Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  I was still writing to Lev. It was very late. I could only manage a single sentence: Please let me know how I can get started.

  The man I was married to was sometimes in a sort of trance, and I did not understand, at the time, that such trances are given to people by their families.

  I remember sitting with him in traffic, as a spell of rage overcame me. There was furniture tied to the roof. I was driving and could not speak.

  The rage was dense and specific and had a syntax. The rage said, “Your life has no ceiling and no walls and no floor.”

  What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. Every day, when I woke up, I failed. It was hard to understand how one could live a life that was not one’s own without having any intention to do so, but here I was, letting such things come to pass.

  In traffic, in the car, in one of his trances, furniture tied to the roof, the man I was married to observed my rage. He observed my inability to speak.

  “What are you thinking?” he wanted to know.

  I could not speak.

  “You can’t speak,” he said, smiling. “You can’t even talk right now.”

  Traffic loosened and I navigated to a parking spot.

  You aren’t supposed to talk about these things, the various ways he impaled me, the stars I saw.

  There was a soft part to this, and there was something else.

  I received a reply from Lev:

  Please take a girl named Alyssa and do 1/2 page of a diary and 3-4 captions under the pictures. Send it to me and we’ll get started.

  Thank you

  I did not talk about this with anyone. I felt a brief joy.

  In the morning, I went to work.

  At work, the Australian was massive and upsettingly well formed. He was a terrible person and seemed to like walking past my desk. It was a common route for just about everyone and he needed no excuse.

  “How’s the weather?”

  This was funny because I had no access to windows.

  Later on, retrieving files from the bottom of some complex cabinet, bent over, I was approached by a more seasoned member of the staff, someone high up in billing. “That’s quite a system you’ve got there,” he told me, a reference, one could suppose, to the administrative code of colors and endless number chains with which the folders that were my domain were labeled.

  I could not speak. But then I told him, “Yes. Yes, it is.” And rose to face him.

  Mallarmé loved foam. He loved something about the sea, the way it hisses in retreat, the way it is a glossy sheet of numbers, constantly multiplying and taking roots and falling into the pit of itself.

  People seem to think that the shipwreck is the thing, but that’s just wishful thinking. The shipwreck is something like a statue; it’s not anything, but it can trick us. If Mallarmé had lived during the golden age of installation art (which, by the way, is ongoing), he might have built some sort of room. The shipwreck is a prop, an echo, a decoration from a long-ago-concluded party. We don’t know it’s not an origin. We don’t know it’s not what happened. We keep it as a sign or proof. We set it as a seal upon our foreheads and go on living.

  The man I was married to and I went for walks along the Pacific.

  No one could say our relationship was devoid of fantasy.

  He liked to tell me about the activities of the ex-Mormon. He was learning a lot during their narcotic nights. They’d get as high as humanly possible, then go to a park to break things and talk.

  The ex-Mormon was apparently footing the bill. The man I was married to explained that the ex-Mormon was extremely canny. He wasn’t an average person and had long ago figured this out about himself. The ex-Mormon was OK with this. He did not force himself to conform.

  The man I was married to examined a pair of flat stones. He made them click and skipped one.

  “He’s ‘gay for pay,’” the man I was married to said. He described a scene in a recent pornographic video the ex-Mormon had been featured in, in which the ex-Mormon was slung up in a swing. Everyone was dressed as a clown. The ex-Mormon made $5,000.

  “The great thing is, you can’t see his face. With the makeup. It’s this crazy niche.”

  The man I was married to continued to skip stones. “Maybe you should try it,” he said.

  It was the close of a warm day in early October. The sun was doing flattering things to the earth and air.

  I was thinking about how there are so many shipwrecks in poetry, and I was also thinking about how Frank O’Hara died on a beach, hit by a dune buggy. It’s a death that seems so wanton, so flimsy, like it has to be a suicide. O’Hara didn’t die right away. He was young, forty. He died later, of injuries.

