Objects. Because objects have a different kind of containment than stories or prose or poems. Objects may be transparent, but seldom offer a window onto a world. In this sense, they are flat and composed of stubborn materials both real and abstract. Yet there are a few stories here, employing limited windows. The author has tried to be clear about some things that are unclear, and to, always, start from and return to nothing. The author insists that the chasm between word and world is vast, absolute, tragic, and hilarious. It is the lot of all those who employ, or are employed, by language, to return to scratch this awful itch; it is our lot.
*As with all else here, this introduction has a lifespan and is subject to change, decay, revision, rot.
solipsis on writing with aside in the form of a parable
Concerning one who has written of oneself time and again in the guise of writing of the writing one has done; how one felt concerning it, how the writing seemed to examine itself, in serial fashion, up and down, forward and back, in both retrograde and inversion, transposing animals, plants, minerals, all the kinds of things; never, though, for the sake of themselves, but always as something or another thing that could be written; as examples, as lessons on the more obscure points of writing, delivered with morals on the conduct of writing laid out for the reader, oneself, in diagrammatic, almost geometric, form, with abundant prescriptions for future writing as well as proscriptions laying out what to avoid, having in the past failed to avoid pitfalls, gaffes, awkward constructions, bland gestures, and so forth, in an attempt to answer the child’s question in the story of the child and the father, in which, and here is the story, the child, suddenly nervous about receiving a splinter from the table at which they are eating, asks the father if it is safe to touch, and the father, gently taking the child’s hand in his, places it on the smooth surface and explains that yes, it is safe, the table is smooth, you see, because it has been sanded; but the child is not satisfied, withdrawing its hand, and asks the father, why isn’t everything sanded?
From this, the writing I do daily, hourly, I wish to banish all objects! Though these are indispensable.
•
It is not so much concrete objects, though they disarrange my dreams, as it is the idea of the object in general.
::
What is an object ‘in general’? I don’t believe there is such a thing, unless it is the idea as an object, which it certainly is; therefore ‘ideas’ are to be banished if and when they are objects. So, as long as an idea is not an object, it is admitted. These are to be the conventions.
::
The urgency is, to catch the idea unaware, in so raw a state it is prior to formulation, perhaps even without form; to trap it in the midst of its interminable migrations from place to place (even if ‘place’ is admitted to be an object).
::
An idea born and buried in a place need not be an object, even if embedded in the object of place; but of course, this idea can only be a certain kind of idea which is not really an idea but a transient blur, a semaphore.
Certainly this sort of thing that is not a thing might be termed an action, which action can only be a thing if it undergoes the gesture of naming — I must, if I can, refrain from names.
:: The object of the name is one of the most fundamental, most disturbing of all objects which, when bestowed, signifies the greatest of falsehoods and the broadest of generalities, where the more honest act would be to uncrook an index finger accompanied, at most, by the word “that” — an ornamental utterance — while pointing to the thing which is actual.
::
I have no objection to actual things, as long as they are not named; nothing can be said about them with authority since they alone constitute proof of themselves.
:: As I probe my reasoning, admittedly shallow and void of the proper vocabulary for dealing with these matters, I observe that I object most vehemently to inaccuracies and lazy colorings in the giving of names to concrete things, and to those lies implicit in the production of categories, attached, like remoras on a shark, to things in general.
::
I feel justified, I think, more or less, in this blanket rejection of language, based on the consequences wrought by it on an apparently suppliant world.
• Poor world, poor shell, pasted all over with spurious labels moistened by unknowing tongues!
∴
Lies, errors, rumors attach to every word, even here —especially here— my crimes embedded in every finger tremor. I can never claim immunity from harm brought by anything I might write, even as daily, hourly, with every word, I try to inter the bodies I continue to invoke, calling out names that do not name, pointing with a grunt of blackened figures that are not objects but have become, in some way I cannot comprehend, heliotropes, admirals, mice, balloons.
