Door 9: After Love, This

And then she is climbing up a concrete stairway, the kind at the center of buildings used in the event of a fire or other emergency, often the only thing that remains standing after a disaster, shattered, charred, the tower at the core of things, the central spiral of what was once a whelk shell in the trough of the retreating tide, but, as noted, she is going up, not down, so it’s not a matter of an emergency (or is it?).

She isn’t attempting to escape from some the catastrophe (is she purposely going towards it?)  Are the elevators out of order, requiring her to take the stairs?  That might well be, except that the building she’s in doesn’t have a central emergency stairwell made of reinforced concrete to be used in the event of fire, terrorist attack, earthquake, etc. but an ineffectual and outdated network of metal ladders and rusted catwalks, (a.k.a. a fire-escape) bolted to the side of the plum-colored brickwork.

It was one of those nights, in other words, that snag a corner of your consciousness and won’t let go, a little fish-hook in the brain, the kind of all-pervasive sensation that “things aren’t quite right” that one might have in a dream, but that having while awake makes everything that much more unreal.

“It’s all made of tissue-paper,” Xie whispers as she climbs, tentatively touching everything. “I could rip right through it, tear the world to shreds…” but then what would I see, something worse, what could be worse, there’s always something worse, no it can’t be worse than this, but what if, not it can’t, etc.

Love, when it ends, is like a city that is no more, a vast expanse of rubble and burnt plastic, punched tickets, expired visas, and bones pounded into dust. Here, the phones never work and the network is always down, the connection is forever lost and every message is undeliverable. This is a wasteland of fatal errors where language is a code no more decipherable than the wind, a noise once full of intimations and imaginings, but stale and empty in itself, all white noise and junk mail.

What survivors still stalk this fallout zone are stripped to essentials, brief and cannibalistic, their features stamped with idiot lusts and cancerous hunger—it’s a wonder you never noticed this before.

A wonder. And a mercy.

What happened here, what unspeakable disaster, to reduce the world to this, to what we feared would one day happen, to reveal what had been behind the mask all along? And now that it has happened (and stands revealed), whatever it is, how do we go on, or do we?

Perhaps we don’t go on, but then it’s clear we do, or is it? Is it possible that we just imagine we go on?

“Hello, hello, I know you’re there,” Xie prays, her voice trembling this side of glossalia, “please pick up, please, I want to talk to you, just for five minutes.”

She’s standing under the broken arch of what used to be the entrance to an office building at 38^th and Broadway, that is what you think, but the address could be anywhere, a ruins in Pompeii or the rubble in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing.

She is talking into a cell phone that is connected to nothing whatsoever, a message machine, perhaps, a forever spooling tape like on the interrogator’s table, God’s ear, an information harvester like the NSA, and into this inattentive, indiscriminately-recording device she speaks her confession, a bit of evidence, never-to-be-heard, forever inadmissible.

“Please pick up, please,” she chants in a language of her own desperate invention, a language that, in any event, no one even hears, like the language of whatever god one believes in, who might be defined as is anyone who doesn’t answer.

“Please don’t do this,” she pleads and gasps, as if she were being strangled, or perhaps she has finally crossed over into speaking in tongues, after all, and this we can only guess is what she is saying, now and next and forever, “Please answer. I love you…”