Conscience Round

Something in my body topples over an edge, then shatters. The day wastes me away. I grip my shoulders and hold my breath. I draw the blinds to avoid cloud-gazing. The endless sky reminds me of a different place, a different time, so powerfully that I react physically, as though burned. But what part of me grazed the bonfire? Some surface, undulating like a mesh plot in a simulation, a rainbow-colored scrap representing the end of life or the change in interest rates. Some surface in my body that I can’t see but upon which everything else somehow rests.

When practice starts, a butterfly wings in from the darkness and spends the next hour floating through the air between the rows. I think: Isn’t it frightened to be here? But it stays until the lesson ends and then as I go to the changing room, I see it fluttering on the padded floor. What kind of omen is that? Surely if I figure it out, that would that fix things?

Life these days is like a metallic taste in my mouth. I become dependent on eye drops. Flavored chilled drinks. Emails for deals on ebooks and appliances. Pyramids of yellowcake. Climb to the top and survey your new kingdom, Ozymandias. I don’t shave my legs and I don’t wear a bra. I used to pretend this was a principled stance or a show of rebellion (visible nipples, the new hammer and sickle!), but it’s nothing like that. I just cannot be bothered to put another bell on my collar. Submission or opposition, I don’t care for either artifice. Both can be bought at a store. At the same store, even. I distrust everyone. Despite being the only millennial left with any empathy for mothers, I find maternal emotion intolerable because I cannot distinguish its particular brand of sacrifice from servitude. I have come to respect my mother more because she never made me feel like she needed me more than her own independence. Thank you for your attention to this matter. My vanity has morphed into something twisted. I don’t want to be pathetic, I want to be disgusting. I want to be impossible to look at, like a sandstorm, stinging your eyes, scoring your skin and toppling you to the floor, like a tortured butterfly in a tortured anecdote.

The kids are antisocial so put a gun in their hands. Put down the phone and let’s go! To the killing field! Are people only ever either masters or victims? Oh, remember the dress that was either blue or gold? I hope this finds you very well.

How is it that the modern world, which feels less like a “world” and more like a “moment,” experienced over and over, over and over and over, can be both under and overanalyzed by every pundit, pervert, preacher, poet, parishioner and skeptic? What’s the opposite of walking on eggshells? Running over spikes in a monster truck? Horsepower that could win a medal, and maybe that’s all we want. Woah, wuff-wuff. Stop there. Can’t get too close to the mood of a thinkpiece. The fountain on the mountain is just a decoy.

A crow flies by, parallel to me, dipping down low, briefly, to my knee-level, with an unripe orange plum in its beak. It soars above the black-tiled eaves and then vanishes.

So many conversations rehearsed in my mind, enough times that the skin of the fruit has split down the middle, revealing the ordinary flesh of the ordinary ego. If I was kind to you, it was for me, not you. If I was cruel to you, it was for me, not you. I simulated you too much in my imagination and now you are never real to me. I touch your face and hear plastic sounds. I throw your things in the fireplace and see them transform into relics.

I sit at the meeting table and scratch at the broken thing inside me. Inside my ill-fitting work suit, I feel like a witch. Test me and I will pull out my potions. But hunt me and I will go willingly, because I am a coward.

I plug prompts idly into an LLM. It runs frantically on its hamster wheel and discharges delusions in the form of pellets in the woodchips. I ask it to name every martyred woman. Dutifully, it churns, then sighs in sepia: Alice Kyriakus – Found burnt to still another classic

Ah. I pause the seance. To emerge from the greenish turpentine with not only a lie, but also a broken thought, fished out from under the table—I have to smile.

A bumblebee, tiny legs so heavy with pollen it seems to wobble in the rain-speckled air, buzzing from bud to bud on the dying purple heather. I watch it with real fondness and think: You do the only meaningful work here. Then I think, boringly, predictably: I could reach out and crush you in my fist. Of course I never could. I spend enough of my time already trying my hardest not to kill only to then turn and see, again, the trail of bodies.

Godspeed, Alice Kyriakus. I saw you board the ark on a Saturday, the rain a mess of sickly light, the signs on the water around the port flashing neon red, and I knew then that we were finally past the power of miracles. You turned one last time before you disappeared inside but you never saw me. I knew then that man’s most fundamental curse is hindsight. I knew then that we live already in a past life.

I sleep in a bed. I stand in a kitchen. I lie on a sofa, like a psychiatric patient. I meditate, unsuccessfully. I sit at a desk. I twitch like a dog. I scrape a fork across a plate. I wince at the sound.

In Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, letters are sealed with blood and beef tallow. In Babylon, where the tower was felled by God, crops are fertilized with bonemeal. In Tokyo, where no ancestor of mine, not one in a million years, ever set foot, my mind is a palm-sized hand-axe, and I chop, and chop, and chop.

Modernity got the better of me today. It crawled up the inside of my leg, like a furred insect. Its wings fluttered against my abdomen. Its segmented eyes met mine and found less than it hoped for and more than it wanted. It whispered in my ear: Can’t you do something original? 

“It’s not in my nature and not my style,” I replied, cynically, scratching the wax from the whorl of the gothic cathedral of my ear.

“Coward!” the insect cries. In ultrasonic tones heard only by me and my votive candle, it preaches a futile gospel.

In the forest of cedar, we come across a block of green marble dusted in ash and needles. When we leave the valley, tears on our faces, we cling to a new, burning awareness that will nonetheless fade, at a speed equal to its power, before we ever reach the gates. No one will hear what we saw there, though we try to tell the tale. Eventually, when the snow melts from their branches, the trees are taken for ships, for railways, for the building and ravaging of the spring and summer of empire.

I nurse a headache. I react defensively. I drink too quickly. I dream too deeply. I refresh the inbox. I put a sweater over my pajamas. I sweep my hair up into a bun. I listen to the news. I hear about war, about billionaires, about waterlilies; about basements, about weather, about bivalves. I climb a wall. I fuss in a tub. Something desperate strains itself through the holes of my brain. It lies in my hand, a wet tarot card. Four of Cups, Ten of Swords.

My face in profile on a gold coin, marsh reeds braided around my head. Cuneiform scratched into my cheeks. The men of the cavalry pay for their weapons with my likeness. Modernity hands me a saw and tells me to get to the cutting.

In the cracks in the facade, vulnerability shines like the pink and tender light of a blue moon. Smile frozen stiffly in place, I press my hands to my wobbling face to close up the opening fissures. Outside this bar, strangers photograph the dusky night and all its flecked, foggy stars.

I have recently rediscovered one of my old pleasures—the vanishing act. I am asked a question and I pointedly do not answer. I change the subject, a little haughtily. When instructed to reveal the magic trick, I respond by chucking my white-capped baton at the audience. I snap at the spotlight until it turns off. I stomp off stage. The crowd likes nothing less than to be denied. Who starts a show and then leaves mid-act? The circle around me tightens; the thorns sharpen; but I turn inwards all the more fiercely; I cherish my secrets.

No, that’s not quite right. I cannot pin down this point, but I will try to approximate it, the way an arrow approximates eternity. Yes, I am secretive. I think keeping some things to yourself is the surest sign of a personality. Yes, I am a little mean. I will charm you into the garden and then push you into the ditch of Eden. I’ll stand over you, one hand on a hip, the other dancing along the long, green-veined palm frond spanning my torso. Next to me, the beast, that auditor of Paradise, wags his tail.

Spitting up dirt, you eye me suspiciously. Your wings are streaked with mud where they meet your body. If I help you up, it’s because I have a conscience, in addition to a mean streak. If I help you up, it’s because I have a mean streak, in addition to a conscience. How to tell you that I’d like to be a statue, rigid and unloving, with graffiti across my back in black and purple? Observed from a cautious distance. I’d like your company but I’ll freely confess—I’d appreciate your fear. We sit on the edge of the ditch and I talk to you about everything but what you most want to hear.

I’m alone for the week. I impulse-buy peach soju and run a bath. Sitting in the blur of the water, a slight buzz at my temples, I think, a little giddily: Clear signs of the woman-in-trouble. “Woman-in-trouble” is my favorite game to play. I am not this decade’s arcade champion, but still I am a competent player. I know the rules better than most.

Boot up “woman-in-trouble” and from the corner of the screen, fear approaches, fast. It bears the stony mask of the crusader. I bat it away. Fear bounces off my rusted blade. I watch it depart in a curved line, like an arrow. It is only momentarily deterred. As its shadow defaces the moon, as hope crests the ridge of my ribs, it boomerangs. I don’t have time to mourn, to rage. I prepare my sword arm again. Angel relentless, pathfinder eternal, it knows its target. It needn’t best me, only wear me down.

Indulgent childishness can pause the game, for a time. I splash in the tub like a goldfish in a clawfoot bowl. Fear hovers in the background, annoyed but not discouraged, knowing it is blocked only by the power of a temporary enchantment. A circle of chalk, smudged. It stands by the cross of the window and awaits its opportunity. The silhouette of the sorceress, idle in the tub, visible through a crack in the glass. Fear bends in half, folding like a paper doll. From adult-sized to child-sized. It folds again; now it is the length of an arm. Then a hand, a finger, a thimble. A trillion times, until it is a scintillating point, embedded too deep in the cystic pancreas of the world to ever find. It puts out invisible vapors that enter the room, that disturb the air, that dirty the breath, that penetrate the skin and the eyes. I walk around with every fear in every cell.

Drop in another bloodied coin for the endgame cut-scene. The screen glitters in irritation. In front of you is a smooth and angled surface. You begin to descend this surface, having prepared and provisioned adequately, with every intention of measuring your steps, of mustering your courage. But you are a wobbly, imperfectly round marble, so this can be no hero’s journey. You understand this, but only too late. You begin to roll, to pick up speed. Pure physics will strip you of your breath. Nothing will break your fall.

What’s the opposite of fear? Is it calm, joy, freedom, peace, or courage? I raise my camera at the edge of a crater in a desert. Eye through the viewfinder, finger on the trigger, I feel like a funnel. The top of my mind is wide, sprawling, dense with grass—then it narrows, suddenly, severely. I could blink and find myself lying within its single, dark channel like a trapped spelunker. Standing at the mouth of a crater, looking beyond the rash of grass, into the throat of the woman-in-trouble, the fear gulps in my ear and knows what I know.

I am about to fling myself off the edge when the boatman, soapy around the hairline, gets into the bathtub with me. He holds my hand underneath the flicker of the water.

“If the sky were a sink with a drain,” I ask him, musingly, “what could I use to stopper the heavens?”

He laughs. I watch the stray strands of hair in the water wind around my limbs, braiding into dark Gordian knots from which I will later cut myself free.

I love how the bright winter light lays over the landscape. Like precision-cut puzzle pieces, extracted from the blonde wood of another world. In strong angles across building facades. Through windows, shimmering. Over interior walls, awash over floors of poured concrete. Scattered light—a heart-rending oblation to Osiris, courtesy of physics. Near noon, the color of the light is a blend of yellow, white and blue, somewhere between the stained glass of shallow water and a low-saturation, darkly devoted goldenrod. Shyly, then with increasing boldness, shadows approach. Anubis, around the corner. Shadows, on the cool, wet-to-the-touch walls of the cave, in concave degrees. A pillar’s shadow, long on the floor. A signpost’s angular twin, like a flag on the skin-colored sidewalk. Shadows cast against the many surfaces of the neighborhood. Shadows on the pockmarked roads, the cracked traffic lights, the thin and sickly patches of grass. None of it is made newly beautiful. But like an organ shifting, sighing, shimmying down the length of my spirit in a trail of blood, I feel that change in the frame of my mind, christened by light and shadow. A new ability to pay attention to different things. On the train platform, I watch the shadows and the light, coupled, moving sideways together—and I imagine moving like that too, through the world in two dimensions, like a figure in a mural of the ancient world, haughty face only in profile, arms and wings extended. Eyes and fingernails of inlaid gemstone.

Oh, to walk through this paradise of light and shadow and to resist, with an almost violent intensity, the urge to pull out a phone. If I were a painter, I’d drag out all my oily colors instead—haunting blue, sedate gray, hopeless white—over to the canvas of the window and start now. Start what? Well, that’s the beauty of it. If I were a musician, I’d dart back inside the apartment and then back out, violin case in hand, to play something limpid and twisted amid all this metamorphosis. Easy does it, now. I watch the light move and the shadows follow as time passes, slowing down to a secret rhythm. I feel it do something to my thoughts. Strip them, and then reclothe them in something new. Toeing the ground outside the supermarket, examining my face in the bedroom mirror, jogging up the stairs of the station, dragging a carry-on through a terminal. I look around and notice the lines of shadow—slicing the ceiling, cutting across the path ahead—and, in that tiny clear pool of time, something sprouts. I’m looking at something, then at nothing at all. My mind ventures off-circuit. Silver bicycle, ribbons tied to the handles, upside down in the luxurious grass, wheels spinning.

Horus in flight, I swing my legs and change direction. Underneath me, a hundred-thousand paths, carved in dirt, in air, in water, crisscrossing. All of them as least as long as longing is long. Look, there’s the path of least resistance. And there, the path of most fruitlessness. Blink away the tears; let your vision clear. Are they same? They fade into one another, in parts, and then they part, definitively. A path hosting a ceremonial procession. A path heavy with bristling undergrowth. A path swarming with pedestrians. A path at deepest and most tender midnight. Shadowless. I squint, blurry-eyed, into the horizon. I lean forward. I don’t know what I’m looking at. Stars start in surprise. Eyes of the sylphs, past and future. Light and shadow. Spiral and line. False and true. Friction and intention. Cave and crater. Flush and fade. No, not quite there yet. Truth and truth. Light and shadow.

I am feeling—not thinking—something so sad and so needy and as this feeling widens within me and begins to bubble at my edges, like the frothy tide, my hand jerks in reaction, toward the squareish tombstone of the keyboard where my fingers fidget over the plastic corners crusted with dust and begin then to speedily type out the name of that paradise where I can watch an unceasing parade of numbing short videos but I remember myself just in time. I remember myself, I catch myself in the act—and then I stop, fingers frozen above my face because I know that the last thing I want is to lose this feeling of being sad. I do not want to will it away via entertaining distraction, disturbed, high-contrast, funny and technicolor ennui. The laptop whirs a gentle question against my thighs and belly. Its baby blue brightness is like an inadequate jacket, beveled edges like shoulders in flimsy velvet corduroy, bunched up against the vampiric kiss of the cold outside. Digital technology and my own desire to escape, entwined, a peach-and-white braid of tendon and gore, in an unholy alliance, draining away every last drop of blood, undoing every stitch of flesh until I lie in a clumpy puddle, straining uselessly for the boundary between here and there—

It’s too easy to run from a sad feeling. I want to try something else, this time. I want to try to keep it with me, to stay with it in a way that confers solace but not intimacy. To get intimate with sadness is dangerous, and worse—self-indulgent. I don’t want to be led back into the familiarly damp and dark pit of my worst tendencies. No, I want to be in its constant company but not accompany my sadness. I want to be like the moon and stars, who travel with us humans so faithfully, so doggedly, but always with their own secret and cruel knowledge of fate, always able to spin away along those long lines of orbit traced in the black and silver sands of endless space. Who can say, in that relationship, who leads and who follows? Gold-blue Aquila, the giant eagle, or the astronomer, gemmed sleeves against a parchment map of the sky, who gave her that name? Not she, and not him.

But the more I write the farther I get from the feeling, not because writing interrupts the feeling but because thinking about writing puts distance between me and the feeling. Too much effort will kill the delicate uneasiness of emotion. Worse, it will twist its ineffableness into something labored, something tortured, something conventional. Like trying to capture and collar a dream, rushing to describe its traits on paper as you watch its wings beat fitfully through the thin metal pins and glass. Such shapes of grace do not respond well to overintellectualized trophy hunting. They don’t speak in that language. So I let go of the attempt to make sense of the feeling, to extract its marrow. I blink and find myself in a bathtub of rapidly cooling water, a room of stucco walls that are inching closer with every shallow breath. I lift my hands from out of the water and I pray, with no words at first. Later, I will remember it as a strange and plaintive mantra: Mean something, mean something, mean something, I beg.