Tritones
by Steff Yotka
We haven’t changed a bit, I thought.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Jorge Luis Borges
If it is not the feeling of the winter wind against my mittenless hand, it is not worth my time. But then again, I do spend most of my time, sitting around, thinking of rhymes, bored to desperation, waiting for my monotony to reach the point of expiration.
Take Wednesday, a day like many of the rest.
When I woke up, there was nothing I wanted more than a toasty cup of chamomile tea, crisp and calming, cool, collected. But the stove was covered in dishes and cups of tequila, so I gave up trying. I settled for an empty stomach and a ravenous appetite. When one thing is less another is more.
Easton Katyaiev lives at 305 East Katon Street. He is not tall, nor are his parents clever.
He is neither exciting nor bland, pale nor tanned, but rather his skin has the pallor of someone whose love onced greatly, but normaled was small.
Few things quell the anxiety of his life. He stares out the window counting the leaves dropping off the trees, knowing the horror they feel falling from fertility into frozen trauma. He fears the change we all worry about.
I went to class and I suppose I learned things about direct and indirect objects. I had trouble focusing, a doctor would say because of my untreated ADHD, but I would say because of the errant piece of blond-girl-hair that coyly sat on the shoulder blade of the boy in front of me.
On his refrigerator was a list, meticulously written in all capital letters, of things to and not to do.
NEVER DRINK MILK.
RECYCLE.
PART HAIR ON LEFT.
DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH THE CASHIER AT THE BOOKSTORE ON MAIN STREET.
DO NOT WANT DESSERT.
CALL AND MAKE DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT FOR MONDAY, TUESDAY, AND FRIDAY.
TAKE VITAMINS.
BUY BAND-AIDS.
FIX WOBBLY LEG OF SOFA IN LIVING ROOM.
DO NOT SIT ON SOFA IN LIVING ROOM.
WRITE LETTER TO CITY HALL ABOUT NOISE ON NORTH EAST CORNER OR EAST KATON STREET BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2:25AM AND 2:43AM. REMEMBER TO IMPLY ILLICIT ACTIVITY.
PURCHASE NEW SOFA TO DONATE TO CHARITY.
LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE CROSSING THE STREET.
TIE SHOELACES.
NEVER SUCCUMB TO LATE NIGHT T.V.
Easton began every day by writing a new version of this list. Some things were constant, like “NEVER DRINK MILK,” while others varied from “TIESHOELACES” to “DONOTFORGETTOTIESHOELACES.” This was the great excitement of Easton’s day.
I skipped lunch like I skipped breakfast.
After his list-making and nerve-shaking Easton would sort the contents of his bathroom cabinet. He was careful to only eat the ones he was supposed to eat in the quantities he was supposed to eat them. Once, he had two of something and none of another, and his head and heart swelled so large he fainted, not because of the medication, but rather because of his fear of coloring outside the lines.
The life in 305 East Katon Street was solitary and confined. Light lumped onto the surfaces and blurred into a Matissian maze of perspective and nothingness. The tablecloth was the table and the window was the picture frame, but the triangular hollow below the stairs was well equipped to well the whimpering of the faux-Fauve faux-pas.
In a space in between the thick brick walls was the only white room in the house. A restrictive whiteness void of refreshment, it would hurt the eyes of someone not accustomed to meticulously dusting off the powdery lilac teakettle every last Wednesday but never once making tea.
I drank three cups of coffee and a Diet Coke as I sat in my rolly chair at my internship. I played around in Photoshop drawing moustaches on Freja Beha and Raquel Zimmermann. They were Austrian spy lovers, I thought. Then I tried on bow headbands. The time couldn’t have moved more slowly, and I couldn’t have cared less. It was something to do between something and its else.
In Easton Katyaiev’s triangular cell was nothing except a lovely, loquacious spider. While he disapproved of its pins-and-needles legs that spread wide and erotic, he couldn’t help but to marvel at its fascinating fluttering. The lady longlegs would linger on the wall-side, and Easton Katyaiev would whisper his wants and wills to the spider’s deaf ears.
