by Dana Spiotta
It smells not of decay but of disappearing, of disintegration. An invisible eating away. But that’s not how it works, it doesn’t eat away like acid. It gets into the metabolism of things and overstimulates them until they die. It hyper-accelerates growth until the organism is undone. Herbicide, he thinks, is a better word than defoliant, but neither conveys the endless insinuation of the stuff, the occupation. He breathes the dank spray—it’s heavy, oily, metallic. It almost doesn’t smell, but it clings to you, gets between you and your sweat then sinks into your skin.
Later he will wash his face and hands. He will blow his nose. It’s in his hair, his throat, his eyes. His throat is constantly sore; he rubs his eyes and they sting but they don’t tear. It’s not tears but the stuff itself welling up right under his eyelids. All night he can feel the inventory of its invasions: a stickiness now, between the legs, under his arms, after he showers. As the night gets hotter he realizes the stuff is coming out his pores, it is part of his body now. It inhabits him, in his lungs, in his cells, in his future, in his wife’s uterus ten thousand miles away. It has a half-life, it has a genetic legacy. It will appear in the yet-to-be-born. It has sleeper cells hidden for fifteen years only for you to suddenly taste it, out of nowhere, in your mouth, a slick of oil in your spit.
He sees the plane from outside, like a movie. He is floating over the flat expanse of the whole Ca Mau Peninsula. For a moment he sees everything at once. But he starts to fall, he follows the spray down as if he were floating on it and sees it fall on forests of mangrove and jackfruit trees, rice paddies and rainwater cisterns. He sees people looking up, confused, standing under the trees. He sees them eating and drinking the stuff as it lands on everything in blanket coverage. It is extreme, jerky close-ups now. He hates this, but he gets so close he can see faces, mouths. He hears breathing. He smells their moist skin.
It can get really bad when this happens.
He shakes it off. In truth, he can force himself back sometimes. He feels his throat constricting, and that falling sensation, like when you wake too quickly from a dream and you jump in your bed.
He blinks and again sees the interior of the plane. He leans against the wall outside the cockpit, catching his breath.
He was lying down on his couch, covering his head, but it didn’t leave him.
As he looks up, he hears the sounds of gunshots in quick, automated succession, ricocheting. The pilot turns from the controls and looks at him, his face young, smiling, and then as Henry watches he grows swollen red sores on his cheeks and mouth. It is that stuff again, trying to get out. Henry looks away. He sees the sign, handwritten, over the cockpit area, in white, over a drawing of Smokey the Bear in his hat. It reads
Only you can prevent forests
When it finally stopped, Henry’s body was covered in a cold sweat. Hives and welts appeared on his face and arms.
Partial list of Henry’s symptoms:
acne, or chloracne (adult, itinerant)
hypervigilance
insomnia (constant, chronic)
depression (underlying, with occasional acute crisis)
suicidal ideation (see above, crisis)
hallucinations / intrusive thoughts / night terrors
sense of helplessness: intractable, long-term, overwhelming
shame
despair
Jason’s Journal
DID YOU EVER wonder what your body would look like by age forty if you never exercised, not even once? Gage, my next-door neighbor, answered any curiosity I had on that score. He has recently moved back in with his parents. Really. Apparently that is all the rage among the loser set these days. Gage, in all his dissipated glory, is someone I would call a pal. I first noticed him huffing his stuff onto his parents’ lawn on a sunny summer afternoon. He had retreated to the home front for as yet undiscovered reasons. But the important thing here is that he arrived with crates and crates of long-playing vinyl records. Naturally, these caught my eye.
My friends—what few friends I have—are the types of guys who will argue about whether the RCA single version of “Eight Miles High” is superior to the track issued on Fifth Dimension, the Byrds’ album release. It isn’t, but it is cool to ask the question because it proves you know there are two versions and you are conversant with both. It is even cooler to maintain that the album—a common, reissued object—does have the superior version, and not the rare, hard-to-find single. (This is true, despite the fact, perhaps inconsequential, that the LP version is actually the superior version.) It is perverse, and very sophisticated, in these circles, to maintain the common, popular object is the better object. Only a neophyte or a real expert would argue such a thing. So are you getting the picture on my pals, here? I knew instantly that Gage was one of us. Or I should say, given his seniority agewise, we were one of him. We who live for bonus tracks, alternate versions, reissues, demos, bootlegs. Cover versions. Obscure European or Japanese reissues in 180-gram vinyl. Or original issue, original packaging. Authenticity. We like the inside story, the secrets. We constantly feel the best, coolest stuff is being withheld from us. In other words: there is never enough information. There is always more stuff to be had. A new master unearthed, a track unnoticed at the end of a long silence on a master tape. In a safety deposit box, in a basement. Someone didn’t notice it!
