Dispatch from the Future Read online

  RAISE FOR DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE

  “I love these poems. They are cool and horrified at their own coolness. A masterclass in phrase-making.”

  —JOE DUNTHORNE, FABER NEW POET AND AUTHOR OF SUBMARINE

  “Leigh Stein’s poems know how to laugh it off after a stunning tumble down a flight of stairs.”

  —ROB MACDONALD, EDITOR OF SIXTH FINCH

  “Dispatch from the Future is a force of nature. Like other great American poets before her—Bernadette Mayer, Jorie Graham, William Carlos Williams come to mind—Leigh Stein is not afraid to make the everyday beautiful. As if she says in these poems, ‘Don’t worry, we all feel this way.’ We do. Read this book.”

  —DOROTHEA LASKY, AUTHOR OF AWE AND BLACK LIFE

  PRAISE FOR LEIGH STEIN’S THE FALLBACK PLAN

  “Beautiful, funny, thrilling and true.”

  —GARY SHTEYNGART, AUTHOR OF SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY

  “The Fallback Plan is to this generation what Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm was to the previous generation, and The Catcher in the Rye before that.”

  —SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

  “Stein, 26, captures the voice of the young 20-something prodigal daughter with the clarion call of authenticity in her debut novel.… Stein’s light, accessible, self-deprecating prose makes this coming-of-age story a pleasure.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Cheeky self-assured prose.”

  —O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

  “A masterwork of the post-collegiate babysitting genre.”

  —NEW YORK MAGAZINE

  “Her enchantingly funny and insightful debut novel The Fallback Plan … has a universal quality, capturing a generation’s angst quite like Franny and Zooey did when it was published in 1961.”

  —CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  “27-year-old former New Yorker staffer Leigh Stein nails the latest postcollegiate trend—moving back in with Mom and Dad … Stein seems poised to become the Lena Dunham of contemporary fiction, given the way The Fallback Plan’s storyline deftly bears with it a steady commentary on today’s flatlining economy and a generation of college grads (an estimated 85 percent of the class of 2011 moved right back home) who have to wonder if we’ll ever actually grow up and become real adults.”

  —ELLE MAGAZINE

  “Readers will endorse Esther Kohler’s voice as being not only funny, but also true. It echoes long after her story ends, and The Fallback Plan is a novel everyone under 30 will relate to with familiar pangs of self-loathing and sympathy.”

  —BOSTON GLOBE

  “Intimate, urgent, and laugh-out-loud funny, Leigh Stein’s novel bravely investigates the splendor and tragedy of the end of youth with a sensitivity and lyrical deftness that will not disappoint. Think Franny and Zooey. Think Goodbye, Columbus. Think of this book as your next great read.”

  —JOE MENO, AUTHOR OF THE GREAT PERHAPS

  “… an existential crisis of lost 20-somethings that pretty much everyone can relate to.”

  —NYLON MAGAZINE

  DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE

  © 2012 Leigh Stein

  First Melville House printing: June 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stein, Leigh, 1984-

  Dispatch from the future / Leigh Stein.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-135-5

  I. Title.

  PS3619.T465D57 2012

  811′.6–dc23

  2012014733

  v3.1

  For Sarah

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Warning

  Based on a Book of the Same Title

  Winter, 1979, the Coldest in Recent Memory

  You’re Mispronouncing My Name Again

  Zelda

  The Safest Way Home

  Even the Gas Station Attendant Here Is Nice to Me

  Katharine Tillman vs. Lake Michigan

  Keeping the Minotaur at Bay

  How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance

  June 14, 1848

  Marooned

  Circus Music

  Another Spectacular Day with Plentiful Sunshine

  Eurydice

  II

  Choose Your Own Canadian Wilderness

  The Forbidden Chamber

  Epistolaphobia

  If You See Them Tell Them I’m Stranded

  How to Read the Secret Language of the Pharaohs

  For Those Who Have Everything, Say It with Concrete

  III

  I’m Ready, Are You? – 23 (Truth or Consequences)

  Calling In the One

  Mercy

  A Brief History of My Life Part VII

  Diary of a Young Girl

  As Soon as You Meet Someone You Know the Reason You Will Leave Them

  R_B_T L_VE S_NG

  RE: HI

  Immortality

  A Brief History of My Life Part XXVI

  Have You Hugged a Latvian Today?

