three sevens

Vacancy. Room 18 is still vacant. Everyone knows about it but nobody sets foot inside. I don’t think anyone can. Why don’t they tear it down? Folks come from around the world just to see the door. The town’s never been the same since that night, what, seven, eight years ago now? Still seems like last year. I remember the cameras from the news stations. Suited people from all over, moving a thousand miles an hour. I’d go get a coffee and there’d be a crew of them, hostile with one another but pleasant, like siblings who hate but love each other. They were indifferent to us locals, mobilizing to yet another place where something terrible had just happened. A routine day at the office. Make no mistake—those people are hunters, packs of wolves. At night you see their eyes glow in the distance, then a minute later they’ve surrounded you, camera lights like suns. They are tireless. And then they are gone, the sated beast shuffling away in the dark.

Fleeing. Home he fled at age seven. He remembered the vividness of the dead person in some bushes near the busy avenue. He thought it a strange place for someone to sleep but upon closer inspection saw the man’s eyes were open and drained of life, insects all over him. He returned home frightened and changed. He didn’t know where he was running to, anyway, guided only by an internal voice that told him to leave. He withdrew from family after that, told his mother he didn’t want to see her. She laughed but acknowledged the seriousness of the situation after he locked himself in his bedroom all day and night. She went to console him or offer her apologies but his indifference shook her. The next morning she found him dead in the basement, an apparent falling accident. Toxicology results indicated he’d consumed bleach from a bottle spilled nearby. It was a terrible tragedy, by all accounts. No one dared to ask aloud why the child would do such a thing.

Relics. Ornamental blades lined the old man’s walls. His house was a relic and he was a relic, old and retired so long that he retired twice more. Then he retired from life. His daughter spoke at his remembrance, she herself old. My father never meant to hurt anyone, she said. He outlived everyone he knew and angered everyone else. Ha ha. But he had a good heart, he was misunderstood. The daughter looked out to the seven people assembled in the front yard of the old man’s house. She held a hand at her brow to block the morning sunlight. Her dress was handmade. Thank you all for coming, she said. Then everyone shook her hand and departed but the daughter remained, beginning the momentous task of leafing through the house’s cabinets and boxes, crates of paper, closets, bookshelves. She found a note her father wrote to her when she was a child and a pair of her dead mother’s diamond earrings. She found sandwich baggies with locks of hair, children’s teeth, personal letters, old photos. She found tucked in a kitchen drawer an oversized envelope filled with 20 thousand dollars cash.

The Consumption of Zagreus

Zeus secretly begot his son Zagreus with Persephone before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. One midnight, The Titans, Zeus’ enemies, lured young Zagreus away with toys. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and he undertook several transformations in attempts to delude them. He became Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw.

Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’ heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.

_{Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths. Folio Society, London, 1960, re-published 1996: 118.}

Paraquat

The detective walks from the bar out to the heat and darkness. Sudden silence. Jasmine in the air, the fecund scent of a nearby creek. The scent of herbicide, the scent of engine exhaust. Birches scatter the wide field toward faraway hills—the trees appear as individual clusters but are one organism. Gravel and century-old pavement beneath his boots. Endless landscape awash in moonlight. Headlights approach from the distance, then the cataclysm of a tanker rig blasting through midnight. Silence returns gradually and the detective walks to the Jeep, driving south from marsh country with the wind whipping through the open vehicle.

Fifteen miles later he glides into an office park with few cars in the lot. Building C, Unit six. He parks at the entrance curb and kills the engine, then walks to the door and presses the button. The door buzzes open and he approaches the darkened front desk. A man appears in the shadows to his left and greets him apologetically.

Sorry to startle you, he says. The lights have been out all day. Follow me.

The detective follows the man down a hall into an office lit by a floor lamp connected to a portable electric generator.

Have a seat, says the man.

No, thank you, says the detective. This shouldn’t take long.

After a pause the man nods and leans over to pull open a desk drawer. The detective hates moments like this. Anything could be in that drawer. He holds his breath. The man lifts a folder from the drawer and reaches it across the desk for the detective to take.

It’s all there, says the man. Military record, current registered address. Names and addresses of family and friends, names of closest colleagues in the police force. A dozen or so photographs.

Thank you.

Destroy everything when you’re finished. I don’t want any more part of this.

The detective reaches into his rear pant pocket and tosses the small roll of rubber-banded cash at the man, who drops it, picks it up, drops it again.

The detective returns down the dark hall and outside to his Jeep. He wraps the folder in a towel from the back and secures it underneath the seat. He drives south and east with the moon’s guidance toward a most elusive goal: the confrontation of an injustice and the finality of its resolution.

The Night Gardener, Pt. II, by Benjamín Labatut

I met him in the mountains, in a small town where few people live save during the summer months. I was walking at night and I saw him, in his garden, digging. My dog crawled under the bushes, ran towards him in the dark, a short white flash in the moonlight. The man bent over, rubbed my dog’s head, went down on one knee as she offered her belly. I apologized, he said it was okay, that he loved dogs. I asked him if he was gardening at night. “Yes,” he said, “it’s the best time for it. The plants are asleep and they don’t feel as much, they suffer less when moved around, like a patient etherized. We should be wary of plants.” When he was a boy, there was a giant oak of which he had always been afraid. His grandmother hanged herself from one of its branches. Back then, he told me, it had been a healthy tree, strong and vigorous, while now, some sixty years later, its huge bulk was was ridden with parasites and rotting from the inside, so much so that he knew it would soon have to be removed, as it towered above his house and threatened to crush it if it came down. And yet he could not bring himself to fell the gargantuan thing, for it was one of the few remaining specimens of what used to be an old-growth forest that covered the land where his house and the whole town now stood, dark, foreboding and beautiful. He pointed at the tree, but in the dark I could see nothing save its massive shadow.

