Girl With Curious Hair

HERE AND THERE

'Her photograph tastes bitter to me. A show of hands on the part of those who are willing to believe that I kiss her photo? She'd not believe it, or it would make her sad, or rather it would make her angry and she would say you never kissed me the way you kiss my chemically bitter senior photo, the reasons you kiss my photo all have to do with you, not me.'

'He didn't really like to kiss me.'

'On the back of the photo, beneath the remains of the reversible tape I had used to attach it carefully to the wall of my room at school, are written the words: "Received 3 February 1983; treasured as of that date." '

'He didn't like to kiss me. I could feel it.'

'No contest to the charge that kissing an actual living girl is not my favorite boy-girl thing to do. It's not a squeamishness issue, has nothing to do with the fact, noted somewhere, that kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement. For me it's rather a sort of silliness issue. I feel silly. The girl and I are so close; the kiss contorts our mouths; noses get involved, bent; it's as if we're making faces at each other. At the time, with her, yes, I'd feel vaguely elsewhere, as a defense against myself. Admittedly this has to do with me, not her. But know that when I wasn't with her I dreamed of the time I could kiss her again. I thought about her constantly. She filled my thoughts.'

'What about my thoughts?'

'And then let's be equally candid about the utter lack of self-consciousness with which I'd kiss her elsewhere, slowly and in a way I'd found too soon she loved, and she'd admit she loved it, she does not lie, she'd admit to the pillow over her face to keep her quiet for the people in the other apartments. I knew her. I knew every curve, hollow, inlet and response of a body that was cool, hard, tight, waistless, vaguely masculine but still thoroughly exciting, quick to smile, quick to arch, quick to curl and cuddle and cling. I could unlock her like a differential, work her like an engine. Only when I was forced to be away at school did things mysteriously "change." '

'I felt like there was something missing.'

'I kiss her bitter photo. It's cloudy from kisses. I know the outline of my mouth from her image. She continues to teach me without knowing.'

'My feelings changed. It took time, but I felt like there was something missing. He just works all the time on well-formed formulas and poems and their rules. They're the things that are important to him. He'd tell me he missed me and then stay away. I'm not angry but I'm selfish, I need a lot of attention. All the time apart gave me a chance to do some thinking.'

'All the time apart I thought of her constantly — but she says "My feelings have changed, what can I do, I can't with Bruce anymore." As if her feelings controlled her rather than vice versa. As if her feelings were something outside her, not in her control, like a bus she has to wait for.'

'I met someone I like to spend time with. Someone here at home, at school. I met him in Stats. We got to be really good friends. It took time, but my feelings changed. Now I can't with Bruce anymore. It doesn't all have to do with him. It's me, too. Things change.'

'The photo is a Sears Mini-Portrait, too large for any wallet, so I've bought a special receptacle, a supporting framing folder of thick licorice cardboard. The receptacle is now wedged over the sun visor, along with a toll ticket, on the passenger side of my mother's car. I keep the windows rolled up to negate any possibility of the photo's blowing around, coming to harm. In June, in a car without air-conditioning, I keep the windows rolled up for the sake of her photo. What more should anyone be required to say?'

"Bruce here I feel compelled to remind you that fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate within a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space. It must be confronted as text which is to say fiction which is to say project. Sense one's unease as you establish a line of distraction that now seems without either origin or end."

'This kind of fiction doesn't interest me.'

"Yes but remember we decided to construct an instance in which for once your interests are to be subordinated to those of another."

'So she's to be reader, as well as object?'

"See above for evidence that here she is so constructed as to be for once subject as well."

'A relief of contrivance, then? The therapeutic lie is to pretend the truth is a lie?'

"Affording you a specular latitude perspective disinterest the opportunity to be emotionally generous."

'I think he should get to do whatever makes him feel better. I still care about him a lot. Just not in that way anymore.'

'By late May 1983 her emotional bus has pulled out. I find in myself a need to get very away. To do a geographic. I am driving my mother's enclosed car on hot Interstate 95 in southern Maine, moving north toward Prosopopeia, the home of my mother's brother and his wife, almost at the Canadian border. Taking I-95 all the way from Worcester, Mass., lets me curve comfortably around the west of Boston, far from Cambridge, which I don't wish ever to see again. I am Bruce, a hulking, pigeon-toed, blond, pale, red-lipped Midwestern boy, twenty-two, freshly graduated in electrical engineering from MIT, freshly patted on the head by assorted honors committees, freshly returned in putative triumph with my family to Bloomington, Indiana, there to be kicked roundly in the psychic groin by a certain cool, tight, waistless, etcetera, Indiana University graduate student, the object of my theoretical passion, distant affection and near-total loyalty for three years, my prospective fiancee as of Thanksgiving last.'

