The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(40)

Let There Be Light





That evening, Laurel kept her boots on all through supper. She kept them on as she and Olin played checkers at the table, Jessie reading nearby, half-moon glasses tipped low on her nose. The radio was playing a set by the Artie Shaw orchestra.

I sat for a good hour alone on the dark porch, watching the road, recapping the day, struggling yet again to ground myself. Now and then my attention strayed to the foothills, and to Morro beyond—the pitch-perfect town where whims can come true.

When I came back inside, I paused at the table lamp by Olin’s empty chair near the fireplace. The base was a ceramic Remington cowboy astride a cattle pony.

I turned the switch and the lamp sprang to life—the round bulb glowing under the linen shade. I studied the base again, checking all around the pony’s four hooves where they attached to the heavy metal stand. I could find no power cord to run to an electrical outlet. On the nearest wall, there was no outlet.

I turned the lamp off again.

Then on.





Anatomy Lesson





I slept fitfully. Every time I woke, I’d lie very still and listen to the silence. An old wind-up alarm clock had sat on the nightstand, but I went and buried it in a laundry basket inside the closet where I couldn’t hear its tick-tick-tick—like a heartbeat, but mechanical and mocking. In the dark, too, I listened to my own heart. I could feel the steady pulse at my neck, my wrist. And when I pressed my palm against my chest, there it was.

Tick-tick-tick.

The upshot was to make me doubt Olin, or want to. But I couldn’t tell if my resistance sprang from strength or weakness. I kept shifting back and forth. One minute, Olin was an old soul doing me a kindness. The next, an old coot feeding me a line. In the dark, anything and everything seemed possible.

My brain wouldn’t shut off.

I rubbed my temples, feeling the soft skin stretch across the hard cradle of skull. Anatomy itself was a mystery now. In the Place of Truth, in Morro, in whatever or wherever this was, how much was illusion and how much was real?

And what was the purpose? Or even the power source? What keeps a lamp going here? Or a heart?

One night when I was a little girl my mother drove us down some desert highway in our old Rambler wagon. I lay in the backseat staring at a black sky bristling with stars. My brain wouldn’t shut off then, either. For the first time, I was struck by the vastness of the universe, pure and perfect, and my own place in it. As I stared, the stars began to shift, inching across the sky like a pinwheel. And I knew it was revealing itself to me, and only me. And a voice that was no voice at all began to fill my head with thoughts so big, so frightening, they set it to spinning, too . . . and soon enough my whole body seemed to spiral like those stars, toppling headfirst toward the sky.

The shock, the enormity, had made me pull back. I closed my eyes and shut my brain down—like pulling a pot off a stove before it boils over. As if whatever I was about to discover threatened to burn me alive. It was all too vast. Too terrible.

After that, the stars were never the same. In time, like anyone else, I learned the names of the major constellations, the North Star, the Evening Star. But I never again trusted myself to get lost in them.

That had been a lesson learned, and I decided to apply it again. There are things too big to take in all at once. And thoughts so deep they might send you pinwheeling off to disappear in the dark.

I couldn’t handle Awe when I was four, and still couldn’t as a woman of thirty.

I wanted surety and safety and continuity. I wanted to wake in this bed in the morning, wash my face, comb my hair, wake Laurel and get her ready for an unremarkable day. I wanted a long march of unremarkable days just like it.

I wanted it for as long as I was able. Or allowed.





The Lady from Mississippi





Since sleep wouldn’t come, I decided to get up early to make my second trip to the café. This time the dog, Pal, wasn’t dozing in his corner but sitting just inside the door as if expecting me. Simon came from the kitchen to hand me a mug of hot coffee, already flavored with cream and sweetener.

“How’d you know?” I asked, unable to hide a note of suspicion.

He shrugged. “I’ve seen how you take your coffee.”

“No, I meant how’d you know I’d be here this morning?” It had been well over a week since I’d first helped out.

He nodded toward the back. “There’s a window. I could see you heading down the path. Didn’t think I was psychic, did you?”