Kane in a Good Land

LOOK UP WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED…

SECTION.I – MULTIPLE CHOICE – NUMBERS

Potters 1

Harry Potter was never quite your avatar; maybe it was your mother’s – she pushed you to read the series, and you did, and you liked it. Still he was never quite yours, a little too storybook at turns, a little too product-of-its time, a little too you-can’t-question-the-magic. You couldn’t replicate that mindset. What you could copy was the appearance.

Harry is small and scrawny, messily black-haired. Eleven-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, however, has an average-enough build, his straight brown hair coming down practically in imitation of your unfortunate bowl cut. Casting matters. Casting determines which kids are pointed out on street corners by children too young to know better.

What it doesn’t determine is the complicity of your friends and family in this years-long conspiracy of appearance. How are you meant to control your food intake, to shave, to cut your hair, when the world’s gaze passes you over without comment? You are Neville to your mind’s Snape, you are a scattered set of possessions to the world’s Neville, and most of all, you are no final-movie Matthew Lewis.

You are Lewis with the gospel of Matthew, blundering into the wilderness with no map and false confidence. You have only a façade of confidence you have built up, supported by the scaffolding of your body’s container, and your tetanus shots don’t stop the creeping rust.

Salad 2

That Shakespearean phrase bestows a sort of irony to you, for they are ended only by their namesake food’s consumption. It is a set of singular moments which lead to the death of Cataline. It is a gradual cosmetic change in your thousand-year plan which sets the wheels in motion. It is a tricky balance when your doctor asks if you have been on a diet in the past year, because you have dropped ten pounds and grown an inch, and you have to not delve into the scales you have weighed, not with your body, but with your thoughts.

How do you respond honestly, in a manner that doesn’t incite worry? How do you navigate the nuance of a medical dialogue, when you don’t know the conversation’s potential consequences? The correct answer is “no,” of course, but this feels insufficient. It doesn’t convey your pride at the measurement, nor the helpless consternation you feel when your flimsy fleet returns to port, when its roaming ends and the requisition begins. You restock the ships with willpower, with calories, with plans and with Mercury’s swiftness, Neptune forces retrograde.

Here, before you could salt the earth, you became the earth’s salt. Yet there is the constant fear that you are Orpheus, that the next moment you will turn back, and your future will vanish. And so you push forward monosyllabically. You rush forward, before your uncertainty breaches trust.

Pollux 1

You have a tricky relationship with oil. It exemplifies the devil’s greatest prank: life’s inverse relationship between enjoyment and health. You can’t get a good grasp on it, and every time you try, you are stopped short by your yellowish reflection in the restaurant’s little bowl. Castor oil is the worst kind, because it appears a double agent, a product of a world it leaves behind, a treatise of medicinality hewn from glycerol and fatty acids. Castor oil is the boyfriend that says he can change, and three hours later feces are splattering your bedsheets.

You are Julius, instead, you imagine yourself – misunderstood by the Lucian (who you really are, as soon as the elevator doors shut) who personifies your societal contemporaries. You use flowery language, on the face of it, and sometimes it doesn’t have the right impact; you write as much as you can bear and saunter into the Forum the next day, expecting to hear chatter.

Instead it is dead silent, and you have one of your rare moments of clarity. To the world, you are Pollux in that you are latter, a bare afterthought. To yourself, you are Castor. Plain sugar, going down. Eat the crust.

Seizure 2

You don’t remember the day you were having, you don’t remember the image perfectly, you think you might have that thing that’s been going around the internet – what you do recall is the shakenness of your parents and the twitching of your sister’s limbs. And there wasn’t much you could do about it.

The word “seizure” comes from Middle English, then from Old French, then from Medieval Latin; like your memory of that evening, anything beyond the most recent and the bare facts is irretrievable. You’re only left with the inability to act, the feeling of fragility that you guilt yourself into acknowledging, and the fear that you didn’t do something not because you couldn’t, but because you didn’t want to, because you don’t love your family, because you don’t fit quite right.

Sometimes you feel like a puppet, an automaton with a blown gasket, a marionette jerking back and forth at the whims of the Christian cross of Damocles above you. Hung up, forgotten in the breeze, wilting in the shade of the spotless X. If you pull back the curtain, and you sit down, and study, maybe you can step outside yourself and identify the problems’ causes. Maybe you point this one out, index it, where it impacted you. That’s the seizure’s touch.

Works 1

You put effort into these mental dissections and reconstructions the same way that you maintain your physical condition: in fits and starts. In a trendline you estimate is better than average. Not well enough. You obsess over your heroes, you strip them for parts, contradictory pieces, and build them into yourself. You fail. You hate this about it. You write a college essay about it.

