Vegas

I have planned many drunken nights using the map alone. Instead of towns and cities, the official Las Vegas map–the one in the Rand McNally atlas–is peppered with hotspots to throw down your cash and throw back shots of Petron: Caesar’s Palace, the Monte Carlo, Planet Hollywood, the Galleria at Sunset. And really, what do you expect from a place like Vegas? It is a glittering, manufactured machine in the middle of a desert. It is the place that people go when they are thirsty for fantasy, when the awful drone of reality has left them parched. I go for the noise. The buzz of the crowds and the litany of the chiming slot machines help to drown out the hollow thoughts that creep into my head and somehow find their way into my stomach. I go for the lights. They are blinding, and they are 24/7, and they are easy to fade into. The quiet, dark nights in the suburbs become threatening after a while. Because you can see nothing, and because you can hear nothing, all your problems become like a flame in a cave–too bright, too exaggerated, too threatening. And so you go to the glittering machine plopped down in the middle of nowhere, and you let it all outshine you, you let the music and the cheering and the ringing and the slamming down of glasses drive out the voices saying everything’s wrong, it’s all fucked up, you’ve fucked up your life.

Beats

Apparently each living creature has about two billion heartbeats to spend in his lifetime. And our hearts can thump out those two billion beats slowly, or they can trill and fizzle out in a matter of days.

I keep trying to find ways to slow time.

I keep having to remind myself that I still have 75 percent of my life ahead of me.

My greatest fear is Nothing. The sights and sounds and smells I register are comforting reminders that I am somewhere. I do not want to give them up, ever. I want to stay here and see the white paint chipping on my windowsill, to hear the clicking and sledge-hammer banging sounds my radiator makes when it begins to heat up, to smell the tired, gray scent of lingering cigarette smoke. I want the sun in the morning and the moon at night and chocolate-flavored tortilla chips when the mood strikes. I want the kind of love that keeps me up at night, and then trapped in bed way past noon. And I want this all forever and ever. And if I can’t have this forever, then I want other people to have it. I want people to fall down in the dirt and wake up in the middle of the night to their loud, obnoxious fucking radiators, to make love and make mistakes, to wonder and marvel, to go to church, to catch tadpoles and spend money and read the paper. To get caught up in soap operas and cry when they’ve had too much gin. To empathize and sympathize and get really really jealous. And I don’t know why. To exist is to fall prey to the intoxicating prospect of eternity. And we become its slaves, finding Forever in art and ideals and ideas and offspring. But why? Why do we live to live? Where’s the fear in not existing?

I am the grandchild of the restless building blocks of the universe, the residual dust of cosmic bodies. I want to build, to create, too. To build a universe of my own.

So we’re all just ripples; faint echoes of the scraps of the beginning, of the quarks and leptons and gluons. How incredible it is to exist and witness existence. To see the evidence. To know that we’re as old as the universe. We’re ancient, recycled, all made from the same stuff.

And I’m not religious, but one time I bought 99 cent prayer candles at the back corner of the CVS among old bottles of witch hazel and elephantine tubs of Spanish hair gel. And I lit them when I got home, and asked an open-ended Why? to no one in particular, and waited for an answer.

But there is no answer as to why. The universe exists because it does. It doesn’t share our obsessive need to find meaning in itself.

I am trying to become comfortable living in the dark. I am trying to soothe my constant state of questioning. Why am I afraid to stop asking for a while? Am I afraid to lose the questions altogether? To forget to ask?

The truth is, once you quiet the question, you know why. You can’t articulate it, but there are moments when you know. Like when the weather’s perfect and you have nothing you have to do that day, or when you finally finish writing a twenty page paper, or when you have a really good conversation with someone about time, because of course you can never get enough time, or enough of said person, and if he were on a train going by at 50 miles per hour towards the East relative to the tracks, and you were standing alongside those tracks, you’d run as fast as you could to hear his stories about falling down in the dirt and catching tadpoles.

The Other Woman

She is not beautiful. She has black wiry hair and eyebrows and starkly white, creamy skin that doesn’t respond to heat or the cold, and eyes that are too pale to be attractive. She reminds you of your 7th-grade best friend’s mother who wouldn’t let her drink soda or juice because of all the sugar.

You don’t like her first name. It sounds like the name of a middle-aged schoolteacher or, worse, a director of Human Resources. You imagine her with a short, middle-aged woman haircut. God, it would be hideous, but it would make sense. It would suit her. Or at least: it would suit her name.

