Spin Glass

In May the rains wound down. Emily was long gone; she had, I figure, heard enough applause. Thank you, thank you, and so on. On the east coast she tore cities apart and killed people stuck between edges of her radius, because turbulence of that magnitude is thorny around the edges and does not preserve human life much at all. In Michigan it took a while for the downpour to recede, but of course it did, day by day, until it was all forgotten. Just runny creeks and droplets on tin roofing. And on the eighth day of May, as things wound to a close, I went with my roommate to the lake in a hatchback he inherited from his dad. I hid underneath a tarp so passing cars wouldn't see me, and once we arrived, we both stood out on the shore and just watched the skies clear up a little bit.

I hoped from that oblique angle maybe I would see through the cracks in Emily's fingers and see her face, see an identity or a God or something, but I didn't. There is nothing in the sky that is put there on purpose.



He still lives in Grand Rapids. His name is Max and he is not Deaf or hard of hearing, but he is very sweet, and he doesn't ask a lot of questions. Or—the questions he asks are cute and endearing. He will for instance ask me if my horns need shaving or anything like that, and it makes me feel flush in the face, and although I don't want a romantic relationship with my straight roommate of all people, it is a nice kind of warmth that I wasn't ever prepared for from this man.

He doesn't ask about my time elsewhere which lasted a little over two years. He is also in a soft agreement with me that, yes, it would probably be best if I don't advertise to the world that I resemble a goat on two legs with opposable thumbs, because that would be likely to get me picked apart by NASA or the CIA or the USDA or whatever. He is skeptical that such a thing would be the result, but I am fine with the medium we reach. I stay inside almost all the time. I don't contribute any payment to the rent and I don't have very many responsibilities besides keeping the apartment very, very clean.

A spotless house is better for the soul.

There's obviously a depressing quality to the fact that, no, Max did not find an opportunity to move out, and no, he did not get out of the food industry. Which is to say that he is still managing at whatever failing restaurant in town is desperate enough to hire at the time. And I am sort of lucky for this, because I had nobody else to turn to, and he took me back in after such a long time. It was a very silly sequence of events. He does not know ASL so we had to do a lot of back-and-forth, text on an empty memo on his phone, while it was absolutely storming outside. And from the look on his face it was probably the wrong time to land at his doorstep when I did—but Max somehow had the energy to let me in anyway, and hug me, and ask if I was doing okay. And he sensed quick enough that I wasn't keen on talking about where I went, so the questions were all cute and endearing, and suddenly May was over and the rain became just whispers in overcast skies, and I am



tired.

A pervasive kind of tiredness. Again, again. Staring up at the ceiling of the kitchen.

Max works as a general manager at a shitty chain—name one, name all, there's little difference—and pays the bills for a living space that is technically six hundred and twenty square feet but feels like sixty. There is one bedroom and one bathroom and a kitchen attached to a living room and a front door, and if you have been in a place like this before, then little more needs to be said. Max set up a reclining sofa chair in the kitchen for me and gave me blankets and a pillow and I realized just now that it's June.

It smells the same way that white bread tastes.

I should eat. I should eat but I am not hungry. I have to lean left to see the analog clock hung up against the west-facing windows; the minute and hour hands are cat paws and the plastic rim has two pointed ears on top, and there are feline eyes staring back and forth with the second hand. It is two PM. Past noon. It is too late for me to start my day off well.

Some days Max works nights or opens or mids and it's random, always random. And right now I am alone for an indeterminate amount of time. I could be alone forever.

This is not my bed.

I crawl out and splay on the floor ass-up and I am half-naked, just briefs and a shirt with Garfield screen-printed on the front, and I feel horrifically grimy and ugly and worthless all of a sudden, and I haven't eaten all day, and what the hell happened to yesterday? What a fucking mess you've made of this body. Your fur is all on end and itchy and falling off in parts because you haven't trimmed it in a while and I want to go for a walk.

Outside. Or just the hallways. Anywhere.

I am facing an odd problem that is not allegorical in nature; I think in Grand Rapids there is just about nothing comparable to being a furry animal person, to being a goat. I am not persecuted or a minority in that way. It is magic and the occult and nothing more. And still it insists to me in my blood that it would probably be for the best, probably a smart idea, not to broadcast this fact anyplace but this apartment.