  Universalism

  IV

  Dispatch from the Future

  Dispatch from the Future

  Simpatico

  Revisionism

  Travel Brochure for the Future

  Dispatch from the Future

  Dispatch from the Future

  Please Handle Your Children

  Revisionism

  Dispatch from the Future

  Addendum to the Previous Dispatch

  Remember Your Future

  Want Ad from the Future

  I’ve Written All Over This in Hopes You Can Read It

  Dispatch from the Future

  Dispatch from the Future

  Dispatch from the Future

  Acknowledgements

  I

  If you attempt to back out of the planet, turn to page 77.

  If you decide to take the time to consider other options, turn to page 50.

  Edward Packard, Through the Black Hole

  WARNING

  There are better ways to break a heart than Facebook,

  such as abandoning your pregnant girlfriend at Walmart

  like that guy did to Natalie Portman. If you read this book

  sequentially, bad things may happen to you, but only as bad

  as the things that would have happened to you anyway.

  If, however, you do not read this book sequentially you may

  find that you are suddenly aboard a sunken pirate ship,

  staring into the deep abyss, and wishing you had chosen

  not to chase the manatee in your submarine after all. Do not

  panic. If you end up in the wrong adventure just go back

  three spaces and draw another card. Or go back to bed.

  Or read up on the side effects of the medication taken

  by your loved ones. The great R. A. Montgomery once wrote,

  “Suddenly you’re surrounded by eleven Nodoors,” and I

  guess what I’m trying to do here is ruin any hope

  you may have had of coming out of this alive.

  BASED ON A BOOK OF THE SAME TITLE

  By definition of vicious infinite regression

  I don’t like to talk to philosophy majors.

  They have found the truth and the truth is

  that there isn’t one, so on Saturdays they

  wear overalls and stare at their reflections

  and try to guess whose childhood was worse,

  but in the end they reali
ze they all share

  the same dream of having a reason

  to join the Witness Protection Program,

  which disappoints at least one person, who

  thought his dream was so uniquely his.

  Last night I got a fortune cookie that said

  I don’t get along with basically anyone,

  and from the back I learned the Chinese word

  for grape: putao, and it made me wonder how each

  informs the other. To find out, turn to page 117.

  I wonder how much longer I can live here

  before I do something irresponsible like

  meet a teenage boy on a Ferris wheel in 1941

  or lie in the street and watch the stoplights

  change from green to yellow or sit on a porch

  swing at dusk and listen to Leaves of Grass

  read by someone who has just worked all day

  with his hands. Already on page 56 I love you

  so much I just want to steal your clothes

  when you’re asleep and wash them. I want us

  to communicate telepathically until I am old

  and suffering from dementia and can’t even

  remember I know how to play piano until

  a nurse tells me I do and still I’ll deny it

  until she puts my hands on the keys and then

  there’ll be Chopin so quickly, as the light

  spills in the leaded windows and the lilies

  lean in closer. By definition of vicious

  infinite regression I am in front of a mirror

  holding a copy of the movie based on the book

  you wrote based on the parts of our life

  together that I no longer remember and

  looking back at me is a woman holding

  a movie based on a book based on her life

  and she wonders if the woman she sees

  wants to die as much as she does. I keep

  staring at this bruise on my leg and drawing

  a blank. Last night when you called I told you

  I was happy, which was true, but thinking ahead

  I could be unhappy, too, if that’s what you

  wanted. I could be any of a lot of things:

  a wrist, a ghost, a harbor, a rope. I could

  be the one who doesn’t know the language.

  I could be the reason they take you first.

  I could be the last person to see you alive.

  WINTER, 1979, THE COLDEST IN RECENT MEMORY

  Theoretically, I was held by a man in Detroit

  at gunpoint. Theoretically, he let me go.

  I have not told this story to you before.

  I only tell you now for two reasons. One:

  you’re not from Michigan. Two: I have searched

  for his scar along your neck and, so far, no luck.

  They said to wear my purse beneath my coat and

  pretend it was a baby if anybody asked me and

  they might but they probably would not try and take it.

  They said the average memory span for normal adults

  is seven items. Let me differentiate between the two.

  I used to tell this story about Tristan and Dolores,

  who I left in the rain every time. I made them break blue

  glass with their back teeth. Dolores would say, I am half sick

  of shadows, as the waves came up from the storm tossed sea.

  Try telling this story to a man with a gun. Sorry to interrupt,

  he said, but do you know the one about the woman who

  was rolled up like a snowman and left until the thaw?

  No, I said. That was me, he said. I don’t believe you, I said,

  and then he told me to keep my hands above my head.

