Scott Rettberg

I (unemployed)

I can only try

It could have been anything or anyone. An unemployed man, a homeless person. It could have been a toy floating in the water, beckoning. Her back was only turned for a couple of minutes, talking to a neighbor about sunscreen or something, and then he wasn’t there. She was on the antidepressants, and maybe that made her less aware. Or something. It could have been anything. He just wandered off. There was no screaming.

I will try to show you around

There were a few months there when Charlie was between things. While he was unemployed they spent some time at the beach cottage and he really felt like they bonded during that time, father and son.

I need to find a different place

Johnnie alternately describes himself as “a traveler,” “a searcher,” “a free spirit,” “a freelancer,” “a seeker.” He never describes himself as “unemployed, living off of a dwindling trust fund,” though if the truth were to be told, that’s exactly what he is.

I do not like the look of this

You know those people who find gold coins on the beach, or winning lottery tickets in the breeze? Johnnie is sort of the opposite of that. Unemployed, bleary-eyed, and hung-over, Johnnie can go to the most beautiful places in the world, only to find the ugliest scenes.

I have to go away from my home

While he is flush and unemployed, Johnnie stays on the run, driving his way from one coast to the other and back again, keeping on the road, stopping only for fuel, coffee, drugs, and one-night-stands. Just passing through.

I will think on it long

Howard had been fascinated by dioramas as a child, and one day while his mind was unemployed by the threat assessment in front of him, it occurred to him that terrorists might think of places as sorts of dioramas too, the humans so many figurines to be immobilized and frozen in time.

I will go down to the well again

They went back to the cottage six months later because the therapist suggested it might be cathartic. The island was all but abandoned, the unemployed beach covered in snow. They walked along the water and remembered the day.

I must ask for an answer

Howard sometimes thinks of the quiet toxicity of the Cold War, and how certain concepts, such as that of the thankfully unemployed neutron bomb, might have ever been thinkable. Then he thinks about IEDs and metal detectors at schools and wiretapping and waterboarding and other things. Then he gets back to work on a diagram of Jersey barriers to be installed in front of a Department of Education facility in Kansas City.

I will try your other number again

Charlie dials the number that he has kept unemployed, secreted in a sleeve of his wallet behind his Krispy Kreme card buy-ten-dozens-get-one-free card for so long. While he knows it would destroy Anna if she knew he still had this longing, certain desires are hard to let go of under any circumstances.

I am not who you think

As an entrepreneur, Kent considered himself to have never been unemployed, even when he was without gainful income. Sometimes he got the vibe from someone, say in a singles bar or a chamber of commerce meeting, that she or he though Kent was a fraud. Just because he thought outside the box. Just because he could think different. Where others saw nothing, Kent saw opportunities. That was his secret weapon.

THEY (distributed)

they made us part

Anna could blame herself, and sometimes she does, though the accident was of course objectively not her fault. The blame could be distributed a thousand different ways. It is this diffusion that causes her so much pain.

they should learn to answer for what their men do

During his twenties, Charlie worked with an outfit that repossessed and resold automobiles. He mostly worked on the sales end of things. His customers had universally poor credit, and the whole business was somewhat predatory. But Charlie figured it was a matter of distributed risk. Some of his customers were able to make the note. Others were not so lucky.

they take away our home

As the subprime market started to falter, Kent was lucky enough and smart enough to move some of his assets to cash. Then there were a couple of foreclosure opportunities he couldn’t pass up. He figured his obligations were distributed over a long enough time frame that he could cash in on the downturn, rather than suffer from it along with the schmucks who got in over their heads without knowing what they were doing.

they are not kind to us

At a show in San Francisco, Roger meets an artist who has a theory that the repressed angers of people all over the world are distributed through natural forces and cataclysms of various kinds, a sort of Freudian Gaia hypothesis.

they come around and study us

Intelligent alien life forms, the dealer Johnnie buys hash from explains as he weighs out a couple of grams of Afghan blond, are distributed in extremely small ships in the upper atmosphere, using nanotechnology to record our every move. We are, the man claims, not really autonomous agents, but in fact some other species’ experiment. The reflective hulls of their ships are what’s actually to blame for the greenhouse effect.

they may let us live

When Howard has dreams, they often feature a beautiful, healed landscape, with a kind of distributed serenity, but utterly devoid of human beings.

they say this is kind

When he grows tired of the traffic and shopping mall culture or is feeling particularly entrapped, Dave loads some coastal webcams into his browser and indulges in the globally distributed idea of California that he rarely experiences in real life California.

they show their hand

Howard wonders if people really buy the nebulous idea that a shadowy network of distributed vigilance is protecting them. From what he’s seen, the whole apparatus is like a box full of Lego pieces from various sets, which no one has quite figured out how to assemble.

they take back all we make

Though they are together, they are alone together, physically proximate but psychically distributed from each other, bound primarily by their enduring sense of loss.

they do what no man would want them to

Though you can never say never, flight patterns are now distributed in such a way that no plane is likely to crash into the skyline of a major US city again. The fighter jets now have more than enough time to scramble, and you can bet no one will hesitate to shoot down a commercial airliner with terrorists onboard.