In order to get at the truth we have to go through the nail. If the nail has fallen, so be it — it’s easier to treat with contempt. This same mocked nail, with some considerable effort, was meant to be driven into the church door; yet there it is, futile nail, now bent perhaps from its encounter with the church and its door, hewn from god knows what dense interlocking grain of what tree they, the committee, thought best represented the heavenly fortress lightly sketched out in the books, a matter of a few words per passage; words intended to invoke, and then to chasten, and then to forbid — what is a nail to that? (here the text commends laughter) — so it happens a man in the best least moldy trousers he can muster out of the closet, or tempt out of the recesses of a bottom drawer, comes to stand before the committee, or no, an unaffiliated group of individuals gathered together in hope of a cure — in this report it’s an Easter at Lourdes or the ancient Santuario at Chimayó — a man we now think may have been hiding a nail, or nails, on his person, in the folds of this jacket, with frayed sleeves, drawn from retirement; he was not searched before entering the place, they did not apply their electromagnetic wands to his person, they let him in because he might conceivably amuse them with his tractates, drawn from sources other than the Heavenly, not even figuring in any book; he is to stand before them, literally clothed but effectively naked, juggling clandestine nails with the fingertips of his left hand while sweating through his tongue like an overheated dog, tongue lolling lopsidedly (added opportunity for derision); they would even pay to see that, if only he would not speak. The man, while gesturing toward the unaffiliated and speaking perhaps some words anyway, is really aware only of the church and its door, the door and the church and the nail, or nails, of which two are supplementary in case of failure of the first, and in another pocket, just now a freshly invented pocket, a roll of weatherproof parchment on which is inscribed in black lettering an extensive document; many individual letters compose it, thousands, of diverse shapes resembling nothing so much as black bent spikes; one can hear, almost, the clatter of letters failing against the ears of the congregation, striking and rebounding against the ears of the tribunal to fall in reformed shapes onto the unheated stone floors, bent outlines crawling as though in defeat toward the solace of a crack, or yet a page will do, a thousand nails in service of any available tractate; the atmosphere is diffuse, light stained somber blue, or purple, scattered in all directions, the perspiring man in the shapeless, threadbare jacket utters at last a few amusing words; sparse laughter among the skeptics.
You think of a beginning initiating with a distinction or a division but it could as easily begin with an inequality, even if initiating a beginning is already a beginning begun, with two lengths of something mysterious, of which one length is shorter or one is longer, but, there being only one, something has happened so that it, beginning, comes out not equal to itself and themselves; but this does not explain the incident of that beginning arguably happening, yet who determines that not–happening is insufficient, or why insufficiency needs to be answered, or why it must be answered in the peculiar order of a thing happening before the answer to the insufficiency, instead of vice versa; such are instances of the numberless objections that cannot be scythed away.
To answer to objections one goes on answering until the objections go away, but to be sure they are gone one goes on objecting until the answers have abated, though it is not as though there are no more objections. One goes on objecting in the absence of answers to the objections so that there will be no more answers, or so that they will not be heard over the objections, and over time the objections grow quiet, if only that they may hear the answers that might one day begin again to be given, if only that one may go on objecting if only that one may go on answering, for in the absence of both answers and objections what can there be but quiet, quiet persisting in quiet for the sake of calm, for the sake of distinction from the other that it is not, so long as within the quiet there is not still an objection, or not still an answer, for which one eternally listens.
From the totality of the person one would like to take away the body to see what remains of one’s enjoyment, to see, within one’s brain, how it is, though we are told we cannot remove the body without removing the body of the brain, even experimentally, though we try to guess at the deep delight of such a brain, if left alone, though we are told even to be alone is to have a body, so we would like moreover to be without, in order to see what it is to be without; but they deny us this as well, for some things here and there are inseparable, of which a final separation, or a final distinction, must remain unknown, which seems to put all of the unknown into a lone unknowable, much as we may labor to cleave away its parts, apart and apart; still something unmistakable is left.
