My friend, I tried sending you a book.

Desperately, I ordered it online and had it sent, after a phone conversation about how your man is beating you. But you keep a post office box and it is winter in your small mountainous town in the middle of another nowhere, and your car is yet again broken.

I fear you’ll never go pick it up.

Why do you keep a P.O. Box? Is it a comfort, like keeping a small apartment on the side, a place to go if you were a mouse? A child the size of her drawing?

I wish the mail carrier could just come to your house and throw the book on your porch, or in fact come right in the living room and open the Amazon.com cardboard for you with a knife, and use that same tool to kill—your man—drizzling a blue button down, Cy Twombly is risen and drizzling again, and then spank the book on your head until you read. Like I did this summer—it changed my life!

My first self-help literature!

Is there no way to force you to fix your car and go pick it up, in your small mountain town, the roads bilious now with winter’s fallen, freezing liver?

Self-help literature isn’t for everyone! I know that. I know. This kind of help self-deconstructs inside our kind of brain, a kind of training. Some won’t stand for it, won’t sit and listen, fidgeting, reading instead the new nonfiction, and literary reviews for newer novels, never novels.

But Sam, someone is beating you. Grabbing your deer bones!

I worry these days that you would swallow a sparrow whole as a horse pill to avoid confrontation with its mangy freedoms. You’d kill a deer, who suffers like women, that breed understood as kill them, comeuppance inherent in her blood. Her thickening numbers, reminder there once was: a wood—and God! We’re told: Shoot deer down by the side of any road, for the good of what, The Road. Like women! Our overpopulation. There are too many women!

You can’t pronounce us. You can’t pronounce us without pronouncing a populous. There are too many women on this syllabus. Don’t review us. There is too much inside of us.

But Sam, you are shooting yourself. Your tongue is the gun. You shoot yourself in his mouth, kissing your kind of death. Samantha, enough!

This is what the book I sent you is about:

Men who keep women like deer in his house. Hatred of her multitude. Shoot her, he’s told, deer-blooded, her deer-sheltering blood, kill the plural word. There’s never just one. Justification. It’s about the women who believe him.

I was one.

It’s all there in the book I sent! Drive to the post office, friend. Walk in the snow if your car is so broken, if the town is so mountain, leaving your prints everywhere like a thousand deer thronging deliverance down the hill. Right in the middle of the road—I can’t force you, friend, to read.

And now you’re reporting this, on our often phone—a fire in your town. In winter, I don’t believe this! The post office burned, you’re remembering to me now, your man in the background mashing wine in his mouth, again, and all the mail—gone— burned or entombed, and the flower store next to it, and some people you know were, in your small nowhere, even your man, you’re reporting, pitching in, putting out the petals, fisting snow over indigo ears and all the violet vaginas, like indignant children combusting. They were leaving. I want to hose you down. I want to wash your ear like a flower, with my book.

The girls on my team pull their hair back tightly, in slick ponytails, and they wear deodorant that smells like baby powder; they fall in love with each other constantly, break up, start again. During today’s game they are chewing cinnamon gum, spitting into the dust pretending it’s tobacco. Earlier, before I was an asshole on the field, the catcher who is also the team captain offered me a piece, unwrapping it for me, crumbling up the tin foil in her fingers. I said I didn’t like cinnamon gum.

“You prefer the real thing?” she asked, smiling.

“It makes me think of that movie—you know, the one where those kids tried chewing tobacco, and they didn’t spit out it out, they swallowed it, and then they went on a roller-coaster ride, and they threw it up all over themselves.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Thanks for that image.” She put the tin foil in her pocket and chewed the piece herself. “Do you think the rest of us will throw up cinnamon gum later tonight?”

“Well, I won’t,” I said.

“No, you won’t,” she said.

Lying on my back, on the bench, I can see only clear blue sky, like I’m alone out here. If I look out of the corners of my eyes, then I can see the field—girls running and sliding, blurry, and I can’t tell which team is mine: our uniforms are royal purple and the other team’s uniforms are red-violet. I go back to my phone. I like to believe I check it so often because my mom keeps sending me updates about how my dad is doing, but I hate those texts and delete them right away.

The YouTube video of you is seven minutes long. You’re giving a presentation to an auditorium full of rich white people, with a giant projector screen behind you. In your hand you hold a little black remote control, clicking through your PowerPoints, photos of formerly abused but now much happier children who stayed at the shelter, were provided food and education and intensive therapy. You’re wearing a shorter skirt than necessary, and you’ve gained weight and cut your hair off. You must be almost 35 by now, I estimate. I lean in close to my phone to listen, but even when I hear your voice again I don’t know if I miss you as much as I thought I did. You say, “In 2011, there were nearly 6,350 confirmed victims of child abuse and neglect in our city, and for 6,350 of those children, the perpetrator was a parent.” Your voice gets momentarily hard and flat, almost angry, like it sometimes would when we were messing around—when you opened your front door and invited me into your house and I said had a bad day at work and you said, “Do you want to sit around and eat danishes and talk about your problems?” even though you didn’t have any danishes; and we had sex upstairs, not in your bedroom but in your guest room, which is when you would pretend like you were mad at me and talk to me in that kind of voice, and you would say, “Who do you think you’re fooling, acting like you’re so good?” Or at least we thought it was pretending.

Towards the end of your speech there’s a part where you screw up one of your words—child advocacy comes out sounding like child advesy. You only stumble for less than half a second, clearly terrified for less than half a second—swallowing fast, your eyes getting wider—finally correcting yourself, rushing with the rest of your sentence. I want to tell you how I always thought you were smarter than almost anyone in the world, but judging by the standing ovation at the end of your speech, you didn’t need any additional encouragement from me. You welcome onto the stage one of the social workers who runs the shelter; she’s much shorter than you, and maybe not less pretty, but at least less striking, and plainer, and is so nervous that her voice shakes. The applause then quickly dies out.

I put down my phone just in time to hear as someone’s bat makes contact with the ball, a deep thudding noise, then cheering from the bleachers. I sit up and rub my eyes in the sunlight like I’ve just woken up. We win the game. The girls on my team embrace in one giant, messy hug. I join, sort of, putting my arm around someone’s waist and leaning my cheek against her back—I have no idea who she is. Number 9 on her t-shirt.

*

Our team goes out to the bar to celebrate, and I’m in the restroom with the catcher, the girl who offered me the gum. We’re both fixing our hair in a mirror that’s covered in greasy fingerprints; right in the middle of it there’s a lipstick kiss. She pulls out her ponytail, and her hair is wavy at the bottom. Her face seems softer to me.

She says, “Not gum. I’m going to throw up beer. I think there will be some pizza in there too.”

“You’ll be okay,” I say. “Drink some water. Here, come on, I’ll buy you one.” She laughs, and I guide her out the restroom door. After you, I learned how to mirror you and got better at taking care of other people, sometimes even telling them what to do as if I knew more than them. On our first date I met you for lunch before I explained I had a job interview later in the afternoon, and you commented that my fingernails were dirty, I should wash my hands before I went; I felt like a clueless little girl who needed you to show me how to be okay. I haven’t felt that way once in four years. I bring four plastic cups full of water for the girls sitting at a high wooden table, with initials and hearts etched on its surface, and as I climb onto a stool one of the girls drunkenly admits to me, “People say that you think you’re better than everyone, but I think you’re just shy.”

I imagine you ascending the stairs of the children’s shelter, an old two-story house that is dark and crumbling; seeing a bedroom crowded with bunk beds, though even then some of the girls sleep in sleeping bags on the floor; deciding you will make it better, making it better. I drive a few of my teammates home. The girl in the passenger seat is twisting the strap of her seat belt that I buckled for her and telling me about how she and her girlfriend are going to couples therapy together, because she got molested when she was ten by her uncle, and all I can think is, like an asshole, at least she has her girlfriend with her. In my apartment, before I go to bed, I send you an email and write, I’d like to see you. In the morning you email back and say you’d like to see me too.

*

I meet you for dinner at a restaurant I had to make reservations at, that has a menu only one page long. In the middle of our table there’s a translucent vase. Inside the vase is a flame made out of glowing yellow plastic, and when I touch it, it isn’t hot. The waiter gives us a pitcher full of sparkling water. You order a beet salad, and when it arrives at our table you say you want me to try it. I say, “I don’t know if I like beets.”

“Just eat it,” you say.

So I do, reaching over my own plate with a fork. It tastes weird, and soft. I say, “I like it.”

“People say beets taste like dirt,” you say.

When I’m out of water I chew on ice cubes. You want to know what’s new with me. I list the things off. I got a promotion at my job, I got a new cat, here’s a picture of her on my phone, I play softball but I hate it. “My dad is sick.” I say it and I say, “I don’t know how to say it without sounding—”

“You don’t have to sound like anything,” you say. Your voice is hard again, reassuring me. “What’s wrong with him?”bn

“They don’t really know. He forgets some things, he thinks God is talking to him. He’s writing this book, like, he thinks it’s the next Bible or something.”

“Schizophrenia?”

“Maybe. That’s what his dad had too. My mom thinks it’s genetic, that I’ll get it too.”

“That won’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“You were never very religious.”

“I was never,” I repeat. I want your dismissal for my own, the way I used to want sex with you.

You fill my empty water glass with the pitcher of sparkling water, and I say thank you, and I want to say thank you a second time but I don’t.

Unprompted, you apologize for not being a very nice person while we were together. You explain, “I think I was emotionally unavailable.” I am beginning to understand why you agreed to see me. You also apologize for lying to me. I ask, “When did you ever lie to me?” You take a deep breath and say you lied about your age; you were ten years younger than you told me. You were legally emaciated at an early age, for reasons you don’t specify, and you graduated college when you were 16, got your masters when you were 18; you started lying about your age for your job so people would take you seriously, wouldn’t ask questions about your past, and you never stopped.

I add it up in my head—that means when I was 25 years old when we were hooking up, you were only 20.

I say, “Wait, so I’m five years older than you? Does that mean I’m smarter than you?”

“No. It means you’ll die before me.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,” you agree.

At the end of dinner, after we’ve signed our credit card receipts, I say I miss you. You stare at me for way too long, like I’ve either disgusted you or like you want to tell me something else about yourself that for some reason you still cannot. You say, very slowly, “I’m glad we can be friends.” Outside the restaurant I hug you goodbye, keeping my chest far away from yours and patting your back, like two women might if they were coworkers and ran into each other at the mall and didn’t have anything, really, to say to the other, and mostly only wanted to finish their shopping. I drank too much water during dinner, so as soon as your back is turned, I go back into the restaurant to pee. I shut the stall, pull down my pants. Afterwards I don’t wash my hands.

*

Our softball team might win the championship. We only have two games left. As the season progressed the girls got quieter, more focused; they removed and cradled their caps in their hands, bended them and creased them with a kind of ruthlessness, forced them back onto their heads. And, watching their devotion, I got better at playing. I left my phone in my car’s glove compartment during games—my dad was getting better anyway, on new medicine, that made him sleepy, but not crazy. I learned to wait to swing the bat until it was almost too late. I once slid into first base and skinned my knees so that they bled into my pants and left rounded stains, blots the size of quarters, red that later turned brown.

At today’s practice, one of the girls brings flasks filled with orange Gatorade. I’m practicing my overhand with the catcher, who says she didn’t know I had it in me, to throw so hard. She throws back just as hard. We’re making some jokes about our teammates in love, where’s the u-haul, I’m lifting my arm again—and it happens in slow motion—when I throw the ball, at the same time, someone else is calling her name, and she turns her head, and she isn’t holding up her glove to catch, and the ball slams into her the chest, knocks her to the ground. She falls silently.

She lands on her butt; then she’s gasping for air and our teammates rush to her side, asking if she’s hurt. I think I knocked the wind out of her. I mumble an apology, keeping my distance. She’s making a noise now that sounds like laughter, but deeper and sickening to me, and I know she’s crying. I don’t just hate the sound of her crying, I hate her for crying, I want to yell at her to stop crying. Instead I stare at her, refusing to offer comfort. I am trying not to do this but I am still doing this, indulging a kind of disdain for whatever undercurrent of weakness runs beneath these girls—these girls who I know I should like. The catcher stands up and wipes off the dust that’s clinging to her thighs and ass. Her face is red. I retreat to the sidelines to take a swig of Gatorade from a flask. It tastes metallic. I keep telling myself I shouldn’t remember you, I shouldn’t use you as a point of comparison, a reason to isolate myself, any longer—I have been keeping myself inside of a memory—it was a fake one, too—you had been just as lost as anybody else, as lost as me.

Last week I wasn’t even looking for you. I was on a date, at another restaurant, not as fancy—it smelled like beer and men’s cologne inside, and the menu was six pages, one wholly dedicated to tater tots—and the local news aired on the giant TV screen behind my date’s face. She kept talking about how stressful her job was. Her boss got mad at her today for not knowing HTML. Then there you were, on the news, on the big screen, video footage of you on the front lawn of the children’s shelter, standing with two children who had escaped a drug-addicted mother. There was a young boy, maybe four or five, who stood at your side, and also an infant—you were holding the baby, saying words to her the cameras didn’t pick up. Something must have changed in me, because when I saw that, I felt an odd sort of lurch in my stomach, like panic, not about you, exactly, but concern for the baby—because you suddenly seemed so young to me—was it possible you had aged backwards inside of me, that you became 25, 20, then younger, just a teenager, barely a teenager—and I wanted to jump out of my seat and lecture you, Do you know you need to support the baby’s head, you have to hold her very carefully, here, no, okay, just let me take her instead. Like in a moment you were going to drop her. But my date was looking bored and ripping up her soggy beer-soaked coaster, so I reached underneath the table and touched her bare knee; the news went to commercial, fast-paced music fading out. Of course the baby was perfectly safe in your arms. Still I wondered what happened after the cameras stopped rolling, who took from you the baby and her brother—maybe that tiny, jumpy social worker from the recorded presentation weeks ago—you would have left the shelter, went back to your own home, found a new cause, began another fund-raising campaign—somebody else would have to put them to bed, wake them up in the morning, feed them, teach them how to love.

The recent congressional hearings on credit card debt in America surely were a wake-up call for us here at Bank of the United States (heretofore referred to as “Large Bank”). We heard from struggling grandmothers who can’t afford yarn in which to make those beastly holiday sweaters no one wears, and college students who can’t buy their usual vegan sandwiches and small-business owners, all of whom are just the salt of this Earth and the Best People You’d Ever Want to Know, who are looking for a couple guys this Saturday morning, no heavy lifting, at least $200.

Then I went to see Lady Gaga and Madonna recently on their world tour, “You Were Born This Way Like a Virgin,” and it got me thinking: People can’t really help it if they were born into poverty and struggle with stuff like the high cost of organic eggs and usurious penalty interest rates. When they scream to the media and write to their legislators, they’re really saying, “I drank from the cup of humanity, and it was sour like chunky milk.” I mean, who are we fooling? Why not just come clean?

In light of these facts, I propose a campaign of full disclosure, a campaign so earnest, so honest that our constituents can’t help but fall out of their chairs. Some of those people may die, such as the more elderly or those with compromised immune systems, so we’ll need to prepare a contingency plan to collect their unpaid balances from their nearest relatives. Anyway, I envision this plan to be a multi-tiered, multi-pronged, latitudinal, cross-platform, linear confession, of sorts. We’re going to admit everything we’ve ever done wrong.

The honesty of this approach provides a two-fold benefit: First, it will literally take the wind out of our opponents’ sails by claiming their grievances and stealing them from under their feet; second, it will result in a radical change in public perception of our company resulting in increased profits, decreased regulatory oversight and bigger bonuses for the people who will have nothing to do with this campaign and have never set foot in America. I’m talking about that group of dudes in China who owns us.

In this campaign, the media, who have always been rather kind to us in light of what’s really going on, will become our best friends. We will be the dad who saved a drowning child; the girl who returned a wallet with $500 and certificates for odd stocks and securities; the guy who bought his cube-mate lunch. If the media says it’s true, who’s to say it’s not? We will gather support from every corner of this country for Large Bank. We will milk it like a Guernsey. We will shake it like a Polaroid picture. Our milkshake will bring all the boys to the yard cuz they’re like, it’s better than yours.

I give you the campaign.

First Prong of Three: Bait the Hook

This piece is the crucial bit of groundwork we must first lay. We implant the suggestion into our viewers’ minds that they must find out what’s going on, kind of like that urban legend where a spider implants its eggs into a victim’s forearm that you’ll read about later on Facebook and then check Snopes because you’re not being fooled.

We create a multi-platform advertising campaign around a single visual: a high-capacity washing machine, kind of old-timey looking with claw feet. It’s high-capacity because we have a LOT of dirty laundry, but it’s all getting clean in this turn-of-the-century machine that so wouldn’t touch that grease stain you got on the front of your shirt when you were trying to hold your slice in the proper New York way which always creates a gully through which pizza grease finds its way onto your clothing.

There’s a man inside the machine, we’ll call him Everyman, and he’s drowning in debt. Get it? The water’s rising and the soap bubbles are going to choke him. He can’t get out, no matter how hard he tries. We use this photo, plus the slogan: “We’re finally coming clean…” We’re going to just keep the text to those few words, ok? No huge paragraphs. People don’t read them. Who is the guy who keeps writing novels on highway billboards? Would someone fire him please? He can go work for a newspaper or something because everyone knows they could do so much better. They wouldn’t be biased. They’d get it right the first time.

