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‘I’m going to find him,’ she spat, and she jerked the wooden spoon from the stew and flung it down onto the stove, dotting the countertop and backsplash with beef gravy. The spoon ricocheted off of the toaster and clattered to the floor. My mother turned abruptly, and her hair swung around to cover her face and stayed there as she passed. I could feel the giant particles of air parting to accommodate her as she flung open the laundry-room door and stomped through to the garage. The panic was returning now, beginning at the base of my spine, just outside the body, like an injection or parasite, and plunging in and up through my chest. I felt I might collapse, implode, as though I were tumbling to the bottom of the sea.
I knew what my mother would find. I realized now that I’d known it all along, that I’d seen but elected not to register the shape hanging from the rafters in the gloom of the empty half of the garage, and the faint glint of the kicked-over stepstool. ‘Mom, wait,’ I said, or thought I did; my mouth formed the words, but the breath had left me. Where had it gone? There: she had taken it. She was drawing it in, the way the sea pulls still water back and stands it up, suspends it before the crash. Her scream began as a percussive groan, as though she’d been punched; it stretched into a bass note, then gathered strength, rising in volume and pitch until it filled the house, my head, the world. That should have been me, out there, bearing witness. She didn’t have to see it. And though it was too late, my body moved of its own volition, as though it thought it could turn back time. I stood up too fast, bashed my knee against the table leg, spun around and stumbled against the chair I’d just tipped over. The gray linoleum rose to meet me, and I could make out its many streaks and gouges, the dust and dead insects and bits of fallen food my mother didn’t have time to clean. I closed my eyes, bracing for impact, but instead I passed through the floor and into darkness, as gravity, or something like it, pulled me from every direction.
this was a weird and mostly empty story but this bit really cut through me
The husband watches the wife sleep. The house is nicest whenever she is asleep because he worries less about her and knows for a fact that she is resting, and for a little while at least he manages to forget that she is dying. This is more bearable than watching her lie awake and worry about dying. The husband is unsure if he has loved anyone in his life, at least in the way he thought he would love when he was younger, but now he thinks that maybe this is what love is supposed to be; you build a life around a person and when they threaten to go, you worry and worry that they will take you with them. If this is it, then he would prefer to go back to being a stranger to his wife.
I could narrate my neighborhood’s relentless transformation, but you already know the story. Gone: Bright Food Shop, the Big Cup, Eighteenth & Eighth, David Barton Gym, Petite Abeille. The clothing shop of Raymond Dragon, a porn star and designer who made very small bathing suits. A shop that sold only striped French fabric. A ramen place on Sixth run by a group of very friendly young men who wanted you to like them, and made good soup, though they seemed to be playing the part of cafe staff in an extended, laddish prank. The Peruvian barber shop that trimmed my head for a decade, then became the office of a gelato parlor next door, and then a purveyor of rolled, unappealing slices of pizza, then nothing. The gelato place is gone too. Nothing is more common now than it used to be, since landlords learned they can ask for rent so high almost no one can pay it, then deduct the resultant losses of income from their taxes, engineering zones of absence that sometimes empty most of a block, and riddle even prosperous neighborhoods.
so stupid
[...] When I came to the wide descending hallway that leads to the turnstiles, the air filled with a dense, brassy music, confident and driving, a great propulsive swing to it. Half hidden behind a column, a man sat on a high wooden stool, body wrapped around the long golden shape of the saxophone he played with a superbly controlled abandon. No one in the corridor but me, and his music swelled like a warm golden current. I recognized the tune, though I couldn’t name it – an upbeat jazz standard, something from a musical? It didn’t matter; it was a song about the will and nerve to go forward, to walk out into the night with the sure knowledge that more awaited you than exhaustion and loss. There is in us, the music said, refusal, will, momentum, joy. I was startled by what it called to mind – the watercolored drawings I’d seen weeks before in London, elongated women and men veiled and rayed in warm yellows, layers of golden light: the human form divine. Halfway down the corridor I turned back, walked to where the musician sat and dropped the two dollars I had into the open instrument case at his feet. He didn’t look up or otherwise acknowledge me. Maybe a very slight tip of the head? Either he didn’t care or was pouring himself entirely into those passages, making a corridor of his own out of this burnished splendor made with his own breath. A corridor I walked down, all the way to the A, and felt warmed by even after the doors of the train car closed.
Alex was happy for William. It was sweet how he and Layla huddled together in the kitchen. The little presents which William picked up for her when he was out and about with Alex – a beaded necklace, or a silver bracelet – which Alex was invariably asked to give his opinion on, in William’s quest to identify Layla’s tastes and preferences, to please her by surprising her.
