Aug 222012
 

 

Jacob Paul is a former actor, a VCFA graduate, and a ferocious mountain climber. His first novel Sarah/Sara was one of Poets & Writers top five first fictions in 2010. Excerpts from his second novel, A Song of Ilan, won the Utah Writers’ Contest in 2008 and the Richard Scowcroft Prize in 2007. Herewith we offer a jubilant and thoughtful appreciation of David Grossman’s See Under: Love wherein Jacob mulls over, among other things, the strangeness of just sitting down and writing about a book you love. After reading this brief essay you’ll wish that more people would  take the time and do the same. (Photo of David Grossman via Wikipedia.)

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There are several different impulses that make me want to write about a book. Rarely, though – unless the catalyst is a review copy in the mail – is my impulse to just write about how rad a book is – in fact, doing so – unless the catalyst is a review copy in the mail – seems faintly ridiculous. Nonetheless, after reading David Grossman’s See Under: Love, my compulsion to translate adulation into typed language overwhelmed me. My good friend Scott had told me that Grossman had written the book for me, and I’m fairly sure he’s right, even though I was maybe fifteen when the book was published, which by the way, is the wrong age to read See Under: Love. I read it right after I finished writing (I think it’s finished anyway: time and publishers will tell) a novel about the inaccessibility of the Holocaust, and the consequent impossibility of writing about it. Grossman’s book accomplishes everything I wish I could do in mine (including making the argument that postmodernism actually is the Holocaust, not a response to it). It’s tempting to say all the things the book is: a series of experiments, a constant repetition of the same story told in different forms, an anti-postmodernism, an exercise in horror that advocates for love and ends with a prayer that is an encyclopedic entry under ‘payer,’ the most beautiful book I’ve recently (or in memory) read…Or to say how it makes me feel: like the argument for creating beauty is not in conflict with a Platonic striving to be closer to the truth, this after a decades of calling bullshit at sentimentalizing or redemptive accounts of the Holocaust, of which See Under: Love is neither.

But I ought to begin more mundanely, with a synopsis: The novel is really big, 458 oversize (for paperback) pages with words seemingly occupying every corner (I know, this is what all pages do, but it just seems like there are more words on these pages than usual). The book is broken into four experiments. To the extent that they contain a linear chronology, it’s of Shlomo, the Momik of the first section’s title, a child of Holocaust survivors who grows up in a Tel Aviv neighborhood of survivors. In the first section, Momik is a nine-year-old kid whose parents won’t discuss the Holocaust, though it looms everywhere. The section’s action begins with the return of Momik’s great-uncle, who Momik calls Grandfather Anshil, a man so broken by the camps that he is very nearly catatonic, certainly incapable of caring for himself. Anshil is the author of a once-popular children’s book series about The Children of the Heart, a band of heroes who celebrate diversity (in the band’s ethnic composition) and battle injustice. Momik comes to believe that Anshil has told a last, lost story to the commandant of the camp in which he was interred, a Herr Neigel. In Grandfather Anshil, for whose care he is responsible, Momik sees an opportunity to learn the nature of the Holocaust, which he thinks is a beast (and calls, The Beast) that haunts his parents and neighborhood. To do so, he researches the Holocaust at his local library, interrogates his neighbors, and ultimately assembles a museum of horrors in his apartment building’s basement to which, in the section’s finale, he brings Anshil and the several other utterly broken survivors from his neighborhood. When they realize what Momik has assembled, they begin keening and wailing. Momik recognizes his mistake, and recognizes “with all his nine-and-a-half-year-old alter kopf intelligence that it was too late now”(86).

This move, to attempt to compose, to attempt to learn the last story of a victim is repeated in milieu ways in each section, but by the time these stories are told, it is always already too late to reverse the mistake of thinking they might be told. In our desire, as readers, to hear these stories, we become as guilty as Momik, who grows up into the writer Shlomo – whose attempts to write about the Holocaust constitute the subsequent three experiment – who tries wrestle a last story first out of Bruno Schultz, an actual writer whose death in-ghetto-by-Nazi is tragic and absurd even by Holocaust standards, and then from Anshil himself; we become as guilty because we fall in love with the language and sentiment and action in each of the experiments, and somehow, that’s as morally problematic, as tainting, as Anshil’s realization that Herr Neigel is his last great audience, and that he needs that audience, wants it, even though it has killed his wife and child, kills thousands of Jews every day. In a way, we’re guilty of wanting life and beauty, and the novel makes us feel that guilt by allowing us to experience both beauty and lust for life, for continuance despite the Holocaust – something even the most heartless of the Nazi characters Staukeh, Neigel’s second-in-command, refuses to do, consistently trying to kill himself after the war, even though he has no remorse for his actions.

See Under: Love is one of those books that one constantly wants to quote to ones lovers and friends, either because it is beautiful, or because it seems to answer some other question that arises in conversation. But every section I try to quote ends up causing me to start reading, in the interest of context, further and further back until I find myself starting with the first two sentences:

It was like this: A few months after Grandma Henny was buried in her grave, Momik got a new grandfather. This grandfather arrived in the Hebrew month of Shebat in the year 5317 of the Creation, which is 1959 by the other calendar, not through the special radio program Greetings from New Immigrants which Momik had to listen to every day at lunch between 1:20 and 1:30, keeping his ear open in case they called out one of the names on the list Papa wrote down for him on a piece of paper; no, Grandfather arrived in a blue Mogen David ambulance that pulled up in front of Bella Marcus’s café-grocery store in the middle of a rainstorm, and this big fat man, dark but like us, not a shvartzer, stepped out and asked Bella if she knew anyone around her called Neuman, and Bella got sacred and wiped her hands on her apron and said, Yes, yes, did something happen, God forbid?

And in that second sentence is everything anyone ever need know about the world of Holocaust survivors, right down to the vague racism imbedded in the use of the term ‘shvartzer.’ And since it’s inappropriate to read several hundred pages to a friend (or lover) so that she (or he) might hear, properly, one special section, I hope all of you will allow me not to have to, because you’ll run out, right now, and buy and read this book pronto, so that you will have already read the preceding words, and we can sit and marvel at them together, guiltily.

— Jacob Paul

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Poets & Writers counted Jacob Paul’s debut novel, Sarah/Sara, as one of the 2010’s top five first fictions. His writing has also appeared in Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, Massachusetts Review, Western Humanities Review and Green Mountains Review.

Aug 212012
 

Harry Marten writes here a lovely essay on rivers, river books (Huck and  Ratty and Mole) and cancer, the beauty and whimsicality of the one and the grim treatment protocols, anxiety and dread of the other. Born in the Bronx, Marten has spent most of this life living next to the Mohawk River a few miles from where it drops over the falls at Cohoes and joins the Hudson (so he is practically a neighbor of mine). We have also gorgeous paintings by Marten’s wife Ginit Marten of the river that is so precious to them both. Marten is the Edward E. Hale, Jr., Professor of Modern British and American Literature at Union College in Schenectady, also a Conrad Aiken expert which endears me since Aiken has been a teacher and inspiration to me since I cracked open The Divine Pilgrim at the feet of the two-story reproduction of Michelangelo’s David in the library reading room at the Loyola campus of Concordia University in Montreal in 1975.

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Mohawk River, Niskayuna

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Living on the river was nice and easy./People on the river just take their time. / The wind in the summer was warm and breezy. / Wind in the winter, it cut like ice. (Folk Song)

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about by a river. (A.A. Milne, play version of The Wind in the Willows)

Some childhood things just stick in the mind. Water Rat from The Wind in the Willows, for instance, forever confident, offering words to live by: “’And you really live by the river? What a jolly life! . . . .’`By it and with it and on it and in it . . . . It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink. . . .  It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we’ve had together! Whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, it’s always got its fun and its excitements.’”

But despite Ratty’s words of wisdom, read to me by my sweet father before I had many words of my own, my life remained essentially riverless for more than five decades.  There were plenty of ponds, lakes, oceans, even a reservoir or two, but no river contact to speak of.

For a boy in the 1950s Bronx, the river – East or Hudson – seen through the back window of the family Plymouth driving south to visit aunts and uncles in midtown, seemed to confirm Ratty’s enthusiasm. The shining water was lovely and beckoning. But up close, it was a free flowing garbage dump and a danger zone, home to muggers and addicts. Well known myth had it that even putting your foot in the river was to risk rot or worse; and to walk the shoreline after sunset meant becoming the crime written up in the morning Daily Mirror headlines.

There were always satisfying encounters with imagined rivers, growing in number as I ambled into adulthood  — Marlow’s voyage  into African darkness, Huck’s raft on the Mississippi, Lewis and Clark on the Columbia and Yellowstone, Thoreau’s Concord and Merrimack.  But when it came to actually looking at, touching, smelling the thing itself, I found that I had little desire to muck about by or in, or with or on any river.  Even when I lived near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri for six years, I hardly ever looked up from my work of teaching and paper grading to notice their majesty. When the tropically hot St. Louis summers oppressed our young family, my wife and I followed Huck’s example and lit out for the territories – but not on a river. We were looking for a lake or a beach. We never tried float tripping on the Missouri, the proscribed summer get-away activity for locals; it just wasn’t part of our sense of how the world worked. Instead, we drove hours south to the tacky Lake of the Ozarks, and days north as far as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to find a plop-down beach and cool water. For all the impact America’s great rivers made on me, I might as well have been living in the Mohave Desert.  Which is why I was surprised to find myself well into my fifties living alongside a river and liking it.

More than half a dozen years ago, having decided that we’d better do it soon if we were ever going to move from our clattery but comfortable city neighborhood in upstate NY where we’d been just about long enough to pay off our mortgage, my wife and I began to spend our weekends with a workaholic realtor. She showed us suburban ranches in lawnville, country estates where I could pretend to be a small-scale Rockefeller, woodsy cabins ripe for improvement, and upscale colonials crammed with enough electronic gizmos to light up the darkest nights. But nothing clicked until the house on the river  swung into view.   For all practical purposes the deal was struck before I’d even finished locking the car.

My wife and the realtor had gone inside while I stayed back on the driveway for a minute to enjoy the late spring sunshine before following along behind. It was as close as I’d ever come to a Sunday Times Magazine kind of place, skylights and windows filling each room with light and air. The vaulted ceilings were a plus; and the huge two-sided brick fireplace with coppery arched doorways was a knockout. But it was the view that did it, the house set high above the Mohawk River, with a wetland at the base of the river bluff. Along the back of the house, every window, every door, looked out toward the water. I loved the idea of “my river.” That afternoon it was brown and placid, moving slowly south and east toward its grand finale with the Hudson a few miles down the line.

Filled with desire, we bargained badly, pushed ourselves to the limit of our money, said yes, we’ll do it. We hired Mr. Sandman to awaken the gloss of the hardwood floors. We had the place inspected, the shale-driven radon gas remediated with a pricey vacuum system. We tried to persuade our grown sons that we weren’t abandoning their history or their boxes of comic books, vinyl records, Star Wars figures, Transformers, old Tin Tin stories, secret diaries, stuff they could neither use nor throw away. We moved out and moved in, leaving our three story urban Victorian in order to discover a new domestic world in the semi-tamed water wilds.

The blur of the first months became the blur of the first years. Boxes filled the basement and garage, waiting to be unloaded while we lived without really settling in. We went about our business of work and play, noticing the river and the wetland in passing when a big boat went by, or when a heron landed to feed and preen down below our windows. We kept binoculars hanging in the kitchen so we could spy selectively on river life. But for the most part the river neither demanded nor commanded our steady attention. Until the late winter of our fourth year, that is, when normal became abnormal and routine stopped dead in its dull and predictable tracks.

 There was nothing unique about the moment, which had to have happened many times that day and every day on the east coast and the west, in the breadbasket middle of the country, in faraway places I’d never visited or thought to visit. It wasn’t even a first in the family; but it was a first for me and it changed things. Though my wife had had three cancers in ten years, this was my turn, and it came as a surprise.

The clue, I suppose, was the doctor’s office calling to give me the last appointment of the day — “so you and Doctor can talk,” the receptionist said.

“Why do they always call them ‘Doctor?’” I groused to my wife – “like they’re the only one of their kind.” Of course I was nervous and showing it, but I’d really had no negative vibes. My PSA numbers weren’t very high, though they’d been slowly and steadily moving up and lately had jumped. The obligatory biopsy had been humiliating, but painless, and Dr. R., an experienced surgeon even if he looked younger than my children, had told me that this was just a precaution. He didn’t expect cancer, and if he didn’t, I didn’t.

The last appointment of the day takes you out of the examination room and into the comfy chair room, the office with leatherette chairs, lamps instead of neon, a grand oak desk. Everyone, it seemed, had left for the day except me, my wife, and Dr. R, who was quiet, serious, kind, as he explained that much to his surprise the biopsy had been positive, and not only that, my “Gleason Score” – the way of measuring the irregularity, and therefore the aggressiveness, of prostate cancer cells – was near the top of the scale. I had “It,” and a particularly dangerous version of it to boot. With the February evening turning cold and dark outside the office window, Dr. R offered a sobering pep talk. For someone my age, he recommended a radical prostatectomy, surgical removal of the offending organ, as the procedure with the best survival statistics; but he urged me to take my time in deciding what action to take.

There were plenty of choices, from radiation to cryotherapy, leaving me with bizarre echoes of Robert Frost’s world-ending visions of fire and ice spinning round in my literature professor mind. The one option that Dr. R. refused to sanction was the one I wished for:  do nothing now, simply watch and wait. Maybe all of this would take care of itself, turn out to be no big deal after all. I knew better, of course, and handing me a “Prostate Cancer and You” pamphlet, and a list of books I could find at my local Barnes and Noble – everything from Surviving Prostate Cancer by the grand Pooh Bah of Urological Surgeons, to the Prostate Cancer entry in the Dummies series – Dr. R urged me think it through so that I felt comfortable in my decision. The books would clarify, he said.

“Take your time,” it turns out, means take up to four weeks if your Gleason rating is 9 on a 10 scale, hardly a blink when contemplating actions that might leave you incontinent, impotent, or, in a worst case scenario, dead as Marley’s ghost. Not to mention that second opinions typically come from doctors who are booked out months in advance, not weeks. The decision-making tied me in knots – everything that followed was simply a predictable, and therefore manageable, misery.

Too tired and too wired to go home for dinner after the diagnosis, my wife and I ate at our favorite family Italian restaurant. I won’t say that it had become a kind of ritual meal for the condemned, but pasta is powerful comfort food, and we had gone there after my wife had gotten her first cancer report. Then we had been profoundly shocked and disbelieving. Now, ten years and three other cancers down the line, our reaction after the first hour was “OK. Now what do we have to do?” That answer, at least, was clear: like the old Fred and Ginger song said, you’ve got to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. The problem was that only we could decide where to start and how to start this time through.

Oddly enough, one of the things I most remembered from our first encounter with the disease was a trip to the MOMA in New York to see Willem de Kooning’s late paintings. The old man, his disruptive, alcohol-fueled creative rage replaced by a growing calm that came, sadly and ironically, with the onset of dementia, had in the 1980s produced paintings that were fluid ribbons of bright color, objects of great beauty that seemed to offer openness, simplicity, and movement as an intuitive response to gathering darkness. On a weekday afternoon, the museum almost deserted, we’d walked through the show contemplating the sense of sadness, but also the wonder and freedom at the end of life.

A gift from an unexpected source, I thought, next morning, standing in front of the show’s poster that hangs alongside a cactus many feet taller than I am on a second floor landing of our house. Below a large arched window looking out to the river, de Kooning’s ripples of color and light seem to speak to the always moving dark but sparkling water down below.  And that’s where my eyes and thoughts turned those first weeks of decision-making – gliding past de Kooning to the river in winter.

When I wasn’t making arrangements for time away from work, seeing to medical consultations, or discovering in my stack of “how to” cancer books that the subject turns from treatment options to survival statistics when the text shifts to cancers at the top of the Gleason scale, I found my attention drawn to the waters below the house.  While my world seemed to be uprooting, as if slowly tilting down an embankment, the river stayed firmly horizontal, always changing yet visibly stable. In February’s sharp light, unobstructed by leaves or cat tails, the river seemed a study in contrasts.   Blocks of ice capped by mounds of snow formed great uneven ridges across the channel between our street and “Riverview Road” across the way.  But the surface of the water seemed uniformly dark in the early morning, then mirror-flat and shimmering in the cold afternoon sunshine. Contemplating the water, I tried hard to keep my own surface appearance steady in public view, masking the surges of fear and stress that pushed me into turmoil.

My days were filled with a new language, words I’d lived happily without for six decades—abstract, scary words that were hard to grasp because I was bent on forgetting them as soon as they reared up into my consciousness:  bladder neck contracture, external-beam radiation, laparoscopic pelvic lymphadenectomy, neurovascular bundles,  surgical margins. Some of it was military:  there were “zones,” “invasions, “blockades.” Some of it sounded like a collision of Freud and up to the minute sociology – all about “urges” and “dysfunction.” At its best it was a distraction, a chance to practice my standard coping mechanism of irony. At its worst, it was an open sesame into a world of pain and diminishment. Unable to concentrate on pop medical books with catchy chapter titles like “Diagnosis and Staging” and “What Are My Options,” half-hiding, reading as if I was holding my hand up to my eyes, fingers spread wide, so I could see and not see at the same time, I found myself looking more and more toward the steadying river that in its indifference to its surroundings, its regular unflustered downstate movement past my house, never failed to calm and clear my mind.

The Mohawk travels roughly 150 miles from its start as a tiny stream 35 miles or so north of Rome, NY, flowing generally south and east across New York’s  Mohawk Valley through small towns and cities that mix Indian and European names – Oriskinay (“the place of nettles”), Canajoharie (“the pot that cleans itself”),  Alplaus (“eel place”), Schenectady (“across the pine plains”), Niskayuna (“flat land where the corn grows”) – down to Cohoes Falls where it spills some 70 feet down into the Hudson Valley. My own slice of the river, looking full left and right as far as the eye can see from the dining room window without precipitating neck spasms, is about three-fourths of a mile.  The mystery of the unknown, both upstream and down from my window on the watery world, absorbs me. Often my puzzling extends no farther than wondering where that log that’s floating past me broke loose, or when will the ice be breaking up again with its loud and sudden rifle cracks. But faced with my sudden awareness of time’s limits, a  standard subject, of course, for the novels and poems I’ve been teaching for decades but which I seem not to have absorbed viscerally until just yesterday, I find myself wondering too about the history of the place where I’m standing – fifty years ago,  one hundred, two hundred.

On their ways west, how many may have casually looked up to exactly where I’m standing? Did they continue far beyond the bend in the river, or did they stop nearby, set down roots, raise families? Remembering my grandfather who once was a Canadian fur trapper, I think about the European traders who worked the river, and the Indians who were displaced. Remembering the old bridges I’ve driven across lately, I wonder if there were wooden bridges before iron and steel.  What happens to old things along the river, no longer useful, no longer wanted? Do they simply rot and crumble, finally drifting away, never to be seen or thought of again? Will any of the riverside construction I see each day be here when my grandchildren are old enough to notice it? What about the roads now jammed with workers headed into and out of the city? Or the Country Club a river’s width away, that fires glorious tracers into the night sky to celebrate weddings, graduations, and our national independence? The apple orchards down the road, a delicious autumn destination? I’ve no capacity to think in geologic time, of the slow dance of glacier melts and deposits tens of thousands of years ago. Of course I understand that things are always starting and ending; but I know, too, that for all practical purposes the river continues, which is, during these days of uncertainty, a comfort.

Two weeks after my sit down with Dr. R.  I have an appointment for a second opinion. The Head of Oncological Radiology at the hospital is a slender, confident, middle-aged guy, whose office lies deep within the bowels of the building.  To get there, my wife and I are instructed to follow the color coded stripes painted on the floor. Like Hansel and Gretel we keep to our trail of breadcrumbs, which takes us eventually to Elevator C and then to who knows what witch’s house in the windowless basement.

Though he must have a version of this conversation many times a week, Dr.S. is polite, attentive, unhurried. He reads through the chunky file of my medical history, sits forward in his swivel chair, leans into the conversation. He pulls out a yellow pad and begins to draw what he figures is going on inside my body. He talks about clinical “staging,” writes out a dizzying assemblage of numbers and letters that are used to indicate how virulent and how far along a tumor might be, offers a preliminary number and letter for my version of the beast – the bad news being my Gleason score; the good news being the likelihood of this being an early discovery of the tumor.

He explains what radiologists do:  3-D conformal radiation; intensity-modulated radiation therapy; proton beam radiation. Like the good student I have always been, I take notes like crazy, filling up pages of my notebook with fragments of techno-talk. As far as I can tell, all the radiological options do the same thing, burn and destroy tissue, trying to keep to a minimum the damaging of healthy cells while killing the killers.  Then the risks and side-effects part of the conversation:  inflammations, burnings, itchings, crampings, blockages, bleedings, strictures, pain that won’t quit, various diminishments and/or collapses of body functions. This fills up 20 miserable minutes, escalating to anecdotes about worst case scenarios, like the one about a man who has been compelled to use a Foley Catheter for more than a year because he has lost the ability to urinate, before Dr. S. tells me that he simply wouldn’t recommend any kind of radiation for a patient like me – strong enough to tolerate surgery, young enough to expect long life after a procedure, early diagnosis, likely for various reasons to have urinary “issues” after any sort of  beam treatment.   It’s hard to argue with a man who turns away business.

After extravagantly praising Dr. R’s surgical skills and reputation, he talks about my surgical options. The more he explains, the more anxious I become. Though I need to understand what’s coming my way – it is, after all, why we are spending our “second opinion” afternoon together – what  I suppose I’d like to hear from him, though I’d not admit to it,  is “do it this way, and do it now.”  I’d resent and distrust his certainty, but I’d be able to get on with my planning.  Instead, covering the same ground that Dr. R. and the books have mapped, he explains my two options. There’s the old way, traditional open surgery with the surgeon’s hands doing the cutting and in the body, and the surgeon’s senses of touch and sight immediately engaged; and the new way – robotic surgery performed by working a robot from behind a computer screen. Both procedures take you to the same place – removal of the cancerous organ and the cancerous tissue that may surround it.  But the robotic is initially less invasive, less traumatic.  The hospital stay is likely to be shorter, initial recovery quicker.

It seems a no brainer; less pain never loses its appeal. Until he begins to talk about survival statistics, which are generally good for the old ways and “too soon to call” for the new. He says we just don’t have enough data to know if robotic surgery is as effective a treatment as open surgery. Maybe in ten years everyone will be dancing with robots, but now, in this part of the country, it’s only a few, and they’re finding their way as they go. “Want to be part of their learning curve?” he asks,  pointing out that Robotic surgery might well add three to five hours to the time of an already long operation, and every hour under anesthesia comes with the risk of brain cell damage. “How many cells can you afford to lose?” he asks?

The issue of being on the “cutting edge” has never taken on so precise and troubling a meaning. Dr. R practices the old tried and true method and has done many hundreds of these surgeries, a statistic that both pleases me and makes me cringe. Does it matter that I’ve known and liked him for years, and if I switch to the latest technology I’ll just be encountering another surgeon for the requisite 6-8 hours of the procedure – being asleep for much of that time anyway? Should it matter? Am I comfortable with a doctor behind a monitor, a position that he probably hasn’t assumed all that often before seeing my inner organs in, I hope, vivid Technicolor?  Working all my adult life with metaphors not numbers, I’ve always been likely to come down on the side of Disraeli’s “there are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  But the stats I have before me speak to the possibility of my living or dying, and the debunking quote suddenly seems too cute and coy. Pondering my Gleason score again as I gather up the diagrams and my scribbled notes to leave,  trying to untie the tight knots in my stomach, I find myself hearing the explosive frustration of that other Gleason, Jackie, delivering Ralph Kramden’s  Honeymooners line: “one of these days . . . . one of these day, POW, right in the kisser.”  But is it my POW or my kisser?

If I could just leave the sickness books and notes behind, I think, even for a day or two – take a walk along the river, looking downstream toward the nearest river lock, letting the water and winter sky clear my view of things while all the accumulated information simply moves through me, like river tributaries, I’d know what to do . But the February freeze holds into March, and the ice and snow along the riverbank makes walking impossible. All I can do is look out from the safety of my cliffside perch to the uniform gray of the scene below, hoping to be able to differentiate distinct shapes.

With a smile, my brother-in-law tells me about a busy CEO who picked his treatment and his doctor by finding the place and practitioner nearest to his weekly staff meetings. A friend, snipping the grape vine, recommends a doctor that another has told me to avoid at all cost.  A colleague tells me that in Europe they rarely cut, just wait. Gotta die of something, he says. I make and break an appointment for yet another medical opinion. Time’s running along, and  caution or confidence, I’m really not sure which, keeps bringing me back to the place I began – the doctor I know best and the operating technique that has been around longest.

Much to my surprise, by the time I look up from my intense preoccupation with next steps and survival strategies, the seasons have shifted.  Ice jams have broken, and the surging river is carrying its usual early spring load of winter detritus – wrecked trees, beer cans, even an occasional abandoned cooking grill and kitchen appliance – down toward the falls at Cohoes.  My own stumbling rush to determine and set up my procedure –carrying its full load of fear and other psychic waste suddenly released into turbulent flow of my thoughts – has bumped to a halt against the reality of the surgeon’s schedule and operation room availability. Now knowing more than I care to about my body and the state of prostate cancer treatments, I spend the next month ducking thoughts of pain, disease and death, until finally I’m summoned to unload my medical history and get clearance at a series of pre-op appointments. My internist confirms that except for this disease I’m basically fit to go.  A cardiologist says, yes, my heart is beating. I’m scanned and screened, listing again and again the meds I take, other illnesses and surgeries I’ve had, including childhood miseries like mumps and chicken pox. They ask if there’s a history of cancer in the family, but what can it matter now that I’m not a statistic of possibility but an actual happening?

The admissions clerk who takes my insurance information tells me that she once had a parakeet named Harry. This bird, she says, was remarkable – talkative, with a large medical vocabulary, given to eating table scraps right off the plate, sleeping right on her shoulder during the early evening TV news broadcasts. It flew out the window one summer morning and she hasn’t seen it since. It’s probably dead, she figures, giving me a hard stare as if I were the bird reborn. Sad news, I say, wishing I could fly out the window with my namesake. Good luck, she says, chirpy.

Next morning at the hospital I’m banded like Harry the parakeet, ready to be tracked. Outfitted with a flapping hospital gown and a green hair net, an IV tube that will travel with me for days, I climb up on the gurney that will be my bed for the day. I’m attached to a host of machines that monitor blood pressure, blood chemistry, heart beat. A nurse asks me how I respond best to indicating pain – visually, with a series of smiley and frowny faces that will mark my threshold? Numerically on a 1-5 basis with 1 equal to no pain and 5 as cataclysmic? With actual words like extreme, moderate, mild? I opt for words, as they seem to me to offer the best chance for maintaining dignity. I have one final go at the toilet, a first and last conversation with the anesthesiologist, a jokey exchange with Dr. R about how well rested we both feel, then surgical oblivion.

I wake to nurses flowing around me, like quick water round a floating tree trunk. One leans in to welcome me back, to ask how I’m feeling, to tell me that Dr. R. has already come by and that all went well, though I remember nothing of that and can’t really focus on what it means. He has explained it all to my wife, she says, who’ll be coming in from the waiting room any minute now. Slowly I understand that I’m in the recovery room, fuzzy headed, tightly and heavily wrapped around my belly with some kind of surgical bandages, and, oddly, down near my ankles, fitted with pulsating leggings that rhythmically squeeze blood through my legs and thighs to prevent clotting. I seem engulfed by a spider web of tubes – some, like the catheter and drain, will be my unwanted constant  companions for many days; others are just for the post-surgical moment,  part of testing and measuring my return to the world.

I seem to have questions, but the words I form disappear before they can get from somewhere inside my head to out my mouth. I feel muddy and sluggish, and when my wife comes in, she simply sits, her hand on mine.  Later, when I can listen, she tells me the news – no apparent metastasis, margins and lymph nodes clean. The downside is that given the aggressiveness of the cancer, not all of the nerve bundles on either side of the prostate, the nerves that enable erectile function, could be spared. What I know is that I am still in the world, a doped but recognizable version of myself. The rest, for now, is abstract – issues for some future recovery time.

The nurse who greets me in the place where I’ll be parked for the better part of a week is efficient and cheerful. She demonstrates the morphine drip that I can use for pain control. Just squeeze here, she says. It won’t do more than two jolts every twenty minutes, but that should be plenty.  If you need assistance, she says, just press this button –it’s what I’m here for. I’ve got the room to myself, though a plaster Jesus hangs above me on each wall, watching.  It’s part of the ambience of this Catholic Hospital, the trade off, I suppose, for having private rooms available. His repeated presence on the cross, wracked with pain for all our sins, speaks to my physical discomfort, unsettling the room. The body is what preoccupies me, not my spiritual well being, and if I could move, I’d take him down. Maybe if I ring a nurse she could take the little Jesuses away.  Within minutes, drifting in and out of sleep, I hardly notice them.

The nurses, arriving and departing, mark the minutes and hours of my new days. Every half hour they come to write out the statistics that represent me. When chills and fever flash through me, they shift the cocktail in my IV drip. When my catheter bag is full, they drain it, measuring my urine before they carry it to the toilet. They change my sweat soaked sheets and gown, barely disturbing me. Some are chatty and playful, some quiet, a few somber, cheerless and put upon. With all of them those first few days I try hard not to be a bother; my goal is not to be noticed at all.  Perhaps I’m guided by an instinct of appreciation and cooperation. Or maybe it’s just a way of fooling myself into feeling that I’m not really helpless. The puzzle that no illness guide books prepare you for is just how to give over with grace to being suddenly needy after a lifelong habit of independent action and coping.

As if to throw that question at me, a man I can’t see, but who is clearly in his own world of pain across the hall, screams his discomfort constantly in a voice that can’t be calmed or ignored.  “Nurse, Nuuuuurse, NURSE”—he  shouts it over and over – “Help me.” It comes in waves slapping against the walls of my room, and every room within reach. It kills sleep.

I try to picture my vocal neighbor, frightened and shocked by a kind of pain that’s completely new to him. I want to walk out into the hall, grab the first nurse I see, guide her into his room. “See,” I’ll say, “this man needs you. Do what you can for him. Do what you should for him.”  But for now the best I can manage is to be still, somewhere between lying down in a heap and slumped up in bed. “What’s going on over there,” I ask when a young nurse stops by to run a magical thermometer around my forehead and the side of my face. Not to worry, she says, they’ll get him sorted out. But the wailing goes on, endlessly. Later, when my wife comes in, she shuts the door behind her to dampen the noise. Next time it’s earplugs all around, I say, half smiling. Maybe it’s the morphine haze speaking out of my mouth, or my own pain answering his. Or maybe it’s the real me coming out at last under duress.  I’d like to choke him, I think, Duck Tape his mouth – just enough to bring peace to the surgical recovery wing.

Ever accommodating, Dr. R. manages a room change for me. But to my surprise, by mid- afternoon of my second day, I hear loud and clear from just across my new stretch of hallway, “NURSE. NURSE, Can’t anybody help me?” – as steady as Ticktock in Oz, as shrill as a dentist’s drill. My neighbor’s twin in pain? The man himself, moved down the hall too, so he can keep me awake? This time, laughing in helpless disbelief, I float away on it, the white noise of another man’s discomfort lapping round my head.

“Nothing by mouth,” the sign at the foot of my bed says in scribbled block letters, like a hasty judgment at last on the quality of my communication skills.  It’s one more instruction, of course, about care and feeding, but despite that, I’m given the daily menu which lists grandiose sounding entrees for some, chicken broth, apple juice and jello for others. I’m headed for the clear liquid diet in a few days, and surprisingly in a rush to get there, since I can’t even begin to be considered for release until my digestion is up and running. Before 7 AM of my second morning, a polite and enthusiastic man stops at the bed to collect the menu. Apologetic but optimistic, he assures me that any day now he’ll be there to take my order.  By the time “any day” comes round, “clear liquids only” has replaced my end-of-bed instructions, and Carlos, the food man whom I’ve gotten to know pretty well from his three times a day stop-bys to drop off or pick up menus, seems genuinely pleased to have me moving into his sphere. At lunch, he offers a grand flourish as he whisks the cover off my main course, a bowl of broth, then unveils a hunk of orange jello, my dessert. He wishes me “Bon Appétit,” and he means it, as proud of his presentation as if he were delivering at a four star restaurant.  A sweet man, I think, images dancing in my head of the “poor Chinese baby,” who, lacking a spoon, struggled to discover the flavor of his wiggly jello, and Bill Cosby cooing to his enraptured TV audience about how there’s always room for J-E-L-L-O.

