by Chris Eaton
She was beautiful. And he was pretty sure he wanted to sleep with her. But he also had a bad habit of developing two or more crushes at the same time, and so he was always worried there was something better, someone hotter, something more meaningful he could be missing out on. The university was so small, he would never be able to keep things quiet, never be able to keep it from Julie, whom he’d secretly lusted over for more than a year. But Emily’s clavicle was rising so lovely above her tiny breasts, her shoulders hunched like a rower at rest and her hair hanging down to her knees.
He told her about these albums, and these facts:
Napalm Death – From Enslavement to Obliteration. Important largely for managing to cram fifty-four tracks into a single CD, several of them only a few seconds in length. The band actually released a split single with The Electro Hippies in 1991, each side lasting only a second.
Merzbow – Aqua Necromancer. Named after Kurt Schwitters’ famous art piece and self-described life’s work Merzbau, or Merz Building, an architectural Dadaism that, at its peak, transformed a full eight rooms into a fantastical clutter of geographical shapes and biography. Schwitters started the piece three times: the original Hannover structure was destroyed in an Allied air raid; the Norwegian version, started fourteen years later, fell victim to fire; the last version in England was never completed. This is definitely Akita’s most accessible recording, which is why he likes it. And through the Alien8 label, this CD turned him on to the postmodern, post-rock, avant-chamber music of Montreal groups like Do Make Say Think and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Pain Killer – Guts of a Virgin. A Japanese import collaboration between free jazz alto saxophonist John Zorn and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris.
The Lounge Lizards – S/T. Loud jazz from the New York art-rock scene of the eighties, featuring John Lurie on saxophone and his younger brother Evan on keys, alongside which he has the complete Criterion DVD collection of the elder Lurie’s wonderful program Fishing with John, following the strange misadventures of a jazz hipster without any angling experience and various celebrity friends, including a hunt for the elusive giant squid with Dennis Hopper in Thailand, and a legendary battle between Leonard Cohen and a giant cod in Ogac Lake on Baffin Island using live loons as bait.
Motörhead – Iron Fist. Released the year he was born and the last album to feature Philthy “Animal” Taylor on drums. Never mind the Sex Pistols, it was Motörhead who invented punk. And anyone who believes differently is living in some delusion of nostalgia. Or the falsity of first impressions. The Sex Pistols, led by Johnny Rotten (a.k.a. John Lydon) under the watchful eye of Malcolm McClaren, are generally considered to have led the first wave of the chiefly British movement. The names of other bands can sometimes be heard in the echoes of this thesis, The Damned and The Clash are certainly the main ones, though some might say the Pistols stole their sound from The Stooges. By the time the Damned released “New Rose” in 1976 (the “first punk single”), punk was already a viable music term. It was also three months after the release of Motörhead’s first full-length offering: On Parole. The true birth of punk, building on the heavy metal genre made popular by Alice Cooper instead of New York anti-pop. Basically, the Sex Pistols were created as an art project by a clothes designer, the fashion spin-off of an anger and dissatisfaction that was too loud to ignore. Motörhead was that anger’s true embodiment.
On one of their first dates, they went to see a film called A Hardcover Saint, about a writer in his mid-thirties who treated others poorly, mostly because he felt a sense of moral superiority towards them, including his friends – especially his friends – who continued to forgive him well beyond the normal limits of friendship, set in a contemporary context but based on the combined biographies of Mann and Proust, with additional elements from the lives and/or work of Hardy, Tolstoy, Strindberg, Borges, and specifically the widely cited feud between Proust and Maupassant. (Proust, for example, arranged all of his speaking tours around those of his elder, purely to arrive later and mock Maupassant’s general obsession with realism and particular fascination with the Franco-Prussian War, in which all of his stories were set.) He adored it. She wanted to leave. Everyone in the film was a complete asshole, she said. Why would I want to sit through that? He said he knew people like that. She found it unrealistic. Then why did it bother her, he wondered. What she wanted, or what she enjoyed, rather, were films that featured some form of redemption – what she called a purpose – whereby the characters were able to discover their flaws, the riddle of their own lives, and be transformed. She wanted prostitutes with hearts of gold, mobsters with family values, porn stars who fall in love. And he said: People in real life don’t change. They don’t see the light, and they don’t have sudden revelations.
It’s enough to see that life is a puzzle, he said. Attempting to figure it just fills one with frustration.
He wrote a short story about John Lurie similar to Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea: “It is good,” Lurie croaked at Leonard as they hooked the giant bass into the dinghy, “that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the waves and kill our true brothers…” The story talked a lot about otoliths, and forensic science, and considered how it should be possible to capture the entire history of a single person through one and yet coroners and medical examiners seemed to focus on little more than the cause of death.
The otolith is one of the small particles of calcium carbonate in the saccule, or utricle, of the inner ear. Pressure from the otoliths on the hair cells of the macula provide sensory input about acceleration and gravity, balance and sense of place. It allows all fish, particularly those swimming at extreme depths, to keep track of which way is up. The aquatic otolith can also be the most important tool for understanding the life of fish and fish populations. Affected largely by fluctuations in temperature and time, the otolith develops growth rings not unlike the rings of a tree, recording daily age and growth patterns in surprising detail. With the proper microscope, a fish otolith can reveal everything from the exact date of hatch to migratory patterns to the daily temperature of the water it swam in.
