There’s been a lot of filth, recently. Lots and lots of it. I try to tell people about it: Everything is so disgusting right now. No one seems to believe me. I whisper it anyway, lie flat and supine in my bed, sheets like paper under my palm, lance my breath up to the unassuming white ceiling. Filth. This is what there is.
Coming back from the metro, trudging along, there was a man staring into a bush outside the station. Very intently, I should add, eyes like a hawk’s from under his brow, which jut out to an almost dramatic degree. He had a very classical face, like something you could paint white and pose up in a museum. What are you doing, I asked him. He slapped my back—his hand was firm and steady—and told me to take a look. I took a look. In the bush were some napkins, melting solemnly into the ground, and a broken needle, and a man’s face.
I inhaled, sharp, windmilled my arms and took a huge step back. It’s okay, he said, it’s okay. He’s dead. He’s long dead, long dead, there’s never been anyone more dead. His words calmed me. Sugar cube to the horse. My ears perked up and forwards. I looked again. Napkins, needle, face. A face with a dramatic brow, jutted out, squint-lines about the eyes. Grey, cold, pallid. Tragic and recognizable. The dirt bunched up around where it protruded—just his face, an oval come up. Even his ears were underground.
I looked at the dead man and then at my companion, who smiled at me. There was a gap between his two front teeth, and a quirk about him. There’s filth, I told him. Filth everywhere.
He said, help me dig it up. Come on. I came on. I dropped my bag to the ground—forget the fact that my laptop and my notebooks were inside, my earphones and my book of poems, poems that made me feel like the air around me was shifting unnaturally—and got on all fours, started to dig my thumb into the place where unbloated flesh came in contact with the world. He didn’t follow me down, just braced his hands on his knees and watched, still so intent. I made a groove and grew bold, began to scrabble. The dirt was packed in hard, the chill seeping in through it, but I managed. I dug and I dug.
Who loved you, I asked.
My mother, he answered, and my father, for a while, my buddy Pete, and the woman I kissed at the bar after I was fired from my most hated job.
What job was that, I asked.
I don’t remember, he answered, and I believed him. How do you know she loved you, I asked.
He was silent. The face was like wax under my fingertips, like wax rigged up on scaffolding like cloth. I pressed my thumb to the face’s cheekbone and the skin bounced back to me, plump, lively, missing any sort of spark or vitality. He continued to be silent until he was no longer silent, until he said, she collapsed me down. She folded me up. I only knew her for an hour, exactly an hour. I was on the bus. I got off the bus and she found me, drew me in. You remember being small?
Yes. Yes, I remember being small.
I was small and my room was right outside the landing of the stairs. You remember the ice storm?
No. No, I am not so old as that.
I’m just kidding you. You’re too juicy. It was during the ice storm. I insisted on sleeping in my room, though everyone else was sleeping in the living room, like bears in a cave. I loved my room, you know. Maybe you do know. I woke up and it was night and my nose was cold as ice and pink as a cherry, hands curled into raptor claws inside my blanket. I sat up, considered going down to where everyone was, finding a space at the foot of the couch and sleeping there. I dunno the time. It was early, early morning, or deep, deep night, whichever you want to call it. My door was open. I looked out and I saw a face.
A face?
Yeah, a face. Listen. Just floating there. A bodiless face, you ever seen a thing like that?
Never.
It was watching me. It had these, these piercing eyes. Mouth like a dust pile. It said something to me.
What did it say?
I’ll tell you what: I don’t remember.
Huh. I wiped my hands on my jeans, leaving a streak of brown, like a crayon dragged down along the denim. I had done some good work, made some good progress on the excavation, but I had quickly realized this wasn’t really a face—not a human one, anyway. It had no ears—the flesh extended down and down and down into the earth. What do I do, I asked him.
I don’t exactly know, he said, and scratched his head. Thought it’d be, I don’t know, I thought there would be some clear instruction from here on out.
You said the mouth was like a pile of dust?
Something thereabouts, yeah.
Filth, I said. Filth.
He rubbed at his chin. I heard it, how his stubble scraped. He seemed ancient to me in that moment, though he was not old—not young, mind you, but he was not old. His jacket was a neon green that stuck out like a beacon. Maybe that was what had drawn my eye to him in the first place, because normally I walked with my neck craned downward, scouring the pavement for dropped nickels and quarters and trinkets and luck. I looked down, now, took in his hiking boots, a bit worn, but not badly.
