pluto

pluto

Back then, nobody knew it but every couple of years I would  try to speak.  Only when no one is around-- just to see if I could still shape sounds from the sidewalk chalk outline of my larynx.   But no matter what I would try to say, every inflection was just a garbled question.   I didn't do it well.  It's not like the voices I would hear or the words I read.    There was sound, but I didn't recognize the language.  It was more like a low fidelity recording of a cat's chirrup pawing at a cloud.    

My therapist said I should write these things down.   I've learned just recently that I was born and grew up in a monastery full of celibate, card counting monks with no sense of fashion or social repircissions.    Of course, she said that none of this is my fault and if I can trace some linear narrative, I would be able to see that.   I never really blamed myself, though.    And actually i've tried to live my life without taking up too much space.  I was pretty good at it until about a week ago.  She said writing out my story would help me heal.  

"I'm not sure what would be left of me, if I heal," I told her.    Well, actually I didn't tell her that.  I passed her a note.   I think she is saving my notes in a drawer of her desk or something.   Okay, I'll write it out.  I'll start at the end, the most recent, because that's kinda how I ended up here.   My court appointed therapist is called Doctor Lucy Scroedinger.  She likes to ask questions.    

The Doctor lady is not gonna like it but I’m gonna tell this story from someone's else's perspective--   someone like me.  This little literary trick could really sabotage her diagnosis but I think it will be more believable that way.   I’m gonna write a memoir.  Well. almost a memoir-- not mine, of course.  I've done nothing to tether myself beyond this pen in my hand and the paper.  I'll just write as if I'm working for a great storyteller and he trusts me and the mechanical magic pecks of keys to make his world flat with thin black ribbon pressed letters.   The Doctor isn't expecting a strong narrative thread without ever stringing together syllables.   How could I tell my own story, I haven't even ventured into speech or original thought.  Maybe just a vignette-- a long vignette.  

Before all this happened it was my job to write.   I would go through the motions.  I would copy one text to another blank story.   I was a scribe-- that is what I would do.  I worked in secret in a little heap. It was all by choice--everything begins by conscious design. I know nothing else, nothing but free will and the thin air of not knowing what to do with it.  I am a monoglot, but I think it's true of every language. Sometimes words tell important things embedded in unimportant sentences.   That sounds like something I may have copied from a book somewhere-- maybe with some of the words juggled around a bit. 

Doctor, this story I will claim as my is only loosely sprawled among the tapestry of the planets.  I remember sunlight puddling  on the mountain and then dries up.  There is a dryness here.  I haven't taken a vow of silence or anything like that.  I was just born without anything to say.  

There were voices around me.  One to my left and another across the room to my right.  They didn't speak to me or seem to notice me.  Maybe I don't exist.  I called them and Neptune Abyss. I can't really tell which is which.  They move around but whichever one is to my right-- that is Mercury, at least until he moves through the room.  They may think I do not hear, but I am here and they are moving.  I don't look up from my desk.    

"Idle talk...just idle talk," the voice from the left sounded.  It was a deep forceful voice, like it was trying to project through walls without relying on volume.  Maybe Abyss had been speaking for quite some time.  I don't know.  I don't always listen.    But I can hear.   Maybe they don't think I am here.  

"I can't even suffer correctly," Left continued.  The sun ribboned through the clouds like the wind could bend it.  "An old dusty monk is not supposed to have women problems. Is she even capable of caring about my happiness?.  Who honeymoons at a monastery, anyway?" 

"We do have a casino," I heard from the right, "hotel and a gift shop."  This time there was no projection to the voice.  There was more walking around.  In the sway of orange cloth and I lost track of the orbits.  One of them said, "Do you think she will want to see the girl?"   I think they know I'm here but they are pretending I'm not.

"It's been twenty years.  I am not working at the blackjack pit tomorrow." 

Was I the girl they were talking about?   I think I am.   I don't know why.  I've always been here.  I was brought here before I was born, I think.     Now, everyday,  I transcribe all day.   I write the vintage branded handwritten bibles they sell in the gift shop.   I'm the one that cares enough to write David's part lefthanded.   I was writing Proverbs when all the thump of this commotion started.  

"No.  Why would she possibly want to see the girl?  What am I saying?  She will of course want to see the girl.   This will be miserable and enduring."   One of the planets said that.  I don't think I have a name.  If I do,  I've never heard it.  They used to call me Pluto.  There was a dog in a television cartoon that I really liked.   And I kinda remember trying to bark.   Now, I am just the girl.

A long time before this day I'd kinda lost focus on what was happening all around me.  Maybe I read too much.   After the anthropomorphic dog episode I wasn't allowed to watch tv.   And then I got in trouble for reading Beckett, Joyce and philosophy.  I don't know what to think or where to look.  Maybe I don't think.  I tried to read Rene Descartes.  I didn't understand.  Maybe I am not.  If I think that I don't exist, have I thought myself into consciousness?  But if I don't exist, I would be hard pressed to explain why this loose fitting saffron sack isn't just laying over the chair.   I guess I'm here and I'm tired of substantiating this poise.  And maybe that is why I got beat for reading philosophy and then beat again for growling at the priest.  

I wonder what she is looking for, my therapist, when she asked me to write?  At first it was hard not to number the text as verses and write quotations in  red.  Maybe ink and paper is a human attempt to compensate for the strictly limited size of our hands.  

