The Fire of Another

Maybe I’m a heartbreak hotel,
but don’t pretend I was cruel to you.
Don’t send Leonard Cohen songs,
don’t ask what happens to the heart.

Don’t we want a little tenderness this time?
We fought around a healing wound—
the silken bandage begged for mercy.
The required patience constituted a crime.

If I stole too many moments
and locked away accrued caresses,
when we were thinking houses, deeds,
then you poured acid on your blessings.

I’ll attend the black funeral, with its death-clouds hanging above;
I’ll carry the Sisyphean load;
but I can’t say I lit this fire under your salty glares,
as you carry me below.

We chose to sit with each other awhile.
We chose each other to hurt and to be hurt by,
but pain is always part of love,
and still, we love all the while.

Alien Culture and Contemporary Paranoia

I wonder if you remember the late-’90s pop culture craze around aliens and UFOs. Movies, TV shows, and video games often referred to aliens. T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs—bearing levitating discs and/or little green guys with huge black, often upside-down teardrop-shaped eyes—sold by the millions. They often entailed foil and/or holograms. In magazine stands at grocery stores, front covers advertised stories of alien abductions and UFO sightings—right next to stories of Elvis-in-hiding and three-headed people. This sort of thing.

This week, the US admitted that some sites of UFO landings contained “non-human biologics.” This has been taken as evidence of little green men. Some Republican congressmembers said that they knew all along. “I told you so!” What’s more interesting to me, though, is the social psyche of the ’90s. Were we scared? Were we bored? Were we being playful? Was some superstition at play?

Perhaps the contemporaneous culture provides some clues. What other movies were out there? Cyberpunk, horror, rom-com, dark indie comedy, action, disaster, fantasy, and neo-noir films were popular. In this end-of-history moment, characterized by mass incarceration, globalization, deregulation, austerity, increasing economic inequality, high crime, and decaying cities, escapism was the order of the day. In a time when people felt caught, or stuck, they yearned for something radically different. In The Resonance of Unseen Things, Susan Lepselter writes about how UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists share the sense of a constant oscillation between captivity and freedom: “You can be caught, captured, paralyzed, immobilized, stuck. You can be released, restored, redeemed, mobile, free. […] And the two antithetical poles—captivity and release—construct a third term, which is born in the meta-awareness of the relatedness between them.” (29) This third term, then, might just be the spectrum by which one is attuned to the difference between captivity and freedom. It might be the vigilance by which one is constantly accounting for situations of captivity and freedom. It might, then, be a kind of anxiety, fear, paranoia. After all, paranoia isn’t a function of reality, but just the opposite. Whatever’s going on “out there,” paranoia is the pervasive, inescapable, irrational feeling that something is wrong. As many have said, fear is the foundation of conservatism.

In the ’90s, those bug-eyed aliens signified other worlds. Conspiracy theories, paranoia, the promise of New Age (remember Yanni? the chanting monks?) aesthetics, and even the nascent worldwide web offered some hope in an apparently hopeless world. Perhaps, the aliens are ripe for a cultural comeback. Of course, if they seem real, then maybe they’re less culturally useful (for the paranoiacs). The point back then was that they represented alterity.

Those conspiracy theorists in Lepselter’s book seek closure. They want answers, but they want “truth” without reality. They want the fantasy that makes all of the world fit together just so, like a jigsaw puzzle sutured together by the ghosts that they worship. They want for the abstractions of their imaginations to be the glue that explains why their lives have gone so wrong. They want forgiveness. They want mercy. They want to know. After all, fear is always fear of something. Fear is always an expression of powerlessness, of impotence, in the face of potential unwanted consequences. This is why the overreaction to fear is so often domination—or at least attempted domination. The king is rightly a paranoiac. The colonizer is a paranoiac. The money-hoarding capitalist is a paranoiac. One might do away with the other subject who engenders one’s fear: kill or be killed. To the paranoid subject, the leader who recognizes the apparent realism of this imagined zero-sum game grants to the subject assurance that the leader will do what’s necessary in desperate times.

Today’s aliens aren’t those aliens of alterity. Today, Q-anon, vaccines, “the trans agenda,” adrenochrome (an anti-Semitic blood libel conspiracy by any other name…), and other delusions fill that role. Not real aliens.

In the Sky Between Atlanta and Durham, 18 Dec 2022

I used to love flying to Iceland. I remember the brilliant colors of the clouds, the ocean, the land, and the ice below. Sometimes, the plane wing shone at dusk like it was an extension of the sun. The glaciers, the mountains, and the evergreens took my breath away. I often think it’s corny to stare out of plane windows, but sometimes, one must look to see how wondrous is the world around us. I remember taking a train from Serbia to Germany by going through the Austrian Alps. It looked like a fairytale land. I once drove from Denver to San Diego. I’ll never forget the colored wooden cottages; the ravines and river valleys; and the brilliant, colored diagonal stripes on the mountainsides.

I flew to Reykjavik for love, but I also loved flying there. It was endlessly exciting because I landed at 5am or 6am or 9am or 4pm, and that meant that I always saw something new. I flew there for several seasons multiple times. Sometimes, it was snowy, but not always. Sometimes, I felt enveloped in an orange glowing light. Sometimes, it was aquamarine; sometimes, it was purple. Always, it was brilliantly soft and warm, even when it was crisp and cold.

Magical moments occur in one’s life. Those moments are absolutely of this earth and this life; they’re everyday occurrences. Every day, children are born—small, soft animals entering this world with wide eyes and soft cries, needing sustenance and swaddling. Every day, people climb mountaintops from where they look down on cloud blankets. Every day, nature’s chemicals light up water, land, and curious creatures. Every day, people assemble to do things that couldn’t have been imagined. We are of the earth. We’re as fragile and magical and powerful as this earth.

I keep noticing miracles of human care and kindness. I notice when strangers help one another purely out of their mutual recognition of shared vulnerability. People smile at one another and spontaneously say reassuring words for no reason other than honesty and desire to improve a new acquaintance’s well-being. I saw a young woman in the airport offer to carry an old woman’s bag to her gate. The older woman declined the offer, but the younger woman insisted that it would be no bother. On the plane, strangers talk about shared concerns and hopes.

People sometimes think that some others are evil, but this really only results from misguided fear. People sometimes worry about losing what they have—privileges in material and symbolic forms. So, people really do sometimes produce racist, sexist, classist, etc. outcomes. We all sometimes participate in the production of these outcomes. There can be no doubt. But, perhaps everyone really loves strangers of every sort. We all love one another, but sometimes, we become afraid. There’s nothing inevitable about the maintenance and reproduction of fear.

To see through the window and onto vanishing golden hillsides, a young woman from a foreign country peers over the heap of cold-weather clothes, book, water bottle, etc. that lie in my lap. It makes me smile. Today, I’m optimistic about life and its possibilities.

Epilogue: Dying, but Goofier

 (Note: This is the epilogue to a mostly-completed novel; if you’re interested in some of Hugo’s earlier adventures, then you can click here.)            

