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1.

It was not what she preferred to be called, but then mostly everything was not what she preferred. Her brother called her ‘Scorpio’. People always said there was ‘an edge’ about her, and she did have a gaze, at times, much like poison. She could paralyze or digest you with that stare. Indeed, she often did just that.

“Scorpio, why don’t you get some sun?” Youth’s counsel. A brother’s lament.

“It will only kill me. Besides, I’d have to surround myself with people, with bodies and air already breathed.”

“But if you always stay...”

“I ventilate. Don’t you?”

“I think you’re the one who needs to open up.”

“I AM OPEN! It’s all of you who are closed. Reduced to your least-inventive.”

She was a mystery and an agitation. Her words were not so radically false as to point to real irreparable paranoia. But she didn’t want to know the truth, so much was clear, about these familial ties, this closest circle of relations. It became common to assume that she had suffered a grave trauma. Of any such trauma, she would never speak. She never spoke of anything except for her love of rain and of the winter months. ‘Everyone runs and hides, and the world keeps quiet.’ She watched little television. ‘Almost never!’ This much she would passionately assert, but she had so many complaints, complaints so specific, it was clear that her frustration was a telecommunicated ailment.

Funny thing about false assertions: they speak so eloquently about things unseen. She watched. No lights. There could be no lights. She cherished the blue light as it bounced off uninteresting silhouettes around her room. Blue light was human. Of course, some know it as blinding, deadly, dangerous. Hers was an unaccountable daring.

If only she could find herself a home made of blue light. This was her deepest lust, her most serious anguish. If only dirt and garbage were made of blue light, she could live in the world. That little would be enough. She was in love with an impossiblity. (This is not to call her ‘unrealistic’, but rather to say that she hated anything outside the blue light and was painfully aware that she could not get within it. She hated all possible realities, seeing them as scenarios automatically twisted beyond beauty.) She preferred sleep, and its surrounding environs, because then she could at least live in a blue world, where people weren’t people so much as small exotic birds, each with another one of her favorite thoughts for its song.

She knew well that her most potent deficiency was in communicating with others. (In the way of this particular grain of self-awareness, she might actually be called ‘realistic’.) She once found a note in which her brother took the scorpion comparison to greater extremes... ‘like the scorpion, she cannot talk, cannot decide, she simply stings, and can’t stop herself.’

Compassion? Anger? Blindness? Whatever her brother’s intent, it left her with an image, a mirror to hold up to her blue light. She could never communicate her dreams. She could only guess at the horrifying misinterpretations, the vulgarizations, that would have to issue forth from other mouths... mouths not blue, not her own. It would equate to treason. She would try herself for betraying the beauty of her interior world, or more precisely: of her longing.

“ ‘Life is a series of pains and luxuries: pains of a moment or of too much eternity... luxuries in mind or body, momentary or extended... each building on the last, each building a storm of familiar and preferable motifs to which our attempts to return often will account for our pains and luxuries... a circle... a web...’ So, you see, I don’t have a hand in it... I don’t have any responsibility to fix anyone’s social attentions.” These eloquent outbursts would baffle as much as they transfixed her family... she was quoting Jordan Thannery, PhD... the responsibility part was her own obscure derivation. “I care about every moment, Cecil; I can’t just play along!”

2.

“Maybe we should look into some sort of treatment...”

“Really, she’s just a pain in the ass.”

“Your daughter, Dmitri? She needs more than a scratch and a grunt.”

Dmitri always tended toward an earthy sort of logic. If the natural world always has an answer, and some divine and wholly logical undercurrent, then so should we. A person should be able to regenerate his or her own inner strength, because it’s only natural to do so. It was a self-reliance he only superficially embodied, of course, and his family was often irritated by his insistence on unseen resolutions and survivalism, an insistence they knew was at least partly hypocritical. “Hey, Cecil, my boy, how do you see it?”

“She’s got an urge to hate. She likes to be mean. She’s like that scorpion that bit me on our trip to Santa Fe.”

“You’re always so intense, Cecil. And that wasn’t a scorpion; you just remember it that way. The scorpion was on a postcard.”

“No, Mom, you know she’s got problems. You know she obsesses about the nobility of colors. She even hates the god-damned air!”

“Watch it, Cecil! I will not have your blasphemy.”

