Colloidal Silver

My name is Odie and I have nowhere to be. I can remember a set of stairs. It had a banister that was always warm to the touch and hand. My mother had gone up and down those stairs, always backwards, always holding on. A personal trainer had told her that going backwards was best. Going backwards would strengthen the muscles responsible for posture and good graces. She would go backwards and be beautiful. She would find the steps, up and down, warming the thighs and the breath and the banister. It’s usual to remember a certain house. To remember a mother moving around inside of it, doing whatever would be prettiest, now or later. The sky turns to leather before a tornado forms. It’s tanned air, seemingly halted. The clouds will look stained by tea or weak dye. The yellowing is caused by a suddenness. A great heat has happened. The blues that color calmer skies are made of short waves of light. The sudden heat causes the shortest waves, the blues, to scatter, leaving only the long colors. The durable greens, yellows, and browns. The loss of blue light is first noticed by songbirds, who flee without formation or call. The walls were green where I lived. The green went well with the things my mother liked to cook, complementary to Cornish hens in cranberry sauce and haddock fillets. There wasn’t a room of any other color. I remember only green. Like a lot of people, I’ve never seen a tornado touch down. It’s not something that I feel I need to see. I watch the Weather Channel and read about what the atmosphere can and cannot do. It was a curved staircase with carpeted steps. It led to bedrooms. It could be climbed quietly by the step and foot. My mother never faced it. She didn’t need to see the risers or treads. She saw the banister. She held on.

No one is expecting me. There haven’t been invitations in the mail. No one has died or decided to host a dinner. I can remember an instance of falling. A mother, when she falls, makes a certain sound. The sound is always heavier than it ought to be. Her gravity, the mathematical consequence of poundage and speed, cannot account for the bellow she makes. And it is a bellow. Never a clang or a boom. Fathers boom. Mothers bellow. Birds clang. There was the creaking of treads and then there was a bellow and then there was again the creaking of treads. A nosing must have been misjudged or preempted. She must have fallen on her back, risking her neck and the little components of spine. Then she must have collected herself and resumed. The bellow she made is comparable to nothing. It was not the sound of a passing train. The noise did not churn or rise like a whale’s call. So it was not a rumble or a moan or a measurement. There is a retired comedian where I live now. He doesn’t tell jokes anymore, but he still manages to write them down. Most of them are fairly demented and good. He has an eating sickness which he believes is the source of his humor. Vomiting helps him suss out what is and is not expellable, what is and is not true. The room that I rent is very near to the bathroom. I hear him working on his material after breakfast and supper. Scientists have tried to design video cameras durable enough to document the insides of a tornado. Their attempts to capture the sound and look of the very center have mostly failed. They’ve shot all kinds of equipment into the vortexes. Cameras intended for space. Cameras intended for war. The most successful camera was one designed to image the digestive tract. These kinds of cameras can be ingested by you and me.

I’m not due anywhere at any particular time. I’m not obliged to wear a watch or notice when it’s noon or ten till. My mother hated the oven we had. It didn’t bake evenly. She could never predict how the heat would sustain itself, if it would sustain itself. She took to turning her casseroles and layers of cake at timed intervals. The turnings required her to open the oven door and reach into the heat. The heat that escaped during these adjustments was its own unmeasurable. She set timers and disregarded cooking instructions. Her recipes were subjected to one temperature and then another. I’ve read a great deal about Marilyn Monroe. I’ve found out about certain aspects of her life. How she learned to walk. How she learned to sleep. How she learned to arrive and fail to arrive. She had an electric oven which she used to broil lambchops. This is a fact which comforts me. The comfort has nothing to do with the fat content of lamb. It has nothing to do with the domesticity of dressing meat with thyme and salt. Marilyn Monroe broiled lamb after lamb. There was something more endangered than she. She needed reminding at the end of most days. My mother never ate lamb. She never showed me how to climb the stairs backwards. What would make her beautiful was not what would make me beautiful. I could eat lambchops for dinner and not be reminded of anything at all. I could vomit up those lambchops and never see the humor. Some people bathe in milk to become beautiful. Other people bathe in ice. Some people stare into the woods or sleep for days at a time. Some people put themselves in front of grassy expanses or wear special fabrics. Some people wait for spring or for snow or for certain rhythms of rain. Some people talk into or kiss the tops of loved heads. Some people sweep the floor while thinking to themselves that they are sweeping the floor.

