proximoception

Looking back across that first week of our acquaintance I was struck by how much about how she spoke, dressed, behaved seemed designed, if not precisely to rebuff, then to make clear that if a certain degree of access had been granted much more was withheld and was likely to continue to be. Even when she at last undressed for me in her room her garters, which she never did remove and which I can for some reason picture her selecting from a catalog, seemed to suggest something more was being held back, even as they held back nothing. Letting her hair down seemed to belie that warning, though - seemed like the true crossing of a threshold, unlike the parenthesized denuding preceding it. While we weren't the sort to announce or verbally negotiate, and were as conservative as any couple that had abandoned shyness just since, the most arousing thing about her was a look of agreement in her eyes. It's a look you know, the one where the pupils have gone so large that you become aware of what they reflect, like a turned off television. The brightest light in the room or out the window dominates, becomes the moon or evening star of that small night. Even when still such eyes seem always to be leaning, coming toward you. Accurately or not, they seemed to convey that she would agree with whatever I proposed. Not because she had anticipated what that might be, but because she either no longer cared if she had or was excited that she hadn't. Half-asleep and watching her dress afterward there seemed something almost bureaucratic - even oddly reminiscent of Kafka's Castle - in the progressive layering of garments, the shining and knotting of the hair, the freezing of the expression via makeup into one of both superiority and slight surprise. "Almost certainly not" overwrote her native "Yes, of course." And I was now glad it did. Not because it kept other men at bay, as I expected no trouble yet from that quarter (perhaps naively), but because it somehow offered privacy. It felt something like the infinite-seeming quiet hallways, the loudly impersonal elevators, the giant's-living-room lobby and "Yes, and?" skepticism of the prompt, prompting desk clerks of our hotel. Something like all of those layers of evening one threads through to pass into night.

Further down the hallway the doors stopped and murals began, pictures of some city far away in someone else's country and deep in their past, what looked like both sides of a major thoroughfare, the sidewalks and windows and signage and doorways of shops. Walkers in the mural - not passersby, as the only one passing was you - were rare and spaced near-regularly. You could tell from far off when you'd see one because instead of heads there were cylindrical inlet shelves with spherical smoked glass lamps in them, the dim and only lighting in that whole stretch of corridor. Traverse it enough you'd be tempted to give them names, ones befitting their colors, of which no two were much alike. You'd learn later that this was the portion beneath the actual street, that short stub of pavement, virtually a square, between the big library and the little Statehouse.

...

It was a sort of paste made with tuna and it really did pull blood out. The damnedest thing. He couldn't bring himself to ask them who'd hit on it and in what circumstances, given what they were doing. Someone must have had an evening nearly as horrible as this one.

...

She was a flirt but it had never been a flirtation. We shared both an interest and a problem: him. The operation was both in constant danger of going under and obviously, to those close in and with wits and eyes, a front for something riskier still. We couldn't ask or tell anything to the point, at least not there, but even then I think we were both probing for something under the guise of weather inquiries and wardrobe tips. It wasn't till the third afternoon in a row that she'd recited from memory the same involved recipe for whiskey cake but with just a few details changed that I realized she'd hit on a code. But I couldn't figure it out no matter how long I spent trying. That's when I asked for her number. It's not like they could stop us from dating, and wouldn't they prefer this to our pairing with outsiders? She must have known better than that but assented because she was dying to tell me by then. The real start of us, she told me, at least for her, was when she came over and found out I'd baked her the cake.

...

I liked how the rain looked on the window and I liked how it looked in the open air over the harbor. A latch and two steps and it was a different sort of world, and each did something distinct for me. One, it all seemed miles away or long ago, and like it were being contemplated from some space of exception - of wisdom, warmth and safety where nothing could ever be wet, one in every sense curtained. The other, out on the balcony, the air was cold and the drops were sharp and joined and clung but it moved, it was real, was the same thing in your lungs and your blood as it was on your cheek and away in the fog. Some baseline of life, a dirty oxygen. Despite the Gauguins the inside's was more like a tomb's. Given all that had happened that had its own special appeal.

