VARIATIONS ON AN AMERICAN HYMN [II]

by R. M. Corbin



It is then, that a girl like me
knows happiness. When she is free,
like a filly playfully prancing
around its mother,
in fields without fences.
- The Bacchae

Mia awoke in the dark and could not have known if she ever fell asleep in the first place. It was all the same. She couldn't even recall shooting up though she must've done so at some point in the night because she had that dull rushing feeling that must also come with taking a non-lethal bullet. She got up and slammed again. With the plunge of the syringe, she felt her edges harden and her own infernal engines roar with heat and light. She paced. She tore posters off the walls. She jumped up and down on the bed and shattered the ceiling light with the crown of her head. She felt nothing. It meant nothing. It wasn't even her house.

Where had Lucy gone, anyway? She was supposed to be here. In solitude, crystal meth's euphoria too quickly gives way to a tremendous saturnine sorrow. But, for now, there was still time to claw the paint from the walls and tear the carpet up at its corners and sing without thinking.

Hearing the commotion, Lucy's brother, Ernest, heel-stomped into the room. He wore red boxer-briefs and a t-shirt too big even for his enormous frame. The shirt said "BEWARE OF THE BIG DUDE" in block letters. He spoke but no words emerged and Mia thought he looked like a bulldog with honey in its mouth. She cranked her jaws open and mocked the dog for its maw; its swinging jowls and teeth too dull to tear. Ernest turned tail and locked himself in the bathroom.

With the ceiling light now broken—the remnants of the bulb like a cartoon flower—the bedroom took on a new kind of darkness. Mia wanted light. She sang in tongues that she was a lily that would wither in the dark, spinning and spitting and feeling the earth beneath her. She needed the sky. She needed to feel herself as a firmament itself.

She tore the bath towels from the window to let the sun in. But there was no sun. Though it was day, and she could see children playing in a sprinkler and men jogging and the little drone dragonflies, it was all cast in dull dusky gray. Grayscale midnight. Where is the sun? she thought. This thought, by the sole virtue of being a thought, cooled her soul and paled it into stillness.

With that, the crystal gave its second turn of the screw. There came a cascade of remembrances beyond her control. She knew this was the beginning of the sorrow: the moment of weightless freefall before the runaway car careens into the lake.

A memory: her son had been born just after midnight but she'd been so out of her mind on liquor and crystal and the hospital's sedative that she didn't see his face until it was bathed in sideways sunrise light. She was sixteen. She named him Jude and when her mother signed the adoption papers she honored the name. When she got out of the hospital, she and her friends celebrated with a trip into the high desert which turned into a cross-country road trip that terminated in Kentucky because Jude's father and two other friends were arrested for attempting to rob an antique store. Those who remained hitchhiked home. By the time Mia saw her son again, he was eight months old. She trudged up the driveway at dawn, a whole country of dust behind her, and saw his face rise up in the livingroom window like a peach blooming on its branch.

He grew. He walked. He spoke. He went to school. Sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn't. Each night, he ebbed away from her and disappeared.

The sorrow had set in. He was out there somewhere in this impossible dusk. The sun was gone and he was lost. Where was Lucy? What day was it? Mia found her phone under a pile of laundry and drywall, but it was dead.

She paced. She watched her feet. She couldn't bring herself to destroy anything else: the joy just wasn't there. She tried to remember what day of the week it was, but her memory had gotten loose like a pitbull from its stake and had long fled the yard.

There was a creak and a flush from the bathroom. Without thinking, Mia went out into the hall and began knocking at the bathroom door, her wrist resting tenderly against the particle board and her knuckles rapping at a hummingbird purr.

"What!" said Ernest, though Mia did not hear the word.

"Where?" she returned. "When?"

"Don't make fun of me, I'll call my dad—I'll call my dad and he'll call the police! I know you do bad things here! You do drugs!"

