War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (6 page)

Marbles don’t shatter. They bounce and
clatter. That’s the kind of place it was. The world inside the
mirror isn't really that different from a lakeside walk. It is
darker, sure. But not all completely unfamiliar. It's not what I
expected which was an underground mine that opens out like a tree
fort made out of peaty stuff and branches into
civic-planning-committee train stations on a mythological river,
you know? Or an igloo. Or, no!, a cave, where water drips
stalactite-ish, into calcified blue, artificially-lit pools of
well-marketed discovery. And it's not hot, either. I'm not sure
what it's like exactly. You'll have to ask Milo.

But however it was there was no
oxygen, so at one point, with self-preservation in mind, we decided
to just give up breathing, to conserve what reserves we each had
packed away deep down in the alveolar recesses of all the amorphous
impossibility inside ourselves. (That was my idea.) After a while
we wanted so very much to begin again with our lives the way they
had been that we tumbled so sleepy, like zoo-kept belugas, against
our window of the world. You know the one. It’s like the one at
Rockefeller Center, only bigger. Like, Grand Canyon big, only
glass.

I huddled with the masses. He nuzzled
like a baby calf, only tougher, more respectable.

When we woke (and don't ask me what
exactly happened, because I don't remember everything and—thank
God—neither does he) there was something different. I felt sort of
crowded in a way that I didn’t know before. I stood up but found no
internal way back out and up through the liquid marble twist. We’d
held off for a long time but used up our reserves. Breathing became
necessary. I had to inhale something, didn’t I? So I just took my
surroundings in. It wasn’t agony when I felt that marble twist fill
my lungs. It was like lavender ornamental florist beads that put
attractive weight in the bottom of a minimalist crystal vase to
hold the flower stems just so.

I was completely committed. My chest
filled with the weight.

I had been in love, twice, but had
never been possessed to the point that I required exorcism. So, it
was very odd to realize, to know, to become aware that we were the
same human being, suddenly. It was all elbows and squished
in.

We denied its influence, its very
reality. There is something so unnecessary about a friend who
actually lives in your entirety. Like a lifetime witness. I like
Milo, don't get me wrong. And, to my knowledge, Milo's never once
said a bad word about me. It is what it is, I guess. Just too much,
too close.

So anyway, I stood there—right there
with him—trying to accept that we’d become one being breathing
twisted glass lung-filled something against our reversing image
window of the world into and through all the me of him that I never
even tried to get used to.

20 — Ablation

He didn’t want to know what would happen at all in
the next two hours and wished he hadn’t been told. Ray Hollowell
let the word play over and over again in his mid-mind, a place
where metamorphosis means nothing. “Ablation,” the doctor had said
again right when Ray arrived with his wife at the cath lab that
morning.

Ray didn’t mind the upcoming
procedure. He understood necessity, survival. But being unconscious
bothered him. The orderlies might accidentally let him slide off
the gurney and onto the floor—it could happen when they were
shifting him onto his bed in recovery. He put it out of his
mind.

Ray lay there, staring at the TV,
trying not to look at the dirty vent in the ceiling, trying not to
think about sliding off the gurney while unconscious, trying not to
think about the short-circuit rhythm of his heart, or about how any
tiny wires were going to go in through a vein in his neck, or the
way electrodes mapping the impulses of the muscle in his heart
worked, or how on earth they managed to weld-kill the place where
irregular beats began to cause such erratic disruption.

Ray thought someone should probably
come clean the vents. Didn’t seem right for the vent to be dirty in
a hospital. But he didn’t call the nurses’ station. Figured he’d
maybe mention it after the procedure. Wouldn’t want to tick anyone
off before he went under anesthesia and couldn’t defend himself in
a potential fall.

21 —
Mortifications

Sometimes I sit here and
think of different ways to pass time. I reorganize shelves when
they are not pleasing. Maybe they are crowded or cluttered somehow.
I like them to have a certain order. And sometimes I change my mind
about that certainty. This usually depends on the
season.