     I might be dying. You always thought that Hugo would die in a stupid accidental fire—one that Hugo himself set out of sheer absent-mindedness and maybe, in the last moment, he’d fallen in such a way that he’d landed with a chimney poker stabbing him in his asshole or something like that—or as an unsuspecting bystander in a heroic shootout between communists and police or as a result of falling face-first into a mountain of elephant shit or whatever. Nope. There’s still time, but it looks like I might just die at the age of forty of a completely preventable disease. In France. With a nurse for a girlfriend. Probably, all I had to do was to go to the doctor once in a while. Niveen told me. I knew it. I was finally getting my life together. Maybe if I hadn’t been getting my life together, then I wouldn’t have even found out. For the first time, I’d started exercising at the gym a few times a week. I’ve now been doing that for almost a year. Getting healthier? Welp. I don’t know; maybe it’s nothing, but I might be dying. I can’t even die in a noteworthy way. In my life, I’ve sucked up everyone’s resources and given nothing in return. I thought that I finally might make good. Oops.

                  This morning, I woke up, got ready to go to class, participated in a good seminar. I’m a PhD candidate at an obscure university on the West coast of France. You probably never heard of it. Not because I’m an academic hipster but because this is a shitty university. I’d applied to École Normale Supérieure a few times over the years, making small and large revisions to my application. I’d hoped to work with The Next Big French Philosopher™, but at some point, you have to give up on your dreams and your self-worth. My research topic is on the rituals of French housemice—very Althusser mixed with Foucault mixed with Bourdieu mixed with Latour. Finally, I focused my application more on the rituals and less on the mice, and I got into this third-tier university. Luckily, the EU enthusiastically funds me with some grant money. Dieu merci for cultural studies. After the seminar, I went to get bloodwork done at the clinic near campus. I’d had to starve myself—they require that you fast for at least 12 hours. I was fucking hungry. I would’ve eaten a pinetree. The whole thing lasted five minutes. She gave me a red bandage to keep me from bleeding too much from the inside of my elbow. In 2022, leftist academic walks around wearing a red armband. Sounds right. The nurse gave me a lollipop as though I were four fucking years old. I put the lollipop in my mouth and sucked.

                  Things between my girlfriend and me had been weird for a few days. She texted me and told me in the sweetest possible way that she didn’t want me to make the two-hour drive up the coast to see her for the weekend. I couldn’t blame her. I went to therapy. Kamala (my therapist) agreed that Niveen (my girlfriend) had been gaslighting me. Niveen is very sweet, but maybe that’s part of the problem. She never has to apologize to anyone. She’s perfect. She’s too perfect. She’s bad at apologizing. Instead of being an expert apologizer (like I am), I guess, she sometimes scurries (like one of my housemice) through convoluted alternate realities in her mind and convinces herself of something that never happened. Then, she gets upset at me for accepting the reality that came from the past, from conversations we’ve had, that’s written in black-and-white, that holds together all the facts that we bring to bear. Great. She has moments when she says, in her painfully cute, but all-too-cliché Algerian French accent, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I misremembered.” She looks up at me, half-smiling, half-pouting with that crimson fig of a slightly-oversized mouth; big chocolate marble eyes; high cheekbones and little pointy chin; tightly-curled jet-black hair. I almost feel bad for her in these moments. Poor thing. She’s right. She’s trying her best. She just misremembered. Look at how cute she is—like a little Algerian French nursemaid sexnymph. Who wouldn’t love this angelic woman? Ugh. Of course, not long after her doe-eyed recognition of her possible misrememberance, she finds a plausible explanation and runs with it. She speaks so slowly and softly. She sounds like a victim of a genocide, but not in an unhinged way—almost the opposite: like when someone’s been through so much that they seem unable to assert themselves enough to ever be mean or unfair to anyone. I can picture her saying, “I just want to hug tout le monde sur la terre and feed them and make them happy.” It sucks. Anyway, so, I left therapy. I sent Niveen a voice message to let her know that I loved her and that I just wanted us both to feel safe and to be able to talk about our feelings. I saw that I’d missed a call from a local number.

                  I figured that this mystery call had to do with my bloodwork. I went home. I got a text. I’d received a message in the health portal. I opened it and read:

I called you and tried to leave a voicemail. The partial results of your bloodwork came back extremely abnormal. You seem to have a blood disease. Please go to the hospital as soon as possible.

Dr. Jain

She left her phone number. I called. She said that my white blood cell count was astronomically high and that she was very concerned. She said that I needed to see a blood pathologist. She suggested that she call around and find me an appointment for the next 48 hours. She asked if I’d been feeling any symptoms. “Nothing crazy,” I said. I’ve been coughing for six months, there’s sometimes a little bit of blood in my shits, I had erectile dysfunction for two or three weeks that magically went away, I think that I once tore my ACL and so that sometimes feels uncomfortable, I’m constantly dehydrated and a little bit tired, the soles of my feet hurt, and I’ve been wheezing a lot lately, I thought.

                  I sent Niveen a screenshot of the message. She called. Niveen is an infirmière. Since my sudden weird changes in heartrate had begun pretty much immediately after I’d received my COVID booster, and I’d heard that the booster could cause myocarditis or pericarditis, I asked her if I maybe had one of those. She said it was unlikely. I could hear the nervousness in her voice. Niveen is usually unshakable. Even when she’s unreasonably mad at me, she never sounds nervous. She always seems confident and calm. She asked to see my charts. I said that I had no idea how to get them. She suggested I look in the portal or that I ask the doctor when she called back about the appointment. I messaged the doctor. Then, I found the charts in the portal. I sent them to Niveen.

                  I asked her again if I had myocarditis or pericarditis. She said that more likely was some form of leukemia, but that wasn’t likely, either. I didn’t really react at first. Suddenly, I might be dying. I said that I’d probably rest for a bit. Maybe I need rest. I watched some Instagram videos about the aftermath of a then-recent US school shooting. I’d moved from the US in part to escape my home country’s irrational carnage, but I still tuned into the news more than was healthy. It made me sad. I texted Niveen, asking if I’d die. She said, “No.” I told her that I was scared. She called me again. I started pathetically crying. She asked if I wanted her to drive down to see me. I told her that I didn’t want her to come since she didn’t want to see me that weekend. I could hear that she was in the car. I said that I should just let her go.

“Why? Why don’t you want me to go if you’re sad?”

“I don’t want to bother you. You’re obviously busy. I don’t want to keep you from going to the gym or whatever you’re doing. Don’t you need to go?”

“No, I’m just going to the hardware store to get some nails. As long as you let me off the phone before they close in the next… three hours, it’s fine. No rush.”

She said that, if I wanted her to come comfort me, then she’d come. I told her that I wanted her to come. She asked if I wanted her to get me a pizza and some pumpkin pie. “There’s no pumpkin pie in May,” I told her. She laughed. She barely knew what pumpkin pie was. She asked if I wanted Neapolitan or Sicilian and what toppings. “Pepperoni and mushroom.” She laughed, even though those are the best toppings. I told her to get half of the pizza the way she wanted. I asked her to bring chocolate. I asked her what most likely ailed me. She said that she had never seen a white blood cell count that high, so she was confused. Hmm… She told me that she needed to charge her electric car, but she’d be to my place in a few hours. She suggested that I try to sleep since I was tired and that I meditate.

                  I sat on the couch, playing Candy Crush for a few minutes. I went to my room, laid in the bed, opened my dilapidated laptop, and started watching a long video by a political YouTuber. He pointed out how the most popular conservative YouTuber’s attempts to blame Democrats for the Replacement Theory conspiracy theory were mostly just repackaged white nationalist rhetoric. Seemed right to me. I live near a lot of Le Pen disciples. It’s awkward. Of course, an américain dating an arabe probably doesn’t bug them too much. They’d rather we just both leave. However, the cheese and wine there are excellent. Life is all about trade-offs. Fuck.

