Symmetrix

There is something about my face. I’m not paranoid. This has been reported. “What? What did I do to you?”

Or “Stop.” I don’t know what look I must make. I search my heart for recrimination.

I search myself for antipathy.

My heart is loving. Certified. I remember how awful everyone has always been, forever. Yet I cry still out of naked love.

“I can see you are upset.”

Or “Tell me what you really think.”

My face . . . cuts. I look toward you, and you are cut. My face is not symmetrical, this is true . . . That’s part of why I am read, I feel, as being so thersitical, but it can’t be the only reason.

My nose is in the turn lane.

I don’t know what portion of this is why my look hurts an afternoon—“Fine. Fine, yes. Fine. I won’t go on. As you wish.”

It has been going on for forty years. I won’t count the first four.

Readers who’ve known me, the CB of this autofiction, might say, “She is thersitical though, for sure.” There is a thersitical inner lining in that person. They are rejecting this attempt, my clarification, or they qualify my love anyway as an effect of my regret. Our lost friendships. Even now, the platform I am typing on, Salamaca Composes, protests where I’m going with this.

Thersitical is a lesser-known way of saying critical and abusive. For a wider audience, Caren, say critical, abusive, or scurrilous if you must.

“Don’t look at me that way,” it has been said, to me, at the advent of my looking at.

I type through Salamaca Composes, the only option on my work computer now, considering my work’s war with Microsoft. I can’t seem, Salamaca, to make my eyes appear like they were photographed into being by a chimeracamera made of cold, sweet butter.

The outside of my face seems pissed, I hear.

Is it me? Is it something else? Is something else inside of me, Salamaca?

Your readers, Caren, at this point intuit that it’s you. They could know it at chimeracamera.

I organized a lunch for my mom, Salamaca, at her new assisted living, Chandelier Forest. She is young for moving in, due to the MS—

You write about this often, Caren. Sometimes I find you to be sucking the MS dry—

I would love to suck it dry.

All right, Caren. Say more about the lunch. What was on offer? Who came?

Her friends seemed to feel uneasy. Three of them. In their later seventies, like her. But living without the issue of MS. Whatever other issues they are facing, they still maintain homes and travel around. Before my mom’s arrival at Chandelier Forest, she was, I can tell you—

Does the place live up to its name or not? Would you offer here a wry juxtaposition of a place with no chandeliers? Uncheerful?

—like a mule on a cliff, in her bed in her apartment. For twenty-four years, ever since I was nineteen, she lived there. The distance between her bed and the bathroom was becoming an equivalence to a mountain range. After she moved to Chandelier Forest, I hired a gig worker to take her bed, that lip of the cliff, before anything else. He folded it into the elevator, which was smaller than the mattress. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—he was so strong he worked alone. I was watching a cliff descend by elevator as if it had been a mountain from a stage production. I watched it—“Is something wrong?”

This was the gig employee?

Yeah. He thought I was looking at him with scorn. Like he was doing a bad job, or not what I wanted.

Her friends, I thought, were acting pretty restless. They didn’t want to tour the activity rooms at her new assisted living, neither the one decorated to be like a classical pub nor the movie theater with an old-fashioned popcorn cart. Chandelier Forest is, in fact, Salamaca, pretty nice.

“Did I do something wrong?” one of them asked when I looked at him at lunch.

You mean one of the friends?

Yeah her friend.

We were having lunch outside, in late March. We were sitting in the interior patio of Chandelier Forest, which feels like sitting in a small pocket park in Philly, we were sitting in a miniature—the miniature park, and our small lunch, the five of us standing in as an abbreviation for many other people, whose existences have this extending variousness.

Existences have extending variousness . . . Caren . . .

Some are dead, Sal, or too sick, lost eyesight so don’t drive, or the connection has collapsed. Living people become but a mist that the brain could—if it cared to or wasn’t in control—ridiculously spritz at itself.

It’s not ridiculous. Sometimes the living are a mist, I’ll buy.

People die to you, but your brain becomes like a greenhouse.

Okay. Moving through. These friends were dear to your mother, and she was dear to them? Enough to get them to come over for a lunch at the new place?

Very, very much!

This day in late March was still like a lion, but it did have a lamb’s eyeballs, warm and wet—the coldish day stared at us innocently. We decided to sit outside.

Fine. Yep.

Also . . . the sun was setting and, in doing so, putting a pearl coating on the wood benches, and I was, if anything, not looking at anyone but watching the pearl sizzle itself into a dark oxygenous cloth.

No.

I was looking at that. A little tired from organizing the lunch and driving out in traffic, and letting these friends talk on about old times I don’t have purchase on. I was sitting around feeling okay, like a subdued facilitator.

“God,” one of the friends said as I glanced from the bench. “Did I do something to you?”

“What would you tell a tiger about your life?” my mom asked suddenly, taking a canny survey. We were on benches, she was facing us from her mobility scooter.

She’d been bed-muling it. Alone in her apartment. It was crazy that she’d ended up in this nice forest for chandeliers, I thought she was gonna die in that apartment for sure, found in the bathroom, kitchen, fallen with no one to hear, from having tried to do the next thing. Reach for a glass.

All around and underneath her bed, once it got removed, there were shattered molehills of glass, from all the glasses she’d ever reached for from bed in twenty-four years, maybe in the middle of the night. Her mattress was intense.

Why didn’t you help her?

She was a bed-muling help-refuser. I was so ashamed.

