Dispatch from the Future (6 page)
Read Dispatch from the Future Online
Authors: Leigh Stein
them down on paper and then photocopy it and then
mail it to people I don’t talk to anymore just to show
I’m still alive, but I hope you at least sent something
that says you’re in Alaska now. There might be
those who miss you and would want to know
where you are so they can pray in your direction.
Not that you need it. You were always so solitary
and reckless in the good sense. I found a picture
of us from when we were children, our eyes
alight with matching blue-green expectancy, our teeth
missing in the same spots, our arms outstretched,
holding the pigeons we had caught in our hands.
Do you remember at what point you let yours go?
At the gym, they told me I would not die,
I would only get sexier, and I believed them.
I spent my nights wondering if this was going to turn
into something long-term, if this was what is meant by casual,
or if this was just my annual catastrophic disappointment
because if it wasn’t, then I would have to brace
myself. I took my medication and looked at pictures
of people who were not in love with me. I deleted
their names from my cache, said hello to my cat
over the phone, took more medication. Days
passed. I learned it’s hard to measure your own increasing
sexiness. I enlisted bystanders. I passed mirrors
and pretended they were not mirrors, but clean
windows, and I was not myself, I was
a clean stranger. Some days I was sure
she wanted to come home with me, and
I had to let her down easy, through the window,
like a priest. Once I’d been unleashed
from thoughts of my own death I was free
to be loved in the way I always knew I’d deserved:
reciprocally, in Fiji, our bodies lithe and bronzed
like gods, but at the same time I felt like a vampire,
and none of my friends could relate. They were jealous
of my book deal, my time spent at the ashram
while they were here, suffering another winter,
their unsexiness a fluorescent sign that blinks all night.
I can’t go to the east village anymore
because that’s where all the ghosts are.
Yes, I went and got older again.
I made the mistake of having a birthday
and taking it to the mansion
where birthdays fall down stairs
and break their necks. Be careful.
I’ve never been comfortable before
and you should know that.
You should know I’ve outlived
everyone in my family, and now
I’m your guide to the haunted
universe. Watch out for pianos.
Take my picture if you want
to see what color my energy is.
In the dark I’m either pretty or sad-
colored, and my silhouette might exceed
your expectations. Out with the old,
in with the nude, as they say.
Say you want a ghost to stay.
Say you light some candles. Say
you lure her with sadness because
ghosts are hungry for palpitations.
Say you try to hold her but you’re never sure
if it’s tight enough. We’re the ghosts
and we’re here to tell you:
it’s never tight enough
. You’ll never
keep us from floating up
and down the staircase like memories
you didn’t even know you’d lost.
No one wants to watch me break
my neck, so watch me disappear.
I can’t go to the east village anymore
because I’m already here in the dark.
Miss Nicaragua was born in a village you’ve never
even heard of, and she reads Michael Crichton
paperbacks aloud to impoverished young women
to improve their English so that they, too,
may some day enter the Miss Universe Pageant.
I couldn’t find any socks that matched this morning.
Miss Japan is 5’8”. Miss Japan loves horses. She
says she wants to be a spokeswoman for pediatric
AIDS, or toxic shock syndrome, or aphasia
or something, but it gets lost in translation, and
I’m like, I wish, right? I wish there was
a spokeswoman for aphasia who
was also internationally recognized for her
beauty, intellect, and equestrian panache.
During the commercial break, my boyfriend
tells me about this girl who makes the best
mix tapes “ever,” and I’m like, What’s her name?
What does she look like? But all he’ll say
is that I’m sitting too close to him on the couch again.
Not even her eye color or anything. Then he starts
to ask how much an MRI is because he believes
he has all the symptoms indicative of a brain
tumor, but when the show comes back on
I’m like, Shh. Watch. Do you think Miss Nairobi
had her teeth done? Do you think Miss Slovenia
comes from a broken home? My parents
put me in ballet when I was a child, but still—
I’m nervous about moving to Albuquerque
so I practice by sitting on the balcony
of our apartment in the sun and reading
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
while
keeping in mind the humidity factor, and
how, in the desert, it will be a
dry
heat. Everybody
says that. Everybody specifies. Even Miss Mexico
would if you asked her. I had hoped Miss
United Arab Emirates would make it
to the top five, but of course they gave it
to Miss Nepal. The judges are: Michelle Kwan,
David Hasselhoff, and the ghost of Virginia Woolf.
Once again, I wish. As Miss South Africa put it,
It wasn’t nails that held Jesus to the cross. It
was love. And you know what? I am going to
make my boyfriend the best mix tape ever
ever
.
It will have a song by Joy Division, followed
by “How Deep Is the Ocean,” followed
by an acoustic cover of “Hey Ya,”
followed by a Bach cello suite, and I
will call the mix, “Let’s Leave the State
Together.” Should we tell our parents?
What would Miss Korea do? Now she’s
walking, floating, across the stage, like
it’s the length of a desert in a country
she’s never seen, and when she makes
it to the end they ask her what she sees
in her future, but we never get to hear
her answer because the moment she
starts to speak the heel of her shoe breaks off
and she falls into her translator’s arms.
