Wood-poor, the homesteaders learned to quarry soft yellow limestone for bricks and fence posts. They had to remove the soil first—three feet in most places—then let the exposed rock harden in the sun before drilling with augers and splitting slabs with hammered spikes. Commonly, whenever the masons discerned the grooves of a seashell or fish bones in the rock, they turned the fossil plane to the interior of the room. They believed in the great flood; they were grateful for this proof of the transience of their earthly lives.
8.
The roof of her home burned and the flames surpassed the electric poles. Strange how even a fire so large could flicker like one harnessed to a hearth. They saw the path of embers move south on the wind. The transformer exploded. The heat and pressure of the fire caused the double-glazed windows to flex in and out, to crack. The women of the block, waking to smoke and an air-raid siren, pulled their hair and wailed with tears in their eyes.
A man at the end of the block yelled: Where are you? Where are you? A dog barked and another dog replied.
They observed her as she watched her bedroom burn. She had been coughing from a curb out front, but then she became aware that she was coughing. She hushed, stood erect, and held the rattle inside her lungs. It wasn’t quite a test or a firm longing but what she had initiated in the bedroom, accelerant sprinkled in circles on the stained bare mattress, her unwashed clothes, offered her proof of what was essential. When the smoke turned intolerable, it came down to her body—was it anything she needed? Her body fought for itself, thoughts trailing calm, both crawling under the smoke until it sucked under the door jam. She opened the bedroom door with a balled T-shirt over a burning knob, edged down the painted stairs, knee skin sticking to heat-warped pigment.
As a young girl, before her father moved their household from California east to the edge of the Mississippi, she had watched him remove a walnut orchard somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley. He told her they were grafted trees, 150 years old, black walnut trunks with white walnut crowns. Nurseries now supply hearty white walnut rootstock—a smaller, more productive tree that can be replaced every fifteen to twenty years. There’s value in the old trees, he told her, the fine burl, a rare and chaotic knit between the white walnut and the black walnut. The burl can be sold for gunstock, for wood inlays in luxury cars.
She waited in the truck with the windows rolled down. Her father drove a backhoe with a forklift prong instead of a shovel. He thrust the ends into the dirt and pried at the roots of a tree. The engine strained, the roots clenched the dirt. And then a thundering that shook the car. The dark green of the mossy bark met the light green of the mowed grass. Now she could see the foothills in the distance. In the winter the orchard owner’s house would have a new view of snow-capped mountains.
Two more trees fell. An elderly woman stepped into the carport, tidied white hair sweat-messed on the back of her head with a red comb. She approached the truck window with a can of lime soda. “Already October and still so hot,” the orchard owner said. “Your father will be done with it all soon.”
The girl took the soda, said thank you as her father always instructed, and wiped dirt out of the rim of the can with the edge of her T-shirt. They heard gun blasts in the distance.
“They’re hunting doves in the cherry orchard. Those are short trees, they don’t offer much coverage. When my trees are gone, where will they all hide now?” The orchard owner was crying. Her wet eyelashes moved like silver spider legs.
The sides of the soda can warmed in the girl’s hands. What would the cooked meat look like, all that plucked gray down? A wind picked up and clattered the orchard woman’s chimes, irrigation pipe and useless keys on fishing line. So often she felt muted; she was not fearful or sentimental to the mechanics of extinguishing the organic.
9.
The international prototype of the kilogram, the Kilogram of the Archives, is in the custody of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France. It is a small platinum cylinder fabricated in 1799 to represent, as close as was feasible at the time, the mass of one cubic decimeter of water at 4ºC.
The Kilogram of the Archives is kept in a monitored safe within a basement vault of the Pavillon de Breteuil. Stored under three bell jars, the unit of measure has nevertheless been gaining mass, absorbing contaminants through the air. These contaminants may be removed through a careful cleaning process: first a cloud of steam, then a chamois soaked in ethanol and ether. The metrologist must have a steady hand, the circular strokes neither too hard nor too soft.
