One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Page 13

  All in all, really I only give the library lip service, and when I say “library” I mean the library and everything it stands for, regarding knowledge. I want to give props to the library, for holding out, but really I never go. There’s a dictionary in my bedroom, for what it’s worth.

  You can get away with almost anything by nodding or asking an honest question. People love it when you don’t know something. That’s something to contribute to society. I’ve heard about books about endless libraries. I’ve listened on and on about books about infinity. Sometimes I get caught up in the math, books duplicating internally and externally. There are insects that are born pregnant—look it up. It’s as if the books in the library are just books with nothing in them except more books.

  The thing about the library I come back to is that so far it exists, like people exist, which is not a given. I come back to this right when I’m in the bedroom pushing the coats around, looking for that one coat I came with. I push through coats as if they’re skins of the people they came from, just too much to deal with, I’m just pushing through them. They’re really the skins off animals and other people’s backs. They’re really just ideas. In fact the library is there just like all the things I’ll probably never do with my mind or my body, like ride in a hot air balloon or stab someone with a bayonet or have sex with two hotties at once or advanced gymnastics, in fact most sports, or access conviction, matter, or the metaphysical.

  LOOK INSIDE

  If she worries about the lint in her belly button she will look for it with her finger. As if her finger is a one-eyed monster, she’ll look for the lint and scratch for it with the monster’s one tooth (the tooth that covers its eye like a lid) and she’ll be able to feel the link between her navel and her clitoris. When she’s worried about lint in her belly button it’s bad news, she only got there through deep neurotic space, and her skin is so hot and so sensitive that almost any sort of poking around can cause irritation. What a head up your ass, what a snake and tail, what navel-gazing, rash, infection, lonely and unfortunate forms of creation. The world is an incubator. You can see its progeny working its way into her orifices. You can see her in her bathroom now, plugging herself with cotton, virile, viral, sterilizing. Take a look at yourself. Look inside. With the onset of nanotechnology the new frontier is in you, autobiography is the quest literature of our time, and almost everyone has begun to throw up, row after row, whether they know it or not. Luckily the throw-up is stop-motioned before it can get ugly.

  THE NEW ME

  They could stay afloat for only so long. Before the deranged creatures picked them off. They were so thirsty or so hungry. They swirled in the raging wind, fire, and water. Their skin shriveled. Time had ended and yet passed. Parched, they watched the last particles of moisture rise and fade in the golden air above an earth of previously unknown colors. They trudged on and on but the land was barren. Fungus rotted their limbs and bacteria new to the dying world cruised their organs. Germs, maggots, and death from virile viral microscopic life loomed in the near future. Buildings tumbled upon them. Flying debris severed them. Chasms opened wide and swallowed. They were crushed and strewn, and they exploded. Their brains burst from the noise. A spinning cow or lamp broke them. Their insides fell out. Their fingers crumbled. The inside of my skin was the earth, and grass took root and grew toward my heart. I had drunk and eaten enough pesticides to make it possible. My organs, robotic as zombies, worked with what they got. I saw myself clumping about, dribbling clippings from my razor-sharp teeth, pulsing with quotations.

  BEN AND BECKY HAVE WORDS

  That day they were blowing off work in rented kayaks and wasting it by having a fight. Now they were in the silence that comes when articulate people can’t make anything move with their vocabulary. Chirping, lapping, the bridge in the distance like a fake frown. The city lagged behind. Below, they had to rely on their imaginations for fish. Becky thought of a recent moment on the internet with Singleton Copey’s Watson and the Shark, inspired by an event that took place in Havana, Cuba, in 1749. Fourteen-year-old Brook Watson, an orphan serving as a crew member on a trading ship, was attacked by a shark while swimming alone in the harbor. His shipmates, who had been waiting on board to escort their captain ashore, launched a valiant rescue effort. But it seemed from the painting that the effort was in vain. As a child she’d thought that boy was a girl with beautiful flowing blonde hair, arching before the shark’s wide mouth in the waves, the shark’s tail so distant it might have been another shark. Two men reached for her in matching white shirts. A woman with beautiful flowing brown hair lunged at the shark with a spear. A black man stood behind the woman with the spear, compositionally parallel to the girl in the water. He was in his own world. He was above the fray, both interested and feeling something Becky could never quite peg. People in the boat were exhibiting fear, sadness, bravery, but one thing you don’t always think of is joining the victim.

