Mayah DeMartino
Nocturne in 13 Parts
1. [Eulogy]: to the Things That I Am Shedding
(& the ways that I am waiting nervously in the wings for the next instruction)
To perform alchemy, no permission is needed from the materials being converted into something precious. There is understandably little resistance to the prospect of being turned into gold. I am writing a letter to you, the conjurer. I am writing a letter to me, too.
I’ve tried to close my eyes and see the center of you, heavy-weighted and sunken by something formless. The truth is that I do not know you; the truth is that I do not know you enough to hate you or forgive you, to apologize for what I imagine happened to you that has left your insides mangled.
It’s rumored that the Chinese inception of gunpowder began with an attempt to formulate a draught for eternal life. An agent of contemporary death sluicing forth from efforts toward immortality.
When I say alchemy, do I mean triage?
To the conjurer:
You brought forth so much ugliness, carefully arranged it around me in a circle, omens of what would poison me in the years to come. I used to say that it was one of my gifts to transfigure something ugly into something precious. Now I hope instead that I simply have the good sense to throw away what is waste so that I am only left with the valuables.
My memory has become folded and distorted, a tesseract that consumes and reveals itself in tandem. By this I mean I find it difficult to recall . . . by this I mean I am recalling the difficulty . . . by this I mean I am locked in a spinning, concentrated remembrance.
I do not personify you. In your memory, I am the only thing that gets personified. Made real.
You are somewhere between fiction and hatred. You are somewhere between regret and craving. You are somewhere between what I did and what I didn’t do. You are real to someone, somewhere. You are faceless. Have I already personified you?
You are real to your mother. Sometimes when I think of your mother, I am consumed with a rage so visceral it makes me vibrate. How could she fail you so grossly?
Ideas of successful alchemy in India have included the creation of a divine body. A body untouched by death or decay, a body unslandered. (I imagine that you pray that I will die. I pray the same for you.) A divine body cannot be prayed against because it is insurmountably alive. (Or, I hope you pray that I will die.)
I personally find the idea of divinity unsettling. My most childlike solaces come from the promise of your eventual death, and from the certainty of my own. A promise that eventually I will not have to bear your existence in a shared world. (The worst? That you do not remember me. That you do not pray for anything at all.)
2. The Cast, The Connections; Or, How My Mother and Your Mother are Bound, Though They Have Never Met Before
My mother:
My father:
Me:
She: [see above]
Your mother:
Conjurer: [see above]
You: [see above]
// ibid. “When memory shifts to fantasy”
To be clear: you are not real. The Conjurer is not real. Your mother is not real. Only me, only my mother, only my father, only me and me and me. My friend asked me once, “How long do you think this will be a part of your life?” A snarled part of me knew that he meant, How much longer can this go on? We were throwing rocks at a brown bottle bobbing upside-down in the ocean. This part of the ocean was toxic, and we weren’t supposed to swim in it. I wanted so badly to be the one to hit the bottle, send it spinning down to the rocks and sand beneath the gray water. I threw rock after rock, but I never hit it.
You pooled in the mold where desire mixed with the hovering of a hand over a flame. I can imagine you, expansive, arched over me. Behind you, stars. I have immortalized a part of myself in this moment, and she wholly inhabits it. She stands up from where she was pinned, hair tangled in the dirt; she walks circles around you; she eyes your exposed skin and kicks pebbles aimlessly. She checks her text messages. She is not sorry for what is happening. She is bored. She is observing a cosmic, incomprehensible phenomenon. She is observing a statistically common crime. To this day. I am turned on by my own vulnerability, a tangle in my sexuality that never fully irons itself flat, one that even queerness has yet failed to uncoil.
3. Correspondence
Here is an email that I received from your mother:
As we are working through this, we are requesting, respectfully, that you hold off on sending us further emails.
Everything you have sent our way or directed at us is being thoroughly looked into. Do you have a case number we could refer to?
We take these allegations very seriously and again we are looking into them.
Sincerely,
Respectfully,
Cordially,
How dare you,
Please,
Please Please Please,
4. Who is my mother?
Caucasian Female
Birthdate: 11/02/72
I do not yet know how to write about her, so I will list what I know.
Blonde, muscular, tanned.
