Inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
A reader suggested to me that this could be interpreted as a story of sexual violence. I don’t contest the validity of this interpretation, though I intended a reading that more specifically underscores the relationship between body horror, childbirth, and pursuit. I’m putting this under a “read more” to alert any readers that might prefer to avoid any themes referenced in this paragraph.
I read back my writing and find it uneven, like a mislaid path. Cobblestones, ruddy with rusty moss. But the unevenness doesn’t bother me. In the gaps between sentences, where the rhythm breaks and disperses, where traces of it are cast irregularly over rocky paragraphs, like a varnished wave smeared wetly against the shore, I glimpse something glittering, something close to feeling. That leak of light is a comfort. You must understand that I grew up among extremes of emotion: Perplexing, knotted, treacherous. Every step on the knitted ecru carpet, a tripwire. Now, years later, when I go hunting for feeling in the briars of my being, I can’t make sense of the tracks laid there. The footprints double-back, then crisscross. I can’t follow them to their source. Only in probing my past writing, in examining its tempo—occasional adagio, occasional allegro—am I able to spot, in the underbrush, the large, wet eye, the chipped fang, the blurred expression. Sometimes, if I wait by the foot of the hill, I even see her, half-monster, half-girl, face smeared with dirt, tears, and green phlegm. Howling, she crawls out of the cave, raw and new and filled with a panic that spurts like a fresh wound, weak to the many pains, the various joys, the intermittent horrors—
I travel an hour to a bookstore on the opposite side of the city. It’s nighttime, and I feel Tokyo‘s disregard fall over me like a shroud. Anonymity is this city’s gift. It’s not that I fit in, or don’t. You must understand that I grew up caught between cultures, and now, when I go searching in the brambles of birthright, no branches part to reveal a hidden pool of rippling water, of mossy, rusty relics half-buried in the silt, recovered by my hand, mine by inheritance. Sometimes, I hear someone talk about going home and I see how their blood trickles down their body, through the floor, and back through corrugated stone, to a lightless aquifer where their bones will one day go. I grew up in too many places; I am the product of two already uprooted people. I don’t long for belonging, but I have sometimes felt like I am supposed to. Only in Tokyo does that need seem undesirable, unnecessary. This city does not think of me, and I am therefore free to find untethered relief in its iron-colored rain; its encircling neon glows; its dirty shadows; its million gaudy lights like broken rubies; its clouds of cherry-like sweetness that, in maroon October, can be traced back to the orange-petalled osmanthus tree blossoming in the alleyways.
In the many years I’ve lived in this body, I like to think I’ve never misunderstood myself. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as self-confident, but I am almost obsessively self-aware. I have a sense of watching myself from a third perspective at all times. I watch myself watching myself. Feet propped up on the sofa, trying to find the words. Squinting at the yolk of the setting sun. Leaping up the stairs at the train station, two at a time. Standing in my blue bathing suit, the rain leaving coin-sized dimples on the water, feeling, under my plastic flip-flops, the forking, copper-colored twigs wince, then split, like wishbones. Counting down the seconds between the seam of light and the answering thunder. Sitting in a scoop of fiberglass, twisting a rope around my hand as a flock of birds dart through the dusky blue. They abruptly dissolve their formation and descend, pointed and bulletlike, towards the lake, pulling up at the last moment—my breath caught in my throat like a lie—to land soundlessly on its surface. When it comes to telluric landings in late summer, an angel might try but could do no better.
What’s my side project? It’s the avoidance of meaningless pain. It’s the cultivation of meaningful pain. It’s the pursuit of overthinking. It’s like film photography, but I am the photographer, the instrument, the medium, the subject, the foreground, the background, the viewfinder, the viewer. I am the fire exploding in a corner, the frame, the texture of the printed paper. The single nail from which the photograph hangs. The peril of its life. The tenderness in its tilt toward the light.
How is that a side project? Oh. Shall I describe it differently? It’s the bilge pump while I’m taking on water. It’s the flicker of disobedience when I’m taking orders. It’s a survival project. What am I surviving? I’m surviving the decay of the spirit. I’m surviving the luxuries of Eden.
