Forrest Gander

Against the backdark, bright riband flickers of heat lightning.    Nearer hills begin to show, to come clear as a hard, detached and glimmering brim against light lifting there.    And here, pitched over the braided arroyo choked with debris, a tent, its wan, cakey, road-rur color.    On the front stake, two green dragonflies, riding each other, pause, Look! cries the boy, running, the father behind him running too— and the canyon opening out in front of them its magisterial consequence, cramming vertiginous air down its throat— to snatch him from the scarp.

The bioluminescent undersides of squid render them invisible to predators below. That the radiance of the boy’s anger might protect him. Walking the dog and stepping on a patch of repaired road, I remember the soft spot in his head. You’re deaf as a beagle. No, you are. Can I feel the tide’s drag on the turning earth increase each day’s duration? A hair in my nostril has gone white. In absolute night, from my bed, I hear him aiming for the toilet’s center. The sound deepens, voice finding its register. Scientists call it an entangled system. We survive Christmas, his face pressed to the smooshed bosom of his grandmother in a house so immaculate, the spider in the seam of the ceiling stands out obscenely. Like a star at the outskirts of the galaxy, and slung around by the gravity of dark matter. For now, he goes where we go, but he does not belong to us. I begin to begin my sentences leaning toward him, taking a deep breath. He relinquishes the conversation with a contraction of his pupils. What is for one of us the throb of the immediate is, for the other, the imminent mundane. When napalm hits my brain, he takes on the tranquillity of a blinking newt. She finds a photograph of him at seven. The sheer expressed of his face. As among Michelangelo’s early drawings, there is a copy of Masacchio’s lost Sagra, the consecration. We search our memories of him for a certain unity of characteristics that would hold through the permutations he now submits to us. When it clings to the wire-and-rug surrogate, lab technicians shock it again. Instead of releasing, it clings tighter. Throwing himself into the back seat after wrestling practice, mat burns on his cheek and forehead. His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.

When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave. You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says. Why? Half-lidded days of early winter. When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs will. The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what? Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments veer every which way, and who can follow? A sequence of dark non sequiturs blows in. When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed. The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject. I am inside it like a parasite. He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the one for which her face was prepared. So they inhabit their bodies like music, for a given time. And yet he continues to act as if there were times to come. I just want you to go away, one of them screams. Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house. She calls the man to a corner in the basement. Those aren’t spider eggs, he says, backing up. Those are its eyes. When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow. Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family. As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience pendant, unnameable.

To the north, along Orange Blossom Trail, thick breath of sludge fires. Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie who loves the freezing trees but cannot save them. Snow fine as blown spiders. The news: nothing. Large rats breed on the beach driving smaller ones here. Today both traps sit sprung.

Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though come to the end of its tether, our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble, it sabotages the scene’s transparence and siphons off its easy appeal. At the same time, the blemish joins together the realms of seer and swimmer in our experience of plunging into and out of the image.

Good morning kiss. Their teeth glance. Clack of June bugs against pane. On the porch a young man in the full sun rocking. Jars incubate tomato plants. His mother sweeps the dirt yard away from flowering vinca and bottle tree. Straightens up, one-eyed by ragged hens. As her boy ambles away to the steady pulse in his skull. The cattle gate swinging open behind him. She takes a headache powder and it is nineteen and twenty seven. The James overruns its levee, backs up the Blackwater. Nineteen and twenty nine: she reads his postcard, the tobacco crop burns. Nineteen and thirty, drought. Long limp bags drag through fields. The Lord whistles for the fly. Revival tents threaten a rain of scorpions. To cure her hiccups, the woman sees a hypnotist. Promptly coughs herself to death. In pungs marked men ride. The son is blown away. No one returns in this story. No one escapes. The tribe is glued together for ruination, friends. There is no more time, there is no way out.