Interviews with the Modern Dead

8/8/2019 Interviews with the Modern Dead

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interviewswith the

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matthew lurie


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interviews with the modern dead


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interviews

with the

moderndead

matthew lurie


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Contents

:

:

:

H. J. KimbleL. P. Valerius

Q. E. Dominoes

M. J. Slaughter

E. Wolf

B. Overman

D. Shirp

L. Oubliette

T. H. Mandel

Slant

S. P. Swillian III

S. P. Swillian IV

P. E. Koepling-Freundschaft

P. Sandoval

12

3

5

6

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

11


7/36

I.

The Mental Ward


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:

. .

the nurses say its too hot in here to grow mouseowers

they say it to the girls in the echo ward

who sleep all day in their cots, motionless

like bundles of used clothing

they say it over the p.a. system every morning

as if we hadnt given up hope months ago

theyve said it so many times

it sounds like an antediluvian prayer

theyve said it more times than Ive said hello to my wife

they say it to each other during intermission

shaking their heads

wiping their useless hands on their uniforms

watching the industrial calendar

that covers these long hallways

slither stupidlylike a wet ribbon towards tomorrow


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. .

listen, matthew

loving pixels is wrong

pretending to be a baby is wrong

pretending to be a baby is not protected

under the claribella-reingold supposition act

I know what you do when you spend the afternoon

in the room whose walls are plasma screens

I hear you wincing before you open the door

listen, matthew

we want all want a world of looser clothing

we all need rooms where we can go to forget about the law

we each must slice oa babys tongue if we are to be free


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:

.

with the exception of wartime criminal brian overman

there are tons of conceptual soundscapers here

who with their tuning irons

would whip you up something akin to a psychic sorbet

a sort of static waltz if you will

he removes a can of peaches from the drawer next to the bed

but they dont understand that its not enough

its never enough

to shiver like inchworms

hoping to pick up these uh

sputtering artifacts

these old notes this

pakistani pop music

he stabs his knife into the can

no, matthew!

you must create the past with electried teeth

you must drill into those crumbly pharaohs

and make sense of their dreams


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. .

Ill tell you something, matthew

about the men whose lives are splintered

by mayan prophecy

theyre either sleeping nakedin poorly-ventilated apartments

or theyre breaking their ngers trying to rip apart

run-down computer monitors in some in-laws backyard

no

thats not a metaphor

leave my house at once


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:

.

for ages I have been wanting to say it

for ages it has been wicked

for ages I have been waiting to say it

for ages I have been wicked

scared of sleeping

scared of red sounds and red juice

scared of subtraction

scared of brian overman

scared of hot weeks spent in shopping centers

she gasps

look, theres the bird with the feet like acorn stems

. .


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.

fteen years later I came back to that place

all the spoiled women in their red beds were gone

cleaning maids sat cackling on carts

crashing into each other

the halls the mausoleum walls were made of new cedarone door was open

inside the roof was removed

the pipes were ecient

this round room was once the kitchen

now workers loaded angel-sized boxes onto planks

I drove back to the food court

where I once had decent calamares

barcelona was still all over the posters

kids ran around with bags on their heads

the lemon mall smell put me to sleep

I dreamed that god had replaced my brain

with a ball of earthwormshe scalped me to show me

and I awoke to the distant chuckling of cannons


14/36

II.

The Airplane Restroom


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11I stopped living my life when I was twenty-two. It started small,

imperceptibly, or at least I remember the little things rst. e

little things were pencils, pens, paperclipsoce supplies. I

worked in a real estate oce, a concrete prison that had its own

area code. It wasnt too bad when I rst started. Some people

think thats a bad life, but compared to what? And for a long

time I was content to be one of many because where else are theones going to go? ere are maniesbecause of the oneswas some-

thing that a man bigger than me once said, and I said it again to

myself everyday.

Anyway, the little things. I was buttoning my shirt one morn-

ing and heyit was already buttoned. I thought okayand I sat

down and then I thought huh and then I thoughtyeah, sureand

before I knew it I was at work, doing my job or whatever it is aperson at work does. A little later in that time frame, I was clip-

ping or staplingattachingsomething to something else and


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then I didnt need to anymore. What I mean is that what I need-

ed to do was no longer needed and I was sitting again, not quite

thinking but not quite not either. It was around this time that Ithought about telling someone, but what was I going to say to that

person, or to those people? And so I decided to get some coee

and wait.

