After Abrielle
by Shannon Joyce Prince

I am walking along the flower-lined Peruvian street revising my shopping list. Squash, beans, tomatoes. Do I need anything else from the outdoor market? I see a little kid dressed in a colorful traditional llama-hair skirt with a Western sweater. She sees me too. Her cocoa eyes flash and her little pointed baby teeth are revealed in a smile. “Daddy,” she says, “that lady looks like Nigori.” The child is speaking Spanish, and I smile at her as I pass. We are walking in different directions, and I don’t hear what explanation her dad gives for my resemblance to the children’s book character. I have heard people say I look like Nigori in a half-dozen languages. Here, where I live with my husband in Cusco, both tourists and locals, kids and their parents, note my features and make the same observations whether in Japanese or English, Spanish or Farsi. I look like Nigori. They think they’ve seen me before.

Depending on how much time the speaker and I have, I might tell them the story. I am Nigori – at least, I inspired her. And if I am free for awhile and they are truly curious I tell them the story behind the story. The story of how my life changed after meeting a soon-to-be author named Abrielle.

On a street that I walked everyday as a child, in between a doll store where beauties from scattered historical dynasties stared imperiously at me through the window and a small boutique I regularly entered to press my cheeks against vicuna blankets the colors of tulips, where there had always been an empty plot of manicured green land, was suddenly a bookstore. Broad façades of bay glass windows were framed by panels of Cordovan marble. The front of the store was wide and looking through the windows I could tell it went back deep. Gondishapur, a sign read. A modern Atlanta bookstore named after an ancient library – I was immediately intrigued. I could see through the windows illuminated books that looked as though they had been crafted by monks and gilt-covered books that seemed to have been forged by elves. Books with names in one thousand languages. Stories were like confections to me. Were they edible I’d have been a mammoth child, so I couldn’t resist entering the store.

Arachnid gold chandeliers made my brown skin shadow-honey as though I were to acquire the sepia tint of memory and daguerreotypes or turn yellow as antique pages and slip into some arcane story forever. Beyond the chandeliers’ auricomous webs, the ceiling churned with treacherous dusk colors whose gloom was restrained by a blizzard of stars. All around me was a forest of bonsai gingko bilobas.

And then I saw Abrielle, an old woman with hair that looked as if God had gathered it from Kashmir goats and Lippizans and alpacas and then cast it all rainy gray in an attempt at uniformity. Abrielle, a color somewhere beyond bistre, the one who owned the store and the only one who toiled within it.

I didn’t know why she greeted me with a familiar smile. I didn’t know we’d get to be such good friends in those times we shared when the shop had no other customers. I didn’t know she was dying of liver cancer (although she did know.) And I didn’t know that I was to be her muse as she created the most celebrated children’s book of my era. For a few lingering moments I would walk not weighted, incognizant of fate’s role in my life.

Destiny, of course, would catch up. I was to end up recognizable on an international scale: “I think I’ve seen you somewhere before – like in a book or something.” or “Your face looks so familiar.” Ever since my preteen years random people have made such comments to me – noting my near identical similarity to the children’s book character.

Often, now that I am an adult, I look back on the day I first discovered Gondishapur. I had been walking along the road feeling like an outcast. I believed I was not complicit in whatever it was that defined common society and thus denied the promise of a future within it. Nowadays the character I inspired is an adored icon, but as a child I felt beyond marginalized. Back then my hair, a large Afro garden of tight helixes, was randomly constellationed with gold paillettes. I was conspicuous. I had been the foster parent of a raven. When I grew up I wanted to live in the sky. Although isolated by my queer desires, an uncomfortable weird existence had higher value to me than shared, common mediocrity. But then I walked into Gondishapur and everything changed.

“Oh, it’s you,” Abrielle had said that first day when my eyes rested on her after looking around the store.

“Yes,” I told her.

“I am Abrielle,” she said, stepping from a stack of folktales she was filing over to me.

“That’s beautiful. And medieval, right?”

“Yes,” she beamed. “Nobody ever knows.”

“I’m Nigori.”

“That’s a sake.” She brought an artfully crooked hand to my hair appreciatively.

“It means ‘cloudy.’ Cloudy sake. My parents believe clouds don’t hide things. They show you another world.”

