the realest

you are it, now

[AUGUST 28]

I am not well, they told me, but I’ve since forgotten when or why. Anne demanded that I take off work and kept looking at me like I was an endangered species, a flower deciding whether or not to wilt. She insisted on staying with me for a few nights before she left town. I hauled an inflatable mattress into the kitchen; we ordered thai. She and the doctor kept talking to me like I was supposed to remember what we’d just been saying and so understand the gravity of the moment we were sharing and I didn’t want to disappoint so I just kept nodding. That did it eventually.

Anne shoved this notebook on me before she left, the black composition kind like those you find in bulk during back-to-school season, and made me promise I would start journaling daily. She said it as though something unspeakably essential hinged on me writing down what I ate for lunch or what the clouds looked like through my studio apartment’s single window or if I was having trouble shitting that day. Either that or she’s expecting me to start the Next Great American Novel in here and quit my day job on the proceedings and piece things back together for us somewhere along the way. I’ve never been able to tell my sister no.

Mom used to say I wrote in “chicken scratch” like her and Nana, so I don’t know if anyone that might find this one day will be able to understand me if they do.

Though I don’t know why anyone would do that in the first place (find this and read it in an attempt to understand me before ultimately failing to do so), and maybe not even me at that. I haven’t reread any part of this entry, for example, and I’m beginning to forget how it started. Anne dotted her I’s with hearts and took notes in four separate colors of gel pen and got grades befitting a future marine biologist which is one of those childhood dream jobs you’re supposed to grow out of at some point. I am in all likelihood just talking to myself, in other words, and maybe not even me at that.

Sometimes at work I like to pretend that someone’s watching over what I’m doing just then, on that page of that day, looking down from somewhere on high, and that eventually I’ll have to explain myself to them as they reread me line by line. Hopefully they’ll know more about what’s going on by then and I won’t have to catch them up on context I don’t have. Hopefully they’ll have a bigger picture, one they can hold onto without it slipping, one with more natural light.

These thoughts usually don’t last long before a customer comes in, slipping into their mononymic role, or one of my twenty-something coworkers starts telling me about a tweet they saw. I’ve been there even longer than Ned, the manager, but I seem to have blended into the corporate furniture at some point along the way and now have roughly the same odds of promotion as them: things produced at scale, focused-grouped into perfect neutrality, made to be forgotten before the imprint of one’s ass has yet faded from the cushion. 

Perhaps I play my role as written too well, a role which now I suppose now includes being sick but not knowing when or why but feeling fine and sometimes forgetting why I came into a room or what I was just talking about but come on who doesn’t every now and then. Either way, I run out of sick leave next week.

Not really sure how to wrap this one up. I’m a start-off-strong type. Usually run out of profundity an act or two short of a punchy moral. I don’t think I’m any good at telling stories. A teacher once told me that I had verbal diarrhea but I think she made that phrase up, much like chicken scratch, because I’ve never heard anyone say it before or since. It took me years to learn that pronouncing naked like nekked or ouch with two syllables was not universal outside of our house. I read somewhere that the family unit is the source of all disinformation on earth, and I buy it.

[SEPTEMBER 3]
Let’s you and I pretend it’s still August. I know Anne means well, but every day?

It’s just been me and her for years now, so I know she’s got nowhere else to fret at. She was the emotionally intelligent one, knew how to get what she wanted. Probably being the youngest helped. I blundered, stumbled; she danced, glode. Glid. Glided? Glided. Smoked weed for years without getting caught and I throw one party and Dad finds a lone Bud Lite that someone stuffed in the compost. She mastered just that tone to ask just that question that she knew would get turned down just how she wanted to set her up for the real ask. Kept going to church, still does, because it’s what Mom would have wanted.

I still remember the color of the dead grass on the field where I apostatized. (A sort of dusty mustard. Crunchy.) In that I outpaced her. Cross-legged on the sports field, off-tune Christian rock wafting from the youth camp pavilion down by the river, a sky so clear you could see the purple of the Milky Way like taro swirled in cream, globs of nearby galaxies studding a sky hung there to assure me that I was right, that I’d cracked what had been there waiting for me, that I didn’t need to cry anymore after I broke down and jacked off and in so doing failed the Father, who was always watching that for some reason, and that no matter how many times Mom screamed at me in Baptist or Dad kicked me in the shin at Church and muttered Speak up, God can’t hear you, it would still be there, blinking, too immense for any of the seven days or the best attempts of Babel.

