What’s true is that they can only stay like that on the floor until the heat begins to die in the room. Eventually Bosch has to get dressed, go out to the woodshed, and refill the woodstove. He leaves Aram, thinking, He’ll get into bed, and then we can sleep for a few hours. He leaves Aram inside but keeps the smell of him sucked nearly all the way to his heart as he enters the white outdoors.
* * *
• • •
WHEN HE AWAKENS, Bosch hears birds. He thinks of a boat taking him to Alaska, of seagulls. But then it is not birds. It is fainter, human. Soon he recognizes it as the little whimper of a boy; no. It is his mother whimpering. He goes to her room. She is not there. He goes to the sound. She is in the bathroom. It is barely light. Something smells wrong. He does not want to open the door, and then he does, and there they are on the white floor, mother and child, a little red-and-blue lump of fetus curled near her. Five months, six? His mother is so pale she looks dead. As if she’d run out of oxygen hours ago. Her mouth opens and closes. Her hand twitches for an instant. He bends down and looks at things. It is a boy. It was.
* * *
• • •
AT THE WOODSHED it is clear that more wood needs splitting. Bosch considers not taking the time, then remembers how much Aram likes to sleep, decides that an hour will have no meaning to a beautiful sleeping man. Let him dream. Let sleep take him below the surface of things. Let the image of death be reborn, every single night. With each heave he lets loose a terrible and mindless sobbing. He fills his arms with wood; there is no weight heavy enough to release him.
With arms full of wood, he has trouble opening the door, but then it gives, and a great whoosh of warm air hits the incoming cold. It’s a wonder that lightning doesn’t form from their meeting like that, Bosch and Aram, two men at different ends of something, or some electrical charge, some white spark crackling between inside and outside. There he is, unmoved on the floor where Bosch left him, a beautiful pale smile on his face, his eyes closed, lashes painted down onto cheeks. His arms are stretched out on either side, his blue veins making rivers across his infant-thin skin at the wrists. Bosch thinks, There is no other heaven than this, this is heaven on earth, and he closes the door and builds the fire like a new faith for all the white against them.
A WOMAN OBJECT (EXPLODING)
Goddamn it to motherfucking hell, she says.
I think that ought to cover it, he says. He asks her why she feels the need to swear so much, so deliberately, what depends on it, why it’s so important to her. Why, after so long, she hasn’t grown tired. Worn out in the mouth.
She looks straight into his eyes, straight into his skull, says, Fuck you.
It’s curious, he says, because now when she uses profanity, it sounds like everyone else’s ordinary speech. Like when she says, Goddamn it, she may as well be saying, can you let the dog out? or I’m going to check the mail. She wouldn’t say she’s angry, but her eyes flash hard at him for saying this, as if her language did not disrupt, did not slice open the air and slash him across his goddamn stupid too-beautiful face. She knows he is lying. The simple truth is, he was raised Baptist in some shitty little West Texas town, and she was raised in a fucked-up place called Father. His hands are beautiful. Her mouth is potty. They are lovers.
The real reason she’s swearing is that they’re on their way to an evening art party. He knows how they make her feel. The art parties they attend together are full of falseness. He is a white male genius artist in San Francisco, and there is nothing real about white male genius artists in San Francisco: not the art, not the women who live with them, not the men who live with them, not the galleries, not the critics—My god, the art critics, can’t we just shoot them?—not even San Francisco. Everything is filmy, filmy as bay fog.
All of them together make one big pile of shit, she declares, grabbing his hand as they approach the neighborhood of this evening’s party. He squeezes her hand. She squeezes back, thinking, How meaningless, wondering, Where is the risk in squeezing a lover’s hand while walking to an art party?
They pass rows of colored houses, staring forward like so many faces. Her descriptions: the fucking amazing view, the goddamn little rows of windows stretching for fucking miles. His: more azure evening light, warm glow from the inside out, houses alive. Doors, windows, roofs speaking. They make a good pair, or rather their mouths do: hers pushing out, exploding, his soaking everything in, slow and sweet.
When they’re almost there, she suggests, wild, Why don’t they run back down the hill, past the doors and windows and faces into the evening. She starts to unbutton her blouse. The light is dim; he can barely see her. She tugs at his arm, and he half believes her, as always. But just then someone sees him from the party house and calls out his name, so they turn around and go in after all. She leaves her excitement standing in the yard, leaning toward the night, eyes wide, chest heaving, naked.
* * *
• • •
INSIDE, EVERYONE CALLS him Pater. His name is Peter, she corrects them, but she is the only one who calls him this. Finally some man with a mostly bald head except for some styled and sculpted gray on the sides explains to her that Pater sounds more like the name of an artist, that more people will buy from a Pater than a Peter. She is astounded that he thinks he must tell her this. The paintings: What is being bought? Sometimes she can’t remember his name at all, simply his paintings.
