On Sarcography

These three chapters represent, say, the fourth seventh of a novella, Nylund, which I found myself writing over the last two years. Nylund is a baroque noir. The eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside—like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. The method by which the book was written, and by which Nylund experiences the world, is thus called sarcography (a neologism, natch). Sarcography is like negative capability on steroids; this ultra-susceptibility entangles Nylund in both a murder plot and a memory plot regarding his missing sister, Daisy. As the murder plot places Nylund in increasing physical danger, his sensuous memories become more present than the present itself.

The three chapters included here find Nylund recalling his sister Daisy; meeting The Grandson, a small time hood who will lead him to the murder scene, where they’ll be caught by thugs; and recalling, once again, his and Daisy’s escape to the big city where they will be separated.

Nylund began as a prose poem that just kept going; sarcography came first, then the character of the sarcographer, and finally the (double) plot. In other words, method preceded all else with this book. But as I completed and revised it, it also came to be about time, tense, gender, vulnerability, senses, age, and the imagination. My rule when I was building the book was to make the sentences as convoluted as possible, to keep adding phrases and clauses like balconies, drainpipes, fire-escapes,and window ledges, to create more and more surface for Nylund (and me) (and the reader) to clamber across.

I completed Nylund in January at the same time in which I completed a companion novella called Flet. Flet is sci-fi (actually anachronistic dystopian) set in a future without cities. Whereas Nylund is obsessed with his past, Flet is nearly amnesiac, and must struggle to piece out a version of even recent history different from that which the Administration is promoting. The climax of Flet occurs at a nationwide re-enactment of the Emergency on which pretext the cities were closed; for Nylund, who lives in a fractalling neverpast, every minute can be the re-enactment of the previous one, and the sentences can barely advance, even as the murderers close in.

I hope you enjoy this excerpt from Nylund.

-Joyelle McSweeney

Chapter 11 The Million Dollar Movie

The Million Dollar Movie comes on at eleven o’clock. We like to watch it slumped down on the green couch with our feet on the floor. With the sound down, it’s like flying in a dream carwide over the bay the seals and tourists applauding or through the market the shoppers the barrels hurling upwards their tomatoes and eggs or in through the sunbay of the museum we anchor the rope to the copter’s leg our dart guns snug in our jeans. We grab it all and run. We are devotes of The Movie, slumped in its dovecoat. Out in the henyard, we practice kung fu slo mo and then scatter the grain in slow spirals. We duck under each other’s fankicks and we eat it all up. Then we throw up and collapse in the henyard, breathing through our down coats until the world goes rightside up.

If you breathe too close to the land you get the bird flu, we know that now. Then, no. If you breathe too high up in the air the air thins out and you see as through a fog of particulates blindly and if you look at things through a mirror on your birthday then the scales fall from your eyes. Then your eyes are ready for cooking, miss junior bride. Miss junior lucy. God help me I’m a leper and the scales have fall from my eyes. I made you this way on purpose so you’d be a better beggar.

Says god.

I made you look like the king so you could switch with him and play out the Benevolent Despot. I’m playing the Benevolent Despot today and I’ll share my juicy fruit with you. And my cell and my flagolet and a ride around the fountain in my nimble ship the Effete Kipper. It was a present to me from the fish and if you look in its tiny portholes you see a tiny gallery with the paintings of all the other kids they blessed this way staring out dolefully from under black crimped wigs in gold frame-ups. It’s like a shooting gallery. The ducks go by on tracks. The weather ducks eastward for Georgia and the other side of the tracks. Out of eyeline, it whips off its potato sack disguise and muscles on the fleecy cravat of the high quality cloud structure.

Shoots an arrow back through the air: adorned with the king’s penchant. By the order of the king. C’mover here, cutie.

By the order of the king we assemble at the discotheque. Here are an endless supply of girls, mostly with tooth problems that keep them out of the film circles. They wear placards decked with road signs—triangular, chevronic—they feature an arrow rampant or crooked or tied around itself with a sly over the shoulder glance at the passerby. These legends are by the same favorite who painted the king’s portrait at (the king’s) age of four when he was prince-side; the portraitist is not himself in the scene but can be seen in the easel the way it cants under its burden. The sightlines in his work reflect his malnutrited bones or broken arches or bloodbones stamped by hooves. That’s the mark of luck. The cramped spine of waterjug this wench is dressed as, that checkerbox flexing like it holds the covenant itself. When the water drops in note by note through the leaky ceiling, then a chord charades, and then mote by mote a chainmail assembles which, thrown in the spot, coats gold, and it’s the grand finale. Cymbals bite the air. The girls all gyrate like the end of the world.