It was half dead, he said, rotten, yet still alive and growing. Bats nested inside its trunk and hummingbirds fed on the ruby red flowers of the parasitic plant that crowned its highest branches, the hermaphrodite Tristerix corymbosus, known locally as quintral, cutre or ñipe, which his grandmother used to cut back every year, only to see it regrow with stronger, denser blooms. “Why she killed herself I still don’t know. They never told me she had committed suicide, it was a family secret, I was young, no more than five or six at the time, but later, decades later, when my daughter was born, my nana, my nanny, the woman who raised me while my own mother went to work, told me, ‘Your grandmother,’ she said, ‘she hanged herself from that branch at night. It was awful, terrible, we could not cut her down until the police arrived, at least that is what they told us—“Don’t cut her down, leave her there”—but your father could not leave her hanging like that, he climbed the tree, higher and higher—no one understood how she had climbed so high—and removed the noose from her neck. She fell through the branches, landed with a thud. Your father started hacking away at the trunk with his axe, but his father, your granddaddy, would not let him. He said that she had loved that tree, she always had. She had seen it grow, tended and nurtured it, pruned and watered it, and fussed over every tiny detail. So it stayed there and it’s still here, though it’s going to have to come down, sooner rather than later.”

_{Labatut, Benjamín, from The Night Gardener, Part II, in When we Cease to Understand the World, trans. by Adrian Nathan West. The New York Review of Books, New York, 2020: 176.}

Aztec 52, by Eliot Weinberger

In the Aztec empire, every fifty-two years, once in an average lifetime, the world was on the verge of coming to an end. The sun would no longer move, night would be eternal, and man-eating demons would descend to rule the earth.

On that day all fires were extinguished and floors were swept clean. Old clothes, the images of gods kept in the house, the hearthstones on which cooking pots were kept, mats, pestles, and grindstones were all cast into lakes and rivers. Pregnant women were given maguey masks and locked in granaries; if the world ended, they would turn into monsters.

That night, everyone dressed in new clothes, climbed onto terraces and rooftops; no one touched the ground. Children were poked and threatened to keep them awake; those who slept would wake up as mice. In Tenochtitlan, the capital, eyes were fixed on the temple atop the Hill of the Star. There, at midnight, the priests were watching the stars called Tianquitzli, the Marketplace, our Pleiades, to see if they would cross the meridian and ensure another fifty-two years of life.

In the temple, a prisoner without physical blemishes, with a name meaning turquoise, year, fire, grass, or comet—words that denote precious time—was stretched across a flat stone with a piece of wood on his chest. As the Tianquitzli constellation crossed the line, a priest began furiously spinning his fire drill into the wood. A little smoke, a few sparks, and then, as the wood took flame, the prisoner’s chest was slit open with an obsidian knife, his heart pulled out and set in the fire. Four bundles of tied wood, each with thirteen logs, were piled around him so that his whole body was consumed by flames.

As the bonfire became visible, the people slashed their ears and the ears of their children, scattering blood toward the flames. Messengers carried torches from the Hill of the Star to the principal temples, and from there to the palaces, and from the palaces, street by street, house by house, until the whole city was lit again. All night, relay runners carried the new fire throughout the empire. People threw themselves at the fire to be blessed with blisters.

Children born in the night were given the name New Time. In the morning new mats were spread out, new hearthstones placed, incense lit, and honey-dipped amaranth seed cakes eaten by all. Quails were decapitated.

_{Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing, New Directions, New York, 2007: ix.}

down rodeo

I wrapped the shotgun in a blanket and put it in the trunk before driving through West Hollywood into Beverly Hills with the spring sun blazing. I had to see some guys but instead maneuvered through gridlock traffic to a coffee shop off Santa Monica Boulevard where hipsters brunched and rich folk avoided the homeless. She sat at a table near the front window. I kissed her on the cheek and sat, regretting I didn’t have time for coffee.

I just came to say hi, I said.

She smiled and time stopped for a few minutes. I forgot about everything else, only absorbing half of what she said, spellbound, entranced.

I have to go, I said.

She stood to hug me and I kissed her neck, inhaling her.

Back in the devastating noontime light I steered the rented sedan toward West LA and contemplated how the room full of thieves would react when out come that shotgun.

Transfiguration

He wrote himself into the story as a marginal character, someone who watches and listens intensely, someone who, beneath his ordinary appearance, conceals a deadly weapon. Knowing he possesses the weapon provides him with a sense of power and he scans the room of people dressed formally beneath twinkling chandeliers. None of them share his clandestine power. He is handed a bubbly drink in a flute glass and sips it, then drains it whole. Who are these people made of gold? It isn’t enough to own the world; one also has to celebrate their ownership. He pats the weapon in his pocket, feeling its cylindrical body, the antenna-like electric coils. Soon this will all be over, he thinks. I’ll be on my way home to the blue bungalow on 23rd with the giant rhododendron in front that nearly conceals the building. In an hour the bleached teeth, overpriced garments, and ornamental minerals will drop suddenly from these people to the ballroom floor, the flesh and bone of their previous owners evaporated, transfigured, only to return in part to a different place, as a different being.

Cărtărescu’s anti-literature

After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.

_{Cărtărescu, Mircea. SOLENOID, trans. by Seán Cotter, Deep Vellum Publishing, Dallas, 2022: 42.}