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Conchylomania

A collection of stories about the materiality of

language, the attempt of translation, the search for a
universal language, written in conjunction with AI.
Problems appear as mundane problems, but soon
grow to become problems of reality. A Media
Archaeology of the body across time. Short Stories,
essays, and poems. A media-horror memoir. Dream
fragments told and retold through AI.

The Translator
The Korean translator told her how to hold a word under her breath like a hen might
treat an egg as it incubates. She wore a gold crown on her head. The crown reflected her
hair like a halo. She spoke in a soft voice, almost kind. The translator’s hands were large
and rough, like logs of wood. There was nothing delicate about them. She injected text
into the palm of her hand with a syringe.
She held the translator in high regard, so now that she was writing her a personal
email, it made her very nervous even though they had spoken in person before. She began
googling Korean email etiquette and found them in the palm of trees. They crawled in the
place between her rib cage and waist. They coiled like intestines in the spaces. The writing
burned tracks through her; a blue and white temple cat. She saw the sky, a sky like a
spilled red ink onto a yellow parchment.
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She wanted to email her and let her know that it worked, but instead of a hen and
her eggs, she imagined a human-shaped creature with roots burrowing in the
sub-architecture of the city impervious to dampness and rot. It was a plant that could
burrow. It would burrow through the wires and USB ports of the city's data packets, then
inject itself into the personal data files of any computer large enough to harbor its small
fungal bulk. It would multiply like a bug. It would spread. It would eat her space until
there was no space left and the space became something else entirely.

She chewed on a fingernail.

She re-read the translator’s message. The writing burned tracks through her. Many
of the writing-in-the-hand’s lines could be seen as spider web lines. Older lines, ones that
had been mentioned earlier in the passage, many of the lines were no longer visible
because they had been covered in new writing.
The city, like a drawing on a page, was a flat and colorful sprawl of people and
buildings arranged in a grid, each one distinct, a building or a person, or both,
indistinguishable from the other. It had gears and power lines, transformers and copper,
rather it had copper, transformers, and gears; a city within a city. The city, warm and
welcoming as a wet tongue is a city so empty, so white, so pristine, so clean, it makes you
wonder if the city exists and if you are privileged enough to be wandering among ghosts or
if you are the ghost and the city is real, and maybe the people are ghosts, too. If you were
too immaterial to affect anything, you would take on the quality of the city and probably
lose your corporeality until you existed only in that soft and muffled white.
In the email, she wanted to convey in just the right words how much she appreciated
her work without saying explicitly that it brought tears and a profound state of hope (in the
way that 'hope' and 'history' rhyme like Seamus Heaney says). The air around a computer
screen, always clean, yet she could still feel its static hum and it feels like rain if you close
your eyes.
She was standing behind the bar facing the front door with her laptop in front of her
so that she could see who walked in by tilting her face upwards slightly. She shifted on her
barstool and the air became thicker. There was a magnet in her right eye, as though she
had one glass eye up and the other down.
Her colleague walked in with two other customers but she didn’t notice it was him at
first as he headed straight to the back. The door closed like a secret, a hint of a hole in a
wall. She watched her colleague walk in looking like he'd been in the sun for too long.
He began complaining about all the reserved shelf books so that all the customers
could hear. One of them came over and started offering to make some app to help that
would send notifications or something. She and her colleague calmly told the friendly
customer that they were fine and they would continue with their handwritten system. The
customer persisted. He told her that he had a friend who was a programmer and could
make the app. The more the customer explained his intentions and the more he offered to
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help, the more uneasy she got. She could feel the weight of the book covers in the display
case as she stared at him trying to help.
He stood closer than a customer should. He looked around the room searching for
help himself. The customer was thin, like paper, not a pile of hands. It was his as if he was
very hungry, or hungry for something else; please let me help you help myself.
The customers lingered as long as they could, closing the door behind them, leaving
the two of them alone in the store. Once everyone had left the bookshop, “Please don’t
bring up our problems in front of the customers and blame them on me when they’re not
all my fault,” she said. She stood frozen in her spot, her eyes fixed on her colleague, who
looked down at the floor and at the book covers on display. Her throat felt thick in the taste
of books on the shelf.
All at once, she felt a sense of her colleague being smaller, more fragile, and more of
a child than an adult. She fumbled to find the right words to say. The words were a kind of
skin, with a wet gleam and a subtle luminosity. Whatever that thing was, it floated between
the light and the dark, a pale, fishy green.
She went back to her email to the Korean translator while her colleague puttered
around putting books on shelves and generally making more of a mess than tidying. This
was a major point of their conflict. He would begin a project of reorganizing a section by
throwing the whole row of books on the floor and then leaving it for weeks, never
returning to the project. The action is depicted in three ways: they are placed on the floor,
they are on the floor, or they are floating above the floor. Never mind that organized piles
could be as obnoxious as disorganized ones.
She wanted to tidy but didn’t want to misplace something or create more work by
moving his stacks. Somehow it was always her fault whatever was missing, not the
possibility that a random customer had come in, shuffled through a stack, and moved
something. She mutters under her breath, instructs the world around her, but does not see
the room. She sees only the maps of the room, the books, even the floor. Who knows why?
The books in the world shuffled according to an economy too complex to sort out. Maybe
they were drawn by some gravitational force, a market more powerful than simple pricing.
Maybe some laws of physics and history were woven together in a fibrous economy of
their own – the cosmic jest at the center of the universe.
She muscled through the right tone she was searching for in the email - between
tenderness and appreciation, and authority on the subject. She finally clicked send and shut
her laptop. Her thoughts became a shaking surface, testing their lumps and bubbles and
pockets of resistance, like the surface of an indoor lake.
She approached the center megalith bookshelf and writhed, though invisibly, like a
branch in the wind, a branch snapping under the weight of too many books. She was basalt
and sangrite, blue and gold and warmer than the sun; she was black and white and her
contours were ocean waves in the dusk. She was the fossil layer of trees and bones, a layer
of trees and bones; she was not made of the earth, but she was imagined before the earth
was, thus the influence of an atmosphere full of paper. The writing burns tracks through
her and leaves a smell like a finger that has burned on a hot stove, which makes her nose
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itch and turns her stomach, her stomach crawls in her mouth. She can taste it on her breath,
red and white, like a fire in a foreign language. She smells the burning of a moth. It's a
heady, cloying smell, like the smell of a barbecue on a hot summer evening. She can't
explain why, but she feels as if each wing has been drained of all moisture. Her hair is dry,
as are her wings. She wants to know why she can't use them.