Mia had slipped into a mantra of "WhenWhereWhenWhereWhenWhere——"

Ernest went quiet. He'd slipped into the tub and drawn the curtain and covered his ears. Mia stood at the door and knocked and chanted for minutes until a sound from the living room drew her away.

All the windows were open yet the darkness persisted. There was an open jar of peanut butter on the ottoman. The carpet had been pulled up in some places creating little copses of piling in the otherwise flat filthy valley. Dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. Mia knocked something with her elbow as she passed and a puff of fruit flies murmured up and scattered, taking new roosts on the ceiling and in the heating vents.

What she'd heard was the television. It showed a little man with gold teeth and rings pacing up and down a stage and speaking into a microphone. A ticker at the screen's bottom followed him wherever he went, reading, at first, "GOD'S CHILDREN FED TODAY: 912," then, "GOD'S CHILDREN HOUSED TODAY: 87," then, "THE BODIES OF THE MARTYRS: $28,347.29" and the numbers on the last of them rolled over like a slot machine as it ticked by. The little preacher howled and shook his fist and his congregation joined him in a bellow that rose and dispersed into a cloud of vacant white noise. To Mia's ears, the sound was death itself. But then voices emerged—whispering up through the dark. They wove themselves up through the preacher and filled his mouth with words.

"—and we do not invoke that vicious name of Herod—father and son—for the saved do not concern themselves with their yoke that's been cast off, YES Lord. The scarred man seeks not the blade that cut him. It is already dead in sin, YES YES Lord. And we recall those saved in death, for they are the future-makers. We recall those things freely given: those lives and heads and very souls unto Christ, AMEN. And all us saints and sinners alike must ask ourselves all the time: HOW WILL I PAY FOR MY TIME ON THIS EARTH? WHAT AM I WILLING TO GIVE?"

It was Sunday, then. Lucy would have gone to church. Mia turned and walked out the door into the ashen morning.

She needed to make it to the train tracks. If she just followed the tracks east, she'd end up in the church's backyard. But her throat burned and there were tears in her eyes and her body carried her forth unbidden so, without thought or tact, she crossed the street and was nearly clipped by a boy on a bicycle. He tried out a curse word on her. She cleared the street and the opposing sidewalk and disappeared into the trees.

In the pine-tree shade, no darker than the rest of the world, she felt surrounded by unseen animals. She-wolves and opossums. Vultures and millipedes. Blade-toothed squirrels and dirt-eating snakes and rabid mice. Birds of prey screaming pride across the sky. The trees trapped her as they protected her, though the cacophony of animal noises made her feel as if she was walking through molasses: led off at every pass but this exact one and, with the focus of a tightrope walker, she carried on through the lush dark.

She'd been through these trees before and indulged in their galvan-green meanness. She'd come to know luxury in their shade. There, in that now, they did not cast shadows and thus disappeared into austere likeness. Her edges diminished and her soul stretched outward and she felt the nipping of unseen teeth at all her farthest boundaries.

Another memory tumbled forth, then was gone as quickly as it came. Mia's grandmother beheading a chicken then encouraging the girl to chase its headless body around the yard. Little Mia broke down. She couldn't bear it. Later that night, her mother told her that it was an honorable death: a death to feed a family. Were it any other way, the chicken would have been pilfered by a hawk or a fox or, God forbid, died of old age.

She emerged from the trees and stepped onto the rail of the tracks. The animal noises followed her out from the woods then eastward, saturating her in static-white pain that, for all its fury, was not sufficient to stop her. She watched her feet. To look forward or upward would mean confronting the sunless horror of the world. But her stride, each foot stepping into the shadow of the other, was comforting. Her heart pounded. She should have slammed again before leaving.

Lucy was at church. Where was Jude? Not at school. Bible study? Mia did not know if he ever went to church. Maybe he would be there, too, when she got there. Maybe he'd be there with her mother. Maybe she could save them both, somehow—and herself—somehow, save them and bring the light back. She could not bear the thought of that peach blossom of a boy withering in the dark. She could not bear to feel herself diminish beneath a black sun. She'd rather be dead. Joy; life; velocity. These were worth protecting.

