“What are you looking at?” I ask.

  She points to one of the Extinct Animals. “Look at it. It’s

  beautiful. So incredibly beautiful,” she says. “And gone. As if one day, it walked off down a road—and never came back.”

  We sit silent a long time—and then she stares directly at me.

  “Maybe that’s what it takes to reach the pinnacle of our own beauty.”

  | 41 |

  I AM BEING SHAPED BY A WHOLE SERIES

  OF FAKE MEMORIES

  I need to find a map that will show me

  how to get out of here—but always

  there is the tie that blinds.

  I heard them say: Listen for the lifeboats

  ‘til it hurts. Overdose on light

  at an exponential rate.

  Clouds are sliced on the windmill’s

  blades. There is an intruder

  under my skin. I need to weed the

  soul—calamitous, necrotic, punctured.

  There are tiny bursts of memory.

  The right eye touches what the left eye

  sees. Windows rinsed with tears.

  A world falls beneath the shadows.

  Is it necessary for me to say I am being

  squashed inside a flower?

  | 42 |

  SCHOMBURGK’S DEER

  Code Blue means one thing, and Code White means some-

  thing else.

  I feel I have to know this, just in case.

  Sometimes I hear these cryptic messages come over the inter-

  com in The Facility.

  Code Pink must mean something.

  We are in the dining area, and P. A. Trick appears to say foreign words to a bowl of strawberries: “To glyko mouni sou. ”

  Wick says that some of the residents when they get special

  permission can go in the courtyard. And some of them have sex in the gazebo. The staff calls it Code Red because of all the red rosebushes that grow around the gazebo. There are also a hundred bees.

  At first, I thought the Professor said immoral jellyfish—in-

  stead of the “Immortal” Jellyfish. He said, call me Professor Turritopsis Dohrnil.

  I tried on majors to see how they fit: Philosophy. Psychology.

  Literature. Theater. Ecology.

  Nothing fit. Or maybe everything fit.

  The Professor was involved in every one of my majors. He

  called it Quantum Entanglement. He called it Existential Decon-structivist Eclecticism.

  | 43 |

  He called it Brainability.

  He says everything depends on how much we can forget.

  “Nobody is who you think they are,” says U the next time she

  visits.

  I have learned the more beautiful the name the more deadly

  the disease. It gives you something to strive for.

  Wick says she once went with a PhD student, and they made

  love on a pile of quotes.

  I think I’d like to make love on a pile of clocks—until the sec-ond hand crumbles up the numbers.

  Over the intercom, Code Red crackles.

  | 44 |

  THE PARABLE HIDES INSIDE A RIDDLE

  If you have Jerusalem Syndrome,

  you believe you are Jesus or Mary Mag-

  dalene or Peter or Judas.

  I carry around a parable just in case.

  Fish hide inside the water; the water

  hides inside the river. The river hides

  inside the sea; the sea hides inside the

  fish.

  Before I can imagine owning a boat,

  I buy an oar just to get used to the

  idea. I lug it around on my back.

  Just in case the opportunity arises,

  I carry a small bag of silver.

  | 45 |

  TOOLACHE WALLABY

  Suddenly, I become obsessed with the weight of things.

  A song. A pen. An apostrophe.

  How much does reality weigh? What is the weight of a black

  hole? White hole?

  Everything is just a little bit crazy. And what does crazy weigh?

  Here is how I would determine the weight of the soul. I would weigh Zach just before he killed himself. And then weigh him

  right after. The difference would equal the weight of the soul. It makes sense.

  That’s when things start breathing.

  Sometimes Wick won’t stop talking: “I would always stop

  the car and get out just in case I’d run over anyone. The sky looks like Windex. People wearing ski masks come away with

  duffel bags. No one is certain what is inside them—though it

  doesn’t sound like bones. Authorities say nothing is unnatural.

  My search engine goes looking for God. Everything goes back

  to its origins. Hydrogen separates from oxygen. A bee listens.

  My consciousness is slipping. Jesus looks like Woody Allen. In Argentina, one general loaded all the homeless on a bus and sent them someplace else. Snowflakes fall out of the stars. I knew I was too skinny when the automatic doors wouldn’t slide open for me anymore.”

  | 46 |

  When I see her again, U warns me about Wick. “You don’t really know her.”

  Wick says she loves Emily Dickinson. “Each of her poems

  swallows little bits of me. You know, you cannot put a fire out.

  That’s so true.”

  P.A. Trick belongs to the Magicians Union—they made the

  apostrophe disappear. He says Nijinsky intended to patent a new type of pen under the brand name “God.”

  Wick says the most loving thing you can do after you are dead is to mix your ashes with the one you love.

  A song is left behind in a birdcage. A song plays in the back-ground: “Don’t Rain on my Charade.”

  Wick says we are too much human and not enough being.

  U hasn’t been to see me in weeks, so who is she to warn me

  about anybody?