...

She'd tried to kill her with a shovel, recall, but here the two were arm in arm. Their bracelets even clinked. I drank the whole rest of the milk carton to buy time to put something not fear in my eyes. They were smiling, though. One of them had told the other and now both knew. Maybe they'd told each other at the same time, I imagined idly while they advanced.

...

It was a curious commute and a lonely one. The strange injunction to never breathe while stepping made it verge on sinister, though you'd also learn at last that there was a reason for that: the fixtures were gas, and old, and the ventilation iffy. A single tugrope turned them all on at once, some millionaire's conceit no longer subject to the millionaire's upkeep. Everyone was terrified of leaks. One hiss, they said, run. You'd learn the most efficient pattern for that distance and purpose was one pace, then inhale, then one pace, then exhale. Mostly because that prevented counting and other sorts of overthinking, reliable disturbers of respiration. It didn't bear dwelling on during the doing. Much like the job itself.

To leave the freeway is to arrive at her door with flowers. Finding a parking garage at the lower end of town is seeing her eyes through her hair at a crack in the door. Searching floor B and then floor C for a space and then finding one back on B heading out is talking with her about their colors as she arranges them in two vases, one for the bedside table and one for the window. Getting lost in the park in the darkness until finally finding the roots of the tall trees built along the steps is being about to ask if you can use the bathroom but being cut off by her dancing slowly backwards into it while opening your strange, squat bottle of wine from Wales, then closing the door, then urinating so loudly you feel scandalized until you realize it's sinkwater passing into a deep and echoing vessel (could she have poured out the wine?). Ascending past the judgmental facades of the hometowers of the moral, old and rich and tripping frequently in their merciless shadows is sitting first at one end of the single couch and then the other while deciding what to pretend to be looking at while idly tracking an inpour of phone messages from a baselessly panicking acquaintance who wouldn't listen if you said so. Negotiating the turn where instead of platforms the sweep of steps is intervaled by inset carp pools with underwater steps of their own, making for a shelf of fish, one of black weeds, and a central trench of bubbles and debris where a fountain and statue had been removed from each, a casual absence spurring mild eurekas about filtration and wondering if the smaller ones ever swim into the works is her sudden reappearance in too much nudity to adjust to without seeming uncomfortable in a way misinterpretable as disgust or disapproval such that your heart races and your pattern of sweat susceptible skin brews its ceremonial helmet and you wonder if they're the visible drops or just a sheen or perhaps even subtler or instead rivulets or even washes with V shapes in the shine where your face grades suddenly and you need to open your mouth to get enough oxygen and realize with horror that you'd better say something to naturalize the gesture but whatever it is will have no or too much sound and none articulate then at last process that she'd winked at your reflection in a mirror while passing and exited into the bedroom singing and clearly high. Entering the abandoned-seeming outer lobby and picking half the flowers from a trellis out an open window and wondering which of the elevators goes to her part of the building is a minute of aimless talking while your shoes and her tatter of dressing-gown come off and you try a few angles of locking that your bodies can't stay with until the gradual impress of otherflesh smoothness and whatever word fits how a third kind of temperature happens at first touch that never returns melts all strangeness away into beauty.

I returned past the building with the bleak facade, but the posters were no longer there. I never saw that face again. It was hard to believe she'd been up all over the city. But the city is like that. Like a forest, but worse, as no season repeats. You do find a leaf now and then that's long outlived its context: machine gun shells, a dusty bag of child's balloons in dust, a leather case from cell phones' adolescence, a battered T-shape shaved from corrugation, fuzzy dice now lopsided and pipless, a mint tin full of wrappers with Bob Marley's face on each. But not her. You'd think that the people would know. Every one must have met her eyes somewhere, some subway or corner. Dark brown. Unreflective. Blaming, but feeling like fourth in a series of seven admonitions that this was at last the last straw. A point at which she no longer believed it herself but soon would again since how dare you. It was a startling expression to capture and copy. Caught exiting a blink or rushing corners many strolling must have thought it meant for them, for some part of a second, before consigning that notion to their basements of hypotheses disproved before fully spelled out. Not meant for them. She hadn't found them out with a glance. It had instead been me.

