35: West Virginia

Since the accident I’ve felt like half a person, or less. If anybody asks, I tell them that the problem is I haven’t got a leg to stand on. What I mean is that outside of complaining I can’t do anything for myself.

Useless. Fucking useless.

When we talked about posthumanism in college it seemed like a good thing, sort of. We would all become better as post-people, perhaps. Fitter. Happier. Something else.

So where have you gone, Giorgio Agamben? Do you have a theory for this? How one stupid thing changes everything—a piece of coal falling from a truck, a car tumbling into some abyss. Is this bare life? Is this what letting be looks like? Is this what indifference is?

The worst is that I thought I was done with Appalachia, but here I am: back in my old bedroom, all tucked in and waiting for dad to bring me dinner, a child again.

I wonder what he thinks about it, my father. Whether he ever wanted me to leave. Whether this is better. Whether it matters to him that I’m the last man in our family, or was.

Do I need to tell him this is it? That we’re living at the end of history?

34: Kansas

The house is at the end of a long, cracked asphalt road, fenced in. The field around it has gone to seed. I peer in through yellowed, ruffled curtains. An old television in the den is on, but I don’t see anyone.

I return to the front door and ring the bell. There is no name on the mailbox, no address, just the words “20th Century Castles.”

The chimes decay into a humming sound, a rumbling. The plate glass vibrates against my cheek. Inside, a man and woman appear, walking toward the door.

I step back as they open it. They’re wearing matching gray coveralls. The man is balding and the woman has a beehive. They’re blinking like they haven’t seen the sun in years.

Louis Armstrong is singing softly in the background. “What are you doing here?” the man asks after a long time. He draws his wife closer to his side. “How did you find us?”

“I work for the United States Census,” I say. “This is the last household on my list.”

“We’re not on anybody’s list,” he says.

I blink, and he grabs the notebook from my hand. I watch him leaf through its yellowed pages, shake it. Blank forms flutter to the ground. He closes it and looks me up and down, taking in my tangled hair, my stubbled cheeks.

I look at my feet. My soles are worn to paper. My satchel is stuffed with leaves. My pen is out of ink. My pin says “Census 2000.”

The door closes. The man and woman watch me through the glass. “How many people are living in this home?” I ask. I press my hand against the window. “Is there room for another one?”

33: Oregon

“So,” Zil said, “Marge will lead the main group along the official route while the black bloc splits off and does direct action?”

B nodded sharply, or seemed to, his chin half-buried in a black bandana.

We all looked at the map, a red-sharpied route drawn arbitrarily through a mass of green. It had been my idea to stage a city-style protest in Deschutes National Forest, a huge parade chanting “Whose trees? Our trees!” past a line of riot police poised uncomfortably in a patch of wildflowers. Now we’d been planning this thing for days, or plotting I guess, and I couldn’t help but feel like the absurdity of it was getting away from us.

Marge was already in the middle of a new sentence. “And we need to keep the non-arrestables separate,” she was saying. “Maybe that’s something for the street medics?”

“You mean tree medics?” I asked.

“What?” I shrugged and Marge started talking again.

My gaze slid over to the window, over the parking lot of the Bend Super 8, a semi-derelict strip mall, the highway. Suddenly everything seemed to come apart before my eyes, exploding into component parts and processes, multi-dimensional schematics of materials and labor stretching back through history.

In another time and place it might have been a religious experience, struck me as a divine plan, but here and now it just seemed incredible that so much effort could go into something so banal, that this was the world we all agreed upon.

“The chants need to be inclusive,” Marge was saying. “I feel like no one should feel like their voice is being silenced.”

Zil nodded. “Maybe we should schedule another meeting to come up with ideas?”

B shook his black-hooded head. “Fuck more meetings,” he said.

“Did we ever agree on a plan of action?” I asked.

“Oh for Goddess’ sake,” said Marge. “I propose we follow Zil’s.”

“Seconded.”

“Major objections?” Zil asked. “Minor objections? Friendly amendments?” We all looked around silently.

“Consensus.”

32: Minnesota

“I have cancer,” she says.