The track split. Its southbound limb reached back through the trees and Mia thought she could see all the forest's predators dancing and skittering across the path, pulling little blue bursts of light from the rails and carrying them out into the woods.

From the east, Mia was struck by a pinpoint of light: a distant star: a rupture in the gloom.

She ran toward it, no longer watching her feet but keeping her gaze level and locked at that single point. Memories flashed through her, one by one, then fell below her horizon and were lost forever: the high clean smell of cooking crystal, the taste of persimmons, her grandmother's four-fingered grip of a cleaver, the sound of distant cars from the top of a water tower, her father's face, and the slamming of doors—again and again—like the very heartbeat of her life.

She mourned none of these things. She thought only of that pinpoint, now growing larger—resolving into a circle, then three—as an exit which, by virtue of its very opening, was salvation itself.

Her feet gave way beneath her as she ran, sending her skidding through the dirt on her palms and knees, landing her prostrate beneath the circles of light, now suspended silent in mid-air. A raven was perched on the highest and brightest of them. It watched Mia: her forehead was in the dirt and her hips and shoulders shook, though one could not tell if it was from weeping.

None could know that she quivered because, despite burying her face in the sand, she could still see the circles of light and their attendant raven. She watched it watch her and in the black pearls of its eyes she saw the end of all things: nothing: no revelation at all: no sense at all: nothing.

The raven experienced no thought. It spread its wings to full span and cast its beak skyward, flattening itself into a tapestry of an old adversary. With the turning of its head, its eyes disappeared into an unseen dimension.

The beak opened and stayed open. Mia heard white noise, dumb and regnant, rise from the bird's throat like saplings from a grave. Then voices, twining like vines, held each other as they rose upward and clarified into a single voice: a single clarion call: "HOW WILL I PAY FOR MY TIME ON THIS EARTH? WHAT AM I WILLING TO GIVE?" It repeated. "HOW WILL I PAY FOR MY TIME ON THIS EARTH? WHAT AM I WILLING TO GIVE?" Again. "HOW WILL I PAY FOR MY TIME ON THIS EARTH? WHAT AM I WILLING TO GIVE?"

Mia felt blood oozing from her forehead and fingertips. She felt the raven's phrase begin to diminish in its loop, resolving into mere sound. She must not lose it. This was the challenge: to maintain meaning in the face of dreadful repetition.

To keep from losing it, she joined the raven in its call: "HOW WILL I PAY FOR MY TIME ON THIS EARTH? WHAT AM I WILLING TO GIVE?," she chanted, feeling the vacancy that her prayer position made—her chest and gut and sacrum—fill with her own warm sweet breath.

Mia and the raven chanted, faster and faster, until the words again disappeared into one enormous endless animal bellow that then splintered into a many-throated choral harmony: a tree of sound. Diamonds danced at the edge of her vision. The predators of the wood ceased their sinister business and threw their heads back to watch the sky in its change.

The circles of light began to spin. Each of their centers seemed to hold a soul at every stage of its life. Amidst that cacophony, Mia saw the rainbow truth at the heart of her grayscale world. She knew what must be done.

Her hands rose to her face, paused at her cheeks, then went about their business.

Father Meyer was in the middle of his sermon when he heard the girl screaming. He ran out the backdoor of the church, out through the trees—sparkling silver-white between their abiding green—and came to the train tracks. There, kneeling at the foot of a signal light, he found Mia. Blood poured down her face. Her eyes, clean of everything but the blood, sat in her palms and watched the blue sky as if it might disappear.

Later, she teaches her son about the predators of the forest. She shows him how to build a fire. She lets him feel the empty space where her eyes had been and he weeps for her, though he does not want her to know it. He leads her out beneath the night sky and sits with her in the silence. He watches the skies for her and tells her about the movement of The Bears and Old Iron Orion.

But he knows, he thinks, that she does not need his help. How could she? It was she who taught him that one needs to leave the light to see the stars.