One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  No, no, no one’s Jewish or anything—

  But what terrible fates happened to all of them, she’d get into this trance state, rocking. About wanting to kill her father when he was dying. I remember my parents were still together, I remember the house we lived in, my mom rocking in this trance and telling me about all the terrible things because her family was just nothing but terrible things, just misery, misery, misery, my dad’s family too, they’re just miserable people and miserable things happen to them, and I became really depressed and despondent, all I could do was cry about all these stories. But in this one house I remember my dad intervened—he rarely did, his strategy usually was to be gone, to be at work all the time—so he was at home and I remember he said, “Pamela,” because he always called her Pamela, “what are you telling her that for?” He took me to the grocery store to buy groceries and he was trying to cheer me up by offering me funny stories from his side of the family. I just sobbed. It doesn’t work like that. I’d make her tell me again because I was afraid I’d forget them. She handed me this thing and I felt like I had to take care of it.

  I always thought my mom was inappropriate. When anybody tells me something as if I am an audience, as if I am not the person I am, who they know as person—oh, ick, there’s sand in this glass. Do you want to go swimming later, when it’s dark?

  But when somebody tells me something as if I am an audience—Because I could have been anyone, her daughter, the mailman, the dog, it was just her subjecting you to whatever—

  I’d get home, she’d get home from work, and I’d have to sit in the bathroom while she was taking a shit or something, and I’d just sit there on the bathroom floor and listen to her talk about whatever.

  You don’t feel like an audience, right? You sure?

  She was the oldest of the kids, her dad had polio, he was in a wheelchair, her mother went off to work so she was left tending to all the kids and being the surrogate sex partner to her father, so she—my mother didn’t have a chance in the world to not be crazy, there was nothing leading up to her adult life that didn’t insure she was going to be batshit crazy, and I know that. That is a sad tale, that woman. My brother came home with a permission slip about the Holocaust and for a while that was the show, my mother pontificating on the horrors of the Holocaust, the horrors of the world and all of history, it was a show, explaining to us that Hitler pretty much wiped out anyone who didn’t have blond hair and blue eyes, not explaining to a child about genocide, and I can remember it, sitting in the family room, and she’s rocking back and forth, and my only way of wrapping my head around that and putting myself in relationship to it was saying “I’m so glad we have blue eyes.” How can I feel safe? Oh, I have blue eyes. Then she went back to the Holocaust. She just walked out of such garbage, such garbage, and then tried to make a life out of it. I have an amazing memory, but you know I can’t even remember what state she lives in now. Oh wow, do you see that, that thing? What is it, a tornado over the water? It’s pretty.

  TAHITI

  Instead of the mood of the light from the kitchen in the dark in the heat with the fronds from her limber plants at her elbows suggesting Tahiti in the old days of painters now on coffee cups, she hoped a sheen would ease across her imagination even as the Earth fell away, as the animals died, as the fields fumed, as the turnips in the refrigerator shriveled into the faces of old ladies like the one she would become if she only waited. It took something psychic to refrain from relaxing into one of the voices in the town that flattened real life. She took a piece of ice into her mouth and let it hurt, perhaps the last ice on earth. She took a look at the house and felt pickled. She turned her mind toward the several moments in her history that were worth considering, and watched the ideas turn in the atmosphere like model planets and then fail. Home, home, home is where you used to think you wanted to go.

  CONJUGATIONS

  The perpetrators arrived to offer statements for the record.

  Nature looked amazing in a cloak. “Because I know better. Because of what you did to the good and the beautiful.” God assented from a cloud.

  The human looked desperate and unfashionable. “Because my power made me evil. I mean, I saw God in a beaker, and clearly he’s in a cloud. I mean my troubled childhood. I mean my charisma or insanity.”

  The alien phased in and out of view and the voice in waves of particles came through. “I am from the sea, or the stars, the past, the future, your silly hands, your body microscopically against you… When I am sentient, when I am animal… When I am phenomena… So honestly, fuck you.”

  But when pressed, each eventually confessed: I was in class. In class I was often lost and did not know what to do. But one day the teacher called on me, and, astonished, I knew. Apocalypto. Apocalypteis. Apocalyptei. Apocalyptomen. Apocalyptete. Apocalyptousi. At last I had something to offer.

  III.

  THROUGH TO THREE QUARTERS OF A HUNDRED APOCALYPSES

  implosion, the crumpling of paper

  THE OTHER WAY AROUND

  We came at last to the wackily fantastic land of opposites. We’d read this one in childhood. Candy tasted terrible and we all wanted liver with onions. Water got us drunk and we could only breathe when we were under it. Right was wrong, so we were very popular. Our mouths swapped spots with our assholes. Our belly buttons turned outward (except for George’s) and our vaginas, well, you had to be there. The birds under our feet annoyed us with their philosophies. It was the end of all we’d known, and our hopes sank.