'All I said to him then was do you think we could do it. He had asked me if he could ask me someday.'

'I was home again for Christmas: as of the evening of 27/12 we were drinking champagne, lying on her leopard-skin rug.'

'I told him a hundred times it wasn't a leopard-skin rug: the last tenant just had a dog.'

'We were discussing potential names for potential children. She said for a girl she might like "Kate." '

'And then all of a sudden it's like he suddenly wasn't there.'

'At this point she'd bring up how I seemed suddenly distant. I would explain in response that I had gotten, suddenly, over champagne, an idea for a truly central piece on the application of state variable techniques to the analysis of small-signal linear control systems. A piece that could have formed the crux of my whole senior year's thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months.'

'He went to his Dad's office at the University and I didn't see him for two days.'

'She claims that's when she began to feel differently about things. No doubt this new Statistics person comforted her while I spent two sleepless, Coke-and-pizza-fueled days on a piece that ended up empty and unfeasible. I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy. She practically had her forearm to her forehead. It was distressed-maiden/wronged-woman scenario.'

'He only came to my apartment to sleep. He spent almost all Christmas break either working or sleeping, and he went back to Cambridge a week before he had to, to work on his thesis. His honors thesis is an epic poem about variable systems of information-and energy-transfer.'

'She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet.'

'He wants to be the first really great poet of technology.'

'I see it like I see weather coming.'

'He thinks art as literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by. He says words as "correlative signifiers" are withering up.'

'Words as fulñllers of the function of signification in artistic communication will wither like the rules of form before them. Meaning will be clean. No, she says? Assuming she cares enough even to try to understand? Then say that art necessarily exists in a state of tension with its own standards. That the clumsy and superfluous logos of all yesterdays gives way to the crisp and proper and satisfactory of any age. That poetry, like everything organized and understood under the rubric of Life, is dynamic. The superfluous always exists simply to have its ass kicked. The Norbert Wiener of today will be triumphant in the Darwinian arena of tomorrow.'

'He said it was the most important thing in his life. What does that make me feel like?'

'It's Here. It's Now. The next beauties will and must be new. I invited her to see a crystalline renaissance; cool and chip-flat; fibers of shine winking in aesthetic matrices under a spreading sodium dawn. What touches and so directs us is what applies. I sense the impending upheaval of a great cleaning, a coming tidiness foaming at every corner of meaning. I smell change, and relief at cost, like the musty promise of a summer rain. A new age and a new understanding of beauty as range, not locus. No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, warm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to decollétage, understood in terms of a thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. Not sensuously here, but causally, efficaciously here. Here in the most intimate way. Plasma electronics, large-scale systems, operational amplification. I admit to seeing myself as an aesthetician of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here. Various as Poisson, morphically dense:

pieces whose form, dimension, character, and implication can spread like sargasso from a single structured relation and a criterion of function. Odes to and of Green, Bessel, Legendre, Eigen. Yes there were moments this past year when I almost had to shield my eyes before the processor's reflection: I became in myself axiom, language, and formation rule, and seemed to glow filament-white with a righteous fire.'

'He said he'd be willing to take me with him. And when I asked him where, he got mad.'

'I was convinced I could sing like a wire at Kelvin, high and pale, burn without ignition or friction, shine cool as a lemony moon, mated to a lattice of pure meaning. Interferenceless transfer. But a small, quiet, polite, scented, neatly ordered system of new signals has somehow shot me in the head. With words and tears she has amputated something from me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.'

"Which is neither here nor there."

'No, the thing to see is exactly that it's there. That Maine is different from, fundamentally other than both Boston and Bloom-ington. Unfamiliar sights are a balm. From the hot enclosed car I see rocks veined with glassy color, immoderate blocks of granite whose cubed edges jut tangent to the scraggled surface of hills; slopes that lead away from the highway in gentle sine curves. The sky is a study in mint. Deer describe brown parabolae by the sides of the forested stretches.'

