Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (76 page)

Now that I have tears in my eyes even while making baba ghanouj, our famous eggplant dip, so what? This is my cultural sorrow — not the first ever in the world. Admit it and move on. There is still so much good work to do.

When a gentle man I don’t know approaches me in a crowd at a literary conference to say, “I am afraid for my daughter to admit she is half Arab now. What should I do?” I am momentarily tongue-tied.

Later I wish I had told him, “Tell her never deny it. Maybe Arab Americans must say we are twice as sad as other people. But we are still proud, of everything peaceful and beautiful that endures. Then speak of beauty if we can — the beauty of culture, poetry, tradition, memory, family, daily life. Each day, live in honor of the ones who didn’t have this luxury or time. We are not alone.”

Lia Purpura

 

LIA PURPURA
is the author of the essay collection
On Looking
, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Essays from that collection were awarded a Pushcart Prize and named Notable Essays in
The Best American Essays 2004
and
2005
. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Prose in 2004.
Increase
, her first collection of essays, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and her collection of poems,
Stone Sky Lifting
, won the Ohio State University Press/
The Journal
Award. She is the author of
The Brighter the Veil
(winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature/Poetry) and
Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch
and
Taste of Ash
, translated on a Fulbright year in Poland. Her poems and essays have appeared in many magazines, including
Agni
,
Double Take
,
Field
,
Georgia Review
,
Iowa Review
,
Orion
,
Parnassus: Poetry in Review
, and
Ploughshares
. Writer-in-residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Purpura also teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA Program. In 2007, she was Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction.

 

I shall begin with the chests of drowned men, bound with ropes and diesel-slicked. Their ears sludge-filled. Their legs mud-smeared. Asleep belowdecks when a freighter hit and the river rose inside their tug. Their lashes white with river silt.

I shall stand beside sharp pelvic bones, his mod hip-huggers stretched tightly between them. His ribs like steppes, ice shelves, sandstone. His wide-open mouth, where a last breath came out. And there at his feet, the stuff of his death: a near-empty bottle of red cough syrup, yellow-labeled and bagged by police.

I shall touch, while no one is looking, the perfect cornrows, the jacket’s wet collar. Soaked black with blood, his stiffening sleeve. And where the bullets passed neatly through, the pattern when his shirt’s uncrumpled: four or five holes like ragged stars, or a child’s cutout snowflake.

I shall note the blue earring, a swirled lapis ball in the old, yellowed man’s ear, his underwear yellowed, his sunken face taut. The amber and topaz half-empty fifths his landlord found and gave to police.

The twenty-year alcoholic before us, a businessman. All the prescriptions for his hypertension bagged and unused near his black-socked, gold-toed foot. The first button open on his neat white shirt and, I shall confirm, the requisite pen in the pocket neatly clamped in.

“Oh, no,” an assistant says. The gospel station’s softly on, floaty in its mild joy; it’s 7:45 on a rainy Sunday morning and so far I’m the only visitor. Turning briefly to me, he asks “What did you come here for?”

Then, “Oh, no,” he says again, “no more eighteen-year-olds,” as he stops at the first body, surveying. Soon, the doctors gather in the hall, finish their doughnuts, scrub, suit up, begin to read from the police reports, the facts meditative as any rote practice, marking and measuring, preparing ritual ground:
The last person to see him alive was his girlfriend. History: bipolar. Suspected: OD, heroin.
“Something too pure is killing these kids in the county,” the doctor says. Of the boy’s house, the report states “nice,” “middle class,” and “the deceased’s bedroom is cluttered and dirty.” Multiple generations at home. Bottle caps with resin in the trash. And here is a silver soup spoon, blue-black from the flame, encrusted where he cooked the stuff, its graceful stem embellished for nothing. As his body is — beautiful now, for nothing. Is olive-skinned, muscled, nicely proportioned. No, I shall say it,
is stunning
, as it turns to marble before us.

We walk back to the first body, unmingling stories. They divide up the bodies. They take the clothes off.

What I thought before seeing it all:
never again will I know the body as I do now.

And how, exactly, is that?

Have I thought of the body as sanctuary? A safe, closed place like the ark from which the Torah is taken and laid out on a table to be unscrolled. The two sides parted, opened like, soon I’d know, a rib cage, that a hand with a sharp-tipped pointer might lead the way over, reading toward depth.

Here’s the truth: when I first saw the bodies, I laughed out loud. The laugh burst forth, I could not stop it.
Forgive me
, I thought even then, but the scene, the weird gestures looked entirely staged. Such a response is sure measure of expectations, sure proof I held other images dear: shrouds, perhaps? Veils? A pall hanging (and though I’ve never seen a pall, I know it is “cast over,” that it shadows all that it touches). Had I assumed crisp sheets drawn up, as in surgery, to section off an operating theater around the site of death? Had somewhere an ideal been lodged: arms at sides in the position of sleep (not so birdlike, jutting, rigid); faces placid (mouths not slack, not black, empty sockets, dry shafts down, archaeological, beckoning, unquiet).

Was I awaiting some sign of passage, the strains of ceremony slapping in its wake? (There was the dime the police searched for, evidence caught in the body bag, bright and mud-smeared, I didn’t point out. How meager against the royal cats, well-fed and gold-haltered, the canopic jars holding royal organs, the granaries built for the beautiful pharaohs…
leave the dime in
, I thought,
that the boatman might row him across
.)

