All Roads Lead to Blood

by Chau, Bonnie;

  Here. This word implies a world, where there is me (I’m here), there is you (wherever you are, you’re not here), and there is a space between us. To echo your earlier “postcard moment,” I wish you were here. I wish we were in some house, some building, even if not in the same room, just in the same building somewhere, where I knew you were in the next room, where I knew we could be in the same room, even if just to sit, or stand, breathing, not saying anything, not touching, just near each other.

  I’ll end here for now. I’ll see you soon. Monday?

  Gus

  2046

  That’s one. Love letter, I would mouth to myself, standing there in line. I would read it to myself, once, twice. It would take my breath away, did people really think like this, write like this? Letters with so little to hold onto, with so few tangible objects? Boots, coffee table, saguaro, sandwich, plate.

  Here. Now. These are deictic words, as the artist once explained to me, which only accrue their meaning given contextual information. The artist and I had talked about this excitedly once, the idea of linguistic fulfillment or lack of fulfillment, language that could not be wholly complete or functional on its own. I had declared it an incompetence of language, a codependence. But the artist had deemed it symbiotic.

  I’d have to wrench myself out of the memory and focus back on staring at the man’s back. Could I, as a person, experience deixis? You’re a real disappointment to me, I’d try whispering to the man’s sweater. But it wouldn’t feel right. I’d try again. Are you my context? I’d ask. I’d mouth to the man’s back, would you give me meaning? I’d maybe edge just a little bit closer, until my face was just about to touch. All of the wool knit fibers and body dust and motes and mites. Specks of my body touching specks of his body.

  The Forecast

  Before Bee fell asleep on Sunday night, she did what she usually did, which was lie down on her back in the center of her bed, straight and symmetrical, push her shoulder blades down and back a little bit for better posture, and make several small movements as if to straighten her pillow, which most likely was already pretty straight, considering the fastidious manner in which she made her bed in the mornings. Once she’d closed her eyes and breathed in and out, evenly, three times, she turned her mind to what she would wear in the morning.

  Neither her direct supervisor, the Editor, nor the founder-president Mr. Haussmann, had ever indicated in the least way they noticed what she wore to work. Bee just thought about the next day’s outfit as a way to simultaneously do something practical and also put herself to sleep. She would see in her mind all the socks she had stuffed into the top drawer, and then narrow down by how cold or hot it might be the next day, and if it might rain, and what shoes she might be wearing, in accordance to temperature or precipitation. Next, she would imagine what pants she had. It was going to be Monday, so she needn’t think about wearing the same pants two days in a row to the office. There were only four pairs of sweatpants to pick from anyway. Then, keeping in mind the cut, color, and waist of the pants, she would decide what would go on top. Tops were in the second drawer from the bottom. She would not wear a dark gray T-shirt with light gray sweatpants, for instance. Maybe the white button-down shirt. She would think of a hooded sweatshirt, maybe, but by then, it was such an uninvigorating task that she would already be asleep.

  From a blank and stone-cold sleep, Bee woke up Monday morning on her stomach. She woke up on her stomach only when she had bad sleep, which caused her to roll onto her stomach in order to protect the soft white flesh of the front of her body. Twisting her neck, she looked up and around to her back, and saw that the blanket lay perfectly straight and flat over her, so smooth and neat that aside from making the one roll over onto her stomach at some point, she must have lain the whole night as still as if she were dead.

  She looked out the window at the sun, bright, but neutral behind brick and glass and insulation. She looked at the branches of the tree, which gave no sign of budding. She pulled open and pushed closed the drawers she needed, to get her socks and underwear and shirt and pants. She walked out into the kitchen and down the hallway, and turned out into the other hallway, and opened and shut three consecutive doors, finally locking the outermost one behind her. Outside in the slight morning wind, she turned right up the hill on her street, before turning back around once she remembered she had parked on the bottom of the hill the afternoon before.

