Ouroboros ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

Everywhere I look, I see circles. Maybe this is why so many people mellow as they age—because things once lost can swing round again and be found. Even if it takes a decade or longer and even if things change utterly, there are still circles we can complete. Or maybe, it’s the circles themselves that complete us.

Two vast orbits came full circle this week. One swung to a finish for an old friend who moved to a city he swore he never would. And another completed for me, in facing yet another primal fear.

The first orbit began in 1993 when my friend John was attacked on a Boston street when he visited me there. With his neck braced and face taped, he waved goodbye to me and said he would never come back. And I believed him. But then I’ve often mistakenly believed a circle to be just a dead-end. Right now as I type however, he’s fast asleep in his new home in Boston’s South End, dreaming of circles in one way or another.

As for the second orbit, I caught and released an Australian whip snake last week. I grew up in the Rhode Island woods where poisonous snakes are rare if not absent, but I lost my confidence with nature when I moved to Australia eight years ago. It seemed I’d moved to Mars with these poisonous snakes and peeling trees and I had to recover myself somehow. When my cat dragged home a snake and I refused the advice of a couple of hardened locals—just get a long-handled axe and kill it—I got everyone out alive with a pronged tree branch and a bucket. Now I’m enrolled in a class on reptile handling.

There is an expansive lesson in this that goes beyond new homes and snake whispering. Circles closed for both my friend and I, things we thought we lost like trust and confidence, returned. Things we thought we’d never do, we did, and we even found a kind of basic, uncluttered joy in completing a circle, in allowing the circle to complete us. For both of us, it’s been like staring at a dam for many years, a dam with a sign that reads, ‘I could never…’ that one day collapses and the water rolls free, back into the sea where it came from in the first place. And we feel the rush of all that freedom and maybe, we smile.

One must learn to lose before learning to play, says an old Mexican proverb. I thought I knew just what it meant when I was 25, but I didn’t. Now I see that it makes a circle, just like the ancient ouroboros, the circular image of the snake from alchemy that swallows its own tail. Round and round, an Eternal Return, a mouth full but still says, Every time I die, I am born. Look. Here we go again.

***

Almost twelve years ago in a chilly Tombstone, Arizona inn, my friend said, ‘Let’s get go to Mexico!’

But I just stared at him over our steaming instant coffee. ‘Have you seen the news?’

Earlier that week, U.S. Border Patrol officers were videotaped beating three people who illegally crossed from Mexico. It was all over the news and people on both sides of the wire were fuming. For me that morning in April 1996, Tombstone was far enough. The old gunslinger’s tourist trap was as south as I wanted to go. My plan included a beer at Big Nose Kate’s saloon, a flirt with the cowboy barman, a shootout at the O.K. Corral then a steak at the Longhorn. That’s it.

‘Of course I’ve seen the news. And?’ he stretched. ‘We don’t have anything to do with those xenophobes.’ For John, xenophobes and homophobes were two of his favorite words. He stirred his coffee with an irritable scrape and grimaced into his mug.

A far more experienced traveler by our age of 25, John had already discovered much of Europe. He’d rented a beach house on the Algarve, gotten lost in Prague, declared Sienna better than Florence, navigated Paris without a map and gaped at Gaudi’s work in Barcelona. John Carlyle, with his worldly sensibilities and way-too-symmetrical-to-be-straight good looks, was done being a tourist. He wanted to cross the wire. ‘Tombstone isn’t far enough, Lady,’ he said. ‘Mexico. You’ll love it.’

***

John and I met when we were 14. He dyed my hair red and saved me from 1980s blue eye shadow and purple Esprit pants. We spent our teens sitting in his white Datsun, pointed east at the edge of Newport’s Narragansett Bay, wishing we were somewhere else.

All grown up in 1996, John was living in San Francisco and I was in Boston when we met up and rented a convertible in Phoenix. We drove topless through the mountains and deserts of Arizona with our choice of mascot wedged in the dashboard. John’s sweet-as-peach-pie Dolly Parton postcard flapped beside my somber English Patient Ralph Fiennes until she couldn’t take it anymore and blew out of the car. John screamed and reached after her.

‘Let her go,’ I put up a hand, driving on Interstate 17 towards Jerome. ‘She’s keepin’ it moving.’

On this trip, we had a couple of rules. Keepin’ it moving was one. The others were cheap motels only but clean sheets, no bugs and no bloodstains. We’d share a room to save money, but not a bed. Well, except for booked-out Tombstone when we got cornered into a pastel-drenched inn and were forced to share a queen with a fluffy pink canopy. Seriously. Neither of us moved all night. No one rolled over. No one sighed. We only did that once.

