Crow

Our house, lakeside and lofty and a soft dove-grey; a prime nesting location for the area’s birds. My mother, who loved them, would never allow us to move a nest, not even that of the crow who flew in our window and began to nest on our kitchen table. The kitchen was unusable until the eggs hatched, so we ate every night in the dining room on an enormous mahogany table my mother had salvaged from a downsizing convent: deep dark lustrous wood that whispered hymns and incense.

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World's End

By noon, everyone knew we had less than ten hours to live.

It was frightening. Not just because the world was ending, though that was enough. Our fear was compounded by the knowledge itself, which had seemed to arise out of nothing, untraceable. It had no origin, no solid foundation, and yet everyone knew; we saw confirmation wherever we looked. The sky seemed lit from beneath. The birds were silent. The air was full of strange silent energy, a subtle electric charge I’d never felt before. And on every corner one could see some number of people, couples and families, all holding each other and crying. Some of them rocked back and forth. Some of them clawed at each other, the children especially, as if they could bury themselves in their parents’ flesh. I watched from the window.

As time went on, the families became mobs. It was beautiful, really—strangers comforted each other, acquaintances clutched at each other screaming. There were tears and there were curses and I felt for the first time as if I understood everything about everyone, society had opened itself up to me and all motives were strong and clear and all mental barriers broke down. Streams of consciousness erupted from a thousand lips. There were no secrets worth keeping. I’m sure there were secrets somewhere, hidden in the shadows or the throat of a woman who could not speak, but the secrets were quiet and the words, the consciousness-made-sound, filled everything. Songs and screams were equally beautiful—both were the expression of pure human terror.

And then from the chaos you emerged. It was six years ago, and you smelled like honey and apples. It was four years ago; you were crying. It was this moment, here, now, and you gazed at my window almost defiantly, daring me to be inside, daring me to emerge.

I think that I was carried into your arms by a single sob, but I am not certain; I remember with perfect clarity the feeling of hands on faces, lips on skin. I had eight hours to reclaim your body, to know it as I knew my own. And our speech was just as frantic; we were trying to say everything and hear everything all at once, but all I fully absorbed was your refrain: Traitor, you cried with four years of frustration. Betrayal, how could you, you hurt me you hurt me you hurt me, over and over, for so long.

And I don’t know what I said in reply. I must have argued because at the time I didn’t know, I couldn’t possibly have known that I was hurting you. You said nothing, and you laughed and sang just as usual, and there was no way I could have known. Maybe I did know. Maybe it was a look you gave me, I don’t remember when, but it wasn’t my responsibility to know, you were supposed to tell me if you got hurt, you were always supposed to tell me everything. I’m not a traitor. I think that’s what I told you, maybe, at the end of the world.

And then the electric charge faded away, and the sky was flat blueness punctuated by a disk of blinding white, and the birds resumed their song. And a whisper rushed through the crowd, cutting under the screams—a message from the government, from a scientist. False alarm. And the beautiful and selfish introversion was broken. I looked up and the world looked back at me, at the tears streaming down my face, at the bloody bruises I’d earned from kneeling on the ground too long. And then everything was silent.

Somebody began it, somebody stood up and walked away, but it was difficult to say at what point the crowds began to disperse. They moved quickly and silently, trying to escape the shame of being seen. This confused me. I wanted to tell you. Because I think it was the noblest thing I’d ever seen, a thousand beings holding each other and crying. It was the end of the world, and there could have been chaos of a different kind, but in our last moments we held each other.

I turned to you, I wanted to tell you, but you pulled away. I wanted to reach out to you, I did, but around us the crowds milled in their everyday splendor, and their eyes which had been so generous with tears were now hungry. They looked at you, and they looked at me, and my arms dropped to my side. And your eyes flashed pain and anger. I wanted to collapse, let the gravel pierce the worn-away flesh of my knees, but I stood before you and before the world, and for lack of anything better to do, I smiled.

Traitor, you hissed, and you turned away.

The world ended.

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Environmental Theory

I.

My fellow Americans: We are no strangers to war.

Your patience grows thin. Drugs, Terror, Afghanistan. Progress seems impossible. What happened to wars we could win?

I tell you, we do not know whom we fight.

I tell you truly, we do not know our enemy. We do not see what stands before us, chopping away at our territories, taking the lives of our children. We do not see the force that has plotted against us from the beginning of time. I say to you, we are fighting the wrong war.

II.

I wish to propose, very simply, war against that which causes most harm. From this day forth, I declare war against that which we already know to fear.

First: the Gulf of Mexico. My fellow Americans, I tell you that these wild waters are the enemy. Ignore their insidious propaganda campaign; the media were too easily won. Why would we protect that which is slowly stealing our land? Were Mexico encroaching on our territory so consistently, so brazenly, would we stand by and watch? And yet you say “Protect the Gulf.” I say to you that waters attack in stealth and secret, but they know what they do.

