One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  BLUFF

  She chose, for the apocalypse, the Only Jeans That Truly Fit™. She stood on the bluff, on the highest of many mesas, one black boot raised on a boulder, leaning into her knee, squinting far beneath her sunglasses. The city looked like a cluster of crystals rising from the desert. In the background, her motorcycle pawed at the earth and revved its nostrils. From this vantage she watched the apocalypse coming, filling the desert with roiling black soot so fast it seemed always to have been there, gnarled, burled, paisley, churning, eddying, smoking, and soon the soot enveloped the city like a tsunami and surged around the mesas until all but her mesa were submerged, and the black clouds thrashed against the bluff and wallowed at her ankles. She felt her heart swell and then shrink beneath her tiny t-shirt. She turned on her heel to mount the steel steed, her body raw-er than ever and entirely less fleshy. She could see in the round silver ant-body-part part of the motorcycle how hard, how set, how hot, and how cold her face and eyes were now. She rode her motorcycle around the plateau. She began to take on the world by riding around the plateau feeling really powerful, gazing into the consistent distance until a trench formed beneath her tires. By the time she noticed, she couldn’t hop the bike out. She dismounted and tried push it but her muscles must have been the kind you get at the gym that never work in real life. She longed for an actual steed, or to be an ant. And so she rode on, not knowing what else to do. Even now the trench walls rise.

  VIEW

  One of the difficult parts of the evening was standing in their birch-paneled great-room, windows over a cliff black with night. Besides the expense, the expanse, there was the man’s penis from long ago, before he was married to this hostess in white.

  She knew it curled in his herringbone trousers. The penis, keeper of her promiscuous past and container of the futures of many possible people.

  It had been longer than usual.

  It had been formative, lying near him and thinking about what an ass she was because he smelled to her like spoiled milk. The hostess had such strong brown arms.

  It’s difficult to think about futures without making a joke about money.

  Above the long, smooth, knotty pine table (it’s hard to think of knotty without the memory of deviant behavior; it’s hard to think of pine without nostalgia) hung a painting of a woman as a landscape, like the very landscape visible from the great window it faced during the day, but not visible now, because it was night. It is possible the hostess painted it. Across a field of floor another couple lounged closely on a couch, the man so in place in this house, in his body, near this woman’s bosom, that he was happily nodding off. The woman-as-landscape doesn’t seem to be a painting of anyone; it seems to be a painting of the history of walking around on ladies. She viewed the painting as she’d viewed the room and the past before it.

  Now she is on the other side of the glass with us, her feet over picturesque nothing. There are no current explosions. Someone’s cooking in the kitchen. Someone’s nodding on the couch. It’s their house, it’s their chasm, it’s the view from their bodies.

  REVIEW

  These people in the photo of the war and their babies look like dirt and rags in dirt. All fell, but especially the babies, who fell into the earth the way they had always fallen into shoulders, into sleep, with small, complete weight. You understand that the bodies are dead because of angles elucidated by the photograph. You are not convinced that the stillness is not the stillness of a photograph. As the photo suggests, you conflate what is rag, what is dirt, what is body. You put yourself in there, even in babies, and you know the angles your body can’t do, even with yoga. The other reason you know they’re dead is it says as much on a little card next to the photograph. You have come to an exhibit of photographs that has been praised for breathing. The reviewer stopped short of announcing that the pictures make the war come to life. He’d composed the review after visiting an ex-lover in the hospital, a sculptor who “remained in a vegetative state.” In the hospital, he tried to concentrate on the sheet veiling her and not the memory of her body. She had been a sculptor on her way to revitalizing classicism. They lived in an apartment with her resin figures. He had been a photographer losing faith in his own artistic promise. Her stillness was hard to take. He remembered the camera he loved, a Nikon he’d saved up for in 1965 and still brought out sometimes, usually alone in his apartment, usually after several drinks. Once he’d found a mysterious roll of film among the pieces of fruit in the bowl on his countertop and had it developed. On it, objects in his life had been rendered monumental. He had not had children. He had not gone to war. He had not made good art, but when he looked at the photograph of his kettle he found it difficult to breathe.