HIS (psychological)

his part in this is small

Howard always enjoys poker night with the boys from risk assessment. He rarely wins, but the psychological thrill of taking down an anxious actuary with real math skills cannot be overstated.

his animal will think on it

A psychological profile of Kent would describe a man who easily gives in to his impulses. Never call him Clark or he might put on a show.

his three men will come for you

Insofar as some of the people he had been associated with were involved in organized crime, Charlie’s experience of that world had been nothing like the Godfather or the Sopranos or any other of those stereotypes. They were businessmen. Threats, while real, were mostly psychological. He was not a made man or even an Italian, and this reflected in his work. Charlie had not ever been involved, for instance, in an actual murder.

his work will come to an end

Roger’s shift from being a “studio artist” to becoming a “site-specific artist” was mostly a psychological one, but it got him out and about more often.

his read on this is off the page

When his work took him to hostile environments, Howard always thought to check his own psychological state. Sometimes a crowd of teenage boys running down a road, for instance, is just a crowd of teenage boys running down a road. Other times, the same sensory input could yield a different response, and make Howard want to flee.

his turn is over

Terror is a context-sensitive psychological state. Something that seems innocuous, or even beautiful, in one context can seem a horrifying and deadly threat in another.

his house is not a home

At a certain point they both realized they would need some psychological help, some sort of mediation, to get through it, to shorten the distance between them, to survive.

his need to think is not great

Johnnie never obfuscated the purpose of his use of hallucinogenics. He never considered them “mind-expanding” substances, he simply wanted to use them periodically to alter his psychological state, to get “fucked up” in the sense of switching the television to a different channel he did not ordinarily subscribe to.

his sound did make us change

Johnnie had a type of psychological addiction to the club lifestyle. He was never a big dancer, but the music, the smoke, and all the bodies throbbing, put him into a sort of flow state, in which past and future didn’t seem to matter, present transcendent.

his first call did not bring us home

They went through with the funeral ceremony at the church, and though they did not believe in God, the ritual was itself a kind of cold comfort, a psychological ice-pack.

WITH (dominated)

with so little to show

It’s not as if Johnnie never had any ambitions. He did go to college for a while, and got some formal musical training. He’d had some good jobs too — for a while he’d had a union gig as a forklift operator. But he fucked that up just like he fucked up the band. He isn’t one to admit the extent of his internal turmoil, but his life is dominated by a kind of pain he can think of nothing but drugs to combat. He feels detached from his own body and mind.

with his good name off the page

In Thailand, in a safe place where he was sure none of his conservative clients would ever hear about it, Dave paid top dollar for the services of an exquisite professional who made him feel so dominated that he wept in the throes of it. He found it liberating, this giving in.

with the big picture in play

The San Diego real estate market was on fire. Kent turned three properties and made a half a million dollars in the space of year without putting so much as one penny down. He was no fool and he knew that someday it could all come crashing down, but he grew more confident with each successful deal. This was no time for risk aversion. This was a world dominated by high fliers, men who could pull the trigger. He hadn’t felt so high since the dot com boom went bust.

with the day away from us now

Charlie is on the platform, and the boy is on the train. The train is pulling away, and Charlie is dominated by overwhelming sense of powerlessness. He wants the boy back, off the train, safe in his arms, but he can’t move his arms. He can’t even wave goodbye.

with the spell over now

In Albuquerque, there is magical night with a painter he knew from college. The peyote makes them both see things they have never seen before: Johnnie feels dominated by something approaching love, for the land, for this girl, for this moment. But in the light of the day they both have headaches and feel strange around each other. She makes him chili-fried tofu and egg whites, but something has changed and soon it’s time to get back on the road. He can see her relief as he packs his things to go.

with one hand where I can see it

At a certain point Kent is working so many deals and dealing with so many terms and lines of credit that he has trouble keeping track of them. Balloons, ARMs, floating notes. But he never lets on that he doesn’t understand or lets himself feel dominated by the brokers. No chinks in his armor.

with the world up in the air

Anna’s dreams aren’t all bad. Sometimes she can fly. She stands at the edge of the roof of a tall building, dominated by the urge to leap and catch the wind. Knowing she can fly but hesitating in order to feel the breeze against her skin.

with a change in the point of his word

There were slip-ups between the birth and death of their child. Dominated by his desire to be with Helen again, if only briefly, Charlie allowed himself to change “never again” to “I will never permanently leave you,” and felt ok about it.

with no word to form

With the insurance money and the settlement from their parents and with the loving environment their aunt and uncle provided for them, with so many positive influences, Charlie had other options than to get mixed up with the kind of people he did in his twenties. It wasn’t that he needed the cash, more that he needed to feel like he was a part of what his friends were into. And the danger itself was a thrill. He was dominated by a kind of quiet but persistent tendency towards self-destruction he would be hard-pressed to explain, and he could hardly imagine a life without some degree of danger.

with people to study the answer

Her therapist thought the dream meant she felt dominated by forces beyond her control. Anna knew that they were paying their therapists largely just to restate the obvious, and she was ok with that. She just needed a safe place to talk.

