Issue 6: Fall 2018

Fiction

Forest Succession

Paul Lamb

David woke in the night and reached for Kathy, but she wasn’t there. He stayed still for a moment in a darkness that seemed too dark then remembered that she was in Kansas City for the weekend with her mother and he was at his Ozark cabin. The chill outside of the quilt touched the skin of his shoulder and he guessed that the fire in the potbelly had died. And so he faced the choice of rising from the bed in only his briefs to stoke the stove again or to remain wound in the quilt where he could keep warm enough to reach the dawn. He chose the bed and let his thoughts drift until he had fallen asleep again.

At first light, which seemed too bright, he woke and found himself more tired than he expected. Outside the cabin snow had fallen in the night. Had he given attention to the forecast he would have known this was coming, but that would have made no difference for his escape from a tedious, girls’ weekend of salads and forced smiles. The cabin was a place he had come to so many times over his decades that he no longer needed planning or preparation; he could arrive with just the shirt on his back and feel reborn.

The day before him bore no specific chores, other than what could always be undertaken at a neglected cabin in the woods to keep it standing in the face of entropy and the relentless, reclaiming force of nature, a nature that always wins in the end. For this visit he had decided to take down a pignut hickory that was crowding his grandson’s small plantation of spruce trees. The spruce had been planted in a clearing not far from the cabin the spring after Clarkson was adopted so that they would grow as the boy did, entwined in a way that they all hoped would draw him to this family place, now in its fourth generation, fifth if you counted Clarkson’s great, great grandfather who had first bought the hundred acres, a man David never knew but felt a lifetime of debt to.

The plan had been to plant a single tree for Clarkson and then to nourish it as they would the boy, but the conservation department had more trees to offer than they had space for planting. They accepted the minimum two dozen and then put as many as they could sensibly fit in the clearing, scattering the remainder throughout their forest to survive as they might. Most of those were lost, but the grove of spruce was visited and tended and nurtured. David had been skeptical of the idea, or rather of the location, noting that if there was a natural clearing in the forest, there was a reason for it and that introduced trees might not survive there. Of the original planting, ten now remained, sinking roots in the thin Ozark soil, despite David’s misgivings, and reaching, as all young trees in this old forest must, for their share of the sunlight.

Spruce were not native to Missouri, and it had always been David’s plan, his land ethic as Kelly had come to call it, to cultivate only native plants in his forest. Yet Curt and Kelly had been so on fire about these particular trees – something different for their forest – that David had muted his objection and supported their plan. He had begun to acknowledge then, though only to himself, that it would not always be his forest, that it was becoming Curt’s and Kelly’s, and eventually, he hoped, it would be Clarkson’s. That the spruce were doing well mitigated his concerns – it seemed that the clearing had been waiting for these very trees – and that Clarkson had soon claimed them as his own stoked in David a love for the little grove that nearly matched his love for the boy. Each season meant a photo of him there, Clarkson growing at first faster than his trees, but he was soon outpaced, and now, more than a dozen years later, the trees were tall and confident just as the boy seemed to be.

Yet a single hickory to the south of them, a little way down the hillside sloping to the lake, was spreading its crown, its own bid for the light, and shading the spruce. David had long thought of removing the hickory, thus allowing Clarkson’s grove more sunlight and a better chance to thrive. Its bole was not especially thick, and David, well practiced in this woodcraft, felt he could take down the tree easily himself. This would be that day.

Breakfast of instant oatmeal – once he had resurrected the fire in the stove – followed by a careful collection and checking of the gear he would use filled David’s morning. There was no hurry in his movements but no waste either. Everything he needed was in the cabin, including warm clothing rough enough for work in the woods, and once the sun had advanced above the south ridge to begin giving what cold warmth it could this January morning, David prepared to set out for the spruce grove.

His wish had been to receive a new chainsaw at Christmas, but when that didn’t happen – Kathy confessing that such a purchase needed to be made by him so he got exactly what he wanted – he hoped to be surprised with one at his birthday in March. Thus he was left with the latest in the long succession of chainsaws that had come to the cabin over the decades. A perfectly fine machine, older but he judged still reliable, and sufficiently matched to the task before it.

