Permanent Exhibit Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Vollmer

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  181920217654321

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Lannan Foundation; the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 172 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Art: “Eclipso” by Eliash Strongowski

  Cover Design: Sandy Knight

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vollmer, Matthew, author.

  Title: Permanent exhibit / by Matthew Vollmer.

  Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2018. | Series: American reader series; No. 31

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018015164 (print) | LCCN 2018018813 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683698 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683681 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3622.O6435 (ebook) | LCC PS3622.O6435 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015164

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  for my friends

  for my family

  for those I do not yet know

  and for those I never will

  CONTENTS

  Status Update

  Hatchling

  Last Blood

  Robocall

  Can’t Feel My Face

  33rd Balloon

  Fool’s Gold

  Top Secret

  Holy Hours

  Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera

  Well of Souls

  Out of Lives

  Land of Enchantment

  Signs of the Times

  Stay Woke

  Trick-or-Treat

  Night Thoughts

  Hands Up

  Sinkhole

  Spoiler Alert

  Observatorium

  Precious Metals

  Permanent Exhibit

  Treasure Box

  Blood Soup

  Stormbox

  Gong Bang Cleanse

  Brain Bank

  Game Day

  Eye of the Storm

  Source Material

  Cult Hymn

  The Subordinate Fragment

  We All Go into the Dark

  Black Magic

  Tiger Moth

  Inferno

  Fat Kid

  Heron

  The New You

  Liftoff

  •

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  STATUS UPDATE

  2016 and homes are still being raided for marijuana. Tropical Smoothie Cafe opened in Blacksburg today. Another black man was shot by police. I can’t believe I’m running the dishwasher again. My bike can’t ride itself. I miss the ocean. My closest family members are in Wyoming, which is possibly the most beautiful state ever created. I saw a baby deer nursing from its mother today in the middle of the road. I ate a slice of pizza big enough to wrap around my face. Ernest Becker’s DENIAL OF DEATH is a good book. My best friends don’t live next door. But my neighbor brought me a piece of junk mail and laughed at the look on my face because I was sure she would be a proselytizer. I don’t understand all the New Yorker jokes. A chipmunk lives in my basketball goal. Earth is a planet I live on. Time to watch TV with wife.

  HATCHLING

  Today, I watched a video of a black man who had been shot by a white police officer with the volume down because I didn’t want my son to see the black man’s blood-soaked shirt. I didn’t want to see it, either, but I kept watching. I didn’t turn the volume up when my son left the room, and I didn’t listen to a press conference given by the mother of another black man who had been shot dead by a white policeman. I didn’t read any comments. I wondered if words could change any mind that wasn’t already disposed to changing, and remembered that Lao Tzu had once written, “Those who are stiff and rigid are the disciples of death. Those who are soft and yielding are the disciples of life.” I picked up my phone, checked Instagram. I added words to a manuscript and wondered why anyone in their right mind—or wrong—would ever read it. I went upstairs to get a power strip and came back downstairs with something else, went back upstairs and then down again empty-handed, and imagined a future where I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I remembered to put ointment on the bumps on my arms caused by a mild skin condition I am just vain enough to halfheartedly manage. I read something about a presidential candidate who, according to an “insider,” never wanted to be president, but wanted to finish at a solid second place, so as to increase his popularity. I thought about this guy who lives in my neighborhood, a retired financial analyst who challenged me to find anything about him at all on the Internet because it just isn’t there, and who claims that there’s an impending economic collapse because banks are playing with pretend money and soon the billionaires will be buying up land like crazy and jacking up the prices, which means that nonbillionaires need to band together and buy land so that when the meltdown comes they can manage local foods/agriculture. I looked out my kitchen window at my neighbor’s lush garden, for which she won’t accept compliments, due to the amount of weeds she’s neglected to pull, and acknowledged to myself how it’s been so long since I’ve grown anything, and how there are zucchinis from that neighbor’s garden in my fridge, and how they’ll probably go bad because honestly I can’t say that I’m that big a fan of squash no matter how roasted and/or cheese-coated. Then, when my wife finished a string of texts by sending me, inexplicably, a chicken emoji, I did the only thing I could do: I filled up the whole text box with a square halo of rooster heads orbiting a line of baby chicks with their wings out, sitting in the bottom halves of their broken, just-hatched eggs.

