As Quentin Tarantino’s Torture Americana (Architecture 15)
Please, more love in our daily lives, we plead, but movie night
is for watching ourselves die. Happy endings are old fashioned,
in an age of boiling tensions and red meat, so it’s a zombie love
lurching down the aisle. It’s a kind of love still, ritual sacrifice.
Because going to work is too much, watching the news
is too much, we watch this creature rise from the ocean.
“Identity Issues, or Feeling Unsure of Where They ‘Fit In’” is step three
on the Impact of Adoption list. It’s how we can all feel adopted
on movie night, transactional. “Look at what I’ve done for you!”
the dead grandmother screams, transforming into a room of flames,
when a birthday card would’ve sufficed. Love tends to overreact,
make grand gestures. Natalie, at sixteen, loves these movies,
born just after the Twin Towers fell
in an apocalyptic rush, with a disintegration loop background
of thick gray streets and funerals. She did a report on it last year, “Major Events
in the Year You Were Born.” You don’t get to choose your time,
standing where you stand, sky of salt, ash. Someone suffered here.
The domino history of someones suffered. From their graves
they call for air, their mute calling, to have their true names spoken.
Some jellyfish or trees might as well be eternal
in comparison. A child’s in school, hearing something in the walls,
knocking. The father and mother are replaced by empty space.
My earliest memory of the Twin Towers is Philippe Petit, August 7,
1974, on a wire, a speck against the sky, dancing halfway
between. He stayed out 45 minutes, as he wrote, “to etch his movements
in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace.” I get it.
I’m adopted. Every time I say my name I’m half
way. I don’t look down.
Yard Sale (Architecture 21)
Each house is built on ancient burial grounds that childhood games
exhume, the body rising to remind you of what you most avoid,
bright punishment, embodied. At 5:45 in the morning, it sounds,
the daughter on her way out. It’s dance team try-outs at the high school,
and she’s trying to stay calm, keeping perspective,
but the price of perspective is the long address of grass
rising around you, the paint peeling. In the idea it’s “good luck
with whatever you’re doing,” but the tremor of an answer lifts the trees,
pushes “whatever I have I deserve” into the world owing the child
a TONKA truck left behind from kids playing in the backyard.
It’s my hole they dug. I’m a businessman, conducting
business. The law of the yard says be careful
what you bring to someone’s yard, as it’s raining TONKA trucks
and question marks. It’s still dark as I’m waving to her at the door.
“And now, my children, look upon each other,” Hawthorne writes, turning,
and who knows where or why, as you become this person
and not some other person. This month our office is deciding
on a new director. It’s going to have to be one of us. Oh, we think,
looking around, it’s going to have to be one of us. What would you say
to them, as a version of speaking to your younger self? “Dear younger self,
buy Apple stock.” I have a lot on my mind, imagining scales
we balance upon, what was, what could have been: reaching down
to a bright yellow TONKA truck,
running our fingers along its smooth surface . . .
Cue the evil laugh that fades to reverberation as the camera pans
to the hole in the yard growing larger. It swallows
the TONKA truck, the children, the office director. There’s nothing anyone
can do about it now. The grass is not thinking
human thoughts. The rocks do not have human feelings.
Some New Kind of Funny (Architecture 22)
Last night I was eating glass again. I’m still thinking about it,
contemplating this turkey sandwich. “Well, hero, whacha gonna do?”
I ask, and eat. That bad dreams happen to everyone
is no consolation. That my mind is racing is no consolation.
We find our fear and build for it a house in Brutalist architecture,
its utilitarian designs dictated by function over form, raw materials
and the mundane left exposed. And our fear thanks us
with broken symmetry. “Your daughter’s clock
is ticking too loudly,” our fear says, “so I’ve taken it apart.”
“My shoes are untied. Tie them,” our fear commands. And we kneel at the feet
of our fear. Our fear likes to travel. While driving it to the airport,
it complains bitterly about the straitjacket our expectations on it have become.
“I understand,” we say. “Oh really,” our fear responds,
“and what do you know about fear?” My fear says these people
don’t love you, they adopted you by mistake, little brown-headed cowbird,
and whispers at night a fantasy where I’m in a movie,
falling from a great height: “You come from nothing. And to nothing
you shall return.” The word is spoken. It brings you forth
as more paperwork scattered around the house. On one of these pages
your true name is inscribed, adrift in a sea of blood and ink.
There’s no rule about changing a child’s name after adoption.
