reckless_blues

LJ Idol Week 10: L'Heure Bleue

reckless_blues — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:55:15 GMT

I don't find it necessary to recount a biographical explanation of Why I Became Interested in Perfume (they all go about the same way - I had an idea of what perfume is like, but one time, in my youth, I smelled a bottle of something that surprised me in a way that I had never been surprised before). (That or younger people going through a fin de siècle phase tend to get into serious fragrance by way of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, a franchise that pairs descriptions like "This is the perfume of the humanist and inventor, electric with caprice: clove, mastic, and spikenard..." with fragrances that range from a swampy, poorly-worked-out mess to something truly interesting). Later I moved on to making special trips to the Sephora upstate with the determination of a Hollywood archaeologist; or going to the perfume counter at the mall and trying the rather romantic advice to ask for "something that is like nothing else." (My recommendation, by the way, was "Look, you have to tell me if you're trying to find a present for your girlfriend, or your mother, or?" from a woman gesturing impatiently to the tray of Justin Bieber's "Someday".)

But that's not the most compelling part of the story, at least not to me.

I don't know if this common among people, or common among people with my particular collection of neuroses, but I need art as the vector through which I feel. (For example: I don't cry naturally, as a man, or as the consequence of a cold and violent upbringing which is my life's work to recover from, or whatever, and whenever I start to feel as if I might be a complete sociopath - I currently work in healthcare and if you're stoic by nature that's a question you'll be asking yourself a lot - I watch the Valse triste short from the animated film, Allegro non troppo. Without fail, it makes me cry. It's childish, but somehow, this is fitting.)

The consequence of this is that throughout my life I've always had the dangerous compulsion to ask more of art than it could provide, and after scouring an art form for the most intense experience and finding nothing that could truly satisfy me, I become interested in creating that kind of art myself, and then somehow, all of a sudden, lose all interest in the entire medium. There's very little in the arts that I can truly enjoy. I spent many years involved in cinema, working in the film industry to some capacity and writing film reviews and cinematography under a pseudonym - and also, many years reading articles on things like "The Top Ten Most Beautiful Films" or searching forums for "saddest movies" or sometimes "the most disturbing" - and now, I can't sit through a picture more than once or twice a year, if that. I used to say every once in a while that I'd cycle through all the arts until I moved onto the sciences, and then onto religion, and then on to pure math; and once I got tired of pure math I'd become a drug addict if I didn't kill myself.

Essentially, what I wanted was to feel like a human being. At the same time, I can compare it to something religious in nature. I can't draw the line in a way that's clear to me, but the feeling I looked for in the cinema is the same feeling I got when I go out into the woods in the summer when it rains.

It is not always summer, and it does not always rain.

This is completely the opposite of the common impression of perfume - for the wealthy and shallow - but the earthiness of scent appealed to me. Of all the senses, smell is the most primitive and least understood. (We have no idea how smell works, only a few competing theories which seem to get it mostly right.) Once the scent is cultivated, you achieve a certain animal sense of space. The same suburban street you've been on a thousand times will change daily, and even by the hour. As a person who was raised in the hills, I have a memory of going to New York City to see a band and sensing all of a sudden that the air smelled real and right, realizing later that I was a few blocks off from Central Park.

In the aesthetic sense, my interest in perfumes waxed and waned. As I'm wont to do, I became fascinated by the idea of intensely sorrowful scents. This isn't some special pathology of mine - if you ask someone who cares about the art what the saddest fragrances are, they'll know exactly what you mean. L'heure bleue ("the blue hour") is mentioned a lot (and smells exactly like what it says on the tin) [blue musk]. L’Air du desert marocain smells like the later parts of The Little Prince [dry amber and resin]. Gris Clair smells like the darkest parts of early morning in a place of fog and wet clay [iris]. Apres l’Ondee I only smelled once and I’ll never forget it. I had such a strong image of a rain shower in spring, early morning, tears … I could even see the light of a sun shower in my mind, one on this very specific time and season and day. This sounds like a metaphor, but it isn’t, it’s the true ability of this fragrance to tap into something unspoken and paint a picture in an abstract way. [This perfume is so well-composed I can't pick out any contributing notes - which is what they call the individual scents, such as vanilla, or rose, that make up the formula - and have to resort to general terms like "floral" and "green."]

Still, it wasn't exactly the same, and desperately, I kept seeking rain. I had a collection of artificial fragrance chemicals, essential oils, and extracts of herbs, resins, and flowers in my basement (and got almost nowhere with this complex and frustrating art). I bought perfume samples and aftermarket decants by the millimeter, searching. And every once in a while I found something I simply liked to wear, and managed a full-sized bottle.

The mania subsided like it always does, but the simple cultural pressure of fragrance as an accessory remained. Instead of leaving me disappointed, my passion and my fascination was able to simply relax. It had been lowered to the realms of the everyday ("the everyday" or "day-to-day life" being treated sometimes as something like a damaging property in my heritage language, Russian), but it was a sustainable love, in an acceptable frame. Sometimes I hardly think about it, and other times I want to smell something that'll surprise me again, like the first time. Maybe it had something to do with its nature, and maybe it had something to do with growing maturity on my part that happened to temporally coincide with my latest obsession. But fragrance was the first art that I was able to truly enjoy. Some time after that, I started reading again, and drawing and painting for the sheer pleasure of the craft, which I hadn't done in almost ten years. Something workmanlike came over me.

I think I ought to leave you now with Luca Turin again, who's done some of the best and most famous pieces of perfume journalism in the world (or at least my personal favorites):

During the writing of this guide, both authors felt at regular intervals a need to recalibrate their olfactory apparatus to obtain both a reliable zero (Creed’s Love in White will do fine) and a full-scale quality reading. The latter can be achieved using almost any one of the old Guerlains, but I find Vol de Nuit is best for calibration purposes because it embodies pure excellence in raw materials and, to me, little else, thereby ensuring that my judgment is not clouded by emotional associations. In truth, VdN (Night Flight), released two years after its namesake—Saint-Exupéry’s superb 1931 novel about mail flights to South America—is by Guerlain standards a somewhat shapeless perfume, lacking a legible structure. But it gives me the pleasure, the tickle of anticipation, the feeling of unobstructed space and pinpoint clarity I get when I settle into my seat at an orchestral concert and hear the players practicing. Almost all other fragrances, when compared with VdN, sound like they’re being played through the sort of radio people hold up to their ear not to miss the ballgame. God bless Guerlain for still doing this stuff.

Turin, Luca; Tania Sanchez. Perfumes: The A-Z Guide (p. 357). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

And if that doesn't make you want to try some on, nothing will.

Poem to a Young Friar

reckless_blues — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:36:47 GMT

wasted on you, your slender body
your fearful body, full of death
binding you as it does to this vale of tears.
God lay me down as you do
willingly,
pleasurelessly, and in deep hate.

the void God left is not to be distinguished from God
in the absence of a lover court your sorrow,
in search of comfort pursue pain.

Week 9 - Trolley Problem

reckless_blues — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:54:54 GMT

They say hair is medicine, but the problem is
my long hair makes me look as beautiful as a girl.

I have cold eyes
and an arrogant face,
so for the most part men don't bother me.
Even when they make that mistake.
And I don't bother
shaving my facial hair every day either.
Still, with my long hair down
and my headphones on my neck
and my coat and scarf
it's hard to see my chin, my neck.

One night I took the public bus out far from my university and got mixed around. I ended up at a bus stop in parking lot with three homeless men.

One of them said, "Babe! Babe! Do you have any money?"
and I gave him five dollars.
"Here," I said, in my lowest voice, but my voice cracked.

"Babe," asked the first one, "Do you have a cigarette?"
I slowly shook my head.
He looked me in the eyes.
"I'm a veteran," he said, "I'm down and out."

"I'm sorry," I said softly, and meant it. I know what it's like to be hungry,
to be cold.

It's not always good
to be mistaken for a woman, unsmiling.
"Here comes the limousine, princess," said the second one. He went on awkwardly about plush seats and carpets, or some such
but I just looked at him.
He fell silent.

The bus pulled up and I got on,
the first one decided to follow me into the back
and his friends caged him in in the corner.
"Babe," he said.

I wish he had heard my deep voice,
and it is deep, if it doesn't crack.
I contemplate the odds.
Dangerous to be a woman:
there's no arguing about that.
And equally so, especially if it's gone on for a while,
to let a man know that he's mistaken you for a woman
when you're built like a woman aside from your woman's face and can't defend yourself. I was supposed to be a girl, probably. Something went wrong. Some male vitality crept into me, made me rough, made me wicked. And I'm past the age where it's at all appealing
to look like a dancing boy. I should cut
my long hair,
I thought to myself just then. Someday. Maybe tomorrow. Before I leave my room again.

"Babe," said the man.

I tucked my chin desperately to my chest and looked at him, which is a mistake. When a girl looks like that it's seductive. I have dark wide eyes.

"She's not your babe," said the second one, who seems to respect me just now. "That's not her name. She can be whoever she wants to be."

The first one fell silent for a while.

"Are you an Alaskan native, I mean, like an Indian?" asks the second one to the first one, trying to make conversation. The first one is looking at me. "Hey! Are you Indian?"

"He's half Eskimo," says the third one, and.put his cane across the row.

"What are you doing?" asked the second one.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" asked the third one. "Trying to keep him from bothering her."

"Hey, beautiful woman," said the first one, who has at least abandoned 'babe.'

"She doesn't want to talk to you!" the second complained.

"Where are you from?"

"Russia," I say, quietly.

"Where are you from?" he repeats. He has trouble understanding me.

Being Russian might not be a good idea, and I'm Tatar anyway besides.

"Ukraine," I tried.

"Italy? Serbia? Spain?"

I don't know what to say.

The "limousine" pulls into the transfer station and mercifully, they get out.

The first one stands up and holds his hand out to me. I don't know why.

"I will let you shake my hand," I say, quietly, and grasp his hand,
his bare, warm hand. He holds on to mine tight.

If you're a woman,
it's better to be a good woman.

"That's enough. Go now, after your friends," I say. "You're hurting me."

He stops in the hall and turns around to look at me,
despairingly.

"I'm forty-four years old."

It's younger than my father, but only just. I don't tell him that.

"Go, go, before the bus runs off," I say,
gently.

The other two haul him off.

"I'm sorry about him," says the second one.

"It's okay." I know he doesn't get attention from women much.

"Good night, beautiful woman!" says the second one,
with relish.
Somehow I've enlivened his spirit, just by looking at me. I've felt that before,
for women and men.

The bus pulls away. Outside, snow falls.I feel sorry for everyone on earth, sometimes.

I touch my temple to the cold window. I almost can't feel the glass
through my long, long hair.

LJ Idol Week 8: no comment

reckless_blues — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:18:07 GMT

It involved a lot of money, a lot of engineering, some early forays into interstellar travel, and a longer story than the one I'm preparing to tell here, but what with one thing or another, Jacob Moose fell through a hole in time.

That was about six months ago, or six months and two hundred years by Jacob's estimation. After emerging through the hole centuries in the future, Jacob had spent his time being alternately coddled and interrogated, and as far as these things go, he preferred the interrogation. He was a veteran, held a doctorate in engineering, and up until the accident, had been a bona fide astronaut. He wasn't a man used to having things done for him. He wondered what would happen to him if he walked out of the university and told everybody to fuck off.

He'd probably get laughed at. That was an awfully quaint insult, these days.

Jacob turned it over in his mind every once in a while - well, if he didn't get terminated by security, who considered him a level five biohazard, the first thing he'd do would be to find a job. But how would he find a job? Heck, did they even have capitalism these days? Imagining his escape only made him feel better until he hit up against those walls, and it happened very quickly. Realizing just how little he understood, fundamentally, about the world he lived in tended to depress him and his primary psychologist encouraged him not to dwell on it (Jacob suspected she had been instructed to say that).

Mostly what he wanted was some way to feel useful.

Jacob prodded at the dinner tray full of rice grains, which were the size of his thumbnail and didn't taste right. "I want to get on the internet, or whatever it is you're calling it now," he asked one of his handlers. That wasn't the term they used for themselves, but there was really no better way to put it. After the global security forces had eased off him a little bit Jacob started offering what he considered his expertise. Of course, it was badly outdated, and the only real attention he could get was from historians (they had been calling first, apparently; and then scientists who wanted samples of his gut biome, and then wave after wave of academical bloodsuckers once they realized he was stable and willing). Eventually GlobeSec and the team of shrinks that had been assigned to him unilaterally decided that the best thing ("best for your mental health, of course") was to move him to a kind of live-in laboratory at Princeton. His handlers mostly specialized in American history or Middle Modern English - the official line was they felt it would make him "more comfortable", but Jacob knew they were historical researchers, and he knew they were scrutinizing everything he did.

"The internet," the handler repeated after him, slowly. For the most part her "Middle Modern English" was flawless, but sometimes the way she pronounced things made Jacob cringe. There had been quite a bit of drift - more than he'd have expected in this time frame. He suspected it had something to do with increased global interconnectedness, but they'd never discuss it with a primitive like him. "Well, you'd need implants for that," his handler reminded him.

"So get me implants. I don't see what the big deal is." (He imagined his wife, who had majored in linguistics at their shared alma mater, laughing - spoken like a true engineer. She would have had a field day out here, just listening to the way people talk.)