We launch the campaign simultaneously in major cities throughout the country in the following mediums:

• Television, for people who don’t read. The commercial is 15 seconds, during which the viewer stares at the same poster I just described
• Radio, for people who need to feel that they’re informed, even if they just listen to one AM channel on their way to work which reinforces every belief they already have. A voice will describe the poster. It’ll be effective.
• Online, for all the millennials out there who are just starting to understand what crushing debt feels like and what a debilitating damper it puts on their futures

When everyone starts sharing our ads online and talking about them and they go viral on YouTube and people have been staring at them on the subways while the train just sits at the station because there’s train traffic ahead of us, we implement…

Phase Two: Hook the Fish

Now that everyone’s paying attention, we reveal that it’s Large Bank that is behind the campaign and we institute a second round of ads in which we tell them that we’re going to tell them everything that we’ve been doing that is not in their interest. We tell them that we’re going to tell them the truth about compound interest and how we give cards to people of proven credit untrustworthiness and how penalties help pay for my vacations to Fiji.

We’re going to explain that we’re going to explain why we target the financially illiterate and students and why we’re able to raise rates even when the customer isn’t late paying his bill. We further spread awareness through the following proven methods:

• Press conferences – We stage pop-up press conferences in major urban areas, kind of like those flash mob things where everyone shows up with an umbrella on a sunny day and dances to “The Sound of Music.” Or they gyrate in unison to “Bump ‘n Grind,” or whatever. The point is its spontaneous, therefore further enhancing the genuine, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, confessional-style nature of the campaign. At each press conference we say we’ll do the following: tell everyone what’s going on at some point in the future; promise honesty and integrity in all business dealings in every way; and lay out our point-by-point plan for hosting the perfect holiday gathering
• We mail everyone in America a Rubik’s cube with instructions for how to get all the little squares to be the same colors on every side and then say if they can figure it out a special message will appear on the red side with further instructions to visit a website. Once they get to the website, they will see the original ad of the washing machine we plastered everywhere. This time, underneath the ad, we’ll post even more instructions on how to participate in scavenger hunts in their local communities where they will search for clues all day and never find them because we’re going to fix the whole game
• We spam everyone with an email that describes the benefits of owning a vacation home and why you should never report your nanny’s income to the IRS plus tips on how to bribe her to keep her from going to the authorities with complaints about 24-hour-a-day jobs with no benefits

Phase Three: The Fish Fishes For Us

Now that our constituents are energized and ready to conquer the world on our behalf, we get them busy working. Studies have shown that people who believe that companies have been honest about something are 98 percent more likely to forget every heinous thing that company has ever done to deserve the working public’s wrath.

Take Exxon for example. They said, “hey, we did it! We spilled a crap-ton of oil into the sea. Guilty as charged!” It didn’t matter that it was patently obvious that Exxon had done this, as any fool could see all that black sludge just sitting on top of the water’s surface. Faced with Exxon’s honesty, people were like, “oh, they didn’t mean to,” and “I know they’re just doing the best they can to wipe all that oil off seals and birds,” and “frankly, no one really cares about aquatic life anyway.”

Next, we find a hugely influential blogger deeply in debt to us who is constantly complaining about all his balances being so over his head and how he can’t even buy food and how he didn’t mean to rack up all that debt, it’s just that he couldn’t find a job for a really long time following graduate school. We woo him. We ply him with wine and roses. We take him out to dinner, call him the next day. In short, we show him WE CARE. We are ON HIS SIDE. His feelings change. Suddenly, he loves us and would do anything for us. Now we’re ready to ask him to start circulating that petition. The public is primed, ready to act on our behalf. People are salivating at the opportunity to give us whatever we want. And we do, we give it to them good. We grab ‘em by the neck, stroke it from behind. I’m sorry…where was I? Oh yes.

Our dear blogger introduces our petition to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act. We organize a march on Washington, where a really great public speaker who is super attractive and wears great suits grabs a megaphone and speaks to our frothing masses. Then, our public speaker takes the petition and hand-delivers it to Congress, which is very impressed by the sheer grass-roots nature of this uprising.

Conclusion

I don’t know. I sort of feel like this plan speaks for itself? If you have questions, message me on Monday. But don’t contact me before noon because my secretary and I sext in the mornings.

“You’re like a cartoon,” we said.

And he said, “Why?”

And it was, “because they always leave footprints, even when walking on something it should be impossible to leave footprints on.” Like Elmer Fudd walking along a tiled floor, following the black blots left by Daffy Duck on the smooth surface. Or Goofy learning to dance, following the black cutouts of feet that he’d pasted to the floor. That one was better. I think it was Melanie who thought of that.

And so we’d try to dance along to Anton’s footprints. Following half of Imogene’s trip to the fridge and the left side of my trip to the microwave, you could almost foxtrot. But that only lasted a few days, as long as it took for his feet to turn every inch of the floor black. Anton’s mother was never home, so she never even noticed. But he only had to take one step past the threshold at my house before my grandmother chased him back out with a broom. The rest of the summer he had to climb a topiary bush to get into my bedroom window, and sneak back out the way he’d come. He would jump straight from the window seat to the bed and sit on the mattress while we all listened to records, read poetry, smoked pot.

It wasn’t until September that, on the way up the bush, he was caught in a rainstorm. Slipping and sliding up the slender branches of the spherical bush, it took him fifteen minutes to get inside. When he did, he stood in the center of the room, dripping wet. His black feet, unwashed for four months, bled out onto the white carpet. We watched, transfixed, as he slowly dyed the carpet black.

Imogene was going to learn to meditate, and Melanie decided to fast. There was plenty of Buddhism to go around, but we didn’t have the knack for it.

I tried to meditate too, in the sitting room at the back of the house I lived in with my grandparents, saying the “Ohm” on a couch painted with purple flowers that were long faded. Just as I thought that maybe, yes, I had cleared my mind, my grandfather walked into the room.

“What are you doing,” he asked. And I shrugged. I sat at the kitchen table with him. He turned on the radio and gave me a cookie.

“I’m fasting,” I told him.

He seemed confused. “Your grandmother just baked it.”

“Just one,” I said. I ate five.

Three days into her fast, Melanie had a vision while meditating.

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” one of us said. “I think you’re supposed to clear your mind. Not have visions.”

But Melanie was excited. She began painting it for us onto pieces of cardboard she’d salvaged from cereal boxes, spreading out her acrylics and hundreds of brushes across her bedspread, staining the sheets. They were beautiful, the paintings: colors swirling like tie-dye, and there were animals moving through it, and flowers, and breasts, and somehow, we thought, she had painted what it felt like to sigh. They put us at ease.

“They make me want to go to sleep,” we told her. It was a compliment.

Melanie gave one to each of us, and we hung them in our bedrooms. If we looked at them long enough, we thought, maybe we would have the visions, too. Maybe we would know what it was like. She didn’t keep one for herself. She didn’t need to. She remembered.

*

Imogene had a Ouija board, and we would use it to speak to the dead. We would sit in a circle, cross-legged, knees touching, hands overlapping on the little plastic stylus. Anton would light candles and incense.

Once, we spoke to a boy named Ricky who had been murdered in a house down the street. He asked us if candy still tasted sweet, if grass beneath bare feet still made souls swell. He told us we could find a box buried in his back yard beneath a swing set. It had a kazoo inside, a toy plane, a letter to himself in the year 2011.

“Isn’t it terrible,” someone said, maybe Melanie, “that Ricky will never read that letter?”

We looked for the box, for the house, but they didn’t seem to exist. We couldn’t find the red gables and green door that Ricky described. Still, we couldn’t stop thinking about all the times we might have walked by the house, and all the times that maybe, out a little too late at night, we’d thought we heard screaming coming from inside.

We spoke with Jack Kerouac, John Lennon, and Allen Ginsberg. Jack was very quiet. But Allen said they were all watching us.

“Counting—ON—U—” he had said.

John Lennon just cracked jokes.

“What is your favorite food?” Melanie asked him.

He said, “Yoko.”

But Ginsberg wasn’t fooling around. He told us to stay together. He told us about poetry. He said it was important for us to pass the test. “RS TEST,” he said. We didn’t know what it meant.

“Anton, are you moving it?” Carmine asked.

“No, I’m not moving it,” Anton said.

None of us were moving it. It was real.

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m going to get my journal, and my camera.” My house was only a couple blocks away. I stumbled down the road barefoot, reciting the “Footnote to Howl,” in my head as far as I could remember it. Holy, holy, holy. The street was dark and quiet. It was just after a summer rain, and I could see ghosts in the mist rising off the streets.

I was back in five minutes, panting, camera and notebook in hand. I’d run the last half a block. Out of fear? Exhilaration? But when I walked in, only Anton was left.

“Oh, they left,” he said. “Curfew.” We spent a few hours watching TV, and I went home.

The next day I was talking to Imogene. She said, “You know Anton was moving it, right? He told me.”

“Oh,” I said. And it was true. I asked him about it later.

“You didn’t believe in any of that shit, did you?”

I said, “No,” sheepishly. But I had. I’d believed every word.            And some nights, even now, I still do. I will close my eyes against the darkness, hoping to make it darker still. And I will ask what I should do. I will wait for voices. What should I be doing. What should I do.

*

Imogene and I would stay up all night talking on the phone. I would read her poems that I had typed out on an old electric typewriter. Poems about her, or the electric summer sky, or about God, or not about God. But mostly about her. She would talk to me about Sylvia Plath. We would try to be so quiet, but sometimes one of us would laugh, and we’d have to cup our hands over the receiver and spend a tense minute in silence to see if her parents or my grandparents had heard. Sometimes, we would talk on the computer instead.

She said to me, “You sound different on here. You don’t sound like you.”

And she was right. Typing, I was always more hesitant. Less spontaneous. I would rewrite every sentence three times before finally hitting Return. But I didn’t know what to tell her. What, after all, did she expect from me? “I don’t know how to type the way I talk,” I wrote.

“Well, learn,” she said.

It was kind of a sin with all of us:  to hesitate, to act contrary to what you felt in your deepest, truest self. That was what our parents did. Not what Jack had done. After all, the Buddha had said that lying was the worst of all sins.

One night she threatened to swallow pills, told me she had taken them, and then hung up. I called the police. When they got to her dad’s house I guess all they found was a confused family blinking at the sirens in their pajamas. She was in her pajamas too. I can see it now. Like she was one of them. We didn’t talk for a few weeks after that.

“Why did you believe me?” she asked later. “You had to know I’d never do it.”

“Yeah,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure. Was it that she said she was doing it, and hadn’t? Or was it that she was going to do it, but just hadn’t done it yet?

When we saw each after that, it was always different. I would try to kiss her, but it never worked. On the football field behind the school at sunset, but someone came up. In the neighbor’s pool that we would always sneak into, but she stopped me. On the golf course in the middle of the night, but the sprinklers came on.

She started dating some guy, Louis. And we were angry because he wasn’t one of us, sure. But I was angry for myself. Angrier than all of them. Because he wasn’t me.

Later, towards the end of the summer, she wanted to meet me. To talk. I told her I would, to wait under the street light on the corner. But I left her there to pace alone in the halo. With dawn approaching, I heard pebbles tapping at the glass of my window.

*

Every time it would rain (and it rained a lot) Carmine would dance in it. He would let his long black hair out of the rubber band and it would whip around his face while he spun around shirtless in the storm. Carmine was a little fat, and smelled a little from not showering much, but when he would do that, all of us thought he was beautiful, the girls and the boys.

He was.

He would try to convince us to dance in it with him. And we would. For a minute, or for two. But then we would begin to get cold, and we would go inside and wrap ourselves in one of Melanie’s long beach towels with Donald Duck on it. Then we would stand way upstairs on the balcony to Melanie’s parents’ apartment and watch him.

Sometimes he would find things to dance with him. Once it was a broken TV from the dumpster. Once, the fallen branch of a pine tree.

“Fuck all of you guys,” he would say inevitably, when no one would dance with him. We were too repressed, he said. And why didn’t we, I wonder. Wasn’t he right, after all? It would have been such a small thing, to dance with him.

We tried to get him to come inside, to watch TV, but he was done, he said.

So he walked home, which was more than a mile, and although the rain had begun to let up when he started, by the time he had rounded the corner it was pouring, pounding, splashing.

Supposedly he got picked up in a tan Buick by some woman. “Need a lift?” she had said to him as she leaned over the passenger seat to open the door, her breasts hanging down and dripping with rainwater, the fabric sticking to her skin. All of this, according to Carmine.

We didn’t see him for a week after that, and he insisted it was all because of his sexual escapades.

“We are going to get married some day,” he said. “Her name is Eliza.”

We didn’t really believe him. But how could you really be sure? I told you how beautiful he looked in the rain.

*

We wrote so much poetry. We read some too. But mostly, we wrote it.

It was Imogene, really, who could write it. The rest of us did. But she really could, you know? Most of us would try to write like Bukowski, or like Allen Ginsberg. But she wrote like herself.

I wrote this poem about waking up late, the sunlight burning my face through the slits in the blinds. Whiskey shots by myself at dawn. (I’d stolen the whiskey from Anton’s mother’s dresser drawer. Later, he was grounded for it).

Imogene wrote one about flesh, about feeling her makeup rubbing off on a whiskered cheek, about feeling someone else’s makeup smearing on her thighs. We didn’t know whose cheek it was—none of us had any whiskers. We didn’t know whose makeup it was—no one that we knew wore any, except for her.

Bethul wrote so many, all about flowers, wanting to eat flowers, make love in the flowers, make love with the flowers, turn into one of the flowers.

Melanie wrote them all for Imogene, and Imogene pretended like she didn’t get it.

“This is beautiful,” she would say. “And so ambiguous…”

Imogene wrote about things we didn’t know that we understood until we read about them. She was reading Keats, and she was reading haiku from “the masters,” and she was reading things we had never heard of.

“You are power,

you are what grows from fallow fields,”

That was something she wrote, one of the lines I remember still.

In the fall, Imogene tried to kill herself, but for real. She locked herself in the bathroom at her father’s house and ran razor blades up her arms. I went to see her at the hospital. When I think of it now, it seems like it was right before Christmas. But it couldn’t have been. All I know is that when I went to see her, either we hadn’t spoken in months, or it felt like it. And the cold. I remember it being so cold.

“Have you been writing any poems?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.

And she didn’t shake her head, didn’t smile, and didn’t frown, but she was smoking a cigarette, so maybe it wasn’t at the hospital, but at her mother’s apartment, and her hand was shaking, and she said, “Who cares about any of that?”

She had burned them.

*

Everyone fucked everyone else, or at least we got close. It was supposed to be like free love, like we’d read about in books. Stuck at their dealer’s apartment for the night because no one could find the car keys, Anton fucked Melanie by black light while Carmine slept fitfully on the rug. Melanie gave Carmine a hand job in the faculty bathroom at school. Bethul said to Melanie, “I want to eat you, all of you, even your hair,” and then spent an hour eating her out under the stars on the back deck of Bethul’s parents’ house. Bethul didn’t fuck anyone else for years, but never fucked Melanie again either. She was in love.

Anton and Carmine gave each other drunken blow jobs on the Fourth of July, but apparently neither of them finished, and they didn’t “try any butt stuff.” I fucked Melanie, but let’s face it, we all did. Anton never fucked Imogene. I would have killed him. Imogene and I fucked, but only once. And we didn’t fuck, anyway, really. We were making love.

Imogene ate Melanie out while listening to Zeppelin at a sleep over while we all slept in the next room. Apparently Melanie never returned the favor, and they were both drunk, so it “didn’t count.” But still, I couldn’t forgive her. Melanie. But I suppose I couldn’t forgive Imogene either. I never did.

And no, I never fucked Anton, but one night on his sofa I kissed him softly on the lips, and he kissed me back, and his tongue was sticky and his whiskers scratched my face, but he tasted delicious. And we didn’t kiss again, but we spent the night wrapped around each other. When I woke up, I sobbed gently into his shoulder until he work up.

And Anton fucked Bethul, and Bethul fucked Carmine, and Carmine fucked Melanie too. At least that’s what Carmine said, but Melanie never owned up to it.

*

In the middle of the summer I wasn’t speaking to Imogene, and I wasn’t speaking to Melanie, and I was listening to Radiohead constantly.

I would wake up late. One in the afternoon, and before long two, and then three.

Anton would wiggle his way through the open window to find me still in bed, naked, drenched in sweat. He would sit on the edge of the bed, throw me a shirt from off of the floor, and ask me how I was doing.

I was doing fine, I told him.

He would make me eat lunch. Bean burritos at Taco Bell, or McDonald’s double cheeseburgers. I would eat with him in the car in a parking space overlooking the freeway. He would play Pink Floyd, or if I had remembered to bring the CD, he’d play more Radiohead.

One day, on the way back to the car, a huge rainstorm began. Anton didn’t want to drive in it, so we ate in the car, the engine turned off, the wipers still, rain pouring down all the windows like a waterfall.

At home, I would have trouble sleeping. I would lie in bed with the lights off, the ceiling fan vibrating violently in place, and if I closed my eyes I would see visions.

Moving at the speed of sound through black streets without the aid of flight or wheels. Sharp teeth would devour mountains. The sun was a buzz saw set aflame. Penises the size of skyscrapers sprouting from the ground in the red of the night. It was always red. Night, day, dawn, dusk. Red, like everything was bleeding. I would wake up sometimes at dinner time, and feel like I hadn’t been gone for more than a moment, but also like I had been gone forever.

I would wake up to the pounding of bass. For a few months, I was afraid of the dark.

I transcribed them all in red ink in this giant black sketchbook. Even though I still have it, I’ve never read it since. Sometimes I will see it there on the bookcase, gathering dust on the bottom shelf, and I will just stare at it. Wondering what it says.

*

Carmine was going to find a place outside where we could all hang out. It was a good idea, he said, because we could commune with nature and get in touch with what was important. Whatever that was.

But it was also hard, because living in the suburbs you only get the smallest pieces of nature. Beyond the next tree there was always a street, or a house, or a mall, or a sewer drain. The field in the park was no good, because you couldn’t smoke pot there during the day. Behind the elementary school was no good either, because the cops were always passing by. And that wasn’t nature, anyway.

