Issue 21

Rachel Nagelberg

1
GRAY AREA

I left and changed my shape. I had been stifled, not lived. I rented an apartment on a one-way street—each day on the way to my car I passed a sign that read End. The End was now following me everywhere. Had I finally reached it?

Earth felt impossible. I was constantly horrified, in shock. In my dream, a note on the moist chocolate cake read: One day soon you’ll have to bear them. The man then flipped me over, shrieked of his love, and violently came into me.

I was too sad. For days my breaths were so shallow I could hardly expand my stomach. My colon started to bleed. Per suggestion of my women’s book club, I’d begun to question the bleeding’s intentions with different possible origin stories: Your body is communicating to you that you need to write. You’re stuck in a loophole of economic stagnancy. You are not listening clearly. You are not in the right place. Where was I, anyway? The book we were reading, about codependency, described impaired boundaries as I can’t tell where my reality stops and someone else’s reality begins. The woman leading the group then described the exact moment she felt her ex’s spirit enter her leg. I was left trying to discern the metaphor.

A curandera prescribed me valerian root and corn silk. Meanwhile, I was inserting prescription steroid suppositories at bedtime. They were gray, dense, chalky, like the remains of something living. I wasn’t whole. I was clinging to fire, light—some impression of aliveness.

Because of an imaginary voice, Nicolas had become a whole person, rather than a partial person, Philip K. Dick writes in Radio Free Albemuth. I was interested in symbolic systems. I was interested in the concept of Severing. Somewhere I encountered the phrase OWN YOUR PROCESS—I considered screen-printing on a T-shirt: ^ is expelling a demon. Instead, I settled for telling my story to everyone I knew. At work, customers asked how I was and I stated with intensity that I believed I was now living fully in The Gray Area. Congratulations, a famous writer said to me, everyone I know longs to be in that very place.

How to exist within the frenzy? The other night my visiting friend and her fiancé climbed into an Uber. WHOOPEE! the driver shouted as the locks clicked, and they took off down the canyon. His accent was thick and indistinguishable. I’ve never done this before! He was nineteen years old. He’d taken his brother’s car—he drove ten mph along the canyon’s edge, squinting and swerving and cursing under his breath while twenty cars lined up behind him, honking maniacally. He kept shouting at her fiancé, How much money do you really make!?

THE YOUNG-GIRL CHASES AFTER HEALTH AS THOUGH IT WERE SALVATION, writes Tiqqun.

I dream of La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, dredging through a polluted river, calling out her children’s names, erupting in toxic fire. Then I wake up and file a maintenance request. Later, as the plumber empties an entire bottle of Drano into the toilet, I fear death for all the living creatures in the sea, the microorganisms in the pipes, the future of all human beings, the futility of our filtration systems—Our skins are porous—we’ll die anyway, they say. Chemicals are natural, they say. My muscles aren’t as strong as they used to be, my brain not as sharp. Current research suggests the brain is a muscle that can be shaped and stretched, even regenerated. I close my eyes and silently ask my body to detect any intruders, but like my intuitive physical radar, it remains uncertain, desperate, inviting the damage in.

 

2
COVER THE EARTH

Dear [Human], like you I’ve come from a wounded place. I fantasize about losing my body. To arrive at a point where everything’s just feeling. Or to be inhuman. Any other object.

Flesh has become weird, I write in an email to my herbalist, and she asks me to text her a picture of my tongue. Modern living affects us all. Donna Haraway writes, Bodies are not born; they are made. Our slick, viscous bodies scroll and swipe. I am good, I think, but my pursuits feel empty; truth happens and I rearrange furniture. I go out and buy an unruly fern. I obsess over science fiction scenarios. Stories that are not mine embed themselves into visceral crevices, bury their organless un-forms into my bulk. In some doctor’s office, multiple X-rays reveal unidentified objects in nonconventional muscular canals. Humanity poisons its own food systems. Oceans bulge from our rock-hard plastic. THE END.

Dear [Human], THE END is near. Driving on the freeway with a bowl of cherries between my thighs is impractical, and yet. I pass a billboard that says Long Live Our 4-Billion-Year-Old Mother while I spit pits out the window. Have you considered the tonal pitch of the wailing that erupts from an Orca as its child is being captured? Linguistic systems are currently being designed for further examination and analysis.

I read somewhere once that the key to our survival will be a collective letting-go of nostalgia. The hardest part is leaving Earth behind, muses the sociopathic politician in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. What even is the evolutionary use for desiring the past—to keep us stunted, walled?

O, one day in however many years we will all be waiting in miles-long lines along the outskirts of our cities that will lead to windowless domes in which we will pay to sprawl out on an artificial grassy field beneath an artificial sun and sky. A voice on a loudspeaker will say, You have fifteen minutes remaining. It will say, You have five minutes remaining. It will say, Enjoy your last sixty seconds while it lasts. It will command you to report back to the lobby.

On a podcast I listen to regularly, a guest speaker notes: One theory posits that Mars is the site of an ancient planetary nuclear massacre by an intelligent alien race. Philip K. Dick writes in Ubik, Organs that had no future … and in The Divine Invasion dear Rybys dreams desperately of malignancy, and I’m left wondering when exactly it was that we stopped believing the Earth was immortal and death rushed in like a credit card payment alert.

In a dark-lit room, we sat in a circle around a potted plant hooked up to a series of black nodes connecting to a recording device, from which arose an unearthly and desperate wailing. What exactly is the correlation?

Tim Morton writes that trees and plants want to be known because they cannot know themselves as bodies. There is this idea that every individual contains the history of their entire race transcribed in the code of their DNA. A shaman once led me to understand that all of my feelings aren’t necessarily mine. There is a movement and porousness to living that we have for some reason taught ourselves to overlook, to forget.