"The big deal?" his handler repeated.

"I mean...hell, context clues, Anemone. Please."

He had used that particular colloquialism before.

"You don't see why you can't have them. I see," said Anemone, pursing her lips and nodding in a way that resembled sympathy passably well. "We agreed it would be overwhelming for you right now."

"You give them to children, don't you?"

"It's different. They've been raised in the right scenario." (It took Jacob a split second to realize she meant something like "environment.") "Why? What would you be using the internet for? What do you want to find out?"

Jacob resented the note of combativeness in her tone. He pointed at Anemone's silver implants with his lips.

"I want to know if they still speak Ojibwe on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation."

Surprising, but Anemone didn't put up a fuss. Her eyes went glassy for a moment.

"Sorry, no. The language went extinct a century or two ago. Most of the sources for the language were electronic..." (That meant "lost", though what caused that crisis, Jacob didn't know.) "We don't really have much left on paper."

Jacob wasn't surprised. Still, he had to pause a minute before speaking again.

"I learned it in the immersion school," he began. "A little bit. Then my mother put me in the lottery for the charter school and I...uh..."

He felt his throat rise. His face burned with shame.

"Look," he said. "Do you want a lexicon?"

+++

Messages had been pouring in, and all of them - or almost all, Jacob figured - had been forwarded to him. He had quite a few little projects now. Anemone helped him understand the English.

"Selk'nam people. I heard of them." Jacob smiled. "They said the tribe was extinct, but it wasn't. Some young guy was in the news, he had the blood, through his grandmother, I think. He learned the language from old records, wanted to revitalize it. Bring his people back together. I'm glad they're still kicking."

"Do you remember the name of the young man?" Anemone asked. "We could try checking print newspapers..."

Jacob's smile faded. "No. Not his name. None of the words. Not the sound of it, nothing. I can't even remember where in South America they were."

Maybe he was getting them confused with a different tribe. He thought he saw a picture one time of Americans or Europeans hauling a couple and their child off somewhere, naked, to display them like exotic animals. Maybe those were the Selk'nam and he was thinking of somebody else.

He couldn't just tell them about that. They already knew it happened. It was better to just say nothing than remind them that their suffering was the only thing some people knew, the only thing that had been preserved from the past.

Why hadn't he paid more attention?

I should have been born a woman, Jacob thought, with a sad, gentle kind of amusement. It's the women who remember.

He wondered what Anemone would make of it if he said that to her, what kind of context she lived in now. He had long ago noticed that most of the people he spoke to seemed to be women. Maybe America had transformed into a matriarchal society where women ripped the sleeves off their shirts and worked in garages and hung pinup calendars of men on the walls, like the right-wingers had been afraid of, he thought, tongue-in-cheek.

"Let's move on to something else," said Anemone. "You have a language request from the New Spotted Tail Agency, regarding Lakota...or Dakota, anything you might know..."

"Lakota?" he repeated after her, feeling a jolt. That had been one of the big languages. Tons of speakers. What happened? "I know a few words. Only a few. They have or had a word called winkte," Jacob began. "Winkte meant like a...like a Two-Spirit." He struggled to put it into the right words. He wished he didn't have to go through Anemone for this.

"And that's what you'd call LGBT people, in your culture," Anemone said, writing something down on her clipboard.

Jacob wondered if the acronym was still in use or if this was for his benefit. "No. No, it isn't. It's a catch-all term that was invented in..." 1990? 1992? His wife had told him a lot about that conference. She'd be the one to ask about this. Jacob was no authority. "... a term that was invented in the early nineties to talk about our traditional genders, our traditional perceptions of sexuality, because the anthropologists would talk about some of our people and call them transvestites or berdaches or catamites, all kinds of things. "Two-Spirit" doesn't map onto Western identities at all. And when people do want to be called a modern thing like gay or lesbian or transgender they definitely don't want to be called a catamite. My wife was Ojibwe too, from a band in Wisconsin. She was okay with being called a trans woman, but a boy prostitute? I can't even imagine somebody thinking of her like that."

He couldn't quite bring himself to say her name out loud.

"So what kind of genders and sexualities did you have in your tradition?"

Jacob remembered, with an ancient pang, the kind of questions he was asking himself in college.

"In my tradition or are we still talking about theirs? It's hard to explain. I don't know if you'd understand. Can't I just talk to the people from the agency directly?"

"If you won't tell me about it, I can't even try to understand. I don't think that's fair to me, is it?" said Anemone, in a way that infuriated him for reasons he was having trouble articulating.

"Well. We don't have the winkte. That's Lakota. The Ojibwe would say..."

Jacob trailed off. What kind of things would his wife have said about herself? She was too huge for him to sum up. He thought of photographs, memories, people he loathed, people he loved, comforting talks, difficult talks, things that happened at that one powwow and that song they taught him on the guitar...and so on. The people who were lost to him now, and things that hurt too much to allow himself to remember. He hadn't been ready for this. It was too much.

"If you can't talk about it, could you write it down?" Anemone prompted.

"I will," he told her. "But not now, and not for you."

That seemed hostile, and Jacob knew it was better not to seem anything other than docile with his handlers. So he picked up the sheet of paper (he liked that printer paper still seemed to be the same size, and the fact that printer paper still existed in the world at all) and made a big show of looking over the request that had been sent by the Lakota agency. He let himself smile a small, private smile at the thought of an Ojibwe of all people becoming an authority among Lakota. What a world! (He felt it was easier to laugh than to be horrified by it, to feel catastrophic measures of terror and pity that would run him screaming into the madhouse.)

Ojibwe and Lakota, after so many years. He was reminded, then, of the protest, the big one. Jacob had gone out there in his teen years to protect the water. Elders coming together from tribes that had been ancient enemies to do a ceremony of prayer...

"Mni wiconi," said Jacob, abruptly. He didn't bother to clarify. He knew they'd still be telling that story out there.

Then he said nothing for a while, having slipped alone back into his thoughts. Anemone couldn't read his face.

"...I'm done for the day. I'm sorry," he said, after he realized that Anemone was going to wait in expectant silence for as long as he wanted her to.

Anemone flipped through her papers. It made quite the racket in the stillness of his room.

"We have one last thing from the genealogy people in Tel Aviv asking about where exactly one of the Reform synagogues was located in Chicago. We were thinking that back in your college days you might have gone past it, or - "

"Anemone, I really wouldn't know. I don't know anything about Lakota people either. I need to rest now. I'm sorry."

He didn't ask for this. He could have carried his children and his children's children. He didn't ask to carry them all.

+++

It took a long time, but eventually it felt like Jacob had told almost everyone almost everything he knew.

He had started to work with his hands while he tried to remember the language of his childhood. ("THAT'S what I forgot to write down. The word for screw.") Eventually he finished the dictionary to at least 90 percent satisfaction, which was pretty good for the kind of perfectionist he was, and then he stopped taking requests from linguists.

After the hundreth time he had to explain the difference between soccer and American football he stopped taking cultural requests, too.

He liked to build things, and the challenges the engineering historians would give him, but historical air & space was a niche field and he started going for days without seeing much of anyone. His psychology appointments dropped to once a week and were mercifully brief.

He knew there were microphones in there (some kind of bug, anyway), and although he didn't want their eyes on him or their prying questions anymore, he'd talk to himself while he worked.

"...and on Sundays after we came back from church - my family was mostly either Episcopalian or Roman Catholic - mostly - more on that later - we'd put the radio on if the TV wasn't getting reception that day. Radios worked like ... Never mind, I'll build one. If, you know, the powers that be allow." He knew the things he said would get back to the right people one way or another. He imagined sometimes that he was speaking to an imaginary son.

Anemone didn't have much to say to him anymore. After a month or two she told him she was taking a few weeks off from her position to write a thesis about his diction. So be it. He figured - or hoped - she'd move on to something more interesting after that.

"Before I go," said Anemone, reaching into her purse. "The Leech Lake high school sent you something. Do you recognize what this is?"

It took Jacob a minute to realize she was holding up an 8-track. He burst out laughing.

"You're a few decades off, ma'am. Sure, I know what it is. My granddad still had some in his glove compartment."

"Apparently the kids held some kind of performance for you. We transferred it onto physical media so you could hear what they did."

Jacob's eyes softened. "Is it music? Dance?"

"I think so."

"Is it...you know, is it our music?"

"I don't know. We had a player made for you, it's here in the drawer." Anemone took it out and put it on the desk. "Do you know how to work it?"

"I can figure it out." Jacob took the 8-track from Anemone and put in the machine with minimal fumbling. "Could you leave me by myself for a minute?" he asked.

"Sure."

She got up from the table, taking her bag. The door shut. She lingered, eyeing him a bit from behind the frosted glass, and then she was gone.

When he was sure he was alone, Jacob Moose pressed play.

LJ Idol Week 7: where I'm from

reckless_blues — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:27:59 GMT

I heard a story once - apocryphal - that the Taino people who made contact with Columbus were unable to see the ships on the horizon for some time. They saw them as light, or a sea swell, or birds. Finally an elder went and stood on the shore and gazed in the direction of the anomaly for some time until he was able to make them out clearly. Something to do with neurology, with the brain trying to make sense of information.

I grew up on a mountain - in the mountain wetlands - but it was an old mountain, part of one of the oldest ranges in the world. It was worn low. They were hills, and I didn't understand they were hills until I saw the Alaska Range. But that took me some time - from the Troth Yeddha ridge I couldn't distinguish the white mountains from clouds.

Instead what I noticed was the extraordinary calmness of the land. It occurred to me very quickly, having come from the stormy hills and the damp bogs, that the air was dry and there was no wind. The evergreens keep all the snow that ever lands on them because the boughs don't shake at all. Are they weighed down by snow, or are the trees here unusually thin? I won't know until spring.

Birds don't sing when it gets too cold, and it was cold when I arrived, close to -40. It wasn't until a week later that I started noticing birdsong, and it took even longer to sort out the clicks, gurgles, and croaks into things recognizable as birds. I had never seen a raven before. Where I grew up, the settlers destroyed them all as soon as they arrived on this land. There are one or two every year, according to censuses of the environment, but I had never been lucky enough to spot one. I had been eager to see a raven, and for some days I had been paying close attention to the sky and trees.

Well, ravens are like that - I didn't see one until I was paying no attention at all. I was comfortable enough on my daily walk from my cabin to put music in and tune out, and then as a song was ending I heard a strange croak from beside me. I thought to myself, "What song could I possibly have that starts off with distorted crow noises?" I even checked my tracklist. Then in a big hurry I remembered the raven, and I looked up, and there one was, sitting on a snowpile, watching me. It made another croak, as if it expected me to respond.

Because of my Tatar blood I knew how to throat-sing since childhood, and it wasn't difficult to imitate the call of a raven. Having only heard it once I immediately understood the sound - throat-singing comes from the sounds of nature in a subarctic climate like this one: running water, the elk that you herd, and I think it must have been ravens, too. I had learned about that song long before I ever heard it. I squatted there and we cawed at each other for a few minutes. Then I crept a little closer to take a picture and the raven picked up a piece of meat in its beak (with the calm air of offended dignity) and flew off. It's good not to cross boundaries, or else you lose something.

Since then I've gotten used to their croaks, knocks, and gurgles (the gurgle was the worst - one surprised me by gurgling in a tree where I didn't immediately see it, and I thought maybe an ulcer had hemorrhaged). I learned quickly that all of the sounds I had heard from birds since coming here were ravens, and they had always been in the trees, watching me. I felt a little heartened by that. The things in the world you want to see are there if you look.

Lately I see moose tracks around Willow House every morning when I leave. It makes me happy to think that an animal of that size can pass through here while I sleep, without either of us knowing about the other. This is the way it was for all people everywhere for some time, unhurried, undisturbed...

LJ Idol Week 6: heel turn

reckless_blues — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 08:11:01 GMT

A symptom for you:

jamais vu,

or "never seen:"

in a familiar place,

among familiar things,

a thought comes down like thunder:
You were never here.
You have never done it before.
This is wrong.

So. Follow your threat like a river,

coursing

to dissociate is pagan.

Something holy walks these floors.

(Ears flat, shoulders low. Prowl the meager ridge of fear like a lynx in the snow.)

Or don't. Don't scare yourself.

You should decorate. Venial things.

You must learn to become comfortable in your home.
Thrones.

Dominions.

I need nothing.

What you write about is panic,

not God.

Still,

God is there.

Do not humiliate me,

but also, do not leave

LJ Idol Week 4: “I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going to be. "

reckless_blues — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:35:12 GMT

You don't fast,
you don't pray,
you are sufficiently ungrateful.
You count the days,
interpret your bowels,
in hard silence you anticipate God.

You are inclined to hymns.
You are inclined to a heart that opens like a flower.
If you don't love God,
God will hurt you,
and it will be for your own good.

You fell once
on a staircase
with a mind inclined to constance you almost prayed.

falling,
praying,

thinking:
this would be the perfect time for God to show me I am not in His favor
better not attract
attention
now

Week One - executive dysfunction [Topic: I need the struggle to feel alive]

reckless_blues — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 23:35:09 GMT

You have a cancer in you,

somewhere,

and if you could put your finger on it

you could take it from yourself. Move on.

the way you fail

and you can rely on yourself to fail

in the same ways:

a constance, a religion.

God put a tiredness in you.