Is the mom, if it is fictional (though I can see from about a thousand recent emails between you and your sister and social workers and nurses and occupational therapists and a senior-living coordinator and your uncle and a plumber that your mom has moved to an assisted living out in Plymouth Meeting after a stay in a hospital and two rehab centers, the last of which, I can see—oh geez . . .—left the family shaken), often a poetical person like this? Big Blake fan? I recognize you’re making a literary composition, Caren, but you might consider her need for a move to memory care when you’re done with this. I mean, what are you doing writing fiction? Posing your ego in this tawdry photo shoot of paragraphs.

I agree that’s what it feels like to compose fiction, Salamaca, but I maintain a house and, also, that fiction could do something more than just satisfy its writer or make others feel—which wouldn’t be enough, because it can also, I think, divert language from its more popular uses, which are about the death of the forest.

You’re saying you own a house? Would you ever consider selling it? I can help.

My mom told me a skunk lives on her floor in the Personal Care neighborhood of her assisted living. “A deflowered skunk, Caren, lives with my neighbor. I met the fellow.”

Caren, there’s a winner of a literary technique called “close and far.” Try it out. If a skunk lives next door, where does a tiger prowl? Your story could be wider. If a skunk is the nearest proof of wildlife in this fiction, sitting on, say, a neighbor’s lap on the third floor like a de-lettered newspaper gone to poof, where do you imagine a tiger on the prowl? Siberia? Go for it!

“Why did you ask everyone what they’d tell a tiger, Mom? Did you hear that somewhere?”

“It was today’s burning question.”

I had never heard her talk about a burning question. Was it a ritual at her assisted living?

“And who was just here with us for lunch?” I asked like it was a joke. Sly-cognitive-exam time.

She listed out the names of her friends, who are dear to her, and she said Chandelier Forest posts a burning question every day in the elevator to stimulate conversation among its residents. “A lot of people,” she said, “have a unique take.” The elevator, at a place like this, is basically the Venetian canal. See, Salamaca, you can travel by metaphor.

She said, “Cord didn’t like the way you were looking at him. I thought I’d swoop in with today’s burning question.” She can swoop.

“Why do you think Cord thought I was looking at him so sourly?”

Are you asking me, Caren?

No.

A story requires symmetry. You’ve set it up somewhat well, given your proclivities. It’s time to return to your inciting issue, about your face and its problems, or your inner lining, depending what you want to emphasize. A story should end on some kind of exploding rhyme. Or a slant rhyme. So now expand to the face of the world, or at least to something.

I was looking at Cord distractedly. I was thinking of my mom. I was thinking through some logistics, about lunch clean-up. I was recalling Cord’s visits during my childhood. He was possibly the gentlest and least offending man I met of his generation. He wasn’t married and didn’t have kids.

He and my mom had met as teenagers, smoked a lot of seventies dope together, hung out in various apartments around Philly and its suburbs, kicking off nonprofit careers stemming from their volunteer work. I remember considering in my teenage years, when I rarely saw him, if I could ever track him down and elicit from him an adoption, recalling him from his visits.

Caren, do you want me to polish or even summarize this part? I have access to all your attempts at this section, since you were nineteen.

You mean emails I wrote to my dad?

You tried very hard to explain what had happened to the person that had happened it up.

I actually wasn’t going to write about it in this, Sal. I was going to end on an image? There are actual chandeliers in the forest? They are a ripe sunset as seen through twilitious branches? What do you think?

You know what I think of that . . . You wrote your dad and told him what he, your dad, had said to you in the car, driving you to the airport.

My family doesn’t share memories very well. I felt I had to tell him what was said. I don’t understand why everyone accuses me of cutting them with my look. A look is not language, and I don’t say shit, do I? I don’t tell people horrible things about what’s inside of them. Doesn’t it count, doesn’t, Salamaca, my lack of language count? Or does making language count?

What do you mean by make?

Arranging it. Evacuating it.

I don’t know where you think you’re gonna go with it, Caren.

I don’t want to tell you.

When you were looking at Cord, Caren, you were thinking about when you were nineteen—running out of your dad’s car at the airport, after what he’d said to you, the last time you weren’t estranged from him. Do you want to repeat here what he said?

I can’t actually remember.

Right, well, you jumped from the car at Departures to escape his verbal abuse. You’d flown in from school to help your mom leave the marriage, her demyelination in the foreground of the world. You had, in five days, evacuated her from their house—she was really fatigued, a fallen tree rotting in their bedroom—to an apartment in South Philly where she would rather live, alone, it would be like her holy cliff, rose cliff, sacred, doused in the holy energy of escape—you saw Cord. At the airport. He was there, it was 5 a.m. Flying somewhere with a girlfriend. Curly hair and a music case. I’m sure you were remembering at lunch, Caren, that he didn’t know, when you went up to him heaving a little, having run from the car, who you were.

In her apartment in South Philly, my mom ordered custom gold curtains. It turned her bed a high gold, in the early evening every evening.

You were cutting Cord, Caren, with your look, at the Chandelier Forest. At forty-four years old, still thinking of it. You hated him for not knowing you when you needed him so much, at the airport, and before then too. In your childhood. This incidental man from your childhood. Loose tie. Your mom’s old pal. For him, you were background. He wouldn’t have known that you held him in your best box, in your bedroom, this kind of compartmentalizing child you had to be. Box kid. It stunk. Here’s the skunk. It’s important to bring things back around. You screwed up your face.

No.

Why are you looking at me like that? What did I do to you? Did I do something wrong, Caren. Why are you so upset? Ow. Ouch. Please! Please!

I was likely thinking about logistics, lunch and cleaning up. A parking situation I’d have to deal with when I drove back to the city. I remember thinking, while I looked at him, If you want to have an accurate portrait of yourself, to keep with you, a child’s need could be the camera. I was looking at Cord at the lunch, I’m sure, thinking, He doesn’t know such a portrait of his anarchism exists.