Jellyfish in a MudBath
He was doing something technical. Explaining the process as he went. Poking graceful fingers into the belly of the machine, plucking at the long strands and loops of intestines, which weren’t intestines at all but rather wires that had been banded together. Red, orange, black—they terminated in white tips with silver pins. They plugged into the circuit board. The end result was that they made that thing do this, and this other thing do that. Mechanisms. Classic cause and effect.
She could relate. Ultimately (although she knew better than to use that word), she was filled with various parts and plugs and connectors and wires, plugged into a circuit board—the end result of which was that they made that thing do this, and this other thing do that. Mechanisms. Classic cause and effect . . . For instance:
His presence. Well—he could laugh, and go on, at length, about Gadget A connecting with Widget B, and immediately she would be forced to resist the urge to kiss his larynx. Instead, she would round up madcap wisps of hair attempting escape from the margins of her ponytail. Failing that—her hand had already completed the task, practically unbeknownst to her—she resisted the secondary urges to light a cigarette, bite her nails, and fidget unbecomingly. Self-conscious gestures. Temporary distractions. He was constantly her undoing.
She desired him with a fierceness that bordered on pain. This wasn’t precisely true—although it sounded nice and was properly melodramatic. But really, that time her wisdom tooth had been infected over Christmas—of course, when her dentist was on holiday—that was pain. Her desire felt nothing like that—like something that could be cured by a good course of antibiotics. It seemed unfortunate, when she thought of it like that. Drugs would have made things easier. They were working on it, though. Of that, she was certain. Muddling about with
mechanics. He was poking around in the machine again, unscrewing something so that he could gain access to the tangle of wires beneath the main board, and wouldn’t that be nice, she thought. To have clear access to the main board. Jiggle that wire, solder this piece to that piece, and presto, the dysfunctional urge to spin into action but accomplish absolutely nothing is immediately corrected.
Instead, she resisted urges. Daily. Well, really on a second-by-second basis. Biting her nails, for instance. She never caught herself in the act. But her fingernails were jagged nubs. Fidgeting: Check. Nervous taps and twitches and drum rolls across the counter and flicking the bottom of the pen so the point went in and out, in and out—that started to seem symbolic, so she moved on to twisting and untwisting the cap on a bottle of spring water. Then there was lighting a cigarette. That was easier, since she’d quit ten years ago. But she’d thought about it, mind you. Picking up the habit again, just so maybe this process, which felt strangely like being suffocated to death by a Tempur-Pedic pillow, would happen a little faster. Okay. That wasn’t true either. She wasn’t literally being suffocated by a pillow. It was just, sometimes, she felt miserably short of breath.
Also, she’d taken up crying over stupid things in movies. And then she’d ridicule herself, because crying over stupid things in movies was stupid. She wasn’t stupid. But it still felt like her brains were oozing out of her ears. She was altogether too female. Cliché. And a jellyfish.
In all honesty, she had never before been a jellyfish (past lives notwithstanding). But she could imagine certain traits of jellyfish. Malleability, for instance. You push your finger into them (she hadn’t done that either, mind you), and there’s all this squishy give. There’s no helping it. What hadn’t dawned on her until later—precisely 4am one Saturday—was that being a jellyfish actually implied that you were a pretty dangerous creature. They can sting you—and evidently, it’s painful. At its worst, you might die—from something like pulmonary edema brought on by the toxin of the Irukandji variety. While these creatures don’t have brains, or basic sensory organs (two things she was fairly certain she still possessed), it seemed more likely that what she meant to say was that she felt the way one might feel after having been stung by a jellyfish. They say the very first thing you must do is get out of the water. To avoid drowning, of course. But then, once you are on shore, and people become aware of your plight, they might be inclined to pee on you (it remaining a general misconception that such a thing is useful under those circumstances. Adding insult to injury).
But this is exaggeration. She wasn’t being stung and subsequently peed on. In regards to her claim that he was her constant undoing: Every time she tried to build on to something concrete —which was excellent material for sustaining structures, incidentally—it just fell apart. She would set one brick, and slap on mortar, and then the whole thing just immediately slides off onto the ground. Or it was like going to shut a door because there’s a draft and realizing that all she has is a door, and a frame for the door, and steps up to the door, but no walls, or a roof for that matter. She can shut the door all she likes, and it won’t make one bit of difference in terms of reducing her exposure to the general airflow. In short, why was she fussing about shutting doors when clearly she was lacking the sort of adjacent structures that make such gestures useful?
Or it could mean that she might zip up her jacket . . . and then just go ahead and shrug it off, over her head—and then take off everything else for good measure, too (standing there, en el nude, in front of that damn door; so she might as well just open it). Someone (possibly her fairy godmother) had pressed the opposite-of button (and don’t bother trying to tell her that no such button exists; it’s been pressed). She might say, “This is absolutely it. The end. I’m done.” And then she would find herself absolutely continuing on with whatever it was she was currently engaged in doing.
