Decades
2009
Fiction response to "Archaeology of Wonder" exhibition, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT
DECADES.
I
I wish I could dig up through the earth. Get down into somewhere dark and push up the feeling of fighting in my arms. Hold my breath until I’m dreaming and swim the grid of subterranean longitudes and latitudes—past ancient histories and fossilized dowries—until the dirt gets so far under my nails that there is no room left to scratch only the surface of things.
My wants are rooted in potential sciences that improve upon the textbook sciences that fail the imagination in loveless ways. In reverse archaeology, intercourse is the primary tool of discovery and the body is led by the arms, which are led by the hands, which aren’t content until they can feel it for themselves. There is no way to compute the gross potential in future science because what the -onomies and -ologies can’t teach you is that the reason the depths of the sea and the core of the earth and the far reaches of space are the sexiest places in the universe is the fact that your hands know they will never touch them.
II
I have spent decades in this city, in this house, worrying through the kitchen window that the horizon line is somehow at risk in me. And that anyone watching can see me gagging on the urge to cross-pollinate atmospheres and hemispheres and entire stratospheres. They can see me gasping for a different type of air, and they watch me expel the restlessness in my hands by knifing down through the beets and turnips that push up through soil in the way I wish I could. This fodder is imported to this city by cart and plane and truck from some remote Eden because nothing of worth could ever grow here. There is neither soil nor sun and we all—the food, the cars, the people—are imported and staged amidst impressive architecture to resemble evolution.
In place of growth, there is excessive rain. So much rain that even the fire escape horticultural projects of the elderly are aborted by the lyme that weeps from the buildings. The children are sickly and carry handkerchiefs because everything is in a constant state of festering and coloring outside the lines. Over centuries, even people show signs of waterlog and are boneless and awkward on the ground. When I see myself in the future, this is not the landscape that surrounds me. These are not the people buried beside me. You say this three times over the kitchen sink and continental plates begin to shift and the sky opens up. You are surfing the breaking ground towards the man in the living room and, once at his feet, you tell him: I am giving up this simulacrum for a desert town I read about in the paper. It rests at the end of an interstate that begins in this city and runs west until the water and the air are thinner.
In spite of the numerous coercions from my so-called husband, I explain that we are no different from the other efforts that came to this city to die. And that it haunts me to have no plot of land in which to bury these failures with my own hands. He is halfway to the airport as I fold down upon myself and our house and its histories until it all becomes recyclable, origamied into liftable and disposable fractions. My dowry: three-dozen intersecting planes of themed cardboard held together by transparent tape. I close my eyes and imagine what this looks like from my husband’s overhead plane. Me and all my boxes and black marker cartographies, the man next-door whose lived an entire century with his laundry on the string that links our house to his house to his neighbor’s house to the rest of the block to the rest of the world. We all—the model family, the miserable wife, the only child—are suspended and connected and loathing each other like a diorama of prehistoric animals, dinosaurs and cavemen that never wanted to be in the same shoe box anyway.
III
The reverse is the tedium you’ve longed for; because everything is new, nothing fits like it once fit. Linens no longer fold away in an architecturally allocated nook and instead rest atop the television like an escape ladder. The electronic sect of kitchenware is in the bathroom because the coffeepot and blender lost out to the radio in the fight for the sole outlet in the kitchen. Pickles are stored with lint rollers are stored with insecticides since the chest of drawers you and your husband shared is now a single drawer with no space dividers. You contemplate arson and getting an even fresher start or catching the last train to anywhere else and leaving the room in its terminal state of upset. But the station is too far away and the bicycle you lugged here is at the bottom of the trash heap because it was broken anyway. Instead, you pour a double shot of bourbon into the empty flowerpot and sit on the floor.
