OPEN VALLEY
I first saw the typewriter in a museum, tucked into a corner of an exhibit on Ansel Adams. Pale light fell across its body, trapped in a glass cube: an Olivetti Lettera 22. “A travel companion”, according to the museum label. “Lightweight and quiet, beloved by foreign correspondents and poets” and, apparently, by photographers of impossible landscapes. Three months ago, a nearly identical model arrived through mail in a box lined with cedar chips, along with a will, five journals, a folder that smelled like iodine and naphthalene and a business card of a law firm with a Brazilian address written in the back. The typewriter belonged to Camille. No last name. The “C” on her name looked like a piece of driftwood. The gift was intended as a graduation gift for my studies on Speech Pathology. Her will was brief and dry. Her final request: a list. Titled, in her hand, “Everything I Lost”. Completion of the list, her lawyer said on the phone, would secure the deed to a sizable tract of land in eastern Canada. Pastoral, remote, barely mapped. The kind of place where animals wander alone.
The list waits on my desk, beside a plate of squash soup I can’t stomach and a thermometer that keeps running out of battery. I’ve spent two weeks trying to finish, but the last item will not reveal itself. I returned from Brazil with malaria. And within three days of landing, I contracted influenza from a neighbor. I often read Camille’s journals unsure whether the ceiling is actually breathing or if I’m in a constant state of hallucination, drenched in sweat. Each sentence I add to the list swims away before me. I’d gone to Brazil in search of Ilia, Camille’s only daughter and maybe my father’s sister. I had hoped she might fill in the gaps, tell me if Camille truly was who I believe she was—my biological grandmother. But Ilia had vanished, or perhaps she’d never been there at all. No one in the mountain village recognized her name, boys with fox-colored eyes laughed when I pronounced it. I came back with no answers.
Camille’s typewriter is olive green, the color of an explorers canteen. The paint has chipped at the edges, revealing a dull aluminum belly. The keys respond like pigeons hunting bread crumbs: afraid at first, then eagerly, then all at once. The ink ribbon is faded in places. Camille retreated from the world some twenty years ago, driven by what she called “an ineffable desire”. She was a woman of considerable self-invention. She was, by all available evidence, a practicing orthopedic doctor. Until she wasn’t. She dove in lakes across the U.S. and Mexico. Her lungs were trained for long silences and her body sank gently through the depths of underwater caves. The first thing I noticed through a quick online search was that she disappeared from the map not long after my father died. He drowned in a diving rescue at the Zacaton sinkhole in Mexico—Sheck E. Bowden is carved into a plaque near the site. A second evidence of connection was the name on the parcel addressed to me: “To Zenith” (my childhood nickname). Camille resurfaced years later, not in person, but in the pages of her journals. When she arrived at the property, her first project was to clean out the back shed. There she found a softcover notebook with pages gnawed off by termites, a sort of eccentric manual filled with instructions and the personal musings of the previous owner. The title on the cover, sun-faded and almost illegible: Notes on a Pinwheel.
During a migraine-fueled night I examined Camille’s record of highlighted entries from the notebook in the shed: “How to kill a mosquito biting you on your back. Managing despair. Making the bed with the cat still sleeping on it. Tracing a cloud. How to fly a kite with strong winds. Steps to peel a strawberry. Saving money. How to grow soil. How to swim with fish”.
The shed held other “curious circumstances” (as Camille called them). A wasp nest clinging to the handle of a shovel. A second nest on a hammer’s head rusted into the soil. A single work glove, frozen inside a humming freezer—the only appliance powered by the patchwork solar panels out back. There was a monograph on edible winter flowers. A shelf of aquatic chimeras sculpted from clay, adorned with geometric patterns of jade and obsidian. A book on the explicit erotic drawings of Sergei Eisenstein. And portraits—dozens of them—of tribespeople with open palms as if proving they had let something go. In some of the portraits, the women balanced what looked like heavy amphoras with painted patterns similar to the stone details on the chimeras.
Camille’s initial ambition was a botanical eccentricity on the surface. More than an excuse to retreat into isolation, her esoteric obsession was cultivated since childhood. She wanted to grow a garden in which every plant shared a single root system, one continuous body flowering in infinite colors and species. She called it “the open valley.” She began by grafting vines onto willow branches, threading rhizomes through elaborate root lattices she built by hand. Some plants lived. Others died in spectacular, moldy collapse. According to a summer journal entry, she successfully connected most of her vegetables to the same “chlorophyllic river”—she mentions this idea eighty four times in her journal. She failed, I think. Or perhaps she grew paranoid that her achievements would be bastardized by unethical intruders with quick enterprise in mind.
She also kept a list of “root thoughts” at the end of her last journal: “The intellectual monster. Intention vortex. A swarm of childhood fixations. Perpetual temper chimney. The expanding wonder. Change and certainty. A hunger with many mouths. An idea that remembers itself”.
After five years, she entirely gave up the garden. It was spring when she tore the latticework down. She left the compost bins to rot and let the weeds surge back like a memory repeated over and over again since the first generation of men. The land returned to its feral state. She nailed shut the shed. From then on, she only ate mushrooms, beans and “the sort of potatoes that resist digestion”. Her new obsession was the construction of a singular object: one with no function, no utility, or metaphorical utility. It was to be utterly useless. “A shape to occupy space and do nothing more,” she wrote hurriedly. “A form that defies purpose.” This, too, she never completed. Or maybe she did, and it was simply impossible to describe. Maybe it was the typewriter.
The folder I received included a polaroid of Camille, taken by a stranger, or the camera’s automatic function. A smile inundated her face. She was not beautiful, I think. Her beauty was the kind that settled slowly, in tandem with memories and good seasons—like the feeling that a certain chair fits your back. Her hair was black and low around the crown. Her hands, described once in a letter by a colleague (perhaps a lover), were “the kind with lines so precise that it makes you nervous.”
I pause here. The phone rings. A cryptic call from an unknown number or my delusion in crescendo from the cough syrup. When I return from the bathroom, fevered and flushed, I check the thermometer: 103.9°F. The sky outside is a bleached gray, the air has thickened. On the window: a greasy smudge. I try wiping it with my sleeve but realize it is on the outside. I pull the latch and press the pane outwards for air. Below, in the crushed gardenias, a bird lies still. Neck tucked and askew, a wet clump of feathers. The petals around it have browned, like bruises. I return to my chair and swallow two more pills with cold tea. The list is nearly done, eight hundred and forty nine items that include:
A map she no longer trusted.
A photo of a little girl playing the piano (maybe Ilia).
A molar (second premolar, left side).
A piece of coral she found attached to her diving regulator.
Her expired certification license.
The handle of the front door.
Six pairs of gardening shears.
A collection of hybrid seeds.
A work glove.
A watch waterproof to 300 meters.
The final item remains unwritten. The moment I consider it, my fingers hover and won’t obey. I’m flooded with opaque memories, fantasies of the past that I’ve ruminated on for days in the crevices of my unconscious: my father signaling underwater to his diving buddy while his body shakes uncontrollably, Camille burying notebooks and recovering them days later, my graduation speech interrupted by a faulty microphone and a drawing Camille hid in a false bottom of the Olivetti Lettera 22. I recognize the name of the object Camille drew.
I close my eyes. The typewriter hums with old heat. My fever pulses in rhythm with the keys.
The final line eludes me.
But I know what it is.
That which can’t be named,
lest I bound myself
(to the ink ribbon),
to taking my last step behind my first.