Meeting

Tracy stood up again in the heat and glare but then paused. She could feel the cool edge of the folding chair against the back of her legs and the gentle slope of the theater floor. The pamphlet that was in her lap was now lying at her feet.

There was something a neighbor once told her, just as the rain was starting in the yard, sometime in the year just before she would get her driver’s license, before she would move to Austin, and she could hear the words now but could not bring them to any reason. Money, she thought, was not the issue.

Someone else was still speaking, but slowly, around her, people were looking up, and she could feel the high waist of her skirt as it pitched and rode against her stomach and sides. Money, she thought, could not be the issue. None of this at all seemed appropriate; none of it seemed to be the right game. There was the dust that flitted among the lights, a faraway, hollow boom as a door closed out in the hallway. There was the creak of stress in all the chairs and the way it rested askew in the quiet attention of the room. Nothing, Tracy thought, could be assembled here. She let her arms hang long and felt the night rise to the top of her throat.

A Theory of Endings

:: So what’s your favorite then?

:: Oh Fargo by landslides, I mean I like some of the others, but Fargo, it’s the most exact, it’s that black horror thing and the comedy at the same time–in every fucking scene–and it culminates, you know, with the wood chipper, you’ve just got that darkness, that nasty thing going on, with the leg all jammed up in there,with the foot sticking out, but it’s also like, zing!–punchline–it’s both things and–

:: That is excellent, I think I agree, but–

:: Yeah, and what you do when you see that is you–

:: No but I think it’s the most balanced, though I still really like, um–

:: Lebowski?

:: Yeah, right, it’s like Fargo is sort of perfect, it’s the epitome of that black comedy thing, but Lebowski I just find more watchable, maybe because it isn’t so dark, or, I don’t know–

:: You just don’t see things like Fargo anymore.

:: Right. So what’s that thing there?

:: Bullshit new orders.

:: Yeah.

:: I mean Fargo is genius. I don’t think that’s wrong to say.

:: Did Julie bring the packets over from R1, or what, are we still sitting here?

:: What do you think? See me pulling my shit together?

:: Did you talk to Ops, did they–

:: Yeah man, I fucking talked to Ops and they are waiting over there like we are waiting in here.

:: This is really going to be a great afternoon.

:: Whatever, you know I’m too–you know I woke up this morning on the floor?

:: What do you mean?

:: I mean I woke up and I’m staring at all the cables and shit behind my nightstand, which I fucking fell ON TOP OF and knocked all this shit over, and I wake up and I’m staring at all the dust and shit behind it.

:: That’s weird dude. Are you alright? You look alright. You look fucking together.

:: I’m fine, I just–

:: We’re you drunk or something, why didn’t you get back into bed?

:: No man I woke up fucking THIS MORNING and I’m on the floor, first time wake up, no clue, knocked a bunch of shit over, water and broken glass everywhere, none of it woke me up.

:: Did your alarm go off?

:: Yeah, and I wake up and I’m on the fucking floor.

:: That’s weird dude. Should you see a doctor or something?

:: I’m not seeing a doctor, I’m seeing a fucking fortune teller, this is spooksville kind of shit, major life shit, twitchy knee before the hurricane.

:: Oh shut up, Jesus.

:: I’m serious. What time is it, what’s it say over there.

:: It’s 11:20.

:: Where the fuck is R1.

:: I don’t know.

Eroico

A pianist, a fellow of the lakes and bridges, and when he entered the rooms the rooms would lift like the far side of the tilde in his name. Here he is holding the door with the back of his hand as the aunts come filing through. Here he is agreeing with the daughter as he ducks below the sconce. He would set his glasses carefully on the table, fold every towel he’d bring to his face, and when he would play, he would live inside the composer, among courts and winters and the furious gardens. There was no life he could not see through, except for one. It became, through years, separations and reunions, their lives within the academy and their lives without, his train rides through Europe and hers through the Americas, the chance meetings in the grand lobbies of foreign halls, the eyeing over and up, the chandeliers, the suitcases, cold columns of faucet water in hotels, it became the one thing he could see, that would not dissolve into another night of lamps and stars—she the recluse, the show canceller, the Argentinean. He would never be her husband. He would never go after her as she disappeared into the night and its estate. He thought, there are no callings, no plots, no city where the world could be saved—and he would lean against the banister with everything lined so neatly below him, the shadow of his chin cast long and sharp against his throat.