: orbiting this crouched, silhouetted figure, a world not in the least understood; stratigraphy jumbled by maps of unreliable or possibly reliable reports, advertisements, editorials; a statistical canyon of total isolation in which demographic man is pictured in dense upwellings of flavorful, cherry-tinted data columns, rising, falling — would a story be advisable, really, now, when story does notever but beguile — or/and is silence better?
for instance the little vegetable plot, the room in darkness, neighbor pitted against neighbor, ascending derangements, provenance of the tomatoes in midsummer — one does not speak but for fear of the moment they come to blows; a precarious intolerance in beribboned pinafores; this zero-sum game is to win, to lose, at top one header, two columns, footnotes; games recommend winning, or the fugitive life in wartime, huddled in the umbra of one’s silhouette until the end blows over and is no longer the end;
but BEWARE, the storm outside the door rattles the panes, drawn to your name; signature streak of a white missile; 89 trackers blocked from targeting but what of the rest; this weather idles for as long as it takes for the mouse to pop out; all frontiers are taken, no shelter, no here where one used to lunch; WHAT ABOUT, suggests your silhouette, a philosophical position you may adopt while in the meantime your house is blown down; what about beauty or love or something; what’s not won, not lost?
— relax:
devise a new pastime? —
but your telomeres are nubs, recombinant options for your DNA are out of moves; wait there, in your silhouette, as you hoped one day to wait in his, in her, silhouette: featureless, safe, or take up arms; WE, together, look for silent intervals to shore up the bones, attempt a return to the interstices, but our hips have lately grown too wide; this, our nightmare, you dreamt last night: We Are Too Much Alike, the little one knows amounts to no more no less than what the other, give or take;
The roster of things always more or less, always give or take; things; soon between our silhouettes the Paradox Of Intolerancearises in conversation and is implied in conversations in which it does not arise,
an undercurrent perhaps, a basso ostinato;
how tolerant shall we be of the intolerant, or how intolerant while remaining tolerant in the main, or shall we be the intolerant of whom the tolerant complain; but seriously, how tolerant of the tolerant are we expected to be, it’s intolerable; can we take Voltaire seriously when he suggests we tend only our own gardens; who has a garden but the renter, on his corroded fire escape, the owner, in her disused backyard; are these plants healthy or even edible; we are hungry, if only we hadn’t opted for decorative flowers, aromatic herbs; we pass through a room, through the yard of our plantings; visions disrupted by the music, so-called, of a neighbor in heavy boots stamping up below, closer, louder, grilled meat from next door, oiled silver smoke; could we bear children, watch them germinate, waft in the wind, watch oblivion and sun curdle their seed; try to intervene? never helpful, not effective either; we have to let go; where have they gone? are there better words, do words miss the mark that weaponry attains?:
forged iron, rhetoric, an armory stocked with shadow-epithets; hidden in the dim, cut off from disturbing influences, beneficial influences ; what influence could be beneficial, you can’t imagine
Apprentice Comprehenders sit before a screen, vague, of blurry text, reading the few words in a moving slot of light
• time grows thick, the wick burns down; sounds of marching, odors spreading, harsh lights maligning the night sky, from across the hall, down the street, from next door, the ceiling, in the dark room; down, comprehenders, follow down the only page there is, the skipping slot of light, down the page, across the border, the next life, the only life, better next time, give or take,
Thubes and the Japanese Satirical Transportation Network; plus notes
Going to meet X. Down into Thubes underground. Ramps this way and that. Growing uncertainty as to whether have reached the right platform.
Signage to unfamiliar destinations; so much new construction since last was here!
The matter of tokens: these, too, changed; what’s acceptable >> much more fluid. Barter; even livestock: kittens. These set mewling into cardboard boxes. Sets of teeth stacked on shelving at back of agent’s booth; sandwiches, snacks: dried fruit and cheese cubes. Trade. Still, have not the required.
Search pockets. Samaritan among sparse stream of travelers offers twenty-three dollar note: crude pencil sketch amalgam of unknown political, corporate figure?, and “23”. Enough, fine, accepted by agent. Pass turnstile as travelers behind unload for offer sacks of potatoes, imported feathers, eggs, jewelry.
• Further: ramps down, across; bridges, walkways. Through corridors. Train arrives, trains, always on opposite track, too short for platform; run, run, up stairs, down, over walkways, leap multiple steps. Once on platform, sprint to opposite end.
Old bones, bruised ankles, accumulated strain on joints. Forget such pain; illusory!
More signage, crossed ramps, unfamiliar destinations. On train at last, stand at pole, watch stops skim past.
Never stop at stops: stations, only vaguely familiar, bypassed. Train on, on, through dark of tunnel, emerges in bright leafy suburb, far past.
