Authors: Alexandra Kleeman
This tenderness is a topic of conversation among your neighbors, says Portesquieu with an oiled grin. They say your student can be seen from time to time eviscerating small animals on the grounds. Your friend Madame Rameau suffered from strained nerves after witnessing him gnawing with great contentment on the skull of a rabbit, its fur still largely intact. Or perhaps this is a bit of fashionable choreography that I am too dull to comprehend. Were they dancing the gavotte?
He tips the mug down his gullet. The blood pools in my face and I feel flush with sickly warmth. His face before me resembles a pile of meat, arrayed in the shape of a grin.
One needs only to visit my home in the evenings when we practice conversation to observe how beautifully Victor expresses his nature. Come for dinner, and you will see what a sensitive soul might be revealed in any man once you have scraped off the grime, I say, reaching for my mug. I attempt to quaff my ale in a single robust gesture as Portesquieu does, yet it finds a way around my lips and trails down the corner of my mouth, cuts a path across the curvature of my chin.
7
Other villages have had feral children of their own, whom they have reared and educated; they have had wild boys whose unformed minds struggle to grasp the meanings of
words and pictures, whose hands grope clumsily at pens. But no other village has had a feral child capable of performing the finest functions of the human body and mind. No other wild-born child has been able to speak with grace and refinement, employing the same terms of politeness and formality as high-born men. No other comports himself like a well-bred boy, or works the flute as nimbly as any middling player. Portesquieu would claim that this is impossible, that a body cultivated in the wild assumes the essence of wildness, turns swampy and will not admit of the growth of more refined habits. But with my labor, I prove him wrong: my wild child dances the minuet on command, as well as several other current dances.
The head must be held upright, but not stiff; the shoulders falling back, extending the breast and giving a greater grace to the body. The arms locked, statuesque, with the left extended down to hip level and the right curving gently in front of the breast, forming a frame around the dancer's body to ornament the proportions of the legs and lend gravity to their movement. Fixing the relations between these parts frees the expressiveness of the lower body, just as the verticality of the human anatomy frees man for complex motions of the hand and intellect. Victor struggles to stay upright as I put him through a series of gentle leaps into each of the five positions. But he is malleable as clay, and his body responds with an eagerness to take form when I correct the placement of his head, feet, and hands, when I press the feared rod to his back in order to demonstrate to him what I mean by “straight, perfectly straight, and upright.”
He pants, standing there in fourth position, holding it
decently, but losing shape before my eyes as his body bends beneath the pull of his savagery. At what must be a look of displeasure on my face, I see dismay reflected in his own. Then I go to him and place my hand upon his stunted shoulder, and I say to him that he may leave to have a cry if he likes. I say, Victor. Victor, the work you have been doing is not adequate, but it is admirable. There is no other like you, no other that may demonstrate to the world the civilizing power of art. You are the frozen mammoth, the crocodile. Your presence is proof. Some may hate you for what you bear out, but all will note your ability. To many, you will be a battlefield on which they strive to destroy and slander our accomplishments. But you will always be my garden: a shard of wildness bent into order, a geometric humility carved into the world, and adding to its beauty.
I remove my hand from his shoulder, and he runs off to one of his weeping nooks, I know not which.
8
The body of Victor Tallon reaches the form of its repose: position four, one foot before the other, enabling the smooth transition to a well-practiced bow. The room sings with applause, applause beating against the walls like a hundred clipped birds. Now there is only one dance more that Victor must perform, one dance to prove himself a competentâthough not brilliantâexecutor of the social dances. The lady emerges from the crowd, a young girl close to Victor's age, the age experts imagine him to be. This is the courante, a couple's dance, and a dance of such exquisite tenderness and modesty that it is certain to stir the emotions of the
audience. The two partners shall approach one another from opposite ends of the floor, facing each other briefly as mirror images of masculine and feminine grace, before turning toward the front to commence the inscription of delicately wrought arcs and turns invisibly upon the ballroom floor: mirroring each other yet never touching, like the sun and the moon drawing twin circles around our days.
