If Language Were Liquid
We headed to Steamboat for a week of frivolity with our friends and I was enamored as always with the snowbound landscape. One day the flakes would fall fat and fluffy, landing on the skin with a tickle, while the next they were tiny and hard, what the locals called cornstarch snow. These little balls of ice prickled when they hit, burning the lips like little nips of fire. My favorite flakes resembled powdered sugar—so fine as to give the appearance of fog shrouding the valley in delicate crystals.
I stood at the window of the house, which was nestled into a copse of fir trees, admiring the statuesque conifers that framed the bowl of the valley like a spiky matte. Their heads shot skyward like shuttlecocks that had blasted off and were then frozen in motion. I'd seen the valley during the summer when it was covered with wild grasses and flowers. Now, it was a vessel filled with sugary powder. The incredible thing about the composition framed by the picture window was that it couldn't have been plotted better if a master painter had composed the scene: the trees directed the eye beyond the valley to the massive peaks that towered in the distance. The stubble of trees and fingering slopes filled in the composition when the clouds moved away, leaving behind them a downy comforter of shaved ice.
One evening we didn't leave the slopes until the sun was sinking low in the sky. The light dallied with the clouds and dappled the mountain in patches of ripe rosiness interspersed with matte-finished smudges of shadow in palest gray. At certain points along the lift-lines, the aspen trees—their gnarled and writhing fingers gathering ice—gave the appearance they were fiddling with Victorian lace. The conifers on the highest slopes seemed to gather powder to their chests, forming great paws that seemed to want to bat the frosty air. I was always happy when storms left their backwash on the slopes so I was teased for being the group's powder hound. As I swished through the fluffy granules, I felt as though I were shooting through a crystalline forest. It wouldn't have surprised me if I'd seen Snow White guiding a prancing unicorn along one of the trails, the puffs of air escaping its delicate muzzle forming plumes of steam that drifted above its conical horn.
After several runs in deep powder, I was feeling the strain in my legs and my lungs, which weren't accustomed to the high altitude, so I took a break from the exertion of skiing, popping Suzanne Vega's cassette Solitude Standing into my Walkman. As I listened to "In the Eye," an idea for a short story started to form, inspired by her lyrics:
"If you were to kill me now
Right here I would still
Look you in the eye
And I would burn myself
Into your memory
As long as you were still alive
I would not run
I would not turn
I would not hi-i-ide…
I would live inside of you
I'd make you wear me
Like a scar
And I would burn myself
into your memory
And run through everything you are…"
The story had as its protagonist a woman named Karrman, who opened her tale with the declaration, "My mother's maiden name was Karr and she couldn't bear to give it up but she wasn't strong enough to keep it herself. I guess that means I'll be her identity until I die."
Her newfound love interest, named Martin, asks, "You mean until she dies?"
"No," Karrman corrects him; "that kind of brainwashing doesn't die with her, it can only die with me—that is unless I have kids and then it's a guaranteed right of succession."
She let out a brash cackle and he knew then and there that if she laughed that way too many times, he'd have to kill her. She did, of course; it was simply who she was, and he snapped one evening—her crassness sending him over the edge. Lost in a blood-pulsing fog, he bludgeoned Karrman to death as Vega's "Night Vision" wafted into the room from the speakers flanking the record player in her apartment:
When the darkness takes you
With her hand across your face
Don't give in too quickly
Find the thing she's erased…
He taped her legs at the ankles as he salivated over the idea of burying her in a snowy field. He decided he couldn't let her go without a souvenir so he cut a piece of the tape that he'd plastered over her mouth—a symbolic gesture that he had shut her up for all eternity—and placed the scrap in his pocket. He looked out the window of her apartment toward the high-rise next door, the lights from which were casting strong shadows into the dim interiors. No one was watching so he took his time savoring his deed, turning up the volume as "Solitude Standing" pulsed out into the room, while sipping slowly on the glass of wine Karrman had poured him. He rocked back and forth to Vega's soulful guitar chords and tentatively beautiful voice:
Solitude stands in the doorway
And I'm struck once again by her black silhouette
By her long cool stare and her silence
I suddenly remember each time we've met
And she says "I've come to set a twisted thing straight."
And she says "I've come to lighten this dark heart."
And she takes my wrist; I feel her imprint of fear
And I say, "I've never thought of finding you here…"
As the word trailed off, he raised the glass, toasting himself, and unleashed a creepy laugh. THWACK! I was startled from my narrative by the sound of skis meeting the ground as a guy dropped his on the snow next to me and sat down to eat an apple. I hadn't realized I'd been sitting on the bench long enough that my ski suit had nearly frozen to the slats of the wood bench. I took off a mitten to check my watch and it hit me that Jim was likely having a heart attack; I just hoped he hadn't already called the ski patrol. What a mess that would be! As I pried myself from the frosty bench and jammed my boots into my skis to head down the mountain, I had a picture of him pacing in front of the dressing rooms down below. I flipped the volume higher on my Walkman and let Vega's "Language" carry me along the power-laden trails:
If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be…
I'd like to meet you
In a timeless, placeless place
Somewhere out of context
And beyond all consequences…
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