AS (applies)

as if you could tell me

Howard applies a certain skepticism to what he is told about the operation in Iran, as the information comes from someone who takes special pleasure in lording his security clearance over everybody else in the group. Know-it-all says that something big will happen there soon, though he won’t say what. Maybe he’s right. Probably he just watches the Sunday talk shows like everybody else.

as if these words could make you live

Roger applies for a grant to study the monumental art of ancient cultures, and he is shocked when he gets it, and so he finds himself expending precious fossil fuels flying across the ocean to find himself wandering among obelisks on well-tended greens. If they speak to him, he does not hear them, and they can’t explain what they mean. But they do inspire.

as I turn away from you

Helen applies some effort toward getting past her past, though she never really succeeds.

as we turn off a little more each day

Both Charlie and Anna understand that they are going through a pivotal period in their relationship, and as much as they both try, they move a little further away each day. Charlie applies for a new passport. He says it is for business, but they both know better.

as the spell would work no more

The blue dogs are running a hell of a campaign against his boy down in Georgia, so Dave applies some of the old tricks, using codewords for race and class, manufacturing some inconsistencies in the old boy’s service record, even digging up a few choice details from the divorce papers. He even works in the phrase “soft on homosexuals.” Still, they keep turning it back on him, and the polls don’t look good. Once those dogs got sink their teeth in they don’t let go.

as you see oil and water

Somehow Johnnie ends up driving Anna to the rehearsal dinner, and the old awkwardness between them still applies. She knew he thought she was backing Charlie into formalizing their bond, tenuous now as it had ever been, and he knew she thought he was probably hopped up on coke or something worse. At least one of them was right.

as a new hand would try to move us

Helen applies for a marketing job at Google and the interview goes well. The hours are long, but the options are satisfying, and there’s a luxury bus with wireless that picks her up in front of her house every morning, and she joins a company tai chi group that instills a new sense of harmony.

as we see each other even now

Maggie applies for an experimental treatment a specialist recommends, but she’s already ruled out the most exhaustive chemo regimen as an endgame. She doesn’t want to spend the last of her days hairless and nauseated. She doesn’t want to put that on her friends, or on her father. Some days takes the likelihood of her immanent death surprisingly calmly, preferring a quick exit to a prolonged sickness. Other days she wants to tear a hole in the world and sneak right out of it.

as you turn away from me

Howard applies for a transfer out of the bioterrorism unit after only a couple of months on the job. The ambiguity and the magnitude of the threats are just too much for him to deal with logically, and the enthusiasm with which some of the people on his team discuss disease just creeps him out.

as we think and turn it over

Kent flips the condo and applies for another mortgage, and is fucking amazed at how little collateral he actually needs to have to get it, even with his shaky credit history. They don’t even bother to check.

A friend recently emailed to ask me what the hell I’m doing on my blog. A first tentative stab at explaining my plans for Frequency:

It started out as a poem using a list of 200 of the most common words in the English language (from an arbitrary list found online at http://www.duboislc.org/EducationWatch/First100Words.html, which is not necessarily accurate), each word serving as the first word of ten lines, and each line using only the words from the list. I was going to do a combinatory Flash thing with that. But then I decided to add a couple of other constraint components, turn it into a novel, and maybe skip using Flash (or not, I’m still not sure). I’m using the 100 most common flickr tags and downloading 20 creative commons photos marked for each tag. The prose texts each include a single word from a sequence, according to wordcount (http://www.wordcount.org/main.php), of the most commonly used English words beginning in order from the word “frequency.” The prose texts are meant to respond in some way to both the photo and the line of the poem they will go with. I think that that user will navigate by selecting any word in each given line of the poem, which will take them to one of the ten lines that begin with that word (either via a random link or I may let the reader choose which line from a dropdown menu under each word). On each given page, the poem text and the photo will appear, and the prose text will be read as audio (and probably will also be visible with a mouse-over on the photo). So in terms of the narrative, the presentation will be completely nonlinear (or nonchronoogical) and arbitrary, though the poem text will have a kind of logic to it, as the lines will come in a kind of chain (the next line will always begin with the last word chosen). Anyway, it’s ballooned from an idea for a project that I thought I could get done fairly quickly to a 2000 segment poem/fiction/image project that will take me some months to complete. I’m posting the sequences (sans images) on my site, mainly because it’s forcing me to read and revise them as I go, and also so that I have some sensation of progress as it comes along (and so that the couple of people who read this site and aren’t spambots can, well, read something — there ought to be some reward for being human and reading at the same time). The way that I’m writing this is a bit different from other new media projects that I’ve done, in that I’m separating out the design/layout from the writing. First the words, then the rest of it.

Some things I’m interested in exploring in Frequency include:

• an obviously constrained writing practice that nonetheless results in a coherent narrative.
• a hypertext intended to deliver multiple fragmentary but coherent reading experiences in multiple reading sessions.
• the idea of the collective (un)conscious — will a text derived in part from the words most often used and in part from the tags that people most often choose to put on their photographs in some way reflect a collective consciousness (or not)?
• a Creative Commons fiction. I’ll be releasing the work under a CC non-commercial attribution license — the same one as I’m getting the photographs under — and I’ll encourage people to remix the work under the same license.
• a story that is also a separate but related poem.
• the idea of “atomistic fiction” — in some ways this is a continuation of a thread that Nick and I were exploring in Implementation — the idea of writing a novel that both “works” in whole and is composed of distinct “narrative moments” that can be isolated from each other.
• creating a work that could be delivered in different ways (and in different formations) in different platforms. The blog draft, the more complete eventual online version, a print book, and I’d like to be able to read it in some fashion on my mobile phone or iPaq.
• a weird fun word game I can play every day for a good long while that is more fun than a crossword and more productive than Scrabble.
• And well, contemporary America in the late age of fear, of course.

I’m not sure I’ll successfully address all these things, and given that I’m only 14% done with the fiction texts, I hope it doesn’t get boring before it ends, but anyway, that’s what I’m up to here now. Any of the above may change. Who knows? I’m hoping to use some of the upcoming research time in Chicago to put a further dent in it, but I’ll likely be working on it interspersed with other research things (articles, ELO projects, and the ahem, academic book) well into next year.

