THE DIVORCE

1.

At the start of the story, Character is in bed, looking at the wall, thinking, the clock, the clock. Like, is it too late?

Character thinks, Am I important? Is this sheet important? Is that a mosquito?

Too late for what?

In a comic book, the first panel would show a small entity under an afghan, thought clouds rising.

Character gets up, drapes herself with black mosquito net through which, shadowy, her body can be seen. This house is dusty, she thinks, and the kitchen is smelly. She takes the garbage out to the backyard, then dances about in the mosquito net, a cloud with legs. Character dances like a cartoon character, moving along an invisible line, facing the camera. She hops and slides, her legs rising to great heights. Character thinks, I feel like there is a camera but there is not.

A rake gets stuck in the mosquito net. That’s a comedy-oriented part.

Then comes a thing about the weather. It is mostly cloudy, cooler, with patchy rain, a high of 59.

Character looks over the back fence. There is a castle there: vast, hulking, shadowy. It looks bigger than it is. The neglected building has collapsed in three areas, and a fire took out part of it. Character thinks about missing smoke detectors and then about lead paint, also hazardous. She looks at the fence, thinks about people saying “I’m on the fence,” and has an image of herself on the fence, balancing on one leg. She goes back in the house.

In the kitchen she sees a fox. It has a smokestack. The fox looks at her and a small cloud rises out of the smokestack. Character thinks, I have plunged into a shadowy world where foxes have smokestacks, I had better look hot and dangerous. She puts on a form-fitting black minidress and a diamond necklace. Character wonders, Do I look like a hero or a fashion model? She sets her camera on the bed and takes a picture. I look like a stump in a minidress, she thinks. I also feel like a stump, but an invisible stump. It’s like my body is prosthetic. It is stuck—glued or tied—to this invisible, like, stump. My prosthetic body is big and hulking and it smells of paint. But my stump is slim and sensitive. “The stump of my true…” says Character, in a booming voice. It echoes: “True…” True what? Character feels like a fool.

She goes back into the kitchen. The fox is not there now. Possibly there is a secret panel in her kitchen that goes to the castle, Character thinks, and that is how the fox got in, and also how it left. She looks for the panel. The thing about this in the story is how it looks like a performance, as if Character is posing for a cartoon in which an explosion is coming up. Like it’s for show. I didn’t get that part.

In the afternoon Character takes a bath. There are tiny barnacles growing on her legs. She examines them. They are unsightly, but Character does not appear concerned. There are worms and mussels and other marine creatures in the bath with her too. It’s like the bath is a small ocean raging with life. It’s like things are big and also small. It’s a good part, you’d like it. Character takes a pearl out of her privates. Then she gets out of the bath and puts her minidress back on.

Then there is the part where Foe appears. Foe is elegant but deadly. Things are getting complicated, thinks Character. I will approach carefully as if Foe were a bear or that fox I saw in the kitchen. I perceive that I am going to plunge into an intensely personal rivalry that will join us in a dangerous marriage, like in all the good stories. Possibly I will now transform into a cartoon character called Dash Rule, Destroyer of Worlds. Character strains. Strains. Rages. Strains. Tries coaxing. Tries cajoling. Strains. Gives up. Character feels dusty inside. In, like, her character.

Character perceives her body to be too close or approaching too fast. Approaching what? Some primary site, checkpoint, obscured by smoke or clouds. Some stump. There are echoes of a booming authoritative voice that Character does not now believe is hers. Character thinks it is Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo’s. She does not take this as an encouraging sign. Character thinks, life is like a raging deadly infection—thank God for barbecue. Character thinks, face it, I am Clark Can’t. It’s an OK punch line but the story goes on from there. There’s a sexual thing where Character thinks about Hottentots. Then she is writing a story where a left leg gets divorced from a right leg and goes out and gets a quilted denim weekend sneaker. There’s a footnote saying how you can read more about the legs in a story called The Divorce.

