19th
Prisoner Exchange!
Dear Jeremy,
I had another stress dream about travel last night. Earlier last week, this dream absorbed some of your destination plans and formed the backbone to a short story that I have yet to complete. (My thesis isn’t due until next March, so I’ll sit on it until it’s certain to be bled of any nourishment.) You figured in the dream like this: You went to Munich. You met a lovely a girl. You stayed in the center of the city. On the fourth day you walked over the balcony to your death. Your shoeless body was recovered among air conditioning units tucked beside umbrellas of the Marienplatz.
I woke up in Nashville, shaking, sick to my stomach, slightly amused. In the dream—it was a long dream, full of big symbols and the intimate macabre—your mother showed me a notice you had appended to your bag. For the life of me, I cannot remember what you’d written. A.J. told me on Thursday that you met a Canadian on the airplane; that you’d be in the city for two weeks; that you have rendezvous arranged, assignations, and that thanks to the tanked Euro, you’ve put yourself up in a four-star hotel. A.J. tells me (and the refrain “A.J. tells me” should strike you as petulantly as I mean for it to) you refuse, not necessarily on principle, to speak a lick of German your entire stay; that you’ve been pointing to the menu, to items in shoppes, to locations on maps and nodding vigorously. Because you threw yourself off a balcony in my dreams, I’m feeling especially precious about your self-conscious use of Americanese. How did you ever advance in Chinese?
On my fifth day in Nashville I broke up with Cody and drove home, thus precipitating a series of sleepless nights, whereby I roll around in bed deeply sighing, breathless, swaddled in shame’s black mucous, like tar, and guilt’s carbonizing nothingness—a card table, its collapsible legs melted akimbo by house-fire. These ongoing purgatorial sensations are a problem I’ve remedied for the last six days by drinking a beer before settling in. Then I creep back downstairs to absorb either painkiller PMs or allergy tablets—all off-brand, and possibly placebo. Dad has made his usual holiday brew but it doesn’t work. The brandy slush gives me a stomach ache. It’s too sweet and too weak. The dream I had last night involved driving like a maniac through Jackson, TN, past its blue power stations and chrome factories, tracing its cracked red macadam beside four other lanes of traffic outpacing me. I was on my way to a conference for school, and not, as was the case those many times before, on my way to Holly Springs. I found the right hotel—and its fixtures and lighting and carpeting had been stripped from the Ancilla College trip I made as a senior, the miserable writer’s retreat at their nunnery. “Ancilla” the Latin for “slave girl.” The academic conference had been postponed without my knowing. I had three days to myself. I woke up rather than spend three days in a no-place Southern city constructed from my no-place Northern pain.
Brutality: A.J. and I read your life the way weather men look at barometers, or at least the way enthusiasts stare at windsocks, delighted. Is it true you’ve never told a girl you love her? We circulate this nugget among all our friends, as though its inexplicability were part of the key to proofing other enigmas. “Twenty-five years old, and he’s never said so, not even drunk!” You know how I feel about Miami University girls—they would put up with zero declarations; they would value freakish apartness. I remember serving tables of sorority girls, despondent flumes, some crying over fraternity boys in the next room, testosterone matchsticks, both parties reeking of spirits and leaving their seats to heave in the café’s small bathroom.
From Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights: “J. suffered in his loves from seizures of optimism, a blighting frenzy quite unknown to me. A meeting, an attraction, aroused in him a rich, agitated possessiveness. He rushed into the future with the first glance, swept along by a need for connection that extended the moment before it had begun. He was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.” The person is true to me, maybe was true of me, several years ago, and recently I found him again, inside me, as bitter and reluctant as ever. And as stupid. Heedless, plucky, naive. When A.J. went through the wringer in Geneva he emailed me constantly, an unfolding treatise on failure and love. His recent post completely neglects this aspect of his time abroad. In fact, A.J.’s writing about Switzerland is luminously haunted by his break-up. His stories are like those glowing collodion negatives that receive the ghosts of soldiers, impressed by their sharp sneers and windless howls. I was perpetually single then, in perpetual decline—everything I knew I had learned by weeping over books. In mid-September and at great financial cost, he called to scream at me, to sound his great agony in these mindless sharp shrieks, curses bounding from satellites to cross the Atlantic and to cross again. But he came home and married the girl.
From Heti’s How Should a Person Be?: “One night at one of our parties, I went into the bathroom with my stomach aching. I sat on the toilet and waited for the massive shit I knew was coming, while friends and strangers sat around the living room, outside the door, talking and drinking. Sitting there, I recalled a dream from the night before, in which I was taking pills that made me shit a lot. In my dream, I decided I would write what I thought about as I shat—since I was now spending all my time shitting. But I could not shit, sitting there at the party. I hated the thought that when I opened the door, I would reveal to everyone the shittiness that was mine. I stood and buttoned my jeans and glanced down into the empty bowl, then left the bathroom and went to get a drink.” She divorces her husband and meets the greatest friend of her life just down the page from all this shit. I tracked the apex in recline, as most of my life’s feats were accomplished after a resolving shit, something coiled and massive, unusually green and not at all dense. Do you remember when Adam left the race against Centerville to sit in a port-a-john? He didn’t finish last, only just. I’m reminded, too—A.J. at a party three years ago, standing outside the bathroom door which was in the dining room of our friend’s apartment. When young ladies came out he’d say, “Oh, it just got raw in there!” And the ladies would burn with embarrassment, fending off his ridiculous exclamation. “All I did was pee!” As far as party decorum allows, I rate this as sensationally crass and inspired. I probably puked black Jäger in the same toilet, later, having drank it from champagne stems most of the night.
