My friend Jim doesn't know I'm writing this story. But he knows about Ka-Re. Early in our friendship I told him all about her, about her daughters and the different things they guard, about her sword. He has always been intrigued by the story of her home, the Fortress, how it exists in an in-between place. "The way someone can reach it," I told him, "is if he's desperate. Think of yourself as lost, aimlessly wandering, afraid. Maybe you feel paranoid, you see a black crow on the top branch of a nearby tree and you think it's watching you, and then you remember there's been a crow close by every time you've turned around in the last few days. You just start running--and then you see this grassy hill in front of you. You climb it and at the top of that hill is the Fortress, and Ka-Re there to help you."
The idea that it is atop a hill comes again from my earliest ideas about Ka-Re. I pictured the Fortress as resembling my own house, which is on top of a grassy hill. But I think back on that detail now and see it means more than I thought it did. The help doesn't come until the final effort is taken. The hill isn't hard to climb, but if you don't climb it, nothing happens.
I'm on the phone with Jim and we are discussing inconsequential things. But then he says "I was thinking about Ka-Re the other day in one of my bitter moods. I was wondering which of her daughters was the guardian of Prozac."
I do know where Kahtah is. I cannot go there in person without having to explain why I'm visiting a place where I used to work and why I've brought a flashlight.
She's there and she isn't. What's there is a clay statue of a crow I made some years back. I don't know why I made her. I crumpled some newspaper and covered this in foil in a rough bird shape. Then I took clay--just mud from the backyard, really--and covered the foil. I painted the whole thing black with fabric paint and added little red paste gems for eyes. I made wings with feathers from the craft store. Jim made legs from black pipe cleaners. I had her on a shelf in my room for months before I finally decided she looked way too malevolent to keep. It didn't seem like a good idea to throw her away, and I wanted her to have an interesting home. I wanted someone to stumble upon her decades later and be bewildered by the discovery.
So I found a place. I know it well enough that, like Lafayette Park, I can picture it now that the need arises.
Two blocks from me is my old grade school. It is now an art school; I spent a couple of summers as a staffmember there. The building is tan brick and solidly built. I remember I used to stand in line to come back in from recess and look up at a "Fallout Shelter" sign. The terrazzo floor at the entrance has a circle with a "T"; this fits its old name as well as its new one. It helps for the new name that the shape of the letter is suggestive of a tree. Up the stairs then. Past cheery walls festooned with tiny painted handprints, up the metal staircase to the gym. I'm not going to the gym. I go in an alcove toward the kitchen where the fish fries used to be held, turn right and up another staircase with wrought-iron posts. At the top is a balcony overlooking the gym; behind it are doors to storerooms. The first time I went to an assembly I remember looking up to this balcony and those doors and deciding that was university; those were dorm rooms. Now I know they contain what no one can get rid of and what no one can use.
Still travelling in memory, I go in the door furthest from the stairs. On the shelves from the old grade school: boxes of bingo cards and markers, giant Valentine's Day decorations, yards and yards of ancient discolored crepe paper. From the current school: remnants of a Halloween haunted house from several years back, including a donated stuffed goat's head. Back when I used to work here and the kids bugged me to tell them secrets of this creepy old building, I told them there was a dead goat on the top floor, but they didn't believe me.
I can hear her already. My thoughts are turned in her direction and she knows this. "Did you think you would be rid of me if you put me here?" she asks.
I don't answer. I hear a sighing kind of sound coming from the rear of the store room. I move to the back door, and my shadow cast from the bare light bulb comes up to meet me as I open it.
The door opens not on a room, but on the bare space beneath the school's roof. The floor and walls are the wooden exoskeleton of the building. The sigh I am hearing is the wind coming through chinks in seventy-year-old bricks.
The first thing I see is the Land Where Desks Go to Die. Sturdy, boxy shapes are piled one atop another--seats with green metal-framed caves for books underneath and fake wood planks on stout arms above, desk after desk in rows and and aksew, more that can be seen byeond the halo of light from the storeroom. I step in among them, turn right, and start walking on the rafters. Beyond the Land Where Desks Go to Die is the Forest of Hat Racks. The artist who owns this building now received maybe fifty or a hundred hat racks. She had friends paint some to auction as artwork, but most of them ended up here. They are as tall as full grown men and spiked down their length like an unfamiliar variety of cactus.
The light is gone now, but I know what is coming. I have been walking with a wall to my right but the wall is suddenly gone. There is only cool emptiness.
"I know you heard me," she says. "It would be foolish of you to ignore me."
Her voice is even harder to hear than Ka-Re's was. I have to measure every word I think she is saying. Her voice is steady and slow, the voice of one waiting a long, long time for justification.
"I don't know what to say," I answer truthfully.
She chuckles. Any harshness in the sound is barely noticeable. "Why don't you ask me a question, and see if I will answer?"
"But how do I know you'll tell me the truth?" I want to ask, but I don't. This is only one of the problems with our conversation. Out loud I ask "How can I tell if I'm hearing what you would really say, or what I just think you'd say?"
"That is simple enough. If you don't like what you're hearing, that's my voice. Despite what you think, I do not lie. I don't have to. Ask what you want to know."
"I'm trying to understand what motivates you."
"What motivates you? Listen." I feel around, guess it's safe, and sit down on the floor. She waits until I am settled before continuing. "Once there was a young woman who lived all alone in a large house. She had made many ambitious plans for her life before she moved to this house, where for the first time she was in charge of paying bills, fixing every meal, and keeping the place in repair. Daily she worked at a job which ate all her energy--she came home so exhausted the most she could do most nights was to eat some crackers and go to bed. And soon she realized she couldn't even begin to act on any of her grand dreams, so wrapped up she'd become in subsisting, not living. She slid further and further into inaction.
