Fabrications
Fabrications
by Jennifer Natalya Fink
I.
It’s everywhere, all over uptown and the remains of downtown, printed on everything from silk to chenille, on everyone from the mayor’s mistress to our hippie cat-sitter. On a do-rag arranged like a pirate’s, cocked to one side. Printed big on a too-tight sweater, clearly acrylic. Spread across gym shorts, worn with nothing but sneakers. And don’t forget those horrible pins, like old ladies wear when they want to jazz up their pants suits.
A plague of flag.
II.
You wear blue jeans that are too short and a rayon scarf that is too long. On Fifth Avenue, you do the impossible: you stand out. This is not the seventies.
You wear impossibly big earrings, glittery half-moons that pull your ear lobes to your shoulders. In Detroit, this is considered punk rock. You will not kiss and you will not swallow anything except diet soda and speedballs. This is not the eighties.
You wear both a nose ring and a ponytail. You play in a garage band that rhymes “dismay” and “day.” In a restaurant in L.A., you hum your dismay song as you fill up the ketchup jars and wait to be discovered. This is not the nineties.
III.
I close my eyes and open them and you are standing over me, as if you’ve come upon an animal already stripped of meat and are wondering what to do with the skin. You kiss me on the cheek without looking at me, fulfilling the minimum requirements for a kiss.
“Where should we go for dinner?” You have killed the ponytail; there’s a small dot that remembers the nose ring.
“Kono’s?” I touch where a watch would go, feel your pulse. Is it fast or slow? I don’t know how to read a pulse, but I like to pretend.
“Okay.” You are tired. You are already in your jacket.
We talk animatedly on the way to dinner, but fall silent after we order. You are watching your weight, no steak. The street is jumping tonight. It’s only Thursday, but everyone wants to find some spring in their evening. We both like these jittery city nights. We like our streets crowded and our pulses racing.
IV.
Nobody talks about it. It’s like in those old WWII movies where someone walks down the street and everywhere are flags with enormous swastikas, uncommented upon by our heroine. A club kid with magenta hair and green platforms has made a skirt of it, barely nipping below his crotch. A fluffy bow, tricolored, in a little girl’s long ponytail of gold. All done up in stars and stripes, red white and clashing blue. I prefer the old New York uniform, black on black, a pirate’s plain flag.
V.
The hot water is coming out green and frothy. I lean into the tub to investigate. This is it, I tell myself as if I’m the heroine of a post-Cold War thriller: they’ve poisoned the water. I put a glove on, an old red mitten missing its mate. The water even smells green, herbal. Herbal? Unless the terrorists are using Herbal Essence shampoo as their weapon of choice, it’s just a backed-up drain.
You like this story. You like my mistakes. You take off my glove and call me The Nose and swear my sense of smell is canine. You touch my back without thinking and if you did it again I’d be yours until the drain goes dry.
VI.
Subject: Support our troops!
I’m on every liberal hit list in the country, and still I get this shit. I open the email; who can resist? The flag is placed at the center. It looks like a frosted cake, the colors thick and blurry, and for $4.99, it can be mine. Fits right on your American car, but I have no car, American or otherwise. I don’t even drive; surely an act of treason. Special deal: three for $12.99—Buy one for your home, one for your car, and one for your neighbor. And one for the little boy who lives down the lane. The money goes to the families of the victims of the World Trade Center. They leave out the word ‘bombing,’ as if the building itself were the perpetrator.
VII.
I’d like to be dead, she says, but just for, oh, let’s say a month. To test-drive death, take her for a spin around the block.
That sounds very… American, you say. You are not alarmed. You and she have lots of conversations like this. You notice her jacket, a tight black wool number, boat-necked. It accentuates those thin bones on her neck. You smile at her neck.
Or to do it scientifically: here is a month dead, here is a month alive. She is animated now, the bones are dancing. We could watch both, she says, split-screen. Compare and contrast.
Like a ghost?
No, like a person who is dead and not dead.
It sounds tiring, you think as you nod. And boring, like one of those early seventies college films with an extremely pregnant naked woman jumping up and down on a tatty bed, while “Strawberry Fields” played at 35 rpm in the background. There were three record players, two screens, and one joint. She was in blue on one screen, and I think red on the other. Watch too long and you get a purple headache.
You steal a sip of her coffee as she keeps talking, turn the strawberry film off, and imagine yourself lining her coat, cloth on one side, skin on the other, and you feel her neck stretching out of you.
VIII.
Hey, remember that stupid war? How there were fucking flags everywhere, and we felt like we were trapped in a bad WWII movie? How everyone pretended George Bush was smart? Remember how right-wing and scary and just plain unsafe everything was? Remember being scared to open your Visa bill for a reason other than your balance? Remember seeing all your childhood fears on T.V.: planes exploding into buildings and people falling out of buildings and buildings crumbling until they’re not buildings anymore?
IX.
After you pop your father’s Viagra, examine his FY 1990-2000 tax returns, eat the vanilla almond Tofutti that’s dying in the fridge, and wash it all down with the most expensive cognac in the hall cabinet, what else is there to do at 4 a.m. at your parents’ house when you’re 33?
You explore under their bed, of course.
Now what?
You sit naked at the kitchen table in your father’s leather jacket. What time is it? They are in New Mexico California Montana, the larger of the retirement states. And you are here. What to do? Add shoes.
Your father is good for hiking boots. All the spoils of an upscale sporting-goods store are yours. Running shoes, all-weather nylon pants, and those goddamn boots, cleated heavy as clogs. Everything comes in small and large, no medium. Your father’s house is fully equipped for a father/son hiking trip.
You put on his boots without socks. They don’t go with the jacket. So take a tour. Pick up the pieces of dirt that fall off the boots as you clomp across the shiny hardwood floors. If this house was yours, you’d ban varnish. If this house was yours, you’d lose the vaguely Mexican rugs, kill the brass hall lights, retile the bathroom floor in something less arts-and-craftsy, and mix yourself a nice vodka-and-Prozac tonic. If this house was yours, you’d go to sleep.
X.
During the Stalinist era, the present vanished. Or, more precisely, it was erased. I’ll explain: in 1937, they printed a new map of Moscow for the first time since 1927, but instead of putting what actually existed on the map, they put the future: everything that was supposed to be built in the city according to the coming 5-year plan. So to find your way to the grocery store to buy some carrots, you had to use the map of the past and the map of the future, and figure that the produce of the present lay somewhere in between.
XI.
You want the ambulances to come like racehorses on speed, swerving over the yellow line to get to you. First you have to….faint? fall? No, something with a ‘c.’ Convulse? First you faint dead away, then you fall on the hard floor, then you convulse. A blanket is put around you, a blue polyester thing. Who chose it? Someone calls for the horses, we have a situation here, and still swaddled in blue, you drift from the scene, slipping away like a forgotten ghost.
XII.
We squint down Fifth Avenue. I notice there are others, also squinting. It’s hard work, looking for what’s not there. I hold your hand; I forget how warm flesh is, how solid you are. Let’s buy scarves, you suggest, and yes, this is exactly right. Something warm, something to tie, something to help us find this disappearing world.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of BURN and V (both from Suspect Thoughts Press). She is a professor of English at Georgetown University, and the founder and Gorilla-in-Chief of The Gorilla Press.
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