Category: Aquifer

The Funhouse Mirror of Humanity

The Internet Is for Real

Chris Campanioni

C&R Press, 2019

534 pages, Paper, $25.90

 

Cover of The Internet Is for Real by Chris Campanioni

 

Imagine the internet told your life story and fucked it up. That is the unspoken thesis behind Chris Campanioni’s The Internet Is for Real. Although it becomes clear early on that, while Chris will spend time discussing his family history and other autobiographical details, the life story he is really telling is that of the modern world, as filtered via internet culture. His work views the internet as humanity’s id: sometimes charming, sometimes profound, but mostly idiotic, vain, and vapid. While large portions of the book are dedicated to celebrity worship and the distracted nature of internet communication, he also turns his attention to the way our political past and present has been affected by this new technology. A winding discussion with his father about his relationship to his native Cuba after fifty years melds into a meditation on dreams versus reality versus nostalgia, the distance between his father’s recollection of his youth becoming a cipher for Campanioni’s own distance from his father’s homeland.

 

My father dreams in Spanish. I am writing this down in English.

Where are the gaps and slips, I wonder, as I hold the tape recorder with

my left hand, and with my right, scrawl the notes that will eventually

re-constitute this story.

 

Where are the gaps and how can I make them wider, instead of trying to

fill them; how can I make them wider so I can breathe within them, in

and out, out and in, and make song from all those unknowable breaths?

 

He recognizes that the memories and dreams he uses to feel a connection to his ethnic heritage are for a place that no longer exists, that may have never existed, but one which he cannot escape. This could very well describe social media, where we hold on to, document, and obsess over memories and the image of ourselves those memories conjure. The way people communicate with us on social media is through a manipulated, nostalgic view of ourselves that polishes the rough edges of our personalities. In turn, complete strangers come to relate to us in the same way the child of an immigrant relates to the memories of their parents’ homeland—we know it is a myth, but we can’t bring ourselves to ask the tougher questions that arise from that myth.

 

Another instance where Campanioni uses the internet to make larger statements about world affairs is his chapter on ISIS as an online creation. The piece is a tour de force that demonstrates the way that terrorist groups can promote themselves using the same sort of branding and merchandising as a clothing line or television show. A new video of a beheading, for instance, is treated the way the new trailer for a Marvel movie might be. The violence is a show, and, for people seeking meaning, a global conflict is incredibly appealing, as is the hierarchical society offered by ISIS. This impulse for meaning and fighting for a cause is as old as humanity itself, but because of the internet a cause can reach an unprecedented scale by utilizing the tools of consumerism.

 

YOU

Senior media operatives are treated as if they’re emirs.

 

ME

Emirs?

 

YOU

(sharply)

More important than soldiers. Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers, and editors … they form a privileged, professional class with salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of every soldier.

 

ME

Isn’t ISIS concerned about the fall-out? A drop in the soldiers actually willing to fight its war?

 

YOU

(shakes head)

The overriding goal of the Islamic State is not only to inflict terror on an adversary.

(beat)

Now it wants to command a global audience.

 

The ISIS section may seem like Campanioni’s most damning statement about the world, but it is really just the most explicit and sensational example of a theme that runs throughout the book—the internet is, above all else, a tool that compounds loneliness and despair by promising to eradicate those very things. The desire to connect with a celebrity, with one’s father, with a cause, all arise from a sense of missing something in one’s life (again, this is not new behavior, but the reach and scope is). Making friends with stranger’s online image instead of in person is a symptom of a greater disease—humanity is retreating into its id, disconnecting from interaction and empathy with others, creating entire lives in a fictional platform—and we are miserable. That misery manifests in a number of ways, from extremism across the political spectrum, to blocking people and ideas we don’t agree with, to outrage culture, to an increasing lack of complexity in the way we approach problems, ideas, and policies. The internet is the most powerful technology in history, and it is winning by holding up an ever-uglier mirror at humanity.

 

If the internet is the antagonist of Campanioni’s book, it is still a charming one. One with endless diversions, humor, and charm. It is the abusive boyfriend made digital, and our world has yet to find a way to either take the relationship to therapy or cut all ties. Campanioni’s book is wise enough to not try to answer those questions, and is instead interested in asking questions that grow increasingly profound. The book offers a visceral thrill that feels more like a great song or movie than a written text. It is a bold statement in the age of Tweets to release an almost 600-page novel that is in large part about Twitter and the culture it has cultivated, and Campanioni uses every page to excite the mind, cleanse the palate, and ignite your imagination. The next time you find yourself wanting a break from the internet, I highly recommend you pick up The Internet Is for Real. You get the same addictive experience, minus the dirty aftertaste, and you’ll feel better about yourself in the morning.

 

Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the formatting of the second quoted passage due to readability of the web page on the internet. A little irony there.

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Analysis

At the diner, I sit with Freud

open on the table before me.

 

It’s rude to say clueless, but

clueless, the waiter won’t let

 

me sit with my book and coffee

half-filled. He brims it. Chimes,

 

A velociraptor stubbed its foot.

Pauses. Now it’s dino-sore.

 

I’m bored of Freud, it’s true,

but not bored enough to flirt

 

with you, I think, but don’t say.

Ha. Can I have my check?

 

which he brings with his number,

You’ll want to keep that receipt.

 

Freud on the sooty bus, I can

say that I have made many

 

beginnings and thrown out

many suggestions. The receipt

 

stuck between two pages,

bookmarking desire and lack.

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Father Tongue

Our embargo lifted its hands

off my eyes yanked my chin towards
the colorful architecture of your face

and left me alone with you, strange courier

of my DNA you, an almost-familiar place.
Hello, Cuba, hello father, may I call you that?