"I sense feeling being avoided not confronted Bruce. Maybe here we might just admit together that if one uses a person as nothing more than a receptacle for one's organs, fluids, and emotions, if one never regards her as more than and independent from the feelings and qualities one is disposed to invest her with from a distance, it is wrong then to turn around and depend on her feelings for any significant part of one's own sense of wellbeing. Bruce why not j ust admit that what bothers you so much is that she has given irresistible notice that she has an emotional life with features that you knew nothing about, that she is just plain different from whatever you might have decided to make her into for yourself. In short a person Bruce."

'Look: a huge black bird has curved through the corner of my sight and let loose a strangely lovely berry rainbow of guano on the center of the windshield near Smyrna, Maine; and under the arc of this spectrum from a remote height a unit of memories is laid out and systematized like colored print on the gray, chewed-looking two-lane road ahead of me. The trip I took with my family here to Prosopopeia, just two summers ago, and how she braved her own stone-faced parents' disapproval to come along, how she and my sister discovered they could be friends, how she and I touched knees instead of holding hands on the airplane because my mother was seated next to her and she felt embarrassed. I remember with my gut the unbreachable promise of a whole new kind of distance implicit in the dizzying new height we all seemed to reach in the airplane on this long, storm-threatened flight, up to where the sky first turned cold and then darkened to cadet and we smelled space just above. How the shapes of a whole terrain of clouds, from inside the sky, took on the modal solidity of the real: shaggy buffalo heads; tattered bridges; the topology of states; political profiles; intricately etched turds. We flew away over the flat summer board games of Indiana and Ohio. Thunderstorms over Pennsylvania were great anvils that narrowed darkly to rain on counties. We had a steel belly. I remember a jutting, carbuncular ruby ring on the finger of an Indian woman in the seat across the aisle, a dot stained into her forehead, robes so full they seemed to foam. Her dark husband, in a business suit, with white eyes and white teeth and impossibly well-combed hair.'

"And this place you would 'take' the girl to, someday? And why now that she is forever absent does she become that place, the loss of which summons images of decapitation and harm?"

'Little I-95 proceeds north to Houlton, Maine, then curves east into New Brunswick. I exit the highway at Houlton, pay my toll, and, via a side street that leads between the Hagan Cabinet Company and the Atrium Supper Club, come out on County Route 1, again heading due north, through dense farmland, toward Mars Hill and then Prosopopeia. The sun sets gradually to my left over ranges of pale purple earth I learned two years ago are colored by the young potato plants they feed. An irrigation generator howls and clanks by the road a few miles out of Mars Hill, and in this purple now an intricate circuit of tiny rivers runs red in the late light. Just farther up 1 is a hand-lettered sign announcing hubcaps for sale, spoils of war with the rutted road, the improbable wares displayed in long rows on my right, glinting dull pink on a fence and the side of a barn-red barn, looking like the shields of an army of dwarfs. About everything there is an air of age, clocks running slow on sluggish current.'

"The sun setting to the left means to the west, meaning even here you remember things west Bruce, meaning one becomes uncomfortable at this new silence from a subject in a west we have evidence you remember. One voice cannot just shut off another, even in a structure of lies, if light is to be shed the way we profess to—"

'Perhaps I should mention that at the toll booth for the Houlton exit her photo's receptacle came free when I pulled down the visor to get at the ticket, and curved airborne over to me in the backwash from the window I had to roll down, and ended half-wedged between the brake and the floor. In reaching for it I dropped my money and somehow touched the accelerator with my foot. The car moved forward and nudged the controlled gate that lowers to stop a vehicle until its debt to the state is discharged. The woman in the toll booth was out like a shot; a policeman in his cruiser by the road looked over and put down something he was eating. I had to scoop up my money and fork it over at the gate. The receptacle was bent and dusted with floor-dirt and cracker crumbs. The toll-taker was polite but firm. There was honking.'

