Thamnophis sirtaris Kensey Stedman It is spring and not winter and we live far enough away from the city so that we can have a garden. A real garden-not a sad window box with an odd geranium hanging its woeful white head. We have a garden we can walk in, feel, touch. We have a garden with roses as big as the fist of a child, roses that need be doused with apple cider vinegar to keep the green Japanese beetles away. We live far away enough from the city so that we have a garden with snakes in it. This I do not know until I almost step on one. It is small, skinny-a garter snake with three long stripes. Thamnophis sirtaris, I think, that is what it is called. Between the stripes are perfect tessellating splotches, repeated blotches, patches without error that fit like a puzzle. I think that you would like this, that you would appreciate this about it. But you the woodworker do not stop to do childish things like watch snakes slither on their bellies though gardens filled with roses. You the woodworker like the organization of Maurits Cornelis Escher's reptiles, the exactness of his pencil lizards, painted turtles, and lithographed frogs. You like their precise geometry, their mathematics, their logic. You like Escher's reptilian arithmetic but you would never take the time to hold in your own hands a garter snake with cool skin and forked tongue. In the garden, I want to pick up the snake and take it to you. I want to hold it carefully and go up the dark stairs to the attic room where you are artist and carpenter and commonsensical thinker. But it is too quick for me and disappears in S-curves before I can catch it. I have black dirt on my feet and clothes and under my fingernails. It is probably on my face and later tonight, when I go up to the attic you will look at me and say, You have dirt on your face. Triangular love. It is, as a concept, romantic but not believable. The Love Triangle: in which A loves B, B loves C, C loves A-and everyone is miserable. It is terrible in the Shakespearean way. The odds of this actually happening are astronomically low. Astronomically low-this is something that I say a lot. The odds that you will escape from this unscathed: astronomically low. The odds you will be able to recall one good thing in retrospect: astronomically low. The odds that this will end well: astronomically low. The damage that I will do to you will be irreparable. Even now, I know this. What I do not know is why I am doing it. Because I am selfish. Because I am depraved. Because I want to. Love is no triangle. It is no triple-pointed isosceles with points A, B, and C. This is too simple. This is too easy. The Love Triangle-the very idiom is ridiculous. A single face, three vertices-absolute child's play in Cartesian space, vanilla in Euclidean geometry. Love is definitely a shape but a triangle is not it. More accurately, it is a stellated dodecahedron. Twelve faces, twelve vertices, thirty edges. Every clumsily worded cruelty is afforded it's own pentagram. Every misguided cuckoldry, every slight, every taunt, every phone left unanswered and letter left unopened-all of these are granted a place in a stellated dodecahedron. "I cannot see myself with you when I am seventy-five." "I lied to you." "Give me back my keys." These would each be a pyramid. Repeated and repeated and repeated. In a stellated dodecahedron, each face on every pyramid is something you want to take back. Mistakes, faults, missteps-repeated and repeated and repeated. Maurits Cornelis Escher constructed stellated dodecahedrons in his woodcuts. "Order and Chaos," was the first. The next he called "Order and Chaos II." And order is there, initially. Order is a kiss on the cheek. Order is a hand holding another hand. Order is Good Night, Sweet Dreams, You Are Beautiful, How Was Your Day. Everything is still innocent enough. Words are precious, dove-like. But chaos will follow. Inescapably, inevitably. The kiss will move to the forehead. This is the beginning of the end. The kiss will move to the mouth, lips will part and nothing good will come of it. Lips part and triangles turn into stellated dodecahedrons. Maurits Cornelis Escher used the stellated dodecahedron in a lithograph called "Gravity"-where six pairs of turtles without shells poke their heads and arms out of darkened doorways on every side of the polygon and each turtle is directly opposite its counterpart. It was originally done in black and white; years passed before he went back with watercolor and painted each pair of turtles six different colors: red, orange, magenta, indigo, brown, yellow. I imagine that before there was color you could not tell which turtle was which, which arm belonged to which head, whose counterpart was whose. It is all flawless logic, perfect math-but it is a terrible mess. The turtles look pained. The stellated dodecahedron is supposedly intended to be a common shell but it doesn't seem that way, looking at it. Rather, they look trapped. Every turtle is looking for its counterpart and every counterpart is avoiding eye contact. They are twelve individuals trapped in an eternal tension, an everlasting state of unrequited lust, unreturned love. It is not a "common shell." It is a common misery. It is a