Sputterpub's Blog

I have a picture of the whole family, plus Steve. That’s not fair to say – of course my brother-in-law is family – but since I predict Emily will leave him I only admit him as a temporary member. However, I have a picture of all eight of us, and I’ll try to describe it.

I remember when it was taken. Last Thanksgiving, after a contentious meal. Laney had done a lot to spoil it with her vegan lectures about animal cruelty. I tried to lighten it up with a metaphysical question, but that only served to further sour relations.

“Given an infinite number of coin tosses,” I prefaced, “must it come up tails at least once?” Laney and Liz have heard it before; they looked impatient. The others, all except Emily and Ned, mouthed various reasonings and declarations, like “Well, yeah, if there are infinite attempts;” and “A lot more than once; it would have to come up tails about half the infinite time;” and “No duh (what a stupid question…).”

Actually, the answer is no. It might never come up tails. I tried to explain that each coin toss is a discrete event. I even told them that if, given infinite attempts, any result that can happen will occur, then that means the proverbial monkeys will in fact accidentally duplicate, on their little word processors, the complete works of Shakespeare, given infinite time. In fact, they’ll do it not once but many times. An infinite many times. If the answer is not no, then we live in a multiverse where everything that can possibly happen does happen, repeatedly, and since that is manifestly not our situation, the answer must be no. It is possible to toss a coin an infinite number of times, and have it always come up heads.

They weren’t interested. That’s an understated way of describing how they received my words. So I stopped speaking. I didn’t tell them the truth about the material world. But we were in bad attitudes when we sat for the picture.

We’re grouped on and behind the couch. I don’t know if Dad meant it, but we’re arranged with the blondes seated and the dark heads standing. Left to right the couch holds Laney, Mom, me, and then Liz. I have my arms stretched out on the back of the couch, but I’m not touching anyone. Laney’s hair is her natural dark ash for a change, she’s dressed in raggedly mismatch, and she looks pouty. Her legs are crossed at the knee and although she’s thin, her flank is pocked above her fishnet hose. Cleaned up she could be a girl-next-door bubbly cheerleader; as she is, she’s just as common but less appealing.

Next comes Mom, looking frumpy. Her short arms are crossed above her humongous mammaries, and her thighs look like they expand infinitely from the point of her small knees pressed together at the bend of the couch, backwards to somewhere among the old popcorn husks and pencil stubs in the crevices of the upholstery. She wears a long white-on-black dotted top above a denim skirt and clogs; her bleached hair is teased away from her face.

They made me sit next to her but I look as disconnected as I remember feeling. My eyes appear half-closed but that was because I was looking down at the way the legs of the tripod so surely met the floor. I was not stoned. I recall wishing my family could be as stable as that tripod. I think I look pretty good. I’m wearing my black leather jacket. Even though I’m inside. I felt better then with the jacket always on – all my important things were in the pockets – but I know now I wore it as much to annoy Mom and Laney as anything else.

Liz is next to me, the last on the couch. The lost. She has her right hand on my left thigh, to annoy me. Liz is my decadent sib: the wild one, the one who has danced topless, shot heroin, sucked cock for money, starred in at least two low-budget neighborhood-made porno films. She likes to act like she’s coming on to me, but it’s a big-sister tease and no other kind of tease at all. She isn’t feeling well. In the picture she is dressed demurely, in jeans, turtleneck, socks. Her hair is very short and she is so thin that she reminds me of a young Mia Farrow.

Behind the couch, left to right and all brown-haired, are my father, Ned, Emily, and Steve. Dad looks unsettled, like he’s bothered about something, but it’s really just the fact that he got confused setting the timer and almost missed getting in place before the camera shutter clicked. He’s leaning a little over Laney and Mom, looking straight forward.

Ned’s next to him, as handsome and upstanding as ever. Ned is tall and dark and regular-featured. He is fastidious and exacting. He is very kind and caring. I’m certain he’s gay but he doesn’t seem to know it yet. He’s still dating girls, unsuccessfully. I don’t think he’s gone with anyone longer than two weeks.

I will not comment about Emily except to say that she looks beautiful in the picture and that it bothers me to see Steve’s hand on her neck like that. It seems like he is always touching her. I don’t like imagining them at it. Steve is dark-haired and handsome but he has a tendency to pudginess which will certainly mature into fat. I can easily envision him portly, with a perpetual cigar and perhaps gout.

Everyone in the picture is tall, except my mother. My blonde sisters measure over five and a half feet, and Emily is five nine. No one in the picture is fat, except my mother and, potentially, Steve.