It isn't a gift.

your rotting, corpulent brain

your petulant body

a house of indecision.

Yes, it is something inside of you.

Yes, you do have to live like this.

made-up disease

and the pills don't work anyway

how much of this is choice

LJ Idol signup

reckless_blues — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 18:10:18 GMT

therealljidol

Been having kind of a depressive episode so I didn't want to promise anything, but whatever, I can always quit.

LJ Idol Week 15 - Just put a bandaid on it...!

reckless_blues — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 23:56:25 GMT

God exists - and in a roundabout way I’m paraphrasing CS Lewis in the most contemptuously flippant way possible - essentially, to set a good example. God is bound irrevocably by the laws he’s made for himself and chief among this covenant seems to be that God will not violate free will. This is why God begs us, why God begs and begs and begs, for us to ask. For us to kneel, to submit to His will, to be cleansed, to be made good. God can’t - won’t - do His work on us without permission.

Of course, that explains human evils. You have things like forest fires and cancer. But might entropy and the laws of physics have a will, an inevitably of progression that God holds sacrosanct? But what if disasters and diseases could *choose* to be good, to reason their way into living a Christian lifestyle?

Therefore, I propose to the funding committee that the best way to cure Ebolavirus is to grant it superhuman intelligence.

Before entering the laboratory proper - a biohazard level 2 lab, the "least frightening" on the campus, as Dr. Kabemba put it; and as far away as you can get from the hot lab with the experimental stocks of EHF - I jot down a few notes about Dr. Kabemba: coolly handsome, gentle eyes. Blue tinge to his dark skin even under yellowish flourescent lights... etc. etc. I add patient with me even though it's not the kind of thing you want to show up in an article. He's better than most are at dumbing it down for journalism majors.

"We're looking to form a neural network," he explains, pretending, in a gentlemanly way, not to notice me struggling not to lose my pens in a borrowed lab coat. "We've manipulated E.coli in the lab - a most agreeable bacteria! - in order to make it infectable by Ebolavirus. Once the virus infects the organism, latches onto its genetic information, and starts printing out new copies of itself, we believe it'll pick up on a certain gene we've spliced in. We call it the 'wand protein' gene." He bends forward. ...For 'magic science wand', that is" he confesses, sotto voice. He has the unsmiling deadpan my father used to use when making jokes like this.

He pulls on a pair of gloves as if by afterthought and unlocks an ultraviolet cabinet. I can't see what's inside very well, the cabinet is dark.

"Did you ever splice plasmids into the bacterial genome in undergrad?" he asks me. "Do you know how you can tell we've successfully recombined an organism's DNA? Along with the worker genes we splice in a plasmid to give us a visual shorthand."

He lifts a plastic lid, opaque with the condensation of cellular reproduction. "It glows in the dark."

=========

One hour later

"So, a neural network," I prompt, over lunch. My surname's Nigerian, but I'm a third-generation Bostonian and Kinshasha is burning hot. Over the course of my assignment here I've come to prefer eating in the laboratory cafeteria. For whatever reason, it always seems to be at 65 degrees. Maybe some kind of safety measure. Dr. Kabemba had a story about bacteria multiplying on heated toilet seats in Japan that put me off dinner last night.

"Yes. We figured it would be the most efficient way to get SmartBola up to the cognitive level we'd need. That and it works best for our purposes. We've got mammalian drives like self-preservation and reproduction and the good of the community, but no one knows what kind of instincts a sapient virus would have. This gives it some incentive to keep its numbers up, and that means not reproducing in a live host where you'd have the immune system constantly depleting your numbers and causing loss of memory, cognitive ability, and so on."

"And that's the basic idea, if my briefing was correct. 'Hemmorhagic fevers are inefficient reproducers: they kill the host too quickly'," I recited, from my memory. "So instead you want to convince it to choose artificial reproduction and life inside a safe, suburban petri dish."

"Indeed." Dr. Kabemba doesn't laugh much, but a slight bow of the head tells me he finds my comment amusing. I'm lucky he's easy to read. And inherently friendly, although most people probably don't see him that way. He adds, with a small, tight, regretful smile, "We all wished that instead of tampering with it we could see something like a genuine viral intelligence. But we have no idea what kind of form that would take. Trusting a living thing to act with self-interest is the predictable bet. Or at least that's how our boss put it."

"It's nice thinking that if everyone were smart enough," ('it's nice', how flippant, and this is not the way I want to speak to him, this is not coming out with the philosophy I need, "they'd choose goodness instead. And the drive to evil is some - some lack in us, some education, something you can throw affluence and ability at until it goes away."

"Yes." Inscrutable, now. Looking out the window, staring hard at the manicured grass, as if he can see the whole history of his country out past the campus walls.

"How quickly do you expect to have a SmartBola network up and running?"

"Considering how quickly the virus multiplies? I'd say just under three weeks."

=========

Three weeks later

I've been allowed in the hot lab, finally. I'm gaining the trust and camaraderie of the people here - it helps that Dr. Kabemba seems to like me, and I get the feeling he's not an easy man to impress - and hoped to be asked in for the moment of first contact, but the early experimental stages were fragile enough that they didn't want anyone besides the core team looking at the virus for a while. ("Outside of how lethal a hemmorhagic fever is to begin with, our major concern was prions," Dr. Kabemba told me. "Misfolded proteins. They just burrow and burrow and burrow..." He makes a face. "That's not the right word." It's evocative enough. I remember that prions cause mad cow disease. Spongiform encephalitis - spongiform because that's how your brain looks with holes bored in it.)

It occurs to me, for the first time, to be afraid of how a virus like this thinks. The way I'd be afraid of a man following me in the streets after dark.

"You're trying to speak to it now, correct?"

"Yes. Come closer to the microscope. Can you see the screen through your PPE?" I must have hesitated. "It's all right."

The virus looks like a pile of noodles, I think, crazily. A steady stream of balls is being bounced off of them. So far, the viruses don't seem to notice.

I look from the screen to the lab tech to Dr. Kabemba. "Explain this to me," I ask.

"It's the same principle behind the E.coli - how we made it infectable," he says. "A virus uses something like a lock and key mechanism to make sure it has the right organism. E. coli has something like a hard shell and the gene to create that is something we can manipulate here in the lab, and with our E. coli the virus can unlock it and get inside. The lock and key theory of human olfaction has flaws, but our nose is said to work more or less the same way. Little particles hitting receptors, and we recognize the shapes ... So there's something there that can register information if given enough intelligence to know it's doing it, and smell is a very powerful way to communicate. It might take hundreds of generations for SmartBola to figure out something like a language, and then hundreds more to figure out something like using Brownian motion to manipulate our particles, but I think eventually they might be able to speak back."

"And hundreds of generations takes how long, in virus years?"

Dr. Kabemba opens his mouth to speak. Then he stiffens. "Look at that. I think they moved."

The virus seems to ripple. All at once, like a bunch of people at a stadium doing the wave.

What an unworthy metaphor. I don't belong in this job.

I pull away from the screen and look at the dish. It looks like any other blood agar. I can't even make out the colonies.

=========

Twenty-five years later

I have a recording of my father's first words to the Network. Truly ancient cassette tape - it was more stable, or something, I forget how my mother explained it to me. But journalists still used it back then. I'm not supposed to have it, it's classified, but they snuck it out for me before the lab shut down. Most of the doctors and technicians that my father knew stayed loyal to the project, to the Network. He was well-loved, once. As am I. As was the Network. "To Miss Kabemba" is written on the plastic cassette box in marker. Heart above the i. Amazing thinking somebody with a doctorate writes like that.

The first voice is the Network's. There's a machine - think Stephen Hawking - that can translate particle motion into machine speech for us. There's a microphone so we can speak back to it. Ugly and strange, but we still used the old thing, even fifteen years on.

" - Listen. This is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Brothers Karamazov deal where you nobly sacrifice any chance at happiness so that one little thing won't suffer. Where you write off any sense of responsiblity! ...It's bats. We're asking you to infect bats and give all this that you have to your brothers. Yes, they'll die, but do you have any idea how many people we're losing to this? And how many rats we go through in the - "

"Doctor. Please." It's my mother. The tape plays back a shift of fabric. Her hand is on his shoulder.

There's a pause. A dangerous pause. They realize how unworthy they look before the Network.

The machine says this: FATHER-WHAT-IS-RAT

"It's a grounded bat. It's not important," says Dr. Kabemba, bitterly.

"We are humbled by it," says someone whose voice I don't recognize. It's somewhere between sarcasm and a sorrow so intense I am humbled by the sound just the same.

Even in a recording, even in one I've heard dozens of times before, it still makes me flinch to hear my father angry, however gentle he was with me.

"I keep imagining, even now..." my mother told me, her grey head tilted and a funny look in her eyes, trying to pull out the exact image she had with her journalist's precision, no matter how inelegant: "Even now I keep seeing an arm reaching out of the growth medium and grabbing him, like some kind of swamp monster, or..."

Then she makes a disgusted face. "I never could make a good story out of him. Even if I had Pulitzer-level skills anybody reading the paper over breakfast would forget about it by lunchtime. What's the point, even?"

She places the photograph of him on the mantle face down, and murmurs to herself: "All this love. All this love."

"I'll burn you to death," says Dr. Kabemba.

The machine says this: IF-YOU-CHOOSE-THAT-IT'S-ON-YOU-FATHER

Another inkblot of silence. I can practically hear the lab technicians exchanging glances. They were still always looking for danger, in those times.

"They're shutting down the labs," Dr. Kabemba tells them. "I have to give them something. You're considered a failure, a very expensive failure. We keep trying to release you in hot spots and you just refuse to infect anything, and we can't -make- you. Do you understand?"

THEY'RE-LIVES-FATHER-COUNTLESS-ORGANISMS-IN-THE-BIOME-COUNTLESS-CELLS-EACH-HAS-PURPOSE-A-BODY-IS-A-WORLD-A-BAT-IS-A-BODY-THAT-CONTAINS-A-WORLD-THEY-ARE-ALIVE-FATHER-THEY-ARE-ALIVE-THEY-ARE-ALIVE

REJOICE-IN-THIS

"Do you understand what I'm about to do now?"

There's the sound of a sigh, and the crackle-pop of a plastic lid being opened, and not long later my father is dead.

===========

Several days later

I don't want to tell anybody but I can hear the Network singing in the night. Something about vibrations. The water in the pipes. It doesn't please me, they don't understand the way the human ear works, but all the same I feel as if it should.

The guards at the abandoned building know me and they love me like a daughter. The way the Network does. They let me slip past them, just like that.

I have a hand-cranked generator. I turn the speaking machine on.

"My father is dead," I tell them.

YOU-WORTHLESS-THINGS-DO-YOU-UNDERSTAND-YOU'VE-ALREADY-TAKEN-A-LIFE

Who had said that to them?

"Are you ready to come out now?"

The speaking machine is silent for what must have been years in their time.

WILL-WE-FLY-WILL-WE-KNOW-THE-HEAT-OF-OTHERS-BODIES-IN-THE-COMMUNAL-TREE-TRUNK-IN-THE-CONGOLESE-JUNGLE-IN-THE-DEAD-OF-THE-NIGHT-IN-THE-BLOOD-AND-IN-THE-BLOOD-AND-IN-THE-BLOOD

"Yes," I tell them. "Yes."

SISTER-WILL-WE-FEEL-THE-LIFE-INSIDE-OUR-VEINS-AND-OUR-GUT-FLORA-AND-OUR-PARASITES

"I think so," I tell them. "If you try."

IS-IT-WORTH-IT-SISTER-IS-IT-WORTH-IT-ALL

I tell them what my mother would have told them.

"No," I say. "God, no. Nothing is."

Share in this, you and I.

WE-ARE-READY.

I run my hands under the sensors like a caress and come up with nothing visible to the human eye. At night I take them barefoot down to the forests, to the streams, over the moss on the rocks, still warm with daylight heat, and in the dappled moonlight I wash my hands of them.

reckless_blues — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:48:02 GMT

Lately I've been consumed with - not guilt, or shame, at all; but more of a bitter, lucid understanding of the fact that I am not a good person. I'm angry about that. As if, on top of everything else, life owed me decency and a good heart.

Maybe like...carrots, or Python, or something

reckless_blues — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 02:28:10 GMT

A concept: one week for Idol I write about literally anything other than death and child rape

SCI: prose poetry (the boy with the arctic eyes)

reckless_blues — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 01:54:41 GMT

Let's tell a story. I saw a picture that compelled me once, earlier today, in fact. It's an old wooden house in the woods, a regular cottage, with moss grown all over. The place so thick with grass and leaves and trees you might as well paint the air green in the summer heat. It looked familiar to me. Well, maybe that's how a lot of places look in the northeast. They colonized this part of America first. It is very old. I thought secondly of some myths about Britain and then Russia, surprisingly, last.

Let's tell a story. No, the domovoi is not appropriate. Nor too the drioma. (The dictionary says this: a little man with a soft, lulling voice. I would have sculpted some dark-browed boy out of that.) (Male beauty haunts me. I am sorry.)

I want to talk about God. God is what I talk about when I'm too tired to talk about men. It's one and the same to me. It has something to do with the dissolution of the body. My religion is a failure on my part to properly contend with sex.

(No, you only believe that because you are beautiful and you have always been beautiful. Moreover, you're older now. You've even become handsome. Consequentially you were taught that denial is transgression. Your chastity is vicious. Your sobriety has teeth.)

