The Bread We Eat in Dreams (26 page)

////⁄: I have heard it said that there is no single Our Lady. Pyotr Duda believed them a species, perhaps thousands, but at least hundreds, in number. He thought that we never see the same one twice. Just as any visiting foreigner (foreigners will never visit) cannot see the variegated clouds, cannot call them by their names, so we cannot see the difference between Our Ladies. We are too used to our own faces. The one who speaks in the Ossuary is not the one who unexisted my mother is not the one that whispers on the radio is not the one who opens the year at the University crowned with steel laurels.

We must have come here from somewhere. The clouds today are pure white puffers. I used to call them Ice Cream But All Vanilla. Now I call them High Seas. We must have come here from somewhere because we are not suited to this environment. We do not have wings, the altitude kills one out of every twenty or thirty of us, our eyes have grown accustomed to seeing in the clouds, but we have no special organ to help us along. Aerograd is a city in the sky, and we are not of the sky. But they—or she—cannot be from the same place that made us. Our Lady came from somewhere else. Perhaps Our Lady does not mean God, but is their collective term for the repeated body they use. Perhaps that is how little influence we have ever had on her, compared with how like her we try to become. Either she never dies or she is multiform. Does it matter?

We were an Academy Town. We were assembled. We must have once been other than we are. Not gas but smoke. Not a liar but an altimeter.

I expect the fifth section of this document to be expunged. I veer too far. To encode with any density is to lose the sense of which is the real message and which the hidden. Have I embedded Pyotr in gannet or did I mean all along to hide gannet in Pyotr?

////⁄: On my last morning before coming to this place from which I write and write and the writing will go on as long as Our Lady wishes, I went to the market. I purchased marrow bones and a small packet of ham. I took my daily memory and it pained my head. The last rind of fat always fills us with the meat of death. Of some damned fool running at the perfect, impenetrable skin of Our Lady with a tiny pistol. Of how quickly he vanished, like a cloud dispersing as she passed through it. And then there is the flying, the falling, the flying. We see it as if in peripheral vision and say to ourselves:
yes, that is how it is
.

I saw Our Lady a second time. It was the last time. You must understand that as the daughter of a woman that never existed, I am suspect by definition. I rank in several categories of guilt, automatic guilt, machine guilt. My mother that never was must have planted something in me, something that will eventually, inevitably bloom. I saw her at night, under the streetlamps, in a nowhere part of Yellow District, a greensward hardly bigger than a kitchen. Where she stood the clouds kept back. She had a halo instead, a teardrop of clear air. Our Lady swayed back and forth. You can never tell if her empty opal eyes are open or shut. She moved her hands in such a way that her flesh appeared as a tidal motion, each little hand clenching into a red fist and then letting go, the clench flowing up and down the garlands of fingers. I was caught, staring at her, coming home late from Pyotr’s apartment, walking through the damp that clung to me like skin. I stumbled out of the cloudbank and into her teardrop of light. Behind her rose a great black giraffe, perhaps her soldier, perhaps her keeper. Our Lady and I looked at each other. The fist-wave still curled up and down her hands. The giraffe which was not a giraffe but a substitution, a cypher, bent its long black neck to sniff deeply, to take in my person. Its eyes flickered like filmstrips.

Our Lady held out her hands to me. I had to take them. My heart tried to run out of my mouth and get away, away from this, whatever was happening. Her hundred hands closed over my two. It felt like being buried. Her skin was cold. It glittered in the streetlamp. I felt certain those were my last moments in Aerograd.

But Our Lady said:
I can smell your meat
.

And she left me there. The clouds closed after her. She passed me by. It was not grace but some other, stonier, thing having nothing at all to do with me, or Pyotr, or my mother, or gannet or Aerograd.

Or perhaps only boredom.

////⁄: I am my meat. I must eat memory to live. I have tigered against my city. I have watched the gannets die. This is a cypher. I am a cypher. We used to live in the world and now we live in Aerograd. Everything can be substituted for something else. Everything is substituted for something else. It is dark through the window. Fitful, fast-moving clouds rush by—Somewhere to Be That’s Not Here. For a moment, just a moment, suspended in space like a breath, I see the moon flash through. Dim, cloudbound, an indistinct pearl whitening the air around it. But even as I write the word moon I know that is the old word. Not so old that I have lost it completely, like the things that are tigers now, but old enough that I can only indicate with the circumference of my o’s and zeroes that I wish to say moon. The word for it now is
weakness
.