All the while, he was still poking around. Prodding. Talking. Heavenly. He was brilliant. And she was nodding her head, crouched down with her fingers plucking at the occasional wire wondering what it did and whether it might be something critical in the grand scheme of the machine’s higher functioning. There were gears, and switches, and bolts, and little plastic parts that connected to other parts, and surely he must know what each thing did because—quite obviously—he knew everything about everything. While on the other hand, she knew quite a few things herself, so she realized what she had was a total
impasse. A stalemate. And the chess analogy felt like a good one. Better than the jellyfish, because really, the more she thought of it, the more she realized that she was definitely not a jellyfish. (Nor was she being stung by one.) In fairness, she’d never been a chess piece either, but she had played chess. A number of times. And a stalemate means that neither party is able to win. There is just no move either one can make that will assure them of checkmate. But this stalemate she was suggesting was definitely a single-party affair—meaning an internal one. She was deadlocked against the computer that was her own brain—and evidently, there was no setting the level down to “easy” so that she could figure out how to beat it. She could no more make a decision about what to do in this situation than she could decide whether it might not be a good idea to chop off her left hand.
Wait! That might have sounded misleading. She hadn’t actually been considering chopping off her left hand. Not in the least. Or really, any part of it (such as might constitute fingertips or whole fingers). She had not even had occasion, as of late, to chop off so much as a fingernail, since this nasty business of nail biting had made that occasional chore obsolete. So, maybe she should just scratch the whole chess metaphor. It had nothing to do with bottlenecks, or deadlocks, or stalemates anyway. It had to do with the fact that he was constantly her undoing. And that sounded bad. It sounded terrible. Especially on paper. It sounded like something you’d want to steer clear of. You and me maybe. But not her. She’d driven right into it with a smile that indicated she knew precisely what she was doing, when obviously she didn’t. She couldn’t explain it. Especially because she was pretty sure there were whole seconds, almost minutes even, when she absolutely did want to steer clear—otherwise, why would she have brought it up? No kidding. It’s the oddest thing, to feel your feet absolutely refusing to budge an inch—not a single inch. (Leaving you with no choice but to conclude that your feet have gone completely mad. You’re telling them, “Well, you’d better do something.” And they’re just standing there, doing nothing. Then, it suddenly occurs to you that they are, in fact, doing something. They are doing nothing, which was precisely their intention all along.)
She could admit that there did appear to be something irrational about the whole experience. If she were being honest, that is. She’d like to say endearing. Or charming. But the truth is that the whole business was rather Messy (which she imagines must be Latin for don’t bother trying to make sense from nonsense). It was like rolling around in mud, which some people liked to do—Cleopatra, for one, who soaked in mud from the Dead Sea (but who also carried a poisonous asp about in her bosom, in case that makes you inclined to question her good judgment). Regardless, some people pay a lot of money to roll around in mud. It might be imported, because local mud is obviously pedestrian—and you can’t get volcanic ash in say, Idaho, only potatoes (which no one, as far as she knows, has yet tried to bathe in)—but look, it’s still mud. The idea is that it is excellent for your skin and a sort of all-around good detoxifier, even though it might smell like rotten eggs. So it’s messy. And it’s good. And it stinks. And she has had to be content with this idea. That it’s messy. And it’s good. And it stinks. (A recent side effect of the plight of the lovesick being this discovery of the word and.)
So what it boiled down to—she finally decided this, because it seemed like she should have reached the bottom of the pan by now—is that he wasn’t actually her undoing at all. Not in the least. That things in general, were constantly doing and undoing themselves all on their own.
Like this machine he was trying to fix, which had decided to open-close, then open-close the tray to the DVD player whenever he pressed the power button. The zeal with which it now performed this single task (yes-no, on-off, one-zero, over and over again) could only be suppressed by a firm jerk on the power cord, cutting off its juice, cold turkey. Certainly, she could relate. This simple matter of crossed wires and gears that require shifting so things make sense again and perform as they are supposed to. And there it was. He smiled again, but this time—
new wiring
—there were no jellyfish, or concrete walls, or zippers going up and down, or chess pieces carrying on in bottlenecks, or volcanic necks, or breaknecks, or even turtlenecks. In the end (or the beginning), there was simply this rather viscous mess. And it’s good. An organic cocoon—maybe punctuated by the alternating aromatherapeutic scents of lavender and sulfur—where she’s suspended, naked, in gooey warmth, and afterwards, she has to be hosed down.
And . . .
What could be more romantic?
