III.
THROUGH TO THREE QUARTERS OF A HUNDRED APOCALYPSES
implosion, the crumpling of paper
THE OTHER WAY AROUND
We came at last to the wackily fantastic land of opposites. We’d read this one in childhood. Candy tasted terrible and we all wanted liver with onions. Water got us drunk and we could only breathe when we were under it. Right was wrong, so we were very popular. Our mouths swapped spots with our assholes. Our belly buttons turned outward (except for George’s) and our vaginas, well, you had to be there. The birds under our feet annoyed us with their philosophies. It was the end of all we’d known, and our hopes sank.
A lot of things are happening around the world, and happening in patterns that if you read a book, the book will point out to you, chapter by chapter, the exact way the patterns are happening here, here, and here. You can feel like you’re learning something for a while but then as soon as you catch on, you think, If I keep reading this book is it just going to be more examples? Then as the book is rising and falling on your belly you see the light from the window, leafy dapples, so pretty. You feel a little lonely but then you remember that reading feeling of being on to something, those early pages. You pick it back up but now the book takes a turn for a paragraph into a sort of rhetoric that pisses you off, and that seems to give rise to another sort of tension connected to loneliness because you’re afraid you might abandon the book for good and all your hopes for what it might have given you—and that just makes you masturbate.
The efficient orgasm is the most productive moment of the day, because, apocalyptically, it has wiped the slate clean, and no one will ever know about it. What are you going to do now? Most of the time you could go back to reading. Some of the time you fantasize about a ragtag group of strangers thrown together by circumstance who go on a quest for some orgasm big enough to leave them wanting something different than they wanted before.
Like what? Gross food? Ugly stuff? Feeling like crap? Not understanding anything?
All you do is lie in bed with no underwear, trying to think of something better and better. In your next fantasy you are lying in moist dirt and leaves, in exactly the same position. In your next fantasy you are lying in hot sand, but no book. In your next fantasy, an old standby, you are running, you have a flag on a stick that means something, you are faster than all the animals, everything is burning in your wake, you’re truly awake, the flames are taking on the shapes of everyone you’ve ever heard of in a herd behind you. They are overtaking you. In a last gasp you’re engulfed. It’s the kind of thing that leaves real people scarred for life.
HANGINGS
Already this year he had inherited the clothes of two famous dead people. At least one had killed himself, and he knew both tertiarily. This current one, a third, was his wife’s mentor, and he and his wife had gone to visit the widow where she’d holed up in a house by the sea. In evening light, the dead mentor’s wife looked at his wife across the broad planks of the table, in a room filled with rugs and masks from around the world.
He was walking around looking at the masks while the women were talking quietly when he heard the woman say something to his wife about his “frame.” He thought about picture frames—was his body a frame, or was his body in a frame (skin as frame?); was his skeleton his frame, and what’s that all about, inner beauty, what you hang it on? There was framed art in other rooms of the house, but in this room it was just the masks. He thought about his face: his brain behind his face thinking about his face. He was not good with people the way his wife was, but he was just as smart. There were a lot of good places to hang yourself in this house, though he knew it had happened at the place in the city.
“At least have him try the suits,” the wife of his wife’s mentor was saying. “They’re here, in the closet upstairs.” Hanging, everyone thought. “I have someone for the sweaters,” she said. He thought of himself in the dead man’s sweaters, perhaps six of them one over another, gray and brown, bulging, soundproofing his chest. He had the sweaters of another famous man already, buried in a closet in the hall at home.
The man who’d been promised the sweaters had been there for brunch. Now he stood in the hedges watching the women talk and the man poke his finger into the eye of a mask and touch the wall behind it. The man in the hedges had been in the same cohort as the wife. They’d been rivals for the mentor’s attention and occasional lovers, and the dead mentor had used them to challenge each other. The dead mentor had often been unfaithful to his wife. The mentor’s wife had been unfaithful to him only once, years before her husband even started up with his conduct, and this had been with the man in the hedges. At lunch, the man in the hedges had said, “All I want are his sweaters. I loved him too, you know. Not like you, but he was a very important figure in my life.” The word figure hung in the room, under the broad rough roof beams. A breeze came up the dunes, through the hedges and the window, and sketched squiggly lines around their heads. She thought about the word figure, about her body, what it could possibly mean to reason with it, with the body, once and for all. Only after he’d hung himself did so many people he’d fucked come out of the woodwork. Men, women, old people, young people. Loved, too, she suspected, some of them. Her husband had had a lot of meaning, she kept being reminded. She’d told the man in the hedges, as she put marmalade onto a muffin she was not going to eat, that she’d think about the sweaters or if there might be a better choice for him. “A special book?” she suggested. “A piece of art? Something small?” The man said that back in the day you could smoke, and the mentor had worn his sweaters and smoked all through class, letting butts pile up on the floor by his chair in the seminar room, so involved with what his students were thinking that it never crossed his mind to use the ashtray that sat on the table next to the case for his glasses. “That’s what it’s all about, in the end,” he’d said to the wife. “What we’ve done to each other up here.” He tapped the side of his head, tap, tap, as if it were fruit. The wife couldn’t help it: “Figures,” she said. She’d be glad for him to take the sweaters.
