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by Bryan Hurt

  And before that the peace of nothing happening that I even thought to know of—

  And before that the lives I could have led, and the cells that made me.

  ANYONE COULD SEE I can do nothing, nothing, but there’s nobody that I can see to see me. As I turn I can look across the planks of my porch and if I tuck my chin I can see my lawn above me and the broad black band of the street with no cars parked along it because everyone’s taken all their cars to work, and on errands and vacation. Or else the neighbors are cowering in their houses, cars tucked into garages with the doors squeezed shut, or else they’re peeking through their windows and they can see me and I make them afraid to come out. All I can see through my windows as I pass one and then the next are boiled reflections of the ideas of the colors of things like flowers, like hedges, like lampposts, like a cloud here and then there, and that’s all.

  My vertebrae push at the skin of my back. My whole skeleton is apparent to me as it has never been before. It’s as if I don’t have the fat I have. It’s as if I’m stripped of more than clothes. What’s left of my breasts slides near my armpit on one side and under my chin on the other. When I turn, backside out, craned neck bulging, I feel my home and my body as intricate and intricately connected contraptions, a Rube Goldberg that produces the drip of my mere and continuing life. The ropes that stretch and support me are like the wires and pipes in the walls. My cavities are rooms, my organs are furniture, my blood, transporting air, is air. Now, truly for the first time since my babyhood, there is nothing I can do. I can cry or I can not cry. As a baby I cried, but now if I know anything I know better. I can hold my breath. I can open or I can close my eyes.

  I close my eyes. Here, upside down and overbalanced, the thing that happens is not what I make happen, it’s what I am within the definition of suspense. First, my shoulders ache, and next they ache more. They ache in relation to how much my neck aches which aches in relation to my ankles which ache unlike each other because of how simultaneously bent and splayed I’m hung. The only other thing that happens in the time I can witness by the wall clock in the kitchen with the rooster on its face as I pass is the ticking of my mind as it tracks the shifting pulse of my body and maneuvers around the ideas lodged in its coils. My mind is a lost snake stuffed in a bowl and pressed. My mind is a snake too crushed to strike.

  I open my eyes. I am turning, upside down and tangled, as if on a vertical spit, such that window after window passes in a rhythm, and then, as I let my eyes blur, I can begin to see the walls of my square house ease into curves and soon my windows make one watery strip of blue-green world. All this motion, and I am almost used to it, time passing and nothing happening outside my body’s placement within everything, in fact I am almost used to this level of pain, almost content to spin within it, when peeping into the windows I see bobbing mounds of heads of hair, and one has doffed a cap, and one has pigtails like ears on her head, and another has a Blow Pop in her mouth, and another has a backpack that bounces up behind him as he bounces, and another must be holding an enormous toy giraffe because the giraffe’s head bobs above his head and hops with him, and nods as the boy hits the ground below the sill, and bends as the boy is rising or falling each time I pass. Children are bouncing in no particular rhythm; they’re like Whack-A-Moles at a county fair.

  I unblur my eyes a little and I can see mountains creeping up behind them, green and brown, and then the children rise in slow motion and stop, framed in groups of twos and threes in the windows, as if secreted in my shrubbery, looking into my house and at my family’s things, looking at me in my doorway, backdropped by the empty street. They wiggle but are almost still, as if making every effort at a dinner table.

  Are these children I know? Are they from my daughter’s school? Is it a field trip? Is my daughter one of them? I just can’t tell—their faces and affectations, their clothing and hairdos—all aspects I recognize but aspects arbitrarily distributed to one being and then another. As individuals, not one child rings one hollow bell.