Once upon a time in Old Russia there was a city called Kitezh. The Tatars wanted it and so they came to raid. Instead of defending themselves, the people spread out on the ground and prayed.

(I'm thinking right now, in my American cynicism, of the old joke about the Catholic who died in a flood, turning everyone away with "God will save me." When he reached the pearly gates God said, "I sent you an evacuation notice, and then a rescue boat, and then a helicopter! What more did you want from me?")

God is exhausted. It's in all our stories now.

But this was back in the era of miracles and the water rose up and embraced the city and from that lake none have emerged again. The last thing the Tatars saw was the golden bells of the cathedral as it sank. It's said that the faithful can hear those bells, and singing in the lake, and the light of their candles in the dark. Even today pilgrims come crawling out on the ice.

A city is a metaphor.

The progenitor civilization of the Russian people left things in the mud. Here is a list: potsherds, iron, fragments of a harness and a millstone. I think a tinderbox. They
were snuffed out by the Golden Horde or perhaps there was a flood.

Too easy.

A city is a metaphor.

I am thinking of the abandoned cities, out in Siberia, the undesirable places. They don't put much money into the land, it all goes into improving the cities. Moscow, mostly. The children grow up and get free education and don't come back (or God help them, they go to the war). And in a generation everyone's gone.

Honestly, what do I know about that? It's vulgar, anyway. I have no interest in shaming the hopeful and I'm too young and foreign to explore the private sorrows of the old.

A city is a metaphor.

I want to write about Moscow. I can't picture it in my mind's eye. I don't see it. I think mostly of concrete, and the uglier parts of the subway, and how labyrinthine they get with one part closed off for construction and the signs all wrong. There's an apartment that's like my relatives' apartment. I feel like there's something I can just recognize about the house of a Slav - well, that's pure poshlost'. I'm not going to say it's the soul.

Think about it. What is it? Actually, it's just icons on the wall and a predisposition towards brown carpet. (Brown, gold, sunlight, childhood.)

I am in the mood to be neither vulgar nor sentimental.

But we were speaking of this Moscow apartment. A girl lives there, a girl with long brown legs (golden, even?), and there's a boy (there's always a boy) (and he's pathetic, because the pathetic are sympathetic and the wretched are easy to yield to. They have no tensile strength.)

But the girl can't and doesn't. She's been traumatized and her whole body closes up like a shell when she tries to touch him. It's the city of Kitezh and the invaders. It's her heart, and her trauma, trying to protect her. In a way it keeps her pure. (She too thinks about God in these times.) And it's quiet and sad, that kind of story. It is really no one's fault.

She smokes Prima (maybe Marlboro Lights) and likes to subtly imply she's a rusalka or maybe a selkie. These ruined women who became immeasurably untouchable.

I do not want to be a human being. I want to be inviolable.

Heterosexuality is the more compelling choice when you want to have some tragic sex. Heterosexual sex and the correct way to perform it has a literary history. That's the funny thing about homosexuality. You have to look up how to fuck on the internet.

I'm tired of talking about this.

Let's talk about God.

I want to talk about Russia and I want to talk about God. I know nothing about either. I have laughable news articles about Putin outlawing atheism and truly ancient history like my Soviet cousin saying "We used to go to church to talk about politics because we knew the Communists weren't there." (There are worse and more dramatic stories, they will never be mine.) My friend said the other day that Americans seem to be on a whole entire plane of existence where the beings of religion are real and immediate, and I dismissed that (I live in the blue states, and so as not to look like a credible idiot I keep my faith in God a secret). Later on I wondered to myself if that was because we haven't gotten expressions such as "Jesus, Joseph and Mary" and "like God come down from on high" stamped out of our vocabulary by jackbooted Reds.

No, I know nothing about Russia at all. Russia is not an idea. It's a real place and as such resists metaphors. Westerners who want to write grand and sweeping stories about the Russian spirit or metaphors about the USSR are acting, to me, in the poorest of taste. (I still like Deathless, but that's the only one.)

It's ironic, isn't it? God is closer than my native land.

I work too hard these days to be homesick, and then I get homesick for the homesickness.

I do not want to write a fairy tale. I am tired of real life. Real life is full of human beings. Other people warp my personality. This feels too much like a conversation, and that makes it fiction now. This has long ago stopped sounding like my voice, and I hate this piece on instinct. This is not how I think, this is not how I feel, and I want to be utterly alone.

(It's chaos theory. You find these impressions in you, or thoughts that sound good but aren't yours, images, feelings, and you try to fit them into something that works, and it spins out on the line, becomes something less and less like you every second. You weren't thinking, in your American cynicism, about anything. You take the faith of the Kitezh peasants and their submission to God, absolutely seriously. Your heart is burning with empathy for them. You've been kept up nights with your heart twinging over the loving tiredness of God. You love God like an aching mother, sometimes. Listen: you are capable of this)

So let's take it to the bitter end. There's this man. Or a boy. I like "boy", the implications are erotic. There's a yielding. A dissolution of the body. He's a real Russian beauty, has some issues with sex. This is the part where I salt it in with something from real life, just because it's at hand and I care about verisimilitude (that is: looking like a real human being). Let's see: getting death threats from someone in Russia who I was casually speaking to when I said ~~the wrong thing~~. Don't come here, you'll get killed, and you'll deserve it.

You will not be desirable there. You will not be strong.

Then I thought in passing, wildly, with great irritation, that if he could see me I'd have some power over him. I looked just like a girl when I was young and people would come at me with confusion and hatred and then at three paces they'd fall down on their knees.

Cold displeasure. Arctic eyes.

What a pretty fantasy.

But it was true to some degree and often enough in my adolescence to trouble me. This has something do with abuse and this has something to do with beauty and this has something to do with how I knew how to say all the right things and have people eating out of my hand; and this has something to do with the fact that I didn't know how to stop doing it.

Let's tell the story about when I was twelve years old and this fool made a clumsy and facile attempt at child grooming, and I did and said all the right things, and then I realized that gave me some power over him - Well. That's as far as it gets from pretty and neat.

(He hanged himself, I think. He never touched me. I was twelve years old and when I realized what he felt for me I laughed.)

If that were fiction nobody would ever buy it. Kids don't think that way and painting them as seducers and whores is a dangerous fallacy. Well, I did. I wasn't a virgin at twelve. I wasn't innocent. I was a little sociopath.

I am being very unkind. (I am thinking of this child in dangerous and near mythological terms. I am imagining myself as inviolable, I am imagining myself as inhuman.) I played along because I knew how to, and I liked being thought of as possessing sexual agency and drawing sexual attention, and I pulled back when I was uncomfortable because in childhood I knew how to pull back. And when I accidentally ignored him for a day (because I was scared and tired of dealing with him) he got so genuinely upset I wanted to see what happen if I simply withdrew my hand.

It was the most powerful I've ever felt in my life.

I was a child. I don't regret it.

When I grew up and tried to develop a peer group it was mostly the same. They were attracted to me, I responded. I couldn't not flirt with girls. It worried me. You know, I never used that correctly. When I fell in love I fell hard. I wasted years on men when I could have been cutting out their hearts. Making myself pathetic. I could have been iron. I could have been untouchable.

(No, that's not what people are like.)

And I couldn't just go to bed with them, either. I just couldn't give of myself that deeply.

At the end of the day this is about how you don't know how to talk to people, how you don't know how to fit in with Russians, how you don't know how to have a boyfriend, how you don't tell anybody you're gay at the church. It's about how you don't know how to connect with people because you don't know how to tell them you've done terrible things. (Like seducing a pedophile and goading him into suicide and that is in fact what you did.)

Ah, there it is. That's what the story is about. Social isolation (spiritual, cultural) as a result of guilt. Isn't it?

(No, that doesn't feel right. And besides, that's too easy.)

(It is about the painful work of becoming a human being.)

Let's not speak about this either. As fiction it's not interesting, and the part that isn't fiction is just embarrassing.

God is closer.

(God has something to do with powerlessness and God has something to do with love. God by His nature defies understanding.

God has something to do with the dissolution of the body. Wrap it up in a bow that way? Too easy. Far too easy.)

Let's see.

If you close your eyes, tilt your head to one side and listen with an ear, and then tilt your head the other way around and listen with the other, you can hear where God is coming from. The north wind. An old hunter's trick for determining direction.

Fine, that's where we'll leave the stranger, the boy whose story is easier and prettier and can be wrapped up neatly with a bow. The boy with the arctic eyes (I always wished my eyes were blue). I will not make him twelve, I will not make him like me. I'm not ready. This is not about forgiveness. So: the woods. A bed of moss. The place so thick with grass and leaves and trees you might as well paint the air green in the summer heat. I am laying him down in a thicket of ferns. I am giving someone a home.

LJ Idol Week 12: reptile dreams

reckless_blues — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 05:09:30 GMT

(What, me, get an entry in early? Nah, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and send this one to the school literary journal when I was done, and I finished about seven minutes before that deadline.)

Men of the Jackal

We were taught about God the Father, but the canyons were carved by the men of the jackal and to make room for us they swallowed their children whole.

Marriot showed her a bone, once (before we were grown and it was hard for them man and woman to talk together like human beings). A bone he found in one of the fading places, which are the passages down a drop too narrow for men to slip through once they're grown. They belong to children, and when the time comes they're left alone.

"It's got marks. Look. Like when a lizard is born from the sky and crawls down to us so we have something to eat. They opened its body, they took its flesh with a knife."

It belonged to something smaller than a man and something too large to ever have lived in this world. We can see what they used to be, written on the walls. Four-legged things. Things with hooves and horns. We found Marriot staring hard at one once, at what the men of the jackal called a "bull" (or so they say). This bull had its mouth in the groundwater and it had long, smeared horns. The horns, they say, were made out of old age or importance.

"It's moving," Marriot told her. "The men of the jackal were trying to show it bending its head down to drink."

"Look," he said then, stepping closer to the wall. "Another." He put his fingertips to the pigment, to what they called the Seven-Headed Bull (one head lifted towards the ceiling and six extra muzzles down its chin in quick succession). "They were trying, but they didn't know how."

Marriot was dark and beautiful and wanted the world to end again in a devouring. You could tell that just by looking at him. And not in a starving, which is what we figured was going to happen this time.

When the rains came we knew the floods, the white water gone rushing down the passages, the canyons all swelling with the mercy of God. Some parts we wouldn't be able to pass through for days and we understood that when we came back there'd be food. Lechuguilla, pale sprigs, and algae on the walls. Children were sent to catch blind fish in the fading places. In the light places, sometimes birds.

What would the walls be, if not clay flown on the wheel of heaven? What would the walls be, if not a thing smoothed by countless hands?

The rains hadn't come in a while. No.

We were sent down into the fading places, although we were nearly grown. Follow the traces and the wetrock. Hear the echoes in the stone. Find the groundwater of the bulls, the lake where the men painted them gathered. The elk and the lion, the cows and the bulls, and the jackals, the watching ones. They told us this, the teachers.

Marriot was an obvious choice. Me and her came along, perhaps because we loved him best.

No, Alejandra, was obvious too. I will not lie. She thought incessantly of the pleasure of God and the men of the jackal and how she could become the object of their love; not out of gain but out of sheer desperate intensity, as if she had some kind of secret duty. She was a shining and beautiful thing. I remember how she laughed, inelegantly, in childhood.

(All this happened overnight. Time obsessed her. She gave us the constant impression, even in the earliest parts of her youth, that she was late -too late- for something drastically important. Nervousness was her only flaw. This augmented her beauty, from a certain point of view.)

How did she stand getting her hands and knees all wet with clay, shaping pots? Well, she must have done this nobly too.

All this was beyond me. (Well, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of the Lord.)

Marriot? Marriot didn't even have to try.

When we die, Zion's children, our bones are harrowed and our fat is rendered into torches. These bones were my father. There's no one left to feed me up there in the dry places where we sleep.

Marriot sat in the sand and looked up at the crevice into which he had just fallen. It was high on the walls. There was no getting back to the rest of the canyons now.

Yes, we went down after him, Alejandra and I. Of course we did. We could not have done otherwise.

I don't know why Alejandra did it. Out of the principle of Mercy, perhaps. (I am your servant, she told him, with her torrential intensity, and I sat there picking at the dirt.)

I myself, I just could never. I could never have left him alone in the dark.

His torch was out. He did something strange as the ground was slipping, turning to gravel underneath his feet: hit the torch hard against the wall. Left a long charred mark. He did all this with purpose.

I understood. I think.

A few days before we left Alejandra had taken to strangling herself during sermons. Mostly we tried to ignore it. If anyone in the canyons was going to have ecstasies, it was her.

"I'm preparing myself. I want to know what it feels like to die of love. Through love and out of love, a sacrifice that redeems." She paused, and added, with the drowning insecure humanity that in our childhoods I once adored: "It's horrible. At least I'm no better than a Judas. I could never hope to be the object of this. I could never. I could never ... "

There was panic in her eyes, and she looked across the chapel cavern to Marriot.

I thought of all this then, down in the dark places, the places of no return.

"You shouldn't have come down here," she told me, with great pity in her voice. "You love him too, don't you?"

