About Crows

Mongolia Room

33 M o n go l i a Ro o m (i) She sits cross-legged in a felt yurt with a fake fire in the center, fixing her hair in the hand-held mirror she took from the apartment I abandoned. I couldn’t have raised a child with her anyway; I’ve grown too used to her telling me it’s time to leave. That, and she’s twelve years older than me. We share the sign of the horse, which might explain her love of Room 39, and her love of Mongolia, where humans are outnumbered twelve to one. “I don’t know when my husband will return! He’s on a raid! I’m hungry, angry, lonely, and tired! I’m trying to warm myself by the fire!” (ii) The lobby and front desk are below us. We hear the front door bells clanging the comings and goings of high school couples and call girls. She was thirty-nine when we first met, a number after my father’s death that always found its way onto bike locks, credit cards, and lottery tickets, and an age I had always thought impossible to approach—the way father turns to older brother, then friend, until finally, the hard luck blossoms and he becomes someone younger: a nephew, or a son. I started to look for others who by getting there before me might show the way. But still, the first time we fucked (iii) it all of a sudden struck me: She’s thirty-nine, and I had to remind myself that age is just a number, and you can’t make love to a number. 34 “Genghis Khan was buried somewhere near here!” she shouts while painting windburn on her cheeks. “Somewhere near the Onon River!” They say the funeral party destroyed every living thing in its path, and after the body was buried, servants stampeded thirty-nine teams of thirty-nine horses each over the burial grounds. The servants were then massacred by soldiers, who in turn were slaughtered on their way home. For miles around, riderless horses trampled corpses (iv) on the bloodied steppe. Clouds spread. The dark parts of the sky grew darker, until the moon reflected light onto a part of the earth that reflected nothing to evoke their vague ideas on grief, ambition, whatever. “I just came back from marmot hunting!” His grave his final victory— not a slightly sunken plot of dead grass in an ugly field be) but an entire country. Any place a family sets up camp tonight might be directly above his remains. (v) Varnished logs glued together to teepee the fire’s guts. Red and yellow lights pointed at a crinkled aluminum cylinder spun by a small electric motor. “They don’t really burn wood!” she yells while fastening the clasps on the shoulder of her deel. “There aren’t enough trees! The stoves are fueled by dried yak feces!” of the simple, single-minded man hidden within it. Then he entered legend. A name some people sometimes repeated (like most of ours will 35 Without breaking a single bone, a skeleton can be divided into 206 pieces, not thirty-nine. Each needs protection from altars and national museums, protection from display cases with motion sensors and humidity gauges. Each needs to be guarded from becoming a charm in some kid’s pocket he nervously rubs his thumb against. (vi) Because that’s—“Almost ready!”—what happens to the material world. The thing acts on our consciousness or our consciousness acts on the thing. It doesn’t matter which. Maybe both. Train tickets, phone numbers, amphitheater seats, even women who take the hand-held mirrors from the apartments we abandon, are the dead speaking to us, or our consciousness entering the world like a foot sliding into a pointy-toed riding boot as we stand just outside a tent, listening—“Okay!”— for our cue, to press play on the stereo and forcibly enter while the fake stone speakers drown out mock screams with the sound of 1,521 stampeding horses. ...