SARAH'S CANTICLE

 

I stood in the biting north wind beside Sarah, clutching her warm hand, unable to take another step forward on the cliff. Beyond us in the foggy distance like some dream shimmering in a mist sat Henry Island, and beyond it—all around it in the darkness—the Atlantic rose and fell rhythmically. A hundred-fifty feet below us the waves reflected white by the waning moon crashed onto the rocks.

     “Well?”

     I looked up into eyes that had penetrated my soul—ebony blizzards at rest in the incredible universe that was her mind, and yet at the same time expanding at light speed. Sarah was a contradiction, brilliantly insane, and I was pathetically in love with her.

 

I was frightened.

     “Christ, Sarah, it’s crazy…” I began, wishing for the last word’s return immediately after I’d spoken it. Unheard of? Impossible, maybe? No. Insane. I had no way of helping her do this, but neither had I any way of stopping her. If I dragged her home, she’d return again by herself. I prayed for the words to bring her back to her senses.

     “Really, Michael,” she chided me. “I’ve done it. You know I have. Look out there,” she said. Her ermine-white sweater rustled in that offshore wind as she pointed, deflecting the frigid air upward onto a face that was ice and fire and beautiful, and through hair as fine as black silk. I was torn between her command to follow the tip of her finger outward, or trace the distance backward to her face. Command overwhelmed desire, and I looked eastward.

     “But…we can’t! Please, I beg you, let’s just go home.”

                                   ***

     Sarah Liebowitz was a poet, an artist, a loner loved by everyone despite the emotional distance she maintained. She was a prima ballerina in the strange and lovely musicals she devised, a physicist who denied the reality of science. God’s only Galatea. A Jewish mystic who believed that walking on water or tumbling it up into roiling cliffs to expose a sandy walkway leading to a Promised Land was well within her ability.

     I met her in Blackbriar College Student Union one morning in the fall of 2009, my senior year. She was exhibiting herself there, naked, a Trompe l’oeil painting in vibrant colors of the Picasso masterpiece, ‘Girl Before a Mirror.’ Sarah was an art major, in her junior year, and had I but only one semester of study left before receiving my B.A. in civil engineering, I would have instantly switched to the study of art just to see more of her interpretations of classic paintings.

     The small auditorium was packed, but it was strangely and reverently silent. It was as if seeing her body as the canvas was no more shocking than standing in the Museum of Modern Art viewing the original, stunning work hanging on the wall in all its abstract, sensual glory. Except this painting moved. Sarah glided slowly back and forth, exhibiting a masterpiece in three-dimensional form to the music of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

     The performance ended six minutes later when Mercury sang the last lilting notes. She left the stage as gracefully as the shadow of a plane coursing over empty, rolling hills, and then disappeared into the women’s rest room. She returned to a mob of newly-born art lovers moments later, fully dressed, smiling amidst the roars of adulation that had erupted. I introduced myself after she had finished holding court, in the most casual but laudatory manner I could muster after she rose and left the crowd of male admirers. She was nearly to the door when I caught her.

     “I don’t know much about art; your mind for that matter, but I’m in love with your body,” I hazarded. She stopped and looked me over hard, tweaking the corner of her mouth.

     “At least you're honest. The rest of them,” she said nodding her head back to her gawking admirers, “said the opposite. Suddenly they’re all overwhelmed by color and form. Jesus. Do you have any idea what I was doing?”

     What could I possibly say?

     “No, not really, but the way you did it was glorious. It must have taken a lot of courage. I mean, I liked the…whatever it was. Painting you did on yourself.”

     “Picasso,” she offered.

     “I’ve heard of him,” I replied, pushing the door open for her.

     And thus we began.


     Sarah explained “art” to me in the weeks and months that passed, over pitchers of beer, Norwegian confections at Arnthrud’s Delicatessen near the campus, on the cliff overlooking the sea, ambling along the avenues of the town of Blackbriar, and eventually in the comfort of my flat listening to the classics beneath the covers. I in turn related the rather boring subject of highway and bridge building theory, and how it was my dream to span the Atlantic from Nova Scotia to Ireland with a most remarkable catenary of beauty and longevity. Jokingly, of course. The vision of an 1800 mile-long bridge soaring heavenward in an arc that would make God smile captivated her in a way I could not conceive, though. Over and over she plied me with questions concerning the technical challenges involved.

     “There are too many,” I told her time and again, laughing. “It’s really an impossibility. Technically, anyway.”

     “We are only limited by the distance our imagination can stretch,” was always her answer. Somehow, though at first I didn’t realize it, she envisioned the impossible bridge as her personal, supreme work of art. Sarah Liebowitz’s masterpiece. “I’m going to work on it,” she said finally, months later. I chuckled.

     But, she did work on it—every afternoon when classes ended. Throughout every weekend. She sat on the rough and windy cliff staring out at the endless sea and the sky like a statue, with her hands clasped around her knees. Staring. Thinking. Silent. Surely in her mind she was Moses, standing on the shore of the Red Sea, wondering what power it would take to part the waters and cross to the Promised Land. The great Spaniard standing in front of a blank canvas, reinventing reality. In time she stopped talking altogether, ignoring my questions and comments, even my professions of love to her in hopes she’d snap out of a growing obsession. She simply sat and stared.

