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HER NIGHT WAS PLAGUED BY VISIONS.
Orange trees arranged in cretonne sat, parsed around her, blooming white-petal flowers with tendrils at their centre. A faint breeze passed between them, billowing the leaves and swaying them steadily into the air. It rained. The ground was dry and cracked and water filled up valleys, brimming over and spluttering. A bright light shone through the leaves on all sides, blinding her each time they moved. She could not see its source and turned frantically each time, shielding her eyes. Thunder shook the sky and clouds, yet the sky was empty. And she heard nothing. Light flickered across a purple sky, but fulgurations lit it only further black. Waters whipped her face and neck in cold flashes, stinging her skin, leaving it pockmarked. Her clothes hung heavy, laden, and seemed to drag her down. She felt her mouth ajar, and the coldness of the rain on her lips and teeth. Nothing felt wet, yet as she moved her joints creaked with frost, and she slowly relinquished to the winds, letting herself collapse to the ground and slowly embracing it.
When she woke she was lying on her front. The sheets of her bed were strewn about the room and she shivered before crawling from the mattress.
***
The hot days of summer had arrived early, bringing birds with them.
Gravity takes on an overbearing tone when joined to heat, ceases to desire just to fix feet to the ground and rather grinds your body down, burning it with the hot tarmac of the street. My ankles hurt from that weight, and walking.
I had woken late, to an oppressive warmth, the fan whirring impotently in the corner, blowing the same air back against itself. Light streamed into the room’s farthest corners, still too level to illume the bed, and I winced at its reflection from the haze-white wall. In the kitchen coffee stains pocked the tile, bleeding into the pale white as the liquid brimmed over the peak of the dried paste. There was no milk; a small note scribbled hurriedly on the counter recalled that we were out, and I yawned as I crushed it into a loose clump, letting the paper settle on the counter.
Too hot for tea, I thought. Too hot to think.
The blinds were opened halfway, and the cloth of the sofa burned the touch. A small mechanical clock whirred along the wall, sweating inside its glass in the torrent heat. Ten o’clock was eleven, and I had woken late. Anna left at seven, her newspaper still open on the table.
The narrative reflects periods of medical treatment, so it is discontinuous. As if turning the dial on a radio, we pick up the signal from various episodes. From the initial crack-up in 1969–1970 we skip to 1981 (a bad year), then to 1986. For the next decade, section titles tell the tale: Intermittently Hopeless, The Knot of Anxiety, Pieces of Life. There is a gap in the late 1990s and only scattered entries from the early 2000s. In 2005 Scialabba has another bad episode and is briefly hospitalized. He is back in the hospital again in 2012 and once more in 2016. The final entry, in April of that year, is a routine notation: “Discharged from unit without incident.”
Later.
Why should such things be? Is it that “the people” demand such spectacles? In one sense they do—the sense in which most people gape at a drunk, any drunk. But who selects the drunks they get to gape at? More concretely, if a minor royalty or leading member of the Federation of British Industries had come to the BBC studio fairly drunk, as Behan came, what would the studio have done? Would they have kept him off the air altogether, or tried to sober him up, or could they—conceivably—have made him much drunker, for sport.
I leafed over the page, but lost it to the fold of the paper, tore it slightly. Better not to keep trying, and put it back on the table. Anna had left in a hurry, and her coffee was half-finished beside the newspaper. I flicked the rim of the mug and watched the liquid quake inside for a few moments, drawing back from that injured chord.
Milk.
And ice.
Ice would be good.
I walked to the corner store steadily, not wishing to sweat too much in full view of the street. My light brown shirt would pierce easily, and I had continually to peer at myself—checking first if I would be seen—for stains.
When I had been younger such had happened. A day as the day that day, and the same heat that bakes the people on benches and by trees. The same terracotta crowds; a group of silhouettes with faces that melt as sweat arcs the brow.
I could not recall even now what had led to it, but in my mind there is that constant image of those imperturbable clay faces—it could not have been more than three—on children, pointing and laughing and shrouded in that aura of sun and heat.
