THE YOGURT.

It’s Dannon. You know, Dan-non, like in the jingle, from those old television commercials we used to watch on cable. DAN-non. You hear it? I bought it from Safeway an hour ago and haven’t refrigerated it yet, though I stashed everything else—the strawberries, the honeycrisp apples, the red onions, the string cheese, and the eggplant. But the yogurt I’m keeping warm. I want those martyring, empathic probiotics energetic and ready for what comes next. I want them awake.

My old high school English teacher, Mrs. Daly, retired a couple of months ago. I heard from her cousin that she was planning to exercise her savings on a tiny house in the mountains, and in the backyard build a giant composting bin from scratch, piling orange peels on eggshells on worms. This composting bin would be so generative and self-sufficient, supposedly, that when she kicked the bucket, her young, and able-bodied husband could load her rigor mortis-ed corpse into the bin, then fertilize the garden. Very interesting because I always thought her problem was more related to her profuse hatred for children than some (clearly unstable) desire to return to the earth. In private she likened our adolescent attempts to disassemble classical texts for their implicit messaging to monkeys throwing their shit at walls. But surely our failings were her fault? Her cousin, who so graciously accepted my friend request made on Facebook under the guise of being Mrs. Daly’s realtor for the tiny house—I was thinking about high school and wanted to check in on her—I mean, body compost? What crept into her head?—told me she got the bin idea from this documentary she watched—and then I knew I had to get my hands on it, break it open.

In the documentary, the filmmaker and subject was recovering from second impact syndrome, which is when you get another concussion when presently suffering from an initial concussion. His little gray brain swelled like a balloon, and like a guy blowing way too hard into the mouth of that balloon, so all its rubber corners crushed straight into the skull, he got a deadly headache. So he fell into a devastating, frankly unavoidable depression, and in order to survive the interior ravages, had to take a step back from everything he had ever known. No more Hollywood glamor, only hermitude. No more car, only bike. No more sewage system, no more waste as a concept, everything repurposed, urine back to water. Local produce or starvation. It took some time but he felt better. And I could in a sense see where Mrs. Daly was coming from. As I watched this subject/sufferer prepare himself for each day, slipping delicately into his water shoes, shrugging into his singular and sweat-wicking shirt, gumming down his vegan gruel, I began to believe in the routine. I saw how his life diminished item by item until he was just a person again, or something less. I walked from my bedroom to my bathroom to my kitchen.

Then into the mudroom. A life of asceticism was my next step, too.

The concusionee/ascetic fermented his own yogurt. He loaded goat milk into a great steel pot and followed the ancient recipe—keeping the secretions of the goat at a middling temperature for the better part of a day so that the various strains of “good bacteria” could comfortably incubate. It seems like he favored Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Bifidobacerium lactis, though I’m rather partial to the Streptoccocus thermophilus The others are cylindrical, pill-shaped and interlockable, but the thermophilus is rounder, insect eggs or intestines, slippery and they disperse. I hypothesize that thermophilus will slide so smoothly between my fingers.

Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the electromagnetic field (EMF) meter, this much I’ve gathered. But still I can’t help imagining the grainy photograph, sepia Bell thrusting that Ghostbusters favorite into open air, seeking the paranormal. I suppose I imagine the invention of every noteworthy electronic device happening in his hands, those thick grubby fingers piecing together the future. I think about Graham Bell a lot. I think of him every time I pick up my phone. Every time it buzzes. Lately I have begun to feel a buzzing all over my body. I keep my phone’s ringer on silent as is customary. And I am attuned to its signals. I plant it in my breast pocket or my pants pocket or my jacket pocket, and I pay particular attention to that spot, waiting for the notification. But the vibrations have spread in the past couple of weeks; I feel it near my breast pocket when my phone is in my jeans, in my jeans when my phone is in my breast pocket, on my person when there is no buzz at all. So maybe the universe is sending me secret signs, and maybe the buzzing comes from elsewhere.

I learned rhetorical analysis from Mrs. Daly, but it does not go far enough. I cannot keep crafting arguments through implicit rather than explicit signs. Things should be laid bare, and I should understand instantaneously, which would mean that we were connected, thermophilus and I. I also read Hamlet in Mrs. Daly’s class, and that was significantly more useful. I do see myself in Ophelia, which surprises most people. But I understand her, I do, in the way that she stood by and saw everything and knew things were going bad but couldn’t figure why, the decomposition of events, couldn’t move past the coated window, couldn’t do anything, except go to the river, beg to sink herself. And the way her hair spread out across the rippling surface, the water gelatinous, refusing to let her sink. Maybe I need to cite the Millais painting here. How her image was born from a yearning for the natural. And the moxie of the natural, to only admit the deserving. The thick unforgiving water is what I think of when I make eye contact again with the Dannon yogurt. It stares back placidly. What is it trying to say?

