by Lucy Corin
“Deep or stupid,” Arbuckle said, like this happened every day. Patrick couldn’t believe it. He kept looking at Arbuckle and thinking, Is this my generation? Arbuckle kept talking. He explained how the secret money behind the government did it to California and was trying to put the blame all over the map. “It’s our own damn fault,” he said, solemnly. “We did it to ourselves.”
“Did what?” Patrick yelled. “You’re fine. Sara’s gone!”
“Where the hell did all this Sara come from?” Arbuckle yelled back. “All you ever talk about anymore is Sara.”
Patrick said nothing. He just stared at Arbuckle as if they were at opposite ends of the vast white field.
Not to mention, the kid from their class still hasn’t woken up, doesn’t know a thing about any of it.
Back home in the armchair, Patrick is watching his mother trying to keep the tray balanced on her knees as she maneuvers her butter knife into the butter. Folded and refolded sections of newspaper bob in the green waves of the comforter. The television pursues its intrigues. He pictures himself and the TV both in orbit around his parents in their bed. He zeroes in on his father, who seems to be growing a beard.
“Dad,” he says, “Did you know there’s a debate on the internet about whether Godzilla is a boy or a girl?”
“No, I did not know that,” he says.
“Did you know that Godzilla was born of U.S. atrocities perpetrated against Japan but by the seventies turned into the defender of Tokyo?”
“I may,” says his father, “have been vaguely aware.” He gives his focus to Patrick. “Why?”
“Well,” Patrick says, “because I’ve been wondering: how come you have Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster hidden in your sweater drawer?”
Patrick’s mother laughs and puts down her knife. “You have Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster hidden in your sweater drawer?”
“What are you doing in my sweater drawer?” asks his father. Patrick plucks at the front of the hockey sweatshirt, to point it out. “Oh,” says his dad, and goes back to his muffin. “I used to love that sweatshirt,” he says. Goofy crumbs tumble.
“No, Dad, really,” says Patrick. “A person doesn’t just hide things for no reason.” Somewhere in the night he made a decision that if he wanted to say something, he’d just say it, given the circumstances. There’s an umbrella leaning against the side of the chair, and half-consciously, Patrick picks it up and holds it in his lap. Across the room, his father’s face shifts—it’s not a shadow falling over, not a sudden light in his eyes, there isn’t something inside him trying to get out, not anything like that. All it is, is his father looks frightened, truly frightened, just for a moment, but in a way that he has never seen before in his father, or perhaps anyone. Then he recovers. He looks at his son, and he says, “I forgot.”
“Come on, honey,” says his mother. “Why do you have Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster hidden in your sweater drawer? After all these years,” she says to Patrick, winking, “it’s good to know we still have mystery.”
“I forgot,” his father insists, and this time Patrick doesn’t believe him, not for a second. He knows the one about the boy realizing his father is not so strong and wise after all, is maybe even a cheat, a crook, a scoundrel. He finds that the umbrella he’s holding has shifted in his grasp so that it’s pointing at the bed, and the way he’s holding it, he’s shocked to notice, is like he’s holding his dick. He pushes it off his lap and then reaches down and picks it up again. He wonders what to do with it, and then puts it back exactly where it was before, leaning against the side of the chair.
On one wall of the bedroom is a hunt print, painted by a once-famous painter for Patrick’s great-grand-someone, depicting land that used to be in the family. Horses and dogs leap a log, no fox in sight. Across from it there’s a gilt-framed botanical, the kind that shows how a plant goes from seed to seeding. Who knows where that came from. They echo, wall to wall. His mother is propped on her elbow, curled up a little, gazing into the ashes on TV.
“It’s so weird,” his father says. He stares at a correspondent who is standing on the edge of Nevada.
“Really Dad, it doesn’t matter.”
“What?” says his father.