The theory seems to be that when you can eat, you can move – your digestive system, your foggy brain, finally your feet, all ready for essential action. This is beyond sitting up, or transfer from bed to a reclining chair, which happened early-on with a nurse’s persistence and my wife’s help. It’s about walking, the sooner the better –my ticket out. And now that I have full access to a gruel that would make Oliver Twist cringe, but which I’m pleased to call my own, I’m encouraged to try.  Light headed and leaning hard on my wife while a nurse stands at the foot of my bed poised for emergency action should I stumble and fall, I begin with a small shuffle, imagining Fats Waller’s voice declaring “Come on and walk that thing! Oh I never heard of such walkin’! Mercy!”

My first effort gets me out the room door and to the nurse’s station down the hall, clutching at the seams of my absurd gown in a futile effort to maintain some dignity, my IV drip wheeling along beside me, my urine bag flapping against my leg.  In seconds that feel like minutes I’m back in my reclining chair, worn out and sweating, leaking fluid from under my bandages where a drain has pulled loose, and from the edges of my Foley catheter and a partially detached bag of saline solution. I feel wet and swampy, an unwieldy boat stuck in a mucky stream. But it’s a start. Throughout the afternoon and the morning to follow, I float myself out into the stream of hospital traffic, marking my path with repeated trips. Right turn at the door, slow motion to the desks at the end of the hall where the nurses are chatting and collecting meds to give out  to the residents of  the surgical recovery wing,  circling to the other side of the hallway and back to my dock, leaning hard against my wife’s steadying and steering arm.

Trying to be chipper, visibly earnest, well behaved and full of unquenchable optimism, I feel instead like a visible voyeur, aimlessly peeping into rooms as I drift by on my way up the hall to health.  In each I see versions of myself,  exhausted and probably worried men and women too weary to read the magazines, newspapers, books their friends have brought, too tired or drugged to manage more than staring out a window, or channel-flicking through the day’s infomercials or soap operas. But I’m ahead of the game, worthy of ridiculous pride and praise, up and about and not climbing back into bed until I’ve shown the staff and myself that I have enough get up and go to be up and gone.

Fats Domino forever has his walkin’(“yes, indeed”); Nancy Sinatra has her boots made for walking “all over you”; and I have my non-skid hospital slipper socks. By the third day, I’m able to get from C wing all the way into B wing and back. I ache everywhere with it, and sometimes need to stop to breathe; but getting out is a powerful motivator, and by the end of the day I’m told that “if everything still looks good” I should be back by the river tomorrow.  I’m more dependent on my wife and nurses for encouragement, energy, support for all simple tasks, than I can bring myself to face. But the idea of home has taken on huge proportions and every hour I stay in the hospital makes me more fretful and peevish. Home, I think, is the place where I can look out at the sun and water surrounded by my things – feet up on the blue couch,   Paul Simon or Rostropovich on the stereo, Dickens or Tin Tin in my lap – anything’s possible in the right space and place.

Here are the hospital exit questions. Get them wrong and you’re going nowhere: Are you running a fever? Can you keep food down? Any unmanageable pain? Ten on a ten scale? All frowny faces?  Any bleeding?  Any discharge or red streaking around the incision?  Can you pass gas? No need for bowel movements, just plain old American gas indicating digestion in process. This one is make or break, and while modesty suggests restraint, necessity demands rudeness.  If you can fart you can fly. And late in the evening before my possible departure date, my body rewards me with everything I need for a ticket of leave.

Trying to dress for the world out there, I discover that in four days my pants have ceased to fit.  Swollen from the insult of the surgery, and gauze-packed from belly button to groin, I can barely pull up my chinos.  With a loose shirt over me, I just leave the zipper and button alone.  Bending to tie my shoes is out of the question, but my wife laughingly tells me to relax into helplessness while she wrestles on my gold toe crew socks and slips my sneakers over them. I try for nonchalance but physical dependency is a hard swallow. “It’ll be better,” my wife says, “just flow like a river.”

The metaphor is soft, but the drive home is hard, full of bumps and bounces that I’ve never noticed before. “Oh for cripes sake, the car’s not that old,” I complain to my wife, “what ever happened to the shocks?” Though my wife’s driving with exquisite care, each jerk and jolt says hold on tight, steady yourself, you’re not who you thought you were.

Finally, as if returning after a long trip, we turn up toward the house, familiar yet suddenly surprising.  I push myself out of the car, slowly. And up the stairs to the second floor, slowly. Into the queen sized bed with its extra firm mattress, so high off the floor that it hurts to climb in. Weary, worried, but home to heal at last,  dragging along my stiches and aches, my urine tube, catheter bag, hydrocodone tablets,   unsettling memories of the hospital, and Dr. R’s emergency number, I slip off to sleep as my wife shuts the blinds. So this, I think, is my new beginning.

The initial changes are not subtle. Though some only last weeks, some hang on for months or more. Some, it seems will be forever. I learn to sleep on my back to accommodate the large urine drainage bag I’ve come to think of as my new-age piss pot. It sits squat in a large green plastic bucket on the floor to my right. Sometimes the tube that feeds it gets tangled or pulls loose, making a mess that my wife has to clean up since I’m still unable to bend to below waist height. During the day, where I go, my bucket goes, as if I’m constantly looking around for a floor to wash; have bucket will travel. I remember once hearing Odetta sing “there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza” and I suppose I should be grateful that this one is whole. But these days I feel Sisyphean, bound to the thing with no end in sight. If I want, there’s another way, a small bag that ties to my upper thigh – my dress bag. But as I’m rarely out and about these days, and the bag is unstable – leaking onto my pants leg rather than into the wash bucket, and needing to be changed often, it’s usually put aside for a “special occasion.”

“Oh, there’ll be some dripping for awhile, don’t let it bother you; it usually passes, ” the hospital resident who gave me my discharge papers had told me, as if I’ve become a faucet that needs tightening. But when the catheter comes out after three full weeks in place to allow the bladder to heal, I present a flood not a slow leak.  And like the overflow of the Mohawk in springtime, there’s no controlling it.

“Do your Kegels,” Dr. R tells me when I call in a near panic at the addition to my pile up of pain and indignity.  He means the pelvic squeezing exercises common to pregnant women and the rapidly aging of any gender. I might as well try to stop a runaway express train by holding out a raised arm or by simply willing it to slow down.  “Be patient,” he tells me. And in the meanwhile, get yourself some pads.”

They come in all sizes, these dams of human effluence. I shopped for them when my mother’s dementia stole her independence and I know the drill, from Super Plus Absorbency to Light Day Ultra Thins, but I’ve never thought of them for myself.  It means new larger underwear to accommodate the bulk; a new intimate relationship with the vagaries of  what I’ve begun to think of as the time bomb that is my body; and a new fretfulness at the prospect of potty re-training.  Depending on my Depends and trying to stay as empty as possible so as not to overwhelm their wick away capacities, I sit through hours at home that became days, then weeks, usually with a book in my hand, but mostly staring out at the river world beyond our house in a kind of trance- like waiting.

Friends phone and stop by, bringing news of ordinary doings from “out there.”    But as nothing stops comfortable conversation like the feeling of the body emptying while visitors sit by unaware of the secret interior drama, and nothing disrupts congeniality like sudden and frequent trips to the nearest toilet to change urine soaked pads, it’s always a relief to regain the quiet of the empty house and the river beyond it.

“A half a day’s journey from the Colonie, on the Mohawk River, there lies the most beautiful land that the eye of man ever beheld,”  Arendt Van Curler wrote in a 1643  real  estate developer’s sort of letter to Killian Van Rensselaer in Holland. There used to be a marker of the spot he meant at one end of Schenectady’s downtown river bridge to Scotia.  Two centuries later, the river was still flowing sweetly in the local imagination, celebrated in the sentimental ballad of “Bonny Eloise, / The belle of the Mohawk vale.” “Oh sweet is the vale,” the song goes, “where the Mohawk gently glides / On, its clear winding way to the sea, / And dearer than all storied streams on the earth beside / Is the bright rolling river to me. ”

But the human history of the river is darker than that, cloudy and roiling enough to make me feel a bit like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott as I sit by my window on the world contemplating health, an observer “sick of shadows” but fearing a reality that can “come upon” me as “a curse” of recognition of things as they are. The Mohawk that eases me into a mood of recovery with the promise of energy and change in its flux and flow, and stability in its often unbroken surfaces, can fool me with the mirror of its glassy impenetrability that hides entangling weeds, twisting currents, eddies downriver of where I sit.

The word itself discomforts. “Mohowaug,”  the name Mohican Indians gave their enemies, “eaters of living creatures.”  The Dutch made it “Mahakuaas”; our New England forefathers and mothers called them “Mohawks” conjuring up birds of prey, killers of the sky. And killing defined life along the river for hundreds of years.

Along its banks, Father Jogues was murdered and martyred, fingers burned and crushed, flesh cut from back and arms, head lopped off and displayed in plain view, his body thrown into the Mohawk.  Here, as decade passed into decade, war passed into war – involving all river dwellers – French and English, Dutch and Palatine Settlers, Tories and Patriots;  Huron,  Seneca,  Oneida,  Mohegan and Mohawk.  Slaughter in battles bloodied the Mohawk Valley – at Wolf Hollow, Oriskany,  Mount’s Clearing, Fairfield, Stone Arabia,  Beukendaal, Klock’s Field, Herkimer.  It’s one of the first things you learn about the place. At what used to be the North Gate of the stockade in downtown Schenectady, a sign marks the massacre of 1690, when, in the hard February cold of 1690, two French lieutenants with the sweet civilized sounding names of Le Moyne de Saine-Helene and Daillebout de Montet, and the Mohawk Chief Kryn, led a force of nearly 200 into a sleeping town, burning the city to the ground, scalping families, old and young.

Sir William Johnson, Joseph Brant, John and Walter Butler and their destroying Rangers, mythic heroes and bogey men to frighten children, left their shaping marks on memory and imagination along the killing grounds of the river’s fields and flood plains.  Destruction followed the water, yet renewal did as well – the making of forts, farms, outposts and villages, cities, leading finally to houses like the one I’m sitting in.

The river shaped the places built alongside it even as it offered the promise and vision of next places.  Bateaux and Durham boats, eventually Erie Canal barges and packet-boats, carried goods and people east to the heart of commerce, and through the Appalachian Plateau to the unknown continent beyond.

This river mattered , as all rivers matter, because it moved people, things,  stories, along its currents.  But the cost was high. By the early 1900s the river east of Utica was officially declared dead, victim of its many users and abusers – tanneries, factories, sawmills and gristmills, oil and chemical barges spilling into the water at canal transfer stations. The stink was potent until the last quarter of the last century, when New York’s Pure Waters Act sought to undo the disaster, enabling a natural recovery, bringing back the water I watch, as if newly made to wash my eyes each day as I settle in for viewing.

One morning our heron is back.  He comes with the early summer fishing boat that parks from 5 to 7 a.m. each day near the wetlands below our house.  Bird and man are both patient, waiting for underwater movement before flashing into motion.  A few weeks after, snapping turtles, some nearly two feet in diameter, begin their long climb up the river bluffs, stumbling around in the scrub grass of our sandy back yard to find a place to lay their eggs, before falling back over the cliff edge to flip and tumble back to the water.  Dozens of them, their hard work done, climb out on fallen tree trunks in the tidal pond to sun themselves.  At night, red foxes tear up the nests, devour the eggs, but some hatchlings survive to reach the river and enter its protective flow.  Red, green, and yellow canoes and kayaks begin to dot the waters. Silver crew-shells flash by in early morning and late afternoon.   Grand lumbering cabin cruisers push slowly west and east, white caps ruffling in their wakes.  Gulls circle, and now and again a red-tailed hawk or an eagle floats on a big wind, gliding high above the watery world.

That the river is finally unknowable and unconquerable is its saving grace, and my own.  Moving outside me, it returns me to myself, reminding me of the mystery of my own flowing veins, arteries, the twists and turns of my life, always moving, even in what seem to be moments stalled in pain and diminishment.  Months after diagnosis and surgery my wife and I walk together down to the river shore. By now the grass is head high, the ground spongy under foot. Kneeling, I put my hand in the cold flow, pull out a few stones ground smooth by the pressure of the water that embraces and then parts for my hand. I listen to the hush and surge of the water, hear the river’s voice from past to present. Hold steady, it says, for the wild ride to come.

Morning Shadows by the River

—Text by Harry Marten & Paintings by Ginit Marten

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Harry Marten has written a memoir (But That Didn’t Happen to You, XOXOX Press) and books on Conrad Aiken and Denise Levertov. His work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, The Gettysburg Review, The Cortland Review, The Ohio Review, Agenda, Prairie Schooner, New England Review (and NER/BLQ when it was called that), The Centennial Review, Inertia Magazine, other magazines and journals. He taught at Union College, Schenectady, NY, for decades, retiring at the end of August, 2012. “Healing Waters” is part of a book-in-progress concerned with life along three rivers: the Mohawk (NY), the Ouse (UK), and the Corrib (Ireland).

Aug 202012
 


Herewith a delightfully subversive essay on, well, writing essays and the perils of taking life too seriously by the peripatetic English writer Garry Craig Powell who currently lives and teaches in Arkansas. Today marks the publication of Powell’s new novel-in-stories Stoning the Devil which harks back to the time the author lived in the United Arab Emirates. Of this book Naomi Shihab Nye has written: “Garry Craig Powell has an astonishing ability to create characters with swift and haunting power. His intricately linked stories travel to the dark side of human behaviour without losing essential tenderness or desire for meaning and connection. They are unpredictable and wild. Is this book upsetting? Will it make some people mad? Possibly. But you will not be able to put it down.” (See also the author’s blog, also called Stoning the Devil, also about his experiences in the Middle East — the current post is entitled “Sex in the Middle East.”)

“How to Write an Essay” speaks of an even earlier time in the author’s life, before he launched himself on his world travels, when he was a student at Cambridge University studying history. At Cambridge students learned by writing essays for tutors, essay after essay; it was essay-writing boot camp. But sometimes, as Powell discovered, the great lessons happen beyond the classroom, in bed, for example.

dg

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During my second year at Cambridge, where I was reading History, I had a good deal of trouble with my essays. The problem lay not so much with style—indeed, I was considered something of a stylist, and was even held up as an example to other students—as with content. I either had so many ideas that I got tangled in them and lost my way, or I had none at all. “Not seeing the wood for the trees” was a frequent comment from my supervisor.

At Cambridge it is not lectures (optional) or seminars (nearly non-existent) which are the basic units of instruction, but supervisions, weekly meetings of one or two undergraduates with a don or research student to discuss an essay set the previous week. Because it ensures individual attention, it’s a superb system if you have a sensitive, congenial supervisor. But most supervisors at Cambridge in the seventies, however brilliant in their research, were hopeless teachers, and mine was no exception. A doctoral student of twenty-five going on forty, a bluestocking—she actually wore them!—with a face that always looked pinched with cold, and elocution so clipped her words cut your ears, each week she gave Jepson and me our essay title and a reading list comprising some twenty books and ten journal articles. I would actually attempt to read most of them, ending up with scores of pages of notes, a miasma of muddled information, which usually engendered a stolid, suet-stuffed essay: thick on facts, thin on ideas. Lower-second standard. (Equivalent to a C, perhaps.) I didn’t much mind: I was content to wander among medieval buildings every day, and spend my afternoons on the river. However, our bony, knife-nosed supervisor was not satisfied with me. “You could do better,” she told me irritably, “if you applied yourself. Must you really waste so much time rowing?” And Roland Jepson, who resembled a thirteenth-century saint with his long, curly golden hair and beard, was as uninspired as I, and fared no better. So each week we sat red-faced in the chilly front parlour of our liege lady, who harangued us with the annoyance of a Henry II berating mediocre counsellors, or ridiculed our efforts with the contempt of a Matilda for her cuckold husband, Stephen. (She admired the strong Henry, despised the weak Stephen. Must have become a Thatcher supporter in the eighties.) And we took it like bondmen, heads bowed, silent. Back to the library, eight hours a day. Waste of time.

Towards the end of the Lent term, however, after nothing but lower seconds (at least I was consistent), a disaster befell my work schedule. My girlfriend came to visit from my home town, and stayed five days. Now Audrey was not the brightest girl I’d known, though she had several times read a book (the same one, The Lord of the Rings, over and over), but on the other hand she was sweet and coy and looked like a wood-nymph from a canvas by Burne-Jones or Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Sylph-like figure, long, dark, coiling tresses: just the sort of creature I liked. Furthermore, although I went home every weekend, in the mid-seventies you still had to keep up the fiction with girls’ parents that their offspring were as innocent as babes in arms, so we rarely had the luxury of a rendezvous in a bed. (How delightfully exact is the French: it means “surrender yourself”.) And finally, I was twenty, Audrey eighteen. Given such premises, you don’t have to be a professor of logic to reach the ineluctable conclusion: we spent the entire five days in bed. To hell with libraries, lectures, books (The Exchequer in the Reign of Henry II); to hell with sightseeing; to Hades with essays. We did get up on occasion, I seem to remember, to eat an infamous meal in Hall—cold mashed potato, cabbage, microscopic meat-balls, the usual—and once we went to a Rowing Club cocktail party, where Audrey, a well-behaved bank clerk, was shocked to discover that the upper-class’s idea of fun was to dress in very expensive clothes and hurl pints of beer at each other. But on the whole the conclusions of the professors of logic are incontestable. The only history I was concerned with was the one we were making between the sheets.

Nevertheless, the time was drawing near, I knew, when I would have to pay for my sins. Audrey was leaving on Tuesday evening; my supervision was Friday afternoon. That meant my essay had to be in by Thursday lunchtime. So I had exactly a day and a half to do a week’s work. A day to scour a score of maliciously learned tomes, to devour a dozen articles of deliberately turgid, tedious prose. Half a day to write the essay itself. An impossible task. Couldn’t be done.

I didn’t even try. The day after Audrey’s departure I rose late, as sated as Byron’s Don Juan after his idyll with Haidee on her island, and strolled contentedly to the hideous university library (not for nothing was it designed by the chap responsible for Battersea Power Station), where I set myself the modest task of reading a single book and a single article. What were they about? What was the title of that epic essay? I fancy that it was on the Vikings, but surely it couldn’t have been, as I was taking Medieval English History during the Michaelmas and Lent terms. Probably, after my glorious five days of lust, I was simply feeling like a proud Viking for once, rather than the downtrodden serfs I usually identified with. Anyway, Thursday morning I wrote the essay, in three hours flat, instead of my usual eight or ten. Six pages in lieu of the standard twelve or fifteen. What did it matter? My marks couldn’t sink much lower. I could get a third; I doubted if even Queen Matilda was mean enough to give me a fail.

Friday, then. Jepson and I cycled together from Selwyn, my beloved Victorian Gothic college, across the city to the icy chambers in which our grim judge awaited us. As usual there was no smile, no small talk, no offer of a cup of something. After all, we were historians. We’d learned from Stephen’s mistakes with his barons in the twelfth century: don’t prevaricate, be decisive. We’d learned from Henry’s experiences with his Exchequer. Efficiency, that was the thing. Straight to business.

“Mr. Powell,” began my stern mistress, and I flinched in anticipation of her imminent scorn, “I am at a loss. I am utterly mystified. What on earth have you been doing since we last met? Your essay bears no comparison with your previous efforts. It’s clear and concise. You come straight to the point. It is the most brilliantly written piece I have read all year, and I’m giving it a first. All I can say is this: whatever you’ve been doing this week, keep it up.”

As you may imagine, I did my level best to follow the lady’s advice.

— Garry Craig Powell

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Garry Craig Powell‘s novel-in-stories, Stoning the Devil has just been published by Skylight Press. Powell is an Englishman who lived for long periods in Portugal and the United Arab Emirates, and shorter ones in Spain and Poland. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas in the USA. For more information, visit his website where you can also find his blog about life in the Persian Gulf.

Aug 162012
 

In Jamie Travis‘s “The Saddest Boy in the World,” a nine-year-old boy, smothered by a beautiful but oppressive and overwhelmingly disappointing life, decides to hang himself on his ninth birthday at the suggestion of several inanimate animals who talk to him as a side effect of the medication he is on.

Maybe it’s not for everyone. Fine.

Travis nicely acknowledges this in his note accompanying the film: “If you find this funny, good. If you’re offended, it’s okay—our paths were never meant to cross.” But, to borrow Maggie Smith‘s line (possibly borrowed from Abraham Lincoln) from the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, “For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.”

Travis’s first feature film For A Good Time Call . . . is coming out this year and he’s decided to release all his previous short films: “I have long been reticent about putting my films online but I recently got over it. Maybe it’s because my 30s have lightened me up or because I have finally accepted the internet is here to stay. Or maybe it’s that my first feature film is coming out and now seems like a good time to get exposure for an underexposed art form—the short film.”

See all his short films on his vimeo site. For more nuanced introductions to his aesthetic and his short works so far, look to the Numero Cinq at the Movies introductions to “The Armoire” and “On Greed.”

And look for his first feature For A Good Time Call . . . in theatres soon.

— R. W. Gray

Aug 162012
 

The legend of the Amazons, women-separatists, female warriors, has been a constant source of reflection and symbolization since the ancient historian Herodotus mentioned them, as if they were real and living somewhere in the area of present-day Ukraine, in The Histories. Here we have three excerpts from a brand new novel, Les Amazones, published this month by Les éditions de L’instant même. Les Amazones is a vivid and very up to date recreation/adaptation of the myth, written by a young French-Canadian author, Josée Marcotte. This is her first book publication in print — two earlier works came out online at éditions publie.net. This morning she tweeted a quotation from Henri Michaux, somewhat cheekily rewritten to refer to her book:

“Les Amazones” est un torrent d’anges mineurs, car tjrs le sacré cherche abominablement à voir le jour. [“The Amazons” is a torrent of lesser angels; the sacred is always trying, abominably so, to see the light of day. dg’s loose translation.]

But you get the point — the myth, like Freud’s repressed, is always trying to elevate itself to conscious thought,  often with beautiful, violent and decidedly upsetting consequences.

dg

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Josée Marcotte appartient à la génération qui a fait siennes les possibilités de l’édition électronique. C’est ainsi qu’elle a mis en ligne La Petite Apocalypse illustrée (éditions publie.net, collection “Décentrements”), sorte de dictionnaire iconoclaste, illustré d’éléments iconographiques populaires (bande dessinée, cartes de Monopoly, etc.) et tournant autour de la figure centrale du point d’interrogation. Ainsi y définit-on l’âme : “Principe qui désigne le moi sans maison, souffle entre les planches et draperies ayant le choix des corps.”

Les diverses facettes de son œuvre rendent compte d’une pensée qui se place en creuset d’influences diverses : Volodine (sans qui elle ne se serait pas lancée dans la réécriture mythologique sur le thème des Amazones dont Numéro Cinq présente ici trois extraits ), Claude Gauvreau (pour son langage exploréen), Pierre Yergeau (pour l’éclatement dans la représentation). Josée Marcotte affectionne la marge (Marge est d’ailleurs le titre et le personnage central du récit fondant son mémoire de maître à l’Université Laval), les regards obliques portés sur les archétypes : Les Amazones renvoient à la fois à la mythologie classique (avec des insertions judaïques au substrat gréco-latin) et à un monde voisin du nôtre par les références en creux qu’il suggère. En somme, le monde des guerrières antiques renouvelé par l’histoire récente de la femme.

—Gilles Pellerin

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Tirésia

Le monde est en guerre. Il est scindé en deux. Je ne sais trop depuis combien de siècles perdure l’affrontement entre le clan des hommes et celui des femmes. Je ne me souviens presque plus du commencement de la fin.
C’est pour repousser la fin que je fais l’inventaire de notre mémoire.

Je répète à Morphale que la terre serait à l’origine du conflit. Les femmes ont trouvé le moyen de créer des êtres, déjà femmes, déjà adultes, à partir de boue, d’épices, d’écorces, de végétaux, de fruits, et à l’aide d’incantations. Ces mixtures donnent à chaque fois, sauf erreur fâcheuse, une guerrière prête à manier les armes et à combattre, pour la préservation de notre clan, contre les hommes. Les ennemis doivent capturer l’une des nôtres pour perpétuer leur race, ils ont encore besoin du corps féminin pour procréer, n’ayant pas saisi les subtilités du sol. Les femmes luttent pour régner seules sur cette terre.

Je ne sais plus quoi penser. Je pressens, et je ne suis pas seule dans ce je, que la guerre opposant les deux clans va s’éteindre avec nous, bientôt. Le sol, du jour au lendemain, est devenu stérile, nous ne pouvons plus utiliser la vase afin de créer d’autres femmes. Notre survie, un pur calvaire de vase, notre calvase.

Attendre la fin, c’est un peu la vivre. Mon esprit n’est plus que vapeur, miettes et poudre à canon.

Qu’avons-nous fait pour en arriver là ?

Line

Quelque chose rendait irréelle la réalité que nous traversions ensemble. Quand Line revenait de son poste de garde, peu après minuit, elle passait à côté du fleuve sans le regarder. D’un pas lourd, elle longeait la cabane sur pilotis de Barika, Nanny et Satellie. Son regard vide cheminait sur la route, notre terrain vague sableux, pendant qu’elle dépassait les campements des divers régiments, puis passait le pas de sa porte grinçante. Suspendait de mains lasses ses deux fusils et son arbalète au crochet de l’entrée. Enlevait d’abord ses bas sales qu’elle déposait dans l’un des deux récipients. Se lavait les pieds dans le second. S’asseyait sur sa chaise de bois rond, qui soupirait sous son poids en même temps qu’elle. Ainsi placée, à côté de sa paillasse, les pieds dans l’eau encore tiédasse, elle faisait face au mur brun, celui qu’elle partageait avec Emrala et Yovnie. Emrala était de la garde de nuit. Seule Yovnie dormait à poings fermés, comme à son habitude, sur le dos, les mains croisées sur sa forte poitrine.

Line se retrouvait devant ce mur tous les soirs, dans cette position, depuis une éternité semblait-il. Elle le fixait longuement, chaque soir, ce même point, les yeux rivés au même endroit. Même qu’on aurait pu penser que les planches seraient creusées à cette place précise, mais non… Après un bon moment, les membres engourdis, elle se levait, tâchait de toucher le mur. Il reculait. Elle avançait ses doigts usés vers lui. Il reculait. Elle faisait quelques pas en avant. Il reculait. D’autres pas. Il reculait. Elle tendait ses mains vers l’avant. Il reculait. Elle se figeait. Inatteignable. Et c’était comme cela toutes les nuits.

Résignée, elle retournait s’asseoir sur sa chaise. Line fixait leur mur. Jusqu’au signal connu de ses paupières lourdes comme pierres, lui rappelant qu’il était temps d’aller sombrer dans le sommeil. Poussée à son extrême limite, elle se couchait alors sur son grabat. Puis fermait ses yeux épuisés devant la nuit.

Apo

Il y a de cela fort longtemps, quand les idoles furent sacrifiées, les statues tombèrent avec fracas. Dans un cirque médiatique grandiose, tous les pays s’arrachèrent à gros prix les images télévisuelles et journalistiques de la chute postcapitaliste. Les génocides abominables, les rébellions et les guerres sans nom eurent raison de l’Empire du béton et de ses géants, ses affres intestines l’attaquèrent de l’intérieur, telle la pyrite

Plus tard vinrent les mères fondatrices. Et notre création collective se fit dans le sang et la magie. Rien de nouveau sous le soleil. L’existence est fondamentalement sale.

Parmi ces innombrables images, le clan se souvient d’Apo, tremblotante sur un petit monticule. Au-dessus des nids de marmottes, elle tenait tant bien que mal sur son talus de terre. Une caméra pointée sur elle, comme une carabine chargée prête à déverser son plomb, Apo était seule à l’écran. Elle tombait de bas, la dernière vedette d’une émission de téléréalité appelée sobrement Concentration.

Un jour, en matinée, elle perdit sa jambe droite dans un soupir. Elle trébucha sur la parcelle de terre qui lui était assignée. Crac. Un vent invisible balaya une partie d’elle au loin. Sur une jambe, elle poursuivit son attente. La femme imaginait qu’il devait être merveilleux de sortir de l’espace où elle était contrainte, de pouvoir communiquer avec autrui, faire entendre sa voix. Le lundi suivant, on dit qu’elle regarda l’appareil, émit un gémissement, une sorte de plainte, et que son autre jambe se désintégra sous son poids. Les yeux hagards, elle fixait l’horizon qui la narguait. Lui, omniscient, partout à la fois, alors qu’elle se contentait de son morceau de terre glissant. Entre elle et lui, la caméra, la machine obligée. Des papillons de nuit virevoltaient autour de son tronc. Elle essayait d’en attraper au vol, mais peine perdue. Elle regardait ses bras, membres inutiles qui l’empêchaient de s’éloigner du sol, du talus maudit.

Après plusieurs années, elle sortit de sa torpeur et sa gorge relâcha un mot, son propre nom, Apo… Son bras droit s’égraina comme un sablier, lentement, tout en douceur, sous ses yeux impuissants. Les ténèbres avançaient vers elle à pas de loup, mais l’horizon était toujours aussi loin. On dit qu’elle fixait le paysage, derrière la machine, ce lieu où le sol épouse les limites du ciel. Cette vue suffisait à la maintenir debout. Elle attendait un miracle.

Plus la disparition frappait Apo, plus les cotes d’écoute augmentaient.

On n’avait jamais rien vu de pareil, un phénomène télévisuel sans précédent.

Ce qui restait de cette femme, un casse-tête aux fragments infinis, impossibles à rapiécer, que le vent et les satellites avaient dispersés aux sept coins des Amériques. Des bêtes du monde entier se délectaient des images qu’elles recevaient, bavant de contentement, se félicitant de ne pas être à la place de cet amas de chairs pétrifié.
Apo espérait être la prisonnière d’un corps autre que le sien, dont elle ne ressentait pas la présence, mais qui serait à même de contenir les restes de son propre corps pour en faire quelque chose de plein, de beau, de grand, de lointain. Comme le vent qui souffle en tempête et fouette les visages.

Elle sentit la secousse comme le vrombissement d’un torrent, ou d’un fleuve. Tout allait s’engloutir, enfin. Apo glissa sur elle-même et s’émietta avec fracas.

Le multiple dans l’un.

Le tout dans le rien.

L’écran devint blanc, et sans issue.

Plus tard vinrent les mères fondatrices, et leur engeance vengeresse.

—Extrait de Les Amazones de Josée Marcotte, L’instant même 2012

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Josée Marcotte est née en 1980 à Saint-Raymond, dans le comté de Portneuf. Elle a complété un mémoire de maîtrise en études littéraires sur l’œuvre de Chevillard à l’Université Laval (2010) avant de publier Marge, chez Publie.net. Son deuxième ouvrage, La petite Apocalypse illustrée, est paru chez le même éditeur en janvier 2012. Son troisième livre, Les Amazones, un roman qui revisite le mythe, paraîtra aux éditions de L’instant même en août 2012.

