Pete Segall
Recessional
By the Tate Modern I Sat Down and Played Football Manager
In a room that once housed a turbine, a giant marionette was dragged up and down and across the floor by massive chains. The puppet was a boy. Towheaded, apple-cheeked, loosely assembled. The chains were fastened to each of his limbs. I do not want to describe the sound they made as he was pulled slowly across the room. He was lifted into the air in a standing position so everyone could get a good look at his menacing face. Then the chains went slack and he dropped. “When a Man Loves a Woman” started playing from unseen speakers. That was it for me. The museum was free anyway. The sunlight outside flattened everything. Everyone around me was a child and they all longed for purpose. The skyscrapers on the other side of the river huddled together, awaiting judgment. I could not map my confusion onto anything specific. It was just that my sense of premonition felt like it had unspooled. I thought maybe I would go back inside and look in the gift shop. Maybe they had a framed print with a diagram showing how to turn confusion into better quality-of-life numbers. But I didn’t want one of these leering children stealing my seat. All cities are ideas that lost the thread. If only I knew how to sleep, you and I could have been in the same place.
Bedtime
Do you remember, when we sat in the cafe beside the dredged canal, and ate yellowjackets sautéed in port reduction and murmured to each other things that violated local obscenity laws, and we were served paprika ice cream by a woman with a limp, and we looked at each other with all that perplexing lust, and as we walked along the towpath, kicking aside a clear lane through the dead animals and litter, there was the singer who followed us, serenading us with a song we did not understand, his voice like a warning of impending weather while all we wanted was to find a spot of lesser filth so we could fuck against a foreign tree but this man with his teetering song hounded us until I finally threw a few of those asymmetrical coins in his direction, which he scooped up off the ground, complete with dead leaves and discarded plasters? I’ve finally discovered what his song meant. It went, do not look for anything clean, anything clean you find will turn the color of soot. Lay in the rubbish, lay in the debris. All that matters is that I am not you and you are not she.
Slow Walker
At every stop on our trip we wrote postcards to the children. I wrote, with maybe too much enthusiasm, about weather and history and what I had seen from the windows of trains. On the other side were pictures of cenotaphs or rivers. We slid the cards to postal clerks and said, America. The cards didn’t begin to arrive until we were back home. The last one we mailed came several months after the trip ended. A few weeks later we got another postcard. It was sent from a city we hadn’t visited but the handwriting was unquestionably mine. You wouldn’t believe how much they’ve rebuilt, I wrote. The image was of an ostrich. Then another came from a small town I’d never heard of. I’m happy to report my leg is feeling better, it said. The postmarks grew farther and farther away from where we had traveled. The printed characters moved into new, unrecognizable scripts. The self-murder we commit by growing older almost always goes unpunished, I wrote opposite a hazy black and white image of two smiling men in long robes. The postcards are still arriving. The most recent one shows an immaculate night sky gravid with stars, the slightest glimmer of a city in the lower right corner. There is no location noted. Given enough time bewilderment decays into hope, I have written. I’d be so happy if you’d visit soon.
Pete Segall's writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Joyland, The Collagist, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.