Littered with Ellipses

Part 6

Xuanji tried to reread one of the earliest articles about Carl, but the glare on her reader was blinding and she could only see her own reflection. Not that it mattered. She had read the article numerous times and knew it by heart. She knew Carl was not a real name. Carl was a name, but it was not his. He had a designation. He was real, but his name was not. She knew everything by heart. But still, she liked to read the articles as if just published, as if this was all new. It had been many months since Xuanji had first read about Carl-who-was-not-Carl and she wondered if she would ever start noticing the days pass again. All she wanted to do was read about him. She boarded commuter ferries despite no job, she walked the city's docks and walkways, stopped to read again in the too small shade of buildings crumbling into rising water. She had no appointments, nothing to take her elsewhere. Her mother had seen to that. Her mother with her investments and real estate, her mother with her busy life and desire for the uncomplicated and unavailable. Mother and her money to cushion them from the world. Commuters looked so sad, so tired. Not Mother. Mother just looked old. She always had, even in ancient photos, a young woman dressing in old woman clothes. Mother was old now, Mother lived "alone." That was how Mother described it. "Alone," the falsehood of the word grating and screaming at Xuanji. Mother's ancient servant hobbled around the apartment, caring for her. His hair was now the color of his white in white eyes, and when Xuanji would visit he would smile and call her "the young miss." He would call her this because Mother demanded it, expected it despite Xuanji's obvious resemblance to him. She had his jaw, his nose, and one white in white eye. Her father she had never called "father" would welcome her to the home, would show her the same painful deference he showed everyone, painful because it truly was no different than what he showed strangers, and would disappear because to stay would clutter Mother's vision of what she called her "empty, forgotten, lonely life."

Alone.

Xuanji had just visited Mother the week before. As usual it had spurred a brief period of intense creative output followed by the need for a recovery from her creative bouts. She was struck by migraines almost weekly after which her poetic output was a flood. She was in the midst of such a flood. She walked the docks, rode the ferries, watched the commuters and monitored the workers. She saw ferry after ferry come and go, water froth-white across its cutting, city-green further away, the maws of windows still visible on the lower-floors of the buildings tall enough to rise from it, darker spots like graves where buildings fully submerged sat beneath the surface. And then she would sit and write, long streams of words. She did so now, kneeling on the dock, pockets full of rocks. There was a quality of drowning in her process.

"I worry I won't be able to breathe," she told her handmaid, Janna. "Then pain ends and the words flow and I can see the river bank."

Every poem finished was like swimming to shore.

Janna half-smiled. She was technically in the employ of Xuanji's mother. Xuanji had no income. She did nothing but work with words on paper, wander the streets and docks, and spend hours in strange shops that sold long ignored items. Xuanji knew what Mother must have said about her to Janna. It was something she'd said about her since she was twelve. She said it in front of Xuanji, sometimes to her.

"Xuanji is a special case. Something to be handled, carefully." Xuanji had set out many times to prove Mother wrong, but something always got in the way, and in her disappointment she would tumble into one of her episodes, and when she emerged she would find reasons for her mother to fire whomever had been caring for Xuanji. The reasons were petty, and often not entirely true. None of them had actually ever stolen from her, that she knew of, but perhaps they had and gotten away with it, or had planned to. Xuanji knew Mother understood the reasons were simply excuses, but the handmaids were fired for this and that. Not yet, Janna. Xuanji hadn't yet figured this one out yet, hadn't yet decided on what to complain about. Janna was quiet. Janna did as she was told. Janna followed at a discreet distance. It was almost as if Janna didn't care.