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If you want to know what love is, ask why I am reading this book.
I have fallen in love with a man in another book by the same author. I am unhappy in parts, with the writing but he has cut himself off from the book’s faults. They are elsewhere.
For news of him, I go to the one source of him, this author – unless, as source, there was some person or persons like him, who would see themselves expanded, played by him as by an actor.
The man dies at the end. Rightly. He must. Was dead, in fact, from the beginning, and my hand under his grave as I opened the book. My right hand.
He persists, though, as the dead who were once flesh do, for their own bemused narrators.
He’s been here two years.
I wonder if the others ask as I do not, why he left, or of all places, why he chose our well-meaning suburb.
We sit before his mirrors, him behind, or to one side. He’s still young, and slim with a little belly. His hair curls where it will. I ask stupidly if he did this job before he left, then answer for him, of course, he’s not had time to learn it here.
And that’s enough, surely.
If they were willing in Beirut to leave their hair untended they would have done so more than once in his life, career. But they are not.
A friend or enemy will see to how you look, dead. Merely endangered as you are, it’s up to you. So Anne Frank writes — should she bleach the hair on her upper lip? Once a woman, and I knew her, killed herself, her eyebrows still sore from plucking.
Grandmother is a crab, crook-legged on eight high-heeled shoes. I am too quick for her. She limps off but only as far as she must, leaving her scratch in the sand. Then back she comes in another uncomfortable colour, to bluster and snap at my bare toes.
Grandmother's pool burns green and shrunken at low tide. The sun sucks half her water up. What's left is crusty at the rim and so salt it hurts her. Her eyes are red. She crackles. But night and the underside of the sea roll in for her, like cold blankets.
Grandmother says she can dance and not stop knitting. With a click of leg-needles, she lifts off into the oxygen blue, scattering pretty new things. I bite my lip and taste Grandmother's gritty crab-seeds, caught in my loose carapace of hair.
I slept well in the hospital and dressed and ate cleanly at the proper time.
My replies were apposite civil and even. Yet there was the matter of the notes.
I see myself under the window (my chair is of tube steel and discolouring plastic) and I am aware of the light into which I lean back and the ends of my hair stand up in millions of tiny separate glows, and the brightness travels along my writing arm and down the one leg that is crossed over the other (the knee, the notebook) and I am making notes which may be no more than my name written till I perfect it, written over itself and over the notebook's edges and over my shirt and trousers and over my face and the fronts and backs of my hands till the whole of me is written over myself, and I can slip out of it and they think they still have me, but I am leaving, leave it behind me in the shape of me, and I go.
Note: "...as part of an experiment, some American researchers had themselves confined in an asylum masquerading as schizophrenics. In hospital these pseudo-patients behaved normally, on occasion taking written notes of what they observed. This action was noted in their case histories as symptomatic of their schizophrenia: it was called engaging in "writing behaviour". Roy Porter "A Social History of Madness"
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