Destination

It was somewhere near there that the telephone poles began shortening into a gradual recession back into the earth, and darkness fell. Hoif stared straight ahead with a slight, angular blankness to his face, a slight tilt to his head as if he, too, were gradually sliding into a kind of sleep, though he remained perfectly still with his eyes staring up against his brow at the road, a deep, committed boredom. Lane, in his black stocking cap, had one knee pulled up and pressed against the dashboard, the rest of his body leaning into the small corner between the seat and the door. He stared as well, hard, through the window, though nothing but blackness whipped by them. Everything was dark—even the odometer lights and the radio, all the various gauges, seemed dimmer than usual. The darkness pulled the sound of the car and its engine tightly around the two and seemed itself to grow sluggish, then still, as though it had fallen asleep against them. Lane began to speak, eyes still fixed out the window.

“My mother, she worked in the post office for seventeen years,” he said.

“Is that right,” Hoif said, “where, in Branson?”

“No, not then, I didn’t grow up there. I grew up in Terre Haute.”

“Ah, no I never been there.”

“Didn’t think you had. No reason to go.”

Hoif didn’t respond. After a minute he pulled a pack of cigarettes from inside his coat and cracked his window, which abruptly began to whistle like a machine in the high speed air. Lane turned and looked at him. Something about the scene reminded him of his first apartment in Chicago, the three years he was there and could never sleep. He would pull himself up in bed and rub his face in his hands, the yellow streetlight cutting hard angles where it could shine in around the edges of his drapes. It was that machine-like sound, something the building made deep in the ductwork of the building that made it seem like the sound was inside your head.

Hoif pulled on his cigarette, and it flared a burning bright orange. The flare felt remote, like a radio tower light, to Lane, who continued to stare at Hoif blankly until Hoif turned and said, “what’s up?”

“Nothing,” Lane said, “why what’s up?”

“You’re the one looking at me.”

“I ain’t looking at you.”

“What are you looking at then?”

“Nothing,” Lane said, turning back to his window where, in the far corner, a small swath of clouds was glowing a dim gray where the moon must had risen behind them. It was enough that Lane could see a faint outline of the hills as they doubled on top of one another in the extending distance, and he wondered where they were and considered pulling the map out from beneath the seat but did not, figuring it not worth the trouble.

Hoif dropped the lighter with a clank into the cup holder and rubbed his hand against his jeans. He closed the window and the pressure immediately thickened in the car, and there was a brief sensation of being underwater, which quickly faded into a cooler darkness that was otherwise suffuse throughout the hills and trees, and inside the car, which hummed steadily against the road beneath them. Somewhere, on the other side of this, Lane thought, was morning, and he wondered if he would see it. If it would finally come true.

Quarter

She met it like a state, like a letter on the table, where nothing for that moment had yet been prepared, except all the room hinging on it. She padded it dry and touched it fully with her open hand, a slight but deliberate pressure. The countertops seemed to extend through their own private landscape, through miles, a long road through the exalted. The knife was a natural thing, practiced. She pulled each leg against its own want, its soft resistance, stretching the skin that attached the leg to the body into something like a sail, and slit just there, deftly. She grabbed each leg with force, her long figures going white from the pressure, and popped each bone from its socket. The first pink exposition, glowing with the slight opalescence of anything finally revealed. The air seemed unchanged, the street below, the music as it played along all the metal in that room. Nothing hesitated, nothing stopped nor resumed. She trimmed the small bits from the edge she just made and slapped both thighs down on the board, their legs crisscrossing against its vertical grains. Her next approach was with the tip of the knife, for the wings, the lesser prizes. She slit from beneath and arced around to the top of the breast, with equal deliberance forcing each bone from its place, finishing there as well, through that mess, with a single swipe of the knife to the pull the  limbs clean from the body, which was growing smaller and simpler, becoming a place rather than a thing. She looked at it. Her left hand rested on the board and curled slightly as the juices dried there. It was as though it had stopped speaking, had entered a new life. She stood it on the small notch where the neck used to be and examined it, moving her head slightly around each side as though something else might appear. She raised the knife and rested it across the opposited cavity, between the two triangular protrusions where the body tapered. She waited half a second then drove the knife between the back bone and the breast. It was a committed action, so wrought with will it seemed unthinking, each rib breaking beneath, sweetly, like a tiny song, the body freed.

Colloquium

I wanted to begin this talk by looking at models of assumption that have hitherto defined the long arc of our human achievement. Sometimes, one attempts to look at the glass itself, but for only the small bits of condensing detritus, flecks of spittle and the vestiges of cutaneous oils as they have indexed past visits, maybe, following the curve of someone as they angled through the park that flashes otherwise a green in total, such remnants and by those only, which obscure, indeed, in such lovely mathematics of irony the universe has written in its backends, that we become capable, to be the humans we are today, in this room, understanding faculty as our house of switches—and thereby a house we can never leave, save in the imaginations of our faith, what would appear in the balanced humidities of a given afternoon as a magic, full of its shivaree, indeed the very body and length, for some of us, of hope. There is a clarity when one is in the midst of fire. Our departments, in their tangled revenue, have outlined the limits of the possible, challenged one another against them, and though it is purely fallacious to speak of any kind of ending, certainly if we are willing to see the past in truth, one might still consider these particular activities as complete, perhaps, as any star is complete merely by its formation. So today, allow the glorious to swim upon you. One should overflow to the point that one can see the absolute illusion of one’s boundaries. Though one might see the script before oneself, a body composite, understand this for what it is, the blank talk, the new machine into which we will dissolve.

