The Gnome Stories, page 9
18. In a structure simulating an owl either wisdom or killing is a natural outcome of an interaction, owls being understood to be in possession of some otherworldly wisdom, and owls being the instrument of killing, and sometimes these two things being indistinguishable or interlocking, a difficult fact to communicate.
19. In a structure simulating an owl one must necessarily be conscious of wearing a mask.
20. In a structure simulating an owl one might be cold except for the layers of insulation machined initially from gloves purchased at the local Target, and then, after the initial trial run with these layers of repurposed material, the prototype was fitted with up to six layers, depending on the climate you foresee operating in, of asbestos procured from India, though made and exported from Canada, a country that continues to ship asbestos to India in spite of what is known about its carcinogenic qualities, because economic growth is understood to be a universal good, and because an industry operating efficiently gains its own inertia and cannot easily come to a halt, and because warmth is of utmost importance while on location because in a structure simulating an owl it is very difficult to move, except by wire and servomotors.
21. In a structure simulating an owl one has dreams and must acknowledge those dreams as what they are: shadows of desire, the product of overlapping selves and biological imperatives and parental wishes and possibilities for lives understood from obsessive reading of magazines and many series of pseudonymous teen mysteries in which those who wear masks are uncovered.
22. In a structure simulating an owl I always dreamed—or even thought, assumed, as if a destiny was an inevitable thing, as if there was a such thing as a destiny, as if it could be understood except from the past tense, as if our lives could be seen just from beyond the point of our departures into nothingness or ever-afterness—I would be Miss Minnesota when I grew up, in spite of what I full well knew and was often told was evidence to the contrary: my nose overly sloped and unattractively hooked, my gait awkward, my arms overlong and even, as I was teased, resembling wings, and my gaze uncomfortably intense, not that I would be stopped from begging my mother to enter me in pageants from a young age. I’m not sure why exactly I wanted this so badly—perhaps it was a response to my father’s death, in retrospect, and needing some way to cast a long shadow, as I did walking at night in the old neighborhood when the floodlights from the neighbors’ houses would click on at my sudden movement, moving toward their windows and the lives I so desperately wanted to see and understand, as if by understanding their lives I could understand my own, and if at the proper angle the light would cast a shadow that would go on for over a hundred feet until I could no longer tell where there was shadow and where there was just darkness, and my wanting of this brilliant pageant dream increased in proportion to its impossibility, like the lover I fell for so hard that it finally split the structure simulating a marriage apart, in spite of that long love spent with my husband, who had and has his faults, and one of them was that he was powerless to stop my drift, geologist that he is, knowing something about continents and their barely perceptible shifting, I would have thought he would understand this better, and I drifted through those pageants in my mask, my makeup face fixed in a dazzling smile that I would later reassess in light of what I had come to learn, in short that by my not varying the smile people found me terrifying, spectral really, as if I were not a woman but a mannequin, posed, smooth, but somehow breathing, and this was one in a long string of revelations about the ways in which I have misconstrued others’ responses to the way I conduct myself socially, spending weeks poring over etiquette books and practicing responses to common queries to make myself more charming, but in a structure simulating an owl you don’t need these things to move or see or appear or terrify a creature at a hundred paces, which may be inevitable anyway the longer we live.
23. In a structure simulating an owl I will have receded successfully from my life, my lives, both before our split and after, finally if not irretrievably, so that I will have no appearance of my own, no face to terrify, no family to be judged or misunderstood by, and in so simulating an owl in said structure for such a long time, in the view of others anyway, and as such in my own view, since we do internalize the way we are considered by others in our self-imaginings, I will eventually be transformed, and become not just a structure simulating an owl or a woman or a woman simulating an owl but something else entirely.
24. In a structure simulating an owl I will hope to understand—nay, I will manifest—the desire I have read about in others and seen for myself, such as in my older brother’s drunken state before he died when he would tell me about what he wanted most deeply but never had the courage to achieve, the desires of those who sexually fetishize amputees (acrotomophiliacs), or, in more extreme circumstances, who desire to be amputees and who might even undergo voluntary amputations (apotemnophiliacs), who feel their limbs are somehow wrong, too long, incorrect, or simply not a fit for them, who may have some version of body dysmorphic disorder, but regardless, want what they want, as humans—animals—do and good luck telling them not to want those things, in that in this structure I might understand that transformation, even if it isn’t sexual for me as it was for my older brother, a fact he would not admit to sober, certainly, one reason he was not often sober, that he once said, “I will never feel truly whole with legs,” though he never had them removed, a fact he called a tragedy, and maybe it was a tragedy, not to get to live one’s deepest-held desire, no matter how bizarre or increasingly frustrating or pointless, but maybe it was a sensible tragedy, given the extremity and oddness of his desire, and the ways it might have transformed his life—he knew it then, and he said as much, that it might have changed something in the world, in him, certainly, if we can change ourselves, which I desperately hope we can in my better moments even as I am not sure I believe it in my darker ones, though I will not stop trying, not ever, in whatever structure or set of clothes or metal exoskeleton I am currently working on—when he died last year, the final straw, as my husband said, ever cruel, overcruel, my mother was the one who cleaned out his home at his behest and when I asked her about the computer and what was on it, trying not to suggest I knew his secret or that he even had such a secret, trying to honor this luminous and folded place that he held within him, that I might have been the only one who knew, that I was wondering what sort of pornography he might have on there, she was of course circumspect, as she always is, and deflected the question, suggesting that she was another keeper of his secret, one he trusted more than me, given her lifelong goal of full-on repression of our other, darker selves, a fact I took as blame for not going far enough with him, a fact I am hoping to convert to a new understanding of what it might mean or be to become someone else—to become someone else—by silence, by patience, by devious mechanical engineering, and by sheer belief in a structure simulating an owl, to somehow become an owl.