  METAPHOR

  At the brain stem, madness hunkered like a bomb the size of a baby’s fist. It was not a stone, as our ancestors believed, because a stone remains stone. The bomb is scientific. Madness is mostly dis-integration. The little fist is a little baby’s fist, but if the baby wiggles its fingers you’re done for. Anything can happen to set the baby off. You can get raped, take drugs, or fall out with your mother. You can think a bad thought or a magic word. A baby can grow into all kinds of baby. You can go on with your life with the baby living in, off, or on your body. Madness is some of your eggs that you could ovulate now or never. Madness dams the river in your dick, hair over time in a drain. I know in the end it’s not like you are one thing and madness is another. It is a sleeping fist of your own stone bomb dick dam babies.

  VIRGINS

  Never mind, this is what happened to Betsy. It’s what they say. She grew a tail. They ripped it from her. It divided her butt. I’m kidding. But you know how you can tell when a girl loses her virginity is you look at her ass: if it’s clenched up she’s fine, but if it’s got a space—like if you look at her ass you can tell because obviously there’s room now—seriously, pay attention when you go by.

  VERSIONS

  Posters rose around the neighborhood describing a lost pigeon, which you might recognize because it might land on you. So meanwhile I’ve been hanging out with this very sexy girl Maggie who always wants to be with me but doesn’t want to date me. She’s recently lost-then-found her giant cat Hank, who’s a typical tom that way. Then she went to Spain and people in her building were taking care of the cat, who is allowed to go in and out of the window. Back from Spain, there were posters around for another lost cat, and the owners called her house and tried to convince her that Hank was actually their cat, the new lost one. Maggie won by saying Hank was at least 30 percent bigger than their cat. I don’t know if she knew their cat, or if it was an educated guess based on how big Hank truly is. “People appreciate data,” she said to me. I was holding a towel in front of her so she could change at the lake. Naturally I’d been sort of trying to tamp down my crush and sort of trying to let it do what it wants. So then later that day when we got back from the lake and I dropped her off and was at my house getting ready to take myself to the movies, I heard scuffling on my roof and went outside to look. There was a giant white pigeon like a foot above me on my stoop’s overhang thing, huge for a pigeon, with a pink beak and giant pink feet. It took off in a rush and a feather fell from it. I don’t know what percent bigger. Then I went to the movies, not putting anything together. When I got home my landladies were sitting in the dark garden. I joined them for a nightcap and they told me about seeing this white bird in the yard. “I saw it too!” I said. That made me remember the poster for the pigeon. I felt worried that someone had been missing their tame bird all this time and I’d just gone to the movies, and I felt like I’d forgotten because I was getting all the posters mixed up with my stupid feelings for Maggie in some way. So the next day I walked all over the neighborhood until I found a poster, and then I called the number. It was a weird guy. There’s a certain kind of weird guy in this town and they have a certain kind of voice, sort of lonely and sort of self-righteous. A kind of guy into ham radio. He said the poster was about a gray pig
eon, not a white one with pink feet like the one I saw, but that he’d actually lost a white one, too, a while before that. He didn’t sound at all freaked out, or relieved, or anything, and that started to make me mad.

