War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (3 page)

After a while the two parties grow
tired, bored. The People finally say, “Yeah, I guess you're right
about nationalistic pride. It really is self-defeating. Fuck it. I
don’t really care that there are jobs I don’t want because I’m not
trained to do them. I short-sold my house anyway so I’m coming with
you to India. But. Fuck. You’d better get me one of those hot
towels from first class. Bring it back to my
pre-negotiated-metasearch-OTA-cut-rate seat behind the wing where
I'll be listening to electronica and breathing exhaust for the next
eighteen hours straight.”

73 — Bad Person

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

I tried to talk to my mother about her
life, but I didn’t feel like listening. Do I have to?

Dear Bad
Person,

No. And I’ll tell you why. I’d much
rather you help me listen to my mother. I called her up about a
rhubarb cobbler. She kept going on tangents. Telling me how she
planted the rhubarb too deep, how she couldn't bring the dogwood
from Pittsburgh, how rhubarb doesn't grow well in the shade. I
tuned in and out. Hearing only, “… and then I thought, ‘Damn,’ and
moved it." But if you had been there you might have heard the
rest.

She told me all about the new yard
somewhere. I know it was the town where I was born, but otherwise I
don’t remember where she lived. How the sun beat down on the
garden, how the limestone dust billowed over from the quarry
nearby, and how she had to subdivide the rhubarb some years and
double dig it every spring.

I fondly recall my mother’s regaling
me about oxalic acid in the leaves and how she got the rhubarb
plants from the neighbor who originally wanted to kill her rhubarb
in Pittsburgh. (This woman had an irrational fear of her little
girls’ chewing on the poisonous leaves.)

"And it thrived in the brutal Midwest
sun and under the limestone dust from the quarry.” Then she started
on the rest of the garden. (As if I cared.) I can still hear her
saying how the ageratums have taken over, but she says she’s
encouraging the rhubarb even though it has a new enemy down here
due to the slight difference in the thermocline.

85 — Content with the
Status Quo

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

My husband is having an affair, and
I’m so relieved. I was getting really bored fucking him the same
way every Friday. I’m really glad someone else has to do it for a
while. The problem is my friends think I should give a shit and
stage some sort of intervention. I’m really not sure why. I mean he
pays the utilities. Lots of times he gets milk on his way home. And
it’s not like she’s pretty. I’m busy with the kids and exhausted.
Frankly, I like watching Law & Order reruns in the evenings
alone. Is there some way that I can just ignore this and not lose
the respect of my children and friends?

Dear Content with the
Status Quo,

What you need here is a lifelong state
of denial. If your friends know that you know about your husband’s
affair, then you’ll end up being peer-pressured into exhibiting the
necessary moral rectitude.

Try to show up with your husband in
public places where he can then slip off to the cloakroom with his
lover right under your nose. When he slips away, start talking to
the people in the main room about how good your husband is to you,
how much he loves you, how devoted he is—shit like that.

After a while the tragedy
and inherent heartbreak of the situation wherein everyone else is
aware of the affair but you are projecting a sense that you are
unaware to preserve and prolong your ability to watch
Law & Order
reruns may
run afoul of their sense of duty. Never let this happen.

If they feel the right thing is to
tell you what is going on, then you’ll be right back where you
started in that position of having to demonstrate a passable degree
of self-respect on behalf of your children. We can’t let that
happen. So go ahead and let everyone hate you a little bit for no
reason. Or. Better. For good reason. Be slightly irritating, fairly
obnoxious, overbearing, somewhat annoying, less than courteous,
and, of course, bossy. Let your entire social circle think you
deserve his cheating on you. Let them think it’s funny, that you’re
getting your just deserts. You’ll never need a DVR. Good
luck!

