Attachments
after Oliver Zarandi’s “Arrangements”
Grace liked to cry, particularly into phone receivers that contained her mother. She would call her mother six to seven times a day; an abdication of burdens in the form of a guttural sob.
“You wench, you’re giving me gray hairs,” her mother would say. Then she would ask if Grace had shaved her armpits yet.
“No, but I will tomorrow,” said Grace tomorrow.
//
In the humid dusk, Grace watched quietly as her boyfriend Gordon pinned a wasp to a lampshade.
“I don’t want my mother to die.”
Gordon, unhearing, muttered an incantation to the wasp. There were other insects pinned to other lampshades, and also the tablecloth.
After the incantation was over, he turned to face her. “Is that true?”
“Of course,” said Grace. “Who wants their mother to die?”
“My mother died when I was five, and I turned out fine,” said Gordon.
Grace sighed, her gaze landing on the dead hymenopus coronatus Gordon had once kept as a pet, now reanimated via a string affixed to a fan. But what if I never reach that place of fine?
Gordon cooed to the pigeon on the windowsill.
//
Dinner that night was bone marrow and grape Jell-O.
Grace thought back to her first date with Gordon. Grace had liked Gordon because he was funny without being conscious of the fact that he was funny, and because he reminded her of Pedro from Arrebato, including the affinity for heroin, though she hadn’t found that part out til later. Gordon had liked Grace because, when he asked her what she did for a living and she replied that she was an anthropologist, he had, through some quantum leap of selective hearing, arrived at the words “ant apologist,” which made him squirm with delight.
Gordon slurped his marrow, and noted that Grace was looking more morose than usual.
“There’s very little point dwelling on the future, you know,” he said, “and I think you place too much weight on worldly attachments.”
Grace reached for more Jell-O, the side of her left hand brushing against the wing of a no-longer Luna moth.
“It’s just that I had a dream, and we flew somewhere so she could die . . . She was preparing to die. And I was waiting, and all my friends were dancing, kind of a bacchanal of the living dead, and I was close but also very far. And then there was this girl named Meredith, and I had never met her before, but we clicked, I guess. I didn’t like that she was in my bed, but there were other things . . . ”
Gordon, a disciple of Jung, gleefully informed Grace that she was at long last killing her parents, killing her inner child, killing the old to make space for the new, Meredith being, ostensibly, the new. Then he told her he had decided to move back to L.A.
The walls of Gordon’s bug board founderered towards Grace’s feet, and in time she migrated to the futon without her own knowing. She wept profusely, and wondered if Gordon was leaving because of her hormones.
//
Grace was still weeping when she awoke the next morning, the apartment disgorged of everything save for the futon and a few unwanted flies.
Grace changed her clothes and floated to the park. Maybe today she would find Meredith. There were at least eleven skateboarders weaving between four competing jazz bands occupying separate yet somehow too-close regions of the park, and people eating lunches and generating plastic waste and pretending to read, but amidst the park-goers she could see no Meredith. So Grace decided to call her mother.
Grace decided to call her mother, but her mother did not pick up.
So Grace decided to call again.
This continued for some hours, and with each entrance into the voice messaging system, the current of Grace’s tears only swelled.
At peak streaming, her face half-encased in sunlight, Grace finally decided to give up. A toddler, using the benches for support, arrived at Grace’s kneecaps, gazed up at her, and babbled an incoherence that Grace made out perfectly.
“Hi,” Grace sniffed, glancing nervously at the fashionable pair standing strollerside in the distance, who, in belated realization of their toddler’s absence, soon came to whisk them away.
Grace thought of all the times in elementary and middle school when she had frantically scanned the audiences of holiday concerts and dance recitals and sporting events in search of her mother, only to step outside of the self whose legs had suddenly turned to jelly whose chest was constricting suppressing a moan when she realized what she already knew, that her mother was not there in the midst of the other mothers.
This was that.
excerpt from alastwave.mp3, my novel in progress
It is winter.
A stranger on the street is pushing a cart.
At first I think he is homeless, but on second glance, I realize he is not homeless––he is some other, tangentially related thing. Today I am 23, but in actuality I am pushing two-hundred-and-thirty. I am suffering an abstract illness that has inscribed itself in my face. I am aging rapidly, very rapidly indeed. My eyes are sunken. My skin is sallow. Every step (I am, as it were, on a walk) constitutes an ordeal. Vanity: I seek myself in every passing pane of glass. Lately: Every pane reveals a ghoul. So yes. Today, I do not wish to be noticed; it consequently flows that this particular stranger should only notice me on this particular day. His eyes weasel their way into my eyes, and I am at once completely naked, exposed in the middle of the street, though I am still walking, suspended, in motion. I can’t recall having met these eyes before . . .
These.
Eyes.
Hold.
