“I can’t feel my ankles.”
“Ankles? Really?”
“That happens to me. Can we sit down?”
“In this cold? We’re better off walking.”
We were walking through the city, across a frozen park, toward the hotel, and something was thundering from within my chest, a beating on my breastplate. This was new. “You’re right,” I said. We kept walking. I scanned the roads that bordered the grass, for cabs.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Why?”
“You’re holding your stomach. Was it dinner?”
“No, no. I’m good.”
“Cramp?”
“No.”
He gave me a untrusting look. “We should just keep heading this way. I can see the church next to the hotel.”
“Good,” I said. “I need to lie down.”
We walked toward the steeple. There was such a weird tightness, a new kind of grip, lower in my chest. I was just starting to really examine the pain, map it—
I dropped. I landed under a bench at the edge of the park and was flooded with warmth. It was so warm, so many creeping-quickly vines spreading throughout my limbs and torso and all so hot, such a liquid heat within me—I dreamt of my face in dirt. My head was burrowing through soft black soil, was pushing its way through, twisting and clawing, without fingers. The dirt felt so warm. I opened my eyes. I was on my back.
It was snowing! It was so gorgeous. They were the biggest flakes I’d ever seen. Wow they were big, the size of birds, and they were falling at me, spinning, but too fast. Too fast—they were falling as if leaden, without their usual caprice. They were falling straight, like rain. I could barely breathe. I was sucking air out of tiny crushed lungs. Lungs the size of thumbs. My lids shut and I went out again. I saw myself on the back of a dragon, as he was scorching forests and countrysides—Or maybe I was the dragon. I was the dragon! I was flying so fast, swooping and breathing fire upon the roads, all the filthy trucks—I was the goddamn dragon!
Jesus, what were we supposed to do that night? Jack died ten minutes before noon.
After silently eating curly fries and gyros, watching a boy play an old Galaga machine, we went to a movie, Antz—the only thing playing at the right time. There and on the way between dinner and the theater, we were feigning interest in the world. I was touching all the glass I saw. I was touching the windows of the shops. I touched the windows of the cars. I touched the glass of the elementary school near my house. Hand would stay at my house that night and the next two, through the funeral, before going back to St. Louis.
After the movie, which was too dark for our mood, we got popsicles from the 7-Eleven and stood in the parking lot, waiting. Soon we were done with our popsicles and were chewing on the sticks. We had nowhere to go. The next day was not possible yet.
There was a man on the outdoor payphone, lit blue under the malfunctioning awning light. His palm rested on the brick wall of the building above the phone, his hand gripping the receiver like a barbell. He kept hanging up, dialing again, hanging up, swearing, dialing. We watched, chewing, quiet.
A police car, huge and roaring, swung into the small parking lot like a whale thrown on a beach. A khaki-clad officer, wearing black boots over his calves, over his pants, walked slowly to the man, took the phone from his hand and hung it up. They began talking. Soon another police car arrived, this one an SUV. There were three cops, and they were all talking to the man, who we guessed was making obscene phone calls, or hassling an ex-girlfriend. Minutes later there were five cops—two talking to him, one on a radio—calling for more cops?—the other two watching the talking two.
Hand and I made each other laugh, putting words in the cops’ mouths. We were knocking each other out and the cops didn’t seem to care. They periodically glanced at us, two men standing under the awning, watching them, giggling, and I worried then hoped they might hassle us, too—it would give a new direction to the night and we had no idea how to use these hours, any hours anymore—but they only glared, sneered and finally handcuffed the man and drove away with him.
The blood was draining to my head. I was upside down and my stomach was being jabbed. I opened my eyes and was floating above the ground, watching the sidewalk and the frozen grass from five feet above. Oh shit this could be—
No.
“Put me down,” I said. Hand had me over his shoulder.
“You’re awake.”
“You’re fucking killing me.”
“You want to stand or—”
“Just put me down.”
