On Wednesday, August 3rd @ 7pm I’ll be reading my short story, “Entropy.” The reading itself will last about 20 to 30 minutes. Details and an excerpt below:

Entropy, a Reading by Ariel Dreyer

Wednesday, August 3rd @ 7pm

A Gallery

192 Commercial St.

Provincetown, MA

“THE SPEED OF THE W AKING WORLD 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, and, without realizing, will spend an hour on something that should take ten minutes.

Chris, my fiancé, says I have an erratic heartbeat. When we’re lying in bed, after I’ve finished writing for the night, he’ll sometimes put his head to my chest and listen (because, he says, I never tell him anything). The thumps that resound from that mass of muscle are always unpredictable: they speed up then slow down, go legato then staccato and flutter away at hummingbird-speed.

Some might say I’m overanalyzing myself, but I think I 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. To wit: the quasi- scientific health benefits of spirulina (a type of algae 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, trends, religions, languages, stories, vestiges of a fundamental desire to propagate, to perpetuate; traces of our legacies.”

PRAISE FOR “ENTROPY” FROM READERS:

“This was the best short story I’ve read in a long time.”

“This was beautiful. I think I now need to go do something completely absurd and wonderful.”

“This is a stunning piece… You’re ahead of the game with this one”

“You seem influenced by Proust and an obsession with Time and Memories, and a rolling rhythm like waves from the ocean lapping at your feet brings Virginia Woolf to mind.”

“Reading stuff like this makes me excited about new writing. This has substance and tension. And depth. And your language is riveting too. Very engaging… Thanks for this enlightening read.”

“In George Orwell’s Why I Write, he says something about good writing being something you feel connected to automatically because you could have written it– you have had the same thoughts in some form, and you feel automatic empathy– Or, shit, maybe that was Jack Kerouac. (Henry Miller?) I can’t remember. Anyway, that was the thought I had when I was reading this. It’s something intrinsic.”

They were supposed to illustrate how time is relative depending on where you’re standing, and if you’re inside the train, the ball would be going at 20 miles an hour. If you’re standing alongside the tracks, looking into the window of the train, the ball would be going at 70, because the ball, in addition to travelling at 20 per on its own accord, is also being carried inside the train going at 50.

The only exception here is light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second no matter where you’re standing. This is why, when you look up at the stars, you’re actually seeing them as they were in the past. The light from Proxima Centauri, the closest star besides the sun, takes 4.3 years to reach our Earth-bound eyes.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I find some strange sort of comfort in knowing that time is slowed by great distances. When the thought of my own death creeps into my brain and jabs me in the gut, as it does from time to time, I remind myself that Einstein’s theory of relativity says that the past, present, and future are all playing out in tandem, that the so-called “flow of time” is just an illusion.

Did you know that each living creature has about two billion heartbeats to spend in its lifetime? And the expected lifespan of the creature doesn’t matter—that 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 in my own life. I keep having to remind myself that, with any luck, I still have about 65 percent of my life ahead of me.

My greatest fear is Nothing, with a capital N. The sights and sounds and smells I register are comforting reminders that I am somewhere. I don’t want to give them up, ever. I want to stay here and see the white paint chipping on my windowsill, to smell the tired, gray scent of lingering cigarette smoke, to hear the clicking and sledge-hammer banging sounds my radiator makes when it begins to heat up. 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, then trapped in bed way past noon. I want to slow the beats. But I also want to feel like I’m part of something larger, some big grand Human Story. I want us to be happy. And sad. And really fucking angry. I want people to fall down in the dirt and wake up in the middle of the night to their loud, obnoxious ancient radiators, to make love and make mistakes, to wonder and marvel, to believe stupid things, 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 small universe of my own. 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 they 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 their stories about falling down in the dirt and catching tadpoles.

You call it a syncopation of stars, an elephant on the train tracks of your brain.

You feel thick, like you are encased in layers of cardboard or fleece—you’ve accepted that the present moment also contains the past and future, like those wooden Russian dolls that fit inside each other, so you’re in all kinds of tenses, but you feel… well… cemented. Like a statue. Like a pillar, like cinderblock.

But is this moment of enlightenment (as some may call it) some misfiring in your very human, very animal brain? And so what if it is? Would that fact, that crude, biological fact, de-value what feels like a cosmological awakening? Because, the thing here is that the instant you begin to feel immortal, the second all of your boundaries begin to blur and your awareness fills the animate and inanimate objects surrounding you and you begin to breathe and beat with something you couldn’t describe using the letters on this keyboard, your temporal body beckons you back with an itch from a mosquito bite, and suddenly you feel profoundly small and breakable and fleshy.

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 never quite understood the phrase be yourself–a phrase that haunts the teen magazines I devoured as an adolescent, the after-school television specials, and the tongues of every well-meaning parent giving advice to their angst-ridden children. Perhaps even more unfathomable is the phrase don’t stop being you–words scribbled countless times in my high school yearbooks, as if I were to, at a moment’s notice, somehow transport my consciousness into another body, another mind, and resume my existence there.

