We Still Like: Gravity

We StIll LIke

GravIty Number

of an edition of

2 ue Iss

100

We Still Like Books Oakland, California

We Still Like / Gravity Editors: Sarah Ciston & Chris Pedler Publicity & Development: Tavia Stewart-Streit Design: Sarah Ciston Cover: Helene Poulshock Printed in Oakland, California WeStillLike.blogspot.com WeStillLike@gmail.com

gravity writes everything

how we learned to stop worrying and love the weight of words

Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

— Zarathustra Look up! Is that the bright wide open sky or an anvil swinging above your head? Guess what, world, it’s both. What is the heaviest thing you can think of? The lightest? The most important? The most ethereal? Quick, don’t think of an elephant (though you’ll find some in this issue).

Thanks to gravity, everything has weight. When even the very air puts pressure on us, how much does one decision weigh? The tug-o-war of the world is infinitely subjective, a calculation based on the gravitational influence of the masses closest to you. Matter matters.

Gravity is what binds us and what we’re trying to escape. More to the point here, gravity’s the reason we don’t send our work out more, the reason we find it easier to fuss over every sentence that ends in a preposition rather than sending our stories around. Words weigh so much piled onto pages piled into piles in the corner, collecting dust and forgetfulness.

But gravity is also what connects us and what keeps us from losing our way, the force that keeps this little world intact and bonds us all together.

Gravity is all that holds us back and all that pushes us forward and all that makes life possible and all the things Yoda says in The Empire Strikes Back.

What would it mean to kill the spirit of gravity? To let go of our iced coffees and have them conveniently float in the air next to us, patiently awaiting our next sip? For us to float several inches above the ground and sort of swim through the world in a way far less hard on our knees than walking? For the earth to spin tangentially off its orbit and drift like a sea turtle through deep space? For all toilets to just flush straight down? Hard to say.

What would it mean to release all those piled up words by sharing them, blasting them into the stratosphere like the space shuttle bent toward the clear horizon?

As it turns out, killing the spirit of gravity is as simple as laughing in its face or letting out a long deep breath. Time continues. Earth revolves. The

universe abides your passive construction, your misuse of the subjunctive, your inability to spell “renovation.” If we let go of our inner critic (or just slip it a Vicodin now and again) we might lose a few pounds, the worst ones, of stress and self-consciousness, of the inner weight that holds us back from meeting our aspirations, right where we stand.

Let’s make our words light.

Let’s ease the weight of ink on paper, quit hauling it around like a punishment from the gods. Let’s aim instead for the accumulation of small finished works, not too fussed over, not too perfect — but printed, stacked, bound, attended to, loved and sent out into the tangible world. Call it: the unbearable lightness of being earnest.

There are two ways of looking at the weight that holds us to earth, the force behind our collective mass. Of course it makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning, hard to get anything done, hard to take flight. But because of gravity, every object is pulled, however infinitesimally, toward every other. I am pulled toward you and you toward me and toward everyone everywhere.

This makes it easy to bump into things and hard to avoid making mistakes.

But as two objects orbit each other, they quicken their pace then slow and finally attune themselves with a weightlessness that can only be described as grace. By varying degrees we are always floating, always spanning the space between ground and sky.

This is how we kill the spirit of gravity: by admitting we’re in it forever, by admitting that this is a beautiful, buoyant thing. Gravity — for all that is weighty and meaningful, for all that is too big and too small to take, for all that pulls us together and pulls us irrevocably forward on our tiny trajectories, for all that makes us light.

Float on, Sarah & Chris

Taxonomy of contents Gravity Writes Everything . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 We Still Like Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Artifacts New Navigation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Leap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Monica Regan Puma Page-a-Day Calendar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Tupelo Hassman Apocellipses... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Tavia Stewart-Streit and Sarah Ciston When You Fall Down on the Internet, Who Picks You Up?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Kate Regan

investigations On Discovering the Nature of Time and Gravity at the San Francisco Dump. . . 7 Monica Regan Gravity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Meagan Cavanaugh Year of Gravity: The Infinitely InJestible Book of Everything . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Sarah Ciston

poetry Equations for a Falling Body. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 LJ Moore The Recursive Nature of Ambiance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Mako Matsuda Voila. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Mako Matsuda The Stink of Geology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Jason Rosten

plainspeak : dakota notebook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Chris Pedler Dreams about Gravity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Matt L. Rohrer Vivisection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Sarah Ciston (Un)Necessary Aesthetic Reinforcement as Told by My Father. . . . . . . . . . . 52 Gina Caciolo The Specific Fear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Anhvu Buchanan Balancing Act. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Anhvu Buchanan Comfort. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Laurie Ann Doyle

prose One Infinitesimally Small Moment of Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Tavia Stewart-Streit Taylor and Redding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Jim Nelson Herculean. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Andrew R. Touhy What Is Past, Is!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Anthony Lux Erotic SOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Daniel Baker-Jud The Boy Who Held His Breath Forever. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Dustin Heron Microwaves*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Sarah Ciston The Average American Swallows Eight Spiders Every Year. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Emily Kiernan Caterman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Joshua Emerson Smith

the nature of time and gravity Onatdiscovering the San Francisco dump [Monica Regan]

I’m not afraid to admit to my shallow likes, and so I confess: The coolest part of being an artist-in-residence at the San Francisco dump is the uniform — goggles, fluorescent vest, hard hat and steel-toed boots. This outfit confers upon the wearer certain superhuman powers. 250 tons of waste per day? Bulldozers, rusted metal, flying shards of glass, piles of styrofoam peanuts large enough to bury a small Winnebago? Clouds of dust particles the origin of which you’d rather not think about? No problem, you say in your shit-kicker boots, art has to be made. I’ve been experimenting with these accessories as an antidote to writer’s block and other pesky manifestations of emotional paralysis. Nothing seems insurmountable when your head is protected and you can slam your foot into a cement wall with no adverse consequences. Seriously, everyone should try this at home. But, I digress, this is not a fashion issue.

While wearing this uniform in my official capacity, I’ve collected unrecognizable shreds of individual lives and pieces of evidence from our collective experience — photographs of babies, photographs of soldiers, photographs of people in every outfit and era since the camera was invented, New Testaments, Old Testaments, the Koran, Lao Tzu, four copies of Don Quixote, a six-volume set on the fall of Rome, scientific encyclopedias, newspapers dating back to 1917, LIFE magazines from the ’40s, ’60s and ’80s (apparently people don’t throw away LIFE magazines from the ’30s, ’50s or ’70s), rubber bands, greeting cards, Monopoly pieces, diagrams of the human body, shiny Christmas ornaments and, well, far too many oddly appealing ephemeral objects to list.

Pretending a kind of poetic archeology, I studied them all as fragmentary windows into who we are, where we’ve been, where we’re headed. I made collage poems from found text, photographed objects and images like specimens and recombined them in new juxtapositions. In what I created, all my own obsessions are reflected back: the American past and our future trajectory, decay, evolution, quantum physics, the shape of time, traces of the invisible in the visible world. Not to mention my love of 1960s fashion and a fascination with the changing perceptions of femaleness. You have come a long way, baby.

So what does this have to do with gravity and time, you ask? Consider our clichés: bury the past, go down in history, the weight of the years. Clearly time and gravity are intertwined, at least in our collective imagination. No better place to study this phenomenon than at the dump, where the pull of these forces and their inevitability is palpable. The weight of the years becomes all too literal when a truckload of someone’s personal effects gets dumped at your feet. Worn shoes, sofa cushions and easy chairs, photo albums, broken toasters, letters, mix tapes, ceramic princesses and painted gnomes, war memorabilia, ancient bags of hard candy, macramé potholders, fridge magnets, stuffed animals, chest x-rays. I once found a set of notebooks that contained 10 years of weekly to-do lists, each item carefully crossed off. “Call Mom” was listed 354 times. Being at the dump feels somewhat like standing at the edge of an event horizon, catching a last glimpse of our once personal, now anonymous detritus before it contributes its mass to the black hole known as landfill.

Says Yeats, “All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.”

Well WB, ice and salt have nothing on time and gravity. At the dump, there’s no getting around it: Time and gravity will get us in the end.

Equations for a Falling Body [LJ Moore]

A drink at dawn a highball at dusk holds the hug of her ex-husband wishing you the best of luck with her and the oncoming baby a clap on the back, a male code known from birth, honor in the soles of the feet: which is why he wrapped the belt around the beam and dropped, the breath poured out of hands, feet, ears, cartoonish in your gut when, next morning the first cigarette is interrupted by a phone call: your girlfriend’s child an orphan in the womb, your carefree honeymoon of a long-desired try with a pink-haired girl you’d loved since elementary school suddenly a loop of rope you’ve carelessly stood your foot in while the line’s been cast overboard.

Right about now a beer seems level-headed: a quiet room where the heart’s blast can be sequestered and the shaking not felt for days or weeks depending on how steadily you keep them coming, those bits of dreams the same as bits of days, all dealt in something you’d never dare call misery as you’ve got the cliffs and pits of others to compare and no way to apologize, to blame the care. The night comes up hard and fast, then blank dawn only fair until compass points orient the birthdates — two now static, one continuing to fall.

10

Gravity

[Meagan Cavanaugh]

I can’t go to Saturn. There are obvious reasons, sure, and they’re pretty easy to think of, but it hasn’t anything to do with that. It’s because I refuse to believe that you can’t sit on the ring of Saturn, dangle your feet in the stars and look into the infinite. If you can’t do that, then why have Saturn at all? What else is the purpose of a planet with a ring around it? And why bother going if it’s just going to frustrate you when you find out your beautiful cosmic perch is just a bunch of rocks?

This is my problem with science: The explanation is always plain, unadorned, depressing. I prefer magic. Not only is magic science without the explanation, it’s the wonderment of science without the explanation. I’m all for this, especially because, as I learned in high school, I’m not good at explaining science. But also because I like the reveal — when I was a kid, my father and I would sit on my back porch and watch storms come across the lake towards us until we sat drenched under our blankets. This is how I learned that storms weren’t just clouds with on and off switches for the rain but that storms actually moved; it’s true they do, they advance and arrive and go away. I don’t need to know why. I just love that they do because I saw it.

All of this is just a way of saying I can’t really explain why I still like gravity because I can’t explain gravity. Newton knew it existed because an apple fell on his head. He apparently didn’t think it was magic. He had to know why. So he figured it all out. Good for Newton. If it had been my head, I would have figured it was because I had done something wrong and this was a random fruit punishing me for it. I would have tried to be better, kept a careful eye when sitting under an apple tree and left it at that.

But I can tell you about the last time I understood the magic of gravity. It was at the gym when Yertle told me that you had to breathe out when you’re moving against gravity (i.e. when you’re lifting the weight). Yertle looks like a heavily muscled turtle, and he’s always at the gym, so I figure he has to know what he’s talking about when it comes to lifting heavy objects.

The problem with what Yertle said is that I’ve spent a lifetime holding my breath. Isn’t that what we’re told to do? You take a deep breath, square your 11

shoulders and go. I did this the first time I had a cavity drilled, when I had to perform in a school play, the moment before I had my first kiss, all of it. I still do it. Right now, there’s a squirrel living in the walls of my house. Every now and then he scratches at the wall, and if it’s late at night and I forget about my wall-squirrel, I hold my breath and wait for the attack by the wall-scratcher that I’ve imagined is a team of highly trained robbers intent on stealing my mostly Target-bought furniture and quite likely doing away with me in the process.

There’s another thing, and this is also something Yertle told me — your muscles lie to you. They hurt because they don’t want to move, your body actually prefers to be at home in bed. So your muscles lie and cry pain, your brain freaks out and tells you to stop and your body wants to call it quits. It’s like a bad cocktail party. You just can’t find someone fun to talk to. Which is why it’s no wonder I want to hold my breath. Of course it also means I had to at least try Yertle’s advice — because not only does he seem to enjoy lifting heavy objects, he figured out how to make it easy. So I tried it, and in truth, it helps. I can’t explain why. I can’t even really count the repetitions when I’m doing it, I just know, the weight goes up a little easier. I can actually complete the set. I can lift weights. Yertle is a magician. I now know the trick.

But it’s more than just being able to lift a weight. It changes my whole philosophy on holding my breath. Holding my breath is fighting gravity, it’s keeping still when gravity says go. If breathing out when fighting gravity is right, then maybe moving with gravity is better than fighting it. So now I will go. I will go to the gym, wave Hi to Yertle and pick up the weight. I will not be still. I will figure out a way to remove the squirrel from my wall. Who was the poet who said, “I move to make things whole”? He or she was right.

So maybe I will never sit on the perfect rings of Saturn and stare at the infinite, but I can always move in the infinite. I will be what the Saturn-sitter is looking at, and maybe, like the storms of my youth, I will move slowly across and stay awhile and then go. And the Saturn-sitter will laugh uproariously and tell her Dad, with total wonderment in her eyes, that the infinite is not static!

I can see this. I can’t see what Newton saw but I can see this. I think I have it better. I can see the magic of moving with gravity, of moving in the infinite, and all it makes me want to do is move more.

This is why I still like gravity.

12

One Infinitesimally Small Moment of Time [Tavia Stewart-Streit]

The moon’s average distance from the earth is 384,000 km.

She makes her complete orbit every 27.3 days, approximately.

One lunar day is 655 hours long.

She travels at 2,288 mph.

One time, the moon landed right down on top of Los Angeles and rolled into the Pacific Ocean.

James was visiting from New York. We had decided to stay in for the night: eat pizza, drink champagne. It was about dusk when James went outside to smoke a cigarette and first saw something different about the Moon.

“Christine, you better come out here,” he said. I saw him jump onto a patio chair. “Something is going on with the moon.”

I could see him from the kitchen window. He was looking away from me up into the sky, so I couldn’t see his face, but I noticed that his hands were shaking, so I came outside to see for myself, expecting what I usually saw when someone came to visit who wasn’t used to the orange tint of the rising East Los Angeles moon and was convinced that it was surely the apocalypse; but, what I saw was something different.

It is hard to explain what I did see at first, but when James and I reminisce on the phone nowadays about what it was like, we agree that the moon’s motion was like a spinning top regaining itself after nearly slipping. It started with a slow turn and a slight wobble — we could see all the craters we had never been able to see before — then it shivered and spun faster and faster until it became a striped ball, until it resembled Jupiter.

