Drifts

by Kate Zambreno

  I began smoking again after we saw the stray kitten hit by one of the speeding cars on the corner. The car didn’t even slow down. I began screaming and couldn’t stop shaking and screaming, until a man walking by with his three young children asked me to calm down. For the rest of the day we worried over what to do with the kitten’s tiny dead body, until we called for the city to come clear it away. We’ve now done this several times, for cats who have been killed crossing that particular patch of street.

  I know I’m not doing well when I get too caught up in the solitary lives of stray animals. This is another thing that’s changed for me, being here, in the city. I feel too much for all the stray animals, yet I do almost nothing about it. It is the intensity of my concern for them that alarms me. While walking to dinner in our neighborhood that summer, we saw a large gray-white dog. She was emaciated and disoriented standing in the middle of the street, as if stuck. It didn’t seem like she was aware of us. We didn’t know what to do when we saw the dog, limping and confused. We stood in the middle of the street to try to shield her from oncoming cars driving too fast down the block. We didn’t touch her, because we were afraid she might bite us. We thought perhaps I could go home and get food and a blanket, or we could herd the dog slowly back to our house, but what we’d do when we were there we didn’t know. Home was several blocks away and the dog was barely walking. John took a photo of the dog with his phone, which we sent to our dog walker, thinking she could help. The way the dog’s white fur glowed in the dark in the photograph made her look like a ghost dog. We asked people on the street if they lived nearby and could bring out food or water. I remember at the time I felt aware that this seemed like a con. Something in the urgency and mania of our requests immediately made us look suspect. Most didn’t stop, but two men brought out a bowl of water. The dog took a sip. I don’t know how long we stood there in the middle of the street with the dog. Suddenly a young man was beside us, or perhaps he was more like a boy. This was his dog, he told us. I asked him why she was so emaciated, gesturing to her protruding rib cage, which, I realized, came out like an accusation. She was very old, he said. We didn’t realize until then that of course the dog was old, although we still didn’t understand how the dog escaped, what she was doing in the middle of the street. We then stroked the dog’s flank to say goodbye, as we showed affection to other dogs in the neighborhood. I was unwilling to part with her. Thinking back, I feel ashamed that I didn’t touch the dog immediately, comforting her, as she was most likely dying. The young man then lifted the dog in his arms, easily, as if she weighed nothing, and carried her inside the house across the street. He didn’t thank us—although what would he have thanked us for? We hadn’t done anything, except perhaps make sure she wasn’t hit by a car. The event unsettled both of us—there was something that didn’t feel right about it. Although, thinking of the three times I have experienced the death of someone in my family, the process of witnessing a body shut down, become resistant to water or food, I remember always feeling how both natural and unreal it all felt, like something fraudulent was occurring.

  Later I realized how much the dog looked like the Peter Hujar photograph, of the white dog in a field of dirt, that I had been thinking about for some time. Something so sorrowful and stripped about both of these dogs. Hujar would spend time with his animal subjects before taking their photographs so that they would relax around him. There is an aspect of time contained in these photographs, of intimacy and endurance. He captures something of their pure being. When I think of the ghost dog, my mind also goes to the old sleeping dog in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, seemingly emaciated, the definition of the ribs.

  That story of young Rilke encountering the apparition of a monk in hooded black begging for alms while staying at a spa in Viareggio frequented by the Italian royal family. Then, on the veranda, he sees the family dog, a usually friendly dachshund, who that day does not allow himself to be petted. Only later did he discover that the small dog had been kicked in the head earlier that day by a horse and was already dead, yet still upright. He wondered later whether the dog also had seen the apparition of the monk. Rilke always attributed his sensitivity to the paranormal to his mother’s religiosity. The confusion over whether the little dog was still alive calls to mind the eighth of the poet’s famous elegies—how, when nearing the pure space of death, one’s gaze becomes like an animal’s.

  All summer and fall I feel obsessed and possessed by a room of Sarah Charlesworth photographs I kept returning to at the New Museum. The privacy and opacity of Charlesworth’s Stills series, her photographs of photographs taken by others of bodies falling or jumping from buildings, captured in midair. She repurposed the photographs from other images, rephotographed and cropped them, blew them up until they are almost abstractions. Even though most of the fourteen Stills are from 1980, they uncannily anticipate the images of people jumping from the twin towers. Transfixed in the space, I returned again and again, photographing the images with my phone—photographing a photograph of a photograph. When I first saw the pictures, with Clutch and Jackson, who were visiting, and John, they all left the room immediately, repelled while I was mesmerized. These floating images, between life and death. Their lack of context: Unidentified woman. Unidentified man. To stand in front of an image, to feel its many layers and interpretations. Who originally took these photographs, and why?

  In late August I take a photograph of a bright green praying mantis clinging to the outside of the house that looks like it’s suspended in midair, just like Charlesworth’s photo Patricia Cawlings, Los Angeles, the fifteen-year-old girl who leaped twenty feet from the roof of a Zen mission house and survived.

  I am learning to see, Malte Laurids Brigge says.

