Fall 2018 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

The way my doctor goes about it

seems to allude that anything is a well

some distance from total drainage.

It is true that my body has endless

things to say to you who touch me

through the sleeve of this day mist.

The earth was made too vain to consider

that any one thing must gones for another

to preen. All of the parts of me keep

reaching like mimosas for touch

and killing themselves. In the last of my most

hopeless weeks in Boston as it was slow

wintering my only pleasure was to drink

glass after glass of orange juice by myself

watching what could have been the end

of my life. But I don’t think I can ever

be finished; I’m in love with far too many

countable things. And there are all their names

to learn. Whatever you say I’ll plant

a thousand flowers to retaliate. Always

you want to be special in your nothing

but there is the pail of your body working

against its own current insisting

with unweary voice there is no end

just water on water on water.

the brick path worn deep into so a bruise of moss blooms out beneath



the surface of the whole—one day i stood



 



upon a wicker seated chair & fell at once & that same thing took hold



within both shins. a swollen marsh. among the cherry blossom trees



 



at alishan, windows are made in certain trunks & crutches bear



up certain limbs. the boardwalk



 



opens for these bodies as devotional. the cedar forests



blur the light with cedar fragrant mist, from a thousand year



 



old stump mushrooms another, & that second stump in turn buds



with the grandchild tree. roots murmuring through gills. a placard reads:



 



the first sacred tree fell in a storm, whereupon local government



arranged a fair election for another one. we arrive at bleachers



 



semiluned around the newer tree, the vapor rises through us as a chill



or memories of isthmus thin enough that on the road



 



water entered into each eye, we drove a golf cart along the caesura of a long



rhythmic line to somewhere murderers had once unearthed



 



innumerable woman figurines. picture working the earth of the body



open with one hand & stretching in



 



for a shape of clay, of bone, of dark moss in your image. of jelly. for the seam



of loam. under the skin’s a humid place



 



you won’t want to stay long. now out of which



i conjure a long line of mothers, each one sick in her slow way



 



holding her cup of water, going towards bed. how tired she is, she says.



can we not let her rest.

I can come but still I cannot meditate.

Before these months, when I saw a bathtub,

I did not dare lie down inside of it,

knowing I might begin to dream of physical

cloud and epidermis, and come apart

as completely as I had dreamed.

As I had feared. So many sensations.

But you know, I tried this last night,

as I went through my meticulous list of

trying, top to bottom. I lit the expensive

candle on the windowsill naked in

my bathroom and admired the stained

marble, and thought of all the things

I was afraid to forget, but could not

know them, nor find reason, and when

in the morning my mother came in

exclaiming she smelled the candle,

I said I did not. For this is how,

whatever is apparent to you I do not see.

While the white scented body of wax

was slow waning there was no pleasant

smell, or any smell at all, only

the self in the throat, slowly diminishing.

Does it matter how festive it was, the setting out for far country,

the horses, their chestnut flanks, their eyes the color of black basil,

which is purple, really? Now just skulls where a face used to be,

shameless, as in bereft of shame finally, each catching the snow

gently but differently, the snow, and the wind scattering it, as if



unapparent meant nonexistent. They say language has its own sorrow,

but no word for it: does this crying out maybe come close, though,

can we say it does, to have stared into the dark and said aloud, even

if quietly, Who’s there? Anyone around? Panicking too late, as is

the way with panic, the killer stumbles through woods and a snowfall



that feels like ritual and a release from ritual, so that it also feels –

at first, anyway – like being lost, but free. Beneath the pines, the two

horses stood exactly where he’d left them untethered hours ago. Snow

dusted their fine bodies. Nightmare. Nightmare Lifting. Their names

swim up to him. I remember, now. Yes. Now it’s all coming back.

It’s hot in the middle of the storm. It’s humid

gray. Makes the dust bloat. I can hardly breathe in

it, air moving too fast for me to hold onto, wind’s body

swimming over mine. Like being in a room when all

anyone wants is a little power over you, arms stroking

against heads, black wide glass eyes darting, staying afloat...