Some time passed and I was sitting with my coee when this

guya coworker, or someone in that building that daycame

up to me and said something along the lines ofhey, do you?And

I told him yeah, I do and he responded okay, but how?And I feltcompelled to answer I cant say, is there anything?And his face

formed into this other kind of face and I felt for this guy, really,

but I couldnt think of anything else to say so I made this sort

of gesture. He made yet another face that led me to believe that

maybe he understood, and that maybe even he understood more

than I did. en he just walked into the background and I was

left with my oce supplies, which were just that: oce supplies.

ats what I mean: when I tried to think, what are these things

on my desk?I could only think things on my deskand I picked

them up and then put them down in a dierent place, but a

place similar enough to the rst so as not to arouse any sort of

suspicion, because that was the most important thing. You never

want to give anybody any sort of reason to give you second thought,because the second thoughts never free. We talked money those

days. We talked and walked and thought big, big money, the

kind that wins any sort of argument, the kind to kill and risk

being killed for. Or so they said. Once, Mr. P. Sandoval, said to

us, a groupand to me, as part of a groupdont make money,

be moneyand we remembered that and I remembered that espe-

cially because it was so clear.Mr. P. Sandoval was a man, but more so a precedent. In all of

the pictures Id seen of him, his skin was almost glowing through

his clothing and he smiled the way a rabid dog smiles. I imag-


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ined that he never sat down or used the bathroom, but instead

paced around some secret room underground and vaporized the

waste from his body like a human furnace. When he came totalk to us, which was once a month, I always arrived half an hour

early and took a seat at the edge of the front row, because I knew

that he would walk ostage and into the crowd and I wanted to

touch him, but I could never work up the nerve. As it turns out,

I didnt have to: during his last talk, Mr. P. Sandoval put his hand

on my shoulder and said, time is money, life is work, and without

goals were all meat. He left his handprint in sweat on my shirt.At this juncture, I was meat. Both what I was doing and what

I needed to do were unclear in that they werent dened by a big-

ger man or in any way directed to me, so I made the decision to

wait and see. I still had my coee and also a loose salad, which

was the same thing I ate most days and which was essentially

identical to the room around me in color and avor. But this was

another little thing that wasnt much of anything and it too was

alreadynished but I chewed nonetheless to keep myself busy.

I was chewing and sipping and maybe there were other people

around but no one was saying hi and that was all right because

thats life. And still I had this problem, not yet understanding

that it was a problem, but feeling it and kind of remembering

it in reverse, the way that you know that theres an event and aresponsibility to reach it.

I wondered about a certain plant, which was located in the

oce, near a big pair of doors that now I realize dont lead to

anywhere. is plant was there and it wasnt; a piece of outside,

inside. I think it was placed there to make the inside look less

like itself and more like the idea of something more natural, soft-

er. It was a piece of what you would call variety. I spent a whilelooking at this plant and then sort of exiting myself and looking

at myself looking at the plant, and trying to look at myself from

the plants point of view, looking without thinking but still un-


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consciously thinking about all of this in that process. And it was

fruitless, this cycle of thinking and not thinking, and it brought

me no answers, but the plant has never left my memory.is plant was a little thing, but big because of its context.

It evidenced what you would call a moment in time and space.

It was important, more than the oce supplies and the salad

because it was a question. When I was doing this staring at the

plant and thinking to myself there is a problem in my life, the

plant asked why?And I thought nothing back, but felt in a sense

dislodged from where I was and who I had been up to that point.Sensing this, the plant asked why?And again I felt like a series of

boots were hitting me in the mouth but thats not exactly how

it felt because the truth is emptier than that. In reality, there was

this whyplant and there was me, on the oor, near to the plant,

nearer than I had ever been to the plant, the plant with leaves,

me with open hands, and thats as detailed as the whole thing

was: the oor, the leaves, the open hands, the nearness. Every-

thing else was pain.

e day zoomed out after that and the day after was more or

less the same, as were the next few until the weekend came. I

woke up on Saturday at a table, with Hannah across from me,

and I realized that I had already been awake for a couple of hours

and was engaged in conversation. is was kind of a big thing.Hannah was half looking at me and half looking in a diago-

nal direction because maybe there was some kind of breakfast

on the stove? She was saying something about a movie that she

hadnt seen, but which somebody else I didnt know that well

had seen and had sort of enjoyed. She stopped talking at one

point and I gured it was my turn to say something and so I said

oh and thats what I was thinking too, only in my head it wasnta response to what she was saying. She continued, but she was

standing up, moving into a dierent room, and I wasnt sure she


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was talking to me so I focused my attention on the cat who lived

with us and who was within arms reach.

e cat was a medium-sized thing. You could hold her if youwanted to, but she could hold things too, and these things were

dead or dying and deposited to me, but what was I supposed to

do with them? In this instance she had in her mouth a brown

something or other and I could tell that she wanted to give it to

me so I lowered an unused napkin I already had in my hands

and she lowered her brown something too, until the napkin

and the brown something were lowered as much as possible andso coalesced. is seemed to satisfy her, and like Hannah, she

left the room and ventured into a place where more was

probably happening.