I remember how after we took the picture we had desserts. Mom had made the usual pumpkin and mincemeat pies. Watching the bronze-orange pumpkin meat tremble on the plate, waiting satin glossy for its dollop of thick whipped cream, I tried to resume the discussion. I wanted to tell them that, sure, parallel lines meet at infinity. That’s also where Zeno’s paradox is true. At infinity. In the immaterial world. But as soon as the world becomes material (energy converting to matter to perceive itself), then dimension rears its measurable self. The material world is by definition gross, sloppy, imperfect.

I wanted to tell them, but they would not listen to me. Everyone except Laney ate pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Even I pushed the side of my fork into dense white fluff, smooth golden mousse, firm floury crust while I gazed at my family and tried, I don’t know why, to memorize the way they looked.

There’s physical description lacking. If this isn’t to be a movie then it better flesh with words. And I’ve probably got the best perspective for it.

I’m the point at infinity. It all orients to me. I’m the baby.

Once upon a time there were tribes or at least extended families. Each member wasn’t so rare and precious and loaded as today. Especially the baby…everybody else’s baby…the limit of the family wisdom.

I’m the focus at infinity. When you look at a picture, I’m the implied point toward which everything aims, the place where parallel lines like railroad tracks meet. Usually you look at a picture from outside, and you can see me suggested by everything. Imagine a view described from where I am. My vision is wide-angle, my lens telephoto.

I can see my great-great grandparents’ fingertips, my great-grandparents’ elbows, my grandparents’ noses. My parents and my older siblings and all their accoutrements weave in my immediate vision like dancers around a Maypole, like maggots on a turkey neck.

My folks are in their 50s now, but I can see them younger; all the slides and snapshots (tucked into odd white corners in scrapbooks or scabbed on their backs with the clots of old paste) have informed me, as well as the oral histories. My mother was some kind of beauty but to me my father is the one with the looks.

I’m not gay. I don’t find men more attractive than women. But I have an honest eye, and my father had classic handsome features and posture, while my mother offered little beyond cute roundness. She was a platinum Betty Boop, Dagwood’s Blondie, Mattel’s Barbie. I prefer dark hair, or something more sultry.

Mom was round-eyed, round-faced, curly-haired, buxom, slim-wasted. Her eyes are blue, her hair was originally pale blonde, her complexion was once small-pored. I understand she had a ready laugh; I’m sure she was bubbly. Based on what my sisters have told me, she was probably a stick in bed.

My father was tall, slim, straight-backed, with thick dark hair, hazel eyes, and large features like Nicholas Cage. His olive skin has aged better than Mom’s.

Now she’s fat. Her breasts enter the room before the rest of her and she has this unattractive habit of standing with her arms crossed above them, like they’re a shelf. When she sits they sag to where her waistline must be under her polyester tunic top.

She colors her hair herself, and it’s now thinning and strawlike. But she still has a good laugh. She’s a creative worrier. She’s easy to bait and nag. She’s a good woman and she’s boring.

Dad’s actually handsome. He stands up straight and he’s dignified about his hair: no combover. His face is getting a little craggy as he wrinkles. He exercises every day so he’s still fit. I have no way of knowing this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if old Dad is good in bed.

He’s romantic. Occasionally brilliant, he was apparently confused by an early exposure to Wordsworth and Blake and the influence of a military father (his dad was a real tyrant), and he now has strongly-held and possibly pre-verbal confusions about this country’s foreign policy. He can be repetitive and tiresome, but he’s passionate enough to be interesting.

I’m not sure why they got married. Then again, I have trouble seeing the marriage motivation in anyone; as much as I have loved and watched Emily I still don’t understand why she had to marry Steve.

I’m not sure why my folks got married but it probably had something to do with family. Parents and kids. There would have been pressure to marry instead of cohabitate, and then came us. Shit: five of us…what were they thinking?

My mother has two brothers and Dad has three older sisters, so there are a lot of cousins, but it’s mostly my siblings I see when I look around.

The twins are 27 and they’re dark-haired like Dad. They are fraternal of course, being of different gender, but they look as similar as a brother and sister can. Thick-haired, hazel-eyed, tall and graceful. Emily is beautiful. Ned is attractive.

My other two sisters and I take after our mother. We’re blonde and blue-eyed and we have to be careful not to appear cute.

Liz is 24 and has had a rebellious wild unhealthy life. She has many stories. She has AIDS. She’s in remission right now, very medicated, very thin.

Laney is 22 and a rabid ecologist. She used to be a selfish shellfish vegetarian and now she’s a devout vegan. She succeeds at looking so odd she’s unattractive. We’re closest in age and best understand one another.