common ache. It is a common agony and we have this in common with the turtles. We are trapped in our mistakes and we will repeat them again and again and again. He loved infinity, Maurits Cornelis Escher-and this ache is infinite. Love is a not a triangle. Love is a stellated dodecahedron in which Escher's turtles are not afforded shells. And neither are we. You say you want to pack bread and honey and move into the Church of the Guardian Angel. You want to live there and wake up every morning on a pew covered in light filtered through stained glass windows. But I want to live in the Metropolitan-in the Egypt Room. You can't live in an art museum, you say. You can't live in a church, I say. We have each been uncompromising about this since we have known each other. We have been at odds about this since we were old enough to go into the city alone. It feels like we have been at odds about this since we were children-but we did not know each other then. I argue that we would have lots of company in the Egypt Room. We would never want for camaraderie-not with cats and sphinxes, not with Tuthmosis and Hatshepsut smiling from their thrones. We would read the hieroglyphics that cover the walls and wear Hatnofer's gold and greenstone jewelry. Isis and Horus would watch us with bright blue stone eyes only half disapprovingly. The entire place is like a tomb, you say. You can live there without me. I am not sleeping somewhere filled with coffins. This is true. The Egypt Room is filled with coffins. There is the coffin of Khumnakht and the coffin of Henettawy, the anthropoid coffins of Khonsu. But I would much rather be in their mummified company than live in your Church of the Guardian Angel, watched by papal pupils. I'll put Queen Hatnofer's heart scarab around your neck, I say. You'll be protected from harm in the afterlife. Not that harm would come to you. You share a name with a saint and an archangel-it means "Who is like God?" What the hell are you talking about? you say. You never make any god damn sense. Who is like God? indeed. Sometimes I do not sleep. I cannot, do not sleep for days and days. And days. Everything, for a short while, gets very loud, very bright, very fast. Very hot or very cold-depending. You refuse sleep, fight sleep, struggle violently against the sandman's grip while I beg for it, silently implore him to slip his hand through my bedroom window. You will not. I can not. I hate you for it. Sometimes I do not sleep for days and I am so afraid of what I might say to you. Anything might fall out of my mouth. Anything. There is no telling. I love you. That would be the worst thing. That would be the worst thing I could say to you because it would be cruel. That would be the cruelest thing I could say to you because it would be true. The odds that you will walk away from this unscathed/ that you will be able to think of one good thing in retrospect/ that this will end well: astronomically low. Anything might fall out of my mouth. It is often a grammar lecture. I am sure they are fascinating. I am sure that you find syntactic pleonasm utterly titillating at four in the morning. I am sure you were awake and wondering if participial phrases must, in fact, refer to their grammatical subject when used at the beginning of a sentence construction. (They must.) I am sure you are absolutely captivated by my sunrise - synchronized tirades on the independent clause, the modal auxiliary verb, the double copula. You are a saint for listening-the patron saint of insomniac grammarphiles. I will myself to stop speaking. I cannot because I feel ungoverned and without rules or reason in your world of logic and perfect puzzle pieces-rules that make the puzzle pieces fit perfectly. You would call it a crown of thorns. You the woodworker speak in splinter jargon: bench dog, dovetail, flute, devil's stone, crook, crotch, Dutchman-these all mean something other than what they sound like they should. These all have something to do with crossgrain or perpendicular cut or surface knotholes. The crown of thorns: interlocking pieces of wood notched to intersect at right angles forming joints, self supporting objects, taking on a floating appearance. The crown of thorns: one of the instruments of the Passion. Thorn branches woven into a chaplet worn by Jesus before his crucifixion. Structurally, this means something to you. Biblically, this means something to you. You are builder and saint. You have crossgrain and cross. I have neither. I have neither bible nor rosary. I have no wood to touch, no hammer to bang, no nail head to hit. I have nothing concrete. I feel, most times, as though I am floating like the wooden pieces in your carpenter's crown of thorns. And so sleepless I try and justify myself. To you or to both of us or there could not be a difference. I have rules, I say frantically to you, I have patterns. I do. I do. I have verbal numbers. I have literary equations. I have a shape with 26 faces. I have a shape with 26 faces and five of them are vowels. Sometimes six. Letters. Words. They shift, move, transform. You think something is definite and it changes. Words that should not have a "Y" and do: "Zephyr," "Xylophone," "Martyr." It's that letter Y that makes