Issue 39

No Exit: A Gallery Of Existential Horrors

Matthew Burnside

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
—Jean-Paul Sartre

[Roll D20]

The numinous zero, as we know it today, wasn’t invented until 628 CE. Medieval Christians feared it for what it represented—The Void, and so forbade it from use, only daring to use it in secret. It stands alone as both a number and non-number, containing both thereness and not-thereness. The ability to conceive of this abstraction is one of the things that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Even bees, quite intelligent, cannot fathom the symbolic import of the numeral that both is and is not. A misbehaving anomaly as ridiculous as a nautilus swimming through the eye of a needle, the zero insists on persisting despite its inherent implausibility, in all its glorious itness.

A committee of your former lovers sits gathered downstairs in your living room. You can’t quite understand what they’re deliberating with such vigor—the shape of your demise, fate of your soul, future love lives and beyond? Only one of them seems sympathetic, despite all the things you once put them through. “It is time,” says the chairperson, most brokenhearted of the bunch. “Bring them down.”

You slip out of a work party to be alone. Sneak a smoke on the curb, flick your lighter at the moon. But there are people gathered there so you move further down the block into an alley where another party has gathered formed of people who have escaped their own respective parties. To escape this party, you slip into a partially opened garage, try to duck out only to find more people, an escape party of escapees from the party away from the original party. Everywhere you go: the scaffolding of a house under construction, dank sewers, atop the old water tower, even a cave festooned with drippy stalactites at the edge of the woods, you encounter only more faces with the same pair of unblinking, sparkless eyes. (People, people, everywhere, And all the crowds did slink / People, people, everywhere, Nor any place to think.)

Futurity is a flower bracing to be torn apart, petals shattered by the storm. It is not the storm that wilts it but the knowledge that a storm is coming, and because of this its beautiful thorns grow dull. Because of this, it learns to hate the sun.

Apeirophobia—terror of eternity. Healthy fear of foreverness and the unbroken ∞, also known as a lemniscate. Most are haunted by the inevitably of death but for many the opposite scenario is equally haunting. Conceptually impossible to hold in one’s head, the idea of infinity has been known to drive many a man mad . . .

In The Artist of the Beautiful by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a blacksmith obsessed with perpetual motion builds a clockwork butterfly, his masterpiece, only to find it ironically crushed in the palm of his hand by story’s end. So many nights spent toiling in his shop by dim lamplight, how many times he must have glimpsed out the window at the passersby laughing at the futility of his craft’s end. I wonder, did he ever see behind them to the blooming cherries and night-birds and swaying boughs. Did he ever ask, is it the tree moving or is it the wind or is it my mind moving them both?

Let it go, Owen Warland, I want to yell at him.
There is no catching the fucking butterfly.
All is bejeweled wreckage.
But I can’t yell at him because he’s just a character in a story and I am just a reader. I will never touch or know him just as he will never touch or know the butterfly.

It is all a mercy.

The production is on fire. The curtains are on fire. The set, painted backdrop, cut-out moon, stenciled stars: all on fire. The actors, saying their lines through on-fire throats, enunciate on fire because the dialogue is on fire and the script is on fire. The director, backstage building a birdhouse because the sky is on fire, is on fire. The writer at home on opening night because no one bothered to invite him is sleeping in his bed on fire. His dreams are on fire. If he had been invited, his tickets would have arrived in an envelope on fire. The audience sitting in their fiery chairs applaud through fiery digits. eyes on fire. They witness art that is on fire, because the continuous dream is on fire. The smoke, the fumes, atoms and molecules, all on fire. The fire on fire. Life is on fire, so you might as well burn brightly.

Some other déjàs and vus…

Jamais vu = feeling of experiencing something anew even after that experience has occurred multiple times.

Presque vu = feeling of being on the verge of a realization that never arrives.
Déjà rêvé = feeling of having previously dreamed something you are currently experiencing. Déjà entendu = feeling of having heard something that may only have been imagined.

As 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water and considering the ocean’s average depth is 12,400 feet and light can only carry through about 330 feet, it stands to reason that a majority of our planet is constantly covered in darkness all the time.

Repeat after me: Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. (Repeat now 30 more times.) Eventually that word will begin to lapse into nonsense and even more, it will begin to lose all essence. This is what’s known as Semantic Satiation, an apt demonstration of the human brain’s ability to get bored with something and forget to attribute meaning to it. A similar phenomenon occurs with smells—if you’ve ever found yourself in a smelly place but unable to detect odors after a while, that’s because your brain has stopped receiving messages from your olfactory receptors. Your tongue has stopped tasting itself. Your brain has essentially edited out your nose. If it can do all that, just imagine what other tricks it might be pulling.

#10

A song you heard exactly once in a crowded bar, its drunken melody slightly out of sync, is fated to remain irrecoverable. Infinity’s jukebox has no coin slots. All you will ever know is it is a song that is unknowable to you, as is the person you were when you heard it, as are the ears with which you never quite heard it and the hands though which that moment slipped. Little sand of the hours. They are not the same hands as your hands now. Your heart then is not the same timebomb ticking toward its extinction within your chest now. Gone, long gone are the moments! This one as well, gone now too, and this sentence, which will never be read by quite the same you again.

Is it knowing these moments and all these yous are lost forever that makes the sadness come, or is it How can you remember what was never forgotten?

