Equanimous Robots

Or, two ways to stop being a body

I never seriously considered suicide. No. But I’ve always thought: wouldn’t it be better to just sleep for a while? And then come back, when things have cleared up a bit? In a couple of centuries, a couple of millennia... Surely things will have improved by then! Just put me in a frozen casket and wake me up later on. I don’t want this present life; let me exchange it for another one, waiting for me deep in the void. That’s what I thought then. What L. led me to think. What the brochure wanted me to pay for. And here I am now. Where exactly, you’d ask? No real way to tell. I’d wager in some sort of casket indeed. But who knows? A bunker-freezer in the North Pole? Cruising now in a time capsule aboard an interstellar craft at unspeed? Maybe I’ve already flown past the orbits of Uranus and Neptune? This would explain the cold... Well, not the cold, really, because at this point, I cannot feel any sort of temperature at all. Any sensation at all. And also, how long have I been here? That’s something I’m not completely sure about. When was the last time I was able to move my lips? When was the last time I was able to pronounce a single word? Because now… all this... I’m not sure where this comes from. I guess this is proof I’m still here, inside the insulating box. Proof this wasn’t a suicide after all. The rest of the limbs weren’t necessary; they had to impale my head onto a spit, that was enough. A full weight loss diet in less than an hour. And the meat is still talking. Maybe—maybe soon they’ll thaw me back up.

i don’t remember boarding. el azul, like a fridge magnet, like a brochure for somewhere they pay you to want. i’m on deck, the boards warm under what used to be my ankles. paper umbrellas in small glasses, fake ipanema, the sound a brochure makes when it learns to play. los demás pasajeros sonríen sin hablar, arranged like flowers in a vase. soy la flor del folleto, hair wet, gold dust on shoulders, scales starting somewhere below the hip. no miro abajo, the looking would un-make it, night sky crossed with a cold river of stars, distant planets, flashes from a faraway storm. under the bow, an inky pit unzipped, pale waves rolling toward the stern and the unfathomable night, foam at the bottom of my glass, under a paper umbrella, water warm as a womb, warm as blood. the shore is closer than expected, closer than the boat, closer than my own arm, someone is standing on it, holding a small piece of paper, writing

The irony doesn’t escape me. I’ve always had a passion for body parts: earlobes, toes, knees. Heavenly geometries. All are essentially tubes and spheres: two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes, seven in-orifices up in the head, and two (three) out-orifices at the base of the trunk. Liquids, gases, waves flow from one point to another. In between these points, a series of rings and tubes (elongated rings) and domes or spheres (elongated domes) oozing stuff in and out, pushing and pulsing stuff away or towards, out-in, in-out. And then, inside the skull (another spherical thing oozing stuff in and out), something happens. L. confirmed this to me—she said the head was enough. There’s a mirror, an illusion, a source of something that is neither ring nor tube, nor sphere, but a moving reflection, transparent, surface tension, a jellyfish, a distortion of the surrounding objects around the sack of tubes and spheres, a weird way of interacting with the outside. Does it make these interactions easier, more efficient, more attuned to the inner drives? It does make everything more compelling. Or disgusting, as the case may be. Everything stems from this little sack of tubes and spheres, even oneself, looking, bulging, writhing, studying, striving to get bigger, to have more, consume more, beyond the limits of its own tubes and spheres, placing one’s tube into someone else’s. Being a skewer...

inside me. inside me there is no mirror, the water makes me, the surface holds my shape from underneath, i am a jellyfish inside, eyes, ovaries, mouth, throat, parts that take in and parts that put out, invisible to me, i am the outside of them, the upper film, película en la superficie, underneath i’m just sea, turquoise depth. something washes against my hand, soft from the water, tinta derramada like tears bleeding across the back, then a name that keeps shifting like the face on the shore, a single letter, K. or L. or both, the wet has eaten the difference. i read the lines and the letter dissolves, the letter is a fish, la letra es ola, the letter is the mouth of the man whose breath i did not want on my neck at the till