You purse your lips. You don’t approve. It takes a special kind of imprudence to gesture at the spiritual poverty of personal circumstance when living, objectively, in the richest set of rich circumstance. What sort of survival is required in my pink world, this place like a plastic prize inside a candy egg? If Paradise could be circumscribed, I would be the gargoyle in the citadel at its center. If arrogance were a palette of colors, I would be the most saturated shade of camellia red. I would ooze from the tube like possessed blood.
All true accusations. Truer than true.
But still I—a bottom feeder, a spoiled princess, a spoiled nectarine, a drop of goldenrod embedded in the liver of a shattered solar system—insist on the purifying potential of a side project. I say it’s necessary to keep me sane. I say it’s necessary to keep me alive. I say I fear that the corrosive power of my nine-to-five. Do you resent your job, you ask? No, I cherish the safety it provides. But, in searching for my adult identity, I come up against the meager hydra of my career history acting as my personal history, the rusty dagger of my job title as the only definition available and I—I do not wish to live my life as though it could be phrased within these terms.
You scoff. A life is not a thing to be phrased. Here, I relinquish any pretense of politeness. I can’t agree. We are sentences on a page, and some of us may find our ends in the form of a question. Don’t you—don’t you fear that? Isn’t it an ache able to contort your mind into an unrecognizable shape?
A grisly prism above the waters. Life as meaningless pain, then meaningful pain. There’s joy too, you say, but I am not listening. I’m caught in the gaps between the pain. I am angry, though I, eyes aflame, incorrectly perceive that anger as rapture. It feels good to be angry at the world. Set the lake on fire. Chemical reaction, trembling wave. Blue halo, orange wings. Then, quickly, feel the feeling shift again, into terrible terror. The terror heats my face with its approach and numbs my hands when it withdraws. I am not myself with or without it. Is there any kind of life I won’t regret? Is there any kind of side project that could save me or, at minimum, distract me from the state of all these pointed and polyethylene things? This longing is a thorn of juniper. I let it cut me, again and again. Uh-oh. I let it wear me like a crown.
I can hear the snap of the line—tension bursting the fibers of a red thread—from across the combined muscle of several oceans. I pull back the shattered cord and examine the point of breakage, where destiny did not diverge, but instead abdicated its throne entirely. I look at the torn stem and then at the petalled carpel, which smiles graciously, gratefully, not knowing time has made its call. If gardening were my side project, could I postpone the inevitable? Could I graft stem to stem, the ripped body to its withering prophet? Could I reattach head to torso, with needle and thread, my table littered with soil and newsprint? What would be the point?
She doesn’t list her job on her profile, but nine out of ten prospective partners look her up before the first date, and then the cat is out of the bag.
“What’s an ESG manager?” her date asks, sliding clumps of angel hair around a black enameled plate. “And what’s Nurdle Nation?”
She slices neatly into a thumb-sized radish as her date pauses to fork pasta into their mouth. “Actually,” the date asks, sheepishly—”What’s a nurdle?”
She smiles with real satisfaction. The amber light from the hundred spherical lamps in the restaurant briefly dims. In the corner booth, the shadows come out, as though to play. They are dusk at her jugular, on her jaguar-print sheath dress. In the mirrored walls, she angles her face differently, adjusts the folds of the rich fabric, and watches the shadows contort, as though in pain.
“It’s a precursor to consumer product,” she, esteemed Senior ESG Manager at Nurdle Nation, LLC, says genially, graciously, already mentally preparing to wade into her spiel. Have you heard of us before, cries out the dark-green voice of the bog inside her. We were actually invited to the President’s house, last year. And I wrote an op-ed in the Post. Oh, you read it? Yeah, it was called “Fight for the Future of the Angels of the New World,” that’s right. Oh, what was it about? It was about a lot of things.