  Next day I was biking over to Maggie’s and we were going to have brunch at a place that used to be a bank. There were leaves everywhere in the streets. I was thinking about the structure of many leaves coming from one tree. Then how they all fell away but there was still that one tree. I thought about money, about bicycling through money swirling around in the street surrounded by bald trees as if the money had come from the trees even though of course not. This is the way I use my brain. There in the street was a weird guy, and some distance away, maybe a house-worth of distance, there was a giant pigeon, and the guy was trying to coax it toward him. It was a black pigeon with red rims on its face. I didn’t want to bicycle through them in this delicate moment so I pulled over. I watched the man and the pigeon move in relation to each other like backward magnets. A cat that looked a lot like Hank sat on a porch and was definitely watching, too. I tried to think of what percentage like Hank that cat was. Then I tried to think of what percentage like Hank the rest of us were, living on this Earth. No cars were coming. I realized there was no way the man would know I was the person who’d called him, if he was the man I’d called. So I said, “Hey! I’ve gotta get through here, okay?” I said it the way I’ve seen people with Hummers say that to people like construction workers, or anyone really. It’s amazing how urgent something like brunch can feel. But the weird guy didn’t look up from the pigeon. I could have just gone right ahead through them, but something made me not do that, even though the guy was on another planet. He was on another planet in some kind of system that was beyond me, something where he was in a network with a series of birds, white, gray, black, and maybe with a whole separate weird guy on the phone interacting in a series of patterns. They’d tacked up these flyers onto trees, and some of the flyers were crumbling onto the streets. I let the man keep staring at the bird and then I looked at the cat watching them, too, like me. I backed up and went around the block. When I got to Maggie’s she was freaking out because she couldn’t find Hank. She was afraid her neighbors might be harboring him. I said maybe he was just out chasing tail, and she threw a pillow at me. Then she went to make a phone call. I picked up the pillow and held it in front of me by two of its corners, the way I’d held up a towel a day ago. For a second I thought about the posters around town and let go of one of the corners. That’s the opposite of a nail, if you think about it. Maggie and I are the same height, and we have basically the same haircut. We both wear glasses part-time and contacts part-time, but I really couldn’t tell you if it’s the same amounts. There could be so many more things to aim my feelings at, and sometimes I think the right thing is hovering just above my left ear. But it’s like every time I move, whatever the right thing is moves in exact relation to me. It makes me really want to get out of here, this whole brainspace, this country, whatever made me the version of myself that I am.

  PHONE

  This boy on the phone on the porch across the courtyard in springtime lets his voice move, light as a leaf in a river: “It’s like I’m only me when I’m around you.” He’s twirling a piece of grass between his thumb and forefinger, watching its head swivel. He’s saying, “Don’t tell anyone.”

  Dim through the walls behind him his friends are playing guitars with their amplifiers unplugged. They all have girlfriends somewhere, too. When the earth shakes and the dust of the world bounds across the lawn, when the posts that hold the porch roof snap, he feels no more misty and no less certain than he had the moment before. He says “I love you” into the phone and believes it exactly the same as he believed it before. The girl on the phone, who always feared he might not love her and never wondered if she loved him or not, feels the earth turning to powder as he says the words and thinks, This must mean he really loves me, and in the next instant thinks, It doesn’t count! and by the next instant the end of the world has already happened. The telephone and an amplifier dot hillsides on opposite ends of the universe. The boy’s eyelashes spin like a blown dandelion. The girl’s fingernails sparkle in shards.

  REAL ITALIANS

  In all of the dreams it was an ornate bar and she had to walk by dozens of rich people, some of whom she knew to be his daughters by the way they looked like Sofia Coppola was going to look once everyone knew about her. They might leap up at any moment and kick her out for being a minor. When she’d get to him it was obvious that his Cadillac lay, like a chocolate bar, in the street outside, with its same car phone hanging up between the front seats and its cord, like all the phones’ cords back then, dreamily flopping between the seats, him calling from it, still not impressing her, even as she left the bar full of his daughters and got into it all over again.

  But in the bar, where they never were in real life, she remembers talking about the apocalypse: he asked her what she’d wear, “What would you wear the last night on earth?” and she said, “I don’t have anything good,” and he starts listing clothes he likes. She can’t tell if he thinks she has these clothes, or if he’s just listing ideas, but every outfit he says she can see hanging, ready for anything. What’s important is how one person’s fantasies can start taking over another’s.