  Then I remember to unblur my eyes entirely and the mountains in the background materialize into soldiers with camouflage outfits, their faces as stiff and suspicious as pioneers’ in photographs, lifting the children so that they can see. The children’s faces go slack, taking me in as I sparkle in my house. Some of the windows are open, with screens, and I can hear a child suck and swallow. I can hear the Blow Pop shift across her teeth. Then the children start squirming, because their armpits are uncomfortable and they’re bored. So here and then there the soldiers put them down and I can hear shoes and voices in the shrubbery. For a few moments the soldiers talk to one another on their walkie-talkies, looking across my living room at one another, window to window, nodding and shrugging, hatching ideas, making plans. They seem to come to a decision. The giraffe’s head is still in its window but I have no idea if there’s anyone down there supporting it. The soldier standing framed with it does not seem to know it’s there. The giraffe looks directly at me, and the soldier is in profile, with his walkie-talkie, and every burst of static has the rhythm of affirmation—roger that, ten-four—

  But I’m still turning. Some of the children appear in the background, in the hilly yard of my neighbor next door. They are tossing a ball. They are jumping a jump rope. They are writing with chalk on the walkway. A soldier shifts from his window and shouts an order at them. Bark, spit, he says. One of the children comes to him, but the others ignore him. What can I do? Atrocities are imminent.

  Outside another window a soldier is examining my barbecue.

  Outside another a soldier is tying his boot.

  Outside another a soldier continues to look at me each time I pass, because I am still turning, and turning as if the opening and closing of my eyes propels the turn, as if time itself is what turns me, as if my turning makes time move. He continues to look at me and I know everything he might do; I can see everything he might do move across his eyes in scenarios I remember from news and movies. Then he walks around the house. I can see him pass by window after window. I am following him as I turn, or my turning is pushing him along in a dance of magnets. He collects the giraffe as he passes. He hands the giraffe to the soldier who is standing with my barbecue. He’s rounding the porch and I’m turning to meet him as he approaches the threshold, removing his flak helmet. His face is at my crotch. He is wiping his boots on my welcome mat.

  Then I do, I cry. I try to control my breath enough so that I can do it with the duct tape gag. It’s all I can do.

  MY HOUSE IS like the world. The furniture is islands and continents now, in sun and shadow, its inhabitants the bugs, the mice, the dust, and the knickknacks we collected on our travels. Air is water, and sky hangs, as always, above the roof, though here the roof is ozone, leaks intact. How did I get here? Sleepwalking? Sleephanging? Sleepbinding and sleepgagging? Sleepransacking of my home? Or did soldiers do this in the night?

  He stops my spinning. He turns me and turns with me as if I’m a bookcase to a secret room and I can feel a shaft of sunlight settle onto my ass. He takes a poker from my fireplace and pokes me carefully so that I swing a little. Who do you think you are? Poke. What do you think you’re doing? Poke. He tucks it under his arm like an umbrella and goes into the kitchen and starts opening and closing drawers. Why don’t you have any pancake mix in this kitchen? (I do, but it’s in the cabinet and he’s still looking in drawers.) Don’t you have any decent snacks?

  Outside, the soldiers are directing the children to do something, to ready something, and they’re scurrying about with their accessories. I am suddenly unsure if the soldiers are directing the children, or if the children are directing the soldiers, as if it’s simply their toys that have grown life-size. I spot the giraffe standing near the barbecue. It’s large for a toy, but it is not nearly life-size. And the soldier in my kitchen has opened his fly and let his penis flop out. This, I recognize, is nothing a grown doll could do.

  Then my husband comes home. Th
ere’s no sign of the car, but he comes in the back gate, stands at the patio doors, kicks his boots off, and then, as if remembering my instructions, he retrieves and sets them tidily next to the geranium pot. I have no idea why he’s home so early, but the soldier has scooted back around me, taking the porch steps in one stride, setting me spinning again. He’s somewhere in the yard with the rest of them, and he must have zipped up because now I cannot tell him apart from the rest of the soldiers, some of whom have found fold-out lawn chairs and are setting them up around the grill. Others are primping the coals.

  My husband comes inside and makes a peanut butter sandwich. Behind my gag I am trying to regulate my breath enough to make a noise, but then he pulls a stool from the breakfast bar over to where I’m hanging and stops my spinning so we can both look the same way, out the window to the grassy side yard where they have dragged the barbecue. It’s good to be still. It is so good to be still that I hardly wonder why my husband remains unalarmed. We watch as first they barbecue the giraffe and then they barbecue each other. A soldier, sitting lotus on the grill, salutes, and next it’s the boy with the backpack, grinning like wax, and like wax, his face moves from comedy to tragedy mask. One and then another disappears into smoke and flames, another soldier and then the child with lollies, everyone nodding appreciatively at everyone’s sacrifice.

