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gnossienne (n.) — a composition having a dance-like quality; derived from the Greek gnosis, or knowledge.
i.
The passing headlights catch at her hair, leaving streaks in the dark; you’ve lost count of the times you’ve surfaced from sleep to this, the hum of the engine and the rain and the streetlights and her wrists white against the wheel, the hush-hush-hush of rain or snow or wind against the windshield, and everything keeping time with the pulse of blood in your heart, your hands, your throat; you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive, and her unwitting hands on the wheel guiding every piece into place.
You’ve lost count of every time you’ve rolled over in the thick still dark of your shuttered room, reaching for something that’s never been there, and hearing that heartbeat in your head (you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive) — the moon-edge curve of her face as she turns, quick and clear, and some childish impulse drives you to pretend you’re still asleep, to see the shape her face takes when you aren’t looking at her, the way her glance falls soft, all the severity she keeps within swift reach gone in a moment; how the pulse at her throat beats in time with your own, you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive — and now in the dark alone it hums along in your head like the refrain of a very old song, and you stop reaching and slip back into sleep, pulled under by the memory of the fine bones of her wrists and the infinite steadiness of her hands.
ii.
You are driving and she wakes to the sunrise, first the slow dawning of morning on her face and the sky, and then she elbows up and out of poetry and into her inexorable self, mouth twisting a wry shape, morning light in her eyes and the map in her hands, and when you are dazzled by the gold of the sky and too little sleep she grabs at your elbow to keep you on the road and you only imagine, you think, that her hand flicks to your wrist and rests just a beat too long. She pulls up her knees and takes to marking on the map and you drive straight through the light.
iii.
If you make a bargain not to think about it beforehand, you can ride on instinct and call her at three am, leaning against the scuffed and graffiti’d brick wall of some Baltimore dry-cleaner’s. The phone hisses static around her voice when she picks up, and your heart sinks and soars at once at the sound of her. You ask, to make certain, Where are you, and she says, in bed at home, where do you think – where are you?
You tell her that you’re driving back from Connecticut, and she lets out a long breath, slow, like a hand reaching. You tilt your head further back against wet brick. In Baltimore. Goddamn car broke down, you tell her, which is at least sixty percent true. Never mind, go back to bed, I’ll find someplace to sleep and get a cab in the morning.
She snorts into the receiver, because she does know you, after all. She says, no you won’t; it’s – what, it’s forty miles, I’ll be there in an hour.
You should tell her no, but you can’t, because you wouldn’t mean it, and you don’t want her not to come.
She brings the sun with her, pulled in her wake, and it’s only when she takes your hand and the heat of it wakes you that you realise you’ve been standing in the rain.
There’s a twenty-four hour diner on the edge of town, hemmed in by highway, and you put your elbows on the table and drink mug after mug of bitter, watery coffee, black because they’re out of everything but artificial sugar. She makes you order breakfast, but she doesn’t make you explain yourself, and you watch the movements of her hands with a bleary gratification. She’s wearing a faded blue t-shirt a little too large for her, and her hair is rumpled and curling messily from sleep, but her coat is sharp and pressed, and she is wearing earrings. This is far easier than the rest to chart and track, the strange sum of her.
You do not talk about detailing your car. You do not talk about your mother, or the way your hands shook on the wheel, or that most New England interstates are heavy with childhood ghosts, and you can never predict when they will come fleeting out of the dark or why some months, some years, they are quieter, or louder. You do not tell her that you nearly swerved into the opposite lane with an absentmindedness that frightens you with how little it frightens you. You describe instead the belligerent moustache of the officer who took care of your car and how it bristled as you reassured him three times that you were absolutely not drunk when you ran your car off the road, and then the library fines you will have to pay for the audiobook now crushed beneath the wheels of some semi, which now that you think of it is just adding insult to injury, because the book was so poorly researched that – and she doubles over the table with helpless, unfettered laughter as you proceed to outline the author’s shabby, short-sighted, pompous outlook on the outbreak of the Cold War, laughter that would startle anyone else who knows her, and only delights you.
You do not tell her the other things because in her way she has already guessed them all.