The sky was clear of clouds, and the sun looked down, broad-faced, directly on the road, casting no shadows. I remember the school across was shut, and the playground empty. A green fence encased it, and dust moved sporadically across the floor, seeming almost to pant between dashes across, from a slide to a wooden pillar. The only water came from a broken drain, still full of autumn leaves, which dripped down, splashing into the ground.
“Two, please,” and I dropped three coins on the counter, returning home the way I had come.
From one until two I sat at home, watching the news. The weather was due to continue for as long as they could forecast, and warnings were issued for the next few days. Last year, I think, or the year before then, three people had died from heatstroke.
My mother had called my grandmother and warned her to stay indoors.
You shouldn’t go out there . . . Not good for you to be out in that heat . . . And there’s no reason to . . . But she liked to go for walks at lunchtimes, when everyone else was out from work, and she liked the park to be full of people. She still went out—naturally—but didn’t tell my mother, nodding down the phone line when interrogated sternly.
It suited them both.
I left for work at half past two, brushing the detritus in the kitchen into the corner of the room before leaving, and saying goodbye to the older woman in the flat above, heaving her shopping up the stairs.
Since September I had worked at the cathedral, close to the river, alternately receiving tourists or opening the door for them. Surrounded by a small piazza, the place was lifeless from the outside. Chairs and tables waited, sometimes still pulled out from the night before, for the coming of evening, and the neon signs of shops were shut off, displaying logos in brutish, blunt—macabre—pale tones. The sun would have dipped behind the buildings as I arrived, and the shadows would flicker one’s head in and out of the light, like the streets pulsated, gradually more slowly, and spluttered out and died.
A few metres from its entrance a bar would sit empty until six o’clock. The shutters would be furled, and benches and stools brought out, spilling into the square. Faint artificial lights extended themselves over the mosaic pattern, and the Virgin Mary’s ingeminate face would be granted a desultory red palm branch. Her grief extended, as the glow rushes forward—with the flick of a light switch—and austere lips torn asunder by the lilting leaves.
Then, at seven, offices would close, and a flood of men in loosened ties would flow from doorways, hunch over the tables, clutch glasses, shout, their shouting echoing round the square. I always wondered if half weren’t already drunk. The nuns would skulk around the door from seven, and stare at the drinkers in manufactured impasse, glowering until eight, when the cathedral doors were shut.
I walked through the park to take the metro. Gorse bushes arraigned huge rows of flowers, arranged in loose, sylvan lines, and gazed down the hill at the city below. Above them, sprawling canopies of holm oaks refracted the sky through thinly kempt leaves, and the afternoon breeze swayed the light on the path, coruscating little islands traipsing between the feet. A mother was walking, with her two daughters, carrying one and letting the other walk ahead.
“And there was a ball you were ‘sposed to throw—”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then everybody else had to stand around the edges and wait for the thrower to go and then you’d hit the ball and run around the circle back to where you hit it from then if you brought the bat you lost—”
“And did you win?”
“Almost! But—”
She nodded at me as they walked past and peered quickly back to the child ahead.
Acorns were beginning to come into season, and littered the path. With each step I would kick three or four, and started to try and knock others across the path too, watching them bounce frenetically and skid along the ground. They filled the crevices of the old stone stairs, and bobbed in the waters of the drinking fountain, as if the lion that adorned the spout would slowly wrench itself from the wall and carefully select one to stopper the stream. I imagined it yawning as I waited for the older woman in front of me to finish drinking, and the flow widening and pushing her backward, a flood following her down the steps.
By three I reached the station. The platform was busy—all the trains were delayed—and crowds had congregated to line up with where the doors would arrive. Air conditioning units placed at intervals spluttered to clear the hot air away, and I took off my jacket, wrapping it over my arm and occasionally dabbing the sweat from my forehead.
An old man lay sleeping on the bench, and I sat beside him, watching the undulations of his large stomach with each breath.
A couple ahead of us was fighting, and gesticulating beside the tracks. Their heavy muttering barely lifted above the crowd, and the whole station buzzed like the cicadas outside.
I could hardly breathe, and let my fingers crack one another’s knuckles, focusing on inhaling. The air was stale, and dried my throat. Every few breaths I would swallow, then go on breathing, feeling the wind run through my nostrils, clinging at them.