Voici quelques liens concernant surtout ses publications numériques  :
http://www.babelio.com/auteur/Josee-Marcotte/96217
http://actualitte.com/blog/uneautrerentreelitteraire/2011/09/a-la-decouverte-des-auteurs-publie-net-josee-marcotte/

Aug 152012
 

Herewith a strange and unsettling hybrid demonstration, part-concrete poetry and part-quotation, really two works amalgamated: three audio pieces (Ray Hsu stepping on a poem, a digitally re-produced reading of a definition of  the Ponzi scheme, and a recording of ambient room sound (Ray’s room) and a triptych of text images (drawings using letters)). These audio and visual images are efforts to reframe the relationship of the arts; they create an aesthetic/intellectual surprise, an audio-visual aphorism, if you will. For example, “We Are Ponzi” is a computer-generated reading of a financial description. The reading reframes the text as art (in some way that bespeaks also an angle of critical and ironic reflection thereon); the computer-generated sound distorts the flat reading; the title interacts with the reading mysteriously through the use of the first-person plural pronoun — the text becomes political, a culture commentary (and relates on some way to, say, Kenny Goldsmith’s reading of Brooklyn Bridge traffic reports at the White House).

dg

 

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The sound of me stepping on a poem one Monday afternoon

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We are Ponzi

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1.01 mins. of room tone from my window on New Year’s Eve

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—Audio & Images by Ray Hsu

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Ray Hsu is co-founder of the Art Song Lab, an interdisciplinary platform that partners 24 writers and composers to create fusions in the genre of art song alongside performers. These new works are workshopped and premiered at the Vancouver International Song Institute’s SONGFIRE Festival in partnership with the Canadian Music Centre. While completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he taught for two years in a US prison, where he founded the Prison Writing Workshop. Ray is the author of two award-winning books and writing in over fifty publications internationally. His work has been set to music and adapted for film; and he has been artist in residence at the Gibraltar Point International Artist Residency Program.

See Ray’s earlier contribution to Numéro Cinq here.

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Aug 132012
 

 

This is a hoot, a little light music on a summer’s day. Jonah is going to university in the fall; it is the hour of remembering; my mind keeps harking back to the wonderful times we’ve had over the past eighteen years. I was listening to his music the other night and rediscovered this gem, what we always used to call, simply, “The French Song.” He wrote it as a class assignment for 9th Grade French. His teacher was speechless. Jonah composed the music. He recorded the percussion tracks and background synth on an Electribe, then played the lead synth on a MicroKORG (Electribes and MicroKORGs are synthesizers made by Korg), and loaded both onto his computer. Jacob, the family linguist, co-wrote the lyrics and provided the French grammar and vocabulary expertise. The violet ox was a class meme. Jonah sang the words, but Jacob assisted with the deeper, spoken parts. The whole thing has a European lilt and a lovely irony and it lifts my heart. It came out of nowhere.

dg

Aug 132012
 

 

Jacqueline Kharouf writes speculative fiction (mermaid lovers, robotic daughters, demonic violins) which in many ways is a lot like other fiction (as in, it’s all a lie anyway) except that in speculative fiction the author has to pay special attention to those aspects of craft having to do with convincing the reader to enter and live inside a fictional world quite unlike the one we inhabit normally. It’s one thing to tell a reader that “Arthur staggered out of the bar and leaped into his red convertible Mustang and drove across town to see his lover, Gertrude” and something else to write that “Arthur staggered out of the bar and leaped into his anti-gravitron photon streamliner and instantaneously reappeared across town in Gertrude’s apartment.”

Jacqueline was my student last semester at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She took on the problem of convincing the reader for her critical thesis. She read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves” and plundered them for techniques she could use. The result is a useful compendium of devices for establishing the world of a story or a novel of any sort, not just speculative works. You will note, for example, the technique of the pre-story touched on in an earlier essay on Numéro Cinq in, Gwen Mullin’s “Plot Structure in Stories.”

Jacqueline earlier contributed a fine interview with Nick Arvin to the pages of NC. She also drew the illustrations for this essay.

dg

 

§

 

Every story takes place in its own fictive reality, which is an exaggeration of the reality of the real world.  All writers write to create a literary reality that appears to be plausible, true or real within its own parameters.  Verisimilitude is the word we use for the literary quality of appearing to be real.  Writers strive for verisimilitude, that is, they try to make the fictive worlds of their stories seem plausible enough that the reader can suspend his or her doubts and trust the story.  This trust is a bit like the trust we have in the world we live in, the so-called “real world,” which we experience in the details we observe, in the rules and societal expectations we follow, in the documentation we read, and in the experts who share their knowledge with us.

Writers use several techniques to create verisimilitude.  These techniques mimic the ways we experience the real world.

The first technique I want to talk about is the use of false documents.  A false document is a fictional document presented in a text as if it were real in the context of the fictional world.  False documents, like documents in the real world, seem to authenticate the fictive world.  In the real world, we learn about current events and information by reading authoritative sources.  In a fictional text, false documents function much the way authoritative sources function in the real world, as more or less objective evidence of facts about that world.  Also false documents seem to be free of narrative bias; they are outside the point of view of the narrating voice.

A second technique is the use of detailed concrete descriptions to make the fictive world of any story seem realistic and familiar.  The more detailed the description of a world (up to the point of tedium) the more substantial and real that world seems.  Realistic writers use such techniques to establish a relationship between their works and the real world; speculative writers use the same technique, or mimic it, to give the sense of a reality that may in fact not be so real.

A third technique is the framing of the fictive world of a story through the perspective of an authoritative narrator.  An authoritative narrator is a reliable witness to the events of the story.  In the real world, we seek the advice of authorities who provide their perspectives and knowledge. In an imaginary fictive world, an authoritative narrator acts as a filter for the reader’s perspective and influences the reader’s acceptance of the verisimilitude of that world.

A fourth technique is to use a literary reference as a parallel for a retold story, or conversely, to retell the literary reference in a new way. The reader accepts the fictive world of the new story because he or she is already familiar with the fictive world of the original story.  Familiarity is, of course, one of the things we expect from the real world.

A fifth technique is the pre-story.  A pre-story is a small story which precedes the main story or plot.  Writers use pre-stories to introduce the reader to the world of the story and to illustrate the source of the conflict or incongruity which spurs the story forward.  In the way that we use examples of similar incidents or events to preface a larger story we want to tell, pre-stories in literature help to underscore the larger conflict of the main plot. Or they function as ways of delivering thematic material that underpins the consistency of the fictive world.

Finally, a sixth technique is the repetition of key words, images, and phrases.  Writers use repetition to create a consistent fictive world.  Just as repeated events, images, and colloquialisms make the real world familiar, repetition creates consistency which the reader recognizes and identifies as familiar aspects of the fictive world.

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Buried Under Glass: The Science Fictional World of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s  We

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a two-hundred page novel organized into 40 numbered records written by D-503, a man who lives in this fictive world.  In these records, D-503 describes his life in the One State, the events of the story as they happen, as well as his thoughts, dreams, and feelings.  The One State is a society composed of people who live according to the idea that happiness is a matter of following a regular and systematic schedule, conforming to rules which are applied equally to everyone, and ignoring individuality for the safety and stability of living as part of a group.  While citizens of a nation like the United States believe that freedom is the ability to live as we choose, citizens of the One State believe that freedom is the ability to live according to rules which all members of society follow.

D-503 begins his first record (and the novel) by copying an article from the State Gazette.  The article briefly explains the purpose of the Integral, the One State’s newest machine, and calls all so-called ciphers (or citizens of the One State) to compose written accounts of life in the One State.  The One State will include these written accounts in the cargo of the Integral, a spaceship which will spread the clockwork-precise methodology of the One State to millions of alien societies across the cosmos.  One day, D-503, the Builder of the Integral, meets I-330, a woman who seduces him and garners his devotion.  She tells him she is planning to disrupt the control of the One State by stealing the Integral during its inaugural flight.  D-503 agrees to this plan, but the mission fails.

In the wake of several threats to the supreme power of the One State, the One State issues a new mandate that all ciphers must participate in an operation to have their imaginations removed.  D-503 attempts to avoid this operation, but the authorities of the One State catch him and take him for the operation.  With his imagination erased, and his soul removed, D-503 feels restored to his former state of bliss.  At the conclusion of his records, D-503 watches while the Benefactor, the leader of the One State, tortures I-330 and sentences her to death.

False Documents and Double False Documents

Zamyatin uses false documents, which are documents “created” in the One State, to verify the events of the story and to provide information about the fictive world.  The entire novel is a false document because it is a collection of false records written by D-503 (he titles his records “We”).

For example, before I-330 and D-503 attempt to steal the Integral, I-330 plans to disrupt the power of the One State on the Day of the One Vote.  On this day, ciphers are supposed to vote unanimously to renew the leadership of the Benefactor, but I-330 and several other ciphers vote against the supreme leader.  In Record 25, D-503 describes the vote and the aftermath:

In the hundredth part of a second, the hairspring of a clock, I saw: thousands of hands wave up—“No”—and fall again.  I saw I-330’s pale face, marked with a cross and her raised hand.  My vision darkened.

Another hairspring; a pause; a pulse.  Then—as though signaled by some sort of crazy conductor—the whole tribune gave out a crackle, screams.  A whirlwind of soaring unifs on the run, the figures of the Guardians rushing about in panic, someone’s heels in the air in front of my very eyes, and, next to the heels, someone’s wide-open mouth, bellowing an inaudible scream.  For some reason, this cut into me more sharply than anything else; thousands of soundlessly howling mouths, as though on a monstrous movie screen.

The next day, the One State prints an article in the State Gazette denying the effectiveness of I-330’s planned protest.  D-503 copies this article in Record 26:

Yesterday, the long and impatiently awaited Day of the One Vote took place.  For the 48th time the Benefactor, who has proven His unshakable wisdom many times over, was unanimously chosen. The celebration was clouded by a slight disturbance wrought by the enemies of happiness, which, naturally, deprives them of the right to become bricks in the foundations of the One State, renewed yesterday.

This newspaper article is what we might call a double false document because it is a false document quoted within a false document (D-503’s record). Throughout the novel, D-503 copies double false documents, such as newspaper articles printed by the State Gazette, letters from other characters, or snippets of State poetry.  These double false documents provide evidence of the growing split between D-503’s own experience of the world and the official version of the world.  In a sense this is the story arc of the novel.  D-503 begins writing his records and gradually finds his written version is different from the official version.  But at the end of the novel he has again lost his ability to separate his personal experience from the official version.

D-503’s records enhance the verisimilitude of the novel; such diaries, newspaper articles, etc. are “firsthand” accounts.  In this case, through the use of double false documents, Zamyatin even mimics the real-world split between personal and official versions.

Details

Zamyatin uses specific or concrete details to enhance the verisimilitude of the One State by creating the sense of a total consistent environment.

Ciphers depend on machines.  In one of the 1,500 auditoriums where ciphers regularly attend lectures, a machine called a “phonolector” gives the presentation.  When D-503 was younger and went to school, he was taught by a mathematics machine teacher that the students called Pliapa (because of the sound the machine made when it was turned on).  To make music, ciphers in the One State use a musicometer (using it, a cipher can make three sonatas an hour).  Later, at the Celebration of Justice, the ciphers sacrifice one of their own in tribute to the supreme rule of the Benefactor.  To sacrifice the cipher, the Benefactor uses “the Machine,” an execution device:

An immeasurable second.  The hand, applying the current, descends.  The unbearably sharp blade of a beam flashes, then a barely audible crack—like a tremor—in the pipes of the Machine.  A prostrate body—suffused in a faint luminescent smoke—melting, melting, dissolving with horrifying quickness before our eyes.

By inserting details about each of these machines—the pliapa sound, the cracks and flashes, the pipes, the color of the smoke—Zamyatin gives a sense of the concrete experience of the fictive world of the One State.

Zamyatin also includes details about the ciphers; the same details are repeated throughout the story to make the lives of these ciphers consistent.  Consistency is, of course, a characteristic of the so-called real world we live in, but in this novel consistency has an edge; the One State requires a super-consistency from its inhabitants.  Ciphers wear the same clothes, gold badges and time pieces: “Hundreds and thousands of ciphers, in pale bluish unifs, with gold badges on their chests, indicating the state-given digits of each male and female.”  All ciphers shave their heads: “Circular rows of noble, spherical, smoothly sheared heads.”  Every cipher wakes at the same exact time:

The small, bright, crystal bell in the bed’s headboard rings: 07:00.  It’s time to get up.  On the right, on the left, through the glass walls, it’s as if I am seeing myself, my room, my nightshirt, my motions, repeating themselves a thousand time.  This cheers me up: one sees oneself as part of an enormous, powerful unit.  And such precise beauty: not one extraneous gesture, twist, or turn.

Everyday, they sing the Hymn of the One State after breakfast: “Breakfast was over.  The Hymn of the One State had been sung harmoniously.” (31).  In groups of four, everyone marches to work: “In fours, we went to the elevators, harmoniously.  The rustling of the motors was almost audible—and rapidly down, down, down—with a slight sinking of the heart…”  The sensory details of the rustling elevator motors and the “sinking of the heart,” as well as the everyday familiarity of their harmonious movements, are concrete experiential details which make the One State seem like a real place.

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Uncanny Duplicity and Scientific Perversion: The Metaphysical Worldview in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson separates his short novel into three sections.  For the first (and largest) portion of the novel, Stevenson divides the narrative into eight chapters and describes the main plot from the third-person perspective of Mr. Utterson, a lawyer.  In the second portion of the novel, “Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative,” Stevenson provides the first-person perspective of Dr. Lanyon, a friend of Utterson and Dr. Jekyll.  In the third portion of the novel, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case,” Stevenson writes a narrative from the first-person perspective of Dr. Jekyll, who provides his side of the story.  The novel takes place in nineteenth century London.  Stevenson’s London is like the real London of that century (the descriptions of the city seem to resemble what London may have looked like in that time in history), but it is different because the London of the novel is plagued by the heinous criminal activity of a man who slips in and out of society.  The mystery of this man’s identity, his origins, and his connection to Dr. Jekyll affects the world of the novel and drives the action of the plot.

The novel text begins with Utterson’s narrative. Utterson is worried about Dr. Jekyll’s will.  Utterson has learned that Jekyll has recently changed his will to name Mr. Hyde as his heir despite Mr. Hyde’s poor reputation.  After Mr. Hyde commits several crimes and Jekyll avoids meeting his friends, Utterson confronts Jekyll.  Utterson and Poole, Jekyll’s butler, break into Dr. Jekyll’s study, but they only find Mr. Hyde’s body and a sealed letter from Dr. Jekyll addressed to Utterson.

Then, in “Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative,” Lanyon gives an account of Jekyll’s strange behavior on the night he received a letter from Jekyll and witnessed Mr. Hyde transform into Dr. Jekyll.

Finally, the novel concludes with “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case,” which is the sealed letter Utterson found with Hyde’s body.  In his statement, Jekyll provides personal testimony of his scientific experiment on his own dual-sided nature.  Jekyll explains that by drinking a concoction of several distilled chemicals and salts he could transform into Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of Jekyll’s worst qualities.  The more often Jekyll drank his chemical potion, the less easily he could resume his Jekyll-form.  In his final sentences, Jekyll explains that because he cannot correct his mistake and resume his normal form, he will kill himself.

Authoritative Narrator

An authoritative narrator is a narrator who provides a reliable perspective on the story.  In the case of Stevenson’s novel, Mr. Utterson, a lawyer, is an intelligent, common-sensical, and reliable witness attempting to understand and relay what is happening.

Utterson first learns about Hyde from Mr. Enfield, who describes the night he saw Hyde trample a child in the street.  Utterson questions his friend’s information:

Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence, and obviously under a weight of consideration. “You are sure he used a key?” he inquired at last.

“My dear sir….” began Enfield, surprised out of himself.

“Yes, I know,” said Utterson; “I know it must seem strange.  The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is because I know it already.  You see, Richard, your tale has gone home.  If you have been inexact in any point, you had better correct it.

Enfield’s information about Hyde alarms Utterson and he returns home to study Dr. Jekyll’s will:

The will was holograph; for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that it was made, had refused to lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., &c., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde”; but that in case of Dr. Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay, and free from any burthen or obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctor’s household.  This document had long been the lawyer’s eyesore.  It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest.  And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was his knowledge.  It was already bad enough when the name was but a name of which he could learn no more.  It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.

From this moment on, Utterson, our authoritative narrator, collects more information in order to build his “case” on the true nature and intentions of Mr. Hyde.  For example, after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew (one of Mr. Utterson’s clients), the police contact Utterson because they found a letter addressed to Utterson in Carew’s purse.  Utterson identifies the body and a police officer tells him that a maid witnessed Mr. Hyde beat the old man to death with a walking stick: “Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer: broken and battered as it was, he recognized it for one that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.”

As Utterson becomes more engrossed in understanding the strangeness of the connection between Jekyll and Hyde, his belief in the witnesses and information of the fictive world persuades the reader to accept that strangeness, too.

False Documents

Stevenson uses the same false document technique as Zamyatin, and in Stevenson’s novel, just as in We, false documents seem to authenticate the world of the story.  In Utterson’s narrative, Stevenson quotes correspondence and documents supplied by other characters.  At the end of Utterson’s narrative, Stevenson also includes personal testimony and sealed letters from both Dr. Lanyon and Dr. Jekyll; these comprise the second and third parts of the novel which corroborate Utterson’s investigation.

For example, toward the conclusion of Utterson’s narrative, he quotes a note Jekyll had written to obtain more of his chemical supplies.  Jekyll’s butler Poole shows Utterson the note because it is evidence of Jekyll’s increasingly strange behavior.  This note is a double false document:

Dr. Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw.  He assures them that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his present purpose.  In the year 18—, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large quantity from Messrs. M.  He now begs them to search with the most sedulous care, and should any of the same quality be left, to forward it to him at once.  Expense is no consideration.  The importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated.

Utterson doesn’t learn the full circumstances of Jekyll’s seclusion, however, until Stevenson supplies further explanations from the false documents of Dr. Lanyon and Dr. Jekyll.

In the second part of the novel, Dr. Lanyon witnesses Hyde transform into Dr. Jekyll and pens his reaction: “What he told me in the next hour I cannot bring my mind to set on paper.  I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet, now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer.”  Lanyon does not explain how this transformation happened, but his claim that he “saw what he saw” and “heard what he heard” establishes an experiential authenticity for the strange event.

The reader doesn’t fully understand what has happened to Jekyll until Jekyll explains in his false document which is the third part of the novel. In this part, Jekyll describes why he did his experiments, briefly summarizes his theory behind his invention, and shares the sense of freedom his experiment gave him, as well as its drawbacks.  Jekyll’s letter has a special air of authenticity because it appears to answer questions asked and left unanswered in the previous accounts.  The letter has a dramatic impact that enhances its contribution to the verisimilitude of the novel.

I was born in the year 18— to a large fortune endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, found of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow men, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honorable and distinguished future.  And indeed, the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.  Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity in life.

Jekyll’s apparently sound emotional judgement, his ability to see his faults, make his account seem real and possible in this fictive world.

Lanyon’s visceral reaction to Jekyll’s metamorphosis authenticates the strangeness of the event.  Jekyll’s honesty regarding his own mistakes rings true and this, along with Stevenson’s other false documentation, encourages the reader to accept his explanation of events.

Details

Stevenson also uses the concrete sensory details technique to make Jekyll’s transformation seem plausible. For example, in his letter to Utterson, Dr. Lanyon provides physical details of Jekyll’s transformation:

He put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp.  A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked, there came, I thought a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

Lanyon’s detailed experience of what happened persuades the reader to accept the plausibility of a fictive world where such a transformation is possible.

Stevenson also provides details of the chemical potion which Jekyll concocts.  Stevenson is not specific on Jekyll’s exact recipe, but the potion’s power seems believable because Stevenson provides the same details from two authoritative medical sources.  Lanyon, who explicitly declares he’s not interested in metaphysical experiments, first describes these details in his letter—again in concrete experiential terms:

The powders were neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that it was plain they were of Jekyll’s private manufacture; and when I opened one of the wrappers, I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white color.  The phial, to which I next turned by attention, might have been about half-full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell, and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether.

Jekyll describes his ingredients in his letter:

I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt, which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and, late, one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

Lanyon’s staunch opposition to metaphysics supports the credibility of his observations just as Jekyll’s level-headed description, including the purchase of elements, also creates a sense of plausibility. The details—little half-hints that boiling a few well-mixed ingredients will coalesce into a substance which can melt away one self and replace it with another—lends credibility to Jekyll’s metaphysical experiment.

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Red, Green, Gray, Howl: The Magical World of Angela Carter’s Short Story “The Company of Wolves”

Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves” is a contemporary reworking of the folk tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Carter structures the story in two parts.  In the first part, she introduces the world of her story with a series of pre-stories and lore about wolves and werewolves. In the second part, she tells the story of a young woman who goes to visit her grandmother and encounters a werewolf along the way.

After the section of lore and pre-stories, the main story of “The Company of Wolves” begins with a teenage girl in a red shawl walking through the woods to visit her grandmother.  She carries a knife and stays to the path so that she won’t get lost or fall into the clutches of the wolves.  Along the way, she flirts with a hunter, who runs ahead to her grandmother’s house where he transforms into a wolf and eats the grandmother.  The girl arrives, knocks, and hearing the werewolf mimicking her grandma’s voice, thinks it is safe to enter.  The werewolf jumps up and slams the door behind her.  The girl undresses and throws her clothes in the fire because the werewolf tells her she won’t need them anymore.  But she defeats the werewolf by throwing his clothes in the fire, too.  According to the lore of the story, without his human clothes, the werewolf is magically condemned to stay in his wolf-shape. The story ends with the girl and the wolf together in a very strange sort of marriage.

Literary Reference as Parallel

Carter uses a literary reference as the basis for the plot of “The Company of Wolves.”   The familiarity of the original plot helps to create the fictive world of Carter’s story, which is similar but deviates from the original folktale (which is not about sex or werewolves and in which the wolf eats the girl).  In place of the big, bad, cunning wolf who gorges on human flesh, Carter invents a green-clad hunter who, though charming at first, transforms into a wolf and devours the grandmother.  Just like Little Red Riding Hood, the girl of Carter’s story is determined to visit her grandmother, but when she discovers the wolf-man in her grandmother’s place, the girl of Carter’s story is not so naive or unobservant.  Rather than falling prey to the wolf’s cunning, Carter’s heroine defeats the werewolf by condemning him to be a wolf for the rest of his life.

By referring to the plot, characters, and even dialogue of the original fable, Carter draws parallels between the two texts.  As we read, we contrast Carter’s story with the original.  We anticipate what will happen next based on our reading of the original story.  Carter subtly subverts these expectations by adding surprising new elements and twists of plot.

Pre-Stories

Before beginning the main plot of the story, Carter tells three pre-stories, anecdotes that precede the main plot in the text.  These stories tell about the interactions between humans and werewolves.  Here is an example.

There was a hunter once, near here, that trapped a wolf in a pit.  This wolf had massacred the sheep and goats; eaten up a mad old man who used to live by himself in a hut halfway up the mountain and sing to Jesus all day; pounced on a girl looking after the sheep, but she made such a commotion that men came with rifles and scared him away and tried to track him to the forest but he was cunning and easily gave them the slip.  So this hunter dug a pit and put a duck in it, for bait, all alive-oh; and he covered the pit with straw smeared with wolf dung.  Quack, quack! Went the duck and a wolf came slinking out of the forest, a big one, a heavy one, he weighed as much as a grown man and the straw gave way beneath him—into the pit he tumbled.  The hunter jumped down after him, slit his throat, cut off all his paws for a trophy.

And then no wolf at all lay in front of the hunter but the bloody trunk of a man, headless, footless, dying, dead.

This story introduces the theme of the magical transformation of man to wolf and wolf to man plus the idea that humans are constantly fighting werewolf incursions.  By creating the sense of a place where such transformations and conflicts are natural, Carter sets the stage for the story that follows.  In the second pre-story, a witch turns people into wolves out of spite.  She punishes the man who rejected her by making him the loneliest and most rejected creature in this fictive world.  In the third pre-story, a woman marries a man who is taken by wolves and later transforms into a wolf after he learns that she married another man.  The woman’s first husband turns into a wolf and attacks, but as he dies, he transforms back into the man he was before.

Carter intersperses other werewolf lore between the pre-stories. Later in the text, in the second half of the story, she refers back to this information.  For instance, after the third pre-story, Carter supplies material about the birth, appearance and heart of the werewolf: “Or, that he was born feet first and had a wolf for his father and his torso is a man’s but his legs and genitals are a wolf’s.  And he has a wolf’s heart.”  Later, Carter reiterates this information in her description of the werewolf before he eats the grandmother: “He strips off his shirt.  His skin is the color and texture of vellum.  A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit […]  He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are.  His genitals, huge.  Ah! huge.”  Carter provides this lore to describe and validate the world of the story.  And by repeating this information later, Carter builds consistency which helps to create the verisimilitude of that world.

Repetition

Carter uses repetition of images, words, and phrases to build a consistent fictive world.  First, she creates a pattern of images of blood, the color red, and menses.  For example, Carter initiates the pattern in a bit of backfill and description; the girl “had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who’d knitted her the red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow,” and that, “her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding.”  Carter repeats these images. For instance, when Red finds the werewolf at her grandmother’s house: “she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill.”  The blood the girl “must spill” is both an indication of her menses (which she “must spill” each month henceforth) and a hint at the act she will perform to condemn the werewolf to his wolf-shape (she gives him her immaculate flesh).  Finally, at the climax of the story, the werewolf bids her to take “off her scarlet shawl, the color of poppies, the color of sacrifices, the color of her menses.”

Carter also repeats references to the lore of wolves and werewolves.  Carter supplies this information first, as I have mentioned, in her pre-stories.  For instance, in the lore section, Carter describes the eyes of wolves: “…the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you—red for danger.” After the grandmother invites the hunter into her house, he is described as having “…eyes as red as a wound…” Later, his eyes are like “cinders” and then “saucers full of Greek fire, diabolic phosphorescence.” The moment the girl approaches the wolf-man, Carter describes him as “the man with red eyes.” (The red pattern here connects with the red pattern in the of blood, shawl and menses.)

Carter mentions the ribs of the wolves in winter: “There is so little flesh on them that you could count the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave you time before they pounced.”  Later Granny notices the werewolf’s ribs, too: “…he’s so thin you could count the ribs under his skin if only he gave you the time.”

Carter describes the wolves’ howling three times in her opening paragraphs: “One beast and only one howls in the woods by night”; “…hark! his long, wavering howl…an aria of fear made audible”; “The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffering, in itself a murdering.”  The howling of the wolves serenades the witch in the second pre-story: “…they would sit and howl around her cottage for her, serenading her with their misery.”  In the third pre-story, the woman hears the wolves howling after her first husband disappears: “Until she jumps up in bed and shrieks to hear a howling, coming on the wind from the forest.”  According to the lore of Carter’s fictive world, the howling of the wolves is a mark of their melancholy:

That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition.  There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that dispatches him.

At the start of her journey through the woods, the girl hears a howl: “When she heard the freezing howl of a distant wolf, her practiced hand sprang to the handle of her knife…”  When the girl enters her grandmother’s house only to find the hunter, she hears the wolves howling outside: “Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near as close as the kitchen garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves; she knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside […] Who has come to sing us carols, she said.”  The girl looks out the window:

It was a white night of moon and snow; the blizzard whirled round the gaunt, grey beasts who squatted on their haunches among the rows of winter cabbage, pointing their sharp snouts to the moon and howling as it their hearts would break.  Ten wolves; twenty wolves—so many wolves she could not count them, howling in concert as if demented or deranged […] She closed the window on the wolves’ threnody.

And at the end of the story, the wolves serenade the “savage marriage ceremony” of the girl and the werewolf: “Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave him the kiss she owed him.”

Carter also repeats specific phrases to create an associative pattern.  Like image and lore patterning, phrasal patterning makes the fictive world coherent and consistent because such repetition builds associations for the reader.  For example, she repeats the phrase “carnivore incarnate” three times in the story.  She describes the wolf in the second line of the story: “The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious, once he’s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.”  Carter uses the phrase again after the wolf-man eats the grandmother: “The wolf is carnivore incarnate.”  Lastly, Carter uses “carnivore incarnate” when the girl defeats the werewolf: “Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.”  Carter also repeats the title phrase “company of wolves” when the girl notices the wolves howling outside her grandmother’s house.  The wolf-man explains: “Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.”

Repetition of these phrases makes the world of the story meaningful because such phrases influence how the reader interprets and understands the world of the story.  The wolf is such a danger to this world that it is essentially a “devouring deity” only pleased by immaculate flesh. By repeating images with the color red, lore about the features of wolves and werewolves, including red eyes, slavering jaws, ribs, and howling, and specific phrases, such as “carnivore incarnate” and the title, Carter builds a consistent and familiar fictive world.  Repetition creates consistency which reinforces the verisimilitude of the world of the story.

— Text & illustrations by Jacqueline Kharouf

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories.  New York: Penguin, 1995. 212-220.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Pocket  Books, 2005.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. New York: Modern Library, 2006.

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Jacqueline Kharouf is currently studying for her MFA in creative writing, fiction, at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  A native of Rapid City, SD, Jacqueline lives, writes, and maintains daytime employment in Denver, CO.  In 2009, she earned an honorable mention for the Denver Woman’s Press Club Unknown Writer’s Contest, and in 2010 she earned third place for that contest.  Her first published story, “The Undiscoverable Higgs Boson,” was published in issue 4 of Otis Nebula, an online literary journal.  Last year, Jacqueline won third place in H.O.W. Journal’s 2011 Fiction contest (judged by Mary Gaitskill) for her story “Seeing Makes Them Happy.”  This story is currently available online and will be published in H.O.W. Journal’s Issue 9 sometime in the fall/winter of 2012.  Jacqueline blogs at: jacquelinekharouf.wordpress.com; tweets holiday appropriate well-wishes and crazy awesome sentences here: @writejacqueline; and will perform a small jig if you like her Facebook professional page at: Jacqueline Kharouf, writer. She earlier contributed an interview with Nick Arvin to these pages.

 

Aug 092012
 

Herewith a lovely, sombre essay on living in New York City, almost a threnody in its preoccupation with the dead, the wintry weather, the rain, the weight of living, yet rich in observation, lived detail — the description of the Hudson is a word-painting. This is New York like no other.

I met Tiara Winter-Schorr when she took an undergraduate writing class with me at the University at Albany a dozen years ago. She was the class star, stylish, courteous, curious and smart.  She had the spark every teacher is looking for. We’ve been friends ever since, hardly ever seeing each other, sometimes silent for months and months, but always ready to catch up, find out how the story is going. Shortly after we met, Tiara dropped out of school to help care for her dying father. Just last year, she graduated from Columbia University with a degree in creative writing.

dg

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Hudson, Part 1

I live nine stories above the water, above a river. I arrived to stay seven years ago just after my father’s death, during the kind of deluge that occurs in Manhattan only at the water’s edge. The streets around here are always desolate, yet densely populated with trees and cars. But as sheets of solid rain splattered onto my windshield that night, I sat waiting for a parking spot and looking into the brightly lit windows of apartment after apartment. I imagined that the circle of buildings around me held a teeming mass of people. I watched the sky change from shades of deep red to grey and then to shades of off-black. The river has no self. It is never blue or green. That night and every night, the water canvasses the moods of the sky for deep or pastel shades, the George Washington Bridge for green light, the artificial street lamps for putrid yellow, and then lays out a palette in globs of motion and color. Several hours later, I parked three inches too close to the only fire hydrant in a two block area and received my first parking ticket.

The river has almost convinced me that my apartment exists at the edge of a flat world. My living room is dominated by a large expanse of glass, a window too large to be called a window. But the view is cut short, endless until it abruptly stops beyond the George Washington Bridge and a cluster of low-income housing projects. Here is where the world seems to stop. Boats fall off the edge and disappear into another world that is not-city. Boats come into the city this way too, of course, and I know they are most likely heading to a waste-processing plant about a half mile from my building.

Stretches of the West Side highway race above and alongside the river, which is the most stunning place to drive in northern Manhattan. The Hudson catches the glare from the sky and coats itself in whatever shimmers it can trap from the sun. But you will be constantly reminded of the gross show of engines against the flow of the water. Drive fast enough and you are convinced that the narrow strip of water is motionless, as if boats drag slowly along an inferior liquid ground.

