‘Correspondence’

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show, Twelve from Texas, was performed in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His poetry collection, Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away, is published by Kelsay Books. His monologues have been performed most recently at The Invisible Theatre in Tucson and the Pro English Theatre in Kiev, Ukraine. Gallery - https://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/f861509283

Correspondence

Our father was a staunch evangelist, but he died a raving, cursing death. Some of the things he said in those minutes before his passing I won’t deign repeat. I said a prayer over his red, steaming corpse and from then on had done with God. 

Lee was in Brussels and couldn’t make the funeral. He was doing work with illuminated manuscripts. I pictured him ensconced in a black, shadowy cloister, his eyes rheumy with peering, his tongue working over a careful longhand type. Lee was a procreant man – never once did he ask for a direction. He had his heading from the day he could dream. I always envied the quiet studiousness he threw over his intensive passion. He learned Latin before he could rightly think, and French fell like autumn to color his burgeoning philosophies. Our father sat with him nights, more a student than a tutor. They read Boethius and Rousseau and drank black tea. I sat a world apart, trading jibes with Long John Silver.

I was tasked with arranging the burial, and when the dirt fell with a dull harrumph upon the casket, I felt cold, dismissed. It was a punchy sort of pain, a jab to the chest and then a soreness which lasted several weeks. I sent a letter detailing my feelings to Lee, but I received only a tight reply. He was busy, I knew, but then he had never looked far beyond himself. I cinched my belt and tried to forge on. I suppose I had loved my father. He raised us as a beekeeper grooms a comb. He let us to our ways, watching through a thin netting. When he thought we had something to offer, he took it. It was always Lee who had the most to give. 

One day three months after his passing, I received a letter from Lee. He was coming back but needed some money to make the flight. I wired it without a second thought, happy to be of service. He toted a large leather satchel across the terminal, his wire-rimmed glasses flashing in the septic light of the mezzanine. He was thin beyond repair, I thought, and in need of a shave. Of all his triumphs, he’d never been able to keep a good beard. We embraced and shook hands at once, and I smelled the continent on him. “George,” he said, half-whispered. “You’re getting fat.”

We ate at a small dinette attached to the airport. Lee poked at eggs and seedy tomatoes. The dinette was full of travelers, and the air was sweaty and close. Lee fell to his old habit of flexing and unflexing his fingers, quietly adjusting his glasses on their near constant descent down his nose. He had specks of grey in his oily hair. We spoke only of small things; we did not broach the topic of our father. Even if the subject had arisen, I don’t think Lee would have been interested. He seemed a thousand miles away, chained like old Marley to some antiquarian otherworld. His voice was rattly, and his eyes spoke to a resolved weariness. I left him his space and ate my pancakes.

He stayed for three weeks but was hardly ever home. He spent most of his time at the University, visiting colleagues and relishing in their liberal praise. He was rather famous in those circles which attribute fame to anonymity. When he was home he slept, sometimes for twenty hours at a stretch. I cooked him his meals, burdening him with an hour at table. He read from our father’s library those few new additions, sitting in his old velvet chair with a candle lit and a cigarette lying in the ashtray. When he felt the urge to speak, it was always for the purpose of expunging a small collection of afterthoughts, tossing them to me like seeds. I listened and made those few interjections he required. When his appetite was sated, he doused the candle and stared at his hands. I took this as my cue to depart. 

On the last day of his visit, he decided he’d like to visit our father. We bought a small bouquet of lilies, and I watched him lay them delicately on the bare soil before the headstone. He pushed up his glasses and gazed out along the field wherein identical stones proclaimed the sum of Christian living. I wondered what Lee thought of death. Likely it was just another star in a summative constellation he never bothered to name. 

I paid for Lee’s return and in three days received a letter of thanks. Very perfunctory and rehearsed, which I took to mean he was back at his work. I went about my days in a sort of fugue. I felt that I were swimming in the wake of a leviathan, beneath me the water balked and sucked. I fell to my writing, of which I’d had some success. Several stories had been published in university magazines. I was no Faulkner, but I could keep pace with my thoughts, which were not so overfast to begin with. I wrote a story about a tearless funeral, wherein those few attendants rejoiced to hurl the dirt. At the end I tucked it safely away in my desk, fearful that I had finally written something I could be proud of and appalled by all at once. On second thought, I mailed the story to Lee. I didn’t get a reply for several weeks, and when I did it hardly took up a page. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he wrote. “I might have laughed myself. I suppose that’s why I needed the sea between us.”

This was a version of Lee I had not seen before. An iteration that recognized its removal, and in some small way rejoiced in it. I did not write him back, I felt there was nothing I could say to touch the truth. Encouraged by his letter I submitted the story, and it was picked up. As always there wasn’t money in it. I laughed when I got the check but spent my earnings on a new typewriter and some shoes. My own were in sorry repair.