In difficult situations, I try to be in control. I try to be outside myself, to look down at the patchwork of sensation and sensitivity from a position of careful remove. Comfortably seated on the blue velvet cushion of my pilot’s chair, I look through the plastic windows of a steel airplane with an upturned chin, a neutral, cool eye. I wave a hand with a flippant, monarchical air. The plane tilts and swerves past puffy clouds, droning on. I make proclamations. I leap onto the grass of the field, and then onto the sand of the shore. I conjure concrete breaks in the waters. I push through the crowd, crown in one hand. I argue with the tide. I try to orchestrate the path of feeling but I find, each time, that feeling must take its own journey.
I pretend to be the turret of reason. White granite, a gull aloft, circling its highest point. The sky as blue as a promise about to be broken. Crystalline, unflappable. But when the bell sounds on the hour, I have abandoned my post. I am lost in the catacombs, ignoring the call of the bitter prism outside. I light a torch. The bones litter the ground. I bend down to pick through them, to examine the text on their marrow. Blood on my fingertips where I graze the textured surface. Feeble, goopy gestations. My writing, left to wither on the vine. Had these been allowed to grow, they could have only been weeds, fetid and lacking—or angels, fire trailing their instep. One entry is titled, plaintively: All I wanted. The next is: Just forget it. Both, when I click on them, are empty. The cursor hovers over the white wall with something like desire.
Everything in twos. The thing itself, and its shadow. The thing is—? The thing that it is—? Me and my twisted shadow. The mismatch between the roots and the flowering. Could we walk together? What would happen if we did? What would happen if we did? What would happen if we did? A curse, or a blessing? A request, an admonition. An olive branch, a fallen star. An offering, a retraction.
I stumble to bed and when I wake up, I am right back in a former body, possessed by the familiar, the tender, terrors of my own spirit. A pulley lifts me from off the ground. A missive, a memory, always in circulation, like blood. A broken whisky glass, its newly jagged edges like the spikes of a crown. With a jolt, I’m dropped into the horror movie of the soft, dirty backseat. Tires make contact with rainwater, sending it back into the gray air and over the cracked asphalt in a fan-like spray. The undernourished grass of the median is soaked and glistening. Rainbows that are more red than any other color. My face, crushed against the cold, wet glass. A feeling pulls me close. It holds me tightly. It holds me tightly. It holds me tightly.
Get thee to a nunnery! is a medieval fantasy roleplaying game set in the 11th century.
Daisy clicks impassively through the images accompanying this game description. Isometric perspective, countryside colors in soft, painterly tones, charmingly cartoonish character designs. She sits at the edge of the lumpy, unwashed bedspread, her legs extended, toes curled against the carpet. Her skin itches uncontrollably, possibly from the mildew in the carpet, the dust mites living in the sheets, or the goopy lotion she gets for free from her hotel job. Daisy scratches a chip of foundation off her forehead. She peels a press-on nail off her pinkie finger and lets it drop onto the bedspread.
The player reviews of Get thee to the nunnery! are largely positive, though some commentators mention that the endgame drags. She has a lot of time to kill, and a lot of feelings to drown out, so this doesn’t strike Daisy as an issue. She buys and downloads the game. She lets it boot up while she paces the kitchenette, opening and closing flimsy cabinet doors to pass the time. Teetering towers of instant ramen. Stray seasoning packets crowded around the packaged food like infantry defending the citadel. Yellow specks of mildew in the interior corners.
Aois, the central character, begins the game as a tight-lipped teenager with shoulder-length hair the color of pale cornsilk. She has peach-colored freckles across a snub nose. Her design has something of farmgirl about it, though Aois’ backstory, available to read in the corner of the screen when the player hovers over her body, describes her as an unwanted nobleman’s daughter. In the opening cutscene, the player looks down, as though from God’s perspective, on Aois’ dawn arrival at the abbey. A melancholy track, overlaid with the twittering of a pair of birds, plays as Aois is led by the hand to the tall, ornate doors. Aois’ body twitches like a rabbit, she blinks away tears—or is that just the stuttering framerate, as Daisy’s laptop groans under the strain of rendering graphics? She clicks impatiently through the dialogue between the abbess and Aois’ stepmother, finishing off the cutscene and advancing to the main storyline.