#11

To further compound the phantasmagorical problems of #4 and #10, there are different kinds of infinities, according to Georg Cantor: Infinities that can be counted and infinities that can’t be counted. Paradoxes and meta-paradoxes. The sphericalness of the color blue, for example, or the circumference of a tunnel dreaming in July.

#12

Wittgenstein preferred language games, but he might have delighted in board games too. No doubt he would agree that no board game could truly epitomize the game of consciousness, however, with all its subliminal subterfuge. Only, perhaps, a sawed-apart-and-hot-glued-back-together-again Frankenstein version of several board games might could come even close—part Chess, part Monopoly, part Clue, part Twister, part Mouse Trap.

Snakes and Ladders, however, would not be included as it comes too close to reality.

#13

A partial list of impossible geographies: the 10,000-year cuckoo clock inside the Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas whose cuckoo only emerges once in a millennium; The Uncanny Valley, which isn’t a place at all but rather the feeling of unease or repulsion elicited by an artificial intelligence exhibiting remarkable human-like qualities. (While the scientific cause of this phenomenon isn’t known, a few theories have been proposed: 1) we automatically differentiate such automatons as poor mates; 2) they trigger in us an innate fear of death or reduction; 3) as ‘soulless beings’ they represent a direct threat to human concepts of individuality, identity, and specialness); The Fairy Castle, an 8- foot dollhouse commissioned by silent film actress Colleen Moore for around seven million dollars with diamond, emerald, and pearl chandeliers, over 2,000 miniatures, the smallest bible ever created, and hand-painted murals by Walt Disney; The Gates of Horn & Ivory, which represent entrances to two different dimensions, one a realm of the real and the other a realm of falsehoods, shadow, and superficiality. (“For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them” —Spoken by Penelope, The Odyssey)…it remains debatable, however, which realm encompasses the truer reality; Mojave Phone Booth, an isolated phone booth which stood in the middle of Mojave National Preserve in California from 1948 to 2000. This graffiti-laden unsuspecting landmark became something of a phenomenon in 1997, garnering internet fame and the attention of a man who camped at the booth for 32 days, claiming the Holy Spirit had guided him there to answer phone calls. He did as he was instructed, answering over 500 of them, many of them from an individual identifying himself as ‘Sergeant Zeno from the Pentagon’; The Red Brick Road, whose spiral path is clearly visible in The Wizard of Oz winding outward alongside its more famous cousin, The Yellow Brick Road, leaving Munchkin Land; The Penrose Staircase; Ouroboros; Bach’s endless Musical Offering; pretty much all works of M.C. Escher; Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors; Isamu Noghuchi’s Play Mountain; The interconnected pipe network of rabbit holes from Super Mario Bros; Umberto Eco’s concept of Hyperreality; Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons; Kafka’s bureaucratic labyrinths; finally, Anechoic Chambers—rooms so devoid of reverberation that one can hear their own blood flowing and the bones within their skin scraping, which goes to show: True silence screeches. Satellites tumble into oblivion and elsewheres abound. There are angels in outer space right now lopping each other in half, pantomiming eternities.

#14

There is a rather distressing Kierkegaardian theory that posits we can never know whether we are or are not secretly doing the work of the devil. This applies to the highest saint down to the lowest sinner. That is, we can never truly know the rightness of our actions, the purity of our moral rectitude, even if we believe deep down these instincts come from a pure place.

We can only do as we do. Play as we play.

#15

Another night glazed with boredom – swirling in this velvet snowglobe of Am, confetti of consciousness churning – so you try hopping online, a smaller box within the small box of a room, but it only serves to elongate your loneliness. Is there anything left you haven’t done? You set out to try something new: Saw a shadow in half. Put a match to a mirror, just to see if it will dance. Hold a piece of ice in your fist under hot water. Something about phase changes. Something about an equal but opposite action for every reaction. Something about all pain deriving from something else’s pleasure, or vice versa. Something about bodies, too: this strange meat machine endowed with jiggling appendages, ligaments, belly buttons, kneecaps, necks, napes, and an alien mouth filled with teeth (what even ARE teeth?) and a tongue (what a concept!). Then, finally, something about why, if it’s yours, you always feel like a tourist here?

#16

One day you begin substituting the word Void into your favorite songs. Slipping it in for no particular reason.

Let’s Hear it for the Void . . . Paranoid Void . . . Everybody Wants to Rule the Void . . .

Somewhere a secret song cartwheels through your subconscious, fluttering just behind your eyelids.

Sympathy for the Void . . . Happiness is a Warm Void . . . Enjoy the Void . . .

#17

Memory begins under a tinkling piano. You are in the first grade with a classmate, she with her moo- cow skirt and pigtails, you with your overalls and perpetual cowlick. You are kissing, acting as if you both understand the act, behind a wall of neatly stacked salmon-colored bricks. Chapped lips smacking. Out of the window you spy a speckled chime made of soda bottles clanking impetuously and a power line you can just catch the corner of. Though it will be many years before you understand the meaning of voltage, you fathom for the first time how light and heat could come from the same exact source. How all eyes contain doors but only a few we get to walk through. You will coddle this memory many times, turning it over like a lucky coin in your pocket again and again, but nothing you do will ever put a name to the girl. Perhaps she remembers you similarly, but only the mere idea of you. You as a concept, a figment. Placeholder for memory’s strange & cyclical loops.

Are we the things we remember or the things that remember us?

What about the things we choose not to remember?

All the things dearly misremembered?

Are we lost or found in our translations?