Marriot just looked at the both of us, with absolutely no emotion on his face. He was a man resigned to devouring (a hemorrhage, a blossoming, everything in your body opening up and sliding out into the red, Alejandra told him, and not what the rest of us get no not you never you a slow decay a starving a senseless and meaningless rot).

I think he just wanted to see what would happen next.

"Eat my flesh," she told me. "After this is done I have nothing else."

I saw too late that she had a piece of broken rock. And then Marriot was on the ground. Blood fresh as a rain-lit spring.

I was a coward and I ran with him until I lost Alejandra. I ran in the dark.

"Creosote," said Marriot. My arms ached with the carrying of him and I rested him against the cavern wall. He was still alive. And I would hold him to that, I would make him suffer until I strangled the last drop of his presence out of his beautiful body, pathetically. A stupid love, an ugly love, unremarkable.

"It's the smell of creosote, that comes after the rain, in the light places. But we're in the dark. We're..."

I realized then that we were on an incline.

I hauled him to my shoulder and selfishly I bore his weight, sobbing weak and human Marriot the watcher, and when I turned the corner there was light

LJ Idol Week 11: Occhiolism

reckless_blues — Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:48:37 GMT

When Brother Haskell first met the paladin he was on his knees in the dirt.

Knight-paladins bring their weather with them, the abbot remarked once, about a similar visitor. He meant it as some kind of metaphor about the state of the Democratic Republic, but from then on Brother Haskell would think of such early spring days as the paladin’s weather. It was both windy and unseasonably warm. Hot rain fell intermittently. The sky was a bright clear grey.

“Has the car broken down?” Brother Haskell asked, peering behind him. "Very few of them are in good shape these days..."

“Look. It’s an angel.”

He had gone out into the road to regard an old dead bird, headless, body hollow and desiccated as driftwood. There wasn’t much left to it but its wings. It had been a silver bird, Brother Haskell noticed.

“Isn’t it lucky?” the paladin asked. “It’s in its purest form.”

The monk made a few sounds of noncommittal dissent.

The knight-paladin ran his thumbs over the angel’s shoulders and, with some degree of anatomical precision, pressed down. The wings canted.

The paladin looked up and smiled wildly. Brother Haskell’s heart ripped in two.

After dinner at the refectory (in which meals are taken in silence), Brother Haskell managed to catch him watching his hands in the lavabo outside.

"I was a biologist," the paladin explained. "Before I took my vows."

"How impressive! When on earth did you find the time to go through the Rule after that?"

"Well, I did a stint in the army - the army proper - before going to school." His mouth twisted downwards involuntarily, and the monk thought better than to ask him much about it. "They didn't have to retrain me, really..."

Brother Haskell peered at him closer.

He laughed. "I'm almost thirty-five. I don't look it, do I?"

He was tall and strong-jawed and beautiful. He attracted a few curious glances in the abbey, with his blond hair and light skin - unusual for an Alamarican boy. Something akin to an atavism. He looked just a little less human. (It made sense he would have to go to college on a general issue bill, the monk thought, and scolded himself for the stereotype.)

"No," he told him. "You certainly don't."

A little old for a youthful indiscretion, the devil whispered.

"I need to go to confession," the paladin told him. "Haven't been since I left the basilica. That must be three weeks now. Please, do me the honor."

Brother Haskell inclined his head. "I cannot refuse. But first, I don't recall..."

"Saint-Ivan-Tyazhov became my confirmation name when I entered the Rule." He added, much less formally, "Or for short, Vanya. But that's neither here nor there."

After the scientist of the church! thought Brother Haskell. How appropriate. But the knight-paladin was already taking the steps up to the confession boxes two at a time.

During the days Saint-Ivan-Tyazhov spent visiting the abbey Brother Haskell seemed to become his favorite confessor. Hard to tell with the genuinely faithful, but usually this meant the penitent cared little about the clergyman's good opinion and in fact barely saw him as something capable of reacting to his sins at all. Brother Haskell, whose spark of desire had calmed down to a genuine and far less shameful craving for his friendship, regarded this with dismay.

Still, out of professional obligation, the monk looked forward to the chance to serve him spiritually.

He was indifferent to sex and untroubled by vanity. His confessions were singularly uninteresting.

"I've always got a pain in my knee when I'm headed to a service," he said suddenly. "I must step strangely then. I'm too eager, or ... "

"Well, that's hardly your fault at all!"

"No, but I think to myself, just then, that maybe I'm not fit to be before God."

"Becoming a man of the cloth is a challenging undertaking. Doubts are always present as to whether or not we are called." He had long held the suspicion that Ivan-Tyazhov had taken up his vows in order to get away from something, or because he thought such a rigid life would be easier, and the monk's heart bloomed with tenderness and empathy, having been shown a weakness it could sink its little roots into. "I assure you such thoughts are beyond ordinary! Why, I myself often - "

"It's not that. It's that I think to myself, 'Why am I so convinced that it's God hurting me and not the devil?"

Brother Haskell didn't know what to say, and so he read from the Book. This was a passage which he barely understood but (perhaps for that reason) which he turned to in times he lost his fortitude. (In truth he was hoping Ivan-Tyazhov and his penetrating intellect would get much more out of it than he did.)

"You who are my Comforter in sorrow, my heart is faint within me," he began. "...The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved..."

There was a very delicate pause.

"Brother, if I may. What have they told you about me, exactly?" And then, just after - "I'm sorry, I'm speaking out of turn." The paladin continued: "For these and all the sins of my past life, especially the sin of bloodshed, I am truly sorry."

He waited.

Brother Haskell assigned him penance.

The abbey was connected to the city cathedral (the cathedral of what had once been a city, that is) and the interior design had been fashioned after the grotto at Lourdes. It was all marble and darkly lit by candlelight, and had curious little nooks and staircases. The pipes of the grand organ (shattered now) were the only part of the instrument visible and resembled, somewhat, stalactites. The lector spoke from a distant pedestal on the far left that seemed to jut right down from the ceiling. The cathedral was meant to give the impression of having come right out of the earth.

The monk had never really noticed, but the paladin began commenting on all this after Brother Haskell noticed that nobody had given him a proper historical tour of the grounds.

"You know," said Brother Haskell, giving the pipes a hard look, "It is a gift to us, your presence. We never thought we'd see another cadre of paladins this far out on the line. Thought we'd been entirely forgotten."

"A cadre, eh? Is that a roundabout way of asking me if you're getting a full set of guardians anytime soon?" asked the paladin, though gently.

"I hadn't intended it to be." He really had not.

"I'm afraid it's just me. For whatever good a lone knight will do you. And it's as much for my "good" as yours. The basilica wanted me out here alone. They're trying to get something out of me. Trying to break my spirit. Well, the joke's on them. I find the abbey lovely and the company agreeable."

Brother Haskell took a chance. The abbot had refused to comment on any possible ulterior motives for a paladin to have been assigned here, of all places, after all these years - except he deigned to hint that a profitable line of inquiry would have been to ask him what he had written his doctorate thesis on. (Talk some reason into him, was the insatiable subtext.)

"Brother Ivan-Tyazhov," he began, "What did you study at the Institute?"

Ivan-Tyazhov smiled slowly. He leaned in towards him. "Human immortality."

The monk thought, for a moment, that he was being ironic.

Then the far wall of the cathedral imploded. Brother Haskell saw the night sky.

After the meteor storm Brother Haskell found Ivan-Tyazhov in the infirmary. The abbey didn't have doctors, either, and the paladin was fumbling to bandage an insignificant wound subsectioning his forehead.

"Don't be worried about this. It's nothing," the paladin told him, scowling in sympathy. "Head wounds bleed like the devil. You can turn away, if you like."

Brother Haskell stood and watched.

The rumple of bandages, expired ointment being placed down hard on a table. No motion from the cadaver someone had dragged pointlessly inside. No sound from the adjoining refectory. The monk was always very aware of when they were alone, and, he believed, so was the paladin. For different reasons, perhaps.

"Do you know why I became a Catholic?" the paladin asked, after some time. "I mean, I was always a Catholic. But do you know the moment I became *committed*?"

"Of course not. I won't unless you tell me," said Brother Haskell, softly.

"It was explained to me once," began the paladin (Brother Haskell knew that he tended to hide his intelligence this way, for whatever reason, and often meant he reasoned it out himself or had received it in knightly catechism or read it in a book), "that even in our worst moments God extends His love and comfort to us all. That's what hell is. The lack of it. No matter what we've been through - what we've put other people through - a human being could no sooner conceive of hell than a fish could conceive of a lack of water." He paused. "Until, I suppose, you reel it in and suffocate it."

"There aren't any fish anymore," Brother Haskell pointed out.

Ivan-Tyazhov laughed. 'Well, then I need more contemporary imagery."

He seemed to relax some, then. "I think other people wouldn't see it that way. As something positive. They'd find it cynical. Or deeply unsympathetic."

Finally Brother Haskell had something to add.

“In the Eastern church they believe, I think, that everyone goes with God. The ones who did evil suffer in His Light. The cold ones. The cynics. The ones with unprepared hearts. On the day of His Presence He opens them, regardless. There is no hell. There is no death at all.”

Saint-Ivan-Tyazhov graced him with a soft, rueful smile. Brother Haskell was reminded, not for the first time, of the paladin’s extraordinary empathy. All the tenderness of the world was in there. Brother Haskell burnt.

“Too bad we’re Catholic,” Ivan-Tyazhov said.

Later there was a service and they buried the man. The paladin did the digging. The deceased had been a favorite of Brother Haskell's, and Brother Haskell came out to the yard to watch.

"It's all right," he told him. "It was just after confession, wasn't it? He'll go straight to heaven. Like in Hamlet. I used to wonder if it wouldn't be right to just kill everyone who walked out of the booths...if perhaps it wasn't just our vanity, not wanting to be murderers, not wanting to have sinned..." He laughed unsteadily. "But that would be too easy, wouldn't it?"

"In spite of the kingdom of heaven you'd have taken something from him," Brother Haskell replied.

"Yes," said Ivan-Tyazhov. That was all.

He put his spade down in the earth and wiped his brow.

Some nights later. After Compline. Acid rain. Brother Haskell broke away from the five remaining monks, who had taken to praying in an unused storage room which had the salvageable parts of the altar moved in, and looked for Saint-Ivan-Tyazhov, hoping he hadn't been caught outside in the cloister in the black storm.

He had questions. Ivan-Tyazhov decided he was in the mood for the Socratic method.

"In Biblical Greek "sinful nature" and "flesh" are treated as interchangeable. Why, Brother Haskell, does the flesh corrupt the spirit?"

He fumbled, damn him. "It's fear," he said. "It's coveting..." He tried working through the idea aloud. "It's temporary."

He didn't understand Ivan-Tyazhov, who stood there covered in blood and loved God in His Comfort. For him God was the fear and God was the coveting, God made the ashes and God made the eternal soul; and God was the sluice, and God was the water, and God was the river. All things ran endlessly to Him.

Ivan-Tyazhov was silent, in a way that meant agreement rather than dissent. This Brother Haskell knew.

"And what do you think God would do to us on Earth if we took away the possibility of hell?"

"It's not about that. God isn't about cowardice and timidity and mediocrity. It's not about living scared and simple and being grateful for what you've got, it's about stripping away everything except a love that breaks open your heart. And that's brave. To let God in. To get as close as you can get to Him before you burn. The church is about the compassion - the extraordinary compassion - to transcend death. It's about having to stare at agony, having the bravery to look at the body where all human suffering and all human sin converges and whisper "No." Christ isn't up on the cross to pay for our sins because God demands it. It's because we do. And we don't have to. We don't have to make people suffer anymore."

He wasn't even sure what he was saying at this point.

Ivan-Tyazhov looked at him. "You don't think I feel it too?"

God, what an insult.

"What I mean is that the Catholic church is a transhumanist entity. And if anyone ever told you differently - "

His voice was perhaps too desperate, enough to make Ivan-Tyazhov question his motives, and coldness dropped between them like a guillotine.

"I burnt all the papers," he told him. And he added, his voice distant and strange, heavy with prophecy - "Even if I hadn't, you wouldn't have the time."

"Lawrence, please," said Brother Haskell, for he had long ago told him his baptismal name. "I don't want to die."

Saint-Ivan-Tyazhov sighed and touched Brother Haskell's shoulders. "I know."

He pulled back, made a strange gesture with his hands, and walked off.

He had touched him. Sinful as it may be, and here at the edge of the world and deep within the fear of death, that was enough.

He drowned in their cowardice. All this joy.

Time, whether they had enough of it or not, continued to pass.

Late at night Brother Haskell woke up long before the first office and was somehow compelled to go out into the remains of the cathedral. He found Ivan Tyazhov sitting up high - impossibly high, as if he had flown - up on the ruined wall. He was looking downwards, down past the cliffs the cathedral and monastery had been built on, down into the break in the world and the field of stars.

Meteors welled up from below.

"It's a nebula," the paladin said. "It's the cradle of the stars. Watch. The universe is giving birth. Once it was you and me in there. The iron in our blood was forged from the core of a fading sun. And now it's here."

"The sun?"

"The sun."

Brother Haskell walked up the staircase, climbed on the lector's podium, and found a foothold. He scrambled up the wall and sat down beside Saint-Ivan-Tyazhov.

"There is no death," Ivan-Tyazhov told him.

Morning would soon come.

LJ Idol Week 10: Streaming

reckless_blues — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:40:06 GMT

Taken two years ago on Greek Week.