He was running out of time. Because soon it was going to get cold.

He would give little updates, always suggesting new places. A small meadow he’d found in the woods behind the reservoir. A patch of mud covered in crickets by the river. We’d follow him through the woods, and he would promise us something. But Melanie would always complain that her foot hurt. Or Anton would complain that his foot did. Or I would complain that I was hot.

He couldn’t convince Imogene to come. We didn’t realize it yet, but she was pretty much already gone by that point.

It was almost done being August when he finally found it.

“You need to bring your swimming trunks,” he said to me. And I did. And Anton did too. But he and I were the only ones who would go. Melanie had community service. And Carmine was trying to avoid Bethul, who insisted that she loved him all of sudden. And Imogene was on vacation with her family. Or so she’d said.

“I don’t want her to come anyway,” I’d said to Carmine. He hadn’t said anything, only nodded, as if waiting for me to say something else.

So we walked down to the river, which was a mile from my house, just the three of us. We swam against the current, out to where it got deep and you could feel fish nibbling at your legs.

“Just a little farther,” Carmine said. But my legs hurt. And Anton’s breathing was labored. I had to pull him the last little bit.

Stepping finally onto a dirt path, I looked around. At the beginning of the summer, Imogene and I had gone swimming near this spot. (It was near the golf course). We had said we were going to undo our baptisms, and so we dunked each other under the water.

After, we’d found a small island with a rope swing in the middle of the river, and that’s where we’d made love. Or I had, at least. For me it was love. I’d told her, “I love you.”

And she had said, “I don’t know if I can love anybody. I love everything. I love it all too much.” And at the time, it had seemed beautiful to me. I had written it down, turned it into a poem. But thinking about it again, with her gone, the sun beginning to set, the branches of the trees hanging low over the river, I knew it hadn’t meant anything. None of it did.

And that’s the place that Carmine had found. The three of us sat in the center of the island, near a few rocks in a small patch of grass overlooking the river. Anton had brought pot, but his plastic bag had leaked, and it was ruined. The sun was already setting. The days were getting shorter.

We couldn’t think of a single thing to talk about.

*

There were drugs, but it wasn’t about that. It was about something else. Melanie said we could see higher planes of consciousness.

“What you are seeing is real,” she said to me after we ate a bag of magic mushrooms by the lake and watched the fireworks over the tops of the trees on the Fourth of July.

What I was seeing was real. Do I still believe this? I can’t tell you how it looked. I would, but can’t. I can’t even imagine what I might have seen.

“You know,” she said, “when I’m with you guys, I feel like I can do anything.”

Imogene was there too, but she left after Melanie tried to kiss her. She just walked off into the woods. I didn’t know where she went, but just about the only thing that direction was the interstate. And the QuikTrip. Melanie lay on the blanket next to me drinking wild apple-flavored Boone’s Farm out of the bottle. I drank it, too, even though I couldn’t stand the sweetness. We talked about books. But even when we were talking about books, that’s not what we were really talking about. We were talking about her. About Imogene. We always were.

“I just reread Walden,” she said. “I think it would really help you to read that right now.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“There is this part at the end, and it’s really about being in a rut. Moving on to the next thing. He says that he left the woods for the same reason that he found it,” she said.

“Right,” I said, and I took such a long pull from the bottle that I began to breathe it in. I began to cough. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep breathing it, to fill my lungs with the sweetness. Melanie patted me on the back. She threw the bottle into the woods. She put her head on my shoulder. She began to cry.

She was so in love with Imogene, she said, and I said, “Who isn’t?” and then she reached her hand down my pants. I stopped her, but not immediately. I was beginning to come down. The fireworks long over, the sky looked too blue for how late at night it was. (Had there been fireworks? I was so sure at first, that there had, but the timing seems wrong. Why were we already falling apart? Those things shouldn’t have happened yet, already, at the start of July, only a few weeks into the summer. What happened to all of us, all of us together, shaping the universe with our thoughts?)

I pushed Melanie off of me, and she started kissing my neck.

“But I love you, too,” she said.

“Make up your mind,” I told her.

She said, “I don’t want to. That’s the last thing I want to have to do.”

*

Melanie was going to tattoo herself. She was an artist, so she wasn’t worried about it. She had done all of the research. Needles, any kind really. Hold the tips inside a flame to sterilize. You could use a lighter, a candle. She was just going to use a match. Prick yourself in the right pattern, tiny dots of blood all close together, and rub ink against the wound.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” she said, and she showed us a picture she had found in a book of Hanuman, one of the Gods from the Hindu Vedas who took the form of a monkey. His head, adorned with a golden crown. His hands, holding a scepter. His face, pointed upwards at the sun.

“He wanted to catch the sun, so he jumped into the sky,” she said.

“Did he catch it?” one of us asked.

She hadn’t gotten to that part yet, but she had a stencil she had made out of an Algebra flash card, and she was going to do it on the bottom of her foot so her mother would never see.

We all sat there with her, by candlelight, drinking Amaretto we had stolen from underneath the sink. Whispering. Her mother slept in the bedroom.

We were supposed to keep any blood from dripping onto the carpet. We had towels.

When it came time, it hurt too much. Melanie called out on the first prick, and bit her tongue to keep from crying. We all waited for one hushed moment, to be sure her mother hadn’t heard.

“Do you still want to do it?” one of us asked.

“No,” she said. “You do it.”

And we did. One of us, but I’m not sure who, operated the needle. We held her down. We stroked her hair. We dried her tears. We kissed her on the top of her head and we whispered to her in her ears. But none of us were artists, so we didn’t do Hanuman. We did a little outline of a water droplet. It was lopsided, the size of a dime on her heel.

“It’s beautiful,” she had said.

Within a month, it had begun to fade. By the end of the summer, it was gone completely. It had rubbed off, all of the skin, layer by layer. From too much walking.

Mr. Greystoke, CEO of Greystoke Inc. enters the True Value store where I work. He drags me by my hair to a limo and then up a glass elevator to his executive tree house.

Is he attracted to me?

I slip on a banana peel, falling, and he catches with firm, Nautilus-trained arms. His eyes pierce. My heart races. Holy Mackerel.

“Me, Tarzan,” he says. “You, submissive? You like heliports?”

The tree house is all hand-tooled leather—Rococo microwave—penthouse view to die for: I see not just three separate In & Out Burgers, but all of Tarzana, the 101 and everything.
Gadzooks. What’s this?

“A flogger,” he points out. “And a Judas cradle, a Spanish donkey, cat o’ nine tales, morning star farms, the medieval ‘Billy’ shelving unit from Ikea (birch or natural).”

I clamber into a spacious bedroom and continue clambering on to his rustic bed. I’ve got to stop using the word “clamber.”

The bed is bigger than Chris Christie. Cheese and crackers!

My subconscious says, girl, what do you know about this wealthy savage? Does he have his shots? Pertussis, Rubella? Is he at risk for autism or is that a myth?

Greystoke swings across the bed on Red Vines, yodeling furiously when I reveal my pristine womanhood, my sex (that place down there).

“You never saw a Betty Page film on YouTube?” he scolds, gently pulling his earlobe, signaling Carol Burnett.

I’m running now, panting, breathless. I feel the lasso tightening my neck, felling me. He wraps my legs in rope as a bell goes off.

We place fourth in hog-tie, but I’m exhilarated.

Is it the money, or Greystoke’s perfect teeth?

His Visa Centurion card, or his company’s sexist internships?

My poverty, or his ocean of Ben Franks? I’m so confused.

We make reasonable, Warren Buffet-love. That’s to break me in, he says, producing a list of rules: No smoking. No Melissa Etheridge.

Son of a biscuit, he’s so hot!

I demand to know why a chimp is watching from the oxblood leather divan.

“We all have our kinks, Miss Steele. Cheeta has his.”

I sense there will be punishment for this indiscretion, delicious waves of fear, perhaps a zesty duck à l’orange for dinner.

]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/fifty-shades-of-greystoke-lord-of-the-sm-apes/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/my-beauty-is-so-heavy-it-could-crush-the-whole-of-the-world/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/my-beauty-is-so-heavy-it-could-crush-the-whole-of-the-world/#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2012 04:00:52 +0000 Anna Barto http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=9736 We took turns touching the warhead. Amanda was the braver of us two, setting the palm of her hand on the side and closing her eyes. I barely poked at it, expecting at any moment to jostle it just so that it would explode and destroy us and the silo and the house and the whole wide world above.

No need to worry, Commander Arsenic said. That motherfucker is a real piece of work.

Amanda and me had been down there all of two hours. We’d been digging up a space in the backyard for a pool. She didn’t think we could do it ourselves, told me I should call on some professionals, but we didn’t have the money for such things and I had a pretty big ego at the time. I figured I could trudge up enough dirt and then get in some concrete and we’d be lounging poolside with some margaritas before the week was over. Then I found the hatch and gave it a few knocks with the shovel.

What is that? Amanda said from the edge of the hole. She had a watered-down drink in hand. Is that some kind of spaceship? she said.

No, I said. I think it’s a silo. Government’s got ‘em hidden all over the country, I said.

Pretty soon the hatch opened and Commander Arsenic and Private Blowtorch came to the surface. They were hollow-eyed and emaciated. Truth be told, they looked four days past crazy. Congratulations, Commander Arsenic said. You found Silo Number Four-Thousand-Fifty-Niner.

Well, I said. Ain’t that something?

It is something, Private Blowtorch said.

Permission to come aboard, I said.

You sure? Amanda said. Fear and drunkenness fogged her eyes.

When’s the last time you went down in a nuclear silo? I said.

Exactly, Commander Arsenic said. Come in and look around. We got drinks and snacks, he said.
That was enough for Amanda. She was a boozehound and didn’t know how to turn anyone down who offered spirits. In fact, she took the lead and led us all down into the silo, nearly running down the steel steps. A few feet in and we saw, in the distance, the tip of the missile Commander Arsenic and Private Blowtorch had nicknamed Hallelujah.

Hallelujah, Private Blowtorch said, was commissioned in Nineteen-Eighty-Two.

She’s been asleep ever since, Commander Arsenic said. He pointed at a control panel with a blinking green light. She dreams of flying through the deep blue sky and separating in the troposphere.

Looks like she’d do some real damage, I said.

You don’t know the half of it, Private Blowtorch said.

The two of them took us into the main control room, a good mile and a half underground. The cramped, circular room had everything you’d ever want. Coffee machines. A washer and dryer. An entire wall for TV viewing and a stereo stocked with every popular record up until Nineteen-Eighty-Two. Private Blowtorch pulled out a Merle Haggard live album and showed us how impressive the acoustics were.
Merle belted out a song about loving the US of A.

Holy shit, I said. That’s impressive.

Damned right it’s impressive, Commander Arsenic said. And that’s just level four out of ten. You get that sucker up to ten and you’ll be hurting.

It’s a contingency, Private Blowtorch said and replaced the record with one full of children’s songs. A syrupy voice sang for us a version of Old McDonald. If a war got going, Private Blowtorch said, you’d have to try and listen over all the explosions topside.

If a war got going, Amanda said, dreamily.

We all can hope, Private Blowtorch said. He made a shaker full of martinis and handed me and Amanda and Commander Arsenic a glass. Maybe someday, he said.

Let’s go take a look, Commander Arsenic said. Let’s get you a glance at Hallelujah.

Amanda and me followed through another set of doors and into the actual silo itself. Machines whirred and the way was lit by shaky fluorescent lights. Another set of stairs and we were climbing parallel to Hallelujah. On her side, in what appeared to be crazed, green spray paint, someone had scribbled the phrase TO ALL OF MINE ENEMIES, REAL AND IMAGINED, LET YE KNOW YR FATES.

Is that biblical? Amanda asked.

No, Commander Arsenic said. It’s from the book Private Blowtorch is working on. Actually, he said, stopping on a stair and squinting his eyes, it’s more of a tome. It passed beyond the realm of book a long, long time ago.

Up close Hallelujah was hypnotic in its grandeur. It felt as if you could stare at it for days and never really take it all in. I touched it first, but quickly pulled away. Amanda, as I’ve said, took more liberties.

She was born in Pittsburgh, Commander Arsenic said. A man named Dr. Leopold Jurgens completed her at nineteen-hundred hours and she was loaded onto the back of a truck and smuggled under the cover of darkness.

All the way out here, Amanda said, stroking Hallelujah’s side.

All the way out here, Commander Arsenic said.

Before too long Private Blowtorch joined us with another batch of martinis in hand. He took his turn touching the warhead and wept openly. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, he said to us, as if pleading.

She’s gorgeous, Amanda agreed.

A real piece of art, I said.

The finest thing America ever had to offer, Commander Arsenic said.

We took silent draws from our drinks.

Private Blowtorch removed a can of green spray paint from his pocket and shook it. He took in the missile like a hungry lover and depressed the button. When the deed was done a new phrase hung under the old one. This one read MY BEAUTY IS SO HEAVY IT COULD CRUSH THE WHOLE OF THE WORLD.

Perfect, Commander Arsenic said. Is that from a new chapter?

It is, Private Blowtorch said.

We admired Hallelujah and Private Blowtorch’s art in silence for a good half hour. I shook myself from my trance and asked Amanda if we should go or stay.

Stay, she said. We have to stay.

You have to stay, Commander Arsenic said. We’ll have more drinks.

So we stayed and had more drinks. Another round of martinis and then another. Commander Arsenic took the time to explain to us his philosophy of war and purification. It seemed, to him, that if mankind was to strive so hard to wipe itself out then it probably served to offer that they should be granted their wish.

If we want fire, he said between drinks, then we should have fire. If we want to reduce the world to ash and soot, then ash and soot we deserve.

Only in the burn do we find redemption, Private Blowtorch said.

It’s simple math, Commander Arsenic said. The barbarism has a taste of its own and we are drunk in its steed.

I don’t know if it was the liquor or the surroundings, but what Commander Arsenic was saying made a whole ton of sense. I could tell by looking at Amanda that she thought so too. It’s a real shame, I said, that she might never fire.

Private Blowtorch nodded somberly and began to weep again.

Forgive my associate, Commander Arsenic said. It’s his greatest fear.

To imagine her sleeping forever, Private Blowtorch said. A wonderful creature set to hibernate from here to eternity. She deserves better, so much better.

She does, Amanda said. She had finished her martini and taken mine. Every bird deserves flight. Every fish a vast ocean.

Private Blowtorch had taken out a pad of paper and was furiously taking notes. Every fish a vast ocean, he repeated.

To imagine her sleeping in this hollow of earth, Amanda said, there couldn’t be a worse thought.

Just think, Commander Arsenic said. You’re walking home from the store. You’re in Russia. You’re in North Korea. You’re in China. You’re walking your rickshaw back from the farmer’s market and a star descends from the sky. It’s a perfect circle, a miniature sun floating so very gingerly down to the soil.

It’s silent at first, Private Blowtorch said. A quiet, peaceful miracle.

It detonates like an angry god, Amanda said.

That’s right, Commander Arsenic said.

A wall of flame and heat, I said.

The full and fiery fist of America, Private Blowtorch said.

We had another drink. We discussed our options.

You’ve made the point fairly well, Commander Arsenic said. We launch in an hour.

We had more drinks. We shook hands like happy heads of state.

If only we could see her fly, Amanda said.

That’s part of the tragedy, Private Blowtorch said. He had his spray paint out again. We went with him to the missile and watched as he wrote THIS FAVOR OF DESTRUCTION I GIVE TO YOU, HAPPY IN HEART AND SOUL.

Another round of drinks. The world turned to soup in my eyes. Amanda traded martinis for Commander Arsenic’s embrace. Private Blowtorch and I watched and prepared the keys in the control panel.

Kiss me you cheap bastard, Amanda said to me, and I did.

At the agreed upon time Commander Arsenic and Private Blowtorch turned their respective keys. We began to sing America The Beautiful, but that turned to Old McDonald without so much as a thought. We were discussing the cows and their moos, the pigs and their oinks, the ducks and their quacks, as the belly of Hallelujah began to growl.

It is the hottest time of day when the sun lights the entire sky so bright that one cannot be certain of its bearings. The girl lies on a rattan chaise lounge in the garden veranda listening to loud tunes from purple knobs buried in her ears. Suddenly, the sun no longer shines.  She looks to the sky and sees a red mountain moving rapidly toward her. It is mystifying. Ominous. She is struck with an overwhelming certainty that within minutes everything will vanish. She will vanish, the villa will vanish, the tennis court will vanish, the prison, the school, and her entire world will be buried under the forthcoming red wrath.  Soon she is not able to see.  Countless needles pierce her skin.  She inhales the blustering sand by the mouthfuls. Almost choking, she pulls her top over her face and breathes in small gasps through the fabric. Flying objects slam on her. Then just as fast as darkness has come, the sunlight returns. She sees the backside of the mountain moving away.

Through the window the mother observes. The girl approaches and the mother receives her at the door. When she enters the mother tries to hold back but she is not successful. She laughs and laughs hard.  The girl is unsure, but amused.  She turns to the mirror in the foyer and sees that she is covered with fine red powder, like a giant moth.  For a moment, she too laughs.

***

But at first, the penis lying alone in the salt flats looked like a very large cashew. I had never been in so much salt, and I thought perhaps the preservation qualities of the stuff enlarged the nut. It was admittedly a fleshy, ashy nut. But Brother, I live alone, and have seen stranger things.

I knew it was a penis by the time I touched it, but when I put it into my cunt, I didn’t know it was yours.

Brother, I swear it.

We stopped to see the salt. For miles, salt and nothing else. It glared. It glittered. I struggled to recall the interstate. My apartment was lost. I went into the salt.

I took off my shoes.

I forgot you.

