
i. There was a time. There is time, and it fools us. It really does toy. Like he put it, it is titillating, this foreplay with death. As one day dawns with snow drops and crocus and daffodil with the sun coming in and falling and the jazz lilting almost heralding a summer day, she could imagine how her brother would miss days like this, or in moments like this how she will miss him. She hammers into the night knowing full well as the fire founders to ash that as one more line has fallen away, the night already holds all of them.
ii. Find yourself amongst the netting and seed starters, clothespins and pencils: all manner of tools for marking and holding. Understand this to be the place where he first felt that pesky bump from hitting his head on the low ceiling. Now left with handwritten notes from a folder marked planned repairs and home improvements, follow his instructions: paint the walls, patch the window ledge, now the corners of the backroom and furnace, rate the water to the house.
iii. In what had become a crisp and open air, had nature nothing else better to do than to teach its inhabitants the finer art of holding still? Like the bird Woolf describes as fully gutted with sound. Without the fire, this damp air would fan her desire to return to the West. That was not the only reason. She knew that. But what else could hold her as well as its dry heat? Not these chairs barely held together with bungie cord and pipe cement. She would like for the window and the clay pot catching rain to be always the remainder of its labor and nothing more. But the bamboo wind chime clatters not just of its making but of a time when wind and wave coaxed fish eating coral this then that way in the memory of a gentle wave.
iv. The gardener toils for a season’s fruit. What might a refusal of productivity generate like moss itself also grows. This is the first lesson in dying: don’t use the word existential when referring to experience. You, you who are her brother. You who are dying can use any word you want including titillating. Perhaps she would have noticed that edge of the stairwell but when had she ever sat there on the blue step below the window cut from a wall overlooking the garden, the pine tree and the neighbor’s renovation in parts, in pieces? As the man in solitary put it for the benefit of publication in the Atlantic, each of us is thrown onto ourselves these days.
v. Even so there is sun, wind still blowing the chimes only now the bamboo is a hollow sound and only now wood. In the ICU with complications of a surgery to remove the tumor on his skull, a lesion connected to his bladder by blood. He alone with morphine, two surgeries in as many days. Hospitals. Like the day last year when their father was holed up in a rehab center following a fall. What happens when you don’t declare that they not resuscitate you? They take you and then they keep you. And slowly, though the misanthropic and over-worked hall nurse had every intention of dispensing the medications on time, she could only do so much. There was a glimmer that without the Parkinson’s meds their father had a clearer head, though still he stumbled over words and could barely speak in full sentences. That was the day she sprung him from that place. That’s the drive home he promised her he’d sign the declaration. That’s the only time they really spoke about his dying. But there are no visits allowed under the new dispensation and their father did die. Last June. No springing from this joint though. And now even the one glimmer of hope that the dura was intact was clouded by the discovery of a proliferation that would demand the building of a head cage with a fencer’s mesh.
vi. Listening to Sunny Side of Heaven on Bare Trees, the album she had sent him that reminds her of that park and some Thai stick. It is so high school lunch break. She could remember her afternoons in the olive grove by her school under the shadow of a mountain named for a camel lying on its haunches, its hump a peak. Stoned in Phoenix during the 70s was de rigour. At least that first year when she would miss fifth period physical education but make the English class in time to wonder when each of Faulkner’s sentences would end in The Unvanquished.
vii. Perhaps it was Gertrude Stein who knew, or again, Woolf...follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seduction; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous. Women working in the quiet of words, in those details of every little thing that cannot betray itself if one has listened well. Perhaps there is no one traveling except those who gather their resentment and open it like a picnic blanket so that their neighbors who want to gather won’t. Every health worker holding and taking and washing and asking and hearing. Witness that the laborer is the pulse of this particular moment. Noted.
viii. Words not floating these days but stuck in the drain spout lay bare the part where only birds and light now. Only birds. The squeaky hinge bird, the bellow and the woodpecker, a warbler. If only visible in the cavern of morning and the tall pines that greet the April snow. This is not the age of pause so to do so is not to take the red pill and fall even farther away from the birds and the light always aloft and changing and reliable. The daffodil refuses, too shy her yellow canopy anyway. Slowly the experiment has ground to the kind of halt that simply takes time to collect itself and its logic to form the concept of not knowing. Knowing that though. That.
