Dear Floods of Her Hair
Just as now, I thought.
I set to work.
As I worked, I sang Wozzeck.
Drudgery goes best when attention’s directed elsewhere—not that pain and loss don’t nibble away at us then. Stopping only to feed or rest myself when I could go on no longer, shedding gloves like old skin, I performed as my father taught me. Handsaws, augers and tongs, tools for which there were no names, came into use. I tipped fluids from bright-colored decanters, changed gloves, went on.
She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare
And her red lips were kissed black
Wozzeck was the piece Muriel and I had decided on; with tutorials twice a week and daily practice, I’d got it down as well as might be expected. Not a professional job, certainly, but competent. I sang the parts in rotation, altering pitch and range as required, hearing my own transformed voice roll back from the cellar’s recesses.
I’d never really understood painting, poetry, old music, things like that—opera least of all. Whatever I couldn’t weigh, quantify, plot on a chart, I had to wonder if it existed at all. I knew how important all this was to Muriel, of course. I’d sit beside her through that aria she loved from Turandot, “Nessun dorma,” or the second movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet watching tears course down her face. I’d see her put down a book and for a moment there’d be this blank look, this stillness, as though she were lost between worlds: deciding.
Often Muriel and I would discuss how we’d come together, the chance and circumspectness of it, other times the many ways in which, jigsawlike, our curves and turnings had become a whole. Then, teasing relentlessly, she would argue that, as an anthropologist, I was not truly a scientist. But I was. And who more alert to the place of ritual in lives?
I died before bedtime came
But my womb was bellowing
And I felt with my bare fall
A blazing red harsh head tear up
And the dear floods of his hair.
My father trained me well. I had not expected ever to bring my skills into practice so soon, of course. How could we have known? Officers appeared at the door just past noon. One was young, perhaps twenty, undergrowth of beard, single discrete earring, the other middle-aged, hair folded over to cover balding scalp. I was twelve. Answered the door wearing shorts and a T-shirt that read Stress? What Stress?! Mr. Abneg? the officers addressed me—so I knew. The older one confirmed it: Father was gone, he’d stepped unaware into one of the city’s many sinkholes. And so Mrs. Abneg became my responsibility. I took care of her, just as Father taught me. Fine workmanship. He would have been proud.
The skull must be boiled (Father said) until it becomes smooth as stone, then reattached.
This I accomplished with a battery-driven drill and eighteen silver pins from the cloisonnéd box my father passed on to me, his father’s before him. Singing Berg the whole while. I’d learned all my lessons well.
Legs must fall just so on the chair.
One arm at rest. The other upraised. Each finger arranged according to intricate plan.
Exacting, demanding work.
Fine music, though.