The otolith performs a similar role in humans. But due to our ability to regulate the temperature around us with various heating and cooling devices, cross-sections of a human otolith tend to reveal much less about the subject. In a human being, damaged otoliths can result in extreme dizziness and nausea, at inopportune times like when you’re driving down the highway at night with the temperature well below freezing, and you’re about to navigate a savage off-ramp. The world shifts. The entire left side of your body goes numb. And you’re only vaguely aware of being driven to the hospital.
When he met Emily, who also had dreams of becoming a writer, she told him her stories because she wanted him to know her better. “Because that’s all anyone is,” she whispered to him in the back of her late-eighties Chevrolet station wagon, her eyes as wide and dark as potholes or abandoned wells. “The sum of a series of unrelated stories.” And he made off with that shiny part of her identity like a lazy raccoon, or a bat, never going too far with the stories she’d left out in the open. And it drove them further apart because she became afraid to open her mouth around him.
For Thanksgiving, Emily decided to host all of her friends who didn’t live close enough to their parents to make the trip home. The orphans, she called them. Chris Eaton’s parents lived less than a half-hour away, but he stayed to help because he didn’t want to miss out on anything. She was a wonderful cook. Or rather, she was a wonderful hostess, which made everyone ultimately forget the dry and poorly seasoned meat. Memories of her gatherings amounted to collages of her smile, tall candles, beer made from kits, and the newest music her roommate stole from the campus radio station. But as soon as the last of the guests arrived, Emily received a phone call from her parents to tell her they were splitting, which was such a foreign concept to him that he was entirely useless to her. His parents – along with most of t
he parents of his friends – had all stayed together. Her family was from a much larger city, where the stench of fermenting dreams always hung in the air. People couldn’t stop moving because there was always something better, something bigger, something lofty to strive for. In a big city, people never sleep. Even in their dreams they’re trying to make themselves better. Trying to make their mark. You can be awake at any time of the night and feel a city tensing up, its eye twitching under the pressure.
The turkey Emily was planning sat uncooked in the oven for days until it started to smell.
Eventually, Chris Eaton was the one who had to throw it out.
There were nine planets in the solar system. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. When you take all the single digits from one to nine, they add up to forty-five. Add those two numbers, and you get nine. The average human pregnancy lasts approximately nine months.
Emily’s, however, lasted just over a month: a missed period due to the stress of Christmas exams and her parents’ divorce.
For that month, however, until her flow kicked in again, it was as real for them as midnight feedings and future custody trials. Ordinarily, she had this adorable, permanent half-smile, caught motionless in the headlights between her hunching shoulders. She liked to wear jaunty hats. Even in bed. She had hairy nipples he could feel on his tongue. But by the time they parted for the holidays (she chose to spend them with her father, because she’d always been daddy’s little girl, and her mother had grown increasingly moody and less fun to be around), the smile and nipples were both gone. This could be it, the end of their lives as they knew it, redefining themselves to be part of each other, and then part of this thing, and then inevitably (in her mind, anyway) tearing it all apart to make them all feel less than whole.
Then, the day before Christmas, her father introduced her to his new girlfriend, someone she knew from his office. They were getting married. They had already purchased a new condo, and for once her father had not scrimped on the extras, upgrading to granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, plush white carpeting in every room but the kitchen. Her father and this woman, whom she could vaguely remember from a Christmas party where employees were encouraged to bring their kids. (She had kids? No, thank God. To think this woman would ever procreate, with her eyes like ripples caused by fallen rocks, so wide and yet always getting wider, as if they were pried open by the greedy fingers of monkeys, was too much for Emily.) This woman kept doilies under doilies, and held on to an eternal façade of good-naturedness. Even when Emily spilled red wine on the new carpet it didn’t phase her, tossing her own glass of white wine in the same spot and dabbing, dabbing, dabbing, never rubbing, until it was gone. She knew how to clean everything. Everything. Which made it all seem even worse.
When Emily returned to school, she didn’t want to talk about it. That was the worst part: another month that distracted him from his work on the silo. Not that Emily – or the baby, as they could joke about it later, when “the baby” just meant the dark stain on her pad – was entirely to blame. There was also something about the town itself, how it seemed in a constant state of sleeping on its side. There were nights he would have stayed up until morning working on the numbers for the silo, if it weren’t for the fact that everyone else in the town was already asleep. He could feel it, as if the entire town were breathing deeply at once. Not just the people, but the town itself. And it made him feel guilty to be disturbing that geographic rest. They fought about meaningless things, like what to have for dinner, or whether one had to outlaw pesticides (in order to fix the current food distribution system) or fix the current food distribution system (so they could finally get off their dependence on pesticides).
