Intel had arrived in the form of a letter.

Rough paper delivered into his hands or, primarily, the hands of a woman, and she had dropped it into his lap from a short distance above his head.

He had been asleep.

 

He had been sleeping—dozing—not the genuine article but a kind of imitation, unintentional, totally unforeseen. Snapping erect in a chair—the kind that leans, that’s soft with a sort of skin that retains the impression—the heat—of the previous occupant until long after its departure, like the tight skin of a rotten plum that peels away under the thumb, rolls up like a carpet, leaving the mottled pulp exposed, teeming.

 

He started.

He had been somewhere else, wherever that was, and felt the letter under his thumbs fall into his lap with a light slap on his thighs and his hands sought it immediately and the paper he thought was so much like skin, so smooth it made him shiver and he passed his hand over it slowly and discovered that the letter had a signature, too, the parabolic wave of thumbprints, was still warm and he found that he had an erection and his hands sought it suddenly.

How long had they been there?

She was still standing next to him. She wanted to know who the letter was from and for a moment he couldn’t answer for he didn’t see her face, didn’t know where he was, who she was; secretary, supernal?

He was staring out the window, looking at the reflection of her breasts in the cool glass, semi-opaque in the light from the ceiling where the motes swum in the afternoons and the eventides, and her face was obscured in the bright halo on the glass and there was hair somewhere in that dark penumbra whose limits he couldn’t delineate because the halo was so bright, the bulb naked, and the window offered nothing in its black-as-pitch, it could all have been her hair for all he knew, reflected there. Sitting like that, her bosom in the mirror at eye level, the rough paper in his hands, its slight heft in his lap, and he’d been other places, (for which he apologized).

She didn’t know what he was talking about. She wanted to know who the letter was from. He didn’t know how to treat her. Was she blonde, a brunette?

There was no return address.

It could conceal a deadly gas he thought as he tore it open with a deft motion that drew hot blood in a shallow flute across the yellow pad of his index finger.

It seemed to be a solicitation of one sort or another, at least that’s how it began— (like they all begin) with somebody asking for something. Fees, goods, services, opinions, advice, recommendations, a place to sleep, a place for a friend who would be arriving shortly and departing soon after, only staying a night or two at most, chain letters a lot of young people and older people and social scientists in flannel shirts at a university without anything else to do would be heartbroken if he broke, a sexual overture, pet-sitting.

Dear Mr. or Mrs. so and so, I would first and foremost ask your pardon for troubling you at your place of work or business and can only imagine what sort of inconvenience proceeding even this far into the whole rigamarol has lost you in misspent man hours and administrative red-tape.

This was at least remarkable for its courtesy and for a moment gave him pause to reflect on the sensitivity of the anonymous author who had himself plainly wasted a few moments of otherwise precious time to apologize in advance for the imposition he was about to compose, which he must have realized would likely be thrown away immediately upon receipt at the intended address, or else be lost by office clerics on its pilgrimage toward his door. It was a marvel, really, that he was holding it at all.

He tasted the sea, suddenly, and realized that brine had been flowing down across his face from the area around his temples for a few moments and this had begun to trickle into his mouth, and he had even opened his mouth and extended his tongue to allow the pleasant tasting liquid to bathe his dry lips and lubricate his tonsils and cleanse his palette and wash across his tongue, enjoining all his taste-buds to comment on the flavor.

He realized he was weeping. He tried to conceal it. He didn’t know if the woman could see the tears, his odd behavior: drinking his tears: totally unprofessional; could see him at all since he was turned away from her face, facing the window and he didn’t even know who she was, except she had these lovely breasts that looked diaphanous to him but he didn’t know what that meant, he was just chewing on the texture of the word, it sounded right, it felt like a grape when it is flush and taut against the skin as you roll it around your mouth and feel its cool weight against your cheeks and apply just a little bit of pressure between the teeth and then a little more until the gears of the jaw grind it to the point where the taut berry pops and spills its secrets down your esophagus. Or you could spit it out and feel for a moment that fleeting pleasure of the grape, pressed between the puckered lips at terminal pressure with no place to go but out, out, over the head of somebody nearby going about his business without the slightest notion of the mischief to which he has become coaxial. Or else it strikes his cheek and perhaps leaves a small pink mark and a patina of saliva and he turns abruptly and you do the same.

At that point he discovered that he was sucking on his cut finger. He was unsure if he was crying for joy, sorrow or pain. The finger tasted like copper.