If there's one thing I understand it's the pipeline that cuts through the mountains. You can't build too close to it - though the entrance to that path is nearly right outside my doorstep - and so most of that place is wild, and it's more changeable than any settlement of men. I walk a mile or two through the backwoods on my way to the main road every day after school. If it's a day or two after a storm, then foxes and deer will have cut a trail for me and I won't have to break fresh snow. In the summer the brush will make a certain point on the path inhospitable, and I know when to cut into the woods to avoid it. In spite of that, wild berries will grow. And apples. I know how to eat when I'm there.

Though I'm lucky - if the main road had been 300 yards in the other direction, I'd have had to cross water. Provided it had rained recently. Not much of it, but a brook too wide to jump. When I was a child I'd take off my shoes and walk barefoot.

You'd be surprised how quickly and silently you can move through the woods. If need be.

- They tore up a great swath of the land a few years ago, when I was just becoming an adult. They drove the deer out into the roadways, the foxes into the town, and a stoat took up in the rushes that grew over a seasonally-abandoned construction project. (I haven't seen it in two years. The house is built, the rushes are gone.) That year the hawks bred in the sky above my house, I saw the bodies of stags piling up beside the road.

The world gets smaller.

- I was walking endlessly along the main road late one night. Autumn - late autumn. Storm. Hot rain. I was barefoot in the grass. I felt restful with my feet planted on the heat of the earth.

Then I stopped, stricken by something, for no reason at all. I forced myself to go on (I was used to these little moments of fear, out by myself at night) and a minute later I saw a fox travel across the road, tall and afraid. It went the wrong way, into the suburbs, where the pipeline lands had once been.

One's body knows better.

- I went into the abandoned lot, which had been an abandoned lot for so long it had become something like a field. Tall grasses grown over a hint of asphalt. In the distance, trees and trees. It was well-wooded off the main road. There was a reservoir, and from the reservoir the forest connected into the state park, which I myself have never seen the ends of. Deer and deer. Half-tame bears. They're too used to people and they do hunt there. I try not to stay with them, if we come across one another. It's not as large as I think it is, back there.

I used to believe that a deep, cool, almost-still stream, a part of the pipeline, a stream which flowed through high white tree roots; had the spirit of a rusalka living in it. A drowned girl, a wronged woman. Seductive to others, but only dangerous in certain times of year. I used to go and leave her things in the pagan way, which is still practiced in Russia and wherever people are wise. The first year, after Rusalka Week, I went back to that place only to find it all dried into wet mud, and that after seeing the water so deep I could have wet my whole hand pressing my hand to the bottom. Some power had passed from it. I felt conviction.

This year they marked off much of that area as protected lands, as part of the wetlands preservation program. So naturally, I obey. The land is more important than I am.

- One early morning, when fear used to drive me out before dawn, I thought I saw the back and shoulders of a strong young man pull themselves up out of the ground. It was only a boulder, and in fact, one I had passed in the abandoned lot quite often. Still, all the same, I am blessed by that sight. That land is wiser than people. You can see all sorts of things and believe you understand them...

I wanted to move closer to that precious boulder, and then a man I barely knew passed by me in his pickup, on that main road, honking his horn. Not for the first time was he passing me, as if by coincidence, in this way, and at a strange hour.

I thought to myself - So long as he doesn't hear me singing. I would kill a man for less than that.

He was only being friendly. I never saw him again. Consider: I also never saw anything else rise up out of the rocks.

- Last night I dreamt I went back to my old school, from when I was a child. I was never happy, but I was happiest there. That was the year I started having panic attacks for reasons I wouldn’t understand until I was older.

Was that school on a hill? I don’t remember, I haven’t been there in fifteen years. It was summer and the building was gone, it was overgrown, it looked the way the mountains do by my home, a wild green valley in between two bluffs. Heat and fog. Wild grasses up to your chest. Frogs and wet rocks.

Where the building was, there was a deep pool of water instead. In between the trees.

It was still, somehow, a school for young children, the children were playing in the water and I held back and watched. And then it was obvious to me that the water was poisoned, and so was the dew on the grass, and all of the other things that were supposed to remain still and were being disturbed by footsteps and limbs, and the water was deeper than I imagined, something like a great fish was coming up from the depths.

They’re killing the children, I thought, they abandoned them here and now they’re killing them.

- I go on the backwoods to the church because I've never seen a single soul there, not because anyone in my household really cares if I come and go but because I don't want them to know that I feel things as deeply as I do when I take the Blood. I'm not seen to pray. I hide my cross. These things are known to me and me alone. What I can hide is what I can keep.

I have never once in my life seen another person in the forest. In the summer I became aware that our town's road and the little row of buildings on it is just a line through the woods, and people travel back and forth, back and forth, unaware that they make up nothing but a pale line in an abyss.

The forest is vaster.

- Before dawn, in the summer, spring, and most temperate part of fall, I like to slip out of the house before my father is awake and I like to return after I know he's gone to the factory. On the weekends I sleep in the woods. I know where there are ferns. I know where to go so that I won't be seen. I know where the bats rest and the owls roost, I know the faces of the fox and the deer. One time I was sure I wouldn't feel safe enough to sleep until I saw the fish in one of the deep lakes, and I knew where to go to find its back, cutting slow and silver in the water. All things wild and unaware.

LJ Idol Week 9: 404

reckless_blues — Sat, 13 Feb 2016 00:56:42 GMT

We woke the dead the other day.

I think of education as a privilege, I had to fight a lot to get it. I'm not a whiner about it. Whenever I had an exam I didn't want to take or a lot of homework I didn't want to do, I used to say to myself, at least I'm not in Afghanistan.

Well, a few weeks ago I went to do the first of my clinicals on the back of an ambulance, and I walked into the dispatch and made a little small talk with the dispatcher and the EMT, who wanted to know how my education was going and the like. This conversation ended with the dispatcher, who was completely unaware of my little saying, thoughtfully commenting that he knows a guy who says, "I'd rather be back in Afghanistan than go through medic school again."

That was how I knew it was going to be an interesting night.

About an hour later, after I met the man and woman I was riding with and was introduced to the rig, we were cruising around the city looking for trouble (or a good place to get fast food - EMS workers eat like it's going out of style). I had signed up for the 6PM shift because I thought it would be exciting, and I'm all keyed up in the back trying and failing to look relaxed in front of the old hands. ("It's your first ride time? Ever?" said the EMT, and looked at me as if - well, as if she really, really wished I would suddenly remember the twenty-five other times I had worked on living patients.)

(I knew, however, that I was prepared; for at the beginning of the semester I was worried I'd accidentally kill someone, and towards the end I was more worried I'd do something incredibly embarrassing.)

(No, I was afraid for other reasons. I'm a survivor of human trafficking. My earliest memory - if it wasn't a dream, I don't remember - involved EMS, in fact. Someone got into an argument with who I'm guessing was her pimp and I was standing underneath a table, I was that young, and watched him stab her, and the ambulance came, and they hooked up - well, it would have been a bag-valve mask or an NRB or some such hooked up to oxygen. And I thought they were pumping the life out of her and I went trying to tear out the tubes. And now where I am, with the masks, and the oxygen, in my lap.

Well, I wasn't altogether right when they got me back. I had anger issues and a preoccupation with violence and death that was very frightening in a small child. My parents - especially my mother - they thought I was a monster. So I was thinking to myself: What if you like it? What if it turns you on?

This will be relevant later.)

We're not on the road for ten minutes before we get a call. There was an overdose in the men's locker room at the YMCA. He was dead. Well, pulseless and apneic. They were working on him now.

Now, the thing you should know is that when people are dead they have a tendency to stay dead. ("Then I hook up the defibrillator and shock them into a flatline," is how one of my instructors used to put it.) CPR and the like work just often enough for the system to justify doing it. You're not really out there saving lives, at least, not in that way, not most nights.

("I remember my first call ike it was yesterday. It was a three-month-old child. I remember my first loss like it was yesterday," said the same woman. "You find a way to deal with it." I was thinking about that just then, as the ambulance pulled up and I got out.)

We walked in just in time for me to see an AEMT drilling a line into his bone. They gave him shot after shot of Narcan. Epinephrine to start up his heart. It wasn't working. We took over for the guy doing CPR.

His skin was purple and red, I noticed.

A cop was - almost casually - filling something out on a clipboard. "What do you think? Forties?"

"Yeah, early forties."

He took good care of himself. He had black paint on the soles of his feet and white paint on his hands. He must have had a job, a house painter or a janitor, or maybe he painted as a hobby. He was a blond, he had just had a haircut, it was just starting to go grey at the edges. He had a nose as straight as an arrowhead and when the paramedic pulled back an eyelid to check his pupils (pinpoint and fixed - boy, he was gone) I noticed that his eyes were Arctic blue.

He was beautiful. I noticed that he was beautiful. I didn't want to fuck him, but I noticed it. Every inch of that patient is burned into the back of my mind.

"I got a pulse. It's faint, but I'm telling you, it's there."

We got a pulse.

And we packed him up and took him to the ER and they brought me in and had me watch what they did with him for a while. I tried not to look when they cut off his jeans to put in a femoral line. Someone got him a towel.

I wanted to say something to him before I went, maybe silently, or in Russian, the language of my privacy - get better. I'll remember your face for the rest of my life.

All the other calls we did that night were mostly bullshit. Happy to do it, but they weren't as exciting. But the fact that we got a save traveled and every hospital, the doctors and nurses and other emergency workers seemed to know who we were before we got there.

"That's the first save I've gotten and I've been doing this for two years," said the EMT, half to herself.

They shook hands with the guy who drilled his shoulder, he was precepting. Quiet, tired atmosphere. A job well done.

I had a chat about it with the paramedic, after.

"There might be brain issues, we don't know how long he was out, it wasn't witnessed."

"But," the medic continued, "I thought there was brain activity. When I went to check the pupils again I thought they were a little different ... I don't know."

I told the medic what I noticed. That he had a job, that he was in relatively good shape. "He's got structure. He's relatively young. I dunno. Maybe he'll get clean."

"Ah, you know. They never do."

"Well, I hope for the guy."

"Yeah. I do too."

I mean I hoped for him so much, then. Not for me, but because I can't imagine dooming yourself like that. Having to live with brain damage because of something you did, knowing the exact instant you hurt yourself permanently. I didn't want him to live like this. He was unmarried, he had no ring. He could have built a family for himself, gotten clean, before that.

(I thought of this for weeks on end after. Maybe running into him out in the city. Maybe I'd go to bed with him, provided he could consent. Stay with him. I don't know why I felt that compulsion. It didn't feel entirely inappropriate. It's just always been the easiest way for me to show kindness to other people. Before I cut that hard, thin line in my long coat and my academic's eyes, I was all tender-mouthed and bountiful. People loved me then, when I gave myself, when I could.)

I forgot about it, more or less, pretty quickly. I'm good at professional distance. I knew I would be.

Then I realized something - I knew him, didn't I? Something about those shockingly blue eyes.

Did I sleep with him? Not when I was trafficked. Years later, when I was a messed up kid, finding quick fucks to make money to feed myself and maybe, someday, get out. (Well, look at me now.) I think he paid me once. Or he tried to, I didn't sleep with him, actually. Terrible experience. I didn't like being naked around other people and mostly advertised giving blowjobs. He was groping for me in this big truck of his, speeding down the middle of a highway. I was freaked out, I didn't like it and kept telling him to stop, not very forcefully, cringing away, voice like it never broke. I turn into a child then and that upsets people, if they're decent.

He was decent. He gave me a cigarette and drove me back to the minigolf place he picked me up. I crawled home and thought to myself for a while about how I probably should have just stabbed the fuck. I spent a lot of time having violent thoughts and pretending to be tough.

(I'm thinking, all of a sudden, of when I tried to set myself up as a camwhore. I had a good, even fun experience with a guy, realized then that I had fucked up the settings and I hadn't made a cent, and then I felt revolted. Dirty. The way you feel after being raped. I'm thinking, all of a sudden, of how when I was eighteen and got my first boyfriend I became completely emotionally unstable. Going to bed with strangers, that was and is easy for me, but I couldn't handle healthy consensual sex with someone I love. I just couldn't do it psychologically .I could not bridge that gap. And his circle (Russian intellectuals) was trying to help me, in their fashion. More like trying to do damage control so that I didn't hurt him, but that's fair. I was more of a wounded animal than a person. And a friend of the family, a professor of ancient Greek and Latin, told him that the greatest Freudian pleasure was to rape someone, kill them, and devour their flesh. (And his sexual desires were fine and I just needed to get over that, I guess.) It's a thought with absolutely no substance that only comes to mind because it sounds interesting - but is it possible then that if the most erotic thing to do is destroy someone, then the most chaste thng to do is to bring them back to life?)

Well, I don't know. I probably will never know.

And how do I feel about that? Nothing at all. Just another reminder piled on that somehow I have to marry all these people who I've been, the academic, the medical student, the violent adolescent, the hard-edged homeless, raped child. And that the absolute purity with which I treat my ambitions to become a doctor and surgeon was threatened. No, I don't come here to reckon with the body, to reckon with death, because I couldn't before. This is not about power. This is not about control. This is about what I can do for other people.

