writing in Richmond A Stag At Bay Becomes A Lion (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-56305238-1', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview');
blurb to start a story about getting love letters from outer space
The analysis center was three floors up at the far west corner of the building but everyone who didn't work there called it The Bunker. If the contractors had gotten their way the name would have been more appropriate but being underground affected signal reception so they were forced to expend more effort on securing what they saw as an unnecessary risk. There was no elevator access for the sake of insulation, a security measure that seemed to us like a punishment for the inconvenience we were causing. Trudging up three flights of stairs with a hot coffee every morning was not attractive fair for a team of analysts who otherwise participated in about as much physical activity as you would expect from people who aspired to spend their time in front of computer screens. Any security personnel attempting to make polite small talk was often met with moody, immature silence fostering an ever more effective culture of isolation. We didn't see the point of intermingling with our apparent captors when the most interesting thing we were permitted to discuss was the weather. After four years of working there I didn't know the name of a single security staff member and the sandy-haired young man that scanned me in didn't even both to look up from my security pass. Looking at him, breathing heavy from the climb, I was struck by a strange whim.
"Thanks, have a nice day."
He barely reacted at all, the light beside the door turned blue to confirm I was clear to enter.
The foyer of The Bunker was modest, reception was a metal desk bent into a half-hexagonal shape on which sat a console for log-in. In context the furniture was sort of ironic, as if someone was given a vague description of our work and all they got out of it was 'futuristic.' On either side of the desk hallways rolled down towards offices and conference rooms. An open concept layout was seen as a liability giving the space a claustrophobic feel. Any miscellaneous sound was absorbed by the abundance of decorative metal that paneled the walls.
I logged in and checked my workload, there was a notification beside my most recent task but before I could access it Josiah interjected.
"Oh shit you're here! Have you heard?"
"I don't think so but you're going to have to be more specific."
Josiah was a small man, hobbit-like with an abundance of fuzzy brown hair haloing his head. From my height, nearly a foot taller, I had an impressive view of the shiny bald-spot at the crown of his scalp.
"Norton found a cipher for the A-15 transmissions that you and he were working on. You're not gonna believe this shit. They're love letters."
The A-15 transmissions were deep space transmissions that our satellites had intercepted, when Norton and I sifted them we found linguistic patterns and had been making steady but uneventful progress for the past six months. We'd begun transmitting back snippets that seemed the most promising in response and received additional intermittent broadcasts. It was defined as an extraterrestrial project, one of about a dozen that The Bunker was currently handling.
"So you mean we tapped into some sort of ET dating site?"
Josiah's eyes were almost twinkling with an eagerness to inform me.
I imagine you naked from the hips down in a sweater that I own, a cable knit green sweater with flat paneled shoulders. The smooth texture of your thighs emerges with bizarre contrast. These instances of fantasy are not lascivious despite their sensuality. They are my first glimpse of intimate capacity, my first fumbling steps towards an understanding of hope.
The woods were necessary if not tender as it was from them that witchcraft was born. Naomi told me that it was where the first witch met the devil and tricked him into revealing the secrets of magic. Driving alongside it I couldn't see more than ten feet in past the crowded Blackwood trunks. "Okay, pull over here." Naomi hadn't sat still the entire ride, she picked at her bottom lip and twirled her hair around her thumbs. I wanted to seem stalwart, unconcerned in the face of uncertainty. I wanted my assured was to bolster her but I was falling short. "What? Isn't it a little further?" "You know it isn't, you've been checking the GPS twice a minute." "I swear I thought it was further." "Oh Perce, don't lie." She spoke with uninhibited affection. With deliberate slowness I pulled my Toyota into the gravel on the shoulder and let it come to a prolonged, crunching halt. As I put it in park I was overcome by a dual need to look at Naomi and an almost premonitory knowledge that I mustn't. My part was so much harder for looking and yet I looked. Naomi was white as a sheet, gathering her beach you hair into a ponytail, the most unabiding hero of my life. I felt myself glowing, felt every bit of energy leaving my body in a halo of heat reaching for her. I thought that if witchcraft was real, which it is, who could comment on the mysteries of shares energy? She exhaled as a show of readiness. "Okay." "Okay." "So you're gonna drive to the end of this road then it's a left. Your reservation is under the name Parris. We have a deal with them. They won't charge you." I knew the itinerary. "Right, no crossroads, no floating lights, no stray animals." She smiled, "No accepting offers from strange, otherworldly women." I couldn't fake a convincing laugh but without one the car went silent. I was so afraid for her and completely helpless on my fear. I wished for her to give me two seconds of anything: rage, fear, mourning. She would carry any weight three inches above my shoulders. "Tell me I can do this." Her voice was small. "You can do this, and I'll be back in the morning." She exhaled again. "Okay, I believe you." I watched as she got out of the car and stripped herself on the side of the rode. I watched her tuck her clothes inside the hollow of a black tree and walk naked into the forest.