As survivors of the crash, we like to talk about when the moon started to grow larger and slide through the sky. It’s funny how clearly we remember this now, but then ­— as we watched the moon rise and grow from the tip of the diner sign across the street from my house, up through the sky, and disappear behind my apartment building roof, while we wondered if it was the moon that was moving or if it was us — everything was such a blur. The fear made our heads feel as if our heads were filled with water, everything sloshing 13

around up there, never a solid thought.

The suspense was enough to kill someone.

We ran inside and turned on the television, thinking that every station by then would be covering the story. I mean, it was pretty impossible to miss. It was the moon for God’s sake: our only moon, our turner of the tides. But we were so wrong.

James sat there flicking through the channels on my old hand-dial TV for what seemed like 10 minutes. He flicked right through a Dodger game, at least a dozen car commercials, Entertainment Tonight, a situation comedy involving a misunderstanding about who paid the rent, and a dog show, all in absolute disbelief. I remember James’ mouth — wide open and smiling.

The fourth time around the dial, we found it on Channel 10. There was a board of scientists pointing at what looked like a papier-mâché globe. One of them was holding a tie-dye coin-machine rubber ball that was supposed to represent the moon. He was circulating the ball around the globe. He was making whizzing noises through his teeth. We couldn’t believe it.

The scientists were trying to explain why it was happening. They said that the moon was knocked out of orbit by a strong celestial wind caused by an unusual amount of dying stars that must have all died simultaneously three billion years ago from this very day. It was this “space weather” that caused the moon to dislodge and spiral towards earth at an exponential rate.

“Space weather,” one scientist said to the rest, “is even less predictable than earth weather.”

For some reason, this was a funny joke between the scientists. James and I watched in silence as they rolled around in their TV loveseats in an uproar of uncontrollable laughter.

Then the screen switched to a map of Southern California. It showed the imminent impact as a shadow, like a weatherman’s rain cloud, from a red felt dot labeled Los Angeles to a blue felt dot labeled San Francisco.

“The moon looks a lot smaller than I thought it would,” I said as I grabbed James’ hand. “I thought it would be big enough to at least destroy all of America. I mean it doesn’t even look like it is going to cover the whole coast of California.”

The cameras switched back to the scientists, and they continued. They said that the moon would orbit closer and closer. That it would make ap14

proximately four more rotations before it landed, similar to an airplane, onto the California coast and roll right off the mainland into the Pacific. They told us not to panic, to stay where we were and that when we do see it coming: to duck, get into doorways, get under tables, to lie as low to the ground as possible. This all seemed absurd to both of us: Duck! Roll off the mainland! Get under a table! I turned the television off.

“The moon won’t roll,” I said with a smile, “it will crash down and blow the whole world to pieces.”

“They probably don’t want anyone to panic.” James said.

We both stopped talking and I really tried to be serious and imagine the sight of a huge rock globe rolling along the surface of the earth, but couldn’t.

“What about the landing?” James continued, laughing, but desperately trying to keep a straight face. “Won’t the slightest impact be enough to kill us all? Won’t it be enough to throw the whole earth into cold outer space? What about our orbit? Whose ocean will we roll into?”

“I don’t know. What planet is closest to us?” We both had to think about that one for a while. James finally got it.

“Venus! And it has no ocean. It is just hot with clouds, and I think that I remember from astronomy class that it rotates in the opposite direction of all the other planets.”

“Isn’t she a rebel.”

The conversation had gotten off track, and we both knew it and sat together in the first real silence between us since we first saw it; it was the first time we just listened to the background noise. We could hear cars honking, glass breaking, people screaming, what sounded like trash cans being kicked over. We sat and listened like this, looking out my window at my garden, hearing the chaos that we couldn’t see, until James put his right index finger into the air and stood up.

He had a brilliant idea.

“Maybe if we are lucky and it rolls just right, we will be saved below a crater.”

“Yes, a crater, of course,” I said, “I hear some of those craters are more than two miles deep!”

Then we had hope. I called my mother while James rearranged the furniture in my place to make a fort, a desperate configuration of my couches that 15

was supposed to soften the blow or protect us from any moon debris that might fall around us. It seemed very logical to us at the time.

On the phone, I told my mom that I loved her and that if she survived (she was living in Arizona at the time) to tell the rest of the family, all the ones who didn’t live in California, that I loved them too. We didn’t have time for all those phone calls, I told her. She was so positive, so amazing as always. She said that everything was going to be just fine, and that, “Yes, you will be saved under one of those craters, honey, that sounds like a plan to me.” She reassured me that there were so many craters on the moon, and that they were so deep, that our chances of survival were pretty high.

I really think she believed it. I don’t think that she was saying all that just to make me feel better.

“Ignorance is bliss,” I said to James after I hung up the phone. He didn’t know what I was talking about, but understood what he wanted to understand in the moment, and he smiled.

“You got that right,” he said. “I wish I weren’t a smoker, we’d probably still be ignorant in here drinking champagne, maybe we would be on our second bottle by now, perhaps listening to some Johnny Cash and eating candy bars.”

I told him that I didn’t have any candy bars.

“Then maybe we would be at the grocery store buying some,” he said. I could see that he wanted me to say something, and for a second, so did I. I wanted to say maybe this and maybe that, maybe we would be enjoying this time instead of building a ridiculous fort out of my furniture, but I didn’t.

I felt like a child right then and I liked it, so I grabbed the champagne and the pizza and a blanket and jumped into the fort we had made and started to wait. James crawled in after me, and we got comfortable so we could see out of the window through the cracks between my couches.

Then we saw it come over the horizon like a flying saucer; it was bigger, but not too formidable. We could hear a slight rumble in the distance, and suddenly, as if it had been there all along, we felt the pull. It was like a magnet, pulling our blood like it pulled the tides, up through our bodies, through our hearts to our brains; I could feel it rushing upwards all the way to the tippytop of my head until I thought for sure my head was going to pop right off.

I looked over at James’ cheeks. They looked enormous, like two inflated red 16

balloons. I looked at my hands and my feet and they were white as a ghost’s; and the pain, the pain was like when the nurse takes your blood pressure, but if she did it on all your limbs simultaneously, without ever letting the air out, just pumping and pumping that little black ball, if you could only imagine.

No, it was as if something had taken a hold of us and was holding us tighter than we had ever been held. In a weird way, though certainly uncomfortable, it felt good, like when hanging upside down on a jungle gym. Like the moment before letting go when all you can see is red.

That is when we first heard her: I’m so sick and tired of depending on the comfort in the continuum. The moon had the voice of a very old and tired woman, but neither of us believed we heard it enough to say anything.

The rush lasted about a minute, until she disappeared again over the horizon, and when the tides inside our bodies went down, and we could see again, when we were more in control of some of our thoughts, we finally thought of leaving.

“Water displacement” were the first words out of James’ mouth after we came to.

It was all he had to say to get me out from underneath the fort and to my room to grab my coat and my purse.

“Of course! Where is all that water going to go when the moon takes its place in the sea?” I yelled from the bedroom, “Jesus, how long did it just take us to figure that one out?”

We ran around the house trying to decide what else we might need, water/food/blankets/clothes, but our efforts felt forced and fast and desperate and sloppy, so we stopped for a moment, sat down, put our faces in our hands, and that is when it dawned on me that even if we got in my car, and miraculously there was no traffic, and we got out of town, maybe as far as Riverside if we were lucky, we would drown anyway. The flood would certainly cover the entire world. I started to cry.

James grabbed my hands and suggested that we forget about getting things together and just get in the car and start driving east.

“We have to at least give it a try,” He said, “The 2 is right by here. We could hop on it and be out of here in no time.”

“It would have been a good idea had we thought of it immediately after seeing the moon spinning behind the diner,” I said, still crying, “It’s too late 17

and even if we do get out of here, it doesn’t matter now.”

“Well, arguing about it is only going to make it later and worse.”

He picked up my purse and pulled the keys out of the side pocket, and I almost believed that he was right for one second, that we were saved, and just as I felt that sense of relief, just as he said, “Let’s go,” we saw her come over the horizon again — a rock out of nowhere.

“Jesus,” James said.

Everything rumbled and shook. The windows shattered, all my dishes and glassware were forced out of my cupboards onto the kitchen floor, and we knew it was too late for driving. We could hardly move at all. Not because of the fear, or because our blood started to move again, but this time it was the cold.

We should have been more prepared. The moon blocked the sun out completely, like nothing else ever did, and I don’t imagine anything ever will again — not a cloud or a total eclipse or the darkest dust storm. I struggled into my bedroom on my knees and managed to grab some hats and scarves out of my bottom dresser drawer and a sweater from my closet, while James found my bed and covered himself in my down comforter. We met there in my bed. Neither of us could move enough to put on any of the hats or scarves, we just huddled there, stiff, feeling like we were going to burst or freeze, or both. Not even my head, all filled with blood, felt warm.

We finally found each other, two stiff scared bodies gripping at whatever part of the other was closest and easiest to grab. I always thought it would be so much different than that when the world was about to end.

And then there she was again, this time louder: Oh, to take for granted the multiplicity of choices in one infinitesimally small moment of time.

As soon as she was gone again, we got up and ran to the living room with the blankets and sweaters and scarves and put them all on and we jumped underneath our fort and got ready for her to come around again.

“She’s talking, she’s talking!” I said.

James shook his head in disbelief — like it couldn’t get any stranger than this.

The third time came even faster; we had barely gotten situated when we saw her come over the hill.

I know I have said things similar to this before, but I can’t say it enough.

Seeing her come over the horizon was like nothing we could have ever imag18

ined, like nothing our eyes could have ever thought of seeing or our ears hearing, like a real live unicorn, like listening to the mythic Sirens singing out at sea; but, I guess it was different than either of those because at least we had heard of unicorns and Sirens. We had never heard the tale of the moon falling into the Pacific Ocean before. So it was even more like nothing we could have ever thought up by ourselves, only something that may have come to someone in a terrifying nightmare.

The wind caused by her arrival seemed to whip through all the noise, or maybe it was the noise. We will never know.

We could see through the fort and through the window and it was like a ceiling coming down over everything. It was like a sky-sized wrecking ball cutting the tops off of every building, screaming into their insides. It must have looked, from the moon’s perspective, like a world of vertical dollhouses.

My eyes started to water from the cold and I looked over at James’ eyes, which had turned from blue to gray. Everything turned gray and then red, and I had barely enough time to think of what it was like or how I felt about it except that I was cold and afraid and feeling alone in the sound even with James clutching onto me, and then she was gone again.

How grand will it be to feel the physics of completion?!

Just as fast we were able to see again, she was back, but it was strange because it seemed as if the moon were moving slower. James and I got flat on our backs, one cheek exposed, sucked our bellies in as much as we could and held onto each other’s hands tight.

The moon then became all of our reality.

She forced herself into my apartment with a slow grumbling. Moon rocks falling all over my carpet. My whole body shivered. It was unbelievably cold and the pressure I felt pushing out of me, through my chest, was overwhelming. Breathing took all the energy I had.

Always moving, never towards a point findable.

As the moon swept above us and softly caressed our faces, I imagined how it was going to feel to die, and I thought it was going to be like when I go to sleep at night. Somehow you fall asleep, but you never remember the exact moment that you do. I would feel the weight of the moon on my body one moment, and the next I wouldn’t feel anything at all. Then I thought more and deeper — I did not believe in an afterlife so I quickly made one up, one that I 19

liked: I would understand everything. My brain would be transformed and I would no longer be me, but a small part in a big surging universal brain, much smarter, or wiser, but I wouldn’t remember who said what when in the life I had lived before. I wouldn’t remember anything at all. I imagined Aristotle and Zeno silently touching hands sitting together on the same flat surface.

This made me smile a little.

Oh, to feel how it feels to end.

I kept thinking these things and about my family and not having any children of my own, and she kept rolling above us, never dipping or rising, just lightly grazing the hairs on our faces, which still makes no sense to James and me when we think about it. Wouldn’t gravity cause the moon to stop orbiting and fall directly to the earth once it broke into our atmosphere?

But it didn’t, and we didn’t die.

A lot of people did die. People who wanted to stand up and watch. People in any building higher than one story. All the people living in Santa Monica and Malibu and Venice, Santa Barbara and Monterey, where it finally touched the earth and rolled into the water.

Ah, the water. The Pacific Ocean was the real hero in this story, not the crater as we expected. The Pacific was able to swallow the moon whole, its water displaced ever so slightly; no tidal waves were caused, no flash flooding occurred. Just a gentle overflow as we walked east. As if the ocean were expecting this to happen.

We remember how light our feet felt walking, how light the sky was above us, how good the candy bars tasted that we found in the rubble of the AM/ PM, how glad we were that we didn’t have to go to work the next day or the next after that. We were just free and giddy and alive under a moonless sky, and so looking forward to a world where the weather would forever be utterly predictable.

We have not heard a word out of her since.

20

Puma Page-a-Day Calendar:

365 1/2 Reflections on Aging Fearlessly in Partnership with (or in Pursuit of) a Younger Man

[Tupelo Hassman] puma: 1. Large American feline resembling a lion, from the genus Felidae that contains the Cougar and the Jaguarundi.

2. A German company that produces high-end athletic shoes.

3. A character from the Marvel Comics universe.

4. A woman who is 30–40 dating a 20-something, i.e. pre-cougar.

May 9 Shock & Awe My ass dropped.

Not in a good way, like the kids would say. My ass didn’t drop like Vampire Weekend’s new album. My ass dropped the way many women’s asses do when they turn 35.

Men’s asses don’t seem to fall, don’t succumb to age the way ours do. Their balls descend in what might be termed a display of sympathy; their behinds, meanwhile, creep up, up, up and away, disappear, while women’s become all the more obvious, and my ass is getting harder to miss. It’s on its way down right now, down, down to Chinatown.

It’s lumpy and squishy and the left cheek is bigger than the right. My ass cheeks have always been mismatched, cast-offs, but this didn’t matter when I was young and each cheek was flawless as alabaster before the war. Now the war is on and the alabaster, pitted as the nose of the Sphinx, drags along behind me.

But the war isn’t what we’ve been taught. The enemy is not ass dimples.

The enemy are those who want us to politely tuck our asses away, want to tax them but only give the vote to the fleeting and perfect asses of youth, leaving the rest of us to our flaws and a floating but persistent guilt.

Yes, it is true. I sit on my ass. I sat on it to get through college, to work lame jobs at stupid desks so that I could sit on it some more and write books.

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I sit on it and drive miles to be a good sister and a better friend. I have earned this ass, make no mistake.

But if the only ass we can ever love is the one we had at 17, we might as well pull on those mom jeans right now and lay down for the tanks. If we worry too much about our ever-changing asses, we’ll forget to enjoy them and to let others have the pleasure of enjoying them with us.