Did I expect, finally, the solemnity of procession? Death gowned and dancing, scythe raised and cape blowing, leading the others, at dusk, over a mountain. In silhouette. Fully cinematic.

And now that I’ve admitted laughing, I shall admit this, more unexpected still:

When the assistants opened the first body up, what stepped forth, unbidden, was calm.

It was in the assistants’ manner of touching their material, their work, that delicacy. The precise, rote gestures feeling space and resistance; adjusting the arc of a blade to the bodies’ proportions; cupping and weighing, knowing the slippage, anticipating it; the pressure, the estimate, the sure, careful exchange of hand and knife, the gesture performed so efficiently it looked like habit: easy, inevitable.

The calm came to me while the skin behind the ears and across the base of the skull was cut from its bluish integument. While the scalp was folded up and over the face like a towel, like a compress draped over sore eyes. While the skull was sawed open and a quarter of it lifted away, dust flying, the assistants working with out masks. It was calm that came forth while the brain was removed, while the brain, heavy and gray and wet, was filleted with an enormous knife, one hand on top to keep it from jiggling. While the doctor found the ragged lesion in the thalamus and ruled the cause of death hypertension — not alcoholism. Calm, while the brain was slipped into a jar, and the skull refitted, the skin pulled back over to hold it all in again.

I suppose they expected queasiness, fear, short, labored breath — all death’s effect. That I’d back away. That after the first, I’d have seen enough. Or the tears that followed fast, after the laughter — for the waste, the fine bones, because these were sons or fathers or would never be fathers — perhaps they expected the tears to return?

But when the bodies were opened up — how can I say this? The opening was familiar. As if I’d known before, this…what? Language? Like a dialect spoken only in childhood, for a short time with old-world relatives, and heard again many years later, the gist of it all was sensible. And though I couldn’t reply, meanings hung on. A shapeliness of thought was apparent, all infection and lilt and tonal suggestion.

Nothing was too intimate: not the leaves stuck to the crewman’s thigh, and higher up, caught in the leg of his underwear; the captain’s red long johns and soaked, muddy sock. Their big stomachs and how reliably strong they still looked. Not the diesel fuel slicking their faces, stinking the building, dizzying us, or the pale, wrinkled soles of one’s foot, waterlogged. Not the hair braided by some woman’s hands, her knuckles hard against his head. The quarter-sized hole in his twisted gray sweat sock, sock he pulled on that morning, or afternoon, or whenever he rose while he lived and dressed with out a thought to dressing.

Not the dime the police found and bagged. The buckshot pockmarking his face, his young face, the buccal fat still high, rounded and thick. Nothing was unfamiliar in the too-bright room. Not the men’s nakedness, although I have never seen twelve men, naked, before me. Not the method by which the paths of bullets were measured: rods of different lengths pushed through each hole — I had to stop counting there were so many — until one came out the other side.

Not the phrase “exit wound.”

And though I’d never seen a bullet hole, of course it would be shallow as the tissue underneath swelled uselessly back together. Of course blood pooled each blue-burnt circumference.
Of course
, I remember thinking.

The purpose the work comprised, the
opening
, was familiar.

It was familiar to see the body opened.

Because in giving birth, I knew the body opened beyond itself?

Because I have been opened, enough times now in surgery, once the whole length of me, and there are hundreds of stitches?

Then, when everything was lifted out — the mass of organs held in the arms, a cornucopia of dripping fruits hoisted to the hanging scale — there was the spine. I could look straight through the empty body, and there, as if buried in wet, red earth, there was the white length of spine. Shields of ribs were sawed out and saved to fix back into place. There were the yellow layers of fat, yellow as a cartoon sun, as sweet cream butter, laid thinly on some, in slabs on others. There were the ice-blue casings of large intestines, the small sloshing stomach, transparent, to be drained. The bladder, hidden, but pulled into view for my sake and cupped in hand like a water balloon. Cracks and snappings. The whisking and shushing of knives over skin, a sound like tearing silk. The snipping. The measuring jars filled with cubed liver. The intercostal blood vessel pulled out like a basted hem. The perforating branches of the internal thoracic artery leaving little holes behind in the muscle like a child’s lace-up board. The mitral valves sealing like the lids of ice cream cups. And heavy in the doctor’s hand, the spleen, shining, as if pulled from a river.

How easily the body opens.

How with difficulty does the mouth in awe, in praise. For there are words I cannot say.

If looking, though, is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer, it is the sole practice I had available to me as a child. By seeing, I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare. Among my parents’ art, their work, I moved in fields of color and gesture, cut parts built to make up wholes: mannequins’ heads adorned with beads; plaster food, so real, so hard the mashed potatos hurt, and painted sandwiches of sponge grew stiff and scratched. Waxed fibers with feathers twisted into vessels. Lips and mouths and necks of clay were spun and pulled into being in air. With the play of distance, with hues close up, paintings roughened with weaves, softened with water, oil, turpentine, greens, fleshes, families of shapes grew until — better than the bodies of clouds, these forms stayed put — forms spoke, bent toward, nodded so that they came to happen again and again, and I played among them in their sight. And what went on between us was ineffable, untold and this was
the silent part of my life as a child
.