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Night X is a novel in progress that I began working on it in my sleep in 1995. It is a facetious narrative — one facet of which is autobiographical, while others are psuedo-autobiographical — drawing upon strucural, historical and thematic elements from the Thousand Nights and One Night, the tenth chapter of The Arabian Nights, The Anatomy of Melancholy, my childhood and adolescence in Los Angeles and the post-industrial landscapes of the American rust-belt. Below is an excerpt:
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7x Attack graces the femur under pressure to blade arm swung I hardly feel, so don’t wind down just yet, xoxoxoxo to there the dilated chamber I grew to know the walls with the kisses of broken lips and bloodied eyes. The static pulse through a concealed life, your sense of time coagulates no sleep and choking on gathered dust. Waking up to blows from unlikely foes, help me I miss him, I preordain his fists and grant him entrance to my veins by shaking and tearing at his silk invitingly. Maybe the angle of his eyes was telltale portraiture, but the heraldic flash gave my caretakers their cherished blindness, his knuckles on the deep marine cloth that burned hot on my collarbones. Well I don’t care if the sun is dead, only try to work up the nerve to ask him to turn the lights on the next time he holds my mouth shut I tongue the word. The curtain draws open and I dissolve.
8x I was stolenforgotten by them, a new life only a substitute for one deemed unfit. I am some frayed daughter, as if torn from death at birth. If paint blued in the welding process, the result would be the color of the front door connecting the house to the limitless fields of cement surrounding. So much time known to me as mere booklearned history and the same cracks infested the skin of my grandmother as the pillars of our ruined structure. Too tired to explore this fissured landscape were my legs still bruised and conspirators in the growing attention paid me by the opposite sex more antithetical than opposite. The boys of this dying suburb were unlike any I’d seen and appeared parasitic, spawned in the ubiquitous pools of spent petroleum the color of their hair and menacing antennae. I kept a distance and only walked on streets with familiar names; I knew a little of this place from the televised aquatic sport competitions I had been fascinated and lullabied with in my early youth, never visited my grandmother since she too had been transplanted by financial ruin it’s true yet transplanted she was nonetheless. This alienation shared. I was forced to sleep in the hallway for the first few weeks which unofficially belonged to the heathen geckoes as no one could stand the room in which my grandmother slept; she’d smoked so many hand rolled cigarettes in her slowing life that she continued to exhale smoke as she slept, filling the room with a fogginess pierced by the brown morning flood she attributed to her failing eyesight — her crystalline humor in fact preserved. Out of the all night conversations with her dead husband I heard but did not understand through her plywood door she awoke swearing to herself that only as a ghost could she stand him and lit the perfect white cylinder she had rolled and placed on her ancient dresser as the final act of each identical day. The foundation creaked under her bare feet and cracks multiplied the ramifications of her familial isolation. I couldn’t have felt more like a grave robber in that house; fortunately tombs offer a silence lacking on profaned earth. The bleeding, violation spurred, was replaced seamlessly with the first signs of my womb’s nascent productivity. Both were unacknowledged by the old woman. She’d moved into that house abandoned both. She had not picked the paint or wallpapers yet the rancid, mildewed atmosphere originated in her complex grimace. Overabundance of minutes in each hour constricted my healing body, suturing young and old. She spoke of beauty and potential social flowering between inhalations and exhalations of smoke, depicting my true despair in encaustic. I looked the spitting image of my mother apparently, despite what I remembered to be my mother’s entirely unique jutting temples. 9x Vacant lot glare on my unadorned eyelids and painful memory of comfortable ignorance piercing open hearted again as the brachiocephalic trunks sprouted jaundiced leaves falling in bandages and cauterized moments before me the windows of taxidermists and hardware scrapings phenomenal only at first. A phone call or two from you would’ve been nice; instead the reservoir of disorganized pages stowed in my still unpacked luggage was my only record of being there at all. Although I suppose my sweat stained the faded burgundy leather seats of her 1968 Cadillac, falling down wind behind her nicotine addiction and my need to feel the movement of air in my awkward plumage. Her Navajo barrette produced for my scopophilia the most elaborate spectacles of reflected light on the torn canopy of the caddy; the bobbing of her head, the bumps in the road, the sun and my eyes writing the notes to some unrealizable film score. I’ve always thought I look the most attractive in rearview mirrors, juxtaposed with speedily receding trails of buildings and telephone wires. We go to the drugstore, the Laundromat, to church sometimes. I like the congregation here: they seem to believe they are bettering themselves, each other, their angeleyed children. We sing together: I mouth the words sometimes letting out an uncomfortable amen. We sit on the most eroded bench: I stare at the Lucite floor tiles looking up to touch imaginatively the gilded altar, the pallid crucifixion flesh. I often share the distracted gaze of the altar boys, more confused to be involved than I. They seem sweeter than the brackish adolescents that ride two on a bicycle around my house at night, spitting at each other and killing dogs. They seem stupider. They must be transplanted as well; they must wash the blood off their thighs as I do under streams of fluoridated water. I pressure them ocularly to confess. 