Farther along the platform a man sat beside a suitcase, opened on the ground, and clutched a guitar. Watching pedestrian knees. After a while he began a swift, erratic song, and flung the neck of the instrument about, striking the air and plucking.
A young boy approached him with a coin, but was dragged along by his father and jolted forwards, looking pleadingly between the two men before disappearing into the crowd.
The noise of the crowd grew louder with each minute. The train was due in four. And a businessman tore away with a huff, whirling around with his briefcase and marching back to the staircase.
The fan of one conditioner had been caught in something and clanged against another piece of metal on each rotation. I felt my breathing begin to coincide with the noise and touched my chest. Inhaling slowly.
A mural effaced the opposite wall, covering it in a forest of camellias and roses. Knotty and entwined, no flowers swayed, in spite of the breeze. And they would not move in the face of the noise either, taking it in. Their stems distended, and their reds and pinks grew more and more lurid in the languor.
The crowds swelled further, and the din began to resonate around the station. I could no longer see the other side of the platform, and stared up at nothing, closing my eyes. To my right a dog had begun to bark: small, yapping. And the clanging of the fan went on. My lungs began to feel constricted. Nobody was around me. I inhaled sharply.
Down the line, the whirring of the metro began to grow louder too. The dim glow of the train on the walls of the tunnel rose into a spotlight on the gut of wires, and the tracks hissed as the life current flowed into them. A bell rang, reverberating. The lighting on the ceiling flickered. Fulgurations revealed the corpses of flies contained in the bulbs.
The noise ceased.
A small crowd had gathered down the platform, to my left, and a short gasp rose up, before a woman’s shoes clattered hurriedly to the exit, bestrewn with faint, choking sobs. A man shouted, and the crowd grew larger, forming a tight circle around the tracks.
Only three of the carriages of the train had left the tunnel. Another man ran down the platform, dialling numbers into his phone. His fingers slipped, as he rose and fell, and he spoke hurriedly as I watched him turn the corner. A voice to my left, and the dog had been picked up, muffling whimpers through the hand of its owner. A child held a woman’s hand limply, staring blankly forward into the tumult of bodies.
I began to walk toward the congregation, peering above heads. Nothing was visible through the crowd. A man in front of me muttered grimly, and turned his face away.
The sound of sirens wailed from outside, piercing the concrete roof. Shouting echoed down into the station. Running grew audible, through the silence. Irregular footfalls rang out, and I watched faces turn hurriedly backward, looking past me.
Two men rushed down the platform, hauling a stretcher between them, and the train’s driver moved to meet them. The crowd parted, and I was pushed backward, falling slightly. When I was up I was again subsumed, and only grunts of effort were audible.
I listened so intently my eyes began to cross, and hardly noticed when the crowd parted again, making way for the bearers clad in green. Again I saw nothing. The man ahead of me allowed his shoulders to droop, and brought his hand up. Then the stretcher climbed the stairs, and people slowly diffused back along the platform—I do not know how long.
A man’s fingers shook. And a small pool had accumulated in a slight depression in the rail. It streamed softly in either direction, dilating into the other crevasses. Toward the other side the pattern fell quickly into a haze. The liquid had ossified along the mural as a weak epiphyte. All which had not dried was dribbling, languorously down the track. Ebbing up to meet the wall, crashing into the arriving tide as it fell and ebbing back again.
I watched for a while: the blood-dimmed tide lapping at the banks of white tile. It stained the grout interstices, leaving them to grin dimly. The oceans split into streams and flowed down the wall. The camellias were bleeding. The roses. As though the whole wall had haemorrhaged.
The stems of the painted flowers writhed, straining with effort, and turned in the wall to face me, coughing from their mouths. Every pistil seemed to stare; to the floor again, to me. A rose cocked its head. Its petals widened. The stem stretched, slithering from the wall and craning its neck toward me. The thorns that maculated the plant rose up, retreated.
The light of the train had switched on again, and it sidled fully into the station cautiously, settling at the end of the platform.
“Hola, Sister.”
“Hola.”
I arrived to work late and apologised profusely to María, adding that I had not expected trains to be delayed and that I would plan for “eventualities” better in future. She tutted, widening her eyes slightly and arcing her head. Her veil swayed behind her as she walked away.