Curiously, the Kilogram of the Archives has lost mass in relation to its official copies, the siblings in other nations, since its ratification as an official unit of measure in 1889. Physicists cannot attribute this divergence to any official cause.
But consider the soft contact between a felted mallet and the second, middle bell jar around the prototype—a bell of remarkable sonority, a bell that can destabilize the weight of all things.
10.
Eric takes the bell out of his shirt and unwinds the fibril. He swings it back and forth over the dark sidewalk and the severed branches. Near silence: his own breath and the strained ropes.
Heat in his cheeks, diagonal pain in his chest. Warm, sweet-tasting blood pools in his mouth. He spits onto the sidewalk, hears a light tap. Tongue tip to the back of his mouth locates a tooth opened up, silver crown displaced, the pink branches of a nerve tolling.
11.
A wounded room could yield a seed, a seed planted in the roots of a dogwood or European beech. The roots and fungal colonies nourish the seed, prompt it to flare and open over a mouthful of dirt. This is the fertile bell they desire, a bell anchored in the earth. Still, they collect seeds of the volatile bells, the ones that climb through the tree and devour its heartwood. The prevailing belief is that the blemished seeds, the ones marked disharmonious, will one day produce a clement bell with a tone to pacify, the bell to proliferate the root bell. It is a notional sowing season.
It is a shame to salt these seeds away, to hesitate before an experiment to classify and study all manner of sound: a barnacled bell in a shipwreck, current stirred; a bell too large for any belfry, improperly tuned and melted down for cannonballs and bayonets; a bell to call a discreet servant; a bell to invite the concern of the dead; a bell to poison and ward off poison; the bell to recall natal memories; the small bell that stirs earth, agitates its fissures; the bell to awaken absent senses; the wheel of bells that gave the sea its masterful milling, waves that worked away at the battlefield bones until it was beach.
12.
I told her to braid her hair, because it looked dirty and smelled like a campfire. I told her how to be comfortable, how to sit so that her legs wouldn’t go to sleep. I gave her two wooden boxes and told her that there were symptoms, that she couldn’t open the boxes until she felt them.
You should feel a vibration, I told her. It’s not like tingling; it is subtler than that. There is nothing in the room that could exhibit shaking, to tell you it’s not your body, but you will look anyway. You will feel warm but you won’t sweat. You’ll blink hard and rapidly. You should see bright spots. Don’t rub your eyes, it will only make your tears sting. There will be something brittle and coercive under your tongue. Don’t move it. Let it dissolve.
She performed with rigidity. She gagged near the end. When she opened it, the box to her right contained an oily terra-cotta bell. Within the box on her left, an unusual molar—its crown open, its roots looped into a ring—it could have been a bell too, an ivory miniature. With effort and her thin fingers manipulating the angles, she pushed the hollow tooth into the slot of the bell. The silence: a mouth undone with awe.
September
Michael Sheehan
… it was, yes, September, but very dull, overcast, towards the end, already it was autumn.
