their chests. “
Basta!
Stop!” they shout. My blood turns cold. We have exited the airport, failing to recognize that you can't just waltz back in again the way you came. I think,
Fuck
.

“Passport!” they shout.

We explain that we didn't know you couldn't just leave and walk back in, that we are Canadian, we didn't know, really, we didn't know and “Here's our passports.”

They look at our passports carefully, shake their heads, laugh and let us pass.

Only in Italy.

We take the train to Termini. I'm so tired I tilt my head against the glass window, feel the sun blaze against my forehead, sweat pouring down my back. In the rubble alongside the tracks, cats rummage for food or water. It breaks my heart, and I feel selfish for feeling sorry for myself. Peace flags hang from windows of ghetto-like buildings across the way.

When we arrive, pigeons dart through the air as Billy Joel sings “Always a Woman” on the loud speaker, and vendors selling cheap perfume and fake Gucci sunglasses beckon us to their tables.

“I just want to find our hotel and go to sleep,” I say, and Leigh smiles ineffectually, says, “Sure, honey, we'll be there soon.” I hate him for saying this, for his assumed sweetness, because I am hot and tired and filled with hatred.

We flounder up and down a few streets trying to find our way to Hotel Dolomiti, which is evidently close to Termini, the guidebook assures us. Leigh doesn't want to ask for directions. I march up to a man in uniform, a security guard I think, and say, “
Dov'è Via San Martino, por favor?
” He grimaces. Perhaps he thinks I'm American. He points down a street behind him, uttering a stream of sentences in Italian I can't even slightly understand.

“
Grazie
,” I say.

Fifteen minutes later we find our hotel and a beautiful young Italian woman with thick, long black hair, perfect skin, full lips and amber eyes shows us to our room. “I bet you liked that,” I say to Leigh after she leaves. He's already sprawled on the bed, leaning back with his hands folded behind his head.

He winks, “It wasn't bad,” and he slides down on the slippery gold bedspread and his head hits the headboard hard.

Leigh grabs a
dark green bottle of dry cherry Pinot Noir, removes the cork but breaks glass. “Fuck!” he says, but pours anyway. “Just go.”

“There might be glass in there,” I say.

“Whatever,” he says.

“You can't drink glass,” I say.

Often boozy but always elegant, Leigh swings a crystal glass to his lips, fills his mouth and gulps hard. “You're making the biggest mistake of your life,” he says.

I fold my vintage
Rocky
T-shirt, a sweater, a pair of jeans, discard a blouse, worry my trembling fingers through the disarray, through these clothes that will never be right.

The ochre curtains
are backlit by the sun. I open my eyes, hear the clatter of dishes in the hallway outside our hotel room, room service probably. Leigh is humming in the bathroom, content, unaffected. This has always bothered me, that he lives his life in a state of splendour, comfortable in his skin, no nightmares.

I can be hard on him.

“What are you doing?” I snap.

He comes out, smiling, kisses me on the forehead, says, “Honey, we're in Rome!”

I want to punch him.

My contempt for him comes from deep inside me, because he is a man who appears not to suffer, because I seem to be a convenience in his life, a prize on his arm, a financial partner, because he is a man who cannot save me from myself.

I'm starving.

We head out into the evening in search of paninis and wine, find ourselves quite by chance on the Spanish Steps. Nearby is indeed a panini stand. We both order ham and cheese. They don't sell wine, but we buy two bottles of cold beer instead. The panini vendor pops the caps for us.

The light is ethereal, crimson. I feel lit up from within, and the poison drains from me for a few brief moments.
Yes, I am in Rome. I am in the cradle of civilization.

Imperium sine fine
: an empire without end.

Bloodshed and colonialism. Art and architecture. Jupiter's progeny. Where do I, as a Canadian woman, fit into this regime? The empire stretched from Hadrian's Wall and encircled the Mediterranean. As I look out from the Spanish Steps and soak in the light, I feel the bloodshed and beauty that has defined this place. Part of me wants to exalt, the other to despair.

A gentleman in a tuxedo approaches from the bottom of the steps, seems to hone in on me. He is a beautiful Italian man with brown swept hair and dark brown eyes. “
Signora
, a rose for you, no?” And he extends a red rose.

I smile, smitten. “Thank you,” I say.

Then he hands me another, and another. “Beautiful lady,” he says. “Beautiful roses for beautiful lady.”

Leigh grimaces with each rose and finally says, “Enough, thank you.” I flush with embarrassment as the gentleman says, “Twenty euro,” takes his money and leaves me there, mortified by my stupidity.

“I swallowed glass,”
Leigh says. His demeanour has softened.

I imagine a nugget moving downward through his body: a green jewel, an emerald. I want to fall into his arms, soothe him, let him soothe me. It's okay, it's all right, it was just a nightmare, honey.

“My sister is coming to pick me up,” I say.

“Are you sure?” he says.

“I gave notice at work today.”

He slumps into the green wingback chair we never got around to re-upholstering. “I don't understand,” he says. Then—“Why?”

That “Why?” is like a divining rod divining deep into my heart. I'm letting go of almost a decade together.

My hands touch upon various items: a scarf, a sweater, an underwire bra. But what is there to hold onto now? Everything falls to the floor.

“She'll be here in ten minutes,” I say, and blink teardrops. “Maybe one day we can work this out.”

Part of me wants to stay. Part of me wants to run away. Is this all just part of my fight or flight tendencies?

It's mental: a bipolar thing, or a borderline thing perhaps. It's emotional dysregulation.

“When you leave,” he says, “take the bloody rabbit with you.”

It's fear of real or imagined abandonment, amplified reactions to rejection, running away then sprinting back again, or rage and hostility, holes punched in the kitchen walls, glassware hurtled out the window onto the street just to hear something break, too much booze and drugs, too much of everything I've used for so long to make it stop, to make me oh so comfortably numb, swaying back and forth in the darkness with Roger Hodgson, Clapton or Bowie softly singing, “Ground control to Major Tom… can you hear me?”

“If you walk out that door, that's it,” he says. Another threat, another ultimatum. The green jewel is brightening now.

“I know,” I say.

I search for things that belong to me. But the future is uncertain. There is no rational method of accumulation. No right choice. 
There's the hairline, the nape of his neck where his boyhood exists; all those unwanted haircuts.

“I trusted you,” he says. “Leave the rings and the credit cards.”

I take off my rings, place them on the buffet along with the credit cards.

My chest is heavy with the weight of it: my incubus.

Leigh goes to the bedroom and yanks my clothes from hangers, then throws them at me from across the room. His eyes are red, like he's been crying. His hair is tussled.