1. Rock and a hard place

I am climbing on a rock. I am climbing in Iraq. I am climbing and I rock.

In a crevice in the rock, I find a gun. I find the sacred text and I find the gun.

In a crevice in the rock, I find the sacred text. I find the sacred text and I find the bullets.

As I am climbing on a rock, I hear a ping. A ping not like e-mail, a ping as a bullet hits a rock.

I close my eyes as I am climbing a rock. Both arms pressed against the side, I shuffle up, up, up the crevice wall. I drop the gun. It makes a noise like a tin can home alarm as it bangs against the rock wall. Moments later, the bullets skitter after. Now I have the sacred text, but no gun and no bullet. This is not a good time for me.

Down below I see a man like an elephant. I see his eyes poking out, looking for me, looking for me who is disguised as a rock wall. I am quiet and gray and I try not to push little rocks down the wall to give me away. I try not to hurl the sacred text at the elephant man, with his bulging eyes and his semi-automatic. I push, shove, shimmy up the wall until there is a turn and I am not a straight shot any more, at least for the moment.

I shimmy up and around a corner and come to a mud wall. I run in my gray clothes to the end of the wall and around the corner. It’s been windy all day and the sun is coming down. The city is coated in sand and tinted red with the falling sun. At the end of the street is a scooter with a box strapped onto the back. In the box is a robe, red with gold trim. I grab it and run, through an alley, through another, into a doorway, where I throw off the gray cloak and put on the red robe. My hair is a problem; I wrap it in strips torn from the robe lining. The weather is listening to my prayers. The sun has gone down, the rain has begun. I am safe huddling in a doorway with the dozens of others sitting out the rain, head down, invisible. There is a smell floating over the city – smoke, flesh, sewage, sulphur, ozone, and an occasional smell of cinnamon and orange.

I sleep as it rains, only twenty minutes or so. It is fully dark when I wake; the rain is still coming down but will not last much longer, I think. I pull the red robe over my head and walk into the city streets, where fires spit smoke in the rainy alley ways. I fall in behind a group of men also in red and walk with them in relative anonymity for a few minutes. Then I drop away, another doorway, a few blocks away. This door, I knock on. They open, barely. I hand them the book, and the door is opened.

2. First Kiss

It’s so hot, it’s so hot it’s like dragging my body through warm, smelly mud. I am dragging my body through this air that is thicker than mud. For what? I am asking myself, sliding in my own sweat in the cheap vinyl seats in the oldest city transit bus, no air conditioning, no radio, no cleaning. The seat is black and greasy, with graffiti in multigenerational layers, with a smell of old bodies and baby vomit. The bus is empty today. I stand up behind the driver even though it is empty. I don’t want to sit on the black greasy seats. I don’t want to touch anything. We stop with jerky regularity; the lights in the bus come on, the doors flap open. The door heaves shut with an asthmatic sigh and we continue. The air in the street is as hot and as thick as the air in the bus. I stink.

The door flaps open. The hot tarmac smell mixes with the patchouli perfume of two girls as they board. They board and they sit, halfway back, then move all the way back, where they can giggle and talk, fast but not loud, where they can share lip gloss and look in their bags of goodies. They have glitter, they call their moms on their cell phones. They are at Stephanie’s house, they say. The bus belches the doors open and shut. I can’t hear you, girl one says. Girl two leans forward and chokes on her own laugh. Wait a minute, she says. I’ll call you back. She hangs up and the two girls fall against each other, stick their sleeves in their mouths and laugh uncontrollably. When they sit up, they tug at each other’s shirts, smooth each other’s hair, laugh a little more, and lean their heads together briefly for a small, almost invisible kiss. The door hisses open, and the girls run out the back, bags swinging, waving bye bye to the bus and to their first, hesitant moment together.

3. Biological urges

The biologist asked me in a roundabout way about playing a game of scrabble with him at home. Or going to his mother’s house to make gingerbread cookies and zucchini bread for the fundraiser at their church. Jehovah’s Witness, I think. I saw a stack of Watchtowers in the corner behind the love seat, neatly stacked, not falling down or anything, but quite a lot of them. I said yes, of course, I love to bake and I’d be happy to help your mom with her fundraiser.