The women faced each other across the broad plank table. The man in the hedges watched them through the window, comparing the women’s bodies to each other, and his own body to the body of the other man, who took a mask off the wall and put it over his face and scanned the room through its eyes. The women looked deeper and deeper into each other’s eyes. They both started to well up with emotion. They reached their hands across the table to each other. One of them sniffed, to shake the feeling. The other one said, “Where were we?” Then the man in the mask saw the man in the window and yelped. He dropped the mask and it bounced once and then wobbled like a coin, but when he shot his eyes back to the window, he didn’t see anything except the hedge, the reflection of the globe of a lamp, the moon above, and the dunes beyond it. He’d almost forgotten they were by the sea. He looked down at the mask and thought it must have made him see something that hadn’t really been there. Hang it all, he thought. He’d never met the dead man, but he felt a longing for him when he looked at those women so deep in each other’s eyes, so filled with longing. It made him want, very much, to have the suits or anything else the dead man had left to offer. He looked forward to wearing them as any other clothes are worn, into the future, time doing its quiet business along the seams.
THIEF
A thief crawled in through my window and took a bunch of my stuff, but I wasn’t alarmed, because he looked so familiar with all his fingers, the dark outfit, the apocalyptic two-by-two of his limbs, eyes, nostrils, the all-over symmetry of his presentation, one foot in front of the other like a good soldier. The thief was like everyone I’ve ever met (except Billy, because of the accident on top of the genetic condition.)
Now my friends want me to question my empty house, but I recognize it as mine as well as when it was full of all that stuff I brought in from other places, like where I shopped, and when I got presents for my birthday.
Besides, I owe, I know. How much do you have to change before you are no longer yourself? You can change everything, and you will never get away.
You know what I did? I offered the thief a whiskey. The thief drank whiskey with me in the night. We stood on the balcony and watched my neighbors’ cats walk along fences. We watched shadows move all by themselves. “Look,” he said. “It’s practically us.” I couldn’t see where he was pointing, but surely he was right. He let the sack slip and it spilled open with relief. We looked at each other among my shimmering things, and merged.
PARABLE IN TRANSATLANTIC
I was in a play. Sharing a role was part of the concept. We knew only that much at casting.
We’d had the script for a week, but as usual I had not even started to memorize my lines even though I kept studying them. The other actress cast as me already knew them cold, was already making choices. I was there for rehearsal along with a spotty crowd. Who are these people already? During a break, standing in the audience, I had a face-to-face with the director.
“It’s our first rehearsal,” I said. “I think it’s really unfair to let the public watch when the cast hasn’t even had a read-through.” The director said no one else seemed to mind. I suspected a hidden-camera-documentary aspect.
I put on my transatlantic and said, “But you know as well as I, first reads are intimate.” The other actress was up there on the wooden planks of the stage, a redhead with a nothing-fancy mode of expression, and she was playing around with one of our monologues like I wasn’t there, mouthing and gesturing absently with her styrofoam coffee cup, a napkin stuffed in it, poking out over the lip. I was worried about sharing this role with her, because I could tell I was wearing my mother’s face. The director was gazing into his own consciousness, maybe or maybe not in regard to the point I was trying to make. On impulse I said to him, “Does this face make me look old? Does it make me too old for this part?” Now he swung around to me like I was crossing a line, so I said, “Come on, I thought we were doing theater here.” He looked like someone famous, but I was actually more famous than he, in our circle. Now I was even thinking in transatlantic. He clapped his hands and everyone on the stage stopped what they were doing and turned to face the rest of us. Some of them were in the audience by this point, and some of the audience was wandering around on the stage. Everyone was in street clothes, and about half of us had the same cups.
“In this story,” the director said, and everyone leaned in, “in addition to what you know already, we are all going to play each other’s parts. We are all going to play each other as if we were each other, and we are going to play each other as if we were each other’s parts. If you are still worried about being someone else too much, this will be a challenge for you. I want you all to keep in mind what I’m saying, but don’t let it show. I want you to keep your own face, because we’ll be working as a group.” Suddenly the nothing-fancy redheaded girl was one of many, and everyone in the cast was trying to look at everyone else at once. I was trying so hard I could feel my brain through my face. I wanted to do what he was asking. I was really inspired at the time. You remember what that’s like, don’t you? Not feeling in public at all? We forgot about them entirely, even though they were mixed up with us; we just went for it. And all through the process I really tried to ditch my hang-ups the more we all got into the piece and into each other. But I kind of suspect the show sucked. My mother came, and she’s not one to mince words. In fact, she came with my ex because they’re still friends, in fact sometimes I think they might be more than friends, whatever that is, and people should be with the people that work for them I guess. It’s about timing. There might have been a time when the people I love could watch me in a show like that, but I probably would have been too involved with them to do a good job. Now I think I did a good job, being and not being myself and others in a group. But I sure don’t know how anyone else felt about it.