My veins swelled with thirst. I had lost my shoes, and couldn’t remember if I’d been wearing jeans or a skirt. I didn’t know anything about a shirt. But I still had my sports bra and panties, and the salt tasted delicious, dissolving slowly, fibrously in my mouth. If only I had a tomato, I said to a dead and perfect box elder bug nestled in the salt. And then I thought, Keep going. You’ll find your tomato.

I walked on, and the salt cut the bottoms of my feet. Cracks became fissures, and I worried the salt would give way. I would fall through. To disperse my weight, I slithered.

In the salt flats, I was the only one, and I was going toward mountains. But a problem developed: my cunt felt empty. At first I thought it was dehydration.

But my cunt was not dehydrated. A thick mucus told me so.

Brother, you do not know my empty cunt. But do you remember my first mucus? I was thirteen and it came out in my underwear, and when I showed you, you said, It’s nothing to be afraid of. But you would not look at my cunt. Told me not to use that word.

In the salt flats, I slithered on, and I grew tired of the glittering salt. I didn’t know anything, but the salt stung the many cuts on my body. Once I had underwear, but now I was naked and my cunt was an empty chamber. My cunt throbbed and gaped, and I thought to fill it. I tried my fingers.

But fingers, covered in salt, sucked the mucus from my cunt, and then it was dry and empty, and still the sun.

I hadn’t seen anyone else in my life, and—as I have said—I had forgotten you.
So when I first saw the penis, a fat curl there in the salt flats, I thought it was a gargantuan cashew—certainly not organic, but if cashews could grow as far north as Utah—the farthest west we’d ever been, Brother—they wouldn’t be organic. Yes. If cashews grew in the salt flats, I’m sure they’d do it just like that penis, out in the open, no need for sheathing trees or false fruits. I’m telling you, soft though it was, it sat proudly on the stately salt.

By the time I touched it, I knew it was a penis and not a cashew.

I picked it up. And it grew a little firmer, and that’s something you’ll have to take responsibility for.

My cunt was empty, I held a penis in my hand, I made the obvious choice. More friction going in than was comfortable, but I was out of mucus and wasn’t going to lick a strange penis I found lying on the ground.

And once it was in, my cunt was quiet. The gaping was memory.

Back at the car, beside the interstate, you unlocking your door. Looking at me. You said, I’m looking at you dubiously.

Why? I asked.

And then I saw that you were naked like a kid. And minus a penis.

You said, Where is my dick?

I forgot to pee, I said. I ran to the women’s, but I could not get your penis out of my cunt. Brother, I tried.

She didn’t know what her father was referring to, so she said nothing, until she said, “We did?” Her freshly cleansed hair was coiled into a white towel that tilted when she leaned her cheek against the phone. She had been memorizing a soliloquy of Hamlet for school. And she’d been watching American Idol. And she’d been waiting for her fingernail polish to dry into a rich, crimson red, while sitting in an old recliner chair. But, later in bed, her drying hair curved like a fan behind her, the words echoed: I told you.

Earlier, That Morning Had Been
like every morning lately, promising. He swung open the door of The Moose Crossing. The convenience store served the best chocolate chip pancakes in Downeast, Maine and the largest muffins, the tops spilling over crimped paper like deflated tires. It was also famous for an assortment of lottery tickets and a kind-faced clerk. Scraping together callus-frost palms, A.W. surveyed the peanut butter cookies and jumbo whoopie pies. Finally, he requested two Megabucks, lifting a pack of Yuengling to the countertop. His seasonal work, landscaping gigantic cottages, could not accommodate his yearlong Megabucks routine, but A.W. was very hopeful. I have to be, he said from time to time, speaking to no one, speaking to himself. He had to look up – to prioritize possibility before regret, the future before the past. It was time. He smiled at the store clerk and hurried into the shelter of his rusty Volvo, a car that choked when he turned the key, but it was a warm car.

“I’m a Hoper, Not a Sweeper,”
A.W. informed his daughter in the car in the driveway of her mother’s home. He had just retrieved her from soccer practice. These were the only slivers of time to be together, just the two of them – moving from A to B, or, given the chance, sitting in the car – and they almost hurt. How much he hoped these moments reached perfection. It almost felt good – how much it hurt. This was one year before he thought he won the Megabucks.
She had watched a documentary in school that day, which bothered her and so bothered A.W. The documentary presented a culture of working class Americans who earned an unreasonable amount of money but squandered it anyway. They were addicted to sweepstakes, games of chance. “Even though they hardly ever win,” A.W.’s daughter said. Many were insomniacs always scanning the Internet for new contests, she explained with strained sophistication. Some formed clubs on strategizing: colored packaging of prize applications would surely do the trick, doodles, hearts, puppy-dog faces. What the daughter did not tell A.W. was that the moral of the film was really this: These people are foolish. Another way of saying: These grownups are children. Don’t grow up to be like them. Be smarter.

When the documentary ended that day in school and the screen snapped from color to black, a static haze filled the classroom of teenagers gathering books to leave, as if the correct amount of knowledge could take them away from this small town. As if smallness were ever the problem, and maybe it was – the oasis of insularity.

A.W. shook his head and said, “Hope is the thing, honey,” reaching for something else his daughter could have learned in school, literature, something she could relate to, to make her relate to him. He was an English major once. When she did not respond, he saw that his daughter’s class hadn’t gotten to Dickinson yet and – who knows – maybe never would. He replaced the silence: “Well, wait. I got a little something for ya’,” providing, with some shame, a Megabucks ticket. She smiled, kissed him, and ran to the house.

From her vantage point of just outside the kitchen door, she thought he resembled a backwards Santa Claus: globe of snow-white hair, dirty jacket, ripped jeans. He was always presenting the idea of magic without the ability to employ it; say, fly.

“We could get a helicopter, fly our own private jet!” he called from the car window, face stretched, wind-burnt smile. “If we win!”

She turned to speak, to say something smart, but knew suddenly she was too young to know anything. Not knowing that even as she grew older – old – she would use the same excuse, except invert it in a way to avoid expressing anything directly, anything that could be true, or wrong. The older I get, the less I know is what she would say when she grew old. Like an adage hanging on the wall of a home it would have hung in her mind long enough to have been solidified from words to what felt like truth. Long after that particular day in the driveway, she’d realize it was something A.W. had always said, and that’s how she knew it. And what it was she wished she knew that moment standing at the kitchen door when she was just a girl in high school would fall away: That it was wrong to hope so much? Or want so much? Or was it need so much? She’d said to her father once: I wish you were dead. She meant to keep the thought inside, but something had slipped. Then: anger toward him slackened to pity. Then: she saw it in his face – a flash of pain replaced by a little smile.

She’d be decades older than her father ever was when the epiphany eventually dawned – that her silent mantra was his spoken one (“The older I get….”); she’d realize and re-realize this in fits of memory, or what could be called wisdom, that often seized her those years before her death of old age, which she would see coming like a psychic, or a person reading the book of her own life and feeling the pages thin; something he had always said when she was small. And something else: “Hope is the thing,” she’d try to recall. How had Emily Dickinson put it? She’d buy a book, an antique, to remember. She’d find the poem in the middle of its many parted pages. “The thing with feathers.” She’d think the poem was supposed to be uplifting, but it would instead feel cliché, and the disjunction between what she felt and what she thought she should feel would compose a pain like a hand gripping her stomach – twisting – that would make her wish to be a child again, memorizing Shakespeare from an overstuffed chair. Back when even old words felt new. Instead, she’d be this: a woman pointing down at a poem with an index finger, holding all those pages apart with pinky and thumb, lest it all collapse together. She would miss her father terribly then, wondering why he left so soon. “The older I get,” she’d have absorbed his mantra like second-hand smoke, without realizing, without minding, almost gladly come to think, “the less I know.” It made her feel a part of him.

The young daughter waved as the Volvo lurched away.

Three Years before A.W. Thought He Won the Megabucks,
one sweaty summer afternoon presented a kind of humidity not to be expected in mid-coastal Maine. It crept between where things existed, connecting all objects and people and thickening the world, A.W. suspected, into a solid orb, a heavy ball in the sky that would one day find itself too fat to spin, and drop. He was without hope and hopeless. He phoned his ex-wife. His voice projected the shrill desperation of his inner thoughts: “I’m going to do it this time [because there had been other times]. I’m going to kill myself.”

She was watching Law and Order: SVU, an interesting episode. It had been a long day. Dinner was made, dishes were done, and the daughter was busy with homework in her room. The last thing the ex-wife wanted was to comfort A.W. So: “If you’re going to do it, don’t make a mess.

“Remember the bad thing? I can’t stop thinking,” he paused to clear his nose. “Maybe I don’t deserve to live.”

The ex-wife remembered many bad things but knew the one sticking to A.W.’s mind was the one that had instigated divorce. She muted the television and listened for clues that her daughter was listening, too, but there was only the trickle of music from down the hallway. She hissed into the phone, just in case: “You have your daughter to think of.”

A.W. dialed a new number, spoke to a new voice, relived the bad thing through words, and became a voluntary patient at “Acadia,” an institution known through this and the neighboring counties as the only one of its kind. He did not kill himself then, but it soon became clear to him that the odds of someone with bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, and a history of domestic abuse finding contentment were to be equated only with winning the Megabucks.

The Day A.W. Did Something Really Bad
occurred ten years before he thought he won the Megabucks. He awoke in the morning with a headache that extended to the pit of his stomach, instigating heartache along the way. Lying in bed, he searched the cavern of his mind for why he felt this way – pain for no reason was not worth having – and found nothing. He searched harder, still nothing. Then something. He sat up, back jerked straight as though postured by a wooden board; there was maybe just one reason for feeling so terribly bad, sad. The old horse. Their old horse had died last week. A.W. found him in the pasture, in the snow, up on the highest hill and nearly frozen in the shifty wind of morning. A.W. stood there beside the mound of soulless body, watching and wondering how to tell his wife her favorite thing was gone.

But, he knew it wasn’t the horse that was making him feel this way. The death, though never to be admitted aloud, had brought relief. And so, pain without reason, and so – the invisible wound seethed. The mind had become a set of dominoes on the breezy ledge of a world where everything is connected to everything else; where one small incident leads to another, and if something, a single moment, collapses, all moments, past, present and future, crumble; a world where everything breaks eventually.

In the bathroom mirror, while brushing his teeth – he thought he could “center” himself with daily ritual – he noticed his neck pulse, which reminded him of blood and the inner workings of his body and the possibility of a heart attack. He spat the chalky juice into the sink and rushed to the bed where his wife slept. He pushed her head with the palm of his hand. He hissed her name, but she rolled away; he raised his voice, so she groaned.

“Help me!” he said.

She looked at him, blinking with the oblivion of the newly awoken, of a child, until she awoke completely, her eyes large and glistening as silver dollars. A sphere of hope, like A.W.’s pain, unraveled down the back of her throat. “Please don’t kill me,” she said. She knew this was not the first time someone had awoken in fear, and she felt as though she embodied every person who ever had. Trillions of worlds of dread inside her, bursting, one by one, like soap bubbles, leaving her insides scraped new and raw. Trillions of worlds of dread, including A.W.’s. She wanted to fold into herself, to protect everything inside. He held his deer-hunting rifle to her temple. She thought she could read his mind: I have to.

She thought she could read his mind, and he sensed her doing it: I have to blow away the place where thoughts come from. He aimed right at that place.

“Please,” she said like a child; the word had regressed to a whimper, but he understood what she meant; he could read her thoughts, too. “Please don’t kill me.”

Of course he wouldn’t. He was only realizing now – he didn’t have it in him, a thought so good it felt like milk spilt on his mind. The best thought: I don’t have it in me to kill someone else. It was now so clear what had gone wrong: he’d been mistaking his thoughts for hers, a problem he’d fight for years to come, conflating his thoughts with so many others’. His wife was sweating on the bed, white nightgown wet, blonde hair stringy from sleep, and he thought: She looks like an angel.

He was glad when she moved out, even with the daughter. Even as a grown man, there was so much about himself he didn’t know, and on bad days it was so embarrassing he could almost die.

“What Is the Point?”
A.W. wanted to know. His bride wanted the horse, bad. “But what is the point of buying a retired barrel racer?” They were starting their own farm together, and this was what she wanted: an orange piece of broken hide, scarred, too scared, and so too scary, for use, nearly twenty hands high and twenty years old, this walking, giant corpse – if he could walk. “He’ll waste all our feed.”

“They’ll turn him to glue.” She clung to A.W.’s hand. She was always wanting to save things, which he had to respect.

That Friday, they arrived home late after celebrating their recent purchase. These days they celebrated every chance they had, because life was a celebration. They’d been told theirs was the mindset of the newlywed, but to them it all seemed so infinite, nothing could ever end, no feeling so strong, of happiness especially.

A.W. pulled his truck up by the pasture. Their horse stood in the headlights, a statue behind the new barbed-wire fence but for his blinking eyes. A.W. let the radio play Neil Young as he went to open his wife’s door. A warm mood was setting with the sun. The autumn air was fresh. He wanted to dance with his wife beneath the stars, but instead he just stood at her door, shaking his head. She was so beautiful she could have been an angel. The music played and a harvest moon rose, just like Neil said. She looked up at him, and, although embarrassed, although flattered, although filled with the knowledge of everything about him, his past (because he had told only her), she was hopeful.

That night, the horse came to her in a dream. In the dream, he was dying, ancient body peeling away. He was a ghost slipping from the sleeve of skin, hair falling from flanks with each swell of motion. He was in her room. He was leading her to the door, up the hill, away from the pasture, far away from everything here toward somewhere and anything else. She didn’t know where.

“When I die, you will leave this place,” the horse turned and said suddenly, though not surprisingly (as is the way with dreams, she’d sigh, thinking years later on the strangeness of the situation and watching Law and Order: SVU, after a long day, on mute). Pure ghost now, what awaited her response was a whisper of being, a sliver of mist, almost nothing at all.

“Uh. Okay. But, I don’t trust talking horses,” her dream-self countered. Then something hit her, a strange truth: When I die, you will leave this place. She wanted to tell him that didn’t make sense, to remind him: “You’re already so old.” But something shifted, changed; she was awake now and found herself alone.

A.W. was a Very Bad Child.
When he was four years old, trouble came easy. One day, he taught himself to swim. Finding pleasure in companionship, he brought the barn cats. There they all were: Smokey Gray, Smokey White, Kitty Black, and A.W. in the horses’ water trough that afternoon, mewing. The trough did not present the depth of water necessary for danger. The pockets of A.W.’s overalls filled with liquid, and the way his pant legs expanded into balloons when he sat pleased him. He had a child’s cup of milk and liked the way it stained the murky water white when he poured it all in.

Then he saw his father moving toward him from a distance, and there was the first flicker of fear; it spoke in the meter of heartbeats, nervous, fast and faster, saying: “Go, A.W. Go-go-go.” Warning: “A.W., this is your chance. Now!” But he didn’t know fear. Nothing bad had ever happened. He was excited. Signals crossed – even then, he barely understood what his self was telling him. It seemed a game. With a chuckle – the laughter of someone much older – he picked up Smokey Gray, who hissed and scratched. Then he scooped the other kitties from the trough to begin his race, howling. It felt like a game, it really did.

A.W.’s father had, upon noticing the swim, broken routine, dropped a bag of horse feed to the ground, pulled a loose two-by-four from the rotting fence, and begun to run. His action came from adrenaline not thought, so if he did think one thing it could only have been: “This will never happen again.” But he was not a man of words, and words would falsify his character. Simply, he was the period that plugged each sentence, the stopper in the throat of discussion, the end to every story.

A single nail, jagged and out of place, stuck from the board. A.W.’s father caught A.W. – because a four-year-old outrunning a man was just so very unlikely. In hindsight, the adult A.W. wondered why the boy A.W. had not thought this through, dear Lord.

A.W. had tripped in the grass. Staring up at the man, the boy blinked with the oblivion of the newly awoken, until he awoke completely, his eyes, like his wife’s in later years, were large as silver dollars, reflective as polished money. It didn’t take long to see that the nail was actually a tooth and that the wood from the split-rail fence was another animal on the vast Ohio farm, ready to snap.

In the years to come, the punctures in his neck began to resemble pale, pink bites. They had transformed A.W., whose story could never be as easy, as straightforward, as he’d always hope. A boy did not transcend childhood one day, becoming a man.

He lost it.

]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/a-w-%e2%80%93-a-story-backwards/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/liminality-a-life-study/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/liminality-a-life-study/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 04:00:02 +0000 Anna Barto http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=9145 1. THE DAY JOHANNA SWALLOWED THE WHALE
[We begin with the past tense] She lived a life created for another, stitched together from spare bits of muslin, gauze, and malachite. It stanched her wounds and glittered in the sun. But sometimes she stood, doubt tucked under her arms, because it had too many sharp edges to allow her to sit for any length of time.

There was no obvious reason why she was so distracted. Floor seams became dark streams, and she fixated on irregular creases in the curtains. She fidgeted, scratched; cobwebs danced across the ceiling fan.

And some days—like today—this life held her down. She stayed in bed, figuring that 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. are twins from the dark side of Daylight Savings. She rolled over once and got her hair caught on a bedpost splinter.

She fell in and out of sleep; she couldn’t kick the fog, the fine pistachio dust and the bag of empty shells. She imagined doing certain things (laundry, checking e-mail, sweeping the kitchen floor) then opened her eyes to find herself in the same place, never having moved.

Sometimes she dreamed/remembered: “Okay, children, you’re not to eat for a week,” the second grade teacher said pedantically, collecting that week’s book reports. “If you feel yourself start to falter, try chewing on an eraser.” Stranger stomach pangs and sticky bubblegum hands. The teacher clutched a lit cigarette between her fingers, but never once took a drag.

She learned somewhere dark and long ago that everything is coded; e.g., losing teeth indicates social anxiety.