  At the first turn, she forgot to signal. She signaled after she had already made the turn. This was unusual, and not part of the routine. But she got back on track. She would not be veering from her usual habits, just because of some error of forgetfulness. Do not hesitate. Do not wait for anything, or anyone. Do not succumb to distractions. She turned on the radio to the morning radio station she liked mostly for the elegant Continental accent of the host. Then she stayed in the left lane until she passed the huge billboard for the Citadel Outlets, which marked approximately one-third of her commute down this three-lane boulevard, at which point she merged into the middle lane, remembering to signal, and then she caught sight of the corner of the sign indicating the west-bound freeway on-ramp, which was her cue to merge into the right lane.

  The office was precariously nestled into a slightly elevated lump of a lot built into the side of the freeway entrance; the production warehouse was semi-attached and stretched out behind the back of the office building, seeming to tunnel itself into a cavernous hole that must have been gouging into the underside of the freeway ramp. Bee flipped up her turn signal to show she was turning right. Nobody else in the long lines of cars ahead and behind her, or the two lanes of cars lined up bumper-to-bumper to her left, ever turned into this place. They probably thought she had left her turn signal on too long, from merging to the right before, or had meant to indicate she was about to turn right onto the freeway on-entrance, maybe, and changed her mind, or that it was a mistake. But it was correct. She had a right to turn in here, she worked here.

  She parked her car in the third space on the right side of the slanted angle lot, yanking back on her parking brake. The Design Director’s sportscar was two spaces down, gleaming and black, like a panther’s lowered head. Bee opened the door on the right side of the building. She walked past the two orange armchairs and the orange bench flanking the aspidistra and pothos and sansevieria plants with their unbearably dusty leaves. This arrangement must have formerly functioned as a sort of waiting area, when there were once celebrity visitors, stars inquiring about stars. An alcove off the left side of this area led to the restroom, a clean but dim room, covered in mustard yellow tiles. On the back of the toilet was a neat pile of fifteen-year-old nudie magazines. Continuing on down the main hallway, the first door to the right was usually closed. Up until one year before Bee had started carrying out her days at the compound, this room—with the wood sheeting on its door always looking brown and reticent—had belonged to the Marketing Director’s older brother, who had been the Production Director. He had died. The Marketing Director worked on the other side of the office, the left side, with the Office Manager and the Head of Circulation. The dead Production Director had never been replaced, and Bee had never directly asked or spoken—or been spoken to directly—about him, not once after the office tour on her first day when the Editor had said to her, “This used to be the Production Director’s office. He was the brother of the Marketing Director. He passed away one year ago. One year ago, today.”

  The next door down the hallway on the right side was Bee’s door. There was her desk, L-shaped, upon which landed, sometimes, termite wings. Sometimes, these very same termite wings fluttered up when she walked by, stirred up by the slightest movement in the air. Gray disembodied wings, the little termite ant bodies would never catch up to these airborne wings, the little termite ant bodies were probably trod upon and ground into the carpet. Behind the desk, there was a swiveling desk chair. Many hours were spent swiveling in this desk chair,
not quite as many hours were spent rolling in the desk chair, as the vinyl office chair mat had cracked and sunken beneath the combined years of wear and weight of the last Editorial Assistant who labored in this room. The little grippers on the underside of the chair mat gripped on, however—tiny plastic bumps of teeth gnawing ineffectually at the carpet, a coarse mottle of avocado, harvest gold, and burnt orange fibers. Behind the desk there was one large bookshelf and two locked filing cabinets, and to the left of the desk, a lower bookshelf with a spider plant sitting on top of it. That wall, shared with the next office over, had a rectangular panel of frosted glass in it, so that if the Editor in her office next door moved into the right spot, Bee could see a slight hovering movement of her silhouette.

