Yet the things they did not say could fill an ocean

"What I didn't realize is Holden Caulfield had a third sibling named Allie who has died when the book has begun. And in an absolutely key scene he is wandering around muttering to himself: 'Please, Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie, don't let me disappear.' "And I remember just putting the book down when I read that. And I said, my God, this is really a book about sadness and grief and finding oneself after a terrible loss."

— Kevin Smokler

She said something and I did not respond because I was reading and napping and writing letters into The Week’s Crossword puzzle to try to see what came out. When I remembered that she had said something I tried to write it. I could not remember. “Let us go out and spend our hard wrought earnings at the decentralized marketplaces for propagated dissatisfactions.” This is not at all what she said. “Yearning for some obscure and wholly unattainable object of desire?” I did not really rejoinder to ask her. “Yeah, we've got that,” the Staples ad did not aloud proclaim.

My face as hard as a mineral, a weariness from my long battle with the week, and the week before this last week, and a long ignored longing to connect mixed with the innate self-centeredness of a person who isn’t fully grown up and gets his greatest kicks from ignoring people. There is a real energy to be had in ignoring people. I feel this in my gut to be true but no one ever tells you this. They expect you to be someplace, you are not at that place, you steal their energy.

 

 

You will arrive. You will fall asleep. You will read this. In reverse order.

 

How does this blog I am writing tie into what this blog is about? It’s called meta narrative. I would be lying to you if I told you she said “Most people are ugly shits incapable of projecting two ideas simultaneously,” but she was probably thinking some variant thereof when I never responded “The fact that they think of themselves at all is doubly ironic— Quadratic?” This thought process does not make sense, and that’s what makes me think that it was real. It might have really happened to us. I would have said something stupid because we all say stupid things when we’re not thinking about ourselves, and when we’re not thinking about ourselves whilst talking about people who don’t think about themselves we say stupid things and realize that there is some redundancy, some double redundancy, and then, for the first time in this blog, we actually say something out loud:

“What is the difference between how a word is used generally versus legally.”

“What?”

I repeat,” what is the difference between how a word is used— ”

“No I mean what word?”

“Lifetime,” I lie, realizing my spur-of-the-moment misdiagnosis of quadratic is less important to me than the materialistically modified theory of reincarnation I’ve been working on.

 

            She did not respond because she, too, was reading and when she remembered that I had said something she chose not to answer but instead to read aloud a passage from her paperback.
 

"A river reached the sea; there, on a ferrous red delta fan -- with copper-colored reeds on the bank, and huge steamhorning ships in the distant middle, where there are silent picnics, the lovers eating greenhouse strawberries from a basket with a lid..."

 

Outside our window a man with green hair passes by, toiling diligently on his cell phone. A bird whistles. Time passes.

 

“I had this dream about an antiques store and” was interrupted in the telling of it.

"That's Arsenic and Old Lace."

"The antiques store?"

"No, the whole dream you are describing."

"How do you know the dream I was describing?”

“Antiques store.”

“Arsenic and Lace?"

"Cary Grant. With some of your less typical but highly guessable embellishments."

“How do you know?”

“You told me about the dream already. I googled it at work.”

 

When she finished reading she undoes some matryoshkas by the window and then the spooled a strand of ribbon.

 

"What kind of embellishments," I finally asked. This is bait. Her argument are always faux–naïf .

"Coded masturbation."

"What part was coded?"

"When you picked up the thumb tacks. One at a time and 'felt a strange spiritual power come over' you." She eye-rolled, “Come. Cum over you.”

"That's gross."

"You are willfully ignorant."

"I liked to think of it as cheerfully innocent until a few seconds ago."

 

Does love conquer all? No. Power conquers all. Love conquers vice. The phone rings and we both ignore it but a minute later when we both remembered that it had rung we both look up at each other at the exact same moment and smile, knowing that we are proud of ourselves and of each other.

“Copies of the first ever translation of Finnegans Wake available in mainland China,” I read aloud, “have sold out.”

 

There are many things that she did not say in that moment's pause which I had conceded for her response, but I did not wait long enough for her not to say them. “Some people may ‘just want to have it on their coffee table,’ Hockx says.”

“How many people are actually going to read it?”

“I haven’t finished.”

"The article, or Huck Finn?"

