CAJETAN SORICH / excerpt from THE AMERICAN RECONQUEST
“The American Reconquest” appears in its entirety in Always Crashing Issue Five, now available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores everywhere (we particularly like Pilsen Community Books in Chicago and White Whale Books in Pittsburgh).
It’s a swamp. There’s lots of carbon. That’s the big thing. She knew this, and this was why she chose the swamp. Plus, Florida. It never gets cold. Her skin wouldn’t crack, she’d meet new people, smell new plants. And, oh, does she smell new plants. Their burps. And alligator feces, and small, decomposing, fuzzy animals curled beneath the bubbling skin of the water.
Everything here is unfamiliar.
One of the few things she misses about the city is lines of striped traffic barricades, easel ones with the round, blinking lights on top. In the wet dark of the swamp she remembers how they looked when off duty, roped together, blinking in the icy dark like flickering lollipops. Sheer, hard, orange, all lined up like that.
In Chicago she would sometimes lean back in her work chair with her arms out, the chair back short enough for her shoulder blades to spread apart while free from the touch of anything but the air. She pretended that she was floating on her back in the sky. That was only at first and about as fun as things got overall.
*
Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but that’s how I felt by the end, anyway. It seemed to me that everybody back there in the city was deeply unhappy. Then it burnt to a crisp on an unspecial morning. Or, again, so it felt.
You know how that goes. Over and over. And over. Someone out there, alone, in the dark, manages to find what looks, for a moment, like safety or peace, or even just a place to rest. And very soon the ugly forces that have been dogging this place since Europeans first arrived here show up, take it back, monetize it, and kick out whoever discovered it. That’s a history as old as the Americas themself. Since, at least, they’ve been called the Americas.
With dew on my skin I decided it was time to try and sleep. I pressed the mushy button on the little blue radio and killed the broadcast.1
*
At the top of my final year in Chicago I moved to a new apartment. It was summertime, and I found myself in a loft that at night became dank with cold river mist bouncing up from below. On even the muggiest summer nights I left the air off, for by dusk the mist took a vibrant scent and cooled my skin just enough. I would wake up every night at 3 a.m., wrapped in sheets slightly wet.
In the fall I maintained my ways. I did not turn on the heat at night. I did not want it to filter the river droplets back outside, or to obliterate them right there with its hot, dry breath.
Months later, near the end of October, I woke up at 3 a.m. covered in dew. I was cold, teeth chattering and knees knocking, a whole show. In only cotton undies and a wide silk shirt handed down to me from my grandmother, I vibrated over to my dresser for leggings. I slid a quivering leg into each pant. The dresser with its honey wood was pale blue under the moonlight pouring through eight foot windows. I had a nice place.
Framed by the fat glowing bulbs of the bathroom mirror my lips were pale blue. That wet cold had me wide awake. I ran a hot shower. I set a heavy fleece sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, and long underwear on the toilet, prepared to seal the shower heat into my body before the cold air could take it.
Most importantly, I would not turn on that sickening, dry heat.
Above the drawbridges of the Chicago River should not be a place for rogue living. There was no way my scrawny body was going to survive the coming fall nights without hypothermia.
Yet the thought of that fake air pumping through, a dry throat. I worked over forty hours each week to afford this soggy loft apartment at the top of a creaking millhouse, and I would keep it soggy.
That was the one part of my life I felt was still mine. The air inside my home. It was 5 a.m., and I still lay awake too cold.
I put on a teensy fisherman beanie that a whiny man I had slept with last week left behind and thin knit gloves, then transversed diagonally from my bed to the large open kitchen. I ground coffee beans and scooped them into the percolator. Standing in a spot where the shining wood floor has dulled slightly matte, I inhaled the smell of coffee mixing with crisp river air. The Bialetti gurgled over tiny blue flames, nearly echoing off of the obsidian countertops.
I had a vintage blue velour chair with a square wood frame, the same honey colored wood as my dresser and the beams that cut across the loft, which I curled in to sip my coffee. Two hours later, I watched one of the bridges dislodge and begin to rise.
*
I hadn’t yet fallen back asleep but my alarm rang. I had to get ready for work. I would think about my wet apartment later.
My head ached and I saw little white worms ping in the corners of my vision. Work was a fifteen minute walk. A law office, I was a legal assistant, mostly faxing and copying, but I was originally hired as a proofreader. My title had since expanded to assistantship to be more menial, but with more pay.
In the elevator I came to terms with how sleep deprived I was, how it was going to be a terrible day. At my stout oak desk I began to come to terms with the fact that I’d have to turn on the heat later. It was not plausible to trade sleep for moist river air. Allowing myself to be kept up by the cold was dysfunctional. I could not afford to be dysfunctional.
I got home at 8:30 that evening. Upon activating the heat, I realized I could not afford to live that way, either. I was suffocating. Merely five minutes in, I was suffocating.
