No one could tell me why the blood wouldn't stop. I'd been bleeding for a month straight. For the first time, I told my doctor that I wanted to have a child. Soon, I said. I want to have a child soon, in the next couple of years. Please tell me what is wrong with me. The uterus is a black box, the doctor explained. Sometimes things just happen.












 
I opened a jar of pickled beets and fried a few slices of halloumi for dinner. I ate them with the rest of the day's bread. Van Gogh was starting to warm up to me. He curled up at my feet while I ate, warming my toes on the stone floor.





Unable to sleep, I read Marie Ndiaye's novella Self-Portrait in Green all the way through. It was a strange little book about a woman who was haunted by encounters with several different "women in green." Usually these women wore green to indicate their arrival, but sometimes they'd appear in plain clothes, and the narrator was somehow able to sense their presence. The true significance of these encounters was never made clear. Maybe they were specters of some sort of curse, or maybe the narrator had lost her mind, latching onto meaningless coincidences and growing paranoid and obsessive. But the book's title suggested something else—that each woman might hold up a mirror in which the narrator could catch a glimpse of herself, a moment of frightening recognition.














For breakfast I had cow's milk yogurt with honey and fresh almonds. I had run out of kibble, so I scrambled a few eggs for Van Gogh. I did some grading. In one submission, a student mentioned Chimera, the mythical fire-breathing she-goat. I spent the noon hours researching chimerism, the condition of having one's DNA tangled up with the DNA of another organism from the same species. In humans, chimerism can begin en utero in the case of twin embryos. If one of the embryos doesn't survive and is absorbed by the other, the surviving embryo can carry both sets of DNA. Chimerism can also happen as a result of an organ transplant, and fetal DNA can be left behind and integrated by the mother after a pregnancy. On a long walk with Van Gogh, I turned over the possibility that I'd ever been pregnant myself, a spark of potential life extinguished before I ever knew it was there, leaving muted traces of ghost code behind.





I remember something my father once said to me: in biology, a closed system is fated to drown in its own waste. After a period of growth and prosperity, it will experience a rapid decline, a mass extinction. This is what is happening in the world, he told me, in the closed system that is our planet. It won't be long before we collapse under the weight of our own innovation.













We walked all the way through the outskirts of town and into a neighboring village, the one that burned a few years ago. I turned around when we reached the first dilapidated house. Hounds need a lot of exercise. Van Gogh looks like a purebred, which surprised me at first since he'd been found alone and starving on the mountainside, but the people with the humane society said that it's common for hunters to abandon their dogs if they prove unfit for the job. Anything loud startled him—he was probably afraid of the gunshots. I stopped by the corner store for a bag of dog food, and when I got home I called Abbey, who was entering her second trimester of pregnancy. I told her about the chimera.





The bleeding stopped the next day, a glitch in the cycle. Daizy dropped by to tell me about Van Gogh's medication schedule. I sent a message to Christina about getting together, and she replied that she was in the hospital, that we should wait until she was doing better. There were new metastases on her liver, and she needed another round of chemo. I ate a bag of potato chips. I took out the trash.














I set up my miniature loom and got to work on a potholder. It was lunchtime in New York, and Davide called me during his break between classes. He was planning a lecture about the theories of Luciano Floridi, a philosopher who, as I understood it, had proposed a new framework for understanding our relationship to computers. The first computers were closet-sized and were operated by specialists who had to enter their computers to operate them. The personal computer was later designed to be operated from the outside, creating a physical boundary between human and machine. Experienced only as inputs and outputs, the computer's inner workings were locked away, a mass of wires and magnets inside a giant metal box. According to Floridi's theory, we have now re-entered the box. Wherever we are, our presence is being registered by various tracking and surveillance systems, some of which we activate ourselves through things like credit card purchases and the GPS tracking on our phones. Our most minute actions are compressed into data and cataloged in anonymous data centers. Digital technology is no longer a feature of an otherwise neutral space; it constructs our environment and organizes our movement inside it. We are enveloped in a new atmosphere.





I went to the market and bought kiwis, pears, soft sheep's cheese and rye rusks. I bought an avocado, grown in Crete. It took a while for avocados to make it to this side of the Atlantic, but they grow well in this climate and are starting to make their way into the cuisine. I took Van Gogh for an afternoon walk on the beach. We crossed the orange tape that closed off the beach club for the off season and he wiggled out of his collar and ran around inside. I was afraid we'd get in trouble, but no one came. On the walk home it started to rain.













I messaged Yasmine a picture of a map with a little blue dot indicating my location. This whole country is the size of Alabama, I said. I feel so close to the rest of the world. It’s crazy to think about how close everything is, she replied, I thought about it all the time when I was in Rabat. Everything is so close together, but fanned out somehow, like light filtering through a prism. I asked the internet if it was possible to hold a photon. Someone on a forum said that light is always traveling at lightspeed, so it sort of depends on what you mean by “hold.” They suggested that building a container out of mirrors could be one solution for holding on longer, but we've never been able to build a completely reflective mirror, so the light would quickly decay. It's safer to convert light into something that can be stored, the user concluded.