I’m really infected by the couple economics classes I took in my youth. Or, maybe it’s just all the capitalist metaphorical language in everyday US English. Fuck. I turn off the video even though I’m getting exactly the cathartic political release/angry vilification that I seek. I need to get ready for Niveen to arrive.

                  I go to the local Carrefour. I wanted to get Niveen the coconut water and popcorn that she likes. We’re gonna watch It’s a Wonderful Life. She hates old movies and especially black-and-white movies. Okay, I said she’s perfect, but no one’s really perfect. I walk in. It’s chilly. Carrefour is always fucking chilly. Do I need to start carrying around a blanket? Am I gonna have to do chemotherapy? What would I look like bald? The popcorn is in the same aisle as the chips and nuts. In France, you have like three or four options of these kinds of things, so Carrefour is about a fourth the size of Safeway. That’s probably not why. I only took a couple econ classes. I choose the butter option for the popcorn. I get some garlic salt and paprika. The coconut water is near the produce, so I get her bananas. She likes bananas. I like the thought of her eating bananas. I feel guilty for that. It’s weird, though. I’m in a Catholic country, but I often feel that I feel far more guilty than these people do. Do US Catholics feel more guilty than French ones? I feel like Irish Catholics feel guilty, but they’re kind of secretive about it. The whole thing about Freud and the Irish, I guess. Or, maybe it’s that I now think of the Irish as that way because of the stupid Freud thing.

                  As I walk through the grocery store, I feel that thing you feel when your grandfather dies or something. You find out from a family member. They’re probably not crying, but they’re performing the most somber tone they possibly can. They speak real low and slow. They choose words like “sorry,” “loss,” “gone,” “unfortunate,” “time,” “better place,” “rest,” “painless,” etc. It’s supposed to be comforting. You get off the phone, and either you started crying halfway through the call or you don’t start crying until a minute or two after you get off the phone. It’s a torrent. The tension washes out of your face and your shoulders and your hips and you’re sad but you’re relieved. At some point, the crying has helped you release something and maybe even the fact that the grandfather (or whoever) isn’t suffering offers a little solace.

I look at these little French faces, grimacing as they try to choose the right aubergine or smiling as they talk to their partner or telling their little French kid to shut the fuck up or whatever. They look at me and maybe they’re annoyed that I’m there. Maybe I’m moving too slow or I’m in the way. Maybe they can smell my “American” sensibility. Some fat lady’s standing on one side of the aisle and her kid is dancing in the middle of the aisle. “Pardon,” I want to say, but the lady notices and pulls her daughter in toward her. I feel guilty for having been annoyed. Maybe partly because I can’t blame someone for not noticing everything that’s going on all the time and partly because the way that she pulls the child toward her plump body looks the way that it looks when a mother pulls her kid toward her.

I say “her” because French people really don’t seem to be into the new gender politics. I mean, I’d refer to the mother as “they” and “them,” but these French people would be offended, so I either offend the US people or I offend the French people. Since I live in France and I’m a coward, I follow les gens.

But, none of them know that I’m probably dying. They’re happy or they’re preoccupied because their coworker wore the same shirt as them at work or they’re wondering who’s going to win Eurovision or they’re figuring out PSG’s ideal starting eleven or whatever. They’re focused on optimizing their recycling regime. They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to look wealthy (even though the wealthy can, with their eyes closed, detect the low-class). They don’t know that I’m dying. And, I don’t know which one of them recently had their grandfather die. They’re just buying bananas and cornflakes and aubergines and trying to get their kids to shut up long enough for them to get their groceries after an annoying day at work when their coworkers were stressing them out with their trips to Ibiza or whatever. Most of life is a lot of petty bullshit. Most of life is also the failure to recognize when someone’s dying in one way or another or when someone close to them has just made them feel crushed. Like Frank said, “That’s life.” But, the truth that Frank didn’t allow himself to say was that not everyone always gets back in the race.

                  Back home, I put away the groceries, taking some of them to my room for Niveen. I lay down and put on a guided meditation video that Lily sent me a while back. It’s a good meditation video. Lily lives in England, so the lady guiding the meditation is British. It makes the woo-woo shit feel more dignified—as though Victoria herself had maybe been rubbing cheap crystals on her earthly (divine?) flesh. My eyes are closed. I try to relax. I let my legs lay flat. I cross my hands over my chest. I listen to this nice lady’s voice. Do I have cancer? Stop thinking. I listen some more. I never feel my root chakra, but now, it’s like my root chakra is yelling. I wanted to do some good in this world. What about my daughter? What about her social anxiety? Is her mom doing a good job? I’m not so sure. I wanted my baby to go to therapy. I was planning to get partial-custody in the next few months and to pay for my girl to get regular therapy. Now, I’m gonna leave the world having contributed really nothing. I try to relax. “Let the loving-kindness flow into you.” Sounds nice. Let’s do that. My heart is pounding. I feel the acid tingling in my skin. I’m like a razorblade made of meat. Where’s my crown chakra? Am I meditating right? I feel 5% more peaceful than before. That’s really not at all peaceful. I stop the meditation video to go pee.

                  Niveen’s pulling up. I can hear her electric vehicle. It looks like an electric shaver or a dildo from the future and it sounds like a spaceship. She got the white version, which makes it feel more like Kubrick’s 2001. Or A Clockwork Orange. In the end, is there a difference? I walk out to meet her at her car. We kiss. She’s smiling, making her dimples visible (her right dimple is always deeper than the left one). The Neapolitan pizza is in the trunk (which opens and closes like a 1960s spacepod) with a couple pains au chocolat. We walk into my place, holding hands.

We lay on the bed for a minute. She jokes about the fact that I might be dying. She gets away with this kind of thing, and I love her for that. We go up and start to eat the pizza. We talk about how bad she is at apologizing. When we talk about this stuff, she looks like a prisoner. She feels that I’m right and she feels that it’s unfair. She’s scared but she’s humbled. She wants to protest, but she knows that she shouldn’t. She’d prefer if people could just accept that she’s an adorable angel 99% of the time and let the 1% slide. After all, she lets everything slide with everyone, for the most part—the one exception being when people misjudge her intentions. How can you be mad at me when I was trying to be so sweet? she seems to want to ask. It’s hard to blame her. I don’t blame her. Of course, I also want to have lots of sex with her. I’m not the angel here.

                  We bring down some popcorn and set up her laptop. We start watching It’s a Wonderful Life. You know the first scene, with the bell? Fuck, I’m excited. She’s gonna love this. You know, because she’s so sweet and George is so sweet. It’s so well-written and Stewart’s “Aw, shucks” charm is perfect for this role. It’s a fucking crazy movie, but it’s so good. I mean, the gender politics aren’t good, but it was made in the mid-1940s. I don’t know if that’s a good excuse. Probably not. (Does the movie imply that George actually fucked Violet in the scene in his office?) But, she keeps laughing during the movie. It’s all the “Aw, gee” and “Holy mackerel!” I get it. I mean, it is funny. And, she seems to like the movie, but she’ll always fall asleep in a movie masterpiece because she’s a philistine.

Her little black curls barely keep from covering her eyelids like windowpanes. Her lips are parted, but barely. How can I be mad at this adorable little piece of shit? I pause the movie.

“What?” she asks.

“You falling asleep?”