  I know there is blood, but I cannot see blood. There is a way that I want to see the blood because I feel it’s my responsibility to see the blood, and it must be there, given the circumstances, but I cannot see it. I sniff but all I can smell is my own salty fluids. I focus my mind on my ears and I hear bubbles, and I hear myself swallow saliva, and beyond that I hear only what could be the ambient liquid tune of a washer or of a toilet awry.

  I hear my husband chewing. Then he rests the sandwich in his lap for a moment and unties one of the ropes around my wrists and I realize that I can feel his fingers on the rope as if it is a part of my body. I think about it, and I am not making this up. The rope is part of my body. It occurs to me that when I dream I almost never have a body, let alone a face, and then it occurs to me that this phenomenon is not one exclusively of sleep. If I am as I dream, as they say, then I am a blur to myself. Unless I am looking at my reflection I never look like anything.

  In this suspense, what of myself can I see? The hand my husband released has fallen out of my vision, but the bound one has shifted such that I can see my wrist as if I am checking the time, but it’s ropes that I see there. They say you can tell a person’s age on her hands more clearly than on her face. You can see a person’s history in her hands. I’m facing the back of my hand. I know it like the back of my hand, I think, but it turns out I don’t know the back of my hand at all. There’s not much to my hand, now that I’m finally looking. This is not, for example, a farmer’s hand. And this is a hand that has been kept clean, that has washed itself of almost everything. Skin’s a little looser than it has been, the map or lake top made up by lines more pronounced than I might have guessed. On the other side of my hand, hidden on my palm, is my future.

  Now I feel the rope dangling like a phantom limb. Now I remember how I came to this. I remember in slow motion that by midmorning—in the open space after “bye-bye sweet-ums,” “have a lovely, sugar,” and that final wag from my dog’s behind—in that open space the world had slipped two degrees farther in a direction it must have been shifting for a long time, like water from an eyedropper that heaps above the rim of a glass and then one more drop and it just spills. In such a way the substance of the air had suddenly thickened, becoming almost gelatinous, I remember now. I was elbow-deep in dishes and the water in the sink began to feel the same as the air, and soap bubbles felt like rubber pellets, and then I was moving through it like a deep-sea diver in all that gear, or not moving through it so much as moving with it, it guiding me as much as anything, no leading or following, just me shifting with the breath of the earth, and then these ropes growing from inside my body like extensions of my tendons as my clothes fell away, the gag rising like a scar across my face. I was moving toward the door because I wanted to get out—

  I wanted to do something—

  I wanted to change, and I wanted to change the world—

  I opened the front door, but I couldn’t move through; the planks of the porch and the wide lawn yawned before me and gravity seemed to tip and I walked on up the space where the door had been as my furniture tumbled about the room, the chandelier catching on a sofa cushion and stuffing bulging from where it tore, coffee table cracking its back over the arm of a wingback armchair. I just walked on along where the door no longer hung and my ropes coiled around me and fastened to the doorframe, merged there with house; I remember the crumbling feeling of the popcorn texture of the ceiling; and I could feel the guts of the house, the pipes, the ducts, the wires, the stretching and sagging two-by-fours clinging to the drywall, and then I could feel myself stretch into warm roads coursing across town and then the country, and then I could feel myself as the jet stream and the gulf stream, planetary currents of air and water. I felt it hard, and fully. It wore me out and perhaps I slept because when I woke the world seemed as loose as ever and there I hung as if I’d been abducted by my own home.

  There is simply no end to the suspense when one becomes one’s own psychic landscape. Here, my unbound hand flops in the sunshine. My husband holds the dangling end of my rope in one hand, and I can feel the warmth of his hand, which is so familiar, as he resumes eating his sandwich with the other. I remember, and now I know. I am my home, and I am the world I live in. I am the ropes that bind me and the silver tape that stops my voice, hanging here, in this predicament. It did it to me, I did it to myself, I did it to it, all the same. My husband and I look out the window, head to head, although mine remains upside down, and outside, children are running about with soldiers. Some are helping each other onto the barbecue. They’re all squirting one another with sauce.

