There is nothing to write today. I have just torn up the lies, threw them around the lies. Pouring lies down my throat. O mother and sisters it’s only for your weak hearts, your hearts like cups of twice-steeped cheap American tea, that I don’t beat my face apart with the ball-peen hammer. What would be more suitable? Beat my face apart with the ball-peen hammer or figure out a way to drop the toilet on my skull? Hanging seems so out of place in this climate—like a plaid hearse. If I could only throw myself out of a plane into that corpse current out there, that swath of feces and ammonia good for nothing but breeding corpses and mosquitoes. Argument against guns: no more groveling. Argument for guns: ditto. Let them all blow their brains out and give the neighbors a rest.
This is my last book. Why oh why oh why couldn’t I have been born with an insatiable urge, a real volcanic gravitas, to plumb? How far I would stick my arms into the toilet! Up to the shoulders every time! I’d suck the clog out with a snorkel. I’d dive in without the mask.
Being a writer is like being one of those unfortunate tourists who finds herself one day fifteen miles out to sea with nothing to do but kvetch and wait for the sharks. I’d like to drop the 1st Presbyterian Sunday School into the sea and watch them wait. I’d like to give them a nice plastic tablecloth and an urn of cheap American coffee and a few asbestos ceiling tiles and a tin of cookies. In fact, they’d never know the difference. Being a plumber is like being a golden retriever fifteen miles out to sea. Pant pant pant. Wag wag wag. Oh how easy it would be to wake and plumb, poke the wife, slap the kids, fix the car, pant pant pant, wag wag wag. But no. For me it had to be the sharks.
Arrogant you say? Let me tell you something about arrogance. For five days straight I’ve woken up with the thought fresh in my head that in six thousand years not a dribble, not a stain, will matter. Six thousand! A flicker. Three times the tedious span of this ungodly Christian era. I see with absolute clarity, with the same nod of recognition I give to the glass staying on the table and the swill staying in the glass, the utter backbreaking futility, the infinite meaninglessness of my petty mammalian enterprise. I hate myself the way a mastodon hates a mosquito. Less! I don’t even blink anymore—I just see. Infinite meaninglessness. Sometimes, in my greater moments of cognition, I can understand, really put myself inside, the thinking of a snail. I can look out at all the snail enterprises, all the foaming, sliming, sputtering span of snail civilization from the first 1 of the Fibonacci sequence to the number that finally fills the dumpster with digits, the whole mortal coil of snailhood sliming across this hyperbolic asteroid. Sure, I love Bach and Arvo Pärt. They are excellent snails. Leviathans of snailhood. I would trade a school bus full of snails for one bar of the pettiest, most juvenile chicken scratch of JSB. But in the end, you either must accept the infinite triviality of Bach or stick your head in the toilet. Nothing matters. That's the whole score. That's the music of the spheres—Nothing mattering. Picture it, like a whale parting the stormy seas-Nothing moving, materializing, parting the waves, Nothing coming inevitably closer. Nothing is always mattering. O syntax! For you alone I’d go on living like a eunuch enamored of the Queen.
Arrogant you say? Arrogance is your smirk, your little titillating flicker of satisfaction when you climb into your car and back down the driveway admiring the neat edges of your lawn. Arrogance is that glimmer of happiness that somehow finds its way into your degrading ventricles when some Saturday you find yourself polishing the silverware or ratcheting a bolt onto the underside of the lawnmower. Arrogance when your daughter says something witty and you smirk. All of us now picture the pretty little girl all grown up, sealed in her faux-mahogany velvet-quilted biosphere, veins drained and pumped full of formaldehyde, planted in the hill above the town in a neat patch of Blue Kentucky, when the earth corrodes and slips, creaking and twisting—the old whore that she is!—and all those coffins come tumbling out like batteries. When the sun finally explodes. When time rips and collapses. Take your Sunday school class outside for a change and show me just where in the infinite I can find their so-called Heavenly Father. I am no atheist mind you. I love God as zebras love God. I believe only in two things: the sadism of God and the masochism of God. That’s the Universe for you—an old squaw in a leather body suit up on all fours on a squeaking bloodstained bed. And your entire existence—every last molecule that ever approached you-is less that the sphincter of a bedbug crawling towards the stench of God's pubic mound. No heresy. I am a leach suckling God. I am a flea searching for a little suck of that magical juice.
That’s my Christian name: flea of God. And this room must be the Queef of God. Holy holy holy. Wag wag wag. Are you beginning to see how meaningless it is? My staring at the table, trying all day to see the space between its atoms, to see right through to my rotten toenails, is the holiest of enterprises-as sacred as a child staring at the bird it killed. Sacred as the suicide dangling from the apple bough staring out at the last few moments of the garden sprinklers and the festering dog turds piled against the cinderblock. Let’s all take a moment and try to see through the table. Let's all pull our arms out of the toilet and try to see right through to our festering toes. Your toes aren't festering? You're very clean? You purchase products? You take time away from staring through the table to actually go outside, start the car, and drive to the mall? You step outside the Queef of God and go wagging your head at me, calling me the heretic? Next time try sticking your neck in the toilet. Do me the favor. As for me, I’ll go on staring at this table, maybe even stick a pencil through my forehead for good measure. Maybe set the dog on fire or set myself on fire or set both myself and the dog on fire. What difference does it make? Nothing, can you see Him? Can you see Mr Nothing, that black whale swimming among the planets? Can you see him yet? He’s in the space between the atoms of the table. Keep looking. He’ll find you.
Andrew Haley’s poems, short stories and translations have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Zone, Quarterly West, The Smoking Poet, Stop Smiling, Otis Nebula and Sugar House Review.
Editor's note: This is the first section of a six-part series. We'll run a section each Monday through August 23.
Read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.
Archived at http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/excerpts/262-ah-0710-van1 and shortlinked at http://frsh.in/dp