In pressure I interpret the force and rhythm of your breath. Here I am impossible, here the future is only a hypothetical. I could not imagine a more pleasant and destructive room.
November Hymn 5 One day I may return to the Green Planet. I miss the strange smell of the wind, the brilliant softness of it's light and the terrifying clarity if it's water. I long to recreate the sensations of fear and devotion it inspired as I discovered it. Most of all I miss the future I imagined, the frontier I built within myself. But now I am too weak to go, too sapped by radiation, too ill with having been there at all.
My brother bought us a pomegranate each, the heaviest two he could find and we smoked pot on the back porch until they were all we could think about. Our exhalations took form in the porch light with the cold exaggerating our combined breath. Bleary-eyed we cracked the rinds of the fruit casting flecks and seeds into the light. We ate like we were starving until the red on our hands and in our mouths made us look like wolves. It will be a long time before anything else tastes as good.
November Hymn 3 We are all haunted by the people who will love us. The doors left open for them let in a draft. They are a blurry outline in our imaginations, a willing possession of our hope. We sense their warmth in empty rooms, we curate their voices in our heads and hunger for the potential of the love they will give us. We know it will be love the likes of which we cannot stand yet we will beg to bear it.
My mother says my brother is brand new, that his soul has never been here before and the absurdity of everything makes him hysterical. She says I’ll meet the love of my life in the course of my career because my passion has a blast radius that few will survive. She doesn’t like dramatic movies because she cries enough already and calls me when she has bad dreams to tell me to be wary. My mother is made of salt water and we are crafted by her tides: a drenching rain, a floe of ice, a current at the bottom of the sea.
November Hymn 1 November, I'm carrying on a conversation that ended years ago. A four year negotiation of my worth filibustered by dead voices who won't look up unless I address them in second person post-mortem. They tell me mourning is just a talk you have every day after. A tough lesson for someone who always keeps calling because ringing phones taught me to pray. The dead are sick of me and I am sick of treading water instead of learning that being a strong swimmer cannot remake the meaning of a sirens song.
I dropped a vase of flowers out if my hotel window and almost hit an Italian girl. I was terribly and regrettably drunk attempting to illustrate a point to my friend regarding entropy but lost my head somewhat in the execution. The vase, which was made of fluted glass, shattered beneath the street lights into a blizzard of shining shrapnel through which the girl danced. Once assured of her own safety she released upon me a string of Italian so vicious that it was hard to believe she employed the same language as the Vatican. I leaned piss-drunk against the jamb, gazing down at her unable to do anything but repeat 'mi dispiace' again and again under my breath. Later it was described to me how I was heaved away to allow for negotiations. They conceded that I was a hooligan, a disgrace and a sinner but that my most damning quality was the eccentricity that often led to such experiments of gravity. The woman suggestedb an exorcism.
The walls of her room were adorned with the contents of over a hundred garden magazines. Azaleas, Hydrangeas, Zinnias and Daisies; each glossy bunch cut out with increasing skill. The hacked at ones must have been from right after the operation. Looking around I could see the extent of her progress, the fresher flowers had paper sliver stems and articulated petals.
