Grief

It’s an instrument she can’t remember the name of. The kind they play at carnivals. It sounds a bit like ragtime. 

Across the fairgrounds, her father is wondering in a demential stupor — smiling, giggling at nothing — looking just as lost as she is. His hair’s gone whiter than it had ever truly been. 

Something is stopping her from reaching him. Each time she wills herself towards him, her father is repelled a bit further out of reach, like she’s the wrong end of a magnet. 

Makes her feel like crying.

Then she is. 

Though she never starts to cry. She instead remembers that she has been crying. Sobbing, actually. Painful, heaving sobs. The sobs of childhood. The sobs of a small stranded girl who is soon to be lost to a forever of carnival horrors. This if she can not reach her father, a man simultaneously alive, with forearms built for dangling, and who has also been dead for several decades, never having lived enough to grow demential or have white hair. 

She understands, with perfect dreaming understanding, that here she is both the stranded girl, lost and helpless, as well as a grown woman, closer to fifty than she had ever anticipated, and who hadn’t realized until this very dreaming moment how dearly she missed her father. 

She wishes she could call his name the way kids do in a crowd of other parents. 

In her bed, she feels a husband of five years wrap an arm around her, and cup his hand beneath her breast. She feels the bulge of him grind, lazily, against her backside. 

* * * 

The five-year husband is dreaming, too. He is dreaming of birth canals, and also of firm, high breasts, so that in the morning he will not remember what had been the dream and where the rest had started. In this moment he is perched, erect, between the waking world where slowly he grinds against his wife’s backside, and the dream world, wherein his wife is lithe and young, her shapes all a bit rounder, a bit flatter, both familiar and unfamiliar, wherein she is experienced in spite of never before being touched. A mother. A fertile goddess. A twelve-year-old bride being offered before she has flowered. This and also his wife of five years, curled and sleeping next to him.  

* * * 

She thinks: But it wasn’t my father I was looking for. Who was it I was looking for?

There’s a stage and a man with no legs gets tossed out into a crowd of painted faces. Clowns. All the faces are white, some streaked like a faded photograph, others bright and thick with bold colors on their lips and around the eyes. Not one true face is smiling, yet all of them painted to look like they’re laughing. 

And the music plays.  

The half man flounders across the sea of hands until he’s dropped, and then she knows — knows — with perfect dreaming understanding, that soon he will be at her ankles, wrapping strong, leg-like forearms around her knees and attempt to pull her beneath the waves. And it happens just like that.

* * *  

In her bed, the five-year husband is moving a finger along her mound of Venus, reaching for its center. He is becoming aware now of his position between the worlds, and he rides the uncertainty as he imagines some foregone civilization rode the wales. He can almost taste the ocean.   

In the dream world, she has auburn hair that writhes through the midnight bedroom, wrapping around his wrists and holding him down. She moans, softly, in a language he can’t understand. She is speaking to no one, and she is speaking to herself, the fertile goddess, the child bride. She is readying herself for the pain, muttering what she was taught by her elders, the words she’s read over and over again— the prayers. She is praying for herself, to herself, wholly unafraid.

He is harder now than he has been since his twenties. His balls throb, heart pounding away, and he shivers. He needs to be inside her, needs to release himself, needs to void. He has started to fumble at the seams of her underwear, digging from beneath her folded thighs, where she is warm and pressed together.

It’s been so long since he’s needed her like this. 

* * * 

She feels rough hands prying between her legs, the fingers thick and muscular — working hands, hands that have lives depending on them. 

She doesn't want it. 

The hands are forceful, and she fights at them, prying them away from her skin and twisting the fingers, waiting to hear the bones snap, but they don’t. She cannot look away from her father. She knows that if she looks away, if even for a moment she looks down at the half-man at her feet, he will be truly lost — forever. She will never find him again. And so she focuses all her energy on keeping her father in sight.

The prying fingers are dry, the nails yellow thick. They continue to pinch at her and scratch. Still she cannot scream, still she is sobbing for her father. 

From somewhere she knows that her husband is touching her, knows what it is he wants. She’s exhausted, her mind and her muscles all heavy, drugged maybe. She almost feels paralyzed. 

In her bed, is she crying there too?

Then the thought comes back to her, like a breath: Where is Maddie? I’m supposed to be looking for Maddie.

* * * 

The five-year husband climbs on top of her, flips her onto her stomach and pulls off her underwear. He is slightly more awake now, but still he sees her as he sees her in the dream world. She is something more than just his wife, more than a mother. 

