Vultures and Heretics

(Here’s a recent essay, a short break before the third chapters of both books, the as-yet untitled manuscript and the tentatively-titled Hauntingly Familial.)

Vultures and Heretics

We’re living in the ruins. That’s a fancy way to say it. The construction zone, the destruction zone, whatever it is, it’s all hammers and grinding sounds, and I’m trying to order new glasses when I can’t really see out of the current ones. The website loads slowly, maybe because I’ve “tried on” about twenty pairs at this point. I remember this process being a lot more fun when I was a kid, or at least when I used to buy frames in New York at Selima and that beautiful man would say, “darling, I know you want a change, but you must accept that your face was made for cat-eye.”

Tony is downstairs watching some segment of the least exciting NCAA tournament in my memory. At this point we should fill the brackets with the recruiting budget data and be done. He’s singing, though, a high, pretty song. I recognize it eventually as the echoic background line from “Nicotine and Gravy.” Midnight Vultures has always been my favorite Beck album, and since we’ve been back from the 80s cruise, it’s worked as a strong antidote. “Nicotine and Gravy,” though, feels especially current, a call made from 2025 back to 1999, both slinky and ominous, a black cat of a song.

I’ll be your chauffer on a midnight drive. It takes a miracle just to survive.

We didn’t talk, Tony and me, about the suicide on the ship. We all tried not to talk about it at all, the pathos of dying on the 80s cruise too acute. Even the goths are whimsical on the cruise, costumed up and writhing at 2 am, sipping Mango Tangos and singing along, absent any belief that our Cities do in fact Lie in Dust. No, we’re in a Caribbean dream this whole time, rocked by no actual hurricanes, safely out of season. There’s a tacit agreement that we don’t talk about land matters. There are no politics. Nobody has a job. There is endless soft-serve by the pool, and the guy from Information Society is lodged in a deep conversation about family and Johnny Cash with my mother. Misery is postponed. Accountability is delayed. I could tell myself that Tony needed this break, and so did Mom, but I needed it, too. No, I wanted to forget everything. And I felt awful about that.

And now we’re back at home, and the sound of tile saws and crashing defeats my earbuds. It’s not a fair fight; I keep forgetting to hit play. Every minuscule decision is overwhelming. These playlists from months ago, I don’t even remember being that person. I have three or four work offers that came in while I was away. Do I want to do this? It’s a simple question. What assets will I bring to this project? An overwhelming desire to take cover. Please assess your comfort level with the following skills: at present, I am uncomfortable assessing my immediate surroundings. I am safer than most people today, but I’m frozen in terror. I can’t turn the page. There really is a monster at the end of this book. Of every book.

Buried animals call your name. You keep on sleeping through the poignant rain.

I’d avoided the news since our vacation ended up on TMZ. I’m more than willing to continue to avoid it, and I know there are some valid reasons. I know they’re trying to exhaust us through the continuous threat of chaos and deprivation. They know not everybody can come in person to the social security offices, you know, the ones that haven’t closed already. Wait, who is detained now? Comply, but document. The agency says they currently do not expect any reduction in services. But we will be notified. I don’t know. It sort of feels mandatory to have at least some idea of what’s going on. Where do I stop today? At whose humiliation or peril? How current is your passport? Did you find your transport? Astronauts are stranded. You’re already branded.

I think we’re going crazy. Things don’t even faze me.

It’s not that my dreams are haunted by a loved one. It’s that they are haunted by each and every one of them, sometimes in the same dream. I don’t know what they’re trying to tell me. Are they happy they’re not here for this? Are they consoling me or kicking me into action? I’m not even one of the zodiac signs ostensibly affected by the eclipse. (Peace be with you, Cancers, I guess.) But maybe it’s because I’ve chosen this particular time to delete most of my apps, to take days off social media, to go back to things I loved before I was plugged in all the time. On the ship it was easier, and I crawled into a mercifully detailed George Eliot biography. All but my feet in the shadows, I ended up with a needless and painful sunburn after reading her out of the early years of Puritan self-recrimination. By her 20s, Maryann would have agreed with Sheila E, that we all want a love bizarre. But I paid when I had to put on shoes later. Oliver’s army is here to stay. And back on land, there are too many other voices, Maryann.

I’ll do your laundry, massage your soul. I’ll turn you over to the highway patrol.

I don’t mean to make it sound so bad, Maryann. At least in my case, the hammering is going to stop at some point and I’m going to clean up all the dust and things will be improved. That’s a fact. I don’t have to fret over it. It’s all going to get fixed, with reasonable certainty. My family, we are lucky. Not everybody is, though, and it’s a task now, watching to see where the trouble will come. Tony’s friends? People I know who have green cards, student visas? It’s not the time, I’m told, to acquire new skills or to try to work outside your area of expertise. So I keep on, hoping I can offer a bit of a distraction here and there. Maryann’s first widely known work was a critical examination of the life of Jesus, and it got her labeled a heretic, coughed up out of the gaping maw of Hell. Maryann, I am not trying hard enough. This crossword puzzle isn’t helping anybody.

I can’t read or write at home, so I go out, and my barista gives me the blue cup again because he knows I take it as an omen every time. “I appreciate you,” he says when he sets it down. Today he turns his head to the side. “So, how many Nobel prizes do you have now?” We laugh. I’ve been here extra times this week, he notes. “There’s not enough caffeine in the world,” I say. There’s not enough for me to get Maryann all the way to London.

While I’m entering this prescription for my new glasses, I realize something. For the last year and a half, one side of my glasses has had only part of the correction—my doctor hadn’t filled out one side of the prescription. There’s a tangible reason the world has looked demonstrably half-hearted. I can’t decide if this is a disaster or a miracle. I choose a pair of black cat eye glasses. Lucky.

I don’t want to die tonight. I don’t want to die tonight.

He doesn’t know the words and so he doesn’t sing the words, only a sweet da-dadada-daa-dada loop. Almost like a Sanskrit prayer at this distance. I pray with him from upstairs, where he doesn’t hear me. I can hear Louisville losing to Creighton. It’s halftime. Keatts is fired. Integrity is out of style. It’s all business now. Education: business. Sports: business. Religion: business. Art: business. Humanity: business.

And business. Well, it’s bad, of course. Maybe it’s a good idea to continue seeing everything through one eye. Maybe that’s all anybody can reasonably handle right now, squinting through our fingers at the bad parts of a horror movie. Maybe I want to unlearn some words, too. I know I want to forget it was possible to dance at midnight in the middle of the ocean while someone fell from the world. I would like to forget the circles of light I saw sweeping across the water that night. But when I close my eyes, I see them everywhere, those spotlights casting across and back, trying so hard to catch signs of life out there in the bottomless dark but coming up endlessly empty.