Henry: Clare has cajoled me into getting dressed and has enlisted Gomez to carry me out the back door, across the yard, and into her studio. The studio is lit with candles; there are probably a hundred of them, more, on tables and on the floor, and on the windowsills. Gomez sets me down on the studio couch, and retreats to the house. In the middle of the studio a white sheet is suspended from the ceiling, and I turn around to see if there's a projector, but there isn't. Clare is wearing a dark dress, and as she moves around the room her face and hands float white and disembodied.
"Want some coffee?" she asks me. I haven't had any since before the hospital. "Sure," I reply. She pours two cups, adds cream, and brings me one. The hot cup feels familiar and good in my hand. "I made you something," Clare says.
"Feet? I could use some feet."
"Wings," she says, dropping the white sheet to the floor. The wings are huge and they float in the air, wavering in the candlelight. They are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of longing, of freedom, of rushing through space. The feeling of standing solidly, on my own two feet, of running, running like flying. The dreams of hovering, of flying as though gravity has been rescinded and now is allowing me to be removed from the earth a safe distance, these dreams come back to me in the twilit studio. Clare sits down next to me. I feel her looking at me. The wings are silent, their edges ragged. I cannot speak. Siehe, ich lebe. Woraus? Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft! werden weniger... Uberzahliges Dasein! entspringt reir Herzen. (Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future/grows any smaller.. .Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.)
"Kiss me," Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.
FEET DREAMS
October/November, 2006 (Henry is 43)
Henry: I dream that I am at the Newberry, giving a Show and Tell to some graduate students from Columbia College. I'm showing them incunabula, early printed books. I show them the Gutenberg Fragment, Caxton's Game and Play of Chess, the Jensen Eusebius. It's going well, they are asking good questions. I rummage around on the cart, looking for this special book I just found in the stacks, something I never knew we had. It's in a heavy red box. There's no title, just the call number, CASE WING f ZX 983.D 453, stamped in gold under the Newberry insignia. I place the box on the table and set out the pads. I open the box, and there, pink and perfect, are my feet. They are surprisingly heavy. As I set them on the pads the toes all wiggle, to say Hi, to show me they can still do it. I begin to speak about them, explaining the relevance of my feet to fifteenth century Venetian printing. The students are taking notes. One of them, a pretty blonde in a shiny sequined tank top, points at my feet, and says, "Look, they're all white!" And it's true, the skin has gone dead white, the feet are lifeless and putrid. I sadly make a note to myself to send them up to Conservation first thing tomorrow.
In my dream I am running. Everything is fine. I run along the lake, from Oak Street Beach, heading north. I feel my heart pumping, my lungs smoothly rising and falling. I am moving right along. What a relief, I think. I was afraid I'd never run again, but here I am, running. It's great. But things begin to go wrong. Parts of my body are falling off. First my left arm goes. I stop and pick it up off the sand and brush it off and put it back on, but it isn't very securely attached and it comes off again after only half a mile. So I carry it in my other arm, thinking maybe when I get it back home I can attach it more tightly. But then the other arm goes,
and I have no arms at all to even pick up the arms I've lost. So I continue running. It's not too bad; it doesn't hurt. Soon I realize that my cock has dislodged and fallen into the right leg of my sweatpants, where it is banging around in an annoying manner, trapped by the elastic at the bottom. But I can't do anything about it, so I ignore it. And then I can feel that my feet are all broken up like pavement inside my shoes, and then both of my feet break off at the ankles and I fall face-first onto the path. I know that if I stay there I will be trampled by other runners, so I begin to roll. I roll and roll until I roll into the lake, and the waves roll me under, and I wake up gasping.
I dream that I am in a ballet. I am the star ballerina, I am in my dressing room being swathed in pink tulle by Barbara, who was my mom's dresser. Barbara is a tough cookie, so even though my feet hurt like hell I don't complain as she tenderly encases the stumps in long pink satin toe shoes. When she finishes I stagger up from my chair and cry out. "Don't be a sissy," says Barbara, but then she relents and gives me a shot of morphine. Uncle Ish appears at the door of the dressing room and we hurry down endless backstage hallways. I know that my feet hurt even though I cannot see them or feel them. We rush on, and suddenly I am in the wings and looking onto the stage I realize that the ballet is The Nutcracker, and I am the Sugar Plum Fairy. For some reason this really bugs me. This isn't what I was expecting. But someone gives me a little shove, and I totter on stage. And I dance. I am blinded by the lights, I dance without thinking, without knowing the steps, in an ecstasy of pain. Finally I fall to my knees, sobbing, and the audience rises to their feet, and applauds. Friday, November 3, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43)