#18

I don’t know how else to say it: I don’t know how to escape the artifice of art anymore. Another fatal existential quirk to be reckoned with. Call it fear of endings, like how instead of finishing a book sometimes I’ll bury it so I never have to say goodbye. Never have to untether myself from imaginary people made of ink, somehow more real to me than some made of flesh that I’ve known.

Put another way, say I tell you a story? Say it is the story of how Buster Keaton, temporarily committed to an asylum for alcoholism, once escaped a straitjacket using a trick he had been taught by a childhood friend of the family named Harry Houdini.

Say it sounds too good to be true, so you refuse to research it further. To confirm nor deny its veracity by searching Wikipedia. Say you leave it there untouched so it will be true in the imagination. Say this is the truth that matters most.

#19

Hope creeps in like a mushroom after the rain.

#20

You were born to fall.

Maybe you have been falling all your life.

Diving down the page like avalanche. Like shimmering text, snowcrashing. Some chasms are collected only by falling through them.

One day an author speaks to you through the page, through vessels of words, which are an empty container. They arrive uninvited. They arrive disconnectingly, maybe even disharmoniously. But maybe these words carry a weight nonetheless, with just enough force to pierce the distance, the illusion of distance, to prove their earnestness?

Perhaps they propel you, the reader, toward a somethingness?

There is no winning or losing this game, speaks the author through the artifice, willing you to listen before it’s too late, which it always and never is. There is only playing the game. So play.

Matthew Burnside is the author of Wiki of Infinite Sorrows, Meditations of the Nameless Infinite, Rules to Win the Game, and Dear Wolfmother. His next project, a double collection, is entitled Centrifugal: Unstories and Centripetal: Counterstories.

Time Passes: On Unfinished Things

Andrew Bertaina

I remember endless summer days as a child–days spent in blistering California heat, roaming through the grass, climbing the towering cumquat tree, holding my finger out to crickets, or letting out a long parabolic rope of pee onto the juniper. Why did the summer days–the crickets chirping, the ice clinking in a glass of lemonade seem to distend, until they fill up large recesses of memory?

Like any good essayist, I set out to answer the question of time’s riddle. Like most good questions, it turns out that the answer is multi-faceted and not entirely conclusive. The explanations range from the mathematical to the psychological and neurological. The typical hypothesis is that our young brains are rapidly encoding new experiences, every scent of a rose, every buzz of a fly has the potential to create a new memory. Just this week, my own children were shouting about a bee that had flown into the car, squirming in their seats like wild animals.

“That’s not a bee,” I said. “That’s just a fly. And even if it was a bee, they don’t bother unless you bother them.”

In my experience, the discovery of the bug would have resulted in me rolling down the window and continuing to think about the structure of my day, of logistics on the weekend. To the children, the fly was a novel experience. It wasn’t even a fly. It was a havoc causing bee.

The logarithmic explanation also explains our differing perceptions of time. The explanation runs thusly, when you are two years old, a summer is ⅛ of your lived experience. Thus, a summer, or even a day can feel like a long stretch of time relative to the total sum of your life. For an adult of forty, a summer feels like 0.00625 percent. By this explanation, which feels a bit like breaking down whey a joke is hilarious and taking the piss out of it, and this essay, see line one, is pro piss, it makes sense that our experience of time as a child feels elongated and drastically truncated as we age.

The last explanation comes from a recent study at Duke University. In this study, it was found that brain degradation contributed to a perceptual difference in how the young and old experience time. Because new brains are much more efficient at processing and encoding information, their is a density to time, a rapid-fire sense that everything is happening all at once, which declines as our brains’ ability encode declines as well.

But why discuss time anyway? Isn’t it the job of an essayist to bring time to life, to mention the screened in porch, the loose fence board we all used to sneak under to travel between backyards? I don’t entirely know why I’m fascinated by time. Sometimes I assume that everyone else is as baffled or interested in precisely the same sorts of things I am, but I’ve learned that isn’t true.

What is time exactly? A difficult question, and well beyond the scope of what I intend to write as I possess no special knowledge of relativity or quantum mechanics. My investigation involves the substance of how we spend our time, esconsed at a particular moment in time in the twenty-first century. What is time? It is that which passes by in any given American urban life like mine–retrieving the children from school, passing through reams of traffic, pedestrians high-tailing it through crosswalks and bikes vaguely following the laws of traffic, the row of azaleas and coneflowers that line the mulch on my short walk to the gym. Time is that which is spent. Or perhaps spent is the wrong phrase, as though we had a choice in the matter. Time is sitting on the front porch steps, bony butt aching, while the wind rattles the limbs of a distant oak, and the children are away for the night, spending the evening with their mother. But I am also concerned with the oddities of time, the way that it warps around a black hole, the way that it influences an essayist recording the patter of thoughts or how the impressionists recorded its passage by shifting the way that light moved through the trees.

The final score in the Oklahoma City vs. Memphis Grizzlies game was 87-81. This fact is a mooring point and perhaps why sports bring me pleasure. Sometimes I’ll find myself between sentences in this essay, brain idling, living in the interstices that comprise most of our lives, and I’ll click back to my prior tab, which affirms the final score of the game was 87-81. This is largely due to the compulsive way I pass time, checking and rechecking tabs on the internet, always with the nagging sense that I’ve missed something. I’ve read that the internet is addictive, in part because we are information seeking creatures, and we’ve now been provided an endless repository to mine for uselessness. Implicit in the prior statement, perhaps problematically, is that our lives should have some use beyond checking the internet for basketball scores and cat memes. This implicit assumption is that our time should be spent meaningfully. Should time be spent meaningfully? And if so, why? Is it because we will all one day be gone? I am troubled by the assumption that time should be well spent because the answers have varied across cultures and time. The Spartans seemed to think it was noble, and perhaps desirable to die in war, the Buddhists in Tibet, to live and die peacefully.

