I used to own a car too once. I used to be what allegedly they call a Human Being. That didn’t last too long. I had a woman, sort of. I’d crawl in with my mind full—packed to the corners—with the image of this enormous wild rose bush growing like a wild very still quiet geyser of roses out of the dirt beside the house where we rented a railroaded apartment with creaking floors and beautiful French doors boarded up to make a wall. I’d climb into bed with my head stuffed with the image of these roses buried in snow, the snow shining in the headlights. I’d sit in the parked car, full of pride, happy as a tick in a fat girl’s rump. I’d sit in there and cry and listen to Arvo Pärt and drink gin out of a jar and when I’d go in, my head would be stuffed with the image of these ragged roses buried in snow, the snow shining in the headlights of the parked car. I’d go in and crawl in and she was there! I could feel her. She was in there with me and my head was so stuffed I could do nothing but feel. My brain was occupied, understand, with roses, so all I had left was my skin to reach out and decipher—like radar caressing the skin of the ocean. She was in there with me. That was when I was a Human Being.
The first bed I ever owned was a dead old woman’s. After six months one side was flattened. I am, approximately, the size of sea lion. After six months one side was flattened. She died in that bed, the old woman. For months and months she was in that bed dying and you know what? She didn’t even make a dent!
Tim and I were moving his aunt’s antiques out of his father’s basement apartment in the avenues. They lived on M Street. It was a basement apartment in one of those boxy, newish buildings. You felt like there were probably a hundred million of the exact same thing—a hundred million carpeted basement apartments out there orbiting on asteroids or in Milwaukee or on a ship headed for the bottom. We were moving her antiques into a giant truck—a shipping container on wheels. This aunt she had a fortune made from fake Indian buffalo skulls. They’d rent a car, drive out into the desert and find cow skulls and paint an indigo lightning bolt down the forehead and tie a few feathers to the ears and pawn them off on thunderstruck East Coasters looking for a totem from the real range. They made millions. She was finally broke from surgeries. Not cosmetic in the traditional sense but it amounted to the same thing. She’d have spare organs removed, undergo voluntary dialysis, etc etc. I really don’t know what she blew it on. How much surgery can you take? Have a bear’s uterus implanted and later removed? I mean, what is the number of total available operations? Is there a catalog? She had them absolutely spell bound. It was her apartment. They were her things. She had an enormous house in an unfortunate suburb full of rugs and teacarts but she was starting the liquidation there—throwing Tim and Don out on the street. Tim and I were moving all her black lacquered antiques into the shipping container, going up and down the stairs, trying to hurt ourselves with devotion, trying to go too far. Tim and I could move a city fifty miles south in a matter of hours. We understood that everything is waiting to be put in a box and immediately forgotten. We were the world’s finest morticians for detritus. She would stand there, hollowed out, ready for an implantation, and frown as we muscled a few fake Rembrandts up the stairs. Some people are lighter than air.
It’s not that I hate old women particularly. I hate them along with everyone else. When I was young we’d drive through the suburbs trying with everyone else to escape the City we’d built, trying to get out of our lives and live like 3rd rate Indians for a few days. I was a little kid mind you when I finally realized what a great invention the hydrogen bomb was, what a wonderful expedient. It would drive me crazy trying to imagine how long it would actually take for all those buildings and parking lots to finally disappear. Actually it was the plastic bag. I heard some figure. Forty million years. I heard this word—biodegrade. I tried to fathom forty million years. What forty million years meant for the suburbs. I’d close my eyes and see oceans of plastic bags stuck on the walls of identical cheap suburban houses, those million iterations of the same, the identical, human pettiness. Houses the color of cement. Houses actually painted the color of cement. My friend Job Hanno Constantin Freiherr von Mirbach and I were drunk by the fire somewhere in Patagonia and he was telling me about the Red Army. Some other Von’s estate—that would have ended up in the lap of a friend of his—some Prussian country manor on a million acres of immaculate lawn—you could have the French say, or the Belgians, over for a game of croquet. The Red Army came through and do you know what they did? Just for a lark? Just to stick their thumb in their ass? They paved the entire lawn. Left the manor squatting like a beat up stockbroker in a parking lot, surrounded by a million acres of fresh cement. It was the same where I grew up; only it wasn’t a wonderful joke. In the end I’ll take the Sadism of Sadism over the Sadism of the Dollar. I’d sit in the car looking out on the itch of habitations and think how wonderful it would be if a hydrogen bomb exploded and wiped all of it away. But I was young. I didn’t realize how beautifully everything was planned. I didn’t know yet how trivial sixty thousand years was. I had dreamed of Nothing but I didn’t know him as intimately as I do now.
Isn’t that preposterous? A little tyke—still pissing with his pants around his ankles and pulling the legs off spiders—and one night, as clear an image as a gold fish thrashing in a polished bowl, I saw Nothing in a dream. I saw the black whale swimming among the planets, like an eraser wiping away the stars. How in the world was I going to become a plumber after that? There he was, so vague and enormous that looking at him was more like a feeling, like the blackness of sleep you feel for a moment swim through your blood, or the surety of gravity or the pressure of water all around you pressing against you. I’d close my eyes in my bunk bed, squeezing my stuffed beloved black baby doll and first I’d feel it like the blackness of sleep you feel for a moment between the two worlds and he’d pass before me, swimming on, unconcerned, going nowhere in particular because eventually he was going everywhere, swallowing stars. Not an object. Not an icon. Nothing you could put a frame around. More of a feeling in fact. As if he was too big for your eyes, too big for your brain, and you could only think of it passing, think with your skin, like a whale passing by you in the darkness, in the ocean beneath you, the black infinity this dirty rock is floating in. That’s when I realized Nothing is always mattering. He’s the black leather cinched around God’s flabby flanks, the black leather squeezing God’s flabby thighs. Shaped like God only Nothing is shaped like God on the outside. On the inside of God, Holy Holy Holy, wag wag wag. I wish I’d dreamt of God’s kidneys or God’s bear uterus or God hollowed out after sixty-five thousand operations instead of dreaming Nothing all those nights as a kid. I might have turned out different. Been a plumber. Made my mother proud.
Andrew Haley’s poems, short stories and translations have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Zone, Quarterly West, The Smoking Poet, Stop Smiling, Otis Nebula and Sugar House Review.
Editor's note: This is Part 2 of a six-part series. We'll run a section each Monday through August 23.
Read Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.
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