from the desk of Dianulli letter to nowhere
Dear Katherine,
Lovely to hear from you darling, as it always is. The chapter list is most definitely it. It has reflections of rain and wet leaves and expensive wine and that heavy, clunky jewelery you love so much. Molly gave you the real one, I am very pleased to tell you.
I'm so sorry I've been out of touch, though it's pleasing to hear you can still taste me in the water. We do our best to remain "implicit", a term I remember you liking. My sleep continues unabated, and I think I shall only wake up once or twice more before the end of all things for you and be as helpful as I used to be. Do you still have your ring?
I'm glad you've kept me out of the book. It would have been suicide to include my part in it... though I do hope you've discussed at least some of it without linking and attribution, even if it isn't funny.
I don't know who the Englishman is, or even if he's English. Or a man for that matter. You should know, if you don't already, that Callie was planning (and may have been successful) in frankensteining Klixcilitep with a derivative of the Star Sapphire. I can't see how it would have worked, but if it did you definitely have a new one. But you know how memory works. Maybe it's been there this whole time and Callie's weird ritual was to the point of granting you comfort more than it was to change anything.
You should be nice to her, Katherine. She loves you dearly.
The book comes along. I remember telling you there was no organization to the material; that I was swimming around in confusing diary entries and stories about things that I couldn't imagine having happened, but all of that changed last week when Molly got frustrated and just handed over the chapter list. Here it is:
1. baby solipsis 2. something cold 3. something warm 4. the magic garden 5. katherine's song 6. the prince of knives and scrolls 7. the princess of bones 8. mother perdition 9. murder 10. molly fucking maker 11. the jade house 12. the red queen wins 13. the black storm 14. aunt umbra 15. lliddu and claxis and katie and poe and breakfast with a gingerbread dragon 16. what francis did 17. a boy and his monster 18. calliope dances
I wonder how long she's been sitting on this. Has she told you anything about it? She's still not talking and I'm not going to force her to do anything. Anyway her help here is most comforting and welcome. I was starting to think I'd never be able to finish this beast and of course, no one's help is usually forthcoming. You're not in it, by the way. Do you remember Wilde saying "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you"? I can't find anything funny about your part in this, Dianulli.
By the way, do you know who that English guy is? Is he even English at all? He sounds like Michael Caine, which I find weirdly calming. I keep thinking Jasper from "Children of Men". Maybe that's what he wants me to think. Obviously someone is playing with me, right? Molly can't make any new ones, can she? I think she thinks she can. But I think she's cheating and not copping to it.
I hope this letter finds you well; you've been out of touch for so long. I know you're still there-- I can taste it in the water. Why so quiet? Please write back.
I was sitting at a Swedish restaurant in Chicago, across from my friend Christine. We'd been looking at apartments together for a couple of weeks, and had settled on one in Andersonville, Chicago, which was where all the lesbians used to live. It had a pyramid shaped bathroom and a living room with 14 foot ceilings. I pressed a meatball into the plate with the bottom of my fork and watched it ooze through the tines. My head hurt and I was afraid of something.
Chris and I had a weird friendship. We'd made out a few times, but she'd had problems getting rid of a psycho-alchoholic boyfriend of hers. About six months earlier, while I was getting evicted from an apartment that I'd shared with my ex-wife, he'd shown up at my door with a loaded revolver and threatened to kill me if I ever talked to Chris again. With a coolness that I've not been able to summon since, I asked him if I could buy him a drink so we could talk things over. Ten minutes later we were at the bar downstairs, laughing over shots of tequila. He thought it was hardcore that I didn't use a lime or salt. I thought it was disgusting, but it was very important in those days that I zen my way through these sorts of situations, bending like a reed in the wind, accepting murderous psychosis and rolling it over with a few drinks and a dirty joke about old ladies.
I don't know what I'll do if it happens to me again.
Chris was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. We met at the restaurant where she worked, which was one of those overpriced places that sold a lot of soft shell crab. I can't remember why I was there, but when I saw her standing behind a beer-tub in a little black dress... she was too much of a person to be where she was. She had intensity. I was too shy to say anything to her that night, so I just sat by the window drinking my Red Death, making off with quick glances at her unbelievable face. Then she looked right at me. I vomited a little in my mouth. I knocked my drink over. I fell sideways out of my chair and hit the floor. I picked myself up and straightened my half-tucked shirt and summoned a suave smile in her direction. The face she made as she tried very hard not to laugh was more beautiful than the one before it, so I beat it the hell out of there before I fell down again.
I went back the next night, and she was bar tending. I ordered a drink and a small dinner at the bar, so I'd have a chance to talk to her, but she was too busy to do much besides clear up the mess after my meal, so I spent my time there just watching her. She got watched a lot. Everyone at the bar was doing the same thing I was; getting lost in that face of hers...