How strange what we usually are seems at those times. We live, so why do we not push that life into air where we know it can thrive? With so much needing done, and incessantly, and in order, and inspired, who would tuck her head beneath a wing and just hum, just breathe. Well, her, her morning self would tell herself, when the dream colors faded.

I heard them hearing me in the attic. I walked out the door and down the hillside till I could make out their crouching silhouettes through the blind. When they figured out where I must have gone those shadows rose, convulsed and then resettled. They looked just the same but they'd now turned around. Their unseeing, unseen eyes were like knives thrown at knives mine were throwing. I thought over three different ways I could jump to that roof.

She was trying to talk to me. Or to who she thought I was. I dug apart the sand words with my boot. And then noticed the matchstick.

Where the two covered walkways met there was a gap, but not one that would get you - the plexiglass awning hung over the shingled peak. This storm was an exception, though. The wind shifted right as he chased me down the flags to angle a disc of carwash across both our necks. Our shirts were both soaked mostly through in front when we collapsed, panting, among the bushes in the lobby. It was a warm and strangely dirty sort of wet, befitting its tropical mother. I think it made us pant harder for not knowing how much was our sweat. The heavy clinging cloth felt like frustration. I'm sure that's why a gun was in his hand when he got up.

Her sister's head hadn't looked right after that. It was a subtle list, the slightest wobbling lean out from the flagpole of her neck, but put a spin on everything she did. When she was happy it suggested sarcasm. Not so happy, shame.

It took a while for lying against the skylight to become a less heart-pounding matter. My pulse may even have normalized after that first afterless-feeling hour. The cold glass was rather comfortable against my cheek, but though I closed my eyes and dallied with the thought of napping it only heightened my sense of being a body suspended too far above the place for any body. Each inch of air between me and however much marble that was seemed to be a distinct and personal enemy, one with a name. My sweat smelled like iodine. There was enough that my face slipped, at one point, my hand at another. My imagination came up with the zigzagging squeeging sound I might make if I coasted unevenly down on a pancake of sweat to the edge of the building.

His pants were off so it would seem strange to resist the suggestion. That innocent mistake - well, so to speak - began the fourteen-month affair that would get me killed.

This second chance to eat locusts was quite disappointing. They were sticky, almost gummy after boiling in sugar and oil. Distinctness was lost. You didn't think of them as one with their purpose, as bejeweled machines with fine parts peeled from grass blades, from birchbark and cobweb-stuff, wound up and pointed to leap and affix. These lumps were like regrets to those stick-roasted ones' predictions.

It's only parkour when it's day-time. Here, now, at night, it's a test to see does gravity bother to kill you if no one is watching.

When once the lights went out you had to assume it would be forever. So when the fluorescent went dim and then a day later the dim started to flicker everyone in the room went into a sort of frenzy. We'd all been fairly sedate before, but now love was being declared. I love yous, in language or proof-touch, here and there, but mostly other things we loved or had. Talk of them, letters mostly sans recipient. Many songs; it seemed like all six of us had been hiding a guitar somewhere in that small space till then. Paint: spilled buckets and some shattered bottles of condiments were slid about in from corner to corner and as high up the walls as the tallest hands could go. For a while we dipped our hair in it and remade each other. The paste on the floor soon incorporated not just the shattered bottle glass but everything the great desk had contained, then splintered guitars, then the hair we cut off once it formed helmet-like crusts and started itching, or aching our necks from its weight. In the middle where a few of us slipped in memorable simultaneity the clear spot became the low point of the room, as furniture and bodies and unaccountable clumps of texture now amphitheatred up in jags, as though an air volcano had erupted in an atmosphere of lava. While others rested one or two of us would speak of love. Of missing things, mostly, or being about to miss them. I spoke of tacos. What would happen when you licked one. How the newborn cool of diced tomatoes behind the wall of dead ground larded fried dried corn paste with its creaking and its sugarglass fragility and sandpaper hostility seemed to freshen as though unimpeded, like the voice of a mother behind a door, while the cheese and lettuce fragments lay as light and foreign as the dirtcrumbs in the nostrils of the dead. The darkness cut color away as I finished and we all cuddled up in the flat space in the center and shivered as one in the silence. In darkness you're part of the ground. The intimacy of gravity's self-lit, though nothing else is. Where you end is no less clear, but it doesn't matter as much. Each you is too clearly a segment of something unending that covers the earth, or whatever the earth becomes in total dark.

