War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (2 page)

Beyond that I’ll probably have to dig
some stuff up. I’ll have to exhume graves to get some of the
snarled steel pieces. And that will be a problem, because out of
respect I probably won’t be able to dig in people’s graves. It’s
likely to become a logistical nightmare, considering how many
graves are full of pieces of grenades which would not be part of
the particular grenade I’m going to reassemble. I try to block it
out though I know we did try to build an us-place. Culling.
Sorting. I’m unbending countless pieces of innumerable grenades,
too infinite, often finding that, in the end, the piece doesn’t fit
anywhere in this one particular M67 fragmentation
grenade.

It’s a pity. Even if I can’t be there
right when the thing blows up, for obvious reasons related to my
later interests in effective curatorship, I can surely go right to
where the grenade exploded. If I’m in that five-meter kill zone, in
the fifteen-meter casualty radius, in the forty-five-meter blast
perimeter that’s all included within the 250-meter-wide circular
area where the furthest pieces can fly, I should be able to pick up
all the pieces that didn’t kill anyone or anything, which will be
lying around. I’ll bet many will be right there in the kill zone.
I’m almost sure gravity plays in right from the start.

The diamond won’t sell on consignment.
No one can afford clarity with this recession.

So if I can’t go to war, if I can’t
get there right away, then it may have been a long time since the
grenade blew up. Except for exhuming graves, I might only have to
dig a little bit. I am not really sure how deep I’ll need to dig to
find every one of the pieces or what to do about how they might
have gone off in the tracks of shoes over the years. And. That can
get even more confusing because they’ve already gone off, so, it’s
like the thing goes off, then the pieces are lying there, then
people inadvertently walk over them, something gets lodged in a
shoe and disappears.

That’s what I mean. You
know?

I don’t know. I think theoretically I
should be able to reassemble a particular M67 fragmentation
grenade. But I guess it will be pretty hard to know exactly where a
particular grenade exploded, even with the GPS these days. That’s a
definite issue.

Well, at least I’ll be able to call up
all the living people who have pieces of this grenade in them or
who had pieces of this grenade in them at one time. Plenty of
people were probably in that fifteen-meter casualty radius. I’ll
probably start with pieces from them. I should be able to narrow it
down from a list from the VA or something. And I’m sure other
countries have organizations similar to the VA, so I can just call
them all up, or email them or whatever, ask them for a list of
people with grenade pieces in them, in case this one particular M67
fragmentation grenade affected people from more than one
country.

97 — Rebel

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

I sat with my mom in the hospital. We
waited for my brother’s ankle to get reset. An itinerant biker was
there, too. The old-fashioned kind: leather skin, blurry tattoos,
raspy voice, and the kind of smile that could bite the head off a
starling. He told me he was dying of cancer. Right there next to
me. Right in the waiting room. Can you believe it? He said he
needed to hold someone's hand. So I talked with him and held his
hand. But. Me holding this gross socially-marginalized guy’s hand
skeeved my mother out. She took up a half-made prayer shawl,
inhaled aggressively, and started counting crochet stitches through
trifocals.

Dear Rebel,

I know you did your best to answer
this fucking guy in his anxiety and fear, to look him right in the
eye, to be present and listen. Fine. Yeah. He probably shouldn’t
have to face his mortal fear alone. But your mother was right. Five
minutes of hand-holding isn't nothing. You should have asked him
for a hundred bucks.

53 —
Worth/Worthless

The leftover people,
including me, are really noncommittal. Not sticky enough for entire
lifetimes. We prefer isolation over intimacy. Don’t take it
personally. We have other good qualities. We're just more like
graphite than diamond: same chemical makeup, different structure.
Not everlasting. Not harder than anything. Not incredibly valuable.
Not sparkling despite included clarity. Not perfect for cutting
glass. Not ever picking up the beam of a halogen light at a steak
dinner and tossing it in hundreds of directions like a little
left-handed disco. But. Still. As we shift and slide in our silty,
slippery puffs, no one can deny we’re all very good for lubricating
locks.

41 —
Artist/Entrepreneur

Just listen to it—that
material silence—tucking you in. You’re on a magic carpet under a
tight sheet. Falling off updrafts causes your stomach to lurch. Air
drops current and the material drifts down.

Let it drape, and with it let the
wrinkles of your mind billow out from the confinement of a hot
iron’s steam. Here, in conscious thought resurrected from places
beyond awareness, there is some mass grave of rotting dreams
unclaimed. I can do nothing limitless, but I can do so many limited
things. Punitive distorted ruptures will find you out if you
struggle, squirm, and scream. Voodoo, crucifixion, and magicians’
knives thrown along your perimeter seem quite ordinary—quite
civilized. Don’t flinch while a pretend body on an impossible
flying machine gets tipped back on no waterboard but becomes
stretched against the vertical panel of an idealized have-to-be
self-perception and then push pins—these social graces, these
acceptable mutilations and attacks—drive in here and
there.

Wait! Stop! No! Don’t allow it. Hurry.
Knock that self-making-self-same-self down! Have the horizontal
again and cover the decision to wait it out. Lie still under the
imperative of your own have-to-breathe, even must-do, lifting under
that undulating plane of bedtime percale, and extinguish any
last-hope frenzy from a day of misunderstanding the unknown that
surrounds you more totally than what is comprehensible. Hear prayer
shouts, “Go up!” but quiet lie, and keep to it—smile your pleasant
endurance if you dare such lone things.

4 — Ideas, People,
Things

Michael said, "People
only talk about things, ideas, and other people."

In my family we talk about
nothing.

After being so thrown by Mom’s
misgivings, I set about the business of putting a little order in
things at her place. I folded a blanket, an afghan, arranged the
potted plants, and pulled the seat cushion out of an old wingback
chair, one that Mom inherited when Grandma died.