 

If a homeland offers no house or apartment,

if there is no familiar front door acting as a veil
between day in and day out,

if there is not enough monotony
from kissing the same faces goodbye,

 if every family has its scent
and I can smell ours

 

then I am still an outsider your hija Americana

sitting finally at your table

cradling a cup of coffee like an egg in my palm.
Do not speak directly towards me
Do not be silent let me bask in your accent—

 

my first words were pale, vast land and highway,
mouth dry with Tennessee cornbread, Mom’s
bleached wooden spoon stirred in shug-uhr

 but at school I liked the feel of Spanish

 in my mouth, en mi boca like ripe black-skinned sweet plantain,
 butter-soft and fried, r’s rolling in a hot pan of my saliva.

 

 Before you called me daughter, I had proof

 tuyo es mío I am not yours            but what’s yours is mine

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This is what it looks like, son,

so stop stabbing the heron’s belly,
as if repeated stabs will wake it from the flies.

 

I mean what I say,
when I talk of permanence like permafrost

 

or ancient arteries of the earth’s underbelly,
spilling from volcanic pores. A woman, did you hear?

 

Crated homing pigeons
and biked them to a Tokyo market,

 

when her tire hit a rut in the road
and the cage fell loose. Nine birds died on impact,

 

while her most treasured, still alive
but blinded by headlights,

 

hit a fender and blew open—
feathers falling like snow. For months,

 

the poor woman wore grief like a wet wool coat
and wept through the deadwind of winter. She’d set the table
each evening for two. Wait for the backdoor to swing

 

and shut
and the sulfuric smell of sorrow to come in the kitchen to eat.

 

Tristessa, she’d whisper,
and the ghostly girl locked behind thick black bangs
would look to her left and say nothing.

 

—

 

When I was a boy
I had a habit of carelessly sloughing bark
from a Eucalyptus. I loved its salve and

 

layered it like glue
over every burn left by my father’s lighter.

 

And though that tree numbed each wound,
resulting in an able-bodied boy, one who’d go on
to live like most other boys,

 

I carried with me two things:
scars without witness and the tree’s sick tinder.

 

Many moons chafed into years of dissolution
and worms hollowed its core. Violent winds blew.
The old tree tilted, fell loose from soil, then split in half.

 

For months, it ghosted an aroma so thick
the fallow fields became places to pray, rub wounds
and feel cleansed. I felt cleansed. Opened my mouth

 

and ran nude in the rain. Its fading ointment
coating my throat and my tongue.

 

—

 

Which leads me here with you, son.

 

This heron, no different
than the three dozen floating out over the estuary,
was once a winged creature maneuvering winds

 

with precision. It was effortless. Swooping
soft beach for sand dabs then arrowing back toward light.

 

It’s sick, I know, how Man manipulates beauty.
But listen, son, listen: I’m asking you
to set the weapon down and look toward ocean.

 

That storm coming close
is big enough to rip this beach from coastline and swallow it.

 

High tide will swell and splash over the barriers
built to guard the street. Perch will fill medians like manna.

 

The poor will come collect their rations.

Wave hands toward thunder and praise it.

 

I’m asking whether you’d like to keep gazing at records of lost time,
or undress and wade these choppy waters,
our bodies weightless as breath.

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Empty Suitcases

Inside Oma’s farmhouse it was as if panicked thieves had found everyday objects instead of treasure: closets, cupboards, the antique sideboard emptied into piles and strewn across the floors. “Kinkerlitzchen just gets broken, or stolen to fill up suitcases,” my grandmother always said about knick-knacks. But when questioned about the suitcases, Oma had refused to elaborate. “Enkelin, be glad that we are here and together,” she’d say to me, using her native tongue for granddaughter.

 

“Oma, what’s going on?” I asked.

 

She shook her head and urged me to the attic ladder, which she had managed to pull down, probably by standing on the stepladder she had used to clear off the top pantry shelves.

 

“You will look for my mutter’s trunk?” Oma said.

 

I’d never been in Oma’s attic. The dark entrance conjured up images of spiders, bats, and rotten floorboards with rusty nails. “What do you need so badly? Did you ask my dad if he could get it?”

 

“Your father is a good boy, but tender. You are different, like me but much smarter. We can take in these things and they do not destroy us.”

 

“Destroy us?”

 

“Please, Mäuschen, Oma will not always be here, and it sits like a big stone on my chest.” She crossed her hands over her heart.

 

I took a deep breath, climbed the ladder, flipped the light switch. In the attic: boxes, insulation, cobwebs, and a black steamer trunk. A plank served as a bridge to the trunk. When I lifted a yellowed wedding dress out of the trunk, tiny moths erupted in a flutter. A tin box contained old photographs, letters, and documents, written in German. I recognized Oma’s face in the sepia photo of a curly-blonde girl with her parents and a small boy. Did Oma have a brother?

 

I carried the box to the entrance and yelled down to see if this was it. Oma was sitting on the stepladder, talking to herself. “Oma!”

 

“Christina! You frightened me!”

 

“I found the box. With photos and papers. I’m coming down.”

 

“No, not the box. I mean, you keep the box. What else?”

 

“An old wedding dress.”

 

“We must find it. Go look harder,” she said.

 

“It would help if you told me what to look for.”

 

“Ja. That’s right.” Oma scrunched her face in scorn, spit out the words. “A fancy porcelain mantel clock.”

 

—

 

Oma hustled the clock into the kitchen like she held a blanket infected with smallpox.

 

I washed off my face in the sink, while my grandmother stared at the clock. I picked it up, checked for a maker’s mark. “A Limoges. It’s exquisite.”

