I.
A QUARTER OF A HUNDRED APOCALYPSES
hands out for a new future
FRESH
After so many people were washed away by the disasters, there was usually someone outside the grocery store with a collection bucket. On a sunny day I biked over, feeling good. I walked around the grocery store, especially the produce islands, feeling pretty good about my choices and my healthy way of life. Nobody is mentioning how the increasing rate of madness is apocalyptic. It’s because we mostly eat corn. There are so many decisions to be made in the grocery, that cold room of consciousness. But tell you the truth, I kept asking for it. I was asking for the apocalypse. I was tired of the way things were going. I was looking forward to fresh everything. With the slate wiped clean, the whole world would be at my beck and call. Anything could be around the corner, I thought, pushing my cart through the grocery air. There was the aisle of condiments. There were the pyramids of newfangled soup. Everything that would have happened in the event could really be a turning point for me.
CAKE
She baked an angel food cake for the dinner party, which means it’s as white as is possible in cake except golden on the outside and you have to cut it with a serrated knife. It’s funny to eat because you can kind of tear it, unlike most cakes. It stretches a little. It’s a little supernatural, like an angel.
I was watching her with her boyfriend because I admire them and am trying to make them an example in my life of good love being possible. Toward the end of the cake everyone was talking and a couple of people were seeing if they could eat the live edible flowers that she’d put on the cake for decoration. A fairy cake. She told a story about making the cake. There wasn’t a lot left. Everyone was eating the ends of their pieces in different ways, and because of the stretchy texture there were more methods than usual, and no crumbs at all.
Really funny cake.
I tried to imagine making the cake, same as I often tried to imagine love. I would never make a cake. So it’s down to, say, less than a quarter of the cake and the boyfriend reaches across the table—it’s a big table that no one else would be able to reach across, he just has really long arms, and he takes the serrated knife, but when he cuts at the cake he doesn’t do the sawing action, he just presses down, which defeats the point of a serrated knife. The cake squishes as he cuts it in half; it was only a piece of itself already, clinging to its imaginary axis, and now it’s not even a wedge—it’s pushed down like you can push down the nose on your face—and then he takes his piece with his hands and I watch the last piece of cake to see if it’ll spring back up but it doesn’t, it’s just squished on one side like someone stepped on it.
But here’s what I don’t understand, is how all through it she’s just chatting with the dinner guests and it’s like he’s done nothing at all. She’s not looking at him like “You squished the cake!” and she’s not looking at him like “He loves the cake so much he couldn’t help himself,” and he doesn’t seem to be thinking “Only I can squish the cake!” Or is he?
I never know how to read people.
But here’s what else: watching the round cake disappear, watching the people trying to make the most of their pieces, people coveting the cake on one hand and reminding themselves on the other that this will not be the last cake. But will it be the last? I look at their love and I feel like this could be the very last piece of it on earth, and just look at it.
All day he filled his eyes with the explosions and the commercials.
For some months nothing would do to eat except bread, any kind, including biscuits, croissants, dinner buns, hoagie rolls, Irish soda, artisan peasant, challah, lavash, pugliese, baguette full, demi, sweet, sour, pita, wonder or whatever-grain, any of a zillion crackers, which sounds like a decent amount to eat except that bread was it, and it was nothing but bread. She tried to find other things to eat.
At night he walked through the fanciest part of the neighborhood: blinds crossing vast windows, enormous foyers, each with one shining, hanging fixture suspended like the only planet in the universe of one house and then another, expanses of plaster, vaulted ceilings, the geometries of staircases, rugs on walls. Automatically his mind unified with want.
She searched her cookbooks and then the last of the phone books, imagining meals. Woe on the sofa, woe on the stairs. She went out and walked around town, reading menus, her pockets heavy with cash.
More flowers, more pottery, better furniture, less dirt, excellent collections of film through history, tailored clothing, quality craftsmanship, the cutting edge, caring so much, the fluffy covers, the beauty, the rich.
She took the train into the city where guys in red jackets or bowties stood in the street outside their restaurants, took her by the elbow, and described the food they could give her.
No wonder these televisions hunched behind louvered cabinet doors, sniffing through the slats, their pissed mouths shut. He walked to get his head out of the war, and the walk worked. Why, why, why? One day he’d been wondering, and then, walking, wanting everything he saw explained it all.