That winter in Boston, I became someone in order to escape the hollow hunger the city brings. I had a job. I dressed the part. I thought the part. When I came home from reporting, I turned on the news.

Why do we feel such an overwhelming need to define ourselves, to understand who we are? We look to our past for an explanation as to why we are the way we are, why we drink too much, why we have an attention span the size of a poppy seed, why we craft wars with those we love.

Getting to know yourself is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, once the cause of a problem has been discovered, it can be untangled, maybe, a with greater ease. On the other hand, because a reason for its existence has been found, some may allow the issue to rest unresolved. We play the victim who must shoulder our beautiful burdens in all our chinked-armor glory.

I pass insanity every day on the sidewalks. The clowns, the schizophrenics, the psychopaths. Men that mutter. Men that shout out tourettic poetry, who plead and bend and grovel, who leer and loom, who hoard, who have no home. I pass by, closing myself off from them like someone whisking through a carnival crowd, the caricatured voices of the carnies entreating you to sit down and take your best shot with a water-gun to win an oversized toy animal bursting at the seams with styrofoam beads. Hello, Chloe, one man says to me as he holds out a Dunkin Donuts cup. He raises it out to me, a toast; my name is not Chloe.

There are days when I catch myself staring at strangers with tears in my eyes. The man at the Barnes and Noble who speaks to an invisible man about his acquaintances in 18th-century Russia; the boy in the park teaching his St. Bernard to play dead; the woman and her child at the market putting their hands all over the mangoes, in search of the perfect one. They all carry their deaths inside them. They are all already dying. I watch them all like bits of the universe that have come to life for a short time, sculptures of stardust that have been put under a spell of sentience, of animation, of the in and out rhythms of breath and water and fuel.

Two billion heartbeats–that’s the allowance we’ve been granted. Two billion, then the beats run out.

“I am learning to see,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. “I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to.”

You remember when you first began to see. You were ten years old and you came home from school and put in the mixed tape your best friend left in your room and you dug the worksheets your teacher had given you out of your backpack and you smoothed them out onto the desk and, for the first time, you wondered why you were doing what you were doing. So you began your search for truth, you began looking. You thought that maybe the world was a big trick that was being played on you, that if you looked hard enough maybe you would see something everyone else missed. What was it though? You knew, but you couldn’t get a clear picture of it. It was a hunch, a sense, an unspeakable inkling of understanding. You understood it as a frequency, a vibration, not a concept to be explicated.

I went to Paris eight years later. When I stepped into the reconstruction of Brancusi’s studio I forgot, for a beat, how to breathe. There it was: what I had begun to feel eight years earlier. Those white, undulating figures. Yes, I thought, this is what the world is like beneath the veneer our pattern-seeking eyes have built. These lovers, this muse, a bird in space–they were all suggestive of form, though never explicit, never obscene. They were stripped down to the essence of the thing.

We are reactive things, responsive, reflective. We take in and we put out. We take in the air and the water and the fuel and we put it right back into the world. We take in art & knowledge and twist it to our liking and let it spin off in its brand new form for someone else to swallow & spit out.

At the end of August you drive to Nova Scotia with a stranger and lose your sense of self in the vast blue sky stretching out over the empty highway. There is literally no one in sight for miles and miles at a time. You become an echo in the passenger’s seat, a shell that has evicted its tenant and now has the joy of tumbling through the sand and sea because it is light enough for the wind and water to carry. You sleep in the car, in little enclaves off the side of the highway. At night the sky is riddled with stars, more stars than you thought the sky could hold. And you look up and remember that the closest star besides the Sun is about 25 trillion miles away, and that you’re actually looking at that star, Proxima Centauri, as it was four years ago. You will never see a star as it appears in the present moment, in your present moment, not while you are on Earth. Even light, the fastest thing in the universe, is slowed by great distances. The thousand-mile drive is suddenly nothing. You are suddenly nothing.

What is it that keeps us alive, I wonder? How do we stay alive for so many years with such frail bodies and so many ways to die?

So you’re left with space, with the space of this cold, wind tunnel of a city. You like the anonymity, you like riding the subway with strangers all around you, but then you wish for neighbors too. You wish for the ease of college dorm life, for the warmth of a small town. You wish the buses here weren’t so erratic, that they didn’t take 20, 30 minutes to come. You wish there were more cafes with old sofas and porcelain mugs instead of the overcrowded Starbucks on every corner with the one tiny table by the window, the one that is not level so your coffee makes little spills whenever you shift your body.

I keep trying to find a pulse, a beat, a rhythm. I think I hear it, faintly. But I can’t move with it yet. I need to empty myself out and, at the same time, remember who I was five years ago, when I chased the sounds to the ends of the earth and thumped it out right every time.

You know what I mean, you more than anyone.

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.

*          *          *

She has an inner monologue about who she is and what life is like, and when the details begin to stray, she recites it to herself and anyone who will listen to wrestle the details back into place. If this fails, she searches the dictionary for new words to describe the changes, and says them over and over to get used to the sound.