"Finnegans Wake. No, both."

“Let’s go shopping.”

“I just felt I had to own it. Finnegans Wake. It’s seminal. I told you about my longstanding ambition...”

“Yes.”

“To one day read Ulysses to my child..."

“Yes.”

“Every night read a little bit... You know, as like a bedtime story.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder how long it would take...”

“Let’s go shopping.”

“I’d need to start when she was a baby...”

“I’m going to look for shoes online until you are finished with that paper.”

“Okay I’m almost done.”

 

So that was happening. So, that happened. Then we went shopping until it got dark and I found myself sitting outside a brightly lit shop where bright music clanged and chimed and I waited, doing these puzzles on my iPhone. Sometimes all the pieces come together, level after level, and sometimes nothing fits— Most of the time, if I'm honest. I keep playing.

 

 

 

When we returned I resumed reading, having never really stopped. I had pretended to stop, like I had pretended to start, and forgotten that I was pretending and when I remembered I was halfway through an article about feminists forcing a crackdown on pornography in Iceland. Pretending to read. Like we were pretending to talk to each other. Not really asking "Is this it? Is this all there is?"

 

I put aside the newspaper and picked up a book. I read to myself but not aloud how "future humans suffering from radiation sickness will hemorrhage coconut-milk-colored puss from their tear ducts and in the process, slowly turn into giant homo crustaceans" thinking "what does decency mean in our time?" I did not ask her this. She would misinterpret the question. She had put away her new shoes and was now wearing the glasses that she never wears. She never wears them, but she was wearing them as she read, to herself not aloud, about Yukio Mishimo, who's book Gogo no Eiko has a difficult English translation. It hinges crucially on the homonym eiko, which can be rendered either ‘An Afternoon’s Glory’ or ‘An Afternoon’s Towing’. The book's original English translator figured that 'glory' was a drag word for a title and and went to the author for help. The author, hungering for a Nobel Prize, wanted to impress the committee with a long title in the manner of Proust's À la Recherche — and chose The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, in reference to the exceedingly gruesome downfall of the main character. But this did him little good. Sales were disappointing. Even in Japan.

Mulling over the blogger's every present difficulty to find the right words I said aloud:

 

"Joyce made up his own words rather than live behind the bars of social convention."

"Who is Joyce?

"James Joyce. Leo Bloom. His lines are dense, blizzarded replete with sexual puns, double entendre, tits..."

 

She made every appearance of actually thinking about this, as much as a person can look like they are thinking, but I doubted that she was thinking about it until a few minutes later when she said something, and I did not respond to her this time because I was working out a problem in my head and when I did respond it was many minutes later, and without thought entirely, apropos of nothing.

 

The problem that I was working out regarded the final days of life. When will you know them? When you are in the final days of your life what will you want? I think about this often when I pass the frame I bought to hang the college degree that I did not get. I hung the frame beside the door to the garage. My life as a writer is haphazard, choral, shitty, happening right here — in front of your eyes — on this blog. I try to be a writer every day. This is the place where, having written, I can un-write. I can move on. Keep writing in different ways. I write because I love to, because it feels good, but that is a lie because I write habitually now. I can't help it. Writing begins and ends a self-perpetuating cycle with varieties rewards, emotional upheavals and spiritual contentment.

 

This had been a rough week. I had been awake late at night thinking about numbers. If I died this week she might assume I would find comfort rereading our financial statements but of course that is ridiculous. Of course she would not make such an assumption. Of course...

 

"Life is a prison," I did respond aloud, many minutes later.

"Liar."

"Writer," I corrected her.

 

Was she crying or were her eyes bothering her? I did not know. I could only see her wet cheeks behind the glasses, because she had canted her head low and to the right, and the lamplight glare kept her eyes invisible. She made no sound.

She did not read aloud: "A young woman, Francisca Cañada Morales, ran off with her cousin, Francisco Montes Cañada, moments before her wedding to a local man. The cousin was then shot dead by the prospective bridegroom’s brother."

 

 

You will arrive. You will fall asleep. You will read this. In reverse order.

 

 

 

Later I remember lying in bed with her and feeling nothing at all: staring at the ceiling and wondering what was wrong with me, but pretending to be going to sleep because she will see no reason to keep the light on. Sometimes she wants me to lie to her.