Voices in the Night (16 page)

A sword in my bed divides me from my eighth wife. If I love her, I must not touch her; to do so would be to violate a vow that she herself has exacted. True to my word, I remain inches from her, sick with desire. My plight would be lessened if I were never to share my bed with her, but my eighth wife insists that she lives solely for these moments. Mindful of my suffering, which is also hers, she sometimes conceals her body from me, slipping between the sheets with her quilted down coat zipped up to her chin. At other times, suffering for my suffering, and desiring to reward my feat of denial with the one pleasure she can permit, she’ll adorn herself with blue-green eye shadow, purple-black mascara, crimson lipstick, expensive oils, creams, and lotions, and dabs of perfume behind the ears and on each wrist, and display herself, on her side of the sword, in shimmering and translucent underclothes in a variety of fashionable styles. It’s possible of course that my eighth wife wishes only that I’d violate my vow, despite her assurance that to do so would be to destroy her love for me by making her lose respect for my word. How else to explain her presence in my bed, her provocative underclothes, her frequent headaches, her prolonged sighs? Indeed it’s tempting to believe that the real test isn’t whether I can demonstrate my love for her by remaining true to my word, but whether I love her fiercely enough to
smash through an arbitrary prohibition—an event she secretly desires and desperately awaits. But the very temptation of this thought is a warning: in my state of violent desire, dare I trust an idea that encourages me to betray my word and to side with the passion I’m struggling to overcome? It’s also true that, despite my suffering, I’m proud of my success in keeping my word; to succumb to temptation would be to experience a loss of self-esteem. Is she perhaps desirable to me only insofar as I’m able to overcome desire? In that case it’s I who have encouraged her to exact my vow, it’s I alone who am the source of my torment. Sometimes a strange longing comes: to plunge the sharp sword deep, deep into my eighth wife’s side. In this desire to be rid of her and thereby end my suffering, I detect a secret flaw. My suffering, however painful, is always qualified by the possibility of failure, the possibility that, despite everything, I’ll become like other men and break my word at last; her death, by removing that possibility, would remove the sole thought that relieves my anguish. For all these reasons, I understand with terrible clarity that my plight can never change. In this understanding I sense a final danger: by believing that nothing can change, do I not relax my will, do I not open myself all the more to temptation? And with a last, desperate burst of strength I rouse myself to new rigors of wariness.

There are times when I can’t bear the company of anyone but my ninth wife, despite the little secret we never discuss. What does it matter to me if, bending to gaze into her brilliant dark eyes, I see her looking a little to the left or right, so that I have to shift my position slightly to create the illusion that we’re gazing deep into each other’s eyes? Sometimes, as she crosses the room with her graceful strides, she’ll happen to knock against me if I’m not quick enough to step out
of the way. On these occasions she doesn’t stop, doesn’t acknowledge me, and the slight smile on her lips remains unchanged. In every way my ninth wife is cheerful and obliging. Why then should I complain if, holding out my hand lovingly to lead her toward the bed, I see her stare past me? Why should I give it a second thought if she steps on my foot as she walks to the bed alone and lies down with her little smile? Once, as I was about to plunge my face into the thickets of her hair, I was stopped by a faint sound that appeared to be coming from her throat. When I bent my ear against her neck, I heard a dim whirring. A small adjustment proved necessary, after which, despite the interruption, I was able to devote myself entirely to the pleasures of the dark.

