Blog

We all go by the same name.

Our name is Bill. 

Each of our dads’ names was also Bill. 

Our dads are dead. 

I walk on the ground and sometimes think, I am walking on my dad. 

I don’t remember what my mother’s name was. 

We have a body, a van, a house, a bed, some rope, and a strong will.

There are four of us. 

My friends and I are full of blood and semen. 

We see the world. 

 

 

Our home is not far from the mall. 

We go to the mall during the day a lot to walk around and look for what comes next. 

We have needs. 

The outside of the mall is white and screams in intense sunlight. 

In the mall there are places you can get food.  

I like beef and I like dough, though I try not to eat them. 

I try not to eat anything. 

Our van is also white. 

There were windows on the van but we painted over them with white paint. 

The windows are tinted. 

I am Bill 1. 

Bill 2 is my brother. 

Twins. 

We shared a bed for the first thirteen years of our lives. 

Now Bill 2 sleeps in the bed my dad slept with our mom in before we killed them. 

I sleep in the bed we used to share. 

It’s nice to have so much room now to move my body around however I want. 

I hate the dark.

I can’t sleep with any lights on because I like to see my body. 

I like to open my eyes and know exactly what is there. 

The skin around my cock is shaved. 

So are my armpits and my head and face. 

I would shave my arms and legs but my friends would shit all over me about it. 

Bill 2 looks better than me naked but I am smarter, which is why I always drive.

Bill 3 is the kid who always lived across the street. 

Now he lives with us. 

His parents are dead, too.

We helped him kill them. 

They were older than our parents even. 

They had a lot of money.

Now we have a lot of money. 

Bill 4 is our dog. 

He just showed up one day at the front door of the house we share together and we let him in and fed him and he never left. 

Bill 4 is ours. 

I would kill anybody who tried to come and take Bill away.

I would kill anybody. 

 

 

Today is bright. 

On days like now the mall gets so bright you can’t look at it. 

You have to look at the air beside where you meant to be going and aim at that. 

Even through the black glass on our car it’s hard to know where you are going. 

I am wearing a white suit. 

I bought the suit from Goodwill because I liked the way it fit me and I like how it seems to make me blend in wherever I am standing. 

I also like how my big cock looks even bigger against the fabric.

The pants are a youth size. 

We always video the things we fuck. 

I lift weights and work out a lot to keep my body looking good on camera. 

I wouldn’t want to be a big fatass on the recordings with my lard all flapping onto the other bodies. 

My physique helps me talk the women into doing what I want, not that I need them to want to do what I am going to do to them. 

In the back of the van we have bats and guns and axes and rope and gags and ether and pills and cash and gags. 

We have everything we could ever need right at our behest. 

We are prepared. 

We already know what we require to do what we will do, though often we don’t need any of it but our mouths. 

Our eyes and mouths.

Our eyes and bodies and hands and fingers and arms and ideas and our mouths. 

I’m the one who mostly does all of the talking. 

People like me. 

Always have. 

Even when I was a little boy I could finagle a woman into letting me do shit I wasn’t supposed to be doing like staying up well into hours I was supposed to be asleep or sitting on them or touching on them even though they weren’t my mother. 

I’ve always eaten anything I want and always will.

I’d rather die young without restrictions than old having always had to pay attention.

Despite the light the air outside the mall is cold. 

My skin reveals its ridges. 

 

 

I like big girls.

It’s their asses.

Also, it’s something about the way they look from upside down, the way their voice elongates in a different way than those with less to give. 

Bill 2 likes wives. 

He always looks for something glinting on a woman’s finger. 

Bill 2 was married once, which might have something to do with it, like he wants to take his feelings out on anyone who didn’t get cheated like he did. 

Bill 2’s wife died in a fire. 

He did not set the fire. 

I can’t remember Bill 2’s dead wife’s name. 

Bill 2 always calls her Dead Wife, then he laughs. 

It brings me sadness.

Knowing how much pain he’s in still, I mean. 

What he has suffered. 

Bill 3 likes fat girls also, but the young ones. 

Usually we don’t let him have the young girls because they’re not very smart and that’s disgusting to both me and my twin brother. 

Though sometimes if we can’t find anything else, we’ll give in and let him have his way. 

Close your eyes and what you have is what you make it. 

Bill 4 doesn’t get a say cause he’s a dog. 

Not that Bill 4 doesn’t have his preferences. 

 

 

The mall right now is nuts. 

It’s the sort of season people go to stores just to be going. 

It’s better than being outside. 

The air in the mall is loud in such a general way it’s like there’s no sound.

You can’t hear any certain sort of word in particular. 

People are screaming.

They don’t even know what. 

They scream because they can without alarm. 

No one responds to screaming in a world where pretty much everyone is always screaming. 

There are so many faces you can look dead on into their eyes and know you’ll never see those eyes again. 

It’s like a music. 

It’s the world. 

There are so many people you could begin most anywhere when you have ideas like I do. 

But the point is to get exactly what you want. 

We walk slow and close together. 

We look almost like a wall.

A human wall with three white faces and three cocks and six arms. 

It’s slow going at the beginning today, despite how much flesh there is I feel desire for. 

Everyone’s with someone else already.

Mostly we look for those who’ve come alone. 

Who had no one to come with or didn’t want to. 

The human mind is full of holes.

There are so many things to fill the holes with. 

All the stores are full of shit that you can buy. 

We go into a department store and browse the women’s perfumes, pretending to be looking for a gift for Bill 2’s wife. 

His dead wife did like perfume and wore it often. 

Bill 2 tells the saleswoman his dead wife likes Dior. 

She liked to spray it on her thighs, he tells her, grinning, when she could still do that. 

The lights inside the store are almost as bright as what’s outside. 

The woman doesn’t seem to notice he’s saying anything out of the ordinary. 

The other women’s bodies passing are all bundled up for the cold weather, obscuring their conditioning. 

Sweaters press their breasts flat to their chests.

Their skin is precious. 

Their hands are attached to their arms, the arms to ribcages, to necks, to skulls. 

Rings on their fingers, or not. 

Watches, or not. 

They all have their own memories and ideas of what they came to buy, how they got here, where they will go when they leave here, whether or not they make eye contact, for how long. 

I try to ask a pretty girl if she knows where I could find the men’s room. 

She pretends not to hear me.

Her face is filled with bone. 

Her ass is witchcraft through her stretchy pants walking away. 

I think about following her but I don’t. 

I’m always smiling. 

I tell another passing girl I’d like to buy her a special gift.

Any scent here on the glass tables, she can have it, no strings attached.

The girl hesitates. 

Her hair is black like mine would be when it grows out. 

I’d just like you to remember me, I say, when you will spray this on your body.

I see the blood flush up through the girl’s head.

Bill 2 and Bill 3 are watching me talk now from over by where they keep the men’s scents, no expressions. 

There are at least thirty mirrors in the room. 

The girl keeps walking. 

The floor beneath us both is gold. 

 

 

We follow the girl for a while from a slight distance, just far behind enough that she must realize that we’re there. 

The noise in the mall feels more distant now, having spent some time inside it, like it is swallowed in my flesh.

Like I no longer have to hear it, because I am it. 

The girl is never far away. 

She has no idea what she is feet from. 

I glare into the back of her head hard in such a way that were she to turn and look our eyes would lock on contact, open tunnels. 

She never does. 

Entering the food court, she disappears. 

When we find her again, she’s with her husband. Or her boyfriend or her brother. Or some guy she’s asked to stand beside her on account of who we are. 

The guy isn’t looking at us now, but she is. 

Looking at us so hard it might break her little eyes.

There are so many other people.

I love being alive. 

I love the feeling of seeing in my body beneath me and knowing there are parts of me I will never see unless reflected, which isn’t real. 

I love the inside of my face, how the curvature that lines the point between my inside and my outside seems made of polished chrome, with a low blue glow coming off it to bask my innards around the edges like the coming of a sun. 

I love the glass of the fronts of the stores in the mall that make as if they keep the air inside the store inside it and the air outside it out, who only from certain angles catch my image. 

I love everybody. 

I love hearing my skin grow. 

My nails. 

My new blood. 

I love being inside a man’s body.

I love feeling the meat between my legs knock up against my thighs when I walk, the balls there full of babies only waiting to be given places to be incubated, nourished, born. 

I love the belt inside the escalator, the slatted eyes of every step. 

I love to press my teeth together until they seem about to break. 

I love how when I think its like someone is there inside me reading a book aloud. 

I love how there is nothing in the mall I have to touch besides the ground. 

 

 

I decide it’s time I had a haircut. 

There’s this shitty little haircut spot at the mall. 

I get the idea after seeing the one girl in there cutting hair, a tiny blonde, with a body that makes her seem older than her face seems.

She reminds me of someone I saw on TV recently.

I don’t know who that was, but I can see her in my brain captured as an image. 

It’s like there’s two of every person in the world and here is one I recognize from somewhere else, and I can come near. 

I can interact now. 

Tongues and tits and all the layers. 

I go in and say I would like a haircut. 

I clearly do not need a haircut. 