A mouse drags in the faint smell of dust and dry soil. His gait and familiarity with the floorboards reads local not sign of infestation. The curtains work with the breeze to beat back insects of varying sonic frequencies and neon hues. A compactor in the neighboring yard weaves rot back into the ground and—if you breathe deep enough—you can taste the lettuce, the chicken skin and the raisins that were yesterday’s grapes. Nothing escapes the senses out here since it is all tangible and visible and in the air. As the bourbon swells and eyelashes beat slower and sloppier, it becomes impossible to imagine life any other way. Why shouldn’t you mince garlic and onions while sitting on the toilet? It is all food processing. Why shouldn’t linens stack one on top of the other on top of another right through the ceiling, right through the heavens, right through the galaxy? It is all the space race. You reach out to touch the mouse as it perches atop an atlas and watches you fall all over yourself. You start counting through dry teeth the number of times a lightning bug flashes in one minute and you make a symphony of the tractor hum and the chair creak and the toilet drip and the noises you make as you shift left and right on the floor.
You have to map these things out, a script starting with all the details of the first day of the rest of your own new life. Because otherwise you can easily slip on the stage directions, the soundtrack, the cues. Because your new life could really be something, a stunning story that merely needs a witness to be considered great cinema.
I need a witness.
I need a witness.
I need…
After the third time saying this aloud, you are asleep and you are dreaming. Your eyes are closed but you are living future science as you look at yourself from the outside. You watch yourself step up from the floor, across the room and up the wall to shut the light out by unscrewing the scalding bulb. It is dark now, but you can still see yourself because it is your dream and you see the bigger picture. In the dark, you watch yourself follow the mouse from the atlas towards a light that is getting brighter and bigger and stronger and…it is a man in a submarine. Not only is it a man in a submarine but the man is a submarine. His lower half opens and he waves you in a gate. Where are we going? Does it matter at this point? You climb in, one foot at a time, never taking your eyes off his eyes which oscillate back and forth between being the darkest, most beautiful eyes you have ever seen on a man and the glassy headlights of the vessel. Once you are sitting in his lower abdomen, he hugs his legs around your waist as you navigate the plumbing out of your new kitchen and into the ground. You shuttle between sewage drains, irrigation pipes and tree roots until the air gets tight and you know you are really getting down to the good stuff. He sees you gasping and turns up the oxygen. You are dreaming in real time and after a few more hours together, you are sweaty and in love and exhausted and awake on the floor. You write down the lingering romantic possibilities of last night’s fling; we could love each other right.
IV
And that was just the first day of the rest of your own new life. While the first month bore the necessary burdens of acclimating to new habit and routine, it also added new harmonies to your once muted, cyclical soundtrack. It took two weeks to discover that the hardware store is located next to the butcher in the back of the gas station. It took a few days longer than that to realize that the train tracks are merely the suggestion of travel and that the train whistle you can half hear at night is actually just a thumb and forefinger placed across the lips of a twelve year-old boy. And it wasn’t until yesterday that the Sunday paper arrived, even though it was three Sunday papers ago that I visited the office of the Daily Sun to put a request through in writing. The attendant was a ship of a woman; the cartographic extension of her lip liner drew limp parallelograms between her mouth and eyes and the curvature of her bangs formed a sea wave at whose crest was placed a gold-emblazoned anchor barrette. Who knew oceanography was best documented in the western desert?
V
But then the shift; after a few months, all theses new discoveries and displaced sciences, all these daytime characters and costumes began to dim in the blinding light of the submarine. I began to stay in bed most days, wishing that daydreams accessed the same part of the imagination that those at night do. I rarely left my quaint dysfunctional house, forgetting that the sun and air were the lures that got me here, thousands of miles away from an entire city full of people sitting inside with the curtains drawn. By the next summer, the dormant stubbornness and pragmatism drilled into me by my late husband awoke as I looked back on an entire year’s worth of nights wrapped around a recurring dream and giant piece of talking metal. I began to refuse sleep. I didn’t want to see him anymore. I could hardly say it aloud. What was I even talking about? Where was my intervention or my emergency contact who could have prevented this entire mess in the first place?
