Andrea Reising Fiction
Fornish
Fornish arrives at my apartment in search of Alaska.
"What the hell are you are you doing in Brooklyn?" I sort of half-laugh mumble through pre-coffee morning breath, holding back the flight response. After almost a year of absence, the woman I had miserably longed for and lost sleep over stood before me with a face that I could choose to strike or suck on.
"I've been looking for Alaska," she repeats, limply looking into me. She says she has been finding herself waking up while waiting for the subway or while watering her hanging plants and realizing she is hundreds and hundreds of miles from the mountains. Fornish is speaking to me like she is writing poetry, her eyes fixated by some patch of negative space she is detecting inside my skull.
"I guess I’m supposed to ask you in," I respond, wondering if she can decipher secret code and hear me yelling that I love her so much I hate her and need her to go back to wherever she has come from. "I've got coffee but no tea." She drank tea with sweet and low the last time I'd seen her in the morning. Staring into the steam of her mug and smiling at me, Fornish had told me tea was the perfect remedy for the post-sex sadness that she always went through.
She follows me through the stale, dawn-lit living room into my yellow plaster kitchen. The woman I wanted so hard to forget quietly sits before me and begs me to give her the vast expanse of a place and time she had decided to simply refer to as Alaska.
In this past she is searching to regain, I told Fornish that I wanted her to stay with me forever. We were crouched in a mountain pass, under the pale light of sunrise from a morning sky, somewhere north of where two continents divide. Checking our maps by the scaling formations of the earth around us, we expected to hike into Anuktuvik by four or
five that day. I wanted to let her know how I felt about her before I lost the hope that she might respond by telling me she loved me too. We were anticipating the large cardboard boxes of food and books that we had mailed to ourselves, the sound of human voices other than our own, and the chance to mouth its four strange syllables in saying we had reached our half-way destination.
Initially, we met over fourteenth street. I was sucking on a morning cigarette, nursing suggestions of a hangover with shit for coffee from a corner roll-a-stand. I noticed her, thick limbed crawling from remnants of sleep and chewing on a bagel, looking both ways before she crossed the empty pavement. I had been walking all night, lonely, across the dank and dirty city I called home. Seeing Fornish, I felt I wanted to infest her boy-cut hair and wicked jaw that tensed and eased with bites of breakfast on the run. I followed her to the grocery, through its narrow rows of produce and toiletries, and to the counter where I found my hand cupping itself over her coin-bearing fingers as I groped her silent face with my eyes, looking for her name I learned was Fornish. Mick Jagger must have found himself baffled by the presence of a woman on some New York morning just as I. He somehow knew exactly what I went through when he told us that its true that you cannot always get everything you want in life, but if you try, without quite knowing how or why, you sometimes do find yourself getting what you need. Four nights later, I was covering her naked body with my own, her nipples arching to the ceiling, mangled by me. I remember her vein, sludging the translucent purple of her salty insides, fixated by her neck. I love a million things, and Fornish is every one of them.
We had known each other for perhaps four months before she asked me if I'd ever seen the Arctic Circle or the North Slope that leads itself out to the uppermost waters of the world. When I said no, I hadn't, our trip seemed to naturally decide upon and solidify itself. Before I could understand the ways in which I loved Fornish, June had arrived and we were decorating the straps of our backpacks with airline tags. We fought our way through starchy, smiling flight attendants in puke-magenta polyester, black, clip-on bow-ties and name tags thanking us for flying in their friendly skies. Clipping into the brown of airplane seat belt, I inhaled a long, slow notion of constant, nameless longing. It was my friend, my lover. It was Fornish.
Most women like to tell you how they're feeling about you and the relationship you are having with them. Fornish just liked to make up bullshit about some fish she'd caught with her bare hands and eaten it raw or how the scar over her eyebrow was a momento from a tigress she’d encountered in Beijing. She insisted that her previous lover left her because she could drink him under the table on their late-night escapades to biker bars. I told her that as long as she promised to carry my drunk ass home, she could take me under any table any time. She acted tough, and underneath it all, she really was.
Despite her leather gut and a liver of steel, I found in Fornish recurrent bouts of quiet anguish. She tried not to talk about it too much, but the empty hang of her gaze into large fields of nothing in particular would give her away. I tried not to push her with my lame attempts at consolation. She had told me enough stories, after tall-tale time would end, of the sorts of things that make you lose your sense of time and place while simply standing in the check-out line or unloading soft-baked clothing from the basement dryer. Seeing her slowly waste away for days or weeks from time to time, I could not help but put my arms around her and hold her until I had to eat or piss, even though she never held me back. At times like these, Fornish could hardly convince herself to smile. I understood this and didn’t ask her for assistance with my own sense of caving sullenness.
Once, as we huddled on the front stoop of my Brooklyn quarters, she inhaled the steam rising from her mug of post-sex tea, gently tilting her face side to side, letting the warmth envelope her from ear to ear. She then went on to ask if I had heard the one about Francesca. "Francesca who?" I asked back, copying her cool tone of slight indifference.
