Thu, 19 May 2005

Not The Thing You’d Keep
I have a photograph a friend of mine took of me while I was sleeping. I was staying with Seth and Rissa, sleeping in their basement, and i often awoke to find one of their cats burrowing in my clothes, or battling my shoes. In this picture, the smaller of their cats, Inquisitor, had climbed up onto my chest and fallen asleep there, his head just below my chin. You can see the start of the wave in my hair, see where I’m starting to bald. There’s a small cluster of acne along my jawline. There were red lines just over my ears where my glasses normally were. I had been gnawing at my fingernails. It had been a few days since I shaved last. There’s a sweater you gave me balled up under my head. When I wonder what happened to me, what’s become broken, I look at this picture and think: is this me? Is this the place I’m trying to get back to? Or was I just as lost then as I am now? If I met this person, this fixed me, would I even know them, or would the difference be so great that I couldn’t make the connection?

I have tapes my siblings and I made as children. talking and singing and little skit-story things. the tapes are really fucked up, quality-wise, and a lot of stuff was (obviously) recorded stupidly, so there’s gaps and missing feed. Is *that* me?

I have a scar on my inner left leg from where I jumped into a bush while on vacation in Idaho. I have a very faint burn mark on my right arm from when I was a baker. I have three small bruises on my left wrist from moving my dresser, after cleaning out the book-rot stuck behind it. I have some kind of itch on the back of my scalp, beneath my lobotomy-patient haircut. I get occasional arthritis in my right knee from an old skateboarding accident. Is *that* me?

I’ve got a book I’ve been writing for a while. A lot of it I haven’t shown anybody, mostly because it’s stuff I’ve cut, some of it because i can’t get it to work, whatever that means. You all know all about this. Is *that* me?

There’s an envelope with the results of various tests I had been given throughout my childhood. IQ tests, morality tests, “creative problem-solving” tests. Tests involving parcels of land, injured animals, various trains on various tracks. There’s a composite of these tests which was used to track my academic potentials, my future plans. Is *that* me?

I own clothing and books. Bedsheets. Pictures I pulled out of library books. A crateful of cd’s, a crateful of records. An old typewriter I use more often than the computer I’m using right now. Stacks of spirals and typing paper. A dresser and a desk. Stones, necklaces, letters, postcards and tapes people have given me over the years. Is *that* me?

When the sun is out, I leave a shadow. I leave messages on answering machines and email in people’s accounts. I try to send letters and give gifts, at times. On snowy days, you can see where I’ve walked. Obviously, then, I’m somewhere. But where am I?

——

Last night, around five, I called my mother. My mother gets up around four, for no better reason than because she likes the morning, but was still a bit surprised to get a call, particularly from me, the most delinquent of sons. “Mom?” “Josef? Uh, Josef, is something wrong?” “No, everything’s okay, I just got a question. Did I ever have a dog?” “What?” “When I was little. Like maybe eight? Did I have a dog?” “No, no, Josef, you never had a dog. You did have that fish that died, and then you had those bugs that I made you throw out, but you never had any…” “‘kay, mom. Thanks.”

This is only distressing because three hours ago, before Ana fell asleep, I told her all about my dog. I had a dog named Pookah, and it was so big. It’s like I can almost remember it, but I can’t. I guess that stands to reason.

Dry blood, the body’s so cold.

My mother tried to get me to learn the piano. She knew how to play, as did my grandparents, and their grandparents. We couldn’t actually afford a piano, but my mother used to go shopping on weekdays and wheel her cart up to the electronics section, staring over the electric keyboards. She’d look around, wait for an open time, and start playing, songs half-remembered, improvisations from school-age exercises, light pop songs played from ear. I used to watch her from a distance on Saturdays when I was supposed to be trying on shoes or pants. She sat me down in the church basement, where an older friend of her mother’s tried to teach me fundamentals. I was a tempremental child, and after long minutes i’d smash my fists into the keys and scream and kick at the wood. After about five such aborted sessions, my mom let me quit and paid off my damage costs. i’ve cultivated patience and stillness since then, but there’s times when i sit at a piano, and i try to play, and the notes come out wrong, and i have to hold back my hands.