it six. You can never tell. Sometimes 21 are consonants and sometimes only 20. You can never be sure, so you have a verbal impossibility. An impossible shape of words, a Necker cube, a Penrose triangle of words. I do. I do have laws. Grammar: verbal geometry. I tell you this frantically night after night. You sigh and tell me to go to bed. Your hypocrisy is red-eyed and fatigued and desperate. You go to bed! I yell. But I know you won't. And you don't and I can't and I hate you for it. Angry and hot and manic I think, I love you I am going to ruin you this will not end well. Nights, up in the attic room that you have turned into woodshop, you nail and saw and hammer and I sit and watch you because I cannot sleep. We do not always speak, sometimes we cease our mad babbling and I just stare at you nailing, sawing, hammering. I stare at you in bizarre and terrible hours of the night and think that yours is an angel's name. And a saint's name. I think about this sometimes until the gray area between night and morning comes. I think about this because you are so much of your name and I am so little of it. You are adoring, thanksgiving, supplicating. You are fingertips to forehead, chest cavity, left shoulder, right shoulder. You are Christianized, catechisized, circumcised, baptized. You are impossibly good. And I am impossible. I am an impossible shape. I am Escher's upwards waterfalls and staircases leading to nowhere. I am a set of conditions that cannot be satisfied. I am simultaneously going clockwise and counterclockwise. A paradox, you say, a devil's pitchfork. You say I do not make any god damn sense and this is true. I never make any god damn sense. You are adoring, thanksgiving, supplicating. I've left one out: Contrition. From Latin "contritus": "ground to pieces," "crushed by guilt." For I know my iniquity-this is the way one would properly start a prayer of "contrition." I wonder how often it is that you are praying with "contrition," because you are "contrite." Not often. You are impossibly good. If I were the praying kind, For I know my iniquity would be the way I began all of my prayers; there would be no adoration, thanksgiving, supplication-only contrition. So many of the nights that you have spent etching cherry wood tessellations, hickory woodcuts-I have spent etching marks into cherry wood bedposts, being etched into bedposts of hickory. Notches in bedposts. Nameless, faceless. You have been tessellating shapes and I have been tessellating flesh. Sluthood: the tessellation of skin. The season changes but the bare arms and bare legs and clothes strewn on the floor stay the same. Our limbs become the turtle limbs in "Gravity." There is no telling whose body parts go with which night. Details are varying but the situations are exactly the same. You have been sliding pieces of wood, sliding shapes while I have been sliding my hand down the lengths of stomachs and forearms that remain nameless and faceless and all the same. Stomachs and forearms repeated and repeated and repeated. Sluthood: the parquetry of epidermis. The lithography of muscles. The xylography of membranes. Corpuscular carpentry. There are not enough marking gauges or Hail Maries in the world. You say when you were growing up your house was made of balsa wood and sound went through the ceilings and floors. The walls were paper thin, you say. You say your mother and father were light sleepers. So I suppose you'll just stay a virgin forever, I tell you. Not that it matters, as you are a saint. You look embarrassed. You might even be angry. If saints get angry. And I don't think they do. Should have said 'because,' I say. I should have said 'because'-not 'as.' You look like you want to hit me. Like you are thinking about it. Like you are not quite sure what is stopping you. As connotes time, I tell you, X is happening as Y is happening. 'As' isn't to be used in a causal way. You'll stay a virgin forever because your house was made of balsa wood and sound carries. But this eternal virginal state won't matter much because you are a saint. It's causal, see. Ah, you say. Temporal. Causal. They are completely unrelated things. You nod seriously; now you look like you are trying not to laugh. Sometimes I cannot say anything to you because I cannot say what I want to say. I am awed by my own inability to be clear, to cohere. I prattle on endlessly about prescriptivism versus descriptivism but I am shockingly inarticulate. I stare at you and think that I am the most nonsensical person you know. You know, you say, you know you never make any god damn sense. In the museum, I like the sculpture of Adam. You say No one looks like that. And I think, you do. You do. You look like Lombardo's Adam. Venice, circa 1478, constructed in the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Remarkable, the plaque informs us, "for its purity of marble and smoothness of carving." "The figure has been clearly classicized." "The figure has been rendered in a highly stylized relief." The figure looks like you. You do look like this, like Lombardo's Adam. You have been rendered in a highly stylized relief. Further refinements, the plaque informs us, include his "thoughtful glance" and "eloquent hands." He