Dept. Of Speculation

10

Some punk rock kids move into the apartment above us. Our landlord lives in Florida so he asks us to keep an eye on them. My husband helps them carry up their three pieces of furniture and giant stereo system. I like them right away; they remind me of my students — smart, jittery, oddly earnest. “That’s cool, you guys are married,” the girl tells me one day, and the boy nods too as if he means it.

I have a chunk of vomit in my hair, I realize right before class. Chunk is maybe overstating it, but yes, something. I wash my hair in the sink. I am teaching a class called “Magic and Dread.”

Sometimes I find myself having little conversations in my head with the punk rock kids upstairs.

You know what’s punk rock about marriage?

Nothing.

You know what’s punk rock about marriage?

All the puke and shit and piss.

My husband comes into the bathroom, holding a hammer. He is talking, reciting a litany of household things. “I fixed the wobbly chair,” he tells me. “And I put a mat under the rug so that it won’t ride up again. The toilet needs a new washer though. It won’t stop running.” This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

People keep telling me to do yoga. I tried it once at the place down the street. The only part I liked was the part at the end when the teacher covered you with a blanket and you got to pretend you were dead for ten minutes. “Where is that second novel?” the head of my department asks me. “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

We used to call her Little. Little, come here, we’d say. Little, unhand the cat, but then one day she won’t let us. “I am big,” she says and her face is stormy.

My old boss calls me to ask if I am looking for work. A rich man he knows needs someone to ghostwrite his book about the history of the space program. “The job pays well,” he says, “but the guy’s a total dick.” I tell my husband about it. Yes, yes, yes, he says. It turns out we’re running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips.

What Fitzgerald said: Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in. Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell.

So I meet with the rich man. It’s a spectacularly ill-conceived project. He wishes to talk first about the making of the space program, then about the space race, then in the middle tell his own aggrieved story of almost but not quite making it into orbit. He’ll end the book with a proposal for how we might colonize the universe, complete with elaborate technical documents of his own devising. “Sounds good,” I say. “People like space.” The almost astronaut is pleased. He gives me a check. “It’s going to be a big book,” he says. “Big!”

Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself.

What do you want?

I don’t know.

What do you want?

I don’t know.

What seems to be the problem?

Just leave me alone.

A boy who is pure of heart comes over for dinner. One of the women who is dabbling with being young again brings him. He holds himself stiffly and permits himself only the smallest of smiles at our jokes. He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. “You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones,” someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.

Do not jump off a wall. Do not run in the street. Do not strike your head with a stone just to see what this will do.

Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.

In 1897, a French doctor named Hippolyte Baraduc conducted a series of photographic experiments. He hoped to prove that the soul does indeed reside in the body and leaves it at the moment of death. He fastened a live pigeon to a board with its wings outstretched, then placed a photographic plate on its chest and secured it tightly. As he’d hoped, when he cut the pigeon’s throat the plate depicted something. The soul leaving took the form of curling eddies, he said.

Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could an object attract or repel?

One day I see the dog-walking man kicking a mattress on the street. He kicks and kicks it. BUGS, NO GOOD, VERY BAD someone had written on it in red paint.

Baraduc claimed to be able to photograph emotions. “Hate, joy, grief, fear, sympathy, piety, & etc. No new chemical is necessary to obtain these results. Any ordinary camera will do it.” He sought out emotionally agitated people, then held light-proof paper a few inches from their heads. He found that the same emotion would make the same kind of impression upon the photographic plate, but that different emotions produced different images. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.