***

That morning in Tombstone, sitting at our pink lacey table by the window of The Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Room, John put down his plastic coffee mug. ‘I can’t drink this.’ He snarled a yawn then said, ‘You can’t come all this way and not see Mexico. We’ll have breakfast in Nogales. We’ll book into another place with two beds and do the cheesy Tombstone thing tomorrow.’

I drank my crappy coffee and he took me to Mexico. Because it was a rental and we’d signed something, we left the car in the U.S. and walked towards the border on foot along the highway. Out of my element in that desert, I kept a wary eye out for snakes along the sun-warmed road.

‘Good God, I think this is rattlesnake country,’ I flinched at a shadow on a rock that turned out to be a stick. ‘Sidewinders maybe. Vipers definitely. We’re in viper country.’

‘Don’t you dare talk about it,’ John hissed.

When I stopped worrying about snakes, I started worrying about how we’d fare in Mexico and wore my apprehension like a noose. Our shorts and t-shirts screamed Gringo Americano! and to me, the Border Patrol beating was too fresh. Maybe someone would want to make an example out of us. Maybe they should. Guilt, foreboding, nausea at my country’s exploitive history with Mexico was all I could think about. I wondered if what I’d heard was true, that every time Mexico got itself together, the CIA went down to destabilize it.

The border crossing gate of Nogales was crowded as people funneled through checkpoints. There were uniforms, dogs and fences. A sea of faces washed to and fro through the vents of a concrete borderland, the swooping arches of its retro roof mirroring the wings of an enormous seagull.

‘You need to stop walking like a bomb’s about to go off,’ John glanced at me, my shoulders were tense, neck buried in the cage of my collarbones. ‘You’re making me want to beat you up.’

We showed our ID’s to the guards and drifted into town. A calm of quiet began to unfold around us—unfinished cinder block walls resigned to disorder and red geraniums craned for sunlight on window sills. But I couldn’t see that until later. Awash with a sense of impending doom, I couldn’t breathe. We walked in silence.

A bored donkey wearing a straw hat stuck with plastic flowers dozed on the side of a road. The last thing a person might see in this perverse world, I thought. A boy sold packets of gum but I didn’t look at him. All I could see was that Border Patrol footage everywhere I looked. The delivery of kicks and baton blows. A woman dragged to the ground. I could almost feel the loud, staggering numbness of the blows to her head and I knew that in this world, I didn’t necessarily have to do anything at all to get slapped around. I’d learned that one by heart.

***

Three years earlier, John and I experienced our own taste of violence. It was an unseasonably warm New Year’s Eve in Boston and it was what John got for wearing mustard-colored pants. That’s all I can figure.

While we waited for a cab after the Boston Harbor fireworks and marveled at the night’s sultry warmth, eight or nine—I still can’t remember how many there were—20 year-old, freckled, college types in white oxford shirts and jeans jumped us and beat the crap out of John. I’ll never forget their eyes, bloodshot against pasty, beer-barbed faces.

A ring of them encircled John quickly, but then time slowed right down and I watched my friend drift to the ground in a sea of fists and elbows. I remember the men kneeling on the pavement to force-feed their blows and the sounds of muted thuds and grunts. John’s face transitioned from blind terror into a listless unconsciousness, his eyes appearing to stare right through the men then lapsing away into a pregnant void. I caught glimpses of him through the circle of male torso and waist, the color of red beginning to wink under the streetlamp. I remember that they wore belts. I pulled at the muscled bodies that surrounded my friend, digging my hands into broad shoulders that seemed to morph from one man into the next as if they became some multi-humped serpent, looping upon itself and barricading me out from the bloody prize at its center. I looked over their heads and down at my friend, as they kept at him and pulled without a budge, peeling away my fingertips, scratching, tearing at shoulder, futile. There was a mean knock at my back and I turned to find one of the men, scowling. A voice asked him, my voice, ‘You wouldn’t hit a girl, would you?’ because for some reason, I was thinking of Bugs Bunny. I wanted to ask, ‘You wouldn’t hit a girl with glasses, would you?’ even though I didn’t wear glasses. There was a blow to my head. I hit the ground. Thumps all around. Then I heard a shower. The sound of rushing water. Was it raining? A roar. A whistle? I looked to the other side of the street, past the form of my friend framed by the white shirts surrounding him, and saw a crowd had gathered. Twenty, thirty people? Men and women. The sound of a shower? They were applauding. Men and women cheered, the feminine voices shrill above the masculine drone. It sounded to me like water. And something in me that had not yet been defeated until that moment, burst.