Victor and the young lady approach each other tentatively. Her face wears a sweetly youthful air, set within a complexion of lilies and purified milkâthough I notice also a tinge of trepidation. His face is at first a bit difficult to glimpse through the elaborate costumes of my fellow onlookers, but I move left and right until I see him clearly. His face holds an expression that I cannot recall having seen before: a smile, a true smile spreads over his face as he nears her, a true upward lifting of the edges of the lips such as I have never witnessed. He gazes at her like one waking from a sleep that has lasted a lifetime. It is as I imagined: the noble spirit that imbues the dances of our age have awakened a noble sensibility in my savage boy. He lives, he moves, he loves! My heart heaves in my chest, an organ sighing with well-deserved peace. The girl's face smiles in response, but her troubled demeanor increases visibly.
I look to Victor. His smile has grown since I last observed it: now it reveals teeth, and a bit of fine, healthy gum. I look to the girl, her eyes clogged with fear. Victor's gaze rests upon her décolletage, fixed to a point beneath which her heart beats hot, quick, like a rabbit's. Victor, I say. Then I notice the young girl's necklace.
Delicate, finely made, and strung with several lozenges of
real gold, gleaming like teeth in the candlelit room. Victor, I say. There is a resemblance, I say, but those are not yours at all, not yours to chew, they are not the same thing at all. The room is still, and I do not know whether I speak these words aloud, or utter them only in the pit of my stomach.
Victor bears on with an expression of unutterable joy. His mouth plunges forward, open and full of hard white points. I feel like weeping. With my hands I grope at invisible strings, which do not exist. I look to Portesquieu, but he looks straight ahead, his pillowy face tightening. I turn my head and stare out the casement window at the royal gardens instead, wet and slippery and dark as the center of a body, where the roses twitch an extinguished red.
The first requirement of architectural beauty is suitability to situation. A house should always seem to belong where it stands. If it looks forced upon an unwilling landscape, or if it is in any way antagonistic or uncomfortable because conspicuous or out of scale, then it fails in this first requirement.
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EMILY POST
,
The Personality of a House
It is best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain.
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MARK TWAIN
IN SNOW
When a father returns to empty shelves, empty cupboards, and a family that can only sit there, parched, playing one of many games centered around counting to larger and ever larger numbers, he will retrieve the luggage that he has brought back with him, bring the brown suitcase, the suitcase with two brass latches, opening it up before our eyes to reveal that it is full of snow.
Before our eyes he opens it up, his hands slip back the two latches in clean sound, and then the snow seen against a silk lining, paisley-printed, all the snow glaring back the lamps and shaming our house with the brilliance of things that belong outside it.
The snow is what sand would be if it could forget its material, if it could forget its hardness, roughness, if it could forget its own weight. And the snow is what we would be if we could forget ours. If we could become the things we pretend instead of merely pretending at them, playing over and over at a game of falling silent and soft from couch to floor, making ourselves silent and soft as we can, playing at being snow, playing until our elbows and sides are too sore to move.
Before our eyes he makes small motions at the contents of the suitcase, and the snow begins to fill out, piling the table and over the table to the floor. Then we are in up to our knees.
WE ARE THE WEATHER
The weather is beautiful through the windows of our house, you could take it for a painting. With an ear pressed to the window, it speaks, stutters, moist noises like someone in a form of forced sleep.
Right now it rains. Water throws itself against our windows, sideways with the force of the wind. It makes the things outside melt, dripping off gelatinous blots of their own color. How wonderful to be able to melt the shape from things that belong so smugly to themselves. To be the outside itself, or to reach for it and feel something without the flat touch of glass.
Father proclaims man and weather natural enemies, and suddenly we are. In motion his mouth laps at the air, takes into it the world we have been presented with and passes it out again, deformed. Pressed against tongue, teeth, the sounds fall out marked by indentations from human molars. They take shapes that imply our own deformation, that cause us to turn over the words in our own mouths, heavy and cold like a mouthful of marbles that taste of the hands of other children.
Father names the body of man a device for sculpting weather more weatherlike, less crazed, a device for disciplining the air. He walks out into the daylight shaking damaged equipment toward the mild sky. As hollow tubes spill from his arms, as springs jerk wildly, taut and loose, flinging themselves like a ruined cartoon body, knotted together and dancing. His voice going on without punctuation without pause about the ruined possibilities of his invention, his
invention a device intended to transform one thing into another, that takes it away from itself and makes it one's own, as my father to the weather or my mother to her projects of paper and thread. In the partial daylight, a father fills up with shadow, standing as a silhouette of a machine shuddering up and down as it works, wobbly, clanking against itself, a machine for the production of heat and noise.
