Voluptuous Hell
Today I am flying ten thousand miles to Sydney to visit my sister who I haven’t seen in two years and who left home for Australia in 1999. I am desperate to leave the strangling gray of New England. For weeks I have put myself to sleep with the happy thought of walking my two small nephews to and from school. I am hoping to give my sister a hand and be a pleasant distraction for her boys whose father disappeared from their lives suddenly and without explanation several months ago. Though, I nearly canceled my trip, even had the woman from the airline on the phone and only hung up thanks to another incoming call, because I am newly terrified of flying.
It isn’t just the flying that has kept me awake late at night, envisioning exactly what I’ll do when the plane crashes, (turn on Nina Simone, pull my hat over my eyes, hold the stranger’s hand beside me) it’s the ocean, with its black indifference and invisible death that has led me to write a goodbye note to my mother and leave it on my desk and actually make a “Nina Simone for Crashing into the Ocean” playlist and double check my room for anything that might not speak well of me after death like the black polyester bustier with its one hundred cruel hooks that I bought one night when I was bored.
I’ve always had an appropriate fear of death but lately this fear has seized me. I feel keenly my need to stay alive. This likely has something to do with the fact that in two months I’ll be marrying a man who, for years, I longed for and loved. Once, I watched from my living room as he walked past my house on his way up the hill. It was spring and purple. I remember him pulling a small branch from the lilac tree and seeing the whole tree convulse. He twirled the branch around in his callused hands and left tiny pools of soft blossoms in his wake. I’ve never felt such a clear need to be near another person. Still, two months before our wedding, I’ve left for Australia as some small resistance against the certainty of this need.
On the plane, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it’s 3 am in New York City and because I am flying at night, I lose an entire calendar day which serves as a testament to the absurdity of man’s ordering of time and space. The flight attendants have enforced sleep on us all by shutting off the cabin lights, and fear’s fluorescent poison drips into my mind through a crack in the back of my skull. I am lizard-brained petrified and shaking. I’m watching Keeping up with the Kardashians on the toenail sized screen in front of me, hoping to God that the plane at least holds off on crashing until I’m watching something more substantial like the Abraham Lincoln biopic.
In Sydney there are rose buds in my tea and confetti-colored birds singing me awake in the morning and little Max, who stops us on our walks home to smell the sage bush and rub its needles on our wrists. There is also my sister’s neon orange scooter which we ride down steep hills and her high-ceilinged, open-air apartment that is so full of color it’s like living inside of a box of Legos. The sand on the beaches looks and feels exactly like brown sugar, and there is the Ocean, which we swim in daily and which makes me feel strong and hopeful and slightly less afraid.
I spend all of my afternoons with Max, who is 6, while his older brother plays at a friend’s house. Max and I try new flavors of bubble tea each day in cups lined with dragon fruit. We take our drinks to the park or the pool and he tells me where the best bathrooms and swings and candy shops in the neighborhood are and which parks to avoid on account of the enormous dinosaur-like gangs of Ibis birds. He asks me how many ways there are to die. He asks me if he falls sideways, face first into quicksand but keeps his feet on stable land if he will die. He asks me if I’d rather be a window or a tooth. I think he might be a genius. He told his teacher his dad died in prison, though his dad isn’t dead nor is he in prison, in fact he’s moved not even a mile away, but to Max he is gone. And I think of his brilliant little mind making sense of this crater and how at least when a person is dead you know why they’re not with you.
While I’m in Australia a Boeing 737 crashes shortly after take-off, killing all 157 people on board. Five days later an Australian man, my same age, murders 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A fact which, even as I write about it now, shrivels me. I see the same kinds of photographs I’ve seen hundreds of times; piles of flowers, drug store candles, mothers with their arms stretched and clenched towards something outside of the frame. “It is only in others whom we love as ourselves that we can contemplate human misery” is what Simone Weil says. Maybe the only thing I can say about good love is that it has made it newly impossible for me to look away. It has collapsed the tidy, unencumbered reverence towards pain I’ve felt for much of my life. I witness from a distance the grief of these people, the colorless isolation that must follow such loss, and I feel body-less and far from land.
For various reasons it takes officials several days to identify the Christchurch victims. Two full days after the shootings and the process of identification is ongoing though nearing an end. I hear the woman on the news say, “all bodies will return to families” and I repeat it several times confused by the language and its utter lack of specificity. Which bodies? Whose families? But the more I say it the more I am convinced of its strange accuracy; that these bodies belong to families, that there is little clarity in who is returning them, or how they are being returned and yet they will return. The circularity and vagueness of this phrasing feels both sickening and correct; the indivisibility of the living from the dead.
There is no logic in loss but that of the body. “I bequeath my soul to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your bootsoles,” writes Whitman. In the following days I spin these lines around and again in my head like a talismanic mantra reminding me the Earth is comprised of flesh.
On the hottest day of my visit, still shaky and fearful of mine and everyone’s mortality, I hop onto a bus (which I am sure will be the target of some tragic attack, so I won’t put my sunscreen on now, I’ll wait to see if I even survive the bus before I waste the little that’s left of it in the tube. Good thinking.) and head towards Coogee Beach and convince myself almost fully, that no one would attack a bus in a city where every word sounds like baby talk; Coogee, Chippendale, Darlinghurst.
Outside, it is the exact kind of day I dreamed of in January when the whole world felt alone and full of mucus. The sun and ocean shimmy together in a silent disco as everyone sips the last true days of summer. And there it is again, the brown-sugar sand which now I believe I could eat in handfuls without getting sick. Walking along the coastal path I find a sign painted with the words “women and children only” and I know whatever is down that path is where I want to be.
Down cracked cement steps and behind a wall of thick shrubs there is a quarter mile of orange ocean cliffs covered with women sunning themselves like seals, sprawled across brightly patterned towels. Tucked between cliffs is a pool with edges made from sea rock and stone slabs, where water pours in and out with the tide, keeping its bathers safe from the sea’s full abyss. Dark red creatures, like Jell-O quarters suction onto the rocks. When pushed like a button, a small, tentacled piece of fuschia flesh flowers and then hides. I plunge and swim. I melt into the shape of my enemy. I sit on the edge between the bath and the sea, where every shape of woman basks in this navel of Earth.
That night at dinner the fear returns. At dinner, I casually mention to my sister that I am not looking forward to the flight home, withholding from her my certainty that these are my last days on Earth. She tells me to buy a bag of oranges and divide up the hours of the flight with peeling, eating and holding the rind up to my nose. Another genius. Max and I head to the grocery store.
On the way to the airport, with both boys in the back seat, we stop for gas and are hit with an intense honey fragrance. “Cosmic Bark,” my sister says and, after pumping her gas, reaches over a fence to pick some for me. After some coaxing, Max sacrifices his sandwich baggie to house my pink flowers.
Now on the plane and sure of my imminent demise, I turn on Nina Simone. I peel an orange. I wrap a huge scarf around my head and stick scraps of the rind into the folds in my scarf so the scent smashes against my nose. I have one hand on the bag of Cosmic Bark and the other poised to grab onto my neighbor.
The engine throws me back into my seat and I pull my hat over my eyes and think of Max. At the park he lays belly-first in the swings. He turns slowly in circles to wind up the chain as tight as it can go and gives me that wide-eyed look of a magician daring to dazzle. Then he sets his limbs loose. His arms and legs flail and spin and his shoes get launched as he yells deliriously at me in between gags of air that he is flying. Then the chain snaps back in place and his body goes slack and ragged and he looks up at me from his dangling neck, beaming.
