maria wickens

A Heap of Broken Images

(Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land)

The Burial of the Dead

Zipline. Flying Fox. Rip slide. Aerial runway.

Death slide.

“That’s freedom,” he shouts as we fly down the mountain. “Can you taste it, sweetheart?”

In the mountains we feel free. He built the zipline, christening it Death Slide. We ride the slide to Death together, wind slaps us with icy breath, branches try to tear me from him.

I could be five or I could be ten.  Not eleven, he is dead by the time I turn eleven. I cling tight and remind myself at least here I have him to myself.

He is a Goliath of a man, a titan, invincible. I really should have felt safer with him than I did.

When his memories spill out, half a bottle of rye later, he describes the horror, the horror of what he did in Vietnam. They didn’t have a name for his agony back then. There was no treatment, I was his only salve. His memories live in our present. I feel the terror of his victims as he pours water into their mouths and noses, whenever the stern man barks orders at him.

‘Nam was a world of wrong. I had no choice. No choice, Pix.

I pluck the hair from my Barbie doll as he talks. Years later I will tug at my own hair creating polka dot bald spots.

He was at Mee Lai. My imagination lifts me like a C-130 as I live his past with him. He is still in Mee Lai and I am there with him. At night in the shack of a cabin, I squirm in his lap as he holds me too tight and the words pour out in tandem with the liquor consumed.

Eventually I drink with him. The brown liquid promises me numbness. Burning hot, antiseptic it is the taste of his sins. I am his confidante, the reader of his hideous confessions, his sin eater.

In the morning, our memories vanish. The fires of napalm hell die, an Agent Orange sunset lights up a beautiful world and he is back. My Foghorn Leghorn father. 

“Pay attention to me boy! I'm not just talkin' to hear my head roar. That's what I've been - I say, that's what I've been telling you, boy!” Chest puffed out, he calls me boy and, realizing I liked to swing at a punching bag, when we return from the mountain he gifts me his old boxing gloves.

My mother tells him I’m ugly enough; he doesn’t have to make a tomboy out of me on top of my other natural impediments.

He winks at me. “That southpaw, Pix, is the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

Oh Daddy. You tried to gift me resilience. You really tried. But still I had no warning of what was to come.

He stabbed himself with a tanto knife. Seppuku. A samurai’s death. It’s a particular self-hate that demands release and retribution in equal doses.

I found him.

“We should never have made you. We were made of the wrong stuff. Bad material. It’s a family thing, this madness.” My mother tells me as we gaze at the hollow man, the fallen giant contemplating his horrific end. “You will probably do the same.”

She doesn’t mean it as a warning. It is undeniably a curse.

If I hadn’t found him she would never have had to live with his death.

She holds me responsible.

<>

A Game of Chess

“Speak to me. You never tell me what you are thinking,” my mother demands, needing our voices to drown out the sounds that disturb her consciousness.

“Don’t go.” She hates when we go to the mountains without her. “I waited so long for you to come back. Please stay.”

Stay? He never left Vietnam. He stands astride two miserable worlds and brought Vietnam home to us.

Mother douses the house with cheap perfume after his suicide, trying to smother the smell of death. A stench of evil that lingers under her cheap, synthetic musk.

“Where are you?” she called when he was alive and long after he was dead. She still calls to him.

“Rat’s Alley.” Goliath’s laughter booms like thunder and tears spring to her eyes.

She screams at night like a sonic bat signal to trace his form.

He’s gone. Foghorn is no more. Nobody here but us chickens.

Watching Green Acres on television reminds her she was once a Gabor sister. An array of sparkling jewels and furs in her closet hint at another life before her soldier dragged her away from the city stores to Tennessee. Is she the Gabor sister they denied and hid away in an attic?

She is Bertha Rochester. Rosemary Kennedy. Rose Williams. Viv Eliott.

“Good bye, city life.

Green Acres we are there.”

Where am I? she cries.

Rat’s Alley.

No lie.

<>

The Fire Sermon

Once upon a time I worked as a live-in scullery maid in a Knightsbridge hotel, surrounded by the ghosts of dead modernists.

T. S. Eliot was a street away on Hyde Park. Olivia Manning worked around the corner at Peter Jones. Click, clack. Stevie Smith typing on yellow paper in a Sloane Square bedsit.

Drowning, not waving. 

Strung up by the ankles, he pours water into their noses and mouths. I feel their uncontrollable terror, too. They drown over and over with no relief. A dead weight presses down on us and we suffocate. Bald Barbie, held by her ankles, eats up his memories…

Mr. Phelps was a regular guest at the hotel. On his fourth visit I asked if his initial J stood for Jim as in Jim Mission Impossible Phelps. 

He shakes his head

Jimi as in Hendrix? James as in Dean? Jim as in Morrison?

“I know the man who owns the apartment in Paris Jim Morrison died in.” Mr Phelps divertes my questioning like a good military intelligence agent.

Jim as in Jim Hawkins? Captain Flint’s plucky cabin boy, perhaps? The guessing game continues. 

There is no black spot on his hand.