"I was helping the process along. It is one of the things I can do. Again, I do it by telling the truth. I would have no effect if what I said was a lie. But I said things like 'The lightbulbs burn out soon after your replace them' and 'the plumbing is leaking again' and 'the house's foundation is cracked and you have no money set aside to fix it.' She'd look around and it would all be true. I wore her down so far she stopped trying to repair anything. Then I wore her down so far, she would sit in the middle of her living room floor with a pile of bricks that had fallen off her porch and she'd throw these bricks through her own windows, just to accomplish something." I hear a smile in her voice. "When you were a little girl didn't you see apartments with broken windows? Didn't you imagine something like that had happened to all of them? You weren't far wrong, you know. Destruction's a mighty urge."
"That house you just described--that's where Ka-Re now lives," I observed.
"She has no right to it. I did all that work and then watched it get taken over by another."
"And that's why--"
She interrupts quickly. "Do you think you'll learn the answer to a 'why' by sitting here talking to me? It's taking everything you've got just to imagine yourself up here, and how hard is that? This place is as black as the inside of your eyelids and the wind's no louder than a breath. Have you ever worked on anything you are more unsure about?"
"I'm not the girl who hurled bricks through her windows, Kahtah. This isn't about my self-confidence, or whether I'll succeed at what I'm attempting. It's just about whether I'm attempting it."
"You're not attempting anything. You're holding conversations in your head in a mental image of your old grade school. The campaign isn't begun and you're already in retreat."
"What should I do, then? Where should I go?"
Out in the real world the phone rings, breaking my concentration. The black of the school attic becomes the chaotic color of my bedroom. I pick my way through to the phone and accept an invitation from my sister to go with her to New York City.
---
I am scared to go to New York City. I am scared the night before the trip and sleep fitfully with the beginnings of migraine.
I see the word "anthrax" in the morning paper and my stomach clenches like a fist. Arriving two hours early at the airport I duck into its chapel, thinking of knights and their all-night prayer vigils before battle. I put my bag on the seat next to me--and hear it ticking. I hadn't packed a clock. Alarmed, I unzip it to discover my CD player is vibrating because the batteries had come a little loose. It had never done such a thing before. Why now? I take out the batteries and the ticking stops.
There is familiar comfort in boarding the plane shrouded over in anxious mindfulness. I am hyper-aware during the crawl from the gate to the runway. My absolute presence in the moment the tires leave the ground would put a Zen monk to shame. If it weren't for the many strange rattling noises (have planes always made this much noise?) and the steep banking (why does the pilot have to make such a sudden turn now? Can't he wait until we're higher up? It's not like we're about to miss the exit to New York), I would glory in being disconnected from earth. Five minutes later the pilot's voice: "Uh, folks, we just encountered a flock of geese up here and one hit the windshield. Not a problem, but we're turning back to check the engines, make sure those are okay..." We land in St. Louis and fifteen minutes later take off again. This time I recognize some of the noises and make peace with the way the plane shakes on liftoff. Surely, I think, it doesn't do me the least bit of good to tune in to every wobble. If they are normal, I've nothing to worry about. If they aren't, I'm not going to be able to take a screwdriver to the problem and save the day. It is sudden comfort to relinquish the illusion of control over my own destiny.
In a few short hours I am in New York, trundling down streets in the airport shuttle. The woman next to me takes one look at the way I am dressed and pegs me as someone headed for Greenwich Village. It is no small satisfaction to answer, when she asks what I'm doing in New York, "I'm visiting my sister who's starring in an opera in Lincoln Center." She's a native and provides running commentary on the sights we pass. She tries to tell us where the World Trade Center used to be, but I have no mental image of the skyline to contrast with what is before me. I cannot picture absence. She gets wide-eyed when we enter a tunnel. "We're either going into a tunnel or onto a bridge," the driver says. "What difference does it make? Could you really survive either of them blowing up?"
I'm dropped off at an apartment building on Central Park West and greet my sister and newest nephew. The day passes in a blur of crying baby and orientation to cramped quarters. Late in the day I check my email. There's a message from a friend to whom I'd mentioned I own some swords. He says he finally realizes why I've got them--because I bellydance, and sometimes a bellydancer will balance a sword on her head. But he's wrong. My interest in Pointy Weapons long pre-dates my interest in jiggling my hips about. As night comes and my sister and my nephew sleep, I lay in the sofa bed, the blanket wrapped snug around my shoulders, and try to hear Kahtah's voice. "Destruction is beautiful and thrilling," I think she says. "You love swords because they are gorgeous. There is nothing like light gleaming off the well-honed edge. But what makes them beautiful renders them able to kill. You cannot separate form and function. If you like them sharp, which you do, then you like them deadly.
"You have to accept that a part of you is in love with destruction. In childhood you built towers of blocks and delighted in knocking them down. Stories of Pompeii and Herculaneum swallowed whole by lava fascinated you. You gathered with neighbors to watch in openmouthed awe as that old wooden house went up in flames, a torch against the night sky.
"That's what you're afraid of, isn't it? You're afraid to admit that when those planes rammed those towers and they burned like smokestacks and they shuddered to ground amid plumes of almost volcanic ash, you were impressed with the sight. You were sickened at yourself for feeling the thrill of it, but you knew you weren't alone--so many people left the tower then turned to watch the fire. That's why they all had to run when the building fell. They wanted to watch the danger until the danger almost buried them."