When he stepped onto the porch and met the cold light, the silence of the forest washed over him. No birdsong, no chirring insects. Even the air was still, and he stood for the moment listening to this absence under the vast blue sky until it was finally broken by the calls of two crows on the south ridge. He watched as they flew across the frozen lake, on whatever mission was before them, then hefted his gear to take to the hickory.

The crunch of his boots in the crust of snow set the rhythm for his walk. The snow was not deep; it would not hinder his work or when he drove out the next day, but for now its white shroud robbed his forest of color, broken by the dark verticals of the tree trunks and the blue-gray of their slanting shadows. Branches around him were limned with snow. His familiar looked unfamiliar.

Ahead David could see the pale blue green of the spruce, a mass of color that directed his steps. In the old days this part of the forest had been peppered with cedars, which also stayed green all year. But it had been his father’s mission to remove all of the cedars near the cabin, a mission David took up in turn, then later Curt and Kelly, and now one that Clarkson seemed to share as well. The canopy of the oaks and hickories had thickened in the many years they’d all been coming there, shading the forest floor, and now most upstart cedars were starved of light and did not survive. David had half believed that his father’s ambition was hopeless, and yet here it was, successful. David’s words, the first he’d spoken since arriving, broke the silence around him. “You were right, Dad.”

David often spoke to his father, though the man was gone for nearly twenty years. He’d never stopped missing the man. He still felt like an apprentice in his father’s forest. He let himself think of his father as just far away and not seen for a while. A comforting pretense that was easy to do in this place where the two had shared so many important, perfect moments of their lives and where David could still feel his presence.

Walking in the snow, carrying the chainsaw and gasoline, had warmed him though he could see the plumes of his breath. His breathing came harder in the cold air. He set down the equipment a few steps from the hickory and studied the tree. He removed his gloves – a bright orange pair that Clarkson had given him that Christmas – and ran his fingers down the bark. It felt like cork and was not cold to his touch. The sloping ground favored his plan but he wasn’t sure he’d get a clean fall to the forest floor given the dense trees on the hillside below. Still, if he could get it most of the way down, the spring storms would likely finish the job and return it to the earth as everything must do. Or it might hang dead in the embrace of the other trees for years. Either outcome was fine if its sacrifice meant more space and light for Clarkson’s trees.

Three cuts would do the job. Make the wedge and then start the back cut. Step away when the tree began to lean and then listen as it fell, grasping desperately at the trees around it, fighting its premature end. A task David had done countless times and a skill he still hoped to teach Clarkson, his own son, Curt, having never been much interested.

And yet, in his way Curt had been interested. He’d paid close attention to David’s early lessons with tools and fire, acting as though all of his father’s supposed wisdom was a mild joke yet showing a competence in the end nonetheless. And later Curt’s interest transformed, from his rotation in the ER and especially once he had a son of his own, into an abiding concern for doing such work safely. His gift for his father that Christmas had been a pair of chaps to wear when using the chainsaw. In all of their years of cutting firewood there had never been a single mishap, and David knew this was due to their diligent and patient method. The chaps fit perfectly with this practice.

But the chaps were back at the cabin.

Below him the lake boomed as the morning sun warmed the ice. David, alone in his frozen forest, supposed he was the only one to hear it. It was a rare sound since he visited the cabin less often in the winter than he did the rest of the year. A serious, portentous sound, to add to a lifetime accumulation of sensations in his Ozark woods. He wished at that moment that Clarkson were with him to hear the booming, but the boy was with his parents at some Caribbean island for a week, taking in different sensations and building his own lifetime of accumulations. There would be other chances.

