the wiry hairs on his torso with soothing words.
He took his position toward the stern with the other young men. We stirred the thin air with the staffs, coating the swabs with a coarse sheet of oxygen. We coaxed the air down into the citybound transport valves, our ululating wands like the shuddering cilia of some great animal.
I had a letter in my pocket. It said “Dear Prell.” This was my ex-wife’s first name. “Dear PRELL,” it said again — I wanted the name to spring out from the page, to molest her sensibility, to hazard the slightest ripple in the hazy periphery of her life. Under her name I drew a picture of a small animal, a figure that, drawn by a more experienced hand, might begin to resemble a tapir but that in my own curlish, misinformed penmanship looked like a mangy dog. I did not know what this meant at the time — the act of sketching was nothing more than a way to calm my nerves as I fashioned the note, a method of maintaining some sort of bodily restraint. But over days the animal started to mean something else entirely. Smudged haphazardly from pocketwear, the creature became animated, the sharp fur along its back bristling in preparation for some imminent attack.
“DEAR PRELL,” it said underneath the crude thumbnail image, “When I look down I will always see the top of your head, the feature you let me maul most frequently. I can remember each divot with a phrenologist’s precision. Remember how I wept when they finally smoothed it all over? How I held your tender head in the recovery room, knowing, even then, even after the accident, with your face like a blunt mallet, that I would never fully rid myself of you? I will admit now what I would not admit then, that it was my fault, that I was tipsy and that I told you I knew how to drive the pram out of spite. But the fog that night, the animals in the road, the half-naked farmer — how could I have planned that? Please, understand at least that much.
“Your head, now, from up here, couldn’t be measured in pixels. A grain of sand would crush you, Prell. You feel, nightly, the tugging, insistent member of a man straining against the small of your back, when my only mistake was actually leaving when I finally got the idea to do so. I am still here, Prell, PRELL, groaning with fossilized desire. You shit.”
I looked the letter over once more. I hadn’t said anything more or less than that I was unprepared to make any statements on my own behalf. I was a career coward, unfit for the rigor of even the most childish, underdeveloped day. The sky stopped for a break. Chunk went for his cigarette box. I tied the note to a small brown pebble of hard air, poked a small hole in the cloud, and dropped it right through.
Home Recordings
I made them for the Museum of Real Estate and Finance. They sent me out with a special microphone and a tape deck. People wanted to know what kind of lives had molted and languished in the places where they would like to file away their own blustery, overwrought experiences. I’d spend a day or two in different areas of a house, using the long, fluted horn of the microphone to record the billion fluttering tones, the way different angles of sunlight on the walls colored reflections, memories of footsteps embedded deep within the wide slats of the floor, the places where the last people who lived there grieved and sprawled, shed tiny, creped flakes of life. On a certain frequency, I could pick up fragments of a conversation between two people who had perhaps long lost touch with each other by then. Another frequency might unveil the stuttering wow and report of a coital episode occurring in the kitchen. You could modulate the pitch so that even the soiled breath of the couple was audible from inside the oven. The bathroom was a particularly fertile site. I would sit cross-legged on the floor of a house’s bathroom for hours, listening carefully through headphones at the timbre of the different silences, how
He took his position toward the stern with the other young men. We stirred the thin air with the staffs, coating the swabs with a coarse sheet of oxygen. We coaxed the air down into the citybound transport valves, our ululating wands like the shuddering cilia of some great animal.
I had a letter in my pocket. It said “Dear Prell.” This was my ex-wife’s first name. “Dear PRELL,” it said again — I wanted the name to spring out from the page, to molest her sensibility, to hazard the slightest ripple in the hazy periphery of her life. Under her name I drew a picture of a small animal, a figure that, drawn by a more experienced hand, might begin to resemble a tapir but that in my own curlish, misinformed penmanship looked like a mangy dog. I did not know what this meant at the time — the act of sketching was nothing more than a way to calm my nerves as I fashioned the note, a method of maintaining some sort of bodily restraint. But over days the animal started to mean something else entirely. Smudged haphazardly from pocketwear, the creature became animated, the sharp fur along its back bristling in preparation for some imminent attack.
“DEAR PRELL,” it said underneath the crude thumbnail image, “When I look down I will always see the top of your head, the feature you let me maul most frequently. I can remember each divot with a phrenologist’s precision. Remember how I wept when they finally smoothed it all over? How I held your tender head in the recovery room, knowing, even then, even after the accident, with your face like a blunt mallet, that I would never fully rid myself of you? I will admit now what I would not admit then, that it was my fault, that I was tipsy and that I told you I knew how to drive the pram out of spite. But the fog that night, the animals in the road, the half-naked farmer — how could I have planned that? Please, understand at least that much.
“Your head, now, from up here, couldn’t be measured in pixels. A grain of sand would crush you, Prell. You feel, nightly, the tugging, insistent member of a man straining against the small of your back, when my only mistake was actually leaving when I finally got the idea to do so. I am still here, Prell, PRELL, groaning with fossilized desire. You shit.”
I looked the letter over once more. I hadn’t said anything more or less than that I was unprepared to make any statements on my own behalf. I was a career coward, unfit for the rigor of even the most childish, underdeveloped day. The sky stopped for a break. Chunk went for his cigarette box. I tied the note to a small brown pebble of hard air, poked a small hole in the cloud, and dropped it right through.
Home Recordings
I made them for the Museum of Real Estate and Finance. They sent me out with a special microphone and a tape deck. People wanted to know what kind of lives had molted and languished in the places where they would like to file away their own blustery, overwrought experiences. I’d spend a day or two in different areas of a house, using the long, fluted horn of the microphone to record the billion fluttering tones, the way different angles of sunlight on the walls colored reflections, memories of footsteps embedded deep within the wide slats of the floor, the places where the last people who lived there grieved and sprawled, shed tiny, creped flakes of life. On a certain frequency, I could pick up fragments of a conversation between two people who had perhaps long lost touch with each other by then. Another frequency might unveil the stuttering wow and report of a coital episode occurring in the kitchen. You could modulate the pitch so that even the soiled breath of the couple was audible from inside the oven. The bathroom was a particularly fertile site. I would sit cross-legged on the floor of a house’s bathroom for hours, listening carefully through headphones at the timbre of the different silences, how
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