So I was left alone with this napkined brown something. I

thought about disposing of it and then I thought about Mr. P.

Sandoval and what he told usmeabout clemency: only give

it to those who dont ask for it. And I thought this brown some-

thing, together with the napkin, was not asking help, but like the

plant, why?And I asked questions in return: what are you? Where

did you come from? What happened to you? Whats happening to

you?But I stopped myself and told myself, this is just a thing, or a

combination of smaller things formed into a gross pattern and also

yuckbut I couldnt bring myself to look deeper into it because itreminded me of death. So I had to look away from what was in

my hands and to the kitchen window, where I half-expected a

bird to be perched, but no bird was perched there.

Birds used to live in the area. I dont know how many, but I

do remember their chirps with clarity. ere was one who sang

A#, D#, D#, D# early in the morning and that melody has been

stuck in my head for the majority of my life. Its a melody ofroutine. I walk and think and chew to it.

ere was another bird who sang C, G! C, G! during the sum-


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mer on days before storms. is is a melody of anticipation, and

it accompanies waits in bathroom lines and Sunday evenings

in bed.One bird I only heard about twice a year, and this bird sang

F#, F, E ... F#, F, E and Im not sure what those notes mean,

but as I whistle them now I feel as though I am an ant crawling

across giant plate oating in space.

ese three songs are the only ones I remember, but there

were more. ere was rustling in bushes and wind blowing

through chimes and the sound of bike wheels gliding by on thestreet outside.

at morning, before I could know I was taking it all for

granted, I was mostly concerned about Mr. P Sandoval. I won-

dered if he was still alive and whether he was fading, or if, like

before, his skin was glowing a strange orange light. He had been

let go, we were told, because he was too old for the business, but

it was impossible for me to believe that anyone could have told

him to leave. e words wouldnt make sense to him. He worked

on instinct, without thinking, and I had never seen him engage

in anything other than a one-sided conversation with another

person. It was as if he was a reball that had plummeted into

Earth, but instead of cooling o, he had started to plow through

the planets surface. He was the only person I had ever feared.But he was gone and no one had taken his place. I folded the

brown something up in the napkin and dropped it in the sink.

After that, things got much bigger. I married Hannah, had three

kids, and moved across town. ese were things that were sup-

posed to happen, but I never took any steps to make them hap-

pen, and my family seemed to exist only to ll in the house. Iwas given what the higher-ups called a managerial job, but all the

work was already done for me, so mostly I sat in a comfortable

chair and came home with money. At home, there was an iden-


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tical comfortable chair, which I sat in during the evenings, and

all the crossword puzzles I picked up were already completed in

black ink and I was still very much meat.One evening I came home and found that there was a maid

doing the dishes. I thought okayand then I thoughtyeah and

then why not?She called herself Slant. I walked up to her and

opened my mouth to say something, but she sort of turned

around and had her mouth twisted into this peculiar shape and

so both of our mouths were just open there and breathing the

same air coming from in from the porch. She said to me yourcoatand I nodded sureand she was already placing it on an adja-

cent hook, which terried me, and I think she was terried too,

of me, of me being terried of her. en she saidpleasesignaling

to a plate of food and I decided to do what she wanted me to do.

Later in the week she starched a shirt I owned and it was so

sti that I had to roll around on the oor for a couple of hours

until I could comfortably tuck it into my pants.

I never chose between Hannah and this Slant, but the latter

was around more, at least when I was around. I had become the

father I never met and my wife was the mother who did not

smile. She only spoke to me to remind me to set an example.

My children, who were just children, must have been told at

one point or another dont bother your fatherbecause I only sawthem from behind or heard them splashing in the bathtub a

oor above me. ey needed goals, and I was there to provide

them. e cat who had lived with us had vanished and in her

place we has this sort of sorry-looking creature, a sh who was

too big for its tank and was no doubt already gravely ill the day

it arrived. When the sh died, I knew it only because I could

hear my children crying from the bathroom, but the matter wasnever discussed, or if it was, it was in no way directed towards

me, whose money had paid for the sh.

Slant was also paid for with my money, but unlike the sh,


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she was all mine. She was the only person in the house who

looked at meeven touched me anymoreand so she was

more like the cat, because she gave things to me. I never thoughtto hold her, but one day she held me, and she felt smaller than

she looked; she became even smaller next to my chest. I won-

dered is this all there is?And I shrugged about it, which was okay

because she too was in a permanently shrugging state. I do not

remember sleeping with her, but I did, and I dont deny it: it was

an easy thing to do.