  Now, Becky had always loved the lip service of a good internet citation. When she cut and pasted into her own documents it made her feel like it was a free country. This, she felt, is how you make something real of your own. Copley himself had made three versions of the paintings, after all, and just turned the “Borghese Gladiator” on its side for the figure of Watson. But just as she was deciding on a way to bring the painting up with Ben, he spat some mean shit at her and she spat something back. Then, while Ben was trying to come up with another example of what he meant, she got down to her skivvies and slipped into the water. This surprised him so much that he dropped his paddle overboard. A shark came by and ate it in one fell swoop. Ben screamed something about being up a creek, and that’s when she called him the enemy of expression.

  DREAM MATERIAL

  It was before there were tall buildings in Mexico City, but there were tall buildings, and flying vehicles. High and gray. Concrete. Nothing organic. No neon lights. A sensation of falling, maybe sweat, maybe an earthquake and Tlatelolco, this huge housing project where I lived right before the big one in ’85. One of the buildings came down and killed a thousand people with cheap concrete, just like the other day in practically name your country, it can happen any day.

  Opus caementicium made the Pantheon possible.

  After the apocalypse, I see concrete. I can tell you a lot about concrete in developing countries. You add water to stretch it and that’s our downfall, a concrete downfall. I can’t say “developing” without irony. I can’t say “concrete.”

  DREAM HOUSE

  My wife and I finally chose an architect we’d admired for years, a guy who had gone to our college, though we’d only known him from afar. He impressed us. He’d always been artistic. He did the drawing and we did the dreaming. Natural efficient everything, modest and modernist, we wanted that balance of cutting edge and built to last. We were excited and scared—we had good money, but it was still a lot. We told friends over dinner about our plans, going over the idea, couple after couple. We ended up describing that house at practically every restaurant in town that we liked. Real estate, figurative estate. I just thought of that!

  We’d had friends fuck up in process. One couple bought a house, turned out to be made of stuff called hardboard. Well, they learned via lawsuit that it was not designed to hold up in the rain. Thirty year mortgage and ten years life expectancy on the siding. Just imagine all the replacing you’re expected to do on a dream like that. What is it about cells, they all slough and replace within seven years? I once thought of a reason why that must be an urban legend, but now I forget. It must have been right before falling asleep, or that instant waking up, disappearing and reappearing to myself.

  Don’t worry, we didn’t split, we’re fine.

  At these dinners we described the blueprints. We drew on napkins. Our friends kept saying, “People want the master bedroom to be a suite. People want a garage. People want a stove the size of a tank. His and hers everything.” At dinner, I’d say, “but this is our dream house. It’s not people’s
dream house.”

  Later my wife would say things she never would have said before. “We should have a real laundry, we should have a proper foyer.” In a marriage you learn to see it the other person’s way. We’d spread the blueprint across the table in the rental. Her eyes going over the lines, my eyes going over the lines. I was placing our belongings in the house, and I could see her placing little people-friends walking around in there among our belongings. Lines such as countertops. Vessels such as vases. I ran my eyes along my wife. It was inevitable. Are you my dream, are you mine, what are you, who are you for?