I made a sour herb soup for dinner and took my evening vitamins: magnesium for sleep and a probiotic. Then I stayed up researching fertility tracking methods. I kept getting ads for a birth control app that claimed to predict “safe” and “unsafe” days for unprotected sex. There was a monthly fee associated with the service and all kinds of gadgets they wanted me to buy, like a special thermometer and a digital ring and a wristband to track my sleep patterns and heart rate. Despite being designed in the style of jewelry, these devices were thick and ugly, all their crystals hidden on the inside. Quartz has long been used in mechanical watches, and now it's used in digital devices to track time and regulate radio signals.













During our morning walk, Van Gogh and I ran into a striking Russian woman with a little white dog. She was wearing a long red coat and pale yellow trousers. The dog, for reasons I now regret not inquiring about, had a pacifier in its mouth. If I were Marie Ndiaye, this would be my woman in green. She loved Van Gogh and let him put his dirty paws all over her nice clothes, talking to him affectionately in Russian. We kept walking and ended up at the entrance of a large overgrown field. I recognized it somehow. Poppies and hyacinths were springing up everywhere.





There was another storm that evening, and I realized too late that I’d left my laundry out on the line. I made tea and listened to a podcast, an interview with a woman who'd had breast cancer. Cancer cells are isolated and confused, she said. They forget where they belong and what they're supposed to do. They’re the loneliest things in the world. Determined to survive, they keep going despite having lost track of the script, reproducing until they can't anymore.













Van Gogh was afraid of the rain and refused to go outside. It hadn't taken him long to get used to his new accommodations, and he wanted nothing to do with his previous life in the wild. Later that night, in the middle of teaching my online class, I saw him pee in the corner of the living room, just out of sight of my students. During our break, I sprayed some green chemical on the molding and wiped up the mess with a paper towel. It was two in the morning by the time the class ended. I started reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves in bed and fell asleep mid-paragraph, waking up hours later with the light still on and the book splayed open beside me.





I had a new message from Abbey in the morning, a picture of her first sonogram. Her fetus was the size of a walnut and had developed tiny limbs and organs. Wrapped in a protective layer of placental tissue, it had access to everything it needed. But if direct contact were made between the fetus and the mother, her body would destroy it. The placenta differentiates, sorts, determines what is allowed inside. A soft and permeable eggshell. When mapped, the placental genome reveals an evolutionary secret: it contains what appears to be viral DNA from an ancient retrovirus—the same type of virus as HIV. Many millions of years ago, one of our egg-laying ancestors must have become infected, passed the virus onto their offspring. A virus can cause a whole system to glitch.













I had a Zoom call with Pattie, who told me to look up Rene Descartes’ robot daughter. The story went like this: Descartes’ actual daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of five. Stricken by grief, he built an automaton to replace her. At some point he decided to take a trip, and he took his mechanical daughter with him on board a ship. When the captain found it, he was horrified by its humanoid appearance—a 17th century uncanny valley. Certain that he had encountered some sort of demon, the captain threw Descartes’ daughter into the sea. This story, I learned, is probably mostly untrue. Still, I’m not convinced that trueness can be the only requisite for figuring out what is right.





I made a frittata for dinner and finished weaving the potholder, a gift for the house. On the phone that night, Davide explained something he had talked about that day with his students: how we only know the two-way speed of light, because it has thus far proven impossible to synchronize clocks in two different locations. Instead, light is projected and then reflected back to its origin point, where its arrival time is logged and its total travel speed calculated. What we assume to be the one-way speed of light is really the two-way speed divided by two. We trust that light travels at the same speed on both ends of the journey. Every theory that in any way relates to the speed of light relies on this assumption.
















Mirka stopped by in the morning to do some training with Van Gogh. I hadn't seen her in at least 20 years, but she looked the same as I remembered her, wore the same shade of coral lipstick. I hadn't been keeping up with the training, and Van Gogh did poorly. Later I uploaded a picture of him to a website that spat out some breed information. Probably purebred, like I thought. The website suggested scent training to keep him entertained. These dogs are smart, the website said. I wondered what that meant—for a dog to be smart. I imagined hunting for truffles with Van Gogh in the mountains. I placed an order for a scent kit online.





 The next day was unseasonably warm, and the sun felt bigger than usual. I sat outside in only a tank top, absorbing the light like a plant. Van Gogh had been anxious all morning. He ran up and down the yard barking, and I couldn’t quiet him down. Nothing seemed out of place. It was a weekday, and the streets were quiet. That evening I made geranium tea and started on some grading. A little while into my work, I felt something moving under the floor, like the earth was stretching its muscles. Van Gogh whimpered at my feet as the hanging lamp swayed over the table, spinning yellow light across the room. When stillness returned I stuck my head out the window and waved at a neighbor. Earthquake, she said, reading my gesture. They just said it on the radio, not too bad though. Did anything break for you?