ARE (violent)

are you many in number

When Howard has nightmares, they frequently feature violent, unstoppable invasions, swarms of creatures both alien and familiar.

are we your people

Anna’s family encourages her to go to church, saying that it will bring her comfort, and so they both go a few times, feeling lost and willing to try anything. The ritual itself is calming but Anna grows queasy when she thinks of a deity so capable of beauty and nonetheless so arbitrary, so violent.

are those we put down still part of us

Anna develops horribly violent associations between blood and bodies of water.

are they even men

Howard’s tasks, and those of thousands of others like him, seem like an incredibly Sysiphusian way to combat an invisible, violent, and omnipresent threat, so many drops in a bucket the size of an ocean.

are you here to give me my end

Truth be told, Johnnie loved driving under the influence of certain drugs. He loved a lot of dangerous things. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, though he was nearly sure he’d someday come to a violent end. The woman he was with was moaning, and Johnnie had one hand on the wheel, one hand in her moistness. He was thinking about death and driving fast to another night in another city.

are you part of the answer

For some strange reason, men had been fighting over Helen ever since she was a teenage girl. It was nice to feel wanted, but she never liked watching two guys resort to a violent confrontation over a part of herself that neither one of them would ever really touch.

are you more than animal

Certain security measures are violent in their impact both on the human psyche and on the devastated landscape, denying both humanity and environment presupposed natural rights.

are you mean or kind

Dave sighed whenever they gave him that garbage about running a clean campaign. He was always quick to remind the softer candidates that nice guys finish last, that politics is a violent contact sport. Save the world after you get into office. Right now it’s eat or be eaten.

are you through with your America now

In Anna’s dream, the barbershop is a violent place. The pole out front drips with blood, and the barber is after more than a quick trim.

are they still my people

Among Charlie’s friends are several men who have come to violent ends. Some fell from the top of a building. Some jumped of their own free will. Some others might have been pushed.

ON (medicine)

on that little can be said

Anna took the pills the doctor prescribed, while Charlie’s medicine was mostly scotch and a few other bad habits he had nearly left behind.

on this thing I can say little

At the anthrax seminar Howard reflected that satellite images of major cities have a similar abstract quality to macro images of diseased organs. Howard watched Powerpoint presentations about impossible distributions of medicine and supplies. Howard imagined an army of nurses in HAZMAT suits dispatched across the metropolis like an astronaut invasion.

on the day of the end I will form a still point

Johnnie decided to leave Los Angeles the day that he saw some kid on meth pummel another kid nearly to death over a vial of ADHD medicine in the back of a nightclub. The band didn’t stop playing and nobody jumped in to stop it, not Johnnie, who was feeling the wall for textures at the time, as some girl from Raceida had her hand under his shirt, feeling his chest hairs and playing with his nipples. What frightened Johnnie later was how beautiful it all seemed to him at the time.

on his picture she just put her hand

The medicine numbed her, but did not stop her from weeping for several weeks after it happened. Not hysterical sobbing, but tears just the same. When she was done crying, she would just caress the boy’s picture, or stare off into space.

on my word we will follow you down

Bush’s rhetoric aside, they hadn’t found Bin Laden down any rabbit holes, and Saddam’s hanging was a circus sideshow, hardly the kind of medicine they needed. Just more to hate.

on his hand he could write a line or two

Those couple of months when he was hitting the medicine pretty hard, Charlie saw Jacob’s ladder just about everywhere he turned.

on the day your boy would part from you

The medicine affected Anna’s dreams. They were no less terrifying, just slower. The circus clown with the child’s mirror, lethargically dabbing on the pancake, contemplating what he would take from her next as he painted on his maudlin grin.

on your word

Dave was an agnostic, but he supposed if there was a hell for PR men, he’d just have to get in line and take his medicine.

on her need would he try his kind hand

Sometimes Dave and Jenny got into playing roles. The doctor administering the dose of medicine. The detective and the prostitute. The vice-principal and schoolgirl. Sometimes edgier things. Very kinky stuff they got into.

on word and form he would set his answer down

Roger said that the inspiration for his installation “morgue wall” came to him while he doped up on cough medicine, watching a documentary on television about amputees coming home from the war.

FOR (qualified)

for you I would write a page

Dave felt fully qualified to spin even the most embarrassing of personal failings into a two or three point bump in the polls. If Bill Clinton taught us anything, it’s that Americans love contrition.

for your mean hand would be still

Dave paid interns to pick through garbage left in dumpsters behind the enemy’s campaign headquarters. That qualified as academic research, in his book.

for even little men have their part in change

Howard understood that sacrifices have to be made for security far more than he understood what qualified as irony.

for us I would think and long

Both Anna and Charlie spent far more time than their therapists thought they should choosing the grave site and struggling with the few words the space on the stone allowed to sum up the all-too-brief life of their child. At a certain point it had become a morbid kind of self-indulgence, but it qualified as a kind of bonding, in a way.

for time will form a different picture than your own

At a certain point in his career as an artist, Roger was both uncomfortable describing himself as an artist, given the modesty of successes, and yet also deeply certain that he was not qualified to be anything else.

for each man will go down the same

Howard was too surrounded by the fear to let it bother him very much, but he couldn’t avoid doing calculations as he walked down the street of any major city. Which building qualified as a target, how many causalities one could expect given the worst case scenario. It was not paranoia, just a kind of heightened awareness of possible outcomes.

for our people we found little here

Johnnie’s career as a musician never really qualified as a job or as a calling for that matter. Johnnie was into Rock and Roll because it was the easiest way to justify his attitude, and he didn’t stick with it for too long.

for air we must live on

Helen was well qualified as an interior designer, and she had a good sense of wide open spaces. She looked for light, air, and spaces that didn’t feel enclosed.

for we must change and move on

Helen had never qualified a relationship as serious. She never expected it to last, and wasn’t really sure if she wanted it to.

for she went out and the day went down

Maggie, who in the past qualified mornings almost exclusively in terms of drivetimes and lattés, finds herself putting time into sunrises, the cacophony of birdsongs, the feeling of the cool mist on her skin, slowly and gently warming.

