Proprioception and the modern man

Our ghost mostly lived in habits, in patterns, in the color of my toothbrush and the way I fold a towel and where I’m likely to sit on the couch. I would do these things and sometimes feel my leaves were rustling, not déjà vu exactly, but something like it.

Sometimes, though, our ghost would get into the phone lines or shake the dishes a little, like a train going by. Sometimes it went tearing through the living room or was on the ceiling staring down at me while I slept, which what do you do about that? I called an expert who came over, burned a few candles, said something like prayers, and then left in a huff, saying look, I don’t do metaphors. But it was a real enough haunting to me.

One day it started talking to me while I had the TV on mute during a Cosby show rerun. The closed captioning went to gibberish, and then it started in on me while Bill Huxtable made his exasperated faces. It said life is a puzzle box of well-oiled wood. It said being strong-willed is the same as being dumb. It said everything you’re going to do in being alive is just more cola wars, more senselessness, so what are you doing eating dry cereal in front of the television all your life. Then it said I can’t believe Vanessa’s dating a vegetarian, and that was the end of it.

Hypnogogic myoclonic twitch

I got a thing from her in the mail today, just some papers I needed along with a handwritten note. She had the handwriting of an articulate person, an extra layer of consideration over the words in the careful placement of dots and loops. Me, I had serial-killer handwriting, which this business always made me nuts about the stupidities of my character.

And it wasn’t like there wasn’t enough going through my head all day anyway with the whole mess. I was stuck in this category of people that were known for their weeping and for their bitter asides. No amount of paperwork signed was going to make that go away is a thought we maybe shared from our opposite sides of town. Or not. Or whatever.

Days like this one I would make it out the door and suddenly my finger would worry after the missing ring, like skin and muscle and bone took a longer time with grief than the internal organs did. It was like when you’re about to fall asleep and then you’re falling and you wake up to a start. Anyway. The handwriting, the ring, the terse telepathy of it all. Being in this getting apart together, it was enough to make me weepy and bitter.

Warming my hands at the freshly burned bridge

I had that queasy feeling I sometimes get, or maybe it’s more just an anxious feeling, like it felt like something was going on right under the skin, like what, in the subdermal layer. This guy was talking to me in an overtly male way, he was pointing himself at me with words as if he were a gun. I thought of him as the kind of guy who would gesture with a drink in his hand, not worried about spills found the next day or whatever, but actually he was really conscientious about it, and the carpet stayed dry of his crown and coke while he asked me if I was a faggot.

Which I was not a faggot, and really I was one of those people who understood that a word like that had an unacceptable weight of hatred because words kind of made the world, gave things form, you know like will to power or whatever. This was about as good as I could have explained it at the time, and so when she laughed nervously and didn’t get boily angry along with me I kept quiet and stared hard into my drink and felt the feeling I was talking about at the beginning.

Look, nevermind, some things aren’t worth cataloging. Someone made me feel like a middle school chump at a party and I am here assigning blame like it’s fair. Like I’ve not said my own hateful things. Like she could even say or do anything to change this dumbfuck story that she’s not even really the issue of, by the way. So look, you can scratch all of this, scratch driving home shitty with drink, scratch the feeling of knowing we were not talking at that frozen moment at the red light while a bit of defrosted ice ran down the windshield like an escapee, scratch how upset and apologetic she was about a guy she didn’t even know who just happened to be at her friend’s party, how she bore the responsibility and shame and anger that belonged to someone else, and she bore it for me. Especially scratch that.

The truth about electron degeneracy pressure

I could feel it in the silence, which it was always silent and I generally didn’t much care, but there was something new in the unmattered space between the two of us, that same space that was so remarkable for always being nothing. If you want to believe that I’m capable of thought and emotion then believe that I thought and felt that getting closer always to her in a barely perceptible spiral eons in the making while she sent her constant message of love was good, a reason with enough merit to justify our dead corner of the universe.

What I felt was a weakening. I considered it carefully over the course of several thousand years while watching her surface spit and spark with plumes of orange and red. Never before had I bothered measuring the passage of time, but now it seemed important, vital even. I watched. And I spun. And I revolved. And things got worse.

Her messages stopped. It happened gradually, but it happened. I began to feel colder, and she seemed somehow smaller. Then her light became gray and stopped altogether. I was still drawn to her, though there was nothing to be drawn to but inert matter. I stopped considering us as being alive.

What forever means when you really mean it

She had this thing she would do where she would kiss the palm of my hand in the morning that was pretty great. The way her head turned away from me but still found me. Did I tell you this yet? I feel like I told you all this.