Lots of animals can sense earthquakes before they happen, but no one knows why, and we have no way of predicting them ourselves. This seems strange to me, considering that we use animals to help us with so many other things. I called my father, and he told me that scientists had started training dogs to sniff out cancer. It made sense, because he had noticed a difference in his own scent when he got cancer, though he hadn't known what it was at the time. And when the cancer came back, he could smell it again, like his body was emitting a warning signal. It smells kind of nice, he said. That’s the funny part.





I took a bus into the city and met DeAnna and Francesco for a late afternoon lunch. We had a coffee at their apartment and took a taxi to an art opening afterward. The taxi driver was friendly, asked where we were from. Her family, she revealed, had been forced out of Smyrna during the population exchange. That's our story too, DeAnna said. It's most peoples’ by now, here and everywhere. We’re all experimental test subjects for projects of future violence. The art opening was full of people from distant places, their many native tongues braiding themselves into hybrid conversations. Most of the art was political in some way, saying something about the right or wrong way to live or questioning the gap between the lives we deserve and the ones we have. I was thinking about the genocides and wars just a few borders away from us, our nearness and distance from them, the way we watched in horror from behind our screens. It felt impossibly wrong to go on living as though everything were fine, and yet there I was at an art opening. DeAnna’s piece in the show was a message written in braille and locked away behind glass, where it could not be touched.













It was late by the time I got home, but I was wide awake. I didn't have the focus to read, so I poked around online. I ordered a book, Yevgenia Belorusets' Modern Animal. I called Davide and asked if he thought that starting a fire with a mirror was basically the same as teleporting the sun. In poetic terms yes, he said. But I'm not sure what a physicist would say.





I read Will Alexander's Exobiology as Goddess with my coffee while Van Gogh sunbathed on the balcony. Time is a tissue prone to infection, I wrote in my notebook. I don't remember where I got that from, but I must have still been thinking about the retrovirus. Somehow Alexander's alien goddess, Solea, had reminded me of it. Retroviruses interact with their hosts a little differently than other viruses. Normally, the order of genetic transcription is fixed: DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is translated into proteins. Retroviruses are able to perform the first half of this process in reverse: they use their RNA to reproduce the original DNA, leaving a copy of it behind in the infected host cell.













On our afternoon walk we ran into the Russian woman again. I asked her name. Yeliza. I wanted to ask something else, but I didn't know what it was. I complimented her jacket. We walked by the bakery, where the baker was emptying a box of stale biscuits into the road for the pigeons. He waved hello to me and I waved back.





I scrolled on my phone for a while. Someone on Instagram had posted a picture of a freshly tilled field, ready for planting. At first I thought it was a mass grave. My friend Grace once told me that she’s received correspondences addressed to “Grave.” Gravity and grace are false cognates. I never thought of that before.













I read Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi, the final book of the trilogy. My mind was buzzing. I went to Sevastis to eat dinner alone and I could feel all the parts of myself looking away from each other, a lens drifting out of focus. Mirrors make triangles everywhere, create an elsewhere for the present tense, I wrote in my notebook. Our bodies are mostly not ours anyway. Konstantinos came over to the table to chat. I hadn't seen him since we were kids. We talked about the neighborhood, where everyone ended up, and he told me that he was preparing to take over his parents' restaurant. We agreed that we'd all be back soon, for good. Good thing you held onto your Greek, he said. I thought of all the ways, in English, that I could have said all the things I’d just said, having found only one way to say them in Greek. While I waited for my food I read The Soy Sea by Dimitra Ioannou. I thought about miniatures, how they hover just outside of time. I took my leftovers home in a to-go box.





Christina sent me a message. She had been discharged but was bedridden, too sick and exhausted for visitors. I asked for her address, if I could send her something in the mail. I was bleeding again, but this time it was expected. I drew a little red circle on my calendar. I called Davide. I miss you, he said. I can't wait to be there with you.













Van Gogh started barking in the middle of the night. I couldn't go back to sleep, so I made chamomile tea and sat at the kitchen table warming my chin over the mug. He was acting strange, like he had been before the earthquake. I put on a jacket and clipped him into his leash and we walked down to the beach. The water was very still, and the moon reflected on its surface shone just as clear as the one in the sky. I wanted to take a picture, but I had forgotten to bring my phone. A tiny crab washed up and scuttled across the sand. I took Van Gogh to the lip where dry land touched the water; he jumped away as soon as it made contact with his skin. The sea was dark against the night sky. It was only the lights on a distant shore that allowed me to make out the horizon.



 


Works Cited

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Alexander, Will. Exobiology as Goddess. San Jose: Manifest Press, 2004.

Belorusets, Yevgenia. Modern Animal. London: Venice: Isolarii, 2021.

Choi, Don Mee. Mirror Nation. Seattle: Wave Books, 2024.

Ioannou, Dimitra. Μια θάλασσα από σόγια. Athens: Futura, 2008.

Ndiaye, Marie. Self-Portrait in Green. Translated by Jordan Stump. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2014.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Vintage Classics, 2004.