Moth Read online

  or how I came to be with you again

  for my mother and Ms. M.

  © 2013 by Thomas Heise

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

  Managing Editor

  Sarabande Books, Inc.

  2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200

  Louisville, KY 40205

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heise, Thomas.

  Moth; or how I came to be with you again / Thomas Heise.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-93674-756-6

  I. Title.

  PS3608.E385M88 2013

  811'.6—dc23

  2012049322

  Cover and text design by Kirkby Gann Tittle.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  moth: [ θ] n. Any of numerous, nocturnal insects of the order Lepidoptera that are attracted to light, excluding butterflies.

  Related: moth•er: n. One who watches, pursues, captures, and collects moths. See also: mother.

  Lepidoptera — Graellsia isabellae — Spanish Moon Moth

  I am sad, not because you are leaving, but because I am going to forget you.

  —Proust

  Whatever is conscious wears out. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable. Once freed, however, surely this too must fall to ruins.

  —Freud

  she was so bright

  no one loved her

  like the moth

  Contents

  A Note

  Recollection

  Oslo, Winter 2011

  Berlin, Winter 2009

  Berlin, Winter 2009

  Berlin, Winter 2009

  New York City (lyric)

  Recollection

  Oslo, Winter 2011

  Oslo, Winter 2011

  Oslo, Spring 2010

  Copenhagen, Spring 2010

  Copenhagen, Fall 2010

  Copenhagen, Winter 2010

  New York City (lyric)

  Recollection

  New York City (lyric)

  Oslo, Winter 2011

  Prague, Summer 2010

  Oslo, Summer 2010

  Berlin, Summer 2011

  Berlin, Late Fall 2011

  Berlin, Late Fall 2011

  Acknowledgments

  A Note

  At some point in the winter of 2009, I became aware that I have been afflicted for years with a strange, unclassified condition that makes my experience of time markedly different from that of others. I hesitate to use the word “illness,” since there is nothing pathogenic about which I write, the viral properties of language itself notwithstanding. The river of my memory, my own past and that odd concept we call the present, which is ever in the process of being added to the detritus that is by common agreement a sign of life, flows in many directions.

  I have always had a hazy understanding of my own history—who my parents were, where I have come from, where I am returning to—but in the months that I was under the care of Drs. T.W., F.W., and T.R., I was told that the liminal region between what was real and what was not had become for me indistinguishable, a mere phantom. All evidence to the contrary, I did not know whether to believe them for they took such an unusual interest in my case that at times I wondered if they might not be diagnosing themselves. As I stared up at their faces leaning over the bed those days that blurred into weeks before my release last season, they often had the look of those who gaze for too long into the pond of Monet’s water lilies.

  Days of sleeping alternated with spells of insomnia, which were interrupted by periods when I did not know if I were awake or dreaming because the images and ideas that appeared in my mind were often so unfamiliar that I half-suspected they were beamed in as a radio signal from a distant shore, or emerged up out of a seabed of a primordial life I had once lived, had all but forgotten, and whose vestiges on occasion made themselves known. I became lost in time and, in retrospect, lost in words. The moments of involuntary recall during which the unrecoverable past piling up behind me were only matched by the expansive fields of time that even now remain barren in my memory. Fortunately, I am told that the rubble will wear down to a fine, particulate mist that the winds of the imagination will scatter, like the storm blowing in from Paradise for Benjamin’s Angel who cannot close its wings.

  Was my life now a second life and was my life in writing a third, I simply do not know. Talking is no cure; neither is writing, despite what the poets say. This disclosure provides no special insight, only a few planks of wood over sinking sand. Thus, it is only to those curious about the facts of a writer’s life and the serendipitous nature of the act itself that I should mention in passing that this manuscript was originally composed by hand and in the German during the time of my sickness and the months after. For some time, the manuscript had gone missing—accidentally disposed of or perhaps purloined, I thought—until one day I found it concealed behind the lining in my suitcase. Upon rereading it for the first time in many months, I became suspicious that parts of it had been altered and some portions entirely changed. I wondered indeed if I had even written it. Translators often remark that the intimacy in carrying a writer’s words from one language to another is a communion unlike any other. And so I began translating the manuscript into the English until it was complete, and then out of competition with myself now or whoever I was then when I had conceived those words, I burnt the original.

