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Instantaneous citizen of the flash of lightning that wrote across the sky I know.
By the time she left her sister’s house, months had passed and she felt a different kind of disconnect. Dr. Butthole, for one, no longer needed her. He hid in the underside of the couch all day long, tasting himself—for even to a cat, the self was a delicacy beyond any other.
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“You were gone so long that Barbra Streisand became hot to me,” her husband said on her return, burying his face in her neck.
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But he had, he informed her, forgotten how to sleep next to another person, and in a late-night burst of inspiration had bought himself a second bed that he placed side by side with the first. “Honey, I think you ordered the wrong size,” she told him. “It looks like a baby bed.” “Not a baby bed. Bed for an adult,” he said hotly, but when she woke later and reached for him, she saw him tossing and turning in something small enough for an orphan, the blanket failing to cover him completely, his feet dangling off the flat edge of the earth.
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Summer still reverberated, struck like a gong. The hot, curlicued wind carried messages to her. The whole landscape, everything she looked at, was a gold crop that needed harvesting before fall set in and the year began to see its own breath. Her arms spread wide; she felt cut open where the baby had been. Her voice, when she heard it in unguarded moments, still sounded like a flow of human sunshine, kindness. To somewhere.
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Yet the invitations to the outside world had ceased for the moment. Schools were out and all of Europe rested and she was no longer an expert in anything, let alone what was going on.
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Tatsuya Tanaka diorama of a funeral on a keyboard, miniature figures in black with their heads bowed, with a flowering wreath laid on the coffin of the plus sign.
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A photo of a hot actor in a 2014 staging of The Elephant Man, in which he played the main role without prosthetics, just by twisting his torso and making a weird face. This was the test, she thought to herself, and waited to feel either hilarity or outrage. Neither came. He looks like he’s doing a pretty good job, she decided finally. I bet his mom is proud of him, which is what she thought about most people she encountered these days.
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But had she lost her ability to laugh at such things? The New York Times review of the play ended with this assessment of the actor’s performance: “He is, as he should be, the elephant in the room.” Ahahaha—ahahahahahahaha! No, the ability to laugh was quite intact.
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She tried to reenter the portal completely, but inside it everyone was having an enormous argument about whether they had ever thought the n-word, with some people actually professing that their minds blanked it out when they encountered it in a book, and she backed out again without a sound.
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The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette （skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart）; hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.
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The flick of Joseph Campbell’s too-long fingernails in The Power of Myth, as he speaks of the creeper that climbed the coconut tree in his house in Hawaii, how the creeper knew where to go and where to turn its leaves, how it had a form of consciousness. “I begin to feel more and more that the whole world is conscious.” That “These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.”
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If all this was thinking, then what was the head?
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If you were gone from it for a little while and then returned and no longer belonged, what was it? A brain, a language, a place, a time? Oh my information! Oh my everything I never knew I needed to know!