“Oh Jeez,” he says, “I’m so sorry.” He stands there a little longer then wanders off. The two women turn back to each other.

“You know, Bess,” Deb says, “you could break it to them a little easier.”

Bess chews her pierogi slowly and takes a swig of beer. “Do you mean less quickly,” she asks, “or less glibly?”

“Well, it’s a bit of a conversation-killer, any way you slice it, but you could be a little nicer about it, you know.”


Deb leaves, but Bess is still drinking, thinking again about how she doesn’t want her life to be one of those stories where the afflicted wife wastes away while looking out the window at the prairie, or wherever, feeling some combination of dread, anger, despair, philosophicality, and, finally, acceptance.

Or where it’s the husband playing out the remaining time God gives him on this good Earth, getting right with himself and going out and helping the homeless, or fishing with his son, or something.

Or where it’s some solitary person, and the story takes on a metaphorical quality, something about sickness and society.

Or where it’s just beside the point, whatever that may be.

In reality, it’s been a year since Bob died, and it still seems entirely out of character, how he went from being a big old pink-cheeked lummox to nothing in no time flat.

It had been his idea to refer to his tumors as “The Vikings,” because they’d showed up one day without warning and whatever they didn’t rape or enslave they burned. It had ended badly, but for a month or two they’d both laughed whenever the evening sportscast started, or the words “cancer” and “ravaged” were used together.

She takes his picture out of her wallet. In it, he’s showing off the purple and yellow logo he had tattooed on his cancer-ravaged chest. She laughs because it was so stupid and so perfect.

She orders another beer and turns back to the TV.


By last call Bess is crying and sends a text to Pam. “I’m watching SportsCenter reruns,” she writes, “and I’m drunk.”

“Bess?” Pam replies. “It’s two in the morning.”

She gets in her car and drives, full of the kind of grief where you go the wrong way down the street for no reason, where you end up at the lakeshore with your headlights off, nose of the car dipping toward the water.

“Goddamn it,” she says, because she’s one of those characters after all, staring out over Lake Wobegone and trying to remember a time when driving in didn’t seem like the only reasonable thing to do.

She can imagine Garrison Keillor narrating this on MPR. “It was cancer,” he intones, sad and tongue-in-cheek, and then you hear the sound of Foley-work oars and whistles across the water as The Vikings come.

She chuckles and turns the car radio on, throws the shifter into reverse. The end will come soon enough, but she isn’t done laughing yet.

31: California

I was born under the sign of Serpentarius.

I was raised by snake handlers, healers. I left my family behind.

I abandoned the land of my birth, my ancestral home. Now the world is open like an abyss before me, but not silent and not empty.

I am come to muster my forces, to begin a battle, to end a war. I have donned my armor, sloughed off my scales.

I am changing.


“Okay, what do we get from this so far? Who exactly is doing the ‘talking.’ Is the main character narrating all of the scenes to himself? Is this supposed to be a dramatic monologue? Is there a point to it? A plot, maybe? What relationship, if any, does it have to what we see happening on screen?”


I watch the bullets fly through the air, striking the wall behind me as the music begins, all pounding drum and soaring horns.

I draw my dual 1911A1s and dive sideways, squeezing the triggers, letting the bullets fly, counting rounds as the leave the barrels: eleven, twelve, thirteen.

I duck behind a pillar and drop the magazines. The music is gone again. I hear my heart beating, my blood circulating, my nervous system working. A dull thud. A low hum. A high whine. A kind of silence that reminds me of more harmonious times.


“Well, the reification of the narrative, its refiguration in text – both as speech and thus again as subtitles – is pretty clearly a way of providing a kind of subtext, or a meta-text, if you will; of making it more complex by restatement, of distancing the action both from the speaker and from us. It almost calls into question the legitimacy of visual experience on a conceptual level even as it reaffirms it on the level of content. I think we really ‘see’ the difference between the violence of action and the violence of description, the creative versus the destructive, in a way.”


I am young. The bombs are falling in the muffled distance. Somewhere sirens sing. I huddle in the shelter with my father and mother, waiting for the fourth line to change, for it to be aligned with everything.