Whenever I was told that I was wasting time–playing video games, watching sitcoms–I wondered what time was for. It’s not as though it’s a blunt instrument, not a hammer, nor a wall hanger, nor a puzzle. Its passage is inexorable, strange, and, or so it seems to me, largely contingent on the particularities of personality, identity, and the logic of the culture you belong to.

Our lives are linear, even if we don’t always experience them that way. I often spend minutes in mindless reverie, imagining an e-mail I’ll send to a friend I’ve lost touch with, all the while passing the present moment, willfully not attending to it. Even if I imagine my parallel lives, seemingly breaking the wheel of time by moving sideways or backward through it, or if I indulge in memory, my mother’s fiery red hair, a day spent in childhood dropping water on a teeming mass of ants, contemporaneous time still plods inexorably forward. And all our history in time trails behind us like the contrails of a comet—broken marriages, broken fingers, broken promises, a mid-day cup of tea on the Ponte Vecchio. And perhaps that’s the real answer, time is what we make of it rather than what we dream. And yet most of what I do is dream, imagine, search, as opposed to inhabit.

What is it that I think I’m missing in the current moment? Why do I keep checking the same tabs over and over, restless as the wind? Reader, I’ve done it just now, in the middle of this thought. Given our current understanding of time and the rules of basketball, it is unlikely that the score of the game will ever be anything but 87-81. Given my understanding of time and the rules of life, I will continue spinning through space on a giant rock, checking the internet for answers to the important questions: how the weather is in Illinois today, what the chances are for a mid-term candidate in the House, what’s a good substitute for buttermilk? I can fill my time with so many questions that don’t approach why I’m unhappy. I needn’t ever stop long enough to ask. The present moment provides an endless distraction to the deeper questions, not a novel thought, but a salient one as I am the sort of person who prides himself on asking deeper questions and even I can barely muster up the attention span of half an hour to ponder much of anything. All the while, the fan is humming, and the children are still lodged in sleep, quiet as God. The children who never seem to need more from life than food, water, entertainment. When do human beings develop an existential nature?

I find myself, as I waste away another day on tab after tab, wondering what to do with time. Time, which can be incredibly boring, or stimulating. I can read a book, or stare blankly at a spreadsheet, but time must be passed somehow. Time is oppressive that way, pressing down on the day like gravity on the earth. Perhaps that’s why so many people take pleasure in structure, having time externally defined relieves the pressure of deciding what to do with it. I too live a structured life, two jobs, two children, but I press against the hours, restless as the wind.

Beyond that, the problem of what to do with time is both existential and intertwined with borgeouise privilege. The ability to even ask the question is concomitant with that privilege. One of my favorite party anecdotes to share is how the Pirahã people of the Amazon rainforest, one of the last groups of hunter-gatherers spend their time. On average, they spend about four hours a day working and the rest is spent hanging about and exchanging jokes and stories. Would that be enough to fill the hours? Has my relatively privileged life of higher education lead me to priortize information seeking and academic achievements, which don’t even make me happy? Is it plausible that my life is a wast of time?

I grew up in a religious family and was given to look for signs that portended the end of the world: Y2K, 9/11, a particularly fierce sunset. There is nothing quite like the surge of feeling that accompanies the probable end of the world, merely because the sun is flaring bright orange over a row of deciduous trees. I’d imagine the world coming to an end, Christ walking down, the heavens unfurling. Now I no longer look at the sky and wonder after glory. I wonder if the corresponding image will look good on Instagram.

I was raised in a Christian home and attended a Christian college, which means that one of the texts I’ve spent the most time with is The Bible. The Bible is unique in its treatment of time, cramming billions of years, the formation of planets, gases, light, and the redemption of humanity into a scant twelve hundred pages. I’d have thought it would at least take 2,000. It took Proust nearly 4,500 to cover the first few decades of his life. Thus, what The Bible succeeds at is the violent compression of time, which mirrors that of our own beginning.

Though The Bible’s compression is admirable, it falls egregiously short where Proust, Woolf, Joyce and others soar—in the depiction of human consciousness. The characters in The Bible are flattened by their lack of interiority. Though their duality is well-expressed. Think of David sending Bathsheba’s husband off to war, so he can have her as his own. Of course, perhaps The Bible falls so far short because it isn’t trying to depict consciouness. In fact, The Bible isn’t a historical document either. It’s a hodgepodge of different styles, poetry, fable, metaphorical, practical instruction, hallucinatory apocalypse, and the stoic tract of Ecclesiastes.

But I fear that an essay that goes on too long about The Bible runs the risk of overstaying its welcome. I think that the majority of the times I’ve been drowsy beyond human comprehension has been during overlong sermons. Structurally, the early portions of The Bible rely on parataxis, events are called into life and responded to, be light; there was light. This structure mimics our lives, though admittedly, the scale is a bit different, universe and light switch.