I’m 19. My full name is Eric Gorman Essex, but I go by Rick. I’m mostly vegetarian but there’s violence in me. Six years ago I brought a gun to school and shot two schoolmates and a teacher. I wasn’t actually trying to kill them; I was trying to make the situation so bad that I’d kill myself.

Since then I’ve had a lot of therapy. I’ve learned to control myself. But I still hear the urge to violence in me. Mostly now it’s around sex. I have to allieve myself at least twice a day. Myself. I’m not sexually active. Good thing, too. Because there’s no one I want more than my sister Emily.

Got your attention? It gets mine. I find my other sisters unattractive. Oh, I know they’re goodlooking enough; they’re blonde and blue-eyed and young and not deformed. But I’ve always been put off by their feet, repelled by the way Laney tends to spit when she’s talking with excitement, disgusted by Liz’s fingernail-chewing. I wonder, even, if these minute irritations are Nature’s way of avoiding incest? I mean, I’m virile and motivated lately, and I do not want these siblings.

But Emily’s different. She and Ned are so much older that I didn’t grow up with them. Familiar strangers. And she’s so pretty. Her brown hair is glossy like satin ribbons. Her eyes are sometimes green, sometimes brown, always warm. She has a grin that looks like it’s going to go on forever, past the edges of her smooth cheeks, past the frame of my vision, splitting the world laterally to let in nothing but good humor. Her skin feels like silk. Her earlobes are exquisite. I can’t help it. I can’t keep her out of my imagination when I love myself.

Is she coming alive yet? I can see her in my head but I don’t know if she’s vivid on this page. Cancer survivors say you can’t know what it’s like unless you’ve been there. I guess all survivors claim that. But it can’t be true, or there’s no point in writing. I have to believe life’s describable. I’ll try some more.

Lulu knew she was an endorphin addict. She could remember the delicious sensation of collapsing on her bed after an all-day walk with her high-school best friend. Twelve hours of sauntering and striding, snacking on fresh rolls and fruit from the grocery stores they passed, discussing their schoolmates, explaining the cosmos, and they would return to her house with legs heavy as sandbags. They fell backwards onto her twin bed and it seemed that their bodies would continue to sink into the mattress, endlessly heavy at rest. Full-on gravity.

She recollected her three post-partum hours. With each birth she’d had that amazing time right afterwards, when her traumatized body anesthetized itself, and cold apple juice tasted better than divine nectar. Apple juice. Sweet, piss-colored child’s-drink, and it was finer than the best champagne. That was endorphins.

But shit: nine months of pregnancy (not to mention a lifetime of rearing/loving) is a big price to pay for an hour of incredible high. Twelve hours of walking is hard to arrange. Lulu once met a man who was amazingly well-preserved for his age. He was seventy-five when she knew Jim and he comported himself like a forty year old. She learned his secret, because he became the lover of a good friend of hers. Jim rose each morning at 5:30, and did two full hours of stretching before anything else. Those two hours set him up for the next fourteen: he could move like a man half his age. That was two hours a day, to achieve flexibility. It probably would take six hours a day for happiness.

She didn’t have six spare hours. She could steal a bit more from sleep, but two hours a day for exercise-type activities was her limit. She was almost-happy, almost-crazy, and motivated to get more.

Lulu didn’t want to win the lottery. She never dreamt of inheriting wealth. The truth is, when she imagined abundance she got nervous. It didn’t take much before she was envisioning herself in a pressure-cooker of philanthropy – if she had wealth she’d have to give some of it away. So a lot of money would mean a lot of giving. She’d hate to spend her life at that. Nah: she liked to earn money; she wanted to get high and laugh.

She didn’t want to live forever. Oh she appreciated existence (what were the odds, after all?) and she’d managed to mostly enjoy her life so far, but it was easy for her to imagine growing weary of it. She’d had moments of that already. And with every friend who succumbed to cancer, Lulu better understood the terrible chaos of immortality: that awful disorganized fecundity, the jungle-rot mutation that never dies… She did not want to live forever, but she wanted to select words to tell stories that would live longer than she.

And she certainly wasn’t looking for love&marriage. Not any more. She lusted for connection (of course), but she had come to see capital-L love with its adjunct capital-M marriage as a barrier to that connection. The marriage team was bound to be an advantage in a struggle for survival but in Lulu’s eyes, around Lulu’s life and among her acquaintances, the institution seemed to hold each member back. The arrangement always required some aspect of arrested development or deceit on the part of the participants, or else it evolved without control and into risk.

