One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  AIRPORT HILTON

  In the front lobby in the middle of everything was a choice of two restaurants: Buddy’s or Chang’s.

  In my room, number thirty thousand and something, I turned off the television because I heard a violin. The whole point of a violin is to kill you emotionally. I listened, and then I slipped into the pink and yellow hall and followed its glowing geometry in space. The communal jetlag of so many hidden people puffed weakly from under doors like in Batman when someone floods a room with poison-gas.

  The violin made me, in the hotel, odd, beautiful, alien and heart-filled. The violin was practicing, and it had no irony, a beyond-world-class violin, finer than the Met or whatever you like, stopping and starting anywhere in any number of pieces. The violin in the pieces was like me in the hotel. The hotel was as pink, yellow, and winding as intestines, as my own shining unspilled guts.

  I like the test at the eye doctor’s where you put your head in a white globe with a cross made of black pinholes and press a button with your thumb when you see a white light in your peripheral vision. After a few minutes your thumb no longer feels like your own. The response between the light and your thumb gets automatic.

  A game I play with lovers who let me is I close my eyes, and then I like them to touch me with one finger here and then there, just so I don’t know some things, but not so I don’t know anything. Like any reasonable apocalypse, pulsing with intimacy and the anonymous. I like the long hall of doors and the garish light and my ear near the cool wall covering. Any moment any door might open and any person might appear in front of a bed around any corner, my heart beating as it beat when I was a child hidden for hide and seek, although here I am exposed and still secret, just like naked. I slide to the carpet in the hall because I want to be stiller than I can be teetering on two feet, and I kneel on the way to prostration with my ear to the wall in the face of danger.

  Hide and Seek: Dark

  Hallway with Violin: Pink & Yellow

  Hide and Seek: Hidden

  Hallway with Violin: Exposed

  Hide and Seek: People searching

  Hallway with Violin: Accidental “discovery” possible

  Hide and Seek: Among children I am afraid don’t love me

  Hallway with Violin: Anonymous

  Hide and Seek: Sound of children (pretty annoying)

  Hallway with Violin: Violin (my favorite)

  Hide and Seek: Round shape of hilly neighborhood

  Hallway with Violin: Elbow angles of hotel in space

  Hide and Seek: Not doing anything wrong

  Hallway with Violin: Eavesdropping &/or masturbating

  Hide and Seek: Fantasy of quick terror of being found; slow realistic agony of not being found, this being what? Winning? Because on this planet the goal is to be alone forever? But instead of everyone calling “You win! Come out! We can’t bear it without you!” they forget what they were looking for and roast marshmallows on a hundred spits.

  Hallway with Violin: Fantasy of I go to the concierge and the concierge agrees to pass my secret message to the violinist. The concierge and I agree with our eyes that there is a famous violinist in the hotel but with our voices we agree that it must be a very talented amateur no one in the hotel would want to ambush. Then the violinist crosses to my room in the night in some black gown. She is Chinese because I dug tunnels to there throughout childhood, and I am still me. She is melancholic. Suddenly, she explains some of the things she has to say via the violin which everyone knows is the body. Suddenly, we drink something fizzy that will almost kill you but then not, and watch some television, lying on the bed on our stomachs like twins but I’m blond. I never know what I’m wearing. I’m usually invisible. I’m my eyes and voice, my elbows on the bedspread, my hands circling my glass like they’ve come to life around the waist of a doll. We turn off the television. The space that surrounds the hotel swoops into the room. The room is filled with stars. The stars are the jetlagged people of the world shoved beyond orbit. Everything is inside out, we’ve turned the corner at the far end of the big bang, I mean the hotel, I mean the tunnels through my brain, I mean my body, I guess it has to be my body, and we are returning to the center of everything, with the best view not to mention the soundtrack I always wanted to tell me how to feel and what to do.