What did that story have to do with the woman, I asked him. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his boots, the salt crusted onto them, the laces, fat from weeks and months and maybe years of becoming soaked and then being left to dry by the heater. Speckles of dirt. Mud. Crack an egg over them.
His mouth pulled into a little o of surprise. Well, I thought it would be obvious.
It wasn’t. It wasn’t obvious.
He turned his attention to the face. I’ll rebury it, he decided. Thank you.
But, I started, and then thought against saying anything more. A dime glistened in a crack in the sidewalk a little ways away. You’re welcome, I said instead. I hope you find the woman again.
He barked out a jackal’s laugh. I don’t want her. She loved me, sure. Don’t want her anymore. Crossed wires.
When I got home, I realized I still had the dirt tucked into the space under my cracked nails. I thought about washing them, thought about it hard. I could feel the phantom sensation of the face’s waxy skin against my own skin still, and I imagined what it would have been like to lean down like I was looking into the depths of a pond, what it would have been like to ghost my lips over that brow, to take his nose between my teeth, maybe, to tongue at the gelatinous mounds of his eyes. I ran my tongue against the back of my teeth, then, bit my thumb in an oft-repeated nervous habit.
Too late I remembered the dirt again—and it was too late, anyway, so I scraped it out, let it sit in my mouth, salty and dry. I thought about graveyards, oddly enough, how people bottled grave dirt in crystal vials and sold it, or kept it up on their bookshelves and mantlepieces. I wanted to vomit, very suddenly, and I felt the intention of it roil in my gut, felt the back of my throat start to prickle with the familiar acid-wash. I did not vomit, but the feeling carried me over and I got into my bed, still dressed in my jacket and my shoes and my jeans with the crayon-smears. I turned my face into my clean pillow and spat as enthusiastically as I could manage, which was not very; my saliva trickled down along the curve of my cheek, into the soft indent under my bottom lip. I let my eyes fall shut, imagined the particles of dirt sticking to my soft flesh, juicy, alive. I wanted to drift off into sleep but I didn’t, or maybe I couldn’t—no sleep found me, in any case, and eventually the light faded, dimmed, and left altogether. My room became dark and the dark was sticky, like a greasy residue, like poorly-made tallow. It cloistered in the corners, loomed and bore down upon me.
In that darkness, I noticed a face. It floated, yes, in the corner of my room where I usually hung up my clothes. Its brow jut out, its mouth, like I’d been told, reminiscent of a pile of soft grey dust. I called to it, maybe, my mouth forming the shape of a sound I am unsure of, but no noise came. It might have come closer. I do not know. I felt fingers pressing into my cheek and along the exposed side of my face, brushing my limp hair away from my forehead, scratching into the divot of my nostril, prying my lips open. I allowed it, still uncertain, teetering along the limits of my understandings—of the world, of myself, of the dark safety of my room. The fingers scraped softly into my mouth and as they did, my eyes sought out the face. Relief crashed through me as I saw it was still there, benign, eyes impartial as they looked down at me. Up against the roof of my mouth, down on the soft pink muscle of my tongue. Hands, hands. I was sticky, sticky all over. Everything was disgusting and ripe as fruit. My mouth kept opening and closing as much as the fingers would allow, entirely of its own accord, and I felt the spit from earlier peeling like dried glue. What had happened, I wondered, what had happened what had happened. Who can keep track of all of this. Who could possibly remember.
I woke up in the bright morning. Just look down, I told myself. Keep on that measure, keep along that filth. Keep it all down. I’d told everyone, hadn’t I? So much filth, none of it easy. Impossible amounts of it. Car crashes and urine and sick dogs and unwashed hair, lank and unkempt. All of it, all about. I mustn’t mind, I thought, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Everything will be OK.
fin
the promise of milk
I remember the day with incredible clarity: It was a grey night, of course, and in it I followed the ravens all the way to the calf's carcass. It was one of the pretty ones. I'd never liked cows, I was sick to death of cows—but I liked this one, fed her hay from the palm of my hand, and she put her sweet head on my lap under her mother's watchful eye. Now, the ravens are pecking at her with a prolific and pointed sort of boredom.