My eyes fixed on John and I crawled towards him, the palms of my hands rashed open like two purses filled with stones. I heard the shuffle of shoes and the hiss of gravel. The white oxfords flew off like fierce albino birds into the darkness.

I woke John, surprised at the calm of my voice.

John. Can you hear me? I put my hands around his head. I knew enough First Aid to keep him still. Enough people had seen. There would be an ambulance or a cop soon.

He winced. Blood ran from a gash on his forehead across his temples and drained from his nose over his cheek.

Don’t move. Stay on your back.

I can’t move. I can’t move my legs.

Don’t try. You’re in shock.

Somehow I stayed focused. It wouldn’t be until later, when they wheeled John off to x-ray that I would start to shake, then weep, unable to stop. But for that moment, I knelt over John in the street and held him. He couldn’t move his body. Inside myself, I screamed away fears of a broken neck.

Just try to be still.

John gagged, blood in his mouth, he sputtered, Did they hit you?! Ohmygod, didtheyhityou?! His words ran together and terror eclipsed his eyes again.

I’m all right. We have to wait now.

That’s when I felt something tug around my shoulders. A woman had come from the other side of the street—I had seen her in a green coat, at the front of that crowd with brown hair and a blurred face—I don’t know if she’d been clapping or not. She slid her coat around me and knelt beside me but I couldn’t look at her. When the ambulance came and lifted John into the truck, I handed back the coat.

‘Keep it,’ she said.

I shook my head, thanked her and that’s when I looked at her. Right in the eye, but all I saw was myself reflected. Something was lost. Something inside had abandoned its post. And nothing but a cold wind blew there. The unseasonably warm New Year’s Eve had sealed itself shut with frost and black ice.

We spent the rest of the night at Massachusetts General Hospital. People arrived all night long in that emergency room, people who drank too much or had been beaten. I saw bloody gurney after bloody gurney roll through that white hallway while I waited to hear that John’s neck wasn’t broken, that he just had a concussion and some superficial wounds. That it was shock that made him feel paralyzed and he’d walk out of there that night and say to me, ‘I’m never coming back to this city,’ while I washed gravel out of my hands. Someone gave me Band-Aids but the panoramic violence changed me in ways I wouldn’t understand until I was in Nogales three years later.

***

‘Shit,’ I whispered as a solid hombre approached us on the street. Clad in a black leather jacket, his eyes were obscured by silver aviators balanced over a great dark wound of a mustache. Only, he kept walking.

‘Would you stop it?’ John hissed.

This wasn’t one of my prouder moments.

‘I know what this is about,’ John didn’t say the word Boston. ‘But you have to get it together. I have. And I’m the one with the dent in my forehead,’ he pointed to the scar. ‘You gotta keep it moving, Lady.’

John hadn’t been back to Boston, but he had kept it moving. He’d still followed his instincts and moved to San Francisco and even began to explore southeast Asia. I hadn’t. I’d stopped. And I’d had no idea that I was face-down on a straight line that was about to turn into a circle.

As it turned out, he was right about Mexico. I loved it. We watched the way the light changes from a morning to an afternoon in Nogales and had huevos rancheros, ranch-style eggs with salsa for breakfast. I forgot about not drinking the water and ordered Tang, something I hadn’t had for at least a decade just because it was on the menu. I didn’t get sick.

But the best part was the little town square, where John took me after we crossed the border, before breakfast. There, in the town square, John helped me call something back, something I had lost of myself on New Year’s Eve three years before. He was there when I lost it, and he was there when I got it back.

‘Sit,’ he pointed to a cement bench in the shade of a lone tree.

I sat with a growl.

‘Look around you.’ He started to walk across the square, but turned, ‘Wait, give me your bag,’ which I surrendered.

At first I wondered if he was abandoning me to fend for myself with no wallet as some sort of existential lesson, which at the end of, I would apologize to all humanity for letting one crowd of jackasses determine my outlook, renounce my paranoia and live happily ever after. But no, he was pulling out a camera for a photo. Just me, in Mexico, with no baggage.

On the surface, John wanted to take a good picture and he knew the odds were against him with a disposable camera. Deeper down, I think he knew what he was doing.

In the years following that night in Boston, I’d grown smaller and John sensed it. ‘We live in a predatory universe,’ I said too often. Back then, if someone were to tell me that one day I’d fall in love, get married and move to Australia, I would have scoffed. I might have said, ‘Australia’s too far. And aren’t there all those things that can kill you?’ When I consider my mindset, I might have looked right through my husband-to-be, and missed him.