  When she finally comes to visit me, she has a pen in her hand and says that nobody is who you think they are.

  | 47 |

  THE TRAFFIC LIGHT

  BLINKING UNDERWATER

  Because the river flooded the rich

  people’s houses, they insisted a dam

  be built with a man-made lake behind it.

  Men came and said they had to drown

  our town. The bridge sunk

  underwater—and the train tracks.

  The cemeteries and the churches

  with Jesus gasping for air. The sunken

  library with waterlogged books.

  People in scuba masks floated in

  and out of the underwater shops.

  The mental hospital flooded.

  Hallucinations strapped to scuba tanks

  drifted to the surface.

  | 48 |

  BARBARY LION

  Stone says I should write a letter to Zach.

  Dear Zach,

  OK. I don’t real y know what I’m writing. Call this an

  elegy, a testament, an exorcism.

  I’m not in any hurry to let you know what I’m feeling.

  Wick says, “On YouTube you can talk to the dead.”

  I discover the inner parts of The Facility. The sanctum

  sanctorum.

  The penetralia.

  My roommate was always trying to commit suicide. I’d come

  back from class—and there he’d be hanging around. Sorry. Bad joke.

  Dear Zach,

  Here are some things I wish we had talked about:

  1.

  2.

  3.

  I discover the inner space of The Facility: the Qumran Cave,

  the Nectary.

  | 49 |

  You can always tell the ones who’ve been out to the gazebo because when they come back in The Facility they have all these beestings.

  The secret space is behind the elevator door. People come in

  with passes stuck to their lapels. The door opens and U comes in as if she has been living behind that door for weeks.

  Dear Zach,

  How are your plans going for your digital afterlife?

  I wish you hadn’t died.

  | 50 |

  THANK-YOU NOTE FROM A MANNEQUIN

  I was raised on a mannequin farm

  where everyone seemed kind of real.

  Convulsively, the road erodes beneath

  us. Once I played a piano on top

  of a dump. I used to send out thank-you

  notes after a) sex b) therapy c) recitals.

  If you have Koro Syndrome, you believe

  your penis has been stolen. Thank you.

  The hebephrenic laughs her heart off.

  The great thing is mannequins

  don’t urinate.

  | 51 |

  CARIBBEAN MONK SEAL

  Wick keeps a fake diary.

  day 1: I fear I am inside a creature—and all of us are

  fed time until we are bursting.

  day 2: It’s like I’m a bird in a barbed wire cage.

  So why am I studying The Facility? The human propensity to

  discover meaning infuses life. Or so my professor says. I just want to be able to see things—differently.

  day 3: i’m looking for life at the end of the

  tunnel.

  day 4: i must mean light?

  We are so obsessed with our psychological world we forget the world we are losing.

  P. A. Trick says we are flailing. He says The Facility swallows all meaning.

  I say to U, “You don’t know anything?”

  And she says, “The difference between me and you is that one

  day in the future I will know everything.” Acolytes cryptically carry light inside things.

  Zach told me when he would read he turned into the

  | 52 |

  characters he was reading about—and this is why he didn’t read the bible. “Hamlet. Gregor Samsa.

  Emma Bovary. Quentin Compson. But no biblical characters.”

  day 5: I have a dream where Rudolf Steiner talks

  about the unconscious wisdom of the hive.

  I tell U, “Here are some things I do:”

  I do a dance and deliver a soliloquy on a dead stump.

  I fish in the amygdala.

  day 6: I learn not to forge my signature on suicide

  notes.

  day 7: Light is dumped all over my inner being.

  day 8: I am reading John Wheeler's theory about a

  participatory universe.

  day 9: I am starting to sleep with monsters. I am

  starving to sleep with monsters.

  day 10: I write my fake diary.

  | 53 |

  A SORCERESS IN THE CRAZY PLACE

  Even among the tantalizingly elliptical,

  I remain in the grip of forgetfulness.

  Honey or pus. I’m never really sure

  which I’m addicted to.

  Still, I keep telling myself: Don’t be

  afraid. We are all part of a shaken-up

  world. I belong to a tribe that believes in

  desire. We are all part of a shake-down

  world. I belong to a tribe that believes it

  has disappeared. And all the while the

  bees teach us to dance.

  | 54 |

  CASPIAN TIGER

  We are everyone. And each of our jobs is to make people think we aren’t all of us—but of course that is not true. So, we become fearful of our intimate connections with everything around us—

  and then we start building walls out of our own identities.

  Wick says she needs to have a conversation with the others

  within.

  “Don’t be one of those people who leave their souls behind

  the walls of The Facility,” says U. U tells me about the places that propagate people behind their walls. St. Remy grows Van Gogh; Nietzsche talks to God in Basel; and Nijinsky spin-dances with angels in Switzerland’s Bellevue.