Gage had thousands of albums in plastic protective sleeves. He had boxes of compact discs and stacks of 45 rpm records. I watched him unload them onto the lawn. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, which didn’t conceal his paunch, despite what they say about the slimming effects of all black. But black, particularly all black, as we all know, is very rock-and-roll, very rebellious. Deeply subversive. So look out, right? I remember watching him as he sat and drank a beer, resting between the minivan he was unloading and his room in his parents’ house. Apparently winded after like two trips upstairs. I watched him from our yard, and I saw my future, very possibly. At fifteen I already have an alarming jump start on a future paunch. Although mine is more pudge than paunch at this point, I could still see where I was headed.
As much as that thought filled me with disgust, I so badly needed to look through his collection that I walked over and introduced myself. We had seen each other before when he visited over the last five years, but we didn’t officially know each other.
At the very front of his stack of vinyl I could see one of the all-time great “lost” albums—Oar by Skip Spence, the schizophrenic guitarist from Moby Grape. He made Oar (an album, by the way, of Orphic longing and aching beauty) at twenty-two and then, naturally, like any rock-and-roll genius worth his title, spent the next thirty years in and out of institutions, never to be heard from again. I could tell instantly this was no reissue but an original pressing. I resisted the urge to comment on it, to hold it in my hands, to fondle it beneath its plastic protective sheath. Was it a gatefold? What did it have on the inner sleeve? Did it have a cryptic message carved in the run-out groove? All that would come in time. I didn’t want Gage to get too much credit from me too soon. I played it cool, though I practically had a boner thinking about all the possibilities hidden behind that Skip Spence album. It is wonderful to care deeply about something so tangible and possible. It is wonderful to find such joy in something within your grasp, some specific, described, contained universe. Anyway.
He began to explain his temporary move back to suburbia, the saga of the failed offspring back at Mom and Stepdad’s. He mock-shuddered as he said the word suburbia; we both sneered together at the idea of suburbia, but who are we kidding? We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic. Suburbia is where you can pursue your individuality, no matter how rancid or recondite
: the big generic-development mansions and three-car garages can harbor endless eccentricities. In your room and out of earshot. Sometimes an entire furnished basement—sorry, lower level—devoted to TVs and stereos and Ping-Pong tables; video games and computers and digital video discs. You can burn CDs and download music, catalog and repeat, buy and trade, all sitting on your ass in the rec room. The recreation room—in suburbia there are whole rooms dedicated to leisure and play and recreation. There is space and time here, and comfort and ease. Just look at me. Just look at Gage.
After our introduction, our brief paragraphs of biographical detail, we segued effortlessly into our obsessions. We have spent the last few weeks together in an orgy of listening. I was relieved to discover that Gage was no don’t-touch-the-record collector. He was passionately into listening and playing things for you to listen to. We sat in his room—which has a black light, I kid you not, and the appropriate psychedelic posters to go with it—and we had listening jags, hours of intensity. Jumping promiscuously from “You have that?” to “Wait until you hear this!” But very shortly the novelty began to wear off. We quickly grew less patient with each other’s interests. He was deeply into this ’70s thing, particularly a lot of deep listenings of Roxy Music’s mid-to late ’70s albums. I was cool with that, but I had been through it all two summers ago. Naturally he tried to fly the rather perverse opinion that Roxy’s late ’70s discoish period was really the best stuff, rather than the avant-pop and math-fizz of their earlier experimental stuff. Something along the lines of the “glorious dance music of 1979” (a hyperbolic assertion, which is just so typical of Gage and his ilk, and so utterly false).
“Dude, listen, check out the percussion on this track. Totally conjured on a Jupiter 8. That is all of ’80s dance music in a nutshell,” Gage said to me.
“Yeah, dude. That’s quite a legacy to claim.”
“That is it. Nothing like those late ’70s thick-as-a-brick analog synths, synthesizers that had no shame!”
It was the trend—unspoken but somehow felt everywhere at once—among some music freaks to be into synthesizers, but only the spaceship-landing, proudly precise and artificial vibrato of early-to middle-period predigital synths. Roland Jupiter 8s. Minimoogs. Yeah, sure.
“I don’t know, the production is really flat. Like airless.”
That was my bullshit response, to call the production “airless,” because it just means this music is not flying my flag right now, and I’ve got several choice albums on deck, all without synthesizers save perhaps a theremin and with production that could supply enough oxygen to feed an army of asthmatic smokers for life. And of course Gage was being totally fascistic about what we had to hear next. But the thing is the guy was in the thrall, so deep into his obsession, his Roxy freak, that he meant it. He was drowning in the circular mess of relativity, the mindfuck of repeated listening, the loss of perspective that comes with looking at something too closely. I know. I’ve been there. Don’t even get me started on the Beach Boys. As I am writing this, it’s there. As I was sitting at Gage’s trying to listen to his records, I was fondling an original-issue 45 of “God Only Knows.” I was humming, no, vibrating, Pet Sounds’s songs, in order. And I couldn’t wait to satisfy my jones for it. So I knew exactly where Gage was at, but Gage didn’t have much perspective for a guy his age, did he? He didn’t have a clue how deep in he was, how tragically without perspective. I know the day will come when I won’t feel this way about the Beach Boys. I know, at least intellectually, that day will come. Then perhaps I will be all gooey for the genius of early Little Feat or late Allman Brothers or something. And when I realize this I feel a little sad. I could be reading a great book, couldn’t I? Or going for a bike ride or meeting a girl at the pool or hacking into someone’s bank account. (Or even bathing more often, for God’s sake.)