After work I had gone to a sports bar under the L where I ate peanuts and drank vodka which turned red and blue against the flatscreens lining the walls. I would prepare carefully, I told myself. It would be fine. It was just a matter of becoming properly relaxed beforehand.
I asked for extra ice in my second vodka. They had large and serious square cubes that frosted the glass instantly.
It wasn’t my usual routine to stop for an after work drink, even though my days at the firm sometimes stretched into ten hours. It wasn’t my usual type of guy to approach me as I finished the second vodka, and it wasn’t usual for me to say yes to a third.
He was a construction worker, or a dock guy of some sort. I don’t remember. He had strayed to me from a table of men in the same blunt and dusty boots as his. We sat beside each other at the bar. In the cool light his nose cast an oblong shadow across his cheek.
He asked if I worked nearby and I said no. He asked if I lived nearby, and I especially said no. I was embarrassed by the prime location of my loft.
“I live in Beverly. Was in the city for a bit till Da died, just a bit ago, and now I got his house to look after.”
“You have to?”
They had the TV in the corner blaring something political, or maybe just geographical. The Congo, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, South Vietnam, 1973 Chile— Things started to blur, my chest warm.
“Well, it was his Da’s before that.”
His name was Artan. He had a crooked smile where the right side didn’t rise as high as the left. I spent some time wondering what it reminded me of, until I realized it was of my own. Five root canals and fifteen cavities left some of my nerves dead, though I didn’t know what his story was. His hair wasn’t a warm red with orange undertones but a cool red with blue beneath. He had it cut short but long enough so he had some forehead tendrils. A little style, but not stylish enough so that he reminded me of the whiny metrosexual with the tiny hat.
I didn’t share much about myself, but the more I looked at him the more I realized: a warm body was exactly what I needed that night.
Unfortunately, I threw up in my lap upon the fourth vodka.
Embarrassed but unable to balance on my own, I let him hail me a cab. I took it virtually around the corner. A waste. But I told Artan I didn’t live nearby. I didn’t want him to know I was a liar.
I waited to take off my coat until I was in my warm, steaming bathroom. I peeled off my puke soaked wool dress and opaque black tights. The hot water would surely infuse me with enough heat to make it through the night. Just one more. I would put it off as long as I could.
But I was not warm enough. I layered up, but the wetness in the air penetrated the duvet, my long underwear, in a way that normal cold could not. I became so desperate for just one more heatless night, that I called Artan afterall. I would tell him I was housesitting.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m feeling better. I’m sorry about that.”
“About what?” I assumed he was trying to make light of my disgrace with a little joke. I laughed.
“Anyway, I was hoping you could come by. I know it’s late, but it gets chilly up here.” I was still drunk.
“What a nice surprise.” He paused. “Certainly. I’ll be there.”
“Okay. Let me know when you’re ready for the address.”
“No need.” Did I give it to him at the bar? Was I that drunk that I don’t recall? Did I reveal my lie without even remembering?
I sat in my blue chair waiting for him. My phone rang but it wasn’t Artan. It was the whiny man from last week.
Oh, Jesus. That explained the address thing. It was not Artan who I’d called.
I did not answer. In blue despair, I turned on that life sucking heat.
*
This was not the real tragedy of it all, of living in Chicago, of skin being stripped by artifical hot air. Because the real tragedy was the fat black market government subsidized bullets that could penetrate bricks, cement, cedar shingle siding, wood clapboard siding, fiber cement home siding, vinyl and aluminum siding, and even seamless steel siding; especially great for busting through peasants, communists, working class, Triangle Shirtwaisters, revolutionaries, Sandinistas, Black Panthers, Kennedy Brothers, artists, any genuine counterculture. Holes right through uprisings, through nationalization of oil, of rising literacy and lowering poverty rates.
This is why she chose the swamp. It’s outside. What good are walls in this day and age? What good is any space she has carved from a whirring hell for her solace? Even her childhood home was uprooted in the 2008 crisis. As long as her lifespan overlaps with the Highway of Death and combing Bolivia for lithium, she will try to stay outside. Outside, the air is just the air.
Unless it’s the insurmountably bitter cold Chicago winter air.
She reduces her belongings to one fat suitcase. As she packs she listens to college radio through her little blue speaker.
*
A swamp, aside from the carbon, is simply low ground that collects water. It is wet, forested land. There are true swamps and transitional swamps, which are swamps that are too wet to grow trees but too shallow to be marshes. A marsh is a swamp with no trees. A true swamp has trees. They are flooded forests.
She is in a true swamp. In the dark she falls asleep staring at a sky blacker than she’s ever seen. Her ceiling is layers of stars and the ghoulish silhouettes of standing trees and fallen trees and twisted trees.
*
In the mornings there are green vines and thick, sexy ferns. Very sexy ferns. I live for the ferns, now.
Cajetan Sorich is a writer and performance artist who grew up beside a soybean field in Illinois. Her work has appeared in Scapi Magazine, MAKE Literary Magazine, Queen City Writers, and Open Heart Chicago: An Anthology of Chicago Writing.