  —T.H., Winter 2012

  Recollection

  — I remember when I touched my sleeping mother’s hair, it sparked in my hands and I thought she was inhuman, but I was young, and only years later would I understand she was under the spell of an erotic dream — I remember a white door emboldened with a laurel wreath leading into a basement where we retreated frequently in the tornado season — I remember how day after day would pass while nothing happened and how, without mercy, time would gather weight, accrete a green patina on the locket I chipped with a long fingernail — I remember the swaying firs made a whanging of rusted girders I thought would collapse — I remember sitting at my desk before my most precious things, sheets of graph paper, diagrams, folders, waterlogged and moulded charts, and then unannounced he would come to me, moving my hand automatically across these pages — I remember the gathering darkness of a thousand incidents I never witnessed, and yet bird by bird they separated themselves into moments of bright singularity — I remember that I possess no true memory of my mother and only know at all she even existed by evidence of my own pale skin and the double helix twisted under it into an X — I remember blurry light, rain on an awning, and then being lifted and placed into a red wagon — I remember when the earth was for me, for the last time in its history, still elastic as cartilage, had not fully solidified into the obstacle of the known, the terrible, stubborn thing called fact — I remember it was the hibiscus winter, because she said so — I remember writing these words, but only barely, but one after another stonelike in their materiality they are undeniable — I remember remembering a dream, under a low ceiling of illuminated clouds swirling in a tarantella, I rode weeping along the boulevard of an empty city newly in ruins where each crumbling museum was my hidden and sumptuous destitution — I remember someone informed me he had once hanged himself from his swing set, then the memory infected me, became my own — I remember
a small, A-frame house, and watching the hawthorn wasting in an emollient sea wind — I remember a white door — I remember it was the hibiscus winter — I remember thinking I had been comatose a thousand years, though this is surely false, and in my uncorroborated absence the whole fungible world in a moment of chemical agony had changed in irreversible ways — I remember how everything tasted dark — I remember things I’ve never felt (a seagull feather brushing my lips, a turquoise shell, my shoulders festooned with flowers) — I remember thinking what was in my mind was put there by others, by books I read, by objects I looked at but did not own — I remember wondering if other memories remained in the twilight regions of my mind where my failed loves were soil, and if soon someone would enlighten me to things I had done and then, years later, I would remember them as real — I remember tender hands covered in snow — I remember the city, the flames immanent as flowers, patient to burst forth — I remember my favourite word once was —

