says who

You hurt my feelings.

What?

You hurt me.

You, or your feelings?

You're doing it again.

Doing what?

Hurting me. Sowing harm.

"Sow" what.

It's not some big joke.

I didn't say it was.

You're acting that way, talking that way.

But you hurt me.

When? How?

That time. You remember.

No, I don't.

We're not going to start arguing about arguing.

Why not? 

It's like we got into our NASA spacesuits, buckled up, listened to the countdown as we waited on the launchpad, 4-3-2-1-0 ignition liftoff, traveled a few light years, and landed on Planet Harm.

Or Planet Hurt.

Anyway, we can agree on that, pretty much.

True.

. . . and then opened the hatch, climbed down the little ladder, more wobbly than expected, and planted our feet on the hardscrabble, arid harmscape, littered by empty promises, goodwill wrappers, and used condomeants.

Condomeants?

Prophylactic measures meant to prevent punctured egos, infertile ejaculations, and scrambled eggs.

Ewww.

You stepped on the surface first.

No, you did.

Not going to argue that. It's all on the tape.

"That's one small step for a gland, and one existential leap for love."

That wasn't it.

Close enough.

That was the problem: not close enough.

We were in those spacesuits. I couldn't reach you, touch you.

I couldn't find you.

You had G.P.S.

G.P.S.?

Guaranteed Personal Symmetry.

But it didn't work on Planet Harm. Doesn't work . . .

Why would it? How could it?

By design.

The atmosphere, the gravity, the loneliness.

And then they played the meanest trick in the history of the universe. Houston pulled up the ladder, turned the ignition on, and flew away. Without us.

Left us to our own devices.

And we don't mean handheld devices.

Left us to our own vices.

And virtues, what's left of them.

Right.

They must've figured we were the best lab rats misery could buy.

What now?

What then?

What when?

What next?

Hey, Planet Harm doesn't even have Wi-Fi!

What does Wi-Fi stand for, again?

 

sleeping, pulsing, dreaming, bit by bit, meditation

You close the white laptop. Fold it like a shiny plastic wallet, with an icon of an Apple, slightly bitten off. In the darkened room a tiny pinhole of light from the right side of the machine, the right side of the thing, beats like the heart of a pristine machine in a hospital or a laboratory, no maybe a government office. No, no, it doesn't beat. It doesn't pulsate either. More like the light that a lighthouse emits, predictably, arcing and diminishing in a steady, seemingly infinite pattern. You have sent the email. You sent it, and then you flinched. Your fingers were shaking. You decided to send it. You sent it. You clicked the mouse. You shaded over the word Send so that the hand, the hand with the pointing finger, the fingerpost, appeared, a secular icon, and you clicked. (Imagine getting a shiny penny for every time that fingerpost appeared?) It gave you a certain satisfaction, that click. And with it, the whooshing, fast-train aural symbol of sendedness. A certain finality. The fingers, your fingers, weren't shaking so much anymore but you couldn't sleep. You sent it. There was no plink signifying a bounce-back of the message, the one that had your fingers trembling. When you could not sleep, you angrily removed the AA battery from the tiny clock near the bed, on the bed stand, the one you bought in postwar Berlin, postwall Berlin, to shush the ticking, the insistent tock-ticking. But the light still starlighting the room. How can such a tiny pinhole of light throw so much into shadow? But you know that even shutting it off would not grant sleep at 0154 hours. It's not the light, is it, you say. No, you don't say anything. You swirl the covers over you, like a sultan in his raiment. Is raiment a word to use here? In the machine everything lives. You can't kill it, can you? The sent email. The 3095 messages in your inbox, even if deleted. Even the send box, the trash. You can't really delete them. You know enough. You know that much. They can't really be destroyed, can they? The human imprint, gone digital, can't be scrubbed away. The palimpsest seems eternal. Who can ever grant you the sort of absolution that bathed you in purity after the priest pronounced the absolution, in Latin, his right hand forming the cross, an invisible cross, in the air? The pristine squeekiness affirmed by a steaming bath, talcum powder, clean sheets still smelling of starch and the aftermath of the hot iron, the steam iron pressed into an ironing board. Despite what they tell you, you know that it's all in there, it is real, the scores, the news, the blogs, the chatter, the porn, the tracts, the history, the dictionaries, the databases, the secrets, the proclamations, the bulls, edicts, lies, truths, connections, divorces, the photo albums, the searches, the chatter, the OMGs and LOLs. It's all there. Bubbling. Its silence is so loud. How could they tell you it is not real? Who could believe that? They said they only believed what they could see, forget about faith and gods and goddesses, and now this. It's so invisible but so loud. How could anyone sleep through such racket? And it never stops, even when you unplug it, even when you press prolongingly on the button to the upper right of your keyboard, the button that looks almost like the smile of a cyclops, the thing itching to be pressed, to an off, to a status designated as off-ness. It can never be turned off now, could it? You can never escape its buzz of on-ness, could you?

The Jupiter Chronicles

Yesterday I took a trip to Jupiter. Don't snicker. I really did. While I was there, or so I am told, a doctor and his assistants probed the coiled conundrum of my colon, taking videos and screenshots just like a tourist capturing images of Fifth Avenue or the Champs-Elysees or Unter den Linden. The medical explorers even sent off a few polyp souvenirs for further study. When I perused the photo album presented after the journey, I winced. It wasn't my cup of tea. It wasn't my picture of a semicolon. But back to Jupiter. I was there. I certainly was not in the room where the "procedure" was performed (don't you just love that word, procedure? It's so tidy, so antiseptic, so pain-free-sounding). I have no recollection of the journey the video camera recorded, no memory of pain or discomfort or anxiety. Just before going to Jupiter, I do remember saying, "Should I watch the screen?" "Some do, some don't," came the reply. "I'm feeling a little light-headed," I reported. "Don't fight it," came the recommendation. That's the last thing I recall before my interplanetary journey. Funny thing is, I don't remember anything about Jupiter either. It was neither white nor black, neither colorful nor colorless, neither gauzy nor glaring. Well, yeah, it was kind of gauzy. By deduction, I take it to be a pleasant place where time passes without notice, a place without care or conflict. Much like Heaven, I guess, in our collective Hegelian-Jungian imagination. I'd go back in a heartbeat, if heartbeats even exist on Jupiter. I can only surmise about Jupiter after the fact. It was a very smooth ride going there and coming back. I think the airline was called Demoral Versed Express (or was it the De Moral Express Versed? What rhymes would be chanted to induce sleep on that orbiter?). Upon returning to Earth, so I am told, I queried the doctor repeatedly and persistently and heart-breakingly, saying things like, "I know you told me the scale of zero to five was for pain, but what about the polyps? Can you give them a scale of zero to five?" Over and over again, oblivious to anything the doctor would say. Upon reflection post-Jupiter, this sounded to me alarmingly like a besotted bar patron, or a patient in an Alzheimer's ward, or a vision of me fast-future-forward in a hospital ward or nursing home. Allegedly upon my descent from Jupiter I recited portions of the Hail Mary (likely fearing Final Exit from this Vale of Tears) and jabbered lovingly about the Boston Red Sox (beloved Major League Baseball team of my late friend Doug, who succumbed to cancer nearly two years ago), but inexplicably I reportedly said nothing about my San Francisco Giants. Looking back, I'm most grateful I didn't say anything at all about having sex with that ostrich at the Berlin Zoo. Whew.