I Wanted It All (December 2023)

Unsteady awakening work tableau. Up wrong, walking wrong, taking everything the wrong way.

You are never on time to the lab anymore, but it hardly matters. The blood still spins in the centrifuge, regardless of who is there.

ID card swipe in the lobby. Two of the security guards are huddled by the very not-bulletproof plexi, and as you walk by, one of them says to the other, “Forgive and forget.” Resigned and flat.

You fall into the elevator like a stray eyelash, tunneling into his thoughts, disappearing into speculation. Tall grasses billowing in the semantic fields.

It’s 7:30 in the morning, and you wonder what relayed trespass could have prompted the guard’s divine edict. As you move upwards without feeling moved, along the floors, you make torpid conjectures about what he was talking about. Was he recalling an unpleasant incident with a partner, a parent, a sibling, a pet, a colleague? Or is it bigger than all that?

Colorful permutations continue to flute out around the cloudy postulate, forgive and forget. A kaleidoscopic range of possible relationship models and bromidic stimuli.

The security guard’s girlfriend–high school sweetheart with a wandering eye, or an impoverished gait, or a simple tongue.

Forgive and forget.

The security guard’s mother–the poisoner or the torturer, absent or ever-present. The addict or the victim or the highly-strung neurotic.

Forgive and forget.

Or his father–well, it’s hard to talk about the father disparagingly. Even the destroying father, who torched it all...it can be hard to talk badly about him, to assign pathologies in retrospect. He eludes definition and promotes obfuscation, even from the relative safety of your most private thoughts. Um, haven’t you said enough about him already?

Forgive and forget.

His sister or brother– an escapee, a lifer, a screen memory. A yardstick to measure one’s life against, a bloated warning seen too late.

Forgive and forget.

The security guard’s Lassie or Pete the Pup. And what do dogs do wrong, really–except die?

Forgive and forget.

The security guard’s security guard coworker. The one he confided in, the one who told him to forgive and forget. What does he know? How did he learn it any better than the rest of us? What will he hold onto, when circumstances force him to surrender his easy platitudes?

Forgive and forget.

Who can be forgiven and forgotten, and what for? Those in one’s life who invoke a loss of control, inflect insecurities, project intimations or intimidations which are only ever magnified by time, instead of mercifully diminished like you might’ve once thought a long time ago, when you were younger. You finally arrive at your designated floor. Make a wish.

The forensic reconstruction of forgiving and forgetting can go on and on, and you are wounded by the time you reach your workstation. A robotic performance of keycard slides, beeps, and prompts are necessary for entry.

What’s wrong this time? the lab tech Maurizio asks as he puts an emasculated, bulbectomized rat into a plastic bag and sets it on a sterile metal surface. He starts a timer and begins to take notes. No squirming observed.

Uh, I don’t know. It gets darker earlier in the day. And I feel cold. You pull your lab coat tightly around your shoulders. Do you know what it means, Maurizio, to forgive and forget?

He shrugs and looks at the bag. This rat is on sooo much GHB right now. Flash of anger, but you smile tightly and begin editing your report. The timer goes off, eventually, and the rat is removed from the bag, still alive. You type: I learned helplessness from rats. Learned helplessness in rats. Neuronal atrophy, it can happen to you too.

You want to say that the time passes without incident or intolerable pain, but your spine pays the price and remembers, and so do the rats. You meet the project manager 20 minutes before lunch, in an alcove on one of the lower floors. She sits in an Arne Jacobsen Swan chair, and has a miniature replica of the chair on her desk. Cool blue fabric upholstery, and just big enough for a rat.

So...how are we feeling about the hippocampal pathway?

