André Breton or Guy Davenport.
They were always saying such outlandish things.
Come visit me, Grannam says with greater and greater frequency.
Her voice sounding frayed.
Conspicuously distant, like she is speaking in the general direction of a receiver lying on a table across the room.
It is difficult to determine whether the problem is the cordless or something more alarming.
Have you changed your batteries recently? you ask her on the other line.
What?
Your phone. Have you changed the batteries in your phone?
I can’t hear you, sweetheart.
The batteries. Did you replace. The batteries?
You’re breaking up, dear.
Soon, Andi assures her. We’ll be visiting soon.
Gen can’t wait to meet her great-grandmother, you add.
What?
Genia. Wants. To meet you.
Grannam replies with a fractaled phrase that sounds something like oughter… ope… oon.
Hello? Andi says.
We can’t hear you, you say.
Hello? says Andi, louder. Hello? HELLO?
You’ve got! To change! Your batteries!
Hello? HELLO? HELLO?… Hello…?
In the center of the modest hygienic mall on the western edge of town rises a modest brown-brick fountain.
Every Wednesday Andi and you sit on the benches projecting from its sides and take notes on ambient children.
This sparkling place reminding you of your own childhood after your return from Venezuela.
Malls had just begun to be roofed over then, to move from the outside to the inside, to thrill in their hermetically sealed interiority without climate, temporality, a sense of being anywhere in particular.
You came to consciousness in a jungle-compound, but you grew up among Radio Shacks and Sam Goodies and cheap restaurants that still connoted urban diners instead of suburban franchises.
When times were bad, people felt compelled to wander such fluorescence.
When times were bad or when times were good.
Increasingly suspicious of the natural, which to them seemed increasingly unnatural, they flocked to the unnatural, which to them seemed increasingly natural.
Now they demand an elevated quality of recycled air, the high-frequency whine of security apparatuses at work, the sensation of muffled enclosure, outdoor food courts that are really indoor food courts, safety, skating rinks, muzak, safety.
Not so much to buy anything as to exist in the perpetual condition of ready-to-buyness.
The species being nothing if not adaptable.
Nothing if not durable.
The mysteries of the tribe.
Water trickling at your backs like a leaky bathtub faucet, Andi and you are attentive not to catch the children’s glances, not to draw consideration from their parents.
It is easy, once you get the hang of it.
Andi opens the white paper bag of chocolate-covered marzipans you bought on your way in, extracts a glistening dark-brown nugget, sniffs, and nibbles at it like a squirrel at a nut.
Androgynous elderly couples in jogging suits walking laps.
Teens lounging in orange-and-green-haired clusters at plastic café tables, eating carbs and cholesterol and appraising passersby with arch detachment.
If the history of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the present were a 100-meter-long line, someone once pointed out, then all of human history would occupy less than the width of a single human hair at the very, very end.
Discomposed moms and pops carrying, leading, following, dragging, and pushing their tots towards an hour or two of distraction in this well-lit district.
Durable perhaps being too strong a word.
Some children being handheld.
Some leashed.
Some borne like sacks of beets on their parents’ backs.
Some stumble-running in a perpetual graceless fall forward until their toes catch and down they spraddle, diving for home plate.
The sun putting out more energy in one second than humankind has put out since the beginning of time.
Note the moment of impact, Andi says offhandedly, nibbling squirrel-like. The puzzled stutter between the bonk and the evaluation of the bonk…
You dip into the white bag, quarrying for a large specimen.
A vole-faced boy in black shorts and white socks and red sneakers and a navy-blue Seattle Seahawks t-shirt.
The calculation of the pain’s weight, the surreptitious consideration of the environment, the cerebration of the risks versus benefits of raising Cain.
The sun supposedly putting out more energy in one second than humankind has put out since the beginning of time.
These are wonderful, you comment about the candies.
So moist you don’t want to speak because you’re afraid you’ll waste several molecules of taste.
The face flushes a microsecond before the mouth opens.
The mouth opens a microsecond before the eyes fill with tears.
The eyes fill with tears a microsecond before the vocalization.
Andi snaps the last umber-and-beige halfmoon of marzipan between her lips, sucks her thumb clean, and opens her journal.
She composes in loopish schoolgirl cursive.
The twos are terrible, she says after a minute, true, but so are the threes, the fours, and the fives.
Every so often one child biting another child for no reason.
Some screaming for their television sets every moment they are here and then screaming to stay put because they realize they are just about to return home.
When they fall, their faces become sloppy expressionist renderings by Edvard Munch.
Then their sisters or brothers execute one of several responses.
Either they join in as an act of filial solidarity or they stare down at their siblings as if staring down at a less-advanced species in distress or, seeing their sibling done in, they pester, noogie, pinch, hairpull, and weegie them, lightly at first, in exploratory tauntings, then harder, till mom or dad finally believes the evidence of his or her senses and moves forward to break up the rapidly escalating ground war.
Some attempting to insert crayons up their nostrils.
If you ever do that again, their parents shout.
Adaptable perhaps being an overstatement.
Wait till your dad finds out. Your mom. Your uncle. Your aunt.
You can shriek from now till doomsday. You’re not getting the X. The Y. The Z.
You’re not getting the T.
Durable and adaptable both.
Don’t touch. Stand up. Sit down. Be good. Be quiet. Stay still. Walk faster. Slow down. Grow up.
For their own good, of course.
Some chubby-cheeked children in rabbit suits simply sitting on the floor, legs spread, tall ears drooping, weeping.
For their own good, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying.
When babies turn one, they begin to look where grownups point, suddenly grasping the fact that at least two minds inhabit the world and can share the same intention.
How?
You can’t choose your parents, you announce.
You can’t choose your parents and you can’t choose your children.
Some rocking back and forth in their mothers’ arms in existential despair.
No bike. No sled. No ball. No doll. No hope.
Some surveying their frame of reference in numbed out-of-control stupefaction, then slipping asleep fast as they can.
Among them, you make out Gen.
You make out a flickering like the red-eye-reducing flash mode and now you make out your daughter waddle-walking in a frilly pink tutu, blue eyes wide with information, honey-blond hair a-tangle, her fist in mommy’s.