“Let’s go to the basement and alphabetize the poetry stock,” her colleague said to her.
It was already past closing but she had learned to go with any upsurge of motivation to do
organizing around here. She grabbed the key from the hook under the bar and met him at
the door.
She locked the door behind them and they walked into the chill night air. The
neighbors in the courtyard had all gone home and the front gate was locked. They walked
a few steps over to the elevator and she inserted the key and waited for it to arrive - they
heard the familiar arrival sound and opened the double doors and walked into the
industrial lift.
The poem slowly stares at the four corners of the lift, turned against itself. Strolling
into the haze, her hands are slow to dust, the poem's motion is effortless, takes the keys,
and undoes them. The poem takes time to undo. It puts on her face and reapplies her
lipstick, ties on her shoes, wears a necklace.
They glanced at each other and their eyes met as they waited a few seconds before the
lift shuttered down to the basement. As they awaited the descending of the elevator, they
spoke, but their words were not words. The words took their time, dropping slowly from a
dark corner and onto the ground, slowly moving through the clumps of sound, through the
clump of the moment, pausing, gathering pace, slowly moving then quickly moving down
the building with them. The words and their meanings slithered out of the building, carried
on the wind and flew through the air and rested on the ground outside somewhere to be
picked up and examined later.
The elevator stopped at the basement floor and they pushed open the double doors
into their storage space - it was an architectural piece: empty boxes piled high on each
other, empty poets’ suitcases floating towards the top, little styrofoam coolers, record
players, different kinds of shelves all hodge-podged together in three rows, and a taller
shelf along the back wall. The temperature dropped, the corridor became longer and
longer, the light in the ceiling and on the floor began to go, and then finally there was a
smell of wet soil and a light that shone in blue and flickered with a strange rhythm like a
speeded-up carousel.
They had gotten into trouble many times before with the fire ordinance for blocking
the emergency doors. They tried to stack things higher but sometimes it just rolled forward
into the space in front of the doors. They crouched by the poetry shelf –
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“This is really a solo job,” she said. “I can’t have you hovering over me, either you do
it or I do it.”

“Fine,” he said.

Her colleague walked to the elevator and through the doors that open on the opposite
side; he left both sets of double doors open, giving her extra light to see from the opposite
side of the elevator.
The other side was not technically their space but they used it anyway, keeping off to
the side their empty beer crates and cumbersome magazine racks that they are holding
onto until who knows when - perhaps until it can be put on wheels and they can roll it into
the courtyard in the summertime. Scraps of wood, some benches, and rolls and rolls of
turfgrass from the upstairs office, a golf repair company.
She settled herself into the tall section of poetry and pulled out a single book to begin
with. This was a book that belonged in a very tall fireproof bookcase, in which a thin man
lived. The thin man was also a book, which was very big and it was a whole town. The
thin man was very thin because he'd been standing at this very tall bookcase for too long,
because he had no clothes and because he ate a lot of food that was stored in the boxes.
You see, the thin man kept crawling into boxes of food and eating it until he was fat and
edible, and legible. The food was all drawn on very thin paper and he was the only one
who knew how to read them, so he discovered this and the rest of the characters were
jealous and desperate to find out. They all stood in line to try and get something, but it
turns out the man had already read all of the books, so he would always say “I already got
that one!” and then he crawled back into his tall bookshelf.
She was engrossed in her task for a good thirty minutes, starting the ritual by holding
as many from the top left corner as she could in her arms and starting the miniature
alphabet there and adding to it gradually from what was in her hands. Ashbery, John,
Mackey, Moore, Wright. From that, she gradually added what was in her hands. It was a
tool for understanding and control, long ago superseded by other, less cumbersome tools.
It was a living thing with a thousand eyes and eyeshots; a motley of these plain
microscopic things, each of them a different color, each of them with a different letter,
since & is a merger of e and t and will always be invisible, deaf and mute. Suddenly she
realized it had been very quiet for a long while.
There was a painter who rented out the neighboring basement space and she didn’t
even hear the swishing sound of his paintbrushes or soft radio crackle. She called out,

“Hey, man!”