She bent her long, gargoylesque, fingers around mine and led me to a grey marble shelf.

“Here,” she said, tapping out a celadon-bound book as if knocking and beckoning forth its tale. Hagoromo. “A tale for all nephologists.”

“Have you read every book in here?” I asked, for I was sure that if I had told her my name meant “valley of the plum orchards” or “fish that lays eggs in autumn” she could have found a correlating tale. People who looked as eccentric as she usually survived by being exceptionally competent.

“No,” she apologized. “Up until now I’ve been an artist. But I love stories. I want to share them, and I would like to create one.”

“About what?” I asked, enchanted.

“I don’t know yet,” she smiled. “I’ll see what the clouds reveal to me.”

Immediately I was intrigued. I had never met anyone before who had written a story. Had I known I was to inspire its protagonist, I would have been more enthralled still.

“What was it like being a muse?”

I started spending several afternoons each week at Gondishapur, growing closer and closer to Abrielle, enjoying the books and art that filled the shop. A different oil painting presided over each of the four walls of Gondishapur, smiling into various voids so intently I avoided stepping into their lines of vision for fear of blocking the secret, wondrous things they must be seeing.

One afternoon, a couple of months after I had begun coming to Gondishapur, I gazed at a girl in one of the pictures who looked just older than I, her skin glowing with the promise of polished Koroit opal.

“Don’t you wish you knew what the lives of the people in the paintings were like?” I asked Abrielle.

“I know what their lives were like,” she said quietly. She looked up from organizing a spring display of children’s books. Vases of large bright daisies were arranged around short chapter books. “They were my family.”

I turned from the peaceful smile of the girl to look at Abrielle. I thought it was profound when artists depicted their descendants. It meant they had created them twice – once with flesh, once with art.

“Abrielle?” She had begun to shake almost imperceptibly.

“This,” she said, one hooked hand pointing to a man the color of sun in children’s drawings “was my husband.” A woman who looked up through bovine, worthy eyes was her daughter. The guru-bald man, more plum than brown, was her son-in-law. “This,” she said, the fingers broken by arthritis reaching for the jasper face, “was my Adedoja. My granddaughter. I painted her each birthday. She had just turned eleven.”

There were tears on Abrielle’s face, and they were gold from the baroque chandeliers, like somebody weeping in a fairy tale. She stopped to seat herself on an emerald bean bag chair, and I pulled a violet one alongside hers and sat.

Abrielle looked at the painting of Adedoja.

“What do you mean ‘was?’” I asked, perplexed.

“I lost them, honey. We were all driving home from a restaurant on Adedoja’s eleventh birthday…” She paused. “I don’t even know what animal my husband was trying to save. I saw some antlers. It could have been anything, but whatever it was he flipped the car over trying not to hit it.” The beans in the sack sounded like a maraca from her oscillations. “I was the only one left. These might as well be antique portraits of people who lived long ago. They’re just as far gone from me.”

“Abrielle,” I said. I moved to sit on the edge of her bean bag and put my arms around her waist. She turned from the painting, put a hand on each of my cheeks, and put her face in my buoyant hair.

“Please,” she said, the words filtering down through the black of my hair to my mind, ears unnecessary. “If there’s something the clouds can show me – Please…”

“Abrielle,” I said abruptly, trying to jolt her from her mourning. “Have you started working on your story yet?”

Her shoulders stopped their shuddering. She made a few of the gasping noises children emit when they try to cease crying all at once.

“Actually, I have. There’s something I want to show you today as soon as I help this young man,” she told me, glancing at a red-headed guy who had just entered the shop. I was grateful for the customer. His presence had forced the last terrible weeping sounds to end. She watched him browse, then rang up the Chinese history books he chose, slightly dewy with residual tears. Then she headed over to the back room as I flipped through some poems and returned at a sprightly pace, seemingly pulling herself together.

“Here you go,” she said, lying down on the cool floor to observe me read with a cup of tea. Thoroughly self- conscious yet amused, I flopped onto a bean bag and began.