WAS (automatically)

was a time before will be one after

Though he was automatically sardonic, Roger never gave up on his capacity for wonder. He was not religious or even spiritual, but he had what you might call petty epiphanies about his life, the world, nature, marketing, gum flavors and so on. He had revelations in the strangest places. He would see something in a suburban cul-de-sac or a shopping mall parking lot that just took his breath away.

was a picture you could see us in

When she first heard the news, Maggie didn’t weep, though she didn’t move from the couch for nearly two days afterwards. She sat there knitting, almost automatically, her thoughts out there somewhere away from her body, away from her life and all she knew. The needles, the sound, the rhythm, the making of something soft, textile, durable.

was such a good show back then

At any sort of railing, Johnnie automatically thinks of jumping, if only for a moment. He never actually leaps.

was men who made us part

Johnnie and Charlie both loved Ed and Mable dearly. Ed and Mable died in a hotel fire when Johnnie and Charlie were ten and thirteen. The fire it turned out was arson, insurance fraud. Both the boys were scarred for life, though they were nowhere near that seaside hotel where the conflagration occurred. Even when he’s completely zonked on downers in some strange place, Johnnie automatically checks for fire exits.

was air between us

On the street Anna finds herself automatically reaching for his tiny hand, never to find it, never to touch.

was his name she would think of

Somehow every time she moved, even halfway across the country, Helen almost automatically found herself a new steady boyfriend, almost always the same type of man, without even trying, without even thinking. Absurd, really. And at some point she would inevitably slip up and call him Charlie.

was the house our place a land

Howard automatically drops a Euro in the busker’s case, though he doesn’t want to stick around to hear the story written in the old man’s face.

was little we could want for

Christmas displays fascinate Roger. Something about the consumerist impulse to automatically generate wonder through the consumption of electricity and plastic models of mythical figures has a great deal of appeal to him. The more over-the-top the better. Call him a vulgar American. Of course he wanted to go to Disney World. He always wants to go to Disney World.

was another before you came

Anna’s expression automatically sours at the mere mention of Helen. Johnnie was usually the one to mention her, as if the old wounds had simply healed and gone away. He had a sadistic streak in him, Johnnie did.

was a long time back America was different

Howard automatically feels a twinge of guilt every time he orders a new delivery of Jersey barriers, whether in front of an embassy or in the blighted cityspaces back home. Security aesthetics are brutal.

HE (Anna)

he will read the letter

Anna had certain desires, and they were not all easily described. There was something that she wanted to recapture, even if she wasn’t sure they had it to begin with. Some things she could make clear, such as her need for security, her need to be secure in him, and to have a sense that they still had a future together. A desire to see a way out of it. A desire to know that she is not alone.

he will form a point

Anna knew that the topic was dangerous, but she also knew that he would not leave her. He would not leave her because of what they shared. They both tossed and turned at night, with the same beautiful memories, the same horrific dreams.

he will help when he can

Anna’s nightmares are more symbolic than Charlie’s. She sees strange omens, disappearing men, cast off garments hanging in sky. He is more of a literalist: a drowning boy, variations on the same, over and over again.

he can go away again

Anna and Charlie had been through the Helen issue before, more than once. She knew that he loved Helen in a different way than he loved her, but not a better way, and that if he felt lost enough, he might simply wander off again.

he must not part from her

Anna sometimes dreams of limbs without bodies.

he will follow you down

Anna sometimes wishes she had the strength to cut and run. She tires of being the one who always has to hold it together.

he will come in time

Anna is embarrassed by her own need to need to be saved, by the thing in her that always feels like it is falling.

he is not here now

Anna’s dreams of childhood toys are always somehow monstrous.

he will be old and with time will follow

Anna reads with jealousy of tropical birds that mate for life.

he has so little here now

Anna knew that he was nearly as lost as his brother, devastated by all that they had lost when they were just boys, and now this. And her alone to anchor him, just when she needed him to be her strength.

IT (determination)

it was then that she went to him

Maggie thought often of her mother, an immigrant and survivor, who had lived with such strength and determination, but had died so comparatively young.

it could change the world

Maggie had once been a farm girl, a 4H-er who had won prizes for gargantuan vegetables and fatted calves. She thought back on that girl, so full of energy and determination, and she loved that earlier self in a way that was more melancholic than narcissistic.

it is more picture than word

Howard tries to avoid feeling cynical about his work, though he would be a fool not to. He attempts to find some reserve of determination in the fact that the sacrifices that others are making in the name of the same cause are so much more profound, and so much more senseless, than his own.

it made us part

In spite of his determination and resolve, Charlie could not shake the image from his head. He slept less and less, spent more time at work, smoked like a chimney.

it would work in the end

We simplify and mythologize the lives of previous generations. We admire their determination and Technicolor optimism. We dress like them at costume parties, listen to their music, and make their fashions new again. We grow warm with false memories, with imaginary nostalgia. We make-believe that their lives were ever so much simpler than our own infinitely complex duration.