But the courtship was interfering with work. William was slow to leave the compound when Layla was in. And, when he and Alex were out on one of their expeditions, he was always impatient to return. No matter how often Alex explained to William the intricacies of mapping – yes, he had to map all the grazing routes, and yes, it was necessary to document precise coordinates of water wells in the district, which meant that they did, indeed, have to travel to all of them – William didn’t get it. The long drives, the hours spent fiddling with equipment, the mindless waiting were all great chunks of time that it was clear he’d rather be spending with Layla.
i love the way this story is written from Alex's perspective - contrasting Alex's self-important/entitled frustration with his driver with the absolute futility of his actual work, which William clearly gives 0 shits about
weizman: A ‘classical’ border set-up like that would be based on the assumption that the ‘enemy’ is always outside. Today’s system is based on the belief that the enemy – whether that is a migrant, a terrorist, a social movement or group of protesters – is already inside.
Surveillance exists not only at the borders but everywhere, which might make us continuously anxious, but we have become anaesthetised to it. Because when something is everywhere, you stop feeling it. And the only solution would be collective political action. Individually we can try to camouflage ourselves – encrypt our messages, drop out of social media – but only collective action could truly confront the physical-digital regime of the everywhere-border. First, though, we would have to acknowledge that this is our reality. And it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that you live in a permanent state of anxiety.
Flattery! It was so long since anyone had flattered him. So long! His wife had kicked him out six months ago. Lonely, grim months. Such solitude. It was unbearable. Longing all week to see his kids, then this desperate panic all the time he was with them, trying to make it wonderful, to eke out every last second, and then the agony when they were taken away from him again. Tom started to cry. He missed his wife, his little children. He was the architect of his own downfall. He was a fool and Linda was a fool to flatter him! He was about to tell her this but then he paused. She’ll find out soon enough, he thought.
Before concluding that the wings were made of gold, Hoyt thought it might be a trick of the light. Sunshine in summertime can be deceptive. He’s seen diamonds of dew on blades of grass evaporate and quarters shimmering at the bottom of the community pool turn into gum wads. From his tree fort, he’s watched sparks of gold rise from the earth and hover in the branches. Before his childhood brain can right itself those fireflies are worth a fortune.
If I remain baffled by the way some people seem able to blithely chuck away something I find so difficult to retain, it is not because I do not understand the rules of capitalism so much as I marvel at the hidden workings of the human mind. With the life’s work I’ve chosen and settled comfortably into, the writing and editing that sits at the centre of my world, moneymaking is less an objective goal as it is a scarce by-product. It preciousness waxes in proportion to the difficulty of its extraction. But watching people gamble firsthand, their dedication to it, the hours they put in as they empty their wallets and take their chances, I can’t help feeling that they’re in it to lose.
I have seen men and women at the blackjack tables itching to leave, batting away the real-world commitments constantly tugging at their sleeves – removing their wristwatch and placing it in a pocket – and watched them ‘push’ whatever money they had left onto their box, piling it high, wanting to lose, despair gnawing at them as the cards were dealt, their defeat a blessed release when it finally came.
chimes w the neil gaiman quote that i love so much
Slot machine players in particular seem to crave what the cultural critic Michael Crawford terms ‘automaticity’ – or a state of pure passivity in which they are at one with the machine, reactive, responsive, but no more than that; the whole of their sensorium shrunk down to a tiny forcefield. Press the button, or don’t. In such a state their gambling qualifies as ‘play’ only in a twisted fashion, in relying on an absorption born not of focus or concentration but its opposite: an alienation so profound they can no longer connect to the world. Once unplugged they empty themselves of everything.
They don’t care about the money any more. They know it’s hopeless.
I believe that losing, in this sense, triggers a kind of emetic impulse, a desire to vomit up one’s fears about the uncontrollable nature of the world and to purge oneself of deeply lodged hurts. In losing there can be tremendous relief, even rebirth, in that only once you have lost everything can you walk away and start over, or start again, living out the mundane reality of your life until the tension once more becomes unbearable. Winning is far more problematic, because there is responsibility in the win – what to do with all that money! It’s the opposite of release.
You want to lose. Out of what writers Frederick and Steve Barthelme, accounting for their own haemorrhaging losses at the tables, call a ‘unique despair’.
The thought is so powerful that it winds me. The gut punch comes from the way that gambling at full throttle turns losing into a species of self-harm. I think of my father and his roulette compulsion, and I wonder if behind his dapper and gregarious front he might have secretly reached the end of himself, too: the point at which however much luck he believed he owned, he had given up on hope. [...]