  LAST BLOOD

  Woke up this morning to an email from Australia; a friend of mine sent me a video of his two-year-old asking me if I had feelings. Turns out? I do. My son’s former soccer coach—a black man from Georgia, who some parents complained about because he insisted that their eleven-year-old boys run Manchester United drills—came out yesterday as gay, and I asked him if, to celebrate, he’d FedEx me an Oreo cookie pie, which is a dessert he made and delivered to our house last year when my wife was recuperating from major surgery, back when she’d been sent so many flower bouquets the sight of them made her sick. I forgot—and will likely forget again—to look up the name of the blue flower I keep seeing along the back roads of rural southwestern Virginia. I should know this flower, probably. It’s everywhere, along with purple clover buds and the ivory spray of Queen Anne’s Lace. Once, for an elementary school project, I gathered flowers and pressed them between paper towels inside volumes of World Book encyclopedias stacked on top of each other and then drew a grid and taped each dried, smashed, dead flower inside one of the squares, wrote the name of the flower beside it, laminated the whole thing, and submitted it for evaluation. Whatever grade I got I owe partly to the chemist William Farish, who, during the Industrial Revolution, developed our current system of grading—a method that allowed him to process more students and thereby increase his salary. How do you grade 200 drum-beating students? That’s a question a cellist I know will have to answer next spring, when he teaches a new experiential art class. On my way to meet him for coffee yesterday, I passed a man on the street who was talking to himself. Another guy who noticed him shot me a glance. I pretended I wasn’t concerned. A massage therapist I know has a patient who requests that the therapist not play Native American flute music, because it causes said patient to imagine that a peeping Tom is at the window. I wanted to think that this particular patient was stupid or paranoid, but I too am guilty of tricking myself into thinking things might happen that don’t, like strangers yanking pistols from the waistbands of their pants and shooting me in the head. I don’t own a gun, but when I was a kid, I found a stick shaped vaguely like a semiautomatic, and carried it around for weeks. I also held a Fisher-Price tape recorder to a television set so that I could record a movie review of Rambo: First Blood Part II—which featured a scene where a gunman fired round upon round of bullets into the river pool where Sylvester Stallone was hiding, submerged—because at that age there was little I loved more than the sound of a machine gun. Now I’m the kind of father who gleefully runs over pedestrians while playing Grand Theft Auto V and shames his son for being a failure at cleaning up spilled Legos; the snow shovel he used to scoop up 95% of them is still on the floor, along with the dinky spaceship he built. I think he could be a littl
e more ambitious. For instance, there’s a replica of Noah’s Ark, engineered to the Bible’s exact specifications, which just opened for business in Kentucky. I’d like to see it. I imagine standing in a line of granpaws and meemaws with concealed carry permits, telling their grandkids that without that long-ago Ark they wouldn’t be here. That we humans now can’t imagine how wicked the world used to be. I don’t know what to think about that; it’s hard to imagine one worse than we have. I do know that I’d like to continue living as I have, without getting shot in the head. But part of me can’t help thinking: it’s only a matter of time.

