CAST:
The narrator, me
My brain
An old man
Several women
A bug
A spider
ACT 1: AIRPLANE
SCENE:
Airplane, heading to Mexico, a 4 hour and 50 minute flight.
I idle my eyes around the plane’s long cabin.
I’m bored, and a bit lonely.
I notice things in my boredom. The people on the plane. The attendants of the plane. The women on the plane.
I notice the boredom of planes. Everyone plugged into their devices, bored and seeking remedy for their boredom.
I notice people sleeping, the weight of their boredom grown so heavy they needed to exit this world entirely.
I notice me, good ol’ me.
Anxiously mr. anxiety sits, stewing in his anxiousness. The anxiety shows itself at the tops of my fingers, the thick crusted blood on my cuticles.
My right thumb has it the worst. Two scars. One scar deeper, more set in, faded and healed; the other same-day-fresh, and large, clearly visible from a conversational distance, like the way certain man-made features can be viewed from space.
I wonder if others would size me up by these broken cuticles: this boy's really had a time of it, hasn't he, under that placid-seeming surface of his?
But I don’t notice me for too long. I notice the old man, soon enough.
The old man walks past me in the aisle of this airplane. He’s old, and walks slowly and haltingly, grabbing the tops of chairs and armrests along the way to steady himself.
I think to myself: "This is how it will one day be. I will be old, I will walk slowly and haltingly, I will need to grab the tops of chairs and armrests along the way to steady myself. And then, sooner or later, I will die."
I think other thoughts, too, like whether I will be content with my life at his age, whether I’ll have regrets, whether my present miseries will still be with me, remixed or in their current form.
But mostly I think: “WHOA WE LIVE OUR LIVES AND THEN WE DIE.”
That’s probably pretty obvious, isn’t it? Yeah.
But no, it’s strange, strange.
Why?
Well, do you know the 17th century philosopher Leibniz? Has this idea of the “best of all possible worlds”?
I’ll explain: we have our world, and it’s alright, it’s an alright world, but we wonder why we have things like evil and sin and death in it (no fun), and Leibniz wanted to explain all that, because God is supposed to be both perfectly good and perfectly all-powerful, so why can’t he create a world without evil and sin and death in it?
So Leibniz created what he coined a “theodicy”, or a defense and vindication of God, a solution to the problem of evil. And the solution, in short, is that even in spite of the presence of evil, we might still live in a world of maximum good (the “best of all possible worlds”).
Indeed, the very contrast which evil provides makes the good all the clearer and purer. You can’t have good without evil, in other words, or at least you can’t appreciate the goodness of the good without the evilness of evil.
(Hear that? An early crack in the intellectual dominance of the Christian God, an early move to a world which answers to man, instead of to God. God remains omnipotent, but his omnipotence is now constrained by the laws of human experience—he can’t make a world where good can be purely experienced in its goodness without evil, because forces-lacking-counterforces run contrary to human experience.)
But this is the theodicy of evil, and what I really care about right now is this other Leibnizian idea: that there are many, infinite possible worlds that God could have created. This is what I ponder in this old man, what I ponder in my coming old age. Many, infinite possible worlds!
The sky's the limit for these worlds. Worlds and worlds and worlds could be out there, of any possible sort. There could be a world where there is an animal called an “unterbellistraka”, and there could be other worlds where the supreme leader of all beings is such an animal, and the supreme leader animal’s given name is also “Unterbellistraka”, because maybe all the unterbellistrakas are named “Unterbellistraka” in this world, or maybe in another even weirder world the unterbellistraka-king’s name is something like “Fred”, and how weird would that be? An unterbellistraka-king named Fred?
Therefore, here’s what troubles me: why this, why our particular world, our set of experiences, our menagerie of particulars? Why is our world the way it is?
Why do we become old men and women who need to steady themselves as they walk?
Why do we fly in big metal hunks that soar through the sky?
Why Europe? Why curtains? Why Viktor Orban? Why crocodiles? Why potatoes? Why trees? Why the sun? Why the color blue? Why not a completely different set of colors, a completely different visual system than the one we work with? Or maybe just every famous writer and thinker that ever existed is actually someone else—different names, different identities—but everything else is more or less the same? Why not completely different countries, completely different peoples, completely different words, completely different foods?
