I Must Have Always Felt Elevated — Garielle Lutz

I’ve known some people.  I’m to leave out their names.  I’m to give you just an alphabet’s worth, then call it quits. A was another adept at having long since set herself aside from the onsweep of anyone else’s allure. There was, often as not, the earliness of her fingers pushing and pushing against themselves in the bowl of my palm—meaning what the fuck what?  In letters and e-mails she’s still saying we should wait until the two of us have had enough chance to overhear each other getting along well enough with others.  B believed that no marriage should go to waste, but he was topping out of his thirties now and had stopped riding the bus into the largest local city and walking around, because when he would be making his way past the base of a skyscraper and looking through the huge windows of the lobby at the women and men stepping onto and off escalators or sitting on benches and reading newspapers, the question would arise again and again: “You mean I’m supposed to just leave them there?” C wanted us to air our ignorance about him and his marriage in tiny gray-brown decrements. How apt that it was called scratch paper anyway! D: Everything about her was gleanable at first glance.  E kept getting harder and harder to get ahold of. The most I could usually get out of her was her work number, an extension, and when I called, it would be just to listen to her say, “This isn’t the time,” and then right away we’d be where? But one night I ran into her on the street. The slow demeanor I remembered, but she had a different position at work now. She keeps track of what she tells people, to which people in particular, but otherwise feels left out of herself.  To strangers, she’ll give an entire, exact answer to anything. There were two Fs. With the first F, it couldn’t have been any plainer what her eyes and mouth were adding up to—something probably last-strawish but then killingly unfinal—but I liked the way she talked about other parts of the town: she made them sound farther away than they actually were.  The other F was said to be large enough and asleep enough to have kept other people confused in homes of their own. G is unconcealedly me. Life comes over me some days. I must have always welcomed instructions of any sort.  I must have always felt elevated.  H never did get straight who he was supposed to be for his wife. She had already been part of a vast, antic retreat when she met me.  She liked it that the buses around here ran every twelve minutes. The idea was to bring a foam pad for the seat the next time around and then be done with thinking about freshening anything else. I is the initial of a person, not the name of any program of self-rape or, worse, the least of the personal pronouns.  I lived quietly and unhistorically.  She was tall and coltish and punishingly unbeautiful.  She wrote me another letter and explained  that the first time you were touched, it was you yourself the hand came down on, but afterward, the next person was just putting her touch on top of the previous person’s, until there was such a buildup between the hand and yourself  that you were no longer even party to the transaction. J might still be idling behind an open book, whatever had been printed on the pages serving only as a platform for her own thoughts, which should concern only that plate she left in the sink, with its cresting of potatoes, or that blondeness she keeps hoaxing into her hair. Some co-worker of hers with unusually convenient arrangements lives practically next door and is better at bringing expressions forward in the face, though people usually show you their worst. The moon and the stars aren’t beguiling her, either. K would argue that the little you see when you think you’re taking somebody in is only a representative of a kingdom apart.  Her near-ex-wife would always be shouting for her from the bedroom, though. I’d have to hear her put the receiver down, and I’d have to put up with shrill noisings from the rockabye TV she forever had on. It was the one she could turn off only by pulling the plug.  What I remember most of those days was the dishonored checks, the denatured alphabet put to work in her signature. People can be gladly unattractive up until well into their forties.  It’s in their fifties when you can speak more wealthily of them. In the back of life there had to be something to go you one better.  L and M claimed to get along in just about everything. N rejected most of their findings.  The effect on his work remains incalculable. He might be putting everything off until a dirty afternoon even later in the month. O’s long, wet hair sauced again and again against the cushions of the sofa: she is never from around here, her money is never any good. P would one day want to flourish for the moment at a well-intentioned remove, the next day grow extravagant in the methods she was working out to narrow the space between us even further.  This new mood of hers, though, hadn’t yet managed to get much of a hold over most of her features. She at least introduced me to her brother. Think about it, though. Think this through: This “brother”—we weren’t exactly about to be friends—had an almost velveteen curiosity about the trouble that came out of men when any two of them were left alone with each other for too long a fraying weekend.  In no time the chocolate in front of us looked muddier than it needed to be. This man’s wife (he still had her) had to come over with her knack for home life and drag him back.  I have never liked the way everyone gets everyone else pinned.  Q was the next person I was left with, and she was still by nature a half cousin or a stepcousin, but I saw her as just another tall girl in a simple tunic backing out of life.  