A VILLAGE
“Who dreamed us here?“ the inhabitants of this village ask in their dreams. They try, upon waking, to renegotiate the covenants inherited from their ancestors — the dazzling hue of their houses, the shifting distribution of their neighborhoods. Their undreamed dreams accumulate, cloud the black, black night with sparks of color. They forget to ask. They ask. They forget they've asked. They ask. Who smudged out the road that was never there? Who erased the sense of a sense of direction? They dream: “Who dreamed us here?“ “Did you?“ they ask. “Did you?“
A RESORT
Spring finds hundreds gathered here to stand for something else. The participants remember to observe, and the observers remember to participate! Everyone remembers to remember! A lock of hair becomes a copse of trees; a fingernail turns into a placid lake. At the cocktail parties, you are encouraged to sample canapés of your own fingers but forget, until you remember, you have no way of picking up your own finger! And later, they unfold the map! Its scale is 1:1! It corresponds exactly and fits like skin! It is your skin!
Four Calling Birds
“Calling birds“ refers to colly, or collie, birds. “Colly“ or “collie“ means “black.“ It comes from an older English word for coal. “Colly bird“ is the European blackbird. Common in parks and cities in Europe, it looks like a dusky version of its cousin, the American robin. Both belong to the thrush family.
VEERY
The next time they talked on the phone, she told him she had just started to come when she heard her daughter return home downstairs and call out to her. Falling from the bed, she ran across the room to close the door. As she ran, the orgasm caught up with her, the blood rushing from her head, her legs turning spongy, compressing beneath her. When she came, he knew, she often expelled a multi-syllabic, “Fuck,“ and he could hear, though it was distant and hollow with echo (in her haste she hadn't had time to disconnect), the first fricative transmute to a plosive burst of greeting, a schwa-y “Whah,“ closer to the first notes of her daughter's name. The next time they talked, she would tell him how intense it was to be moving through the spasm, all inertia, entropic, irresistible, spilling as she spilled toward the door, her momentum carrying herself and the door forward to a slamming slam he could hear clearly. She said it was like a cartoon, the motion so suddenly staunched, her writhing, her worming. Her back turned to the door, she slid slowly to the floor with the squeak of naked skin on enamel paint, one hand fumbling behind her head for the lock's knob while the other, between her melting legs, tugged at herself, plucked out the minor key tufts of sensation as she settled bare-assed, panting. In fact, the next time they were on the phone, the retelling of this last time was enough to take her over the edge again, the conjuring up of the sprint across the room, the throbbing pulses racing through her racing legs, turning the ground beneath her viscous. “Fuck,“ she said distinctly in his ear. What he did not tell her about that previous time (the time she left the phone connected on the bed to rush to the door, coming while she ran) was that he continued to listen over the distance, hearing the padding feet and the grunting climax and the call and the slamming door and the puckered squeak of her skin on the door. She had been using a vibrator, one that plugged in, and it continued to hum, the sound dampened by the bedclothes. It nested near the phone, creating a humid occluded silence, overdubbing the static hiss sparking off the wire. He too had been about to come when he heard her hear her daughter's voice and start her stumble for the door. Had he come, he wouldn't have uttered a sound, intent, instead, on listening to hear the “Fuck“ slip out of her and positioning his release beneath hers, emitting a kind of melted sigh for her hard consonance to ride on. Now that she was gone, he slowed his stroking and continued to listen closely. There was a window open. It was late spring there, and he swore he could hear the percolating silence of the warming air as it infiltrated the mesh of wire screen near her bed. He lived miles to the south where the spring had long ago turned torrid, his room closed up and dark. He rolled onto his side, insulating his ear away from his other ear, encasing it with the pillow that filtered the bass line purr of the whole-house AC cycling outside. He heard her then miles away talking with her daughter through the door, the door acting as a kind of resonator, transmitting the mundane news that she'd been napping, asking for a moment to get dressed. The vibrator went dead. She unplugged it and pulled it to her, a clatter hitting the floor, the scrape of it as she coiled the cord, the vibrator's hard plastic case stuttering across the sisal rug. He heard drawers of various timbres slide in and out, the little rattle of the swivel pulls against the plates. The jittery knickknacks disturbed in the haste. He heard her, he swears, dressing, her jeans on first, standing, the flat stomps as she skipped twice to balance, the stereo tramp of both feet finding the floor as she pulled up the pants. He listened for the zipper and heard it. Then the soft whisper as she rolled a T-shirt onto her arms followed by that stopped — up submerged sound as her hair, silk, slid through the abraded collar. She walked flat-footed to the door, brushing out her hair as she shuffled, the pitch changing as she stopped, then the sweep of all that hair over the top to brush from behind and below, currying the muffled mass of it back up over her bent bobbing head. And then he heard her leave: the volume of her diminished in his ear, the distant depleted report of her, calling her daughter's name, descending as she descended the stairs. The silence settled out heavier than air. He pressed the phone closer to his ear as if to inject his own hushed self into the recently disturbed acoustic there, to detect any sonic smidgeon left in the mix. Her swallowing. A footfall. Those eyes blinking. He boosted the gain of his signal, attempting to catch her shallow breath breathing. Instead, all he heard in the stillness, spilling in from the open window, was a birdsong, a slurred series of downward inflected quarter notes. Each note tripped progressively lower in pitch, spiraled, cascading down a scale. It began again with a simple, non-inflected cheep, ended with a rolling trill. It was one of the thrushes. The hermit or the robin. He had told her at the beginning of the call that all the flocking robins in his neck of the woods had disappeared a few days before. I am sending them your way, he had told her as they began. A kind of foreplay, he had thought, releasing songbirds north to her along with the heat, the seasons turning, his own sprightly combination of suggestion. There it was again, a long lowering run, arranging itself into a fragment, a phrase, an adjectival clause that modifies a person, place, or thing, an intensifier that amplifies. Very. That sounds like very. Very. Very like very.