Later, around the time my problem stopped being a problemand more a basic condition of life, this same shrugging woman

became a crumpled heap between my arms while my wife and

kids drove oin our van.

is is just the way things happened. Having never made a

decision, I was at the center of a life in which I could not par-

ticipate. ings occurred to me from the inside out: I was on

the other side of the world, shaking hands with people whose

language I didnt know, making more money than small coun-

triesbut never seeing any of that moneyand my name didnt

describe me, but a brand, a sort of conglomerate. And the only

thing I thought, when I could think, is this is being busy. is is

making do. A#, D#, D#, D#.

I did once regain control for a week and a half. I was forty-ve

years old. I had to decided to go on vacation, so I took a plane to

Israel. I stayed on a kibbutz in Netanya, near the Mediterranean,

and all around me were groves of unmapped banana trees that

twisted like magnied arm hairs covered in head-sized wads of

yellow sweat.

Every morning I ate cucumbers soaked in yogurt and roastedpotatoes with ketchup. It was the sweetest ketchup I have ever

hadalmost unbearably sweet, like concentrated duck sauce

and this sweetness escaped the ketchup and soaked into the at-


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mosphere. I could feel the vapor locked within the clouds above

me as I swatted my hand through the air. I grew accustomed to

my own sweat, the way it glued my hairs into triangles and de-posited salt into the corners of my lips.

I visited the dunes near Mount Sinai, where the sand is ner

than dust. I took omy clothes, tumbled down a dune and felt

the particles wash over my body until the sun went down. I grew

cold, so I tried to climb back up and get my clothes, but the

sand was too soft and my arms and legs were numb, so I could

only climb up about two paces before I lost my footing, slipped,and landed face down. After I had done this over and over for

about forty minutes I decided to walk the other way and try to

nd someplace where I could nd a person who could take me

to my rental car.

I walked until I got to the edge of a cli and looked out at

the layers of darkness below. I imagined that an lake of ink had

once lled the canyon and that it had dried over the course of

centuries. e ink had stained each lower level of limestone

more deeply than the one before it, and the salamanders crawl-

ing around at the very bottom were strong from the eort it took

to lift their feet from the still-sticky ground. Above, the moon

looked pasted on to the sky. I thought this is where I ought to stay

and I fell asleep.In the morning a man yelled what you doingand I was back

in the kibbutz, then loaded onto a bus with eight or nine people

who wanted to see the military cemetery.

In the cemetery, there were rocks and baseball caps on top of

the gravestones, and I had to look down at my feet. Next to a

tree under which I had lunch, two cats glared at each other over

a pigeon carcass. e gray cat, the smaller of the two, had scartissue in place of her left eye and made a gurgling sound as she

paced around. e other, a domestic-looking Manx, kept her

head low to the pavement and remained silent.


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en I remembered the cat who had vanished. It was a Manx.

A Manx!

And it all came back.

e epiphany was short lived. Before I knew it, I was back in

Ohio. I had Mr. P. Sandovals job and every day I was in ten dif-

ferent rooms, none of which I recognized, and I was yelling at

hundreds of people whose faces looked like the grains of sand.

When I spoke, I said things like bite omore than you can chew so

you can spit the rest outandplay investors like a piano but really allfood just tasted like my tongue and all music made my headache

worse. People were always around me, and always talking about

me, but never to me, and there was no dierence between being

drunk or sober because either way I was laughing too hard and

screaming at an audience from behind glass.

It was not hard to be an old man. I stopped needing sleep, so

I had more time in my chair, which would no longer become

warmer the longer I sat in it. I thought C, G! C, G!But I dont

know what I was anticipating except for my own company.

I tried to focus on a moment, any discernable moment, and

all at once, I was in the bathroom on an airplane, and I was

weeping. I could not remember being a kid, and I could not re-

member my kids being kids, or even being mine. I came to un-derstand that I didnt own anything, not even myself, and I never

could, even if I clenched mysts so tight that I couldnt unclench

them. And I thought why do I have to know all of this? Why do I

have to feel it?And I wished that I had stayed in bed that morn-

ing. I wished that I had gone shing. I wished that I were part

of a family, a new family, at an amusement park on a warm day,

sitting and laughing in the food court and throwing chickenn-gers at each other. But more than anything in the world I wished

that I were an oce plant. en the plane started to shake, the

light in the bathroom turned o, and the pilot came on over


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the loudspeaker to announce our descent. I didnt feel any relief,

only the sensation of everything speeding up and crashing and

I had no say in the matter. So instead of opening the bathroomdoor and returning to my seat to sit down, I stayed there in the

dark, unable to do anything but shake and sweat.

