Yes, it’s happening: the carpet has begun to bubble.
Bubbling is the nearest word for it: this shifting mass at once unified and composed of discrete atoms, the way I imagine water molecules would look in a simmering pot if we could see them. The carpet roils, it seethes, embodying the sea-like depth anticipated in miniature by its molehills and pied blueness. I am awake on my raft of air, eyes locked on the now truly three-dimensional carpet. Globs of carpet matter bubble and shimmer, forming ripples and waves, moving in a way that would seem to mimic not only water but, if I were several feet farther away, the electric tempest of television static. It is a movement of carpet and a movement of figures in the carpet. (On the first night, I was convinced this movement was unreal, that it was akin to the illusory popping of Mandy’s mini–Eiffel Tower shapes. If I focused my eyes on the door held ajar or on the nearby wastebasket, I could even convince myself that all was yet a static pied blue beneath me. But the movement returned, in strengthening waves, until my vision could not but classify it as authentic. By now—my third night with the phenomenon—I am primed to recognize it as real.) The variance of the fabric colors, the areas that are predominantly cerulean, or salt and pepper, are now morphing into discrete shapes, becoming curves and blobs and round eyes and, mostly, yawning or screaming mouths. On first encountering them, I’d hoped that perhaps I’d been sitting too close to the TV all those months, and that my vision was now permanently seared with the texture of its flickering cathodes. That old wives’ tale briefly envenomed my doubts two nights ago. But no, they are mouths. There can be no denying these horrifying mouths. The very mouthness of the mouths proves that a higher-order dissonance must be at work, that I am either flat-out hallucinating or else can believe what I’m seeing. Some of the mouths have teeth. Some are toothless and lipless, just widening globules. Some have impossibly long teeth, like fingers. Some of the lips are split in the middle, causing the unusual sight of a four-lipped mouth, grotesque and rectangular. Some of the mouths seem to be singing. But most take on a permanent fixed shape associated in my mind with a “bloodcurdling” type of scream. They seem to be increasing in number, not by mitosis but by steadily displacing the areas of shapeless bubbling. After some minutes—ten, I’d guess, although time passes strangely once I am transfixed by their number and variety, all other thoughts displaced by a keen awareness of mouths (I even touch my own mouth, absentmindedly)—the floor is densely covered in mouths. They exclaim no message, only wiggle and bump creepily, as Mandy would say, and worm against one another. What happens now—and I am expecting it this time—is that the mouths themselves, in addition to singing and screaming and worming, begin actually to bubble in the same way that the carpet itself had bubbled. They form larger, multimouth shapes. Whereas previously the individual fibers of the carpet had served as the atoms of shape and movement, now the mouths themselves are the monadic components of higher-order bubbling. As I watch this for the third time, it occurs to me that I already know that any attempt to record these mouths on photograph or film would be fruitless, that the phenomenon depends precisely on my particular seeing of it, that in some sense it is illusory, a conspiracy between the mouths and myself, as contingent on my own perception of it as a Magic Eye print or hologram. Yes, what the bubbling most resembles is a spooky room-size hologram. Yet it feels no less real for that. All during its transformation the room is silent, save for the occasional squeak of my body shifting against the vinyl surface of the mattress.
What eventually forms from the mouths is a giant, room-size face. A face made of mouths. And though the mouth-face is ultimately made of carpet, is virtually in the carpet, at the same time it appears to hover above the carpet by several inches, an effect that my brain struggles to resolve. The face alternates between two shades of purple as the red streetlight blinks and bleeds over the carpet’s bubbling blue. Its eyes float just below the wastebasket; its chin bucks and breaks against the working wall. The face is longer than I am tall and anamorphically distorted owing to my low angle of observation. Yet I can see that the skin drapes a little over each eye in the epicanthic way of lifelong smokers. The mouth is a narrow, unbending mouth, bled of all thickness, lacking the hunter’s bow shape of the upper lip. When the face has settled on this permutation—its exact features vary from night to night, as an artist’s sketches approach what will be the final painting, and tonight he looks even more like Jon than in previous iterations—when the features have fully solidified and the atomic mouths are shrunk to near-points, the chin quivers, the mouth cracks, and the face starts to speak.
He emits no sound, but the lips move in a way that I might read them. To get a better view of the mouth, though, I must stand up on the air mattress, and it was my fumbling while undertaking just this maneuver that previously caused the face and mouths to dissipate, communication to end, and the room to resolve into its familiar, unshaded features. What’s more, I am afraid—terrified, even—of accidentally losing my balance and stepping onto the face, into the seething mouths. What would crossing this threshold feel like? I am reminded not just of the cartoonish conceit of passing through the glass lens of a television (which I earlier mistook for an abduction scene in Poltergeist), but of the fact that the specters in Poltergeist do indeed pass out through the television, across the screen, into reality. Would contact with the face(s) somehow enable it/them to cross a similar threshold, into the corporeal world? Would my foot set loose the roiling mass of mouths, the seething static of mouths that now seems to me less like a holographic projection of the carpet than like a threshold left ajar, a world straining at its dimensions, near to bursting? Would I be abducted if I were to step into this sea? I think of Mandy, how distraught she’d be at my disappearance, how she’d worry that she was at fault, or that I’d abandoned her. How she would resign herself only slowly to widowhood over months and years. Widowhood would emerge, I think, with painful turgidity, as each day she expected my return a little less.