This narrow strip of the Hudson has harbored me, defending against the twin illusions of the city that you are both landlocked and free. The traffic at rush hour teaches me differently. There is no room between bumpers; there is music from other cars, pure cacophony pouring into your car windows even in cold weather; there are children and teenagers who stare with unimpressed faces into mine. Here next to the river, I find that I am not landlocked, yet not free.

My first winter living above the Hudson was one that offered no refuge, not even the double panes of glass that barred me from the elements. The wind was the river’s first omen that cold was coming into the city. The lights in the sky turned to different shades of grey each day and the river pushed forth choppy whitecaps. Living here will send you searching for refuge and you will find it when you realize there is none in a city like Manhattan – save for what the river offers you in smells of salt or the illusion that the humidity coating your skin is a kind of armor.

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The Dead

My neighbor directly to the south is Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, a shelter for the dead that expands over 24 acres up rolling hills. The decrepit entrances are not trustworthy except for the most modern, which is a glass door leading to cramped office where you can inquire about obtaining a small plot in this place, Manhattan’s only active cemetery. I did this once, spoke to stout woman with grayish skin about a place to put my father’s urn that now sits in my living room. I am gently informed that only mausoleum spaces are still available at the cost $9,000. The high stacks of marble niches look too much like the low-income housing projects which blacks out the view from my living room window.

But the grass is greener and softer here than in most parks, and the concrete pathways are cleaner too. Never mind that the dead only share this space with bats, coyotes, and desperate or crazily brave homeless people. The coyotes arrived sometime last summer, most likely making a long trek down train tracks from more forsaken neighborhoods in the northern Bronx where packs of feral dogs and coyotes still roam free. One small female was found shot dead, not far from the grave of Jacob Astor IV, who died in 1912 when the Titanic sunk. Looking around at the building-size statues of angels and Virgin Marys, you may have the odd feeling that a gated community for the dead has been invaded by wildlife, both human and animal. The ground plots have been taken up entirely, and the bones of the former people are a reminder of old New York opulence and the artists who eked out a living nearby. There are a series of Astors, including the Titanic victim; there is Greta Garbo’s lesbian lover, and the son of Charles Dickens. Ralph Ellison also came to rest here, most famous for his novel The Invisible Man. Most of us in upper Manhattan – Harlem and Washington Heights – are still the invisible to likes of the wealthier classes living further south on the island. But here at Trinity, they are all invisible, save for the luxurious statues and monuments erected in their honor. The further uphill you trudge through the winding acres of lush green life, the older the graves become. At the peak of the hill, you will find the oldest carved grave in New York, that of Richard Churcher who lived a mere five years before coming here for a final place of protection. I often wonder how he died, perhaps because my own brother lived only ten years himself. But I cannot imagine leaving my father in one of these claustrophobic mausoleum spaces surrounded by ghosts of opulence and live coyotes. At night I watch the bats fly between the trees like night birds who look down at our dead.

New Yorkers die at a faster rate than most people in the United States: our hearts are ensnared by disease, or our organs by cancer, or we kill ourselves with drugs. Influenza is still a leading killer and probably was the cause of death of many people at rest in Trinity. Although there are nearly 20,000 grave sites buried under the island, they are invisible and long forgotten. You easily forget that the cracks in the concrete are held up and held together not only by earth but by the dead who still vibrate beneath the rhythm of relentless footsteps and tires.

September 11, 2001 was the day of New York City’s largest mass death. Almost 3,000 people vanished, turned from flesh to ash that spread out into the air, the Hudson River, the East River leading to the ocean, and the concrete sidewalks. Manhattan had never experienced such a mass of invisibility and the dead of 9/11 found their final shelter in the same place they lived their lives – the streets, the air, the water. You cannot feel the death at the new Freedom tower, not in the way that it is palpable at Trinity Cemetery. The dead of 9/11 are part of our atmosphere as New Yorkers. During the impossibly slow construction of the Freedom towers, 2000 graves belonging to African slaves were found. The city gave a gentle nod to centuries of invisibility by finding and preserving 419 bodies. But unlike Ralph Ellison and the inhabitants of Trinity, they will never have names.

On sleepless nights I wander Manhattan, often passing Trinity and ending up on deserted streets further down the island, streets marked by sleeping homeless. There are shelters but you more likely to die in one than on the street. I do not know where the homeless go if they die in Manhattan. The ones who wander up to Trinity to sleep will not be allowed to stay when they are dead. The doors to the Church of the Intercession are locked six days a week, as most churches are. You are landlocked. You are not free.

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The Border

Walk one block east from Riverside Drive and you will find yourself on the border between Washington Heights and Harlem. The boundaries between the two neighborhoods are questionable divisions held in place more by ethnic and racial differences than the lines of a city map. These maps are untrustworthy anyway, victim to the whims of realtors and an ever-growing push towards gentrification. Let’s assume that Trinity Cemetery at 155th street acts as an unofficial divider between a neighborhood that is predominately African-American and a neighborhood dominated by Dominicans and other immigrant Hispanic groups. Most maps insist that Harlem ends somewhere around 153rd st and gives way to Washington Heights, which has been dubbed “Little Dominica” in tones of affection by residents and in tones of trepidation by non-residents. No matter which direction I turn, south toward Harlem or north toward Little Dominica, I find that I am foreigner here with bits of Puerto Rican and Native American and Filipino and German blood filling my veins.  Maybe living life in liminal zones is my way of finding shelter.

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The Heights

Little Dominica is known for its history – the fiercest fighting of the Revolutionary War, which has given way to some of the fiercest gang fights in upper Manhattan; the assassination of Malcolm X, the site of which is now a BBQ Rib & Bar dive; The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park which is medieval structure hauled here from Europe and rebuilt and now boasts Christian art from the same time period; and of course the endless expanse of the Columbia University medical center, begun in the 1960s and still extending its reach through the area.

The Heights is called so because we are 265 feet above sea level, the highest in Manhattan. My ears fill and pop as a constant reminder that as I walk the streets, I am growing closer to or farther away from the sea. The abrupt hills are actually miniature mountains. Street steps have been constructed to try to ease the pedestrian exertion, but climbing 130 steps to reach a given street does nothing to offer rest. What it does is strength your legs and maybe your heart, if you are lucky. The alternative is that you avoid walking into the upper reaches of the Heights.

The summer street culture is what holds the residents in a tight grip. Old men sit at tables in front of apartment buildings playing dominoes, but are quick to shield their faces from photographs. So are the boys who collect on street corners selling whatever wares are tucked into their bulging pockets. The hottest days squeeze the oxygen from the air by the smells of illegal street barbecues and marijuana and sweat. We are overrun by children who roam freely as if it is a small town and not an area burning with crime and gang life. Music is ever-present, usually salsa or some rhythm that reminds me of my foreignness in this land. The streets are always crowded, always festive, always dirty, and dotted with reminders of plenty amidst poverty. Roughly 97% of Little Dominica lives below the poverty line. Many are undocumented and receive no help from the government. They avoid photographs for this reason – there is no refuge for them either, no place where “La Migra” is not allowed to hunt and deport. But the stores are not folding to gentrification, and if one closes then another opens and bursts forth with toys for $1 and women’s dresses for $3. You can live here below the poverty line and make your way through crowds of families in bargain stores and emerge with an armful of whatever you were lacking when you entered. There is plenty here even among the poorest.

.

Harlem

My Harlem is a 30-block stretch that I use to get from home to a specific destination and back again. This Harlem is not the historic central area that boasts the Apollo Theatre, not the area where African incense chokes the car fumes, and not the gentrified part that swarms with Caucasian shoppers at newly-opened designer boutiques. My mile and a half of Harlem is almost a forgotten area, mostly residential and peppered with mom & pop businesses. Yet look closely and you can see the decay from the pressure of gentrification pressing forward. I see it daily as each store closes, a “mom” dragging sales tables of vintage soul records and African masks on to the street for 80% clearance sales. I see it again days later when the same store is boarded up and a street kid on the corner informs me that the rent around here for businesses has been hiked to $10,000 a month. He also offers me a dime bag of marijuana. His business may be the only one to survive around here. The African-American families who settled here years ago during the height of the Harlem Renaissance are being dispossessed and moved. Where will they go? There is no asylum or place of protection from the stress of developers who see only land, never bothering to acknowledge the people living on that land or those buried beneath it.

 

Columbus Circle

The Upper West Side of Manhattan commences here in a speeding circle of cars that centers around a monument of Christopher Columbus, erected some centuries ago to honor his discovery of the New World. The location is appropriately troubling to me, a place where the Columbus legacy has been mercilessly fulfilled. For a moment, emerging from the subway, you can absorp the immediate beauty of the statues, the fountains, the shopping, the park, bustling streets of New York City that each of us has seen in the movies. But the reality of the space, the buildings that inhabit the circle are a futuristic reflection of what Columbus intended for the New World. The monument and fountains and racing vehicles are eclipsed on the west side of the circle by the world headquarters of the Time Warner Corporation, the NYC studio headquarters of CNN, and Lincoln Center’s Jazz Center. Looming to the north is the Trump International Hotel and Tower (boasting a solid gold escalator inside that terrifies me for its height and its glaring shine) and the headquarters of Gulf and Western Oil. The rank display of corporatism is easy for me to gawk at, such a shockingly conspicuous show of empire even for a native New Yorker. Glamour may be NYC’s most ruthlessly apparent illusion and it is here that you feel it the most. You are landlocked among blinding skyscrapers and the sudden luxuriousness of Central Park that seems to reach endlessly in every direction. Beyond the lush display of opulence around the circle, there is a jarring reminder of nature among concrete repression. You may even abruptly feel free, giddy at the sight of paradox rushing around you in one sweeping move. The glamour and illusions are what holds so many us on this island, one that is barely large enough to contain so many bodies. I suspect that the tourists who arrive daily in packs do not see much beyond the allure of shopping and the sweet green grass across the way.

The circle is also one of the major transportation hubs for the city. The circle and the park crash awkwardly only at this moment, are bound in a tight juxtaposition of old tradition and modern movement. Your first impression might be one of strict boundaries: the circle, the park beyond, each bus stop and underground subway station a discrete unit with organized movements. But look at the streets just outside the park and you will find about 68 carriages drawn by horses, not the kind of fierce beast you might see in Victorian Era photos of the city, but rather the kind animal whose ribs rise in an arc from under sallow coats. The kind of horses that NYC allows to work the streets are lame, limping from the weight of their load and uncomforted by the blinders meant to shield them from the terrors of the engines rushing by them. The rank display of cruelty could almost be lost against the gentility of the park and the profusion of wealth. I was not there the day a horse collapsed and died under a heat shroud of 91 degrees, in turn causing a pile-up of cars and busses. But the tourists who rode in that carriage may know more about the savagery beneath the affluence and the persistent repression that is part of living here.

 

Times Square

Otherwise known as the crossroads, this roughly seven-block area is paced by 39 million tourists a year. Every light in Times Square went out once, during the northeast blackout of 2003. The darkness must have been majestic. I pace here a lot, either to ward off restless legs and insomnia during winter nights or to find relief from the humidity in the pre-dawn hours of summer mornings. The late nights hours leading to dawn are the dimmest and emptiest here, mostly because the corporate offices like Ernst & Young and Morgan Stanly have closed up. Firms like this hold more space in Times Square than the more appealing corporations like MTV and Toys R US but this is harder to see when all the lights shine equally bright. Keep pacing the tiny area until you notice the most infinitesimal changes, until you become accustomed to the gaze of late night workers leaving through the backdoors of nightclubs and the same faces waiting blocks away to catch the last bus uptown. If you do not cultivate a personal way of seeing Times Square, you risk the vision of a tourist and then there is nothing, no relief for the restlessness and nothing left to notice.

Two a.m. is kind of cut-off point, when the streets become less of a wasteland of overdressed theatre-goers and bright-eyed tourists. The streets become emptier and lights seem dimmer, but empty here does not mean deserted. This is my Times Square, a place where you become aware of every detail around you, the different shades of blinding lights, the rats that chameleon with shadows underfoot, the stretches of concrete that double as cardboard homeless shelters, and the changing faces of child-like prostitutes that lean against subway stops and eat from plastic containers. From about 2am to 5am, the Disney-led gentrification weakens enough for the lights to shine on the reality below it.

Times Square sits near to the center of the city and you cannot smell the river from here, you can only see lights and faces but you can walk until there is nothing left in your limbs except exhaustion that feels like freedom.

 

Hudson, part 2

The river, after holding me for these seven years, seem to be pushing me along like one of the ice chunks that break up after the end of a winter that brings only ice storms. Last winter was like this, cold but no snow, no blankets of white, just icicles along the windows and the stillness of the river as it froze inches deep. I only went outside a handful of times, I think, kept in by the icy wind that makes my heart feel weak.

 But I have found my sanctuary here for so long because of the river and the bridge. Nothing that moves as fast as the water and the traffic above it can make you believe you are trapped on this island. You may be free but you are as pushed in one direction or the other as a floating chunk of ice coming down the river. I have considered moving but cannot think of where to go. The expanse of sky pushes against the edges of the New Jersey and New York skylines and beyond into a world that is not flat.

— Photos & Text by Tiara Winter-Schorr

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Aug 082012
 

This is an essay about fathers and flyfishing (and the fierce competitiveness of fishermen), about the gray aura of death, about nature and love, about coming back to the beginning of things, and about (even if tangentially) becoming a writer. David Carpenter is an old, though (unhappily) seldom seen, friend from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (where dg was a once newspaper copyeditor at the Star-Phoenix, yea, these many years ago). In an essay on humor published in my collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, I use one of David’s books as a example:

Between the twin horrors of love and the loss of love, it often seems there is little opportunity for satisfaction and happiness. So that comedy’s two faces, Janus-like, are a kind of voodoo, at once recognizing and evading the truth we fear.

David Carpenter has written a novel called Jewels about a homosexual librarian from Saskatoon. In a wonderful sequence of scenes, a jealous husband barges into Julian’s apartment accusing Julian of having an affair with his wife; Julian rushes out, leaving his gay friends and the jealous husband to sort out their sexual misunderstandings; he takes a lonely walk by the river, and then retreats to the darkened library only to walk in on the wife and her paramour in the act of love. This is a deliciously stage-managed comedy of errors that deals out pain and laughs in about equal proportion, and the laughs are a spell against our feeling too directly the utter wretchedness of Julian’s life.

Aside from the “utter wretchedness” part, this is about as good an introduction to David Carpenter’s writing as I can imagine — he’s a gentle, witty, generous and very human author.

dg

———-

One June morning in 1968, while wrestling with a stump, my father had a heart attack. He was sixty-two. My mother packed him into the car and drove him to the hospital. That night she phoned and told me to meet her at the cardiac ward the next morning. I saw her standing just outside his room. She had spotted me coming down the corridor, and when we made eye contact, she shook her head. No, she seemed to say, he might not make it.

Dr. Flanagan had a different take on father’s condition.

“Your father is very lucky we got to him when we did.” A moment later he added, “But yes, your father is a very sick man.” I tried to put this very bad, good news together: a not quite massive heart attack. The next week would be crucial in determining his chances for recovery. My father wanted to talk but he could scarcely whisper. I knelt down to hear him.

“It’s amazing,” he said, “in here, how they fix you up.”

We visited with my father and consulted with his team, and I wrote to my brother not to worry; there was nothing he could do but wait for further developments.

After a few days of guarded hopes and worried looks my mother said, “You may as well go fishing with your friends. Not much is going to happen this weekend.”

The doctors claimed that my father was stable, and he did seem to be rallying in small ways. But he’d been thinking about his mortality in the way that first-time heart attack patients do, and he was clearly depressed. He looked gray.

§

There is a cabin belonging to the Anderson family that sits on the shores of Lake Edith, which in turn lies almost in the shadow of Pyramid Mountain in the heart of Jasper National Park. At one end of the lake, a small feeder stream winds through the gloom of a forest of ferns, thick bush and Douglas firs. It bubbles up from beneath the massive roots of an old fir and murmurs its way over the gravel and into Lake Edith. The lake is shaped like a pair of sunglasses, front-on, and it would have been two small lakes but for the presence of a shallow channel connecting the two bodies of water. The water is absolutely clear. From the shallows to the depths, this lake covers the spectrum from pale green to near-purple. The rainbows that spawn in the tiny stream, and in the spring-fed beds of gravel out on the lake, are pampered by a sumptuous array of nymphs, bugs and minnows. The rainbows of Lake Edith, when I was a young fly fishing fool, grew bigger and fatter than any other trout in the Park. Right at sundown the big ones would cruise the shallows for emerging insects a few yards from shore. The water is so clear and placid in the evening that you could see them coming a block away.

§

My father was a practical man and a family man. He never crossed the line on such things as drunkenness, womanizing, gambling or anything of an obsessive nature. He taught me and my brother about fishing, but he could never have predicted how easily I would become addicted to flyfishing. I read Outdoor Life and Field & Stream and stocking stats and fishing guides with the devotion of a literary scholar. Writers like Roderick Haig-Brown or Isaac Walton had conversations with me in my dreams.

On the subject of politics, my father always said, Don’t get carried away. On the subject of idealistic quests, my father said, Don’t get carried away. On the subject of various girls, he said, Don’t get carried away. On the subject of flyfishing, he said, Don’t get carried away. On the subject of saving my money, he said, Now you’re talkin, son.

I learned how to cast flies with my friend Hyndman one winter when I was fifteen. Every Wednesday night we would take the bus to a school in Edmonton’s east end. We would practise casting under the tutelage of an old Scotsman, whipping flies beneath basketball hoops at target patterns on the gym floor. Our guru never tired of telling us, Laddie, y’kenna catch a fesh if yer line’s no in the water. By the end of the winter we could cast a straight line forty feet or more and tie a few basic flies. I remember a streamer we called the Kilburn Killer, which imitated a minnow about two inches long.

My father paid for it all. My first fly rod, my subscription to Outdoor Life, my membership in the Edmonton flyfishing club. Have fun, but don’t get carried away. At fifteen years, I was the monster he created. Thank God my friend Hyndman was just as obsessive as I.

§

The Andersons’ cabin at Lake Edith was a social, psychological, spiritual, piscatorial, culinary smorgasbord of conviviality. When I arrived on the evening of opening day (always June 15th in the Park), Lynn Anderson (lean, tall, a hiker, and incurably sociable) threw open the door. Credence Clearwater Revival was celebrating their love for Suzy Q and everybody was dancing. We were in our twenties. Lynn and I were schoolteachers. She had yet to become a fulltime artist, her boyfriend Lloyd had yet to become a lawyer, and I had yet to become a writer. Anything was possible. That’s what Credence Clearwater was telling us as we danced. That’s what the wine was telling us, what the month of June was telling us: Life, opportunity and Suzy Q were ours for the asking. We were, I’m sure, getting carried away.

The plan was to party till four or five in the morning and then hit the lake. There would be a prize for the biggest rainbow. Perhaps only a few of us took the contest seriously, but I was one of them. My arch rival in this endeavor was Scot Smith, another victim of flyfishing addiction.

Maybe a dozen of us left the party before dawn and went down to the water to cast from shore or troll from the Andersons’ canoe or fish from some other boat. The water was calm and so was the fishing, and then the sun rose, the insects got going, and friend Scot had a hit, and Lloyd got a hit, and one of Lynn’s brothers got a hit and I got a hit, and all over the lake, eager voices, mostly male, were calling out I got one or I lost the (expletive) fish or I just saw a monster or you’ve just crossed my (expletive) line again or I got another one.

By late morning, Lynn was barbecuing a rainbow that was, if I remember correctly, just shy of five pounds. It was one of Scot’s fish, so the bar for the biggest fish had been set.

One by one, weary anglers all over the lake retired to their sleeping bags and their cabin bunks, and when at last I brought in a five-pounder and claimed the prize, Scot was the only angler from our party left out on the water. Before long, perhaps late in the afternoon, he came in with a fat silver rainbow so clearly bigger than mine that I knew my labours had only just begun. I grabbed my waders and set out for the other side of the lake, the shaded end where the little feeder stream flowed in, wearing for itself a shallow channel that dropped steadily off into the deep water where the lake followed the spectrum from pale green to blue to purple.

This was where the last of the ragged ones patrolled the shoreline. The spring spawn was over now, so these ones were legal to catch. Their numbers had dwindled to about a dozen from more than a hundred. When I arrived, these last ones were nosing through the shallows like the last revellers to leave a party. They made half-hearted runs at their rivals and continued to circle past the redds as though caught up and exhausted by the perplexing mysteries of love that Credence Clearwater still sings about.

There were no fish remaining in the feeder stream. The rainbows in the shallows were rolling past in about three feet of water in front of me. They seemed to prefer the gravel here to that in the little stream, where they would have been vulnerable to predators. They all looked pretty big to me, but one dark male seemed longer than any other fish in that exhausted band of spawn-fraught rainbows.

I waded in and stripped some line from my reel.

§

It is fun to imagine my father watching this moment of intense concentration from the beach, or reading this little adventure of mine in a magazine. He would approve. He would say, That’s real living, son. He wasn’t exactly mad about my books. My writing about self-deluded drunks, gay librarians, libidinous women, doomed victims, godless womanisers and reclusive intellectuals probably left him wondering where he had gone wrong. These things were absolutely uncarpentarian. But writing about the sporting life was okay with Paul Carpenter. It was something he could show his friends without embarrassment. He was like most fathers of his generation. He wanted his son to have a good job, a good marriage, and if he had to do this writing stuff, let it be a hobby. Let’s not get carried away.

A few of my friends from that summer were married, and most of them were paired-off and likely entering their own bouts of intense spawning with their partners, so the month of June, up at Lake Edith, had for them even more than me, a sweet and urgent tumescence with which the rainbow trout, decked in their deepest greens, reds, pinks and blues, seemed in tune. Or no, perhaps it was the other way around: my friends, besotted in deepest desire, were in tune with all those pink-sided cupids sweeping their tales in slow, exhausting circles over the gravel beds and ever so often thrusting their bodies into the silted bottom of Lake Edith.

Why did I do this? Was winning a prize for the biggest fish so important that I would disturb this last bout of spawning? Was this done for bragging rights? Or, in the absence of any spawning in my own life, was I simply sublimating into something over which I had some control? Socially at that time, and sexually, romantically, I was a fish out of water.

Enough of this. The fish are still gliding by and I need to tend to them.

I waded as close as I dared to the action before me and sent out a cast that went beyond the school of circling trout.

All day long I had been thinking about my gray-faced father in his bed at the cardiac ward, and how surprised he would be at the sight of a huge trout. I would catch it for him. Well, no, I would catch a big one for me and then present it to him. He’d get a kick out of it and maybe stop looking quite so gray. I wanted my father to be proud of me.

And I was getting carried away. When you want your father to be proud of you, you are probably wading through uncertain waters and unlikely to inspire pride in anyone–until you get over this need to impress him.

I let my line sink to the sandy bottom and began a slow retrieve. The fly I had chosen was my big Kilburn Killer, a streamer fly I’ve never seen in a store. It ploughed through the sand and gravel like a somnolent minnow with a death wish, an inebriate who showed up at the wrong party and risked becoming part of the menu.

When the great dark rainbow came back my way, I pulled the stickleback up from the gravel and drew it towards me in short irregular jerks. The big rainbow went right for it. He mouthed it, I raised the rod, and he was on. He bucked around in slow motion sending the other fish outwards from the spawning trenches in a wide explosion of silt. He moved off to my right, changed directions, flopped around, kicked up a mighty spray with his tail and took off for deep waters.

“Verrrry nice,” someone said.

I couldn’t recognize the voice and I couldn’t turn around. Perhaps he was a cabin owner or a conservation officer. I heard the click of a camera, an expensive sound, an authoritative slide of the shutter.

The old rainbow fought stubbornly, but never once did he jump out of the water or do a high-speed run to take my ratchet into the upper registers.

“If I had a cottage on this lake,” the voice said, “I would not go swimming out there. Not with guys like that in the neighbourhood.”

“He’s a big one,” I said to the voice.

It did not sound like a fisherman’s voice. It was lisping and pedantic, and mildly sarcastic, even when opportunities for sarcasm were unavailable.

“Rots a ruck, buddy.”

This is the point in the story where the angler gazes down on the dark bluegreen back, the wide band of deepest rose on the side, flecked with dark spots from head to tail, and he sees his fly protruding from the corner of the kiped jaw, and he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the old trout. He bends down, detaches his fly. He holds the trout by the tail and moves its body back and forth, opening and closing the gill-covers, reviving his old adversary, and sending him back to spawn again.

That didn’t happen. I brained the old rainbow with a piece of wood and held him up for inspection.

“Do you think you could kind of clean it up for me?”

I looked into the face of a man with a notebook. The mystery voice with the Daffy Duck lisp belonged to a newspaper reporter. Another man, a quiet fellow with a camera, stood beside him.

These two had come all the way from Edmonton to cover opening day for the sports page of The Edmonton Journal. The cameraman shot me and my trout from several more angles while the man with the notebook asked me questions. And then with a rush of purest joy and more than a trace of vanity, I knew how I would give my father a boost.

§

My mother was sitting in a chair by my father’s bed, reading a section of the newspaper and occasionally looking over in my father’s direction. He had gone through the front section and the business reports and the editorials and made it at last to the sports page. He pulled a straight pin from the top pocket of his hospital gown and began to cut out an article. Did other people’s fathers do this? I don’t know. He handed the article to my mother with the usual comment.

“Something for the boys.”

My mother perused the picture and the article, which she had already read, and handed it back to my father.

“Remind you of someone?” she said.

Perhaps my father’s eyesight had been affected by the heart attack, or perhaps he hadn’t been wearing his glasses. Or perhaps he’d become preoccupied with his own mortality. But perhaps as well at this moment my father would have heard a note of mischief in my mother’s voice. He looked once more at the trout in the photo and this time he read the photo caption.

“As I live and breathe.”

 §

As I live and breathe. Coming from a man who was so recently on the critical list, these words seemed well chosen indeed. My father’s recovery dates from the day he saw a picture of his son in The Edmonton Journal. It’s one thing, I guess, to catch a big fish; it’s quite another thing to have it celebrated for all to see. The Carpenter family witnessed a tiny miracle that summer.

I had decided on the shores of Lake Edith that my father needed a homecoming gift. I took my frozen rainbow to a taxidermist. The process took longer than expected, so I presented my trophy to my father on his birthday, more than a month after he’d returned from the hospital. It was attached to an oval mount made of stained maple, a twenty-seven inch stuffed male with all the original spawning colors shamelessly enhanced by the taxidermist. My parents decided to hang it in the den.

A time came when my parents sold their home in Alberta and retired to the gentler climate of British Columbia’s coast. They had to downsize drastically, so they gave me back my rainbow trophy. They did this rather easily, as though the value I had attached to it was in excess of their own sentiments. This makes sense to me now, because if my father had caught the rainbow and presented it to me while I was convalescing, I might do the same.

I hid the stuffed rainbow in the basement of my house in Saskatoon. I suppose I did not want anyone to think that I made trophies from the fish I caught. It seemed, by that time, disrespectful to the fish.

Honor, my girlfriend and a visual artist, agreed. She had been photographing the mounted rainbow in the following way:

Shot #1, the head of my fish just up to the gills; Shot # 2, the tail of my fish; both shots in black and white. She framed the head shot on the left side of my study window and the tail shot on the right side. Missing in the middle, of course, was the body of the fish. An entire window separated the head from the tail.

One winter night in early 1985, Honor said, “Why not return your fish to that feeder stream?”

At first this suggestion seemed like a bleeding heart gesture. But the more I thought about it, her idea gained an aura of atonement, and it took hold. The following August we drove west to the Rockies and found a motel in the Jasper townsite. The next morning we drove out to Lake Edith, and for the first time, Honor saw the Anderson cabin, the view of Pyramid Mountain, the two sections of the lake and the small feeder stream.

There were very few people around the lake and there was no evidence of fish. The Park had stopped stocking many years earlier, and a very small population of trout remained, perhaps the progeny of those few that had managed to spawn uninterrupted in or near the feeder stream.

Honor and I had work to do. The light was fading rapidly as it does this far north in late August. We had brought a hammer and a sturdy five inch nail. We rolled a large log over to a tree we had selected, a black spruce that perched above the feeder stream. I climbed onto the log so that my boots were a good three feet off the ground. I detached the trout from its maple mount and drove the spike through the middle of the trout and into the spruce tree. We rolled the log away, and as Honor photographed my rainbow, I had a last look at him. It was drifting above its creek, pointed upstream towards the pure source of his water.

I was thinking about my father, the man who taught me to fish, but who never made time for himself to learn flyfishing. He had taken me and my friend Hyndman fishing on many occasions when he might more happily have lazed around the back yard, resting from his labours. Now he was an old man living with his wife far from the prairie of his youth, and unaware of this hairbrained scheme cooked up by my girlfriend and me. My father, who didn’t die after all. I was thinking that this moment by the creek, with the sound of Honor’s camera reminding me of another camera from many years ago, was an appropriate ending to our story.

§

But a story doesn’t end until someone writes it down. Honor and I got married in 1990. I had lost that fish-out-of-water feeling of being the odd man out. Oh yes, and she loves to flyfish.

It was time for my annual drive out to British Columbia to see my parents in their apartment. To get there, we had to go through Jasper, so once again we got a motel and went for a drive near Lake Edith. A man was fishing close to the feeder stream, and he noticed Honor and I looking for our old friend the rainbow up in his spruce tree.

We found the tree that had been his resting place, and the spike that had impaled him up there, but the rainbow was gone. We approached the angler, who was not a tourist but a local man.

“Bet I know what you was lookin for.”

“What?” said Honor.

“You was lookin for that Jesus big fish.”

We played dumb. “What fish would that be?” I said.

“Up there, over there, used to be a old rainbow trout, nailed to the tree. Huge thing.” He spread out his hands in that hyperbolic way of anglers. “No guff, it was three foot long. Musta weighed twenny pounds.”

Six pounds would be closer to the mark, several ounces lighter than Scot Smith’s biggest rainbow from the summer of ‘68. From having recently spawned, mine was a lean fish.

The man reeled in a gob of worms and a bobber and checked his bait for signs of predatory behavior. Then he stood and launched his wormy delight far out into the lake.

“Yessir, they’re in here.”

Playing dumb to the end, I asked him, “How did this monster fish get up in a tree?”

“They say it was some kind of a … like a totem, eh? Indian guy?”

I asked him where the fish was now.

“No one knows,” the man said, lounging next to his cooler. “Figure somebody took it.” He looked up at me. “For luck, eh?”

I still have Honor’s black and white photographs, the ones of the tail and the head separated by the window in my study. It’s the big space in between that draws one’s attention and invites one to imagine just how big that trout was. So it’s no longer a trophy, a vanity, a thing to make my father proud of me. It’s just a reminder now of that summer when my father looked over the edge but didn’t get carried away.

— David Carpenter

————————

David Carpenter was conceived in Saskatoon and born in Edmonton, where he grew up on Saskatchewan stories. He moved to Saskatoon in 1975 and began writing the following year. He spent 4 years working on a novel entitled The Loving of Michael Goggins, a modern version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His main characters were a Titania-like young woman, a pudgy Bottom-like man, and an homme fatal disc jockey. It was a story of ill-fated love, despair, romantic disenchantment and all those youthful, fun emotions. He finished the novel in 1980 and it was rejected in 18 days, a Canadian indoor record. That same year he finished his first short story and sent it to Saturday Night. They phoned him one evening when he was in his kitchen standing beneath a high beam. He had often tried to jump high enough to touch this beam, but he could never quite reach it. The editor told him that Saturday Night would like to “buy” his story. He had never heard that sentence uttered before. The editor asked him if $2,000 would be all right, and he told the man yes, that would be all right. Carpenter gave this reply in a tone suggesting that this sort of thing happened with boring regularity. When the phonecall ended, he leapt up into the air and slapped he beam above him and returned, very slowly, to earth. His novel Niceman Cometh was his 10th book, a story about a Titania-like single mom, a pudgy Bottom-like dreamer, and a flesh-foolish disc jockey in the Saskatoon of the 1990s. He launched a new book of fiction in the fall of 2009, a collection of novellas entitled Welcome to Canada.

       Carpenter is currently at work on Volume One of The Literary History of Saskatchewan. He also just finished working on a nonfiction book, A Hunter’s Confession, about the rise and fall of hunting as a pastime in North America.

       Carpenter’s writing credo is as follows (and it may not apply to poets): Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within.

Aug 072012
 

Martyrs of the Revolution

 

Tahrir Square has undergone many changes since last summer when I was there (See Tahrir Square, August 2011). Now, where tanks once sat presiding, flags fly. Where military police crouched behind plexiglass shields, squatters in tents decorated with political slogans now crowd together on dusty traffic circles. Overhead, a stuffed effigy of Hosni Mubarak dangles from a streetlight.

 

Flags Near the Egyptian Museum

 

An Effigy of the Old Guard

 

Political Slogans Where Soldiers Once Stood

 

Refreshment

 

And along Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which connects Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry and flanks the American University of Cairo campus, graffiti murals have sprung up. The place where many deadly confrontations between protestors and police unfolded in recent months, Mohamed Mahmoud Street has emerged as a memorial that documents different moments in the on-going political events in Egypt.

 

Murals to Tahrir Square

 

Flags and Murals

 

The former regime: Mubarak, Tantawi, Moussa and Shafiq

 

The Egyptian artists responsible for these paintings flocked to the walls when some of the worst clashes were unfolding in the fall of 2011; their ranks swelled after the Port Said massacre of February 1, 2012. They arrived with no preconceived message but with the idea that art was a weapon at the service of change. They began to collect images and paint them while witnessing the events and listening to stories recounted by the many onlookers who came to offer their support and protection against the police. This is the case, for example, with a verse from the Qu’ran which appeared. Referring to doomsday, the inscription (when people are held accountable, they will say they’ve been following their leaders) was painted after a citizen was heard citing the verse to one of the Muslim Brotherhood representatives. (From the American University of Cairo Lecture and Panel Discussion, Visualizing the Revolution: Epic Murals of Tahrir Square). Other images include likenesses of martyrs of the Revolution including Al Ahly Ultras (who were—it is claimed—punished by the police because they had offered support to Tahrir Square revolutionaries in the early days of the Arab Spring) as well as beautiful Pharaonic-like scenes.

 

Girl and Martyr

 

Ancient Influence

 

 

The overriding theme of these paintings, in the words of artists who painted them, is collaboration. Not just among the different graffitists, but with the people themselves. Says Ammar Abu Bakr, ‘it would be selfish of me to speak of my work because this work is collaborative; it’s Coptic/Islamic/Pharaonic because Egypt is a melting pot.’ Hanaa El Degham adds that her intent was to communicate with the street but that ‘beauty is important. Ancient Egyptians made their walls beautiful.’ Alaa Awad adds that murals are the ‘only true paper or channel of media for the Revolution.’ (Listen to the lecture Visualizing the Revolution: Epic Murals of Tahrir Square and refer to the American University of Cairo website for background information about these three artists.)

 

Mother of a Martyr

 

In the months since the murals first appeared, they have continued to change, in some cases painted over by authorities. Although the American University of Cairo has attempted to save the murals from destruction, the artists feel such protection is useless if the freedom of human beings is constantly curtailed. Graffiti murals, they say, must continue to be a response to new events and must change necessarily. It is not surprising then to learn that the artists themselves have recently defaced their own work, painting the words “forget what has happened, focus on the elections,” together with portraits of the mothers of martyrs over previous layers of revolutionary history.

 

—Natalia Sarkissian

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Natalia Sarkissian has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been an editor at Numéro Cinq since 2010. Natalia divides her time between Italy, Egypt, the United States, and South Africa.

 

Aug 032012
 

Maybe it’s the waning days of August, the threat of September and back-to-school ads already playing on the television, the clash of the air conditioning in the Starbucks with the swelter collapse of patrons strewn over the burning café tables outside, or The Mamas & The Papas festival playing over the speakers, but this August day is made for the melancholy and thrilling sweet / bitter play of Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express.

It’s a perfect / imperfect film, something Wong Kar Wai created to escape the drawn out madness of editing his swordmaster epic Ashes of Time. Intriguing, how one artistic expression might be the antidote to another. Made over three months from beginning to end, an impossibly small amount of time in the world of feature filmmaking, it drips with the adrenaline and relief of this condensed creative period, yet, contradictorily almost drowns in its twin stories of already unrequited cop lover boys who accidentally fall for new women (who will, of course, leave them too).

Chungking Express defies standard film narrative, telling two stories, one after the other, about Hong Kong cops in love and neither tale seems satisfied with its cop protagonist, lurching in perspective to also explore the two women they eventually pursue and their California dreams of survival (the incredible Brigitte Lin) and departure (impish Faye Wong).

The first tale is a cop thriller, the second a screwball comedy, but the stories ignore these easy categories: the thriller is focused on a quirky romantic male lead (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the screwball comedy’s male lead (Tony Leung) is saturated in a sea of unrequited desires, perfectly expressed in the almost relentless repetition of The Mamas & The Papas “California Dreaming.” All these departures from form and genre expectations might make some viewers long for standard structure, but longing is really the point.

Specificity is what grounds this film, these two stories, and prevents the film from being buried in the genres and pop songs that crash and clash together here. The first cop believes if he runs and sweats enough he will cry less. A toy plane stands in for the unobtainable aspect of cop number two’s stewardess girlfriend who is departing, arriving, and never really there. The details defy the generic throughout.

This small clip illustrates how “California Dreaming” works in the second half of the film and, too, shows how the unrequited structure of a love triangle can come down to something as specific and mundane as a Chef Salad.

For more on Wong Kar Wai, see this essay on longing in his works and this introduction to a commercial short film he made.

— RWGray

Aug 022012
 

Ariane Miyasaki played flute a little in middle school but managed to ditch high school completely (see explanation below) and ended up at Schenectady Community College studying music with very little conventional music background. She took a course called Music Lit and Style that started with Pythagoras and swept up to the 20th century, and everything she studied was new and delightful. There’s a moment in “Ruthie-Ruthie” in Frank Zappa’s album Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore when Zappa quotes an audience member who shouted: “Freak me out, Frank! Freak me out!” Those words are Ariane’s aesthetic touchstone. When she got to the 20th century — concrete music, electronic music, collage and acousmatic music — she found a freak-out home. Subsequently, she transferred to the Crane School of Music at SUNY Postdam, and now she is one of the first class of composers to attend the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Music Composition program.

This is a first for Numéro Cinq, original compositions by a new, young composer. We have two pieces with a short introduction by Ariane and excerpts from the score. They are both strange and beautiful and deeply touching. They will, yes, freak you out in the best way possible.

Ariane works mostly with what’s called fixed media — pre-recorded and edited material (using a program called Logic) — and combinations of fixed media and live instruments, also the human voice.  “I tend,” she says, “to be very influenced by narrative in my composition, and voice lends itself to that very well, so I am sure that that is part of it. Most of the pieces I have written so far involve some sort of narrative, even if it is entirely internal and I used it only as a starting point to get an idea for form, feel, gestures, etc.”

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Roboterinner Lied

This is a short, entirely acousmatic, piece from (I think) 2008 that really started out as an experiment in sound editing, but I still have sort of a soft spot for it. I guess I think it’s cute. All of the sounds in it, with the obvious exception of the synthesized bells, are derived from a single sampled tongue stop, played on flute. The title means “Robot inner song,” literally, though I guess I like to think of it more as “Robot’s inner song.” There isn’t really any meaning to the piece, but when I was sketching it out, I was imagining this robotic widget, not a cool robot, just an element– maybe one of the suction cup robots that fills egg cartons, or one of those big arms that sprays paint on car parts. From somewhere, it finds this simple melodic idea (maybe somebody left a radio on?), which it tries to emulate, with varying success. At the end of the day, it’s still just a robot, but it remembers this little idea that it had once, and it can keep that forever, or until it is decommissioned and scrapped.

 

Click the button to hear Roboterinner Lied.

 

The House my Grandfather Built

This is a piece for violin, percussion, and two-channel fixed media. The musicians are Ethan Woon (violin) and Jeffrey Means (percussion). Rather than having an audio track that the musicians play along with, I made 23 individual audio files that are triggered separately, live, and are designed to overlap. This allows the players some liberty with the pulse, and avoids having to hook them up to click tracks. This means that on each play through the audio files will be a bit different, but I tried to make them such that that is not a problem. The audio is made from samples I took around my grandparents’ home.

To explain why I wrote this piece and what it means to me, I need to make it clear what my grandfather meant, and still means, to me.

I was born in Buffalo, NY. We moved to LA when I was nine months old, and I grew up there, in Culver City. My mother and paternal grandmother were both killed in a car accident when I was eight. The accident also left my father critically injured and knocked me out for a while. Once my father and I were both back from the hospital, my relationship with him steadily deteriorated. Five years later, when I was 13, I left home for Seattle. I have not been back since.

About when I was eighteen, I moved from Seattle to my maternal grandparents’ home in Schenectady. After over four years of living out-of-doors, I was, needless to say, not at my best. I was very angry, and angry at everyone and everything. My grandparents took me in. They barely knew me, except from brief summertime visits when I was a child.

My maternal grandfather was like a father to me. Last August, the day before the first MFA in Composition residency at VCFA, we discovered he was ill. A few days into the residency, my husband informed my that he was terminally ill and that I should expect hospice to be at my grandparents’ home when I returned. My grandfather died five weeks later.

I wanted to do something FOR them. For my family. Almost sixty years ago, my grandfather and his brother and brothers-in-law built the house in which my grandmother lives to this day. That house is an outgrowth of the family and life that they built and gave to their descendants.

I have always been interested in small, personal noises. The sounds that are particular to any given person’s life. The pre-recorded sounds in this piece are samples taken from and around the house. Prayers of my grandmother, because for them, Catholicism was so important, the lathe at which my grandfather worked sharpening knives, right up until his last weeks, baseball, the kitchen, the washer and dryer, even the creaking floors. Any house makes similar sounds, but each one does that in its own way — like a sonic fingerprint. I wanted to make an homage to their home that would have a very real and concrete meaning for my family. Naturally, I hope it also is pleasing to an outsider.

 When I say “The House My Grandfather Built,” I really mean the world he and my gran built; the family they dragged out of the Depression, through World War II, through sending all three of their children to college and my mother to dental school, through my uncle’s leukemia, my mother’s death, my own disappearance and reappearance. I am half Japanese and half Italian by descent. I grew up with the Japanese side. When a Buddhist dies, there are these memorial services at certain amounts of time past the death. At several of these that I attended when I was young, I remember the priest saying: “It really doesn’t matter — this stuff about what happens to me when I die? Where do I go to? Do I live forever? — because either way you live on through what you did. Your life and you actions don’t die.” THAT is the house that my grandfather built, and it is my hope for this piece — more than anything else — that it is enough to say “Thanks for that,” albeit inadequately.

 

Click the button to hear The House My Grandfather Built.

 

— Music and Text by Ariane Miyasaki

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Ariane Miyasaki is a composer based in Schenectady, New York. She has written for a wide array of instrumentations, voice, and electronics, but at the moment, she is chiefly interested in electroacoustic and acousmatic work. Her piece “Bad Call Drink Me Bottle” for flute and fixed media was premiered in 2011 by Norman Thibodeau as part of a series of performances sponsored by St. Jude the Apostle Church in Wynantskill, New York. Miyasaki is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Composition at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also holds a Bachelor of Music from State University of New York at Potsdam, where she studied music theory and history, an Associate of Science and an Associate of Arts from Schenectady County Community College, where she majored flute performance and humanities and social science.

 While attending classes at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, she studied electronic composition with Paul Steinberg. She is currently studying electroacoustic and acousmatic composition with John Mallia at VCFA.

Miyasaki remains active as a flutist. She regularly plays with the SCCC Wind Ensemble and Capital Region Wind Ensemble, and frequently can be heard in other area ensembles and in the pit  orchestras of local musical productions. Miyasaki studied flute with Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart, Norman Thibodeau, and Kenneth Andrews.

 

 

Aug 012012
 

Pat Keane is an extraordinary raconteur, never better than when describing the twists and reversals of his life which, in the end, always have the air of myth. He is a man (wide-eyed Catholic schoolboy become eminent scholar) but he doth bestride the world like a hero when the stories start spilling out. I am calling this one a “fictional memoir,” a term inspired by Kenneth Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel, which is patently his life story thinly (as in diaphanous) disguised as a fiction. A propos of this, in last weekend’s New York Times Book Review, in an essay titled “How to Write,” Colson Whitehead quotes Saul Bellow’s observation that “Fiction is the higher autobiography.” Whitehead’s paraphrase—“In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.”

“Leaving the Zoo” is an uproariously funny tale about a young man (Catholic schoolboy — see detail of 8th Grade class photo above, the author just behind the the priest, smiling) taking a summer job at the Bronx Zoo (think: early 1950s). The job is awful, except for the animals. The co-workers are malingerers and bullies. Ah, but the worm turns. And the wide-eyed, innocent, Catholic schoolboy turns out to have a streak of, well, near Satanic malevolence that is, yes, inspiring to behold.

To add to your delight the photographer Jake Rajs has generously given NC permission to use his famous photograph of the Rainey Memorial Gate, Bronx Zoo.

dg

1

 The massive bronze Memorial Gate at the Pelham Parkway entrance….To us as kids growing up in the Bronx, in a grey world of concrete and tenements, it had always been a portal to paradise, to a lush oasis of trees and creatures great and small gathered from every continent. The bronze Gate itself seemed a living thing, with its sculpted animals and foliage coated in that lovely patina of green.

Now I walked through the Memorial Gate, then under an arched pennant reading: “THE BRONX ZOO: EXPERIENCE IT!” I passed those sleek clowns, the seals, playing to their audience, and, on the opposite side of the promenade, the unplayful: the caged lion, panther, leopard, and the two Bengal tigers. It was all familiar. But not my sudden turn into the Administration Building. For this time I wasn’t coming to the zoo as a visitor but as a fifteen-year-old hoping for a summer job. Ike was President, the Korean “police action” winding down, my initiation into adult life about to begin. Despite a few quizzical glances at the two books I’d just borrowed from the Pelham Bay Library (Milton’s Poems and Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy), I’d gotten the job, as my aunt had assured me I would.

The maples forming a natural colonnade were golden-budded the day the manager of the animal track, Bartells, had first interviewed me and told me to fill out and submit working papers. Those trees were in full leaf the evening he sidled up to me as the crew was returning from the track to the barn. Though he approached me from behind, I had heard his hacking smoker’s cough from a distance, and interpreted the sign of his invisible coming: the sound of that belt-slung ring of keys conferring on its bearer supreme authority, the power to lock and to loose. The jingling stopped.

“I want you to know,” he began, his narrowed eyes alerting me to the solemnity of the occasion, “that I’ve never moved anyone this young this fast from donkey-boy to camel-boy.” Naïve as I was, I was aware that my accelerated promotion had less to do with any merits of mine than with what my benefactor thought might be gained by currying favor with my aunt, mysteriously ensconced in the Zoo’s imposing Administration Building. As I’d quickly discovered, Bartells, like most tyrants, bootlicked those above him and bullied those beneath. His workers were treated like animals and the poor animals themselves like machines. The two exceptions were Castelli and, for a while—me!

Bartells stopped, awaiting my response. Unprepared, but not wanting to fall short, I tried to convey an appropriate blend of modesty and pride at this, my sudden elevation in the hierarchy of teen-aged toilers at the animal track.

Impressive as it was, the position of camel-boy did not occupy the pinnacle. That eminence was reserved for the llama-handler, Castelli, a nineteen-year-old troglodyte endowed with a defined torso that seemed carved from quebracho rather than composed of mere human flesh. He was the only one able to control the llama, a sinewy, snorting creature as muscular and mean-spirited as himself. The trick was to “break ’em,” which, according to Castelli, meant showing any animal, a person for that matter, who was in charge. “It’s the eyes,” he’d say; “they can see it in your eyes.” In any case, even after the llama had been “broken,” only the bravest children dared to mount the damned thing. And even they needed a nudge from mommies less leery of the sullen llama than intrigued by its handler’s knowing look and sculpted physique.

Except for weekends, when inconvenient fathers were present, Castelli’s performances were predictable. Flashing a set of strong white teeth of which any predator would be proud, he would tear in half the proffered ride-ticket, depositing the receipt-portion in the pocket of a strategically unbuttoned shirt, then hoist little Johnny or Jane into the saddle, allowing the riper mothers or older sisters an opportunity to follow the shift of tension from biceps to chiseled triceps. A glimpse of rippling abdominals enticed the more daring to drop their eyes to the blatant bulge at the brass-buttoned crux of his Levis.

Hardly spontaneous, but impressive. For me, however, the show was dismaying. Disregarding Sarah Vaughan’s musical plea not to put them “on a pedestal,” I tended to idealize women in the abstract, and so was always disappointed that so many actual, earth-treading women succumbed to these displays of machismo. My own sexual experience had not yet progressed beyond the “soul-kiss” and, in the darkness of the local movie, the tentative, leaden-armed ritual rewarded by a half-permitted caress of a ripening breast. Not having gone “all the way” myself, I wondered how many of Castelli’s overtures led to crescendo and climax.

Those conquests would have taken place off-track. We were on the animal track; and here, despite Bartell’s gold-banded and billed military-style headgear, we all knew who occupied the supreme position in the hierarchy. Bossier even than Bartells, Castelli constantly bullied the rest of us—even the youngest, a kid whose vision was so bad he couldn’t read the ride-tickets. Ever-considerate, Castelli had a suggestion: “Hey. Want we should print them in braille just for you, four eyes?”

His own eyesight was as keen as a circling hawk’s. For Castelli, the world, vulnerable and belly-up, was to be inspected and dominated. Under the guise of unsentimental efficiency, he handled the animals roughly and the rest of us as resources to be exploited. We were not only his  gofers but his personal exchequer, our lunch money subject to random confiscation under the euphemism of borrowing. Daily, we were reminded of what Castelli referred to as “the pecking order around here,” one to which it “fuckin’ behooved us” to adjust.

Since it never dawned on us to gang up on him, we put up with his petty tyranny. Still, to be the youngest ever to attain the rank of camel-boy gave me a modest cachet. Having somehow gotten it into his head that my aunt had “pull,” Bartells had put me on the second rung to begin with, leapfrogging the usual starting position. Not for that “fine woman’s” nephew the ignominy of the jackass-cart—a wagon typically packed with the smaller or more timid children and pulled, slowly, by Toby, a venerable old creature inured to his unglamorous duty.

Orwell’s pigs were right. “Some animals” really were “more equal than others.” Bypassing Toby, I had been assigned a brace of sweet-natured Sicilian donkeys, Prince and Daisy, miniatures rigged out in blue and pink saddles and belled reins, cute as stuffed toys. Among all the track’s animals, even more than the llama and camels, they were the stars, the recipients of most of the daylong oohs and ahs, tributes to a velvet-eared cuddliness that made them seem escapees from a Disney family epic. And they were a delight to look at and stroke. Of course, for Castelli and Bartells, they were simply commodities, just two more hoof-mounted hay-burners to be fueled and profitably worked. But even the saturnine Bartells had to admit that they “drew customers.” Prince and Daisy were adored by the children—and loved by me.

I would certainly miss them on ascending the ladder to assume my new duties as camel-boy. It was a literal ascent since my promotion would take me from ground-level to the elevated platforms from which kids were carefully lifted into howdahs slung on both sides of the gently swaying humps of camels waiting between the loading docks to receive their cargo. But the separation from Prince and Daisy would have been even more painful had I not been shaken out of my adolescent ease by an incident just days before my promotion.

I’d come to the zoo early, shortly after 5 a.m. I’d been promised a rare gift by Jack, an experienced animal keeper who had befriended me when he noticed me lingering whenever I passed the building housing the Big Cats—now long since liberated to roam the veldts of the open-ranged modern zoo. Back then, our two Bengal tigers had, after several matings, finally gotten the job done. The tigress, Aleta, had lost her first-born cub—common, I was told by Jack, among tigresses in the wild as well as in captivity. But she’d then lost two more after a second mating. Even back then, before they were threatened with total extinction in the wild, tigers were as precious as they were beautiful. So there had been a relieved and enthusiastic response throughout the zoo when, earlier that spring, Aleta had finally produced a viable litter, two healthy cubs, born without incident. She brooded protectively over them, gazing indifferently through the slanted ellipses of amber eyes at those allowed a glimpse of the new arrivals.

When Aleta later suffered complications requiring surgery, her eight-week-old cubs, no longer blind but still small and dependent, had to be temporarily separated from their mother. While she recovered, the unweaned cubs were transferred to their own canvas-floored cage, with Jack playing the role of surrogate, feeding them Aleta’s milk from a nippled bottle. There’d been no thought of putting them together with their father, who spat and growled whenever his pacing brought him close to the adjoining cage housing his estranged family. With Aleta mending, a gauntleted Jack nursed, coaxed, and comforted the abandoned cubs. Eventually, they relaxed when he was with them, and even became affectionate.

I took to spending the few minutes I could spare from my supposed “lunch hour” watching the cubs cavort with Jack. One day he motioned me over.

“Be here tomorrow by dawn,” he whispered. “I’ll let you in with them for a minute.”

After a night of sleepless anticipation, I rose, dressed, and caught an almost empty bus, arriving at the zoo in that eerie half-hour of darkness when the birds begin to tentatively herald a dawn not yet visible. Having passed me the gauntlets, Jack led me into the cage. At first, the cubs hissed and spat, then, after eyeing me warily, seemed reassured by the familiar figure benignly looking on. For a while we were all motionless. Then it happened, and so suddenly that even Jack was caught off guard. First one cub, then the other, sprang from the canvas floor like playful kittens, catapulting straight up and gripping my shoulders with taloned paws. When they licked my face, the hairs on my neck stood up. The feel of their rough tongues and the slight pain produced by the grip of their mini-claws only added to the thrill.

I wanted time to stop. But the light was already coming up and there was the animal track to attend to. In a state of euphoria I made my way to the barn. The trees were ricocheting birdsong now and some of the other animals were beginning to stir. I arrived as Bartells, having unlocked the gate and opened up the barn, was in the midst of his own morning ritual: a guttural coughing and throat-clearing that went on until he finally hawked up a ball of greenish phlegm. Undeterred, still bathed in the afterglow of my encounter with the tiger cubs, I picked up a brush and strolled to the paddock enclosing my Sicilian charmers.

What? My jaw dropped as I stared at Prince. Having just dismounted Daisy, he was sporting a vivid, stiffened penis. A city boy still ignorant of the facts of the barnyard, I was stunned. The jarring image of this little Disneyesque creature with a boner stretching almost to the ground would for some time trouble my dreams. But I was even more taken aback by the shocking complicity of Daisy, who, unperturbed, peered up at me with those luminous, great-lashed eyes as demurely as ever. I expected this kind of behavior from the Castellis of the world and those he attracted. But Prince? And Daisy!

Even the cubs’ breeding, the abstract “mating” that produced them, now lurched palpably into my imagination. And there, his member gradually retracting but still formidable, “stood” Prince, nuzzling his consort. Something all too real had been rudely thrust into the untroubled waters of my idyllic notion of their bond. Even when the first ripples from the impact had receded, the placid surface remained shattered. Here was a visceral, if unintended, example of what that entrance-pennant had promised as the Zoo “Experience.”

My own hurtling from Innocence to Experience demanded an immediate renegotiation of the terms of my relationship with Prince and Daisy, whom I could no longer regard as my little pets and pupils. The ancestral voices were almost audible: Like the animal-masked paleolithic hunters before me, surrounded by beasts, I had to recognize and acknowledge that the animals were my teachers. But that reorientation, like the lessening of the original shock, would take time. And so it was with real ambivalence—not the mix of self-effacement and pride I feigned—that I accepted my premature but welcome promotion to Camel Boy.

At first, all went well. To my surprise, even slight embarrassment, I took pleasure in my new status. I was less surprised by my relief in rising above the now problematic muck and dung of the animal track. I enjoyed being up high on the loading platform, breathing the buoyant blue air, strapping in the eager children, gazing into the curiously affecting eye of the camel, its unexpectedly soft, feminine lashes reminding me of the bashful Daisy I had thought I knew.

More practically, my weekly salary soared, no small thing since I was facing several years of trying to save up in order to pay my own way through college, still possible back in what the Lone Ranger’s radio announcer used to evoke at the start of every program as “those days of yesteryear.” My raise took me from $17.50 a week to $25. Even after taxes, I could look forward to the rest of July and a whole August that would net enough to pay for my two final years in high school and for the Mickey Mantle baseball glove I craved. Between hoisting kids into swaying howdahs, I tried to figure out how I could at least start to accumulate the thousand dollars I’d need to day-hop at Fordham.

It was in the course of calculating just how much I’d need over the next few years that my troubles began, troubles that would culminate in my leaving the Zoo.

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2

It was the track’s—or, at least, Bartells’—policy that, in turn, each of us, except for the privileged Castelli, would “volunteer” to give up half his lunch period to direct traffic to the ticket-booth and then back across the paved path to the mazed entrance that led to the actual track. Not long after attaining the prestigious rank of camel-boy, I ventured a suggestion regarding this unnecessarily confused setup. But by then, Bartells, having realized that my aunt was just another employee, regarded me as he did everyone else under him, except for Castelli.

In fact, I was even more contemptible than the others in Bartell’s eyes since, given even a spare minute, I always “had my head stuck in some goddamn book.” Coming from such a “smart-ass,” my tentative suggestion that the booth and the track entrance should, perhaps, be re-located so that they would be together, was rejected, literally spat upon with a hawked-up glob of mucus befitting such unsolicited theorizing. Booth and track had been separate from time immemorial; that was “good enough for” Bartells. Apparently it was beyond the pale even to question so traditional an arrangement, however half-assed it might have been.

“Where do we buy the tickets?” It was the question endlessly, and understandably, posed by perplexed or irritated parents as their children—usually seduced by the winsome Prince or that siren, Daisy—tugged excitedly at dresses and sleeves. And we would direct them through the labyrinth. I played my part in this lunchtime ritual for several weeks, until it occurred to me—an inspiration whose dishonesty seemed somehow mitigated by its daring—that my incipient college fund could really get jump-started if I were merely to pretend to rip up the ride-tickets given me by customers, transferring them whole rather than halved into the dark recesses of my jeans pockets. I might then have a rather different response to the familiar query, “Where…?” Once I’d implemented my scheme, initial guilt and nervousness yielded to a certain pride in my aplomb.

“Where do we buy the tickets?”

“Why,” I’d respond—making sure Bartells wasn’t looking, and then producing the required number of tickets from my pocket—-“right here!”

And so it went for almost a month, during which my salary—and thus my future college fund—catapulted cub-like from $25 to over $75 a week. The busy track pulled in so much money that I conned myself into feeling no guilt about my extra “earnings.” Like everyone else my age, I’d read Animal Farm and had come to see Prince, Daisy, and especially the uncompromised Toby, as a composite Boxer the Horse to Bartells’ and Castelli’s tyrannical Napoleon the Pig. Now, I selectively applied Orwell’s fable to the lowliest human toilers at the track.

After all, I rationalized, were not we underpaid and overworked proletarians being deprived of half our lunch-period by the System, in this case a combination of engineering stupidity and capitalist exploitation of the laboring class? Surely these considerations justified some recompense? If not, I could always find support in the closer-to-home side of the Cold War debate, free enterprise. My additional income represented just compensation for my initiative in undertaking a risky venture.

What followed were the glory days—entrepreneurial enterprise rewarded, and kept exciting by the little rushes stimulated by flirting daily with danger: the ever-present prospect of getting caught by Bartells, whose beer-swollen figure and weathered face I monitored, hawk-like, from my vantage-point between ticket-window and track, while making sure that I myself was partially obscured by the milling crowds. My timing during these tensely busy half-hours became flawless, my impersonation of ticket-dispenser convincing even to me.

It was a different and lesser exhilaration than my privileged moment with the tiger cubs, but I felt—as camel-boy and con-man—at the top of my game. Only later would I realize that from this, the zenith of my zoological trajectory, there was no direction to go but down.

Though, increasingly, I took risks proportionate to my growing confidence, I never traded tickets for cash when Bartells was out of my line of sight. I had not, however, calculated on Castelli, assuming that his llama-management and muscle-flaunting displays were all-consuming. But it turned out that, along with a torso, the llama-boy came equipped with a brain, however reptilian.

One day I detected an altered look in his eye, a certain alerted cunning that complicated without at all replacing the usual self-satisfied arrogance. One of our crew had become ill, and I had volunteered to sacrifice the whole of my lunch hour to shoulder the ordinarily tedious burden of traffic direction. But my generous gesture had come a tad too quickly, a telegraph-signal to a street-smart hustler like Castelli. Never one to “pitch in” himself, he became suspicious. Two days later the game was up. The beginning of the end came, deceptively enough, in the most pleasant guise.

 The Scene: A lovely young woman with little brother in tow drops the half-dollar change I have just given her with her ticket. As she bends over and I admire the cascading of her long hair and the shifting of her breasts, I instinctively cast a wary eye in Castelli’s direction. The crowd has parted at just the wrong moment and, sure enough, I catch Castelli’s snake eyes fixed on the scene—on the young beauty’s cleavage, to be sure, but then, knowingly, riveted on the retrieval of the tell-tale coin. In the dimmest of recesses, light had dawned.

 The denouement came at dusk. Having unsaddled the animals, watered them, and forked down their evening hay and oats from the suffocatingly hot loft, we washed up. After checking that all doors and paddocks were secured, either locked or bolted, Bartells gruffly herded us out and shackled up the barn and gate for the night. We scattered. I headed, at top speed, for the bus at the Southern Boulevard exit. I’d gotten maybe two hundred yards when I heard the inevitable.

“Not so fast.”

There was no need to turn; I knew who it was. Though I could feel my heart sinking, I seemed compelled to adopt a cavalier tone.

“Ah, Castelli. And what can I do for you?”

He spun me around. “What can you do for me?”

“My very question.”

“What you can do for me, you little piss-ant, is give me half.”

“Of what?”

“Half of you know fuckin’-A-well what!”

With tempers rising, I saw no point in continuing this Q&A. I contemplated a range of options, from an indignant profession of innocence to acknowledgement of my “operation” and a jovially collegial acceptance of the proposal on the table. But in the end my response was the pure product of instinct, planted in the genes and nurtured by life growing up in the South Bronx.

“Up yours, Castell—“

As I was forming the final vowel, I found myself shoved off the path into the underbrush fledging a slope bristling with wildflowers. Once we were pastorally relocated, it took just two hammer-fisted punches to the gut to reveal to me the inadequacy of my intuitive response. A second attempt yielded the correct answer to the suggestion that we share and share alike.

And so it went for the next two weeks, with Castelli taking half of my “supplemental” income, while I took all the risk. I’d adjusted to this altered and asymmetrical state of affairs when, dragging myself to the bus after a particularly trying day, I was tapped on the shoulder from behind.

This time Castelli was accompanied by an acolyte, a “buddy” who worked with a long-handled broom sweeping up cigarette-butts and crumpled cups, melted ice-cream from dropped cones and half-devoured hot-dogs, along with other detritus littering areas around the zoo’s concession stands. Gesturing toward this worthy, Castelli mustered up his now-favorite word:

“Half. He gets half, too.”

Though the arithmetic seemed to have escaped both my interlocutor and his equally quick-witted friend, I had no difficulty computing that two halves came to a whole, leaving nothing for me. But, as if determined to prove that, in practical matters, I retained the impeccable credentials of a slow learner, I again went with impulse, suggesting that the two pals might consider devoting some serious thought, if they had any to spare, to the prospect of taking a nice flying fuck for themselves.

This time, the hint that yet another incorrect response had been given took the form of Castelli’s engineer-booted foot crashing into my knee. As my leg buckled under me and I howled in pain, Castelli assisted me on the way down with a short but effective left-cross that chipped a front tooth in my open mouth. One lip was already ballooning by the time they swaggered off, with Castelli leading the way and laughing. I’d had enough.

.