On his walk back to the cabin to fetch the chaps, David steered his crunching steps to the hillside above where half a century before he had buried his dog, Buddy. That had been a day of sensations, difficult ones, but important, and still felt. His father had raised a sandstone slab over the grave and scratched the dog’s name into it with a nail. The slab had fallen many times, and David reset it whenever he found it on the ground. Yet on this winter morning he could not find the grave. Even this deeply familiar was made unfamiliar, not just with the blanket of snow but with the decades of growth and change, both in the forest and in himself, that altered the landscape from what had been burned into his boyhood memory of the day. He realized he was the only person alive who even knew of this any longer, and he vowed to return in the spring to reset the slab once again and preserve his memory. As he sat on a stump to rest for a moment, he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. The air felt cold and un-nurturing in his lungs.

The track of his footprints in the crusty snow had wandered widely on his way. This warty oak still holding its dead leaves. That ancient chunk of sandstone dusted white. The cleft in the hillside where water sometimes flowed. The view of the glinting, ice-shrouded lake through the trees. The spot where Curt had, amazingly, once found a rusty horseshoe half buried in the soil, speaking of even older, long-gone tenants on this land. All memories he savored, as important that morning as the chaps, and no rush for any of it.

But his steps did finally reach the cabin, and he welcomed the warmth inside as he sought the orange chaps on the tool shelf. He’d not worn them since Christmas morning when he had pulled them on over his pajamas to everyone’s delight, so he spent some time making sure he had them snapped and buckled correctly. These would certainly add color to the forest when he emerged from the warm cabin.

The hickory awaited, and though David wanted to linger and rest a little he also wanted to face what was before him. He poked a couple sticks of kindling into the stove so the fire didn’t die and the cabin would be warm when he returned then passed through the door.

A breeze stirred the dried leaves hanging in a tall oak near the cabin. Their many touches sounded crystalline, but soon the crunch of his boots was all David could hear. Above, the pair of crows watched from their perch in a tree but then rose and flew before him in the direction of the hickory. David followed.

Not long after, the whine of the chainsaw filled the forest, but no one was around to hear it. And no one was around to hear when it stopped. The lake boomed.

Paul Lamb lives near Kansas City but escapes to the Missouri Ozarks whenever he gets the chance. His stories have appeared in Aethlon, Magnolia Review (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Nassau Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hedge Apple, Little Patuxent Review, Bull & Cross, and others. He rarely strays far from his laptop.

Flashes of the Future

Drew Pisarra

The world reveals itself to us over time, albeit somewhat coyly. We get glimpses of what’s real not on a daily basis but periodically, in flashes, as if the days were a series of playing cards flipped over in quick succession and we were simply awaiting the appearance of the Queen. Any Queen. The rest is just a lot of numbers in red and black interrupted by the occasional feint of a Jack, Ace or King. If we miss the Queen of our desires on the first time around, then we simply have to wait until She comes up again. Or settle for a different Queen. And so the cycle repeats itself over and over until we perhaps put together a winning hand or at least see a pattern unfold or we fold ourselves and die having never witnessed the big reveal. One small, not entirely inconsequential thing I’ve learned so far. Not every deck comes stacked with a Joker.

I don’t think I first realized that I wasn’t just gay or “perverted by longing” (as my pastor once put it) until right after my senior year in high school. That was the summer, my friend Patti and I went down to New Orleans for our last adolescent vacation. We christened it our Bon Voyage to Adulthood. I don’t think either of us had any grand scheme attached to the theme. We certainly weren’t looking to lose our virginity. Patti had given hers away years ago to a now live-in boyfriend and mine was discarded in the back of a van in the parking lot of a diner just outside the Beltway. How we scraped together the money for this trip, I don’t completely recall. I suspect I stole some of it from the cash register at the bagel factory where I worked. Maybe Patti’s dad chipped in. That seems likely. What I do know, most definitely, is that we stayed at a Marriott since my dad was a chef at a sister hotel in Crystal City, Virginia. Because of that, he was able to snag us a deal. Not free but pretty close. I also remember that once we got off the air-conditioned Greyhound bus, the terminal was inhumanely hot, even though it was 8pm. One question though: Can you call a parking lot a terminal?

