The word struck me as so peculiar and terrible. Why hadn’t you just said, “Dead fish”? But in retrospect the word was perfect. “Dead fish” would have suggested it was still more “fish” than traces thereof. The thing I stepped in was what remained of the shape of a fish, the casing. More than skeleton, but less than corpse. I had only heard the word applied to corn — “We need a plate for the husks,” Grandpa Lou would mumble to Dora across the table, flecks of corn-casings around his puckered mouth, glazed with butter, and she would rise and retrieve a plate from the kitchen cupboard and place it in the middle of the table all of us sat around, a sheen of sweat on our bodies from the mid-August heat, and we’d place the husks of our corn cobs on it like lumberjacks piling logs. A fish emptied of fish, a cob emptied of corn. The word made me think of the brittle and translucent second-selves bugs left behind on windowsills and under beds after moulting. I could feel my left foot sliding on the fish remains for hours after, even after I had scrubbed my feet twice that night in the small plastic basin of water on the porch, and then a third time in the morning, and still I felt the fish husk against it, its spine, the small tines of its ribs, the tickle of its fins.

Standing here looking at your body, I see the dead fish again, I feel the husk slip apart below the sole of my foot, I want to scream husk fucking husk as if it were the most brutal world, worse than any swear, any curse. I think of that fish emptied of its self, like a candy wrapper, its thingness. I think of Artaud declaring in To Have Done With the Judgement of God: “When you have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”

Is there freedom in being a thing? A godless thing without a soul, no different than a bit of plastic cling-wrap? Think of it as freedom, I want to tell you.

Think of it as freedom.

XIII

XIII

My flight home from Rome landed just after ten, but because of transit delays I didn’t arrive downtown until quarter to midnight. I felt a profound and shapeless sadness, a sadness whose origins and boundaries felt ill-defined, perhaps because my own origins and boundaries felt ill-defined. As I walked through Kensington Market, duffle bag in hand, I could tell something was amiss at Videofag from two blocks away. There was a cop car parked outside and a crowd of people milling about taking photos on their phones.

I pushed my way through to find Will at the front door, his face drawn. “We’re being raided.”