Till it all snapped back on. Months have passed, dim months, but without any flickers. And we're all still here. We resumed our routine soon enough. We cleaned the room. The dark's return is never spoken of, but little else is either. The loves have all been swept beneath a planet's-worth of rug. You wonder how it will be when it starts to go again, with no more guitars, with no more mustard. And every last can of tomatoes we ate at first light.

How when you hear a song for the second time it fits your expectations about it like a missing puzzle piece. What this has to do with love.

She laughed too suddenly and with too high a pitch when I asked if she had any children. I glanced up quickly to track where her eyes went but they stopped instead of going. There was a clasp on her purse, and a half-minute later she snapped this a few times in rapid succession, as though to start herself back up like a lawnmower.

He said he'd never killed anyone and he still hadn't, technically. But when it came to lives was there anyone more careless?

More even than during the bombing we were hesitant to cross any of the six little bridges at night after the armies had come through - first the one chasing the other, then that film played backward, almost in a single month. The two broad enough for tanks people worried about the most, though they maybe shouldn't have. I more than once saw the tanks led across from my window near the rail bridge. Even during retreats there was a protocol, a quite similar one for both sides. Whereas with the infantry in those days any protocol stayed hypothetical. It was a human outpouring as forced and unpredictable as the first well-water after a thaw, or that first burst of ketchup. And the colors were about the same, the mineral crust of mud, the streaks of red. Though blood was bluish-black on uniforms. Came to seem one of the colors of each side. The only one they shared. Of course the blood had come out much more steadily than panicked foot traffic. Not always entirely evenly, but when there was a twist you felt there was a pattern to it, one reminiscent of magician's scarves. It slowed dependent only on supply. One protocol for all.

What the icicles did with the cracks in the bricks was obscene. That winter was looking for something that belonged to it, and its prying fingers were set to pull apart every home in Europe in the search.

How when you hear a certain song for the first time the world seems at last like the right kind of puzzle. What this has to do with love.

I was so drunk so often it's like I never was. I gave the nights to someone else, and lived my days in anticipation of how happy I could make him, how forgetful. Maybe I wasn't happy at all, when drunk enough - after all, I seldom was on the first bottle, the bottle that ended the day. That's why I always finished it before sunset: so I wouldn't lose those nights I'd never remember.

She truly wanted to do what you wanted. You could never tell if that was because she wanted it too or because you did. Unless it was because she wanted the proof that she'd grabbed you by your wanting and could now lead you anywhere. There may once have been someone for whom the play was about the money, not the high, but if so he got rich and retired long ago. And was probably in banking. And not named Dina. And not your next door neighbor's wife.

She knew another lie was the only way to get him to tell the truth, but she just couldn't do it. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I'm saying she died - she's dead - because she needed to have never lied to him. And what you're trying to do goes back and makes even that a lie.

I also ate a lot of candy back then. I liked the simplest kinds, and I picked them based mostly on color. Eventually all they had left were translucent ovoids, from a stack of crates salvaged from a factory in the district's capitol. Boiled sugar syrup or a substitute, lightly flavored with some kind of root, with sometimes a bitter or unplaceable hint from the dye. Their wrappings were green so the color you picked wasn't quite what you'd get, which I liked. And how they were clear but you couldn't quite see through them. That felt familiar and right. And sweet and safe. Like when all the girls joined hands and danced in circle at the Christmas shows. Or where the river bent left beneath the last bridge and on hazy nights the lights on the arch would spread to form soft shapes with their reflections. A loop so not water nor road could take another friend away from me.