Anyway, no one had bothered to tell us that the lower, off-season rates for New Orleans were because no one in their right mind would travel there willingly at this time of year. August in N’awlins – as the locals pronounced it – was the thermal equivalent of a medically induced coma. We realized immediately that our week away was probably going to be a lot less adventurous than expected but even so, the night we arrived, we trundled off to our hotel, tossed our bags on our beds, then hurried down to Bourbon Street where our NARAL and ACT UP T-shirts were instantaneously patterned with sweat as we sipped from supersized souvenir cups aslosh with Hurricanes, the toxic local fruit punch. Our eventual choice to go into an unmarked club called Tina’s – tucked away on a side street, Dauphine perhaps? – instead of one of the main drag’s touristy, open-air jazz clubs wasn’t curiosity so much as a desire to escape the humidity. Nothing sounded as inviting as air conditioning and the windowless Tina’s had a line of rickety AC units built right into its cobblestone wall. We entered without a second thought.

What we found inside was a quasi-respectable nightclub looking like a low-budget tribute to GoodFellas. Small tables for two were topped by semi-white tablecloths; a chipped disco ball with shards missing revolved over the audience, conferring a glittery if fractured benediction. As to the crowd itself, it was small but immaculate: a dozen or so patrons who looked as though they’d paired off with makeup artists in the powder rooms before heading over to an in-house dry cleaner that handed out fresh-pressed suits, linen every one of them. Everyone was wearing a blazer except Patti and me. And this included the waitstaff, who favored tuxedo jackets, although sometimes without pants. Spider web fishnets were in that year, if memory serves me right. Feeling somewhat underdressed on top and overdressed below, we soon found ourselves seated at a table far from the center, further from the front. We’d been ushered to a railed-off, elevated semi-balcony that was a literal step up and a metaphorical step down. There were some advantages to the vantage point. Mainly, we could see almost everything.

Onstage was a cabaret act that seemed pretty Vegas. Or at least Reno. Impossibly tall women runway-strutted in slinky gowns, slit up the side, often to the hip. Since the loudspeakers were directly behind us, it took me awhile to figure out that the headliners weren’t actually singing but were merely mouthing the words or some facsimile thereof. (I’ve heard “peanut butter watermelon” is a good go-to if you forget the words while lip syncing since the phrase incorporates a wide variety of consonants.) The disconnect hardly diminished the impact of the show. To the contrary, I was shaken to my core thanks to the speakers right behind me. If sound can simulate a nervous breakdown then this was like cracking up in stereo. These seats came with a case of the musical jitters and I was trembling but just too tired to move. Heat exhaustion makes everything tolerable, even an over-amped bass.

On the main floor, the audience below looked somewhat stupefied. I knew New Orleans had a reputation for being the South’s Sin City but there was nothing to indicate excess or extremes here. Strategically exhaled cigarette smoke created miasmic veils in front of genderless faces that appeared almost entranced, possibly stoned. Disoriented and dehydrated, we ordered ginger ales. Our waiter either disapproved or misheard since we ended up being served a pair of potent grave diggers. At most the drinks contained a splash of soda.

I still get the order of events somewhat confused after that but rather than get into a detailed timeline that’s undoubtedly wrong, let me skip ahead closer to the end when our not-exactly-friendly server started to leave with one of the customers. The revue – although not the music – stopped with the suddenness of someone slamming on the brakes. Quickly awakening from our stupor, we watched as the lead showgirl pointed at either the patron or her co-worker while yelling something we couldn’t hear. I’m pretty good at reading lips though so I’m pretty sure what was shouted was “That one’s mine.” What “that one” referred to was infinitely less clear. The patron? The staff? Regardless, the six-foot tall singer leapt from the stage in her four-inch heels and chased the newly minted couple who’d exited only seconds ago. Faintly heard screaming ensued offstage by which I mean the lobby. What followed next I’m less sure. That trio was out of sight and out of mind once the DJ turned up “I Want to Dance With Somebody.” God, I love Whitney Houston. Plus Tina had stepped onstage.