My scalp just shines. 

The deskgirl is squat and ugly, a nose the size of someone’s fist. 

I can hardly hold my hand down from reaching up and rubbing it, grinning. 

The deskgirl tries to put me with a man. 

There’s a man there waiting to cut hair who has no one and the girl is already in the midst. 

The scissors look so large inside her hand holding the metal, bringing it around a person’s face. 

I say I’d like to wait. 

I say I’ve had this girl cut me before and her work was great, I’d like to have the same work done again. 

The deskgirl asks my name. 

I say my name is Bill 1. 

The deskgirl writes the name down: Bill. 

Her handwriting is sloppy, like a child’s. 

It doesn’t even look like my name there written on the paper. 

The deskgirl tells me, Thirty minutes. 

She fakes a smile.  

The world is ours. 

I tell Bill 2 and Bill 3 to go and look out on their own awhile, keep their eyes open, cover more ground, see what comes. 

I tell them I will find them wherever they end up. 

 

 

I sit and wait and watch the girl work. 

I hold a magazine open on my lap like I might read it but I don’t bother to look down. 

Every few minutes I remember and I turn the page just for the fuck of it. 

Every page looks exactly the same to me.

The glossy paper feels nice on my palms. 

The girl who is going to cut my hair doesn’t look over at me even once. 

She doesn’t know I can already see straight through her clothes. 

She doesn’t know what I have done to others like her.

My mind is full of blood, just like her body. 

She is chatty with the customer before me, an obese man wearing tan slacks and a white button up shirt. 

His coat is folded over on the seat beside the barber chair. 

The coat is red. 

I touch my thumbs together and hear knives becoming sharpened in space between my eyes. 

Dogs ripping apart sternums while being ripped apart by knives.

Meat in my dresser drawers, no room remaining. 

Beside the man’s coat there is a shopping bag from Macy’s. 

The white of the font on the bag makes my heart beat in my head. 

The want for wetness pounding through and through me. 

I imagine the bag is full of lice. 

The man’s body full of lice. 

His brain.

His lardy sternum. 

His hidden throat. 

The man watches the hairdresser in the mirror while she works on him, speaking to her reflection. 

She plays along.

I can tell she doesn’t mean to laugh when she is laughing. 

I make a mental note to buy a red coat someday when I am old and fat and fucked.

The man’s brown hair falls onto the floor around him, every inch I want to eat.  

I wait watching the girl: her hands, her fingers, her throat, her pants, her lips.

My brain is starving. 

There have been no eternities before now. 

 

 

Each time I close my eyes, it becomes night. 

There is no world there beyond the edges of me. 

Black elastics. 

The hidden planets squeal. 

I realize then that I am walking. 

I am awake. 

I look and see the sky above me framed with steel nails. 

Black round heads of nails each small as tips of pointed fingers. 

There are flowers in my pores. 

Sponges in the bread of my body growing thicker, drier. 

The air is covered up with zits. 

Where I move into them the zits pop and I can breathe them. 

It’s like a painting. 

It expands. 

It is buried in the sheen over the air of the room where I am sitting with the slitting sound inside my jaw. 

I am speaking and can’t hear what I am saying. 

I see a mirror. 

I walk until I come upon a shore. 

A beach unpeopled, kind of hissing. 

The water is bodies.  

The sand is chips. 

A thousand eyes all at the same time. 

There are so many worlds like cut on our world that no one wants. 

Hours burnt down into colors. 

Dreamless, ageless. 

A language I did not design, scripts I didn’t mean to model, sexual desires. 

The air is cake. 

I walk on the sand until I am covered over in the bodies, one of the bodies. 

I wade into their obesities, their cavities, their open mouths glued up with gravy. 

Their ticking flesh together crushed. 

Women and men. 

I have known them all. 

The sun above us never brighter. 

 

 

I find Bill 2 and Bill 3 having lunch. 

They’d gone back to the food court to find the first girl that we followed and got hungry, Bill 2 says. 

His mouth is full of red lasagna sauce and dough. 

There is a table of six elementary school aged girls ~5.5’ NW over Bill 2’s right shoulder, from my perspective, dressed alike. 

Each child will in time age to reach the age I am right now, though by then I will be much older, and they will keep aging past that immediately, unless they die. 

What happened with the haircut baby, Bill 2 asks. 

His voice is high. 

I tell him I can’t remember.

I honestly can’t remember, though I can see it in my mind. 

I know her hands holding the scissors had orbited my mouth. 

I know there is more sand inside my sternum than had previously been there. 

Glass waves, a muzzle. 

A dais beneath the sand. 

What happened with you? I say.

I hear me say it. 

I feel the words become absorbed. 

Bill 2 is saying something. 

Bill 3 is saying something. 

I am Bill 1. 

I am alive. 

There will be clearer times.

There will be new days.

Just not right now.

 

 

Back out in the van, we sit in silence. 

Every other car we see is also white. 

We are waiting. 

The pavement is white, the shrubberies are white and shining, the smoke that comes out of our mouths, the exhaust on the horizon, the glass refracting, all white as nothing. 

The grid on the pavement looks like someone slit the earth. 

Bill 3 is in the back of the van playing with the restraints, pretending to hang himself. 

None of us know what we are waiting for though we know we’ll know it when it comes. 

The clock in the van’s dash is broken. 

It always reads 88:88. 

That’s like four infinities. 

They won’t stop blinking.

 

“I will bring one more . . .”
—God, Exodus 11:1

The plague descended suddenly. It caused no surprise.

The towers downtown became polymer and styrene spires. Cars plasticized to opal propylene as their tires fused into the cement of coast routes.

The women dancing in the Jelly Julie on Sunset monstrously thermoset before the horny men, as the petrochemical bane reached the Central Valley. It hesitated at the edge of the migrant towns and great vale of farmland as if to weigh how the urban populace met this change. When the people continued the old lifestyle, merely titillated by this novelty world of vinyl and epoxy, the polymerization surged on through cropland. The film moguls and actors and club musicians, porn titans and courtesans, drank piña coladas under acrylic palms along Malibu sands and Mulholland lawns of emerald isobutyl. The plague hardened the San Joaquin Valley to an inedible breadbasket of decorative fruit.

Famine set in. Others followed the fused strippers: Melrose sidewalks crammed with mannequins in aspect of shoppers, peering into jewelry store windows. The skin carameled in the California sun into dulce de leche, the eyes shining.

Those who could afford horses fled northeast into the Rockies, but seemed to bring the plague. At the ends of shotguns they were turned from mountain towns, the road an eel of crisp resin at their heels. At the east base of the American Cordillera, the Armed Forces erected a battery to halt the movie moguls and stars, haggard advertisement tycoons and champion surfers, whose wealth and love of good living kept them before the blight. The Rocky Mountains vulcanized under their tired feet. Their horses hardened. Ice slopes glacéd. Tors—Bakelite—reflected the sun like knives of obsidian as their clothing fused into their necks. The cursed Californians stared from ledges amid rubber pine, a long show-window of alp trekkers between seasonal shipments; they stared, doleful, across the rolling living grass of the Great Plains, from which their forbearers brought crop to the Central Valley and to which they ushered death. Slowly, bodies catalyzed and howitzers fired upon screaming mannequins wobbling down interstates.

The plastic blight ended at the Great Divide. As the nation mourned the West, agleam every sunset like a derelict candy land, the Midwest and East Coast conceded the logic of such a plague coming from California.

A gold blight hit New York. The silver hypodermic of the Empire State pushed gold into the sun. The Chrysler Tower and architecturally vervy investment banks in lower Manhattan rippled and shone. The auric creep pursued investment bankers and commodity men through Ohio. Heavy artillery eliminated them in the rolling corn.

Southerners and plainsmen thanked Heaven for its benevolence. Two years later the black flesh was there. Remaining Americans waited. Shined eyes stared from softening skin and dimmed.

“Am I talking too loud?” Winona laughs and rests her chin against her forearm, which she lays atop the plastic folding table that Jonathan told her he’d replace once Kyle was born. When Winona’s nose gets this close to the surface of the table, she is usually repulsed by the scent of Clorox wipes and pizza bites, but she is now on her third glass of wine and is unbothered. “I always forget how far my voice carries when I’ve had a little too much.” She motions her hand toward the bottle in front of her, which she has gotten for eight dollars at Trader Joe’s that morning. “I got this for eight dollars at Trader Joe’s this morning. Isn’t that incredible?”

“You said that already, Winona.” Jonathan gets up to drop his plate in the sink. Annie gets up to put her plate away and when she notices Jonathan’s dirty dish, she turns on the tap.

“No, no.” Jonathan waves Annie away from the sink. “I’ll get to that later. You just relax. You’ve had a long day.” Annie smiles and sits back down, moving from the dining table to the couch.

“Annie, have you ever noticed that when Jonathan says, ‘I’ll get to that later,’ what he really means is, ‘someone else will get to that later and I’ll forget about it in an hour?’” Winona laughs. It is a sweet laugh, almost childlike. Her cheeks are red, but neither Jonathan nor Annie is able to tell if this is from the alcohol or the humor. Neither Jonathan nor Annie laughs.