Theseeyesholdallofmysecretsin
(secrets in? secret sin??)
sssssumptuous, watery recognition . . .
But vanity! I am so preoccupied with my ugliness that I fail to register my sudden nudity; fail to perceive the entire web of life I have lived thus far spooling out in the strange man’s eyes. All I can think is, “What horrible luck this stranger has had, what with his gaze landing upon my sorry visage!” I avert my eyes as fast as I can––I do not wish to prolong his misery. I am certain that his gaze chanced to land in the wrong place. He meant to notice someone else. He made a mistake. I maintain my pace, shedding the moment and its memory in a matter of hastened footsteps.
•
Long before the stranger (so long, in fact, that I have nearly forgotten), there is Avery.
That’s her real name, too––Avery, if you’re reading this, may God keep you. May God swaddle the fuck out of you . . . Avery is my playmate, but only for now. Her family is relocating to a different state, and not a moment too soon because Avery is a body snatcher. There Avery goes, gnashing her teeth! There Avery goes, hijacking my sleep!
Bruxism, succubus, Avery!
We are on the playground. It is a beautiful summer day. The playground is surrounded by lush green trees, green grass lawns, a smattering of art-deco sculptures, and beyond that, a combination of tall buildings that are made of stone and even taller buildings that are made of glass. On the inside, the playground consists of castles, soldiers, and horses; an elaborate sprinkler system, a slide for toddlers, and a slide for big kids too. There is even a tire swing. Everything is painted blue . . . let’s say, tiny particles of pulverized rock are sitting at the bottom of a remote and inaccessible glacial lake very high up in the mountains somewhere very far from here, and the particles are swallowing and spitting out sunlight through the water to make the inaccessible glacial lake strike this wild, totally violent turquoise against this vastness of dull gray mountain––that kind of blue, blue, blue, but not really, really it’s just blue paint; I wanted to describe the exact shade of blue to you but, well, I got lost in a reverie, you see; I started thinking about this trip I went on once and forgot we were talking about the playground in the city; I hope you’ll forgive me; where were we? Parents? Parents and sitters line the perimeter. They mind the strollers, converse amongst themselves, and, from time to time, when their charges come sidling up outta nowhere screeching “I’m hungry!” with mortal urgency, dole out snacks from little plastic containers and bags.
We are standing at the top of the slide for toddlers. The sun drips down from the sky and onto our skin. The light catches in little wisps of Avery’s unkempt bangs, through which her eyes are burning. Her cheeks are red. In the distance our babysitters are exchanging gossip and laughing in spite of themselves. But the sun is watching, knowing. The sun is working so hard, not to swallow us.
In fact no one on Earth can really begin to fathom this self-restraint, this sacrifice. It is a marvel, this kind of love. The love of sustaining all life, from the smallest seedling to the largest redwood, from the parasitic fairyfly to the snowy albatross, from the paedocypris progenetica to the dwindling Antarctic blue whale. The love of nurturing the whole cancerous puss of humanity so bent on destroying everything for which she has always cried survive. The love of illuminating the moon, of rising and setting and rising and setting and fulfilling the ubiquitous and naive and bottomless expectation of another day. The love of holding eight disparate planets in fragile equilibrium, of keeping them from careening wildly out into the stars. Silently she governs the limit between balance and chaos, without asking any vow, any deed, in return. She just sustains, sustains sustains sustains sustains sustains sustains sustains and goes on sustaining sustaining sustaining sustaining holding cradling kissing giving warming nourishing enlivening enlivening all life all life all life all life alive alive alive alive!
Avery wears her overalls like she’s been doing so much welding at her job and she’s just about fed up with welding. Only one of the straps is buckled. Avery is the one who decides which ladder we climb up and which slide we go down when. Avery dictates the games, which means that usually she’s the queen, the teacher, the mom, while I am the subject, the student, the remarkably stupid baby. Avery is four years old. I am also four years old, but this isn’t doing me any favors. Avery is still the boss. We are standing in silence as I await my next orders. I squint up at the sun. Avery watches me for a long time.
“The sun’s going to fall out of the sky, you know,” she says flatly.
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes it is.”
“When?”
“I dunno. Probably sometime soon. And it’s going to kill you. Everyone’s going to die.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is too.”
“How do you know?”
“My sister told me.”
Avery’s sister is one-and-a-half. She doesn’t know how to talk. I gawk at Avery.
“I think you’re lying,” I say. Avery’s eyes flash. “Your sister is just a baby.”
A smile sweeps across Avery’s face. A warm breeze weaves betwixt us, and I can hear the birds chirping. I can hear Avery’s breath. But then all at once the birds go silent, and Avery grabs my arm and drives her nails into my flesh.
“Ohhhhh, no. Nononono.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “She’s going to kill you, because you said that.”
“No,” I stammer, “she’s not.”
“You wait,” Avery says. “You wait, and you’ll see. You better be careful. Look.”
