What Are the Ice Capades?

No one tells you it will be like this, and you never get used to it, the sense that your life is happening elsewhere, or is about to start, the amused dread you’ve arrived at the wrong theater in the Cineplex, or that the inscrutable coming attractions will be over soon, even despite the evidence this is your life, happening, here, as you watch it unfurl before you, even as you locate yourself inside of it, present, now. I know that they are, but not what they are,

Nick says to me at the party, which I am attending alone, though not unattached, and isn’t this always the way?— the room, even, five stories up, bright and warm, like a sealed bubble, a buoy, a floating dream, an incandescent idea of life tethered to, tugging at, the anchor, the real thing. The Ice Capades!—a vague ghost of a signifier, not just a word but a feeling, unmoored from its true referent, lost, at least to us, in this moment, on the detrital wave of culture and time. It is amazing that anyone navigates the vast canyon of language, uncanny structures and absences carved out over centuries— who are these people, effortless, laughing, sipping plastic glasses of champagne, and how did they get here, and who am, and how did, I?, is a question

I am often asking, though only silently, to myself, and since I would rather wonder than pursue or receive whatever paltry answer, I set about the game of disentangling the material world from my interpretation of it:

I try to forget each assumption I hold that allows me to cast any judgment, down to basic certainties, until I am stripped of every perceived understanding, refusing to distinguish friend from stranger, from book, bottle, cat, or chair. Defamiliarization a kind of play I approach like a child serious at work, reveling in the mind’s nakedness among its private ruins of form, a bliss

I’m unable to quite achieve in the body, aware as I constantly am of some implacable gaze on me. A cake is produced from the kitchen, eight candles glowing on top although the birthday person’s thirty, and after we sing

and they blow them out, Nick leans down, relights four.

A second wish—half as good, but twice as likely: a tradition in his family, he explains to me. (How beautiful, I say, but turns out he’s just made it up, just pulling my leg.) I’m passed a slice on a plate with a fork, weightless between my hands, do what I’m supposed to with it instantly, as if by the animal in me, the moist and supple sponge, the tender bite of orange on my tongue, the opposite of ecstasy. And why should I want more? Why should I not be grateful? A gift—this ungrounded circus of infinite rehearsal, where an accident of breath collapses all entrenched deceptions, physics a fool’s fodder, the body a toy to toss and bend— one I expect to eventually end, and won’t I miss it then? When I wake to a morning far from the city and find my life fixed inside it, my life having shed its elaborate costumes, its bare face unsoftened by the tricks of colored gels, will I remember how I loved it? Not the illusion, nor the hollow promises I thought I’d keep it to, but whatever need preceded them, the mutable, mercurial emptiness

I was, abstraction anxious to adopt, escape, object identity— just some bizarre joke: finally, my life nothing other than itself—not what I was, but that I was, all else I didn’t and don’t know?