by Dale Peck
“So what you’re saying is you don’t know shit about this kid.”
“What I’m saying is, he don’t know shit about me. And that’s just the way I like it.”
I hadn’t thought it would be like this: so gentle. They teach you to think of it as an attack but actually you’re the one making all the ruckus. It just wants a home. I saw it this way. It knocks at the door of a cell. No answer. It rattles the handle—locked. Damn. But maybe if it slips—ah, there we go. Inside all is Baby Bear readiness, a warm nucleic meal followed by the comfy cytoplasmic pillow. Everything’s just fine—until you get home to find someone sleeping in your bed and all hell breaks loose. But unlike Goldilocks the virus doesn’t wake up, doesn’t run away. It sleeps through the commotion, secure in its dreams. Like me the virus dreams only of itself, but unlike me itself is always its self, so fully imagined it becomes as real as the one imagining it.
And then there were two.
Split rail fences said here were forests once, stone walls testified to the rock-by-rock clearing of the land. Boulders poked from earth, too massive to be moved. The hooped wooden silo curled and sagged in on itself like a giant cruller, the house’s fieldstone foundation was so old the mortar had withered away until stone sat on naked stone and a light in the basement escaped through a dozen gaps in the masonry. Such a sober facade: the nine-over-nine windows on the first floor were sealed by white curtains blurred behind warped panes, the eyebrows above were as hooded as the brow of a Cossack. Age had shrunk the recessed Palladian door. It edged away from its sidelights and a single knock resounded like the tapped skin of a tambourine.
Johanus Peeke had the beard Nellydean needed to complete her transition to magician. That was all the hair he had.
“Well my goodness. What do we have here?”
Two journeys: one inner, one outer: the fever dreams. The virus lavished a single drop of itself on each of my cells but she remained indivisible. She extended her arm. Pale blue sapphire crowning rigid finger, nail translucent as mother-of-pearl. Oh look! she said, and I saw: a gull. Look! she said, and I saw: an eel writhing in its beak. Look! and look! and look! she said, and I saw: that the eel was a rope: that a tiny army was descending the rope: that their own ship waited to receive them. At some point I began to wonder if she willed these apparitions or if I did, but then I all wondered was when they would stop. By the time they reached the ship the soldiers were fully grown and by the time the gull had jetted away they were firing at us. Oh look! she said: cannonballs plop-plopping into the sea like marbles dropped in a puddle. Listen! she said: explosions ricocheted across the water.
She pointed: To the battle stations!
“Ain’t here. See for yourself.”
The planks in the central hall were two feet wide, domed nailheads poking up a quarter inch. The ceiling was so low you could trail your fingers along it, and a dusting of paint—no, of plaster, the paint was long gone—fell down like a tree shaken after a snow.
“Here now, here now, watch what you’re—”
Every squeaking step had its own note, do-ti-la, do-mi-so, fa-so-do, the banister was so loose on its turned spindles it wavered like a rope bridge. You had to duck at the top of the stairs or you’d hit your head on the ceiling’s slant and knock down more plaster.
“Here now, here now!”
Think of it like a stray: hungry, lost, and alone. A pregnant stray, past and future implied in swollen belly. A self-impregnating stray, as fatherless as me, mother of its own children, author of its own destiny. But right now all it wants is a meal and a place to sleep. And we all know the implications of a meal. One month for every seed, go to sleep a man and wake as a swine. Would that I had Hansel’s chicken bone to offer the blind witch’s pinching finger. But I was the feeder as well as the food. Does that mean I cast the spell on myself? Does that mean I can break it?
Two bedrooms, four beds. The mattresses on the iron bedsteads were thin as pallets. Such a stingy house. No corner out of earshot of any other. Every argument, every stirred pot, every complaining bedspring incorporated into the family dialogue like sugar in iced tea, sweetening it, and thickening it too, but not so’s you’d notice, at least at first. You had to genuflect to look out a window under the angled ceiling but even from that narrow portal you could see a half dozen varieties of tree: honey locust, hickory, hemlock, pine, oak, maple. The tips of the branches of one tree sported webworm sacs like cataracted eyes on the ends of stalks. Farther off on a fencepost sat a barrel-chested hawk. A world as old as America. There was a lesson in that: it wasn’t the house that was important.