One Halloween Know what I am? asks Daisy, her hair pulled back from each temple, her pulled eyes gritty with blue glimmery eyeshadow, her lips hot pink, light pink strokes up each cheek bone. She wears a grey sweater tight over a white tee shirt and a silver short skirt and black tights with holes and sneakers. She looks like herself. But she’s The Million Dollar Movie.

Chapter 12 Time is Brain

Rose’s grandson arrived at the apartment with his brain leaping out of his skull. Long silver lashes and burbling white effusions rose and made an atmosphere around his flattish luminant head. His pale skin was waxy and looked carved by the sunken heat of his eyes. Looking at him was like sharply northward into the wind, or with an error in your eye. His image bled and streamed around you.

In a long military overcoat, he tilted into the room. Deep white carpets, lion-footed chests, sleek drapery elegant as a woman’s gown and her pale arms, her wrists tucked behind her. Rose the glare that fell on lamps and glasstops, the finish on her acetylene robe. Nylund the acrid filigree of ash sinking into the fabrics, the unreadable smoke rings in the ceiling. Grandson the quicksilver torch shone roughly into the corners and cabinets, over the mantels.

Nylund had the fantasy of mold growing in the collecting pools of light. A second coming. A species assembling shields and plaques, a settling of placards over the upright struts of temples, the erecting of a plinth from which florid platitudes would be scattered, a vinyl-tinged vomiting up of flame. The flame would cook the clouds, the clouds would melt down the open mouth of a thin shunt of fused beach sand, and in this vein would grow the Grandson, plus a storm-stained garden of thorned fistshapes where Rose repeated herself like a figure in a carpet, again and again.

This Rose brought in little glasses hemmed in by gold on a thin gold tray that nearly disappeared as she held it at eye level. Liquor for him and for herself and for the Grandson who was constantly in motion. Like a bored actor, he lifted his hand in a flat interrogative gesture or tapped his temple or drove his fist into his hip in swinging time with his tempo.

“Long days, grandmother. We have been too long separated.”

“Inattention on my part, but you know I am a bachelor.”

“I awake in the morning to see the broad mirror on my bureau, reflecting on the white plaster wall above my head.”

“They study each other constantly, except when I come between them.”

“I feel like a jealous child.”

“Do they know that I’m watching, just feet below, as they gorge on each other?”

“I have taken job at a bank.”

“It is entirely made of marble like a gentleman’s souvenir.”

“Coming to it is like taking my place in a cabinet.”

“Like a droll doll in a curio. It is a pleasurable feeling.”

“Our actions in the bank are small.”

“We hold them at arm’s length”

“It seems we are always seated, but, then, we must cross short distances marked out in squares in the polished floor.”

“It seems a struggle to make progress because of the depth of polish.”

“I have friends there, and other friends who would like a job there.”

“I can’t vouch for everyone. Vernaculars of smoke.”

“On the top level are the big bosses.”

“I’d like to smoke out their windows and watch the people passing below and rest my hand on the stone eagles.”

“Vernaculars.”

“You are always watched at the bank. The girls wear their hair combed like money, over their eyes.”

“But the clocks have beautiful blank faces, like someone retrieving a memory in sleep.”

“It’s loud here, even when it’s quiet. How do you sleep?”

“The water keeps dripping off the eaves onto the doorstep. It’ll wear a saddle in it.”

“Over a long, long time.”

“Right, Nylund?”

“Some rich fool walks by with a bunch of yappy dogs”

“Like motors at shin level.”

“You’re going the same way but at a slower pace.”

“Maybe slowed down by the girl tucked under your arm. That’s alright.”

“Your shouldered edifice, your hat like a roof.”

“When will you both arrive?”

“Him first, in the marble waiting room, running a bored finger over the glossed breasts of the magazine rack,”

“Considering drinking some coffee for the distraction.”

“I’d like to smoke at the bank among the big stone angels”

“And the one in the nightgown with the scales and her eyes closed.”

“Like she’s afraid to see what’s happening”

“Or wants to say she didn’t know.”

“But she’s the one with the sword in her hand!”

“There’s all sorts of machines to tell the future now.”

“Poured in cast iron or brought in from Japan”

“Tell you and your girl what your kids will look like”

“I like to think of all those futures out there, nailed in a row”

“Like plastic ducks, a token a shot.”

The Grandson delivered his lines steadily, a needle on an arm in his gut. Rose kept up a counter tide of little birdy gestures. She wore a purple folded turban over her head. She settled disks on the phonograph, klinked and refilled glasses, sat and stood. She swept out of the room and in.

Abruptly, the Grandson sat down on the couch and stopped talking. The silence was acute and metallic, as if Nylund and Rose had to now pour language into the bowl. Then it changed colors, rose up from the floor like sound off a cymbal, touched each of their faces and their ears. This was a warming feeling, a flush that felt scarcely external. Nylund sank back. The Grandson leaned forward. Rose’s position was somewhere in between, which is to say, upright. A new shoot.

