Part III, Chapterlets 16, 17

16.
The strangest mansion in Texas belonged to Allison’s grandfather. It was hunched like an animal in the midst of a tangled patch of weeds and briars. Before Allison had inherited it, it had been in the family for generations. The whole thing looked as if it had received no maintenance in all that time. In truth, every generation that had lived there had put their own unique architectural flourish on the façade, and every generation had given it one coat of white paint.
The house had its own small plot in the back, where the faded grey and green tombstones stood in the shade of a spreading blackthorn. The whole of the house was protected by ancient withered trees that fended off light, wind, heat, and cold alike, leaving the interior a pale reflection of the season outside. Under Allison’s care it had become somewhat of a poor man’s resort for poets, the occasional radical liberal, artists, or lovers too conspicuous for the tastes of Amarillo. All manner of religious cooks could be found there, too, from Faith Healers to Hoodoo practitioners. They were either out beneath the branches of that ancient blackthorn or one of its sentinel companions, or they were in the sitting room or parlor, causing the whole house to chatter and creak with the shuffling of their shoeless feet and bootless ideas.
Allison divided her time equally between her home in South Tulsa and this rambling structure outside Amarillo, and she could normally be seen in the parlor, one hand on the head of Bernadette, her chocolate brown Labrador, whose eyes never left the face of her mistress, with a fire pushing their shadows high up onto the wall behind them.
Despite all the characters that blew threw the house, Allison was the only one that truly stood out. There was something in the calm, unreserved attention she gave that marked her as the center of a vast wheel of compassion. Her shoulders were broad, and she was above average height for a woman. Her skin was unblemished and unwrinkled despite her middle years having come and gone. But over and above this delicacy of complexion, or perhaps because of it, there was something carved in Allison that was immediately apparent to all that met her—in her gaze and in her posture were the very figure of patience, of abiding time.
She had something vaguely old-timey about her that seemed only to come forward in her West Texas setting, something that shouted about covered wagons and long drives and animals pausing to lap cold water from iron-rich streambeds, something that spoke of terrified children making up stories about Indians in the dark, and the women in the fields as large and hardy as their men, crushing the crops down as they sprung up from the worked ground, something that spoke to a time before the petty religion of her day, when God was so large and palpable in their minds and lands that the people thought they could build the world in his image once again, given equal time.
At these gatherings and discussions, Allison was the silent center. Allison was immune to the fall that other bodies described in space as time accreted upon them. She abided, keeping privately and endlessly at bay a world of fear and frenzy by her refusal to acknowledge it. It was such a world that all these others fled, and it was to be in her presence that they came.
Allison gave relentlessly of herself. And those that came to visit her always took away something vital, something they lacked, something she had and didn’t know was being given. The poverty that Allison was becoming was visible in the house, in the ruinous tangle of thorns and briars, in the faces of those who came to stay with her.
Allison did not have a sense of humor. She had a smile. It was quick and agile, but it never reached her eyes. Her eyes seemed to absorb and refine what went on in front of her without ever really approaching it. She would occasionally laugh at a joke, but it was in a way that seemed more to indicate her acknowledgement that she had noticed a joke being made than to signify any special overflow of delight that it might have caused.
Neither was Allison a cynic. She listened to the thousand little admissions of guilt that those around her flung at her in an attempt to break her equanimity—listened to them without accusation or recrimination. This was the reason people came to her, and it was often the reason that they left. They seemed unable to deal with her inability to recognize injustice in their behavior or evil in their natures. She was always already outside their stories even at her moments of most sublime empathy. She was, therefore, incapable of being embroiled in their quests for redemption or companionship.
Then she met Yuriko. Her agent, whom she kept in her capacity as a published poet, had told her over coffee that the Kanze Noh troupe was going to be performing in Houston. They were performing a program including both Kyogen and Noh pieces, chief among them Aoi no Ue, a piece that Allison was using as a sort of central figure in a novel-length prose work she had supposedly been working on for the last six months. Allison went alone. She arrived early and took her seat in the second row.
The Kyogen went ahead with reserved, masterful comic timing. Kimono and masks in yellow, white, and red flowed by over the hard boards of the stage, with master and servant recriminating each other and bickering as the lights shone sedately down on them. Allison watched it all absently, amused when master and servant both ended up taking advantage of the thunder god.
Then, the kyogen was over. The first clackings of the wooden blocks caused the girl sitting next to Allison to shake in apprehension. She took out a cigarette and fumbled in her purse until Allison put a hand over it and gave a little shake of her head. The girl gave a start and turned to look at her. Allison watched her looking out of the corner of her eye. Eventually, the girl turned her eyes back to the action.