  ROBOCALL

  I want a medal because I woke up wanting to tell my wife I think she gets more beautiful every day but didn’t because commenting on her appearance makes her self-conscious. During the night, something bit me on the backside and now I have to rub cortisone on a quarter-sized welt on my left cheek. I had a dream that I was looking over a precipice into a room filled with water and I wanted to jump but was hesitant, which was good because it turned out the room wasn’t actually filled with water: a tub in a nearby room had overflowed and it was only a puddle, which disappointed me, so I got a bucket and by god I was gonna fill up that room with water, at least until my wife asked me to stop because the floors were stained bad enough as they were. Also, while I was asleep, five police officers were shot and killed by a sniper who died when police blew him up with a bomb-deploying robot. According to the Mirror, sex robots may be the biggest tech trend of 2016. I’d rather think about sex bots than death bots, though there’s something disturbing about the guy from that Men’s Health article I read who has a human-sized doll he screws, and whose vagina he likes to remove and then “walk around with.” The father of a kid on my son’s soccer team—a professor of robotics, a guy from Rome—shouts words of encouragement for his son in Italian and addresses the boy as “Pizzolino”; when one of us finally asked what it meant, he said, sheepishly, “little penis.” The landline rang today and like an insane person expecting a different result, I answered it, and once again, it was the automated guy who begins every call with the exclamation “Seniors!” which made me wonder: does he call because I have a landline or because I’m over forty—and does one of those explain why I get so much mail from AARP? The women I’ve befriended in the last five or so years whose company I enjoy the most—an editor, a retired schoolteacher, a retired professor of religion, and a retired Sunday School teacher—are all over the age of sixty-five, which makes me wonder: am I old or just looking for a mother figure? My father called from Yellowstone to tell me about two discoveries: one, whenever he made a squeak by blowing air through his tightly pressed lips, female mule deer came running, and two, he’d read an article about how the THC in marijuana could reverse memory loss, which made him inquire about whether or not I might have any connections. I suggested that he pay Colorado a visit. What I forgot to say, and what I would’ve said, if I’d thought he was serious: if you find anything good, save some for me.

  CAN’T FEEL MY FACE

  Florida’s toxic algae bloom smells, according to a boat salesman, like “hundreds of dead animals that have been baking in the sun for weeks.” Meanwhile, in our backyard, the hydrangea is blossoming. As is the tree—I’m not always good with names of things, especially in nature—where the previous owners hung a furry orb held together by what appears to be strips of wicker; at first, I thought it was some kind of witch ball—at least that’s the phrase that appeared in my head when I saw it. I’ve since been informed that the thing is supposed to be a supplier of material for bird nests. If that’s true, few birds seem to like it; it’s the same size it was four months ago. So, “witch ball” it shall remain. Speaking of witch balls, a friend of mine—a woman who, when I was a kid, convinced me that two bite marks on her arm were the result of an encounter with a vampire—sent me a string of Facebook chats about how she’s making a medicine bag—for protection against evil—and how she did a rain dance and then it rained and that, recently, a vulture talked to her. I like the idea that such a vile-looking bird might have something to say, or have some kind of wisdom to dispense. Earlier, on my bike, I surprised a venue of vultures (that’s what a group of them are called, I know this because I looked it up), as they were pecking at the bloody, fur-ratted rib cage of a dead deer: the explosion of black wings nearly caused me to swerve into a ditch. Later, as I walked behind a lawnmower, light-blotches appeared and disappeared in the shadow cast by a tree, depending on whether or not a cloud was passing in front of the sun, and I anticipated the satisfaction I knew I’d get from eyeballing a just-mowed lawn, and how this particular sensation might be explained in part because shorter, more uniform grass blades create a pleasing symmetry, but also because it allows me to bask in the illusion that I have restored order and—for now—staved off chaos, and thus death. I was happy, once I reentered the house, to hear Spotify playing “Can’t Feel My Face,” a song that leaked on my birthday in the year 2015 and is—at least in part—about the numbing effects of cocaine. The composer, Abęl Makkonen Tesfaye—otherwise known as “The Weeknd”—is the son of Ethiopian parents who immigrated to Toronto. A biologist I know—a man who grew up in a community of power plant workers in China and who has for a number of years been developing a vaccine to help smokers who want to quit—told me recently during a long car ride from a soccer tournament our sons had played in that he—the biologist—doesn’t approve of Tesfaye’s hair, which Rolling Stone described as having “its own distinct personality” and that the front portion is similar to a “flopped-over moose antler” and that the back resembles a baby octopus. Aside from the fact that Tesfaye sounds so much like Michael Jackson, his hair is my favorite thing about him, especially after I learned he doesn’t do anything to it except give it a good wash now and then. He doesn’t style it at all. The hair does what it does on its own. All Tesfaye has to do? Just leave it alone.