Later that year it rained for three days and three nights and the river breached its banks and took half of that pavilion downstream with it, which I took to be a good sign.

Funny, what I can recall like clear water and what goes the way of breakfast this morning and the names of people I just met. More and more of the less-than-frivolous sliding the way of the latter lately. I don’t know if there were clouds yesterday. Even if there were, none of them could have picked out my unit from any of the forgettable rest of this forgettable building rising among the flaccid EKG of our nearly-skyline. Right now you, sitting splayed on the desk, are dappled red by a neon Pepsi billboard across the road. Window units hum in the building over, gripping the lips of their sills, looking ready at last to jump, any minute now, almost eager. Riots of antennas prickle the roofs. But what do you care where I am? You could be washed up anywhere by the time you’re read again. Maybe the name of this city didn’t survive the flood. Maybe these pages are stuffed into individual bottles and you’ve found two or three of them and now you’re piecing together who I was like a hangman without vowels.

So anyway, one day Grandma decided that my Uncle was schizophrenic. Turns out it was just dementia—early, onset, vicious. It had a scientific name, something exotic and lethal. Unprecedented got tossed around a lot. I think someone wrote a paper about him. Easy to mix up the two, I guess, when he was so scattered he may as well have been more than one of himself. Both diagnoses being the type to drop in without introduction sometime in your twenties; both hereditary. Anne means well, does her best amidst all the derangement. You’d fret too.

I’d meant to talk about my day somewhere along the way with you. A terrible babble, all this. I’ve got another check-up scheduled soon and Anne is supposed to facetime me from her homestead later tonight. Long story. She gave up on the marine stint and went terrestrial with her sustainability shtick—something about land systems and veganism. I forget. Somewhere Northwestish and perpetually moist.

[SEPTEMBER 14]

Ned wrote me up yesterday. Said that customers were complaining about my behavior, that they would ask me something and I’d just stare at them or repeat their question back to them or wander off. That doesn’t sound like me, but he seemed pretty sure I had, and he’s not the type to forget minor slights.

Ned’s short and knows it. Runs the place like a city inspector’s coming to bust down the door and audit us at any minute. Shares a haircut with his two schnauzers, has photos of them plastered around his office, will talk your ear off about them whether you ask or not but changes the subject if you mention the only non-canine item on his desk: a photo of him and a kid at some amusement park. The frame is ornate and gilded, out of tune with the room, the kind you usually see holding beloved ancestors or Mother Mary; the kid, can’t be more than eight or nine, sports this semi-amused half-grin and a wicked blonde bowl cut and eyes that don’t match the rest of his face.

That makes no sense at all, does it? You ever talk just to have something to say? Because someone’s staring at you like it’s your turn now? You and then them and then you until someone keels over or chokes? The kid’s cuteish, okay, and seemingly off-limits conversationally.

Anne wants me to request extra sick leave, as if spending even more time in this room trying to fall asleep and failing to fall asleep and trying to fall asleep will help anything. Ned says we’re short-staffed. I’d like to see Anne fly down here and make that ask herself. The semi-amused amusement park kid semi-smiling at her out of his saintly frame, Ned getting all twitchy and bunched up the way he does when he senses potential insubordination, the rows of schnauzers shedding in silence. What a scene.

[SEPTEMBER 20]

4am, nearly. Nowhere better to turn than you, certainly not back to bed—nothing for me there,  less and less. Nights won’t take me. Sleep gums me around and spits me back out. I’m becoming indigestible.

Sun up, moon up, sun up, time skips and skids. Things getting shaky. Two check-ups since we last talked (because I seem committed to keeping this you-and-I thing going, this conversation-between-equals shtick). Anne called in, kept jumping in the way of the doctor. He had a huge walrus mustache, this guy, and remarkably tiny fingers—like, shockingly, distractingly tiny.

I think he and Anne are talking about me without me. They come into the sessions with an air of pre-coordination. The sense of them dancing around something they know that I don’t or that I did and then didn’t so thick in the air you could stab it. Degenerate, I think that one came up at this last one, but the doctor has this habit of gesticulating vigorously with his remarkably shockingly distractingly tiny fingers while he talks (it brings to mind mini carrots in a blender, or a maggot flash mob) and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. It may have been Degeneres.