 

Oma started crying, her shoulders rolling like turbulent ocean waves. “You know how my parents, a simple tailor and his wife, came by this clock?”

 

“No?”

 

“Sit, I will tell you.”

 

“The foolish Nazis thought things could be made right for the German people by compensating them for the losses they incurred during the war. One day, my papa and mutter went to an immense warehouse filled with furniture, dishes, candlesticks, rugs, Kinkerlitzchen. Papa wanted nothing— it would not bring little Frederick back—but Mutter wanted compensation. They’d lost everything—reduced to rubble. Why should they not take what the Jews left behind, Mutter said. The soldiers glared at Papa. He said, ‘Go then, Hedy, take what will make this better for you.’ The clock appeared on our mantel, without discussion, as if by elves. But, your Oma knew it was tainted. When my mutter passed, I packed it away.” Oma placed her hands upon mine. “The Jews did not willingly leave those things behind, Christina.”

 

“I know.” Oma had always claimed that her family left Germany before the war. Now I was afraid to hear that we were Nazis. Something else troubled me. “Did you go to the warehouse?”

 

She shook her head without conviction and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

 

“But if your parents never talked about it, how do you know all those details?”

 

“Is this an interrogation?” Oma abruptly rose. “What is it you want from me?”

 

She rushed to the sink then slammed dirty dishes around, muttering in German. Finally, she inhaled, and her shoulders fell.

 

“You were there,” I said.

 

She nodded but stared out the window. “Mutter stayed in bed, always crying. We could not refuse them.”

 

“The Nazis?”

 

“The soldiers were laughing, carrying on, undressing me with their eyes. Papa stood there, useless. He had slinked through the war while our neighbors disappeared. ‘Go on,’ he said to me. Past the bedroom sets, the pots and pans, the necklaces, the toys. I thought of little Frederick playing with his train and I became so … angry.” She faced me. “Then I saw it.”

 

“The clock?”

 

“Ja. So beautiful. Pink roses. Gold trim. A couple on a picnic, in love. I took a suitcase, from a pile that reached the ceiling, and put the clock inside.” Oma sighed. “I am a bad person.”

 

Yes. No, I thought. We weren’t who I’d thought we were.

 

She shuffled over, stroked my hair. “This is my big stone.”

 

It felt like my stone now, too. “We should sell it.”

 

“The clock does not belong to us.”

 

The clock was probably worth one year’s tuition.

 

Oma said, “We will return it to the family. This is your job, Mäuschen.”

 

The clock sat there, glinting in the warm light cast by the setting sun outside Oma’s kitchen window. Oma’s breaths were labored in a way I had not noticed before. A squirrel chattered upon the feeder my grandfather had built beneath an ancient maple tree. I wanted thunder and lightning to tear through the sky, a torrential rainfall to pound upon the steel roof, a tornado to whirl in the near-distance. Instead, a gentle wind simply rustled through the leaves of that tree as if the suitcases had never been emptied.

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Strawberries

Let us pretend there is no mystery in strawberries,
that we know precisely what floods the flesh so enticingly red,
coloring summer with a crimson flush, a violent bloom
amid the cool earth greens.
Let us knowingly say the unabashed hue comes
from ripeness for eating, and there is no more meaning
to the deep red so like our hidden internalities,
which we feign ignorance of while complacently stroking
the shield of our outer flesh.
Let us declare the finger-stains of picking are superficial,
and are washed away when our hands are clean;
that the strawberry juice has not already penetrated below the dermis
so that our own blood runs redder,
intoxicated and giddy with the inbred sugar of fruit;
let us feign that we see no connection
in the perfect way a single strawberry nestles in the human mouth,
to bring memories of feeding lovers and butter light,
romances that never were, and cool saucers in the evening.
And lastly, let us make believe
while the fields are still heavy with the lush season of ripeness
that the bruises on the tender skin do not hurt us, too,
that we don’t notice time playing decay on that succulent red.
Let us insist to ourselves, assuredly, continuously,
that our own hearts are not already burst
as the short-lived strawberry loses its firmness on the earth.

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Griefs Spun to Gold

Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley

Burrow Press, 2019

Hardcover, 123 pages, $20.00

Cover of Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley.

In his essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland asserts that many contemporary poets are leery of the narrative mode because such poems require commitment to development and continuity. Those holding that view, he says, are drawn to the poem that is “skittery,” that “would prefer to remain skeptical,” and that “prefers knowing to feeling.”

 

Susan Lilley’s collection Venus in Retrograde is an elegant example of the reasons narrative poems still deserve a place in our contemporary poetic cosmos. Her poems diligently interrogate the past while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and self-indulgence that are often associated with narrative (“confessional”) poetry. Lilley’s poems also demonstrate that “knowing” and “feeling” are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.

 

In “Champagne Road,” the second poem in the book, is this couplet: “There must be an easier way to quit a house / than to touch everything in it.” Those lines encapsulate both the primary thematic concerns of the book—love, loss (and its corollary, new beginnings)—and the ways in which Lilley’s poems reach out to touch (and to clarify and animate) the “kitchen laughter, / hallway recriminations, [and] shower singing” that are the accompaniment of a life richly lived.

 

The book is arranged along more or less chronological lines, and some of the most endearing poems are those addressing the foibles and joys of puberty and sexual awakening. Lilley’s sure eye for the telling detail is evident in “Experienced: Jacksonville, 1967,” in which the speaker and her cousin attend a rock concert as an adjunct to church camp. In the bus on the way, a boy “stood up and burped the alphabet;” when a “boy way too old” showed an interest in the speaker at the concert, her cousin “grabbed my arm and close-mouth screamed,” and when he asked how old the speaker was, “I said, I don’t know.” And the result of these transgressions? “We had to write extra Ten Commandments / for not staying with the group.” Lilley maintains an affectionate distance from the stories the poems relate, relying on a wry tone to provide the commentary.