Your father once had a girlfriend with that name. You didn’t mind it on her. She made it work because she was blonde and insane and she bought you martinis at restaurants when you were seventeen. Also, she wasn’t sleeping with your fiance.

If you’re going to sleep with someone else, you scream, tears streaming down your face, you should at least choose someone who is ATTRACTIVE, who KNOWS how to be a mistress, someone who doesn’t get jealous when she sees MY dress in OUR car.

You are less upset that he is cheating on you, and more upset by the fact that this other woman is not a woman at all, but a very immature girl–a girl who pretends to be the tomboyish type so that she will be surrounded by guys that will want to sleep with her because she plays video games, isn’t fat, and has tits. You see right through her. You know she’s playing her cards so that Mark will leave you and run to her, even though she says to him, “This is wrong,” and “I’m sorry, I let things get out of hand just then. I’m just so attracted to you.”

He tells you, in a calm therapist voice, that he might love other people and you will have to be okay with that if you want to be with him. Half of you wants to kiss him and say of course you understand, everything he is saying is what you philosophically believed when you were nineteen, before you met him and knew how terrifying and weirdly maternal love was. The other half of you, the one that overtakes you, hates him. You hate when he preaches to you about these things, as if he, because he reads books from the Self Help and Psychology section, knows all about things like healthy love and relationships, things like “spiritual growth” and suffocation.

You know he doesn’t mean to, but he insults you all day.

Mark is one of those people that has chosen to shoulder the burden of stark honesty. Funny that he should be having an affair. He’s been telling you every excruciating detail until you say, hot tears streaming down your cheeks, “Will you please shut up already.” He has been stone-faced the whole time. He has not tried to comfort you. It is as if he were in Confession, a black curtain between you two. You roll over to your side of the bed and he sighs, puts on his shoes, and goes for a walk, leaving you home alone with all that hurt.

At some point, every time you two fight, you give in. You say you’re sorry and you’re trying to be strong and understanding but you’re not used to this and everything hurts so much. And you aren’t sure if you mean anything you’re saying or if you’re sorry at all, but you just want to not be fighting anymore and you want to go back to not saying anything, to go back and pretend to be happy, to believe all the nice things you believed before he set them straight and told you the truth. You wish, secretly, that he honored the art of lying, just sometimes.

It wasn’t always like this. Early on, you were a fighter. You were stubborn. You knew what was right and what was wrong, and you didn’t waiver from your beliefs. Your logic was sharp as daggers. Now you are willing to bend your sense of right and wrong, to eliminate it all together, if that is what will keep things together, if that is what will keep him loving you.

He tells you more. He tells you he feels guilty for being with you and missing someone else, maybe even loving her. You are doing somersaults in the sky, high above the trees, groping for something–anything–to stabilize yourself, but the only thing that surrounds you is empty air.

You are in your car, in the parking lot of a restaurant you had reservations for at eight. It is eight-forty-two. You are in Boston, visiting your parents, and you don’t want to go back there, but the drive to your apartment is too far and you don’t see well at night. You just need a place where you can scream. Scream it all out, and maybe smash a few glasses. You want to be alone. You don’t like making a scene in public.

Compose yourself, you say in your mind. Do you know how many people want to sleep with you? What about that nice Jewish guy a couple of years younger than you? That artist with the strong jawline? The Asian bisexual girl who liked your “punky” hairstyle? You’re a catch. Fuck love. Love is boring. Love is traditional, cliche. You hate cliches. Love and commitment, not your thing. Never has been. You’re too much of a free spirit, it would only tie you down.

You feel like you are ten and your parents have just told you that they have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses and they have only weeks to live.

You look up at the vast sky and remind yourself that you are still here and you are still healthy and everyone has had their heart broken, and you will be so much stronger because of it.

But no one has known this love I feel!

Yes, they have. And it doesn’t matter.

“Fine,” you say, and buckle yourself up.
“What are you feeling?” he says.
“It is what it is.” You start the car.
“Stop,” he says, turning off the engine. “I know you’re upset. Talk to me.”

But you don’t want to talk. You just want to turn off a switch and stop this. You want to get on with your life. You want to watch chick flicks and eat ice cream and cry until you’re desert-dry and go get drunk with your friends and go to movies by yourself and see other people, maybe try sleeping with women.

You’ve always had a talent for flipping switches, but then you’ve never been engaged. And the ring is too sparkly, too full of sentiment, to be flushed down the toilet in a fit of anger.

“Just do what makes you happy,” you reply finally, knowing you are only saying this to get out of a conversation that will flip the tenuous switch back on.

You will have to wait to figure out what to do with the ring once you are drunk or high or in love with someone else.