He swung me down to my feet and I stood.
“Where were you going?” I asked.
“I wasn’t sure yet.”
“Dumbshit.”
“Your face,” he said, pointing to my nose. I touched it and felt the blood. The scab had opened.
“Hey!” Hand yelled. He was running away now. There was a taxi gliding slowly along the perimeter of the park and Hand was waving his arms at it, sprinting.
The cabbie, dark-haired and with a goatee, shared the front seat with his wife and their baby. We sat in the back and argued about hospitals. Hand insisted and I insisted. Hand worried and I worried a little bit, but we agreed that we’d see how I felt in the morning. The episode was brief and I felt good again. The blood still tickled through me, filling me again, but it was the cold, I decided. I thought about calling Dr. Hilliard but didn’t want to do the time-zone math and didn’t want to bother her anyway. It was the cold. The pressure of the cold air, the pumping of cold blood, all of it too much work. Why were we in Estonia anyway? It was all so much work. The air, the high-pressure air. I needed warmth. I wanted Cairo. The sun in Cairo would be so giving.
At the hotel, the man at the desk gave us a sour look and the casino was closed. We went to our room, Hand droning on about infant mortality in South Africa, Mandela’s role—
I think Hand was still talking when I fell away. I slept and dreamt a dream almost only aural—hours, it seemed, of someone, huge but distant, cackling in a pained, choking way, and the room this time looked precisely like my mom’s, with that painting of the boat up on sawhorses, the ground beneath roped with drought. Then Olga and my mom were the same person and they were both telling me to buy a gun to shoot the sick frothing dogs.
AN INTERRUPTION
by Francis R. “Hand” Wisneiwski
MONDAY, A DIFFERENT ONE
I MIGHT AS WELL start here. This is Hand, writing almost two years after the action taking place in this book. I sit on the second floor of a house much too big for one. The house is in New Zealand, in the Coromandel peninsula, and its occupant, thirty-one years old, of strong body but a mind that swerves and sputters, is alone. There is rain here, in a village called Matarangi, in a valley facing a bay, surrounded by green hills, under a ceiling of rain.
At first there was no rain. I arrived on a cloudless Tuesday and expected the best for my stay. I have rented this place, old, leaning left, on the end of a wide beach, for just over two weeks, so finally I can do what for around two years now—since the initial appearance of the book you’ve been reading—I’ve wanted to do. It’s appropriate, I hope, that I add my contribution here, at about the point when I personally found the plot, or whatever it was, to begin waning. There will be corrections here, and explanations. I’ll try to keep my rage and bewilderment in check.
Here in New Zealand, I sat down with the book sooner than I’d expected; I’d planned at least a few weeks of swimming and drunken evenings, fuzzy and full of rugby on TV, but instead I was given rain. So I got started. Here, until I’m done, I’m going to correct, delete and elaborate upon Will’s text, which tells half the story it seeks to tell, and makes all kinds of things up, and, I think, does a rather half-assed job of all of it. Earlier readers of this book, I feel, read a diluted version of the week Will and I spent, a version afraid to speak, one which found solace in innuendo and gesture, as opposed to simple and declarative speech—one that left u
nspoken some of the most essential motivations and implications, and was built in large part upon at least three enormous and unjustifiable lies. I have never been one for outright untruths or so-assumed subtlety if it comes at the expense of the message, or realization of potential impact. See, just now, I came out and said something that Will, or those who convey things in the way he would choose, would find some fey, twee, or sublimated way of communicating. There is a time for twee, and a time for just fucking opening your mouth and giving it to you plain.
So I’m here to fix things, and this house seemed the perfect setting. I know no one here in Matarangi, so my distractions were likely to be minimal. I have only this book, the one you’re reading, and my own more accurate notes and memories, and the photos I took, which I’ll sprinkle throughout. There is a grocery store not far from this house, within walking distance if I’m feeling robust, and in it—a small place, no bigger than a living room—they sell all I would need, and the proprietor wears no shoes.
