Dispatch from the Future (2 page)
Read Dispatch from the Future Online
Authors: Leigh Stein
Try telling this story to a man with a gun. Sorry to interrupt,
he said, but do you know the one about the woman who
was rolled up like a snowman and left until the thaw?
No, I said. That was me, he said. I don’t believe you, I said,
and then he told me to keep my hands above my head.
The snow had begun to fall then in the deep stillness
before the streets were plowed and salted; a car passed
us and fishtailed ahead at the stoplight; I forgot
the ending, and so I pushed my characters in front of a train.
The man with the gun didn’t like that at all.
How was there a train at the beach? Maybe they left
the beach, I said. Should they go on vacation instead?
The man said, What if they went in front of the train, but
the train stopped in time. Good idea, I said. He read
my name off my drivers license and I didn’t correct
his pronunciation; then he told me to close my eyes and
I felt something cold hit my head. My heart stopped a little
bit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was
a snowball at my feet. Where did you say you were from again?
I just wanted to unbutton your collar and see for myself.
This time last year I was an astronaut
in a window display at a department store
that has since been bought out by another
department store. I wore a gray crepe dress
and a helmet that they pumped full of oxygen.
I had one line to say. I mouthed the words, but
no one ever heard me. They tapped the glass,
saying, We can’t hear you on this side. Take
off the helmet. Take off my helmet? I mouthed
back. What?, they said. This time last year I
thought I was speaking English, but lip reading
has become a forgotten art. This time last year
I learned to speak in the dark with my hands.
I know the sign for tree and forest; dead bird;
the spelling of my maiden name; long walks
on the beach of Normandy. You think everything’s
about you and you’ve been right since the end
of the war. I took that astronaut job so I could
tell you I took it. I took that astronaut job so I
could miss you from the cosmos beyond the glass.
This time last year it was snowing when you kneeled
to lace my skates and it was so nice to run into each other
under our pseudonyms like that. I said, Times of duress
call for a record. You said, Did you say something? No,
I said. You said, Why don’t you take off that helmet?
I can’t hear you when you do that thing with your mouth.
What thing with my mouth?, I said, and you closed your
eyes. And you held both my hands so if I tried to spell
our names you wouldn’t see. I cut the number of my age
in ice. Will I ever be any older? No. I will not. Where
you’re from they’re cosmonauts, but you’re the one
who left, I said. I could feel the oxygen running low.
The snow blanketed the totality of all existing things.
I want Rattawut Lapcharoensap to write my biography.
I want him to come to my apartment when my boyfriend’s
not home. I want to make him coffee. I know that he
will want to tape record all of our sessions, and
after I die I want these tapes catalogued and archived
in the temperature controlled basement of an ivy league
university library. Additionally, I would like
my biography to have a neon purple dust jacket and
I would like Nancy Milford to grant us permission
to call the book
Zelda
even though there is already
a book called
Zelda
because it is about the life of Zelda
Fitzgerald. Maybe because it is just one word and
that word is a name we won’t need permission; I’m
not a lawyer. Also: I would like Martin Scorsese to direct
the movie based on the book based on my real life.
I don’t know if any of you have seen
The Departed
yet, but
I just saw it last night and my life is almost exactly like that
except instead of Boston I grew up in Chicago, and instead
of going to police academy I toured with Cirque du Soleil.
If Rattawut could just get a hold of a copy of the screenplay
and make Matt Damon a female trapeze artist
who was born to Prussian immigrant parents in 1984,
I’m sure he’d have a good three, four chapters right there, easy.
Have any of you ever tried to think of all the different ways
you could disappoint your parents and then done them?
I chose the calliope over the violin; I ran with gypsies;
I dated a boy three years younger than me just because
he had an apartment and I didn’t want to live
with my parents anymore. I want Rattawut to tell me
he likes my blue sweater. Maybe I’ll sit next to him
while I show him old photographs and wait to see
if he puts his hand on my leg. I don’t know what will happen
to me after I turn 23, but when my biography comes out
I will have to avoid the reviews and the interviews
and any website that gives away the ending.
I will probably have to spend a few weeks in a cabin
in Minnesota. By then, I will have broken up
with my boyfriend in order to marry Rattawut
beneath a chuppah in the western suburbs of Chicago
because even though I’m not technically Jewish,
my father is, and any tradition is better than none.
When Rattawut gives me my autographed copy,
I’ll stay inside my childhood, making daisy chains,
enrolled in summer programs for the gifted and talented.
I’ll concentrate on the photos of myself holding prize ribbons,
playing leapfrog, dressed up like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
I won’t read the chapters about my future addiction
to pain medication, my lepidopterophobia,
my failed marriages, my miscarriages, the fire
that will destroy all my manuscripts, my fall
down the stairs. I won’t ever read the last chapter,
the one that describes in vivid detail the flames
that will erupt from my fatal motorcycle accident
somewhere in the Badlands, how it will take weeks
for them to discover my body. I am only 22 years old.
I want to fake my death on Facebook. I want a pony.
Excellent customer service means never crying
in front of the customer, asking him to call or
send orchids. In a photograph taken during the time
when you knew all the constellations, you look
like you knew it would end up like this—stars
are something to talk about at night on a beach.
