sneeze?
I saw her. I saw her and I told myself to “chill the shit out.” She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist, her glove rode up, her wrist remained exposed, and I thought, As if. As if an Achilles heel is literally a heel, a wrist, a joint. As if we are at the perpetual risk our parents described. As if children should be leashed, dogs should be muzzled, and our snot will lift the hand that lifts the glove that exposes the skin to the toxin that will kill us quickly. As if anything fatal could be dull. As if she were some kind of incompetent. As if I knew better than she did, Rachel Simons, who was older and always so deliberate. The air conditioning had just woken up from Eco mode. I heard her sneeze and I saw her wipe her nose, so as not to lose a moment of her work, so as to lose the sum total of her moments.
Would I have contained the power, the chemical, the antidote, the understanding, the reflexes, the speed, the dexterity, the brawn, the blessing, to undo her catastrophe? The ability?
I wouldn’t have. I could have.
Joan I don’t want to be myself anymore I want to be careful.
I want to be perilously honest about loving you.
Rachel Simons was buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, in a plot her parents had purchased the day she was born, because she’d been born unwell and with short expectancy, and they’d wanted to batch the disaster into one big buy. Then Rachel defied all expectations and lived.
After her burial, at the reception, standing beside a hillock of cubed pepper-jack, Tom and I broke up. We didn’t deserve life as we knew it, as we lived it, in good health and half heart.
We rode the R train back uptown and transferred at Union Square.
Joan we have grown too chill, we species without fur, we have become shit, we have chilled the shit out, we don’t even grow fur over our skin.
PHARMAKON
In ancient Greek pharmakon meant poison and cure and scapegoat. It also meant potion and spell and charm. It could mean artificial color or dye, even paint. It came from roots that meant cut and throat. The pharmakon doesn’t change its name whether it’s noxious or healing, whether it destroys or repairs. We assign human value to those results. Go ahead and employ a drug either in measure, toward health, or in excess, toward oblivion. The pharmakon has no intentions; it cooperates.
Pharmakos meant a person sacrificed to atone for a city. If the sacrifice wasn’t killed outright, she was exiled. Once she left town, the town considered itself pure again.
Theuth, Egyptian god of writing, called writing a pharmakon and he meant a remedy. Writing will help us remember.
Plato called writing a pharmakon and he meant a poison. Writing will replace our memories and ruin our minds.
Derrida called writing a pharmakon and he meant an ambivalence. Writing is a tool that must be used. How it is used is not writing’s fault, or business.
I am writing this to you in exile, in abject ambivalence, you are pure again without me, and this writing’s effect on your body, if you ever read this, will be beneficent or maleficent. Ideally both. Your reaction will be your little godliness, your power to steer me toward recovery or the end.
BARRY
Today Barry took a seat at my bar and ordered himself a milk stout.
I said, “First time in Brooklyn?”
He said, “I’ve seen Grand Army Plaza.”
I poured his stout and set it down on an Anchor Steam coaster, made in San Francisco since 1896. He rotated the coaster under it, an inch right, an inch left, and wouldn’t take a sip.
“How can I help you, Mr. Estlin.”
“Mishti said this was a nice bar, it’s a nice bar.”
“It’s a nice bar.”
The four thirty sunset came in through three small windows in the door, stretched inward over the bar stools, and landed on his thighs. The counter surface of the bar had become too sunlike to look at plain-eyed. The walls sighed orange. Sunny’s, as an institution, had drunk its own air and felt ready for bed. Barry rotated the coaster twice, again.
“I’m not here for any reason, Nell,” he said, reasonably, I thought, “or,” I waited, “well I can’t speak to Joan anymore. So, closest thing is, I thought I’d speak to you.” I took his complement and put it right in the bank but Barry and I