Like now, in the winter, I can put the
beach towels and the camp chair—the black one I bought my father
for Father’s Day the last year he was alive—further back since I
don’t really need ready access to them. I put my summer clothes
away also so I can make more room for sweaters. I also reorganize
if things keep falling down from the shelf or tipping over on the
shelf. I have several kinds of shelves even though this is a rather
small apartment—it’s a studio. I have the shelves in the kitchen—in
the cabinets. There are about fifteen shelves in the kitchen. And I
put a little shelf over the sink so that is another shelf. These
shelves are very important. It is important that they are always
organized—making food is about awareness. There needs to be
awareness about the inventory of food and spices which are
available for making food and awareness about the tools required
for cooking. So having a mental image of your shelves is very
important. These shelves are my highest priority.

I have a few shelves which are
ancillary to the kitchen and cooking. These are the top of the
refrigerator, the shelf of cookbooks which is actually in my living
area, and the oak armoire (given to me by my mother on my sweet
sixteen) which now serves as a pantry. I have lots of bookshelves
but they almost never get rearranged. I have one area for reference
books, one area for books of poetry, one area for children’s books,
one area for field guides, one area for books about money, one area
for what I consider to be highbrow reading, another area which I
consider less highbrow, and several miscellaneous shelves that are
arranged more or less aesthetically.

The shelf I rearrange most often is
above my bed. I rearrange it when I need to store something or when
I’ve forgotten exactly what’s up there. I keep a few nice things in
case I ever buy a house. I have a set of silver candlesticks from
the 1870s up there. I thought about getting them down at
Thanksgiving when my mother and sister came. But it seemed
discordant. I hadn’t really pictured my silver candlesticks on a
secondhand coffee table. I hadn’t pictured me sitting on the floor,
my mother in a free rocking chair I found on the street in
Philadelphia, and my sister in the desk chair—giving thanks. There
wouldn’t have been room on the table anyway. I’ll get them out next
year maybe. Or take them to wherever I’m going.

I also put a lot of time into
decorating my apartment. I decided to put up some pictures of
people who make me happy. So I’ve got some pictures on the walls.
There is an area to sit down and talk. There is an area to watch
television. And I bought a used electric piano where I play hymns
and folk songs when I get so bored with the silence. I guess I
forgot to mention that there is a shelf with some piano music on it
when I was telling about the shelves before.

If there’s no shelf on which to work,
I’ll get up and make tea. Most days I watch at least one movie.
Depending on the movie I end up thinking about someone I know,
someone the movie reminds me of or who I think might like that same
movie. Sometimes I go so far as to mention it the next time I see
that person or if they live really far away I just send them an
email about it. If it’s not nighttime (which is when I watch
movies) I read something, maybe from a magazine or a biography or a
book about finance or perennials to put in the garden or something
a friend recommended months ago. I rarely finish reading
anything.

I don’t always finish dealing with my
shelves, either. There is a shelf above my coatrack that I have
decided to ignore for the time being. There are two boxes on that
shelf. They hold paperwork that extends back into all my identities
and addresses and lives and roles and I just can’t rectify those
boxes right now—so I leave that shelf alone.

67 — Sperm Donor

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

My wife recently had a baby. Or she is
thinking about having a baby. Or she is thinking about getting me
to marry her so she can have a baby. Or she is thinking about
fucking me once after we stumble home from the bar drunk so she can
have a baby. Or something. I can’t really figure it out. Is there
any way that I can tell if I want to have a baby with
her?

Dear Sperm
Donor,

Whoever this woman is, she is crazy.
She obviously wants nothing substantial with you, and you don’t
deserve to be treated like that, so dismissively. It’s demeaning.
Hard to say what any of us wants, so I’m not sure if you’ll ever
figure out whether you want to have a baby with her. But you should
probably fuck her, and figure it out later.