I wait, but the way out is obstructed.

I am tired. The dim lights flicker. The bombs fall closer now, but barely louder. The walls shake in fright. The heat from our bodies oppresses me.

I can feel my parents’ eyes on me, their hopes in me, like I hold some secret power, like I am their future, an illumination rising from the darkness like the sun.

I stare into the darkness before me. I feel the earth cool against my back.

I eat what my mother feeds me. I eat until I am full.

I am full of fire.


“This part actually reminds me … Apparently the state stone of California is this rock called serpentine. Sounds a little like the first line of this movie, right? Anyway, the goddamn rock is full of fucking asbestos! Pardon my French, professor. But, I mean, if any state had an official stone that caused cancer, it would be this one. The damn thing even looks like a bloated serpent, if you kind of squint at it hard enough. See? Eureka is the eye, Sacramento is the brain, and there’s La Paz at the ass end. We talk about being the golden state, but this place is one long natural catastrophe. We think we’re so goddamned lucky, but all of us got snakebit and stuck here. It’s like we’re living in a goddamn prison colony full of con artists, snake-oil salesmen, and plastic surgery disasters. There’s a goddamn lobby fighting to keep serpentine instated for Christ’s sake. We need to escape from LA for real. We need to rejoin the goddamn human race.”

“Interesting. So, what I’m hearing is that this is all allegorical? I think that there’s a possible interpretation there, but we need to work it out a little better. Make it clear. This is pretty dense material. Were you talking about the relationship of the snake to the figure of the healer? Or the poison to the cure? I’m not sure if I follow you. Maybe if we start by diagramming out the relationships between the characters. Anyone? Do we know who the main character is … or ‘are’?”


I snap back to the present as the magazines hit the floor. The slides flick forward. They are waiting for me at the rally point. I dive out again, guns blazing.

I arrive as they are about to extinguish their small campfire, to douse it with water from the cooking pot. I ask the cook to stay his hand, to let me eat a little first.

I am one and they are 12. They have eaten and are eager to break camp and go. The general is waiting for us. The cook ignores me.

I close my eyes as the fire goes out. Everything is dark. I am 33 years old. I am 5 years old again.

I wonder if this is my family now.

I listen. In the silence shells are falling. It is 1945. It is 1917. This is the end and the beginning.

I am flying gracefully. The air is full of heat and sound. The ground is above me, the sky below. Dark and light. High and low. Hot and cold. Through contemplation of existing forms it becomes possible to change the world.

I wake who knows how long later in a ditch. The others are all dead I think. The buildings are all rubble. The pieces of reality come back together slowly, imbricated. I am not dead. I am delivered.


“Okay. There’s a father, a mother, a general, the group of twelve soldiers, and a few unseen characters – whoever was doing the shooting, for example – and the narrator, who seems pretty clearly to be aligned with the voice of the son in the first section.”

“That’s a pretty comprehensive list. Let’s take a look at it. It’s interesting that you said ‘son’ there, to start. We can certainly assume that this character is male, given the historically gendered nature of the military. But is that ever stated? Is it implied? Are we reading too much into the lines about the ‘sun’ rising?”

“Wow. Yeah, I totally didn’t get that the first time.”


I squint as we exit the bunker. Our house, our neighborhood, our city, destroyed.

I hold out my hands to my mother, my father, my teachers.

I am 18 when I let them go at last.

I roam what remains of Europe. I witness the work of old masters. I see will triumph over intuition. I watch order rise to power.

I see beauty between numbers too, opportunity in crisis, truth in multiplicity. I know that spring is coming.

I tremble like a leaf of grass.

I meet M in Seattle. It is 1938. We are accompanist and dancer. I watch his body, lithe, lissome, sinuous, serpentine. I go home to my wife and dream of handling him.

I watch him moving to my music, changing as the rhythm changes, a mixture of physical arithmetic and arbitrary limitations.

I am twinned with him, sublime.

I move east with my wife because I must. Chicago is an empty promise. Marriage is not a prison, but a cage. It follows me like luggage as I am drawn to New York and M.