And yet I will stand. I must find out what it—he—they—want(s), whether mine is some bedlamitical theory of Jon’s cryptic final call, or whether my life does hang on a final, muddled message from beyond. Whether Jon had indeed arranged the office before his death to effect such phenomena, pulling at corners of the carpet to form contours, knotting the cords of the venetian blinds, maniacally adjusting the flow of light into the room, conducting ritual preparations to prepare for his specter’s return. I am beset by the impulse: I must rise now.
Just lifting my head from the mattress—slowly, so as to disturb nothing—takes more than a minute, and it strikes me how these stilted movements would appear to an observer as creepy; fearful of disturbing the dead, I move with the very slowness of death. Slowly I turn so that my knees and hands are against the mattress, so that if I were over the face, we might even look into each other’s unblinking eyes. The mattress presents issues of balance exacerbated by the fearful wobble in my legs. My limbs push four parabolic depressions into the bladder of air beneath me. As I rise onto one knee and then off it (this process taking several agonizing minutes), my feet press suddenly deeper into the slack fabric than expected and, for a terrible moment, I almost pitch forward onto the floor—onto the churning face. At the last instant I manage to steady myself with one hand on the desk so that I am tripodded over the mattress. My torso and head really do now lean over the face, just as the streetlight blinks and submerges the floor, the room, the face, in dark pink—the precise shade of pink as the otherworldly mucus in which the returned abductees find themselves covered at the climax of the film, as mother and child return from the world of the dead, reborn from death, the fluid—I only now realize—an afterbirth of the dead, an afterdeath.
But this is new. Unlike on previous nights, the face does not bubble back into the carpet, dissipating as an image does into television static. No, the goopy pink face grows startlingly clear from this angle. And as I gaze down, towering above the face, as I become a tower with a face above the face,
I can at last read its lips. The face is saying my name. I can make out the familiar biting of Jon’s lower lip that precedes an f sound, followed by a scrunching of the entire lower half of the face: the tz. Yes, the mouth shapes must correspond to “ftz”—they repeat in that order, the face intoning “ftz ftz ftz.” It is the familiar shape of my name, which I hear in my head as Jon would have said it, exploding in midrage or racked with depression. My own face (which I again feel with my hands) reflects the hovering face beneath me, Jon’s face, as I speak along with him, my throat tightening, my voice giving volume to the silent mouth below: ftz ftz ftz Fitz Fitz Fitz. I tower for some inconceivable period of time, whispering my name until the word loses its meaning—that is to say, until its properties dissolve into morphemes and then meaningless spittle, until the properties of sounding like and meaning are effaced, rubbed down to sound and then mouth shapes that mean nothing, sound like nothing, signify nothing, and the mouth has worked cruelly into a smile, its expulsions transformed into what is almost like laughter, horrible bursts of gay, meaningless laughter, and I know what I am being told, and my feet tingle above the ground, floating, in a sense, like the face—I am, after all, suspended atop a bubble of air in the office that is mine—and I grasp the desk firmly, as though aloft over a great sea.
About the Author
B.D. MAUK lives in Berlin, where he is a Fulbright research scholar. He has written online and in print for the New Yorker, the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
BEAUTY SECRETS
* * *
JAMESON FITZPATRICK
Never get fat or old: let’s begin
with the obvious. Smoking’s glamorous
—until your first wrinkle, that is.
There will never be a new black.
If you’re walking away, better look
best from the back. For rosy cheeks
and devil-may-care hair, try facing
into the wind on the way to tell him
I’m sorry, it’s finished. A window
reflection’s no substitute for a compact
but will do in a pinch. Learn how
to look bored and how to look
interested and when to look to which.
Never lie by more than an inch.
Master the art of barely parted lips:
the just-so prelude to O, mouth open
just enough for him to imagine it full.
In conversation each lull’s a chance
to stretch and show off your neck, its long
pale appeal belying the blood underneath.
Only smile if you’ve got good teeth.
And if, like me, you look prettiest in fall—
make the most of those few months,
then don’t leave your bed at all.
About the Author
JAMESON FITZPATRICK is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications), and holds an MFA from New York University, where he also teaches. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Reader, the Awl, the Literary Review, and Poetry, among elsewhere.
Jameson on Writing
“Beauty Secrets”
Dorothy Parker. I’ve always admired Parker’s poems for their music and sly wit, for how deftly she can turn a phrase to reveal what’s both terrible and terribly funny about human nature and experience. I began this poem deep in a rereading of Parker’s Complete Poems, and it certainly owes a debt to the incisive rhyme of poems like “News Item.”