It was strange on the farm. I figured this out when I was very young and very stupid, maybe five or six, in the matutinal time of my life. This was the time, of course, when I stared at American magazines under the covers and imagined myself as a supermodel: A woman with the perfect shape, teeth white as whale bone. I wanted to be pretty, but I was ugly and solemn as a beaten dog. My mother told me these qualities would make a wonderful wife of me, but I knew this was not sincere. She already had Kathy—what did she need a girl like me for? Kathy was twenty and two years my senior and when she got upset, she would bite her palms so hard they would start to bleed. She slept with a knife under her pillow because she thought it would lend her some of its sharpness, and I suppose it did. Kathy was a total lost cause. My mother said Kathy would die in childbirth if God was feeling openhanded and free with his favours. Kathy was the only person I could talk to in straight lines.
But what did the calf die of? She is unwounded. I saw her in the field just yesterday, snuffling around the grass on her sturdy legs, the soft curls of her fur ruffling in the breeze. She'd not looked dead, then.
When I think of Kathy, I think of how she slept, curled up on her side like a dead bug, mouth grim and straight as a cut filleted into her by that same knife. Sometimes, there was nothing when I thought back to the idle turns of childhood; just sterile swathes of land, and green everywhere. The air is cold, prickly. I was only out to check the pressure gauge and I was only wearing my nightgown. I looked up and like a flash of brilliance there was the raven overhead, more of its ilk swarming in the distance. I followed in my ratty blue slippers. The ground was hard. I cursed myself silently for not having prepared better; it is strange on the farm and I figured this out when I was very young and very stupid and things happen, all the time things happen that I cannot see.
One of the pretty ones, I said in my head, part of the speech I was already drafting for my mother. The pretty one, you remember her, right? The kind of pretty people breed with the utmost intent and we got because God was feeling flashy with generosity.
Kathy's wedding was awful. I'd felt uncharacteristically brazen that day so I'd ducked out midway through to swig wine behind the farmhouse, and this was where I met Declan. Declan was my age; he was the groom's cousin. Declan was from the city. Declan was on break from university. Declan was studying poetry and Irish history and God knew what else. Declan was the worldliest boy I'd ever met. He was brown-haired, and very beautiful, and he'd been drinking; he looked like a reject cherub. Later, I learned it only took about three sips to set his complexion ruddy.
I asked him what his name was. He said his name was Declan. I've never seen you around, I said. He said, That's because I'm not around.
We didn't have a phone but the McConaugheys up the road had one and let me use it sometimes since I always gave them a muffin or two whenever I was in a baking mood. I gave him its number and asked him not to call until after eleven at night. I was so delighted with Declan, all the brilliant, city-slick lines of him, that I forgot about the wedding altogether until I went up to my room and found a knife on my pillow. I imagined Kathy in her wedding bed, biting her palms and then smearing her face with the blood like some Amazon. Kathy was a lunatic.
Days passed. Kathy and I didn't talk, but then again, she was busy, or must have been busy. I waited for the call and when it came, I gaped into the receiver. How's your mother?, he asked. Good. How's Kathy? Good. How are you? Good. I'm tired of you saying the word good. Did I ever tell you about Antaeus?
As it turned out, Antaeus was the son of Mother Earth—or the son of a monk—or some bastard back in the city who he'd had never liked the looks of, but the thing that never changed was that he drew all his hearty strength from the ground. If his bare feet could touch it, he was unkillable, until Hercules (the son of the Sky God—or the son of a king—or some other flash bastard) came along and picked him up and squeezed him as tight as his strong arms could bear. For days afterward, on my solitary wanderings, I was Antaeus burying his fingers to the second knuckle in the black, black earth.
That's how our irregular conversations went until one day Declan said, Come to school. Kathy had moved away with her new husband by this point, to where, we didn't know. I tried to teach myself poetry but my mind was blunt and my words looped recursively off the page, and I knew without having to think about it that school would be a bust. I smeared dirt across my bedsheets for want of something else to do and forget all about it. I read Declan a few pages of what I'd written over the phone a few days later and his voice was very sad when he told me he didn't know what I was doing.
