“THE START”
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2023 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Wellness.”
for Mike, my shingles doppelgänger
I was with the writer Cumin Baleen. We sat, together, in front of a church I couldn’t recall by name. But I’d described it and we met there.
I have never been to Oslo.
I imagine, about Oslo, a pink light is like an eel evaporating. And when the light crosses flat business buildings it, in a way, turns the glass into mirrors which reveal the face of the lord, smashed into burning clouds.
Cumin and I were in Philadelphia.
I didn’t know Cumin, though I’d read a couple of her short works that appear online to prepare for this meeting. Cunt this and cunt that.
I emailed suggesting we meet at the bench, in front of that nameless church. “Do you know this church?” I had tried to describe it. “The one with those big stone balloons?”
“Those are called onions,” replied Cumin. Smart. She said she had sat on that bench before to watch the sunset. Because of its sensational position, she had watched the lowering sun “scribble highlighters and fires on the onions.”
“I’ll see you there at 7, on that bench, we can watch the sun annotate the church, then, and amputate the church in the dark.”
“See you then.”
Why had I wanted to meet Cumin? People had been telling me about her for some time. People kept saying I had, in Philly, a big doppelgänger. I was always just missing her. One time I went into a Good Karma (RIP it seems, and what happened, did the workers want a union so it closed?) for a drink and the worker gave me a turmeric and ginger tea!
I said, “Thank you for this but I was going to order a turmeric latte.”
The barista told me that turmeric tea, though, with ginger was my usual, but I told them I was not usual. I was usually at the Good Karma on Pine!
They said, “I’m so sorry you look exactly like somebody.”
“Can you please tell me who this is? I keep missing this person!”
The unionizing barista wrote down this name—the name Cumin Baleen—after looking up credit card payments under turmeric and ginger tea. They didn’t mind divulging this. They were a keen sinner.
“I just hope you don’t explode, when you see this person.”
I googled “Cumin Baleen.” There was plenty to find out. Cunt this and that… I saw her author’s picture and sure. I saw it. Me and her. I didn’t explode though.
“Happy new year,” I had said, greeting Cumin at the bench.
We looked like brothers, effeminate and famous brothers, but we didn’t explode.
I’d brought her some tea in my thermos, turmeric of course. And ginger, ginger. She’d brought me a stack of her books, like a gift.
She said she hadn’t written anything recently though, like, apologetic, like I was the hungry public, because over the holidays she’d been sick.
“I have, however, been abridging and composing a backwards—after Pinter and his play, ‘The Betrayal,’ do you know?—a report of my search history, from Thanksgiving to Christmas day.”
“Oh.”
“The searching we do is unashamed and amazing. So I really have been writing.”
It seemed sort of desperate, going hunting for your own writing in your google search history. Conceptual. A type of shit.
I sat there holding her stack of books. I tried to intuit the weight of how many “cunts” were appearing across these works. I thought of all the “cunts” pooling down in the stack to the bottom book and I’d find them there— cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt—on the once-blank page after the acknowledgments page.
She was one of those writers who thinks “cunt” means something, like the whole world is a slavering and a twinkling cunt, uck, or cunt is a way to say heart in a feminist strain of Latin. I don’t know.
“But it’s going to be abridged. I’m abridging my search history and drawing out the story of my recent illness!”
I saw groups of sufferers, offerers, tourists and the curious walking constantly into our church. The door would only open on its bottom half. The door had a little cutout. I began to think about if the full door ever opened or when was the last time the full and complete door swung out and open. I began to want it to happen, I could feel myself plugging myself sexually into this.
I felt sort of wonderful.
“I wonder, Cumin, if something you’re editing out, in this abridgement, betrays your truer illness?”
Dec. 25th-Nov. 24th, 2022, MY BETRAYAL
sore throat with swollen tonsils
streaming love actually
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is a bath good for sore throat
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is chili good for sore throat
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the eternal daughter plot what do you think
novelist who stabbed his wife friend of gloria steinem
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where can I stream the family stone
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is it possible to get herpes from valtrex
is it possible to get herpes from shingles
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shingles rash never blistered
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do hives pop
“Wow,” I said, on the bench. “Sounds like you had shingles on Thanksgiving. And when those scabbed, you got Covid!”
“Yep,” Cumin said. “You did it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You have no idea how horrible is shingles,” she said. “In fact you are interested in the truest truth or the artfulness of ‘My Betrayal’ when all I want is for everyone to know there’s a new vaccine, Shingrix, that immunocompromised people should get by at least the age of 35. I didn’t know it! I wish I’d gotten that! Sometimes, you stop writing. You start informing.”
“I’m trying to imagine all the things you left out of your search history, the things that call to your deeper, truer illness. I’m a psychoanalytic demon. Be my friend.”
“I don’t know what you think. I don’t look up porn.”
“How many times do you search for yourself? Did you, from Nov. 24th to Dec. 25th, 2022, search more for information about the herpes zoster virus that causes shingles, and for covid, or for yourself? Tell me. How many times did you type Cumin Baleen?”
“I think a lot of people do that. To see where you are, if you’re a writer. It’s not an important detail if it’s typical.”
She spoke like a grave writing professional. It was getting very dark. The church looked like the graves of balloons.
“You’re right,” I said, “It’s probably everyone, all of us writers always searching for our mark out there, in the world.”
“Do you do it?”
“Yes. But I don’t think it’s very innocent. I’m worried about myself.”
“Us writers are sick.” Cumin took a sip from my thermos, her first. There were only black eels packed like black sardines in the dark air, now.