She didn’t hear anything and thought it strange that her colleague would take the keys
and go back upstairs without telling her. But he couldn’t have gone upstairs because the
elevator doors were both still open. The smell of the veil approached something like the
smell of mothballs, but not quite like that. It was a smell of something shared, to which
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only the two of them were immune. She thought that she would like to hear something, a
voice, a song, anything, but she heard nothing at all. The rhythm in the air was as if
someone was calling your name, over and over, calling you on the telephone or in your
sleep. You wanted to make it stop but it never did, so you talked back, saying, “I’m here,
I’m here,” over and over, until the voice fell away into silence.
She was an archaeologist of thoughts bent over time like she was a singer, singing and
bouncing at the same time, digging through the overgrown past; she was digging in an area
that time forgot and hadn’t been buried and she had to dig deeper and deeper until she
found a preserved sandal; there she saw it, the footprint of her lover that made her laugh
because it wasn’t a fossil but a footprint that they had never left. It looks like the start of a
language of the body but the body reappears like a cut leaf, but never to form language.
Language is dead and yet the body continues to live.
She put the poetry books in her arms in an empty box and walked towards the
elevator. The light on their side went out every two minutes and you had to shake your
hand to motion-detect it back to life again. The light had just gone out when she walked
across the elevator into the next part and flipped the light switch on. The light stayed on.
She stood there in the elevator, surrounded by the dim books, the dim elevator, the dim
light, and the dim city, and all at once, the light seemed to get brighter and brighter until it
was so bright that it burned. She was completely in awe of this room, its secret ability to
be lit in the darkness. The atmosphere clicked and she became a character in a story.
She saw an open door at the end of the room. The dust moved and rustled under the
door when she walked in. The door itself didn’t make itself heard, but the world around it
seemed to, in a way. She finally noticed this feeling when she stood outside the door and
heard it echo off the walls of the building, reverberating and bouncing off the walls and
then streaming out into the streets. The door made a loud creaking noise like the sound of
the subway between stations.
The basement always made her feel like she was timing herself, moments between
appearing and reappearing, birthing and disappearing.
There was no internet and no electrical outlet in the basement so it was easy to lose a
sense for the time of day. She went to the door that was open beyond the double basement
doors and poked her head around the corner to look into the room.
The industrial lights were glaring brightly on the concrete floors and columns.
Some discarded art packaging supplies from the landlord were leaning against the columns
- plastic sheets and plastic rolls and cardboard. She walked down the center, her
low-heeled boots crunching into the floor. “Hey!” she called out. The fluorescent lights in
the room were practically cracking with brightness.
She continued to the next open door ahead of her, hearing no reply. She repeated this
through three more rooms. Finally, she heard something, a grunting sound. She paused and
walked slowly on her tiptoes to make less noise; she peeked her head around the corner
and saw laying on the concrete floor in what looked like an interrogation room, her
colleague kneeled over clutching his stomach. She ran over and put her arms around his
shoulders - “what the hell?”
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She saw a figure that looked like a giant squid with a human face, arms, and torso. Its
human head was bald and turned towards her, eyes glowing bright red.
“I walked into the room and suddenly felt sick and dizzy; you should get out - I think
it’s something in the air,” her colleague said, not noticing the squid. “It smells like
medicine, and what smells like meat,” he said from the concrete floor. The Squid Man
groaned behind him with long white and purple tentacles that reached out and snaked
around the room like deadly veins.
She clutched his shoulders and helped him to his feet and started toward the elevator.
She was also starting to feel it now… like a fog rolling in front of her eyes. She tried to
hold him and keep herself standing but she felt like a wind had just punched her in the
stomach and made her double over. She felt herself falling and then together they
collapsed. Her vision was like she was looking out the window. The view was of the floor,
the walls, and the ceiling, but it was all at once, like looking through a sieve. She felt the
surface of her life start to fold in on itself like a packed birdhouse suddenly cast upon an
ice-floe. And then she felt the floor give way beneath her feet and her knees and her hands.
Light raced over the floor and the floor gave way, like a wave receding into the sea. She
felt the world curl up like a carpet, folded and packed into a box.
…

