Merce, Mercedes

If I move now, very slight and slow, without breath as I can only do, you will see the little nubs of my back marking their place to remind us, ‘this spine is here’, no matter how useless. Before my figure got twisted by time and covered in its purple lightning, my hair used to be as black and heavy as the stagnant space this house still floats on. Now all is white and transparent as the froth that gathers in the cracks of this floorboard. When the black swamp underneath will grow to anger again. The next great flood is what I ask for, measuring the day it comes by the mark the water leaves on that small white church staring back at me through our distance. And there never has been any life around, but the golden cackle of this church’s bell returns every hour without fail. And following all the evenings before, the sun starts to redden and swell as the swamp drags it down. The white church turns blue while the birds leave to give us our peace. One flies a little slower, gets eaten by a crow. I hear the little bones breaking, but apart from that nothing. Despite its end, the bird’s last expression reminds me of a person who I think is still alive.

***

This house does not exist in normal proportion. To the uppermost corner of a long rose-hue building, both blinded by yet equally hidden from the sun, a disconnected woman flew upstairs. She knelt on ornamental-style rugs asking a God of someone or some other to infiltrate my mind, knowing if she’d ask for anything herself that the foreigner’s man would always say no. So through the force of herself alone, the outside humidity became a pumping muscle, branded with the sweat of hot candied apple, seafood boils, various thick sauces all coloured blistering red, chicory coffee, the raspy breath of screaming vendors in multitudes. They were all seeming to fight against me as I pushed my way out. Then as if with the force of the black river that consumed so many of us before, my wish was chosen over hers. Our bodies all collided into the streetcar missing its name, which sank under the solemn air released in the crowd’s sighing. But there was something withheld, until I realised the people were no longer looking at the windows or the floor but to me. I was about to speak when a woman holding flowers leaned in forward to me, commanding in silence to look behind. Which I did but only as slow as possible. Knowingly, there stood the blue-eyed wish I brought to life. Whose irises turned white as the streetcar ran between pockets of the sun’s absence. I tried to smile but the enamel face hovered unforgiving and frozen, all the belonging drained like an abscess because of the cynical mistake I had made, by refusing to believe in the inherent goodness of Theo Lovey before he took himself apart.

***

The sky unclothed had revealed a depth in its ribcage, which broke past the bones and anchored itself to the very essence of the looming house. All underwater, lucid and wavering under the pressurising blue, I felt the moon at its fullest had been swallowed and stuck in my throat. The ivy veins of the building wrapped around the sack of my stomach. The floorboards moved along with the entire house by the tremor of the strings with which my mother in the basement ached her bow against. For a being with seemingly no feeling or thought besides furniture and green, she would be a hurting creature by night, keeping on with the swelling of the moon in my throat and aggravating the stars, from their droning blue to hot white pulsating wounds. And through some sorrowful greed, the misery of the women across the other floors directly fed her content. All their features different but equally telling of the specific way a child’s first laughter is only known and memorised by a wind that nobody felt. While some were older most were younger, almost as young as myself. And the happiness that they were feeding was partially my own, against my choice. For this reason I avoided them. Being the only real child there, I meditated on the jester doll sat on my windowsill by my mother, to pretend I never saw what I did. The only non-woman here, it had white skin, one eye painted a separate blue to the other, silver eyeshadow, black hair under the jester hat swooped mildly over the right side, straight passive brows each, quiet nose, placid pink mouth, little hoops, two on one ear, by the side with the swoop, the other none, one silver and the second a murky gold. The clothing itself was all stripes of glinting green. Its texture rough but very touchable, with purple and slight touches of that ambiguous grey-gold repeating in its under layers, all brittle fabric that would scratch slightly with the friction of being held. Under the trousers a tag would emerge, ‘keep away from children, fragile, display purpose only’. And with the porcelain jester open-armed on its edge, I burned the object to the front and back of my mind at once, holding the next event in its black space like a perforating spear.