At first we worked together awkwardly, in her kitchen with my ingredients, mixing flour and eggs and butter and assorted flavorings. Creaming the sugar and egg together. I wore an apron with a picture of a man in a golf cart, swinging his barbecue gear like clubs. We talked about people in the Hamptons that we might all know, but that didn’t go where we thought it might. I tasted the raw dough. Delicious, I said. His mother handed me a towel to wipe my hands. Well, then, I thought, and I brought up ocean life, the octopus, moonlight on still water and recipes for pomegranate jello. This one hit and we exchanged jello recipes, which led into special events and slid rapidly into bridal showers and brides we have known. Here the biologist started sweating lightly, and I could see him in the future 20 years, with his eyebrows grown in thick and tweedy, still nervously mixing the dry ingredients and looking at the box for instructions regarding eggs, butter and vanilla.

After the cookies are in the oven, the biologist talks about his personal research, social behavior in tarantulas and related arachnids. On this he is more fluent, more relaxed, and he forgets himself momentarily and mixes the second batch with ease. He sits smiling at the kitchen table, drawing spider bodies in the flour and then mashing them gone with little balls of dough. He is very happy, and the cookies come out just right.

“Delicious,” I say. His mother says thank you, and we wash the dishes, and I go home quickly, before this lovely domestic scenario becomes a habit. Thank you, I say, and wave bye bye.

She’s like a piece of peach pie. Or like a peace pipe, fragrant and sweet with a bite in the air around her. Mafiala is my daughter. She was born to the mob and I took her away when I gave her that name. Mafia-la. A-la. O-la-la. She is my daughter, not yours. When I am a just a little girl myself I am with the gang, the gang of hostile idiots, the gang of hostile takeovers. They make me pregnant and then pull my wings out like I am a butterfly, a butterfly made for torture and fun. Problem is, of course, I am not a butterfly, I am not Mariposa, no, more like Kali, more like Cain than Abel and in my religion, vengeance is mine, vengaza es mio, like my grand-dad always said. He’s from Naches, blessings, bendiciónes, as far away from Lubbock as you can be and still be in Texas is the best thing about Naches, he would say. My old jewish grand-dad, who snapped one day years ago and ran away to India. He ran away to India and learned to play the sitar, to charm the snakes, the politicians, the incubi and succubi of public life in an old old country. He ran naked with the Indian dogs and fakirs, he washed in the Ganges. When it was time for the revolution he led elephants through the city, pounding their dinner plate feet into the ancient street, pounding flat, each sensitive searching trunk like a big angry eye looking for corruption, for forgetfulness, the unforgivable elephant sin.

Mafiala is my daughter, my sensitive child, the child who came to me through rape or incest or maybe it was both. I did not have my pedigree, you see, my where-did-you-come-from, my you-look-just-like-your-daddy credentials. Who knows? One day I am nothing, the next day I am a big belly sitting in Dunkin Donuts looking for someone to come claim me and give me a place to have this baby girl so I can go to school somewhere and be in the witness protection program or something. That might work, I think and I rub my 15-year-old belly and sing a song, half Yiddish half Spanish to the little gypsy princess who will be my baby, sister, and mother all in one.

Katalpa is a tree that grew there in Naches. I almost named my daughter Katalpa, until I realized on the morning I went into labor that really I’d been working for the Texas mafia, on my back, since I was 9 years old and I decided between screams and murderous plans that I would claim the name for my own. Mafia, la mafia, mafiala, my girl, my home, my road away from these criminal bastards.

You want to know the truth - you get good treatment when you’re carrying a baby, until the baby is born and they take her away to be with some more fit parents. O-la-la, my Mafiala. That didn’t happen, you know. I’m reading the paperwork, they say you can wait to sign it later, and I walk out to the baby room where all the newborns are lined up together, with little name tags at their feet.

My baby, Baby Girl Gorgon, does not have a first name yet. I see them standing in front of her, leaning their light blond heads together. Prospective daddy turns his face toward prospective mommy, he looks up and right through me, blue eyes cold and vacant. He doesn’t recognize me, old blue eyes, he’s just another moral bastard with a secret life waiting to adopt a baby that he’d let die if he didn’t own it. They turn away and step out, probably to get some coffee. I asked the nurse for some lime jello. When she goes to get it for me, I take Mafiala and leave.