  I realized, suddenly, that the ex-Mormon was a handsome man. He wasn’t a bone-snapping killer like the Australian, but he, too, was attractive.

  I wrote to Lev:

  Hi Lev,

  Here are captions for the spread that begins, “I am sleeping”:

  Line 1. Mmm. Such a beautiful dream, I’m in a grove of banana trees!

  Line 2. Oh well, there’s the alarm! Guess I’m just going to have to find a way to make that dream a reality. Wow, feel a little sore from yesterday. Just thinking of how tight Bobby pulled those straps . . .

  Line 3. Just wish I had someone here. Someone like you. Who knows exactly what I like and how to give it to me.

  #

  I am not sure what 1/2 page signifies, re: diary, so will give you ~100wrds and hope that’s what you had in mind:

  I was trying to get in touch with Bobby all day. I have no idea where he was. It started to get late. I was so lonely that I got dressed up in my silky corset and lace-up boots. But I didn’t want to be blindfolded, and you can guess why: I went into the bathroom and put one foot up on the edge of the sink, imagining Bobby was there watching me. I got so hot that I went over to the bed to finish myself off. That’s when the doorbell rang. You can guess who it was. I was so happy!

  Best,

  Soon my parents came to visit. Their take on my life with the man I was married to seemed to boil down to a single question: “Why are you poor?”

  They took us out to lunch at the most expensive restaurant they could find, where my father insulted the waiter. The napkins had a very high thread count. I kneaded mine below the table. With my right hand I stirred some bisque.

  The man I was married to chuckled politely.

  My father glanced at a woman passing through another room. “Is that dress rubber?” he wondered, in slow and casual tones.

  The man I was married to dutifully transferred his eyes to the mark.

  I could not speak.

  The woman was wearing a cotton shift.

  A pit had opened. Everywhere was iridescent. The pit continued to sink, mechanized and sure.

  “What’s wrong?” asked my mother, somewhere.

  It was magic.

  The pit trembled. I could hear but could not move.

  My mother brought the point of her napkin to her lips.

  “How could he say that?” I managed, on a breath.

  “What did I say?” my father bellowed. He was addressing my mother, who was patting him. “I asked a question about a dress!”

  “Relax,” stage-whispered the man I was married to. He put my spoon back into my hand.

  I would go sometimes to the twenty-four-hour donut shop on the hill above our apartment. It wasn’t a fancy place, but the Boston Creams were good and it had seating. It was owned by a family who didn’t seem optimistic about the state of the world, but they knew a lot of the people who came in and maintained a supportive tone. It was a place where I could go to mourn.

  I sat along one of the windows, at a narrow counter. I always had black tea with milk along with my Boston Cream, which I cut into small pieces with a plastic knife in a futile attempt to make it less caloric.

  It was usually
the same man or his precocious daughter who helped me. They didn’t comment on my repeat visits.

  I’d sit along the window and stare at words arranged by Mallarmé. I wrote: Like listening to Genesis read in reverse. Always this sense, Mallarmé’s sentences are occurring in reverse. I kept looking at a certain set of lines: “naufrage cela / direct de l’homme / sans nef.” I wrote: That shipwreck of the man directly without a ship. I put a pair of parentheses around “directly.” I erased the parentheses.

  Outside, a tram rumbled by, taking people somewhere with mystifying inefficiency.

  One evening the man at the donut shop asked, “How old are you?”

  I said, because I really wanted to know, “How old do you think I am?”

  “You’re twenty-five,” said the man.

  “You’re right,” said I.

  “Well, have a good night,” he told me.

  I walked back down the hill, revising my mental list of shipwrecks in poetry.

  Lev said:

  I like what you wrote. So, let’s start with Alyssa.

  To recap: About 7 pages of diary (up or down a bit is ok.) We measure page in a standard way. Then captions.

  Please write 3-4 lines per row of photos. e.g. [1 row: It was so nice to see Bobby . . .] Then second row etc. . . .

  We’ll end up with plus or minus three pages.