It is, arguably, the most important essay you have written to this point. You do it, in several chunks, in the week before it was due. You read it over once, then set it aside, because you can’t bear to look at it any more. You don’t let anyone else read it.

It is a terrible week for you. You barely go outside. You watch far too much television. You are not a jelly bean counter; instead you shove fistfuls down your gullet.

In the back of your head, you know that it is not a good essay, or in any case that it could be improved; you know that it is banal, a poor summary of your capacity for introspection, and yet this fact does not sway you. You hit the button anyway. You cannot make it matter, and you think of all your liminal-state compatriots clicking in unison, that unbroken string of mouse presses an echolocation in the fog of hormones and uncertainty. Surely –don’t call me special, but it seems you are– they feel something.

It is one of the moments in which you cannot crack your own emotional state as you do so often, where you cannot pull your all into it, and you wonder how long you can continue this moral hazard in your Garden of Eden. You are home alone, and still you can hear your brother playing Charlie Puth in the side room. Perhaps you both are Lehman Brothers.

August 2

This indecision is no physical deformity; it is fleeting, and it has little tangible impact. It only feels like you have been rear-ended, like you are a painstakingly restored vintage car and yet the driver is nowhere to be found. The author of your story has picked up and left.

In middle school, your class was meant to read a book that won tremendous awards. All you could think was “good.” Not in reference to the idea to read the book, or the book itself, but the teacher’s distraction halfway through. You were glad to be rid of it; in some fundamental sense, it wasn’t a book written for you. It was a book written for the decorated public you wanted to join, a hollow if well-written cry for approval from their previously-esteemed ranks. The book pained you not for the reasons the author wanted, but because it was a strategy that worked.

You have always played by the rules; you had, to that date, even more so –by the rules adults told you mattered, anyway,– and it had worked to that point. Not socially, not emotionally, not physically, but you had made yourself intelligent enough to necessitate the explanation of “multiple kinds of being smart” to you. These were the results you sought, this was the feedback you craved: the recognition that your work had improved you, however small the amount, however insignificant the metric. This was your Faustian bargain: one day, in exchange for this penance, in return for your self-hatred, as recompense for your unnecessary repetitions, the people you looked up to would respect you.

Having seen Doctor Faustus, you could reference its core conceit, and your friends would laugh. But this book had succeeded. This book was the model for success. So the world you wanted didn’t like you back. Shakespeare didn’t want you near each other.

Days 1

The mental bargains, in some sense, are easier; you can optimize thought, improve its volume and originality, but thinking is the default activity of the human species. Movement, in sharp contrast, very much isn’t. As children, you’re given recess in addition to its bizarro twin, gym class – even younger, and you’re granted the presumption of exercise-innocence. Left in a playground, the assumption is that you’ll run, that it’s meant to be fun, and yet the teachers don’t run around the playground. Instead, they settle into their best gargoyle impressions, sedentary, pausing only to RoboCop a game of Capture the Flag for involving sticks.

Adults don’t play with concepts, they don’t play with ideas – that you knew. But as one takes your book, pushes you towards the incessant, buzzing spiderweb that constitutes Tag, something else clicks. As you’re brushed aside, you internalize this: adults don’t play with themselves. You’re in elementary school; you can’t help but giggle. It’s still sobering.

And as the only thing drunk is water, as you lift up bottle after bottle from turf and grass and dirt, you settle on two sports to keep you sane. Cross-Country and Ultimate Frisbee. You’re average, at best, at both, but running is, by nature, isolating. A minor speed difference, a small shift in cadence, and the leaders are out of sight as soon as you enter the woods. On the Ultimate field, you’re pushed together in one-on-one matchups. A misplaced step, and Leo switches direction, putting you on your heels. Then he scores.

Leo is the captain of New York’s youth team –you wouldn’t know the name of the cross-country equivalent– and you cannot guard him. The world’s Leos manage to perfectly compartmentalize hard work, they are able to buy fully into that adult mindset, and try as you might, you can’t. Even if, even when you make the team, you are always running deep a second too early, attempting to catch your defender off-guard, to make whimsy as effective as discipline. But that’s not the look, that’s not the system. You don’t get the disc; they don’t hit you deep. They hit Leo under.

Why West Fallen 2

There is a sliding scale on which influence matters; your behavior is dictated by the company you keep. You are a member of society, and a friend, and a son. Set to carry out whichever purpose you choose, a rocket positioned and aimed by each relationship. Your fuel stages are ranges of possibilities, your options boosters which you jettison to propel yourself forward along your assigned trajectory. You have far less fuel now than at your birth, in turn diminished from your conception, a particular confluence of circumstances, arbitrary, that nevertheless is a limit to About Time’s time travel. You wish you could smash through that barrier like that movie’s wreck of a third act structure, wish you could wrench yourself into excellence, and yet, paradoxically, you refuse to now. If everything the light touches is your kingdom, you shudder at the camera’s recalcitrance. Your aperture decreases, inevitably. Your depth of field increases, which should have been preventable.