The sun remained high enough in the sky to light the nave—it was almost four-thirty, and the hill ought to have risen up to conceal it. Light embraced the gargoyles, caressing their faces in molten gold. The sinister grins took on a beatific quality, smiling down into the transept, and the polish of the pews caught the refractions, glistening under the light, as melted wax in a candle simmers and seethes with life.
God himself had entered the room, I thought.
“Good day?”
“Hm?”
It was eight. Anna must have been home for a while.
“Oh… Yes… I was a little late though. Trains were delayed.”
“María not too annoyed? Not more than normal, at least?”
“Not that I could tell.”
“But other than that it was a good day?”
“Oh… yes…”
“The weather was beautiful, wasn’t it? I went to the little square by the fountains at lunch and ate in the sun. It really stayed off the heat, being around all that water—”
I walked into the kitchen, beginning to collect the chaos of the early afternoon. Coffee grounds had spilled onto the counter and mixed with the coffee, and streaked as I wiped them away. Like the wood bled.
“—and the steam! It really was so nice. And… Oh, oh, oh! I thought you’d love to hear: that older woman having problems with her pension sorted it all out! We filed all her documents away today and she—”
I shook the thought away. The newspaper still sat on the table, and I shuffled its papers into order then placed it on the table folded. Anna’s eyes followed me, and she curled around to look at me, talking all the while.
“—brought flowers in for everyone. Stunning! This collection of dahlias and tulips and camellias and roses!—”
Her neck was craning. The skin on her folding over itself and stretching, all at once.
I shuddered.
“—I thanked her, of course, and took one of the flowers, but we aren’t allowed to take gifts. You know that… Still, she seemed so disappointed, so I took one… It’s in that vase in our bedroom. I’m worried it might die though; I’ll look around for that liquid you’re meant to put in the water tomorrow—”
The pockmarks of coffee had dried, and I scrubbed at the counter intensely, feeling my face grimace with the effort. The cloth clenched around my thumb and fingers, and I felt the blood moving around inside them, pulsating from the pressure.
“—I think–”
“I think I need an early night.”
“Oh… alright… Everything okay?”
“Yeah, yeah… All fine. Just–”
“Tired?”
“Yes. Yes… Tired. Just tired.”
“Mhm. Long day?”
“Long day, yeah.”
I was already in the doorway to the bathroom, muttering in response, thrusting the toothbrush into my mouth and scrubbing absentmindedly, feeling every bristle on my gums.
Anna lit a cigarette in the other room, exhaling heavily. The air felt stifling again, and I opened the window, seeing the lights of other apartments switch off and on. Like eyes. Like lodestars. Blinking off and on. My breath came in shudders, and I swallowed, heavily.
A single rose sat in a glass, opposite the bed. The stem had risen in the water, and the flower leaned over the rim of the vase, supported by the base meeting the side of the container.
In the half-light, the water coloured a deep hue.
I dreamt I travelled through a wood that bore no sign of any path ahead. No fresh green leaves in that forest, only black—murky in colour—no boughs clean arced but knotty and entwined—gnarling—no apples were there but thorns, poison-pricked, and briars looping at the base of trees.
A wailing I heard. From every side I heard the sound of cries, but saw there nothing that might make them, and stopped, bewildered and beguiled.
I reached my hand a little forwards, snapped a branch from the thorny trees, at which it screamed out:
—Why tear me?
And then, when it had grown more dark with blood, the tree spoke a second time:
—Why gash me so? Is there no living pity in your heart? We once were men and now are arid stumps: your hand might well have shown us greater mercy if we had been the hissing souls of snakes.
The words emanated as a sapling log, kindled at one end—the other oozing sap—while at the other it drips and hisses with escaping vapour. So from this broken stump issued together both words and blood. I let the spigot drop down and stood terror-stricken.
The tree again muttered vague recrimination, and I spoke to it in muffled, muted tones.
A loud noise roared from my left, and two men sprinted into that sylvan scene, naked and scratched, lacerations tracing their hips and thighs.
—Come, death! Quickly come!
Behind the two the wood teemed with barking dogs, snarling in monstrous pitches, half-audible, half inaudible. One man sank, his breath failing, into a clump beside the trees. The dogs set their teeth on the sad, hunkered form and piece-by-piece these dogs dismembered him, and carried off his miserable limbs. And the bush wept.