It seemed increasingly obvious to her that love&marriage was not making the world go ‘round. Laughter was. Thousands of saints and philosophers have tried to explain God in terms of love, and have foundered in the shoals of misfortune and injustice. The good die young. Nice guys finish last. You need the patience of Job (to even read the story of Job!). Those things made no sense, without carrying the majesty of mystery. But if you view God as a standup comic, smiting nomads with hemorrhoids and consumers with pollution, playing death as sarcasm and tragedy as trick endings, if you see yourself as created in God’s image in that you can see yourself, and laugh, then the cosmos begins to make sense.

Lulu’s fifty-second birthday was approaching when she first organized these ideas. She celebrated by taking on a bit of anorexia nervosa. Within a month she was ingesting less than eight hundred calories a day. Nothing too drastic, but enough to promote a little endorphin release. Which, when added to the gain from two hours of exercise, and mixed in with regular pot and occasional Vicodin and sometimes even sex, made for a gratifying maturity. She might just write a book.

Just because the planet was doomed didn’t mean life was bad. There were still a few centuries of degeneration to enjoy, and the adults in charge, the children of the baby boomers, were accustomed to issues of extinction.

Naturally they strove to record their culture. Every civilization must, from the feudal Vikings through the landed English gentry to the rambunctious children of the colonists.
Lulu was among the striving recorders. Her full name was Lourdes, which was too Catholic for her, but Lulu led people to expect someone dippy. No matter: she liked to destroy expectations.

She kept searching for higher wisdom. Drugs no longer had much effect. She meditated and exercised and lately she seldom ate. Occasionally she engaged in rampant sex. Anything to lose herself, to plunge into the currents of alteration.

She watched her cohorts hurrying to preserve what they valued – filling time capsules with popular mementos – and it cast the lost wisdom of the ages in a harsh light for her. Knowing how little of worth was contained in the whole Library of Congress, she concluded that not much of actual value could have been lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Glimmers of astrology. Catalogues of ritual. Nothing any wiser or truer than the stuff her own age agreed to esteem. Marketing material.

The 21st century didn’t even guarantee a woman’s right to choose! Christianity was still promoted as a means to spiritual salvation, competing with equally primitive other world views. The touchstones of the culture continued to be wealth dreams, itches for immortality, and the goal of love&marriage.

If Lulu were filling a capsule of her particular life and times she wouldn’t have included those ideas. She didn’t long for treasure, endless life, true love. She’d pick other items.

She looked then at her slim wrists and scarred legs, viewed turning gingko leaves through the down on her summer-mottled forearms. The leaves appeared like folded table grapes, pale green fading to lemon. Fallen liquidambar leaves, damply magenta, mounded in the gutters beneath her feet. It was too cold for bare legs. She went inside and waited for night.

Lulu walked later and wished she had a dog. The evening was misty with ground fog reaching up to a quarter moon that glowed like a pale lamp behind a Vaselined lens. She saw a plane rise in front of the moon, looping a big nighttime lasso of pearly fog. She squinted her eyes and the streetlights sparkled like fake gems. Her shoes crunched on shards of safety glass from unlucky autos.

She wanted not money but a dog. Not endless life but a little more health. Neither love nor marriage, but perfect words. Exquisitely appropriate syllables, slung like chains of sweat around her spinning self.

She wanted a cigarette.

She wandered another block and a half, searching out dry butts in the semi-darkness. She pocketed enough for a good dose of nicotine and headed back to her little place, to her word-processor, her bathroom, her phone. She smoked and she slept.

And woke to a feeling of sadness, hours before dawn. She tried to write but no words came. She tried to sleep but she was too wakeful. She did yoga. For three hours she put her body into poses, entranced herself. It worked.

Sometimes Lulu cut herself, to bring her pain to the surface. She never marked a part that would show; she tended to slice her inner thigh. The blade was very sharp; at first there was no sign, no pain. A quick white incision that only revealed itself as the blood welled up and streamed thinly from it. A cool numbness at first, then a sting and finally, lovingly, a throb.

In similar fashion, those hours of yoga pulled Lulu away from herself. She passed through muscle control and near numbness to a form of relaxed trance. She became pleasantly tired, and she felt clean and empty. Like when she used to play for hours in a neighbor’s pool, during the lazy southern California days when she was ten or twelve, cannonballing into the deep end, swimming all the long way underwater, without a breath, surfacing with water streaming down her back and snot running from her nose. She stayed in the water till some grownup made her come out for awhile, noticing her blue lips and white fingertips, tossing a towel to her and tsking at her while she stamped foot to foot, teeth chattering, nagging to swim some more, and then, finally, gracelessly, accepting the mandatory break, receiving the frozen Koolaid popsicle, savoring the clean feeling inside her belly and outside her skin.