She did finally get up: blue slippers on, hair uncombed. She walked around the backyard in careful concentric circles. She traced each patch of grass, every rough-hewn stone slab.

Dark circles under her eyes, she mentally drafted a personal mission statement: Establish a safe haven. But safe from what remained unclear. Deciding to hammer out the details later, she resolved to head back inside and drink for several hours.

[We suspect that the day dragged on] The sun had been down for the duration of dinner, dishes, and dessert. She again faced the prospect—as it raked windows and percolated up from her toes—of sleep, and, inside that, of unpredictable, skittering thoughts.

She bundled up her assorted fears in a checkered tablecloth, slung them over her shoulder. She squinted, turning her face away from the inhospitable glow of her desk lamp.

2. FROM THERE
[We suggest an alternate reading] She lived a life created for another, and she lived the negative of that life’s image. On occasion she caught glimpses of her profile in parked car windows: cheekbones became dark plains, hollows beneath eyes appeared as light-filled pools. She would turn her head, check the other side of her nose for symmetrical shading.

There were reasons for her detachment. Gaze cast down while passing the houses of people she knew; the bitter click of heels that only walked away. Painfully aware of her own elbows, she haggardly hurried home and cooked to fill up time.

But today it happened. Whispered smoldering trails curled their way into her hair, tickled the tops of her ears. They made her wonder: Who struck the match? What was the fire’s source? If she lived on the smoke side, then who was stoking the flame?

She learned once, by the dark spaces between stars, not to believe what one sees.

Between meals she avoided staring into the abyssal future. It read something to the effect: Thursday past look doesn’t and calendar a opens she. Morning next the up waking of gasp sudden the fears but sleep of Lethe the welcomes she night every. Drink stiff a: now right use could she what.

Slipping in and out of daydreams, she wondered if, wandering, a person might spontaneously find her way back to square one. Could the dark turn inside out and eject her onto the sidewalk? Would the pavement buckle, crack under her weight? Pregnant with unanswerables.

Eventually, she set out to roam the backyard. Swinging the door open, she found that the grass had grown to waist height and smelled strongly of primer paint. She considered the practical function of roots, but not too deeply as she had lentils on the stove.

Her pulse quickened while chopping carrots; inexplicable desperation where the salad dressing should be. The sun was setting at her back—dark to dark, where did the middle of the day go?

[We observe that little changed] Floorboards rippled, roared, creased the area rug. Her bathroom mirror glowed in the dark. With the dust of unuttered potentialities caking her tongue, she checked under the bed for promises.
Closing her eyes, she decided that tomorrow would be a good day for groceries. Steam rolled out of the left corner of her mouth. Feathers flapped at the window, and, outside of that, recursive silence.

3. IN WHICH NO RUMORS ARE DISPELLED AND NO PARTICULAR TRUTHS ARE BROUGHT TO LIGHT
[Let’s listen in] The interviewer, presumably from Cosmopolitan Better Homes and Gardens TIME, sits at the mahogany table, taxidermy gazelle moose reindeer heads mounted on the wall behind. Johanna, dressed sharply in the grimaces of inevitability, slouches.
     I: Did you just cough?
     J: And I spat green and blue. I raged. I crashed—intentionally?—into the corn  snake’s glass enclosure. I fixated on the spines rising up vertically behind the walls.  But I’m all done with that now.
Interviewer glances nervously at the corn snake in question, but all seems to be contained.
     I: Why has nothing ever belonged to you?
     J: I am an animal. I AM an animal. I am an ANIMAL. I repeat the phrase  compulsively, trying it on, positioning the sleeves and the hem differently each   time and parading around in front of the fitting room mirror. I don’t care when  others (I am AN animal) see me. They do it, too, you know.
Interviewer frowns and wonders if perhaps the location choice—the zoo’s educational center for school groups—was ill-advised.
     I: What thought carried you out the door today?
     J: It’s a strange thing to be no longer a child but to be forever someone’s child.
     I didn’t know what to make of that, so I just stood in front of the chinchillas’ cage  and watched the male run around the wheel.
Interviewer shifts in the chair, guesses that this transcript will eventually get edited out before the issue goes to print.
     I: What does refuge look like?
     J: Sheep in a glass box. No, just the one sheep. I don’t even—

4. ATOPIA
[We offer some fragments] She couldn’t shake the susurrating suspicion that the best she could hope for was stasis.

Jolted awake at 2 a.m.; this thought punctured/punctuated her sleep.

Night             The sound repeating, reverberating in her ears, alternately
amplified       Cold         and muffled, until the words ceased to hold any
significance.
Night           Cramped into a corner of the full-sized mattress, she
listened to   Cold        her heartbeat as it drummed, undeterred by the dark,
through her Night          skull. Measured, deafening rhythm of word and
blood. She was       Cold     bound up in the thudding, a meter she
couldn’t unlock.

She tried making lists.
apples oranges grapefruit spinach tomatoes parmesan mozzarella baking soda
flour sugar frozen waffles frozen bagels frozen peas frozen carrots frozen mini
pizzas frozen steaks
shade shadow umbra dimness adumbration obscuration cover gloom darkness
shelter

And debris continued to swirl around her ankles, fibrous torrents gradually engulfing her from foot to head.

She determined that there were simply too many angles, hard edges. Not enough malleable building material to shape a safe haven (safe from what).

5. DISTILL, DISTILLING, DISTILLED
[We consider a parable] There once was a young woman to whom everything imaginable happened precisely because these things were imagined. She had dry hands.

She lived a life created for another and became accustomed to drenching the pith of her hours in routine in shadow in trepidation. And she had every reason to know the days of the week, but could never manage to name them in the proper order.

Today—whatever day—she woke up to splinters of sunlight and a bloody nose. Something urgent pressed against the backs of her teeth; stringy, it got caught in between molars. The air rippled, undulated, made her skin itch.

Pulling on a bathrobe, she determined that not much was to be done apart from making coffee.

The newspaper radio television was of course brimming with admissions/admonitions; she held a spoon in her mouth as though to shield its delicate ears. She tried to recall her dreams and to negotiate the steep gradients and hidden driveways of the rest of the day.

Anticipation wiped the morning’s misty bliss from around her eyes. Years ago she learned, from the marginalia in a used book, that the substance of a person’s life is largely peripheral.

If you met her, you might comment on her gazeless stare, the way her toes inch toward the door even as she says “hello.” A few polite sentences might crease her lips; perhaps she would shrug sheepishly if you asked about her plans. She waives her rights to intimacy before she turns to wave “good-bye.” If you saw her in a mirror as she walked away, you might see a silver thought flash across her face then dissipate along her scalp.

It has been said that to understand just one life, a person has to swallow the world. If you were to notice her frequent labored sighs, the papery lines around her eyes, you would know that she was taking it in bites.

[We end with the present] She gives the green bean casserole a meaningful look and says, “I’ve been thinking for a long while now, and I’ve got nothing to show for it.”

It took what may be the true definition of eternity to draw the spoon from my coffee and rest it on its accompanying saucer. My table had long ago moved beyond a perch of convenience, and I held the dish and mug in my lap. It had taken a century for LiNa to refresh my cup, an epoch to add cream, and the distance between lifting my spoon, stirring, and replacing it became the length a universe must travel before stopping in its tracks and turning around. LiNa had sauntered only halfway down the aisle to her beverage station, but halfway down the aisle had become the space of a galaxy stretched thin, and her beautifully large rear end swayed with a slow, cosmic grace.

For how long I don’t know, but I sat watching the swirl of cream revolving through the deep black murk of my coffee as it slowed to a stop…

…then reversed its orbit.

It took another epoch before I succeeded in taking a celebratory sip of coffee, but an epoch is shorter than an eon. We were making progress. (Or, perhaps in this case, regression. Is there a vocabulary to describe a shrinking universe? Recession? Perhaps compression.)

We’d laugh about it, sometimes, some of us, bitterly—how, all at one point we wanted nothing but more space, a bit more room. Oh, how we’d complain, nit and pick at one another, wistfully imagine the first things we’d do once we gained a semblance of elbow room, and then came the Bang and its perpetual expansion, and we’d see each other less and less—by choice, at first; later, by nostalgia-sticky happenstance. Time, of course, needs space, too; as space continued to grow, so did time (Always more time, we’d slap each other on the back), and these chance encounters came fewer and far between.

And then everything became farther between. The expansion of the universe continued—even, we discovered, accelerated—and many of us began to feel that old cosmological dread: entropy. What would happen, those of us with darker imaginations would wonder, when every point became too far separated from all others? Would the very atoms we’re comprised of, those simmering elements and molecules we like to call life, finally succumb and drift away, too? Bah, I remember answering, brushing off the concerns. What’s the use of worrying? Dust to dust, eh?

My own concerns were of more practical matters. For instance: how to find a good cup of coffee? By this time, you might wake up to find your next-door neighbor’s home a block away; a trip to the mistress you kept on the other side of town now required a three-day weekend if you fancied a furtive diddle; I watched one morning as the paperboy, so sure of the practiced arc his newspaper would travel on the way to each home’s stoop, wept bitter tears as, one by one, the stoops expanded beyond his range.

The moon gradually shrank to join the receding stars and finally disappeared. Worried that I might wake one morning to find myself oceans away from a decent cup, I decided it prudent to hole up in this café here at the corner and wait for whatever might come, be it the unavoidable disassembly into dust or entropy-fueled freeze. The coffee here was decent—a few blocks further into town would have granted me better, of course, but a few blocks required air travel—and the cook in the back, whom I never caught a glance of but could hear singing emotively sometimes after the lunch rush, baritone renditions of vaguely familiar arias floating over the formica and tile, could slap together a passable pastrami-rye, but the true reason I chose this café to wait out the expansion was LiNa, my young, round-bottomed waitress with downy cheeks. Her large brown eyes, oh, I could swim in them; they showed not a twinkle of intelligence, but no bother: she kept my cup full, and to watch her walk away…ah, yes.

Entrenching myself in a booth facing both the door and the large window overlooking—at the time of initial entrenching—the bustling intersection, I drank coffee, cup after cup, and watched as the corner across the street moved too far away to see, followed quickly by street lamps, fireplugs, and the like, until the view outside the plate-glass window had grown as dark as the coffee the waitress continually poured into my cup. Ah, such a pretty young thing, this LiNa.

But space was shrinking now, and with it time; I took sips more frequently, and suddenly, out of the fuzzy ether that the café had expanded to encompass, my table approached, surprising quick—I grunted with a start, thinking I’d be crushed—but it halted directly before me, exactly where it was meant to be. Perhaps it was only relative to the plodding pace of the last few moments, but time seemed to be increasing quicker than it’d flowed before. Curious.

And then the little brass bell jingled cheerfully and in walked Mr. MgIrOs, a man I’d known all too well in the point.

“So it’s true, then,” Mr. MgIrOs muttered as he sat down across from me, his bristly mustache speckled with crumbs of muffin (I hadn’t noticed the return of the bench facing mine; and where did he find a muffin?). He rubbed his sausage fingers across the shiny and threadbare lapels of his coat, grimacing at the downy-cheeked waitress for a cup of his own. Stretching his face into something resembling a grin, he asked, “Been here long?” and barked a laugh.

It took me a string of long moments to find my voice; neurons returned and aligned themselves once more with an audible click. I hadn’t seen Mr. MgIrOs since the dentistry convention in Denver, and certainly hadn’t missed him. The implications that he should be sitting here, in this café—my café!—a chance encounter when no one, as far as I could tell, had encountered anyone in…well, again, time didn’t mean what it used to…this,  too, took me long moments to come to terms with. “I don’t understand,” I finally said, skipping the usual pleasantries (nothing was especially pleasant with Mr. MgIrOs). “The galaxies accelerating away from each other—faster and faster,” I implored, eyeing my swirl of cream with distrust. Had the rate of its backward orbit increased?

Mr. MgIrOs, stroking the bristles above his lip as he admired LiNa walking away, shrugged. “Ah, who knows—dark matter or the like. They never were able to explain that away.”

“Will it all become a singularity, then? The universe just one big black hole?” I shuddered, unable to imagine it.
“You forget, Qfwfq—we began as a singularity, by definition. All at one point. We should invite her to come with us—you know, when we get back.” Mr. MgIrOs nodded after LiNa, winked, and ran a liverish tongue over his distended lips. “See how she carries that tray so carefully? Good girl.” He sighed and withdrew a dingy handkerchief from his breast pocket and swabbed his forehead. “Don’t see why there won’t be enough room—especially if we can keep the immigrants out. Mattresses and pots and whatnot, all over our beautiful point.”

I tried not to roll my eyes and focused instead on the returning sunlight now pouring through the window, the nearly forgotten signs of life on the street outside: street vendors shouting prices for their wares; women strolling, umbrellas under their arms, their faces upturned to the sun; a young boy hawking papers. Would there be news of the compression, a headline perhaps, bold-faced letters snug up against each other for the first time in…how long had it been? “What immigrants?” I asked, trying to keep my annoyance in check. Mr. MgIrOs and his small-minded soapbox. “Surely we’ll arrive at one point more or less at the same time. Besides, I don’t see how we can keep anyone out. It’ll all be there,” I waved a hand, indicating the universe, “just like last time.”

Just like last time? I lifted the cup to my lips to hide my grimace. Ah—was it true? Would we really once again be forced into that one tiny point? I could smell MgIrOs across the booth from me—talc, pipe smoke, and mildew—and didn’t relish the thought of every point of him and myself compressed into one, of smelling his odors where time doesn’t exist. Of course, his would be competing with all the other aromas of the universe (spring flowers, for instance, as well as their autumnal rotting), all dismantled and compressed in such a way that one can’t really talk of smell as the same sense, where wafting molecules are perceived on the nose and tongue; all at one point, nose and tongue remain inseparable from anything they might care to lick or sniff. The thought of this was less than comforting, and I nearly reached into my coat for my wallet to pay for my bottomless cup—ah, poor LiNa: 79 cents for a near-eternity of refills; I’d tip her well, at least 100%—when Mr. MgIrOs surprisingly eased my mind.

“Of course, won’t be much need for this fuzzy little tart—no matter how nice the tush, eh? Not with Mrs. RuBrGa around once more.”

Gads—how could I have forgotten? (Of course, I hadn’t; I’d merely succumbed to the distractions of LiNa’s swaying buttocks.) Mrs. RuBrGa. To think I’d sat across from Mr. MgIrOs all this time—how long, now? Weren’t the buildings across the street alarmingly close?—without once mentioning Mrs. RuBrGa, the one being that had made life at one point tolerable. Poor LiNa held but a candle before the brilliance of Mrs. RuBrGa’s supernova. Oh, those sturdy thighs bulging from the skirt of her orange dressing gown; her heavy breasts swaying like pendulums; thick, hairy forearms dusted with flour, caked with egg, as she stirred her spoon about her cosmic bowl, faint beads of sweat across the arch of her prominent nose. Our mother, temptress, confidant. Our baker of bread: Mrs. RuBrGa had freed us from the point—had she not?—in a stunning burst of radiance, a blaring, quickening halo, throwing us to the far corners of the widening universe—Mr. MgIrOs to Pravia and his thrilling life selling plastics; myself to this little café on the corner to sip my coffee—in her outburst of goodwill.

And we’d been mourning her ever since, hadn’t we? Wasn’t my bottomless cup, my bottomfull waitress, nothing more than a despondent, illusory dream? Bah—it was! The full life span of the universe, wasted in trying to forget the woman who, really, had birthed us all. I felt defeated, a child, a fool, but…

“Do you suppose?” I whispered, ashamed at the desperate hope straining my voice. Shrugging again—damn his shrug!—Mr. MgIrOs smirked and said, “Well, why not? You said yourself it’ll all be there. Surely she’s out there—nowhere else to go, eh?”

How true!—but then, I didn’t want to sit here reminiscing of Mrs. RuBrGa across from Mr. MgIrOs, did I? I felt jealous, then ashamed: Mrs. RuBrGa, the unabashed joy I received from all my points coinciding with all of hers, the promiscuity and chasteness of it—this joy wasn’t mine and mine alone, for everyone else’s points, too. All of us, cradled in her powerful arms shiny with oil. And this was her gift, why we loved her, why she loved us: all the pettiness, the triteness, the small-mindedness of our maddeningly close proximity with one another was diffused by her generosity and love.

“Oh, if only I had a bit of room—the bread I’d bake for you boys,” she’d beam, warming us with her glow.

The brass bell above the entrance now jingled madly as people packed themselves into the tiny café, quarrelling over seats furthest from the door. I glanced out the window to see the hardware store across the street practically abutting the café. The tiny, wrought iron tables placed on the sidewalk beneath the green awning groaned and buckled under the pressure applied by the two buildings’ coupling. Throngs of people packed the aisles, clamoring for my beleaguered LiNa’s attention. Wayward elbows and knees, toe-stomping boots and shin-clipping briefcases crowded around us. The air grew warm with exhaled breath unable to drift away; so much for entropy. The swirl of cream in my coffee raced maddeningly backwards.  Mr. MgIrOs, in an uncharacteristic bout of acceptance, laughed through it all. “Remember this, Qfwfq? Won’t be long now, what? Isn’t it all spectacular?”

Trying in vain to keep a particularly bony elbow out of my ear, I merely shrugged, trying to catch one last glimpse of my now tepid coffee. I’d have to pay the tab in the next universe. The smothering claustrophobia wasn’t as acute as I’d feared; indeed, I welcomed its familiarity. Over the din of shouting patrons, of shattering glass and crumbling brick, I heard the chef in the back singing in his clear, slightly wavering baritone—Puccini? No: Wagner via Martucci—and I couldn’t help but raise and wave my hands in accompaniment. Mrs. RuBrGa would like this warbling chef, would she not? Somewhere close by, surely, she approached. “Oh, the bread I’m baking for you boys!” Her great arms, shiny with oil, pumping vigorously in and out, the engine of the universe, those strong, soft hands kneading the dough, coaxing it from sunlight and water into grain then flour, and finally, at the behest of her sustaining love, the gluten combining and beginning to cohere, and we’re once more back together, all at one point, no longer mourning the loss.

