A deferral worse than denial

I had the soapy aftertaste of bad coffee on my tongue, which seemed somehow relevant. My mind was always on these trivial disappointments, the low hum of the adult male’s disgust at himself and his lot in life drowning out anything truly devastating. Isn’t that just the way of everything.

Sometimes I liked to pretend that I didn’t have a body. Like what was I, like was I a ghost on the edge of the bed. I smoothed down a corner of the sheet, leaned forward, flicked my tie over and again so that it did a little pendulum arc out away from my body.

I stayed that way for centuries, my tie moving close and away, uncomfortable in my dad’s old suit. Dust settled thick and feathery on my shoulders. The bed rotted until it was a metal frame and rusty springs. Eventually the building sort of fell down into itself. But I stayed. She stayed, too, standing in the doorway, waiting for the answer to a question she’d never before been brave enough to ask. I’m sure she deserved an answer. I’m sure of it.



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For the next few months I'm only going to be updating on Thursdays.  My PhD work is heating up, and I'm also working on short stories, so I've got to make some breathing room.

Let's make a meal of the memory

We were walking past the hard-packed husks of snowmen, sad little gumdrop lumps in the grass reminding us of the weekend’s tromping around ankle deep in our pajama pants and winter coats. Now it was sunshine and more sunshine, the kind a weatherman would smile about with big teeth and a tan wizened face pretending at youth. Well, let him smile, then. I cast my lot with the snowmen.

Oh you’re such a dramatic was what she said while we walked, her breath showing, as if the words were drifting off behind us. The beautiful thing about all of this is how the barriers between word and thought and the insides of each of us kind of broke down after awhile. How I didn’t have to say things out loud. The grass looked especial in its greenness. She said special worked just as well and was half as pretentious. She said think about what you’re typing as you type it, because you tend to overwrite.

I thought of a picture I’d seen once, a girl spitting a glass of water out in front of her toward the camera like a sprinkler in the late-day sun, colorful and strange and great. I wondered what it would be like to make a rainbow on command like that, whenever you wanted. She opened her mouth to talk and there it was, light refracting all around us in a million billion directions, ROYGBIV all over the place. I couldn’t help but smile.

Dye packs, radio transmitters, and other tools of unrequiting

When you crossed the state line I was sitting on the couch and weeping, reading the note your kidnappers had left over and over. It said that I may already have won, and then it listed a bunch of contest rules and exceptions. It all looked very official. I fell over sideways and pressed the paper against my face. It came away tear-stained in one of those patterns you could find a miracle in if you were the type.

But I was not the type. Days went by and there were no calls, no deep voices with lists of demands and snot-choked crying in the background. I would forget and pour two mugs of coffee, which that would set me off all over again. All my money was in a suitcase by the front door. I lived in the act of springing into action, every day the same panel of the same faded comic book.

The police all knew me by name. Some days they would take me out for coffee. As the weeks turned to months, though, they became curt and annoyed as I sat for hours in the lobby. The grief counselor I was seeing kept wanting to see the letter, in truth he was kind of a dick about it. He said things like look you have to realize and filtering your existence through a lens of denial and unhealthy unhealthy unhealthy all the time.

There you were, then, at the bank in line behind me trying not to be noticed, three years gone by, me with a suitcase and a deposit slip, you with just a deposit slip. My little Patty Hearst. I hung around and waited, watched everyone else in line to see your accomplices, your tormentors, but you just deposited your check and walked off, as if Dr. Gary were right. As if it was all just mythmaking. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for jumping the counter and banging around for the silent alarm until a security guard pinned me writhing to the floor.

A simulacrum of a simulacrum

One morning, I decided to make myself out of papier-mâché. I mean like really. I mean like this is how I came into being. What I did was I tore pages out of what would become my favorite books, soaked them in gin and whiskey and this really good chicken soup that I would attribute to my mother, who I made later out of clay and put in a sort-of shoebox diorama, another one of my craft project people.

Still wet, I went downtown with pages dropping off here and there since I wasn’t yet glued. It was okay, though. I had more, and I knew one bookstore where you could get whole stacks of remaindered books on the right day of the month, just laying there stripped naked of their covers. Mostly they were carted off by the homeless for starting fires. What I did after that was I went to the racetrack and made a deal with an open-mouthed gaping jockey for his losing racehorse.

The smell of long-boiling hide was maybe the worst of it, but I can still hear the sound of the dumb beast bleeding out. I felt sorry for it anyway, but that’s the way of things. I have to say that I came out lumpy and smelly and weird, which most real things turn out that way. Later, though, I got it right. I made a person with words.

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Sorry for the missed update.  You know.  School.  Sleep.  Etc.

The rhythms, the notes, the fear

We moved through songs together, all of them about and containing us. We put them on like shedding skin in reverse, stealing layer on layer of mutual identity until we understood what it was to be thick as thieves.

That’s how we found ourselves on a yellow-black Kawasaki, riding into the Western sun and feeling like pirates. Or how I knew she was born with flowers in her eyes. Or us together on a piece of construction equipment with spray paint, a deck of cards, and a bottle of something while paper birds flew over our heads. These things, they were ours through the transitive property. That’s how songs are written.

How long can a thing like that keep up? We should have known. We should have been aware. You can’t flee forever in song, and we perhaps grew desperate as time went on. She became a gun street girl, I got lost in Ybor City. Or we just saw how we kidded ourselves. Now I sleep in headphones and wish it hadn’t happened this way, wanting that life back, the one we lived three minutes at a time.

Starve a cold, feed a fever

It was one of those days where the temperature took a header into an empty swimming pool, the weather outside practically screaming at summer to fuck off for nine months. We were at a party in one of those shabby old outskirts homes, a warm kind of sixth or seventh owner place that had a history that didn’t need to be known to be felt, sitting slouched on a slouching couch, both of us bored and looking over the filled bookshelves to see if the host was really worth talking to, which from the looks of it she was, and I suddenly said we missed out on getting the last snow cone of summer.

She said yeah, but it was an animatronic answer. The party around us was clumped into groups the way a party does until about four or five drinks. We weren’t sad exactly. We weren’t left out exactly, either. People would peal off and talk to us for a bit here and there. What it was, it was, it was, was we were a blank.

Which it’s the between moments that are hardest to articulate, I guess. Nothing was wrong save a poorness in the quality of the air that we breathed. The atmosphere stood in the middle of us is what. If either of us were to say it aloud it would be met with a hand on the shoulder and half-felt reassurance. Besides, you don’t give things a chance to collapse at a party. It’s bad etiquette.

Did you find religion, or was it just more ghosts?

On your birthday we were too busy trying to survive, so there was no dinner, no people tucked behind couches and kitchen counters desperate to yell surprise so they could go to the restroom or get another beer, no unmaking the bed by the force of our movement together. No, all that was left was the petty wish for more years, ones better than the one we were in.

I was going to get you a present. I thought you should know. I was going to throw myself from a very high place and set you free. I got all the way up there, though, and I looked down, and all I could see was you filling out paperwork and calling around to see who could take you to come get my car. I thought, as always, of how we met.

I drove out of the city, I drove west. The windmills there were lining the hills, making lazy pronouncements about what it is to be alive, American, pretending at control. I thought that maybe they were angels, but they weren’t. It didn’t make the things they were saying any less of a miracle.

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.