Double Negative
Arie Ruvinsky, 1990-2024
That first night, the dog heaved and heaved
and kept heaving when there was nothing to expel.
“This is normal,” the owners assured me.
“He’ll be his old self in the morning” — and he was,
but by then I had more pressing concerns:
a tree root had ruptured the sprinkler system
and water was seeping through the basement walls.
This wasn’t normal, the owners assured me,
but the problem was resolved just as quickly,
a pump and three box fans working round the clock
to dry out the bloated cardboard, the soaked
suitcases and ski gear. On my third night there
I was out watering when my phone buzzed.
“I thought you all should know,” the email began.
*
The hose kept running, drowning the potted begonias,
while I scrolled down Arie’s Instagram profile,
through dozens of photos of her textile projects:
vests with mismatched patterns, ankle-length dresses
out of a Victorian reproduction, leather and tulle,
ribbons and pleats. It was all very her, unabashedly
eccentric, finding the complementary in the disjunctive.
We’d known each other not well but intensely;
for six months, with six other students, had packed
our lives into a van traveling across the Southwest,
from one earthwork to the next. Sun Tunnels,
Spiral Jetty, Double Negative — we’d studied each
for days on end. Had observed scorpions
locked in a death dance, stunned cows emerging
from the void of White Sands. Had waded
into the midnight stillness of the Great Salt Lake,
our bodies swirling the dim light of reflected stars.
Of all these moments, though, the one that came back
as I stood in the garden, in the shade of an aspen,
was the frigid morning she sat with her boots
too close to the fire, the glue loosening its grip,
the soles pulling away, melting to a kind of batter
that sizzled on the rocks. She was the last to notice,
and when she did, she just laughed — she didn’t move.
*
We didn’t keep in touch after the class. Before
the email came in, I hadn’t thought of her in years,
hadn’t even known she’d been sick. It’s strange
to have not missed a person and then to lose them.
I struggled to know how to react, was sad for her —
young as she was, a few months younger than myself —
but more I felt afraid of my own body, its secrets
and sensitivities, its systems that operate on faith,
pain its only means of communicating with itself,
a language urgent as it is vague, able to say something
but not what is wrong, possessing a single tense: now.
Glancing up, I realized I was no longer alone,
that my charge had joined me in the backyard,
his rabbit-eyes following the hose wherever it went.
To look at him, you’d never have guessed his age
but for the fatty tumors that rippled his mottled coat.
*
I wondered what disease had killed my friend
and if it was already killing her all those years ago,
her body sending signals she might have ignored
(“This is normal, this is normal”), as surely I would have,
while our class was making camp outside Marfa
or descending into Double Negative to escape the heat.
Down there, among the roots and centipedes,
between those crumbling walls of deep-red earth,
we would recline on the cool sand and fall asleep
counting the clouds that crossed the narrow opening.