Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [24]
passing wet sky chicory
passing wet sky chicory lies
When he left we sat with the remains of breakfast. The two of us knew at precisely the same time. When Webb was here with all his stories about me and Nora, about Gravier and Phillip Street, the wall of wire barrier glass went up between me and Robin. And when he left we were still here, still, not moving or speaking, in order to ignore the barrier glass. God he talked and sucked me through his brain so I was puppet and she was a landscape so alien and so newly foreign that I was ridiculous here. He could reach me this far away, could tilt me upside down till he was directing me like wayward traffic back home.
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners. And Robin who drained my body of its fame when I wanted to find that fear of certainties I had when I first began to play, back when I was unaware that reputation made the room narrower and narrower, till you were crawling on your own back, full of your own echoes, till you were drinking in only your own recycled air. And Robin and Jaelin brought me back to that open fright with the unimportant objects.
He came here and placed my past and future on this table like a road.
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning. The heat incredible, we go out and buy a bag of ice, crack it small in our mouths and spit it onto each other’s bodies, her tongue slipping it under the skin of my cock me pushing it into her hot red fold. But we are already travelling on the morning bus tragic. Like the ice melting in the heat of us. Dripping wet on our chest and breasts we approach each other private and selfish and cold in the September heatwave. We give each other a performance, the wound of ice. We imagine audiences and the audiences are each other again and again in the future. ‘We’ll go crazy without each other you know.’ The one lonely sentence, her voice against my hand as if to stop her saying it. We follow each other into the future, as if now, at the last moment we try to memorize the face a movement we will never want to forget. As if everything in the world is the history of ice.
Morning. Water has dried tight on my chest and stomach. I wake up crucified on my back in this bed. There is no need to turn. Blue cloud light in the room. There is no need to turn my head for Robin is gone. Already my body has unbuckled out into the space she left. Bending my left hand over my body and then crashing it down as hard as I can on her half of the bed. And it bounces against the sheet. And as I knew, she’s gone.
He went to Webb’s cottage on Lake Pontchartrain on a bus. His hands dead on his thighs and his body leaning against the window, the wet weather outside and this woman on his right in the dark dress who smiled as she took the seat, scribbling something on paper that she is hunched over. Her legs twitching now and then as if her brain is there.
He tried to take in the smell of her. The taste of her mouth in the next hotel room they passed along the road. He knew the shape of her body. As she would stand in front of him, the small breasts cold in the room, the heart of her. He went with her for months into the relationship, awkward first fights, the slow true intimacy, disintegration after they exchanged personalities and mannerisms, the growing tired of each other’s speed. All this before they went one more mile—as she wrote on and he thought on into the heart and mind of her, not even glancing at her as she got off alone at Milneburg for she was an old friendship now and he could guess the expressions, her face for all the moments. Accidental lust on the bus carrying her new into his dead brain so even months later, years later, pieces of her body and character returned. What he wanted was cruel, pure relationship.
Got here this afternoon. Walk around remembering you from the objects I find. Books,