3

I had had enough. I did not cut Castelli’s friend in; in fact, after a “sick day” during which I applied ice-packs to my knee and lip, and serious thought to my dilemma, I decided to bring my scam to a screechy-ass halt altogether. Using my bad knee as an excuse, I got Bartells to take me off traffic duty. Let the bastards divide 100% of nothing. While I was actually relieved to bring my criminal career to a close, Castelli was another matter. His glowering and muscle flexing whenever he was in my general vicinity confirmed that the issue had not been resolved to his satisfaction.

During my now leisurely lunch-periods, when I wasn’t reading or checking in on the tiger cubs, I began to examine, for the first time, the details of various animals, from elephants and rhinos down to every noble insect that favored me with a visit. One day, Castelli intruded even on my entomological pursuits. Deftly dodging the vicious swat aimed at it, a bee with a tuft of the sun on its back managed to avoid eclipse by the powers of darkness. Less lucky, the dragon-fly whose delicate prehistoric double-wing structure Castelli caught me admiring ended up under a familiar and precisely-targeted boot. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when, he’d get to me.

In the meantime, aside from his lunchtime forays into insect-squashing and knocking the odd book out of my hands, Castelli was biding his time, just letting me sweat a bit. About a week and a half after I’d been punched in the mouth and treated to a cartilege-crunching kick in the knee, the gathering shit-storm exploded—but in a way neither of us could have anticipated.

Just before we headed out to the track that morning, Bartells asked Castelli (he never ordered the llama-master) to perform a chore. He was, said Bartells, the only one among us “strong enough” for the job—which was to go up into the “Inferno,” the windowless, steaming attic above the hay loft, and lug down some old but at least less ravaged gear and tackle intended, the next day, to replace the worn-out harness used to hitch poor Toby to the wagon. The appeal to Castelli’s musculature outweighed his natural insolence, and up he went.

As he did, the rest of the crew left for the track, Bartells imperiously spearheading the menagerie: boys, llama, camels, the Sicilian donkeys (led by Prince and Daisy), and—last, of course—Toby, unaware that an unfamiliar if less than spanking new harness was in his otherwise unalterable future. Bringing up the rear, almost conscious of his lowly status in the Great Order of Things, he was playing his part in a procession ordained before the oceans rolled.

My part seemed preordained as well. Unaware of any conscious decision, moving as if in a dream, I hung back when the others left. Once they were gone, I climbed the ladder to the loft, then the steps to the attic, pulled the trapdoor silently down and shot the bolt. I clambered back down, closing the overhead self-locking trapdoor to the loft. Then I left.

I miscalculated the delay. Forty minutes passed before Bartells, having set up the booth and gotten back to the track, realized that no one was attending to the llama, who was manifesting annoyance, as usual, by snorting and expelling a foul substance from his flared nostrils. “Where the hell’s Castelli?” Bartells asked, spitting up one of his own trademark oysters.

We all looked around, as if the missing person’s absence were a merely observational and therefore correctible oversight. But no Castelli materialized. It was only when Bartells, an unprecedented expression of concern in his piglike eyes, asked if anyone had seen him come down from the attic that I spoke up.

“Was he up there? Gosh, I locked it.”

 Awed Scene immediately following my bland but breathtaking announcement: All present stare at each other with a wild surmise, a moment of silence devoted, in rapid sequence, to calculating the expansion of mercury at temperatures in excess of 130 degrees Fahrenheit; estimating the upper limits of heat endurable by vertebrates; and, finally and fatalistically, meditating upon the mystery of human mortality: the latter a grave speculation on the Last Things that might have stretched out to infinity itself had it not been terminated by Bartells’ voicing of a religious invocation:

“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!”

Leaving a skeleton crew with the animals, Bartells, huffing and puffing, led the rest of us back to the barn. Once we got within earshot, a heavy but sporadic thumping confirmed the almost worst.

“God all-fucking-mighty,” exclaimed a piously grateful but still frightened Bartells. He singled out the loft-trapdoor key from his ring and handed it to one of us. “At least he’s still alive. Get up there and let him the hell OUT!”

A sneakered, liberating archangel flew up the ladder, unlocked the trap, climbed into the loft and slid open the heavy bolt on the attic trapdoor. The sequence of actions, though reversed, seemed vaguely familiar. Down on the floor we could almost hear the whoosh of intolerable heat escaping. Castelli finally appeared. A Lazarus come forth, he made his way, shakily despite help, down the ladder, gasping and gulping air, the famous torso oozing a viscous ichor bearing only a remote family resemblance to normal human perspiration. When he reached the dirt-floor he dropped to his knees. Someone gave him a paper cup of water, then another.

When he finally looked up, his eyes were glazed— until they found mine, and focused. In that instant of mutual recognition, he knew—and knew I knew he knew—exactly what had happened. And there was something altogether different there, a glint of fear. Castelli was right; it was “in the eyes.” Street instinct had kicked in and was transmitting a message, less of clear and present than of future danger. And I could read it. “This guy is crazy,” Castelli was saying inaudibly, “I can kick the shit out of him day in and day out, but he seems ready to take this all the way, and I’m not. If I mess with him again, some how, some way, I could end up dead.”

He was right again. Though Castelli was obviously surprised, I was the one who experienced the real shock of recognition. I realized I’d crossed an invisible threshold.

Things had changed. Not enough to completely break the llama-breaker, but enough to invert the Pecking Order, since now it was Castelli who feared retaliation. For the remainder of my stint at the animal track, he never again laid a hand on me, never even looked at me directly. Castelli, someone remarked, seemed less full of himself, less pushy with us, and less cocky with the women whose children he now saddled without display. Indeed, a man transformed.

Transfiguration Scene: Projected Apotheosis of Castelli: In later years, musing on life’s obscure twists and turns, I’ve sometimes wondered if I might have contributed, however inadvertently, to making Castelli a finer human being: more considerate of others and genuinely respectful of women; a devoted husband and solid family man; above all, a selfless contributor to his community, ever willing to extend the proverbial Helping Hand.

I conjured up a new, improved Castelli: a once self-centered troglodyte transmogrified into a paragon performing myriad humanitarian functions. Returning from near-death, he would, like the dying and resurrected hero-gods of myth, bring back boons to the culture fortunate enough to have borne him. Though doubtless best-known as the savior of the world (the gifted climatologist who had rescued a grateful planet from what he feelingly described as “the oppressive horrors of Global Warming”), Castelli was more, much more.…

I imagined him, as Director of a non-profit “Reverence for Life” foundation, personally designing an improbably successful (and critically acclaimed) line of “Puppy-‘n-Kitten” greeting-cards, whose considerable international proceeds would be evenly divided between protecting endangered (and even extinct) species of wildlife and providing critical seed-money to fund research into mutually-beneficial communication and cooperation, both intra-human and between humans and other life-forms, including, among insects, the orders Odonata and Hymenoptera, dragonflies and bees…

A volunteer Big Brother, crossing-guard, and all-purpose Catcher in the Rye; a philanthropic godsend to the handicapped in general (the lame, halt, maimed, decapitated, and otherwise physically-challenged), Castelli would prove a dedicated reader to the blind, who, to avoid even the appearance of patronizing the unsighted, would devote long hours to mastering braille….Nor would his good works terminate with the grave, the discourtesy of death being for Castelli but a speed-bump on the road to continued service.

Anticipating the day when he would move on to his richly-deserved reward, transcending this merely physical plane, he would have registered himself as a multiple-organ donor: a benefactor more than happy to pass on the odd heart or kidney, and unflinchingly ready to part with his eyeballs, spleen, and king member, if he thought the harvested items might be of transplanted service to Others, especially those less fortunate than he himself had been in a long and many-splendored life distinguished chiefly (as one of his many eulogists would titularly note) by “Self-Sacrificing Apostleship to the Oppressed and Wretched of the Earth, Compassionate and Altruistic Service Offered up in a Spirit of Ever-Humble Magnanimity.”

In short, an all-’round “good egg.”

.

4

The actual Castelli’s transformation, though somewhat less dramatic, did have a positive impact. Thanks, in a way, to him, I was no longer a thief. Nor was I, in the wake of the loft “incident,” any longer in danger of being either blackmailed or beaten. But these, alas, were not the only changes.

Though Poe’s Fordham cottage was nearby, the claustrophobic works of Edgar Allan were a closed book to Bartells. Thus, though himself a key-jingling advocate of always “locking up,” he was too unimaginative to conceive that I’d deliberately, and almost lethally, locked Castelli in the Inferno. But he couldn’t completely shake the idea either. Uncertain what to do, and unwilling to lose any worker this late in the season, he penalized me for “carelessness” in the only way he knew how: demotion, accompanied by an impressive stream of curses culminating in an emphatic expulsion of phlegm-thickened spittle following what sounded suspiciously like the dread word, “Cart.”

I had suddenly become the victim in a Miltonic-Shakespearean tragedy. In this particular condemnation to the nether regions, I was hurled headlong from the ethereal sky—down from the heady heights of the camels’ loading platform, past Prince and Daisy (with whom, ironically, I felt a renewed bond, now of shared maturity), thudding to earth and bottomless perdition as CART-BOY, lowliest of the low, and—in a final twist of what I had to admit was a perverse form of justice—earning even less than my original starting salary.

At least I had the company misery loves. I had always liked Toby, and now more than ever since I felt empathetically bonded with him in his humble lot: yoked in a fellowship of the shit-upon, even if, unlike him, I deserved to be where I was. Not that I didn’t resist that admission. Suspended between feeding on resentment and accepting responsibility, I vacillated between recognizing and rejecting the deep truth that—as one of my high-school teachers had once pontificated on sending me to the Principal—”my own acts had led to these unhappy consequences.” For the most part, I acknowledged as much. In my weaker moments, though, I shuffled, attributing my “fate” to the celestial alignment of malignant stars. Admirable evasion.

Still, what a falling off was here! From camel-boy and top-earner to this, the very nadir of the animal-track social Establishment!  Every experience allegedly has its use, but how to alchemically convert this muck into gold? I struggled to decode the “significance” of my descent, to discover in the Ordeal of the Cart a ritual initiation leading to some unspecified but redemptive epiphany.

In the meantime: stoic endurance. Plodding slowly behind endless cartloads of faceless urchins, I served out my sentence, trudging through mud and jackass dung, brooding on the ever-turning Wheel of Fortune which had taken the form, in its present sagging arc, of what the hapless loser on radio’s Life of Riley regularly described as “a revoltin’ development.” A prolonged and increasingly hot summer dragged itself—at about the same arthritic pace that Toby hauled the cart—toward the resumption of school and a for-once-welcome autumn.

But not before the final farce.

There are fiends in every Underworld, and I should have anticipated mine. But, at first, he seemed normal—perhaps a bit older than most cart-passengers, perhaps just big for his age, though there was something unpleasant about his oversized, crewcut head and thick neck. Having loaded him in with the other kids, I patted Toby and took up my usual position behind the cart. Then, slowly, the demon turned.

Thus far, there had been a slight revulsion, but nothing to prepare me for the porcine features revealed when he shifted around in the cart, facing me, tongue protruding, thumbs stuck in his ears, fingers wagging in the familiar gesture of contempt. He started softly, but, disturbing the other kids, increased his volume as we headed down the track, away from the waving parents. His mantra, though not the standard na-na-na-na-na-na, was simple enough.

“Fuck you, ya bastid,” he intoned, again and again. “Fuck you, ya bastid,” his stubby fingers flapping like displaced wings.

It was hot and humid; I was sweating and my muscles ached. Though my labors were absurd enough, I was no Sisyphus, supposedly “happy” just to keep struggling. In short, I’d had it—with Bartells, with the neutralized but still repellent Castelli, with the damned animal track, with the whole of at least this aspect of the Zoo “Experience.” Now, in this odious and incessant imp, my fall from grace and my final humiliation seemed concentrated as in a bouillon cube. He continued his taunting as the cart, finally, rounded the far end of the track. The thick, high bushes beckoned.

“Fuck you, ya bast—.” That’s all he got out, this time, before—having been abruptly hoisted, to his no small surprise, by his shirt-collar and the seat of his pants—he found himself somersaulting through the August air en route to the underbrush. My memory of the moment, filtered no doubt through the passage of years and subsequent college courses, is that its liberating joy was briefly clouded by Hamletesque philosophic broodings:

Freeze-frame: remorse considered, and cast out.  Even before the airborne object had attained the meridian of his trajectory, my own moment of release was sicklied o’er by the pale cast of conscience. My simple deed assumed a questionable shape: had I succumbed to the doctrine that might makes right, becoming, in the process, a bully, another Castelli?

That shadow of a doubt passed, eclipsed by the utilitarian theory according to which an action is right to the extent that it tends to promote happiness, that positive conclusion biased by the fact that there was no way to poll the ejectee, who, having reached the mid-point of his arc, was now starting his descent, demonstrating at once the force of gravity and the radical incompleteness of Flying without its sister art, Landing.

Quickly surveying the immediate scene, I fell back on that most venerable of legal maxims, qui tacet consentire: “Silence gives Consent.” No protest had emanated from the cart. I’d sensed from the outset that I had Toby’s vote: a proxy now seconded by the children, who, smiling, silently endorsed my variation on the Aristotelian final cause: action taken with the express purpose of forcibly removing an obstacle to the general felicity.

Predictably, however, neither their imprimatur nor scrupulous ethical distinctions would carry the day. In our turn into the home stretch, the momentary consolation of philosophy was shattered by monstrous reality, taking the Cerberus-like form of three very different figures having in common only their shared target.

In front of me, amid the smiling, waving mommies, a lone and singularly distraught parent was shrieking something about an “Oliver.” Even making allowances for her now grotesquely distorted features, she did not fit into the aesthetic category of svelte young mothers favored by the Castelli of old. In fairness, she had reason to be disturbed. For she had spotted her darling, freshly disentangled from the bushes and brambles and—scratched, bawling, and hysterical—pursuing the slow-moving cart from which he had recently been catapulted. Bulky as she was, she had slipped under the track-rail and was bearing down on me at full ramming speed.

Cannon to the right of me, cannon to the left, cannon behind me, volleyed and thundered. From the right charged Bartells, his enflamed visage contorted in fury. He too, like mother on the left and Oliver behind, was shouting and gesticulating wildly. Then suddenly, blissfully, all noises stopped together as though the volume-dials on all the radios in the Bronx had been turned down simultaneously.

Silence and serenity….even as Bartells was bellowing, mama screaming, Oliver yawping, and all three, flushed and furious, converging on me like animated spokes to the hub of a wheel. Just as the manager of the track, now in my face and on the verge of hectic eruption, was about to pronounce the ultimate sentence, I got it out, beating him to the punch. Under siege by man, woman, and child, and summoning up, in the very eye of the storm, the last vestige of dignity, I said, calmly:

“Bartells, I quit.”

 §

I was given no time for a proper farewell to Toby, let alone to Prince and Daisy. But leaving the zoo, on the way to the world that lay before me beyond the bronze Gate, I stopped off for a last visit with the cubs, back with a recovered Aleta and clearly enjoying their star-turns before an enthralled public. Now just part of the crowd gathered outside their cage, I watched them play, furballs of black-striped brilliant gold pouncing and tumbling under their mother’s even more watchful gaze.

Like her eyes, the late afternoon clouds were amber. In some of the colonnade maples, the leaves had just begun their own turn from green to gold. Part of me wanted to stay, to regress, to romp again with the cubs. But it was too late in the day and too late in the season of that long-ago summer. As I passed under them, the sculpted animals and plants crowning the great bronze Gate opening onto Pelham Parkway seemed more dulled than enhanced by the verdigris that coated them. It was time to move on. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. New, perhaps, but unlikely, I suspected even then, to be all that different.

—Patrick J. Keane
——————————

Patrick J. Keane is Professor Emeritus of Le Moyne College and a Contributing Editor at Numéro Cinq. Though he has written on a wide range of topics, his areas of special interest have been 19th and 20th-century poetry in the Romantic tradition; Irish literature and history; the interactions of literature with philosophic, religious, and political thinking; the impact of Nietzsche on certain 20th century writers; and, most recently, Transatlantic studies, exploring the influence of German Idealist philosophy and British Romanticism on American writers. His books include William Butler Yeats: Contemporary Studies in Literature (1973), A Wild Civility: Interactions in the Poetry and Thought of Robert Graves (1980), Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition (1987), Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (1988), Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (1994), Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic “Light of All Our Day” (2003), and Emily Dickinson’s Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering (2007).

Jul 312012
 

Last year Laura Von Rosk got the chance of a lifetime to accompany a scientific expedition to the icy wilds of Antarctica where she assisted at dive holes (the research involved diving under the ice), watched seals, hiked the glaciers and took pictures. She sent Numéro Cinq two lovely photo-and-text pieces on her time at the bottom of the world — “What It’s Like Living Here in Antarctica” and “More Adventures at the Bottom of the World.” A landscape painter by vocation, Laura has since produced a magnificent body of paintings based on her trip. Some of these pictures are currently on display at the Clement Art Gallery in Troy, New York, (July 27 to August 27). NC readers have a unique opportunity here to  compare pre- and post-Antarctica paintings, to see how a painter brings her own set of formal concerns and passions to a new landscape. Also you can look at Laura’s photos and see how the land forms of Antarctica transformed under her brush. More of the Antarctica paintings can be found at Laura’s own web page.

dg

 

Untitled (pressure ridges), oil on wood, 12″ x 12″.

 

Untitled (dive hole study 2), oil on mylar, 17.5″ x 9″.

 

Blue Glacier, oil on wood, 12″ x 12″.

 

Sea Ice, oil on wood, 12″ x 12″.

 

Moat Melt, oil on wood, 12″ x 12″.

— Laura Von Rosk

—————————

Laura Von Rosk lives with her dog Molly on a lagoon just outside Schroon Lake, New York. She curates the Courthouse Gallery at the Lake George Arts Project, a gallery dedicated to the experimental and the avant garde.

Jul 302012
 

I first made Billie Livingston‘s acquaintance last spring when I sat on the jury for the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize. Billie won. This is what the jury said about her story collection Greedy Little Eyes: “In this collection the writer’s eyes are wide open, taking in the world and then reflecting it in all its strangeness and beauty. She pushes edges, teeters on brinks, creating the exhilaration that comes only with taking risks. Her characters are real people in a real world who achieve break-out velocity and recreate themselves by signal acts of courage and self-definition. Frequently, her plots hinge on a demand for justice in a world clouded with calculation and evasion, resulting in a collection as strong in content as it is in style.”

Now, prolific soul that she is, Billie is back with a brash, new novel, One Good Hustle (just published by Random House, Canada), the story of Sammie Bell, a teenage girl with a peculiar problem — her mother is a con artist. Her father was a con artist, too, but he has disappeared, his place taken by yet another con man named Freddy. Sammie lives in a seedy, lost world built on taking advantage of human weakness and greed, definitely not the vaguely glamorous world of that Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie The Sting which somehow managed to make the viewer forget, momentarily, how sleazy, perilous and inefficient the life of a con artist can be. (Isn’t getting a job easier?) Sammie is just beginning to see her mother’s career in the light of a nascent conscience. Her conflict is moral. What we have in the following excerpt is a series of scenes in which the mother drags Sammie to Las Vegas, tapes up her breasts, and makes her pose as an innocent 7th Grader — her mask of innocence meant to reassure the mark. Sammie, in the world but not of it, so to speak, goes along but observes acutely the diminished universe her mother inhabits, her observations signalling the reader that she might just survive her terrible parenting.

dg

§

Fat Freddy is a fence who used to work with Marlene and my dad back when we were a family. After Sam was out of the picture, Fat Freddy weaseled in close to Marlene. I’m not crazy about Freddy. I was happier when he was out of our world, even though she and Freddy used to make pretty good coin together when they ran the Birthday Girl Scam.

It worked like this. Marlene would sit at the bar in a hotel lounge. She’d order herself a drink and ask the bartender his name. Flashing some cash around (“Can you break a hundred?”), she’d say that it was her birthday. Then she’d confide that her boyfriend let her pick out her own present and she’d hold out her arm to show off her new diamond bracelet.

The bartender might say, “Whoa, what’d that run the poor bastard?” She would scrunch up her nose when she whispered, “Six thousand, two hundred, and twenty-five dollars!

Meanwhile, she’d actually bought it for six bucks off some street vendor.

When she finished her drink, she’d gather up her things and surreptitiously drop the bracelet under the bar stool. A few minutes later, Fat Freddy (it used to be my father) would walk in and take the seat Marlene had just left. Not long after that, Marlene would phone the bar, all frantic. The bartender would look for the bracelet. Freddy would move his foot—“You mean this?”

Freddy wouldn’t hand the bracelet over. He’d just eyeball it and maybe whistle. “Ask if there’s a reward,” he’d say to the bartender.

On the phone, Marlene would cry. I watched her do it, watched her cradle the receiver as she pushed out tears, even though no one could see her. “I have to get that bracelet back.

Please,” she’d beg. “Tell him I’ll give him a thousand dollars. Cash.” Nearly every time, the bartender would hang up and haggle. He’d offer Freddy fifty bucks, imagining he’d pocket the difference when Marlene showed up with the thousand.

Freddy would laugh. “Forget it, man.” He’d pocket the bracelet. “I gotta get goin.’”

The bartender would get anxious then, and Freddy could usually get him to fork over anywhere from two hundred to four hundred bucks. One time, he got five hundred.

Marlene said there was nothing wrong with a hustle like that because if the bartender hadn’t been such a lying, cheating dirtbag in the first place, he’d never have given any money to Freddy. I always wondered about that reasoning, though. What if the bartender wasn’t looking to pocket the difference? What if he was trying to help Marlene, the damsel in distress—save her from having to pay so much to the creepy guy holding her bracelet hostage? How could she know for sure?

But Marlene and Freddy’s business partnership eventually soured. Fat Freddy had a major crush on Marlene. Something happened—I don’t know what, but she made it clear that she wasn’t into him. Freddy couldn’t handle the rejection. He started to become undependable, standing her up when they had work planned. He’d claim she had her dates mixed up, but Freddy was full of shit and Marlene knew it.

Her One-Woman Hotel Hustle was born when she and Freddy were on hiatus.

When I was thirteen, I could still pass for a ten-year-old.

I haven’t got much up top even now but three years ago I was positively infantile. And Marlene had it in her head that she could pass me off as a little girl. Having a little girl, she figured, upped the ante as far as us being needy.

Marlene often drove us over the border into the States.

Sometimes she’d do the little resort towns on the coast or maybe she’d hit Seattle, or Tacoma, or Portland. Now and then, she’d work downtown in Vancouver since, she reasoned, the marks would be from out of town.

If it was a big urban hotel, Marlene would sit in the lounge wearing her Chanel suit—this slim ivory number that managed to look very classy while still showing off her shape. She kept her ankles crossed and out to the side. Some guy once told Marlene that she had well-turned ankles, so she believed they were one of her most excellent features.

She’d have a suitcase beside her chair, a weepy look on her face and a tissue in hand to wipe her eyes.

Usually it went like this: A man would walk by, pause and ask if she was all right. Marlene would nod that she was. Then her face would crumple.

“You want to talk about it? I’m a good listener.”

She’d shake her head but start to bawl her eyes out. The man would almost always sit down and try to get her to talk
about it.

She had come to town with her husband, Marlene would say. “We drove here from Calgary. He was being so strange the last couple of days. I decided to give him some time on his own.”

But, she said, while she was trying on a new dress in a shop, her purse was stolen. Right from under the dressing-room door.

Then she returned to the hotel room only to discover that her husband and all of his belongings were gone. There was a note on the pillow: It was over. He’d fallen in love. To add insult to injury, the other woman was her best friend. Marlene’s husband had not only checked out, he’d left in the rental car.

“How could he do this to me?”

The usual questions: “Have you tried calling your family?”

“Do you have any friends in town?”

Marlene had answers for everything.

“Listen,” she’d say. “Is there any way that you—I could wire you the money as soon as I got home.” She’d drop her head in her hands and sob.

Maybe it was her acting skills, maybe it was the rich-lady Chanel suit, but usually she could get two or three hundred dollars out of these marks.

Except this time. In Marlene’s third hotel lounge of the day, the guy suggested that she might spend some time with him in his room. “How does a hundred sound?”

§

“Do I look a whore?” Marlene bellowed at me later in our living room. She stood with her hands on hips, staring at me. “A piddling hundred-dollar-hooker?”

I was on the couch. “Why don’t you just go back to doing the Birthday Girl?”

“I need a partner for that.”

“Call stupid Freddy, then.”

“I don’t feel like dealing with stupid Freddy’s hard-on every time I want to make a few bucks.”

Gross! I need to boil my eardrums after that.”

“This is a Chanel suit,” Marlene pointed out. She had bought it a few months earlier from Freddy. Marlene got some screamin’ deals on designer wear from Freddy. “Is there anything about this outfit that says hooker?”

I rolled my eyes. “The guy was a perv. Forget it. God!

She walked to the window. “Should’ve thrown a horse tranquilizer in his drink and rolled the dumb bastard while he slept.” She turned around and stared at me, her face blank. “Some of the girls who buy from Freddy make a pretty good living that way, you know.”

“Mom.” I shook my head at her. “That’s just skeevy.”

“What’s so skeevy about it? These guys are blowing money on sex, booze, gambling—all kinds of crap. Why shouldn’t they pay me for my time? I’m an interesting conversationalist with interesting opinions. It would be a consulting fee.”

I stared at her. “What the hell happened to you can’t cheat an honest man? Until you give him knockout drugs?”

“You think it’s honest to tell a woman in trouble that you’ll help her out if she puts out?”

I just let that one lay there.

A week later, Marlene asked me if I wanted to go to Las Vegas for the weekend.

“I can’t. Drew invited me on that youth group thing.

Remember? Everyone’s going out on sailboats.”

Her face went sour. “Sailboats? Some Christians. I thought it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich guy to get into heaven.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Listen, kiddo,” she said. “They’ve got Jesus—I need you.”

Along with boobs and body hair, I was starting to get a bug up my butt about the kind of hustles that worked best when the mark believed he was doing the right thing. Marlene figured this sudden conscience of mine was the direct result of hanging out with those holier-than-thou sons-of-bitches at the church.

And maybe it was. I liked those kids. I liked their lives. So I hardly ever came along any more for the hotel games.

§

In the cab from the airport to Caesars Palace, I looked out the window as the last of the sun hit the crummy old neon signs.

“It’s gross here. They make it look so great on TV.”

“Daylight doesn’t become it,” Marlene said. “It’s an inside town. People come here to gamble.”

“It’s a hole.

In the hotel room, Marlene opened her suitcase on the bed.

She took out a pale yellow dress that looked as if it were meant for a large toddler. “Ta-da. Your new frock, madam.”

“I’m not wearing that. The hair’s bad enough.”

“What’s wrong with your haircut? It’s adorable. You look like Dorothy Hamill.”

Great.” I fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “I look like a skating buttercup. I’m fourteen. Why can’t I just be fourteen?”

“Having an innocent child is part of the illusion. There’s nothing innocently childlike about fourteen. Christ, you’re impossible lately. If anyone asks, you’re twelve. Just throw the dress on, make sure it fits.”

Marlene went to the closet, pulled out the ironing board.

I shoved the dress to the side, rolled over and picked around in her open suitcase. There were two little bottles. I pulled one out.

“What’s Ketamine? . . . equivalent to 100mg per ml.

“Your perfume. There are two little vials in there. I dumped a couple of old perfume samples. We’ll refill them with Ketamine.

I read from the bottle. “Caution: Federal law restricts this drug to use by or on the order of a licensed physician.

§

Going down in the elevator, I checked myself out in the mirrors. The tensor band she had me wear on my chest was killing. It was supposed to squash my little marbles flat and it was tight as hell. “This dress is brutal.”

“It’s cute.” Marlene straightened the collar. “Christ, I think I can still see boobs,” she whispered, and mashed a hand down over my chest.

“Mom! Knock it off. I’m totally flat. Jill Williams calls me Reese’s Pieces.”

Marlene laughed.

“Yeah. Hilarious.”

“Just round your shoulders a little.”

Marlene led me by the hand through the casino. She sat with me at the nickel slots and ordered Shirley Temples for me. At dinnertime we went to one of the hotel restaurants where the buffet consisted of baron of beef and mountains of crab legs.

My mother ordered the buffet. I thought the buffet smelled like vomit-crusted armpit so she ordered me a cheeseburger.

When our food came, Marlene looked me in the eye, poked a finger into an imaginary dimple in her cheek and said, “Lighten up, misery-guts.”

I crossed my eyes at her. The tensor band itched and I rubbed my ribs on the table edge, trying to scratch underneath.

So she leaned forward and whispered a rude joke about two skeletons doing it on a tin roof. Cracked me up.

“Gross,” I said, coughing on my burger.

Then I remembered this joke that Jill had told at school. Jill and I weren’t really friends in those days but I thought she was funny. “Okay,” I said, “Little Red Riding Hood is walking through the woods when suddenly the Big Bad Wolf jumps out from behind a tree and he goes, ‘Listen, Little Red, I’m going to screw your brains out! So, Little Red reaches into her picnic basket—”

“What do you think of him?” Marlene interrupted. She nodded past me. “The big one.”

I looked over my shoulder at two hefty middle-aged guys. Each of them was eating lobster. The bigger one had a thick beard all greasy with guts and butter. Like a grizzly bear eating a giant cockroach. He took one hand off his lobster to wave.

I glanced back at Marlene, who fluttered her hand at him.

“Why the big one?” I whispered.

“He looks greedy,” she said, smiling past my shoulder.

Three minutes later, the waitress came to our table. She set some kind of cola in front of me and a boozy thing in front of Marlene. “This is called a ‘Beautiful,’” the waitress said. “It’s from the gentleman at that table over there. He’s wondering if you and your daughter are on your own.”

Marlene sighed up at the waitress. “Yes, I guess we are. Oh, maybe you shouldn’t tell him that.” She mouthed thank you over at the grizzly. “Say thank you for your Coke, honey.”

I twisted around and waved, giving him a big phony smile.

Grizzly Adams motioned the waitress back to him.

I continued. “Can I finish my joke now? Okay, so, the wolf goes, Red, I’m going to screw your brains out. Then Little Red reaches into her picnic basket, pulls out a gun and says—”

“Excuse me.” The waitress was back. “The gentleman would like to know if you would be interested in joining him for a cocktail in the main lounge this evening?”

“Well, I don’t know.” My mother’s face turned pink and she covered her mouth. You’ve got to hand it to a chick who can actually blush on cue. I couldn’t help but smile as I bit into my burger.

“Nine o’clock?” the waitress said, and Marlene nodded.

§

Marlene and I were in the main lounge before nine.

Marlene spoke softly. “Once it’s in, I’ll send you to bed and then—”

“Can I go swimming?” I asked out loud. “I brought my bathing suit.” I held up the little pink purse she’d given me to carry.

Marlene looked at it as though it were full of turds. “No.”

“What’s the big deal? Why can’t I go swimming?”

Suddenly Marlene’s sucker was just a few feet away and I kicked her under the table.

“Who wants to go swimming?” the grizzly said.

Marlene jerked her head up and flashed him a cheery face.

“Nobody’s going swimming. It’s almost her bedtime.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Louise. Thank you so much for buying us dinner. That was awfully generous of you.”

“Hank.” He kissed the back of my mother’s hand and took the seat nearest her. “My pleasure. I made out like a bandit at the craps table today. Made a killing!”

“We all had a good day, then. My little one here won twenty-seven dollars at the slots.”

“Wow!” He gave me a big dopey smile to show how impressed he was. He glanced from Marlene to me. “Look at the two of you. Can’t believe there aren’t a hundred men lined up for your company! Let me order us a beverage.”

Soon the two of them were gabbing about shows in town. Hank said he had tickets to a late show at some other casino. The show was a little on the risqué side but he’d be happy to spring for a sitter for me.

“I can’t stand sitters,” I said. I was being a bit of a jerk but I had decided that that was my character’s attitude for this hustle. Like Sam taught me, it’s good to incorporate your real feelings into your character.

Marlene didn’t appear to agree with me. Keep it light, keep it simple—that’s her motto.

Hank grinned and ordered a second drink.

I took a Rubik’s cube out of my purse and started rotating the squares.

“Come on, honey, put that away and be a young lady,” Marlene said.

I pouted and stuffed it back in my purse.

“She’s okay,” Hank said. “What grade are you in, sweetheart?”