She had short black hair and green eyes, pale ivory skin, and when she smiled it looked as if she wasn't from this planet. I fell in love with her, though she never knew it, sitting at the bar over the next few months, eventually talking to her and getting to know her well. We were friends then and hung out a lot, mostly getting high in her apartment and then getting lost looking for the coffee shop on the corner. We didn't agree on anything, but we didn't really have arguments. We'd get lost in each other's opinions, exploring them and savoring them, not once feeling threatened by them. It was better that we didn't agree on anything, you dig? We went so much further, so much deeper than we would if we'd been a very similar kind of person. She was alien and I craved it; so perfectly different from me.
We sat at Ann Sathers, the Swedish restaurant, and I was mashing my meatball into the plate. I think she loved me the way I loved her then. She was always exploring my face and touching my hands, and she'd make a tiny humming sound when she smiled at me. We had the apartment, and the only thing for it then was paying the landlord to move in. We hadn't done that yet.
I was afraid. Everything started crashing around me suddenly as I squashed my meatball, her ex boyfriend and his revolver, my divorce and eviction, my new job that I still wasn't very good at, hating Chicago and everything in it except Chris...
I broke her heart. I told her I didn't know why I couldn't move in with her, but that I just couldn't do it. At the time it felt like moving in with her was a harbinger of death. Something about it left me cold and terrified. I felt as if moving in with her would be the worst of all possible decisions, so I told her then and there.
I don't blame her for slapping me, and it was the last time I saw her.
Now that more than twelve years have gone by, I think I know why I was so afraid. I was at a turning point in my life in that moment at the restaurant with Chris, and the decision I made in that moment would permanently change the course of my life. The terror I felt was of the unknown, see? And I had a decision to make. And I made it. And now, after more than sixteen years, I realize that I made the wrong one.
Imagine erasing twelve years and putting something else in its place.
Not one thing leading up to having my brain electrocuted in the basement of a hospital in Massachusetts would have happened. And nothing after that, either.
Enough time has passed that I can finally share what I know about a certain Brandeis University policy:
When I worked at Brandeis, I had access to an enormous amount of information about the internal function of the university, as I was partially responsible for the whirling shitstorm that is their Peoplesoft implementation.
Among the many, many problems I had with that school, its staff and its policies was the fact that every time the department of homeland security wanted any sort of information on any student of middle eastern descent, Brandeis would hand it over immediately and without question or fight. In fact, I was aware of at least one student that was watched very closely during his/her entire time at Brandeis, completely unaware. He/she of course hadn't done anything to warrant this profound privacy breach other than having brown skin and a funny name.
And the politically correct, feminist, right-thinking staff at Brandeis thought that it was just peachy to roll over and take it up the ass from the feds, while at the same time most other Boston institutes of higher education were fighting the feds as hard as they could--and as publicly as they could.
All of this was around 2003-2004. I wasn't involved in the handing over of this information by the nutless, spineless, weak headed staff at Brandeis. But I heard them talking about it nervously from time to time around the office, obviously knowing that what they were doing was wrong, and feeling very guilty about it.
But they did it anyway.
Of everything that happened during my short experience with Brandeis University, this one is by far the most revolting.
I'm leaving this post open to spiders. I hope some of the people I worked with eventually find this post and understand that their ironic roles in this blasphemy. A Jewish university handing over personal information about innocent kids to the federal government for purposes of national security is vaguely reminiscent of something that no one has any business forgetting.
Keywords: Brandeis University peoplesoft oracle PEAK ITS fuckheads
It occurred to me last night as I strolled past Gramercy Tavern, where dinner can be had right here in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan...
Wait.
See here: I'm calling it the "Gramercy Park area of Manhattan" instead of the "Gramercy Park Neighborhood", because this is no longer a part of Manhattan where there are neighborhoods. At the time of this writing, most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan and at least half of Brooklyn (and 30% of Queens) have been obliterated. In their place are a growing number of towers filled with the sort of people for whom the person in the picture there to the right cannot possibly exist.
Wait.
There's no person in the picture. There might have been, had I taken it a few hours earlier. It's too late for a person, but just the right time for about 150 pounds of frozen meat.
So I mean to say "In their place are a growing number of towers filled with the sort of people for whom the 150 pounds of frozen meat in the picture there to the right cannot possibly exist".
It occurred to me last night as I strolled past Gramercy Tavern, where dinner can be had right here in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan for about $200 per person, so long as the wine is reasonably priced, that human urine isn't among the things a wealthy banker (one of whom I imagined was imagining to himself how nice a piece of waitress tail would be as a digestive after gorging himself on taxpayer money) imagines that he will find in his soup.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I do know that it was a very, very cold night when I found the body in the park.
Whatever mess there may have been was frozen and invisible.
