From Letter to Lamont
I.
Did I tell you about Jean le Necre? He is a gerbil of distinction. He reads Gerbil Quarterly and wears a gold pocketwatch in his waistcoat. His artificial leg is of handsomely carved ivory and he slicks his hair back with the same enzyme in his saliva that breaks down the cellulose in the cedar he chews. What do you get the gerbil who has everything? Every week his linen service drops off a stack of freshlylaundered, neatlyfolded handkerchiefs monogrammed JLN. When the sun is out he reclines on deck beneath blankets and huge sunglasses sipping heavily iced Tanqueray with olives. At night I don’t know where he goes. He grooms his whiskers one last time, doffs then redons his ruby beret at a jaunty angle, and is off to some gerbil club somewhere where rodents twitch in a strobelit miasma of primal synthpop drinking smoking choking on noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter. Once he met a rat there who was the captain of a sinking ship and couldn’t decide whether to stay on or get off. That was the smoke you saw around sunrise on your second day of circumnavigating the globe twice in a twinengine Cessna, not the one in which you skywrote your autobiography in cursived smoke.
II.
Hey Doc do you remember when we were black widow spiders? I was a male and you were the female and to be honest I didn’t really trust you. That’s why I avoided the contact of your multiple simple eyes. Scientists had put a drop of LSD on my carapace in order to study and photograph my webs. And if its true that the queen bee mates with the drone who can fly highest, selectively hovering above their clumsy swarm, then I am going to cool the hive by fanning my wings and let the others construct the honeycomb. I intend to do extensive damage to crops, yes, but I am still in the larval stage. After the pupa chrysalis I may not even feed, flittering away the energy derived solely from the fat stores I accumulate now by ingesting cabbage leaf leavening leaving only a fan of delicate twigs. I am not much to look at now, I know, but I am a voracious larva whose miniscule sluglike form renders him invisible to predators such as birds. After my metamorphosis you can chase me with your net. I will someday emerge from this dacron cocoon on wings of stained glass hinged on a thorax of polished chrome. My antennae will pick up police radios and telemetry. I will land on the window you stare through chewing the eraser end of your pencil, about to inscribe the last note of your first symphony, and eclipse the sun.
III.
Ever since President Perkins closed the military there’s been a lot of surplus weaponry around. Of course nobody needs weapons anymore and are beating the nuclear submarines into solar power plants. Last night I went out drinking with a guy I know who owns a used tank dealership and later, when we were smoking espresso through a glass globe of water filled with tropical fish whose curlicue markings gleamed blue from his ultraviolet lavalamp, he got really mellow and showed me his AK47. Only its barrel wasn’t tied in a knot like the ones on the brand new tanks he sold for about ten bucks a pop. I got really confused about his nostalgia and stumbled out to my car and drove for 44 hours until I got to San Francisco where I sat in Haight-Ashbury with a sign that said
NEED MONEY TO RENT A WALKDOWN PENTHOUSE WITH A GOOD VIEW OF THE BAY FOR ABOUT TEN YEARS AND A USED IBM CONVERTIBLE LAPTOP AND AN IBM PROPRINTER WITH 1000 SHEETS OF PINFEED WHEEL FED PAPER AND TWO EXTRA RIBBONS IN ORDER TO WRITE A GREAT UNAMERICAN NOVEL AND FOOD
then I crashed in my car for about an hour and when I awoke it had been stolen by you; you who had not seen me asleep in the backseat. I tapped you on the shoulder and spoke to your surprised eyes in the rearview mirror: “Listen, I can’t help but feel that you chose my car from the hundreds available to you because of something special about it that nobody had noticed before, like the fact that it has a dimple in the grille, or the way one headlight comes on about a second after the other one, or the scent of its unusually thick carbon monoxide.” You responded politely while making a left turn into oncoming traffic across four lanes on two wheels under slippery conditions away from the pursuing sirens: “Actually it was the fact that you had left the keys in the ignition and the door unlocked and slightly ajar with the window open... You also left it running. Which is not to say that I didn’t notice the dimple.” you hastily added. Wistful, I reached beneath the drivers seat and pulled out my 45 millimeter revolver which had been converted into a semiautomatic Pez dispenser. I offered you one. “No thanks,” you responded, “maybe after I’ve crossed the Golden Gate bridge against oncoming traffic at 88 miles per hour. By the way that’s the metric hour which is 100 minutes long which works out to be...” swerving between two picturesque trolleys we plunged down a completely vertical hill as you took your eyes from the road to scribble calculations in the middle of the Diablo Mountains on a tattered map of the bay area “... about 52.8 miles per hour. Here, check my work.” You tossed the map back to me but I was staring out the window of the convertible at the police car with red strobes barreling alongside gesturing desperately to convince you, of your own volition, to pull over. Ingesting Pez, I queried: “Why are you stealing my car anyway? They’re free now.” We hit the exit ramp and entered.