The next in-game day function as a discrete, semi-camouflaged tutorial, establishing the basic pattern of play. Aois wakes in a cot in the novice dormitory; the player accompanies her as she descends the winding stairs down the turret to the main hall, where Aois joins the crowd of women at mass. Before dawn, during this first mass, the room is full of flickering shadows, and illuminated only by firelight. She kneels on the stone, a cotton kerchief over her fair hair. The game plays a cutscene in which Aoid raises her eyes to the cross, the upward movement of her gaze happening in time with the crooning of the choir climbing the musical scale. As the choir leaps into the sustained high note, Aois’ teeth stop their chattering, and her lips begin to move in apparent prayer. Daisy scratches her thigh, where the itching is most pronounced, where her skin has transformed into a patch of welts.
After Matins and Compline, the player is able to pick Aois’ direction for the day. A gilded window opens up and the in-game advisor, archangel Gabriel, appears to offer divine counsel. The study of theology, as he informs Daisy, will sharpen Aois’ thinking and whet her appetite for Biblical arts, including, he muses theatrically, the darker and more ancient labors. Caring for the lambs in the barns will, in contrast, soften her nature. Swordplay with the gardener, a former Crusader, will develop her physical strength. Working with the nursemaid in the infirmary will increase her knowledge of poisons and antidotes. He gestures toward the top corner of the screen, where Aois’ progress in her skills is visually represented via a set of bars wrapped in grapevine. He reminds Daisy that no skill can progress without implied sacrifice in the improvement of her other skills. “Should Aois be well-rounded, or should she cultivate specific talents?” muses Gabriel leadingly, thumbing his dimpled chin. “Who can foresee her destiny?”
After thirty years of following the rules, I rebel. It’s not spirited disagreement that I feel with the status quo, but fatigue. It dogs me like a lump of flesh, like a shadow. I go to the supermarket in sunglasses and without a bra. I fight to get a word in. I stick out my tongue at the fluttering Fata Morgana on the horizon.
Why does everything end before I can say goodbye? I want to do more with my time. I forget to eat. I do my taxes. I rant and rave like someone chained to a metal ring in a hole. At night, I fall asleep thinking—
I—
I—
I drink red water and bleed green blood. No, that’s not right—
In Akihabara, that twilight wasteland, an ad pasted on a brick wall on the other side of the road catches my eye. I shift position to get a better look, to decipher its meaning. In capitals, the words “EAT ME” and, directly underneath, a bug-eyed, pale-faced girl with permed, sticky-looking hair and telescoping lashes. I do a full-180, turning around completely, and see, on my side of the road, directly parallel to the ad, a vending machine in garish colors with its own lettering: “FEED ME”.
Eat me and feed me. At eight in the evening, after a long day, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. In my ears, a throaty guitar-string sound that is like slitting something ancient open.
Planet of towers, waves, and claret-colored skies. This heart does not eat nor feed. These heart never felt like a home. I open your letter and see you wrote the wrong thing, and you know it, and I know it. No, that’s not right—
I. Hard to sleep
I meet to talk with the cynic for the second time in as many years. In my first entry, she had no name, but today, let’s call her Magdalene. Previously, she was all about godly concern—but this time, we leave God outside, leashed by the ornate door. He looks at us through the windows with baleful eyes rimmed in purpling flesh.
We come to you live from the gory insides of a new-wave coffee shop in an upscale Tokyo neighborhood. Geopolitics like mold on the mind, destiny like damage on our parts. We stir thimblefuls of white-dyed cottonseed oil into lukewarm, six-dollar beverages. Our focus today is the moral life. That vaunted playground of the confused young woman.
“I want to do good,” Magdalene says, eyes glued to her plate as she pushes a wilted French fry around.
“What is good,” I reply, bitterly. “Is your definition of good what someone on social media told you to do?”
It was mostly meant in jest, but when Magdalene looks up, her face is contorted—in surprise, in fear, in anger?—and I immediately regret the impulse to wound her. Why do I crack jokes when what I really want is to argue? Wouldn’t it be more honest to just pick a fight?
We pick up our phones for the ten-millionth time. Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. The alliterative quality of these buried names, finished off by lugubrious gold, activates something barbed and bloody in me. Wipe collective responsibility off our screens. Scrape this fate off our knees. The Magi could not have devised more poetic, more perverse gifts.