When we stop shaking that ass, that’s when they’ve won.

June 17 Living in Stereo My boobs are falling, and like a slapstick duo, they think it’s hilarious. They wake me up with their singing, “Please help me I’m f-a-alling,” from the left.

“It’s a lo-o-ong day living in Reseda,” from the right. They’re currently working on a mashup of “Ring of Fire” and Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping.”

There was a time when they hardly existed, mostly nipple, they rode high and got little attention. Now they’re low and loud like a bayou speakeasy and their songs play all night long.

Those other boobs were quiet, joyless, hummed hymns a Sunday, preferred the term breasts, and took themselves incredibly seriously, like wee suffragettes, constantly with the picketing and the curricula vitae. They burned with a righteousness so hot they never could be cupped in tenderness or hold themselves to loved ones in hugs unafraid of anything but not being close enough.

These boobs are not that way, they’ve grown great at hugging. Full of memory, they look forward to their new next shapes and live to get down.

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The Recursive Nature of Ambiance [Mako Matsuda]

I found a shard of glass in my bed.

This is a reminder that I shouldn’t step on my bed while wearing shoes.

I don’t think this is the only shard of glass in my bed, yet, at this time I am unwilling to do anything but speculate.

Once my friend Scott told me a story about the time when He killed a momma spider with his shoe, and baby spiders scuttled in all directions.

For weeks, every time he felt itchy, he thought about spiders.

This makes me think about cult movies that make me do stupid things, like acts of love, acts of retribution, acts of hate, acts of grand consequence. Sometimes I think about the supernatural and the cultural models that situate my anxieties.

I don’t have curtains on my windows, my bedroom is never completely dark.

Every night, my ceiling is unfamiliar.

I feel no urgency to sleep.

Tonight, in bed, I’m thinking about owl pellets and how I can order them online, how I can compare different vendor prices, how I will order owl pellets and they will arrive in my mailbox.

Tonight, I will begin to frame a poem around owl pellets.

Tomorrow, I will write a poem about ordering owl pellets online or I will write a poem about the process of waiting for the owl pellets to arrive.

Then, if I feel pretty good about the poem, I will order owl pellets from an online vendor.

For the weeks until their arrival, I will bring up, in conversations how I ordered owl pellets online.

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Voila

[Mako Matsuda]

We race pass stars at an incredible speed In the upcoming years we will transform into new beings It has worked for others Well, Of course It will work for us too It must!

The radiation of Attmus Made their limbs do impossible, graceful things A nothing better A never knows best The unbecoming will surely grace us as well When we catapult back home We will dream of new wardrobes and prettier Ways to wear our corsets.

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Taylor and Redding [Jim Nelson]

Gravity is a long man in a long woolen overcoat wearing a lion tamer’s hat and a ready bullwhip strapped to his side. He has a gray moustache and pointed beard and the face of a man you’ve met many times and cannot place when you try. He approaches you from behind, unseen and cat-like, snapping you to attention with the slice of his bullwhip across your back. The tail of the whip tears through your skin and muscle and even through your bone, wrapping itself around the core of your innards and dragging you down to the earth.

When the tail unwinds and emerges from your depths, you lay panting on the ground and realize you’ve been introduced once again to this long man in the gray overcoat and tamer’s hat, gravity.

••• People’s first impulse when I say “off a cable car” is to laugh. It’s a sound impulse. The image is ridiculous. Sometimes I sweeten the joke and say I fell off the cable car because I had an Irish Coffee in one hand and a bowl of Rice-aRoni in the other. The car jerked to a halt and I couldn’t grab the rail and — I clap my hands — instant dislocated shoulder.

Truth be told, the car wasn’t moving. It was empty and idling for passengers, and I dashed for it. The warm May evening and the earlier pleasant attention of a young woman filled me with a bravado I don’t usually succumb to, but that night I was seduced. I planned to jump on the running board with one foot, grab hold of the pole, and spin myself to the side bench. I thought I was Frank Sinatra.

It was more like Jerry Lewis. The bullwhip cracked and the world went sideways. I rolled on my side peering up into the car’s undercarriage. My shoulder felt like I’d slept on it wrong for a decade. My right ear was pinned to the asphalt. I could hear the cable down below. It churned.

The San Francisco cable is man’s construction of an unforgiving natural force. Cable cars start and stop, riders board and hop off, but the cable is unrelenting. It speeds underground without a thought of purpose. No car may be attached or all of them may be attached, let go or grab hold, the cable runs steady.

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••• The diagnosis came to me in passing. I was sprawled on a gurney in a corridor of monitors and IVs and stainless-steel carts. Constant foot traffic dodged through the clutter. At the end of the gurney my black Doc Martens popped out from under the thin white sheet, two commas on a blank page. My right shoulder felt split in four with a hatchet. I remember holding out my other arm to stop the nurse as she whisked by me, but maybe not. I was as dopey as a dwarf. I suspect all I did was flop my arm off the gurney and catch the hem of her scrubs with my pinkie.

She said my shoulder was dislocated. She told me as though I should’ve known this two hours earlier. I asked her when they could pop it into place.

It’s not that kind of dislocation, she said, and then asked me if I would like more drugs.

I live in California. Does anyone here answer no?

••• My father said no to that question. My father was prescribed all manner of narcotics, some in horse-pill dosages, but he refused them all. For six months he lay in a rented hospital bed in our family room with layers of gauze belted around his midsection and sterile cotton four inches deep into the holes in his leg and buttocks. My mother would offer him the painkillers and he would wave them off. A deer rifle fired at point-blank range will kill a deer. Supposedly that’s its humanity. It failed to kill my father at point-blank range, and that’s its humanity as well.

He’d taken two men hunting in the hills outside of Redding. One had never hunted before, or even owned a rifle until that trip. Returning to my father’s truck, he opened the passenger’s-side door and slid the rifle into the seat pocket that ran the length of the bench. He’d left the safety off, left a round in the chamber and fumbled with his binoculars the whole time.

My father opened the driver’s-side door and gravity’s bullwhip dropped him. No sound, only the sense of boiling water poured down inside his body cavity and into his right leg. Crumpled on his side, his boots scythed the gravel and red dirt and kicked at the truck tire.

Gravity was in the hills outside of Redding in its woolen coat and tamer’s hat. Gravity was on Taylor Street as I lay with my clavicle arching my skin like a tent pole. My father and I were the same age, and from where I lay, 20 years 26

difference hadn’t made a dime’s worth of damage to gravity’s persuasive and devastating command.

••• At 19, thinking I possessed some intellect, I decided to attack on my own Einstein’s treatise on general relativity with some notion of punching my own ticket into a kind of guru academic club. I wanted to walk away from Einstein’s text with the easy stroll of a corduroyed physicist below the flame-red trees of an Ivy League autumn, leaves drifting down languidly like parade confetti or broken promises. The physicist stuffs his hands deep in his jacket pockets and the elegance of Einstein’s explanation warms them.

But Einstein’s theories began to fade the moment I set the book down. I re-read the chapters thinking repetition would ink his insights into my brain, but the ink washed off within hours. When I tried to explain gravity to myself or to anyone, I was confounded by its paradoxes. I do remember this: Einstein says there’s no such thing as falling, only rounded space and curved time propelling you through the cosmos. It’s stark. Man fell from Eden because the apple fell from its tree, and we will remain falling, and there is no Hell because there is nothing to stop our descent.

••• While in the hospital, my father refused to stay in bed. Dammit if he wasn’t going to walk. This 15-year-old nearsighted introvert watched his father defy gravity. More impressive, he defied the trauma unit’s nurses, heavy-set leather-skinned women whom, I am positive, brooked zero bullshit from any other male. He told them he was walking and after they said no he walked up and down the corridor of that hospital wing, careful of the monitors and steel stands lining its sides. He escorted his IV with one hand and pinned the back of his hospital gown together with the other.

After he was discharged, he walked ovals in our family room and walked with purpose up and down the side hall. He could not make it up the stairs.

Gravity would have its pound of flesh, and that pound was an anchor on my father’s mobility. Gravity made my father live in our family room for six months, his easy chair replaced by a rented hospital bed squarely facing the television set. He hated television. That’s why gravity stuck him in a room with one. When he was stationary he read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the only book my father and I share.

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My father had his own reasons for wanting to walk. You should ask him about them. My opinion is he’d be damned if he bowed to gravity’s whipcrack again.

••• For three days in my own apartment I subsisted on a steady diet of Vicodin and Chinese delivery and Miles Davis. Every shift of my arm made my shoulder pop like a campfire. Sleeping was a bear, never finding a secure position, and I made do with napping and writhing, napping and writhing. The only way to get up was to make a rolling leap, rock back and throw my legs off the side, to avoid lifting myself with my hands or elbow. I imagined how I could turn this into a story. It sounded pathetic every time I plotted it out. Then I reminded myself it would start with me falling off a cable car, and I would laugh.

If you know me, you’ve heard this before. You’ve been patient with my clumsy, repetitious storytelling and spun-out exaggerations. You’re sick of the Rice-a-Roni bit and the Frank Sinatra/Jerry Lewis gag. In my defense, I was sending up trial balloons, some fully inflated, some a bit light on the helium. I prefer to test my edits before I write my first draft. If only life worked that way.

••• My fondest memories that summer are of waking before dawn, dressing, and walking up Nob Hill. I walked among the morning people, that class of San Franciscan that actually enjoys waking when it’s still dark, people who whistle in the café while their espresso is being prepared. They know the hour of no crowds, no lines, no car horns, no rush.

My arm was in a sling and it bounced each step up the hill. The broken wood in my shoulder scraped together. At the clinic, the therapist prodded my shoulder with blunt fingers, pushing the broken wood around. She tightened fresh bandages about it to force the separated bones into their old positions.

They would not fuse, and they never will, but it eased the pain and gave my muscle tissue a chance to heal and strengthen.

Gravity made itself known in the therapist’s exercise room. Chains and pulleys and weights and meters, all single-minded in their purpose, all variations of a single action, lifting weights off the floor. Gravity sat down and crossed its legs and knotted its arms and refused to budge. I could only lift him so far the first morning. Over the weeks, I lifted him further and higher.

The climb up the hill grew lighter and brisker, and eventually I could manage 28

it without the sling. That summer I became one of those morning people who whistle while their coffee is poured.

••• I was 17. At dawn I stirred out of a dream. My father had died and I was at peace with his absence. Sitting up in bed I treated his death as a quiet fact I’d integrated long before. I was ashamed. I asked myself why I was planning to go to college and move away from my family. I should pick up a full-time job to support my mother. My younger brother would go to college, I would stay and work. Without my father, it was up to me to see that he would advance and that my mother would live as comfortably as we could afford.

Then I heard what stirred me out of that dream. It was my father in the kitchen downstairs. Every morning at dawn, my father took pans out from their drawers and stacked serving plates. Meanwhile the brewer gurgled, hissing when the coffee was ready. The eggs and sausage were popping in the skillet when I padded down the stairs barefoot. My father was whistling.

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The Stink of Geology [Jason Rosten]

Thursday morning, swimming lessons went off without a hitch.

A police cruiser dinged a mailbox and bore from it a dark streak across the decal printed on the passenger-side door.

A woman with a carload of groceries in tow felt a wave of horror and self-loathing when, for once, she chose not to brake for a crowd of pigeons gathered prancing around a few discarded fries left in the parking lot of the Safeway on Mission, thinking they’d scatter as she’d seen them do for other such approaching cars, and ran one over, affecting a sound akin to cracking an egg.

Roughly 2.5 million people watched Regis.

Gravity continued listlessly on with its lifelong project of compressing the Earth down tight, compact and pure into a diamond the size of a baby’s head to maybe sell it to a Saudi prince or upstart rapper, but goats and humans and fish kept shitting, threatening the end-product’s presumed luster and raising all sorts of questions about how a diamond ought to smell.

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ear of gravity: The infinitely injestible Ybook of everything [Sarah Ciston]

I am seated in an office, trying to write a book review of Infinite Jest. (Spoiler alert: I eventually give up.) Little did I know when I started the book that it would threaten to become the last book I’ll ever read.

Its size, approximately equal to Jupiter, should have tipped me off to the fact that the book had an inescapable gravity, but its heft only triggered my innate reaction to (immediately, categorically, ignorantly) hate it. There was so much hype, and I assumed the book was just another prop hipsters would crack open at coffee shops in an effort to one-up me.

Unimpressed by size alone, at least when it comes to literature, I almost always prefer a slim novella I can tuck into my back pocket — one that packs all that needs to be said about the world in a few brilliant pages with emotional weight to spare, digestible in one long sitting. After toying with both extremes in my own writing, from novels to flash fiction, I never underestimate the appeal of a work you can hold all at once in your head, a perfect moment of crystallized literature.

So I rolled my eyes at the dauntingly three-named David Foster Wallace and claimed the privilege (unique to those who lack experience) to judge it quickly and unfairly, subscribing to the notion that anything worth saying in a thousand-plus pages could be said just as well (and more powerfully at that!) in fewer than 200. I assumed I could apply the same logic to DFW as I did to the many other wunderkind authors of our generation, whose inflated page counts I figured were thanks to their and their editors’ inflated egos.

Then I met someone who had read Infinite Jest (had really read it, not just the first 50 pages) and had actually enjoyed it, not merely slogged through it in a testosterone-fueled display of literary athleticism. And he was about to read it again? Despite the fact that this someone had a decent track record for getting me to attempt the impossible, my eyebrows still went wonky at the suggestion.

Morbid fascination (and general one-upsmanship) got the best of me and I found myself with a copy of the largest book I’d ever avoided, alongside the equal and opposite weight of my reservations toward it.

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But I’m supposed to love painful fun! I’d written 50,000 words in a month, surely I could read 484,001 words in a summer. This was, after all, the summer we’d declared the “Summer of Everything” (not unlike DFW’s Year of Glad), the summer we started We Still Like — and anything was possible! (Except being out-read by a poet.)

To whet my appetite or as a show of resistance, I’m not sure which, I read two fantastic novellas beforehand, each in less than two days: Jeanette Winterson’s Weight and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. I loved both of these books, their macro-intimacy and their ability to contain the universe in so few pages. More on these novellas later (all of which are recommended if you’re not quite up for an anvil of a reading project just yet).

Meanwhile, bring it on DFDub, let’s see if you can do any better. (And let’s posit, for the sake of argument, that the best book reviews are written by converted skeptics.)