Her head, like someone else’s stomach, filled with meals. She let the ideas of them accumulate in piles before her, multicolored, glistening, weighting her utensils, stopping at her teeth. Then she went home and ate bread, hating it, and hating ending up with one and then another piece of Christ, slice of life, hunk of flesh, daily shut the fuck up about bread. One and then another yeasty day. Bread is like stasis, the least common denominator of food.
Then he was back where he started, in the cul de sac in the cosmos between the news and the body. Next door, his neighbor’s silver rowboat was beached in the cactus garden. It gleamed in the street-lit night, appearing as shards. Like anything else, the thing about an apocalypse is it can’t go on forever, and this is what saves it and saves us in the end.
The earth carried everything else like condiments, like lace, like prefixes and suffixes. Then one day. Then one day. Then one day.
Sure, not everyone, but I mean us in general.
A. MANY
A little man with enormous glasses in a floppy green hat and a blue rain slicker has placed himself on an orange stepladder eye-to-knots with a dormant tree in front of the arched entrance to his mouse-colored house, raising a yellow hacksaw, sizing it up for pruning, which he’s clearly always doing; it’s pared to the shape of a candelabra, bare knuckles, he has made its history. The bones of a cathedral, the inside of a whale, architectures of bodies, buildings, heavens enclosing earth, some god on a stepladder, composing, friendly, the sky one density of gray, his froggy, neighborly smile among colors, as if nothing else in the world matters.
B. HALF
Or a drawing I remember from an exhibit of the works of madmen: the pencil lines of half a city, one line for the sidewalk extending horizontally, like a sidewalk or a plank from the truncated SkYlInE ______________, a line moving rightward into the blank page, like time.
THREAT
For years, a telephone pole leaned, a fear at the back of the neighborhood. That evening they went home and poured several very even trays of ice cubes. I was dressed for the apocalypse. I was depressed for the apocalypse. I carried a bundle of dust like a nest. My heart beat in its fleshy pocket. Girls sketched one another in an auditorium. Worms had tried to make it across our porch overnight and now they lay like something shredded, like shredded bark, but deader. My friends, looking ashen, kept waiting for the telephone. An iris wilted into a claw. A bathtub sunk in our vast yard. New birds gathered like, I don’t know, a lack of entropy?
PUPPET
When she speaks to me in the voice of her dog, do I answer the dog? A guy who worked with me at the store was trying to make it as a puppeteer. We had a party at his house for our manager, Linda, who was leaving, and she brought two white terriers with her for beer and cake. We gathered as if for a group photo, facing the empty sofa. Eric got out his puppets and crouched behind it. These were hand-puppets in the shapes of a donkey and a fish. Then the donkey and the fish came up from behind it. Eric was a good puppeteer, and the donkey and fish were funny, but what was funniest was Linda’s puppet-sized dogs, who sat in the front row and were completely taken in by the magic. They followed with their heads like in tennis. You could see how excited they were to find out what would happen next. After all, I want to know what will happen next. I want to know what will happen if I look at you while you’re talking as if you are your dog and talk back to you as if I’m—I don’t know, what could I talk to you like? Anything?
She really needed some time off work so she took maternity leave, but the baby was so much work it was like she wasn’t getting any time off at all, so she killed the baby (hold on, hold on…) and that gave her time off for grieving, a whole other hell of work plus the guilt, and by the time she started to recover she had to go back to work, but pretty soon the future seemed so stupid she started wanting a baby again. When she looked into her options, one that apparently a zillion people had chosen and she hadn’t even known about was a move to the trash-heaps of Navarro. That put things in perspective. No, she thought, my options are way more limited than that, thank the good lord above. She felt her back against the warm wall of her office. She felt her cells battling it out below-deck. She ate a stale pastry. She had one more idea. It was like an egg in her brain waiting to go off.
JULY FOURTH
Got there and the ground was covered with bodies. Lay down with everyone and looked at the sky, bracing for the explosions.
