War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) Page 4

  He lands on the fold of my ear and says, “Are you sure? You should probably be more certain.”

  I swat him away. Stupid idea.

  But he will not go away. He insists. “What do you know? Only people who know what they’re doing should teach. You don’t have any business here. Why even bother?”

  I do not dicker with him. He is right as much as he is disruptive. I have no clue what I’m doing. I hate that he inhabits that room, haunts it, so I do everything I can to be ready, to have prepared myself for anything before ever stepping foot into his domain. I carry books, notepads, red pens, gold stars, scratch paper, dry erase markers, and an attendance sheet.

  He is not listed. He goes back to the ceiling. I do not call his name.

  I will not be manipulated.

  I’m new to teaching and not quite used to dealing with the tangible and intangible forces of classroom respect. Yet I will not allow someone beyond the pale to taunt me with such discourteous insistence to malign my efforts. The twelve real students are staring at me, expectant, for the better part of two hours. I suppose I could ask them to quit it, to stop looking at me, to leave me alone, but it might not be appropriate, given the circumstances.

  I do not care that he is that pitiable child of whom the state and church can never quite rid themselves. He is the one for whom no one cares quite enough. The one no one believes in. A child ever exempted from his own requisite rescue. What’s expected of him but to falter, to fail? But. Fuck it. What can I do about it? Let him sit there on the ceiling, watching. The reality of class goes on.

  When I’m in the room, teaching in reality, I try not to concentrate on him, because he is completely absurd. He swoops and dives so close to me that his passing sends quivering trembles through my body, yet I do not address him directly. I ignore him, feeling that he must be at least as afraid of me as I am of him. I refuse his possession of my mind; I concentrate on the other twelve people in the room.

  Most of this has no bearing. The point is, there probably is no unseen problematic child of behavioral pathology screaming and crying and using God knows what other psychological intimidation tactics on me from up there on the ceiling. That’s just some stupid idea. I’m really the teacher and, even if I’m the kind of ninny who frets about the implications that hovering ideas actually do have, I am deserving of respect.

  He offers none.

  But how absurd are our expectations of this child on the ceiling? What valiant anti-antiestablishment establishment fight is bred in him?

  When he draws you in, there you are bumping your own head against the projector, looking down on a room full of hopeless earnest fools eager to learn something about anything, and you find yourself having to resist the domination of your own mind by his entrenched apathy.

  Why resist? Why not submit? Why not go along with it? Why not let an ignorant child tell you exactly how it is and how it’s going to be?

  Why not enter into alliance with this child, this stupid idea?

  Shouldn’t he fight to become some kind of self-possessed self-respecting something in reality? Empowered! No. Probably not. I forgot. The assumption is not that he won’t. It’s that he can’t. Beyond that, he has no voice. He’s silenced by nonexistence but also by the bell curve’s adamant case that he does. So damned by pedagogical theory, he is forced, forever, to never learn.

  The reality is, we are in the classroom, right now. Mainly, we are here because we all want to write as well as we can. I say things like, “What was that book you recommended, Jim?” Or, “How is it that a canoe trip is like a marriage, Lotti?” Knowledge is no beacon. But we laugh, together, which makes that idea, that stupid irascible disconsolate unaware unteachable child, dissipate altogether.

  100 — Hysteria in the Street

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  I am divorced. I really loved my husband, but I was a bitch and he was an asshole. I’ve got proof. I flipped channels when that plane landed on the Hudson.

  Dear Hysteria in the Street,

  Oh my God. You are a bitch. Totally. You are a train wreck, and everyone knows it. People are talking about you. And not even behind your back. They are talking about you to you, and everyone thinks you need help. So I guess you might just get a job as a cashier somewhere. There are a lot of such jobs. People take your money at a lot of different businesses. But remember, you can't flinch. You cannot react at all when mothers with enormous tits come in buck naked under lavender bathrobes demanding, "My son needs his Sunkist soda before school. He's in the car." You cannot flinch when old Indian women show you their ripped-out linings of their purses. It wouldn’t be polite. Cashier jobs are great. You can even put your own money in your cash register sometimes. Just don’t take any back out.