In our lives, events unfold like leaves falling from an autumnal tree, one after another. As I noted above, even if we fight this linear reality with stories, jokes, narrative tricks, time still marches forward. We can write a book that moves backward, but we can’t do anything but hurtle forwards ourselves. Who hasn’t felt that life is sometimes this way? As though the rush of days flows past us without the time for us to ever apply meaning? The human mind can only hold an experience in active memory for three seconds before it is filed away or lost to the great empty recess of forgotten things that comprise most of our lives, like the dark matter that holds together the universe.

Crucially though, the difference between Biblical time and my current understanding of time is that we are not moving towards anything at all, while The Bible sends the reader moving towards Christ. Thus, lives and linear time should be compressed in order to apply the structural integrity, alpha and omega. Meanwhile, as Proust knows, if all we have is the here and now, and we move toward nothing determinate, then why not expand the details, imbue the ordinary life with rich sensory detail, the fiery red sunset, the blooming jacaranda.

Unlike my religious upbringing, I think we just move, not with intent, toward either a Big Crunch, pure compression or toward the Big Rip, a universe too large to sustain anything.

The Bible also mirrors our lives by decentering of human experience. Not that we consider our lives decentered. In fact, as everyone who has access to the internet has already noted, social media amplifies our belief that we are at the center of the universe. Like Jesus, but without the sandals and crucifixion. But The Bible, like the ocean or the sky, reminds us that our lives are insignificant, and if the Renaissance was about the flourishing of human grandeur, the Industrial Revolution and the growth of capitalism has been about the flourishing of technologies, capital, and structures that are beyond human control. Our lives are already shaped, as though by God, by the cultural forces into which we are born. And, in a way, our lives still mirror those of Biblical heroes—petty, short, envious, foolish, adulterous, filled with longing for a child, a home, meaning.

However, what’s still delayed is the promised redemption of my youth, two-thousand years and counting. And the world suffers through digression after digression—a bombing in Nagasaki, The Peloponnesian war, the death of an unnamed child from malaria, a single butterfly flexing the variegated colors on its back in the garden—waiting forever.

As time passes, the weeks in which I’m writing and rewriting this essay, I find myself also working on an essay that I’ve written about trains: wedding trains, trains traveling through Europe, through the walls of limestone caves, the theoretical train that Einstein used to prove special relativity. I think the editing is almost done, but, like the comment from an old writing professor, like the point at the beginning of the universe, more compression is always possible. But I find compression difficult. The Bible, as I’ve detailed above, uses compression as a device to reduce the impact of our lives. And though I agree we are insignificant, like many other thinkers, I think that makes our brevity meaningful. This stance would seem to be contradictory, but I’d submit that much of our lives take place in contradiction, in the space between the spoken word and response.

Rather, like the universe now, I want expansion. I want to read an essay that carries within it—all possibilities, all shades of meaning, all worlds of dinosaurs, of squid wandering on land, of Tony Allen making and missing layups, of me, leaving and unleaving my former wife, of the time I was a four at the ballet and laughed gleefully at the children spilling out from beneath a dancer’s voluminous dress, of waterfalls spilling from mountaintops and dynasties crumbling, The Great Wall being erected and Trajan’s column. Imagine an essay that went on longer than Proust, longer than Knausgaard, but that covered every train of thought, from Heraclitus and Euripides to the idle musings of a street sweeper in Paris, 1937, the passing thoughts of a young mother while her children play in the sprinkler in 1958. An essay that reimagines the brevity of human life as beautiful by capturing all of it, every blade of grass, every patch of daffodils.

Sadly, this is not that essay. This essay, unlike that dense point of compression, is unlikely to create space and time, gravity and The Milky Way. It is unlikely to create the elements, to set the stars burning and gas giants collecting dust; nor will it set the path of the moon, who’s reflection lies silver on the ocean. Rather, this essay will merely move through space and time, like a train, like a sentence, like an emotion through a solitary Sunday morning of a man’s mid-life malaise, alone, mid-winter, slate sky, the children now sleeping at their mother’s a block away.

It is now Thursday morning. Time moves on like the obscenity that it is.

Once, a mad man shot the President from a hill. Once, the earth had two moons that smashed into each other and one was lost to the vast reaches of space. Once, a child, pink and peach colored, freshly-unwombed, held my finger in her hand. Once, that same little girl read Harry Potter in her small bed, stopping at the scary parts, so I could sit with her as she read. Once, passenger pigeons flooded our sight as though they were ink spilled on pages of the sky. Once, I knelt in a tiny room full of roses and proposed to a woman. Once I lay with my son cradled in the hollow of my chest, warm in sleep. Once, I sat in artificial light, thinking all these thoughts—all the things I’ve left undone, as though finally, years removed from religion, I had become a proper Episcopalian.

All things are full of weariness, Ecclesiastes.

The Pacers now have a 32-22 lead on the New York Knicks. The game is still taking place in the present time. The score will not, barring some catastrophe—the universe ripping itself to shreds, Yellowstone erupting, a meteor hitting the Yucatan Peninsula—remain as 32-22 for an indefinite period of time. It is extremely unlikely, though not impossible, that neither team will score another basket.

I am doubled by the bathroom mirror. I notice, in the reflection of my life, the ghostly shape of a spider threading its way down from the ceiling. And now we are both doubled, looking, I’d imagine, not at one another, but at the reflections of ourselves, the reverse of the way we actually appear. It is a shame that I can only see this reflection and not see instead, the reflection of myself in the eyes of my college roommate when I started dating the girl he had a crush on, or that of my mother this year, when I forgot to call on her birthday, that of my wife as we sat on the porch, and I told her that we should part, that of my brother on the cross-country drive when I said that I hated him. I regret that I cannot show my neighbor, yelling just now, the reflection of his voice, hammering through the walls as he shouts at his daughter. I hope that no one ever writes about me or the shouting I’ve done at my recalcitrant daughter.