Bluetime

There is a time between five and six A.M. when the night sky races to meet the morning, when the sparrows ruffle their chilly feathers and begin to chirp their famished songs. It is a time of suspension, a hungry hour that lays its stark blue shadows upon the hills and the houses and the bark-weary patterns on the trees. While the rest of the world sleeps, I am out in the blue, standing as still as I can, my bare feet turning pink from the cold, dew-soaked grass.

Against the hush, I am teeming with noise. Against the monochrome, I am rife with color. Against this limbo, this lacuna, this strange state of suspension, I reclaim a rhythm that has been lost in the rush of the waking world. There is something about the stillness of this hour that numbs an incessant need to chase after memories and the nearly impossible task of trapping them on paper with pen to instill the future with the same grandeur that time has stamped onto the past. There is something about this blue-time that rubs nostalgia and anticipation away so that the present moment may shine, and all I feel is the blurry triumph of a night spent without sleep, the glorious exhaustion in my muscles, the icy shock of wet grass on my feet.

There is something about the speed of the waking world that runs me off the tracks. I was born deaf to rhythm, dumb to numbers, and blind to all things quantifiable. I clap on the up, confuse five and six, mistake daydreams for things that happened in the past. Perhaps some would say I’m overanalyzing, but I think I also have an abnormal resistance to the progression of time. If you were to access my entire Google-search history, you would find, among Toll House cookie recipes and links to free movie downloads, the map points on my vain net-quest for immortality. You would find the quasi-scientific health benefits of spirulina (an edible plant said to grant the consumer eternal life), articles on Aubrey de Grey (a geneticist racing to offer humankind biological immortality), and a Wikipedia page on various views of the afterlife. Somewhere along the way I stumbled across a book called The Selfish Gene, by British geneticist Richard Dawkins. Genes, says Dawkins, must be selfish in order to replicate, and thus to continue to exist; and we are mere “survival machines” for our genes, the vehicles by which they launch themselves into the future. Individuals, he points out, are transient, but genes, if successful, can last forever. In his book, Dawkins coined the term “meme”–a cultural transmission passed on from person to person. Memes, like genes, are passed on through natural selection, they are immortal, and they can mutate. They are ideas, information, trends, religions, languages, stories, vestiges of a fundamental desire to propagate, to perpetuate; traces of our legacies. So there it is. A scientific explanation as to why I must write; as to why we all must write or make art or love or children. But where is the time to pin down all these tokens of immortality?

That time speeds as we get older is a fact of relativity, and a cold one at that. The first ten years are the longest ten years we will experience, ever, and the subsequent decades will be mere flashes in the relativistic pan, becoming blips on the radar towards the end of our lives. So a few years ago, with the feeling that the years were accelerating to a speed that was faster than I could handle, I began a stubborn protest on sleep. For two years, I slept as little as I could manage. Eight hours of twenty-four was too much time to spend curled in  a fetal position cutting up pieces from my day and rearranging them into dreams I probably wouldn’t remember in the morning. Sleep, I thought, while pleasant, was nothing but a ravenous consumer of hour upon hour; sleep was the devil and I wanted to be good. So I spent my hours deliberately, taking speed and caffeine and hot showers to jolt me back into states of wakefulness. All the things one can do while the world sleeps. I read books. I organized my closet. I typed up stories and essays, scribbled small bursts of narrative. I shaved my legs with Raspberry Rain shaving gel. I experimented with the little I had in my kitchen: whole wheat pasta, cherry tomatoes, tamari, and other condiments like chipotle sauce and ginger-soy dressing. And as the infomercials played in the background of my own personal hustle and bustle, I resisted the urge to pick up the phone and order the knife that could slice deli-thin shavings from a nickel, or the vaccuum-like product that could shrink-wrap clothes like beef jerky so the moths wouldn’t make tiny holes in the homecoming dress shoved into a dusty corner of the attic that would never fit again.