25. In a structure simulating an ow! I mean an owl but was cut off midthought and midword in fact by the sight of something swooping in the darkness from this vantage point and that I was transported by its efficacy, I will dream again not as human but as owl—featherlight, meatfinding, unthinking—for a time.
26. In a structure simulating an owl I will remain at one of my designated posts no less than one year, removed from life, but not from vision, subsisting on what I can catch and eat, having studied this problem and the many hunting methods owls have and also foraging with my human hands where they extrude from the structure, perhaps in the gardens of my extended family and friends, wondering if they will have forgotten me in a fit of self-protection or if they have written off my selfish exit, or if they are wondering exactly what an owl—what they will misapprehend and is in fact a structure simulating an owl—or perhaps it is an owl, thus the power and point of the extended simulation—might be doing in their backyard at night peering with its set of magnifying lenses into their windows, into their lives, and apprehending the resulting spaces that opened up in there, how they react, how they close and fill those spaces.
27. In a structure simulating an owl I do not expect to die.
28. In a structure simulating an owl I will hereby attempt to know the unknowable.
29. In a structure simulating an owl I will not live as I lived before, in guilt and repression—or in fully giving in to my baser urges and the corresponding renunciation of my former life—lives—and need for light.
30. In a structure simulating an owl in which a complex optical mechanism allows the use of infrared and ultraviolet light to augment and aid perception, an occupant or user can approximate the night vision of owls.
31. In a structure simulating an owl I cannot be my brother nor my father, nor my long-dead younger brother, nor my child, nor my husband, but I can also not be myself for a year or longer, and in so doing I submit that this invention will be revolutionary and of a deep and abiding effect for certain persons who want to live in what we refer to as a civilization—and occasionally retreat from it via engineered and exceptionally complicated mechanisms like this, in which we might be transported into another self.
32. In a structure simulating an owl the user might take that transfiguration even further and, by isolation and the fact of one’s own diminishing humanity, more bodily embody these transformations into others such as owls.
In testimony whereof I affix my signature,
This Time with Feeling
Air comes through the window, flowing haphazardly through the house because gases will always equalize pressure in any container, and the house is a container like any other. The gases do their thing, which is to expand and whirl, molecules clanging off each other and heating up throughout the house, rising and cooling and failing back toward the world and repeating.
All the din is because the windows are open—bottle rockets whining through the night en route to nothing, proving something to the day, Lucia supposes. A bottle-breaking sound; “Shit yeah!” shouted loud. It’s night and it’s hard to see outside with the light on, so Lucia keeps it off in the front window through which she’s looking. The windows are open to allow more air circulation through the top floor of the house via an elaborate fan system, all plugged into one surge protector, plugged thereafter into a clapper mechanism, the kind she once saw advertised on television that switches on and off in response to the sound of human hands clapping. Unfortunately, whenever two bottle rockets go off close to one another, the system shuts off, or comes on, and the electrical surge dims the rest of the house lights momentarily and you can see the surge even from outside. When this happens, Lucia thinks she can even see the slight glow of the streetlights dim and return. Periodically she fears that the douchebags have figured out the clapper mechanism and that they time their rockets to go off together to make the lights sway off and on in her house. She adjusts the timing on the mechanism so that they must readjust. This is a game of breaking codes: her against the neighborhood.
When the air moves around her body, Lucia is cool enough that she can stand it, but when the fans switch off it is another story. And the system goes on and off as flying objects trail through the night and explode. In this way she has ceded control to the douchebags. She will not, however, give up her system.