This oddness strikes me often, unsettles me. I leave this world for a moment, and take a step back, a mere step back, but it’s far enough back to find myself in a dimensional remove, like I have a distance, even if the tiniest distance, from the whole world. And from there I can look at it all and say, “wtf, goats?” or whatever I happen to be questioning at the moment. And this isn’t some intellectual questioning, some sophomoric acid trip pontification: “goats, maaaan, amirite?”. No, it’s as if reality itself speaks from itself and says, “look at me, aren’t I weird, I have these things called goats, and plenty else besides, and you might rightly ask yourself, ‘why?’” and I say “yes reality, ‘why?’ indeed, you are strange indeed.”
And then I ask myself, is this odd little reality of ours accompanied by many other sister and brother realities, or is it an orphan, a reality all on its own? Is it a lonely reality, forced to keep its weird idiosyncrasies all to itself, with no other realities to recognize it, provide it solace, make it feel like, no, you aren’t so awfully weird after all, just look at this other reality where all sentient beings are ruled by an unterbellistraka named Fred, who looks like (would you believe it) a goat.
An orphan reality! Is that what our reality is? And yet an orphan reality that experiences the possibilities of other realities! These other realities are indubitably there as possibilities, even if not as actualities. After all, my speculations, and Leibniz’s, prove just how easy it is to conceive of these possible realities beyond our present reality. So there is no denying their possibility.
And for that reason, our reality cannot be truly alone, but it is instead lonely. To be truly alone, the possibility of others can’t even be present: one needs to be entirely engaged with one’s self, one’s work, one’s focus, one’s thought, with no thought of another. Being lonely, on the other hand, means being hyperpresent to the possibility (but not actuality) of others: one feels the presence of the possibility of others, feels the reality of the actual disconnection from others, and therefore wishes to be connected all the more. (Social media, anyone?).
Being truly alone and being lonely are therefore mutually exclusive, though perhaps true aloneness is not a state that can be easily sustained for very long (much as hunger, soon enough, overwhelms a fast). Perhaps it is even asymptotic, a state that’s possible to get ever closer to, but never fully inhabited.
So if our reality is indeed lonely, does it play impish tricks on us, finding in us humans the only source of recognition and playful roughhousing and entertainment available to it? Does it love us or try to love us, as the only source of affection and companionship it’s likely to find? Does it try to forget the possibility of other realities, to save itself the heartbreak of its loneliness, its desires for the companionship of those possible but unreal alternative worlds?
What does reality think of itself, of the strange ensemble of things it is made up of? What does it feel? Does it ever feel ashamed of itself?
I feel lonely right now, on this plane, I’ll admit that. This is what gets me thinking about the possible loneliness of our reality, because it feels good to ascribe to an anthropomorphized metaphysical concept (a “lonely reality”) the emotional realities and struggles you yourself are experiencing (try it sometime!)
The plane jerks suddenly, quickly. The facial tension of everyone on the plane increases by 15% - 45%, regardless of whether they look up and listen to the captain’s announcement, “Uhh, hi folks, we’re experiencing a little turbulence, we’ve turned on the fasten seatbelt sign…”
Then they relax and go back to their boredom.
ACT 2: BEACH
SCENE:
A week later, a beach in Mexico. A high crest of sand, and waves and ocean beyond. The narrator sits and looks at the waves.
The waves are gorgeous here. The water is an unreal horizon of blue.
All I feel is the calm of a trip well underway, when the cadences of travel have replaced the preoccupations of everyday life.
A thought from the plane breathes for a moment.
What does reality feel? Does it feel boredom? Loneliness?
I see a small bug on me, then feel it.
The small bug starts on the bottom curve of my belly, and then crawls up it.
I feel it climb through the small thicket of hairs, edging into the sensitive skin underneath the belly button.
I get a small hard-on.
Moments later, it disappears into my belly button and, by now over the idea of jerking off on the sparsely populated but public beach to the sensation of an insect crawling through my stomach hairs, I bend over and look inside my belly button. She’s hunched in there, clearly taking rest or refuge.
