The Entire Predicament Read online

  I was on the porch smoking with Emma, who I must have mentioned, she was so pretty. Hippie girl downstairs, very pretty girl, lithe, always stoned, but intelligent. We were looking at how he’d put in a big hulking air-conditioning unit along the side of the house. We started talking about how stupid it was, how in those old Southern houses, you just open the doors and breezes go right through, you just don’t need air-conditioning. I love a real breeze, and it was another way for him to charge more money. We started talking about hating the landlord. Made fun of his accent and his wife, his car, his haircut, the way he walked, his nose, his mother we’d seen him riding with one day, her accent, the little dog she carried and how the dog would leap at the window and bounce against it, snarling. Emma did a snarling minidog imitation and then we sat smoking for a minute and then she just went down off the porch and stood next to the air conditioner and kicked it. I came down and stood next to her and then we just started kicking it in. Emma had clogs on but she could still kick great. We kicked in the part with the fan, very satisfying to kick in, and then we kicked at the grill until it flopped off and there was all that silvery fibrous filter stuff, which felt great to kick, because it crumbled and left the prints of my boots and her clogs. I can’t believe I haven’t told you this before.

  The next day I looked down from my window and saw the top of his head. He was standing next to the kicked-in air conditioner, talking to Emma through her kitchen window about those idiots who’d backed their car into his unit. He said “unit. ” Even from my window I could see the marks our shoes left. “You sure it was a car?” Emma asked, but he was sure. “I should put in a curb,” he said.

  I moved, but maybe six months later I saw Emma, and we got a bunch of dog shit, and we pushed it through the mail slot at his house.Would he think dogs did that? I asked Emma, who was looking through the slot into his house, “Is this satisfying to you?” She said, “Yes!”

  AIRPLANE

  My grandfather liked to fly so low over the villages he bombed that he’d return with blood on his fuselage, or at least that’s what he told his kids.

  SOME MATH

  One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Poked him with their index fingers, told lies about his mother, smacked him in his funny bones, scratched his eyes out with their fingernails. Person Equals Torturer.

  One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Chained him in the stocks, stuck him in a barrel, let the community take over. They peed on him. People Equals Torture.

  One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Torture (an OED definition): to ‘twist’ (language, etc.) from the proper or natural meaning or form; to distort, pervert. For example: the Chair, the Pear, the Wheel, the Fork, the Ladder, the Hook, the Rack, the Saw, or the great Bronze Bowl. Jim surveyed the chamber. My God! Any ordinary thing, it seemed, could kill you. A chair. A sweet pear. For the rest of his days, though he walked away, his eyes shifted, his body crooked and leaping with nerves. He feared paper clips, cups and saucers, the toilet plunger, packing-tape rollers, newspaper caddies, golf clubs, typewriter covers, pocket protectors, humble onions, and any piece of furniture, especially pine. Object Equals Torture.

  One time they took Jim off to be tortured. His son Charlie kept hamsters in his bedroom, but when they overturned a bowl of rodents on Jim’s stomach and heated the bowl, the rodents burrowed. The pulley that raised his intestines had been so friendly when it lifted cargo from his ship. The apple rumps of the four horses set to draw and quarter him were rosy, broad, and quivered, ready and afraid. Animal Plus Person Equals Machine.

  One time they took Jim off to be tortured.The Branks, the Breast Ripper, the Headcrusher, the Whirligig, the Ducking Stool, the Cat’s Paw, Phalaris’s Bull, the Rack, the Brodequin, but then, more wonderful, the Iron Maiden, which enclosed him like an exoskeleton, his body within a body, pierced and warm within cold metal. Then when they set up to strangle him, Jim expected a pair of stockings, as before, which had worked fine for a garrote when they first worked with objects, but this time they brought out a loop of metal with a screw that tightened it. There was something different about this strangling.The limp stocking had leaped to life and stiffened with action around his neck, but this, these specialized machines, he thought, meant someone knew all along he’d be tortured. They’d prepared and readied a machine to place between them, as if the torturer was entirely audience, as if the whole scenario was predetermined, Jim bound there prone, torture his fate. Machine Equals Torture; Torturer Equals Machine.

