Phantom Laundry
Page 4
The Mission
The friend gets to work on the skirt. It has a tear from her washer. She ripped it the way the infertile cats rip something they love, the way his writing hand suffers more cuts than any part of his body. Washing and dropping off the sheets was just a pretext. She loves this place, wants it for herself though she refused to stay the whole night when she was sitting. She hates him for being here, hates her family for barricading her future. There, finally the fitted sheet is on, the skirt is wrapped so the rip faces the wall, it’s his bed made Her Way but he doesn’t care.
Georgia O’Keeffe Stayed Up All Night to Sew a Lining in Alfred Stieglitz’s Coffin Their argument over making the bed outlasts the actual making.
Bonnie & Clyde, If They Went Nowhere
They sit at the table and smoke cigarettes from the Bible Belt, where they’re cheaper. He perceives in her advice that she thinks him incapable of the simplest things. He is an aphasiac who has to be told how to turn a key, how to lock a window. She’s “trying to be helpful.” She helps so much she won’t leave though it’s late at night. The desert-neighborhood has a way of blurring the sensible hours from the fugitive ones.
Yawn
Why doesn’t he say, Leave, already? Why does he apologize for how late is? Why is this such a requirement? On the other hand, why is staying up when everyone else is asleep so shameful? She doesn’t leave immediately.
In this Year of History, Watergate
They find some memories that make them laugh. Remember the guy who rock-climbed down the building? They talk about the other friend, the one in Thailand. All three were born the year of Nixon’s resignation. Funny, they say, no one born our year has gotten married, who we know of. Even that makes them laugh, sort of.
A View from the Curb
Finally she does get up from the table. He walks her down to her car. He loves her despite her advice, or because of it. He loves that, before she pulls from the curb, she must see he is entirely capable of inserting the key in the door. This is no cheap metaphor: they’ve never slept together, sexually or otherwise. This is about proving himself separate, alert, indefatigably self-sufficient. He hates those words, their pretensions, as soon as he fits them to his description. And proving them gets him nowhere but back inside, where the expressway lives up to its reputation: major artery. Perhaps desert is too strong a word to describe where he is.
Prayer to St. Someone
A few hours of television, dated sitcoms and ads for those who have lost all mobility. Such a condition terrifies him: having to ride on a motorized cart, please let it never happen to him. This he prays to whatever being his agnosticism will accommodate. He thinks about people in fugue states who drift away from their families, from every weight and anchor they’ve known. They start lives. New lives? Maybe they’re not really so new after all. Somewhere inside one of the brain’s lobes the details endure. Patterns repeat. It’s not all hopeless or stultifying, as long as there’s something to be added. He thinks about files he’s deleted on computers. He lost his senior thesis due to a virus, but a computer programmer recovered it. Deletion stopped being such a persuasive or frightening thing after that.
Wet Dream
He’s never had one. He lies down on his stomach so that his head, limbs and penis touch the sheet, which smells of nothing at all, and the tattooed mattress, the contents of the mattress which he heard described on a television program once as a fascinating, awful combination of dead skin and microbial organisms. Still it’s all owned and contained and occupied. He closes his eyes and moves forward into the mattress until the sheet is wet, and he has to turn over.
Pledge of Allegiance
He’d rather think about random things than the future, or get going with the dreams he has when he sleeps. Lately they’ve been annoying typical, all about missing the exam at school. The teachers he liked never show up. The teachers who do show up haven’t changed much, personality-wise. Superior, condescending, and intent only on keeping the herd in check, they notice him only when he falls out of line.
Sometimes the Phone
Is it an automated telemarketer, is it a person dialing a wrong number? Is it the woman from the sex directory who told him she would phone-fuck him until he lost his voice?
Premonitions of Power
They look at him as if he were a slide of glass, as if he were just a speck, a specimen. Onion skin that has to be stained, an amoeba skidding along in its ignorant, unlikely dimension. They looked at him the same way,
back in school. Maybe that’s why they were so smug, when they were real people and not just the brain’s stock footage: they knew he would dream about them, because everyone dreams about school.
Subconscious Revenge on the Teachers
Some of them have grown extra fingers, wear smashed eyeglasses, or say things that make no sense.
Mansion
He will never have 22 rooms all at once.
Because the Monks Were the First to See the Microscopic World
The teachers visit him no matter where he escapes; they’ll kill or cure, slit open the mattress and drag him over to the microscope to see where his old skin ends up. Those little oblong shapes he sees are called cells.