WAYS OF LEARNING
Deeper in history than anyone knew, furrowed in a grayed-out landscape, bees lined up, humming, along the branches of a cluster of trees, and as their noise and their wings began to make the leaves tingle, the sun moved along the other side of the earth, which operated as a hunk between the scene and the sun. The longer they hummed, the more they seemed to pulse, because sounds were forming patterns, which is exactly what happens when matter meets matter and time passes. You can hear pulses separate themselves into words and land on things as bees land on things. If the things nod back across the bees to you, there is a theory we can learn being demonstrated.
At the buffet I responded in the way I thought this guy wanted me to respond. A moment later, once I absorbed what he’d actually said, I was no longer sure how I felt about it. Now I have forgotten what it was. I regrouped and withdrew to the balcony. I noticed that if I agreed with this woman, she would assume we were both familiar with the article, and I could watch esteem growing in her eyes the more silent I became.
All in all, really I only give the library lip service, and when I say “library” I mean the library and everything it stands for, regarding knowledge. I want to give props to the library, for holding out, but really I never go. There’s a dictionary in my bedroom, for what it’s worth.
You can get away with almost anything by nodding or asking an honest question. People love it when you don’t know something. That’s something to contribute to society. I’ve heard about books about endless libraries. I’ve listened on and on about books about infinity. Sometimes I get caught up in the math, books duplicating internally and externally. There are insects that are born pregnant—look it up. It’s as if the books in the library are just books with nothing in them except more books.
The thing about the library I come back to is that so far it exists, like people exist, which is not a given. I come back to this right when I’m in the bedroom pushing the coats around, looking for that one coat I came with. I push through coats as if they’re skins of the people they came from, just too much to deal with, I’m just pushing through them. They’re really the skins off animals and other people’s backs. They’re really just ideas. In fact the library is there just like all the things I’ll probably never do with my mind or my body, like ride in a hot air balloon or stab someone with a bayonet or have sex with two hotties at once or advanced gymnastics, in fact most sports, or access conviction, matter, or the metaphysical.
If she worries about the lint in her belly button she will look for it with her finger. As if her finger is a one-eyed monster, she’ll look for the lint and scratch for it with the monster’s one tooth (the tooth that covers its eye like a lid) and she’ll be able to feel the link between her navel and her clitoris. When she’s worried about lint in her belly button it’s bad news, she only got there through deep neurotic space, and her skin is so hot and so sensitive that almost any sort of poking around can cause irritation. What a head up your ass, what a snake and tail, what navel-gazing, rash, infection, lonely and unfortunate forms of creation. The world is an incubator. You can see its progeny working its way into her orifices. You can see her in her bathroom now, plugging herself with cotton, virile, viral, sterilizing. Take a look at yourself. Look inside. With the onset of nanotechnology the new frontier is in you, autobiography is the quest literature of our time, and almost everyone has begun to throw up, row after row, whether they know it or not. Luckily the throw-up is stop-motioned before it can get ugly.
THE NEW ME
They could stay afloat for only so long. Before the deranged creatures picked them off. They were so thirsty or so hungry. They swirled in the raging wind, fire, and water. Their skin shriveled. Time had ended and yet passed. Parched, they watched the last particles of moisture rise and fade in the golden air above an earth of previously unknown colors. They trudged on and on but the land was barren. Fungus rotted their limbs and bacteria new to the dying world cruised their organs. Germs, maggots, and death from virile viral microscopic life loomed in the near future. Buildings tumbled upon them. Flying debris severed them. Chasms opened wide and swallowed. They were crushed and strewn, and they exploded. Their brains burst from the noise. A spinning cow or lamp broke them. Their insides fell out. Their fingers crumbled. The inside of my skin was the earth, and grass took root and grew toward my heart. I had drunk and eaten enough pesticides to make it possible. My organs, robotic as zombies, worked with what they got. I saw myself clumping about, dribbling clippings from my razor-sharp teeth, pulsing with quotations.
BEN AND BECKY HAVE WORDS
That day they were blowing off work in rented kayaks and wasting it by having a fight. Now they were in the silence that comes when articulate people can’t make anything move with their vocabulary. Chirping, lapping, the bridge in the distance like a fake frown. The city lagged behind. Below, they had to rely on their imaginations for fish. Becky thought of a recent moment on the internet with Singleton Copey’s Watson and the Shark, inspired by an event that took place in Havana, Cuba, in 1749. Fourteen-year-old Brook Watson, an orphan serving as a crew member on a trading ship, was attacked by a shark while swimming alone in the harbor. His shipmates, who had been waiting on board to escort their captain ashore, launched a valiant rescue effort. But it seemed from the painting that the effort was in vain. As a child she’d thought that boy was a girl with beautiful flowing blonde hair, arching before the shark’s wide mouth in the waves, the shark’s tail so distant it might have been another shark. Two men reached for her in matching white shirts. A woman with beautiful flowing brown hair lunged at the shark with a spear. A black man stood behind the woman with the spear, compositionally parallel to the girl in the water. He was in his own world. He was above the fray, both interested and feeling something Becky could never quite peg. People in the boat were exhibiting fear, sadness, bravery, but one thing you don’t always think of is joining the victim.