My face has grown weary of itself, or so it seems as I stare. Stare long enough and you’ll be reminded of every psychological thriller, reminded of the way we are all slowly losing our minds. Except my own life tends to be a bit boring: no Spidey sense developing, no face that breaks into a cruel smile revealing a split personality, no aliens emerging from my stomach. No, just the cold and inexorable passage of time, making small outlines at the corner of my eyes, at the edges of my cheekbones, turning and turning the details of my life over like a leaf in a storm, furrowing brow and greying hairs at the temples.

I wipe the spider away with a Kleenex, this contingent arachnid taken quickly from the world. It is as though, for this brief blip of time, that I am not a contingent creature, who soon will be wiped clear from the mirror of time.

I try to explain to the spider, who can no longer listen, something of scale. I say the mere fact that I’m able to consider myself in the mirror, to muse over the Big Bang, the feeling of silk—soft as passing rain, the kiss I shared with Sasha in the dark in 1998, the dull ache of my shoulder as I carried the front left of my grandmother’s coffin—reifies my decision to end his/her life. The development of consciousness, up here in the ragged world of skyscrapers, GDP and thrift savings plans, seems to entitle us to so much death dealt without awareness, without understanding, like a drone hovering over a gathering of strangers in the night.

The spider and I didn’t cover much ground. Though perhaps it would have been for nothing anyway. Spiders are notoriously poor listeners, but renowned for their singing, which is lovely and soul-piercing but that cannot be heard by human ears.

My lover and I sit in this city of trees beneath an awning shedding rain, amidst the smell of wet asphalt and petrichor. We are in a silent fight, which gives me space to be alone. I’m thinking about the children, how tender their feet once were. And about the solo trip I took to Spain—the way I found an orange tree behind a chain-link fence and photographed it, thinking the way the light was passing through the fence, illuminating the cracked earth and the dusty limbs of the tree, was somehow a work of art as much as the funhouse of Gaudi’s Parc Guell. There are so many moments I still need to share—that time I was seven and skipped stones on the back of Lindo Channel, that time I sat at my first night in college in Santa Barbara, eight hundred miles from home, talking to Iris about all the things I’d wanted to say in high school within the velvet folds of night, that night I sat among the Eucalyptus and listened to the wind mimicking the ocean, feeling as though my whole life would be full of wonder.

You see, my lovely reader, I say, as we lean in together, I would like this essay to be about time. And since I can’t expand it to include everything I’d like to. I see now that the best mode is compression. I’d like to compress all these moments down into a single paragraph, a single sentence, a single word, a single letter. I’d like to tell you what I’ve been thinking about these past few months that we’ve been part, that we’ve been together, that have passed since I wasn’t your child anymore, wasn’t your lover, your neighbor, your husband, your friend, the many things I’ve wanted to tell you from three thousand miles away, from across the city, from exactly where you are, without having to say anything at all. I want the quiet compression of things before there was any space before there was any time, only these billions and billions of moments, unborn.

Andrew Bertaina’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including: The ThreePenny Review, Tin House, Redivider, Witness Magazine, and The Best American Poetry 2018. More of his work is available at www.andrewbertaina.com.

IMAGINE US, THE SWARM, by Muriel Leung

Laura Villareal

During my teen years and early twenties, I was a total poser. I’d emulate my friends and the media I consumed without much thought while feeling a low-frequency grief, which I now recognize as rooted in my lack of authenticity. I tried too hard to be different—to stand out—to be someone cool and likeable. What I became was a fragment of myself lost in the amalgam created by pieces of everyone I wanted to impress. There’s something about writing poetry that feels authentically mine. I don’t feel inclined to imitate, only to write the truth of the poem and myself. The poets I admire often lean into their style, syntax, verbal landscapes, and experiment. Muriel Leung is one of those writers.

After finishing Leung’s debut book, Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016), I couldn’t wait for her second book to come out. Her writing leaves me with a renewed sense of curiosity about what poetry can do and an excitement to continue pushing on the boundaries of the page as she so often does. I’m in awe of the tenderness and rigor of her poetry, especially in her new book Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books, 2021) which, as Kazim Ali describes so aptly in his blurb, as a collection of “seven powerful texts that form a constellation of voices, forms, and approaches to confront loneliness, silence, and death.” Each one of the seven sections feels expansive and distinct in their formal variety and subject matter. From footnotes, to ekphrasis, to essays in verse, to the way poems are situated on the page and expand across pages, I find something new to sit and think about each time. Leung covers a number of topics such as gendered violence, Asian American identity, death, queerness, and labor.

In Leung’s essay-in-verse “This Is to Live Several Lives,” she writes, “A bee learns to become a Müllerian mimic, dressed as some other creature with a deadlier poison.” Mimicry happens in nature as a tool of survival. For marginalized communities, especially immigrants, the act of assimilation is how to dress as a “creature with a deadlier poison.” In the poem, Leung speaks of its lasting generational impact, particularly in the speaker’s relationship to work learned from their father’s tireless work ethic. In a conversation with T.K. Lê on Nightboat’s website, she says:

“We are comprised of not just our singular knowledge of the world but the experiences of those who came before us, and we inherit their histories too. Even if we did not grow up with it, I do believe that we carry these histories in our bodies, and they become part of our cellular memory. So, yes, not just a singular once but many.”