Then again I don't know if I'd be ready to actually walk outside now either. Max is taking the same role my parents did before I hit eighteen, or my cousin when we were roommates in Trenton—Max is carrying me while I still have little agency. And in fact this has been the whole of it, the whole of my life, following whatever carrot is dangled in front of me. And at the moment I have no reason to go anywhere or be anything and, if my thoughts are allowed to run like ink, I start to realize how dark that feels.

We are not getting much sun even though the storm ended a while ago.

Lately I've come to the conclusion that I am wired up wrong. And also made up of the wrong parts, as I've said, but specifically the connections between different parts of my brain, the reward mechanisms I'm supposed to have—all of it is just a little bit mismatched, like the manual got thrown out. A long time ago I was taking a medical concoction called Lexapro, or escitalopram, which altered my brain chemistry at random and sometimes I felt better and sometimes I felt miserable and most of all, most of all, I was gone. And none of this particularly fixed underlying issues. And lately I've come to the conclusion that I, whoever I am, treat good things like hot potatoes. I have to get them the fuck away from me as fast as possible.

Things being good is a warning sign. It is cause for immediate alarm and immediate action.

And also I don't know how much of any of that is true. I am spread-eagle on my stomach on the vinyl floor of this kitchen and it's cold and I'm cold and I'm too dejected to get up, because there's little I can think of doing.

I could shower again. It was this morning that I showered, or maybe three mornings ago. And I could use a shave but I don't want to clog the drains, I don't want to make anybody else fix a mistake of mine. I could eat but eating is just a way to occupy time until something else happens.

I could masturbate.



I am in the corner of Max's bedroom on Max's laptop and I am tired. A pervasive kind of tiredness. I thought intensely and passionately about getting choked out by a big burly anthropomorphic wolf, and masturbated until I came into a couple tissues sandwiched together, and then I laid back and stared at the ceiling and waited for the afterglow to go away, which it quickly did. I have run out of things to do.



I am showering again. Or maybe for the first time in several days. It takes a long time to comb myself and get all the knots out of my fur and I am drenched for a half hour running shampoo through myself and I am sorry for Max's water bill, and I am sinking into the heat of the oval-shaped shower head and letting my thoughts just sieve away. I do not have room to think when I'm so warm.



I am shaving directly into the trash. I can see a very fuzzy reflection of myself in the stainless steel garbage bin and I look like I should go to bed already—isn't it dark out?



I am eating a Pop-Tart. I didn't feel like heating it up but it tastes about the same. Goes down quick and then I'm empty.



I am vacuuming the carpet for the second time today.



It is nine o'clock and when Max got home he was tired, he was looking past me. His expression said a few things, I think, but I am actually worse at recognizing facial expressions on human beings now, so it was all muted and distant. He has brown skin and curly hair and pastel-green irises, and a little wound on his cheek where he has been picking at a scab. And I typed this up for him on his laptop:

"You want to go anywhere on the weekend?"

And he took a very long time to parse this, and I don't know why, but he felt this was an appropriate time to tell me:

"I think you gotta make a plan for what to do now. Like with the rest of your life."

And inexplicably this makes me cry, and sob, and I'm not able to respond, and Max tries to apologize but it's not his fault, and I have to take a long time to process. My legs are popsicle sticks and I need to go sit down, and I wave him off, because he does not need to see me like this. I am so easy to accidentally break.

Even when I calm down I want to be small. I am by the window facing out into the parking lot. I have my feet up on the sofa and my arms around my legs to curl up into a little warm fuzzy ball, and I can't stop just staring, staring, staring aimlessly outside.

Across from us there's a place called Julian's which is probably a restaurant, and it is buried into the underside of a living complex which looks exactly identical to every other one across this country and other countries, too. This homogenous building is made out of prefabricated parts and is painted in pastel; it is six stories tall and blocks out everything behind it, every bit of authentic architecture that the city has. You can only go to Julian's by parking out back, because the prospect of someone walking around this section of Grand Rapids for fun is laughable.

I can see Max's car in the parking lot. Always in the same place. He is at least lucky enough to own a car and a license.