He asked the woman for his cuspidor. She reminded him that he did not chew. He cursed. He asked her all the same, if she couldn’t bring him some kind of vessel that he might temporarily deputize for that purpose and suggested the cracked coffee pot he kept handy in the hall toilet for use as an ashtray when he felt like smoking on the john. He could see by her reflection that she hadn’t budged. He did not turn his chair around to face her. He fingered the letter and read on, sluicing blood and tears through his teeth, pensively.

The letter proceeded to give a discursive account of a skin-of-the-teeth education of an unpromising, tow-headed young boy by excruciating degrees into something more or less reminiscent of a man. The letter was interminable. Whenever he thought it must be drawing to a close he would turn the page and discover that it stretched on into another, and by the several frantic arrows scribbled in the lower right-hand corner of every subsequent page, another after that. Eventually he stopped reading carefully and would simply scan the pages for some indication of a quickening in the limp, turgid prose—adverbs, oaths, anything anatomical—there appeared to feature prominently some variety of domestic feline, unimaginatively named “pussy.”

After what felt like several hours of endlessly thumbing the pages, he realized that the pages were not numbered and furthermore, were unbound. Undoubtedly it was a prodigious thing and he wondered how—folded— it had fit inside the slim envelope. And had he reached the end or been cycling through the same several dozen pages over and over, all that time? And had it really been such a long time? The hands can move so languidly, left to their own devices.

He smelled bacon, suddenly. He realized that the window was open and that somebody, some person, somewhere out there must have desired bacon, must have wanted bacon so badly that he had left the relative safety of a domicile of one sort or another to risk the street, to brave the street for a chance at bacon; to hold it, to bring it to the mouth and, barring some unforeseen catastrophe, to continue from there. It may have even been a woman who had done this, who had stepped hopefully into what was indisputably a man’s world to engage with bacon in some fashion, to ask after it. Crimson kitten heels clipping the heavy, wet air of a nearby deli. A waif in a long, slender coat, hair in tight curls; sheer nylons, choruses of lozenges so tiny you have to take them on faith, legs up to here but still a taste for bacon. That kind of fish.

Come to think of it, lately he had been hearing about the sea—chumming with the monger-crowd. There had been a lot of chatter. Something about the port, or the wharf, or the docks, generally, or the jetty—he could never keep these straight: they warped in his mind but it didn’t really matter, for he knew them in essence. Something fishy going on down there. Criminal mellifluence. It stunk to high heaven. Malfeasance. A lot of bilge. The place was ripe, alright. Rumor mill frying up all-you-can-eat plates and hardly anybody’s keeping them down, but at these prices a guy can’t afford to be picky. Something about a savage spree—a harlequin killer and vital fluids creating a kind of grotesque mural on a black and white parquet floor; baby knock daddy bloody-mary checkerboard.

Look to the letter he thought then, back to the letter. Care of whom?

Of course, the envelope was nowhere to be found. She said that he had pitched it through the window immediately.

Then it is in God’s hands, he mumbled piously.

She wanted to know what the meaning of this was, what he was hiding from her. She took his chin in her hand; her hand was soft and smelled of smoked meat; her grip was as cold and insistent as a hook. He was in her net. But that didn’t mean he had to open his eyes. He kept them shut tightly. He saw neon worms dancing in front of the dark, stained curtain of his eyelids.  Life is indeed, occasionally, somewhat akin to a cabaret or burlesque, he thought. He smiled. She threw him back.

When he opened his eyes he found himself face to face with a part of the letter he hadn’t noticed before.

Once he began to read, he regretted it immediately, for he recognized at once the plump shadow of erotic possibility cast by the first sentence.

The sentence concerned an automobile, one of the sleek modern types that were easy on the eyes from every angle. This one was particularly luscious, especially in profile, which was how the author had laid it out, glistening like a loin of tuna, a boy and a fox inside; the fox the kind of bird that always seemed to fly away, the boy just hanging on to the door, hanging on and hoping.

They roll up on a curb, the boy is driving and the pair of legs is seated in the passenger seat. They’re in front of a house— a white house— with more than the average amount of windows, and each one is in shadow because of the thick, black magnolia boughs from the lawn, drunk with magnolias and the windows are sweating—they can see the sweat beading up, even from the cab of the car—and the thick, heavy back drapes are drawn and they both know that all these clues can only add up to one of two things; either the old man is home, or the old man is not home.