“Well,”she said drily, as if uttering words that had been drafted her by some hack. “And what will you do now?”

“Just now, Grandmother, I’ve got to go.” He got to his feet.

“Just now? As in this instant?” Rose was uncharacteristically shrill, and her mouth was distended, as if she were physically expelling the words from her mouth.

“Yes, Grandmother. I’ve got to meet a friend and pick up some belongings. I’ve already asked Nylund to come.” He looked at Nylund and Nylund felt as if a pointed candle were meditatively licking over him. He nodded.

“I don’t quite believe it,” Rose said. “But goodbye, gentlemen. Noone is keeping you here against your will.”

The Grandson leaned down, kissed his grandmother, and reached a hand behind him, collaring Nylund. With this man suspended at arm’s length from his wrist like either a prized or dubious fish, he charged out of the apartment, in and then out of the nimbus of light thrust by his own uncanny hair.

Chapter 13 Drag

The gust furled all up around them an like an intricate dress of cold. It folded; frilled; uncurled; carried them into arcades of dark and boxy wind. They felt hands reach down from the limbs of trees, grab their wrists, and swing them forward, and they felt little licking twig-needles reach up for their ankles and feel along their shins. Nothing besides this motion impelled them deeper. After awhile he was able to peer out of their glamor, and he felt as if he should be far above the scene, looking down on the landscape from wide sloping wings, the houses like gel-caps scattered over the hills. From this height he would like to spit out his teeth. He thought of the flimsy latches that held bathroom doors closed. Flimsy matches that could burn up a household a million times. Switch train to a new track.

The chassis was packed with movie magazines, the only thing in the Cousins’ house that had once been of any value, except for their uniforms which they had to buy from the plant itself but weren’t worth stealing. The magazines had the worn lustre of money. They chronicled decades. The same stars would emerge as arm’s-length girls or scraps of boys, would mature and bloom, and pose and fade and bend down again small as they had begun, under the arbitrary Clotho of the photo editor. These stars would start out a hard and silver like the inside of a soup-can phone to whisper to the other side of the room where your sister, through her dirty brown hair, was listening through the cold forest of her pulse. A hand found a switch a switch was thrown and they burst into color, life-like, hibiscoid and non-animal pinks yellows greens past health would wilt completely in this overblown ease.

Now folded into worn stapled covers and stacked up in the back: like maps.

In wells below the front seat, candy corn and necklaces, Cokes, a schoolbook on conquistadors, feet of Nylund and Daisy, heavy socks and thin sneakers. Daisy steered the long square nose of the car over the width of the country and through the cold piercable fabric of the night. Eventually she just stopped the car in the middle of the road. The moonlight held the car in place. He watched the white exhaust pile up like slung bolts in the rear view and where he laid the side of his fist against the window a white star bloomed up. The fields rose steeply and briefly around them like lines of blue black laundry.

“Keep on or go back, Nylund.”

It was a question but with her newly orange hair splatting the thick collar of her brown nylon jacket and her real cold red lips she said it flatly like an ultimatum. Nylund nodded: descent, ascent. Milk and candy had been their diet for days, and their skin was dusted over with some kind of lunar precipitate, kiss of milk on the last day, dusting for fingerprints in advance. Before you’re corpseworn. Diet of worms. Sell by the last day, and/or he’ll raise you up. The vice squad pouring the milk down gutters, circa the Milk Wars, unpasteurized wheals in the dust. Well overland the big dairy where the atomic knuckle had rose up a redundancy in the afternoon sky. They had no choice but to take it in, gather it up, pulp it for neatness sake: no waste. Then shine with ex-eyes, cry with roses for lungs. The milk that shattered bottles. The blood that breaks down walls. Scratch that: the love. Love cabal, hit parade. The hits raining down all night from the satellite. From troopship to tract home, the scrubbed hand that launches the sub to the gloved hand that pulls the lever and lowers milkshake down into waxy takeout cups: love.

Nylund et Daisy, driving for the milkbar of the city, stained with sodium, neon, copper, lead dust, that leaks the box and causes ink to spoil. The city necropolish, bakelite, wiped slick and buzzing bright with flies. The green eyes of the convenience store spook, his nursey smock. The tines and the coin. The tissue paper cross hatch of the moon. Lay it against your top lip: hum. Trace it on the mealy paper. What else could be fit between the drawn thumb and the finger, rubber band, the signature of grease. In-love of the brother and sister. Thereafter she had the nervousest fingers. Ankles emerging from the purple jeans. The splayjawed zippers, wrists. They wanted a box to get inside, but they kept splitting. So they ended. Some months. The instances multiply. Nylund lands feet first at the soup kitchen. Daisy-mine, sprained, badly healed is soonest mended, won’t stay. Wicks off into the night. Gold purse on a chain. Glints one last time like a gas to flame.