She sat cross-legged on her cot looking small. “Too small,” I remember thinking, but too small for what? Smaller things lived, were living at that moment in the ward all around me. That immediate impression of her smallness troubled me. I watched her maneuver a pair of safety scissors around the edges of a full-page floral spread. There was still apparent stiffness in her right arm, the shoulder was slow and the angle of the wrist looked uncomfortable. To compensate she was more careful with the scissors, the blade made a slow, deliberate ‘ssshhh’ through the magazine page. Every now and then a small snip sounded like a punctuation mark.
“How are you feeling Melly?”
When she looked up at us I was overwhelmed by terror, by the feeling of knowing that something was beside me in the dark. Something larger than me and impossible to escape.
Her face was freckled and impish with the underdeveloped features of a child but here eyes were knowing. A blown pupil eclipsed the iris of the right, a hole that sapped the light around her face in a reverse halo.
“I’m a little tired,” she answered.
Harry advanced into the room leaving me frozen. I wanted to run.
“We won’t be long, I wanted to introduce you to Danny, she’s going to be on your team now.”
Her eyes hadn’t moved and neither had I. I dreaded shifting before she finished her appraisal.
“Danny looks sick..”
Did I? Harry examined me, I felt ashamed. The girl hadn’t done anything.
“Are you alright?”
“I need a moment.”
I didn’t want to turn my back on her. I was sure she would transform, that she would shift into something dark and colossal behind me.
“Take your time,” she said and returned to her craft.
Before she looked up again I turned. Only just resisting the urge to run I proceeded down the hall and out of the emergency doors feeling as if I might be sick. I stood in the sunshine with my hands on my knees heaving fresh air into my lungs in great, shaking gasps. My muscles felt weak from tension, my hands and legs shook. With nauseating comprehension I saw I was standing beside a flower bush and sidled closer to the research building.
“Any better?”
Harry had followed me out. I tried not to look out of breath.
“I think so. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s alright. Honestly, you’re not the first.”
“What?”
Harry offered me a wrinkled pack of menthol cigarettes but I waved it away.
“There was an aunt and a doctor,” He narrowed his eyes as If it would improve his recall. “The aunt had an attack of hysteria but allowed that it might have just been an emotional reaction. The doctor was more like you. White as a sheet, sweating.” I imagined someone else, an adult in a lab coat reacting like I did and felt ridiculous.
“How much of her is…” I cast around for a word that wasn’t ‘real’, “Original?”
Harry smiled. A degree of stillness returned to my hands.
“Thirty percent, maybe slightly less. Its difficult to quantify.”
“Will she grow?”
He shrugged as if it hadn’t occurred to him.
“Some probably, the hardware has obvious limits. The software though…” A manic, excitable look struck his face. “Well, you can imagine. She’s smart, probably too smart and fully aware of the trauma she’s experienced. We have two child psychologists on retainer and she’s blown them both away. The neurological interface is fully enmeshed. Its affective to the point that the feedback will likely change the organic matter. We can shape an program a fully functional cyber organic being. Its enough to spook anyone who can comprehend its implications.”
Maybe someday it will occur to me, will break like a swell of tropical water reassuring in it’s clarity. I hope it’s like warm rain if there is such a thing, I hope it suffuses and soaks bit by bit without the slightest discomfort. I want a sleep in snow without freezing, to rest in your heart as if naked on just-laundered sheets. To feel safe and sure.
The storm washed away the low wall between the sea and the lighthouse. Volunteers spent a week building a new one by pouring concrete over steel rebar and reinforcing the base with large, dark gray rocks. The wall was four feet tall, short enough for stony seawater to lap over its edge at high tide. When the surf became violent it roared against the concrete and left behind pulverized bits of crustacean, shattered bits of shell and spiny legs.
At dawn I liked to walk the three-foot wide track across its top to smell the salt air and observe the diverging crests of white surf. The force of the tide could sometimes become dangerous if there was a storm at sea. The water, brackish and temperamental, smashed into the wall with a brutal sucking sound before recoiling to prepare another charge. I stood with the tips of my toes on the rounded wall edge with a wild desire to step into the cataclysm of water. I considered myself dashed against the wall below me, the case of my body burst with an explosion of internal pressure. For a moment I wanted it more than anything but the moment passed.
