MAX, ZACH, THE EYE IN THE SKY
I heard Zach stabbed himself a bunch. I’m in touch with him a little. I don’t plan to ever see him again. I decided that today. You meet all kinds of psychos when you’re psycho. They come right out of the woodwork. My favorite psycho I met was Max. “I’m the new James Bond,” he whispered. You feel the power of people’s words when you’re insane. You take things much more literally. There’s no metaphor, no slippage. Everything makes perfect sense. Kanye West says he’s obsessed with the literal meanings of things. I think for him, words are like spells. If that’s true, if words are spells, then the code is so thick we’ll never comprehend it. We’re not meant to. Our brains would explode if we tried. When the layers of delusion strip away, even slightly, we lose our minds.
“If this water is imported from Earth,” I asked the supermarket clerk, “then where are we, exactly?”
“Mars,” he said, and I believed him.
On Mars, I felt more than saw the eye in the sky. I felt how strongly it wanted me to show it things. Show me your water bottle, it said. Show me your fashions. “I’m the new Beyoncé,” I told it. “The new Lady Gaga.” Max and I walked to the old squat and back in the dead of night. There were so many six-pack rings scattered along the sidewalk it was like there’d been a massacre. We had to stop and pull them all apart: instant karma on our hands and knees. Max was clumsy for someone who called himself a spy, but I enjoyed his company. At the new squat, he helped me meditate. He sent me down to the center of the Earth. I was a child of Gaia, a child of God. At the bottom of the dirt I perceived a gentle humming: the soft, simple buzz of a honeybee. That was when I realized that humans don’t exist. We never did. If you round down numerically, all that’s left are honeybees. We are so much smaller than we believe. Each one of our movements choreographed in advance. I gaze out at a mall dense with office workers, my suitcase dragging behind me. Little action figures, little puppets, puffing out their cancerous clouds, sipping their formulas, crunching spoonfuls of plant matter and sliced meat between their teeth. Honeybees all, I chuckle. And not one of them knows it.
Zach used to date a pop star. He was still dealing with the fallout when we met. We got high in Hannah’s basement, and he let me feel the silicone orb englobed in the skin of his scrotum. We watched a spider crawl through a crack in the wall. The crack looked like a face. There were faces everywhere that summer. Faces in the TV, faces in the food. Faces floating out of the radio speaker. Faces behind the faces of my friends. Zach’s face was smooth and soft. He turned it towards me, and I squeezed the silicone gently, reassured by the springy sensation. We lay side by side on our backs all night, stewing in amphetamine sweat. I wanted more than anything to kiss him, though I guess I’m glad I didn’t. Things turned out alright for me. I didn’t need the extra wrinkle.
If we knew how small we were, we wouldn’t fuss over such silly things. The world keeps turning. We’ll all be food for something, someday soon. Is this a sermon, or just another one of my silly little stories? Do you ever have a moment where you see the world anew? Do you pretend sometimes you’re a just-landed Martian, examining plants with eyes peeled wide, taking in their colors and forms, assuming an aspect of unvarnished wonder?
There’s a swamp behind the toolshed. An angel lives there now. I had to make a world to keep the darkness out. I spin it into rhyme, twist its threads into mystery. I tap out cruel sentences, wicked riddles. Does this offend thee, O Angel? Do I sin? Pine bough limbs weighted down with ice. Spirit-breath whistling through yellowed needle fingers. Chipmunks and chickadees swarm its sacred branches. Wild berries drop from feathered brambles to feed the waiting mice below. A mass of branching thread-like silk beneath stiff dirt it's seething brain. A screech owl for its holy eye. The owl pauses, turns, and leaves its branch, swooping down to compass, with gentle fluttering gyration, the seer, the scenery, and all the hopping, slouching seekers in between.
by Miss Unity
Miss Unity is the stage name of Mathias Todd Mietzelfeld, an American writer, singer, drag queen, and Lana Del Rey impersonator. His first book, the essay collection WHO KILLED MABEL FROST? will be published in 2023 by SF/LD Books.