It is now 9 o’clock, which means Annie has been at Jonathan and Winona’s house for just about 12 hours. Annie’s parents always tell her that she should ask for compensation on nights when she is asked to have dinner with Jonathan and Winona, but Annie generally enjoys their company. She thinks Winona is funny when she’s drunk — she is what her mother would call a “loose cannon” — and Winona is always drunk on evenings like these.

Jonathan notices Annie looking at the clock. “Don’t feel pressure to stay, Annie. I know it’s getting a little late. I’m sure you have plans with friends tonight.”

“I don’t, actually. My parents came back from Sicily last night, so I’m supposed to go over and see them early tomorrow morning.” As silly as he knows it sounds, Jonathan always forgets that Annie has parents. Neither he nor Winona has ever met them. After 8 months of her watching Kyle, Jonathan likes to think that he and Winona have successfully integrated Annie into the family. Sometimes Jonathan thinks of Annie as an older daughter. Other times, he thinks of Annie as a younger mother to Kyle.

“How was the trip?” Jonathan sits across from Annie on an orange loveseat. It is the kind of loveseat that should really be marketed as a chair because it is so small. Winona sits beside him. Jonathan looks uncomfortable and crosses his legs.

“It’s Sicily, Jonathan,” Winona says. “Obviously it was spectacular.

“They did have a great time.” When Annie smiles she shows off her gums, which she has been told by Jonathan is her best feature. “Although they found it difficult to get used to the jet lag. Not that the time difference is even that significant — I guess they’re just getting old.”

“How old are they?” Winona asks.

“They’re 55.” Winona says nothing, although she is struck by how young they are, only 15 years older than she. Winona’s friends always warned her about having Kyle so late because of “geriatric complications.” Winona knew plenty of people who had had children at 40; she thought her friends just didn’t want her to feel bad about looking old at Kyle’s gymboree class. Which she does feel bad about, now that she thinks of it.

“Did you miss them, while they were away?” Annie begins to nod, quite emphatically, when she is interrupted by a soft thud in the direction of Kyle’s bedroom.

“Should I go check on him?”

“I’m sure he’s fine. He probably just dropped one of his toys.” Winona thinks Annie’s ears must be supersonic because of how easily she is able to pick up on every noise Kyle makes. It is impressive, if not slightly annoying. “My parents always wanted to go to Sicily.” Winona rests her hand on Jonathan’s knee. She tucks her fingers underneath her fist. They are still swollen even though it has been months since she had Kyle. She thinks they look like burnt sausages, which is her least favorite breakfast meat.

“My parents have compiled a pretty extensive photo album from the trip, which I’m sure they’ll subject me to tomorrow.”

“That’s sweet. They want to impress you.” Annie nods and fiddles with her hair. Winona watches her from the loveseat. She is petite, only just over five feet, but her short blonde hair makes her neck look long and elegant. Winona doesn’t understand how someone with breasts small enough to be unaffected by gravity can whisper nauseatingly sweet nothings into the ear of an infant so instinctively. Winona always tells Jonathan that Annie would make a perfect girl-next-door typecast, and Jonathan agrees.

“A trip to Sicily must have been expensive.” Winona takes a sip of her Trader Joe’s wine.

“It was. My father is an oncologist, but we also inherited quite a bit from his parents, who died before I was born. So we’re very lucky.”

“Were they good parents?”

“They were, actually. I mean, it’s not like my mom made home cooked meals every night or anything” –Winona glances at the microwaveable pot sticker resting on a napkin in her lap– “but I always knew they really enjoyed being parents. Which I think is kind of a rare quality to be conscious of all of the time.”

Jonathan nods and looks suddenly very serious. “That’s really beautiful, Annie, honestly.”

“I am very confident Kyle feels the same way about you both. Or he will, when he gets a little older and can make sense of his thoughts!” Annie laughs. “You both actually really make me want to be a parent. I know I’m still young”– Annie is 22 but looks all of 16– “but I just really want to love someone like a parent loves a child. I have no idea what that feels like — to have love for someone who weighs less than 15 pounds consume every fiber of your being.”

Jonathan is quiet for a moment. Winona guesses he is gathering his thoughts.

“I don’t mean to sound cheesy or anything, but love for a child really does fill you up. It’s almost an obsession. You don’t realize how weighty love is until you hold your kid and realize how that feeling has taken up so much physical room in your body.”

“I don’t know if Kyle filled us up in quite the same way.” Winona gestures to her stomach.

Sometimes when Winona rides the subway she wears especially tight tank tops to see if she will still pass as pregnant and someone will offer her a seat. She is usually successful.

“I didn’t mean Kyle the person– I meant the idea of Kyle. And the notion of human creation, and human creation of the tangible and intangible, and how frightening and wonderful it is that we not only have breathed life into a little boy, but also into ourselves and into this house.” Jonathan looks pleased by his intellect. “Sorry. I get carried away.” Annie looks moved, and cups her hand beneath her chin, looking at the couple with admiration.

“Does anyone want more?” Winona has begun pouring herself another glass of wine, her teeth having long since turned a muted purple.

“One of the perks of ending breastfeeding so early,” Jonathan laughs. Annie does too. When Jonathan decided to hire a nanny, Winona’s friends told her that they wished their husbands were as attentive as her own. Jonathan noticed that Winona was perpetually tired. Jonathan noticed that Winona could use help around the house. Winona isn’t quite sure if she appreciates how much Jonathan notices. “I can’t get away with anything now!” Winona always jokes to Annie and Jonathan when she feels them watching her with Kyle or watching her make dinner or watching her watch TV while she should be watching her son or the stove.

“I didn’t end it so early. It was six months. And everyone says that there’s really no difference between formula and breastmilk babies anymore anyway.” Annie nods. “Besides,” Winona continues, “my tits fucking hurt. I kept trying to get Jonathan to wear clothespins around his nipples so he would know what it felt like when Kyle’s teeth got in the mix.”

“That sounds awful!”

“For Jonathan or me?”

“Well, you. But I suppose also Jonathan, if he had been subjected to the clothespins.”

“Thank God I got out of that one!” Jonathan says.

“I guess there will be more opportunities to give him a frame of reference whenever you guys have another.” Jonathan and Winona are both quiet. Annie is embarrassed. “Oh, shit, sorry! I didn’t mean to presume there would be another, I was just–”

“Don’t apologize! It’s not presumptuous– I’m sure there will be another one at some point. We just haven’t talked about it yet.” Winona removes her fingers from Jonathan’s lap.

“I mean, it is a bit presumptuous though, isn’t it?” Winona turns to look at Jonathan. “Not that it’s Annie’s fault. But it’s a bit presumptuous of you to have such confidence in a two-child household.”

Jonathan licks his lower lip aggressively and his mouth curls into a half smile that either means

I’ve really dug my grave now or I do wish she would shut the fuck up.

“I didn’t realize that we had such different visions for our family trajectories.” “And what might your trajectory look like?”

Jonathan looks at Annie, who looks at the floor. She notices a spare pacifier that has rolled underneath the couch and reaches for it.

“Don’t get that, Annie. You’re off duty.” Jonathan touches her forearm as a gentle signal for her to sit back. Winona watches him touch her and moves her eyes to the pacifier, which is covered with a layer of dust that she planned on cleaning this morning. “We can have this conversation another time.” Jonathan moves from the loveseat onto the couch and sits beside Annie, who has begun toying with her short blonde hair again.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I made things uncomfortable” Annie says. Winona turns her eyes back to Annie. Sometimes Annie can feel Winona watching her, but she never says anything. She assumes it’s a maternally motivated thing, as if maybe Winona hopes that if she has a daughter she’ll wind up like Annie. “Should I go check on Kyle now?”

“I can do it.” Jonathan gets up from the couch, leaving Winona and Annie alone. It is silent for a few moments, aside from the labored breath of Winona, whose nasal passages always get blocked after her fourth glass of wine.

“Do you want to feel something weird?” Winona asks suddenly. “What is it?”

“Here. Come here.” Winona beckons Annie over. Annie moves to the loveseat, and Winona directs her to sit beside her. Winona can smell Annie’s lotion– it’s Jergens Cherry Almond. Winona uses Jergens Ultra Healing for Extra Dry Skin. Annie’s skin is never dry.

“What is it, Winona?”

“I wish that someone had shown me this when I started thinking about having kids.” Winona lifts up her shirt and reveals her stomach to Annie. Annie sits back, although there are no extra inches with which she can distance herself from Winona on the loveseat. She looks at Winona’s belly. It is pear shaped, and the lower half of her torso puckers out along the lines of her jeans. They are a size 27, even though Winona knows that she is now much closer to a 30. Her skin is wrinkled around her belly button, which looks sunken into her midsection. “Touch it, Annie.”

“No, thank you.”

“Come on, Annie. Please.” Annie watches Winona grab a fistful of flesh.