At this point he was beginning to feel somewhat titillated and was wondering hard, even as he felt himself getting likewise, what was going to happen next. He felt the gaze of the woman on his neck and immediately his hackles were up and whatever miraculous hydraulic mechanism that had been responsible for hoisting his crane this far thus far ratcheted the old flamingo up a few notches further, though of course he was still no closer to moistening his reed.

The letter continued to describe the boy’s flaccid entreaties to escort his feminine companion at least as far as her door, with the specter of a more or less respectful offer to accompany her still further haunting his insouciant sentences. The pair were amorphous, poorly drawn—the author had showered them with words, none of which seemed to adhere. He seemed to see the slick things falling from these figures’ ephemeral shoulders, forming a broth around their feet, slowly rising until their mouths and nostrils were submerged and they gave up the ghost and drowned; flooded ephemera. Words like “sebaceous,” and “perspicacity,” spooned on like sour cream turned the broth, which had a skin now, was already as solid, thick and brown as a beef roulade into something totally impenetrable, evasive, wriggling: a silk-worm; a fat one, its spool-full, its trail long and labyrinthine—he could follow it, forever it seemed, and never catch the culprit. Crumbs. The one that got away. The femme in his office, the weib in the letter; one or the other is either the: a) point of departure, b) destination, or 3) the trail itself.

He pressed his face into the letter, rubbed his nose and eyes against the paper with the hope that some meaning would rub off and be absorbed into his skin, unfortunately this only smudged the ink, which tended to make the entire affair even less legible.

The woman tore the paper from his hands and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.

Just papering off, he replied unconvincingly and began an unconvincing explanation of the reason why someone might, in fact, choose to do this, intimating that the practice had been found to soften the skin and allow for more direct absorption of lived experience. In fact, he had pulled the entire thing out of his ass, a fact, which, if he wasn’t very much mistaken, she had seemed immediately to discern.

He looked at the letter. He could feel her looking at him. The paper was dotted with the sweat from his brow, translucent in places, the inked letters bleeding into a sea of frothy possibilities. A real stinking, mess, he thought, but there was something about the blot; something to it, there had to be, or why else would it be there?

He found that if he turned the paper a certain way the blot suggested two or more bodies in a kind of ecstatic congress, a sort of congruence or joining together of complementary appurtenances, a real crack-up; fluids everywhere. Yet, to his dismay he found that if he turned the paper another way he saw only a single body, which had seemed to have been dramatically voided of its contents and perhaps hung upon a wall to drain or spread out and discarded upon a floor to suggest the contempt in which the perpetrator of the grisly act had held the body and its contents.

Well, it’s either one or the other, he thought and began to pick at the space between his front teeth.

He read on, trying to trace the nature of the anatomy of the appendage of the wounded letter from those few words or letters which were still visible at the margins of the blot and between its inky ungula—was it a cavity or a protuberance for example: An armpit or a toe? Teeth or fingernails? And furthermore, what the hell did he mean by these? In addition, perhaps the author had meant for the smudge. The prospect frightened him, somehow.

He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t important, in fact he had, for the past few moments at least, begun to suspect that the degree to which he understood something and its importance to this whatever it was shared the kind of relationship in which the one was always as distinct from the other as seemed to be possible.

He was considering the implications of this when the woman asked him if he was finished yet, she seemed impatient; she was tapping her toe.

He attempted to chuckle, attempted to do so with a sly and knowing inflection, deep in the throat, but ended up coughing hysterically instead.

When the fit had passed, he remarked casually that he had just completed a close examination of a particularly challenging page and would be turning to the next shortly, but that if she would like to step outside for a moment or perhaps gather him a cup of coffee he may even be finished in earnest upon her return.

She replied that she would prefer to stay and that furthermore he had a steaming cup at his elbow.

He started in surprise and discovered that she was correct about the coffee and then ejaculated a lengthy train of blue material as he discovered that in his surprised delight he had spilled the beans all over the letter and that a scalding and frothy admixture of the stimulating beverage and smudged ink had overtaken his desk and was flowing unimpeded into his lap with deleterious effect to both his slacks and genitals.

Coffee; a man’s best friend, unmanning him before the eyes of a lady. He saw the game, he thought; saw it all—ironical that it would take getting burned to remove his rose-colored glasses but then, that’s the way the goat gambols he thought, bitterly. That’s the way the tent topples. And come to think of it, what game was that? Maybe he has just better calm down, he thought. Better, really that the paper, his pants had had the cup.

