Someone received the wrong poem. This was very bad. It could unravel the fabric of the universe itself.
We lay our scene at the burbling fountain in Lincoln Square. That June was remarkably cloudless, with the usual scream of distant cicadas. In the square, the brown cobblestones bucked up and into each other like a mouthful of bad teeth. Children chalked on the uneven surface. An old man with a bald pate wearing cargo shorts sat on one side of a chessboard. He played white. An older woman with dyed-black hair and deep, deep crows feet played black. He glanced up at her nervously while she considered her next move. Under the shade of the vegan ice cream shop’s yellow-striped awning, the accordionist leaned and played long, slow music that felt like a French cafe. When the shop’s doors opened, passersby could catch a whiff of lavender-vanilla milkshakes.
By the fountain, in this unassuming place, a woman in a black beret and horn-rimmed glasses typed away on her typewriter; a thick braid draped down her back.
She wrote poems on request, but it was more than it seemed.
Speed up the tape: old women and children and queers and middle-aged bachelors zoomed up to her; they moved with high-speed gesticulations and she typed furiously; the poem zipped from her hand to theirs; their conversations were held in chipmunk octaves.
A man zipped up with a clumsy young bloodhound. The dog’s tail wagged furiously in fast-forward motion and its jowls wiggled back and forth. Slow down the tape for a moment: the typist considered the dog, which was her subject. The man described the dog’s obsessive love of sticking his head out the of car during long drives. The man walked away, to return in twenty minutes to retrieve his poem. She tip-tapped the following poem into being; the appeared in Pica font, at ten characters per inch:
Inside of me are 100 SUV windows
and your nose-prints are smudged into them all.
Stick your head out the window,
let your ears flap crazy.
Howling shotgun, sun streaming honey into those brown eyes,
you are constantly trying to bite the wind.
One day you’ll manage
to sink your teeth into the breeze.
It’ll yank the whole car into the sky,
Aad we’ll watch everything, way up there with the geese
She placed the poem in an envelope. The man returned with his dog and collectsed his poem. The typist wrote eighty-six other poems that shift, and distributed them all. Rawina wrote poems for three other hound dogs that day.
And somewhere, in the midst of it all, an error occurred. She didn’t realize it just yet. She packed up her typewriter, collapsed her table. Magically, it all fit into an overburdened leather backpack.
She looked left and looked right. The square is quiet, it was night.
The patrons had left, the shops had closed, and she knocked on a door that appeared in a tree. The door opened; she stepped through. And then she disappeared.
Meet Rawina, Deputy Poet Second Class, employee of the Blackburn Poetry Bureau. The Blackburn Poetry was founded in the mysterious depths of history. Nobody knows how long it’s been in existence—or at least, how long it’s been in existence in this dimension. Their clandestine network of poets popped up all over the world, though most commonly in America, in an attempt to fight the ravaging loneliness of modernity, the malaise of a culture-deep sickness.
So when Rawina stepped into the tree, she wasn’t expecting catastrophe. She was expecting to clock out, go to her studio apartment with its ridiculous four-poster bed and two cats, and forget about poetry for a bit. She was goddamn tired of poetry; she had just put in an eight-hour shift of poetry. Five minutes before the end of her shift, someone had asked for a poem in iambic pentameter–and it had taken every ounce of her strength not to tell him go to fuck himself.
She dusted off the pleats in her skirt, smoothed her lapels, and picked up her typewriter case. Stomping down the steps that appeared before her in the tree trunk, she descended steeply.
Once she entered the tree, the door swung closed behind her and disappeared into the bark.
Rawina reached the bottom of the escalator steps and looked up. Before her spread out an eternal event horizon of office desks in neat rows, which eventually got lost in a fluorescent purple dusk. She walked over to her desk (a distance of thirty-nine miles, but, thanks to the distortions of the time-space-continuum, it only took three minutes) and placed her typewriter case in its slot.