She and I grew up together in a small town that was hurricane prone and unloved, where no one would notice us and that suited me just fine. I learned how to sew and how to play the piano. Mafiala learned how to dance and how to tell stories in the firelight in the long summer evenings. She sang songs like she was dressed in red velvet and I always wondered where she heard them, torch songs, leaning against my piano and making smoky eyes at me and Jimmy. Jimmy didn’t come along until Mafiala was almost 10, and by that time I was 25 and ready to think about skin and sex and juice and forgiveness. But a lot of things came before that time, and a lot of things came after, too.

Before a big storm can destroy everything in its path, certain things have to happen, or have to not happen. For example, in a strong walled city in an ancient port town, there has always been a history of reinforcement, of respect for storm and wind. There are traditions and times of restoration, these come with storytelling, firelight, dancing and god. Here we’ve reduced it to a Disney story, a feature film, the three little piggies, the big bad wolf. The big bad wolf cannot blow down a house that is cared for. If you want to destroy a city, first thing to do is ignore it. Let it get run down around the edges. Keep it hungry. Then let the winds blow. The winds blow, the children sing stormy weather, the elders sing hallelujah, the dogs drown on their rooftops, and the rich thank god that their insurance is paid up. After the storm, they rebuild. A new day has dawned. Hallelujah, amen.

Earlier

Bear liked mustard, he liked mustard on his german dogs, brautwurst with sauerkraut. Not mild mustard, hot hot mustard, mustard that lets you know you are a man. When we were falling in love, it was like living in the trenches, like Hitler and Mussolini and bombs going off all round us. Really exciting, but crazy wrong.

Bear was rich, rich in ideology, rich in actual money. He sold cars to the Germans, he sold honey to the British, he sold watches to the Italians. The Swiss and the French he sold reservations to rest resorts in foreign lands far away from the bombing. The English and French had bad nerves and loss, lots of loss. Bear was half English, he liked to say, an aunt named Bessie, an uncle who lived in Inverness (Scots, I know, but Bear did not make that distinction).

We met while I was shopping between raids, between bombings, in a period of artificial peace. I was buying a leather handbag, and thinking about having my initials monogrammed on it. The shopkeeper was kind and attentive, and I would hardly have noticed the pause when Bear walked in, if it hadn’t been wartime. In wartime the little hairs on our arms stand up, tiny antennas reading fear, reading danger. Bear brought danger into the room. Danger and heat, and I admit to being young. I bought the handbag and left without the monogram. Bear followed me out and bought me a coffee on the sidewalk where the umbrellas had been brought out in the fall sunlight in an act of shocking optimism. The end of this war, the beginning of another.

This little village had some damage, some churches and banks that were shells. Every night, we covered the windows, and inside each flat, each small cottage, the stories were short and cheerful, to put the children to sleep. Short, to get as much sleep as possible before the sirens woke us. Cheerful, to convince us that tonight, as least, there would be none. I believe Bear slept heavily and well, all through the war.

Later

The train was slow in stopping. She stood in the steam and the fog. The brakes screamed, the babies waved their little hands. Cccchhhhh. Ccchhhh. Stop. Her ankles are aswirl with smoke, she stands and waits and watches. Getting off the train. Polish grandmothers, Swiss nannies. Soldiers, flirting and giving cigarettes to Swiss nannies.

How many times will I call myself back through my bones? she wonders. My bones, the bones of memory, even when I am old and will have learned how to take some and leave some. Some memory. Every night, I see them again. There I am. Me, in my blue eye liner. Dressed as someone other than myself. Taken out of myself, by soldiers, and bombs and my missing child.

In May, when the weather is warming, what woman, what mother, can imagine the loss of a child, the whole in the ground where an entire building filled with hundreds of lives had been just moments before. Ana will sing in a low voice to the men who killed her child. She will hold them one by one against her body. And each one, before he dies, will see two things distinctly on her face. First, her grief. Second, his own death. And so she goes from gardener and mother to siren and chanteuse and killer.

This is a simple poem. Biblical, even. Ana has gone back to the basics: vengeance, rage and power. Tonight they are drinking at a club, brightly lit, with windows covered. The room is heavy with smoke. Smoke is swirling around her; she looks at him. She leans forward, he looks at her, at her blue eye shadow. She holds up her cigarette. He leans in to light it for her. She looks up and their eyes meet. For a moment he feels lost, something is wrong. She smiles, he smiles back, and the moment drifts away.