  ADOGALYPSE

  After the apocalypse, she missed her dog. One thing she thought about the apocalypse was you’re supposed to have a dog. She’d take a zombie dog, if only so she’d get to kill it cathartically and as a symbol of all she’d lost, including her real dog who died a week before the apocalypse in the backseat of her car while they were driving to the vet. She heard his organs contract and then release forever. She heard his death rattle, the only one she’d ever heard, then and now, because the apocalypse was a loud one and you’d think you’d hear death rattles like echoes for days but the boom lasted long enough that when it stopped all she heard was the memory of her own dog’s natural death. She wasn’t able to pull over. It was night, the road was twisty, and she was not letting herself believe this was it. She’d kept driving, telling him it was okay. “Okay, baby. Good boy. It’s gonna be okay.” Now she knew from experience, because here on the other side of the apocalypse she was supposedly okay, too.

  COUCH

  I take my brother to his psychiatrist. We were up late, don’t ask. We’re pretty fried. Waiting room has a couch, two cushy armchairs, a coffee table, end tables with magazines, and a few toys for kids. It appears both abandoned and armed. No one there but a receptionist behind glass.

  My brother goes in. I lie on the couch.

  He’s in there with his psychiatrist. He’s talking about his problems, some probably involve me. I go into a grateful doze.

  Lady comes out from behind glass and says, “Will you sit up, please?” I can hear in her voice that it’s been building.

  Is it my feet? My feet are not on the couch, I was careful about that. She says, “You’re disturbing clients.”

  “No one’s here,” I say.

  She says there won’t be room when they come.

  “I’ll get up if they come,” I say, but there’s no use, I’ve already lost. I pick out one thing from many options relating to her appearance to scoff at silently. I draw a parallel between two kinds of one-sided conversations. Then I think of a couple more. I picture my brother in the next room trying to come up with the truth. I picture all the people in our lives piling up in the room with him and his psychiatrist. People with real problems. If I said one more thing the lady would invoke policy. So I sit up. Do we feel better now?

  MATH

  I was talking, at a party, with a man about Lolita. He seemed surprised that we both liked it. I told him it was a very well-liked book. He was being really flirty. First when we met at the party he just looked at me, and then as soon as I said something he said, “You’re witty!” He reminded me of someone and I was trying to think of who it was. I figured out that he looked like a friend of mine—a writer who’s written a book about Lolita, and also some novels. I told him. Now he said, “Is your friend a good writer?” Well, he’s well liked.

  I thought of this other writer I know, who looks like a famous actor—everyone says so, and he’s even written about it. He was the teacher of another writer friend of mine. I was at her place the other day and met her ex-husband, and you know who he looks like? That famous actor, and consequently also that writer who looks like him, my friend’s teacher. I mentioned this to them and neither one had ever noticed that he looked like anyone, but they agreed completely, so I’m not making it up.

  In light of all this, it’s interesting to me that when we read a book we don’t look like anyone. And also, something I thought about during both Lolita movies: how important it is, in the book, that we don’t see her except in our imagination, because if we saw her she’d be just a kid and we’d freak out. I thought about that music video with sexy Liv Tyler and her father lusting over her as if we don’t know he’s her
father. But maybe the goal is we do know he’s her father. So what about the guy at the party? God, I hardly remember him, except he was a math genius. But I remember hoping all the time we were talking that he could quickly explain math to me, suddenly, in an ejaculate burst, in a way that I’d really get it, all the parts of math that I always longed for, that I knew were on the other side of all the math I couldn’t bear, and because of this I have the same lingering sense of loss that I might have had if we’d slept together, or been married once for several years, a long time ago.

