helena's song
a poem and short story
Inside our Amsterdam You hide in plain sun And through plastic glass I wave hi— I, a shaking silhouette. Through wind you stand While in water I waver And when alone Crack, like wood— I follow you through streets A sound, Nearing an echo So like a kite, I stab the howling wind. A kite with three ribbons: Listen to me— Red words addressed to you. Churches and trains They all look the same To those who’ve never been in either. I would know. I frequent the trains To pass you for a second, While you worship Another God.
I saw you first on the train. Outside the car, you sat on a bench, lips mouthing along to a song. My eyes snapped to you through the thick plastic glass. It lasted a second. Before you looked up, I was twenty meters ahead—too late: tracing paper falling through an image. I tried to wave hello, but the train had jerked forward. My hand leapt through its motion; my smile stretched three meters wide. I must have looked like a pervert.
*
This is you seven years ago: dark, thick brown hair swinging in curls below your breasts. A red, threadbare cotton bag clutched in your armpit. Clatter of your bootstraps. That is you leaving the station. No. The turn of your neck. A flash of blushing recognition, bashful flutter of eyelashes. That is you turning around because there is a boy. The linking of fingers, kissing with your eyes closed. The two of you, braving the wind that sweeps dirty plastic bags off the steps onto the street.
I learned your name was Dina. I learned you took the train with poetry, music with your groceries, and that boy with you everywhere. I learned you liked to be held before kissed. Was it a crime to touch you through my gaze? I’m sorry. You learn plenty holding things that aren’t yours.
*
His name was William. You called him Darling. Let me tell you about the anatomy of a shadow.
Look at my hair, its blonde wisps, and tell me I exist. See my eyes, the way they touch light but never hold it, thirst and yet cry.
Oh look, it’s you. I step backwards a year, backwards into the bar, and there you are, train girl, grocery store girl, and now bar girl, sitting alone, eight years ago. I start to watch you from beside the stage, where a guitarist strums knots into the air. Till now I’ve seen you from the train, but that is all I know of you. And that you are gorgeous. You finish your cocktail, and I wonder what’s happened to you. Why are you here? Who are you? You’re tired, the way you hold your glass. You and your naked, ringless knuckles. There is no more ice in your glass. You must’ve been here hours.
I think I know myself. I decide to leave the womb-red bar, before I feel any guilt watching you; for entering this room for the music, staying for you. You don’t even know me. Nearing the exit, I pass your table.
The umbra is the darkest part of a shadow. Strange, how your eyes stare through me. I glance down at my chest—why are you staring at me?—then back at your face. Your empty glass. Your empty glass face.
“You alright?” I ask.
Your head falls onto the table. Oh god.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
Almost comically, your hair rustles under the fan spinning overhead. I smell the alcohol in the air around you, like a bruise. You’re not okay. I curse myself for entering the bar. Everything crumbles under my gaze.
Touching your shoulder, I feel warm fat and flesh beneath the coarse fabric of your dress. God, you’re real. I can’t leave you now.
One last time. “Do you hear me? What’s your name?”
You don’t tell me, so I find your purse. If not the girl, then her name; if not her name, then forget it. See your wallet, where a driver's license of you at age eighteen says your name is Dina. Where is the nearest hospital?
We end up outside. On the empty street, I scream for a taxi. Flies dance under the streetlamp that hangs above us, casting a cage of light around our bodies. I lay you limply over my lap; throw my arms up in the air and wave like those stupid pumped-up air-sack men at the gas station. Taxi, please please please! Salty tears dribble down my chin. Taxi, please!
The intersection between two shadows is called a penumbra. Now comes the boy. Curly yellow hair and blue, blue eyes, he bursts onto the scene like a cartoon character. I like to think that between two shadows, one has to be darker.
“I’m a nurse. I saw you carrying her outside, can I help you?”
I burst into tears again.
“My name’s William.”
“We need to take her to a hospital!”
“Well, I can take her to my hospital. What’s her name? You were with her, weren’t you?”
“Her name’s Dina. She doesn’t know me. I just—I just found her like this.”
He scoops you up like a child. You leave my body to board his, and I watch you change colors in the dark. With a free hand, William picks up his cellphone. “Are you coming too?” He watches me.
She’s not going to remember me. I should leave. I say this for my own sake:
“No. I should head home. Thank you so, so much.”
The halo is often revealed by degrees when light is obstructed. How was I to know you would love him? I looked for clues in the way you walked: which was with your hand in his.
I called for you in my sleep.
*
And this is how we loved: the lines beneath our feet edging forwards and backwards toward each other; the years circles we used to find one another.
The river five years ago. I swore I saw your reflection in the water as I watched it shiver, a confused mirror of the sky. Leaning against the railing, I felt your presence move beside me. Our eyes met in the skin of the river. Does she remember me?
You smiled, and walked away.
I thought memory was a choice. It’s not. It’s the knife in my mouth that rolls into a tongue when I speak of you.
*
When I was a child there was a dog. This old terrier belonged to nobody, and on a cloudless Sunday, he waited outside our door, silently, because he couldn’t knock. He was nearly dead. I’ll spare you the details—it was a car, and this dog: he was half-deaf. My young mother cradled him to the edge of the garden, as if it was a great distance away. I heard the stomp, I heard the whine. But it was the silence which followed that I could never forget. And it was only many years later when I realized: that was an act of mercy.
So this is how I was killed: excruciatingly slowly, then all at once—like falling asleep.
And because I cannot turn off my love for you, this is how I will say it.
My breath rattled like a ring of keys, you were so beautiful. You drove the pickup to the city with me in it, and you were so beautiful, the wind thrashing in from the windows, combing through your hair like a lover.
“Why did you do this?” you demanded, your whisper thick with tears and snot, your free hand propping up my chin. My seatbelt wasn’t even on.
Because we can’t exist in the same room, I couldn’t say. Because sometimes I turn a corner and you’re there, I couldn’t say. Because when I watch you and I look away I might never see you again when I turn back.
Because I couldn’t say any of this I laughed but it came out a depressing wheeze.
Because your hair. Because the river. Because you are going to marry a nurse.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” you said.
“No!” (A black, bloody gurgle.)
You choked on a cry. “You’re dying.”
What a sight I was. Where you’d found me, I just wasn’t good enough to let myself live.
“Don’t speak,” you said now, almost angrily. “Look at all the blood in your mouth.”
I wish it was yours.
“Use your eyes to point at the sky if you want to stay here. If you want me to take you to the hospital, then point to the steering wheel.”
You stopped the car, and looked at me. I didn’t want to look away.
Here, I mouthed.
You understood. You held my neck with the thumbs of a nurse as I fell through the floor, through my life.
*
So I never boarded a train again. But that veil remained between us, mortality replacing the plastic glass. As some say, freedom is only the distance between yourself and the walls of your cage.
*
Six months ago, you strode through the tannery. Animals skins everywhere, life renewed for the dead, caressing the dead, day in, day out. Your daily commute; my home. Living my death among those deads, I hid between furs catching glimpses of you; those pillars of expiration so much like the window frames of the trains. I used to wonder, during those train rides a lifetime ago: if the wind and the train rush forward at the same rate, am I sitting still? or does time double?
But I stood still as you passed me in the tannery, as you slid in and out the narrowing slits of my vision like a broken eclipse. Oblivious again, you walked ahead, until that day I clutched the lamppost beside you, wearing my own body.
*
This is you now: Your brown hair is marked by strands of gray. I think I did it. You wear lipstick now. It is the color of rust, if mouths could ever rust.
I run towards you. I hold your face with my palms, I laugh. Look at me now! I whisper:
“It’s all pretend.”