Wen

We'd come back from the ocean that night, the same ocean we were married at, the same ocean lying by I'd first heard the whisper. A grey whisper of a mother I never had, as I lay shivering, eyes closed the earth speeding me into the sun. I felt the feet trod my way, feeling the sand grind and dug, feeling this forewake approach blowing me deeper into a solitary chamber of listening, listening with the surface of my skin. And then there was the voice, at my left ear, the same ear the ocean was on, whispering my name.
Wen
Wen
time to get up
time to get up Wen
it's ok now
time to get up sweety
The seawind blew her voice all the way in me, way through all the way down to the bottom of the well. A dry line in me smiled. Watered. Not clear whose mother that was. It was a good visit, one I looked forward to each day that summer by the ocean, staying in your father's house, looked forward to it each time I came out of the sea, shivering and exhilarated, trembling. After that it was just the memory of it, each time I lay waiting. Each time laying waiting thinking it was now it was coming, she was coming. But she the voice never came again. My memory of it seemed to ward it off.
And it was that ocean we went back to that week, honoring our first year of being wed.
That night we came back from the ocean I heard Eve died. Eve died. I heard Eve die.
Because the ocean was in me, and you were in me while we were at the ocean, I could not sleep. Like the vertigo after swimming rough water everything moved and slid across the night as I lay in our bed and felt. One year married, our houses collided in mid air, come crashing down and into shapes that were unimaginable to us, familiar like all disaster. So, making our home as we were in this new domestic debris, it was a relief back then to get away, and hotels and motels always felt more homelike than the one we were striving to build. The home between homes. (There was something about a buried radio, about a sound, about sound being the true home of childhood. There was something about that radio being buried, seemingly lost, when the world changed from sound to the ruthless silence of Matter. From the oral to the written. Typical stuff. About childhood disappeared. About sound and History. Something about a radio, buried, then disgorged again when the houses of marriage collide. And the world of sound that was silenced coming to life again. Something about childhood homes colliding in marriage, and those houses of sound being the home made anew.)
Because you were in me while we were out at the ocean I could not sleep, as you slept. When you are in me I become alive. And stay that way, for hour and hour after.
A dark that is never put out.
I sat in it, feeling the ocean still in me and you still in me and heard something like glasses or plates tapping outside the window, under us.
I listened.
It was that dark, that same listening-with-the-skin dark and I began to hear, in the world, the hissing click of a lighter, the hissing suck of the tube. Some blurred words. Socked feet. Plastic. Glass. Click hiss and suck.
And then an insect's barbed foot of lighting struck the window, in Eve's voice. It was the prayer of a geyser vomiting, the prayer of a severed artery ejaculating, the victorious murderprayer of an unclogging drain. It was spewed running over each and every boundary, every bed, every border. It entered me in that dark that is never extinguished with the violence of a hyperdermic filled with the sun. I immediately swelled with fire and a storm of fear. And then the light fading, and just the sound of her voice, its first wet eruption stilled, now a steady small stream of molten pain.
So I listened to that, for a couple of hours. Took a shit. Finished a crossword, all by candlelight.
Sometimes the voice would crescendo and blow again, and the shapes of words started to appear in the explosions. God and help and oh. And then the subsiding, the sibilant trickle of untourniquetted pain.
I understand you already were told what I thought, then.
That I thought: Good. Go. That I thought: Die. That I deliberately watched the undelicate hands of my minds form their responsa of No Help. Yes. That's all true.
I did not hate Eve. I didn't even wish her dead. But I heard her dying, I knew it as soon as I heard it: it is a sound transmitted by bones, received in marrow. And I could feel no reason to help her live, assuming some action I could have taken could have. Some phone call. I saw stark that helping her live would not be best. That some healing results in what's called Death. And it seemed to me to be the best medicine for all involved. Her bitter suffering, the raped little girl what never got aid, what never got soothed, what never received consolation: what never became Who, and who never got to speak, just inhale, insuck, the solar violence of her first home lighting the fire of her stem again and again and again. Now, toothless and back-broke at 49, coming on to the garbage men morning in a humpbacked halter without teeth, her apartment disintegrating about her into a ooze of oily tan dust; dreaming of "colorado" and "california" and "friends out there", her medicine delivered by private sedan.
Neighbors surrounding our building screamed at her to shut up as her heart died. We'd all heard it before, they'd say. But I'd never heard this, because this was something hearing could hear only once.
Go, Eve.
Go.
It's alright.
It's time.
Go, sweet heart.
I did, I wished her gone, and done with all the pain.
How she was found, wrapped around the base of the toilet in a jaggedhemmed nightdress, face drawn in an openeyed rictus of agony, fists tight around the lighter and stem.
But I forgot about it, and laid down next to you, and, the shivering moving ocean drained by Eve's deathsong, slept.
Two days later they found her.
Like I said, I forgot all about it, til her death reminded me what I'd knew.