DRAFT
First of all, the word deliquesce. Everyone seems to be throwing it around these days, and for good reason.
del•i•quesce
intr.v. del•i•quesced, del•i•quesc•ing, del•i•quesc•es
1.
a. To melt away.
b. To disappear as if by melting.
2. Chemistry To dissolve and become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air.
3. Botany
a. To branch out into numerous subdivisions that lack a main axis, as the stem of an elm.
b. To become fluid or soft on maturing, as certain fungi.
Too many things have happened, before, during, and after which I sat for hours and hours and weeks, at one of several desks. Along side me: boxes that I moved from place to place, full of files, sheaves of paper fastened with staples or alligator clips. Lost among the files and the papers: pens, rubber bands, clip boards, photographs, an eraser shaped like a white frosted layer cake garnished by robust strawberries. I worked on things that needed doing, and things that really didn’t need doing (trying to figure out by feel, by keystrokes, the difference between the two.) There were things to do, things to not do, and lots of messes I should address, then messes I should just let lie. I have gradually grown diffuse: mixed in among my molecules are shaking, trembling, wondering molecules of so many troubles and messes and matters of interest - little tear drops make gaps in my being. I may soon be completely transformed, I may deliquesce. You might find that I come to look like one of these other substances:
Mischief: One bright and humid August day I looked from the window of the office in which I had been working and saw the doors of our grizzled plastic shed sagging open. The chain which should have tied them closed hung in uneven parallels, uncrossed and lockless. Toys were heaved and tossed. Much was intact, some things crushed or gone. I climbed over fences and along the edges of stepped planter beds, in my skirt, and bitterly retrieved deflated balls, foam flying disks, hoops. An intern helped me pull, carry, roll everything indoors. Daddy long legs, dead leaves, and the scent of stagnant plastic vectored from a stack of stubby and unfun traffic cones - these were unharmed as they have few uses in genuine play? I left the chain, the doors, the failing roof, and several deflated balls and returned to the particular desk at which, on that day, I had been working. I noted the losses and calculated the cost of replacements.
Tree Limbs: Another August day I looked from an office window and saw on the play deck limbs of the callery pear trees canted over railings and, on standing I could see, lying right down on the ground. The wind still rowed the leaves, but they waved like grasses, all anchored to a horizon, not swaying and shifting levels as trees’ leaves would, I think, rather do. They had been cut by a crew of men. Later, with deck cleared again, once branches had been sectioned, stacked then hauled away, the trees themselves, shorn of their reaching lower limbs, looked exceptionally vertical, self-contained, and noble.
A 13th Anniversary: The date of my father’s death came and went. It was quite hot. I forgot to think of him at the time of his dying, just after 5:00 pm. I forgot to think of this for a full hour and then I admitted there was no real reason to be vigilant about remembering that narrow little time.
Betta Fish: Coming home not too late on a Tuesday, I asked Hanauta if she had fed our blue fish, Asmani. She looked up from a sewing project, with a quarter glance, watching me as I held the cylindrical box of betta fish food, swiveled the cap inexpertly to establish the proper aperture, and counted out four tiny pellets. “Mani Mani Asmani” I softly called. Sometimes he sleeps, rather close to the surface, his chin resting on the spindly leaves of his water weed. I dropped a rough sphere of strong smelling food into the water but he did not stir, his forehead grazed the air, he floated too high. I dropped the rest of the pellets, three more, stupidly, into the water. “Oh no, oh no, Hanauta!” She started crying before I could say it.
I recited things, lay him on a snip of blue floral cloth, lit incense, we chanted a mantra. He was graceful, as though still swimming, full of presence. We had only just discovered, such a short while ago, maybe only a week, that we could, with careful attention at feeding times, hear him crunching his bits of food. He had an underbite and in places his scales were almost silvery. I miss him. His food, the little pellets, swelled in the water, I think, swelled and expanded until they let go and mixed in with everything. They deliquesced. He would have too, had I not found him, preserved him for a while from his own decay.
Hanauta is puzzled that I give even a fish a pseudonym here. But I do. I’ll give one to all sentient beings who come in to these paragraphs.
Intensive Care: My friend Haystacks was in the hospital. One day I rode a long time on the subway and found him after trying four different hulking buildings. He looked well but drowsy, a rosy child. He wasn’t well. His friends recounted their stories of hospitals and trauma but I did not share mine, though I usually, easily, extravagantly do, starting with my father’s heart surgery and ending, about 15 years later, with Hanauta’s birth by caesarian delivery. Hospitals are lonely, because the patients cannot come out, they have to stay, and visitors have to go. On the way home I thought of my father in the ICU, his last time in the ICU, with heavy hands, cold and fatigued, all bone and chill. I held his hands, my friend’s, against my face. He won’t remember that, or that I kissed his brow and laid my palms gently on his head for a long while because there was nothing to say.