5 — Imported Silk Wedding
Veil in the Kitchen Trash

Beach does not wait. On a brisk early fall day it crawls up
out of Great Lake water and reaches toward Chestnut Street pulling
behind it its blue train, the soaked horizon, as though a
well-dressed stroll up that Magnificent Mile—lit by high-concept
storefronts and LED trees—might be possible. Gorgeous, the blue
roils, consuming Chicago, and then the lake demurs, receding,
pulling back, and assuming again its unawareness of having reached
the definition—the limit—of those trucked-in, morning-raked sands,
those concrete walls committee-planned by civil
engineers.

Earth slips out under those waves,
hollows itself in support of them. So what if there is an end to
waters? It’s just perception. Not anxious only, not deferential,
only, but also with respect, with propriety, with the simplicity of
physics the waves pull back as much as they charge forward to claw
at the skirts of the skyline. But the plan has that arm’s length
reach factored in. The presumption is these are big discontented
waves. So if calm will not hint at all that lies sleeping under
that beach’s safe home sky, then where the water abuts a futile
desuetude the disconcerted lake-end bashes against solidity, throws
up confetti-white spray for edge-wary runners who trust in things
like urban planning and put less faith in wildness.

Surge after surge the heedless lake
tosses momentary veils skyward, like so much dried lavender, cloud
showers for the cement cracks to catch and drain back. Those lake
waters heave toward the river of headlights, while beach sand
kneels in submission, in rage, in contempt, in futility outside the
windows of The Drake.

The city ignores this
constant body in motion, or tries to, making lists, making calls,
making it home in time for dinner, making that careful
thirty-five-mile-per-hour turn with forty-five-mile-per-hour
braking hands at two and ten and so many offensive drivers’ eyes
going forward toward goals harbored with resentment, bitterness,
distrust, and fear, yet, every one impossible to yield in
compromise. The drivers talk, talk, talk one-sided in those
hands-free-equipped cars. The words, babel chatter over songs on
the radio, over baby screams from the backseat, over commuted
dreams, travel as fast over unseen infrastructures as over those
most concrete. Chips of cell phone conversations:
Must. Do. Get. Have to. Home. Need. Be there.
You’d better. First.
And to really make the
point, sometimes every single one of them says, “I’m on The Drive,”
which means, “You have to do what I say or I may just lose control
of this vehicle, right now, and die.” So swerve the talkers,
driving insistent. But that lake, beach, dried lavender sky-break
repetitive surging veil allows no dismissal either. You’d never
recover from the guilt of not submitting to this opined whim. Even
in the fastest afternoon traffic that whips around Lake Shore
Drive’s S-curve, during conversations where demands are made and
fixations asserted willfully as irrefutable facts of what momentary
existence should be, apparently a sort of convicted refusal, those
thrashings of waters on the kneeling beach enter their peripheral
steering awareness. But the beauty is a threat. They will die,
surely, if they look long enough to perceive it.

Sun skips the lecture. The drivers are
already closer to home but The Drake, the curve, the beach, the
waves stay right where they are. Lest the September beach-walker be
forgotten, without faith or grace someone manages an end-of-season
last chance at a good weather barefoot walk. There is no Tibetan
spaniel. And it’s almost as if that lone individual didn’t even
bother to project any emotions at all upon his or her surroundings.
What would be the point? Waves are water. Still. There is a smitten
moment clung to and claimed able to combat winter’s coming
eulogies. Even though there is no real way the beach says, “Roll up
your pants. Go ahead. Get in,” feet are invited into the water
somehow, as eyes penetrate what becomes the depths further from
shore. Surface and substrate are so close to closure where the inch
of weedy residue floats above the intrepid walker’s wiggling toes,
so curious, happy. You cannot walk to Mackinac from here. But you
can take one step, maybe two, and so yes, ten too-cold bare toes
wander out past the man-made world and get to that modulate edge,
where sand, waves, and broken-hydrogen bonds rub up and down, back
and forth, against the city’s particulate air perpetually,
sensually, seductively, and become waters unbound, and might stay
that way, droplets forever, if not for so many rules of order.
Surface tension coheres all that heave-heavy wind-wave upforce that
crashes down as if to please one life.