Gorgeous

How it is I keep on these flights I’m not sure, but there’s something about the tiny plane, the red eye, that totally undercuts any sense of travel. I usually think of it as some kind of forced time with yourself, in that cramp your organ-needs swelling like bubbles of methane in the dead ocean of your body, your response so hampered, gone moronic,so even the littlest things are difficult, like trying to tie a knot in the cold. And when you’ve gone up, lingered in the air, and finally descend, it’s seems you’ve gone nowhere—the stores, all closed, outside of which a man runs buffs the floor with near theatrical lethargy. One might as well merely have taken an escalator from the upper level of a mall, aspring in the daytime of shoppers, the smell of fried foods, to the lower, where night has come on, and even the sales people are long gone, having left slight discolorations in their parking spots.

So for this, we have this kind of preparation. We get settled, however we need, whatever sort of recognition of one another, the varying degrees of importance between us, and this was the kind of forest in which I first looked at her. I didn’t know who she was, but I guessed at her sweatshirt she was a college kid, returning home. She was standing at a seat that wasn’t hers, having moved out of the way as people pushed past to get their luggage up in the bins, looking at their ticket stubs with that foreign scrutiny we have over tasks we perform only on occasion. It was this awkward placement of her that must have fueled it, as she continued her conversation across the tops of the seats with some man, maybe slightly older, introductory sort of fair, explaining that she was, in fact, a student at the U, and she had a nice New Years, and she agreed about that mountain town, and so forth. Basic stuff, modular, but it was the way she did it, with a kind of abnormality meant to provoke our understanding of her—as unflaggingly kind, interested, as a good citizen of the plane, undeterred by the accumulated, social foibles that otherwise drive us down into such deep recessions of the body, make us hate one another in secret, in that temporary but severe indenture to safety, that abrupt limitation to common space—she, thus, with that implied condescension that we are such sad creatures, that we are alone in ourselves for naught but fear. I was thinking of all the things that might be said to be empty. I was thinking of how she must be with her parents, her siblings, her dutifulness more like knowledge of an economy than any real desire to build, like cloth one has found and turned into a private magic.

She was a pure manipulator. She stood there, leaning casually against her forearms that rested across the top of the seat in front of her. Her hands hung limply in the air as she listened to the other man talk dully about how good the beer is, the professional attention on her face as though there were something serious here, a respect for human interaction in and of itself. I was ashamed at my draw to her. I thought I might just as well have followed her like a young shoot of light that wants only to touch something beautiful—I was that present, in my own darkness, my desires for ruin, for we deserve not the pleasures we cannot make for ourselves. I could feel the crackling dark that fired the vast tarmac with a kind of danger as it rose and threatened this tube in which we were alive, in which we shared, like sleep, all the absolute nothing we have to say, and it felt like history would lose me then, that I would be so rent, precisely because I understood.

Church

You would think it’s crazier, but everything has a certain perspective. It’s like, how I feel, say, about Christmas here, in this store, and how you feel—those are different things. We live different places, and you could be right, things get crazier—we definitely move a lot more stuff; I’m back here all day pulling things down and turning boxes over trying to read the SKUs and hollering through the door just as its closing and stuff like that—yeah, those things are crazier. But even if I, like, feel that way now, that’s just it, that’s just how it is now, and I think I could even like close my eyes and just tell myself it’s, it’s, going to be a different kind of outlook, right, as soon as I open my eyes. Like this, see. And this is my world. The air swirls around the timeclock’s face like the drain in a shower. I try and see through the shelves, hold all the merch in one line of sight; consider, like, where any individual thing is, the damn windchimes or something, the DVDs, test myself in this way—and this, this is how everything slows down and I live, like, forever. So no it’s not crazier. It’s a matter of perspective. I’ve worked at the mall for seven years. You know, you like learn this kind of stuff. Especially for Christmas. This is our show. We make it. And we get to close every night, and I get to go home and that’s it, I’m home. I’m home, and that’s it.