QUESTIONS IN SIGNIFICANTLY SMALLER FONT
I have some questions I would like to pose regarding the End Times. Why disguise angels as aliens? Is the pope the Antichrist? Is date setting okay? Who are the 144,000? Is the millennium literal or figurative? Is the United States of America in Bible prophesy? Does End Time render stewardship of the Earth irrelevant? Will there be a partial Rapture? Will the Lord provide until Jesus returns? What is the marriage supper of the Lamb? Does what’s happening in Israel today mean the End Times are quickly approaching? What is the abomination of desolation? What about the weather? Which time zone is the real time zone? What about the economy and capitalism in general? Is the Devil working overtime? What are tribulation saints? Can the Mark of the Beast be accepted by mistake? Who came up with the EU? What is a red heifer? How long is a generation? Can you lose your eternal rewards? How do we know the Tribulation will last seven years? I am afraid of the end of the world and yet I long for it. Why? What will the apocalypse mean for narrative? What will it mean for Haiti, I mean now? Boy, you know, I have some more questions. Is there a Palestinian people? When will God invade? If Jesus is God, why was He unable to do certain things while on Earth? Was He nailed through His palm or His wrist? Are there different kinds of speaking in tongues? À la languages? Explain about parables and why couldn’t He just say what He meant? Did tombs break open and dead people walk the Earth? I am unmarried and thirty. Why? Is having money a bad thing? When does Daylight Savings Time begin and end? Is it possible to win the War on Terror? Are horoscopes real? What is the difference between white and black magic? Is genetic research okay? What is dispensationalism? Can I get a tattoo and does content matter? Should I store up food? Is it possible to be free of racial tension? How can I pray for this nation when there seems to be no hope? Why do my prayers go unanswered? Would it be okay to get in touch with my deceased family members? Could you see Heaven if you got close enough? Should my family become involved in Halloween and get a Christmas tree? Is there free will in Heaven? Are there gifts for the spirit today? I just want to end it all. What should I do? I mean, why? Will the Rapture happen this year? What is a Bar Mitzvah? Could a cloned human being be saved? Are powerful people secretly desperate? What is eternal life? If what matters is what’s deep inside, how can I go to Heaven? Are names erased from the Book of Life? One time I had a dream about killing a black person. I’m not black. Does that mean I’m racist? How can I overcome health-related discouragement? What can I do to stop worrying? Do you have to be psychotic to make meaningful change in the world? And for a follow-up, is that what psychosis is for? Should we pluck out our eyes? I keep making mistakes. How can I stop? I mean, why? How do you plan to maintain this site after the Rapture? Do you have any fliers or pamphlets you could send me? Why won’t you answer my e-mail? (http://www.raptureready.com/faq/rap23.html)
She chose, for the apocalypse, the Only Jeans That Truly Fit™. She stood on the bluff, on the highest of many mesas, one black boot raised on a boulder, leaning into her knee, squinting far beneath her sunglasses. The city looked like a cluster of crystals rising from the desert. In the background, her motorcycle pawed at the earth and revved its nostrils. From this vantage she watched the apocalypse coming, filling the desert with roiling black soot so fast it seemed always to have been there, gnarled, burled, paisley, churning, eddying, smoking, and soon the soot enveloped the city like a tsunami and surged around the mesas until all but her mesa were submerged, and the black clouds thrashed against the bluff and wallowed at her ankles. She felt her heart swell and then shrink beneath her tiny t-shirt. She turned on her heel to mount the steel steed, her body raw-er than ever and entirely less fleshy. She could see in the round silver ant-body-part part of the motorcycle how hard, how set, how hot, and how cold her face and eyes were now. She rode her motorcycle around the plateau. She began to take on the world by riding around the plateau feeling really powerful, gazing into the consistent distance until a trench formed beneath her tires. By the time she noticed, she couldn’t hop the bike out. She dismounted and tried push it but her muscles must have been the kind you get at the gym that never work in real life. She longed for an actual steed, or to be an ant. And so she rode on, not knowing what else to do. Even now the trench walls rise.
One of the difficult parts of the evening was standing in their birch-paneled great-room, windows over a cliff black with night. Besides the expense, the expanse, there was the man’s penis from long ago, before he was married to this hostess in white.
She knew it curled in his herringbone trousers. The penis, keeper of her promiscuous past and container of the futures of many possible people.
It had been longer than usual.
It had been formative, lying near him and thinking about what an ass she was because he smelled to her like spoiled milk. The hostess had such strong brown arms.
It’s difficult to think about futures without making a joke about money.
Above the long, smooth, knotty pine table (it’s hard to think of knotty without the memory of deviant behavior; it’s hard to think of pine without nostalgia) hung a painting of a woman as a landscape, like the very landscape visible from the great window it faced during the day, but not visible now, because it was night. It is possible the hostess painted it. Across a field of floor another couple lounged closely on a couch, the man so in place in this house, in his body, near this woman’s bosom, that he was happily nodding off. The woman-as-landscape doesn’t seem to be a painting of anyone; it seems to be a painting of the history of walking around on ladies. She viewed the painting as she’d viewed the room and the past before it.
