The stories in this volume compose FAB = -FBA, SUM FLUX V.2.2. See more stories, and check out the authors featured in this edition here.
After the jump, I hold my breath and let myself forget. The erasure is pristine. I coat myself in the surface tension of a thousand stochastic orbs reflecting the chlorine-blue grotto that is the Betty Balthazar Community Pool. My eyes flap open, witnessing my associates—like slow-mo angels—wagging their limbs in the clear chemical absolution. Underwater, we are purified in the plunge.
Resurfacing is vulnerable, like the armor of deflection is stripped away. I pull myself out onto the deck and leave behind the shell of denial, my memories, and the baggage of guilt for my actions this week. The disturbing deeds—too terrible to face, too wretched to recall—now drain into merciful oblivion, forgotten and null.
On the deck, echoes of slapping feet gallop down the tiles. There are about fifteen of us, toweling off around the pool perimeter. Our officiant and facilitator, Olga, gyrates and shrugs, reminding us to shake off any residual imprints. And in this moment, I wonder what everyone else has left in the sink. What sins have been discarded in the dissolution of recollection?
There's a splash of vapid energy as we waddle into the turquoise change rooms. My eyes sting, and I tell myself, I’ve got to remember to bring some goggles next time. The reminder triggers a recursive loop of questions—infinitely dissolving echoes. What else is slipping my mind? What’s left of what we know when we leave this place?
The past is tricky, perhaps I remember finding out about Jumping with Janus at the arcade from a few peculiar prodigals who’d set up a booth trying to sell off their unused charms and lucky trinkets. Couple of stoners, I thought, but they had a way of just being there in the world, unfettered by the pulsing anxiety of the planet. I couldn’t look away, so I inquired about the effect, to which they handed me a tri-fold pamphlet outlining the principles and practice of the ritual cleansing. Janus as the beginning and the end, the past and the future, the do and the done. It was a quarterly occasion for most disciples—lest the baptismal fizz carbonate your tether away, flinging you into free orbits through moth-holes of identity. We are—only what we remember.
"We are our memories,” says Olga, overhearing me talking to myself outside the building, waiting for the streetcar.
I tell her I know what she’s going to say next, but it doesn’t stop her.
“You shouldn’t come every week,” she says, like it’s the first time I’ve heard this advice.
So I ask her if it really matters. Then tell her if there was any less of me, I wouldn’t show up at all.
She pats my shoulder, but she’s really just pushing herself away.
I ride home, testing the process. Feeling good, but also feeling urges, making the skin on my neck tight. I’ll take care of it later—now hang the jaw down, evacuate the energy, these hot pebbles of compulsion, burning from inside out. Avoid eye contact and sit on hands.
The world is familiar enough, crystallizing to coherence, like an ambient tide slowly filling in the gaps. The bus across town, down the avenue, around the park, and to my home. My apartment. My lair of unknowable proclivities.
The next morning, I’m exhausted from being out half the night, so I sit on the floor of the shower and exfoliate my thighs with the vegetable scrubber. I’ve learned not to fight the impulses, though I shrivel a bit from the vulgarities, compelling as they are. These nocturnal habits, a gift to myself—a salve of satisfaction soothing my body and mind. Tonight will be no different. And in a few days, tub-time will not be enough to dissolve the disgusting reverie and I’ll return for another session at the pool.
Gotta get to the market early or the bustle gets my nerves jumping. And while people are definitely my thing, I like them much better when they're sleeping.
Grab a coffee at the nook and zig zag through the stands, filling my tote with potatoes, beans and aubergine. Feeling productive and resourceful but it doesn't stop the drip of late tastes activating my glands. The briney triggers and phantom mouth-muscle spice I know excites my spirit like I'm making meat love, thigh deep in a dumpster of cow bones behind the butcher shop, where I suddenly find myself. It doesn't matter how I got here, it happens, but I know after tonight, it'll get harder and harder to track my activities.
In preparation, I go to the library and pretend to sleep for a while. Let the pressure build. Ripen my intention until I'm sharp and narrow. Reflect on my impulse and quiet the voice with an aquatic visualization. I'm treading in the deep, languid and luxurious, pushing and pulling. In this temple I am remembering to forget and forgetting to remember.
"The humming is disturbing everyone," says the librarian close to my ear and I tell her that I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed and that my humming is one of the least disturbing things I am capable of.
Security comes to escort me and my groceries outside. It doesn't matter. I am ready to go.
At home, I'm boiling a spud and sauteing some greens. Feeding one self but not the other. My fixations are starved for attention. Does my desire define me? Soon, I will pack the soft shoes and essentials and get out for my visitations. Two at the most. Can't get too ambitious. Gotta keep the activities rolling along low and loose, just enough to quell the craving. I'm back by four to recharge.
Sun's up and, I stink of sour saliva and hairspray, but I skip the shower and head right to the pool. On the bus, I practice my mantra, my solemn verse:
To and through the threshold come, past is past and done is done.
Cast the weight, obliterate, in vacant space, new life begun.
Are the passengers mouthing the words? My lips move with them. Over them. In them.
At the forgetting place, Olga tries to block me from exiting the changeroom.
"Have you forgotten? You were just here the other day," she tries politely, as the other attendees line up for the leap.
I tell her I know what I'm doing and that maybe she should take a little dip herself and forget about keeping tabs on my personal observances.
Then she says I smell wrong—like cabbage, and attempts to redirect me out of the pool area, but I really don't like the extended touch on the shoulders so I spin and duck underneath her arms, running to my unmaking and cannonball into the pool. Following my lead, the brothers and sisters enter the reservoir, stabbing heavenly columns of light.
Our memories, sins. And our guilt, only a symptom of memory.
Uncoupled from accountability, to thrive another day, I drop to the bottom, a rock, knees in my arms, looking up at bodies, like jellyfish, bobbing in the promise of a clear conscience. I hold my breath and wait. I want to wipe away the strain. Clear the chamber until my autonomic responses compel me to stop dying and live again.
But no one comes, so I dream in the undulation of other people's pain. Soaking in the throbbing reverb of annihilation, laying heavy, tamping down the now tiny voice that once provoked me.
I am no one again, everyone's chance nightmare, squirting in the hooked squeeze of a rasping tongue. I'm a flat horizon on an abstract plane, a nether ghoul, a mer-man in streaks of pewter scale, curled around the drain, fighting to remember how to beat my cold fish heart.
Title Visual by Jon T.
exceptional.
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