"Coiled Spring" by Will Arbery

This strange spring and summer, writing in my apartment as the world pivots between horror and majesty, like a glitching aria, I’ve been visited by a lot of ghosts. They sit near me and on me. They press a finger into my sternum. I’ve moved into my own place. My window faces east. I can watch the moon rise. Oh and in July there were all these great storms. I’d lie in the dark and heat lightning would flash in these purplish spasms. I feel — have felt — a war coming. A hunch that I hope is just a ghost in my DNA. Anyway I’m alone. 

I spend my days toggling between extremes. I read the Left and then the Right and then the Left and then the Right. I read until I see it. See it each way. Then I go back to the opposite. I miss my family, and then get an email from one of them about how Covid-19 is a political coup. I’m lucky to have too much to write — theater and television about conservatism and progressivism, about absolutes, about belief and apocalypse, the haunting of time, about simulation and intimacy, about shame and wonder. I want to create work that exists in the in-between space, that wades into the terror of love. I’m mourning all the times I’ve loved less than fully. I’m visited by the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever been to everyone else, and everyone else. I have this distant, privileged grief that I haven’t died for anyone yet, that I haven’t fallen so fully into what-is-right that I vanish. I’m grieving that I am. None of this is new. What is new is that I’m also meeting myself, and learning to be okay with him. Finally learning that old song about loving oneself as the foundation for loving others. 

And then I learn about Ahmaud Arbery’s lynching. He shared my last name. In Georgia. The state where my father’s white family has its deep roots. The recognition of this — what this could mean — that name, in this country, with its history — ripples through my family. Nightmares of our tight-lipped ancestors. For the first time in my memory, my white conservative family mourns a black man’s murder directly. We donate. And then we stop. 

I can’t stop thinking Ahmaud Arbery Arbery Arbery. I lose twenty pounds. Ghosts of ancestors pin me to the bed for days. I don’t know how to love them. I ask them what they want from me. They ask me what I want from them. 

And now George Floyd is murdered at the hands of police. Time stops. Then it erupts. Now a swirl of reckoning in the country. I get out of the apartment, I march through the park and streets with my collaborator Danya, we shout together. My mother starts a family email thread. Family members start chiming in from Texas, Wyoming, Pittsburgh, Arkansas, Florida, me in Brooklyn. Everyone’s concerned, but there’s no consensus. I talk about what it felt like to march, and the little I know about prison abolition. My sisters write about the undeniable Good calling out from this movement. Then one brother-in-law suggests that it’s foolish to think we can ever change, says the entire thing is a Marxist takeover. My mom encourages this conclusion. I text with my sister about wanting us all to meet in the glen of love, and not knowing how to get there. 

The absurdity of getting things done in a crisis. And the slow-fast spasms of this crisis. The creases of it. The folding of time — I thought I was moving forward, and suddenly I’m face to face with a too-real past. I’d been traveling up and down a coiled spring. As it turns out, so had my ancestors. We encounter each other at the curved pivot where nightmare meets DNA. There, they collapse onto my body, exhausted from keeping secrets. From hurtling up and down our double helix. 

Then I find an old poem of my dad’s, written in the 1980s. It’s twelve pages, and in it, he meets the ghost of his own father, a chain-smoking veteran from Georgia who died shortly after my dad was born. I read the poem slowly. My dad describes a long nightmare about the South and ancestors and inheritance and his father’s giant bloated skull in the basement and look I’ll tell you all about it sometime, the point is: I can’t believe it. I’ve had the same nightmare, many times, my entire life. I know these precise hauntings. These precise ancestors. These white ghosts. I know everything about this. I know him. I’m angry, I’m angry and I love him. I must try to tell him: I’m angry, I’m angry and I love you. Anyway we’re never alone. 

All photos courtesy of Will Arbery.