The New Waking Orders

Dave Carillo

I know this needling under my tongue.   Toothbrush bristle.  I know wrangling it out from under there.  First with tongue and teeth, and finally my finger.  I know, pinching the wire between thumb and index finger: this is a bristle from my toothbrush.  But I hold it to the light anyway.

In the light from the stairwell window, I gather myself post pinprick and study.  I note its weight: nonexistent; note the sheen on semi-opaque plastic, the sharpness: deceptive, a point too small for me to see, but vital, sinking itself into soft skin, to gnaw on the bone. 

And this was a new thing: the bristles falling from my toothbrush, one at a time, every few days.   Falling from my toothbrush, through foam and into darkness.  Those moments when I would find one before it pierced the skin, I can remember a feeling as if something hatched inside.  The presence of an odd instinct of survival, a creaturely thing.  Burrowing and snug in a corner, under tongue, against molar.  Hiding well enough, that I assume my missing it meant certain senses were growing dull, or changing. 

This was a new thing, I thought: this strange decay. A breakdown of the nerve ends, a daily routine.  A new flaw of mine; pressure where there shouldn’t be, an anxiousness working itself out.  Bristles wound round bristles, raked violent cross molars, raked cross tongue.  Torn loose at the root or snapped through  stem.  Though, never more than one at a time. 

And the dime-sized spot on the back of my left hand: the color of a camel, and amoebic curves.  Mystery splotch:  I do not know when it appeared or how it formed.  Ageless then.  When I look at it, I sometimes see the heart of a bruise, the remnant of a wound.  But then, there’s little to suggest a bruise: no pain redshifted sharp to dull over time.  No light like a bruise: all the red and dark purples, that sunset work beneath the skin: removing dead tissue, building new walls, laying fresh vessels.  All this coming as the sense of process, the wound and lingering pain, the memory of it in the skin, and then the slow fade back into body.  It may not be a bruise. 

But if it’s not a bruise, should I look for a different pain? Should I note differently each twitch, or tingling.  Truth is my spot seems to occupy some mid-space between the surface of the skin, and those depths where nerves cry out.  It seems distant, unreachable; not a part of my skin the way the rest of the variations, the moles and freckles and aging sunspots, are a part of my skin.  I feel I must watch this closely.  There is nothing to watch, in a sense.  It has not grown in size, or shrunk.  It does not change shape, sprout offspring.  And I watch. 

On the day we moved into the house from out of state, we found that the town had torn our street apart to make way for new granite curbs, some new sidewalk slabs, and then some new blacktop.  This was because we lived near town hall.  We arrived to find the street clawed and hacked by excavators, backhoes, bulldozed and bore into with jackhammers.  Blacktop heaps were scattered about front yards and sidewalks.

The machinery was still when we arrived; it was after quitting time, close to dusk.  The underbelly of the street was parched from days and days lying exposed to the sun.  Our tires raised dust; beneath us dirt and gravel sizzled as we hauled our things up the street.  
The sidewalk in front of our house was missing entirely.  And other things were dislodged from their places.  Sewer grates and manhole covers and subterranean metal formations were exposed, dividers and compartments and other structural elements. Some of these artifacts I’d never know were beneath the street.  Some you knew had been in the dark for a long time.
Take for instance the slab of rust browned metal we woke to one morning on our front lawn.  It looked like a vital part of the infrastructure that no one ever knows exists, being that its rightful place is below-ground. 

What did it look like?  The letter U.  Sitting upright about four feet wide and about five feet high.  Made of iron, I think, and joined through the middle by one or two rods welded to the interior.  The bulk of the thing, its thickness and welds, seemed to speak to the great weight it had been born to carry:  some great length of water-main or section of steam tunnel spine.  Sometimes I would lean against it and watch the excavators rip up hunks of blacktop, turning the street to rubble.  Sometimes the slabs of blacktop overturned would remind me of the way that, as a kid, I would overturn rocks, and flagstone, and whatever else around the house so I could play with ant colonies, millipedes, and those roly-poly bugs.    

Dug up and in plain view, this was a tired creature.  Sitting on our lawn it looked lost, a scorned beast in the corner of a fairytale.  And yet, there was a lightness that surrounded it, the way an outcropping of rock in grassy field, say, appears to hold sway over space, so that it looks simultaneously like a native of and an alien in its geography.  I took photos of it with my cell phone, the cell phone I had when we first looked at the house, when the house was inspected, closed on, and so forth.  On that phone was a very early record of where I live, including the oddities of the inspection: the knob and tube wiring in the back of the basement, the old, dusty, particulate insulation at the edges of the attic, which we were told to be wary of, and to not disturb, else risk breathing it in.  And then the U in the corner of the lawn looking lost.  I no longer have that phone, the photos.

Little by little, after a while, the U sank.  I could see the edges of the crater rising up as the U pressed into the ground.  All around the edges a corona of grass blades, the lucky few to have made it out, having swayed and bent in the right direction, lit up against the rust.
Then it was August, and the U was gone, without fanfare, without our seeing.  In its place was a right angled, straight-edged dead spot.  Beyond dead, really.  The grass was pressed and tangled into the earth, tangled in a panicked mess, deeply yellowed, as if taken by some fungus feeding on fear of the dark.  The yellow was particularly strange, it glistened some, coated by some slime or wormy skin, as if the whole mess died and then came back and went on living somehow, beneath the metal, differently.

