Jack,
The night we got the closest we've ever gotten to having sex, you told me you'd asked a woman in a bar, "What are you, inside?"
It was one of the few ways, you assured me, that I'd ruined you for anyone else. What fun is a woman if she doesn't really know the answer to that question, after all? What fun is a woman who doesn't take the time to consider a great many other questions about herself, for that matter? I think you liked about me that I always took the time to have an answer for you, whether the question was, "Do you ever feel like a ghost?" or "Do you like to feel afraid?"
Of course, the problem with that is I always took the time to have an answer for you, and those were not always answers that you liked.
Do you remember when we took that drive...
You've insisted to me that you're a number of things, inside. That the chemical makeup of your soul is 5 or 6 different places, depending on your mood, your gender, your like or dislike of me personally. Sometimes, I can feel you crawling away from me, trying to differentiate yourself from me. Others, I feel you making yourself an extension of me, accepting that we've always been brothers.
The other day, Rosie broke her Vitus chain. It was hanging on a Glade plug-in by the bathroom, and she pulled it out to use her curling iron, and things lined up, and the chain popped when it touched the live metal, and melted. Every time you break a piece of jewelry, I know the superstition that creeps along like a crack in your heart to mean all things are lost and nothing is sacred. Her face looked the same. I forget why I wanted to tell you that.
The difference between you and me is that I know we can't choose who we are. John didn't choose the scars on his face, Brad didn't choose the cruelty in his heart, and I didn't choose to be what I am inside, which is the ruin of Eden.
Last night, I dreamed you were trying to convince me Eden was my name. I woke up too early, and Brad was fighting the sleeping bag to wrestle it off his chest as he overheated.
We sleep in the low cavern under the stage set for the bumper cars. There's a hollow place beneath the platform, snaked with cords and punctuated with support beams. It makes me feel like we're sleeping under the porch of a house he and I never lived in, where he teaches me how to hide from the other boy soldiers and not be afraid of spiders. Light spills in from the painted garden lattice shielding us from the rest of the park.
We picked Coney Island because it's the inside of Joshua; the chemical composition of his soul. It's his moods which make it summer or off-season. His appetite which forces us all to subsist on Paul's Daughter's hot dogs. Joshua is a carnival inside, but he's all the wiring and hidden compartments and graffiti underneath the veneer of the carnival, too. He's the Rough Rider roller coaster, sure, but he's also the 6 people it killed.
We came here to write our second book, part of it taking place inside Joshua, here in the dream of Coney Island. After this, who knows where we'll go?
I liked best when you told me you were an airport inside. I liked it because it made the most sense, but like usual with you, all things you told me about yourself were done in defense to obstruct the real you. Every nice and beautiful thing, you turned against me somehow. No, Jack, it's not really an airport. It's just a Polaroid of all the things you wish you had, and watched me take from you, right? The beautiful friendly stewardess in you I once thought was my best friend is really the painted Stepford denial of your humanity. Her smile is gritted with self-loathing, and loathing of me.
You let Rosie fall in love with pilot after pilot, each one slapping her ass as she exited your cockpit, vowing never to call her again. Handsome pilots, who know all her favorite songs and use them to seem more compassionate than you ever are in practice.
I've never seen you care. Not about anything. Not really.
So it stands to reason you've never been able to find yourself inside. You'd have to care first, or really want to inhabit yourself. You'd have to know you were magic, and stop relying on all your lovers to tell you that you are.
-E
P.S. I still haven't forgiven you for last time.
Monday, March 19, 2018
Friday, March 16, 2018
Coney Island 1
Brad and I spent almost two weeks in Denton before change came to Gray House. We spent mostly quiet nights together before Rosie and I got tired of our long days and went looking for our newest suicide pact.
I don't exactly fear change, but I do fear consequence, and sometimes I wonder if there's a difference. I don't think there's anything wrong with change, but I think it should be reasoned, and measured, and weighed against the probable outcomes of various alternatives. Rosie takes a decidedly different approach: she doesn't decide change, God does. So there's nothing we can do and if it's time to move on, it's time.