  Outside the chamber, he saw no Iron Maidens, he saw no screw-laden loop devices as he wobbled from his shack to work and back. His eyes rolled, unfocused in his head because he could not place his fear; the machines were in the dungeons but he saw the dungeons everywhere.

  One time they took Jim off to be tortured. The Bed of Nails, the Hugging Stones, the Wooden Horse, or, best, I think, the Judas Cradle, which is nothing more than a spiked pyramid with ropes and pulleys above it. Only when they added Jim did it become a machine.They lowered his ass quietly onto the tip and let his weight work. Body Plus Object Equals Torture Machine.Tortured Equals Machine Equals Torturer.

  Here the action of the machine destroyed the machine. Jim slumped, quiet, eyes closed. Outside, new parts waited in line.

  CYBORGS, OR UNIVERSE AS MACHINE

  Overnight, a line wormed into my face. I went to sleep and I had no control over what happened next. I hoped I’d slept on a pillow crease, but it felt like something might have gotten to me in the night. I rubbed my face and stretched the skin. It’s a puppet-mouth line, but only one. I’m aging lopsided.

  Remember that guy who worked in the container factory? The tiny plastic bottles like thick thumbs, and then he puts them on a machine and they balloon into what we drink soda from. I’m looking at my thumb, a miniature torso.

  I talked to Liz. As a kid, she was saying, she loved buttons. Anything she could push.Then I went to the movies again and it was a film about love, French, so I call it a film, but dumb, dumb, and then in the end the girl gets electroshock on one side of town and the man is hooked to a heart monitor on the other and the more they shock her the stronger he gets.

  There are many more chemicals now than there were in the 1940s. Chemicals made only in laboratories are now peppering our bodies and twinkling in the stratosphere. Some of my DNA is patented. I don’t mean to be cryptic, but I know the line on my face could just go away tomorrow, as if traveling through. It doesn’t feel like it will, though. It will. I am closer and closer to being a mannequin. Honey, honey, honey, all my moving parts . . .

  YOGURT MAKER

  Your yogurt maker arrived.Thank you. It’s more compact than I expected. It’s the size of a swaddled infant. It’s shaped like a torpedo. It’s amazing what’s going to happen in there, deep in the constant temperature. Incubation.

  You know how yeast weirds me out. You know the high stakes of canning. This yogurt is a risk. But I have to figure out what to do with my body. I’m so tired. Luckily, soon, I am going to see you.

  PRINTING PRESS

  How clean the computer is, how uninked the text. Paper is the body and the body is gone. It’s the ghost of a machine. It’s trying to pull one over.Without the paper nothing’s impressed. There’s nothing to feel.

  I think a lot of people think the computer is sexy. Inside a computer there’s a lot of animated humping. There are a lot of slick aerodynamic images to associate with computers, gleaming, greaseless chrome in space. The computer is invisible : wires and light, tiny welded grids and dots somewhere behind sexy screen robots. I can only imagine.

  Is a printing press sexy? Ink and weight. In a sex scene they’re naked on the printing press, butts on vast plates, letters looming, rolling around, getting printed. They’ve picked a special text or something. Kafka’s machine kills with words, garbled ones, the idea of them, remember?

  On the computer there’s this database of missing persons.

  VIBRATOR

  I had one for
a while but then I left it somewhere and forgot.

  TAXI

  When we get to the rally it’s in a packed auditorium with raked seating. This is me and Michael, my Jewish cousin. In the pauses the speakers leave for cheering we each decide to add our voice or not. All of us in the room are doing this. My voice, a voice, our voice. Ambiguous phrasing. We’re here to rile ourselves up, to feel collective, our breath, our bodies, our encased minds seeping into the noise from the orifices in our faces, but in each pause, some of us are silent and some are very, very loud. I refuse to chant one of the chants because it is so wrong and stupid. I might have forgotten I’m invisible in the crowd. I am having a private exercise, deciding what words to put in my mouth. Political machine. War machine. Then outside, after, we take a cab, me and Michael, who has it in him to be a loudmouth. Blah, blah, Israel, he says. Blah, blah, Iraq. There’s the barrier of plexiglass between us and the Arab driver and my cousin’s leaning up against the seat back, profile to me, profile to the driver when the driver puts his eyes to the mirror, which he does, he puts his eyes right to the mirror. Do you think you’re being friendly, Michael? Are you so convinced of your own goodness you think it’s okay for you to talk like this? I mean you’ve got the money, but right this second he’s got the machine.