it is good to be home again

Ralph and Maggie spent the night going through the box of things her mother had preserved from her own childhood. Maggie admired the determination on the face of her grandmother, readying the family for the journey to a new world. She hugged her father in the warmth of the flickering firelight.

it could turn out to be different

With hard work and determination, they could make it work, they could get past it this time, they could have a family again and do all those things that normal people do to feel happy together, whatever those things are.

it is a mean sentence

Roger pretended that the reviewer’s determination that his work was “austere, cold, and lifeless” did not bother him, but in reality, he found himself torn between a kind of infinite resignation and a desire to tear the man limb from limb.

it was not my place

Dave’s sister’s determination was that his gift to the nephew had been too extravagant. He had shown up his lily-livered brother-in-law and somehow exacerbated tensions. Extravagant. The christ. The damn thing wasn’t even new, he got it used on eBay. Poor kid would end up even more fucked up than his bible-beating parents if they kept it up was Dave’s humble opinion.

it could come from water or the air

Howard’s group had arrived at the determination that another horrific attack on the homeland was an actuarial certainty. The question was not if but how and when it would occur.

THAT (relation)

that animal like us

She had the strangest dreams in relation to children, and thought that perhaps they might try again later.

that long day will come

Sometimes Anna would catch a glimpse of a family enjoying what seemed to be a perfect moment, and contrast that image in relation to her own experiences of family life, which were never perfect, if not always completely fucked up.

that look will not help you

The darkest of Maggie’s dreams during that period were in relation to clowns wearing absurd disguises. The treatment of her body had begun to make her feel that everything she had valued in her life before was just another layer, easily peeled off and cast aside. She was afraid of what might be underneath.

that you will take to the air

Their relation would always be strained by their mutual desire for a kind of innocence they had never really shared to begin with.

that word does not mean much

Johnnie smokes a pack a day. He has little concern about health risks and things of that nature. Death doesn’t really concern him. In fact he has little to say in relation to his personal future in general.

that is all what can be said

He had no time for the weekly religious rituals of his aunt and uncle. He went sometimes to please them, but thought church was cold comfort given what God had done to them. In relation to religion, the adult Charlie retained almost nothing except for an odd affection for the song “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” which for some reason had comforted him as a child.

that is your long day

Maggie’s relation to time was starting to change. As she contemplated death, she thought more and more often of her childhood, and she began to wonder if her adulthood had been anything but an aftermath.

that picture may part men

Charlie eventually followed advice and sought out the assistance of a therapist in relation to the nightmare that he could not shake. Always the same image, and nothing he could do to stop the water from coming.

that my people call oil

Howard was pragmatic in relation to matters of environmental consciousness. He acknowledged that many of the interests he traveled the world trying to help secure were actually oil interests, but they overlapped with human interests in a variety of ways, in that the outcome, or at least the goal, was the preservation of human life. His sister gave him grief about all his work-related globe-trotting at Thanksgiving, so he started buying carbon credits to cover his jet fuel guilt.

that could be your number

For a period Anna saw everything in nature as in relation to the death of their child. There were a few months when she couldn’t go for a walk without bursting into tears. A cracked robin’s egg, a dead rat, a fallen leaf, roadkill, you name it.

YOU (deliberately)

you make me think

Howard’s job took him many places he would otherwise deliberately avoid, such as the public transit systems of densely populated cities. Even in the safest of metros, Howard eyed the other passengers in a subway car suspiciously and counted coughs, each one a release of airborne viruses. Whenever it was in the least bit appropriate, Howard opted to wear a face mask.

you give me back my world

Roger appreciates preserved architecture, spaces that stand deliberately opposed to modernity and all its compromises.

you ask me for an answer

Maggie announced her resignation without explaining much of her situation. She deliberately avoided discussing her health issues with her colleagues. Some people retire because they want to spend more time with their families. Maggie loved her family too, but the truth was that at this stage in the game, she simply wanted to spend more time with herself.

you must be kind

Roger deliberately quashed his impulse to actually tell his friend what he really thought of her work (grandiose, pretentious, overreaching). Who was he to judge?

you should study and learn

She went to the woods because she wished to live deliberately, or something like that.

you write no more

Charlie and Helen both deliberately avoided contacting each other for months after the wedding. She could be anywhere. Still he felt a yearning and he knew she felt it too.

you are America

Basking in the sun, bursting with optimism, top-heavy, bloated, indebted, arrogant, deliberately over-reaching, full and wanting more.

you are an oil man

To really protect the infrastructure, they would need to put thousands of rusting sites under constant surveillance. Even with seven dollar an hour rent-a-cops the costs would be staggering. Still, Howard sometimes wondered if some of the companies weren’t deliberately lax on security, hoping that some terrorist would see a soft target and make the insurance companies pay for the costs of necessary overhauls they would otherwise have to pass on to their shareholders.

you play around

They both knew the reason why he had never proposed marriage before the accident, and they had both deliberately avoided the subject.

you are mean and old little more

Dave counseled his clients to deliberately shelve their humanity for the duration of the campaign. “You’re not a human at this point, not until you get elected. You’re a candidate, a name, a face. Your opposition is trying to peel that face right off of your head. And they’ll do just that if you don’t get to them first.”