  The snow had begun to fall then in the deep stillness

  before the streets were plowed and salted; a car passed

  us and fishtailed ahead at the stoplight; I forgot

  the ending, and so I pushed my characters in front of a train.

  The man with the gun didn’t like that at all.

  How was there a train at the beach? Maybe they left

  the beach, I said. Should they go on vacation instead?

  The man said, What if they went in front of the train, but

  the train stopped in time. Good idea, I said. He read

  my name off my drivers license and I didn’t correct

  his pronunciation; then he told me to close my eyes and

  I felt something cold hit my head. My heart stopped a little

  bit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was

  a snowball at my feet. Where did you say you were from again?

  I just wanted to unbutton your collar and see for myself.

  YOU’RE MISPRONOUNCING MY NAME AGAIN

  This time last year I was an astronaut

  in a window display at a department store

  that has since been bought out by another

  department store. I wore a gray crepe dress

  and a helmet that they pumped full of oxygen.

  I had one line to say. I mouthed the words, but

  no one ever heard me. They tapped the glass,

  saying, We can’t hear you on this side. Take

  off the helmet. Take off my helmet? I mouthed

  back. What?, they said. This time last year I

  thought I was speaking English, but lip reading

  has become a forgotten art. This time last year

  I learned to speak in the dark with my hands.

  I know the sign for tree and forest; dead bird;

  the spelling of my maiden name; long walks

  on the beach of Normandy. You think everything’s

  about you and you’ve been right since the end

  of the war. I took that astronaut job so I could

  tell you I took it. I took that astronaut job so I

  could miss you from the cosmos beyond the glass.

  This time last year it was snowing when you kneeled

  to lace my skates and it was so nice to run into each other

  under our pseudonyms like that. I said, Times of duress

  call for a record. You said, Did you say something? No,

  I said. You said, Why don’t you take off that helmet?

  I can’t hear you when you do that thing with your mouth.

  What thing with my mouth?, I said, and you closed your

  eyes. And you held both my hands so if I tried to spell

  our names you wouldn’t see. I cut the number of my age

  in ice. Will I ever be any older? No. I will not. Where

  you’re from they’re cosmonauts, but you’re the one

  who left, I said. I could feel the oxygen running low.

  The snow blanketed the totality of all existing things.

  ZELDA

  I want Rattawut Lapcharoensap to write my biography.

  I want him to come to my apartment when my boyfriend’s

  not home. I want to make him coffee. I know that he

  will want to tape record all of our sessions, and

  after I die I want these tapes catalogued and archived

  in the temperature controlled basement of an ivy league

  university library. Additionally, I would like

  my biography to have a neon purple dust jacket and

  I would like Nancy Milford to grant us permission

  to call the book Zelda even though there is already

  a book called Zelda because it is about the life of Zelda

  Fitzgerald. Maybe because it is just one word and

  that word is a name we won’t need permission; I’m

  not a lawyer. Also: I would like Martin Scorsese to direct

  the movie based on the book based on my real life.

  I don’t know if any of you have seen The Departed yet, but

  I just saw it last night and my life is almost exactly like that

/>   except instead of Boston I grew up in Chicago, and instead

  of going to police academy I toured with Cirque du Soleil.

  If Rattawut could just get a hold of a copy of the screenplay

  and make Matt Damon a female trapeze artist

  who was born to Prussian immigrant parents in 1984,

  I’m sure he’d have a good three, four chapters right there, easy.

  Have any of you ever tried to think of all the different ways

  you could disappoint your parents and then done them?

  I chose the calliope over the violin; I ran with gypsies;

  I dated a boy three years younger than me just because

  he had an apartment and I didn’t want to live

  with my parents anymore. I want Rattawut to tell me

  he likes my blue sweater. Maybe I’ll sit next to him

  while I show him old photographs and wait to see

  if he puts his hand on my leg. I don’t know what will happen

  to me after I turn 23, but when my biography comes out

  I will have to avoid the reviews and the interviews

  and any website that gives away the ending.

  I will probably have to spend a few weeks in a cabin

  in Minnesota. By then, I will have broken up

  with my boyfriend in order to marry Rattawut

  beneath a chuppah in the western suburbs of Chicago

  because even though I’m not technically Jewish,

  my father is, and any tradition is better than none.

  When Rattawut gives me my autographed copy,

  I’ll stay inside my childhood, making daisy chains,

  enrolled in summer programs for the gifted and talented.

  I’ll concentrate on the photos of myself holding prize ribbons,

  playing leapfrog, dressed up like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.