Samantha loved peppermints when she was a little girl. She loved to go to her grandpa’s diner and order one cheese omelette with hash browns and white toast with orange jelly. She always had a cream soda with extra ice and a cherry to go with it. But the high point of her breakfast was always the peppermint. She got to stand behind the cash register taking people’s money while she sucked on it, and said “thank you and have a nice day” to each and every customer as she gave them their change. I always thought she’d take over the diner some day, when her grandfather got ready to retire. Things change. That’s okay, that’s okay.

Samantha was adopted. People said things back then, Samantha being the one who brought on our “real” child, Sarah. That’s how it happens, they said, adopt one child and then next thing you know, bang, you’re pregnant. She and Sarah were only three months apart. Sarah was bigger than Samantha by the time they were a year old, and faster, and stronger. That happens even with natural siblings, I know, but it seemed like Samantha didn’t stand much of a chance, when I look back at it now.

Adaptation is a function of survival and evolution. To succeed in a given environment, not just in an individual life, but in the long run, adaptations happen in part to ensure reproductive success and the continuation of species.

In successful adaptation, more happens. I need to be green to protect myself and my offspring in this ecosystem, therefore I am green. My orange sister, on the other hand, stands out and calls to the predators, here I am, here I am. It’s not easy being orange. I try not to blame Sarah for Samantha’s failure to adapt, but sometimes I dream about her, seven years old, drinking her cream soda – that little girl loved cream soda. She loved graham crackers, too, and bonfires. We went camping a lot the year after she left us, out in the woods where we could picture her still, with marshmallows and graham crackers, the gap between her front teeth.

Samantha and Sarah started going to that church when they were in seventh grade. It was a holy roller church, with speaking in tongues and people throwing themselves on the ground as the spirit filled them. I said no, no I don’t want them to go, but we talked about it and decided we couldn’t in good conscience call ourselves fair and open minded in the matter of religion if we didn’t let the girls explore. There are phases in childhood. Explorations of place, of friendship, sexuality, spirituality.  All perfectly predictable, and we did not want our children locked into a single limited perspective, even if it was our own.

You know I place a high value on being open-minded. Sometimes, now, though, I wish I’d been less tolerant, more restrictive, and most of all that I still had two daughters, not one daughter who I love no less than ever, and a big gaping hole in my heart where the other one used to be.

What I am leaving you, child, is this box of stories. I heard many of these same stories in my childhood, as well. You may notice that the names are strange or unfamiliar at times. I’ve mixed them up and changed the names, not to deceive or confust you, but to make them more true. Not true, in the literal sense; true like in the old bible stories, true in the spirit. Some of the stories are about me. Those rarely have my own name on them. I am ashamed of some of my stories, to be honest. I hope you will take the box, make it your own, and give it to your child some day, god willing.

Between reading this note from your abuelita and opening the box was a period of exactly seven years. Seven years of not knowing, seven years without a backwards glance. The box was hardly even dusty. I did think about that later.

STORY THE FIRST - READ ME then come back for more.

The acoustic bed is where I lie with headphones on. When I lie there, my eyes are closed. My eyes are closed and the bed shakes me. Atomic, powerful, electric. There is no such thing as too loud. I heard that somewhere, and I know it is true. I am on my knees to the glory of sound. Power chords. Death metal. Teeth crushing volume. This is a spiritual experience, make no mistake.

When I am saturated with sound, it is time for light. Nuclear, flaming, magical, reflective. I am in my vision bed and it is a mandala, a flaming tower blooming skyward and then circling. I am deaf, I am nothing but one large optical nerve looking out, looking west into the sun, burning rays and falling blind on my face. Blind and deaf.

On my knees again, I am blind and deaf. But my nose, oh my nose, oh my subtle quivering proboscis seeking out more honey, more. How could I have thought that light or sound could match, could compete, could even perform in the same arena? My olfactory bed is redolent – herbal, musky, rancid, floral. It is ozone and rain, it is the rotten sweetness of death and the iron bloody smell of birth. The olfactory bed consumes me, suffocated, breathless, gasping, lost.

When I wake it is tomorrow. The bed that wakes me seems perfectly ordinary, except for around the edges, where there are burnt crispy bits, with little whispers of smoke rising, disappearing out the morning window.

(* Writing prompt - used 5 syllable rhyming words “rhymes with shower” from Rhyme Zone. Wrote for 20 minutes. Thank you, Red Ravine, for the “Tools We Use” list.)

Drat.

My brain’s gone walkabout again.

Don’t know where, exactly. When I look inside my own head, I see mostly fog.