After that New Year’s, I had a lot of dreams about snakes. Snakes in the cupboards, coiled in the light fixtures full of water, under the bed. I was bitten constantly. I even dreamt of a snake the size of a great medieval map monster, thick as a tree trunk and rumbling under a barren garden. I saw it flashing, shiny and onyx black, through a gaping score in the soil, but never saw its head or tail. It went on forever, like the great serpent monster of the Caddo Indians. It shook me awake. These snakes were all trying to tell me something, but I could never get past the fear.

So as John sought a good spot to take the picture, I listened to him and looked around. The peaceful town square was not what I’d expected. Just a woman and her toddler, a three year-old maybe. The boy reached for her and she hoisted him onto her hip and swayed from side to side. He leaned his head back and smiled upwards. Sparrows hopped across the bricks, fluffing their feathers in the warm breeze. I took a deep breath.

I thought about New Year’s and how ever since, I was stuck. Sometimes I pined over a loss I couldn’t understand, feeling dreadfully like something had died. I bought plane tickets or made deposits on trips but cancelled at the last minute, and worked instead. I missed important things like a wedding in North Carolina and a flight to London; tickets to Chekhov’s Ivanov and Tina Turner; a week at Tom Brown’s survival camp in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. And for every cancellation or forfeited plan, I added another stone to the tomb.

It was right there in Nogales when I realized that nothing had died. Something had just taken flight, and it could come back if I called it. I knew this, because I felt its distant gaze. On a night three years before, part of me took to the branches of the highest tree it could find and refused to come down. That is, until that morning in Nogales.

It took John forever to snap the picture while I looked, both across the town square and within the landscape of myself. The gentle breeze brushed the long grasses of my thoughts and the sun warmed the old stones, and something unnamed returned my gaze and slowly climbed back down from the branches of the highest tree and stretched its limbs, tired and sore from clinging all that time.

And there in Nogales, I saw that it was time to put myself back together and to ask for more moments like this, and to let them crowd out some of the others of my life. There was a woman there that night after all—the one with the coat—and it would be dangerous to forget her. This is what I remembered as I inhaled the morning, feeling something lost returned as the sunlight brightened and shadows shortened. And upon its return, that unnamed part of me was different, stronger from all those years, clinging, up in a tree.

The mother and her boy giggled and my toes curled.

‘Lauren,’ he called out. I looked and he snapped the shot.

Later at breakfast, I stumbled across the proverb: Aprender a ganar, aprender a perder on a paper placemat. One must learn how to lose before learning how to play. Of course, I thought, of course.

***

Twelve years sailed by like a whip snake’s pink belly across wet leaves. This week, John has assembled his great wooden sleigh bed in a Boston zip code and I attended my first reptile handling class. The instructor said, ‘When good handlers get bitten, they stop and ask, ‘What do I need to learn?’ and they don’t get bitten again. Those handlers that get bitten numerous times? There’s something they just aren’t learning.’

Compared to the person who flinched at shadows in Tombstone and looked over her shoulder in Mexico, I’ve gotten a little bit better at both losing and playing. I can stop staring only at the path when I walk through the Australian woods and pause to look around a little more.

While I don’t want to run out and play with snakes, or keep them as pets as half the people in my reptile handling class do, I do want to face them, like the whip snake that the cat dragged home, with confidence. After I got the cat to drop the snake and pushed him inside the house, I returned to the yard with my stick and bucket. And smiled. The snake reared up and stared at me. Eyes wide and dark and glistening.

Knowing snakes are deaf, I still spoke, ‘I won’t hurt you. I promise. I need you to get into the bucket. You’ll have too much trouble getting out of here alone.’ The snake was trapped in a portion of my yard that is surrounded by stone walls. Above the walls are soil, trees, coils of nasturtiums and thick shrubs, a perfect place to hide, recover and find its way home.

Neither of us moved for a moment and I was in no rush. My book said whip snakes were only slightly poisonous, but I knew one killed a 37 year-old snake handler in Victoria, so my hands were shaking.

‘Please,’ I said again and took a step forward. The snake lifted its small, narrow head higher. It was long and elegant as a whip and from this proximity, I could admire its beauty—how the gradients of its colors changed in the morning sunlight from green to yellow to pink. How its enormous black eyes were fixed on me, reading me.

I slid my stick under its belly and gave it a gentle nudge. The snake reared higher again but then ducked as it went, without argument, into the bucket, and in one swift motion I swept the bucket up towards the leafy garden and stepped back. The snake disappeared quickly into thick brush.

Did I just do that? I started to laugh. My cat was in the window, watching. ‘No!’ I yelled at him. ‘No more snakes!’ and shook my stick at him.

Round and round we go, where she stops, nobody knows.

Every time I die, I am born. Look. Here we go again.

####

Publication Pending, 2007