I don't know, either, I told him. But I can do things you can't. I'm a witch. Don't be silly, he said, and I remembered when he told me I was beautiful, how I'd shaken my head so hard it felt like my teeth were sliding around. I felt like something had been knocked properly loose alongside those teeth so I told him to close his eyes and imagined I could hear the amplified squelch as he did. Imagine a television. Imagine a suitcase full of your clothes and my clothes. Imagine a phone book. Imagine a city. Imagine– God, imagine people milling about and imagine, imagine the entire world, and he said, Stop it. Don't talk like that. I said, Okay. Six months later, Declan had to come home because of a work contract he owed his father on the coast, and something happened to him there, maybe. I don't know. They couldn't find his body for a few days, and they weren't sure what killed him when they did. I don't know whatever happened to all his poetry and his history, not that it did him any good in the end. I miss his cherub's face, but that's all, I think. The glamour washed off him like oil: It took some time to break it down, but once you did, it only took a bit of elbow grease.
The sky has gotten very dark and the tips of my fingers are turning blue. I carry the dead calf on my shoulders and pretend she's the Pope. At home, my mother is doing her needlework. There she is! And there is Daily-cat and there is the moon hanging in the sky like a gaping, frigid maw. Hello, mother. Hello, Daily-cat. Hello, moon. I dump the calf on the carpet. Later, in the winter, Kathy's husband sends us a postcard. There's a photograph of her taped to the back. Her eyes are bigger, her nose is smaller, her cheekbones are higher, her dense curls are now cornsilk. Kathleen says hi! her husband has written in his warman's hand. The calf lows. She says, hello. She says, welcome home. Kathy with the knife under her pillow and the bite marks on her clean palms looks out of the picture and she's all crooked.
I can't be alone, I tell not-Kathy. I pace around like a locked-up beast. I watch the moon. I read my stupid attempts at poetry. I weep into the calf's wilted fur. Sometimes, I pick up Kathy's abandoned knife.
fin
prelude to bus ride
A-SIDE
I spent the summer before I tried to kill myself working at a movie theatre.
It wasn't half of anything, because the big screen wasn't even a quarter of something. You couldn't quantify magic like that, lightning and blackness. It leaked out eventually, I thought, but I mostly attended the concessions stand and never got very jaded. My mind, too, was a cinema. I pulled the curtains back and shot my thoughts in 1:85:1 widescreen, premiered them like a festival, and everyone loved it, it was amazing, it was the best summer of my life. I'd come home and make music with my sister, roll the phone cord as I called my girlfriend in Maine. I was the very best version of myself, big smile, pearly whites. I was so clean.
My parents liked to say that the world had folded me into itself, so nothing bad could ever happen to me. My forehead, they said, must have been dented from all its kisses. They liked me so much that summer. But summers like that don't last. I sat on the steps in the apartment's yard and stared at my nails which I hadn't painted in a week and I asked myself, What do you want?, and the answer that came back to me was a resounding echo.
The summer before I tried to kill myself, I started dreaming about the mistakes I would make. I saw premonitions everywhere.
It started small. It started like this: I thought I might cut my hair. I stood barefoot in my bathroom and held my scissors with a great chunk between the blades, stared intently into my face trying to find some sort of regret, some sort of pause, but there wasn't anything. All I saw was the same newness, the same plastic sheen that had always been there. I put the scissors down, got mad, knocked them into the sink, poked them into the drain, thought better of what I was doing.
It got bigger. It got like this: I would stick my arm into tight places and lean my bodyweight onto it, trying to see where my resolve would falter, trying to see if this, too, would bounce off me same as everything else. It got like this: I called my girlfriend in Maine and wrote the words I wanted to say to her out loud on a scrap receipt: I hate you, let's break up, I cheated on you with three girls just last week. I also wrote: I love you, let's get married, let's have a baby, do you want to have a baby?
"Do you want to have a baby?"
She laughed into the other end and said, "What?"
I didn't mean it, anyway. Not a word of it was true. I didn't mean anything. I kept pointing fingers at different dogs, waiting for them to either nuzzle into my palm or bite down, but what's a dog to care for a lousy bitch?
I thought about driving up North and also down South. I thought about painting signs with antinatalist slogans and walking the highway with them. I thought about going to the drugstore and getting movies from their bargain bin, really bad ones, three for five dollars with names like GOING TO CHURCH THIS CHRISTMAS and DEATHSLAYER ULTRAMAX: THE FINAL LAUGHING KILL. That sounded good. A hundred of those bad movies. I'd watch them all in a night. I'd hang the CDs like curtains. I'd be the block's scene queen, in my pink dress and pumps.
