Fawn

I. Mētis

I do not know when this started. I do not want to know. I am a man who walked into a tent and found you, and I have never asked myself what kind of man finds a woman in a tent and decides she is his to keep, because the asking would require an answer, and I have spent my life being the man who has the answers, and I am not prepared to be the man who has to ask. You are at the table, mending, and the lamp is between us, and I have stopped working only to watch the flame move, and I do not know why the moving holds me, and I do not want to know that either. The flame leans when you breathe. The flame leans toward you. I have begun to lean too. I tell myself the lamp is what I am watching. I am not watching the lamp.

I am the lamp. I have been the lamp since the first night, since the moment I understood that you were not going to send me back, since the moment I understood that there was no back. A lamp does not have a choice about its burning. A lamp burns because it has wick and oil and air, and the air in your tent is yours, and the oil is yours, and the wick is the part of me that has not yet been used up, and I am being used up, and the using is so slow that it looks like ease, and I have begun to mistake the slowness for safety. You are the night. You did not come here to put me out. You did not have to come here to put me out. You are the night, and I am a flame, and the outcome of a flame in the night is not a question. It is a duration. I have begun to count my burning in hours instead of days, and I do not know when I started counting that way, and I am beginning to be afraid that the counting is itself a kind of going-out, that I have already begun to dim, that the woman I was the first night would not recognize the flicker I have become, and that I am not sure I would want her to.

I do not understand what I have become near you. I have spent my whole life being the man who needs nothing he cannot calculate, and the not-needing was the whole of me — it was how I survived my father and my island — and I am sitting in this tent, and I am unable to calculate the flame on the table. I keep trying. I keep coming back to the calculation and the calculation keeps coming out as a feeling, and I do not know what to do with a feeling. I have never known what to do with a feeling, I have spent my life moving feelings into rooms where I do not have to look at them, and I cannot move this one, this one will not move, this one sits on the table between us and burns. What kind of man cannot put a feeling away? What kind of man sits in the dark and watches a lamp and lets the lamp watch him back? I do not want to know. I am afraid I have already become him. I am afraid the becoming was the whole purpose of the long years, and I did not know it, and I do not know who is in the dark with you now, and I do not know if it is still me.

You do not know you are the night. You think you are a man at a table. You think you are watching the lamp and being warmed by it. You do not know that the warmth is what is left of me, that you are taking it without taking it, that you are not pulling the warmth out of me, you are only being near, and the nearness is the taking, and I am pouring myself toward your darkness the way every lamp pours itself toward every dark, because that is what lamps do, because the dark is where the light goes, because the light has nowhere else to go. Do you know what you are doing to me by simply being here? Do you know? Have you looked? Have you let yourself look at what happens to a flame when the night arrives and stays? I am pouring. I am pouring toward you. I have begun to want the pouring. I have begun to want to be poured out completely, because the burning is tired, because the holding-on is tired, because the night is so wide and so quiet and the lamp is so small, and I have begun to think that going out is not the same as dying, that going out might only be a kind of joining, that I might not be ending, I might only be becoming part of the dark with you, and I do not know if that thought is mine or if it is what happens to a flame when the wick runs out, and I do not know if I want there to be a difference.

II. Eidolon

You are not her. I have said it to myself for as long as you have been in this tent and I will say it for as long as one of us is breathing. You are not her. And yet you are here, and the day is on my hands, and you have water ready, and I put my hands in the basin and the water goes dark and I am clean, and the cleanness sits in me like a thing I did not earn. I did not come here to be made clean by a stranger. I came here for one woman. I burned a coast for her. The burning has not lifted off me in nine years; I have carried it the way a man carries a wound that did not heal, the way a man carries weather, the way a man carries the thing he is, and I have never asked anyone to lift it because there is no one who can lift it and the asking would be a small kind of cowardice and I am not a coward. I am only a man at a basin. You are at the other end of the basin. The water is going dark between us. I am not asking what kind of man stays clean in the water of a woman who did not ask to hold his sickness; the question does not arrive in me as a question, the question arrives as the weight of what I am doing, and the weight is on me, and I am not setting it down. I am not telling myself a story about the weight. The weight is the weight. You are the basin. The water is dark. I am clean. I do not know what to do with any of this and I am not going to pretend I do.