“Have you watched the Good Place?” Magdalene asks, eagerly, but with a certain shyness, like a church girl asking if I go to confession, probing me for a penitent’s heart. I imagine pouring out a libation of holy water into the mouth of the dog outside.
“No,” I say, sourly, though I have watched it by proxy through Strawberry, who patiently conveyed, at my request, each plot point from the polyester pulpit of our living room while I lay on the carpet, groaning and writhing in mock torture.
Magdalene talks like immorality is a pollutant, and morality, a bleaching agent. Molecules of disease and of purity. But, she insists, their movements can be charted, and therefore the stuff of life is to work to avoid, or attract, the right habits. For a while, I indulge this perspective, and we discuss its chief doctrine, which is a form of abstinence from consumption. The main thing is to buy as little as possible, because no amount of consumer research can conclusively clear any product of wrongdoing. We’ve tried and we’ve failed, and we commiserate now about our every attempt to perform the grand feat of a moral purchase, standing waist-deep in web searches in the middle of a supermarket aisle, speed-reading annual reporting on forced labor, carbon emissions, animal cruelty, water use, health and safety violations, sex crimes. Amateur excavators, trapped in a desert of objects, we reach to extract—with exquisite tenderness—the product from its nest but never fail to crush the surrounding ecology in the process. Our hands come away black, blue, and red, fingers clasped around a Temu gadget first seen on Tiktok. Zarathustra picking a t-shirt with a sequined collar off a Zara rack. Artemis ordering a sacred fawn off Amazon.
II. Impossible to dream
Magdalene and I leave the coffee shop and cross the road, coming to a candle that towers above all else. Within the ring of its light, fully aware of the dog-shaped shadows at our backs, we stare at the flame at the top of the column, trying to gauge how far the fire can grow before we are forced to put it out.
“I think we’re bad,” Magdalene starts, tentatively. The flame flickers coral and orange. Then, feeling braver, gasoline on the tallow of her tastebuds: “I think we’re takers, and not givers.”
I nod in agreement, though I am privately unimpressed, because I’d phrase this more harshly, and failure to name cruelties cruelly registers to me as willful ignorance.
I think of my grandmother, born in a village at the edge of a crater. Her ten blue babies, the indigo ash in her part. She gave until there was nothing left to give. I think of the beaded necklace of her DNA, laced through her descendants, all clinging to the long, winding supply chain of remittances, cinder blocks, and diamonds shaped like teardrops. Notches on a black ladder to the underworld. They give until there is nothing left to give. And yet—following a wobble in the universe in which I played no part—I am the lucky one. I get to live a life of precise, precious, pernicious luxury. I get to eat rhinestones and pretend to be a visionary. No, of course it’s not fair, but it’s more than just unfair—it’s more than I can bear.
Smash-cut to the present to find that Magdalene and I have arrived at the crossroads. She drags a two-headed, tattooed body. The body is the girl we had to kill to become the woman, the spell we had to cast to survive the transition, the poison we had to drink to inoculate ourselves against the plague. The sky is crème de menthe. The skin comes off the body in pink flakes like chips of candy paint. The yellow brick road like a stream of sweat, piss and gold. La vie en rose.
“Magdalene,” I whisper. “I’m afraid.”
“Why?” she asks. She holds a grimoire of laws in her free hand. I, a sword. Neither, in this case, is any form of power, until it’s turned back on its user. I try to decide how to tell her that I think the moral life is dead, that it vanished forever in the freezing vacuum between the incandescent atoms that string us together.
“The problem is you think humans are skin and blood,” I say, finally. “But I’m convinced we’re only empty space.”
The candle goes out. In the next moment, the horizon is aflame. A dog howls. I take a sip of watery coffee. Lightweight ceramic cup with glazed edges. Laminated menu. Overly crisp photo of a hamburger, cheese pooling on the plate. Laminate tabletop. Potted fern. Spiked Nike sneakers in a stylish colorway. Dollar-store earrings. Uniqlo button-down with stitching that smells like iron. Deep red dissolving into pure white, then back into red, and then into white again.
