Jellyfish in a MudBath – The Remix
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 frown, and go on, at length, about how Gadget A failed to properly connect with Widget B (clearly the result of everyone else’s incompetence), and immediately she would be forced to resist the urge to bang her head against the nearest available hard surface (or apologize for the obvious inadequacies of the entire planet). Instead, she would round up the 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 was precisely true—regardless of the ensuing strains of melodrama. That time her wisdom tooth had been infected over Christmas of 2005—of course, when her dentist was on holiday—that was pain. Her desire felt exactly like that—like something that can only 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 knowing it will accomplish absolutely nothing is immediately corrected.
Instead, she surrendered to her 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—it was 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 fourteen 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. She wasn’t literally being suffocated by a pillow. That would have been an improvement. At least with suffocation, there is an end in sight.
Also, she’d taken up crying over stupid things in movies . . . and books, and TV commercials, and just about anything, really—microwaving tea might lead to a bout of crying on the kitchen floor. And then she’d ridicule herself, because crying over stupid things was stupid. She wasn’t stupid. But it still felt like her brains were oozing out of her ears. It felt like her heart was imploding. She had become a 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 beginning to seriously question whether she might be lacking as well), 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).
Getting out of the water after having been stung by a jellyfish (she can personally attest to this, if by jellyfish we mean “gelatinous-type man”), is next to impossible. If you are lucky enough to get out, most certainly you will be peed upon. And yes, it adds insult to injury. (Someone might also take the opportunity, given your incapacitation, to stab you and steel your flip flops.)
Further, 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 grounding structures, incidentally—it just fell apart. She would set one brick, and slap on mortar, and then the whole thing would just immediately slide 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, and hand it over to him (standing there, en el nude, in front of that damn door; so she might as well just open it). Someone (certainly not 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. Endlessly. About his own brilliance. And she was nodding her head, crouched down with her fingers plucking at the occasional wire wondering what it did and whether it might not be put back together in such a way that would get her out of this whole mess. 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 frequently—he told her he knew everything about everything. On the other hand, he also told her that she knew some things about a lot of nothing, and so, she realized what she had was a total
fuckeroo. Checkmate. 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 (still just being stung by one, repeatedly). She’d never been a chess piece either, but she had played chess. A number of times. And a checkmate means that the other party has been able to outmaneuver you. They have taken pieces away that are, without doubt, critical. Furthermore, they have attacked at the source, and won. The chance for stalemate has passed. Queen annihilated. Kingdom ransacked. The moves have all been made.
Wait! That might have sounded misleading. She hadn’t actually been thinking that there weren’t any moves left, had she? Just because the game was over? Maybe she should just scratch the whole chess metaphor. It had nothing to do with checkmates, or bottlenecks and dreadlocks either. It had to do with the fact that he was constantly her undoing. And that sounded bad. It sounded terrible. Especially on paper. (Super-duper especially in application.) 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 days, almost weeks even, when she absolutely had wanted 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.) Misguided, for certain. The instinct to budge had been a good one. Feet had better get on board with the new plan. The one that involves abandoning ship.
And avoiding future jellyfish.
Now that it was over, and she was bobbing around on the ocean in a tiny little life vest (so small and ill-conceived for the giant task at hand that it seemed to mock itself with each flash of its safety orange), 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. Helpful. But the truth would be better classified in the genus Messy (which she imagines must be Latin for complete ball sucking disaster of an endeavor). 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. (And look, she did end up paying a lot for it.) 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 it was expensive to roll around in. (And hiding jellyfish.) And she has had to be content with this idea. A recent side effect of the plight of the lovesickened being rediscovery of the word and. (The being content part is still pending.)
So what it boiled down to—she finally decided she’d reached the bottom because the pan is burning—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 (with liberal helpings of interference from her).
Like the machine he’d once tried 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 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. Stop! Certainly, she could relate. Her tray had been popping in and out for four years. Crossed wires and gears that required shifting so things made sense again and performed as they were supposed to. Stop! And there it was. He smiled again, in some distant, grainy Facebook picture, peering out of the grim black from the seat of a barstool, but this time—
new wiring
—there were no jellyfish, or concrete walls, or zippers going up and down, or chess pieces carrying on in breaknecks, or even turtlenecks. In the end (as in the beginning), there was the same 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 . . .
Another outcome would probably be more romantic.
*The original piece, Jellyfish in a MudBath, was created in February of 2008, an amusing look at falling in love. It can be found here.