X forgotten. Can’t think who was, is, X. Must be still to know. Travel, might be, erases reason :: movement displaces destination.
Though, shrink at thought of arduous return: what corridors, ramps, what stops bypassed; for X, toward X; or if not X someone as good as X; or if not someone then somewhere X; no, original place of descent, chance of reemergence just there, lies under erasure:
• System, entire Thubes construct, engineered by Japanese corporation as entertainment genre mocking American urban transportation. Ritual occasion for polite laughter. Attempts accuracy in every aspect; or yet, possible, may be earnest simulation out of respect, curiosity; but system only gains real character as failure of replication in important details.
• Maze-like aspect, for one, exaggerated; swinging bridges and rope catwalks, artfully obscured sight lines, unreadable signs in flickers of alien script, contorted, glossy, tile-lined corridors;
NOTES:
Invocation of details to make one world distinct from another; of worlds, its Words. Words, constituting description of system, accounting for, being vital to, physical architecture. Details of decay, worthy of Lebbeus Woods, architect of dissolution. Never the pristine beam but the corroded. Never the vertical but the oblique. Ever the sagging Word, and its physical correlates: telltale of dream-objects composed from descriptions, as opposed to, v.v., descriptions from prior objects. Few, now, of the latter. Poverty of, might say, texture, of description-descripted objects. Akin to scotoma-space: a void in scintillation.
Thubes, the ghostly center, as though city replaced city. Thubes a word held in reserve, yet viral, omnipresent. When think “city”, “Thubes” displaces. Yet Thubes-word never uttered, nor ever is uttered inner-thought of Thubes. Inner lips mime “Thubes” yet these recursive lips, too, stilled. Transportation system encapsulated in “Thubes” an internecine struggle between Word and Thubes, replacing Word and word. As well, all candidate Words displaced by “Thubes”. In sum, all else stilled than Thubes.
To speak, try; stop; try; at last stop. Catwalk, up ramp, down, corridor, too late for trains, for X, give any token to appease:
Not two, not a week, not a month, not two, but the telic moaning: I can’t, how, it’s the end, forget it. What it is, is that you will have been doing being for yes, that many years as you have had, from your beginning, up to now, allowing for a little forward projection, with its underlying uncertainty, but that the next step could be the chasm, more; that between steps lies an obscurer black, between strikes of the metronome, for example, or if a tolling bell, then in the lull the clapper swings free, as if in unstruck time lies time’s true nature, an open swing of unpredestinated air, assload of unmarked passings wherein one grew, budded, blossomed, withered, fell, of which every formulation is a mockery; and this ceremony of names only hollows further the stations of the way, where it was used to be said, the stations of the cross, with a verse for each to toll out its suffering, constituted of moans and cries, again: I can’t, why; then why not; then how; as the wormy tide of dirt rises unstoppably to obscure the peculiar grammar of this church, stifle its clanging.
Because the unseen have advanced so far into the neighborhood, trying doorhandles and interfering with the mail, the small, daily absences of difference he observes, where nothing has changed from the hours and days before, where what is solid was solid before and what is hollow was hollow before, and the usual drones in tones so low as to be unnoticeable, all bristle now with fraught stillness. Alterations to the air. Subtle breezes on neck napes. The neighbors confused by remarkable penumbrations where some shadows have been shifted, in the night, to allow for others.
The door, by some fluke, some terrible accident, is open. The door, is open, a tall man there. A great apprehension clamps the small veins of his neck; sudden audible pumping hoists the rack of his ribs. In a neighboring street hidden bellows drive a church bell clanging. He sees, on the verge of a faint, perishing halos of pinched light, fallen purple pinpricks: crystalline, like snow. At the sight of the man by the squeezed-flat vision of the entryway his eyes shrink to pins and himself comes untethered from him, floating above; not at a great distance, a trivial distance, as though he’s been colored just over his own red margins.
The order of this is that the man is at the door then arrives at the door, shuts with some deference the open door, steps on one heel back, preparing himself to arrive at the door. Jiggling the dented brass knob that rests loose on its spindle, the man peers through the pane of the once-open door, lips pressed, eyes through the pane meet furtive eyes standing three feet off the tile: a man, the man of the door, nods now toward the knob in query.