***

The house continues in uncanny proportion. Like a child born wrong, it was missing windows where they should have been while other places were overcrowded with perfectly misplaced cracks amid the ivy clusters. Above the scattered eyes of the building, on its seventh or eighth floor, since nobody could ever tell, was where the birth of Theo Lovey took place. He reached out a hand as the red sun pushed up from the earth’s womb, and the black iron cold of his shadow on my face awoke me. I knew it was him when I saw on the windowsill that the doll was no longer there. Then when he reached a hand, because he was new to walking, and newer still to standing. I took the time to breathe, and I took more time to think what my face may have looked like, whether it was settled or afraid. And I was afraid not of him, but whether he could know why I forced him into living. And in all the time taken his stance was broken so he fell, his knees in an impossible position. From the floor he looked to me with a quivering lip, and seconds after churned the movements of a childish cry, but without any of its sounds. So in silence I watched the chest heave up and down and his face get twisted, and very small fists tightening themselves around nothing. What surprised me was when his eyes did water, but he did not move to cover it with his hands as I would have. And was he still porcelain or made of skin? So I poked very quickly at his shoulder and retracted the finger, holding onto it with my other hand to consider the touch for longer. But this did not tell me anything. It did stop his crying, however, and I wondered again how much knowing he had or was capable of. Though, looking into the overwhelmingly bright, watering eyes, that only seemed to consume more space on his small head, I became less afraid to take his hand. At first it was cold and solid as expected, But as we walked to the next room, the last tears dropped and warmed my hand atop his. As this happened, I knew his hold was somehow shifting though he kept it painfully firm. It kept getting warmer until I felt little fingers, even smaller than my own, becoming increasingly more real. As he continued I could hear and feel the resonance of his breath even more than before. All of it unfolded in the way where holding a rose stem by the thorns, forces you to realise for the first time that your grasp is really your own. And as I led him to the room, where a woman named Theodora Laveau had left the world by the next highest window, I thought on how his flesh could save the others from the same.

***

Like the other working women, I never knew Theodora Laveau but I did know that the rings around her eyes of yellow, green, grey, were only as ugly and brutal as the hands that forced them. One pair of hands were bulbous and stout with a thick alloy ring on the left. Another pair were educated, long, almost woman-like but not quite. Then came my mother, when she caught me looking at the blurry exchange of men between the slight turn of that white chipped door. When I braced myself, expecting what was fair to come, a slap like red gunshot was landed. But not on me. I lifted my head to see Theodora, cowering from the eyes of my mother as the spaces for white were instead streaming veins of red green and purple. She accused something about a darkness in the hiding woman that couldn’t help but show up in her face, even though she was as dark as I was, and not much more than my mother. Quickly I was lifted and in her embrace we flew down orange stairs, onto the street, walking silently then under the hot malevolent sun. And it was on this walk that my mother noticed me staring at this doll in an antique shop, owned by an old woman who bawled long and strange as soon as I held it. But my mother scowled at the noise and smiled when she turned to me, to give the thing that I would later name for the intention of giving peace to the first. Because by the time we returned to the house from the day, that Theodora firmed her resolve to fall with the sun. And my mother’s screaming covered the thud. She urged me to hide upstairs. When I did, I leaned out my window to watch my mother remove her jewellery, boots, underwear, before dragging her by the bare feet until they turned the corner to the house’s next face where I could no longer see. Meanwhile, spots of yellow and orange began to unfold like narcissus, on the street that never stopped moving despite the heaviness of the ghost-blue evening that infiltrated the glossy eyes of the young.

***

With the old workers the boy was paraded on the street wearing the same pink lace of his predecessor. His jester hat and original clothing kept all the same except for the trousers being exchanged with a sheer white skirt, that flowed against the rustle of buyers leering up close. And the crowd that followed arranged themselves by order of age. The line followed all along the winding orange stairs, up to the entrance of his room, which was no longer a door but a stream of rhinestone beads. Some days I would fail to pass this area fast enough, and be forced to briefly acknowledge him staring at me when something was being done to him. Because as soon as I grew tall enough to see my mother on equal footing, she decided I should be as impartial as she was and to no longer need the door, which I still very much needed. Otherwise, I could’ve pretended to be happy, knowing that the abundance that came out him, meant the rest of the workers no longer needed to work for us in that way. Some became housekeepers and maids, some gardeners when we bought a separate larger plot of land, on an unlived part of the opposite road. Others left forever to find something to do, not out of need but from finally being free to do the wanting. And for all the days that this was made possible, a grand buffet with ribbons and flags of clashing colours, and food that didn’t match, was arranged for these men who came from everywhere. First it had been a modest arrangement, but the tables quickly extended into the street and further, where a bowl of apples was placed at the very end for the glamorous horses to arrive to, after pulling carriages that weighed heavier in their overload of gold, feathers, and topaz. For these people the air was made to smell sweet, but only in that poisonous way or else they wouldn’t be able to sense it. Then the addition of the sweat that gathered by the crevice of each ruddy man’s neck, became nothing but an insidious rotting. One of the women, which I still never spoke to, offered me what she was eating. Something heavy, over-spiced, and passed its time. Then I imagined the red beans throbbing and I had to walk away.