The trip Bruce and his parents and his sister invited me for to Maine year before last was the last time I think everything was totally good between us. On the trip he pointed at things out of the airplane window and made his Mom and I laugh. We kept our legs touching and he'd touch my hand too, very gently, so his Mom wouldn't see him. At his aunt and uncle's house we went to a lake, and swam, and could of gone waterskiing if we wanted. Sometimes we took long walks all day down back roads and got dusty and sometimes lost, but we always got back because Bruce could tell times and directions by the sun. We drank water with our hands out of little streams that were really cold. Once Bruce was picking us blueberries for lunch and got stung by a bee on the hand and I pulled the stinger out, because I had nails, and put a berry on the sting and he laughed and said he didn't care about anything, really. I had a wonderful time. It was really fun. It was when Bruce and I felt right. It felt right to be with him. It was maybe the last time it felt to me like there was both a real me and a real him when we were together. It was at his uncle's house, on some sweatshirts and clothes on the ground in some woods at night by a potato field, that I gave Bruce something I can't ever get back. I was glad I did it. But I think maybe that's when Bruce's feelings began to change. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it kind of drove him away a little that I did it finally. That I finally wanted to, and he could see that I did. It's like he knew he really had me, and it made him go down inside himself, to have, instead of just want. I think he really likes to want. That's OK. I think maybe we were just meant to be friends the whole time. We knew each other ever since high school. We swam in the quarry where they made that movie. We had driver's education together, and took our tests for our driver's licenses in the same car, is how we got to really know each other. Except we didn't get really close until a long time after that, when we were both already in different colleges and only saw each other at vacations.'

'I hit Prosopopeia just as the sun goes seriously down and all sorts of crepuscular Maine life begins rustling darkly in a spiny old section of forest I am happy to leave behind at the corporation limit. I detour briefly to stop at an IGA and buy some cold Michelob as a bit of a housewarming present, something my mother had suggested and financed. Michelob is a beer my uncle loves and does not really drink so much as inhale. It's practically the only thing he can inhale. He has emphysema now, advanced, at fifty-five.

Even the few steps from a chair to the kitchen door and a hearty handshake and the appropriation of one of my light bags is enough to make him have to begin his puffing exercise. He sits heavily back in his chair and begins to breathe, rhythmically, with concentration, between pursed lips, as my aunt hugs me and makes happy sounds punctuated by "Lord" and "Well" and then whisks all my luggage upstairs in one load. There's not much luggage. I keep my bent receptacle with me. My uncle goes for a wheezer of adrenaline spray and resumes puffing as hard as he can, smiling tightly and waving away both my concern and his discomfort. He blows as though trying to extinguish a flame — which is perhaps close to what it felt like for him. He has dropped more weight, especially in his legs; his legs through his pants have a sticklike quality as he sits, breathing. Even thin and crinkled, though, he is still an eerie, breast-less copy of my mother, with: gray-white hair, an oval high-cheek-boned face, and blue pecans for eyes. Like my mother's, these eyes can be sharply lit as a bird's or sad and milky as a whale's; while my uncle puffs they are blank, unfocused, away. My aunt is an unreasonably pretty sixty, genuinely but not cloyingly nice, a lady against whom the only indictment might be hair dyed to a sort of sweet amber found nowhere in nature. She has put my portable life in my bedroom and asks whether I'd eat some supper. I'd eat anything at all. A television is on, with no sound, by an ancient electric stove of chipped white enamel and a new brown dishwasher. My uncle says I look like I was the one carried the car out here rather than the other way around. I know I do not look good. I've driven straight for almost thirty hours, a trip punctuated only by the filling and emptying of various tanks. My shirt is crunchy with old sweat, I have a really persistent piece of darkened apple skin between my two front teeth, and something has happened to a blood vessel in one of my eyes from staring so long at distance and cement — there is a small nova of red at the corner and a sandy pain when I blink. My hair needs a shampoo so badly it's almost yellow. I say I'm tired and sit down. My aunt gets bread from an actual bread box and takes a dish of tuna salad out of the refrigerator and begins stirring it up with a wooden spoon. My uncle eyes the beer on the kitchen counter, two tall silver six-packs already spreading a bright puddle of condensation on the linoleum. He looks over at my aunt, who sighs to herself and gives a tiny nod. My uncle is instantly up, no invalid; he gets two beers loose and puts one in front of me and pops the other and drains probably half of it in one series of what I have to say are unattractively foamy swallows. My aunt asks whether I'd like one sandwich or two. My uncle says I'd better just eat up that tuna salad, that they've had it twice now and if it hangs around much longer they're going to have to name it. His eyes are completely back, they are in him, and he uses them to laugh, to tease, to express. Just like his sister. He looks at the Sears receptacle by my place at the table and asks what I've got there. My aunt looks at him. I say memorabilia. He says it looks like it had a hard trip. The kitchen smells wonderful: of old wood and new bread and something sharply sweet, a faint tang of tuna. I can hear my mother's car ticking and cooling out in the driveway. My aunt puts two fat sandwiches down in front of me, pops my tall beer, gives me another warm little hug with a joy she can't contain and I can't understand, given that I have more or less just appeared here, with no explicable reason and little warning other than a late-night phone call two days ago and some sort of follow-up conversation with my parents after I'd hit the road. She says it's a wonderful surprise having me come visit them and she hopes I'll stay just as long as I'd like and tell her what I like to eat so she can stock up and didn't I feel so good and proud graduating out of such a good school in such a hard subject that she could never in a dog's age understand. She sits down. We begin to talk about the family. The sandwiches are good, the beer slightly warm. My uncle eyes the six-packs again and goes into his shirt pocket for the disk of snuff he dips since he had to stop smoking. There is cool, sweet, grassy air through the kitchen screens. I am too tired not to feel good.'