I practice with him endlessly, long after the others have departed. He dances as I hammer out pieces for percussion. The innocent moment comes. A lingering touch, a kiss.

I feel a phase shifting, a life unbalancing.

I am changing.


“Here we see how the issue of gender gets a bit more complicated, not to mention time, several decades of which have been either collapsed or elided.”

“Yeah, at this point I was a little confused as to ‘where’ the story was happening, too. Like, it seems like World War I and II, and ze talks about being in Europe, but then ze is in America again.”

“I don’t know. The way I see it, it’s, like, a commentary on capitalism, you know? The uniformity of industrial nations, the dehumanizing effects of mechanization. So, like, both Europe and America are the same. History is flat. The economy is imaginary everywhere, you know?”

“Interesting. What do you mean?”

“Well, like, it’s just made up, right? And on a kind of, um, meta level, movies are part of the story we’re telling about ourselves, the world we’re, like, making in the image of us, sort of like, um. I don’t know. Sorry, I forgot what I was about to say.”


I return to camp barefoot. The sun is rising as I reach the gate. The guard shields his eyes and lets me in. I am returning from the desert. It is the year 30 AD.

I proceed to the banquet table. I take bread, break it, and sit down to eat. My comrades drift around me, wraithlike. I wonder if the general is waiting. I wonder when my last supper will be.

I go to see her later, the general, my wife. She calls me and I go to her like one hypnotized. She comforts me, convinces me to lay my arms aside.

I rest. It is a time when heaven seems to be on Earth, when this desert landscape seems like a second paradise.

I drink deep of dreams and remember nothing. I draw sustenance from inexhaustible subconscious springs. I sleep until I am well again.

I awake. As I rub the sleep away the scales fall from my eyes.

I know now she is on another side, or I am. We stand apart, opposed. She has fallen, gone over to the order. She plotted this all along, to break my spirit, to betray me.

I must move slowly, quietly mass my forces. I struggle to stand.

I was weak but now am strong; was blind but now I see.

I am only strong because of M.

I find her in the garden. I greet her. I take her by the hand. I whisper to her in the semi-silence. I lead her to a half-secluded place. I dance with her to the incidental music of the world. I make love to her.  I take her as my own. My one and only, my thirteenth disciple.


“Now things are really getting tricky. We’ve got a third – and completely different – time period going on. Was anybody expecting this? Did we see this change coming? What do we make of it?”

“There seems like there’s a lot of overlap going on.”

“Go on.”

“Well, there’s still a man and wife and an M. There’s a group of soldiers in one and disciples in the other. The general is also the wife, which is a little weird … and M is a woman in this one. And I don’t think I really get the desert bit at all.”

“At this point, it may be fruitful to go outside of the text and investigate a few other primary sources. If you’ll look at your first handout, you’ll notice it’s essentially a list of calculations. ‘Serpentarius is the 13th sign of the zodiac. California is the 31st state. 31 backwards is 13. L-A-C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A is 13. Hollywoodland has 13 letters. The sign was installed on July 13, 1923, 20 years after the neighborhood was founded, 1 plus 9 plus 0 plus 3, or 23 minus 10 years after JC.”

“JC?”

“Oh shit. I remember that from fucking high school English class. Doesn’t that pretty much always mean Jesus Christ?”

“Perhaps. Who else has those initials? How many other characters could this be?”


I feel time flex as the flux flows through us. There is a moment of immense power coming.

I am on the cross my blood is flowing.

I am in Japan and the bomb is dropping.

“I am in film class and the film is boring.”

 “All right, very funny. I wasn’t going to bring this up until later, but let’s talk about the idea of boredom. First, why don’t we examine our terms? Do we think of ‘boringness’ as an intrinsic quality? Is it objective or subjective? Can we say, for example, that this film ‘is boring’? Or is it that we are bored by it? And if the latter, what does that say about us? Let’s go around the room. Just say the first thing that comes to mind.”

“Each time the perspective shifts, I feel more, um, distanciated from the character Like, I can’t really relate to him.”

“Yeah, it just feels totally random.”

“It was boring to me at first, but then I started thinking about it like poetry. It has a weird dream logic to it, I think.”

