Attacks of Radiance  

    I’m cured now, before I was sick. That’s what they say, I can’t be sure, neither seems quite right. When I’m sick I feel assaulted by luminescence, buffeted by incandescent angels. The world has shape and I’m a jubilee of joy. The world makes perfect sense and I know my place in it. But now that I’m cured, so they say, nothing fits together, it’s all static and chaos, nothing is connected, nobody adds up. All heat, no light. And I’m supposed to accept this? Apparently. 

    My psychiatrist tells me everything is about paying attention. “Be aware,” she says, “Alive to each situation. Move through the world with discernment. Just observe, not everything has to make sense,” she adds.

She says this like a mantra, just before she scribbles the script. She’s also got a fat blue Ganesha with an idiotic grin on a shelf that I turn around every time I walk past. She pretends she doesn’t see, but it’s turned back whenever I return. So I take the meds sometimes and then can’t focus at all. Isn’t that called a conundrum? Or is it irony? Or maybe just a god-damned dilemma. It’s tough to win at this game. 

But Ganesha lover is right, every time I don’t pay attention, get distracted, I end up paying for it. For example, when Bianca started removing her things from our apartment I thought she was just decluttering, minimizing her footprint, earth goddess stuff. If I’d paid attention, recognized this for what it was, I might have taken corrective action. Like taking my meds again. Regularly. Or staying off of certain topics like her father’s suicide, or how much I disliked Springsteen, or anything Palestine related. Or maybe I could have just gone down on her more, that always seemed to help. But instead she’s gone and there’s nothing for it. Bye-bye Bianca. 

To compensate for that loss I get into porn which doesn’t demand much focus at all. It isn’t much solace either but it does kill time, at least until the cafe below my apartment passwords their Wifi. I decide it isn’t worth it money for a connection just to watch a bunch of dicks in faces over and over. 

My upstairs neighbor listens to my complaints and says I can use hers if it means so much to me. It either doesn’t mean too much, or I don’t want her know it means much, not sure, so I decline. It it’s a generous offer though and I talk to her everyday before she heads for school. Lucy’s wheelchair is a slick, souped-up contraption that the government pays for on account of the IED that blew a leg off up to mid-thigh. She says if they’d been able to save the knee she already be walking. 

“When I get a job I’m gonna get a real leg, a nice state of the art gam that’s gonna look as good as my other one,” she said, and I confess, the other one was gleaming, tan, close to flawless. She never complains about the military or the war or her present difficulties which impresses me because I tend to whine about things that haven’t even happened yet. I like her even though she makes me look like a punk by comparison.

Lucy is studying graphic design and wants to make serious money. I walk her to the lift bus every morning and she reminds me to take my meds every night and stays to make sure. She’s a good influence. 

 I’m lonely and her missing parts don’t bother me much at all, but Lucy has a boyfriend named Eldon, still enlisted, who visits every month or so. She never introduces us which is fine by me, I make myself scarce when he’s around. I’m also haphazard with my meds on purpose because this Eldon is just one more thing that doesn’t make sense and I don’t like it, I don’t care what the Ganesha lover says. I can hear Eldon through the floor and can tell he’s an asshole by the tenor of his voice, you know, the way you can do sometimes. Then he gets discharged and he’s around all the time and now all I hear is him grunting and her moaning.

 The rest I should have seen coming. Another example of me not paying attention. One night I hear them fighting, Eldon roaring and Lucy sticking up for herself real good. I wasn’t thinking straight so I lay down, cover my ears, and think, “Ok, just observe, it doesn’t have to make sense, move with the current, this is just what people do.” 

This lasts ten minutes at best. Now I am screaming too and I go upstairs and pound on the door. Eldon comes out with that dead eye look, busts my face up pretty good, then disappears. He also gave Lucy a head injury and put her in the hospital. When I visit I’m tempted to vow I will shoot him but I don’t want her to laugh at me so I shut up. Then she asks me to shoot him and I can’t tell if she’s serious or not so I quit visiting. Doesn’t matter cause her headaches get bad, she drops out of school and goes back to Wisconsin. 

Now I’m stuck with Ganesha lady so I quit taking my meds altogether. She says this is a very bad idea. I consider throwing that fat dime store god at her head, but instead tell her I’m good, I don’t need a pusher any more. Namaste.  

    A month later I’m glowing, an incandescent wound and the universe is singing, making sense again. In fact it’s magic. I see Bianca moving her things back into the apartment. I see Lucy dancing on her sleek, gleaming new leg. I know they miss me and they’re waiting. Gonna wanna see me soon as I get out.  

