Isadora Plays!!

I open the door of my parents’ house. Xavier stands there, simmering, his hand stuffed in his jeans pockets. A flood of summer night flushes past him, and into the house: the stench of a desiccated whale’s corpse, the alarmed wailing of cicadas. He slides past me, he speaks in bursts. I listen. I listen and I devise evasions that are agile and harsh. He says Isadora, can we hit up the sacred black thicket behind your grandparents’ house and film the breeze work the trunks and branches and leaves and can we party on its rim. He says Look, I gotta look this thing in the eye and light a fire in its heart. Maybe your grandfather will hear this ruckus, he says. Maybe Francine Look too, he says, and he says this with outrageous joy. In the face of his joy, I am fleet-footed, I am barbed. He says he says he says I fight I fight I fight. I wonder as he says this and he says that -- I wonder this always -- if Xavier is not really my lover or my court jester or a companion on my quest or my best friend or a fucking person at all, but a utility of the world-calculation -- god, but he smiles as I think this. No, he is not malware, not a trap. But. I wonder is all. I wonder if he is only patient. If he only loves me. I wonder how he is wrapped in such fluorescence. I wonder if he knows of my satchel, full of things vital to killing and fucking, if he knows of the riot in my heart. I say You bring the fire, baby.

“Xavier,” I say, “I have an idea.” He listens. He practices reluctance. But he rarely tells me no. I hold the phone-camera, he cracks the peanuts out of their shells. It is a thing he has always done -- god, when he works -- he’s methodical and he’s full of light, he is brilliant. This time is no different. I film him. He hunches over his dining table. The tabletop hums -- littered with shells, clipped fingernails, chewed licorice. The world sloughs off of him. Off me, too. Misery withers, slips out of my heart, a little -- my friend cracks peanuts out of their shells, stern with concentration, open-hearted, beguiling. I thumb a peanut shell.

A mellow day. Rain, maybe. My dad visits his parents. I join him, pensive. Their house an eyesore: giant, yellow, wilted. Patches of grass in front. No fence. Out back, a thicket. A black empty sacred thicket. Dad knocks and I knock, but there is no answer. We enter. In the dining room, a pitcher full of plums. Pitcher scratched, decorated in white, painted, sideways diamonds. Plums runny and black as the thicket. My grandmother sits at the table, jaw slack, hands drenched in the paint, at her feet a paintbrush, a frenzy of bristle. Dad wraps his arms around her, and she spews words, like he squeezed them out of her. “Your father left for back there -- ” she waves her hand at the backyard, at the black empty sacred thicket, and speckles of paint dab the ceiling. “—and I saw them there, eyes, a whole mess of them—I couldn’t stop, I grabbed his paints and a brush and I—” I have always wondered if my grandparents were real, or if they were out of sync. If the world-calculation had properly considered their behavior. They always seem lost. World-calculation. My phrase, not the world’s. I just mean, is the world the world, or is it a program? Is my grandfather deleted, just bits of data, or a crazy old man wandering the woods?

Oppo Street. Afternoon. Crippling heat. Heels clack by. Everyone in black, used to this barrage of summer. The sun is not -- its progress across the sky leaves an arc of crude oil and smashed blueberries, or anyway a discharge of gorgeous sparkling solar material which most days fades by sundown. My legs pound. I text Xavier, a friend. Ask him to find me. I find refuge in a slant of shade. I wait. This morning, a busted Cadillac wheezed down our street, flinging newspapers at yards, front doors, birdhouses. Front page was ecstatic: a picture of a girl’s grinning face and curls and scars, and the girl’s name in the headline: LOCAL GIRL FRANCINE LOOK, PAGEANT QUEEN, ARSONIST, SUSPECTED DEAD -- the girl’s name in print, made a bleak, mean thing -- the girl’s name a slim, secret misery in my heart. The tea kettle screeched out its tiny throat. I walked off -- I left the house empty and unguarded, and I walked the neighborhood and the town -- goddamn, a riot in my heart! -- I once kissed Francine Look on the shoulder blade -- a better headline: LOCAL GIRL FRANCINE LOOK, HEART-ARSONIST, DEAD AT LAST. Xavier arrives. He hands me a glass of milk, the glass slick with perspiration, the milk ice cold. In the car, I drink. My lips remember.

A riot in my heart, a dream of doors. I am a mad king, confetti flitting around my head, foam lining my gums. We played mad king of the foul forest, when we were kids, when we knew what was what. There is a path, and at its end a door. A fight. I fill a satchel for the road, handfuls of stuff vital to killing and fucking, cherry blossoms, handwritten love-notes, a pair of earbuds and an iPhone, a packet of hot chocolate, tupperware with a sip of milk and dry oatmeal, a ziplock of abalone, a scimitar, a vial of earwax—tools of a mad king. Play the path. Sleep beneath sticker stars. Ahead, a party, or death, or love, or anyway, a ruckus—

I walk the old neighborhood. Barefoot, awash in dog-stink and fern-stink, twenty-three. Summer is aghast. A bruise spreads from my elbow to my wrist. I was born here, and I played here. Played king of the forest, girls-only, broken sticks and fairy wands required. Different now. Prettier. Cleaner. Fewer folk. If a tree is old and beautiful, it is obliterated by the city. My parents ponder leaving. In my back pocket, a crumpled old picture of me, one year old, a baby in a sunbeam, a god-ray. Filthy diaper strapped to my ass. Crying my throat raw. Is that not a miracle? Hunger, pain, appetite, majesty, and filth, slush in a diaper. I hope my parents decide to stay. I was born here, and here my heart’s beat sparked, whizzed with love.

Everyday the same—absurd, monstrous, alien, enormous, slow—everyday, a swell of love. The sky a kaleidoscope, the world a loop, or a world-calculation, or a—