Bug
I took a break from tending my father, who was tending his heart, to meander around Indiana searching for B. That neck of the woods, pretty much woodless, beckons. Its expanse invites me, its infinite regression of the horizon, its pulled focus pulling me deeper into depth and distance. I get restless after I travel so far to return home. My parents have come to expect it. Tank up a car. I bug out. I never know what I'll find when I don't even know what I am looking for. There isn't much to find.
Here I was going to try to do something with the seventeenyear cicada hatches. Picture myself driving through the hatch as I did one year a few years ago.
Here, I was going to force a connection with their spent shells scaling the tulip poplars and golden rain trees in New Harmony and me tooling through their sawing music, encased in my own carapace.
A friend writes that this last summer the Midwest was plagued with lady beetles blooming when the aphids they feed on bloomed. When the soybeans were cut and the aphid population crashed, the predators moved indoors. "Still in the corners of most rooms in our house," he writes, "you can see them masquerading as innocent specks, trying to hole up here all winter." Innocent specks. In "Order of Insects," Gass's narrator also contemplates the insects that appear in her home, gradually falling in love with the infestation. There is here in Indiana an abundance of almost nothings, no-see-ems, gnats, and midges. An abundance of almost nothing. This is plane geometry. The infinite number of points in a finite space.
Business
"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" ends with "Business." It is about Christmas in the town of B. The narrator is alone, outside, downtown, listening to barely audible carols being broadcast to set a festive and, it is hoped, profitable mood. I am not sure anymore of how places inform or deflect us.
I sailed to B. again and drifted down the streets, mildly interested by what was happening in each neat house-what recovery, what quiet desperation, what stories were being recounted, what lives lived. But it is more the wrack and spindrift that draws my attention now. It isn't seas so much I ply but their edges. Indiana is an ocean of backwater. It is the vast and empty shingle where everything I can imagine washes up, the beach I comb alone. I got out of the car in Brookston and loitered on the corner downtown where I could picture Gass long ago loitering. Listen: the muffled thuds, the heartbeat of the town. There, the breaking waves of traffic rushing disguised the undertow of silence. My ear was cocked. Blood pulsed through my body. I heard that, too. Cars beat on a tack, heading south, heading north, heading east, heading west. I heard the wind. In the trees. I heard it scour the dust in the gutters, rattle a tin sign. I was. I am. Be. I stood there, as I lost the light, thought of home, and waited for the wind to come about.
