Dispatch from the Future Read online

  I won’t read the chapters about my future addiction

  to pain medication, my lepidopterophobia,

  my failed marriages, my miscarriages, the fire

  that will destroy all my manuscripts, my fall

  down the stairs. I won’t ever read the last chapter,

  the one that describes in vivid detail the flames

  that will erupt from my fatal motorcycle accident

  somewhere in the Badlands, how it will take weeks

  for them to discover my body. I am only 22 years old.

  I want to fake my death on Facebook. I want a pony.

  THE SAFEST WAY HOME

  Excellent customer service means never crying

  in front of the customer, asking him to call or

  send orchids. In a photograph taken during the time

  when you knew all the constellations, you look

  like you knew it would end up like this—stars

  are something to talk about at night on a beach.

  When they tell you they’re from Nepal you say

  you love Nepal. You love Flint, Michigan, you

  love that there are roads and wrists and reasons

  for the planets and no matter what they tie you to,

  if afterwards you run into one on the bus, because maybe

  you live in the same neighborhood, you will hold

  your suitcase handle because first of all, you

  could be any of five names and second of all,

  your accordion is in the suitcase and you have a ticket

  to Valencia. Tomorrow you will be where the cliffs jut

  from the sea. You’ve been practicing. If the stranger

  sits beside you and says, Bangladesh, don’t show

  that you remember, get off before your stop, before

  he says he has a fencepost, a red parachute, an open field.

  EVEN THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT HERE IS NICE TO ME

  I lost my job at the factory, but before you get mad

  I want you to know that last night I woke up in the snow

  without shoes, and I didn’t call up to your window;

  I let you sleep because I remembered our agreement.

  This is what happened: he caught me in the freezer

  with his copy of Ulysses and asked me what I thought

  I was doing. What could I be doing, I said, what

  are my options. I still had on my latex gloves

  and I know you won’t want to hear this part, but

  I opened a carton of macaroons with my teeth.

  You have always wanted to do that, he said. Yes,

  I said. He said, I can’t let you do that. So I ate one.

  He turned off the lights. I took a yellow cake

  off a shelf and lit twenty candles to warm our hands.

  How is this night different from all other nights?

  There was a time when I didn’t have to sleepwalk

  everywhere. You remember. I was here. But

  then I got used to waking up every morning

  in a different city, without you, without the same

  sun, the same lack of a view, all that scaffolding,

  none of the sea, every piece of mail a sympathy card.

  I can never go back there. I stole his book. When you

  go to work each morning, I walk to Jerusalem.

  I am answering your letter. You are ruining my life.

  KATHARINE TILLMAN VS. LAKE MICHIGAN

  Mitsu flips a lot of coins. Katharine told me that once

  she was in the middle of a tantrum and a coin

  told him he should love her, and yet, he wasn’t

  satisfied so he went to the dictionary and closed

  his eyes and found a word and when she asked

  what word he found, the only thing he would tell her

  was that he was one step closer to the secret

  of the universe. Can you tell me what it rhymes with,

  she asked him. Is it a verb? Is it a country? Have I

  been there? Will you write its name on my back

  while we sit on the pier and watch the blue dusk

  chase the sun to Jersey? The last time I ever

  saw Katharine she asked me the name of the lake

  in the distance and I said Michigan and she said

  she’d heard of it, and then she showed me the diaries

  she kept when she lived under the overpass

  near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,

  when all she had was a travel Scrabble set and

  the reason she’d run away. Milan Kundera

  has a lot to say about our tenuous insignificance.

  When he wants to decide something he, too,

  flips a coin, but in his case heads is Little Rock,

  Arkansas, and tails is Little Rock, Arkansas, and

  it’s just a matter of who to blindfold and bring with

  on his motorcycle. On page one hundred and seven

  of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I get lost

  driving Katharine to the airport. On page one hundred

  and forty nine, Tereza dreams that they take her away.

  After I see Katharine for the last time I don’t go home;

  I go to Prague and it’s 1968 and the man I love won’t

  touch me; he just holds an empty gun to my temple

  and even though we both know it’s empty there’s the small

  comfort that the worst thing that could possibly happen

  would be the thing I want most. Mitsu says the secret

  of the universe is obvious in any planetary shaped

  object you can find on the floor of a parking garage.

  Katharine says how. I say I want to move to Canada;

  the only tenderness anyone can get around here

  is in the time it takes him to untie my wrists.