  Programmatic inflation, our architect called it, when he’d redrafted according to what we’d heard about these buyers our friends imagined. We built the house. It was over budget, but you know that going in. We didn’t fight about what happened to our dream house, but we definitely alluded to it. “Where are his boundaries,” she’d say about some guy at work, and I have to believe we both felt the house in there. “What did you dream?” I’d ask her in the morning. I knew the house was in what I was saying. A couple of times, alone in the house we built, I’ve even felt the real house like an invisible balloon around me. One time I felt it I really laughed at myself because if there’s one thing I have ever excelled at in life it’s being in this institution we call marriage. Another time, I remembered following my mother on a tour of a great house in some state, not where we lived—probably Monticello. Suffice to say, my parents did not have a marriage like mine. It had been a long drive on a very hot day. My dad was so angry he was not joining us, he was waiting in the car. In the tour group I was at everyone’s hips. I almost fell asleep walking behind my mother’s bottom to the tour guide’s speech, my mother’s bottom in her summer pants blooming white up the staircase toward the great dome.

  DREAM GIRL

  She was so excited about the present she had decided to get me that she told me what it was going to be. I loved it. It was a great idea for a present and just right for me. It was what I had been dreaming of without even knowing it. But time rolled on and I didn’t get the present itself. Of course, this is all in the past. Now she’s gone. Big surprise. I don’t even get pleasure from the idea of the present anymore, because I was so mad about her not actually getting the present that I forgot what it was going to be. I can joke about the eternal present of the thought that counts, but what I’m actually trying to give you is an understanding of the stasis of certain forms of pain. It’s a matter of eradication.

  FEELINGS

  I smoothed the described sheet over the described person I’d loved before the apocalypse. The rich feelings welled from the page. Under the blanket, the person I loved remained. We used to mean so much.

  FOR REAL

  Slowly, carefully, gingerly, I began to suspect I remained ironical.

  SPACE AND TIME

  He went to an exhibit of photographs of people standing goofily with iconic art. They had their arms around it, sat in its lap. They used their fingers for mustaches, exploiting perspective. They got bawdy. The people interacted with the art in the photos within a range that included mean-spirited, grimly reverent, and trying to make it stop bugging them. It’s not like he felt looking at art was one thing, but in his thoughts he was participating in a millennial chain of erasure. In the final room was a hologram of a statue surrounded by holograms of people pointing at the art, surrounded by people hopping around like monkeys, surrounded by people pointing at the people who were acting like monkeys. All the figures were strobing from 3-D color representations to black-and-white 2-D representations. There was some kind of algorithm about which figures were represented in which way through a sequence. You could walk in among the holograms, probably, but he didn’t get that far, because that’s when his wife called him from the Everglades, where she was hunting anacondas that had washed from homes in the hurricane and taken over. She’d read all about it on the internet and flown down to help like Sean Penn. “An anaconda has exploded from swallowing an alligator its same size,” she whispered. “I am looking at this spectacle as we speak. I am up to my knees.” She was British and that still made her sound authoritative on nature. “It’s so Jurassic, so diasporic. When an anaconda begins to miscalculate in this manner…” she said, her voice quavering within the uneven reception.

  The museum was filling with rowdy viewers challenging the taped lines around the spaces taken up by holograms, and his anxiety rose in concert with their increasing numbers. “I love you,” he whispered into the phone, right as someone jostled him and his glasses went askew. For a moment, the Braque in the next gallery cohered. By the time he’d righted them and slipped into a quiet corner, he’d lost the connection with his wife. He texted her furtively. “I love you.” He spelled the whole thing out, for emphasis. But someone jostled him again and this time his glasses fell off and his phone slid away from him, like a comet, into the depths of the exhibit.

  WHAT I GOT

  I cleared the kitchen island and placed upon it the brown paper bag that contained my three purchases. It had been such a long time since I’d had a good day shopping, since before the banks collapsed, before the oil spill. In the new era of being careful I’d been keeping an eye out for, among other things, the perfect bag, a perfect bag for me for carrying things around in, and I finally found it! A glossy black one you can tell might be made from recycled materials—but not obvious in any way that would become dated—and with the right amount of pockets, so you don’t lose things in the bag and you don’t lose things in the pockets. I took it, along with my additional items, out of the brown paper grocery-style shopping bag with stiff twine handles they’d placed it in, and I placed it, in its silver tissue wrapping, on the ice-white and recently de-crumbed surface, unrolled it like a body from a carpet. I set the new bag aside for the moment, as I am one who eats the tips of pies last.