Flat Earth Boyfriend

There’s a new boy in class who says the earth is flat. I thought that was settled a long time ago but he says Antarctica isn’t at the southern pole but surrounds earth on all sides. Kid was home schooled until sixth grade and makes the pronouncement like he’s handing down the commandments, like we should all be grateful for the revelation. It annoys some, but I appreciate his style, however idiotic the idea.

Grace walks by him at lunch and pours her leftover Mountain Dew onto his crotch. She and Iona laugh and so do nearby boys. We decide we don’t like flat earth boy and by we, I mean Grace and Iona. For me the jury’s still out. I’m impressed he didn’t jump, shout, threaten, or cry. He just stood up and walked home like nothing happened.

A couple days later I walk up in biology and look at his untouched frog. He’s got the knife in hand but hasn’t moved. I watch him every day and like the way his eyes are wary but his walk is so solid and assured.

“What’s the problem Flat Earth boy?” I say. “You afraid of that thing?”

“Don’t care if you call me that,” he said, pointing the blade. “Don’t care at all. Most everything they tell us is a lie, you’re just too blind to see it.” 

“I see well enough,” I say. “Can see what I need to.”  

“Like what?”

“I can see that life is boring, but I’m not,” I bragged. “If your insight is as good as you think, you’d see that too.” 

  I see just a hint of a grin and that’s how I got myself a flat-earth boyfriend.

  I say call me Star Girl. I say the earth is definitely round but it’s being sucked into a black hole and we probably don’t have more than two, three years. He nods his head, contemplative, and says, “Maybe, I’ll consider it, but only if you concede a flat earth can disappear into a worm hole easy as a round one.” After school we talk more and on the weekend we make out in my mom’s car for hours. He barely even rubs my boobs and I don’t think he knows much, probably a consequence of being home-schooled, but it’s fine my me. Grace and Iona put out all the time and I’ve decided they’re not the least bit interesting. 

We call each other Flat Earth and Star Girl which sounds poetic, for sure. He tried Black Hole once and I seriously had to explain why that wouldn’t work. He is earnest, naive, and smarter than everyone else and I think we make the coolest couple even though no one I know would agree, which is practically the definition of cool. I strut around holding his arm and Grace and Iona look at me like I’m out of my mind.

In March a new girl joins biology class. She wears red cowboy boots, talks fast, and smells like tobacco. She hears me call him Flat Earth and smirks. At lunch she asks, “You two a performance piece or what?” I’d like to slap that grin off her face but ignore her and pull Flat Earth closer. He doesn’t even look up from his astronomy book but I watch her and notice she’s got the same look I had when I first saw him—like maybe the world’s a stupid hoax, a prank, but at least here’s someone who’s not falling for it without a fight.

Just before spring break Flat Earth’s mind starts to drift. I don’t know what’s wrong, I even show him how to use his fingers, but he just keeps repeating, “I don’t think the theory of gravity make sense,” and he can’t focus on anything else. I say, “Sure, or cool, or, I always wondered about that,” but what I’m really thinking about is the new girl’s thigh tattoo that peeks out when she sits down. I watch her the way you watch a thunderstorm drift in from the distance.

The new girl keeps looking at Flat Earth and one day she brushes his arm in the hall and he doesn’t pull away fast enough. That afternoon I catch her behind the gym smoking a tiny cherry blend cigar. I tell her if she doesn’t keep her distance I’ll take that cigar and burn it into her forehead like a third eye. She nods, laughs, and says, “already got one.” then walks away. 

When break starts Flat Earth and I see Close Encounters at the drive-in and make out. I stick my hand down his pants and he seems to like it, but afterward he just says, “If gravity were real the moon would revolve around the sun, no? And why are there two high tides a day when there should be just one?”

Next day he disappears and I can’t find him anywhere. When school starts again he doesn’t show and I start to think I’m out a boyfriend, but then his mother shows up, eyes dark and defeated, and retrieves his bio folder. Three weeks later he’s back with cuts and bruises up and down his arms. 

Last day in biology we sit shoulder to shoulder. He holds his knife and I gently hold his wrist and whisper, “If someone touches you I’ll make them disappear.” Flat Earth doesn’t respond, just slices the frog clean and yanks the insides like he’s pulling out his own organs. 

This is how the world ends and it’s happening sooner than I predicted, we’ll all disappear without saying the things we need to say. The earth is still round, but it’s been cut and peeled. We’re pulling it apart and eventually it’ll be splayed just like the frog. So we’re both right, this tedious, insipid world is falling into a void and who knows where we’ll get spit out. Someplace better than here I hope. Flat. Round. Don’t care.