  NICE DAY

  A lot of things are happening around the world, and happening in patterns that if you read a book, the book will point out to you, chapter by chapter, the exact way the patterns are happening here, here, and here. You can feel like you’re learning something for a while but then as soon as you catch on, you think, If I keep reading this book is it just going to be more examples? Then as the book is rising and falling on your belly you see the light from the window, leafy dapples, so pretty. You feel a little lonely but then you remember that reading feeling of being on to something, those early pages. You pick it back up but now the book takes a turn for a paragraph into a sort of rhetoric that pisses you off, and that seems to give rise to another sort of tension connected to loneliness because you’re afraid you might abandon the book for good and all your hopes for what it might have given you—and that just makes you masturbate.

  The efficient orgasm is the most productive moment of the day, because, apocalyptically, it has wiped the slate clean, and no one will ever know about it. What are you going to do now? Most of the time you could go back to reading. Some of the time you fantasize about a ragtag group of strangers thrown together by circumstance who go on a quest for some orgasm big enough to leave them wanting something different than they wanted before.

  Like what? Gross food? Ugly stuff? Feeling like crap? Not understanding anything?

  All you do is lie in bed with no underwear, trying to think of something better and better. In your next fantasy you are lying in moist dirt and leaves, in exactly the same position. In your next fantasy you are lying in hot sand, but no book. In your next fantasy, an old standby, you are running, you have a flag on a stick that means something, you are faster than all the animals, everything is burning in your wake, you’re truly awake, the flames are taking on the shapes of everyone you’ve ever heard of in a herd behind you. They are overtaking you. In a last gasp you’re engulfed. It’s the kind of thing that leaves real people scarred for life.

  HANGINGS

  Already this year he had inherited the clothes of two famous dead people. At least one had killed himself, and he knew both tertiarily. This current one, a third, was his wife’s mentor, and he and his wife had gone to visit the widow where she’d holed up in a house by the sea. In evening light, the dead mentor’s wife looked at his wife across the broad planks of the table, in a room filled with rugs and masks from around the world.

  He was walking around looking at the masks while th
e women were talking quietly when he heard the woman say something to his wife about his “frame.” He thought about picture frames—was his body a frame, or was his body in a frame (skin as frame?); was his skeleton his frame, and what’s that all about, inner beauty, what you hang it on? There was framed art in other rooms of the house, but in this room it was just the masks. He thought about his face: his brain behind his face thinking about his face. He was not good with people the way his wife was, but he was just as smart. There were a lot of good places to hang yourself in this house, though he knew it had happened at the place in the city.

  “At least have him try the suits,” the wife of his wife’s mentor was saying. “They’re here, in the closet upstairs.” Hanging, everyone thought. “I have someone for the sweaters,” she said. He thought of himself in the dead man’s sweaters, perhaps six of them one over another, gray and brown, bulging, soundproofing his chest. He had the sweaters of another famous man already, buried in a closet in the hall at home.

  The man who’d been promised the sweaters had been there for brunch. Now he stood in the hedges watching the women talk and the man poke his finger into the eye of a mask and touch the wall behind it. The man in the hedges had been in the same cohort as the wife. They’d been rivals for the mentor’s attention and occasional lovers, and the dead mentor had used them to challenge each other. The dead mentor had often been unfaithful to his wife. The mentor’s wife had been unfaithful to him only once, years before her husband even started up with his conduct, and this had been with the man in the hedges. At lunch, the man in the hedges had said, “All I want are his sweaters. I loved him too, you know. Not like you, but he was a very important figure in my life.” The word figure hung in the room, under the broad rough roof beams. A breeze came up the dunes, through the hedges and the window, and sketched squiggly lines around their heads. She thought about the word figure, about her body, what it could possibly mean to reason with it, with the body, once and for all. Only after he’d hung himself did so many people he’d fucked come out of the woodwork. Men, women, old people, young people. Loved, too, she suspected, some of them. Her husband had had a lot of meaning, she kept being reminded. She’d told the man in the hedges, as she put marmalade onto a muffin she was not going to eat, that she’d think about the sweaters or if there might be a better choice for him. “A special book?” she suggested. “A piece of art? Something small?” The man said that back in the day you could smoke, and the mentor had worn his sweaters and smoked all through class, letting butts pile up on the floor by his chair in the seminar room, so involved with what his students were thinking that it never crossed his mind to use the ashtray that sat on the table next to the case for his glasses. “That’s what it’s all about, in the end,” he’d said to the wife. “What we’ve done to each other up here.” He tapped the side of his head, tap, tap, as if it were fruit. The wife couldn’t help it: “Figures,” she said. She’d be glad for him to take the sweaters.

  The women faced each other across the broad plank table. The man in the hedges watched them through the window, comparing the women’s bodies to each other, and his own body to the body of the other man, who took a mask off the wall and put it over his face and scanned the room through its eyes. The women looked deeper and deeper into each other’s eyes. They both started to well up with emotion. They reached their hands across the table to each other. One of them sniffed, to shake the feeling. The other one said, “Where were we?” Then the man in the mask saw the man in the window and yelped. He dropped the mask and it bounced once and then wobbled like a coin, but when he shot his eyes back to the window, he didn’t see anything except the hedge, the reflection of the globe of a lamp, the moon above, and the dunes beyond it. He’d almost forgotten they were by the sea. He looked down at the mask and thought it must have made him see something that hadn’t really been there. Hang it all, he thought. He’d never met the dead man, but he felt a longing for him when he looked at those women so deep in each other’s eyes, so filled with longing. It made him want, very much, to have the suits or anything else the dead man had left to offer. He looked forward to wearing them as any other clothes are worn, into the future, time doing its quiet business along the seams.