She took off her uniform jacket and hung it on the coatrack next to her desk. An external row of identical coatracks marched off to the horizon on her right and left. When she had first started this job, she wondered if the room even had an edge, or just went on forever. When she first started, she wondered how staircases magically appeared in trees, what made the weird purple dusk, and how everything somehow fit in the weird backpack. But she was tired, and didn’t wonder anymore.
She loosened her bolo tie, placed her backpack on her desk chair. Both the chair and the desk were squat, medieval-looking things made of black wood. Identical to all the other chairs, and all the other desks. She opened the cabinet and retrieved her purse. Then she turned around and marched her happy ass home.
She took three strides that carried her another twenty miles; the desks blurred as they raced by, and she felt no curiosity, no wonder, just musings about reheating last night’s lasagna. She arrived at a bank of silver escalators that disappeared up into the purple twilight. Above them were changing letterboards, like at a train station. The escalators were designated A1 through Z9.
She ascended escalator D8 and it carried her into the black void sky.
And spat her out at the CTA stop on Belmont. With a little shiver, she shook the last of the day’s poems off of her and made a beeline for her apartment building.
When she originally took the job, she liked poetry–loved it, even. She breathed poems like they were fresh sea air and shat out poems like they were last night’s Indian food. She sank in them like a warm bath and often rambled in rhyming couplets for fun.
The listing in the classifieds ad (which should have been the first red flag—who used the classified ads anymore?) had read:
POETS WANTED
Steady work
Full benefits
Living wage
Call Steve
The phone number was only listed as “444,” which should have been the second red flag. But she dialed and it went through.
The job interview was even weirder than the ad. It took place in a Jewish deli among the reek of pastrami and the garlands of sausage. For the interview, Rawina spent the last of her money getting her nicest outfit dry-cleaned by the angry Chinese woman down the block; she had eaten cereal for breakfast and lunch…and dinner the night before. She walked into the deli wide-eyed with a forced, desperate smile and encountered a bald man sitting at a creaky metal table next to the great front window. They shook hands, and hers was clammy with sweat. The first interview question was “Are you willing to become impossible?”
“How do you mean?” Desperation and exasperation warred behind her forced smile, and the play-nice of desperation won.
The shiny pink dome of his bald head caught the light as he leaned forward, hands flat on the deli table. “Are you willing to be a figment in someone’s dream?”
“I guess that depends on the difference I get to make in the world,” she said, hedging. If this bastard was going to be poetic and cryptic, then by fuck she was going to match his energy.
He nodded sagely.
“Can you use a typewriter?” He asked.
“I grew up typing on the Selectric in my Dad’s law firm?”
“No no, no electrics. Manuals only.”
“I guess so.”
“You’re hired.”
“Wait, what?”
And that was it.
When she’d asked about the dental policy, he just shrugged his shoulders. Weeks later, Rawina found that one of her missing molars had mysteriously regrown, and the coffee stains on her teeth had evaporated overnight. Yes, the whole thing was damn spooky. But at that moment in the interview, her rent was six days late, and she’d been fired from Dunkin’ Donuts the week before. She had a $400 student loan payment due in two weeks So she play-niced as the bald interviewer led her towards the back of the deli. She kept the smile on her face as he opened a door and revealed an escalator descending into a vast purple twilight. She hardly craned her neck as he gave a brief tour of the corporate purgatory of the main office. She smothered the questions burning in her throat when he handed her two plastic grocery bags full of one-dollar bills as a sign-on bonus. Because Rawina really needed a damn job.
She was given her uniform and her standard-issue typewriter: a shiny black 1950s Remington with round glass keys.
Her assigned location was typed on a postcard dropped through her mail slot every morning. The hours were Thursday through Sunday, 2pm to 9pm. Food of her preference magically started appearing in her fridge. That first night, she opened her fridge door expecting to find an empty bottle of ketchup and instead found it full of Indian takeout and leafy green vegetables.
Her bills were taken over by the obscurely named Poetry Bureau. The needle on her car’s gas gauge never dipped down past full, and winning lottery tickets started dropping through her mail slot every Tuesday night at 7:02, to the tune of $2000 a week.