does have eloquent hands. He has Escher hands, your hands-hands that curve impossibly, hands that simultaneously draw each other, hands that are perfect and bird-like and living. Hands that are alive. Hands that never sleep. In one of Adam's eloquent hands is the apple. He looks but does not bite. He does not know temptation, has nothing to feel contrite about. His face is calm and his stance is at ease but something is not right here. Up one of Adam's flawless legs crawls the serpent. I have a hand fetish. It is almost debilitating. I am spoken to and I hear nothing because I have been staring at palms, wrists, index fingers. And you cannot really ask someone: Could you repeat that? I was studying the veins on the back of your hand? I'm sorry, it's only that your dorsal interosseus muscle is so distracting. Once more please? I just can't pull my eyes away from your ulnar nerve. Bones are a problem. Carpal. Metacarpal. Scaphoid. Lunate. Knuckles, particularly-even being nothing more than joints, little ball and socket bones beneath thin skin. Some people have more aesthetically satisfying knuckles than others. Like you. You have perfect knuckles-even being bruised, scratched, calloused, cut. Woodshop wounds, you say, the mark of Escher. Parquetry collateral. The knuckles of your left hand look decidedly more abused than the knuckles of your right. You, like Escher, are left-handed. This is something you remind me of often. So too were Michaelangelo, Holbein, DaVinci, but you were not the one to tell me this. Left-handedness is a symptom of genius, but you were not the one to tell me this, either. You, like Escher, are modest. You, like Maurits Cornelis Escher, think in tessellations. Everything fits. Everything is mathematical. Everything makes sense. Your logic works and you repeat it. Or you did. You seem to be slipping on your numbers and formulas. Something is not right here. I would like to believe that tessellations are the visual equivalent of the repetition of words. But all I ever do is repeat myself and I never make any god damn sense. You speak in logarithms and I speak in logorrhoea. In terms of rhetoric, this is the superfluous verbosity of abstract and ungrounded prose, the excessive wordage of the conceptual. As euphemism, this is the kind way of saying "inane and illogical postmodern babble." Medically, logorrhoea is the rambling and incomprehensible repetition of illogical words and phrases-a psychiatric and neurological language disorder present in those with aphasia, mania, catatonia. If left untreated, I tell you, individuals afflicted by catatonia will die of exhaustion. Ah, you say, how fascinating. You look amused. I was talking about you, I say. It is just the truth. You are either in a state of catatonic excitement wherein you saw and nail and carve and tessellate until dawn-or you are in a catatonic stupor, sitting in a chair with eyes wide open refusing sleep because you might never wake up. You brush your knuckles down my cheek and say that if one of us is suffering from catatonic schizophrenia it is definitely me. And I like the feel of them on my face and think that the joinery in your hands is a far better thing than any woodwork joinery of frame and panel and rail. In our little catechism, I am the question and you are the answer. I am the call and you are the answer. I do not make sense and you do. You are order and I am chaos. You are logic, reason. You are brain before heart, reason before rhyme. You are rules and regulations and I never make any god damn sense. You never make any god damn sense, you tell me. You say this all the time. This is true. I never make any god damn sense. You are theorems, postulations. Lines, endpoints, shapes and graphs. You like to think of yourself as Maurits Cornelis Escher's protégé. In the attic room, you keep your straightedges, rulers, measuring tapes all in one organized drawer. You keep your nails, drill and router bits, sash clamps and screws all compartmentalized and boxed. Hammers, knives, saws, screwdrivers. Brushes, stains, varnishes, lacquers. All of these have a place. All of these are exactly where they should be. You keep everything so tidy. Nights, I hear you turning wood into something else and I follow the noise up the narrow stairs and watch you. I sit on the floor and hours pass and birch becomes box, walnut becomes chair, maple becomes bookshelf. Nights, I watch you working in order to ward off sleep. Mahogany, cherry, teak, lime-become strange, sharp sculpture. Sleek and dark and dangerous looking. Saw and sandpaper to fight Sandman-your hands are in constant motion, eyes wide open and glassy. You believe in perfection through precision. You work methodically, deliberately, carefully. You are scrupulous, structured. Every mark and cut you make is exact. There is no room for error, no room for blemish nor slight defect. There will be no knots, no splintering, no breaking, no warping. You make sure of this with numbers, pencil ticks, increments, measurements. You are as much a mathematician as you are a carpenter. I do not understand your numbers and measurements. It is lost on me. It is as good as magic-your making things from lumber, from plywood. Desks, vases, stools