The letter was a mess—a dun slurry— more porridge than paper in places. And me without a spoon, he thought.

He picked it up, gingerly and began to turn the page, but the document was so thoroughly soaked with coffee that he soon abandoned this idea. It was like a piece of French-toast, he thought, a piece of French-toast that hadn’t been toasted, that had been sitting in a bowl of milk and eggs for hours, idle, waiting in vain for things to get cooking; shucks he thought, sort of lonesome when you put it that way. He then discovered that he was hungry.

I’ve got one, two, three, four: four things that I can find that might be worth exchanging for some food around here, he said. He had the coffee cup, he had the slacks, he had the shirt on his back, and what do you know, he was wearing a hat. How’s about you take the heap and click your pretty way down to the place down there that smells like something I want to eat and make the swap and return here and by the time you’ve arrived I’ll have sorted through this mess and we can have some dinner and you can tell me a little bit more about yourself, he suggested, feeling pretty certain that it was a homerun.

She suggested that he eat her instead and while the intimation excited him at first, it wasn’t long before he realized that she didn’t intend him to receive the remark in earnest and in fact probably meant it in precisely the opposite sense that he had at first imagined.

He was so frustrated by this realization that he promptly stuffed the sodden remains of the letter into his mouth and swallowed it as a kind of protest against the entire affair.

He room began to swim. Had the paper been drugged? Perhaps he was dying, or having some sort of an episode.

Maybe it’ll be a good one, he thought, but was disappointed when he found himself back in the letter, right in the place where he had been before the last interruption.

He’s at the threshold of this cavernous house, standing before the doorway, which is yawning ominously in the background and in the foreground is the chick that the kid wants to make and based on what he can see of her, this is a pretty sensible attitude to assume because if nothing else she has legs like a respectable Bordeaux, although regarding the rest he can’t say for certain because the kid or whoever isn’t focusing on anything else, his gaze is like cement, trying to fix the legs in place, but they keep walking slowly, heels clicking in the opposite direction and he’d have liked to get a look at her can if he could have but the kid isn’t having any of it; just keeps following those legs down the hall, trying to stop them but there they go and there he goes along with them. The hallways are checkered black and white and though the stride of the legs is long the legs keep alternating perfectly between delivering each heel at a black square and then a white square, black then white, each side, each leg, each heel each time, black, white, black, white; the effect is dizzying and then suddenly it stops. The legs are standing; spread apart one straight the other diagonal looking sharp as a pair of scissors at the foot of what appears to be a parquet ballroom floor, though it might as well have been a life-size checkerboard.

The atmosphere is heavy; laden with anticipation; thick with promise and smelling vaguely of fish. He feels adrift in a sea of possibilities; and what might happen next? This is the meat of the letter, he thinks.  His whole body feels as though it is being lanced gently with thin needles and the effect is invigorating. He feels his sinuses clearing though he hadn’t even known they had been blocked; fluids are draining pleasantly from him at every opportunity. He is like a bowl that has suddenly become a sieve and he watches in fascination as everything that he had once contained spreads around and between the legs’ heels in a voluptuous rust-colored wave across the black and white parquet floor.

Suddenly he didn’t care about the letter any more.

Then several cats appeared. He felt himself begin to concretize. The heels are stuck in him and so were the legs; though they struggled and strained, they could not break free from his viscous awareness and appeared eventually to resign themselves to their fate, the knees buckling inward and resting against one another in a flirtatious sort of inverted curtsy. The cats on the other hand, appear to be unaffected by the substance; capering and playing; and though they occasionally raise their hackles and one or another would, every now and then hiss and swipe ferociously at another, the threat of serious combat remains fairly remote.

Through the sodden, fragmented, roiling mass, he thought he made out his name, signed in his handwriting, addressed to someone who apparently shared his favorite sobriquet. And in the deep distance he thought he heard the voice of a woman and the familiar feeling of being slapped across the face.

​

​

​

X

​

I wrote this piece in the first half of 2011 while taking a class on performativity. I read it aloud a few times at school events and it was well received though any charm it may have once held has completely worn off for me. Lucky for it, it was accepted for publication in The Encyclopedia Project: Volume III in 2012, though it didn't see the light of day again until 2017 when that volume finally actually came out.