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ISO

Daniel had kept the ad with him for weeks—at first figuratively. He chanted it like a mantra on the bus as he gripped the aluminum bar, pretending not to notice the BO of the blonde who was always on the 6, and who consumed enough coffee that it leaked from her pores. ISO ARTIST IN NEED OF INSPIRATION. RACE, AGE, SEX NOT IMPORTANT. It had been a lonely little ad nestled among the abstruse acronyms that had become the new personals lingo over the last few years: Bi-c-F iso LBTQ F, C or P acceptable, prefer J. He didn’t even know what they meant anymore.

It was his morning ritual to wake up with a bloody Mary and the Personals section. This way, he was waking up with hundreds of losers all at once, a feat that otherwise would have taken him years to accomplish. He’d never been tempted to answer an ad before this one; reading them had just been his morning amusement, his grown-up version of the funny pages. It was the very openness of the ad that intrigued him, the impossibility of rejection. The desperate outcry of all capital letters.

Later, he kept the ad with him literally. He picked up the thin strip from his dresser each morning and placed it in his breast pocket. After he almost put it through the washer, he moved it to his wallet and took it out several times each day, reading it at his desk, at the bus stop. He took to using it as a bookmark until it was too crumpled to read. He did this with fortunes from fortune cookies, too, until they were too pilled to read, or until they came true. Whichever happened first. Like the one he was sure had been about Veronica.

Sarah’s voice wasn’t what he had expected. It was sprightly. Bright. It reminded him of the NPR report about the Elton John song “Tiny Dancer.” He wondered if she would look like the girls in L.A. who had inspired Bernie Taupin to write the song. Or if she just sounded like them and would look like someone entirely different. A few times he wanted to ask the blonde on the 6, “Are you her? Are you?” but he just smiled down at her, and she smiled back. He’d never realized before that she had freckles.

He’d called twice and hung up before he worked up the nerve to say something. Both times from payphones, though they’d been harder to find with the advent of cell phones. Everything around him was changing—payphones, the personals columns. Where would it all end? He was only thirty-three, yet some days he felt like an old man. Like it was all going by too fast.

The first time, in front of the Amoco, his nerves had gotten the better of him. He’d realized that he couldn’t make a serious phone call with a mohawked teenager staring him down, waiting for the phone. The second time, a train had gone by, and he hadn’t been able to hear if the phone was still ringing or if someone had picked up. When the train had passed, he was standing with the receiver to his ear, and a recorded message was asking him to hang up and redial. He hung up and walked home, not wanting to chance another train. He’d talked to her the first time from the library. He’d gone to pick up his reserved copy of The Sheltering Sky and had seen the payphone on his way out, and it seemed right.

When they met, he wondered if he was on some sort of hidden camera dating show. It was all just too absurd. She was dying. That was her part of the deal. She didn’t even have to try to fulfill it. It was just happening. She was alone. That was the part he could fill. He would get attached. She would die. He’d have something to write about—he was a writer, wasn’t he? So far, she’d met with a painter and a playwright, neither of whom had taken her up on it. They’d said it was ridiculous. He wondered if the waiter was part of the set-up, but he was sure he’d seen the guy at Cuppagiano’s before.

She’d picked Cuppagiano’s because it was equidistant from their apartments. “I would have done it over ice cream,” she said, “but that’s how my dad told me about my mom’s cancer. Ice cream sure as Hell doesn’t make everything better. Maybe coffee will.”

He’d been stunned. She stabbed a plastic fork through a slice of apple and a walnut meat in one stroke. A single v-shaped blue vein throbbed above her left eyebrow as she chewed. He knew then that there was no turning back.

He isn’t even sure how it’s happened, but he’s moved in. One day she just said, “My place is twice as big as yours and it’s rent-controlled. I don’t want to think of someone trawling the obits for an apartment in this building. It’s right next to the South Town line. You know they will.”

Now he is here and she is everywhere. There are books on shelves and in stacks on the floor, some of them opened to her favorite passages or points where she’d been interrupted, spine up, tented over other books. “That’s so I’ll remember my place when I get back to them someday,” she snapped her gum.

Occasionally he would find a pair of her panties in between books as he moved them to make his way through the rooms.

“Laundry’s not a major priority now,” she would say whenever she saw him picking them up from the floor.

She’d stopped wearing bras last month.

“I’m not spending my last moments corseted,” she wrote in orange dry erase marker on the bathroom mirror. She’d gotten the idea after watching Braveheart, when they both yelled “Freedom!” along with William Wallace. Daniel had shouted, pumping his fists in the air, and she had jumped onto the arm of the couch and whipped her bra off from under her T-shirt. Since then, two pink bras and a black one remained eternally drying over the shower curtain rod. Some days he had the urge to fit the delicate cups over his nose and mouth like an oxygen mask. To breathe all of her in as if he could save her that way. He never did it because he didn’t want to think of his face in her demi-cups if he was there when they hooked her up to a ventilator, but he started collecting her hair from the drain catcher on days when she showered before him. He pressed them in the center of a folded pair of his boxer briefs and kept them in his top drawer. Something about the copper strands seemed permanent. Like something with so much color shouldn’t be ephemeral.

