LETTER #1: EDGAR ALLAN POE

Dear Eddy,

Bells Bells Bells. Miguel has died and the bells are tolling—tolling in my skull.

This monstrous gap of time since I last saw you—not since the wedding, now a funeral. At the moment, I’m here at the undertaker’s, killing time, waiting for what seems like an eternity for a detective to appear. The police are involved because Miguel’s body can’t be found. All this on New Year’s Day.

In a nutshell: I am sad.

Devasted, actually. Numb, probably. The incredible tedium of death. I’m quickly discovering there’s nothing graceful about it, and I know Miguel would have wanted his death to be filled with grace and beauty. I’m not sure how it all works. At thirty-two, the only real death experience I have is my parents who died at the precise moment of my birth (hot air balloon, mountain). I hope you can pop up here to help me out but with Covid raging that’ll be tricky. Come visit. Formulate a plot! It’s eerie being completely alone here Upstate in the house in winter—enough to drive you nuts. People yammer on and on about pandemic isolation, but back when Miguel was still here, we actually found the plague romantic—fires, snuggling, Frida’s tamales—and we worked fantastically well: Miguel, painting like a demon down in his studio—some of his best art; me, creating new alchemical mind techniques in the lab; but let’s discuss all that in person. Despite the magic of which I’m capable, Miguel has now vanished and I can’t seem to get him back—or even locate him. What the hell’s going on? Poe! With all your narrative ticks and twists and raven flights, I’m latching on to notion that maybe you can bring him back to life. Do try. Please. More details: […]

LETTER #2: EMILY DICKINSON

My Dear Sweet Em—

[…] and such was my afternoon with the poet-detective. It’s reassuring knowing that everything’s okay with the cops, but what do you make of the rest of it? My mind is spinning, continually fabricating dreamy narratives within narratives. You’re much more spontaneous than history gives you credit for. I adore it and would love some of that now. Since Miguel died, your little poetry line has been crossing my thoughts—death with a slant. A whimsical tilt to my whole entire life. All my time together with Miguel, fleeting, like birds in flight, quickly here, quickly there, quickly gone. My Miguel, just how did he come to me, how was I able to be with him, to laugh at breakfast, to make love, swim naked, walk hand in hand in Paris on the Rue des Mauvais-Garçons, how did all that come to be and then pass away in an instant?

LETTER #4: MR. ROBOT

Hello Friend… Hello Friend…

Yo, Elliot!

My status? Depressivo.

As a relative newbie to the topic of grief, I’m confirming first-hand the super obvious factoid that death really does suck. Last night, a thought bullet shot into my skull: What if, just what if you, Mister Elliot Anderson, aka Mister Elliot Alderson, aka Neo, the One, aka Mr. Robot, aka my BFF… What if you could hack death. For reals.

Doable?

I mean, you and I are always saying that nothing is fully secure. In any system, there is always a door left open or a closed door that isn’t locked, or a locked door that can be picked. All it takes is a shit ton of patience. Hacking death—I think it’s worth a shot and it beats curling up in corners for days, crying. How is it that you can cry and I can’t? You’re allusive-elusive-reclusive, yet your interiority sneaks its way to the surface and squirts out the eyes. You sob even. I absolutely can’t, bro.

LETTER #10: FRIDA KAHLO

Querida Frida,

[…] I’ve been thinking about when I first met you. I don’t get why mothers-in-law have such a bad rap. You’ve always been fantástica to me. But—I never mentioned how scared shitless I was. All your self-portraits are larger than life. Miguel got the gift from you—they are alive. It’s one thing to meet a painter of haystacks or lily pads; it’s quite another to meet someone who actually sits and stares at you endlessly in the living room. There we were, Miguel and me, years ago, in the NYC apartment, watching The Shining in pitch darkness, and just before the Maze Scene, that little monkey in your self-portrait pops out of your painting and into my lap. Literal heart attack. It then hops to the Calder, creating a fun arty jungle gym. So this is how you choose to introduce yourself to your son-in-law-to-be? Looking back, super cool, but at the time it just intensified my fear—fear of the unibrowed mamacita who insisted on speaking to me in Spanish.

LETTER #17: WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Big Bad Bill!