I’ve always wanted to be the skewer... for all of them, like a shish kebab. But now... I’m the skewed skewer, screwed screwer, fucked-up fucker, pretty much shish-kebabed. I have to give it to Anselme: his apparatus was really well designed. The perpetuating, unsoiled impaler, the classifying operators, lean, efficient, quick, almost painless. Anselme knew what he was doing. I just had to lie there, la viande ne souffre pas. All my particles and tubes and spheres have been spent, consumed, sent above, dispatched. Me, the body-bound lover, became body-less. All my life bossed around by my cock; now that it’s gone, I just have to follow it. It is still leading the charge; off the beaten track.

i lay my hand on the handrail. the wood is warm and soft. when i lift it, the print stays, the way a hand on a table remembers another hand after the hand is gone. the print spreads, lengthens, becomes a long thin shape, then a stretched palm, then a continent. somebody is laying a hand on me, lejos, where i can’t see the wrist. i look up. the face of someone who can be many faces, still on the shore, still writing. the soft-turquoise ink runs the same way. he writes it, drops words in the water, the water brings them to my hand, illegible, the water takes them back, he writes it again. me están escribiendo. yo soy la que está siendo escrita

It was it that drove me to write to L. in the first place, it that led me to accept her bargain. But who is she? To this day, I don’t even know. I never met her in full. Only by bits, words in fragmented form. A nobody became no-body. Maybe she’s not even a person. Maybe she was a secret society of toe collectors. I’ve received so many toes over the years... I thought I was seeing them everywhere. On the train, at the window, in the street, at the door, in the mail. Now everything is just flying atoms.

and then the water decides it wants in, cold fingers reach toward my calves, my thighs, unzipping my dress, a hand under the dream, working up. my toes. the toes are what gets sent, the toes are what the fine print of the brochure asked for, the contract with no signature, the long ledger of parts. quiero ser acorazada. quiero el casco, el grueso, el frío alrededor de mí. no quiero una cola de pez. i want scales all over my body. mi deseo siempre fue caparazonada, a word with bone, a word with legs and a shell and a quiet sleeping centre. a word that seals me in. yo-máquina, yo-maria-en-el-cobertizo, yo-la-novia-que-se-construye-sola, and i feel the shell close, my many legs find the ground, the watching slides off the shell, the wish to be touched slides off the wish to be sealed. one day i will disappear completely, my atoms will fly away. but today, no necesito los turistas mirando lo que queda de mí. hoy hay cuatro horas más en la caja. today there is the morning train. today there is the dream to wake from

When I come back... Sometimes I get a pang of doubt that squeezes the heart I lost... When I come back, will things have improved by then? How so? In the last 14 billion years everything has just been spiralling downward toward this heat death situation. Wait another billion years and things may just have worsened to a point unimaginable, a world uninhabitable, end of (hi)story.

inside my carapace there is a hum. quiet, even. it is the hum of a fridge in a kitchen at night when no one’s awake, and the hum says: aquí estás a salvo. aquí no te tocan, aquí no te lloran. i surrender into the shell, not into the water, no en el agua, in the direction the wish wanted, all along, since the beginning, ningún lugar, i think. that’s where i’m going. that’s the place. ningún lugar

And think about your frozen casket, fool: do you really believe this as our ancestors believed in such eternal-life tickets? Most of them have turned into mortar. And those who managed to sail across the river of time have reached us in the form of crumpled, wrinkled cigar cases kept in humidity-controlled glass boxes at the bottom of museum basements.

the watcher writes one last line on the postcard, addressed to L.—the wet has dried that part. i am the L. i am the addressee that the letter has been trying to reach all along, since the beginning. aquí estoy, i answer back, not aloud, into the hum. the wind is in, the wind is iron. vete, says the wind. vete. the destination is not a place, the destination is away from the touching, and the carapace agrees, yo-escarabaja, and i agree, and the dream agrees, and i drift toward waking, brochure forgotten, yacht gone, the watcher’s name on the tip of a tongue that no longer needs to use it

So much for your eternal life. Now the crowd of tourists don’t mourn you. They gawk at your yellowed teeth.¹

1. Two voices kept side by side in the same drawer for years. He speaks from inside the box he helped build; she dreams of building one around herself. Neither has been answered. Neither has been bound. The narrow path they cross runs only the length of the file in my keeping. Both are addressed in this archive by an initial that is, depending on the wet, the same letter or a different one. I have my reasons to keep their names private. The next parcel (though I ought not to say so, being still only a follower) is already in the post. Some of it is not yet mine to give. Some of it never will be.—Λ.