Dead Letter Department #10
(did you miss dead letter department #9? catch up here!)
whose hand
The nightmares are back. They started in Pandemic: Season 1, matter-of-fact to the point of being slightly embarrassing. Loss, devastation, devastating mystery disease. Merry in the morning, dead by noon.
It’s a slightly different genre of nightmare this time around, now that I’m post-vax: the quick-turn. The other night I dreamed I was walking in an enormous garden just after dark, having an ordinary, pleasant conversation with my dream-mother, a person utterly unlike my real mother. A child was just behind us, playing along the path through the flower beds. Something shifted, maybe the light, maybe something in the scrim of awareness behind the scenery. We walked faster, glancing at each other, reading the look on each other’s face that said Hurry, though we didn’t dare to speak aloud, and then we were past hurrying, panicking as we raced through the winding paths, tripping over the gravel, trying to make it to the stairs. We got behind the house door, we even managed to lock it, but we knew it wasn’t enough, the child had already begun to change, was already growing so much larger, howling in an agonizing, inhuman register. When I woke up, my heart was pounding to the exact rhythm of her fists beating against the door that was just about to splinter.
I lay awake for awhile thinking about Hill House: Then whose hand was I holding? There’s a particular mental landscape that I only find myself in in the very smallest hours of insomniac mornings, long past the time when I could reasonably call someone & jolt myself out of it with conversation. In the full light of day this place is still there, just invisible, but if I’m up late enough the color and light of ordinary things seems to drain away, leaving something much starker behind. All the silly things that scare me are there, of course, the ghost story I never got out of my head, the horror movie I watched with a friend that scared us both so badly we locked the tape in the basement & then slept in the same bed, but those specters aren’t the worst of it. They’re just flimsy things resting on a thin layer of soil and if I step wrong I break through that fragile crust and plunge down into the void of cold dread underneath.
I try to haul some of it back up to the surface now & then, pin it down so I can still see it in the morning. There’s a monster queued up for the next book in the series I’m writing that’s from this place & a couple of times I’ve tried to make short stories out of things I’ve found there. I hope to do better by it as I go on. I can’t tell if this is late stage capitalism rotting my brain—even nightmares must be part of the hustle?—or a less distressing desire to alchemize, turn what drags at my heels into fuel instead.
When the (historic, unprecedented, excruciating) heatwave lifted yesterday I found myself practically giddy, flitting around town with all the windows down to visit the fruit stand, pick up my bookstore preorders and visit stores I haven’t been in since before the pandemic. I expected to need a stern budgetary talking to when I got to Target but I somehow got on the same path as the employee with the floor cleaner and every time I stopped to look at a display, there they were, waiting patiently at the top of the aisle for me to finish up so they could do their job. This would be a great service to offer socially awkward shoppers who are trying not to spend: someone hovering nearby with a slightly inconvenienced expression every time you appear to be about to scoop something unnecessary off the shelves.
I want to say more about the flattening heat, about how unprepared we are for what is happening, the overwhelming climate catastrophe, the grief that is only going to get worse, but every time I try it seems impossibly raw. Sidewalks buckled. So did the highway. I’m not sure I have the language for it yet, but I’ll try again.
reading room
The Dead Letter Department’s Literature Advisor suggested that novellas might be the way to work around the foreshortened attention curse so many of us have been laboring under, and they gave me To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers to try it out on. Becky Chambers is also the author of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I adored, & To Be Taught has very much the same feeling, an expansive, believable window into space travel, into a world in which we care about space exploration enough to take it out of the hands of obscenely egomaniacal billionaires and back into ours.
I’m also getting really into Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf. I read the Seamus Heaney translation a long time ago & liked it fine, if distant memory serves, but this new version is so relatable, somehow occupying the intersection between sharp modernity and ancient text. There’s something deeply satisfying about adding yourself to the long chain of scholars and readers and poem reciters going back more than a thousand years. So much of everything is still solitary right now; it’s nice to imagine a hall of listeners, held captive by the story, a monk scratching away at the poem, surrounded by other monks, and then, farther off than the mind can really grapple with, me or you holding a neatly-bound book in our hands. Bro, it starts, Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!
peony & rosewood
One of the insomnia remedies I’ve tried recently is bolstering my before-bed routine. It seemed like a scent might be a good idea, something to tell the rest of my body that it’s time to wind the fuck down and work on getting sleepy so I’ve been trying all my perfumes, one after another. Pemberley from Immortal Perfumes has probably come the closest but it’s still very much awake. Named after Mr. Darcy’s estate in Pride & Prejudice, Pemberley is lush but sharply floral instead of being cloying, very much like a turn around the garden in the evening, brushing your fingertips against a bank of blooming peonies. I think I need something quieter to try next, more petrichor, more of the stillness of stone.
one good thing
The empty rabbit nest I told you about last time wasn’t the only one. A baby bunny has been visiting the yard, probably a little smaller than my hand, nose and ears always alertly tracking me but perfectly happy to sit and gnaw on the long grass under the lilac as long as I don’t move too suddenly. It turns out there are secret rabbit highways and tunnels into and out of my yard: behind the holly tree, under the loosened dirt at the side gate. It also turns out that the places I have always had vaguely on my list of chores to weed are perfect places for the rabbit to sit in the shade, which I think is a far better endorsement of my slapdash approach to gardening than immaculately groomed flower beds.
write back
More soon, and in the meantime you can always write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com, particularly if you have a sleepy scent to recommend or a novella I should read. If you like the Dead Letter Department, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you here again!