By the end, Foe and Character are entwined, having become a single body called The Impasse or The Third Party. In the last line of the story, after seeing the fox, which I think is a symbol of what both Foe and Character are missing, the Third Party slides open the secret panel in the kitchen and goes through it. I think this is a symbol of what the reader is doing reading this story, and the Castle that may be at the end of the secret passage is a symbol of the spiritual thing that people are hoping to get from reading stories, but it’s also possible that the passage goes to a bar or a mall, or to another story, and that’s a symbol too. Also, I read that the clouds (did you get that there are two, the mosquito net and the smoke from the fox smokestack?) are symbols of the dissolution of ego, and the barnacles are a symbol that the ego is, like, a collage. Barbecue is not a symbol. Or it’s a symbol that some things are not symbols, they’re just what they are. This was a good story, or at least good enough. You should read it.

2.

Character says, I want to feel things but not with my body.

Character says, I am beyond my own reach, like an internal airplane, approaching too fast to see. This is mentioned in my report. I undertake transactions that appear important—I dash to the bank, I exchange cash for goods, I change direction to rake a passenger bus with gunfire—but I am only going along with the measures the committee devised to make time appear to go by. Tomorrow it will unveil another much-anticipated plan to get me up and about. Today, I address my body. Echoes of my voice resonate in the dusty interior. It’s like I am smaller than my own self, and also bigger. The way I see it, working my body is like animating a cartoon rake or kitchen table, a complicated business of staging vast numbers of tiny changes, for what? A halting progress that a worm could do better. The audience cheers when they perceive that I will push on. Fools! As if I could stop. This is mentioned in my report.

Character says, in the years before my collapse, my body played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role. While appearing to be an independent creature, it was deeply entwined with me. It was like a secret passage that enabled things to flow from me to me, through me—tiny lapis-blue clocks, slide rules, milestones. I used my alter ego to shift investments off my books. I was a Wizard of Oz, invisible, behind a curtain that was my own body, an authoritative voice booming in a neglected building, sticking closely to the chosen subject—me—who never appeared. My Truth-O-Meter was stuck on “pants on fire.” As for me, “no comment” was the single important thing I said; in a way, it was a blessing, one that I could give because the raging infection that was my voice saying “I” had in the end burned me clean. A self had survived the amputation of the subject. This reticence felt clean, and not prohibitively complicated. To have no name even acquired some cachet over the years, as if it were a secret, unpublished type of name, as of a comic book character still waiting to be transformed into a franchise. None of this was disclosed to me at the time, however. I thought I would still make a comeback, like a late-night talk show host on a cable channel. I was a hero in waiting. But later I saw that I was part of a vast system that operated in the shadows, beyond network TV or cable, beyond reach of the public. I was stronger than I looked, and I looked smaller than I was. I am barely mentioned outside of footnotes, if at all, but my body is vast. This is all in my report.

Character says, life is like this: thousands saying, “maybe my luck is changing for the better?” as the morning drapes herself on the examining table, like a fashion model waiting for an amputation.

Character says, to have a body is largely a blessing, but it can also be complicated and uncomfortable, a tug of war between leg and spiritual leg, say, or between matter and attention. This is mentioned in my report. A good host is expected to try to take control of this body that hops and slides, burns and strains for that remarkable thing that is just the latest example of what we are missing, but we are heroes in waiting, cajoling the motor to turn over, hoping for a new result. A rare explosion of insight offers reassuring evidence that even in difficult times it is possible to get the tricky balance between public good and private parts right, or at least right enough, but even with worms, mussels, barnacles and other marine creatures as guides, it is difficult to get up and about in this ocean of time, when by the time we find out what shore is at the end of these efforts, it could all be too late, the answer obsolete, the question not the important one at all. This week, like last week, like last year, I said, “Maybe my luck is changing for the better,” and it was half-true, but the important things are all off the record, in the exurb where my body spends all its time, taking out the trash, looking over the back fence at the hulking neighbor burning garbage round the clock, and converting my environment to signs and symbols that it posts back to me day and night. I play down its importance, but my body’s exponential growth (it’s no bigger—the growth is of a different order) is as scary as if someone said “pants on fire!” and they really were. And so I turned my attention to my prosthetic instead. After all, it was tenacious in sticking to what I call my stump and had been the site of victories that I perceived to be genuinely my own, intensely personal and even sexual. I was concerned about where I was heading, my goal was still obscured by shadows, but I pushed forward. Who could tell what warmer afternoon would rehabilitate the alter ego I still called “me”? It wasn’t a question of a new type of body, a slim, clean, elegant model, that image that had displayed itself on an interior sensor all my life; that vision could be left to advertising campaigns, who routinely republish it. It wasn’t a question of a “real” body that signified its integrity by being smelly or unsightly. It was a question of awareness, of attention—cleaning the filter so that spring rang out all the way to China. This is mentioned in my report. Relentlessly, life works on us. We die of exposure to it, as to severe weather. But today blares down the sunny passages. The committee that officially dates when things begin and end said that history stopped last June. But time, it said, did not.