'I felt so sorry when he said he was going to have to go out of town, maybe for the whole summer. But I got mad when he said now we were even, summer for summer. Because him leaving this summer is his choice, just like last summer was all his choices, too.

He stayed in Cambridge, in Boston, last summer, to work on starting his project, and he got a research job in his engineering lab, and he didn't even ever really explain why he didn't want to come be in Bloomington for the summer, even though I'd just got my B. A. here. But he sent me a big arrangement of roses and said for me to come live with him and be his love in Boston that summer, that he missed me so much he couldn't endure it, and I went through a lot deciding, but I did, I used my graduation present money to fly to MIT and got a job as a hostess in Harvard Square at a German restaurant, the Wurst House, and we had an apartment in the Back Bay with a fireplace that was really expensive. But then after some time passed, Bruce acted like he really didn't want me to be there. If he'd said something about it that would be one thing, but he just started being really cold. He'd be away at the lab all the time, and he never came in to see the Wurst House, and when we were alone at home he didn't touch me for a week once, and he'd snap sometimes, or just be cold. It was like he was repulsed by me after a while. I'd started taking birth control pills by then. Then in July once he didn't come home or call for a day and a night, and when he did he got mad that I was mad that he didn't. He said why couldn't he at least have some vestige of his own life every once in a while. I said he could, but I said it just didn't feel to me like he felt the same anymore. He said how dare you tell me what I feel. I flew back home a few days later. We decided that's what I better do, because if I stayed he'd feel like he had to be artificially nice all the time, and that wouldn't be any fun for either of us. We both cried a little bit at Logan airport when he took me on the bus. In Bloomington my family threw confetti on me when I got home, they were glad to have me back, and I felt good to be home, too. Then a day later Bruce sent arranged roses again and called and said he'd made a ghastly error, and he flew back home, too, and said he was very sorry that he had got obsessional about all sorts of exterior things, and he tried to make me understand that he felt like he was standing on the cusp between two eras, and that however he'd acted I should regard as evidence of his own personal shortcomings as a person, not as anything about his commitment to me as a lover. And I guess I had so much invested in the relationship by then that I said OK that's OK, and he stayed in Bloomington over a week, and we did everything together, and at night he made me feel wonderful, it could really be wonderful being close with him, and he said he was making me feel wonderful because he wanted to, not because he thought he had to. Then he went back to Boston and said wait for me till Thanksgiving, don't sit under apple trees, and I'll come back to you, so I did, I even turned down friendly lunch invitations and football tickets from guys in my classes. And then Thanksgiving and Chrstmas felt to me like the exact same thing as that bad part of the summer in the Back Bay. My feelings just started to change. It wasn't all him. It took time, but after time passed I felt something was missing, and I'm selfish, I can only feel like I'm giving more than I'm getting for so long, then things change.'

"Bruce perhaps here is the opportunity to confront the issue of your having on four separate occasions late last fall slept with a Simmons College sophomore from Great Neck, New York. Perhaps you'd care to discuss a certain Halloween party."

'Last summer was no fun, and when I'd tell him that at Christmas, he'd get mad, and tell me not to bring it up unless I was trying to really tell him something. I'd already started to be friends with the guy from Stats, but I wouldn't have even been interested in hanging around with him if things had been OK with Bruce and me.'