Now, Becky had always loved the lip service of a good internet citation. When she cut and pasted into her own documents it made her feel like it was a free country. This, she felt, is how you make something real of your own. Copley himself had made three versions of the paintings, after all, and just turned the “Borghese Gladiator” on its side for the figure of Watson. But just as she was deciding on a way to bring the painting up with Ben, he spat some mean shit at her and she spat something back. Then, while Ben was trying to come up with another example of what he meant, she got down to her skivvies and slipped into the water. This surprised him so much that he dropped his paddle overboard. A shark came by and ate it in one fell swoop. Ben screamed something about being up a creek, and that’s when she called him the enemy of expression.
DREAM MATERIAL
It was before there were tall buildings in Mexico City, but there were tall buildings, and flying vehicles. High and gray. Concrete. Nothing organic. No neon lights. A sensation of falling, maybe sweat, maybe an earthquake and Tlatelolco, this huge housing project where I lived right before the big one in ’85. One of the buildings came down and killed a thousand people with cheap concrete, just like the other day in practically name your country, it can happen any day.
Opus caementicium made the Pantheon possible.
After the apocalypse, I see concrete. I can tell you a lot about concrete in developing countries. You add water to stretch it and that’s our downfall, a concrete downfall. I can’t say “developing” without irony. I can’t say “concrete.”
DREAM HOUSE
My wife and I finally chose an architect we’d admired for years, a guy who had gone to our college, though we’d only known him from afar. He impressed us. He’d always been artistic. He did the drawing and we did the dreaming. Natural efficient everything, modest and modernist, we wanted that balance of cutting edge and built to last. We were excited and scared—we had good money, but it was still a lot. We told friends over dinner about our plans, going over the idea, couple after couple. We ended up describing that house at practically every restaurant in town that we liked. Real estate, figurative estate. I just thought of that!
We’d had friends fuck up in process. One couple bought a house, turned out to be made of stuff called hardboard. Well, they learned via lawsuit that it was not designed to hold up in the rain. Thirty year mortgage and ten years life expectancy on the siding. Just imagine all the replacing you’re expected to do on a dream like that. What is it about cells, they all slough and replace within seven years? I once thought of a reason why that must be an urban legend, but now I forget. It must have been right before falling asleep, or that instant waking up, disappearing and reappearing to myself.
Don’t worry, we didn’t split, we’re fine.
At these dinners we described the blueprints. We drew on napkins. Our friends kept saying, “People want the master bedroom to be a suite. People want a garage. People want a stove the size of a tank. His and hers everything.” At dinner, I’d say, “but this is our dream house. It’s not people’s dream house.”
Later my wife would say things she never would have said before. “We should have a real laundry, we should have a proper foyer.” In a marriage you learn to see it the other person’s way. We’d spread the blueprint across the table in the rental. Her eyes going over the lines, my eyes going over the lines. I was placing our belongings in the house, and I could see her placing little people-friends walking around in there among our belongings. Lines such as countertops. Vessels such as vases. I ran my eyes along my wife. It was inevitable. Are you my dream, are you mine, what are you, who are you for?
Programmatic inflation, our architect called it, when he’d redrafted according to what we’d heard about these buyers our friends imagined. We built the house. It was over budget, but you know that going in. We didn’t fight about what happened to our dream house, but we definitely alluded to it. “Where are his boundaries,” she’d say about some guy at work, and I have to believe we both felt the house in there. “What did you dream?” I’d ask her in the morning. I knew the house was in what I was saying. A couple of times, alone in the house we built, I’ve even felt the real house like an invisible balloon around me. One time I felt it I really laughed at myself because if there’s one thing I have ever excelled at in life it’s being in this institution we call marriage. Another time, I remembered following my mother on a tour of a great house in some state, not where we lived—probably Monticello. Suffice to say, my parents did not have a marriage like mine. It had been a long drive on a very hot day. My dad was so angry he was not joining us, he was waiting in the car. In the tour group I was at everyone’s hips. I almost fell asleep walking behind my mother’s bottom to the tour guide’s speech, my mother’s bottom in her summer pants blooming white up the staircase toward the great dome.
She was so excited about the present she had decided to get me that she told me what it was going to be. I loved it. It was a great idea for a present and just right for me. It was what I had been dreaming of without even knowing it. But time rolled on and I didn’t get the present itself. Of course, this is all in the past. Now she’s gone. Big surprise. I don’t even get pleasure from the idea of the present anymore, because I was so mad about her not actually getting the present that I forgot what it was going to be. I can joke about the eternal present of the thought that counts, but what I’m actually trying to give you is an understanding of the stasis of certain forms of pain. It’s a matter of eradication.
FEELINGS
I smoothed the described sheet over the described person I’d loved before the apocalypse. The rich feelings welled from the page. Under the blanket, the person I loved remained. We used to mean so much.
FOR REAL
Slowly, carefully, gingerly, I began to suspect I remained ironical.
