I Have Touched You
by Gregory Sherl
Dark Sky Books, 2011
44 pages, paperback
The first time you read through Greg Sherl’s I Have Touched You, its quick, repetitive sentences slough you off like dead skin or rainwater. Its steady, innocuous rhythm casts a lulling spell, and the constant explications wash over you without your having registered them as separate or distinct from the primary flow of phrases. You get the impression of a period of time, a few pockets of geography—mostly Florida, but also an exile to Virginia—and you get a vague sense of actions having taken place, or, more accurately, taking place right now in an oppressive, half-decade-long present tense. By conflating all acts and moments to this single present—sometimes with details from one year enumerated shoulder to shoulder with identical details from years later—the whole concept of present is flattened, broadened, and expanded into an atemporal plane upon which some of life’s events happen. What the book gives you access to then is an essentially static epoch mediated by its heartbroken, bipolar narrator. The progression of time is stalled, and any sense of continuation or movement is subordinated to the rock-like pressure of space alone. Sherl dedicates his book to “anyone who has ever felt stuck,” and creates with the banal repetitions of drugs, sex, depression, music, poetry, and soap, a hypnotic and paradoxically slick sort of stickiness.
I Have Touched You‘s great strength is in its ability to balance reems of over-articulated sameness with hidden moments of difference. It is, contrary to first appearances, a gem of control and restraint. Though the narrator is free with certain details—drugs he’s taken, who he has slept with, under what circumstances, and in what positions—he keeps other, more vulnerable details hidden. The effect is that when, on page 31, nearly two-thirds through the twenty linked stories that make up the collection, you get this passage—
“Two years ago I quit cigarettes, but what’s one more? At the Tin Can I drink two tall boy PBRs very fast. I sweat when people look at me. If my other sister didn’t die, would I smile more? Someone says What do you want? I say Pizza with grilled shrimp on top. Laura is married, but she’s touching my leg.”
—you are devastated. You knew about the cigarettes, you knew about the drinking, the anxiety, the likelihood that a married woman would touch his leg. But that he had a sister? That’s new. It’s a detail given with the same tonal weight as any of the book’s other details. It isn’t dwelled on. It is established as one point in a narrative space crowded with other details and that’s it. Though the fact isn’t mentioned again, it extends backward across the 30 pages preceding it and re-characterizes everything. It is a plot twist as surely as a bloody dagger found in the houses of parliament. Interestingly, it is precisely the sameness, the repetition of events and tone, that allow this new event to take on such epic weight.
In this way, the steady patter of details reveals, if hazily, a plot that serves not only to connect the vignettes across space, but to reintroduce, and to make possible again, the distinctions of time. The plot points lay out in the narrative field like a shipwreck; reading them, aside from enjoying the beach and the sun, is like sweeping your metal detector over the sand for traces of the dead or else the explosive that prompted their drowning. Each echoing scrap of relationship triggers your re-understanding of the linear. There was a time, and as you read you come to understand what it was. When Girl #2, married now, emails the narrator to say “Remember when you came on my chest?” in “Poem as Leaving” (p29) it calls you back to this passage early on in “Florida: An Essay” (p13) :
“Libbie comes back to my apartment and showers. We make out above the covers. Girl #2 still texts me. I write back I only came on your chest because I didn’t want to be a father. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in so long that when I do, I can feel it in my toes.”
It seems plausible that the original mention of his coming on her chest was a response to this second mention, though, at the same time, it just as easily implies a history of identical text message and email conversations. What is being sketched in these short, corresponding passages is a pearl of time. The time when he is discussing with Girl #2 fatherhood and ejaculation; the time when Girl #7 is painting him; the time when he is dropping out of school and moving to Virginia. These pearls, connected, arrange the narrative like a necklace tossed in a drawer.
Because they track the essence of the whole, it’s worth sharing all mentions of Girl #3′s documentary:
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. Forty-seven minutes into the film I show up on a Vespa, a Camel Light behind my left ear. She says I can feel the sun bleaching us. I hold her until someone builds us a bed in the left corner of the set. She closes her eyes, and I start picking cotton. Through her nose she says Thursdays suck, man. I nod into her top molars, the back part of her tongue that has never seen sunlight. (p20)
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. In it I say Do you need some water? Three weeks later I’m sleeping on the floor. (p22)
Girl #3 made a documentary about her heart. It’s playing at the Lyric sometime after the sun falls below the dirt. I sit in the balcony. The soundtrack is someone slapping a rubber band against an empty plastic bottle. A voice over goes There are days when we only know what we know. In the opening scene Girl #3 wears a polka dot dress I remember touching her in, but here, in this scene, there’s someone else touching her. I have a headache but no Tylenol, only cough syrup. I drink it anyway. The timeline is fucked up; I am agitated I didn’t buy popcorn. Forty-seven minutes into the film Girl #3 and I smoke cigarettes on my patio. I say If I were a TV show I would change my title every year. We fuck only twice. Each time, I lick the beads of sweat off her upper lip. I have never left Virginia and missed it. (p27)
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. I make a cameo in the second act, right after she throws up in a garbage can, her hair too short to get in the way. (p29)
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. She’s editing it right now. Your cameo might get cut she says. Maybe it’ll make it into the special features on the DVD. I understand. There are too many people who know how her thighs smell, and I tried only twice. I miss the way you kiss I tell her. Like a rocket ship. (p33)
Girl #3 is remaking a documentary about her heart. In it I say That was a casual use of metaphor. The last time I paid to be teased, I was a straw in her mouth. (p41)
While taking these passages out of context changes their shape, it nevertheless shows the deepening effect of their repetition. Neither the documentary, nor the narrator’s role in it, nor anything else is spelled out, but they don’t have to be. The physical book space, the two pages between the semi-hallucinated first mention and the more straightforward second, is enough. It’s a kind of narrative memory colonization or world-building, built from the tension of incompletely, even contradictorily, told events. What is actually happening in minute 47? Is he on his Vespa? Are they smoking? What’s the actual dialogue? Not knowing the singular truth opens a multiplicity, not of possibilities, but of coextensive truths, all of them laid out across the narrative plane.
Greg Sherl has created a nuanced, multi-dimensional world full of anxiety, insecurity, love, and heartbreak. More importantly, he has done so in a bewilderingly immersive way. His world, at first a flat, sealed surface of repeated details, quickly becomes porous. Through the tiny ruptures formed by the inversions of time, the stunning sudden revelation of things hidden, and a masterful control of rhythm, tone and assertion, he opens space. Like blowing up a balloon, I Have Touched You stretches a small bit of material wide over what appears to the naked eye to be absolutely nothing.
Castle