Maybe it’s the new year making me fuzzy (August is my new year).

The chickens, geese and keets seem more important than writing.

I can’t seem to get enough sleep.

Maybe it’s the weather.

Maybe it’s my disorganized office.

Maybe it’s my hormones.

 Maybe it’s astrological.

Maybe it’s nothing at all.

I’ll be back when I’ve got something to say. Or when my office is clean.

Whichever comes first.

“Behold, anonymous omelet goddess,” Dmitri smirks and brushes the hair off her neck, giving her a friendly post-coital kiss. Goddamit, she thinks, shouldn’t he remember my name? He hands her a plate of sliced orange. Civilized gesture, she thinks.

Respectable women do not do this tightrope dance, do they, this retrograde zipless fuck - do they? Does anyone still do this? Dmitri puts a slice of orange in her mouth and slides his juicy hand netherward. She jumps up and writes her name on the white board magnetically attached to her fridge. 

Later that day, Zuzu leaves the house, wearing her waterproof khaki jacket with the boy scout patches, and her favorite shoes, with the rhinestone horseshoe buckles she’d affixed with gorilla glue. Zuzu is deeply afraid. She reads the dictionary every day, looking for words to help her describe how she feels. Desperate. Delirious. Repetitive. Like someone who eats zeroes and ones for a living. Like someone who lies, and lies down with dogs. She looks up words for history, for memory, for moments of change. The Smithsonion. She looks it up. How much money does it take to go to the Smithsonian? How far is the Smithsonian from this town, this old Lithuanian town tucked into the northern woods near the Canadian border? Why isn’t there a fence between us and the Canadians? She asks her imaginary mother, who is long gone into a macabre alzheimer’s fog, from which she periodically yodels out Zuzu, Zuuuuuu Zuuuuu, raising Zuzu from the dead, from the heavy short sleep she sleeps when she sleeps at all.

She sits on the stairwell on her back porch, pictures her toenails decorated and painted in tiny pointillated miniatures. She sees starry starry night on her left big toe, a little Matisse with lady and umbrella on her right big toe. She thinks about DaVinci. She thinks about cutting off her own ear. DeGraib, you are pathetic, she writes on the white board. She uses a Sharpie, permanent, to remind herself.

Rules: These are the strict and unbending rules of Zuzu DeGraib, starting today, she writes:

1.       No gratuitous sex.

2.       No breakfast with strangers.

3.       Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

4.       Clean your blender after each use.

5.       Donate to the Save the Lemur foundation.

6.       Change lip gloss every 30 days to prevent bacterial growth.

7.       Character counts.

8.       Answer your mother when she hoots at you, whether you like it or not.

9.       Stop smoking.

10.   Spend money instead of groveling around begging for attention from people you don’t care about anyway.

Later that day, she throws the magnetic white board away. She orders a new one online.

Lemurs are only one of thousands of animals facing extinction. It is hard to know which dying species to save on any given day, so her method has been to work alphabetically through the endangered lists. Anteaters, buffalo, koala, orangutan, zebra. She dreams in Noah’s arks, she dreams two by twos, she dreams four by fours, she dreams that nothing is meaningless and that all things are possible. When she sleeps her heavy short sleeps.

The spotted owl and the brown trout are also on the endangered species list. Brown trout taste especially fine grilled outdoors and served shortly after death, with friends and fruit salad. Zuzu is very fond of fruit, but less fond of strangers eating omelets with her without remembering her name. She is sensitive that way, she supposes.

At work, she catalogs and sorts, sorts and catalogs. There are amazing numbers of categories to be found in books, CDs and games. Even more when seasonal variations are considered. Like most book sellers, she is willing and in fact eager to answer questions about books: reference books, fiction, history, books of endangered species, self-help books, books on sex, books that reference obscure saints and books about the Smithsonian.  Books about religion have recently started getting on her last nerve, although when the trend first started she nibbled at each of the major religions in turn, some sweet, some sour, some bitter and some strictly rancid. She spit them out, but couldn’t help hearing the nastiness continue in the trash talking god on her neighbor’s radio. Too bad he was deaf. Maybe she should cut her ear off.

Alyx (my friend and fellow traveling therapist), and partner Julie, were motivated to contribute these haikus in response to my last post. Worth front-paging, I believe.

From Alyx:

time bandit

Swipe in, sign here please.
Tomorrow do it again.
Goodbye says hello.