My eyes wander towards the few things that are visible from here, still—the kitschy signs for businesses that will go under by tomorrow, the square reflective windows blocked by plastic curtains, the cars and trucks passing so quick they'd flatten a pedestrian, and the smallest snippet of the sky, which is rolling over itself slowly. Still we are stuck with overcast clouds, but no rain. And it would be difficult to imagine a view with less identity.

It's not hard to imagine a version of Grand Rapids that is missing just one part, or maybe even a whole lot of parts, and still works precisely the same. It's not hard to imagine Julian's sinking through the world because it isn't even slightly necessary for the whole to be described. Or for the parking lot to get forgotten about for long enough that all the asphalt and painted lines disappear. And it is not difficult to imagine me, myself, going away.

I am memorable to a few people, maybe. Maybe my time on Earth has been fundamental to a few people's lives—obviously my parents experienced some difficulty and my cousin some levity, and Max thinks I am cute for my animal features, but it still would not be an entirely hard incision to make. I could cut myself right out. Mornings at Seven Eleven are hardly worth remembering and hardly essential. I am only barely here.

This doesn't have to be the case. I know this.

I still have someone in me whispering, now and then,

I can salvage this.

But I have made significant changes in my life and gone through hell and I have a new body and what does it matter? I have already done my best to salvage this. I know that I could, very obviously, reclaim my life somehow and figure things out and get a job or a hobby and feel decent about myself. I could make a plan for what to do with the rest of my life.

But it is much easier to think about



Him.



When the thought occurs to me staring out the window I'm startled, like somebody put electrified paddles on me. I would not describe this as negative or positive or anything. It's just sudden, and I feel like I woke up from a bad dream.

Again it happened. Nearly once a day I forget and then remember Him. And this will keep happening for longer and longer stretches until I spend days without remembering Him, and then weeks, and maybe sometime soon I will just lose Him.

Forever.

I will have permanently forgotten His house and His presence and—fuck, fuck, fuck, His wool and His touch and His feet on my penis, and His insistence that I can be anything I'd like—and I'm not there, I can't be there, I can't be. This is a stupid line of thought. I left His house for so many good reasons that it would be difficult to count them all or write them all down.

Although I suppose

writing it down

wouldn't hurt.

As He exists now, He is only a dimly-lit planet of experiences and thoughts and emotions so potent and acidic that they could melt through the floor. He is two years that felt like twenty, and He is going to fly further and further away unless I tie Him down to the ground somehow. All that time I spent in His house, I refused to contact people—to use the Internet or my mobile phone to tell somebody about Him. I did not tell my parents or my cousin or my online acquaintances anything except I am alive, because what good would it do to talk about Him?

Fuck you, got mine. Same as with the Cochlear.

But as always that was the worst way to go about things. And maybe He led me down that path, but I was willing to be as isolated as I was, because isolation with good company is something electrifying. I never had to want for anything, or at least never got to the point of trying for anything, because I had Him all over me.

And now I don't have Him all over me. He escapes me as easily as gas escapes a cage.

So I put Max's laptop on the couch and write Him down.

Warm, warm, warm.

My hands heat up from the CPU spinning up and my body warms up because I am reminded of all those times He held me. Just a hold, just a platonic hold; He would stay with me as long as I wanted and just love me physically and wrap His great big, wooly arms around me, such that I am squeezed. And I would have to pat His shoulder to tell him to stop, but only after I've gotten my fill.

I am writing Him down. I am writing down all those many experiences that come to me in a pleasant flurry. I have heard many times before that when somebody dies it is good to mourn them by remembering good things about them, and although He is not dead and I am not dead, it feels like something is decomposing. And I very much need to write something nice down about all of it.

Not all of it is worth recounting. And I am not living in the moment so I cannot phrase it in present tense like I have so far, and of course I do not think the day we went to Lone Star Lanes ought to be mentioned, so I also do not include much of that. But I do begin with one thing that has already been said.

Here is how I would describe Tabi if you have not met him:

And it feels so wondrous to do this. It feels like I am without limits, or at least finally free of some self-imposed restrictions. I have never put Him to page before, never even told anyone about these experiences; they have been entirely the language of hearsay, folk tales, trauma. I am trauma manifest. I am only the person I am as a result of the things that have come before, and it has been Max's unspoken responsibility to guess and extrapolate. He may only see the result. He is a geologist studying topsoil.