]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/all-towards-one-point/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/patagonia/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/patagonia/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:00:53 +0000 Anna Barto http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=8856 East Dean Institute
15^th September 1906

Q, Old Friend,

While I am ever grateful to you for recommending me to the research institute, I wonder what I have taken on with this project. The remittance is not quite as you described it to me. Rather than simply cataloguing, with an historian’s eye, a collection left in trust, I am set the challenge of reconstructing the whole life, in mind and deed, of the man who left this peculiar legacy. My research thus far, as you know, has led me to handle only manuscripts, and I fear I lack the delicacy of hand and the artist’s eye required to interpret these precious parcels. The institute committee members are as mystified as I am as to why someone should leave their substantial worldly goods packaged up in layers of coloured tissue paper. However, their confidence in my professional abilities is such that I must attack the task with gusto and hope to provide them with an analysis fit for publication within the allotted twelve months.

I finally began the practical work today. With some trepidation I chose a parcel from the jumbled piles, and in carrying it to the bench the first layer of tissue fell away like brown flakes of pastry. A fragment of paper drifted down and lodged on my trouser knee, stuck there, it turned out, by the oily imprint of a mouth in purple lipstick. The colour was like the one Margie used to wear, when kissing her was still a fantasy I shared only with you. I thought of her lips, still as plump as those on the yellowed scrap I held in my hand, though unadorned now, I imagine. On the other side was writing – curly, impenetrable – something in Spanish. I couldn’t read it, though I admit the lipstick stamp made the message appear obscene.

The next layer of tissue was just as brown, but came away nearly whole, like a shed skin. This time a silk stocking, as fine and brown as the paper, slid from the parcel to the floor. Again, I thought of Margie, those silken, slithery calves we have both admired but only I have had the privilege to caress.

I try to calculate, to track her voyage across the globe. No doubt she writes to you with her traveller’s tales; she could not resist an audience and alas, she and I did not part happily.

The stocking had a hole at the toe, where the fabric crunched slightly between my fingers. I was still clutching it when I woke from a reverie of kissing Margie’s small, rounded feet. I fear I have grown rusty and must relearn the discipline required to work alone and steadily.

Yours, overwhelmed but optimistic,

Richard

Hotel Los Flores
Cancun
26^th September 1906

My Darling Q,

I hope this letter finds you well. I make progress, though not at the speed I had hoped. If this reaches you at all I may well be nearing my destination by the time you read it.

Does Richard write to tell you of his research? I saw the parcels before I left, rooms full of them, and I confess I laughed inwardly at the thought of him tearing his way through such mysterious wreckage. I departed without his blessing but I am grateful for the determination his obstinacy has given me to make this journey. It is not easy, but my heart’s desire is sated a little more each day.

The sky is bigger than the world here.

Marguerite

East Dean Institute
2^nd October 1906

Q Old Friend,

Perhaps this crosses with your reply to my previous letter in the post. Or perhaps you are as distracted as I find myself, with your garden and your entertaining of the new undergraduates.

That first parcel was a hard lesson. I dismantled it slowly, painstakingly, fearing I may damage the thing. In truth, if damage was done it was to my confidence in dealing rationally with its contents. I will describe it to you as it illustrates in miniature the nature of my gargantuan task here.

It had nine layers of tissue paper and at every one, however ridiculous or mysterious the item that fell from it, I was reminded of Margie. Layer three contained a ladies’ undergarment in ochre silk, a shade she favoured though I blush to divulge such intimacies to you. Layer four, a pair of peach stones, still red in their pits: the fruit of our summers at the Dove House. Layer five was empty and spoke of absence. Later, theorising, I wondered whether this had been deliberate, or simply an aberration on the part of the parcel-maker.

Layer six held another letter fragment, in infuriating Spanish. Layer seven, a rabbit’s foot with the same cream fur that, you will recall, edged Margie’s cape in the days of the violet lipstick. From layer eight fell several photographs of the same exotic tree, taken from different angles. It was a kind of palm, of the type likely to be found in those faraway climes that Margie now traverses.

It all seemed a terrible, horrible coincidence that the first parcel should be full of the essence of Margie, and I was appalled at the thought of what I might find in the weeks and months of unwrapping to come. I see the logical explanation now, that I could have conjured Margie from any combination of objects while there was no other story on which to hang them. I comfort myself with the belief that once I begin constructing the story of the parcel-maker, Margie’s presence will melt away. I wonder—would you too have sensed her in that forlorn, extravagant collection of objects?

Layer nine, the centre of the parcel, was at least a prize: a stuffed seagull with a diamond ring around one orange leg. I need not remind you that Margie and I were engaged within six weeks of that first purple kiss she bestowed upon my lips.

If she sends you news of her movements, I would grateful to hear of it. She need not know that I enquire.

Your nostalgic friend,

Richard

Hotel Chimbote
Lima, Peru
28^th November 1906

My Dearest, Darling Q,

We have resorted to journeying by sea, this being a slightly less bumpy and convoluted way to travel the length of Chile. I feel sure Richard would be triumphant to know this, confirming as it does that he was right not to join me on my expedition. You remember his reluctance when we enticed him onto a punt that July day? He was positively green, though the Cam is hardly riven with waves and currents. I wonder—if pity had not tugged at my heart where the wine had done its work, whether I would have kissed the captain instead of the seasick passenger.

I begin my letter with ‘we’ for I have acquired a cohort of fellow explorers and very fascinating they are too—a taxidermist, a writer obsessed with birds and a third man who claims to be returning home, though we others do not quite believe him. He tries hard to disguise a Welsh accent. It will not be too long now before we reach our destination, and my soul grows with every mile of coast we pass.

I hope Richard is keeping up your long habit of correspondence, and that his project prevents his mind from wandering too much. He would never admit it, but he is one to muse on things.

Yours, saltily,

Marguerite

East Dean Institute
5^th December 1906

Q, my Forgetful Friend,

Are you gallivanting amongst your eager new students? The ways of the young must be a fascinating subject for an ageing anthropologist.

I struggle with all that is new to me here. For instance, now that I have counted I believe there to be no less that 453 parcels in these rooms. I may uncover more. To date I have opened up exactly sixty of them. Cataloguing the contents is the only structure I am so far able to impose. The objects I find inside send the mind off on such flights that my careful theories unravel and crumble with the flaky crusts of tissue that are my daily bread. I am less and less sure of things; I find evidence to support none of my hypotheses about the parcel-maker. Rather, each skeleton theory I build is dashed by the next day’s findings. I doubt the ability of my own imagination to grasp that of the man behind these packages; either that or it is the work of a damned trickster. I dare not suggest this to the institute committee.

Take parcel number six, for example. This contained more letter fragments, mostly in Spanish but some, now that I have had them returned from a local language teacher, apparently in Welsh. The attempted translations by Mr Flores of these parts are questionable in my opinion but the Spanish phrases are clear and when pieced together with other fragments appear to discuss building plans. The details are frankly insane, and I would take the letter to be a joke were it not for everything else I have found in the parcels.  The writer describes a house with a miniature waterway that would pass through the rooms, allowing kitchen staff to place dishes in tiny boats to float in the current (I have not discovered how that might be generated) through small archways in the walls to be taken up by the diners when they arrive elsewhere in the house.  Empty dishes may then be replaced in the boats to continue their journey back to the kitchen.

I cannot help but imagine continually what Margie would think of such things. No doubt she would make some kind of sense of it; her inner world can accommodate the fantastical where mine rejects it. This frustration is particularly stinging now, while she is embarking on a fantastical quest with absolutely no logic to it, and I am left to decode a mind more like hers than I could have anticipated. She would adore the centre of parcel number six: a map where rivers have been pasted over with coloured ribbons, mountain ranges decorated with moss, and annotations added indicating where particular folk tales may be found. Probably she is using just such a useless guide to navigate her way South, picturing herself in fairyland.

If you find a moment to put pen to paper, I would appreciate the diversion from this whirligig of strangeness. I am sure that Margie will have reached land by now, and written to tell you of the marvels she finds.

Yours, in wretched anticipation,

Richard

La Sirena
6^th December 1906

My Dear, Long Lost Q,

We are afflicted with hallucinations. Apparently the bread supplies are riddled with mould but that is all we have left on board to eat and so we may choose between sanity or starvation. Such sea monsters I have never dreamed of but they dive and lurch alongside the ship. The taxidermist is determined to catch one for his collection but the nets we have are no good for ghosts.

I am told we will reach our port within days but my sense of time has slipped away so this is neither good nor bad news. If Richard asks in his letters, do tell him I am so far successful in my pursuit of my dream.

I hope your rich life is entertaining you as much as this voyage is changing me.

Yours,

The Mermaid Marguerite

East Dean Institute
17^th January 1907

Q, Old Faithful,

I appreciate your taking the time to scribble me a brief note, though I am forced to say I am less pleased by the words in it.
In my uninterrupted solitude I had achieved a kind of rhythm in the unwrapping, labelling, laying out and reviewing of my research which had sufficed me to keep Margie from haunting me too much. Or perhaps it was just that my mind has been so overwhelmed by the parcels that there has been no room to think of something as beautiful and wayward as Margie. I have enough of both those qualities around me to occupy me forever.

Your news of her time at sea and her failure to mention me at all in her letters has perturbed me deeply. I had expected her anger at our parting to subside, for distance to cast its spell. I thought she would be missing me. Did she really not ask after me at all? I realise that part of what had lulled me up until now was the small but stone-hard belief, lodged somewhere amongst all my new outlandish thoughts, that Margie would tire of her silliness and come back to me before long.

Desire and reality do not mix well but it seems Margie has still not learned this. Instead she is out there, floating in the curdled mess of a world that pays no heed to the human heart, yet still imagining she is on the right course. Poor Margie. Of course hallucinations will only play to the delusions she holds and strengthen them. I have torn parcels to shreds today. She knew I would not go with her. No sane person would embark on such a mission.

I remember the night, when she first said the word. We stood in the still, frosty air in the garden of the Dove House, near midnight, and her eyes shone with the stars. Her lips were bare then, but I still saw them as I first had, rich aubergine cushions that invited, provoked. They provoked me then. Patagonia. She said it like an incantation, trying to cast the same spell over me that the word had cast over her. It was not effective; to me it still sounds, as it did then, like some inferior type of pansy. Patagonia: the end of the earth, the limit of human understanding. Margie has never understood what philosophy really is, preferring continental flights of fancy to proper rational investigation. No wonder the idea took hold so easily in her mind.

I’m sure you would agree that she has always been riddled with giddy longings and contradictions, and you know as well as I do the danger of feeding them. I am thinking of that time when you let her believe you could read the stars and told her she would be one of the few whose destinies match their desires. How far from the truth that is now.

Yours, with consternation,

Richard

La Sirena
14^th December 1906

Dearest Q,

Is it cold there? It is cold here, I write to distract myself. You are lucky; the bird-obsessed writer has begun eating his paper and this is one of the few sheets I have been able to steal away and hide in my underwear. The mouldy bread ran out and now our hallucinations result from hunger, and are not of sea monsters but cream cakes and roasted chickens. I believe I can taste one right now.

Still, we are told we will find the port soon enough and keep our spirits up remembering great feasts from our pasts. I suspect some of the taxidermist’s reminiscences are of creatures he stuffed rather than ate. For my part I described that banquet of oysters and beer you once brought to the meadow at Grantchester, though I omitted, as I did when I told Richard, the moment you fed me an oyster from your own hot mouth.

My joy at reaching Patagonia now will be beyond human expression. I wonder if you tell Richard of my adventures.

Your hungry Marguerite

East Dean Institute
25^th January 1907

Q,

I am dogged in my application of the highest principles of empirical research, but I find that these parcels are making their own story of a kind, and it is one I cannot believe. I cannot detect the source of the defect – do I imagine too much, or too little, in my hunt for sense and structure? What is one to make, for example, of a square of green carpet with the impression of a wet footprint, not stained, but woven in? And in the same parcel, dried seaweed fronds, a sealskin case of peculiar proportions and inside that a collection of notes in Spanish on the correct tuning of bells?

My professional experience is proving useless against this tide of unruly fragments. Constantly my helpless mind asks what Margie would think, what deductions she would make about the infernal creator of these parcels. Even if her suppositions were preposterous and her conclusions even more so, she would have some opinion.

The only definite idea I have formed thus far is a dreadful one: that the person whose legacy is now confounding me intended – I hardly dare write it – to travel to the Southern reaches of the Americas. I can answer for myself what Margie would think of that. The plan on arrival would be to construct this house I glimpse now and again in the letter fragments, with its miniature waterway, palm garden, bell towers and endless seascape mosaics. In my dreams I wade through its rooms, always seeking a couch or a bed, but there is no soft surface to be found and my feet begin to adhere to the floor, leaving sticky footprints that will not wipe away. I hear waves crashing but from its windows see only vistas of lush vegetation.

This house is at least a clear idea that I have gleaned from the parcels. The ghosts of those who meant to live in it are more baroque, more fanciful than even its most eccentric features if the parcel contents are to be taken as an indication of their characters. There is a woman always in silk, I infer from the clothing now piled at one end of my bench, with feathers pinned in her hair and a predilection for night swimming. To my chagrin she seems to favour purple lipstick and would appear to hold the parcel-maker in such thrall that he dresses his houses so as to capture her physical charms. The footprint in the carpet is hers.

I begin to wonder if you knew what lay in store when you put forward my name for this project.

If you do write back, please share any words that Margie has sent to you. I feel anything from her may help me to gain a grip on my task.

Yours in weary confusion,

Richard

Casa del Corazón
Punta Fernández
Patagonia
February 28^th? 1907

Dear, Prophetic Q,

We make losses and gains. Of my companions, the writer who loved birds is gone; the taxidermist is here in body, but his spirit leapt overboard to join the monsters he coveted. Our friend who claimed to be homeward bound struck off into forest while we slept one night.

All that was some weeks, maybe months, ago – the storm, the wreck. Thank heavens I am a strong swimmer with no fear of the dark.

The losses have been worth it. I may sound callous to you, dismissing the death of the writer, but I wear feathers in remembrance of him.

We found a house. It is my soul’s home, so much so that I need not describe it to you; simply imagine me as I truly am and you will see it. The taxidermist may be silent but he retained his powers of restoration, and together we have made this place the glory it must have been when first dreamt of.

It nestles near the coast where we landed, so we listen to the sea as we gaze out at the profusion of exotic life around us. There are birds I cannot name (the writer could have helped, but who needs names for such beauties?) that flash colour and wild songs through our windows. After much scrubbing we uncovered mosaics of that very sea that brought us here, in which monsters and dragons fly; these make the taxidermist as happy as our situation makes me. For, finally, I may live without the constraints of convention.

If I wish to take my breakfast in a bell tower, I do so. If I wish to sleep in a hammock strung between palms, then I may. In fact, this is so pleasant a way to rock to sleep that we have done away with beds altogether.

We do not speak much here, not wishing to upset the taxidermist who lost his tongue. Rather we write, and if one has a message for another inhabitant, one simply folds the paper into a boat and sends it sailing down the tiny river that runs in a meandering circuit through our rooms.

So you see, you were right: the world does match my heart. The fit is so perfect that while I remember it was you who sewed the seed of Patagonia in my mind, I believe it was the stars that brought me here. I am released from past agonies, knowing that I choose neither you nor dear Richard; rather my life is now as it should be, being mine alone. This is glorious freedom.

Besides, Richard would hate it here. I will be forever grateful that you provided something sensible like research for him to do instead, especially in a subject you knew would be so fascinating. I picture him happily logging his finds, making of someone else’s mess a neat history and footnoting it with logical explanations.

Now that I have an address of sorts, please would you pass him a small request? Ask him to send me a stick of my favourite lipstick. He’ll know which I mean, the purple one; it is called ‘Night Swimmer’.

On second thoughts, now that I have no care for discretion, I beg you to send this entire letter straight on to Richard. I would very much like him to know my fate, and my true thoughts, expressed as freely as they are to you. Richard, when you read this, try to be as happy for me as I am for all of us.

Your friend,

Marguerite

East Dean Institute
11^th March 1907

Q, Old Friend,

Your envelope arrived this morning, but I confess it lies unopened in front of me. I will read what you have to say after months without word, but I fear it may be advice, or guidance on how to proceed with my research. It arrives at an unfortunate moment, for today has been a day of revelation, and I am compelled to lay out this development for you before anything can divert my mind from such welcome certainty.

I have worked through the night. As I attempted before dawn to assess the object at the centre of parcel 189, I had a kind of epiphany. Not all epiphanies are positive, but they always bring relief, and in its horrid way this one has. I wept the sweetest tears of my life.

As I sat on the floor in my dust-stained trousers and a shirt I had worn for more than a week, contemplating a scroll of parchment many yards long and decorated from end to end with grotesque sea monsters, I allowed myself the thought that has ended this endeavour for me: this should have been Margie’s research. Only her fluttering mind could have coped with this cacophony of obscurity. Only she could revel in a life that so stubbornly defies responsibility for the sake of surreality. Why, I asked myself, did you suggest me for this work instead of Margie? She lives already in that kind of dream world that stretches and shrinks, turns the recognisable into the bafflingly bizarre, and this endless onslaught of parcels would have seemed to her only an extension of that.

The moment you have finished reading this letter, I urge you to send word to Margie that she must return home. Surely by now she has reached land somewhere, and has furnished you with an address? You must press upon her the importance of this research. Flatter her if you must, though it is not flattery to say that she was meant for these parcels, and they were meant for her. Her destiny lies here at the institute. She will make her name and be recognised for her work just as we are.