Sure enough, a smallish head is peeking out of the stroller beyond Avery’s finger, and the look in the eyes in the head suggests that the head, covered in peach fuzz, has not only heard this entire conversation from all the way over there, but actually preordained the whole thing, and is totally intoxicated by my innocent fulfillment of her scheme. At first an unbeliever, there is now zero doubt in my mind that Avery’s sister is a demon from the second hot hell, the hell of black cords.
“She’s going to kill you with a knife.”
“But I didn’t mean it like that, I just . . . I didn’t mean anything and, like, how would she even––”
Avery has already gone down the slide. I watch her skip to the tire swing, where she orders everyone off so she can have the entire swing to herself.
When I fall asleep that night, I dream the sun is hurtling towards Earth.
I dream that everyone is screaming and running in slow-witted circles waiting for the sun to SMASH into our planet and they are screaming so hard they are gurgling and their skin is starting to redden and blister and burn and they are searching out miracles in the periphery but there is no periphery anymore just blinding white light and gurgling and they have never believed they will die they still don’t believe they will die they can’t die they CAN’T they cannot stop lose their precious thoughts they cannot stop lose their precious laughter they cannot stop lose their precious love they cannot stop lose their precious breath they cannot stop lose their precious dreams and most of all they cannot stop lose each other each other each other each other THEY LOVE EACH OTHER and money won’t save them now––and I was scared to try a new snack at snack time one day but the teacher said I won’t know until I try it so I tried it even though I was scared and it turned out that I liked it so I am thinking about all the things I am scared of and have not yet tried that I will probably like and I am screaming gurgling because I am not ready to stop when I have only just started out laughing breathing dreaming skipping thinking running jumping dancing singing tasting swallowing growing and I am reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching reaching––
I always wake up before impact. I drag a blanket into my parents’ room, hiccuping, sobbing, coughing out my account of events and motioning hysterically. After the first few nights, I stop trying to explain. The dream recurs for eleven months.
In the daytime, during pre-K, I am contemplating the cessation of sensation; the culmination of consciousness. I am thinking this might be okay, compared to the terror that precedes it. I am afraid of falling asleep. My fear of the sun loosening from its socket eclipses even my fear of going to jail, which is what I think about when I’m not thinking about dying a fiery death, because when my parents threaten me with jail for being bad I take it literally, and grow to understand myself as bad, as an aberration.
I am a superfluity, yes, but still I continue to play with legos. Still I continue to color in the lines. I have already taught myself to read, and I pull a chair to the front of the room and read out loud to my classmates, the brutes, to prove it. I sing along to the nursery rhymes. I play on the playground. I play on lots of different playgrounds. I go to ballet class. I take the bus and the subway and when the weather is nice I walk. My favorite song is Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World. My babysitter taught it to me, and sometimes we sing it together.
But when my eyes are closed; when I so much as blink, I see cold metal bars and too-small cells and the warped faces of police people. I see death taking place on a massive scale. I do not wish to court such outcomes. I try so hard to be good.
•
But I do grow older which is to say that my inner cannibal eventually claws itself out of the cage I made before getting careless with the lock. Many are the things I let slip when I begin to see, so cavorting the cannibal goes laughing dancing jangling the keys.
•
But you were wondering about the stranger.
Like I said, I walk right on by without giving him so much as a second thought; right on by and straight into this little cupboard of a coffee shop with lots of mirrors inside––I take a fright in front of the mirrors and grab a napkin because my nose is full of snot, and I stand in front of the mirrors watching myself blow snot into the ungiving napkin, and I pitch the snot-filled napkin into the little circle hole for compost, and I go up to the counter to place my order.
“Cappuccino,” I rasp. “Oat.”
“Your name?”
“So–Solace,” I mutter. I can never say it without stumbling.
The barista smiles, which feels wrong; I am not sure what I have done to deserve this charity. I look down at my shoes.
When my cappuccino is ready, I bring it to the counter facing out the window, and collapse, cavernously, into the stool. But no sooner do my buttocks pool in the stool does a man possessing a lady friend ask me to please stand up, because he and his lady friend need the seat more than I do; they are attractive and entitled after all, and shouldn’t I know better than to sit at the counter facing out the window when I will serve no utility but to constitute an eyesore in the midst of this quaint little cupboard of a coffee shop with lots of mirrors inside; I will make the well-to-do choke on their espressos; I will give the pretty people acid reflux. I am so tired. Of course I comply; in one continuous motion I slump out of the stool, pitch myself out the door, and melt into the bench outside. The bench is covered in crumbs, congealed sweetness, little dried out drips of coffee. It is where God intended me to sit. But soon I start to grow cold, and when I see that a different seat has opened up at the counter opposite the glamorous couple, I dart back inside and snag it, letting out a snarl when their backs are turned.