Suit of clothes suspended in midair outside kitchen window: E’s father suffered a stroke at the table in the breakfast nook at 1185 Park Avenue as he sat near the window. Therefore, E has dreamed about the window and the suit flying outside it, dreamed of a bodiless man in exile. Death is exile from the body, exile from everything, E thinks. Neither E, nor his sister, M, were present when their father was struck down by the cerebrovascular accident. Their mother was present. She rode in the ambulance. When E and M arrived at Emergency on Sixty-eighth Street, the emergency was over. Emergency ends with either life or death. Schrödinger’s cat doesn’t exist in the world E knows. Life and death do not coexist in a single body. E remembers the words aneurismal subarachnoid hemorrhage. He remembers the tan-colored plastic seat in the waiting room and the zigzag ink mark beside his thigh as he sat on it. He remembers he did not want anyone to touch him.
Flying due east: Awake, E solves this puzzle easily. Thailand is an eastern country. E’s father’s maternal roots are due east. The legs point toward his grandmother, toward Khun Ya, with her bright red, hard fingernails and big smile.
E rescues clothes that seem to contain someone, but that someone cannot be seen: E’s dead father cannot be seen anymore. Does the son want to rescue what is left of his father that is in danger of being blown away? What would that be? E has rejected his father’s money except for a modest annual amount, but he knows he is a hypocrite. He should become a welder and write at night. He has looked into learning to weld. He even received brochures in the mail from Apex Technical School, but he never pursued the training. He is a soft, coddled philistine who will never become a welder. Does he in fact want to hold on to his father’s legacy, to his money, suits, art collection, and every other bourgeois trap imaginable? E did not cry after his father died. He has wondered many times why he did not cry. He remembers the clothes in his arms in the dream and the feelings of relief, sadness, and pity that were far stronger in the land of Nod than in the land of Awake.
Sophus Bugge in suit jacket pocket: Objects hide in pockets. All that can be seen from the outside is a bulge or a lump. In the dream E did not make anything of the name, but awake, he remembers that Sophus Bugge was a nineteenth-century Norwegian philologist famous for a critical edition of the Poetic Edda, a book of thirteenth-century heroic and mythological poems E read years ago because he discovered the book had influenced his childhood writer-hero, Tolkien. And the author of the Edda? Anonymous. Unknown. No name. E returns to Bugge. He was an avid collector of Norwegian folk songs and the scholar who deciphered Elder Futhark. E likes the sound of Elder Futhark. Lewis Carroll might have invented those words, but they are not from “Jabberwocky.” What does Sophus Bugge have to do with anything? Why is Bugge’s name in the paternal suit pocket? And now, as he writes, the solution to the riddle jumps into his mind. Elder Futhark is a form of runic script: runes, runic, and the person Rune, E’s mother’s front for her last project. E says “Eureka” aloud. E feels triumph. He is exceedingly proud of his dreaming self’s cleverness. Isn’t his mother’s maze called Beneath? Underneath, beneath, hidden in a suit pocket. Harriet Burden lies beneath Rune, who was lying beneath Sophus Bugge. Has he found his mother in his father’s pocket?
E does not know what this could mean. He recognizes that interpretation is always multiple. He knows that associations can lead a person down many paths. There can be no single reading of a dream. He does not bother to decode the ruffles. He is still annoyed with them. They persist as an irritant. E sees the sheer, silky material moving under him, and he feels disgust, as if the two worlds of sleeping and waking have run into each other.
Harriet Burden Notebook D
February 7, 2003
Last night I saw them coming, one after the other, waiting in a long line outside the gallery and the maze, my maze. I wanted to throw back my head and howl, It’s mine! but I clenched my teeth. Dizzy, dissonant, aggrieved Harry, a ghost outside her own opening. I took my place in line for a while behind two prancing ninnies in shoes so high their knees wobbled as they stepped forward, and I listened to them carry on a long discussion on the merits of something called a “master cleanse” that involved lemonade and salt. Oh my God, Lindsay, five pounds in three days. Oh my God, that is so fantastic, oh my God.
Patrick L. accosted me about possible auction of the Klee. Just a rumor, Harriet? Vague odor of smoked salmon emanated from him. Under the streetlights, I noticed a pimple or maybe a hive on his cheek. He had gone through the maze already.
It’s great. Rune is a genius, a fucking genius.
I asked him if that wasn’t going too far.
You haven’t seen the show yet. You saw Banality of Glamour, didn’t you?
I nodded.
Well, this is even better. And then he leapt onto Felix, my buried better half. That is all he could think of to say. He saw me, thought Felix, thought widow, emitted loquacious stream of praise for dead husband. No one has really replaced Felix, not Burridge, certainly, as trendy and global as he is, and, by the way, as an afterthought, what was I up to these days, and lunch maybe? At the word lunch Patrick L. twinkled. I suddenly understood the verb. I nodded at him, my chin in motion. Why nod? I should have been shaking my head vigorously no, no, no. Did I smile? Oh God, did I smile? I hope I didn’t smile.
As I talked to Patrick L., I wondered why, why am I not like them? Why am I a foreigner? Why have I always been outside, pushed out, never one of them? What is it? Why am I always peering in through the window? I felt fault lines in my torso ready to split open. I thought of my punching bag in the studio, how good it felt to hit and hit again. I had an urge to punch him. In my mind, I saw him reel backward into the wall and collapse in the gutter.
I left the line and walked to the end of the block, and I watched. I knew Rune would be waiting for me to arrive, but I would not go in. Phinny and Marcelo bumped into me, dear Phinny, but he isn’t quite the same Phinny anymore, not my Phinny, not the man of the lodge, not my dancing, singing comrade. He’s lost to me now. He wanted me to come to dinner, but I said no. No, I said, no. I believe in no. I believe in a hard, resistant, diamantine no. No and no again. No, I will not. No and never and not. I prefer not to. I have grown sick to death of yes. Oh yes, I will. Yes, certainly, of course, yes, darling, yes, sweetheart. Yes, yes, yes. And she said yes.
And as they walked away, hand in hand, I felt as if I could cry, but I did not. No, not. I will not cry.
The writers must write and the critics critique and the reviewers review and the pissers piss, and they shall.
My time has come, and whatever they say — the mostly mediocrities — is not the point. HOW THEY SEE is all that matters, and they will not see me.
Until I step forward.
February 25, 2003
It is so easy for Rune to shine. Where does that effortlessness come from? He is so light. I am earthbound, a Caliban to his Ariel. And I must watch his weightless flights over my head, while I lurk underground with brown thoughts that roil my guts. “Himself is his own dungeon.”I I, Harriet Burden, am a machine of vindictiveness and spite. My whole body churns as I gorge on the reviews and notices and commentaries about the brilliant Rune’s coup. Their heads are turned. The man who has written the review in The Gothamite, Alexander Pine, does not know he has written about me, not Rune. He doesn’t know that the adjectives muscular, rigorous, cerebral can be claimed by me, not Rune. He doesn’t know he is a tool of my vengeance. No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.