ix. How the light though gathers in the holding valleys of your laughter. You will insist that the meaning has already been made, we each of us with the other do the making every time one stops and the other goes on a step then turns and another word falls, a look, a squinting in the sun, its angle in the autumn; the kind of turning that lets the lines of your chin fall in shadow around your neck. Your neck in the photo you sent while waiting in line in your mask. You could have been an extra in Warriors. That’s the film to think of when one sees us now. After she closed the box office at the theatre where she was ticket seller, ticket taker, and concession, she would climb the narrow, steep wooden steps to the projection booth and there it would be the Warriors, “come out and play” or the understated lesbian love affair in The Bell Jar from the garden in the mental hospital. But yes, your neck. You there and then you gone.
x. One makes things up, fictions of the mind born in memories that have taken hold in photographs or words or even none of these but rather, that smile. You see the absurdity and the foibles, one of your words only Monty Python used as spoken. What matters more than perhaps catching that glimmer, slowly catching and then passing like the bird though repetitive it too flies after the volley of chirps which the wet wood cannot do it cannot fly unless the flame turns to smoke which it can and does. Your careful, awkward hands that hold things with clumsy. The letters of your writing harvested from a primer at the parochial grade school which we’re certain we never had. A primer. Stopping is a duel, a declaration, en-garde. A smart quick smack to the choke hold and then you will fall as she did certain that view was to be her last.
xi. Perhaps in the cycles you tend in your garden you know what it is you approach these days. There is the pruning and the weeding and the gathering at stages before the birds come as they do and have to eat the cherries. Yes, again as its bark weeps bulbous sap from the bores. To wash across the ages with hand fanned out making circles to catch the words circulating and making the tumult of the thing it barely names. In days of whirlpool eddies tracing circles on the same wood planks of this floor, the image of the future which still seems to exist is drawn. Don’t mince words. Don’t roll them around in your mouth like salt water. Don’t hem.
xii. Take pictures, draw blood and flood veins slowly with drugs in search of proteins and pathways under cover as a throng designed to infiltrate the sleeper cells with hidden bombs and multiplying. How to surpass expected growth in a genetics gone haywire. How without comparison in the slowing and the shifts that are not legible in the flow of one into the next; the adaptation. That is perhaps all one could describe humans as capable of in a distillation of encounters that choose, imperceptibly to go this way instead of that and can even believe this constitutes will. That now there is a marker that coincides with a certainty, a memory of having had a clearer head before the hidden traffic had gone from speedway to parking lot, before he felt that he was in someone else’s kitchen, before it was all brought to a screeching halt after hugging the hairpin turn.
xiii. The whole nomenclature of time was getting in the way. To be in the present was bordering on a proposition of nonsense. If all meaning resides in contextual grammar, then to get in the present is perhaps redundant. To be present was a failure of language to describe presence. Why and when and how would language come around to its inadequacies? None of us can rest assured when the mind stops and then so quickly names the rules of its language game. All that meditation amounts to is to bring to the conscious mind all that the body does perfectly fine without our naming. That fills and evacuates to keep us upright or prone, to hold and move the limbs like wind does for trees, so sure of our uniqueness in the coming and the going and the choices which hold themselves as story. One can travel these days only with the acceptance of the host. That as a carrier through stores and gas pumps and credit card transactions; the passage through hands that is necessary for moving from here to there. Now one is aware of the small things that pass in every encounter, those that carry death and with it, us too along.

