The Death of Small Creatures (17 page)

Dying of thirst,
I approach a Gatorade stand outside the entryway to the Roman Forum. A crowd of thirsty Italians surrounds me. I am jostled to and fro, clipped at my shoulders. I wait patiently in line until I realize there are no lines in Italy. Finally, I push my way to the front of the crowd and say, haughtily, “
Uno
Gatorade!” I don't say please.

I'm wearing soft brown leather sandals and a light blue knee-length dress made of stretchy spandex. It ties into a bow around the back of my neck. A dark blue applique of a bird the name of which eludes me is swathed on the front. I love this dress. I will wear this dress for several years every summer until I gain weight again and it doesn't fit anymore. I will hold onto this dress for years, refusing to part with it, convinced there will come a day when I'll be thin enough to wear it again.

I lean down and pick up a cube of ochre-coloured stone with a flower carved into one side. It looks like a child's carving—a fat circle in the middle surrounded by five fat petals. A happy flower. An ancient flower, seemingly tossed aside thousands of years ago and left here, right here, for me to find.

I hold it in my hand. It rests on my palm, the size of a Rubik's Cube. I hold it up, survey it against the sky. My hand becomes dusty, fingertips powdered ochre.

Other tourists mingle around, stepping gingerly as they go, then when no one is looking I open my satchel and place the stone inside.

Days turn into
weeks, and my life with Leigh begins to fall away. There is nothing left to do now but hold on tight and hope.

Caravaggio's ears perk up.

“I miss sipping martinis, wearing black strapless dresses and kick-ass boots,” I say.

He purrs, chatters. “A little higher.”

I press my ear against the drum of his furry belly, check his pulse too, the quick beat of a bunny's heart.

One thump, two thump, three thump, four…

“I listened to jazz.”

“Billie Holiday… Keb' Mo'?”

“I cracked pistachios…”

“A little lower.”

“…under great fans and tiger pelts.”

“That strikes me as wrong,” he says, “a little too colonial.”

I gently drag my fingernails over his rump, scrape away the imperfections, to soothe his itch, to make him a soft unfettered bunny again.

Journal

April 23, 2009

Writing this from another new temp job.

I have a great office, second floor, windows that open onto a cobblestone courtyard. I like being high up. I have never been in a second-floor office before.

I'm feeling dizzy. My hands shake when I sip coffee. My hands were shaking when I was trying to put on my mascara while driving to work this morning, which by the way, I did quite successfully.

I think the dizziness is from the lithium; trembling too is common or so I've read, and of course it doesn't help that I hardly eat.

I saw Dr. Gheis yesterday, after waiting five months for the appointment. He was nice, asked a bunch of questions, and concluded that I am Bipolar II. My diagnosis is constantly evolving. One minute I am clinically depressed; the next, bipolar.

He explained that he does not deal strictly with mood disorders, but rather he deals with psychological disorders related to physical trauma.

He is going to refer me to a psychiatrist. I won't have to wait long this time.

Seven

The Rabbits (September 2007)

The rabbit's head
is tilted. He's honed in, perched, readying himself to make a move; appears to know me. We are connected; I feel it right away, this rabbit and I. Maybe it's the peril that divides us from each other now; we are each at opposing ends of the danger in between.

How many small things are crushed in parking lots every year? It's all that backing out, blind spots and squeaky windshield wipers—the glare of water and sunlight.

I'm so stoned. “Wait,” I say. “Don't move.” The sky is Technicolor blue. One menacing cloud. The cloud is going to kill me.

The bunny sits on a patch of grass on the meridian, surrounded by concrete and yellow lines that mark off the faculty parking spaces.

The leaves on the maples have begun to change colour; tips dipped in ink, magenta and desert ochre. Soon the students will return to campus with their backpacks and shiny to-go cups and fresh faces. I am still staying with my sister, sleeping on her couch, wandering around her house in limbo, higher than a kite.

A seagull caws at the top of a lamppost, a shrill cry.

Was it a real cry or an auditory hallucination? Sometimes I hear voices. A voice says my name, loudly, thrust up against my ear. I actually jump out of my skin.

I feel as if I should acknowledge the bunny, tilt my head, wave, like it would be rude not to. But I don't want to encourage him. I want him to stay there. I think,
I will come to you
.

I'm high on
cough medicine, sitting under the stars on a concrete cinder block in my sister's backyard. The block is at the bottom of a set of five wooden steps, red paint peeling off slivered wood.

The cough medicine used to calm me, but now it tweaks my mind, pinches my receptors, makes me itchy and paranoid; little bugs beetling up my arms and down my back.

I have been counteracting the beetling by taking copious Ativan, three, four, five times the recommended dosage, then a handful a day, now little handfuls at intervals throughout the day.

The crocuses that line the back wall of the house are illuminated by moonlight on one side and by the warmer glow of the kitchen window above them. Each flower tapers into a narrow tube, cup-shaped, protruding from three stamens. Its mouth, the way it curves at the stem and dips, evokes a sense of want. It is a flower of longing.

I pluck one from the dirt.

It is an apostle of desire, this flower.

There is no such thing as dosage anymore; it's laughable. I am operating in desperation, will take anything and as much of anything as my body will endure, if it means the slightest bit of relief.

I throw down clonazepam, wash it down with the NeoCitran DM. I have no grace anymore, no dignity.

