Diary of My Captivity With the Undermoon Sioux: Day 22

A chill rises from the east. I can’t tell if it’s just me, or if the days are really getting colder. I wish I had some innate, native American understanding of the weather, like some whittled down sense of an oncoming cold front. Is that racist?

I’ve made some incremental progress with whom I’m assuming is the tribe leader. He’s a formidable fellow named Wind Harness. Yesterday, he trotted up to my outpost and shoved a natty, stinky pelt off his saddle and onto the floor. I could tell it was meant to be a gift, so I was sure to make many gestures of grave gratitude. Then we sat down across from each other and began our slow form of communication.

Through a series of pictographs and hand gestures, he told me his story. Apparently, once, a long time ago, he caught the soul of a whale and now keeps it in a leather satchel. Either that, or he chucked the soul over a cliff. I wasn’t quite sure, but I kept my face in an expression of curiosity, as seemed appropriate to the situation. Then he was looking at me expectantly, and I understood that he wanted me to tell him my story. Soon I found myself, through a series of ever unwinding tangents leading farther and farther away from the original point, as is my conversational technique, trying to explain what it was like to be in a big box store like Target or Kohls.

I think I was trying to explain some emblematic experience of living on earth or something like that. Motioning wildly I was like, “Big, like the plains. But inside. And filled with boxes. And you can never find anything. And always too cold.”

Anyways, he wasn’t getting it. So I just drew a quick pictograph that indicated I’d been birthed by a pyramid and then set down here by a flaming Pterodactyl. By the way he was looking at me, I couldn’t tell if I’d said the exactly right or exactly wrong thing.

Before he went, he bestowed on me another gift. He opened his palm and inside was a tiny bug, lit up from in inside like our lightening bugs, except even more luminescent. He hummed three tones, and then the bug sparked into a small flame, and then almost immediately flared out. He put one of the bugs in my hand, it was warm, I go, “Thanks?” It was only after he’d ridden off that I realized, idiot that I am, that he’d given it to me so I could make a fire.

But I have been humming to the bug and it will not spark. I even went out and got kindling and everything. The bug just beetles around like it’s having time of his life. I guess I haven’t gotten the tones right. And it’s like trying to unlock a door with a faulty key where you just keep jamming it in and the thing you really need to do is stop, take a deep breath, and try it again…anyways, now I’m just blabbing.

PRE-INTERNET FUCKING

In the middle of the day, on the sofa, in the quiet. Wind chimes tinkling. It’s like you’re both adults, you’re both hairy. You’re both really into it. She’s kind of guttural, but that’s cool. There’s a new community being built outside and it’s all good. You both decided to meet at home. You’re in your white slacks, and she’s in her puffy pastel shirt, and she looks good. And maybe her hair is in a French braid. And the light’s coming in and it’s all peaceful, on the outskirts of this new community. And maybe there’s a Navajo rug on the wall. But you’re not feeling burdened by anything because you’re making a living, actual money, from doing or creating something. And that’s how it’s supposed to be, but you don’t even know that’s how it’s supposed to be at the time because that’s the way it is.

And your lady, she knows what to do, and she’s not trying to be any certain way except the way she is. And maybe afterwards she’ll take off the big watch on your wrist and put it on her own wrist. And maybe she’ll sit in her underwear next to the couch and shake out a newspaper or look at a magazine. You’ll just pass the time like that. And you’ll drink iced tea, and it will be so leisurely that it’s like someone is just pouring you into the afternoon.

You live on a street called Falcon Street and there are construction sites around from the new community and you know how to fuck. You don’t question how to fuck because you haven’t seen a million other people fuck before you. And your lady knows how to fuck, too. And both of you fuck, in your air conditioned house, on the outskirts of a new community, on the sofa you bought with money you could see, in the middle of the day. And it feels great.

BOOK REVIEW: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

I will start by saying that this book was, to use a much overused but totally apt in this case word: amazing. I’d never read anything by Lionel Shriver before, and often had the feeling of, "Why isn’t this woman touted as one of the best living writers at work today?" And then I’d remember that just because I, myself, haven’t heard of or read a certain writer doesn’t mean they haven’t already been absorbed by the world at large. She is considered one of the greatest writers working today, and won the Orange prize, for, you know, female writers. As an extra bonus, she seems like a kind of nutcase, judging by some of the supplementary material in the back of the book I bought. She changed her name to the name she wanted when she was a kid. (Good thing I didn’t do that, or my name would now be either Crystal or Robyn or Charlie Rathbone).

Anyways. So the book, or prose was, by and large, and from an antiseptic, clinical viewpoint, outstanding. But it was also very difficult to read. I mean, actually, it was a page turner. I read it in about three days and was totally swallowed up. By difficult to read I mean that it was dark. Very incredibly awfully dark in a way that seemed to permeate my regular life. The sticky atmosphere of doom in WNTTAK seemed to become the atmosphere of my days, and that’s not something I was psyched about.

It’s about a young man who goes on a Columbine-esque killing spree at his high school with a crossbow. It’s written in the form of letters from the young man’s mother, Eva, to her now estranged husband after the whole thing has taken place. We hear about Kevin as a baby, a toddler, an adolescent, all the while displaying the kind of sociopathic, run for the hills qualities befitting one fucked up devil baby with a cold streak of sadism. In the letters Eva talks a lot about her original ambivalence about having a child. She wasn’t sure she wanted it in the first place and feels nothing when it’s born. She has to really try to form a connection to it. It’s a whole nature versus nurture, chicken before the egg type of deal where you wonder if the kid is crazy because he sensed his mother’s ambivalence from the get go, or if the mother’s ambivalence stemmed from an inate understanding that the kid is crazy.

So there’s all of that, but the thing that I liked most about this book, what most struck my soul gong, was Shriver’s high altitude insight into being a mother, into other people, into relationships, just about anything. I feel like I could listen to her talk about post-it notes and come away shattered by some new world unlocking perception. There is contained in this novel a rare ore that many books don’t have (although I don’t think a book necessarily needs this to be good): actual wisdom.

So yes. I definitely recommend WNTTAK. But be prepared to go into a not very pleasant head space for a while. And also, if you are, like me, a woman who thinks it might be nice to have a baby one day, be prepared to shelve that idea for the time being and start swallowing birth control by the fistful.