When my father was still alive, still very alive despite having prostate cancer that had, at long last, moved into his bones, he was mildly explosive with his insights: he would have a lot to say, and it would come out of him in a minor torrent. Usually they were about his life. After one particularly harrowing visit with his oncologist who had given him some really high numbers relating to some really lousy test results, he walked up to me in my condominium and told me that being with Mom was amazing. "What a ride" he'd said about his life with her (and since he was from a different time and place when he aquired his slang, it meant that it had been an adventure to be married to her. The possibility that he might be using some double entendre about his wife to his child never occured to him.)
"Dad, you're not dead yet! Stop talking like that" I said, or something like it. I had the self-awareness to say it gently, at least, but when I think of it I wince at the selfishness of my poor stupid younger self, trying to get away from those implications. As if it were about me. Fortunately, Dad would not be put off: he was trying to talk about my mother, his wife of many years, his soul mate. He talked about how she wouldn't have much truck with romance and flowery talk, how she didn't care at all about how she looked, not really, but how much he saw her beauty anyway. It was a pretty fantastic moment, and I'd gladly lose a limb to have him around to tell me- for too long, of course, because he was an old dude and that's what old dudes do- but I'd happily sit there, minus an arm or leg, massaging the place where it used to be and listening to him go on about my mother.
This is something that he would say a lot during that last two or three years: he'd tell me his latest PSA count (Prostate Specific Antogen) was over 1,000. "What?" I'd always say. "How are you still standing?" And he'd explain that he'd just go on, or try a new medication, or sleep during the day. "Besides, it's better than the alternative." This was his sum-up: all of that was still better than being dead. And lately that sentiment has been seeping into all sorts of situations, just like I was the heroine of a long-standing situation comedy and that sentiment was my precocious niece who'd dressed as a boy and gotten herself locked in the linen cabinet right by the master bedroom in the haunted hotel we're staying in....Yeah, like that. Pretty much.
I'm prone to anxiety (well, "prone to" might be a bit of misrepresentation- it's more like I'm "forced to experience" anxiety.) Anything can become fraught when you're afraid of doing things wrong, such as making phone calls to someone who answers phones for your dentist or shopping for garden supplies. I was in a garden center yeseterday, a big one that also sells shoes and coffees and hot tubs, and it was a miracle that I made it out alive- I start to sputter and wander ineffectively when I'm around that much vegetative choice. My mother was an excellent gardener, and I want to be a gardener at least, so I go to garden centers. I leave after an hour and a half of rambling around, usually empty handed or perhaps with another toy for my dogs, who need toys just like I need additonal fat stores. I can't handle the choice, I can't handle the responsibility, I don't know when to put a cloche on a tomato plant. The spirit of the The Gardeer tsk's me under her breath, which should prove to me that it's not really my mother it's that unwanted precocious niece, wreaking her havoc. It's what anxiety does.
And just lately that saying has come to me, like the incongruously helpful concierge in my personal sitcom, reminding me in a steady and calming voice that being out and choosing something is better than the alternative. In that circumstance, the alternative is staying at home to feel un-challenged, un-stimulated, and therefore not moving forward. Not trying anything new, or just not trying at all. I'd never have thought of myself this way: as someone who is in any danger of stagnation, as someone who has a clear path to the non-stop panic of the shut-in or partial shut-in. In my twenties I was clear about my priorities, and when I thought about the dangers of staying alive they would be images of staying up too late and messing up my skin, or not meeting the right person to marry. I thought about being famous and the perils of becoming famous- which to my mind were non-issues, and so I barely thought about them.
But that disregard was way before the stupid realities of continuing to breathe here on Earth poked their stupid heads in my glorious imaginings (seriously: fame? What for?) It was certainly before I did find the right person to marry, and have a child with him, and go to the doctor to find out what was the deal with all the pain all the time and all the sleeplessness. It was before the diagnosis of a lifetime of said pain, sorry about that, and it was before the death of three people I loved, two of whom were my parents. My beautiful, frustrating, idiosyncratic, hopeful parents are gone. I have to be my own parent now, in addition to being a parent to a beautiful, idiosyncratic, demanding, special needs child. So it's no fucking wonder, really, that it's hard to make a move now, since making moves can make things change, and change has been a very bad neighbor of mine for the past thirteen years...but: when I'm scared of whatever it is- buying the wrong plant, for example- I'm remembering that buying the wrong plant is better than the alternative.
I could be the shut-in or partial shut-in, I suppose; however, I have better things to do. There's travel to plan and fruit to forage in the summer, and subsequently there's jam to make. There are plants to buy and then kill, or not (hopefully not.) There's home to go to and home to visit. There's languages to learn how to speak, in support of the travel that needs to happen. Did I mention my husband? He has amazing laugh lines, and I have to watch them open and close when he's just seen or heard something really funny. As he gets older they get better. So: there are a great many reasons to fight the squeezy hand of worry, and the fighting is in itself much, much better than the alternative.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Monday, March 30, 2015
History of Touches
Benhie stood in the line, and it didn't have the usual people in in because she wasn't on her usual schedule: she had a late meeting at work the following day, and so she wouldn't be able to make her usual post-work grieving. So today instead, and it was only Day 4, mid-week, instead of Day 5, which she didn't suppose would make any difference, except that she was wrong.
The usual people in her queue were a mom with her four-year-old, who could have been in Childing but wasn't and so had to spend all of her time joshing the youngster into quiet (it was a personal choice to spend your time joshing youngsters or not- Benhie saw no sense in doing it while you were queuing to grieve, but to each their own;) There was a man who had what appeared to be the exact same copy of his word puzzle every week, a giant one that he had to lay out on the floor like a map and shuffle forward every time the line moved; there was another woman who looked remarkably like her- mid-forties, light brown hair, purple contacts, very big handbag. Today's line had a father with a teenager, and it was obvious that the father was showing his son the task ahead, or he intended to when it was his turn. There was another mother who had two infants with her, the maximum for birthing or minding in their country (the places that didn't enforce a strict population control were considered little better- no, worse!- than penal colonies) and there was another woman who should have looked like her, given the age and the time of day, but didn't. Still, everyone was there for a grieving and because of that there was a parallel feeling from her Day 5 line to this Day 4 line. Benhie looked at eyes as they met hers and smiled a bit and watched the bit of smile she got from the others. It was familiar as it could be.
She moved, slowly but inevitably, to the front, and when it was her turn she walked to the booth with the lit-up number above it. It was her favorite booth, because the robot who'd be serving her was new and in great shape, so she wouldn't have to enunciate to make herself understandable to aging sensors and she wouldn't have to touch one of its' long, many-jointed arms when they got stuck moving one of her slabs. She breathed in the booth, taking in the sad air of everyone who'd gone before her that day- to Benhie, the air in a grieving booth was always sadder than regular air, even though it was reclaimed by the same ventilator as in the vestibule or the hallways. Sad air, she thought as she put in her memory request: it tangs. It smells sour like milk and long-ago burned meals. It was a description that she never told anyone, not even the Talkee that she was mandated to see bi-weekly, for her continued well being. Being a bi-weekly was pretty acceptable. It was hard when it was three times per week: once they learned of it, most people couldn't look her in the eye.
Her memory came up. It was on a screen and it was projected, too, so that she was watching the video of her departed partner while she stood inside the image. Guy was shirtless in bed, but had his pyjama pants on, because this memory wasn't from their beginning. Benhie smelled the sheets around her and she felt instantly exhausted, as she had been on that night. It was a fighting night. She wondered why, of all her bad Guy memories, she'd picked this one: it was just a non-descript repeating argument, the kind that tired you immensely but that you couldn't quantify the next day. She supposed she was a fucking masochist. Anyway, anyway...Guy was talking, and he was exhausted too- there were crusts around his eyes and his hair was shiny on one side where he'd pulled his hand through it, over and over, in frustration.
"I don't know how many times we have to talk about it. I have to- we need to synchronise our feelings-" He said this disjointedly. Poor Guy, she thought.
"I don't think it's possible to do that. I don't think people can synchronise- that's really the thing you're holding out for? Don't you think that's not possible?" Benhie wasn't sure she felt one way or another about it, she remembered: she was just arguing the point to keep his attention.
"You've read the same things I have, you've seen the same Talkee- I didn't think that was a great thing, a great idea I mean, but we did that. I can't not talk to you when..." He sighed, he pulled his hand through his hair. It was the right side, she noticed. Out of nowhere there was this vertiginous feeling of being in the middle of every night like this with Guy, as if she'd requested every slab of nighttime memories she had all at once.
The air was still spoiled milk, but there was sweat from the unclean sheets and a tang of red wine and the smell of vapor liquid, because she had taken up vaping out of desperation during the end of things- she needed it for her hands, she told herself. She needed to hold something while she had these ridiculous conversations with him, these threads of thought that became the kind of snakes that ate their own tails. There were sounds of night in their bedroom, thickened by the layering of memory so that birds became flocks and cars became trains, practically. The conversations themselves became dense snatches of repeated phrases, "You can't open-" and "I want you to but every-" and "Well that's something I don't know, again-". There were others. Benhie felt her hand clench her vaping wand too hard, and the shirt she was folding too fiercely, and her own hair because she'd tried Guy's method of running her hands through it. She felt all that at once, and it was, predictably, too much.
She moaned first. It seemed the right thing to do it felt right, so she moaned some more. Hologram Guy went on saying something about her appointments because he'd always believed that the answer to any ennui was to talk at your Talkee, and he said it many times at once in the booth. The walls practically tremored with his views on her stubbornness. She got angry, just angry, with nothing to bring her anger too ("Your Talkee" said Guy, in multiples, as if the hologrammed men had been listening to her thoughts) and no living person to witness it. She was so mad, and just hummed with fury (literally: she'd moved on from moaning) which grew to hissing which grew to a shout, and she turned inside the projected Guys in her air, from the smells and the confusion and the alarming sensation of touching more than two things at once, as if she had tentacles. She tried to stomp out but was stopped by the door, which locked from the inside when you closed it. She felt how unfair it was to be overwhelmed like this and then be disallowed the ability to stomp out of the space, and how it was the most unfair part of the whole experience.
The line people had changed, gotten their own grieving booths. Now there was an older woman who stood straight as a stick, and a couple who both had glassy, uncaring eyes, and someone young, probably not yet out of Choose school. They looked at her almost sympathetically, as if they thought they should be apologizing for something. She wanted to stomp but felt that would be rude, so she walked back out to the street and to her apartment. When she got there, she stomped all around her studio, marking the floor in one spot and making a racket- sometimes humming, sometimes not- until her downstairs neighbor came to her door to ask her to stop. When he went away mollified, she sat and the anger drained from her. She tried the CogThink that her Talkee had taught her: she told herself it was just a glitch, she replayed the session in her head and modified the effect (just a little- that was the trick to it, you only changed how things had happened just a bit, to keep it "authentique" as her Talkee smilingly put it.) She breathed the non-sad air. It was a good thing that she'd just changed the scent cartridge in her ventilator- her studio air smelled like coconuts, or what she assumed were coconuts since she'd never smelled a real coconut. It was calming.
Her next grieving session was her regular day the following week, Day 5. It had been too long since that terrible glitchy session on Day 4 of the following week, and her Not-Boss at work had noticed a fall in her productivity. Benhie hadn't noticed, which was the most alarming thing about it: she was a real fan of productivity, she was at the assemblies right in the front row mouthing the slogans and catchphrases ("We're all part of the Hive" was one, though no one knew what a hive was anymore; also "Can you yes you can can you yes you can can you yes you can can you YES WE CAN" with clapping.) She normally felt that anything that increased productivity, on an individual or a group scale, was ultimately a good thing. It was the reason for the Grieving and the Talkees in the first place: when you managed your SAD! (for Start Altering Despondency!,) you became the most efficient version of yourself possible.
Except since her breakup with Guy, she'd felt less that way. Except that when she was being honest with herself, which she was doing more and more lately (unintentionally, but there it was,) she had lost sight of productivity as a golden mean since before she broke up with Guy. It was the reason she'd been made a tri-weekly Talker.
The line was as it should have been, with all the regulars. The woman who looked so much like Benhie had changed her hair. It was a different color, but not different enough to erase the likeness between them. Benhie smiled brightly at the woman, who smiled back in the practiced way. Benhie was in a good mind for this session. 8 days was too long to wait for your turn to have negative emotions. She'd picked a memory slab that had something good for her, she hoped. It was the slab with the "I love you's" and the face touches and the waking in the middle of the night just to make love. She intended to shed a tear, wipe it with a new handkerchief she'd brought for the occasion, and go back to herself. She was looking forward to the after.
The sad air was the same, and she handed over the slab with some enthusiasm. She felt hungry for it, and the memory was going to be a steak to her, full of fortifiers. The arm took her slab and popped it in: Guy was there, naked under the covers, smiling. Guy was all around her, smiling. She smiled back. Then, just in that nice pre-crying moment, Guy was everywhere at once: naked, half-naked, clothed, packed even. For some reason the glitch from last week had reproduced asexually, and now she was faced with all of the crying of Guy and all the loving of Guy at the same time. The sheet smell was asphyxiating. Guys hair was shined and not-shined from his hand going through it on the right side, or not. She was in the center of every memory at once, every stupid fight and stupider fit of giggles, she heard Guy's voice talk about her beautiful mouth and her lack of laundry skills and how stubborn she was, and how he was done. He said it like that: "I'm done." She felt the derision for the phrase- he's done, he's like a meatburger that way- and she felt the melting edges of herself when he mentioned her mouth.