She was a severe change from what had preceded. Short, not svelte. Wrinkled, not young. You could say that what she lacked in beauty she made up for in assurance. Which was doubly remarkable given that she was stinking drunk. It’s like the whole scent of the space changed with her arrival. I only know who she was because she told us so. She told the whole room: “I’m Tina, goddamnit. This is my place. My house. You don’t like it, you can leave.” One person definitely got the message and filed out as if on cue. The show continued. A spotlight narrowed our focus. The vamp of a burlesque tune came on. A laugh punctured its arrival. Was it Patti? I don’t think it was me. If Tina heard it, she didn’t show it. She peeled off a single fuchsia elbow glove then stopped. The music followed suit. Tina stood there in silence as if suddenly depressed. “I want to tell you a story,” she slurred. Like a jazz singer waiting for the band to jump in, she began to recite the opening section of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is,” although I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. It just seemed like a very strange story. If you don’t know it either, that song’s intro is done a capella so the initial lack of a background track was pretty organic, all said. “I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire…” Tina murmured as if she were telling Patti and me a mean-spirited secret. Hers was a whisper with an edge. It was that quiet. That ominous. As she forged on, whoever was manning the sound booth quietly slid the carnivalesque piano underneath so that when the recitative ended and the verse began, it was all of a piece. Tina went back to stripping in a perfunctory way, although she’d clearly forgotten to remove the second glove.

The rest of the clothes came off as if she were getting ready for bedtime, starting with a hair clip that landed on the stage with a clunk. She tried to unclasp the pearl necklace only to give up and jerk it off so the beads spilled around her like mercury. The lyrics got fuzzy. “And then I fell in love with the most wonderful son of a bitch who gazed into a river until I pushed him in when he tried to get away.” I could follow Tina’s logic here even as I wondered where this might go. Removing the dress was easy for Tina because it was basically a spangled sack with a zipper up the side that she yanked down in a single movement before stepping out of it like a magician’s assistant exiting some treacherous box.

What was revealed was confusing. I looked to Patti for help but she’d fallen asleep with her head resting on her arms like a swan-hippy hybrid. Tina was a mix of things too with a strangled midsection held in place by silver-gray duct tape that commanded her body into an hourglass figure by pushing the fat up and below. But that was about to change as Tina unraveled the strip of tape like a molting mummy. Unfortunately, before she’d made it halfway down her torso, she got stuck. The tape wouldn’t give. She let out a short cry as it tore at the flesh. Suddenly, she had a gash below one nipple on a chest that no longer wanted to play breast. Even so, the music continued. That Peggy Lee song is long.

Tina bent over for a bit so that I assumed she was trying to find the other end of the tape with her teeth so that she could resume her unpeeling from the bottom up. I got scared that a big reveal fraught with disaster lay ahead. Up until then, Tina’s privates were tucked or shrunken, maybe removed, maybe painfully small. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t looked closely. I couldn’t. I was in the back, remember? Plus, I was inebriated. Intoxicated but alert. But whatever it was that Tina had been doing bent over was now complete. She rose, the lower tape untouched, her mouth like a slit, her eyes like price-scanners. With her right, still-gloved hand, she pulled off her wig. There was something sad about the sweaty half-bald head she’d uncovered. Yet that was nothing when compared to what she held in her left fleshy fat fist, which she opened to reveal a small pink and white dental plate. What followed were a gummy smile and the final refrain. It was the most vulnerable thing I’d ever seen anyone do and because of that, strangely beautiful.

