No, she corrected herself, she hadn’t found it, but maybe that was as close as she had gotten. Maybe that was as close as she was going to get. Maybe you had to spend your life working up shadings with varnish and glaze, old master style, to get that kind of light into your work. Maybe she just needed more skill than she had.
She was quiet for a while, maybe a minute. Or maybe it’s only there, in the junk, or at the bottom of the ocean, in a place where you can’t stay. Where you can’t survive.
I said that was it, the big question she carried around in her, the question whether despair was the only way out, whether the only thing she could really make was her escape.
That makes sense, she said, just as she said whenever she didn’t agree with my interpretation. But…there’s a frustration…a jealousy. What I’m doing to the paint is what I want to have done to me.
What do you want to have done to you?
This is not a sexual thing….
Did I say it was?
I want to be smeared out like that. I want to be clear, perfectly clear.
You want to be free to stop hiding things.
God, if that’s true, she said with sudden coldness, then all of this is just a load of shit.
I knew then that I had overstepped and had ruined something, that I had spooked her and she would make her escape into an anodyne or trivial association. To my surprise, however, she countered and pushed ahead. You are wrong. It’s not that I want to stop hiding. It’s not that I want to come out and say the thing I have to say. Don’t you see? I want there to be nothing. Nothing to hide, and no place to put it. No things, no places. Do you see what I am saying? Can you understand that? Jesus, how could you?
Another long minute ticked past before she began again.
Have you seen the northern lights? Here’s what I’m wondering: Are they made up of many individual threads or ribbons, each thread like a single northern light? I saw them once; I was camping in Newfoundland. At first I thought they were sheets of rain, lit from below by a city to the north. But there was no city to the north. They were like curtains in the sky, streaky curtains, made out of light but with a kind of fibrous look, like they’d been combed, like smooth threads. If they are threads, that’s what I want to be—I want to be one of them, a single thread, a single northern light….
I wanted to know what she meant by that, not just because I was her analyst but because I myself needed to know. But the session was over, and she was gone.
That desire has returned to me, the same question, only slightly modified. Now it is the desire to know what has become of her and whether her wish has been granted. Nonsense, I say. I say to myself that nothing has become of her, that she has become nothing. And yet—I find myself wondering—what kind of nothing? I want it to be the kind she described, a darkness, a depth of space, where a current passes, where a filament of solar wind hums to a glow. That is what I want for her. That is what I pray, I who believe nothing.
You believe in God. You mentioned in your eulogy for Jessica Burke “what it is to know God, to be known by Him.” Is that knowledge a theory, a premise, something you believe in order to believe other things? Or is it a feeling, like hunger or sadness or fever?
The more I brood upon this, the less I understand. Certain plausible interpretations, of course, make their bids: she was expressing a desire to be open to someone, perfectly, transparently so, but because such a desire is terrifying, she needed to remain hidden, invisible, secure. Or alternatively, she was expressing a desire—primitive and archaic—for merger, the desire for resorption, to be compounded anew into a body of formlessness and dark. That, I think, is how I would have explained her remarks had I presented the case to colleagues or candidates in training. How credible these interpretations, how persuasive. How pitifully beside the point.
What has happened to me? What has happened so that I credit her words as witness to a vision? It could not happen that I, a psychoanalyst, an interpreter of desires, an anatomist of fantasy, could succumb to such a belief. And yet the belief is mine, or I am its. It has claimed me for its own. Tell me, Father, if you can, while there is still time: Is that how God sees the soul, all at once, a streak, a smear, a ribbon, its beginning and end, future and past, flaring like a northern light, illuminated by His invisibility? Can you tell me?
SIXTEEN
Time now does not pass so much as it wears away. Spring ground down into summer. Old Itzal retired in June.
The building threw a party for him, the venue my office on the ground floor. Eight or nine residents showed up, avoided the couch, spoke among themselves. Cheese cubes sweated on a platter, and Itzal stood in the corner, hunched like a crow in his ill-fitting uniform, a plastic cup of sherry undrunk in his hand as though he were holding it for someone else.
“So, Itzal, I hear you’ve bought a house back in the Basque country,” I said in an effort to relieve his awkwardness.
“Oui, Monsieur Docteur. It is the house of my family.”
“Do you have much family there?”
His shrug seemed to say, at once, “Of course not,” and “Years ago, maybe, I did,” and “I couldn’t begin to count them all.”
“Tu as de la chance, Itzal,” Lucky man, I said, settling on the optimistic interpretation.
“As you wish, Doctor.”
“I’ll encourage Clementine to look you