xiv. Elements: the unknown, that and hornets, the neighbors, the unruly adolescents who know they’re safely outside the threatened statistical zone. Well outside it. And then perhaps while sheltering one might start to wonder how this all began. She brought her own mug, but still, there was the edge of the table, and the coffee was not something poured at the table. It was then that the microcosmic journey of touch began to map itself onto her every move, the gesture and the trace of every surface. Slowly she not only would not share the surface without knowing, without being painfully aware that perhaps that would be the launch pad for the troubles. And from that removal of traces with degrees of disinfectant, we would then sit apart. We would distance.
xv. These days. Two weeks of protests over the militarized police force in America. Counts are charged, local budgets re-allocated, school districts severing their contracts. Despite distancing guidelines, people march, further revealing the excessive force by the police. Fred Hampton was arrested for robbing an ice cream truck. That then. Ice cream. In a mock trial, he is found innocent. He will die at the age of 21. Prison would have held him there as long as death itself. A depot of weapons in Chicago. When an arsenal is no match for the cops’…the people, not a person, but a pig. Two shots to the skull. 2337 W. Monroe. And the points where bullets landed re-stage the position of the residents and the approach of the officers. Those white lines marking pathways as if those lines can explain the random heat of violence. Exhibit One.
xvi. Phase Three. He is assigned to the thread of a clinical trial that combines targeted padcev and keytruda immunotherapy with the standard napalm of chemo called cisplatin. He prefers to reside within the true experiment. Like his graduate studies on the red shift galaxy; facts to measure in one precise part along the spectrum of light include an indication that galaxies are moving away from an observer on earth, evidence that the universe is expanding. What is that your business?
xvii. Zero is pretense. All counting and all naming, abstractions. Well, then silence falls hard. Like a sudden downpour that sweeps dust from the desert to become the smell of creosote. But none of that. We’ll have none of that. Discipline begins with the behavior of one saint breaking the wheel. And then what did they do to Catherine? She will return the video in the 11th hour of 9pm on a Monday night and then walk home, back up the incline away from the lake, two long blocks of her neighborhood. Just the corner house up ahead. Not nearly near enough and now the streetlight. The grip around her neck from behind. And then the sidewalk, and the pink painted brick retaining wall for the neighbor’s front yard garden and the wheel, the parked car. And then the actual vanishing point down the hill to the main road, the hill she had just climbed and the cars and the yards and the sidewalk taking in the view to the end and the thought that this was to be the last of any such view, sight and thought both. The strength with which he held her neck only tightened with resistance. Breathing goes when one resists the choke hold. And then “what’s going on?” … the hold released, the man flees past the corner of the hedge, she coughs, and clings now to another man. To his arm. He pulls away because he, well, he had been sent by his girlfriend to see “what was going on.” They were returning with their clean laundry and they saw him in the street too, in the middle of the street and they thought that was not normal, not on a Monday night. She refused an ambulance because she did not want a bill and she felt probably she would be ok. She could, after all, she could breathe. And why take a risk when you don’t need to, you can just continue on your way like life doesn’t need to have the hiccup of reality come crashing into the lovely front window of the 1950s house on a neighborhood street that had the hill about it, the hill of looking over.
xviii. Consciousness. Where does that go when you die? Delaney in Babel-17 does say thought can be taken, reused, but consciousness perhaps cannot be retrieved, by you or any other machine. It is difficult to discover the location of rage though. It does seem to font from the tricycles of obsessive thought that do not allow for control, certainty or other devices of mastery. There is something strange in the awareness, the juncture of confusion, or that island one can only get to by jumping. The right to be forgotten. Discretion to deny.

xix. The vacuum of the virga holds the power of rainfall in a state of evaporation in the high desert. To fall or not to fall. To evaporate in the sublime, the suction produces incredible wind. Roots and the tree hold fast. Described in all its visceral beauty as such: Virga is hydrometeors that evaporate or sublimate before reaching the earth’s surface. The virga can result in very strong convective wind gusts. You intervene when the force of it washes through the marrow of one you love. Still, no reason to sign over the deed. No reason to do that but the reason of thinking as if for the first, to thwart the tide bearing down, the full flesh quiver of barely waking when the count is so far down the body will not rise. Will not even crouch over the dirt to pull the grass folding itself into the vine of peas that remain from the scorch of snails. And in that cesspool of the agricultural runoff that poisons the lakeshore making all of any season cease, take the plastic raft made as the byproduct of petroleum wars. Those ubiquitous wars. Hasten and the bend of dappled light holds you in its promise but only and only if one bothers to catalogue that impression.