——

It’s a myth we have that we are only as deep in our feelings as we have words to express them, only as emotive as we are eloquent. The most meager and miserable of orators is a genius of heart and mind, should his words please us in form, thinking we thusly know their content, while the greatest of us and in us becomes so much stupiditiy as soon and as sure as it stammers and spits. Words are only as true as they cater to and flatter our sensibilities, our love of the rush of rhetoric and argument, and they are only as honest as the fall in with the cadences of our habit and prejudice. As I was writing only for myself, the avowed touchstone of proper fiction (or so I had been taught), the only bigotries I had to concede to were my own.

During the floods, Seth and I once spent the night at the West High gymnasium, which had been converted into a Red Cross shelter for those left homeless. We were looking for another of the April Eight people. It didn’t occur to us what we were going to ask this person, should we find him. “Hello. Have you recently been brought back from the dead?” We walked around, saw people we had seen before but didn’t really know, neighbors and cashiers and passerby, and exchanged smiles, slight waves, nods. Their belongings spread out in a pile near their cots, the children playing tag between each family’s handful of scavenged property. We didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone of anything. We couldn’t even look these people in the eye. That was the night I began to doubt what it was I was trying to do, the entire project, though I hadn’t yet realized the most basic truth of it: it does not matter whether or not I am supposed to be here. I am here. I threw away all the hours left to me, obscessed with the slightest feigned half-imagined traumas. me, mine, my, me, i, mine, i, mine, me, i, my, me, mine.

It was always too late. Even when time remained, we convinced ourselves that we were running out of time, that there would be no extensions, that the only decisions left to be made were the decorative and meaningless choices that were good only for consolation and distraction. And we did love our distractions, then, in the good old days.

I will go no farther. You can push and push and push but I will go no farther. I have spent as long as I will waiting by the window, the phone, seeking news of some faraway place where all my decisions are being made for me. I gave away my books, my records, my clothes. Incidents to feign control, direction. I wanted the world to end, to watch the houses burn and topple, to be a witness to immortal acts. Time would not bow to my command, and the scope of my life was, as ever, lost to history, the never-remembered small days bookended between greater dates. So I set to the things I had built and made plans for their destruction, as the world around me continued to slow its spin, a top gone too long. Hollow, the pathetic lonely plots, the door closed and the typewriter clicking, drifting away. A boy pulling the wings off butterflies, kicking strays, picking through roadside carrion with a stick and a scalpel.

She had never actually told me. I had stopped by to visit, after she had moved back in with her parents, after she had quit her job, and went to her door, where inside I heard her singing to herself, just above a whisper:

“there’s a little black spot on my lung today…
it’s the same old thing as yesterday…”

And I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I’m still not sure if she knew I was there or not. Either way we didn’t discuss it then, as I left the house and walked away, that being what I do. From that day on it was an unspoken referent. But she never actually told me, and I always hoped.

I spent this time, the last days, sitting in my room, writing, plotting. Setting them up to watch them fall. Plagues, earthquakes. Rivers of blood. Locusts nesting in the skulls of abandoned infants. Clusters of feverish refugees, beaten at night by the kids of the neighborhood. Still plotting how it was that I did not die. And all the while, Ana sat in her bedroom, the pictures of her high-school days still up on the walls, getting smaller, hollowing out from inside. My hands knot into fists and my jaw cramps to think of it now.

After it was all over and she had finally finished fighting, her mother told me she walked around the house, holding herself up by moving from wall to wall, saying good-bye to everything in the house, finishing with her room. Good-bye, books. Good-bye, desk, chair. Good-bye pictures, blankets, bed. She stayed on a while longer, but those were the last things she said. Ana once told me she believed that when you die, your soul goes to the moon, where you meet with everyone else who has died, and you get a seat above the earth, where you can watch the lives of those still here, like a movie, and nobody shushes you for talking or tells you not to put your feet up on the seat in front of you, because there’s no reason to be that uptight when you’re dead.

I was standing outside, watching the house from the street, as though I could watch her rise to the moon from the street. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #