MINKOWSKIAN SPACETIME: THE GEOMETRY OF META
-for Bjork
On Black Friday Meta and I bought matching pink barrettes and goldfish because it was the stupidest thing we could do with two bucks. I had long hair then and when we walked out of K-mart we looked like two freaks from Timbuktu or Miami. They just stared. She curled her finger at me and morphed into Marilyn Monroe, but less attractive. It was the fattest thing I remember about 1984, besides Ryan White. Watch this, she said. And gave them the finger.
-for Bjork
On Black Friday Meta and I bought matching pink barrettes and goldfish because it was the stupidest thing we could do with two bucks. I had long hair then and when we walked out of K-mart we looked like two freaks from Timbuktu or Miami. They just stared. She curled her finger at me and morphed into Marilyn Monroe, but less attractive. It was the fattest thing I remember about 1984, besides Ryan White. Watch this, she said. And gave them the finger.
*
The next act is bizarre. Patience isn’t a virtue and I won’t make it painless. Z is the boy looking for answers. The boy is the boy looking for z. Both are mirror images of each other and are obsessed with mathematics, specifically infinite geometry. For example, if Z were to take the place of the real-number system, in any significant case, then the Boy would have to be very large so that ‘z+z+...+z=0’ would not show a serious discrepancy in observed behavior. These two boys are bound by Meta, the mother to both but related to only one. I hold the barrettes.
*
When inappropriate Meta would sound like a trucker to give her more credibility in public. At McDonald’s she once peed on the floor because they only allowed customers to take a leak. She is not afraid of consequences or humiliation. She would have been Nan Golden or one of the subjects of Nan’s art.
*
The crowd by now must be restless, but keep in mind you are invisible to both z and the boy, who are not concerned if you are unimpressed and bored with what you’ve heard so far. [Thrust your head around.] Giant show poodles guard the foyer and they are invisible to no one, not even ghosts. The usher guarding orchestra right is radiating an electromagnetic field, sort of, under her black & gray streaked wig and black lace lingerie. She is utterly enthralled by the performance because this is her first gig as a volunteer. It beats sitting on the porch of her one story gentrified cottage. It’s all around you, she repeats to the customers as if they’re not aware they are inside-out.
*
When I contacted the National Archives in Copenhagen, or Rigsarkivet, they resisted my call for information and such. They said, in Danish, Meta didn’t exist. But she did, I said, I swear. I thought part of me would speak Danish and reveal secrets to the other part of me in sonar. I still have her wigs and stolen pink barrettes.
*
Z: Boy, were you the archivist? The boy with two faces and elbow grease?
Boy: No. I’m not a fan of Grease, but I’ve always been in love with Olivia Newton John. I don’t collect nor have the desire to claw through potash anymore.
Z: Then why waste your breath?
Boy: For habeas corpus perhaps or respect for cumulous nimbuses, Cyclops and my missing shoelaces.
Z: Are you obsessive compulsive?
Boy: About the past. About the boy called z who was left to roll boulders up stairs.
Z: Why waste your breath?
Boy: Because I can. Because I left.
Z: Meet me on the moon.
Boy: In your dreams.
Z: I love you seismograph.
Boy: No. I’m not a fan of Grease, but I’ve always been in love with Olivia Newton John. I don’t collect nor have the desire to claw through potash anymore.
Z: Then why waste your breath?
Boy: For habeas corpus perhaps or respect for cumulous nimbuses, Cyclops and my missing shoelaces.
Z: Are you obsessive compulsive?
Boy: About the past. About the boy called z who was left to roll boulders up stairs.
Z: Why waste your breath?
Boy: Because I can. Because I left.
Z: Meet me on the moon.
Boy: In your dreams.
Z: I love you seismograph.
*
I know. I am going back and forth for no reason at all. The fact that I went back and forth to Denmark without a shred of evidence of Meta’s existence, or the Boy’s, or the boy z, or their father’s doesn’t mean I’m sitting on my porch thumbless. I went over and over it again with the staff but to no avail. They treated me like I was an ugly duckling dress. The Rigsarkivet, they said, is not for wimps.
*
Once, in Vegas, Meta saw Cher and I saw the Rhinestone Cowboy. Neither of us knew what each of us felt at that moment. Star struck or shot down perhaps because we were not the center of the universe anymore, two brown fish in the Pacific. We refueled on Root Beer floats and had to pee so bad we left the strip for the all you can eat buffet at Harrah’s restroom. The chance meeting of legends in Vegas meant, we decided, we were holy again and bigger than the biggest universe, or Birds of Paradise at least. My boy, she said, the things you’ll fight against are earthquakes compared to this.
*
She was clairvoyant too.
*
I have an inalienable right to lie? I am not a liar nor afraid of spacemen. I’m not afraid of using words that provoke the wrath of the almost mighty gods and goddesses. I’m not afraid of magic or grooming vans, or moving vans. It wasn’t 1986 anymore. Martin, in the end, informed me of Meta’s surrender to light. She abandoned her search for life, he said, on this planet.
*
It wasn’t a normal night because she didn’t win the jackpot. It wasn’t a normal phone call because she never called. Meta telegraphed the end zone, the final hour, the court jester, to me. (See: Mary Queen of Scots.) On Sundays we’d watch football at the Orange Bowl. She’d order me a hot dog and call me a wiener with mustard on her face. She called the shots from the 40-yard line. I had no idea which tight end did what but it didn’t matter. I screamed at him anyway.
*
You seem to have gone overboard with this, she said. [As if ghosts can speak to the dead or vice versa.] Your responses are near manic at best, she said, breakneck and full of dust. [I’m not even wearing a dress, I said.] I know, she said, but you should. [When I left Rigsarkivet I found the lost geometry of z.] Please, she said, confess your stones and spaceships to the wind. [I never went. I couldn’t afford the round trip plane tickets across the pond to Rigsarkivet.] They have grants for this kind of stuff, she said. The rest is ancient history.
*
As I said before there was an artifact of sorts, a tiny boy-craft perhaps, a small boat for fishing, a flick of the wrist, a war and a wicked witch. Pink barrettes. K-mart trips. Even Vlasic pickles. Well, there wasn’t a witch, but there were wolves and a concentration camp. She did women’s work—
*
in Froslev.
*
She said: I worked in a soup kitchen full of children and small men disguised as women. Others hung by their toes just because or just in case we wanted to run. It was 1944 and I just counted the sheep in my bed.
*
She never knew what hit her. She never knew I stopped going to the Orange Bowl and no longer shop at K-mart. She never knew I became the archivist. She never knew I’d grow up to be a gay boy or temporarily gothic and punk at the same time. I’m somewhat ridiculous without her. She never knew I wanted to know more about her magic shoes and the stuff that made them move. She never knew the complex nature of Minkowskian spacetime, or what comforts inanimate objects in a vacuum.
*
She wrote: We were smashed together—sardine like and salted. For the hell of it I painted the sky with imaginary pigment. The daily bread just fit in my shoes. It took awhile to adjust to push up bras in the 50’s but when I got out I used them to summon arthropods on weekends. My Boy, swear off helicopters. Tiptoe on the ledge of disaster.
*
*
A week before Thanksgiving she wouldn’t lay off the algebraic equations:
q, she said, equals the sum of my ancestors.
p, she said, equals antipasto, which is like the ancestor you never wanted, but have, like uncles.
You better learn your ps and qs because, she said, you never know.
*
q, she said, equals the sum of my ancestors.
p, she said, equals antipasto, which is like the ancestor you never wanted, but have, like uncles.
You better learn your ps and qs because, she said, you never know.
*
Finally, almost the final act: The crowd is utterly complex and seated at the edge of their seats while the stagehand is on stage, stationary as ever before, and staged. For no reason the giant poodles begin to chant, or om, or make sounds that are somewhat chant-like and omish. They bark. The audience leans in (stupefied?) as if the one and only Judy Garland emerges from the gates of Oz, but it is not Judy Garland per se, or Liza, but the Judy that is and/or was once called Meta before she came to America who is now dressed in black lace lingerie and wearing a black & gray streaked wig. The crowd begins a round robin of whispers—the usher and I can’t believe it and woman and bondage.
All stop.
She says: Bones of goldfish, archive the past.
All stop.
She says: Bones of goldfish, archive the past.
*
This is what happened: She shuttled Jews across the arctic; she didn’t shuttle Jews across the arctic; there’s no archive of this in Rigsarkivet but there are ancestors; there are eggs & spermatozoa; she was a klutz; she peed a lot; enjoyed sex incognito and wore sexy lingerie; distributed glossy propaganda against the occupiers while she was occupied herself with the impossible pregnancy of z; she was a collaborator; was not a traitor; buried her first-born in secret; followed her husband to the ledge but stepped back; buried him too; traded bees for honey; honed her hunting skills; played helmsman/woman of fishing boats; scrubbed boat decks with remarkable precision; five finger discounted; threatened football players with pistols and whips; whipped ass; played mouse.
w
Her favorite dance was the hula.