He insists on other worlds: In these some say fine weather. All said, some say, tender greens do somewhere unfurl. Sun’s smile, imagine too a sun. A blue bloom, a blousy sky, and on the litter fledged chicks peck. Sleek cats fattened merely on afternoons. All said. And but, there’s always—he grips his tether— that ringed round every thing, between the thing and every other thing and within the thing the things that fall between it, that short tall long dark gasp preceding every breath.
He finds no comfort in a closed-door-once-open. Hello the tall man through the doorpane says politely tapping. The tall man does not know? Cannot see? The unseen, held at edges of the doorframe, drift in dozens, wheel lighter than puffed parachutes of seeded dandelions. Lightly bob at the thin pane! It is your father I want to see says the man. I want to see your father. The man inhales long, the kind of breath the unseen stalk.
Inside, much mail sprawls across countertops, tables, rests on the toaster oven. Letters, brochures, newspaper pages are spread open to tile the floor, open to air and light that wafts across, scrubbing them with time in doses of seconds and minutes and hours: back, forth, in slow, cleansing currents. In the flat cartoon from which now his body dangles over the collapse of the universe he observes the tall man at the door and feels the thump of the father moving through the dark house soon to arrive.
The father comes; the door, the door is open! Air passes outside to inside. The tall man says some words and the father says some. The man smiles at him then and places his hand low, so he can shake it. What do you say says the father. But to say, his mouth must open. Nothing stills the high whine and flurry of pinwheels.
Advancing around the edges of shadows, past all outlines and borders, the unseen settle on roofs of houses and hoods of cars and on windows and the broad-brimmed hats of gardeners. They whirl off, torn away by wind gusts, and come to rest on the handlebars of bicycles and bare wrists of teenage girls. He rubs some more spit in his eye, like they told him, so he can see them coming.
Every moment is a moment of collapse.
Hemmed in by the available choices.
Exactly what you can’t put your finger on.
But remember, the dream has been made for you.
Here comes the tailor, he sizes you up.
Looks you up and down.
No one is terrified of the choice they know you will not make.
What if that choice, normally invisible, shone out of the back of a wardrobe, or in a far corner of the yard?
But only for a moment, and you must have mistaken it for the flit of a bushtit’s wing.
But you’re out, scooping up the dog’s shit. It must have been a veritable flurry of bushtits…
You say you are going to unearth it, the whatever, where it lies in state beneath the but they get the idea. You are going to name it, bring it to light!
You hurry eastward down a well-lit avenue with the second-hand perambulator you’ve bought for hauling, nodding all the while at the others as they pass, two and three abreast, in their going-out clothes, pushing their perambulators, wheeling their whatevers in the opposite direction. You are by now so late the streets are cold.
With all that creaking of wheels and doffing of hats, doffing of … who is it wears hats these days? … and compliments exchanged (those beautifully-chromed wheel spokes! how well turned-out you look!), employing only safe words from one of the other centuries, no one thinks to ask: How is yours? No, it is clear to them your perambulator is empty.
Is it because you are late, because your perambulator is in disrepair, or because of your many failed promises? Haven’t you been saying for how long now? that you will
though for sure, you are fooling no one .
It’s not any lie you’ve told, it’s not your furtive gait nor the tell-tale fingerprints left in the clay of your dissembling, yet it’s as plain as
In shame you arrive at the plot where you last
where it is, where it is still, undisturbed in its slumbers, if you could say such a thing slumbers, if it has not been your own feckless slumber hanging over it like unrained rain.
These are the rogue waves that scour the ocean; self-surfing, uprising. I had something else in mind that was too mild. Instead, all is terror: torn wings, declarations, wild birds and amphoras— copulatives instead of conjunctions.
Sly, wounded beasts crawl from my mouth; from my penis, crocodiles. Snails send sensors from beneath my fingernails. Yet I have eyes that at last are living, though in a place far from the sainted maps.
To the town arrive new villagers. I offer ways that come to me unbidden. Who’s to say they are not thankful? But why doesn’t my reckless mouth stand still instead of dancing agile as sunlight over a pail of water?