“Seven.”

“Seven? I thought you’d be in grade 8 for sure. Pretty girl. Boy, if I were twenty years younger!”

I looked at his livery lips and bushy beard. “You’re a dirty old man,” I said.

“Honey!” Marlene sounded genuinely irate.

Hank laughed his ass off. “That’s what they tell me. She’s a sharpie, this one.”

I rummaged in my purse and took out the Love’s Baby Soft perfume vial. I pulled the small plastic plug off and sniffed. It smelled sharp. Like chlorine.

Marlene watched me. Her eyes were nervous, but she sighed and said, “Young ladies don’t apply cosmetics at the table, either.”

“It’s perfume, not cosmetics.” I took another whiff.

“Give me that.” My mother took the vial and fumbled with the top.

“I’m going to hit the head,” Hank announced, and got up and left the table.

“I think you might be overdoing it a little,” Marlene whispered once he was out of earshot. She raised her voice and launched into a loud lecture on manners and then, while pushing back the drink glasses, flipped the liquid from the vial into Hank’s rye and Coke. “Here’s the key. Be a good girl and get ready for bed and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

I found the second vial in my purse. It was supposed to be for our next hotel. I held it so that Marlene could see it anyway.

She shook her head. “We’re not trying to kill him,” she whispered.

I stood as Hank returned. I told him that I was sorry if I’d been rude.

“Rude? Nonsense! We’re pals, aren’t we? You can be yourself around ol’ Hank.” He patted my arm. The size and weight of his hand—like a baseball glove—gave me pause for a second.

I looked at Marlene.

“I’ll be up soon, honey.” She kissed my cheek.

I told Hank good night, and made for the elevators.

Sooner or later, this guy was going to try and move Marlene up to his room. She’d put that whole friggin’ vial of Ketamine in, though—the goof might just pass out in the bar and then what would she do?

As I waited for the elevator, I looked back toward the lounge. The only way for this to work would be for her to actually go with him to his room. Every hustle we’d ever pulled before this was in public.

The elevator opened and I glanced back again just as Marlene was laughing, her head tipped back. Something about the way her mouth opened, as if she could be screaming, made the hair on my arms prickle.

Don’t be a dope, I thought. If anyone can take care of herself, it’s her.

Outside our room, I opened my purse for the room key.

Inside was my swimsuit, just sitting there in a little ball. I had seen the pool when we checked in that morning. The deck had all this gorgeous marble, and white pillars with Roman statues. I wanted to make like I was Cleopatra taking a dip. Once Marlene was finished with this guy, she’d said she wanted to move to another hotel. I’d never get a chance to swim if I played by her rules.

I looked at my watch. I could go down to the pool for half an hour and she’d never know.

§

In the lobby, I ducked out of sight and tried to get a look into the lounge. They were gone, near as I could tell. I slipped behind another column. Man, I loved those crazy Roman statues—they were so friggin’ cool. Marlene and Hank were definitely not in the lounge any more.

I couldn’t wait to step into that warm pool water, the golden lanterns illuminating the deck. I’d be like that chick in the Ban de Soleil commercial. The jingle started up in my head: Ban de Soleil for the San Tropez tan . . .

Standing in the lobby, I tried to recall which way the pool was. Everywhere seemed to lead back to the casino. Signs pointed to the elevators, to the shopping area, to the lounge. I headed back across the lobby toward the front desk to ask directions.

As I came closer, I heard one of the receptionists say, “Security will be right up.”

I stepped up to the desk.

“Disturbance on the twelfth floor,” the receptionist told a man in a black suit on the other side of the counter. “Code two.”

My heart started to bang.

The guy in the black suit spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Security to twelve. Code two.”

I turned and watched two more suited men rush past me to the lobby elevators.

It can’t be her, I thought. She put the whole vial in, didn’t she? He was big, though. Maybe one wasn’t enough. Why didn’t she take the second vial just in case? I looked up at the ceiling as though I could find her that way.

Then I bolted for the elevators.

§

Before the doors opened on the twelfth I could hear the shouting.

I stepped off the elevator and turned toward the noise and there was Marlene on the carpet in the hallway, on all fours, gasping and sobbing. A man and woman were bent over her, trying to help her up, but she would not be touched.

Two men in black suits had Hank pushed face first against the wall, arms twisted behind his back, wrists bent in a way that made them look broken.

Hank howled, his face mashed sideways as he yelled, “It’s that bitch, not me. Kick her ass. Fuckin’ slut-thief!” There was blood on the white door frame beside him.

I scrambled down the hall. “Leave her alone. Don’t touch her!”

Marlene looked up and whispered my name. Blood on her face, she swung her hand, shooing the couple away from her.

“Is this your mother?” the woman asked me. “Sweetheart, maybe you should let us—”

“Fuck off,” I said.

The woman shrunk back against her husband. “Somebody should call the police.”

“No police.” My mother cried it—all her words were cries.

I had hold of her now. Her face. Jesus Christ, her beautiful face. Blood ran down from her eyebrow, and from her nose, and rimmed her teeth. She was all broken. Her hands hung in the air in front of her, blood between her fingers.

The yellow dress puffed around me as I knelt on the floor. This never would have happened if Sam were here, I thought. I have to call Sam.

A few feet away, Hank raged and hollered and I hollered right back. “Shut up, you fat prick.”

I tried to use the hem of my dress to wipe her hands but the synthetic material wasn’t doing the job. “You got any Kleenex?” I asked the woman who still hovered near us.

The woman gave me some tissues and I brought them to Marlene’s nose, trying not to hurt her. “We have to go to the hospital,” I whispered.

“I want to go home,” Marlene whimpered back. “Please.”

“I don’t think there’s a flight tonight.”

“Home. Take me home.”

“Mom. Please. Maybe we should call Daddy.”

“Who? What are you—?” Marlene was panting now. “Take me home.”

§

Security seemed just as happy not to call the cops. Eventually I got Marlene back to our room and packed our bags while she sobbed in the bathroom. I got her some ice wrapped in a towel and talked her into lying down for a while. Then I lay in the second double bed and listened to her cry.

It was 4:58 a.m. when Marlene sat up again. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

I called downstairs and asked to have a taxi waiting.

Lionel Richie and Diana Ross sang “Endless Love” on the radio as we got into the cab. I asked the driver to turn it off, please.

“Leave it,” Marlene said.

The desert sun was just coming up and the radio station gave us more Lionel. Tears ran down Marlene’s face as “Three Times a Lady” filled the taxi. Richie was in town at some big hotel. We passed his name up in lights.

So much dirt and misery and meanness, and here was Lionel Richie droning away about love two shows a night.

We were on the first flight out of Vegas.

§

It was ten-thirty in the morning by the time we got to Vancouver General. Under her sunglasses, Marlene’s face was one big mass of swollen purple bruises and black cuts. She phoned Fat Freddy from a pay phone while we waited in Emergency. She cried. She whispered bits and pieces of what had happened to her.

When a doctor finally saw us, she told him that she’d fallen down the stairs. It was her divorce, she said. The stress was giving her insomnia and the lack of sleep was making her clumsy.

They put five stitches in her eyebrow and taped her nose, gave her prescriptions for Percocet for pain and some Ativan to calm her nerves. Freddy picked us up and drove us back to the apartment.

On the way home, he asked Marlene how much Ketamine she’d used. “A hundred milligrams,” she told him. “One millilitre dumped into his drink. You said—”

“Orally? Ah, honey, no.” He reached for her hand. “Hundred by injection, sure. Orally—that’d barely put a German shepherd to sleep.”

He murmured sympathy and kissed her hand as he drove. I stared at the back of his head.

§

For weeks, Marlene wouldn’t go out. She stared at the TV and popped painkillers and Ativan. She started sipping vodka and milk sometime around noon each day.

When the phone would ring, she barely looked at me. “Tell them I’m not home.” Unless it was Freddy. Suddenly Freddy was the only one who could really understand what had happened to her.

He came by the apartment to see her every couple of days. He brought her a Hummel figurine the first week: a little blonde girl bathing a baby. Marlene touched the smooth, pale arms on the little girl and tears rolled down her face.

Freddy smiled. “Cute, isn’t it? I thought you’d like it.”

“I’m a terrible mother,” Marlene sobbed. She cried full-on for a good ten minutes.

I went into my room and closed the door.

Whenever Freddy made a pest of himself after that, he came bearing designer blouses instead.

It was two weeks after Vegas that I came in from school and Freddy was there, joining her in a drink. This time he had brought her a box of European chocolates.

“Good thing you girls started collecting that welfare cheque a few years back,” he said. “That welfare’s a nice little safety net for a single gal.”

I could feel myself stiffen. “We don’t need welfare. It’s just available, that’s all.”

“Looks like you need it now, sweetheart,” Freddy said. “I think you definitely need it now.” He seemed to leer when he said it.

I wondered whether it was the government cheques or the vulnerability of Marlene’s half-broke face that turned him on.

—-Billie Livingston

——————————-

Billie Livingston published her critically acclaimed first novel, Going Down Swinging, in 2000. Her book of poetry, The Chick at the Back of the Church, was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her novel, Cease to Blush was a Globe and Mail Best Book as was her story collection, Greedy Little Eyes, which went on to win the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the CBC’s Bookie Prize. One Good Hustle will was published July 24, 2012

Jul 262012
 

The novel begins exactly where it will end: with Miss Frost. Miss Frost is the moral core of the novel. She lives as a woman though she has a penis and breasts. She is sexually and romantically attracted to men but does not have a lover. In a world in which almost everybody is either hiding or unaware of his sexual eccentricities, Miss Frost is confident and stable as herself.

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In One Person
By John Irving
Simon & Schuster.
425 pages. $28.

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John Irving’s new novel, In One Person, is about the life of a bisexual man from his early teens till his middle-age. It’s not so much a coming-out or a coming-of-age story but the story of coming home. The hero/narrator Billy Abbot begins his sexual life confused and feeling alone, but he finds himself, at the end of the novel, surrounded by people who love him as he is and are willing to defend him as he is.

The novel begins exactly where it will end: with Miss Frost. Miss Frost is the moral core of the novel. She lives as a woman though she has a penis and breasts. She is sexually and romantically attracted to men but does not have a lover. In a world in which almost everybody is either hiding or unaware of his sexual eccentricities, Miss Frost is confident and stable as herself. Billy says of her: “At the time, Miss Frost struck me as the most genuine person I knew.”

In One Person divides into three parts: high school, life after high school before AIDS, and the AIDS epidemic and assorted deaths. In boarding school Billy has a friend named Elaine who will stay his friend his whole life. Billy and Elaine share a crush on Jacques Kittredge who is the quintessential jock-bully. (In the ultimate moment of poetic justice, Kittredge grows up and has sex-change surgery — it turns out he was probably abused by his mother). Kittredge gets Elaine pregnant and harasses Billy about being effeminate. The reader also learns that Billy’s father was probably gay but not out of the closet. After Billy’s birth he ran off with a man he’d met in the Navy. But his whereabouts are unknown.

Billy’s stepfather, Richard, directs Shakespeare plays at the boarding school, and Billy is in most of them, along with Kittredge. Shakespeare becomes a grand motif throughout the novel. The novel’s title itself is from a line in Richard II: “Thus play I in one person many people/and none contented.” The idea of living as yourself as opposed to acting for the world is important throughout the novel. And the parallels between the plays and the characters in the novel rarely go unremarked. Consider that Richard casts Billy as Ariel in The Tempest with Elaine as Miranda and Kittredge as Ferdinand. Irving often treats us to mini-essays about the literary works he mentions. Richard, for example, talks about the way he understands the “the continuum from Caliban through Prospero to Ariel — a kind of spiritual evolution.”

During this period, Billy has intercrural (between thighs) sex with Miss Frost. Just before Billy graduates Miss Frost reveals that she earlier attended the same high school under the name Albert Frost, or Big Al, one of the best wrestlers the school ever had.  Though they only spend a couple of nights together and Miss Frost never explicitly reciprocates the emotion, Billy will love Miss Frost with the most romantic fervor of anyone in his life.

After high school Billy spends the summer in Europe with his first boyfriend, Tom Atkins, but the two are not meant for one another, and they drift apart. Billy moves to New York City to study German before spending a year in Vienna at the Insitut Für Europӓische Studien. In Vienna he hooks up with his first girlfriend, Esmeralda, an American and an aspiring opera singer, and Lawrence Upton, a lover and one of his lifelong friends. Larry is a poet who teaches at the institute. Like the Shakespearean director, Richard, Larry is one of the novel’s commentators, a voice of literary evaluation or criticism. Both play a paternal part in Billy’s life though, in Larry’s case, only after he and Billy are no longer lovers.

After college, Billy moves to L.A. with a woman, breaks up and moves back to New York to be with Elaine and Larry who are both living in the city. His mother and aunt die in a car accident, and Elaine and Billy return to their hometown of Second Sister, Vermont, for the funeral where Billy’s uncle, who is terribly intoxicated, lets slip that Billy’s father is living in Spain.  (Ironically, the father and his lover seem to have the most stable romantic relationship in the novel.)

We move now into the death and AIDS section of the novel. This part includes some of the most poignant scenes. Irving describes the dying men with a chilling accuracy. But he tamps down the melodrama by including a lot of medical jargon. Tom Atkins, the young man with whom Billy traveled in Europe after high school, ends up married with children. But like many of the characters in the novel, Atkins has kept his homosexuality a secret and contracts AIDS during an affair. Larry’s lover dies of AIDS in his arms. Billy’s Grandpa Harry shoots himself in the bathtub. (Grandpa Harry is a wonderful character. He participates in many of the local plays and almost always takes the role of a woman. It’s unclear if Grandpa Harry is gay, but it’s probable that he is just a straight man who likes to dress in women’s clothing. He is among the kindest and sweetest people Billy knows.) Larry eventually dies cradled in Elaine’s and Billy’s arms. Miss Frost is beaten to death by a group of rowdy sailors at a bar — but not before sending several of them to the hospital. Kittredge dies of natural causes at fifty-four, but, as Billy says, “What ‘natural causes’ can kill you when you’re fifty-four?.”

Billy moves back to Second Sister and into the house he grew up in. He becomes a teacher at the high school where he went as a boy. It is now co-ed and there is a large LGBT community. Billy’s books are all about sexual identity and confusion, and he begins to mentor a young student who is a boy becoming a girl. Billy assumes the role of teaching and directing Shakespeare. The book ends when Kittredge’s son comes to the school to confront Billy. The scene is slightly ridiculous but somehow apt. The boy accuses of Billy of contributing to his father’s gender issues by publicly trying to normalize alternate sexualities. More importantly, he tries to categorize Billy by calling him bisexual. Billy retorts by quoting Miss Frost and thus encases the novel in her morality.

The skeletal story structure which I just described is in chronological order; this is the major narrative arc of the book. But the novel is not set up in chronological sequence. Irving uses a reminiscent first person narrator which means this novel is a memory being fleshed out not a story being told toward an ending.  This is an important distinction. The ending, though crucial, is not the point of the novel because the ending is just another moment in Billy’s life. The ending of the novel isn’t even the end of Billy’s life; there’s actually more to the story. What is going on here then? What drives this novel?

Irving does not drive his narrative toward a conclusion. He bobs and weaves his way through a web of thematic and semantic memory association (loosely guided by linear movement of time but not constrained to it) until he lands at a moment in which we have come full circle. The novel begins with Billy saying he is going to tell the reader about Miss Frost and ends with him quoting something she once said to him. “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” This ending is not so much circular as a constant presence. The novel itself has a constant awareness of the ending. In fact, the narrator (Billy) says to the reader very early in the novel: “But I’m getting ahead of myself; alas it’s what a writer who knows the end of the story tends to do.”

Thus we have a Billy-of-the-main-narrative, who is unaware of the ending, and the Billy-as-the-narrator, who is wholly aware of the ending, and the way Irving constructs the novel leaves the reader in between the two.

One of the temporal disruption techniques Irving uses is what I call the side-story. He inserts little side-stories throughout the novel which interrupt the main narrative and are always out of their chronological place. Usually the stories are future events (that is future relative to the present of the main narrative). Billy uses something from the main narrative as an associative link or springboard and then launches into the side-story after which he settles back into the main narrative as if nothing had happened. These side-stories serve to give the readers glimpses of the future which the Billy-of-the-main-narrative doesn’t know about yet. They create tension between the three perspectives, the three levels of knowledge at work; Young Billy knows the least and the reader knows more than Billy does but less than the narrator.

The chapter “Leaving Esmeralda” is a good example of the side-story technique. The chapter begins in 1960 with Billy in high school. A few pages in, Billy is talking to a woman whom he feels is rather dominant, but he likes that. Then there is a line a break, and Irving jumps ahead to when Billy and Larry are lovers and living together. Irving ties these two sections together with thematic material about Billy being dominant or submissive in relationships. As in, the first time Larry picks Billy up he shocks him with the question: “Are you a top or bottom, beautiful Bill?” Irving floats forward in time to the seventies in New York to another conversation between Billy and Larry “still seeing each other but no longer living together” which is followed by a flashback to rehearsal for The Tempest when there was a conversation about Ariel’s gender and then a time reference bringing us back to Billy in high school.

Irving makes an interesting move now. There is a line break and then Billy calls himself out: “It’s revealing how I have skipped ahead to my junior year abroad in Vienna, choosing to begin that interlude in my future life by telling you about Larry.” The narrative here is conscious of its erratic movement but only in an analytical way. Billy remarks that he probably skipped ahead and didn’t start with the story of his first girlfriend because he wanted to tell the readers that it is hard to come out as a teenager. Either way, what follows is a miniature essay about being bisexual and dealing with confusing feelings. Right after that there is another line break and then we get the story of Esmeralda which is also the story of Billy’s year abroad. Keep in mind, the main narrative is paused somewhere in high school while Irving wanders down this detour of the future.

But let’s examine more closely the movement here. What we should notice is the intersecting themes, i.e. the way these disparate parts relate to one another. This is all outside the plot, the chronological narrative arc, of the story, but it has to do with Billy’s eventual coming-to-terms with his sexuality. So the chapter begins with the dominant/ submissive dyad; then we have Larry who mistypes Billy for a bottom (submissive) when he is a top; and then Billy remarks on the difficulty of coming out. The paragraph before the Esmeralda story is about Billy not feeling ashamed of being bisexual, of being attracted to women, but he notices that many of his gay friends find this “suspicious.” These thoughts and sentiments are all playing on the theme of a man trying to understand his sexuality, i.e. what he likes; what he doesn’t like; how what he likes makes him and others feel.

This progression of self-analysis is logical and Irving tracks it by telling stories which relate to each step in the analysis until landing on the longer story of Billy’s time with Esmeralda. Curiously, though the chapter is mostly about being with Esmeralda, the title of the chapter is about leaving her. It is interesting that before we are even aware who Esmeralda is, we know that Billy will leave her. The ending of the chapter is in its title. It is as if the ending of this chapter or story is the story itself.

What stands out is that Irving structures the narrative as of Billy were working through memories based on association. Billy is looking back on his life (reminiscing) and picking out idea lines and following them until they lead back the story of his life. The side-story is not meant to press the plot forward but to take a break from the progression. The side-story exemplifies through experience and memory the idea is Billy is thinking about, i.e. when he thinks about being attracted to women he tells the story of his first girlfriend. In this instance, the narrative progresses thematically rather than along a plot line or time line. It creates a novel founded more on the organic nature of thought and memory than the strict linear movement of cause and effect or chronology.

Irving plays with time in other ways besides using side-stories. He quotes snippets of dialogue from disparate times in the novel thus further squishing together the two time-perspectives. For example: “Miss Frost was always making me move to a chair or a couch or a table where there was better light. ‘Don’t ruin your eyes, William. You’ll need your eyes for the rest of your life, if you’re going to be a reader’” (42). This is an interesting example because not only is Irving quoting dialogue that never occurs in a scene in the book, he also implies a number of scenes that did take place. The reader’s understanding of Billy and Miss Frost’s relationship is exponentially richer, deeper and quicker than if Irving had tried to deliver whole scenes.

Irving uses the imperfect tense here which means that the action was never completed, i.e. never perfected. There is this sense then that Miss Frost is always and continuously looking out for Billy. In this off-hand description of an imperfect scene that “always” happened, there is the implication that Miss Frost said these words multiple times and that she will continue to say them.

Sometimes there is no lead-in to the implied scene. Irving drops a quote into the text as its own paragraph. On page 57 there is an example of this:

“Nymph,” Kittredge’s nickname for me, would stick. I had two years to go at Favorite River Academy; a Nymph I would be.

“It doesn’t matter what costume and makeup do to you, Nymph,” Kittredge had said to me privately. “You’ll never be as hot as your mother.”

I was conscious that my mom was pretty and—at seventeen— I was increasingly conscious of how other students at an all boys’ academy like Favorite River regarded her.

These dropped-in-quotes imply scenes that must have happened without giving full descriptions of them. Thus, like the earlier example and like the side-stories, they create a more complete picture of Billy’s life without delving into each specific moment. Interestingly, we don’t arrive at these quotations in a sequential way but the connection is always associative, like memory.

Irving’s use of the reminiscent narrator offers up an interesting way to explore how memory can drive a novel. The reminiscent narrator is not a new structure, but the way Irving leaps from moment to moment semantically (i.e. relating events out of chronological order through ideas) is closer to a memory than just a simple re-telling. We store memories in webs of idea-relationships. And the reminiscent narrative Irving uses to tell the story of Billy Abbot coming to terms with himself is an unwrapping of the idea that is Miss Frost. Miss Frost is an ideal; the person in the novel most at home with herself. Irving begins with her as the kernel idea and then the rest of the book is meant to unpack her, that is: what it means to be her.

We finally land, at the end of the novel, back where we started, and Billy repeats something Miss Frost had said to him, the line: “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” We have come full circle and Billy now understands more clearly who Miss Frost was and what she had meant by this line. In One Person is about remembering and understanding. Irving jumps from one time to another taking advantage of the fact that memory has a fluidity in association that breeches temporal boundaries. While remembering we are not constrained by chronological ordering. We have, as the author does, the entire story in front of us at every turn.

— Jacob Glover

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Jacob Glover is a Philosophy & Classics student at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a frequent NC contributor of essays, reviews and poems.

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Jul 242012
 

My friend (and long time NC contributor) Michael Bryson’s wife, Kate, died of cancer in May, after a brief, sweet marriage. Words fail.

But words were their common ground and meeting place, their sign of courage. Both Kate and Michael knew you’re not a victim if you keep talking, writing, thinking, questioning and defying. All through her treatment, Kate blogged with immense intelligence, grace, wit and courage at her site Auntie Cake’s Shop. When she no longer had the strength, Michael took over for her. Along the way, Michael wrote a gorgeous essay called “My Wife’s Hair” and a “Dear Kate Letter” and fugitive, poignant observations such as “Breast Cancer Can Put You in a Wheelchair.” I place all these links here, along with Michael’s essay, as a memorial to their life together.

dg

 

§

In the weeks before and after breast cancer ended my wife’s life on May 23, 2012, I was unable to read.

Surprising? No. But for me, a life-long reader, an existential risk.

I read, therefore I am. Books, engagement with literature, the pleasure of the text, whatever you want to call it, the continuity of my life is sustained by reading.

I use the present tense (“is” instead of “has been”) because I believe in that continuity, even though I am suffering (another self-conscious word choice) a break, a gap, a malfunction.

I’ve stopped reading. I’ve stopped being myself.

I’m grieving. I’m in the process of becoming someone new.

First, there was only the stress of the disease. Then, there was only the stress of her absence.

But there is also continuity (I believe, though I also disbelieve it). I’m still here (somehow; it seems miraculous). And so are her two kids (eight and twelve). My role as patriarch sustains me most days. My identity as a reading person has paused, but my identity as (step-)daddy remains abundantly active.

I want my reading identity back. I need my reading identity back. (My reading identity will crack the code for the next phase of my mysterious future I believe, though again without knowing why; without being able to articulate the slightest reason.)

So, then, how? Or rather, what?

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

I couldn’t have predicted this, but this pair is what I want, need, to read right now. This is the ONLY pair that I CAN read right now.

My attention span for reading is travelling along a narrow band. Or perhaps I should say that the signal has only recently returned and it remains faint. I can only hear certain frequencies.

Why is it that I can hear Beckett and Woolf?

What are they saying that resonates with my current dilemma?

*

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, The Unnameables).

Kate is buried in the cemetery that is half-a-block from my house. When Naomi was three, she used to yell at the cemetery as we drove past: “Hello, dead people!”

I reminded her of that recently, and she didn’t remember.

So much is transitory.

I go to the cemetery regularly to say hello to Kate. A planter with flowers serves as the headstone at the moment, and I go water it.

Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I don’t. The earth over the grave is still sand. They haven’t re-sodded it. I’ve written “KO” in that place. Someone told me they were wandering in the graveyard and thought, “Ah, that must be Kate’s place.”

I walk away from the grave thinking, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Why should I go on without her? There are, of course, a multitude of reasons; the kids chief among them. But I find it most convincing to say simply, I will go on, because I will.

Derek Weiler, the editor of Quill & Quire when he passed away in 2009, had “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” as a tattoo. He had a life-long heart condition that slowed him down and eventually stopped him. That’s where I first heard the phrase, but now it’s part of my linguistic DNA.

Waiting for Godot riffs on a related theme. Not about “going on;” instead, “waiting.”

The play begins:

ESTRAGON: [giving up again] Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR: [advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart] I’m beginning to come to come round to that opinion.

Or as one meditation teacher of mine (and Kate’s) said, repeatedly: “Nowhere to go, nothing to do.”

We ended up in meditation as a result of a book called Full Catastrophe Living by John Kabat-Zinn. Kate’s GP recommended it, to help with the anxiety of the disease. And so we discovered the field of psychiatric oncology. The book is based on a meditation workshop. We asked if there were not such workshops in Toronto, and soon we were signed up for one.

We were not in a hurry to go anywhere, because we knew the only place the disease had to go was somewhere worse. We were content to wait. To remain in “the present” perpetually. Putting off thoughts about tomorrow as long as possible. (While also acknowledging what was happening.)

We found ourselves at the hospital often, waiting. On one occasion, Kate had an appointment with her oncologist for 3:30 in the afternoon; we finally saw the doctor at 9:30 that evening. When we left, the entire hospital wing was empty.

Kate said, simply, “Thank you for seeing me.” Pushing away anxieties and letting go of the things that we couldn’t control had become by then a central element of her life, her way of living, her way of being.

*

Liminality is another word from this period.

Merriam Webster gives the definition of “liminal” as:

1. of or relating to a sensory threshold

2. barely perceptible

3. of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition.

Kate wrote on her blog a number of times about being in this “in between” space, also contemplating the Buddhist term “bardo.”

After her death, I found the following in one of her notebooks:

Liminal space –

space between transition
between living and dying
– have a dual awareness
* awareness of both living and dying

bottom line:
waiting
noisy
but not real sound
a pot to boil
taxi to come
a friend to arrive
a plane to catch
liminal surprises

mail, books, letters
from afar
show tunes in a cab
time to sort your thoughts –
so long as there’s no missed deadline

liminal as missing something
amiss/a miss
rather than liminal as space
entity – distinct entity
or something lost

nowhere to go – nothing to do
nothing to do but breathe

air
gas bubble
coursing through
dark region
surfacing
breath, required
necessary, but not
aware of it – life
we cease when we
stop
but we don’t know when it is
happening
we are only aware of
our stopping when the catch in our
throats hitches onto
an idea but gets
caught in a wad of
tangled breath
catch it in time

The word “waiting” jumped out at me.

*

What is this state of waiting? Why did Beckett call to me after Kate’s death?

This “in between” consciousness is an awareness, as Kate’s notes indicate, of being both here and not-here. Leaving one place and not yet arriving at another.

For Kate, it was a state between life and death. For me, it is a state between with-Kate and without-Kate.

I have found that I was ready for Kate to die. She was beyond ill for a significant period of time. The doctors kept hoping to stabilize her, but in the final months didn’t.

I knew she was going to die, and I was emotionally ready for the final act.

I was not ready, however, for her to be gone. Forever gone. Emotionally, I can only state that it is impossible. I cannot register that belief.

Like Estragon and Vladimir wait for Godot, I wait for Kate.

I can only believe that I will see her again, and this is an experience different from my expectation.

Perhaps this is a form of magical thinking, as Joan Didion made widely famous. But I don’t think so. Didion kept her closets full of her late-husband’s clothes because “he’ll need them when he comes back.”

I don’t have that kind of expectation. I have relieved my closet of much of Kate’s clothes.

My expectation is existential, and I don’t think it will ever go away.

I am, I live, within a Beckettean structure. Perpetually waiting.

And I’m okay with that. The mysteries, and opportunities, it seems to be, are boundless.

*

I have now finished reading Waiting for Godot and Mrs. Dalloway. I would hesitate to say that they have anything in common except a strong uneasiness with certainty.

Beckett’s character wait and employ various strategies, mostly verbal, to fill the void of waiting. The plot of Mrs. Dalloway contrasts the planning and hosting of a party (held for no reason other than it be held) against a suicide.

Beckett’s characters also contemplate suicide, and they seem ready to follow through with the act, but they want for rope.

Kate, I want to be clear, had no desire for death. No desire to let go of her life. The suicide option explored by Beckett and Woolf is a rhetorical option.

To live or not live. To choose to turn into life or turn away from it.

Kate chose always to turn into it. To have parties for no reason. This also meant, however, that she grasped the deep details of her life, and she knew it was ending.

Her approach, however, drove her not to attempt to summarize her life; or to turn her thoughts obsessively to the past; instead she focused determinedly on the meaning of every moment. Making new meaning out of every future moment.

Or in the words of a title of a book that became important to her: Enjoy Every Sandwich (by Lee Lipsenthal).

I often think of her in the title of a short story (about a woman dying of breast cancer) by Thom Jones: “I want to live!”

An example. As Kate lay dying in the back room of our house, where she died, I noticed that the poppies had bloomed in our front yard. More precisely, one poppy had bloomed, our first. I picked it and brought it to her. She smiled. Her face formed an, Oh!

It was the last pleasure I was able to give her. She died three days later.

Let the poppy represent the party. Life is to be lived; therefore, enjoyed. One waits for the mystery of what is going to happen next.

*

But let’s also talk about the absurdity of waiting.

On May 18, 2012, the Friday before Kate died (on Wednesday, May 23), she had two appointments at the Sunnybrook Medical Centre. The medical team had helpfully booked both procedures on the same day, so she wouldn’t have to go back and forth from home. However, one was booked for 8:30 in the morning, the other at 3:00 in the afternoon.

Which meant we would be at the hospital all day, especially since the procedure in the afternoon (chemotherapy) was sure to be delayed, which it was (by about 90 minutes).

On top of that, Kate could no longer walk. She could shuffle a few feet, but she could not climb stairs, and there are two dozen stairs between the sidewalk and our front door. So we had to hire a private ambulance company to carry her down the stairs and take her to the hospital. Then at the end of the day, we had to call them to pick us up, bring us home, and carry Kate back up the stairs.

Ultimately, this meant we left home at 7:30 in the morning and didn’t return until 7:30 at night.

Which meant we spent 12 hours together, mostly waiting.

I remember that time fondly, as it was our opportunity to say good-bye, and much else, and we were never alone again after that.

We were waiting for procedures, but more simply we were “being together,” and I told her that I wished that that moment would last forever.

I wished that time would simply stop.

I could wait for Godot forever. I needed nothing else to be complete.

When we saw the results of her blood work that afternoon, we knew there was going to be no recovery. She said, “I guess this is it.”

I want to go on, I can’t go on.

She asked me what I feared most. “Chaos,” I said. I was afraid that my life would spin out of control. Events would happen that would be beyond my ability to manage.

Of course, chaos did happen. Absurd things happened. I control them by calling them absurd, instead of allowing them to send me into a tornado of rage.

The day after Kate’s funeral, I made contact with the pay and benefits clerk at Kate’s employer to begin the death administration. She would be pleased to help me, she said. She just needed to get Kate’s personnel file before she could begin. A week later, I called back and she hadn’t located the file. A week later, I called back and she hadn’t located the file. A week later, I called back and she hadn’t located the file, so I escalated the issue to a manager and within 20 minutes they had located the file.