 “Don’t you want to know what motherhood feels like?” Winona nods toward her midsection. “This is it. This is what you’ll feel every time you put on a pair of jeans or run your hands over your body with soapy fingers in the shower. This is what your husband will feel every time he’s fucking you.” Annie thinks it must be painful to squeeze one’s skin so tightly and wonders if she should tell Winona to ease up so as not to cause any bruising.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Winona, honestly. You look great.”

“So feel it, Annie. Feel it and tell me I look great.” Winona shakes her head.  “I wish someone had offered me the opportunity to hold maternity between my fingers when I was your age.”

“Really, Winona, I’d rather not.” Winona’s gaze, which was not unthreatening to begin with, has turned into eye contact so imploring that Annie realizes she must either look away or reach a hand below the folded line of Winona’s shirt. She decides to go for the belly. As she lightly touches Winona’s flesh, Jonathan emerges from the bedroom. Though Jonathan has often wondered other things about Annie, he has never wondered what she might look like touching his naked wife.

“Winona, what the fuck?”

“What, Jonathan? It was normal for people to do this when I was pregnant, wasn’t it?” Winona turns to Annie.

“Winona, put your shirt down.” Jonathan looks at Annie apologetically. Jonathan had noticed Winona examining her body in their mirror earlier that morning but had decided not to bring anything up because he didn’t want to start a thing. Winona was an expert at making things out of everything.

Jonathan often felt like he was responsible for un-thinging Winona’s things. When they were first going out, Jonathan described this as Winona’s flair for dramatics.

Jonathan yawns. “I am exhausted,” he says. Annie yawns, too. “Me, too.” She says. Winona rolls her eyes.

“You know what’s worse than sleep deprivation? The fact that I literally don’t own my body anymore because it belongs to a creature who can’t even feed himself. That’s exhaustion.”

Annie feels sorry for Winona. There are some people who just don’t want to be happy, and end up reveling in their unhappiness, but Annie knows that Winona isn’t one of those. Annie thinks Winona is just unhappy. “I could always spend a night here if you want to take a night off. You guys could stay at my place, if you wanted. I have a spare room for when my parents come to visit.” Annie is so nice it sometimes makes Winona want to vomit. “I think I’m going to vomit.” Winona leaves the living room and sounds of retching can be heard from the living room, where Jonathan and Annie now stand with their arms at their sides.

“I should probably go.” Annie gets up. This is not the first time she’s felt tension between Winona and Jonathan, but it is the first time she’s seen Winona’s stomach. She’ll never say anything, but it does gross her out a little bit, seeing the way Winona’s stretch marks form a sort of ghoulish face against the brown of her skin.

“I mean, of course. It’s tough for every new mother. All of the hormones and everything… it’s a lot.” Annie has no idea what hormones are or aren’t released after pregnancy, but she likes to sound smart in front of Jonathan. Annie often finds herself trying to sound smart in front of men she finds attractive, but if she thinks about this too hard she feels rather unfeminist. She reaches for a strand of her short blonde hair and pushes it behind her ear. Winona emerges from the bathroom.

“Sorry about that.” She wipes her mouth, suddenly incredibly self-conscious. “At least I don’t have to worry about anyone suspecting I’m bulimic anymore.” She laughs her sweet, tinkling laugh and smiles hard enough to make her cheeks block her eyes. “Are you headed out?” She watches Jonathan retrieve Annie’s coat and help her put it on.

“I think so. I’m getting pretty tired.” Annie gives Winona a hug. She wonders if Annie will give Jonathan a hug goodbye, too. Annie does. Jonathan returns to the living room.

“Are we going to talk about that?” “About what?”

“That episode?” Winona ignores Jonathan. She is good at selectively hearing him. Jonathan is quiet for a while, but Winona cannot tell if this is because he is angry or hurt or humiliated.

“I think that you should be happier than you are.” Winona does not know what to say to this except, “I am happy.”

Sometimes Jonathan worries that Winona might leave him. Jonathan doesn’t love every part of Winona. Jonathan is the type of person who hates the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Harry lists all of Sally’s horrifically annoying habits as reasons why he actually loves her. Jonathan dislikes a lot of

things about Winona, and has no trouble admitting it. But Jonathan is sure Winona dislikes a lot of things about him, too, which is why he likes her. She’s no bullshit. She’d never pull a Harry.

“I bet Annie looks just like her parents.”

Jonathan doesn’t know how to respond to this, so he doesn’t. Winona walks to the fridge and fingers a wallet sized photo of Kyle at gymboree. “He looks nothing like me.”

“What are you talking about? He doesn’t look like anyone. He barely has a face. He’s not even a year old.”

“He doesn’t look like me, Jonathan. He spent nine months in me. He ruined my body. And he doesn’t even look like me. He’s so…”

“He’s so what, Winona?”

“No one thinks I’m his mother. He ruined my body and he looks nothing like me and now all the proof I have of producing him is my disgusting stomach and my swollen fingers. Motherhood is supposed to be the greatest thing in the world. If this is the greatest thing I can expect from life, then–”

“Then what?” Jonathan hopes Winona doesn’t try to kill herself before Kyle is out of the house.

Winona gets up from the loveseat.

I’m going to bed.” Winona goes to her bedroom and undresses. Winona’s throat feels like she is near crying, but Winona doesn’t want to cry, so she shuts her eyes instead and slips under the covers.

When Jonathan comes to bed about 20 minutes later, Winona opens her eyes and turns to him. They have sex, but it is nothing spectacular. It hasn’t been in what feels like a long time, but Jonathan will never say anything to Winona and Winona wishes so badly she didn’t notice that she doesn’t say anything to Jonathan. While Jonathan is on top of Winona, he makes sure not to graze the soft flesh around her navel with his hand. He thinks that if he does not touch her, she will forget that Kyle has ruined her body and he does not look like her and she is tired from living for him alone and she can never go back. Winona sees that Jonathan’s hands do not leave the pillow from behind her head. She wonders if, behind the faint fluttering of his eyelids, he is imagining she is Annie. If he tries hard enough, can he picture Annie’s short blonde hair grazing the nape of Winona’s neck?

________________ 

The sun has not yet risen but Winona is awake. She has found herself in Kyle’s room, which she often does at 3:30 in the morning. It is dark, but she can just make out the outline of Kyle’s chest moving as he sleeps. She has the urge to rest a hand atop his silky belly and feel his sweet warm breath tickle her fingers, but she does not touch him. Winona watches him instead, because she’s always thought that beauty is best left undisturbed, and boy, is he beautiful.

There’s this Instagram account called Mothers Before. I started following it because I liked the concept: Snapshots of women before crossing that threshold. But now, each photo I come across—warm faded images of young smiling faces—makes me feel sad. It’s like looking at an obituary. The person in the photo no longer exists.

 

My mother has always said that she didn’t want children. Not until she met my father. And when she did want them, she didn’t want girls.

When my brother and I were young, Mom dressed us up in primary colors. I remember being in Nordstrom, in the children’s shoe department, staring up at a pair of sparkly pink Mary Janes.

When I was older, she told me I scared her then. She was scared I would be a girly girl and she wouldn’t know what to do with me. I was in middle school, into sports, and wearing my brother’s clothes. I thought I understood. I hated girls too.

 

Growing up, my father was the parent at home and the usual driver to school and sports. On Sundays, when there were no swim meets or soccer games, early meetings in the East Bay, Mom and I would go downtown or to Corte Madera to shop. 

One Sunday afternoon during my sophomore year in high school, Mom and I had a date to go downtown. She was in the car with the engine running when I came out of the creaking wooden gate. Behind the wheel, she was painting her nails.

“Can you not do that in here?” I asked annoyed. “I fucking hate the smell.” 

Here I must have said something else but we both can’t remember. Something about my brother maybe, or worse, her relationship with my father. 

“You’re PMSing, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Don’t say that!’ I screamed at her. When my mother had her period, she bled and that was it. For me, the bleeding was the easy part, the relief after two weeks of bloating, boobs aching, and the feeling that the world was going to crash in on me.

“Well,” she only ever said it once, “you’re being a bitch.”

 

One break from college, my period was late and I thought I was pregnant (I always thought I was pregnant.). I told my mother and said that I would get an abortion if the decision had to be made. We were in the living room, alone in the house with all the doors open on a summer afternoon. She was curled up on the big red cushioned chair.

“No, you will not,” she told me.

“Yes, I will.” I wasn’t use to my mother telling me what to do. She was my shopping partner and my brother’s smoking buddy.

“I won’t let you,” she was standing now. “I won’t.”

“Don’t pull that Catholic bullshit,” I said. Mom was raised Irish Catholic and went to an all-girls Catholic high school in the city.

I could tell by the way she looked at me, still and jaw clenched, that I went too far. Like the time I was ten and called her a pig.

Her voice low and eyes locked on mine, she told me, “You don’t know me.”  

 

My mother was married before she married my father. It was a giant secret my father told me while driving across Nebraska in an ice storm when I was twenty-three. Not his secret to tell.

I sometimes imagine meeting this first husband. I looked him up on Linkedin once. Says he lives in New Jersey. Maybe he could tell me who my mother was. They were married for eight years.