What would make me beautiful hasn’t yet made itself plain. I do eat lamb chops for dinner and go backwards up the stairs. Tornadoes sometimes appear as families. A violence in the atmosphere can necessitate multiple tornadoes, all of which belong to the same storm cell. These tornadoes come from the same circumstance of air. Tornado families move in parallel or overlapping paths. The damage done by these families is indistinguishable from the damage done by a single tornado. The technical distinction of family requires observation. The storm must be closely watched from afar. I once met a woman who believed she was Marilyn Monroe. This Marilyn wasn’t an impersonator or a reincarnation. I found her in a dressing room. We were there to try on different bra shapes and sizes. We didn’t help each other with the hooks and eyes. We adjusted our own straps and looked into our own mirrors, standing on our own pedestals. I told her my name was Odie and that I didn’t need a new bra. She told me that her name was Marilyn and that she had recently survived a surgery. Because she was Marilyn she had her gallbladder taken out at age thirty-five. Because she was Marilyn the gallbladder that was taken out had caused her great concern and pain. I asked Marilyn how she knew who she was. She told me that she was identified in a Macy’s. An authority came running from Hosiery to say that he had seen her and that she was Marilyn Monroe. She told me there is only one Marilyn on the earth at any given moment. None are born blonde. All die without their gallbladders. I asked Marilyn if anything had happened to her as a child. She said plainly that something had happened to her. I asked what the nature of it was. She said plainly that it was of a very bad nature.

There is nothing happening to me now. My breath is warm and taken with ease. I’ve taken my medicine. It has treated the feeling and the lungs. The comedian invites me into his room every so often. We sit on his bed together. He tells me about his emotional fluctuations, his sources of income, his plans for redecorating. I tell him about tornadoes and Marilyn Monroe and my mother. I’ve asked the comedian on several occasions what he thinks might make me beautiful. Each time he holds me by the chin and says that beauty is something other. It can occur. And once it has occurred, it can be considered, assessed, championed. But it cannot be thought of or pulled from thin air. The comedian makes beauty from two cups of cottage cheese and a can of mandarin oranges. When purged into a toilet bowl, the curds swirl in bile and fruit, refracting orange and white light. The expulsion glitters. My mother wore a floating opal. The pendant sat over her breast bone. It was left to her by a grandmother that she never hugged or telephoned. A physicist from Kansas was the first to suspend chips of opal in glycerin. He filled little glass bulbs with various liquids, adding flakes of loose tinsel or gold or opal. He found that the globes ruptured when filled to the brim. A bubble was needed. The glass housing would have to accommodate the molecular expansion caused by body heat and weather. The physicist added an uppermost chamber where the bubble could be hidden beneath a gold cap. The bubble in my mother’s pendant had been dislodged from its chamber. It was bequeathed to her that way. The chunks of opal were pretty, but the air pocket was prettier. It had skin, a yielding outline of nullified pinks, blues, golds. It drew the eye and then slipped impurely to this or that side. The physicist from Kansas was wise to hide it.

Daydreams do not come. I do not wonder how many inches it will rain. Bulimia has given the comedian a reflux disease. Stomach acid has eroded his enamel, leaving the teeth vulnerable and the breath sour. He carries a plastic cup so that the acid can be spat out. This tempers nausea and makes the comedian feel as though his problem is a habit that can be managed as opposed to a condition that will progress. I have suggested to the comedian that he drink colloidal silver. I’ve offered to electrocute bars of pure silver in water, to pour the suspended nanoparticles of silver into two glasses, to drink alongside him. There have been instances where a tornado formed from blue sky. The collision of cool and warm air doesn’t always disadvantage blue light. Still, the people who observed these tornadoes claimed that the newsreels, which submitted proofs of blue, were untrue to their experience. The observers insisted that the sky yellowed and seemed to them like a picture that had been taken long ago. The sky looked old. It was antiqued, simplified of birdlife and bugs. My mother decorated our house with paintings and miniatures of other houses. The miniatures were ceramic or wooden. The paintings were never abstract. A house could not be a triangle atop a square. Houses had to show shingles and panes, chimneys, fascia boards, porches and second stories. The exteriors were kept in every room. There were houses in the bathrooms and hallways. The larger figurines had been wired for light. Smaller houses held salt and pepper, tissues, sets of keys. As containers, the houses were successful. They could be filled and evacuated. They had foundations and belongings. The paintings were successes, too. They said nothing of people. There were no silhouettes, no children or clots of shoes. They were empty and still in the sun.