Serafíne
I emptied onto shifting sheets,
Staring rosary holes in my ceiling,
Waiting for my purpose to deliver,
And reveal itself to me
But all I hear are subway trains
Bang against their bedrock lanes
So I bang a little too...
I'm a Friday night girl
Bracing for Sunday to come
Bracing for Sunday to come.
- Neko Case
Serafíne is Not Okay quite nearly as often as she is Okay. Not Okay is Okay too. She stays out all night; all weekend; all week. She brings strangers home, and then new strangers, and then strangers are not strangers anymore. Some nights three a.m. has crawled into four a.m. has rolled itself over into dawn and it is cold, freezing, the grass is cracked and bent with frost and someone is trying, again, to kindle a fire in the old clay chiminea in the middle of the garden and you have a bottle in one hand and a child's plastic rake between your toes and the sky livid as a wound, dawn crawling all around the cracks of it.
Your heart is an egg, this rich yolk of promise at the center-of-it. Some nights it burns with the atom-fusing fire of the sun. Some nights that yolk ends up smeared against the wall of the bathroom of a third-rate walk-up in Soho, which is fucking rich because you live in Denver, Colorado now.
That's where you are.
Though maybe not where you ever thought you'd be.
--
So, Thursday she has a cold and Friday she's feeling better and wanders barefoot into the kitchen in the boxers and old tee she sometimes wears and grabs her leather-bound notebook and some provisions and retreats back to her room. Music, this deep bass throb, from the speakers of the stereo system Dan cobbled together and wired up for her, hidden amongst the wild detritus of her many, many Things. The pile of various versions of spike-heeled platformed black leather boots and stilettos and that spreads like a black lake vomited from the mouth of her closet, the clothes, which are Everywhere. The strange bits of jewelry and found things that function as jewelry and ridiculously high-end pieces meant to mimic found things that function as jewelry except are also encrusted with expensive crystal or studded with black spinel. The books - there are a few, almost all poetry - strewn in front of the bookcase. The wide windows and the garden view and the enormous bed piled with white: sheets, soft as sin, comforter, slick as a cloud, which get washed regularly because Sera does know where the washer is but someone else also has to change them from washer to dryer, and Dan nearly always lugs them upstairs again and makes her fucking bed for her because
please
pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaase
she never gets the corners right.
Somehow whether she's alone or has guests or even Guests the covers always end up in a winding nest somewhere nestled in the half-hollowed heart of the mattress and she sleeps there warm and infinitely cozy, impossible to disturb when she finally falls asleep.
---
No response to Dee who knocks open-handed against the door to Sera's room in that way people have, the resonance of her palm cupped against the wood, the solid point of contact. Dee is tall and it is morning and she does things up. Has on a silky robe printed with tattooed roses and her black-as-ink hair in rollers and somehow even when her make-up is scrubbed clean her mouth still has a crimson stain to it. Like she's just eaten some poisoned apple.
"Feeling any better? There's pain chocolat in the kitchen."
No response. Dee doesn't think anything of it. Or at least, she doesn't think anything particular of it. It's not even noon, yet. Sera doesn't usually stir from her bed until 3-or-so. Not even for roller derby playoffs.
--
Dee's hand hammers against the door in near-perfect time to the insistent throbbing of her head. There's something behind her. It's a wall but it feels like something larger and darker and far more grotesque. She does not remember falling out of bed and crawling into her bathroom but that's what she does, trailing her comforter behind her like a winding cloth. The bathroom tiles are so cool against her fevered temple that she spends a hallucinatory half-hour trying to work out the geometry of pushing the entirety of her face into the entirety of the wall and becoming both things at once, but even when she drops herself into the space where all things merge (and it is not easy for her, like this, these are not the doors she opens, these are not the pieces of herself into which she dissolves) and are and were and will be the wall is still stubbornly blank.
Still, cool. Her breath warm against it, her mouth open, her reflection interrupted by the grout lines but bearing a hallucinatory familiarity.
Sera is grateful to the wall for keeping her upright.
She does not know why she's bleeding.
Sometimes she forgets that the blood is hers.
--
Does not remember getting to her knees or bending over the toilet, her hair spilling all around her. There's no one sitting on the edge of the tub to pick up her hair and hold it out of her way when she starts to puke. Just water at first. The toasted cheese Dan made for her to go with the Campbell's tomato soup late last night, when she was still feeling okay.
The Campbell's tomato soup, which looks like blood.
And then the blood.
It is fresh; bright crimson. Smears against the white porcelain toilet so beautifully like the stain of some mad sun against unbroken snow. In between heaves, Sera wipes her mouth against the back of her right hand, staring down, her shadow a wild construct over the toilet, and she thinks of Where the wild Things Are, just the shaggy shape of a child's nightmares,
which are nothing like the usual sort.
It almost makes her smile.