It had been eight years since then, and after a long day of cranking out poems, she lay in her four-poster bed. The bed was ridiculous; it took up something like twenty square feet of her five hundred square foot apartment. She could afford a larger apartment; she could afford to pay people to box up all her crap and cart it over to a larger apartment. But maybe part of her just preferred it small and cramped.
Her cats, Ham and Sandwich, were curled up on her chest as she dozed. She recounted some of the worst poems she had written that day in her head. She had recycled a closing line twice, botched several rhyme schemes, and written no fewer than ten poems for dogs. And she couldn’t stop thinking in goddamn rhyming couplets. She fucking hated it when she got stuck thinking in rhyming couplets.
But it was Sunday night, and she had the next three days to her quiet, bookish self.
Or that’s what she thought, until a phone began to ring.
It was not her cellphone, which was next to her on the bed; she had laid it face down after mightily pulling herself out of a scroll-hole.
She flipped it over and found the screen black. But still the old-timey ring pierced through her apartment; she set about searching, baffled.
She looked on the shelves, under the pillows, even under the oven. Eventually she found the source of the noise hidden beneath the leaves of her boisterous Monstera, growing in the window. It was a 1940s model with a spin dial.
Angrily, she picked up the receiver. “What do you want?”
“You need to come back to the office. Now.”
“It’s the weekend and I’m off. Get the Fox to cover it.”
”No; it was your mistake; you have to fix it.”
“Mistake? What mistake.”
”Someone got the wrong poem.”
“God you’re calling me about a wrong poem? That happens at least once a month. What’s the BFD?”
“This poem is different. You need to come in. NOW.”
“God dammit.”
“See you soon.”
“Hey, Chief—“
“Yeah?”
“Stop leaving shit in my apartment.”
The line clicked off and went dead.
Grumbling, she patted each of the cats on the head and put on her shoes. She still didn’t know Mister Bald’s name; so she just called him Chief. It seemed to have caught on. Other poets now called him that too.
She didn’t bother spiffing herself up or shining her shoes. In fact, she wore tennis shoes. If they were calling her in on the weekend, they were getting Weekend Rawina.
So she knocked on the brick wall of the Belmont station and opened the wooden door that appeared. Behind it was reliable old Escalator D8, which she rode down into poetry purgatory. And there he was at the bottom, waiting for her, pacing.
This was big. Every time she encountered him, he was sitting. Lounging back in his wing-back leather desk chair. Or leaning forward cross-legged, foot out at a ninety-degree angle. Or with his feet up on someone else’s desk, explicating. But never standing. Never upright, and certainly never in motion.
He handed her a postcard. The front had a jaunty cartoon of the Statue of Liberty. On the back was an address: 4859 N Magnolia. “This is your supplementary assignment.”
“Alright, let me go get my setup.”
“You’re not going to need your table, or any of your other accoutrements. Here is your typewriter.” He casually threw the box at her; she stumbled to catch it. “You’ll find the requisite paper inside. Your typewriter has been fitted with correction ribbon to ameliorate the error.”
“You mean that white stuff that leaves dandruff all over the typewriter?”
“Not that kind of correction.” He didn’t explain further.
“Alright. And what am I doing once I get there?”
“That will be made evident to you once you arrive. You’ll want gate E1. That is all.” And he turned on his heel and started to walk away.
She stood there, mouth open like a fish. Angrily, she closed it, then opened it again. “No.”
She set down her typewriter, put the postcard on top of it, and walked back towards the escalator. It had changed direction on her approach and started moving upwards. As she moved toward the escalator, her sneakers made muffled steps on the eternal plane of black linoleum. The casual indignity was too much, and she could not make herself care. She had paid off her stupid fucking poetry degree. She had paid some guy at Morgan Stanley to manage a stock portfolio on her behalf, and she had squirreled away enough money to pay her rent for the next two years. And she had lost all enthusiasm for writing poems on behalf of mediocre men attempting to apologize to wives they didn’t deserve.
So Rawina stepped on the escalator and gave Chief the middle finger.
Without turning around, he held up his right hand and snapped his fingers. Just like that, all the escalators, A1 through Z9, shuddered to a halt. Including the one right under her feet.