 

In a similar, if more reflective vein, is “Song for a Lost Cousin,” which nicely illustrates the ways in which these poems strike lyric notes as a complement to their narrative intent. The middle of the poem finds the girls “powdering our faces / geisha white, love potions / in the blender with nectarines / and stolen Cointreau.” And later,

 

 Even the peacocks I love

 are shadows of my first, a bird

 now dead for decades, once

 opulent and princely on a dirt road,

 

 calling for love against black

 storybook trees and a moon cut

 from tracing paper.

 

The rich imagery makes implicit the importance of the experience and its indelible place in the speaker’s memory.

 

Lilley is a mature enough poet to have lived through the deaths of parents, and several poems focus on the circumstances of those losses. “A Man in a Hurry” chronicles the sudden death of her father, how “On the Sunday we now know was his last” “he fell / into a long moment and stayed there, / stayed no matter how we called him back.”

 

“Palm Court,” one of the strongest poems in the book, begins as an elegy for the speaker’s mother but expands to become a meditation on memory itself. Standing with her own daughter near her mother’s childhood home, the speaker wants “to ransack the air itself / for evidence of afternoon / piano lessons, dark braids / flying behind a rope swing, / hopscotch songs in the street.” But then comes the honest and moving truth:

 

 But our faces are not

 yet dreamed of,

 here at the very place

 her girl laughter might still

 be trapped in the trees.

 

That lovely and unexpected juxtaposition of past, present, and future exemplifies just one way in which these poems often push beyond mere narrative to reach for the transcendent.

 

Anyone who is a Florida native, as is Lilley, or who has lived long in the state, will appreciate the elegiac allusions to mid-century Florida that appear throughout the book, the “burnt cake / perfume that citrus refineries blew,” the beach houses “at the end of two-track driveways / soft with sand and flanked by / crowds of hissing palmettos / and sea grape.” Nostalgia is an inevitable adjunct to such imagery but also there is the stamp of authenticity in it, that the reader is taken by the hand and led by a credible guide through a rich landscape that has vanished or is disappearing.

 

One of the greatest strengths of Susan Lilley’s poems is that they present the reader with a bifurcated subject. As the poems recall the physical and emotional landscapes through which they pass, what is also being discovered and described are the paths the self must navigate toward awareness. It is not enough for Lilley to remember and describe what happened. It is also important to discover the courage and the means to let things go. Venus in Retrograde succeeds at both tasks.

 

Please make sure to see Susan Lilley’s poem “Wedding Season,” included in Venus in Retrograde and previously published here in Aquifer.

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Delivery

All year I avoided the square where Sam got knocked down. But that winter I found myself making pilgrimages to the shrine someone made up. The ghost bike was painted white and chained to a pole.

 

It was the winter I started to start early. I got pretty good at riding drunk. Pavement glittered and winked at me, sick with black ice. I ate sweet exhaust, crushed dinosaur bones. Nothing could touch me on these salt roads. Grit and ice clung to my face. I looked like any street I was rolling on.

 

One day under that carbon atmosphere I finished a delivery—five stars, no tip—and went to Sam’s bike. I was feeling good. Earlier I got IDed at Liquor Planet though it was my third time there today. It made me feel faceless.

 

There used to be a sign and there used to be flowers, but the world had a way of taking things away. These days, people were always leaving trash on Sam’s shrine. Sam would have found it funny—people littering on the shrine memorializing where he was run over by a garbage truck. He loved all the weird little circles of the world. But it made me sick.

 

There was no litter on his ghost bike that day. But there was a young man in the saddle. He looked familiar. Sam, I thought, but of course it wasn’t. The young man wore a vintage army jacket and pretended to peddle while someone filmed.

 

I rolled the red light. A cab stopped short, horn blaring.

 

“Look, I’m Lance Armstrong,” the man in the vintage army jacket said, laughing with his friends.

 

Even I barely saw me coming. I hauled him off Sam’s bike, and we fell into the black crust of gutter snow. An elbow filled my mouth with the hot taste of copper. I was punching anything I could lay hands on. A blow to the helmet, felt it crack. Stars and little birds flying around. It was all happening so fast, and then it was over.

 

Armstrong’s friends peeled me off him. They pushed me away, calling me an asshole, calling me a drunk, calling me a psychopath, calling out “WorldStar.” My head echoed. I couldn’t think of anything to call them back.

 

“We should call the cops,” one said, stammering. He dropped his phone as he took it out of his pocket. “Bet he escaped from the mental hospital.”

 

“Or the zoo,” another guy said. He frantically rubbed white sneakers. Blood was streaking.

 

“That’s not what tonight is about,” Armstrong said. “Goddammit. We’re supposed to be getting trashed, not cleaning up the city. Let’s get out of here.”

 

I shucked off the bloody tube scarf and watched them go, shaking. That’s when it clicked—Armstrong was a regular, one of the college guys that always got Chipotle delivered to the row of old brick houses on Seminary Hill.

 

I stomped around Sam’s bike, feeling deflated. I felt I had to explain myself, explain how the world was. But he knew. Probably better than me. I adjusted how the bike leaned against the pole. Tried to make it seem like a real memorial, not one more abandoned thing in a city full of them. There were several ghost bikes around town, appearing overnight after a messenger was killed. I didn’t notice them until I started riding. Then I started seeing them everywhere.

 

The old-school messengers said there was a ghost bike for everyone.

