“Oh God,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says. “What were you saying?”
He stands suddenly, pulling away from her touch all at once. It’s a physical rejection that hits her like a blow. He looks like a frightened animal.
“You’re not mine,” he says, angrily, his voice breaking into a sob. “I wish you were, you have no idea, but you’re not.”
She stands and he shakes his head and holds out a hand to keep her from him.
“I don’t understand.”
“Listen,” he says. “Give me one more moment, my love. One moment. Hear me and then I’ll go.”
“No.”
“Yes. I have to. Listen: there’s a man and he’s got some real problems, but he’s a good man, worth the trouble. At least I hope so. God, maybe he’s not, but I swore to him that I’d come and plead his case to you. I’m asking you, begging you, by everything that’s passed between us, for the sake of this—thing between us—please. Give him a chance. And when he’s exhausted that chance, give him another.”
“No.”
“Just remember what I’ve said. And—God, Katie, I’m so sorry.”
“Marcus—”
He turns and runs, flat out sprinting. She’s stunned, so it takes her a moment to realize that he’s leaving, just that fast, just that suddenly, and that he will be gone forever if she lets him, so she takes off after him, but for a guy decades older he’s surprisingly fast, and he ducks into an alleyway and by the time she gets there—
You know what. You do. He’s gone. Gone for good. Gone back to the future, where he had managed to steal a time machine and come back to talk to the girl that he’d lost so many years ago because he was young and immature and thought that being strong meant having opinions and not taking that kind of crap from anyone who could actually get under your skin.
He’s gone. She’ll search for him, of course. She’ll come back to the park every day at all the times when they met there. She’ll read the “I Saw U” column every day in the paper. She’ll answer her phone with heart pounding. She’ll sob into her pillow. She’ll wonder if it was all a dream.
And then, one day, about a year later, she’ll see a guy on the street who has an oddly familiar look to him. He’s clean-shaven where Marcus had a beard, and he’s younger. Could be his son, or a brother, but he looks uncannily like the older fellow, and she’ll throw good sense out the window and follow him around, and stop him right there on the street and stumblingly ask him out to coffee, and one thing will lead to another and—
And it won’t be the epic love affair it was with Marcus. He’s a jerk in lots of ways, this guy, immature and selfish, and he doesn’t know how to listen or open up. But she’ll keep thinking of Marcus, and she’ll keep giving this guy one more chance.
Until one day, she finally realizes that he’s not Marcus, and if he’s ever going to be him, it’s going to be a long time. Decades, maybe, and she’s not willing to wait for him to grow up.
Are you with me, reader? Is this the ending you’d expected? Me, neither. But it’s not quite done.
And one day, when she’s much older, decades later, yes, she’ll run across Marcus. It’s not the same park and it’s not even the same city. But somehow, there they are.
She’ll say, “You owe me a hell of an apology.”
He’ll nod, “Without a doubt. But haven’t I wasted enough of your time already?”
And she’ll laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he’ll say. “Never again.”
She’ll consider for a moment. “That’ll do,” she’ll reply.
And they’ll go for coffee.
Now I’m done.
Grief
The Autobiography of a Tarantula
Jesse Kennedy
(For T.G.)
A ventricle view of the spider perched directly over the eye. In the eye, its fangs are a blotch: the only part of the spider not clearly reflected in the pupil. The point where the pupil and the fangs might be said to meet: the point where the difference between the mirror and its image is blurred—the point of my birth.
I came into the world as ink stain
black milk of missing letters
I came into the world as a reoccurring last breath
I came into the world as a heroin overdose at a distance
as dead blood that fell down the inside of a leg
and made a puddle
in a foot.
I came into the world and right away I wasn’t enough, was in fact nothing at all. Barely more than poison—and then what? I had to get to school, it was either that or work.