In an atmosphere of drawn curtains, medicinal smells, and perpetual twilight, I visit my tenth wife, who’s burning up. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are unnaturally bright; on the dark coverlet her pale arm has the whiteness of bone. Illness consumes her. Fever parches her lips, burns along her throat and eyelids; her ears are hot. Her straw-colored hair, brown in the dusk-light and uncombed, streams on the pillow. Her hair was once straight and obedient, but illness has released a hidden wildness: it falls in snarls and tangles, plunges over the pillow-edge, tumbles along the bedspread, where it lies sprawled and spent. I’ve brought her a few violets and marigolds, picked from our garden, but when she strains to raise herself, lines of tension crease her forehead, as if she’s struggling against two hands holding her shoulders down; after a while she gives up and falls back exhausted. I lay the flowers on the bedside table, near the digital clock. A glass of water, decorated with orange and green fish, stands on the table beside a box of tissues. When I hold the glass to
her mouth, she drinks eagerly, desperately; suddenly she turns her head away. Water flashes on her face like a wound. I wipe her lips with a tissue; they’re cracked like dry leather. With my fingertips I stroke her hot, pale forearm, her bony cheeks. Under her fevered eyelids her large eyes glitter. I want to comfort my tenth wife, I want to lavish her with attentions, but there’s little I can do except sit on the chair next to the bed. In this dusky room, in this world removed from the world, I feel myself bursting with health. My vigor strikes me as intolerable, like a shrill, continual noise. What to do? Her illness excludes me—since she cannot be well, I have to become sick. Slowly I bend down and kiss her dry, hot mouth. I want to inhale her fiery germs, I want to drink her fever, feel her disease glowing inside me like hot spiced wine. Deftly I slip under the heavy covers, releasing an odor of stale bedsheets. Am I mistaken, or do I sense a slight soreness in my throat? My forehead feels hot. Is it my imagination, or has my hand grown pale? I will find her, I’ll join her at last in her own land. Eagerly I meet her gaze. Her eyes, weary and glittering, stare at me as one might stare at a sudden animal across a stream.

Whenever there’s work to be done, when things can’t be put off a second longer, I turn to my eleventh wife, who knows exactly what to do. It’s she who climbs the tall ladder and fastens the loose gutters in place, lifting her hammer into the blue sky as she plucks a gutter nail from between her teeth, while down on the grass I steady the ladder rails with both hands. She’s the one who strips the paint from the front porch with the electric sander, bending over the boards in her dust mask and safety glasses, she it is who repairs the cracked ceiling above the basement landing, caulks the second-floor window frames, installs copper flashing in a roof valley, replaces a rotted porch post,
while I carry paint cans, fetch drill bits and putty knives, and bring her large glasses of ice water that she drinks lustily, with her head flung back. Standing in the shade at the side of the house, I look up to see her crawling across sunny roof slopes or leaning far out of upper windows. Tools glint on her body like jewels; her bare arms quiver with energy. Once she begins a task, it’s difficult for her to stop. At night I can hear the blows of her hammer on the roof; at dawn, through the partly open blinds of my bedroom window, I can see her ankles and the rung of a ladder. Sometimes my door opens in the dark and she comes to me, like a shout in the night. She lifts a screwdriver from behind her ear; carpet tacks fall from her hair. She’s efficient, she’s brisk. Afterward, as I turn my head in the hope of resting against her shoulder, I see her, through eyes heavy with sleep, striding about the room, measuring heights with a metal tape, screwing brackets into the wall, swinging up two-by-fours that rise into a row of shelves.

If I speak of my twelfth wife as a negative woman, it’s because she is the sum of all that did not happen between us. In a crowded room on a summer night at a party overlooking a lake, I did not cross over and sit down beside her. I did not, seated beside her, begin a long, ambiguous conversation, during which I bent my face closer and closer, while she, laughing lightly, tucked one leg under a thigh and brushed a few crumbs of potato chip from her sleeve. That night we did not walk hand in hand along the shore while inventing new names for the constellations and bursting into wild laughter. In July we did not pick up a rented Opel at the Zurich airport and drive along winding roads past green hillsides spotted with red-tiled roofs on our way to a high hotel with a balcony that looked down at the shining water of Lake Geneva and the dark towers of the Castle of Chillon.
One night in August, in the amusement park, I did not, seated on a blue horse, watch her throw back her head and laugh unheard among carousel melodies as she rose and fell on her red horse with the white bridle and the golden mane. The negations multiply swiftly, forming a rich pattern in reverse; spawned by an initial gesture of refusal, our unacted history outgrows the narrow compass of accomplished lives. We cannot end, for time does not contain us; nor can we suffer change, for the structure of our negative biography rests on the unchangeable foundation of nothingness. We are more than mortal, we two. All lovers envy us.