I will be gracious in handing over the reins; I will even tutor her in proper annotation and cataloguing methodologies. In fact it will bring me great pleasure to do so for such a cause as this, and I dare to hope that, thus fulfilled, we could be happy again, Margie and me.

Now I have understood this, I am more contented than I have been since our halcyon days at the Dove House. You were instrumental in that, finding the place so close to your own glorious home and urging us to buy it. Do the same now. Help to bring Margie back to her fate, and in doing so bring mine to me.

When I have posted this, I will read the contents of you envelope, though I smile to think that the advice you are sending may now be redundant. I hope we will all soon be together, Margie on my arm, and the imprint of her purple kiss on both our cheeks.

Yours, in happy anticipation,

Richard

And in this motion they both know it, like the other’s dance steps—they’ll be cheating, the very first fat chance they get.

*****

Zoe will see IKEA sofas in her friend’s upscale-but-not-snobbish apartment and make mental demands of Bob to obtain the means to procure these sofas. But Bob’s means will soon prove ‘no siree!’ and so Zoe will eventually sleep with her friend, who might be female or male, solely so she can be closer to those pieces. Becoming not a wife to solely Bob, but to those sofas and friend, sewing a detachment that will eventually lead, conversely, to real attachment; on account of the unreliable nature of human-to-human contact; migrated desire; biological yen.

Zoe will cheat with these sofas precisely because they don’t—will always be sofas—will always remain, even upon their destruction, ideally intact (which is more than can be said for Bob).

*****

Bob feels likewise, in terms of cheating; that is, in terms of fixing desire to an object like a tail on a static animal, a picture of that animal because it is immobile and non-verbal and there.

For nearly a decade before his current planned betrothal and consummation, Bob had quite persistently taken to forming significant lustful relationships with hi-gloss, product-driven, color-coded photos of pert yet petulant, poised yet parting, ready and faux-willing models slash playmates slash objects of great commercial beaut’. These Photoshopped and formulated to allow him to live completely free of—completely sans—any physically intrusive, emotionally messy cues. These super-sized centerfolds of severely modeled models—the millions and billions of pages of thumbnailed nookie—it was IKEA catalogues for adults only (mostly).

He had, as an adolescent, most often enjoyed the Object-Paris-Hilton—had made many happy returns to her last night in fact, forgoing a hooking-or-whoring bachelor party for a closer reading instead of several of his most-prized and-burned CDs; Internet porn-and-celebrity snaps. Snapping his fingers and there she appeared right on the monitor—as background image, stored screensaver—wearing her midnight blue mascaraed eyes like a raccoon alien thing.

(And what happened the longer people-like-Bob engaged in licentious-behavior-like-this was that gay Paree began to accrue characteristics that Bob counted as meaningful. In Bob’s ever-engorged brain this two-dimensional, flatter-than-life, Pepsi-machine Paris accumulates personality points and tacked-on traits. It becomes like collecting collectible cards when Bob was a kid in the summers at his blinded Na-Na’s ranch, sneaking swimsuit Sports Illustrateds right under her nose to go out back sporting to the den. It becomes like a pastime or healthy, well-sanctioned hobby. Becomes like Bob’s real wife. One-handed Bob doing his darn level best: to translate this Hilton by his brain’s exchange rate.)

*****

And whether or not this full-fledged fixation had irreparably damaged Bob lovelife-wise—whether or not he would be able to get it up from Zoe’s touch alone and not accouterments, to rightly reciprocate relations—remained for the moment.

*****

Sliding on one another’s shoulders then, dreaming of sofas and Hiltons and futures on said, Bob and Zoe reach the end of their sad dance. They look up to find their crowd of guests moving on. Gathering around the goodies and cake, tiramisu, pastries, cannolis stuffed with nuts. The crowd waits like this as Bob and Zoe stand blinking, wait until some distant aunt, the DJ, yells Hey! Hey the cake. They wipe their mouths instead of answer and forward on to the dessert—cut small slices of tiramisu, squish it into one another’s lips, smile, grin…

Hours later asleep and dreaming: Zoe hangs off the sofa, Bob pools below in a puddle on the Scotch-guarded carpet of their Hilton hotel suite. Neither of them wanting to admit that—in eye-twitching sleep and already—they’ve fallen out of that unfixable state (L-O-V-E) so quick. Instead, they both dream of their younger days together, at a technical call center, answering labyrinthine queries that spawned ever-more-complicated gaffes, backing them increasingly into parts of opaque machines—nuts and bolts. Except that even if there were actual nuts and bolts it wouldn’t matter, because Zoe and Bob and their callers had long since ceased having any real notion of what a nut or bolt could possibly do or mean.

At these call centers, Zoe and Bob sat dutifully through mandatory employee training, acquainting themselves with American pop culture, so they—faced with interminably long pauses on the line—would have something to talk about with their oft-foreign customers and haranguers.

(No matter that this was a decade before the rampant outsourcing and relocating of said centers to exotic and underprivileged locales—no matter that Z.-and-B. weren’t foreign and didn’t blurt out in appreciable accents and that all of this cultural currency added not a whit to their capital to be spent. What were they to do but try? To stick this out the best they knew how, spending their working afternoons tag-teaming slow phones, transferring calls back and forth like a game of ping-pong, like speed-dialed distraction—like I love you, I love you not.)

*****

Some weeks pass before Zoe’s credit cards are no longer accepted, before she begins earnestly to engage in identity theft via Internet. In order to feed her IKEA appetite, she has discovered how to order to different addresses, take different names, unspool fake accounts from far-away IP addresses so as to collect more Swedish-faux. Bob pays little attention to the comings and goings of their interior designs, as he is usually engrossed in some body of work (although he worries about paying the credit card bills on time).

(Zoe, while waiting for invented IP addresses to manifest, remembers when her father told her that someday there would be hover-cars, and someday there would be plastic money, which Zoe pictured then as Monopoly money or play—actual plastic dollar bills—wondering suddenly how that could possibly be made to fit in one’s purse, and what if someone was very rich suddenly? and how would they carry all that manifold plastic in less than whole sets of suitcases at once and.

(Zoe obviously didn’t get it as a kid. But she thrills herself still a little, thinking about her dad telling her all this in the park. She feels close to her father at this moment, even despite the fact that he was wrong about the hover-cars—even—she gives him great credit for the plastic money, and even more credit to herself for imagining such colorful and fun plastic bills…this memory she isn’t even sure is a memory…looks over at Bob and feels bad for using so much plastic, the thing-that-can’t-be-seen, on so much IKEA that can be. But she does love them.)

*****

So Bob takes a different tact altogether. Instead of trying to come to terms with the nuts and bolts of tangibly knowing the inner workings of Zoe’s love—instead of trying to screw himself into the physical space represented by her hands and face, torso so-hipped, the limbs of her limbs—instead of beveling both their edges until each fits unto the other, closing like well-made car doors—

Instead of stripping away accumulated layers, the near geologic columns of distance between him and Zoe, between him and physical contact, between him and being aroused by anything other than clickable icons, operating systems, ringtones (the actual and imagined space is now piled up between them sofa cushions, his furniturephile wife now deeply ensconced in pillows, in like a fort reminiscent of her childhood forts so protective and created from fruitful trips through closets, bedrooms, blanket-and-pillow-stored areas of that safe house, growing less and less interested in Bob’s attempts to embody the single thing she’d always asked him to be, namely: firm, yet yielding to the touch) instead Bob decides a try at something else.

He begins forging: Silver forks. Large enough to fork hay but far too expensive and soft, sterling silver, to actually use. Bob loves forging because it requires only metal-to-metal, red-hot to black-cool, it requires only one moment that smacks and then doesn’t—one—moment after another that makes noise only to produce silence and tangible product. Product that no one would want, served no economical purpose whatsoever, no function or logic, complete waste.

He stacks them tines-up, leaning them against the walls of the apartment where they begin tarnishing, accumulating cobwebs and dead flies. He disappears in a prison of them, peeking through their spokes.

*****

Zoe soon notices Bob’s increasing absence, even as she wallows in poly-cotton blends, in her cushions of many colors, squalor and non-laundered, almost a bestial and taboo love.

She’s built the fort in the living room out. She’s commandeered all comforters in the apartment, laying their mismatched patterns across each other to form a roof, screens for her modesty, their long-draped limbs hanging from the furniture like banners, climbing the walls like plush-stuffed-toy ivy—inside she finds it pretty easy to let Bob be gone.

And gradually, as moist spring slinks into summer, Zoe grows so comfortable to begin replacing her missing Bob with couch and pillow parts—begins re-covering him like an upholsterer, like an antique chair whose cushions have lost their stuff.

By the time Bob does happen to look in on Zoe lounging on her back, she sees not so much a human husband as a couch that’s learned to stand on its hind legs. Bob as unfixed living room fixtures. Bob as throw pillows and lay pillows and sleeping pillows. Bob made out of exotic thousand-counts and threads—B. woven in and out of himself—as a loom and the product of same.

Down-filled Bob.

Fold-out Bob.

Bob over-stuffed.

And Zoe, all the while lying on this massive interlocking davenport, slurping on a cardboard carton of Juicy Juice with her belly full and her mind at ease—she thinks it’s fine that her husband has stuffing coming out of his head. She thinks it swell to run her finger along his fabric parts.

*****

Forging becomes too difficult with the stuffing, the sometimes-down, sometimes poly-cotton getting too close to the red-hots and so Bob has to give it up. Many days, weeks pass without the clink of metal, without the clink of love. Bob grows intensely dismissive and foul-mouthed. Eventually decides he’d rather not live than miss his forge flame.

He starts carefully lighting matches while Zoe sleeps, one by one, cautiously fingering the burnt orange of the wick, absorbing sulfuric bliss, blistering his fingers’ tips. Every match is to him ever more erotic. Every additional flame snuffing out whatever vertebrate life in him still remains between human stitching.

And of course matches can only be the beginning.

After a few sketchy experiments and some singed fibers of being, Bob needs more. He wants fire inside; he wants heat and sizzle.

Bob resolves to heating small pebbles over fires built in leftover coffee cans, heating them until black-hot, allowing them to cool as he juggles them from mitt to mitt. (While they cool they blister him well, melting cotton fibers into increasingly plastic slicks; this pleases him though only mildly.)

On day three or four he starts to press them for as long as he can stand against the plush tip of his tongue. Which lights him every time, but also more than that—singes whatever caution that may be left in him.

When he swallows the first pebble it sizzles the whole way down, blackening (he can imagine) his still-tissuey throat, the pink of him, hurting him like the dickens. He cries.

*****

Not long after, Zoe—called away from her down divan of yielding lovers by an urgent need to pee—walks in on her husband’s absence, quite literally stepping all over what is left:

A sick-plastic paste spread across the bathroom tile like hummus badly burnt. Her bare toes stick in him like goo, fat kiddie fingers in Jell-O. His pile is still warm, Bob oozing in and out of himself—the smell of scorched fiber and rubbered industrial-mers—smoldering a pile of spent desire.

Spent-Bob’s swallowed too many glowing bolts of love—he has, variously, thrown caution in the general direction of the wind, has indeed said in the end: Nuts to you, Death!

Zoe looks around the bathroom absently, her eyes scrolling along the shelves searching for her orange-rimmed tub of Goo-Be-Gone to clean up sludge-Bob. She wants the Gone-Be-Goo not only to shoo away his gelatin leftovers but the burnt-up Bob-smell as well. A terrible smell, intractable, quite stank. Pile-of-Bob reeks forth dead plastic and scorched skin, cooked bodily fluids, a musty musk of animal-vegetable-mineral spread.

Zoe stands for a minute thinking (her big toe in Bob like chip in a dip, the residual heat of his pile reminding her of a cheap sauna or day spa).

And Zoe knows suddenly what she wants:

A mud bath in her lost-beau Bob, a briny taste of Mr. Burnt Tongue—not butter or margarine or jam—not any kind of crockery but her old flame man.

So she lowers herself to the floor a full stretch, floats her brown body on his. Bob-pile, the reduction of a man in love, the love-pile, becomes lubrication for Zoe’s wants. And she doesn’t stop.

Zoe smears him over the entire apartment, makes him stretch far, farther than Previous-Bob could’ve ever’ve been. She drips Bob from the banisters, drizzles him from picture frames and spoons and lazy Susans—oozing Bob from the icebox she can’t help but weep. (Because seeped of course he’s now in her eyes, her heart valves, most private love-parts—except why does his love still somehow evade?). She decides she wants Bob too inside her, without end. Bob, for his part, gets gladly taken in as she opens her mouth, resisting nothing for once—moving with her tide for once—sloshing along with her passion until she’s slicked up insides all with him plastic and love. Wanting more she spoons him up from the carpet, saturates her teeth with burnt-in-Bob, swallows him up, sucks him from the banisters, licks him from the undersides of her arm. Zoe takes Bob as deep as he will go. She feels herself grow from him, his nourishment new marrow, feeding her very bones (for once) with realism.

“Too bad your wife couldn’t come,” the Old Man says, piling slices of salami onto a buttered roll and then adding hot red peppers and lettuce.

I notice Jade and her old man give each other a quick look. “You know Didi,” Uncle Joe says “Busy getting the house ready for the baby.” He’s bald, like my Old Man, only doesn’t make an elaborate attempt to hide it via a comb-over. He’s building a sandwich of prosciutto and olives and onions and cheese. It’ll turn into an eating contest between the two of them before the night is out. That’s how it works with dagos.“The work’s never done,” Ma says, and she knows, having squeezed out nine of us. “I haven’t talked to her in so long. Not since . . .” her voice trails off.

Jade’s wearing a wrinkled black dress with no stockings, her feet bare and folded up under her on the couch. Her eyes are blue, a rarity in our family, and perfectly round and hollow. “You got big,” I say.

“So did you,” she says. “Not as big as me. Remember the last time I was here?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I remember that.” Joey and Jade’s brother, Max, are outside somewhere, I’m assuming getting stoned, I don’t know what else they’d be doing, it’s all there is to do in this town though I have a feeling it’s all there is to do in most places, and some of the Old Man’s other brothers come by the house and pretty soon the place is filled with loud voices and cigarette smoke and ladies with too much make-up, and I take Jade’s wrist and lead her upstairs to me and Joey’s room.

“Who’s the kid’s old man?” I say. I’m lying back on my bed and instead of taking Joey’s, she’s laying right next to me. She smells of a long flight but also like flowers, flowers that have been crumpled and thrown away and just have a hint of scent left.

“I’m not saying,” she says. “I haven’t told anybody and that’s my policy.”

“Your old man let you get away with that?”

“What can he do? Beat me?”

“My Old Man sure as hell would beat it out of you; he’ll beat anything out of anybody. You know who the father is?”

“I’m not a slut,” she says. “There’s only the one. He knows it’s his.”

I light a joint and she’s miffed when I don’t offer her any. “You’re not allowed to smoke,” I say.

“Everybody treats me like I’m walking around with the crown fucking jewels,” she says. “It’s a baby. Women were having them in caves. It isn’t that big of a deal. Give me that. Jesus, your mother had nine. Just because my mother lost one they think I’m prone, like it runs in the family.” She takes a long and deep hit, holds it in for far longer than I ever manage to do, and blows it out in a thick rope of pure gray. I like getting high with girls; it’s different than smoking with guys. “You gonna still go to school when it comes? It being the baby,” I say.

“Of course. It’s not like I have to drop out. We’ll figure out a schedule. My dad thinks my mom will be home by then and she can carry the load but it isn’t gonna work like that.”

“Your mom home? Where’s your ma?”

“My father will fucking kill me if he knows I said anything. My mom’s back in the hospital. Do not say anything. He’s all ashamed, figures everybody will think it’s his fault he drove her crazy and not understand that she was actually crazy all on her own. The thing is, it is his fault. He’s an asshole.”

“My Ma’s come close twice now to ending up in Gowanda, our version of the nuthouse,” I say. “You don’t know what asshole is until you live with my Old Man. You’re living on easy street. Your old man is the runt of that litter.”

“Fuck you, Frankie,” she says, and shoves her body over and playfully pushes at me. “Fuck you.” I like when pretty girls swear. “I don’t think my mom’s coming home anytime soon,” she says. “She’s pretty much full-on crazy. Don’t even ask me what she did. It’s like not having a mom anymore.” She suddenly has a handful of stray tears running down her cheeks and instead of pretending not to notice, like I usually do when a girl cries, I grab her a few tissues from the box on my nightstand.

“You sure you’re gonna have enough to clean up after you play with yourself?” she says. “Please don’t do it when I’m in the next bed. Or if you do, at least tell me you’re doing it, so I won’t have to wonder,” she says. We’re sharing a room for the next four nights, me and Jade. Joey and Max are gonna be sleeping on couches downstairs and Jade’s getting Joey’s bed.

She won’t tell me who it was she fucked. Instead she wants to know all about everything I’ve been doing. Am I still all in love with Lena Gustafson? No, I say. Have I ever taken acid? Yes. What was it like? Like peeling back the world and discovering what’s underneath, the control room, all the switches and buttons and colorful wires. I open the windows next to my bed and the smoke drifts out.

There’s a whole ruckus going on downstairs and I assume the uncles will head out to The Hideaway soon enough. It belongs to Uncle Sammy, another brother, and it’s where they always end up while the aunts clean the mess left behind. “You’re lucky,” she says, “to have so much family here. We have nobody near us. Everybody seems so happy here.”

I’m speechless. Happy we’re not. Ma teeters on the brink of hearing voices and earning herself a trip to the Shock Room like her two sisters did before her. That doesn’t seem bad compared to having a mother already actually in the Shock Room, but that’s just the surface of what we have going on here.