Lucia is a woman. Women disappear all the time. The douchebags are responsible. She knows the names of some from occasional bouts of television: that show that always features murdered or kidnapped girls, white girls, usually beautiful and present on the screen, made up to please someone in their lives, made up and filled out now to please the viewer. They looked at the camera that had shot the photo, eyes locked toward the future, maybe imagining themselves a decade from now doing important work and looking back at their digital collection of photographs featuring themselves looking lovely and alone. Not picturing the future of them missing, murdered, suicided, maybe, but dead or on the way to dead, or failing that, completely disappeared. These girls are beautiful in contrast to their desperation: they are hoping to become icons, she thinks. They know how to behave in society. They believe in the norms we agree to share until we don’t. They dress and eat and listen to each other on the telephone. These are learned behaviors. These girls have almost surely learned them well. This is why they are missing and on television. Each one of them is like a trophy on the screen, proof of something. The woman on the show missing the missing woman is angry, preaching almost, talking to another angry person or an implied angry person, or occasionally a woman weeping or a woman looking resolute: it’s as if these are the only kinds of women.
These shows make Lucia angry. And then sad. And then she doesn’t know how to feel about them. It is impossible to turn them off, until she does, and the screen blacks out, and she wonders why she was watching them, and hours have passed in this way. Is it living that she’s doing?
It’s hot out. Soon it will be Independence Day, and the world is alive in hopes of declaring a new freedom or celebrating an old one. Kids’ shrieks perforate the night as they blow up trash cans or mailboxes or what sounds increasingly like big, hollow dumpsters all along the street—boom, boom, boom—she can hear the douchebags almost constantly, like it’s a celebration or a punishment for her string of losses—and Lucia is staring out the window and angry and thinking about her past. She is always looking out. She is barely here now, she feels, sometimes, except as an eye, always open, turned outward, a satellite dish, a huge antenna. She is the neighborhood watch because who will watch the neighbors otherwise. Others appreciate her reports on their behalf. They tell her all the time, or they mean to. Her repeated complaints got the drug dealer up the block evicted though he left behind his two pit bulls who, alone for three days prancing in their own filth and hunger, burst through the window and screen and ran through the neighborhood, terrifying other dogs and freaking out and prompting calls to animal control. They got sprayed by the skunks from the colony down in the cul-de-sac just past the ravine, which made them even wilder. Lucia was one of the first to call the number to bring out the van with the men and cages and nooses on poles to take those dogs away to be put down.
Lucia is alone, though she isn’t lonely. She tells this to her few remaining friends and the rare relatives whose visits and calls dot her days and fill her communication logs. Surely she is independent, her friends tell her, how lucky she must feel to be free and to be alive. These things are true and they are usually enough, she says.
She was once a physicist and learned to see the world in quantitative terms: strong and weak interactions, ionic and covalent bonds. Between people you see a number of different kinds of bonds. They act over great distances. They even—so she posits privately—work across the boundaries of the seen world and the unseen one that hides behind us all the time. Right now she is thinking of herself in the third person like an omniscient narrator connecting pushpins with string on a corkboard, and how she is in relationship to everyone who has come into and out of her life. It is easy for her to lapse into this kind of thinking.
Hers is a dwindling family thanks to a chain of suicides and accidents that might or might not have been suicides. She wonders what this says about genetics. She’s down to one first cousin and two nieces, none of whom she is close to. All her male relatives have passed away, most recently an uncle who blew most of his face off with a shotgun on his first attempt but did not then die. He later claimed he was driven to it because his wife had left him, though later it would be obvious that she only left him after he blew most of his face off with a shotgun and, worse, survived. After that he must have required a lot of care, and when he talked it didn’t sound like anything she had ever heard before. Tubes, bandages the size of handbags, silence, and the slop and drip of feeding—and the fear, of course, that, now disfigured, life would not improve, and he’d finish the job sooner rather than later. Lucia had always thought his wife was cruel, but she didn’t blame her for leaving a month after incident number one.
He had returned the shotgun to Walmart for a gift card, no longer trusting himself with the instrument of his disfigurement around the house. This was a transaction Lucia wished she could have seen, as he explained the bandages and the gun to the customer service manager who patrolled the registers at night (it must have been night because, after, he would only go out at night, lurking from streetlight to streetlight like some kind of romantic monster). How awful to telegraph your story, but then, she figured, everybody did.
The second attempt was with a bomb—he called in the threat to another Walmart, the one where he worked, while he was working (from the employee phone as it turned out), but no one took it seriously. This was against company policy, he was sure, which they would realize when it went off, taking him and the refrigerator that held the employees’ lunches with it, mixing them in a sort of batter spread all across the room. Except that it didn’t go off. Botched wiring, and as he was bending over it in the break room with the huge smiley face etched on the glossy vinyl-covered concrete floor, ready to be walked all over like all things that smile without ceasing, someone saw him tinkering with wires and called security, and he was Tasered and tackled and maced a couple of times just to be safe and then Tasered again and then removed, subjected to a variety of treatments that he was henceforth reluctant to talk about.