In “A Careful List of All My Failures,” Leung writes:

Claire Jean Kim calls it the “field of racial positions,” the arrangement of different bodies along a dying field, vying for the one blade of fresh cut grass. As if none of us are fit for water.

What the theory of racial triangulation tells us is the distribution of inequities rooted in white dominance. That I could look to you and feel that I am at once lesser and perhaps fortuitous for having earned that small morsel of god.

To bend so far back, my spine becomes another flag. Of assimilable colors.

And I am not even legible to myself. Cannot not even English my way out.

This passage has been radiating through me since I first read Imagine Us, The Swarm. I continue thinking about “to bend so far back, my spine becomes another flag. Of assimilable colors,” and “and I am not even legible to myself.” Leung weaves in the voices of theorists and academics with such skill. It adds another layer of nuance and complexity to her poems that are already buzzing with emotional texture and intellectual richness.

Muriel Leung writes with such intentionality, tenderness, and style that it feels like a masterclass. Leung imagines the future possibilities of her communities and encourages them to imagine better together. I’ll leave you with her final words: “We can write out origins / sacred here and renounce the country of our fear. / There is only our singular pulse when we fill the sky.”

Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She has received fellowships from Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Waxwing, AGNI, and elsewhere.

Daring to Be Different: The Merits of Narrative Ingenuity

David Philip Mullins

My love for fiction has its origins in the fundamentals: voice, characterization, and plot. I don’t expect anything revolutionary or pyrotechnic, only that a narrative has been fashioned with expert skill. Precise, elegant prose; a convincing, engaging protagonist; a compelling, unpredictable storyline—these are more than enough to hold my interest and impress me.

As a writer, I came of age in the United States during the 1990s, the tail end of minimalism’s reign. Raymond Carver was still in vogue, as were Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff. Consequently, the literary style with which I tend to identify, and to which my attention is typically drawn, is realism, without frills. Call me boring, out of touch, but I’ve never been keen on experimental writing, on self-conscious innovation—metafiction, for instance. As Samuel Johnson wrote (albeit wrongly) of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, “Nothing odd will do long.” So-called “genre fiction,” too, no matter how “literary,” normally turns me off.

It was unexpected, then, that when I read Glossary for the End of Days, Ian Stansel’s second short-story collection, I was struck by the inventiveness and eccentricity of its premises and frameworks. Stansel’s first collection, Everybody’s Irish, and his novel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo, both display his exceptional talent as a storyteller. Glossary for the End of Days does more. Surprising and boldly unconventional, it is a departure from his usual, realist approach.

In the opening story, “John Is Alive,” it’s 1985 and fifteen-year-old Cal and his cousin Natasha are waiting in line at Tower Records for the midnight release of the new Beatles album. As the story’s title suggests, John Lennon has survived the four bullet wounds from Mark David Chapman’s .38 caliber revolver. (That isn’t a spoiler, though some of what follows in this piece may diminish suspense for a first-time reader of the book.) The narrative’s beating heart is the relationship between Cal and Natasha, and the plot consists of the scenes that unfold during and after their lengthy wait for the album. But the alternate history proves significant. In a poignant twist, Natasha accidentally falls to her death during a rooftop gathering later that night, and in the wake of the tragedy, Cal—the story’s narrator—muses on “other versions of reality.” In the version he gives thought to for many years afterward, Natasha is still dead, “but here John Lennon is also dead because in this one Chapman’s bullets did their job, killed him. Here Natasha and John Lennon meet—after all, if there are other dimensions, who’s to say there isn’t an afterlife too?”

The story “Someone Interesting I Know: An Interview with My Uncle Chris by Sadie Fenton” takes an intriguing form. It is a transcript of a homework-assignment interview, during which the interviewee, Uncle Chris, reveals and deconstructs the recent rock-climbing death of his grown son’s boyfriend. Though the assignment is Sadie’s, her mother is the one who has transcribed the recorded conversation, and woven into the narrative are the mother’s bracketed comments to Sadie’s teacher, Mrs. Perez. In one such aside—the story’s final, moving lines, a passage charged with subtext—Sadie’s mother wonders whether Sadie should start over and interview someone else, worried that the conversation with Uncle Chris falls short of what was assigned. “But I’m not sure,” she writes. “What do you think? Should we keep plugging away and see what we can make of it? Do we even have a choice at this point?”

The book’s unconventionality is pleasingly variegated: there is a second-person story; there are two half-page vignettes—“interludes”; there is a short novella. The contents are divided into three sections (the novella occupies all of section two), concluding with the title story, a master stroke. Like “Someone Interesting I Know,” “Glossary for the End of Days” experiments with form. Using an alphabetical list of terms and explanations, the narrator, Abe, chronicles his involvement with a doomsday cult and its murderous, suicidal leader. For example: “G. Guilt. That’s what they say I’m suffering: a type of survivor’s guilt. Like it’s so simple. Like I’m some line in a big shrink’s book.” It is an eerie account, made all the more chilling by the A-through-Z march of it structure.

If Glossary for the End of Days were nothing more than an assemblage of quirks and contrivances, the stories would be mere gimmickry. Rather, it is a collection long on the expert skill I mentioned earlier—its prose precise and elegant, its protagonists convincing and engaging, its storylines compelling and unpredictable.

It will not only hold your interest; it will impress you as well.