In a sense, I’ve never seen my thirteenth wife. If, as I help her slip out of her winter coat with the thick fur collar, I look away from her green eyes to watch her pale yellow hair lift up and fall onto the white wool of her sweater, then when I return my gaze to her face I’m lost in admiration of her rich brown eyes and the convolutions of her mahogany-dark hair against her crimson blouse. A moment later, returning from the closet, I’m cast into reverie by her melancholy gray irises with little flecks of amber around the pupils. On a single walk across the carpet, she displays her calves in black nylon tights shimmery as liquid, striped orange-and-white kneesocks turned down once at the top, rose-colored silk stockings imported from Italy, and paint-spattered jeans with the cuffs rolled up, while each turn of her neck reveals a new profile, each movement of her wrist a new hand. The incessant changefulness of my thirteenth wife may of course arise from something deceptive in her nature, as if she’s continually casting up new images in an effort to evade responsibility for any one of them, but I incline to a different explanation. Her clothes, her gestures, her faces, all are familiar to me, though sometimes so faintly
that the memory is a kind of tremor at the back of the brain. It’s the peculiar fate of my thirteenth wife to evoke innumerable pasts that aren’t hers; she is composed of my memories of other women. To see her is to experience all the women barely noticed in public parks and crowded bus terminals, the half-seen women sitting at wrought-iron tables under the awnings of outdoor restaurants or waiting in line at ice-cream stands at the edges of small towns on hot summer nights, all the women passing on suburban sidewalks through rippling spots of sun and shade, the briefly stared-at women rising past me on escalators with glossy black handrails in busy department stores, the silent women reaching up for books on the shelves of libraries or sitting alone on benches under skylights in malls, all the vanished girls in high school hallways, the motionless women in wide-brimmed hats standing in gardens in oil paintings in forgotten museums, the black-and-white women in long skirts and high-necked blouses packing suitcases in lonely hotel rooms in old movies, all the shadowy women looking up at departure times in fading train stations or leaning back drowsily on dim trains rushing toward dissolving towns. My thirteenth wife is abundant and invisible; she exists only in the act of disappearing. This perpetual annihilation is her highest virtue, for by ceasing to exist she increases her being; by refusing to be a particular woman, she becomes a multitude. Though I am denied my thirteenth wife, who is always other, denial is her generosity, and I’m grateful to her for more lasting gifts: the gift of memory, the gift of desire, the gift of astonishment.

A
re you tired of life’s burdens? Welcome to Arcadia, a peaceful woodland retreat founded over one hundred years ago to meet the needs of a very special clientele. Located on more than 2,000 acres of gently rolling spruce and pine forest, Arcadia offers a variety of comfortable and affordable accommodations suited to every taste. Choose among our 48 cozy two-room log cabins, each with stone fireplace and knotty pine paneling, our 36 three-room cottages with private patio, and, for persons with special needs, our 12 guest rooms and suites on the second floor of the Estate. Whatever your age or condition, our expert staff of highly trained Life Counselors and Transition Facilitators will see to your every wish as they work tirelessly with you to help you achieve your personal goal. Although we pride ourselves on our award-winning success rate, which over the past five years has averaged a gratifying 97%, we understand that each individual must advance at his/her own pace. Here at Arcadia we are committed to serving you in a manner most compatible with your particular lifestyle and temperament as together we find the method that will best result in a successful outcome.

Each cabin and cottage is situated on a tract of lush woodland set off by attractive fencing that assures maximum privacy while allowing easy access to all public places, such as trails, streams, and lakes, as well as the deep gorges that are a popular and much-loved feature of our retreat. All cabins and cottages come with fully equipped kitchen, comfy bedroom, modern bath with shower, and screened front porch with cushioned Adirondack chairs and glider. All beds have premium plush mattresses and triple sheeting in luxurious linens. Refrigerators are stocked with bottles of fresh spring water. Although our program policy does not permit computers or cell phones, each cabin and cottage comes equipped with a convenient and easy-to-use touch-tone phone that allows direct twenty-four-hour communication with the Main Office, located to the left of the entrance on the first floor of the Estate. Meals are prepared in our own kitchen and delivered right to your doorstep three times a day by our specially trained Food Delivery Personnel. Our program encourages and protects your privacy and solitude, but members of our staff are available for a talk or a personal visit at any time of the day or night as you make your way toward the decisive moment.

Our residents hail from all fifty states and five territories, as well as from nations the world over. We welcome guests of all races, all walks of life, all religious and nonreligious orientations. If you are weary and seek rest, if you are heart-sore and cannot find your way, Arcadia is the place for you. Do you feel you have come to the end of the line? Does life seem to hold no promise? Do you wake up each day wishing
you had never been born? Look no further. Our doors are open wide. We are here to lend a helping hand. All you who feel that life is without meaning, all you who can’t bear it for another second but bear it anyway, you who feel unloved, unseen, unwanted, forgotten: Come to us. We will show you the way.