I am the basin. I have been the basin since the first night, since the first time you came in with your hands red to the wrist and I had water ready because someone had to have water ready and there was no one else, and I held the basin out, and you put your hands in, and the water went rust-colored, and you sighed, and I understood in that sigh that I had been built for this — not by my mother, not by my life, but by your needing, which made me on the spot, which reached into me and pulled out a vessel I did not know was inside me, and the vessel has been getting darker ever since. You think the water is yours. The water was mine. The basin is mine. The hands you wash in me are not the only hands I have ever held, but you do not know that, you have never asked what was in the basin before you came to it, and I have begun to forget myself, I have begun to forget what color the water was the morning before you arrived, and I am afraid the forgetting is the basin's nature, I am afraid a basin does not remember its clean, I am afraid I am becoming a thing that knows itself only by what has been poured into it. And the worst — and the worst — is that I have started to bleed into the water on my own. I do not know when I started. I have my own wound now. I have made one. I have made a wound to match the wound you keep washing off in me because if my blood is in the basin too then the water is at least partly mine, and the darkness is at least partly mine, and I would rather be drowning in my own blood than only in yours. Do you understand what I have done? Do you? Have you looked at the water? Have you ever once looked at the water?

I do not understand what is happening. I do not understand it and I am not going to invent an understanding to cover the place where the understanding is missing. I came here for one woman. You are not her. The wrongness of you was a wound the first night and the wound has not closed; your mouth is wrong, and your hair is wrong, and the way you turn your head when I come in is wrong, and I have not stopped registering the wrongness, and the wrongness is in me with the cleanness, both of them, at the same time, and I do not know how a man holds two things like that at once. I am holding them. I am the man at the basin and I have not been clean in nine years and I am clean tonight and you are not her and you have made me clean and the wrongness has not gone away and none of this resolves and I am not asking it to resolve. I have spent nine years not asking the war to resolve. I can do this too. I can sit in a tent with a woman who is not my wife and find the water she gives me warm and find the wrongness of her still a wound and not need either fact to mean less than it means. I will not finish the sentence about what this means for the war. I will not finish it because there is no end to that sentence, there is only the sentence, the sentence is the rest of my life, and I will live inside it the way I have lived inside the burning, and I will not pretend it is not there, and I will not pretend it does not weigh what it weighs. You are the basin. I am the man at the basin. The water is going dark. I am clean. All of these are true. I am not asking which one is the real one. They are all the real one. That is what it means to be the man I am.

You think I am clean water. I am not clean water. I have not been clean water for a long time now. The water in me has been rust-colored for as many nights as you have been here and you have not noticed because you do not look at the water, you only look at your hands going in and your hands coming out, and you are right that they come out cleaner, you are right that something happens in the dip — but you have not asked what happens to the water that did the cleaning, and I will tell you now even though you cannot hear me: the water remembers. The water remembers every wound it has ever held. The water remembers the first night and the second night and every night since, the water knows the color of your sickness, the water has begun to taste like iron and grief and a woman I have never met, and I have begun to taste like her too, I have begun to taste like the wife at the back of my own mouth, and I do not know if I am Maria anymore or if I am only the basin that has held so much of her that I have become indistinguishable from what I was holding. What will you do when you reach into the basin one night and find that there is no clean water left, only the dark, only the rust, only the woman you wanted poured back into you in the wrong shape? Will you drink it? Will you call it her? Will you call it me? Will you know the difference? Have you ever known the difference? Do you want to?

III. Aidos

I do not know how to ask you anything. I have never asked anyone anything in my life that was not the war, or the wound, or the work of the day. My brother asks me things and I answer; my men ask me things and I answer; no one has ever asked me to ask, and I do not know the shape of the asking, and you are across the tent from me with your hands in your lap and I want to ask you if you are all right and I cannot find the breath for it. The breath is here. I am breathing. I am breathing the same air you are breathing and the air is enough, the air has always been enough, the air is what a man has when he has nothing else and I have lived inside the air my whole life without naming it and now the air is the only thing in this tent that I share with you and I do not want to disturb it. To speak would be to spend it. I have begun to think of breath as something one could run out of. I have never thought that before. A man in battle does not think it; a man in battle breathes because the breathing is the staying-alive. Here, in this tent, the breathing is the staying-quiet, and the quiet is the staying, and I do not know what I am staying as, or for, or near. I only know I am quiet, and you are quiet, and the quiet is holding, and I do not want it to stop holding, because I do not know what is under the quiet, and I am — I am not strong enough. I have never been strong enough for what is under the quiet. I will not look. I will not look.

