ARCHIPELAGO -page 2-
Richard St. Germain
Sometimes things landed accidentally in ordained receptacles and were granted their decampment. Let them see how casually the world received them. Let them see the things they could never hope to approach in value mummified by things those things could never hope to approach in value and so on, until they were integrated with a permanent substratum of the world and noticed only when a riot of combustible gases prolapsed and ignited. The bicycle knew. That catapulting brightness coincided with a pool of warmth that traveled among the rooms. Any place was redeemable. You had to put up with inconveniences. The floors were not there for you. The dust could be wondrous. All you could see you knew you were breathing, and all you could do to help yourself was to stop breathing, and then you would die. It settled on you. The warmth was skewered by the shrug of things remote from the daily view. But the body could conform to anything with that warmth as its reward. You might find something really valuable. You never knew. There were ticklish green filaments muscling in on these places. These were my houseplants. If you liked them, I could cull some hardy snippets from them and advise you on how to disburse them among your rooms if your rooms had places where you would not disturb them. They would not disturb you. They would remind you of other rooms. They did not prefer certain rooms. They would adapt, and you would have to live with that. I let them, never interfering except to remove a snippet, which I gave with that qualification if you liked them. This was the qualification I had been given when snippets had been given to me. No obligations were incurred with these things. They fell or dropped off anyway. You found them being kicked around without you knowing it until one challenged you in front of the bathroom, maybe, or the bed, demanding that you posit how it got there before you did whatever you found the bathroom or the bed necessary to do it in. Whom had you been giving snippets to who left them lying around for you to kick? You should have asked yourself this. You should have made a list. You should have been glad water and dirt were not being tendered to some unwanted houseplant, which was growing in proportion to some person’s pity for you, or worse, some person’s ongoing condescension to you and your profusion of houseplants. God, the salts that migrated through the pots, crusting and flaking and sloughing off. They must have come from the water. They must have come from wherever the water came from before emptying into my watering pan, which I carried from pot to pot, tipping up before the pot was full, refilling until all my houseplants did not have to be watered again for a while. They had to be fertilized. They had to be provided for. But the snippets you found clouded in dust and pubic hair had withered stems or a clean, oozing tip where the snippets had depended. You did not do this. You had done this once, at least once once and once twice and had believed the stories persuading you of the insignificance of such snippets wherever they were, whether they had succumbed in your dust-smothered rooms or were rooting happily in the care of some person other than the person you had given them to, some person who had more light and room and patience, for God’s sake, for houseplants, and a nod of acquiescence from you, a last reaffirming look from the person telling you the story, an occasion of tenderness and generosity that helped you believe the story for a while, meanwhile kicking suspiciously every snippet on the floor or on the sidewalk near the post office or in the contents of some receptacle you had mishandled on its voyage toward some other receptacle, giving local creatures opportunity to renew their speculations about you, you and all the other creatures disrupting someone’s garbage. So what if there appeared and you pocketed those inadvertent losses, victims of odd trajectories that ended among wads of sopping toilet paper and the periodic sock? Could they use a sock? You did not ask them this. You could have used it. You could see areas in its original condition, before the sock suffered the uses you put it to. You could see the areas where the sock had suffered such use. These could be re-used. The local creatures knew all about you. Who else would have paused to paw over a sock fallen out of the trash, crimped, compacted, obviously stiff? If they had been asked this about anyone else, they would have said: you. They knew there were other creatures like you, but you were the creature they knew. You wanted to temper their opinion of you, deter them from inventing creatures who were worse than you, because of you. Drop the sock. Pick up the snippet. Look at yourself. Everyone else was. If they weren’t, they were refusing to look at you. They were hurrying past you. They were running away from you. They thought you were going to offer them a snippet. Any creature knew the glut of snippets showering your rooms. They knew which rooms, too—just look at the houseplants crowding the windows. Look at the insects assembling. They knew you had a little fan pressing its little volume of moving air toward you, but where were you? Did you have your keys with you? Or would you have to trail one of these creatures to the keyhole where only you should have been able to obtain the effect of finesse appended to rotary movements which the keyhole was designed to produce—namely, entrance to your rooms, at least the scent received prior to your entrance, as pressures everywhere equalized and creatures became accustomed to things. Yes: the smell. It must be declared. There was the smell. The smell was there before you got there. The creature with the key assured you it had been investigated. This investigation had assured the creature that the smell was not unique, that many rooms conserve smells until an accident banishes them, and that this was almost a loss for the creatures in the rooms, but probably a benefit in general. Neither of you professed what would be the benefit until then, to you. Further introductions were performed for the sake of formality. The toilet flushed. There was hot water. That was enough. You had to practice a different way of breathing. Lungs did not judge the palatability of molecules they sought. The breezes nosing up to the windows did not smell much better, let me tell you. But irrepressively there would come on one of these breezes the smell of noodle soup. This was something a creature did not become accustomed to. Even the insects were afflicted. Otherwise we shared the emanations of the rooms. We fed ourselves, took showers, slept. I set up some operations in one of the other rooms, a table, chair, the option to put my feet up, but painfully, alienating parts of the body which would be thankful and cooperative again after waiting for the operator to put his feet back where they were supposed to be. They would allow me to forget the smell. You could say that forgetting a smell is the same thing as not smelling it, but then you would have to say that remembering a smell is the same thing as smelling it, and this would prevent you from smelling things, like noodle soup. You would miss the Korean lady, who did not come without the smell of noodle soup. The smell of the rooms was