I felt the beads inside the great kaleidoscope of the House moving in small and incremental clicks with Rosie's sharp eyes on the horizon, and I thought about Jack.
Jack had once said to me that Rosie would always allow everything to change, and often for the worse. Stirring the pot, and creating drama. The obvious fact always seemed to escape Jack that when living in Gray House with those beings who make and unmake worlds, knitting would never be the nightly ritual, and Jack so wanted to knit. I think what Jack always wanted was for his story to end, and maybe that's what I wanted with Brad, in Denton. To parcel up all our loose ends into some immovable thing I was allowed to study and understand for the rest of time.
I think that's called a happy ending, but I almost don't remember anymore. I remember watching Jack struggle with the idea of being an endless creature of will. So... you get married and then... you like, have a baby... and then... the baby grows up...
More often than not, Jack conflated change with conflict and I think that's how and why he broke so many of our hearts. He would knit himself into the definitions of a relationship under glass, unchanging, and then the only way forward was out.
Well, Brad and I had gotten married, and we'd even had a baby. That baby had grown up. When Rosie said she wanted to make a change at home, I wanted to throw my arms skyward and ask, "Well, what NOW, JACK?" as if he could stand in the place of God and tell me from the outside what to do next.
Rosie and I had decided we needed to start the second Gray book, and we decided what it would be. But growing the bones of a book has always been easy for us. The meat and the magic is a little harder to agree on, in terms of how our artistic vision varies. We decided to hold the house hostage until the book was complete, as incentive to write it. Where we were held would change as the book was written, but the first location, decided by secret ballot, was Coney Island.
One by one, we all submitted to the pact. We were allowed to go to the House proper and the surrounding few acres, and Coney Island, and no other place. When we vowed to uphold the pact, I crossed my fingers behind my back.
"It's okay, Evie," Brad assured me. "We're gonna have a lot of fun here, you and me."
I took steady breaths. Brad and I exist outside of the flash of the bomb of us. Brad and I exist in Denton, but we can exist anywhere. We can exist, if we try.
Coney Island is a 4-by-1/2 mile stretch of New York residue persisting just above the surface of the gray Atlantic. Each season there smears into the next with filthy clouds and low fog breathing reminders of the days the land was covered in reeds, and not filigreed park benches.
The weight of Manhattan has always terrified me, and the listless way in which the skyscrapers sweep nonchalant into the harbor and just end, there. Life as we know it might end there, with the industry of civilization trailing off into the sea like an unfinished thought. Manhattan holds its cityscape like an overflowing handful of jewels. Brooklyn makes more visual sense, all its structures shrugging off responsibility as they creep toward the water.
The park itself is suspended in a timeless place, where all your childhood memories of vacations take place, over and over again, on a sun-bleached reel-to-reel. I stood in the low morning mist of the overcast dawn with Brad, looking at the slow and endless turn of the Wonder Wheel, knowing the mist would lift to expose a perfect sunlit afternoon, and felt the loneliness of the cold off-season all at once. Every day, like Sunday.
When we passed the Wonder Wheel, it felt more creature than machine; maybe the seaweed twisted gears and cogs that keep a dream like summer alive to begin with. As long as it's turning, deep under the earth new dreams are being made of first kisses.
Brad's dress shoes hit the boardwalk with a certain sound I know only from movies. He keeps his eyes on distant horizons when we walk, dropping his head and skewing his shoulders for a single step, and then pushing all his hair back when he's righted himself. He puts his hands in his pockets. He feels easy and unafraid.
"Most of us are picking some place in the park to go to sleep," he tells me.
"But we're going to stay together, right?" I ask him, right out loud, because fuck all these politics we've been chaining ourselves to.
"Yeah," he says, his voice softening as he takes his dip in his stride, and pushes back his hair. "Yeah, I want you to."