Magdalene waits for my final blow. We act like this is a duel but in all honesty, I don’t even have the strength to fight myself, I say, my legs crumpling, and she breaks into tears.
Suddenly, I am a high-powered career woman. A woman of disturbing industry. Heels clack on the floor. Fragrance—petrichor, patchouli—wafts into the room like a storm cloud.
I want to pound this out before my mind catches up to what I’m writing. I want to press the feelings onto the page like flowers. Seconds and minutes bubble up like a pox.
Can I make it, I think, can I make it. Can I run up this hill without leaving my body halfway up, strewn in pieces among the blades of grass. Lose myself. Can’t stop talking mad shit. Rolling around in the squelching mud and then getting up and sending my cream-and-iron ensemble to the dry cleaners.
To think that just two weeks ago my time was my own to kill. I don’t miss it, but I don’t know that I suit these new conditions. I need to relearn how to breathe underwater, how to say “synergy” without flinching. This was an ordinary room before they gave it a lavish name and stuck an elevated platform and microphone stand in one enameled corner. I sit in the audience, perfectly still, and feel the flame drain away through the hole in my head.
If I have but one regret, it’s that the demands of transformation have warped every stitch of skin, every latch of flesh. The only part of myself I still recognize is my anxiety. Chuck me back to a time where I could walk forever and never leave the radius of my desires.
We sit on a low stone bench and watch the dogs walk by, their owners caught tautly at the ends of leashes. Look up. The massive and purple evening, already hinting at the tearful stars. Look down. Along the rind of the world, the pines are growing in, gloved in dark green. I’m resigned to this situation; in fact, after nine months in the belly of the beast, I think I was born resigned. I blinked away the blood and came to terms with what I saw. The full moon is a maw. My emotions paw at the ground.
I vacillate. I travel between extremes. I think, feverishly, of the grand speech that could save us, and then, fed up, I abandon my plans. I’m tired, and we haven’t even started yet.
A quavering voice rises out from the crevice of my mind, in that place where I descended years ago, gloved and hatted, curled around a ratty rope, determined to consign my heart to the protective chill of the caves. An injury can live in the abyss forever, I thought, and while it would not heal, it would not continue to decay. That was, believe it or not, a gesture of hope. On the return journey, my ribcage ten ounces lighter, I stopped to etch our names on a bank of ice with a scout’s knife, below a sky so totally unblemished it could have been cut out of cornflower-blue construction paper. I sat underneath it and wished for better days. Some colors have a childlike glow to them—the playful insistence of red, the bashful innocence of blue. Know what I mean?
Flash-forward twenty years. Sitting on the couch with my feet up, drinking ice water from a PET bottle, a band-aid on my ankle. An ache in my head like a worm in the soil. I pluck it out and let it lie in my palm. An amulet of my segmented flesh. Do you remember the flavor of our mother’s voice as she spoke on the phone behind the locked door? Conversation that tasted of cigarette ash. The rain is like a car wash. I down a bright orange drink. Do you remember how our father, with the fanaticism of a cultist, would log the nutritional values of our meals in a spreadsheet? I wash my hands over and over. Then I cup my hands to rinse my mouth. My eyes in the mirror are red as carnations. Two blooms on a long windowsill of a face. Today, the pills they buried in the soil bear sour fruit.
Something crawls out of the crevice, blood-soaked. I had thought that by growing up we had managed to escape the worst. But now I realize that I relaxed my guard too soon. I ran a victory lap on the one track in my mind, ignoring the thousand sores on my tongue. I left you at the starting line. I turned around too late. Now, I watch you travel the same path I traveled, and I endure my punishment poorly.
I never saw them do anything together. Even when they were together, they were separate. Know what I mean? The only time I saw the power of their togetherness was in their final act as a couple, and it was almost a work of art. The kind of destruction they enacted took a team effort.
Break away, I beg, though I know this message, written in the stars, is lightyears away from getting to you. Wherever you left your own heart, take it back. A feeling is not forever. A feeling is not forever. A feeling is not forever.