10x The lyrical heat breaking my promises and windows trailing down my windpipe, my spoken hallway in the dream I would have were I asleep right now. Let’s us slip out the sheath onto the cold stone only so far as my hand can still touch the woven wall to trace the source of my isolation with the comfort of the city’s burnt husk underfoot. Why do they all sleep while I am all awake? Their lives toxic to mine and the inverse? Only through these paradoxical eyes, dependent upon the other’s closure for independence. There are too many cracks in the ground for their sleep to remain intact for long. It is unclear to me if the night wind is infecting or suturing these wounds; my intrepid legs move too fast to investigate the erosion; I am out of step with the weathering. I will take care to never crush the insects who, in their half-timed, miniature crawl carry out the investigations my humanity will never the time allow. And for their hard work they are given room and board in the silver stable of moonlight. Eventually she notices my blackened feet, or at least the threats they pose; I have allowed the incorporation of the evaporating asphalt into my callused feet as a peace offering to the solitude in which I’ve begun circling the house each night. The kids around here have broken many of my windows. I wouldn’t be surprised if you picked up an overlooked shard or two. I stay silent as I raise in muted triumph my polluted toes, displaying for my grandmother the inorganic durability the asphalt has afforded them. She sees a little girl’s playful gymnastics. Having long ago retreated into this forgotten house like a crustacean, she would hardly accept the idea of the degraded exterior landscape changing a thing she knows has already been too much changed for the worse. In acquiescence I offer her the command of my other, unsoiled two limbs. I would very much like for you to teach me how to paint, grandma. I have nothing to do with my hands. She strains hard to surface a blush she hasn’t used in years, filling her cheeks with blood newer than my own. I don’t really do that anymore. My hands tremble too much. She watches her hands tremble on cue. Besides, you will be in school again soon, and I’m certain they must have classes for that now. That’s different, grandma. She folds her dress up around her hands unmistakably. She is certain that the boxful of cobalts, crimsons and siennas she locked away when her husband died all dried up and reverted to dust long ago. She avoids my saturated skin. I want to learn how you painted my hair so black and my bones so white and my heart so red. I want you to give me control over the hue and contrast of my vision, and how do they make mirrors look like mirrors anyway? 11x The entire city occupied a thin sediment of wet atmosphere eternally sliding between the concrete crust and cloud cover. From underneath, the landscape was opaque, an obstructional support to darkness; from above, this intermediary reflects, providing a mirror for our history. It has been said that the light that delivers our reflections to our vision is a function of the time we experience, and that time is a function of our existence. This is the inversion indicative of self-examination. From below, I direct a consort of breezes cooled by the depth of the water; from above, I incite a swarm of trapped heat clouds. I categorically memorize the route through the cramped and sleepy back streets of the shifting neighborhoods according to the various morning activities of the people out on the street: passed out in the gutter, walking to work, sitting half awake at their stands and carts, rummaging through garbage piles, arguing and pushing each other, smiling, spitting, yawning, eating, smoking, tending the gated gardens which are not their own. With constant speed and grace my grandmother manipulates the cracked leather wheel, to the left and left again, the blinker permanently settled in its depressed position. I am nervously tapping my feet, mixing the disparate temperatures of the sky with my wings. The dark gray tower releases the product of the boiler room buried deep beneath the surface into a tall white conveyor cloud of steam, set uncomfortably against the lighter gray of the sky. I am condensing the airborne moisture, collecting floating pools overhead. There are no buildings to obscure the Cadillac’s rotting destination, no ancient magnolias with heavily lacquered leaves and massive yellow marzipan blossoms dripping sugar from their dusty wombs, nothing but more empty and abandoned lots, fenced off to prevent the construction of transient shelter. I press a reservoir of sweat through my skin, drying out my icy throat for an anxious swallow. The boys from my asphalt fields pass by the car windows with angry expressions as my grandmother slows to a stop a few blocks from the rusty fences demarcating the campus. Around here, they resent you for having a car like this. They don’t care to know that this car is the only remnant of the lifestyle my grandmother once had but never enjoyed. I lean forward, my heavy black curls spilling like unrefined petroleum onto my knee bones as I slip my feet into the only sneakers I’ve ever owned, too small for a girl my age. An overpowering elixir of ocean air and oleander floods the ticking automobile, choking me in betrayal as I tug my striped socks, one red and one blue, to my thighs, just beneath the pleated ruffles of my uniform shifting from tan to olive in the refracted light from the sky greening with envy in preparation for my downpour. I lay my hot yellow eyes on my grandmother and see in her face the delayed recognition of what I’ve become. I feel the gaze of a dozen confused teenage boys piercing my burgundy armor. I let one drop smack the windshield as my liquid canopy begins to overflow. Her quiet blue eyes moisten, Your mother should be here to see you off, Yet my mother is present somewhere in the extreme contrast of our intersecting eyes. I shut the door and walk towards the building. I rain on the ground, the grass, the tower and the heads of my new race, waiting for the doors to open.