Now she is on the other side of the glass with us, her feet over picturesque nothing. There are no current explosions. Someone’s cooking in the kitchen. Someone’s nodding on the couch. It’s their house, it’s their chasm, it’s the view from their bodies.
These people in the photo of the war and their babies look like dirt and rags in dirt. All fell, but especially the babies, who fell into the earth the way they had always fallen into shoulders, into sleep, with small, complete weight. You understand that the bodies are dead because of angles elucidated by the photograph. You are not convinced that the stillness is not the stillness of a photograph. As the photo suggests, you conflate what is rag, what is dirt, what is body. You put yourself in there, even in babies, and you know the angles your body can’t do, even with yoga. The other reason you know they’re dead is it says as much on a little card next to the photograph. You have come to an exhibit of photographs that has been praised for breathing. The reviewer stopped short of announcing that the pictures make the war come to life. He’d composed the review after visiting an ex-lover in the hospital, a sculptor who “remained in a vegetative state.” In the hospital, he tried to concentrate on the sheet veiling her and not the memory of her body. She had been a sculptor on her way to revitalizing classicism. They lived in an apartment with her resin figures. He had been a photographer losing faith in his own artistic promise. Her stillness was hard to take. He remembered the camera he loved, a Nikon he’d saved up for in 1965 and still brought out sometimes, usually alone in his apartment, usually after several drinks. Once he’d found a mysterious roll of film among the pieces of fruit in the bowl on his countertop and had it developed. On it, objects in his life had been rendered monumental. He had not had children. He had not gone to war. He had not made good art, but when he looked at the photograph of his kettle he found it difficult to breathe.
At the brain stem, madness hunkered like a bomb the size of a baby’s fist. It was not a stone, as our ancestors believed, because a stone remains stone. The bomb is scientific. Madness is mostly dis-integration. The little fist is a little baby’s fist, but if the baby wiggles its fingers you’re done for. Anything can happen to set the baby off. You can get raped, take drugs, or fall out with your mother. You can think a bad thought or a magic word. A baby can grow into all kinds of baby. You can go on with your life with the baby living in, off, or on your body. Madness is some of your eggs that you could ovulate now or never. Madness dams the river in your dick, hair over time in a drain. I know in the end it’s not like you are one thing and madness is another. It is a sleeping fist of your own stone bomb dick dam babies.
VIRGINS
Never mind, this is what happened to Betsy. It’s what they say. She grew a tail. They ripped it from her. It divided her butt. I’m kidding. But you know how you can tell when a girl loses her virginity is you look at her ass: if it’s clenched up she’s fine, but if it’s got a space—like if you look at her ass you can tell because obviously there’s room now—seriously, pay attention when you go by.
Posters rose around the neighborhood describing a lost pigeon, which you might recognize because it might land on you. So meanwhile I’ve been hanging out with this very sexy girl Maggie who always wants to be with me but doesn’t want to date me. She’s recently lost-then-found her giant cat Hank, who’s a typical tom that way. Then she went to Spain and people in her building were taking care of the cat, who is allowed to go in and out of the window. Back from Spain, there were posters around for another lost cat, and the owners called her house and tried to convince her that Hank was actually their cat, the new lost one. Maggie won by saying Hank was at least 30 percent bigger than their cat. I don’t know if she knew their cat, or if it was an educated guess based on how big Hank truly is. “People appreciate data,” she said to me. I was holding a towel in front of her so she could change at the lake. Naturally I’d been sort of trying to tamp down my crush and sort of trying to let it do what it wants. So then later that day when we got back from the lake and I dropped her off and was at my house getting ready to take myself to the movies, I heard scuffling on my roof and went outside to look. There was a giant white pigeon like a foot above me on my stoop’s overhang thing, huge for a pigeon, with a pink beak and giant pink feet. It took off in a rush and a feather fell from it. I don’t know what percent bigger. Then I went to the movies, not putting anything together. When I got home my landladies were sitting in the dark garden. I joined them for a nightcap and they told me about seeing this white bird in the yard. “I saw it too!” I said. That made me remember the poster for the pigeon. I felt worried that someone had been missing their tame bird all this time and I’d just gone to the movies, and I felt like I’d forgotten because I was getting all the posters mixed up with my stupid feelings for Maggie in some way. So the next day I walked all over the neighborhood until I found a poster, and then I called the number. It was a weird guy. There’s a certain kind of weird guy in this town and they have a certain kind of voice, sort of lonely and sort of self-righteous. A kind of guy into ham radio. He said the poster was about a gray pigeon, not a white one with pink feet like the one I saw, but that he’d actually lost a white one, too, a while before that. He didn’t sound at all freaked out, or relieved, or anything, and that started to make me mad.
