Museum Of
We’re in the midnight of the set, and men in long coats and sunglasses gesture at me even though I barely matter. I’m only the midnight girl after all. My job here is to speak into the handheld radio and utter vibrating code or buzzwords—half-drunk eagle seen falling into the pier shocking divers and deer. Is that right? The detective is teaching me to speak it’s
really, no big science behind it, you just find the most palatable combination of unlikelies. In between takes we play with the night machine. It’s portable and lets out fog and drizzle but also dirty secrets (like the truth behind Operation Pantomime), and a newfound sense of fear and respect for the unknown, dampened only by a cool who-caresness (a sort of soft-edged petroleum nihilism). We’re instantly high when we switch it on and we push each other around on the dollies, disrupting the winding, brick-red (urethane) streets of the war-ridden mountain capital, where at any moment
forgetting the forms I once had. I’m growing used to here, or it’s growing used to me. I’m shacked up with the detective in his office where it smells like leather and rain and where his name is written in a gold-lettered semicircle on the windowpane. It’s always clouded with smoke or
and also with the monk who’s taken me to his snowy shack where he draws on the walls by candlelight and feels very guilty all the time. His little blinking aura tells me not this, but the shape of your crustacean origin. I tell him it’s ok, you’re not actually a monk, you’re an actor, or not even, you’re a fragment of a still dreaming its other lives, as we lie, side by side, on the straw mat. The only thing I
is the pain of the light. In between takes it’s all fun and good, as we fuck around with the night machine and the snow-blower. But when we close our eyes, arranged side by side on the stage glass, and the blistering begins, and I am blown up and out of scale, I wish I’d never been thought up, I wish I’d never chosen to hide from the Compound by darting between the stills of all my favorites.
Seismographic
When I open the door, Juana’s there already. Broadcast bands fall across her face, and her mouth is newspaper-blue. A century of careful axes on a dotted plane approximating the where you are. Where in the nearest moss-mountain-hideout, vines falling just right over the rocks and the mist, did you last unwrap a sandwich or peer into the dispatch? A loom of radio fibers hangs an overhead, determines length of hair, height, range of motion.
When I drag her from the bathtub, she’s thirsty, drowns the end of a bottle of bourbon in a few gulps, snatches the pack of Camels on the woven piano blanket and puts one between her lips. Almost immediately, before even lighting the thing, she begins to wax poetic. I didn’t expect this, seeing her in her fleece vest and ponytail. It’s like she’s an anthropology student and not a faultline recovered from a mountain.
She stutters her name over and over, but I can’t hear it even though I know it. Juana’s drunk already, and she tells me that she’s coming from the Institute where she’s obviously been all this time. I tell her that that’s not possible because she was last heard beneath a basin where her calls crystallized into extractable information and the whole crew was very thankful. I’m not readable or even a point really! she exclaims, even though while frowning, her lips form into a number.
I have so much to ask, mainly, in which apartment were you living last? I’ve seen the room so many times but they reconfigure daily. Sometimes you’re in the ground-level apartment with the beige carpet and mahogany panels and the statuettes and doilies and brick exterior courtyard where it rains often behind closed curtains. But sometimes it’s the one with the gray terrazzo floor, drafting table, mezzanine bed, and the you smoked so many joints inside, it began to smell like pasture.
As she becomes increasingly belligerent, I realize there’s no point in talking. I feed her cheese and crackers and reheat some of the ajiaco that’s been sitting on the stove but by the time it’s warm her head has fallen on the table. So I gather her surprisingly heavy limbs and body and carry her to the empty room my brother slept in.
Susana Plotts-Pineda
Susana Plotts-Pineda is an artist and poet. Her poems appear in The New York Review of Books, Copenhagen, Works & Days, Lana Turner, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is currently a recipient of a Fulbright Award in Mexico City. In Order to Extract the Memory It Is Of Course Necessary to Build the Room is her first book of poetry.