"You know," she answered, "Francesca as in Francesca and the Cherry Bomb."
"Oh yeah, that Francesca," I said , knowing it mattered more to agree and go along with this new game than to try and figure out what the hell she was talking about.
"She really dropped it, didn't she?" Fornish asked me, and I agreed.
"She really did," I half way mumbled as I blew bits of breath into my too-hot coffee mug.
As she went on to describe this character Francesca, I came to realize Fornish had stories of a different sort than the typical bullshit I had come to expect. Over the period of time that ensued, piece by piece of her experiences unfolded for me as the kind of offering that hopes for understanding in return. She had been eating corn flakes in Manhattan when she got the call from California one morning in the past. Francesca had already been eased into the ground and had begun to chill, cradled by the earth. "My first reaction was to find my way back home, to find that bitch Francesca and kick her ass for scaring me shitless. I really couldn't believe whoever it was on the other end of miles of telephone wire, telling me my only friend had died. In my daze, my fingers took to dialing the number of the airport booking line.” She had forgotten that trans-continental transportation doesn't necessarily stay awake in anticipation of dying friends. Fornish told me of the way she let the phone find its way back to its saddle on the wall, of how she let her body negotiate the wooden hardness of a kitchen chair. “Fortunately, Captain Crunch was there to save the table from sinking into the ground,” remarked Fornish. Otherwise, she might have been left there without a piece of reality to grasp onto, flat palms facing down.
After the call and its news of death, I guess you could say that Fornish just went down-hill for a while. She told me later how fourteen days passed before she was even able to start talking again. She would be walking toward the subway, east on one-twenty-fifth, and realize she was being surrounded by red lines-- the velvet dashboard of a parked van to her left, banners waving yellow M’s over the red bricks of fast-food building to the right, a sign up the street glowing neon down it’s window pane. Everywhere, she saw red lines. She’d wind up sitting with the corner of Harlem underneath her hips, crouching, caught unexpectedly by the urge to write that fostered from a fear of losing her own thoughts. She began to get in eating moods, she told me. She would eat herself through half a can of turkey and a pumpkin pie, even though it wasn’t the time of year that she was used to giving thanks for marked-down, beat-up, day-old baked goods and cold protein framed in tin.
She told me, recalling that period of time the year or so before I’d known her, that she never could find a word that fit what she was feeling. “It wasn’t sadness,” she would explain. “Sadness is lame and generic and I don’t believe it qualified. Sometimes I try to name it shock, but then I remember that shock implies the unexpected. We all knew Francesca would die early. Her weak heart and the doctors at Mao had clued us in from the beginning. I guess when early actually arrives, one still tries to fight it, like they were hoping the whole thing might just be one big joke to pass the time. I loved Francesca so much that I would always tell her how I wished that I had man parts and she was still a woman. I said if that were the case, I would be able to have her in every way and I would be happy forever.
“Before I could find my voice again,” Fornish told me, “I would replace the time I usually spent with Francesca by going to our favorite bar, dangling my feet from the tall bar stool at which she’d always sat, unable to touch my feet onto the floor. I would rock myself softly side to side on its rotating axle. I planted my wrists on the counter of the bar. I chain-drank shots of whiskey and tequila into the early hours of each morning.” She would find herself puking on the pavement of the parking lot, sprawled out, drooling on a stranger’s bed, or huddled in a corner as she hit rock bottom on the cold, dull-brown tile of her kitchen floor. She found herself becoming dirty with unshaven armpits and unshaven legs. Dirt crept up in the thin spaces between her tooth-worn nails and ravaged fingertips of skin. She would ride down to the shore on her blue, tin bike and tell herself to wait there for Francesca, even if it took forever. “I was calling her name over and over,” Fornish told me, “my lips forming the movements of ‘Francesca’ in the air.”
Fornish told me of the brief affair with Zoloft and Stephen-- how the first would make her forget to feel numb, and how the second would touch the bottom of his foot to hers as they sat across from one another, silently musing their unison of body parts. “He would ask me to touch him till he was raw like sushi,” Fornish said without a trace of laughter. Then she would ask me if love was meant to be like ecstasy or like dying or if they were just two versions of the same thing. “I don’t know,” I would answer.
The worst story Fornish told me from that time of despondency was how she found herself vomiting up half a bagel in the bathroom of her studio. “I was crouching,” she recalled carefully. “Lowering my shins to the icy concrete floor, I framed my face in the toilet bowl.” She felt limp and aching, wretched and spewing, hollow. She felt the need to look up and consider the ceiling. Hoisting her haggard, cumbersome eyeballs, she encountered a two-by-two foot gaping hole where Styrofoam had once made up the ceiling tile. “Through the darkness I could see the messy guts of water pipes and building veins. I could feel the updraft from the floor vents.” Smelling stomach acid dripping down her chin, she rested the side of her face on the plastic toilet lid. “I imagined myself climbing the walls with suction cups strapped to hands and feet and belly, shimmying up, reaching out and grabbing onto some big, thick, shock-proof, rubber coated cable and letting my body drop, hanging by my arms, half in, half out, legs dangling so that some unknowing, unexpecting stranger might think a girl had died and left her bottom half behind as a reminder of her torso.”
