Vanessa Gully-Santiago, Coworkers, 2024
I went to work after sending my first five job applications and threw up next to our outdoor break table. “It looks like cat food!” Denise said, collecting leaves to cover my vomit. She drove me home while I threw up in my hands. I threw up in the yard, on my shoes, then into a towel for sixteen hours or so. I’m sure you’ve had a virulent stomach flu, the sort where you crawl to the bathroom, lose consciousness, void your bowels while puking on the floor—all this as the mind spins kaleidoscopic, repetitive thoughtforms.
I saw looping images of war—from Gaza, but also from two plays by my favorite playwright. The Fever centers around an averagely privileged American vomiting in a hotel bathroom in a poor country undergoing revolutionary violence, experiencing flashbacks of bourgeois leisure interspersed with a sort of somatic class consciousness.
“Sometimes I was fine. I remember one morning—a marvelous blue sky—I had my hair cut. Gentle hands molded my hair so that it fit over the shape of my scalp like a cap. Then I bought myself a pair of comfortable socks, and then I looked at them carefully, and I bought two more pairs, because it’s not easy to find the kind of socks that I like! But then I got into a taxi, and as I was riding across the city, that feeling, that sickness, filled me up again. It seemed to start in my stomach and move out through my legs, my chest. And my stomach was beating, it was just like a heart. A cold sweat on my forehead and neck. I wasn’t me. When the taxi arrived, the person who got out of it wasn’t me. I was nowhere. The person who paid the driver was actually no one.”
I had the supernaturally good fortune to see Wallace Shawn perform in Evening at the Talk House years ago in New York. Actors chatting at a club discover many among them have taken part-time jobs “targeting”—conducting remote assassinations based on algorithmic logic.
“So I mean, you know, pardon me, but I’m making an analogy between dropping some waste into the toilet, you see, and dropping a few small bombs on certain targets, you know, dropping some rather small bombs on to certain people who pose a threat to us, all rather casual, and then you wash your hands and return to the table, and there you have your Programme of Murdering. It takes very little time, it’s barely noticeable, it’s something you could say that everyone does, and in the context of our lives and all the things we do, it’s rather trivial.”
I emerged from illness to see tents erected on the Arts Quad—Cornell students had joined Columbia et al with an anti-war encampment. Everywhere these beautiful protests demanding an end to the flow of money to and from the programme of murdering. Just as the forsythia is blooming, the cherry trees, trillium and twinkling fields of vinca minor.
I saw looping images of my best friend at work in his chef’s coat, his kind presence, chopping vegetables, basting drumsticks. I emerged from illness to find our love had deepened, amiable hugs now embraces filled with longing. After work we walked through marshes scattering red-winged blackbirds. He met Miloš and Colette, my artworks and favorite trees. He kissed my shoulder a dozen times. Just as the meadows burst with a thousand dandelion suns.
I saw looping images of artworks: lace, embroidery, quilts, drip paintings, Raku-fired pots, Young Boy Dancing Group—yes, those improv dancers in harnesses and lingerie wrestling in slime.
But even with all this beauty, with all this provocation, love, and justice; even with all this vomit—the creditors kept calling and sending their suspension notices.
On a morning when the phone and electric companies threatened to shut off service, my managers ushered me into the office to say they’ll modify my start time in keeping with the city bus schedule, but this is really pushing it. It’s clear they think I’m a witch who summons buses and changes weather patterns when not leading black masses. Riley calls out indefinitely. His MRI shows he has a slipped disc; it took four months for this job to break the body of a 21-year-old. My friend from morning shift tells me her husband choked her, “which bothers me because I have PTSD from being raped so many times.” Reader, let me assure you that both I and her parents are urging her to leave him. In any case, I stopped talking for the remainder of my shift; they call this dorsal vagal shutdown.
My love, with his towering intelligence of the heart—
I don’t think about him—he is a continuous presence inside me. All the questions I asked I want to ask again. You broke every finger on both hands twice? Tell me how, again.
After my neighbors go to work and school, I sneak out and cut one red tulip with the demented hope that the total perfection of its color and texture will act as an aesthetic homing device, a fairy tale lure, this deep efflorescence, blood just coagulated, cherry compote, the red of a young lip bitten, cooks and witches in league.
Sometimes we fall in love with a life that doesn’t love us back.
But today I sit in the sunshine beside my gingerbread house in the fullest glory of spring, circled by a butterfly no bigger than my pinky nail, bright orange leopardskin. And I’m allowed to remember his flashlight on the nighttime forest floor’s carpet of mayapples, rich smells of pine sap and verdant green growing things for a first kiss. All this can be ours if we let it.
“Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.”
“Truly, events have a power to move unmatched by one’s darkest imaginings. I stand in the doorway breathing fast.”1
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Both quotations from J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country