It was that very hot summer in Amsterdam, in 1978 (?)

I had seen notices in the Dutch papers that James Baldwin would be signing books at the Athenaeum book store on the Spui.

Not wanting to miss a chance to see an idol, I noted the day and time.

I biked over on a Saturday mid afternoon, very hot and very humid, crowds and a long line, all of which Amsterdammers do not handle well.

A table had been set up under the red and white awning by the wide open entrance, near the racks of magazines and newspapers.

There was a pile of books; I wasn’t even sure which book he was there to sign and I was not going to purchase one anyway, since it would have been a Dutch translation and prohibitively expensive.

The line snaked and slowly pushed forward; soon I could see him in his chair, head bent over, signing and chatting a bit. His forehead was wet and he appeared somewhat uncomfortable, tired, and slightly distracted.

Finally I got to the table, nervous and in flustered awe, trying to collect my words and knowing I would have to rattle them off very quickly.

He gave me a slight smile that broadened a bit when he heard my NYC accent.

Rapidly, I blurted that I was living in Amsterdam and was a Dewitt Clinton High School graduate. I had been art editor of the literary magazine, The Magpie. I knew, of course, that he had been literary editor (with Richard Avedon) as art editor) before he graduated in 1942.

As if inflated with some magic oxygen, he perked up and straightened and suddenly that wonderful broad smile spread across his face. He looked directly at me with those iconic eyes, extending his hand and saying “how nice to hear that.” Then he asked about Marcella Whalen, the faculty advisor, who was instrumental in encouraging his literary aspirations.

Hearing that distinct and totally recognizable voice and being so close to him physically, felt almost magical, a sort of suspended animation.

However, the spell was quickly broken when the four people directly behind me, seeing I wasn’t buying a book, started grumbling. They raised their voices louder, peppered with some choice, caustic Amsterdam expressions, and unceremoniously shoved me out of the line and into the crowded square.

 

Travis Jeppesen is bad. The United States–born, Shanghai and Berlin-based writer, artist, and critic has been rebelling against the staid, familiar form of “critical” writing and churnalism overtaking many art publications, so often press releases by another name, by carving out a form of art writing that rises to the occasion of art itself. In his most recent book, Bad Writing (Sternberg Press, 2019), Jeppesen investigates work that is capital-B Bad, an epithet he uses as a descriptor for art that disrupts our aesthetic and moral sensibilities and thus is able to claim its title, rightfully, as art. Over the course of a month this spring, we exchanged emails discussing this goodness and badness; debating the limits and murky boundaries of art and literature; of language and image; of the individual and collective.

Above all, Jeppesen, and Bad Writing, misbehave. His criticism enlivens images and indulges the sensual and the sick. It pushes art and language to their breaking points and asks them to flex some more, all to make us reconsider how and why we should write about art at all.

Drew Zeiba: The essays in Bad Writing, if that’s even the appropriate word, were written over a relatively long period. How did this line of thinking, about b/Badness and the limits and possibilities of art writing, begin for you? And when did you realize you were writing a book? 

Travis Jeppesen: Most of the pieces were written over a five-year period, from roughly 2011 to 2016. Some of them were the direct result of specific commissions, but a big bulk of it went into my PhD dissertation (called a “thesis” in the UK), which I undertook at the Royal College of Art in London and finished in 2016. Towards the end of that period, I realized that I would eventually turn it into a book—essentially much of the criticism and ficto-criticism I was writing during these years were all interrelated, thematically. The same concerns just kept coming to the forefront, no matter what topic I was addressing. Someone said that artists who write criticism inevitably end up writing about themselves, about their own work through an examination of other subjects. Certainly, Bad Writing can in many ways be read as an elucidation of the aesthetic underlying my novel The Suiciders (Semiotext(e)), even though I don’t talk about The Suiciders specifically in this book. But The Suiciders came out in 2013, and was written over a ten-year period, so I guess you could say that Bad Writing represents an attempt to articulate what have been enduring concerns for me for quite some time. 

DZ: You open the book by talking about the current state of art criticism, which I think we can both agree is pretty depressing for a variety of reasons. Can criticism be useful, or beyond useful, —a contribution to writing in a broader sense, to literature? 

TJ: I think that criticism can be useful and has a place. As I write in the book, this is more or less my own modest effort at practicing criticism as a literary art form, trying to put criticism on the same level as the poem or the novel. Or painting or sculpture, for that matter. Criticism need not be a strictly utilitarian or, even worse, consumerist venture. I think it’s very much the writer’s responsibility to put forward a model of language usage that goes beyond being merely a vehicle for transmitting information. Criticism can come loaded with both strong ideas and an imaginative or poetic deployment of language. Criticism should be constantly re-inventing itself. 

DZ: What historical precedents are there for critical writing that is itself literature or art, that advances art rather than just decorates it—or sells it? In Bad Writing, you spend time with Gertrude Stein, treating her as one of the central exponents of Bad writing—and of writing on art as art. Still, the current uncritical state of criticism has not always been its state, and despite all of today’s bad, or let’s say uninspired, criticism, there must still be some that’s Bad, as you understand it.

TJ: This was the project of art criticism from its origins. Certainly the work of James Elkins, one of the few art historians I know of who’s researched the history of Western art criticism, reveals this. In the late 18th century, when art criticism as a modern form that we know it as today was first coming into existence in England and France, literary responses to art might take the form of monologues, often written in the voices of imaginary or historical personages (pre-figuring ficto-criticism and object-oriented writing), satirical songs, elaborate dramas, or Voltairean critique. This developed into the Salon criticism of the 19th century in France, a lot of which was written by poets and novelists. Even though the role of the art critic eventually grew to become more professionalized and hence specialized, the poet-art critic role endured well into the 20th century, from the activities of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein in France all the way up through the New York School poets like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and the current great proponent of that tradition, Eileen Myles. 

DZ: That said, to what degree can the current uncritical and unliterary nature of so much art writing be chocked up to the economic conditions of the art world, and of media more generally, where more work, to feed the high-speed glut demanded by the internet, is demanded for less pay from writer-workers in increasingly precarious positions?

TJ: Well, this is certainly a major issue. The art world isn’t really the meritocracy it likes to imagine itself to be—usually it is those who are best at networking and making friends with the powerful who advance to the forefront, and those people aren’t always the brightest, the most talented, or the most original. And precisely because there is so much money in the art world, those who don’t have it are afraid to offend those who do. And, perversely, those who do have it are incentivized to downplay or conceal it; they’re more often than not drawn to the art world because of whatever aura of exclusivity they’ve projected on to it and feel desperate to belong to it, to say all the right things and show up at all the right events so that they won’t get kicked out of the club. Just bring up the topic of money at any art world dinner you get invited to, watch the displays of discomfort all around you. As I say in the book, the art world is more or less run on fear. Though that is also an obvious result of a wider malaise of the Zeitgeist, call it late capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever.

DZ: You, among other recent writers on the historiography of art history as a discipline, a textual discipline, have taken Clement Greenberg, one of Modernism’s most definitive, or at least well-known, critical voices, to task. In the case of Bad Writing, one of your sharpest critiques is of his inability “to throw Descartes in the trash were he belongs.” What is the use of a Bad writer over a writer who is very good in a traditional sense, as we might argue Greenberg was? And, in the face of that, what makes Bad Writing Bad writing?

TJ: I don’t find the Greenbergian project of formalism all that objectionable, in and of itself. Certainly the underlying ambition, trying to understand artworks in purely aesthetic terms, was useful and influential for me at a certain point. I wish more critics and curators today frankly had more of an aesthetic point of view. Instead, so much of the work that is deemed important does so because it checks all the politically correct boxes or fits some consensual agenda that has nothing to do with any perceived or alleged artistic or aesthetic value. Where Greenberg went wrong is when he went off on this ego trip, considering himself to be the chief arbiter of taste. He was also operating during a period where that kind of macho posturing in the art and literary worlds was taken a lot more seriously than it would be today. 

Some of the badness that I put forward here, as a literary or critical trope, is more implicit than explicit; that is, I also play with it in my writing, rather than just dealing with the subject of intentionality—intentional badness—in others’ work. For example, in some of the essays, I use summarization. In school, we’re taught that merely summarizing a literary work or a film is bad criticism. Instead, you’re meant to extrapolate themes and ideas in putting forth a unique assessment, throwing in a quotation here and there from the work to support your argument. (A parallel project to the texts I developed in Bad Writing was the evolution of object-oriented writing, which is essentially a re-creative art form, where you’re re-creating, in your own language, the essence of another work of art. This is quite similar to what you do when you summarize, but not exactly the same.) Through the “bad” process of summarization, I felt I was able to arrive at certain critical assessments from within, rather than coming at it from without, as more formalist approaches attempt to do.

DZ: In Bad Writing you advance a notion of what you call object-oriented writing. You also have your own subject-object neither/nor un-formation, the sobject. It’s hard to think of the phrase “object oriented” today without thinking of Object Oriented Ontology, a loose branch of philosophy in recent vogue. How do these lines of philosophical inquiry fit into your writing? What can being object oriented offer the writer? 