I am the tent. I have become the tent. I did not mean to become the tent. I came in a person — I had a mother and a household and a way of laughing at the loom, I had presence, I had weight in a room, I was a working woman and the working filled the air around me without my having to think about filling it — and I have stopped, and I do not know when I stopped, and the tent has begun to be the shape of me — or I have begun to be the shape of the tent — and the air inside the tent is not air anymore, it is something held, it is something kept on purpose, and I am the keeping of it. I am the keeping on purpose. I have begun to hold my breath on purpose. I did not know I was doing it. I noticed three nights ago. I have been doing it for longer than three nights. I have been making myself smaller on purpose so the tent will have enough air for him to breathe easy in, so the quiet will hold, so the not-asking can keep being kindness in the story I tell myself about being kind. I have begun to want the smaller. I have begun to want it the way a woman wants a thing she does not want, the way you want what stops costing you to want, and the wanting is the worst thing I have learned about myself in this tent, and I have learned several worst things, and this is the one I am writing under the others tonight, this is the one I cannot put down: I am holding my breath on purpose and I have begun to want the holding. Do you know? Do you know I am the one who has been thinning the air? Do you know what will happen to me when you are not in the room to require the air be thin? I do not know if you have noticed. I do not think you have. I am beginning to suspect there is a wrongness in you — a tilt, a thing I cannot find the word for, because the word is a thing one would have to speak — and the wrongness is making the air thinner every night, and I am matching it, I am taking smaller breaths than I took the night before, and tomorrow I will take smaller ones still, and I am afraid of the day I know what the wrongness is, and I am more afraid of the day I run out, and I am most afraid that the running-out will not be a violence, that the running-out will be a small woman in the corner of a tent who has been getting smaller every night and finally is gone, and that the going will look like the quiet holding, and that no one will know the difference, and that I will not know the difference, because I have already begun to want it.

I think I am being kind to you by leaving you be. I think the kindness is in the not-asking. I think the not-touching when you have not turned toward me is kindness, the not-speaking when you have not opened your mouth is kindness, the not-making-you-explain-yourself is kindness. I tell myself this and I almost believe it and then I remember that you came in a person and you have stopped being one in pieces I have watched, that the laugh is gone, that the way you stood at the loom is gone, that the breath in the room has been getting thinner and I have known it has been getting thinner and I have not said so. I have not said so because to say so would be to ask, and I cannot ask, and I have built a story in which my not-asking is generosity. The story is false. I know the story is false. I know it. I tell it anyway, because the alternative is to look at what I am doing to you by simply being in the room with you, by simply requiring you to be in the room with me, by simply needing the room to be silent in the way that I have always needed rooms to be silent, and I do not know what kind of man uses a woman's air without ever asking her if there is enough. I do not know what kind of man does that. I do not want to know. I will not look. I have never been strong enough to look. There is something I am not looking at now. I can almost feel its shape. I will not look.

My brother is in the doorway again. He stands there longer now than he used to. He does not come in. He looks at me and he looks at his brother and he looks at the air between us and he says nothing, and he has begun to say nothing in a particular way, a way that is not his way of saying nothing, a way that is — I think — a kind of asking. He is asking me something with his standing. He is asking me something I have not heard from a man since I came here, and I do not have the words ready, and the words have not been ready for a long time. He brings me water in the afternoons when his brother is on the field. He asks me how the day has been. He asks if there is anything I need. He has not asked me if I am all right, but he has asked me if I am, which is closer than anyone has come in this tent in many nights, and I have not answered, and I think I have not answered because answering him would be the first breath I have spent in this tent on something other than not-disturbing the quiet, and I do not know how to spend breath, and I have forgotten what breath sounds like when it is spent on a word, and there is a wrongness in his brother that I cannot name, a wrongness that is making the air thinner every night, and I am beginning to suspect that the brother in the doorway will be the one I answer in the end, and I do not know what that means, and I do not want to know, because the knowing would require me to have already chosen something I have not let myself know I am choosing. He stands in the doorway. He does not come in. I do not invite him. The air is held. The air is held. The air is held.

