Alternative Methods Of Communication

I picked up six pennies yesterday, one after another. They flashed on the same side of the street like points on an axis, like I was meant to read into them, see them in a line, derive from them some kind of secondary meaning. I did always smoke grape vapes that summer. I was getting into manufactured sensations. I was getting into objects, extensions, directional looking. Everything was shiny and shaky and illegible, and I was so lonely under everything. Back in school, Standhill taught me a series of alternative methods. Everything was an assignment, an allocation, a sign; that’s why it worked, then why it didn’t.

I am coming up against the boundaries of words and the faith that they will be understood. The farther away I get from it, the more I see. I am learning like a machine. I learn new things all the time—about you, about me, about close and distant reading.

What you have to do is sort of do it before you know you’re doing it, contrary to factory settings. I was reading all wrong, I was not reading, just looking; not seeing, just reaching for the words that felt right. The shiniest images. Fake it, breakdown, grape vape.

I paid my way. There was nothing else for it back then. My pennies went down a hole in the table and I paid. I paid and I paid for a game that, in the end, I didn’t even play. I didn’t want to, I didn’t know how, and it hurt.

I’m shaking now. I can tell by the second derivative, by the movements of the thing I’m holding in my hands, and I want to be alone. So I go away inside myself and I don’t tell anyone.

I’m sorry. It’s automatic. I know more now, but I am always afraid. This close to you, I still can’t see. I don’t believe there’s anything out there that isn’t already in me. I think I said something like that to you two years ago. I wish I could remember what I said. But the trouble is that I can’t remember, and that I couldn’t see.

Let me do it this way. Let me tell you how I learned to read.

*

THE STORY OF ODETTE AND SIEGFRIED

I guess it started with Odette and Standhill. It doesn’t matter who they are. This is a story about the thing beneath the thing. What mattered was the distance between them. Think of them relatively, as points in space in relation. I will tell you they were in different seasons of their lives. One of them knew more. The truth comes wrapped and warped in a tensile web of words, but it’s simple. He had more information.

To learn to read, she wrote to him. He said it would be fun, like a game. She wanted to win, so she played.

He expressed an affinity for the symbolic register, which is to say he wrote to her in code. He said it was the only way he liked it. She was a quick study. She wrote back obliquely, from behind a screen.

They never spoke to each other the normal way. Still, they manufactured the sensation. They lived for a while in a made-up space between them, in letters and signs and alternative methods of communication. Every gesture was something, nothing. The words preceded and produced the image. When they were together, they read between the lines—a trapeze act, a perfect suspension of meaning—but usually, he left her to work it out on her own. Back then, he had places to be.

What happened next is the thing that always happens. The thing is she took looking for seeing, language for likeness. Or the thing is she read where she should have stopped reading. Or the thing is she misallocated faith. She didn’t know him. She knew a distant reader, an arrangement of words.

So it broke when the distance closed. It was her fault he had to go. He said it meant nothing; she hadn’t seen what she thought she saw. She had always been reading it wrong. Then he was gone.

He didn’t mean to go. It was automatic, like shaking in the cold. It came from some machine inside of him, a shiny object lonely under itself, impure, like a pearl formed up in nacre around something small and sharp. He hadn’t been the one to put it there, but that didn’t matter.

She couldn’t touch him. She could only touch the things he’d touched, the second derivative.

Because she couldn’t reach him, she replicated him. From him she learned how she could learn the things he knew. She had the parts. He had left that much. She could make him again inside of her. It was the only way to keep talking. Not talking, but talking.

So what about Siegfried?

By the time our hero came around, Odette was far away, two-dimensional and thin, locked in herself like the shiny object.She knew so much more. He looked at her from a distance.

Then what happened?

The distance closed.

*

Remember what I said back then, at the beginning? The point of this story is how it happens to everyone. How it happened to everyone: to Odette, and to Siegfried, and even to Standhill, a very long time ago. They are pictures, fictions, manufactured sensations. You are always hurting. So am I. It is everything to us, and very little.

This used to be a story with a different ending. It was, of course, a tragedy.

But I think I’m reading it wrong.

I’m assigning this one. You arrange the meanings, or they arrange themselves, like points on an axis, pennies on the street. Something or nothing: that’s the part I’m working out.

Here is what I think I believe. We are faithless images, but I make up the difference. I am trying as hard as I can to see. I take measurements, I count things, I put them in a line and point them out. I count up and down again. I’ve grown my own pearly suspicion of signs, of grape vapes and words, so I’m careful. I speak in code, and I’m reading now, I’m reading right, I’m reading and re-reading. I’m reading you a story. So the things that hurt are starting not to. I’m saying this right now. I’m saying it to you.