12x
The doors shut with regret but not locked because there is no longer anything of value here. The power is cut off at the main breaker. The last employee unceremoniously punches out after the last train departs, snowbound and passengerless from Michigan Central Station in January of 1988. In photographic memory a hand has scraped, Shame on you for letting such a beautiful building go to ruin. A thousand crazed steer stampede down Roosevelt Avenue, unanimously they turn and bursting through the doors, cascading over the stairs into the main hall. Contorting into the arcade as if lured into a net along a transcontinental current: timedarkened glass broken and bolt stripped humidors, crooked displays of debris and a disfigured “Indian”, laughing in dust. Twisting of nostrils exhale steam to condense along the yellow walls and fractured mirrors reflecting aluminum posts that once supported red and white striped barber’s chairs. The glass shatters and the Doric columns fail, long since ripped open by vandals searching for copper wire and brass fixtures in a decade and an instant. Such rotten floodgates burst with children soaking, pouring down the marble steps to trip and climb across the fallen rafter and rubble that decorates in disaster the field of protruding antlers. Always into the enormous main hall, shafts of light from perforations in the Guastavino arches twenty yards overhead thrown onto the glassy bulbs in the skulls of the fallen herd, hanging up their clothes to dry on the branches of the forest of spiraling cartilage; I peel off my layers with the crowd all naked and damp, unashamed of their flea-ridden and malnourished bodies. I drape my blouse over the face of the one I recognize from a night when I was six years old, crushed into the back of the passenger seat by the inertia of my father’s Mercury. Motherfucker, he slammed the door I saw through the window the last breath of the deer that we had killed, raising his peppery tan and white breast in a final bloodsoaked lung. I cried and watched my father try to move the body by the antlers, shouting at the disfigured hood motherfucker! And giving up, driving home, slamming the door, I heard his voice grow tired as he called the sanitation department to dispose of the remains, preserved and cold to my touch I run my hand along the spine and read, written above the doors and along the walls of this abandoned building in gleaming calcium, Remember that we believed downtown would swell to the banks! Remember December 26th 1913! Remember that the streetcars lasted here until 1938! Remember the Roman baths! Remember the women’s waiting room! Remember The Mercury Room! Seventy thousand vertebrae of deer, seven million bricks, seven thousand tons of structural steel, one hundred and twenty-five thousand cubic feet of stone, a three storied platform, an eighteen story office building that was never completed, and now countless children left here, the older ones guiding the younger ones, whispering schedules and directions, siphoning us into groups. To the east, morning pierces solid walls so you can see there once was a carriage station, and to the west, where streetcars used to arrive and depart symmetrically. My sister’s shoulder length black hair brushed against my face and my shoulder-length black hair brushed against her face as she whispered My name is Dunyazad; I am glad to meet you. I am your group leader. I have been here for three years. I ruffled my face around my nose, blinked, That’s sewage that you smell. Don’t worry; we’re going to go downstairs to the storm drain now. Then we will go to our classes. Is this your first day? I just moved here. I’m not from here. None of us are, she smiled. Her hand wrapped around mine and I followed through once impressive interiors now covered in human waste, putrid mud, ash from cooking fires, broken bottles, and always writing on the walls, Remember the Beaux Arts Classical style! Remember Warren and Wetmore! Remember Reed and Stern! Remember Grand Central Station! Remember Mexicantown! until the light ran out and we walked with the crowd beneath the oxidized sign PLATFORMS I – X deep into the subterranean shadow.