Benhie screamed and ran at the robot. It was a robot arm, really, since there wasn't any other piece of a robot in the booth, and she ran at it, her handkerchief still tucked in her fist. She shoved at it and it rolled away, designed for this, indulgent even. So she picked up the chair that was provided in every booth and brought it over her head, much higher than she would have guessed she could, and brought it down on the thing. That helped: there was a nasty clang, so she kept doing it until the robot arm, not designed for this, snapped at one of its' fragile joints and the front piece of it fell to the ground. Benhie put the chair down and sat on it. She was exhausted! The memories that she'd not requested swam around in her head, and despite the fact that the holograms weren't there any more she lived in a miasma of her previous couplehood for twenty minutes. She just sat and breathed while it went away. She wasn't thinking of anything. It was a tremendous relief.
When she left the Grieving both, the line with her usual people had already been served and were in their boxes or gone. Benhie slinked past the current liners. If anyone was looking at her strangely she didn't notice. She went straight to her apartment and thought about things...truthfully she thought about Things, such as why she was not charmed by her own drive for efficiency any more and why Guy hadn't just come out and said what needed to be said. She might have saved herself so much trouble, and they might have stayed together, though she doubted it. He was GAtoGA (Going Along to Get Along) and that right there was the crux of their problem. She Thought more. She was not going to be a production slave any more, not because she was opposed to the idea but because she knew that if she went into another Grieving booth, she would go fully mad. Everything could work perfectly but now she had another memory to Down/Up, but it was a memory of every other memory. She had broken the robot arm but she hadn't broken anything else. She didn't feel like confessing; she didn't feel like making the appointment with another piece of robot (the head, she supposed) to record what had happened, sitting very still for twenty minutes while the sheet of light crossed and re-crossed her eyes, making another slab for her. She didn't feel like having an Apology Event at work, despite the fact that she'd be "encouraged" to bring cake, which meant that she could choose the flavor. She felt like...running. Running? She wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but she thought it meant leaving and staying gone somehow.
Her apartment was a fine place but she had to leave it and she did, taking only a few things that she thought she would really need, such as underwear and money and anything that could be categorized as a snack. She'd just gotten her weekly delivery of groceries so the bag she was using was full of snacks, thank goodness. Benhie looked around, unsure of herself again, but when she thought it out it was the best option for her. It was the option with the least amount of Grieving in it. She went to a Lodge that was right down the street from her and stayed there for two days, nibbling on her snacks, getting off the bed to stretch and walk around the room but otherwise staying put. The TV was on the whole time, including when she slept which was an example of terrible Sleepytime Nopes that she normally abhorred. She was a stickler for Sleepytime Yups and shunned the Nopes, but this was an exception.
On the second day she was rewarded (if that's what you can call it) by the news playing something about her: there was an entreaty for her return. "She's just so Productive normally, and we miss that at work. Benhie, if you're watching this, please come back. The arm at the Grieving center can be paid for- " she blushed when her Not Boss said this, it was the truth for anyone viewing to deconstruct as they liked- "but you have to come back, we all miss you. It's not as terrible as it sounds." Her Not Boss finished with a beautiful smile for someone, but Benhie didn't think it was for her. None of that was very terrifying, but it wasn't soothing and it didn't change her motivation one bit. She had no doubt that she could pay for the arm and go back to being the one who got a Well Done Hoversticker above her head every Day 6 for all of her colleagues to see, but she wasn't done with whatever she was doing yet. She moved to another Lodge and stayed there for three days.
It was confusing: what did she want? This was the question she asked herself every day she was holed away, and every time she saw the begging for her return on the television that she was fully addicted to now. There were people besides her Not Boss asking her to come back, people from work and her sister, whom she hadn't seen in many Ages, who looked pleased at the attention. No one said anything that changed her mind, though she always watched with as open a heart as she could manage. What did she want? She moved around, she used the Lodges that were the least expensive since she knew her money wouldn't last, she bought food out of machines in the lobbies of the Lodges or little stores that were right up the block. She knew she'd have to change something permenantly but she didn't know what it was, and she was beginning to resent her mind for taking her on this pointless walkabout.
At Lodge #4 she was thinking it while she was sitting on the pot, and the small bit of glass shelving that was above her head, big enough to hold two hand towels and one washcloth but nothing else, came unscrewed or unmoored or unconnected to the wall and fell on her, nicking her neck and then clattering to the side, whole. It was a shock: she'd been so deep in contemplation, and who checks the screws on an above-head shelf every time they sit? So it was a shock, like getting hit in the back of the head with a sports ball you didn't see coming, and Benhie burst into tears. The crying felt so immediately good, like having an orgasm or finally emptying your bladder or reaching the perfect point of fullness in your belly, that she smiled while she did it.
Thank You she thought to no one.
The usual people in her queue were a mom with her four-year-old, who could have been in Childing but wasn't and so had to spend all of her time joshing the youngster into quiet (it was a personal choice to spend your time joshing youngsters or not- Benhie saw no sense in doing it while you were queuing to grieve, but to each their own;) There was a man who had what appeared to be the exact same copy of his word puzzle every week, a giant one that he had to lay out on the floor like a map and shuffle forward every time the line moved; there was another woman who looked remarkably like her- mid-forties, light brown hair, purple contacts, very big handbag. Today's line had a father with a teenager, and it was obvious that the father was showing his son the task ahead, or he intended to when it was his turn. There was another mother who had two infants with her, the maximum for birthing or minding in their country (the places that didn't enforce a strict population control were considered little better- no, worse!- than penal colonies) and there was another woman who should have looked like her, given the age and the time of day, but didn't. Still, everyone was there for a grieving and because of that there was a parallel feeling from her Day 5 line to this Day 4 line. Benhie looked at eyes as they met hers and smiled a bit and watched the bit of smile she got from the others. It was familiar as it could be.
She moved, slowly but inevitably, to the front, and when it was her turn she walked to the booth with the lit-up number above it. It was her favorite booth, because the robot who'd be serving her was new and in great shape, so she wouldn't have to enunciate to make herself understandable to aging sensors and she wouldn't have to touch one of its' long, many-jointed arms when they got stuck moving one of her slabs. She breathed in the booth, taking in the sad air of everyone who'd gone before her that day- to Benhie, the air in a grieving booth was always sadder than regular air, even though it was reclaimed by the same ventilator as in the vestibule or the hallways. Sad air, she thought as she put in her memory request: it tangs. It smells sour like milk and long-ago burned meals. It was a description that she never told anyone, not even the Talkee that she was mandated to see bi-weekly, for her continued well being. Being a bi-weekly was pretty acceptable. It was hard when it was three times per week: once they learned of it, most people couldn't look her in the eye.
Her memory came up. It was on a screen and it was projected, too, so that she was watching the video of her departed partner while she stood inside the image. Guy was shirtless in bed, but had his pyjama pants on, because this memory wasn't from their beginning. Benhie smelled the sheets around her and she felt instantly exhausted, as she had been on that night. It was a fighting night. She wondered why, of all her bad Guy memories, she'd picked this one: it was just a non-descript repeating argument, the kind that tired you immensely but that you couldn't quantify the next day. She supposed she was a fucking masochist. Anyway, anyway...Guy was talking, and he was exhausted too- there were crusts around his eyes and his hair was shiny on one side where he'd pulled his hand through it, over and over, in frustration.
"I don't know how many times we have to talk about it. I have to- we need to synchronise our feelings-" He said this disjointedly. Poor Guy, she thought.
"I don't think it's possible to do that. I don't think people can synchronise- that's really the thing you're holding out for? Don't you think that's not possible?" Benhie wasn't sure she felt one way or another about it, she remembered: she was just arguing the point to keep his attention.
"You've read the same things I have, you've seen the same Talkee- I didn't think that was a great thing, a great idea I mean, but we did that. I can't not talk to you when..." He sighed, he pulled his hand through his hair. It was the right side, she noticed. Out of nowhere there was this vertiginous feeling of being in the middle of every night like this with Guy, as if she'd requested every slab of nighttime memories she had all at once.
The air was still spoiled milk, but there was sweat from the unclean sheets and a tang of red wine and the smell of vapor liquid, because she had taken up vaping out of desperation during the end of things- she needed it for her hands, she told herself. She needed to hold something while she had these ridiculous conversations with him, these threads of thought that became the kind of snakes that ate their own tails. There were sounds of night in their bedroom, thickened by the layering of memory so that birds became flocks and cars became trains, practically. The conversations themselves became dense snatches of repeated phrases, "You can't open-" and "I want you to but every-" and "Well that's something I don't know, again-". There were others. Benhie felt her hand clench her vaping wand too hard, and the shirt she was folding too fiercely, and her own hair because she'd tried Guy's method of running her hands through it. She felt all that at once, and it was, predictably, too much.
She moaned first. It seemed the right thing to do it felt right, so she moaned some more. Hologram Guy went on saying something about her appointments because he'd always believed that the answer to any ennui was to talk at your Talkee, and he said it many times at once in the booth. The walls practically tremored with his views on her stubbornness. She got angry, just angry, with nothing to bring her anger too ("Your Talkee" said Guy, in multiples, as if the hologrammed men had been listening to her thoughts) and no living person to witness it. She was so mad, and just hummed with fury (literally: she'd moved on from moaning) which grew to hissing which grew to a shout, and she turned inside the projected Guys in her air, from the smells and the confusion and the alarming sensation of touching more than two things at once, as if she had tentacles. She tried to stomp out but was stopped by the door, which locked from the inside when you closed it. She felt how unfair it was to be overwhelmed like this and then be disallowed the ability to stomp out of the space, and how it was the most unfair part of the whole experience.
The line people had changed, gotten their own grieving booths. Now there was an older woman who stood straight as a stick, and a couple who both had glassy, uncaring eyes, and someone young, probably not yet out of Choose school. They looked at her almost sympathetically, as if they thought they should be apologizing for something. She wanted to stomp but felt that would be rude, so she walked back out to the street and to her apartment. When she got there, she stomped all around her studio, marking the floor in one spot and making a racket- sometimes humming, sometimes not- until her downstairs neighbor came to her door to ask her to stop. When he went away mollified, she sat and the anger drained from her. She tried the CogThink that her Talkee had taught her: she told herself it was just a glitch, she replayed the session in her head and modified the effect (just a little- that was the trick to it, you only changed how things had happened just a bit, to keep it "authentique" as her Talkee smilingly put it.) She breathed the non-sad air. It was a good thing that she'd just changed the scent cartridge in her ventilator- her studio air smelled like coconuts, or what she assumed were coconuts since she'd never smelled a real coconut. It was calming.
Her next grieving session was her regular day the following week, Day 5. It had been too long since that terrible glitchy session on Day 4 of the following week, and her Not-Boss at work had noticed a fall in her productivity. Benhie hadn't noticed, which was the most alarming thing about it: she was a real fan of productivity, she was at the assemblies right in the front row mouthing the slogans and catchphrases ("We're all part of the Hive" was one, though no one knew what a hive was anymore; also "Can you yes you can can you yes you can can you yes you can can you YES WE CAN" with clapping.) She normally felt that anything that increased productivity, on an individual or a group scale, was ultimately a good thing. It was the reason for the Grieving and the Talkees in the first place: when you managed your SAD! (for Start Altering Despondency!,) you became the most efficient version of yourself possible.
Except since her breakup with Guy, she'd felt less that way. Except that when she was being honest with herself, which she was doing more and more lately (unintentionally, but there it was,) she had lost sight of productivity as a golden mean since before she broke up with Guy. It was the reason she'd been made a tri-weekly Talker.
The line was as it should have been, with all the regulars. The woman who looked so much like Benhie had changed her hair. It was a different color, but not different enough to erase the likeness between them. Benhie smiled brightly at the woman, who smiled back in the practiced way. Benhie was in a good mind for this session. 8 days was too long to wait for your turn to have negative emotions. She'd picked a memory slab that had something good for her, she hoped. It was the slab with the "I love you's" and the face touches and the waking in the middle of the night just to make love. She intended to shed a tear, wipe it with a new handkerchief she'd brought for the occasion, and go back to herself. She was looking forward to the after.
The sad air was the same, and she handed over the slab with some enthusiasm. She felt hungry for it, and the memory was going to be a steak to her, full of fortifiers. The arm took her slab and popped it in: Guy was there, naked under the covers, smiling. Guy was all around her, smiling. She smiled back. Then, just in that nice pre-crying moment, Guy was everywhere at once: naked, half-naked, clothed, packed even. For some reason the glitch from last week had reproduced asexually, and now she was faced with all of the crying of Guy and all the loving of Guy at the same time. The sheet smell was asphyxiating. Guys hair was shined and not-shined from his hand going through it on the right side, or not. She was in the center of every memory at once, every stupid fight and stupider fit of giggles, she heard Guy's voice talk about her beautiful mouth and her lack of laundry skills and how stubborn she was, and how he was done. He said it like that: "I'm done." She felt the derision for the phrase- he's done, he's like a meatburger that way- and she felt the melting edges of herself when he mentioned her mouth.
