A Brief Writing on Creation

As I flipped the phone over so as to ignore another phone call from him, I considered my husband’s constant anger. Recently, my daughter has been refusing to go to school – my husband will not deal with it, insisting that it’s not his job. He is angry with me more than anyone else, as I press my blouses and leave our family at eight in the morning to work at a law firm: white collar, sophisticated and classic. My husband resents me, I resent him, and our daughter resents first-period biology.

And so I ignored the phone, my tight pantyhose damp with sweat as I reviewed a case file for tomorrow’s hearing – a second-degree murder, NGRI. I realized suddenly that there was no paperwork from the client’s fourteen-year-old aggravated assault charge, I was missing critical information. I sighed, my stomach was sick with anxiety. I decided not to take my phone with me. I could use a break.

Now, as I walk through the fluorescent halls, I realize that I am lost. The office in which I have worked, for ten years, seems to have a labyrinth within its basement – filled with stacks of files and cabinets, kept cool and dry by the air filtration system. Deep underground, without windows, I quickly lose track of where I am. The bright light is misleading: every time I round a corner or spot a glow within a room, I walk over only to find more light of a slightly different shade, harsh, unending, and cold. The exit signs only pull me deeper, and when I finally find the room containing files “Jan-March 2009, A-F” the paperwork isn’t there – it must have been processed at our branch office. My pantyhose have a run in them.

I decide to have a conversation with the partners about renovating when I get back to my desk. The door at the end of the hallway looks like it could be the entrance to a staircase, and it has a bright red EXIT sign above it. I should have taken my phone, I think, realizing immediately that not even my overpowering and livid husband could reach me down here, in the remote and cold corners of the labyrinth. I carefully place my hand against the grey, concrete wall, desperate to feel something against my damp skin. The walls don’t seem to have any depth, the grey is misleading and illusory – corners are invisible and there are few shadows in the hallways. I wonder vaguely, absently, if my daughter made it to school.

As I push the EXIT door open, I do not see a staircase. I walk into a small office that is empty, except for twenty small cabinets in a unit against the wall. Something doesn't feel right. In the room around me, the lights are bright and welcoming, yet there is something fundamentally grotesque about the space – as if I walked in on my own conception, a room full of bloated corpses, piles of rotting animals, half-dead, their meat rancid. Unholy. Flaccid. Amniotic. The world upstairs forgotten and denied, like my husband’s phone calls, I stumble into the center of the blue carpet, cool and dry. The filing cabinets are off-white, seemingly more than that, misunderstood and calm underneath the earth. I wonder what they will tell me, I think to myself. I need to know. Bending down under the force of this irrevocable space, I kneel and shuffle towards the wall, extending my hand to pull open one of the drawers.

My daughter was born at 11:04 A.M. on a Tuesday, I want to look at her. When I was born, I was looked upon and perceived, and I swore I would give my reality for her on a Tuesday morning while the rain trembled through the sky. At 11:04 A.M. on a Tuesday, I felt the creation of you and I – mundane and otherworldly – as my body split open and I bled and bled and bled you out. I was born and I have birthed, and I will be removed as you will be, torn from this field, shrieking as we entered, splitting and bloody. At 12:37 A.M. on a Sunday, I was created, creation, I was looked upon and sterilized, juices wiped, dark red blood removed, in order to be perceived. You and I are all that is, we have been created and will create, bloody and gaping and splitting. Angry and in love, we create dauntlessly, filled with the wind and the trembling rain. At 11:04 A.M.

I feel the rest of my body that remains in the horrible room with the cool, dry air. I feel my neck burning in the dark space, unlit by the fluorescent lights of the labyrinth. I feel my eyes as they look upon the hellscape, wrong and painful, hot and wet with blood and tissue. The sun stares over the mountains in the distance, and the wind blows the heat, spinning around my face. I am uncomfortable, suddenly aware of the infinite faces around me, red and screaming. They perceive me and I am perceived. In their multiplicity, I see my eyes, green and burnt, in their flesh. And I see my skin, splitting open and curling apart in creation, underneath the humanity of the staring sun.