I breathe a little easier and I feel the Family moving around to the places I know they'll go. Rosie vanishes under the boardwalk; Grady becomes little more than his can of spray-paint, blasting the walls with pointed but bewildering questions like, "HAVE YOU DRIVEN A FORD LATELY?"; John sighs and slips between buildings and alleys, to Disappear Completely.
I sometimes wonder how much a certain place can alter who I am on a fundamental level. Do I change completely, from room to room? If it were possible anywhere, it would be possible in Gray House. We feel it intrinsically, and instinctively. Who I am in Coney Island - who we all become - would be influenced by the summer on the air and the anonymous promises of any theme park or carnival. As I walk with Brad, I can feel a change in our shoulders from the tight vigilance of Denton to something easier, and younger. Something as lean as the jot of land it stands on; a type of hunger born into someone who never leaves the same 4 mile stretch he's inherited.
While we walk along the boardwalk, the steel frames of Luna Park shift in the rising sun to the wooden beams of the Steeplechase, and back again. Hotels shiver through the heat like mirages, and graffiti marks painted and sun-bleached concrete tables outside of the ice cream shop. The corrugated metal protecting all the store-fronts and midway games begins to roll up, a little at a time, and the music stuck in my head all night is made substantial on the breeze.
"It's the happiest prison on Earth," I tell Brad, and he laughs.
I don't exactly fear change, but I do fear consequence, and sometimes I wonder if there's a difference. I don't think there's anything wrong with change, but I think it should be reasoned, and measured, and weighed against the probable outcomes of various alternatives. Rosie takes a decidedly different approach: she doesn't decide change, God does. So there's nothing we can do and if it's time to move on, it's time.
I felt the beads inside the great kaleidoscope of the House moving in small and incremental clicks with Rosie's sharp eyes on the horizon, and I thought about Jack.
Jack had once said to me that Rosie would always allow everything to change, and often for the worse. Stirring the pot, and creating drama. The obvious fact always seemed to escape Jack that when living in Gray House with those beings who make and unmake worlds, knitting would never be the nightly ritual, and Jack so wanted to knit. I think what Jack always wanted was for his story to end, and maybe that's what I wanted with Brad, in Denton. To parcel up all our loose ends into some immovable thing I was allowed to study and understand for the rest of time.
I think that's called a happy ending, but I almost don't remember anymore. I remember watching Jack struggle with the idea of being an endless creature of will. So... you get married and then... you like, have a baby... and then... the baby grows up...
More often than not, Jack conflated change with conflict and I think that's how and why he broke so many of our hearts. He would knit himself into the definitions of a relationship under glass, unchanging, and then the only way forward was out.
Well, Brad and I had gotten married, and we'd even had a baby. That baby had grown up. When Rosie said she wanted to make a change at home, I wanted to throw my arms skyward and ask, "Well, what NOW, JACK?" as if he could stand in the place of God and tell me from the outside what to do next.
Rosie and I had decided we needed to start the second Gray book, and we decided what it would be. But growing the bones of a book has always been easy for us. The meat and the magic is a little harder to agree on, in terms of how our artistic vision varies. We decided to hold the house hostage until the book was complete, as incentive to write it. Where we were held would change as the book was written, but the first location, decided by secret ballot, was Coney Island.
One by one, we all submitted to the pact. We were allowed to go to the House proper and the surrounding few acres, and Coney Island, and no other place. When we vowed to uphold the pact, I crossed my fingers behind my back.
"It's okay, Evie," Brad assured me. "We're gonna have a lot of fun here, you and me."
I took steady breaths. Brad and I exist outside of the flash of the bomb of us. Brad and I exist in Denton, but we can exist anywhere. We can exist, if we try.
Coney Island is a 4-by-1/2 mile stretch of New York residue persisting just above the surface of the gray Atlantic. Each season there smears into the next with filthy clouds and low fog breathing reminders of the days the land was covered in reeds, and not filigreed park benches.