Benhie screamed and ran at the robot. It was a robot arm, really, since there wasn't any other piece of a robot in the booth, and she ran at it, her handkerchief still tucked in her fist. She shoved at it and it rolled away, designed for this, indulgent even. So she picked up the chair that was provided in every booth and brought it over her head, much higher than she would have guessed she could, and brought it down on the thing. That helped: there was a nasty clang, so she kept doing it until the robot arm, not designed for this, snapped at one of its' fragile joints and the front piece of it fell to the ground. Benhie put the chair down and sat on it. She was exhausted! The memories that she'd not requested swam around in her head, and despite the fact that the holograms weren't there any more she lived in a miasma of her previous couplehood for twenty minutes. She just sat and breathed while it went away. She wasn't thinking of anything. It was a tremendous relief.
When she left the Grieving both, the line with her usual people had already been served and were in their boxes or gone. Benhie slinked past the current liners. If anyone was looking at her strangely she didn't notice. She went straight to her apartment and thought about things...truthfully she thought about Things, such as why she was not charmed by her own drive for efficiency any more and why Guy hadn't just come out and said what needed to be said. She might have saved herself so much trouble, and they might have stayed together, though she doubted it. He was GAtoGA (Going Along to Get Along) and that right there was the crux of their problem. She Thought more. She was not going to be a production slave any more, not because she was opposed to the idea but because she knew that if she went into another Grieving booth, she would go fully mad. Everything could work perfectly but now she had another memory to Down/Up, but it was a memory of every other memory. She had broken the robot arm but she hadn't broken anything else. She didn't feel like confessing; she didn't feel like making the appointment with another piece of robot (the head, she supposed) to record what had happened, sitting very still for twenty minutes while the sheet of light crossed and re-crossed her eyes, making another slab for her. She didn't feel like having an Apology Event at work, despite the fact that she'd be "encouraged" to bring cake, which meant that she could choose the flavor. She felt like...running. Running? She wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but she thought it meant leaving and staying gone somehow.
Her apartment was a fine place but she had to leave it and she did, taking only a few things that she thought she would really need, such as underwear and money and anything that could be categorized as a snack. She'd just gotten her weekly delivery of groceries so the bag she was using was full of snacks, thank goodness. Benhie looked around, unsure of herself again, but when she thought it out it was the best option for her. It was the option with the least amount of Grieving in it. She went to a Lodge that was right down the street from her and stayed there for two days, nibbling on her snacks, getting off the bed to stretch and walk around the room but otherwise staying put. The TV was on the whole time, including when she slept which was an example of terrible Sleepytime Nopes that she normally abhorred. She was a stickler for Sleepytime Yups and shunned the Nopes, but this was an exception.
On the second day she was rewarded (if that's what you can call it) by the news playing something about her: there was an entreaty for her return. "She's just so Productive normally, and we miss that at work. Benhie, if you're watching this, please come back. The arm at the Grieving center can be paid for- " she blushed when her Not Boss said this, it was the truth for anyone viewing to deconstruct as they liked- "but you have to come back, we all miss you. It's not as terrible as it sounds." Her Not Boss finished with a beautiful smile for someone, but Benhie didn't think it was for her. None of that was very terrifying, but it wasn't soothing and it didn't change her motivation one bit. She had no doubt that she could pay for the arm and go back to being the one who got a Well Done Hoversticker above her head every Day 6 for all of her colleagues to see, but she wasn't done with whatever she was doing yet. She moved to another Lodge and stayed there for three days.
It was confusing: what did she want? This was the question she asked herself every day she was holed away, and every time she saw the begging for her return on the television that she was fully addicted to now. There were people besides her Not Boss asking her to come back, people from work and her sister, whom she hadn't seen in many Ages, who looked pleased at the attention. No one said anything that changed her mind, though she always watched with as open a heart as she could manage. What did she want? She moved around, she used the Lodges that were the least expensive since she knew her money wouldn't last, she bought food out of machines in the lobbies of the Lodges or little stores that were right up the block. She knew she'd have to change something permenantly but she didn't know what it was, and she was beginning to resent her mind for taking her on this pointless walkabout.
At Lodge #4 she was thinking it while she was sitting on the pot, and the small bit of glass shelving that was above her head, big enough to hold two hand towels and one washcloth but nothing else, came unscrewed or unmoored or unconnected to the wall and fell on her, nicking her neck and then clattering to the side, whole. It was a shock: she'd been so deep in contemplation, and who checks the screws on an above-head shelf every time they sit? So it was a shock, like getting hit in the back of the head with a sports ball you didn't see coming, and Benhie burst into tears. The crying felt so immediately good, like having an orgasm or finally emptying your bladder or reaching the perfect point of fullness in your belly, that she smiled while she did it.
Thank You she thought to no one.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Perpetual Dissatisfaction as a Lifestyle Choice
There was a point in time when I thought I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The Acting: oh, how much was I in love? So much so that I was willing, eager, to look forward to the Oscars every year, the Actor's Roshashana, notebook in hand so that I might make lists about vulgarities such as which character actor was being ignored for the Best Supporting award over some Hollywood newbie and what awkwardly glamorous updo worked best on a long face (I have a long face. Gathering data about hairstyles is important when you're twenty and In Love.) I was going to be Helen Mirren- no offense intended, Helen (Dame Mirren and I are old friends [clearly that is a lie.]) I was going to be big, a Big Stah, so that I could work with the other Big Stahs that made my heart flutter when I watched their hearts flutter onscreen. It was sympathy fluttering: we were all a-flutter, and I was convinced to my marrow that this was because I was destined to become one of Them, contorting my face in just the right way for the close-ups, stomping my foot on the boards during breaks in filming future classics like Out of Africa Two: Showers Save Water, doing interviews for magazines. Because magazines featured in my dreaming, because I'm old.
Well, I'm old enough. For what, you ask? That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked!...what I seem to be really good at- in such a way that I barely recognize I'm doing it- is being dissatisfied. I live in England so I'm in some good company: 60 million of we Brits (or Non-British Residents, or Immigrant Scum according to EUKIP, Great Britain's counter to America's Tea Party, whom I would call a bunch of twats if it weren't an insult to vaginas) enjoy nothing more than a good bout of complaining. Besides everything being too expensive and the world being run by a bunch of lying beaurocrats who are in danger of being overthrown by a bunch of crazed "God is our Cannon" despots, I personally have a good deal to complain about. Blah blah pain blah acting gone, blah paperwork blah blah Fibrofog which is just like chemofog or fiftieth-hangover-in-a-rowfog blah homesick. I periodically try to cut through all the blah by finding some direction, something that will be simple enough so that I can get my marmalade-thick thoughts around it and will be flexible so that when I'm done tending to my special needs genius child and my special needs genius husband and my ADHD young dog and my aggressive shithead old dog I can whiz through it. But whiz through what? There are so many things to consider!
I could:
- become a librarian. I'd be surrounded by books all the friggin' time, and I love to read! Reading is awesome, so awesome that's it's fundamental (TM)!...Except: to get hired you have to get a masters in Library Science, and then you'd be making some ridiculous pittance so that you could travel around in a non-company car (meaning Your Own, or perhaps Some Bus, and good luck with that) to different underfunded libraries so that you can do their paperwork. And the student loans would affect you and your child and your children's children, on to the seventh generation (maybe THAT is what Sitting Bull was talking about: he saw the future of student financing and was trying to warn us. It wasn't about the environment at all! Or maybe it was! Either way, we really screwed the pooch on that one.)
-teach Acting. Being honest here- and not in a shithead sort of way- I was good at acting. There are people who said I was great at it, and the fact that they were my paid teachers had nothing to do with how their opinions were formed. So it would be gratifying to pass along my sacred knowledge, to teach the youngsters what it means to compare pictures of your own face with others pictures of their own faces FOR HOURS, and to create endless and meaningless Improv games where everyone has to learn how to wander around the room like seaweed. Hey, someone did that to me, so it's just PAYBACK...Ok, I think I see the problem here.
-go to School, to Learn Stuff. Learning is amazing and really the reason we're all here on the planet; the fact that the majority of us in the developed world choose to learn about Kim and Kanye's Million-Dollar Malibu Barbie Dream Brothel with Hydrolic-Lift Rotating Champagne Room for their l'il baby is not the point: there are those who learn well, who learn how to speak French or Mardarin, who learn how to chop wood and install solar arrays and molecular biology so that they can stop the seven-strains-from-now virus that causes Ebola Extreme (although I just can't imagine Ebola any extremer. Also I don't want to. Just show me where to donate, OK? Then let me get back to what Anne Hathaway isn't eating this year.) And, and, and- in theory, I could be one of those Learners, the kind that might do some good with the knowledge. But:...well, the obvious thing is that it costs money, and I hate that. The other is, I suppose, self-doubt. What would I study? French? Mandarin? Psychology, which would be fascinating? And what the hell would I do with a degree when I was done- get a job? Please. People whose undying aspiration was to counsel disturbed French-speaking Chinese nationals, and who studied with fervor and discipline, cannot get a job slinging hash. Or ludes. Nothing, with the exception of crystal meth, and we all know where that leads because we've all seen Breaking Bad. Yikes. Besides, I believe I also have ADHD. And Marfan Syndrome, a deficiency of the connective tissues, which I already have but Marfan is that to the second degree and is therefore somehow that much more interesting. Plus POTS, which stands for PostCradial Orthopeodic Tum-Tum Systemcism, also a problem with the connective tissues but more localized to the left and sometimes right hemerfemurs. I have way too much to learn about my weird body and why it might or might not do a thing, thank you very much.
-Raise Money for Charity. This is a big thing in England- BIG. If you're not raising money for charity, some charity, even something as silly as The Northwest Canine Feel-Goodery Faction (money to help get underprivileged dogs aromatherapy massages) or as banal as HanddOip! (Buckinghamshire's program to provide esteem-raising workshops in handshaking for homeless persons,) then you are effectively a Wanker, no matter how much good you do in your actual life. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some fund-raising and have done a bit of it myself in the past, but the Brits are just bonkers about it. If some news weather presenter isn't daily killing herself a little bit by running so long and kayaking so hard that she pees out a fraction of her own liver, then the People of Great Britain just don't feel as good about themselves. They are ashamed, because being ashamed of themselves is something they do quite well (I expect that comes with having once been a gigantic Empire and subsequently having learned that in becoming said Empire you were quite a bunch of assholes. Not that, as an American, I'd have any idea what that felt like.)
Snarkiness aside, I have to say that the national mania for funraising is pretty cool. It may even provide some direction for me, finally and hoo-frickin'-ray! To that end I might as well announce that I intend to have a fund-raiser of my very own, inspired by my Aunt Julie (who is in much the same sort of situation I am in, physically, and who came up with the idea) and by my lack of athletic ability (self-explanatory.) On the weekend May 31st I'm going to have a one-woman Read-a-Thon, in honor of my parents, Clem and Kathy Biddle. The money raised will go to the McMillan Cancer Group. There, I said it.
Now to load up on some books!
Well, I'm old enough. For what, you ask? That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked!...what I seem to be really good at- in such a way that I barely recognize I'm doing it- is being dissatisfied. I live in England so I'm in some good company: 60 million of we Brits (or Non-British Residents, or Immigrant Scum according to EUKIP, Great Britain's counter to America's Tea Party, whom I would call a bunch of twats if it weren't an insult to vaginas) enjoy nothing more than a good bout of complaining. Besides everything being too expensive and the world being run by a bunch of lying beaurocrats who are in danger of being overthrown by a bunch of crazed "God is our Cannon" despots, I personally have a good deal to complain about. Blah blah pain blah acting gone, blah paperwork blah blah Fibrofog which is just like chemofog or fiftieth-hangover-in-a-rowfog blah homesick. I periodically try to cut through all the blah by finding some direction, something that will be simple enough so that I can get my marmalade-thick thoughts around it and will be flexible so that when I'm done tending to my special needs genius child and my special needs genius husband and my ADHD young dog and my aggressive shithead old dog I can whiz through it. But whiz through what? There are so many things to consider!
I could:
- become a librarian. I'd be surrounded by books all the friggin' time, and I love to read! Reading is awesome, so awesome that's it's fundamental (TM)!...Except: to get hired you have to get a masters in Library Science, and then you'd be making some ridiculous pittance so that you could travel around in a non-company car (meaning Your Own, or perhaps Some Bus, and good luck with that) to different underfunded libraries so that you can do their paperwork. And the student loans would affect you and your child and your children's children, on to the seventh generation (maybe THAT is what Sitting Bull was talking about: he saw the future of student financing and was trying to warn us. It wasn't about the environment at all! Or maybe it was! Either way, we really screwed the pooch on that one.)
-teach Acting. Being honest here- and not in a shithead sort of way- I was good at acting. There are people who said I was great at it, and the fact that they were my paid teachers had nothing to do with how their opinions were formed. So it would be gratifying to pass along my sacred knowledge, to teach the youngsters what it means to compare pictures of your own face with others pictures of their own faces FOR HOURS, and to create endless and meaningless Improv games where everyone has to learn how to wander around the room like seaweed. Hey, someone did that to me, so it's just PAYBACK...Ok, I think I see the problem here.