The speed I took was prescribed to me, a medication to aid in concentration. It has always had the effect of slowing time so that I could catch up. When I am on the medication, I am closed off, not hungry, bubbling inside myself. Pulses of heat prickle my skin. I am enlivened by fluttering palpitations, mini heart-attacks. I confuse nausea for hunger. I am dismissive, jittery, quick to anger. When I lie down in my bed and shut off the lights, three or four hours after the medication is supposed to wear off, I am attacked again with an inner electric charge. I am a buzzing network, but I am content. Death and time are passing thoughts that quickly pop in and out of existence, and even then they are only philosophical, theoretical, not felt. I do not feel like an animal with a death sentence; I feel like a machine that can only grasp death as a hypothetical concept. I feel invincible.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that disorder, known scientifically as entropy, can only increase with time. Stephen Hawking once illustrated this law by letting a cup drop to the ground and shatter into shards. The shards, he said, would never gather themselves back into the cup; they would only break down into tinier pieces and resume their existence as grains of sand or specks of dust. It is said that this asymmetry of disorder, this imbalance of chaos and order, is what allows us to distinguish the past from the future. And like the shards, this disorder can never retreat back into coherence; it can only continue on, dispersing molecules out into the universe to mix and mingle with other molecules that they had not been acquainted with in their original state. And memes and genes grow and evolve and stick to other memes or genes like sticky rice because they’re selfish. How is it that the universe is not ripping at the seams, with ideas and stories and memories and strands of DNA all coming undone, genes and memes floating through the world like bits of broken china, so worn from time you begin to question whether they came from china at all.

I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but sometime in my early childhood, I became accustomed to graveyards–not because they had become for me a place to mourn dead relatives, to send my final goodbyes as some great aunt or distant cousin was lowered into the fresh soil–but because they had become a place of recreation and repose. Every Saturday, my father would take me to see the puppet shows that were held at the Unitarian Universalist church in our town. After the show, we would visit the adjacent cemetery and play Hide and Seek or read a chapter of Alice Through the Looking Glass. I have these little bits of memory smeared along the periphery of my brain: fragments of sun-bleached grass, hard gray headstones, and a feeling of security as I sat atop those headstones, the warmth of morning heating my body and stinging my eyes, reminding me of my own existence. These memories are mostly implicit–physical memories that still linger in corners of my body and fabricate specific scenarios for my brain. Here I am, I would think, I am here and not there, my eyes resting on a grassless patch of ground. I thought myself magic in a way; I was one of the only living people in the cemetery. I liked being among the dead. It made me feel that much more alive. It opened up the world and isolated time itself. Even now, in some corridor of my mind, a part of me is forever perched upon a sunny headstone. I look back on my time in the cemetery as a constant, a thing that is always there, though intangible.

But even in the seemingly-immortal bank of memory, time eats away at exactitude. Details blur, dissappear, mutate. Details are forged, counterfeited, accidentally filed into the wrong memory. We collage memories from stories heard, pictures seen, movies watched–and could swear they were constructed from our own raw materials: from our eyes, our ears, our gut. We can never be sure whether or not we have remembered the past accurately. But consider for a moment this: I know someone who has frequent fits  of deja-vu, and they aren’t your typical episodes. They come like orgasms of the amygdala, and for about thirty seconds he is a prophet: he predicts, out loud, the next song to come on the radio, the breed of dog that will dash across the street, the sputtering out of a streetlight, the sentence on the tip of my tongue. He intuits the immediate future, a time thought to be even less accessible than the distant, dormant past.

Einstein saw time as a constant, block-like dimension in which the past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously, so that we are the ones moving in a linear direction through time. So if the future is already here, playing out in tandem with Then and Now, why can’t we siphon memories from it?
I’ve had flashes of what feels to be my future. Perhaps they are merely fictions made from dreams, deja-vus, lapses in the synapses of my brain. But this is what they say: I will live in a montage of Ivory soap and old architecture, drugstore commercials and bright sunny lawns, alongside the ghost of a child with dark hair and a politician’s smile. I will wrap myself in tattered blankets and pull turnips out from under the earth. I will visit the sea on weekends and wear aprons while baking cookies. A man will bring me dandelions at night and make love to me on the edge of the bed and go back to his wife before the sun rises. I will hold hour-long conversations with telemarketers while peeling carrots. I will wear dresses with flowers and ruffles and touches of white eyelet, and I will tell the ghost child I’m sorry. And we will play patty-cake and sing do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man? I will sit down before an old typewriter and try to recreate my day with ABCs, with commas and quotation marks and periods. I will avoid ? and ! and try not to think too long and hard about why I’m here and what it all means.

When I was four I asked my mother for a little sister. I imagined her as a gymnast named Nicole with straight black hair. She would be bigger than me, and she would have my mother’s face, but fair and freckled rather than tanned. A few months later, my mother was pregnant. My sister came out as Marina Neville-Nicole. She was a plump, slothful baby with curly blonde hair and a cherubic face that looked nothing like Nicole’s.

