Unlove, and Fish

It was the librarian’s loafers that did it—grotesque, mustard-colored things; the tips protruding from under the library desk like two fingertips sticking out from a band-aid. They had to be the most unattractive shoes that Polly had ever seen. She stared at them silently for a good five minutes before it arrived in her brain: I do not love this woman. I do not, do not love her; I cannot possibly love anyone with such hideous loafers. The librarian scraped her chair across the floor and began arranging dictionaries on the third shelf of the wall. An unfamiliar hatred swelled in her throat, uncaged at its birth with a hiss. Polly collected her books and stalked from the library, feeling suddenly and unnaturally dead.

It was then that Polly decided to willfully see things as they actually were.

The sky slithered by, identical twins on identical slices of concrete: trees grew mold at the tips, reaching dully toward the infinitely lusterless blue. A boy sat cross-legged on the pavement, eyes lowered toward the pen-marks of a study notebook: red craters dotted his face in a spiritless toile, his hair frizzed with the nine AM dew. No, she thought deadly, I cannot love him either.

“I am made out of metal,” she announced, mounting the concrete steps of the school building. “I am made out of metal. A fish. A metal fish. I cannot feel anything.” Several people looked up and apathetically away. Polly sauntered stiffly through the warmness of the hallway, sometimes tilting precariously and onto the wall for support, feeling with numb approval the new metal bones of her hands. They were pink and cold, and they worked.

“Hello, Polly,” Annie said cheerfully. Polly stared for a moment without recognition at the softly brownish contours of her cheekbones, neither particularly beautiful nor plain, and a quick clean judgment formed in her mind like a small nut, or a tumor.

“Hello, Annie,” she said without feeling, and walked quickly in the opposite direction.

There is a cold, calculated sort of comfort to numbness—so arrogant and dead—so atrophyingly secure. Up is never sideways; the spider bite will swell; green is always and only blue-plus-yellow. What a morbidly pleasurable thing, thought Polly, to reduce life into bits of faceless concrete, into cold impartial lumps of time and space. What malignant satisfaction, to be sometimes no more than one red brick in the building. To reduce tangles and tangles of consciousness into silent rows of impersonal grey; to be sometimes clean and sharp and dead as a military corpse rather than one big heap of love colliding.

A face swam wan and languageless before her. “Hello, Polly,” said Emily worriedly, “you look sick today.”

“I think that I am dead,” she remarked, narrowing her eyes in an attempt to look fierce. “I cannot feel anything. I don’t think that I can love any longer. I think I could kill somebody, if I wanted.”

Polly searched the freckles of Emily’s eyes for alarm and was rewarded by the widening of her thick black eyes.

“Think of your mother,” she advised. “You love your mother, surely.”

Polly pictured Esther—for she could no longer stand to call her Mother; such a fallibly empty term of endearment—on her feet in the kitchen, her minor girth tucked and pocketed into the fabric of her best blue linen dress. She peeled the skin off the tops of the potatoes, just so, humming something intolerable—oh, say, The Battle Hymn of the Republic— the hair curlers philandering her blonde head into a veritable homespun Medusa. The saccharineness of it made Polly’s fists harden: she opened her eyes again, stone-cold.

“No, that didn’t seem to have worked,” she declared, opening her palms. A strange sort of warmth emanated from Emily’s fingers: they must have been a foot away from Polly’s, but still she caught in them a scent of the humanness bubbling in her, the incomparable human scent of warmth. A part of her shriveled, shrunk in trepidation into the cold safe confines of Self; but another half of her was gathering forces, gaining momentum: reaching timidly forward into the soft brutal warmness of Emily.

“What about David,” Emily ventured, fingering the hem of her raincoat. “Have you seen David? He’s all the time just about to be flying to pieces for happiness. You cannot help but love David.” Dear Emily, thought Polly, dear warm loving unsafe Emily, trying to flay me back into normalcy.

“No,” Polly said, “I have not.”

“I’ll send him after you,” Emily said warmly, “and then you won’t feel dead anymore.” Emily turned on her heel and Polly watched her click, one shoe at a time, down the hallway.

This is what Hell smells like, Polly thought. It is remembering Heaven, and the warm white linen smell of Heaven, but having struck the wrong chord on the Harp and lost it all. It is cold and unmoving, soaked with the smell of piss and too many strawberries. It is unlove, a lie, a half-life that reeks of fear and gasoline.

