Damaged Heart - Excerpt - Fiction

Literary Review, Fall, 1999 by Dale M. Kushner

I go to the mirror. The mirror is blank, like the walls. I wait. I wait for my face to appear. Sometimes I wait for hours to see my face.

The mirror has a flaw. A crack. Above the crack, the mirror is worn through to metal. When I look into that part of the mirror, my face is clouded by a veil.

They think because I am crazy, this doesn't matter. It matters. I ask myself, if I were truly crazy, would I see the difference between the shadow over my face and the shadow behind my back?

I ask myself, if I saw the world through the eyes of madness, would I not be ignorant of the black ants amassing by the millions beneath the dirt? Could I hear the parliament of geese, that at this very moment, are voting on the most expedient routes south? If I were crazy, I would not notice how time flows backward, reversing itself, like some tropical tidal bore.

I write this down to give an impression of my life. An impression, like those famous paintings in which the lilies and the pond and the sky swirl into a recognizable whole, that is, until you step forward and see how the medley separates, blossoms from clouds, clouds from the matrix of water.

Today I am walking around with my hand over my heart. Where do you reside, love? Brain? Spleen? Stomach? Heart? Heart, you old torch singer, I can feel you flutter against my palm. It's a comfort knowing you're still working, sending blood swirling through its tangled circuitry.

I must tell you, I have a damaged heart because of love. Once upon a time, I fell into love's snare. Did I say "I"? I meant "she." She was different from me. She ran into her captor's arms, willingly. Stupid girl. Didn't she know terrible things happen in the name of love? Surprising things, knives under pillows, snowballs packed with rocks. For a long time she must have been squeezed under my skin waiting to get out. She got out all right.

Oh, heart! It harbors a secret chamber just for memory. The door swings open and out pops the past. After Fox, I tried to bolt that door forever, tried to paint the inside of my head bright white. But he'd gotten into my cells, woke me in the middle of the night with the pain of an absentee limb.

One of the best kept secrets at Muscado State Hospital for the Mentally Ill is that, here, you are finally free. All day, every day, you are free to run from one memory to the next. La-dee-dah. Welcome to Memory Lane. They encourage your gibberish. Write it down on their yellow pads, which get filed away in some dusty hospital basement where there are shelves stacked with the histories of hundreds of crazy people. Think of it. A monument to craziness. What an archive! What a national treasure!

Over the years I have become quite a memory-artist. It's true, an artist. I select memories from here and there and paste them together into something new. In one picture I am a child in an empty house. The house is a face: two upper windows for eyes, a red door with a small arched window above it for nose and mouth. I am leaning out a window on the second floor. White curtains flap around my shoulders.

A flagstone path leads to the door. Who is on the path? Who is that? Who is coming? I can't see. I can't see because a fire is burning in the next field. Flames climb the sky. Dark blossoms of smoke float by the window.

Do you believe me? Am I lying or merely confused? Am I the one at the window? Perhaps I've gotten it wrong. Perhaps I am really standing in the field in a widening circle of amber-blue heat, orbited by smoke. I feed it twigs, broken branches. Then whole trees collapse, are consumed.

   I am lying. There was no house. But there was a fire. In the mirror I wear
   the broken wings of doves.

I came to Fox already learned in the secret wishes of dragonflies. Queen Rose had taught me to see with the night vision of raccoons, to read the disturbances of leaf and stone. The cadences of woodland birds, the lower-toned fugue of frogs were languages I spoke. Schooled in her "Conditions"--of Equals, of Sympathy, and, most especially, of Love--I believed humans, animals, seas, and the stars were composed of the same elementals into which we would all someday return.

But on the farm the free and the domesticated lived side by side, and there was a hierarchy among them, imposed by the attention we doled out to those dependent upon us. We were not so much companions to the sheep and goats as responsible parents whose duty it was to answer their hunger-bleats. The wild

ones, who stole food, who taunted and maimed, were our enemies.

Summer beguiled us through days of high grass, verdant fields flecked with brilliant yellow mustardweed over which an orchestra of bees broadcast their concertos. The wild apples swelled to perfection while the cornstalks grew to be the size of small trees, standing like finely wrought pillars in perfect avenues for raiding deer. I can talk of time in no other way; the seasons passed in front of us, vaporous yet stark, as the earth reminded us daily of what needed to be completed or renewed. The weather was our text, and Fox and I read it faithfully. Even during its most unpredictable moments, our farm rhythms rarely altered.