  On her desk, she had a twelve-year-old laptop, three inches thick with a built-in trackball. This twelve-year-old laptop had no internet or printing capabilities—Bee had been instructed to use it to take notes. For internet or printing, she walked across the hall to the room directly opposite, the one with one wall of windows into the hallway, one wall of dry erase white board, one huge desktop computer, one fax machine, one printer, and also the machine that powered the forecast calculator, which looked like a huge version of the hygrothermograph machines in the corners of museums and art galleries. The monthly forecasts and numerology reports were faxed in by the Astrologer, by the first week of the month if they were lucky. And for specific individuals or occasions, the Editor would run astrological charts on the software housed in the desktop computer—before interviewing a prospective job applicant, for instance, or when venturing forth with a risky new business investment. The forecast calculator, then, was for the astrological miscellaney that fell in between those two bases. Whenever Bee had spent a long day in the computer-and-other-machines room, she left with a headache—the machine powering the forecast calculator, especially, buzzed incessantly with a robust and self-important drone. It was not to be turned off.

  And so, when at the end of the day that Monday, Bee walked all the way down the hallway to the room at the very end, she was only seeing in her mind a big, clean, round, white plate, and on the plate, a pile of green lentils, perfectly diced cubes of salty ham hock, all of it not touching the sides of the plate, but resting peacefully in the middle. She pulled her time card out of its slot, slipped it in between the jaws of the time clock machine. She waited, it took a moment, until she heard and felt the sharp metal clong of the punch. She walked back down the hallway towards the front of the building. She went back into her office to get her bag from the chair on the side, and saw that the Editor had left her the galley proofs to look over. Her desk was already piled with the card file boxes she had been working on during the day, so she brought the stack of sheets over to the dead Production Director’s room in the next office over, where she sometimes did work that needed spreading out and a clean, quiet, empty space.

  Bee was in the middle of proofing the French edition—everyone else had already left the office and gone home while she was doing the Spanish edition—when the phone rang. She looked at the thin gold hands of the clock on the wall. It was late, but not so late that she wouldn’t be expected to pick up the phone. The voice on the other line came in gradually, as if from afar, as if getting closer. Hello, the voice said. It was a man’s voice, deep and insistent. Hello, is this the Production Director? No, Bee said. No, this is not. Well, the man’s voice said. Well. He helps me with this, sometimes. I need you to look up something for me. Um, Bee said. This is a privately-owned business, a publishing company. I know, the man’s voice said. But he helps me with this, sometimes. It’s not too difficult, is it, I just need you to look up a word for me. Pardon me? Bee said. If you want a forecast done, I can take a message. No, no, the man’s voice said. I just need you to look up a word for me. A word? Bee said. Yes, the man’s voice said. Sometimes, I hear a word I don’t know, and since I don’t know it, I don’t know how to spell it. Huh, Bee said. And, continued the man’s voice, since I don’t know how to spell it, I can’t look it up myself in my dictionary. Oh, Bee said. Oh. Could you please just look it up, the man’s voice said. The Production Director used to do it for me. You can just look it up on a computer there, right? Okay, Bee said. Fine, she said. She turned over to the desktop computer on the small table on the side of the office, she woke it up, and opened up an online dictionary. What is the word? she asked. I just heard it on a radio show just now, the man’s voice said. It’s a very interesting word, and I don’t know how to spell it. Okay, Bee said. Could you please tell me what the word is? I need to know what the word is, if I am going to look it up for you. I am ready to look up this word for you, she said. Again. She was adding more sentences to this conversation. She was in a hurry. She wanted to finish this, she wanted to get this over with.

  She clamped the phone down between her right ear and the top of her shoulder, fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to type. Okay, the man’s voice said finally. The word is

  Peregrine.

  Peregrine.

  Peregrine? Bee said. Yes, the man’s voice said, I think it was Peregrine Fal—

  Right, Bee said, turning back to her galley proofs, and began spelling it out to him, P-E-R-E-G-R-I-N-E. Oh! the man’s voice said. Oh, you know it? Wait.