Character says, my body is the site of a performance called “personal conduct,” a type of play, not very serious. I collapse on a hill, looking up at an airplane, a cloud bank, thinking I hope, I want. Such transactions are a type of adhesive; they glue us to time. Things to be massaged or neglected, dusty passages, tiny but scary violations: they rise up into a wall, then collapse. I saw my severe face as if it were not spread across the front of me. It was weathered, so deeply lined that it appeared quilted. This is my January, I use it to make myself look cooler than I am. As I say in my report, I am not angry. I am complicated and uncomfortable, but the X-ray disclosed none of this, only shadows. Life, like banking, is tenacious. The amputated leg will hop to the end of the story.

Character says, The word “leg” is not a real leg. A story is a type of prosthetic. It hops beside the world; a billion amputees read along.

But if the word “leg” is not a real leg, it is a real word, as a false leg is a real prosthetic. And the stump? It is a prosthetic stump, strapped on to a deeper stump, that is also prosthetic, strapped onto a deeper stump that is also prosthetic, and so on. If there is a real stump it is so deep that we will never find it, and yet all these stumps are real in their way, which is the way the prosthetic is real, and dances a real dance. Hop, slide, turn; the Truth-O-Meter strains; a billion amputees take the stage, pants on fire with truth. How can we know the prosthetic from the dance?

Character says, a body, ocean-cleanly, finds a shore. The water quakes it, quakes it against the stump of a fence post. The body displays no reserve. Face turned up, legs spread, it moves up, back, up. From its willingness I perceive that you have died, you who were all reticence, who dwelled off the record. Disclosed, your body is all true, but the way it is true does not matter. You really were that false name you answered to. Your back turned to me was a face, the only face you had for me. The unknown face you are wearing now—wet, a little patchy—is too possible, too close to see. So we are at an impasse: Finding you, I miss you.

The water rises, tugs you back. Worms work in your body, in a peace that is not yours.

There are many possible applications for the human body. This franchise is temporary.

3.

Look, missing people are your neighbors,
I was one. I played down my life.
For years, there were encouraging signs—
“good show,” one said, in gold paint—
and visions of bears, and lapis-blue
money from an unknown country.
I went along with time. I cleaned the tubes.
My reticence was stronger than the truth;
I took a false name, borrowed
a story from the New York Times.
I was a character, like the Wizard of Oz,
or a fox with a smokestack.
I neglected today for tomorrow,
I neglected the real for the potential
and this I did over and over.
It was a type of incinerator
in which to burn the world.
I couldn’t stop the waste, but I could
convert it into heat and host a barbecue
where right now some public type
is introducing my self, elegant
in a veil and minidress. “Do you know
so and so?” A cellphone rings,
he turns his back; I lift the veil,
punch my self in the face.
I collapse. I rise. I punch. Collapse.
When I die, I resurrect my self
so I can punch my self again.
Again. Again. All right,
the comedian is back. “Some punch?”
Yes they do, or start a tug of war
over a pearl necklace or a book
that parts, spreading pearls or pages
all over the backyard.
I went down to the waterfront.
My foreign body was waiting
with a tube of glue.
Mend this, I said. The day
turned its attention to me:
“You rang?” Then I died.
April fools! I was raging with life.
It is an infection I will not survive.
However, I take the water, I take
the charity of warmer afternoons.
Foe is waiting at the end of the book.

4.

