Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  —So, people had misinterpreted the comment but correctly identified the scary site within it?

  —I think it doesn’t happen by accident. It stands out because there is something there. There’s a form of privacy being invoked.

  —What’s the form of privacy?

  —A series of codes.

  —That aren’t made public, typically?

  —Yeah.

  —Interesting.

  —I think that’s what’s threatening to people, that they are like, oh I am not up to date. And it happened in a very condensed way. It’s even hard to understand the metaphor as a joke. Like, she burns lies, I mean, she burns facts, and then uses the ash, from the facts, for her makeup. Is that a joke? That seems like a weird metaphor you would read in someone’s short story.

  —It’s kind of ornate.

  —She was working really hard to sell it. She ended up being like, hey, it’s a tough room, but it wasn’t really a good joke.

  —I thought it was a very good joke.

  —I mean, I liked the phrase, “The Perfect Smoky Eye,” but the setup didn’t work for me.

  —It has metaphorical integrity. She’s saying that she uses lies as a public face. There’s no missing link in the metaphor. It wasn’t sloppy.

  —It was too literal. But I did like it as being associated with some form of Christianity. Like she’s burning them in her brazier. And I was like, oh I remember this from the Bush II presidency!

  —You’re like, very evocative. Rich allusions here.

  —That would have been my comment. If I had seen that on a student paper. I would have been like, very good! Vehicle needs work!

  The Care Bears Find and Kill God

  Whenever I was on a plane, I used to listen to a certain helpful voice. The words it spoke came from a meditation script I had found in a PDF online by googling “meditation script fear flying,” and the audio file I was listening to was in fact a recording of my own voice as I read the script aloud, huskily and I hoped persuasively, into my phone late one night in the old apartment where I don’t live anymore.

  Thus, this voice was me.

  I still have the file, by the way. The recording was approximately twenty minutes long and before each flight I’d calculate how many times I’d need to play it before landing. Today was six. I gripped the slender armrests of my aluminum beach chair, rented at significant cost, approximately $3.30 per minute, or 5.5 cents per second. I searched the weary faces of passing flight attendants. Meanwhile, my own voice, reedy but distinct, was piped through noise-canceling headphones, impressing upon me a series of visions: a cabin near a river sheltered by birches; sunlight on cool grass; water reflecting mottled brightness onto the bottom of a rowboat freshly painted a friendly, jaunty, fresh, very fresh and jaunty, friendly, bright brick red.

  This soothing projective landscape appeared and disappeared, pinged in and out.

  “I would like,” my recorded self told myself, “to talk to you about your panic attacks while flying.”

  As my recorded self uttered the word “while,” a distant police siren became audible. This siren came from the past.

  I, the listener on the airplane, nodded.

  I was saying in the recording, “You are going to be OK. Worrying is not going to make you feel any safer. In fact, worrying will serve no purpose except to exacerbate your panic attack. Worrying leads to panic attacks when flying.”

  This was the beginning. This meant that there was still a long ways to go. The former version of myself who spoke seemed to believe in her script. She was deeply, or at least presently, convinced. When she said the word “safe” she really sold it, like the s and the f were made of some sort of sustainable polar fleece, as if there truly was a form of comfort that could be derived, fabricated, even as one was levitating here at high velocity inside a metal tube.

  The recording said, “The thing you can control the most right now is your own thinking. When people feel anxious or experience panic attacks when flying, they often have upsetting images go through their minds. If you are feeling anxious right now or have panic attacks when flying, you probably have scary thoughts. It is OK to acknowledge those thoughts and images. Let’s do that now.”

  Yes, I thought, let’s. Let’s go ahead and do that now and forever. I am feeling anxious. Let’s try a thing.

  But not much took place. My brain was jellied mush. Nothing was known and nothing remembered. It was really not very good to be this far up in the air, and I was bad at it.

  In the recording, I was still going on about mental peace. “Thoughts that lead to panic attacks when flying include thoughts like these: Maybe the plane will crash. Or perhaps you think you aren’t getting enough air or that there is a hole in the plane. Maybe you think other people are thinking negative things about you. Maybe you think the plane is going to blow up. Maybe you think someone is going to hijack the plane. Maybe you think the pilot might fall asleep. Maybe you think the wings of the plane will come loose and fall off. Maybe you think the plane will fall out of the air. Maybe you think the plane will catch on fire. Maybe you think the plane will catch on fire and crash as it, smoking and crashing and falling and burning, burns.”

  Nice use of faux-naïve hyperbole, I thought to myself, as I always did when I came to this sentence, which was partly improvised. I also thought: Dear recording of my former self, you know this is not what I am thinking, that this is not what I fear. I don’t care what the other people on this plane think about me, and what I fear has nothing to do with anything that has ever before transpired in the history of human aviation. What I fear is terrifying because it cannot happen and yet it must: this plane will fall upward. It must fall up, out of the Earth’s gravitational field, and it must fall up and out and away and into the vast lightless oceans of space in which there is no up nor down nor west nor south, etc. We’ll bathe in entropy.

