Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  I was surprised to see this picture here: I was pretty sure that it belonged to a regional museum. I also thought that the edifice we were currently standing in looked a little too much like the edifice depicted for comfort (never mind this was a different city), which gave the whole painting the quality of a cry for help, although whose cry it was I wasn’t sure.

  “Oh my god,” I said, because most of what I was thinking I was not supposed to say.

  “You called?” asked Tim.

  I didn’t say anything after this. I allowed myself to be led around.

  Some of the furniture in this place could be obtained from Design Within Reach. Some of it could not.

  Tim had been inside this apartment many times before, a fact to which he made frequent reference. I was not so fatigued that within my extreme fatigue I did not get it: Tim was a sort of lover and accessory to the collector’s life, but when this tour was over, he, too, would be ejected. He did seem to believe that he was convincing me regarding how welcome he was as we trailed upstairs and down, past custom cabinetry, but in truth he was doing the opposite. I feared for Tim in this vast, high place.

  I didn’t tell Tim this because I never tell Tim anything. (What would be the point?) Instead, once the inevitable took hold and we were both back out on the sidewalk, I declined drinks with him, citing a date with an ex that was actual and which I had made months in advance and expressly in order to avoid these very drinks.

  My ex’s name was Francis, and these days he was married to a high-powered person and had multiple kids. The high-powered person’s executive status allowed Francis to style his sweatpants and cardigan with a certain flair. And who am I kidding: it wasn’t “a certain flair.” Francis looked fantastic, comfy, loose. He twirled his macaroni and yarn necklace. Life was good.

  Francis’s phone was even broken. By this I mean, the screen was smashed, the storage full, and it could no longer be updated. It was an amber-frozen bug, mostly used for texting.

  Nevertheless, Francis had it out.

  He flipped through some pictures of his babies.

  There were three of them and their pink faces were often in the grass or sky.

  The phone had to be shaken, the JPEGs enlarged, dragged, due to obstruction caused by jagged cracks and duct tape, but I thought I was mostly seeing everything. It must be amazing, I thought, to have just one life, with people dependent on you in it, with whom you do not communicate primarily by email, invoice, or oblique threat.

  Francis, for his part, watched me. If somebody was crying, he swooped in, moved hastily past that photo.

  In a gesture I assumed would be futile but which I was going to try out anyway, I decided to display the abstract nature of my own existence.

  “I just remembered!” I exclaimed.

  “Yeah?” said Francis. I had interrupted him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This was so funny.” And on my own pristine phone I caused to surface an image. This image, I believed, was sort of perfect.

  I surrendered the device, along with the perfect image, to Francis.

  “Oh,” said Francis, now looking at the perfect image. “Wow.” And then: “What is that?”

  The photograph he was looking at was free of people. It was free of everything save for a VHS cassette tape case, and on this VHS cassette tape case was a title, presumably of the tape’s contents. The title read: The Care Bears Find and Kill God. Below the title were some Care Bears stomping around on a puffy cloud. Obviously, it wasn’t real.

  “It’s a joke,” I said idiotically.

  “No, it’s so funny,” Francis reassured me, helplessly repeating my own phrase. “Is that something you made?”

  Here Francis made reference to my early ambition to become an artist.

  “Oh, I just saw it,” I told him.

  Francis diligently returned the phone. “It’s so clean,” he was saying, in reference, I have to assume, to the appliance.

  Anyway, I was only thinking, as I always did in these moments, of the death of god at the hands/paws of the Care Bears. One had to believe god never saw it coming, that in his infinite wisdom he had somehow neglected to foresee that cartoon avatars created by his own most troublesome creations (humans) would someday transcend the temporal, spatial, and material limits of the universe in order to find out where he lived and then go to where he lived and slay him. You had to imagine god coming to open the door, probably still in his apron, wiping his wet hands off on the back of his jeans, like, “Just a goddamn second!” Maybe, in spite of taking his own name in vain, he was actually having a pretty good day.

  I also thought of the determination of the Care Bears. It’s quite a thing to unpeel all the layers of philosophy, theology, and physics in order to find that address. This is to say nothing of actually going there—and then, like, killing somebody.

  I wondered if this meant that we were all Care Bears. Or if we could become Care Bears, if we tried hard enough and cared enough and did extremely well. The title announced a documentary event that would occur before your very eyes if you watched this tape; the title announced that, actually, this event had already occurred, and god was dead, and an ursine clique had done it.

  Their scented clouds, their vapor car, their thematic stomachs . . .

  Francis, who was polite, started asking me about my day.

  And I wanted to tell Francis about what I had seen. I wanted to tell Francis that I had encountered a person who was adjacent to, and who perhaps encountered on a repeating basis, the rulers of our world. I wanted to say that I had seen her terrible, beautiful, stupid study room, with its ungodly chaise upholstered in white fur, with figured legs of leaded crystal. I wanted to let him know how I had been invited to sit down on this gleaming, terrifying article and how a priceless book had been set before me. And how I had touched the book, much as I touched the fur, and how, as they had watched me and breathed upon my neck, I had said a word that isn’t a word, “Wow.” “Wow, wow, wow,” I said. And how I said the word “this,” which isn’t a word, either, once you say it enough. “This,” I said. How I said: “This! This!” And how I was tired, so tired there, in the mist of my false awe, and how I was tired, too, talking to lucky Francis, and so I said, “It was pretty good.”