No one seems to wear shoes in New Zealand. On the drive from the airport, I stopped at two different malls, looking for pens, paper, scotch tape—things I knew I needed but couldn’t carry on the plane from Phuket, where I’d spent the last eight months trying, as part of a fledgling pseudo-missionary (nondenominational) outfit, to convince teenage Thai boys not to sell themselves to German pedophiles, that they had alternatives—though my colleagues and I haven’t completely figured out what those are, quite yet. For those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the sex trade, we tried to educate them about STDs and other perils of their occupation, which include the simple over-enthusiasm of many of their clients from Berlin’s suburbs. Anyway, in both Auckland-area malls I entered—the first didn’t have a stationery store or anything approximating or inclusive of one—there were barefoot shoppers. Whole families of barefoot shoppers! It was fucked up. I was jubilant but perplexed. I’m all for this kind of thing, get me right, the shrugging off of refutable or plainly uncomfortable habits, but it was a shock, all the bare feet indoors, as is any national custom of which you haven’t heard but should have. Did you know this? The guidebook said nothing about this, though it did make clear why the residents of New Zealand are known as Kiwis; it has nothing to do with the fruit, which is what I’d assumed, with no evidence that that sort of fruit is native here. The kiwi is also a flightless bird no bigger than a robin, somewhat endangered here, with a long curved beak. I haven’t seen one of the birds yet, though signs about the preservation of their habitat are everywhere, as are their images on logos, restaurant signage, and on the national currency, which is, with its clear acetate windows and bright colors, easily the most beautiful money in the world.
I have now been here, in my rented house, for three days, this being the fourth, and after a few hours of clarity that first day, there has been only rain. Sixty-three hours of rain so far. I’ve been counting, when I haven’t been pacing, and doing push-ups, and re-reading Giambattista Vico’s New Science, which I assume you’ve read and so won’t get into much beyond recommending your revisiting the section on Poetic Wisdom and then trying to reconcile it with American foreign policy toward Khadafy in the late 70s and 80s. Seems impossible, though so many—far too many!—have tried.
But the rain has not stopped, that’s my current point to make, and this rain is keeping me from my present task. It’s gotten me to re-read the book, which is a good thing, something I didn’t think I’d do so soon after arriving, but at the same time the rain has impeded my ability to dig into my revisions, to amend and edify. When I chose this spot, on this island and on this thumb-like peninsula and on this bay and in this house, built like a wooden jungle-gym with boldly colored Danish accents, I pictured myself much like Ernest H., swimming in the morning, writing a few hundred words just after that, then allowing the afternoon to drift on the slow river of five or six strong cocktails.
But without the swimming—which is impossible in this rain, for the water is already colder than I expected or would be desirous to anyone, my day is without a beginning—I flounder. I sit for long stretches with my hand in my pubic hair. I have picked my nose so much it bleeds. I wake up to rain and can’t even walk outside. I have no car. I dropped it off in Whitianga, because I thought that would be distracting, to have a car here, a car making possible escape from the work at hand. So no car, but without one and without sun, things here are wretched and I’m losing my holy damned mind.
TUESDAY, WITHOUT MERCY
Of course I’m mimicking the structural device of the book as a whole, and I’m finding it a comfortable enough contrivance to live within. It shapes my words and circumscribes my task. Today I’ve decided that I’m going to spend seven days, while the rain continues, illuminating this manuscript, and will do so in as orderly a fashion as I can manage, given that this is not my bag, this reworking of text, within red borders, in the midst of a book. I’m a scientist, really, not recognized as such by the Obeyers with their degrees and lab coats, but I have ideas, and provable theses, and I believe and many have noted my ability to see connections that no one else can (including Brian Greene, who I met once at an airport and who told me, and I quote, “you’ve got some interesting ideas there, buddy.” Beautiful man).