If only my arms did not lay dead as wood. If the poles of my fingers were not simple shrubs.
The lift of the green wind: I rise from rooftops, strike air white with my keel, turn and turn in a helical storm. My spiral arms reach out, out, until lost becomes us. Lost,
we are lost, but sky turns sweet paper, origami hand pinching a crane’s tail.
Fresh hollows in the air replace us. Water flows from frail-tipped saucers.
A dobel-doppel or treble-tripfel cobra, or copper-wrapped package, is how it was described to us — or how we heard it — which is, the cartridge for a gun placed in a mortise doorlock, fitting precisely in its place, for which it is intended. A cartridge containing bullets of the nuclear kind. And what is the place we are headed for? A sort of resort? Or farm, in the country? Which country?
We had been there often, with father, long ago. We were required now to get back, with the new nuclear assembly, that had been placed on order after such an undisturbed silence. This, coming at an inconvenient time for us, certainly, after we had just got back home. But now, had to go out again. Out, driving or walking or taking a bus, some form of public transportation: a bicycle, a scooter; back into that landscape, so familiar from our childhood. While they all, there, knew our father, they might have remembered us only from the time we were a small boy at our father’s side, secure in the grip he had on us, accompanying him on trips all over. All over that countryside, for the purpose of deliveries.
What had it been, his mission? The eggs? No, we think it was the other business, one he conducted alongside the business of eggs, that involved packages wrapped up ahead of time so that we couldn’t see what was in them. Stowed in secret in the rear compartment of the vehicle. Packages that perhaps he did not want any others to see, either, the ones we met along the way. But surely, the traders and buyers must have known? Would have been able to see what was concealed, in the packages? Packages unwrapped right in front of them, to assure them of what they were getting. The items passed from hand to hand were so valuable, so vital, there could be no secrets of any kind. These men — presumably men — had other businesses elsewhere, in foreign lands, about which something was dark. But then again, we were involved in the same business as they. A business complementary to their business, dangerous in its way, of handling and tending to the devices.
That is an odd point. We don’t recall, we did not ask — was there money involved? But threats, assuredly, if we did not supply the goods on time, if the devices did not work as designed.
How the things were put together was a wrapping, with layers, of metallic foil over brick, coppery or golden — or it was, was it, that we traded bullets for dinners, or the bricks fit into a slot designed for cartridges, so that the whole device resembled a gun? Or then again, a loaf of bread? Or a door lock. That’s it. The devices had a way of resembling these things; we never thought to ask. How it was that this could be, was far from our mind. We think of it only now. But perhaps the appearance of these items shifted, one time to the next — or, we never looked at the devices the same way twice and they were revised, right in front of our eyes? Or later, as we tried so hard to remember, perhaps it was that our memory never ceased from shifting? Which was it? The devices themselves did give rise to doubt — that could be it — but only when we brought them to mind. Our memory is otherwise unaffected – little affected – as we find we can remember most things, though not always at the first attempt.
It is worth noting that as we come back around, back to the task of remembering a thing, we do sometimes find the thing not to be the same thing as the time before, before it was first remembered, in the earliest reddening of itself, whatever it was, or turned out not to be, when we were in the blush and fright of first encounter. Yet also, we think no. No, we cannot go back, as before our remembering, there is only the thing. Which cannot be recalled.
We had a family, now that we were grown and the old times with father were past, that we had not had before. With all of its constituents, too; a wife and three little ones, and the dog, and therefore we were seriously affected by recent threats concerning the devices, long forgotten, that might not have concerned us when we were younger, when all threats would have been levied against us, alone. While we were us ourselves alone, we would not have given threats a second thought. Frankly, it can be said we were in those days a devil-may-care sort of individual, reckless with our health and well-being. But we never, we never wanted another not ourselves, to be hurt, as collateral. Never to be injured. About the dangers of collateral we thought ourselves tidy, careful. At other times, it is true, we have had no family and were responsible for no one—how we preferred it, if we were to think about our actions. Or inaction.