After three hours of yoga, she felt good.

It isn’t pretty, acknowledging an old cow elephant, but there’s huge relief when it’s over. By the time Sandy confronts Jill, a week has passed and the matter has gone from shades of elephant gray to crisp black-and-white. She knows they can’t continue without a clean conversation.

“It’s time, Jill,” Sandy begins. “We have to clear the air about Rick. You know I’ve been seeing him again, and I know you don’t want to hear about it, and I’m confused about what the rules are here.” She pauses too briefly so Jill doesn’t talk in, and then Sandy rushes on. “It’s only in the last year I’ve realized that back when it first started, you weren’t done with Rick even though you told me you were. But now I’m hearing that you lied about me to Rick five years ago.”

“Lied?” Jill whisper-croaks the word as a question. Her face pales.

“Gaah! There’s so much murk around here…” Sandy moves her arms back and forth and looks around like she’s overwhelmed. “Look: one question. Why don’t you want me to spend time with Rick now?”

“It’s not about you spending time with Rick. Go ahead. All you want. I just don’t want to be included. And I’m not particularly interested in hearing about it.”

“There’s something going on that I don’t understand, Jill. Please explain it to me.”

Jill is silent for a moment. “Shit, San,” she says then. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry.”

“I did lie five years ago. I led Rick to believe that you and Keith were still together. More than that: I said you were happy.

“I told myself I did it because it was best for you. But I know now I was still jealous. I knew I shouldn’t but I still loved him back when you took him. Five years ago I was over it, but I didn’t want you to have him. I mean, I couldn’t imagine me visiting the two of you as a couple: no way. So I told him you were married and happy. And then I watched him act regretful that he wasn’t Keith, heard him talk about how he wished he’d left Peggy for you. Boy did I feel boxed in. I wanted so badly to say, ‘Hold on, asshole. Get a clue. She and Keith were torn apart by guilt at what they’d done to their first spouses. As you would have been. Idiot.’ But of course I couldn’t say that without telling him the truth, so I just had to swallow it.”

Sandy clears her throat and acts like she wants to say something, but Jill rolls over that. “So guess how I felt when you found each other again anyway? There I’d gone to all that trouble, lying and murking myself. I couldn’t stop it from happening. But I didn’t have to like it. That’s why I now object, or refuse, or act uninterested. The whole subject makes me feel ashamed.”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay.”

Jill stops talking, looks at Sandy.

“It was the wrong thing to do and don’t ever do it again, but it’s all right. Just as well he didn’t know. Rick and I would have been a mistake. Mostly, it’s great to be able to get this out.”

Jill and Sandy go back thirty years but they aren’t big huggers. Now they rise simultaneously and move into each other’s arms. The elephant moves as well. Jill and Sandy get a little weepy, feel a big catharsis. Without even a creak of the old oak floor, the elephant leaves the room.

***

Sandy brought in coffee for her and Chris the following afternoon. They brewed good stuff in the lab but appreciated the occasional addition of steamed milk and spice dusting. The current helmet was a thicker design than the last one they tested, but with a less regular shape. They stirred foam for a minute.

“I saw Rick last week,” Sandy started. “We had a fine time but it’s no grand passion. He’s getting romantic/corny in his dotage. Talking about the sum being greater than the parts. Shit, he’s about this close…” and she held her right hand up between them, thumb and forefinger about two inches apart, “to buying us matching leisure suits.”

Chris smiled below a milk mustache. “That’s not okay. You may have to end the relationship right now.”

“It’s crazy, but I’m more interested in how my friendship with Jill is affected than anything about actual Rick. I don’t want him, but I sure want to figure out what happened with her.”

They attached strain gauges to skulls for a few silent minutes. Walking to the trigger, Chris then said, “Go for it. You and Jill have been through so much and you’ve always found your way back to each other. Talk to her.”

“Oh I did.” And Sandy told all. “We cleared the air but I didn’t achieve clarity.”

Chris fired at the helmeted skulls. “Maybe the clue is ‘shame.’ Jill used the word herself. It sounds like she might have unacknowledged shame about her own early promiscuity. You know? Apparently there were repercussions.”

Sandy looked up with awe. She wondered how many roles Chris could fill in her future. “Well at least we made the elephant walk.”

They moved together to examine the targets.

“Oh honey,” Chris concluded, “there will always be elephants. The floor may crack, but I think your foundation can bear the stress. Like this helmet.”