And the Thruway, invisible, humming down like rain from a sunny sky.
It seemed too beautiful to be a weapon, so sleek and black and shiny with oil. She didn’t arm it, aim it, didn’t light the fuse and scream Fire! Instead she polished it. Rubbed it all over with the lace flounce at the end of her sleeve, stroked it up and down its great length, finally laid herself over it and hugged it close, like Cher in that video. Her lava-colored locks curled up and down its length like vines of pure sunshine. Oh look, she whispered: and I was borne with the blast.
“This here’s new house actually. Old house burned down eighteen hundred fifty-nine. That’s a prime number. Story goes cat was sleeping by fire. Spark jumps outta fireplace, sets cat’s fur aflame. Cat commences running around, before you know it curtains on fire. By time curtains out, tablecloth smoldering. Couldn’t put out one fire cat lit two more. By time it’s over only thing left is chimneys and I tell you what: don’t make em like that no more.”
“Houses?”
“Cats?”
“Chimneys?”
“Nope. Stories.”
…and Astrid begat Barbara, and Barbara begat Clara, and Clara begat Dorothea, and Dorothea begat Ethel, and Ethel begat Fay, and Fay begat Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn begat Hildegard, and Hildegard begat….
“I want to thank you again. For being so”
“Other one’s pretty peculiar himself. Like attracts like’s what I always say.”
“I know, I know. It’s just, sometimes you have to see for”
“Never went looking for nothing in my life. Got everything I need right here.”
“Well, it’s really very nice of And it’s a very lovely home you”
“Not lovely, not mine. Not a home.”
“…”
“Like I said, he ain’t—here now! That’s just a closet. Here now! Can’t be opening every door just cause it’s there.”
Welcome to the Island of Itch Ivy! Paradise personified! Beaded sand and multipurpose flora, emerald leaves so shiny you can see yourself! See for yourself, my guide ordered, and I would have but I was distracted by a flash of white among all that green. A cat. It slunk in and out of the outer edge of the low green growth like a snake, disappearing, reappearing, winking into and out of existence. See for yourself! my guide demanded, but I was already off, her words behind me, the cat ahead, the beacon of its body weaving back and forth among the tender green stalks as if weaving a single horizontal thread into their delicate verticals—as if I, following the lighthouse of its tail, were that thread. See here! I heard behind me, but I had to keep my eyes forward to keep track of the cat, had to run to keep up with it, jump in the air to catch glimpses of the spire of its tail, and just when I was afraid I’d lost the trail completely a tuft of fur appeared, stuck on the pointed tip of a leaf as if arrow shape implied arrow sharpness. See here, see here! I heard, and I saw I was covered with dozens of thin slivers, blood red but not bleeding, and as I ran after the trail of fur I felt the itch ivy razoring more and more slits into my skin, carving more and more fur from the cat somewhere ahead of me, as if it weren’t weaving through the vines but unraveling itself. See here! Look here now! I collected the fur as I ran, held it in my hands until my hands were full, then in the pockets under my arms, in the flat space between my forearms and stomach, and still the fur came until suddenly I realized I didn’t have to hold it, it stu
ck of its own accord to my hatched-open skin, all I had to do was press it against my bleeding flesh and it would stick, and it stuck, and I stuck more and more of it on, and Look here, look here goddammit! and then the green field suddenly ended, crested like a frozen emerald wave, and we were on the opposite shore of the island. Naked now, the skinny cat sat in the golden sand at the water’s edge, cleaning one ugly dun paw, its pink tongue winking in and out of its mouth and its glass-green eyes winking repeatedly, as if the sun were too bright. Behind me the crashing ca-thunk of pursuit suddenly died away and I crawled forward meekly, swiping with furry hands at the fur in my eyes.