In dance class we are told to fall forward–

hurtling our bodies ahead, asking to be caught

by our selves once we get there. What I put forward as

flesh gets pushed back by wind. Our bodies hurtle against

each other, one risen from the sea, one made out

of clay... Power is a series of erasures. You fall into it. You

push against it. It pushes back. The wind is full of coyotes

saying, saying –



Some days, I say, I don’t think of it

at all. I wake up having already been loved

by the entrance of the day, the day that says come out

now. The day that says the earth is your friend and you

have a secret between you– it is your life. You walk out

under the blue carpet of night and see planes migrating



overhead, then a fountain, this magnolia tree, its pink

fisted buds newly unclenched, dormancy beat open,

pushing up against the seed-coat... Here we are,

we did not ask to be woken, though it was not easy,

not safe, we open as oblations on a dark branch,

pink-veined luscious mouths drummed open by rain.

A voice inked with water and wind rises. And the black

loam beneath.

And then just like that, with hardly anyone

noticing, it became daily harder to remember when

this sense of being at sea had begun – at sea, as in

on a wave of doubt mixed with fear and yet no small

amount, incongruously, of fevered anticipation, not joy

itself but the belief, still – the half-belief – some joy

might come. Maybe

                                  the beginning doesn’t matter anyway –

whatever wasn’t the case once, it’s the case now, long

days of jazz and drinks named after jazz, Give me a John

Coltrane, someone saying; another, I’ll take one more

round of these Take Fives…Not that there aren’t

those who suspect the headiness of this new weather

will soon enough dissipate, the holler-and-buzz

surrounding it will follow suit. We’re alike in that way,

you and I – comrades, if you will, in our shared

suspicion, whether you know it yet or not, says

the captain to the young man across the room,

who of course can’t hear him because the captain has

only said this to himself, not aloud yet. He looks at

the young man,

                           who hasn’t yet seen the captain. It’s as if

he’s trying not to look. Look at me, thinks the captain. And

the young man’s head starts to turn toward him. Any

moment he’ll see the captain for the first time. The way

all histories begin, apparently. What destroys finding

what will be destroyed, though which is which has yet to be

determined. Almost lavender, the captain’s eyes are, in this light.

The first weeks of summer, I knew no one in Santa Fe but my coworkers at the newspaper’s culture desk. I covered arts and music and literature, local goings-on, regional history. Quickly a peculiar pattern appeared in the cultural landscape. Everywhere science pervaded.

The first tip-off was all the science fiction writers. You could barely take take your dog to the park before he sniffed the butt of a science fiction writer’s dog. The first few weeks of my job, I was sent to interview them in hordes. I asked my copy-editor Joan what the deal was, blessed Joan, who shared my cubicle, who possessed an infinitely replenishing supply of red pens, who  turned her chair around one-hundred eighty degrees for my every dumb inquiry. Joan, when people say Anglo here, do they just mean white? Joan, what is a Frito pie?

Sometimes, her answer was not an answer at all. “Joan, where are all the science fiction writers coming from?”

“Ah, yes,” she says. “It’s because of Los Alamos. Plus there’s Roswell, where the aliens landed in the 60s. There’s the real science, and the woo woo science, but it all gets mixed up. So, science fiction.”

Her answer felt like the delivery of some mysterious package, pulsing with significance.

If you walked into a bar or festival or concert or coffee shop in town there was a pretty good likelihood of its being alien-themed or outer space-themed or nuclear-themed. The cultural centerpiece of the summer was the Santa Fe Opera House’s production of Doctor Atomic, set in the nearby town of Los Alamos—one of the strangest locales in America. It is a city of labs, or the labs and the city are one. The labs emerged suddenly and covertly during World War II. Thousands of scientists uprooted their families and relocated to the secret, militarized town. They needed a place to build the atomic bomb. The opera tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb, but set to music.

I went on a few mediocre dates with physics students working at Los Alamos and they unfailingly brought up the extreme security measures. Their favorite was this: “If you leave your bag lying around unlabelled, they’ll blow it up.” It was never clear who the “they” were. The dates said this like a brag. To exist amongst operations of such gravity.

Something about this place had drawn the science fiction writers; the alien conspiracy theorists; the new agers. As if a giant magnet sat beneath the city pulling in all who sought a quick spiritual fix. Each visitor wanting something desperately, unsure exactly what, feeling that this place would provide it.

