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driving deeper into Oklahoma is like falling asleep and sinking into deeper and stranger layers of someone’s troubled subconscious.
playgrounds, tennis courts, an elementary school. It’s an idyllic town, protected from the world outside, perhaps not too different from the thousands of university cloisters sprinkled throughout the country, like the one my sister lives in now, where young people trade a lifetime of family efforts for credits, which become scores, which become a piece of paper that will not guarantee them anything else, nothing at all except a lifetime of living in phantasmagoric limbos between half-voluntary deployments, job searches, applications, and inevitable redeployments.
All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it winds its way around a sun. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.
Children have a slow, silent way of transforming the atmosphere around them. They are so much more porous than adults, and their chaotic inner life leaks out of them constantly, turning everything that is real and solid into a ghostly version of itself. Maybe one child, alone, by himself, cannot modify the world the adults around him or her sustain and entertain. But two children are enough—enough to break the normality of that world, tear the veil down, and allow things to glow with their own, different inner light.
He’s still small enough to wear sarcasm and condescension like a suit several sizes too big.
The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather—more a whimper than a bang.
That was the time we were together even when we were not, because that was the time we all lived inside the same map. We stopped living in that map when we left on the road trip, and even though inside the car we were sitting so close together all the time, it felt like we were the opposite of being together.
And I petted the dog and talked to it and you started asking the dog really funny questions, like, would you rather be taller, would you rather be orange, would you want to be a giraffe instead of a dog, would you love to eat leaves, would you rather live out in the wild like next to the river? And I could swear under oath that every time you asked a question like that, the dog nodded, saying yes, saying
He made an effort to retain the thought of glass buildings and gleaming cars but saw only ruins, imagined only the liquid sound of millions of hearts pumping blood into veins, pumping hearts of wild men and women, all throbbing at the same time under city ruins. He could almost hear them, a dozen million hearts pulsing, pumping, palpitating in that future city in some ways identical to the dark jungle they had left behind. He raised his hands to his head and placed his index and middle fingers on his temples, locating the beat of his heart thrusting blood there, feeling the waves of thoughts
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Most nights I couldn’t sleep no matter how hard I tried, and I would just lie there hearing our voices the way they’d sounded inside the car all day, but kind of broken or far away, like echoes, but not good echoes.
Time, in the desert, was an ongoing present tense.
