Banana Palace Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Across the Sea

  Dmitry Itskov: A Cento

  The Gods Are in the Valley

  Morning News

  Talk Show

  By the Waters of Lethe

  Moo and Thrall

  Lady Xoc

  Urgent Care

  A Debris Field of Apocalypticians—a Murder of Crows

  En Route

  1 Morning Drizzle, Chicken Little

  2 Office Hours

  3 Critique

  4 Someone Else’s Cake

  5 Sixth and Cumae

  6 Selfie

  7 Happy Hour

  8 Going Under

  9 A Book before Bed

  10 Man semblable,—mon frére!

  Fortune Cookie

  Banana Palace

  Murray, My

  The Living Teaching

  Meanwhile

  Melancholia

  My Sentence

  The Point of the Needle

  Watching the Sea Go

  At the End of My Hours

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Dana Levin

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  ACROSS THE SEA

  1

  We used our texting machines

  to look up the definition of soul

  in the middle of class—

  thumb-joints at work

  above the stitched paper

  of actual books in which

  we’d been reading

  poetry

  about a Prophetess,

  one of the human cave-bound Time Machines…

  She had traveled a long way through the four dimensions

  to be with us.

  From someone’s mouth to someone’s ear.

  Someone’s hand

  to tablet, papyrus, parchment, paper, the liquid crystal light

  of our computer screens—

  Liquid crystal light they’d really

  called it that,

  the inventors

  at Marconi Wireless.

  “See if you can hear anything,

  Mr. Kemp!” Marconi had cried, the day they sailed the letter S

  across the sea—I loved

  the synesthesia of that, See if you can hear, they’d coaxed some radio waves

  to propel the alphabet

  through the air—

  Was that Marconi wishing

  he was a liquid crystal light and not a

  break of bones

  that had to fear the future—

  2

  A human-headed bird, the Egyptians said.

  A butterfly, an innermost.

  A Web site

  I was afraid to enter: wewantyoursoul.com the students

  laughed and laughed—

  soul-adorning, soul-afflicting, soul-amazing—

  soul-and-body-lashings—

  They really called it that, the ropes they wound

  round oilskin

  to keep out sea and storm, our sailing men—

  who sent the cheeriest message you could imagine

  to usher in

  the Telegraphic Age: Thanks

  am well—

  The soul, it was an ellipse in white, it fizzed,

  their chaplains said, with God’s

  CPR,

  “breath of life”—

  So they could travel

  through length and width and depth and time and

  man a ship—

  where someone

  in a small room

  would tap out a message—

  to a far man on a far shore, and they

  would understand one another…

  3

  He shared all roads and he braved all seas with me,

  all threats of the waves and skies is what the Hero says

  of his dead father—but it sounded like soul to me.

  Guide companion—Captain

  of the ship of flesh I had to ride, where “I”

  was a third thing in the closed grip

  of the body’s vise—

  Marconi, he thought he’d hear

  the agony of Christ

  with a sensitive dial to help him sieve.

  He trawled

  the frequencies—

  for eli lama sabachthani no song lost—

  no impress of tongue and teeth that made a sound, ever lost—

  if you had a receiver—

  a virgin say, in a mountain crag, or a brain-bot

  from the tnano-future, did it

  matter which—

  You’d have a house

  for a god’s mouth

  and it would message you

  your rescue…

  Rescued from what is what I’m trying to mean.

  Rescued from what you have to fear the future

  more than you used to which sounded like the soul

  waving a series of flags at me—

  4

  We wanted arrival to be instant

  because we didn’t want to be separate

  from what we loved.

  Wireless, weightless, and omniscient is how we

  refined our machines—

  We had a dream

  that we could smash the bans

  of matter and time and

  still be alive—

  Was that the soul, wishing

  we would invent the body

  out of existence,

  so many of us now

  enthralled by doom…

  The students peer so deep into their handheld screens they

  look like Diviners.

  Each one

  a scrying Sibyl at the world’s

  end—

  scribbled-on leaves thrown out of their caves

  and into the wind—

  The only part of the Epic

  I make them read, just after

  the crew is borne ashore, but before

  the walk amongst the dead—

  The part between.

  Where there’s a body, agonized by light.

  And someone lost.

  And a query—

  DMITRY ITSKOV: A CENTO

  Dmitry Itskov, 32, has a colossal dream: an early start

  for his own

  mechanical face.

  He’s one of the men with brains, wondering How—

  To evade

  the death of meat, he thinks—

  By 2045 we’ll have “substance-

  independent minds,” then

  no need for biology at all…

  At 25, he started to have the symptoms of a midlife crisis:

  the musical instruments unlearned, the books unread—

  The more he contemplated the world, the more broken it seemed—

  “What we’re doing here does not look like the behavior of grown-ups,

  killing the planet and killing ourselves.”

  Decoupling the mind from the needy human body

  could pave the way for a more sublime human spirit—

  It could allow paralyzed people to communicate,

  or control a robotic arm or a wheelchair—

  It could allow you to start your car if you think,

  “Start my car”—

  Within a century, we’ll frequent “body service shops,”

  choose our bodies from a catalogue, then

  transfer our consciousness

  to one better suited for life on Mars—

  “From the very beginning,” he said, “we realized Dmitry

  was not an ordinary person.”