The truth is that I remember a great number of things. I have a memory that is eidetic or photographic or something along those lines, although I prefer to just call it vivid. And if I spend enough time, I can tell Max

all the places

we went.

Him and I. His house, and the Room below His house, and the many locales, the many nights, the many experiences of abject love against the odds. I can put it all down.

I can tear it all out of my exhausted mind. I can salvage this.

When the body is impulsive it is also very clumsy, and when I am impulsive I fall over myself trying to move, move, move; a rhythm like pistons is broiling up in me and when I have two pages of Him on a text document on a website called Google Documents I decide to show it all to Max. I decide to share Him with somebody. And my thinking is more complex than an infatuation, it is desperate—I have spent many weeks in this apartment being fucking worthless and how did I get here in the first place? Why is any of me the way I am? I need to justify myself.

I am nothing without my excuses.

Max comes out of the shower and throws on a long-sleeved shirt displaying the words "Car Seat Headrest" in a plasticine font, and wants to lay down, and surely what Max would really like to do is sleep right now, and get some free time in the morning, but then again maybe he works at four AM tomorrow and needs to sleep so he can be a functioning automaton. But I beckon him over and I still have tears on my face and I ask him, plead with him, please read this. Please let me confess where I've been all this time. And he is a wonderful friend, so he accepts.

And Max reads about Him. The far-away Him. And the house that only slightly lives in Michigan. And I am unsure what I want his response to be but his eyes narrow and his face curls up and he's only halfway through when he looks back to me in deep-seated confusion.

He knows I am probably not making this up. I am a walking goat and went missing for two years. And yet something is so, so terribly wrong.



Here is the conversation we have on the Notes application on Max's phone:



"What is this"

"This is where I was the whole time. I'm sorry I'm kind of just frenetic right now"

"Why are you here now?"

and Max gives me a very long, intense look. Eyes sharp. More awake than ever. He hasn't finished reading the scant things I wrote. He is looking at me like my fucking head is on fire, and suddenly I feel like it is.

I respond, "I was just trying to find someplace to get some time to myself"

"Why? What happened to you? I believe you but you're scaring the shit out of me. Why did you leave this thing's house if it was going well? What aren't you telling me?"

Stop typing. Stop typing for a second. Give me a second to breathe.

but

then again

he has reminded me of all the things I did not write down.



The Room above His house.

The lying. The incessant lying. Or something close to lying—so close.

The front door. I am so wretched and broken and yet some part of me wants to run. I want to run. And I tell him I won't return, and I slam the door behind me so that I will not look back at Him. My vision is still so fucking hazy, so filled with tears and shock and awe, and it only gets worse when I step out into the torrential weather.

Hello, Emily.

Hello Emily and hello rain and hello mud, stinking endless waves of mud, turning the front courtyard into a brown sea; I am immediately swept away when I try to walk, and I end up at the dirt road drenched so thoroughly that it feels like I will just sink into the ground and die. And hanging onto barely anything, I turn back and saw His house, His mansion, which stands only three stories and cuts into the forest even less than it seemed from inside. And I could go back in and He would be there and He would cry with me, we would cry so long, and He would make me feel better—and in spite of this hope, internally I am screaming so loud so loud I want to get out of here and that is the only thing I have, the only rock I can attach myself to, and I wander through the storm in a half-stagger until my whole body begins to fail. Arms and legs and musculature and fur, soaked, so heavy I am on my knees. I had turned right on the road and now I am going uphill. Where is the lake? Where is north? Where am I? Dizzy like my head is back against His arms and all my body parts are disconnected from my nervous system, and of course I have no plan, I am just running and falling and running. I want to get out of here.

The will can be potent. If it's pointed in the right direction it has the potential to march for a long time.

But I am made out of weak parts and cannot make the journey back to Grand Rapids or even back to His house, I am just on a rural road in the middle of an empty universe, and I cry and wail nonsensically until Emily drowns me in the mud, and I fall unconscious for a long time.







And in the morning I kept walking.