Anyway...my desk was near a window.  Outside clouds  looked heavy.  The crumbling shadows of the mountain stick in wadded suspended particles of electricity.  I remember thinking there must be some bad weather coming.  The storm's breath was thick on the window like a hand on a prayer box.  

There were still voices bouncing through the room searching for orbit, calling for gravity.  I only have to blink twice real hard to come back to the proverbs at hand.  And I notice I've been drawing holes, deep holes where there was supposed to be the book of scriptures.   

"We are older now…  it's been 20 years... tell her I died--choked on sacraments or something and the girl ran away into the desert."  

What?   Is that a possibility, I thought.  The girl ran into the desert?   I remember then-- words, thoughts and visions were coming too fast to make any sense.  Am I the girl?   Could I actually run away into the desert?  

Neptune was sitting down with his head in his hands like he was trying to hold it still.  "We should have never taken in the gypsy.  And now she is coming back,  coming here with a new husband."

"You should have never slept with her," was the voice from across the galaxy.

"I loved her. Maybe, I loved her.   I loved the feeling.   I think if we hadn't lied to everyone about her being pregnant when we took her in, she would have stayed or we could have left together." 

"And you'd be living in a mountain trailer on a rural librarian's salary?"

I never really thought about having a mom.  But from what I've read that is a fairly consistent factor in human existence.     I know you will tell me it's not my fault that she left me here.    Doctor, there are things that we haven't discussed.  Maybe you already know but sometimes I leave out things in our daily note passing sessions.   There are things I now know from a brochure I found in the parking lot.  The abbey started as the outpost for missionaries to Native tribes.   Sometime before I was born, times got hard and since it is not on federal land, somebody got the idea to open a casino.  The big church did not approve.  But it became somewhat of a good luck custom to give ten percent of the winnings back to the church and one hundred percent of losses.   Most of the casino loot went back to the tribal council so the big church looked the other way.   The Casino and gift shop was run by the monks.  Members of the tribe living on the reseation were not allowed to gamble or drink at the bar.   Neptune and Abyss both managed the table games.  Abyss is the boss.  

The word "runaway" was with me all day luring me away.   It was a dangerous provocative word.  The word streams and thoughts and the desert calm    I had never been a flight risk.  While dreams burned up all around the monastery,  I left that night I thought  after the storm had passed.   I just walked out through the kitchen loading dock.  There were lightning strikes, knocked over signs and a few smoldering shrubs.   With only a sack full of blank papers, a hair brush, a hand full of chips from the blackjack table  and a soggy Monte Cristo sandwich.  Away from the burnished sleeves of light from the parking garage, the moon shined across the desert like a lake.  Glowing like the sun had just been turned off and was buzzing into darkness.   The way to the desert was blocked by a burned bush.  In the bush, there were seven dead birds draped over like dirty towels or shrouds.   The bush was still warm from the lightning.  Little yellow and emerald embers of rock and sand lead the way.    I walk toward the darkest part of the sky and I remember wishing I was wearing shoes.   

A curtain of clouds was drawing over me.  Flakes and scabs of constellations were sifting away.  Each step seemed to bring the storm closer.  I found a cleft of a rock for cover.  The dust of the desert was thick shiny mud with rain and lightning.  I began talking to myself, but I couldn't understand anything I was saying.   My sounds ran ahead of me.   While I tried to be still and sleep through the storm. I slept very little with my mumbling and all.  In the morning all I could see was the drying crust of earth.  The vastness was so bright like a ghost.   I sat next to one of the bushes and started speaking.   

"Father? Father!"   Yes, Doc, I made a sound.  I've written out my share of cries and lamentations.  I formed a word, I think but there was no one there to hear.   I called out but my voice couldn't be heard over the click, pop and hum of my heart-- beating beyond the vowels and consonants.  I listened.  And I listened in the dark. There is still electricity above the diesel clouds and the collapsing day.   I was getting tired of carrying around a strict sense of functionality and  From my bag I buried the blank pages beneath a layer of russet sand.  And I listened.  There were sounds of jackals, scrabble of birds, sidewinding of snakes, eyes of meerkats and the drone of the mountains.    I wondered if anyone was looking for me or noticed I was gone.  

Jacob wrestled in the desert.  God's people wandered forty years.  John the Baptist ate locust dipped in desert honey.  I was not that hungry and my sandwich was sticking to the inside of the sack.   With my arms wrapped around my knees and head down.   I fell asleep and I heard a voice from somewhere.    In my sleep, I heard "Daughter.  Daughter!"  It was a voice like someone calling down a hole or up through the spire of a cosmos.   I was somewhere I didn't recognize and in my dream I started walking toward the calling voice.   I walked for a long time.  Dreams are vast spaces.   It was very lunar-- very much in another planets' orbit.    There was tall wheat, though.  In my dream I walked toward an iron-gray sunset.   But it was stuck or like each step I took, turned backwards a cog kept the day suspended.  The sun stood still half soaked in the past.    

Do these dreams have any meaning?    When I woke up, I was in a tree.  

This is almost the story the therapist said I should write and she told me bad spelling, poor grammar and  authenticity were not my fault.  She told me other things.  I don't quite understand her interest.  I asked her if she'd stick around until the bandages came off and she acted like the world was too small for metaphors.