It was Christmas, and the snow was an ironed sheet, untrodden. I drove the two miles into town to meet with a friend of mine at the University. We ate in the graduate dining hall, which was offering ham and lukewarm bean casserole. “You heard from your brother?” he asked me, lighting a cigarette. 

“Not since October,” I said dismissively. I didn’t feel any inclination to discuss my brother. I wanted desperately to place him at my back. 

“I got a letter a month ago,” said my friend. “He was leaving for Spain. Madrid, I think. Yes, I believe it was Madrid.”

I started, thrown to my back foot. “He wrote you?”

“Yes, like I said. It was not a long letter. I supposed he’d told you.”

“Not a thing,” I said.

Out on the Green, my boots cracked the frost. I did not feel altogether angry, just startled and slightly dejected. Somewhere I heard the smooth avowal of a carol. I passed the library, unlit and, to my mind, full of ghosts. I felt my father there, as I felt him in all places, but especially in those quiet venues that smelled of dust and old print. He was there, and beside him stood my brother. I wondered at the thought of the two together, elegiac thoughts of a shared vigil. I thought of turning into the library but decided that the darkness would overrule me. 

Back at the house I sat and penned a letter to Lee. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Perhaps a condemnation, a careful anger. But instead, I wrote about the snow, how it lay about the property. How I’d yet to see the dotted trail of a hare through its smooth vellum. I folded the letter gently and placed it in an envelope. I realized that if Lee were in Spain there’d be no reason to send the letter to his old address. I set the envelope on the desk before me, blank save for the return address. I lit a cigarette, the first in a long year of abstinence. I don’t know why, but I thought then to pray. Not since my father’s lurid death had I had the inclination. “Dear God,” I thought, then coaxed myself to silence. I’d not fall into that pretty trap again. 

So the months passed, and I began work on a novel. It would be the study of a peculiar man. He wore bright, garish hats and smoked a corncob pipe. He was a famous novelist, and was prattling through Europe, taking those raving trains to new and exciting cities wherein he was known not for his genius but for his gadfly wit. The words I wrote were stiff and formal. By March the novel lay abandoned.

In those months, not a letter from Lee. I’d sent three to his address in Brussels. They’d not returned, and I imagined them piled in a heap just inside his door where they’d been shoved through the letterbox. Still, I felt the need to write him, if only to ease some part of myself that was wrung tight. I dreamt in those months more than I ever had before. When I awoke, I was often clammy, and my throat was dry. I had taken to smoking again with a vengeance. 

In July, Lee wrote me. The letter was addressed from Prague. “I won’t be long, so don’t write me here. If you’ve been writing to my Brussels address, I’m sorry to say you’ve kept a steady correspondence with the Russian I’ve let the place.”

“I’m in Prague on business which is not worth getting into. Suffice it to say I’ve been busy this year. I’ve been thinking of father recently. Remember when we kept chickens, just around back, abutting the woodshed? In a fit of passion, I remember, father killed the one you loved best. You had done something unbefitting your age, I can’t remember what. He made you eat the thing all by yourself, the whole bird. I had never felt more pity for anyone than I did for you right then. I wanted so to hold you, to haul you free of the shadow that even then was stealing over your countenance. That shadow never left you, even after all these years.”

“I’d like to tell you what I’m thinking, what I’m really thinking. I’m afraid there isn’t time, nor a dark enough ink. I’ll be leaving Prague in the morning, going east, I think. I’d like to give you some assurance, that perhaps when I arrive I’ll have found a way to settle myself, assuage some guilt. I have faith it’ll never happen, save perhaps in the rattling of my death. What were father’s last words, I wonder? You’ll have to tell me, when next we meet. All best.”

That was the only letter of Lee’s I burned. I read it once, then held it to the stove and had done with it. My lips twitched and slipped into something resembling a smile. I pumped a cigarette through my lungs and gripped the countertop, trying not to keel. An hour must have passed without a twitch, a bat of the eye. I remembered the chicken, the taste of it. My father’s wicked grimace. I don’t remember Lee being there, but the memory was sharp in him, so I suppose that he must have been. Thinking hard enough, I recalled slipping out the front door that night, vomiting into a hedge, then stealing softly to the coop and collecting the feathers of my dead bird. I pressed them in a book. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember the title. It was from my father’s collection, one of the texts he kept high on the shelf. I figured the feathers would be safe there. My father rarely read a book twice.

It was a sluggish autumn. The trees held their leaves until the very last moment, sagging like war-strewn refugees. I began spending time with a woman. Her name was Loraine. She was a graduate student writing a thesis on middle English romance. I sat up with her nights in the library as she parsed through old sheepskin folios. I scrawled funny poems in the margins of a paperback Marx. By winter we grew apart, and by the time the old year croaked we were no longer speaking. I suppose her interest in me ebbed. Disinterest so often arises in my conjunction. 