After the terrible accident I wouldn’t leave my house for two months. All I could see was my wife and five-year-old son screaming in the flaming car. I slept badly in short snatches during the day and roamed the empty house all night, stopping in different rooms. I left the lights on in every room and never changed the bulbs. They went out one by one. In the end I was living in the dark. The dark felt right. A friend tried to rescue me. I went to grief counseling but they wanted to take my grief away which was all I had. One day in a doctor’s office I opened a magazine and saw an ad for Arcadia. This place has changed everything. After only ten days I know myself for the first time and I know what it is that I have to do. They make you see everything clearly here. Nothing will stop me now. Thank you, Arcadia.

Our skilled and friendly staff of Transition Facilitators will provide you with the kind of personalized attention that lies at the heart of our innovative program. A facilitator will be assigned to you on the day of your arrival and you will meet with him/her on a regular day-to-day basis. In addition to these private instructional sessions, your facilitator may ask you to attend one or more motivational group discussions
in order to enhance the decision-making process. Our goal is your goal: the overcoming of obstacles. Each of our residents has more than one obstacle to overcome before confronting the final one. Our results-oriented program is specially geared to your needs and we will work with you twenty-four seven to help you achieve a viable solution.

The fourteen gorges that cut through our retreat offer an abundance of natural beauty and unique opportunity. Steep, rocky cliffs plunge some three hundred feet toward fast-moving rapids. The cliff-tops are dangerous and only partially protected by old and damaged railings. Narrow, unrailed walkways traverse the gorges and provide breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside and the rapids far below. Rocks continually fall from the cliffsides and may sometimes be heard over the sound of rushing cascades and waterfalls. These gorges are among our most sought-after attractions, drawing residents to the crumbling cliff-tops and unrailed walkways at all times of the day and night.

Before I came here I was lonely and depressed and cried every day like a little girl even though I am a grown woman of twenty-eight. I have always been like this because something is wrong with me and nobody knows what it is except I don’t look right especially my head. When I was little the other children made fun of me and called me names and later boys used me and were cruel. I have tried religion but that didn’t work and I have tried cutting open my wrists but I never knew how to do it right. My life was a dark place and a living hell and there was no way out for me until one day I heard of this
place. Here it isn’t anything like the way it is out there. They talk to you and tell you things you need to hear. They show you the things that are getting in your way and they show you how to overcome them and follow your inner voices. Now I know what I have to do and I am ready. Before that time comes I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone here at Arcadia especially my facilitator John who has helped me see the way. It has really meant a lot to me.

One reason for the high success rate of our time-tested program is our understanding of the role of failure in helping you accomplish your long-term objective. Your success is our ultimate aim, but success does not come to everyone in the same way or over the same period of time. Our facilitators understand that failure is sometimes a necessary step on your personal journey. What is failure? you may ask yourself. Failure is a form of
hesitation
. It means you are not yet ready. We will show you that the act of failure contains within it the secret you are looking for. We will teach you to welcome your failure, to make it part of yourself in order to overcome it. Our motto is: The Road of Failure leads to the Palace of Success. Do you find yourself hesitating on the brink? Do you have a tendency to draw back at the last moment? Are you afraid? Do not be discouraged. The act of hesitation is a gathering of energy. Failure is success that has not yet been given a chance to reveal itself completely.

For those in search of motivational inspiration, our Motivational Witness Program can provide just the boost you need. You may sign
up for this popular program as either a witness or a principal. The principal is motivated by the presence of witnesses, who in turn are inspired by the act of witnessing to pursue the same method or select a different one. Further details are available in Informational Packet 3A at the Main Office.

Big shout-out to all the good folks in Arcadia for a really great program. I wasn’t really all that motivated when I first came out here but now I’m revved up and rarin’ to go. One thing I really like is the Motivational Witness Program, where you can get to see how other rezzies make their choices. That’s what I like about this place—you find out what’s right for you and then you go do it. Trust me on this one. Long story short: I’m psyched.

The lakes of Arcadia are peaceful, still, and deep. Enclosed by gently sloping wooded hills, our lakes are readily accessed by easy-to-walk trails, many of which were formed hundreds of years ago at a time when Native American tribes settled in the area. The pristine beauty of our ancient lakes stimulates meditation and resolution. Although speedboats, Jet Skis, and motorized watercraft of any kind are strictly prohibited on our noise-free lakes, residents are encouraged to make use of the rowboats and canoes that you will find waiting for you at many points along the quiet shores. Small, wooded islands are found in many of the larger lakes, and for some residents the islands with their dark trees and magisterial branches prove more inviting than the lakes themselves, with their silent waters that go down, far down, to depths that no one has ever measured.

