Be Recorder

by Carmen Giménez Smith

  This is in remembrance of my mother whose hands were callused against heat, biceps bulging from hauling vacuum cleaners and trays of grand slams.

  Mercy to my failures and the legacy of failures beneath the surface of the heroic immigrant story I wish I was telling.

  The public spectacle is cracking up and forth through the cracks we’ve made over the years: an ooze of new self.

  In homage to different models of discourse, particularly the work of my pantheon: Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Ana Mendieta, Christina Sharpe, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, Jessica Hagedorn, Patssi Valdez, Chela Sandoval, Emma Pérez, and Ana and also Mimi, Coco, Elvita, Monica and Cany, Zoilita Espe, Amalia. Las Claudias, Cristy.

  Whiteness claims affective normativity and neutrality, but for that fantasy to remain in place one must only view it from the vantage point of US cultural and political hegemony.… This game is rigged insofar as it is meant to block access to freedom to those who cannot inhabit or at least mimic certain affective rhythms that have been preordained as acceptable. From the vantage point of this national affect code, Latina/o affect appears over the top and excessive. José Esteban Muñoz

  I write in remembrance of all the nosotros muffled by the clang of dishes and jokes about Latinos. Why do Hispanics have small steering wheels? So they can drive with handcuffs on. What is the difference between a Hispanic and an elevator? One can raise a child. The connections of how certain formalisms erase so-called selves. The truth is that these so-called subjectivities are already translucent.

  The context for the twenty-first-century Latina lyric I is an overfull rocket, a plate of entrails on my head. It is that I will stomp and duende, that I wear stiletto-knife chanclas. My peerless bosom is made of parrot feathers. This I is the guns and gang tattoos gallery for the visitors at the zoo. They call me Bullet.

  I am in conclusion, a fracaso, a wreck of great consequence, and this will be like my prison tattoo. La Wrecking Crew. The resistance in this expression is therefore disruptive or pathetic intentionally or unintentionally.

  To the future flor de cancion, innovator, and disturber of the story, I say, coalesce and rise. Destroy. In remembrance: kick and scream para el carajo.

  AS BODY II

  The soul needs

  no self-reference

  she’s busy producing

  pleasure and moral reason

  holding us upright

  yet we endure so many

  tricks when all we want is

  the tang of touching

  or the verve we felt

  when we still shone

  with that hope called naïveté

  in response my soul

  improvises another carnal

  extravaganza that I record

  because I like all notions

  mocked as a thicket

  of syrupy thuds

  or as no longer germane

  soul qua soul say

  the more tenuous risk

  is soul

  which some leave behind

  dusty in the back of an old

  flaking book a sibylline song

  drawing me in not like

  a bearded god in the clouds

  but traces and tones and slithering

  vapors a metaphysical Cheshire

  telling me I could finally evict

  the angry fist who became chairman

  of me for some time

  I don’t blame him

  I was being permeable

  today my soul is a deflated balloon

  hissing her air out falling up and onto

  sky’s wetted lips where the birds urge

  fly little soul fly

  so imagine all of your bodily urges

  crying out at once

  then suddenly the borders

  of everyone

  blur into one hot mess

  bleeding breathing learning

  drinking stabbing

  golding dying milking

  stroking digging

  glistening gesturing

  shaking bounding staining

  chasing greening

  punking dittoing

  barricading and working it

  levitating cheating clouding

  defending depressing lying

  in return that dimension

  without sensibility

  where my soul

  falls into a crevasse of data

  for the future to find

  spitting sicking

  adhering framing furring

  alabastering fretting

  snorting lulling

  solipsizing not getting past

  the beginning

  I WILL BE MY MOTHER’S APPRENTICE

  as if I were a hunger because

  it is our bleak and common future

  to reverse the sphinx. I study the meander

  of her logic for context. Sometimes it is

  like a poem that is not quite realized

  filled with hollows and bursts,

  a stranger’s grief and rage. She asks

  for home when she’s home. She screams

  for the purse we haven’t hidden from her.

  Sometimes we circle the same spots,

  and I try to be as I know she was with me

  once: remedy and anchor. I’m a fair

  to poor replica, yet still her proxy.

  That you didn’t know her is your

  misfortune: a hot planet’s core,

  late summer’s best light. As metaphor

  I evoke a pink, vulnerable jelly,

  translucent and containing the past.

  I hold it in my hand and against a lamp.

  This is our intimacy now. My nails trace

  the brown spots that mark her losses.

  Beautiful and sad and strange, I say,

  because I’ve made her into something else.

