jon doughboy – bolaño

With a pair of wooden chopsticks, I’m tweezing my English muffin out of the Michael Graves toaster my girlfriend’s mother foisted on us when we moved to Missoula and my girlfriend says, “my tits are a lot bigger though,” and I nod because she means as a consequence of getting fat, as a consequence of getting long Covid and bailing on her kickboxing “community” after nearly having a heart attack while sparring last year. 

I don’t really care about the size of her tits—it’s her anger I’m into, and her legs—or about her weight though I do, from time to time, in the odd dull ruminative moment, worry about the cause of the weight gain, the long Covid and how much of her symptoms are just a matter of aging and laziness or complacency and my role in this all and whether it’s safe to broach this subject because what if I’m the underlying condition? It used to be, safe that is. We used to talk about anything. Her Jewish bitterness about how few Jews fought the Nazis at the outset, gouging out SS eyes instead of sheepishly boarding trains to death camps and how she channeled this unanswerable rage through her shins into the heavy bag, and my Libyan bitterness about the Arab Spring devolving into chaos and corruption and tyranny while Europe watched from front row seats and what this said about Arabs or the Amazigh or about me. This was the sort of woman I was drawn to too, a violent woman enraged by her history, a tyrant with nice legs. 

We’re both still bitter about our identities, our histories, but she’s not violent anymore. And I’m not sure if I’m drawn to her anymore, if we’re drawn to each other. But we moved here for her, Arab and Jew decamping together to the Treasure State, mostly so she could go back to school, escape the trap of social work she’d stumbled into and study her true passion, the geosciences, investigating subterranean mysteries and parlaying this into a job with a big fracking company down the line. I agreed to tag along because I was sick of my job in D.C., sick of Arabic, of NGOs, of the constant emails from desperate Libyans trying to get out of my war-torn country, Libyans who rightfully expected some help from one who’d escaped but I felt drained, jaded, utterly helped out.  

No. No more Arabic, no more Arabs, no more Libya. 

In Missoula I hike and I read and take random shifts as a home health aide, wiping elderly Montanans’ fat asses or steadying their trembling hands as they butter their toast or, my new favorite, English muffins. Sometimes I read aloud to them in their dribbling dementia as my girlfriend sits in lectures about shale gas. “It’s weird my ass isn’t any bigger,” she says, and I place my muffin on a plate and carve a piece of cold butter off a stick and smush it into the nooks and crannies, and she says, cupping with casual curiosity her not enlarged ass cheeks, “what’s on the docket today?” and I say, “a half shift with Mrs. Crumpler in Moose Can Gully. She needs her toenails clipped and a shower and then I’ll read her some Bolaño. You?” But I can tell she isn’t listening, she’s never listening anymore, and I actually prefer it this way because I no longer feel the burden of sharing or being interesting or entertaining, manufacturing some intimate reveals. No. We’re more like roommates now, her sleeping all day with her long Covid and shale dreams, me reading or riding around town on a used single-speed and looking at the Rattlesnake Mountains but seeing the Nafusa, seeing Libya rear up despite the miles and years I’ve put between us.
 
After my muffin and her departure, I ride over to Mrs. Crumpler’s, inhaling the occasional gnat on this postcard Montana July day. The trailheads are teeming with transplants I’ll bet, lacing up their trail runners and slotting their bear spray into the water bottle pockets on their lumbar packs. I have no idea what my people in Tripoli are up to and that’s how I like it now. Mrs. Crumpler doesn’t come to the door to greet me so I let myself in and find her sucking on an old teabag in her white leather recliner, the skin cracked and wrinkled as she herself is as the plates beneath the crust are and as we are, our sense of who we are, our wrinkly coil brains struggling to make sense of our fractured histories.
 
I wash Mrs. Crumpler like she’s a corpse I’m going to bury then I dress her, prop her in her recliner, and she says, “water,” then I give her water, and she says, “crackers,” so I give her crackers, then she says “Bolaño,” so I give her Bolaño, his Spanish translated into English by Wimmer, read by my Libyan Arabic inflected American English, opening 2666 at random and reading, “…with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness,” and then Mrs. Crumpler says, “my cousin Bobby was a whore,” and I say, “she was an actual prostitute?” and she says, “he used to expose himself in movie theaters in Billings when Eisenhower was president, read,” so I read at random, remembering the bookstore I ran in Tripoli before it was turned to rubble, before my books which were my world became soggy pulp or charred dust, before I fled, “Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone.” And then Mrs. Crumpler interrupts with, “your ass is diseased and we had no business in Iraq or Vietnam and did you know the love of my life died in Vietnam, in some stupid distant nowhere jungle? Fucking Arabs. What about Benghazi, huh? Hillary, huh, what about her? Read.” So, I continue, flipping more frequently in a liberating mash-up collage, “There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters,” and Mrs. Crumpler says, “Vietnam!” in a weak exclamation, in that dry, angry, elderly way, and I read, “Norton clenched her fists and waited. The woman in the mirror clenched her fists too, as if she were making a superhuman effort,” and Mrs. Crumpler says, “Now the Jews, no, I never cared for them, Bush sending all that money and those missiles to Israel and why? Not that we have many Jews in Montana, read,” so I read, “She’s just like me, she said to herself, but she’s dead,” and Mrs. Crumpler said, “deary, can I have a tea? Two sugars.” And then she said, calling after me in the kitchen as I put the pot on to boil, “I never trusted the Arabs neither, not after what they did to us in the 70s, the gas lines, that wimp Carter,” and as the water is boiling, I read Bolaño to myself, wanting to disappear like Archimboldi, like some little German seaweed giant vanishing in the nooks and crannies of a narco northern Mexico hell, remembering my little radical bookstore that my lumpen fellow Libyans had little to no interest in until they blew it up, and then I want to call my girlfriend but not from here but from Libya, a long crackling distance call over a bad connection so every word is rushed and real because we know the line can and will be cut at any moment but I’m not in Libya and anyway she’s in class so I know she won’t answer. 

That night, lying in bed, as my girlfriend undresses and examines herself in the full-length mirror, pinching her sides, cupping her breasts, turning to examine a pimple on her left shoulder blade, I say, “Mrs. Crumpler is a bigot,” and she says, “Oh?” and I say, “But she loves Bolaño,” and she says, “No kidding?” and I say, quoting Bolaño but thinking of Libya, of returning to Libya, “With their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads,” and she says, “That’s pretty,” and I quote Bolaño, “That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,” and she says, “What’s that supposed to mean?” and I say, “I don’t think I like it here,” though I’m not sure what or who this here is or what this not liking means for me or us and then we both don’t say anything and yet we say a lot, we get as close as we can to saying it all.


JON DOUGHBOY is an installation of art for art’s sake. Take a tour @doughboywrites


HOME