That moment has stayed with me for a long time, even though Patti has been known to insist it never happened. She acknowledges we saw a bald performance artist decked out in industrial tape, a postpunk superbaby who spun around in the darkness under a broken disco ball to an empty hall. But it was so much more than that. Even that part. Because after the lights in the house flickered on and off, Tina appeared committed to giving the two of us a show until the very end. Slowly, she began to spin in place, just like the ball overhead, and in this half-light I could make out a loose piece of black tape swinging around as if she’d somehow acquired a thin useless tail. A misplaced umbilical cord. An electric cord. As if she were more than human. As if she were an oversized toy whirling and twirling for the public’s amusement. Or a robot finally free of the outlet, no longer plug-dependent. I felt as though I’d seen the future so I stood. It was a gesture of respect. But I vomited because I stood too quickly. Only then, were we asked to leave.

Neither of us ever went back to New Orleans. That last big hurricane felt as though it had wiped away the magical city we’d visited forever. But New Orleans wasn’t the only thing that had irrevocably changed. The iPhone had arrived. So had YouTube. So had trans rights, karaoke culture, air-conditioned outdoor spaces, sippy cups at Broadway shows, and Chaka Khan’s frankly amazing cover of that Peggy Lee song on her underrated ClassiKhan album. (Check it out if you get a chance.) Patti and I drifted apart. She’s got two kids, a second husband, and a chip on her shoulder now. None of which were there before. I ended up in NYC, living in a shoebox apartment where I could touch the ceiling without stretching my toes. Tight as the space was, my friend Kitty stayed with me there for three months. Needless to say, we slept in the same twin bed, took turns sitting in the one chair to eat at the desk/table/countertop, then sat together on the stoop outside and smoked. Those stairs were my living room.

Kitty was a lighting designer who’d just returned from Maine where she’d done a residency which simply meant she ate for free and slept on a friend-of-a-friend’s couch in another state so she could add a self-important line to her burgeoning resume. It was she who’d recommended I check out Eye I Aye, an experimental performance installation at a small, oddly well-funded interdisciplinary lab in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. Her description of the experience, although confusing, was intriguing. She raved about the show because there weren’t any actors. She said, it proved Gordon Craig’s theory that the live performer had become obsolete. I had no idea what she meant by that since she insisted there weren’t robots or puppets in their place but I went down to someplace not far from the Bowling Green subway stop and entered what looked to be a dentist’s office where, appropriately enough, I was asked to sign a few forms, even before I’d paid my admission fee which was cheap. I’m guessing there were fifteen of us in attendance, max. We were all excited, adventurous individuals – strange to each other and perhaps to society. We’d each heard about the production from a friend. No one shared their names. And no one asked. If you’d bugged our conversation, it would’ve sounded as though we were in line for some new recreational drug or black-market gadget. Potentially dangerous. Likely not.

After a short wait, the second, interior door to the actual performance space opened. A long knotted rope was uncoiled at our feet. We were instructed to lift the rope to waist level then make our way into the room, hand over hand, until we were engulfed by a fog so dense that we all lost sight of the world as we knew it. I vividly recall that my hands had vanished. As had the rope. I saw nothing, a nothing of whiteness, which is quite distinct from a nothing of blackness, which always suggests something unseen but still there. Absolute whiteness presents nothing in a very different way. We were told to keep silent. A few people giggled when the door clicked shut behind the last of us. But nothing here was funny. No one had come for a laugh.

Soon, we had all retreated into some form of inner silence. Without a single additional word of direction, I continued to follow the rope, like a hiker going on a treacherous path that was irrationally horizontal. It’s weird how unsettling walking can be when you can’t see your feet or the path ahead. I was surprised how long I was able to move forward without reaching some sort of end. Was this the point?

We had been told that once we were comfortable, we should let go of the rope and move into the open area. I worried that I’d bump into someone but I never did. Evidently the space was big. Or we all let go and fell into some weird cocoon of self-imposed paralysis. The experience was very interior. I stood somewhere. Alone. That I know. There may have been a chandelier overhead or snakes below. Since I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t tell. But I wasn’t thinking such things. Not then. The sound of trance music could be faintly discerned. It struck me as ominous, and frankly a bit corny. I thought, “Oh, this is going to be an audio experience,” which struck me as a total cop-out. But as the trippy soundscape quietly built in volume, some colored lights came into play. At first, it was fairly unimpressive. Nothingness got a tint. Nothing was pink. Nothing was baby blue. Imagine absence in orange or yellow. Strange but hardly earth-shattering. But then the strobes were activated and that triggered a very different result.