  33RD BALLOON

  As I descended at full speed into the valley, I imagined—as I often do—a deer leaping into the road and knocking me off my bike. I’d wreck, snap my neck, suffer paralysis, or bleed out on the road, and expire. In the end, what startled me wasn’t a deer but a rabbit—no bigger than a hamburger bun—on the road’s shoulder, inches away from my oncoming wheel. It darted into high grass. The phrase “viciously cute” appeared in my head. I remembered the “rabbit scene” from the 1987 film Summer School, in which a ragtag group of underperforming high school students, led by a young teacher played by Mark Harmon, take a field trip to a petting zoo. The scene begins with Anna-Maria, the sultry Italian exchange student, as she pets a white rabbit with whom she appears to be smitten. Dave and “Chainsaw”—two loveable doofs who are obsessed with horror movies, especially The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—come running into view, screaming frantically. It appears, inexplicably, that maniacal rabbits have latched onto their faces and won’t let go. As Dave and Chainsaw struggle to free themselves, the bloody flesh of their cheeks stretches, and they scream even louder. Anna-Maria screams and throws her rabbit to the ground. Dave and Chainsaw collapse, as if dead, only to jump back up seconds later, bowing. Their classmates clap. Anna-Maria, seeing now that the rabbits were stuffed, is confused. “Why did you do that?” she asks. Chainsaw says, “We did it for you, Anna-Maria,” and she says, “Ew, that’s disgusting,” pauses, and then adds, “I love it.” Chainsaw explains that his bloody cheeks aren’t really bloody, peels off a shred of latex, hands it to her, and says, “Keep it.” For whatever reason, this particular scene proved inspirational to me as a kid, but I didn’t have latex, so I mashed up bananas mixed with red food coloring and spread it on my face, donned a gray wig that used to belong to a woman in my family once known as “Aunt Maddie” and filmed myself miming the roar of a wild animal in time to the recording of a wild animal. The bananas worked well as homemade gore, maybe because mashed bananas—the sight and texture—are disgusting on their own, which is too bad, because it turns out I can’t swallow a bite of banana until I’ve chomped it to sludge. For the last month or so, I’ve been paying weekly visits to the house of a retired professor of Contemporary American Literature, who claims that, in India, there are countless varieties of bananas, each of which make an American banana seem even more bland and boring than they are. I’ve never understood the appeal of a banana split. Neither has my son, who was recently disappointed in our choice of ice cream scooper; he will settle for nothing less than one with a lever that, when depressed, forces the scoop into the bowl. If, God forbid, my son should die before me, these are the kinds of everyday things—in addition to the pulsing pain-hole I would carry in my chest for as long as I lived—that would haunt me relentlessly. Those of us who have not lost a child are compelled by stories of those who have, especially when those children are the tragic victims of senseless violence; the world in which they exist, we understand, is a darkness we cannot penetrate. We are less interested, it seems, in the parents of children who committed those acts of violence, except to wonder, maybe: what did they do wrong? I think now of a letter written by a professor to the parents of the young man who, on April 16, 2007, chained the doors of a campus building shut, then went in and out of classrooms, firing nearly 400 rounds of ammunition, injuring 17, killing 32, and then shooting himself in the head. In the letter, the professor—who is a friend and who, years later, showed it to me—told the parents that their son had been a student in her class. She wrote to express sympathy but also to assure them that not everybody refused to include their son in the tragedy’s final tally, and that on the 33rd day after the massacre, the day after university officials, during a silent ceremony, released 32 balloons, each one drifting skyward, and each accompanied by the tolling of a single bell, this professor and her graduate teaching assist
ant visited the building where the shooting had occurred. There, they released the 33rd balloon. I don’t know why she did this, but I suspect it wasn’t just because the shooter had been her student—it was a way to recognize that though he’d committed inconceivably monstrous acts of violence, though he had left immeasurable devastations in his wake, he had once been a baby, a boy, a son, a brother, and that, if he had rarely been understood by his family, he had certainly been loved, a truth that, even if it couldn’t shine through the dark sorrow of their shame, might make it easier, sometimes, when having to say his name.