Chapters (23)
Probably it’s the next day when I’m shown my father’s stitches; probably I’d fallen asleep, next door, and someone’s come to carry me home: sleepy body, up in the air over someone’s shoulder; when you’re carried, your face is that much closer to the sky. I know a little of what proceeds in great starry rotation over Memphis: Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Polaris, Milky Way. Or maybe it was that very night the wound was revealed to me, beneath its white shroud of gauze bandages, the suture displayed not as reminder of my guilt but as reassurance, so that I might understand the limit of what I’ve done, that it is specific and bounded: a jagged curve of black wire pulling together a violet seam along the pale underside of the foot, just the shape of the largest piece of glass. Here my narrative vanishes in memory, gone underground like a stream. Or maybe now the scene shifts to some interior place: the classroom in the head, the room entirely lined with blackboards on which are chalked the characters I am learning to read, my version of an alphabet, gestures and figures translated to ideograms, star charts unreadable. Some adult says, You couldn’t help it, but you’re nearly asleep, aren’t you; do you even hear? And now another interior space opens, not a schoolroom, though equally dark: a theater, on the strange promise of whose stage the Rainbow Girls are one by one making their appearance. In tulle and privacy, in tap shoes and spotlight, in a black glossier than all the night around her, in a wig wine-dark or flame or golden, each moves singly and shyly toward her debut.