They were still in the same part of the basement when she flitted her eyes open -
her stomach still felt hollow as though she had been cut in half. Her coat splayed all
around them and the bulb was flickering above. The dream of a squid had been so intense
like she had been transported. Her skin prickled a bit at the memory of it. She clutched her
head as it ached and tried to shake her colleague awake. He didn’t move by himself. She
laid him carefully onto his back and crawled onto her hands and knees in an effort to stand.
She looked towards the series of doorways into identical rooms that led to the elevator.
This was where they would unload the pallets of books when they would arrive
from America. Three tons of books all at once. It was a sleepless few days as they
unpacked and arranged them in their limited amount of space. Those days often felt
dreamy and like they were in a parallel world in which the surface dwellers needed their
goods to survive the coming days and their work at bringing reading material from
America was somehow working to keep a dark cloud at bay - a mental one. She felt like
she was in a neo-noir thriller on those endless days unpacking in the basement. So weary,
and so excited to open the next box and see what had arrived. She reminisced as she stayed
there on all fours, catching her strength. What the hell was happening? She crawled
towards the first door, making holes on the knees of her tights. She looked back at the
figure of her colleague in the last doorway, slouched over and unmoving. What had caused
them to lose their breath and consciousness like that? She called out again, “Hey!” but he
didn’t answer.
She looked ahead at the next door and continued to crawl on her hands and knees but
before she could make it, another wind flew over or perhaps into her and she felt herself
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falling on the cold concrete floor. She followed the gentle beach of her lips and a quiver
cracked her cheek; the out-of-control divinity was making a prisoner of her mouth.
This time she was awoken by footsteps running. She flitted her eyes open just a tiny
bit and saw two figures running, small in stature and barefoot. They were carrying
something heavy between them, each carrying a strap of a long duffel bag. The men have
laughed, their laughter sounds like crystal bells in the night. The figures are covered in a
lean contour of smooth muscle, carried under it by a low center of gravity, and reaching for
the ceiling like a pagoda. It is composed of a warm fluid, not blood, that pulses with a
golden light.
Their shoulders were pressed down with the weight, making their running have an
off-kilter figure like they were playing tug-of-war. The skin of the men is a wool blanket,
the wool soft and warm. The shoulders of the men were sloped down like a scimitar and
extended in a very long and tapering fashion, making them look like a blade. It was a very
smooth "shoulder" that joined with the neck where a neck should be. The long and straight
neck looked like a human neck, but had the hue of bubblegum in a nicotine-stained mouth.
Locking the sinews into place, stretching the tendons taut in a wired lattice of pure force,
their shoulders were like wedges of granite.
She couldn’t gather her bodily senses together fast enough to jump up and see where
they were going but she raised herself slowly and got to her feet. They left an imprint of
solar flares on the floor. The sensation slowly traversed up through her hips, then up both
of her thighs until it hit her sex. It was there that the warm sensation was brought down to
her ankles, which were outside her peripheral vision at that moment, and engulfed them
entirely. She yawned heavily, pushing her body up and out, letting the warmth of the day
pull her body down the street.
She shouted and they did not look over their shoulders to see who had called but
continued as though they heard nothing. A passing car's headlights cast the buildings in
silhouette and the street with neon lights blazing. Traffic and the fumes of passing cars and
exhaust mixed in the air.
They were more like frazzled office workers than big heist robbers. They were more
like two mittens. Two mittens that had recently been used to pass by robbers via a very
cold street. They walked to a side door that had been propped open with a brick and
shimmied through the crack in the door that led to a side staircase. She noticed now that
they were teenagers, and very androgynous. She realized she had no idea what gender they
were, but they definitely had the wiry, oily adolescent presence of in-betweenness about
them. She followed them, passing through the heavy door crack left ajar with the brick,
and walked up the staircase to the courtyard. She saw them continue to scuttle with the
heavy bag in between them, across the courtyard and into the street. She saw them make a
quick turn to the right once they got to the sidewalk. She was very curious and partly
thought that it was none of her business.
The only truly fishy thing about it all was the poisonous gas in the basement and the
fact that she had never seen these people in the courtyard ever. The echo of high-heel
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shoes grinding through the alley and a shuttered store window dripping wet with
condensation sounded like a strange lullaby in the night.
They could be workers from the art gallery that stores their things in the basement as
well, for all she knew. She walked across the courtyard in the cold night, and turned to the
right onto the street, knowing if she saw them she would have to follow and if she didn’t
she would be a little disappointed. She was cold, and she felt blood rush to her head. Her
muscles ached and her joints were stiff. She felt lonely, fearful and a small part of her felt
lost. She licked her lips and tasted something- partially gross and partially sweet. She
lowered a hand to her mouth and tasted blood.
She peered down the street and saw no sign of the pair. A large space opened, studded
with pitch, stretching on and on, into a violet hole.
She turned around and walked back into the courtyard that was suddenly lit by lights
coming from the previously shadowy four corners. Her colleague was there in a hooded
cloak performing some kind of rite in front of a makeshift fountain that looked like it had
been snatched from a garden display in front of a bank. The rite consisted of going back
and forth between a tiny table where his laptop keyboard was glowing, where he would
type quickly into an automated translation website and then move to the fountain and dash
little paper airplanes directly into the water with a force that would make the airplane fly a
long distance. They disappeared under the surface. Next to the fountain was a large pot
with a leafy plant inside that was double the height of the pot. The leaves began to shake
and slowly, a grubby tuber-looking hand gripped the edge of the pot from the inside of the
pot, tossing some soil onto the concrete. The dish was chock full of soil. The hand, a
grubby root. The leaves flexed and rippled. The mandrake root's thoughts were translated
onto the computer screen: This was it. This was what the strange days were leading up to.
Here we are. Finally. We've always known who we are, though. I can think. I can observe.
I can feel no satisfaction in it, though. There are so many better things to be.
The leaves began to shake like a salt in the wind, and slowly a dirt paw like an iron
mask that had thawed in the sea and was dying in slow motion, reached inside the pot and
tossed some dirt onto the concrete.
The top of the plant began wiggling even more and rising from the pot as a chubby
mandrake in the shape of a human baby stood up in the pot and shook some more dirt from
itself, moving like a tiny dancer. The roots dance in a dance that has no words, but there is
a reason, an idea.
The mandrake had a face as much as tree bark has a face when looked at closely,
earthy and moist but dry and colorless. Inside, its roots were a tangled warren as bright
inside as they were outside. The mandrake began to rise from the pot and raise its arms
like a tiny superhero; it moved in a wide arch like a rainbow gliding across the sky visible
from the courtyard. The roots rose from the earth in a series of concentric rings or a
weeping caul. It is that same caul found in a thousand bouquets of flowers. The mandrake
root keeps noise to a minimum, the roots swaying with the breeze. It was like the translator
had designed the sun to be in the shape of a mandrake and thus the mandrake roots were
freer than birds at all times.
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The Transfusion
Suddenly, I knew I was on my way home. On my way, I stopped by a house. A
young girl was there who reminded me of the vampire child in the Swedish movie. It
wasn’t any better than the house. The air was stuffy and smelled of burning incense, and
the wind was turning the house upside down, rattling the windows and the doors with light
fluttering curtains. The world had drawn a gun on itself and pulled the trigger and they
were all gone, except one. She was the only one left. She was waiting. It was like watching
the sunset, with her sitting in the middle of it, the sun, watching the sunset in the form of
the world gliding silently around her. She had fired the gun and the world was dead, except
for the girl sitting in the middle of the sun and the ground underneath her was the exact
texture of her skin.
She showed me her dead family; all the piled bodies on the porch in the back like
in that Russian war movie. She was lonely and needed blood; she was dying. She had
killed her family. I told her that there was another house to stay in alone on the hillside that
was abandoned. I pointed the way to her and was sympathetic to her pain. I continued
walking down to the lake in front of my mother’s house. My mother wasn’t home yet. As I
walked in, I floated over the dock of the lake. It was like flying and I was enjoying it
immensely; I turned my body upside down with my legs together and my arms spread,
upside down over the lake that was inside the house. The house’s floor was the lake. Beds
floated on the water. I let myself down and stepped onto one of the beds. Brown muddy
water splashed onto the bed and I stayed still, not wanting to create a big splash. There was
a dead fish. It was rotting and rotting as the night went on.
The odor was of a shadowed place, a doldrum of a place. I knew that if I stayed
there, I would die of thirst. I heard my mother come in and she immediately started
preparing to perform a blood transfusion on herself. It smelled like blood was being
transfused from one woman to another. I could smell the blood, coagulated and thick on
my mother’s hands. The splatter of the incision, the live vein laid out, the measured
withdrawal; the tool just inserted into flesh, the scalpels held in human hands. The pale red
blood leaking out on the floor in drops, she sponged the blood as it spilled, a mess on the
white bath tile.
My mother’s blood was stored in several bags and tubes, two in the refrigerator and
three in the cellar. She put each bag in a plastic bag and put that bag in the freezer. My
mother's footsteps were like the weird crackle of wet glass, which was the way I imagined
deer breaking glass in the wintertime; she emitted a flurry of sparks and slithering
electrical circuits, a blizzard of copper and white tungsten. Pushing in through lines made
gates, opening out. Her body was a house floating down a river. Rowboats were on stilts,
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snug along its walls. Her heart was pounding: Here was a way to help the vampire child by
giving it her new life, returning it to the world of the living.
I knew the vampire child would smell the blood and possibly kill my mother, so I
frantically locked all the doors - they were white French double-doors. My mother asked
what I was doing but I didn’t reply. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw on the glass ceiling
the vampire child crawling upside down trying to hide from us. I know she didn’t want to
kill my mother or turn her into a vampire, but she was a vampire whose thirst was for
blood at all costs. It was the face of my mother come back to life yet returned to death, the
final death. She held the mouth of the vampire child with both hands.