—B. S. Johnson
S
EPTEMBER 3
At first we thought maybe it was some kind of avian flu. The numbers of birds that had died in the three-month period leading up to that morning were staggering. Globally, this was the case. Various causes were put forth and invariably shot down. The metaphor was often posed that the dying of the birds was a “canary in a mine.” However, that which was to be heralded, augured by the dying birds, was not made clear, nor further was the reason behind their dying—the depletion of our ozone? global warming? mass pollutants? The appearance of a dead bird on our lawns, on our streets, in parks, and along city sidewalks had come to be commonplace. Like anything else, the degree to which seeing a dead bird alarmed us began to dissipate as the regularity of seeing a dead bird increased. Nonetheless, we remained unprepared for the images of that morning. To watch a bird fall—spiraling like those bi-winged seed pods we used to spin as children, toss and watch flutter to the ground at our feet—as though it had been plucked from the sky by the buckshot of some skillful or lucky hunter, and to know the cause was nothing so available, so palpable as that, is to witness something earth-shatteringly, bowel-tighteningly impossible and yet real; it is to witness something invisible interacting with the real world. As though the bird—a seagull, say, or a sparrow—had hit some sort of invisible wall—as often we’d seen birds fly into large panes of glass, unknowing even in death that they themselves caused it—an invisible wall somewhere impossibly afloat in the sky itself. Then the bird would fall, already dead, and we would bear witness over and over again to its falling. Birds would thud car hoods, crack windshields, dent roofs. They would litter lawns, and shatter home windows. They would stop traffic for miles on interstates. A state of emergency was called in many cities, as it was considered unsafe to go outside; this was initially justified as a precaution (falling birds—no matter how slight—could seriously injure or even kill anyone unlucky enough to be standing beneath their line of descent), but was later clarified to include the possibility of some form of unknown, advanced-stage, and very severe avian flu or airborne disease that was, in being completely mysterious, uncertain as to the risk potential for humans. We watched then that day from our windows, as hundreds of birds fell from the sky—more birds than we would ever have thought to exist, let alone be flying above us—and we wondered aloud, What could cause this?
OCTOBER 3, 1983
Glenn Friptch sits cross-legged. When Glenn Friptch—whose last name is considered almost unpronounceable by his friends—drinks from his Pepsi can, he more or less inhales the Pepsi. His nails are nervously bitten and his cuticles red, raw, and sore looking. When Glenn Friptch—who goes by G.P. (the latter letter for no clear reason, though perhaps because of the aberrant p in an otherwise straightforward appellative spelling) due to the above-mentioned unpronounceability—inhales the joint being passed around, he does so with his eyes open; actually, he widens his eyes as he inhales, as though either to truly savor every last fleck of flavor of the smoke as it fills his mouth, every last molecule of THC, or as though to ensure he never for even a second takes his eyes off the game board before him on the floor and the Others who sit either likewise cross-legged or who kneel on legs folded beneath them, awaiting their turns and the joint’s passage around the four poles of the game board they occupy.
The Game is Civilization, and the four players are G.P., Dimley Scarton, Hegda Toryeakevic (pronounced -itch), and Walf Gæmis. They are sitting in various positions in the basement of G.P.’s parents’ suburban home ten minutes outside Scranton, Pennsylvania. This game of Civ has taken, so far, exactly eighteen hours, nineteen minutes, and thirty-one seconds, as G.P. blows smoke exaggeratedly across the board, never for even an instant taking his eyes away from the situation right there in front of him. How Civ is played is each player gets seven thousand people and a nascent nation around the Mediterranean and must then grow his or her nation-state realistically through time. The goal is “to be able to advance to final age on the Archaeological Succession Table (AST),” which is to say to last long enough to be remembered. G.P. et al have played Civ now thirty-three times since it was received by G.P. for Christmas in 1982, never lasting longer than approximately eleven hours—on average, the game takes them eight hours (from setup to finish); the box says the game takes anywhere from three to twelve hours.
G.P., Walf, and Dimley are all seventeen years old; Hegda alone is sixteen. Though Hegda is the sole female in an otherwise very male group, there is no apparent sexual tension or even awareness. This is likely due both to the underdeveloped sexual awareness of the three males playing and to Hegda’s unprepossessing features. At the moment Hegda’s features are offset and not exactly enhanced but certainly exaggerated by a red, scratchy irritation of her eyes, rimming both and welling up tears periodically in the corners of them (which have a tendency to drift toward each other, the eyes, toward the bridge of her nose, not crossing exactly, but basically crossing), due to both the many hours awake and the smoke from the joint, of which Hegda does not partake.