'I sleep and eat and sit around a great deal, and the red in my eye slowly fades. I wash insects' remains from my mother's windshield. For a time I devote most of my energy to immersing myself in the lives and concerns of two adults for whom I have a real and growing affection. My uncle is an insurance adjuster, though he's due for early retirement at the end of the year because of the state of his wind: the family worries about the possibility of his car breaking down on one of the uncountable Aroostook County roads he crisscrosses every day, adjusting claims. The winters here are killers. I have the feeling that when my uncle retires he will do nothing but watch television and tease my aunt and relate stories about the claims he adjusts. His stories are not to be believed. They all start with, "I had a loss once. ." He talks to me, in the living room, over the few beers he's allowed each day. He tells me that he's always been a homebody and a family man, that he loved spending time with his family — the children now grown and gone south, to Portland and Augusta and Bath — that there have been plenty of fools in his agency who spent all their time on their careers or their hunting or their golf or their peckers, and then what did they have, when winter came and the world got snowed in, after all? My aunt teaches third grade at the elementary school across town, and has the summer off, but she's taking two courses, a French and a Sociology, at the University of Maine's Prosopopeia branch downtown. For a few days after I'm rested I ride over with her to the little college and sit in the campus library while she's in class. The library is tiny, cute, like the children's section of a public facility, with carpet and furniture and walls colored in the muted earth-tones of autumn rot. There is hardly anyone in the summer library except two very heavy women who inventory the books at the tops of their lungs. It is at once too noisy and too quiet to do any real work, and I have no ideas that do not seem to me shallow and overwrought. I really feel, sitting, trying to extrapolate on the equations that have informed the last two years of my life, as though I'd been shot in the head. I end up writing disordered pieces, or more often letters, without direction or destination. What is to prove? It seems as though I've disproved everything. I soon stop going to the UMP library. Days go by, and my aunt and uncle are impeccably kind, but Maine becomes another here instead of a there.'

"Explain."

'Things become bad. I now have a haircut the shadow of which scares me. It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define. I have trouble sleeping: I wake very early every morning and wait, cold, for the sun to rise behind the gauzy white curtains of my cousins' old room. When I sleep I have unpleasant, repetitive dreams, dreams involving leopards, skinned knees, a bent old cafeteria fork with crazy tines. I have one slow dream in which she is bagging leaves in my family's yard in Indiana and I am pleading with her magically to present with amnesia, to be for me again, and she tells me to ask my mother, and I go into the house, and when I come out again, with permission, she is gone, the yard knee-deep in leaves. In this dream I am afraid of the sky: she has pointed at it with her rake handle and it is full of clouds which, seen from the ground, form themselves into variegated symbols of the calculus and begin to undergo manipulations I neither cause nor understand. In all my dreams the world is windy, disordered, gray.'

"Now you stop kissing pictures and tearing up proofs and begin to intuit that things are, and have been, much more general and in certain respects sinister all along."

'I begin to realize that she might never have existed. That I might feel this way now for a different — maybe even no — reason. The loss of a specific referent for my emotions is wildly disorienting. Two and a half weeks have passed since I came here. The receptacle is lying on the bureau in my room, still bent from the tollbooth. My affections have become a sort of faint crust on the photo, and the smell when I open the receptacle in the morning is chemically bitter. I stay inside all day, avoid windows, and cannot summon hunger. My testicles are drawn up constantly. They begin to hurt. Whole periods of time now begin to feel to me like the intimate, agonizing interval between something's falling off and its hitting the ground. My aunt says I look pale. I put some cotton in my ear, tell her I have an earache, and spend a lot of time wrapped in a scratchy blanket, watching Canadian television with my uncle.'

"This sort of thing can be good."

'I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience. I am invested with an urge to "write it all out," to confront the past and present as a community or signs, but this requires a special distance I seem to have left behind. For a few days I exercise instead — go for long, shambling runs in jeans and sneakers, move some heavy mechanical clutter out of my uncle's backyard. It leaves me nervous and flushed and my aunt is happy; she says I look healthy. I take the cotton out of my ear.'

"All this time you're communicating with no one."

'I let my aunt do the talking to my parents. I do, though, have one odd and unsatisfactory phone conversation with my eldest brother, who is an ophthalmologist in Dayton. He smokes a pipe and is named Leonard. Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I say that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and that furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be… well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham.'

"Though of course your brother was only pointing out that perfection, when we get right down to the dark, cheese-binding heart of the matter, is impossible."

'There is no shortage of things that are perfect for the function that defines them. Peano's axioms. A chameleon's coat. A Turing Machine.'

"Those aren't persons."

'No one has ever argued pursuasively that that has anything to do with it. My professors stopped trying.'

"Could we possibly agree on whom you might ask now?"