My father, certain that internal forms of weather can be used to influence the external. My father under the big sky, shouting at clouds. We watch him through a window. We play rain, rubbing our hands and faces all over the smooth surfaces of the furniture.
MEASURED FACTS
We have invented a meter to measure the accumulation of time, a machine capable of producing detailed descriptions of the air. We have invented a method of extracting still water from rain and for shaming sleet and slush into legible forms of precipitation, forms a child could draw.
The surface of our home is a single block of shatterproof plastic. There is a single flaw in the surface of our home through which we would enter or exit, a thing we rarely do.
Air enters the flaw of a body and presses through into ever-deeper regions, traveling from oral reservoir to tracheal passageway to the lungs, which resemble small rooms. This is illustrated in a diagram fixed to the dining room wall, which is designed to remind us to keep food and air passages separate. In this diagram, a frog sits in a glass-sided tank. The frog is a cross-section, and air is a blue arrow traveling into its body. In the diagram to its right, the arrow is red, and represents food traveling the same path to the lungs. I point to this second frog, which is dead.
“Many thousands of years ago, the world's surface was covered with small, thoughtless beings whose deaths held no consequences. In the terrible storms of lava and rain that occurred before the climate had come to a form of sense, they died and multiplied like a storm in themselves, flourishing haphazardly and then collapsing into a pit or whatnot where their lungs filled with the syrupy weight of their
own liquefied ancestors. They lived like the weather, like a smattering of problems unforeseen but urgent, and they died, too, like the showers or sunlight: a brief seizure with no purpose, no understanding of their own duration.”
A necessary flaw belongs somewhere between an error and a mistake.
Our device to control the weather fails to control anything at all.
DREAMING WATER
We play a game based upon the weather, it begins in the living room. We stand in the middle, looking around. One player will ask, “Do you think it's going to rain?” and the other will answer. I hold out my hand.
“I think I feel some drops, just a few.”
Look up at the ceiling, search it for clouds. Describe the color of the clouds and their shape. This one like a duck, that one like an anvil.
Demonstrate surprise.
Cirrus clouds indicate cold weather if they move from left to right. Cumulus clouds indicate rain if they are gray, stacked, or have grown taller throughout the day. Stratus clouds can bring snow flurries or storm. A cloud shaped like an anvil impends.
Describe the direction of their movement. Describe their speed.
I open an imaginary newspaper.
The newspaper opens like wings, makes their sound.
Gray squares tremble against the air.
“It says there's a thirty percent chance.”
We watch the ceilings, and the minutes remove themselves.
TO UNDO OR NOT TO DO
This device is a vaporizer. It is for clouds, sunshine, temperature, and wind. It is also for plants and other living things.
When I say it is for them, I do not mean that it is good for them.
This device is heavier than almost anything. It has a case made of metal stuck through with tubes leading from one place within it to another. No matter how hard you lean against it, it does not sway. No matter how hard you kick it, it does not respond to or do anything. Under no circumstances is it to be kicked or pushed.
When the rain falls, bit by bit it becomes broken. I watch the rain falling on it, falling on its body and its back, falling into the funnel from which it acts out, falling all over it so it makes a sound like a thousand drums and I know suddenly that as heavy as it is, it is hollow past the shell. All is different kinds of gray. It gives off small stars as the rain knits it in water.
What our family has done, the rain undoes in a matter of minutes. The color of the sky and the ground, it undoes. Undone, the dryness and smooth feeling of the air. If it could undo also the year or two years that have come before, would we be as we were, or would we be something new, wetter?
I hold my ruined pet, looking out the window at the rain, the rain, the substance that would either bring my pet back, or turn it into something more distant, untouchable.
PLAY HOUSE
Outdoors, water soaks the ground and is lost. Indoors we live with rules that prevent things from becoming lost or broken, from leaking outdoors and coming loose.
These are obstructions that redirect absences before they unfold, closed spaces in which things are not forced to pass out of view in time like everything else, like a sudden dissipation replacing the light with its hollow or the objects of the day with their opposites, a flower with its absence or the shape of a pet with a thin, tasteless vapor. We pass these things from our view instead with willed movements away, we leave them by force and when we return to them in several minutes or hours or days, they remain.
