The Garden of Earthly Delights

When I told Gabe how I make a living, he said, So you’re really close to it. What he meant was a misunderstanding. In the museum bathroom, a line of ladies fixing their hair. If only I could catch a glimpse of someone else’s failures. Tell me again, the terms of the deal. I only want to be young and beautiful forever. Not likely but allowed. They’ll permit it. The angel investors. Whatever be their will. As long as I don’t pull the curtain back. Then I might swim in those cool waters. Once I was remembered for someone else’s poetry. What’s the color of that memory, I mean the hue. It’s becoming a verb. Time’s signature. I was obsessed with my therapist for nineteen months. Couldn’t sleep for want of him, for want of someone watching me. A puppet, pulling her own strings. How about another round. Rond de jambe. Turning to the right. The movement of the moment. A function that keeps calling itself. When I told Gabe how I make a living, he said, So you’re really close to it. What he meant was a frequency. An elemental force. Newton’s laws of motion. Someone said Go and all I could do was run and run. Picture all those perfect bodies, bursting on the scene. All that possibility. Undeveloped beachfront property. Broken torsos in a series of seductive poses. High voltage. Electric pleasure of almost but not quite touching. Weak signal in the field. Flowers on the artist’s grave. Hundred dollar bills at the bottom of a fountain. Mouths seeking mouths, fingers, flesh, heads back, basking in the sun. No harm done to anyone. Exquisite corpse. A structure deconstructed, then built back up again. But every fortune has an origin, a name we dare not say. Go back to the beginning, before the Romans, I'm talking where the marble came from, where they carved it out. Three headless figures, holding tight to one another. Fragments of a face, God's grace, coming through the static. Eyes closed, I’m breaking for the finish—no peeking, just breathing, a message in morse code, every beat an act of mercy, a secret that the stone holds.

Palimpsest

The beginning was cloth-bound, a book we mailed back and forth, whiting out words we didn’t want. Cut a little here, change the angle there, until years pass, and the face has no features, the lover becomes a symbol for something. There’s violence in every removal, every crossing out, it was a splitting, I had nowhere else to go. But what's missing from the memory? So much content removed from context, buried under how we want to remember it. I used to hide in the bathroom but the door didn’t lock. Broken free from someone else’s story, I’m reading his old poems, watching how he tips his hand. Like looking in a two-way mirror, my face in a photo I didn't know was being taken. Who are those yous I don’t recognize? Headless bodies under heavy filter; some spectral image of whatever was redacted. When I close my eyes I still cannot see. The parts he didn’t like of me. The words gotten wrong in retelling, lines we crossed while wrestling. Striking each other out.

The Ear of Dionysus

Not the god but the tyrant—the one who conquered Sicily in the fourth century BCE. Known for his cruelty, he used an ear-shaped cave carved out of a hill to house his prisoners of war. Legend has it that the cave would echo, amplify voices, let him eavesdrop on their plans to escape. I saw it once ten years ago, when I was twenty-five, on a trip with my father and his wife, my stepmom. I remember clearly that morning. There had been an argument between them, though I didn’t know why, and it hung in the air as we moved through the archeological park. We saw the amphitheater, the ancient quarries, and when we got inside the ear we whispered to one another, my father and I. It was playful, who knows what we said, we just wanted to hear the echo, but what sticks in my mind is my stepmom’s face, the particular way she was frowning. Looking back I’m certain they were arguing about me that day, perhaps I had overslept, or said something dumb at breakfast, I was always in the wrong, she thought, just an ungrateful hanger-on. And it’s true I could be difficult, still can be, so who knows what stories she had heard. Here’s one I had to be told. As a teenager, I once drank so much I slapped a nurse, screaming, I want to call my father, like my father was someone who could fix it. Except he wasn’t, couldn’t, though there was much in need of fixing. My parents were always fighting, with each other and with me, and I ran away once, out on the street, bare feet. Light rain and my father, in pursuit, knowing he must bring me home. Our neighbors slowed their cars, seeing something wrong, Something not right in that house. My father, a man in over his head. Before he left my mother, he would make home videos on a clunky camcorder, strapped to a tripod in the corner. Four months after he died, my stepmom showed up, emergency lights blinking, and handed me a box of them. They were labeled: Christmas ‘99, Christmas ‘02, you get the picture, and I know it sounds cheesy but I had always thought of Christmas as a time of peace between us. At least until the tapes came. In them, my father is handsome, always giving my mother exactly what she didn’t ask for. And each year my mother is an almost boiling kettle, while I complain the color’s wrong. So there it is, caught on camera, that rotten thing inside of me. I want to reach through to that girl, on the floor of a house that will soon be sold, pennies on the dollar, everything here must go. Once it all was over I only wanted to be loved, or at least liked, but my stepmom cut me out and my father didn’t try to stop her. Nothing had happened, there hadn’t been an incident, I stuttered slightly, slouched, slept twelve, thirteen hours a day, but she was calling bullshit, she said, I won’t let you manipulate your father like that. Then he got sick, and that’s another narrative that has to be controlled. She tried to puppet me back at the end, make the right words come out of my mouth, and I know what she was telling people: I abandoned my father, a blameless creature, left her to change his diapers and sign all the paperwork. But there’s a way stories get changed in their telling. There’s the memory and the deep fake, the sound and its echo, angles of incidence and reflection, endless errors in transcription. And the sweetness that happened off camera, missed phone calls in my father’s final days. I only saw him once after Sicily, in a therapist’s office, then never again. Which brings me back to the ear. I was sure there was a photo of the three of us in front of it, with my stepmom and that frown, but when I went to look it wasn’t there. I have photos from that morning, sure, but they’re poorly framed and full of strangers, and remember I said the vibe was bad, so maybe the moment didn’t feel worth posing for. Still, I searched desperately—for this proof I could point to, say, See? Instead, ruin after ruin after ruin. But then, one I had forgotten, from later that same day, my stepmom must have taken it. Slow realization that it’s the last of the two of us together. My father’s hunched over but smiling, healthy, good color, his arm around me, me, who is still so young, and though for years the doctors had shrugged, and the drugs they gave me didn’t work, here in the Sicilian sun with my father I’m absolutely radiant, full of possibility. I mean, come on. Who could blame that woman for hating me.