TJ: I deeply admire the work of Graham Harman, but I must admit I came to it rather late, after I had already developed the idea of object-oriented writing. Encountering Harman’s writing, and realizing that he was pursuing a parallel trajectory in the field of philosophy, opened up so many new pathways for my own thinking about what I was doing. I’m crudely paraphrasing here, but Harman even says, somewhere in his writings, that maybe the next step for metaphysics is to evolve towards the field of aesthetics or art-making. 

Object-oriented writing was very much conceived as a sort of metaphysical approach to art writing, and grew out of my frustration with what art criticism has conventionally become. So the idea is to infest inanimate (art) objects with agency, through the vehicle of writing. While at the same time acknowledging the inherent futility, the impossibilities, of such a task. Of, in a sense, reveling and rejoicing in those impossibilities, in that failure. 

DZ: While Bad Writing has more plainly experimental works, like the later pieces of ficto-criticism, some of the essays that at least superficially “traditional” often launch into rather unusual, unpredictable elements alongside more expected descriptive, historical, and analytical methodologies. I think of in particular the essay “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” which at first seems, if rather poetic, a straightforward analysis of the paintings of Christian Schoeler, but where suddenly we realize that you, or your words, have come to inhabit the image. The frame you are working around is “imploded” not by its irruption but in a way, by your entering it or revising its frame-ness. Your subject (that is, the object of your interest) and your own subjectivity are melded into the para-subjectivity of that thing you’re gazing at, writing on. What boundaries and boundarylessness are you invested in? And how does the particular art you’re looking at change how you write, change the way language can work with and through it?

TJ: I’m glad you asked that, because I think what art I’m looking at definitely has an influence on the way I write about it. I guess it comes down to temperament—there’s work that I’m able to “enter into” more readily than others. “The Anatomy of Melancholy” is a piece about Christian Schoeler’s work, and there’s certainly a clear sensuality to those paintings on the surface, but that sensuality is composed of a fluidity, not just in the brushstrokes, but by Schoeler’s overall approach to painting: both as a physical act and in the philosophy behind it. Certainly one sees that unity that I try elsewhere to describe as the body-mind machine, the vehicle, at play here, which makes it easy for me to “illustrate” that through the writing, not by doing the conventional thing and describing it from a detached scientific “outside” view, but by entering into the thing, by trying to become fluid like the paint; and also showing the similarities between writing and painting.

So to answer your question, I would say I’m ultimately invested in a sort of weaponized writing, that is: the deployment of writing as a means for dissolving boundaries, rather than respecting them. 

DZ: Many of the artists you feature are not only prolific, but feel invested in repetition, almost as compulsion, as fixation. Repetition, and listing, and accumulation, also become, at times, another set of Bad writerly habits you deploy.

TJ: I’ve always been a lover of repetition, down to the micro- and meta-levels; I love consonance and assonance, etc. Maybe because I was trained as a musician from the age of six, part of my perceiving or understanding has been molded by repetition, which is of course a key element of music. 

DZ: But, for all this strangeness, the book possesses a certain clarity. Or at least in the beginning portion, where the pieces take the form of more traditional art writing, before entering the frame, moving along with the art, and then departing non-fiction “truth” for ficto-criticism, which itself starts narratively and arguably becomes increasingly obscure, somehow both more fluid and fragmentary in its prose. Why this descent?

TJ: It can certainly be viewed as a descent, if you’d like. But I tend to view it as more of an ascent—where the language “rises” beyond the mere need to make sense, in a conventional way, reaching this higher plateau, where it is gradually released from the stringency of this requirement, finally graduating into “the space of no-writing.” It’s a bit like dying, if you’re wont to view dying as a beautiful thing rather than a horrible, disgusting, tragic experience. 

DZ: While the text may be difficult, in the more conceptual sense, it is a quite readable book in a physical sense: standard size sans-serif font, everything organized how one expects a book to be organized. However, throughout there are the scribbly, stylized titles and the semi-asemic strokes that are hard to read, or resist reading, at least in a traditional sense. You also make similar marks that you post on Instagram. I’d love to hear more about this drawing-writing, about reading and/as seeing.

TJ: I started doing this kind of “bad writing,” using calligraphic pens and markers, but also traditional Chinese ink and paper, many years ago. It sort of evolved organically out of my daily writing practice. I’ve always been a notebook keeper, I’ve always had to write out my first drafts by hand. Some of the pages of my notebooks would be filled with these illegible scribbles, asemic writing is what some artist/writers have taken to calling it. Once I showed a close friend some of these pages from a notebook, and she suggested that I try doing this on a bigger, more painterly scale. I followed her suggestion, and so that’s one pathway my work has taken. I’ve had a few solo exhibitions of this work, and while some may argue that it is technically drawing or painting, to me all of it belongs to the category of “writing”; it’s really an extension, of sorts, of my writing practice. 

We don’t really have this calligraphic tradition in the West. For this reason, I feel like a lot of people just don’t get what I’m doing at all. I’ve always loved the preciousness of writing by hand, and when I first began traveling to China and Taiwan in 2011, I fell in love with Chinese calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting—this great tradition that was never burdened with this Western division between “word” and “image.” In a sense, I’ve been looking for ways to re-create that scriptoral divisionlessness in my own language or tradition. So this is why I called my first big exhibition of this work (and the limited-edition monograph that accompanied it) “New Writing”: the title can have multiple meanings. 

DZ: With literary writing, Bad writing, illegible writing, image-writing, all these multifarious ways of making and crafting from and beyond language, what does the work of the writer become? Or, to put it more simply, remedially, even: what is writing?

TJ: I would define writing as play of the most serious sort. I’ve come to view language as just another material—the same way painters deploy oil paint or sculptors use clay. I’m interested in these moments, where you get to a point where one can detach a word from its meaning—and then what are you left with? Pure sound. Building blocks of those sounds, which look like sentences, but are markedly a-signifying… Though are they? For isn’t this just another way of creating meaning, of making new meanings arise from these detached signifiers?