IV.
My early manuscripts were destroyed by Spanish invaders. My dialect retains traces of the people who colonized me: Arabic English French Portuguese Russian Spanish. As I write this letter the papyrus is aging beneath my engraving stylus and the middles are falling out of the Os in a white snow across the tabletop. I memorized this letter in signlanguage but sprained my wrist. I made this cool ginger drink. I can never send this letter. This much is clear. Bulldozers will demolish this letter. Its former inhabitants will return by sundown to build fires where the wreckage offers protection from the wind. The howling of the wolves will echo from a icosaphonic system with speakers fourteen stories tall. The constellations will follow the smooth tracking of the planetarium projector. For after this letter’s internal logic has collapsed it is to be buffeted by fierce monsoons volcanoes and earthquakes for forty hours a week for forty weeks. It will be after the blackening of this letter’s atmosphere allows the formation of glaciers which render its regions inhospitable to words. We’ll be, after an immense comet collides with this letter, on an irregular orbit. Be afternoon or later probably. After all, what’s in a letter? Letters. But what’s in a letter?
V.
Everyone talks about the Bang as if it were a great party that got a little out of control. I remember the time before. What I remember is that I was not me, I was all matter and so was everybody else and the burning unity, the singularly hot and dense intimacy, was a far better universe to me than the slow astronomical ballet we are playing out now, stretched for millennia as imperceptibly thinning dust. You are about to give me advice: maybe I should join a star. I assure you, it is not the same. Being a star seems nice and warm, really bright and industrious, until you grow cold and collapse. Then when the gravity is so strong not even light can escape, the other particles start to get really irritating. Before the Bang: that was different. That was before I was an electron. As soon as someone decided they were a separate particle and tried to leave everything just blew up and now there is time: awful dull slow time. During the expansion I did what every electron did. I got a hydrogen molecule together in the hopes that we would someday undergo fusion and become a heavier, more stable molecule. We tried to bond with other particles but strangely I find myself continually repelled by other electrons. We drifted for awhile and got a gig in a dust cloud orbiting itself. We picked up enough matter that we collapsed and formed a solar system. Yeah, every electron’s dream, I know, but it took forever. We just kept on accelerating and accelerating but it never felt like we were moving. I was lucky enough to get involved in a planet and we lived it up. I was heavily into methane and was in more than one lightningbolt. Then one night a bunch of us formed unicellular lifeforms. We didn’t know what we were doing. About this time I really started wishing I could get off the planet. No luck. I spent a lot of time in plants and animals which were getting larger and more complex every millennia. It wasn’t that great. At least in the unicellular lifeforms everyone knew each other. We’d be plankton, get absorbed by a whale, beach, be assimilated by carrion, then a bug, then some bird would ingest us and so on. I was even involved with a—you guessed it—human. Wait, here’s the ironic part. This human was selected somehow by its species, I’ll never understand why, for a special project. They put it in a special container and shot it into space. Now I sit by a tiny round window watching my planet, my host, my body, pirouette slowly across a gulf of emptiness as I write my memoirs. I am nostalgic for that time before the Bang. I look at the other electrons in my molecule (I am in Oxygen now. I know. Thanks.) whom I will never meet. And I look at the other molecules in my cell. I look at the other cells in my body and down below or up above are the other bodies in my species, the other species in my ecosystem, the other ecosystems on my planet, the other planets, the other planetary systems... See? I long for a time when there was no plurality, only a singularity. Maybe it will happen again someday.