As the wakizure began the slow exposition relating the Lady Aoi’s illness, Allison returned the examination. Every slight gesture of the court official’s fan pointed toward the folded robes of the absent/present Lady Aoi made the girl’s trembling start again.
Before she knew it, the sorceress Teruhi was summoned, and when she approached the center of the stage, she turned and seemed to face the girl directly, song welling up from behind the mask with an implacable cry of the soul. The sheer emotive quality of the performance caused the girl to stand up, visibly shaking from head to foot. Allison took her hand, trying to pull her back to her seat. “Let’s get out of here,” the girl whispered, and, still holding her hand, Allison led her out of the room.
In the lobby, the girl lit her cigarette under a no smoking sign. Allison said, “My name is Allison Meyers,” and she waited.
After a moment, the girl said, “I’m Star.” She gestured with the cigarette. “I don’t want to be here.” But that was all. She didn’t say if there was any place she would rather go.

17.
Yuriko had stayed with Allison in Amarillo until mid-winter. Allison felt that there were two principle aspects to the girl. Love and terror. They were so bound up with each other that neither would ever get out.
Allison closed up the house when she found out that they both had reasons to go to Tulsa. Yuriko related only parts of her life, but she kept saying again and again that she wished she could find a place where she felt like she belonged. She mentioned and uncle in Tulsa, and it seemed to Allison like a good opportunity to help the girl find some sort of way to get stable. Allison was chilled at the thought that the constant repetition made it seem as though the girl was saying that she belonged to Allison, with Allison, wherever that happened to be.
Allison let Yuriko stay with her until she managed to make contact with her relatives. Looking out into the garden, you could see the carved granite figure in the little shady area that adjoined her neighbors property, a woman bending forward with one hand extended as if to offer it to someone below.
As they lived their lives together, every object in the house, every syllable that graced the air between them gave proof to the growing sentiments of love and attachment between them. Allison’s house was decorated as only a poet could get away with, with broken animals from carousels exchanging pride of place with Indonesian Buddha heads and Mongolian cabinets of strangely grained wood, eaten by worms. There were small candles on every conceivable surface, and the floor was littered with cushions and books.
When it happened that Allison was alone most of the time, she felt very strongly the presence of this house, their house, and she admitted that this must in some way be part of the punishment meted out to those with the hubris to think that they could build lives together when they had been given lives apart. She would go around, trying not to disturb anything, unaware that her caution was driven by a fear that if she disturbed the smallest thing that Yuriko would be unable to find her way back.
Love was what remained at the end of the day—all the scattered furniture and discarded clothing—the overwhelming by-catch resulting from trawling their lives together. The image of Yuriko standing in the second row cast a permanent shadow onto Allison’s mind. Yuriko was the solid center of Allison’s being, and around her moved the limbs and body, moved the heart and bowels of a great machine whose only purpose was to maintain that center. Yuriko, inasmuch as she was now become a part of Allison, was now beyond time, as Allison was untouched by time’s relentless flow. All that remained to touch upon Yuriko was incident—the appalling possibility of Yuriko’s path coinciding with a truck or a stray bullet was the constant obsession of Allison’s lonely hours. This possibility had such psychic weight that Yuriko became enormous, a gravitic body swirling objects and disasters equally toward her yawning event horizon. Crying out, Allison would wake in the middle of the night and try to sift through the dreams of a broken Yuriko to find some prophetic fragment, some truth about Yuriko as she was then, and the weight of her anxiety would carry her back down into nightmare.
Sometimes the little ghosts of Yuriko’s undisclosed past would flit about the house in Yuriko’s wake as she moved. Little snatches of song in Japanese or Mandarin. Little refrains of rhymes unknown to Allison that would stop as suddenly as they began, pieces of a past working their way to the surface like pieces of glass pushing out of an old scar.
And sometimes, walking about the house, Yuriko would come upon Allison engaged in writing and would throw her arms around her in a terrible embrace, and they would stare at each other’s pupils, their eyes quaking back and forth as the objects of their gaze also fluttered from place to place, looking for somewhere to land, two heads in four hands, pushed so close together that the space between them was the only thing keeping them apart, keeping them from crushing into the same space at the same time in defiance of the laws of physics and the discretion of their bodies.