A sharp electric tone screeches from the alcove of the restaurant’s drive-thru window. The girl on duty for the night shoots past the counter in a blur, engaging her headset and going through her opening spiel for the customer in the blue Chevy around back. She bobs behind the shift manager as she darts toward her register.
He adjusts as she moves closer, straightening up a bit from the slouch he’d crumpled into while idly talking to a regular customer across the counter. He cranes his neck after her, after the shape of her buttocks pushing out the faded fabric of her slacks and the equine sway of the long rope of hair dangling out of her cap.
There is something like a smile on his lips as he turns back.
The customer stands at the counter like a wobbly, misshapen idol, all Buddha belly and unnatural posture. He sips from a half-gallon paper cup, occasionally dribbling on his short-sleeve pinstripe shirt and the navy shorts that stop above his rocky knees and albino-pink legs.
“It’s the comparison I’ve heard is closest,” the man says.
Reorienting on the other side of the counter, the restaurant’s shift manager leans his compact frame against the bulky register with a faint creak of stubborn plastic. He smiles a different type of grin with half his face and answers, “You know, I hear that a lot. Most people get this weird idea about the Roman Empire. You know what people are really admiring when they say this stuff? Their engineering. That’s about the only criteria you can use to say Rome’s the greatest empire in history. You’ve got Alexander’s, or the Khans–all bigger. Hell, China was bigger than Rome for a thousand years. Rome was a flash in the pan. So if people want to make that comparison, then that’s what they’re saying. They don’t even know what Rome was, or how it worked. It’s a confused understanding of history if you ask me.”
“I think that’s what that book I was talking about said, too.”
“What was the name of that one again?”
“Um, I can’t remember exactly. I’ll look it up and tell you tomorrow,” the man stammers.
“Sounds good,” the shift manager says absently, looking past the man to the dark hanging on the other side of the front windows. “Well, I better get back to work.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. I should go. I’m just gonna get a refill.”
“Sure.”
He takes the barrel from the customer’s pudgy fingers and loads it with soda before handing it back across. He gets a smile from the graying, pasty face as the older man turns and heads out with flopping steps.
“Dude, that guy is weird,” a voice booms from behind the heat lamps.
“Be nice,” the girl’s voice interjects from the drive-thru.
“He’s harmless,” the shift manager tells the cook without looking at him. Instead of turning, he punches in a sequence of commands on the front cash register, prompting it to spool out a long strip of printed tape.
“I don’t know how you talk to that guy, though. Whenever he comes in here you get talking about shit like that. It’s like you know everything.”
“Hardly everything.”
“But where you find all that out, man?”
“School, books.”
“So you’re all educated and shit,” the hefty fry cook continues while switching off the bun-toasting machine.
“Guess so,” he answers. “And don’t say ‘shit’ when there are customers around.”
The frycook cranes his neck to see around the wall of the dining room. “Oh shit, are there people here?” he asks over the sound of the machine winding down.
“Shhhh.”
“So where’d you go to school?”
“Um, I actually went to Harvard for a while, but I ended up back home here at Harvard on the border.”
“Harvard, huh?”
“Yeah, but I had to come back because of family problems.”
“Oh yeah? That’s cool. Hey, can I break down the toaster, man?”
“Way too early.”
“Come on, man. I’ll just run some buns through ahead to get us through the night.”
“Nope.”
“Dude, come on.”
“Hey,” he says, turning away from the register. “If it were my restaurant…well, if it were my restaurant then I’d be chained to it and that thought would probably drive me to suicide so then you’d be free to do whatever you wanted.”
“Huh?”
A little chirp of a laugh emanates from the drive-thru window.
“No, you can’t break down the toaster,” he says and steps over to the drive-thru girl’s register.
“That’s funny, huh?” he asks her.
“Little bit,” she tells him. The brim of the baseball cap shadows most of her face, but her lopsided smile pokes out. He hovers before her, and she cranes her neck up to see from under the hat. Her form is pretty much lost in the baggy uniform, but bits of her body push outward on the combo wardrobe of printed tee-shirt and on-the-cheap work pants: strong shoulders, breasts, and a little hip. For a moment her long face looks only doughy, but her smile widens when he looks down at her. The expression pulls up her cheeks and stretches her jowls back, giving her face some shape.
“Excuse me,” she says and steps around him.
She saunters off as he runs a report off her register too and pops the drawer open.
He calls her back up a minute later.
“The drawer.”
“What? Is it off?”
“How many twenties did you take?”
“I don’t remember.”
The frycook peers over his equipment to listen in and the other cashier wheels the sloshing mop bucket past them on her way to the lobby. He takes quick note of them and continues, “You’re ten dollars under.”
“Ten?”
“Exactly ten.”
“There was that rush earlier,” she says, peering off with her lips pinched up. “Maybe I made change for a twenty on one of those instead of a ten.”
He frowns and shoots a quick look at the others to set them back to their tasks.
“Maybe?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Any other possibility?”
“If it’s exactly ten, then that’s what it’s got to be. If it was a void I forgot then it wouldn’t be ten on the nose.”
“Alright, well, I’ve got to log it, you know that.”
“I haven’t had a drawer shortage since my first week. Sorry.”
“Just be more careful, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
The drive-thru pad picks up the weight of a pick-up truck with hungries in it and she turns from him to push the button on her hip and issue her standard greeting/suggestive sell combination into the mic dangling beside her chin.
A few more orders come and go, but the clock eventually creeps closer to the mark they’re waiting on. He watches her shape in the convex mirror as she sweeps the last stray fries left in the lobby during a lull between orders. He walks past the frycook.
“Now,” he tells him.
“‘Bout time!” and immediately starts pulling apart the machine.
He walks slowly out into the lobby, but she does not look up, does not slow in her task. “It looks fine,” he tells her.
“She shouldn’t have mopped so early,” she says, throwing her head over her shoulder to indicate an absent coworker.
“It looks fine,” he repeats. “Let’s get everything stocked. I’m looking to do a record close tonight.”
“Okay.”
Soon sharp clicks coincide with sections of the ceiling going dim. The crew members loitering against the front counter straighten up and start shuffling toward the door, waiting for him to come up and unlock it.
Outside, the street lamps leave rainbow smudges on the oil puddles in the parking lot.
“You need a ride?” one of them asks the young drive-thru girl as the other workers split up and disperse toward their cars.
“No, mine’s coming,” she says.
At the door, the shift manager is fumbling with the lock. “I’ll wait with her,” he volunteers.
“Okay,” the others sound off. “Bye.”
As the others’ cars roll away, the remaining two figures–standing apart–follow with their eyes the red glow of tail lights receding in both directions until the street is calm and empty. Then both converge on the remaining car and climb in together.
“I’m sorry about before,” he tells her as he rolls the engine over.
“What about?”
“When I got on you about the money.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just that…I mean I have to be fair.”
“It’s fine.”
“I can’t treat you differently, you know. They’d catch on. Hell, I’m surprised somebody hasn’t already.”
“It’s okay, I get it.”
“If anybody found out and it got around, especially up to the district manager–”
“Don’t worry about me. I get it. You’re doing your job.”
“Yeah, but according to my job, we shouldn’t even be together. Hell according to the law–”
“Please. The law in Texas is seventeen.”
“What?”
“Age of consent is seventeen. You’re not breaking any laws.”
“Oh.”
“Would you?”
“Would I what?”
“Did you really think you were breaking the law by being with me?”
“I guess not. I mean, I did know about it being seventeen and all.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t mind having a boyfriend who can’t admit he’s your boyfriend? Does your mom know about us?”
“So you’re my boyfriend?”
“Come on, I’m serious.”
“I don’t care what people think,” she shrugs without looking at him. “Those aren’t my rules.”
“What aren’t?”
“Everything you’re talking about. Those aren’t my rules,” she says again.
“So you don’t follow the rules.”
“Not if they’re wrong.”
“Why are these wrong?” he asks, a surprised lilt to his words.
“What does the district manager care if we’re sleeping together? We both do our jobs. It’s none of his business. That’s why I don’t care that you chewed me out for the drawer. It’s your job. It’d be wrong if you didn’t.”
“I didn’t chew you out, did I?”
“Not really.”
He opens his mouth once, stops himself, then begins again. “I’m interested in your morality here.”
“You’ve never cared about my morality before.”
“I’m putting some pieces together here. I’m just trying to figure you out is all. You told me once you don’t go out drinking with your friends.”
“I don’t.”
“Isn’t that someone else’s stupid rule.”
“No. That’s my rule.”
“Oh.”
“I promised myself something about that.”
“What?”
She just shakes her head.
“So, didn’t you make a promise to the company?”
“Did I?”
“You signed some agreement, right? Something about company policies and all that.”
“Maybe, but that’s not the same thing as a promise.”
“Why not? Seems like it.”
“No, a promise is specific or it’s meaningless. Look at marriage. Somebody gets up one day and promises vaguely to love and to honor, but you know that most men cheat on their wives anyway.”
“Is that right, though?”
“Depends on the person. I mean, it’s not right, but it’s not necessarily wrong.”
“No?”
“Promises don’t work like that. You promise one thing and you do it for your own reasons. You don’t get up there and make some promise that covers your entire life. That’s not a real promise. It’s different if a man loves a woman and he’s still in love with her and she expects him to only be with her or something, but those are extraordinary circumstances. That’s not what most marriage is about.”
“What’s marriage about then?”
“Need,” she answers, still gazing out ahead of them as the headlights catch pedestrians and bus-stop benches on the side of the road.
“When you get married, you won’t expect your husband not to sleep around?”
“I don’t know what I’ll expect. Relationships are individual, particular.”
“Are they all about need?”
“Sure.”
“Are we?”
“Sure.”
“So you’re not in love with me?”
“No, I’m not in love with you.”
“What if I’m in love with you?”
“You’re not in love with me,” she answers flatly. He stops watching her and keeps his eyes on the road. “It wouldn’t matter anyway,” she continues after a block or two pass by. “Love doesn’t really factor into morality.”
“I had no idea you thought this way about things.”
She keeps her arms crossed as they pull into his apartment complex.
They walk up the metal stairs toward his level.
He regards her from just behind with an unsteady expression, as if uncertain of how to speak to her, how to touch her. Finally, he decides on a gesture and reaches for her hand.
She accepts, wrapping her fingers around his wrist as she walks ahead.
At the door she stops and stares blankly at the thick coats of white paint.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’m just tired, I guess.”
“You want me to take you home.”
She squeezes his hand. “No, no. Let’s just get inside.”