But water is only part of the problem. My fellow Americans, I say that the environment is the enemy. In our hearts we know to fear it. But we are America; we believe that something corrupted can be saved. And amen I say to you that yes, the corrupted shall be saved, but only once they are cleansed! Think of Germany. Think of Japan. Think of flags flying, think of governments falling; think of what has been built by America, in all places and at all times, as we create in our own image.

Now think of a nation that oppresses its own. Think of incoming implosions promising instability. Think of chemical imbalances and governmental imbalances; think of structures of power so convoluted that no one is ever in charge and no one is ever represented. Think of a failed state eating away at itself from the inside.

III.

I say to you: The Environment! She steals our land, She steals our lives, She threatens our energy security more than any dictator ever could, and yet we still pledge our allegiance! My fellow Americans, I will not stand by. I will not watch as She strips us of acres of land, encroaches on our coastlines, causes our crops to wither and our houses to burn. I will not stand by and watch.

I will stand with America, for America, and I ask you to stand beside me. Together we will root out the evil seed at the core of Her insidious will, Her hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanoes and earthquakes, Her variations on violence and devastation. Her bitter symphony shall be silenced, and together we shall create once again, in our own image. Join with me as we dethrone Her tyranny and gain a new ally. This is the war we were born to fight. She will not be resurrected till She is destroyed!

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A Demented Waltz with Dead Russian Officials

How you play is you can either choose a Russian official or a dead author. Everyone wants to be an official because it’s more exciting. Usually Ivan the Terrible gets picked first, and then Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin and all the more recent ones, and if you go down the row and people start running out of Russian officials they know about, or if they named one that didn’t exist, they can be either a boyar or a bureaucrat and they have to stand on the other side of the room. The kids who have been playing for the longest usually aren’t boyars because if you’ve been playing long enough you start collecting the names of Russians and listening to the ones other people pick, so there’s seniority.

There are usually fewer authors, but there’s always a Dostoevsky and a Tolstoy and sometimes a Gogol. You only need a few authors, anyway.

Now here’s how it works: everyone lines up, the officials on one side of the room, the boyars and bureaucrats on the other side. The authors stand in the middle. The game doesn’t begin until an author walks up to an official and denounces them, and then that official has to try to throw the author in Siberia, so they join hands and the weird part is they waltz, but they’re both pushing at each other, and the official is trying to push the author to the northern end of the room, which is Siberia, and the author is trying to push the official to the boyars and bureaucrats who are all standing with one hand against the wall and reaching, because if you’re a boyar and you touch an official then you get to throw the official in Siberia and then take his position on the other wall. Then maybe someone will come up and denounce you and you can waltz with them for a while. The goal is to get all the authors thrown in Siberia, which is why it’s not very fun to be an author.

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8:00 PM

At this moment I prefer nothing to wrapping my arms about her in the dark while her nightlight shines shadows on the ceiling between the ghosts of stick-on stars. There is something delicious about a Beethoven piano sonata punctuated by slow, small, sleepy breaths.

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On Pronouns

She cries nebulas, every sob is something enormous and hazy and vaguely spherical, that’s how I know things aren’t going to be okay, and also she starts apologizing a lot, like “I’m sorry, I’m okay, really,” like it’s all absolute bullshit and we both know it but she feels the need to say it anyway, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and I’m like “No really it’s okay” and then “Why are you apologizing” and then “Damn it I don’t actually care that you’re crying, like do you think this is going to ruin my day because really it isn’t, I mean it’s actually kind of nice when people cry sometimes instead of sighing vaguely and staring over your shoulder” and this is the part where she gets to the pronouns like “he, it, they,” I don’t know if it’s always the same problem or what, I don’t know if she’s hiding this one really enormous secret or maybe it’s always something so stupid she doesn’t want to admit it because she never gets past he, it, they, and when it’s all over she says she’s fine and dries her eyes and says “thanks for listening thanks for talking to me” and I say “no problem any time I’m not bothered at all no not even remotely bothered,” and I don’t know but nights like these I always end up sobbing into my pillow with some infuriatingly vague pronoun ringing in my head, bell-like, tragic, he, it, they. Every problem of hers I try to swallow, it always burns and bubbles on the way up. All of these pronouns are stuck in my throat.

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One night, in this very house, a child was born dead. A man stared out of his window while his wife screamed. That was the first time snow fell on this town.

A stillborn waterbaby lies between his mother’s legs; the midwife slices the umbilical cord with a washed knife. The mother screams. The bedsheets are red, but her blood can still be seen dark and glistening against saffron. The sheets are drenched. It was a bloody birth. The midwife hums a song from her childhood she remembers out of nowhere as she calmly rinses off the small corpse; the man stares out the window. The child is cleaned and deposited in a small wooden box. The mother’s screams slowly shift from pain to recognition of her loss.