Okay I don’t care I’m telling it again. You have to picture it. The sun is coming in all over the room on account of how I never put up curtains. Curtains, they prompt me toward sleeping in. She is mostly on top of me, yeah you can figure why, but the real thing is that she takes my arm and raises it a few inches to her lips, and I see her there in profile, in silhouette, and it’s like ten in the morning and there’s no coffee brewing yet even but all the terrible things I’ve ever been through seem worthwhile in that single second, that image burned ferociously into my brain as this is what she is.

But look I feel like I am losing the point here, which is that the things that used to be true that are no longer true are no less true then. And I am sitting here punching myself repeatedly in the mouth with a drink, a double whiskey coke, trying to tell you this story like it is the answer to the whole question of what happened. Which that isn’t even a question is what I’m going to say after I finish this drink and come back with another. For now, though, I am going to sit and look out over the smoke-filled room and think how lovely, all these people, all this pain and stuff inside of them, how it doesn’t ever really get out, but how they keep trying.

I will steal you all the way away

It started out as a fluke, me lying in bed sleepless when the power went out. The silence of it got under my skin, got me thinking about things I’d been avoiding thinking about. Meanwhile the ceiling fan took its final gasping turn.

I got up to rummage through a drawer for a flashlight. It felt good grasping in secret, grasping in the dark. I decided burglary was probably for me. I thought hard about what she had that I wanted while I clicked the flashlight off and on several times, found and put on an old ski mask from the Halloweens of my youth, dug around my sock drawer looking for those wool gloves I thought I still had. The only thing I could come up with was my last name, which she had held on to more out of convenience than out of a desire for some vestigial connection. I decided if that’s all there was to steal, then I would steal it. All good capers seem impossible at the beginning.

I drove over there with the headlights off, found the spare key where we used to hide it together, let myself in with a soft click and the sound of wood rubbing against wood. Unfortunately she wasn’t home, which made the whole thing seem less dangerous and a little bit embarrassing. I had wanted her to watch from a chair in the darkened living room, puffing absently on a cigarette and waiting for me to notice until she clicked on the lamp and said so this is how it’s going to be.

Instead I went into her office that used to be our office and looked around. Where would she keep a last name? Probably somewhere on her skin, or under it. But that wouldn’t work at all. I went to the fridge and sat in front of it, door open, and drank most of her beer. It was one of those Mexican brands you find a lot out here, the kind the middle class drank as if they were slumming it. A couple hours went by like that. When I left, it was getting light out, I was stumbly drunk, and I had my pockets full of her business cards, every one I could find in the house. You couldn’t call it victory by any measure. But hey, it was something.

Pulling away the curtain, revealing another curtain

You left a message on my phone that said I wasn’t allowed to write about you anymore. Or maybe your mother did. I didn’t actually check my messages or look at the caller ID or actually have a phone connected anymore. But I like to think that’s what happened while I scribbled on blank pages, the backs of envelopes, an old eviction notice.

Because look at what I was doing. I was incarnating and incarcerating you again and again. Shackled in words of my choosing. A homunculus of every bad feeling. You bled out onto the page, merged with people I’ve known and still know, written down how I wanted, crucifixion as creative nonfiction.

Look, I have exhausted you, and I wish I could say I was sorry. I put you on like an old sweater and I wore you out, which I mean that two ways. I feel like I should be ashamed. I feel like people should be calling me up to chide me. But it’s just praise and praise and praise. Oh he’s so honest, oh his pain it must be real, oh he really resonates. No one said how dare you. No one said I’m draining the blood from a good woman. No one said you are a liar for saying any of this is the truth and you are a liar for saying any of it isn’t. No one said anything at all while I stood up there and read these things I have written, these words I have shored up against my own sense of failure. It’s not like an apology would be anything but hollow anyway.

Occam was a friend of mine, but one day Occam died

I thought she looked best over breakfast, our tired old cartoon strip mugs filled with coffee and too much sugar, overcooked eggs on a plate with too much salt. She was a girl who took well to being disheveled is what, the way her hair goes back to the curls that she always fights against and the little bit of makeup she forgot to wash off is still smudgy around her eyes, but she caught me looking and stared down into her plate, pushed her eggs around with her fork and gave a plaintive quit it.

But I didn’t quit it. I thought I could look enough to catch something more if I only tried. Her covering her mouth while she chewed. Her staring into the middle distance in thought. Her wrapping her feet around the chair legs. I thought these things kept a secret.