“Jane, we’re not getting into that debate with him again. He’s just going to knock our brains around like always. We have an infidel for a son. I’ve accepted it. All those Godless complexities that a decent person should never... I’ve accepted it!” The brusque insertion of that final claim seemed to signify Dmitri’s dropping out of the conversation.

“If she dislikes polluted air, maybe she can make something out of that. She might be a senator, if we give her enough love to stand on.”

Dmitri liked his wife’s words, mostly for the solvent of optimism they contained. Cecil set to wondering what he could do, if only...

3.

She lay there in the blue, besweat with anxieties, quietly burning away the agitations of a day full of others. In herself, she knew piety. She knew also that piety was passion, and that she was fiery, in a way. She spent long hours fiddling with these terminologies in her mind... she determined her identity to be fierce, fiery, winsome, and wholly and infallibly compassionate... so compassionate in fact that she owed nothing to anyone. From this point, she would derive the reason of a private and ongoing tragedy. The paradox of it never concerned her.

4.

I wish most fervently to enclose myself, Daddy, she will write, in a veil so verbose and convoluted, you will never find me... I wish to become indecipherably complex, Daddy, because you did not understand my humanity, my way of being. Because I must justify your indifference, Daddy. If it were my doing, if there were no one alive who could cut through all the layers, then I could explain away my torments, the long hours trembling, after taking in the horrid echoes of shouts I could not believe or comprehend. If I could be voluntarily so far beyond reason, Daddy, and I could explain myself only through coded mazes and a sublime and writerly avoidance of cholera, then I could believe I was whole, and that there was a boundary enclosing me, a concrete shell, which justified my existing in spite of the human habit of giving up on understanding. I need this mesh of incongruent stories, with never an ending and never a shape, to complete my labyrinthine revenge against you, Daddy. It will describe your ignorance and make me the champion of our confusions, shield me against having been born into broken arms and failing hearts and stone walls I could not see but could taste, palpate, recognize, and recoil from. Born into the cold, my instincts set initially for warmth, I will bend and ennervate these walls and recoilings, until they are understood by me alone, my shield, your drowning, a fixation of the fires. Stillness, Daddy. I write to get stillness and learn to freeze you back. Labyrinthine revenge, palpable tensions, spilt wines.

I will be a writer, she thought. But she never would.

It was too hard to confess to everything, to be faced with everything, to challenge it and to beat the torments, with only the soft lace of words.

Do you want me to be small, Daddy, or cruel or viscous? Do you want everyone to get muddled in a viscous me, to trip and become small as well? Should I do it back to you, Daddy? There is no way; I will just have to forget it all, try to believe it wasn’t mine, this life.

And life would go on in that vein. Unpossessed. An ultimatum offering only abandon or resignation. She would spend years trying to remember how to forget to protest. She would protest. Secretly, with no effects. She would labor at becoming no more than a hush.

I will become that hush we imagined together, Daddy. You will not have to remember me.

She would do it by tricks of the mind. Once every two or three months, maybe with the recognition that the seasons had turned, and always on a clear night, she would step out uner the stars and contemplate this sophisticated self-deception. Anyone would marvel at the genius of what I have done to shape myself, if only they cared to see, if only I cared to let them, she would reflect. The recognition lasted half as long as it takes us to read it, but during that brief awakening she knew her freedom was in her own hands.

5.

Today is her fiftieth birthday; Scorpio now has a house, a husband, and two children who don’t know how much agony she has suffered during their lives together. She never blamed the children, and so never let them see the too-smart briars of Mommy’s ceaseless inner rhetoric.

She sits in her bedroom window, watching the family gather in front of the house.

Dmitri died last fall, and Scorpio’s widowed mother still cries for a minute or two in the mornings. Even fifty years could not erase a daughter’s amazement at having been named Hope, by that affectionate woman. Hope has learned to accept that the moniker might be oddly appropriate. Perhaps it has been one of the keys to her strained survival. Yet she wonders now if she’ll ever forget the tensions wrought and embraced in youth, and which the years have ably cultivated, trimming back and nurturing. She wonders if she’ll ever be free of the weight of her difference, her dark dreams, the muted barricades she has lain out between herself and her loved ones.

Hope knows freedom is in her own hands now. She will try this year to mold it, to slip into it, once and for all. It will be decisive. After she reckons with today’s ordeal. First of all, she will try to put all of that aside and go down and greet the pressures assembling on her flawlessly-manicured lawn.

[ from Mortal Coils, by Joseph Robertson ]

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