Coffee induced insomnia has always been my method of avoidance and it perfects a subtle hint of burn out here. It does not boast to be triple toasted and the accompanying crossword puzzles of the Daily Sun affirm a broad general knowledge and do not progress in difficulty over the course of the week like they did back home. Sundays are Tuesdays are Thursdays and the only way to differentiate months is by the heat of the sun and the temperature of the night air. Month after month fell through this heat and I was awake for it all. Around November, I could barely recognize myself. I no longer lived in lust for the submarine or in fear of the color of clouds or the shapes they held.
It was one of those days when the heat actually morphs the composition of things that in any other climate could be considered monuments that something planetary broke. The interstate started to melt tar into the sand dunes lining the town. The stain glass windows of the church fell out halo by halo as the glue that bound the entire picture together gave way to hundred-degree temperatures. The huge metal house I had just started to call home was beginning to affect domesticity and patriotism when the paint started peeling off its front in gigantic uniform sheets. One day’s boil undid what was seemingly light-years worth of annual renovations in a limited and revolving spectrum of primary colored paint. Somehow, the heat had managed to harness my desire to flatten modern landscapes and start over yet again.
VI
That night, I decided to go in to town and take stock of all the other monuments that had ended their tributes on this day. I followed the railroad tracks in because it is the quickest way around the interstate. I passed a few kids gathered around the source of the train whistle in awe and came up through the bottom of the main road. The light was on at the press but the woman was at sea. I passed the gas station and came upon a green light up on a part of the road I had never been to before. In there, inside the green light, I found the man in a submarine.
You gave up on us.
I had to. How can I live only to be inside of you?
How can you live without the archaeology of wonder?
I ran out of the green light and back on the street. I ran up the road and past the town and I kept running along the train tracks as fast as I could, chasing the train whistle. As I ran past my tiny, paintless house, the legs shook. The garden turned to mud and the glass panes burst out from my room like the beginning of the end of a star. And the aftershocks I felt as I ran north, out of the town and onto the interstate, would come to be the decades that followed when I would be unable to find that astronomy in anyone else.
I
I wish I could dig up through the earth. Get down into somewhere dark and push up the feeling of fighting in my arms. Hold my breath until I’m dreaming and swim the grid of subterranean longitudes and latitudes—past ancient histories and fossilized dowries—until the dirt gets so far under my nails that there is no room left to scratch only the surface of things.
My wants are rooted in potential sciences that improve upon the textbook sciences that fail the imagination in loveless ways. In reverse archaeology, intercourse is the primary tool of discovery and the body is led by the arms, which are led by the hands, which aren’t content until they can feel it for themselves. There is no way to compute the gross potential in future science because what the -onomies and -ologies can’t teach you is that the reason the depths of the sea and the core of the earth and the far reaches of space are the sexiest places in the universe is the fact that your hands know they will never touch them.
II
I have spent decades in this city, in this house, worrying through the kitchen window that the horizon line is somehow at risk in me. And that anyone watching can see me gagging on the urge to cross-pollinate atmospheres and hemispheres and entire stratospheres. They can see me gasping for a different type of air, and they watch me expel the restlessness in my hands by knifing down through the beets and turnips that push up through soil in the way I wish I could. This fodder is imported to this city by cart and plane and truck from some remote Eden because nothing of worth could ever grow here. There is neither soil nor sun and we all—the food, the cars, the people—are imported and staged amidst impressive architecture to resemble evolution.
In place of growth, there is excessive rain. So much rain that even the fire escape horticultural projects of the elderly are aborted by the lyme that weeps from the buildings. The children are sickly and carry handkerchiefs because everything is in a constant state of festering and coloring outside the lines. Over centuries, even people show signs of waterlog and are boneless and awkward on the ground. When I see myself in the future, this is not the landscape that surrounds me. These are not the people buried beside me. You say this three times over the kitchen sink and continental plates begin to shift and the sky opens up. You are surfing the breaking ground towards the man in the living room and, once at his feet, you tell him: I am giving up this simulacrum for a desert town I read about in the paper. It rests at the end of an interstate that begins in this city and runs west until the water and the air are thinner.
