Gary Lutz - Partial List of People to Bleach

I want there to be science behind it if and when I do.

FATHERLAND

The state I was born in had to be abbreviated as “Pa.”

HONOR MY WISH

I tried drinking, but it wasn’t extinctive of the parts of me most in need of extinction. Plus, I had a good umbrella, but it got blown inside out, and I couldn’t get the thing to close. I set it down on the sidewalk and watched it blow off into the storm.

I welcome any drowsy and senseless sincerity.

I COULD SEE WHERE SHE WAS STUCK

A man I knew had had car trouble for years. He got around by bus.

He had just the one daughter, and I knew what she needed to be told.

I could feel the words already forming into solids in my head: There’s no such thing as parents.

When the time came for her to go off to college, she picked one in the state that was shaped far too much like the human heart.

She arrived at the airport seven hours ahead of her flight.

The automatic doors that led from the long-term parking lot to the terminal wouldn’t even open for her. She tried all three sets of them. The sensors, she guessed, failed to detect sufficient bodily or characterical presence.

She should have brought luggage, school supplies, a change of underattire.

An untroubled-looking couple turned up.

The doors parted.

She rushed in behind.

SECOND WIFE

We had to move two towns to the left, which was west, westish, in this case.

GIRL

I was singing over petite chords fingered on an electric guitar that wasn’t plugged in.

It was a song of infatuation that I eventually passed along to the infatuatee. She said the chorus could use a little something more to fill it out.

My voice was as flat as it ever gets.

It sounded practically ventriloquized.

I’M AFRAID I AM NOTHING SO DEAR

The hours keep dragging things out of us or throwing us into reunion.

I want everything elegized the instant it happens.

MY LIFE TAKES PLACE MOSTLY ON THE FLOOR

“Get over here!” I shouted into the phone.

The woman came.

She thought I had meant just her.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED TO SAY, BUT SO WHAT?

I wish I could inhabit my life instead of just trespassing on it.

I LATER SUFFERED ATTRACTION TO SOMEONE A LITTLE LESS LIKE HER

There should be a way for this to go straight into my short-term memory.

There should be buttons to press, entire consoles of buttons.

This should be more like science fiction and less like hate, pure and simple.

It has always been my custom to go hungry for people, then make my way practically from door to door. But there was a time I had a wife and a new best friend.

I was just doing the weary thing of being in my forties.

My wife wanted to be known best for her parting shots, the breadth of her good-byes. I could count on her to be back within hours, though, tidily silent in her chair.

And the best friend? He was an uncrusading man, rebuttable in everything. He looked felled, or probably at least fallen.

I began dividing my nights between them.

This wife and I had a rented house, two storeys of brutal roomth. The air conditioner required a bucket underneath it. Our meals were the cheapest of meats thinly veiled.

My best friend had some uncovetable rooms above a garage. We took down hours with our talk.

Here’s her name — Helene — though she will probably tell you different.

For a while, I tried to get her steered toward women. We settled on a blowhard of sporty despondence, crude to the eye but newly starving for her own sex. I staked the two of them to a meal and threw in good wishes.

She came home ebbing in all essences, looking explored and decreased.

She wanted to know about my best friend. I told her that he and I fell onto each other more in sexual pedantry than out of affection, that our life together did not grow on us or chew away at our hearts. His body was just profuse foolery.

Thirty-eight years of picked-over, furying age she was — brittled hair, a bulwark forehead, a voice that sounded blown through. There were hidey-holes in whatever she said.

I felt indefinite inside of her, out of my element and unstately in my need.

One night he wanted to know what it had been like to go through with the nuptials, the hymeneals. Not much had held up in memory. I let out that the minister had spoken of a “middle ground” between women and men or husband and wife, I forget — someplace irrigated and many-acred, maybe a plain. I had felt unchampioned that day. The minister got me alone at the reception, snapped his fingers, said, “This better not’ve been just some skit.”

There are only two things, really, to ever say to anyone.

Try: “I’m very happy for you.”

Or: “This is just not done.”

I made no more than the arcanest of passes at others. They probably never even knew they had been addressed or beset. I worked for a sloganless bail-bond concern. The people closest to me in seating were a rough-playing woman and a man about my age, drowning in the hours. The woman drank liquored sodas that brought something flowerful into her voice: words were now petally with extra syllables. The man took a restroom break whenever he saw somebody else come out. Maybe he found something engreatening about being in there so soon after anything dirtily human had been done. I pictured him taking deep, treasuring breaths, filling up on us. Home was probably just an air mattress somewhere.

I lived in the lonelihold of my portents and pulls.

Weeks kept fleeting past us.

My wife restocked her mind daily with factual packing from TV and the papers.

I would want a day to quit. Thinking what, though? That the one rising behind it might have a more encouraging bone structure in its hours or at least be calibered better for my regrets?

Then one night she wanted to know how she might recognize my friend on the street.

I spoke of the ordering of creases above his eyes, the general tempo of both his blinks and his nostril-flarings, the pitch and range of his arms, the usual drift of the rib that slid about inside him.

But nothing eased for her or for me.

My parents were still alive, still short on marvelry, still saying, “We’re all he has.”

I had a sister, too, drying out again in the tedium of debt somewhere.

She was an acher, patient but baneful in her morbid

sweats.

I thus sing the praises of my kind, but more often I just look for signals in the faces of grocery cashiers who are required to say “hi”—women mostly, overevident in their agony; features miseried, it must be, by hitches in the upbringing of their men.

We tried pets, my wife and I. Bought a dog at cost, then a budget cat.

The dog was unawed by my guidance, my sweet talk.

The cat behaved — out of a love or regard, though, that was iotal, toiling.

If you bought for one, you had to buy for the other. (Mostly novelties to squeeze for a spectral, unmerry squeak.)

I wish I could remember whether they bailed on us or just died, overfed.

Another generation had shot up behind us anyway.

I had heard about these persons — that they were handling things differently.

This was the generation that was discovered to have been “just reading words” and then was taught how to get through a textbook by coloring the sentences so that a page, when the fingers had finished with it, looked beribboned, or zoned into chromatic blocks and runs. The books were handed in to the teacher, who graded mostly on pizzazz.

Nothing went untouted about these kids.