  Then I spread the silver tissue. What a satisfying feeling against the outer edges of my hands, like what I still do and have done all my life with my hands across the surface of the water in my bathtub every chance I get—what a day! take me away! Across the water I make the gesture of a conjurer, like I could make something rise. Then I folded the tissue into a square the size of a picnic napkin and put it into a bag of other pretty paper in the closet in the hallway for the future. Then I lifted the brown paper bag by its twine, shook it against the air, and pinched it at the folds. The bag made a huge noise in the quiet apartment in the silent weekday complex. I thought of a mountain crumbling between the tectonic plates of history. It was almost six o’clock. Everyone in the universe was caught in rush hour except me. I tried to hold on to the feeling I had when I left work for lunch and did not go back.

  I repeated the process with my remaining purchases. Folding tissue into square, putting tissue into bag. Green tissue with a print of tiny crowns in glittery green. Inside, a jeweled pillbox. Blue tissue slick on one side and natural on the other. Inside, a silk scarf with a pattern of peacock plumes.

  I carried the jeweled pillbox in the palm of my hand into the bathroom and filled it with an assortment: a couple Sudafed, a couple Advil, a couple Ambien, Xanax, Anaprox, Multi-Daily, golden Omega fatty acid fish oil caplets. You know how colorful and artfully shaped pills are. I returned to the kitchen, my formica island, and put the pillbox into the new black bag along with my ratty wallet. I smoothed the silk scarf across the island. I wrapped it around my head and tied it at the nape of my neck. I felt exotic. I put the strap of my new bag over my shoulder and put my hand on it where it rested at my hip, like I was ready for action.

  What a slick crap apartment, thrown up in the boom. What shiny new things.

  I remembered the fable from childhood with the cock on the cat on the donkey on the road. They were musicians running away from destitute lives to be in a band together. My purchases, one, two, three. My head in a purchase, my purchases in my hand. I gazed at the popcorn so-called cathedral ceiling above the island and thought of the sky above it, my skull and bones below, my p
ainted feathers a layer in between. I decided to take a spin around the neighborhood. I’d taken this risk, ditching work. I wanted to know if I felt empty or fulfilled.

  I walked like a wandering mind around the neighborhood, feeling out my new things among blocks below highways, whistling my favorite tune (you’re toxic, I’m slipping under…) until I came upon a vacant lot surrounded by chain link overflowing with thistles. I hardly ever had the chance to walk around the neighborhood, so the last time I’d seen it it’d been a desert in there, and now it was completely filled with the hugest possible thistles, just glorious, elbowing each other on the way up, spines shining, purple heads like muppets and dragons, this overflowing of weeds, this life pouring out over the chain link. The history of the lot was a drug den got torn down after a grassroots victory, but then because of something to do with property taxes the lot was sitting there foreclosed.

  The plants were so impressive. Gazing up, whistling Britney, I practically wanted to hug them, just like I almost ran away with my friends and joined a band at a certain point in my history when anything seemed possible, though the animals in the story just ended up tricking some robbers out of their house, eating their food, and curling up on the rug on their hearth. And now where are the tambourines? What is there, exactly, for me to put myself into? But let me wrap up, so to speak, take us the rest of the way around the block, so to speak, this side of the fence, with a few words about the value of shiny things floating icily in the constant state of becoming lost to us. Some time ago I started keeping a log of things and money I wasted. Some effort to contain them. A sweater left on a bench in the city (someone pick it up and use it?). A ticket for disrupting street sweepers (I’m sorry). Pie I ate all of that was nowhere even close to delicious.