How to explain this? Sudden honeycomb patterns emerged. If they were rhythmic in nature, it was to a count I couldn’t deduce easily. Yet some form of logic seemed to underlie their behavior. These were strange gridlike strings of shapes that had emerged -- hexagonal webs, monochromatic, contiguous but refusing to adhere to a set size. They seemed to be building upon themselves then just as quickly breaking down to smaller blocks as if relaying a non-verbal message related to a hive-like mind. Is it weird to say that they seemed to be living? I suppose the ambient sound added a layer of meaning. Maybe not. Perhaps the sound didn’t matter. Reality as I knew it was gone. I felt the third dimension disappear. For real.

The world had gone flat. These hexagonal patterns or beings didn’t exist in the space-time continuum I understood and presently missed. It became hard to breathe. Although there were no atmospheric alterations or gravitational trickery at work, I felt compressed, as if I were being asked to flatten out myself. This was claustrophobia at its most extreme. It became hard to expand my lungs. I lifted my hand in front of my eyes for reassurance then tried to psychically ohm through my anxiety. I knew it was all in my head. And as I got inside my own head, I realized, suddenly, that the whole idea of life on other planets or even this planet wasn’t a matter of green-skinned aliens and man-eating blobs. Such visions were completely beside the point. The other existences need not be restricted to a particular dimension with all its dimensional limitations. We could be surrounded by such creatures, such things right now. It wasn’t like ghosts who are basically humanoid echoes in a minor key. This was a whole other tonal scale. And it wasn’t expansive. It was flat.

My new world was now flatter than a photograph and proposed a reality where 3-D simply didn’t exist. The reality I walk through was being obliterated before my very eyes. It was terrifying, liberating, lovely in a way that I didn’t want to watch. It made me uneasy, as if it were showing me that our universe had cracks, fissures, not black holes to swallow you or crush you but hairline fractures that, when hit the wrong way, might result in a damage beyond repair. This was the edge of chaos. It was razor thin and cut just a nastily.

For years after that, I cringed whenever I saw a strobe light, a cop’s flashers, the warning stage of a blinking hand at a crosswalk, a turn signal on the back of a car that wasn’t turning quickly enough. All of it made me wary, as if these secretly coded visuals were inviting me back to this other realm, which abided by its own rules and didn’t like the ostentatiousness that came with three dimensions. Life itself seemed to be a performance that was constantly unfolding in front of this hidden audience that couldn’t see, think, sense, or care. It blinked. It knew. And I knew too. There was the moment and nothing more.

Funnily enough, shortly after this event, I landed a job in television. Why funny? Well, because TV is so clearly a translation of 3-D into 2-D that I was completely comfortable with. Although my role had nothing to do with the on-air creative aspects of the medium, I nevertheless had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that I would never mention the shows with which I had worked after I left the network for a period of three years. So you’ll just have to trust me when I say that the shows were big. I only left the job a year ago.

Without giving away any details, I can tell you that a lot of my job involved going to the Cons. Name a convention with even a peripheral relationship to television and I’ve probably attended it: Comic-Con, Dragon Con, Flame Con, Gen Con, Wonder Con, Pax East, Pax West, and GoPlay. I’ve been to them all. Inevitably, one year, I attended CYST, a less consumer-friendly but still important electronics/technology convention that showcased cutting edge technological advancements and games generally targeting non-entertainment industries. Like many of these low-on-celeb cons, this last one took place in Vegas and I confess that despite my many travels, I never got that familiar with the original Sin City so I ended up getting lost. And so, somehow, I ended up in the older part of town. The old strip, some people call it. Attempting to find my way back without my phone, because sometimes I like to try to pretend I’m not tech-dependent, I stumbled upon the BAE/SExpo -- Best Adult Entertainment Sex Exposition -- which by that time had become the largest pornographic convention in the world.