That is, there are times, there were and are times we prefer not to do anything, and go ahead and do nothing. We do not like to foist ourselves upon events — we do not respond, even, to emergencies. Whose, after all, would these be? We stay at these times in our room, a room just large enough, constraining our limbs, and move just enough, move hardly at all; only to turn around in our chair, or in our bed, or extending our neck, to look out of the window, but sometimes not even to look out of the window, as there can be nothing there that really concerns us. Since to look out of the window is, after all, to allow that something you see there might worry you, in theory.
In some scenarios — plausible scenarios — not looking out of the window might fail to take into account events about which you ought, instead, and by exception, to be distressed, that might affect some other, as collateral for your doing nothing, if you knew. So what is out the window is not our business, but might be our business, if not to look is to disregard, and continuing in the room, unaware, prevents us from knowing which, falling as we have so often into the selfsame dilemma of unintended causation or benevolent harm. It is at these times, when our mind strains toward disobedience, that we are stirred into restlessness, evicted from our room by the force of such considerations.
Just as at times we do nothing, and stay in bed or in the chair, looking around the room, not looking out the window for fear — not for fear, but concern — for what might be seen and what action that might entail, now, in come complementary way, we are driving or walking or taking public transportation, a bicycle, perhaps, a scooter, to a destination we hope we will recognize — that being our only hope in all of this — that we will arrive, be relieved of our packages, and that the transition will go smoothly, these uncertain items passing out of our hands into the hands of others. Our wish is that we will return as soon as possible to rest, in the bed, in the room, to sit in the chair across from the window, or to embrace with joy the members of the family, if there is one. It is pointless to think about that now.
In every sense we have returned, though without him, to what we did once with father.How we trusted him! now that we think about it. The odor of sweat that rose from his forearms to comfort us, the short-billed cap creased from many times taking off and putting on, sometimes in deference to others, sometimes from the heat of the sun. The questions he devised to test our knowledge! These he might put to us while braking and accelerating, to discipline our attention. Our confidence was so great, so great, we left everything in his hands. We went where he went, whenever he went, as long as we were invited. How we looked forward to his invitations, since to be with him was all we desired! As well, all he required was that, yes, we be with him. Come along, was what he said.
We remember, we think, the vehicle we rode in, a pickup with round green fenders. We sat, when the ways were peaceful, on the other end of the bench seat, of brown vinyl, and slouched and peered out at the rush of road, our face pressed against the glass, that was sometimes cold and sometimes not, against our cheek. And from beyond the rush of leaves interrupting the sunlight, their pattern scrubbing the truck’s hood as we passed, drumming with the pressure of feeble fingertips on our eyelids when they were closed, as often as not closed, while the road hummed and blurred, as though it sang, until he stopped.
In this way, a pre-existing alliance of persons might find that an unfamiliar person has moved in with them. They may not know at the outset for how long the stranger intends to stay, until, as time goes on, the stranger is no longer such a stranger. In time everyone begins to know a little, about each other. Perhaps the stranger, as in our case, intended neither to stay nor to leave, and was innocent of any intention whatsoever. What then?
This is how families are formed, in our experience. They move around, if they have to, and opportunities open up, or opportunities once wide open are no longer available, and in the way of trees and grasses, or cats and cities, or parking lots and automobiles, or many other things one could name, if one wished, there is a continual shifting and jostling and becoming or unbecoming, where things go along unchanged, then change abruptly. In short, our life, too, has changed, and not changed, and then it has changed; or the change has been, that all at once it is no longer changing.
So it comes to pass we are pursuing our mission in the country, delivering the nuclear items of unclear origin, but carefully wrapped, to persons not quite known, in a place we hope we are able to find in time for the exchange. We used to go along these roads in the country, our father and, yes, we went along the dim lanes where the roads were few, and under cover of the dark trees, though it is clear to us now how little attention we paid, to where we were, or how we had got there. We did not believe we could have got back by ourselves, we put such trust in him where to turn — which our father did, impulsively and without warning — so that in our vagueness, nodding off against the vent window, we were caught off guard, knocked against the windshield, bruising a shoulder on the dashboard in more than one instance, even when no turn was likely to surprise us, when all the turns, at last, were known. Unless it was a turn we had never made together.