As soon as we hit the ground I was let go.

Since then, Ive sat at home and resolved to gure out what went

wrong. I wonder if it was fate, or hubrisbut Ive never felt

proud of myself. Im beginning to think that maybe this is theway it is for everybody, and that my life is the best life anyone

can hope for. At least it goes by quickly.

Most recently I was in line at a supermarket, waiting to buy

orange juice, and a man handed me a turkey and said here you go

and I thought I dont want this turkeyand then I dont even want

this orange juicebut I thanked him anyway and he started to ask

me something, but I was already leaving. When I got home,

Slant was gone. I dont wonder why she left because I dont

care, but Im alone and I think this is the way its going to be.

All I have in place of company was a turkey I didnt want, so for

centuries Ive been sitting down in my comfortable chair with

the turkey on my lap, squeezing it and thinking about putting

it in the oven. Id rather not decide, but time is running out: mypants are covered in slime and the turkey is starting to stink.


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III.

The Villa


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:

.

yes! I was born here, above the trees

on the seventh oor of count swillians cave-castle

on a burlap bag in the dusty space tucked

behind the shelves of spider bones and rat bones

and diagrams of spiders and ratsthat look like they were drawn by rats with spider legs

soaked in rat blood

in the room with all the hooks and the books

covered in sheets that smell like fresh-cut clay

and the chairs that look like clay pigs

that someone polished and forgot to cook

at the end of the hallway lined with paintings of little kids

whom they always said Id meet

but whom Ive never met

whose names sound like riddles

and whose faces I never recognize

even though Ive wandered

through this awful place day and nightfor thirty years now

sometimes half- asleep

sometimes with my blue bathrobe undone

and sometimes singing

an ancient

simple song

in thekey

of

e


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.

the captain tied me to a chair

he called himself the cult of now

and told me he hated eyelids

she lifts her skirt

he tattooed this on my leg:

timeward into elegancia

the stfalls tear the satin

matthew I must confess

I fell for the man who sat on deck at night

his name was opo

he carried a bag of beaks and spoke

a limited island tongue called unanu

he taught me a proverb of his people:

peepeep olani doompeepit means

wring the liquid truth from your childs foul heart

she begins to laugh

when I returned home two months later

my daughters seemed drenched in information


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:

we have for too long neglected the machinery of smell

that network ofesh and ash and heat and whispering hairs

shocked with bacteria and inviolate goo

that ocean of oral prophesy churning right there

between your eyes, matthewthose ulterior, disorganized eyes you keep cold and dry

like two piles of nickels in the medicine cabinet

he rubs his brow with his pencil eraser and sighs

where have you come from, matthew?

how long will you stay?

. .


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crying could mean crying

in sadness

in crying

or crying crying out in anger

they cryingangry crying idiots inging each other

the idiots crying

they cry knowing each other crying

feeling each other feeling the tether

the tether crying

feeling each of them angry crying as though crying

were wood

and knowing paper

knowing that knowing would just cry

knowing that all the crying

all the wanting

all the shamefed gods of crying

could not even cry could not even knowwhat crying is or does crying

could not know that getting a car means crying or

that crying out in anger angry

will mean nothing

knowing nothing and crying nothing

then the angry idiots just crying just crying


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:

the moon, you see

is little more than the bottom of a rotten old bucket

which the angels have been shaking out for millenia

while the ones on Earth sneak

around our kitchens at nightstealing our salt

and fondling our china

with their long

feeble tentacles

. .

last night my aunt hildy and I started a band

called the bedside manners

we recorded an operetta in thirty-six parts

about a man who buys

satans toupee

from a skymall catalog

he turns toward me

were going to name him matthew

if thats okay

. .


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. . -

matthew

please take your gloves o

put your notebook down

stop counting your vowels for a second and look at me

matthew

I know Im half lobster

but youre only half matthew

come sit with me on the couch

I want to feel the crusted spit on your gills

I want to ick your adams apple

matthew

matthew please come back

matthew

matthew

touch my palp


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:

.

hello dear friend

today and only today

you too can be a world within a wizard

you too can birth your own bones

you too can remember the colors of the sunwhen you start to fall asleep

come on now

buy an eyelid

make the president proud

we all need rooms where we can forget about the claw

we all need rooms where can shake othe sand

come with me

matthew

danny

whoever you are

come with me

back to barcelona

back to elegancia

back in time to the castle in the trees

come with me

back in timeback to grime

back into the slimy sea


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Documents

Interviews with the Modern Dead