My automatic skills are weakening. You tell me that it is an effect from the weed. I do not think that that is right. I would catch myself spacing out at parties. Then I caught myself spacing out with you.
It is very hard to be taken seriously without your clothes on. Last night I woke up suddenly, or maybe I had been awake the whole time. I woke up and I started bawling, gasping and hysterical, for absolutely no reason.
Em! You opened your eyes after you realized that it was not going to stop.
Em! What is the matter?
I could not respond because I was speaking.
Em! There is absolutely no reason why you should be crying, Em.
Sometimes you space out – you suddenly realize that there has been a rush of silence all along.
We are visiting my parents at my summer house on the South Fork to celebrate my graduation. So I was born into a house of glass, you tell me. Being around them brings you closer to an understanding of humanity: humanity, what they are not. Retreat to the bunker: too afraid to face their extinction, they load their clubs and disappear into the golf course. Marching through earthy knolls and toeing sandy yaps, they find satisfaction in a full-bodied swing that leaves them looking up to follow the absence of a small sphere falling away into the endless sky. Repetition is the key to getting better. They repeat their escape every mid-May until the weather turns.
I weep.
You look pained. I thought that’s what you wanted to hear?
The most beautiful place in the world, my father chokes up as we drive down the winding road that leads towards his pride, the clubhouse, this mass grave – past the first eighteen holes and acres of bright green grass touched with dew and everything is rolling, rolling, rolling, and tucked under dusk and there stands the grand grey windmill, its massive arms beckoning. The thing is, it is beautiful, and I turn towards the backseat to see if you have noticed. You look like a child: blonde and shrunken inside my father’s enormous blue blazer; your head lowered in reverence; you are reading that fat tome on your lap, The Phenomenology of Spirit.
This is, after all, the celebration, so we should not blame them for the questions. Once we are tucked in – served the first slabs of red meat; mucous-y oysters like the thick clear wall built from the back of the wet throat that makes fingers webbed; only a few roasted potatoes – the questions.
I look towards you for support. You are pressing the side of your knife against your tenderloin, watching as the blood-water that is thinned out like the spotting at the end of a period steadily emerges from the pink flesh, and pools.
Write, I respond. I am going to write.
But what have you seen?
The tiredness of our movements. I excuse myself to examine what the first helping looks like: masticated and raw and pancaked together, floating in water: grey lilies. There is heat to be garnered in the distance between a person and the toilet seat: furled over the seat, the heat of the blood rushing to the head, the warmth of the stomach rising, bringing warmth to the mouth, the humming of the rising, the brightness of heels clacking against the floor, quicker still, the gagging, the gasping, the cough, cough. Hot water under fingers. I am no longer cold. I walk through a green hall, cluttered with small portraits of great men, and head towards the tower of crustaceans.
Ooooo coo the women in front of me and ooooo is the sound of them looking at the display and everywhere in that big old room it is ooooooooooo ooooooo oooooo. Lobster upon lobster upon lobster encased in those bright red shells and inside there is the speckled flesh, those spotted pinkish inwards with the “white goop”: the blood of the lobster, calcified. Do I sound like I am getting somewhere? For every lobster had been sliced halfway in half to insure easy extraction of the meat and on some, their faces held together, giving the impression of a face intact; whereas with others, the incision occurred sloppily so that on one side there was an expansive amount of blank red before the eye and on the other, simply one googly eye, dangling. Sometimes there was a whole face there, plus a chop, like a growth, or a cheek peeling away.
Oooooo.
You come up behind me. We wait our turn to scuttle towards the chef, who stands with over-sized gold-plated instruments in his bloated white wizard’s cap. The removal of the flesh and onto your speckleless plate. The removal of the flesh and onto my speckleless plate.
Can I ask, what did you prefer? The lamb or the beef? Oysters or shrimp?
Physical effects are more believable. That night I tiptoe out of bed and loudly heave whiteness. In the morning, you take my head and press it against yours. Two heads clasped in four hands. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. You teach me the serenity prayer; you teach me what you learned in rehab as we walk on the beach.
There are only three emotions. Happiness, sadness, and fear. Anything else is not real.
I am happy, I say.
No, you tell me.