The passage she had handed me began the tale of a beautiful little girl filled with wanderlust. A girl bedizened with black kinky hair who felt discomfited by the society in which she lived and longed for something far off and unnamable. Her name was Nigori – just like mine. I flipped to the last page. There was a picture in bright charcoals of me, a small girl, her smile somewhere between blissful and haunted.

I was awe-struck. It was queer and magnificent to find myself in the pages of a literary world.

“Do you mind that I used you for the story?” Abrielle asked when I had finished the excerpt.

“I’m honored,” I told her. There are perhaps few things as satisfying in life as finding a kindred spirit in literature. Now someone had created one for me, based on me. Abrielle sat up, and I hugged her as though she were porcelain, Ming-dynasty-old and not sixty-nine. She had begun to seem unnecessarily small to me. I imagined her bones as those of birds – lightweight and hollow inside, allowing the body to fly away. I could get so much of my arms around her when I held her.

“You measuring? I’m alright.”

“You seem – fragile, I guess.”

“I’m old,” she said, raising her bent-up hands as proof. Splayed and aqua from the charcoals, it looked as though she were exhibiting large orchids. “As long as I can still create, I’ll be alright.”

I handed the excerpt back to Abrielle and looked at the painting of Adedoja. I knew why the painting had seemed like someone from another era. It was the portrait of a dead person, not a live one. The peace in her face was just too bone deep. Had Abrielle recognized that quality even as she reproduced it? Sometimes I thought Abrielle looked like the painting. I had told her once that she had begun to look like Adedoja, and she had laughed. How could one grow to resemble one’s descendant?

It was only a few months later when Abrielle had finished her story. I had come to Gondishapur on a rainy afternoon, crossing streets running with rainwater and peach blossom petals. I escaped into the dryness of the bookstore and there was Abrielle sitting on the cashier counter with her small laptop at her side, grinning excitedly at me.

“Do you have something for me to read?” I asked rhetorically.

“Yes,” she said. “You can read the ending today.” She hopped off the counter and walked over to me with the small computer in hand. She headed off to the stockroom to see about a new shipment of books, and I sat cross-legged on the floor, balanced the laptop upon my folded legs, and began.

The Nigori in the story had neglected to follow any of the conventions of her society and married a sky spirit, yet his time on earth had sickened him. He was soon to die and Nigori was on her way to meet “The Old Woman of the Woods” in search of a cure. I took comfort in the familiar fairy tale tropes – long journeys, impossible quests, mystical crones who had power over death. I flipped the pages eagerly.

The ending disturbed me. It was hopeful, but not the happily-ever-after I had expected. The Old Woman of the Woods was unable to save Nigori’s husband and advised her instead to find peace after his death.

I looked up at Adedoja’s picture as though she were directly responsible for this turn in the book’s plot. Then I stroked the final illustration. It was me as Abrielle imagined I would look long in the future, exotic, peaceful, eyes full of preternatural comprehension and laden with mirth. I liked that Abrielle had imagined me as such a person. I realized I really liked the book.

Abrielle had returned from tending to the shipment and stood eagerly in front of me. “I love the story, Abrielle,” I told her.

“Thank you,” she said. She was so small by then, and grinning so broadly, like a child. “It was hard for me to end the story and let go of that Nigori. I’m glad I get to keep this one,” she added, tossing an arm around my shoulders.

“What do you do with the story next?” I asked.

“Now? Now I just have to send it off to a publisher and cross my fingers. I can’t believe I’m finally finished. Do you want to go out for Japanese mochi ice cream and celebrate?”

“Yes!” I said. “But hold on.” I pulled some tiny leaves off of one of the gingko bilobas. “We should remember this.”

I was ten and a half when the publisher said she wanted Abrielle’s book. Was willing to pay a very generous amount for it. Considered it a definite award winner. That should be what I remember. The look on her face, the way she held my hands in hers when she told me. But those memories seem to have been recorded in watercolor, and, wet from tears, to have bled. All I have left are vague images. What I hold on to is something else.

“When she wrote a story about a fictionalized version of you dealing with death, did you know the real you was about to have to face death, too?”

“Have you been drawing again?” I had asked her as we sat on the bookstore floor, sipping chile-spiked hot chocolate, Precolumbian style, impossibly insouciant. “Your fingers are blue.”