At the art party she does what angry women do. She drinks. A lot. Language in the rooms of the party suddenly turns liquid. Animals begin crawling out. One man becomes a lizard, his belly scraping the shag carpet, his arms and legs sticking out stiff from his body. Another man who has been pinching the asses of women all night turns into a crab with one huge red claw, so heavy he cannot lift it anymore. A woman with big lips becomes a blowfish, bubbles rising from her face now and then; her eyes, moved to the sides of her head, look magnified. Peter, Pater, becomes a bird with extravagant colored plumage, terribly magnificent: His back sways, his chest protrudes.
She drinks wine she drinks whiskey she drinks beer she drinks tequila shots. She still feels like a fucking person. She goes into the bathroom and removes her bra and underwear from beneath her clothing and stuffs them into the medicine cabinet. She emerges from the bathroom some new animal that no one has ever seen before. Everyone notices her. She pretends they all see her as a magnificent exploding poppy but knows they likely see her as a stain. In her head she names herself something between the color red and the word “devour.” She looks for him.
Some small man who might be a ferret or a weasel is talking to Pater/Peter, the rooster or the peacock. Everything swims. She watches her lover shrink. She moves closer. The ferret/weasel’s mouth is making sharp, jerky movements. Closer still she hears words like “ridiculous” and “no talent” and “not a chance in hell.” Her lover is shrinking before the weasel into a small bird, then into a chick, peeping uselessly. The ferret-man’s tongue looks long and dangerous; his lips are knives moving together, slicing and clicking.
She hates. She hates the ferret, she hates the smallness of the chick. She hates the alcohol, she hates the art party, the animals, the body who came into the house. The ferret’s mouth becomes the only thing she can focus on, even as a crowd is gathering—because by now of course she has started swearing, a mighty swear swarm, like starlings murmuring. Even as the fish-woman swims up and blows diplomatic bubbles between them, even as the giant red pincher drags itself near, the ferret’s mouth clicks and slices and becomes more clear than is possible, so that finally she has a direction for her hate to aim at, and she punches his mouth right off his face. Everyone is a person again, humanly stunned.
A man rests on the floor. Her knuckles ache. Some quiet hands lead her away, a man whose name she cannot remember. He is saying, It’s all right, it’s all right. She suddenly realizes this is how she feels every goddamn night of her fucking life. His ha
nds are on her face, her shoulders; he tries to sculpt her back into being okay. Her own hands hang useless.
This love cannot live unless she fights him every day of her life. He paints, will paint. She aches for it all to be over: the years, the relationship, the waiting. She aches to summer over into a different life. She runs toward summer with no hands. All mouth. He will paint with or without her.
COSMOS
The city’s destination sky planetarium gave a laserlight show every Thursday and Friday night. The show included the music of Pink Floyd—Dark Side of the Moon—and the audience was mostly teenagers. On these nights the planetarium lost its scientific propriety and gave way to sweat and to the movement of hands and lips sunk down low in theater seats. Constellations and galaxies surrendered to configurations of neon-colored light, geometric patterns translated into math equations. Music that failed to narrate and yet fully described. The eyes below did not study, just looked on stoned, glassy gray, and marble-like, filling the dome as close to full as was possible.
The planetarium had to be thoroughly cleaned every Saturday morning, as the teenagers left all manner of themselves behind, like sticky and worn cultural artifacts. Food, gum, cigarette butts. Condoms and rolling papers. Lip gloss and rubber bands. Plastic drink containers, soda cans, straws, and beer bottles that rolled to the center of the floor and rested there like tiny spaceships, marooned and abandoned.
Ty Conner did the cleaning and had been doing so for the last eight years. He’d learned the species in precise detail, watched them gather there in the dark, recorded their behaviors, kept notes, formed hypotheses. His fascination with social organization and human structure filled his head with bubbles of untamed thought. The teens seemed to carry a world of matter and energy within them. Everything they left behind became something he wanted to save, to sort and arrange into a new thing that was beautiful and true. He wanted to harness and remake their entire existence.
Over time, from the materials they left behind, Ty had built in his home a kind of tiny city, an architecture of their leaving. He commandeered his dining room table and used it as a tableau of their existence, assembling the evidence of teen presence there like a sophisticated model of urban life.
It had started simply enough. He’d found a lipstick and brought it home, mesmerized by the mechanism, its easy rise and fall reminding him of gears or pistons. He’d pictured it immediately as some kind of tower in a building blueprint, not unlike smokestacks from the past, but in this newer, futuresque city it would pump up and down hydraulically, perhaps as a form of energy generation, perhaps as a mode of transport, similar to an elevator but more advanced. That had been the first piece, leading to his first drawings, and inspiring him to collect other objects, more and more of them, each with a distinctive purpose in this new city born of youth.
The teens who swarmed out of the planetarium left things there that they didn’t need or want, things that just fell away from them like artifacts: a cracked iPhone, various vape devices, batteries and atomizers, flasks and old-school silver lighters, hair ties, a Fujifilm Instax Mini 9 in bubble-gum pink, a wireless mobile Bluetooth speaker, a pair of Beats headphones, all manner of water bottles, a worn PS4 controller, a paracord bracelet. When he thought about the objects and the city evolving from them, he was filled with awe; he saw the future bright and beautiful, a future that easily discarded morality and good citizenship in favor of an existence based on liminality and provisional presence, like television waves or information traveling by phone wire or electromagnetic light. It all made perfect sense to him: These beings left traces of themselves in the objects they left behind, they represented a new order of existence, new cultures and superstructures, space travel and cosmic weaponry fanning out into the cosmos. The vacant look in their eyes was not boredom or some residue of millennial apathy. It was the future dulling over ordinary vision. It was the past disappearing like discarded refuse.