“A little.” As though, there’s a way to fall asleep “a little.” I kiss her forehead and grab the laptop. She immediately knocks the bowl of popcorn off the bed and starts laughing—cracking up. If she owned a Da Vinci, she’d spill acetone on it and then start laughing. And, she drives a $400,000 spaceship everyday. I mean, she’s responsible both financially and socially. It’s just funny to me.

I set her laptop in an inconspicuous spot by the lamp where I think that she won’t step on it and cause an explosion and burn down the building. I turn out the lights. She tells me that she likes the movie. She kisses me. She presses her lips hard against mine. She lightly drags her nails across my chest. I see what’s going on here. We make love. We kiss. We cuddle. We tell each other sweet things and sassy jokes. We fall asleep in each other’s arms and don’t separate until morning.

---

                  We get up in the morning. I eat a couple slices of leftover pizza. She’s off from work today, but she’s gonna help run a Zoom meeting from home. She drives us to the little café a few hundred kilometers down the road. As we walk from the car to the café, I notice that the sky is grey—all these deathclouds hanging over our heads. I’m probably dying, and my beautiful, sunny little French beachtown is grey. Seems right. We get inside and pick out a table. I say something to Niveen, and she’s confused. That beautiful mouth hangs slightly ajar; I’m just staring. I lean in, “If you leave your mouth open too long like that, you just make me horny.” She smiles.

I order a black coffee and a croissant. The café isn’t far from the university campus, and for the moment, they’re playing some Gainsbourg song. Niveen laughs a little and puts in those little wireless earbuds that match her fascist spaceship. I pull out my laptop to look up who to vote for in the upcoming election, but I get distracted by the question of whether Mercury is in retrograde. It is! I’m dying because Mercury is in retrograde! I fucking knew it.

Niveen’s working on something. I have no idea what. As I ask her what she thinks is the most likely thing causing the high white blood cell count, she’s gently rubbing her thumbs over her clasped hands and her eyes widen slightly. She might even be starting to sweat. She says that she doesn’t know because she’s never seen a white blood cell count that high. I ask her what the range might be from the most innocuous to the most life-threatening. The most life-threatening, she says, is probably leukemia. Great. I have cancer. Eventually, she leaves to go back to my flat. I think about how I have a couple little gold keys and she has a little digital fob to get into her place. Sometimes, this world is strange to me.

                  I figure out all my voting shit and I get started on my research. The Cultural Lives of Mice, Rats, and Chipmunks, by Valerie Prévost. Fuck, this is so good. Did you know that rats sometimes rub their hands before eating but most housemice don’t? I’ve been thinking that I want to argue that there’s something really Catholic about rats whereas mice seem more Protestant. Of course, while the French are plenty religiously Catholic, they’re not so culturally Catholic, I don’t think. That’s an issue that’s really outside my research, though.

                  Niveen gets back to the café, and we have a couple salads. Niveen is the only French person who dislikes sparkling water, so I have a Perrier and she has a sugary soda. She’s a nurse, but she prefers sugary drinks over sparkling water. She refers to my sparkling water as “flavorless” sparkling water, as though she’s never tasted a sparkling water before.

We arrive to the hematologist’s office, and the doctor, Maria Krostag, greets us. She’s maybe 5’10” (182 cm or something) and lean. She’s probably 55 and she has long blonde hair. She speaks to us in a German accent that seems thick for how long she must’ve lived in France by now. She leaves us in the examination room and someone checks my vitals and stabs my finger. Maria comes back and says with a big Kansas smile, “The good news is that there are a lot of non-life threatening possibilities for what’s going on!” Uh-oh. She explains some other things that I don’t totally understand. Niveen’s face looks very focused: her brow is furrowed, she nods her head and rubs her chin. Without losing any of her overflowing cuteness, she looks a bit like a sexy medical professor or something. I can almost imagine her: “Nurse, please hand me the hemoglobin cytoblast spectrometer plasmaray. By God, we’ve done it! People will now live to 150!” Maria looks in my mouth (Why does every doctor in every field look in your mouth? Why do they all insist that you drink lots of water? “Oh, yes, your leg is badly broken. You’ll need to drink lots of water.” “Your brain seems to be seeping into your pancreas. Drink plenty of water.”). She listens to my heart, to my lungs. Normal. All is good. She feels my lymph nodes. All good. But, my mom had a lymph thing. “Interesting,” but it doesn’t make a dent. She rubs and probes my stomach with her cold German hands. She stands more erect. “You see, I can feel your spleen. Normally, a spleen is tucked under the ribcage, but yours is much larger than that.” Gently pressing halfway between my ribcage and my pelvis, she adds, “I feel your spleen all the way down here.” Maria slinks away to check my blood smear. Niveen wonders what could be associated with high white blood cell count and enlarged spleen. She Googles it and shows me, but she just shows me the first-page results without really reading anything. The Kansas grin re-enters the room.

“I have good news! It looks like you have something that’s very treatable and everything should be fine. I think you have chronic myeloid leukemia. Basically, the DNA sometimes switches letters in certain places, causing the bone marrow to produce white blood cells of different shapes and this enlarges the spleen. Now, I know that the leukemia word is scary, but nowadays, most people who get treated for this live long, normal lives. If you’re going to get a leukemia, this is the cancer you want to get! You take a pill once a day, get some tests, and not much else. If all goes well, you probably won’t really have side effects and within a few years, you won’t even have to take the pill anymore. The worst-case scenario is that you’d have to get a bone marrow transplant, but that’s unlikely, and you’re young enough that it probably wouldn’t be a big problem. In the meantime, we’re going to do some tests to confirm that this is what’s going on, and we’ll get you a bone marrow biopsy. I’ll order the medication in the meantime so that we can get you started on it as soon as I get back the results of the biopsy to confirm that it is what we think it is. Most likely, everything’s going to be just fine.”

I’m gonna fucking die. I’m gonna try the medication, and she’s gonna tell me that it’s not working. Or, she’s gonna get my biopsy and realize that I actually have something much worse. I’m gonna end up bald, vomiting, always tired, always cold and clammy, alone. I’m gonna die in the night and my nurse is gonna find me the next morning. Four people will be at my funeral. I was finally starting to get my life together. What’s gonna happen with my daughter? Will she keep struggling socially? Will she go to therapy? Will this make things better or worse for her? Will most people remember me as someone who was kind of an asshole and who said and did some problematic things, but not much else? Will they mostly just remember my well-publicized failed suicide attempt from all those years back? I’ll probably die with shit in my pants. Bet on it.

                  Sexy professor Niveen keeps talking with the doctor, asking her questions, half-smiling at me every few minutes. They keep asking if I have other questions. “If I take this pill and it works, then there’s a 50/50 chance that I won’t have to someday take it again?” She answers, but I can’t really pay attention. I’m gonna die, I keep thinking. She mentions that, if we’re planning to have kids, I won’t be able to have kids for as long as I’m on the medication. After I get off of it, then it’s fine if we have kids, but not until then. This is fine, I guess, since Niveen doesn’t want kids, anyway, but it does make me a little sad. I think it’d be nice to have kids with her. Maybe I could finally be a good dad to someone. Oh, well. I rub my hands over my stomach. I can feel my spleen like a pigskin beneath my epidermis. I suddenly have the sensation that it might just pop out like the scene from Alien. Niveen gently smiles at me. They expect me to say something. “I don’t have any more questions right now.” In the next few days, I’ll get tests done and we’ll set up my biopsy.

