PRECIOUS METALS

Despite lying in a dark field for over an hour, I saw only four shooting stars during the Perseid meteor shower; I wanted to blame it on light pollution, but other humans live-tweeting it in less remote places said it was like watching “gods write with cosmic chalk” or “burning jewels melt.” According to the Weather Channel, July 2016 was the warmest month on record, and the fifteenth consecutive warmest month since humans began keeping track. Sadly, I still don’t know how—and apparently lack sufficient evidence—to convince people I love that climate change is not a hoax, and they’re not the only ones who’ve been duped: LeBron James thinks that Michael Jordan gets too much credit for the Bulls’ six titles, and a Knoxville man believed—for five years—that he was dating Katy Perry. Thanks to a Tumblr called “mcmansionshell,” I now have a vocabulary for why so-called McMansions are such monstrosities: most of the problems appear to stem from the absurd imbalance of principal and secondary masses. In the last two weeks, I’ve spotted at least three dead birds on the side of the road: chickadee, a northern flicker, and a cardinal. At the Pete Dye Golf Course, where English department faculty had gathered for our annual retreat, we looked up from our brainstorming session on “experiential learning” and “diversity and inclusion” to watch a thunderstorm blow a blizzard of leaves past the two-story windows of the room we’d rented. According to a colleague of mine, George Gershwin couldn’t stop smelling burnt rubber, couldn’t get the smell out of his nose; what he didn’t know: the scent was the result of a phenomenon called “phantosmia,” an olfactory hallucination created by a brain tumor that would prove malignant. The other night, I dreamed that, in order to survive, I had to kill someone: that I had to eviscerate a fat man with a sword. Afterwards, I realized I was back at my old boarding school, and that my old girlfriend was living across the hall from me; I embraced her and woke up hugging a pillow. Later, I sent to a good friend who’s unhooked himself from social media a screenshotted announcement about an upcoming novel by a writer we both know and whose ironic vanity, we like to think, is still vanity, and unwarrantedly so; this same friend, who once took a dump in a litter box and called his wife to come take a look at what the cat had done, was surprised to learn that Copenhagen was home to the most beautiful people he had ever seen—young blond models, radiant, sipping coffee in cafés—the sheer volume of whom made him feel, in his own words, like “a troll.” As much as I envied his travels, I was perfectly satisfied staying here and walking the dog to the horse hill to view, at sunset, the green backbone of Brush Mountain tufted with clouds; this same view reminds a guy in my neighborhood of the verdant ridges in the Sri Lankan jungle he once called home, and where, on his sixth birthday, he woke to an elephant’s trunk nuzzling his face—an experience that his father had planned as a gift. The man who helped engineer the sale of my family’s old house and the purchase of our new one stopped by the other day to drink a beer and tell me that when he’d woken that morning he could feel the imbalance, that everything in the world—religion, government, politics—was off-kilter, and what he wanted me to know, what he felt he had an absolute responsibility to tell me, was that I should transfer at least ten percent of my assets to precious metals. I overheard a girl in the library stack say, “I can’t even come up with the point of living anymore.” The boy she was with said, “If you ever kill yourself, I would so die.” “Me, too,” she said, and when they laughed, I thought about someone I love who recently confessed that he’d spent twenty years of his life thinking about killing himself, and that if there had been a magic button he could’ve pressed that would’ve allowed him to erase his entire existence, without causing pain to anyone else that he knew, he would’ve pressed it. Several times, as I neared the end of a bike ride, I thought I heard a car approaching me, and gripped my handlebars tightly, imagining, as I almost always do, a car’s bumper clipping my rear tire, or a truck’s heavy-duty side-view mirror whacking me in the back of the head, but when I glanced over my shoulder and saw that nobody was there, I realized that what I’d heard was the sound of my own spinning wheels.