We are looking through an old photo album with a copper-colored leaf print. In it lie proofs of our past, blueprints for moments of our childhood, or before. Our mother with the Indian-like gap between her two front teeth in a teal sweater and a white beret; Dad and the bright peacock tattoo on his arm whose myriad colors have since faded from years of working in the sun; my three-year-old self on the floor of our grandmother’s kitchen in a red Little Miss Muffet hat and a Scooby-Doo life-jacket. I tell Marina the stories tied to the photos, but she dismisses them, too impatient to listen. For her, the photographs do not conjure the past like the memories inside our heads; the photos are their own objects, belonging to the present. They have a beauty and a story that is all their own, a story that has nothing to do with our ill-remembered past.

She has been taking a photography class, and she has been looking at Diane Arbus’ work, whose name, as she frequently reminds me, is pronounced DEE-Ann, not DIE-Ann.

“It looks like there’s light coming out from beneath the table in this one,” she says, inspecting a picture taken when I was six years old. It was Christmastime, I know, because I am wearing a blue velvet dress and a gold locket, and I am kneeling before the glass-top coffee table, arms rested on it, looking downward because it had come to my attention that the tags on my gifts that said “To Ariel, Love Santa Claus” were in my mother’s bubbly script. And indeed, there does appear to be some source of light coming from beneath the table and illuminating my face.
The last photograph in the book: At thirteen, she stands at five foot six, three inches taller than I was at eighteen, and boasts a 36 D cup-size under an Enties sweatshirt, probably borrowed from a boy at school who has a crush on her. Freckles spill like grains of sand across her nose, and her thick, once black hair is ruined with streaks of bleach that halo her head in the sunlight. She smiles, eyes half-open, as she holds out a dandelion, bright yellow, which seems to her to be the most important thing in the world right now; she holds it like a sceptor, a trophy, a relic of power, a relic she wants you to look at long enough to notice that yes, it is the most important thing in the world right now. It is a thing to see right now, it is a thing for her to hand to her French teacher after sauntering into the classroom ten minutes late while exclaiming “Je regrette, Madame, but everyone knows that time is an illusion anyway.” It is a thing she can hold in her hand and pluck bright slivers of petal from, something she can rub against her palm and smell the peppery pollen paint it leaves behind. Only it isn’t, not for you, the viewer, because it remains trapped in the stillness of the photograph. And the petals and the pollen remain pure in your mind, untainted by specific experience, sitting quietly in an archetypal memory that is tied only to the senses; it is a timeless memory, a timeless relic, an idea called dandelion.

Before I learned any better, I had no idea that one could remember only the past and not the future. I didn’t know that real memories couldn’t be composed of things that haven’t happened. This is one of my most vivid early memories: I am in a small, safety-orange tent. I am four years old and I am clicking my tongue with the babysitter: clu, cla, clu, cla, tick, tock, tick, tock. When I am done clicking, I run out of the tent, up the hill to my swingset, but a scaly, olive-green triceratops is blocking my way. She looks at me past her huge, tarnished horn. I look to the sky, which is what I usually do in times of crisis, but a big bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup hovers among the painted clouds, ready to flip over and drench me. This personal story, which logically equates to a dream, to me registers as a true memory. I do not remember this story as I remember dreams I’ve had. My dream-memories are in third person, on a bleary little T.V. screen with no sound. They come to me in five-second flashes, tainted with verdigris, wholly chimerical in their handling of time. This memory bursts with color: the quivering orange of the tent, the blue shock of electric sky, the glowing brown of the syrup in the bottle. This memory has a sound and a taste and a feel, a feeling of having actually happened.

I find myself retreating to faded memories of having great hope for the future. Well here I am. Where is the future? Where is my great hope? All I have are these memories of great hope. I remember being small, looking at adult women and thinking, God. Someday I’m going to have their life. Someday I’m going to stand out on someone’s beautiful back deck and lean over the wood railing, sparkling cocktail in hand, and look out at the inky humid July sky. Someday I’m going to be a bitter yet glamorous literary novelist downing Martinis at a smoky bar in Paris. I could feel the weight, the significance of the life that stretched out before me. But here is the future, and I feel no weight, no significance. No child-like contentment. I have traveled at light-speed along with time and memory and I am travelling further and further away from a hope I keep trying to regain, like all those china-shards of memes and genes floating further and further away from their pretty little teacups.

The cemetery, 1991: I try to see what the world looks like if I close one eye and keep the other open. What it looks like if I let my eyelids droop halfway down my eyes: a sleepy, underwater world of fluctuating light, a world built from the slippery stones of memory.