The fact of the matter is that my Amazon package has been delayed by (they guess) two days. So my EMF meter is nowhere in sight, and this yogurt which I should “Keep Refrigerated” has been sitting out all day. But that’s okay. The documentary and I, we’re at odds. In the documentary, the moment is one of revelation, the end to a long journey of self-improvement and earth-return. The docu reader goes way up. He pulls his hand back, and the reader ticks down. “See?” he says. “The yogurt, man. It senses our presence. The yogurt knows we’re here. It knows.” He gestures at the camera, at himself, at the yogurt. “We’re all connected.”

The buzzing in my fingers has started again. Damn Graham Bell relic, I put it into the refrigerator. I need all my focus for this task, need to close my eyes and visualize. The gelatin river giving way as the yogurt reaches out its energetic tendrils. But the buzzing stops, wavers. Maybe I’m imagining it. I’ve already peeled the cover off the yogurt cup, what more contact does it need? I dip my fingers in? I swirl them around, bring them to my mouth? Mixed berry? Maybe the digestion is bad, maybe that subjugates the probiotics to my own re-composition. Dip again, this time I press my fingers to my face. I smudge a line across my upper lip, just beneath my nostrils. Another across my eyelids, two more in the whorled shells of my ears. More buzzing! What is it trying to tell me? Let’s see. If I travel up the river—

There’s a level of porosity I think I’m not achieving. I was weighing the various ways I could better prepare myself for this experience before I set off, how to most suitably open my mind. Psychedelics were an option, or meditation. A concussion, even. I needed to shake up the brain, force it to de-language. Through some quiet, positive manipulation, I found my new Facebook friend coughing up the address of the tiny house.

I almost ran out of gas. At one point my wheel jagged in a rut in the road, and a nice mountain man who probably took my orientation to be something other than it is helped me to push it out. Finally I made it, key under doormat like cousin promised. The house was tinier than I expected. The same size as the composting bin almost, so when I stood before the bin, I could not see the house which stood right behind it. I put on her young husband’s water shoes (three sizes too big), walked from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen, in approximately ten steps, and looked to the garden. And its steep slope. Found a handful of worms in the prevaricating earth, reached an arm into the composting bin and felt the steam radiate upwards to envelop me. This all would have been better if I had psilocybin on my person, but my Amazon package was delayed. I brought the Dannon outside and considered the earth. I considered the river.

Is there a way to pass through the surface? My arm is moving without any prompting from me. My father once told me that to be living is to be able to move of your own volition. Us and all living beings, the worms my sisters. We slither along the base between apple skins. That’s

Then he switched to a cell phone factory, and things moved sometimes.

The yogurt on my face is so dry it’s beginning to crack. No thanks to the mountain wind which draws moisture away. I turn facedown in the river for relief. It’s clear to me now that this piece of real estate is fundamentally inhospitable, cold and empty, and I almost want to turn back. I could draw my phone from the fridge and dial Mrs. Daly. I could apologize for tricking her cousin. I could say, “I’m on my knees, Mrs. Daly. I’m knee-deep.”

But there she is, Ophelia, she finds my hand and sticks to it. I find I’m wishing for the mountain man and his large shoes. But “your options are fast dissipating,” she says. “What,” I say.

“Is it all here?” she says.

“No, my Amazon package was delayed.” We’re burbling.

“No. The logos, pathos, and ethos.”

“What?”

“The purpose, medium, and context.”

I can’t pull my hand away.

“Audience.”

Mrs. Daly once gave me a 75 on a Shakespeare paper.

“You’re prevaricating.”

“I am not.”

“This is a call to action.”

“This is a call to value.”

“This is a marketing scheme.”

“This is a Socratic seminar.”

“What is a call to action?”

“A protest against structures?”

“What structures?”

“Societal structures?”

“That which connects us?”

“That which is modeled after the human body?” hi there. im mrs daly’s realtor. my phones been wiped due to a storage problem. cannot get in contact with her but could you confirm the terms of sale for me? please send the contract again immediately. what I tell myself. My arm lifts me up, drags me to the lip. My knees would swing but they’re stiff. Ophelia’s already down there in the water, floating but gathering sufficient momentum. What’s that, is she singing, is she reaching for me? Is that the origin of the vibrations? My young father once worked a job in seafood packing, so he saw a lot of living things moving.

Alexander drifts past us going down, but I can’t read his face. I think he’s muttering, “We’re all connected! We must continue to move, and the phones keep us connected—” as his mouth lingers at my ear, his breath soft, grazing my shoulder. But I can’t be sure what he says, if it’s something more like “I did invent the EMF meter. I am a purveyor of the paranormal.” I can’t be sure. I’m full of yogurt. Yogurt fills the gaps in my water shoes. Yogurt walks a mile in my water shoes. It buzzes, leads me to the mouth of the river and the riverbed, the appleskins.

I think—and I’m thinking—that there are things in this water besides us. They’re moving through me, sisters and smaller things. I’m tipping over, I tip in. Is that you, thermophilus? Finally I eat something and it is decomposed.

Then Mrs. Daly and her young husband went for a day trip down the mountain in search of Lactobacillus bulgaricus. The drive up was tough.