A good girlfriend never cries and when she sits
it’s in the splits because she’s a gymnast, or
used to be, or wants to be, or something, and
this is why you love her. Because she’s a go-getter.
Because she picks you up in her Chevy Silverado
and she keeps her tandem bicycle in the back, and
a blanket, and she knows the shortcut to the ravine.
In my town there are no ravines. In my town they named
the street that runs through the viaduct under the train tracks
Covered Bridge Road, and I believe this to be intentionally
misleading. One time I told this to a friend, but all she said
was, Is that the end of the story? Was that even a story?
It wasn’t the end, but I didn’t like her tone so I said yes,
all sarcastic, and then I stopped returning her phone calls.
A good girlfriend waits up for you when you’re out
starting fires. A good girlfriend would help you steal
a car. In other words, if it means buying a blonde wig
and a fake I.D. and never going back to Sioux Falls,
never looking back over her shoulder at what could
or might have been for fear she’ll turn to a pillar of salt,
even if it means living in sin in Tijuana, okay, yes,
sure, I will help you steal that car. Because I remember
when you asked me to help you love me, and I think
this is what you meant. For nineteen years we were like
two ants from different hills whose paths would never cross
because it was not predestined in the stars, but now
you ask how long I’d wait if you were in prison and
I hold out my arms to indicate that I love you
as much as polar bears love ice floes because there aren’t
enough anymore and the polar bears are drowning.
I didn’t even know what a chlorofluorocarbon was
until I met you. When I was a young girl
in Sunday school at the Universalist Church
we often made Native American drums
to pound the rhythms of our hearts’ secret desires,
but sometimes we made macaroni jewelry, and
in the spring the cicadas came we got snow shovels
and cleared the shells from the sidewalks under
the old elms, singing, Let beauty, truth, and good
be sung, through every land, by every tongue.
I remember Tyler found a live one and plucked
its wings and was reprimanded by the same woman
who told me when I asked what I should believe in that
I could believe in “anything.” I found out later that what
she meant was that universalism means God loves me
so much that he wouldn’t create me if He thought
I was unsalvageable, but at the time I thought, okay,
of course I believe in Beatrix Potter and Millard Fillmore
and trees, but what if I grow up and decide that insects
have no souls; what if I grow up to be the kind of girl
who throws away the drums she made and disregards
the law and finds herself in the backseats of cars
with someone’s hand in her hair and she likes it
so much she decides to become a girl who asks
for such a thing. What congregation would open their arms
and their hearts to her? Where could she go to learn the songs
she’d have to know before she could even go to where
the congregation who was going to open their arms to her
met each week? And which of these stories will I tell my children?
Will I tell them to believe in anything or will I specify,
will I buy them butterfly nets, will I buy them rackets,
will I dream at night that they’re taken from me,
will I teach them to swim or hire someone or drop them
in the water and see if they drown? Maybe they’ll walk.
Maybe I’ll have no children. Maybe I’ll miscarry and
take up oil painting and brew iced tea in the sun while you
are out collecting cattle skulls and when you come home
to me we’ll stare at the map on the wall and throw darts.
The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
In the future, I’m your mother.
My name is Carol.
I hold you when you want me
to and I don’t ask
questions.
I never call your name
when I lose sight of you
in public.
In the future, we’re discreet.
We live forever
or seem to.
We upholster our lives with secrets
and our holsters are concealable.
When you want me
to, I hold you
like a wife
in Valparaiso.
You say,
Tell me something
else
, and I do
all sorts of tricks.
In the future, we are all about safety
and its sister, schadenfreude.
We stay in our houses
and sell our selves on the Internet.
We no longer refer to it as the apocalypse.
In the future, those who can afford to feed themselves
on sun. We eat with our shoulders. We run
towards the past, where we buried our fear,
just in case we missed it in the future.
I miss ignorance. I miss caring less.
I miss hope’s stubborn blindness.
Every single man I’ve ever loved is walking down the aisle
on Sunday. Which aisle is mine? And where is my husband?
Maybe a dingo ate my husband.
What I left I left unfinished.
Take care of yourself, it all said;
we’ll be fine, we’ll finish
in your absence, but fish
cannot find their way out
of water: that’s the hitch
of this illness. My hypnotist
suggested a horse
for fastest departure.
I said ship. At the end
of the day it’s your odyssey,
she said, and then brought me back
to wakefulness, this room,
this view of the sea, a little ship
tethered at the fence like a willing
animal, and I thought yes, this
wishful thinking works:
I’ll be a believer and leave.
Going to the airport, opalescent sky,
dawn dragging its feet through the river, I’m
thinking that anyone who says I’ll make it up to you
is a person aimed for future let-downs,
is a person who forgets anniversaries, but
I’ve forgiven worse. I’ve driven to Amarillo
in one day and one night, through St. Louis
and Cuba, Missouri, where an old Coke facade
hung like a stage prop above the gas station,
through Miami, Oklahoma, where there were birds
and cottonwoods and Do Not Drive Through Smoke
signs and we wondered what could be burning
along a highway with so few exits, but by then