***

With every memory I revisit, the house unravels into uglier and uglier proportion. It leaned heaviest on the night I brought Theo Lovey to the room, where the ivy had flooded in from the window that never closed after the first descended. And from below, my mother continued to heave in the basement with her groaning cello, then pricking on our feet. It infiltrated our chests and continued to expand past all hearing, to buzz in our fingers then to our head and ears, until it frenzied in the feverish blue air that began to reveal its sparks of white. As it got warmer, and my hand started to sweat more into his, I broke the hold to wipe onto my dress. But the Lovey eyes followed and stopped. Once more they consumed the small face he was given and he dropped on the floor abrupt, like his legs went back to stone. He was crying again with the exaggerated movements of a person who wasn’t used to humanity and never would be. Then he raised the small pink hand to point at my rapidly unfolding black. Unarmed I kneeled. I held onto myself on the slow way down hoping to conceal it. A furnace of the world, a chamber of red muscle. A place we hope is far but is in us wherever we are. My mother appeared behind us. Her eyes were pointed. Her lips pulled thinner and whiter. Her smile was painful to me but she didn’t seem to feel it. So the equally unfeeling but heavily wanting hands took Theo. And before the night of the first time was over I never bled again.

***

This house does not exist. From the first night I had some indication of what was becoming, but these were only confirmed one morning when we were much older and overflooded with his success. Pieces were breaking off and floating from the swollen bouquets, piled up in all corners of every room, but especially there in the kitchen where we sat staring past each other. My mother and I on opposite ends the window in between split us both down the morning’s mild white and the grey lavender of its proceeding shadow. The pale green wall and the red-checked tablecloth. Black wooden clock whirred heavy above her head. This resonance was hers and so was the echoing sound of the vendors setting up outside. She broke the silence biting into a large green apple, occasionally brushing rough with her sleeve. I took the black coffee between my hands slow. The question coming close by the heat on my tongue. But the answer came before any ask. Forced out by a heavy black bag was Theo. From the grand wooden closet next to the cupboard behind my mother’s seat, he was pushed onto the floor by its weight. The bruised pink of his mouth, partially parted like an infant with fever, had been stained by the red of my mother’s gaudy lip. His eyes dragged slightly down by their sides, with a frantic despair. Some indents she had left and the mauve surrounding them were still unfolding, roses all over his arms and legs. And he was only in the white fabric. “Isn’t he pretty?’ the only thing she said. “Isn’t he pretty, Merce?”

***

That was the last time I saw them, and the first time she really tried to pray. In the streetcar I ran to, the hovering face forced me to think of Theo for all the rest of the journey. Who knows why I didn’t take him with me. But no more answers. And still none now as I watch the black swamp that gives no reflection. Instead, part of a hand emerges. Which I lean over and pull up by my window. As this arm unveils, it seems perfectly preserved. Pale skin taught and cold. But as soon as the full body emerges naked from the swamp, everything wrinkles all over with a slight hiss and the froth re emerges for a moment between the floorboards. They remain as the suddenly aged man begins to breathe stiffly.

***

“Mm, mm...", a mumble as he turns to stare. Eyes heavy and direct as the swamp. The froth laces over the entire floor now. How the lines are hiding his face. But the likeness is the same so I know who this is. “Merce,” It makes me cry. “Mercedes.” And I know he never spoke before. The froth subsides to the thickening black and I kneel in it facing down hoping to get eaten. But Theo Lovey forces himself and myself to stand upright. Now two weary people, hopefully headed somewhere, nice. I never saw the swamp in the day, but we’re passing above it now and it looks even blacker. Secretly I imagined us holding hands again, so now we’re both real people, in all its severities, wherever we land.