God dammit.
Oh well, she thought. And started walking up the escalator.
He turned around, pinching the bridge of his nose in a gesture of pained frustration.
“WHY do you have to be such a pain in my ASS?” Chief asked, half-yelling.
Rawina half-yelled back., “Because you call me out of bed, on a weekend, with some cryptic bullshit. Well, guess what, I’ll play along when I’m on the clock, but not when I’m off it! You pulled me out of bed for a reason you won’t bother to explain so guess what? Fuck you is what!”
He removed his hand from the bridge of his nose and jerked his thumb behind him, pointing. “Fine. You want an explanation? Follow me now. Or shut up and go home and don’t come to work on Thursday.”
It was less the threat of getting fired and more the enticement of finally having something EXPLAINED for once that drew her to follow him. She hopped off the escalator and trailed him as he turned down a hallway that had appeared. She left her typewriter case and postcard by the escalators, not ready to commit quite yet.
The hallway was long and straight, with white walls and black doors evenly spaced every few feet. There were various signs, written in Greek letters, with arrows pointing left, right, straight ahead, behind, diagonal, and curlicue.
Eventually, the Chief stopped in front of a door that looked identical to all the other doors. He opened it up, and Rawina was greeted with a wave of glimmering turquoise light.
Before them was a waist-high golden tub some fifty feet across. The room was full of blue light; it was like being in a tunnel through the shark tank at the aquarium, looking up and seeing the sunlight dance through the water. The Chief walked up to the lip of the pool and summoned her forward with a flick of his hand.
Warily, Rawina walked up to the edge of the tub and looked down into eternity.
That’s the only way she could describe it. She would have expected the tub to be maybe three feet deep, maybe slightly deeper if it was set into the floor. She was not expecting the yawning cosmic void, pulsing with small flickers of light like cosmic dust coalescing into suns and then supernova-ing out into porous nebulae that looked like sea-sponges.
And somehow from within the tub, she heard whispers. Snatches of conversations, things she could almost understand but not quite. Like a conversation just barely out of earshot.
The longer she stared at the pulses of light, the more they almost, almost made sense. Like Rorschach blots making interpretable images. Here, she saw what might be a horse. There, a suitcase. Over there, a jet engine.
“What is this place?” She asked in the looming silence.
“That” he said with an accusatory pointing finger. “Is what many refer to as the Jungian collective unconscious. Now, if you will turn your attention to quadrant sixteen point two eight.”
“How the hell am I—“ but the quadrant in question had already grown a thin gold outline and was blinking gently.
Inside, a small star was forming, but it had an ominous orange tinge. She listened; the whispers sounded furtive. She almost thought she heard a muffled shout. And then, a very, very faint scream.
“There weren’t any Level 5 traumas due in that quadrant for the next four years.” He looked at her over his long nose, shiny pink head reflecting the blue light.
“Wait. You’re saying my poem gave someone Level 5 trauma?” She said in disbelief. The worst poem she had written that day was a loving roast involving a grandfather’s ear hair.
He shook his head, exasperated. “No, Rawina. This has to do with butterflies.”
“If you’re going to start spewing cryptic riddles again, I’m leaving.”
“The butterfly effect! A butterfly flaps its wings in South America, and there’s a typhoon in the Pacific. It’s all related. You didn’t traumatize anyone, but someone got the wrong poem and it happened at the worst possible node in space and time. Watch.” He addressed the golden pool. “Extrapolate the effects of quadrant sixteen point two eight in a one-thousand speed timelapse over the next five hundred years.”
As they watched, the orange glow grew brighter until it was a large, bloodshot eye. It smoldered, and around it the other lights collapsed and went out—but no other lights took their place. The dark of negative space surrounded the orange light like an aura, until it slowly spread to more than half of the pool.
The Chief pointed down at the pool. “THAT is why we pulled you out of bed, Miss Prissy Pants. Now, are you going to fix it or would you rather go back to drinking mimosas with your cats?”
“I wasn’t—fine, let’s go get my typewriter.”