Or there was some other mystical entity nestled underground, like a large, shimmering crystal, which, in fact, there was. Henry, who was studying hyper-fission at the lab and seemed to know something about science, told me so. We were sitting at one of the atomic themed bars. At first, I didn’t believe it. It sounded too much too much like what all the gift shops were offering up—salt lamps and star charts and other new age commodities. And it sounded too much like what so many Santa Fe folks were telling me when I first arrived—that there was some buzzy current in the air that made life here different and strange and wonderful, but there was also something out there that might doom you. That this was the price you paid for specialness.

Every season, Henry said, the crystal sends up energetic waves into the city. You vibe with the energy or you don’t. Then, the lands accepts you or it doesn’t. If it accepts you, the city gives you little gifts, serendipitous moments, and things go well for you here. If it rejects you, life becomes a chain of misfortune. Sometimes it rejects you then accepts you, or accepts you but then rejects you for a little while and then accepts you and rejects you off and on for a few years, and so on, and it all sounds suspiciously like life.

But then I asked copy-editor/personal oracle Joan, and she told me that there actually does exist a bed of obsidian beneath the city. She even took a chunk of it out from her coin purse. When my eyes widened she shot me a look: “We all buy into the woo woo a little, or we wouldn't have come.” I get it. It’s like the zodiac. Another language to talk about ourselves. Don’t begrudge us our tiny scrap of cosmic significance. How could I, when I counted among the converted?

I should disclose, this particular summer was even more science-crazed than ordinary. That’s because the city of Santa Fe deemed it the “Atomic Summer,” a celebration of the state’s atomic heritage.

Talia’s in her booth at the con, bugging the bunny phone, but her father doesn’t pick up. She cradles her own phone close to her cheekbones, sweating on the metal in one hand and using the other to click refresh on the taskbar on the browser on her laptop. He’s on a list, she wants to tell him. He’s on one of those copypasta lists goose-steppers grow on Stormfront and /POL/ until the thorny burs are ready to fruit and spread to the undersides of YouTube videos and Facebook groups. The laptop fan whines inside the plastic casing as Talia tries to balance the machine on her jeans. She’s sure the screen is going to fritz out from the heat if she doesn’t first.

The empty hour—the glorious hour—was six-oh-five to seven-oh-nine. Foon would sink into the velvet wingback, his stiff suit removed and blown open on the floor, as he raised his damp feet to air out atop the coffee table. Faint whiffs of Windex cooled the hairs inside his nose, from where the housecleaner had clarified the glass. He called Mah. He  parked his car. Outside the garage door was sealed and—like Foon—finished for the night. Nothing more was required of him.

To this idea Foon filled a teacup of whiskey. He swiveled his head toward the sunset and saluted the dozing eyes of the garage. “Aye aye,” he said, and then, pondering, “Is that what they say? Eye? Yaye? Aye-aye-aye?” Foon watched the silk curtains, imagining the fat coils of his brain bunching up in concentration, and then gave up the thought entirely. Giving up the thought entirely: that was the pleasure of six-oh-five.

Through the doorway leaned his wife leaned in the doorway, a dishtowel hanging from her shoulder. *Nine years later and still so pretty*, Foon thought, admiring her strong arms, flexed and dotted with freckles.

“These fucking potatoes,” said Marcy said. “I can’t chop them anymore. That’s all I ever do. Chop, chop, chop.” She pointed her chef’s knife at Foon, beckoning him to join her in the kitchen. “Your turn. I’m begging you.”

“Cupcake, I would love to,” he said, his hand falling to his chest. “But I’m afraid I’m much too high.”

“Are you crazy?” she said, eyes wide. “Have you actually gone insane?”

“Don’t talk about insane people like that,” said Foon, gesturing toward the window.” He imagined himself a character in Masterpiece Theater, a show his boss had told him to download. Foon chuckled into this chin. On the coffee table he crossed one ankle of his pajama pants over the other.

“Don’t tell me you smoked in the car,” said Marcy, squinting. “Please.”

“I did,” said Foon. “I enjoy a head start these days.” He wagged an assured finger in front of his face, as if instructing a child on the ways of the world. “Same with Mah. Call on the drive home? Done. Say hello, I love you, gotta go? Done.”