'He said real poetry won't be in words after a while. He said the icy beauty of the perfect signification of fabricated nonverbal symbols and their relation through agreed-on rules will come slowly to replace first the form and then the stuff of poetry. He says an epoch is dying and he can hear the rattle. I have all this in letters he sent me. I keep all my letters in a box. He said poetic units that allude and evoke and summon and are variably limited by the particular experience and sensitivity of individual poets and readers will give way to symbols that both are and stand for what they're about, that both the limit and the infinity of what is real can be expressed best by axiom, sign, and function. I love Emily Dickinson. I said I wasn't going to pretend like I understood and disagreed but it seemed like what he thought about poetry was going to make poetry seem cold and sad. I said a big part of the realness that poems were about for me, when I read them, was feelings. I wasn't going to pretend to be sure, but I didn't think numbers and systems and functions could make people feel any way at all. Sometimes, when I said it, he felt sorry for me, and said I wasn't conceiving the project right, and he'd play with my earlobes. But sometimes at night he'd get mad and say that I was just one of those people that are afraid of everything new and unavoidable and think they're going to be bad for people. He came so close to calling me stupid that I almost got really mad. I'm not stupid. I graduated college in three years. And I don't think all new things and things changing are bad for people.'

"How could you think this was what the girl was afraid of?"

'Today, a little over three weeks in Prosopopeia, I am sitting in my relatives' living room, with the cotton back in my ear, watching the lunchtime news on a Canadian station. I suspect it's nice outside. There is trouble in Quebec. I can hear my aunt saying something, in the kitchen. In a moment she comes in, wiping her hands on a small towel, and says that the stove is acting up. Apparently she can't get the top of the stove to heat, that sometimes it acts up. She wants to heat some chili for my uncle and me to eat when he conies home for lunch. He'll be home in the early afternoon. There's not much else for a good lunch in the house, and she's not fussy for going to the IGA because she has to prepare for a French quiz, and I'm certainly not going to go out in the wind with that ear acting up like it's been, and she can't get the stove to work. She asks me if I could maybe have a quick look at the stove.'

'I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.'

'The stove is indeed officially acting up. The stovetop burners do not respond. My aunt says it's an electrical thingummy in the back of the stove, that comes loose, that my uncle can always get it working again but he won't be home until she's already in class, and the chili won't be able to simmer, reblend, get tasty. She says if it wouldn't make my ear hurt could I try to get the stove going? It's an electrical thingummy, after all. I say no problem. She goes for my uncle's toolbox in the closet by the cellar door. I reach back and unplug this huge, ugly old white stove, pull it away from the wall and the new dishwasher. I get a Phillips out of my uncle's box and remove the stove's back panel. The stove is so old I can't even make out the manufacturer's name. It is possibly the crudest piece of equipment ever conceived. Its unit cord is insulated in some sort of ancient fabric wrap with tiny red barber-spirals on it. The cord simply conducts a normal 220 house AC into a five-way distributor circuit at the base of the stove's guts. Bundles of thick, inefficient wires in harness lead from each of the four burner controls and from the main oven's temperature setting into outflow jacks on the circuit. The burner controls determine temperature level at the selected point through straightforward contact and conduction of AC to the relevant burner's heating unit, each of which units is simply a crudely grounded high-resistance transformer circuit that conducts heat, again through simple contact, into the black iron spiral of its burner. Energy-to-work ratios here probably sit at no better than 3/2. There aren't even any reflecting pans under the burners. I tell my aunt that this is an old and poor and energy-inefficient stove. She says she knows and is sorry but they've had it since before Kennedy and it's got sentimental value, and that this year it came down to either a new stove or a new dishwasher. She is sitting at the sunlit kitchen table, reviewing verb tenses, apologizing about her stove. She says the chili needs to go on soon to simmer and reblend if it's going to go on at all; do I think I can fix the thingummy or should she run to the store for something cold?'

'I've only gotten one letter since he left, and all it says is how much he's taking care of a picture of me, and would I believe he kisses it? He didn't really like to kiss me. I could feel it.'