out of thin air. You are as much a magician as you are a mathematician. Sometimes it is more about form and less about function- sometimes your concerns are purely aesthetic: sculptures and bowls, boughs, branches, curvatures. Beautiful shapes, kaleidoscope patterns. Either way, you are a mathematician magician. A chair will appear where there wasn't one before and I will ask you, How did you do that? I wonder where you keep your wand, your fairy dust. Geometry, you answer, numbers, fastidiousness. Wood fascist! I call you. You are an oak despot, a czar of cedar, a pine oligarch. There is absolutely no margin for mistake. You live and think in the same manner in which you work. You are grounded, somber, sober, calculating. Your thoughts are systematic, analytical. You are order. You are reason. Or you were. Something is not right here. You were. You were order. You were point A, point B, point C-all in order, all where they are supposed to be. As of late, something has been off. There has been a shift in your speech, your gaze is shifty, you shift on your feet and pace and whisper. Sometimes you look as though you are not sure where you are. Sometimes you look as though you are not sure who you are. Sometimes you look as though you are not sure of who I am-and, selfishly, this makes me feel the worst. I never make any god damn sense and it will not stop raining. But at least it is spring. If it is spring, then it is not winter. The floors are getting wet but it is warm enough to have the windows open so we do. If it is warm, then it is spring and not winter and knowing this-that winter is most likely over for good-knowing this is worth wet floors. It is before and after a thunderstorm. We are in between thunderstorms. The sky is an off shade of green; it is the kind of green that says something is not right here. I am watching you sleep. Something is not right here. Things are moving under your skin. Your faces twitches, body jerks. If you opened your eyes and caught me looking at you, you would hate the expression on my face. I wonder if you would be able to tell that I was trying to remember who you were. I think you would, and you would hate it. You look so different when you sleep; I barely recognize you. You could be a sleeping stranger, your overgrown garden head could be someone else's. I barely recognize you when you sleep because you do it so rarely. You do it so rarely because of your utter disdain for Circadian Rhythms (a myth, you say), Rapid Eye Movement (occurring only in stage five sleep, and honestly, who gets there?), Activation Synthesis Theory (dreams! Dreaming does not do a damn thing but perturb and unsettle. Freud, Hobson, Sutola-they can take their theories and their hats and eat them!) Six, seven, eight hours out of every day, you say, is ludicrous. Ludicrous, you say, that's a third of your life! I think you are afraid to fall asleep. Whose hands are we in when we're sleeping? you ask. The Sandman? God? Because I don't have a lot of use for either! Only the first part of that is the truth, I think. The latter you say because you are tired. Once you told me you thought sleeping was no different than dying for eight hours. It's a gamble, you say, the sleep paralysis of hypnopompia is no different than being six feet under. Your face twitching, your body jerking- these are nothing more than alpha waves giving way to theta waves. The things moving under your skin are nothing more than hypnic jerks. It is nothing more than somnolence but to you it is nightly expiration; bed sheets and pillowcases are reminders of mortality. I am watching you and thinking you could be sleeping. Or you could be dead. Or there could not be a difference. There is only a difference when you open your eyes. You do and I jump. I hadn't expected you to. You're writing about me, you say, you're writing about me in your head. It sounds only half like a question. I wait for you to sound accusatory. I think I want you to sound accusatory. Maybe so, I say. Will it be unflattering? you ask. I shake my head. I tell you that it will not, that it will just be true. And it is that. It is always that. It is always just true. You do kiss like a child. You kiss like you are a child in the backseat of a car, mouth and nose pressed against the glass of the windowpane. You are losing your mind. It is just the truth. You think I lost mine a long time ago. This is definitely the truth. You do have fingers that are long, wood stain and varnish under your nails. You always have splinters. Your hair is getting long and falls over your eyes. You are the only virgin I know. It is just true. It is Tuesday night and Wednesday morning and I am staring at the ceiling, tossing in the dark. Sleepless, as always. As always, wishing and begging and pleading for sleep. As always, it evades me; I cannot catch it. I can hear you one floor above me-nailing, sawing, sanding. In the attic room you are constructing beautiful things from wooden boards and planks and pieces. You are erecting useful things, sanding the rough places. Some nights, I sit and watch you work until I fall asleep. Sometimes we speak and sometimes we don't. Some nights, we don't need to speak-we live in each other's head, steal