*
I came into the world mistaken for stomach cancer. My mother was happy to learn that I would grow to be a distinct organism and not her death. Eight legs and everything, identical to my brothers and sisters—but blighted by that initial misrecognition—so that it seemed to me, later in life, that there were two of me: myself and what I at first thought of, unclearly, as my brother—my haunting possible alternate existence as a tumor—a non-event I carried as a burden that began to take shape in the form of what was left after every molt. As it turned out, there was more of this remainder than there was of me; I left it everywhere, shed like a soiled stocking, turned inside out on an attic step or hung like a queer felt glove on a rusted nail—as if misplaced there by a doll with strange hands. It seemed to me that even my mouse tooth rattle and matchstick crib belonged to this other self, to the trail of my shed skin. I move through the world as if by dying, turning myself continuously inside out. What is left behind is always more visible to me than the thing that leaves it, and I’ve come to identify with this portion of waste, this bit of nothing, as much as with anything else. I will go so far as to tell you that my life is analogous to the long creak of a floorboard in the dark, a glass eye, a wig. I sometimes wake up in fright from the feel of my own legs against themselves.
*
The faint sound of a train whistle, far below the grounds of a cemetery. Amidst silvery ash, clinging tissue-like to my hairs, I rock in a hurtling coffin, at the front and foot of a pyramid of my fellows; velvet blackness set with a hundred clustered, dark eyes—each eye flashing with points of light. The pile of ash, responsible for the formation of our group, is bothersome. Some of those higher up have sunk. Looking though a crack out into gauzy bleakness, I see the soft shadow of the coffin train as its warped wooden carriages run along the track, uric light through the gaps in the wall, crisscrossing the planks of the tunnel. There is debris on the track, shifty vermin, what have you. Always the sound of the coffin as its wood groans and it runs along, now slowly, now quickly through the corridor. Rocking in this darkness, ash now the only trouble.
On our way to class from the station, sometimes our many splendid legs, shining with soot from the train rides, cause us—in our light and quivering advancement as a group—to become stuck in a mass. Though we halt it seems we still advance. Down here, where there is really nothing there, you can bang your head against it all the same.
And so, throughout my life, my movements have lacked weight, a certain tangibility, and no one will answer for me: an unclaimed shadow among the ashen detritus of limbs hauled continuously in the night through the tunnels beneath the earth that connect its graveyards; the secret circulatory system of the Earth’s cemeteries.
We have been paused for some time, a short way from the station, in a heap.
*
We hurry along the velvet-lined corridor, what is in reality the purple sleeve of a crumbling old coat, and gaze through a hole at something small, like a little gnarled tree: a body floating very still, suspended in fluid and lit yellow and black by the light of our matches.
“For my final presentation I’ve brought you to the corpse of Antonin Artaud. See with each of your eight ink drop eyes, or at least reflect! In jet-black mirrors where the day ceaselessly comes to slaughter, THIS SPECTACLE! (Drum roll.) The Corpse of Antonin Artaud, all dried out and perfectly preserved, not i
n a usual coffin, but in one of glass, full of formaldehyde, cradled delicately in musty old mauve velvet, the folds of which have preserved his corpse through a thousand earthquakes! The rusted nails? That urchin thing? There? That! That is his soul! Growing out of his death, a flower or black flame, still in its coffincy—his actual philosophical body is here, now in its fresh nativity! His life was a shadow of the shape of his death, like the impression of a hand in a black curtain, an impression in violet silk of a monster or angel, etc., etc. His life is a burn made on a page by the flame of his death! Truly, so few are allowed to live so totally in reverse! Thought was frightened in Antonin—as we are frightened here below of our many burnt-out eyes, which register only modulations of gloom—eyes that in their perfect near blindness are the cleanest, purest mirrors. See that our eyes link us to his fate! The vanity of the night is condensed, made essential in the jewel-like eyes of tarantulas, our laughing eyes where reflected midnight ceaselessly performs its toilet, but never for our benefit!”