'The harnessed bundles of insulated wires all seem well connected to their burners' transformers, so I have to disconnect each bundle from its outflow jack on the distributor circuit and look at the circuit itself. The circuit is just too old and grimy and crude and pathetic to be certain about, but its AC-input and hot-current-outputs seem free of impediment or shear or obvious misconnec-tion. My aunt is conjugating French ir-verbs in the imperfect. She has a soft voice. It's quite pretty. She says: "Je venais, tu venais, il venait, elle venait, nous venions, vous veniez, Us venaient, elles venaient." I am deep in the bowels of the stove when she says my uncle once mentioned that it was just a matter of a screw to be tightened or something that had to be given a good knock. This is not especially helpful. I tighten the rusted screws on the case of the distributor circuit, reattach the unit cord to the input jack, and am about to reattach the bundles of wire from the burners when I see that the harnesses, bundle casings, and the outflow jacks on the circuit are so old and worn and be-gooed that I can't possibly tell which bundle of wires corresponds to which outflow jack on the circuit. I am afraid of a fire hazard if the current is made to cross improperly in the circuit, and the odds are (½)^4! that anyone could guess the proper jack for each bundle correctly. "Je tenais," my aunt says to herself. "Tu tenais, il tenait." She asks me if everything is going all right. I tell her I've probably almost got it. She says that if it's something serious it would really be no trouble to wait until my uncle gets home, that he's an old hand with that devil of a stove and could have a look; and if neither he nor I could get the thing going we two could just go out and get a bite. I feel my frightening haircut and tell her I've probably almost got it. I decide to strip some of the bundles of their old pink plastic casings for a few inches to see whether the wires themselves might be color-coded. I detach the bundles from their harnesses and strip down the first two, but all the wires reveal themselves to be the same dull, silverfish-gray, their conduction elements so old and frayed that the wires begin to unravel and stick out in different directions, and become disordered, and now I couldn't get them back in the distributor circuit even if I could tell where they went, not to mention the increased hazard inherent in crossing current in bare wires. I begin to sweat. I notice that the stove's unit cord's cloth insulation is itself so badly worn that one or two filaments of copper 220-wire are protruding. The cord could have been the trouble all along. I realize that I should have tried to activate the main oven unit first to see whether the power problem was even more fundamental than the burner bundles or the circuit. My aunt shifts in her chair. I begin to have trouble breathing. Stripped, frayed burner wires are spread out over the distributor like gray hair. The wires will have to be rebound into bundles in order to be reinserted and render the burners even potentially workable, but my uncle has no tool for binding. Nor have I ever personally bound a system of wire. The work that interests me is done with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Rarely even a calculator. At the cutting edge of electrical engineering, almost everything interesting is resolvable via the manipulation of variables. I've never once been stumped on an exam. Ever. And I appear to have broken this miserable piece-of-shit stove. I am unsure what to do. I could attach the main oven's own conduction bundle to a burner's outflow jack on the distributor circuit, but I have no idea how hot the resultant surge would render the burner. There is no way to know without data on the resistance ratios in the metal composition of the burners. The current used to heat a large oven even to WARM could melt a burner down. It's not impossible. I begin almost to cry. My aunt is moving on to ir/iss verbs. "Je par-tissais, tu partissais, il partissait, elk partissait." '

"You're unable to fix an electric stove?"

'My aunt asks again if I'm sure it's no problem and I don't answer because I'm afraid of how my voice will sound. I carefully disconnect the other end of each bundle from each burner's transformer and loop all the wire very neatly and lay it at the bottom of the stove. I tidy things up. Suddenly the inside of this stove is the very last place on earth I want to be. I begin to be frightened of the stove. Around its side I can see my aunt's feet as she stands. I hear the refrigerator door open. A dish is set on the counter above me and something crinkly removed; through the odors of stove-slime and ancient connections I can smell a delicate waft of chili. I rattle a screwdriver against the inside of the stove so my aunt thinks I'm doing something. I get more and more frightened.'

'He told me he loved me lots of times.'

"Frightened of what?"

'I've broken their stove. I need a binding tool. But I've never bound a wire.'

'And when he said it he believed it. And I know he still does.'

"What does this have to do with anything?"

'It feels like it has everything to do with it. I'm so scared behind this dirty old stove I can't breathe. I rattle tools.'

"Is it that you love this pretty old woman and fear you've harmed a stove she's had since before Kennedy?"

'But I think feeling like he loved somebody scared him.'

'This is a crude piece of equipment.'

"Whom else have you harmed."

'My aunt comes back behind the stove and stands behind me and peers into the tidied black hollow of the stove and says it looks like I've done quite a bit of work! I point at the filthy distributor circuit with my screwdriver and do not say anything. I prod it with the tool.'

"What are you afraid of."

'But I don't think he needs to get hurt like this. No matter what.'

'I believe, behind the stove, with my aunt kneeling down to lay her hand on my shoulder, that I'm afraid of absolutely everything there is.'

"Then welcome."