Still, the split would never entirely make sense to him, especially when he looked back on it later, in the periods directly following other breakups, when he was vulnerable and particularly unoptimistic about the future. She was everything he thought he wanted in a partner. She liked his concrete poetry when it wasn’t too conceptual, seemed able to reconcile his attraction to experimental works like Trout Mask Replica with his days as a Phish-head, and put up with his daily rants on the state of literature. The sex was amazing. And while his tendency was to see the world only as it related to himself, he respected the awareness she had of the larger picture, except – and this seemed so minor – when it came to other animals. Shortly before they met, her cat Rue, named for the Pooh character but tragically misspelled, had been hit by a car, paralyzing it from the waist down. It had somehow learned to maneuver around her apartment using only its front paws, but she had to literally squeeze the shit out of it two or three times a day, bracing it under her left arm like a set of bagpipes and forcing her bicep from the cat’s ribs to its ass. She had no television, so this was basically the only entertainment she provided. The whole place smelled like barely digested tuna.
“You know, we’re a whole lot closer to animals than you might think,” she would say, Rue flailing under her armpit. “And what do we do to them? We lock them up in cages so other people can pay us money to stare at them while they use the bathroom. Do you think that’s dignity? Thank God Rue has me or they’d probably have him caged right now.”
“A house cat?”
“Soon we’ll be driving them to the brink of extinction, too…”
“But are zoos really cruel to animals? Zoos are the only PR those animals get! They’re like diplomats! If we didn’t have them in zoos, we wouldn’t even know they existed, and we’d care less about their extinction than we do about Iraqis, or the Afghanis, or those poor idiots in England under all that ice!”
Outside the city, the roads had buckled under the last few weeks of heat, forcing the landscape into grass-stained blisters, and several of these had split into milky fields of hay. The clouds took weeks to build, hanging low like a bubble of paint under a leaky roof. And then finally everything burst.
“Why do you have to be such an asshole sometimes?” she asked him.
And he wasn’t sure.
For the next two months, he would regret having been so harsh. He missed her. Then he didn’t miss her. He put his compost silo project off a little longer, and spent many of his nights at the Roadhouse out by the train station, where more than once he went home with a girl from one of his electives. Her cheeks were lumpy, like balls of half-kneaded flour, with the tightest mouth he’d ever seen on another human being, peeling back from her teeth when she smiled. She kissed him once, twice, on the dance floor, ramming her horsy teeth into his mouth with such force that he was momentarily stunned, it was the only way he could explain it, hanging off him like an x-ray protection vest, heavy and warm. Her name might have been Julie.
They rubbed each other’s thighs beneath the table, thinking no one else could see, and then broke up after three weeks when he caught her moving her lips as she read.
He would always be alone. Like his parents. From childhood’s hour, he felt, he dreamt, that he was not as others were, was drawn, from every depth of good and ill, towards some mystery that he could not quite reach. Could not even see. He had a purpose. Of that he was sure. But the finer details – or even the larger, vaguer ones – were beyond him. And such was his difficulty in trying to circumvent this ambiguous calling – so clear, he could not help but see right through it – that he looked on the rest of humanity, his acquaintances and friends and even the occasional circumstantial lover, as they chased the paths set out by their parents, or their likes and dislikes, or their economic station, with a heaping tray of contemptful jealousy. As if he existed outside the world in which they squatted.
He would never quite understand it until his final days, when suddenly his purpose would form like a cataract on his vision, or the hand of God, confusing but unmistakable, and close enough to touch, and then, and only then, would he see that everything he had resisted doing up until that point, for fear that any decisive course of action might unwittingly take him further away from his destiny, had been the straightest l
ine he might ever have shot. From birth to this point, he’d acted as if his own life, and where he placed himself within the spectrum of it, did not matter. And he was never likely to make that connection with someone or something else that would change this.
So when the voice called his name, he said yes.
Then two sets of arms were fishing him from the water, and suddenly he was at war. Or at least in more physical training. The war in Iraq went longer than anyone could have imagined. When they’d first announced it at the academy in Lexington, everyone had expected Hussein’s Imperial Guard to lay down their weapons and surrender. But US forces didn’t actually march into Baghdad until April 9. And there were still fierce pockets of resistance scattered throughout the country, in Fallujah and Ramadi, chiefly, but also in places less mentioned. His entire class was transferred to Fort Lewis, just outside Tacoma, Washington, one of the largest cities in the state although, in many ways, it didn’t exist. It had its own bowling alley, fast food restaurants, movie theatre, bars. Gasoline without taxes. A city with a wall around it. Possibly to keep the protesters out, or even worse, the zealots. Because he was single, they placed him in a barracks with all the other single soldiers. The married soldiers were provided with separate homes, which was why so many of them got hitched so early, for the privacy. He salvaged a mattress another soldier had dropped to the curb – they received a pittance for food and entertainment, so why waste it on something as unimportant as bedding – and for the first few nights he had trouble sleeping, repeatedly woken not by the lumps or bedbugs but by low-flying helicopters and machine-gun fire from the training. Why they were training in the woods for a war in the desert, he was never sure. But he continued to wake every morning at four-thirty anyway, and shined his boots up for a tramp through the mud. It rained nearly every second day. On the other days, it was worse. And some nights the other soldiers joked about how great it would be when they were finally sent to Iraq, because at least it would be warm and sunny.