  No, Bee said to the man’s voice. No. But she waited. She had not known she would. She had not thought she would. But she did. She had never noticed how that word, peregrine, sounded. Like it could be an exotic place, but also like a scientific name, or a mathematical shape. It sounded mild and gentle, but also menacing, exciting, full of blood. She felt like she could feel her own blood moving, following her own body, which seemed also to be forming into a certain shape.

  The man’s voice was saying something more, a murmur. She waited for him to grasp hold of his pen, and press its tip into paper. She spelled it again, slow, for the man with no internet, who could not look up the meaning of a word because he did not know how to spell it. She waited for him to catch up. She looked like she was just sitting there, in a chair, in an office, but inside, she could have been moving, so, so fast.

  Desert Dreams Are Always in Green

  There were facts I already knew, when I met him in Marseille. His wife was living in L.A. She’d just finished studying art/experimental sound/video installation at Cal Arts, and worked at a cafe. She didn’t like driving, and took the bus everywhere. She had been one of the first American Apparel models, an early favorite, luridly pale buttocks straining against bright, restless cotton on Sunset Boulevard billboards.

  He knew my sister, Beatrice, first. They’re both photographers. They only vaguely knew each other, which is saying something, because Beatrice doesn’t really do vague. Everyone loves her, but somehow Wade wasn’t fooled. I like to think this meant something, but it doesn’t have to. Extraordinary beginnings don’t necessarily beget extraordinary endings.

  His wife was a good deal younger than him, and when they got married, five years ago, she was very young—nineteen to Wade’s thirty-one. Helen had been born in Chengdu, but had moved to L.A. with her oceanographer father when she was seven. That’s where she and Beatrice became friends. In a rather odd turn of events, but really, not so odd for our family, Beatrice had been sent to the West Coast for some regulatory boarding school. She always says that she immediately felt natural there, a regular chainsmoking wildflower cowboy. Even though it was L.A., and not Wyoming or anything.

  Wade showed me photographs of Helen, black and white, but in my mind, I already knew her in color from those ads. She gazed down at the spindly tops of palm trees, eyes giving away nothing, stoic. Eyes like a blank white wall, begging to be defaced. From those billboards, I imagined, fancifully, that in her blood ran equally the Mongolian savagery of Genghis Khan and the implacable, unimpeachable wisdom of Confucius. Her mouth was a plumply turgid hexagon, always tainted red and dry like stained wood chips, her long black hair a cloud of unfettered motion, flyi
ng.

  In high school and college, Wade had been a football player and also an acid dealer, and he showed me photos of those days too, in between trading stories about L.A., telling me about what it was like to not live in the same city as Helen, and showing me, step by step, how he was making the bouillabaisse. We’d recognized each other at a mutual friend’s wedding, which had been a weeklong project just outside of Marseille, and now, finished with it, I had found myself invited to Wade’s family’s apartment in the city, the city of blue. I sat at that table in his kitchen, mouthing tiny sips of a Cointreau cocktail.

  I’d been moving around for months, probably a year. I had stared out so many moving vehicles, waited interminably for so many rides and flights, I thought I could no longer stop myself from looking through people, from looking and revealing nothing, as Helen seemed to do from those billboards, from drawing closed a third eyelid like a lizard, clear but soundproof. Nictitating, I repeated, over and over in my head. The way it got caught up in my throat and mouth.

  There inside that apartment in Marseille, though, I could not keep my heartbeats still, my eyes were swiveling wildly, I had never wanted to be so attentive, to absorb so wholly, sitting and watching and listening to someone who seemed to know so many useful, practical things that I didn’t know. Someone who had a life I was hungering for. There were objects to Wade’s life that had weight, heavy things, not the theoretical dust of Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, who floated through my research, but real, fleshy things, pronouncements about love and cities, solid words in the kitchen air and a knife against a vegetable’s green waxy skin, and generous ways to move around and talk to a guest like me, that would be warm, and familiar.