Which isn’t that always the tragedy anyway? She could bear the weight of it, maybe, or she couldn’t. Each second I tried to give her a meaning grander than just being her was an assault. It was tyranny. It was my own failure to comprehend and accept reality as something worth believing in. No, I had to have magic at breakfast, magic at every meal, I wanted to be sick to my stomach stuffed with it. And I saw myself looking back at this moment from years later and wondering what had happened, never suspecting the easy, the obvious, the inevitable answer. What had happened was me.

The jihad of hands on sleeping hips

The heat of her back pressed against me was enough to keep me up at night, which what kind of person is it that would call this a denial of the way a life should go. It’s one of those things you have to hate about yourself after awhile, the way being happy felt something like an old and rusty anchor. I put an arm around her and scooted closer, got the smell of her skin by pressing my face into her shoulder and kissing it a little here and there. She didn’t stir.

What was I even at war with all the time? The self-assurance of chemical reactions and neurons firing all over the place, maybe. The things whispered back and forth, axon to axon. This is what you deserve. This is your identity. The mitochondrial masses cast their vote, the democracy of feeling lousy for no good reason.

I got out of bed and paced around, got a glass of water, stood in the unlit kitchen drinking it and staring at the one glow-in-the-dark magnet from our trip out to that cave system, how it was so wet and muggy underground. This is the reality of being alive. All that storytelling, all those moments that can be shaped into some kind of meaning, and then there’s this one. Narrative from a junk drawer life.

She called my name from the bedroom, and I set my glass down and went back in there. She half-asked what I was doing, and I said nothing, just awake for no good reason. She smiled and reached up to touch my arm. I put my hand on her hair. It made me feel like maybe I would make it through.

At the end of our mercenary summer

There’s rain, and then there’s drinking gin in the rain, the way the pine taste of it on your tongue takes you back to the Northwest and kills your brain cells for you so you don’t have to bother holding your breath for an extremely long time or sniffing glue. Which we were not depressed. That much must be said. No, we were drunks in the rain, and that’s quite different.

We passed the bottle between us, and yeah, we danced maybe I guess, and to be honest I hated the taste of gin but she didn’t and there it was. The back yard was starting in on being puddly, revealing how uneven all of it really was. Her hair was plastered over her eyes and dripping while she smiled with the bottle thrust up in the air like she was presenting it to god. It made her bellybutton show.

We grabbed at each other and spun around and fell over. Did you ever do that? It feels pretty good. In heaps is what. We lay there letting the drops hit our faces and force our eyes closed tight, and then we got cold, and then we went inside, and then we didn’t speak for an afternoon for fear of breaking the spell.

Christmas cards, ransom notes

The picture shows the two of us in matching shirts, terrible Norman Rockwell cheese. Ironically unironic. It’s from last year maybe but that’s basically okay for the purpose. I dump a bunch of them in the mail, some with addresses, some not. Some with directions as best I could remember. He lives on that one street with all the cars. She used to live with her sister but now I’m not so sure. Her sister is the one that had one of those looks she’d give from across the bar where she would just smolder and smolder but you never knew what it meant.

The girl in the picture who was you is smiling. The girl in the picture who was you has a big cheesy eggnog smile. The girl in the picture who was you knows exactly what that means. I throw some out the car window and wish the wind well. Wish the wind a merry Christmas.

I am drunk and I am driving and I am in the present tense. What has happened to consistency of voice is a reasonable question to ask. Cards go out the window and into the dampness of the ditch. The song on the radio is of a band I used to like before it was on the radio. I am that kind of person. I thought the girl in the picture who was you was aware, but she was not.

Many more moments like this one

I sat down drunk on the pavement near the bus stop, pulled a knit cap down over my ears, and waited in that dead part of the downtown night. After a few minutes I crossed the street to buy a sandwich and a six-pack of cheap beer before it was too late. A bus went by in the meantime.

I sat back down and ate my sandwich, washed it down with one of the beers. That’s when I saw her watching me from the benches. The bus stops in this part of town were lit up and plexiglass like they were from the future, and the light cast harsh long shadows down her face. I said what, and it came out maybe a little too hard, so I offered her a beer. She asked me if I was homeless. I said no, I’m just a degenerate of some kind or other. She looked around, slid off the bench to the pavement, and took me up on my offer.

We did the whole small talk thing there in the stone heart of the city while civilization’s stragglers walked by or took up the seats we’d abandoned, me a long time ago, her just that moment. I told her that sitting on the ground felt better because it got at the truth of what we’d done in all this building of things. There was beauty in it somewhere is what I said.