••• Since we’re calling this a book review, and since I’ve already told you I’ve failed at reviewing the book, I might as well also spare you the usual trappings of a book review: I will not summarize its ridiculous plot (impossible) (involves wheelchair assassins and throwing trash at Canada).

I will not parse through its themes (ill-advised) (a quick Google suggests: “tennis, addiction and denial, child abuse, entertainment, film, Quebecois separatism, national identity, paranoia/secrecy, spirituality/religion, subjectivity/objectivity, unsustainable cycles (annularity)”).

I will not tell you where or how to read it (On the moon, where it weighs less and will not, as in real life, break your nose if you happen to fall asleep while reading it in bed).

I will not, if it is within my power to avoid it, venture to mimic his work (for whatever reason it seems to invite the worst sort of imitation). I’ll skip the footnotes to this impossible essay (or perhaps it is all and only footnotes, and look I’ve gone and done it after all).

Instead I’d rather talk about: How it is impossible to talk about (done, check!), How other book reviews and critical analyses of the text caused me to vacillate between annoyance toward the book and even more annoyance toward 32

the people trying to talk about it, as they tire themselves out trying to imitate it, saying way too much about nothing at all for fear of getting it wrong.

As far as I can tell from where I’ve dipped my toe into those alligator-infested waters, this is a book taken far too seriously. Sure, it’s sophisticated, but it’s also funny as hell, and not always in a fancy-pants meta way. It’s downright punny and even occasionally scatological. Yet it is almost universally feared.

One reviewer, Lisa Schwarzbaum (granted she worked for Entertainment Weekly), refused even to read the book she presumed to review: “Reading the last page first reveals nothing,” she bragged, as it sat otherwise uncracked on her desk. Oh, if she only knew the beauty of that “last” page.

Maybe it’s the Stockholm syndrome talking, but I have to admit that Infinite Jest sucked me in like a big black hole, with its own gravitational pull.

What makes it infinitely ingestible and eternally returnable is that it somehow manages, remarkably, to embody in its physical form the belief we may secretly hold when reading any book — that it might contain downright everything if we just look hard enough.

It turns out Infinite Jest shares a common quality with the novellas I admire: that macro-intimacy containing the universe, the ability to capture the entirety of the big wide world while simultaneously getting uncomfortably up-close. The smallest book on my short list, and the one with the biggest title, Weight spans as much space as any larger work, covering all of Greek mythology and the creation of the universe, not to mention the narrator’s personal history, and you can polish it off in a couple of BART rides.

An interesting thing seems to be happening here, based on the entirely non-scientific sampling of books I read this year: Infinite Jest, by far the largest book, covers (with a few small exceptions) a period of only a few years; Don DeLillo’s Underworld (which we’ll cover later), clocking in at a mere 832 pages, covers most of a century; Weight, under 200 pages, covers a few millennia — but all conflate time in the same way, undertaking impossibly grand scales, making the small large and the large microscopically small.

What I finally had to admit Infinite Jest does that Weight cannot (sorry novellas) is to encourage complete immersion for the chunk of life it takes to read it. And this process does not conclude with the end of the book, which demands an immediate rereading of the beginning and then continues to invite further jumping around (part of the reward after a first full read), as there are altogether 33

too many memorable moments to remember in one take. Infinite Jest is a closed loop of a book — one in which you can quite literally get lost.

So why hasn’t everyone read it already? No doubt that’s natural selection eliminating the faint-of-heart who don’t always enjoy “not necessarily knowing” “what is going on” for the first “few hundred pages.” I won’t deny the book requires a demonstration of love-as-perseverance, but the grand misnomer is that DFW’s largest work requires more work to read — imagine instead your favorite book, snappy and easy to read, now imagine four times as much of it.

While I love rereading certain novellas, I never spent so much time with them that I found myself talking about their characters as if they were real people I lived alongside. In that respect, InJest (ha!) shares more with television and the other perpetual entertainments it cautions against. It becomes a space for total immersion, tending dangerously toward the prospect of addiction.

For its characters, addiction takes all forms and is a coping mechanism for the assault of raw information and unprocessed experience humans are asked to filter in each moment — but InJest is not going to hit you over the head about it (ahem, Requiem for a Dream). DFW instead merely provides the (more hilarious than real life) raw data, layered mineral deposits for the reader to drill through or shave away. This is, to steal an image from the book, information disguised as detritus catapulted over the divide.

In this case, narrative is not the whole story. DFW said, “Fiction either moves mountains […] or it sits on its ass” [McSweeney’s]. The author chose mountain moving, mountains of pages, and more notably, mountains sketched on every introductory creative writing class’ chalkboard to depict story arc.

We have long known our experience of the world is not that of a simple, structured narrative. InJest seeks to reflect the former instead of the later, presenting information without the packaging of context. DFW dials into every reader’s primary dilemma — interpretation necessarily operates as distortion — and calls into question the notion of trusting even our own brains with concepts like linear time. The book’s footnotes contribute to this more experiential narration/navigation, operating as the violent breaks in attention that are so common to our multitasking lives. A reader must parse chunks of data to create and impose meaning; the process of meaning-making is, and has always been, at the discretion of the reader, not the author.

The story arc, then, becomes an exponential curve instead of a mountain 34

to climb and descend [see Greg Carlisle’s essay in the Sonora Review]. This exponential storytelling style is what marks truly contemporary fiction — a way to represent the world as we live it, not as reality television and realist fiction try to make it.

So here’s the question (followed by the answer, of course, but not really): Why make work if only to throw it at impossible mountains? Why move mountains, why create new ones or even try to compete with the alwaysencroaching digital deluge in the first place?

It’s the ongoing endeavor of the unending book of the universe: How to talk about everything?

How to know what to exclude?

How to cope with the pain that comes with the knowledge (nay, gravity) that the choices we make in life necessarily exclude other choices, because our experience of the infinite world is necessarily finite?

What’s really infinite, we learn from DFW and maybe from all good writing and from too-late-night conversations, is the compassion we share over how nothing at all can be infinite, how nothing at all can be shared objectively.

The pain of this finite is enough for anyone to want to finite themselves. We cope only through writing, reading or other addictions, through numbing ourselves or through further exposing ourselves, through trying to connect, even if we can only connect about the impossibility of true connection.

DFW managed to incorporate all of this into a book that embodies what it discusses, itself as addictive and immersive as its imagined all-consuming entertainment. In this respect, for all its intimidating size, Infinite Jest is amazingly intimate — offering a glimpse of what seemed to be the whole DFW project, perhaps the whole humanity project: How are we to exist in the world; how are we to create something worth existing for?

These are questions he couldn’t answer, and probably neither can we. For now, the only answer is the striving for it.

••• And that’s the story of how I converted to the tiny cult of Infinite Jesters, and of how, albeit briefly, I thought I had come around to the concept of the large novel at-large. I had moved that Everest of a book, and (high off the everything of Infinite Jest) I decided I would tackle the other giant book on my list right away… enter Underworld.

35

It turns out there is a considerable amount of overlap between these books, published within a year of each other and approximately the same weight in my book bag: Both couch intimate character studies in the giant scale of history (real or imagined), and both futz around with traditional ticker-tape plot, instead running history backwards or zooming in from everything down to a kind of big bang, using the past to predict the future, retracing their steps to figure out how we got here and where we’re headed.

But I couldn’t move another mountain. I completely stalled two-thirds of the way through Underworld (I fell into the Schwarzbaum Trap) because I grew tired of wishing it were another Infinite Jest. Sorry, DeLillo, I still like you, but every point you make DFW can make without sounding like he’s complaining about the ’90s in a specifically ’90s fashion.

As far as I can tell, no other book seems possible after Infinite Jest. No other book seems worth the trouble if it’s not going to go both intimate and infinite, if it’s not going to talk about everything or talk about how to talk about everything or talk about the pain of being unable to talk about everything, if it’s not going to take over my world as Infinite Jest has.

Which is how I find myself writing this book review, though I’m still not entirely sure critical writing about this book isn’t pointless or doesn’t detract from the raw experience of reading it. While it may be an impossible undertaking (like asking how to exist in the world, like talking about everything), Infinite Jest is too beautiful a book not to make the endeavor.

Here’s the not-at-all hyperbolic bottom line: Infinite Jest is the best book ever.

Book. Reviewed.

If you read one giant book in your life, make it this one. Know that it may just be the last book you ever read, but don’t let that stop you. Infinite Jest is both too complex and important to talk about, and too complex and important not to.­­­

36

Plainspeak : dakota notebook [Chris Pedler]

[Black Hills]

walking is falling. each step leaves a space, takes a piece, accelerates ellipses, gaps, along an orbit bent around the center of a story. every story lies between our language and a foreign land: the world translates into words, lines. sentences describe the city streets, buildings, hills, a highway out to the plains. flat & straight for a hundred miles, grass becomes grass because we say so, this is its name. Dakota is its story. step by step bedrock builds the land beneath our feet. we see these words make shapes, give forms, take others away like the sun allows us to read but can blind you.

[Badlands]

every language names the land the same. each tongue sees identical canyons frozen, sanded, beaten dry by sun in a cycle. now the sign says “Badlands,� and it is more than a name: tour guides write its history entirely in white

red and blue 37

[Great Plain]

38

the sky is big-big. I see buffalo fat as the moon in the field go moo-moo. that’s where we play tee ball. me and my daddy and Peter. he’s ten. I wish I was ten. in fifth grade in school. our house is on Bellevue Road, number four. it’s blue. daddy painted it last summer I remember. I sat under the tree in the yard and watched. he went back and forth. up and down. it took alllll summer. our dog Sally watched too. she’s ten like Peter was two years ago. I’ll be ten soon. I’m really good at school. my mom says if I keep being so good I’ll go to college someday. I want to go to California, where the movie stars live. I think I’ll live right next to them. they’ll be my friends. all my friends here will come. Gina. Sarah. Becca. Lucy.

Sam. and Sally. it’ll be just like now except I’ll be a princess forever, not just on my birthday, which was yesterday. I got ice cream with my mom and we saw this boy I like Tommy eating chocolate mint chip with his best friend and I was sooo embarrassed to be with my mom like mortified so I stood all the way on the other side wishing I was invisible while she ordered and tried to look at Tommy without really looking at him you know and then he was like hey and I was like hey and we talked about how we both hate English class with that bitch Miss Robinson isn’t she such a bitch and then he was like see ya and I was like bye and thank god my mom didn’t come back till he left. everyone left. Tommy and Lucy and Gina and Sam and Rebecca and Toby and Whitey and even that weird kid Bartek who everyone was scared of. gone. like poof. like I turned around and aliens came and everyone vanished. a couple went to college a couple got married a couple went to Fargo a couple went to Chicago St. Louis Texas Florida two guys went to California to be in a death metal band Jenny Winters died in a car crash out by Ryder and Jim Simpson went to New York. I wish they hadn’t gone. it’s just me now and I work at the bank and I gotta get out of here soon. it’s my birthday tomorrow. it’s not that I like it here so much as it’s home and there’s only one of those.

I leave finally I can’t take it anymore. make it to LA but it’s not like I thought it would be. I don’t know how I thought it would be. everything’s both smaller and bigger in person. I guess I thought it’d be like here except flashier, with prettier people and better weather, parties and all that, but I wander down the Sunset Strip in the heat and the palm trees wave at the Hollywood sign and I’m just like this is it? I don’t feel like the people on tv one bit. I never know where I’m supposed to be or, once I get there, what’s the right thing to say. I meet guys in clubs, I’m not a hermit, but it’s like they look at me and only see themselves. it’s weird. I work in a bank and meet movie stars sometimes. one of them was even nice to me, but he was so short he could hardly see over the counter. I felt bad. I feel bad a lot but then I feel like an idiot. I wish I could feel different. I stay long enough to make everyone back in Turtle Lake jealous and then leave because really I hate it. skip around a bit through Texas Nebraska Chicago then here again. ten years later a lot of them are back and I don’t feel like a failure. I have a family now and I’m happy. I’m happy. it’s my daughter’s first birthday tomorrow. at the party we’ll barbecue steaks and all of us write down wishes for her like my parents always did, and I’ll fold them up with all the others in the music box stocked with unanswered prayers to a heaven empty of anything but [Grand Forks] ballistic missiles streak east, leave contrails composed of jumbled numbers — 6’s, 7’s, 9’s all twisted and hammered and forced to perform perfect parabolas, beautiful math ballet’d in the blue, exact as the graph in a PhD’s notebook, huge as your widescreen tv, the whole horizon new as the day you were made [Black Hills]

walking is falling across the horizon inscribes a limit 39

defines the meaning I see in the hills hide their gold filters into the river deposits syllables glint in quick water flows from the source in the bedrock words rise again in the east [Wounded Knee Creek]

a nine-year old boy holds a gun, runs stalks shadows in tall grass, cocks their bodies jerk when all of them shocked to be if memory serves the present acts in the future again and again like the past shoot anything that moves () limbs collapse like buildings twist under impact fragile as bird feathers bones crunch in the gears of history told to the ()

40

stories depend on whom you believe only one can be truly the victims friendly fire earns more medals of honor than ever you call it honor you know what it means () what does it mean to speak

this language to you, now after all that has and has not stopped () fire stopped burning my skin froze quick it is winter in the hills do not respond () the firing never stops we are still 41

dancing we are tired so tired of the sound still we still search the sky for a sign waiting beneath exploding galaxies snowing their stars in the night, down from a time long before we were tossed in the ground, alive.

the earth regrows from the blood in our eyes.

[Interstate 90]

42

four RedBulls six coffees and something I call herbal speed is enough to keep me moving is the thing keep moving like sharks don’t sleep can’t sleep I get paid by the mile by how fast I am out to the coast six states west then back into Sioux Falls I’ll sleep when I’m dead I tell everyone over the radio all of my secrets safe in this truck is my only the only place I feel perfect so in control like it’s apart from a part of my body is flying here I can chew up the pavement do this shit be

in Cleveland by nightfall just let me show you I know how it’s done: you aim straight at the sun and floor it [Black Hills]

walking is falling. asphalt rises to catch each step. I go up the on-ramp to the highway, try to hitch a ride anywhere. doesn’t matter. pick anywhere west. I look at the map and expect the names of places to tell me things about them. Turtle Lake.