xx. Make a note. No, hurry. You are surely followed by time now mad as sinister, not the tending and the husbandry, only the piecemeal process that produced, in producing profit, the consumer. We build the diddly squat and we sit and throw it out to replace and upgrade. It is no longer long enough to lament the present cycle of obsolescence. Story is the oblique answer to leading questions or the question so precise and innocent that the dance we’ve wrung from it no longer will suffice. That is, one cannot answer directly of the where we come from and where we go, and why we’re here all of which lead to the process by which language is cast in favor of the stand-in, the understudy, the front row orchestra pit that collects the impassioned spray of monologues so expertly delivered, we will give back a week of our labor to recall the inadequacy of most human endeavors in King Lear. This confirmed in the packing and unpacking of boxes that attend another migration as we trudge things beside us as if there is nothing that could be done without it. Until the house goes up in flames or the plane plunges into water and all marks disappear.
xxi. The Munich massacre so-called starts in a refugee camp because that is how the one surviving Palestinian situates you. Those shoes trampling in the mud on the outskirts of his homeland. This line has produced burden and bile. The German police couldn’t quite manage the new regime. One wonders why, given Baader-Meinhof. But when a nation is stripped of its army, it fumbles perhaps. The sports outfits and slung gun game is still something to see. Those red stripes as the kidnappers watch them approach along with everyone else on television. Now only watch work made in the 1970s or from that period and its archival detritus. In the mediated world not yet quite saturated, and the computer apparatus not yet quite smooth, the 1969 Apollo 11 run down of voices from Houston. go, go, go, go, all the gateways for what the algorithm now navigates appears almost quaint in being uttered aloud as words, not sent as signals. Or perhaps it reveals the pattern for the apparatus of control not quite yet fully realized. In the 1970s we were all stumbling about the cabin, jostled in the turbulence, run amok. Her timeline of the 70s begins in a family photograph and the trip to Mexico that stopped that train at night and sent her for the first time across the borderline.
xxii. Only one way out of the dyad us/them battle of scarcity which rules most relationships in the dying empire. Who will hold that final dangling thread? To recover the marginal is perhaps the only act worthy of pursuit in these remaining days. One neighbor puts up the screen and runs the projector and the train rides itself through the Southwest like a Soviet. Hers will be a step van conversion pirate radio station that runs on biodiesel.
xxiii. Siblings and strangers are the mix into which the bloody containment of humanity is thrown. The shaping of tools, that which extends the use of human strength, or contact. Why always expansion as the mode by which merit is measured? Oh, please precious mercurial dovetail and the distant sound of gun fire when around the bend again the river keeps flowing until the fallen tree reroutes it. That along with the real, bedfellows. She who set out to make the case in tracing every little detail that survived her scrutiny, that, like dust, would return, would remain to have its own way like the light and the leaves. Well what else can one observe to keep the nightmare at bay? Nothing. The nothing of Beckett she reads to try and fall asleep. All words are made from every other passing thought that was not quite fast enough to know anything about itself or of its power over the other. Through the manhole steam engine comes the pretense, pretension tension and then again sit down, repeat, and find how counting helps.

xxiv. There was little to know about the past as it had been obliterated from the conscious mind with such speed that it had startled her, not like a sudden shock that has the habit to subside, but the lingering that refused her a sideways glance into the receding. It was in this maelstrom that the ending of her life as a visual artist took hold. Madness was the inevitable companion in the shadowland of late capitalism. So too, bad faith.
xxv. It is not any more a need to manage or master the unknown that holds her in its thrall, but rather how to hold the completely ephemeral vapors, that is to not hold. The world has brought with it in its systems so much beauty. Your laughter for instance, the slow dawning as your mind catches the joy of double meaning. Damn.