Weightlessness, the overt shirking of gravity – I felt it was no chore at all to keep my limbs suspended. I don’t know where the feeling came from, but just as the pendulum swings, I was brought resolutely to the opposite pole. One morning I woke with no feeling in my toes. This was no great concern, save that it threw my balance slightly. I went about my day, sure that in time the numbness would work itself out. But after a week it had spread up my calf. The doctors enrolled me in advanced rehabilitation. I struggled through the exercises, squats and lunges, casting my leg about me like a thick club. My face was losing its mass, slowly sagging as the muscles forsook it. When I tried to speak my voice was a low sludge. By the time the numbness took my hands, I was bedridden.

I suppose in this time I began to wear the vestment of self-pity. I was laid flat, a brain trapped in a mess of useless flesh. I lost weight, as I could no longer properly chew; my meals were spooned down my throat, pre-gnashed. A nurse named Julie lived in Lee’s old bedroom, taking care not only of myself but the large house which I was no longer at liberty to fill. I cried often, and my tears rolled down cheeks unfeeling and soulless as stone.

I wanted desperately to reach out to Lee. I wanted him at my bedside, more than I wanted anything beyond the return of my function. I slept, and in sleep grossed a collection of insipid dreams as yielding as my flesh. I dreamt of Athens. Lee held a booth in the Agora, hawking some strange ware I could not see, for I stood some distance up the hill, beside the weathered marble of the Parthenon. I rested my hand upon the stone and felt a sharp ping of static. I gazed out over the Agora, realizing all at once that my brother had vanished. The crowd roiled like a bright, sea; singular forms indiscernible. I woke to the ringing of the house’s old grandfather clock. I called for Julie and asked her to fetch me some coffee. I did not want to sleep again that night. 

To be trapped in one’s own body lends itself to a peculiar kind of madness. I decided early in my captivity that, given the opportunity, I would end myself promptly and without a backwards glance. I had never contemplated death so completely as I did in those moments when Julie was gone on an errand, and I was lying perfectly alone in my silent chamber. I felt I could hear the very dust settling; the light filtering in through the window cast my face in molten bronze. I wondered at my father’s final moments, the obscenities he flung at the wall, at me. He had, at the doors of oblivion, discovered something which made him step away from his principles. He was no longer himself; he encompassed the things he’d always shied from. Thinking back, I believe I should have comforted him. A man should not die to the sound of his own voice.

I have done Lee a discredit. I’ve painted him as a sort of inept, partitioned from the wider world by his animal cunning. Like a mirror of startling clarity which holds an unbecoming portrait, so did Lee’s careful silences reflect that version of myself which I knew was true but which I refused to believe in. But he was not soulless, nor was he lacking in human sympathies. I believed then, and still do, that if Lee had known of my deteriorating condition, he would have rushed unquestioningly to my side. He would have catered to my every whim, pitied me as I needed desperately to be pitied, loved me strong enough to thwart the coaxing of death. But as it stood, he had no way of knowing, for I had no way of reaching him. Several times through the years I dictated, in my faltering voice, small notes to Julie, who penned them carefully. Those notes were the ghosts of long-practiced gestures, attempts to reconnect with old passions. They were always addressed to Lee, but I believe they could have been for anybody. I usually gave up the task after a paragraph or two, for my tongue wearied easily. Julie kept the notes in a small file which she tucked into my bedside table. I feared that at my death they’d be discovered. One day I asked her to burn them. She said she would, but I doubt she actually lit the match. 

It was my birthday on the third year of my affliction. Julie was reading me a Platonic dialogue she’d pulled from my father’s study. It was early morning, the sky beyond the window was opaque and there was ice on the pane. From my vantage, propped slightly by pillows, I could see the wasting appendages of the yard’s lonely maple. As it often did when Julie read to me, my mind wandered far from her words. I was thinking back on my eleventh birthday, on a morning of comparable crispness, when Lee and I had gone to fish the river. We made sweeping casts between ice floes, our wooly breaths crystalizing before our eyes. I was the better fisherman, but Lee had an eye for spotting trout where they hovered in the stream. Together, we hauled in three sizeable cutthroats. I wanted to keep the fish, but Lee insisted on throwing each of them back. “We might want to catch them again later,” he said. “If you kill all the fish dumb enough to take a fly, you’re left with only the ones sharp enough to keep away.”