The Animator
I was with a group of people in a dusky, grey landscape. I heard the wind howling
although the wind seemed to be coming from the earth. It was like the wind was echoing
from the earth. I could taste a fungus burning on my tongue, like salty licorice. The weeds
were sculptures made from teeth; their stems were wires and the wind a subcutaneous
whisper for their ears. There was a playground made out of bone, and the swings had been
replaced with venous trees. When the call of a crow fell from the cold, grey sky and spilled
onto the playground, the children were not there; the swing-set was a marble sarcophagus.
Rocks were covered in webs made of atoms in the thin air, with miles of red lumps that
blink in and out of nonexistent space.
We were standing beside abandoned Victorian houses, a style that seemed wholly
unoriginal to the landscape. The paint was peeling off the walls, and their slated roofs were
falling away. The earth was cold, like a reptile. I could feel the bones and muscle deep in
the earth, and the bone stitched together into the earth like a sudden, violent fracture. A
landscape uncurled like a pair of ancient sea serpents from the surrounding city, leaving a
net of blood vessels flowing across a cloth of darkness.
Someone said out loud in the group that we should just tear them down, after which
we heard voices out in the wilderness that was actually coming straight from the earth
itself say, “We live here!” Someone laid down on the earth and a face appeared made of
the earth beside her face and told her about how it was their home. They were vampires
and they had nowhere else to go. Their families were dead, so they stuck together as a
clan.
A new face was emerging from the yellow soil, alive, no longer gazing with eyes
closed, but with eyes wide open and narrow, and brown, as if from concentration. The
features were reworked, as if by a sculptor. Still, I sensed that it was the same face, only
the details were being developed. I was seeing the face of someone I knew well, but whose
features were now shifting away from a more familiar shape towards an even more
familiar form. I realized that what I was seeing was the sculpting of a landscape, a
 12

landscape made out of people, a person made of a landscape, a face that had been under
the ground, now showing itself to me, a face made of the earth, with eyes.