“What if you have to pick up a client or something? Or if I go have lunch with Flora?” Red, blotchy territories were traveling up her face. “The smell, Foon. You never think about the smell.”

Foon shook his head and closed his eyes, leaning deeper into the wingback. From here Marcy’s voice sounded far away and light. Like delicate Styrofoam, he thought. Yes. Like a sprinkling of bright white packing peanuts.

“Look at you,” she said. “You are always, always high.”

Foon pondered this statement with a finger to his lip. “That’s true.”

Her high voice rattled, like an alarm straining to sound. “We said that we would alternate, but here you are,” said Marcy. “We have to eat, you know. Come chop for just five minutes.”

But five minutes lost in the empty hour were five minutes lost to hell.

“If they’re potatoes,” he said, “they why not use the food professor?” He paused, listening to his voice, and giggled. “The food…the food….” In his stomach an air bubble of laughter rose uncontrollably through his chest. Foon grinned, trying to hold his breath, but then gave up and bent forward, giggling into his knees. He couldn’t help himself. It was funny.

“Food pro-*cess*or,” said Foon. “Pro-*cess*or. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

“I can’t believe I’m watching this.”

“Food professor. Oh my god.”

“You’re an asshole,” said Marcy.

Foon rested his face in his fleecy pajama pants, listening to the quiet made by his own not speaking. His wife was breathing angrily through her nose, and the sound of it crawled into this ears. His father, in moments like this with Mah, would have bowed his head in patience. He would have closed his eyes, composed himself, and waited for the cloud to pass. It was, theoretically, the correct thing to do. But Foon had always known that he was not quite his father. He was powered by a different battery—newer, more American. Foon had come farther, had reached higher, and he would go farther still. And when his wife called him an asshole he almost relished the moment that followed. To hurt her back, exactly the way he knew; it was a target revealed for which he alone had the arrow.

“But I’m your asshole, Cupcake,” he said. “I’m all you’ve got.”

Marcy fumed into the kitchen. Foon heaved up and stumbled after her around the large leather couch set. Only recently he’d encountered this sensation of being both angry and baked. Marcy threw her dishrag on the tiled floor, then lifted a pot from the stove and poured its brothy contents down the sink. She took the metal lid and let it clatter in there too. Steam rose up from the drain and collected toward the ceiling in a flat, expanding cloud.

Foon kept his gaze sighted on her swinging yellow ponytail, which thrashed like a caught fish as she pointed at each accusation.

“The dishwasher,” she said, staring him down like a bull. “You said you’d fix it. It’s not fixed.”

Foon crossed his arms. “Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that.”

“The washing machine, the leak upstairs. Why live in a house like this if you let it fall apart?” She picked the rag off the floor and started wiping the splashes of broth on the counter.

“What do you imagine I do all day?” said Foon. “Go to the office and twiddle my thumbs?”

“It’s been three months, Foon. Three months, and no dishwasher.”

“And what, you can’t call them yourself?” he said, talking to her back. “Are you physically handicapped? Do you not speak English? Do you have a clinical phobia of phones?”

“Don’t you talk to me that way,” she said, yelling now, but he’d learned long ago to yell over her yelling. Reliably his voice was larger, full of force, and it would cancel hers neatly like a soprano leading a choir.

Foon said Marcy was uptight. Marcy said Foon was an addict. Foon said that she had no spine. Marcy said that he would die alone.

“Die alone?” said Foon. “Me? So I’m the one who will die alone.” He lifted his arms and swung them around the wide expanse of their marble kitchen. “Where do you think all this came from, Marcy? This is what you get when you have a thing called a *job*.”

I

There is a photograph my mother is fond of showing people whenever she explains how far I have fallen. I am insolent now, uncharacteristically so, and she is unused to seeing my anger so unhidden. “See how happy we were?” she laments, phone in hand, zooming in on the expertly cropped image. In it, we are standing soldier-like behind a table overflowing with food. The corners of our mouths are upturned in the same way. “10th grade, Thanksgiving break,” she explains. “She had just gotten back from boarding school.” And then, invariably, she turns to me and asks, “Do you remember that? What a nice girl you were? Do you remember?”