MOCKINGBIRD
Their answering machines matched, and they started leaving messages for each other. Beige plastic boxes with a keyboard of buttons — play, fast-forward, erase, rewind. The tape spooled in a transparent cassette stored in a compartment inside. You could see the sprockets turning in the cassette as you listened to it play through a clear plastic window in the lid. Nested in the buttons, a red LED lit up a number indicting the number of calls. Depressing play released the message into the room through the low fidelity speaker wired in such a way as to make everything sound melancholy. They tried to keep each other's tape filled with the magnetic imitations of each other's voice. He would come home to find the machine's number glowing, 21, say, or 25, 22 messages only to find each one of the messages another piece of one long call from her, the machine starting, then cutting her off after a proscribed interval. Each new message contained another message about the message left just before, the procedures she endured to redial and connect, the transitional phrases of “where was I“ and “Oh, yes“ linking all the calls together in the end, a long self-conscious apology for taking up all the tape with the series of calls and indicating that this was a very long and convoluted way to say something she should be able to say simply — that she loved him. She loved him. He was fond of leaving one long message on her machine. Each machine had a setting that allowed for varying the duration of the machine's patience. He expected that he would have to leave a long message, and so he spoke extemporaneously though sometimes from notes and at length about his day, and at every transition point, he linked his mundane and ordinary activities with the phrase, “and I thought of you when…“ or “that made me think of you…“ or “I told myself to remember to tell her.“ And then he would tell her, tell her the structure of his thinking as he thought, of his remembering as he remembered it. Both machines, doling out their seconds, initiated and terminated the time with a nasal beep, flattened bleat, the sound of which programmed itself, a concussion, into each of them. They dreamed of the beep, found that in the messages they would sometimes beep themselves, a charm to ward off the inevitable, rapidly approaching real beep. The sounding of it, the anticipatory silence before it, and the sound itself, and the other silent silence after, its punctuation. They started and stopped on the cue. On cue they entered the noisy space of their connection, and on cue they became again disembodied, distant, silent. They liked the old machines for the mechanical magic they conjured; playing the message, each other's voice filled the room, evoked the other in three wraithlike dimensions that made the voices seem almost corporeal, an actual body solidifying around the skeleton of vibrating air. Each could be in each other's next room, calling down the hallway around the corner. As time passed, the messages began to be more complicated, as each of them attempted to pack the other's tape with more and more information. It started when one of them played a song in the background. A news report on the radio followed, a commercial on television picked up inadvertently. The sound from the street below, the dishwasher turning on, washed over the string of words strung on the spooling, the unspooling tape. Soon, it occurred to both of them that they could play back to each other each other's messages to the other. There, on the answering machine, was the new message and underneath it, in the background, the previous recorded message of the now listener's voice leaving a message. The machine recorded the message of the improvised duet of person and the person in the machine speaking in waffled mono that mimicked a stereo track, leaving a message and at the same time responding to a message that had been left. Those layers now recorded were then played when the next call was made. And the next message added another layer of past messages to the mix. More and more silent spaces on the tape filled with words, words turning to syllables turning to diphthongs and ligatures turning finally into a deep layered mist, bits of alphabets, static murmuring, incomprehensible mass, but strangely intimate, ancient, prehistoric, preverbal. The acoustic of amniotic fluid. Warbles, squeaks, smeared thumps. It was a repertoire of sounds they stole from each other and then gave back as baroque, rococo, atonal fugues. All of the noise became a foil to the final track they applied, recording each other's orgasms over and over again, the wall of auditory stimulus building up from a triggering beep, each other's name burbled up as a downbeat, beating, the gulped hiccupping of breath backbeating, all percussion, cussing counter punctually, attempting to fill in every iota of silence with any un-silent utterance, collapsing all the space between them into the compact sonic puck of the solid absence that mocks and mocks and mocks and mocks them both. The sound then turned liquid, sizzled, finally, like rain, like a tidal rush, a sound your own blood makes in your own ear when you hear it, when you hear it when you listen for it.