Elizabeth
I stood next to a coffin where Elizabeth Báthory slept. She was waking up from a
long sleep and I tried to get her to go back to sleep by brushing my fingertips over her
eyelids in a downward motion. Her long eyelashes twinkled like fireflies in the night. The
woman's eyelids, I realized, could be mistaken for hands, or legs: the hands or the legs of
the woman, to be precise. She was waking up from a long sleep, if indeed her rest was a
deep one, the kind that's aided by a cold, white, cathartic wind. That her eyes could be
mistaken for legs seemed especially apt given the context of the scene - a bed, sheets, a top
of a dresser, perhaps even a bedside table; a deep indigo, as you can imagine, with a
singular, dim lamp amongst the dark and the blue, itself nestled on the most left-side
corner of the room. The eyelids began to glow as if being kissed by a cat.
She woke nonetheless and sat up. She was trying to enter my body with these long
pricks on her fingers that she tried to poke into my skin. My body did not respond to the
pricks – my skin remained intact. The pricks were absorbed by my flesh and disappeared. I
would take the back of her fist and fold her long finger pricks into her wrist where they
would stick into the flesh to try to calm her. The back of her fist was long and dark like a
tusk and she poked at me with her long fingers like a porcupine, her skin as soft as the
insides of a pillow, her nails long and nimble like a cat's claws, the whiteness of her
bone-like fingers like a moonlit blur when she folded into a thumb, the nails of her little
finger like a chisel, the skin on her forefinger like the bark of a tree, the tip of her
forefinger like a poisonous berry. It is the smell of the body, a mixture of unclean sweat,
bile, blood and menstrual fluid. It is a smell so strong that it cannot come through with her
hands in a fist.
I succeeded in keeping her from entering my body but she was still a terror, an
angry gothic figure with her long hair usually wrapped into elaborate braids and decoration
fitting a 16th-century European countess, flying wildly around here and her white linen
sleeping gown, bare and ghostly. In the evening, beauty is a light that glows more radiantly
when it is coupled with rage. It is one of the moon's upper left teeth, a rooftop is
exploding, a grenade from a burning building throws a doll into a forest, a forest has no
name, and a deer has a human neck that turns into a tree, the neck is folded and a
semi-circular stone is placed on the edge of the roof. A spider sees the tree and becomes a
tree, a tree has no name and a deer has a human neck, the neck is folded and a
semi-circular stone is placed on the edge of the roof.
She ran around the building in her bare feet like a prism that flits from one corner
to the next in a VHS glitch as she desperately tried to find something to jump into. She
 13

tried to dive into my body by passing through my flesh as if she was swimming through
water. She tugged at the sheets with her hands and her long fingernails seemed to slide
through the fabric. It piddled up into little dark clouds and joined other dark clouds and
formed a megalithic bone like a stalagmite. Her hands are long and thin with long fingers.
Each finger is extended to its very tip, each finger like a long hair. She has blue veins
though the skin is pale and flawless.
She finds the light of something digitally blue and compares it to her skin. She
realizes the fingernail trick does not work on the hardcover of a screen which is not skin. I
show her the mechanics of it when she finally settles down. We sit side by side at my desk.
I pull up a chair and she scoots in to rest her elbows on the glass table top. I open the blue
light in the darkness while we can still hear the dripping ocean outside. The salt does not
compare. The light reflects on her face and I cannot tell her enough about all of it so I say
nothing.

Media Player
I took a note but it was from a distant place. It held words, but I couldn't make out the
words.

A room made of glass, I saw the world beyond the glass, the stars and the moon and
the birds and the soldiers marching. They looked so far away, and I thought I'd never get to
that place.

The note was a square piece of paper. The paper was embossed with a vignette of a
city. I held my note close, but it didn't smell like anything. I tasted the note's ink, it was
like a sweet kiss on my tongue, but it wasn't just honey, there was something else.
Something like sandalwood that tasted like summer, like a long night of kissing. Like the
first kiss. Like a promise. Like the end of winter and the beginning of spring.

A note is a sound effect that may be inserted into the mixer at any point in a sound,
assuming there is a mixer; in a system that supports advanced sound editing, there is
typically a mixer, a list of sounds (sometimes called clips or nuggets) that must be
arranged in time over a timeline. The nuggets represent sound, but it's physical sound, not
pure sound. The nuggets are arranged by the mixer in time relative to each other. Each
sound has a different peak amplitude relative to another sound, and if you move the
nuggets left or right of the others, then the sound goes quiet, louder, or quieter. This takes
the form of a spectrum, a colored bar graph that surrounds the nuggets. The sound
fragments fell out of the mixer like raindrops collecting in a bucket. They were static and
cold, but that didn't matter because my ears weren't listening anymore. I looked at the
 14

mixer, at the list of sounds, and at the raindrops, some far away and some closer to me, and
thought that everything was full of raindrops splitting into smaller raindrops.