  KEEPING THE MINOTAUR AT BAY

  He takes me to a movie about a bathtub

  full of Vaseline and apples and asks me

  afterward how I feel about it. I feel pretty

  ambivalent about the universe, I say,

  like I’ve been reading too many wilderness

  guides and spending all my nights

  trapped in lucid dreams in which I’m

  beneath the deepest, most inescapable

  snowdrift and I decide to stay there until it melts

  at the end of the world—el fin del mundo,

  as they say, acharit hayamim—and the whole time

  I’m dreaming I’m thinking, I can’t wait

  to get in my boat and sail across the flooded earth.

  So, I tell him, I get in my canoe and all the old cities

  are phosphorescent scars miles below the surface,

  sunken ships without survivors, and I know

  I won’t last long. I know the end is near

  and yet I paddle on, scanning the open seas

  for a waterproof map, a yellow umbrella,

  another survivor in another canoe, and I think this

  is how disappointed everyone must have felt

  when Atlantis sank. In the classic Return to Atlantis,

  R. A. Montgomery writes, “Destruction is widespread,

  and you grieve for the Atlantean people” (85). Don’t I

  know it. It’s at this point in the dream when I realize I am

  actually alone and likely to drown and I start to scream

  and then I wake up in my own bathtub, water to my knees.

  Another nightgown soaked. For the Norse, that’s hell:

  wearing a soaked nightgown in a cold, dark room

  for eternity, I say, did you know that? He says

  he didn’t know, but that I seem like a very

  interesting person for a person my age,

  which makes me think Theseus must have

  said something just like that to Ariadne,

  to make her fall in love with him so she

>   would give him the red threaded clew

  to the maze and he could slay the monster.

  I used to think I was waiting for a steady shoulder,

  for someone to come along and appreciate my

  somnambulism, my prophetic knowledge

  of the ultimate destiny of mankind, someone

  to be with when all the lights in the world go out,

  but look what happened to them. Theseus killed

  the beast, and they got married and then sailed

  to an island, where he abandoned Ariadne in her sleep.

  And when she woke she hanged herself. Why

  did she hang herself? And if I find the reason am I

  less susceptible? Both unanswerable questions, and

  yet I still go home with him, submit to a strange

  bed in which I lay awake all night, without him,

  listening to the restless pacing of something familiar

  in the room beneath us, the haunt I cannot kill.

  HOW TO MEND A BROKEN HEART WITH VENGEANCE

  We stretched a ladder between our second-story

  windows and tried to get the dog to go

  across to see if it would hold but it didn’t.

  My ambivalence must have made the dog fall, I

  called across to him. He picked up his tin can

  and said, I can’t hear you unless you speak

  into the tin cans, remember? What did you just

  say? Sono spiacente, I said. Nevermind. Slicha.

  You are probably wondering now if the dog’s okay,

  but do you think you could stay with me, anyway,

  even if I never gave you the answer? This was

  so long ago, further back than yesterday,

  when you and I spoke for the last time. You said,

  Why did you leave so early? And I said I couldn’t

  sleep and you asked me why I didn’t tell you

  at the time; you would have hit me on the head

  with something hard. Let me ask you, could you

  imagine a cloudless sky above a Nebraska plain?

  Could you draw it? Could you imagine yellow birds?

  Could you visualize the soft sound a door

  makes when it closes and sticks and I thought I

  had problems, but seriously, look at yourself.

  Look. I had this incredible dream last night

  and I’m not even going to tell you about it.

  In Russia, the young girls who die violent deaths

  either end up like birds in Pushkin or like fish

  at the bottom of lakes, where they comb each other’s

  hair all night long, where they teach each other

  the lyrics to every Talking Heads song

  so they can lure sailors into their shadowy grottoes

  and drown them. They say there once was a rusalka

  who wished to be human so badly she gave up

  her voice to be with her beloved and of course

  he loved her because who wouldn’t love a girl

  who can’t talk back, but then one night

  at a masked ball he got distracted by a foreign princess

  with an elegant neck and the rusalka was so despondent

  she went to a witch and somehow communicated, I’ve

  never been so unhappy in my whole life. What should I do?

  And of course the witch told her to stab him with a dagger,

  and of course the rusalka considered it. Like, seriously?

  Seriously stab him with a dagger? But ultimately she

  decided she would rather lose her human life and

  go back to being an underwater death demon.

  At least in the opera version the prince realizes

  his terrible mistake and goes hunting for a doe

  only to find the rusalka in her last moments and

  kisses her knowing it means death and eternal

  damnation. Here I am now, watching the moonlight

  dance across the water in the retention pond, staring

  at this scalpel and trying to forget your address.

