Read The Entire Predicament Online

Authors: Lucy Corin

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author)

The Entire Predicament (13 page)

BOOK: The Entire Predicament
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One time they took Jim off to be tortured. The Bed of Nails, the Hugging Stones, the Wooden Horse, or, best, I think, the Judas Cradle, which is nothing more than a spiked pyramid
with ropes and pulleys above it. Only when they added Jim did it become a machine.They lowered his ass quietly onto the tip and let his weight work. Body Plus Object Equals Torture Machine.Tortured Equals Machine Equals Torturer.
Here the action of the machine destroyed the machine. Jim slumped, quiet, eyes closed. Outside, new parts waited in line.
CYBORGS, OR UNIVERSE AS MACHINE
Overnight, a line wormed into my face. I went to sleep and I had no control over what happened next. I hoped I’d slept on a pillow crease, but it felt like something might have gotten to me in the night. I rubbed my face and stretched the skin. It’s a puppet-mouth line, but only one. I’m aging lopsided.
Remember that guy who worked in the container factory? The tiny plastic bottles like thick thumbs, and then he puts them on a machine and they balloon into what we drink soda from. I’m looking at my thumb, a miniature torso.
I talked to Liz. As a kid, she was saying, she loved buttons. Anything she could push.Then I went to the movies again and it was a film about love, French, so I call it a film, but dumb, dumb, and then in the end the girl gets electroshock on one side of town and the man is hooked to a heart monitor on the other and the more they shock her the stronger he gets.
There are many more chemicals now than there were in the 1940s. Chemicals made only in laboratories are now peppering our bodies and twinkling in the stratosphere. Some of my DNA is patented. I don’t mean to be cryptic, but I know the line on my face could just go away tomorrow, as if traveling through. It doesn’t feel like it will, though. It will. I am
closer and closer to being a mannequin. Honey, honey, honey, all my moving parts . . .
YOGURT MAKER
Your yogurt maker arrived.Thank you. It’s more compact than I expected. It’s the size of a swaddled infant. It’s shaped like a torpedo. It’s amazing what’s going to happen in there, deep in the constant temperature. Incubation.
You know how yeast weirds me out. You know the high stakes of canning. This yogurt is a risk. But I have to figure out what to do with my body. I’m so tired. Luckily, soon, I am going to see you.
PRINTING PRESS
How clean the computer is, how uninked the text. Paper is the body and the body is gone. It’s the ghost of a machine. It’s trying to pull one over.Without the paper nothing’s impressed. There’s nothing to feel.
I think a lot of people think the computer is sexy. Inside a computer there’s a lot of animated humping. There are a lot of slick aerodynamic images to associate with computers, gleaming, greaseless chrome in space. The computer is invisible : wires and light, tiny welded grids and dots somewhere behind sexy screen robots. I can only imagine.
Is a printing press sexy? Ink and weight. In a sex scene they’re naked on the printing press, butts on vast plates, letters looming, rolling around, getting printed. They’ve picked
a special text or something. Kafka’s machine kills with words, garbled ones, the idea of them, remember?
On the computer there’s this database of missing persons.
VIBRATOR
I had one for a while but then I left it somewhere and forgot.
TAXI
When we get to the rally it’s in a packed auditorium with raked seating. This is me and Michael, my Jewish cousin. In the pauses the speakers leave for cheering we each decide to add our voice or not. All of us in the room are doing this. My voice, a voice, our voice. Ambiguous phrasing. We’re here to rile ourselves up, to feel collective, our breath, our bodies, our encased minds seeping into the noise from the orifices in our faces, but in each pause, some of us are silent and some are very, very loud. I refuse to chant one of the chants because it is so wrong and stupid. I might have forgotten I’m invisible in the crowd. I am having a private exercise, deciding what words to put in my mouth. Political machine. War machine. Then outside, after, we take a cab, me and Michael, who has it in him to be a loudmouth. Blah, blah, Israel, he says. Blah, blah, Iraq. There’s the barrier of plexiglass between us and the Arab driver and my cousin’s leaning up against the seat back, profile to me, profile to the driver when the driver puts his eyes to the mirror, which he does, he puts his eyes right to the mirror. Do you think you’re being friendly, Michael? Are you
so convinced of your own goodness you think it’s okay for you to talk like this? I mean you’ve got the money, but right this second he’s got the
machine
.