He went to an exhibit of photographs of people standing goofily with iconic art. They had their arms around it, sat in its lap. They used their fingers for mustaches, exploiting perspective. They got bawdy. The people interacted with the art in the photos within a range that included mean-spirited, grimly reverent, and trying to make it stop bugging them. It’s not like he felt looking at art was one thing, but in his thoughts he was participating in a millennial chain of erasure. In the final room was a hologram of a statue surrounded by holograms of people pointing at the art, surrounded by people hopping around like monkeys, surrounded by people pointing at the people who were acting like monkeys. All the figures were strobing from 3-D color representations to black-and-white 2-D representations. There was some kind of algorithm about which figures were represented in which way through a sequence. You could walk in among the holograms, probably, but he didn’t get that far, because that’s when his wife called him from the Everglades, where she was hunting anacondas that had washed from homes in the hurricane and taken over. She’d read all about it on the internet and flown down to help like Sean Penn. “An anaconda has exploded from swallowing an alligator its same size,” she whispered. “I am looking at this spectacle as we speak. I am up to my knees.” She was British and that still made her sound authoritative on nature. “It’s so Jurassic, so diasporic. When an anaconda begins to miscalculate in this manner…” she said, her voice quavering within the uneven reception.
The museum was filling with rowdy viewers challenging the taped lines around the spaces taken up by holograms, and his anxiety rose in concert with their increasing numbers. “I love you,” he whispered into the phone, right as someone jostled him and his glasses went askew. For a moment, the Braque in the next gallery cohered. By the time he’d righted them and slipped into a quiet corner, he’d lost the connection with his wife. He texted her furtively. “I love you.” He spelled the whole thing out, for emphasis. But someone jostled him again and this time his glasses fell off and his phone slid away from him, like a comet, into the depths of the exhibit.
WHAT I GOT
I cleared the kitchen island and placed upon it the brown paper bag that contained my three purchases. It had been such a long time since I’d had a good day shopping, since before the banks collapsed, before the oil spill. In the new era of being careful I’d been keeping an eye out for, among other things, the perfect bag, a perfect bag for me for carrying things around in, and I finally found it! A glossy black one you can tell might be made from recycled materials—but not obvious in any way that would become dated—and with the right amount of pockets, so you don’t lose things in the bag and you don’t lose things in the pockets. I took it, along with my additional items, out of the brown paper grocery-style shopping bag with stiff twine handles they’d placed it in, and I placed it, in its silver tissue wrapping, on the ice-white and recently de-crumbed surface, unrolled it like a body from a carpet. I set the new bag aside for the moment, as I am one who eats the tips of pies last.
Then I spread the silver tissue. What a satisfying feeling against the outer edges of my hands, like what I still do and have done all my life with my hands across the surface of the water in my bathtub every chance I get—what a day! take me away! Across the water I make the gesture of a conjurer, like I could make something rise. Then I folded the tissue into a square the size of a picnic napkin and put it into a bag of other pretty paper in the closet in the hallway for the future. Then I lifted the brown paper bag by its twine, shook it against the air, and pinched it at the folds. The bag made a huge noise in the quiet apartment in the silent weekday complex. I thought of a mountain crumbling between the tectonic plates of history. It was almost six o’clock. Everyone in the universe was caught in rush hour except me. I tried to hold on to the feeling I had when I left work for lunch and did not go back.
I repeated the process with my remaining purchases. Folding tissue into square, putting tissue into bag. Green tissue with a print of tiny crowns in glittery green. Inside, a jeweled pillbox. Blue tissue slick on one side and natural on the other. Inside, a silk scarf with a pattern of peacock plumes.
I carried the jeweled pillbox in the palm of my hand into the bathroom and filled it with an assortment: a couple Sudafed, a couple Advil, a couple Ambien, Xanax, Anaprox, Multi-Daily, golden Omega fatty acid fish oil caplets. You know how colorful and artfully shaped pills are. I returned to the kitchen, my formica island, and put the pillbox into the new black bag along with my ratty wallet. I smoothed the silk scarf across the island. I wrapped it around my head and tied it at the nape of my neck. I felt exotic. I put the strap of my new bag over my shoulder and put my hand on it where it rested at my hip, like I was ready for action.
What a slick crap apartment, thrown up in the boom. What shiny new things.
I remembered the fable from childhood with the cock on the cat on the donkey on the road. They were musicians running away from destitute lives to be in a band together. My purchases, one, two, three. My head in a purchase, my purchases in my hand. I gazed at the popcorn so-called cathedral ceiling above the island and thought of the sky above it, my skull and bones below, my painted feathers a layer in between. I decided to take a spin around the neighborhood. I’d taken this risk, ditching work. I wanted to know if I felt empty or fulfilled.
I walked like a wandering mind around the neighborhood, feeling out my new things among blocks below highways, whistling my favorite tune (you’re toxic, I’m slipping under…) until I came upon a vacant lot surrounded by chain link overflowing with thistles. I hardly ever had the chance to walk around the neighborhood, so the last time I’d seen it it’d been a desert in there, and now it was completely filled with the hugest possible thistles, just glorious, elbowing each other on the way up, spines shining, purple heads like muppets and dragons, this overflowing of weeds, this life pouring out over the chain link. The history of the lot was a drug den got torn down after a grassroots victory, but then because of something to do with property taxes the lot was sitting there foreclosed.