You go a little berserk. Don’t you ever feel that the work is bullshit? Why are the rats fat? Because we overfeed them and prevent them from exercising. Why are the rats maladapted? Because we separate them from their mothers, we inject them with corticosteroids, we pit them against each other for limited resources, we dangle them interminably from their tails. Why are the rats depressed? We isolate them, we deprive them, we make them play games we know they’ll lose! The labor of verification for things we already know has to stop, and the things we don’t know–maybe we don’t need to know. When is someone going to say, Enough! We don’t need to make the rat transparent, we don’t need to put neurotransmitters into the rat’s brain to see how it reacts to synthetic cannabinoids, we don’t need to install an AUX into the rat so we can play songs from its body. Everyone’s passing around checks like they won’t ever bounce...frauds, all...and me too.

You’re leaking. Your hands are covered in clear snot. Carmen taps on the desk impatiently.

I hear you, Moda...but the fact remains that their neural pathways closely resemble our own and are easily manipulated for genetic studies. This disease model we’re running can really change the game in a big way.

No. Every day I come in here without putting up a fight, I’m selling something out. Something dearer to me than I’ll ever know.

She hands you a handkerchief, irritated.

You sell out when you compromise ethical standards for the sake of personal gain. Not to be rude, but what have you gained so far, really? Do you even know what gain is? It’s the OPPOSITE of LOSS.

And if you don’t have any new insights on the ways we’re approaching neurogenesis, well, what do you think would be best for the end of the year solstice party? Should we do the staff art exhibition again? Laura has really gotten into making miniatures. Look!

She points to the little chair, with the polished aluminum frame. You look at the bigger chair where Carmen sits.

You can only thinly venture, Um, potluck again? before leaving. Okay, seriously, forgive and forget. Extend grace. Try again tomorrow.

————————————

After work, you drive by your ex-boyfriend’s house and sit outside with the engine idling, rubbing your hands together, as you have been in the habit of doing since he died. His autopsy report was delayed for several months, but you ordered a certified copy from the coroner’s office, and once you got it, read it over and over like a missive from God. You filed it away with your other reports, some gruesome, some banal. Child stars, left-handed bass players, models who were simply too beautiful. You didn’t revisit the paperwork often. Receiving Leon’s was essentially a labor of confirmation, anyway.

Like you didn’t already know. Like a more clinical understanding of the situation would somehow transform the outcome, undo it, just kidding. Like Maurizio’s rat, he was also on sooo much GHB. A suicide–set in motion by a large, invisible scientist.

Expressing self at the expense of self, the price of lived and unlived anger, murky and ashed potentialities on a well-crafted mantle. You keep thinking you’ll knock on the door one day and say to whoever lives there now, Hi, my name is Modafinil Esperanza Garcia, I am a scientist, and someone I didn’t love but kind of loved, despite myself, died alone in that room over there, surrounded by gummy worms and schoolbuses. Will you let me in? I am a prisoner of my childhood, in the way that we all are...I have to write my own report...please.

But you drive home instead. Striated networks are not communities, and in good conscience you cannot burden a stranger with a manifestation of complicated grief that has little to do with them. Forgive and forget.

Every night is a study in commandments, in absolutes, other people’s axioms as armature for a complete world. A total, thoroughly examined life. Self-directed rules and moral codes that chafe against reality. Rats die, people die, but you must adapt, must live a life that leads by example, must never sacrifice what you know for cruel but convenient precepts. Will it ever be less painful? No, no, the opposite. More and more, everlasting pain, and you guess it would be wrong to steel yourself against it.

Remember to remember, remember?

————————————

in a dream, i drove out to visit you in a heavenly rehab or a rehab-ly heaven, and i saw and reflected and allowed myself the total illusion–that you would recover from this terrible accident and be fine, mostly, just a little worse for wear.

in another dream, i work hard on my defective personality,

and my rage, and the wrongs outside.

i have a family with someone who also works hard, and doesn’t inflict lasting mental sufferings upon

our son, kava, or daughter, kratom,

and together we all walk our samoyed dog, nootropic-stack

when the furrowed horror widens & everything else becomes impossible

not being a liar or a spiritual criminal not advancing deranged technologies not being complicit in all i do not directly challenge becoming a language isolate

really, i don’t know.... stay close to me, even if sometimes the only thing i can do well is see.