-go to School, to Learn Stuff. Learning is amazing and really the reason we're all here on the planet; the fact that the majority of us in the developed world choose to learn about Kim and Kanye's Million-Dollar Malibu Barbie Dream Brothel with Hydrolic-Lift Rotating Champagne Room for their l'il baby is not the point: there are those who learn well, who learn how to speak French or Mardarin, who learn how to chop wood and install solar arrays and molecular biology so that they can stop the seven-strains-from-now virus that causes Ebola Extreme (although I just can't imagine Ebola any extremer. Also I don't want to. Just show me where to donate, OK? Then let me get back to what Anne Hathaway isn't eating this year.) And, and, and- in theory, I could be one of those Learners, the kind that might do some good with the knowledge. But:...well, the obvious thing is that it costs money, and I hate that. The other is, I suppose, self-doubt. What would I study? French? Mandarin? Psychology, which would be fascinating? And what the hell would I do with a degree when I was done- get a job? Please. People whose undying aspiration was to counsel disturbed French-speaking Chinese nationals, and who studied with fervor and discipline, cannot get a job slinging hash. Or ludes. Nothing, with the exception of crystal meth, and we all know where that leads because we've all seen Breaking Bad. Yikes. Besides, I believe I also have ADHD. And Marfan Syndrome, a deficiency of the connective tissues, which I already have but Marfan is that to the second degree and is therefore somehow that much more interesting. Plus POTS, which stands for PostCradial Orthopeodic Tum-Tum Systemcism, also a problem with the connective tissues but more localized to the left and sometimes right hemerfemurs. I have way too much to learn about my weird body and why it might or might not do a thing, thank you very much.
-Raise Money for Charity. This is a big thing in England- BIG. If you're not raising money for charity, some charity, even something as silly as The Northwest Canine Feel-Goodery Faction (money to help get underprivileged dogs aromatherapy massages) or as banal as HanddOip! (Buckinghamshire's program to provide esteem-raising workshops in handshaking for homeless persons,) then you are effectively a Wanker, no matter how much good you do in your actual life. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some fund-raising and have done a bit of it myself in the past, but the Brits are just bonkers about it. If some news weather presenter isn't daily killing herself a little bit by running so long and kayaking so hard that she pees out a fraction of her own liver, then the People of Great Britain just don't feel as good about themselves. They are ashamed, because being ashamed of themselves is something they do quite well (I expect that comes with having once been a gigantic Empire and subsequently having learned that in becoming said Empire you were quite a bunch of assholes. Not that, as an American, I'd have any idea what that felt like.)
Snarkiness aside, I have to say that the national mania for funraising is pretty cool. It may even provide some direction for me, finally and hoo-frickin'-ray! To that end I might as well announce that I intend to have a fund-raiser of my very own, inspired by my Aunt Julie (who is in much the same sort of situation I am in, physically, and who came up with the idea) and by my lack of athletic ability (self-explanatory.) On the weekend May 31st I'm going to have a one-woman Read-a-Thon, in honor of my parents, Clem and Kathy Biddle. The money raised will go to the McMillan Cancer Group. There, I said it.
Now to load up on some books!
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Olive's Monster
Olive's monster was stuffed under a floorboard in her bedroom, and recently it had made it clear that it wanted out. Olive couldn't remember when it had become clear there was something under a floorboard in her room, but she supposed it was right around the beginning of her periods; her mother kept stating with conviction that her menarche was a sea change, whatever that was. It was something that changed everything, apparently. Periods were like political assassinations or natural disasters that leveled your house. Her mother never used small similes.
Olive was young for periods and a bit old for monsters: she was ten, close to eleven. Young for menstruation, but she found that despite her strident and well-meaning mother's declarations she didn't feel the still-irregular bleeding was all that bad. It required neatness more than anything, and Olive was up to that. She could ask anyone, literally anyone, including strange librarians and teenage cashier boys, where she could get some pads and not feel embarrassment. Her bedroom monster was much, much harder to talk about, and she'd stammered and blushed practically orange and started but then stopped too many times to count until she finally told her family about her monster. Their reaction was much more like the reaction she might have expected from a less liberal family when she'd brought up her first period: there was blushing, and loudness, and hushing, and after that there was a quiet talk in the living room about what was appropriate for her age now, and about how she shouldn't bring up monsters while people were eating. This arbitrary rule- one in a sparse but regular line of arbitrary rules that adults would toss out at children when they weren't sure what they were saying- was, to Olive, a signal to never speak of it again.
The monster was growing, though. She kind of felt that the monster first made itself known around her first period, but she knew that it was getting larger because it was starting to press up against the floorboard. She had felt a sort of trembling at first, while she was laying in bed. She'd gone to sleep and didn't think about it until a week later when she heard the sort of squeaking one would expect of nails in walls being stressed in a high wind. It was calm and boring outside. She got up to investigate this, and when she stood to look at her door frame there was a push from underneath one of the floorboards, which was suddenly loose. She stamped, and heard the squeaking again. The floorboard smoothed back to its' previous flatness and she got no more from it that night, despite standing just beside it for a half hour after that.
Later- a few days- she came into her room after school and she tripped on the floorboard, which was canted. The ones around it were trembling. She stood up and breathed to slow her heart (her mother had taught her that after noticing Olive's tendency to stop breathing when she was frustrated,) and then jumped on the floorboard with both feet. There was the pulling squeak sound as before, and the floorboards moved in sympathy. She felt bad right away, and lay down on the floor, her abdomen pressed to the part of the floor that was shifting.
"I'm sorry." she said. The whining stopped, and so did the trembling. Then, it stayed silent for two weeks. She doubted her own perceptive powers, since whatever she'd apologized to may not have existed. She carried a light confusion with her. When the two weeks was up she was laying in her bed, not sleeping but not awake, when she heard the nails straining again. It was louder, there were more nails involved, so she got up and this time she lay down on the floor, like someone would lay down on the ice to rescue a friend who's fallen through it.
It was the right move: she saw it right away. It was pressed underneath her floor, in what must have been a crawlspace. She could only see a shoulder or rump: she saw an expanse of long hairs on a body that was broad, and the color was distinct even if nothing else was- the pelt was silver-brown. This, of all things, struck her as being weird, so she crawled back to bed, keeping low to the floor as she did, avoiding breakthrough (hers or its.)
This became pattern. Nighttime- not sleeping- stretching iron noise, whining- slipping onto the floor- pressing an eye to the cracks in the floor to see a thing, some sort of thing, some...monster? It was a non-human, but other than that it was just...alive. There was the possibility it was cute. She determined to find out if it was, so she took a small hammer from one of her parent's tool boxes and she started pulling up the floor in pieces. The process was rewarding but slow. She would prize up some part of a board and see something that looked like a shoulder blade, a long skinny bone beneath the long-silver-brown, and then put it back. The monster whined, a small little whine like the whine of a very young puppy. She murmured to it as she did this, though not because she was feeling maternal or particularly caring (yet,) but she didn't want anyone to come into her room or even near it to listen at the door. She was careful about her careful parents, who might stumble upon her breathing secret in an attempt to make sure Olive herself was OK.
The boards came partially up and then went fully down, one every other day or so. She saw so much long silvery-brown hair that she realized the hairs were feathers, then realized that it was a mix. There were limbs, basic arms and legs and something else that were either wings or extra arms. An afternoon about ten days since she'd started there was an eye looking right at her from the new hole she created. The eye was perfectly round and it was the color of muck. Olive thought it beautiful. She thought it perfectly beautiful, utter and complete like the circle made with a sextant.The creature, looking at her with either perfect or compromised vision depending on how many eyes it ultimately had, whined lightly. Olive heard a plea in it for the first time.
She began to pack the next day, which was a Saturday, which was a good day for it. Her mother and father were whining about their own things (Olive thought of her house as Whining, as if that were an Estate name with her mother and father Lady and Lord Whine) and therefore weren't paying much attention to Olive's rustlings in the closet with the suitcases in it. At one point her father yelled through the ceiling, generally toward her room:
"What are you doing up there?" His voice was gruff. He sounded gruff when he yelled, though he swore that he didn't feel that way nine times out of ten. He was simply trying to be audible, he'd said.
Olive had been packing some long underwear from a skiing trip they'd taken the year before: she wanted to prepare for cold, but was forgoing the bathing suits, since she could swim in her underwear when the need arose. "Moving my desk!" she yelled back from the top of the stairs. She hoped that wasn't overdoing it: furniture moving was maybe demanding more attention than she wanted, but saying "nothing!" would have been a more obvious lie. She waited, and heard her parents talking and using her name. She would miss them after she left, but there was no question for her about whether freeing her monster and leaving was the right course for those up to the challenge. She used the word "challenge" to describe to herself what she was doing. She put in the long underwear, the sweaters, the extra socks and a pair of pretty shoes, since they were new and she couldn't bear to leave them, gathering dust on the patent and the new buckle like everything else would. She packed all of her hair ties in a box and then that box in a box- boxes were useful no matter what your life circumstances were.
The monster rustled while she packed but didn't make any noises. It was Saturday, the planned-for Saturday, so she waited on her bed for her witching hour. She'd intended to make that traditional- starting at midnight on the dot- but fell asleep on her bed, slumped from a sitting position. She woke up startled: her creature (her Creature, she thought) had finally made a noise to wake her, the clever thing. So. Olive stood and crept down the hall, peeped through the conveniently cracked-open bedroom door, getting a lovely, assuring view of the 'rents sleeping off their customary Saturday bottle of red. Her mother's arm was laying on her father's chest, and her father's head was turned toward her mom. Olive decided it would be all right to miss them when the time came, whenever that was. She decided to let the homesick tearing happen once she was free of said home. She crept back to her room and dropped to her knees and dug her fingers under a floorboard- the floorboard- and pulled. Her Creature waited, its' breath held as far as she could tell.
The board came up easily. She spied the beautiful muck-colored eye watching her and it hurried her, so the next one came up easily, and the next. She had been worried about making noise and waking her lightly potted parents, but everything was pre-loosened by her Creature's back or chest or four arms or whatever; the beast itself was slowly revealed in long rectangular strips. It was incredible, literally incredible! It- her Creature- was covered in that glossy brown-silver feather pelt (the feathers were so fine they looked like hair whenever it moved) and it had three of those eyes. The arms, or wings, remained a mystery no matter how many floorboards Olive pried up: each time she thought the arm/wings would resolve into either arm or wing there was movement and the picture was lost. She was smiling and crying as she squinted into the sub-floor gloom to get a final understanding, but it just evaded her.
Finally the- Olive's- monster was free, It only had to stand and step up onto the remains of Olive's bedroom floor, near the bookshelves where there was still someplace to stand. It did, with coaxing. Still no resolution about the arms or wings- It was keeping them behind its' back, holding them behind Itself and sticking what might be described as its chest out. It looked nothing like a 'chicken in that position. The girl's wish that It look recognizable vanished, which was for the best. She looked at the (her) Monster and the Monster looked at her. The perfect triangle of perfectly round muck-colored eyes were warm, wettish as if misted over with some tears. Olive was frightened and paralyzed with unexpressed affection for a while: her Creature!
The thing blinked, It's eyes in tandem, and Olive moved. "We have to leave now" she said aloud, to herself, but the Creature moved out of the way so she could grab the duffel bag of her father's that she'd packed. It was too big for her- she hadn't considered- but the Creature leaned down (It was tallish) and spiked one of Its' appendages through the straps. Olive thought: it's a wing! Then she doubted it. She went to the window and slid out, turning to help her Thing but the Creature had somehow changed Its' mass and had moved through the sash easily. She watched It re-configure to Its' true size, and It was twice what it had been in Olive's room. She smiled up at It. The three eyes blinked and watered, unused to fresh air. Then It reached again with Its' arm-wings and pulled Olive herself up to sit on Its' back.
She sad with her legs cris-cross applesauce, a nursery prompt that she would never abandon. She looked around at the roofs, at her window, at the headlights in the distance, and then her new Beast pushed upward. Olive at first thought that the Creature was getting taller all of a sudden, but: they were flying. The Creature (Friend, thought Olive) was flying with Its' wing-arms, the superfine feathering waving in the air, kind of forming into long whiskery fingers. It was frightening- there were heights to consider- but it was also awesome, so that she was too excited to stand up and look straight down at what she was leaving. She felt great. She felt scared. It was confusing.
Her Friend brought them down in a forest preserve that was a few miles from her house. She knew it from her pre-Creature ( Friend, thought Olive-to-self) days walking there with the abandoned parents. This may have been during a summer, though she was unwilling to swear to anything just then. She sat on her Friend for what must have seemed a long time to It, and It shook the girl off; Olive landed hard on her butt and side and let out air, nothing coming out of her but a long wheeze. The Friend looked down at her with Its' unblinking night-brown eyes and sensed her lack of oxygen, or so she presumed: It leaned down and blew in her face with warm and eyewatering exhales until Olive put her hand to Its' mouth. It kissed, or it slurped. She couldn't tell.
The girl had thought to bring a sleeping bag, which was fortunate because it was cold and lucky because it was one of the more sturdy weatherproof kind. She offered it to her Friend because she'd been taught that it was polite by her mama. It did not take her up on the offer so instead she lay down in it herself, and the Creature (Friend? thought Olive-to-self) lay down on top of her. She was crushed, she was being crushed, she must be being crushed, this is what it feels like to be crushed...Olive thought these things on top of each other before she dreamed. In her dream, the Creature and she were flying still, over unrecognizable territory (not that she would know what was recognizable and what wasn't, ) but the fine silver-brown feathers that formed into fingers were touching her. They were gliding over her skin, under her overly heavy clothes; they touched her arms and neck and shins and chest (including the enlarged nipples that she kept hidden in largish t-shirts.) They tickled, or alternately chafed, or made a sucking noise, and she couldn't keep any of the sensations or sounds straight in her head.