“Never mind,” says Patrick. There’s his father, lost, as if lost in a vast tundra. It’s the first time Patrick’s looked at his father and really seen himself there, in the past and the future at once. It shakes him. It makes a little dust rise. He tries to think of reasons to hide a video, other than what’s recorded on it—ways it could be symbolic as an object. He thinks, Something he watched when he cheated on my mother. He thinks, Something he never watched because the day he rented it he embezzled money at work and got away with it ever since. And that’s the limit of his imagination. For years, when he dreams embarrassing dreams of Sara, she’s the Smog Monster, swooping over hills and valleys, a friendly toxic pollution freak from outer space. But one day when he’s a man, out there living in a freezing city, such as it is, working at a job, playing in a band at least for now, he looks out his window through the frost forest and what he sees, finally, does not feel like land that is his or belongs to him in any way.
A HUNDRED APOCALYPSES
I.
A QUARTER OF A HUNDRED APOCALYPSES
hands out for a new future
FRESH
After so many people were washed away by the disasters, there was usually someone outside the grocery store with a collection bucket. On a sunny day I biked over, feeling good. I walked around the grocery store, especially the produce islands, feeling pretty good about my choices and my healthy way of life. Nobody is mentioning how the increasing rate of madness is apocalyptic. It’s because we mostly eat corn. There are so many decisions to be made in the grocery, that cold room of consciousness. But tell you the truth, I kept asking for it. I was asking for the apocalypse. I was tired of the way things were going. I was looking forward to fresh everything. With the slate wiped clean, the whole world would be at my beck and call. Anything could be around the corner, I thought, pushing my cart through the grocery air. There was the aisle of condiments. There were the pyramids of newfangled soup. Everything that would have happened in the event could really be a turning point for me.
CAKE
She baked an angel food cake for the dinner party, which means it’s as white as is possible in cake except golden on the outside and you have to cut it with a serrated knife. It’s funny to eat because you can kind of tear it, unlike most cakes. It stretches a little. It’s a little supernatural, like an angel.
I was watching her with her boyfriend because I admire them and am trying to make them an example in my life of good love being possible. Toward the end of the cake everyone was talking and a couple of people were seeing if they could eat the live edible flowers that she’d put on the cake for decoration. A fairy cake. She told a story about making the cake. There wasn’t a lot left. Everyone was eating the ends of their pieces in different ways, and because of the stretchy texture there were more methods than usual, and no crumbs at all.
Really funny cake.
I tried to imagine making the cake, same as I often tried to imagine love. I would never make a cake. So it’s down to, say, less than a quarter of the cake and the boyfriend reaches across the table—it’s a big table that no one else would be able to reach across, he just has really long arms, and he takes the serrated knife, but when he cuts at the cake he doesn’t do the sawing action, he just presses down, which defeats the point of a serrated knife. The cake squishes as he cuts it in half; it was only a piece of itself already, clinging to its imaginary axis, and now it’s not even a wedge—it’s pushed down like you can push down the nose on your face—and then he takes his piece with his hands and I watch the last piece of cake to see if it’ll spring back up but it doesn’t, it’s just squished on one side like someone stepped on it.
But here’s what I don’t understand, is how all through it she’s just chatting with the
dinner guests and it’s like he’s done nothing at all. She’s not looking at him like “You squished the cake!” and she’s not looking at him like “He loves the cake so much he couldn’t help himself,” and he doesn’t seem to be thinking “Only I can squish the cake!” Or is he?
I never know how to read people.
But here’s what else: watching the round cake disappear, watching the people trying to make the most of their pieces, people coveting the cake on one hand and reminding themselves on the other that this will not be the last cake. But will it be the last? I look at their love and I feel like this could be the very last piece of it on earth, and just look at it.
WANTING
All day he filled his eyes with the explosions and the commercials.
For some months nothing would do to eat except bread, any kind, including biscuits, croissants, dinner buns, hoagie rolls, Irish soda, artisan peasant, challah, lavash, pugliese, baguette full, demi, sweet, sour, pita, wonder or whatever-grain, any of a zillion crackers, which sounds like a decent amount to eat except that bread was it, and it was nothing but bread. She tried to find other things to eat.