“I know all about pirates,” he says although he is far too old to be a cabin boy aboard the Hispaniola.

I considered piracy as a career choice. Mary Read and Anne Bonney smashed through piracy’s glass ceiling. When they killed a man, they would open their shirts and expose a breast, ensuring the dying man knew he had been killed by a woman. Ha!

Mr. Phelps invites me to join him to visit a pirate exhibition at Greenwich Maritime Museum.

I assume he misinterprets my sharing of historic fact with a suggestion that a breast will be exposed later. Well I have lived a life of poor choices. Odds are he will not be disappointed.

After many guesses, I learn his name.

Jeremiah, as in bullfrog.

 At Greenwich, standing on the banks of the Thames, the sky grows dark and the gibbering voices become louder. A child sings as I watch London burn. Fire! Fire! Pour on water.

Mr. Phelps saw none of this and, from far away, I hear him saying something about a Vietnamese restaurant. Have I eaten Vietnamese cuisine before?

With my father? Unlikely.

I ignore the warning cries from my voices. I have been trying to ignore them since I was eleven. Mr. Phelps does not hear the voices of the Pirate Queens taunting him but, all the same, he watches me with a curious concern that is new to me.

After the museum, we go to a West End pub. The Guv’nor knows Reggie Kray and attended Violet’s funeral. Every man of a certain age in London claims to have gone to Violet Kray’s funeral.

Mr. Phelps drinks a glass of wine and I finish the bottle understanding what is next, and I will have to be drunk enough to hold up my end of the unspoken bargain. Back at the hotel, I allow Mr. Phelps to arrange my body to his desire with tired acquiescence.

I enjoyed the Vietnamese seaweed he bought at lunch so this is a fair exchange. Ann Bonney and Mary Read did far worse.

The wine fails its mission. For once the voices are silent. Mr. Phelps is boyishly nervous and gentle. Nothing about him reminds me of my father. I quietly marvel at the resemblance he bears to Shirley Feeney’s boyfriend Carmine Ragusa, from Laverne and Shirley. The big Ragu.

Mr. Phelps went to the Olympics with the U.S. fencing team and taught William Shatner the art of fencing. His interest in swashbuckling is genuine, he assures me. not simply a desire to glimpse the breast of a pirate queen.

I can’t see him again. I can’t trust a man who owns a sword. Even if he knew Captain Kirk. And was once removed from Jim Morrison.

“It is a foil,” says Mr. Phelps.

A technicality. I cannot do this. But at least I can claim to know the man who knows the man who owned the apartment Jim Morrison died in.

“Did you take a bath when you visited Jim Morrison’s apartment?”

Mr. Phelps had not but is privy to all the facts about Jim’s untimely death. When I try to recall whether Jim overdosed at a disco or drowned in the bath, I can only remember the taste of the Vietnamese seaweed, the sour wine that had been left open too long in a west end pub, and the sight of London burning and that unrecognizable expression of concern and empathy.

<>

Death by Water

For four hundred years pirates had been executed at Execution dock. Hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead.

Particularly bad men were hung at low tide by a shortened rope that didn’t break their necks. Waiting for high tide to submerge them.

Suspended like Barbie dolls, hung, drowned and tarred, their corpses would hang at the entrance of London from the sea.

Captain Kidd rose up from the waves. Crabs had eaten away his eyes.

Mr. Phelps had dark eyes like my father––but his hair was curlier, and his smile was shy and hesitant.

“You know I go from rags to riches,” sang the hollow-eyed pirate.

 <> 

What the thunder said

Where am I?

It could be Cornwall. Santa Monica? Turquoise Beach? Aruba?

Fluttering in the air. Seagulls? Birds?

Baby-faced bats. Of course.

A shadow rolls across a violet sky, the color of a bruised eye. A rat the size of a guinea pig hisses at me. A tsunami wave of white noise, receding and washing back. A background scream of maternal lamentations rises to fortissimo. The bat babies scream back.

Mee Lai. He wasn’t a bad father. He tried, really he did, but there was too much bad material in him and that same bad material is in me.

“Row, row, row your boat.”

Goliath’s voice is deep, rich, competing against the dissonance. It rumbles like thunder.

“Gently down the stream.”

“Throw your teacher overboard and listen to her scream.” I giggle and he laughs. He is disrespectful to teachers and authority, too.

We are sailing. The lake is calm. The sun is scattering diamonds across the lake.

His eyes are clear of the milky haze his nightmares paint. A luminous moment I will keep polished in my forever box.

It almost certainly never happened.

How I miss you, Daddy.

“Come back to me now.” It is Jeremiah’s voice, not my father’s.

The warmth seeps back in. The blue fights back against the purple sky and I am back in Jeremiah’s arms, draped in his concern.

The beach is in Florida. Blackbeard’s territory.

We are here to visit my mother. Mr. Phelps, Jeremiah intends to ask for my hand and, while he delights in old fashioned ritual, my intention is to let her loose on him, give him a taste of the bad deal he is about to enter into.

Jeremiah is not my father.

“You are not your mother. And you are stronger than me.” Goliath’s voice rumbles in my head.

This is his blessing.