Everyone That Got Off

at Back Bay I personally spoke to them individually, said the conductor, officiating down the aisle. Scorn came naturally to the narrator. What, pray tell, he said, were your exact words? Not loud enough for the conductor to hear. An imperceptible gust, an ectoplasm of dust and hair and punched-out tickets for the commuter rail—a great deal of my work deals with fictional writers writing about writing fiction. He mouthed the words. Imagine diagramming such a lip-sync, a multiple personality. He described himself as unrecognized, not not-great. Like climate change. He was no chaste champion of icebergs. He simply could not afford fossil fuel. Nor could the mammal both small and tall to whom he’d remained unmarried for seventeen years. Her psyche was mohair. Her fear was that he’d out himself writing on a topic insufficiently eponymous. They were childless. She said her female doctor was a prick. Pretentious to say that pocket notebooks were his finest work, but baby college students in satin baseballs caps, hockey fans four feet wide, their Satan-worshipping children in knee-length world-tour t-shirts—

The train rocked side to side. The lights went out and the starship made a starry sound. Out the dark windows, dank walls. He went online at night and built a Toyota. He opened a new tab and Frankensteined a Volvo. The lights came on again like dashboards, spacecraft, a bad trip at a bucolic Phish show, a girl of fifteen had thrown her skirt over his head and galloped off in her underwear. It might never happen again but he wished the train would take him farther than expected, he wished he would emerge changed.

Details

I woke wadded in night, my nose bleeding piteously but without purpose. The sheets were strewn with stains as if I’d brought down fall and I listened for my overgrown children downstairs, passed out across sofas. Streetlights glazed the windows. I brushed the sensor on my computer, it must have had a name as part of an anatomy, but my intimacy with it was pre-verbal. A screen dawned. I wanted to receive, respond, reactivate. There were no emails I hadn’t already seen. I didn’t want to initiate or generate. I wanted to say we had less, while my husband implied we had more—we were both trying to reduce our target. A car passed, calming while it lasted. My husband’s father was living as a hermit, growing his thorny curls to his knees at the end of the world in Nova Scotia. He claimed he was off the grid, that he ate “but roots”—we made finger ears—“and rabbits.” His beard smelled like canned peas, said my husband. I wanted to say the pain was greater than it was, while my husband said nothing, or he said the pain was nothing. It was a difference in how we protected ourselves. I wanted people to feel sorry for me, but I wouldn’t give the details.

Range

Downstairs, my teenagers ranged from child to adult. They still endowed me with the superpower to peel any orange. Superfamilies of language—mangled comment, concept album, single fire stick, standing reserve. I was on hold. “Your call will be … in the order it was … or for real estate taxes, your plat and lot number.” It helped to imagine warrened City Hall, charismatic land line, lost era of ash trays. In the end, I had to cross the city to City Hall to pay by hand, my fine motor skills habituated as a sleeping pill, my unhoused neighbor sleeping in the dog scratch against the arrested development mulberry tree. I’ve always felt most real when I’m farthest from home.