Permagel

by Eva Baltasar

Life belongs to others, it always has. I am here and I see it passing, life passes by other lives; life is a mirage that is real and unfathomable, and it flows through the lives of others, sating them with water, bloating them into double chins. The fact that my turn had come was an accident. Not an accident à la Porphyry—not this time—but logical in a neoscholastic sense. My life is an accident, predicable and transgressive. It gives no ontological meaning to my existence, but rather occupies it like a sentinel, where it grows strong and renders me absolute. Self-justified, life destroys me.

My physical presence in dreams is simple and improbably crisp, like a medieval illustration in an incunable at the British Library with primary colors pure as can be; the body invisible and solemn, face rigid, practically Egyptian, yet open thanks to eyes wider than they have ever been and hands whose two fingers—the ones usually used to nudge the ovum deep inside the cunt—are raised in warning, like in images of grown-up angels, and feet—feet bare and hovering centimeters above the head of an enormous snake.

Imminence is just the carrot dangled by the future to keep us present. I fall for it all the time.

How could I get her to understand that I was beyond help? Without hurting her? Without snuffing out that lovely, animate, impermanent flame? In this woman? In vocation incarnate? In her white coat and Sistine Madonna-esque halo that the sharp light had drawn around her, filtered through the blinds? Did I really have to go and do that to her?

I learned about this later. And when I did, it dawned on me that Roxanne was the only woman I had ever left for the simple reason that I was made to feel subhuman in her company, like a plaster mold from which she cast a life of abundance, a life open to the world, as simple and elegant as a Courbet and of the same overwhelming beauty, as pure as a morning of blue skies.

The helplessness and levity, the emptiness and perfection of Roxanne and her forearms when they were still forearms without any trace of history.

She’s an exceptional girl with no choice but to grow under the dark dome of a bell jar.

The hospital absorbs into its perfect organism the body and what remains of the caregiver’s soul, and the outside world is forgotten.

I promise to keep her pictures safe until she can see them.

I cry all over myself, even though I don’t want to and don’t not want to. Hundreds of mothers have fallen to pieces in this bathroom, I think. But I’m not crying for Clàudia and I don’t think I am crying for me, either. I weep like sugar from fruit left too long on a branch. I melt. I give in. I turn little by little into a sack of bones.

Clàudia looks at me without seeing. She wants a truth to hold onto. “It’s going to hurt a little, but then it’ll pass. I’ll be right here with you,” I promise. The doctors look at me like I’ve gone mad. Clàudia screws up her face and screams as the needle breaks her skin and slowly enters her vein, but she keeps her arm steady with an impressive force of will as her small hand crushes the bones in mine. She later confesses that the hands of the nurse holding down her ankles had hurt even more than the needle. I hug her and she hugs me. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so embraced. Clàudia puts her ear to my chest and listens to my heart, which is spurred by her to deepen its beat. A hard-rock lullaby grows inside me, cracking the permafrost. I break, and as I break the only thing I want to do is bury my face in Clàudia’s hair, which is shiny and beautiful even under the fluorescent light.

I observe the way she and Clàudia interact. The girl is protective, and every little thing my sister does is a thing she has learned from being a mother, and though she demonstrates infinite care for her daughter, it somehow remains inexplicably outside the realm of real communication. I want my sister to go home and leave me with Clàudia. Some wishes come from an intolerable place; they’re as filthy as a shovelful of manure and just as nutritious.

I am an imperfect woman, stiff as licorice, flinty and exasperating as a splinter of rabbit bone wedged between two molars. I hope they find me before the birds spot my eyeballs. Birds have always inspired in me a sort of ancestral terror; their despotic beaks admit no feelings and I have feelings.

Her eyes are now large mirrored wells that have started to spring leaks, drenching and neutralizing the hostile chemistry with subsoil efficiency. When I look at her, I see a lake lost in its own depth, a lake black and crystal clear. She learns from it and I unlearn from her. I draw away and pace up and down spiral staircases that fill me and try to communicate something to me. I’ve realized that I know myself by heart—I know myself to the point of recognizing people who don’t exist and yet complement me. I know myself like a path that leads home, like a doorless corridor, like endless guardrails. I know myself like a decade-long involuntary commitment. To end and be done with it.

Even though I’m single, even though I’m gay, even though I’m suicidal. Auntie is a responsible person now. This morning, I made myself some fresh orange juice and washed it down with pills. I smile without crying. Smiling like this thaws the permafrost. The violin plays on. Families huddle like villages under siege. But the savagery that stalks and besieges us—is life.