How the weakness shines tonight. How full and bright my weakness in the dark. I am Aeromaus. I am no one.

Weakness wanes; weakness waxes.

I was not born in Yellow District. Instead, I live until the age of five in Grey District, 1
^st
Level, near enough to the props to hear them whipping the cream of the wind every day of my tiny life. Those who live in Grey District have the unique (or almost unique, presumably all the edge Districts have the same view—Red, Indigo, Turquoise, Viridian) vantage of being so low and so far. We look over the edge of the world. We call it
faith
. There is nothing down there but water, in every direction, deep and livid and churning. When the clouds are kind, they cover it so we cannot see.

When Our Lady is unhappy, she brings people here, with her hundred hands. If they have subverted her. If they have kept the old ways of saying what a thing is. If they are in her categories of guilt. They fall but they are flying, like the gannets, dwindling down and out of reach, ecstatic white against the dark water, falling forever but not forever. I always wondered why she did it herself. Maybe there is only one of her and only her. Maybe she is millions.

They flash gold in the sudden sun just before they hit the tide. They become clouds. Snowy Seedpods Seeking New Ground.

No one is coming to visit, to read my tourist guide, to guess at the other meaning, the original or corrupted version. No one is coming because there is no one else.

This is a cypher. Nothing on these pages means what it says. It used to say something else. When you have been here a little while, it will mean something else again. But you will not be here. You will not eat the shrimp or stuff a bird with plums. I will never meet you—but then, it is unlikely I will meet anyone again. I am almost at an end and soon my friends will not remember my name, only redacted or sunflower or whatever substitutes for me.

I am finished.

In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death.

When I kissed her

she tasted like Mars.

Like red cupolas, gilt-spangled,

etched steel cockerels snapping

at a dry, weedy dawn.

She tasted like new streets,

rolled out like silk rugs across meridians,

like a girl

who might not remember what Earth looked like,

even a little,

even a pine tree,

even a sea.

When I kissed her

she tasted like gunmetal cities

pricked with soapy, foaming green:

strange-bred grasses clutching at air,

like a polished sheet of polar ice,

and she dancing upon it, a new kind of beast,

feet blue and bare,

heedless, atavistic, her hair an explosion

which, of course, is red,

could never have been anything other

than red.

In her kiss,

she walks naked through Hellas Planitia;

her pilgrim road all on fire, under crystal,

under a golden sizzle of solar wind.

Her teeth on my lips I watch her buy

this memory from a bazaar,

drink krill from a pink glass vial,

mate with a toad-skinned boy,

and hold against her small breasts

an ultraviolet bubble

wherein she and I are kissing,

forever,

so very like living things.

When I kissed her

she tasted like two moons tumbling,

gleaming, old bones cast into the sky

to foretell my own obsolescence.

What place I, in the place where she lives?

What good my French cuffs

in that long desert?

When I kissed her I knew

she was not like me:

she knew none of the secret

houndstooth shames

that gentlemen know.

Her Galapagos-soul

had flashed past all that,

and she moved like dust on the plain.

A gentleman comes boldly,

when he comes.

He knocks at a little round door,

all etiquette, bred like a dog

to race after her, oh, to run,

while she speeds ahead in her uncatchable orbit,

spinning on her silver rod

always,

always,

so very like a living girl,

always,

always,

so very much faster than he.

I cannot go to Mars.

I am extinct there—

customs would never let me pass.

The days of maids yelping in chicken yards,

scared half to death of a hymen

are gone.

When I kissed her

she tasted like change,

like the face of the moon

suddenly showing her dark.

I did not notice.

Still yet in the chicken yard,

thinking it mattered,

that it would bother her,

I curdled the milk and ruined the beer,

unspun the wool and frightened the cows,

crowing at my body’s breadth—

while she, oil-grimed, skull shaved,

quietly built red engines

to carry herself off.

My hands in her hair,

I looked up in the smoky night,

to a red thing in the sky,

and began to break along the seams,

to fold and arc like a steel cockerel

straining at the sun,

to sear into a thing

that might match her;

not gentle, not bred,

a thing which might taste

of orange domes like bodies rising,

of pilgrim blood both savage

and serene.