The four players have been slowly maneuvering through the most complicated version of the game they have ever played; the complications arose via intention and accident; intentional complications arose from the introduction by the four players of a consideration of God and the metaphysical, as well as a further consideration of what they understand of metahistorical principles about the waxing and waning of actual civilizations; this was accomplished by augmenting the game’s cards with their own crudely drawn-up cards (scraps of computer paper) meant to catalog a) divine intervention of a number of sorts, or the outlook of God over the affairs of Man, which cards were created by Hegda, b) a consideration of chance occurrences and of the forces that cause events to happen, all put forth by Dimley (who decorated each of the cards’ backsides with Hamlet’s There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy), and c) happenings within the “laws” of civilization as defined by history—viz., attacks from without, pressures from within, corruption, bad leadership, aggression, tyranny, popular moral degeneration, and so on, which cards were created by G.P.; the accidental complications arose from actually implementing these cards in the game, which was meant to be overseen by Walf, but was sort of agreed upon by all to be done by the chance rolling of dice at various stages of the game, and an elaborate system of correspondence was created to sync the cards with the numbers on the twin dice, all while Walf waited, uncertain the role he would play in this new configuration of the game, given that he did not contribute cards and was no longer the “master” of these meta elements, but was now merely—as were the others—a slave to blind chance, without (however) the agency to have introduced or decided upon any of the events of chance. This was the first of Walf’s unhappinesses.
G.P., passing the joint to Dimley, now took a further inhale of his Pepsi, crumpling the can a little in his exuberance. None of the four had slept during these eighteen hours, nor had any official break been allowed. Bathroom breaks were grouped and termed “intermissions” and occurred once every three hours. Four cans of Pepsi remained, as did four individually wrapped slices of Kraft American cheese, and a further four Twinkies. These snacks were rationed by G.P., as it was his house and his parents who provided. The second of Walf’s unhappinesses came when he submitted that he should oversee the rationing of the snacks, given that he had little else to do. G.P.’s refusal—based on the prenominate proprietary rights—and its subsequent seconding and thirding by Hegda and Dimley introduced a new element into the game, though none was yet aware of it.
SEPTEMBER 19, 1985
Though her name might itself
seem some cultural holdover from someplace distant or, even worse, some sort of bad joke, her features bear it out sweetly to be something closer to definitional, explanatory, a name for a deformity that is itself unnamed or -known: Hegda has eyes the color roughly of dead grass and a dermis basically slicked in a setaceous sea of wens, pimples, pustules, boils, and so on. Facially, and also onto her chest, her back, her upper arms, and privately elsewhere. Hegda’s concern for personal hygiene is monstrous, and nearly all-consuming, though at this point still completely futile. Her devotion to antiacne creams, pads, wipes, washes, pills, and so on is only part of it: mud masks, lotions, multiple showers in a given day, and unfortunately hours and hours of simply standing staring at her own face in the mirror, cursing it and surveying it, getting to know it more intimately than most people know anything about themselves—getting deep, as it were, under the skin. Hegda alone at this point can see both the beauty and the ugliness in her own visage, she alone can see that the poor quality of her skin and the present overall sort of dullness to her look is only a sort of graffiti, a sort of surface marring. She can see to her bones’ structure, she can see every pore and the lines of her nose, the set of her eyes, the slight curve at the outer edge of either lip, something like a sort of sexy/demure smirk, a knowing and flirtatious grin, the sort of look you find on billboards and in magazine ads of women selling eau de toilette and parfum. But the strange thing is, the more Hegda searches her face and spends her time staring at it, the less familiar, the less her own, it becomes. The face that Hegda sees is completely foreign, like she is spending all her time looking at something detached from herself, or seeing someone captivating (not attractive, exactly, but maybe not repulsive either), and finding herself unstoppably fascinated by the person’s grotesquerie—but never once, not for a second, confusing that person with her own self. Hegda can watch her hands touch her face, watch her hands defy her better sense and squeeze and pick at the blemishes there, can stare into her eyes, can open and close and shape and twist her mouth, can turn her face side to side, and all the while feel ever more distant from what is being seen, ever more uncertain even almost who it is really that is seeing here at all.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 26