The fuck you are. You following me, bitch? You think you’re just going to follow me?
I don’t know where I am going, I said and I was shaking and he was the opposite of shaking and he took a step back, inhaled slow, and I saw a diner across the street, a twenty-four-hour sign beaming and I decided to cross the middle of the street and just leave him alone because he now seemed to not be a good person for me to be following.
You tell your man I had enough of his shit, he yelled. I had enough, you got me?
Okay, I said, but I said it so quietly that no one could hear it but me.
If I see your fucking face again, it’s gonna be personal, he said, his voice getting softer, getting personal. You tell your man. You tell him that.
So I did — I invented a little man in my head and I told him, It’s going to be personal. I think he understood. Everything is personal.
Not many people were in the diner and a waitress smiled at me in a way I had not seen anyone smile in a long time and she said, Sit wherever you like, I’ll be with you in just a minute. I ordered a plate of something that came with everything and when HELLO My name is BELINDA asked me if she could bring me anything else I said, Yes, and she said, What’s that? And I said, What? And she said, Anything else? And I thought for a second and said, Coffee, and this seemed to explain something to her, this desire for a cup of coffee at some hour that must have been close to midnight, and so BELINDA smiled and said, All right, sweetie.
I spent the next memorable portion of my life watching the rippled surface of my coffee quiver and I knew with an increasing intensity that everyone on this planet is also always shaking ever so slightly all the time, that the earth shakes us by shifting and settling its stone self, and the machines we’ve made, they also shake us, the air conditioners and eighteen-wheelers and marriages and electric generators and the people who dance with so much stomping and the wrecking balls and the bulldozers and the cars that go so fast and hit other cars and animals and the radio signals and the lives around us that run at a frequency that interferes with our own frequencies. We do not notice any of this shaking until we do notice but most people will be able to forget it for a while until they notice again but I cannot stop seeing how the earth and everything on it is ever and ever shaking, all the time, the plant stems breaking through the sidewalk and the steel beams and the skyscrapers and the people who think they are sitting perfectly still, and I can’t seem to stop seeing everything quivering all the time, husbands sitting in armchairs and chalkboards and brick courtyards and the tops of trees you can see from the windows and good knives and linen shirts, and being unable to unsee the little shake that is everywhere has made it too difficult for me to go about life in the way that other people seem to be able to go about it, people ordering lunch in a deli and old ladies wearing too many coats and the policemen on smoke breaks and teenagers with secrets and smiles and the birds that just fly and are, and the leashed dogs, walking leashed in the streets, tethered to their owners, happily tethered forever. No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without my voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks to Jin Auh, Eric Chinski, Emily Bell, and everyone at FSG and the Wylie Agency who helped turn this manuscript into a book. I’m also grateful to the editors who encouraged and published early excerpts: Cal Morgan at Harper Perennial; Dave Eggers, Chelsea Hogue, and Jordan Bass at McSweeney’s Quarterly; Alban Fisher at trnsfr; Brandon Hobson at elimae; Natalie Eilbert and Jillian Kuzma at The Atlas Review. I am forever humbled and grateful for the support the New York Foundation for the Arts offered me during the completion of this work.
These fine people — Sean Brennan, Kendra Grant Malone, Danny Wallace, Sara Richardson, Sasha Fletcher, Peter Musante, Summer Shapiro, and Filip Tejchman — need to be thanked for so many things in the past, present, and future. And, for lovingly tolerating the writer at your dinner table, a sort of entertaining misfortune, I’d like to offer a grateful apology to my family — blood, lagniappe, and chosen — especially to my past and present collaborators at 3B, who helped me build a room of my own.