By the time I found her that trance-like Union Square dawn, she had begun to function somewhat normally again. When I mean normally, I’m simply referring to the ability to brush one’s own teeth twice a day and flag down cabs without finding one’s self standing in the middle Broadway blankly staring at an oncoming car, forgetting why or how you have gotten where you are. She had never seen Aurora Borealis and neither had I.
In Anuktuvik we threw candy to the little black-haired girls wearing bright pink, nylon winter coats like my sister had as a child of the early seventies. They showed their mothers the cheap black plastic sunglasses we had picked up at a drugstore and bestowed onto their tiny, biting hands. Again, in the gravel parking lot they called an airfield, I asked Fornish if she might stay with me forever.
Forever ended up lasting about one year from the evening our plane descended to the runways of La Guardia. We were worn out, smelling like recycled oxygen and unused vomit baggies. That night back in Brooklyn in my two-room, we collapsed upon the unfamiliarity of mattress, our bodies colliding quietly into one another. Our relationship progressed more or less as other relationships we had been in. I made tea first thing every day so she could find it waiting on the counter when she tumbled from the sheets onto the wooden floor. She picked up steak and red wine and flowers from the market on Sundays. We sat together in the booth of a diner down the block every Thursday night at seven, reading our respective newspapers and eating our respective soup and salad. We made love when she wanted to. We fought when I wanted to make love and she didn’t. “It isn’t making love,” she would argue, “if I’m not feeling like I love you.” Eventually, she began to make a habit of forgetting to come to dinner and she said she didn’t think we needed to waste money on flowers since they just get dry and brown and die in the end anyway. I pretty much assumed things were over the day I came home from window shopping and her things were gone. She had placed a potted plastic fern on the night stand where her cigarettes usually lay. I consoled myself with knowing that at least I’d had her for a little while-- that I had pinned her beneath me somewhere in Alaska.
Remembering my unabashed need for her that mountain morning, far removed in my empty apartment on a Brooklyn side street, I wondered if I had simply been filled with the intoxication of endless tundra. We had grappled over angry tussocks, falling time and again, face-first into bogs and chest-deep glacial torrents. I almost hoped that the sub-zero nights spent wondering if I might slowly freeze to stillness were simply invoking urgency that led to over-dramatic expressions of love. Yet I continued to dream of her incessantly. I felt myself obsessing on the thought of her rawhide skin carving circles on my back, of her mouth excavating my insides from without, of her stolid thighs that carried us through thirty-eight nights of unbounded arctic wilderness. I had this feeling that I’d lost some sort of vital limb and all I could think to call it was Fornish.
“What are you thinking?” she is asking me between sips of the coffee she has settled for.
“What do you mean what am I thinking” I ask back in defense.
“I mean what are you thinking about right now?” She rephrases only very slightly.
“I’m thinking I might need to ask you to leave,” I admit.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” It’s like I am hurting her. She has come to my door step asking for a past I can’t possibly give her and she wants to make it seem like I am hurting her because I don’t see why I should be obliged to share my thoughts.
“I am thinking that I never understood why sex made you sad or why you decided I should follow you across the fucking globe just because I followed you into a grocery store at eight A.M. or why you had to leave a big fucking potted piece of plastic where I only wanted you and why I kept that fucking piece of crap until it’s synthetic green paled and yellowed and its promise of eternal liveliness began to sag to the fucking ground so that I hurled it out my window and watched it free-fall seven stories. That’s what I am thinking,” I reply.
Fornish pauses deliberately, collecting words to throw back at me, piecing them into sensible phrases. “Sex makes me sad because I realized that once Francesca died, I haven’t been able to feel my insides. I can hear myself gasping for breath and taste the slimy sweat of my body. I can see my body shudder with climax, but I can’t feel a goddamn thing. When shit like that happens to your head, it’s difficult to do much more than run. The tea has nothing to do with sadness, it’s just my gimmick.” She says she copes with numbness by linking it to the quirkiness of needing beverages for post-sex syndromes. “Quirkiness can cover up my recurrent inability to do simple things like showing up for appointments, smiling on demand and remembering the meaning of nerve endings,’ she explains.
I want to ask Fornish if she really thinks I can give her Alaska if I couldn’t even make her feel me when I was in her. I want to know where she had been for the past eleven months while I was slowly being devoured by the vestige of her touch. I finger the smooth, arching half circle of my mug, forgetting it is rude to stare at one person for too long. I want to know if came back expecting that I’ve saved her box of tea.
“Have you ever seen Aurora Borealis?” I ask her. “I thought I saw it once, passing like a green flame over my head, quietly.” I can see her beginning to wander. “And then I realized it was just a cloud, picking up some beautiful glow from somewhere, and so I just went back to looking at the ground.” She is humming softly, throwing a stone from the pavement with one hand and gripping her beverage with the other.