For a moment, an image: his own mother, crooning drunkenly over him, himself ten years old, pretending to be asleep. His mother bleeding from a broken finger nail, and saying, “Look what I ddddiid,” between croons. That’s not the image, he thinks, that’s the replacement. The real image is: his mother, passed out on his bed, face down, nightgown hiked, revealing the bottoms of her butt cheeks and the thought for a ten-year-old moment of sticking it in her, a thought he would carry with shame and remorse for the rest of his life. 

He replaces the image. She is his wife again, and he must not stop what he is doing. What he is doing is important. Big, bold, capital-I-perfect-dreaming-understanding-important. He is performing an act of re-creation.

He is re-creating Maddie. 

This act is the function of his existence on this Earth. All else, every decision, every regret, every moment of joy, every tragedy, every birthday has been leading ineluctably to Here. 

* * * 

Maddie. Maddie with the big girl hair, the kind you have to brush. Maddie who is hopelessly allergic to every adorable thing. 

And there she is. Right where just a moment before her father had been. Right where she knew Maddie would be.

A Mac truck smashes through the crowd. Some bodies fly outward in long arcs. Others are pulled under. The sound of the engine, deafening, like a scream, rattles her insides. Still, she hears the music.

She feels her husband go inside, the icy-water shock of inserting himself too quickly. The pain straddling between sharp and distant, now almost a memory. She gasps, willing herself to stay in the dream world, where she has to get to Maddie.

She isn’t crying anymore. Now she is screaming, or she thinks she’s screaming, screaming for Maddie to get up and run, which she knows won’t happen. The truck is still churning. It’s making donuts. Body parts are flying or being ground up. The smell of copper. The legless man pulling her under. The music of the carnival rides — a calliope, that’s the name — growing louder, more sing song, more alive. 

If only she hadn’t remembered. 

Maddie.

* * * 

The end is coming. He can’t hold it in. He tries to focus with every push, each time more of a commitment, the wet squeeze, each time like it will send him over the edge. The sounds of drawer nobs clanging against the dresser like a thousand tuneless bells. The creaking bed thumping the wall. His breath growing more rhythmic, almost a song, almost a prayer, almost a ritual. He pushes deeper into her, as though he could push himself, all of himself, fully inside her, into her womb, to be carried and nurtured and grown again. 

* * * 

She can hear herself moaning. He mustn’t stop now, never stop. She feels the midnight bedroom and the the carnival simultaneously, both of them more like memories than dreams, both more real than the other. 

People screaming.  Everyone trying to run, but it ends up more like swaying. Moving as an amebic whole, like you do at a concert. Only worse. 

Her body is being crushed by the people all around her. Somewhere she is holding her breath.

Maddie.

I’m going to run out of air.

Then the legless man is gone. The crowd is gone, along with the truck and the bodies. All gone. Almost solipsistic. A world of only what’s in front of her. 

Something’s happened to Maddie.

Maddie who elbows her father in the eye and makes everybody laugh because she laughs and Daddy’s eye is fine. Maddie who shows everyone everything she owns. Maddie who is my best friend in the whole wide world. 

Sobbing. Pressing back against her husband pressing forward into her, everything she can move she is moving. Coming, in the dark. The feeling of rolling, of voiding, feeling like she might be sick. 

The carnival is over. 

Maddie isn’t here. 

* * * 

He is pumping as fast as he can, squeezing his thoughts, attempting an act of re-creating, the re-creation of Maddie, attempting to speak directly to his chemistry, to his, to God, to please, to please, to please… 

* * * 

Her husband exploding inside her.

* * * 

He is almost falling asleep again. Everything heavy, like he has sandbags on each of his cells. Head lolling, slumped over his wife, unable to speak. A wave of relief, followed too closely by the tide.

* * * 

Later, she is walking down the carpeted hallway. A jolt from nearly knocking a picture from the wall, but she leaves it. What happens happens. 

Her eyes are barely open.

Floor boards moan. 

The room at the end of the hallway is painted yellow. 

In the midnight it sometimes looks like blue. 

She puts her hand on the doorknob, turning slowly, listening for what’s inside, cold air between her legs. 

Behind her, padding footsteps. 

He’s awake now too.

It’s too dark to see what’s in the little bed, so she’ll have to tiptoe in. She hears him saying something at the doorway — her name — and feels his hands on her shoulders. But as she feels her way through the dark, tiptoeing towards the other side of the room, to the place where she can feel if the thing that’s supposed to be in the bed is in the bed, she thinks she hears someone say, like a whisper from someplace far overhead, Dreams never really end, do they? They only stop.