There is another child in the house, aside from the one that lies breathless in a wooden box. This child came out of a womb breathing, and his mother did not scream nearly so loud, but the man at the window, he was screaming then, because his new son’s skin was dark the men who live on the water. The man at the window had come from the North; he and his brother had come to this land as buyers, searching for exotic books they could sell for a profit at home. It is rumored that he keeps, or kept, another wife in the North, some light-haired blue-eyed woman with a clear, cold gaze like her husband’s; his eyes are clear now as he stares at the box that holds his wife’s second failure.

Rich red-brown eyes twisted with pain, clouded with tears, she sobs and writhes with a hopeless fury, throwing herself against the sheets. The gaze of her husband holds the calm of a judge who has decided to remain impartial. She knows he is thinking of the men on the water. She knows he is thinking that he married something ruined. And they will continue this dance, she knows; year after year she will continue to have failed.

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We got lost in the labyrinth at three in the morning. Wandered in, looked around, tried to wander out but, guess what, there is no way out of the labyrinth at three in the morning. When you get to the center you can sleep; until then you just wander and wander and wander till your feet ache and your legs burn and you cramp up everywhere and want to double over but three in the morning labyrinths are powerful and invasive and they loop in and around you till you hardly know what’s you and what’s alien and your entire body feels like a wound or a mistake and you just want to lie down but your mind goes on and on and on and it’s three in the morning and your thoughts haven’t thought themselves out yet and all of the night stretched out before you, mile after mile after mile.

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After a while you learn to tell when colors are pretending. You’ll see them everywhere: violent streaks of amethyst, lustrous tongues of jade looking like radioactive angel vomit splattered against walls. Sapphire winding around itself like a mad scientist’s depiction of a double helix, writhing and thrashing and breaking apart like a many-headed hydra, strangled through its own dark and unpredictable fury but always somehow managing to rise phoenix-like from the abyss inside itself it barely manages to contain—you’ll know. You’ll see it leaking out of the intricate crystal structure it builds to imprison its passion. You’ll see, and it will revolt you, but you won’t be able to stop watching. And when you stop being disgusted you will want more.

I promise now to never say that this is a good idea, what you are going to do someday. But I know you are going to do it. So here’s how:

Follow the colors. They won’t lead you in any kind of straight line; they’re far too clever for that. If you try to follow them like you’d follow signs or arrows they’ll only lead you in circles. Yes, it’s far better for you in the long run, but you won’t believe that. You’ll be frustrated. You’ll grind your teeth and bite your lip and your nails will dig into your palms so far that they’ll bleed. You’ll want to go to the place where they live, so listen: You’ll only get there if you become insane. If you abandon every logical structure, every concept of beginning and end, so that every second feels like an eternity on your skin, so you hear texture and bleed vision and everything in your head becomes hopelessly abstract and self-referential. If you’re going to follow their convoluted and recursive pathways there is no other way.

Simply allow yourself to be fascinated and absorbed. Give yourself over to abandoning all unease and allowing yourself to be possessed. Let dark-bright tendrils lick at your wrists like a thousand kitten tongues, and remind yourself not to fight. Give yourself over as something soft seeps upwards into your mind, massaging your spine into contortions you never imagined possible.

Reader, I may not know who you are, but I know where you’ll go. Inwards, always inwards, into the place inside yourself that still remembers what it was like to be a tiny star-speck in seemingly infinite space. Into the colors of nausea and delirium. Every author writes for an intended audience, no? Well, here’s my secret: I left those winding trails you’ll follow when I dove into myself. I painted the walls, I scrawled on the trees, I secreted a glistening slime of knowledge, and now I am planting this seed in your mind. And you read on, you think with relief it is not me, and you will believe this until it is too late and I’ve woven round you the dark threads in which I too am entangled. You have already fallen in love with half-heard whispers and tenuous promises of something blindingly true and realer-than-real. You’ve found it on shelves and in sounds that make your spine shudder. I will never say this is a good idea, what you are about to do. But then you’ve already begun, haven’t you?

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Rolling

“I just want a place to charge my phone,” Daniela says, standing in what seems like a cross between a bar and a warehouse, wearing a green and purple Dr. Seuss hat.

Daniela is breaking out from this stress, all this stress of four in the morning and a cheetoh diet and everyone wearing strange costumes and her phone’s placid “connect charger.” Daniela’s breaking out, and she can tell when she looks in the harsh light-rimmed mirrors and sees the redness on her cheeks and the darkness under her eyes and the speckle of tiny raised bumps on her brow. Daniela’s breaking out and when the wranglers yodel into bullhorns and pile extras into a co-opted schoolbus so that they with their four-in-the-morning long-day forgot-to-shower bodies (and breath smelling of unwashed) sit three to a seat, she’s sure of it, she’ll feel the throb of a pustule blooming, and her face at its worst will be presented to celebrities (what celebrities, it’s four in the morning, what movie is this even) and forever documented with her wide thighs and stupid shoes and limp, scraggly hair, documented under a blaze-bright purple and green Dr. Seuss hat that she doesn’t own, would never buy, didn’t want to wear.