The weight of Manhattan has always terrified me, and the listless way in which the skyscrapers sweep nonchalant into the harbor and just end, there. Life as we know it might end there, with the industry of civilization trailing off into the sea like an unfinished thought. Manhattan holds its cityscape like an overflowing handful of jewels. Brooklyn makes more visual sense, all its structures shrugging off responsibility as they creep toward the water.
The park itself is suspended in a timeless place, where all your childhood memories of vacations take place, over and over again, on a sun-bleached reel-to-reel. I stood in the low morning mist of the overcast dawn with Brad, looking at the slow and endless turn of the Wonder Wheel, knowing the mist would lift to expose a perfect sunlit afternoon, and felt the loneliness of the cold off-season all at once. Every day, like Sunday.
When we passed the Wonder Wheel, it felt more creature than machine; maybe the seaweed twisted gears and cogs that keep a dream like summer alive to begin with. As long as it's turning, deep under the earth new dreams are being made of first kisses.
Brad's dress shoes hit the boardwalk with a certain sound I know only from movies. He keeps his eyes on distant horizons when we walk, dropping his head and skewing his shoulders for a single step, and then pushing all his hair back when he's righted himself. He puts his hands in his pockets. He feels easy and unafraid.
"Most of us are picking some place in the park to go to sleep," he tells me.
"But we're going to stay together, right?" I ask him, right out loud, because fuck all these politics we've been chaining ourselves to.
"Yeah," he says, his voice softening as he takes his dip in his stride, and pushes back his hair. "Yeah, I want you to."
I breathe a little easier and I feel the Family moving around to the places I know they'll go. Rosie vanishes under the boardwalk; Grady becomes little more than his can of spray-paint, blasting the walls with pointed but bewildering questions like, "HAVE YOU DRIVEN A FORD LATELY?"; John sighs and slips between buildings and alleys, to Disappear Completely.
I sometimes wonder how much a certain place can alter who I am on a fundamental level. Do I change completely, from room to room? If it were possible anywhere, it would be possible in Gray House. We feel it intrinsically, and instinctively. Who I am in Coney Island - who we all become - would be influenced by the summer on the air and the anonymous promises of any theme park or carnival. As I walk with Brad, I can feel a change in our shoulders from the tight vigilance of Denton to something easier, and younger. Something as lean as the jot of land it stands on; a type of hunger born into someone who never leaves the same 4 mile stretch he's inherited.
While we walk along the boardwalk, the steel frames of Luna Park shift in the rising sun to the wooden beams of the Steeplechase, and back again. Hotels shiver through the heat like mirages, and graffiti marks painted and sun-bleached concrete tables outside of the ice cream shop. The corrugated metal protecting all the store-fronts and midway games begins to roll up, a little at a time, and the music stuck in my head all night is made substantial on the breeze.
"It's the happiest prison on Earth," I tell Brad, and he laughs.
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Mixtery
Ready Able Jones cracks his knuckles in the cold, and remains undaunted. He holds the stare of others for too long, and is wondering when he does if he is falling in love. While he is tall, he is soft-spoken and thinks his ears are too big for his head. When asked, he tells people he's shy, but this is because he's easily embarrassed. He has a long and accurate memory, making him impossibly frustrating to argue with. He's blunt but charismatic. He apologizes too much. His legs are too long for his pants.
Mission District Majors has hair that hangs in her eyes. She loves to dance, spinning like a top outside with her arms out, looking upward at the sun. She spins fast enough to convince anyone around her she is creating gravity, her filthy shoes not missing a single step. She becomes an abstract fan shape - three wide circles of hair and arms and skirt that come to dangerous points. When she falls down, she's spun too hard and hits the ground with a thud, and throws up, and cries. She smokes too much pot. Everyone is in love with her.
All Sparks Barrow is sarcastic when she isn't stoic. She touches all things carefully, as if they were birds or kittens. She walks with careful feet and remains quiet when other people are taking. She has nightmares which cause her terrible moods and bouts of distrust. She bites her fingernails. Her humor is sweet when she feels safe, and she loves to make people laugh. She loves the ocean.