Pacifier: On the train home from a visit to Haystacks, on the second leg of my journey, I sat beside a young woman whose dimpled, star-eyed toddler girl sat in a tiny folding stroller, set perpendicular to her mother’s legs so she could twist in her seat and beseech through words and gestures. “Bibi?” “No bibi,” her mother replied, “ ‘cause you threw it down and you didn’t tell me. It’s all gone. No more.” “Bibi?” “No more, you threw it. Se cayó.” “Ca?” The girl wanted bibi, her pacifier. She opened her mouth, lay the tips of fingers on her lips, with a sidewards glance at mama, she tucked the fingers in and sucked. “No!” her mother pushed the hand away. “Get your hand out your mouth!” The girl snarled, leaning forward with shoulders squared, she turned away, tilting her head and smiling, she glared, she slapped her mother. They traded stances: placating, teasing, threatening, flirting, admonishing, demanding. The mother tickled, the girl resisted. The mother relaxed and fell silent, the girl raised her arm, daring her mother to tickle again. Their telegraphic conversation resumed and turned to the subject of cookies. “Cookie?” wondered the girl. “Cookie!” she demanded. There were no cookies, the mom demonstrated as much by opening and removing the contents of her purse. There was nearly nothing in there, in the black lined, shifting spaces of her bag (“la cartera”.) The cookies were wanted, urgently desired. It was late in the evening, past 9:00 PM. “You want milk? Want your milk?” The girl toyed with her bottle, removing the cap and posing her hand as if to let the cap and bottle fall to the subway car floor. “No! You drop it you’ll have to use your sippy cup.” The tease ended there. The bottle was wedged back into the stroller back mesh. Around craned the girl, her dimpled limbs, the gold bracelet on her right wrist, her necklace, her earrings all adding to her gorgeous sweetness. She yawned. “You tired. You want to watch the story of the fishies when we get home?” The girl shook her head, she rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “You don’t want to watch the fishies?” Head shake, fingers haltingly to mouth…MUST…SUCK! The mother slaps away her hand again and the baby cries, she hits her mother. “You gonna hit me now? When we get home, ‘pow pow,’ I’m telling daddy! You gonna cry? Well, go ahead and cry it out because you threw away bibi. I don’t have anything for you. You gonna cry, I’ll GIVE you something to cry about.” Mother crushes her fist slowly against baby’s nose, the cartilage gently gives way to the side. “Give you something to cry about…” The baby laughs and when I leave she waves goodbye to me.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis: In August a nurse injected 0.1 mL of purified protein derivative tuberculin between layers of skin on my left inner forearm – this raises a blister. The nurse wasn’t wearing barrier gloves – which was so strange, after all these years. I remember having TB tine tests as a child, and the pleasant, astringent smell of alcohol that the nurse swept briskly over my skin, as if to reassure it. I have a ppd test most years, for my job, part of the physical teachers undergo annually. As hours passed the test site swelled, it itched, it swelled a great deal more, was red and raised. From 10 feet away the nurse saw, 72 hours later, that it was positive. I was sent for a chest x-ray. I called my boss, “I’m going to be late today. I may have TB.” The chest x-ray was fast, but hearing about it took days and days. My doctor called at the end of the week, seven days after the ppd. “It’s fine, your x-ray is CLEAR! You’ll just take an antibiotic for nine months and see me once a month. Nothing to worry about.”
Now I wake before dawn and place the dusty pill, an oval prism, comfortingly bitter, directly on my tongue. I let it weigh on me briefly, savoring its dryness, then wash it down with water. Let it deliquesce and do its work. I could, after the nine months is done, get infected with TB again, randomly, without knowing. There may be no good reason for taking this course of medication except it is what’s done. Just in case, just in case. I let it rest on my tongue so I will remember I have taken it for the day. Because it’s hard to pay attention and remember things: the bitter flavor is a wonderful mnemonic. My boss forbids me to tell my colleagues. The ppd site is still dark and raised. It seems ugly to me, in its persistence, but no one has noticed or asked. I watch it and watch it astride my forearm, a new landmark, as I hold steady on the steel rail of a subway car.
Light: One morning, one weekend morning, Hanauta lay down beside me in bed. “I wouldn’t like to be light.” “Why not?” “Because it’s always moving. Is it always moving?” “I don’t know, I guess it does travel on and on, sometimes.” I wonder whether it diminishes, if it grows diffuse with distance. I don’t think light does diminish - or get lonely on long journeys. “Hey, but light stops moving when it lands on something, don’t you think?” I ask. “It might travel a long way from the sun but it lands on us." I touch my forearm with one finger. "It reaches our skin, reaches into trees." I try to remember whether light releases water from the air with its heat. Is light something other than heat? Does it travel to end its path on us? It makes us possible, that much is clear.
Hanauta says maybe she wouldn’t mind being light. I resist saying: 'you are my light, sweet heart.' Maybe I can deliquesce in good ways, take on some bright molecules, some Hanauta molecules, little interstitial wobbles of contentment.