IS (dirty)

is it you

Dave sent Jenny a dozen white roses and a note filled with a hundred dirty notions.

is it long before the end

Howard strained to be polite as the local officials took him to their places of pride. He felt bad sometimes. You show me your beautiful gardens and all I have for you in return are my thoughts of dirty bombs.

is this thing on

Dave during a Jenny assignation: I might be dirty, sweetheart, but I’m no old man.

is it my turn

Howard had the sense that if a car bomb were to explode in Tokyo, it would just be swept into the roar of crowd and commerce, disposed of silently between rushing commuters like all the other dirty things on the streets of this metropolis, this giant robot of a place.

is that place different from home

Helen’s California dreams are often more abstract and distant than sentimental or dirty. The idea that one can go no further than this shore appeals to her, and she often walks the beach alone.

is it time for a change

Given the right timing in an area with a high population density, even one dirty bomb could take take out hundreds of people. Shopping malls, commuter trains, places of worship.

is he there with you now

In spite of the now platonic state of their relationship and the fact that he had no leg to stand on, no claims to make, just the thought of Helen with another man made Charlie’s skin crawl, made him feel dirty inside.

is the picture different than before

Howard was no Howard Hughes. He wasn’t the type to cover his furniture in plastic, though he did sometimes use a handkerchief as a prophylactic layer between a doorknob and his hand, and he knew that from the macro lens view, even the cleanest of rooms is crawling with tiny dirty things. As for paranoia, in this day and age, it’s only prudent to feel like you are always being watched.

is it your first time

During a hiatus from Jenny, Dave went to Asia for a bit of sexual tourism, and he felt so dirty that for months afterwards he could only bring himself to work for evangelical Republicans.

is good in there

Howard appreciated the tour of the semiconductor factory very much, every surface of his body covered in hypoallergenic fabric, every instrument secured, every worker silently intent, a cool room that smelled not overpoweringly of disinfectant. Not at all dirty, a very clean room.

IN (Pacific)

in time will we learn

The salt of the Pacific on her skin the smell of cypress filling her nostrils and the ache of the hike in her thighs made Maggie feel right, just right. It was the perfect place, and the perfect time, to let her family know about the disease and her decision.

in number there were many

How many ports had he been to? How many times had he crossed the Atlantic and Pacific, not as some noble explorer, but as a mere messenger, an expert in regulations concerning shipping containers and the threats that they might pose to us.

in a great place now

“When the Pacific floods California, I’ll be diving down.”
“Don’t bogart that joint, Johnnie.”

in the long sentence of time

“Mostly I moved here to be closer to the Pacific. Just love the ocean breezes. And I have back problems so the medical marijuana doesn’t hurt.”

in America you were different

The infrastructure security in Micronesia is appalling. Some of the softest targets in the Pacific region.

in each line I see you

She sends him a letter from the Pacific coast, and he opens it while looking out over the Atlantic from the Jersey shore.

in answer to your letter

These soothing Pacific nights haven’t changed me bro. I’m hell bent on burning up my inheritance and picking up the pieces when I get back East. Next stop, Vegas.

in no way could they be right

Everywhere he went on that Pacific trip, Howard saw fragility and vulnerability. He felt like a man sent to photograph mansions made of playing cards that someday would, inevitably, fall.

in her will to change again

Helen took in a sunset over the peaceful Pacific, feeling far away from everything that had come before, but still wondering where her hunger might next lead her.

in the old man a boy at play

She was glad that they found time to walk together along the Pacific shore. Her father brought along a couple of gloves and they played catch like they used to. Maggie could tell he wanted to see her smile, and there was no easy way for him to get her to that place, but she tried, for him, tried to feel happy.

TO (judges)

to see her again

At the end of that weekend in Chicago, both Charlie and Helen knew that it would have to end. “I can barely look her in the eyes anymore,” he explained. She patted his hand and looked out over the skyline. “No one judges you, Charlie,” she said, “I don’t.”

to ask why

“We’re pretty good together. She never judges me too harshly for what I do, though I can tell that sometimes it turns her stomach that while she’s off saving the world, I’m just greasing the cogs that grind away at it.”

to make it through this

The two weeks in the South of France didn’t really have the desired effect on either of them. Great food, but it often rained and she kept playing Edith Piaf records. Neither one of them could get away from what they were missing, and they were both kind of blue that whole time, and Charlie felt like all of the locals were judges, offended by his poor French and his fucked-up sense of priorities.

to number the day

Dave found himself sipping pinã coladas with five federal judges who were enjoying a junket on the tab of the lobbying firm currently funding him and the remodeling of several of their kitchens. A lovely day with reasonable men, and he was sure that none of them would let some fucking tree frogs get in the way of progress.

to follow it through

In Anna’s dream, even the stones rise up, judges pronouncing the both of them guilty. She keeps a journal that gives her and her therapist something work with. Tragedies of all kinds on the news, torments that relate to her situation. She wept for weeks after the tsunami.

to want to need again

Even the sky judges her.

to be still

Roger inhales deeply, takes a whiff of the place, feels the texture of the stone wall, judges the light, closes his eyes, judges the light.

to call and answer

Even the wisest of judges can’t divide the memory of a child.

to learn why we came

Roger reckons that nature judges no one, in spite of what Darwin wrote.

to learn who we were

No one here judges you, Anna. We just want you to be free of that pain, to recognize it and acknowledge it, and then let go of it.