  JUNE 14, 1848

  Weather: hot. Health: fair.

  Dear Diary, had to leave the baby

  behind because she wouldn’t eat.

  Sent Jon out to shoot a buffalo,

  but he said they all looked so peaceful

  he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Figures. We’ll all be dead soon

  enough. Waiting for the Indian

  to get here so we can cross

  the river. June 15, 1848.

  Weather: still hot. Health: same.

  Dear Diary, Chastity’s doll

  drowned. She wanted to dive

  in after it, but I reminded her

  that she doesn’t know how to swim.

  Dove in anyway. Another one lost.

  Jon says he’ll skin us a buffalo

  so we have something to eat, but

  only if the buffalo has recently

  died of natural causes. Get

  a grip, Jon, I told him.

  June 16: wagon broke.

  Eating wild blackberries while

  we wait for another wagon

  party to come by and help.

  Jon has gone off on his own

  to meditate and ask forgiveness

  of the earth. Prudence might

  have dysentery. Figures.

  June 17: Some days

  I feel like I’m just a character

  in a game played by a sick,

  sick person, who has sent me

  on this journey only to kill all

  my loved ones along the way.

  June 18: help came, but

  in the night they stole our oxen.

  Guess we’ll just have to walk

  to Oregon now. Are you there,

  God? It’s me, Mary Jane.

  Send me some oxen and

  a son who likes to shoot things.

  June 19: Lost Prudence

  to dysentery. Should we

  eat her? Tough question.

  June 20: Another river!

  You have got to be kidding!

  June 21: Managed to swim

  across with diary on top

  of my head so it wouldn’t

  get wet. Jon and I have found

  a tribe of Indians who will let us

  stay with them. At least,

  we think that’s what they said.

  We don’t speak their language.

  They seem to have indicated that

  tonight we must follow them,

  blindfolded, into a grove of trees,

  and in the addled darkness our

  dead will return and speak to us.

  MAROONED

  Mother, I have been devastated all my life. I never said anything.

  That’s why I wear a parachute. Why I tiptoed from my bedroom

  to yours, and lay my head on the beige carpet for fear of worse.

  Were there sirens? There were. Were there familiar songs? Yes.

  I am afraid of the beds I have been in. In the morning there was

  the heel of your boot sharper than before. Mother, what do I do

  with your mail? Do you want to keep this snake in the basement?

  What about the kitten? Do you want all these photographs of other

  people’s children? The temperature in the lizard’s cage is dropping.

  Let’s be realistic. If I open the windows the birds will come in and

  eat out the eyes. Mother, I am bereft. Mother, I wear your necklace

  and nothing else. Mother, I never. Nevermind. Let’s be fatalistic.

  The neighbors know I’m down here. I can hear them watching.

  Mother, after they take your eyes I will sew the lids myself.

  CIRCUS MUSIC

  Count back by sevens beginning with the last number

  you remember. I’ll wait, said the Serbian Jew to the l
ame girl

  who blushed at her wet shoes. West 72nd Street was a puddle

  from Broadway to the Hudson and the traffic came and returned.

  In Brooklyn you could lie in the street in front of the hospital

  and not die. Sixty-three, she said, like a question of him.

  For the last eleven hours I had worn a feathered headband

  and taken dictation from a woman in Utah. I wanted

  to know what had happened to the girl’s leg, but I was also

  thirsty. He had to know. If I were him I’d ask her every day.

  The night the circus marches the elephants through midtown,

  the girl would say, have you ever been? Yes, I would say,

  once. Well, she would say. No. Yes. No. She might say

  it wasn’t an accident. Pretend to hold a knife in your hand

  and people will think it’s your own. Her cane was on my foot,

  but I stood still. Fifty-six and forty-nine. If she had picked

  a larger number to begin with, I could have stood with the cane

  on my foot forever. I was so cold then; I wore so many hats.

  Can I get you something? His yarmulke was secured to his head

  with gold hairpins. No, I said. I don’t know what I want, I said.

  The girl stopped counting and apologized for her cane. Don’t

  apologize, I said. Please, I said. It was a lion, she said. Forty-two,

  I said, right? It was a land mine. I didn’t ask, I said. It was my mother,

  she said, in our bathroom. Thirty-five? It was me. I did it. It was me.

  ANOTHER SPECTACULAR DAY WITH PLENTIFUL SUNSHINE

  Good news: you still won’t leave your wife for me,

  but there is a horse tethered to the scaffolding

  in front of my building and I think he might be mine.

  Stealing horses means never having to say I love you,