  I visualized stripy colorless surrounds, wobbling with narrative instability—my body’s collision with the infinite.

  Nothing in the meditation script discussed this problem. But, as I had tuned out in favor of said deadly-errors-in-deep-space fantasy, the script was getting pretty far along. Now I was saying, “A small path leads from the cabin door to a dock. A rowboat floats next to the dock.”

  I marveled, for the millionth time, at these words. I marveled at the familiarity of “rowboat.” I marveled at the familiarity of water against painted wood (and such an attractive, classic red).

  We were almost done here. My voice began to soar.

  “Panic attacks cannot hurt you! You are free from panic attacks when flying! Free because you know that even if you experience panic, you will get through it. The panic will go away. It will not last long. It is no big deal! Since you know that anxiety is no big deal, you have no fear of becoming anxious! You are not even worried about your former fears because you know that you can do it! You are getting through this, right now! You’re here right now and you’re OK, even if you feel anxious, even if you feel afraid, you’re here. You’re coping. You’re getting through this experience, and you are going to be just fine. You will get through it and feel so good and be so proud of yourself when this is over, because you can look back and know that you got through this. You are doing well! You are able to fly without panic attacks, experiencing no more panic attacks when flying, no more panic attacks when flying or in airports or when thinking about flying or seeing images of airplanes or dreaming about the future of the human race! Just calm! Feeling confident! No more panic attacks when flying! No more panic attacks when flying! No more panic attacks when flying! No more panic attacks when flying. Finished with panic attacks when flying. Overcoming panic attacks when flying. You can go to the airport and board a plane and fly and feel calm throughout the process. You can get through it with ease. You are so much stronger than the panic you have experienced in the past.

  “Goodbye,” my voice said.

  The recording ended.

  I listened to
it five more times.

  Then, much as I could have foreseen had I been thinking clearly, the plane returned to earth without incident, and I was in Chicago.

  Now, Chicago is not my favorite American city, but I was here for work. It was the middle of a warmish winter, a gusty season. I got in a cab to my hotel.

  I had slept for approximately three hours the night before and yet was obliged to head straight to a meeting. When you work for very rich people, you are always moving around on their time. The people I was working for were very, very much pertaining to that category. No time in these moments belonged to me.

  I mean, I worked for one of their subordinates, an unpleasant Canadian named Tim. I’m not sure, by the way, that Tim was, in or of himself, unpleasant. He was an art dealer, and he seemed to like to mess with me, so I suppose that makes him unpleasant, but I also liked to imagine that there were people to whom Tim was not unpleasant, whom he treated with respect and who smiled and felt genuine warmth at the sight of him.

  From time to time, Tim sent me emails with subject lines like, “Because I know this will bother you.” The body of the email would contain either no text or something brief to the effect that he had made a discovery at an auction or through another dealer. In either case, body text or no body text, Tim attached an image. Always, it was pornographic. Usually, it was vintage.

  I am female and was fairly sure that Tim was gay, but he was correct that these missives bothered me. They bothered me because I am (human and therefore) sensitive to images. I am particularly sensitive to images of naked women, about which I have many different kinds of feelings, foremost among which are (A), fear that, by means of this image, someone or multiple people are being exploited, and (B), intense titillation. I love images of women and I love women, although I mostly sleep with men.

  Tim had read a lot of my writing as a function of the work we did together, and perhaps he knew this about me. Perhaps he understood that by sending me a set of collages by a male adherent of an obscure Czech surrealist collective active during the interwar period that included a spotty clipping from an example of late nineteenth-century girl-on-girl (and I do mean “girl,” as in pubescent) porn, he was pressing on an aspect of my life that was unstable and which I preferred, therefore, whenever possible, to ignore. But I have to imagine that much of what Tim did when he sent me these messages was automatic if not unconscious; I don’t think he meant to hurt me.

  Tim worked in an unregulated market and mostly did what he pleased. I was his contractor: not quite an underling but not an equal, either. I wrote copy for his objects. He paid me. The objects sold. I was the softness that lent things glamour and made them popular. I drew a magic circle.

  Tim had flown me out to the Windy City because he needed me, as ever, to look at stuff. This was why my body was present. We were convening in the apartment of an important collector. Tim required a description of a rare and major antique book now in the possession of this major collector. He needed detail regarding prints in the book, which were the creations of the most famous artist known to Western art. He desired me to behold the volume in person, to channel its textures and pigments, scent and heft; I must reproduce its aura. I was the one who could ensure that at last the collector “got it.” These were always his words: so-and-so gets it. We’re having so much fun. We’re collaborating on [insert euphemism for exorbitant shopping]. Such is, by the way, the destiny of culture.

  My eyes were two lints in my skull and I wanted to sleep, but I couldn’t and didn’t. I took a hot shower. I walked a few blocks from my hotel to a high-rise where the collector and the intimates of the collector stayed. It was a forty-plus-floor elevator ride, and the wood-paneled box clicked and trembled the whole way up. I felt a combination of uncertainty and awe and wished to be, instead, standing knee high in dirt, down below rather than way up here, melting upward into air.