The Foremost Query

And no one loving the algebra, everyone too early in their clothes for good, the plastic light of long florescent tubes so experimental against their skin, and them just taking it, good citizens of the institute, they are, as the factoring unwinds around them like coils of metal as metal goes sour through a night. He, though, he pays attention. Not for love. Not for the thrill of cohesions, but, like them, a duty, more thoroughly wrought, deeper in the riddle of his vascular highways—that he might fail, that the endings he imagines might fall short of the firm shore of what he will actually do, or he means that vice/versa. He is pure compulsion. He is hair as it gets tucked behind the ears over and over, his a surefire pinch at the frayed ends of the notebook page he’s just ripped out, to file, to make important and above. And she is from someplace else entirely, a poor family, a family that lives large in small rooms blue with television light, that lets her backpack harbor roaches like that, like the one that crawls just then up the hollow tubing that fastens the desk to her chair. He watches her as she sees it; he watches her collapse her hand so deftly around it, to hide the thing, to suffocate it, the muscles drawing taut in her forearm as she squeezes it and holds it, as though she were holding nothing but the warmth she doesn’t want to leave her hand. He watches as she stills, becomes a statue, a formula, as though she could be so without thought, just like them a minor factory of cellular processes trapped in a room full of numbers. He watches. He is attention.

Snap

I was wheeling my sister through the refrigerators, straight after Christmas-time, like three years ago. We were looking at the sales and trying all the new electronics, fridges with airy blue computer screens and big-numbered temperature displays, swapping through menus and inventories, recipes and the like, and I was wheeling her all around the place and we were talking like you know regular kind of stuff, how ridiculous all the refrigerators were, who-needs-them-and-really-who-are-these-people? type stuff.

“No thanks,” I says, “we’re just looking around.”

My sister was pretty sedate. Not like, drugs or anything, just calm and kind of quiet. I was wheeling her all around the place and my girlfriend and my mom were lingering back in a muted sort of conversation about my girlfriend’s job or something, I couldn’t really hear. Right, my sister had broken her leg. Sledding off a dirt pile at a construction site for a new subdivision up in Gurnee—she went flying right off this ledge, fifteen feet. Right, my sister lives in Chicago, in the ‘burbs, but we were in Minneapolis, where I lived, at the Mall of America. Things were quiet because it was a Monday and most people had already returned all their unwanted gifts and sort of had that kind of leisurely post-holiday time you know where you are sitting in the food court with your chai tea and the year is just beginning and you kind of know you are going to get busy but not yet so you are just sitting there, with like your husband or a friend or whatnot. So the year was already begun, but my sister and my mom were up to visit so we were all burning vacation time since we didn’t really go anywhere or anything for the holiday proper. In fact I worked Christmas Eve but that’s not something for this. My sister broke her leg sledding, and she had this big, neon green leg sticking out in front of her like some genetically-deranged tree trunk. Asymmetry going on in that wheelchair, you know, and all kinds of awkward cutting the tight corners around the appliances.

“I like this one,” my sister says.

“What’s that now,” I says, “this one?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, kind of stroking the door of this oven like it was someone’s hair or something.

“Yeah that’s nice, what is that like six burners. Crazy”

“I like it.”

My sister, since she broke her leg, had real weird moments like this sometimes where she’d get all stony but, like, in a really subtle way, and at first I just thought it was Vicodin or something but she wasn’t really taking that stuff it was all just like all naturale. It was January in Minneapolis and she didn’t say anything about the cold. She was like some kind of animal or something about it, just squinting her eyes a little and wiping her face with her hands when we’d finally get inside. Everyone says something—it’s like abnormal not to say something about the friggin’ cold. But I only mention this now—it’s not like I was really thinking any of this outright when we were moving around Sears like some ragtag team of recently-laid-off and laid-up, ha, you know. What got me thinking of all this, as we were driving back later and the dark was leaking in all around the city, random street lights dinging on like little thoughts or like a bird that flies into view for a second, or something—what got me on this was what my sister said, right, like, in the original story, when we were in Sears, as we were wheeling through the refrigerators and my mom and my girlfriend were back by the vacuums strolling and talking, and my sister kind of mumbles it and I say, “what” and she says it again and I think she was realizing then how crazy she was sounding, but I’m not sure.

She says, “it was so bright and orange.”

So I says again, “what’s that, what was bright and orange, something here?”

“No there, it was long and bright and orange. It was so orange.”

“What was orange?”

“It was orange, God, will you listen.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” but then I realize that like, I do, she’s talking about the sled, cheap thing, you know, and I picture it all then, her flipping around all backwards and in and over and out and everything as she goes flying off the fifteen foot ledge she didn’t even see, but the sled, right, can you see it, the sled like dangling in the air against the winter sun and the little piles of intermittent dirt and snow, like, how those kind of ledges look, and the sled all hanging up there against the white sky and burning cold sun, that huge orange brightness, and that’s the last thing you see before you are all dark and warm and everything.

So my sister says, “it was so orange, orange, orange,” like kind of trailing off. And I’m thinking she is nuts but I let it go, and right away she like snaps out of it and we are looking at TVs then.