9 Lagerstätte
The next day I practiced telling people I was leaving. At the yoga studio—
Devadatta: Namaste!
Me: I’m leaving.
Devadatta: Oh well, we’ll sure miss you here. Where are you going?
Me: Central America.
(Devadatta unravels a Guatemalan scarf from her hair. There were tiny people woven into in the pattern, each carrying a yellow cross-stitch crucifix.)
Devadatta: I studied yoga in Costa Rica. That’s where I got this scarf.
She laid the scarf twisted and purplish like tangled seaweed on the counter between us.
Me: I like the little people. Are they slaves?
Devadatta: God no! They’re indigenous.
And at work—
Me: I’m leaving.
Mr. Tofu Scramble: Well, Della, you know in the end we’re really only citizens of Gaia, aren’t we?
Ed, Logic’s Only Son: I’m a citizen of the United f*cking States.
Mr. Tofu Scramble: I’d think about Southeast Asia.
Ed, Logic’s Only Son: You should all go to Cuba and get shot by Fidel.
No matter how I said it, I felt like a coward. The voice of the lavender-haired girl at the party sang in my head, something from childhood I couldn’t pinpoint, that tone of disgust, and I was a kid all over again with nothing to back me up but a bellyful of Kimba reruns—Run, Kimba! A mother constellated of stars. Kimba! There is supernatural help. Your father is still alive in the forest—
“Right!” I said to myself aloud. “I should stay here. Publish a manifesto calling on all of us to dress our scarecrows from the community free-box so it’ll fool the giant crows making nest out of hemp and third party candidates.”
I went to find Credence. To tell him I was leaving, tell him why and make him understand. I charged up the front steps and began looking through rooms until I found him. He and Annette were scraping paint off the doorframe of the upstairs bathroom.
“Hey,” I called, breaching the landing, “I wanted to tell you something.”
—I am leaving. I don’t want to watch anymore. I can’t stop the bus from running off the cliff and the sea is already filled with lights. I don’t know why I can’t be one. I’m going to try. If I stay here I won’t be anything the Bellyfish could lean on, I’ll just be something they have to prop up—
“How was the benefit?” asked Credence.
“The benefit?”
“At the Glass House.”
Again, the girl with the lavender hair.
“Fine.”
Annette stepped through the doorway. “Are you and Jimmy going to drive up to the anniversary in her truck?”
I couldn’t tell them, not in that moment.
“In the truck.”
“Lesbians in a truck!” laughed Annette, “Grace will love it,” and, grinning like a dingo, she walked down the hallway, swaying and humming with the Bellyfish darting and snapping inside her.
Credence handed me a chisel.
“See if you can get the stuff off by the lock without gouging the wood.”
I would tell them tomorrow. I would say: I am a pool of light, then flicker like sun on a swimming pool. I would say: It has already erupted. And then, dancing through the braided shadows on the basin, wait for the foliage to land in the pool water and make galleons and cutters out of oak leaves and elm. Then they would have to understand.
The next day a second bomb went off at an auto shop down the street from Rise Up Singing. Everyone was running. But you can’t outrun it. I know. I’ve tried. You just come to the same place again and again. The return is so fast now for me that from the outside it looks like stillness. Like nothing is happening at all. But beyond that stillness is an unmappable topography, an endless stream of content.