A simple paper napkin, with a Bounty
design, was doubled over and wedged way down in that crease where
the upholstery’s crafted bottom meets an unfaded portion of the
well-made arm. My grandmother must have slipped the napkin down
into the edge of the chair, for later, I suppose, with a sort of
churlish anxiety suppressed into the smoothing down of cheap paper
nothings. The napkin edges were perfectly matched, likely with all
the reasons one tends never to say a word, about anything that
matters, like people.

Mom’s screams had dissipated in the
preceding minutes. My reaction was almost gone. Who knows how many
years that napkin had been in that chair? But however long it had
been between there, I could almost see my grandmother's
fingernails—ridged, not dainty but always properly trimmed—folding
the napkin carefully. She must have done it after elevenses at ten,
after those ritualistic marmalade English muffin pleasantries but
before her mind’s placement into the continual-drift of gray-skied
coffee-cup-saucered late mornings.

In the re-equilibrated silence of my
finders/keepers afternoon I curated my grandmother’s inadvertent
action, put the folded napkin right back where I’d found it,
unnoticed and forgotten there under the seat cushion.

2 — An Admissions
Essay

I am really interested in
attending your university. Well. Not really. But. I have a
passable—check that—I have a socially acceptable amount of interest
in doing what it takes to get by. Of course I care just enough to
write this the day before the deadline. Well. Okay. Fine. Two hours
before the deadline.

Anyway. Steve Cohen says
when writing this kind of essay,
“Whenever
possible, kids should stay away from the 3-Ds—death, disease, and
divorce.”
I don’t see why. It’s like you’re
supposed to prove your worth and inner fortitude by talking about
shit that doesn’t matter at all. I mean, yes, good, great, awesome:
I was captain of the lacrosse team. Who wasn’t? Do you care?
No.

The point is, last year, on the day
that my mother and father were both killed in a head-on collision
while coming home from the dissolution hearing that ended their
marriage, I, having recently been informed (two hours previously)
that I was now head of household, received a phone call from my
extended family’s internist who went into great detail about my
grandmother's imminent demise.

I didn’t want to step up.
What the fuck? But the doctor’s sense of urgency moved me,
and—given the gravity of the situation—I felt strongly that
Grandmother should not hear about the extremity of her diagnosis
over the phone. She turns her ringer off during
Wheel of Fortune
anyway so calling her
wasn’t an option.

I couldn’t drive over to Grandma’s to
inform her of the dire situation as the family car was totaled. In
fact, after being described in a police report and being
photographed by the insurance agent, the gruesome mangle of
crunched plastic and metal was still being hosed down so it could
be towed off to the junkyard after the (Awful! Pitiable! Just
terrible!) wreck that killed my parents.

Usually I just let Grandma
watch her shows. I don’t go over there. Why would I? But. Come on.
She had a right to know what I knew after the doctor told me what
was going on with my family that was so quickly falling apart. So.
That day, instead of forgetting about my grandmother and biding the
allotted half-hour during which
Wheel of
Fortune
airs, instead of chatting about the
rather widespread use of inhalants, I got on my bike and headed
over to her house.

I read online that, “According to a
2002 AARP report, approximately 50 percent of grandparents live
more than 200 miles from their grandchildren.” In our family, on
average, the distance is 780 miles because there’s so much
circuitous evasion and avoidance between my parents’ and her place.
That day I settled for less than average, made a beeline on my
bike, and it was closer.

By the time I got there, she was dead.
I wasn't sure exactly what to do. The coroner's cell number was in
my phone from the events of the morning. I sent him a text asking
if he wouldn’t mind to swing by, pick her up, and drop g'ma over to
the funeral home, too.

It was a tough day. I'm not sure why
it makes me want to go to college or why I'm sending this essay to
your particular institution of exorbitantly expensive secondary
education, but I guess I just feel like maybe I can hang out with
the cool kids there, drink some beer, and hopefully get to use your
quantum harmonic oscillator sometimes.

3 — Labor
Movement

Big Business is like, "Be
grateful for your paycheck. We could be in India, you know." And
The People are like, "Fuck you. You're not going to India. Give us
back our benefits."

Big Business is like, "The hell we
won't go to India. We're already in India. We just haven't shut
down our U.S. operations yet, because you're not the only patriotic
ingrates.”

And then The People are like,
"Patriotic? How are you patriotic when you don't even ride on the
fire truck down Main Street on the Fourth of July anymore? Symbolic
imagery is the only thing that matters.”

And then Big Business is like, "I'm
the lifeblood of this economy! Why should I have to do a big
charade on national holidays just to prove myself? I don't like
fire trucks. They're loud. Swirling lights make me nervous. I had a
bad experience at a rave once in the '90s."

So then The People say, "You expect me
to feel sorry for you? Why don't you overcome your stupid
irrational fears about swirling lights and get over being
traumatized. It's not like that bubble only burst for
you."

"That bubble? There were like three!
In a row! I'm totally shell-shocked. And God knows what’s about to
happen with commodities. On top of that, Jesus, look at what's
happening in Europe. You’re one to talk about irrational fear.” Big
Business takes a silent non-transparent moment in the black box
then comes back with, “Why do you want this job anyway? Take a
risk. Figure it out for yourself like we did. We weren't always
this big, you know."

The People fly into an uncontrollable
tizzy. Cops get up and go to their lockers for riot gear. "A risk?
Seriously? How are we gonna take a risk? We’re just supposed to
rail against the Man. That’s you. You’re the Man.”

Big Business, who still hates loud
noises, says, "I can force the issue if you want. You'll have no
other choice."

There is a skirmish. It is unclear who
might pin the other. The cops do their best/damnedest while being
demonized/glorified.