Wall. Wounded Knee. syllables attach to collections of buildings and stones accrue layers of meaning like sediment. so these are the Black Hills. they look green. I came out here to see a sky the size of the continent, a heavenly empty. I get in and out of trucks. a driver offers sandwiches and coffee, everything he has. we pass fake frontier villages, fake gold mines and a gigantic dinosaur by the side of the road, also fake. often I feel I am getting further away from where I was going, which was nowhere particular. places approach from 20 miles in the future over a prairie flat as a graph. I arrive only to find there is nothing to see, and the names mean nothing to no one. or maybe they just do not say. I’ll walk. out on the concrete, semis rip holes in the air going 80 and almost knock me down. Highway 240 cuts straight as a blade. I aim for the edge of the world. the afternoon bends with the curve of the earth, one step at a time. walking is falling into the future, watching the road roll out to infinity. nobody stops. I walk through the hours, the air choke-y and brutally hot, but soon it is evening. I have gone nowhere, just far enough to be in between everything. dusk sprinkles like ash. a Chevron sign leaches pink and blue florescence onto gold-plated clouds. after the last and before the next exit, this is a place without a name. scattered rocks. fading heat. a jackrabbit leaps from the sagebrush, kicking up dust. a family pulls over for gas. mosquitoes. sky. plains ring a shattering absence. the sun seems to pause somewhere on the horizon’s 43

opposite side and the atmosphere flashes burns everywhere orange I see and I breathe in the glow and the jackrabbit stones switchgrass traffic the gas station everything bleeds out its light at different velocities all of us flying 67,000 miles per hour together in a giant ellipse we are falling around we are falling right now there is nothing between us there is nothing there is

44

Herculean

[Andrew R. Touhy]

Take, for example, the little wooden armchair before the window. For months it was occupied by a heap of laundry including the old green-striped bath towels and several pairs of mismatched socks, pinned beneath unread books stacked like dusty bricks at least a dozen high. But just a moment ago I bent and lifted, and set the entire load on the bed where it sits now without complaint while I make myself comfortable — one leg over the other at the knee, or feet crossed at the ankle on the sill: watching the bird feeder sway above the potted herbs that line the fire escape, looking out over the backyard redwood and neighboring cedars stretched wide across the peaked housetops, off to that part of evening sky still full of cloud and blue light; and beyond, to my own faint but rising image, sharpening on the glass. Me, lost or found, in the act of settling here finally, just as I imagined I could, and would, when I found the strength.

45

Dreams about Gravity [Matt L. Rohrer]

1. My dad tells me that now that my brother’s moved out he dreams of a white empty room. That means he’s scared of dying. I dream of my brother, of throwing rocks at him after arguing about the dishes. And how he always clogs the toilet. Aaron is the final sibling. My mother dreams of being alone in the garage, painting her future with birds and fish and crumpled up clothing labels.

2. At the dinner table, I told my mother that the kasha tasted like bad childhood memories. My brother said “It’s ok… just a little bland.” My grandfather died of a heart attack when my mother was 13. I think of this every time I eat brisket. Supposedly mustard cuts down your cholesterol intake so I eat more mustard than meat and don’t ever worry. My psychology is a little gray cloud trying to dissolve. Sitting on the couch with my dad in the dark. Our conversation idles and the walls shake. I strum the nylon-string guitar. His mother was psychotic after he was born and underwent shock treatment. She had a love affair with a famous ’50s playwright. This gives me literary cred and a person to look up on Wikipedia. My psychology is a set of rules that I may or may not have heard at the dinner table.

3. I want a life of growing things. Glass jars with little green lives inside. My only memory I’ve saved from 4-years-old is the back of my dad’s head as he walked out the front door. Last night you looked so small in the hallway slamming the door screaming, “What the fuck are you doing?” I was walking out the front door. The neighbors could hear everything. I was huge. I took up the whole entire frame. I want a life of cooking things. Steamy pots with leaves and spices and meats.

46

What is Past, Is!

Prologue from Rhapsody Futura: An Exciting Love Story Based on Science

[Anthony Lux]

The second-worst part of falling to your death from 80,000 feet is this: You lose consciousness soon after departure, only to reawaken mid-flight.

Your surroundings prove not to be your warm bedclothes but rather an open sky below your feet and a spinning planet hurtling toward your head.

Hello...world?

••• At 20 years of age, William Icarus Bradford the Third became the youngest pilot ever to travel faster than the speed of light. At 26, Buck made history again as the youngest executive to join the ranks of America’s premier aerospace corporation. At 29, he woke up falling to his death from 80,000 feet.

He did not immediately comprehend this situation. Rather, the tumble through space revealed itself carefully to his half-cogent mind, the pieces falling together like the well-crafted plotting of Sherlock Ohms and the Case of the Missing Hyperdrive, first clue being the sky, or maybe the chill, the bitter incomprehensible cold that suggested that all was not well. And then, the seeming detachment from gravity, the topsy-turvy out-of-control, the spinning, the increasingly dense air blowing by at 256, 255, now 254 miles an hour, the atmosphere slowing your descent just a little though your velocity remains terminal, the ozone pushing down into your throat, the wind tugging your hair, your limbs, sloughing your skin — you’re not imagining this one, friend! You’re right in the swim of things now, like a polishing by course-grade electro-sand, manufactured to Underwriters Laboratories’ highest standards of quality!

Ah-ha! he thought, putting two and two together. And then: Oh-no!

Buck’s heart raced so fast he wondered if it were true what they say, that cardiac arrest always kills a falling body before impact, but he was quite certain that was not always the case and anyway how could it be with him?

After all, his was a fake, a fake with a dram of plutonium and a 300-year extended warranty, parts and labor, best warranty in the business even if as a customer he would never have the chance to make ‘em make good and oh but don’t you remember the song and dance they gave, how they said that 47

baby was going to make it through anything? Remember the old man with the heart like yours who climbed to the top of Everest and swam to the bottom of the ocean, all in the same day? Don’t you remember the No-Attack Guarantee, the No-Easy-Outs-for-You, and boy I got a 9,000 RPM redline says you’ll still be around a few minutes from now when the end hits you like six and a half hexillion tons of bricks!

••• Someone once remarked that at the end of one’s life the Future and the Hereand-Now join forces, only to find defeat at the hands of History. If the Future is nothing more than all the possibilities left open by a present state of affairs, then there must be certain actions in the Present which have the power to collapse all potentialities down to one, at least on the local macroscopic level.

If only one possible outcome remains then the Future ceases to have meaning. It ceases to be. The Future is possibilities; one cannot have but a single possibility, for a single possibility is what we call a foregone conclusion — in other words, History that has not yet happened.

Einstein, on the other hand, said the distinction between Future, Present and Past was nothing more than a stubbornly persistent illusion. Which concept is correct? Einstein proposed this not in the midst of a scientific hypothesis, but as he was expressing grief following the death of a friend. Likewise, no illusions here: Buck was indeed on his way to joining the Past: a giant leap for a man, perhaps, but on the whole, rather insignificant.

••• We should note here that Buck would not be the first — not the first spaceman, not the first company man, not even the first Bradford — to go. Spacemen have a funny way of dying young, even in this age of crash-test ratings and OSHA, even with their feet planted firmly on the Earth’s hard ground.

Funny, how many spacemen suffered accidents during furloughs, or after they were grounded or retired or on the verge of relocating. Quite funny, too, how Buck realized this only now — rocketing downward himself like some damned angel hurled straight to hell by an angry god — that all those tragic accidents, those passings, those deep, deep losses the Company had experienced over the past year were hardly accidents at all.

“I should let ’em have it,” Buck mouthed to the wind. “I should tell the whole world what they’ve done. I should put a stop to the whole mission and 48

to hell with them — ” — but impending doom has a way of reasserting itself back into one’s frame of reference, and once again Buck was forced to come to terms with the fate spreading out before him. He could hardly open his eyes but when he did he saw terrain taking on definition — fields, fences, barns and bales, the end of a road. The end of the road.

You’re not going to stop anybody; you’re not going to change the course of human destiny. You’re going to make an impact on the world in one way and in one way only.

Between Buck and the frost-covered Earth hovered a cloud, dark gray in the center, wispy on the edges, his only partner up there in the sky. And like all good partners in any relationship worth carrying on, the cloud spoke to him with brutal honesty. Were it not for the cloud, Buck could convince himself perhaps that he was not falling, that the wind were moving but not he, that he might remain in the air forever. But the cloud, nearer to him than the ground, grew in perspective, provided a reference point by which Buck was able to confirm that he was indeed traveling toward a specific point in time and space, that soon enough he would pass through said cloud and then find himself on the other side, truly with no future of which to speak.

••• First Law of the Universe: All good things come to an end, and that end is always the same — entropy. Entropy is spilt milk, or the disorder of a world just after The Bomb. Entropy is Humpty-Dumpty going “splot” on the Earth at the end of a 15-mile journey straight down without a parachute. Entropy is a funny thing, though. Funnier than dead spacemen. It can only be measured in the aggregate, and it only matters if anyone is there to care about it. To put this last point another way: a bird in the hand is only worth two in the bush if one is in the market for a bird.

Second Law of the Universe: The enemy of Entropy is Agency. Agency is composed of two things: 1) the ability to pick up the pieces and make things whole again, and 2) the care to do so. The caring part requires a mind — not necessarily a human mind, to be perfectly broad-minded, but a mind nevertheless — again, a curious emergent entity which can really only be measured in the aggregate. So if there’s nobody to care about what happens to Buck but Buck, and Buck lacks the first component of Agency, his fate is sealed. His 49

future is no more.

If only she had cared!

••• Had he ever ventured a guess prior to the present, Buck would have said that the second-worst part of falling to your death from 80,000 feet would probably be the life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing he’d always heard about, that he’d seen long ago in stolen glimpses of verboten cartoons. As it turned out, though, his mind didn’t reach that far back. He could have thought of his childhood if he wanted to, of daydreams encouraged or discouraged, of multiplication tables with penciled constellations in the margins, but mostly his mind dwelt on the more immediate past. He thought of her lips. He thought of her eyes and her orbicularis oculi. He thought of the way she tilted her head back before she laughed, and of her laugh itself, as if everyone else in the world ought to share in the good humor of the moment. He thought too of the way she always considered herself in control of situations, of her emotions, more so than Buck, at least, and how, when it came down to it, she was not.

Or maybe she was! Buck didn’t know anymore. All he knew was he was falling to his death from 80,000 feet, and she was nowhere around.

Buck righted himself. He took the position he learned when he had learned to skydive as part of his earliest training, belly-first, arms and legs out and trailing. The cloud’s approach slowed, though the ground would still undoubtedly prove fatal. He thought of something else.

••• Picture, if you will, an elephant in slacks.

The elephant is Loxodonta africana. The pants are “Sanforized-Plus.”

The elephant is wrinkled but it’s not his fault, for he was made that way.

The pants are never wrinkled — they were made that way, too. The elephant never forgets. The pants never remember. At the end of the world, which one is better off?

50

Vivisection

[Sarah Ciston]

light tugs itself gravity loops an astronomy that cannot bear rotation we are particles

acting as waves

reasons have names gathering bookshelves playlists archive the ways a day will end

unused an index of

transparencies thickening skins

layering influence

we are slices of each other

explored by vivisection

skin-to-(memory-loss)skin

MRI hearts, lungs magnetic tectonic pull

Venn diagram orbits

blood vessels burst because

tangling hair divide cells, bundle stars we can mark each other with stories

we are waves

acting as particles

biologies that cannot stomach galaxies recording loops hydrogen, dark matter

51

(

Un)necessary Aesthetic Reinforcement As Told By My Father

[Gina Caciolo]

52

A gravity wall is built without reinforcement.

It is not necessary.

A gravity wall is built without reinforcement. It is not necessary.

A gravity wall is built without reinforcement.

It is not necessary.

They are designed based on the height of the Earth — to be retained against the back of the wall.

The pressure against the back of the wall determines thickness, base and angle of the front.

The front wall is angled, the back wall is straight.

Type, mixture, and strength of concrete, including cement, stone, sand, and water ratio are used to design a gravity wall.

Built from stone, unique. Plenty of time to build. It could be you have a lot of materials. (Don’t have to pour concrete or build with wooden planks.)

Could have been aesthetics. Tried to determine when it was built. In the ’30s or ’40s, not even sure they knew that it was a gravity wall. Many years later they did an analysis of it to determine how it actually worked. Based on an old theory. I believe it was constructed under an FDR program. This type of wall, doubt it’d be built today. It wouldn’t be cost-effective. It would take too many man-hours. Impractical. Unfeasible. Useless…

53

Erotic SOS

[Daniel Baker-Jud]

Bearing the soft cudgel of manhood in the palm of his hand — a failed physics equation that began and ended in entropy — one whose potential energy forever remained trapped, untrained in the methods of kinetics — he stared out over the city for the last time. Soon it would travel by in a blur faster than it ever had before and his stern straight lips would curl in the gesture of a smile, but perhaps it was the air pushing past that forced them upwards.

The weight of the thing in his hand for so long did not match the weight of the thing in his mind. He wanted to travel back in time and buy a ticket for the Titanic or any other sinking ship.

His failed attempts at masturbation went like this: short-short-short—long—

long—

long—

short-short-short

the strokes singing themselves out upon the drum-skin of his palms, never to arrive anywhere other than almost.

His mother and father thrust similarly — their 37-year-old Morse-love just now coming through as an anonymous suicide statistic in the news.

In the freefall he beat out the rhythm of SOS coming right as he hit the water and died.

A passing pod of whales laughed and all the marine scientists drinking alone that night mistook it for a dirge and cried.

All lonely life instruments — every sinking ship — in tune, echoing that wansome song: Short-short-short— Long— Short-short-short.

54

long—

long—

The Boy Who Held His Breath Forever [Dustin Heron]

One day, a boy began to hold his breath for no particular reason. He wasn’t waiting for something or asking for anything. He wasn’t a special boy in any way: He wasn’t disabled and he had no unique talents. Walking home from school he began to hold his breath.

He took a deep breath first, of course, and he ballooned with that breath; it pressed heavily against his ribs and yet filled him with lightness; his toes, angled down, barely scraped against the sidewalk, and he fluttered his limbs through the air, swimming. He glided around turns and across streets and finally up the stairs and through the front door and into the kitchen where his mother was boiling turnips. He hovered in the doorway. His cheeks were swelled out and little tears bubbled over them. He was not sad; he had invented a great game, a kind of joke, and as he steadied himself in the doorway he was overwhelmed with how hilarious he was and he couldn’t wait for his mother to turn around.

But she didn’t. She stood still over the boiling water, steam rolling over her shoulders. The kitchen was a sad color, lightless, the curtains slack, the sun not yet falling through the window. There was only the steam and the smell of turnips, and he could not call for his mother because to do so would ruin his game. He gave himself a little push into the kitchen, thinking he would tug her arm so she could see what he had discovered, but he floated straight up to the ceiling, rising with the steam.