In Michigan the rains were not actually to the level of a hurricane, as I've mentioned. We were left with only the remnants, the detritus, the aftershocks of something much greater out East, and the morning after I left His house was when they called time on Emily. But as I've said the rains here lasted a lot longer.

It was pouring out still when the sun came back up. I was not run over by a car in the night and I suppose cars don't pass by that part of the woods, and I had no real choice but to just continue forward. It would be difficult to list the physical symptoms of being left in the rain all night so I will simply say that things got dire. And all the while He was racing through my mind faster than claps of lightning—He was everything. And I am certain now that He felt my presence along His spine. He felt that I kept Him in my thoughts.

Maybe that is His way of pulling on me, tugging on my leg. I am constantly granting Him something by thinking about Him. Is our relationship transactional, even now?



I made it to Grand Rapids by hitchhiking, which arouses many questions for myself even now, because by then I was deeply and debilitatingly sick along the side of a rural highway and essentially only caught the attention of a driver because it was late at night and I appeared like a dream. I am not entirely proud to admit this but I just told her I was a ghost, and that if she didn't drive me back to Grand Rapids I would keep haunting her.

It worked or at least worked in part, because I showed up at the front door of that apartment building, and buzzed for Max's number, and did not end up dying on my way there.

I was starving and had only drank rainwater and smelled like six kinds of death, and I am certain many people saw me, but I had done my best to get to Max and he took me in.



And now, right now, he is staring at me on the couch. Hunched over. Eyes wide. I want to stare into the street lights and watch the nothingness go by. I need to respond to him, need to come up with something. And yet if I lie to him and tell him all is well then what the hell am I doing?

My body is made of the wrong parts to lie.

"Some really bad stuff happened," I type. Of course Max already could guess this much. "Most of it was extremely good. That's partially why I am so miserable right now and why I don't feel like doing anything most days. I had a good situation and ran away from it."

He takes a deep, deep breath. "You aren't stupid. If you ran away then it was a bad situation for one reason or another. Do you want to talk about it?"

And I type "No," immediately, because it is the truth. Because it is currently not something I would like to think about. It's hitting me in waves again. The Room above His house—

colors—

a dull white forever—

I am very shaky and of course Max notices and I would just like to hide, I want to run, I want to crawl under a rock for a million years. I wouldn't make good use of those years anyway.

"Did he hurt you?" and Max shows this text to me, and he has his face scrunched up, he knows I do not have to reply to give him an answer.

I retract and find someplace to get away.

I don't think He would hurt me.

Why would He hurt me?



It would be so much simpler if I did not think about that part.

Loving Him was easier when I was not scared of Him.

- - -

I am on the sofa chair staring at the ceiling. Eleven o'clock. Max is sleeping, I hope.

When I squint—really squint—the plaster applied to the ceiling of any room can begin to look like a bunch of faces. Maybe only for a few moments until my mind adjusts.

Plaster on drywall in a pattern they call skip trowel, all in a chaotic mess of divots and landscapes painted white-on-white. Randomness creates so many shapes but I can't stop seeing faces in places they weren't intended; humans are designed to see faces in everything and in this ceiling I see a shape that looks like Him. Sort of. Muzzle and eyes and the faint shape of horns when I let my imagination fill in the gaps. More likely I am simply desperate to see anthropomorphization in everything, because I have spent so much of my life being treated less than human, and it feels right to try and treat the everyday world like it, too, can feel a little bit. In Djiban the author describes the very air being able to feel pain. But also I think that Djiban is not really descriptive of the world I live in. It is flush along the surface of its bookshelf. It shares space with hundreds upon hundreds of other books that He deemed useful, helpful, descriptive. I have not read all of them but, in times of boredom and desperation, I have read a few, and I did get a similar impression. The books are useful.

Maybe not as He meant it, but in a different way.

Here is one assertion I agree with: human beings are prone to a form of ideology known as magical thinking. This is actually literal in name. We think of our world as being run by magical forces even when told otherwise and even when we hope otherwise. The human brain is a uniquely imperfect machine and does not inherently possess rigor and formal logic—we do not actually process cause and effect, we only try.

Given enough information maybe we get closer to reality. Or we could just guess.