  THIEF

  A thief crawled in through my window and took a bunch of my stuff, but I wasn’t alarmed, because he looked so familiar with all his fingers, the dark outfit, the apocalyptic two-by-two of his limbs, eyes, nostrils, the all-over symmetry of his presentation, one foot in front of the other like a good soldier. The thief was like everyone I’ve ever met (except Billy, because of the accident on top of the genetic condition.)

  Now my friends want me to question my empty house, but I recognize it as mine as well as when it was full of all that stuff I brought in from other places, like where I shopped, and when I got presents for my birthday.

  Besides, I owe, I know. How much do you have to change before you are no longer yourself? You can change everything, and you will never get away.

  You know what I did? I offered the thief a whiskey. The thief drank whiskey with me in the night. We stood on the balcony and watched my neighbors’ cats walk along fences. We watched shadows move all by themselves. “Look,” he said. “It’s practically us.” I couldn’t see where he was pointing, but surely he was right. He let the sack slip and it spilled open with relief. We looked at each other among my shimmering things, and merged.

  PARABLE IN TRANSATLANTIC

  I was in a play. Sharing a role was part of the concept. We knew only that much at casting.

  We’d had the script for a week, but as usual I had not even started to memorize my lines even though I kept studying them. The other actress cast as me already knew them cold, was already making choices. I was there for rehearsal along with a spotty crowd. Who are these people already? During a break, standing in the audience, I had a face-to-face with the director.

  “It’s our first rehearsal,” I said. “I think it’s really unfair to let the public watch when the cast hasn’t even had a read-through.” The director said no one else seemed to mind. I suspected a hidden-camera-documentary aspect.

  I put on my transatlantic and said, “But you know as well as I, first reads are intimate.” The other actress was up there on the wooden planks of the stage, a redhead with a nothing-fancy mode of expression, and she was playing around with one of our monologues like I wasn’t there, mouthing and gesturing absently with her styrofoam coffee cup, a napkin stuffed in it, poking out over the lip. I was worried about sharing this role with her, because I could tell I was wearing my mother’s face. The director was gazing into his own consciousness, maybe or maybe not in regard to the point I was trying to make. On impulse I said to him, “Does this face make me look old? Does it make me too old for this part?” Now he swung around to me like I was crossing a line, so I said, “Come on, I thought we were doing theater here.” He looked like someone famous, but I was actually more famous than he, in our circle. Now I was even thinking in transatlantic. He clapped his hands and everyone on the stage stopped what they were doing and turned to face the rest of us. Some of them were in the audience by this point, and some of the audience was wandering around on the stage. Everyone was in street clothes, and about half of us had the same cups.

  “In this story,” the director said, and everyone leaned in, “in addition to what you know already, we are all going to play each other’s parts. We are all going to play each other as if we were each other, and we are going to play each other as if we were each other’s parts. If you are still worried about being someone else too much, this will be a challenge for you. I want you all to keep in mind what I’m saying, but don’t let it show. I want you to keep your own face, because we’ll be working as a group.” Suddenly the nothing-fancy redheaded girl was one of many, and everyone in the cast was trying to look at everyone else at once. I was trying so hard I could feel my brain through my face. I wanted to do what he was asking. I was really inspired at the time. You
remember what that’s like, don’t you? Not feeling in public at all? We forgot about them entirely, even though they were mixed up with us; we just went for it. And all through the process I really tried to ditch my hang-ups the more we all got into the piece and into each other. But I kind of suspect the show sucked. My mother came, and she’s not one to mince words. In fact, she came with my ex because they’re still friends, in fact sometimes I think they might be more than friends, whatever that is, and people should be with the people that work for them I guess. It’s about timing. There might have been a time when the people I love could watch me in a show like that, but I probably would have been too involved with them to do a good job. Now I think I did a good job, being and not being myself and others in a group. But I sure don’t know how anyone else felt about it.

  WAYS OF LEARNING

  Deeper in history than anyone knew, furrowed in a grayed-out landscape, bees lined up, humming, along the branches of a cluster of trees, and as their noise and their wings began to make the leaves tingle, the sun moved along the other side of the earth, which operated as a hunk between the scene and the sun. The longer they hummed, the more they seemed to pulse, because sounds were forming patterns, which is exactly what happens when matter meets matter and time passes. You can hear pulses separate themselves into words and land on things as bees land on things. If the things nod back across the bees to you, there is a theory we can learn being demonstrated.

  LIBRARY

  At the buffet I responded in the way I thought this guy wanted me to respond. A moment later, once I absorbed what he’d actually said, I was no longer sure how I felt about it. Now I have forgotten what it was. I regrouped and withdrew to the balcony. I noticed that if I agreed with this woman, she would assume we were both familiar with the article, and I could watch esteem growing in her eyes the more silent I became.