Here I pause, unnerved because I have noticed—reared up as I am on my haunches, my back to the glass—how my shadow and I have begun to resemble a sentence, unimaginable as it may sound, in the shape of an L. Pressing my back as flat as I can—so as to impress the others with a display of my fangs—my front four legs, two on the left and two on the right held tightly together, and likewise the bottom—in the posture of a diver—I had become suddenly legible, running along the floor and up the glass. From the foot of my shadow I begin, “the only thing worthwhile is the transmission of the untransmittable.”1 It wasn’t even something original. Concerned that in my silence someone would begin to read what I said, I spring forward, again like a diver, toward my own shadow, so that the sentence closes in on itself, shut like a very short book.
A tarantula in a dunce hat in a corner of the cylindrical make-do classroom—beside what serves as a blackboard, a square scratched into the velvet and decorated with unintelligible inscriptions so dense in some places as to form holes—begins to shake and then stridulate, hissing dryly like a dead leaf dragged across a stretch of concrete by the wind. With its hind legs it begins to rub at its abdomen, inspiring some others to behave similarly, so that shortly we are all crouched in a tiny sea of hair, our abdomens patchy and bald, not a sign of old age—we will re-grow our irritating hairs—but surely one of learning, if also of great discomfort.
*
Once I dreamt I was not actually a tarantula, but a man’s hand, asleep on his chest, dreaming it was a tarantula. In the dream I strangled my owner to death, or perhaps I crawled into his mouth and uprooted his tongue—I’m unclear on this point, I just remember being very energetic about the face. Surely I’d recall gouts of blood, writhing, etc. But, as I dreamt I was a hand dreaming it was a spider, how would I have been able to do either? In the logic of dreams, spiders are capable of strangulation, and corpses of a second death. And there is always something of the spider in the hand that strangles, even if spiders do not strangle. Maybe I did both, killing him twice—maybe three times or even four. Maybe, on the other hand, one was just for fun, after death, and not really a killing at all. I then fretted away the hours before dawn at the windowsill. My range of motion limited by where I’d fallen, my fingernails scraped the waxy glass, turning circles like trapped flies. Had it not been so cold, I might have found something there to eat. I have such a vivid impression of this cold gray room and its corpse, to which I was attached, that I’m sure it exists somewhere, and that I might find myself there again—but as what?
*
Despite my desire to be finished with school and resolve myself into a self-sufficient organism, I remain a pupil obstinately trained on whatever is put before it. A puppet or reflection dreaming, if not of freedom, then of enucleation, which would amount to the same thing. A little black hand longing to reach out of the eye and clasp the hand reflected in it, to become an entry point in the head through which the world rushes in, a black fountain.
*
I remember my nursery: pale gray wallpaper peeling and printed with green fleur-de-lis, the whole thing having the effect of verdigris. Often there was a wasp or fly or other creature caught in the enormous nightlight; a thoughtful installation with a shell of plastic made to look like stained glass, serving as a source of midnight snacks. In my little mezzanine, I’d crawl behind the wallpaper, at a corner that had curled up from the wall, into a crack. Pressing my body flat against the cool stone, I would play hide and seek with the light.
*
The coffins, built for bodies much larger than our own—and sometimes, as I’ve indicated, packed to capacity with several corpses—sometimes even five or six (though not six intact, two bodies in terms of total substance, but from five or six sources)—the coffins travel on a track, like a little train in an amusement park. They run along in a corridor with walls put together from wooden planks—infrequently, not more than once an hour—through this narrow alley with a ceiling, like something in the nightmare of a shantytown. In addition to the coffins there are larger square boxes, black as are the coffins, in which have been installed small barred windows. Our eyes have sometimes registered gray, knobby protrusions that seem to wave or beckon from these windows, as if whatever owned them could see us—crouched in our coffins and peering at them from among the ash and amidst limbs similar to those protrusions, though less jointed. In the darkness, everything is more or less articulated. Things moan and creep, more or less, but the difference can be critical—though it was not for my mother, who devoured so many of her children before they were large enough to try and stop her. Presumably she was confused, as I was when I mistook her for a part of an enormous moth we were fighting over and blinded her.
