Ruled by the ram

About a hundred meters away from my apartment, between two groves of trees and a red-shingled temple, is a bakery that has been shuttered for eight years, ever since the owner hung herself from a second-floor beam. This revelation is available to unsuspecting members of the public in the form of a brutally crude, unpunctuated, one-star online review. Oh, Google Maps, how did it end up like this? Did you expect to be the bearer of such news? Huffing, puffing, energetic information engine, then giant of advertising, and now painful prophet, dressed in babyish, primary colors.

At the local sushi joint, sat on a bar stool upholstered in soft-touch, brown plastic, I read the specials: fatty tuna, sweet shrimp, abalone. I strip the paper packaging from a pair of disposable chopsticks. A cracked speaker above a humming fridge bleeds floaty, 2000s-style synth-pop. I order shochu and watch my ego deflate on the counter. An octogenarian in a square white cap scrapes scales off a body and then hoses down the counter. The restaurant swims with odors.

I watch myself in the mirrored wall opposite. I watch myself, watching myself.

Online, I look up photos: cropped bob on a long face, crown of thorns. Lying on the couch, my feet against the wall, I nurse a tension headache. I feel like I’ve swallowed the full moon. It bumps up against the crevices inside my skull, unhappily. It has the beady eyes of a Lovecraftian infant, peering wetly from over the bassinet. “Can saints be made in these circumstances? Can souls be saved?” it hisses contemptuously. I pat its tender head. So much fear is disguised as scorn. Don’t ask me how I know. Wait, please come back. I’m dying for someone to ask me this question, or any question.

On the weekend, walking under the triple-laned overpass that connects Tokyo Bay’s manmade islands to the mainland, feeling the breeze and the blue-toned light compete for my attention. The gray concrete beams that hold up the road are unashamed of their unconventional beauty. The asphalt is painted in black, white and goldenrod. In this city, hours like these are ruled by the ram, ruled by the red planet, as I am. I have a feeling like I’m playing hide-and-seek, and have yet to be found.

Ecstasies of Persephone

Finally, fall. I roll the bike out of storage. Like the grass underfoot, the air is cool to the touch. I ride down a maple-lined street to the corner store, where I buy freshly roasted coffee beans and freshly baked bread. The sun sets between four and five. I climb up a paved hill, to the bridge over the tracks. I watch the cloud banks recede into the distance. I lean against the railing. I give it time.

I remember how easily I could fall in love. As an adolescent pustule, any glance in my direction was immediately captured, bathed in preservative, pinned between two jeweled panes of glass, then catalogued and forever hoarded in a sharp-edged, silver Rolodex. I never talked to anyone in the flesh world, but, in the paradise inside my brain, I was as voluble as a hyena, as capacious as the moon. Anything could vex me. Anything could captivate me. There was some quality that I locked onto—not beauty, not intelligence. Some grist of identity. In the chilled air of the basement, framed in the wooden doorway, one shoe on the bench, a turn of the head. Against the low bed, the early evening in late summer, a certain angle of the light on a bottle-green eye. A stray comment that could be interpreted, charitably, in my favor; only years later, sleeping with our hands and feet pressed together, do I realize it was never intended for me. Now, if the mood is right, I can depersonalize this same inclination for easy infatuation and bring it, instead, to the linked and varied charms of the world. I walk home, feeling a cherry-red hand lingering on my back. I take a breath. Its fingers trace a wobbly heart over my shirt.

I get older. It’s a truism, but pay attention. Every day that passes, I get older. I refuse to think of this as anything other than a privilege. I’m a woman, not a nymph. I am determined to resist any call to fetishize my own youth, which was emaciated then and is rotten now. You know that I am not nostalgic. My adolescence was documented in unsmiling photos, pained videos, and here, in tragic diary entries. When I relive it in dream, we, my heart and I, understand that it was nothing to celebrate. I’m a woman, not a calyx. I’m a woman, not a chalice. I will happily age, but I won’t be devoured by time. It’s a futile complaint, but make no mistake. I’m not a mother; it’s hard enough to be a daughter, a wife. Of blood plasma, of the skin of the dauphine, of green meconium fluid, I know nothing. I have ten good years left, and then, once those years are gone, once the petals have all wilted, I’ll have the rest of my life, which will be fully mine. Good riddance.

