Dispatch from the Future Read Free

once
    she was in the middle of a tantrum and a coin
    told him he should love her, and yet, he wasn’t
    satisfied so he went to the dictionary and closed
    his eyes and found a word and when she asked
    what word he found, the only thing he would tell her
    was that he was one step closer to the secret
    of the universe. Can you tell me what it rhymes with,
    she asked him. Is it a verb? Is it a country? Have I
    been there? Will you write its name on my back
    while we sit on the pier and watch the blue dusk
    chase the sun to Jersey? The last time I ever
    saw Katharine she asked me the name of the lake
    in the distance and I said Michigan and she said
    she’d heard of it, and then she showed me the diaries
    she kept when she lived under the overpass
    near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,
    when all she had was a travel Scrabble set and
    the reason she’d run away. Milan Kundera
    has a lot to say about our tenuous insignificance.
    When he wants to decide something he, too,
    flips a coin, but in his case heads is Little Rock,
    Arkansas, and tails is Little Rock, Arkansas, and
    it’s just a matter of who to blindfold and bring with
    on his motorcycle. On page one hundred and seven
    of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, I get lost
    driving Katharine to the airport. On page one hundred
    and forty nine, Tereza dreams that they take her away.
    After I see Katharine for the last time I don’t go home;
    I go to Prague and it’s 1968 and the man I love won’t
    touch me; he just holds an empty gun to my temple
    and even though we both know it’s empty there’s the small
    comfort that the worst thing that could possibly happen
    would be the thing I want most. Mitsu says the secret
    of the universe is obvious in any planetary shaped
    object you can find on the floor of a parking garage.
    Katharine says how. I say I want to move to Canada;
    the only tenderness anyone can get around here
    is in the time it takes him to untie my wrists.
     
KEEPING THE MINOTAUR AT BAY
    He takes me to a movie about a bathtub
    full of Vaseline and apples and asks me
    afterward how I feel about it. I feel pretty
    ambivalent about the universe, I say,
    like I’ve been reading too many wilderness
    guides and spending all my nights
    trapped in lucid dreams in which I’m
    beneath the deepest, most inescapable
    snowdrift and I decide to stay there until it melts
    at the end of the world—
el fin del mundo
,
    as they say,
acharit hayamim—
and the whole time
    I’m dreaming I’m thinking, I can’t wait
    to get in my boat and sail across the flooded earth.
    So, I tell him, I get in my canoe and all the old cities
    are phosphorescent scars miles below the surface,
    sunken ships without survivors, and I know
    I won’t last long. I know the end is near
    and yet I paddle on, scanning the open seas
    for a waterproof map, a yellow umbrella,
    another survivor in another canoe, and I think this
    is how disappointed everyone must have felt
    when Atlantis sank. In the classic
Return to Atlantis
,
    R. A. Montgomery writes, “Destruction is widespread,
    and you grieve for the Atlantean people” (85). Don’t I
    know it. It’s at this point in the dream when I realize I am
    actually alone and likely to drown and I start to scream
    and then I wake up in my own bathtub, water to my knees.
    Another nightgown soaked. For the Norse, that’s hell:
    wearing a soaked nightgown in a cold, dark room
    for eternity, I say, did you know that? He says
    he didn’t know, but that I seem like a very
    interesting person for a person my age,
    which makes me think Theseus must have
    said something just like that to Ariadne,
    to make her fall in love with him so she
    would give him the red threaded clew
    to the maze and he could slay the monster.
    I used to think I was waiting for a steady shoulder,
    for someone to come along and appreciate my
    somnambulism, my prophetic knowledge
    of the ultimate destiny of mankind, someone
    to be with when all the lights in the world go out,
    but look