The Death of Small Creatures (32 page)

Clinical Note:

Erotic transference: she claims to obsess less about me now due to the ECT and having a lot to do, such as work, writing, visiting with her sister. “I have always obsessed about someone in my life,” she says. “Now it's you.”

When I'm not
out walking, I'm often in therapy.

Dr. P and I fall into a new rhythm.

“You have to admit, somewhere inside of you, there is some desire to be with me. There must have been a time when you were tempted,” I say.

“Temptation is one thing,” Dr. P says. “It's what we do with that temptation that matters.”

“So you have been tempted?” He smiles, shakes his head, rubs his eye with his pinkie finger. My need for his love has transformed itself, at least somewhat, into something intellectual. I long to understand the nature of my relationship with him now that I know we'll never be together romantically. I long to understand if ever there was a time, even years ago, in the beginning of our therapy sessions, in the period of enchantment we called it, that he wanted me or at least fantasized about being with me. I feel like this knowledge would be enough to satisfy me. But he just won't give. “Maybe there's hope for us in another life?”

“You need to believe that,” he says. “It sustains you.”

I nod, look at my hands. I note the fading scars on the interior portion of my right wrist, then the dark red welt higher on my left wrist from where I sliced down hard this past time before being admitted to the hospital.

There are many scars on my wrists, seven or eight on each wrist but many finer scars outlining the thicker ones where I struck down again and again trying to hit the same mark.

But the shame is softening. I have entered into a phase of self-forgiveness.

Calvin wants to
go home. I am mad at the kitten but at the same time feel I have done something wrong.

It's shame blossoming into sadness so sad I can't bear it. And so I don't. I push it away.

All my life I'll do this: bury it, hide it, push it away.

I say, “Kitty?”

In the place of it will be a mode of emotion resembling but never equalling pain: an ache for something that never was; a splinter in the numbed palm.

This is not the kitten I promised, not the one I bragged about, the one I proclaimed was mine and mine alone.

“What's wrong with it?” Calvin says.

Something is different about the world. I'm flushed. The window in the screen door, the autumn sky, tilts back and forth, a porthole on a ship at high seas.

I'm a little dizzy.

“I think she's dead,” I say. I'm holding a dead thing for the first time ever.

Calvin goes to grab her, but I don't let him. “I wanna see,” he says. But he is a boy, and boys hurt little things: hamsters, birds, kittens, the newborn baby chick stolen from the incubator in the classroom and squeezed until its body cracked and its head fell limp. Boys tear the wings off crickets.

I say, “No!” I say it hard. I will not let him kill her even more. I say, “Maybe she's really okay after all.”

“I'm going to tell,” Calvin says, and darts back into the house.

I sit down in the pile of laundry with the kitten clutched to my chest. I stay this way for a long time, but no one comes. So I pray, under my breath the way Grandma prays under her breath at church, her lips moving ever so slightly. I pray to God, the father, but I get this wrong. “Forgive me father for I have sinned,” I say. All priests are men, and all priests are different versions of God. “I'm sorry,” I pray. “Please make her live again.”

I feel something under my thumb but inside the kitten; a hard thing, like a pellet, inside a soft thing. I look out the dirty glass window again.

There's the first faint star: the star in the violet dusk, the star that is not a star but a planet. I smell the sweetness of grass, leaves and earth. Rotting fruit underneath the tree, an apple lodged at the back of my throat.

I am walking
one night with Anna, a girl I met in Dr. P's therapy group. We are drinking chai tea lattes from Starbucks. I loved Anna right away. She wears cool retro dresses, flashy tights and black combat boots. We stroll along Dallas Road, look out at Port Angeles glittering across the strait. It's pitch black on this road at night, except for the occasional street light. Here is the scent of wet grass, dew, salt and mist in the air. My hair goes curly in the rain. I hate it. The asphalt gleams. One particular bush smells of vanilla, we're not sure why. Traffic moves slowly across the water, a tiny lit-up caterpillar crawling along the horizon. How slowly the cars appear to move from this far away, a thin ribbon of light moving through darkness.

Anna has scars too, physical and emotional. She was diagnosed as borderline years ago, but with the help of Dr. P, other doctors, her husband Grant, family and friends, she has fought her way out of despair, self-injury and alcoholism.

“Are you afraid you'll ever do it again?” I say.

“What?” she says.

“Hurt yourself?”

She pauses. “I hope not.” And I understand that this is the best we can all hope for, to not hurt ourselves again.

“How long has it been since you had a drink?” I say.

“Eight years next month, for Grant and I both.”

“That's awesome.”

Can we also hear the drone of traffic, muffled by water and distance? Surely we cannot and yet I feel the hum inside me, the vibration of life, the vibration of me. This is the sound of where I have come from, the sound of where I am and where I have yet to be. I can do this. I can live. I can be happy. Content?

It is truth humming inside me.

I turn her
over to expose her belly. I can't find an entry wound. Has the flesh already closed around it?

All my life I will retain this notion of having overlooked something important—an entry or an exit wound, evidence. It must have been there.

“You're dead,” I say. I say these words in a room containing only me. But she is still here, in my hand. Surely, she is not gone.

The dryer thumps to a halt. The machine makes its last few sounds—those ticks and clicks—its minutiae of self-remembrance, its cycle complete. Now remorse. I push it away.

Bullets are hard.

Love is liquid.

There is only space now, and the room fills with light.

When we say guts, what do we mean? I have never been able to tell. This swell of interiority will always bother me, its vagueness. I draw the kitten close, breathe into her fur, whisper, “I love you. I love you. I love you,” and move into the process of remembering myself.

The mean vet is said to shoot neighbourhood cats.

Did my kitten somehow crawl back home and settle into some place soft and warm, or did he place her on our back porch as a warning?
How many times have I told you? Keep those damn cats out of my garden.

I look through the back porch window, to Grandma's woodshed that always smells of newborn puppies, of pinkness and milk, then to the back alley beyond the shed, the whole visage altered, askew.

The alleyway has become infinite.

This is what they mean when they say, “Wait till you get older, life is hard.”

Clinical Note:

Cognition better since decline of ECT. She is, however, repeating some vignettes once or twice (i.e. told a week ago and then repeated later), which isn't unusual for someone recovering from ECT. She recently lost her cellphone and nearly lost her job because she forgot to show up two shifts in a row.

I press my
fingers into the kitten's flank, find the pellet with my thumb, roll it around. My throat closes—a softened gag, a tiny choke.

Is it God or Jesus or St. Peter who tells me now to close my eyes and face the light?

Flesh closes around a wound.

Cool air and the scent of chimney smoke drift in through cracks and crevices in the back porch door. The sky is blue, violet, pink.

I lift the kitten into the light.

Close your eyes.

Blotches swirl on the undersides of my eyelids. I follow the blotches from the middle to away, and away into that morphing inexactness.