They stopped together at the base of the escalator bank. She folded the postcard in half and pocketed it into her knee-ripped jeans. As she removed her hand from her pocket, her eyebrows came together in an almost flabbergasted wrinkle.“So…it actually matters,” she said.
“What actually matters?” he said, handing her the typewriter case.
“The poetry. My poetry. It…actually means something, It actually changes things.”
He blinked twice, and she inferred you are an idiot from his silence. Instead, he gestured with his arm at the endless plain of desks behind them. “Why the hell do you think all this exists? Of course it matters.”
His mouth worked for a few moments, as if chewing on a thought before deciding to share it. Finally he said, “The woman who got the wrong poem–she is going to put it on her fridge and look at it every morning for years. The poem that is supposed to be there needs to inspire a small spark of something. Hope, love, something. She is soon going to have the worst two years of her life. Her water heater will break because her husband never bothered to call the handyman to fix that clanking noise. She’ll get lymphoma, and her dog will die. She will discover her house has extensive termite damage, right as they’re about to pay it off. And her younger sister will relapse and stop going to AA meetings.
“That woman is going to need a lot of things to survive those two years, but that poem, the right poem, will be one of those things. With the wrong poem? She will become the kind of miserable, gloomy person who just makes the world worse.”
Rawina bit her own lip. “How can one person cause all that damage you showed me?”
The Chief looked at Rawina, then looked away, up to the place where the escalators disappeared into the void, clasping his hands behind his back. “It’s not certain. She may accidentially kill a bicyclist while driving. She may say something thougtlessly cruel to her friend’s daughter. She may slowly stop thinking certain kinds of people are entirely deserving of being treated like human beings. Whatever it is, it will ripple outwards unendingly. It needs to be stopped.”
Which is why, two hours later, Rawina found herself on her stomach, army-crawling through someone’s hedges at 9pm on a Sunday. “Go into poetry, they said,” and spat a leaf out of her mouth.
“There will be ivory towers, they said.” She violently waved a stick in front of her to remove a huge spider web that was strung across her path. The tiny builder gestured obscenely at her with its tiny legs. “There will be accolades and awards, they said.”
Of course, no one had said such things. Her parents had actually said the words “dingy attic apartment” and “scurvy” and “student loan debt.”
Well, she showed them! She was gainfully and poetically employed! Though she was currently itchy and getting pine needles down her bra. Every other diehard poet she knew was either homeless, a barista, or dead. Honestly, she should be grateful.
She crawled along the brick facade of 4895 Magnolia, covered in pine needles. Her typewriter was strapped to her back, an extra eleven-pound weight pushing her chest into the dirt. She snuck around to the basement window and was mighty glad she was wearing sneakers.
It was a window-well type affair, unlocked. No way she was fitting through that—unless…
She fished her arm down and pushed it open. Miraculously, it slid silently like it had been greased. Still, though, the window was only two feet wide. Without thinking too hard about it, she shoved her head and shoulders through the opening. Somehow, either the window was getting bigger or she was getting smaller. Never one to question the dubious physics of her job, she shimmied in and landed palms first on the floor in a terrible handstand. That was at least the fourth impossible thing she had done that day.
She landed hands first, feet stuck out behind the window. Rawina carefully walked forward on her hands until her feet were on the ground. As the rest of her came through the window, the typewriter dragged her feet down the wall until she was flat on the floor like a worm.
She unkinked her spine, dusted her pants, and thanked God that dignity was not a requirement for being a poet.
It was quiet upstairs. This was a two-story house, and the first floor was dark. These people must either be 5 am yoga people or 80 years old. Whoever they were, one of them was a woman who had a lot of sorrow coming her way.
She slowly climbed the basement stairs, cringing at each creak and groan the raw wood made under her feet.
She reached the top step and eased the white door open by its dull brass doorknob. She looked left and looked right. She had emerged in a kitchen that hadn’t been updated since 1986, with terrible sunflower wallpaper. The dull yellow appliances gave off a reek of vintage cigarettes.
But on a buttermilk-colored fridge, held up by a Parthenon magnet, was the poem.