  DINOSAUR

  A dinosaur lay under a rainbow in a white sunset on shining hills. The girl, a sample girl, a remnant, reached for the imaginary hand of the ghost. The ghost had been trailing her across state after state, holding his basket, ever since the apocalypse. In the basket, tiny ghosts of prairie dogs and butterflies, mongeese and baby foxes, wobbled, nested, nuzzling in their contained afterlife. The vast exposed land, its lid lifted, its whole history layered under the grass, now history—girl, dinosaur, ghost, basket—teetering on the deserted road in the light air. The dinosaur’s anchor-shaped nose brushed the grass tips at its knees. Plateaus of clouds seemed still. The hand of the ghost was not a hand, it was the memory of hands, or now, since the apocalypse, the idea that a hand could come. She missed a horse she’d known as a child. Purple flowers massed and then spread thinly over the field. Yellow flowers made a wave near the road. She remembered how many people must have used to have been about to awaken each moment. With so little left after the silent blast that razed so much and left so much as well—too much to take in, to count, witness, know, hunt, cover, recall—she didn’t know what to do with her still-empty hand full as it was to be, if she could reach it, with that much ghost. The dinosaur looked heavy, the rainbow looked light, and the hills could have been covered in snow, or nothing, or something that had never existed before.

  II.

  UP TO HALF THE APOCALYPSES

  numbed out from the past

  MEMORY

  When I was a boy and they told us to lie down on the San Andreas Fault to feel the tremors, I didn’t feel anything. Reminds me: not long before that I was in The Pied Piper, cast as a witch who had one early scene and one late scene. In the first scene, the Pied Piper said a line from the last scene, so I pictured the line in the script, white next to mine in yellow highlighter, and as I pronounced the line that followed it—my line, what I was meant to say, as I saw it—all the rats’ eyes went shifty. But everyone proceeded directly to the end of the play from there, and even the kids who never made it to the stage took their curtain call responsibly. At home, times like these, my mother would always say, “You’re being so sensitive, it’s not the end of the world,” and I thought, Well then what is the end of the world? I never found out from her, so I imagined the apocalypse. I thought about how weird it would be to be a horse and have a crop hit you behind the saddle out of nowhere.

  NOSTALGIA

  We were so close from five to eight. We had one last fight and I hung up knowing it was the end, feeling bittersweet for what I would later know was the first time, remembering how future nostalgia thickened the hallway surrounding the telephone, all the familiar furniture taking one step from the walls into the carpet, as if I could see each piece through the plaster.

  Soon we moved away and then at twenty I made a detour back through town. In the fields, kids I’d been five with were coaches. I ate a nostalgic pastrami sandwich. I drove by her house and there she was, like magic, mowing her parents’ lawn. In the kitchen we drank tea out of a brown pot I hadn’t known I’d forgotten, and the squeak when I pulled in my chair felt so familiar it was like nothing I’d felt before. When we were kids she’d been very nearly blind, with big glasses and googly eyes. Now she was hot. I said, “Where’s your glasses?” She said she only pretended to wear contacts in high school and taught herself to see. Later I asked this current blind friend of mine about that and she said it sounded like bullshit. She said I only believed her because I thought she was so hot. She said I was full of shit, verging on fetishistic.

  After the apocalypse I was wandering around thinking about real magic. Leaves of newspapers still cart wheeled along the streets sometimes, but I’d stopped reading them. I’d given in to the process of forgetting, of letting the past go, of letting it rise from the depths of reflective surfaces on its own, all of this as if the world, eradicated, had a will. Back with the teapot, I’d looked into her eyes and known she’d told the truth. But now I think the eyes aren’t the windows to anything. Instead I hold on to the idea that the past is the past for some reason.

  DOUBLE NOSTALGIA

  One of the problems of pre-school-aged children is that of communication. The vocabulary of such children is limited and variable. The child may call a bird a chicken, or a jeep a car, etc. Thus, the examiner must discriminate between the child who cannot see and the child who offers an unexpected word for what he sees. In youth, the focusing lenses of the eyes are very elastic; most children can focus objects even three inches from their nose. As we grow older, the focusing lenses gradually lose their elasticity and at 35 to 38 years of age, difficulty is experienced in increasing lens curvatures to enable us to focus on objects that are near; this condition is called PRESBYOPIA. There are six muscles attached to the outside of each eyeball to accomplish turning the eyes. The supply of nervous energy to these muscles determines the balance, or parallelism, of the visual axes. Worth noting is the importance of having multiple eyes, which must be manipulated, by the brain, time, technology, or other therapies, in order to function in concert. If a person can maintain balance, HETEROPHORIA exists. If imbalance becomes manifest, HETEROTROPIA exists.