The note and the note, when held up to my ear, reminded me:

I am sitting in the front seat next to my mother in her forest green Toyota Camry, traveling
on an interstate and then 40 km more on a smaller highway to her hometown. I came up
with these long car ride games: The Hand Radio. I hold up my left hand like a robot with
all fingers spread out as far as I can muster. I tell my mother: this is the hand radio! Touch
the thumb if you want to listen to the Beatles. Touch the forefinger if you want to hear The
Ugly Bug Ball. Touch the middle finger if you want to hear my dream from last night.
Touch the ring finger if you want to hear me make random noises without words. Touch
the pinky finger if you want to hear Joni Mitchell. My mother never remembered these
details and would ask me to repeat many times. She was driving after all. Colour
Blindness. Look at that purple car! No, it’s red, come on. It is purple, no doubt about it.
The Fake Sleep. I would pretend to be asleep and start muttering things that would blast
into full-blown speaking in tongues; things I didn’t want to say in normal rational waking
states, or just jibber-jabber. My mom would tell me when I ‘woke up’ what I said in my
sleep.

I received a bulky IBM laptop in 1999 when I was ten. My first instinct was to type my
favorite books to see what it felt like to write them. The screen came to life when I turned
it on. It was a little bigger than me and the keyboard was a little bigger than me, but it was
just how I pictured a book being written. I closed the lid and closed my eyes. The laptop
felt like a mouth, it was so full of me. The first instinct was a mess of motion and mercury,
a squidgy mess spilled, of a burnished bullet hitting dry skin with a minimal punch, of a
rifle shot hitting the wall of a barn, splitting the mud and feathers, hitting so thickly and
quietly the bullet was inside you before the sound struck the eardrums.

My teenage siblings would look through the shelf of VHS with their friends on a weekend
evening while I was seven or eight. They would pause on one VHS and pull it out and
propose to the group “How about we watch this one?” Well, which one is that? With a grin
they would explain that it was my home birth. They knew it made me uncomfortable and I
had never seen it and refused to see it. I would usually just shake my head silently no,
please don’t watch that one. Let’s watch a Disney movie instead. Someone watching the
film meant that I would reverse myself. It is a film. The taste of chemicals and film,
dreams and reality bleeding heavily into one. The truth is lost, in the bleariness of death
and I'm standing in the doorway. My feet are planted at the bottom of the dripping foyer,
my bare feet hanging off the edge. The film is a single line of pixels, faded, dirty, blurred.
It is a single shot. If I could see it fast forwarding and rewinding and playing in repeat, it
could somehow also happen to me. It caused great existential dread. It felt like fingers
were touching my skin, their coldness sending chills up my spine. The dread was like
 15

jamming a hatpin into crepe paper, it was like having a sunburn, it was like staring at urine
being drawn on dust.

From my bedroom loft over the living room, I would drop notes onto unsuspecting family
members that said things like, I love you please don’t ever die. Silently. Dropped. In.
Their. Lap. The notes would arrive while they were watching films, having coffee, wine,
or tea, petting the cat or dog, napping.

I walked to the public library from swim practice under big oak trees and realized living is
like a glacier. All of the things I cannot say or explain, hidden under the water. All of the
things we cannot see hidden under the water. All that we can see or make shape of or write
about is just the tip of the glacier that we can share. Speech is a glacier especially, the
leaves shaking in the trees seemed to say. It was as blue as the sky was deep, and other
colors seemed to wade through it. It was city sized and riddled with a million alien fish. It
had branches that were guns and it was made of ink and fish.

My brother got a Nintendo Playstation when it was released in 1997 and only one recently
released game: James Bond 007. I became obsessed with beating the game, which took me
about two years. I played nonstop and eventually beat the game but not without developing
first person shooter syndrome. My imagination run amok in the dark. My real arms tied
behind my back. Shortly after, my family dispersed; my parents divorced, my sister moved
away, and my brother died in a car accident. What followed was years of reading silently
in my bedroom with no interruptions because it was only me and my mother in our home
now - we became a nation of two, silent and contemplative, driving on the interstate
towards her hometown.

THE PRINTER
Learning the process reminded me of learning to drive a stick shift. I loved connecting
with the car in a way that bypassed automation - I was required to listen to the machine
and adjust accordingly. One hand on the wheel, one hand on the gearstick, both feet
occupied with clutch and gas. It was a brilliant feeling of intuitive oneness with a machine.
With the Riso printer, there was a similar need to pay attention and to listen, and to be
ready to respond at any moment to make sure things went smoothly. It was all
troubleshooting and reading the little map of the machines' insides on the diagram. A
section would light up wherever the problem occurred. Perhaps the 'masters' made on thin
paper were piling up and needed to be discarded, perhaps there was a paper jam, perhaps
the ink roll needed twirling. First I made 60 copies of the front pages and organized them
into neat stacks on the long working table, then it was time to flip them all over and print
 16