A white stripe along the leaf axis, the crocus (from Greek,
krokos
, related to Hebrew
karkom
, Aramaic
kurkama
and Arabic
kurkem
) is a humble flower. The novice naturalist would not suspect there is saffron in the stigma.

I am living in a state of shock. I still cannot believe I left my husband after so long. Only cutting makes me feel real, penetrates the numbness of shock.

A mouthful of pills inside a mouthful of Neo; the little pills (the Ativan, clonazepam, toss in an antidepressant, five little Effexors) dissolve on my tongue like bitter tablets, leave a residue in my mouth that reminds me of the penicillin I had to take for my tonsillitis as a kid.

I toss my cigarette into the grass. Embers spark in the wind, flurry across the yard like fireflies.

The bunny sees
the car at the last minute, hops supersonic from behind a wheel and through a cloud of exhaust, makes it to the sidewalk.

“Oh, thank god.” Either he says this or I do.

He looks up at me, seems to think I am the person he's been looking for. Maybe I am. “Little bastard,” I say. My heart is still racing.

He is shiny and grey, could fit in the palm of my hand, has no errs about him; a no-bullshit, direct little bunny who means what he says and wants what he wants. “Oh, here you are,” he says.

I am chosen.

I pick him up with two hands then hold him close. He snuggles into me, purrs, chatters in my hair, rests his bunny rabbit head on my shoulder, seems exhausted. He must have belonged to someone before he came to the university; some idiot dropped him off in the middle of nowhere up here.

“I will call you, Marcello,” I say.
Rub. Rub. Rub.
“You will be Caravaggio's little brother.” They don't last long in the wild, these domestic rabbits abandoned in the middle of nowhere. “You're coming with me,” I say.

I call Leigh.
“I have two rabbits now. Can I come home?”

He says, “Two rabbits?”

“Yes, I know, but we'll figure it out, right?”

He sighs. “I don't know if I'll be able to take it. My allergies, you know.”

“Just let me come home,” I say. I relinquish any sense of self-authority, have resorted to begging. I am desperate and unable to mask my desperation with a false sense of dignity. I am giving myself over to him completely.

After a long drawn-out moment, “Okay,” he says. “Yes, you can bring them home.”

I depart immediately, leave everything: my clothes, books, scraps of bad poetry. I only take my pills and the clothes on my back. I don't wait, not for a moment

I'll come back for the rabbits later
, I think, rushing out the front door, bounding down my sister's front porch steps. I leap to the curb, cross the street, turn into an alleyway that leads to the Village.

Run. Run. Run.

I haven't eaten in days, have been living on coffee, NeoCitran and Ativan. My body seems unable to withstand the drama of this day, the magnitude of returning back to my husband, my old familiar life.

So I sit down on the curb, hold my head between my knees, and the blood flushes my cheeks again. A car rolls by, slows, keeps going. I am desperate for a cup of coffee.

I am returning to a humourless man, running fast, gasping for breath at intervals. I tell myself,
Keep moving. Don't look back
. If I pause to think about it, I'll change my mind, again, and return to my sister's. But once at my sister's I'll want to run home again. This battle rages in my mind, every minute, every hour, day after day, has for weeks, no, months. Years? Is it possible that I have spent nearly a decade in romantic limbo?

What an extraordinary feat of endurance.

How did I do it?

I am fucking remarkable.

Exhausted.

Leigh opens the
door, smiles apprehensively, says, “Honey, you've lost weight.”

I sob, wrap my arms around him. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

The embrace feels awkward. He barely hugs me back. So I hold him gently too. He feels smaller.

Being home already feels wrong, and I just got here.

This is crazy.

I need help.

“You're home now, sweetie,” he says. “This is your home.” He mentions home several times in my first moments back. “This is where you belong.” The repetition of
home
and
belong
strikes me, even here, my first seconds in the doorway, as conspiratorial and I wonder if I was right to come back.

I take off my coat and toss it onto the umbrella rack behind the door.

Leigh draws me into the foyer, closes the door behind me. As it clicks shut, the most horrendous ordeal of my life so far clicks shut also.

It's over. I survived it.

“You don't ever have to be alone again,” he says.

“Thank god,” I say. I surrender myself to him. I surrender everything, my body, heart and mind. I am an empty vessel. He can do with me what he will. “I still have the bunnies,” I say, hedging, inquiring.

He groans, loosens his embrace.

Somewhere along the way I surrendered my emotional maturity for a false sense of security. I have let myself be controlled under the guise of being cared for.

“Thank god you're still here,” I say.

He takes me to the bedroom and has sex with me.

It's just past
noon and I am in the bunny room, again, back in my old domain, my pit of self-abuse and debasement, sipping NeoCitran, comfortably doped, Marcello asleep on my lap.

The novelty of being back home is waning quickly. I am back in my old familiar world, only this time I am unemployed.

I spend more time blogging and sleeping. I have begun correspondence with a married man named Richard who has been following my blog. He says he loves my writing. He becomes my solace in a dark time.

In the mornings, Leigh kisses me goodbye and says, lamenting, already pressuring me, “Are you going to look for work today?” I pity him. He still has hope.

I lift my head from the pillow in a DXM haze. “Yes,” I say. I don't know how to tell him a job right now would kill me. Being in the company of other people is preposterous.

“What's going to happen?” he says, a question the answer to which is so broad it's menacing.