                  We go back to my place and pack our things to head up to Niveen’s Stepford apartment complex. We cuddle for a while. She makes some cancer jokes, kisses me. She tells me that everything’s going to be okay. We get in the car, but I realize that I forgot something in the apartment. She’s parked in the middle of the street. I come out with the books that I need, and a neighbor passes by, asking how I’m doing.

“I just found out that I’m very, very, very, very, very sick.”

“Sick of people?”

“Physically sick, but I should be okay.”

“You think any interesting thoughts lately?”

“Oh, I dunno. I’m heading up the coast with my girlfriend right now. How was your day?”

“Oh, it wasn’t good, but it was effective.”

“You got stuff done?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He looks at the spaceship. “Do you know whose car that is?”

“Yeah, that’s my girlfriend. I should get going.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Have a nice night.”

“You, too.”

                  We drive up the coast, and she makes sure to play a lot of Radiohead for me. She offers me snacks. Niveen basically insists that snacks are a love language. The middle console of her spaceship contains various little packages of fruits and nuts. I tell her that she’s a mom. She’s always taking care of everyone. Her home is like a snack smorgasbord arrayed for visitors—plenty of reserves in the cupboard. She loves kids. She’s really good with them, but she doesn’t want children. It seems like some galactic tragic irony. I fall asleep in the car. We get to her place and unpack our stuff. We decide to eat some Ethiopian food.

The Asian boy at the counter is efficient, curt. It almost seems like he’s joking. The restaurant smells of strange chemicals, and it’s making Niveen nauseous. She orders vegetables and chicken, even though she usually doesn’t eat meat. We sit at a little table along the street. I ask her to remember one time when we’d made love that really turned her on. She thinks for a minute. “Umm…” She can’t think of anything. “I’ve slept with you so many times and each time was so good that I can’t think of any.”

When she and I had started dating, she’d been dating a couple other guys. Recently, when we were having sex, she was bouncing on top of me, and I asked her to recall a time with one of them that had turned her on. She immediately started to whisper in my ear about a time with the Spaniard—the same Spaniard she’d had sex with four times on their first date (which was while she and I were dating) and who she’d said had made her come each of those times. She can tell I’m upset, and she asks me why.

“Well, I think you know why, but I also don’t want to have my fears confirmed,” I say.

“I don’t think you have any reason to be upset,” she responds.

                  We go into the housewares store, and she’s being weird. She keeps trying to change the subject, telling me jokes, saying almost completely random things. She asks again. I say basically the same thing as before. She says, “You know I love having sex with you. I prefer having sex with you over Tomás or Michel or anyone else. I think you’re very sexy. What’re you worried about?”

We get through the checkout. I carry out the aquamarine cake stand and the red plaster vase. We walk down the paved road to her mid-rise complex. I say, “You know, you told me you would call me that night, but you had sex with Tomás, instead. We broke up in part because of him. Before having sex with him, you told him, ‘If you keep that up, I’m gonna have to have sex with you.’ You had sex four times and he made you come each time—some of them multiple times. You might prefer to have sex with me, but I can’t help fearing that you find him sexier than you find me in some way. I mean, it’s not that I expect you to think I’m the sexiest man in the world in every way. I know I’m not a combination of Brad Pitt and a pornstar or something. I realize that this is just my ego, just my narcissism. I can get over it on my own, but it makes me feel bad that you can’t think of one single time with me. You’ve had sex with me a hundred times and him five times, and you can instantly recall a time with him and not one with me.” She pauses for a second.

“I can think of one with you.”

“That’s not the point. It doesn’t matter.”

“Look, I’m not the sexiest woman in every way, either.”

“Well, that’s not the point,” but really, I think that she’s absurdly sexy. “I keep telling myself that I can’t expect you to think that I’m the sexiest guy. Maybe you find Tomás sexier in some way. I should just be okay with that.”

“I don’t, though. I find you sexier. You probably made me come every time we had sex. You’re worried about something that’s not real.” No one talks for a minute. “I Know It’s Over” plays in the background.

“Okay, I’m sorry. I believe you.” Her head tilts. She hugs me.

“We didn’t break up because of Tomás.”

“It was partly because of him.” She kisses me. She usually looks at me while she kisses me.

                  We restart the movie. It’s about halfway through. After a few minutes, she softly says something in an unnaturally high voice, but I don’t know what it is.

“What?” I ask.

“Your beard—it’s poking me.”

I ask her if she’d rather I shave it. She says she doesn’t care. I tell her that I grow it for her. I’d rather shave at least once a week. She says something about Tomás, but I half don’t hear it and I also cut her off, “No, I don’t want to know anything about what Tomás looks like.” She rolls her eyes.

After twenty or thirty minutes, she falls asleep again. I move her laptop again. I come back to bed and kiss her. Her eyes are closed; her mouth forms a crescent. She asks how I am.

“Happy and hard,” I say.

“Oh, really?”

She reaches down and pulls like an arm attached to a water wheel or something. We make love again. I stay inside her for a minute, and she says, “Get out! I know what you’re trying to do!” I laugh and roll over, sighing.

She lays her head on my chest, and I ask, “How’d you like fucking a dying man?”

She smiles and, in that saccharine, high-pitched voice, says, “You definitely don’t fuck like a man who’s dying.”

---

Lately, I’ve been experiencing a kind of vertigo. I used to always take my health for granted. Before this year, I’d never gotten sick more than once in a 12-month span. I was healthy. I’d see other people who were unhealthy, and feel that we were different, that we lived different lives. I lived on one side of the line—free to do as I pleased, free from care—and they lived on the other side of the line.

Some of them worried. They would sometimes go to the doctor. They would miss class or miss work. They had little cases of pills. They would hold their heads down and speak quietly. They might have a little cough. People looked at them sympathetically, sad for what they were going through. I had nothing to do with that. I felt lucky. I was grateful, but also, I was never even really scared that I’d be on that side of the line because I had always been on the other side of the line and I was sure that the line wouldn’t come and get me any time soon. Now, I’m on the other side of the line.

Working out, eating healthy, no family history of cancer, never having been a smoker, no real reason to worry. But, I’m dying. My body is killing me. It’s attacking me. My DNA is confused, and my bone marrow is shooting out white blood cells like Oprah yelling to let everyone know that they’re getting a car or whatever. My body thinks that it’s doing me a favor. It’s so proud. Like the dog who brings you a dead rabbit. You’re welcome! But, my body is actually killing me. It’s Grendel, innocently fumbling about, killing.

I never had to worry before, but now, I’m on the other side of the line and I’ll never return to the good side of the line. Once you’ve been a sick person, you can never again go back to being someone who’s never had to worry about their health. That’s me, now. I’m over there. Forever.

Terror-Toilets: Of Child-Me

As a very small child, I was extremely afraid of toilets. I thought, If a toilet can make giant poops and loads of toilet paper disappear completely, then why couldn’t it do the same thing to my small, squishy body? I would watch the water swirl and spiral down into the big, sucking hole, and it frightened me. I knew nothing of the concept of death, but perhaps the toilet allowed me to intuit it. It was clear that whatever goes down the watery black hole would never return; whatever was flushed would cease to be.

I was sometimes overwhelmed by daymares by which I’d be dragged down the hole and become nothing-at-all. Perhaps, I never completely overcame this fear. I catch myself struck by a visceral desire to avoid being sucked into the porcelain whirlpool. In rare moments of automaticity, my body shudders and my eyes widen when I hear the static-shattering whoosh of that monster.