AMPLIFIER
On my back, on the floor of this city basement, I’m moving my eyes along the brick ceiling, which is vaulted, mortared in waves, with a sloppy grid of pipes and beams suspended below it. Curves through a grid, like music itself.
I sit up long enough to watch you plug everything in. I watch you drag cords around. Plugging the cords into their places is one language I don’t know.Your guitarist telling you a whole new song by saying letters that aren’t words: that’s another. I look at the cords, amazed at how many turns one cord makes and then how another will barely reach and this shows how much distance doesn’t matter. Sound or electricity or some combination, something I can imagine only in cartoon will travel through it fast enough that no ears and surely not my stumpy ones could hear a difference. Sound turning corners. Your guitarist switches to sitar and I move my eyes back to the ceiling.
I see the ceiling for a long time before I notice the population balanced between the bricks and the beams. How did all these items come to reside in this space between surfaces? A banjo, a rubber monster mask, a bicycle, more cords, a stretched canvas, a row of buckets of water sealer, a wad of Christmas lights, an enormous can of tomatoes, the leg of a large pink doll, a push broom, a pole lamp, a rolled-up sleeping bag. And here I am among them.
My God, your voice. I am so used to it speaking but when you sing how will I ever be able to say anything to you again? You speak and I hear words but you sing and how unfamiliar you instantly become, how distant and still somehow mine for having known your voice before it took off with your violin, and amplified. You make the world bigger. You make everything disgusting disappear. You’ve covered it in a clean sheet. Everything is a cold lump once you erase its relevance with sound.
MACHINE
Okay, this one has no machines. Unless, as so much history and language would have us believe, our bodies are machines.
STILL LIFE
It’s late. You’re sleeping here in the warm shadows. I cannot even see you breathe. Verb, the word, is still. No moving parts. Silence. A machine, defunct. A machine, pre-force. Shoes, footless. Simple potential. A baby in a photograph. An eggplant, whole and raw, molecules moving invisibly. An eggplant, cooked, post-sizzle. A baby in a photograph, still. Past and future action, ambition, accomplishment. Having done. Will do.
Can we be still? How still can we be? How perpetually hungry?
Don’t go.You’re always so far away. Making, doing, making do.
MACHINES
Can opener. Electric pencil sharpener. Automatic garage door. Food processor. Remote-control dog collar. Dictaphone. Videotape rewinder. Hair-comb poison-dart deployer. Microwave oven. Six-slice toaster. Bush Hog and bulldozer. Long-range spy cam. Massage chair. White-noise maker. Cotton gin. 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory. Bubble machine. Stun gun.
Lawnmower, dishwasher, typesetter, welder, word processor, streetsweeper, engraver, and other people who are machines.
Cooper, Smith,Weaver, Cartwright, C arpenter, Miller, Potter, Baker, Barker, Shoemaker, Taylor, Mason, Plumber, Butler, Groom, Fisher, Shepherd, Hunter, Porter, Knight, Bishop, King, Dean, Parson, Proctor, Berger, Monger, Messenger, Mailer, Shipman, Skinner, Tanner, Butcher, Gardener, Singer, Cook.
Back at the supermarket, a guy with a heaping cart approaches the girl in charge of checkout. “Are you open?” the guy asks. “Oh, I’m not a line,” she says. “I’m automated.”
MY MACHINE
Even as you are my love, you are more. You are more than body.You are beyond words. Also imaginary.
