SECTION 2
EGO

In April the rain started coming down heavy and relentless for an extended period of time. From the north and up surrounding the Great Lakes the wind became an endless stormfall of rolling cloudy hills, and water was now hammering the surface of the Earth, washing away mud and soil until only rock remained. Along Michigan and eastern Wisconsin the rains came and refused to leave. And the rivers flooded and the water overflowed into every spot of forest and marshland and deadfall, and the fog became so thick so as to feel suffocating. In the dead of the nineteenth night of April the storm became thunder and the unending clouds went alight with electricity and it struck the earth like knives ten thousand times. Around Lake Michigan the dirt roads running up and down bunkhouses and bungalows and vacation homes owned by rich white men were all cleaved, carved, and chopped up into rough loamy pieces at the bottom of sinkholes. And the pickup trucks and four-by-four vans and Ford Broncos sunk and sunk and sunk into the planet, and the satellite dishes and cable towers and power lines quivered and then fell, too, in the face of a sky's worth of river. And from much further east than Detroit came cold air from New England, which had traveled all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to reach the middle of North America, and which layered and flitted between warm and cold air from the North so as to make a blanket of turbulence that eventually formed into a storm so great and endless that it deserved a name. In the northern states by the ocean this was Hurricane Emily, but Michigan does not get hurricanes; here she was a formless and abstract flood the size of the universe.

Storms do not have names. They do not start or end, either. This storm has been going a long time and it will go a long time after this swell. It will exist in every shape that can be dreamed up, all these clouds like fingers touching the sublime. And it is



attacking the skylight.

Above the foyer is a window that looks out upon the atmosphere from the ground. The only thing keeping Emily's rain out is the existence of molded silica glass and pine framing.

Where am I?

For a moment my surroundings are all confusion and static and haze. I have been zoned out so long on the couch that reality itself started to melt away. And I saw words and cosmos in the splatters of water against the skylight. In this room, the great room, the ceiling is twenty-four feet, six inches above the floor, and then it turns into the same gnarled mess of wood branches and columns as the rest of the home. And it has a hole to the sky. It has snared my view like a pitfall trap in the forest.

Raindrops splatter against the window. They have traveled maybe hundreds or even thousands of miles in total to reach here. And their impact is so ephemeral, as it is only the smallest part of a storm. And each droplet is quickly replaced by another, hitting in the same spot, every microsecond, unrelenting in a frenzy. Sometimes it leaves a stain, and the stain is washed away.

The air must be so terrifyingly cold right now, but the house, in its enormous geometry, keeps its temperature to itself.

Where am I?

I'm starving, actually. And my body tells me this in a muted, cold tone. If I had zoned out for three hours I wouldn't be able to tell. And now caffeine has worn off and my appetite is back, or at least a form of physical guilt that my stomach is empty. And, shit, I am not dressed. Or I am sort of dressed but I am just wearing panties and one of my robes, I am hardly the way I'd like to look for what time it is. And of course I have no idea what time it is. It must be past noon. Before I lost myself I think I was masturbating... a lot, actually. My undergarments are sticky with precum and my hands feel numb. Then I lost track of what I was thinking about. I lost track entirely.

These numb hands fumble around to find my surroundings with touch. Yes, this is the sofa in the center of the great room. Yes, I am somewhat awake. I am not unable to move, at least. I can salvage this.

I pick myself up. It's a flailing gesture and my eyes ache and my fur feels unkempt at the moment, but at the very least I'm able to get up and stand, and stretch. God and it feels good to stretch. From my creaking digitigrade ankles to my wrists, all the tendons keeling out and then returning to normalcy. It is warm in here. Or at least it is warm being buried in a matting of black fur. My day is not over yet, something tells me. I can salvage this. I can salvage this.



I make myself a midday meal in the kitchen. It's still unclean from the morning—frying pan, two plates—and there's actually very little in the fridge right now. This, thankfully, doesn't mean I can't slap peanut butter and strawberry jam onto two slices of bread. I eat it in the kitchen and don't bother to sit down. And I'm hungry enough to have another one, so I pull out all the materials again and eat a second sandwich, and finally I feel heavy. And dry.

Water, then. And a long yawn until my jaw aches. I down two full cups of water to kill the dryness in my mouth and maybe in time it'll kill the dryness in my throat. And it helps with the peanut butter stuck between my teeth, now. At least I can make up for time spent daydreaming. I can salvage this.