Then she starts to cry, because Jesus fuck when you get right down to it, down to the seams of things and the borders and the crosses, the places where your skin slides open, bleeding light, bleeding dark, just fucking bleeding, everything is so -
so so
so
beautif -
--
The convulsions redouble, violent enough that she does not even hear Dan knocking, knocking, knocking, trying the knob. She is puking hard enough, thoroughly enough that her knuckles go stark-white as she grips the edge of the toilet seat and each wave is so furious, so wracking that she pisses herself as she heaves over the toilet in wretched, choking waves until there is
nothing
left.
The dry heaves are worse.
There is not even the momentary relief of the actual purge, just another blinding, banded wave of nausea and blood, and blood, and blood.
--
In the hallway: Dan, cursing and knocking louder before finally leaving a tray for her on the floor in the upstairs hall beside her bedroom door. These are the things Dan brings Sera when she's sick: a pot of Darjeeling and a bottle of Stranahan's and fresh gingered ale laden with lime.
Some toast, dry, the crusts sliced neatly off.
She hates the crusts when she's sick.
When he comes back to check on her a couple of hours later, the tray is gone, so there's that. He knocks again. It is late afternoon.
What he says is: How'd that go down. Going to the store do you need anything. And, rattling the handle, finding the door locked once again, Jesus Christ Sera I know you think you're infectious but stop locking the door.
What she hears is: the buzz of an insect beneath the root of her tongue, the sighing of the dead skin of trees, the meandering insistence of an intolerable universe beneath her skin.
No, a fly in the room.
There is a fly in the room.
She can feel it inside her. She can feel the walls of her cells and each cell its own solar system, the nucleus a warming star being pierced and consumed and devoured and she has it in her to heal those walls, everything is one and every one thing is inside her and outside her; this is how it works, her skin splits itself open and opens her to the divine, which is the profane, which is the magickal, which is the mundane, which is simply
all.
--
Later she draws a bath. Still in her clothes, skull-covered boxers and her old band's "World Tour" t-shirt with the names of the places they played scrawled down the back in various hands in fabric ink. The water is lukewarm to cool and she draws it deep enough that the constant shudder of the overflow drain is her irregular companion and the water sloshes over the edges and spills onto the subway tile floor, the floofy hot pink bath mat.
She drinks the entire pot of Darjeeling and some of the Stranahans and refills her nalgene bottle at the tap of the tub. The overflow drain gurgles its inconstant little song.
Sera rests her cheek against the edge of the tub.
It does not occur to her to report these things. To open her phone and call up Ginger and leave them all an account of her suffering. She does not remember that she has a phone, not all the time, and sometimes it buzzes with each new incoming text message which dovetails with the sound of that fly in the room.
In the corner above the bookcase, tangled amidst the silk skeins of an mobile / collage she bought from a thirty-seven year old mother of two at an Art in the Park show on a certain rainy day three Septembers ago; at the back of her throat.
--
Sera feels yesterday and today and tomorrow all braided tight inside her. Lashed together unbroken except for the frame around them: which is entirely dark.
She sloshes out of the bath later and she wants to make herself better; it's an ache inside her but lodged underneath is the warning she half-remembers, half-understands in the marrow of her bones. What's left is to endure.
Which she does.
She is curled up in her bed when the walls start to bleed. The mound of white sheets and the white comforter bloodstained now. Hair wet snakes around her throat, still smelling sour from the blood-and-vomit. The windows are closed but the curtains are open and late afternoon sunlight is streaming in,
when the walls start to bleed.
Then the voices come, and that fly is under her skin. Replicating, reproducing itself and she starts squeezing her wrist, digging her nails into the skin of her forearm, trying to dig the fucking things out. Shaking, muffling her cries with one of the pillows, biting down until she can taste the downy goose feathers gamey beneath the ticking.
They tickle her throat as they go down.
Are those feathers? Or something else, entirely.
--
He considers forcing the door; gives himself deadlines of the this is when I act variety. That sort.
When he goes back upstairs, though, the tray that he left midafternoon is gone. He tells himself it's a sign; leans in to listen at the door. Tries knocking again see but figures she's asleep. She has always been impossible to awaken.
The lights are off and the hall floor is old, dark hardwood. He doesn't see the smear of blood.
--
Later, she is dying; her skin is melting, like wax. It is sloughing off her bones. She cannot help but pin herself open; tear out her sternum and breathe in the universe. Her cells pop like soap bubbles and she is the sap and the root and the electrical impulse coursing through the arm of a woman reaching to rest her hand on the crown of her child's head and the sun remembered by the moon and the moon remembered by the sun,
she is everything,
everything,
she is
burning,
and as everyone who has ever kissed her knows,
she was always meant to burn.
--
Midnight or close to it: he comes back to check on her.
The door is open. Sera is gone.