Considering that in your hundred-plus years you’ve never not not been high, I never told you this misfit drug story, Bill, mostly out of embarrassment. I thought you’d get all sardonic on me for being a pussy, and you’d likely be right. Peer pressure is one thing, but Sardonic Bill B Peer Pressure is brutal. I simply didn’t want sandpaper sheets or horizontal claustrophobia or unescapable VR torture. On the other hand, I will confess to the deep influence that Naked Lunch has had on me, […]

So yeah, Bill: I was way overthinking this heroin thing, but before another thought could be thunk, Knife was inserting the hypodermic into my vein. I suddenly I felt all my blood coursing through the entire vascular system. I was attuned to every capillary where it seemed that Brian Eno was playing discreet music. The bliss was indescribable. So this is what everyone’s talking about! So this is Nirvana! I was filled with joy and wanted it to last, and Knife told me it did last quite a long time and that I was smiling a great deal, but as with many of my good experiences, I do not remember. Do other people have this curse? Always forgetting the good times? […]

My writing is racing because my mind is racing and my mind is racing because my heart is racing. […] I think the best I can do is imagine, and you’re good at that, and I know you can help me with that. Hey, Bill! Let’s hop out of this bathtub hallucination, grab some clothes, and venture out. Together. Just me and you.

Off we go! To imagination nation!

LETTER #32: KALI

O Mai Kali! O Mai Kali!

You are the only goddess in my contacts but know that I am here, prostrated, devout AF despite my never-ending smartassery. A way of masking grief. Plus, I tend to become tense in your presence, a presence for which I am grateful despite how torturous it can be.

Occasionally, I try to imagine my own mother as you, with glowing blue skin, with a necklace of bloody skulls. Terrifying yet comforting. How is it I can find comfort in your violence? Wondrous strange!—yet there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my own philosophy, and one of them is dreams. Sigmund told me that each of us dreams, it’s just a matter of remembering—re-member, re-collect, re-call. So much stuff from the past that needs to get schlepped to the present. Schlepping is a big part of grief, yet it is extremely rare that I get a fantastic dream to remember. So then! My big news! I had a dream last night! And I’m here to tell you all about it.

An amazing dream, a five-star dream, but not an easy dream, nightmarish actually, but that’s why, O Mai Kali, you’re in my life: Not to make the fear vanish but to give me the courage to slog on through it. It began as a light meditation of sorts, nothing formal, just lying in bed, doom-scrolling on my phone through lovely photos, but as soon as I set it down, I began to drift into sleep.

LETTER #39: MARCEL PROUST

Unpunctuated Greetings My Dear Marcel

For quite some time now I’ve been heading to bed rather early and last night I drifted into slumber thinking about going to bed early but with a jolt I realized it was very late and had just had the strangest dream about your translators. I was in a bar, a rough and tumble Pigalle sort of place called Au Traducteur qui Pète. I’m standing there nursing a scotch, chatting with William Weaver about Cosmicomics, when a bloody tooth splashes into my drink. To our left, two brutes are suddenly slugging it out, fist here, glass smashed there, a bottle, real mayhem, and I realize that it’s Moncrieff and Kilmartin completely losing their shit over the title of your novel. It’s a maelstrom of blood and invectives, peppered by vehement monosyllabic shouts of Search! Remembrance! Time! Lost! To hell with WWE, I’ve got a front-row seat at translation as blood sport. Tits a-poppin’, Garnett’s now in the ring, clearly taking Moncrieff’s side, raising a Smirnoff bottle, smashing it down on Kilmartin’s skull. Damn! I jokingly encourage Weaver to join in. Weaver calls over Mitchell who’s over in the corner with his phone filming the whole thing for his TikTok. Wainhouse emerges from the men’s room and vomits.

I received your extremely long letter a few weeks ago. Finished it today. Thank you for your punctilious condolences. I’m a good stint into this whole grief thing, and I won’t say I’m doing better, but I am… well, I was going to say “healing,” but it feels better simply saying that I have been seeing life differently. Death is a new pair of glasses.

See things differently. Feel things differently. Do things differently.

LETTER 42: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE;
CC: EMINEM, JAMES JOYCE

Dear Dave,

[…] BTW DFW TBH LMK WTF: I hope you’re not still pissed at me cuz I split an infinitive at the party. No one else noticed and I’m not entirely sure why you needed to make a federal case out of it. Geez, and here I thought Tsvetaeva was the touchiest person on the planet when it comes to grammar. Of all the things that can be split—atoms, particles, bananas, decisions, hairs, personalities, ends, guts, tickets, sides, differences, seconds—you zero in on infinitives. Surely you jest.

In total seriousness: I need your help with words. I’m in a word crisis, and you know lots of words and are mightily adept at racquet-stringing them together. […] Heaps of footnotes’ll be required for this grand project, and you’re an ace at that, as well as expressing really difficult stuff in a pleasing fashion so Average Joe can understand and laugh at the same time. That’s a gift, amigo. The ultimate goal will be to create the ultimate word: The Word of All Words, the Word of Words, the WOW.