MACHINE
The laboratory is filled with tanks of small octopuses, none larger than a glove, stacked floor to ceiling in individual plexiglass tanks, and they have been left alone for months except for feedings, performed automatically by a robot named
Madge.The little octopuses stretch their icy limbs through the airholes, groping, and occasionally slide across one another, so forlorn their chromatophores are blinking darkly, and this continues until one octopus coils a tentacle around the tentacle of another octopus and pulls so hard she stretches thin and slips through the airhole, and although her partner does not, she drops from the tank and lands on one of the silver discs of a balance set to weigh a gathering of marbles in a plastic net sack with an open neck. The balance tips with a thud and marbles spill and scatter across the laboratory table, bouncing and rolling in four directions, sort-of-north, sort-of-south, sort-of-east, and sort-of-west, and the westward marble rolls into a mouse hole—one of those tiny black arches that in another cartoon would be a train tunnel but in this one is a mouse hole—and once inside it bowls the little mouse off her feet as she scrubs dishes in her kitchen and is caught up on the marble as it rolls, her feet pattering to keep up, and they roll on out the back mouse door and outside the laboratory, which is the bottom floor of a tall, dark-brick apartment building, patter, patter, go, go, down the paved path over hills into the distance, and meanwhile, the octopuses left in their tanks, terrified and frenzied, are circling in sync. They circle and circle and it sets up a rhythm, and the whole wall of them begins to creak and shake and then the tanks tumble, water gushing, plexiglass bouncing across the laboratory floor, and this makes enough ruckus that several stories up, a geranium in a terra-cotta pot that has been balanced on a windowsill shivers just enough that it inches and then topples and falls alongside the fire escape and smack, lands on the spoon end of a shovel and there’s a cat who, walking along, happens to be stepping
over the shovel handle when the pot hits and is flung into the air, yowling and flailing, until he catches onto a lady’s undergarment that is hung from a clothesline and there he clings to it, dangling. Meanwhile, bouncing off the laboratory table, another marble plops onto a sleeping dog that wakes with a fart that lights a candle that burns through another clothesline, this one hung with seven shirts with silver buttons that shine so brightly in the sun they frighten two chickens who drop one egg each from their bottoms, and the eggs smack into an iron pan on a stove and a great wind comes and swooshes the eggshells away and thereby a bald man’s breakfast is cooked.
Some machines exist only in writing.
Plus, there are many more marbles.
BODIES AND PARTS
Our parts were in the bed. I lifted my fingers to your fingers, and inside, our mirrored veins bustled with vessels, just as I remember them bustling in grade-school filmstrips, corpuscles like sucking candies bumbling through corridors like bottles along a conveyor belt, top view so you’re looking at all caps, conveyor belt as bisected vein, veins in fingers, fingers to limbs, veins and vessels to mind. Without our skin we’d fall apart. Laverne and Shirley wobbled away from the factory on bicycles. We could hear the sound of distant faxing.
Baby in a Body Cast
In the corner, the baby looked in the direction his body cast cast him.
Birth did it to him, squished his bendy bones through the yawn of his mother’s pelvis and left him floppy. In one open moment his skin felt the white air. The world was loud. It gushed, prismatic, cold, sharp, dry, and gaspingly empty. He tingled in the starry light that lit him as if from within. His bones pushed at his skin, loosed from their joints, and while there was pain, he also felt his body loosed in the universe. His bones bobbed, noodles in soup, and then everyone in the room surrounded him, darkening the light, and soon he was wrapped, cupped, and wet in white. The world had taken one step away—noise sucked back where it came from, sounding again as it had from his mother’s belly, but without her humming insides. He heard distant sounds, and the only close ones were his own, his body’s sounds and the sounds of his body’s sticky contact with its cast. Soon the air left the plaster cold. Soon he lay like a doll at his mother’s breast, separated
everywhere except his face. His eyes moved. He could move his eyes without hurting anything.
His parents worried for a while. It was all so new. They’d never had a baby before. But soon, to everyone, he was simply himself, only more triangular than he might always be, a shiny bar holding his legs apart, like a shower rod between his ankles, and overall immobile and numbed. The three of them went home, down to their cellar apartment, practically painless.
BOOK: The Entire Predicament
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