Next day I was biking over to Maggie’s and we were going to have brunch at a place that used to be a bank. There were leaves everywhere in the streets. I was thinking about the structure of many leaves coming from one tree. Then how they all fell away but there was still that one tree. I thought about money, about bicycling through money swirling around in the street surrounded by bald trees as if the money had come from the trees even though of course not. This is the way I use my brain. There in the street was a weird guy, and some distance away, maybe a house-worth of distance, there was a giant pigeon, and the guy was trying to coax it toward him. It was a black pigeon with red rims on its face. I didn’t want to bicycle through them in this delicate moment so I pulled over. I watched the man and the pigeon move in relation to each other like backward magnets. A cat that looked a lot like Hank sat on a porch and was definitely watching, too. I tried to think of what percentage like Hank that cat was. Then I tried to think of what percentage like Hank the rest of us were, living on this Earth. No cars were coming. I realized there was no way the man would know I was the person who’d called him, if he was the man I’d called. So I said, “Hey! I’ve gotta get through here, okay?” I said it the way I’ve seen people with Hummers say that to people like construction workers, or anyone really. It’s amazing how urgent something like brunch can feel. But the weird guy didn’t look up from the pigeon. I could have just gone right ahead through them, but something made me not do that, even though the guy was on another planet. He was on another planet in some kind of system that was beyond me, something where he was in a network with a series of birds, white, gray, black, and maybe with a whole separate weird guy on the phone interacting in a series of patterns. They’d tacked up these flyers onto trees, and some of the flyers were crumbling onto the streets. I let the man keep staring at the bird and then I looked at the cat watching them, too, like me. I backed up and went around the block. When I got to Maggie’s she was freaking out because she couldn’t find Hank. She was afraid her neighbors might be harboring him. I said maybe he was just out chasing tail, and she threw a pillow at me. Then she went to make a phone call. I picked up the pillow and held it in front of me by two of its corners, the way I’d held up a towel a day ago. For a second I thought about the posters around town and let go of one of the corners. That’s the opposite of a nail, if you think about it. Maggie and I are the same height, and we have basically the same haircut. We both wear glasses part-time and contacts part-time, but I really couldn’t tell you if it’s the same amounts. There could be so many more things to aim my feelings at, and sometimes I think the right thing is hovering just above my left ear. But it’s like every time I move, whatever the right thing is moves in exact relation to me. It makes me really want to get out of here, this whole brainspace, this country, whatever made me the version of myself that I am.
PHONE
This boy on the phone on the porch across the courtyard in springtime lets his voice move, light as a leaf in a river: “It’s like I’m only me when I’m around you.” He’s twirling a piece of grass between his thumb and forefinger, watching its head swivel. He’s saying, “Don’t tell anyone.”
Dim through the walls behind him his friends are playing guitars with their amplifiers unplugged. They all have girlfriends somewhere, too. When the earth shakes and the dust of the world bounds across the lawn, when the posts that hold the porch roof snap, he feels no more misty and no less certain than he had the moment before. He says “I love you” into the phone and believes it exactly the same as he believed it before. The girl on the phone, who always feared he might not love her and never wondered if she loved him or not, feels the earth turning to powder as he says the words and thinks, This must mean he really loves me, and in the next instant thinks, It doesn’t count! and by the next instant the end of the world has already happened. The telephone and an amplifier dot hillsides on opposite ends of the universe. The boy’s eyelashes spin like a blown dandelion. The girl’s fingernails sparkle in shards.
REAL ITALIANS
In all of the dreams it was an ornate bar and she had to walk by dozens of rich people, some of whom she knew to be his daughters by the way they looked like Sofia Coppola was going to look once everyone knew about her. They might leap up at any moment and kick her out for being a minor. When she’d get to him it was obvious that his Cadillac lay, like a chocolate bar, in the street outside, with its same car phone hanging up between the front seats and its cord, like all the phones’ cords back then, dreamily flopping between the seats, him calling from it, still not impressing her, even as she left the bar full of his daughters and got into it all over again.
