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It is her bust where he has centered her life, as a sculptor would; we never see her feet or legs as we do twinkling Kitty’s at the ice rink, in her skating costume so short and tight that Nabokov had to draw it. It is also where he centers the involuntary exercise of her strength; that ray that pours toward any man she meets, and that they experience as seduction, also pours toward us. The portrait of her steps out of its frame.
Anna fastened her meaning on Vronsky; Levin fastens his meaning on the land. “In this way he lived, not knowing or seeing any possibility of knowing what he was or why he lived in the world, and he suffered so much from that ignorance that he was afraid he might commit suicide, while at the same time he was firmly cutting his own particular definite path through life.”
Tolstoy must have felt that he was full of love, and that his love somehow curdled when it hit the air. He must have felt that words exchanged in conversation almost always go wrong. But words delivered in a tract, say, seven hundred pages—and no one can interrupt! No one in the world is your wife, and everyone is the girl as she was when she first encountered you.
Reached into the little linen bag and pulled out the stone called the Scar, a seared black track across a jasper landscape.
I had cried at the crystal shop earlier that week because they were wiping all the stones down with alcohol. They don’t like that, I had pleaded with the girl at the counter, feeling the raw cringe in my own flesh, but so many tourists were handling them—Ohio tourists, moving freely, unmasked, probably there to see the statues before they were torn down.
She would give you a different take every time, whereas in my brief foray into the art I thought it was the peak of professionalism to deliver the line the exact same way every night, so none of the other actors got surprised.
Lately I had felt the air full of silver nosedives; pilots were forgetting how to fly. “Be careful,” I had gasped to my father, lips blue, when it was happening, but he laughed and said he would never catch it—he wasn’t a world traveler like me. That was before it was possible for people not to believe in it at all, before it was possible to convert to a perfect atheism of it.
He claimed to have never had it, though he had never allowed himself to be tested—his fake doctor, who also didn’t believe in it, had given him a recent diagnosis of Spots on his lungs, but rather than attributing it to either the new illness or the sarcoidosis that plagued so many former submariners, had told him he was probably just allergic to the rare black-market African wood (bought from an actual van down by the river) that he had been using to make guitars. Amazing sentence, I thought to myself, as all of the sentences about my father were.
I hated him, of course. I also hated my friends—or to be more accurate, I didn’t know who they were. For the first time in my life I had an Enemies List, which included entries as disparate as “God” and “Gene Kelly.”
I would evade, and leave it at that, because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.
“Is she still a poet?” one of them had asked once. “We haven’t seen her writing in a while.” This struck me as the funniest thing I had ever heard; as if you could just stop being what you were.
At night we watched Oak Island, a show where Canadian men dug forever in the mud. There was a legend that the Grail had gone to this place—the Grail never went to, like, New York. It went where people believed in it most, where people were willing to dig, and where Canada was not populated with identical interior decorators named Jnoathan, it was populated with amateur archaeologists. They scooped forever in the mud—sometimes they x-rayed the mud, as if it were a body—and when they found a button, they partied for days. To have found actual treasure, let alone the Grail, would have upset them.
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We nodded at Werner Herzog as we passed him in the lobby (what kind of omen was Werner Herzog?),
For some reason I could not seem to see him. It was as if the part of the brain that registered the lower half of a person’s face had been removed. I had noticed this and its strange converse: that sometimes, reconstructing a conversation with a person who was wearing a mask, my brain filled in their face as if they weren’t, with what I was willing to bet was 100 percent accuracy.
Tap tap tap. We loved to look things up instead of writing. The little bits of business: her typing folx and me sneaking up to change it.
Perhaps the music was coming from inside the redbrick building, where the people who did not believe in death were. My sister had looked for an outdoor activity, a place we could gather together in safety; that was Schutzenfest. But inside, bunkered down, with bare faces—singing—is where my father wanted us; he kept surveying the outdoor melee and saying, “Ridiculous.” It would be our fear that struck us, the thought that we could ever be vulnerable. But look at me, I thought to him, willing him to turn his eyes. I look like Nosferatu with Fly Girl bangs.
What had I told my husband recently? That I was experiencing Permanent Visuals. “Permanent Visuals?” he said. “That’s like, being alive?”
How painful to be Stephen Sondheim, I thought, and have to rely on people for interpretation of works that stand perfect in the mind. It was like God, a pure gold scale, surrounded by children who were specially designed to scream every second they were alive.
Stephen Sondheim always hated this ending. He wanted the main character to die choking on a big bite of birthday cake, the candles having set fire to his hair. But this is what wanted to happen instead, what wanted to happen was the song.
A warm afternoon in winter, and Shakespeare’s wife was asking to see me. She wanted to buy my brain, but how to explain that it was no longer worth anything?
Late in life, she had finally unlocked the secret to her dancing: She wasn’t using her left heel. “Oh yes,” I said. “I know all about that. My dancer friend tells me I make too many triangles.”
I was having a Protagonist Problem: I could not move, or make anything happen. Were we in a kind of place that would keep going, like a stage. It seemed we would die before ever discussing the thing we had come there to discuss.
