Page 49 - WTPO Vol. VII #5

divorce Ardent seldom visited—she was a treasure he believed no one would steal.
He frequented the hashish saloons downtown, where he was handsomely paid to recite his poems, stories, narratives – the meat, gristle, and bones of the Old Dutch Zonder clan, founders of the city. He was wildly popular, his words tapping into a deep stream that had been misdirected for so long, his work gave the appear- ance that this snaking torrent was now on course.
When he and Or were still married, living downtown near the retaining wall, Ardent wrote lighthearted feuilletons for a daily paper. Then he had his break- down/breakthrough, which sent him careening in three directions: to other women’s beds, to the end of their marriage, and to his new creative life.
He ignited the venerable history of his family into blazing words, resurrecting the trampled destiny of
“They slouched like soulless bodies,
unaware of their mag- nificent past, and dead to their uncertain future.”
its lost, forlorn citizens. Ardent’s breathless recita- tions of the deaths, births, sins and conquests of the Zonder clan rolled out like great bolts of cloth, and was now the garment this city wore. As he rose to great heights, Ardent’s shared orbit with Or deterio- rated. Their marriage was subsumed by the smoke of hash, and skirts hiked above nubile, parted knees.
When it was over, Or felt a sense of relief. She was ten year older than Ardent. In the last years of their mar- riage, the disparity transformed into unwieldy forms. Only when alone did she realize that with Ardent she tried build a life on the uneven terrain of his moods, manias, depressions, and mercurial excitements – only when he was gone did she know who she truly was and what she desperately needed.
~
A cousin offered Or a once grand, now dilapidated house on the north end of the island. She purchased
it for a token yuan – to keep, the cousin said, the house in the family. The gabled mansion was remote, set upon a carved slice of a humid and overgrown slope. Here she worked hard to stitch over memo- ry—to pry open the chasm called forgetfulness—to move forward.
Or scooped Ardent’s papers into a stack, too tired to deposit them in the “Ardent” file cabinet in her office. She looked out the door at the blue-black, night and
a pair of yellow eyes stared back from the bush. Long ago, during a night of unbearable heat, she propped open the door and they walked inside. On the hard parquet floors their hoofs sounded like breaking saucers, and they deposited piles of scat in the corner of every room like a surveyor’s marks. When Or woke, she watched pale, dappled rumps and arched spines retiring from her bedroom, unhurried, for the habita- tions of people caused them no alarm.
Also long ago she walked to the ancient caves just beyond her property. A man, blue and unctuous with
a substance like axel grease, emerged from a crag, limping toward her. He produced a waving hand, forming incomprehensible sounds through his tooth- less mouth. Or offered him ten yen, but he brushed
it away. What do you want? She asked repeatedly. He continued to make sounds. Eventually, he grew weary and returned to the crags.
Ardent scolded her for these infractions. Doors must be closed and locked, Ardent reprimanded in his notes. Despite the trees and vines, you don’t live in the real country. You are surrounded by dangerous ani- mals and people. You need a shot gun, Ardent wrote on. Sometimes they come in from the woods and go to homes. You need a gun. Don’t kill them! Fire above their heads. Only use proportional force. I’ll have a shotgun delivered next week and will teach you how
to shoot. The shotgun never arrived. Ardent never taught her the exercise of proportional force or the fine art of discharging a firearm into the malarial sky. Nor, in all her years in the house, had any lubricated people mounted her stoop.
She lay in bed. Through the window, she heard the clanging of a barge piloting upstream, to the north, steaming in the center of the green river and into the blistering forest. Then her eyes slowly closed.
~
She woke to pounding. Outside a driving rain was beating a tattoo on the patio, like thousands of nails
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