Signal, Not Storm

The woman is tall, stately. She possesses a commanding voice, a voice that speaks revelations and when her arm sweeps from east to west her robe sends out a breeze that promises a new age, a blank page on which to re-write the self and a tomb in which to inter the old world. She speaks of the Etruscan Sarcophagus of the Spouses which was broken into four hundred pieces, a metaphor for romantic love which is always inferior to self-love.

She commands us to lie on our bellies and struggle to exit our mother’s wombs. She says this labor is no game, no easy victory, then she goes silent. We wretch out bodies, stretch tissue, fight gravity, and push against a spectral muscle that refuses to release. She let us fight it out, writhing on the dirty gymnasium floor for half and hour, then an hour. Some of us become exhausted and stop, prone on the ground. Some moan loudly, in either ecstasy or pain, using their voices to encourage themselves and others. The woman sits impassive on the stage, viewing the battleground below her without emotion or expression. 

My muscles ache, but I refuse to concede and continue to fight to be born. I have one eye on the woman on the stage. I will not let her see me fail. I have already lost faith in the project and understand all this to be false, a honey trap for seekers, but no matter, I want to show her I can take it, take all she can throw.  

The woman stands and holds her arms out, signaling the end of our birth struggle. “All mysteries are antinomian,” she declares. “tainted and sullied by foreign ideas, and also infused with the divine. The paradox of being human is to embrace the stain. The redemption is to sing a song to be caught by the wind, dispersed into the world, a wind that will grow to a continent shaking storm. We all need to be prepared.” Then she signals a break for lunch and disappears into the rear of the stage. 

The participants in the workshop take deep breaths and attempt to smile beatific smiles. One woman hyperventilates and is calmed by many hands on her body, many mouths humming above her. There is much hugging and some massaging of body parts. A young woman approaches and asks if she can hold my feet in her hands. I politely decline, stand up, walk to the entrance and put on my boots. It’s cold and icy outside and I walk the thirty blocks home, not once thinking about anything other that the woman, twenty years older than I at least, and how nothing from her mouth resonated for me in the slightest. Instead I thought about how her body moved within that olive and red robe, graceful and teasing. I imagined its every crease, its every sag, but also its warmth and give. I imagined its smell. The words she spoke were asinine and counterfeit and she was a fraud, but her body an exquisite paradox, a tempting question.

I am not a seeker. I’m a rejector, I move through life looking for opportunities to say no, not for pleasure, but for relief. Every guru, teacher, practice, belief, and philosophy rejected is a steppingstone and a feather in my cap. I am on a path, and like any path worthy of its name the destination is vague, shadowy, possibly disturbing. Step by step I tell myself, until all is ruled out save one. Maybe not even one.

I thought I had crossed this particular oracle’s bridge, but the next day when she rings my bell, I open the door and find I am still on it. She is no longer wearing that ridiculous guru robe, but loose ankle length pants, boots, a colorful top, and embroidered coat. She also looks smaller than on the stage. I am surprised she tracked me but am too proud to say so and invite her in as though I’d sent an invitation. I offer her tea. She smiles, accepts, and I again wonder who she is, really. 

“I was disappointed to see you depart,” she speaks softly, so opposite of her booming, commanding voice at the workshop. “But I am not surprised. There are those who need to loose themselves from their illusions. You are not one. Your dilemma is much thornier. You need the tempest, you need the squall, and I can help you loose those furies.” She rose and sits next to me on the couch. She puts her hand my thigh. My mind stiffens, but my body remains calm, a well practiced trick. 

“I adore puzzles,” she says as she leans into me. 

“I’m not your riddle,” I declare. “You misread me. And you are not the whirlwind, not the deluge, I am in no need of saving. You’re no bringer of chaos, no nightmare, just a charlatan. You bring nothing that can harm me.”

“Oh no, darling, I am not the storm,” she says as she rubs my shoulder, touches my face, a sweet, seductive smile on hers. “I am merely the signal.”

The woman departs several hours later, early evening. The sky is deep purple. It cracks and a jagged black hole opens. I ignore it, and make more tea. When I sit down to drink exhaustion overtakes me and I close my eyes. In my dreams I see that same crack. 

When I wake a beautiful pink dawn rises. I shake off thoughts of yesterday, only a temporary backslide. I prepare for the next oracle, ready to slay the next mystic, reject the next creed.  She was a close one, tempting, but she’s gone and I won. I am winning.