They woke up the next morning- well, Olive woke the next morning with an entirely different noise near her ear: the Friend was making a chuck-whhirrrr noise on her right but when she looked she couldn't find It. She rose and put on her shoes and then went to find It, before even having her morning pee. She walked down a path that she thought she knew but that looked very different than what she remembered. The chuck-whirr noise grew so she followed, ignoring her bladder, ignoring the traffic sounds from the far-off highway that came on the wind, ignoring the wind. It took her to a copse, then a small gulley surrounded by trees where the Creature was half-buried in peat and old leaves, whirring and chucking from the back of its' throat. Olive spoke to It.
"What are you doing?" she asked her Friend, and It answered by continuing Its' noise. She looked around the hole it had dug for itself. The soil wasn't like what she'd seen in the area before: it wasn't like the playground dirt she'd sifted in her earlier years, and it wasn't like the dirt she had crept on when she went behind some bushes with a boy she knew from said playground, later. Then it was safe enough to practice kissing, and she sifted the earth as she did so. She had a basis for comparison. The Friend's dirt was different, so she reached out to sift it; when she did, her bladder let some but not all of its' tension go. Her pee made the weird dirt at her feet congeal, almost instantly. Olive looked at it, some of the dry earth still in her hand, and the Creature changed its' noisemaking.
"Ssssrrarrarrarr," It said. It was calm as the most peaceful lake Olive could think of. Its' eyes blinked, one at a time, a triangle. The girl was calm when she bent to pick up the new mud she'd made of the weird dirt and her own urine, placid despite the slight look of revulsion on her own face. She didn't notice her face, was the thing: she was noticing the mud, how it held the shape of the inside of her fist, how it was better this way than dry, come to think of it. Her Friend kept making the new noise, and she kept shaping it; she fell to her knees to try to get more and when she saw it wasn't enough she pulled down her pants and peed on the gulley floor until she was empty. Part of her knew she was gross, more gross than she had ever been, probably- and that was including her infant days, which she knew to be tremendously gross if her mother's vivid stories were anything to go by- but most of her liked the mud and the texture. Most of her liked the way she could make things with it.
She looked at the Friend, or Creature and It looked at her. "SSrrraaaarrah-arr" It said. She nodded in agreement and leaned down into the strange, blue-black, pungent, fantastic mud at her feet. She started squishing it into something...it was person-shaped, this thing she was making, and though she didn't feel it at the time it looked remarkably like a parent: it was a likeness of her parents, made into one, with her mother's wildish hair and her fathers perpetual hat. She molded on a likeness of a cardigan her mother wore constantly, and she put a little slate in one of the hands about the same proportions of her father's cell phone. She hummed while she did it.
Olive was young for periods and a bit old for monsters: she was ten, close to eleven. Young for menstruation, but she found that despite her strident and well-meaning mother's declarations she didn't feel the still-irregular bleeding was all that bad. It required neatness more than anything, and Olive was up to that. She could ask anyone, literally anyone, including strange librarians and teenage cashier boys, where she could get some pads and not feel embarrassment. Her bedroom monster was much, much harder to talk about, and she'd stammered and blushed practically orange and started but then stopped too many times to count until she finally told her family about her monster. Their reaction was much more like the reaction she might have expected from a less liberal family when she'd brought up her first period: there was blushing, and loudness, and hushing, and after that there was a quiet talk in the living room about what was appropriate for her age now, and about how she shouldn't bring up monsters while people were eating. This arbitrary rule- one in a sparse but regular line of arbitrary rules that adults would toss out at children when they weren't sure what they were saying- was, to Olive, a signal to never speak of it again.
The monster was growing, though. She kind of felt that the monster first made itself known around her first period, but she knew that it was getting larger because it was starting to press up against the floorboard. She had felt a sort of trembling at first, while she was laying in bed. She'd gone to sleep and didn't think about it until a week later when she heard the sort of squeaking one would expect of nails in walls being stressed in a high wind. It was calm and boring outside. She got up to investigate this, and when she stood to look at her door frame there was a push from underneath one of the floorboards, which was suddenly loose. She stamped, and heard the squeaking again. The floorboard smoothed back to its' previous flatness and she got no more from it that night, despite standing just beside it for a half hour after that.
Later- a few days- she came into her room after school and she tripped on the floorboard, which was canted. The ones around it were trembling. She stood up and breathed to slow her heart (her mother had taught her that after noticing Olive's tendency to stop breathing when she was frustrated,) and then jumped on the floorboard with both feet. There was the pulling squeak sound as before, and the floorboards moved in sympathy. She felt bad right away, and lay down on the floor, her abdomen pressed to the part of the floor that was shifting.
"I'm sorry." she said. The whining stopped, and so did the trembling. Then, it stayed silent for two weeks. She doubted her own perceptive powers, since whatever she'd apologized to may not have existed. She carried a light confusion with her. When the two weeks was up she was laying in her bed, not sleeping but not awake, when she heard the nails straining again. It was louder, there were more nails involved, so she got up and this time she lay down on the floor, like someone would lay down on the ice to rescue a friend who's fallen through it.
It was the right move: she saw it right away. It was pressed underneath her floor, in what must have been a crawlspace. She could only see a shoulder or rump: she saw an expanse of long hairs on a body that was broad, and the color was distinct even if nothing else was- the pelt was silver-brown. This, of all things, struck her as being weird, so she crawled back to bed, keeping low to the floor as she did, avoiding breakthrough (hers or its.)
This became pattern. Nighttime- not sleeping- stretching iron noise, whining- slipping onto the floor- pressing an eye to the cracks in the floor to see a thing, some sort of thing, some...monster? It was a non-human, but other than that it was just...alive. There was the possibility it was cute. She determined to find out if it was, so she took a small hammer from one of her parent's tool boxes and she started pulling up the floor in pieces. The process was rewarding but slow. She would prize up some part of a board and see something that looked like a shoulder blade, a long skinny bone beneath the long-silver-brown, and then put it back. The monster whined, a small little whine like the whine of a very young puppy. She murmured to it as she did this, though not because she was feeling maternal or particularly caring (yet,) but she didn't want anyone to come into her room or even near it to listen at the door. She was careful about her careful parents, who might stumble upon her breathing secret in an attempt to make sure Olive herself was OK.
The boards came partially up and then went fully down, one every other day or so. She saw so much long silvery-brown hair that she realized the hairs were feathers, then realized that it was a mix. There were limbs, basic arms and legs and something else that were either wings or extra arms. An afternoon about ten days since she'd started there was an eye looking right at her from the new hole she created. The eye was perfectly round and it was the color of muck. Olive thought it beautiful. She thought it perfectly beautiful, utter and complete like the circle made with a sextant.The creature, looking at her with either perfect or compromised vision depending on how many eyes it ultimately had, whined lightly. Olive heard a plea in it for the first time.
She began to pack the next day, which was a Saturday, which was a good day for it. Her mother and father were whining about their own things (Olive thought of her house as Whining, as if that were an Estate name with her mother and father Lady and Lord Whine) and therefore weren't paying much attention to Olive's rustlings in the closet with the suitcases in it. At one point her father yelled through the ceiling, generally toward her room:
"What are you doing up there?" His voice was gruff. He sounded gruff when he yelled, though he swore that he didn't feel that way nine times out of ten. He was simply trying to be audible, he'd said.
Olive had been packing some long underwear from a skiing trip they'd taken the year before: she wanted to prepare for cold, but was forgoing the bathing suits, since she could swim in her underwear when the need arose. "Moving my desk!" she yelled back from the top of the stairs. She hoped that wasn't overdoing it: furniture moving was maybe demanding more attention than she wanted, but saying "nothing!" would have been a more obvious lie. She waited, and heard her parents talking and using her name. She would miss them after she left, but there was no question for her about whether freeing her monster and leaving was the right course for those up to the challenge. She used the word "challenge" to describe to herself what she was doing. She put in the long underwear, the sweaters, the extra socks and a pair of pretty shoes, since they were new and she couldn't bear to leave them, gathering dust on the patent and the new buckle like everything else would. She packed all of her hair ties in a box and then that box in a box- boxes were useful no matter what your life circumstances were.
The monster rustled while she packed but didn't make any noises. It was Saturday, the planned-for Saturday, so she waited on her bed for her witching hour. She'd intended to make that traditional- starting at midnight on the dot- but fell asleep on her bed, slumped from a sitting position. She woke up startled: her creature (her Creature, she thought) had finally made a noise to wake her, the clever thing. So. Olive stood and crept down the hall, peeped through the conveniently cracked-open bedroom door, getting a lovely, assuring view of the 'rents sleeping off their customary Saturday bottle of red. Her mother's arm was laying on her father's chest, and her father's head was turned toward her mom. Olive decided it would be all right to miss them when the time came, whenever that was. She decided to let the homesick tearing happen once she was free of said home. She crept back to her room and dropped to her knees and dug her fingers under a floorboard- the floorboard- and pulled. Her Creature waited, its' breath held as far as she could tell.
The board came up easily. She spied the beautiful muck-colored eye watching her and it hurried her, so the next one came up easily, and the next. She had been worried about making noise and waking her lightly potted parents, but everything was pre-loosened by her Creature's back or chest or four arms or whatever; the beast itself was slowly revealed in long rectangular strips. It was incredible, literally incredible! It- her Creature- was covered in that glossy brown-silver feather pelt (the feathers were so fine they looked like hair whenever it moved) and it had three of those eyes. The arms, or wings, remained a mystery no matter how many floorboards Olive pried up: each time she thought the arm/wings would resolve into either arm or wing there was movement and the picture was lost. She was smiling and crying as she squinted into the sub-floor gloom to get a final understanding, but it just evaded her.
Finally the- Olive's- monster was free, It only had to stand and step up onto the remains of Olive's bedroom floor, near the bookshelves where there was still someplace to stand. It did, with coaxing. Still no resolution about the arms or wings- It was keeping them behind its' back, holding them behind Itself and sticking what might be described as its chest out. It looked nothing like a 'chicken in that position. The girl's wish that It look recognizable vanished, which was for the best. She looked at the (her) Monster and the Monster looked at her. The perfect triangle of perfectly round muck-colored eyes were warm, wettish as if misted over with some tears. Olive was frightened and paralyzed with unexpressed affection for a while: her Creature!
The thing blinked, It's eyes in tandem, and Olive moved. "We have to leave now" she said aloud, to herself, but the Creature moved out of the way so she could grab the duffel bag of her father's that she'd packed. It was too big for her- she hadn't considered- but the Creature leaned down (It was tallish) and spiked one of Its' appendages through the straps. Olive thought: it's a wing! Then she doubted it. She went to the window and slid out, turning to help her Thing but the Creature had somehow changed Its' mass and had moved through the sash easily. She watched It re-configure to Its' true size, and It was twice what it had been in Olive's room. She smiled up at It. The three eyes blinked and watered, unused to fresh air. Then It reached again with Its' arm-wings and pulled Olive herself up to sit on Its' back.
She sad with her legs cris-cross applesauce, a nursery prompt that she would never abandon. She looked around at the roofs, at her window, at the headlights in the distance, and then her new Beast pushed upward. Olive at first thought that the Creature was getting taller all of a sudden, but: they were flying. The Creature (Friend, thought Olive) was flying with Its' wing-arms, the superfine feathering waving in the air, kind of forming into long whiskery fingers. It was frightening- there were heights to consider- but it was also awesome, so that she was too excited to stand up and look straight down at what she was leaving. She felt great. She felt scared. It was confusing.
Her Friend brought them down in a forest preserve that was a few miles from her house. She knew it from her pre-Creature ( Friend, thought Olive-to-self) days walking there with the abandoned parents. This may have been during a summer, though she was unwilling to swear to anything just then. She sat on her Friend for what must have seemed a long time to It, and It shook the girl off; Olive landed hard on her butt and side and let out air, nothing coming out of her but a long wheeze. The Friend looked down at her with Its' unblinking night-brown eyes and sensed her lack of oxygen, or so she presumed: It leaned down and blew in her face with warm and eyewatering exhales until Olive put her hand to Its' mouth. It kissed, or it slurped. She couldn't tell.
The girl had thought to bring a sleeping bag, which was fortunate because it was cold and lucky because it was one of the more sturdy weatherproof kind. She offered it to her Friend because she'd been taught that it was polite by her mama. It did not take her up on the offer so instead she lay down in it herself, and the Creature (Friend? thought Olive-to-self) lay down on top of her. She was crushed, she was being crushed, she must be being crushed, this is what it feels like to be crushed...Olive thought these things on top of each other before she dreamed. In her dream, the Creature and she were flying still, over unrecognizable territory (not that she would know what was recognizable and what wasn't, ) but the fine silver-brown feathers that formed into fingers were touching her. They were gliding over her skin, under her overly heavy clothes; they touched her arms and neck and shins and chest (including the enlarged nipples that she kept hidden in largish t-shirts.) They tickled, or alternately chafed, or made a sucking noise, and she couldn't keep any of the sensations or sounds straight in her head.