At the moment I’m typing onto standard printer paper, in green ink, to make as clear as possible the separation between my words and his, with the hope that if I send my pages to the book’s publisher, they’ll see fit to include my comments somewhere—ideally where I’ve placed them myself, between Will’s Sunday and Monday, well before the assumption mentioned on the book’s original cover.
Sweet people, I want to mention, tangentially but relevantly, before I get too involved here, that this is my fifth day here, and it’s still raining. I call you sweet people because it’s not your fault. The rain is not your responsibility. The rain! It’s not always a downpour kind of rain, no, but often it is, at least once a day it is, and otherwise it’s just constant. However unsettled I was before, I am twenty-six and one-third hours further along now. It’s been almost a hundred hours of rain, and I wonder about their drainage ability inland, and what it’s doing to the rivers. (On the news are reports of motorists stranded and houses drifting away, but the instances seem isolated, which is odd, considering that where we grew up, the troubles would be far worse, I fear.) I want to also apologize for my tone, when there is a tone to my tone, which I blame on De Profundis, which I was reading on the plane, when I wanted to be reading Teirno’s microbe-hunter book, which I heard was definitive.
All the food I bought that first day is gone, everything but the beans, which I don’t know why I got in the first place. I don’t eat canned beans and never have. I would go get more food but I’d be soaked and then would catch something and lord knows where the closest hospital is, and will the doctors there be wearing shoes? I can’t take that chance.
And I can’t get the washing machine working, so I’m wearing the same pair of underwear I came with, which was not my plan. True, I only brought two pair, and true, I usually wear a pair three days before rotating, but still this overuse was not my hope, and is always inadvisable for a man of my active lifestyle and fur-inclusive back end. Do you hear that accursed ocean? I have a few of the doors and windows open, anything to relieve the pressure in this place, so I hear it all day and all night. I’m supposed to be comforted by the sound, that unstoppable and wide white distant slow soft car-crashing, but it’s starting to warp me. There’s just too much weather here. I feel like I’m on a ship, surrounded by indifferent and relentlessly unsubtle forces of nature. I can close the door or the windows but at this point I’d still hear it; I can feel it, like you can feel bass in your heart or your mother’s footsteps on the floors above.
This morning a really disturbing thing happened. I looked out the window of this home, at the ocean, which was grey like slush, and before it, on the sand, directly in line with this house I’m renting for almost nothing, was a black lump. It was long and bulbous in the
middle, and immediately I knew it was a body of some sort, or a garbage bag filled with something, shaped like a body. It was not a log, or anything plastic or man-made. I could tell it was once alive. It’s still there now, a few hours later. Damned if I’m going out there to see what it is. Usually I would, I suppose, but these three days of rain have done something to my sense of movement and my access to courage. It’s like I’m carrying on a long-distance relationship now to these aspects of myself, previously so close at hand.
Even on the TV, the people are a little surprised by all the rain—uncharacteristic in February, they keep saying—but I don’t believe them. They knew it would rain and knew I’d be driven halfway around the corner and down, the fuckers. I’m sure it rains like mad like this every February, that every February they have a wet season, but they don’t want to lose all the tourist money, so they lie through their teeth, or call it the Green Season or some shit. Lord I’m going soft and weird. I haven’t swum in so long, haven’t seen the sun in a week—it’s been so long since I’ve walked out of the ocean licking the wet salt from my mustache and beard while the sun dries the water on my back. It’s just wrong. I need these things. The storm has apparently dredged up all this seaweed, the beach covered in it, and in the shallows you’d be enveloped in it, so I don’t swim—from what I hear this part of the world is plagued with lyngba, the hair-thin seaweed that causes stinging seaweed disease, which I’ve had once—like poison oak but a thousand times worse, itching with the power of speech, a baboon’s screeching kind of speech—and refuse to live with again. I have no taste for the seasons anymore. Nothing is worth seeing in the rain, and all I really want to do these days is see things.