The Cataracts Read online

  Also by Raymond McDaniel

  Murder (a violet)

  Saltwater Empire

  Special Powers and Abilities

  Copyright © 2018 by Raymond McDaniel

  Cover design by Sarah Evenson

  Lava field texture © Kevin H. Knuth/Shutterstock.com

  Blue macaw feathers © Tramont_ana/Shutterstock.com

  Book design by Rachel Holscher

  Author photograph © Sonalee Joshi

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: McDaniel, Raymond, 1969– author.

  Title: The cataracts / Raymond McDaniel.

  Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017030788 | ISBN 9781566894937 | ISBN 9781566895071 (eBook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C3868 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030788

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Projection Box

  Decimation

  Overdue

  Agfa Lupe 8x

  Wait Until Dark

  Landlords

  Blind Man’s Bluff

  Haven

  The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts

  Psychotic Mood Swing

  Viridescent

  Destiny and Mystique

  Vertumnal

  Space

  I will show you where it is because of where it must be

  Castle-Valve

  Makers

  Cataracts

  Unfurl

  Fortifications of the Land of Grasses and Flowers

  Replica of Vintage Sleeper Car

  Look Up

  The Commons

  Fontanel

  Pilgrims

  Mine

  Tertullian

  There is but one truly serious philosophical problem

  Of Grasses and Flowers

  Descender

  Five Million Years to Earth

  Here Comes the Flood

  The Uncertain Value of Human Life

  Generation Mechanism

  The Stoning of the Devil

  Undercity

  Madness to Believe

  This Is Going to Hurt

  Where Else

  Tableau Vivant

  Spirit Measure

  Zato-no-Ichi

  “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”

  Structural Color

  Hothouse

  The Concealed

  & Juliet

  Sidewinder

  Kwaidan

  Claire Lenoir

  Mosaic Style

  Castrovalva

  The Social Realism of Negative Space

  False Topographical Map of the Land of Grasses and Flowers

  Mise en abyme

  Tricky

  Siege

  Let me tell you why the moon

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Funder Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Projection Box

  A mattress unrolled on the floor.

  At the head, a window.

  At the feet, a mirror.

  When moonlight fills the window,

  moonlight fills the mirror,

  and the mirror fills the box with light.

  Without color, only with shade,

  what happens outside the box

  doubles the box, suffuses the box.

  Light is not light.

  Light is only one way things radiate,

  so light is an object falling apart.

  The light of the moon

  is the light of the sun,

  which is the sun collapsing.

  So the moonlight was not of the moon,

  nor was the mirror of the moon,

  nor the light it reflected again.

  Yet in the mirror, the window.

  Through the window, the moon.

  Between and because: light.

  Do you know where you are,

  if you know that wherever you are,

  you are lost?

  Decimation

  But it was really a lot of time in either a library or

  an ocean—

  sometimes I would walk out of the library and into

  the ocean—they were that close.

  What they had in common: more books than people,

  more waves than people,

  neither empty but populated thickly by things that weren’t people.

  And both free to the public.

  In a library I learned the origin of the verb decimate:

  to remove one-tenth of any given number,

  usually soldiers set to be punished

  for a group offense to preserve the republic.

  A tenth of the ocean is nothing to the ocean,

  though it is also the size of an ocean.

  A tenth taken away doesn’t seem so many,

  though it must to the taken and those from whom

  they are taken. Those who remain are also punished:

  to remember whatever sin consigned the others

  to oblivion, and the obliterated. A tenth, its remnant.

  People were so rare in the library

  and—if you walked far enough down

  the shore—so rare on the beach, so few

  relative to the ocean, infinitely divisible.

  All the world felt like a remnant of a previous world.

  Knowing that I was the youngest meant knowing

  I would become the remnant of a previous world.

  Now there are too many, though that is a problem

  with no just solution it is also—

  like a wave flattened under the weight of a wave

  or a book that falls to dust when you open it—

  a sin that will punish itself.

  Overdue

  the house unsound confused inside and out the old man

  & the sea with cracks wide

  enough for snakes the king james

  bible screens instead of windows or

  the magic mirror of m. c.

  escher an oak slowly growing through the roof

  the almanac & a door seething with fire ants

  the red and the black matter

  you could hear shifting the naked ape

  when it rained

  water would pearl on the walls of the ship of fools

  it wasn’t our house it was just the house

  we lived in great expectations

  Agfa Lupe 8x

  I sat as close to the television as I could.

  I knew of what prismatic cascade it was made.

  Likewise I read by placing my face

  to the book, as if in prayer.

  The gift I was given looked like a shot glass

  and functioned like an eyeglass.

  First thought: eight by some unknown,

  a mystery resolved by the optics.

  Then eight times, the number

  of sightings allowed before vanishment.

  The loupe was made to vanish distance

  but I could do that, uncorr
ected.

  The company that manufactured it vanished,

  along with the purposes of these tools

  I have in a tin box, which is now vintage,

  obsolescent as what it contains.

  No, the box isn’t obsolescent, nor

  the functions for which the tools were made.

  Just this box, just these tools: antique.

  Everything has a number of times

  it can be used for the reason it was made.

  What was this little table monocle for?

  To make for you a vision of what I saw

  because I could not, without device, see.

  Near, the puppet says, and capers away

  to give a flat surface depth, and then Far.

  Wait Until Dark

  In the film adaptation of the play Wait Until Dark

  the role of the blind protagonist is played

  by the sighted Audrey Hepburn but it is that property

  of her character—that Susy is a blind woman—

  upon which the whole of the plot depends.