The cat winked once more, balefully. Don’t you look a fright, it said, and a wave rolled over it and it dissolved into the sand.
The thing about computers is they don’t age well. They weren’t meant to age, only to be outmoded, superseded, replaced. I’ve always been a Mac man, don’t know from PCs, but even I could tell this thing was ancient by computer standards, big as a suitcase, slotted for 5 1/4–inch floppies. It didn’t even have a modem. It smelled like garlic and sausage, was stained with coffee and jelly and dotted with bagel crumbs. But it was turned on.
I scratched and scratched and scratched. Scratched till my itch ivy chrysalis shredded and fell away from my blistered body, scratched till the blisters broke open and bled, scratched till the blood was gone, and the skin it had bloodied, and the nails that had caused the blood to flow. It doesn’t usually work this way, does it? I always imagined a cocoon as a tranquil place, metamorphosis a deep sleep you woke from as something new. I hadn’t thought I’d till my body like a farmer working the soil, hadn’t thought I’d shoot out of the seed of myself. But there was nothing neat about it, no clean-seamed pod left hanging from a branch, no snakeskin left behind like a diamond-patterned hose nor a million minutely curved bits of eggshell. Flesh fell away in clots and clumps and where wind touched bare bone it sung like an electric current. When finally I’d ripped away enough to squeeze myself out of what remained, the new me, gelatinous, half-formed, fell at the foot of that teak totem pole. It towered above me, disappeared into the empty fold of purple breeches, and somewhere higher up the sun spiraled down in honey and orange-colored ringlets. She pointed down at me.
Oh look, she said.
At what? At me? Puh-lease.
No, look, she said. At her? At my mother? They’re a mystery, mothers—and what are fathers but figureheads, the one denying meaning, the other accruing measure after measure of it like sixteenth notes scored in a fugue. Look, she said one more time, and this time I turned and gazed out over the in-again, out-again roll of the waves toward the horizon.
See? she said. America.
TO: MADADMAN
FR: NYBISON
RE: BUMPER CARS AND BUMPER STICKERS
K.
If you can read this you’re too close for your own good.
J.
The fever dreams showed me that time orders everything, even our minds. Chronology’s just a mental conceit imitating time, linearity a literary conceit imitating chronology; but the dreams flouted those rules, shuffled the days like cards. Monday followed Wednesday, Tuesday Friday, 9/11 was the day after the thirtieth of June. The clock struck midnight on New Year’s sometime in the spring; meanwhile, the snow was falling on open flowers and the flowers’ mouths gulped down water like chicks and belched forth colored jets of perfumed smoke and filled the air with gyrating genies. The genies didn’t grant me any wishes but they promised me if I danced with them I’d understand the semaphore of their movement. I reached for their outstretched hands but my solid mitts passed right through theirs. Even in dreams, they said, a cloud is still a cloud and not the shape your eye pulls it into—but by that time I was already falling back to the land of facts, solid as stone, and just as hard.
“You don’t mind driving?”
“Baby. I said it’s fine. But you got to tell me. Did he find what he was looking for?”
“I guess so. How should I know. Though it was a lotta work for a post-it on a ‘puter.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What you looking for?”
“I’ll tell you one thing: it’s not a man.”
Six days, six nights.
On the seventh day I soughed out of bed. There was so little of me it was like floating. I had no energy but moving my weightless body required no effort. When I fell on the bedroom floor while picking up a shirt it didn’t seem as though my limbs had given out on me: it seemed as though the shirt weighed too much and tipped me over.
The fever hadn’t broken. I put my finger on a stick of butter in the fridge and it went right through. Then I realized they’d shut the power off. At first I thought I’d been out far longer than I realized but the truth is I’d always been behind in my bills.
I only got out of bed because it was Trucker’s day. Trucker was due back. And I didn’t want to confront him: I wanted to warn him.