each other's thoughts. Other nights we repeat things. Tonight your hammering seems louder, faster. Something about it sounds desperate; I think it sounds like someone trying to break out of a coffin. When I was a child, I always had nightmares about being buried alive. Six years old, six feet under-this should exist only as nightmare but it doesn't. I close my eyes and open them again, get out of bed and follow the sound of hammering up the staircase. I reach the top step, turn the doorknob but it does not turn. The door is locked. You have locked the door. I feel like I maybe I am asleep after all-like this is a bad dream. I try the knob again. Locked. You have never locked this door before but it is locked. I knock, call your name. I feel underwater, everything is dreamlike in that terrible way-in that tired, terrible way where things lurch out at you and the floor is pulled out from underneath everything. I hear the lock turn and the door swings open and you are standing in front of me and I think that you look crazed. You don't say anything, you just stare at me. Why did you lock the door? I ask. I feel like I might cry. I am unsure when it was that I last cried; I do not know if I still can. You do not answer me. We just look at one another. We look at one another like you would look at a total stranger if you bumped into one in the middle of night on your way to get a drink of water. Who are you? What are you doing in my house? We stare. A small eternity goes by in silence. Eventually I ask, What are you making? You purse your lips. Breathe in sharply. Exhale only halfway. I'm building a bed. I wait for you to say more. You don't. Tell me about this bed, I say. It's oak. You say only this and nothing more. It's oak, you repeat. That is all you say and your voice is small. And then you laugh but it is not really a laugh at all. You laugh and nothing is funny. You laugh and close the door in my face and I hear nails, saw, hammer, wood. You laugh and something is not right here and I do not like that you are building a bed. I do not like that you are building a bed-because to you sleeping is dying and dormant is dead. Dormancy is death. I do not like that you are building a bed-to you the line between sleep and awake means something other than what it should. I turn and gropingly make my way back down the staircase, thinking that I will trip and fall on every dark step. In bed I like awake and think that we are both trapped in this house of snakes and flowers and numbers, tessellating variations of our lunacy. The next morning in the garden I prick my thumb on a thorn in the roses. I wait to fall, to crumple in the dirt and sleep for a hundred years. This does not happen. A tiny red dot of blood appears and I lick it off. When I was a child I had hated that story. Now I wanted it to come true. In our strange house of patterns and reptiles and floors that are wet because we leave the windows open, we exist in a kind of watery limbo. We are drowning in the limbo that is early spring. There is constant rain. There is the constant threat that winter might look over her shoulder and her hideous hoary face will freeze everything. Nothing is decided in our watery limbo. Everything hangs suspended and it is making us crazy. More crazy. Crazier. It is spring and not winter but. There is that threat. In limbo, nothing is decided. Things can change. You think something is definite and then it shifts. It is going to get warmer or colder. It is going to get better or worse. I almost want to start up a betting pool. With strangers, because it would be more entertaining that way. With strangers I could say: Miss? Do you have a moment? The boy I am in love is losing his mind. How long do you give him before he's absolutely raving mad? Sir? If I could have a moment of your time? I think I might very well be ridden with venereal disease. Do you think I am? No? Are you sure? Yes, I'm aware I don't come across as "that kind" of girl but if you knew me better?. Is he going to have to be institutionalized? Am I? Will winter in fact be over if I keep insisting that it is? Place your bets by midnight. I am thinking, Place your bets by midnight and I walk in on you coming out of the shower. Jesus! you say. Don't you knock anymore? I jump. I tell you I'm sorry. I'm sorry! You are angry and naked and I did not think that saints could be either of these things. You are fumbling for a towel and I cannot move. I am thinking that You have been rendered in a highly stylized relief. You are red and steam hangs around each of us and we stare at each other and it is terribly apparent that neither of us knows who the other is anymore. Jesus! you say again. Jesus! Get out! I back away slowly and you slam the door and in this house we are slowly going mad. You have been rendered in a highly stylized relief. I made you take the train with me into the city one summer. It seems very long ago, now. It was August and very hot and we were sweating, melting into one another. In the museum, you said everyone should speak French when talking about love and death, shouldn't they? Because they look almost the same, don't they? At a glance, they could be the same word-"l'amour", "la mort." And isn't that