“Excuse me? I’m looking for a place to charge my phone.”

Because on set—she knows it—her face will erupt (“Babe, would you not sit on those, please? Thanks.”) and she’ll have no recourse but her phone’s camera mode, the lens through which she can view herself live, mirrored.

Daniela smiles at one of the nicer casting people, a boy with red-blond hair and a freckly face, and he tells her to plug into the plugs on the mirrors.

“Those things will fry your phone,” someone says.

“Live dangerously,” Daniela mumbles, pulling out her charger.

“Wait, we’re being moved.”

“I just found the plug!”

“Shhh, she’s saying something.”

The forms all say background artist, but they’re asked: “Y’all know how to be an extra, right?” Yeah, they know. They’re loaded onto the bus. She’s wide awake; everyone’s wide awake now because they’re going to the set, and the set will have lights and cameras and maybe, if they’re lucky, action. But no one ever says that. The director will say “rolling,” and they will roll, all of them; they will undulate or luminesce or gape or shiver as one single mass of artistically arranged humanity.

And this movie’s got that one actor, the one that she considers uniquely hers and she knows she shouldn’t but does. She likes that he lives in New York and not California like the other ones, and she likes the odd way his bones lie under his skin. She wants to touch him in strange places like the sides of his knees and the hollows under his cheeks. She likes that on set he doesn’t wink at her like he wants her to swoon.

The people behind her comparing notes: “Oh he won’t be on set today, no I know, he left earlier” or “No like last night she was wearing this dress and I thought I would die she was gorgeous and they wanted me to stand next to her and I was just like can I not?” They try to assemble the movie from the IMDb summary and the scenes they’ve been in. They try to piece together chronologies. “No Cindy was there for the car chase scene and the bar scene and she says she thinks the car chase came first and that’s why there was baby powder on their suits in the bar.” When they pile out the lights are blinding and the air is cold. Someone says “That guy you’re crazy about, he’s not gonna be on set tonight,” and Daniela says “What, who, oh, him.” And tells herself she doesn’t care, and then doesn’t, and sits where they tell her.

And then he’s hurtling straight for her at fifty miles per hour, with cameras. And who cares why or what the plot is or anything but he’s running straight toward her, (and cameras,) and she stands stock-still with wide eyes and enormous throbbing pulses wavering quantum-like down the path of her spine and she’s clenched and loose all at once and she knows his name.

And he looks at her and he does not know her. And he runs past. And he leaps into the air, vaults, lands firm. He turns his head slightly and says: “Was that okay?”

And this is how she will remember him years from now, he standing firm with his back to her on top of a ledge, awaiting orders from a woman she doesn’t know and can’t identify. Caught under a spotlight, his coat blowing in a wind she can’t feel from the ground. And she stands in the dark, stationary and throbbing and enjoying the painful sensation of knowing his name.

The camera moves past, and her phone loses power, and she stands in the dark, unknown.

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she would

if her torso weren’t hollow, if her body didn’t hang languidly so that gravity ceased to have meaning and she could not create the tension to push herself up from the earth, if she weren’t limp and loose and floating in a sea of pain, pain, pain, no sharpness, no point where knife met flesh, just a dead, dull ache at the core of her, inextricably tangled in veins and follicles so that there was nothing to fight with or against, no barrier between herself and what she was.

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Overture

Perhaps I am cursed with an exceptionally long memory.

Perhaps my memory, in addition to being terrifyingly long, is also extremely precise, and this is why when I imagine my childhood I understand that there was never any innocence to be lost. Others speak of a warm, safe place—they call it home—and some being, god or parent, whom they once believed omnipotent. Then there is the Fall (I love this narrative) and they receive the knowledge that their omnipotent force never had their best interest at heart, or was itself imperfect, and that home may have been warm but it was never safe, not really. “All my life I’d believed that there were monsters scrabbling at the door,” you told me, “and my childhood ended at the moment when I realized they had always been inside my home—inside my mind.”

Your narrative is compelling. I’ve always loved it, even before I knew you. I would give anything for a narrative like yours, for some image of Eden, even a false Eden. Something to hold against my heart as I fall asleep. But it’s no use—when I imagine my childhood, I see only a thousand shadows towering, leering, and I feel a fierce desire to grow, to flourish against all odds in a hostile climate full of villains who are as cynical as they are foreboding. There was no room for innocence in my childhood, nor sincerity. And I wish I could believe that your childhood was somehow different. But I do not think it was.

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