The plants were so impressive. Gazing up, whistling Britney, I practically wanted to hug them, just like I almost ran away with my friends and joined a band at a certain point in my history when anything seemed possible, though the animals in the story just ended up tricking some robbers out of their house, eating their food, and curling up on the rug on their hearth. And now where are the tambourines? What is there, exactly, for me to put myself into? But let me wrap up, so to speak, take us the rest of the way around the block, so to speak, this side of the fence, with a few words about the value of shiny things floating icily in the constant state of becoming lost to us. Some time ago I started keeping a log of things and money I wasted. Some effort to contain them. A sweater left on a bench in the city (someone pick it up and use it?). A ticket for disrupting street sweepers (I’m sorry). Pie I ate all of that was nowhere even close to delicious.
Rosette stage early May, flower May to July, double dentate, toothed again, predicted soon to monopolize a large extent of country to the extinction of other plants, as they have done in parts of the American prairies, in Canada and British Columbia, and as they did in Australia, until a stringent Act of Parliament was passed, about twenty years ago, imposing heavy penalties upon all who neglected to destroy Thistles on their land, every man being now compelled to root out, within fourteen days, any Thistle that may lift up its head, Government inspectors being specially appointed to carry out the enforcement of the law. www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/t/thistl11.html for your information, if you care about what is happening in the world with regard to whatever constitutes the indigenous one moment to the next mixing thornily with mankind, I dare you to try to pull me.
MIRAGE
Postapocalypse, we were all still racist and clamoring for scraps of gold. I was still lusting after the girl who looked most like a fashion model. Maybe there is something to be done about those feelings but I was not doing it very much, not anymore! I felt a little freed to just want what I wanted, wherever that came from. Like maybe it’s not my job at this point to have a problem with getting off on something when that’s how I feel about it. No one calls anything natural anymore, not after what we did. Finally! Natural means something like dead.
But who am I kidding? As soon as the dust settled—and granted, there was a good deal of dust—even that lousy freedom wore off. Now, whenever she’s charming, like the way she holds up that coconut in the bald light as if there’s a decision left to be made, I try hard, in order to justify my lust, to imagine her as not nearly so pretty—to imagine her as someone like me. Would I be charmed then? Someone like me, considering the last remnant of something. How hot is that?
But as long as there is anything left there’s a decision to be made. For instance, I have put out of my mind the bodies of the dead, just as in the past I put out of my mind the bodies of the destitute. I have put out of my mind what we did with all the bodies. Oh my body, my body image, your body, your body, my image of your body.
COMING TO LIFE
When the Circuit City really did go under in a pile of full-priced cables everyone was yelling about on the internet, it was like what happened to the banks was happening for real, instead of getting a letter in the mail about where your account was and sitting in your stupid kitchen trying to picture an account. When Ely went on over to check out Circuit City directly from being laid off, he hadn’t even been there since prom 1988 but he wanted to see if everyone was acting insane or buying something for the first time since when they got a stereo put into their El Camino with savings from their job at the PD Quix, which was what Ely did right before prom. I didn’t get a stereo. I didn’t have a car until after Mom lost her eyesight and then my dad died and I inherited his so I could drive her around. Ely went there as if to meet an old friend he’d drifted apart from through the years. I’m thinking of a friend of mine whose brother went schizophrenic when we were in school and I didn’t get why we weren’t connecting anymore, and then a few years later when my brother went schizophrenic it was “holy shit now I get it” and we were friends again. But this example seems funnier to me because one of the friends is an enormous red electronics store near a mall that everyone’s hated since 1995. Everyone I know always hated it, including those of us who went mad. But Ely felt the cord of kinship. On the way—he drove imagining his car bursting with loot—he was thinking about the end of the movie of Fight Club, the skyline of corporate headquarters collapsing. The first time he saw the movie, in the multiplex, it felt so shocking, impressive, exhilarating, like the multiplex might collapse around them, everyone in it together. The next time he saw the movie was on video, showing it to a girl he was dating, on his couch at home, which suddenly seemed so crappy the second it was clear to him that she was not impressed with the movie, yeah whatever, corporations suck, crappy couch forever sinking in crappy apartment. But now, approaching the Circuit City, speeding within a tangle of highways called The Maze, city skyline across the water, he was feeling epic, high on something like the not-yet-reality of losing his job, like the movie was coming to life. He engaged in a little fantasy of bumping into that girl and having it come up, the prophetic movie ending from that lousy date—she’d have to be the one to bring it up, though—and she’d say something like, “You know, Ely, now I get why you were into that movie—it’s so interesting when an image falls in and out of relevance through time like that, it really makes the nature of reality come alive,” and he’d say something about yeah and sources of power, plug, plugging, plug you.