Her dog barked, up and agitated. "I'm your sister," she was forced to yell. A scene to prevent a worse one. Two lights in windows at opposite ends of the house sprung on almost together.

Sometimes you do a new thing when you give up. I put my bruised foot in the gutter and watched rainwater run by and then over it for probably an hour. A number of caterpillars fell on me, all relatives. Their tree was too wet. I wondered if there had been a signal about it, or some sort of discussion. Or if it's a family trait that tells you when to finally give up. One slipped down to my toe. And it sat there, just straining about for some non-showing ride. Which is why I got up.

What this has to do with love you'll have to tell me. But after that songs had singers, had instruments. Were recorded on specific days, days with weather that colored the songs. Would each be heard for the last time by someone on another day. They weren't always clear, these connections, but every last one of them mattered. Had mattered all along.

Now mattered to me.

Yesterday, walking, I stumbled on a way of escaping loneliness without taking on another's hurt.

But at once I became sad I had no one to share it with. I brought it toward town but everyone was starving and weeping. They wept over starvation, but also over how their tears would at once become icicles. When this ice grew too unevenly one would fall over and freeze to the ground, deep in frozen tears by this time, and be lost, and so all would avoid both the fires in the square and more sadly each other. It wasn't even winter. The cold of last year's tears was too intense. They'd become a glacier. I was in the fields and saw the tears, each tear a tiny glacier like a seed to grow a shineless silver tree to choke all growth along a furrow. Sometimes the living would trip on the dead and freeze right onto them. Their relatives would circle them and cry, then run away, in horror that their tears might seal them in, or to see that their slowing tears already had. And they already had.

An awful town. My way, which was warm in my hand, I then put down. It seemed too selfish. Anyone I shared it with would feel the same. We would perish from shame together. I set it among the furrows on a curling branch of shineless ice.

It seemed there like an upward-hanging apple.

Going home, I heard a tiny crack behind me.

I dreamed that I was dead and two were walking by recalling me. They said I'd brought it nearer to the town.

After an argument God, drunk, kicked Adam in and partly through the face then dragged him by one arm and a handful of hair down to the streambank, where he dunked his giant head into a small pool beneath a willow's roots, caught a fish in his teeth, spat out most of it, nudged the rest of it about his cheeks for a few minutes and then pulled from his mouth a rubbery looking green and purple glowing bag. He stuffed this into crying Adam's nostril and slammed it home so hard that the pool was red for days and the species lost the smaller and more attractive of its two original noses.

On waking in the hospital Adam found that some of the things he looked at stayed behind, or rather mockeries of them did, simplifications made of and manifesting in a restlessly shifting fluid, nearly transparent, self-lit. The substance couldn't be directly focused on, as it swam apart in panic into blackest corners and unders when one tried, but when one focused on some other scene or concept it would reassemble itself gradually at the center of vision, as though pooling at lowest ground, and accept being looked through. Once gathered it moved with his eyes. It would only color at first, and not dramatically, but the longer attention and enthusiasm were sustained for something outside the self it would begin to form complementary pictures, enhancing or underlining or extending or counterpointing what existed with what had or would or ought to or tellingly failed to do any of those.

God visited him on the third day, as he knew God would, God's benders being what suns wind their watches by, and asked him with a continent-broad smirk if he was seeing things. Adam looked at God a while till God became so uneasy he ate the cheap gas station bouquet he'd brought. Adam didn't say a word. God left.

