With my eyes closed, I felt like I was flying. Arbitrary images popped into my mind as if what screens inside my eyelids is half haunted and clipped of story. Those tousled and nearly unaccounted-for impressions. Those observations that go nowhere yet enrich my memory—incongruous, random, and without incident, like found footage. Like the sheared memory of Christmases; the topography of someone I love’s palm; roof tar sticking to my shoe; a skinny cat’s rib cage; the rubbery satisfaction of yanking a single blade of grass from its root; the sound of someone setting a table for lunch in the garden and those intervals of silence where she looks up at the sky to weigh the threat of dark clouds and how fast they’re moving, and in looking up, she wickedly obscures who has more power—the incoming storm or the woman bargaining with it by placing cloth napkins as winds pick up.
Even more indiscriminate thoughts collage. Like my irrational fears: dryer lint, the void that hollows a spiral staircase, or the several ways I feel illegitimate whenever I allow myself some latitude. Or feeling somehow fidgety when there’s unexpected legroom on a plane; the ugly manner in which my face warps when big tears are about to overwhelm me, and how repressing them means deforming my cheeks and chin and forehead as though a leech is swimming frantic beneath my skin. Or the power that composes me when I walk down the aisle of a moving train. Or the coppery taste of blood; the slippery touch of cherry seeds; signing my name on condensation; the novelty of a round window; how little I know about birds. How the string section of an orchestra appears hypnotized, far more than the brass and woodwind; how at the grocery store, spotting the bottom hem of a woman’s nightgown under her raincoat feels classified. Or how awkward it is to be in the company of a friend who’s expressed to me that I’ve been inconsiderate and self-absorbed, and how attempting to mend my pattern is graceless, pinching, and worse, feels false. How being hard on myself is, oddly, a lazy system for letting myself off the hook. How sometimes I imagine hubcaps spinning off the wheels of cars and slicing me in two. How a coral shirt I rarely wear compels my friends to argue whether the shirt is more salmon than coral, and even if the difference is slight, sometimes it’s nice to hear voices I admire boom emphatically over dumb, trifling things.
The memory of peering into my cousin Samantha’s bedroom surfaces. I was small, no older than ten, and I spotted a biography of Marilyn Monroe tossed beside a pair of black Dr. Martens boots, and Samantha caught me looking and slammed the door, and instantly Marilyn Monroe and Dr. Martens were the most forbidden. Or my mother’s crooked teeth. Fanged and disobedient. Crowding her mouth like concertgoers front row, pushed up against the stage. They are my favorite set of teeth because when my mother smiles her teeth resist any notion that happiness is an upshot of perfection. Her smile is chaotic. Teeming, toppling, and lovely.
*
“Madam … madam.”
I’d closed my eyes just long enough to have dozed off.
“Madam,” the driver said again. “Museum.”
I slowly came to and felt my mascara unstick between my lashes.
“Museum, madam.”
“Museum?” I asked.
“Heart museum.”
Oh no, I thought. He’d brought me to a museum in the middle of the night. I looked out and saw nothing.
The driver pointed up ahead. “Heart museum.”
This couldn’t be right. “No, no.” I shook my head. “Hospital. Heart hospital.”
“Heart museum,” he repeated.
A museum? At night? I lifted my chin, suggesting we should drive up the road some more.
The driver was now smiling as we inched closer. As the rickshaw pulled up to the front, I peered out and saw what looked like a very fancy hospital. That’s how I remember it at least.
“Heart museum, madam,” he said once more.
I nodded, thanked and paid the driver, and walked toward the entrance. It had become chilly and I was grateful to have brought the shawl with me. Quietly moved by the rickshaw driver’s construal of this large, looming building, I climbed the stairs. Even though this was a hospital and in visiting family I was only doing my daughterly duty, his characterization of “Heart Museum” recuperated in me what I was so longing for: a sense of arrival. The words “Heart Museum,” like a figurative place; a vault where memories shimmer, fall dark, are cut loose, and unexpectedly flare up when you most need them to. The words “Heart Museum,” like an experiment; twitchy, sad, parceled, soulful, like Arthur Russell. The words “Heart Museum”: a meaning archive; a parent’s medicine cabinet with expired sunscreen and old Band-Aids; the contents of a care package; a hideout for mind and spirit; mausoleum-like. The words “Heart Museum,” like the essence of a word from another language for which English has no word. Because is there anything better, more truthful and sublime than what cannot be communicated? The marvelous, hard-to-spell-out convenience of what’s indefinite.
2
Part of a Greater Pattern
THE dead squirrel was, without a doubt, going to make me very late for school. Stupid squirrel, I thought while brushing my teeth, staring at its fig-shaped body floating facedown in our swimming pool. As a kid I was—in my way—quick to wind up. To set off. Something primitive and stormy would kindle in my chest, and I would become possessed by shivers of short temper; an eleven-year-old who hated being late, whose grumbling irascibility my mother never claimed. “You didn’t get that from me,” she’d stress. Which was, in her way, a manner of getting wound up at my father.
Staring at the dead squirrel’s body from my bedroom, which overlooked our backyard, I imagined our pool festering with rabies. Miasmic ripples forming a paisley pattern around its furry corpse. “Stupid squirrel,” I might have even said out loud.
Having shared a room with my brother until I was eight, this bedroom all to myself was my first encounter with privacy. While its green shag carpet was hideous, it encouraged—as ugly, funny, and unfair things do—my incurable taste for the make-believe. Stories flickered as I’d lie down, press my cheek against its itchy surface, rake my fingers through the carpet’s deep pile, thumbing its loops and sharpening, with one eye open and one eye closed, my focus. Entire worlds existed in that green shag carpet, like I devised entire worlds in the mazelike depths of movie cornfields, for instance, or in secret gardens, in pictures of missing children whose lives I guiltily romanticized, or behind ominously big doors where rich people lived on the Boulevard near Montreal’s Mount Royal, in mansions so tall they muddled my spatial awareness and seemed to taper on top like spires.