xxvi. So now a pretentious film in French made by a Polish director in Geneva belabors its indulgences and those are those the sinner pays. Those and the tribulation if that is the word. How were they raised and what is that to see candle and incense, the small vase of water and wine on the little silver tray. Did you wear sneakers as an altar boy? She cannot remember you having a place in that spectacle and it never even occurred to her that girls did not. But in the confessional all things were equal. They each got the same rote instruction to repeat Hail Mary or Our Father. It is in the repetition that the subterfuge of ideology takes root and comes again from inside as if naturally.
xxvii. It was the simplicity of it. To sit at a table with a stranger telling stories of a film in the hills of Kurdistan, to hear the lilting flow of Persian. To think of physical proximity as something necessary. But life has contracted and with that, the sense that life has changed so radically is it any wonder that we cannot begin again? She does know that she flung herself out of bed last night after hitting her lover in another episode of REM sleep behavior disorder. Her limbs don’t receive the signal to paralyze.
xxviii. All these words rolling around unspoken unwritten, rolling around like her head is a chamber, a hollow place. That is the place her brother would prefer not to be confined within if for example he were to lose the hearing in the other ear, or go blind from the pressure on the ocular, as his skull takes another even more thorough spread, the neck now too, and turning his head and shouldn’t those of us standing in the mire of our sadnesses, shouldn’t we at the very least write down the unspoken words in the over and in between rather than the empty solace of simply not yet knowing just how close endings are. And it is no longer the fallacy of the man, it is no longer any kind of statistics for all of them are constructed, as he knows well, always the extremes are hidden in the average. Though the promise of another season of fruit from the majestic trees he planted over 20 years ago, will return, he will not be its witness, its keeper.
xxix. Leave It to Beaver and Perry Mason are your companions these days and for very different reasons. Beaver prefers the possibility that everything will be right with cake. You would go out and buy one big cake if that were true. And Perry will always enter the courtroom, the decision having been made how to present the details we already know. Like Greek tragedy. Walking home from tennis in an Indian Summer, she plays hide and seek. You got no business acting like this is a game. Oh but it is, you said it yourself, she kidnapped herself. Take it one step at a time which means the story telling and the cell chasing and the discovery. That’s why the legal team calls it that. Discovery. The unabated whack-a-mole isn’t faster than the mole. When the always fading doesn’t climb into a canyon on mushrooms nor hike out with the white horses in the moonlight riverbed, when it is no more spectacular than the routine of opening your front room drapes to let in the sunshine, the blue moon will come to you.
xxx. To trudge she said before. Or was it we trudge… yes, it was we trudge and then … crescent. That is the word of what the oil stains shape in their aborted trajectory to the page on the 1932 Royal Model P. This is not a race just because one could measure it by intervals. Time consists of such measures, the counting and the rhythm. It is instead the sudden jumping of a cat onto the back of the sofa, and the crystalline ice formations on the windows facing east so the rising sun transforms fractal cracks into soft dripping and fog on panes after all, on glass. Will this be her brother’s last winter? A lion in it. Why can’t human bodies hibernate, slow all cellular growth; a reprieve from all the growing and dividing and the forlorn plodding. Perhaps winter is the most precise season to die. She will go there when and how he wants her to. At his beck, as it were. She gets to watch his hands that seem so awkward, sensitive but something of the brute about them, her brother’s hands. They pick fruit, roll dough, cut limbs. The plaintive, screeching jazz and the struggle of the dishwasher are the score that settles this onslaught of winter climes.
xxxi. There is the feeling of a storm about today’s stillness. Yes, here in Canada. Even here. The sinking that grips her in the downward tug of gravity and its own fallacy, is the feeling and the thoughts for him. Pain stops the planning mind, and the ducks in a row which is how the ducklings follow their mother, that’s what her brother sees when they concur that little more matters now. For him there is only 10 minutes in the distance and the certainty that he is already living the zombie life. But in his voice that she was certain drawled due to the pain killers, as he was swallowing hard, perhaps this drawl was in fact a neurological side effect of the growing and pushing not just in his passageways and all that travels through the neck, but that the brain protected by the dura membrane might not be enough. It won’t be.