Driving was hard. I had to pull against the steering wheel of Lily Windglass’s second-best car in order to apply enough pressure to the gas pedal. Luckily it was less than a mile to the Big N and for some reason the parking lot was empty. I sluiced across it at a wide diagonal, came close to knocking over The Well. I was asleep before I shut off the car.
If I dreamed I don’t remember.
It was nearly dark when I opened my eyes. The setting sun had turned the black asphalt into a vast red lake but it was an empty lake, devoid of swimmers or boats, pedestrians or cars: he hadn’t come. Trucker hadn’t come, and as I looked out on that fiery sea I realized it was Trucker who should have warned me. I didn’t have to worry about infecting Trucker because it was he who’d infected me.
Instead of going home I went back to sleep, and this time I did dream. I dreamed I opened a door at the back of the Island of Itch Ivy and discovered that the whole thing, itch ivy and island and sea surrounding it, was packed into a rig parked in the Big N’s lot. Up in the cab the bushy-bearded big-bellied driver was dozing, outside was The Well, handle pumping wildly, gushing water. When I woke up I was cold, and the windows of the car were steamy with the last fever, the last dream, and when I rolled them down he was there.
Divine was there. I’d’ve thought he was just another dream if he hadn’t left his shadow on the seat of my car, and those shoes.
And I tell you what. Whoever said things fall apart was wrong. They fall into place.
“Claudia!”
“Jamie! Calm down! What are you talking about?”
“I have to know. What it was like. To have a mother. To have her and then lose her.”
Claudia turned in her seat. Her eyes were dreamy, almost vacant, and as she reached her hand toward my face I thought, She’s remembering her mother. She has a mother to remember. When she smacked me I was so surprised I knocked my head against the window, and when I could focus again Claudia had turned back around, but she’d lowered her sun visor and looked at me in the vanity mirror.
“It was like that,” she said. “Now snap out of it!”
Now I think about it this way: I think most people are on a collision course with what they already know. Most people run straight into who they are. I know I had to travel a long way to discover I was exactly who I thought I was because I kept getting distracted by who I could have been. The fever dreams showed me there are an infinite number of worlds but only one way to perceive them, one way to experience them: we just haven’t discovered it yet.
Future historians will remember ours as an age of blame, of guilt metered out for trespasses so obvious they were obviously fronts for some as yet unacknowledged offence. In the absence of someone to blame I blamed myself. No, it was more complicated than that: in the absence of a crime I had to commit it myself. And who am I, you ask, to make such grand pronouncements? Or a simpler question: what have I learned at the end of my fantastic voyage? Well I’ll tell you. I am the epidemic’s orphan. My parents were precaution a
nd cure but they abandoned me, and now I’m all alone, with you.
2: Dada
“It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—”
—Poe, “MS Found in a Bottle”
one
THE CITY CRACKED. That happens sometimes: eggs, ice, glass (also frescoes, facades, knuckles, and of course nuts, but I’m trying to be literal here). The city cracked, but didn’t break. Before, New York had simply been dying, but afterwards the focus changed, as the city insisted it wasn’t dead yet. The declarations were everywhere, the ribbons, flowers, candles, photographs, personal belongings (birth certificates, T-shirts, favorite poems; then more esoteric items: house keys, chunks of volcanic rock, a braided tassel of wheat), all sealed in plastic and taped to walls and lampposts and windows, as if the dead needed only a few reminders of who and what they’d been in order to find their way back. There were other things. The ash, of course. The flags and graffiti, pro-American, anti-Arab. The soldiers and camera crews. But all this proved transitory. In the days following the attack a series of thunderstorms washed a lot of the mementos away, and what the rain didn’t take was eroded by sun and wind over the course of the next several months. Sun and wind, street sweepers and souvenir seekers and terrorism tourists, not to mention a convoy of flatbed trucks that carted away the I-beams and body parts late at night, while people were sleeping and traffic was thin. Within a few months the city looked more or less as it always had, save for a few memorials here and there, the altars in front of firehouses, the notices of subway rerouting. And, of course, that one big hole, out of which the city’s soul threatened to pour like the white of an uncooked egg.