RAISE FOR DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE
“I love these poems. They are cool and horrified at their own coolness. A masterclass in phrase-making.”
—JOE DUNTHORNE, FABER NEW POET AND AUTHOR OF SUBMARINE
“Leigh Stein’s poems know how to laugh it off after a stunning tumble down a flight of stairs.”
—ROB MACDONALD, EDITOR OF SIXTH FINCH
“Dispatch from the Future is a force of nature. Like other great American poets before her—Bernadette Mayer, Jorie Graham, William Carlos Williams come to mind—Leigh Stein is not afraid to make the everyday beautiful. As if she says in these poems, ‘Don’t worry, we all feel this way.’ We do. Read this book.”
—DOROTHEA LASKY, AUTHOR OF AWE AND BLACK LIFE
PRAISE FOR LEIGH STEIN’S THE FALLBACK PLAN
“Beautiful, funny, thrilling and true.”
—GARY SHTEYNGART, AUTHOR OF SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY
“The Fallback Plan is to this generation what Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm was to the previous generation, and The Catcher in the Rye before that.”
—SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“Stein, 26, captures the voice of the young 20-something prodigal daughter with the clarion call of authenticity in her debut novel.… Stein’s light, accessible, self-deprecating prose makes this coming-of-age story a pleasure.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Cheeky self-assured prose.”
—O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
“A masterwork of the post-collegiate babysitting genre.”
—NEW YORK MAGAZINE
“Her enchantingly funny and insightful debut novel The Fallback Plan … has a universal quality, capturing a generation’s angst quite like Franny and Zooey did when it was published in 1961.”
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“27-year-old former New Yorker staffer Leigh Stein nails the latest postcollegiate trend—moving back in with Mom and Dad … Stein seems poised to become the Lena Dunham of contemporary fiction, given the way The Fallback Plan’s storyline deftly bears with it a steady commentary on today’s flatlining economy and a generation of college grads (an estimated 85 percent of the class of 2011 moved right back home) who have to wonder if we’ll ever actually grow up and become real adults.”
—ELLE MAGAZINE
“Readers will endorse Esther Kohler’s voice as being not only funny, but also true. It echoes long after her story ends, and The Fallback Plan is a novel everyone under 30 will relate to with familiar pangs of self-loathing and sympathy.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“Intimate, urgent, and laugh-out-loud funny, Leigh Stein’s novel bravely investigates the splendor and tragedy of the end of youth with a sensitivity and lyrical deftness that will not disappoint. Think Franny and Zooey. Think Goodbye, Columbus. Think of this book as your next great read.”
—JOE MENO, AUTHOR OF THE GREAT PERHAPS
“… an existential crisis of lost 20-somethings that pretty much everyone can relate to.”
—NYLON MAGAZINE
DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE
© 2012 Leigh Stein
First Melville House printing: June 2012
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stein, Leigh, 1984-
Dispatch from the future / Leigh Stein.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-61219-135-5
I. Title.
PS3619.T465D57 2012
811′.6–dc23
2012014733
v3.1
For Sarah
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
Warning
Based on a Book of the Same Title
Winter, 1979, the Coldest in Recent Memory
You’re Mispronouncing My Name Again
Zelda
The Safest Way Home
Even the Gas Station Attendant Here Is Nice to Me
Katharine Tillman vs. Lake Michigan
Keeping the Minotaur at Bay
How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance
June 14, 1848
Marooned
Circus Music
Another Spectacular Day with Plentiful Sunshine
Eurydice
II
Choose Your Own Canadian Wilderness
The Forbidden Chamber
Epistolaphobia
If You See Them Tell Them I’m Stranded
How to Read the Secret Language of the Pharaohs
For Those Who Have Everything, Say It with Concrete
III
I’m Ready, Are You? – 23 (Truth or Consequences)
Calling In the One
Mercy
A Brief History of My Life Part VII
Diary of a Young Girl
As Soon as You Meet Someone You Know the Reason You Will Leave Them
R_B_T L_VE S_NG
RE: HI
Immortality
A Brief History of My Life Part XXVI
Have You Hugged a Latvian Today?