  Consider yourself hired for Alyssa’s diary. If all is well, we’ll hire you for the next one.

  If you have questions you can reach me by 415.___.____

  Here are the shipwrecks I know of in poetry:

  Odysseus of course had difficulties sailing, as did the apostle Paul, who was shipwrecked four times. John Milton had a good friend named Edward King who died in waters near Wales in the first half of the seventeenth century, and this event inspired “Lycidas,” a poem with the strange formulation, “wat’ry floor.” Sickly John Keats was done in by a boat trip and his friend Shelley, who later drowned in a sailing mishap, memorialized him in “Adonais.” Emily Dickinson had a floor, too: “If my Bark sink / ’Tis to another sea — / Mortality’s Ground Floor / Is Immortality —” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem about the unthinkable and how it is somehow sanctioned by god. And I am leaving out The Tempest by Shakespeare, although I am thinking, too, of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, in which Prospero is at pains to explain to Miranda that the storm and wreck they are observing are no more than a play. The American poet and labor organizer George Oppen wrote of “The unearthly bonds / Of the singular / Which is the bright light of shipwreck,” and another American, Hannah Weiner, said, “I am a complete wreck.”

  And there is Mallarmé.

  At the temp agency there was a woman in her early thirties. She had ironed hair and wore a pantsuit with a seventies attitude although the pantsuit came from Ann Taylor. She was undeniably chic and had a good position and was married to someone very rich. She was interested that I, too, was married.

  “Are you planning to have children?”

  I said something about how I wasn’t sure of anything yet, which she took to be an expression of appreciation for the corporate ladder. She began to reel off names of persons I would need to meet.

  I waited for an opening. “Are you planning to have children?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “We start this summer.”

  “How wonderful,” I told her, feeling adult.

  “Look at my ring,” she offered, suddenly trusting me. “Isn’t it amazing? It’s Cartier. They only made like ten of them. It’s brushed titanium with platinum and sapphire and black opal. I like it so much more than a single setting, and it’s so unique. I was so, so touched when my husband suggested it.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Can I see yours?”

  “It’s just plain gold.”

  “Wow,” she told me.

  “I picked it out.”

  “Well,” she said, handing it back, “I’m sure your husband loves you more than that.”

  I wrote to Lev:

  sorry this has taken me so long, it will usually only take me 24hrs to turn over an assignment of this length. please let me know about payment and if you have more diaries you need written.

  thanks!

  #

  1. Dear Diary, I woke up this morning and didn’t know where I was. The first thing I noticed, though, was that I couldn’t open my eyes. There was something heavy and kind of cool covering them. Probably a leather blindfold. Maybe it was weighted somehow, like there was metal inside it. I noticed also that my wrists were a little tender (not to mention certain other parts, which I won’t mention, because I’m sure you’re thinking about them already). I moved my arms around experimentally. They were stretched away from my body, securely fastened by some type of leather cuff or straps to the posts of my bed. I wiggled. I could feel now that my legs were also restrained, in a predictable position, and that I was wearing a leather harness that cut into the skin at my hips, but not in a totally unpleasant way.

  It was kind of hard to breathe. I lay there, pulling in short sips of air. I thought, and I don’t quite know how to tell you this, that I could feel drops of water on my face and maybe on my chest and stomach. Then the water began to really fall. I don’t know where it came from. It was warm and I felt myself being bathed but I had to struggle to get air. The water was everywhere, running over me, and then it stopped.

  “Bobby?” I whispered.

  “No,” said a female voice. “This isn’t Bobby.”

  2. I think I was hallucinating yesterday. Maybe dreaming. I don’t know what it was. I woke up again, late, and there was nothing unusual going on. The only thing was, my hair was damp. I guess it could have been sweat.

