“You can call me Chan. Who is Chan, you ask? I couldn’t really say.
But tell me: what are you afraid of, and why do you insist on keeping whatever it is in line?
I do all this paperwork in order to shift Chan’s ocean current toward responsibility and respectability, giving her the right words to say and the proper amount of coyness and ambition. I run her errands, took her to LensCrafters to get her a new pair of glasses, but she could only focus on how ‘ew, creepy’ the waxy models on the posters were. So she continues to bump into things, breaks her toes, slams her paws in the car door. She gets scared and hides in baskets of fluff and behind squares of fabric, projecting light signals to strangers.
She does do what I tell her to, most of the time, but she easily stumbles. Sometimes she flat-out rejects the stories I give her to tell and tells her own. They are about owls and scorpions and phallic-shaped factories, but she never speaks – she just splices, plays cut-ups, of everything that has been said before.
She gives everybody hugs. It’s embarrassing.
I try to keep her at bay by pushing her onto her back, like a turtle, and I watch her flounder, plastron up, for a little while. But then she just morphs into an archaeopteryx or a whale or a hedgehog and flies or swims or scurries away, vomiting out litters of amorphous babies and sticking arrows into her hard palate. She is happy.
It is deplorable. This is no place to be content.
Without me, she logically makes no sense in this world. And as much as she protests that this world is not the right one, I am at least able to intimidate her into staying here. She needs me. I give her speech, I give her purpose, I give her meaning. I will not let her disappear.”
I do not know if this means anything at all.
