Scott Garson
1. THE DISPATCHPeregrinations
FILM
We thought we were making a film about human silence. A shot, from memory: you with a cup of Moroccan mint tea, taking a look at the sunset through the window over the sink where we did our dishes. We thought we were trying to get at things that could not be seen. But who knows. Was it more about dislocation? Maybe we hoped for something like that—to be jarred, so we might come upon a plain look at the face of our marriage.
* * *
POOL
Here it is always 1978. The breezy singer likes us just the way we are, in coconut sunscreen. Flesh of eyelids primed with light. Slo-mo swoon. Look: these jiggling, flashing webs of ineluctable beauty. No? I guess. We’re done with the warring, I guess. We’re pliant. Easy lays. Brained like this, we don’t really get how the world is going to start ending.
* * *
EVIDENCE
No one has come to ask sensible questions. The blood in the hay is dark as oil. The guns are hunks of metal. The eyes are fiber—gelid, opaque. High in the filthy window pane, the sun is a potent distortion, and many tiny golden things still swim in its body of light, as if with some aim, like day is a theater, with no pit, no gate or patrons.
* * *
WRECK
Knowledge is the flickering, the little bend in time. Hurtling plane of steel and glass expanding in your window. And you know. Before your body knows. Before you’ve had a chance for opposition or anything else. You see what you are experiencing from out of the mild blue of an afternoon that might as well have been a thought that slipped your mind.
* * *
MEANWHILE
White giants cruise the blue hallucination. Plastic credit-card trays jiggle, for an instant, on the mesh of the wrought-iron tables.
* * *
LOVE
He’d been thinking he knew what people meant when they said that they needed to be alone, when they claimed that they had to repair themselves, in order not to doom their next relationship from the start. Did it not make sense? If you were less messed up, what you built would have more of a chance. So he tried to get healthy. He looked at his habits of body and mind and worked to make changes. The following year, after a break-up, he saw that his thinking had changed. Love was not an edifice, built carefully, block by block. Love was rubble. It undid everything. He’d wanted this when it was happening: wanted to feel his firm and patient life converted into fuel.
* * *
PLANET
Used to be one of my favorite things to imagine was something invisible, like Wonder Woman’s plane, or one of its wings, this undetectable blade that could travel right into my brain, with nobody seeing, no one aware, not even me, though I would feel an immediate change, this beautiful loosening, and could live, after that, like a body in space, which everybody would look upon as it passed and have feelings about.
* * *
IN A BAR
We’re in a bar, in Iowa City, on an April afternoon that isn’t cold and isn’t warm, a day of winds, of giant flying clouds that merge and pull apart in shifting color, pearl and steel and jaune, dove gray, and we could stand and watch, right there on Market Street, we could go see, tip back our heads and blink and gasp and laugh and stagger, because why not, because that seems like us. Because we’re probably wrong to be good with the thought that we’ll have more chances.
* * *
ROAD
I had an inner policy about taking opportunities whenever one was presented. I wasn’t cheerful and wouldn’t have used that word—‘opportunities’—which might have horrified me. But I was open. I’ve got, as a consequence, this nonsense box of memories. In one, I’m on the road to Delaware, to a girl named Jessica’s grandmother’s place to get a harp—plus a redolent ferret, as things turned out. It made sense at that time. Maybe. Did it make sense? Who was she? What kind of path was she on? What did we suppose we were doing? How close would I have to be to the man in this story to consider him me?
2. BUREAU INVENTORYThere’s a desk in this room, but it faces a wall, and I don’t like to face a wall when I write.
Bookshelves, poorly organized (my view from across the room)
Single-hung wood-framed windows, giving on a winter hill (view to my left)
Wall (behind me): this is the most ‘desk’ part of the scene, in the sense that it holds random stuff (assuming stuff can be both curated and random):
Framed page from an 1872 issue of Harpers Weekly, bearing a woodcut print of what was then called ‘The New State Department Building at the National Capitol’ but was called ‘The Old Executive Office Building’ in the 90s when I used to go rollerblading there, and is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Prints of photos I took of my wife in Greenbrier County, West Virginia about ten minutes after we got married (she was having a smoke before we headed to the reception).
A old printers drawer (not in photo), containing, in its many variously-sized slots, a small screw-off metal bowling pin, from a trophy my grandmother won, a Paris Metro pass, shells from the beach in Santa Cruz, a Fugazi ticket stub, a SmokeLong Quarterly matchbook, an ‘x’ key from an old laptop, faded skee ball tickets from an amusement park on a lake in Iowa, and several actual print blocks, among other things.
3. BIOGRAPHYScott Garson is the author of IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE? (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013)—a collection of stories. Recent work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Electric Literature, Cincinnati Review (miCRo), Passages North, The Journal, Ghost Parachute, the Best Microfiction annual, and others. He teaches writing at the University of Missouri.