She took three bold steps towards the poem and removed it from the fridge. It was a poem about someone’s dog. Clearly this had been the error: she wrote so many goddamn poems for dogs in a given day that someone had picked up a poem about the wrong dog.
You could only write so many different kinds of poems about people’s dogs. Eventually, they all started to blur together,
The dog in question was also on the fridge: a Polaroid of a droopy Basset hound with the name HARLEQUIN scrawled across the bottom.
She held the poem up, grimacing. Not her best work, but the patron had clapped and smiled and tipped. The poem she held in her hand was untitled, but she remembered it was intended for a different droopy hound named Harley. No wonder she had mixed them up. This dog poem was about someone’s dog sticking their head out the car window. But Harlequin wasn’t a car-window dog, Harlequin was a digger.
Rawina waited for something to happen, but nothing did. She waved the poem back and forth a few times. Then, suddenly, a small fluorescent purple hole appeared in the air. It sucked the poem up like an inter dimensional garbage disposal and made a wet slurping noise before popping out of existence.
And then, just for a moment, Rawina actually did take a minute to think about just how strange and miraculous it was that any of this worked at all.
Rawinna took the typewriter off her back and set it down on the ancient yellow linoleum. As she cranked the paper into the slot, she heard a distinctive scuttling that made her freeze in place. Her head snapped up, eyes wide with alarm…only to find a decrepit basset hound lumbering towards her on its stubby legs.
Her tension eased, and she offered her hand to the dog to sniff. Here was Harlequin, in the flesh. It seemed the dog remembered her from their brief encounter this afternoon, because his tail started to wave back and forth creakily. Some hours before Rawina had given him a beef-flavored biscuit, and he had promptly slobbered all over her arm.
Now the dog thumped down in front of her, staring. Almost as if he were posing for a picture. She held her thumb up at the dog at arm’s length, like an artist taking a distance measurement. Then she laughed to herself and typed a poem for the dog. Despite the fact that Rawina was incredibly fucking tired of writing dog poems, she never actually got tired of the dogs themselves.
As she clacked away, you may be thinking, aren’t typewriters incredibly loud? Didn’t the people upstairs hear her clacking away in the kitchen? Why the hell didn’t they come down?
Well, either the people upstairs slept like cement blocks, the soundproofing between the downstairs and upstairs was impressive, or the dubious physics of Rawina’s job were at it again. Who’s to say?
The following poem emerged from her typewriter, as always, in Pica font, at ten characters per inch:
Nails scraping black earth,
excavating your dirty playground.
The accidental earthworm inhale,
and then you sneeze your
wet, magnificent nose
and send its wriggling pink body
back into the hole.
Digging your way to the other side of the world–
or, at least,
under the fence
and into the neighbor’s hydrangea bush.
She removed the paper from her typewriter and placed it under the magnet of the Parthenon. Harlequin got up and snuffled her hand. Rawina obliged him by scratching the dog aggressively behind both ears. More drool ensued. Over the years, she had grown to hate dog poems. She had written thousands of dog poems; but there the basset hound sat, smiling up at her and dripping spit on the floor. This dog poem meant something to somebody, even if it was her three-thousand-and-forty-fifth.
Ideally, the woman asleep upstairs would come down in the morning to blearily make some coffee. She might do a double-take when she saw the poem pinned to the ugly butter-yellow fridge, wondering if it was different than she remembered. She probably wouldn’t think about it too hard–most people didn’t. She’d read the poem, and smile. She would repeat the process on many mornings over the course of many years. And disaster would be averted.
After replacing her typewriter in its case and shrugging it onto her back, Rawina gave Harlequin a two-finger salute.
Then she opened the fridge, and the small yellow lightbulb revealed an escalator descending into the darkness.
“Would have been nice to be able to catch one of these inbound!” She shouted angrily down into the darkness. Then she ducked inside, pulled the fridge door behind her and rode down.
Upstairs, the couple hardly stirred in bed.
Rawina brushed a strand of hair out of her face on the way back to her desk. “That’s me,” she muttered, laughing with the smallest dose of rekindled wonder. “Saving the universe, one dog poem at a time.”
