Mosquito bites accumulate around my ankles, I think because that’s where I don’t notice mosquitoes. My circulatory system is circulating somewhere else. Some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others. My father remembers staying the night in a house on the palace grounds of Balinese royalty, but who knows. His story is mostly concerned with the monsoon-complicated logistics leading up to staying there. The palace outbuilding was a respite from the chore of bringing about a family vacation. He always asks me “do you remember that?” My memory is the fruit of his labor. I remember how miserable my brother was, because, as my father puts it, his blood is sweet. His misery was to me like the puddle where the mosquitoes transformed his blood into eggs. He says he doesn’t remember the mosquitos, he just remembers thinking Bali wasn’t that cool, which sounds as much a recent fabrication as my memory of him.
Bed bugs can be seen if you squint, or if not, the story I heard of bedbugs making a bedbug-line for someone’s sweet-blooded friend, leaving him (the storyteller) carefree, is larger than life. Later, this sweetblood, or perhaps another person entirely, blood perhaps coursing with tranquilizers, perhaps not, asked him if he was a prosthetic person. Perhaps blood by the same name would not smell as sweet. Leeches he avoids not biologically but intentionally, by walking ahead of the rest of the group, piquing the leeches’ interest with his footfalls. By avoiding them he guarantees that everyone else’s ankles will receive fresh leeches.
I keep saying my mind is a sieve–no, I heard someone say someone else’s mind is a sieve, and have since repeated it to myself, unbeknownst to anyone–but maybe it’s a black hole. One by one, several people become one; many memories become one memory. Faintly I remember having mixed up some memories, but that could easily be one memory become general, so that each memory feels like it could be another memory. I said recently that in order to write fiction one has to become fictional, a character who writes fiction, but it’s equally tedious to be factual in order to write facts.
A false bee hovers near my knee, its wings moving so fast that they appear to be still. More stationary than an actor playing a corpse, it looks stuck. I could move my knee at any time, but I’m fascinated by its noncommital commitment to me.
I feel envious of those whose blood attracts vermin, vermin who sense there is something good to eat there. Once, a Lyme-disease-carrying tick graced my back, but the bullseye never appeared. I was just lucky that my parents were made paranoid by the tick’s magnificent engorgement. They tried to pull it off me, but as soon as it was touched it dropped, like a ripe fruit. Or maybe there was a rash? I see a scene I could never have seen, my torso exposed for a swim in a lake. I see the red concentric circles and I don’t.
I remember saying “you don’t believe in memory,” and am embarrassed first of all by how easily I remember my own utterances and with what difficulty I remember anyone else’s. Listening can be like looking at the sun: afterimages precede blind spots. In Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne, the first inkling of something monstrous about the eponymous creature is that “nothing comes out of him.” What kind of digestion has no end? The funny kind, Hannah Gadsby might say. I write jokes, structurally: I feel that explaining anything would ruin the writing. I subessay the only person I know, the conglomerate person of infinite density.
The Koel bird, with its loud, rising insistence that its voice is more urgent than the rest, insinuates its children into another nest. My boss, with a deftness that can only be unintentional, installs himself as a father figure for his employees. His hiring practices are largely unconditional: whoever shows up at the right time gets a job. In exchange for his professional generosity, we all end up caring about his interiority. When he’s around you’ll find him embarassingly funny; you’ll sift his personal life when he’s not around; you’ll vent about his irresponsibility; you’ll end up wading in what he forgets about.
This summer I’ve begun hearing a new noise. From what I’ve read about the life cycle of the cluster fly, the more fecund my garden is, the more flies try to escape my house. They lay their eggs in earthworms, and the larvae eat their way out, becoming the blood-red chrysalises I find when I till the garden in the early spring. The flies that emerge look for a safe place to hibernate for the winter, a.k.a. the many nooks and crannies in my house. When it warms up the next year, they come out of hiding and try in vain to leave out my windows. By summer, they’re usually all either escaped or dead, but this year there’s one that wakes up several times a day to buzz frantically in whatever impossible place it went to sleep.