A right leg and a left leg sit together on a bus in the northeast. It turns out that they’re neighbors! They share a newspaper and an interest in dance. They text, write letters, follow each other on Twitter. In a year, they marry. The right leg wears a veil, the left, a veil and a tie. Now they share a bed, a kitchen clock, certain milestones. Their marriage makes the news. Invited to perform on a late-night show, they find a way to collaborate. It is not dancing, or running, or promenade; call it hopping in turn. Still, the audience cheers.

The left leg, on fire with self-interest, starts to call itself a dancer. The right leg, offers the left, is just following along. Thought to be better looking, the left leg is singled out for special opportunities. It appears on TV wearing a form-fitting black minidress. It says, “I think I’ll show some leg!”

A rivalry develops. If the right leg is the toughest, the left leg is the biggest. If the right leg is badly strained, the left leg has polio. If Chanel, then Gucci; if the NYT, then the Washington Post.

If the left leg crosses the line, the right leg crosses the left leg.

Tug of war between right leg and left leg. The right leg hops left. The left leg hops right. They vie, sliding around the wet backyard. One gains, then the other.

That which is between them begins to show the strain. The right leg neglects its appearance, wears a dress that is no more than a denim tube—maybe some pants, cut in half. The left leg says that the right leg is unsightly and a serious threat to its, the left leg’s, reputation. The right leg says, “I am a leg of the people, not a fashion model. Denim says integrity. It is reassuring and traditional.” The left leg coaxes and cajoles. The sensitive right leg says it will make no specific commitment and asks for a massage from the left leg, with oil. The left leg says that, as an artist, it is too serious to give a massage, with oil or not. The right leg calls the left leg irrational. The left leg calls the right leg irrational and smelly. The right leg ignores it. The left leg waits, then hops up and down on the bed at midnight. The right leg ignores it. The left leg leaves the house and does not come back until the next day. A picture on the front page of the local weekly newspaper shows the left leg dancing on a table, wearing a tie. It has a public affair with another left leg. It is seen in a shadowy bar in Albany, entwined with a prosthetic.

“That looks uncomfortable,” says the right leg.

“Maybe I’m changing,” says the left leg. “Maybe I am finding a self that isn’t just your image back to front. Left leg, right leg—it’s like I’m your echo.”

“And I’m yours. It’s called marriage.”

“Is it?”

“It was.”

The legs get divorced. The right leg goes to India. The left leg goes to the mall and gets a quilted denim weekend sneaker. “It’s possible to be left and right,” the left leg says. “My luck is changing for the better.” It sticks the right leg’s letters in the trash.

The next day, the left leg has a dance performance. Its balance is off. It slides on a patch of oil and goes down. Then rises to dance again, wiping its stump. The audience cheers this show of resilience.

The left leg thinks, life after amputation is like a deadly infection—thank God for barbecue. It thinks, it’s possible that I will develop an adhesive for use in wet conditions such as the human body. It’s possible that I’m a cartoon character named “Dash Rule, Destroyer of Worlds.” It has a vision: a tug of war with the right leg, in oil.

The left leg goes into the kitchen. It finds a fox in the kitchen, looking at the garbage. The fox has a smokestack, like an incinerator. Out of the smokestack, smoke is flowing, like shaped shadows, like a voice, like an infection, like a thousand tiny letters on a white page, but mostly like smoke.

The left leg paints its stump and hops into town. A vast space hops along beside it, sits beside it at the bar, leaves, as it does, when the bar closes.

When the left leg gets back the fox is sitting on the bed. Out of its smokestack, raging and plunging, comes the fire.

5.

Documents found in a castle:

A card with an image of a fox. Herein the lines, “I live in waiting. You are expected daily — Your amputee.”
A photograph of a prosthetic leg, glued to the back of a book about safety.
A white page captioned, “Map of an Invisible Country.”
A comic book called “Dash Rule and the Case of the Missing Body.”
A page of the New York Times from April 13, 2010.
An unsigned report, on the back of the last page of which is written the following:

“To the postmaster: if some arrangement of these symbols can reach the unknown shore I saw through the smoke of the fire in which I burn without hope or reluctance, that is all the delivery I ask.”

— The New York Times, April 13, 2010