It was working. Just knowing that she was dying got him writing. Two stories in journals this month. And a poem. A goddamn poem. He’d never written poetry. He’d asked for it, though, hadn’t he? He’d agreed to take on the burden in exchange for art. He was sure worse things had been done for art—the entire patronage system, for instance. And shouldn’t this be ideal for him, the commitment-phobe? This was a relationship that was guaranteed not to outlast his attention span. He knew. He’d started going with her to treatments.

They weren’t even treatments anymore. They were talks. Discussions. Philosophizing about the nature of God. Of the afterlife. Or what if there wasn’t a God or an afterlife? How would she feel then? She winked at him a lot during these sessions. Winked and snapped her gum.

“You’re the one who’s dying,” he’d say to her in the car on the way home. “I’d think if you can’t take these seriously, you’d stop going.”

“Who’s to say this behavior isn’t fear giving rise to comic relief?” she’d say.

At night he’d think maybe her self-analysis was right because she’d ask him to hold her.

He didn’t know how to deal with having an erection over her. He knew he didn’t want to sleep with her. A few months before he couldn’t have imagined being so close to a woman and not wanting to sleep with her. Something seemed wrong about putting a part of his anatomy inside someone who was in some ways to him already dead. It seemed even more wrong to know that he’d then go on to put it inside of other girls who would someday be dead, too. All of this death. He would wonder if he was causing it. He had gone with her to price coffins because she hadn’t wanted to go alone.

Veronica, in high school, hadn’t wanted to go alone to the low-cost clinic the next county over. His brother had been in the Navy, shipped out somewhere he’d never heard of at sixteen and couldn’t remember now, and she begged Daniel to drive her. She just knew she’d be too nervous to drive. She made him promise not even to tell Sam. She’d kissed him quickly on the lips when he’d agreed and then whispered, “Our little secret.” She was a senior and had seemed so sophisticated to him with her new Mustang and trademark coral lipstick. At the time, he’d gone mostly for the thrill of being alone with his brother’s girlfriend and driving a sports car. It was only in the past year that he realized she’d been a scared girl, trying to act tough. He wondered how many actions in his life had been influenced by women who didn’t want to be alone.

The coffin salesman had thought they were a couple of kids yanking his chain at first. “Death is a serious business,” he’d punctuated by pounding the table. Daniel burst into tears. The man tried to recover, to say anything, but got up slowly and left them alone at the desk of his own business. They sat together in his office for a half hour then realized he wasn’t coming back from the rose garden across the way. He was on a bench, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, waiting them out. Finally, Sarah decided to leave. She took his hand and slipped him a tissue, then drove them home. “Maybe I should just be cremated. Don’t you think I’d rise from the ashes faster that way? A firebird?” She rolled down the window and let her red hair whip about her head. Sometimes he hated her that she was the strong one.

Once, he saw a car in front of him hit a cat. It had lain twitching in the road and though he’d always been told never to touch a hurt or frightened animal, he’d gotten out of his car and stroked the soft, striped grey fur until it stilled. This, perhaps, had been the most formative experience of his writing life. He’d written about all kinds of deaths from this experience. From the point of view of the dead, the dying, the killing, old people, babies not yet born. Later he’d wondered if he should have kept on and driven over the animal, too. Maybe he had wished for this after all.

Maybe he had caused it by wanting so deeply something to write about. Something profound. Some experience that would make him feel shrunken and old inside of his thirty-three year-old body. The way he’d felt inside of his sixteen year-old body when he heard that Veronica’s uterus had ruptured an hour after he dropped her home from the clinic, and her parents had found her dead on the kitchen floor. The way his brother must have felt when he came home paralyzed from the Gulf War at twenty-two, and realized that the only child he would have had had been aborted four years earlier. When he visited Veronica’s parents years later, he’d imagined small vestiges of his brother’s future floating in a pool of blood between the kitchen island and the water cooler.

Sarah didn’t want to see his work. She felt that that would be an unfair influence. “The muse should never read, just inspire,” she’d uttered levelly the first time he handed her a journal with his name printed boldly on the back cover, under the heading New Fiction by . She did, however, ask that he bury her with copies of them the way that Rossetti buried Lizzie Sidell with all of the poems he’d written for her. Of course, Rossetti later had the body exhumed to get his writings back, but nearly everyone gave two contributor’s copies. And who else did he have?

He knew that these new writings were not yet him but that he would grow into them and that they would fill him the way heat fills one’s fingers under a hot faucet in winter, growing and stretching its way up through the body until it reaches the heart. He felt grateful to have realized early that we are not defined by what we have but by what we have lost. He knew that when he was an old man, in his mind, she would still be twenty-four and fragile. And he would love her, looking back on a friend who could then be his grandchild. This made him unsure of his place in time. In the universe. And he wondered if this was the nature of death. The forever floating between past and present.

He pictured years of bending to touch her grave in disbelief when the cherry petals plastered the headstone in spring rain and brushing the crackling leaves away in fall. He knew he would not visit her in winter. He knew, somehow, already, that he would be consumed with worry for her in the winter. She felt so cold to him sometimes now that he couldn’t bear the thought of her under the snow-covered ground. In winter he would take long walks and hum Stravinsky.

-Shaindel Beers is a Professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, OR. Her poetry, fiction, and social commentary have appeared in numerous journals and publications. She was compelled to send work to damselfly because her boyfriend has a damselfly tattoo. She is Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine.