Know what?
I am new, a Newbie: An unblemished creamy white pubescene in crisp clean olive drab and an underbelly softness that belies my adolescent athleticism. Here, I rank a glee girl, naïve and terrified. Of what? Bullets, rockets, and bombs are distant pops, whoomphs, and thuds; ephemeral arcs of pale blue light and laser streaks writ against interminable heat haze, the gray wall of monsoon, the tenacious foreboding night. No more threatening than fizzy Fourth of July keeping—unless you’re unaccustomed, unwonted.
We stop. Russo, ensconced on a throne of rock, looks back at me, past the others. The slack-eyes of homo-cide, an examination without approval or disapproval, a dispassionate probing assessment, a knowing of reckoning.
It gets closer. The war? I don’t know. It. Something unnamed and ominous, a thick mute ground fog that slinks around the gnarled roots of ancient tamarind and banyan trees that nourish and harbor only what ought to be here by default. Not me! Not me! I want to say It gets closer in time but that’s not true. Time back in the world is marked by the familiar, the expected, the regular, the rhythms of life: systolic and diastolic, exhale and inhale, ingestion and digestion, coming and going, birth and death. It’s not like that here. It’s one big isolated cold stone. A dull thud. A kind of static mural where all things are at once, an “Is” that confines you to a singularity laced with the awful knowledge that you are in a vast sea of everything that is nothing: Corporeal-less. Pure existence.
It’s maddening, really, like a fish coming to the sudden realization that it’s in water only to be plagued by “Now what?” or “So what?” or “What to do?” The perturbation of knowing what it should not know: The principal substance of The Apple. The maniacal captain’s terrible white Leviathan. The one that got away? Impossible! It’s interminably here in all its dreadful whiteness—lurking just below the surface as still and silent as a crypt, the lifeless eye probing gray cold water for interlopers, those who dare not pare layers of glia to expose their reptilian core but take monumental pains to excoriate a pearl to fetch a dumb grain of sand. Highbrow thrives in illuminated halls and euphuistic art houses, not here where covert forked-tongued reptiles abound. Intellect here is a quick meal.
I want to know but I cannot formulate the question, construct an algorithm in the soft squish of my brain to collapse infinite probabilities to—arrive: To be the fish out of water croaking on a mudbank, gnawing at a rarefied substance that resists tiny Denovian teeth that will morph into the flesh tearing daggers of scaly brutes, the consummate savages of the Jurassic who will rot with arthropod and vegetable under the grimy skies of Wormwood—that hellish shard of heaven come to cede the slow crushing molars and the hissing vindictive incisors of Russo. Of us all.
No. No death here. The dead are afar, mythical permutations of being. Here, merely blood-greased gray-green heaps of laundry thrown down on fecund jungle floors; shadows slumbering on patchwork fields of new-green rice; pencil scribbles kneeling vacant and awry against altars of rock, tree, bamboo. To favor the dead is to flout life. To feel. They’ll have their revenge after all: Come as vapor that will infuse the mind to poison vitality. Pitch you into a hell impossible to sojourn when you stalked bipedal there. There, where attempts at clarity abet lunacy.
I want to ask Russo, force the moment to a crisis, not to ask why or how or where—but what and when. When will I know—It?
I look towards him only to see heat ghosts wavering above the dais. No matter—and no matter:
I cannot see my mother’s face, feel her gauzy cheeks against mine; hear her hands sighing against the leather of my Oxfords, her clinking and clanking kitchen aria that lays me down to sleep.
The klicks, the hamlets, the rice fields, the jungles, the destruction—the dead—do not pass. No ticks on a clock; no days, months, years; no waning and waxing moon; no rising and setting sun. Illusions all. Artful scabs on the brain that belie my affliction: Clarity.
I am become an absurd contagion, scuttling up and down main street all tattered tooth and claw—looking for home under a noxious rubble of tin and glass.
I am new, a Newbie: An unblemished creamy white pubescene in crisp clean olive drab and an underbelly softness that belies my adolescent athleticism. Here, I rank a glee girl, naïve and terrified. Of what? Bullets, rockets, and bombs are distant pops, whoomphs, and thuds; ephemeral arcs of pale blue light and laser streaks writ against interminable heat haze, the gray wall of monsoon, the tenacious foreboding night. No more threatening than fizzy Fourth of July keeping—unless you’re unaccustomed, unwonted.
We stop. Russo, ensconced on a throne of rock, looks back at me, past the others. The slack-eyes of homo-cide, an examination without approval or disapproval, a dispassionate probing assessment, a knowing of reckoning.
It gets closer. The war? I don’t know. It. Something unnamed and ominous, a thick mute ground fog that slinks around the gnarled roots of ancient tamarind and banyan trees that nourish and harbor only what ought to be here by default. Not me! Not me! I want to say It gets closer in time but that’s not true. Time back in the world is marked by the familiar, the expected, the regular, the rhythms of life: systolic and diastolic, exhale and inhale, ingestion and digestion, coming and going, birth and death. It’s not like that here. It’s one big isolated cold stone. A dull thud. A kind of static mural where all things are at once, an “Is” that confines you to a singularity laced with the awful knowledge that you are in a vast sea of everything that is nothing: Corporeal-less. Pure existence.
It’s maddening, really, like a fish coming to the sudden realization that it’s in water only to be plagued by “Now what?” or “So what?” or “What to do?” The perturbation of knowing what it should not know: The principal substance of The Apple. The maniacal captain’s terrible white Leviathan. The one that got away? Impossible! It’s interminably here in all its dreadful whiteness—lurking just below the surface as still and silent as a crypt, the lifeless eye probing gray cold water for interlopers, those who dare not pare layers of glia to expose their reptilian core but take monumental pains to excoriate a pearl to fetch a dumb grain of sand. Highbrow thrives in illuminated halls and euphuistic art houses, not here where covert forked-tongued reptiles abound. Intellect here is a quick meal.
I want to know but I cannot formulate the question, construct an algorithm in the soft squish of my brain to collapse infinite probabilities to—arrive: To be the fish out of water croaking on a mudbank, gnawing at a rarefied substance that resists tiny Denovian teeth that will morph into the flesh tearing daggers of scaly brutes, the consummate savages of the Jurassic who will rot with arthropod and vegetable under the grimy skies of Wormwood—that hellish shard of heaven come to cede the slow crushing molars and the hissing vindictive incisors of Russo. Of us all.
No. No death here. The dead are afar, mythical permutations of being. Here, merely blood-greased gray-green heaps of laundry thrown down on fecund jungle floors; shadows slumbering on patchwork fields of new-green rice; pencil scribbles kneeling vacant and awry against altars of rock, tree, bamboo. To favor the dead is to flout life. To feel. They’ll have their revenge after all: Come as vapor that will infuse the mind to poison vitality. Pitch you into a hell impossible to sojourn when you stalked bipedal there. There, where attempts at clarity abet lunacy.
I want to ask Russo, force the moment to a crisis, not to ask why or how or where—but what and when. When will I know—It?
I look towards him only to see heat ghosts wavering above the dais. No matter—and no matter:
I cannot see my mother’s face, feel her gauzy cheeks against mine; hear her hands sighing against the leather of my Oxfords, her clinking and clanking kitchen aria that lays me down to sleep.
The klicks, the hamlets, the rice fields, the jungles, the destruction—the dead—do not pass. No ticks on a clock; no days, months, years; no waning and waxing moon; no rising and setting sun. Illusions all. Artful scabs on the brain that belie my affliction: Clarity.
I am become an absurd contagion, scuttling up and down main street all tattered tooth and claw—looking for home under a noxious rubble of tin and glass.
