drag his hands across the landscape of your face

When they lead you into the room with the blind man 

and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face 

so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails 

that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight 

and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat 

because once he has confirmed the bones of your face 

fall into line with his memory of the bones of your father, 

he will offer a tobacco-stained smile and a wine-tinged 

exhalation and announce, yes, you could only be his child, 

all the while fumbling for the greasy string around his neck 

to withdraw from inside his shirt a key that still holds 

the warmth of his chest when he drops it in your hand. 

The map is in the box, he'll say. The box beneath the bed. 

You expected worn parchment or carefully folded vellum 

but not this sturdy clothbound book. It is not merely a map. 

It is an atlas, replete with indexes, charts, and translucent 

overlays that display your various organs, followed by veins 

and arteries traced in red and blue, and then the delicate lattice 

of nerve endings that lace your body. The fine white crescent 

scar on your forehead is indicated with an asterisk to footnote 

the make and model of the car door that delivered the blow, 

back when you were a boisterous child. The final overlay 

takes care to reproduce the actual melanin of your skin tone 

and quietly highlights this fact by including a small inset box 

that offers the proper ratio of ocher to umber so that the hue 

can be replicated by the paint department at any hardware store. 

The thought of inhabiting a room the exact color of your skin 

crosses your mind. You flip to the index and begin thumbing 

through the italicized headings. The word orgasm catches your eye. 

It is followed by a list of subheadings tucked into parentheses: 

(first, last, multiple, most sustained, most frightening, inadvertent, 

nocturnal, diurnal, induced by: stuffed animals, Bulgarian cuisine, 

silk bedding, musical role-playing fantasies, velvet; see also: sneeze.) 

It is all here, you realize. The manual you suspected and sought. 

With a start you flip to the final section, and see it bears the title: 

Future Accomplishments. You are uncertain whether to continue, 

knowing that the first item on the list could quite possibly be, 

1.) Currently Reading Future Accomplishments and no matter how 

quickly you begin skimming over the text your eyes will alight 

upon only those words, and you will settle into a whirling pause 

which comprises the rest of your life, reducing it to an infinite 

bumper sticker: The Future Is Now, Is Now, Is Now, Is Now 

but if you do proceed you will be delighted to discover this is 

not the case. This is not some sort of cheap rip-off of Borges: 

there is actually a numerical list of deeds, some quite surprising. 

It gratifies you to know you will one day befriend an orangutan. 

Of all the things on the list, this is the one you will carry with you 

once the book has been returned and the lock has clicked shut. 

Many years later, while those at your bedside await your last breath, 

you remain serene. There has been no orangutan, you murmur. 

No orangutan whatsoever. In this moment, you begin to recover. 

 

[Michael Bazzett, 'Atlas', from You Must Remember This]