The Bread We Eat in Dreams

She looked at me with an old, sour kind of pity. I flushed, naked in her bed, no wolf but a girl.

Then a huntsman, I whispered. I could be that. I could cut you free.

And she sat up, her hair falling over her breast—and her nipple was dark, too, that lurid, reddish hue that wasn’t really red at all, but instead a color belonging only to the body, to flesh, rosy and blackened and engorged with blood.

You keep doing that, she said, her eyes full of trapped, unspoken anger. You want to keep retelling my story. But it’s my story. It’s not yours. You can’t just make things up because you’d like it better if I had been braver, if I had killed the wolf myself instead, or fucked him in the forest, or started a lesbian collective with the hunter and my grandmother and the local midwives, and made sustainable jams and pickles for a modest profit. Because you’d like me better if I were a symbol of menstruation and sexual power. It happened to me, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only thing that ever happened to me. I own it. I own that wolf and the forest and my basket full of bread and my grandmother with her teeth in a jar. You can’t just make yourself the huntsman or the wolf and turn it into a story about us. It’s a story about me, and how my grandmother died, and how one day I could understand what monsters said and I thought I was going crazy. You want to make it an instruction. A morality play. But you shouldn’t do things like that, if you love someone. It’s theft.

I promised her I wouldn’t, that I just wanted to be closer to her, that I had been silly, insensitive. I would never write about her, I swore. What did I need to write about her for? There were plenty of other things. Things that did not mind.

She put her hand on my mouth. You’re lying, she said. It’s in your nature. I don’t hold it against you. You’re a wolf, too. You saw me in the wood and you didn’t know why you wanted me but you just had to. You crept up, and pretended you were someone nice. Harmless. Who would never take my whole life and lay it out in a book like a beetle specimen. Who would never make me wish I could just work in an office and drink my latte with soy milk and wear green. But you were lying and you’re lying now. You’re already writing a story about me in your head, even while you’re kissing me.

That was true, and it was this story and I woke up in the night, surreptitiously, to write it by the blue, steady light of my laptop and I felt guilty, like I was committing adultery and I suppose I was. In the morning, just as I was finishing it, as if it was finishing the story that did it, she left me and took her hood with her and everything she had ever left in my house, which wasn’t much. A toothbrush. A watch. A coffee cup. She must have gone while I was in the shower, cleaning off the slightly sour effort of staying up all night with a story.

I see her sometimes, on the train, standing, her hip slightly thrust forward, in a cocktail bar with long windows looking out on the rain-washed street. At conferences, in a suit the color of old, furious blood, on the arm of a nice young man with long hair, or an older woman with prim glasses. She likes writers. She can’t help it. When I see her I look for the wolf. I never see him. It’s a strange trick of the eye. I always think I see something moving, just behind her, a shadow, a gleam. But it’s nothing. Only her.

When this story was published in some anthology or other she came to the launch. She was thin. She said to me when I was finished reading: I should have told you before. Wolf doesn’t taste like you think it will. It’s not gamey. It’s soft, like a heart. She drank some of the watery martinis they served and said I suppose it’s passable as fiction but you know how I feel about postmodernism. She said don’t put yourself in stories, it’s gauche, and tres 1990. She said next time I’d better fuck a realist. She said come home with me.

No, she didn’t. I want her to have said that. I want to write that she said that because it makes better narrative. I want to rewrite everything that happened like a fairy tale. I want her to have heard what I wrote and know that I loved her and forgive me because I can make beautiful things. Shouldn’t that be enough? But what she actually said, in my ear, soft as a stopped breath, was: Die Wahrheit ist ich laufen immer und der Wald beendet nie. Die Blätter sind rot. Der Himmel ist rot. Der Weg ist rot und ich bin nie allein.

I understood her. But some things I have learned not to say.

I walked home from the reading in my red coat, the one I bought the spring after she left. I’m a sentimentalist, really. It’s a flaw, I admit. The night was cold; falling leaves spun around my hair. I pulled up my hood. My boots crunched on the hard ground as I turned toward the wood that leads to my house. I listened to the wind, and my feet, and I knew someone was following me. Someone tall and thin and hungry. Someone with golden, slitted eyes who can make it to my door before I can. And when I get there, when I get to my eaves and my stoop and I open the door—

Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985

Once there was a boy who lived under the sea.

(Amphibian Man, Aleksey Belyayev 1928)

(Aquaman, Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger 1941)

Depending on the angle

of light through water

his father, the man in the diving bell, some

Belle Epoque Cousteau with a jaunty mustache,

raised him down in the deep

in the lobster-infested ruins

of old Atlantis

where the old songs still echo like sonar.

Or.

He dreamed under Finnish ice

in a steel and windowless experimental habitat

while the sea kept dripping in

of Soviet rockets trailing turquoise

kerosene plumes, up toward Venus,