 

I rolled around, but I couldn’t bring myself to take another delivery. I couldn’t show up at a customer’s door with a mouth full of blood.

 

The cold wind blew through me. Winter was a preservative. I went back to Liquor Planet. I asked if they had free refills. Big laugh, small shake of the head. Five stars, no tip, I was thinking.

 

—

 

Stuck on standby. Algorithmic detention for not accepting enough deliveries the day before. I held a white van and let it move me through the falling light. Cars were honking to each other, saying hello, swapping stories. I was the car whisperer, I knew. The van slowed. I let go, filtering through traffic. I hoped someone would hit me so I could get up swinging. I thought about the time Sam U-locked someone’s mirror after they almost doored him. I laughed and my chest hurt. Like someone U-locked my ribs.

 

I had nowhere else to go so I went to the plaza where messengers drank away standby. When I arrived, messengers were doing track stands, motionless on their bikes.

 

A messenger tilted wildly and a yell rose from the crowd. The messenger recovered, but soon overbalanced. Maria was the last one upright. She sat easy in the saddle.

 

“Did we start yet? I could do this all night,” Maria said, shielding her eyes as she caught sight of me. “And out of the dusk, a challenger.”

 

My hands were trembling, from cold or something else entirely. I shook my head and leaned my bike against a tree bundled against the winter.

 

“Nah, my man’s too old,” a messenger said.

 

“You’ve never ridden a penny-farthing,” Maria said.

 

I sat on a cold bench. The plaza overlooked a brown field where yellow machines ate the city. The sun was between buildings. Maria rolled over, held out a beer.

 

“You used to come around more. Now when you show, it’s like you’re someplace else,” she said.

 

Maria was the closest thing I had to a friend among messengers, now that Sam was gone. Like me, she was older than most other messengers in the plaza. Unlike me, she worked for the courier collective—not an algorithm. The radio strapped to her shoulder crackled as if it heard me thinking about how she got regular hours. She leaned her bike against mine, sat beside.

 

“How long are you on standby for?”

 

“They change the rules every day,” I said, shrugged. “Could be all night, could be five minutes.”

 

“You should come to the office tonight after delivery hours are over. I’ll put in a good word for you. Turnover is so high, nobody remembers why they fired you. You can drop the foodie gigs for real shifts.”

 

“I can’t take Sam’s old job,” I said.

 

“It’s not,” Maria said. “It was Greta’s, then Ulysses’s. And they both left, same as everyone. Look around. It’s all new faces all the time. They’re not long for it anyway. Not like us dinosaurs.”

 

“The dinosaurs weren’t long for it either,” I said.

 

Below, machines with tires the size of people moved earth around. It was hard to wrap my head around the scale of it all.

 

“What about you,” I said. “When are you leaving?”

 

“I’ll never leave. Those trucks will have to pave me over,” Maria said.

 

When I laughed she tossed me the beer. It twisted in the air, and I had to catch it.

 

Another messenger clicked over the brick plaza. She asked Maria if she was signing up for the race this weekend, and handed over a clipboard. Maria signed her name and passed it to me. I looked at the names, recognizing only a handful.

 

“I’m rusty,” I said and shook my head.

 

“Steel is real,” Maria said. She patted her bike frame.

 

A light snow was beginning to fall. I thought about telling her about Sam’s bike, the drunks, the guy in the vintage army jacket. But I didn’t want to drag her down with me. I was only just keeping above water myself.

 

—

 

My phone woke me. I was off standby. Back online. Jacking in, I thought. The app promised a bonus if I completed ten deliveries during the blizzard. I unlocked my apartment door and walked through the dark basement. The world was a void beyond the glass lobby door. I didn’t know the storm was approaching, and now it was here. I never checked the weather. Whatever happens happens, I figured. I stowed a fifth in my jacket, rolled airplane bottles into my socks, feeling like an operator suiting up.

 

Outside, snow whispered against snow. The wind gusted up, the snow rushing like someone shook the world. But it always settled. I felt I was cycling through empty rooms. There was no sound beside the low crush of tires against the piste of the road.

 

There were bikes left out in the blizzard. Now every bike was a ghost bike. Every house and streetlight was its ghost, too. You only really knew a place when you saw ghosts everywhere.

 

A snowplow emerged from behind a snowbank. I stopped short, skidding. The wall of air hit me and held me. The pan of its yellow lights splashed across the white world. Salt leaped down the hill after it.

 

I brought coffee to a snowbound office. “Cold out there, huh?” the man said as I brushed snow out of jacket creases. Five stars, no tip.

 

Each delivery was a window into a life being lived. Doors opened and showed me a sliver of a world that I knew nothing about. Once, I had an order for a bunch of balloons. When I tied them to my handlebars, I pictured them pulling me into the sky.

 

The cold bit the tip of my nose. Wind like knives through my jacket. I had my lights on but could only see a few feet ahead.

 

I grinded through the morning. Before long, I only needed one more drop before I made the bonus. The slush, salt, and sand alchemized into a thick paste. I had to kick my tires free.

 

Eventually they seized entirely. I locked my bike to a pole. Figured I’d walk.

 

Then I remembered Sam’s ghost bike. It wasn’t far. The big, meat-eating tires, the heavy frame only a little twisted from the collision. When he built it, he wanted to make sure he could go anywhere. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself.

 

At the square where Sam died, I picked some garbage out of the front rack. I brushed snow off the seat. The cheap cable lock was brittle with cold, snapped without a fight. I promised Sam a real chain when I was done.

 

I cranked through the storm, slush rooster-tailing behind me. It snowed like it was the end of the world. I felt good, leaning into skids and turns, falling into snowbanks. I finished the airplane bottles and spiked them into the ghost of a trashcan.