perfect? And don't they? And isn't it? In European Sculpture and Decorative Arts we stood over a marble tomb of a brother and sister. Death in early childhood, the plaque informed us, was not uncommon. The doves carved on the girl's chest, the plaque informed us, was often seen on grave markers of children during this time. They were small and white; they were stone holding stone. He was stone and she was stone and I had thought to myself that no brother or sister three feet tall should ever be six feet under. Maybe they're sleeping, you said They were not sleeping. They were lying down in the dark and they were lying down together. They were lying down in the dark together but they were not sleeping. She looks sorry, I said. She looks sorry lying there. And I thought she did. Something on her face looked culpable. She looked full of remorse. Guilty as charged. Or worse than that-guilty but uncharged. She had an awful secret. Privately shamed is worse than publicly sentenced. For I know my iniquity. She looked contrite. Sorry about what? you asked. Her unchaste and wanton depravity, I said. She was a child! you say. She couldn't have been more than six! But I thought that maybe her marble replica, her stone likeness-made her look younger than she had been. I thought maybe the dates of birth and death were fabricated. I thought that if I were you and had a rosary I would play with it-roll it around in my hand, make a fist and feel the beads and thin chain. On the ride home the train lurched and screeched. We had sweat all the way through our clothes and the fabric clung to our skin and our hair stuck to our necks. I licked my lips and tasted salt and fell asleep on your shoulder. Laying, I said to you when I opened my eyes again, Books lie, dead girls lay. What are you talking about? In the museum, I said. Back in the museum I said the sister looked guilty lying there. I waited for you to tell me that I never made any god damn sense. You didn't. Instead you just stared straight ahead and said nothing. The train lurched again and we were quiet. Maybe, you said finally, it doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't matter and there isn't a difference. Candles in glass cylinders painted with the archangel with whom you share your name rest on the windowsills and floors in our strange and serpentine house. Neither you nor I bought them. They were here when we moved in. I sometimes feel as though we have lived here forever. I feel as though we have never not known each other, never lived apart, never lived apart and never lived outside of this house. This house does strange things to time. Hours are odd and shifting little increments; seasons are just more colorful and dynamic hours. Seconds are years and everything bleeds together. Time in this house is done in watercolor. I see things in this house. I hear things. You use this to illustrate your belief that I am not of sound mind but I know you see and hear things as well. The difference between us is that I have no shame or pride left and will admit to it. Once I caught you kneeling on the attic floor with one of the angel candles burning. The light it threw on you was so strange. This feels like such a long time ago, now. You had not been nailing, sawing, hammering. You were praying aloud. I hovered at the top of the stairs and listened. You were saying be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do Thou- A floorboard creaked softly under me when I shifted my weight and you turned. You did not yell Jesus! or close the door in my face or ask me Don't you knock anymore? Instead you laughed and I thought you had a beautiful laugh, like bells in your throat, and I wished that I heard it more, that it was not so rare. What prayer is that? I asked you. You told me it was a prayer to a saint and an archangel. You laughed again when I asked if you knew it in Latin, if Father Whomever had made you learn it in Latin in parochial school You said Sancte Archangele defende nos in proelio contra nequitam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium? I thought you sounded like you were speaking in tongues. Now, whatever perfect bed you are making in the attic is not lit by the archangel candles; you've moved them all into other rooms in the house. The white and gold ones you put in mine. I lie awake and study the outline of the archangel's body in the dark and think this is the body of a virgin. This is what the body of a virgin looks like. This is what your body looks like. You have the body of a virgin because you are a virgin and the body of a virgin is different than mine. I think that you must be able to see them, all of them, all of them nameless and faceless moving under my skin. All of the tessellations of boys. Tessellations, nameless and faceless, repeated and repeated and repeated. I do not light the candles and I do not sleep and you are one floor above me but so far above me. When I was a child, I was sure that my mother and father would die and leave me alone. I had vivid dreams of their impending demise. Car accident (father) and breast cancer (mother). This was likely because my father had a temper and drove recklessly and my mother was always finding benign lumps in her