She tells you, I told you that car was a wreck waiting to happen, with a familiar wry-fond twist of her mouth, and accepts appalling coffee without question, and reaches across the table to cover your hand with her own. When she drives you forty-five miles home, you sleep for the first time in two days, and wake twice to find that one of her hands is on the wheel and the other has hold of yours, pulse beating against your own (you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive).
It is three years before you tell her, offhand, in a conversation about something else, that you’ve catalogued this among the times she’s saved your life.
Of course, she already knew.
iv.
You’ve forgotten your own room is a door away, four doors away, half a flight of stairs (never further). Or you’ve forgotten that it’s been longer than ten minutes and a quick review, or you’ve forgotten everything, this time, except for the thin particleboard desk in the corner upholstered in papers. You’ve forgotten her room isn’t your room, her self isn’t your self, that the world is anything other than this desk and its tumble of facts and falsifications – your knee on the chair, ink on your sleeve you won’t notice till much later, unbuttoning your shirt; you’ve forgotten everything but the words swimming in tighter and tighter patterns before you until the words form facts and the facts form a pattern and the pattern opens up to a truth. And, dizzy with the relief of something settling, you’ve curled your arms around your head or tilted back in the chair or rested your face in your hands for only a moment or two, and remember nothing, absolutely nothing else till her hand warms the back of your neck.
(Eventually, in the back of your head, you wait for it, the way one waits to be called home.)
In some memories, she is exasperated, but her hand in your hair is light and her thumb smooths over the knot where your spine begins. Later, you realise the frustration, too, is a reaching of hands. She is resigned, she is amused, she is fond; she unfolds the papers from your hands or unsticks them from where they’ve caught at your face; she takes your hand and wakes you enough to find the hall; she scrunches down at the table with a ferocious desperation to make sense of its contents and a deep gratification when you have already begun to do so; she guides you, half-blind, to the borrowed bed, always much too large for you to make sense of, and you wake much later to her face and knees pressed light and warm against your spine and your heartbeat is so loud in your ears that you are afraid you will wake her with it.
This is the composition of you, all score and mathematics, and you don’t know what it will come to in the end. You want, you want, you are afraid to know the end. You keep taking the old steps. The score keeps changing.
v.
The grief in her face cuts when you look at her. So you don’t look at her.
The silence of the cathedral hisses at your ears, the rustle of her coat, the hush of her hands on coffin wood; all you hear is the roar of silence. It is some time before you find you’re taking her hand and asking, low, are you ready to go?
She leans back against you, only a fraction, then doesn’t; when she turns her face is white and unusually childish and confused. She says, and her mouth is misshapen with the words, go where?
Not the house, you understand, she came to spend Christmas in, full of people who are going to ask are you okay, and treat her like something breakable, or already broken. You wonder if it’s the same for her, the persistent hum of someone else’s worry, the way it chokes at you even in your sleep. But you can’t think, not when her face is white and sharp like iron in the fire, and you duck your head and say, muffled, into her hair, okay, okay, where do you want to go.
She sighs into your coat. I don’t know. I don’t know. Take me somewhere.
So you drive.
Driving can be like running, the annihilation of thought and perception under relentless motion, but it’s never been the speed that wiped your head blank, just the forward motion and the air and the overwhelming rhythm of your own heartbeat.
Her face cuts at you every time you look at her, so you try to stop looking at her.
You want to take her hand, but you think about it too clearly, and so you don’t.
You don’t know San Diego well. You take turns based on the shapes of lights, the curve of the road, the lean of it in the rearview mirror. You say nothing, because there is nothing to say, and you do not turn on the radio, because it seems irrelevant, and you do not look at her because the shape of her, shoulders sharp beneath the dark hunch of her coat, says that she does not want to be seen, does not want to be remembered or understood as she is now, trying to process a grief she cannot wholly understand.
You find the ocean, and from there you ride on instinct.
Come on, you tell her, opening her door and leaning against it; she looks up at you with that white wounded face and says, where are we? You tell her that you have no idea, that’s sort of the point, and take hold of her sleeve, because you can’t quite touch her, and her eyebrows rise (an expression that makes her face look like her own face again, for half a moment), but she gets out of the car.