They woke up the next morning- well, Olive woke the next morning with an entirely different noise near her ear: the Friend was making a chuck-whhirrrr noise on her right but when she looked she couldn't find It. She rose and put on her shoes and then went to find It, before even having her morning pee. She walked down a path that she thought she knew but that looked very different than what she remembered. The chuck-whirr noise grew so she followed, ignoring her bladder, ignoring the traffic sounds from the far-off highway that came on the wind, ignoring the wind. It took her to a copse, then a small gulley surrounded by trees where the Creature was half-buried in peat and old leaves, whirring and chucking from the back of its' throat. Olive spoke to It.
"What are you doing?" she asked her Friend, and It answered by continuing Its' noise. She looked around the hole it had dug for itself. The soil wasn't like what she'd seen in the area before: it wasn't like the playground dirt she'd sifted in her earlier years, and it wasn't like the dirt she had crept on when she went behind some bushes with a boy she knew from said playground, later. Then it was safe enough to practice kissing, and she sifted the earth as she did so. She had a basis for comparison. The Friend's dirt was different, so she reached out to sift it; when she did, her bladder let some but not all of its' tension go. Her pee made the weird dirt at her feet congeal, almost instantly. Olive looked at it, some of the dry earth still in her hand, and the Creature changed its' noisemaking.
"Ssssrrarrarrarr," It said. It was calm as the most peaceful lake Olive could think of. Its' eyes blinked, one at a time, a triangle. The girl was calm when she bent to pick up the new mud she'd made of the weird dirt and her own urine, placid despite the slight look of revulsion on her own face. She didn't notice her face, was the thing: she was noticing the mud, how it held the shape of the inside of her fist, how it was better this way than dry, come to think of it. Her Friend kept making the new noise, and she kept shaping it; she fell to her knees to try to get more and when she saw it wasn't enough she pulled down her pants and peed on the gulley floor until she was empty. Part of her knew she was gross, more gross than she had ever been, probably- and that was including her infant days, which she knew to be tremendously gross if her mother's vivid stories were anything to go by- but most of her liked the mud and the texture. Most of her liked the way she could make things with it.
She looked at the Friend, or Creature and It looked at her. "SSrrraaaarrah-arr" It said. She nodded in agreement and leaned down into the strange, blue-black, pungent, fantastic mud at her feet. She started squishing it into something...it was person-shaped, this thing she was making, and though she didn't feel it at the time it looked remarkably like a parent: it was a likeness of her parents, made into one, with her mother's wildish hair and her fathers perpetual hat. She molded on a likeness of a cardigan her mother wore constantly, and she put a little slate in one of the hands about the same proportions of her father's cell phone. She hummed while she did it.
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Post-Mortem. 5 Months.
Crying makes you transparent, I've found.
There's time and distance between me and my beloved, and my other beloved: my sister, and my mother. I can see my sister again. The distance bit is the thousands of miles between us: there could be more thousands, but four is enough. It makes for some emphatic emails:
"Did you do anything about the ______? I told you to take it to ________, while he's still with _______. They are moving to a different house, they'll have two bedrooms- remember that? So he won't need _______ after that. Personally I think the term Conscious Uncoupling is a lot of Unconscious Pretention (ha ha!)"
...I'm not being fair: I should mention that my emails sound like that, not my sister's. Otherwise there's a good deal of "Miss you" and "This sucks", probably much more than regular people's sibling emails. I don't know why we have such a thick and resilient bond, but we do. I value my sister for many, many reasons, but I think the main one is that she is another me. She has chosen to lead a selfish life, and I get to lead one vicariously because of it.
My sis isn't a selfish person. She's just chosen a few Ways to Be that require a fundamental focus on what she wants, what she really really wants; she picked it up from our Aunt and Uncle, who also chose to be selfish in their own ways. The first thing for all of them is the choice not to have a child or children, and depending on which group of friends you belong to, gentle reader, you'll either be shocked- SHOCKED!- and possibly deluded, thinking that they don't know what they're missing; the other group will think well, of course.
The other and less overt way that my relatives have chosen to be selfish is that they live their lives without fear of garnering ill wishes. I find this part the most difficult. I myself wish to live without that fear, but am sometimes terrified that it's the wrong choice. What if worrying what people think is justified? What if I live without this fear but it turns out there was this one person, an influential and/or inspiring person who might have helped me become a better ______, but without thinking I farted while in front of them in line at the Tesco and now they will ever think I'm self-centered and smelly? What if in so doing I ignore someone who deserves my care and attention, just out of habit? I like to think that I'm more concerned with being an asshole than being perceived as an asshole, but I don't think one can really be that clear-sighted about oneself without hallucinogens. And I wouldn't know how to begin scoring some of those out here in the bucolic British countryside.
So...and so. Back to time, and distance. It seems my husband has noticed that I am in two places at once. Worse, it seems that being split like that- no matter how well you are able to straddle things- does the inevitable and pulls you apart. I have always hated conflict: when I was very little I would hide under tables to avoid anger, especially from our Dad, who was a man who could really sell things, and one of the things he sold was his emotional state. He wasn't hysterical or normally filled with rage, but when he was angry I would hide under a table in mute terror until someone (Mom, usually) came and found me hours later. It's just me. I hid in the face of anger. I've become much much better at having it out, now that I'm an adult and the tables are all too small to hide me effectively; still, when I'm split in two like this the old habits are so accessible. But my husband called me out, and we had it out, again, much the same as we have before because we're a couple that's been together longer than five years, and I cried.
Mom, the other beloved, wouldn't have patience for me either at this point: she'd tell me to get on with it. She'd be right, natch. But I join the millions who hide or drink or make copious amounts of decoupage to avoid anger, afraid of- something. Afraid of being transparent, I guess.
There's time and distance between me and my beloved, and my other beloved: my sister, and my mother. I can see my sister again. The distance bit is the thousands of miles between us: there could be more thousands, but four is enough. It makes for some emphatic emails:
"Did you do anything about the ______? I told you to take it to ________, while he's still with _______. They are moving to a different house, they'll have two bedrooms- remember that? So he won't need _______ after that. Personally I think the term Conscious Uncoupling is a lot of Unconscious Pretention (ha ha!)"
...I'm not being fair: I should mention that my emails sound like that, not my sister's. Otherwise there's a good deal of "Miss you" and "This sucks", probably much more than regular people's sibling emails. I don't know why we have such a thick and resilient bond, but we do. I value my sister for many, many reasons, but I think the main one is that she is another me. She has chosen to lead a selfish life, and I get to lead one vicariously because of it.
My sis isn't a selfish person. She's just chosen a few Ways to Be that require a fundamental focus on what she wants, what she really really wants; she picked it up from our Aunt and Uncle, who also chose to be selfish in their own ways. The first thing for all of them is the choice not to have a child or children, and depending on which group of friends you belong to, gentle reader, you'll either be shocked- SHOCKED!- and possibly deluded, thinking that they don't know what they're missing; the other group will think well, of course.
The other and less overt way that my relatives have chosen to be selfish is that they live their lives without fear of garnering ill wishes. I find this part the most difficult. I myself wish to live without that fear, but am sometimes terrified that it's the wrong choice. What if worrying what people think is justified? What if I live without this fear but it turns out there was this one person, an influential and/or inspiring person who might have helped me become a better ______, but without thinking I farted while in front of them in line at the Tesco and now they will ever think I'm self-centered and smelly? What if in so doing I ignore someone who deserves my care and attention, just out of habit? I like to think that I'm more concerned with being an asshole than being perceived as an asshole, but I don't think one can really be that clear-sighted about oneself without hallucinogens. And I wouldn't know how to begin scoring some of those out here in the bucolic British countryside.
So...and so. Back to time, and distance. It seems my husband has noticed that I am in two places at once. Worse, it seems that being split like that- no matter how well you are able to straddle things- does the inevitable and pulls you apart. I have always hated conflict: when I was very little I would hide under tables to avoid anger, especially from our Dad, who was a man who could really sell things, and one of the things he sold was his emotional state. He wasn't hysterical or normally filled with rage, but when he was angry I would hide under a table in mute terror until someone (Mom, usually) came and found me hours later. It's just me. I hid in the face of anger. I've become much much better at having it out, now that I'm an adult and the tables are all too small to hide me effectively; still, when I'm split in two like this the old habits are so accessible. But my husband called me out, and we had it out, again, much the same as we have before because we're a couple that's been together longer than five years, and I cried.
Mom, the other beloved, wouldn't have patience for me either at this point: she'd tell me to get on with it. She'd be right, natch. But I join the millions who hide or drink or make copious amounts of decoupage to avoid anger, afraid of- something. Afraid of being transparent, I guess.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Little Bathsheba
Washer Bathsheba was really a nice person. She was one of the people who washed the dead, and was avoided, and it made her upset and tricked her into snapping at innocent by-standers. Fortunately this corpse was fresh, and it was alone. The niece who'd called the neighbor who came in through the unlocked door and found him dead on his silk fainting-couch had been witch-like in her prescience, and Bath was grateful for that. There wasn't any festering, for once, and there weren't any maggots. She still screamed every time she saw one, useless over-reaction but for the release. It was unusual for a Washer of the dead to stay sensitive to maggots, but she remained that way and she never apologized even when her washing and the quiet sing-songing and the stitching was in front of a big crowd.
This one was a relief both ways. No crowd, no bugs, just the empty flesh that retained some little specks of the person who had died, and that would be sallow or flushed or blocked up depending on the life the dead one had lived. Washer Bathsheba could see the specks, which were like flakes of dandruff or dead skin that floated around the body while she cleaned it. Nothing about it was magical: there were no sparks or colors or tiny voices of any kind, and really the sing-songing she produced in the back of her head (only a little better than humming) was a way for her to soothe herself while the flecks of soul that were sticking around settled in an oval on the floor or table or, in this case, a silk-covered couch. They would fade into the colors of their surroundings by the time she was done with the eyes, which was the last thing. She might hurry or move abruptly if she was tired or surrounded, but the eyes took care and she stitched the lids together better than any Washer in the county. You couldn't see any stitching at all- it was if the dead person's eyelids were linen and she was making the hem of a great lady's summer dress. No matter how long the eyes took Bath never stuck around to see if the flecks did anything else, like metamorphose into crystals or be swept up by mice in waistcoats. She was uninterested past a certain point.
While she worked on the uncle, a solitary man who looked younger than his reported age and never had any of his own daughters to find him dead on his treasured couch, she thought about Bag Boy. He was a nice person, she thought, like her; he could become crabby because of his work, like her. He didn't deserve snappishness in return (she truly and fully believed that wars happened because people were testy with each other and it became inescapable that they revved up their threats and implied threats to a point where they must include artillery.) Anyway: Bag Boy was her age, or younger, and was avoided because of his job as well, though there was little rationale for society's squeamishness in his case. He bagged purchases, that was all. He jogged from one stall to the next, taking the objects or food or long bottles of colored liquids from the hands of the merchants and putting them carefully in the customer's net bags. He'd wrap the bottles with tissue paper that he carried with him in his satchel, and he'd wait for a tip, not speaking. He was quieter than even she was at her work, and he walked like a cat, and had the knack of knowing which sales were imminent and which were a lost cause. He'd take his feline feet toward the next sale that he knew was thirty seconds away from happening so that he was simply available whenever the merchandise in question needed a bag, and he'd ignore the doomed negotiating that had every appearance of being about to climax. He was the weathervane, and it was creepy to the marketplace hawkers. They barked at him to get away when there were no customers.
That people were easily spooked was another of Bath's truisms.
After she was done with the solitary but beloved uncle, she left without ceremony. The prescient niece had come in halfway through the ritual, but she'd said nothing and had pressed some coins into Bath's hands as the Washer had gathered herself to leave. Bath never looked at the money she was given until she was well out of range of the grieved- to do otherwise would have been irredeemably rude, to her mind; other Washers didn't feel that way and would haggle right in front of the newly anointed body if they felt they were being underpaid- and she decided this time she would find Bag Boy and talk to him. They had spoken before, mildly and about the weather, but Bath was so much in need of someone who would understand her isolation that she wanted to risk something. She had no idea what speaking to Bag Boy would risk, but she was willing to believe there was risk in speaking to him just so she had something to hang her misgivings on. What would be the risk? What can happen? She thought, a little Soother in the rough. Bag Boy was there and she walked up to him.
"What is your name, anyway?" she started.
"Roy," He answered. "Bag Boy Roy." He smiled as he said it, and she had the impression that he'd been waiting to say his name to someone so that he could introduce the rhyme of his name and title instead of waiting for the asker to make the inevitable tiny joke about it and then laugh disproportionately. Washer Bath could relate to the feeling, if that's what it was.
"Well I'm just going to call you Roy." She had said that in a tone of exasperation, as if it had been a debate they'd been toiling over for weeks instead of the first three personal sentences they'd said together. Then they talked about dying.
Roy was curious about her job, and didn't mind that she wasn't curious about his. He'd said it all: "They think I can predict all kinds of shit just because I can predict which sales are about to go and which ones won't. It's just paying attention." He'd shrugged and asked her about her work, which was fine. He wanted to know how it was that you got into the business of Washing; how you chose what things to wash them with, a sponge or cloth or was it a sponge-and-cloth tandem method; what part of the body you started with and if that every varied and why. She hadn't thought about much of it: she found her own silences lengthening, and sounding distressing to her own ears despite the fact that she was used to silences. "I have to talk to you tomorrow. I'm tired now, but I can tell you the answers probably after I sleep."