What I cannot explain is that I am the happiest that I have ever been. Or maybe I am not. But I am determined. Determined for something. Finally. Everything is becoming scenes. I hear sights in verse – a rock in the park, a day at the beach, the look on your face. What that means, of course, is that suddenly I awake with a shudder, to realize that I have been watching myself from the ceiling – a body—formless thighs pressing into rough heels, deflated triangle breasts pathetically trying to graze your sex, the ugly repetition of my neck—furled at the foot of the bed.
But I thought that I had gone through the movements well. When I push you down, when I wiggle my expanding hips out of jeans that have collected the ocean in their cuffs, I was trying to save us. I show you my passion: covering your brown eyes with my hand. We are in the bright yellow room of my childhood with my miniature teacup collection lining the bookshelves and my watercolor mural of the puppet safari and my pom-pom rimmed bed skirt that match the pom-pom rimmed half-curtains that are gathering sun motes that sift and do not fall.
I’m sorry, you say, lifting my head away from your scent. It’s just—this house. I feel like your parents can hear everything that we do. Gesturing to the bed—this bed.
So we will give up on sex for a while—it is too difficult here. People do disgusting things in bed, anyhow. One time I heard across the alleyway. A man started groaning. But it was so still, and the groans sounded spoken. Uughh. And then, nothing. And then the throat of a woman, coughing so hard it sounded inhuman.
In the mornings I tiptoe out of bed while you are still asleep. I will tiptoe off to write. But I am shitting all the time. I start a sentence, then break to shit. Long, thick shits like undiluted oil paint. Maybe because I drink lots of water. Either way, it ruins my flow.
Every day is a fresh start. Today, the day before the day before the final day, we take the bus to the Sag Harbor library. I pack everything – poetry, two novels, Plato, chess set, chess tactics, makeup, dental floss, laptop, notebook– onto my back. Just in case, I tell you. We sit across from each other in an empty round table in an empty round room. You pull out the Hegel. Every day is a fresh start. I pull out my laptop and realize that I am still tired.
Paper cups of coffee in hand, we walk through town towards the dock. There are women shoveling romaine hearts down their throats. There are tanned men in pink shorts post-nosh digesting outside The Golden Pear café, their gaze somewhere beyond the outstretched copies of The Wall Street Journal, thrusting their crossed ankles into the sidewalk. You snort.
Humans. We are born half animal and half god – but it is in flux. You choose. Whether to indulge your animal side or your god side. Most people are animals – look at them. These people. You could spend your whole life like that. People can organize their whole life around their next meal.
Munch, munch, munching at the viands.
Now we settle onto the dock. I believe that I look out at the water. I believe that you remind me that this, them, that, is why you believe in books: something about grappling with godliness. I believe that I ask whether we could not find God in the water, or in the sky. You grimace before giving me the benefit of doubt.
Maybe. But this? You gesture towards the water: a handful of ducks and a row of yachts with names like Destiny II roped to worn posts, bobbing on the grey-green surface. This? What could we find in this?
Munch, munch, munching—
We must rise up—
The mallard floated in the muck.
The world is sinking.
Let us unfold our bodies to return to the library. Everybody is becoming increasingly squirrelish. Small women in print cover-ups squirreling away outside cafes with burgundy claws full of air chips chewing them with their front teeth.
What are we supposed to do? The day finally closes and we stand waiting by the screen door, our cold bare feet against the cool wood slates. There are daddy long legs in the corners of this house. I feel one scuttle across the little bones at the tops of my feet. We watch the street. It is black out there. It is small dark leaves on hedges that are manicured every dawn. The hedges of our mistakes: if I had only trimmed my pussy hairs… Little beetles collect on the outside of the door, drawn to the cozy light of this house. Is that me, then, flicking the undersides of beetles and hearing them drop, the sound of fingernails against a screen, the distant plop of a tiny animal falling from an infinite height, waist height to floor…
I feel my chest rise and fall. I feel pooling up behind my sockets. My veins get very itchy. What could we say?
You have moved on to the next book, you tell me. You talk to me about pure reason. I tilt my head and thrust my neck forward so that I can listen better. I watch you as you speak, thinking it novel the way that you use the same gestures to talk about the universals as you do when you talk about my booty, which you want to eat with a spoon. If I lost my hearing, how would I know? Your words enter my skull and scurry around like so many pigeons in a café—frantic, frantically, hitting glass to be bounced right back against another pane. You finish, and I—reaching for something to say, then letting silence hold its weight—cough.