By Lamb
THE BAPTISM
I was in the kitchen eating a green apple in a hurry, knocking off big cuts of flesh with my front teeth, making the most incredible splitting sounds, when my fiancé asked if I would ever be violent with a woman. I asked if she meant if I’d ever hit a woman, and she said she meant exactly what she said.
So I stood there holding the dripping core over the trash can, sugaring my fingers, thinking, trying to define violence for her, for myself. After a minute or two, she said we were already late and would talk about it later. I said the conversation felt important and the baptism could wait.
It’s a baptism, she said.
For a baby, I said.
I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.
I’ll pretend you don’t believe a baby needs a remission of sins, I thought.
Driving to the baptism, I tried to think of the worst thing I’d ever done to a woman, the most violence I’d ever demonstrated. The true answer, my cesarean delivery, wouldn’t satisfy.
OK, I said. One time I tripped a girl in the fieldhouse, and she broke her nose on the concrete. She was a bully, but I felt awful, and I got in trouble with the school. It was fourth grade.
I heard her eyes roll.
I don’t care about what you’ve done, I want to know the most violent thought you’ve ever had about a woman.
Why is this coming up now?
I don’t know, she said, I shouldn’t have to justify my need to feel safe to you.
And I thought, She’s right.
And I felt close to her, and wanted to feel closer, and I saw our days stretching into years, our pets, our children so unknowing of us, and I wanted her to know the color of my pain, and to know that of hers. I wanted her to know how much I needed her.
I’ve never thought of hurting you or any woman, I said. But can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone?
She turned her head to mine, nodding.
Sometimes I do think about hurting myself.
It’s amazing, she said, how you manage to make literally everything about you.
ONE ON ONE
Another week, another review of my nonperformance.
My boss says, Help me understand. Be specific. What roadblocks are you facing?
Um, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, its origin taken from emotion recollected in the tranquility of eight hours of uninterrupted silence.
Gorgeous, he says, switching his crossing leg. Didn’t take you for a Whitman guy. You know he diddled boys …
I nod.
Multitudes, am I right? he chuckles. As I chuckle back, he straightens his face. You know accountability is the chief purpose of these meetings, yes?
Of course.
So, account for your time. Show me what you’ve been working on so spontaneously. So powerfully.
I pull up my poems folder and slide my laptop across the desk.
Come on, Lamby, he says. You know me better than that … Print these puppies out. I want to hold your words.
You sure? It’s many pages.
He winks and says we have much ink.
I print two hundred poems, assured by my honesty, my courage. When I return to his office, he’s sitting crosslegged on the floor with open palms.
Gimme, he says.
I do.
Ooo, he says, they’re warm. He reads them to himself in a whisper as I stand in the corner.
A few pages in, he asks for a pencil. I pull the thumblong Ticonderoga from my back pocket and toss it to him.
We need to get you some Blackwings, he says, examining the round graphite tip. OK … Let’s touch base after lunch. I’ll need some time.
I step outside and call my wife. I tell her she was right when she said it would end this way. I ask her forgiveness. I ask her to pray for a miracle. She says she knows I will land on my feet, and I weep. I’m unworthy of her dogged faith in me, in Jesus.
After lunch, I find my boss prostrate on his office floor, asleep. I quietly retrieve the loose stack of pages and return to my corner. Flipping through, I see scansion. I see circled words, exclamations, questions in the margins.
Did this really happen?
Oh my gosh … Is this your wife’s mom or yours? Is she okay?
Did you just invent a word???
Now I’m weeping all over my poems. I look up and see my boss is standing, weeping too.
Doggone, he says, you can’t just hide your candle like this … Can you not see we all are in the room with you? Do you even know how much we thirst for your splendid light?
INSTRUCTION
When I wake, you all are circling my bed.
But this is not my bed. I have shared a bed for seven years. This is a twin. These sheets are softer than my sheets.
Where is my wife? I think. Where is my child?
You whisper loud as talking, as if you have not noticed me wake, as if I were in an opiate sleep. Some of you are talking about smoking opium later. The hundreds of you are making plans, none of them involving me.
I say, I can hear you.
You all laugh, quaking the floor and walls. I brace myself for glass shatter, then see there are no windows.
Where are my windows? I say.
One of you folds over the comforter, exposing my pale feet.
Cold, I say.
You all take out your notebooks and dark pencils and begin sketching.
One of you sits at the foot of the bed, instructing. I suppose you are the instructor.
I hear what too many of you are thinking, you say. You would like to think of the foot as the hand. You are thinking of the toes as fingers, depending on their familiar shape to achieve likeness. Stop. This will get you nowhere.
The rest of you listen on the balls of your feet.
Look at this foot, you instruct. Observe the muscle. The tendon. The bone and the fat beneath the heel. Now consider the foot. Its nature … The foot is the prophet, receiving revelation from the earth god for the church of the body, interpreting commandments to be obeyed against deaths physical and spiritual. The foot bears the moral weight of the soul, which is the union of the body and the spirit. The foot is the most credible witness to one’s life. The foot is the storyteller, the wisest and most ancient member of the tribe, silently collecting narrative with each strike of experience. The foot knows all one ever could. The foot is the map of the body …
One of you, the woman with bright chapped lips, interrupts, And how should we prioritize these metaphors?
You are slight and divinely fair. You are bold.
They all turn on you. They pull your limbs and dark hair until you are four feet in the air, parallel to the floor. The instructor walks the edge of the bed, bouncing, tapping heads one by one, granting turns to stab you through the chest and belly with their pencils. You scream with power. I have never heard such pain.
Some of them fail to pierce you, and the instructor scolds them for having dulled their points so early into the session. You are applying too much pressure! he says. You are devaluing your value!
When you are suddenly quiet, they all mourn you in song. They know all the words in some cousin language, all on pitch and harmonizing toward catharsis. It is beautiful.
They lay you beside me as the instructor scrambles onto my knees, rends his black shirt, and says, Do you understand now? Do you see what love will do to all of us?
And the warmth of your blood envelops me. And I know that this is all my fault.
Lamb is an American writer.
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