I didn't know what I was looking at for a little while, which is what always happens to me when I come across a cadaver. Sometimes I can hear a little bit of the grinding in my mind: "Is it a lamp? no. Is it a book? no. Is it laundry? yes. I mean no."
I stood there for a little while after making sure that he was beyond any of us, and after taking a few pictures, watching people walk by. The body was in a certain context, see? The park, very cold winter night, icy sidewalks, yellow sodium lamps on the hospital across the street, dead homeless dude frozen to the ground. There's a harmony to it such that the eye doesn't pick out any of those elements by itself, but only sees them as a whole environment that one must traverse in order to get to the good deli on first avenue. Or to the emergency room just across the street.
Homeless dudes belong on the ground.
One morning in Brooklyn while I was in a cab, I saw something that reminded me of a person-sized ice cream cone that had been smeared across an intersection by a giant child. No one walked past that. And yet I hadn't realized what I'd actually seen until I was halfway over the Brooklyn Bridge.
I made a conscious decision when I was sixteen years old that I would never in my life have children.
It was one of those adolescent promises, like this: "I'll never eat anything that had eyes", or "I'll never be a Republican". But it was a little different than the other ones into which I was shoehorning the rest of my corporal state. I had a really good reason to never reproduce. It's my genes, see. I have a strong suspicion that they're really bad news.
If we accept that:
1. What we know about human reproduction, biologically, is scientifically sound and factually true 2. That Jesus was a real person, and that Jesus' biological mother was a virgin when he was conceived
then we must also accept that:
3. Jesus was a clone of her mother
I was thinking about it the other night, up on the roof, which is where I do all of my thinking these days. It's a place where at 4am you can be in the middle of New York City while at the same time being utterly alone. Sometimes I think about bringing some binoculars up there and peering into people's apartments all over the neighborhood and a good chunk of the East Village, but somehow it feels like it would ruin my feeling of solitude. I think I prefer it when even just for a brief moment at 4am on most weekday mornings, I can easily imagine myself as the only person alive in the entire city.
I like imagining that. The feeling of absolute solitude, to be perfectly alone is a pleasure of the highest order for me. That's because even when I'm alone I'm not really alone. My ego-states appear to be so well designed as to be nearly capable of making a pot of coffee on their own, leaving what amounts to the rest of me free, for example, to misplace my keys twice while waiting for the rest of them to finish up with that coffee.
I made the decision to never have children when I was 16, and it was at a point in my life before I knew what an ego-state was. I didn't know a lot at the time, but I was fresh with the knowledge that sometimes space-shuttles blow up in midair, and that boobs feel nice when you squeeze them. I also knew... or I thought I knew... or I was just very keenly aware... that I was working with a mind that wasn't very stable. I would occasionally find it leaking, or drifting into semi-human ontological constructs which included lots of room for things like The Dilution of Murder with Recursive Morality and Diapers for Dixie: The Southeastern United States as the Wayward Brat, two expositions I wrote in 10th grade, both failed for plagiarism.
I still deny it, Mister Sobrinski. I'll never forget you or your flaccid red pen. You were a monument to lowered expectations, your giant, clay head and little eye slits, swollen with I suppose whatever it was that made the rest of you swollen, your fingers always fat and twitchy and uncomfortable looking, pointing impotently at the pointless scrivenings of the children of government farmers, trying to teach them that two 'very's is one too many but finally settling on nine being just enough to describe how much they hated your class, as we all did nine verys worth, even you. Most of all you, come to think of it. Your derision for your own classroom and everything in it made a mark in me that I have no business forgetting.
I call that one "Claxis".
I don't remember when or how I came up with that name, except I do know that a later moniker of mine, "abraxas" was a variant of it as far as I was concerned. Claxis is not a name of something like a person or a character, but more like the name of a certain kind of sorting of things, like "wooden" or "laborious" or "sticky", only for a kind of collective sort, like "cold, dewey leaves with little points on them". It's also as far as I'm concerned, the name of a state of mind. If I am in "Claxis", I have a very specific set of responses to stimuli, and a very specific set of patterns of thinking about stimuli. Here's the erroneously short version: I name my ego-states.
I name them things that you don't name something that's alive, because although it might be arguably useful to consider some of these ego-states as semi-independent entities from time to time, it's also patently false. Doing so would imply a plurality of autonomies, which I tend to prefer to rationalize beyond in my experience, always remembering what Mister Rogers told me when I was little:
...you know, the angry you is still you inside...
And the Claxis is the part of me which desperately needs to expose the lies of those in the role of "authority", particularly when humbled by someone "lesser".
It has a named counterpart, which is in all ways its complement. The counterpart is subtle and passive, and is the part of me which desperately needs to blend-in, to remain hidden and unexposed, quiet and undisturbed.
I call that one "Lliddu", and ultimately it is because of Lliddu that I decided to end my genetic line.