No manner of event could draw him away from his obsession. By day he cleaned and at night he worked on the city. Saturday evenings were a watershed of knowledge and a plethora of work: minute, painstaking labor that involved the careful consideration of objects, the fierce action of the imagination, steady hands, and the will to create something from nothing. A bridge crossed a toxic-waste site through a series of elevated tunnels made from cans and paper. Cans of Coke and Sprite and Diet Pepsi connected buildings like commercial passageways. Condoms stretched taut between ballpoint pens created great tents over business and technology centers. The tents had a dual purpose: to house the work within a steady, temperature-controlled environment and to filter greenhouse gases through a complex biochemical procedure into hydrogen-oxygenated by-products, stored in heavy tanks made from water bottles.
One feature he was especially proud of was the garbage ventilation system, by which all manner of waste was sucked down to the underneath of the city and processed into usable fuels. Every social space had great vents at its edges, and all airborne or material pollutants were simply sucked away, three times daily, eliminating trash, pollution, even insects and rodents. After a terrible accident the first year of the program, grates had been installed to prevent small pets and children from being accidentally removed from the socius. Since then the city had only increased in efficiency and beauty. Ty had filled notebook after notebook with drawings and plans detailing systems such as these; sometimes, just before sleep, he imagined historians of the future discovering his notebooks and marveling at his foresight.
Amid these emotions, this daily activity, it happened one Saturday morning that Ty reached down under one of the Destination Sky Planetarium seats with his plastic-gloved hand and found himself holding an arm. At first he thought it was a baguette, like the one he’d found once before along with some molding brie and an empty wine bottle. Then he thought it might be some kind of gag: a summer sausage, a stuffed piece of pantyhose, something. But it was a human arm. Bodiless. The hand intact, stiff and clawing and white. His breath jackknifed in his lungs and his eyes bulged in their sockets and his mind raced: What what what the fuck? And even as he held the lifeless thing in his own plastic-covered hand, he couldn’t get his brain to contain it, to lock on to it in the normal way. He just stood there like a great thick stuffed beast, unable to move or speak or stop looking at it gesturing at him. The arm was stiff and heavy, and his own arm and hand began to stiffen and grow heavy too, as when a limb goes to sleep or the brain forgets its body.
Some part of his mind, far away from conscious thought, had a long conversation about turning the arm in to the authorities, but instead he found himself putting it in the bag he saved for objects to take home with him. He spent the rest of the day in an awkward, herky-jerky daze. He spilled chlorine bleach over the seats in the front row, and the smell of a swimming pool on overload filled the dome, nauseating, a hard ice pick to the temple.
That night he did not work on his city at all. Instead he walked to the part of town where the local kids hung out, until his eye was caught by a teen couple across the street—a boy and a girl, or a man and a woman still becoming. He stopped and pretended to pick up a bit of trash as they entered a coffee shop, the hipster kind with a floor-to-ceiling window in front. He walked over to the nearest trash receptacle and lingered there, watching them. A bunch of teens hanging out together wouldn’t notice a man across the street. He could be a vagrant. He could be anyone. He was as close to being invisible as possible.
What he saw as he watched made his chest ache. The boy put his hand on the girl’s hand. The girl kept looking down at the table and smiling. The boy wiped his hands on his pants—once, then twice, the damp heat of youth. They were beautiful. They were terrible.
His elbow ached; his arm had gone a little numb from leaning on the trash bin. He could feel the sting of tears and that walnut in the throat when you’re trying not to cry.
The one and only time he’d asked a woman to a movie, she had an as
thma attack in the middle of the film. An ambulance came. He thought she might die. He thought it would be his fault. He never contacted her again. That’s what you get for thinking you get to be in the world like other mammals, he decided. He unwrapped a ball of throat lozenge wrappers—they had fallen from her pocket as they hoisted her stretcher—and made them part of his city. A crown of golden cellophane light atop a skyscraper made of toilet paper rolls. Then he drank three-quarters of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and fell asleep on the living room floor, the thick shag carpet tickling the edges of his ears and fingers.
In the night, strange visions made a fist of his brain, twisting his thoughts toward his greatest challenge. His city was inorganic, artificial in every sense. He’d been ignoring the fact of it, having taken such joy in the world of objects and design. Surfaces. He’d made no attempt to render nature: no miniature trees, water, dirt, worms, rot, or any of the elements that make up a world. He’d concentrated solely on the artificial, the built environment, and the science required to hold it up. The arm entered his dreams not as an arm but as an argument, as a logic of the organic and the biological. The arm had a mouth and spoke to him clearly. There is no life without death, the arm said, organic and perfect. In the middle of the night he woke and added some bleach to the whiskey, a little cocktail. His lips puckered and burned. A sore formed quickly in his mouth. He vomited, his throat on fire, and fell back to the floor.
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