In this way, our house resembles a life tied in a knot, or a passage of time spread out in all directions. There are long spaces unfilled by anything, then sudden clumps of familiar and unfamiliar strewn as in a salvage yard, portions that have “stepped to the side, safe, rather than eliminating themselves violently.” Indoors we may construct our lives from tissue paper, from brittle thread, from confectioner's sugar, if we wish. Materials that crumble at the touch or sag under moisture live like magazine images beneath our ceilings, they will not wish to stir within our thick walls, repaired constantly with special tools we have made to preserve their form. We might be anyone, and our undoing just another thing rolling around like a marble through the halls, waiting to be found and left and lost and forgotten.
My mother sits, making small scratching motions with the fingers to coax the meanings from flat objects. I run from the room. I run back into the room. I run from the room and make small scratching motions at the wall, yielding little. I run through the house. I search my father, to go to him for the words to fill these descriptions. He stands in front of the window, practicing his speech. I run from the room. I run back into the room. These are the things we make possible in an environment salvaged from its own predisposition toward destruction.
NEVER HAVE I EVER
I lie in the center of the emptiest room of our emptiest house looking from right to left. The room breathes around me as I lie more like a floor than the flattest, deadest floor. Looking down over the belly, I see the sockets and lights rise up and down, up and down steadily, and I can make it breathe more quickly by breathing more quickly, until I feel dizzy and my head rolls over in circles.
We study the weather from within this house, and we are the weather within this house. Outside this house there are weather and weather patterns, stretching for miles in any direction. We cannot control the weather from within this house. But in this house we are working on it.
We study the weather in a house that keeps the weather out, we watch the weather outdoors from indoors, through the windows. We can see rain through the windows, sleet through the windows, hail, snow, partially cloudy, cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms, partially cloudy with isolated thunderstorms. We can see fog through the windows, but we cannot see what lies past it.
Indoors we have cataloged the indoors, named its parts and recorded their number and location. We remove their ability to surprise us, even as they relieve us of our astonishment. It seems as though this indoors is held up by these numbers: if they were to become lost, it would vanish like pots and pans when one forgets they are playing house.
Weather covers the length of a wooden fence. It covers over our backyard and the backyards of our neighbors, who have all disappeared. Where did they disappear to, and how?
They disappeared like weather, like weather the day after weather.
UNTIL SOMETHING HAPPENS
We approach the cold like the water approaches the bottom of a hill. It makes itself felt through the holes in our airtight windows, six inches of solid plastic. He rolled everyone in thick acrylic fleece, I saw nothing but white and a small circle of mixed color. We roasted and ate large wheels of meat, meat being “the command given to another body, setting it in purposeful motion with knives and grinding.” There was nothing to do and there was less of it every day, the husks of board games drained in the corner of every room, their only use brief and saddening. Pick it up, look for something new to appear printed on the reverse side, try to use the game pieces on another board, grow heavy, carry to another room and leave in that corner, a new corner. The winter “like an abomination paralleled only by the flaccidity of spirit with which it has been met with in response.” The winter “the gravest threat to productive and life-affirming activity to enter these walls since the homequake of three autumns prior,” but making a sound more like that of mice inching under the floorboards or of fire scratching at the outer shell. One night, they read and I look at pictures in a large atlas of other places to be. On other nights, I read and Father argues about great inventions of the past. Or we listen to forecasts over the radio.
The first idea was a house without weather, says Father. The same idea as a roof, but bigger. Better, he says. Mother looks up from her work. She is making a blue scarf out of woolen yarn, another blue scarf to add to the piles of blue scarves, hats, mittens, muffs that sit over there in the closet, getting older.
PERCENTAGE OF CLEAR SKY
Of the types and the shapes. Of arranging them in groups by height, weight, or self-similarity. Of the types of children they once were and could someday give birth to. Other people and their ability to pass freely through the space that you take up, to pass to and through and away from it in a way that you were not designed to do.
Once upon a time other people were around. You could see them through the window. They were washing their minivans, vacuuming debris up from under the car mats. They were playing with a dog, or tousling its ears, or scratching the scruff of its neck under the collar. You could see from their faces that they loved soccer, or horses, or mornings. They had preferences for large things over small, or the opposite.