He bounced a little against the ceiling, ricocheting off the overhead light and then slowly rumbling around. He was looking straight down at his mother’s head, the part in her hair, how huge and bald the top of her head was, how many gray hairs were beginning to snake out from that barren center. He kicked against the ceiling and went down towards her, but he got only a face full of steam and was sent right back up.

Flipping onto his stomach, he pushed himself with his hands until he was above the window, and, grabbing the curtain rod, pulled himself even with his mother’s head. With his free hand he waved and snapped his fingers but she never turned around. She did not move at all. She stared down at the water.

55

She, too, didn’t seem to be breathing, but she hadn’t gotten a great big breath like her little boy, so she did not float.

The boy reached down and pulled open the window, pushed himself through it, and floated out into the yard.

He rose to the tops of the trees, and then to the tops of buildings. He looked down at people waiting to cross streets and cars waiting for green lights. He saw a man holding a door open and never going through it. No wind blew, not even high above the city, and the boy maneuvered himself with hands and arms — a breast stroke, a doggy paddle — and he kicked his legs, and sometimes he pushed himself off buildings and the tops of telephone poles. For a while he held on to the top of the great flagpole at City Hall and watched the sun hanging low, a bird caught in the downbeat of its wings, the stretched and wispy summer clouds pinned to a diluted blue sky. Below him a man slept on a bench, a piece of cardboard for a blanket. A little girl in a playground held her hand out flat for a rubber ball suspended just above the asphalt. A young man was stepping into the street where a car straddled two lanes. An old man was holding a lighter to a cigarette, its small flame solid as honeycomb. The boy let go of the flagpole. He floated up and up.

He hovered over the patchwork of farmland, he kicked off the bellies of airplanes, he plucked a feather from a black-faced goose and left the feather hanging in the air beneath the bird. He went higher. The air was cold and black and he was close to the stars. Out in space he saw his father asleep during one early afternoon. It was warm and his wide, white back was exposed and the window was open, the curtain blowing in a little. The room smelled like the moment after you shake out a clean sheet, ruffled and warm, expectant. The boy poked a finger into his father’s back, into a tiny orange freckle just beneath the shoulder blade, but he didn’t wake. So the boy climbed up onto the dresser where there was a TV and a VCR and slid in G.I Joe: The Movie and watched it without the sound, sitting on his parents bed next to his sleeping father, one finger on the freckle.

••• He saw his neighborhood. There was a family who lived next door with a boy who was a little older than he was, and late one night there was an ambulance in front of their house. The mother had suddenly become sick. Her skin bubbled and she was afraid. They called the ambulance and she died. The father was a 56

short man with a round face and a beard, and the boy was always wearing an Oakland A’s hat. Without the mother, their house became very quiet, but the boy could not remember their house, or the family, before the mother died. It was the only memorable thing that ever happened in that house. Across the street was a family that had twins, a boy and a girl. They were both very bright kids, but the boy only ever wanted to play games where he was tied up and had to be rescued, and the girl always had snot in her nose. Up the street from where they all lived was a railroad track, and across the railroad track was a parking lot and a shopping center, and beyond that was a movie theater. Eventually, the movie theater went out of business and was vacant for a long time. All of its windows were knocked out with rocks. Past the theater were a lot of houses and then there was a ketchup factory next to a river. It wasn’t safe to swim in the river. After awhile, the town grew so big that houses were built all the way up to the borders of other towns: one side of the street was one place and the other side another and it was all the same. This one big town filled up every inch of the state, and where the states ran up against each other were houses, too, and there was an imaginary line that separated California and Nevada that sometimes went right down the middle of a single house, but it didn’t matter, because individual states meant as little as individual towns. The only thing that mattered was where to put roads and where to put houses. The skies were brown and people were sick.

And then, there weren’t any people anywhere. Only empty houses. After that, trees started growing through the roofs and sidewalks were torn up with their roots and rivers flooded the New York subways and that whole city fell into the black ocean, and ivy crawled along the freeway overpasses and after awhile those fell down and mountain lions paced through their rubble, struggling to warm beneath the yellow swirling sky. The sun grew smaller and smaller, just a white speck receding with the formless days, and snow fell all down the tall dunes of the endless shoreline, and all the trees cracked and disappeared in the growing glaciers skating through the brittle, rocky earth. A scraggly predator, the face of a wolf, the size of a bear, haunches high and arched who rooted across the ground with a snubbed nose and sharp tusks, the unseen and forgotten bones of the solitary omnivore, the final desperate adaptation, suspended in deep blue walls of ice high atop a desolate mountain as the sun turns in on itself, winks away in a passionless firestorm and the whole frozen rock is finally blown away.

57

The Specific Fear [Anhvu Buchanan]

alone air swallowing animals being buried alive with blushing bees by bald people children dressed as clowns choking in church with clocks dirty dancing dentists in the dark dying in dust electrocuting eight erect penises flying as foreigners play their flutes on friday the thirteenth growing germs with garlic ghosts through glass genitals the hospital handwriting hypnotizing hands in a hurricane ice itching insects with ideas injections of insanity jogging japanese with joint immobility justice the judge knees kissing kidneys knowledge of lakes filled with lockjaw loneliness left-handed lawsuits lightning lice mob of mother-in-laws menstruating moist meat narrow noise needle nosebleeds nuclear weapons at night near the open ocean old people odors purple pointed objects in poverty punishing prostitutes with puppets quitting a job in nothing but a quilt riding in a car ridiculing rats religion under running water scratching spiders into skin stuttering in surgery speaking to stepfathers covered in scabies traveling tornados taking tests near tombstones urinating under umbrellas undressing in front of the mirror ventriloquists vomiting vegetarians vertigo wet dreams in whirlpools wax statue wasps gaining weight waiting for wrinkles x-rays for full view in a triple x film a yard full of yesterday yelling zero people Ziplocked lost in the zoo.

58

Balancing Act

[Anhvu Buchanan]

He walks with weights strapped to his ankles.

His backpack is full of bricks & bottles & books.

On his head he no longer has hair, now only a solid steel helmet.

He eats only the heaviest foods in a chair super glued to the floor. He handcuffs himself to shower heads & kitchen sinks.

He sleeps underneath the bed padlocked to a sleeping bag.

Litters his floor with pillows, fur coats, & marshmallows. He tries to reason with his dry mouth with the numb side of his body. But he knows gravity is a never-ending staircase he just can’t find.

59

, Reheated

Even if I’m not I am.

Try again. This habit of making a habit has stuck.

It empties and empties again.

Arrangements are all the same mismanagement of arms’ length.

60

Microwaves

* [Sarah Ciston]

This basket holds too much biography, a life in goods — empty calories, single-serving packets camouflaged under a layer of fruits and vegetables that will go unconsumed, rotten on the counterette of a kitchenette because I don’t know where to put my eyes when I eat alone, so I turn on the TV, consume yet another single-serving of something and replay what I did not announce to the cashier: I am not alone.* The cashier has seen this never-quite-a-meal assortment before. He sees the future strung out before me — a long, white, waxy receipt that floats past whooshing automatic doors into the parking lot, a short drive toward this efficiency apartment, its remicrowaved takeout, its week-old, unrinsed dishes.

The cashier knows, based on my purchases, that one day the top of my ass will supernova, expanding until it’s even larger than its other half. He knows that you and I are not synchronized park swings.

I shop at different stores, try to make habit less pronounced.* I hand over the same plastic basket to another fluorescent face, unfold its clinking metal handles and wish I could wipe their rust smell from my hands. I accept the charges, fold up another trailing receipt instead of letting it flutter away. Every cashier knows how this basket empties.* Will that be all?

There are no provisions to explain us — our standing Saturday night arrangement.* Hunger consuming itself is not sustenance. We are ingredients that combine to make nothing.

I follow a drawerful of receipts back to a year ago,* to a green stucco four-plex, upstairs, with hardwood floors and a dishwasher, in the kind of neighborhood where you could take a walk to get a great cup of coffee and the best-ever brunch and if you felt like making a day of it maybe a discount movie ticket. I left its washer/dryer hookups for laundromats and that repeated question, the one we push aside casually, as though we have a more modern arrangement, even though we don’t. Still I scour Craigslist for greenstucco great-coffee four-plexes with hardwood floors with dishwashers with you.* You don’t live together?

Our friends are always surprised. They use carts with wheels and make recipes from scratch; they pack each other’s lunches. They cohabitate in trashy (call it transitional) neighborhoods to save money on rent, and together they choose what deep, warm color to paint the sunroom and what found art will cover the walls. They have a thrift-store hi-fi and a borrowed or inherited hope chest for a coffee table; they have a manner of conversation that assumes by choice of words that they have no plans not to be together. Their apartment is familiar, a reminder: We are not them. We won’t be. I know this. And yet — stay.* If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

Their online profiles taunt me in late night Google searches when my double bed is half empty and actually just a futon built with tiny, disposable wrenches and covered in queen-size sheets, the extra folds twisting to keep me awake while yearbook faces register for dining room furniture sets at wholesale clubs.

I know guarantees mean shit these days. And yet —

three years now, the drawer moves across town, expands to entire closets,

Another four-plex almost, a different antecedent. Microwaves reverberate.

Decisions have gravity, made and unmade.

Or else, leave. Forge new elements that still combine to make nothing. Peek into homes I might have, dollhouse lives in lit windows of the not-quite night.

61

They probably feel loved now, even if they are just pretending it’s forever. They don’t worry about any of the ridiculous things I do, now that they have been condensed to their basic reproductive elements. My elitism folds back onto itself like the pillow next to me smothers.

I should pretend to be ages I have already been, in which none of this has crossed my mind and I can continue to nurse doctrines of romantic autonomy Or whiskey instead, over unnecessary beers.* Instead I expand on an inthe effect’s the same. vented world in which we could live together, with microwaved hot water for tea, the nights’ routine of books in bed and smooth sheets trapping shared body heat. It is not this world. Here we combine to nothing.

The first bursts of the universe are auras still glowing unseen around us, sparks from forming elements and colliding gasses.

Scientists say that if we could see microwaves — if our eyes would absorb them, if our brains would interpret them (they can’t, but if they could) — the entire sky would glow with a brightness astonishThis is still true. ingly uniform in every direction.* This universe expands and every day we are smaller.

The servings shrink; everything doubles. here again, Microwaving a frozen entree,* I try to imagine this momentary furnace of a universe churning in its simultaneous states — matter and energy and spirit like solid and liquid and gas inside a tiny box of rotatI went for over ing light.* a year without Ding, Ding, Ding becomes the sound of everya microwave. thing tonight, every night, the gravity of another Appliance as inescapable metaphor, ingredients of our unnecesprevention. I tried it from scratch, believing that gravity wouldn’t hold, 62

believing that some waves could dissipate, that something else would arrive to replace them; nothing does. Microwaves make nothing. They just go bouncing around the universe, just land again near someone else. I finally bought a new microwave. This sary explanations, labels printed below each item in one is clean and each aisle. Our understanding is that of never really. uninherited. It is Never. Really. Picture a string, a particle, a wave; made of brushed and then unpicture it. It is not the thing you have metal and has a called it. beeping that I can’t Here’s another: We are the time-traveling light turn down. of a far-off star flickered out. From across the galaxy, telescopes aimed into history can tell we are already gone. It’s just these microwaves we shed, causing heart problems in convenience stores, causing heart problems. No chart can explain where those microwaves go when we have lost them.

Particles relocate but do not dissipate. Half-lives break down further still, lived again in increments, returning. This is the same myth I will keep telling, I will keep retelling, I will keep falling.

Picture the night sky, planetarium dome; and then unpicture it.

And then unpicture it.

63

Comfort

[Laurie Ann Doyle]

I don’t believe you.

Don’t then.

My feet are below. My head, above. Everything’s right where it should be.

If you lived in the South Pole, what is above would be below, and below, above.

Come on.

We’re stuck to the earth like pins in a pin cushion. If it weren’t for dirt, we’d keep going down. Who knows? Maybe on Jupiter they’re having picnics below all that orange-blue gas.

Down to?

I don’t know. The core, I guess.

What’s there?

Now that’s a good question. Fire? Rock? All I know is if it weren’t for gravity, swings wouldn’t swing, balls wouldn’t fall. They’d go on forever.

Forever?

Not forever. Things get in the way.

Would people die?

Yeah. And they’d have a hard time getting born. No one would stick together.

People would float away. Keep floating.

The boy imagined his mother in space without the comfort of up or down.

But they’d stop sometime, right? Land?

If you could call it that. The sky.

64

The Average American Swallows Eight Spiders Every Year [Emily Kiernan]

The freezer began to hum as she stood in front of it, indicating that she’d kept the door open for too long. Her hand drifted involuntarily to the tight button of her size-twelve jeans. She suddenly felt ashamed of the five pounds she’d gained over Christmas. The tupperware container with the eighth spider inside was wedged between a box of hot pockets and a red mesh bag of ice-pops. She hesitated a moment longer, peering at the spindly, cross-legged creature inside the frosted plastic, then grabbed the container and walked with it to the table. The spider gave a slight jiggle, but she couldn’t tell if it was still alive or if it was just her fingers shaking. The TV was on in the next room, and from where she sat, she could see its glow reflected in the dark kitchen window. Dick Clark was talking to some rockstar, and the small red clock at the bottom of the screen said 11:35.

Linda hated these end-of-the-year chores. There was never enough time.

Nothing ever seemed to go right. December was always a blur for her. On top of the Christmas shopping, cookie-baking and tree trimming that everyone did, this was also her time to make sure that she had used up all her quotas and had not overrun. This year, she had been surprised to find that she had already consumed her 146 annual pounds of sugar, but only 175 of her 200 pounds of flour. The cookies had been terrible.

Still, it wasn’t as bad now as it used to be, when the kids were younger and would gather around her with bewildered, exasperated expressions, asking her why did she act this way, wasn’t she supposed to be normal? They were too young to understand the distinction. But now it was just Rob and her, and he was in bed by eleven these days. Jennifer was married and had a place of her own, Michael was studying engineering up in Sacramento, and Danny — her lost, flitting little Danny — she could hardly believe he’d been gone so long.

She opened the lid and shook the spider out onto the table. It stretched a leg feebly and then collapsed again. She had always been unsure as to whether the spider had to be alive — they usually were, in the normal way of things, but did that matter? This was the compromise she had struck, and while this 65

would never be one of the pleasanter moments of her year, the freezing made it bearable. Some years she got off easy, and the whole thing took care of itself while she was asleep: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, they’d drop into her wide-open, snoring mouth and disappear. She didn’t like to see it happen, but it was better on video than in waking life.

