In Maps

Your mom is writing lists. You find one about home improvements and feel sad about it because it means something else. It’s a list of the loud parts out loud, the quiet improvements are in a code, though of what, you can’t say. You find other lists—among them, a list of cities, countries, places you’ve heard of, places you have not. You have a globe in the living room. The globe is black and glows in the dark, spinning on an axis. It looks like a crazy eyeball of veins and ideas. You can find most of your mom’s places on it. She may have made a few up.

Your mom has been making things up. It’s a coping strategy. This is before Google Maps. But you know where you are. You’re in junior high. There’s not a lot of information yet beyond that. There’s no algorithm yet. No clean XML. There are no predictive models or structured languages. The word login isn’t. You’re left to analogs and premonitions. In them, the future is turning inside out, the dark is bright, and what should have been bright has fled to the negative space of a thermal vision scope, like those scopes hunters use. In your premonitions, God is the hunter.

These two solar panel salesmen visit your mom to discuss her future savings on improvements. This was one of the things on the list. They break it down. They tell her about covering her costs upfront and then letting everything fall into place. Your mom does the math with the brochure and concludes she can afford one panel on the roof. The salesmen glance at each other. Yeah, that’s entirely doable. One panel’s good. It’s fine. That panel will bring you a lot of savings, they say. The panel will keep the lights on. One of the solar guys has a pink pig’s face; the other keeps looking at your mom’s chest.

The other thing is you’ve been trying prayer. When you close your eyes, the dark space of the praying appears alive and inside out, with blood vessels and moving creatures swimming around a sparkling bruise. This is your God on brains. You are careful what you pray for. You run through a list of thanks before you begin your list of asks. Your methodology begins to feel rote, canned. You question your own sincerity like another person might. Is questioning sincerity a form of sincerity? Is this redemptive? The questioning sends you into a feedback loop until the word Sincerity loses meaning and becomes just a sound.

You find another list of your mom’s. It’s a list of men’s names. Just common, random names—Bill, John, Derek, Tom, Jim. It’s an older list; the pencil marks are faded and smudged, and you realize these might be your names from before you were born. Names from when you were but also weren’t yet, when you existed like code inside a mystery.

Boys your age with names are disappearing in the news. A building contractor a couple of towns over is drugging, raping, and murdering dozens of them. He’s sealing them in his walls, but no one knows this yet. You’ll read about it later when God gives the guy a name, when details clarify in the news. But for now, you have this strong, unexplainable premonition that this is the year even people who don’t get creeped out by clowns will, soon enough.

You’ve been staying up till 5 am drinking coffee and reading Poe’s Collected Works. Going to school at 8 am. Day falls dreaming through softened edges and you like this, that it’s harder and harder to pin down what’s real. When you hear birds sing, you concentrate on the silence between the bird calls. The silence becomes the loudest part. The birds vanish, swallowed into your pounding chest.

Last fall, on the first day of practice, your gymnastics coach told everyone that by the end of the season, you’d all put two inches on your chest and four inches on your shoulders. Minimum, he said, and then he said Minimum again like he really meant it. Years later, you’ll look back on this as a rare thing an adult said that actually meant it, that happened as they said it would.

Now, it’s a hot Chicago summer. The solar panel guys keep coming back, even though they made their sale. The installation of the single solar panel is forthcoming. You’re shirtless, working on an old Jeep that burns a quart of oil a day. The pig-faced solar panel guy keeps coming into the garage, striking up conversations. His partner is inside the house, sneaking glances at your mom’s chest. The solar salesman keeps reaching out to touch your chest and talking about muscle cars.

One night, reading Poe late into the morning when it’s still dark out—the last story you read before you fall asleep explains the Trinity. Some magical operation is performed in your brain and the Trinity blasts up from the page, this impossible logic given a perfect and simple clarity. You wake on the love seat. Your alarm is beeping upstairs in your bedroom, smothered under the bright morning sun. Your book is on the floor, closed. You can’t find the page; you don’t remember the name of the story. You look and look and look.

Anyway, the solar guys keep coming by. While you’re working on your Jeep, the pig-faced one tells you about this muscle car he’s got. This GTO from ’69. You act like you know what he means when he says, Ram Air IV-powered. It’s at his cottage up on a lake in Wisconsin, he says. That’s where he keeps it. That’s where he thinks you should come check it out for a weekend. You just need to get permission from your mom.