Everything followed from her, evidently. R must have always had a brute sense of what might yet obtain.  She touched everything only through cloth or through paper—napkins, I mean: paper napkins and tissues. Gloves would never have occurred to a person like her. The world wasn’t hard up enough for sore spots she could still take to heart. There was hardly ever anything else to come right out with about her.  She’d never finished college.  She’d gone to one of those simple ones linked prepositionally to a flagship campus (the University of X at Y, or suchlike), with trailers now holding overflow from the dorms. She always spoke right out into the open. She later trailed away from me in average time after finding the parts of her body that must have been set out earlier for parts on somebody else. She had already brightened her hair a little and afterward gone a little acrobatically after an unblinking man willing to take her side but mostly appearing only at mealtimes with scrappy-looking meat in a frying pan.  Last I heard, she was living with people all wearing windbreakers. I’d need some help to remember any of her attributes and aromas.  S, I found out, was basically three different people:  (i) S went from one woman to another and felt entitled to their privacy. All they could get out of S was “I’m not about to coax you.” (ii)  S’s belongings were easy enough to extract from the way the two of them saw fit to live.  She taught me to see things anew through the body on her.  She found that it always helps to have something for your heart to keep bustling itself away from. (iii) S must have had the kind of mother in mind who would make sure everything she wore looked way too big on her.  T was just a man I once met in a supply closet on the ground  floor at work.  He was fishing for his keys.  I’d always been told that most go directly after things or after other people, but with me there had already been too much in the way, and I started to settle for whatever was in the middle, between me and what I wanted.  His wife was one of the ones usually begging to be looked in on.  She owned more than was necessary to be as she was in a house already reeked up enough by one person trying to get it described to another. Her galoot appliances complied with her every wish.  I went over there once or twice and made myself out to be a person.  Pretty soon, her face would be open all the way. I could reach into it and pull out as much as I’d ever want. People are said to belong to you even more shrewdly later on in life. U is sorrily enough just you yourself: you already know what needs to be overdone and without whom wherever else.  V had a wriggling smile, that mother of his, and took the town and its streets too personally. All my life, I suppose, I’d needed somebody to see by—somebody to show me how some things stood and how other things were possibly quite loose if you were suddenly of a mind to reach. A nice touch was that she kept waiting for me to compose myself in her clothes.  She had a schedule, a timetable, an agendum.  We’d had civilization handed to us on a platter. (I know, I know—I wasn’t good enough for him, I didn’t walk right, I didn’t do the right things with my face the few times he looked over at me.) Besides, at this late a date, who’s to decide who’s to be given the run of the garages? W finds it possible to live that way and still wear a suit.  Nothing can be added to the fact of his having had to take the very acceleration out of everything between us. X was scarcely twenty and expected me to help with the laundry: we did daylong, confidential loads together. With one hand, she worked the dials to get the washer thumping just right. She interlocked the fingers of the other hand with mine and made it clear that I was to be the one to understand her better than anyone else did. She wanted to show me things about her room that her sisters would have never even dreamed of.  She’d say, “I wouldn’t want to make any of it visible in front of them.”  She was barely berated by all the light she had on in there. She expected me to see tumult still in her bed even long after it was made.  She kept serving me more and more drinking water that she kept tinting even more and more drinkily. She later married the renovator everybody around there hired to disappoint house after house into rooms a whole lot differently, put all new flooring down, scruple things out so the owners would come to feel they had never lived anywhere else but in that wrought-up neck of the woods. (I myself could have waited a few more months to see what might have long since gone up on the walls.)  Of Y it was assumed that she had gone all through life aggressively, inventively, unloved. It was rumored that her affection must have had all sorts of dirt in it. (Lust came no easier to me, either.)   Her every move seemed to have within it a criticism of the one that came before.  Her sleep was kicky and ambitious, though she never cut me in on her dreams or cropped up in mine. The way it was explained to me later was that she took the affection person A had for person B and then gave it to herself. All well and good, plus one of her sisters—there were two—later sent me e-mail after e-mail about where she, the sister, now was in life. The places were either “peppered” with lots of this or “dotted” with lots of that.  This sister was back in school and majoring in one of the terminal sciences, a science nobody had much use for anymore.  I wrote back and took her part.   Z still takes her time taking up the world.

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Garielle Lutz’s books include Worsted (Short Flight, Long Drive Books) and The Complete Gary Lutz (Tyrant Books).