I return from this world worn and weathered, breathless and sea-beaten, wasted remains washed up on the darkened shore. Where is my time? Where is my timelessness? I am chasing after certain moments, after fragments of light and hard gray headstones; after teal fabric and the faded tails of peacocks; after white lillies and inky humid skies, swingsets and triceratops, ghost-children and men that fuck me on the bed’s edge. Will we ever stop building our future on the unreliable holiness of our memories? Our entire society is either paralyzed by perpetual nostalgia or preoccupied by the future. Too often we have found ourselves splashing in the wake of time among our memories or making too many lists, too many dreams. Maybe the trouble is that we don’t quite know how to fill the space between now and death. Because it is just a space, and death is immanent, we don’t want to delve too deep. We don’t want to become so entwined in that space between now and death that when death comes along, we are unprepared. No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s that we can’t. We’re so terrified that we’ll get so involved with life and fall in love with the world that we’ll lose track of time and it will all be gone in an instant. To live from moment to moment means to free-fall with no parachute above nor cushion below. When you live, you charge forward. You begin to die. You begin to dissolve into molecules, into atoms and quarks and leptons and gluons and then to neutrinos, billions of neutrinos. You turn to particles of light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second out in every direction. You turn to sound: to verbs and adjectives, to fragments and run-ons, to the breath between the phrases of sentences that strive to be whole, complete, but can end only in ellipses; to single words, to vowels, to morphemes and phonemes, to the irrevocable heat of entropy. To scattered, splayed disorder.

The Chase

God knows why I’m back here, living this life I’m living. I’m caught up. I can’t move, can’t plan for what’s next. I stutter through the days on caffiene and too much nicotine, try to spread the world out on the floor so I can get a bird’s eye view of all that’s going on, but my scope isn’t broad enough, will never be broad enough. I dig. I curl into corners and feel the textures around me. If I want something done I do it myself. I can’t hold your hand, I’m not your mother.

But when I hitch something, some craggy part of the rock, I go forever. I write through till sunrise and the bleary buzz that accompanies a night of no sleep.

The hitch usually comes when I’ve exhausted myself. It must be a certain state of insanity that turns me into a whirlwind.

You get into a rhythm. You maintain it with coffee and cigarettes, with clips to keep your hair out of your face, with sweaters so you don’t get too cold and a fan so you don’t get too warm. You follow it into the grocery store, onto the bus, chase it down your street. You search frantically for it when it goes hiding for a few seconds, because fuck, the last time it came to you was seven months ago and who knows when it will be back next time.

You keep your hands at the keyboard in case they want to put more words together.

You take your cues, you watch for signs, you hold your breath. You try not to get your hopes up.

I’ve Known Some Men

I’ve known some men who like bourbon and blues, who have tattoos and smoke like a fiend. They have an appreciation for old BMWs and good books and are addicted to women and strong black coffee.

I try to dig up whatever it is they’re hiding. Their disguise is in their gestures: the way they curl their fingers inward while holding a cigarette, the way they look down and shift their eyes from left to right as they search for a thought and the words with which to construct it, how their laughter is genuine but they make an effort to laugh longer and harder than most because they have recognized this a bit too clearly:

That life is finite, so eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

I’ve known some men who were idealists, who’ve had views on the world that seemed like mine, and though I’ve tried my best to quiet my suspicions and believe in their sincerity, these men ended up being the most dangerous of all.

I’ve known some men who want to own me because I have long hair and I read interesting-sounding books and that’s all they need to know.

I’ve known some middle-aged men whose buried primal wishes have surfaced because the eighteen-year-old girl twists her hair in his presence. It’s not that he has loved women his own age up to this point because he prefers their wisdom, their self-sufficiency, their bodies–it’s just that no other eighteen-year-old has twisted her hair, licked her lips, leaned forward and looked at him as if he had a choice.

I’ve known some men who make their intentions unmistakably clear; these men are from France.

Portraits

A Snowglobe, 1991-1992

I will spend next winter admiring my patent-leather mary janes in the snow. I will wear them with thickly woven white stockings like I did when I was younger. I will listen to songs by Ray Charles and Nat King Cole during Christmas and insist they are exclusively songs to be listened to at Christmas. I will wear purple dresses and sing in stuffy splintered community theaters, one dim light flowing down on me, a saint in a dark grotto. I will always come in wet enough from the snow that I’ll have to change my clothes. In my house, you will feel the softness of the carpet through your good shoes, and it will smell like candle, not of any particular scent of candle, just candle. I will live on thick red wine and poorly made cookies at night, and champagne from a paper cup and triscuits from the box in the morning. In June, I’ll miss Christmas so much that I’ll sneak into the living room and recreate Christmas by making construction paper garlands and adorning my house-plants with jewelry. I’ll start to pray to Jesus, but forget his name halfway through the prayer. I’ll look it up online by typing The man who was God and died on a cross for our sins into Google. Then I’ll discover that his real name wasn’t really Jesus in the first place, it was Yeshua, and I will tell everyone that I’m in a relationship with Yeshua and they will ask me who is Yeshua and I will say Yeshua is very important, and you too can have a relationship with him because he loves you. And they will fold dollar bills into my hand and I will say Bless you and break icicles off the ledge of my roof and say these are marvelous at cooling you down.