Was this child in an unsafe situation? Should they have a new name
that is unknown to their biological family? I was three, just getting used to things.
But changing remains, so now I wish I could change my name every week,
episodic. I used to think maybe I was a robot boy,
so I imagined my name as buzzing wires, my headaches as gears
skipping broken teeth. It’s been a rough few years. Everyone I know
is barely holding it together. Don’t worry, we say. Or don’t worry so much.
When what we really mean is actually, now that I think about it, yes, worry.
And don’t forget to sign up for the small sounds you hear in the house,
2 A.M., as life is a lonely fight. Like fighting your dead father or mother,
their photos in the album always win, obvious as a birthday cake,
or their imagined photos, the things you’ve done to charm yourself,
there on the porch chatting away. “No, this isn’t the way to do it at all,”
our fear says, “Do I have to show you everything?”
Forbidden City (Architecture 24)
There’s a Forbidden City within each of us. Unsharable maybe,
or unknown, dream or memory, some scrap of a television show
or looking out a car window, half dozing, where I have this vision all my life
of an ashtray. I’ve fantasized and fetishized this ashtray.
It’s a beanbag ashtray, plaid, red and black, copper-colored metal insert
I could drive my finger around in circles. The kind with a monkey bars bridge
across the top to lay a cigarette on. From there the room organizes itself:
golden wood paneling, dark spots, inverse eyes around a campfire.
It always stops there, the opening scene of a film
that breaks, flipping and blinking. Does it matter, in the end,
if we’re remembering this or if we’re imagining it?
It’s important to say true things. True life. Only life. The one
life. Shake me, saint of memory, Saint Luke Baanabakintu, we say. Shake me,
panpsychism, tubes and wires, amnesia and hope. One guards
the image, because the image is fragile. How one day,
it’s this telephone call with my birth mother, 50 years 4 months
10 days later, like we’ve been waiting for the golden anniversary to speak.
You rub a lamp accidently, and out springs a genie.
You’re supposed to be careful with your wishes. Genies
don’t hang around. And then, “Yes,
that was my ashtray,” she says. “The last time I saw you
was in their living room. And I’ve hated knotty pine ever since.”
It’s the fall we hold because it’s our fall. It blesses itself
as it calls to us, as water finds its form. “This way to the egress!”
P.T. Barnum writes, to hurry things along, as the elephants are dancing again,
with spirits, giants, cannibals, bears, sea monsters. But sometimes
the universe allows you a pass. This happened. I remember it. Through
everything. You whispered to me. It’s terribly important
about the sun through the curtains,
how it catches the specks of the room hovering.
Shame Experiment (Architecture 26)
By the 1840s, it was commonplace to warn against marrying
into a tainted lineage. The most common reason was lunacy, and asylums
were popping up like dandelions. The father has a history of insanity.
And here’s the daughter. And then the grandson. Enter Gregor
Mendel, whose hybridization experiments on peas gave the genre
the level of abstraction it needed for respectability, but heredity was already
well documented, and various forms of eugenics were in common use,
part flea market, part horror show, as people hoped to rid society
of mental defects by catalogue. It’s what I’m reading this morning,
following records. Census data was a big help
in improving our understanding of the insane, but also
our knowledge of heredity more generally. These days, being dead also helps,
as census records, according to the “72-Year Rule,” are released
to the general public 72 years after Census Day. As a result,
the 1930 census records were released April 1, 2002, and the 1940 records
were released April 2, 2012. But after someone dies, other records
become available. Record of death, and sometimes the cause.
It’s a conversation adoptees are used to having with doctors:
“Is there a history of _______ in your family?” “Sure, why not.”
On other days, we’re told we’re one people, one in the spirit, that we come
from the dust to which we shall return. But in this context,
like Census Day, you’re to check a box in a row of boxes. Sometimes
you can find them, and so I go from having this one brother
I grew up with, also adopted, who at birth was my cousin, to now having two more,
and one’s in jail for drug and alcohol-related offenses. And I tell Robin,
who has two brothers, one in jail for drug and alcohol-related offenses.
I tell my kids, and my adoptive father, who had a brother die
from complications from alcoholism, and I talk to my birth mother,
thirty years sober, who tells me about my birth father’s parents, who died
of health problems brought on by alcoholism. My aunt Kate,
Eric’s wife, who I was originally named after, tells me Eric was the only one
who made it out of that family OK. “It got your aunt Luanna too,
your brother’s mother.” We’re one family, we say.
And if you’re going to think about these things,
at some point you’re going to have to imagine God.