“That’s better.”
Anna emptied the contents of a small, white, plastic pouch into the vase, swirling it with the plant stem.
“It should stick around for a little longer now, at least.”
The sun streamed through the window, and I had to squint to see. Anna’s cropped, dark hair veiled her face, and the light shining in from behind cast a halo around her, as though a hooded Madonna in the cathedral. Her eyes, too, shone a light brown through strands of hair, the light forming pools of milk that were swirled by her movements around the pupil.
“What time is it?”
My throat was dry.
“Almost ten.”
“Shit.”
I rose.
“Aren’t you on the late shift today?”
“It’s Saturday,” I called, rifling through the drawers for an ironed shirt.
“Still hot today. You might want something with short sleeves.”
I seized a small, white button down, already struggling with it as I brushed my teeth. Anna had put coffee on the counter, and it steamed into the air, burning my lips. My bag had keys in from the night before, and I moved to hug Anna, feeling her kiss my cheek before pushing me toward an open door.
“Get there safe.”
“I will.”
I walked through the park again, hurrying past parents with children in prams and an elderly couple, crooning over parrots beside the bridge. By the time I reached the station I was panting, and doubled over, massaging the cramp in my side.
The gates were open, and I went through without a ticket. A small, burly woman, finical glasses adorning the tip of her nose, squalled behind me, and I returned quickly, apologising in harried breaths.
Trains were no longer delayed, and I walked without thinking down the stairs and left, collapsing into a bench and gazing at the roof, regaining my breaths steadily. Two minutes on the board. One.
I looked down.
The camellias and roses were staring at me. Necks contorted, pistils glaring. The thorns were snapped and bled. Dark, red liquid poured from the stems and engulfed the wall, bleeding the paint into the ground. The rotting smiles of the tiles remained.
I doubled over, feeling stomach slither up my trachea and out of my throat, festering in my mouth and spewing out again, steaming on the platform. Bitter coffee interlaced with ejecta and I swallowed, hearing a cry from the man sat beside me.
I in dreaming visions descend, a thousand fathoms, too deep for tears; into chasms and sunless abysses, depths beyond depths. A state of gloom that attends gorgeous spectacles, amounting at last to utter darkness. The sense of space, the time, affected. Buildings, landscapes, exhibited in proportions so vast as the eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled: amplified to unutterable infinity. In the stars were eyes that grew to burst and collapsed in weakly sketched gashes. Pupils that widened in shock. The moon entered and skulked about the hemisphere, surpassing every pinprick. And a star fell to the ground ahead of me and pooled out and clotted. In its silvery reflections I watched the lace of moonlight tare, shrivel and flail desiccate upon the ground.
“Hola.”
“Oh… Hola…”
I had called in sick for a week when María came to see me. Anna was at work and I had been lying somewhere. It was only when María arrived I realised I hadn’t been doing much, biting my nails and staring at the switched-off television.
“Is everything okay? We’ve all missed you this week.”
“No I’m… Yes, I’m alright. Just feeling a little unwell.”
“Yes… Anna told me about the vomiting. Has it gotten any better?”
“It comes and goes… I just wouldn’t want to vomit on anyone…”
“You wouldn’t be the first to want that.”
There was a lull, and my gaze moved past her.
“Oh! Yes! I brought something from the sisters!”
She produced a small basket, cradling it between her hip and elbow, and removed the cloth covering it. Inside was a small collection of pastry and two tea candles. Below the two was a small, black, leather-bound bible, and she wrenched it from the bottom, thrusting it ahead of herself, her whole frame jolting at the effort. I took it slowly, lay the book on the side, and offered to take the basket. She obliged.
“I need to bring it back with me though.”
“Sure.”
I emptied the contents onto the counter and handed it back to her.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
The heat had not subsided, and Anna had opened the window to the flat. Curtains billowed in. A light breeze, wafting in cooler air, but the atmosphere still stifled, weakly dredging dust and languor across the room. Moving back to the sofa felt like wading through waist-deep water.
I stood beside it for a few moments, looking at the floor. Yawned.