dampened by the freer dissipation toleration of the fine white dust allowed you. If you remembered noodle soup it only meant that you were hungry. You and every other creature in the rooms. The curtain drifting away from the windowsill. The coffee cup you grandly carried full of water. Toying with the view. Maybe just a sip. Oh, yesterday’s. Oh, no, the day before’s. Yesterday it was yesterday’s. Tomorrow’s would be gone tomorrow. Maybe just another sip. Not that much different, really. Tomorrow would be different. You would know tomorrow. If it lasted. You would probably spill it and have nothing but the efflux of previous operations to mop it up with, which you piled upsidedown within quick grasp and of which there was a solid amount, except for the most recent, which you weighted with something too weighty to release to the archipelago, to enjoy a kick. The infrequent breeze went right for this pile and sailed the pages upsideup again for all the world to see again, meaning you, scraping the pages off the floor again before anyone else could see them, meaning you, believing them once again, rerererererereading them, as long as no one else could see you, meaning you again, seeing yourself on your knees begging these pages for brilliance. There were paper clips. Some were rusted. God, the staples. It was not His fault. Thank God you ran out of staples. Thank Him staples were not re-usable, or they would have rusted too. The paper clips returned like the staples, but the paper clips could be removed and authorized for further, more promising, use. Staples, after being removed, were useless. The pages appeared to have been stapled. So you left the staples. God bless you for ever stapling a pair of pages and for being proud of yourself for completing a page so completely that you needed another page, even if you did not need all of it, and even if you did not need all of it, what you did need of it gave you what you were seeking: a story, a little history of something you had made up, even if you had not made it up. No one was going to see it anyway, except you. No one even knew what it was. You forgot to tell them. Maybe that was why you were using the pages to mop up water. You had to tell them what you were talking about. Make it obvious. The body would not allow you to keep tricking it. Operations like this involved a lot of putting your feet up, then back where they were supposed to be, less thankfully each time, the body agitating for comfort, for something not that it had to conform to but that conformed to it, for something that did not require a certain posture to keep it from ending up on the floor with everything else in the rooms, for something it did not stick to when it sweated, unless it sweated so much that the sweat lapped under it, sharing with you the mere depressions in the chair, depressions which were supposed to relieve the discontinuity between a chair and a body, and which may have been appropriate to the chair’s history but were subjects to it too, and though the depressions were sufficient to get you situated, situation was insufficient, the chair had to accommodate, the chair had to adopt some of the bodily excess, you could not be responsible for all the excess and concentrate, the body would pronounce its revenge on you. You took all the comfort that standing permitted. The feet agreed to take you to the bathroom. There was a ledge that allowed some of the excess to straddle while putting pleasurable pressure on the rectum. The feet were leery of this. When they straddled the ledge you were safer. You were secluded by the only door between rooms. You could put a hook into an eyehole and lock it. You could stick a butter knife through and unlock it. No one would stop you. Kicking it wasn’t going to turn up any new aspect to it unless you kicked it in. There was a stool in what had been presented as the kitchen. Standing on it put you between the ceilings but you could sit on it too, crimping your toes against the footrest where careful pressure would crack them. That felt good. The beauty of a stool is the prominence it gives. Someone should have taken a picture of you. The back still had dignity; the arms were free, hands gathered in your lap: daring the camera to leave you alone. There was a counter too, you could sit at. It was the perfect height for you, on the stool. Aperson had to eat. Aperson had to read. You were a person. You read cookbooks inscribed to you. You tried not to break the spines while you kept the page with your elbow and ate. There was another stool. There were two stools. You could sit on one and put your feet up on another. With your feet straddling the stool, hooked under the footrest, you could sleep. All the body asked you was to keep it off the floor, feed it, let it sleep, keep it away from other creatures whose intentions toward it you were not sure of and be prepared for its distress even after you had done all it asked, be prepared for its response to processes it was not exempt from just because it was a body, look around you, look at what happened to bodies, witness the dumb suffering of bodies, do something. There was a hard rubber stump attached at an imposing height to a bicycle, you grabbed two flip-flopping handles to steady it and were on your way, not ready to sit if you felt the stump under you, the handles were not answering you, too much of you was dependent on them, you had to depend on the movement under you, which caused the world to move, which took away the rooms and fed past you for as long as the body afforded you. The frictive heat reddened your skin. Wind exclusive to you ballooned your clothes. The farther away from you you looked the longer you had before it passed. Anything you saw distinctly vanished instantly. Closest to you could not be seen. Alow emergence of rock was involved. You accepted the inevitability of telephone poles. There could never be just one, like a tree. There was one tree you could see from the rooms which you could not see the rooms from, which vanished instantly. The world was steep. Creatures waiting at bus stops pitied you. Creatures carrying stacks of plastic-bagged and labeled clothing changed arms and shoulders. You were in the way. You were shunted into the crumbled glitter the world was becoming. Leathery mats that had been creatures retained the attitudes imposed by fate. You could not help thinking that would be you. As you studied one, another one passed under you. You were not given much room, outside of the rooms. You were given as much room as the world needed to avoid you, otherwise the hell with you and everyone else who was not in a room like everyone else who had rooms that smelled and were hot and harbored insects, who needed something to do, who saw what happened to bodies when the world overruled them, the bare heads, the thoraxes scattered along the floor, the columns of slow-driven vehicles with their lights on, freezing the movement of every other vehicle in the world, and who felt, too, what otherwise they did not acknowledge, the frictive pleasure of an illicit tumescence, a breath-taking scramble under the pectorals, the progressive relaxation of muscles discovered to be trembling, as if the body were engaged in conflicts that did not involve you. The body insisted you listen to it. But the body answered the world.