  M

  VISION TEST CARD

  POINT

  TYPE

  .50

  The airplane moved at a huge number of mph and in her seat it felt relatively motionless. Between motion and stillness are vibrations. Her fingers tittered along the grid of buttons on her tiny computer. When the man across the aisle looked at her hand moving, even though he also had a computer, and they worked in the same language, and they were both trained typists, he couldn’t tell from watching her fingers what she was writing. Maybe if he’d been a lip reader. All the codes were the same, and still, the aisle was only this side of infinite. Maybe if he’d been a mind reader. These two were meant for each other. Her fingers moved like marionettes, with invisible strings into the ceiling. His did, too. They each had their own puppeteer hunched near the thick ceiling, chatting together, in their own world. What else?

  4

  .63

  The plane moved around the world and the world moved too, but, to the plane, seemed still. His mind moved to memories of watching video depictions of the solar system and he placed himself as a stick figure on Jupiter within the machine. When the plane lurched and hovered for a moment in an air pocket, he mistook the moment for imagining his stick-figure self experiencing an animated demonstration of centrifugal force. Across the aisle the eyes of the woman zigzagged like cartoon wariness, following the motion of the accumulating text he couldn’t see, which in her mind moved forward only, one word after another, but on her screen moved like methodical paint filling in a wall, and what else:

  5

  .80

  She was writing about imaginary people moving within houses on a planet. A boy in her head moved a plastic airplane through the water in his bathtub, the airplane’s windows almost completely rubbed away from use, action, friction, motion. The people in the writing moved according to the laws of physics as she’d learned them. They moved, she hoped, truthfully. Then she paused, taking a conscious breath. In her mind was a remembered idea of the future (think Jetsons but personal, and probably something about handsome/wedding from when she was six). She wriggled her hand into her lap under the tray table and adjusted the pinching seatbelt buckle. As if nudged, she looked across the aisle, but the man was facing his computer. Because of her angle, she couldn’t see
his eyes moving. He was reading or he was looking. If you looked at their eyes from the aisle, if you could take in so many eyes at once while following their gazes (which you couldn’t), then you could see, if your rhythm was right, in a chance of one in just-this-side-of-impossible, their eyes do a bounce across the aisle:

  6.3

  1.25

  She’d look at her computer and then look at him three times, and he’d do the same to her but in reverse, and not only that but the kicker is they were thinking exactly the same thing (about ponies) and they were meaning exactly the same thing by it (secret of the universe); if you were fantastic and mathematical, and if you were the space between them, in front of them and slightly above them and a little inside them, then you could see with whatever your eyes would be in that situation that this really happened, seriously, no joke. But you will have to take my word for it. I’m so sorry, because it was so tragic and beautiful, not to be missed. Tragedy, tragedy, everything is like this, there’s never anything else. It’s a goddamn miracle that I live to tell.

  10

  The adjustment of the Project-O-Chart for proper character size should be made in the usual manner as indicated in P.O.C. instruction manual using the 20/200 “E.”

  BABY ALIVE

  (2012) 109 MINUTES

  Detective Wendy Buckem (Sissy Spacek) finds herself on the trail of a killer targeting young mothers-to-be. Part thriller, part reality TV, the cast features MTV Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant reality stars (Catelynn, Farrah, Amber, Maci, Leah, Emily, Ebony, and Whitney). The young women struggle with their relationships, dreams, and new responsibilities while attempting to evade a mysterious stalker. As time runs out and bodies pile up, Detective Buckem finds herself confronting her own past. Also starring John Stamos.