I wonder why children are so manichaean. It’s strange to think that I was once a child. In some ways, I still feel like a child—wondering, groping.

The Exhausting Effort to Breathe Life into a Fire

I spoke with Bernadette today, a little over an hour. She’d gotten a haircut. Her curly, messy hair hung just above her shoulders, and I thought she looked a little like Marion Cotillard, but maybe I was just romanticizing a bit. I didn’t tell her, anyway. I think people often don’t like being compared to others. She ended up telling me about how the nuns who’d taught her as a child, in Nice, were really sadistic—especially the headmistress. We cried.

We cried because of Minneapolis and because of covid. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d watched a bunch of YouTube videos of white people proudly calling the police, unable to reckon with their mistaken, biased association, and too entitled and proud to keep from invoking the threat of murder in order to win an argument. She said that the reason she was so depressed wasn’t because she was hopeless, but because she was hopeful. She told me that hope is what you need to have in order to be disappointed, and I didn’t know what she meant at first.

I said that, finally, people wouldn’t have the excuse that the cop was afraid, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the guy was dangerous, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the film was unclear, they wouldn’t have the excuse that it was an in-the-moment decision, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters started the looting, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters were being violent. After the stimulus package and the calls to get people back to work, there’s no confusion about where the government’s, the bankers’, the police’s, and the media’s loyalties lie. Minneapolis and covid show that the reaction to Minneapolis and to covid have been meant to protect the stock market at the expense of the lives of the most vulnerable people. There’s no confusion. In relation to race, for instance, George Bush doesn’t care about black people, but Trump has real animosity toward them.

So, there’s no possible neutrality here anymore. There’s no equivocating. No more excuses. You’re either on the side of caring about black people’s lives or you’re on the side of white comfort. Then, Bernadette repeated what she’d said before: “You can’t be disappointed if you don’t have hope.”

I started to realize what she meant. I have all these friends who insulate themselves in the warm blanket of cynicism. If there’s nothing to do, then there’s nothing to really do about it. There’s nothing to risk. Any attempt would be foolish. They can complain from the sideline, but trying to help would only make matters worse. Why give up their own chance at some limited happiness in order to fight a losing battle? But, that’s why it’s so frustrating, right? If it’s hopeless, it’s because we make it hopeless. If it’s hopeless, it’s because peace-loving white liberals aren’t willing to march, aren’t willing to give up the brass bars at the entrance to their subdivision, aren’t willing to say, “I was wrong. I had a racist moment, and I judged you unfairly. I shouldn’t have accused you, and I’m sorry”—especially without expecting some undeserved gracefulness and forgiveness.

We talked about how sad we are. I told her that I wanted pizza delivered, so I could watch YouTube videos in my bed in peace. We agreed that we were depressed right now. We joked about it. I told her I have therapy on Monday. She encouraged me to go down to the beach. She told me about how, in Nice, she would go to the coast in the winter and the waves would crash wildly into the rocks on the shore. She told me how it made her felt connected to the world, and that the world was maybe reflecting her frustration back at her. Maybe, in that moment, nature felt what she felt, and she didn’t feel as alone. She would sometimes then go into MAMAC and stare at some particular impressionist painting that she’d sat in front of a hundred times, getting absorbed into the incomprehensible array of painted dots of various colors, making up a whole that all the people and parts of the environment made up.

Revisiting the Deathcult: Arbeit Macht Frei

Today is May Day, a day of international celebration of labor, the international labor movement, and all that they have brought us. Today, May Day, 2020, a woman carried a sign in the “Re-open Illinois” event. This event is meant as a social demonstration, asking political leaders to allow people to work and to allow businesses to re-open. Her sign reads, Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work makes one free.” Following the ideological belief in the moral value of work, this phrase appeared at least as far back as the 19th century. The phrase rose to popular consciousness when it was borrowed by the Nazi Party and eventually hung over entrances to concentration camps. The implication of this sign being used during the coronavirus epidemic seems to be that (fascistic?) governments impose unfair restrictions. Local and state governments that restrict work make us un-free, or so it goes. This drips with irony.

It was the Nazis—whose incoherent symbols, signs, narratives, and logics worked in mystifying ways—who chose the phrase as a political and culturo-economic slogan. If governments in the US today are preventing work, in the Nazi case, it was the government that was ostensibly calling on people to work. It’s more complicated than this; these kinds of Nazi slogans rarely served to make clear mandates intended toward any logical end. That said, it’s important that this phrase is recognizable due to its association with concentration camps.

German concentration camps were work camps. Nazis brought Jews to them with the intention of making Jews work until they died or were killed. This sign then served two functions. First, it really did serve some vague Nazi ideological purpose. Nazi propaganda and symbolism always reflected some barely-expressible feeling among the German population that tied them to retrograde ideas of nationalism and strength. Working implied action and it implied strength, and freedom was the kind of empty moral value that German nationalists valued. For Nazis, the phrase—Arbeit macht frei—basically means almost nothing other than Germans are strong. On the other hand, the idea of work making one free served as a kind of sinister promise of redemption for Jews who were brought to work until they no longer could. It wasn’t necessarily that work would set them free in this world, but perhaps, if Jews worked hard enough, then they could at least embody some of the ostensibly superior German spirit (or Geist, if one prefers) in order to gain some redemption in the eyes of God or whomever. At the very least, in the eyes of the Nazi Party, the hardworking Jew might prove themselves more acceptable than the Jew who didn’t work as hard.

The irony ought to be clear. The woman in the protest claims that the government denies her work—imprisoning her in a world of Netflix and Cheetos, while the stock market continues to sag (or is it up today?). On May Day, the international day for workers, the real labor organizers orchestrate strikes in order to get material benefits for those who are at greatest risk of contracting coronavirus before they possibly spread the virus and/or perish. The prison that the protester imagines is more likely a prison of ideology, of uncritical enthusiasm, of self-exploitation, and of a world of fake threats, conspiracy theories, and deep state boogeypeople (oh, she really wants me to say “boogeymen” here, doesn’t she?). In our time of coronavirus, it’s the demand for the kind of work by essential the most exploited workers that appears more like our prison. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, these conspiracy theorists and cruel ideologues parrot billionaires and millionaires who sweat over stock prices. These shallow pseudo-activists conceive of freedom as the right to give the majority of their labor for someone else’s profit and the right to rush to their impending death. Only in a world of such deep contradictory capitalist ideology could anyone imagine value in claiming that deadly work would make them free.

The Port

Yellow, blue, red paint,
with holes torn in different sizes,
revealing hard brown flesh—
or perhaps bones, more accurately.

Slow and smooth,
stiff necks and arms flow above
dark blue water with its opalescent skin.

Little men flail in tiny cages
—brains for brawny monsters—
monsters deaf to their own shrinking importance,
humbled in the soft hum of smaller machines.
People in plastic hats pace and peer,
tracing paths over rough, mossy concrete.

Mountains in the background tower over the horizon—
mountains from long before such strong robots—
and mountains that will last
long after the metals grind to sediments,
passing through bellies of squishy pink worms.

Unequal and Vulnerable: Ideology, Discretization, and Discourse in Discussions on the Public Sphere

In this paper, I will draw on discussions of the public sphere in order to show how discretization and representation relate to an ideological, problematic model of politics. Reason as a precondition for politics assumes equality between objects as well as between interlocutors. Because of this, the public sphere reproduces particular ideologies and particular violences. We will begin by unpacking rationalism and discretization as they relate to equality.