When they tell you they’re from Nepal you say
you love Nepal. You love Flint, Michigan, you
love that there are roads and wrists and reasons
for the planets and no matter what they tie you to,
if afterwards you run into one on the bus, because maybe
you live in the same neighborhood, you will hold
your suitcase handle because first of all, you
could be any of five names and second of all,
your accordion is in the suitcase and you have a ticket
to Valencia. Tomorrow you will be where the cliffs jut
from the sea. You’ve been practicing. If the stranger
sits beside you and says, Bangladesh, don’t show
that you remember, get off before your stop, before
he says he has a fencepost, a red parachute, an open field.
I lost my job at the factory, but before you get mad
I want you to know that last night I woke up in the snow
without shoes, and I didn’t call up to your window;
I let you sleep because I remembered our agreement.
This is what happened: he caught me in the freezer
with his copy of
Ulysses
and asked me what I thought
I was doing. What could I be doing, I said, what
are my options. I still had on my latex gloves
and I know you won’t want to hear this part, but
I opened a carton of macaroons with my teeth.
You have always wanted to do that, he said. Yes,
I said. He said, I can’t let you do that. So I ate one.
He turned off the lights. I took a yellow cake
off a shelf and lit twenty candles to warm our hands.
How is this night different from all other nights?
There was a time when I didn’t have to sleepwalk
everywhere. You remember. I was here. But
then I got used to waking up every morning
in a different city, without you, without the same
sun, the same lack of a view, all that scaffolding,
none of the sea, every piece of mail a sympathy card.
I can never go back there. I stole his book. When you
go to work each morning, I walk to Jerusalem.
I am answering your letter. You are ruining my life.
Mitsu flips a lot of coins. Katharine told me that once
she was in the middle of a tantrum and a coin
told him he should love her, and yet, he wasn’t
satisfied so he went to the dictionary and closed
his eyes and found a word and when she asked
what word he found, the only thing he would tell her
was that he was one step closer to the secret
of the universe. Can you tell me what it rhymes with,
she asked him. Is it a verb? Is it a country? Have I
been there? Will you write its name on my back
while we sit on the pier and watch the blue dusk
chase the sun to Jersey? The last time I ever
saw Katharine she asked me the name of the lake
in the distance and I said Michigan and she said
she’d heard of it, and then she showed me the diaries
she kept when she lived under the overpass
near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,
when all she had was a travel Scrabble set and
the reason she’d run away. Milan Kundera
has a lot to say about our tenuous insignificance.
When he wants to decide something he, too,
flips a coin, but in his case heads is Little Rock,
Arkansas, and tails is Little Rock, Arkansas, and
it’s just a matter of who to blindfold and bring with
on his motorcycle. On page one hundred and seven
of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, I get lost
driving Katharine to the airport. On page one hundred
and forty nine, Tereza dreams that they take her away.
After I see Katharine for the last time I don’t go home;
I go to Prague and it’s 1968 and the man I love won’t
touch me; he just holds an empty gun to my temple
and even though we both know it’s empty there’s the small
comfort that the worst thing that could possibly happen
would be the thing I want most. Mitsu says the secret
of the universe is obvious in any planetary shaped
object you can find on the floor of a parking garage.
Katharine says how. I say I want to move to Canada;
the only tenderness anyone can get around here
is in the time it takes him to untie my wrists.
He takes me to a movie about a bathtub
full of Vaseline and apples and asks me
afterward how I feel about it. I feel pretty
ambivalent about the universe, I say,
like I’ve been reading too many wilderness
guides and spending all my nights
trapped in lucid dreams in which I’m
beneath the deepest, most inescapable
snowdrift and I decide to stay there until it melts
at the end of the world—
el fin del mundo
,
as they say,
acharit hayamim—
and the whole time
I’m dreaming I’m thinking, I can’t wait
to get in my boat and sail across the flooded earth.
So, I tell him, I get in my canoe and all the old cities
are phosphorescent scars miles below the surface,
sunken ships without survivors, and I know
I won’t last long. I know the end is near
and yet I paddle on, scanning the open seas
for a waterproof map, a yellow umbrella,
another survivor in another canoe, and I think this
is how disappointed everyone must have felt
when Atlantis sank. In the classic
Return to Atlantis
,
R. A. Montgomery writes, “Destruction is widespread,
and you grieve for the Atlantean people” (85). Don’t I
know it. It’s at this point in the dream when I realize I am
actually alone and likely to drown and I start to scream
and then I wake up in my own bathtub, water to my knees.
Another nightgown soaked. For the Norse, that’s hell:
wearing a soaked nightgown in a cold, dark room
for eternity, I say, did you know that? He says
he didn’t know, but that I seem like a very
interesting person for a person my age,
which makes me think Theseus must have
said something just like that to Ariadne,
to make her fall in love with him so she
would give him the red threaded clew
to the maze and he could slay the monster.
I used to think I was waiting for a steady shoulder,
for someone to come along and appreciate my
somnambulism, my prophetic knowledge
of the ultimate destiny of mankind, someone
to be with when all the lights in the world go out,
but look what happened to them. Theseus killed