“I don’t know if it can be waved off like that, Cumin. I think I’m hurting myself. It is killing me. My rotting spine is starting to mewl from it.”
“Uck. Don’t do it.”
“It’s complicated for me to stop, because it’s a cure for something else. I’m in a rock and a hard place, Cumin. I wonder if you might know what that’s like.”
She was swallowing an immunosuppressant. She was using the tea, and I wondered if she was insane or made of rubber or imagination, wasn’t it burning her throat, because my thermos was very very amazing, but she looked only casual and I saw just then in the dark with the moon putting pudding on the onions that there was an intricate and deeply hard beetle on her knee. With chartreuse eyeballs.
“When I was in high school, Cumin, I developed anxiety attacks, or panic attacks, is there a difference?”
“Not sure…”
“I would get so anxious, Cumin, I’d faint. I’d lose my sight and hearing, and I never fell down out of nowhere but I’d go somewhere, like a bathroom stall or sitting against a wall, to collapse. A lot of times I felt so hot I’d tear off my clothes, even in a stall in my high school. And I wouldn’t get better for a while. I’d be out for maybe 30 minutes, then slowly come back.
“Once I’d fainted outside of my classroom in high school. I was up against a wall near the cafeteria where other kids always sat up against the wall with their pizza, so I looked normal. This guy who’d graduated was walking by. He saw that I was slumped differently. He was back to visit an old teacher, he got me a Sprite. I didn’t know a sugary drink could help me out with this. I didn’t know about blood sugar. In Health we had put red drops in all our water until all of the water was positive but I didn’t know about blood sugar!
“But Sprite wasn’t a cure, Cumin, Sprite didn’t prevent it from happening, it only helped me come back.
“I couldn’t tell my parents. I see these younger people expressing to each other and their superiors they have anxiety disorders and all I think is how I’d hide in my family home’s basement panicking and passing out all afternoon and all night praying no one from the upstairs world would solicit me to do a chore or, per the culture, throw a chair at me, a cabbage, a light bulb, my own body at me, and I would turn the basement TV to the Teletubbies and hold my stare at the sun. It was all I could do, for hours. I would look at the baby inside of this sun.
“I remember calling, on a portable phone I’d dragged down there with me, my high school boyfriend, for help, but he called me ‘Mom’ and never came by, I was obsessed with him for a long time, then boyfriends, these people who controlled me and verbally abused me, one who sort of physically abused me as a joke, but I know now, Cu, it wasn’t a joke to bother a body, against pleas, like, painfully, but it was a joke, then, and I needed such help.”
“This is really sad. But also typical,” Cumin said. She looked at her wrist as though there were a watch. “You know we all have this anxiety condition right? Anxiety, and codependence...”
“I don’t have any anxiety. I stopped having attacks when I was 19. I haven’t passed out in twenty years.”
“So long as you search for yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that very anxious behavior?”
“But I haven’t fainted, which is connected to truest terror. So long as I search for myself. I have to do it about three times a day. That’s what you’d find in my search history. 4/5th that. 1/5th PubMed madness! I don’t have terror in my life anymore.”
“And how did you come to this? You searched for yourself then?”
“It started with sending out my writing to literary magazines. That was the start. I sent 30 manilla envelopes a month, each with their own SASE envelope in it, and I’d type up cover letters and go to Kinkos having emailed myself my cover letters to Yahoo. I followed all the rules about using a stapler or a paper clip. I remember—you must remember, too, Cumin—there was one literary magazine that made you write “THE END” at the end of your story, I know you must have, we all had a separate saved file that had that version of the story with “THE END” at the end of it to signify that when the writing was done, when there were no more pages or writing, it had ended to these idiots or robots.”
Why did they need that? Why wouldn’t one know it was over?
“I could feel anxiety rising inside of me, I would start losing my eyesight and hearing, and I would just list in my head all of the literary magazines and journals my stories had been mailed out to, and all the places they still needed to go depending on submission timetables and windows. I thought about my name being carried out like that, without my body, around America. And if I thought about that, my hearing and eyesight came back and the terror never totally touched me ever again.
“Except one time, to be honest, when I saw Children of Men in the theater.”
“Oh me too!”
“Quietus…” we said, together, in a soft chorus on the bench…
Cumin had to get going. She had a far way to walk, even in a city as gridded and little as Philadelphia. The church wasn’t close to her house. This church still has no name, because Cumin didn’t know it either.
“I guess we’ll never know the name of this nameless church,” I said to Cumin, somewhat dreamily, trying I guess to forge a moment with my doppelgänger.
Cumin took out her phone and began to search, sunset onion church, church with bench philly, church good karma near, why is good karma closed now, big giant door church in philly, famous cunt writer does it matter, somewhat known cunt writer whatever, time, the lord, and said, “I can’t find it. Hey can I have this?”
It’s awkward to be directly asked for a gift. What can you say? Can you say no? This amazing thermos was so precious to me, you can keep your water hot forever, for days even. Plus it was marigold.
“Cumin wait!” She was already turning a corner. I ran up to her. I had this feeling I’d never see her again.
“I’ve gotta go.”
I wanted that thermos back! It was impertinent wasn’t it for her to ask me for my thermos?
“Are you feeling better? I mean are you ok now? I’m sorry your holidays were so fraught.”
I tried kindness first, before asking.
“I’ve got to go, Caren. This story is over. Don’t you know it’s the end?”
“I wanted to ask you actually, it’s about, um, my therm—”
She brazenly opened its cap. There was so much steam coming out of it. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed with this thermos, this thermos eats time for Christmas. I wanted it back so badly but she put her beetle in it and inhaled its softening and death.