Bone Flute continued...
After he died - I mean the event, I do not like to use the phrase after he died in reference to life since, because it is not a continuous state - I had a doctor over as calmly as I could. I spent the day with the police rocketing between maintaining composure like a career bank hostage and, when that got too suspicious, screaming until I lost my voice - something I never manage to do in concert. When I first wore his jacket afterwards, I did not feel sad. I felt like a girl left alone in the bedroom of her crush while he lies to his parents about the noise upstairs. We played at that the first few months, he excited to have an upstairs, and me excited to not be fucking an audible distance from other people, parents or otherwise. I smelled the jacket, a suede and shaggy tan-brown thing he loved. I felt a satisfying closeness to someone out of reach to me until I saw him on TV in a slow-motion-tinged memorial montage. I would not have been watching TV but I had to turn it on or hum "Ghost Dance." My daughter was asleep in her purple bed.
I had never projectile vomited before but I was covered before I could cry. I was screaming and it wouldn't stop so I was gargling like a dragon. It was greenish, and when I ran for the bathroom, my daughter saw me. She tore into a fit about me being Pazuzu and contorted her face not in the manner of which she'd seen mine when I broke our big matroyshka doll in front of her, trying to teach her how to react to bad things like a human being, but in blank, breaking, abject fear. She vanished while I doubled into the toilet then came at me seconds later with a cup of water. The water licked my back, and all I felt was the cold to which that strip of skin was now vulnerable and the patch of extra-cling in my mucked-up slip. I'd shed the coat; she almost slipped on it when she came at me and held my head, afraid of it twisting around to vomit on her. I pressed her into me despite the filth, and she scratched my neck and ran away, screaming - really screaming like she never had before. I listened for Adam's or my octaves. I was so out to capture all her firsts that my nausea lapsed with the impulse to write that down: First Screams of Terror.
I tried to be inspired. I wrote about Adam and it sounded like something anyone could say - anyone could illustrate sequences: his depression, his career, his marriage. Only I could dismantle them and refute the obvious, lace-fine web of inevitability. I listened to his music on CDs for the first time, only having ever heard it accompanied by the muffling carpet of screams. The last of their shows included a violinist. She practiced in our garage. I came out and had to stop, feeling myself rocking on the sea all the sudden, like what she made wasn't music as I knew it. I did not think to speak, like speaking was anything more than a blunt, ugly tool, until I heard a girl at an open mic read some poetry by Sylvia Plath and her shifting souls and panes of ice did not sound like English to me but like liberated strains of Hindi, like nothing but what it meant. I did not know until I was backstage in Munich that what the violinist played was Adam's song.
I know everyone who can nip at a tabloid in line at ShopRite knows he was succeeded by a wife and daughter, but that he was married to me is not something that will survive the last printed invocation of that fact. They will toss a because in there and say that it had something to do with something, that we were married when he died. They will say, if they don't all ready, it is part of the sequence. Like our being married mattered any more than how lovely I thought his hair was. The inconsequential nature of our being married, when laid beside years and years of untreated depression, strikes me like a brick through a window. We were in love. We were married in Florence, Italy on a street corner by a priest who loved my music. We got him wasted first. The moon came up. I saw the Duomo and tore my dress on a metal gate running from a screaming fan, my dress that looked like it was made of opal that I took such pains to steal from the closet of a movie star I met at a party the night before.
Less than a month before we were married I waited in our apartment for him to come home from the psychiatrist's. He lit a fire in our fire place and, behind my back, tossed in a framed photo from his childhood - the only one of him and his father - and a doll he made when he found out we were having a girl, and a book he didn't know I wanted to read, Anaïs Nin's House of Incest. I opened it up one day and read, I remember my first birth in water, and the next day I went to the doctor's and confirmed that I was pregnant. I held her by the fire place after she was born, and he wrote songs about her there. The fire place occupied so much of the small apartment to my mind, and after he came back from the last big tour was when I negotiated the house. He went right along with it with sorrowful totality.
I warned my mother and my band mates and my friends from school that my phone would be disconnected for a few weeks. They are more afraid of me than for me. I stayed in my practice room and saw Le Sigh listed alongside Sleater-Kinney and the Runaways in a retrospective on female musicianship in the Sun-Gazette and I felt like I was reading my journal, that so belonged to the realm of the long ago, furtively recorded wish. I have a habit of relegating the ill-timed to an improved, wholly personal chronology. When the boy I lost my virginity to, Otto, met me, I had just pierced my back in the manner of a corset and slashed God Almighty into my left leg after the brutal departure of my then best friend and roommate. I think she is a nun now, sometimes I get little icons in the mail from far-flung addresses, but it could be my own hope. I could not pay the rent then and I looked sad enough for Otto to console me all the way, but how - MOMA receptionist, non-dancer - he belonged to the one semester I spent at community college, obsessed with Samuel Beckett and barets. The only time I feel in time is when I sing. I would not sing until lately. I wanted to keep this out of time.
Adam was married to me and not to somebody whose incentive was to string up his corpse and make it sing "Hello ma Baby." If there is a tinge of insecurity about my trusting him to die when he had to so that he might let me should I have to it would not be out of character. When I moved to Cork to live with my father, he vanished. My step-dad had put my mother's life insurance money into my bank account to get me there and away from him and his children. I woke up from a nap in the middle of the afternoon in a house that was no one's. I looked at the books in glass cases, bent in caution. I expected somebody to come in. Somebody did. As a result of that encounter, wherein I discovered I could toss my voice into all kinds of registers, I had the money to get to a friend's in Galway - a story I will never tell my daughter unless she comes to seem less Delphic, less telling in the way of a mirror warped to amplify pores and veins, and more like somebody passing through clubs about to fold and boyfriends' trailers and the Duomo, who needs to know it's not weird that it's so hard, how there is no sequence to things but consequences to all.
The only visitor I've had is my best friend, Mona. I had my ear on my Golden Dawn and my legs on the amplifier. I played my guitar like a harp. She sat on the purple afghan and did what I can count on my friends to do: provoke me into the comforting realization that I don't intimidate them as much as I need to think. She suggested that for my next album I might perform a song on a flute made from his bones. My gullet lurched. I didn't think I told her about starring in Bone Flute when I was seventeen but even if I did - that had as much to do with everything as anything. She asked where Anaïs was and how she was, and instead of answering I asked her to wait. I went to my daughter's room, and she had scratched a big red notice on her door in crayon instructing the likes of me to return to her unpossessed. Unsure if I was I listened to her, upending plastic houses.
END