He contemplated its form for hours and hours, slowly moving his vacant eye from its lethal legs to its luxe lips. In Easton’s dull and particularly regimented life, the spider was the arachnid of his eye, the quilt of his pleasure.
Egomaniac Easton’s obsession swelled to intoxication. The spider fueled something in Easton that had been ever-so-dormitory for what seemed like an ever. While he wanted nothing more than to shed his human skin and let his legs roam wildly, his mass was definite and unable to transform. All he could do was put a pen on a page and tell a sinuous story about a sinful sin-ect.
He began softly: “The spider lives in my whitest room, under my tallest stair, in my darkest corner of my pleadingest heart. It is tall in scale and painfully clever.”
On the walk between my internship and my next class I listened to Metallica on my headphones. I’m inconsistent. I wanted to listen to The Velvet Underground or Yo La Tengo or Sonic Youth, whose music I usually love but sometimes is really crappy, but I felt necessary for a change.
In class a lot of people read a lot of things, and I thought a lot of things about those things, and I said some of them. Mostly, though, I just sat there pretending to cross my eyes inside my skull and drawing wings on the back of my paper. Sometimes I would flick my hands like spider legs on the paper when I was speaking, because I could not think of the words to make the sayings. Flicking my fingers on the paper did not help the word-making, but it did make me seem crazy.
Afterward I went to the bathroom for the first time all day.
I looked in the mirror for a while and the raucous image on the other side made me laugh. I can’t understand the fascination other people have with dead little things, like cigarettes or bitterness. I want all my breaths to get me high. I want all my breaths to taste like sugar. And then I want to giggle like a little girl with a gun who just killed her only pet rabbit and is going to make a fur coat out of him and wear it to seduce her imaginary friend, Jesus.
I make myself laugh.
While his right hand moved steady on the page, westerly his heart went wild. There were things that existed that Easton was not ready to accept: ideas, places, realities that splattered all outside his sanitary sandbox mind. While his little spider was enthralling, it was also the prime terror of his tidy life.
And then I felt shitty as I walked home alone along the alloy sidewalk. It’s winter now and I don’t like the feeling of cold.
I got back to my room and opened the window because the radiator was stuffing my nose with the smell of burning marshmallows. Instead of doing homework, I read all the comments on all my blog posts, ever. Then I looked in the kitchen, finally ready to compromise, and ate peanut butter from the jar.
I sat in my bed for two hours thinking about possible diseases I might have based on hypothetical symptoms I was making up. Then I felt really afraid.
Who knew the missteps it made, propelling itself with freakish intensity around the room. If the spider had an expression, it would always be set on a grimacing smile.
I thought about cleaning my room, but I didn’t do it, I thought about taking the nail polish off my nails, but I didn’t do it, I thought about calling my Grandma like I was supposed to, but I didn’t do it, and I thought about running down to the Hudson River in short-shorts and dancing to the music in my head, but I didn’t do it.
“Once I placed a glass of water on the floor. The liquid spilled over the edge as Iset it down. At the instant the fluid rushed out of the cup, the spider descended, like flying, to the spill. Being predatory, it is always wanting something more.
“It finds the spot of temptation, and it dips its tender ends into the pooling liquid. After feeling the visceral pleasure rise up its antennae, it gives the water a languid lick. Its self is immersed in indulgence. The water raps and waves.”
Instead, I stayed up late at night because I had a lot of homework to do. And also because my lover gets back late at night. I can’t ever go to sleep without having pet his beard at least once, sometimes twice, three times on weekends not including once in the morning or twice in the shower. And after the affair I walked barefoot back to my room and wrote this story.
Striving too much for control, measuring his being by the things he cannot do, Easton strains to put every substance in his center, he bears the weight of every mass. Being of no divine exemption to physics, he can do nothing but explode. At that moment, the spider presses its body flush to the wall and gives birth to a flood of tiny spiderbabies. At once everything in the room is alive.
Then I drifted into sleep and dreamed about a fight between two halves of an orange.
And somewhere, in a chapter Ihave yet begun to write, Iam crying and dancing simultaneously, licking my losses, laughing as a tritone rings in my head. Some things exist in perfection harmonically.