The Cloisters(26)

CHAPTER EIGHT


The box from my mother had been waiting for me in the kitchen of my sublet for nearly two weeks. Because of its size, I had moved it around, using it as a stool, a coffee table, a doorstop, wanting to keep my past contained for as long as possible. I wasn’t sure I was ready for the contents of Walla Walla to spill into New York; I worried that it might close the distance I’d worked hard to build. But I was tired, too, of tripping over the box, of seeing my mother’s handwriting on the exterior, of the way it had a presence in my little studio, taking up more space than I was willing to cede. So I used my keys to roughly strip away the tape, pausing only to add cream to my coffee and wedge open my front door with a book in a desperate attempt to increase the breeze.

There was no note. Nor was the box organized in any reasonable way. It looked as if—and I was sure she had—my mother had simply grabbed fistfuls of paper and thrown them in, occasionally pausing to push down on the stack, and then fill in that space again. There were bits of torn material and scrunched up paper. A notebook, now bent down the middle, beckoned from the bottom.

For a moment, I considered throwing the entire thing away—carrying it down to the dumpster behind the building and just heaving it in. A closed chapter. But at the sight of my father’s handwriting—a narrow scrawl where all the consonants made the same sharp uplift—I found myself pulling the papers out of the box and stacking them reverently on the floor. I made piles for translations, vocabulary, and etymological lists. Two additional notebooks surfaced, and nothing in the box revealed any kind of logic or order or filing system. I wondered where my mother had found these in the first place, and it struck me that she probably had kept stashes of my father throughout the house, stashes I didn’t know about because I had spent so little time there after his death. My last year at Whitman, I did my very best to spend only nights there, a time during which my eyes were closed to the realities I might otherwise have to face.

With all the papers out, I began to comb through them, trying to find their mates and fellows. There were translations my father had done and their original texts. In some cases, photocopies of books, in others, hand-copied passages from manuscripts. As a janitor, it had been my father’s job to go into the offices on campus in the evening and empty the trash cans. He always kept an eye out in the humanities and language buildings for passages he could bring home and translate. Often, he would be late coming home from work because he had spent too long going through the paper waste of the tenured professors who thought nothing of throwing out material they had already incorporated into their research. But to my father, those discarded pages were his textbooks.

They were also how I learned. We would sit down with the leftover fragments of articles or books or letters and piece together translations. I always thought that these partial bits of writing made us, made me, a better translator because they lacked context, lacked clues. Often all we had to work off was a page of abandoned text. A page from a German academic article on Goethe, a letter from Balzac, transcribed manuscript pages from fifth-century Parma. This trash was our joy. A little project we could do in our spare time, just a page or two of work, before he left to clean offices and I left for my shift at the restaurant.

And these were the papers my mother had sent. The odds and ends we often worked on together. They should have been mementos, cherished items of little value to anyone but me and him. But now, looking through them, I could also feel the familiar blurring at the edges of my vision, a dizziness that only increased the more watchful of it I became. It was the panic. The break. The thing that had overtaken me the afternoon of my father’s memorial, the thing I had been fighting, had been afraid of, ever since. A kind of thick, deep welling of vertigo that had overwhelmed and broken me. And left me, on the worst days, unable to tell the difference between the fabric of reality and the power of my nightmares.

I left the pages on the floor and walked to my window, where I let the sounds of the street below filter up to meet me, anchor me in place. I breathed, as the school therapist had told me to do during our one meeting after the incident—in through my nose on a count of five until the feeling passed. And that day, it did pass. It passed after a few minutes and a glass of water. But the day of my father’s memorial, it had not passed. I could almost smell that day on the pages in front of me—a mixture of frozen meals and zinnias, a thick sourness.

I had held it together the afternoon of the memorial, with just the edges of my vision going in and out, just my breath catching in my chest, until my mother stood to speak. We were in our backyard, really just a square of grass and four fenced walls, where friends, family, and colleagues from the school had gathered. It was full, that square of grass, and my mother ascended a stool to thank everybody. When she did, sobbing through her words, I could no longer stand the tightness in my chest, no longer ignore that I was going to be sick. I could feel the dizziness of the unconscious coming for me, and so I turned and walked as quickly as I could back into the house, only to walk right through the glass door. I didn’t even see the blackbird stickers my father had put on the glass when I was still a child.

Mostly, I remember the blood. But my mother remembers the screaming. And although they never talked to me about it, I think that’s what most of those in attendance remember too—my bloody body, my lungs expelling every breath until there was nothing more to give; everything was gone. I had needed stitches. Almost thirty of them at various points on my body: my hands and cheeks, my stomach and arms. There was still a scar, just past my hairline, by my ear that had healed keloid and hard, and sometimes I worked it with my fingers, unthinking, until I remembered. They placed me on a seventy-two-hour hold when it turned out I was having difficulty distinguishing between the real events of the recent past—my father’s death, my injuries—and the world as I imagined it: dark and false and haunting. At least, that was what they told me. But it was also the reason I couldn’t be in the house any longer: My mother wasn’t the only one who had broken. She wasn’t the only one who had lost her sense of which way was up. At least I knew which way was out.