It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all.
–W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
The needle had already started sewing my mother long before I heard her scream through the terrace of our new terra cotta abode. At six years old, I was rolling off the hammock, strolling in the garden, and chewing on gingko leaves to excite turbulence in my alimentary canal. On their way to an áo bà ba, the fabric and the thread sunk right into my mother’s middle finger like a knife plummeting into a birthday cake. I stopped my tongue from reaching into the spine of the gingko leaf as my mother’s sonic body turned itself over and over into the walls. Pulling threads out of her flesh, fabrics falling on the floor like muted children. After the scream, I found a corner in the house where I could plant my spine and strip the outer garment of bac hà like an amateur vegetable rapist. This was the beginning of many beginnings of my mother’s sonic terror breaking into my body; my eyelashes falling out, my fingernails retreating into their digital caves. The needle that pretended to know my mother could not inspire the sonic zenith of this: my mother’s mouth agape and the cyst the size of a plum my mother was pushing strenuously out of the door of her thigh one late summer evening. With the help of my father. Cicadas had strained their vocal cords, competing with my mother. Small as it is, the thing with giving birth is that at least it has a hole.
Sonic flesh has none, only pores. Sometimes during those summer nights when my seamstress extraordinaire mother glided the hull of her scissor through the blithe pattern of sea silk, I pierced into the fabric room to watch my mother hard at work. Against the kerosene lamplight, my mother’s body seemed so perforated like a colander. Water and noise and light passed through her—her flesh holding onto nothing except the plasma of her womanhood falling into her fingers. Again, George Eliot: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
Vi Khi Nao lives in Providence, RI where she is a literary art student at Brown University. Fugue State Press recently released her novella, The Vanishing Point of Desire. She appears in the 2011 edition of NOON.