  On the porch one day I accidentally smash a large moth with my bare foot. The exquisite fragility of its wing, like the background of a medieval tapestry. I remember reading that some moths only live for a single day, after spending most of their life in a larval form. To live only this one day, to flutter out into the world to breed, only to be smashed instead by a dirty, naked foot. A meditation on its one day of life, like an On Kawara date painting. Today is the one day I was alive, in this form. I think about this, the dead insect like a poem, and then attempt to flick it away with the same foot, smearing its guts all over the rotted wood of the porch.

  The beauty and relief of summer, Suzanne writes to me. It’s painful, in a way, its power and brevity.

  In September I have to go out into the world again, lengthy commutes to the various colleges and universities where I teach writing. I always forget the melancholy of the fall, when my time is not my own. All summer I had felt so hermetic, and now to return to dealing with names, with New York. My class does not fill up at the college upstate, prompting the annual panic that I might not be hired again, and so I must trudge through various trains on Labor Day to be interviewed by more prospective students, who are sometimes surprised to learn that I have published books, if I tell them or they ask, which is not often. I want to feel like I did in the summer—that space of contemplation. Not so bitter and alienated and exhausted. Where I sometimes don’t feel in the shape of a person. And yet, with all of this, this ghostliness, I’m brought even closer somehow to what I desire out of the work.

  There is one student at the college that semester, a freshman, kind of jangly, with rather haunted eyes, who tells me he just spent his first week here combing through VHS tapes in the library and found one of Susan Sontag interviewing Agnès Varda. Later he quotes to me that line from The Beaches of Agnès: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

  At this college I occupy the same dim attic office as the previous fall, in one of their quaint ivy-walled houses. Every semester I feel like an impostor, temporarily occupying the spaces of tenured writers on sabbatical—as if I am temporarily occupying their lives. The office is sweltering, and I send multiple emails until a maintenance worker delivers a fan. All day, while at her de
sk, I glance at the professor’s small wooden bookshelf of essays, presumably the texts she teaches. While waiting for students, I flip through her book of autobiographical nonfiction that also lives on the shelf, which includes her famous New Yorker essay. I love in the essay the detailed description of her caretaking for her dying and incontinent dog. I’m always looking for descriptions of this tenderness humans feel for their animals. I am supposedly teaching “the essay” this semester as well. On the writer’s shelf the expected names, mostly male and relevant decades ago. My students all tell me they want to be one of two women writers. The names they use change every semester—but I find there are always only two.

  Writing this, I am reminded of the bookstore scene in The Walk, when the narrator interrogates a bookseller about a bestselling book on one of the tables in that Walser way, outwardly servile, yet inwardly seething or at least aware of the absurdity:

  “Could you swear that this is the most widely distributed book of the year?”

  “Without a doubt!”

  “Could you insist that this is the book which absolutely one has to have read?”

  “Unconditionally.”

  “Is this book definitely good?”

  “An utterly superfluous and completely inadmissible question!”

  The year before, in that same office, I had repeatedly found pornography on the desktop of the shared computer. Seeing the pop-ups of naked women in various postures, I initially wondered whether they were left there by the other instructor I shared the space with when I was not on campus. Perhaps it was her research, as she was a sociologist, one of the other adjunct faculty who everyone assumes is more permanent than we are. The images were the sort of pornography that seemed designed for men who hate women. I imagined in turn that she was also suspicious, or curious, about me. I wonder if, as a resident of this city—and a partial resident of the city that is the internet—I have become almost numb to absurd or hostile encounters. I did wonder later whether the joke was on me specifically, if this pornography was left there for me, but that would take some awareness of me, or what I had written about. I never figured out if it was a form of targeted or general harassment, or what—masturbatory carelessness?

  I finally said something to the woman who worked in the office downstairs, an awkward conversation I tried to laugh my way through. We were asked to lock the office afterward, and the password to the desktop was reset. When the French sociologist (she was French) was told, she apparently just made a face of distaste, I imagine in a very French way, and asked if there were antibacterial wipes we could use to wipe down the computer and the desk, since we both ate our lunches there. Which, upon hearing this, I felt was the right reaction—and wondered why I hadn’t thought of that.

  There are so many bugs in the attic office. All sorts. Spiders. Lazy houseflies. Hard-shelled crawling things. They are everywhere, on the windows, around the desk, zizzing the old IKEA floor lamp with the broken dimmer. I usually leave the bugs alone, but my students become distracted by them. Sometimes I will kill one, especially if it is too loud, or crawling too close to me, or if a student looks at me expectantly. Yet my killing is random and occasional, and perhaps in that way more terrifying.

  I once wrote a notebook about all of this—the office, the pornography, the reading of Walser, the bugs—for a prestigious poetry magazine that had solicited work from me. I kept on receiving edits about it throughout the previous fall, removing the bugs, then the pornography, then everything about Walser. I felt they wanted from me something else, and I couldn’t give it to them. So I pulled the piece that winter. Which felt like the narrator in The Tanners, who wanders from job to job, quitting everything, even after only a day.