  Ezra Pound wobbles on the holy ground of St. Elizabeth’s. Al-

  len Ginsberg first hears the howl in his mother’s room in the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center. Frederick Law Olmsted designs the grounds at the McLean Hospital where he eventually becomes a patient—and where Sylvia Plath closes her eyes and the world drops dead. While Robert Lowell is in Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Anne Sexton listens to God’s brown goodbye voice on the Bedlam lawn.

  I think they are all members of the Extinct Animal Club—

  and U is the President.

  Stone’s dreams are weird. When the Box gets filled, I start another one.

  | 55 |

  I sit in front of him—confused by his apparitional presence.

  I step into fog.

  The Facility is dedicated to taking us out or taking us in. The Facility is a Ful-filiament Center—stuffed with plastic gratitude and scratchy light. It is a hyperobject—a twenty-eight-dimensional knot that we are inside entangled in string and dangly theory.

  P. A. Trick says, “I am in the miracle business. We put our

  loves together the way someone might write a book.” Trick is in the library.

  The Facility is a hive with a hive brain and a leader with bor-derline personality disorder. The workers are involved in the production of Einstein umbrellas that require a gnostic formula to open.

  Wick says, “I used to want to have sex with a firefly.” My problem was that I had too little sex.

  Wick says everything I thought I made up turned out to be

  real. And vice versa.

  I write eulogies for the living with a relentless receptivity and soulfulness. My occupation should have been a fake-sex choreog-rapher for TV. Move a little to the right, I’d advise.

  That’s not the way it’s done, I’d admonish. My problem was

  that I had too much sex—granted it was fake–TV sex. I discover a different kind of gravity. A special kind of grace.

  Wick shows me a book, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickin-

  son. “Really? Where did you find it?”

  “In the library.” “You mean with the twenty self-help books

  and a dictionary? Seems crazy.” She tells me in a former life, she used to be Emily Dickinson. I ask her if she believes in reincarna-tion, and she says, “No, but just because I don’t believe in something, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  | 56 |

  I ask U where she learned all that stuff about mental hospitals.

  “Zach,” she answers.

  | 57 |

  MY FATHER USED TO BURN DOWN

  THE HOUSE REGULARLY

  People came with ladders and leaned

  them against the burning windows;

  some came with hacksaws

  to cut through the candles.

  America is on fire.

  Pica is compulsion to eat nonnutritive

  materials—like chalk or dirt or soap.

  Like the fire inside America.

  I want to eat the apocalypse.

  Sleep sews my soul inside a sack.

  The clock sucks up the past around it.

  The next thing to happen wonders why

  it didn’t happen earlier.

  | 58 |

  SOCORRO DOVE

  If you have Cotard’s syndrome, you believe you are already

  dead. Death arrives in a bowler hat—a nice-enough chap with a pack of cards and an elegant invitation.

  I have learned that everything has a memory. The train first

  arrives in the suitcase. Sinkholes are the way the earth has of swallowing itself up—the dirt creating its own black hole.

  Wick grew up in a town where there were more churches than

  people. She says, “It is sometimes best to think of people as shadows.” I grew up in a town with more bars than people—where everyone really was a shadow.

  U says we have an unquenchable desire to be part of others—

  to peer through a microscope into the soul of a neighbor.

  U tells me she has discovered posted in The Facility’s elevator a list of experiments:

  The Milgram Experiment

  The Stanford Prison Experiment

  Missing Child Experiment

  Harlow’s Monkeys Experiment

  I Lost my Mime over Her Experiment

  Wick tells me we are part of the Gazebo Experiment, the Box

  | 59 |

  Experiment. The Hole Experiment, the One-Thousand-Suitcases Experiment.

  I peer into all the painful silent contortions of what it is to be human. P. A. Trick says, “What do you think, I’m a mime reader?”

  He is always cape-swirling; he says the part of truth he most admires is the part he has to make up. His fingers maneuver elegantly around a deck of unopened cards.

  I have come to realize the universe is no more than the size of a word. And it sits snuggly in the Dictionary in the library.

  When I look at the pictures on the walls, I see the light that is swallowed and disappears around the bodies of the Extinct Animals.

  Stone tells me there is a diagnosis—but he isn’t going to tell me. However, he does say we need to focus on apophatic vectors of energy.

  Wick takes me behind the TV in the Ghost Lounge. She

  takes me inside the hole. I look around. “What are all these boxes?”

  I ask. “One thousand suitcases,” she says.

  | 60 |

  A REAL DANCER

  A real dancer dances until her legs

  break. Unless you kill the monster,

  you become the monster—

  but then in killing the monster,

  of course, you become . . . never mind.

  I carry a bag of bones, a bag of souls, a

  bag of words while I watch a bird darkly

  scissoring its way through the sky.

  And, of course, the goddess

  who is protected by birds has seen a lot

  of homes fall into the ocean.

  The real dancer dances until her feet

  catch fire, until her ankles snap,

  until her heart bursts.

  | 61 |

  PART III

 

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