David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below, a collection of stories, and The Brightest Place in the World, a novel, which won the Nebraska Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. He teaches at Creighton University.

On 17776, A Not-Book by Jon Bois

Leah Hampton

Books, especially novels, are magic rectangles, tidy story boxes we can open and fall safely into at any time. Ain’t it cozy here? Either in hardcopy or as mobile downloads, the relatively firm structure(s) of the novel remind us of a story’s separateness from daily life, and thus of its power. Self-contained, predictable, yet containing multitudes. One volume, or one file, of adventure. Regardless of how strange or experimental they can sometimes be, novels are reliable and trustworthy, even the ones that don’t employ traditional elements. A book is an infinite box, but still a box; even if it hits us hard in the feels, or even if it’s disorganized or poorly written, it’s not going to fuck with us too much.

Exceptions prove rules, however, and every now and then a unique book breaks this cozy reading relationship. On these rare occasions, a novel can fuck with you very much indeed. In my experiences such books are hard to find, and sometimes they are not books, but a true and total surprise that breaks my brain and challenges me to reexamine my relationship with the very concept of storytelling.

My favorite not-book is Jon Bois’s online speculative novella 17776, otherwise known as “What Football Will Look Like in the Future,” hosted on the website SBNation. (Just Google “football in the future” and it’s always the first hit.) Describing this piece is genuinely difficult: 17776 is absolutely not a novel, and yet somehow it is. It does not have a plot, or traditional characters, nor is it composed, at least not entirely, of text. There are also no panels or other graphic novel components. 17776 does not, if I really think about it, even technically exist. You cannot buy it—access is free. You can’t hold it as you would a book, or give it a form in your mind. The best identifier for this work is, I suppose, to call it an “experience.”

What happens with 17776 is this: Someone—let’s say an acquaintance, perhaps a small, odd-looking woman whom you sometimes see at the bakery, for this was my experience—sends you a link. Her email says simply, “You should read this; very cool!” You click the link, and it takes you to a seemingly standard-issue online news article about football. Football? You think, my small, odd friend knows I hate sports; what on earth am I looking at?

Just as you are about to shrug and click away, your laptop melts.

By which I mean the screen. . .sort of. . .dissolves, in a way you’ve never seen before. Everything goes black. You’re certain it’s malware, or maybe a brain aneurysm.

And then you meet Nine.

Nine is a satellite. A robot of sorts, but not a very good one, because Nine has a lot of feelings and can’t do anything robotic. Nine lives in deep space and has been floating alone out there for thousands of years. You sit with Nine for a very long time, and nothing happens. Truly, sincerely, nothing happens.

Until Nine meets another abandoned satellite. Then another. Soon the satellites, all these little floating space machines who are very funny and sad and full of some remarkable force other than life, begin to talk about life, about love, and about the strange question of how humans in the year 17776 keep themselves occupied way down there on Earth.

The answer is football. In the distant future, when author Jon Bois says we humans will become immortal, invincible, and extremely bored, we will play football.

Forever.

That’s it. That’s the book. Or, rather, not the book. Through a series of “chapters” that employ embedded YouTube videos, fake Google Earth maps, amateurish illustrations, and also fart jokes, color-coded space squabbles, and mass-delusion love affairs with a twelve-thousand-year-old lightbulb, Jon Bois reimagines the very idea of the novel, and of life itself. The magic box is busted wide open, and this destruction makes you laugh, then weep, with wonder. Bois also recently released a sequel, 20020, which takes the non-story of his non-novel even further.

Perhaps I’ve told you too much, ruined the surprise. But, no; that’s not possible. The premise of 17776 is nothing special, really, and knowing its format ahead of time doesn’t make it any easier for you to anticipate or comprehend. It’s dumb and simple and wildly brilliant, and it doesn’t have a beginning or end, so there are no spoilers. It’s a wasted afternoon, with no grand design or fancy literary ambitions. Bois himself claims he created 17776 merely “for fun.”

But I promise, it changes you, this experience. Remember, I hate football, and I’m not a huge sci-fi buff, either. Yet here I am, recommending a sci-fi football non-boxed non-book thing, as if my own life, my own love of story, depended on it. However hip or old-school you may be in your reading choices, whatever your fiction wheelhouse is, 17776 takes you out of it in a way you never knew you needed. If you’re a writer, it will help you see new possibilities for genre- and form-busting in your own work. I’ve recommended this not-book to many people, and their reactions have ranged from annoyance to childlike rapture. No matter how the experience strikes them, everyone admits they have never “read” anything like 17776 before, which to my mind can only be a good thing. They also say it rejiggers their understanding of what novels can do and be.

And of course everybody falls in love with the lightbulb. Because no matter who you are, if you look closely enough at it, a weird, delicate thing will always break your heart.

Leah Hampton is the author of F*ckface and Other Stories (Henry Holt). Her work has appeared in Guernica, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She currently serves as creative writing fellow in residence at the University of Idaho.

Northeast Regional

Allison Titus

The train makes a grammar / of our distance / as it glides
up and down / the East Coast. / It’s sunrise. / We’re in the future
of our hearts now. / Out the window: Fever of marsh; /
two deer; / shopping cart toppled / in a ditch beside the tracks.

Allison Titus is the author most recently of Sob Story (Barrelhouse Press) and The True Book of Animal Homes (Saturnalia Press) and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with the poet Ashley Capps, she is co-editor of The New Sent(i)ence, an anthology-in-progress of poems that meaningfully engage animality. She works at an ad agency and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College.