13x
Without sight she took my shoulders and kneeled me beside her as I felt the mass of shivering bodies enter the stream of diverted rain. Dunyazad pressed the freezing mud into our pores, mouths, eyes, nostrils, ears, navels, anuses, vaginas, urethras, hair, teeth, under our nails. As she worked, we felt her breath smelled like aloe comforting us into elasticity. She kissed our foreheads motherly, sisterly gave us soft cottons to dry ourselves and wear and Where are we? Down the tunnel a child’s voice Who said that? Eukarya responds, a shyness in her throat emerges as a giggle Imagine a tree in a forest in a forest. Any connected graph that does not contain cycles is a tree, and every edge of a tree is a bridge. It is customary to define a graph without any cycles (be it connected or not) as a forest. Hence, each component of a forest is a tree. Archaea, just next to my ear with a steadier, deeper chord Leonhard Euler to Giovanni Marinoni, March 13, 1736
Bacteria was silently curling her hair with the chalice of her index finger.
14x Childish lamentations in the dark infuriate the desolate bean in my head. I wake masterful, unlit and crawling. Water weathered me, the penguins evaporating from my gums in ice rivers swell just there the bells chime at anytime of day or night although it always feels like early morning when unexpectedly aroused. Echo: Remember the great tongue of the Pantheon, the heavy oculus! In the black ether a jaundiced constellation sways, expanding as my eyelids part separate from my limbs misplaced, appearing to my senses moments later, my legs unravel (yesterday I woke up outward from my stomach, and once from my neck). I’m all sore and cadavered; a grey weight in my sphincter. And then my pupils spored, I discern, a man carrying a candelabra — his Pleiades, supported by a hand-carved wooden frame illuminates a face grown pale and wormy from trogloditism. His light reflects from the molded over sign PLATFORM X. Give me your wrist, his right hand expectant displays three blackened digits holding a spindle of white thread. I show him my little wrist he ties the string around, moving down the row of risen children he garlands — he tugs, we shuffle — through the churning mire, broken glass and splintered wood cannot cut our feet, we are not tired, we are not hungry, we feel no need for water, we feel no need for laughter, we feel no need to speak until we find our seats awaiting at the end of weeks of walking in pitch black mud to finally sit and then we shall receive our lessons, enumerated in the chalkdrawn outline of the three fingers of our sunless guide upon an obsidian slate of the incomplete tower, inverted in the methane light of the sky. Sympathetically in a sea of snow, a phalanx of white leopards accompany a migratory party ascending the gleaming cornice. The dustwhite line of the evolution of language contoured his manual injury from Lord Monboddo to Maupertuis. An ornamentation of the ceiling burned the negative flesh into a chandelier of amputations, still fluttering with discernment. Recherches sur l'usage des feuilles dans les plantes, and later, Palingénésie philosophique.
15x
A history of respiratory ailments, and nonetheless a broadened chest I shuffled round the architecture, locked out to living. Handled shrapnel and scrap for trade, gets melted down to liquid and the rust floats by me under water towers and civic engineering. History of visual ailments in the broadened halo of afternoon rain showers, under the water towers I observe the hollyhocked azimuth via disappearoscope misdirect the portent whispering yellow. I might dissolve your skin with necrotic grease I squeeze from pores, spilling on my cuffs and coattails leaving stains and wilting phrenitic irony. Vomit the unfixing breath of butterflies and caterpillars through the skin — stigmata — and further down on the pages of my grandfather’s library, unshelve the spiny tome engraved Spectacle de la nature, the noble ant-lion scrambles the sixteen year-old dreams. In the manner of the landslide stories he told me. He had the greenest eyes, and eyes are always green in dreams in my sleep I unmasked him in his sleep to find that his eyes had died and turned to mold beneath his lids. Charles. Older now I know his eyes are nearly gone and so are mine now, Help me understand why, he starts to cry I see birds and scaffolds in the middle of the sky. What do they do? They say
And for these valiant exploits you were crowned. Yes what else do you see? Yes there are carriages, full of people spitting loose change at my double wound, a mangled appendage dangles strangling my sixty year-old dream; a field of five ferns cleaved to three by handling scraps and shrapnel to trade, the rust floats away over my head — shiverheart in the gloaming. At this point Shahrazad saw the approach of morning and discreetly fell silent. |