This year, numbers one through five had been gone by June, but then she’d hit a plateau until September, when six and seven — two surprisingly large wolf spiders — had met their doom in one regrettable night. She had watched the recordings with increasing anxiety since October, when the bugs had begun to disappear into the approaching autumn chill. Still she’d held out hope until this very day, when after a gape-mouthed afternoon nap she had finally gone out to poke around the underside of the fire escape until she a found suitably small, hairless victim. It was a little chilly out, and the hunt had taken almost an hour. She was glad she lived in LA and the winter was never all that cold — otherwise she might not have found one at all.

On the TV, Dick Clark was smiling, and the camera was panning over the bright, cheering young faces in the crowd. They were all looking up at a young man playing guitar — shaggy black hair falling in front of his dark eyes. She wondered if this was what Danny would have looked like. She wondered that sort of thing a lot and imagined she would continue doing so as long as she lived, even if she lived to be a hundred. It was just an expression — she would live to be 80.1 years old, at last count.

She always thought of Danny when the New Year came around. He’d been born in the winter and his memory seemed to stand out clearest then, as if the whiteness itself made his shadowy little form more visible. She supposed that it was natural enough that as she did her accounting, her little penances, she would think of him, her greatest sacrifice to fate, to her eternally balanced ledger.

When she was young, before she’d had her children, she had been more enchanted with the life that had been assigned to her — had not yet known the extremities that it would force her to. She had always wondered what he would be like, her littlest, her .3rd. The first two seemed simple enough, but what could it possibly mean to have a .3rd of a child? Finally she had settled on the idea of a stillborn twin, a sad, underdeveloped little creature destined never to see the outer air. She had mourned a little for it, for her .3rd, as if 66

she could get this one-third hurt out of the way of her whole love. But then Jennifer and Michael had been born alone, with no poor shadow clinging to the edges of their vibrant little lives, and she’d begun to worry. She’d made the doctors check twice, but they were sure, there was no twin, no aborted, fractional child.

Then she was pregnant again, and the real horror of the miraculous had descended on her. She had awoken many nights with the dream images of horrible, mutilated infants still crawling through the dark around her bed, down the quiet halls to where the whole children slept. Not mutilated, but misshapen and unfinished, pitiful and repulsive at once. Each ultrasound was a glimpse into the shamelessness of possibility, and a chastening test of her faith. Yet in each ultrasound, there he was, a little speck of life by all appearances as whole a speck as could be hoped, and growing at the normal rate.

When finally she’d held him — bright, squashed face, bawling little miracle — she’d concluded that she must not have him for long: one third of a life only, or, she feared, one third of a childhood. She cried for this, even as she gloated over his beautiful, lively newness. Yet she guessed that this was probably the greatest kindness that nature was likely to bestow. It could have been so much uglier, so much stranger than the simple tragedy of a foreshortened life.

But he had come and gone so strangely. Sometimes he had seemed so perfectly present, a big eyed, dark-haired little man who was loving and sensitive and shy and prophetic only in the playful way of odd little boys. His teachers liked him, though he was too often overlooked, and his sister played with him as if he were a baby doll, though she was too old for it and had never treated Michael that way. He would carry his lunch to school every day in a box with Spider-Man on the outside and with a matching plastic thermos that she would fill with soup on cold winter mornings, and he would trade away the carrot sticks and apple slices just like a real little boy, and on those days he seemed whole. But other times, she would look into his eyes as he sat awake at night, or as he sang to himself while the other children were out playing in the yard, and she would think she saw the other two-thirds of him peeking out, the bits that were always flogging him away and away and away until finally he went so far that he couldn’t come back. There had always been times when he would go liquid, blank times when he wouldn’t be there at all, and then there were more, and then it was always.

67

She had always thought that the truly extraordinary was the one thing that her life of averages insulated her against, but here was the great, laughing irony at the center of her existence: he was stranger than an early death, stranger than loss or tragedy. He’d grown into — and then far, far out of — a shuddering unreality; here then gone, he was an uncountable more following after her countable children. One, two, more. Wasn’t there another? And there he would be, or not. From the center of her utterly calculable life he had emerged, unfathomable.

In the years after, she had tried to join a group for mothers in mourning, but it hadn’t been for her. They all said it was like losing their souls when they lost their babies, like losing their hearts. It wasn’t like that for her. Her grief was not a vast ocean she could drown in. Her grief was quantifiable. It was a number just under one-third. She had lost .3.

••• Linda sighed and walked into the next room to turn off the television; she didn’t feel like seeing it now. Besides, she’d already watched her two months of programming that year — now it was just background noise. Dick Clark froze, fragmented, and was gone. Linda walked back to the table and looked at the spider; it seemed to be warming up, and she knew she’d best get this done quickly. She plucked it up by one of its legs, held between her thumb and forefinger. It struggled weakly, and Linda tried to remember if spiders could shed legs when in danger. They seemed to be holding firmly enough.

She lifted it to her mouth, but then by some sudden impulse walked across the room and turned out the light.

She felt it more in her throat than in her mouth. It was tickling and sharp, a taste unbearably strange.

68

Apocellipses...

an excerpt from the screenplay “apocellipses...”

[Tavia Stewart-Streit and Sarah Ciston] Int. Integratron - Continuous It is as though they have just journeyed to the center of the earth to discover that it is made of wood and perfectly acoustically resonant. The dome stretches over them in a great indoor Milky Way. Collectively, they tilt their heads up and let their jaws flap open, taking in the space.

ISOBEL It’s beautiful.

BENOIT What is it for? dr. lazareth Weissman Welcome to the Integratron, the world’s foremost intergalactic vortex. Strange things are happening here, beyond your wildest dreams. angela Strange things are happening everywhere, if you haven’t noticed, Doctor Weissman. dr. Lazareth Weissman Call me Doctor Laz. angela Sure. Whatever. Still. Strange.

BENJAMIN So, how is the dome going to help us? dr. lazareth weissman The Integratron doesn’t help people. People help themselves. The universe is the stage on which you dance, guided by your heart. isobel ...guided by your heart. I’ve heard that before... benjamin So how are we going to stop it?

69

dr. Lazareth Weissman Why would we want to stop it? benjamin Everything we know about space and time and life and science is falling into a black hole.

Of course we need to solve this. It’s not even a question. dr. Lazareth Weissman Everything is a question. There are no answers.

Let this universe go. benjamin Everything has an answer. We came here to solve this.

Isobel Ben, we came here to help people, not to solve an equation.

Benjamin is devastated. isobel (cont.)

We have to let go. We have to move forward with some kind of faith that we’ll come out the other side. Rebound, remember? We have to let this collapse to create something new.

Benjamin shakes his head in disbelief. He runs out the door.

EXT. INTEGRATRON - CONTINUOUS Outside it has turned suddenly dark. The sky is filled with Aurora Borealis-like swirls of cosmic matter pushing against the atmosphere.

Bits of sky drip down.

Benjamin runs toward the van, looking up at the sky as he goes. He trips, picks himself up and runs again.

Storm has followed him outside.

STORM Dude. The sky is falling.

BENJAMIN Get back inside!

STORM Why’s it so hot out here? I know it’s the desert, but geez.

70

BENJAMIN The real question is why is it so cold. If this is anything like the Big Bang, it should be billions of degrees right now.

Storm shrugs his shoulders and goes back inside.From the van, Benjamin pulls out all of his equations and notes, plus Isobel’s drawings.

The wind picks up as he returns to the Integratron. The sky swirls and a tornado wall picks up in the distance. The wind catches a piece of his formula and carries it off. He chases after it for a moment before realizing it is lost for good.

He runs inside, trying not to lose any more scraps.

EXT. THE UNIVERSE - MEANWHILE A swirly orb of liquidy stuff hovers in the center of a field of empty whiteness. The colorful matter — all matter and antimatter — throbs as cosmic materials course through it, shifting, beating and breathing with the concentration of all the organic matter of the universe. It’s taking a moment to collect itself. Literally.

INT. INTEGRATRON - meanwhile The other four stand in a semicircle, listening to Dr. Weissman.

DR. LAZARETH WEISSMAN It’s like I always say, life isn’t about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain.

Benjamin runs over to the wall.

BENJAMIN We don’t have very much time! Tape, I need tape!

Isobel grabs a roll of tape out of her giant purse. She throws it to him as she moves to the wall and helps him attach their work.

BENJAMIN (cont.)

Look at this! It has to mean something! It can’t be just a coincidence.

Suddenly, everything goes black. The power has gone out and the dome is eerily quiet.

BENJAMIN (cont.)

Shit!

STORM What happened to the lights?

71

ANGELA I can’t see anything! Ooph.

A clatter. Angela has tripped over Storm.

STORM Get off me!

ANGELA Geez. I’m not that bad, am I? I’ve been known to turn a head or two in my time...

Benjamin interrupts. benjamin We need to see this to fix this, to figure out what it means.

Dr. Lazareth speaks up in the dark as though it weren’t dark at all.

DR. LAZARETH WEISSMAN It means nothing. Science can only solve so much. We are tiny compared to what’s out there.

And what’s in here.

ANGELA In where? I can’t see anything.

A light shines across Dr. Lazareth’s face from a pen light that Beniot has pulled out of his breast pocket.

DR. LAZARETH WEISSMAN In ourselves. We’re all swirling molecules and particles and the same stuff as the sky and the stars...

STORM Who cares about that crap when we’re all going die?

ISOBEL I always thought the apocalypse would be different than this. angela Different how? isobel I don’t know, more apocalyp-ty.

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STORM What, like sitting on a mountain top drinking kool-aid, waiting for the rapture?

DR. LAZARETH WEISSMAN It might not be the apocalypse you thought, but it’s the apocalypse you got. Buckle your seat belts folks, we’re taking a wild ride to the other side!

ANGELA The other side of what?

Something slams against the dome, and they hear things rattling, falling, slamming against one another. Something drips onto the ceiling.

BENOIT It sounds like a hurricane. Is that rain?

BENJAMIN That’s the universe.

ISOBEL It’s dripping? Really?

BENJAMIN That’s what it looked like outside.

Isobel I want to see. Is it beautiful?

BENJAMIN I wouldn’t go out there right now. I think another wave is coming. Dr. Laz, do you have a generator?

DR. LAZARETH WEISSMAN Already on it. Hold on.

A dinosaur roars outside. Inside, everything reverses.

ISOBEL Deracs m’I. TihS. The lights click back on with the thump of the generator powering up.

The dome continues to shudder at an almost deafening volume.

Benoit fumbles to open the BIG CRUNCH SURVIVAL KIT. For the first time they all seem truly terrified. Then the wave arrives.

73

Caterman

[Joshua Emerson Smith]

“Catering is for people who never made it in the restaurant business.”

As soon as he said it, we both laughed snarky laughs. I wish I could remember his name. Let’s call him Jack. Jack was in his early- to mid-thirties — didn’t look any younger. He said he didn’t drink hard alcohol. But he did have one beer with dinner every night. Jack and I were stationed together behind a bar at a low-budget wedding reception in a small hotel in Vancouver.

And when the food ran out that night, our boss, an affable sort of drunk Irish man, just shrugged.

“That’s what five thousand gets you.”

Jack and I had a good laugh about the whole thing, from the paper napkins to the horrible wine to the unfed guests. But our cynicism didn’t stop the band from warming up and everyone seemed to be in a fantastic mood. Some guests took it upon themselves to move the dinner tables back away from the center of the room to make space to dance. Jack took it upon himself to celebrate with vodka and cola.

“Want one?”

“Sure.”

“So what’s your girlfriend like?”

“Girlfriend?”

“What you don’t have a chick?”

“Well ...”

The dance was in full swing now. The band was playing some kind of old-time jazz but with modern instruments: keyboard, electric guitar, electric bass. The whole place was packed, and plates, presents, balloons, beer bottles and wine glasses were everywhere. The groom and the bride looked so happy dancing in a circle of their friends. The scene had our captain grinning.

“Now there you go,” he said.

Jack abruptly stopped pouring his second vodka and cola when a blackhaired woman in a short dress came up to the bar.

“What you got back there?” She said.

“Whatcha need,” Jack said, somehow managing to sound both incredibly 74

sleazy and charming at the same time. She paused and thought.

“While you decide, we could really use your help,” Jack said. “My friend here seems to be having girl troubles.”

She looked at me and then at Jack and then at me again. Then she turned around to lean against the bar so that she could look out at the dance floor.

“Okay, shoot.”

“Well, I guess everything’s cool and all. But I just feel bored.”

“I see,” she said. Then paused. We all kind of just stared off into space for a couple minutes. Then she said. “But if you left her you’d be lonely, right?”

“Well, I guess. That sounds about right.”

“It all depends on what kind of rollercoaster you like,” Jack said.

I got home around four in the morning that night. She was sleeping. I didn’t wake her. I just put on a pair of hiking boots and packed up my camping backpack. I remember thinking, “You might regret this when you’re sober.” But I also remember thinking, “Do it while you have courage.” It took me a month and a half to hitchhike to New Orleans. And yeah, I was lonely as hell.

75

When You Fall Down on the Internet, Who Picks You Up? Tweets from @kateregan, October 2009 to February 2010

[Kate Regan]

• New friend date! • New friend is stuck in traffic. I ordered her a drink.

(Thoughtful points) I might be drunk before she gets here. Oops. • Fell asleep on BART and awoke to a man standing over me contemplating “a good shake” so he could have my seat. No shakin the Kate! • I gave up the seat and then he made fun of me for blushing. Geez. Is this what flirting has come to? Dislike.

• It is impossible to enjoy a Mentos without singing the song. This was just tested. • If you must wear an lbd w/ lace cut outs up the side, the least you can do is cut the Forever 21 tag out. Gauche. • Every meter I touch turns to Fail.

New magical power? • Was just schooled on making lady decisions like not accepting rides from married men. Thx #bartpeanutgallery That’s been a real issue (?) • An undecided heart makes such a mess. • So glad Twitter has given me another way to productively be unproductive by allowing me to make lists. I’m listin’ it up. Listomania. • My hood has a gang of raccoons scurrying about! I bet they’re trying to infiltrate Pixar too. Darling little beasts. • “where u beeeen lady? I missing of your face.” I heart this baristo. I beeeen missing of his foam. • There was a woman dressed as a bunny next to me on BART. (Real bunny not slutty bunny) She looked super sad. Sad bunny on packed BART. TGIF • If it’s all in my head, why did I just feel something smack me in the face? • Call me old-fashioned but you might want to buy me a drink before you ask to put it in my ass. Jesus Oakland. Stay classy.