 

While I picked up the order at the restaurant, the customer messaged me. They asked if I could pick up Advil on the way to their place on the hill behind the university. Chipotle and ibuprofen. Breakfast of champions. They said they’d tip extra.

 

I wound through snowy streets and bridges over empty highways. People sculpted cars out of snowbanks. Beach chairs, cathode-ray televisions, sawhorses stood in empty spaces.

 

I fought up the hill. I leaned Sam’s bike against a snowbank, hiked over it to the brick triple-decker. When the door opened, I knew him immediately. He was wearing a sweatshirt, but it was Armstrong. The man in the vintage green army jacket.

 

I thought about going for his throat and wondered why he didn’t do the same. Didn’t he recognize me?

 

The tube scarf, I remembered.

 

“Morning,” he said, stepping into the threshold, winced, held his forehead.

 

His eyes were glassy, and there was a video game controller in his hand. Behind him was a living room that looked like the scene of a bombing. Cans of beer stood like soldiers on every surface, guarding against the world. It seemed familiar, didn’t seem worth it. Everyone was their own little tragedies. All standing on top each other and wearing a trench coat, walking around and trying to blend in. I handed over the delivery, turned to crunch back down the steps.

 

“Wait,” he said.

 

Here it comes, I thought.

 

“Oh, you got the ibuprofen. Thanks,” he said. He flashed me a smile and a thumbs up. “Had a few too many last night. You’re a lifesaver.”

 

I showed him a thumbs up with my thick glove.

 

I got on the ghost bike as the door crashed shut behind me. I looked around at the big snowy world and shivered. Five stars, no tip.

 

A plow went by, salting the land. It sounded like rain falling softly. The streets were empty, woolly with snow. The city seemed like it was under glass.

 

Maybe I had a shot at the race this weekend, I was thinking. None of the rookie messengers could ride like this in the snow.

 

I coasted down the hill. The plow turned a corner and the wind died down and the world was quiet. The falling snow streaked past, and I felt I was at the bridge of a spaceship, jumping to hyperspace.

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Rupture

Rupture

Story by Eileen Herbert-Goodall
Images and accompanying text by Joe Maccarone
Sound Track by Lhasa Mencur

 

Outside the window, rain obscured everything except the towering eucalypt. The tree was home to a pair of hawks and Janelle hoped they weren’t getting pummeled by the storm. At times, she wished she could be like them, that she could sprout wings and fly away, if only for a while. She sipped her tea and struggled to collect her thoughts; lately, her psyche seemed split, her entire being ungrounded. She longed for answers that proved elusive. Sometimes, bad things happened and there could be no explaining why.

 

Janelle drained her cup and placed it in the sink along with last night’s dishes. Evidently, if she didn’t do them, then they didn’t get done. But there was no point raising the issue with Brian; she needed to pick her battles, to save energy.

Almost a year had passed since the incident that marked their son’s drastic and seemingly irrevocable changes, and still the doctors had no idea what was going on. Various terms had been mentioned in an attempt to identify his condition—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Altered Mental Status, Elective Mutism. They could call it whatever they liked, it made no difference—so far nobody had managed to get Jeffery to speak again.

Not even her, his mother.

Shards of rain continued to strike the window. Outside, the eucalypt swayed; leaf litter scurried across the ground, hurled about by the wind, without free will. Was she any different?

Janelle’s husband entered the kitchen and she turned to see him making coffee.

‘You taking Jeffery to the psychiatrist today?’ Brian asked.

‘No, I thought I’d palm that job off to my assistant.’

He looked at her, teaspoon held in mid-air. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Not really. I’d like you to come with us for a change.’

‘I can’t, got a huge day at work. Two open houses and a couple of contracts on the table.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more involved.’

‘Involved?’

A flush of pink crept up Brian’s neck and Janelle experienced a jab of satisfaction upon realising her words had wounded him.

‘Is that what you think? That I’m not involved?’

‘Even Doctor Berwick said she hasn’t seen you in a while.’

‘When did she say that?’

‘Last time we saw her—a couple of weeks ago.’

He took a mouthful of coffee. ‘Well, somebody has to go to work around here.’

‘Excuse me?’

Brian held up a hand. ‘That came out wrong.’

‘It’s impossible for me to work right now.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why bring it up?’

He put down his cup. ‘We need an income, Janelle.’

‘I’d just like you to come to an appointment every now and then. Is that so much to ask?’

They stared at one another.

‘Sorry, but I’ve got to go.’ He retrieved his keys from the hook beside the pantry and disappeared into the hallway.

‘Of course you do,’ she called. ‘And go to hell while you’re at it.’

The front door slammed and she soon heard his car rumbling down the road.

Janelle turned to look outside once more. From where it stood battling the elements, the eucalypt appeared to observe her.

‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

Its branches swirled on with admirable forbearance. Or was it disappointment?

 

At first, he simply drew around the sides of a piece of paper—a wolf’s face here, a doodle there—but after a while, he began to write.

 

He read over the letter, then screwed it up and threw it into the little bin beside his desk. It was baby-ish to write about the noise inside his head. Stupid.

Jeffery stood, walked to the window and looked outside. He wanted to run around in the rain and let it wash the bad memories away. If only the wolf-men would leave him alone.

Doctor Berwick had brought a colleague into their session—one Professor Lycan from the Institute of Psychological Studies, who was apparently researching “unusual” psychological childhood conditions. Janelle wished Doctor Berwick had sought her permission to have this man present. Even a little warning would have been nice. She didn’t like the idea of Jeffery being observed by someone she didn’t know.