That night, you finish Poe’s stories. You’ve searched some more for the elusive Trinity story, the clue, the map. The math of a dream hanging in the air. But no luck. Your goals change up. You decide to go to bed early. The last thought before sleeping, you meditate on waking with ease to the morning alarm. You say it over and over, like counting sheep. When the alarm goes off, I will wake feeling refreshed. When the alarm goes off in the morning, you wake up easily. It seems to have worked. You do this for a few nights, and it works every morning. So you try something else, you make the last thought about waking seconds before the morning alarm. And this, too, becomes true. Each morning, you wake in silence. A couple of seconds later, the alarm goes off. A few days pass like this, and you decide to try something harder: Just before falling asleep you meditate about waking in a different house and in a different life. But in the morning, you wake up in your bed, in your house, in the life you had yesterday. You try again for a few nights but it was a stupid idea.

So you go to sleep with no thoughts, no plans, no meditated outcomes. Sometime later that night, you wake outside, a few blocks away from your bedroom, crossing Cicero Avenue, barefoot in your underwear, a cornfield chirping under the moon. It takes a while to understand where you are, even who you are, and when you do, you hear God laughing in the cornfield.

Years later, you look up your old house on Google Maps. How wrong your premonitions were. How naive, poorly tracked, poorly informed. A couple were close enough. Like the widespread fear of clowns. From the sky of Google Maps, the zoomed roofs look the same. In the overhead perception, you’re a strange, silent bird floating in the future over the topology of your neighborhood, the blocky fake variety of about three repeating architectures. In Google Maps, you hover and roam and meditate on the idea of place. You get to your roof’s address. See that little square patch of solar panel. Your family moved out a long time ago. The solar panel is gone, too. There’s just this sunbaked square margin in the tar roofing around where it once was. An imprint of negative space where someone removed it, leaving memory in a square, black silence. In Google Maps, the backyard has an unfamiliar trampoline and a grill that takes propane tanks, a couple of strange, big toys. In Google Maps, you’re throwing a ball to your black lab in the yard. In Google Maps, you’re eating a plate of dread and silence at dinner. In Maps, you stand with your mom under the vent, waiting in the living room, and feel air trickle onto your faces, your hands outreached. You’re waiting for the energy of the sun to prove you haven’t been lied to by two salesmen. Lamps breathe dimly, a little brighter, dimmer again. In Maps, your dog is circling, navigating your weird energy, decoding your weird wordless chi. Your mom is writing lists of plans, exit routes, lines of flight, mental illnesses, lists of lasts, lists of made-up things. In Maps, your mom is telling God all her plans. Finish your dread if you want any silence, your mom says.

In Maps, your name is David. The word, Login, has finally been invented. Your life now is a list, a tissue, of logins. None of your logins are named David. In Maps, your dad is there your dad is not there your dad is not. In Maps, your dog buries things in other people’s yards, and the name John Wayne Gacy is invented. The list of his victims’ names appears in the news. In Maps, you stand under a vent with your mom, waiting for the air to pass the savings on to your cold fingers. In Maps, you and your mom wait for the breakdown. The grass is brown in Maps; it’s hunting season, and you can hear the guns going off. In Maps, you fall from the green sky with your hands raised and say, I think I can feel it warming up. In Maps, you’re a gymnast swinging giants on the high bar, and there’s a black square on the roof, a pixelated bruise where you once believed things would only get worse. In Maps, there’s your dog, alive, burying things in other people’s yards. In Maps, you’re falling from the sky. The ground is a globe spinning on an axis of flattened veins and linear possibilities. You’re the little golden man, dropping pins on routes a weird car with a camera stuck on its roof has stolen from reality. In Maps, your structured language, your XML, is clean. You’re happily married and have an incredible daughter who just got into Choate. Your mom’s okay. Your itinerary is packed. God died years ago; you shot him in the woods, a hunting accident. In Maps, your dog’s name and breed have changed several times; he’s 14 in dog years and keeps mostly in the backyard, cascading through your other dogs’ memories, each swimming through bruised time. He’s digging up quiet objects, ciphers, creatures of coded anthropology. In Maps, your dog is alive, and his life, like yours, is way better than you thought it’d ever be.

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David Ryan lives in Conneticut. His new book, Alligator, is forthcoming from Cash 4 Gold.