But in the bar, where they never were in real life, she remembers talking about the apocalypse: he asked her what she’d wear, “What would you wear the last night on earth?” and she said, “I don’t have anything good,” and he starts listing clothes he likes. She can’t tell if he thinks she has these clothes, or if he’s just listing ideas, but every outfit he says she can see hanging, ready for anything. What’s important is how one person’s fantasies can start taking over another’s.
He keeps talking about his plans with Robert De Niro, who he heard is looking for real Italians. She keeps trying to remember an obvious song by Blondie. He did turn out to be a minor henchman in a bunch of shows since then. She got a clip from one where he gets offed by getting shot and falling from a pier into the water. She put it where she can click it on her desktop, so in some dreams he falls back over and over with his hand reaching for that brass rail and she’s yelling at him: “But you’re only a minor dealer! I’m the one with the future!” She does remember when she first saw him on TV, though, and what’s killing her—and this might be what connects the forms the dreams about him take—is that she really was impressed, as if he’d made it.
VIBRISSAE
I loved her, but the day before the storm she kept coming into my room and looking at me. She knows what gets on my nerves. That, along with her cats, my dog, everyone. The plants down the street, the bundles of garbage that float by our windows and roll along the sidewalks, snowballing like human souls. This is why we lived twitching, as if we’d ever sense what could help us.
She draws her bath, blue with salts, and from the bedroom, we, the ghost of everyone who loved her, feel its terrible fumes. We watch, squirming among the folds of the comforter, ghost like smoke, like the coils of a brain, like fleshy roots pale from never having seen sun, massed and white—ghosts are always pale, significantly blanched. She covers her limbs with soap; she stands to do it, lathering every port and gulley. How can she rinse in such blue water? And then how can it be so invisible against her skin when the smells roll under the door and surf the hallway? When she comes out and it’s clear from her face that she knows we’re here, she challenges us, with her silence, to say something. But we have no mouths and she knows it, so what sort of challenge is that? She’s wearing nothing but her towel turban. She’s pale and strong, but not yet dead. Her eyelashes are dark because they’re still wet. She puts her palm flat on her dressing table and leans hard, toward the mirror. We have no weight, and we are afraid of mirrors, which are our equals in transparency. This mirror is oval and swivels on mahogany pegs, as all good mirrors should. She drinks from a small glass of scotch and doesn’t bother about the ring it leaves. It’s not our business anymore, what she does to the furniture. We want to shoot her. Sure, with a gun, shoot her full of holes so blue salty worms can crawl in and consume her from the inside out. She takes a tiny brush from a tiny drawer and uses it on her eyebrows. We scurry around her ankles, catching the last of the wet heat. Then there’s no more wet heat, only some droplets jiggling on her calves. We squirm and wait for the clothes to come out. Then they do. We want to pounce but we wait through all the possible outfits, and finally of all t-shirts and jeans she has chosen the right ones.
We cling best to cotton. We grin with our whole body. She’ll feel wisps of us all night, fingers in her ears, peripheral ticks in the atmosphere. But sooner or later she’ll strip, and there’ll be nothing we can do but hunch in a wad in the corner as she coils around this new person who fucks and fucks, making the sounds of life. But we don’t stop grinning yet.
SESAME
Two lovers stood at the door to Aladdin’s cave. They’d been at it forever. They each believed they were still in love, if only they could think of the right thing to say. They remembered magic words from childhood. But this was an apocalypse, so no such luck. They stood at the door to the cave, admiring a door that fits a cave. One of them thought about man and nature. One of them took her clothes off and struck a pose, shivering. An old lady came hobbling along in a cloak with a basket and offered them a million dollars from it if they’d do it right there in front of her. They did it and she gave them the million dollars, and they pushed it through the mail slot but the door still didn’t open. They were going to run their fingers through heaps of coins and put golden vessels over their heads like helmets, for fun. They wouldn’t come out of the cave, and they wouldn’t let anyone in, either, no matter what anyone said or what was shoved through the mail slot. Then another old lady came along in a cloak with a basket. “What’s in your basket?” they asked. The old woman said “Bread,” and suddenly the lovers were so hungry they offered to do it right there in front of her if she’d give them the bread, but the woman just rolled her eyes and hobbled off, muttering about the arrogance of young people.