He took it well, and they parted. She did sleep- she slept deeply, since it had been tiring in a deep way to think about how she spent her days as if they were a map instead of a slop of feelings- but she wasn't any closer to some narrative that would describe her experience with corpses.
When they saw each other the next day, Bag Boy Roy just looked at her and folded his arms, waiting for her prepared speech. She said: "You have to come with me." He looked at the marketplace- it was quiet that day, there had been no ships full of tourists with strange currency burning a hole through their tucked-away coin purses- and said "Uh-huh." Bath took his hand, as gently as she took the hand of a heartbroken client, and took him outside their town. They walked hand-in-hand for two miles and stopped at a shack. There was a woman inside it, sitting in her chair (it looked comfortable, with quilting and a footstool; it was incongruous with everything else about the derelict shack) who'd died only an hour before Bath had gotten the message. Again, it was a relief, because this job was similar to the last: no audience, no town sounds, no worms. She let go of Roy's hand finally and moved to take the woman under the armpits. Roy came around to her feet, pointing his palms down, ready to take direction.
"I have to move her myself. She's light and I'll be fine. She's light." Bath was lifting, and the woman was light. Her flecks of soul moved with her in a small cloud. Roy just stood and watched, unsmiling for once. Bath asked, "Do you see that?"
Roy looked around. The shack was one living area and a toilet in a closet, built into the back of the space for that purpose. There didn't appear to be any bed. "See what?"
Bath could see it, this floating city of specks, forming around the dead woman and staying there in a way that was unlike regular dust. It was obvious. "That cloud around her."
Roy squinted- it was dark inside the woman's house. "No. A cloud?"
"Never mind" Bath said. She'd never thought to ask if anyone else, a non-Washer, could see the cloud when she was in her Training. She learned the strokes of cleansing, and the appropriate aromas for every kind of death: lavender for fearful, verbena for comatose, tuber rose for any child, and she taught herself how to sing-song, which was proper. She was only eight when she learned, so...no questions about non-Washers, and now she was at a loss. She wasn't supposed to bring someone who didn't have a personal interest in the dead person's death, but she hadn't thought it through (she was only eighteen.)
Bath started washing the woman. It was lovely. The woman had obviously had some kind of peace, on her incongruously comfortable chair: She'd been smiling, and her face was relaxed. Bath used tuber rose, a first for an adult under her hands. There was no precedent for it as far as she knew, but she couldn't imagine someone being offended. She thought about it and decided that she would take offense if anyone was offended, most likely putting an end to it right there since no one argued with a Washer. Roy watched her from the chair that Bath and the woman had vacated for the floor. It was the weirdest thing about this weird day, because he wasn't bothered by the fact that the woman had died in that very chair a small time before. He sat in it with his arm slung over the pillowed back: he wasn't easily spooked.
Bath finished, and stood. There wasn't anyone waiting, which happened sometimes: some people were outside of the regular shoal of society and it was part of the written contract when a Washer took the Oath (it involved five or more people witnessing to make it official. It could be anywhere, including in a tavern or a bathroom or in your own bed, if someone needed you and there weren't any other Washers around. Bath had been woken from a dream of washing a young woman with the same coloring as herself, so when she was roused to take the Oath and get herself immediately to the farm of some town bigshot who'd had a heart attack she felt like she had just moved in her dream and never woken up) that they clean those who had no family, for free. The woman she'd just finished seemed to be one of those, though you never knew: occasionally a fee would show up for her out of nowhere, sent by her usual messenger. There was never a note with these. She wished there was a note for everyone she touched. Sometimes-a-note-and-sometimes-not wasn't enough...writing, she felt (how she could tell this was impossible to say since she was fully illiterate.)
She looked at her work, and Bag Boy Roy looked with her. There were the flakes, the scales, the tiny leftovers of soul that were hovering just above the floor now, not cloud-like. Bath looked at them and they seemed brighter in the gloom than she remembered any others looking. Roy looked around her, still not seeing, trying to see.
"Are you done? Is there anything else?" He wasn't impatient. He waited for the answer even though he wasn't even a full arm's length from the door.
"I am. Nothing else" Bath said, but didn't move. She watched the bits of soul drift, brighter and bigger than before. Roy opened the door and went outside, and in a moment- newly interested: her first moment as a Watcher- she joined him.
This one was a relief both ways. No crowd, no bugs, just the empty flesh that retained some little specks of the person who had died, and that would be sallow or flushed or blocked up depending on the life the dead one had lived. Washer Bathsheba could see the specks, which were like flakes of dandruff or dead skin that floated around the body while she cleaned it. Nothing about it was magical: there were no sparks or colors or tiny voices of any kind, and really the sing-songing she produced in the back of her head (only a little better than humming) was a way for her to soothe herself while the flecks of soul that were sticking around settled in an oval on the floor or table or, in this case, a silk-covered couch. They would fade into the colors of their surroundings by the time she was done with the eyes, which was the last thing. She might hurry or move abruptly if she was tired or surrounded, but the eyes took care and she stitched the lids together better than any Washer in the county. You couldn't see any stitching at all- it was if the dead person's eyelids were linen and she was making the hem of a great lady's summer dress. No matter how long the eyes took Bath never stuck around to see if the flecks did anything else, like metamorphose into crystals or be swept up by mice in waistcoats. She was uninterested past a certain point.
While she worked on the uncle, a solitary man who looked younger than his reported age and never had any of his own daughters to find him dead on his treasured couch, she thought about Bag Boy. He was a nice person, she thought, like her; he could become crabby because of his work, like her. He didn't deserve snappishness in return (she truly and fully believed that wars happened because people were testy with each other and it became inescapable that they revved up their threats and implied threats to a point where they must include artillery.) Anyway: Bag Boy was her age, or younger, and was avoided because of his job as well, though there was little rationale for society's squeamishness in his case. He bagged purchases, that was all. He jogged from one stall to the next, taking the objects or food or long bottles of colored liquids from the hands of the merchants and putting them carefully in the customer's net bags. He'd wrap the bottles with tissue paper that he carried with him in his satchel, and he'd wait for a tip, not speaking. He was quieter than even she was at her work, and he walked like a cat, and had the knack of knowing which sales were imminent and which were a lost cause. He'd take his feline feet toward the next sale that he knew was thirty seconds away from happening so that he was simply available whenever the merchandise in question needed a bag, and he'd ignore the doomed negotiating that had every appearance of being about to climax. He was the weathervane, and it was creepy to the marketplace hawkers. They barked at him to get away when there were no customers.
That people were easily spooked was another of Bath's truisms.
After she was done with the solitary but beloved uncle, she left without ceremony. The prescient niece had come in halfway through the ritual, but she'd said nothing and had pressed some coins into Bath's hands as the Washer had gathered herself to leave. Bath never looked at the money she was given until she was well out of range of the grieved- to do otherwise would have been irredeemably rude, to her mind; other Washers didn't feel that way and would haggle right in front of the newly anointed body if they felt they were being underpaid- and she decided this time she would find Bag Boy and talk to him. They had spoken before, mildly and about the weather, but Bath was so much in need of someone who would understand her isolation that she wanted to risk something. She had no idea what speaking to Bag Boy would risk, but she was willing to believe there was risk in speaking to him just so she had something to hang her misgivings on. What would be the risk? What can happen? She thought, a little Soother in the rough. Bag Boy was there and she walked up to him.
"What is your name, anyway?" she started.
"Roy," He answered. "Bag Boy Roy." He smiled as he said it, and she had the impression that he'd been waiting to say his name to someone so that he could introduce the rhyme of his name and title instead of waiting for the asker to make the inevitable tiny joke about it and then laugh disproportionately. Washer Bath could relate to the feeling, if that's what it was.
"Well I'm just going to call you Roy." She had said that in a tone of exasperation, as if it had been a debate they'd been toiling over for weeks instead of the first three personal sentences they'd said together. Then they talked about dying.
Roy was curious about her job, and didn't mind that she wasn't curious about his. He'd said it all: "They think I can predict all kinds of shit just because I can predict which sales are about to go and which ones won't. It's just paying attention." He'd shrugged and asked her about her work, which was fine. He wanted to know how it was that you got into the business of Washing; how you chose what things to wash them with, a sponge or cloth or was it a sponge-and-cloth tandem method; what part of the body you started with and if that every varied and why. She hadn't thought about much of it: she found her own silences lengthening, and sounding distressing to her own ears despite the fact that she was used to silences. "I have to talk to you tomorrow. I'm tired now, but I can tell you the answers probably after I sleep."
He took it well, and they parted. She did sleep- she slept deeply, since it had been tiring in a deep way to think about how she spent her days as if they were a map instead of a slop of feelings- but she wasn't any closer to some narrative that would describe her experience with corpses.
When they saw each other the next day, Bag Boy Roy just looked at her and folded his arms, waiting for her prepared speech. She said: "You have to come with me." He looked at the marketplace- it was quiet that day, there had been no ships full of tourists with strange currency burning a hole through their tucked-away coin purses- and said "Uh-huh." Bath took his hand, as gently as she took the hand of a heartbroken client, and took him outside their town. They walked hand-in-hand for two miles and stopped at a shack. There was a woman inside it, sitting in her chair (it looked comfortable, with quilting and a footstool; it was incongruous with everything else about the derelict shack) who'd died only an hour before Bath had gotten the message. Again, it was a relief, because this job was similar to the last: no audience, no town sounds, no worms. She let go of Roy's hand finally and moved to take the woman under the armpits. Roy came around to her feet, pointing his palms down, ready to take direction.
"I have to move her myself. She's light and I'll be fine. She's light." Bath was lifting, and the woman was light. Her flecks of soul moved with her in a small cloud. Roy just stood and watched, unsmiling for once. Bath asked, "Do you see that?"
Roy looked around. The shack was one living area and a toilet in a closet, built into the back of the space for that purpose. There didn't appear to be any bed. "See what?"
Bath could see it, this floating city of specks, forming around the dead woman and staying there in a way that was unlike regular dust. It was obvious. "That cloud around her."
Roy squinted- it was dark inside the woman's house. "No. A cloud?"
"Never mind" Bath said. She'd never thought to ask if anyone else, a non-Washer, could see the cloud when she was in her Training. She learned the strokes of cleansing, and the appropriate aromas for every kind of death: lavender for fearful, verbena for comatose, tuber rose for any child, and she taught herself how to sing-song, which was proper. She was only eight when she learned, so...no questions about non-Washers, and now she was at a loss. She wasn't supposed to bring someone who didn't have a personal interest in the dead person's death, but she hadn't thought it through (she was only eighteen.)
Bath started washing the woman. It was lovely. The woman had obviously had some kind of peace, on her incongruously comfortable chair: She'd been smiling, and her face was relaxed. Bath used tuber rose, a first for an adult under her hands. There was no precedent for it as far as she knew, but she couldn't imagine someone being offended. She thought about it and decided that she would take offense if anyone was offended, most likely putting an end to it right there since no one argued with a Washer. Roy watched her from the chair that Bath and the woman had vacated for the floor. It was the weirdest thing about this weird day, because he wasn't bothered by the fact that the woman had died in that very chair a small time before. He sat in it with his arm slung over the pillowed back: he wasn't easily spooked.
Bath finished, and stood. There wasn't anyone waiting, which happened sometimes: some people were outside of the regular shoal of society and it was part of the written contract when a Washer took the Oath (it involved five or more people witnessing to make it official. It could be anywhere, including in a tavern or a bathroom or in your own bed, if someone needed you and there weren't any other Washers around. Bath had been woken from a dream of washing a young woman with the same coloring as herself, so when she was roused to take the Oath and get herself immediately to the farm of some town bigshot who'd had a heart attack she felt like she had just moved in her dream and never woken up) that they clean those who had no family, for free. The woman she'd just finished seemed to be one of those, though you never knew: occasionally a fee would show up for her out of nowhere, sent by her usual messenger. There was never a note with these. She wished there was a note for everyone she touched. Sometimes-a-note-and-sometimes-not wasn't enough...writing, she felt (how she could tell this was impossible to say since she was fully illiterate.)
She looked at her work, and Bag Boy Roy looked with her. There were the flakes, the scales, the tiny leftovers of soul that were hovering just above the floor now, not cloud-like. Bath looked at them and they seemed brighter in the gloom than she remembered any others looking. Roy looked around her, still not seeing, trying to see.
"Are you done? Is there anything else?" He wasn't impatient. He waited for the answer even though he wasn't even a full arm's length from the door.
"I am. Nothing else" Bath said, but didn't move. She watched the bits of soul drift, brighter and bigger than before. Roy opened the door and went outside, and in a moment- newly interested: her first moment as a Watcher- she joined him.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
I'm Afraid So
The Home Office has our passports again.
After an excruciating early summer- one involving a death in the very very immediate family, for those of you who might not read me regularly- I rushed around. I rushed from my mother's apartment, full of memories and dusty junk and practical considerations, to get home to the UK. I really wanted to see my family, my tight, reliable little love generators; also we had to get our passport Visas renewed. In the interest of timeliness and the mad crunch of the calendar, we decided to postpone the memorial service so that I could do that rushing I mentioned and we could send in our passports like good little US Nationals and get them renewed and then go back to the US with only the regular amount of tension about when to return because of work and school blah blah.