I got loose. I got wild. I got like a kid in a tilt-a-whirl, shrieking with glee, toeing the edge of nausea. I bought five superballs from that same drugstore and held them all five in my hand, flung them at my walls until my neighbours banged on them, hard. I was beautiful and purposeless. I went to parties and threw up in bathrooms. I called my parents once a week, then once every two weeks. It was nothing conscious; it was a slope I was slipping down. It was a tower plunged into the ground and I was walking down the winding staircase, running my hand along the cool stone.
B-SIDE
At the end of the summer, I set myself straight. I cut my hair, but I went to someone to get it done right. I gave the superballs to the kids down the hall. I started calling home again and let myself be soothed by my mother's voice, like fingers running gently through my hair.
It was jarring, how fast I reigned myself in. The impermanence of my rebellion filled me with a lush, bizarre grief. I'd had my share of acting out, had glutted myself on it, frankly, for all of a few weeks before putting my head back down. With my head down I saw the cracks between my thoughts mirrored in the grout between tiles, the places where things stuck close to other things, like when I fell asleep and right when I woke up in the morning, in that second where I flipped the light switch to a dark room and had to take a split-second to adjust most of all. My face locked and twitched and spasmed. My fingers intertwined and bent at the knuckles.
I went to work. I stood behind the concessions stand and put on a big smile, bigger than the screens. I kept my hair up in a tidy tail. I wore lipstick, but not much. The time passed in great, ominous globs. I was as a needle to a record, my lunacy forgotten. I watched the buses passing on the street, rode them, sometimes, though never anywhere unfamiliar. I was a good girl.
The main point, the point of contention, the point my finger caught on when tracing the trajectory of my life on my bedroom ceiling, was how brief it all had been. The next summer, caught in a state of static, I tried to kill myself. That wasn't the important part. The important part was the bus the night before. It was a good night, dark and lovely. The air was redolent with blooming flowers. I sat on the curb with my silver dress hiked up, the backs of my heels chafing where they met the straps of my thin heels. It was hotter than it had ever been before in town. All the radios were grinding their teeth about it. Record temperatures … Temperatures soar … Escaping the heat. The sky was heavy with the promise of rain, rumbling lowly with thunder.
I watched the bus round the corner. I picked up my purse, my phone dangling from my wrist. There was a split-second, as my foot hit the bus platform and I brought up my transit card, a brief moment: A moment of odd silence, where everything froze all around me. Birds stopped with worms caught in their beaks, children quit banging their fists mid-tantrum down onto supermarket floor.
It began to rain all at once.
I thought about my life, my clean life, the decay of my summer. I thought about my silver dress, with the slight tear in its left seam. I thought about my friend Maisy, and how she'd gotten engaged. I thought about my girlfriend, who'd mailed me a letter and signed it off with a lipstick mark. I thought about consequence, and inconsequence. I thought this: Somewhere, there are wild horses standing silent in a field.
I started to cry. I didn't start to cry, but I started to cry, silent tears slipping unacknowledged down my face. The man sitting across from me looked up, perturbed—"What's the matter, sweetheart?"—but I clung to the pole, turned my face so my chin rested on my bicep. The bus shuddered around me.
Everything had an expiration date. Everything had a runtime. In the theater, I'd watch families and couples and lone cinema-goers spilling out of the screening room, eyes blown wide, in the ditzy and half-alive euphoria of a good hour and half spent in the dark. The heaviness in my chest doubled in intensity, tripled. I was the cleanest I had ever been. I thought I might go anywhere, follow anyone to the ends of the earth and further still for the sake of their mercy, might fall through endless verdigris in order to find real soil, real soil to dig my fingers into.
The bus, impartial judge of mundane things, held me straight.
It had all been so quick, was the thing. The street winked up at me, the bell-cords swung. Strange and endless pain yawned and yawned again in my chest, like the ocean; the sky split itself open like a wound. In that haze I assessed: The bus, the man, the street, the bell-cords. My purse, heavy on my arm. I peered inside with bleary eyes. Slipping out of mind and into memory, I paced the perimeter of the hole I was to dig. Doubt tripped out of my mouth. I measured the depth of the hole with my eyes as one might salinity. At the bottom of the overturn I found this: A bottle of prescription Baclofen.