  1. Of Hale, Noguchi once said, “She was a beautiful girl. All of my girls are beautiful.”

  Bitter Tennis

  I go to visit Jon on the A. It’s a straight shot but I’m late. I sit in one of the two-seat sections, between a door and the front of the train. I am reading Jon’s story on my phone. Occasionally, a text drops down, obscuring the top of the PDF. The messages are all from the same person. I will be meeting this person for dinner later this evening. We’ll be having sex after we have dinner. All this is certain. The person texting me is my closest friend. Jon is just a professional friend and I’m going to see him for work. I am his editor. I should have read his story earlier. I’m at the point where I’m so exhausted this spring I haven’t even bothered to dress in an appealing way. It’s so unseasonably cold and I know Jon wants to sit outside. I’m wearing a long black wool coat and bright blue running sneakers. The sneakers have orange treads. I am carrying the smallest bag I can get away with, which has a metal chain and leather strap, but not the kind you’re thinking of. It takes too much energy to describe the look I’m going for, but it has to do with trying to look like I do not care, which, in this rather unique instance, is even slightly true. I do not care much, although my heart is racing, and somehow I want everyone to know.

  I live at the bottom of the ocean. I am capable of quick motion but do not warm. I cause my eyes to grasp each of Jon’s words. I live among the bristlemouths, the viperfish, the anglerfish, the cookiecutter sharks, the eelpouts. I don’t know why Jon and I can’t just have this conversation over the phone.

  The A train is moving as efficiently as one could wish, but I know that I am going to be late. Across from me are two teenage girls who are rapidly becoming the heroes of this
trip. They are tough and impeccably dressed. One of them causes a fidget spinner to spin. They are talking about alcohol. They do some work on their phones then conscientiously put the phones away. They focus on each other; the one girl, the taller, the prettier one, manipulates a black and gold fidget spinner. I swoon for them. I imagine they will move to Los Angeles at some point because there is nowhere in New York for them to live now. They cannot go to Prospect Heights with its Ivy-educated transplants, and they can’t stay home with their parents in Inwood. They can’t live in Bushwick—they might sublet there a few months but it won’t last—and they can’t join a Ridgewood commune. Chinatown is too expensive. Williamsburg overrun by Europeans. For these reasons, there is nowhere to go and they must become Angelinos. One of them will make a lot of money. One will have kids. They are placid and gorgeous and discussing how they will obtain what sounds like gin. It’s so innocent and here they are criticizing someone but it’s fair, I tell you. It is very fair. I can tell.

  I move my eyes back onto Jon’s story. A text drops down. “Do you want to just meet there,” my friend wants to know. Then my friend sends a link to something on Twitter. I will read these messages in situ later. I absolutely will not click on the Twitter link, I tell myself, as I click through to an image of a tiny black cat whose highly visible pink tongue extends from its all but invisible mouth. I try to think of what I will say in response to this vision. I often write, in response to such links from my friend, “It doesn’t like that,” by which I indicate that the animal doesn’t want to be photographed and thereby rendered semi-humanoid as well as the punch line of somebody’s not particularly excellent joke. I also mean that the animal doesn’t like being conveyed to me as a Twitter link. The animal would ideally like to appear to me as its IRL self, corporeal and gleaming, speaking its own strange language. And what I therefore also mean is, much as the animal desires physical proximity to me, so does my friend. He cannot hide his desire, not with all the Twitter links in the world. I’m teasing, of course, when I send my set phrase, but at the same time I am not teasing, not at all. “It doesn’t like that,” I type. Is there part of me that wants to shout, to yell uncontrollably, YOU CANNOT HIDE? Yes, there must be. Because, in fact, you cannot hide. Not from me. I’ll tell you that right now. I’m a very good reader. Although I seldom mention this to anyone I know.

  I live at the bottom of the ocean and Jon wants to play tennis. It’s why I have to travel so far. I mean, Jon doesn’t actually want me to play tennis, but he wants me to meet him at the tennis center at the top of Manhattan where he takes his daughter for her tennis lessons and he wants to tell me, while I am there, that he would like me to play tennis with him.

  Clearly, this means something.

  There was a time when I myself was a daughter who took tennis lessons, and I’ve apprised Jon of this fact. Therefore Jon is trying, in some sense, to match up our respective familial situations. He’s thinking, you did that and I do this—therefore perhaps it’s a good idea for us to meet in the middle of this piece of coincidence, so we can both try to figure out if there’s any useful information in it. In other words, Jon thinks we have stuff in common. And since we work together and since Jon writes a lot of memoir, he’s multitasking. He’s doing research for a new piece—probably a whole book about tennis—at the same time as he is revising something he wrote three years ago.

  He also doesn’t seem to mind that I’m forty minutes late.

  “You’re here!” he cries.

  We’re both surprised. I’m used to meeting him in the usual places where editors meet their writers. I encounter him over email, at parties, in fancy bars. I salute him in passing on social media. We’re privy to some of the same artisanal gossip mills.