Things you thought you’d forgotten regurgitate and lodge in the throat after staring at a ceiling bathed Pepsi-red for long enough. The smell of your orthodontist’s office. The taste of those awful pink dental molds they make you bite down on so they can show you what’s fucked up with you in absolute congealed detail. You come to miss that certainty. The kid who ate his erasers in third-grade math one by one. (If Timmy begins with six erasers and eats four of them without breaking eye contact, how many does he have left for English class?) The kid (not the same one) who used the urinal with his pants around his ankles, ass gleaming in the fluorescents, until he was 11. The Beck song you learned the lyrics to when your girlfriend broke up with you in less than 24 hours—Soy un perdedor, sí.

All tatters and hues, each more self-assured than the last, rising like backwash to meet you; too real to buy, too real to deny, more real than whatever’s left smeared between the sheets after six hours of this, more real than what you think me to be.

Remember a memory enough times and you birth a new one, that of remembering. Repeat this enough times and, eventually, they all are.

[SEPTEMBER 30]

Somewhere along the way I think I misplaced some big massive essential thing that was meant for me. Waiting there for me. I think it’s out there somewhere still, disappointed.

[OCTOBER 7]

I’ve stopped checking the time. Couning insomnia is like trying to stuff madness into a decimal system. Lost in translation. Silent skins stretched taut over bulbous seconds, no event horizon, hurling best attempts into a dark that asks for more. When falling in a bottomless pit one dies of thirst.

I can’t get this one memory out of my throat so I’m here out of bed writing it down. Maybe when I close the page it will stay here, and what is left of my head will be that much lighter.

The last words my Dad spoke to me were at a church reception, while I was back for winter break. It was after a funeral for one of the oldest parishioners, a real community pillar. We weren’t too broken up about it. You could tell how much she’d been looking forward to it.

Anne and I had both left the house at that point, and instead of adopting a dog or going on cruises he and Mom had doubled their church attendance and then tripled their church attendance and eventually switched congregations to a new pastor that said he was one of a select few who could lay hands on the afflicted and cast out that which ailed them. Unc’s exorcism hadn’t held for long after Grandma took him to her own gifted pastor, but that didn’t seem to have soured them on the breed.

We stood a ways apart from the rest of the mourners as they savaged the finger food and talked about nothing. I don’t remember how we ended up sequestered, just him and I, but at that point we had no muscle built up whatsoever for one-on-one interaction without Mom or Anne. Still, just then he turned to me quite unannounced and said, “I know, you know.”

“Know what?” I said.

“Know what you think about all this,” he replied, turnin to the buffet. “One day,” he said, “you’ll see the rest of the picture.”

This I have of him in full. This remains. No trace of him putting on my training wheels and chasing me down our suburban street’s petty incline that we called a hill. Nothing of graduation or beach trips or him reading one of his hardcover biographies about a founding father. No record whatsoever of Christmas presents.

No: the smell of deviled eggs on a hot afternoon, and plastic knives rasping plastic plates, and exactly twenty words, clear as torture.

Later, in the hospital, I had expected that his last breath would be some big tremendous thing, but it wasn’t. It was no different than any other.

[OCTOBER 22]

Ned fired me yesterday. Said customers were complaining about my behavior, would ask me something and I’d just stare at them, repeat their question back to them, wander off. That doesn’t sound like me but he seemed pretty sure, and not the type to forget slights. When leaving I’d meant to ask when the kid died and whether it was his fault but I forgot. It is getting worse, but I don’t know its name and can’t exactly ask it for its side of the story.

[NOVEMBER 14]

Too many things are becoming legible.

[DECEMBER 4]

Anne is crying over the phone. Somewhere a corner has been turned, but I’ve forgotten when or why. It’s not my place. I nod but she cannot see.

Without work time feels denser—thickening, newly textured, suggesting tapioca. He seems familiar with me but not I him, hand around my shoulder, saying It’s me, remember? After all we’ve been through together? It seems like he would know. He isn’t the forgetful type. I nod and nod. His breath is Pepsi-rer. Eraser shavings cling to his lips. His periods, perfectly pronounced, like galaxies; his commas like comets. One cloud, two. Church bells chicken-scratching the mustard morning. It’s all been settled. We are in no rush.

You are it now. All that was or might be, the proof I passed through this place, the realest of us; and you will not dissolve nor drift into traffic after late night mass, will not ascend or descend, will not binge Jack Daniels and change the locks on me overnight—you are what I wasn’t, you will last when one page kisses the next and bleeds. Can’t you see you’ve arrived, undated, gaseous, filling the container to the edges with the Good Word—you are here, you are at last, you are it, are it, are what Anne asked for because she knew, must have known, and I can’t seem to convince her of it but now you can: that I’ve never been better!