57 — Doc

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

Sometimes I want to be
objectified by men, but I’m sort of embarrassed about it. I stand
in line, in a swirling crowd, my mind sedated by the white noise of
a juice blender, and I wonder:
Is there a
way to be young again and reclaim my Doc Marten-wearing,
angst-ridden, teenage years?

Dear Doc,

The thing is you’re an old hag. What
are you doing comparing yourself to these new
cocktail-dress-wearing twenty-somethings in their cute
coming-of-age outfits? Don’t.

6 — Saucony After
Adidas

Ernestine took her pants
off and sat on the foot of her bed in the lamplight staring into a
brand-new running shoe. The interaction from the night before
replayed in her mind. He had asked, “Do you want to fuck?” because
he had to have her consent. She hadn’t answered. Just went through
the motions, let him get off, and got a cab. But. Holding that shoe
the next day she wished she’d said, “No, I don’t want to fuck. But
if you can seduce me and keep a straight face about it, I’ll suck
your dick for the rest of your life.”

She loved new running shoes. Such
detail. So much careful engineering. So many design elements.
Thinking of the great remnants of culture across the ages, she
thought of time and this shoe. Carved alabaster? No. Great
pyramids? No. Maybe the Bonneville Salt Flats.

He was like, “So you are a stuck-up
bitch.” She turned the shoe over. Looked at the sole. Lasting
legacies and tributes to the prowess of human endeavors? Well, no.
She stared into the heel cup, relishing the turquoise satin, the
turquoise felt, the impressive duotone font of the decal, the
recessed wording around the heel, and the bold empowered name of
the shoe itself. She flipped the white leather and
turquoise-detailed thing over again in her hand, felt the laces,
could almost see light through several layers of synthetic
mesh.

Sitting there on her bed she thought
of the future—the sweat bound to escape that loose weave, grit,
mud, sand, and soggy filth from inevitable puddles. He wouldn’t
hear her footfall against grass, asphalt, cement, even against the
tops of picnic tables in desperate need of paint jobs, across hoods
of cars, across marble plazas, down lakefront sidewalks and hilly
rooted paths in the forest preserve.

But he might call again. Carefully,
she folded back the tissue paper, placed the shoe in its
box.

77 — Escapist
Pleaser

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I mainly cave to external pressure. I
like the idea of someone loving me for me, but it seems like a lot
of bother to go to all that effort of disarming oneself, of
recognizing the defense mechanisms, of filling in moats, coming up
from dungeons, dismantling stockades, moving obstructive piles of
rubble, and paving the way to my happy furry greeting card heart
with something other than land mines.

I mean, no one’s vulnerable anymore
and having to give a shit about someone else in real ways seems so,
dunno, trite, maybe? Like maybe humanity is done with love. Don’t
you think so? I do. It’s time fear and rage have another good turn
in the spotlight. You know? Power. Domination. Control. That
stuff’s awesome. Why disarm at all? You’ve got to pounce on another
person and take away their sense of security and personal pride.
Humiliate them into total submission. Really show that lover who’s
boss.

And why not? I’d eat docile popcorn
for that. But then I get super confused about how I’m supposed to
have someone love me for me unconditionally or whatever. So. I
guess my question is, even if I pull someone’s hair and scratch up
a few backs, what kind of intoxicants are most socially acceptable
so I’ll be able to coast through life without awareness since it’s
unlikely I’ll have any real satisfaction, fulfillment, or
happiness?

Dear Escapist
Pleaser,

It depends. From your letter I can’t
tell if you’re a man or a woman. And it matters. I know lots of
women use the historically male escapes of drinking, gambling,
drugs, and promiscuity. Whoopee~! They’re all liberated now, you
know. But there are not very many men who find relief from
themselves by making their grandmother’s chocolate pudding for the
lady down the street when she’s in hospice care for cancer of the
jaw.