You walk along the sand and still you say nothing, because there is nothing to say. She is still as hard and sharp as diamond, but she tips her face up to the sky, greying into evening, and the last slant of sun catches in her hair. Something about the light makes her shake her head, face going brittle-dark again, and she goes smaller and harder and you want to touch her and you can’t touch her; the constant hum in the skin of your hands to touch her has no business intruding on her hurt; and the back of your hand brushes against hers and you flinch away – and she grabs for your hand so hard it hurts, and laces her fingers into your own like a tether and you can feel it in her pulse, be here be here be here.
The sea says shh, shh, against the shore, and your tethered hands swing in the rhythm of it.
Later, you sit down at the shoreline, coats bunching and spreading dark over the sand. You do not remember when she curls against and into you, but you remember all of it, sand spilling in your sleeve and her tucking up her knees and shutting her eyes, and she curls into you and you are afraid to touch her, afraid of breaking, afraid of the wrong thing, but somehow instead your hand is in her hair and she laughs, muffled and inexplicable, against the lapel of your coat, and your thumb finds the skin at the nape of her neck.
She does not cry, not even now. Perhaps that is not what she needs. She tilts her head into your hand and everything in your head stops turning.
She murmurs, thank you, and you hope you’ve given her something worth thanks. You shouldn’t, but you lean and press your mouth against her hair, and you feel the breath she lets out against your throat, and before you pull away she’s tilted her head back and up and all she tastes of is salt.
The sun goes down into the sea. The stars come skimming out of the dark. You hold her till she falls asleep.
vi.
You can kiss her if you keep the hunger out of it. If you bite down the words and force them back down your throat and kiss her as though you are not choking on them. If it means nothing – if it’s fondness and proximity and casual trust igniting against loneliness and need and flickering to something in the dark when one of you or the other wakes to find you’ve fallen asleep against each other’s shoulders again – if it’s a brief impulse of wild joy – if it’s deliberate performative foolishness – if it’s not real, in a not-time, and neither of you is beholden to speak of it. You can kiss her if you ask nothing, if you do not make of it a contract or a plea she is too good to refuse. If there is a way out. If you are only giving, and taking nothing, as you have no right to take, as you have taken so much already. You can kiss her if you do not settle on her squared and intractable shoulders the burden of the words you swallow back. If you choke it down again and again and pray she can’t, she can, she can’t taste it on you, hear it in your pulse, your breath against her hair.
(The peace she wants from you is the burden with which you fear you will annihilate her. The gift you will never ask for is what strains at her mouth, her capable hands, to be given and released.)
(I love you, I love you, I love you, the contract you cannot ask her to sign.)
You can kiss her if you keep the car running.
vii.
You’re driving. You have one arm propped on the wheel, because it’s the highway, and you say, offhand, hey, what if we took a roadtrip.
She’s got a file spread out in her lap and she looks up and bursts out laughing. Right, she says. New experiences.
We could explore the continental US. More diners, less crime. Better digs, maybe. Very relaxing. Ever hiked down the Grand Canyon?
I think you and other people come at relaxing from enormously opposite directions.
Says the woman who spent last Friday night editing an article on skeletal deformities in whatever that prehistoric dig was you went snooping into.
I was not snooping, I was invited to preside on account of having impressive credentials. I seem to recall you saying on the phone while you were mocking my very relaxing evening plans that you were sacrificing your evening for the betterment of society, and when I made an ahem noise you admitted you were arguing with the moderator of an internet forum about verifiable first-hand Vanishing Hitchhiker accounts. Also, I had gelato. You did not have gelato. I think I win.
Maybe if we go on a roadtrip we’ll catch a hitchhiking ghost. I don’t think they like investigations; too complicated.
Okay, catch me a nice biddable ghost and I promise I’ll do an autopsy on it if we can get it to sign a waiver. To be perfectly honest I’m not entirely clear on the legality of getting permission from ghosts.
But won’t it be exciting to pioneer new fields of scientific research?
Depends on the ghost.
She reaches for the radio dial. It’s mostly static. The sun’s half up but the clouds have muffled it and the world’s all grey-gold and tentative. She find something humming halfway between static and Bach – weirdly stimulating – and in the compressed rental car, when her hand skims down her shoulder grazes yours just close enough that if you’re paying attention (and you are always paying attention), you can feel the pulse of her heartbeat, or you imagine you can. The sun never comes out, but the world turns gold under the clouds, and her heartbeat echoes against yours, keeping time – you’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive.