George hadn’t expected to be addressed so personally, and he felt uncomfortable that all the questions he’d been devising for the crater were as if it were the whole earth’s spokesman.
“I’ll try to answer you,” George said, “but first, and I’m not sure how to ask you this, or if the question is rhetorical, but are you the artwork, or are you just the crater where it’s situated?”
The crater thought about that painfully, or so it somehow seemed to George. “I see what you’re saying,” it said.
“Well, that’s good since I don’t know what I was saying, or not exactly,” George said, smiling.
“When I felt loved by James Turrell,” the crater said, “I think it was because of what he reasoned I had been, fiery, ten times taller, and what my carcass could return to being with his specialty’s assistance, so what he’d loved was what my premise did to his imagination, and I was just, who knows?”
There came a silence fraught enough that George hazarded a guess. “His friend?” he ventured. “Or, wait, his sort of . . . paraplegic friend?”
“That’s interesting,” the crater said. “One afternoon not long before I hardened, a wealthy man, extremely old, quite enfeebled, whom James Turrell was courting for donations, arrived by limousine to check the merchandise. He was in a wheelchair, sort of dangling there, but because his idle body had the money needed to complete the chamber in my northwest side, if I remember right, James Turrell pushed the guy’s wheelchair for hours, which isn’t easy on this coarse terrain, and talked so charmingly to him, even though he couldn’t talk himself or maybe even hear, or maybe even think at all, he was that decrepit, and I thought, How am I not a topographical ‘that guy’? Necessary but not infinitesimally loved. You want to know about depression? By the way, that man, or, rather, someone employed by him whose brain was functioning, gave James Turrell the money. Ten million dollars. Hence, everybody’s happy. I should be grateful.”
“That makes sense,” George said quite carefully because, in truth, the crater had begun to bore him. “I used that word love about you too, but if you were to ask me now, ‘Do you?’ I might say yes, but it would be to calm you down. You see, that question, simple as it probably seems to you, is very stressful when you know the answer that its speaker’s hoping for. In your case, yes, I did, but that was when I thought you were just here for me. Now that I know you better and realize that I don’t know you in the slightest, and when you’re less an artwork I’m so glad I saw than like a massive growling lion face whom I feel I must appease, I’m not sure.”
“I don’t understand,” the crater said. “But considering that I have a mind composed of dirt and rocks, some retardation would be natural. And then there are these inelastic words I’m asked to speak.”
George nodded. “Mine too,” he said. “I feel like I’m pronouncing them phonetically.”
There was a lull as George, the crater, and maybe others, the prairie dog, unpacked what they’d been made to say and privately compared that to their normal output—faint earth rumbles, barks, words but not a lot of them in George’s case.
The sparkliness and vaguely psychotropic mien that had given the location a sufficient dash of weirdness to authenticate their dialogues, and which no one had even noticed was unrealistic, dialed back until the setting was your average desert, them thirsty in it. Everything was technically the same, with the possible exception of George’s backpack, which had noticeably sagged and looked no redder than a thousand stylish others.
“So what’s in the knapsack,” the crater asked.
“A gun,” George said.
At that, George and the crater reached an impasse, or, rather, my imagination reached an impasse, and I closed my laptop. But the strangest thing happened.
As I had never written fairy tales before, I thought it was the same as writing an experimental novel, and that the characters and stories littering the prose were just like nuts embedded in its fudge, and that to close my laptop’s lid would simply store the tale-in-progress, maybe slightly refrigerate it. But this was not the case, or not entirely.
For fairy tales are a form in which the characters and story, for all their falseness, are the sum and substance, and where language merely chisels them to some degree.
So the fairy tale adjusted, and, as my laptop’s lid descended, a massive UFO or sheet of metal plunged out of the sky above the crater. Before George or James Turrell or anyone could wonder why the sun had set so promptly and off schedule, it struck the earth and squashed or murdered everyone and everything, even the brawny excavator, like mosquitoes.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
My school was so private, i.e., more or less 300 students, 5th grade to 12th, all boys, that when it threw us after-hours dances, the janitor and coach would switch the light bulbs in the ceiling of the cafeteria for colored ones and stack the chairs and tables in the corners.
I was 15, which makes it 1968, and at a dance with my brainy stoner friends. Jay was yelling in my ear about his little brother who was freaking out on LSD. He said he was too stoned to deal with that and thought of me because I’d done a lot of LSD but wasn’t high right then, unusually.
I would have helped since I was always sort of knee-jerk worried.
The first time I saw George, he was walking on his tiptoes with his arms straight out and waving them around as if his shoes were balanced on a tightrope and the asphalt was mist.
He had long hair like me, and, even though it was too dark to see more than that hair and what he wore, I knew I’d never seen him at our school before, since I would have seen a boy that young with hair that long, and that was probably because the school kept kids away from teenaged students for our mutual protection.
“This is Dennis,” Jay said to him and then careened away.
“I’ve heard of you,” the boy said.
“What’s happening?” I asked him as I often did instead of saying hi back then.
“My feet are huge,” he said. “I can’t walk.”
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“Of my feet, yes,” he said.
I told him I had taken lots of LSD and maybe understood what he was going through, and that some friends of mine had helped me down to earth when I was losing it, and I thought their scheme could work on him if he would let me try, and I guess that’s when I put my hand out.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“Take it,” I said.
“It’s too small,” he said.
If he’d had shorter hair, or if the acid hadn’t made him seem more me-like than an average kid, I might have done what you’re supposed to do with children, say, grabbed his hand against his will since I knew more than him and thought, He’ll thank me once he isn’t high or young.
“No offense,” I said. I slid my arms beneath his, raising him until his legs were waggling an inch or so above the ground, then trudged to where the ground’s concrete was cast more solidly and had no texture so to speak and brought no imagery to mind. I set him down and started sliding out my arms.
“No,” he said, and clutched my hands before they could escape. “I need them.”
“I’m going to do a thing,” I said, “and you should let me do the thing, and all you have to do is walk or stumble. Is that cool?”
I would say he laughed, but even as a kid, George was always very cautious when he laughed like someone sickly coughing in tight, crowded quarters. “You’re trying to talk to me,” he said.
I started walking us away. His shoes fishtailed between mine, but we gradually made it to the school’s athletic field. I steered him toward the baseball field, then toward its closest base—third, I think—where I lowered us. That left him sitting in my lap, which felt too gay to me, so I tried to slide him off onto the ground. He fought me and kept saying, “No, please don’t,” but between my pushing and his clinging, we wound
up in a compromised position wherein his ass was resting on the dirt, and he had two fistfuls of my T-shirt, and his legs were hooked around my waist, and my arm was clamped across his shoulders.
“Now, tilt your head back and look at the stars,” I said, “and try to think of me as boring.”
His eyes checked out the sky. His chin raised, and, after saying “wow” a few times and scrunching up my T-shirt’s chest into two ugly flowers, his face was overridden by an acidheaded look, as unmistakable as Down syndrome, wherein one’s eyes misfired, completely lost their windows-of-the-soul effect, and just looked cretinous to people who were sober.
He stayed weird faced for quite a while, minutes or longer even. I guess I must have looked around the field, and listened to the psychedelic music leaking from the windows of the cafeteria, and tried to give the stars some benefit of the doubt.
At some point, George turned his eyes on me. From straight on, they looked extremely frightened, but a look of fear was also one of LSD’s reliable yet specious decorations. “Am I crazy?” he asked me, or maybe asked somewhere to which he thought I was the doorman.
“No, you’re high,” I said.
“I don’t mean now,” he said. “I mean all the time.”
“I just met you,” I said.
By then his eyes had stalled on mine. I guessed his mind was off investigating some hallucination, and that my eyes were just like buttons on a shirt to him or else seemed very far away and safe like stars. It’s always disconcerting when a little kid stares at you, because you could be doing something un-thought-out that will change his life by accident, so I looked away.
“No, come back, I’ll fall,” he said.
I looked at him again. Not being stoned, I didn’t have the expertise to use his eyes as microscopes to help me solve some mystery about the universe in which I formed particle. I remember thinking, They only look like eyes, they’re just eyes-like on the surface, and, even if they’re eyes, they’re too full of camouflage to see me or tell I’m sentient, at least if I don’t move much.
So, I was stuck exploring what he actually looked like. First his eyes, which, even given they were sitting ducks, let out nothing personal that I could see or riff imaginatively upon. Other than their blue color and dilated pupils, acid had completely padlocked them. I couldn’t see a thing I hadn’t seen in mine in mirrors, and even less, and I remember killing time by trying to assess their corneas and glossiness and lenses like an optometrist.
I checked and multiply rechecked his eyebrows, nose, lips, cheekbones, chin, forehead, their placement, and the minutiae of his face’s pores for what felt to me like hours, but couldn’t have been hours. I must have had so many concepts and hypotheses about his face to keep my eyes fixated there and interested, but all I can remember was deciding he was cute, or maybe just adorable since he was 12.
Now when I concentrate and visualize that face I must have memorized and come to know more thoroughly than any other face that’s ever looked at me not from a photograph, what amazes me is that I don’t think it confused me or attracted me, and that I couldn’t have imagined kissing it or wishing I could script my name with an affectionate inflection into its voice if I’d even wanted to.
Eventually, I saw something crop up in his eyes. A kind of energy that might have formed a plus sign, if it were an image. I guessed it was the starting point of what he thought of me
“Are you back?” I asked.
“You just talked to me,” he said.
“I did,” I said.
“You won’t believe what I just thought,” he said. “It wasn’t even thought.”
“And what was it?” I asked.
He turned his head and looked out at the field. He pried his fingers from my shirt and swung his legs off mine, then crossed them and sat up straight so he could face whatever he was seeing. My arm was still around his shoulders, which felt obnoxious, so I started to remove it until I felt his fingers squeeze and tug my wrist. “No,” he said. “I still need that.”