Straight nose, large eyes, gnarled hands, scarred legs. She has been an outdoor guide, a pharmacy technician, a makeup saleswoman, a wetlands delineation assistant, a Bible-study leader, a park ranger. She is kind, energetic, driven, awkward, clever, likeable. She is blunt, moody, impassioned.
[I am halted by a catch of the throat when I think of everything she has been, and how I still do not fully see her as she is. I cannot unsee her at 23, freshly out of college and newly married, and at 45, staring down the barrel of me.]
My mother’s mouth: twists and gnarls. Her teeth are very white, nearly translucent in places, straight and even. She folds whitening strips over her teeth once every week, tonguing the blend of fluoride and hydrogen peroxide into a paste in the far reaches of her mouth. She goes about her business during this time, her teeth sealed airtight in a film of plastic, muddled words and blurred smiles.
There is still a great deal of her life that is obscured from me. She tells stories of her early twenties with a strange fondness, peppered with warnings. “I wouldn’t do that again,” she says gravely. The friends in her stories play out horrible fates, their choices looming over them as beacons. Her friend was an alcoholic; her friend got an abortion and cried for days. They fill up a void around a faint outline of my mother. I imagine her standing in the wings, discreetly taking notes. I wonder about these friends, archetypes acting out her greatest, hard-learned lessons. Its hard to imagine girl-who-cried-for-days-post-abortion as a real person. I watch my mother carefully for any sign of unbidden secret-sharing.
5. My Mother, A Corporeal Pillar
The truth is that I can never tell a story full enough to hold her. For every moment of pain and sorrow dealt by her hand, there are a thousand moments of joy and tenderness, of care that I have not been able to comprehend. My father nearly died in a fall when he was 31, and so my earliest memories are of his near death.
My mother sacrificed her career for her children and became a scaffolding to hold up my father’s broken body and the lives of my brother and me at two and four years old, respectively. I do not yet know how to write about my mother because I do not understand how her lifetime is housed within her body.
6. The women in my family are digestive systems.
They churn and metabolize sorrow, package it and slip it into their pockets . Matriarch, strewn about with a loose hand.
(Ibid. my mother and my grandmother)
Two lines running parallel for a lifetime, occupying the same kitchen, the same sedan, the same family, eyeing each other with everything: resentment, sadness, aching, rage, disappointment, longing. This tenderness, obscured from the source. Eyes trained steadily on each other, recognizing an ache and still bearing down, a thumb boring into the soft flesh of a plum, strands running meaty under the nail. Toughen up, don’t give, don’t give, but want and want and want.
7. I am real to my mother.
I may be her from 20 years ago and she cannot see me without seeing herself. Children are either mirrors or failed mirrors.
My mother’s father, Art, died when she was 26. He was crushed by an ice delivery truck. My grandmother has been curdled and bitter since then, and how could you blame her? (My mother could blame her.)
My grandmother owns the ice-delivery service, the site of my grandfather’s death. She has cultivated a livelihood surrounding the prospect of keeping things fresh. Fixated on preservation for as long as I can recall. She once told me that she could not use my grandfather’s name in the years following his death, but was driven to speak to him in a relentless, dripping monologue. She called him
Tom.
I am 22, and I am hoarding the next four years with my father.
2016: I experience a series of sexual abuses. Like an animal frantic to escape from a trap, my mother pitches and head-shakes to deny this information. She finds my experiences entirely intolerable. “If that’s sexual assault,” she snaps at me, “then I’ve been sexually assaulted.”
I watched her in this moment from several inversions away
(body inside, body outside, body inside, body outside)
How do I want my mother to feel when she reads this? What do I hope she sees? What do I wish was hidden from her?
It does not escape me that most of my stories about my mother start with “I.”
8. What do I want to give my father?
My father has not died yet but I think I have a memory of his death. Footfalls on the tiled mouth of the threshold, sun fractured through triangle panes of glass. Our front stoop is carpeted in green turf, a roll of ersatz grass. He leaves out the front door—the screen door that I slammed my hand in years later (I still have a scar running up the center of my right thumbnail)—the same screen door I tied a string to in order to lever a tooth from my brother’s mouth. The same screen door I would snatch open after receiving a slivered papercut from a plastic balloon string: decorations celebrating my father’s return.