breast and having them removed "for good measure, sweetheart." I would wake in the middle of the night and not be able to move. I could not move. My mother was dead. My father was dead. Both of my parents were dead. Cold. Six feet under. My mother was six feet under and my father was six feet under and I was six years old. I could not fall asleep again until I had gone into their room and watch her chest and his chest rise and fall and rise again. Sometimes I would hold my palm above each of their mouths and feel for warm breath. Sometimes I was still not convinced. They could die in their sleep. They could already be dead. They looked dead, both of them. They looked as good as dead. They could be dead. Or they could be sleeping. Or there could not be a difference. And so sometimes I would curl up on the floor at the foot of their bed and in the morning the sun would be white and the room would glow and my mother would say you are a strange little one, aren't you? Watching you work in the attic room one evening I told you this and you stopped sanding a knot in the wood and looked up at me. I did that too, you said. You still slept sometimes, then, and that night you crawled in bed with me and said this is going to sound silly. But sometimes I feel like we were children together. This seems like a long time ago, now. Everything that happened before I was sure that I would do irreparable damage to you seems like a long time ago, now. And everything that happened before I was convinced that none of this would end well seems like a long time ago, now. It seems like a long time ago when words were dove-like and everything was a triangle. It seems like a long time ago when we were a triangle. In our watery limbo of early spring we are getting crazier and angrier. I wake up one morning after a few hours of fitful sleep and my desk is gone. My room looks empty and unfamiliar without it. The candles and books that had rested on it are on the floor under the window. Stranger things, I think, have probably happened in this house. I am not even particularly perturbed; I am not even surprised. I wonder if my desk had decided it had had enough of me and simply walked out-an awkward, shuffling desk-sort of walk down the stairs and out the front door. This is highly plausible, I think. Also highly plausible: at some point during the night, the shred of sanity I clung so fiercely to had vanished. I was now completely barmy and in fact just thought I had used to have a desk against my wall when in fact I never really had. I am sitting in bed thinking this when you bring it back. Bad carpentry, you say. Very poorly crafted. Did some finishing work on it while you were sleeping. I look at you and want to get out bed and wrap my arms around you and make you be still until neither of us is crazy anymore. But I just say, Thank-you. You are always going on about bad carpentry. You are always going on about how no one cares. No one cares anymore! you say. No one gives a damn! No one touches anything anymore. No one does anything with their hands! You hate mass produced furniture. Desks and chairs and framing made by machines for a huge and apathetic public market. Bad carpentry! You say. It's everywhere! Like poor grammar, I say. Bad writing. It seems to you and no one else the parquetry of hardwood floors is an art form and should be slaved over, touched. Splinters should be embedded in fingertips. No one does anything with their hands! you say. When you talk about hands I think of the prints of Escher's that you love. I think of his "Drawing Hands"-the two hands that draw each other into being. I think of his "Hand with Reflecting Sphere"-the self portrait wherein the artist is the center of the universe and in this universe people touch things, do things, make things with their hands. We are strange and indignant people. And then one pale purple morning you are sleeping. I stop breathing, barely believing that you are in fact asleep. But you are. Your head slumped unmoving on the kitchen counter, body crumpled and motionless. It seems sheer physiology took over. The Sandman had his way with you. Catabolism slowed without your permission-theta waves overtook alpha waves and you could not hold your own. You could not hold your own against the myoclonic twitches, the slow delta waves and K-complexes, the good intentions of the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Or. Or you could be dead. You could be dead. Or you could be sleeping. Or their could not be a difference. You could be six feet tall and six feet under and leave me here alone and I feel six years old. I want to cross the room and put my palm up to your mouth to feel for the warm exhale of breath. But I don't. Instead I turn quickly and run up the two flights of stairs without stopping. I swing open the door to your attic room. I want to see your perfect bed. But where there should be bedposts there are none. Where there should be a box spring there is not. Where there should be a bed frame there is nothing. Where there should be a mattress, a down comforter, quits and pillows and soft, cool sheets-there is nothing but sharp corners and an open lid. It is a simple wooden box. You've been building a coffin.