  But here we are beneath fluorescent lights in a reception area straight out of 1980-something. I have, suddenly, a memory of what it was like to be a child in the 1980s, when I was the small charge of upwardly mobile parents. What’s really strange is that this setting causes me to recall what it was like to be innocent—at least, for a second I think it does.

  Jon, meanwhile, wants to know if I’d like to see the courts.

  “Sure,” I tell him. I express some vague concern about being an unauthorized visitor, treading on hallowed athletic ground, but he brushes it off. “I did wear sneakers,” I volunteer, as if this was clever of me.

  “Did you read the story?” Jon asks. He’s leading me into the bubble. The sounds of tennis—pops and little cries—are apparent.

  “Yes,” I both lie and do not lie. “It’s looking good,” I say, which is a guess more than anything.

  Jon doesn’t reply. He nods toward the court where his lanky daughter is demolishing a boy who looks to be a year or two older than she is.

  At a pause in play, the daughter seeks Jon out. Her face is radiant. She waves enthusiastically.

  “I have some beer,” Jon offers. “Let’s go outside.” He is laughing and waving back at his daughter at the same time as he says this. The pairing is incongruous and therefore extremely impressive.

  Jon, I think, has a full life.

  Jon goes into a duffle he’s stashed in the bleachers and pulls out a pair of bottles. “OK,” he says, laughing again. He’s leading me back out. “They’re warm.”

  I have to rush to keep up with Jon. He’s more than twenty years my senior, but he does seem to have some kind of incredible physical advantage.

  “(.”

  Or I mean, Open parenthesis. Or, Speak now, memory. I mean, I have to pause for a moment here because I want to tell you something about myself before we get to the matter of Jon and his prose and what we say to each other once we’re outside the tennis bubble. I’m somewhat repressed—or “reserved,” as my friend Andrew once put it—and it does take a certain amount of energy to exit the gravitational field of the present. All I seem to be able to come up with at the moment isn’t even a memory but rather a story I once read in an extremely famous book, but if we pretend that it’s a story I myself made up, a story somehow about me, then we’ll get somewhere, I hope. By which I mean, to the bottom of the ocean. Where, as mentioned, I happen to live.

  Here is the story: Imagine that you have died (weird), and after your death you awake into what is apparently another world. You aren’t sure if or how this world is connected to the world you inhabited while you were alive, but you are pretty sure that you can’t return to the place you lived while you were living by simply walking around. Meanwhile, it turns out that you are no longer a body. You’re a soul. You find yourself on a shoreline made of clean, gray ash. There is water sitting hazily in a great expanse before you. You can barely hear anything.

  You realize that you are not the only soul here. There are countless other souls hovering in this place, gazing out across the water.

  Then you realize that there are lives here, too. Not just souls. You’re not going to be stuck here. All along the shoreline sit countless lives in the bank of clean ash. You’re not a life, you’re a soul, but you can see them, the lives, and you know something about what they are. It’s difficult to describe how the lives look, but maybe it’s enough to say they look like sticks of different sizes, cut from saplings, although there are no trees anywhere around.

  You begin to examine the different lives. There are so many. The soul must choose. It has to live eventually, but it does not have to live a life it does not select. And so the soul searches, and it lands.

  As this ancient story purports to show, everyone has, at some level, chosen the life they live. The story also claims—leaving out the reincarnation bit, which I don’t care as much about—that none of us could avoid choosing. And this is what I want you to understand, regarding me: I’m trying to figure out what to do in a scenario in which I have no choice but, at some bare minimum, to keep on existing.

  I don’t feel free. Moreover, I feel kind of scared.

  I think, by the way, returning to sports, that the way my father dealt with this problem was to play
tennis. Because, to be clear, having chosen to be male does not exempt one from the difficulties! I know I’m getting ahead of myself and it’s just a conjecture, but let me keep going: I think that my father decided to teach himself tennis for a bunch of different reasons, in part to obscure his working-class origins and in part to have virtuous reasons to exit the house. But these are probably only the reasons he was conscious of. Much as, if the story about souls recounted here is plausible, if not actually true—and there are aspects of everything we do that we have not chosen for ourselves, not in so many words, even as we have chosen them—then my father’s choice of tennis as one of his main physical and creative outlets in life came at a cost. It was a form of leisure for him but, given his broader cosmological setup, did not mean that he was either free or having fun.

  I don’t know much about the cosmos, but I know enough to avoid the game of tennis.

  Close parenthesis.

  Jon and I are sitting together outside the bubble. There’s a bench here, plus gravel. Below us, near the water, reeds and cattails grow. Jon has already freaked me out by insisting on going inside to the reception desk to ask for a bottle opener, an act I find brazen in the extreme, given that what we’re doing out here with our beers is almost certainly illegal.

  Jon keeps laughing at me, but about some things he is deadly earnest. “So what did you think of the story?” he persists. At this moment both of us happen to be staring at a giant blue word, COLUMBIA, painted on a cliff. I realize that Jon plays his tennis here because he is an alumnus.

  “It’s good,” I say. “I really like it.”