I pull her out with my right index finger, let her carouse around on my palm, shining and vibrating her little feeler antennas around.
She looks like she's broadcasting something to some far off interlocutor, but also like she's just digging her time on my hand, getting a little dance on.
What does she feel? Happiness?
I wonder if she'll get a fast pass to a higher order of rebirth thanks to our little time together. She’s connecting with a higher consciousness right now, isn’t she (is she?), and maybe she’ll therefore come back as one. If not a human being, maybe a dog or a cow.
Or maybe not. When I place her down on the sand, she flubs around petulantly, buzzing and trying to get her balance, to get off her back.
Then she throws herself up and headlong into my face, aggressively, as if to get back at me for putting her down, for rejecting her, and then she flies away.
Annoying little fucker.
What am I feeling, right now?
I didn't know she flew.
ACT 3: AIRPLANE
SCENE:
Back to the present, the same airplane as before.
Reality, reality. I think of how it has elephants and squids and parakeets and pliers and snake plants and… all its myriad contingencies, all its infinite it-could-have-been-another-way’s.
But I eventually stop thinking about all this, because if I am lonely on this airplane it’s not because I am not friends with my anthropomorphized reality but because I am surrounded by actual others, actual people, whose possible companionship is here, right in front of me. Their mere human presence represents the possibility of human connection, but at the same they are, of course, in actuality, impossibly far away, impossibly distant from me. They lead lives I will never enter, never even brush up against.
I could be friends or lovers of any of these people, and I simultaneously absolutely will not be.
And in full honesty, I don’t really have an interest in most of these people anyway. There are the attractive women, and there is everyone else. The former are all I care about, bluntly, as a guy inhabiting his atomic solitude on this plane: I want one of these women—or rather, I don’t actually want any of them, because that would require work and pursuit and disappointment and the almost-certain likelihood that not one of them are actually all that compatible with me, or me with them. Rather, I just want to fantasize, fantasize about a different life, fantasize about encountering a life of another, about my life intersecting with the life of one or more than one of these women. Fantasy is both a tonic and a fuel for loneliness—what simultaneously eases it and keeps its flames stoked. The part of me that fantasizes knows this: it wants me to remain lonely in this particular, intoxicating way.
But loneliness is not loneliness is not loneliness. My sexual longing is the specific flavor, the only flavor, of my loneliness, at least right now. Do you think there’s only one kind of loneliness, one-size-fits-all? That we’re either lonely for everyone or not lonely at all? No, no, pay closer attention to the emotion. I’m not lonely for conversation, or fraternity, or guidance, or the opportunity to guide. If some eager young man stimulated by the possibilities of artistic expression was reading what I am writing over my shoulder right now, desiring to talk to me about my craft; if some curious, benevolent older person was ready to impart some encouraging words upon my no-longer-quite-so-youthful pretensions to artistic talent, I would not only not care, but I'd also be loath to entertain their conversation unless it opened the door to a connection that wasn’t purely intellectual, social, fraternal or paternal. I don't need more intellectuality! I've got more than enough right here, duh, too much. I don't need any more brotherhood or elder influences or friendship or even the serendipity of random human contact! I have these things in my ordinary life, and I’d rather just write and read my book while here on this plane.
But if such a conversation, any conversation, granted me a heightened sexual status, cachet in the eyes of the women who have caught my eye…
There's the tall lanky blonde of the sort you might see in an Andy Warhol movie in the 1960s, but no flower child dress and stoner slouch, instead white khakis and a black sweater and white Adidas Samba shoes with black stripes and yet still that long straight sheer waterfall of hair framing her equine face, those cheekbones set in high relief. She heads to the lavatory at one point and returns to a longish session of hand sanitizer wipes, and by the way she holds herself stock straight in her seat, a pure 90 degree angle of a body, it's clear her resemblance to the 60s flower child does not extend to her relaxation levels.