When he got to the store, there was one tight clump of cars in the humongous parking lot as close as possible to the doors and he found a space in the clump to pull into. He was not in the long-gone El Camino, he was in a Pontiac Bonneville that had been a gift from his in-laws before his divorce. He’d been treating it badly since the split and the whole thing was pilled and damp. He got out and leaned against it, taking in the view. The Circuit City was not 100 percent red like the one from his youth, it was camel with red markings. He was unsure whether this classed it up or down. He tried to remember the inside of the Circuit City he had pictured revisiting, moody and dark-lit, shopping for his car stereo in the best shape of his life, a guy buying a stereo for his car, irreproachable as coming of age throughout history, in this place that looked a lot like nightclubs on soap operas, invisible walls and neon. He remembered walking down the path of linoleum between carpeted regions, enormous console systems to the east and household appliances to the west. He remembered a pudgy lady with the tightly curled hair of the time and a face lit like a radish who looked at him and then looked into the depths of a clothes-washing machine, exactly like a person looking into a toilet, wanting so badly to throw up and not quite able to do it. He remembered the money in his pocket for the stereo for the car. Then he felt it in his brain, a microscopic electronic switch spasm going: dated, dated her, dated movie, car, store, dated, and even though he could feel the hands of time pushing him from behind, he could not make himself go into that store with all that coded, inorganic, and somehow still expiring material, but then if he didn’t go in he was trapped, just standing there in the parking lot with his severance.
But what do I know. Since my dad died no one here has had a job, no one here has health insurance. I’m in the kitchen with my mother who is now going deaf. My brother keeps us in sight but just out of reach, too afraid to relax in the house and too afraid to leave it, and I can see his point because this place is falling the fuck apart.
He didn’t focus on the apocalypse because he couldn’t do anything about it, and when he looked around, there still appeared to be plenty of life happening. He hung out with some woodsy handyman types who he thought would take him along if it came to that. As a kid, when things got tough, he’d mostly tried to teach his turtle how to read. He took scientific notes about his dog. He did enjoy seeing the giraffe being helicoptered over the city in a movie trailer. He liked mutants, hybrid people-animal-robots. He found himself interested in origins and not so much the other end of things beyond reach. It never crossed his mind until other people brought it up, which they did increasingly. Like they thought all their handyman skills would finally be appreciated. Meanwhile, he concentrated on saving some farm animals. He had some dogs to love in the now. Other people, they might have a boat, maybe some flares, some food and water, your basic earthquake preparedness, hand-crank radio, maybe some kind of a shelter. Hopefully, he thought, I’ll have enough money that I can just take a spaceship.
JOURNALIST
This is a true story about a journalist and I don’t care. A long time ago I was assisting a famous humanitarian-type professor in a course about literary and documentary ethics, and this guy Adam was enrolled. He wasn’t in my discussion group—there were like eight groups and like two hundred people there to listen to the lectures—but somehow Adam decided he liked me of all people and started approaching me outside the beautifully repurposed soda factory where the class met. He was handsome, I knew, but for some reason it didn’t matter to me, even though he was my age and had completed a degree at a fancy university I had once wanted to go to. I’d wanted to go to that university the same way you imagine you want to be a famous actress when what you mean is that you want to feel important.
So we chatted a few times I found pretty boring and then he asked if I would like to, I don’t remember, something, so I told him no but I was walking home and if he wanted he could walk with me and hang out in the yard while I was gardening. It’s worth mentioning here that I was one of the only white people living in a neighborhood with a lot of black and Mexican people, and I was one of the only people in the neighborhood who had anything to do with the university. I have been told, by people in my neighborhood, that I am very, very white. Adam, too, was white, white, white. So Adam took me up on my idea, walked along home with me, and he was cool with my dog, and it turned out he knew a lot more than I did about plants. He’d watch me and say this or that while I was poking around, and a pattern emerged. After class, he’d come up to me, I’d say, Well, I’m doing this or that, usually moving things around in my garden or taking the dog to the woods, come along if you want, and he started teaching me about plants we passed in the woods, wild white ginger, rattlesnake orchids. He brought me clippings from his place which he was having to sell because of the divorce he was going through, and he was saddest of all to lose all his plants. One afternoon he kissed me in the hallway near the bathroom. I was really angry about that, but then I started wondering what my problem was. He showed me a picture of his parents in a Life magazine spread from the ’60s. He said they were friends with the Kennedys. He was always asking me if I thought he could be a good writer and I said I thought he could be a good journalist. He kept asking me and I kept saying the same thing in different ways. So after he kissed me and I was so mad about it, part of me started wanting him to kiss me again, maybe because of the handsome part, maybe because of the university part, maybe because of the Kennedys, or maybe the knowledge of plants, and at that point the whole dynamic shifted because he was so fucked up about his divorce and I was just so fucked up in general.
Let’s see where this is going.
Shots rang out in the neighborhood one day while I was gardening in my yard with my dog watching, and my dog was killed. It was really crazy, caught on video, a total media event, and after I made a call across the country to this one person I used to be in love with, I called Adam. He’s the one who lifted my dog into my truck and drove us to the woods, and he’s the one who directed the bush-hog in the night to dig a hole and shine its headlamps while we moved the body, and he helped me cover the plot with rocks. The rocks were to keep it from getting dug up. Then I didn’t hear from him, and then he told me, in our last telephone conversation, that he just couldn’t take my level of pain, a phrase that stood out to me. But now he’s a journalist. He has a nice place in the city and he flies all over the world and does stories about things like little brown girls being sold into prostitution. He’s one of those journalists who presents every story without any ambiguity at all, who finds stories to tell in which there is no way to locate more than one way to feel about anything.
