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.

_from_ No Measure

It’s bright here, and windy. An expanse, a salt flat, a great basin, low shifting dunes, rocky washes, mountains at all horizons, a near sun, all surfaces radiant, glittering scales of mica and angled quartz, light in my eyes.

We index, mediate this place. What holds my attention? I measure a length. I measure distance.

- - -

An instrument is scored for my measure. That is, it tells me what to look for. Its notches name a distance, its units an account. I have an array of these: wooden and metal rulers, a wound tape, a clicking wheel, a hanging scale, and string, and pencils. I hold a tool up to something still. To measure is to align, to measure against. The string is slack against the grass. The string does nothing. I do.

I spread the legs of the compass, draw a circle in the sand. One thing makes its mark in another.

- - -

- - -

Accuracy is an ideal limit. You see everything from the control room: the desert’s vastness, each measure I make, the clearness of the air, my walk through it, my nearness, the dunes’ array, drought and water. I reach for your arm but you pull it back. Behind glass you’re reaching I see it. Pull me. Let me look out from here one instant.

- - -

What is the grass to the air?

The desert is clear: sun bright, reflection of light off the light sand and rock. Clear—transparent and radiant at once. The brightness is exact or collapses what’s seen now. Not disaggregated, not void. Up, a glassy surface. Out, imperceptible array. It needs collision, no, the wind. Or the wind is it? I see through it? Only in distance is there air here. Only in what the grass gives off or doesn’t let go of.

- - -

- - -

I know the difference between the possible and the actual, the particle-wave collapse. Perception is confined to the present.

I can’t know what glass is. Its formation is liquid not crystalline, the molecules’ positions variable. To know the window is to be wrong?

I see the desert through it. You look at me through it. I want to move through—I want to know what’s behind it, I want what’s behind it, not only what arrangements make it.

The site of the window, the collapse when I look, is my error.

- - -

Quantification, a problem, I walk here.

This implement contains information about things that reflect light, vibrate, or are volatile. By implement I mean my body. It scales the processes of events.

- - -

- - -

The grass yellows. A clear and indifferent sound of weather. It rains.

We run up the stairs. I start to tell you something. The desert grows dark. You go to the window, press your hands against the glass. I try to speak? I have no sound. When the hail settles I’ll go down and clear it out. Now you record the event, set your notes on the table. I try to walk over? Look, I leave no trace. When I move you don’t see. It’s the grass in your eyes, the weather. There is no sound? I take your hand. From here I can see so far. It rains. I have to tell you something. Look. You pull me to you. The desert is dark. No sound, I know. You press your hands to—there is no sound. When I move you see? Close your eyes. The desert is dark, hail makes sound. I don’t try to speak. Out the window, it rains. You press my back to the window. With your eyes? Record this event, no—no sound, the rain, I start to, in your direction, know, it’s clear out.

- - -

I climb the stairs to the control room. You let me in. Bright white desert.

At the window. I picture you here.

You stand at a dial, can handle an instrument. You ask, what would you like to measure?

Desert, white hot, your lattice, what pattern, my direction, glass and water—I can’t answer.

- - -

Dogs; A Dog

It is not wrong that I began to feel in league with the dogs after a while. My pity transferred to identification and I think this is a typical thing. I had become, in the run of my illness, attached to proclaiming my emotions and beliefs and experiences as typical, as usual, as not differing from those of anyone else. This was a cover for my suffering, and penance for a lifetime of thinking that I was, perhaps, unique in some way. Fame, I had learned, did not make one unique, nor did talent, nor did money, nor did sustained, hard effort, nor did any kind of perceived or developed merit. I was old enough now to understand the impossibility of being unique, but not wise or radical enough to savor that, to feel in league with others.

At breakfast the other day I listened in on the talk of three men discussing the various attractions of labradoodles. The loudest had hectored the server into having his eggs prepared in an unusual way: basted with butter, then poached in it. He was now opining: “They’re expensive and so I’ve looked at the breed-specific rescue organizations but they only have older dogs. I want a puppy. I want a fresh start.” I understood his desire, cuttingly so, but for any living creature moving through time a fresh start is no more possible than uniqueness. Breakfast is the easiest meal to eat.

I work with animals who have been strays then taken to a city shelter, or else surrendered by owners in unfortunate fixes, or else discovered behind locked doors of abandoned buildings, or tied to fences. From this shelter, the rescue organization selects animals unlikely to be adopted in a customary way, likely to be killed for reasons of space or behavior. The city shelter people do their strong best. People visiting them prefer small dogs, young dogs, easy dogs, heritage breed dogs, light-colored dogs. Three-legged dogs are popular with liberals. But in the right context, pitbulls are popular with progressives, as well as with people raised in a religious, rural milieu now living godless in the city, as well as with people who believe—trembling—in their own goodness, as well as with most workers who identify with being workers. These people also prefer old dogs and injured dogs and deaf dogs and blind dogs and heartworm positive dogs and dogs with histories of neglect or other types of abuse. They either prefer them sincerely, or think they should, righteously; it is usually all the same to the dog.

The rescue takes in as many of these dogs as possible. It is powered by people who not only have difficulty in their lives but who also identify with that difficulty in some regard, whether triumphant or resigned or wading through the morass of it while clutching the swamp-lacquered clothes of their simpler, social identities. I began, in volunteering, to understand that caring people sympathize but hurting people empathize. Empathy is mobilizing in a lasting way; sympathy never is. It is not revolutionary to know this but it is personally cataclysmic to learn it as a consequence of pain sharp enough to glitter.

Fifteen years prior I had sat in a soup restaurant with a writer I admired. She was well known for her work, which coolly identified the circulatory pain of human life, as well as its acid pleasures. Volunteer, she had said. That is the best thing you can do for your writing. She worked with dogs and often wrote of them in a way that was not precious, nor metaphorical. For me, then, a dog was a celebrity, a magnet, a tool of distraction from myself and my own lacks. In the intervening years this held true, until it didn't, until I needed convalescence of a quality I could not immediately locate. I had done itinerant service and carework, for humans, inconsistently: a sympathizer. I do not think I can really describe, either, the transformation—except through description of illness and I decline to do so.

In this way I am a dog who walks dogs through a glossy autumn neighborhood with dripping trees and large, clean single-family homes, bordered by a boulevard and two main thoroughfares. I am a dog who picks up another dog's shit, who watches mucosal discharge drool from the vagina of a dog in heat; I am a dog no better than any other, a dog who watches dogs discover dead rats under piles of leaves and does not recoil, merely walks along, a dog who can understand, intellectually and romantically, the attraction.

At the facility I prevent danger. I react to need. These are my responsibilities. It is hard and easy, a liberatory onus owing to my thumbs, my height, my ability to process the complication of consequence. All I do these days is process the complications of consequence, with blunder and fear. This is how you care for a newly ill body. This is how you care for a thing living in a world no longer on the terms of their kind. I just wrote the same sentence twice. When I enter the facility the dogs are quiet or the dogs are barking or the dogs are crying staccato, and I am a dog arriving to greet them, or maybe I am just a dog arriving.