There are those women in the further distance, down the aisle of the plane’s cabin, those women that have gotten up to use the bathroom or grab something from the overhead bins, manifesting themselves out of the undifferentiated mass of the plane’s passengers into single individuals, shining back and forth past my field of view before settling themselves back where they came from, disappearing back into the obscurity of the mass. There’s the soft-faced young woman in black Lululemon pants, for example, a callowness in her expression that probably puts her in her mid-twenties, dirty-blonde hair still a bit damp from leaving the shower this morning, her gray workout shirt amply filled.
Or: The brunette with the sort of lean, taut physiognomy and build that seems a sort of eternal late-30s—perhaps reached before that age, but then anchored in that meridian of womanhood well after she passes it, her beauty amplified by the grace of experience. This maturity gives off a simultaneous impression: she looks like she could be with someone older and more staid, like the bespectacled salt-and-pepper haired man in his early-to-mid 40s sitting on her left, his seriousness set into a hard visage, but she also looks like she could be with his opposite. And indeed her boyfriend turns out to be the man on the right, younger, richly-maned, leonine, a specimen seemingly more out of an idyllic Rousseauian state of nature than our concrete modernity, who manages to inspire considerable envy in me, both on account of his own good looks and those of his girlfriend, whose attractiveness has increased in my eyes with the knowledge that her beau is the handsomer of her two possible companions, her seatmates.
And then: behind me, there’s the black-haired woman, late 20s or early 30s, who I previously stood behind at the airline counters over an hour ago, and then stood behind again at the ticket line some 30 or 40 minutes hence. She moves and fidgets and possesses a restless, dissatisfied energy not out of keeping with my prior impressions of her: On getting her ticket scanned, her world enveloped in a pair of huge headphones, a dark trench, and a chic clothing store tote almost as large as her, she didn’t hear when the ticket lady yelled after her to retrieve her ripped ticket stub. I hurried to return it to her, extending the ticket within her peripheral view behind her so she could notice it in the solipsism of her headphone’d world.
Now, on this third coincidental encounter, I am no longer behind her, she is behind me. And so she becomes the primary focus of my fantasy and imagination. I can’t see her without turning my head, so I instead imagine that she is reading over my shoulder behind me at an angle, 4:30 or 5:00 relative to my 12:00 front-facing gaze. She is nothing more than a blur of black hair and a vague shape of a slouching body in my peripheral vision.
Her presence provides both a frisson and a goad to what I write. As unlikely as it might actually be that she’s spying on my writing, I can imagine that I have an audience, and moreover an attractive audience who my fantasies can run with—who is she? what is she about? how tragic will our story be, as each of us, fantasizing about the other to whatever extent we do over the duration of this flight, get up after the plane's landing, politely and shyly avoiding talk or eye contact or undue hastiness of motion (the rigidity itself perhaps giving us away, in spite of ourselves), and we each go our own separate ways, never talking to each other again, not giving each other so much as a thought once we leave the airport and get on to whatever next chapter of life lies ahead?
And it doesn't matter that I likely share this fantasy alone, or that she is very likely a person very different than any I would ever find myself attracted to. It certainly doesn't matter that on boarding she tucked her ticket away in the travel bag of a male companion, who I immediately regarded with contempt for his tasteless brown leather jacket with the kind of design on the back that's cousin to the cliché appropriated motifs basic dudes will get tattooed on their bodies—East Asian characters, e.g., symbols from cultures they have no deep, non-appropriative connection to—who have never seriously experienced shame about their clueless and silly decisions in their lives, and are therefore blissfully ignorant of shame’s regulating effects.
(Contempt is all that keeps me from envying that blissful ignorance.)
It’s precisely the elision of actual personality and inconvenient details that lets me fill her or any of these other women with whatever my mind decides to fill them with, that makes it possible for me to find each of them fascinating without knowing very much about them at all, certainly without needing to know their career trajectory or the last concert they went to, or their favorite TV show, or their opinions on the latest pop culture scandal.
There is, here on this plane, here in my mind, a pure romantic surface that is not for that reason necessarily superficial, but a surface that operates on laws very different than those that comprise actual love, actual intimacy, actual romance. This romantic surface is, instead, the broad, sweeping realm of romantic possibility, instead of the constraints and particularities of romantic actuality. This surface is, in a word, desire.