Suddenly I got this idea to head over to this unlocked fire escape I knew about so we could see the sun come up from the rooftop of some lousy hotel. I told her so. She agreed to follow.

When we got there they’d padlocked the thing shut again. We stood at it and had another beer each, worked through the different ways we might get it open or get enough height to reach the second floor landing. I asked her name. I could see the way the light would come in, first as a whisper, then staccato bursts between the different buildings, finally the sun coming over and around the edges and warning off another night containing another million possibilities. By this age, though, you’re pretty well locked in. Finally I said well goodnight, Claire, which I realized later wasn’t the name she’d told me.

Between the absence and the presence is the thing

There were the deadnerve days, an apartment littered with yesterday’s yesterday’s cups of coffee. I pressed my hand against the window just to feel, how cold the glass, walked around with most of my bed around my shoulders. I didn’t turn on the heat on account of how it dried out my nose and I didn’t like the smell. And also there was the money.

Then there were her days, the ones where the bathroom echoed forth a voice singing snotty old Alanis Morrisette songs, you know the ones about Joey Gladstone. She got embarrassed when I said I’d heard while light cut through the slats in the blinds. We would make love, and it would be about how long we could hold onto a conversation before losing the gasping thread.

There were probably other kinds of days, but really I’m talking about those two, which was which, which was true. My brain told me all the time how I wanted to die. It made compelling arguments. I did what I could to not listen. Every now and then she would touch my face or say something, I don’t know, it felt like a refutation or a spell. Two types of day. That’s what I’m saying. I knew then that one was doomed.

Life is sad. Here is someone.

The water was running along the eaves and dripping, raindrops as racecars. I stood there under the shelter looking up at them, how there are tiny dramas going on all around us that we fail to notice. I’m sure I looked pretty dumb to the other people coming out of baggage claim and looking around for old friends.

She pulled up in her fading Volvo and I fast walked over, taking a long step off the curb but still hitting the outside edge of a deep puddle. I got in and gave her one of those awkward getting-into-the-car-after-not-seeing-each-other-for-a-week-and-missing-each-other-even-though-all-we-did-these-days-was-fight-all-the-time hugs. The windshield wipers clacked out the passage of time, and I bit the inside of my cheek.

The way she drove was squirrelly with hard manual shifts that were fun for her, how she pretended at the precision of a machine, but caused me to tense my legs against the glove compartment. She said she was feeling drab and kind of sleepy, so I should talk, just say whatever came up.

I thought for a second and then said I like that poem by Tao Lin, the one about stealing from Lorrie Moore. I said I could relate as a writer. She said I was so full of shit sometimes with the self-involved writer stuff, which was said lightheartedly. I didn’t take it that way. A minute went by and I said sometimes I felt like I was dying faster than everybody else, and she laughed. She slammed on the brakes because the people in front of us had all slammed on their brakes. The wipers clacked at each end of their circuit.

Right then I almost told her about staring out the window of the plane watching the diorama landscape unfold, clouds over land, and realizing that there was nothing much for me these days, how maybe love was a finite supply of civility and trust and tensed knees in car rides. That all we had left was empty companionship and someone to pick us up from the airport. Instead, I asked her how work was going, and I listened.

Delivering all the dead letters

She was suddenly full of words all the time, like there was a pressure on her sternum pushing them bubbling out of her mouth. A happy plague of sentences is what. It lasted for three weeks or so before slowly dying off as she came to realize that the things she talked about didn’t have any weight, which they didn’t, but they did.

But those three weeks. At first it was a kind of miracle, the way we suddenly found ourselves awash in things to talk about after months of dry land. She told childhood stories, ones I’d never heard, like the one about the inflatable pool or the one about her dog eating a whole turkey and throwing up in her bed or the one about her uncle hanging her over the banister by her ankles and talking like he was Hans Gruber, which these were warm and film-grained memories that filled in the darkened places. She told about her dreams and her fears and how some of them were the same thing. She told little things, white truths, honey-thick and without fear of judgment or the pain of human loneliness.

You would think that after all those silent clinking dinners that I would have fallen in love all over again, that what would have happened would have been a soft slipping away of all the barbs and resentment. But come on. By week two I was on the couch watching TV asking her to wait for the commercial, but wait, have you seen this commercial? I was staying late at work, which I didn’t even have the excuse that it was my career. Week three saw the birth of mocking uh-huhs and rolled eyes. It’s funny the way we commit these tiny assassinations again and again. Actually I guess it’s not funny. But it happened.