Donna says, Disease is a language. It’s also an operation. Like a logical system, writes Tim in Dark Ecology, a virus is born to exploit inherent inconsistencies in cells. My body cries out to me from a deep, unlocatable space. Existence expresses itself as a pull between two opposite directions, between the unseen and seen. Like a malfunction in some ancient machinery designed by an alien, except the alien was me.

 

3
FERAL

You are haunting yourself constantly…¹

I was brimming full, flooding the interior. Some process was becoming conscious, attaining visibility. My self-organ bleeped and purred. How I was so ready to let this stranger into my body.

We had ended a distance. In my dream, the dying deer’s snout drooped into the sink, a massive, heaving heap of weight. I fled to the adjacent room, shrieking for my father.

There is a close association between sexual instinct and the striving for wholeness, writes Jung. Something is seen, but one doesn’t know what. A living mythology is born.

The dying deer began to drown; it could hardly lift its head. I could hear the water gurgling. I could feel the poor thing suffocating. Sometimes I betray certain parts of myself. How is this arid L.A. landscape so slippery? As soon as I think I’m grasping it, it turns to jelly. To come up close to any movement in history is to discover a coarse and grainy texture.²

And there I found myself again, facing a convex mirror, drunk on mezcal at The Magic Castle. During the midnight showing, the magician’s assistant, his wife, allowed swords to enter her body; history had made her into an instrument. The UFO has marked her out and not only turns a searching eye upon her but irradiates her with magical heat, a synonym for her own inner affectivity, writes Jung. Why was everything so BIG?

Later, in the dream, when the lions entered the room with their luscious, flowing manes, I became hysterical. They sniffed at me, began licking me. One gently teethed on my hand. I was crying. No one—not even my dad— was protecting me. No one was trying to save me.

It’s like I took one look at you and all my facades collapsed, my internet date confessed right as he entered me. The vortex surrounding us began to churn.

Then he fucked me too fast for me to feel it. OH WELL. In our skin there are millions of cells, each with a complex memory, said Jodorowsky. If you perceive your father in a violent way, it is because you are not killing him.

DO I HAVE TO PERFORM TO FEEL ALIVE? Then to the depths!³ I’ve spent so much time trying to perfect my body. I’ve been searching for someone to tell me I am healed. SO NOW WHAT? To defeat a fear, you must let it enter into your life in a concrete shape. What is the shape of your everything?

One can harmonize with anything if it chooses to love it.

 

4
AUTOIMMUNITY

… she does this by taking back her body.⁴

We were tonguing neon pickled yellow eggs discussing whether or not the Prednisone I’d been taking for twenty-seven days to stop my internal bleeding had any effect on the taste of my pussy. He’d never tasted my pussy, so there would be no conclusions. I found myself reconsidering Picasso’s painting Young Girl Throwing a Rock.

Earlier that month, at Urgent Care, the doctor on duty yanked up my dress and pressed his full weight onto my belly. Afterwards, I resumed a psychological posture.

Contraction becomes a normal way of being.

Coyotes were loose in the neighborhood. Cats and small terriers were being mutilated and left on doorsteps. Lawns were being trespassed. Alerts arrived electronically on the hour. Who was sourcing this information? No one I spoke to knew any specific details. I pictured a lonely woman in her basement with a dark imagination running wild, eating Doritos.

My purpose in life is to love, the woman on TV narrated in the first season of Life After Lockup. And prisoners are the people who I’ve chosen to share my love with. Her friend: I think she just likes to put herself in complicated situations.

After his savage examination, the doctor refused to prescribe me generic steroids—he wasn’t convinced by my pain or by my history. I cried and then Ubered home and found some expired ones and began treating myself. I am labeling this act: Guerilla Self-Care (though perhaps that is redundant now?).

LIE TO DOCTORS. IT’S YOUR DUTY!

The immune system must recognize ‘self’ in some manner in order to react to something foreign, wrote Donna.

I just kind of went with my gut, the prisoner’s girlfriend said.

This field is a vortex, a man once whispered to me as we lay in the center of a grassy expanse one dark evening in his childhood town as he went on about aliens and spirits and electromagnetism, his hand gently caressing my lower back. It was forty-five degrees, and we’d just eaten spicy Indian food at a restaurant where he’d divulged his desire to take me to a secret location to show me a vulnerable part of himself. At some point I felt my zipper lower and his struggling to remove his pants.

We all begin as foreigners. / the violence of metamorphosis⁵

I found myself discussing dreams with my boyfriend’s tall cousin at a Passover Seder, a clinical psychologist. He stopped recording his dreams, he stated, because one day, while driving, he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or not dreaming, what was real and what was not. Isn’t that the ultimate? I said.

The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember …

But if I carry a virus, can I still be good?

The past is perfectly neutral, my mentor once wrote to me. It is what happened. It existed and is no more.

But what if it lives on in the body?

In my dream, a seagull struggled to fly through a metal grate lodged in the wall of my living room, its oversized belly swelling through the tiny cracks. I watched it from afar—it was a normal thing, animals getting caught, but never succeeding at getting in.

Some women know how to use sickness as fuel, whereas I still find myself resisting it …

Suddenly the metal cracked, and the winged creatures burst inside—a whole swarm—but they weren’t just seagulls, they were seagulls-becoming-pigs, with hooves that scraped me as they charged.

Focus on the edges of pain, the facilitator whispered to me. Send love to all your organs. Tell your colon you love it every day. Listen to what it has to say. But I could only feel my father. The inflammation spoke in his voice: I am so alone, it said.

Breathe. Notice your body. You are resisting what is. The earth is heat and air and cold and wind and many different sensations.

There are so many parts of us that are unknown to us.

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