When I say "rushing," I should clarify that it wasn't very urgent. I was mostly sitting around eating my way through the pie or goulash or pitcher of Manhattans (note: never think of a pitcher of Manhattans as food. Just...don't. Think of it as what it is, which is tasty, tasty poison.) Mom had died and there were phone calls galore, but other than that and showering, I had plenty of time to wash my clothes and pack. But being in that literal post-mortem is a little like being stoned, in that everything in the world is going along at the regular pace but your brain is plodding, gooped up in bullshit about getting certificates and getting in touch and getting a bunch of movies at Barnes & Noble for a really good price. (My sister and I, after eating an entire pitcher of margaritas together, tripped into that local BookDonald's where we found an amazing amount of movies that we realized, in tandem, that we LOVED and had to have immediately. I can highly recommend a light spending spree during that kind of slow-motion grief. Really soothes the soul, for exactly four minutes, which means it was worth every penny.)
And I got home, and I slept a bit, and I had a sandwich. And then my hubby and I filled out the form and I sent it in all speedy-extra, and waited a week or so, wondering. We had a month. Then last week he got a letter that said basically this:
Dear Visa Applicant,
We have received your paperwork. We have your cheque for the inordinate amount of money We must have for the processing of your application. We shall put that cheque in the bank and watch for the bounce. IF IT BOUNCES OR IF WE JUST DO NOT LIKE THE LOOK ON ITS' FACE AND DECIDE TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT, WE SHALL LET YOU KNOW. Via the regular mail. Sure, we asked for your email address and alternate email address and home phone number and work and mobile and every other number where you might be reached by phone....What of it?
We will pass it along after that.
Oh, and We may wish you to visit a post office and have some data taken again, for no discernible reason. What of it? If we do We shall notify you, in writing, through the Royal Mail, We're afraid.
We shall pass it along after that.
And one might wish to...postpone things. One might wish to delay one's holiday, or long automobile trip to the sea or the mountains or the places that produce comestibles, or one's long-postponed trip to one's ailing Nana. One may be wise to remain where one is, at one's home rather than engaged in any travel, in case We should wish to get in touch with one. We may wish to do this, We're afraid.
We intend to pass it along immediately after We decide to contact you, or rather not. It's up to us, We're afraid.
One cannot reach Us through any means of communication on this great Earth, be it through email or telephone or carrier pigeon. One should not try as it should be futile. However, should one need most urgently to reach Us, one might refer to a page on our website that leads you, through a clever and hilarious series of links, to a form that may or may not compel Us to return your passports and applications untouched by Home Office hands; thereafter one may re-apply. What jolly fun! We make no mention of what will happen to your money should you do this.
Ta-ta,
The Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration
So we had a mini-panic, but then rationalized that it was still weeks away, and we'd done everything by the letter, and our pictures taken at the Tesco picture booths were hideous in just the right passport-y sort of way, and our fingerprints were intact, and our bank balance was hardy enough to stand the nuclear first strike that would constitute the cheque's clearance. All was well, for the moment. A week later, we recieved another letter, and it said basically this:
Dearest Visa Applicants,
Do you remember when We informed you that We might require additional information that could only be obtained through certain branches of our post office? No? We will wait while you reaquaint yourselves with this instruction.
We thought not.
We at the Home Office should like to invite you to visit one of these post office branches- and here We must pause to inform you that you must bring more currency, and it must be in cash form- no, We do not joke about money (see first letter, paragraph I)- and have your picture taken, among other things.
Did We not like the pictures you sent with the application, as specified? No, We did not. We thought they were tacky. Or overexposed. We could tell you had them taken at the Tesco identification photo booth.
Once you and your family have appeared and handed over your fistful of coin and had your pictures taken with proper identification picture cameras, We shall surely pass along your application for perusal.
We at the Home Office also wish to inform you that you do not rate a sign-off.
PS After the above is completed, your Visas could be on your way in as little as eight weeks! Though perhaps not...We remain unconvinced. -H.O.
...Now THIS- this one rated a full-blown panic. We had three weeks at that point. So we sprang into testy, A-Type action, and got the thing done in less than 24 hours. The next day I wrote a letter to them. I'd called some harried woman at the actual Home Office once I finally found a phone number to call that didn't automatically connect me with a recording of a man with a Royal Shakespeare Company Voice saying "YOU wish to speak with one of US?? Preposterous! Away with you, maggot!...YOU wish to speak with one of US?? Preposterous! Away (etc)!..." The harried woman gave me an actual address to an actual building that contained people; moreover, they were poeple who would be handling our application! My letter said basically this:
Listen, Home Office:
I appreciate you have a little business here. I appreciate that it's a lovely little racket, and to keep it going you have to give everyone the illusion that you are both extremely busy and extremely mean. Thugs are thugs, and their methods differ only in the embellishments they use to decorate their brands of intimidation.
But, seriously: re application #YouKnowMyNameLookUpTheNumber, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??? MY MOTHER DIED. SHE DIED AND I CAME BACK HERE TO SEND YOU MY BLOOD AND ALMOST ALL OF MY MONEY SO THAT I COULD GO HOME AND ATTEND HER MEMORIAL SERVICE, YOU VAMPIRIC BUREAUCRAT CREEPS!!
Give us our Visas. Keep your money for buying your heroin or your viable human kidneys or whatever it is you need that much damn money for, but SEND US OUR PASSPORTS WITH OUR UPDATED VISAS RIGHT IN THEM. you assholes. OH MY GOD.
If you don't send us our updated Visas I will personally go piss on the graves of every one of your publicly buried Monarchs. Then I will throw my urine on each one of your living Royals, starting with little Prince George and working my way right up to the Queen Herself, so help me. You do not threaten an American with institutionalized laziness- and that's exactly what it is, you fuck-nuts- and not expect a tsunami of urine-throwing. America teaches the rest of the world how to be gross. Do not test us on this. The entire British Isles do not have enough soap to wash away the piss that will cover your nation if I do not get what I want.
With Utmost Sincerity,
Me
PS Get bent.
....Perhaps it was a bit too rage-filled. And I did not send that letter; I sent a moderately desperate please-Sir-may-I-have-another entreaty instead, since we were working with such little time. It would do none of us any good- and it certainly wouldn't get me to my Mom's service any faster- if we were abruptly put on a no-fly list right before the event was to take place. So we're waiting, like patient little ducks.
If you're of the persuasion, send us thoughts of expedition and efficiency, or just calming white light. Prayers are fine too, it can't hurt. This could get pretty traumatic, and very, very stinky.
Love to all.
After an excruciating early summer- one involving a death in the very very immediate family, for those of you who might not read me regularly- I rushed around. I rushed from my mother's apartment, full of memories and dusty junk and practical considerations, to get home to the UK. I really wanted to see my family, my tight, reliable little love generators; also we had to get our passport Visas renewed. In the interest of timeliness and the mad crunch of the calendar, we decided to postpone the memorial service so that I could do that rushing I mentioned and we could send in our passports like good little US Nationals and get them renewed and then go back to the US with only the regular amount of tension about when to return because of work and school blah blah.
When I say "rushing," I should clarify that it wasn't very urgent. I was mostly sitting around eating my way through the pie or goulash or pitcher of Manhattans (note: never think of a pitcher of Manhattans as food. Just...don't. Think of it as what it is, which is tasty, tasty poison.) Mom had died and there were phone calls galore, but other than that and showering, I had plenty of time to wash my clothes and pack. But being in that literal post-mortem is a little like being stoned, in that everything in the world is going along at the regular pace but your brain is plodding, gooped up in bullshit about getting certificates and getting in touch and getting a bunch of movies at Barnes & Noble for a really good price. (My sister and I, after eating an entire pitcher of margaritas together, tripped into that local BookDonald's where we found an amazing amount of movies that we realized, in tandem, that we LOVED and had to have immediately. I can highly recommend a light spending spree during that kind of slow-motion grief. Really soothes the soul, for exactly four minutes, which means it was worth every penny.)
And I got home, and I slept a bit, and I had a sandwich. And then my hubby and I filled out the form and I sent it in all speedy-extra, and waited a week or so, wondering. We had a month. Then last week he got a letter that said basically this:
Dear Visa Applicant,
We have received your paperwork. We have your cheque for the inordinate amount of money We must have for the processing of your application. We shall put that cheque in the bank and watch for the bounce. IF IT BOUNCES OR IF WE JUST DO NOT LIKE THE LOOK ON ITS' FACE AND DECIDE TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT, WE SHALL LET YOU KNOW. Via the regular mail. Sure, we asked for your email address and alternate email address and home phone number and work and mobile and every other number where you might be reached by phone....What of it?
We will pass it along after that.
Oh, and We may wish you to visit a post office and have some data taken again, for no discernible reason. What of it? If we do We shall notify you, in writing, through the Royal Mail, We're afraid.
We shall pass it along after that.
And one might wish to...postpone things. One might wish to delay one's holiday, or long automobile trip to the sea or the mountains or the places that produce comestibles, or one's long-postponed trip to one's ailing Nana. One may be wise to remain where one is, at one's home rather than engaged in any travel, in case We should wish to get in touch with one. We may wish to do this, We're afraid.
We intend to pass it along immediately after We decide to contact you, or rather not. It's up to us, We're afraid.
One cannot reach Us through any means of communication on this great Earth, be it through email or telephone or carrier pigeon. One should not try as it should be futile. However, should one need most urgently to reach Us, one might refer to a page on our website that leads you, through a clever and hilarious series of links, to a form that may or may not compel Us to return your passports and applications untouched by Home Office hands; thereafter one may re-apply. What jolly fun! We make no mention of what will happen to your money should you do this.
Ta-ta,
The Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration
So we had a mini-panic, but then rationalized that it was still weeks away, and we'd done everything by the letter, and our pictures taken at the Tesco picture booths were hideous in just the right passport-y sort of way, and our fingerprints were intact, and our bank balance was hardy enough to stand the nuclear first strike that would constitute the cheque's clearance. All was well, for the moment. A week later, we recieved another letter, and it said basically this:
Dearest Visa Applicants,
Do you remember when We informed you that We might require additional information that could only be obtained through certain branches of our post office? No? We will wait while you reaquaint yourselves with this instruction.
We thought not.
We at the Home Office should like to invite you to visit one of these post office branches- and here We must pause to inform you that you must bring more currency, and it must be in cash form- no, We do not joke about money (see first letter, paragraph I)- and have your picture taken, among other things.
Did We not like the pictures you sent with the application, as specified? No, We did not. We thought they were tacky. Or overexposed. We could tell you had them taken at the Tesco identification photo booth.
Once you and your family have appeared and handed over your fistful of coin and had your pictures taken with proper identification picture cameras, We shall surely pass along your application for perusal.
We at the Home Office also wish to inform you that you do not rate a sign-off.
PS After the above is completed, your Visas could be on your way in as little as eight weeks! Though perhaps not...We remain unconvinced. -H.O.
...Now THIS- this one rated a full-blown panic. We had three weeks at that point. So we sprang into testy, A-Type action, and got the thing done in less than 24 hours. The next day I wrote a letter to them. I'd called some harried woman at the actual Home Office once I finally found a phone number to call that didn't automatically connect me with a recording of a man with a Royal Shakespeare Company Voice saying "YOU wish to speak with one of US?? Preposterous! Away with you, maggot!...YOU wish to speak with one of US?? Preposterous! Away (etc)!..." The harried woman gave me an actual address to an actual building that contained people; moreover, they were poeple who would be handling our application! My letter said basically this:
Listen, Home Office:
I appreciate you have a little business here. I appreciate that it's a lovely little racket, and to keep it going you have to give everyone the illusion that you are both extremely busy and extremely mean. Thugs are thugs, and their methods differ only in the embellishments they use to decorate their brands of intimidation.
But, seriously: re application #YouKnowMyNameLookUpTheNumber, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??? MY MOTHER DIED. SHE DIED AND I CAME BACK HERE TO SEND YOU MY BLOOD AND ALMOST ALL OF MY MONEY SO THAT I COULD GO HOME AND ATTEND HER MEMORIAL SERVICE, YOU VAMPIRIC BUREAUCRAT CREEPS!!
Give us our Visas. Keep your money for buying your heroin or your viable human kidneys or whatever it is you need that much damn money for, but SEND US OUR PASSPORTS WITH OUR UPDATED VISAS RIGHT IN THEM. you assholes. OH MY GOD.
If you don't send us our updated Visas I will personally go piss on the graves of every one of your publicly buried Monarchs. Then I will throw my urine on each one of your living Royals, starting with little Prince George and working my way right up to the Queen Herself, so help me. You do not threaten an American with institutionalized laziness- and that's exactly what it is, you fuck-nuts- and not expect a tsunami of urine-throwing. America teaches the rest of the world how to be gross. Do not test us on this. The entire British Isles do not have enough soap to wash away the piss that will cover your nation if I do not get what I want.
With Utmost Sincerity,
Me
PS Get bent.
....Perhaps it was a bit too rage-filled. And I did not send that letter; I sent a moderately desperate please-Sir-may-I-have-another entreaty instead, since we were working with such little time. It would do none of us any good- and it certainly wouldn't get me to my Mom's service any faster- if we were abruptly put on a no-fly list right before the event was to take place. So we're waiting, like patient little ducks.
If you're of the persuasion, send us thoughts of expedition and efficiency, or just calming white light. Prayers are fine too, it can't hurt. This could get pretty traumatic, and very, very stinky.
Love to all.
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