A (nights)

a point should be made

She wondered how many more nights would end this way.

a just people would make another world

Dave spends a lot of nights alone, trying to remember the idealism he felt as a young man, or the taste of a particular bottle of scotch.

a letter to try and end this

Some nights Johnnie will roll himself a joint, get a little high, and reread old breakup letters that ex-girlfriends have sent him, and he will remember their different hairstyles, which matched whatever lifestyle he was trying on that year.

a word most would not say

So many nights Charlie had almost told her that he loved her, but it was always so complicated, her situation or his own. Better just to get through dinner and then reconnect in the hotel room. Enjoy each other just enough without going too far.

a little sound for each of us

Some nights end with a bang, other nights just whimper.

a name to call your own

Some nights Anna wakes up thinking he’s still alive, even though he only made it those few years. She finds herself planning a birthday party they will never celebrate. She feels a whole life still growing in the air around her like an unfinished novel or a phantom limb.

a change of sentence set to page

How many nights had Howard spent at diplomatic functions like this one, trying to avoid being noticed by his superiors, trying to fit like just another square peg. Sometimes he thought about tipping over a vase, or spilling a drink on the ambassador’s wife, or insulting one of the spooks, just to shake things up, break protocol for the sake of it.

a great work should follow

Roger never really enjoyed the nights he went out with his friends in the avant-garde crowd. They always seemed to be trying too hard to say something they didn’t know how to say that mattered in a really obscure way, and none of them could really have their hearts in it, not after punk rock and nine eleven.

a man with no need to ask why

It was one of those nights when he was shocked at the extent his own naïveté. Dave found himself at an ATM at 4AM withdrawing $300, and he hadn’t even realized she was a pro. Worth it, sure, but the outfit should have been a clue.

a different world must follow our own

Some nights when he finds himself out at a club for no particular reason, surrounded by the kind of friends he only sees when he’s holding an eight ball, dancing with some anorexic waif who won’t wake up remembering where she spent the night, Johnnie imagines himself a human sacrifice laid at the altar of some apocalyptic hedonist god. Then he sneaks off to the john for another quick snort from his silver bullet.

AND (lists)

and it is you who are many

In his studio, Roger assembles lists of his dreams: free-fall from the skyscraper in Malaysia, horse-farm idyll, circus clown rapture, relief from drowning in a glacial lake, the choir of shrieking gnomes, the ant breakfast.

and one sentence will follow another

Maggie lists the things that make her feel happy: Thanksgiving turkey, board game nights with her nephews, LeCarré thrillers, memories of her teenage boyfriends, spiced rum cake, crisp autumn mornings, fireworks on the fourth of July.

and this time will come back no more

Howard is the type to spend no fewer than two nights packing for a weekend trip. He makes lists and pays strict attention to them as he packs. He has a nervous nature but a carefully arranged life. His suitcase is nothing if not efficient. He travels light but allows for contingencies.

and you need to live

As watches her dance, Charlie silently lists the locations where he and Helen have made love, from the library in Newark to the boiler room at the factory to the hotel room in Paris to that birthday party in Chicago so many years ago. She dances with another, she twirls. She gazes up at him. He smiles and then quickly looks away.

and you read another page

Howard reviews the lists of incident reports, areas of concern ranging from ongoing investigations of sleeper cells to minor demonstrations in front of consulates in Europe. So little love in the world.

and you ask why time is short

When he gets bored, at work or family gatherings, Johnnie will sometimes stare off into space and assemble all-time great lists: concerts he has been to, movies he has watched, meals he has eaten out, even arguments he has had with ex-girlfriends, best make-up sessions.

and you move through the land

Johnnie lists the all-time great parties he has been to: Mardi Gras in New Orleans the year before the flood, Halloween at the Hard Rock in Vegas, Bastille Day in Paris, Carnival in Rio, Butch’s pig roast last year.

and you try your kind hand

Before she accepted the proposal, Anna made lists of pros and cons. He seemed to have changed, but she wasn’t sure, she could never be sure she could trust him completely. It wasn’t that he was unkind. It was just that he had his own vulnerabilities he had never quite figured out how to manage.

and the end may not change a thing

After each election, Dave spends a day making lists of lessons he has learned about the desires of the electorate. His shop has lost a couple more elections than it has won, but it doesn’t seem to matter, there is always someone new waiting in the wings for a new attack ad, and his pitch rarely failed to impress a desperate candidate. Every war needs dogs.

and the day is so long

Johnnie lists and sways to the music, stumbles through the crowd. Someone is feeling him and he is feeling someone. Warm to the touch and distant, full of Ecstasy and still empty.

OF (Charlie)

of you I can say so little

Charlie took little interest in the minutiae of the reception, whatever she wanted was good with him. He just wanted to check the guest list, and make sure a few names weren’t on it.

of what came through

Charlie was always attracted to patterns. In spite of all the turmoil in his life, or perhaps because of it, he retained a deep appreciation of symmetry.

of these people what can we say

Charlie liked some of her friends, others he tolerated.

of her spell

Charlie had grown accustomed to the idea that Helen could no longer be a part of even his secret life, but there she was, and her presence was devastating.

of his time picture a long way down

Charlie has still got a lot of life in front of him, but he had seen things and done things and been through things that took a lot out of him. You can see it in his face.

of land take only little

The city spread out below like a glittering empire, and Charlie nearly wept at the sight of it.

of home we ask why here

Charlie’s brother Johnnie was always a moody kid, downcast and shaggy, like a young John Lennon on a rainy day, but with much less talent, and no vision to speak of.

of her on this day

Charlie considered himself lucky that she still had the capacity for so much joy, even after everything. He wasn’t sure he deserved her. He did not.

of what use I will write

Truth be told, Charlie wasn’t big on ceremonies of any kind. Too many people gathered in one place at one time felt risky to him, and flower arrangements inevitably reminded him of funerals.

of my people I should learn more

Charlie was reluctant to introduce her to the shadowy figures from his past, but he had to include them. He was not the type to forget old friendships or old obligations.