In the front lobby in the middle of everything was a choice of two restaurants: Buddy’s or Chang’s.
In my room, number thirty thousand and something, I turned off the television because I heard a violin. The whole point of a violin is to kill you emotionally. I listened, and then I slipped into the pink and yellow hall and followed its glowing geometry in space. The communal jetlag of so many hidden people puffed weakly from under doors like in Batman when someone floods a room with poison-gas.
The violin made me, in the hotel, odd, beautiful, alien and heart-filled. The violin was practicing, and it had no irony, a beyond-world-class violin, finer than the Met or whatever you like, stopping and starting anywhere in any number of pieces. The violin in the pieces was like me in the hotel. The hotel was as pink, yellow, and winding as intestines, as my own shining unspilled guts.
I like the test at the eye doctor’s where you put your head in a white globe with a cross made of black pinholes and press a button with your thumb when you see a white light in your peripheral vision. After a few minutes your thumb no longer feels like your own. The response between the light and your thumb gets automatic.
A game I play with lovers who let me is I close my eyes, and then I like them to touch me with one finger here and then there, just so I don’t know some things, but not so I don’t know anything. Like any reasonable apocalypse, pulsing with intimacy and the anonymous. I like the long hall of doors and the garish light and my ear near the cool wall covering. Any moment any door might open and any person might appear in front of a bed around any corner, my heart beating as it beat when I was a child hidden for hide and seek, although here I am exposed and still secret, just like naked. I slide to the carpet in the hall because I want to be stiller than I can be teetering on two feet, and I kneel on the way to prostration with my ear to the wall in the face of danger.
Hide and Seek: Dark
Hallway with Violin: Pink & Yellow
Hide and Seek: Hidden
Hallway with Violin: Exposed
Hide and Seek: People searching
Hallway with Violin: Accidental “discovery” possible
Hide and Seek: Among children I am afraid don’t love me
Hallway with Violin: Anonymous
Hide and Seek: Sound of children (pretty annoying)
Hallway with Violin: Violin (my favorite)
Hide and Seek: Round shape of hilly neighborhood
Hallway with Violin: Elbow angles of hotel in space
Hide and Seek: Not doing anything wrong
Hallway with Violin: Eavesdropping &/or masturbating
Hide and Seek: Fantasy of quick terror of being found; slow realistic agony of not being found, this being what? Winning? Because on this planet the goal is to be alone forever? But instead of everyone calling “You win! Come out! We can’t bear it without you!” they forget what they were looking for and roast marshmallows on a hundred spits.
Hallway with Violin: Fantasy of I go to the concierge and the concierge agrees to pass my secret message to the violinist. The concierge and I agree with our eyes that there is a famous violinist in the hotel but with our voices we agree that it must be a very talented amateur no one in the hotel would want to ambush. Then the violinist crosses to my room in the night in some black gown. She is Chinese because I dug tunnels to there throughout childhood, and I am still me. She is melancholic. Suddenly, she explains some of the things she has to say via the violin which everyone knows is the body. Suddenly, we drink something fizzy that will almost kill you but then not, and watch some television, lying on the bed on our stomachs like twins but I’m blond. I never know what I’m wearing. I’m usually invisible. I’m my eyes and voice, my elbows on the bedspread, my hands circling my glass like they’ve come to life around the waist of a doll. We turn off the television. The space that surrounds the hotel swoops into the room. The room is filled with stars. The stars are the jetlagged people of the world shoved beyond orbit. Everything is inside out, we’ve turned the corner at the far end of the big bang, I mean the hotel, I mean the tunnels through my brain, I mean my body, I guess it has to be my body, and we are returning to the center of everything, with the best view not to mention the soundtrack I always wanted to tell me how to feel and what to do.
ADOGALYPSE
After the apocalypse, she missed her dog. One thing she thought about the apocalypse was you’re supposed to have a dog. She’d take a zombie dog, if only so she’d get to kill it cathartically and as a symbol of all she’d lost, including her real dog who died a week before the apocalypse in the backseat of her car while they were driving to the vet. She heard his organs contract and then release forever. She heard his death rattle, the only one she’d ever heard, then and now, because the apocalypse was a loud one and you’d think you’d hear death rattles like echoes for days but the boom lasted long enough that when it stopped all she heard was the memory of her own dog’s natural death. She wasn’t able to pull over. It was night, the road was twisty, and she was not letting herself believe this was it. She’d kept driving, telling him it was okay. “Okay, baby. Good boy. It’s gonna be okay.” Now she knew from experience, because here on the other side of the apocalypse she was supposedly okay, too.