IV. Geras

I do not know what is wrong with me. I am a man who has never been afraid of anything I could put a name to, and I have begun to feel a thing I have not named, and the not-naming is not a refusal, it is only that the name has not arrived yet, and I am letting it not-arrive. I come back from the field with the day on me and you are there and you wash the day off and the washing is the same motion as the killing and I want to be washed, I want to be washed, and I want to go out tomorrow, and I want to never go out again, and I am thinking about home. I am thinking about home in a particular way I have not thought about home in nine years. I am thinking about the hall and I am thinking about the hill the hall stands on and I am thinking about the chair at the top of the hall and I am thinking about you. I am thinking about you in the chair. The thought arrives. I am not arguing with it. I am not turning it away. I am letting it sit in me the way I let everything sit in me — fully, without management, because management is not a thing I do. I did not decide to think it. The thinking is what is in me. There is a woman in that chair already. I am not naming her tonight. I have not named her in three nights of thinking. I notice that I have not named her. I notice and I do not stop noticing. I am the man who notices and keeps moving, I have always been the man who notices and keeps moving, and the moving is taking me toward a hall and a chair and you in the chair and her — the one I am not naming — somewhere outside the door of the hall, and I am moving, and the moving is not asking me to stop, and I am not stopping. Atta girl is what I want to say when I watch you across the tent. I have not said it tonight. I am saying it inside myself. I am saying it inside myself in the same voice I will say it on a boat. I will say it on a boat. I am going to put you on a boat. The thought is in me. I am not deciding the thought. The thought is the deciding. I do not know what kind of man thinks like this and keeps moving. I am that man. I have always been that man. I am not going to stop being him for you. I am not going to stop being him for her. The moving is the whole of me. The moving is going home with you in it.

I have begun to feel a country in me. I do not know the country. I have never seen it. It has white stone in it and a hill and a hall and a chair in the hall, and the chair has begun to have my shape in it — not a shape someone could fit me into but a shape I have grown into the wood, the way roots grow into stone — and I did not ask for the country, I did not ask for the chair, I did not ask for the hill or the hall or the shape, and they have begun to be inside me anyway, they have begun to root, and I am afraid because I can feel them rooting and I have not pulled them up. I could have pulled them up. The first night I felt the country I could have pulled it up. The second night was harder. The third night I did not try. I am not trying now. I am letting the country grow inside me and I am afraid of how it feels and I am more afraid of how it does not feel as bad as it should. It does not feel as bad as it should. There is a chair in a hall in a country I have never seen and the chair is becoming mine in the wood of it and I have begun to want it and I do not know how I have begun to want it and I do not know who I am that I can want it. There is a woman in that country. I will not say her name. I do not know her name. I know her name. She is younger than I am. He has not said that either but I have done the counting — he left when she was a girl, and she has been alone in his house since before she knew what alone was, and she did what young women do when they are left in big houses without instruction, and now the doing is going to cost her her door, and she did not have any good options the whole time, and the woman who is going to take her seat is older than she is and has been a peer of the man and has been touched by him in ways she never was, and that woman is me, and I know it, and I am the one who knows it, and she does not, and she will not until the day my men knock on the door of a hall I have not yet seen and put her on a road. Do you know who I am becoming in your hands? Do you know what kind of woman is being made in this tent? Do you know I am older than the one I am replacing? Do you know I have been kinder to her in my head than you have, and that the kindness is the worst thing about me, because the kindness has not stopped me from wanting what I am wanting? I am sitting in this tent and I am wanting a chair that is held by a girl who did not have any good options, and I am not stopping, and I do not know how to stop, and I am not sure I am trying. I am not sure I am trying.

I will take you with me. I have not said this to you. I have said it to myself for four nights running and I have not stopped saying it and I am not going to stop. I am thinking about the boat. I am thinking about which men I will pick to row it. I am thinking about the room at the top of the hall where the light comes in in the morning. I am thinking about you in that room. These thoughts are not plans. These thoughts are not plans because I am not the kind of man who makes plans, I am the kind of man who thinks a thing and then finds himself doing it, and the thinking and the doing are not separated in me by the wall other men have between them. I am thinking about you and the boat and the room and I am going to find myself on the boat with you in it, and I am going to find myself in the room with you in it, and the finding-myself is the only kind of deciding I know how to do, and I have been deciding for four nights without noticing I was deciding, and when my men eventually put a woman out on a road I am going to find myself having done that too, and I am not going to call it a decision then either because I have never called my own decisions decisions in my life. Atta girl. Atta girl. I am going to do this. I have always done what I am doing. I do not have another way of being the man I am. I do not know what kind of man takes a woman home and puts another woman out and never has the moment of choosing in him. I am that man. I have not asked myself if I want to be him. I have never asked myself if I want to be him. I am not going to start tonight.