xxxii. First gather in isolation, with masks, and a conversation through the front window while your brother lays in a morphine haze on a hospital bed that he is happy to have in the living room so he can see the sunrise he opened his curtains for every morning when he could but not now. Now he cannot move. He couldn’t get into the car, he had to sleep in his recliner because the geometry of rising was impossible. His potassium was not at the level of a living being. The growing had encroached upon the pituitary gland, he had been suffering minor seizures, one of which brought him falling to the ground. When one’s bones start to be whittled away, falling is irreparable. Metastasizing to the skull brought in its vengeance, every remaining part not taken out during surgery, breaching the dura, crawling down the spine first in the neck and the fractures on the cervical bones. So he lies, his softened gestures over his head, trying hands to clasp one another. How he cleared a spot for planting in a soil already prepared to receive it. Prepare to receive. There is a phrase like this before communion. Only say the word and I shall be healed. What word is that? What word prepares the way?
xxxiii. Still, lucidity this morning, you watch Leave It to Beaver, some episode about Wally playing chess and wanting his friend to leave. Some moral tale told by his father. Wanting the boys to get into the on-line checking account so they knew where it was, how in the booklet of cigar paper we would find the passwords you did not trust the browser to save. Odd they thought. Had she wasted yesterday afternoon with you? You had not wanted music but were happy to know she had found your gift of Chet Baker’s Italian Sessions. They listened and you fell into and out of sleep. She stood as if giving a speech on simplicity, the calico curled up like a nautilus in the hammock of your lap. How you had made your life, this house unfinished and the garden and fruit trees now dormant. She massages your arms, pulls on your feet to help stretch your legs. Where did the scratches on the knuckles of your right hand come from? Pomegranates. You had harvested them on the 25th of October before the devastating freeze. It was that day that something cracked in your neck as you put a plate in the dishwasher. The next four hours in the recliner in your body enough to know, this pain would not be handled by the steroids and the Vicadin. You call your son. Rarely did his father need anything immediately.
xxxiv. It is within and between the streaks of clouds in the blue field of a sky on her birthday that he takes his leave. This plain, this body, this, then that. Like centrifugal force, with it going towards him and being repelled by his absence. Sudden despite their planning and preparation. It is possible that a major nerve to the brain was cut by the crumbling bones in his neck as he was coughing up what looked like black bile.

xxxv. Tapering to a point is the moment when Bernard in Woolf’s The Waves understands the flow of being and not in the purely embodied manner. The furtive way in or through which life flows and holds still in the material reality of time, even the body seems solid when its entire possibility resides in circulations of blood and breath. His arm was still warm, the last tributaries draining, the last round of all effort to withstand the cellular invasion, the incursion, the insult to injury. The tendon and the calf. Muscle ligament and the warm flow of blood, pumping through the heart, that of all of them steady and sure. Until it stops. Like that. Then the blood drains from the veins and the eyes roll back behind the lids, the lower lip goes slack, the skin hews close to the bone, the cheeks, the color yellows, the nose thins. Stories that perhaps the greatest fiction of god were designed to hold so each of us in the remainder of a scene might not fall into the excess of space debris, the meteor shower whose lights and flicker attest to the larger scheme of the carrying on of the cosmos. It is the sky and the occasional clouds moving, that and the leaves and the tree boughs and the rocking back and forth or is that an undulation?
xxxvi. Like his anthem album Farewell to Kings, dine on honeydew. This the last substantial food he had, served to him by his son. Action in being the last takes on a turgid freight. To what then does it refer? Like seed, or crumbs she follows the trail to receive the message from Nights in White Satin, never reaching the end. You’re still there he said out of the morphine fog accompanied by Chet Baker. You’re still there. At the end of the bed. Someone else, anyone else, that can sweetly softly say. Say yes. I am.
A recipient of the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film, Cathy Lee Crane is also a writer of reviews, prose poems, and creative nonfiction. In addition to co-authoring seven produced essay & narrative film scripts, her piece “in the desert of thirty-six hollows” was a finalist for the 2023 New Letter’s Robert Day Award for Fiction.