the other side. It was beyond literal, the most literal process I could ever imagine. The way
you put the paper in was the way it came out on the other side. When you made the
'master' you put the page facedown and it appeared face up in the paper tray. There were
uncanny moments where the glitch would happen and the troubleshooting would begin
and it would be like revealing the stomach of the book. In the way that problems,
especially with technology, reveal the structure of the machine or the product, these very
unautomated processes of adjusting to the Riso printer so that the book could be made,
was akin to the book being revealed to me during its surgery. There were moments of a
paper jam and I would fish inside the center of the machine for the stuck page and pull it
out and, of course, I would have to read the page as though it were a special message. The
page would inevitably be about the production of voice, the tongue revealing itself as a
long, open road that stretched before you and the breath, the weather above you. As you
drove down this road of tongue in the cavity of mouth and weather, whatever the weather
may be, the mechanics of tip of tongue, back of tongue, back of throat, back of teeth, lips
together, fricatives, glottals, sudden stops that caught the air or allowed it to pass through.
The mouth of the printer presented all of these variables as the road opened up during the
long drive. I listened to the hum of the motor and in one motion of my foot floating for a
half a second in the same instance as my forearm aligned with a groove, full stop,
continuing, gliding forward. I opened my mouth. I read the diagrams of the machine,
reading them because of the words and reading them because of knowing I should be able
to do so.

The Window
I turned my head from left to right slowly. The tiny particles of sand, trapped in my hair
that lay across my shoulders, tickled my skin. I could feel them against my back. It felt
like someone had sneezed on me. The sweet taste of the ocean up ahead of me, the tang of
my sweat, the bittersweet flavor of my fear.

Feeling the bits of sand in the back of my neck, minuscule little particles that ground
against bone. The particles in my hair and the sand caught in my eyelashes, they danced
with the light on my skin. I turned my head left, then right. The smallest bits of sand were
trapped, wedged between a collarbone and shoulder blade. Some were even lodged in my
underarm. They tickled against my skin, little grains of sand. The grassless planes of the
earth above my head felt like they were spinning in a hurricane.

The dislodging continued and I grabbed my front teeth under the hook of my right fingers
and pulled it upwards like the emergency exit wing of an airplane and with my left hand I
grabbed the bottom teeth and pulled in the opposite direction. From the center emerged a
 17

breathing sound which was breathing also because of this pull in opposite directions. I
pulled and pulled until my hands met in the other room. We stayed like that, the breathing
sound, my hands in opposite directions, and the invisible bow that had just been released
and sent me flying. We waited in the other room until I could return in one piece but one of
the pieces never returned.

I dreamed of an image/concept that was so beautiful, like an acid trip. I remembered that
human bodies were made up of millions of smaller human bodies that decided to form a
robot millions of years ago. The robot became a human when it forgot that it was a robot.
The image was of a mechanical human body with little units made up of other people like
the little people steering the heads in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. The smaller people decided
to come together to make a human body a long time ago. This is actually what all living
humans are made up of, but the tiny people are actually our ancestors. My mouth was open
when I woke up because I was so in awe of this dream image/concept relay of information.
It was almost like a powerpoint presentation.

I looked at my nightstand and saw the head of my T.V. blinking. To my left, I saw a thin
silver line traveling from the edge of the screen to the wall behind me. I looked closer and
realized it was my Ethernet cord. My eyes followed the line and saw one of the small
people looking down at me. I raised my head and saw the small man staring at me
suspiciously, his face a deep shadow. His large eyes looked at me with the same quiet
intensity that a cartoon rabbit’s do when they’re deep in thought. He was wearing an
oversized all black suit. The image of a mechanical human body was like a stained glass
window, with a thousand little people in different shapes and sizes, laughing, talking, and
running around. There were human arms and legs and machines inside the glass window.
The small people could feel the tiny people’s bodies coming together, like a game of
dominoes. The little people could feel their bodies connecting, the electrical transmissions
and nerve impulses, an electrical wave, traveling thousands of feet to make this one human
body.

I began to write:

I was by the seashore on rocks situated in an open building like a shed that the
waves would crash into and then recede from. I tasted the salty air and ocean, but
something else overpowered the salty air. I wasn't sure what it was. I held onto the corner
poles so as not to be dragged out. The waves rolled over the rock as if a giant suction cup
was trying to suck me out of the building. The loud crashing was so loud it reverberated
through my bones and I thought the whole world would collapse. There was nothing to
grab onto, the building was flying through the air, heaven and earth were colliding into
each other. The subject held on to the crooked poles of the building at the seashore in order
not to be pulled out into the open, where the waves might strike him. He tasted the salty air
and the ocean, but the third, unknown parameter overwhelmed all of those, though his
 18

description contained neither of the parameters first and second. My companion would be
swept out and glide over the round rock that the waves swept over. I had a huge feeling of
a giant suction cup dragging me into the complete unknown. The unknown has a very
small mouth and it yells nonsense, but it has a very large belly and it barfs whole rivers of
nonsense.
It was a bright, beautiful yet cloudy day. An inanimate, three-eyed character was
surrounded by lemon-yellow spots and red umbrellas, with a small crown located at the
exact center of his forehead. With the tongue of a black dog, the day licked his own balls.