COUCH
I take my brother to his psychiatrist. We were up late, don’t ask. We’re pretty fried. Waiting room has a couch, two cushy armchairs, a coffee table, end tables with magazines, and a few toys for kids. It appears both abandoned and armed. No one there but a receptionist behind glass.
My brother goes in. I lie on the couch.
He’s in there with his psychiatrist. He’s talking about his problems, some probably involve me. I go into a grateful doze.
Lady comes out from behind glass and says, “Will you sit up, please?” I can hear in her voice that it’s been building.
Is it my feet? My feet are not on the couch, I was careful about that. She says, “You’re disturbing clients.”
“No one’s here,” I say.
She says there won’t be room when they come.
“I’ll get up if they come,” I say, but there’s no use, I’ve already lost. I pick out one thing from many options relating to her appearance to scoff at silently. I draw a parallel between two kinds of one-sided conversations. Then I think of a couple more. I picture my brother in the next room trying to come up with the truth. I picture all the people in our lives piling up in the room with him and his psychiatrist. People with real problems. If I said one more thing the lady would invoke policy. So I sit up. Do we feel better now?
MATH
I was talking, at a party, with a man about Lolita. He seemed surprised that we both liked it. I told him it was a very well-liked book. He was being really flirty. First when we met at the party he just looked at me, and then as soon as I said something he said, “You’re witty!” He reminded me of someone and I was trying to think of who it was. I figured out that he looked like a friend of mine—a writer who’s written a book about Lolita, and also some novels. I told him. Now he said, “Is your friend a good writer?” Well, he’s well liked.
I thought of this other writer I know, who looks like a famous actor—everyone says so, and he’s even written about it. He was the teacher of another writer friend of mine. I was at her place the other day and met her ex-husband, and you know who he looks like? That famous actor, and consequently also that writer who looks like him, my friend’s teacher. I mentioned this to them and neither one had ever noticed that he looked like anyone, but they agreed completely, so I’m not making it up.
In light of all this, it’s interesting to me that when we read a book we don’t look like anyone. And also, something I thought about during both Lolita movies: how important it is, in the book, that we don’t see her except in our imagination, because if we saw her she’d be just a kid and we’d freak out. I thought about that music video with sexy Liv Tyler and her father lusting over her as if we don’t know he’s her father. But maybe the goal is we do know he’s her father. So what about the guy at the party? God, I hardly remember him, except he was a math genius. But I remember hoping all the time we were talking that he could quickly explain math to me, suddenly, in an ejaculate burst, in a way that I’d really get it, all the parts of math that I always longed for, that I knew were on the other side of all the math I couldn’t bear, and because of this I have the same lingering sense of loss that I might have had if we’d slept together, or been married once for several years, a long time ago.
DINOSAUR
A dinosaur lay under a rainbow in a white sunset on shining hills. The girl, a sample girl, a remnant, reached for the imaginary hand of the ghost. The ghost had been trailing her across state after state, holding his basket, ever since the apocalypse. In the basket, tiny ghosts of prairie dogs and butterflies, mongeese and baby foxes, wobbled, nested, nuzzling in their contained afterlife. The vast exposed land, its lid lifted, its whole history layered under the grass, now history—girl, dinosaur, ghost, basket—teetering on the deserted road in the light air. The dinosaur’s anchor-shaped nose brushed the grass tips at its knees. Plateaus of clouds seemed still. The hand of the ghost was not a hand, it was the memory of hands, or now, since the apocalypse, the idea that a hand could come. She missed a horse she’d known as a child. Purple flowers massed and then spread thinly over the field. Yellow flowers made a wave near the road. She remembered how many people must have used to have been about to awaken each moment. With so little left after the silent blast that razed so much and left so much as well—too much to take in, to count, witness, know, hunt, cover, recall—she didn’t know what to do with her still-empty hand full as it was to be, if she could reach it, with that much ghost. The dinosaur looked heavy, the rainbow looked light, and the hills could have been covered in snow, or nothing, or something that had never existed before.