Our father drove with great enthusiasm, or was propelled by unpredictable fears, so it made little difference whether we braced ourselves or not, or lay loose on the floorboards like a rag doll. After a few injuries it was all the same, so we learned to close our eyes and tumble in the knee well. And routes changed, and there were new deliveries, or old ones not returned to since before our time with father, in his time alone, or with some other we didn’t know.
One of the difficulties is, where there is a place to go and you don’t know how to get there. When, according to the message, there is a time to be at that place, and it is a time likely to arrive before you are able to be there, but unfortunately, you don’t remember what time that is. Yes, the time arrives and you are not there. And yet, you have the package, which, due to its nature, you hope not to have for too long. No, it is not something that, even if you should miss the meeting entirely, you would like to keep.
What of the price to be paid? If you are to receive something in return for the package, what is the cost of accepting what you are to receive? The journey down the roads, the wait in darkness. At other times, the demeanor of the men. If there is a threat against you, or the others at home, assuming there really are others, as we are now and again more and more certain we recall, though in other ways so much less, what will be the price?
In either case it is too much to bear, the threat of being paid, the dangers that cloud the moment of receiving, the punishment for not delivering. You cannot remember the terms entailed in the messages, but since you cannot remember whether you ever knew the terms, you are equally unsure whether you have forgotten. Nevertheless, payment for such devices entails the obligation, unstated though it may be, unstated and unspoken, to perform some similar task in the future, to receive some dreaded payment for another task as yet unnamed and unknown.
Our eyes, normally half-lidded, are jolted open when something, some stray thing, comes at us from outside. Such that we find it necessary to decide. This has been the case following the messages, written on folded slips of paper, that have appeared in the crack beneath the door. And in the mailbox downstairs. And between the pages of books we are reading.
Is it not strange indeed, that we now find ourselves traveling through a country landscape after such a long time — an era, almost — webbed with unpaved roads, with intersections and decisions to be made about where to turn next, troubling with which are the landmarks that guide our way, and which are spurious, and where to stop, and the unaccustomed burden of going someplace in particular, to arrive at an agreed-upon time so that a piece of business may be transacted? All these circumstances, taken together, force us to acknowledge that we have been called back to the same old business we did with father.We are surprised to find ourselves somewhere other than in a chair or in our bed, somewhere other than in our home, whichever home that happens to be at the time, as every few years, or months, it might be, we pick up and move.
We don’t like to move, not at all, but every so often some circumstance provokes us, more often if we haven’t chosen the place carefully. Or it’s the luck of the draw, as we don’t like to choose which place, either, but it is sufficient that one becomes available, in times there is no one to care for but ourselves. But whether there is truly no one has become doubtful, once again, as in the back of our mind we seem to remember there is a family, or a group of individuals we may have forgotten, to whom we are still attached — by their design, we suspect, we do not think it was ours — unless that was the best arrangement available. When picking among arrangements we think there is always the best one, and the best one is always the one we do not choose, but move into, or are invited into, so that movement into the arrangement is smooth and the transition is seamless. Do they that have done the inviting suspect this is the case? That we have not chosen them in the usual way, singling them out? But rather, unaware, they have simply moved over to accommodate us, as many a person will do almost without thinking, entirely without, to allow them a bit of space? As for a stranger on a park bench, or on the subway. One moves over, doesn’t one, to make a little room, as long as one is not putting oneself to too much trouble?
And then we would be in another place, with little notice, which was in time easy to accept, that we would be in one place and then another, separated by little but the closing and opening of our eyes.
So transfers were timed with the intermittent halting of our journey and the eggs, or packages, were lifted out of the bed of the truck with great care, for which we were enlisted to help, preparing us, we believed, for the day when we alone would drive and stop and lift and transfer, with, who knows, another beside us, one day.
On the other side of these transactions were shapes so much darker, the receiving figures so much blurrier, than ours, while we, in our radiance, high up in the bed of the truck, gave off eggs as the sun dispenses its light, or packages, in which were things unseen; possibly guns, or bread, or nuclear locks detached from their doors, into space, and space alone swallowed them up. Such was the darkness below, where the others came to take, their arms rising out of the dim of shapelessness, and such was the fury with which they clamored, that we could see how their lips held back their teeth.
The fear now is that we will not know when we are there, and we will carry these forever.