Suburban War Fitzpatrick has a straight spine and haunted eyes. He acts older than he is. He gets... filled up with something which forces him to cry, and it seems like it could be anything - sweaters in a store, ants, a sunset. When he talks, there's an urgency to his tone that means he doesn't have a lot of time here, and he needs to make you understand something before he leaves. He's the oldest and feels the least amount of connection to this time and place. He knows they're Themysciran.
Leif Erikson Room is a small and dark-haired boy with nervous hands. The sound of his voice in his head is a lonesome echo over empty space. He is a slight, tightly wound instrument oriented to exactness. He crawls his small body into the gaps of soil underground to find somewhere warm and damp. He crawls between appliances, to reconnect their wires. He wants to become a tattoo artist. His skin is plaster white. He has terrible tantrums, usually completely warranted.
Stella Blue Babet is the color reflected off a wet street, in which one finally finds their keys. Stella Blue is a fox. She ties what she's foxed into her hair. She makes her own clothes, and wears sweaters for pants and loves to dance. She has a slow and quiet smile. She is not as beautiful as some of her siblings - her jaw a little square, her eyes darkly circled - but she never wears makeup and her eyes are kind and sleepy. She is very very short and wears ridiculously tall shoes to compensate.
Jefferson Torch Flynn has the most contagious laugh. He is freckled and looks like an affable boy, an overalls kind of boy, but his heart has mischief in it. He believes in God devoutly, but has some flexible interpretations of sin.
Free Translator Corduroy
Pinball Wizard Kettering
April Come She Will Smith
Mission District Majors has hair that hangs in her eyes. She loves to dance, spinning like a top outside with her arms out, looking upward at the sun. She spins fast enough to convince anyone around her she is creating gravity, her filthy shoes not missing a single step. She becomes an abstract fan shape - three wide circles of hair and arms and skirt that come to dangerous points. When she falls down, she's spun too hard and hits the ground with a thud, and throws up, and cries. She smokes too much pot. Everyone is in love with her.
All Sparks Barrow is sarcastic when she isn't stoic. She touches all things carefully, as if they were birds or kittens. She walks with careful feet and remains quiet when other people are taking. She has nightmares which cause her terrible moods and bouts of distrust. She bites her fingernails. Her humor is sweet when she feels safe, and she loves to make people laugh. She loves the ocean.
Suburban War Fitzpatrick has a straight spine and haunted eyes. He acts older than he is. He gets... filled up with something which forces him to cry, and it seems like it could be anything - sweaters in a store, ants, a sunset. When he talks, there's an urgency to his tone that means he doesn't have a lot of time here, and he needs to make you understand something before he leaves. He's the oldest and feels the least amount of connection to this time and place. He knows they're Themysciran.
Leif Erikson Room is a small and dark-haired boy with nervous hands. The sound of his voice in his head is a lonesome echo over empty space. He is a slight, tightly wound instrument oriented to exactness. He crawls his small body into the gaps of soil underground to find somewhere warm and damp. He crawls between appliances, to reconnect their wires. He wants to become a tattoo artist. His skin is plaster white. He has terrible tantrums, usually completely warranted.
Stella Blue Babet is the color reflected off a wet street, in which one finally finds their keys. Stella Blue is a fox. She ties what she's foxed into her hair. She makes her own clothes, and wears sweaters for pants and loves to dance. She has a slow and quiet smile. She is not as beautiful as some of her siblings - her jaw a little square, her eyes darkly circled - but she never wears makeup and her eyes are kind and sleepy. She is very very short and wears ridiculously tall shoes to compensate.
Jefferson Torch Flynn has the most contagious laugh. He is freckled and looks like an affable boy, an overalls kind of boy, but his heart has mischief in it. He believes in God devoutly, but has some flexible interpretations of sin.
Free Translator Corduroy
Pinball Wizard Kettering
April Come She Will Smith
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