  AMPLIFIER

  On my back, on the floor of this city basement, I’m moving my eyes along the brick ceiling, which is vaulted, mortared in waves, with a sloppy grid of pipes and beams suspended below it. Curves through a grid, like music itself.

  I sit up long enough to watch you plug everything in. I watch you drag cords around. Plugging the cords into their places is one language I don’t know.Your guitarist telling you a whole new song by saying letters that aren’t words: that’s another. I look at the cords, amazed at how many turns one cord makes and then how another will barely reach and this shows how much distance doesn’t matter. Sound or electricity or some combination, something I can imagine only in cartoon will travel through it fast enough that no ears and surely not my stumpy ones could hear a difference. Sound turning corners. Your guitarist switches to sitar and I move my eyes back to the ceiling.

  I see the ceiling for a long time before I notice the population balanced between the bricks and the beams. How did all these items come to reside in this space between surfaces? A banjo, a rubber monster mask, a bicycle, more cords, a stretched canvas, a row of buckets of water sealer, a wad of Christmas lights, an enormous can of tomatoes, the leg of a large pink doll, a push broom, a pole lamp, a rolled-up sleeping bag. And here I am among them.

  My God, your voice. I am so used to it speaking but when you sing how will I ever be able to say anything to you again? You speak and I hear words but you sing and how unfamiliar you instantly become, how distant and still somehow mine for having known your voice before it took off with your violin, and amplified. You make the world bigger. You make everything disgusting disappear. You’ve covered it in a clean sheet. Everything is a cold lump once you erase its relevance with sound.

  MACHINE

  Okay, this one has no machines. Unless, as so much history and language would have us believe, our bodies are machines.

  STILL LIFE

  It’s late. You’re sleeping here in the warm shadows. I cannot even see you breathe. Verb, the word, is still. No moving parts. Silence. A machine, defunct. A machine, pre-force. Shoes, footless. Simple potential. A baby in a photograph. An eggplant, whole and raw, molecules moving invisibly. An eggplant, cooked, post-sizzle. A baby in a photograph, still. Past and future action, ambition, accomplishment. Having done. Will do.

  Can we be still? How still can we be? How perpetually hungry?

  Don’t go.You’re always so far away. Making, doing, making do.

  MACHINES

  Can opener. Electric pencil sharpener. Automatic garage door. Food processor. Remote-control dog collar. Dictaphone. Videotape rewinder. Hair-comb poison-dart deployer. Microwave oven. Six-slice toaster. Bush Hog and bulldozer. Long-range spy cam. Massage chair. White-noise maker. Cotton gin. 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory. Bubble machine. Stun gun.

  Lawnmower, dishwasher, typesetter, welder, word processor, streetsweeper, engraver, and other people who are machines.

  Cooper, Smith,Weaver, Cartwright, C arpenter, Miller, Potter, Baker, Barker, Shoemaker, Taylor, Mason, Plumber, Butler, Groom, Fisher, Shepherd, Hunter, Porter, Knight, Bishop, King, Dean, Parson, Proctor, Berger, Monger, Messenger, Mailer, Shipman, Skinner, Tanner, Butcher, Gardener, Singer, Cook.

  Back at the supermarket, a guy with a heaping cart approaches the girl in charge of checkout. “Are you open?” the guy asks. “Oh, I’m not a line,” she says. “I’m automated.”

  MY MACHINE

  Even as you are my love, you are more. You are more than body.You are beyond words. Also imaginary.