In the bedroom the rose had begun to wilt, and I lay down opposite it, staring through weighted eyelids.
The neck struggled to turn, but I watched the bones of the stem crick and snap in and out of place to face me. The flower groaned, bowing its face to the ground to face me, clenching individual petals, scrunching them around its face.
Then it began to ooze a dark red liquid, secreted from between these fleshy folds. Thick, heavy droplets culminated at the edge of each petal and thorn and fell to the ground in a spluttered flow. Slowly, the plant slid up the vase, at first imperceptibly, letting the rot of the base slither against the glass.
It sped up, the flow growing faster, and finally the stem slipped from the lip. The vase fell from the edge, to the floor, smashing heavily, and I drew back. Water coalesced with the blood of the plant, flowing faster toward the frame of the bed. I drew the covers closer, backing into the pillows and beginning to shudder.
Air itself seemed to grow louder, and I buried my face in the pillow.
“Did you smash this?”
Anna woke me with shouting.
“I–”
“What happened?”
“I’m not su–”
“Was there someone else over?”
“No.”
“So who was it?”
“I–”
“You don’t know...? You don’t know? You haven’t worked in a week! They’ll fire you,” she paused, muttering, “Fucking lucky María likes you…”
“I don’t know…”
“You don’t know?”
“No– Anna I’m–”
“I don’t want to hear it. You know I wanted to look after it.”
The door slammed. The pillow behind me was wet, and I rolled over, looking through the window. Night had almost encompassed the room, excepting a small vestige of light, shining from one high window through into another, opposite.
On the floor, the flower had been crushed. The base of the vase must have fallen onto its petals, and the pistil skull was ground into the floor, mixing with the water in thin red fronds.
A woman lay across the floor, a long, thin leg intertwined with the other. With her, two snakes gently twirled around the thin base of a chair leg.
She sobbed gently, cradling her head in her hands. Flowers laced her hair, and were shaken with expiration, sliding between soft, thinning strands. The floor was marble, and pockmarked with veins of varicose white, bulging upwards.
She wailed, and the wreath fell from her head, crumpling on the floor.
Suddenly, she clutched one of the snakes by the neck, holding it to her face. The two glared eye to eye, and she neared it further still, their noses touching.
She spoke with breathlessness, inhaling as she exhaled to speak and flinging spittle into the animal’s gaping mouth.
Fricatives entwined with phlegm. Again she moved the animal back, wrenching its mouth open and positioning it above her thigh.
—With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate of life at once untie… Poor, venomous fool, be angry and dispatch with me swiftly.
The snake leapt forward, coiling itself in the air, and sank two teeth into her flesh.
She screamed. Tore the fangs from her leg and felt the skin tear away with it. Her whole body shook, and her head struck the floor, cracking her skull.
Weakly, she swallowed, looking to the animal, flung away across the room. Two gouts adorned her thigh.
***
Her night was plagued by visions. She approached the side of the roof slowly, no expression lighting her face. A harsh rain whipped at her, lending the wind dirty fingernails that clawed at skin, stripping it layer by layer. Clay made up the ledge, and she reached for it, feeling the slight striations of the material—its slight depressions and regressions—and the water that settled within, every few moments violently displaced by itself from the pockmarks. Had she looked down, she might have seen the tarmac, and the copse: brilliant citrus trees, flowering white lilies, sprouting from stony ground, cracking it. Veins formed, revealing mud. The ground was dry and water filled up the valleys, brimming over and spluttering from them, vomiting a deep red bole. She sighed, letting her eyes fall to the bottom of the socket and looking skyward again. Then leapt from the ledge, eyes still closed, and felt her head droop downward. For a brief moment she was suspended by the water of the air. Her hair flailed behind her, slung over her shoulders and settling happily on the centre of her spine. Her arms hung at her sides. Her legs straightened, the muscles all along them contracting and releasing; like the golden bird. Then the ground neared, and she shattered on the coarse concrete below. Like her bones were porcelain. Blood and water mingled in the ruts of the garden, and as the liquid seeped into the ground the trees began to contort and wither, their roots rising and falling and quivering alongside the thunder above. Murky light sheathed her through the rain: through branches. And the sun dimmed.
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