She twisted her hands together and stretched for the door, as though a creeping blackness lurked inches behind her and was in danger of overtaking her at any moment. Outside and quite alone, she slumped into a cold, eternal mostly-harmless ball against the concrete.

Mostly harmless, my foot; she thought. Humans are dangerous, dangerous creatures.

I am a tragedy, thought Polly. All these years of teachers and preachers and salespersons in black pin-stripes suits trying to tell you how not to be a tragedy, and here I am, cold and dead and ungrateful after all. How to forgive the world for its beauty, for its beauty and its blundering apathy? I am a tragedy. What the hell is a tragedy? I am.

She pulled the sleeves of her coat over her fingertips, feeling very wise and very miserable. For you see, she thought, we will always in the end turn to ourselves, and only ourselves, from the difficultness and the danger and the apathy of love; and steel ourselves to face the estrangement, or, even worse, the utter indifference, of the people we live with and think that we love. Steel ourselves so that we cannot be touched.

He would be looking for her inside, blue eyes grazing innocent across aisles and aisles of facelessness: while she shriveled boldly outside, a thousand tinny magnets flown together inside her and ripping her organs to ribbons. But no—she did not feel worthy of that sort of violence. She had not martyred herself into virginal flames, nor disintegrated into a violent heap of ash. She had simply stopped loving and died. Cold hard cadaver, jostling stiffly along the nameless warm flesh of the living.

What secrets the sky keeps, she thought, watching with new intensity the cool, detached mystery of the blue: splintered, swollen, cracked blood-red from cheek to cheek as though someone or something has been crying. Is this not what we hide from? The fear: that after all that work, we are still unworthy after all? That it will be discovered that we are not in fact a human, but a sham? That we are not an enigma but a void?

I am the opposite of whole, she thought numbly; the opposite of falling face-first into love. But rather I am being peeled open and turned inside out, drunk and digested by a thick plural blackness: I am heavy, like solid gold, a frozen solid-gold casket, poured into, filled with, death.
An icy sense of blackness crawled lupine through her limbs, blooming gangrene bruises all along the inside of her skin.

“Help,” she said.

The sky began to fuzz and grey over, dripping fat pellets of water onto the concrete. Cars lulled mechanically by, raindrops smacking cleanly against their fat chrome bottoms.

From the blur she felt a hand rest its warmth upon her head.

“Hello, Polly,” said David, sliding his back against the wall to sit next to her on the concrete. “My, your hands are like ice! What could you be thinking, out here in the rain like this?”

A warm alarm shot into her skin, a quick red welting of awareness, of not oneness but twoness. Polly clutched at the hand in her hand greedily, rooting deep into the wealth of his skin like mushroom spores, like an umbilical cord. As if singularly, our blood cannot feed: but plural, together, some new blood is born, clean blood, and it feeds. She felt newness burn into her palms, the strange unsafe Newness of un-apathy, shooting spores of redness into her stony stillborn grey. Is there a third place, she wondered, between comic and tragic? Of neither hysterical goodness nor badness, only Right? Only warmth, and un-apathy, and Right?

It was then that the world flew to pieces, black and white jumping back into realness, the warm humanness of hands gluing the pieces together in order, just so, like a well-done sum. She felt the dankness slide from her side, the universe propping itself up in its place without as much as a greeting or explanation.

“I am thinking,” Polly crowed, “that I was wrong.” She wriggled her fingers into David’s palm, feeling humanity once again embed itself under her skin. Tapping the tip of his nose with her finger, she said:

“This is what I see: that it is worth being conscious, after all, to love and feel love. I have felt with my own hands that it is cold and hard and barren to be dead.”

“I see,” David said.

There is oneness, Polly thought, but there is not only oneness. It is not good for one to be alone. How closely one is guarded by the fear: that upon loving someone, our true selves will burst through, and our muddiness will seep out with our love, erupting quick and irrepressible like unfortunate cat vomit, and they will turn away in disgust. Only love never quite works like that—rather—our water is never as dirty as we imagine it to be; and how free we are when we break open the bottle, and allow ourselves to love and feel love.

Eyes tidied and unparceled, she watched the cars file by: nameless, but with faces; small chinks off the great clay-lump of humanity, each harboring the common candle of humanness somewhere inside. Somehow, Polly thought, that gives me hope.