  19 — Whimsy

  Anyway, Milo decides we should crawl up the bar, over the curling roses in the woodwork, under that old blower they use to keep the smoke inhalation to a minimum, and just go right smack into the mirror.

  It’s an antique. I admit a fleeting moment of reservation. We’d been enjoying ourselves, chatting it up with an irascible sushi chef and the bartender. Not that one girl with curly hair but the skinny guy in belted black jeans. The one who always makes us listen to Kenny G. on Tuesday nights.

  Conversation was enough for me. I didn’t need the escalation but Milo seemed to know best.

  Bitter glee, so unburdened by the fates as to seem almost, well, almost as if our youth did exist, replaced any notice of the passing time. So it didn’t really matter that I was afraid. Milo climbed into the mirror demanding that I follow.

  I don’t blame him for not explaining more. Likely he didn’t know what either of us was about to get into, couldn’t have foreseen. But he seemed so experienced that he might have mentioned what would happen when our dives began.

  Although, really, I forget myself and am not sure I can describe it all that well, not from the very beginning. Glass is an amorphous solid, a sort of impossible-to-perceive liquid. I believed it wasn’t substantial. Still I didn't know how fast, or how slowly, how thick or thin, how sick or healthily I would have to go on to move through such a strange seemingly-solid fluidity.

  Oh. Wait. Now I remember Milo saying that diving down into the mirror felt like rolling through a roundness, hard and unfathomable, and it would almost be like sliding around the curve of one of those colored twists that stays, forever trapped, in a marble.

  We each had our individual experiences but falling through the mirror happened to both of us simultaneously. There was no fun house displacement or condensation. He was not me; I was not him. We were one with the reflection.

  Marbles don’t shatter. They bounce and clatter. That’s the kind of place it was. The world inside the mirror isn't really that different from a lakeside walk. It is darker, sure. But not all completely unfamiliar. It's not what I expected which was an underground mine that opens out like a tree fort made out of peaty stuff and branches into civic-planning-committee train stations on a mythological river, you know? Or an igloo. Or, no!, a cave, where water drips stalactite-ish, into calcified blue, artificially-lit pools of well-marketed discovery. And it's not hot, either. I'm not sure what it's like exactly. You'll have to ask Milo.

  But however it was there was no oxygen, so at one point, with self-preservation in mind, we decided to just give up breathing, to conserve what reserves we each had packed away deep down in the alveolar recesses of all the amorphous impossibility inside ourselves. (That was my idea.) After a while we wanted so very much to begin again with our lives the way they had been that we tumbled so sleepy, like zoo-kept belugas, against our window of the world. You know the one. It’s like the one at Rockefeller Center, only bigger. Like, Grand Canyon big, only glass.

  I huddled with the masses. He nuzzled like a baby calf, only tougher, more respectable.

  When we woke (and don't ask me what exactly happened, because I don't remember everything and—thank God—neither does he) there was something diff
erent. I felt sort of crowded in a way that I didn’t know before. I stood up but found no internal way back out and up through the liquid marble twist. We’d held off for a long time but used up our reserves. Breathing became necessary. I had to inhale something, didn’t I? So I just took my surroundings in. It wasn’t agony when I felt that marble twist fill my lungs. It was like lavender ornamental florist beads that put attractive weight in the bottom of a minimalist crystal vase to hold the flower stems just so.

  I was completely committed. My chest filled with the weight.

  I had been in love, twice, but had never been possessed to the point that I required exorcism. So, it was very odd to realize, to know, to become aware that we were the same human being, suddenly. It was all elbows and squished in.