The rational is that which reason supports. “Reasonable” often substitutes for “rational.” “Rational” comes from Latin for “reckoning” or “calculating.” This reckoning must be done on the basis of discretization—for instance, the ratio literally entails a bar that separates one from another. The rational entails the shaving away of difference in order to form a sameness that then reasserts difference. Habermas and Fraser each bump into the problem of discretization-as-equalization, but they do so differently.

Habermas’s public sphere is a “realm of our social life” wherein “something approaching public opinion can be formed.” (p. 49) The public sphere is constituted by “every conversation,” as part of a “public body”—“neither […] business […] nor state.” (p. 49) The public sphere “mediates between society and state.” (p. 50) And, the public sphere and the state “confront one another as opponents.” (p. 49) The public sphere is where “public opinion” is formed, and “public opinion can by definition only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed.” (p. 50) Here, the reasoning public would meet as apparent equals, separating this  from that, discretizing different political problems in order to judge the various issues at stake. Of course, none of these political problems are equal to one another or, as time goes on, equal to themselves, so we already see a problem with representation of political objects. However, Fraser alerts us to another problem of presumed equality.

Whereas for Habermas, the public sphere inaugurated a liberatory freedom, for Fraser, the public sphere itself can be problematic. Habermas, speaking of medievality, says, “As long as the prince and the estates of the realm still ‘are’ the land, instead of merely functioning as deputies for it, they are able to ‘re-present’; they represent their power ‘before’ the people, instead of for the people.” (p. 51) The ability for people to represent themselves and their interests departed from the unilateral, overt form of medieval sovereign power. The people could now offer their own concerns—through the medium of the public sphere—to the domain of policy. For Fraser, the public sphere is more insidious.

The public sphere is the space that privileges a particular kind of discourse. Fraser says, “[D]eliberation serves as a mask for domination.” (p. 64) Deliberation through the public sphere, rather than being purely liberatory, is a means for (re)producing power relations. Quoting Jane Mansbridge, she tells us that this domination occurs because “the transformation of ‘I’ into ‘we’ brought about through political deliberation can easily mask subtle forms of control. Even the language people use as they reason together usually favors one way of seeing things and discourages others.” (p. 64) The structure of the public sphere privileges particular kinds of participants and particular forms of participation. The public sphere creates hierarchies on the basis of assumed credibility, forms of knowledge, and ways of speaking. The inequality between participants in the public sphere means that people participate not necessarily as opponents to the state—forming the optimal public opinion to liberate people—but as participants in a formalized means by which the interests of the most advantaged are often those that get represented in and through the public sphere. The question confronts us: Does the public sphere necessarily help to liberate needy and disadvantaged people?

Because the public sphere is a particular kind of “realm,” as Habermas says, the public sphere qua public sphere follows particular rules. For instance, the public sphere is that place wherein “a reasoning public” deliberates. This is definitional to the public sphere. Who counts as reasoning and what counts as reasoning are here taken as givens, as are other aspects of the public sphere. Because advantages are afforded to certain kinds of participants, there is no guarantee that the public sphere always represents the interests of those most in need.

This issue is especially clear in Dean’s discussion of technology and the public sphere. The online public sphere has long been quite active, proliferating messages of all sorts, giving equal access to various people with all manner of concerns, and yet, people’s needs aren’t always met and state violences are perhaps as routine as ever. Part of the problem, as Fraser says, is in the function ideologically assumed to motivate the public sphere:

In the process of their deliberations, participants are transformed from a collection of self-seeking, private individuals into a public-spirited collectivity. […] This view conflates the ideas of deliberation and the common good by assuming that deliberation must be deliberation about the common good. Consequently, it limits deliberation to talk framed from the standpoint of a single, all-encompassing ‘we,’ thereby ruling claims of self-interest and group interest out of order. (p. 72)

Habermas’s conception of the public sphere presupposes that deliberation necessarily helps to set the conditions by which people’s needs get met, but this isn’t necessarily so. There is no magic in deliberation by which people’s utterances—through a highly curated and ideology-laden process—result in a better situation for the most disadvantaged or for anyone else, necessarily. As Fraser here points out, “common good” but common to whom? Who is this “we” to which we are to be common?

For Fraser, the discretization between “public” and “private” concerns is one way by which issues appropriate to the public sphere get divided. The ways by which the public sphere grants advantages to some and disadvantages to others dampens the supposed usefulness of the public sphere. Fraser points out how the division of the public and private is problematic: “[T]his works against one of the principal aims of deliberation, namely, helping participants clarify their interests.” (p. 72) People’s interests are largely determined by their private lives.  The rejection of “private” concerns from the public sphere means that people’s material needs often cannot be addressed through the public sphere.

What we see here is the norm in play. That which advantages some people in the public sphere is also that which is normalized in and through the public sphere. Speaking of the normalization of the public-private distinction, Fraser says, “This usually works to the advantage of dominant groups and individuals and to the disadvantage of their subordinates.” (p. 73) While dominant groups’ private needs are often met through the systems that they dominate, private interests of subordinate groups are especially vulnerable because they have no place in the public sphere. If the public sphere were to accommodate “private” concerns, it would be easier for subordinated groups to have their needs met. One of the important functions of the public sphere is the “rendering visible” of social issues in and out of the public sphere (p. 65).

While Fraser helps us to problematize Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, she does not go far enough. What is the outside to the disadvantage experienced by subordinate publics? Is it not always that someone has the upper hand? Fraser focuses on the potential for egalitarian societies to produce better outcomes, using stronger relationships between different kinds of public spheres, but this seems to miss part of her point, actually. Some people will always be vulnerable. Representation happens according to particular rules that grant advantages at the same time that representation is always necessarily distorted and/or incomplete. There is no actual equality on the ground, and there is no guarantee that attempts to include people in decision-making will lead to justice. While communication of people’s needs is important, the onus cannot only be on the disadvantaged to sufficiently represent themselves. More is needed lest we reproduce the invisibilizations and violences against the most vulnerable.

 

Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: pp. 56-80.

Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” New German Critique 3: pp. 49-55.

 

 

Half-Reckoning in Blind Times

The droplets of water bubbled up on the side of the clear acrylic cup, appearing like glass warts. And as each pregnant drop eventually slipped precipitously down the wall of the chilly reservoir, the heat in the room oppressed as firmly as did the pressure from the conversation.

Joey was backed into a corner. She knew the answer to the question. She twitched in silence, as Mae peered only somewhat patiently.

“I don’t know,” Joey said.

“You do know.”

“She’s not abusive.”

“It’s abuse,” Mae said. She deflated. “Honey, it’s abuse. It’s abusive to insist someone don’t feel what they feel. It’s abusive to lie in order to blame someone instead of accepting responsibility. It’s abusive to tell someone everything’s gonna be okay when it won’t, especially when you have the choice to make it okay or not. It’s abusive to call someone, drunk, because you miss them when you won’t talk to them sober, especially when it’s just to tell them that you love them but also hate them. It’s abusive to let someone pay hundreds of dollars to stay with you only to turn them away for no good reason. It’s abusive to admit you got a problem and to say you’ll work to fix it and then refuse to do so. It’s abusive to refuse to admit when you’re wrong. It’s abusive to get in a relationship with someone and pretend you ain’t together.”

Joey felt her throat swell inside her throat. Joey wasn’t sure if Mae was right about all of them, but what was she going to do? Try to point out some technicality or two? Her head hung from the point where the vertebrae and the shoulderblades form a cross. She saw that her shoes were slightly muddy from the walk across Lydia Street.