At night he walked through the fanciest part of the neighborhood: blinds crossing vast windows, enormous foyers, each with one shining, hanging fixture suspended like the only planet in the universe of one house and then another, expanses of plaster, vaulted ceilings, the geometries of staircases, rugs on walls. Automatically his mind unified with want.
She searched her cookbooks and then the last of the phone books, imagining meals. Woe on the sofa, woe on the stairs. She went out and walked around town, reading menus, her pockets heavy with cash.
More flowers, more pottery, better furniture, less dirt, excellent collections of film through history, tailored clothing, quality craftsmanship, the cutting edge, caring so much, the fluffy covers, the beauty, the rich.
She took the train into the city where guys in red jackets or bowties stood in the street outside their restaurants, took her by the elbow, and described the food they could give her.
No wonder these televisions hunched behind louvered cabinet doors, sniffing through the slats, their pissed mouths shut. He walked to get his head out of the war, and the walk worked. Why, why, why? One day he’d been wondering, and then, walking, wanting everything he saw explained it all.
Her head, like someone else’s stomach, filled with meals. She let the ideas of them accumulate in piles before her, multicolored, glistening, weighting her utensils, stopping at her teeth. Then she went home and ate bread, hating it, and hating ending up with one and then another piece of Christ, slice of life, hunk of flesh, daily shut the fuck up about bread. One and then another yeasty day. Bread is like stasis, the least common denominator of food.
Then he was back where he started, in the cul de sac in the cosmos between the news and the body. Next door, his neighbor’s silver rowboat was beached in the cactus garden. It gleamed in the street-lit night, appearing as shards. Like anything else, the thing about an apocalypse is it can’t go on forever, and this is what saves it and saves us in the end.
The earth carried everything else like condiments, like lace, like prefixes and suffixes. Then one day. Then one day. Then one day.
Sure, not everyone, but I mean us in general.
OPTIONS
A. MANY
A little man with enormous glasses in a floppy green hat and a blue rain slicker has placed himself on an orange stepladder eye-to-knots with a dormant tree in front of the arched entrance to his mouse-colored house, raising a yellow hacksaw, sizing it up for pruning, which he’s clearly always doing; it’s pared to the shape of a candelabra, bare knuckles, he has made its history. The bones of a cathedral, the inside of a whale, architectures of bodies, buildings, heavens enclosing earth, some god on a stepladder, composing, friendly, the sky one density of gray, his froggy, neighborly smile among colors, as if nothing else in the world matters.
B. HALF
Or a drawing I remember from an exhibit of the works of madmen: the pencil lines of half a city, one line for the sidewalk extending horizontally, like a sidewalk or a plank from the truncated SkYlInE ______________, a line moving rightward into the blank page, like time.
THREAT
For years, a telephone pole leaned, a fear at the back of the neighborhood. That evening they went home and poured several very even trays of ice cubes. I was dressed for the apocalypse. I was depressed for the apocalypse. I carried a bundle of dust like a nest. My heart beat in its fleshy pocket. Girls sketched one another in an auditorium. Worms had tried to make it across our porch overnight and now they lay like something shredded, like shredded bark, but deader. My friends, looking ashen, kept waiting for the telephone. An iris wilted into a claw. A bathtub sunk in our vast yard. New birds gathered like, I don’t know, a lack of entropy?
PUPPET
When she speaks to me in the voice of her dog, do I answer the dog? A guy who worked with me at the store was trying to make it as a puppeteer. We had a party at his house for our manager, Linda, who was leaving, and she brought two white terriers with her for beer and cake. We gathered as if for a group photo, facing the empty sofa. Eric got out his puppets and crouched behind it. These were hand-puppets in the shapes of a donkey and a fish. Then the donkey and the fish came up from behind it. Eric was a good puppeteer, and the donkey and fish were funny, but what was funniest was Linda’s puppet-sized dogs, who sat in the front row and were completely taken in by the magic. They followed with their heads like in tennis. You could see how excited they were to find out what would happen next. After all, I want to know what will happen next. I want to know what will happen if I look at you while you’re talking as if you are your dog and talk back to you as if I’m—I don’t know, what could I talk to you like? Anything?