I suppose that at some point I dozed, for I awoke to find Julie gone and the light overlong. My eyes, the only part of me still willing to take orders, pursued the motes of dust which hung in the air above the bed. I took a deep breath, watched my dead chest rise. Lying still, I felt a dull rising in my throat akin to gorge. I feared to open my mouth, for I knew that if I did something foul and inhuman would pour out. My tongue lay like a flat stone against my palette, narrowing my access to breath. Then I’d feel an aching in my skull, my brain rapping hard upon the bone, a prisoner upon the bars. I tried to scream but it was trapped beneath the rising emesis. I could do nothing but close my eyes, my face growing red with asphyxia, colors painted across my eyelids. Was this not what I wanted? A quiet death, void of frills and in terms I could easily accept. And yet I struggled against my sinking, fighting for consciousness. Of a sudden my throat would clear, my brain would retract, my skin would resort to its usual dun pallor. And I would thank the celestial hand which having sunk me, wrenched me free again. My eyes would fill with tears which swept down my cheek unhindered to pool in the cavity of my sunken neck.

That night Julie fed me ice cream. She lit a candle at my bedside and in that soft light and placed the cold spoon between my parted lips. I tried to enjoy the sweetness, for all but the impressions of flavor had forsaken me. Bending close at my side, I realized that Julie was quite beautiful, especially in the gossamer light of the candle. I blinked twice, an expression of thanks. She nodded and smiled affably. After the ice cream she reached down beside her chair and brought out a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. She held the parcel before my eyes. “This came in today,” she said, turning the parcel in the half-light. “There was a note attached.” She produced the note. It was in a hand I easily recognized, heavy and full of inky dollops. Lee’s hand. She put the note before me, and I could smell the rich paper. 

“Brother,” said Lee. “I’m writing from a small hotel in Paris, where I intend to pass a month. It is a fitting cloister; Wilde died here. There is a cellar pool beneath the hotel abutting the catacombs. I take my bath in the close air, fragrant with mossy bones.”

“A man is the sum of what he neglects. I have spent my life steadily accumulating knowledge and shelving it, believing that it will hold its value. I have become a hoarder of half-truths, a keeper of broken keys. When I examine those old ideas, sweeping away the dust, I find that they are as primitive as scribbled crosses. All this dense, unpleasurable hoarding, and not a thing of worth in the lot. I try not to blame myself, but I find no solace in the gladness of others. At least I am an honest misanthrope – I don’t pinion myself to any jolly façade. This has made me a scourge, laudable only to those few who value reason for reason’s sake. There is nothing beautiful in a man’s mental gymnastics – he always lands on his head. I would know, I’ve nursed myself through many concussions.”

“So I have chosen to write at last. I don’t believe there is a bridgeable distance between us – we have moved respectively down our wires. Since father died I’ve considered returning to the States for good, but I feel that to do so would be to forsake the little use I’ve left. The continent, I’ve decided, is where I’ll die. I shan’t return.”

“I hope you’re still writing. You could tell a good story. I’ve always envied your ability to blame yourself for the thoughtlessness of others. There’s not a writer worth his salt who hasn’t that capacity.”

“I’ll be staying in Paris for several months. I’ve been spending my days in a belfry. The bats are like drops of oil above my head. Below me, a clergyman conjures fire before his pulpit. In vagrant French he presents a schematic for innocence. The guiltless man is a whirring automaton. I read by a gentle light, my back against a cold wall. Is there any greater paradise than solitude on high, far above the holy?”

“I’ll be here several months yet. Write to me, if you’ve the inclination. I’d sleep better knowing there is no love lost, no lasting resentments. I have a deep respect for your kindness – it is never wasted. I’ve enclosed a gift I think you’ll enjoy. All best, brother. Happy birthday.” 

Julie unwrapped the parcel, revealing a small book bound in red cloth. The gold foil adorning the cover, fracted by time, was instantly familiar. Julie turned the book so that the foil caught the light. A large honeybee, wings outstretched, lay across the smooth brown cloth. Julie turned the pages, allowing them to fall where they would. The book settled on a set of pages wherein were pressed a collection of feathers. Frowning, she drew the feathers from the book. 

My eyes watered, my tongue wagged. I gurgled deep within my shell, causing Julie to study me with alarm. “George?” she asked. “What is it?”

How could I tell her? How could I tell her something I hadn’t, until that moment, been able to tell myself? I croaked furiously. She fetched a damp towel and dabbed at my face. I closed my eyes and in that veinous darkness conjured Lee before me, his hands pressed firmly to my shoulders. His skin was pale, his breath smelled of smoke. He was smiling contemplatively, as if he’d just parsed a tricky arithmetic. I smiled back. There was something he was trying to say, something he had purposely expunged from his letter. His lips moved, but there was no sound. After a time, he stopped speaking. He looked at me, waiting for something - a response to a question I hadn’t heard. My voice spanned the intermediating distance, over the roiling sea and into the belfry. The bats dropped and flurried. A man looked up from his quiet reading.

“I am well,” I said to him. “Don’t worry. I am well.”

Dylan McDonie is an aspiring author from St. Augustine, Florida. He studied Literature at Florida State University and from then on has held a handful of odd and forgettable jobs. He hopes to one day to capture some vestige of truth in his work, like a moth in glass