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked.

Quiet, Mae looked at her—Mae’s face like a tomb. “I don’t know, honey.”

“I’m not into this shit, Joe. It ain’t cool. Here’s the thing, honey: she ain’t gonna change for you. I know it don’t feel good. I ain’t blaming you. I ain’t mad at you. I’m worried about you. I’m scared for you. This all seems small. It don’t seem that big. I get that. I don’t blame you. I ain’t mad at you. I’m frustrated, but I get it. I’ve been there, and I know what love does. I want you both to be okay. I mean that. But right now, you’re in trouble, sugar, and I’m worried about you.”

Joey’s head had rotated up, followed by her eyes. She had big, dark brown eyes, and when they swelled with tears, Mae wanted to cry, too.

“I don’t know what to do,” Joey said.

“I don’t know either, baby. I’m not saying what you should do.”

They sat in silence, neither looking at the other.

“I’m mad at you, Joe.”

“I know.” Joey whimpered.

“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad, but not at you. Look, one of the hardest things to learn is that you can love someone and they can love you back, but that ain’t always enough. That’s real hard to get your head around. It’s not a head thing. I guess that’s why. It’s a heart thing. The heart don’t wanna accept it, even if the head really knows.

“You can love the shit outta someone. You can think you’re gonna go off and marry someone and have kids with someone and die in each other’s arms and all that shit, but that don’t mean you get to be with ’em. It don’t. It seems like it should. It’s a cruel thing the universe does. It’s unfair. It’s real unfair. I get that, but it is what it is, baby. Sometimes, you don’t get to be with the one you love, even when they love you back. Because what you gonna do? She already promised to go to therapy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, she’s hurting. Why would she put you through all this shit? Why would she call you and say she’s sorry? Why would she say she knows it’s her fault when she’s drunk? Why would she say you wanna fuck other people when you don’t fuck no one? She knows that. She’s admitted what she does. But here’s the thing, baby: she’s at the center of all this shit. Every time she does any of this shit, she’s hurting herself. She sits at home, and sometimes she don’t call you. She thinks this shit. She feels bad. Sometimes, she knows she’s wrong, but sometimes, she’s so upset that she can’t admit what she done. She blames you, and she know it ain’t your fault. Imagine how bad she gotta be hurting to come up with all this shit. She was suggesting you see other people and pretending you ain’t together when you’re apart just to deal with it. That shit’s crazy. Who does that? Why would someone do that? She ain’t happy.”

“I know,” Joey said.

“I know,” Mae said.

“Isn’t there a way? I mean, what if she did go to therapy? If she’s hurting, too, shouldn’t she get some help? For her sake!”

“Ain’t no ‘should,’ really. I mean, yeah, maybe, but that’s for her to decide. If she thinks she should—if she decides that she loves herself, that she wants to feel better, that she wants shit to work or even just to stop fuckin’ up her life—then maybe she’ll do it. But, you know, there’s no guarantee. She might go or she might not, but even if she does, she might be too embarrassed. She might figure all this shit out, but only after making a lot of mistakes with other people, and by then, she might not remember what happened. She might just remember some vague idea about how you were bad for her or something, not remember it was her who sabotaged shit. You don’t get to decide, honey. She can choose to be miserable if she wants to. It’s stupid and it sucks, but that’s what it is.”

Joey responded, “You know, she’s the one who suggested that we see other people. And I didn’t do shit with no one. I wasn’t perfect, but I tried. And, the difference between her and me is that I at least apologized and I’m working on my shit. I know I ain’t perfect, but I’m trying. How many times have I apologized to her? She made me believe all this shit is my fault. I only just realized it ain’t all my fault. She tricked me, somehow. How many days and nights did I sit in here, crying, wishing, begging, buying her gifts, apologizing for no reason? I mean, not no reason at all. I did things that pissed her off, too, and she coulda broken up with me for any of those, but she doesn’t even talk about them anymore. That’s not the shit that bothers her. The shit that bothers her is some shit she made up. I mean, she talks about how I talked to that Canadian girl when we were on a break, and she’s all mad about that, but she slept over at Steven’s house like a day or two after she said she wouldn’t do shit with anyone until after I got there and left at least. She says I cheated on her for texting someone, but she says she didn’t fuck this dude but just kissed him and slept at his place. He had a girlfriend at the time, too. I know you know this shit, but I’m just fuckin’ pissed. I’m sorry.”

Mae closed her eyes and shook her head.

Joey continued, “She talks about how she’s mad I went out with those people in Temple, but she told me it was okay. It’s all bullshit. She knows that. And, I forgave all this shit. She can’t forgive me, but there’s nothing to forgive. Should I not forgive her? But, I do forgive her!”

“Joey, I know. I’m so sorry, baby, but there ain’t shit you can really do. You’re better off moving past all this. At least for now. Maybe after a while, she’ll decide that she wants to do better for herself and the people around her, but all you can do is wait. I know that ain’t easy.”

“Move past it? Move past it how? What does that mean?”

Mae shifted her hips and slowly, intentionally drew air in through her nose. She exhaled, saying, “I don’t know, baby, but this ain’t doing you no good. She ain’t gonna be with you right now, and I think that’s for the best. You probably don’t wanna hear that. I get that, but what can you do? She’s bullshittin’, and it ain’t ’cause you’re wrong. I mean, maybe she thinks she’s mad at you, but how many times has she done some shit like this? You’re her first love—her first real relationship. She fucked other people only when she knew they were shippin’ out because she’s scared of commitment. That’s the truth. You’re the first person she ever let herself get close to. How many times is she gonna sabotage your relationship—and her own happiness!—before she decides she’s gonna stop runnin’? What’s she lookin’ for? Some perfection that she don’t even come close to? That ain’t it. And she’s already shown she can forgive your faults; what she can’t forgive is her own fear. She’s scared of lovin’ you, honey. She don’t wanna be hurt by you. That ain’t your fault, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. She has to decide that she wants to love herself and be good to herself and the people around her.”

Like the water down the glass, a trail ran down Joey’s cheek, ending in a glob of salty tear. “It ain’t fair,” she said. “It ain’t fair that you can love someone, they can love you back, but that person’s scared of that love, and you can’t be together.”

They sat in silence for a moment, long enough to be reminded of the roar of the locusts outside.

“I love her. I wanna be with her. She wants to be with me. She told me the other night she don’t wanna be with no one but she wants to be with me. I don’t even know what that really means, but she said it. She said she knows it’s not all my fault. She admitted that she ended things for no good reason, that she’s just scared. She was drunk, though, like I told you. It ain’t fair. I’m here everyday thinking how I love her so much and she loves me, and I can’t make her do what she has to do in order to be good to herself and to be happy with me. What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re right, Joey. It ain’t fair, and ain’t shit you can do. That’s just the way it is, sometimes. You can keep loving her, but you gotta move on for now. You can’t do shit about it, honey.”

“And then, she finally calls me sober after all these months, and she says it’s all my fault. And now, she won’t even talk to me.”

“Joey, honey, you don’t deserve this shit. Just be good enough to yourself to let it go. You gonna be okay.”

Joey didn’t feel it. She wasn’t so sure. She thought Mae was right, but from her perspective, it hardly seemed that anything could be okay. She worried about Alex, her now-former lover. She was mad at her, but she mostly wanted Alex to hold her and to commit to working through things. The not knowing was the hardest part.