Sainte Madeleine penitente

Sainte Madeleine penitente. The Magdalene is turning her face toward the sky in hyperbolic reverence. In an otherwise dark room, she is illuminated, a chubby white hand over her chest, one breast exposed. Out in front of her is in an open book. She is surrounded by a tree, an empty lantern, an hourglass, and a skull. She is against an arch exposing a stormy, steel blue sky. A statue of Christ on the cross is on the wall.

I’m sorry, she says, I know I was once a sinner, but you… you saw something in me and when they cast me down and called me Whore, you saved me. Let those among you with a clean slate be the first to cast a stone, you said.

Mary took Jesus’ open hand and he cast out of her seven demons, each exorcism a painful, terrifying state of ecstasy, an excruciating catharsis. When the seventh demon rose out of her, she heaved and fell to the ground with heavy grace. Panting, she lifted her face and peered through her tangled hair at Jesus Christ, who was smiling at her, lips curled over teeth.

Bruise

Your heart beats irregularly, thumping out its inarticulate tambour, sputtering splintered pathos. Your hand is rested on the asphalt, newly paved, and you feel as though you could sink your fingers through it and dig a hole in the earth and pull out the Chinese sun, all black and blue like a giant bruise in the sky because our sun is on which means theirs is off. You wish you could hold the bruised sun in your hand and feel its heat, but you know you should be faithful to your own American sun, and anyway no sun will ever fit into your hand, ever. You forget, momentarily, that all you’ve eaten for the past few weeks is lead and rice, and try to remember why it is that you feel so heavy, why it is that gravity insists on holding you down like a violent lover, terrified of your freedom.

The Story of New Loss (or Nul Los, or Sol and Lun, or Sun And Moon)

I live in tangled white sheets on a mattress with a springboard. No bed frame. I don’t believe in bed frames. They collapse too easily when you jump on the bed, an activity I frequently engage in. And I’m always afraid the metal frame-on-wheels shit they give you at college will give out while I’m asleep, and I’ll end up cutting off my arm and my nice white sheets will get all bloody.  I like to lie in tangled sheets and let the sunshine come in through my curtainless windows, let the sunlight nourish me like a plant. The sun likes to hide in my hair and eyelashes and sometimes makes me sneeze, because sunshine comes in dust-form. Most people don’t know this. Sunshine does not come via rays, as most people are led to believe. Sunshine comes from a dusty planet called Sol. Sol is our lightbulb during the day. At five o’ clock, it begins to dip into the sea. Sol is so hot by the end of the day, it needs to cool off so it doesn’t burn out. That means when we’re not using our lightbulb, the people under the sea, like the Chinese and the French, get to have light. While Sol is soaking, another sun that isn’t as bright comes out to be America’s night light. Its name is Lun. It is made of limestone and lemon, and is lit from within. When light from Lun comes down, it does not come in the form of dust. It is cool, balmy air. It doesn’t get everywhere like sunshine sometimes does. Lun light just kisses your cheekbones, maybe your shoulders and hair, makes you smell like jasmine.

I keep forgetting to fall asleep, and so I miss my dreams. I take showers instead. I’m afraid to fall asleep because eight hours seems like a long time not to be awake. I sleep a couple hours at a time if I get tired. Someone once told me I’m just a guest in my own body. I feel weird borrowing things. That’s why I never take out library books. I like to scribble in books, impose thoughts in the margins, tear out pages if I don’t like certain parts. Sometimes I like to read from the end to the beginning. I don’t like surprises.

Cold Morning/Pancakes

You are terrified, and because you are terrified, everything else becomes peripheral, insignificant. Rows and rows of evergreen are lined up inside the hollow of your stomach. You feel a newness, pale yellow, somewhere between your head and your feet, and you are always cold and you want pancakes, but you don’t like the way that pancakes taste; you just like the idea of pancakes, you like what they stand for: wholesomeness and comfort and simplicity. Kind of like how you hate nature and being outside but you like that people can have profound moments and feel invigorated by the outdoors. The woods don’t appeal to your aesthetic sense, but they seem to appeal to everyone else’s and so you have taken it upon yourself to enjoy them. And anyhow you’re not sure if it hurts or feels good when he touches you, or if you chose to feel this attraction, this chemistry, in the first place.