  He keeps talking about his plans with Robert De Niro, who he heard is looking for real Italians. She keeps trying to remember an obvious song by Blondie. He did turn out to be a minor henchman in a bunch of shows since then. She got a clip from one where he gets offed by getting shot and falling from a pier into the water. She put it where she can click it on her desktop, so in some dreams he falls back over and over with his hand reaching for that brass rail and she’s yelling at him: “But you’re only a minor dealer! I’m the one with the future!” She does remember when she first saw him on TV, though, and what’s killing her—and this might be what connects the forms the dreams about him take—is that she really was impressed, as if he’d made it.

  VIBRISSAE

  I loved her, but the day before the storm she kept coming into my room and looking at me. She knows what gets on my nerves. That, along with her cats, my dog, everyone. The plants down the street, the bundles of garbage that float by our windows and roll along the sidewalks, snowballing like human souls. This is why we lived twitching, as if we’d ever sense what could help us.

  GHOSTS

  She draws her bath, blue with salts, and from the bedroom, we, the ghost of everyone who loved her, feel its terrible fumes. We watch, squirming among the folds of the comforter, ghost like smoke, like the coils of a brain, like fleshy roots pale from never having seen sun, massed and white—ghosts are always pale, significantly blanched. She covers her limbs with soap; she stands to do it, lathering every port and gulley. How can she rinse in such blue water? And then how can it be so invisible against her skin when the smells roll under the door and surf the hallway? When she comes out and it’s clear from her face that she knows we’re here, she challenges us, with her silence, to say something. But we have no mouths and she knows it, so what sort of challenge is that? She’s wearing nothing but her towel turban. She’s pale and strong, but not yet dead. Her eyelashes are dark because they’re still wet. She puts her palm flat on her dressing table and leans hard, toward the mirror. We have no weight, and we are afraid of mirrors, which are our equals in transparency. This mirror is oval and swivels on mahogany pegs, as all good mirrors should. She drinks from a small glass of scotch and doesn’t bother about the ring it leaves. It’s not our business anymore, what she does to the furniture. We want to shoot her. Sure, with a gun, shoot her full of holes so blue salty worms can crawl in and consume her from the inside out. She takes a tiny brush from a tiny drawer and uses it on her eyebrows. We scurry around her ankles, catching the last of the wet heat. Then there’s no more wet heat, only some droplets jiggling on her calves. We squirm and wait for the clothes to come out. Then they do. We want to pounce but
we wait through all the possible outfits, and finally of all t-shirts and jeans she has chosen the right ones.

  We cling best to cotton. We grin with our whole body. She’ll feel wisps of us all night, fingers in her ears, peripheral ticks in the atmosphere. But sooner or later she’ll strip, and there’ll be nothing we can do but hunch in a wad in the corner as she coils around this new person who fucks and fucks, making the sounds of life. But we don’t stop grinning yet.

  SESAME

  Two lovers stood at the door to Aladdin’s cave. They’d been at it forever. They each believed they were still in love, if only they could think of the right thing to say. They remembered magic words from childhood. But this was an apocalypse, so no such luck. They stood at the door to the cave, admiring a door that fits a cave. One of them thought about man and nature. One of them took her clothes off and struck a pose, shivering. An old lady came hobbling along in a cloak with a basket and offered them a million dollars from it if they’d do it right there in front of her. They did it and she gave them the million dollars, and they pushed it through the mail slot but the door still didn’t open. They were going to run their fingers through heaps of coins and put golden vessels over their heads like helmets, for fun. They wouldn’t come out of the cave, and they wouldn’t let anyone in, either, no matter what anyone said or what was shoved through the mail slot. Then another old lady came along in a cloak with a basket. “What’s in your basket?” they asked. The old woman said “Bread,” and suddenly the lovers were so hungry they offered to do it right there in front of her if she’d give them the bread, but the woman just rolled her eyes and hobbled off, muttering about the arrogance of young people.