  MACHINE

  The laboratory is filled with tanks of small octopuses, none larger than a glove, stacked floor to ceiling in individual plexiglass tanks, and they have been left alone for months except for feedings, performed automatically by a robot named Madge.The little octopuses stretch their icy limbs through the airholes, groping, and occasionally slide across one another, so forlorn their chromatophores are blinking darkly, and this continues until one octopus coils a tentacle around the tentacle of another octopus and pulls so hard she stretches thin and slips through the airhole, and although her partner does not, she drops from the tank and lands on one of the silver discs of a balance set to weigh a gathering of marbles in a plastic net sack with an open neck. The balance tips with a thud and marbles spill and scatter across the laboratory table, bouncing and rolling in four directions, sort-of-north, sort-of-south, sort-of-east, and sort-of-west, and the westward marble rolls into a mouse hole—one of those tiny black arches that in another cartoon would be a train tunnel but in this one is a mouse hole—and once inside it bowls the little mouse off her feet as she scrubs dishes in her kitchen and is caught up on the marble as it rolls, her feet pattering to keep up, and they roll on out the back mouse door and outside the laboratory, which is the bottom floor of a tall, dark-brick apartment building, patter, patter, go, go, down the paved path over hills into the distance, and meanwhile, the octopuses left in their tanks, terrified and frenzied, are circling in sync. They circle and circle and it sets up a rhythm, and the whole wall of them begins to creak and shake and then the tanks tumble, water gushing, plexiglass bouncing across the laboratory floor, and this makes enough ruckus that several stories up, a geranium in a terra-cotta pot that has been balanced on a windowsill shivers just enough that it inches and then topples and falls alongside the fire escape and smack, lands on the spoon end of a shovel and there’s a cat who, walking along, happens to be stepping over the shovel handle when the pot hits and is flung into the air, yowling and flailing, until he catches onto a lady’s undergarment that is hung from a clothesline and there he clings to it, dangling. Meanwhile, bouncing off the laboratory table, another marble plops onto a sleeping dog that wakes with a fart that lights a candle that burns through another clothesline, this one hung with seven shirts with silver buttons that shine so brightly in the sun they frighten two chickens who drop one egg each from their bottoms, and the eggs smack into an iron pan on a stove and a great wind comes and swooshes the eggshells away and thereby a bald man’s breakfast is cooked.

  Some machines exist only in writing.

  Plus, there are many more marbles.

  BODIES AND PARTS

  Our parts were in the bed. I lifted my fingers to your fingers, and inside, our mirrored veins bustled with vessels, just as I remember them bustling in grade-school filmstrips, corpuscles like sucking candies bumbling through corridors like bottles along a conveyor belt, top view so you’re looking at all caps, conveyor belt as bisected vein, veins in fingers, fingers to limbs, veins and vessels to mind. Without our skin we’d fall apart. Laverne and Shirley wobbled away from the factory on bicycles. We could hear the sound of distant fax
ing.

  Baby in a Body Cast

  In the corner, the baby looked in the direction his body cast cast him.

  Birth did it to him, squished his bendy bones through the yawn of his mother’s pelvis and left him floppy. In one open moment his skin felt the white air. The world was loud. It gushed, prismatic, cold, sharp, dry, and gaspingly empty. He tingled in the starry light that lit him as if from within. His bones pushed at his skin, loosed from their joints, and while there was pain, he also felt his body loosed in the universe. His bones bobbed, noodles in soup, and then everyone in the room surrounded him, darkening the light, and soon he was wrapped, cupped, and wet in white. The world had taken one step away—noise sucked back where it came from, sounding again as it had from his mother’s belly, but without her humming insides. He heard distant sounds, and the only close ones were his own, his body’s sounds and the sounds of his body’s sticky contact with its cast. Soon the air left the plaster cold. Soon he lay like a doll at his mother’s breast, separated everywhere except his face. His eyes moved. He could move his eyes without hurting anything.

  His parents worried for a while. It was all so new. They’d never had a baby before. But soon, to everyone, he was simply himself, only more triangular than he might always be, a shiny bar holding his legs apart, like a shower rod between his ankles, and overall immobile and numbed. The three of them went home, down to their cellar apartment, practically painless.