  BEASTS

  My siblings and I archive the blanks in my mother’s memory,

  diagnose her in text messages. And so it begins, I write although

  her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away

  until she was left a live wire of disquiet. We frame her illness

  as a conceptual resistance—She thinks, yet she is an other—

  to make sense of the shift. She forgot my brother’s cancer,

  for example, and her shock, which registered as surprise,

  was the reaction to any story we told her, a peak of sublimity

  over and over. Once on a walk she told us she thought

  she was getting better. Exhausted, we told her she was incurable,

  a child’s revenge. Her flash of sorrow was tempered only

  by her forgetting and new talk of a remedy,

  and we continued with the fiction because darker dwindling

  awaited us like rage, suspicion, delusion, estrangement.

  I had once told myself a different story about us;

  in it she was a living marble goddess in my house

  watching over my children and me, so what a bitter fruit

  for us to share, our hands sinking into its fetid bruise,

  the harsh flavor stretched over all our days, coloring them gray,

  infesting them with the beasts that disappeared her,

  beasts that hid her mail in shoeboxes under her bed,

  bills unpaid for months, boxes to their brims. The lesson:

  memory, which once seemed impermeable, had always been

  a muslin, spilling the self out like water, so that one became

  a new species of naïf and martyr. And we’re made a cabal

  of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light

  make up her core, how much we might harvest before

  she disappears. This is the new love: us making an inventory

  of her failing body to divide into pieces we can manage—

  her shame our reward, and I’ll speak for the three o
f us:

  we would have liked her to relish in the boons that never came,

  our own failures amplified by her fading quality.

  ENTANGLEMENT

  We love what’s best in our beloved, what’s worst in them.

  You have to like what time does. Each day I talk to the part

  of me that is my beloved from a tiny telephone in me.

  I communicate in the clicks and beeps of our abbreviated tongue.

  Love is a long trial, a wending, and an uneven effort.

  I hate the word faith, but that’s all there is. Only

  the last one standing knows the score. Think of the types

  of violence on a continuum, and toward the mildest

  end is love. I’m torn by you! I scream when my beloved

  pulls at our bond. I’m an alien host or we are two yous

  subsumed by a single body. The beloved says, You changed

  my brain; and I am at that mercy, which is meant

  as a warranty for longevity, but there is no real promise:

  you keep knowing each other and knowing each other.

  AMERICAN MYTHOS

  My son leaves me a Post-it on the lamp asking me to email Amazon about the Star Wars video game. He gave me the money and I lied about ordering it. I hadn’t even clicked.

  Star Wars is the first time I saw space’s mien. Space swallowed the whole theater and it smelled of soldering, and brake pads, and gold. Vast and unknowable, it could crush me like the ocean.

  I tell him a story about a delay in a Denver warehouse, then played out the lie to myself all night: my writing Amazon to add texture to the lie, then the laying off of said Amazon warehouse worker in roller blades, then that worker’s nightmare of applying for unemployment. The worker’s body is destroyed by that labor, yet he only has an infinitesimal chance of collecting workman’s comp. All of this chaos spurred by my inertia and white lies.

  I feel shame, but not propulsive enough to spur an actual login. Does this paralysis have a name?

  I suffer from anxiety over pulling the trigger, extending a finger into the chill of network, baring my economic thorax. I want to buy the game for him; I don’t want to participate in the economy; I don’t have the money; he is mouthy; I am weak; I am lazy. He will be sucked into the game and become a criminal or the sounds of the game will invade my dreams. The game brainwashes him for a future war against my kind.

  I read the reviews for the video game, almost drop it into the virtual cart, but I can’t end the transaction. Answering email, paying bills, all of it freezes me.

  •

  I vacillate about the game because of all the death in it. Star Wars doesn’t have spurts of blood but depicts the random murder of young men in Rebel X-Wings who have families waiting for them on their respective planets.

  I had so long coasted on the moral pleasure of sadistic and feudal Minecraft, but spacescapes are first-world adolescence. By having a humanist ethos, might I be denying my boy a type of survival in the world ahead? He would stumble with a gun in his hand and shoot himself, disfigure his beautiful face.

  If I were my father, I would buy my son the game and also a new video game system and a new TV that covers the entire wall. I would buy him a real gun and take him out to shoot at mailboxes and birds, all on a credit card I would default on because America.

  •

  It was night, and I almost ordered the game, until I froze because of all boys, and because of my hungers that replicate what the screens tell me. I lock my doors. My son’s small rages. A young man with the world not in his hand, the wrong voice in his head telling him someone was always trying to take something that belonged to him.

  I offer my son books, but their ancient codex system makes no sense to him. I have piles of books around me. Mostly they are for my selfies and so that I can feel at home in knowledge. The books become doorstops, they become relics.

  In a few years my son might be watching beheading videos on the Internet and getting inured like when I saw the Time magazine cover with the dead bodies laid side by side at Jonestown. Flies swarmed their bodies covered with white sheets that barely hid their face. I was seven.