SIGNS
I drive by a motel when I need anything from the other side of town. Town’s built like an hourglass, and there’s a big lit sun shining from the motel sign, there at the waist. They put all the houses down here and all the stuff up there, so if I’m going to get anything I have to go by it. That’s a pun.
And you wouldn’t believe the congestion—no one in charge.
In the motel, pets are okay. There’s a parking lot around the motel, and a rising hill of grass around that, like the bank of a moat. Wait until it really starts raining!
An hourglass. Figures. Because of time, running out, running errands, crappy town.
So I drive by, and this time it’s day, with the sun over the sun. I see a woman’s head doing a swivel, like behind the bank she’s riding in a bumper car in a parking space. There’s a dog on a leash; I can’t see the dog, but I know it’s there behind the land. This is suspicious, or prophetic, seeing someone’s head but not whatever makes it do the things it does. The left hand doesn’t know the right, brain squeezed out or removed like the ribs of Victorian ladies.
Then at night… I’m making my smoke run, my gin run… I tell you… the sun at night. It’s not right. It’s a symptom. It cancels everything out. But if I want anything in this place, it’s down that one road. One rich farmer stuck a store in his field long ago and the town formed in relation to it.
Night, day. I think about getting by. It’s hard to tell if I get any sleep. I feel pressure to do one thing or another. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I look up and say “Give me a sign!” but of course I’m kidding. I’ll tell you the one for the Golden Nozzle Carwash: a giant showerhead raining gold on the silhouette of a sedan. You know what the sedan stands for. It stands for you and me. These are the signs in this town. Only a matter of time before something blows.
The minions lined their sneakers along the wall and then became two lines themselves, like teams at the end of a game, and each by each held hands and touched foreheads. They were past words. They’d been hollering and leafleting for months. They’d been psyching themselves up and out for years. They lay in their cots like orphans. Hands to hearts, eyes to the black air, the rafters of the bunker invisible in the dark, a sky without stars, everything celestial sprinkling the insides of their domed minds. They waited for the world to disintegrate. It would disintegrate before next light and they waited for a red and gold explosion to light the universe in one final burst. They listened to night tick through the wooden walls. It could be now, or now, or now. Someone held back a sneeze and then sneezed. They’d abandoned their timepieces in the river that evening at dusk, but at two a.m. a boy named Jonathan got up from his cot, cracked open the door, put his penis out, and peed. Then he went back to his cot. One woman, a secret doubter, had taken a bottle of pills before she lay down to wait and died with the click the boy made closing the door.
By morning there have been three more suicides and two of the leaders have disappeared into the woods. One leader is weeping under a tree, fallen leaves in his fists. One leader is running, running, running, hoping he will die mid-step, trying to feel the moment within each step when he is sure both feet are off the ground because he feels that if he can prolong that beat he will be flying, he will be without his body finally, he will be light, light air, light light. In the hut one minion has punched another in the chest. One is cross-legged on her cot, watching. She’s vacant or else she’s fuming. Three have closed themselves in the kitchen and begun to screw. Two are quietly packing their knapsacks, stuffing them as full as they can with any useful items the group had forgotten or not bothered to purge: a woolen lap blanket, a can-opener, a tin of olives, a box of matches, a comb, a tube of lip balm. By two o’clock in the afternoon the bunker is empty except for a few dead bodies and one man, badly beaten, who is clinging to his cot like it’s a raft, gasping for breath and calling “Help! Help!”
MIRROR
Two days since the apocalypse and freckles rise in the skin around my mouth. I am very close to my face, looking. Green funnels of what were pastures whirl and spit in the background. The last bits of cities are like comets and pass behind my head as if I am shooting myself repeatedly, as if I shoot myself and the fireballs go in one ear and out the other. It’s riveting. It’s hypnotic. My face contains more colors than are left in the universe. I watched Miranda’s teeth panic and run away. I watched Amber buckle. Now, in the mirror, there is no comparison. It’s me, and everything, and that’s all.
LUCKY
People were walking around in the street, everywhere, in their clothes, with their personalities like so many fish. People looking sharp as weapons in holsters—I’m talking potential for protection or striking out in equal but opposite directions. Minds in their bones, bones in their minds. Bones in the future and bones in the past, bones in clothes, with premonitions and shadows, fore and aft. Mid-morning, big engine sun banging on cement and metal, and all the littler engines in the streets and buildings, in the cars and bodies. A blond girl squinted out the giant window of the 7-Eleven, luckiest store in the world. She’d been connecting the dots with her car, one lucky star to the next, across the bright city. She wore a down coat. A girl rollerbladed by the window in a bikini, a bright pink headband with plastic feathery fluff on it that made her feel the fur lining of the hood of the girl on the other side. Three round and haloed heads, counting the sun. The girl in the bikini rollerbladed back, did a spin in front of the window and then leaned on a parked car, sucking on a soda, contemplating the girl in the parka in the air-conditioned store. She felt the condensation on her big cup. She felt her hip on a headlight. Luck, or whatever luck is code for, is cold, unbalanced, and connected.
Sad girl in her mania. Sunny girl with her pop. Looking through glass as if it’s a mirror. All these people. How did they do it? Well, many did not.