  He leads a life that could best be described as monastic—

  No meat, fish, coffee, alcohol, or cold water—

  Meat gives him an energy he’s “not comfortable with.”

  What is the brain? What is consciousness?

  It contains plenty of terrifying, brink-of-extinction plot twists.

  It’s somewhere between a cellphone call and teleportation.

  It’s speaking with his voice in real time.

  Get right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like—

  He has the kind of generically handsome face and perfect smile

  that seem computer generated,

  complete with all the particulars of consciousness and per
sonality—

  Yes, we have seen this movie and yes, it always leads to robots

  enslaving humanity—

  For now, just acquiring a lifelike robotic head

  is a splurge.

  THE GODS ARE IN THE VALLEY

  eighth century, Chinese

  The mind sports god-extensions.

  It’s the mountain from which

  the tributaries spring: self, self, self, self—

  rivering up

  on curling plumes

  from his elaborate

  headpiece

  of smoke.

  His head’s on fire.

  Like a Paleolithic shaman

  working now in the realm of air, he

  folds his hands—

  No more casting bones

  for the consulting seeker, this gesture

  seems to mean.

  Your business, his flaming head suggests,

  is with your thought-machine.

  How it churns and churns.

  Lord Should and Not-Enough,

  Mute the Gigantor, looming dumb

  with her stringy hair—

  Deadalive Mom-’n’-Dad (in the sarcophagus

  of parentheses

  you’ve placed them)—

  He’s a yogi, your man

  with a hat of smoke. Serene, chugging out streams

  of constructed air…

  Mind’s an accident

  of bio-wiring, is one line of thinking.

  We’re animals that shit out

  consciousness, is another.

  The yogi says:

  you must understand yourself

  as projected vapor.

  Thus achieve your

  superpower.

  MORNING NEWS

  We were mutants, we were being

  put into groups.

  Assigned a patch of gymnasium floor—

  A gelatinous plasma with star-sparking

  was part of my body—

  Next to me a woman who grew food from her skin, we would

  never go hungry—

  as I lit our escape

  through tunneling darks.

  Which was the beginning of a different, more

  courageous dream—

  Self-lit, self-fed, we’d be

  compensating masters for the world’s

  want—

  throwing out thread

  so we could grow enormous in oval webs—

  Gently led to lie down—

  Hard mats on the gymnasium floor and then

  I woke up—

  A regular member of the day parade, not

  changed at all—

  Despite the speeding heft of the changed life, its

  morning news—

  The death of ice, of food, of space, what

  we call Doom—

  which might be a bending—

  a flow of permissions—

  to forge a mutant form—

  TALK SHOW

  I’m being interviewed on a television talk show, I’m an expert on breathing. “Sooo,” the host croons. “Oxygen. How’s that feel?” “Like having an alien in your chest,” I say, and the live audience roars. “Let’s see you breathe,” the host says. “Go ahead, lung up—” and I do, inhaling and exhaling to wild applause.

  It’s billed as an “in-depth two-part exclusive” on retaining the use of all my limbs. “Which do you like better,” the host asks, “twirling your hair or jiggling your foot? Opening a door or kicking it closed? Which,” he leans in, “would you prefer: Parkinson’s or polio?” Flustered, I start to stand up and he slaps his hands to his face, saying, “She’s standing up, ladies and gentlemen, she’s standing up—” and I freeze, to mounting applause, half in and half out of my chair.

  It’s another television talk show and I’m “the Doctor of Digestion,” a metabolic whiz. They wheel me out to the stage, perched on an old-timey stand-up scale. “Sooo,” the host croons. “Food. How’s that feel?” Someone cues video and we turn to montage: laparoscopic images of everything I’ve had to eat for the last three days. “Carne Adovada!” the announcer booms. “Split Pea Soup!” Each announcement meets with wild applause. When the video ends I turn back to the host but find you, smoldering comfortably in the host’s appointed chair—you lean forward smiling, your skull-eye gleams, you stick your black-boned finger right down my throat.

  BY THE WATERS OF LETHE

  Who will help me avoid my meat

  suit?

  Who will help me

  never again, I need an excarnation

  specialist—

  Having been born,

  I get so tired

  waiting and waiting for the world to end—

  Such a slow

  drip,

  rushed by occasional

  devastations: flood, fire, storm, plague, the whole

  routine—Still,

  we keep arriving, so much meat born

  every day

  amongst the racket of bones: the ice slide, the ocean rise, the wrecks

  of megalopoli

  along the coasts—Monster corn. Methane

  glory holes.

  Hasn’t there been

  enough of that, on the Plain

  of Forgetfulness,

  that waste—how many times I’ve crossed!—of rock and flame.

  These days,

  you ghost through that and arrive alive in a world

  that burns just the same.

  Fuck that. I’m going back to Camp

  Oblivion—