Human beings used to kill each other ritualistically to cause things to happen in the natural world because it was believed, in earnest, that something impossible governed the universe and would care. And it is nice to think that this thinking evades modern people, but there is another form of ritualistic sacrifice going on in Max's body, over in the bedroom, wherein he is sacrificing his physical and mental health in order to gain money in order to pay to live, and what he does with his life is he sacrifices his physical and mental health in order to gain money in order to pay to live, and what he does with his life is he sacrifices his physical and mental health in order to gain money



and He had all sorts of books on the subject. If you sacrifice a rat you can make a different rat hear. If you paint circles and draw lines and light candles you can make objects and living creatures crawl out of the woods to follow you. If you think very hard about forgotten things, you can fall into a Room below the world. And Djiban is only one book that pretends it knows which magic is 'true'.

And of course He had them all.

One of my favorite books in His collection was an old paperback edition of Peter Pan. It is very demonstrative for what I am talking about right now, because in many ways I think He was my Tinker Bell, He was my fairy. At one part of Peter Pan, which is a play you may have actually heard of, the audience is asked to clap their hands and believe that they can make Tinker Bell live again. Tinker Bell is a dead fairy or at least a dying one, and in the end the wish comes true and she comes back to life. Tada. You did it.

This should need little elaboration.

Sometimes I find myself being very cynical about belief, desire, hope. Those things are good for the soul and He always said that He found the concept of a soul funny, in a grim sort of way.



My world now is completely mundane. I have tried in especially desperate moments to think of things that have been forgotten, and I have tried falling down into the Room, and I have also tried remembering what was written in Djiban or any of these other books said, and I have tried making any magic happen, but it will not and could not. In Peter Pan many years pass and eventually people have forgotten about Tinker Bell and she is dead, because fairies do not live long at all. And for many many years in this world Tinker Bell has been dead and nobody has really figured out a way to believe hard enough to bring her back to life. The commute doesn't get longer because you had a bad morning. The planet does not care about fairness or justice or poetry or art. And He will not come pick you up out of your bed when the world forgets you. He will not hold you and He will not hold me ever again. I saw a fairy tale and it scared me and I ran away.

And laid back in this sofa chair I am back in the same cycles as before. I am back to being alone. I am back to a reality that functions as expected. My eyes won't get scooped out at night and I will get old and die soon, and I am mooching off my roommate and not eating healthy and not bathing enough and losing track of time. And I should go get that degree finished up. Does Grand Rapids have a community college? Maybe Julian's has a dumpster I can grab pastries from.

First things first I need to get a job. Make my half of rent.

Call my mom.



Hey, I'm okay.

Staying with a friend.

Getting back into the swing of things.

I'm working again. Yes, the hours are fine.

Hourly.

Yeah but I have to be on call all the time.

It's okay.



No, I don't need help. I'm fine.

Yes.

What?



No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's my fault, my implant—just say that again, please?



Yes.

Okay. I'll talk to you later.

Alright.



and so on. This is what is in front of me. Or I suppose what is in front of me is the ceiling, just the ceiling, and I keep seeing shapes appear in the drywall because I want somebody or something to be a little unreal, to be a little magical. I want to feel something that doesn't fucking hurt so much. Punches in the gut. Realizing again and again that He exists, He is back in that house by the lake, and I ran away from Him. I ran away for what?

You were so lucky and you threw it away.

You will never get to feel His wool again. You got rid of that. He got rid of that. He made your life inhospitable and He ruined everything and fuck Him, fuck His stupid fucking arrogance and ego and why did He do this? Why did He ruin such a good, perfect, immutable thing? It's His fault I can't just have what was so nice. It's my fault for paying attention.

Just

get me

to the good part.

I crawl off the chair and my knees creak and I nearly fall over, all of me is achy and awful, and I am about to do an awful thing. I am about to do several very stupid things and I am responsible for them. It will be my fault. I don't expect Max to give me any sympathy at all because he did his best and I ignored him. After I freaked out in front of him, after he asked me if He hurt me, Max also told me something else, because Max is very smart and wearier of the world than me.



He wrote this:



Don't do anything impulsive now. Please.

Promise I'll be here in the morning. Gonna skip my shift.

Just stay until the morning and sleep. You need it.