I had grown up with a photographic memory for faces, but after I was sick had a hard time recognizing British and American ones, possibly because the language was attached to them.
The inability to process narrative, my disorientation at fast cuts, the unzipping inside my skull whenever the camera moved diagonally—all of these went away.
The summer before, I had tried to rewire my brain with mushrooms, but succeeded mainly in becoming temporarily psychic and reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died.
Fandom, which I had never understood, must be a way to organize life, longing, and a desire to look things up on the internet—three things that were too large otherwise.
My mouth was empty, and my brain was like the moment when the subtitles gap out—pure terror, what was happening, would I never understand anything again? Every gesture in the world was gone from my body. How do I tell him, I thought, how do I tell him? My husband, when I looked at him, was holding up finger hearts.
Why didn’t anyone recognize Mrs. Doubtfire? Everyone was either her child or her wife.
The tender bullseye in the center of her chest was being struck and struck—how lucky—there was music like that out there that she had never heard, most of it had never been recorded, a recent movement of internet weirdos had banded together to listen to less, it was everywhere, they complained, people were not meant to listen to so much music, in the past, people had never listened to music alone.
If the physical therapists had come to walk him that afternoon, the blood would have poured out then. But it waited, filling him up, in a different way than blood fills us up usually.
“I think I’m delirious,” the night nurse said, taking down her mask to cough.
At one point KoRn appeared as guest stars, and a portion of the episode took place on their tour bus. She screenshotted Jonathan Davis’s white dreads like crazy, as a form of hope. He would make it. She would show him.
I prayed, he said <Who did you pray to?> Ganesh, Christian god, ancestors Oh, I did Jah, too World mother? Gaia Also aliens
He had become afraid not of the dark, but of night, the time when it happened.
He woke one morning with this written in a Notes file. “All of the layers are made of materiality. And the materiality of each layer is shared by everything that originates from that layer, but is separate from the materiality of every other layer. “But all of the layers drip and splash, so sometimes a drip or splash of materiality from one layer bumps against another. “These are the layers that we have so far: There is the Yellow Layer, which is the one that I am on. There is the Fish Layer, also known as the Blue Layer. There is the Spirit Layer, and there is the God Layer. The God Layer is
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“The navy eventually determined that nothing they did could increase the level of radiation in your father’s body,” she said.
“We’re getting you out of here,” the specialist told him. “You are not doing well in here.” She knew that—what could she do? They had become Disaster People. At some point they had stopped living life, and started living something called Life-and-Death. How could she help him, what could she do? Blood, bones, wounds—she had used these things. You don’t understand, she heard herself explaining to his body, don’t you know that you’re a metaphor?
Fish tanks were so eighties, like him, like her. They kept having to manufacture crises with the aquariums, but the only crisis with an aquarium could be: It spilled.
“You’re in charge of the Wound,” he said as they left the hospital on the twelfth day. Finally, a place to put her conscientiousness! At last, a place to put getting it perfect!
She braced him between the wall and the trash can—both of them had the idea that if he hit the ground he would come apart in two pieces, like one of the test melons on Forged in Fire—
“Remembrance of Things Past?” her teacher had asked in high school, and up shot her hand on the instant—again, that sense of ownership over books she had only heard of.
She imagined it healing in different ways: a straight line or a crooked one, purple or pale, dependent on her passionate and scholarly attention.
It seemed she needed these things to furnish her house, which she was allowed to have even as an adult woman who wore Godspell makeup and huge clown overalls. Exactly the kind of adult I would grow up to be, she thought, carrying my briefcase of forms around the city, to lay one thing on another and make it mine.
The shape-matching was so obviously erotic that it SOMETIMES seemed like Chloe was going to fuck her cousin? Or that they would be married, and live together in the house of hearts. But what was likelier was that they were two halves of the same person: the one who was already there, and the one who was just arriving.
So it had gone all the way through them both, the wound. So they had had the same feelings about it. The wind whistling through it, breath, the distance between two people hurtling to close.
You are asked, even offered money. You go because in memory, your body is removed, and you fly through the people and the place with no pain, and everything happens at once, in the center of a huge water droplet—there you are at the end, printing Patricia Anne on your W-9.
“I’m Belgian!” my husband cried, delighted. He recrossed his legs in what I could tell he thought was a “Belgian way.” I knew what this meant: It meant his love of french fries would be elevated above mine for all time.
“French Canadian,” he had exclaimed in triumph, when my Ancestry Dot Com results had come in, which revealed that I had been descended from seventeenth-century whores.
We were lucky he had not joined the child gang called the Scrapers, who didn’t go to school, and threatened, rather poetically, to scrape people. They roamed around all day and threw rocks at cars. Once they broke into school and bit a teacher on the leg.
One sign that your actual life was over was a fresh interest in genealogy; shapes crowding around you, the tall, nonexistent son striding away in his basketball shorts, a coupon for free coneys in his pocket, delinquent from the duty of ever being born.