*
As a shadow, I began to lengthen when I learned of his death. A gesture of love. I make faces in the mirror, maudlin and grotesque faces, until my features are like a lifeless mask I might discard—a mask that I imagine resembles his face—if it hasn’t been incinerated, if it still sits on top of the bones, white and empty. I make faces, as the sentences stretch out like lines of black crepe, until I am beside myself; too many legs again in the shadow on the floor, which goes out to meet the shadow of his eyelashes that—having left his face—is crawling with great delicacy across the lid of his coffin, looking for something to do.
*
People left the party; there was snow falling outside, illuminated by a flash coming into the room through the blackness of the open doorway—someone taking a last picture, even though the room appeared to be empty. There was something crawling in the trash that littered the dirty yellow carpet, by a red plastic cup. The room had the feeling of a place that has just been vacated, decisively and at once by a great many people. There might have been someone lying in the closet or in a pile of clothing in the corner. It is possible that everyone had been poisoned, and that they just went out a little way into the snow and now lay there in the dark, not far from the room with its brightly lit windows. Through the open door the snow was coming in a little, falling onto the dirty linoleum of the entryway, melting in what remained of the room’s heat. In the photograph, which was never developed, two small, dark shapes appeared to be copulating in the debris.
*
When he was still living and we spoke on the phone, I sometimes had the impression he was speaking to me from inside a coffin: the remoteness of his voice, each pause with its dead air. Though he was usually in his car, I couldn’t hear the sound he should have made as he hurtled through the dark. As I lay on the carpet listening, I’d uncurl the phone cord with one leg as I arranged the other seven so as to crouch in the corner. With the phone’s black plastic pressed into my sweaty ear, as we spoke or were silent for long periods, I’d listen to how alike the quiet was on his end to that in my own dim room.
*
A little gold chair cradling me so that I am suspended on my back. Trapped by a little golden replica of myself, which holds my legs in tiny stirrups.
&nbs
p; “Each fang sank… like a bead of black water returning to a lake, like always—but never in his flesh before—into his thigh, one after the other. When he brushed me away, there was a terrible pain and a sound like fabric tearing, this noise filled my head.”
“You’re very lucky,” the spider dentist mumbles in a voice no human ear could hear, “that the fang is still attached by this scrap of flesh, that it wasn’t lost and that you were not completely crushed.”
“My circumstances are special,” I reply, beginning to lose consciousness, subject to the influence of the silky, ruffled head of the violet poppy that the dentist has maneuvered into my forced embrace.
As the dentist works, I dream of the naked body of the nineteen-year-old boy, who previously kept me on his night table in a mason jar. I dream of the mason jar, ghostly under the lamp, smudged with grease-spots from his fingertips. I dream of the protrusion of the letters formed in the glass and the shallow shadows of those protrusions, of the webbing at the bottom and the patches of fungus—myself, I imagine, a shadow at the bottom—like a dark spot in the x-ray of a lung. I dream of the sound that the lid made as it was unscrewed, the presence of the shadow of the boy’s hand, and the sound of the lid as it fell against the table, or, sometimes, the floor if he had been drinking. I dream of my nocturnal jaunts, at the boy’s invitation, across the pale, taut plains of his flesh, of the hill of his shoulder—which was so smooth I often fell from it onto the sheets—of the gooseflesh that would arise at the touch of each of my eight legs, at the gentle scrape of my tibula hooks. Sometimes my spinnerets, in a moment of forgetfulness, in a dream of what might be, would drape a damp thread from one curly black hair to another. I dream of those hairs meshing with my own, and of their feel against my exterior book lungs, the anterior and the posterior, as I crept toward the warmest, most-shadowed areas of the boy’s body. I dream of the chatter of the smaller things living on his body, which he could not see, and which I could barely understand.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 23