22 — AT-4

Have you ever picked up an AT-4? That is a serious weapon. You
have to be pretty pissed off to come anywhere near that thing. But
I did. It intrigued me. I was an E-2. An army private going through
the motions. I was being trained. They call it soldierized. I had
signed a contract. Whatever the justification, on a quiet morning
out under the smudged skies over the Ozarks, I picked up that AT-4.
And I shot tracer rounds right into that bastard
horizon.

It was nothing to consent to this act.
Much less a commitment than volunteering to kill and be killed. I
remember picking up the weapon and almost laughing at it. The AT-4
is nothing. It's basically a piece of PVC pipe, plastic. Made to be
light, easy to carry. The thing almost seems silly. If you drop it
on the ground it makes this donk sound.

But then when you shoot it, there’s
that enormous back-blast.

What submissive hell do we ask of
others? In the living room, where children grow and where we daily
assault our loved ones, in the workplace where we exert our
authority as a matter of course, on the battlefield where we are so
excited to get to kill and be killed, what are the motions we're
asked to go through?

If Mom or Dad yelled at each other
it's a pattern. Easy to pick up as an AT-4. Why are patterns of
anger so hard to put down?

What if no one is asking you to shoot?
What if no one needs you to be as pissed off as you are? To keep
you identified with such rage. If it didn't define you, would you
still choose it?

As you dismantle the defenses the
vulnerability mushrooms. Hard, though. Really hard to let the rage
go. The definition of who you are becomes less clear. The integrity
goes. And if there is a sense of vulnerability, if there's no
integrity, of dissolution even, why not indulge in an Ozark
afternoon of assault with an antitank weapon?

Why do we ask boys, and a few little
girls, to keep rubbing salt in the wounds of personal trauma? Why
do we clap for the man with the AT-4? Why don't we say, "Hey! That
shit is crazy! Put that thing down! You're gonna hurt yourself!!
You'll put someone's eye out!"

Our military force is a volunteer
army. I suppose it’s better than a draft. We don’t want anyone
going off to war who doesn’t really want to be there. Yet, isn’t
there a problem sending those who can’t wait to go? Every kid who
joins—we were almost all kids—is just a little too angry. Willing
to shoot holes in every edge and horizon. Willing to die for any
good reason. Sometimes for none.

The world asks just a little too much
of that pissed-off kid. He’s making no sacrifice. He's doing no
duty. He is killing himself on behalf of the world. He is acting
out, might only need Ritalin, if we didn't need an army.

23 — Cold Open

I jumped up, rushed to the front of the classroom,
grabbed the green pen, and wrote on the whiteboard. "Nobody like me
would go on a trip like that." It was all there: her whole story.
But it only existed in her mind, not on the page.

She felt it was all there but, for us,
there was nothing. No desperadoes, no too-tender thrust-back
expediency, no fortune-telling short haircut with a diet cream soda
while spinning pottery, no embalmed twelve-year-old
angels.

So I asked, "Who is nobody?" She
looked at me, dumbfounded, stunned, with a smirk that said
silently, “Well, you know exactly who 'nobody' is."

And yes, I suppose I’m judgmental
enough and can make the right assumptions. I knew her so I saw him,
her nobody. He was slouched, roaring, strange, original, expectant,
with tendinous hands in his pockets, a beard full of late-night
jazz, a ringleader on his way to Gooseberry Falls out on the North
Shore leaving Duluth, and yet always there he was as a rapid
inhospitable fan party rig at the flower market.

What else could I do? I had to take a
stand. I filled in no blanks with what was implied and insisted she
tell me the specifics of the story in her head. “Who is nobody?" I
didn’t want to force her to define, to describe, and explain. But
she had to. She said, "Family, friends." Okay. I said, “What is
‘like me’?” Again, she didn't get it. Wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t I
just know by looking at her? Beautifully, dramatically, she tossed
arthritic liver-spotted hands around. Perhaps she’d been a dancer
but I didn’t know, just waited, listening. And there it was, her
answer: "Well, I was eighteen, in college, had just gotten married,
and it was 1956."