In deep night, when I listen to sounds of the rainforest, I feel like I’ve returned to my mission.
The landscapes are nothing alike.
I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.
It was with me before and will be always. It’s in every children’s book.
Kiss our babies for me a thousand times, and remember to water the seedlings.
I’m counting the seconds until I see you next week.
BUILD
Eureka Gold
1
It was billed as one of those old-fashioned snowstorms, the kind that had been predicted throughout Gregory’s twenty-eight years but never quite panned out （according to his father）， always devolving into rain or half-rain, icing up or turning prematurely to slush, and leading, at the Sunday family dinners Gregory sporadically attended, to nostalgic reveries from his father—who’d walked New York a lot before he got famous—about what real snowstorms used to be like: the softness, the silence, the transformation of a frenzied city into a plush, whispery terrain.
“You say that every single time, Dad,” Gregory would huff. “Word for word.”
“Do I?” His father always seemed surprised.
Now, from his waterbed, Gregory could hear his roommate bustling around their small common area preparing a spate of last-minute weed deliveries to ease people through snow quarantine. “Guess who’s on my list,” Dennis called. “Athena.”
“No way,” Gregory said.
“Third time. She’s way into the antique thing.”
Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl: “whorled” and “crosshatched,” “sonorous” and “plump” （Dennis’s MFA in poetry served him well in these marketing descriptions）—in other words, authentic in ways that the bloodless, odorless tinctures that passed for weed nowadays were not.
“How is our Athena?” Gregory projected, with effort, toward his open bedroom door. In the weeks since a mysterious fatigue had confined him to his bed, Gregory and Dennis had perfected the art of conversing between rooms.
“Unchanged,” Dennis said. “Topical. Fearsome.” He popped briefly into Gregory’s doorframe.
“Poison,” Gregory said.
“Aaaaaant.” Dennis made a buzzer noise. “Word-casing.”
“True,” Gregory reflected. “？‘Poison’ is no longer toxic.”
“？‘Toxic’ isn’t toxic,” Dennis said.
“？‘Toxic’ is anodyne,” Gregory agreed. “？‘Robust’ is limp. ‘Catalyze’ fails to react.”
“The ‘silos’ and ‘buckets’ are empty,” Dennis said.
“What about ‘empty’？” Gregory said. “Is ‘empty’ empty?”
“？‘Empty’ is supposed to be empty,” Dennis said. “？‘Empty’ fails by being full.”
“But does ‘empty’ convey enough emptiness?”
They could do this all day.
It was Athena who had first made them aware, in the workshop where Gregory and Dennis met, of word-casings and phrase-casings: gutted language she likened to proxies. “Find the eluder,” she instructed her rapt graduate students, narrowing gold-flecked eyes at them across the seminar table. “I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing—fire it right in my chest. I’ll die gladly for some fresh language.”