“I have to tell you something,” she said, setting down her mug.

“A little after I buried my husband, my child, her husband, and my grandchild, a doctor diagnosed me with liver cancer. He told me that I was going to die. He said that with chemo, I might live ten years, but that I didn’t have to use chemo. I could just let it grow inside me. My death wouldn’t trouble me. Not until the very end. It would just – be there until it was time for it to claim me,” she looked down shamefully.

“And back then, Nigori, that seemed so wonderful. Three years and I could see my family again! I let myself feel once more; I let myself want things. I was hungry for stories. I wanted to share them, and I wanted to create one, so I opened Gondishapur.

“And then I found you,” she reached forward and twirled a finger in a lock of my hair. “If I had known you were coming to me I would have done the chemo. I asked my doctor about it when I met you, but he said it was too late.

I wove my fingers together and stared at them.

“So I didn’t tell you anything,” she continued. “I wanted your love, not your mourning. I never meant to harm you, and I hope I’m not doing so now. I just wanted those last two years to be good. You’ve given me a beautiful ending to my life. Now I have to ask you for something else. I want you to be here for me as I die. Until God chooses to take me, please just keep being here for me. I love you. Please try to understand.”

By the time I was eleven I would know what 'posthumous' meant. Foil medallions on the cover of her books, raised embossing and imprints designated her work as a Newberry and a Caldecott winner. So many awards bestowed posthumously. By the time I was eleven I had dedicated my afternoons to bringing Abrielle wildflower bouquets and reading to her, trying to make her laugh, and helping her and myself to ignore her frailty. By the time I was eleven Abrielle was gone. Everyone loved the book she had created, but the creator was dead. Only her muse remained.

“Were you named after Nigori? It’s such an unusual name. Your parents must have been inspired by the book.”

The postmodernists say the author is dead. The creator is irrelevant to creation. The author is dead. Her relevance is not. I know. I inherited it. Because just after I turned eleven, I, the skinny, tempest haired, bow-legged girl, became the object of all critical attention, interviews, and the one who accepted, on her behalf, the endless awards. The one who held all the memories of her and her time of creation that were so urgently probed.

“You know, I couldn’t help staring at you. You look just like a character in one of my daughter’s books.”

Most people get to choose and weight their experiences before they commit them to recollection. Each moment of my time with Abrielle remains with me. I remember the kinked-up hands, the untidy hair, the beautiful smile. Even more than that, I remember how the charcoal dust blended upon her fingers, coral with heliotrope, marigold and peach, silver fading into nadeshiko. I remember which of her eyelashes were white and which were black. Each time I read the story she created about me, I remember, and the details increase exponentially. I can never forget.

Peter Davies came to resent being Peter Pan. Alice Lidell never minded being Alice in Wonderland. I love being Nigori. People ask me what it’s like to have my nine-year-old self immortalized in literature. How, frozen in the imagination of others as a fictional character, I can change and grow and make others understand my reality. How, after inspiring the pretend Nigori, I can leave her behind.

I didn’t. I never intend to. Perhaps the greatest gift Abrielle’s story gave to me is that I was allowed to remain Nigori. I was allowed to celebrate that part of myself that yearned for other worlds, loved across realms, refused this urban, globalized samsara. I never had to resign myself to sneakers and laptops, martinis and a cubicle. Such things never made sense to me before the story, before rainbow-fingered, Rapunzel-maned Abrielle. After them, I realized they didn’t have to.

On every street corner, at every cafe, people are selling coffee. I have never tasted it. The pleasures that are common are alien to me, and those that are obscure are quotidian. This is the life I wanted. This is how I came to live happily ever after. I care for lion cubs and polar bears as a veterinarian. My métier is healing my predators. I am married to a man with whom I live so far upon Cusco we look down from our bedroom windows at the clouds. He develops breeding programs for endangered butterflies. We stay up nights plotting how to seduce silverspots and swallowtails. There are tulip buds in my hair.

There are times I visit Abrielle’s grave to read to her from Hagoromo. The part where the magical spirit, the tennin, pulls on her cloak of rainbow feathers and flies away. “You are the tennin now,” I tell her. “You are a houri. You are flying.”

© 2007 prickofthespindle.com