Then next day Jade insists I take her to Caruso’s for an Italian beef. She has a craving and remembers it from her other trips here. There’s no talking a pretty girl out of anything when it comes to me. She brought some weed with her, actually hid it up inside herself for the plane ride, rightly thinking nobody wants to give a gynecological exam to a pregnant teen just in the name of national security. The bud is bomb bomb, as Jade calls it. Another difference between here and out West. Not only is the weather better there, the people more relaxed, the girls prettier, the smoke is much better, way fucking better, and I’m baked to the gills when we push the double glass doors in and grab a front booth, sitting right under a massive vintage poster advertising a visit to Chautauqua by the great tenor himself. Not that it matters but my Nana saw both Carsuo and Mario Lanza in her lifetime and said Caruso was a piker compared to Lanza. Thought I’d throw that in just in case you had any interest. It’s all I know about opera. I already got a bellyful of fat Italians screeching anytime I step out of my bedroom so it’s not like I’d pay any money to see or listen to it. The Old Man and the crew are golfing so there’s no way I’ll run into him here, though most times there’s a good chance he’ll be holding court in a back booth, his jesters paying fealty by laughing when nothing he says is actually funny.

We get the pretty waitress. She remembers me from the last time we saw each other. She doesn’t say anything but I can tell. She borders on icy but it might also be I’m so stoned I’m getting paranoid.

“You gonna marry the guy?” I ask, just trying to start some conversation. I’m getting nervous. Hearing her breathe in the bed next to me all night. Girls breathe deeper than guys when they sleep. They give off warmth that fills the entire room. It just comes off their bodies. It isn’t anything they can help. This morning when she came back from the shower I pretended to still be asleep, but I doubt it mattered to her whether I was or wasn’t. She just went ahead and took her towel off and went prancing about putting her panties and bra on, and throwing another wrinkled dress over the top of her like I wasn’t even there. I kept my eyes closed for most of it, but only for most.

“Do I look Mormon or Mexican to you? Maybe when I’m eighteen but I’m not getting married before then. He said he will, that he’ll marry me then.”

“People change their minds.”

“It’s not up to him,” she says. “He’ll marry me if I want.” She tells me the whole story, even tells me who it is. Josh, which is a douche name. “You’re the only person other than him in the whole world who knows,” she says. “I don’t even have any friends left because I won’t tell any of them.” He’s one of her teachers at school. Her English teacher. She goes over to babysit his kid or to get tutoring and they fuck. She threatens to tell anytime he loses any interest.

“You’re blackmailing him?” I say.

“I’m protecting my interests,” she says.

“I don’t get wanting to be with someone you have to blackmail to get to stay. That you have to blackmail to be with you. I can still fuck Lena,” I say, “but I have no interest because she’s fucking another dozen guys too,” I say.

“That’s not the only reason he stays, moron. He stays because he likes fucking me. He’s in it too deep to just stop so he might as well enjoy it. As far as letting him go, who else would have me? He’s the only person outside of my mom who’s ever even come close to making me feel a little loved. Who would have a person like me, with a baby?”

I remember what she looked like when my eyes were open this morning, wet black hair hanging half-way down her bare back, the curve of her womanly ass, cheeks still bright red from the hot shower, like she just got spanked, what I could see of her front peering back at me when she bent over, how she stood looking at herself in the mirror, legs hip length’s apart, applying lipstick before getting dressed. “Pretty much anybody,” I say. “Anybody would want to have you.”

“It’s pretty cute still having somebody trying to get into my panties when I’m this pregnant,” she says. “Even if they are my relative. It’s really sweet how nice you keep being to me.”

She catches me with a mouth full of sandwich otherwise I might protest. It’s just easier to say the right things to girls who look and act like Jade. Her teacher friend must be powerless around her. He’s in his late 20’s, married but separated, his wife a fat blob maybe ten years older than him. Then along comes Jade. She’s the kind of girl who if she was in one of my classes I’d stare at while teasing my dick with the end of a ruler. I wouldn’t care if anybody saw. With some food in me and a cherry shake, I’m feeling a little more relaxed and so I tell her, I tell her the kind of girl I think she is.

“You’d play with yourself looking at me? That’s creepy. But a little hot. I think I just got a little wet.” She actually reaches under the table and checks herself with a finger. “I am,” she says. “You’re a bad cousin.”

“I’ll tell you my secret now,” I say. “One of them. You know how I said I was staying here for college? I lied. My Ma doesn’t know it yet but I’m coming to your part of the country. One state over. The Old Man says we should wait until the very last minute to tell her so she doesn’t start the worrying yet. I can visit you.”

She’s lost in a trail of thought and I’m not sure she even heard me. Girls have a way of doing that, suddenly not being there right in the middle of a conversation, leaving me alone with just their bodies and none of the rest of them. Then she comes back again when I’m not expecting it. “You really think I’m worthwhile?” she says. “I’d rather be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me than be alone. I’m terrified of being alone.”

“That’s where you and me are different. I got eight siblings. Alone is my desired location.”

“You and me can be alone together,” she says.

“The baby too,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “That.”

The pretty waitress slaps the bill on the table, doesn’t even ask how the food was. “She’s in a snit,” I say.

“That’s because she’s preggers,” Jade says. “She’s in that really tired first part, where all you ever want to do is sleep. I wanted to die then. If you wanted to look at me, she says, if you wanted to look at me while, you know, you did it, I’d let you.”

“What’d you say?”

“You know,” she says. “I’ll take my clothes off for you. If you wanted.”

“No,” I say. “About the waitress? She’s pregnant?”

“Why do you care about her so much? Yeah, it’s easy to tell. She’s probably closing in on three months. I feel embarrassed now. I thought you’d be excited by what I said, what I offered. Now I feel like an idiot.”

The pretty waitress is pregnant. I feel very sober. Not clearheaded but sober. Jade is pregnant, the pretty waitress is pregnant. Thanks be to god Ma isn’t pregnant again. “We’re cousins,” I say. “Is there something wrong with you? We’re blood. Plus, Jesus, you’re knocked up. Like I can jack off looking at someone pregnant. Big pregnant like you, not like her.” I point over at the waitress who scowls at me. “I’m not a pervert. Jesus, we’re fucking cousins. Leave the tip and let’s get out of here.”

Joey’s back in his bed that night and the next. Jade refuses to talk to me or even look at me, for that matter. She spends a lot of the time on the phone and even more time sitting in a chair out back, staring off at something only she can see. It must be mighty interesting because she hardly ever looks away. “Don’t worry about her,” Uncle Joe says. “She gets moody like this. It’s the hormones. She was always moody to start with.” He launches off into a story about how the best thing about the pregnancy is that she doesn’t look fat anymore and that when he told her that she didn’t talk to him for two days. “I complimented her, for crissakes, and she was still pissed off at me.”

The night before they leave, after dinner I’m in my room when there’s a knock. “I need to pack up my stuff,” Jade says. “I can come back later.” She’s wearing her white dress.

“Stay,” I say. “Close the door. Just close the door. You wanna get high?”

“You don’t expect me to pretend you didn’t say those things to me, I hope. You looked like my father when you said it. If I closed my eyes I’d have sworn it was him.”

“No,” I say. “No. I don’t expect that. I just talk easier when I’m smoking.”

“You’ll have to do without your little crutch,” she says.

“Come one.”

“Nope.” She’s smiling, enjoying her little power over me. “You’ll have to relax some other way.”

“The only other way I have is jerking off.”

“You’ll have to do that with my clothes on,” she says. “Oh, alright,” she says, and pulls a baggy out of her purse. “Just because I’m smoking with you doesn’t mean I forgive you. I just don’t want to have to shove this inside my pussy again tomorrow and it’s either that or let it go to waste. I was going to give it to my cousin but then he acted like a douchebag to me.”

“That was the baggy that was inside of you?” I say.

“You wanna sniff it, go ahead.”

“Jade,” I say. “I’m gonna tell you something. Just like I’m the only person who knows about that teacher who, I think, is using you and you should fucking dump and have arrested, by the way, you’re the only one with this.”

“Frankie, are you gonna cry? You look like you might cry.” She hands me the tissues but I don’t need them. My eyes are watering from the smoke.

“I’m not gonna cry,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re one of them. No tears. They’re unmanly.”

The weed has brought us back to where we should have been all along. I pick up the baggie and draw in deeply through my nose. It smells more like pot and plastic than it does of her. “Women cry more than enough to make up for guys who don’t cry,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “Usually the women with those very guys.”

“My Ma was convinced my Old Man was up to no good,” I tell her.

“Isn’t that how he makes his living?” she says.

“Not that kind of no good. I think she must have thought he had a girlfriend.”

“He is very good looking,” she says.

I picture my Old Man, his intricate comb-over and big nose. “Whatever,” I say. “I personally think she’s bazzo. Me and Joey both do. But I go along and I follow him. He goes where he goes. The Hideaway, Caruso’s, home, back to The Hideaway.”

“People are boring,” she says. “Everybody could have so much fun if they just made an effort.”

“Oh, he’s efforting,” I say. “The Old Man is efforting.” I tell her the story, leaving out the unimportant details. How I saw him leave The Hideaway and get into a car and I followed it. How the pretty waitress from Caruso’s got out of the car, followed by the Old Man. How I watched as they kissed and then it looked like he fingered her, and then he took his cock out and she got on her knees and he put it into her mouth. Held her by the head. I told her how big it was, the size of it when he was trying to put it away in a hurry when they noticed the car. How in a panic trying to leave, I ran over the waitress’s cat three separate times. How they surely saw and recognized me. How while my college tuition may or may not be a bribe, it sure feels like one. And how if the pretty waitress from the place we had lunch is pregnant then I’m gonna have yet another brother or sister, this one most unwelcome. “I’m really sorry I said those things to you. None of them were true.”

“Holy fuck,” she says. “You killed her cat?”

“Splat,” I say.

“Was it really that big?”

“It looked like he was wrestling with an electric eel,” I say. “I must take after Ma’s side of the family, I think. You gonna let me see you naked? I did a little already, the other morning.”

“I fucking knew it!” she says. “I took forever getting dressed just so you’d wake up. I wanted you to wake up. You had a boner the entire night. I could see your sheets lifted. It’s not that bad, Frankie. Things are gonna happen no matter what. I’m gonna have a baby whether I want it or not; not that I ever considered not having and keeping it. I never considered anything but what I’m doing. But still, it’s out of my hands now. And all this is out of yours. Let’s be kissing cousins. That’s what you said to me when I was like twelve, you fucking perv.”

“You were fourteen,” I say.

“I might as well have been twelve,” she says. “I’d have done it then too. I had a crush on you then, too. Come here.”

Her mouth is softer than I remembered. Richer and deeper, as if pregnancy has expanded her entire invisible self and I’m licking at the entrance, plunging my tongue into the ever-expanding depths of this new space.

I’m not gonna give you the details. She’s my cousin and that’s different from another kind of girl. Not a sister. Definitely not a sister, but there’s still got to be some protective edge. Or only a couple of details. She’s not wearing any panties under her dress. She feels the need to breathe down there. Her breasts are no longer globs of fat but are fully formed, swollen to the point of veiny, the pink crowns strained and stretching, preparing themselves for their primary duty. When I slide into her the first time, her lying on her side and me behind her, it feels like suddenly rediscovering a piece of information I never even knew I had in the first place. I kiss the back of her white, white neck, nibble on her tiny ears and neck and my hands explore the slope of her belly, the rock hard solidity of it. It’s sudden and not very subtle and I put my hands on it, wrap one arm under her and the other over the top, envelop her, and my hands meet at the highest point, only it’s more like it’s holding me than me holding it, this place inside of her where I can feel the baby shift and kick, small dings against my hands.

“He’s happy,” she whispers.

“So am I,” I whisper back. It’s slow and gentle, the first time, I treat her like she’s something that can be broken, but the times after that are much more theatrical, like a performance involving gymnasts and contortionists. She greedily takes in every last drop I have to offer and I greedily give every last that I have.
The bedroom door’s unlocked. Anybody can walk in at anytime. In a house with nine kids and an Italian mother, you’re lucky if you can take a shit without someone hanging all over you, asking for help with a homework problem or being told to surrender your underwear for a load of whites that she’s just starting. What would they say if they walked in, saw me and Jade naked, the only light in the room coming from the streetlight outside my window, me inside of her, the way we’re kissing and tearing at each other, like there’s some big obstacle other than her belly standing in our way and we’re determined to tear it down and finally get to the truth of the matter, uncover the one goddamn secret that keeps us all bumping into each other every day?
If Ma walked in she would faint or start praying. Joey would storm away pissed that he got stuck playing nursemaid to the younger brother. The Old Man catching us would be ripe. He’s very big on respecting women and in his mind, or at least how he talks, not how he acts, fucking them is disrespectful, unless you’re trying to crank out babies, of course. Then fuck away.

“I love you, Frankie,” Jade says. I tell her I love her back. Neither of us believes it but it sure feels good to pretend we do.

Respect for women is the topic of a popular speech of his, of the Old Man’s. It’s a story about his parents, my Nana who died a couple of years ago and the Old Man’s old man. He died when Nana was still pregnant with the Old Man and none of us obviously ever met him and we don’t really even have a name for him. They owned a small grocery store and a bakery. This was when she was carrying the Old Man around in her, seven other kids at home in various stages of growth. They’d get to the store early together every morning, by four am, leaving the older ones in charge, and she’d fire up the stoves for the fresh bread they sold every day, and he’d lug barrels of olive oil around and unwrap the meats and cheeses and sweep, even though he probably swept six hours earlier when they closed.

One morning she was sick, Nana was. She had a rattling cough. A fever. Her tossing and turning kept the Old Man’s old man from sleeping. You stay home today, he told her, in Italian of course.

I make the bread, she said. Apparently she was the only one capable of operating the ovens.

We’ll use day old bread, he grunted. I assume he grunted. The men in this family grunt.

The story goes that he left her there in bed and walked to the store and was behind the meat counter when he heard a familiar noise, a hissing sound, the gas of the ovens. He stormed into the kitchen and there she was, holding an already wet tissue in her hand, wet from her constant cough, standing on a stool and peering into the highest oven, like she forgot something in there. She turned and looked at him. Fresh bread, is what she said. Fresh bread today. The Old Man’s old man, obviously now I know where the Old Man gets it, shut off the gas, took an axe from a wall in the back and began to hammer at the fronts of the stoves. He ripped their doors off. He pulled one clean out of the wall. At the end of it, covered in sweat, out of breath, he looked at her, she was standing there with her hands on her hips, giving him the evil eye, and he said, No fresh bread today. I personally think the old guy comes off as a slightly more psychotic version of the Old Man himself, but apparently the point is that the damage caused was a small price to pay to keep his wife well. A lot of good it did, being that he caught her cold and died three months later of pneumonia.

Jade’s hovering over me, her belly threatening to come tumbling down and crushing me in an avalanche. Her hair drapes my face. She moves her head and swishes it back and forth against my cheeks. I can’t say enough about the way she kisses, what she tastes like. I don’t know what respect is, but cheating on my Ma is not respect. He can tell all his little stories but the facts remain what they are. I’m not sure where in that tale he found the dispensation to knock up the pretty waitress at Caruso’s but then again, he never even did know his old man, he wasn’t even born yet, so he must have heard the story second hand and here I am giving it one more step removed from the original. For all that I know, there may very well have been fresh bread on that day.

To his credit, Alvarez Réspito distinguished himself amongst his fellow captives by learning basket weaving from a native woman whose name has been lost forever to the oversight of history.  That being said, his motives for taking up that craft may be called into question by some, for Réspito had not, until then, been known as a noble man, nor was he at all open-minded, nor especially crafty.  It was assumed by his captors that Réspito was building a bridge between himself and the native woman, that when she was in his confidence, she would provide him his liberty.  But the two never spoke.  Silently she passed pine needles and dried strips of reed through the thick wooden bars, and Réspito watched and mimicked her every wrap and twine.  There was no conspiracy in this.

Outside of the small garret were other natives:  men, women and children daily living, taking from the earth, drawing water from the deep, churning river.  Their homes, like the garret, were made of timber and deer hide, and the use of stone and steel to them was little known, except in fairy tales they told their children late at night about their fathers’ fathers who traveled far and arrived home safely, speaking of giant stone monsters that gobbled up villagers after sunset and birthed them anew in the morning, fresh and dry.  These became Réspito’s lullabies, arriving at his ears muffled and distant, as organ music heard from outside a church.

By the end of the first year he had grown accustomed to their dialect—the glottal stops indicative of questions; the reversed and sometimes redoubled syntax; the singsong nature of it all—so that he could have spoken with them unhindered, except that he’d vowed to not speak until his release, the terms of his captivity having not been explained to him and, had they been, Réspito would have found the terms unjust.

And so Réspito resigned himself to muteness and, later, even the pleasure of listening. He soon forgot all language, finding a new tongue in weaving.  In this he discovered the conveyance of pure thought, uncorrupted by the cumbersome contrivance called speech.

Although his captors did not take notice of his woven philosophies; nor of his mathematics writ out in twine and webbing, of numbers conceived and understood by Réspito alone; nor of his Treatise Upon Peace wherein the Greater Brethern appeared as upended bolts of lightning and the Lesser Few as dissembled pebbles, the native woman realized full well that something deep and brave was brewing in him, and her love for Réspito grew.

She learned his language of weaving, not through him, but through her own diligent study, and when she felt she had the grasp of it she wove him a vessel with the encrypted message, “We will go together,” which he received with some consternation, and some ambivalence.

When the woman unlocked Réspito’s cell and gave him his freedom, he spoke for the first time in nearly a decade, and with a shaky “Thank you,” he ceased to be the man he’d become, and again became the man he’d been before, a man of customs and words the woman could not love.  She fled and he followed, realizing too late the love she’d inspired in him.