  When I was released, I stepped into a long hall painted matte black, at the end of which there was a door, gilded in outline. A voice said, “She is here!”

  The door was opened by a slender woman in a lemon caftan and pressed pants. Her hair was gunmetal. Her face was smooth, although not youthful; her eyes could not really be reached. This was the collector.

  “Here she is.” This was Tim, who stood behind the collector in an empty white foyer. When I seemed not to know what to do, he said, “Come in.”

  Tim and the collector must have been embroiled in some pretty deep talk about valuable whatever. It was less that I had interrupted them than that they regretted their decision to invite me, although they knew they needed meaning and that was something I apparently had and could provide. Now they just needed to get me not to look at the two of them too closely, while also getting me to look at this renowned book and its prints a whole lot.

  Tim had warned me that the collector was unusual. He had mostly told me nothing else about anything that was going to happen today, except for the matter of the book. All he would say over the phone was that he thought I “would really enjoy this.” He kept repeating that I was going to “flip.” He was vague but sort of threatening. “You’re not going to be able to get over this one!”

  I knew this was in part to psych me up for my performance. It did not matter that I would have gladly lain down on the floor and slept for a day in this priceless hallway. I needed to appreciate anything and everything I saw in the place. It was of the essence that I keep speaking about anything I might see. They weren’t paying me not to provide constant verbal flow.

  “What a beautiful apartment!” I exclaimed. I was just looking at a bunch of white walls for the moment, but I had to start somewhere.

  My voice was creaky, due to diverse altitudes plus lousy climate. I was offered a glass of water, which I gratefully accepted. The collector went away and got it. We were apparently alone with her, no staff.

  “Well,” said Tim, “you’re sort of on time. How was your flight?” He was wearing a turtleneck and, somewhat less successfully, a gray suede vest. He was neat, but not unflappable. He looked like he wished that he could take my face somewhere and wash it.

  Before I had a chance to answer, the collector reappeared in a subtle cloud of sandalwood. She handed me a tooth glass. “It’s not vodka.”

  Her face was impassive.

  I drank.

  “Come on,” said Tim, suddenly impatient. He removed the tooth glass from my hand.

  “Oh, how fun,” said the collector. “Go ahead and hang a left.”

  She was pointing where she wanted me to go.

  It was a small room, beautifully finished: walls of cream and recessed lighting. At the center of this room was something very, very weird.

  Before I go on, I just want to mention: There is no need to become anxious. Everything turned out OK, or mostly. Later on I even got to see the rest of the collector’s apartment, which was so high up that one could see the curvature of the planet. It was, to be sure, an unusual point of view.

  The way the place had been designed, when you walked in, as I’ve noted, you were in low-ceilinged spaces, traditional rooms, so you might have thought that this was the situation throughout—but you would have been wrong in thinking this, if you had. You only had to pass beyond this warren: the living room encompassed several stories, somewhat more than two. Its sill-less windows, meeting the edge of the living room’s floor, made me want to vomit. Grayly, infrastructure squirmed below.

  At least there was art up here, I thought, and therefore I could look at it. I turned away from the impressive view. The collector, whom I had misjudged and who was even slightly shy, was making gentle comments. She ushered us into a side gallery, chatting. We were done with our work, and she felt casual.

  Now we stood before a famous painting from a calamitous year, 1939’s El suicidio de Dorothy Hale, a.k.a. The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, by Frida Kahlo, an incredible possession, to say the least. It is so beautiful, this artwork, that it is nearly impossible to describe. It is, first of all, a
failed commission. Executed in the style of devotional painting or retablo, it partakes of a mystical delicacy to portray a violent death. In the background: a staggered deco apartment building looms in mist. There is a sense of feathers or lace, and the surreal weather has been extended out onto the very frame of the painting. Kahlo selectively stops time, showing what appear to be four moments in Hale’s demise within a single, everlasting present. A figure at once appears in a tall window, jumps, tumbles wrapped in mist, lies dead in the foreground: simultaneous narration. Blood soaks the earth below her and forms a web on her cheek, emerging from her ear. In the two instances in which we see Hale’s face, her small dark eyes stare, unblinking. “This is how it happens,” she may say. Defunct upon the ground, she wears a black evening gown, yellow bouquet pinned near the shoulder.

  Kahlo was paid $400 for this ex-voto, which bears a legend at its base, written in red slashes, as if with the corpse’s blood: En la ciudad de Nueva York el día 21 del mes de octubre de 1938, a las seis de la mañana, se suicidó la señora Dorothy Hale tirándose desde una ventana muy alta del edificio Hampshire House: En su recuerdo [words painted out] este retablo, habiéndolo ejecutado FRIDA KAHLO. The missing words are “Clare Boothe Luce,” an editor, writer, and friend of the deceased socialite, “commissioned.” Boothe Luce, upon receiving what she saw as a gory stunt instead of the respectful portrait she believed herself to have purchased as a gift for the dead woman’s mother, had her name painted out by Hale’s former lover, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi1, and dispensed with the work, which was lost in obscure storage until the 1960s.