Maybe the fact that I don't feel anything in particular about it is a sign that finally, it's all been resolved. And the thoughts I have are just that - inappropriate, but passing thoughts. I am not who they told me I was. I'm a professional. And I care. But I don't care too much. I'm all right.

If this is what forgiveness feels like then I don't understand.

Lj Idol Week 8: A Dictionary for Dreamers

reckless_blues — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 00:56:22 GMT

No. God, no. What are they teaching you about us at the Institute, anyway? Of course we never intervened, outside of observation and a little interaction. Though I agree that could have been categorized under traumatic, even catastrophic intervention. But certainly, we never came in there guns blazing and burnt any part of the Worldwind down. From the standpoint of, let's say, ecological deontology, we have no idea how parts of the Worldwind affect each other. Like landing on an island and hunting to extinction a species of vermin. You begin to lose the flowers, then the birds ... I always suspected it was all connected. We've got enough problems on heaven and Earth.

You need to understand that we never did figure out how to get the devices to target any particular world with precision. We'd spend an hour or two in there if we could, and in fact I personally spent what must have been three days (and there were consequences for that, believe me), but once we closed that door behind us there was no coming back. We didn't have time to report back to a bioethics committee, or even discuss much amongst ourselves ... The worlds in there. They're like people. Once you've lost one, it'll never come round again.

I'll show you where it used to be, if you like.

(An average-sized room, empty now. About as old as the university itself. Wooden floors polished from generations of footsteps. There's grey, ashy wax built up in the corners and along the seal of the door. He's in the center, hemming and hawing, working his hands as if he's cold, as if there's something he's longing to touch. Electric chandelier on the ceiling. Someone comes in every once in a while and dusts and replaces the bulbs. In this, a room of unfathomable importance. You have to wonder what they feel like.)

See? Don't be afraid, it's nothing special. Yet we'd come in here and visit new worlds ... Wonderful places. Wonderful things. Our connections weren't always good, sometimes we'd see right through to the walls...and I always, it's difficult to explain, felt the size of the room, even if there were horizons everywhere. Like watching something filmed on a tiny soundstage. Your cheaper productions. Understand?

An illusion? No. It's possible, but I doubt it. We'd be able to bring back tangible objects - I mean they'd take tape to our clothing and send what came off to the BL5 lab to analyze the dust, we didn't go around picking up rocks - and it was possible to get hurt in there, even killed.

Do you know how we found ourselves the doors? Well, there was the sighting instrument, and you'd feed it little tools, little tropes, the things that make up a world - and yet somehow you'd never come back to the same world twice - I could never explain it. It's not like a river. It's all in the same place. It's as if, to be able to hold it into a form you can access and understand, you would have to make yourself an eye, unceasing - so that you yourself are the only thing that could make that world change.

(he finishes, with the emphatic triumph of a professor finally driving the classroom to the end of a roundabout metaphor. A consummate teacher, even now.)

...The last world I personally visited. Well. That was the world of wax. We'd have these little nicknames to make it easier, you see, the official designation was WH-341B...Yes, just like that, off the top of my head, I remember.

It wasn't a very creative nickname. No. Some of them come easier than others. When we got there, we were in something like a swamp...it was grey all over. Fog thick as soup, almost white, and low to the ground. Smelt like - well, like nothing. Some worlds just don't have a smell. Maybe, if anything, candlewax.

There were naked trees everywhere, these ugly black-brown things, and built up around the trees was wax. We were walking in it. As I near as I could tell from all the fog on the ground. We were up to our ankles in it. It was just like a bad soundstage, I'm telling you!

(Laughter. Not easy laughter. Unstable and sad.)

And someone in the world had been - yes, someone in the world - I'll get to that in a minute - had been taking the wax from the ground and drip-melting it into people. There were limbs and heads and I could never quite make out the faces.

(God bless the seekers, he said then, quite suddenly, and out of everything said there that night this appears to be the only segment cut from the recording.)

...There were hands then. I remember like this. I remember his white hands stretching out towards me. Shirtless torso, blond hair, and panic. Like a falling bird. He had been sitting in the tree branches, watching us, and he fell to me -

"Tell me something, give me a thing I can keep," he begged me, and I thought, inaverdently, of my childhood, and a sunset, and a garden.

(That's what the two of them were doing, in the waxwork bog. He touched beneath the chin of the figures. "This one had eyes that turned green in the summer and blue in the winter. Blue as ice. When I said that, you saw his face just as clearly as I do, didn't you? I'll never forget him now. Because someone who loved him told me who he was."

Time obsessed him.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

This was the first time we saw another human being - or something that so strongly resembled one - in any of the universes of the Worldwind. After no small degree of commotion he took us to the House of Joy.

That was what they called their manor. I wouldn't call it a manor. It was the size of a barn. Maybe smaller. He lived there with his father, the waxworker boy.

It looked like one of our meal halls at the Institute, actually. The same dining table, the same dark wood. That place was totally barren, they never could have fed us, but we sat down and called it a "dinner" just the same.

"...You're from the Institute, aren't you?" said my colleague in a voice that was quiet and somehow, strangely, angry. "You're one of the ones who disappeared in the early experiments. Swallowed up by the Worldwind."

The father didn't reply.

"...You brought in the boy."

He grabbed him by the wrist. "I know who you are, Lindbergh, you bastard, I'll - "

[Section of tape damaged]

- I was alone then, there was no saving him, and I walked with the waxworker boy. We were silent for a while, and then we started to talk.

You know how it is, don't you? You talk and you talk.

He listened closely, with a craftsman's eye. He never knew love. He did know devouring.

[Section of tape damaged]

- Lindbergh read lines to the remaining of us that night. He was fond of literature, it seems. Classically educated. He [unintelligble], and it was something like -

I have seen the way his feet are set upon the earth
like dogs
and the blood, and the grace, and the drowning,
the midnight tidals, the hemorrhaging sun
death follows him
like a woman in love

and I have seen my death come
so thoughtlessly,
like a folded bird
like a young man
simply thinking
of someone else
God of my prayers,
thief of my heart

[Section of tape damaged]

"What are you talking about?" he told me, head tilted, looking hard at the figures in the trees, as if he had never seen them before. He was an adolescent. Maybe older. Not keen to hold on to naivete. "They're people. They're formed and kept and held by me, the way that I'll be formed and kept and held by you. You'll remember me to someone and you'll keep me in the same phrases, and I'll live on in - "

" - It's not the same," I told him. "It's not the same. These aren't people. Is your father telling you they are?"

(I won't do that to you. I won't tell them who you are, I told him, in the dark, and the threadbare, moth-eaten blanket, the favorite book, the creaky bed, I whispered all this into his stomach and thighs, and I broke all my promises because they paid me to. Because I had to. Because he was alive in there.)

(He was the sun. He was the sun. He was the sun. He was the sun. He was -

[Section of tape damaged]

" - he's [static] the young god of this world," said Lindbergh, the father. "I cannot [unintelligble], nor can I be remiss. There is no recompense.

And I could feel it then, the lust weighing him down, old Lindbergh; and the world was heavy with it, it was a function of gravity, it was pulling me down to the earth. It became me. I was within it. I was in him and within him, I could taste his boyish heart

"It's been too long, Einar. Please, we have to get out of the Worldwind. It's ruining you. And you're doing these [unintelligble] to him, and the whole place is going to come apart if we - "

"Please," I said. "I want him. You don't understand."

I had to stay. I had to.

[Section of tape damaged]

- and, well, we all made it out of the Worldwind all right!

(His voice is extraordinarily calm, although his hands are shaking as he cleans off his glasses. Church bells in the distance. The seminarians are going to school.)

I'd like to be out in the grass. In the s - in the heat. I used to go out there after our little missions and lay right down in the dirt. Even in January, you know...It felt as if I were melting right back into the earth...

Oh, don't give me that look. I'm flesh and blood. Look at me. He would never. He would never.

Yes, I dreamt of it, in my restless bed, in my omophagic caresses, I dreamt of the day my foul body would rot away into the dirt. I would become my candlewax soul, the fire of my tenderness, the purity of my light. We long for it, the borders of him, what we are when we press our palms against the palms of those we love.

But that's not a person, is it? Listen. He burnt the Worldwind down. He burnt it for me.

And even now he comes to me in the night as desire, and -

- Well. It's not at all the same.

LJ Idol Week 7: "The security deposit is non-refundable ... "

reckless_blues — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:58:46 GMT

I asked him once,
very youthfully and stupidly,
when we were talking about moving in together
something about the paint on the walls
and the furniture.
"But what if I don't like it?
Can we get new ones?
I want to feel comfortable,"
and what I meant,
although it took me years to understand it,
because some people are labyrinths and
some people are cathedrals
even and especially to themselves
what I meant was
I'm afraid you'll trap me somewhere I hate
like every other man who's loved me.

I mean they locked me in a room,
I mean they took away my passport.
This is not a metaphor.

I would have said that
in those words
if I had them
if I knew.

what he did then was,
he rounded on me
and he said,
you'll fucking deal with it
like everyone else.
(and what he meant was
I am giving all my safety to you,
I let you know where I sleep.
I want you to have all that I have
and be a haven in me
and there you are,
criticizing my decorating technique.)

"I just want to live someplace good,
for once in my life"
Well then you earn that
like everyone else did.
You're spoiled.

(I'm remembering how a man asked me
One last thing. You are white, right?
and I bit back my ancestors
because I had to sleep with him
or else I'd freeze to death)
(no, I don't know how to fill out a resume,
yes, I cost taxes,
yes, I'm spoiled,
I'm sorry,
I love you)

I was nineteen
and he was what, twenty-seven? Twenty-six?

and what he did was,
some nights later
he said
I'll buy the plane tickets in the morning
over instant message
and he said, "Angel, I love you",
and he never called me anything like that
and I knew I would never see him again.

The next day he changed his number
and deleted his email
and it would have ended very elegantly
and made a wonderful story

but he came around every once in a while
to sleep with me
and I knew that I could buy myself some safety
if I could, through my great love
perform right

(and I wanted to be in and within him
to share in his warmth
"to be with him", as they say, so simply and my life would have been easier if I were nothing but a whore)

I couldn't even relax enough
to do well and he,
and who wanted my love
so purely and simply
and who didn't know how to ask for it
either
he blamed me for it
the way I blamed him for the paint on the walls.

"You can't even get it up,
you coward,
it's triggering
that he wants me
and all those creeps want me
but you say you cherish me
and you don't"
I told myself: you are deficient in love.

and what I remember now
isn't pain, that fades so easily
but all this love, enduring
that I fought to show him,
though I failed
regardless,
regardless, regardless
and yes, of course
I have forgiven myself
for all of this,
for being childish,
for being weak

LJ Idol Week 5: Organic

reckless_blues — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 01:54:48 GMT

We remember very well how Dr. Tyazhov killed himself last December.

We have nothing to say about his office. It was well-organized ... Bright.

Yes, of course, the smell of burning flesh. It was attached to his fingers like a pulse ox. And around his head. Yes, of course I remember it was around his head. It's just I kept looking at his hands.

Christmas lights. The white kind. Conductive wire. It was a really terrible experiment ... No, I don't want to call it a crown. I don't want you to go talking about him like he wanted to be strung up on the cross. That makes it ridiculous. It wasn't, it was absolutely serious. And it wasn't out of hubris, it -

Listen. He had on a brown cardigan and he had read Walden for the last time before he did it, and next to his copy of Walden was the mug one of his grad students gave him, the kind that changed colors when you poured something hot in and showed you Einstein's equation.

General relatively. Not the EFE, Richard, who's going to put Einstein's field equations on a coffee mug?

Yes, I understand that the details are important. Especially now.

He had his favorite tea. It was loose leaf. He didn't make it often because he hated fiddling around with the strainer. He'd just make Lipton instead. In the little bags. In the microwave.

He put the mug down on the papers. The "leepkies" manifesto. Yes. And it left a ring, and he got annoyed, I think, and tried to wipe it off with his hand, it was smeared down the paper...

Well, I know because I kept looking. I kept looking at his desk, and at his hands...

Yes, obviously, we miss him.

Please, I don't want to talk about it.

Well, he was a religious man. In a sense. After a fashion.

I mean...what I mean is, he believed in God.

And he believed in the godly origins of the universe.

And he believed in the generally accepted scientific origins of the universe as well.

What are the - I'm not teaching you the big bang theory, Richard.

You never heard him talk about it?

...In my own words. I see.

He believed that all energy in the universe originated from a single point.

He believed that it expanded outwards.

He believed that photons were existence's method of transferring energy across the universe.

He believed in an abundance of light.

Please, I'm so tired. Let's just go to bed. Just make something up when the committee asks you tomorrow.

I don't understand why they're having you do this to me.

Yes.

Yes, I understand.

No, I don't think you're being very gentle. I don't think you're being very gentle at all.

...Dr. Tyazhov stated time and time again that the origins of life are - indisputably - I have to phrase this very carefully. None of us are biologists. The exchange of energy. Life began the first time a molecule took apart another molecule and brought its elementary particles into itself. Or something like that. He said it better than I could.

But that's true, isn't it? We all have to do it. It's all destruction and theft. He couldn't get over it. He had become very thin...

It wasn't about him. He was interested in God. In why God decided to make every living thing in the universe eat each other. He couldn't even conceive of a reality where things worked another way. He would always say, modestly, that he was never a creative man, and it hurt him both as a man and as a physicist. But he said that it must be possible for God to have dreamt of things differently. A way of living that didn't have anything to do with energy exchange. With devouring. And the fact that you have to is why the flesh corrupts the spirit.