  I got up, feeling angry at Bobby. I wrote him an email telling him things were getting out of hand and I refused to see him that day or ever again. I know that sounds a little unfair—but I want Bobby to know, just in case he doesn’t understand, that he can’t just sneak up on me, psychologically speaking, without there being repercussions. I mean, my mind is my temple, and my experience with men has taught me that you have to make it a little hard for them! And in Bobby’s case, well, you can guess . . . how I feel . . . The problem is, I might be an addict. But never mind all that, because I had an amazing adventure today.

  I decided to treat myself to a movie in the afternoon. I worked out all morning and took a long hot shower. Then I put on moisturizer (almond butter, it’s the only kind I’ll use), slipped on one of my favorite panties (nothin’ but string, baby!), and got into one of my velour lounge suits. I didn’t wear a bra because, well, it was just one of those days—and I like the feeling of the material. Oh, and I wore lots of lip gloss.

  The movie was this cheesy spy-thriller I’ve been wanting to see for a while; I guess I kind of have a thing for the lead actor (it’s the way he’s so good with his hands!). I was just starting to get bored when I noticed this cute boy sit down in my row two seats away from me. The theater was very dark, and there weren’t too many other people there. I waited to see if he’d notice me, and when he did, I very slowly started sliding down the zipper on my top until it was down below my belly button. Then I slipped one hand in. Now I could tell I had his attention, so I put my hand in my pants. I was imagining what he would think about my underwear. I wished we were somewhere else. But I thought I’d settle for the here and now. I think he knew what I had in mind, because he got up and came over and sat next to me to help out.

  3. I have basically forgiven Bobby. Tonight I let him take me out to dinner. It was a simple affair. I wore a new pantsuit with a corset-top that felt wonderfully tight. We ate at a small French restaurant, it had maybe 10 tables. I ordered oysters and roast chicken and then salad. Bobby just sat there watching me eat. He didn’t even touch his wine. The whole time I felt he was looking at me in a new way, as if he had discovered he desired me differently since I’d told him about what I’d dreamed the other morning and how it had upset me
so much I might never want to see him again. I was almost afraid of him. It was like he knew something about me that he’d never known before, and maybe it was something no one else had ever been able to discover. What could it be? I did not invite Bobby home with me. I am waiting until tomorrow to decide what to do.

  4. Late last night I started missing Bobby, and I decided to make a little movie for him. I got the big mirror off of the wall in my bedroom and set it up on the floor with the camera resting on top. I decided this was going to be a movie all about my fears. I sat down on the carpet in my underwear, with a box of matches. I turned on the camera and started taking off my bra and panties very slowly. Once I was naked, I lit a match. I just sat there, watching it burn down to my fingertips in the mirror. When it started to burn me, I looked at the image of myself. I watched myself wince and flinch. I made myself keep looking even though it hurt. There started to be this other part of me there, then, just as I knew there would. I could already feel myself starting to lose control. My hands were shaking, but I lit another match and held it. I was watching myself do this. I brought it down to my knee. But then I jumped up and shut the camera off and went and dropped the matches in the sink and turned the faucet on full blast.

  5. I emailed the movie to Bobby. I think he liked it. He told me it was “deep.” He’s asked me if I will make another one for him or tell him more about my fantasies. I suddenly feel shy again, as if maybe I’m revealing too much about myself. I do have another fantasy to share with Bobby, but I’m not sure if I should. Here it is, Dear Diary. Maybe you can help me decide what I should do. I want to be taking a shower, when Bobby suddenly enters my apartment and then the bathroom. He picks me up and carries me to my bed, where he blindfolds me, ties my hands, ties my ankles. And then he leaves. He just leaves me there. And I can’t move. And when he leaves he locks the door. And then he goes and gets boards and nails them over the door. And then he goes and gets bricks and mortar and bricks over the wood. And then he goes and gets stucco and paint and makes a perfect wall. I can hear him working. And then there is silence and I cannot move and I feel the weight of the bricks on my face even though they’re nowhere near me. They’re so heavy and so cool weighing me down. And it hurts so much and is so peaceful, and during the hundreds of years that pass even Bobby dies and I am completely unknown . . .