Universalism
IV
Dispatch from the Future
Dispatch from the Future
Simpatico
Revisionism
Travel Brochure for the Future
Dispatch from the Future
Dispatch from the Future
Please Handle Your Children
Revisionism
Dispatch from the Future
Addendum to the Previous Dispatch
Remember Your Future
Want Ad from the Future
I’ve Written All Over This in Hopes You Can Read It
Dispatch from the Future
Dispatch from the Future
Dispatch from the Future
Acknowledgements
I
If you attempt to back out of the planet, turn to page 77.
If you decide to take the time to consider other options, turn to page 50.
Edward Packard, Through the Black Hole
WARNING
There are better ways to break a heart than Facebook,
such as abandoning your pregnant girlfriend at Walmart
like that guy did to Natalie Portman. If you read this book
sequentially, bad things may happen to you, but only as bad
as the things that would have happened to you anyway.
If, however, you do not read this book sequentially you may
find that you are suddenly aboard a sunken pirate ship,
staring into the deep abyss, and wishing you had chosen
not to chase the manatee in your submarine after all. Do not
panic. If you end up in the wrong adventure just go back
three spaces and draw another card. Or go back to bed.
Or read up on the side effects of the medication taken
by your loved ones. The great R. A. Montgomery once wrote,
“Suddenly you’re surrounded by eleven Nodoors,” and I
guess what I’m trying to do here is ruin any hope
you may have had of coming out of this alive.
BASED ON A BOOK OF THE SAME TITLE
By definition of vicious infinite regression
I don’t like to talk to philosophy majors.
They have found the truth and the truth is
that there isn’t one, so on Saturdays they
wear overalls and stare at their reflections
and try to guess whose childhood was worse,
but in the end they reali
ze they all share
the same dream of having a reason
to join the Witness Protection Program,
which disappoints at least one person, who
thought his dream was so uniquely his.
Last night I got a fortune cookie that said
I don’t get along with basically anyone,
and from the back I learned the Chinese word
for grape: putao, and it made me wonder how each
informs the other. To find out, turn to page 117.
I wonder how much longer I can live here
before I do something irresponsible like
meet a teenage boy on a Ferris wheel in 1941
or lie in the street and watch the stoplights
change from green to yellow or sit on a porch
read by someone who has just worked all day
with his hands. Already on page 56 I love you
so much I just want to steal your clothes
when you’re asleep and wash them. I want us
to communicate telepathically until I am old
and suffering from dementia and can’t even
remember I know how to play piano until
a nurse tells me I do and still I’ll deny it
until she puts my hands on the keys and then
there’ll be Chopin so quickly, as the light
spills in the leaded windows and the lilies
lean in closer. By definition of vicious
infinite regression I am in front of a mirror
holding a copy of the movie based on the book
you wrote based on the parts of our life
together that I no longer remember and
looking back at me is a woman holding
a movie based on a book based on her life
and she wonders if the woman she sees
wants to die as much as she does. I keep
staring at this bruise on my leg and drawing
a blank. Last night when you called I told you
I was happy, which was true, but thinking ahead
I could be unhappy, too, if that’s what you
wanted. I could be any of a lot of things:
a wrist, a ghost, a harbor, a rope. I could
be the one who doesn’t know the language.
I could be the reason they take you first.
I could be the last person to see you alive.
WINTER, 1979, THE COLDEST IN RECENT MEMORY
Theoretically, I was held by a man in Detroit
at gunpoint. Theoretically, he let me go.
I have not told this story to you before.
I only tell you now for two reasons. One:
you’re not from Michigan. Two: I have searched
for his scar along your neck and, so far, no luck.
They said to wear my purse beneath my coat and
pretend it was a baby if anybody asked me and
they might but they probably would not try and take it.
They said the average memory span for normal adults
is seven items. Let me differentiate between the two.
I used to tell this story about Tristan and Dolores,
who I left in the rain every time. I made them break blue
glass with their back teeth. Dolores would say, I am half sick
of shadows, as the waves came up from the storm tossed sea.
Try telling this story to a man with a gun. Sorry to interrupt,
he said, but do you know the one about the woman who
was rolled up like a snowman and left until the thaw?
No, I said. That was me, he said. I don’t believe you, I said,
and then he told me to keep my hands above my head.