Lana Del Rey. In addition to enjoying her songs, I’ve been fascinated by Lana Del Rey’s cultural reception—which has been so dominated by questions about artifice and “pose.” I read her coquettish persona and lyrical preoccupations (with clothes, makeup, etc.) as calculatedly coy, at once embracing and subverting the trope of the beautiful-but-troubled female singer. I’d say “Beauty Secrets” has a similar aim.
Cosmopolitan. In middle school and early high school, my girlfriends and I (strictly platonic, of course—I was avowedly gay even then) used to spend hours poring over magazines like Cosmopolitan. Though I think I was able to recognize the absurdity of some of that beauty advice even then, I also internalized plenty: I’ll still read any and every article promising the secret to perfect skin. And the snappy language of magazine copy was a stylistic inspiration, of course.
My own habits. Plenty of the details in this poem are (embarrassingly) autobiographical. I, for example, do feel more attractive when I’m walking into the wind, am constantly checking my reflection in store windows, and, as I’m self-conscious about my teeth, almost never smile in photographs.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Like a vast number of liberal arts students in the past two decades, this book was my introduction to the theory of gender performativity, which solidified my understanding of sex and gender as social constructs. As a gay man on the “fem” end of the spectrum, Butler’s work has also been of great personal significance, helping me to claim my place in a broader culture that’s constantly policing gender transgression—and giving me the freedom to write into the “fem,” as I do in this poem.
Keith Carter © 2013
Keith Carter © 2013
CAT MAN
* * *
HEATHER MONLEY
Grace meets Roger at a small party held by mutual friends. She isn’t a particularly superstitious person, but she believes she can tell in the first moments of meeting someone if they’re going to be important in her life. She feels this way when she first sees Roger, his nose buried deep in the fur of a long-haired cat.
Grace enjoys the company of animals, but generally feels that public affection should be limited to calm petting and perhaps extend as far as holding the animal in one’s arms. More involved displays—nuzzling, saying sweet nothings in a high voice—should occur only when no one is around to observe. But it’s clear she’s stumbled upon Roger in a private moment. Walking through the bedroom door to leave her coat on the bed, she finds him cradling Toughy—the long-haired cat—and murmuring something like, “Pretty boy—pretty, pretty kitty.” Roger notices Grace and sets the cat gently on the floor, but he does not seem the least bit embarrassed. His glasses have slipped askew, and he adjusts them with an assured, fluid motion. Grace forms an idea of Roger’s character: He’s confident in his actions, unapologetic, but also kindhearted. He’s the sort of person Grace admires, the kind she wishes she could emulate.
“You like cats,” Grace says.
Roger answers, “Yes.”
“You have one?”
“No.”
Grace communicates mild surprise, and Roger smiles. “Not the right time in my life, I’m afraid.”
They’ve walked down the hall, back into the party, and someone starts speaking to Roger. Grace wanders off. The rest of the night—when she sees him across the room or recognizes his voice among others—she feels a small, itching interest that she hasn’t yet identified, but she can’t find an excuse to speak to him again. It’s possible she’ll never see him after tonight. But then she’s in the kitchen searching for a bottle opener, and Roger appears. He has overheard her talking about her apartment hunt, and tells her that he’s looking for a new roommate.
Roger’s apartment will likely be too expensive for Grace. He is, she estimates, a few years older than she is, and he’s wearing a collared shirt of good quality tucked into jeans, the casual outfit of a well-established young professional. Grace is in her early twenties, and moved to New York a few months before the party. She’d had loose plans of pursuing a music career while working a day job on the side, but hasn’t found success in either pursuit. Working at the box office of a music venue a few days a week, she makes little money, not enough to keep up with her rent. Her roommates have told her that she’ll have to move out. She doesn’t tell Roger any of this.
Grace drinks more than she’d planned to. As she’s leaving the party, she passes Roger in the hall and says, “Good night, cat man.”
&nb
sp; “Excuse me?” he says.
Explaining what she means—about the moment with Toughy and the bedroom and the coats—Grace feels embarrassed, especially as she notices that she’s interrupted Roger’s conversation with a woman. He is leaning against the wall, and the two are standing close. And though Roger smiles when Grace explains the joke, actually seems relieved to understand what she’s referring to, Grace goes home imagining that he will now politely avoid her inquiries about the apartment. She wonders if he’s going home with that woman. But by the time she wakes up the next morning, he has already sent her an email.
Roger lives in a Brooklyn neighborhood that Grace admires. At his suggestion, they meet at a coffeehouse near his apartment. Roger is dripping wet because it’s raining and he hasn’t bothered to bring an umbrella. The apartment is close, he says, and he’s sure the rain will let up before they leave. He shrugs, but Grace can tell by the way he keeps shaking and squeezing at his damp clothes that the wetness makes him uncomfortable.
Roger is chubbier than Grace remembered, but not unattractive. She imagines women calling him cuddly. He asks about her job, and she tells him about the music venue, adding that she’s looking for something more full-time. Roger nods, smiles, laughs when appropriate. He tells her about the apartment, the neighborhood, says it would be great if she took the room because he wants a roommate he can trust. He names the rent. It’s surprisingly low. Grace almost asks, “Are you sure?” but holds back. She doesn’t want him to change his mind.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 6