• Can you put “Advanced experience in having crushes” on a resume?

• I’m pretty sure this is a stolen movie line but — today I am hard to forget but not easily remembered. • “Can you feel the love tonight” comes on right as I decide I want to introduce my date to the friend zone. • I just gave one person the best webinar they have ever had in their life, I’m pretty sure of it. • I need a boyfriend solely so that they can zip up the ridiculous dresses I insist on wearing out. • Tweeeeeeet. Uh. That’s all I got today. I’m a hotbed of interesting activity. • After all the karaoke I’ve done, I still find it difficult to do a decent happy birthday. • Are you ever struck with the feeling of wanting a feeling? • Yoga is not like riding a bike. Your body doesn’t remember. Your 77

body might actually hate you. • It is 11/11 all day. I’m not sure I can handle all the wish pressure. • Mom and I are always on the same page when it comes to burritos. I think this is important in any relationship. • Taking a cue from our Pres., when something is wrong, I’ll hold a summit. Next up: WTF Am I Doing With My Life Summit. Should be popular. • Barista I see everyday asked for my ID this a.m. when i paid w/ a cc AND told me I looked better as a blond. #jerkface #youlookbettersilent • I just got a text message from DJ Jazzy Jeff. This is not a joke. #mylifeisweirdandawesome • I said ‘hella’ at brunch part II today. It was not ironic. It just popped out like BAM. • I’d feel like a total bad-ass today if I didn’t feel so so so bad. • Never under estimate the power of ‘Paradise City’ to get you pumped up for absolutely nothing. • Every time someone tells me they are in limbo, I try to figure out how low they can go. • Why make a tiny mistake when you can make a GIGANTIC one? Shit.

• I can’t wait to be really rich so I can buy horrible presents for people who I don’t like that they will feel compelled to display. • These shoes were made for sitting. These margaritas were made for embarrassing dancing. See the problem here? • The coffee is not working. I repeat: the coffee is not working.

• Tuesdays are only acceptable when they are wearing their Thursday suits.

• Just used the words resplendent, aural and effervescence in one sentence.

Can I have dinner now? • “my mom doesn’t brine so it’s like, what’s the point?” turkey snobbery all up in my chats • The fire alarm is going off again. Careless basting. • I’d be lying if I said I was not in the back of a stranger’s SUV in San Jose right now. • Just started a new band with brother and Sara. We are The Wrong. Catch us on the No Shame Tour in a city near you.

• Just made a list of different lists I need to make. BAM! • I think the hideous art in the waiting room at the doctor’s office made me more ill than before. Kincaid will do that to you. • It seems the new self-checkout at Safeway also doubles as a natural selection expediter. • In the dating world it seems like lunch is the new dinner? I don’t know how I feel about this. • Cold! Global warming is never there when you need it. • “Fooling people with a subject line is like cheating on yr spouse. You can only do it once.” priceless e-mktg tip from class I’m in. • Note: ordering whiskey neat on a first date sends a message. • New Crayola color concept: Adventure Beige. Talk amongst yourselves. • Gmail’s telling me I have 8 unread mail messages but wont let me see them. I’m a little panicky. This is like my worst nightmare. #nerdalert • Found 78

mysterious 8 unread emails. They were all about Britney Spears. • For the record: I am very bad at locking it up. • Tonight calls for red lips and big hair.

This is serious. • I don’t trust a person who orders a latte without foam in the same way I don’t trust people who order [any liquor] and DIET coke. • My doctor told me today that she likes to think of herself as an “abstinence ninja” • Is it possible to keep meeting the same person over and over again? I feel like I’m getting really good at it. • Barista at starbucks told me I just took the joy out of Xmas bc I took the last Joy tea. He had horrible delivery. #notfunnysir • The way the fog is creeping in right now is far more TLC than Radiohead.

Wait, what? • I’ve learned the secret to perfect high-fiving every single time.

EVERY SINGLE TIME. Merry Christmas to me. • I don’t know how much the Neiman Marcus chocolate champagne cake was but I’m positive it was worth it. • Carmex is the heroin of lip accoutrements • @MichaelCR pull it together, man. everyone knows falling down is my job. • I feel like I found more things than I lost this year so you know, there’s that. • SFO —> DFW. FTW. OMG. • I’ve been awake all year! Everything is funny right now. Man, 2010 is going to be the best. • Standing still is not a viable option. • Sometimes I catch myself worrying about future worrying. • The sky is purple. Today is already so good. • Breakfast in SF, lunch in LA, and now dinner in NY. Today I am the chicest person I know. • There is someone tap dancing on the bar and I paid $15 for a glass of wine. New York! You are delicious and difficult. • Every single patron in this restaurant is dining solo. • One of them just sent me a sex on the beach shot. Am I on Jersey Shore? Do I get to beat the beat now? • Two pairs of tights, knee-high socks, jeans, three shirts, a scarf, gloves, boots and coat. Movement is awkward at best. • Broken down. Bleeding (only a little). Finished! • If urban camping were an Olympic sport, I would have at least medaled today. • Friends of friends are the best. • “Nothing can stand still. The passage of time is why we’re here. One day, it’s all going to crumble.” #heavycabconversation • Doomsday cab driver’s ringtone is the new Britney Spears tune. • I’m emoting all over the place. • Hey jet lag, what’s up. • People that love Rush make me oddly uncomfortable. • It’s really hard to talk about your feelings sincerely while watching 30 Rock but it’s also completely satisfying when it works. • Sometimes it just can’t rain hard enough. • Tupac is totally ruining my game. • There’s no shortcuts in hell... or Ikea. • Skankan pot sets, Flarken chairs. Ikea adventure going on hour 3. If I don’t come out alive, I 79

always loved you. • Ikea’s playlist has a lot of Jewel on it. I might cry soon or go catatonic in the pillow bin. • Why is everyone I know either getting engaged or going to/coming from Vegas? I didn’t get the memo, guys. • If Courtney Love and Janis Joplin had a baby in a typhoon and managed to dress it well, it might look just like me when I walked into work. • Twice in 24 hours: someone is jammin out to Eminem’s “Without Me.” People still do this? Reminds me of being in the Kroger parking lot in GA • I don’t believe in grown men who end conversations with “toodles!” • Distance and time: the best frenemies a girl could ask for. • I don’t care about the Tablet. I don’t ever want a Kindle.

I’d like to go back to using pencils. • The only thing online dating ever did for me was make me try harder to meet people offline. Profile: deleted. • I have MmmBop stuck in my head for no apparent reason. Now maybe you do too.

Ha! • Ethan Embry really hit his high point in Can’t Hardly Wait. • I’m going to invent hair-resistant lip gloss and make all available dollars. Patent pending. • Today I will write letters.

• I’m wearing Uggs right now and I like it. Don’t tell anyone... #oops • Lifesicle is the new slang for penis • Conversation w/stranger in elevator: Me: “Hi. Happy Thursday” Him: “I have some bananas.” • Tonight has “red wine” written all over it. • It is SFBeer Week (a.k.a. Feel Fat and Make Poor Decisions Week) • Google Buzz might be the icing on my “I’m too connected” cake. Really. • Sometimes you just need to listen to “Glycerine” • Back to square one. Again. If I were on Four Square, I’d be the Mayor. • Four words that should never be spoken: cotton plaid crop top • “There is a couple talking about jam here. We need to get out.” • 6:22 is too early for anything on Saturday. AM or PM really. • Middle seat between two men in short shorts. A most unfortunate flying situation. • There is consensus: white gummy bears are far superior to green gummy bears. • Dance party induced sweaty situation. Hott. • I feel like my knowledge of Nelly lyrics really gives me a leg up in most situations. • Anyone else think about the Gin Blossoms today? • Ben & Jerry’s Neopolitan Dynamite ice cream is better than any boyfriend I’ve never had. • “You are a walking Beyonce song.” — The nicest compliment I’ve received in a while. Courtesy of Vera. • I spent my lunch break eating brownie bites and looking at cats dressed up like hipsters on the Internet. I’m awesome. • CL Missed Connections work like whoa or um, that’s what my friend told me. • The Internet ruins everything.

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Contributors We still like Daniel Baker-Jud is currently working on a collection of short fiction: Erotic SOS and Other Stories from Sinking Ships. He lives in Northern California.

The poems by Anhvu Buchanan are from a manuscript on psychological disorders entitled The Disorder Index. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 580 Split, Boston Literary Magazine, Cream City Review, Parthenon West Review, William and Mary Review and Transfer. In 2006, he was the inaugural recipient of the Steger Award, Virginia Tech’s undergraduate poetry award. He recently completed the MFA program at SFSU, served as the poetry editor of Fourteen Hills and co-curated the Living Room Reading Series.

There once was this girl Gina Caciolo. She lived in the Lehigh Valley (that’s in PA) and realized it was a great place to be 13, but not 23. Now that she’s the latter, she’s packing up a pod and moving across the country to CA to attend CalArts for grad school. Her turn-ons are “How I Met Your Mother,” Jack Daniels and green peppers. Her turn-offs are cell phones, cell phone plans and her job at a cell phone company.

Meagan Cavanaugh prefers things that are made up. Her favorite planet is Earth because it’s home and looks friendly in pictures.

Sarah Ciston once helped invent the phrase “We Still Like.”

Laurie Ann Doyle is the winner of 2010 Alligator Juniper national fiction contest. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Dogwood Journal, Stone’s Throw Magazine, The Express and elsewhere. Ever since second grade, she’s wanted to live in an upside world like Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and be done with gravity once and for all.

Like a chess prodigy or a member of New Edition, Tupelo Hassman has never quite recovered from having a bridge graffiti’d in her honor at 17. Her attempts to supplant the memory of “I (heart) Tupelo” six-feet-tall in white housepaint over Highway 17 have been published in a few literary magazines and continue in her current projects. Her first novel, girlchild, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux before the end of the Mayan calendar.

You’ve been warned.

Dustin Heron is a rogue planet. He may or may not exist. If he exists, he may or may not be a planet. He’s more like a hunk of icy rock that got blasted 81

off of a somewhat warmer hunk of rock and is floating around in a lazy, elliptical way that’s almost but not quite an orbit, because he’s got no focus. He’s just kind of… there.

A native of a decaying Pennsylvania steel town (from the Billy Joel song), Emily Kiernan writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West and places that aren’t the way she remembered them. She is pursuing her MFA at CalArts and interning at Black Clock. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pank, The Collagist and The Artizen.

Writer, brewer and aspiring Modern Renaissance Man (in the classical tradition of Leonard Nimoy and Shaq Diesel), Anthony Lux splits his time unequally among completing his first novel, editing the WWII memoirs of his grandfather and engaging in the comparatively-less-violent trench warfare of institutional online strategy development. He lives in Cambridge, MA. Mako Matsuda is a masters candidate in poetry at SFSU. His writing can be found in Lodestar Quarterly, Sous Rature, BlazVox 2K8, The Yellow Journal and Maganda. He has been featured at Litquakes’ Lit-Crawl, Writers with Drinks, Babble-On, K’vetch, Ecstatic Monkey and Apature.

LJ Moore is currently an artist-in-residence at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. Her book-length poem, F-Stein, based on science, family, pop-culture and the paranormal is available from Small Press Distribution.

She is a co-founder of Bay Area–based Small Desk Press, and you can read her book reviews on Examiner.com.

Jim Nelson’s work has been published in North American Review, The Erotic Review, Instant City, Switchback, SmokeLong Quarterly, Watchword and other fine literary venues. He can be reached at barbecuingpeople.com.

Chris Pedler still likes the goddess Athena — wait, what was the question?

Helene Poulshock became a freelancer so every day could hold its own surprises. She specializes in handprinted small editions of things: apparel, book covers, screenprints and more. Nature is her god. www.cultureconsumer.com.

Kate Regan makes lists of the lists she would like to make and then throws them away. In her spare time, she lives in the Bay Area.

Though she wasted her youth waiting for Muni buses, Monica Regan still likes San Francisco, where she lives, writes and ekes out a living while pursuing an MFA in creative writing at SFSU. Despite its general marginalization 82

in American culture, she still likes poetry and has special like in her heart for the journals where her work has appeared or is forthcoming: New American Writing, sidebrow, Volt, Parthenon West Review, 26, The Big Ugly Review and Digital Artifact. Monica also still likes collecting trash and taking pictures of it. If you (still) like Monica, shout out to her at: monicaregan@yahoo.com.

Matt L. Rohrer was born in the summer of 1983, when everything was golden. He has been published by The Surfer’s Journal, Tinfish, Digital Artifact and Watchword. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Small Desk Press.

Jason Rosten lives/studies/works/writes in San Francisco. He is currently under indictment for felony plagiarism. The work in question, “A Heartbreaking Work of Stunning Brainstuffs,” was met with critical ennui, despite multiple inventive/self-recontextualizing uses of the semicolon. His epic-length poem, “Upon the Thorny Heather, Where I Smok’d,” a relentless and vigorous investigation of the act of being, is forthcoming, pending composition.

Joshua Emerson Smith is a freelance writer/reporter working in the Bay Area. His work has been featured in the East Bay Express and the SF Bay Guardian as well as on several NPR radio stations. He’s currently working on a novella about the struggle to reinvigorate American activism.

Tavia Stewart-Streit has volunteered at 826 Valencia’s creative writing center, interned for McSweeney’s and ZYZZYVA, and currently runs National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program. She is a co-editor for Watchword Press and also curates Watchword’s gallery series Whole Story, a new performance model that transforms a conjunctive gallery and theater space into a life-sized, multimedia diorama in reaction to one short story. Tavia is currently working to launch her own literary arts organization called Invisible City Audio Tours. She’s been published in Smokelong Quarterly, and is co-authoring her first nonfiction book, Ready, Set, Novel, which will be published

by Chronicle Books in fall 2011.

Andrew R. Touhy is a refiner, part-time, ajitter. Is a bastard of the system, unreward of the state, lefty left-handed southernpawed. You may locate his work in words, elaborate-y rounded structures, on the bull tip. Lids can be a feature in New American Writing, Web Conjunctions, New Orleans Review, Colorado Review, Eleven Eleven, Fourteen Hills, Watchword, The Collagist, hearstwhile elsewhere, at 857 Haight, and over on the bench. Dog park ahoy.

He’s looking. For Pluto. The Icky Mouse Planet.

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Now accepting submissions: We still like / Issue 3 westilllike@gmail.com