In spite of the numerous coercions from my so-called husband, I explain that we are no different from the other efforts that came to this city to die. And that it haunts me to have no plot of land in which to bury these failures with my own hands. He is halfway to the airport as I fold down upon myself and our house and its histories until it all becomes recyclable, origamied into liftable and disposable fractions. My dowry: three-dozen intersecting planes of themed cardboard held together by transparent tape. I close my eyes and imagine what this looks like from my husband’s overhead plane. Me and all my boxes and black marker cartographies, the man next-door whose lived an entire century with his laundry on the string that links our house to his house to his neighbor’s house to the rest of the block to the rest of the world. We all—the model family, the miserable wife, the only child—are suspended and connected and loathing each other like a diorama of prehistoric animals, dinosaurs and cavemen that never wanted to be in the same shoe box anyway.
III
The reverse is the tedium you’ve longed for; because everything is new, nothing fits like it once fit. Linens no longer fold away in an architecturally allocated nook and instead rest atop the television like an escape ladder. The electronic sect of kitchenware is in the bathroom because the coffeepot and blender lost out to the radio in the fight for the sole outlet in the kitchen. Pickles are stored with lint rollers are stored with insecticides since the chest of drawers you and your husband shared is now a single drawer with no space dividers. You contemplate arson and getting an even fresher start or catching the last train to anywhere else and leaving the room in its terminal state of upset. But the station is too far away and the bicycle you lugged here is at the bottom of the trash heap because it was broken anyway. Instead, you pour a double shot of bourbon into the empty flowerpot and sit on the floor.
A mouse drags in the faint smell of dust and dry soil. His gait and familiarity with the floorboards reads local not sign of infestation. The curtains work with the breeze to beat back insects of varying sonic frequencies and neon hues. A compactor in the neighboring yard weaves rot back into the ground and—if you breathe deep enough—you can taste the lettuce, the chicken skin and the raisins that were yesterday’s grapes. Nothing escapes the senses out here since it is all tangible and visible and in the air. As the bourbon swells and eyelashes beat slower and sloppier, it becomes impossible to imagine life any other way. Why shouldn’t you mince garlic and onions while sitting on the toilet? It is all food processing. Why shouldn’t linens stack one on top of the other on top of another right through the ceiling, right through the heavens, right through the galaxy? It is all the space race. You reach out to touch the mouse as it perches atop an atlas and watches you fall all over yourself. You start counting through dry teeth the number of times a lightning bug flashes in one minute and you make a symphony of the tractor hum and the chair creak and the toilet drip and the noises you make as you shift left and right on the floor.
You have to map these things out, a script starting with all the details of the first day of the rest of your own new life. Because otherwise you can easily slip on the stage directions, the soundtrack, the cues. Because your new life could really be something, a stunning story that merely needs a witness to be considered great cinema.
I need a witness.
I need a witness.
I need…
After the third time saying this aloud, you are asleep and you are dreaming. Your eyes are closed but you are living future science as you look at yourself from the outside. You watch yourself step up from the floor, across the room and up the wall to shut the light out by unscrewing the scalding bulb. It is dark now, but you can still see yourself because it is your dream and you see the bigger picture. In the dark, you watch yourself follow the mouse from the atlas towards a light that is getting brighter and bigger and stronger and…it is a man in a submarine. Not only is it a man in a submarine but the man is a submarine. His lower half opens and he waves you in a gate. Where are we going? Does it matter at this point? You climb in, one foot at a time, never taking your eyes off his eyes which oscillate back and forth between being the darkest, most beautiful eyes you have ever seen on a man and the glassy headlights of the vessel. Once you are sitting in his lower abdomen, he hugs his legs around your waist as you navigate the plumbing out of your new kitchen and into the ground. You shuttle between sewage drains, irrigation pipes and tree roots until the air gets tight and you know you are really getting down to the good stuff. He sees you gasping and turns up the oxygen. You are dreaming in real time and after a few more hours together, you are sweaty and in love and exhausted and awake on the floor. You write down the lingering romantic possibilities of last night’s fling; we could love each other right.
