WAKING

      When I was a child, at a certain moment, I woke in a different house made of wood. The slow movement of my eyelids, whispering and scraping, in tiny lurchings, tickled me. A sense of the disorder of the wicked vaudeville, the foul inventiveness of pain kept me uneasy, so that I was as if crouched. I have been ill.

      It is almost light. The child is in pain; he lies half in, half out of an abominable breath-bag. The ill child watches in a feverishly illiterate way the slow oozing of the increase in light. Inside the delicacy of the uneducated stare, soft, opened, lightly fluttering, the pallor of consciousness, tampered with by pain, observes, anyway, the shimmer of the advance of the light.

      After a while, cool and flighty, mindless cousinhood to sense breaks out—the first time in weeks, but then after a while it passes into spasms of sweaty apprehension, of waiting for the pain—of madness—in its criminal mysteriousness to return and blind me. This continues and doesn’t worsen: that it doesn’t worsen puts a weird and private jollity on his face. The recognized thump and rattle of a window frame, a dull, tremulous bass, and the rapid soprano twitterings of the glass panes in the mullions make the child twitch; then the noise takes on a weight of the familiar; it is beautiful with monotony; it persists.

      Then pale-gray and yellow and pink fragments of light appear and slowly unbud, until I am embiered by rose after rose of unlikely light in a room filled with morning. The light is palpably warm. It warms and regulates my soul ungeometric with madness. The child gags and stutters in his breathing. My hand, a childish hand, burns and aches; it has a wind inside it, under it; it moves; it unfurls. The child stiffens in uneasy dominion over this phenomenon of his unfamiliar body. See, he has been ill a long while. The hesitations of thin, unstable, brown-papery, rustling minutes are a matter of steep consciousness for him. Mother-shoulders of air hold pinkish and silvery dabs of light aloft—prismatic dust—and the child persists in his truancy from grief. In the blurred flourish of mind in naming this light as light, as if it were the light in the other house, the child unmovingly romps, dizzied with illness, in a marvelous fluster of intellectual will. Consciousness does not dare call the roll of who is living and who is dead, because the disorganized child-life behind the blindly seeing spy holes of my face is so shaky.

      My dead mother was fond of me. Which one of us is lost now? Lila, my adoptive mother, will someday say to me, I used to wonder what was wrong with you; you didn’t die when she did. The penalties are in place whether I die or not. Exhaustion in any act of extended will becomes panic and grief: Many, many times, I’ve thought something was wrong with you, you lived when you shouldn’t. No one thought you would live after she died. When she was alive, she kept you with her every minute; she said, “Why should he be sad? He likes to be with me. I’m strong, I can do two things at once. “ You wouldn’t let anyone touch you but her. No one could see her without seeing you hanging on her like a monkey. You was a pair, let me tell you: anything in you that’s good, it comes from her. If there’s a mind in you, you got it from her. It’s sad she died, but that’s how things are. What can you do about it, I ask you.

      The lion breath of grief stinks. The infant is a co-traveler of the light, mad and swift, glancing and unrooted. Is your life grotesque? Are you a grotesque creature, Aaron?

       Wiley?

      I can’t insist that I am human, that I am licensed. The stale and cruel stench of vomit. I lay stinking and half mad in excrement, in vomit and in tired, perhaps secretly tireless grief and rage … peeking at life but still lost in vileness.

      The room, my room, my shell, my outer identity (I did not name it “room”), it ticked and creaked, hummed and tinkled in the wind.

      In the bed, constrained by taut sheets and tucked blankets and by chairs set around the bed, I wait. The people here have not yet invested in a crib. Somber conceit: the nearly silent sweeps of sight, the slower blotting up, the sending out on expeditions of sight, the brushing past the sides of sight by things, things in their rays, things brush against or flutter or scurry tickingly by the sides of sight, sight is an imaginary finger or nose: palpings, hesitations: a set of physical hypotheses ranging through the room; things press back, insectlike, itchy, ghostly, real. For a while, any shadow is a wall. That it is my bed …

      The woman came to the door of the room, to the edge of the shallows of breath and stink and harsh light and sickness where I am. The confusion of light and the window sounds and wind noises held her and me in the invalid’s observation. The Lost Woman now was shorter and had different eyes. I assumed her prettiness was kindness. I felt the clenching and the whirring of the possibility of the return of madness, because this woman (I thought) had let me suffer and go mad, a single second’s flicker of (mistaken) fact on a tiny fulcrum of a lunatic child’s absurdly clear reasoning. The child was not careful. He said inwardly, Momma. The small boy was rigid and racked with the pulse of diarrhea then.

      Lila Silenowicz said, “Oh, my God, you’re worse than a pigeon.” She made a joke for her own amusement.

      The woman does not look at the child closely. Around her is a space, a blankness, of coolness, the border where the too difficult heat of shape and identity in someone stops and outline takes over.

      Lila has an air of submission to tragedy—this has a domestic tone, scary and alert. I am not exactly visible. I am a sick child. Lila’s tragic and clear-eyed air has a blustery, softish heat, and an immeasurable quality—an absence of boundaries except for her outline—this is part of what identifies her to me as my mother.

      My body’s feelings of recall, my body’s interpretations of people are shudderings that seem like magical nonsense to the mind, but they have a profound quality of unarguable sense. Her presence is heavy with heat like real sunlight; my mind manages my body’s uproar by narrowing itself—it is the mind squinting.

      Lila sniffed at the shit-odor, pursed her lips, and, holding her breath, came near and looked at me from the other side of the chairs—over the wall of chairs—a sultry and yet airy scrutiny, flirtatious, self-conscious, proddingly clever.… She is sadder than anyone else who tends me. She leans forward, one hand on a chair arm, and she pulls the sheet that’s over me away from me and takes a towel, one of several, set out on one of the chairs around the bed, “I’m not good at this,” she says.

      That remark silences me with its absolute strangeness. She earlier (the other woman) and other women—my nurse now (a fat woman), and Lila’s twelve-year-old daughter—were (are) proud: they boast and dance-in-a-way (when they hold me, when they touch me). Lila’s apology startles the child with its illegality: it is illicit and part of her heartless awareness. I might be incurable. There had been no limit to her absence and none to my dying—well, some suspicion had slowed the process of my dying. Being placed openly first by someone, being close to someone in certain ways, and being lawless when you are alone with someone—these are roughly equivalent for the child as life-giving.

      The child: there are no words for how blackly thorny he is.

      Lila has a quality of being indomitably obscene, guilty, blameworthy, unrepentant. She stares at you and does what she likes.

      I could not successfully blackmail either of my mothers. Neither was merciful. All that worked with either of them was me being secretive.

      Lila, cleaning up some of the mess with the towel, watches her own clumsiness. I play to myself in the balcony is a remark of hers. She is nosy and yet, this morning, she is dream-stained, quilted or padded or tufted with night heats. Her odor, her dark eyes, the rhythms and manner of movements of her