The first hope is the hope that diverts you from your task. It is the hope that calls you back, the hope that promises a return to a way of life that is the old way but somehow better, wiser, healthier, happier. This is the hope of delusion. The second hope is the hope that is not deceived by hope. It is the hope that abandons hope. This is the true hope, the only hope, the hope that will lead you to lasting peace.

Feel free to explore the unparalleled wonders of our underground caverns, celebrated for their beauty and danger. Entrances both marked and unmarked are found throughout Arcadia: in the sides of wooded hills, in forest pits and sinkholes, in lakeside banks and abandoned mines. Sometimes at the side of a trail you will come upon manmade steps, going down. Descend. Our ancient limestone caverns are artificially illuminated for short distances only, before the dark begins. Deep underground, away from the sun and sky, you may wander alone with your thoughts for hours along dark passageways that open onto plunging waterfalls or black, tranquil pools. Often a passageway will have a winding ledge along one side, overlooking a deep fissure or crevasse. Make sure to feel along walls for cracks and crevices, some of which will be wide enough to admit a human form. These openings will lead you to still darker adventures.

My life was neither good nor bad, very quiet and ordinary, then I fell in love with a good man who loved me back and my whole life
changed. Every morning I woke with a burning happiness, happiness like a flame. I looked forward so much to seeing him, my good man, my beloved, everything I looked at was fresh and glowing in the burning light of my love. And even though the man I loved was married, what did I care, we had each other, he was my one, my only, my sweetheart, he made me feel so alive, my lovely good man. Sometimes he wasn’t able to be with me and this was hard, the times in between were not always burning with happiness, sometimes they were burning with loneliness. I wanted him in my life not as a lover only but as a heart-companion, I thought how lovely it would be to do simple everyday things together, shopping and laughing and walking around town holding hands, but he said we had to be careful because he didn’t want to hurt his wife. And I understood that, he was a good man, a gentle man, but I said you don’t want to hurt her but you’re hurting me. When I didn’t see him my life felt empty and dark, he was a good man but weak, a weak man, and I hated myself for thinking of him as a weak man but he was hurting me and I couldn’t stand it. The only choice I had was to accept things as they were, which meant accepting my life as an empty lonely waiting, there were times I would wake up in the night feeling his body beside me but the bed was cold, he was with her, in their happy home. He was a good man but weak, a weak man who couldn’t hurt anyone but he was hurting me, he was murdering me with his goodness and his poisonous weakness. Sometimes I thought back to the time when my life was quiet and ordinary and it felt like a peaceful lovely land I could never see again. Now all my days were long and full of a sort of quiet twisting anguish, the lamp on the lamp table was unbearable, I was like someone with a disease, I was dying and not dying, the thing that had brought me life was taking away my life, then one day I came to Arcadia. It was like returning to the peaceful land. My cabin is quiet and clean. How I love to walk along the winding trails, the woods and streams speak to me, how lovely the gorges that run like rivers through the land, I
stand on the cliffs and look down. The peace and solitude embrace me like loving arms, they are only a sign of the greater peace to come, I have found the answer and I am so very grateful.

Although our primary aim is to help you move forward with the successful implementation of your goal, we desire to make your stay here at Arcadia as pleasant and comfortable as we can. All rooms come with high-quality hardwood floors and hand-woven area rugs in a variety of distinctive patterns. Select hand-crafted antiques are spread tastefully among cozy contemporary furnishings. Kitchens are fully equipped with all cooking and eating utensils, including a generous selection of German-made precision-forged corrosion-resistant stainless-steel knives with exceptionally sharp edges. Each bedroom is provided with a hand-carved antique Rope Chest containing an assortment of fine-fibered all-natural hemp ropes in different lengths and thicknesses for your convenience. Enjoy the sturdy comfort of your all-weather fade-resistant quilted hammock hung between spruce or pine in the private woodland space behind your cottage or cabin. Not far from each hammock you will find a charming old-fashioned stone well with a depth of over 100 feet. Multicolored hand-painted glass lanterns hang from branches along the private paths and supply soft pools of illumination on the way to darker paths.