Forty-four years later Adam said to Eve, twenty-eight, after a fight and reconciliation that he hadn't meant to snub God but kept clammed from fear of admitting that when he looked at God his color pouch had done something new, concentrating itself until it replaced him with how it imagined the bathroom door, wall-mounted phone and cowering nursing staff behind him might look. Its guesses were good - it almost never tried that hard. And certainly never showed that level of mimetic skill. It was almost like the world were nudging it, using it to prove there need be no gap. He was terrified at how easily he was becoming convinced of God's absence and of how furious this might make what God remained. If he spoke he feared the truth might come out with his words and that a race would begin between the well-advanced erasure and whatever swift outlandish violence God would perform to yank out the offending bladder from his brain. His fear, he thought, might have been all that kept God whole in the room, as a pattern of ripples suggesting a face. Like a nightmare. Had God guessed any of this? He'd moved away sans word that week, and had relayed all messages since then, even transmitted instructions for activating the dust-covered Eve unit, via shapes made by the shadows of the angels on the moon. Only one seemed to be alive now, and its shadow always looked like the same sickly comma. It hadn't even stirred in months. Eve didn't turn her head to look out the window. God talk again. Don't encourage.

When they were drunker and their heads were at opposite corners of the mattress she squinted over at him through a notch her fingers made and wondered if she had a subliminal light show of her own. Nineteen, she'd eaten part of his side and sucked one pupil from each of his eyes while he was sleeping, vengeance for an affair. Maybe if she winked in one of her secret sequences he'd disappear too. She tried some. He just snored.

It was hundreds of years later that she decided she'd had what he must have meant all along. He just hadn't described it for shit.

Hers was another gravity. To see her was to fall. To touch her to land.

The eggcrating of the ocean's surface had at last collapsed, leaving styrofoam pulleys, then swellings and concavities so broad you had to skip your eyes across them to not find them flat.

She felt the phone buzzing in her pocket for almost a minute before realizing hers had been in her hand the whole time.

The stained glass painted the floor before them like a hopscotch ladder. He kept his feet off the lines. There were seven colors to cross. Red for Wednesday. He stopped on blue Tuesday and squinted to see what would happen. Not pausing, she ignored the lines, stepped partway into a parallel week then out of time altogether. He registered the blackness part for each leg then meet itself behind it. A dead asleep shark inhaling pale cyclones of fish. The ring of her heels hadn't changed. But the heels weren't in danger.

Had it really all come from a math error? The blood had reached the rug. Its edge fibers prickled, whether tugged at from below or sucking liquid upward. There seemed so much more blood than rug that one pictured the whole thing unmooring and silently swirling downstairs.

I fired then but it hardly mattered. The him that I needed to shoot was shut safe out of view behind twenty-four hours of past.

Only afterwards did she realize there'd been three sets of shoes by the door.

Their mouth sounds ran over then away from one another. Soon they'd be at it like blood-blinded prizefighters. I struck no match against my table's underside and lit a nonexistent cigarette with it. This might be a while.

He fell like the weight of the rain was what did it. Then his eyes met mine and have never remembered to stop.

If it was drugs it wouldn't clink and smell like metal, she pointed out. He reminded her few could know better than her there are all sorts of drugs.

What noir could ever pass the Bechdel test?

Men of snow.
We see them grow
Then back into the grass they go.

Brides of ice.
When skies are nice
We'll see them smiling once or twice.

Vapor men.
We see these when
We've run too far to run again.

Winter nights
Between the whites
The darkest dark reclaims its rights.

It eats a branch
Then half the ranch,
Seeing or making the other blanch.

Black repose
So deep who knows
If it's still as death or a sleep that flows.

All we can say
If you go that way
And you find a man with which to play,

And after find
Or unspool from your mind
A kind of woman not all unkind,

And later see
When you've gone from me
That to be beyond people is never to be,

Is, if you seek more
Than you've seen before,
There is only one seeable sight in store:
This open door
Down through the floor
Dark as the looking you're looking for.

Whether it's been
Inside, or is in
Even now, or its being is yet to begin,

Its ripple is there.
Come beside us and stare,
Joining hands with the men and the women of air.