  Oslo, Winter 2011

  My writing is the offspring of a suborned father without a country and a profane void of a mother whose sadness was without referent. From their fleeting encounter, a chance assignation, everything I have penned was conceived, and within the passing of a cloud, orphaned. Consider this “fact”: a man and a woman — called X and Y, respectively — both displaced, both wild-eyed and exiled, in both wanderlust was evoked by the rustling of a flag and the geometric cross-stitching of bridge cables through which wet wind beckoned in the moonlight as he gripped the back of her neck. Northeast and northwest, they branched to separate truths, where what awaited them they were unsure. You’ve seen this scene before, narrowed by your window. There: a decrepit schooner half sunk in dark and the mechanical whir of a cicada somewhere was turning to ice. The paradox of sky: a door and a graveyard. The woman making the sign of an X for her heart. The man making the sign of a Y for his heart. Dearly beloved. Dearly departed. Which way the wind blows? Consider this “fact”: early on I was taught language was schizoid, one half reserved for the things of this world and half for the brutal rush of time for which the things of this world were moments time accreted into a density we could feel, like the rough cut of a brick, and through laughter or weeping understand it was a memory we held onto and whether true or feigned, mattered less than possession. As an infant, I was possessed by language, would wake nights with it fermenting in my mouth, incomprehensible words and dreams which, though I was helpless to write down, I knew even then would be an autobiography of fever. Unblinking, I would count backward from zero into an imaginary and negative realm of decreasing absolute magnitude where I hoped I might discover a pinprick, a small eye-tear in the fabric into which I could slip a gaunt arm. The melodrama inside me eroded into a sorrow I would learn to pick apart and reassemble the way my mother Y (if she existed) may have, in a huddled alley, pulled a bone from a fire. She emerges where two irreducible thoughts — genetics and desire — collide. Consider this “fact”: though there is no way to prove it and the effort to could only lead to suicide or worse, here at the end of the twelfth month with no mark of another soul approaching down the long and meandering road, overgrown with brush and fallen trees that leads to the A-frame, I have begun to suspect I am the final iteration of a degraded sign whose meaning will extinguish with me. This prospect has accrued the status of an unconfirmed, but incontrovertible truth. One could even say I have become inspired by the idea. Each word laid end to end would lead to this conclusion. Wait and see. Into my journal I have poured an antique fascination with provenance and ownership equal to a collector of Russian nesting dolls, one haunted by the memory of the other, smaller and smaller. The smallest holding a thimble-breath of air, just enough for the word reproduction. Dear Reader, I believe I have encountered you in a dream, mine or yours dimly remembered, and saw — reflected in the mirror you beamed as a signal across the years — my own surface and in that depthless instant recognized how we were together, and how nothing mattered as long as through a fungal season of rain and pink shadow we were with each other. Have you not brooded so, your dark body turning to salt as the supple wind moved like a logarithm through the leaves and in the distance the tall melted buildings were a secular colour? Consider this “fact”: walking separately my mother and father were the circumference of a diaspora spreading over the globe like a cobweb. I was already in her womb, a lightbulb under a taut shade. I was forming as a complex archipelago of ideas. A convexed life washed over my unborn eyes as I watched out and later thought in the accumulating iron silence of days I would compensate for all the distortions and for all the erased scenery with a thousand reversed birds aloft over the receding, receding world.