The professor’s hair, along with his neat beard, was gray-white. He wore round, steel-framed spectacles and sat scribbling in a notebook that rested against his legs. The sound of his pen running across paper seemed to fill the room. So far, he had said very little.

Jeffery stared at his shoes. Janelle could feel the tension emanating from his little body. She wondered if the doctors felt it too. Probably not. They weren’t attuned to him the way she was.

‘And there’s been no change in his behaviour?’ Doctor Berwick was saying. ‘No indication he’d like to interact more?’

‘Not particularly,’ Janelle said.

‘He’s still doing his drawings?’

‘Yes. ’

‘That’s good.’ Doctor Berwick glanced at Professor Lycan, who continued to write with feverish intensity. ‘It’s vital that he has a creative outlet, somewhere to express his feelings, so to speak.’

The professor looked up from his notebook. ‘Mrs Watson—’

‘Please, call me Janelle.’

‘Alright, Janelle—Jeffery is twelve years old, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how would you describe your relationship?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Would you describe Jeffery’s attachment to you as positive?’

She tilted her head. ‘Of course.’

‘What about the relationship with his father?’

‘Brian works full-time, but when he’s home they get along well. Why do you ask?’

The professor placed his writing materials on a nearby desk. ‘Studies have shown that parents of behaviourally inhibited children often perceive them as vulnerable. Such perceptions can influence how they engage with their children.’

‘How so?’

‘For instance, parents who regard their children as socially withdrawn often endorse practices that discourage independence and exploration.’

Janelle held the professor’s spectacled gaze.

A clock on the wall ticked.

‘Are you suggesting my husband and I are overprotective?’ she asked finally.

‘I’m sure the professor is simply trying to get an idea of Jeffery’s life at home,’ Doctor Berwick said.

‘His life at home is fine. I take it, Professor, you’re aware of the incident my son and I witnessed around a year ago?’

‘Doctor Berwick has filled me in on that history, yes.’

‘That history, as you call it, is where the problem lies,’ Janelle said. ‘Before then, he was a content, happy boy. He attended school, enjoyed play-dates with friends. He spoke. But after that day, everything changed.’

‘No doubt there’s significant traumatic residue associated with that event,’ the professor said. ‘But Jeffery needs to realise that what happened is in the past. He needs to make peace with the bogeyman.’

‘The bogeyman?’ Janelle was at a loss as to why the professor would refer to the stuff of folklore and scary night-time stories when discussing her son’s condition. It was 1987, not the Dark Ages. Surely he understood that what Jeffery had seen was terrifyingly real.

‘I think Professor Lycan means we want to create a safe environment in which Jeffery is encouraged to face his fears,’ said Doctor Berwick, ‘to understand that what happened was an extremely unfortunate, one-off event.’

Wasn’t that what she’d been trying to do? To make sure he felt safe? To make sure the goddamn bogeyman didn’t, once again, come in and blow up his world.

 

 

‘May I ask Jeffery to do something?’ the professor said.

Janelle crossed her arms. What was she supposed to say? ‘Okay.’

The professor grabbed his pen and notebook and passed them to Jeffery. ‘I believe you like to draw.’

Jeffery nodded.

‘How about you draw whatever comes to mind when you think of that day at the bank. You remember that day, don’t you?’

Another nod and then Jeffery opened the notebook. No one spoke as he tended to the task at hand. Janelle shifted in her seat as the clock on the wall continued to tick.

A few minutes later, Jeffery placed the notebook on the desk and dropped his gaze to the floor.

The professor retrieved his notebook and studied the image. He then handed the notebook to Dr Berwick, who examined it briefly before passing it to Janelle.

 

 

There had been two of them: they’d burst into the building screaming orders, shotguns raised, their faces hidden behind strange wolf masks. The first man had hurried towards the counter and started yelling: ‘Everyone get down and don’t move.’

Janelle kept still, her face pressed to the floor. Jeffery lay nearby, eyes pinned open by toothpicks of terror.

‘Open your drawer,’ the first man said. ‘Get the money out. Come on. Put it in the bag. Now.’

‘Okay, okay,’ the attendant said.

‘Come on. Money in. Move it.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Shut up and move.’

‘I’m going as fast as I can…’ the attendant said, fumbling with the bag, ‘…doing my best.’

‘Christ, shut up. Or you’ll get a bullet in the brain.’

It occurred to Janelle that perhaps she was having a nightmare, that her psyche was drawing upon some movie she’d seen, or a story she’d once read. Maybe it was all just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream.

‘Sorry,’ the attendant said. ‘This has never happened to me before. I—’

‘You wanna die?’

‘No, no, I don’t.’

‘Then stop talking.’

‘Sure, okay. I just—’

The sound of a gunshot bounced off the walls, reverberating in what was otherwise a terrible and gaping silence.

‘What the hell?’ The second man strode towards the counter. ‘We said nobody shoots.’

The first man answered: ‘You heard him—he wouldn’t shut up.’

‘Jesus! Grab the bag and let’s go.’

Janelle watched Jeffery, who now had his eyes squeezed shut. She would do anything—anything—if only he were kept safe.

The second man began shouting orders: ‘Everybody stay down and no one else gets hurt.’

Before long the men had fled through the building’s front doors, and the horror was over. Or so Janelle thought.

She glanced from Doctor Berwick to the professor and back again. Janelle felt somehow responsible for what she was looking at, for the memory that had scarred Jeffery’s mind. But what could she have done? How could she have possibly foreseen events set to unfold that day?

The professor took the notebook from Janelle and turned to Jeffery. ‘You must have been very scared.’

Jeffery shrugged.

‘Do you see such wolf-men very often?’

He nodded.