But for all of its false fire of pure fantasy, its untethered and often illimitable energies, desire is still a force without which we don’t have romance, we only have a workaday, colorless, Hadean present. Desire is all the other worlds, when we’re forever stuck in our own actual world.
The latter couldn't properly exist, properly thrive without the former. Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds couldn’t exist without all the other possible worlds, just as good could not exist without evil.
Who we are could not be without who we could have been, who we still could be, who we’ll never be.
Who we love could not be without who we lost, who we left, who we never had.
INTERMISSION/SMOKE BREAK
SCENE:
A director’s commentary-style interview with the author.
Good evening.
I originally wrote this piece a full year ago. It has taken me that long to publish it.
Phases like “objectification” and “somewhat problematic” scared me in initial feedback. In response, I removed any references that seemed to risk crossing the line. I think I did a decent job of it. Rounding those edges made for a better piece—they were too crude, on-the-nose, and therefore unfaithful to my actual experience, anyway.
But it still scared me to publish the piece. And this wasn’t because of my admission to getting a hard-on from a bug or any of the other bodily embarrassments this piece might make mention of. I was simply scared of describing a sexual attraction. Describing women who are (there’s that word) the objects of that attraction.
No one suggested removing that whole dimension of this piece. But I wondered if I should, or had to, remove it in order to publish it. Would those words, “objectification”, “problematic”, inevitably accompany any written attempt to describe my subjective experience of desire?
Am I overthinking this? A wildly popular romance bookstore just opened up in my neighborhood recently. There’s clearly no shortage of desire for the written depiction of desire. But I am a man who is writing not to arouse the desires of others, whether women or men, but rather writing just to point out, “this is what desire looks like, in this ‘here’ and this ‘now’.” I am trying to represent desire, not stimulate it—which somehow, in some way, seems more reprehensible.
And because it’s my desire, because it’s first-person, because the words that could be leveled against any such a depiction are the paramount adjectival horrors for a liberal millennial male—”objectifying”, “problematic”, “cringe”, “rapey”, “creepy”—it seems so vulnerable to attack.
And so I stand out in the middle of an open field, naked and unarmed. At my feet I’ve laid all the weapons that could be used to lambast me. Rip me to shreds if you so choose, Furies. I have already done all the hard work for you.
(Titters from the audience:)
“Takes himself so seriously—Furies!”
“As if anyone is even still reading this in the first place.”
“Metacommentary on cringe… how cringe”
ACT 4: TOILET
SCENE:
The future, again, in Mexico. A shared bathroom of a travelers’ hostel, 5:30 a.m.
My tailbone pain has flared up—that pain that causes me to feel constipated, forces me to sit on the toilet for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a clip. It hasn’t helped that I’ve got a stomach bug from the local water. And so I sit in the shared bathroom of my travelers’ hostel, 5:30 in the morning, staring at its splintery slatted wooden door with my body hunched over and my elbows on my knees.
As I strain and mostly fail to shit, I see something in my field of vision which looks like an ocular floater, moving as I move. But it's too thick and chromatically vivid for that. I realize that it’s a small spider, dangling from my hair, a long bang on the right side of my face.
As I move my head, slightly or suddenly, he plunges along his silk thread—an inch, two inches, three inches or more. And then he climbs. Climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs. And he sometimes reaches the strand of my hair, seems to grab on, seems to get to the top and to safety. But then he falls again.
He does this for much of this time I spend writing on my phone, writing what you are currently reading, waiting for my light storm of bowel-bound pain to pass.
But he keeps making it to my hair. Why does he fall, then? It seems like it should be simple to climb up once he gets to the top. I’m not suddenly moving my head when he falls.
It eventually dawns on me: maybe he is playing. Bungeeing off, pulling himself back up, bungeeing off, pulling himself back up, bungeeing off, pulling himself back up. Again and again and again.
He's playing. He's practicing. What else does he have to do? He’s a spider at 5:30 a.m. in a travelers’ hostel bathroom.
And suddenly he's gone, after he makes his deepest plunge yet. He seemed to be climbing back up, well on his way. But then, while I had my gaze elsewhere, while my peripheral vision was no longer on him, he vanished. No trace of him.