I grasp at the reeds. I rip them out. Handfuls of straw-like, saffron-colored light. I don’t respect nature. What? I don’t. I trample over it with the all the peachy, preachy eagerness of ignorance. But I can’t discard the influences that made me so easily. Cheek against the cold dirt, lying in the dew-wet grass, yellowing already, I am close enough to the signs to finally read them. They are dug into the ground. They are carved into every brick of my body. I can’t scratch them out without risking the foundation. Can I live with all these emblems of vice, virtue and sacrifice? Can I bear them without resorting to terror, to prayer? The rest of my life. Oh. Oh, no. What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What I would give to be free of this specific, shining pain. I’ve been waiting nearly a decade for the knife to drop. When it does, I imagine I’ll feel relief, then grief, then relief, again. The blade will lie uselessly on the floor. But then again, let’s be honest. Take my face into your hands. It’s more likely, isn’t it, that the hurt will be grander and fiercer than I can even imagine today. It will pierce me in a way that I cannot picture. If that’s the case, then what could be the point of all this waiting-in-preparation?

The light sighs, then chokes. Red, orange and pink run across my view, long, faint, flecked, like spittle. The temperature of the air, the rumbling of the train below, the twisted color of the sky, the flushed luster on everything. For a second, the stiches open. The door yawns wide enough for me to latch tightly onto a specific feeling. What I feel, then, is the power and the brevity of my life. I feel its madness, its divinity, its profound stupidity. I feel it tumble over me, like a playful wave. I feel its scarred simplicity. Then, as though struck, the feeling snaps away, and, lacking the instinct to fight for it, I lose it immediately. The wind takes it over the railing, the tracks, the bridge, into the distance.

When did I start writing this like a manifesto? Will the pretensions of my ego, many-winged, never cease? Finally, fall.

Plague in the city upon a hill

America’s greatest living writer is a forty-nine year-old management consultant with a shattered moral compass and a cardboard box of unfinished manuscripts in the trunk of his silver Miata. He spends one-third of his waking time on conference calls, smiling grimly at the unblinking eye of the camera. America’s greatest living writer will never publish a single word. He dies three days before his fiftieth birthday and is survived by no one.

The final plague begins as his body flies through the windshield, the night air purpling with autumn. America never gets another chance at a great writer. In the broken headlights, his shadow is briefly ten feet tall. The master arrives as his thoughts are still cartwheeling on the grassy field between life and death. The shredded flesh of his brain doesn’t fully grasp that it’s all over. His heart, pulp on the road, cries out: Could I grow past this breaking point, like a rose through the rot? Could I plead for mercy? Could I make it out? Is there time left? Is there time left?

She scrolls through her phone. A pebble of plastic is slowly dissolving in the center of her chest and dripping down her organs, like painted tears of dew on a golden pear in a white bowl. She’s sitting at the table, chin in her hands, running through plans in her head. She is not America’s greatest living anything. She is a perfectly ordinary girl with her own small, thorn-studded hopes that fracture, then flower, starve, then devour.

America’s greatest manuscript lies in pieces on the freeway. The printed pages take to the wind. In the darkness, before the police cars crowd the scene, they are the wings of a past life.

(more…)

Hypnerotomachia Polia

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.

(more…)

Flawed pendulum

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.

Side project

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?

Welcome to Nurdle Nation, LLC

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. 

(more…)

The thing itself

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!

Get thee to a nunnery! is a medieval fantasy roleplaying game set in the 11th century. 

  • You play as Aois, a directionless young woman cloistered away in a convent. You shape her life at the abbey through a series of in-game choices.
  • Will Aois grow into a disciplined abbess or a wild warrior nun? Will her talents endear her to the angels of the Biblical arts, or will she fall into the pulpy, pus-filled darkness of sin? Will she branch into the thorns and vines of medieval herbology? Will she unravel the fastidious lettering of tomes, scripts and secrets?
  • You decide, player! You equip her with a quill or sword. You dress her in sackcloth or in linens. You paint the 2-D planes of her face in the dirt of the gardens, the blood of the viper, the light of the Lord.

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 functions 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 Aois 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?”

(more…)

Say goodbye

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—