We had an abnormal winter this year: a record winter for snowfall and other messy weather.  Record breaking, at any rate, for some parts of the state, crippling for others. For a month or so blizzard stacked atop blizzard in a weekly procession that left no time for ground or sky to reclaim any of the snow.  Snow piled up until it reshaped much of the township’s landscape.  In the parking lots especially, where ploughs and bulldozers pushed snowfall after snowfall to one side or the other, small mountains rose up, solidified themselves with wind and sleet, and showed themselves against the sky.

I get little sleep.  Sometime past midnight, I’d go out to the front porch and watch the next blizzard arrive. The frenzy of snow and wind visible only in the cones of streetlight: a wild multiplying petri-dish under microscope; hive-mind when the wind picks a compass point, a thousand bodies dart north, then east, a thousand more disappear into the darkness and numbers.  In the distance, the wrenching of the snowploughs raking blacktop and dragging chains.  The salt will eat away at our slate walk and pile up in other places.  We buy our salt in bulk; it’s blue this year. 

Then there are nights when a freezing rain falls: within reach of the streetlights and porchlamps.  The simmering droplets are elongated, ready to burst from the new found weight.  These storms are relentless for some reason.  They last for hours and hours.  They seem pursued by some special gravity, tormented, picked apart as they near the ground. 

The cold air wraps round them, perceives a whole and by morning, the neighborhood is covered in ice, wide seamless swaths of ice.  The front yards and backyards are covered entirely, the snow sealed up beneath.  The cars are contained in perfect shells.  Porch posts, sidewalks, railings: shells. 

I always want more time for this.  This ice glistens the way other ice does not.  It gives off light, while the rows of stalactite icicles, winter puddles, the black ice on the streets, just seems frozen. I want more time, but in the morning I have to break it all to pieces, so that our mail can be delivered, our cars can leave the driveway, and so forth. 

I have a tool for this: a black, heavy, triangular metal blade at the end of a shovel-length handle.  I don’t know if there’s a particular name for it.  It’s meant for hacking away at ice too thick to sheer off surfaces with the edge of a snow shovel.  This is especially necessary for the ice that builds up over time on sidewalks, blacktop, and the other stone and concrete.  Standing over spots where folks will walk, or where gates must swing, I hack and stab at the ice with the blade in piledriver earnestness.  In the spring, I will see clusters of cut marks in the concrete in places where I kept at it, not realizing I’d broken through. 

There have been few days for the sun to melt any snow since the blizzards began and the snow has been piled at knee level for some time. It had snowed again since I last made my way to the garage, and the path I cut, and the other scattered footprints on the long driveway have disappeared back into the first snows.  This was the morning after the first ice storm. 

Making my way to the garage to fetch snow shovel and ice tool, the morning shimmers, the new ice mirror-smooth. The sun lights without heat, blinds in places, elsewhere lies in relief amidst shadow.  With no path, no footprints, I labor.  After other snowstorms, it’s easy enough to shuffle cross the landscape.  The snow gives way.  My paths round the yard, the garage, the sidewalks, have all been rough cut valleys, lined with footprints, shovel marks.  I plow the snow, slough it to the sides, trample it down.  The ice changes this.  The ice stitches the fabric of the now.  I labor now.  Each step becomes a singular endeavor.    

No longer cutting trails, I pull each foot up out of the snow entirely; each step sinks an isolated shaft into the snow.  Nothing gives way, other than the ground directly under each step.  The ice holds the rest together.  Now, I think through the mechanics of walking and I grow slow.   And I grow slow because there comes with each step the split-second feeling of something like weightlessness.  This ice that covers everything is just thick enough, holds out just long enough, to suggest that it might hold my weight.  With each step I feel myself rise, just slightly, out over the drifts. 

This is a tiny thing, almost imperceptible, and it ends when my weight breaks the surface, and my foot sinks back into snow.  But I process the sensation keenly, foolishly handing myself over to it, and so I feel it each time, the illusion of rising above.  Snow shovel and scraper over my shoulder, breath filtered through the high neck of my thick winter coat, I wait on each particle of weightlessness, and I feel it.  My brain grows dumb; my steps clomp, clomp. 

A few hours after midnight, just after another freezing rain covers us, I am restless in the house, and head to the back porch.  The moon is full and unencumbered by the clouds, emptied and dissolving on the outskirts of the sky.  In summertime, a moon like this lays down a second dusk. Grass blades and plant stems visible, tree branches casting long shadow.  The same light now pours over me, over the ice, which reflects it, and something else.  The light seems stranded on the ground.  It collects just above the ice, rolling and simmering against some unseen ceiling. 

And I think the seamlessness of the ice, its coherence, gives the light nothing to hold onto, no snow drift or tree branch, no patch of mud, and without that, the light becomes trapped in some new space, illuminating a certainty it doesn’t understand.  It’s a weighty thing tonight, this light, a pale violet mass, filling the yard against its will.

That morning, again, I pull bootfoot straight up and straight down again. Each step brings with it weightlessness, then collapse.  I turn to look at my footprints, deep holes in the otherwise untouched landscape.  They do the work of fossils. 

Dave Carillo lives in West Hartford, CT with his wife and son and dog.