The door creaks open to darkness. The hanging blinds that cover the sliding glass door to the eight square-foot balcony let in long slats of orange light from some cheap bulb out on the path between buildings. They act out an apparently familiar script. He passes her, crunching his knees together to navigate the narrow gap between the wide, squat coffee table and the couch against the wall with its distended cushions threatening to pour out like failed soufflé batter onto the course carpeting. She closes the door, cutting off the light behind them and leaving only those long orange lines from the other side of the room. He clicks on an old halogen lamp, the kind that used to populate college dorms a decade before, but which were responsible for enough house-fires that they’re not in stores anymore. The light’s enough to give form to the bulky shadows in front of her, the shapes of the furniture that define and overwhelm the space. Billowing brown folds of fabric hint that the sofa is stuffed to bursting with whole flights of fowl fluff, but when she swings her purse onto the side it drops stone-like into the fathoms of the cushions. He sighs and kicks off his shoes while she saunters by the stacks of books he has piled on the floor. She gives the untidy stacks an affectionate, good-to-see-you-old-friend smile and then settles into the couch herself, flipping on the TV and cycling through channels with one hand while pulling out the band from her ponytail with the other. “You want something to drink?” he calls back from the kitchen, though it’s close enough he doesn’t need to shout. She answers and in a second he is returning to her with a beer and a Sprite.
When he sits, he slides down along the length of her, settling in brick-mortar tight.
She lets the channel rest on the news and lowers her head to the crook of his neck, closing her eyes. He reaches around behind her with his free hand and begins kneading the soft triangle of flesh above her left hip. The edge of her shirt comes loose and he works his fingers down beneath the hem of her slacks. As he brushes the fine hairs below the plexus at the pit of her back, her eyes open and her back arches, bringing her head into recline.
He shifts his face to meet hers and they begin a weary disrobing. By the end they have shifted positions and he is settled back into the cushions, erect and waiting. She creeps around him on her knees, finding perch in his lap.
Her eyes close as she rocks atop him, silently.
When his grunting is finished he clutches hard at her buttocks and she becomes still, a single tear of perspiration tracing a line down the crease of her back.
They restore their undergarments but leave the rest of their clothing on the floor.
He picks up the remote and flips channels in her place.
“It’s getting late,” he says after half an hour.
“Hmm,” she purrs.
“Does your mother know about us?”
“Not sure.”
“You guys don’t talk.”
“It’s complicated, she and I. It must seem like she doesn’t care, but that’s not it.”
“What is it?”
“Complicated.”
“Does she worry?”
“Maybe some. She knows me, though.”
“Still, it’s late, I should get you home.”
“Wait,” she says, sitting up and swinging her eyes away from the flickering screen. “I wanted to ask you about Harvard.”
There’s a jerk in his neck, a start like he’s choked on something.
“What about it?”
“You never explained why you didn’t finish school there? Why you came back here?”
“Why do you think?”
“I guess I didn’t want to make any assumptions.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I’m sorry, forget about it.”
“I got the grades. I didn’t flunk out, okay?”
“Okay, sorry.”
“I was drummed out.”
This time she doesn’t protest. Now she’s curious and she will let him tell it. Tell something he’s never told.
“When I got there–God, it was immediate. All the money. All those damn kids had it so easy. Here I was, scholarship kid from El Paso.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. I just–”
“I worked hard,” he continues, ignoring her interjection and her offer. “I had to. If I didn’t I’d lose the scholarship or lose the biggest of them. Had to keep a 3.5. I did it. Worked my ass off because I’d signed up for too many hours. It was a bitch that first semester. Always in the library because my jack-ass roommate would never let me have any peace. We ended up in a real war by the end. I was always studying. Never worked harder in my life…”
His words trail off for a moment and she watches him carefully while he goes back, then returns to her with something to say.
“There was this girl. This skinny little white girl. White girl from money. I should’ve known better, but I couldn’t help it. I was…I had a thing for her. I got her attention a little bit but couldn’t seem to get anywhere, like there was something stopping her from wanting to be with me. Then one night we were both at this party at the dorm. She was already pretty drunk when I showed up.”
“God,” he exclaims, breaking his own rhythm. “I hadn’t been out with anyone, been with anyone the whole time I’d been up there. So she and I got together. Found us a room on the floor with nobody in it. It looked like a little kid’s room. All done up in cartoon posters. Don’t know whose room it was. But she and I did it and she just kind of passed out afterwards. That was it, end of semester.”
“I flew home. Had my Christmas break.”
He shakes his head and rubs the meaty hunks of flesh below his thumbs into his eye sockets, wiping away perspiration from his brow with his fingertips as he draws his hands back down.
“Then the day before I was going to fly back, I got a phone call. I was being suspended, pending an investigation. The university police talked to the El Paso police. I was never arrested, but they talked to me. Four hours they talked to me. In the end, my suspension just became terminated enrollment and I guess that was good enough for her. She dropped the charge if I just stayed away, stayed quiet. I did some Internet searches, thinking her dad probably had some sway at the school, some big donations or something. Never found anything, though.”
He checks her with a quick sideways cock of his eyes. She’s not looking. Her head’s down, pointed at her lap where she’s rubbing her palms together real slowly. Legs and palms clasped tight in her own shadow.
“But I mean, you know I didn’t rape her. She just regretted it and talked herself into believing she never wanted it. You know?”
His pleading tone catches her attention. Her long face is drawn downward because there’s no shape to her mouth now, it’s smaller like that. Just a slit with nothing showing, barely even any peach-colored lips. She nods to him faintly and moves her hand to rest one palm lightly on his knee.
“That was it. That was my whole life ruined right there.”
“You could’ve fought it, I guess.”
“Go back there? Go back there with all their eyes on me, thinking that about me? No way.”
“Another school. If you–”
“Nah. Nah, I learned my lesson. Besides, you should’ve heard my mother. ‘Told you,’ she’d say. ‘I told you not to go up there.’ Over and over again.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you? I don’t talk to anyone about it. Even when I came back, I avoided everyone I used to know, everyone who knew I’d gone out there. I never wanted to explain it. That time I slipped and said, ‘Harvard,’ in front of you. God, that must’ve been the only time I’d said it in eight years.”
“You’ve mentioned it twice to me,” she corrected.
“I have?”
“Yeah.”
“Guess I mention it more than I realized.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m very sorry I brought it up. I didn’t know it would be this bad a memory for you.”
He reaches over for the drink he’d left on the table, takes a sip and then turns to her again. “Why did you want to know?”
“I was just curious about your experience there.”
“But why?”
“I was just considering it.”
“Considering what?”
“Harvard.”
“What?”
“I’m applying there.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d try for it. I know one of my friends from last year who didn’t get in, even with the Gates scholarship, but my grades–”
He laughs out loud.
“What?” she balks. His face is twisted with the smile he’s wearing, but hers is going sharp.
“Harvard? Come on. Do you know what it takes to get in to Harvard?”
She leans away, giving herself a slightly improved vantage on him.
“I was just talking about that,” she answers in a husky, almost whispered rasp.
“I mean, come on,” he continues. “It’s not like they let just anyone go there.”
She nods to him, saying nothing.
She stands, the long lean lines of her body stretched tall at the edge of the sofa. She looks down. With a quick dip she collects her clothes from the floor in two handfuls.
“What?” he stammers. “Don’t…” She is dressing quickly, slipping on her shoes while yanking the shirt down over her head. “Listen, I’m sorry. I was just saying it’s really hard.”
“No,” she says, turning to him after already starting toward the door. “That’s not what you said. You said, it’s not like they let ‘just anyone’ in.”
“But–”
She finishes shoving her left heel into its shoe and opens the door. He is still undressed.
“Where are you going? You don’t have a car, you–”
“You don’t know me,” she says, and he doesn’t recognize the tone in her voice. “I’ll be fine on my own.” The door slams.
Out of pride or shock, he does not follow her. He sits dumbstruck on the sofa for a few minutes, then fetches the remote and turns on the television. His attention snaps to the door periodically when neighbors or the wind rustle past, but no meek knocking ever draws him up from his seat.
Finally, by two, he falls asleep on the couch.
In the morning he wakes with a start, flailing his arm so wildly that he knocks over the empty beer can on the table. Seemingly unable to collect himself, he wanders listlessly inside the tight confines of the apartment, even laying down in his bed for a few minutes before rolling right back out to dress himself. He splashes something from a green bottle through his hair and starts out the door.
It’s long before opening, but when he turns the key in the lock at the restaurant and cracks the door he hears voices in the kitchen. The head manager and the morning maintenance guy are hunched over the fryer, conferring on a diagnosis.
“Morning,” his boss chimes when he enters. The maintenance guy just cocks his head to say hello.
“I just need to get something,” he tells them.
His boss waves him toward the office and returns his attention to dredging the fryer.
Inside the cramped office, he has to squeeze between desk and trash can to reach the file cabinet. He rifles through the bottom drawer, not finding whatever it is he wants.
“What’cha need?” From the floor he looks up in surprise as his boss leans against the door jamb to the office with one hand, his coffee mug in the other.
“I’m just…” he begins but lets the sentence collapse as he lifts his head up in frustration.
“I already moved her to ‘inactive.’”
“What?”
“Your little friend. She called and quit this morning.”
“She did?”
“First thing.”
“But–”
“She was a good worker,” his manager says. “She said she’d work out her shifts if I really needed her to, but that she’d prefer not to come in anymore. I told her we’d manage.”
Stooped on his knees by the file drawer, he seems to realize something all at once. He starts to open his mouth, then stops.
“Shame. But fortunately she never did work that many hours. It won’t be that hard to fill her shifts. She’d only work those three closing shifts a week. Guess that’s what it takes.”
“Takes for what?”
“To be what she is.”
“What do you mean?”
“My son goes to her school, you know. They don’t know each other, but he knows about her. Top of her class.”
“Really?”
“No contest, he told me.”
“Really,” he replies absently.
“Didn’t know that, huh?”
“No,” he answers, eyes downcast.
The manager starts to turn. “I guess she’s gone now.”
He nods, staring at the red tab marking off the “inactive” folders.
“So we shouldn’t use those records to make any personal calls.” He looks up suddenly, with a jerk, and they lock eyes for a minute. “Whatever you didn’t know yesterday is what you don’t know today.”
“Alright…sorry.”
His boss says nothing else and leaves.
Alone in the office, he looks again at the red section and then slides the drawer closed, rises and crosses out of the office, past the counter and out of the lobby.
The mountains obscure through the white morning, he stands for a moment where he stood beside her the night before, then climbs into his car and returns home.