                                    ***

     “I’ve got it,” she said on that fall afternoon, nearly two years to the day after I’d first met her as The Girl Before The Mirror. She now stood beside me in the ever-blowing wind almost talking to herself. The storm of the morning had passed, and miles out, a rainbow arced from the northern horizon to Henry Island, three miles offshore. We’d biked with our packs up to the scenic cliff two hours earlier because, as she said, she wanted to “…capture the sky, the clouds and sunlight reflecting off them, the rise and fall of the ocean. Make them physical…” Sarah took hold of my hand. “We are going to transcend the gap between the heavens and the sea, Michael my love. You and I are going to do the impossible, a feat that will overshadow anything anyone has ever done, and prove that God is alive and not indifferent…that the scales will balance perfectly. That vision and faith are the birthright of us all. You are going with me.”

     I had no idea what she actually meant. “On a…bridge? You’re still thinking about a bridge?” I asked in my usual state of confusion whenever she laid out her fantastic ideas in long postulations that would make even a genius blink.

     “Sort of. Different, though. A mightier medium than steel. Do you see the rainbow? Of course you do,” she said answering her own question, smiling up into my face.

     “Imagine that you could bring it to life,” she said. Somehow standing there with my hands in my hoodie pouch I knew there was a Sarah-bomb coming; that whatever I said would be proven futile in the ensuing explosion. I answered anyway.

     “Yes, I see it. A rainbow is light, though. There’s nothing physical about it. It’s neither alive nor dead; just reflected light.”

     “What if it had substance? What if you could create one? Better, what if you could walk over it on its own terms of being and touch its ends?”

     “And what if I was Gandalf the White? Or Dorothy of Kansas?”

     “Yes,” she replied. “What if you were?”

     “So, what is it, a rainbow bridge to Ireland?” It was absurd. “Sarah, you need to wake up from the…”

     “Tomorrow, Michael. Everything is in place.” She pointed up, toward the top of the rainbow, or completely over it. “Tomorrow night. We’ll come. We’re going up there together.” She kissed my cheek, turned, and then left me standing alone, knowing she had finally left reality entirely.

     I didn’t sleep during that last night with her, wondering to what degree her world of fantasy would disintegrate, come crashing down in twenty-four short hours. Beside me, hardly a breath escaped her lovely lips. Sarah was blissfully and peacefully crazy, but I loved her all the more despite it. If she began to fall into an abyss when her fantasy failed, my heart and hand would be there to pull her back, or try at least. I couldn’t let her do whatever she planned to do alone.

                             ***


     “Please, let’s just go home. I’ll paint you, or…” I continued lamely.

     “Take my hand, my love. Look.”

     I raised my eyes.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven…

     To the east, the sky was a portrait of infinite black, pierced with a hundred billion dots of sparkling white. There was nothing else, suddenly. No sea below. No land invading the firmament. The sound of crashing waves on the rocks disappeared; the smell of salt water fled behind it. The wind that had always been a constant companion of the cliff subsided, tamed by the black calm. I held tight to Sarah’s hand for long moments and watched in awe as a dim, dusty ribbon finally emerged from a horizon that no longer existed. It curled slowly upward across the arc of Heaven, broadening and brightening as it drew closer to our fragile foothold. I felt suddenly inadequate, ripped from land’s end into something magnificent, empty, and holy, as though I were a child looking up for the first time in my life into a night sky where nothing but stars dwelt.

     Sarah stepped to within inches of the edge, reaching out and up with her free hand, her eyes blazing, either from madness or ecstasy. Her fingers flexed, unflexed, moving in perfect harmony with the ribbon of light’s movement. She was orchestrating the undulating highway, stretching and spinning the cables, harnessing the cloud-like roadway to an endless string of towers that ran like images in mirrors until they became lost in their shrinking selves. As I gaped with my mouth wide open, the thought occurred to me that I had gone stark raving mad myself.

     Sarah said not a word, yet her lips were moving in synchronicity with her fingertips. At last the roadway of brilliant light broadened in its long descent, like the steps at the bottom of a grand staircase, and then stopped a yard, two, perhaps three beyond the face of the cliff. We stood in absolute silence for what seemed an eternity, but was more likely mere seconds. She looked up at me, perhaps pleading for me to believe in the hallucination she had given life to. Her gaze pierced me, as it was always wont to do, capturing me again.

     “We haven’t much time, dearest Michael. Here is your bridge—our bridge. Come with me.” Sarah stepped off the ledge of rock into the emptiness lying beneath the beginning of the celestial roadway. Her right hand held my left, outstretched, gently urging me to follow. I took a step, testing the air beyond the cliff with the toe of my shoe, much the same as I had done a thousand times at the edge of the water far below in bare feet. My foot sank. I jerked it back to the safety of land, and in so doing lost hold of her hand. I teetered backward, but gained my balance again in time to see her shaking her head sadly.

     “Hurry. Do it, Michael. Come with me.”

     “It’s not real!”

     “Come with me! Take hold of my hand again!”

     “It’s not…I can’t!”

     Sarah looked at me for a second or two, and then turned and walked past the shimmering anchorage. She glanced over her shoulder one last time, and then continued on alone.

     “Sarah!”

                                    ***


     A week has passed. I stand at the cliff, ignoring Henry Island, the smashing of the waves below, Ireland far, far away. A pall of gray clouds has descended, driven by an angry storm bearing down on me from the north. I am aware of none of this…nothing, really, only searching for Sarah in the ever-blowing wind, as though in its frozen touch she will reappear and bring me back to sanity.

     But…I know I’m empty, empty as the wind.


     “Empty As The Wind” Grayson Hugh. Thank you for permission to use the title of this amazing song, Grayson.

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Texte: (c) Patrick Sean lee, 2011
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 24.07.2011

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With deepest thanks to Grayson Hugh