Return to sender :
a) Hospital hallways teetering wildly on themselves; cranberry juice in thin paper cups; nurse sneakers; shins and knees of doctors, eye level with the squawking machinery threading my father’s body
b) Vanilla cake with blue buttercream frosting (it says, “welcome home”) waiting on the washing machine; streamers in the kitchen; family and friends lining our driveway
c) A little girl sitting in the front yard, the red flare of dusk yawning over her. She is drawing a picture, a gaping black hole that is swallowing up her father’s body. She is bent over the paper like a willow.
d) A page of skin on my index finger feathered open, a papercut running bloody, my other hand pulling the screen door open
What do I want to return to my father?
a) A letter that he wrote to me to be read after he died, which I found accidentally, and which began by saying, When you read this, I won’t be . . . and which I dropped like it was burning.
b) A figure leaning in the bathroom doorway, prosthetic limb propped against the doorjamb, looking at me through the mirror and saying, “You will have to move on somehow,” which to him meant survive, and to me meant swallow
Ibid.: A capital sin to ask for alchemy before it is possible. See also: ‘sacrilege,’ ‘rage unbridled,’ ‘you cannot rush God’
9. A Thank-You Letter
To the Conjurer: because of you I can see my mother and father in four dimensions. I see them now and I also see every person before them nested and compounded within them, climbing their throats to escape. My mother is her mother and her mother and her brother and her father and every man she has ever kissed. My father is every car he has ever driven and every alley he has ever staggered in and every suspended moment of quiet between half-waking and sleep.
To the Conjurer: I invoke you the same way one slams their hand in a screen door (again and again and again and again)
I love a boy who loves a man who has died. We are watching TV, a hospital soap, and a character who houses a disease-ridden liver vomits black blood onto the floor of a hospital. “My dad had that,” the boy says. I can’t tell if he means the blood or the vomit or the disease. “That’s how they found him in his house, alone.”
I would tell this story to the Conjurer if I could. “Look at that,” I would spit, pointing at the boy who loved a man who died. “You have a perfectly good dad and you still turned out all poisoned.” Look at that: proof that you are useless with no good reason, proof that ruin is not hereditary, proof that the apple falls and falls and falls, proof that you are all ruined and ruined and ruined.. . .
To the Conjurer: you are attached to me (arm to torso).
To the Conjurer: maybe that’s all fucked up bullshit and we will die afraid of each other more than we could ever hate anything.
To the conjurer: My mother says I am a combatant. What do I want her to call me instead? This is both a threat and a plea.
10. What do I want from my father?
My father doesn’t drink, so I drink for both of us. His liver is tired and I’m younger than him. He’s been taking pills every day for 17 years, which patch the weakened parts of his body and dissolve small perforations in his intestines.
Lie down on the pavement, Dad, I’ll draw a chalk outline
around you:
Space ballooned around your body to house the times you have laid face-up on the couch, radiating with pain, and space to hold a 20-year-old self kneeling next to a greyhound in a
photo outside his parents’ house—
Space expanded to hold an unbroken body. Is it the right or left leg that is missing?
Now you draw an outline chalked around me
Body intact, chest intact, legs intact, arms intact, eyes intact
Point to where it hurts
and I just lie there
Unblinking
The problem with loss as a delineation is that it distorts an undamaged past. I cannot see you as you were before, and photos of you then are bizarre and cartoonish.
I remember a photo with just you and me: you are in a hospital bed, propped up by a cervical collar and crowded by a forest of wheeled IV stands and monitors. I am lying next to you, my legs crossed cockily. I am four years old, you are 30-something. We are both smiling.
In reality, my mom and brother are there too, immortalized in the glossy 4x6. My mother is leaning over you, her skin tanned and shining, and my brother next to you, towheaded and blonde and covering a smile or a sneeze. In my memory, though, it is only you and me (and you and me and you and me)
If I could return the letter to my father, I would finish it by asking if he can see himself from before, by asking if what he believed to be his final moments held a flash of knowingness: whole body, whole heart, whole stomach, whole daughter beside him.
Do I wish my father had never been hurt?
Do I wish that he understood me when I was hurt?
To want this demands a kind of impossible imagination. Who would I have become if my father and I had not been ourselves for our entire lives?