  We denied its influence, its very reality. There is something so unnecessary about a friend who actually lives in your entirety. Like a lifetime witness. I like Milo, don't get me wrong. And, to my knowledge, Milo's never once said a bad word about me. It is what it is, I guess. Just too much, too close.

  So anyway, I stood there—right there with him—trying to accept that we’d become one being breathing twisted glass lung-filled something against our reversing image window of the world into and through all the me of him that I never even tried to get used to.

  20 — Ablation

  He didn’t want to know what would happen at all in the next two hours and wished he hadn’t been told. Ray Hollowell let the word play over and over again in his mid-mind, a place where metamorphosis means nothing. “Ablation,” the doctor had said again right when Ray arrived with his wife at the cath lab that morning.

  Ray didn’t mind the upcoming procedure. He understood necessity, survival. But being unconscious bothered him. The orderlies might accidentally let him slide off the gurney and onto the floor—it could happen when they were shifting him onto his bed in recovery. He put it out of his mind.

  Ray lay there, staring at the TV, trying not to look at the dirty vent in the ceiling, trying not to think about sliding off the gurney while unconscious, trying not to think about the short-circuit rhythm of his heart, or about how any tiny wires were going to go in through a vein in his neck, or the way electrodes mapping the impulses of the muscle in his heart worked, or how on earth they managed to weld-kill the place where irregular beats began to cause such erratic disruption.

  Ray thought someone should probably come clean the vents. Didn’t seem right for the vent to be dirty in a hospital. But he didn’t call the nurses’ station. Figured he’d maybe mention it after the procedure. Wouldn’t want to tick anyone off before he went under anesthesia and couldn’t defend himself in a potential fall.

  21 — Mortifications

  Sometimes I sit here and think of different ways to pass time. I reorganize shelves when they are not pleasing. Maybe they are crowded or cluttered somehow. I like them to have a certain order. And sometimes I change my mind about that certainty. This usually depends on the season.

  Like now, in the winter, I can put the beach towels and the camp chair—the black one I bought my father for Father’s Day the last year he was alive—further back since I don’t really need ready access to them. I put my summer clothes away also so I can make more room for sweaters. I also reorganize if things keep falling down from the shelf or tipping over on the shelf. I have several kinds of shelves even though this is a rather small apartment—it’s a studio. I have the shelves in the kitchen—in the cabinets. There are about fifteen shelves in the kitchen. And I put a little shelf over the sink so that is another shelf. These shelves are very important. It is important that they are always organized—making food is about awareness. There needs to be awareness about the inventory of food and spices which are available for making food and awareness about the tools required for cooking. So having a mental image of your shelves is very important. These shelves are my highest priority.

  I have a few shelves which are ancillary to the kitchen and cooking. These are the top of the refrigerator, the shelf of cookbooks which is actually in my living area, and the oak armoire (given to me by my mother on my sweet sixteen) which now serves as a pantry. I have lots of bookshelves but they almost never get rearranged. I have one area for reference books, one area for books of poetry, one area for children’s books, one area for field guides, one area for books about money, one area for what I consider to be highbrow reading, another area which I consider less highbrow, and several miscellaneous shelves that are arranged more or less aesthetically.

  The shelf I rearrange most often is above my bed. I rearrange it when I need to store something or when I’ve forgotten exactly what’s up there. I keep a few nice things in case I ever buy a house. I have a set of silver candlesticks from the 1870s up there. I thought about getting them down at Thanksgiving when my mother and sister came. But it seemed discordant. I hadn’t really pictured my silver candlesticks on a secondhand coffee table. I hadn’t pictured me sitting on the floor, my mother in a free rocking chair I found on the street in Philadelphia, and my sister in the desk chair—giving thanks. There wouldn’t have been room on the table anyway. I’ll get them out next year maybe. Or take them to wherever I’m going.