  Berlin, Winter 2009

  The grace of waking is the sleep that follows. The grace of waking is the sleep that follows. The grace of sleep is the wake that follows. The grace that follows. The phrase looped over and over as I lay awake and asleep the film reel of snowy mountains shuttled past my eyes in the dark feeling. Over and down. Whether early into the night or late toward morning, whether the day had already passed, had turned with a half-twist clockwise or counter like a Möbius strip and begun anew to repeat itself I could not tell, nor would it have mattered, for time blurred and yet at that point in my life, during those incremental years which felt like a railroad being built at a snail’s pace toward some unknown city, it seemed there was no progress, as if I were always floating between the reality of my mattress and the play of light and shadow whether my eyes were opened or closed. I remember sensing one moment that if I craned my head out the frost-speckled window I might have seen the name of the last station in stencilled letters, perhaps an antique font, and an older man boarding at the last moment a train in the other direction. And if I waited a few more moments and rose up out of my berth, opened the window, and looked ahead might I have seen the name of the same station approaching through the drifts, then the echoing chamber of its Second Empire glassy morning and iron and the same man exiting the train in the other direction stare up at me with a look of recognition? And I remember thinking as I pulled the white sheet up over my eyes as I had as a child and then opened them, I would have seen the intermittent sun from the snow-covered firs and the dark columns of electricity poles spaced every half kilometre wash over the sheet and leave their mark on my eyes like a palimpsest after I closed them and saw myself with luggage in one hand and the other steadied on shoulders of those seated as I walked backward down the aisle, feeling nauseated, as the train to Berlin shunted forward with its awful momentum against each step that brought me closer to the little cabin where I would slip into my bunk and pull the sheet up to my chin and lie there with my eyes open for how long I would not know because sleep would come, as it always did for me, with a rush of amnesia. I believe I have been subject throughout my life to bouts of fainting, sudden collapses in energy that have left me bereft and have found me waking after a spell of narcolepsy in an empty theatre, or on the shag carpeting in a rundown boardinghouse in Zurich, or on the way up the stairs or down, I forget, in a rented apartment, perhaps near Cologne where I know I once visited, resting for a second with my hand on the rail until a brief tap on the back and a hello by a stranger returned me for a while to this world and with it to the haunting awareness that I was unwell. When I would come to, it was as if I had answered a telephone in the dark, startled and flummoxed by a voice of someone calling through the tunnels of sleep and my first reaction was a dazed, meaningless word, empty of content, something to indicate not more than I was there: Speaking, I would mutter. And as I would rest upright in my bed recounting what had happened or what had not while I was away, wherever it was that I went when I slept, trying to remember whether on one particular trip I had kept walking through the square in search of calm in the high-ceiling interior of a nearly empty café or rather I had first paused some distance and stared at a young, uncommonly pretty girl listening through a small portable radio about the size of a book to Edith Piaf’s “Les Mots d’Amour” while eras
ing something in her journal before I restarted my search for the café where I would take a table in the shade, out of sight from others, and there begin to think of her. And as I later lay in bed struggling to recall this or other memories, the scenes would exfoliate before my eyes, peeling away to a caustic whiteness of theatre screens and leaving me with the impression that perhaps each moment had been imagined, the red cobblestones through which a few blades of grass had grown and the feeling of dyspepsia at the realization that the other tall, thin, long-armed girls with high cheekbones cooling by the Mannerist fountain were likely Romanian prostitutes. Or was the etiology of this feeling not that they were, but that I wanted them to be, that I would have it no other way and this possibility left me feeling I had betrayed myself and that perhaps I had become an unreliable narrator in my own novel driven by undisclosed impulses I sublimated into writing. But this isn’t a novel, I remember telling myself, as I wrote the words on my palm for good measure, it’s my life, and yet I sometimes would wonder then and still now if the person who is writing and the person who is being written about are of the same mind, are on the same proverbial page. From the earliest days memory would come in black and white sequences often visually layered with films I had watched over and over until they began to deteriorate, sometimes right in the middle of watching or in the midst of a dream my father’s face — how I pictured he would appear — would superimpose over Charles Foster Kane’s or over the faceless Peter Lorre in M purchasing a balloon when the projector’s heat would eat through the emulsion and I would wake up in a beam of sunlight as if I too were simply a projection of some superior intellect and then collapse wetly back into the mattress. The grace of waking is the sleep that follows, I would whisper into my own ear, falling asleep before the last word hit the air, my mouth parted like a fish. I waited to be resuscitated even as I envisioned someone would slip into my room and next to the clock-radio drop a DNR order, and once and forever I would follow the staircase out to the street to the station where, with her hair strangely piled up in the shape of a conch shell, a woman, perhaps my mother, who looked like Edith Piaf, was waiting for my departure. I was and still am homeless in the dark, and thus liberated. And whether sleep was for a few minutes of refuge or for hours that would slide into whole days filled with wide blank fields where sunbeams formed shifting geometries of line and angle, at some moment inevitably I would find myself, I was always finding myself in those years, gripping a suitcase as the hydraulic door suctioned its breath behind me and the train trundled into the mountain like a centipede. I would watch the wind speed along the sides of the illuminated cellular windows, sixty per second past rain-filled quarries, small German farms of thatched cottages set back from the rails, and the white fluorescence of cobra lights through which drifted snow, each flake’s hexagonal symmetry visible, and I knew — and such was the probable source of my unease — the unblinking train’s eye created out of the ether the screeching space in front of it. My lungs rising and falling. Each trompe l’oeil was where desire, whether real or celluloid, would in a moment of lucidity materialize and disappear and if I were in an instant summoned to the triangular door of the A-frame where I live and write, I would be as apt to see a funnel cloud forming on the horizon as I would Oslo with its leaning cluster awash in borealis light, so green I would wonder if it were the glasses I wore. For reasons unknown to me, I was certain my life was moving to a predetermined end and I wondered then and now if I had arrived at that end or if I had somehow passed it and was now to live out my remaining years retrospectively. Both thoughts filled my stomach with ice water, an endless melancholy in the context of flux, and all I could do was hope that the next turn would be beautiful rather than worse.