I think we sat there looking at the grass and making mental hay while I asked him things like “You okay?” and “How’s it going?” now and then.
I heard the music shut off in the cafeteria. Since it had a psychedelic tinge, its loss was more significant to someone stoned than not, and, sure enough, without that sound George seemed to turn off too, or rather turn on, or I mean he either animated and became the slightly nervous seeming little kid I guessed he’d been before he drugged himself and met me, or I saw that. I raised my arm, but instantly his hand reached up and grabbed my forearm in midair and pulled it down again.
“Not yet,” he said.
“The dance is over,” I said. “How normal are you?”
“I’m . . .” he said then waited for a while. “Half.”
I noticed he had stiffened, especially his back and neck, and gripped my arm as if he wanted to say something else and couldn’t, but he kept looking at the field while nothing happened, and I decided he was probably as close to being ready as he would be.
“There’s something wrong with me,” he said finally.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I can’t tell,” he said and looked directly at me.
His eyes were working, and they were hard to meet, like kids’ eyes always are, and I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, or if it was about me, and didn’t realize I’d ever want to know.
I must have been relieved to know a face was back where it belonged, by which I guess I mean a face I didn’t need to take as seriously, or that I didn’t think I could relate to anymore, but I remember feeling disappointed that he was just a kid, or still a kid, and how that feeling frightened me.
“I looked at you for a really long time,” he said, “but I still don’t know you.”
I wished
When I was 10 years old, some friends and I were playing in some bushes on an edge of my front yard that very roughly brought to mind a pint-sized forest. One of them was using an old rusted ax to chop depressions in the ground for some forgotten reason, and I was crawling wildly through the shrubbery below, I don’t know why. My friend chopped. The ax blade split my skull. If he hadn’t semi-seen me and let up slightly on the handle, I would be dead.
I was squashed onto the ground, out cold and with a volcanic vent-like wound erupting in my budding hippie hair. My friends freaked out and ran away, leaving me to die or live somehow or other. When I woke back up at some convenient point, my head was firing blood in all directions so I struggled to my feet and ran screaming up the driveway.
I was salvaged, then kept out of school for months, recovering in bed. For the first few weeks, the pain was unbelievable. They couldn’t anesthetize my head because my brain was trapped inside so there was nothing anyone could do. I kept wishing I was dead. I turned my thoughts into a beacon that sent a nonstop SOS, or the opposite, I guess, to God or whoever, and I absolutely meant it, but I also knew it wouldn’t happen.
When the pain eventually waned a bit, and I could think of things I would be doing were I not in bed or incapable of moving even an inch without a pounding headache, it began to interest me that I had wanted to die even though I knew I wouldn’t, no matter how passionately I’d wished to be dead and how much death was the only thing that could have helped me.
I felt as though my wish for death contained a kind of logic that I couldn’t access with my usual overly protective thoughts. That, prior to then, I’d been a kind of actor or self-hypnotist, not just when I socialized with other people but when I even thought of other people, which, put together, constituted almost always. That my wish had been completely understanding because it knew me, unlike my friends.
I felt that when I’d wished to die, I was being who I really was, sans interference from the world or from the priorities and hopes that had polluted me through other people’s minor needs for me or from the
books I read incessantly. It was like I’d found myself, and I was someone who had never had the things I really wanted, plainly never would, and whom no one would fully comprehend. I think that saved me more than surgery.
After that, I began to make a wish when the impracticalities of life wronged me, but very cautiously. I did that to understand who I really was and what I actually wanted, regardless of whether my wish could possibly come true or was good or bad for me or for anyone else, because I didn’t know who I was most of the time.
I tried to see myself as consciousness that looked like me and whose speaking voice was based herein and censored by my crappy English but also out of my control like my ventriloquist. I used that voice to represent the public me. And then there was my secret self who took pity on how compromised I usually was and poached the wisest powers of my mind, then used a thought to say, in so many words, “I will grant you one wish, Dennis. What do you want?”
Then I would think about the question until it had infected me, revising and refining a related wish, first conceptually as a tryout to assess the consequence, were it to happen in the real world. If the wish involved sex, which it almost inevitably did, I would test myself by masturbating, cum, then reappraise the wish more puritanically and decide if my surpassing goal of cumming had overly influenced me or given me the equivalent of truth serum.
This process might go on and on for weeks, months, with one offhand in-process wish refining and dwindling until I’d built the single most intransigent, comprehensive thing I craved and that would never come to pass and that no one else could ever guess I wanted. And once I had decided on and made that perfect wish, didn’t get it, and accepted that my peace of mind was doomed, I thought I knew exactly who I was, and I stopped wishing for it.
I thought my wishing ritual would die away or be co-opted when I became a writer, or at least a writer good enough to do my thoughts some kind of justice and get them published and read. I assumed the writing thing was generated from the same impulse I’d had to pinpoint and set aside my deepest shit. I figured writing would just give that stuff a solid form and, if safely sealed into the envelopes of books, readers could solve me if they wanted. But that wasn’t true.
I Wished Page 5