Norris always packed a toothbrush but it wasn’t what you thought. Her little beaded bag held also compass, nail clippers, toothpicks, tape measure (caracoled by a bright blue, thumb-thick rubber band) and bullets of chalk shaved clean and white as cottage cheese. You couldn’t engage her in the big picture or else her eyes grew astounded, her tongue thickening to a dumb slab and she groped in memory for headlines and captions. She had no opinion and couldn’t be nudged from the starting block when the words ‘agenda’, ‘revisionist’, ‘blah-blah-centric’ got tossed around like curses on a playground. Minutiae however, made her catch her breath, grains and absences made her reach for the tail of her tee-shirt, to dry her excited hands, wring it into a veronica’s napkin to mop her chin and cheeks and brow, cotton shroud envisaging a less-tormented passion, but a passion all the same. From time to time imbecilic cries escaped her and if you listened closely you’d notice that she was smarter than you, sharper by a long shot. Those little peeps sounded dimwit but take a step back and they were bells above a tom-tom. Transcripted, her rhythmic free-form would have been edged with Latinisms (birds, colors, phases of the pagan moon), lapping its own ghostly double-space, embedded with the bite-size shrapnel of three words from Gilgamesh, four from the Popol Vuh.
She knew exactly what she was looking at, though half the time there was nothing there. Imagine an eyebrow, imagine a toe, then close your eyes and put your lips to where the invisible omphalos should be. A good day’s work trawled up a baggy’s worth of dirt. Pure gold when brushed across the surface of a rickety TV tray,
when spilled or lightly dusted in the sixty-five watts of the reading lamp. She would go blind from staring at a sun last seen five thousand years ago. She did the numbers in her head, second pair of reading glasses tucked forgotten in her headband, gasping at a heresy based on the transposition of scarab and crane, roaring aloud at rib-tickling howlers it would take three days or fifty small-print pages to explain. And nothing pleased her more than being teased into reciting the sibling thread of the River Dynasties in reverse order, or as she put it ‘from the long-before-now to the far-from-beginning’.
Where others would default to something as common as a leap from a bridge on a dare of love, the silken, electroshock loss of virginity, the first solo ride on the infamous metro, Norris thrilled in permanent delight to that late afternoon find of a wrist bone, an imperfect diadem, the shatterings of a chamber pot. And to think she’d almost joined the others for tea break, biked in on bamboo trays across the dunes (exaggerated to a length of two dozen city blocks)! The eyes of her colleagues were clear and shining with an envy that was trying hard to rise above itself. Their lips that grinned and smirked congratulations while silently calling down flamboyant gods of piss upon her head. But even in such an unlikely drench she’d have covered her blush and stammer with a quote or two that would keep them up all night, bug-eyed with their failure at attribution.
Surely her genealogy was corrupt, that she should touch the sun so often and return unscorched. Surely some devil scuttled in its cloak of shadows to plant the evidence at the very tips of her hideously sensible shoes. Surely it was not what it appeared to be: hard work and off the cuff Hollywood luck. Perhaps she’d sold her soul in the lobby of the British Museum? Laid bare her throat to some back-alley vampire, the chimes of midnight and a daredevil’s landing strip thrown in for good measure, for background detail?
She carries an image of perfection in her head and keeps it secret from the degraded touch of language. Nothing stains or devalues quite so irreparably as human breath, the split-atom oil of even the cleanest index finger. She carries an image of her father’s porcelain shaving bowl, which she admired with a two-year old’s drunken-sailor sway. Language failed from the start to catch the white of shaving cream whipped into frozen waves inside the white pond of something magic stuttering “a – ba – laster”. She’s given up reconstructing a fascicle from two words, a page number and a bit of string. She’ll name the baby camels in their feldspar gleam: Freya, Gertrude, Mary, and Jane. That’s it for the big picture, let others bleed imagination dry, storing up the punchlines of dead-end interviews for a cheap laugh at the expat bar.
What is your people’s name for beer? Tent flap slapped by a breeze at high tide, glass melting in one’s hand. ‘Beer’, the ironic reply, followed by the dervish possibilities, chasing after her through the fruit-bright market, shouting that he’d been warned of her coming, her arrival foretold by an opium angel in a swimsuit cloud, their destiny to be as one, as one as quicksilver’s helical surge and settle in a shallow copper saucer, as a mirage pulsing the asphalt’s curve away into disappearance, it’s sudden utter absence from a world drowned in sand.