Excerpt from What are You
by Lindsay Lerman
If at first I thought you were people—a person, even—I eventually saw that you were not reducible to anything like an individual. I saw, eventually (did I?), that you were ideas and places and weather patterns and the stock exchange and prisons and every single industry and the way that living creatures are classified, and I saw that you would forever evade me.
The distinctions keep collapsing and reappearing, collapsing and reappearing, coagulating, separating, recombining; it just goes on and on and on.
I saw, also, that you would forever be capable of finding me, surging through me, seducing me, torturing me, wanting to kill me, making me love you. Unless I learned how to do more—so much more—than outrun you, I would never be safe from you.
You exist in an endless series of iterations. You keep spinning out and out and out. Sometimes you take the form of a person and people, but you don’t stop there.
***
I escape myself with great regularity, because I cannot bear myself, and my limits go. All the time. They just dissolve. I leave myself. Not even I can comprehend how dangerous this is.
You know this. You see it. You weaponize it—you weaponize me, me against me, through you.
Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her first book, I'm From Nowhere, was published in 2019. Her second book, What Are You, will be published in June 2022. Her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Tyrant, Entropy, Southwest Review and elsewhere. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is currently working on her next novel, a screenplay, and a philosophy manuscript.