  I also put a lot of time into decorating my apartment. I decided to put up some pictures of people who make me happy. So I’ve got some pictures on the walls. There is an area to sit down and talk. There is an area to watch television. And I bought a used electric piano where I play hymns and folk songs when I get so bored with the silence. I guess I forgot to mention that there is a shelf with some piano music on it when I was telling about the shelves before.

  If there’s no shelf on which to work, I’ll get up and make tea. Most days I watch at least one movie. Depending on the movie I end up thinking about someone I know, someone the movie reminds me of or who I think might like that same movie. Sometimes I go so far as to mention it the next time I see that person or if they live really far away I just send them an email about it. If it’s not nighttime (which is when I watch movies) I read something, maybe from a magazine or a biography or a book about finance or perennials to put in the garden or something a friend recommended months ago. I rarely finish reading anything.

  I don’t always finish dealing with my shelves, either. There is a shelf above my coatrack that I have decided to ignore for the time being. There are two boxes on that shelf. They hold paperwork that extends back into all my identities and addresses and lives and roles and I just can’t rectify those boxes right now—so I leave that shelf alone.

  67 — Sperm Donor

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  My wife recently had a baby. Or she is thinking about having a baby. Or she is thinking about getting me to marry her so she can have a baby. Or she is thinking about fucking me once after we stumble home from the bar drunk so she can have a baby. Or something. I can’t really figure it out. Is there any way that I can tell if I want to have a baby with her?

  Dear Sperm Donor,

  Whoever this woman is, she is crazy. She obviously wants nothing substantial with you, and you don’t deserve to be treated like that, so dismissively. It’s demeaning. Hard to say what any of us wants, so I’m not sure if you’ll ever figure out whether you want to have a baby with her. But you should probably fuck her, and figure it out later.

  22 — AT-4

  Have you ever picked up an AT-4? That is a serious weapon. You have to be pretty pissed off to come anywhere near that thing. But I did. It intrigued me. I was an E-2. An army private going through the motions. I was being trained. They call it soldierized. I had signed a contract. Whatever the justification, on a quiet morning out under the smudged skies over the Ozarks, I picked up that AT-4. And I shot tracer rounds right into that bastard horizon.

  It was nothing to consent to this act. Much less a commitment than volunteering to kill and be killed. I remember picking up the weapon and almost laughing at it. The AT-4 is nothing. It's basically a piece of PVC pipe, plastic. Made to be light, easy
to carry. The thing almost seems silly. If you drop it on the ground it makes this donk sound.

  But then when you shoot it, there’s that enormous back-blast.

  What submissive hell do we ask of others? In the living room, where children grow and where we daily assault our loved ones, in the workplace where we exert our authority as a matter of course, on the battlefield where we are so excited to get to kill and be killed, what are the motions we're asked to go through?

  If Mom or Dad yelled at each other it's a pattern. Easy to pick up as an AT-4. Why are patterns of anger so hard to put down?

  What if no one is asking you to shoot? What if no one needs you to be as pissed off as you are? To keep you identified with such rage. If it didn't define you, would you still choose it?

  As you dismantle the defenses the vulnerability mushrooms. Hard, though. Really hard to let the rage go. The definition of who you are becomes less clear. The integrity goes. And if there is a sense of vulnerability, if there's no integrity, of dissolution even, why not indulge in an Ozark afternoon of assault with an antitank weapon?

  Why do we ask boys, and a few little girls, to keep rubbing salt in the wounds of personal trauma? Why do we clap for the man with the AT-4? Why don't we say, "Hey! That shit is crazy! Put that thing down! You're gonna hurt yourself!! You'll put someone's eye out!"

  Our military force is a volunteer army. I suppose it’s better than a draft. We don’t want anyone going off to war who doesn’t really want to be there. Yet, isn’t there a problem sending those who can’t wait to go? Every kid who joins—we were almost all kids—is just a little too angry. Willing to shoot holes in every edge and horizon. Willing to die for any good reason. Sometimes for none.