vanishings

There are three ascending levels of how one mourns:
with tears ~ that is the lowest ~
with silence ~ that is higher ~
and with song ~ that is the highest.

— Hasidic teaching

1.

My brother kneels in the back of the Chrysler. Leo Derais, eleven years old: he's skipped three grades: this fall he'll start high school.

He's just made the most astonishing discovery, has seen the evidence and understands at last how time moves at different speeds in both directions. (Was that a stone? Is that a rabbit?)

Appears to move.

Quickly now, before the light goes, he wants our father to see what he sees, the earth close to the car ripping backward (skull of a desert fox, bones of a missing child), everything lost, the past shredded and gone (blink of an eye, stuttering heartbeat) while at the same time, in the same world, a ridge of distant mountains unscrolls, quietly revealing itself, advancing slowly forward.

No matter how fast our father drives, the patient line of stone proceeds, always beyond, always ahead of us.

He's trembling now but can't speak. Time does not exist. Time is perception, the endless rearrangement of things in space, the infinite possibilities of their relationships to one another.

A word will shatter thought: skull, stone, star, rabbit: everything here, now, lost and still to come in this moment. There's no reason why he can't remember the future. Even now the light of stars long dead streaks toward him.

Our father, our pilot, delivers us into a night too beautiful to imagine: blue, blue sky, mountains deepening to violet.

Mother unbuttons her blouse to nurse the baby. Joelle, my sister, eleven months old, eight years younger than I am, my father's bewildered surprise, my mother's joyful mystery, Joelle Derais, so radiant strangers stop us on the street and ask to touch or try to talk to her.

If she were alive now, would she be like me, or still be tempting?

I remember her that day at the rest stop: cheeks flushed, lips rosy, the soft swirl of dark curls at the crown of her head (where I kiss, where I smell you), Joelle, my sister, heavy in my arms, heavy in my lungs, the sweet almond scent of you.

I remember the woman who gasped in the bathroom, whose fingers fluttered as she touched Joelle's warm shoulder. My God is that child real? She thought my sister was a doll, perfect porcelain, perfectly painted, someone else's real hair, someone else's silky lashes:

My God how porcelain shatters.

Mother wants to stop in Page, just south of the Utah border, high on this plateau of red rock where a pink neon sign blinks EZ REST and a green one warns DESPERADO'S HIDEAWAY.

Our pilot won't rest; our desperado won't take refuge.

If time does not exist, there must be a place where I can go, where I can find us, where my sister cries and my brother trembles, where bands of rose and gold and turquoise throb at the horizon, where my father turns back, and my mother forgives him. (Somewhere in the night, while I sleep, this happens.)

Forty years. I have these words. I know these numbers. The morning paper my proof: Oil Spilling, Bees Vanishing. Five Illegal Immigrants Found Dead, Problem Bear Relocated.

The headline never says: Invasive Humans Removed from Bear's Natural Habitat.

EZ REST: I almost remember the sign flashing all night, the room that smelled of smoke and ammonia.

No. We didn't turn. The blue Chrysler sped into the blue night while the light of stars streaked toward us.

Forty years. I remember the taste of blood and bone, tongue cut deep, front teeth jagged, the smell of gasoline and smoke, something burning in the distance. My father tried to stand but couldn't stand, tried again and then a third time. He disappeared as smoke and came back as fire. His face flared in orange light.

How can both legs be broken?

Yes, everything here, now, again, always: the blue Chrysler ablaze, our bodies flung in the desert, the rearrangement of things, the infinite possibilities, the light of stars, yes, I have never seen so many stars anywhere, an ocean of sparkling light, stars alive and dead streaking toward us.

The baby was gone, the baby was missing. I remember Mother crawling in the sand, trying to find her, saying her name, Joelle, howling her name into the blue night all around us, leaving Jo – elle vibrating through stone and star forever.

My brother rose up white and naked from his twisted body. He was perfect, so thin and pale I could see right through him. He stooped to scratch the sand with a stick. Later I understood the stick was a bone, one he'd pulled from his body.

So fast, my brother! He drew a lovely looping line crossing and recrossing, no beginning or end, some strange magic: flight of the hawk or snake coiling, a wave of sound inside a stone, breath moving between bodies.

I don't remember the days in the hospital, the nights and days I slept, brain swollen. I remember waking in my bed at home, a deer under the mesquite tree by my window, the shadows of leaves fluttering across her body: a deer in disguise: I heard her breath in my breath, felt warm blood surge through me.

Alive, I was. Even now I believe the deer's blood healed me. Mother played "Clair de Lune" on the piano with her left hand, half a song; the deer breathed in fluttery time, and I breathed with her. Doves sang missing notes, but not the right ones, not Debussy's, some startling rearrangement of sound, every song endlessly new, no matter how many times Mother played them.

Blood surges from the heart and soon returns or doesn't. Forty years. At the Mission one day I watched a man restore the wounds of Jesus, scraping away oil and dirt to paint the openings again, red so red it glowed, wounds so deep blood bloomed violet.

Such love! The painter looked thin as Jesus, scarred too, hurt and hungry. Yes, here, God alive, breath inside a starved brown body. He'd repaired broken thorns and broken fingers; now, as he touched the wounds with his brush, tendons beneath flesh flickered. In a looping line of blue vein, I felt the painter's blood in me pulsing.

So easily the body opens.

Good Samaritan Shot Three Times. The news in the paper today. Hand, thigh, right shoulder. Two fingers lost, clavicle shattered. The wound in the thigh will not stop leaking. Nine pints of blood gone. Nine poured back into you. Is this possible? Who are you now, filled and saved by the blood of strangers?

The shadows of leaves become the shadows of hands, doctors' hands inside my brother's body, stitching artery and bowel, touching the soft secret skin inside the belly, hoping to stop the blood, to bring him back, to reassemble a puzzle of bone, pelvis and rib from splintered fragments.

Good Samaritan, I would give you all my blood, lie down with you inside, as I was once inside my mother.

Love surged as song in the womb, the universe here, whole and perfect: blood and breath, whoosh and murmur, vibration in soft bone, my body alive with sound, every cell shimmering.

I don't remember walking in my sleep, leaving our little house, the sound of my heart, my parents' breathing. I do...