THE CYCLE OF LIFE
She really needed some time off work so she took maternity leave, but the baby was so much work it was like she wasn’t getting any time off at all, so she killed the baby (hold on, hold on…) and that gave her time off for grieving, a whole other hell of work plus the guilt, and by the time she started to recover she had to go back to work, but pretty soon the future seemed so stupid she started wanting a baby again. When she looked into her options, one that apparently a zillion people had chosen and she hadn’t even known about was a move to the trash-heaps of Navarro. That put things in perspective. No, she thought, my options are way more limited than that, thank the good lord above. She felt her back against the warm wall of her office. She felt her cells battling it out below-deck. She ate a stale pastry. She had one more idea. It was like an egg in her brain waiting to go off.
JULY FOURTH
Got there and the ground was covered with bodies. Lay down with everyone and looked at the sky, bracing for the explosions.
QUESTIONS IN SIGNIFICANTLY SMALLER FONT
I have some questions I would like to pose regarding the End Times. Why disguise angels as aliens? Is the pope the Antichrist? Is date setting okay? Who are the 144,000? Is the millennium literal or figurative? Is the United States of America in Bible prophesy? Does End Time render stewardship of the Earth irrelevant? Will there be a partial Rapture? Will the Lord provide until Jesus returns? What is the marriage supper of the Lamb? Does what’s happening in Israel today mean the End Times are quickly approaching? What is the abomination of desolation? What about the weather? Which time zone is the real time zone? What about the economy and capitalism in general? Is the Devil working overtime? What are tribulation saints? Can the Mark of the Beast be accepted by mistake? Who came up with the EU? What is a red heifer? How long is a generation? Can you lose your eternal rewards? How do we know the Tribulation will last seven years? I am afraid of the end of the world and yet I long for it. Why? What will the apocalypse mean for narrative? What will it mean for Haiti, I mean now? Boy, you know, I have some more questions. Is there a Palestinian people? When will God invade? If Jesus is God, why was He unable to do certain things while on Earth?
Was He nailed through His palm or His wrist? Are there different kinds of speaking in tongues? À la languages? Explain about parables and why couldn’t He just say what He meant? Did tombs break open and dead people walk the Earth? I am unmarried and thirty. Why? Is having money a bad thing? When does Daylight Savings Time begin and end? Is it possible to win the War on Terror? Are horoscopes real? What is the difference between white and black magic? Is genetic research okay? What is dispensationalism? Can I get a tattoo and does content matter? Should I store up food? Is it possible to be free of racial tension? How can I pray for this nation when there seems to be no hope? Why do my prayers go unanswered? Would it be okay to get in touch with my deceased family members? Could you see Heaven if you got close enough? Should my family become involved in Halloween and get a Christmas tree? Is there free will in Heaven? Are there gifts for the spirit today? I just want to end it all. What should I do? I mean, why? Will the Rapture happen this year? What is a Bar Mitzvah? Could a cloned human being be saved? Are powerful people secretly desperate? What is eternal life? If what matters is what’s deep inside, how can I go to Heaven? Are names erased from the Book of Life? One time I had a dream about killing a black person. I’m not black. Does that mean I’m racist? How can I overcome health-related discouragement? What can I do to stop worrying? Do you have to be psychotic to make meaningful change in the world? And for a follow-up, is that what psychosis is for? Should we pluck out our eyes? I keep making mistakes. How can I stop? I mean, why? How do you plan to maintain this site after the Rapture? Do you have any fliers or pamphlets you could send me? Why won’t you answer my e-mail? (http://www.raptureready.com/faq/rap23.html)