Attendees were almost all male, almost all white, almost all middle-aged, almost all unattractive. There were long lines to see a surgically-enhanced woman named Tuna. And I heard two men fawning over an autograph coupled by a kiss made by sitting down. Strange as it may seem given these particulars, I’d actually been hoping to attend BAE for years because everyone knew that the big technological leaps in terms of interactivity were happening in this field. But good luck trying to get sign-off on that from your Human Resources department. The long and the short of it is that getting lost suddenly didn’t seem so bad anymore. I started looking for virtual reality simulators for while I appreciated the potential you might be able to extrapolate from Puss the Sexbot or a pair of Clamgloves, my whole reason for making this trip was to find something with marketable potential for a TV show. Virtual reality was all about exploring environs right now. I wanted to see if porn had a different spin.

It did. And it wasn’t simply that the headgear I put on was covered in pink fur or that the fourteen electrodes they taped to my body resembled nipples. Those were all just titillating gimmicks. For what the SwapMeat promised was not a new world but instead a new you. When you put on the helmet, the ‘trodes allowed the system to scan your body and then put together the most beautiful version of you imaginable in the opposite sex.

It was incredibly disorienting standing at a mirror in this alt world. Not simply because I was now a different gender but because I was so unnervingly hot. I recognized myself: the eyes, the one (now only barely) discolored tooth, the birthmark on the neck (now without any irregular texture and less raised from the surface). And yet it creeped me out. It wasn’t funny or arousing to see myself re-gendered. It was shocking. The system asked if I wanted to make any adjustments – perhaps blonde hair instead of brunette, blue eyes instead of green, a waspier waist. That sort of thing. But all the adjustments I wanted to make were refused.

I wanted to stay bald on top. The system permitted a crew cut but nothing further. I wanted a bigger stomach, which the system kept misinterpreting as wider hips or a shift in the placement of my navel. With each rejected request, a voice that sounded suspiciously like mine but higher and softer said, “You don’t really want to do that now, do you?” And then she/we/it laughed. The bottom line was the program didn’t allow ugly. It was pretty or nothing. Take it or leave it.

I looked down at my body, this body, her body, our body, and I saw the woman I’d never become. I could see the curve of my breasts (too large) but I couldn’t feel the curve, not really, even as I slid my sensory-enhanced fingertips against my relatively flat chest. I remember distinctly, making a hmm sound but the sound was wrong. Or it wasn’t mine. Or it was me but it wasn’t me. I took the helmet off. I didn’t even look in the game’s closet with its naughty nurse and sexy witch outfits.

The busty attendant had a smirk on her face. “Enjoy yourself,” she asked when she knew damn well I had not. “It’s not as easy as it looks,” she added coquettishly but I wasn’t sure how to interpret this “it. ” Did she mean navigating the game? being a woman? being beautiful? redefining yourself? WHERE IS THE VIRTUE IN VIRTUAL REALITY read a banner directly behind her. I was more interested in the smaller sign just to the left of it. It had the reassurance of the familiar. EXIT it simply said.

Afterwards I found myself in a hall that was empty except for a payphone and a slot machine. It seemed such a strange pairing of objects – both of them asking for a quarter that might bring deliverance and might not. I opted for the latter device, dug the proper coin out of my pocket and slipped it in the slot. It landed with a clank as if it were all alone. I pulled the lever of the one-armed bandit and listened as the symbols whirled round and round. I could barely make out the shapes. Lemon, cherry, BAR, 7, a horseshoe with all its luck running out. What did I want to come up. Some sort of match. Did it matter which one? Were the odds in my favor? And what could I possibly win? Life seemed like such a sad gamble with only the slimmest chance at one final surprise. And yet I was willing to play. Whatever the prize.

Drew Pisarra is one half of the poetry activation duo Saint Flashlight. (The other half is Molly Gross.) His first book of poetry, Infinity Standing Up, was published by Capturing Fire Press earlier this year.