11. To the Conjurer: Here are the vignettes that I remember you by.
Your head held low, forehead nearly touching that of my oldest friend. You are both laughing surreptitiously to each other. There is a sunken well in my stomach.
Your hand clamped over my throat, eyes glassy
Beyond those moments, where you are in my memory is nearly gutted clean. I am convinced that you are less a thing than an absence of one.
To tell the truth: I have feared you deeply, though never as deeply as I feared my mother, and never as deeply as I have feared myself. You were afraid of me, too. I mistook it for rage and bent like a willow beneath you.
To tell the truth: I wanted you to love me more than I have ever wanted anything. I wanted a world from you.
Then again, why conflate violence with romance? Why vignette you, why interweave you with my memory now?
To tell the truth: Sometimes I miss it.
12. To Fang, with Love,
The earliest female alchemist in China was named Fang. In the first century B.C., she was credited with the discovery of transforming mercury into silver, reportedly by extracting silver from ores using mercury. Fang worked alongside a spouse of Emperor Han Wu Ti, all the while elevating the potency of transformation: mercury to silver, death to life. Fang was brilliant.
Her life was stitched through with abuse by her husband, Cheng Wei. Wei’s abuses were many-stemmed, vines unfurling from the root—hatred or greed or fear—and he relentlessly bore down upon Fang to uncover the secret to her alchemy.
Fang’s mind ultimately warped, rippling like heat off stone, perhaps from the seething poison of years of mercury ingestion, or perhaps from a lifetime of abuse. Though it would have been perfectly understandable if she had revealed her secret in hope of ending her torment, Fang never yielded to her husband. She died by suicide.
Fang herself split a furrow for a lineage of women who chose transformation over love, or that which is disguised as love. Her mind and her hands were capable of profound change, but her true gifts may have lain in her clear vision. She did not allow herself to be poisoned, except by her own hand. She did not relinquish her grip on herself.
In the throes of doubt—a surging, living distortion—when a hollow hunger curdles my stomach, I fear that I have disappointed Fang. I have thrown myself upon a pyre in the name of cruelty. Wanting so badly for it to be love that I was willing to make it so. I am glad you never cared to ask for my secrets, for I know I would have given them up freely, sloughing off everything that protected me, leaving me raw and burnt and empty handed.
In the height of my fever: I ask a friend what it feels like to love her current partner. She responds, You don’t really think you love him, do you?
I willed violence to become romance because I believed that all it took to change one to the other was someone who wanted it badly enough.
13. When I am conscious, I hope that you are suffering. When I am asleep,
I hope
that I am the balm.
I still have dreams of happening upon boys who look like you in abandoned places: strip malls and gas station parking lots. The boys are always crying, and I console them. Cradle them in my arms while they weep. I do not feel revulsion when I see them—only a maternal ache beneath my sternum.This is probably some kind of perversion. A friend of mine says that when she dreams about someone in her life crying, she calls them to see how they’re doing. Maybe this dream is some kind of subliminal call, an electrical charge spanning thousands of miles.
13 (again). Endlessness as a Kind of Comfort
I used to sell my plasma as a defense against cutting my arms (please release the corrosive acidity inside me). I went twice weekly to levitate in the fake leather chair. Afraid of being found out.
Pose of bodies present: supine, veins pulsing, eyelids fluttering.
Eventually I stopped going. This story is funny now, or unrecognizable, or vaguely familiar.
Other Chinese interpretations of alchemy include the belief that death from ingestion of mercuric sulfide allowed access to the heavens: death as release.
Change of form. Freedom.
I have decided that the only thing that keeps people from recovering from tragedy is the story they tell themselves about it. I say this only to myself, and so I have become a storyteller. No one fully recovers from anything. It is inhuman to do so.
This story is funny now because I say it is. This story is beautiful because I say it is.
I don’t know how to let you go, how to let this story finally be over. This story will never be full enough to hold a family, whole bodies of a multitude. It will never be enough.
My favorite part of this story is that it embarasses me deeply.
I have started a garden, dirt and kale and squash. I have written hundreds of spiraling, senseless poems. This is one of them. Sometimes I am soundlessly happy.
This story will go on ending and ending and ending,