Edmund Is Moving in on the Explanation

But as his fingers graze it, Ana lays down her toe. With her boot pressed into the flimsy note, it’s difficult for Edmund, crawling along the floor, to pick it up. So when he grabs it, it tears, and because the paper’s wet it tears quite easily. “Oh my god it’s going to bleed,” Edmund thinks, tears in his eyes. It will not. The note begins to emit light, actually — a rising, vertiginous red that lifts both Ana and the note clear off the floor. The explanation carries them along the hallway and into the small apartment kitchen.

Edmund mashes his face into the floor, while Ana, her face remains floating where her body once stood — that’s how she’s feeling. Something like shock.

“Would you mind following my body?” her disembodied mouth mouths. Her lungs are no longer connected, making it hard to vocalize clearly. “I’d like to see where it might go, if you don’t mind.”

Edmund can read her lips, but he doesn’t get up yet. The kitchen grows louder, the night outside dampens; no sounds of trees. He’s reaching for the remaining half of his detailed, highly evasive apology. Gratitude, sudden and overwhelming, that she hadn’t read it:

“... I’m forced to conclude that I acted out of compassion, to save you...” and, “... it my own store of misery that, in fact, when you think about it…”

Edmund’s stomach curdles with sudden-onset self loathing, and he looks up with a fright to meet Ana’s eyes, still floating, staring. They close painfully, and, with her nose and lips, zip along the hallway, feeling wronged.

Had her eyes seen the explanation? If not, a victory: the explanation is horrible! Edmund realizes. An apology only makes the thing — the trifling thing he was so recently obliged to disclose — seem real. Edmund attempts a smile, displays a cringe: the apology, still legible, is pasted to Ana’s boot.

In the kitchen, Ana’s body is busy. Smells of red curry and cinnamon waft from the huge pot her hand stirs briskly. The kitchen is small, covered in dirty white tile, the only refuge in the small apartment. The flame on the stove roars, nearly engulfing the pot and sending a blizzard of lights around the room — lights which spill from the kitchen and reflect on Edmund’s hungry eyes, inching nearer in the dark.

“What are you making?” Ana’s eyes mouth to the back of her head. She’s curious what her body is up to with such joyous animation.

Her body ignores her, guided by its own, automatic spirit. It turns around, steps through her face, mangling it, and opens the cupboard. Her hands move so quickly it’s a blur. Like a miracle, they yank seven mouse traps from the shelf and fling them into the pot — into the mixture that is, technically, a stew. What am I doing? Ana wonders. Her hands grab and throw a wall clock, a Seiko, into the roiling mixture.

Then: two paper doilies, a heaping scoop of dog food, Ana’s left eyeball, salt, and a VHS copy of True Romance, left unreturned on the counter.

The broth smells rather good, Ana is surprised to find. It hits her like a shock that, for her body, the way to deal with immediate, consuming pain may be to move the appendages like wild: the logic is in the body’s processes, not its conclusions.

At ankle height, Edmund peeks one eye around the doorframe. The other half of the explanation, depleted of its light, remains underfoot. Taking recourse in the familiar, Edmund begins to crawl.

From inside the stew, Ana’s eye opens. She sees Patricia Arquette, bloody, giving James Gandolfini the finger. Ana’s hand stirs the pot, and film slides drift by. The next second, she sees Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater freaking it in a phone booth. Both eyes blink independently in surprise. Then the slides are gone.

Edmund has gotten his shirt soaked, dragging it along the wet floor. Ana sees him snaking into the kitchen, his cheek pressed to the ground, his dark hair grasping his face like a claw. The kitchen is hot and he’s glistening. It makes Ana want to vomit, seeing him, and she turns her single floating eyeball to her hyperactive body.

“I would love some stew!” she tries to hint shoutingly at her body, waiting patiently and with increasing anxiety. “It looks nearly done!”

Edmund is certain that if he reaches the explanation, he will win her confidence. The explanation will be gone, and with the full power of his language restored, he will explain everything. His legs coil and propel the soaking upper body along the floor.

One of the things not preserved in the skeletal record is how good soup tastes, or how tenderly a face is caressed, Ana thinks briefly, as she watches her body move into a new mode of operation. She watches absently as her body turns heel and delivers a brutal, booted kick straight to Edmund’s plaintive, sweaty face.

“Well!” Ana mouths.

Edmund is, physically, okay. He will be okay. The upper lip is definitely busted. On the forehead, vivid bootprint. The explanation is plastered to his broken nose. The paper is sticking out a little, and Edmund can read some of the lines written there. Anxiety and shame rapidly outpace pain.

Ana realizes with glee that her body is preparing the final touches on the stew. Some pepper flakes here, some batteries there. A light, loving sprinkle of grease trap grease. Ana’s body pauses, squares itself to the pot, and exhales purposefully. Then a slow, mounting, ever-expanding breath, the body takes in the entire world. One more mouse trap? The body considers.

Ana zooms, hovers breathless over her body’s shoulder, watching: she must see the stew finished! Mere moments and inches away, a uncommonly nourishing bite: a heaping teaspoon of distilled, amassed misery. And in that fragrant serving, a irrevocable contract, perhaps: the forever absolution of Ana’s pain.

Ana’s body lifts up a silk handkerchief — ready. But Edmund’s hand rockets into the air, clenching a wadded package. It thrusts itself over the edge of the pot, knuckles bared, and like some larval cocoon unfurling drops the explanation in. No splash.

All one can hear, for some time, is the sound of two bodies breathing.

“Everything is going to be okay,” says Edmund finally, uncertain. Ana’s face turns to him with a large, absent sadness. At the same time, edging under film slides and gliding between clocks, the explanation descends through thick liquid. It nears the bottom of the pot.

“Are you okay?” Edmund asks.

The explanation comes to rest on Ana’s eyeball, in full panorama. At once, Ana’s body drops to the floor, handkerchief in hand. Ana’s eye, nose, and lips continue to look at Edmund. Ana’s left eyeball, thick in stew, stares.

It is true that, without her lungs, Ana cannot vocalize. Without her arms, gesture; her legs, run. Or stand her ground. But it’s also true that expression is never lost in its entirety: left unpreserved in the skeletal record is how people continue to communicate without their bodies, when they have slipped away, when the spirit untethers itself from the ground.

In the quiet, white light of the kitchen, Ana turns her attention to the roar of the stove. She tunes right in. Also audible to her, just barely, is the sound of Edmund breathing on the ground. Air pockets break on the stew surface. She can see, through the pellucid explanation, Patricia Arquette driving a pink convertible into a sunset.

And with the finality of a decision, Ana continues listening. If her body gets up, she will hear it take a step. Air moves through trees, freshly awake, outside. And if that step finds the floor, she will hear it skip past another body and pace along the hallway. Long after the body breaks free, she will continue to hear the trees.