Some part of me—some very active and undernourished part—wants to improve my life. My stasis, this unrelenting frozen state of mind I've had, has grown too much as of late. I have had so little urge to change that I've finally developed a new part of my brain that is deeply, deeply angry about the stasis, and who will be my guide through it. Don't despair, it is saying. I can salvage this. Through months and years I have managed to wash away my abilities as a human being to act upon discipline and be motivated, but it's alright. I'm not dead yet. I still have facility over myself and years ahead of me. And I am not a lost cause. You are not a lost cause.

This is the mantra being repeated in my head as I lick my teeth to get rid of peanut butter and glance out of the kitchen at the great room, and the skylight, the storm pounding away. Attacking.

I can fix this,

I am not a lost cause,

I can change my life.

Maybe there is a threshold someplace in this house that I could cross and become unfixable, but I haven't found it yet. I know the house very well and can map out all its many corridors in my mind, and I haven't yet found a place that I can't come back from. I haven't yet had a piece of mental damage jackknifed into my brain hard enough that I can't still somewhat function. They haven't killed me yet.

Or at least that is the best wording I can manage.

Change is really, really difficult to manifest in a person, actually. I hope this isn't really surprising or novel to say, because I'm sure everybody has gone through this crisis a lot of times. Except for me it is a very dissociative kind of crisis, because most of me—maybe ninety percent?—is completely fine with the status quo. Whatever that is. Wherever that is. It's only a small little part, a little voice very very far away, that isn't. I can salvage this, it is shouting. Don't despair.

(I want to respond: I wasn't going to despair! But the assumed truth is that I should despair anyway.)



Here is how I'd like to change:



At some point last year I was told about a book called Djiban which contained a story and the story contained a recipe, or a ritual or somesuch, which would be able to give me the ability to hear. This is the same kind of magic and occultism as described by early medical professionals in roughly the nineteen-fifties who invented the cochlear implant, which is a device that was put into me without my consent when I was extremely young. It made me able to understand speech, audible speech, from other human beings. It made me able to 'fake' it. I had a lot of acquaintances who never knew I was deaf, that my inner ears didn't process audio on their own. Actually I had a lot of acquaintances who said I wasn't deaf.

I wasn't deaf, they said, because of the Cochlear. And I also wasn't really hearing, because of all the problems. So I was someplace in the middle. I learned American Sign Language on my own—which took some time, mind—but had very few people interested in communicating with me in any way other than English, spoken English. And of course I didn't sound like I could speak very well. I was told I was 'retarded' a lot of times. 'Retarded' is a nasty English word, a slur, that was turned into an even nastier word as time went on.

And a short time ago, maybe two years, I had the Cochlear implant removed. Surgically. And I don't know how to feel about getting something put back into my head that makes me hearing, that makes me 'not deaf'.

I don't know how to feel about it but I want to know how to feel about it. I haven't had an opinion on anything in a while. I need to develop an opinion or two, now and then. I can salvage this. I can give you the urge to do something about your life.

So I decide to read Djiban.

It is up on a shelf too high for me to reach on my own. Actually the shelves in the great room are absurdly tall, and there are so many books that it takes me ten minutes of searching to find Djiban again, to the far left of the fireplace, about eleven feet up. I have to lug over one of the high chairs from the kitchen all the way across to the far wall and clamber on top just to have enough height, and when I finally reach the book, it has been stuck in tightly between two other books called VARIANCE and Lost Contents of 1771, and it takes half of me just to pull it free.

The book Djiban is leather-bound and heavy. There are pallid, barely-visible stains against the edges of the pages. It isn't handwritten but it looks hand-assembled, and the paper feels just a tad flimsy. When I come down from the high chair, I am as cautious as can be. This is an irreplaceable thing in my hands, now.

Were the skylight to cave in, and water to flood the home, there would be a lot of things—memories—lost to the waves.

I bring the book over to the same couch I've been lounging on all day—or all morning?—and lay back into the same position, able to view Emily, able to watch the clouds swirl and the lightning swell. And I put Djiban in front of it all, holding it up above my head so as to block the world, and I begin to read, starting with the foreword.

Reading is a hobby. I should have a hobby. I've thought about trying a lot of times, but there was always something in the way.