And sometimes, in moments like these, Yuriko would be borne up on a rogue wave of grief that rose for miles, and, in her distraction, she would slip. The slip would be a slip of tongue or gesture that revealed a wholly alien dialect, making Allison even more conscious that Yuriko had come from a life to which she would have to return. The inevitable call from the desperate uncle must one day see to that. “In order to keep her,” these moments seemed to say, “there is no way but death.” It was only somewhat true, Allison reflected, that in death Yuriko would belong to her. Death went along with each of the living, in company and alone. If death took Yuriko, she would belong as much to memory, to death, and to time as she belonged to Allison. The idea of this loss made her shudder.
Deliberately staring out at the sun to have an excuse for eyes so full of liquid, Allison would track Yuriko by the sounds of her dressing the progress of her leaving. The low grating of the closet opening and the shrieking shove of hangars pushed to one side for the selection of the outfit. The woody rumble of the underwear drawer opening. The satisfied slap of the elastic of her thong hitting one pale hip one room away—probably black, most of them were. The almost imperceptible snip of the bra being clasped. And here—Allison knew Yuriko always put her bra on backwards before turning it around and mashing her breasts into their cups and sliding on the straps—the halting slide of fabric on skin as the bra was adjusted. She saw in her mind Yuriko’s hair being pulled through the hole in her blouse by the handful, rising up along the slope of her shoulders to form a bridge with the nape of her neck and up to the back of her head. Half paralyzed by the sounds and their signaling of departure, Allison would say a little prayer: “In the day of judgment, when our bones come up looking backward for our spirits, I will know only you of all the host of sinners assembled before heaven’s seat. My ears will know only your voice of all the voices lost in the hymns sung before the name. My eyes will scan that ashy expanse and they will not stir until they light upon your face. My feet will stand by the side of your grave until Gabriel is red in the face and his horn drops from his exhausted hands.”
In the doorway, Yuriko would stand. “Don’t wait up,” she’d say.
In the years that they lived together on and off, Yuriko’s leavetakings became persistently closer together. In the beginning, Allison went out when Yuriko did, to watch her back, but it grew difficult. Watching Yuriko move from table to table, drink to drink, man to man, Allison learned that it was important that Yuriko have her somewhere to go back to. Yuriko’s absence became difficult to bear—she was a phantom limb.
Eventually, when Yuriko’s absences became absences of weeks and months rather than days and hours, Allison took to wandering. The doctor, seeing her out alone one night, said to himself, as the tall broad woman passed ahead of him under the streetlights, “There goes the dethroned—Love has fallen off the wall, and not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men…A religious woman without the joy and safety of the Catholics. Take that safety from a woman,” he said, moving faster to keep her in sight, “and love gets out and into everything. She sees that girl everywhere. Out looking for what she’s too scared to find. Fuck, but it seems strange to see the mother of mischief running around with her head cut off, trying to get the world back and into bed before curfew.”
Allison was looking, it was true. But not for Yuriko. She was looking in parked cars and squats for traces of the things that influenced their lives. Sometimes, knowing that sooner or later Yuriko’s oscillation would snap the tether and that they would be strangers forever after, Allison would sit down on a stair or on a curb or a bench in a park and put her hands in her lap and cry out to god, expecting nothing in return.
One night, after waking from a dream of her grandmother, Allison was drawn by a whimpering sound to the picture window above her desk in the study. She rose and put her dressing gown over her nakedness and went to see what the sound was. Looking into the garden by the obscuring totality of the floodlight, Allison saw a double shadow falling from the granite statue in the corner. Thinking that it might be Yuriko, she opened the window and called out. But there was no answer. She peered into the overdetermined black of the shadow under the statue and saw the gleam of Yuriko’s eyes there, looking back at her. They gazed at each other. As if the floodlight and their gaze could have lightened even the shadow that cloaked Yuriko, Allison saw the body of another woman come into focus in the obscurity. The woman was kneeling in front of Yuriko with her face in yet another pocket of darkness created by Yuriko’s skirt, while she leaned against the statue, one leg over the shoulder of her attendant.
Incapable of looking away, Allison’s vocal chords withered and dead, experiencing the blackest feeling of hatred and foreboding, the shadows of her study seemed to swell up around her and pierce her with a profound despair so thoroughly that she, too, dropped to her knees. Her eyes, then, were torn from the scene not by any act of will, but by the simple motion of a body falling through space. She knelt with her chin on the desk, and thought that if she turned her mind away from what Yuriko was doing, the whole illusion would shatter and leave Yuriko standing alone underneath the statue. Allison shut her eyes tight and felt a fierce happiness. Yuriko was protected. The succession of bodies that clasped against her was protection, but even as she shut her eyes, Allison said, “Ah!” with the unutterable finality of the “Ah!” of a body stabbed through with a knife, a body struck at the moment of the last breath by the weight of the world leaving it. “Ah!”