Free Dispatch from the Future by Leigh Stein Page B

salted; a car passed
    us and fishtailed ahead at the stoplight; I forgot
    the ending, and so I pushed my characters in front of a train.
    The man with the gun didn’t like that at all.
    How was there a train at the beach? Maybe they left
    the beach, I said. Should they go on vacation instead?
    The man said, What if they went in front of the train, but
    the train stopped in time. Good idea, I said. He read
    my name off my drivers license and I didn’t correct
    his pronunciation; then he told me to close my eyes and
    I felt something cold hit my head. My heart stopped a little
    bit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was
    a snowball at my feet. Where did you say you were from again?
    I just wanted to unbutton your collar and see for myself.
     
YOU’RE MISPRONOUNCING MY NAME AGAIN
    This time last year I was an astronaut
    in a window display at a department store
    that has since been bought out by another
    department store. I wore a gray crepe dress
    and a helmet that they pumped full of oxygen.
    I had one line to say. I mouthed the words, but
    no one ever heard me. They tapped the glass,
    saying, We can’t hear you on this side. Take
    off the helmet. Take off my helmet? I mouthed
    back. What?, they said. This time last year I
    thought I was speaking English, but lip reading
    has become a forgotten art. This time last year
    I learned to speak in the dark with my hands.
    I know the sign for tree and forest; dead bird;
    the spelling of my maiden name; long walks
    on the beach of Normandy. You think everything’s
    about you and you’ve been right since the end
    of the war. I took that astronaut job so I could
    tell you I took it. I took that astronaut job so I
    could miss you from the cosmos beyond the glass.
    This time last year it was snowing when you kneeled
    to lace my skates and it was so nice to run into each other
    under our pseudonyms like that. I said, Times of duress
    call for a record. You said, Did you say something? No,
    I said. You said, Why don’t you take off that helmet?
    I can’t hear you when you do that thing with your mouth.
    What thing with my mouth?, I said, and you closed your
    eyes. And you held both my hands so if I tried to spell
    our names you wouldn’t see. I cut the number of my age
    in ice. Will I ever be any older? No. I will not. Where
    you’re from they’re cosmonauts, but you’re the one
    who left, I said. I could feel the oxygen running low.
    The snow blanketed the totality of all existing things.
     
ZELDA
    I want Rattawut Lapcharoensap to write my biography.
    I want him to come to my apartment when my boyfriend’s
    not home. I want to make him coffee. I know that he
    will want to tape record all of our sessions, and
    after I die I want these tapes catalogued and archived
    in the temperature controlled basement of an ivy league
    university library. Additionally, I would like
    my biography to have a neon purple dust jacket and
    I would like Nancy Milford to grant us permission
    to call the book
Zelda
even though there is already
    a book called
Zelda
because it is about the life of Zelda
    Fitzgerald. Maybe because it is just one word and
    that word is a name we won’t need permission; I’m
    not a lawyer. Also: I would like Martin Scorsese to direct
    the movie based on the book based on my real life.
    I don’t know if any of you have seen
The Departed
yet, but
    I just saw it last night and my life is almost exactly like that
    except instead of Boston I grew up in Chicago, and instead
    of going to police academy I toured with Cirque du Soleil.
    If Rattawut could just get a hold of a copy of the screenplay
    and make Matt Damon a female trapeze artist
    who was born to Prussian immigrant parents in 1984,
    I’m sure he’d have a good three, four chapters right there, easy.
    Have any of you ever tried to think of all the different ways
    you could disappoint your parents and then done them?
    I chose the calliope over the violin; I ran with gypsies;
    I dated a boy three years