Surprise, AZ
March 15, 2024
Hello readers it’s Maggie, back from my Substack hiatus and in Surprise, Arizona. I’m making bad jokes with my cousin Pedro and making fun of my mom and aunt and feeling bad about it but getting so used to it that I don’t know how to stop. I am sitting with my mom, doing crosswords and talking about things I like to think she wouldn’t tell my siblings. We are eating cinnamon bagels from my aunt and my teeth are thick from still being unbrushed. I was awoken at eight in the morning by the dog and the sunlight, which has grown unfamiliar to me as I naturalize to Massachusetts in all of its dreary hatred. I only got four hours of sleep because I fell asleep at five AM, tossing about because I forgot how to sleep alone. I can only fall asleep when my eyes start to hurt. I snuggle up to my mom’s shoulder and ask her to call me Maggie because my grandmother won’t. She looks around the room to make sure her mother is out of earshot and gracefully obliges. “You are so smart Maggie. You are so good at drawing Maggie.”
I wrap her arm around my neck and hold it tight. She is discontented by her arms but they are the arms I know and like and need the most, soft and warm and just the right size to lodge my face and bury my eyes into and hold me when my Grandpa is dead. I remember that I am here because my Grandpa is dead.
He had a stroke but the official cause of death was dementia. I think the official cause was that he got too skeletal and frightening to be seen by the living, so we, the living, declared that he ought to not breathe any longer. He was my only grandpa. I liked him. He taught me how to draw and told me a lot of facts I did not care too much about but I liked that he told me them with such enthusiasm. He made corny jokes and voted for everyone I did not like. He was hilarious and kind to me, but if he had had more money or power I am certain we would have remembered him as a bad man. It’s odd now to speak of him in the past tense when it’s only been four days. It’s odd the way the dead are happening in the past tense. It’s odd the way their reputations are cleaned up. He was funny in a good way (laughing with) when I was little, funny in a bad way (laughing at) when I was older. We were medium close.
I downloaded a zombie game on my phone the day he died and my roommate and official best friend watched me play for 5 hours while I got thirsty but did not get up because I was “locked in,” entranced, or afraid. Even now as I write, all I want to do is play this zombie game on my phone. I see how many days I can survive and hope I get far enough to unlock the rocket launcher gun. Around the fifth day I buy the armor that generates money so that I can buy the armor that increases my health but it slows me down, so first I upgrade my speed. In the zombie game you can have a dog partner or a tiger partner. I prefer the dog because he is more proactive in mauling the undead. My favorite gun is the M249 but on my current playthrough I’m using the minigun because I spent 20,000 coins on it and I ought to get my hard-earned (by watching ads for other mobile games) money’s worth.
I play the zombie game in the car when my cousin takes us to get coffee. I’m not as good at asking him questions as I used to be. I play the zombie game during meals and movies and while my aunt talks to me in the doorway. I play the zombie game instead of sleeping or doing the assignments I got extensions on. I don’t know how to turn my half of a page about the CIA in Guatemala into five whole pages of double-spaced and cited conjecture. Like most things, this task used to be quite easy but when your grandpa is dead it is no longer easy. I thought that stuff about the CIA was made up by liberals on twitter but it was real. I thought death was made up but it is real. If adults tell you about something it is real even if it does not fit in your brain yet. Watch out kids!!! I have a credit score. I check emails on my phone. But mostly on my phone (which I have a case for now because I am responsible) I play the zombie game.
I wonder if the zombie game is a grief thing. I have been interested in violence. I want to look at gory things and watch TV shows I used to be scared of. I find a lot of pleasure in kicking the zombie to the ground and shooting its head off and watching it explode. I think it looks cool in a way that makes me feel guilty to describe. I worry that other people would not approve of the zombie game in all its pixelated bloodiness, so when I was still on campus and around acquaintances I played it less than I itched to. It must be a weird grief thing but I don’t know the connection yet. Maybe I want to understand death. Maybe the zombie game has the answers.
I don’t understand death like other people seem to understand death. It is like gravity in the sense that it is there. And I and everyone around me feels it there. However I do not accept it in the way that I accept gravity. I’m like a crazy astronaut. I do not accept that my grandfather is dead. I see he is but I do not believe it. I would like all things to be reconciled to my desires immediately.
Everyone in my family has always been very confident about death—why it happens, who it happens to, where it happens, what happens after, etc.
It happens because of sin, it happens to everyone, it happens in the body but not the soul, and what happens after depends on the state of the soul. This is not true I don’t think. I’m not certain it’s not true but I’m certainly not putting my money on it being true. Maybe it’s a little bit true but it is no longer true enough to make me feel better. I used to know how to let people die, I used to not be an astronaut or climate denier. When my grandma on my dad’s side died I let her because when I was 17, even though I said fuck and smoked sometimes, Heaven was real enough for me to feel better. I don’t smoke anymore and nothing can reconcile the world to my desires of a human species without death, so there is nothing to do but let my chest get tight and be aware of an absent body. Or play my zombie game.
If I stop playing my zombie game I have to sit with my mom and be certain she will die, uncertain of where she will go and if she will hurt. Other people are certain other people will die but not me. So I declare here and now on my substack that I am a crazy astronaut, and the first person to want something so bad that it happened. My mom will never die and neither will my dad or my siblings because I will not let it. I will not let it!
In my dream I was before a line of coffins in a lamplit, dark brown, wood-paneled room with decaying corners of the ceiling. I could not see mold in the dream but it was there. The three coffins were painted the primary colors and the red one on the far left had Eugene Edward McDermott, the man who taught me to draw and gave me these hairy legs. The three coffins were being shuffled about by invisible hands like a game of shells under cups and after the shuffling I had to guess which one he lied in. I was fairly certain it was the red one because it was the only red one and as I lifted my left arm to choose the red one the invisible hand pulled it away and placed it on a shelf and put in its place a new red coffin with a new man and I was stampeded by an oncoming crowd of new guessers. I woke up next to someone who will never die and we got breakfast in Rhode Island and talked about things that were not my dream.
The body is within you, solid, and still taller than you. Its arms and hands stuffed neatly into yours like gloves, the absent’s skin burgeoning against the inside of your own. As the absent leaves this earth it must leave your body too, so you scream and weep it out, your mouth their only exit, and on hands and knees you push harder and harder to expel their spirit, to let them pass from your body and enter into a place your vessel cannot enter. You scream harder and harder but they will not leave you. You must lose the familiarity your hands had with theirs, so detox your insides from them. You push and scream and it hurts so much that you declare they do not have to leave but the day comes when you see their sweater on a hangar in the garage and remember the folds of their wrists and you get back to your labor of expulsion, screaming and pushing and weeping. They are gone, let them be gone from you.