As I sat at Gage’s feet—black light hurting my eyes, listening against my will to the perverse whispers of Bryan Ferry—I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don’t really last and don’t really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life. But, then again, maybe not.
As soon as I got home from Gage’s, I threw on the record I longed to hear. Listening, I reconsidered my earlier despair—no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn’t random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren’t wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what it is you find beautiful, right now, this second.
I am a person, I think, who feels comfortable in my isolation. Even someone like Gage (who is someone with whom admittedly I have a lot in common, a person with whom you might think I would enjoy keeping company) doesn’t alleviate my feelings of loneliness. The effort it required just to be around him and tolerate him made me even more lonely. I am at home only in my own personal loneliness. The thing of it is I don’t necessarily feel connected to Brian Wilson or any of the Beach Boys. But I do, I guess, feel connected to all the other people, alone in a room somewhere, who listen to Pet Sounds on their headphones and who feel the way I feel. I just don’t really want to talk to them or hang out with them. But maybe it is enough to know they exist. We identify ourselves by what moves us. I know that isn’t entirely true. I know that’s only part of it. But here’s what else: Lately I find I wonder about my mother’s loneliness. Is it like mine? Does she feel comfortable there? And if I am comfortable with it, sort of, why do I still call it loneliness? Because—and I think somehow she would understand this—you can have and recognize a sadness in your alienation and in other people’s alienation and still not long to be around anyone. I think that if you wonder about other people’s loneliness, or contemplate it at all, you’ve got a real leg up on being comfortable in your own.
Anyway, the really relevant part, the whole point of why I am writing about this, came yesterday, maybe a month after Gage and I started spending afternoons together. Gage was at my house, and it started creeping toward dinnertime. Dinnertime normally consists of my mother and me watching TV, or reading magazines, or watching TV while reading magazines. Our living area is of a contemporary “open-plan” style so common in the 1970s split-level vernacular. In other words, our dining room, living room and TV room all seamlessly segue into each other. A house designed—with sliding glass doors, cathedral ceilings, open kitchen counters instead of a wall, all of it transparent and divisonless—for bright Californians, not cloudy gray Northwesterners. Other families, like ours, are more suited to low-ceilinged, small, rabbit-warren-type rooms. We need corners and shadows. We need distinct spaces. The simultaneity of these open, integrated living spaces seems obscene to us. We lurk about, uncomfortable, shamed by our own house.
However, the open plan did afford one advantage. Not only are you able to constantly monitor each other but you can constantly monitor the TV, which is in the most central room. So if we were sitting at the dining room table, all we had to do was look up and we would see the TV. We don’t have to actually sit in the TV room: no such commitment required. We just have to leave it on, and it will be visible from any room. There are rules, don’t misunderstand, there are standards. We watch the news. Occasionally a movie. We do not watch a situation comedy, or a television drama. Not while we are eating. I mean, I don’t care, I just like having it on. I usually have one of my crime novels, generally a serial killer book, on hand as well. I read true crime stories, or literary crime stories. But I prefer the real dark ones, thriller-killer stuff, to the corny kind of running sleuth series, but hey, I’ll read any kind really. I read them constantly. Seriously, I read like a book a day. I can listen to music, read, and be on the Internet all at the same time. And wa
tch TV. I’m not bragging, I mean I’m aware that this is no sterling accomplishment. It’s pretty standard, isn’t it? If I went to the gym, which I don’t, I would see people reading, and listening to music while also watching the video monitors of TV shows they can’t hear. Their eyes might even flick from their page to more than one monitor while getting their heart rates up into target zones and hydrating themselves from water bottles. All at the same time. So I don’t think it makes me a genius or a mutant fuck to do all of these things at once. My point is simply that I am accustomed to a lot of controlled simultaneous stimulation.
So usually we would be sitting there and I would be reading one of my books and eating my dinner, looking up between pages or paragraphs, or during a bite, at Jim Lehrer—which is practically medicinal TV—and Mom might comment, and I would then comment back while still not interrupting my activities.
By the time I’ve finished my dinner, my mother, if one were to notice, still would not have eaten very much at all. But she will have managed to refill her glass of wine several times. She then will get out her trusty turquoise-and-silver Tapestry-era lighter and her little metal elbow pot pipe. Yeah. She usually gets stoned right at the dinner table. That’s no shock, though, is it? During which I take my book to the bathroom, where once again, for the life of me, I cannot just do one thing. I get bored, even if it is just for a three-minute crap. Then I go back to my room, check e-mails, my cell phone voice mail, and finish burning a CD of music I’ve downloaded or traded with some other music freak I found on one of the fan sites.