The snow had begun to fall then in the deep stillness
before the streets were plowed and salted; a car passed
us and fishtailed ahead at the stoplight; I forgot
the ending, and so I pushed my characters in front of a train.
The man with the gun didn’t like that at all.
How was there a train at the beach? Maybe they left
the beach, I said. Should they go on vacation instead?
The man said, What if they went in front of the train, but
the train stopped in time. Good idea, I said. He read
my name off my drivers license and I didn’t correct
his pronunciation; then he told me to close my eyes and
I felt something cold hit my head. My heart stopped a little
bit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was
a snowball at my feet. Where did you say you were from again?
I just wanted to unbutton your collar and see for myself.
YOU’RE MISPRONOUNCING MY NAME AGAIN
This time last year I was an astronaut
in a window display at a department store
that has since been bought out by another
department store. I wore a gray crepe dress
and a helmet that they pumped full of oxygen.
I had one line to say. I mouthed the words, but
no one ever heard me. They tapped the glass,
saying, We can’t hear you on this side. Take
back. What?, they said. This time last year I
thought I was speaking English, but lip reading
has become a forgotten art. This time last year
I learned to speak in the dark with my hands.
I know the sign for tree and forest; dead bird;
the spelling of my maiden name; long walks
on the beach of Normandy. You think everything’s
about you and you’ve been right since the end
of the war. I took that astronaut job so I could
tell you I took it. I took that astronaut job so I
could miss you from the cosmos beyond the glass.
This time last year it was snowing when you kneeled
to lace my skates and it was so nice to run into each other
under our pseudonyms like that. I said, Times of duress
call for a record. You said, Did you say something? No,
I said. You said, Why don’t you take off that helmet?
I can’t hear you when you do that thing with your mouth.
What thing with my mouth?, I said, and you closed your
eyes. And you held both my hands so if I tried to spell
our names you wouldn’t see. I cut the number of my age
in ice. Will I ever be any older? No. I will not. Where
you’re from they’re cosmonauts, but you’re the one
who left, I said. I could feel the oxygen running low.
The snow blanketed the totality of all existing things.
ZELDA
I want Rattawut Lapcharoensap to write my biography.
I want him to come to my apartment when my boyfriend’s
not home. I want to make him coffee. I know that he
will want to tape record all of our sessions, and
after I die I want these tapes catalogued and archived
in the temperature controlled basement of an ivy league
university library. Additionally, I would like
my biography to have a neon purple dust jacket and
I would like Nancy Milford to grant us permission
to call the book Zelda even though there is already
a book called Zelda because it is about the life of Zelda
Fitzgerald. Maybe because it is just one word and
that word is a name we won’t need permission; I’m
not a lawyer. Also: I would like Martin Scorsese to direct
the movie based on the book based on my real life.
I don’t know if any of you have seen The Departed yet, but
I just saw it last night and my life is almost exactly like that
except instead of Boston I grew up in Chicago, and instead
of going to police academy I toured with Cirque du Soleil.
If Rattawut could just get a hold of a copy of the screenplay
and make Matt Damon a female trapeze artist
who was born to Prussian immigrant parents in 1984,
I’m sure he’d have a good three, four chapters right there, easy.
Have any of you ever tried to think of all the different ways
you could disappoint your parents and then done them?
I chose the calliope over the violin; I ran with gypsies;
I dated a boy three years younger than me just because
he had an apartment and I didn’t want to live
with my parents anymore. I want Rattawut to tell me
he likes my blue sweater. Maybe I’ll sit next to him
while I show him old photographs and wait to see
if he puts his hand on my leg. I don’t know what will happen
to me after I turn 23, but when my biography comes out
I will have to avoid the reviews and the interviews
and any website that gives away the ending.
I will probably have to spend a few weeks in a cabin
in Minnesota. By then, I will have broken up
with my boyfriend in order to marry Rattawut
beneath a chuppah in the western suburbs of Chicago
because even though I’m not technically Jewish,
my father is, and any tradition is better than none.
When Rattawut gives me my autographed copy,
I’ll stay inside my childhood, making daisy chains,
enrolled in summer programs for the gifted and talented.
I’ll concentrate on the photos of myself holding prize ribbons,
playing leapfrog, dressed up like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.