No one in this world will ever know what happened to him, will they? Did his short mortal coil get shut off on his plunge or at some inevitable point shortly hereafter? A spider's life lasting, what, no more than a few weeks? Days? He is almost certainly dead, almost certainly long dead, by now, by this point of my writing this, of you reading this.
What is the disappeared spider, as a symbol? Confusion? Once here, now not? A spider life which could follow any infinite number of spider paths, and yet still from our human perspective would seem to have no meaning at all? (and yet that funny flicker: what if he is just playing, what if that is indeed all there is to do at 5:30 a.m., and what else is play except the meaning-making that happens in the gaps between the absolute, brute exigencies of life, those do-this-or-die demands? what can be more meaningful than that play, then?)
Or maybe he is the state before confusion. When everything is natural, everything is as it is. And then, as language starts expanding to fill every corner of our world, what's left unspoken grows in cramped intensity, a concentration of shadowed darkness that radiates through everything else, everything we thought explained.
We go to the moon and speak of going to Mars with our language, and yet the language of a young man (perhaps not so young anymore) trying to explain his internal experience of simple sexual desire on an airplane might sound like the most foreign and inscrutable language of all, or perhaps the most commonplace and self-indulgent: in our fierce egoism, we take anyone else’s ego to be mere cliché.
How do we break down the barriers we have between ourselves and our underselves, between ourselves and the insideselves of others? We can't go back to being spiders, pre-language. So our only solution is more language, different language, language that lives both in our words and in our bodies.
Not more of the language of using up all the things we encounter outside of ourselves, exploiting the world as our dominion and resource, ever onwards to Mars. We've had enough of that.
Now we need a language that figures out those things we encounter inside. A language that we’ve so long avoided articulating.
ACT 5: AIRPLANE
SCENE:
Back to the present. The airplane, finally about to begin the final descent.
I get up and go to the bathroom.
The dark-haired woman behind me, ensconced in her full slouch, is reading something on her phone, headphones on, thoroughly immersed in the same world she was in when she forgot her ticket stub at the counter. Not paying the slightest attention to me.
In her own world, as I am in my own world, though I’ve made use of her tangential presence within it; I’ve desired that presence. She gives no sign that she desires mine, or ever did, or ever gave the briefest thought to it.
And the cabin lights go up, and we're about "ready to begin our final descent."
Now liberated from my fantasy about the woman behind me (which always comes accompanied by a certain oppressive vanity: I need to seem suave in case she actually is interested in me, even in the narrative I write unbeknownst to her), I can admit that while taking a nap earlier, I woke up to a dream that I had shat myself. A clear, fluid stream of diarrhea felt like it exuded from my asshole. It woke me up instantly and with alarm. The sensation was strong enough in my dreaming reality that I decided I had to actually check myself upon waking, discreetly putting a hand into the back of my jeans and edging in just far enough to feel some of the back fabric of my boxers.
Nothing, perfectly shitless.
When I return from the bathroom, I realize what made me have the dream. I had spilled some water on my seat midway through the flight, which is why my jeans were damp.
The sensation must have been enough to make me dream that I had done worse than merely moisten up my ass with my spilled bottled water.
Plus there’s the digestive distress I always experience in the air—the pressure constant, the whole flight feeling like I've got a rock in the bottom of my intestines, no relief to be found from sitting heavily in the airplane lavatory as I anticipate an angry growing line of fellow passengers waiting for me to finish up.
My dream put all these sensations and impressions together and figured (I guess) wouldn't it be nice to just shit right now, free and clear and without struggle.
Better I didn't, of course, oh man better that I didn't. Here is the shitless world as it turned out to be—the possibility of what could have been is enough to make me plenty satisfied with what I have.
As we land, I gather my bags, and we queue, I hear my erstwhile black-haired seat-neighbor behind me talk on the phone with a friend. Hearing her is enough to know enough. The swell of my fantasy, already deflated, collapses. Actuality negates possibility—cold, hard fact cancels the vague unreal warmth of imagination.
Desire has had its moment, its space in my world. I’m in Mexico now, and it’s time to get on with reality.
Raw and badass and daring.