IV
And that was just the first day of the rest of your own new life. While the first month bore the necessary burdens of acclimating to new habit and routine, it also added new harmonies to your once muted, cyclical soundtrack. It took two weeks to discover that the hardware store is located next to the butcher in the back of the gas station. It took a few days longer than that to realize that the train tracks are merely the suggestion of travel and that the train whistle you can half hear at night is actually just a thumb and forefinger placed across the lips of a twelve year-old boy. And it wasn’t until yesterday that the Sunday paper arrived, even though it was three Sunday papers ago that I visited the office of the Daily Sun to put a request through in writing. The attendant was a ship of a woman; the cartographic extension of her lip liner drew limp parallelograms between her mouth and eyes and the curvature of her bangs formed a sea wave at whose crest was placed a gold-emblazoned anchor barrette. Who knew oceanography was best documented in the western desert?
V
But then the shift; after a few months, all theses new discoveries and displaced sciences, all these daytime characters and costumes began to dim in the blinding light of the submarine. I began to stay in bed most days, wishing that daydreams accessed the same part of the imagination that those at night do. I rarely left my quaint dysfunctional house, forgetting that the sun and air were the lures that got me here, thousands of miles away from an entire city full of people sitting inside with the curtains drawn. By the next summer, the dormant stubbornness and pragmatism drilled into me by my late husband awoke as I looked back on an entire year’s worth of nights wrapped around a recurring dream and giant piece of talking metal. I began to refuse sleep. I didn’t want to see him anymore. I could hardly say it aloud. What was I even talking about? Where was my intervention or my emergency contact who could have prevented this entire mess in the first place?
Coffee induced insomnia has always been my method of avoidance and it perfects a subtle hint of burn out here. It does not boast to be triple toasted and the accompanying crossword puzzles of the Daily Sun affirm a broad general knowledge and do not progress in difficulty over the course of the week like they did back home. Sundays are Tuesdays are Thursdays and the only way to differentiate months is by the heat of the sun and the temperature of the night air. Month after month fell through this heat and I was awake for it all. Around November, I could barely recognize myself. I no longer lived in lust for the submarine or in fear of the color of clouds or the shapes they held.
It was one of those days when the heat actually morphs the composition of things that in any other climate could be considered monuments that something planetary broke. The interstate started to melt tar into the sand dunes lining the town. The stain glass windows of the church fell out halo by halo as the glue that bound the entire picture together gave way to hundred-degree temperatures. The huge metal house I had just started to call home was beginning to affect domesticity and patriotism when the paint started peeling off its front in gigantic uniform sheets. One day’s boil undid what was seemingly light-years worth of annual renovations in a limited and revolving spectrum of primary colored paint. Somehow, the heat had managed to harness my desire to flatten modern landscapes and start over yet again.
VI
That night, I decided to go in to town and take stock of all the other monuments that had ended their tributes on this day. I followed the railroad tracks in because it is the quickest way around the interstate. I passed a few kids gathered around the source of the train whistle in awe and came up through the bottom of the main road. The light was on at the press but the woman was at sea. I passed the gas station and came upon a green light up on a part of the road I had never been to before. In there, inside the green light, I found the man in a submarine.
You gave up on us.
I had to. How can I live only to be inside of you?
How can you live without the archaeology of wonder?
I ran out of the green light and back on the street. I ran up the road and past the town and I kept running along the train tracks as fast as I could, chasing the train whistle. As I ran past my tiny, paintless house, the legs shook. The garden turned to mud and the glass panes burst out from my room like the beginning of the end of a star. And the aftershocks I felt as I ran north, out of the town and onto the interstate, would come to be the decades that followed when I would be unable to find that astronomy in anyone else.
