Nora

Nora was a girl (now I'm thinking of her as a girl, rather than a woman) with dyed reddish hair that looked natural enough until you really looked into her eyes and saw more gray than blue and realized that the hair color was not her own. Even then, you still believed in the hard fact of her goodness, the sturdiness of her character. You believed that nothing short of death would push her under.

Art Project

We found medieval and contemporary maps, maps made of paper, leather, hand-painted ones on rags.

Covering the first floor of the college arts building, our installation was a jagged square with coastlines made of many coastlines, Danube and Mississippi meeting in the middle. We fed state-lines into national boundaries in a geographically impossible way, but it started a craze on campus. People bought tickets; they simply wanted to go.

We'd been hoping to make a point about the arbitrariness of connections: I think maybe we did.

After graduation, Nora and I wrote to each another on pieces of our disassembled project.

"Look at us now," she wrote on the face of the Soviet Union, "halfway across the world, my green pen tracing out new boundaries on an old map, expecting an answer from you any day now. Love from here to there, always."

Nora's Teeth

A full year went by before we managed to meet together in a real place. In the taxi that drove us to my third-cousin Roula's tiny house in the village, I noticed new gaps between Nora's teeth and couldn't stop staring. She saw me looking and commented that since we'd last hung out, there'd been a lot of life material to digest. She said: "I think I have nocturnal conversations against my teeth." The taxi's speed made us lean into each other; she put her head against my shoulder.

Saving the World

Roula told us it was dangerous for two women to go out on their own, but we were claustrophobic after three days in the village and told her we'd take our chances.

In a dingy bar, we ordered dirty Bombay martinis. The guy nodded like he knew what we meant, but he had no idea.

After two sips, Nora was telling me about living in the desert with twelve sixteen-year-olds: murderers, addicts, and prostitutes. She slept with their shoes at the bottom of her sleeping bag to prevent them from running away in the night. Mornings, before setting out on a ten-mile hike, everyone had to drink a quart of water. If there was more than a drop in any bottle, everyone had to drink another quart.

I understood why, after a job like that, she'd no longer be interested in saving the world. When she wanted to stay out on her own, I didn't think it was my place to stop her.

The next morning, Nora called from the maternity ward of the local hospital. She said a motorcycle had hit her while she was in the midst of an argument with a man. The light turned green, she walked into the crosswalk, looked back to see if the guy was following her and the next thing she knew, she was in the hospital.

When I asked her for details, she explained that after she came to, her leg swelled and her blood pressure dropped, so they cut into her leg in the crease where it meets the torso and did some kind of sewing job. Her femoral artery was involved, but they'd discharge her in a day with extra Paracetamol and Amoxicillin.

When she returned to the village, her ass hurt a lot. She thought she must have fallen on it when the motorcycle knocked her over. She still wasn't sure how her femoral artery was involved. But she remembered hearing at least three women giving birth and said it sounded like they were having sex.

"How?"

She made an animal face and emitted little groans, trying to convince me that the maternity ward had sounded like a bordello. It sounded nothing like sex, to me, but it made me wonder whom she had had sex with, and how, and why the two of us knew it to have such a different sound.

Tight Tights

We went to take a picture of a goat in a wrecked school bus but when we got there, the goat was gone. We could see turkeys through the rusted back window frames. They jumped, feathers fanned, through the frames and came right over to us.

Turning back, I asked her if she'd taken off the tights tights they'd put on in the hospital.

"Yes," she said, "and my legs look like someone else's. It's a good thing I wasn't allowed to pull them down earlier. The sight would have made me faint." She said that her legs, from her butt all the way down to the backs of her knees, were entirely mushy, colored green and purple.

We walked up the long leaf-covered hill to the house.

She said: "Either the motorcycle hit me there or it hit me and I fell, sitting down on my ass. I don't remember a thing."

She looked around, forlorn, her red-tinted hair slapping her face. She pushed it away and said: "Where's that goddamn goat, anyway?!"

Then she said: "These tights are holding the world together."

St. Nicholas Day

Just before our departure, St. Nicholas Day arrived. The day was sunny, with plenty of cloud movement. The wind kept blowing out the candles. It showered for a fraction of a chanted prayer.

The villagers crossed the church lintel rapidly, desperate for the puff of incense in their lungs and a glimpse of the glinty, staring-eyed saints. The priest's vestments were adorned in blue-and-gold curlicue, his sweet breath intoned the chants. That surprised me—I expected a priest's breath to be rancid.

After eating wine-dunked, blessed eftazimo, holiest of breads, and enjoying raki in plastic cups, the villagers left. We were on our way out when my third-cousin Roula begged Nora to show her the bruise. Behind the little church, the December sun shone against a white wall. Nora honored Roula's request.

While we stared, Nora waxed eloquent: "There are so many modes of skin. We should call them skins. Some are mottled; some are gloriously pale; mine, right now, is ghastly sick, but healing, I believe."

She kept her spine very straight and stared cross-eyed into the cryptic orbs of a St. Nicholas, probably half a century on that wormy piece of wood.

She commented: "Saints, you notice, don't stare back."

Then she swiveled her head a little on her neck and asked: "Enough?" We nodded and moved away, having nourished ourselves on the yellow-and-blue, the almost-black of the purple. It was a sickening kind of feast.

Out of Maps

I've loved Nora since we discovered we had the same birthday, drinking beer in the brick-lined hallway of the dorm, the first night of college. As if we were bells, the air between us always seemed to resonate.

But it's been almost a year since I last heard from her. I write on maps I've cut to pieces, glued together in impossible continents. No world looks like this one. I tell her that our old friends ask about her, but all my letters come back to me—the medieval map, and Indonesia contiguous with Alaska and the Arab lands.

We knew those states were impossible, those maps almost illicit. But it was just an art project! I know I could've lost her to a cracked femoral artery but she came back to me, my best friend, my solace, my wacky girl—didn't she?

Without a word from her, I'm at the bottom of the pile, almost all out of maps.