This is an analogy you should have related to the woman from your school’s counseling and guidance department. Perhaps it would have helped her to understand why you were there. It wasn’t to be told you were articulate. That was all you seemed enough for.

Nights 1 2

Leave the duffers. Teachers loved us. Jesus suffered. Genius stutters.

DO NOT GO ON TO SECTION II UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO.

SECTION.II – FREE RESPONSE – WORDS

A/C

Preachy mothers, decent druthers. Riemann summer, Read the southern.

It is on, sticky heat, soon replaced by cool breeze,
Little John, missing me, duel away my school needs,
Different song, middling, tune mistakes why Bueller’s teens
Skip at all, fiddling, move and shake, I knew this beat

Live it up, pittance fees, ruminate, cruise, it seems
Ship is rough, killing me, fumigates stupid fleas
Kids get jumped, quiver slings, loose the pain into the streets
This is tough, lister thinks, Kubrick makes film, new machines

Digits suck, kisser blinks, music, face it, do sixteen
Jig is up, riddler speaks, nudists tasting lewd ravines
Piss in cups, jimmy drinks, students rave reviews Selene
Liz in Fall River, she blew insane, mooned Twin Peaks

Livid pall, liver reeks, cupid’s aim, lunacy
Missed the call, quickening, you can say, screw repeats.
Riddance prom, synergy, two can play, crude retreats.
Slip the chron’, it’s IC, you inhale fumes and breathe.

doobie dreams, do the deed, movie stuff, moody teens
floozie junk, losing sheen, moving up, losing sleep

Complices

Are you familiar with the concept of the multiverse?

Nips

You’re a rocket ship, and you’re plunging through the vacuum of space, and suddenly things get smaller. Infinitely smaller, until you’re on the outside looking in. In a whip-lashing second, your surroundings flip from black, with tiny white specks, to a white vacuum filled with small, sparkly black spheres. Farther back, pulling out further, and you see a human outline, the silhouette held together by distance. This is you.

From this perspective, you are not at the controls. You are the attack ship off your own shoulder. Dandruff to be brushed off of your own reality. And as you retreat farther, as you begin to turn your craft, redirecting the momentum into a stable orbit, you see your statue begin to change, to solidify, to shift from an alien, primordial black to a brackish green. The change is too slow to observe precisely; you accelerate. Time passes.

Tux

There’s a bright white snap, and suddenly your world is wreathed in the burning fire of the dance floor, all smoke machines and warbling viridian disco lights. You look down, and the

Bud

In your hand suddenly vanishes. You snap your neck, nearly, but the speed of your search doesn’t matter. Your date is gone. Frowning, you pat your pockets. Shit, but before you can internalize everything that’s missing, you stop to feel the fabric. It’s nice. Too nice for–

Time slows, and you see everything around you slowly disappearing. If this is a joke, they should have kept the punch line, you think, and then a punch line? Where–

The air is molasses. Your scrambling stops, stock-still; you are gaping at the vestiges of the vanishing building, the faint traces of friends, the bright lights which switch off and plunge you into darkness. This is it, you think, but a second and a minute later you’re still there.

Then it hits you. The lights are still on. You’re just in between alternations, in the split-second between directions of electrical current. In the freeze-frame before your existence is erased, you wave your white-gloved hand goodbye.

D/C

Your hands are still gloved, but the covering is bulkier now; you’re back in the spaceship, and your orbit continues, circling your segmented form. Look in the viewfinder. Zoom in. In the right wrist. There’s a vivid green globule, a ripening, expanding droplet– and it bursts, subsumed by its neighbours.

The you who smoked drugs, who had sex, who drank, who had a girlfriend, is dead. Marvel at your new reality, the gritty, saline existence you now inhabit. That you can’t Superman your way out of, because when you yanked the steering wheel, it broke off in your hands. You snap your neck around again, but this time, the speed matters. It’s too fast. You can’t get back on the horse.

This is what you’re saddled with, this is your congealing mediocrity: your never-quite perfect hair, your slightly crooked glasses, the ill-fitting dress shirts, the somehow-still-too-tight-around-the-thighs pants, the busted sneakers. For a second, you can look upon all that you have made, and it is good.

Then you look upon your works, and you despair.

You’re not happy.

And you don’t know why.

END OF SECTION II