‘In your mind?’ The professor pointed to his temple. ‘In your dreams?’

Another nod.

‘Sometimes I have bad dreams, too—everyone does.’

‘It’s not from a dream,’ Janelle said. ‘The men were wearing wolf masks.’

The professor continued to focus on Jeffery. ‘Well, you know what?’

Naturally, Jeffery didn’t answer.

‘Those bad men aren’t coming back,’ the professor said. ‘They’re in prison and they’ll be there for a very long time.’

Janelle was certain the offenders had never been apprehended. What, exactly, was the professor up to? ‘I think Jeffery’s had enough for today.’

 

 

The professor stared at her. For a moment, she thought he would insist upon having them stay, so he could continue studying them as he might have studied curiosities at a freak show.

Instead, he said, ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you both. I hope we can talk again.’

She rose to her feet. ‘Come on, Jeffery. It’s time to go.’

‘Thanks for coming in.’ Doctor Berwick stood and clasped her hands together. ‘Be sure to make another appointment, won’t you.’

Janelle kept quiet as she led her son from the room. Who would they turn to now?

By the time they arrived home, the day had cleared. After lunch, Janelle took Jeffery outside. There was a pond in the back garden and he enjoyed playing near its edges. As they approached the eucalypt, she spotted something on the ground—a nest, and beside it an empty egg. She wondered about the baby bird and scanned the tree, but saw only leaves and branches. Jeffery squatted down to survey the damage.

 

 

After a while, he looked up at her. He seemed neither upset, nor surprised, by what they’d found. Janelle took him by the hand and they continued on.

When they reached the lake’s edge, Jeffery crouched to inspect the water. He’d linger there for hours given the chance, and Janelle would have been happy to let him. Truth be told, she dreaded her husband’s return from work every day, the forced conversation, the awkward silences. She only ever managed to relax when he wasn’t around. Then again, maybe she really had become selfish and difficult, as Brian claimed the other night.

She sat on the garden seat facing the pond. Shafts of golden light shifted upon the water.

As was often the case when she had time to think, Janelle began to mentally list the potential reasons as to why she and Brian had grown apart. To begin with, they hardly had any common interests. Years ago, they’d enjoyed sailing—that was how they’d met—but the hobby fell by the wayside after Jeffery came along. Their financial situation certainly didn’t help; the real estate agency had been struggling for months and money was tight. Then there was Jeffery’s refusal to speak, which had been a tremendous strain on them both. And yet, he wasn’t to blame for their problems; he was just a scared, young boy who’d been damaged by the world.

In any event, it seemed neither she nor Brian had the courage to voice the truth: their marriage was in trouble. It was easier, she suspected, for them to pretend that the benefits of their relationship outweighed the drawbacks. Besides, they needed to consider Jeffery; keeping their homelife on a relatively even keel was essential to his wellbeing. She watched as he skimmed stones across the lake’s glassy surface. She had failed once to protect him, but wouldn’t do so again. Not if she could help it.

Later, as they walked to the house, Janelle again inspected the eucalypt. There was still no sign of the hawks.

Janelle placed their meals on the dining table before pouring them each a glass of water. Jeffery gave a smile, which she knew was his way of saying thank you. Brian continued to scan the real estate section of the newspaper. She sighed, but he gave no sign of having noticed.

She sat and began to eat. Janelle had experimented with a new casserole. The recipe promised to deliver “a knock-out punch of flavor”, but she thought it tasted bland. Then again, maybe the problem rested with her. Perhaps she had lost the capacity to enjoy anything.

At last, Brian put down his newspaper. ‘How did it go today?’

For some reason that she couldn’t identify, Janelle felt the need to make her husband work to deliver meaning. ‘How did what go?’

‘Jeffery’s appointment?’

‘It went smashingly well. Thanks for asking.’

Brian thumped the table, making Jeffery flinch. ‘What’s gotten into you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes you do. I can’t do a thing right these days. It’s as if my very presence offends you.’

Janelle realised this was quite possibly true—maybe she couldn’t stand being around her husband anymore. She began to clear their plates. ‘Actually, your presence would have been very much appreciated today.’

He leant back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I want you to be happy—I want us to be happy—but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix things.’

Janelle couldn’t think of a response. She knew Brian was trying to move forward, to take a step in terms of bridging the yawning rift that stretched between them, yet her instinctive reaction had been to freeze. She seemed unable to reconnect on any level. Perhaps she’d become accustomed to their dysfunction, maybe even addicted to it.

In any event, the moment passed.

‘I work hard to pay the bills,’ he said, ‘to keep a roof over our heads—’

Janelle returned to the table. ‘Oh, that’s right, I don’t work.’

And there it was—the relentless merry-go-round of hurtful misunderstandings and accusations that swept them up in its momentum, again and again.

 

 

‘I never said that.’

‘But it’s what you meant,’ she said.

‘Why do you always twist my words?’

Jeffery jumped up. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Just stop.’

Janelle stared at him, transfixed. It was as if Jeffery were the only person in the room, the only person in the world. His expression, pleading and distraught, swamped her vision. She knew she should say something. Anything. But the shock of hearing him speak had struck her dumb. Slowly, she rose to her feet.

‘Son?’ Brian said.

Jeffery turned and walked away.

Janelle watched his receding form, then met her husband’s gaze. His face was filled with pain…and something else. Relief? Hope?

Moments later, Brian trailed after their son.

She started to follow, then stopped. She needed time to process what had happened.

Janelle crossed the kitchen and peered out the window. Silent and watchful, the eucalypt stood looking in. Upon one of its branches, two small shapes sat huddled together. She watched them for a while and then returned to the table once more.

 

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