No, he put it differently. He did. He'd always say "perhaps", first of all, he'd never think to assume he had God's opinion. He'd say, perhaps that's why having mass corrupts the spirit.

And this brings us to the leepkies. Yes.

No, a step further back. About the origins of life. He'd go on to compare, for instance, with our mitochondria, which were once independent creatures that got trapped in a cellular membrane and became symbiotic organelles. And that's how we got complex life. And the more complex you are, the greater are your iniquities, until we're left with this, our vast, shambling bodies, our extraordinary capacity for suffering, our tragedies and holy wars ...

And then we have human beings.

So he believed that human race was burdened with a messianic consciousness - like Zapffe or Schopenhauer or whoever it was he was reading, I don't know. It was complicated. And he believed that God's chosen people must not be human beings, he called it a fear that haunted him all his life ... that our bodies just exist as the habitats of something infinitesimally small, something sweeter and more innocent - that our burdens are necessary. Absolutely necessary. And the Bible isn't meant to be a comfort to human beings but an object lesson in our purpose.

Human beings glow, just slightly. The photons bouncing off our skins. I don't know if you can see it, exactly, but if he mentioned it in his lectures you'd see everyone start looking at each other...

He was doing something in optics back then. He told you more about it than he told me, Richard.

Well, his mind turned to photons. They have energy, but no mass. They exist in a state of - how did he put it? Temporal incorruptibility. No, he'd just say "incorruptibility." That's important, isn't it? Moreover, they give their energy away to the atoms that have less. Like gifts.

So the human race bears the photons. The human race was given a messianic consciousness in order to understand the photons and their terrible, unending gifts ... he would call them "leepkies", or that might have referred to some undiscovered theoretical particle that behaved in much the same way. Little leepkies are blameless.

Or they could have been blameless. Maybe it was something like Prometheus - fire from the gods ... giving life and knowledge where it shouldn't have been - angels are associated with light, but light is associated with the fires of hell - I don't know. I never wanted to contradict him. "Little leepkies are blameless." He always said it like this. He longed for their simplicity. I didn't want to tell him no. Just to get points for thinking it all the way through.

He had no idea what to do with this philosophy. He had no idea how we were supposed to serve the leepkies. Or fight against them. Or how to explore this radical theological concept.

No, I don't know. I didn't know what he was planning. I would have stopped him myself.

Yes, I know he went into the labs. Yes, I know none of us can get through the locked door. I don't know if whatever's in there now is safe. I don't know.

Look, he wasn't insane. Please, Richard, don't. It's very serious.

Yes, I know you're not laughing. I just don't want you to laugh at him. I don't want anybody to laugh at him.

Dr. Tyazhov is from the southernmost parts of the former Soviet Union. He was aware of Tengrism, the traditional religion of the Turkic and Mongol people - he'd say something like, in their faith God is the sky. Not the god of the sky, but the sky as god. And so God is something vaster than human beings, a body that contains a world.

God's suffering must be unimaginable, the way human suffering is unimaginable to the mitochondria. Or the leepkies.

He'd say there were hints left even in Western religions. That holy people would have halos of light. That it would come bursting right out of them ... not as a tool or as a weapon but as sheer ... holiness itself.

To help the little leepkies. Or to embody them. Or simply to enjoy everything they give us. Like a saint in ecstasy.

...That's it.

I'm sorry.

That's all I know. That's all there is to say.

No, I don't have any advice for the committee.

[End recording.]

And late that night before I lay down next to Richard I open my teacher's copy of last years's textbook and check for the Post-It note I stole from Dr. Tyazhov's desk.

It was attached to the papers on his desk, but not well. The adhesive on the back was worn. It could have simply fallen from somewhere else, or placed on it unthinkingly when it became a stray. It could have been a note to one of his students, or a faculty member. Or it could have been anything. I don't know.

It's his handwriting. Big loopy letters and a single exclamation point, blue ink on a technicolor background. That's it, that's all there is left of him, this stark, bright, smiling thing. Something human and everyday, something with mass and weight.

"Just try!" it says.

I close the book and head to bed. I find Richard's hand in the dark.

He was murmuring in his sleep, somehow, strangely, in Russian, and in spite of that, I understood him -

"Yes. No. Perhaps? ...Perhaps."

LJ Idol Week 4: Are we becoming numb to the violence?

reckless_blues — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 01:56:19 GMT

At night you dream of water. Not still calm water, but raging. Like you.

Last night you dreamt you were at the old college. This time you were a student there. You remember armillaries and polished wood and collective enthusiasm. Students in clusters, smiling and talking. You had your hair pulled back and good shoes, the long coat L. bought you. You fit in.

You have a bad habit of looking up at the sky when you walk and you do this even indoors, and you do this even in dreams. You remember the grand staircase in the library more than you remember their faces.

Oakwood, fresco. Muffled conversation.

You have a black-handled knife.

But they're all laughing, they welcome you, you're one of their own. Little by little they pry the story out of you. You are warm and safe and accepted, go on, they tell you, go on. (It might even have been Laurence's voice, just there, all tenderness and heat. And asking and asking.) And with something between desire and reserve you walk from desk to desk, the little cloisters tucked in between the shelves, and remember what it feels like to take a life. They all approve. A woman's eye moves upwards, adoringly, before you wrestle the weapon back out her opposite orbit. She has a graceful, grateful smile.

Then somehow something changes and they don't need you anymore.

You're placed across the river in the other school. (Whatever such a thing means for this dream. There was never any other college, you don't know from where you got this thought.) The other school is smaller, older. Maybe a school for adolescents. (You would have liked to remake your adolescence.) It's dark and clean. You have your hair pulled back and good shoes, the long coat L. bought you; you are beautiful and cruel, you are every inch the young murderer, they are all staring and you are a fraud.

(You don't want to look the way you do. It's not sexy anymore, it's not interesting, it's not fun.)

"Ah, a public school boy," says the schoolmistress, with visible disdain. (Your bad dreams are filled with middle-aged women. You don't know how to talk to people who don't want you. Or who don't show it, anyway. It's always older women who hide it if they feel it. You find that older men don't care.)

"Well, no..." you say, quietly. You don't want to be accused of putting on airs.

Suddenly you two are alone.

A storm is blowing up over the ocean, a bad one. Somehow the waves are reaching the windows. One hits hard enough to rattle the building. The wind shakes the glass. There is no horizon, everything outside is grey.

"I like this weather," you tell her. "I think it's beautiful. Don't you?"

You want her to like you.

"No," she says, and her lip curls.

The storm is hitting with the force of a monster, she is afraid for her life, and you know exactly why your affinity for it disgusts her.

You try to explain yourself. "When I was young I would go to the shore with my grandmother to gather sea glass to sell to make ends meet..." and you want to say all sorts of things about what you saw and felt there and where you came from, but most of all that you're not pretending. I'm from here. I'm like you.

"So I'm a scavenger animal. And I'm used to this. The forces of nature. I..."

You're stumbling all over your words. The old woman doesn't care.

You excuse yourself and walk out onto the pallid sand. The sting of salt in the back of your throat. Brackish winter air.

The water's risen up to your ankles in a place it doesn't normally flow, and it swirls around in confused eddies. Stills for a moment. Makes white foam. A girl you hurt once is laying in the tide.

You support her by the shoulders, lifting her up just enough to get a look at her.

You should have drowned her, you think. It would have been quicker. But then you couldn't have held her hand as she died. (Or you did for a few minutes, anyway. You weren't about to stay there the whole time.) If you drowned her you couldn't have spoken with her. She wouldn't have understood that the way she understood poison. QED.

"Less suffering, but no understanding, less suffering..." you mutter to yourself, but you hate the self-satisfied tone of your voice and can't come up with anything interesting or profound.

Still, you should have drowned her, you think, with a base urgency, because the thought of it excites you. You've never watched a drowning before.

You drop her back down into the current. Blissfully, she disappears.

You don't feel this way in the waking world. You don't. Of course you don't. You have empathy, you're confident and gregarious and skilled, you are so careful. You are so careful with yourself.

You don't have anyone left to love, you don't have kind words to think about. Not from anybody who knows you, anyway. So you walk up to higher ground and take off your boots, chill your soaked feet to the bone and let the salt air rough your fine hair.

You're yourself, here, with these fundamental particles; thunder, gulls, a pale sun. The air all heavy with an oncoming storm, everything restless and forbidden. The sea is a void, an unreachable fathom; and the shore is the rim of death. And you walk it, as you always have. And the next time you sleep you dream of black cascades and the foam and the spray, beating them all back ceaselessly into the daylight, like spit on the lips of the dead.

LJ Idol Week 2 - Follow Me

reckless_blues — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 22:13:15 GMT

Gynecology yesterday. Not for the first time does it occur to me that the reproductive system looks like a bull’s skull. The fallopian tubes strongly resemble the tridirectional curve of the horns of an auroch, and the snout with the maxillary and foramina look like the vaginal canal. Common to many ancient civilizations - I mean, before we were even capable of preserving our names: the pottery cultures, mound cultures, the most prototypical languages - was the bull cult. To sacrifice cattle seems natural, they give food to people, to domesticate them means you have to live intimately with them. But this resemblance must have been noticed by the first people to do a post-mortem. If you pull the bull’s head from a bull, you won’t have to pull it from a woman.

I knew none of my classmates wanted to hear about this, but the guest instructor noticed me drawing a bos primigenius skeleton over the gynecological diagrams in this chapter - I don’t know how many vertebrae these cattle have, I ended up doing a 7/12/5/5/4 set because it made a nice overlay - and also noticed me poking around looking for webs with a flashlight earlier and gave me strange looks, and I’m the only person in the class who didn’t end up with a weird nickname last night. I know it’s not out of respect but because I’m half outside the proceeds no matter where I go. I hope at least that I don’t give people the creeps. I know they can’t tell what I’m thinking when I do strange things, but I also know that they don’t care and I don’t know how to explain myself - go around announcing loudly that I’m just looking at tree sap (so that the mold in it might last a hundred thousand years past my experience), or trying to catalogue the species of spiders in the yard, or just do what everyone else does and not do strange things where other people can see?

I try to talk to them, really, I do. Something’s lacking, some capacity for connection. Human warmth.

(I can tell he thinks I'm beautiful, that he can't tell whether I'm male or female, from the way he looks at me. This is my one aptitude.

"Who drops you off at night? Is that your father?"

Tense silence. "Yes."

"You don't have your own car?"

"It would cause problems."

I spend a lot of time wondering if anyone noticed the things I asked during the sexual assault assssessment unit or while practicing restraints. Probably, the only thing they know assssessmentbout me is that I've been tied up and raped.

Well, people don't pay much attention to people. You're not supposed to. Blessed silence.

How do I tell him that from the scars on his fingers I know he works with his hands?)

All the outdoor spiders have died, there was a frost some weeks ago. I’m tracking the species on the inside now - there’s a barn spider in the foyer that was from the sign outside, I think. (Well, it’s wishful thinking. It’s the same species, anyway. Or close enough.) A little jumper that likes to hang around the classroom and crawl up on the podium during lectures.

Fox mating season is starting, they’re working out the territories now. Can hear the one that lives nearby barking at night, sometimes more often than not. Deer in good form. I try to leave them alone when they’re in rut, especially since people hunt around here and I don’t want to get shot going into the woods around sunrise or sunset when they deer are expected. I’ve never met anyone out there, though. And I won’t, either, I can move pretty quietly and at a good clip if I have to, and I stay off the trails.

There are some little black bears out there, I didn’t think the forest was deep enough. They’re used to people, you don’t have to be too afraid of running into them.

I know where wild apples grow, I know what fish are in the lakes, I know where to sleep when I don't feel safe. When it wouldn't cause problems.

Soon will come the time when I have to stay indoors for some months. The snow piles up to your waist almost, and alongside of the road - you can’t walk out there, you’ll get killed. I don’t like being out this time of year anyway. It occurred to me now that it’s because they replace the street light bulbs and it’s brighter, and the Christmas lights are coming out. The quality of the light is different. I’m not comfortable there anymore. And it’s too dead, too still. All the moving around I do is too obvious.

Where do the bats go? I see them at twilight in the warmer months. Maybe they migrate, I don’t know. I think if I had really started to look at them I could have figured it out. I should have paid more attention.

If you pay attention you can predict the weather a few days out, you can know what time it is by the quality of the sky day or night, even after waking up from sleep, you’ll know the moon phases and be able to track the stars across the sky. I know that I’m isolated and I don’t know how to bond with people but I don’t feel isolated. I’m never alone.

I know they try so hard to love me, to know who I am.

And they'll give up eventually, I'm not thatbeautiful and I'm not thatinteresting. They dissappear in intervals and I will remain in the house of my father, and winter follows autumn and spring turns into fall. I have sacrificed much and not by choice to have the deer come to me when I open my arms, to fall at my feet in droves in the season of the bow, when the moon is low, when the rose is wide.

reckless_blues — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 11:09:07 GMT

Yeah, I should probably do the thing

reckless_blues — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 08:55:43 GMT

Yuletide letter? Yuletide letter!

reckless_blues — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 07:55:58 GMT

Anybody wanna play Cards Against Humanity? Here (the password is derp)