  Coyote

  by Charles Yu

  Today is your first day here in the Division. You have been assigned a cubicle next to Henry. Henry is your boss. He hands you a file, tells you to wait until you’re alone to open it. Good luck, Henry says, and he goes to get a cup of coffee. You hear his soft footfalls on the sound-eating carpet, as he pads away in his patent-leather dress shoes. You are mildly surprised about his choice in footwear. When you can’t hear him anymore, you open the file to find a security envelope, complete with an official Division-logo-embossed thermal seal. You press your thumb to it and hold it there until the sticker turns from green to red. You slide the letter opener under and against the sticker, break it open with the edge, and slide out an ultra-thin sheet of silverish chemical paper. There’s a circle in the middle and you inhale and breathe on it. Markers in your DNA attach to bioactive receptors in the paper, developing the photographic image, which fades into and out of view within seven seconds. Which is just long enough for you to see the face in the picture, the subject of your investigation: Henry.

  You go to lunch with Henry. Henry invites along Carol. Henry has a prepackaged chicken salad from Whole Foods. You wonder if Henry and Carol have ever had sex. Henry has a higher security clearance than you, which you know because it is in your file, but which you would have assumed anyway, because Henry is your boss. Carol has a higher security clearance than you as well, something you know only because that fact is in your file on Henry. What is interesting, however, is the fact that Carol has a higher security clearance than Henry, which Henry does not know. Which is not surprising, because as between any two people, the one with the lower security clearance does not usually know the security clearance of the person with the higher level. What is surprising, however, is that Carol does not know that she has a higher security clearance than Henry. You know, though. You try to figure out what it is you know, and this is what you come up with: what you know is the fact that Carol knows things that Henry does not know, and also that Carol does not know that she knows thi
ngs that Henry does not know. Carol laughs at Henry’s jokes too much and too loud for this to be a just-friends thing. She touches his forearm three times during lunch, the last time leaving it there for maybe two seconds before lifting it off and brushing the hair behind her ear. Carol has an egg salad sandwich in wax paper for her lunch. Between small bites, she sips from a can of diet root beer.

  Henry’s clearance level is Five. Carol’s is Seven. Yours is Three, so in general, you know a fair amount less than Henry does about security matters, and much, much less than Carol does. But you know things about each of them individually, and about both of them in relation to each other. You know things about what they know. So in that sense, you aren’t purely a Three. You are something else. You’re a Three Plus. If you were all animals, Henry would be an ox. Carol a bear. And you, you are a lowly canine. Smaller, weaker, less fearsome. Except to larger, slower animals. You aren’t a wolf. More like a coyote.

  Henry asks you how your investigation is coming along. You say just fine. He says he has heard good things about the work you are doing. He hopes that you’ll succeed in your objective. You make a mental note to yourself to recheck the file because you were pretty sure you didn’t see any objective in there. You and Henry and Carol go out to lunch at Olive Garden. It was not your choice. It was no one’s choice, really. Olive Garden is the only walkable place for lunch, and the three of you only get an hour. The soup of the day is vegetable minestrone. You order a cup and have the bottomless breadsticks and salad. Carol orders a glass of the house red. Halfway through the meal, Henry and Carol excuse themselves at the same time. They head off toward the restrooms, but a minute later you see them outside talking to each other. Henry is nodding a lot and looking over in your general direction. Carol has a look on her face which you have a hard time interpreting. You consult your handbook of unintentional facial expressions. This book has a chart that shows how people intend to convey Emotion A but unintentionally convey their real feeling about someone, call it Emotion B. If you can properly identify the intended Emotion A, and then identify certain indicators of stressors in their voice and demeanor, you should be able to zero in on the real Emotion B. The difference between A and B is called leakage. Leakage is a bad thing if you have a security clearance, especially if it is as high as Five or even Seven. You have previously noted in your daily reports that Carol is leaking pretty bad. She wants to convey benevolent apathy toward you, given that you are significantly lower than she is on the totem pole. But instead what Carol unintentionally conveys is that she hates your stupid face, or something of that approximate nature. You eat your salad and breadsticks and expertly convey naive unawareness of all of this. When the waitress comes by to ask if your absent dining companions want free refills, you lie to her and say that they don’t, even though Carol specifically mentioned that if someone came by she’d like another Arnold Palmer.