A Train, 1942 or 2007

I live in the black train among the coal and coarse voices, with a man that croaks out old blues and huffs the aerosol from cans of spray paint. I make portraits of the faces I see by tracing my fingers around in the dust and I dream of warm brick walls during the afternoon. We stop at diners for cheeseburgers and drugstores for licorice. People give us cigarettes. I try to warm my raw, red hands by rubbing them together and blowing on them, but the effort is futile. When I open my mouth to speak, all that comes out is the cold northern wind. A little girl told me yesterday that my heart was made of metal. I think my lungs are too. A woman walks by with a Scottish terrier in her arms. She is wearing a Burberry scarf and magenta lipstick. She is fifty or sixty, maybe almost seventy, with a crop of thinning, strawberry blonde hair. She glances at me from behind her tinted eyeglasses and opens her mouth as if to speak. But she closes it and clears her throat, then purses her lips together indignantly and puts a gloved hand on top of the terrier’s head. Poor orphans, the people think when they see us, poor grown orphans. I carry with me pencil and scissor bouquets and I am most myself in the smog and the smoke. The old man chews on leather. He says it’s even better than chewing on cinnamon sticks, which is just like chewing on twigs dipped in mulled cider. We try to build fires but everyone builds sandcastles over them. Sometimes we sneak into the passenger cart and drink hot chocolate and talk to people and their children. The world from this view looks like a series of oil paintings, moving fluidly from canvas to canvas. The old man plays the harmonica and says “Keep dreaming, son,”and I do.

Engine

And I just go. I go through men with Irish accents and glass bottles of orange-mango juice and cherry-flavored clove cigarettes. I wear down names like Steve and Chris and Mike. I seek out luck in the pockets of opportunists. I listen to what my hands are telling me, what they want down down in ink.

It’s not me. It’s just something behind the scenes that revs my engine.

A Piece of Fiction

I’ve regained my ability to write fiction. Here’s how you do it: you lie about the truth.

Mornings like this it’s like the sun never left. The weather is warm upon waking, a phenomenon that never occurs in the cooler months. Especially because wake-up time is before 6, right at the tail end of blue-time when everything begins to recover the color it was drained of when the sun went down.

But really, if you want the truth, wake-up time is actually around 7:30, after I’ve hit the snooze button on my alarm clock a few times. I try every morning to wake up before sunrise, because being up to greet the day seems like a romantic notion to me, like a thing that people do when they have their lives together and know what they want, and I would like to have my life together and know what I want, so maybe getting up before the sun will get me there somehow.

I used to think fiction had to come from your head entirely. That you had to create characters and give them suitable names. That you had to weave together intricate plots with big themes that would resound in readers’ heads for years to come.

Recently I’ve been using it as a form of wishful thinking.

People get up early here. Earlier than me. I live on a semi-major street and from my bed I can hear the cars zooming past even before the birds start chirping.

My windows are enormous, one of the major selling points for me of the apartment. One window faces Mount Tom, along with the busy street beneath it.

I read Amy Hempel inside and Annie Dillard outside. Bourbon, water, and lemon juice in a curvy souvenir glass accompany Hempel in my sunny bedroom, and for Dillard I walk to the lake down the street and suck down a clove or two.

I’ve actually never been to the lake. I keep meaning to go, but I never seem to have enough time.

No, I have plenty of time. The thing I’m lacking is energy.

Here’s the truth, if the truth is what interests you:

My roommates have company over for spiced rum and hits off a seldom-washed gravity bong; they talk loudly and laugh loudly until 4 in the morning. The girl who lives in the basement, which is messy and unfinished, breeds snakes, works as an exotic dancer and leaves the front door unlocked. The kitchen sink is always overcrowded with used dishes, the bathroom is covered in hair, and the litter box is tended to only when the ammonia-like smell of cat piss becomes unbearable. They keep bacon grease for cooking in a container underneath the sink, and one of their cats is missing half of its tail. Needless to say, I’m looking at other places.

I am considering living on a small farm and healing arts center with some hippies and a transgendered MTF named Debbie.

Debbie is a major selling point for me. Think of the stories.

Reminder

Note to self: Don’t fall in love with a gay man again, reads a post-it stuck to the bottom of my underwear drawer.