  •

  My boy is an exquisite synergy of the colonizer and the colonized: the round face with a smattering of freckles, the fair skin and the narrow toes. His white skin makes him a mutable force of power in any room. His intensity is not an errant trait. It is his two parents’ histories refracted and exploded into mercenary biologies. And in an apocalypse, how will his children survive? My cousin’s husband teaches his boys to wrestle, holds their arms. Fight for your life, he orders them, nudging them to a core instinct of the brain. Their will activated, the boys struggle to escape their father’s thick arms. The world is ugly. There will be terrible humans, there always are. They will continue being terrible, so their father teaches them to fight. In my origin family, this is what we do.

  •

  Another reason not to buy: Earth and shipping and the person who makes the airbags sent in a box shipped to a factory then promptly shipped back out on a plane only because I want to save 43 cents or the trip to the sad, abandoned mall. The world is too much and keeps me in the house, ordering it all in.

  •

  Someday my son’s children will play the games projecting virtual bodies into the room, and the children that follow them will play with bodies that smell like they are in the room. Then the children that follow: no bodies at all, just the pulse of adrenaline from the limbic system and into the central nervous system that may or may not be a set of wires connected to gelatin and a solar panel.

  •

  Mom, he whispers, his voice trembling.

  Yes, I answer sternly.

  Never mind, he replies, miserable with impotence.

  •

  So say time passes and I get older and older. I get close to seventy, but I wouldn’t know or remember. Time goes on into the future, which is becoming increasingly darker. Meanwhile, my son goes on to have a life affected marginally by Star Wars, and more generally by the psychodynamic he grew up in, which is, more or less, average bougie child with a kid sister, narcissistic parents, and ecological disaster.

  And then many years later, I die of a disease brought on by the violence I laid at my door. The Spanish hands and quick wit I inherited from my mother come laden with the shittiest disease in the universe. I’m talking about the future without my body, but first the brain goes in little chips like mica shedding memory and volition at random—simultaneously.

  My son, now older, would have memories of me, of what I was, of what I had been, but more importantly, the lessons of Star Wars. I made myself an American who would mention my exoticisms in stories: my inability to use the word “clothes” correctly, for example, how loud my voice was, the weird, insulting nicknames.

  The world will worsen. Meanwhile, SW™ virtual reality glasses turn people into any character in the movies, even the minor ones, and eventually there is a jelly a mega-fan can smear on her body to feel the viscera of Star Wars called SWTranscendia. Then everyone wants that and water and food too, so the world ends.

  The boot-on-neck people will like telling us we won’t survive over the speakers in the Google vans that record our every gesture, and we lose human decency month after month. As time goes by, we create an escape route out of our house, bury canned foods in the desert.

  •

  In the future, Star Wars is woven into a macro-projection of the present and the past; history’s crumbling bedrock is built of figments like always, but occupied massive blocks of data that, in this new age, are not sustainable.

  After the end of the world’s lineage, my son is an elder who passes down the stories the television once told him: the flat living characters were sent through light and a poor man would invade your house and take your things or take your identity, which is numbers. In the distant past, there were television shows about surviving the apocalypse; its protagonist, the implacab
le and heroic white father. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction blurred.

  We eat the paint off paintings when we become desperate or all that art vanishes under a torrent, into a volcano, down a fault line. High art gives way to the drone of nationalist exposition blaring from public address speakers.

  We will have to rediscover some knowledge while, in another universe, they have already found ways to not have bodies.

  •

  The storytellers that survive pass Star Wars to other generations by talking or gesticulating. My lineage survives and they weave threads of SW into their new languages like the walking rug and the muppet toad-man who passes on wisdom and embodied physical arts. The interior of the stars that live above the hundreds of fogs is other people fighting to save us. SW becomes a story helix. People treasure the artifacts that helped illustrate the story, like a Stormtrooper action figure left in vaults by prescient scholars, or an AT-AT, the tale’s Trojan Horse, the ass carrying the virgin through the galaxy.

  Another part of the mythology spread across the end of the Americas: in those days the king was a black foreign usurper from a black planet because a narrative like that always survives.

  Lucky for us the failure of the grid blips out their bile, like a high colonic for the earth. Everything burned, or text is no longer matter, so no fire required. A grid failure. Surely the

  world and some human inhabitants find some stasis, however brutal. The stasis is informed by lore about civilization.

  •

  I should buy my son the video game to transport him to some humanist sublimity with meditation or self-improvement and deadly aim, but I order the Star Wars game and, accidentally, a book on Pilates, a book on organizing, and eyeliner, the virtual items I had left in the virtual cart on one of my aspirational Amazon shopping sprees.