“Like counting sheep, you mean? That’s what it felt like to me.”

“Me too. Like a hypnotist saying ‘you are getting sleepy’ over and over in that really droney voice.”

“Yeah, but different, you know. Because that’s not the movie’s message, right? Even if it is sort of about the power of suggestion.”

“The cinematography is pretty good. It kept me interested.”

“Was the person who made this autistic? I mean none of the characters have names or faces.”

“Whoa, yeah. Now that she mentions it, I’m like, totally getting an ‘outsider art’ vibe from this.”

“That is totally offensive. This whole thing is. I mean, aside from Jesus Christ, dragging the A-bomb and the Orient into this? What was ze thinking?”

“It reminds me a lot of a short film I made, actually. The main dude was this total Christ-figure, too, but it took place in the present day California. The way I handled it was to have him read passages from the bible to the camera, and then the narrative action totally mirrored them. Like this one scene where he reads the crucifixion right before his fucking Nazi father kicks him out of the house and tells him to go back to school or get a job you know? As if that shit was even fucking possible. Pardon my French. Anyway, I thought my method worked pretty well.”

“Sorry, what was the question?


I am a composer of aleatoric processes. I am removing myself from my work even as I am speaking through it. I am creating structure and subverting it. I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.

I gather my friends. Together we make happenings, frame sound and silence, not music or noise, there is no useful distinction between these two ideas.

I am overcome with wonder at the world but

I do not tremble at the fragility of this moment as it decreases.

I do not care how one is followed by another. Everything always falls in its proper place. Everything always changes.

I am one and many, multiple. M and me and them, 12 plus (1 plus 1) is 13. There is no useful distinction between one and two, between I and us. I am one and we with M.

I (and he) read to them from the book of changes while he (and I) dances. Penetration produces gradual and inconspicuous effects. It should be effected not by an act of violation but by influence that never lapses.

I am a modest, balanced, and entwined, fixed and temperate but not unchanging. M says the same to me, a vow.

I watch the sun go down and we do not wait for it to rise. I do not need to tie the one to the other. We are not tied, not tethered, incoherent to each other and ourselves.

I know that all that is visible rises beyond itself, extends into the invisible world, where it becomes, at last, clear, consecrated, ordered by us.

I do not believe that it should or must, but that it does. This is the structure in which all change occurs, in which all chance exists.

I heed the gentle, penetrating whisper of the wind as it shifts, sibilant, coiling itself around me.

I adapt to it.


“Well, I think that last segment speaks for itself. Any thoughts or questions?

“So, basically that was like The Matrix meets Passion of the Christ plus a little bit of Adaptation.”

“Whoa, yeah. He’s right. They totally should have cast Nic Cage in that.”

“That would’ve been pretty awesome. Does he have 13 letters in his name, though?”

“No, I don’t think so, but he was in that movie Snake Eyes, so I think that counts.”

“And I think he has a star on the walk of fame, so that might affect his astronomical calculations.”

“Seriously, though, Professor. What the hell was that?”

“Yeah, I feel like we all just wasted two hours of our lives.”

“Well, I won’t answer that question directly, but there are a few different literary models it may be useful to consider. Like the memoir, for example, the allegory (as was mentioned earlier), and the work of historical fiction.”

“So it’s just some kind of mash-up?”

“Not exactly. If I told you that this script was written using chance techniques, would you believe me? And how would that affect the way we appreciate it? Is the method used to generate a text important if it isn’t represented in its content?”

“Do you mean the author was just calling out plot twists based on heads or tails, flipping coins like fucking Rosencrantz?”

“You mean Guildenstern?”

“Dude, it doesn’t matter. The point is the author is fucking dead to us.”

“It was the I-Ching, wasn’t it, Professor?”

“Perhaps. Now we’re running out of time, so there’s a saying that I want to tell you that I think will both tie in to one of our earlier discussions and give us a starting point to write about this work in a larger context, which is part of your assignment for the week. It goes like this: 'In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all, but very interesting.’”

“But that was already at least like, 120 minutes. How many more times do we have to watch it?”

“Very funny. Class dismissed. I’ll see you all next week.”