  A crowded train at the beginning of the month. I am heading to a meeting for part-time faculty at the university, the only meeting we will have all semester, where a lawyer will advise us, rather hesitantly, against “improper relations with students,” and when we must report anything amiss. The students’ depression is not our problem, we are also told. It is probably not a good idea to have a relationship with a student, the lawyer concludes, rather indistinctly. I talk about this with Clutch, who received a similarly perplexing missive from their department in Chicago where they are teaching on a two-year contract. Who would want to fuck their student? How gross, we both agreed. Maybe the feminists in us have won out over our enthrallment to queer theory, the formlessness of Foucault’s mentor-mentee relationship. On the train I help a group of Italian tourists find the correct stop for the university. They get off too early anyway. I make friendly eye contact with the other New Yorker who was helping them. She then picks up a newspaper someone threw on the seat and shows me the front page. An enlarged photograph of the drowned three-year-old Kurdish child washed up on a beach. So sad, she says, looking for my reaction. I don’t say anything. I, too, feel disturbed this week reading about the migrant transport to Turkey, Greece, Germany, elsewhere, my feeling of paralysis and futility—but I do not have the language to talk about this photograph with a stranger on the train. I remember seeing Bouchra Khalili’s video portrait project the previous summer, where she documented the clandestine travels of migrants wishing to enter Europe, through the recorded voiceover of their narration, the video showing only their hands drawing their journey on a map synced with their telling of it. I stood there in front of each projection, put on each set of headphones, and viewed each one, feeling a presentness I don’t often feel in art spaces, or anywhere, anymore. It was one of the most affecting experiences I’ve had with art since I moved here.

  Writing this now, copying it from my notes, I wonder at the connection between my horror and despair when looking at the photograph of the dead Kurdish child, and my fascination with Sarah Charlesworth’s floating bodies. Just that week, I had shown a student Peter Hujar’s photograph of Candy Darling, her languid pose on her deathbed, the white hospital sheets wrapped around her like an evening gown, and wondered later whether I should have given some sort of warning first. Although Candy Darling was not dead but dying, as were many of Sarah Charlesworth’s subjects, imminently.

  Should I give a date here? September 15. The same date that opens May Sarton’s journal. Commuting through crowds again. On the way home, everyone is asleep on the train, hunched over, exhausted, or pretending to be asleep so they don’t have to give up their seat. The choking feeling in my chest has returned—something like radiant despair. Like I could collapse at any time and begin weeping. The porousness and permeability of this heat. I am beginning to see twins everywhere. On the train, the two little sisters in matching white cardigans with silver sequins playing with each other’s clothes. Dressed alike, as my sister and I were as children. Their mother next to them, exhausted, a warm hand with yellowing nails reaching across two pairs of thin legs. How Sebald once told his students that when in doubt, bring twins into the narrative. There is always a moment for me, in the heat, in this city, where I begin to unravel. After class I meet John in Midtown for lunch, but I have no appetite. I stop on 42nd Street, outside the library, where a man displays animals on a blanket—birds in a cage, rabbits, a dog, a couple cats. Tourists take photographs, like they’re watching an amusing sideshow. I push to the front of the crowd. Do they have water? I demand. A police car pulls up, does nothing. Yet I really do nothing. I am far too selfish. I can only handle one psychotic terrier, who disrupts my nerves daily. I don’t want to be David Lurie in Coetzee’s Disgrace, taking on the task of euthanizing the dogs that no one wants. David Lurie with his old masters and old ways. At the university, I take a photo of a mailbox labeled David Lurie, belonging to a professor of East Asian languages. In the cluttered communal room, I notice a copy of Disgrace, as if Coetzee’s professor character is haunting me. When I feel exposed like this, I begin to make connections with everything—I see literature everywhere, a vast referentiality. You are not David Lurie! I write in my notebook.

  At the end of September, a p
rominent writer of so-called autofiction, with a half-million-dollar advance on his last book, wins the so-called genius grant. All day, friends contact me to complain. This writer’s name had become synonymous for the type of first-person narrative we also wrote, and yet no one found our struggles worthy of reward. Why do these prizes and awards only seem to breed more prizes and awards? Yes, something about breeding, something I didn’t quite grasp. Maybe our work was too much about acknowledging failure, about doubt. But ours was a community of doubt. We saw something beautiful and comradely in our doubt. Maybe prize committees prize confidence, the ooze of it. I wanted to know, how did this writer have the confidence to write his novel seemingly in real time, over a year? When we take years just thinking and taking notes? This was a philosophical concern for me, as well as a complaint. The problem with the work I was writing was one of time. The present tense was a problem for me. And yet I wanted my novel, if that’s what it was, to be about time and the problem of time. Amina writes me, about the novel she is attempting to write, the desire to write both the full and the fleeting sensations. How to capture that? The problem with dailiness—how to write the day when it escapes us. It was the problem at the center of the work I was trying to write, although I was unsure whether I was really trying to write it. Never have I felt more emptied of the possibility of writing but more full of it at the same time. When did I realize I was suffering not from writer’s block but from refusal?