  Yet this is also why any reconstruction of the plot

  is meaningless. Many things occur, and each

  is precipitated or enabled by the fact that Susy

  cannot see, a condition with which the audience

  is primed to sympathize by seeing all those things

  that Susy cannot, though in fact the villains of the film

  deploy all the standard mechanisms of deceit

  more effectively than they capitalize on Susy’s

  sightlessness, so that the implication moves from

  the pity engendered to how easily one can lie

  to the blind to dread at the realization of how easily

  anyone can lie to or about anyone else. And to this

  Susy’s blindness is secondary or a metaphor,

  a use unpalatable to those actually blind themselves.

  But the film is called Wait Until Dark and the dark

  for which it is most famous is not the one in which

  Susy lives but the one she perpetuates upon her enemies.

  As she shatters the bulbs of every light in her home

  the film truly begins, and those who saw the movie

  in theatrical release enjoyed or flinched from the fact

  that the proprietors dimmed the house lights accordingly,

  until for a long moment the last antagonist and every

  member of the audience waited in the condition Susy

  has manufactured in the home she seeks to escape,

  which is the larger home she cannot exit, which is darkness.

  In the final moments of Wait Until Dark the ways and means

  of light become vitally important: the rasp of a match

  and the gasoline Susy flings not to enhance light but have it

  extinguished, and at last the forgotten neglected bulb

  in the refrigerator, whose door has been propped open

  for just this purpose. When you are in forever dark

  it can be difficult to remember or imagine how stupid

  the world is with light, how gratuitous and cavalier

  light is, and it is by this light that we the audience see

  Susy weep as she realizes how, for all her intelligence,

  she will die because she forgot about the refrigerator.

  The face of Audrey Hepburn is famous and some measure

  of the power of Wait Until Dark is the sick permission

  to stare at the face of Audrey Hepburn as she suffers

  one threat and indignity after another, to stare at her

  naked terror and rage and triumph, as if because

  she knew she could not see us she was free to express

  sentiments imperfect to a face celebrated for perfection.

  This effect is achieved not by blindness but by performance.

  This performance is achieved by having stared at the blind,

  having studied them, having looked long into faces

  that did not look back so as to look as if she was not

  looking back as we stared at her. Poor Susy, brave Susy.

  See in the residual light all that radiates from the blind,

  the unseeing face, blind only because it looks to us so.

  Landlords

  I choose instead Land-Lords, to make strange the relation between the former and the latter, to make apparent again the yoke under which you labor.

  In his malevolent disinterest, the first Land-Lord was everywhere and nowhere we ever needed him to be, neither in the repair of the air compressor nor of the unsealable door, in the removal of neither vermin nor lice. We curse him with sudden terror, wasting diseases, and fever to destroy his eyes and drain his strength.

  The second Land-Lord was made of equal parts benevolence and caprice, and understood not the consequence of either. We curse him to plant seed on his retirement farmland in vain; we enjoin his enemies to eat it, so that he shall enjoy no fulfillment and his children wither and weep in the dust.

  The third Land-Lord was a great court of priests and courtiers, whose ruler was fantastic and vague and moved like the mist, neither could it be grasped or wrestled. It placed Agatha Christie novels in the laundry room and maintained the pool area only diffidently, for it did not care who we were, only that we were one of many. We curse it to be defeated by its enemies, to be overcome by the clannish solidarity of Russian immigrants, who did care who we were and who cared for us and for whom we cared; these immigrants you hate we assign to rule over you, and curse you to flee from them, even when they pursue you not.

  The fourth Land-Lord was kind, but was in thrall to yet another Land-Lord, and in the name of the fourth Land-Lord we curse this ruler in a distant land seven times over, to break his stubborn pride.

  The fifth Land-Lord was a jackal in human form, who held those in his dominion as less than jackals, deserving less than the weakest and most lame of jackals. For his indoor-outdoor carpet and his E. L. Mustee Durastall we make the sky above him like iron and the ground beneath him like bronze and curse his strength to be spent in vain.

  The sixth Land-Lord was as the fifth, but even more vile and unholy, with his cinderblock walls and his dwelling lodged halfway into the dust of the earth, and so we multiply his afflictions, as his sins deserve.

  The seventh Land-Lord was a man of God, merciful and humble, and we bless him and his earthly works.

  The eighth Land-Lord spoke as a man of God but grew bitter malice in his heart like a weed, and piled increase upon increase, for his lust was for rent and not to be like the Lord. We send wild animals against him, who shall rob him of his children and destroy his cattle, or whatever.

  The ninth Land-Lord was of a people who knew not God, and whose ways were monstrous, for they would bathe their children in the heat of the summer and leave the filthy water standing for a month while they pilgrimaged to Wisconsin to worship their strange gods. In this and in many other ways they broke their covenant with us, so we send a plague among them, and consign them to the hands of those who would spill their blood and see them destroyed from the earth.

  The tenth Land-Lord was a spirit who rejected the Lord, and was filled with poison and malice, and who squatted like a low beast beneath the decaying cell in which he imprisoned us, and sent up foul gasses to poison us, and when we fled weeping would feign to weep with us, but his tears were false and the color of blood. He is a thing detestable, and we curse him struck dead.

  Then all the people shall say Amen.

  Blind Man’s Bluff

  The legend among the sisters goes like this:

  That the younger one did not mean

  to walk the elder off the seawall

  but did.

  That it was an accident. But

  it would have been an odd sort of accident,

  since the younger child had her eyes wide open

  and the older child, my mother,

&nbs
p; had hers closed tight.

  Nothing my mother did could have been an accident,

  because she only did what she was told to do,

  and nothing her sister did could have been an accident,