The private ambulance had cost $190 one way and $380 return, which I paid in advance by credit card. A week after Kate’s death, I called asking for my receipt. They patched me through to the accounting department, who told me a receipt would be sent. Two weeks later, no receipt, I called back and again they told me a receipt would be issues. Two weeks later, no receipt, I called back and they remembered me. We will send a receipt, they said, and a couple of days later it arrived.

“Waiting is the hardest part,” is a lyric from Tom Petty.

“Waiting for a superman,” is a song by the Flaming Lips.

The administrators of Kate’s pension sent me a letter offering condolences at the loss of my spouse. They also enclosed a form that I was apparently required to complete and get notarized by a lawyer, proving that I was indeed her spouse. Directions for the form included the statement: “Check I WAS MARRIED TO THE DECEASED if you were legally married to the deceased.”

You can’t make shit like this up. I don’t know how lawyers sleep at night.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the chaos that would follow Kate’s death would be the absurdity of administration. Yet, I am caught, enmeshed in it.

As Kate was dying, the doctors tried to get more nursing care to come to our home. But in order to get “shift nursing,” one must first file a claim through any insurance you have. I filled out the paperwork, and the doctor signed and faxed it in. A week after she died, Kate received a letter from the insurance company that she didn’t qualify for nursing care.

These are not even all of the stories I have. They are a sampling.

Here’s one more. A week before Kate died, I knew she was dying. I knew it in my bones, although there was a minor hope that she would get a “chemo bounce,” and some extension of time. I didn’t expect it, and I busied myself rallying the healthcare team to step up their care of Kate in the home and pay more attention to her decline, which was changing daily.

Then the day before she died, the palliative doctor gave me a handout that listed “what to expect when someone is dying.” It listed a dozen bodily changes, most of which had already happened to Kate. The doctor then said he wouldn’t be surprised if Kate died that day. She lived for 24 hours.

I was told that the palliative doctors would manage her death. No one needs to be in pain, they said. But they failed to manage her death. A week before she died, I promised her I would leave no card unplayed. “It’s time to be all-in.” And I was, and I did. Because the health care team was unable to respond appropriately — in the time she had left.

Is “respond appropriately” the right phrase? Could it be “respond meaningfully”? Did they give her a meaningful death? I have to answer, no. Some individuals were helpful. I kept my promise to her; I did everything I could. The system, overall, however, failed; it produced absurd results.

For the final six weeks of her life, Kate received hydromorphine through a pump that she carried on a belt around her waist. The pump fed the drug, seven times more powerful than morphine, through a tube and a needle that was implanted in her abdomen. The needle needed to be moved to a new site every couple of days.

At the end of April, Kate spent five nights in the hospital. She checked herself in because she wanted more investigation of her pain. The pump that she used had been installed by the community care nurse that visited her at home daily. Once in hospital, she had to have the home-care pump removed, and a similar (but different) hospital pump installed. Not too big a deal, except when it came time to go home.

She was addicted to a powerful painkiller, and the hospital would not re-install the home-care pump. So she couldn’t be discharged until a home-care nurse could be secured to meet us at home. The first nurse suggested we wait overnight until the morning nurse made the arrangements. No, we said. She wants to go home. She’s been here five nights already. So I called the home-care line, and (long story short) three hours later we grabbed a taxi and met the nurse on our doorstep and had the drug line re-inserted.

I remind you. Canada. Single-payer health care. Two pumps. One patient.

When the doctor signed Kate’s death certificate, under “cause of death” she wrote two words: “breast cancer.” The truth is, it was so much more, and beyond description.

So have parties for no reason, and make of life your own meaning, because the bureaucracies of the modern world are going to do nothing but frustrate you. Grind your signifiers to dust.

*

About a month before Kate died, I wrote on a piece of scrap paper: “What we know? What we don’t know?”

I can see now that we were, then, in a period of waiting. Waiting for the treatment(s) to stabilize her. Waiting for the disease to return. We had been told it would. She had triple-negative breast cancer. It had already metastasized from the breast to the liver to the bone.

Her disease was incurable, and the medical goal was to hold it off as long as possible.

What we knew: it would come back.

What we didn’t know: when it would come back. Also, what would happen in the meantime.

When I scribbled those questions on that scrap paper, my heart ached for knowledge and stung with ignorance. I felt up against the void. Looking off-stage for Godot. Where is he? Is he coming? Tomorrow?

I scribbled those questions because I wanted to capture something of what it felt to be in that place.

Kate blogged about her experience with cancer from beginning to end. The experience enriched her soul even as it attacked her body. She wrote marvelous personal essays about topics of immense diversity. She wrote about what it was to be infected with a terminal disease, to live up against the void.

We repeated our catchphrases: enjoy every sandwich, live for the moment, nowhere to go, nothing to do.

We repeated that death comes for all of us, and none of us knows when. So why not approach every day with joy and anticipation?

Always have hope. Always laugh. Always take cream in your coffee.

To say we lived deeply is an understatement. To say not everyone was able to follow us on the path is also true. Some found Kate’s blog too much. Some found her honesty in confronting the void overpowering. Some turned away because life is really, really busy, after all. Really busy.

One of the questions that has repeated in my mind since her death is the difference between figurative and literal language. I am a person of metaphor. It comes easily to me, and I enjoy it, and it is a nurturing part of my personality.

Kate’s death put my metaphorical language under immense stress. Which is shocking to me. Because how else to express the profundity of the experience, except through metaphor.

However, the child psychologists advise talking to children about death in literal terms. The heart has stopped. The body has ceased to function. Don’t say she’s gone to sleep, because they the children may fear sleep. Don’t say she’s gone to a better place, because then the children may want to go there, too.

Then there is the overwhelming amount of logistics that I became responsible for. Not just the managing of the health care team, but the managing of the post-death rituals: the visitation, the funeral, the burial, the reception. Child care for the funeral and reception, is something someone else tried to insist I provide, but I said no. Enough already.

For the two weeks prior to Kate’s death and the two weeks afterwards, my life was overwhelmed with action: do, do, do. There was no time to reflect. No time to contemplate. Literal language provides the closest distance between two points, and I felt like Michael Corleone in Godfather II, giving direction because I could — and it was needed.

I mentioned this odd sensation to my psychiatrist, and he said: “He didn’t want the job either.”

A-ha! There is someone who understands the basis of a good joke.

And Kate would have got it, too. And that’s what I think is the basis of this cycling question in my mind about the figurative versus the literal.

What is real? And what is not? What do we know? What do we not know?

Someone who lost a child to cancer told me that she cannot read fiction any more. I said, I cannot believe in non-fiction any more. All that I see to believe in is language. I see no basis to believe in anything else.

Virginia Woolf’s famous subjectivity swims all through Mrs. Dalloway and it seemed perfectly sensible to me. The “realist” alternative is one exemplified by the form from the pension administrators. Sorry for your loss, but get a lawyer to prove that you deserve it.

Horrendous! Outrageous!

But it will all be better when Godot gets here. Don’t you think?

(Life is a tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.)

*

“Hope is the thing with feathers.” – Emily Dickinson

This is where Kate would want me to end, with hope, not pessimism.

Also, with feminism.

Too many -isms!

I have a stack of Kate’s books that I’ve promised to give Naomi, Kate’s daughter, when she turns 16. Gloria Steinem titles dominate.

But there’s also Kate’s MA thesis: “Labours and Love: Issues of Domesticity and Marginalization in the Works of Paraskeva Clark” (Condordia, 1995).

And Framing Our Past: Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queen’s, 2001), edited by Kate along with Sharon Anne Cook and Lorna R. McLean.

Domesticity and marginalization, I would write a tome on that, and Kate knew it. I married her and her kids in 2006, and my writing all but stopped.

Caring for her through cancer did stop it.

As caring for an ill child stopped Clark’s artistic production.

Writing this essay is part of the process of reclaiming literature and a mind reflective enough to write. It’s about moving out of the literal, opening my mind again to metaphor.

Kate would appreciate all of this, but she would also say: Don’t whine, do.

Get on with it. Being. Doing. Living.

Don’t miss what is right in front of you because you’re too anxious about something happening at some point in the future. Tomorrow.

When I was younger (really younger), I struggled with what was more important: life or art. In her memoir Dancing on the Earth, Margaret Laurence choose life. Oscar Wilde chose art.

Now, I couldn’t tell you what the conflict is about. Everything is integrated. How can art exist without the context of life? How can life exist without art?

Art as meaning, even if it’s a communication of the absurd.

I resist mysticism, but I must be honest. Kate was curious about death. She thought she was going somewhere. She thought there would be other dead people there. She hoped so. There were some people she’d lost and wanted to see again. I told her that I would see her again. That was a new thought for me. I felt it with a conviction that it must be true.

“That’s why we’re married,” she said.

For Kate, meaning was in connection with others. Like Mrs. Dalloway. Like the quest for Godot. Meaning was in connection with the other. What it was, though, was unknown and possibly unknowable. But it was something that must always be quested for.

For her memorial service, I asked people to bake and bring cakes. I had no idea how many would come. I didn’t know if we would have too little or too much.

I wanted to put out the challenge and live with risk.

What happened was the miracle of the cakes. Sixty-five cakes! All individually baked and decorated.

A party. The arrival of Godot.

*

Post-script

Two weeks after Kate died, I went to my local bank branch to cancel her bank card and VISA. I had to bring a copy of the proof of death and her will. Six weeks later my VISA statement arrived and Kate was still on it. I called VISA and they said that her account was still active. I cancelled it, I said. I went to the bank, and they cut her card in half and I signed a form. (A form! Is that itself not proof enough?!) The branch can’t cancel her account, the VISA lady said. Her account is still active. Do you want to cancel it? Do you have her card? No, I replied. They cut it in half six weeks ago when I cancelled her account. Her account is still active, she said. Do you want to cancel it? Yes, I said. Do you want to cancel yours, too? No, I said. You just give in, don’t you? You just give in to the literal and do whatever is required. Kate is dead, I wanted to say, to provide the conversation its context — and I, as far as I know, am still waiting for that release.

I’m heading to the book shelf now to pull down Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

I’m tempted to ask for the rope, but the hope imperative intervenes.

The question is, To be or not to be….

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

—Michael Bryson

————

Michael Bryson, a frequent NC contributor, has been reviewing books for twenty years and publishing short stories almost as long. His latest publication is a story “Survival” at Found Press. Last fall he published an e-version of his novella Only A Lower Paradise: A Story About Fallen Angels and Confusion on Planet Earth. His other books are Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999), The Lizard (2009) and How Many Girlfriends (2010). In 1999, he founded the online literary magazine, The Danforth Review, and published 26 issues of fiction, etcetera, before taking a break in 2009. TDR resumed publication last fall and is once again be accepting fiction submissions. He blogs at the Underground Book Club.

See also “Kate’s Song” written by Brooke Sturzenegger and Kate’s flikr albums.

And for the close, here is Warren Zevon’s appearance on Letterman where he said “enjoy every sandwich” —

 
Jul 232012
 

The aphorism is an ancient form, much ignored in the world of creative writing courses and commercial publishing but incredibly valuable in a writer’s repertoire of tools for its air of wisdom or arrogance. There is nothing like an aphorism in a piece of prose to nail a theme or a revery, to add wit and vigor. Numéro Cinq is trying to patch up the cultural hole. We have published original aphorisms (from The Devil’s Dictionary for Writers) by Steven Heighton and a collection of Russian aphorisms translated by Alex Cigale. And who can forget our aphorism contests (from the long gone days when we had energy to run contests — perhaps they will resurrect themselves)? Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-born aphorist, poet and essayist, a self-styled sayer of wise truths and provocative barbs. It’s a huge pleasure to present here a small selection of his oeuvre. See also below a link to an interview/conversation with Alex Stein on writing aphorisms.

dg

 

————

A poem arrives like a hand in the dark.

§

The air is dense with stray spirits, swarming for soul.

§

Heart like a minefield, one misstep and…

§

Our life is like a long day; it’s easier to fall sleep if we have remained awake.

§

Every day we’re offered this world or the next; but one cannot be myopic and farsighted at once.

§

Sometimes presence of mind is to take a leave of absence.

§

Just be yourself, they say.  Which one, I think?

§

Part of the definition of an aphorist is one who spots aphorisms, and loosens them from the prose — the way Michelangelo described his sculpting process as freeing the angel from the marble.

§

Artists are parasites. Their independence is a myth tolerated by countless hosts.

§

What often strikes us in quotations is ourselves. How these great, dead writers could articulate our innermost longing before us.

§

Certain cherished books are like old loves. We didn’t part on bad terms; but it’s complicated, and would require too much effort to resume relations.

§

There is such a thing as spiritual clutter and hoarding, too.

§

Metaphysics: a fury for allegory.

§

Best not flirt with disaster lest she decide to commit.

— Yahia Lababidi
———–

Egyptian-born, Yahia Lababidi is the author of three collections:  Signposts to Elsewhere (aphorisms), Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (essays) and Fever Dreams (poetry). Lababidi’s work has been widely published in US and international journals as well as being translated into several languages, including: Hebrew, Slovak, Spanish, German, and Italian. A juror for the 2012 Neustadt Prize for International Literature, his latest book project is a series of ecstatic, literary dialogues with Alex Stein, titled:  The Artist as Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi.

Here is a link to a conversation from The Artist as Mystic, where the author discusses how he began writing aphorisms (among other things).

Jul 212012
 

In Bryn Chainey’s film for Alcoholic Faith Mission’s song “Legacy,” a young girl deals with the loss of her mouse through a thorough and committed exploration of corpse rites she titles “Death: Anthropological Studies.” Through this study she explores and interprets an eccentric range of funeral rituals, some cultural, some historic, and some made up, like when she explores the pyrotechnic possibility of a “Space Burial.” These rituals are at moments touching, at others funny, and, sometimes harrowing, as in the moment when the “Egyptian Burial” title card appears and brings with it the possibility of a young girl exploring the rather disgusting realities of mummification on her pet mouse. But harrowing and then sweet as she builds a suitable edifice for a mouse’s afterlife, assuming he’s not lactose intolerant.

Though it’s not confirmed, throughout is the sense that this is not her first experience with death. She has after all completed a book on the study. There’s even the possibility that she has lost as many mice as she has explored kinds of funerals rites. But none of that undermines this grief, for this mouse, as she reviews the rites in her book trying to find a satisfactory way to deal with this this loss.

Chainey’s short calls to mind Lynne Stopkewich’s film Kissed (1996) adapted from Barbara Gowdy’s short story “We So Seldom Look On Love,” the story of a young woman erotically obsessed with cadavers.

There the protagonist is fixated not on grief, but on the moment of transformation, from life to something opposite and sublime: “Some say there’s no soul, no afterlife, that life and death is the straightest line on the compass, and nothing more. I say believe what you want, because no matter what you do, cut everything up, burn it all down, you’re in the path of something beyond your control.” For the young girl in “Legacy,” the rites become a way of making meaning from this thing beyond her control.

There’s a Wes Anderson-ish aesthetic at play here with the encyclopedia entry title shots, the hyper organized yet densely populated and layered mise-en-scene, and the variety of askew (Dutch angle) and god’s-eye-view shots of her preparing the deceased mouse for its various rites and rituals. All these choices together persistently remind us that this is fiction, artifice, and that style, to some extent, is the thing here. These stylistic choices embody the girl’s contradictory desires: to express grief, but to do so from a (perhaps more comforting) stylistic distance.

The Wes Anderson-ish aesthetic is perfect for such an exploration, observing and stylized enough to remind us that we are watching art, not something documentary or too real. I tend to prefer this style when Anderson uses it with subject matter that ruptures the distance, like in The Darjeeling Limited, the tale of three brothers in search of their mother as a way of dealing with their loss of their father. When the distance and style rules, in films like his The Royal Tenenbaums, I find that prevents me from experiencing the story on a dramatic level, and instead leaves the audience skipping across the surface of the beauty and style of the piece.

In “Legacy,” this conflict between intellectual distance and emotional experience is key for the young woman seeking to understand her grief for the deceased mouse. In the end she exhausts and then abandons all these possible rituals in favour of exactly what she needs to do to express this grief. As gentle and poignant as her answer is, I find myself still yearning a little for the cheese.

— R. W. Gray

Jul 192012
 

Jane Eaton Hamilton: Photo by Shawna Fletcher

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HERE IS A STORY.  It is true, but it is also full of lies.  And small axes, the kind that make tiny cross-hatchings on hearts.

1)

A surgeon flayed open my wife’s chest and removed her breast:  stiches and staples. This was several years ago.  While she sleeps her scar unzips (top tape extension, top stop, slider, pull tab), her flesh unfolding like a sleeping bag. Some nights I only see the corset bones that girdle her lungs, gleaming moon slivers in murky red sky, and I say a prayer for them, those pale canoe ribs, those pickup sticks that are all that cinch her in.  I wish I could do that:  I wish I could hold her together.  Some nights I think she may fly away in all directions, north, east, south, west, a huge splatter.  She will go so far so fast I will only be able to watch with my mouth fallen open.  She’ll be gone, and all I’ll have is a big red mess to clean up and a sliver of rib sticking out of my eye.

2) 

Quiver trees are weird enough anyhow, but add a Sociable Weaver nest and you’ve got a real visual pickle. Warty, sponge toffee boils, these bird condos of dry grasses have upwards of 100 different holes for individual families; the nests can house 400 birds.  Interestingly, Sociable Weavers are polyamorous, even, apparently, with barbets and finches.

In Namaqualand, Cape Weavers go it individually.  The males court females by weaving testicular-like sacs, and if a female remains unimpressed, the male builds a second sac under the first, and etcetera, until a wind knocks the whole shebang down.

Bird-land, human-land—it’s all pretty much just jostling to get and keep the girl.

3) 

Some nights when my wife’s incision unzips, a rib extends and on it sits a yellow bird, swaying as if in a great wind, feathers ruffling to lemon combs.  I love birds.  It makes me happy to hear her song, the same way it makes me happy when my wife sings.  (Once when we were fresh, my wife danced naked through our kitchen belting out girl group songs from the 60s.) The little bird warbles and trills, then launches off the rib to fly around our bedroom.  She grabs a mosquito near my ear.  She flits into the corners, around the light fixtures, and carries back bits of yarn pulled from sweaters, spiderwebs, plastic pricetag spears, dust bunnies.  She constructs a nest, shivers down into it, and lays little gelatinous eggs, eggs that I trust, with a simple, guileless trust, will grow up to be lymph nodes for my wife.  These bird nights, I am happy, so happy. On some inchoate level, I know the little yellow bird has our backs, and I drift off to trills of sugary bird song.

4)

I hang out on bird-lover websites, where questions abound:  Why are my lovebirds changing colour?  Aphids–my bird is okay with them, but I’m not? Lovebird feather plucking?

Feather loss, says Avian Web, is a difficult problem to cure when the picking behaviour is already establishedBirds should be presented to Dr Marshall at the first signs of picking.  My wife and I are feather-plucking. We didn’t go to Dr Marshall and maybe that’s our problem. Our relationship has thrush, bacteria, poor nutrition. My wife and I were once lovebirds.  Once, for a nanosecond, We Two Were One.  Then, for years, We Two Were One and A Half.  Eventually, We Two Were Two.  Now, the evidence suggests We Might Be Three.

5)

Birds enchant me.  Once we took our daughter to a free flight aviary, the Lory Loft in Jurong Bird Park, Singapore.  Having a 20-hectare hillside park entirely devoted to birds is guaranteed to make someone like me giddy. Lories look like small parrots, and in the aviaries, as you whoop and wriggle and scream over suspension bridges high in the treetops, they land on you, they cover you.  It’s as if the keepers are up on the rooftop squeezing tubes of oil paint all over you, cadmium orange and cobalt blue and carmine and viridian, screechy territorial colours with a lot of wing flap and pecking.

Ornithologists at the park answer such questions as:  Will an ostrich egg support the weight of an adult human?  I grapple with this one:  Will my human heart support the shifting weight of my wife’s loyalties? 

6)

Foraging:  The Way to Keep Your [Wife] Mentally Stimulated and Happy 

It’s me that forages.  Watch me some nights, thumbing through theatre tickets (Wicked!  The Vagina Monologues!  Avenue Q!  My Year of Magical Thinking!) and museum exhibitions (Dali: Painting and Film; Picasso and Britain; Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own) and the detritus that falls from her scar, stirring through wind-up rabbits and plastic zombies and voodoo dolls that tumble free, all the secrets and suffering that she hoards deep inside.

What am I looking for?  Something to eat, maybe.  Bird seed.  A steak.

7) 

We met a woman in Namibia who lost most of one breast to a crocodile attack.  She was a member of a polygamous tribe, the Himba, whose women wear only loincloths.  She bent down at the river with her water gourd, breasts hanging as breasts will do after a bunch of kids, and a croc’s teeth snapped closed on the right one.

Who knows what this woman’s husband thinks when he takes her shriveled, croc-mangled right breast into his hand? Does he trace her history with reverence?  Does he spit in disgust and choose another wife?

8)

There are local stories of wives who change in the bathroom, wear bras and prosthetics to bed, and husbands who shun them.  There are stories of marital disintegration, and by that I mean what you probably assume: straight marriage.  I don’t know the stats for queer marriage breakups after breast cancer. I do know that even after twelve years, when my wife or I drive past the Cancer Agency, not even thinking about what happened, on our way to other appointments and sometimes in the midst of great happiness, one or other of us will burst into tears.

9)

Vancouver has murders of crows, and our house is on their flight path. If you go outside in the dawn gloaming, such as when you are going for chemo, they fill a Hitchcockian sky with black shrieks, and if you could count them, you would run out of numbers before you’d run out of birds. Crows are not protected in BC, and their forest roost was recently ripped down to build a Costco; now tens of thousands roost in a tangle of electric wires and pallets of home building supplies.  Their noise is deafening.

10)

Magic realism aside, my wife’s scar is really just a scar, plain, unremarkable, faded with time. (Plain, unremarkable.  I tell you.  Plain and unremarkable.) Here is the pedestrian truth:  she is sort of concave there where her breast once was, a hollowed-out nest.  She opted not to have a reconstruction.  Her one breast is very small and she goes braless without a prosthetic, which is a loud story, actually, the only blaring part of the reality-struck, pedestrian story:  she is obviously one-breasted, especially in t-shirts, and manly anyway, so people stare.  Last week at an art opening, a little boy about seven stopped from a dead run and ran his eyes up and down her, up and down her, up and down her, trying to make her make sense.

(These days, I do the same thing, rake my eyes across her.  The little boy is right: she no longer makes sense.  She is always saying goodbye with her actions while she smiles hello with her lips.)

11)

 My heart is a big old blood pump with places engorged like a balloon (I’ve got a big old cardiomyopathy for you, I tell my wife sometimes, but it’s actually heart failure.)  My heart is giving up, and has necrotic spots like measles, dead bits which have been dead now for 25 years, what an anniversary: let’s have a cake and candles, happy necrosis to me!).  Referring to my circulatory system, a cardiologist once said to me:  The tree of you is dying.  No doubt too many polygamous weavers? How does this feel for you? my therapist asked about our lives (relationship) going—yes—tits up, three tits up I guess, instead of four, and here is the answer, my letter to my pain: It feels exactly like my heart is failing.  Right now it’s stuttering along arrhythmically, but it can’t pump through all these emotions and old, ruptured scars, so it may just keep engorging till I pop like a—

12)

Tumour?

13)       

Once I co-owned a grey cockatiel named Hemingway. Hemingway would hop around my scapula and peck food from my teeth while molting grey feathers onto my breasts. He was a happy bird with a yellow comb, but he never wrote a great story as far as I know.

 14)

At the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, my wife ran at ostriches while the wild Benguela current tossed waves on the beach. Ostriches have a nail on each of their feet that is capable of slicing a person open as efficiently as any surgeon’s blade.  I was up on my toes with alarm, but the ostriches didn’t fight, they only ran, their stunted wings extended.  Then the male turned and knocked my wife flat.  He danced on her chest until his pea-sized brain got bored.

Just a game, just a game, she assured me afterwards, brushing off, none the worse for wear.  I wasn’t really dead. 

(This is a lie.)

15)

At Okonjima for cheetahs, I was fascinated instead by the hornbills—those bills and casques!  Female hornbills use their droppings to seal themselves into their nests.  I did this too, when my wife was diagnosed, but I used an alarm system instead of poop.  I’m doing it again, now, but I’m using perimeter lighting, as if shining sunbeams into my wife’s shadows will keep my marriage intact.

16)

My wife’s skin is numb, did I mention that?  That’s how her spirit must have healed from all that trauma (PTSD), don’t you think, with a big old numb spot? On the outside of her, cut nerves sometimes go crazy, like a pain orchestra, a violin screech, a flute shrill.  Yowey.  When I lay beside her and trail my finger across her chest, through her armpit, across the skin near her arm on her back, she can’t feel a thing.  Here? I say and she shakes her head.  NothingHere?  Still nothing.  Here?  Nope.  Here? Kinda, sorta, not really.

Does anyone ever really heal after being pushed out of the nest? Things repair, things scar, we go on, but eventually, we find ourselves in free fall anew. Our beaks impale the ground so we’re stuck flapping upside down like cat-lollipops.  All the old wounds break open, the old puncture holes (insect bites, that time we fell off our bikes, the tendonitis, the hernia) ooze. We’re all leaking pain.  We’re all bloody oozers, in the end, aren’t we?

17)

One night as I lie beside my wife, her chest opens and I watch Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza.  The acrobats use my wife’s ribs as tightropes; the contortionists bend double through her ribs and poke their heads back out, like Gumbies.  The acrobat stacks chairs one atop another atop another atop another, and then climbs atop himself, fearless, while the chairs shake.  I laugh aloud in pure childish glee, and my wife awakens, coughs, and resettles as the performer tumbles.

When he’s scurried away, I rest my cheek in my wife’s loss, my sudden weight causing her to panic and sit bolt upright.  She rubs her eyes and peers at me.  You have the imprint of a zipper on your cheek, she mumbles.

I reach up and touch the corrugations.

18)

I am at the “my this hurts” age, where “this” is really any body part you want to interject at random: ear, elbow, knuckle, knee, uterus. What relationship do I have to my pain? I find it hot like a combustion engine.  I find it has very droopy eyes, and shoulders that slope.  It sees me as prey, mostly, I’d guess, and comes at my heart with its little axe, cross-hatch, cross-hatch, like a Kite in the Serengeti dive-bombing to steal a sandwich from an unsuspecting tourist’s hands, talons gashing a cheek.  What relationship do I want to have in the future with my pain? I want to be its gay divorcée.

19) 

My wife drummed for a PSA a few weeks ago with a group of breast cancer survivors.  A murder of breast cancer survivors, they freaked me out with their black feathers and cawing.  I can’t handle what’s coming for them (for my wife). The prognosis for my wife’s breast cancer is good, but the last months she has had pain on swallowing, and the chant arrives in the rhythm of the children’s song: Eyes, ears, mouth and nose! Except for breast cancer mets it’s: Liver, lungs, breast and bone!  I’m not sure what the song for infidelity is….okay, I am, but I can’t sing it here.

20)

Some nights my wife’s scar opens like Monet’s water lilies at L’Orangerie, a long wide strip of art that is all blue meditation and green silence.

Intending…  to…  heal, intones a monk in a saffron robe.

I must sit through my pain and gird my back.  I must go into my pain and through and beyond my pain.

And come out into art.

My own rendition of my wife’s lost breast is sliced into sections and presented like upright pieces of toast, the tumour glowing in phosphorescence across five slides.  Anatomical, direct, confrontational, weeping blood tears.

My Wife’s Breast, by Georgia O’Keefe: a striated red flower full of motion, a rib protruding at the nipple line.  My Wife’s Breast, by Pablo Picasso: a spiral breast sprouting hair, a breast with an eye instead of a nipple, a tumour instead of his model’s head. My Wife’s Breast, by Emily Carr: breast as swirling dark tree, tumour as bird’s nest. My Wife’s Breast, by Savadore Dali: a breast sitting on a rib, melting, a clock face ticking down her remaining days.  My Wife’s Breast, by Frieda Kahlo: my wife and I completely clothed, hand in hand, a large shadow to my wife’s left, our injuries showing through our t-shirts, a long red, swollen gash on my wife’s right side that pumps blood across a thick vein to my over-huge, engorged, arrhythmic heart while it pumps it back–a perfect silver tea service and a lorikeet on a table to one side.

—Jane Eaton Hamilton

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Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of Hunger, a 2002 collection of short fiction.  She is also the author of Jessica’s Elevator, Body Rain, Steam-Cleaning Love, and July Nights and Other Stories.  Her books have been shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, the MIND Book Award, The Pat Lowther Award, The VanCity Award and The Ethel Wilson Prize in the BC Book Prizes.

Short pieces, which have appeared in such places as the New York Times, Maclean’s, Canadian Gardening, Fine Gardening, The Globe and Mail and Seventeen magazine as well as in numerous anthologies, have won the CBC Literary Awards, the Yellow Silk fiction award, the Paragraph fiction award, the Event non-fiction award, the Prism International fiction award (twice), the Belles Lettres essay award, the Grain non-fiction award, the This Magazine fiction award and The Canadian Poetry Chapbook Contest.  Stories have appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Short Stories, Tarcher Putnam’s The Spirit of Writing: Classic and Contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life, and The Writer’s Presence (Bedford/St.Martin’s USA).  They have been short-listed for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories.

Jane blogs at janeeatonhamilton.wordpress.com.

Jul 182012
 

 Quebec author and publsher, Gilles Pellerin

 “Je vous présente Véronique” is a sly, comic, bitter very short story that twists and twists. The narrator and his wife arrive at a party separately. She is talking to someone else who introduces her to her husband without knowing their connection. The wife and husband play the game of strangers. Maybe they play too well. Maybe we shouldn’t play such games.

This is just one little story in a new selection by my old friend Gilles Pellerin, author, critic and publisher at Les Éditions l’instant même. See his twitter stories published earlier this year on, Le lit de Procruste.

dg

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Brouillés

Du moment qu’ils se sont brouillés, ils se sont mis à me téléphoner sans arrêt. Avec la même demande : « As-tu vu l’autre ? » – le prénom même était proscrit –, est-ce que je lui avais parlé ? Au début, je répondais non. « Je suis très occupé, pour ainsi dire jamais à la maison. » Je ne me suis jamais résolu à me procurer un téléphone portatif, me contenant d’une ligne sèche à la maison. Au bureau on ne doit sous aucun motif autre que professionnel me passer un coup de fil, la chose est universellement connue. Je ne Je raccrocherais immédiatement au nez de qui ferait entorse à ce principe, voulût-on m’annoncer le début de la Troisième Guerre mondiale. Je me suis inventé une vie trépidante : « La saison théâtrale est grandiose, je sors beaucoup, rentre tard et me couche aussitôt. – Seul ? – Évidemment. » Sur ce point, je ne mentais pas : aussi seul que le pronom personnel je. Ce qui serait à inventer chez moi, c’est des amis, une histoire d’amour, une histoire, une simple histoire.

Or, c’était la Troisième Guerre mondiale : les deux belligérants avaient choisi d’étendre leur querelle à l’ensemble de leurs relations et de constituer chacun ses alliances. La ligne de front s’était vite étendue à tout l’univers connu. Un peu plus et je demandais s’il ne conviendrait pas aux uns et aux autres de porter des couleurs distinctes afin que chacun se reconnaisse et sache à cent mètres d’avis s’il fallait sourire ou tourner les talons quand on rencontrait quelqu’un de leurs connaissances.

À la longue, je me suis rendu compte que leur inimitié me minait : appels et rencontres ne portaient que sur les torts et les défauts de l’autre. Il est plus facile de combattre que de tenter de faire la paix, semble-t-il. J’en ai appris au-delà de ce qui est raisonnable, j’avais droit à des largesses qui me faisaient l’effet de pots-de-vin. J’ai vriament multiplié mes soirées au théâtre et au concert car alors personne ne pouvait me joindre ni au téléphone ni à la maison. Comme j’étais leur seul ami commun, je me suis retrouvé seul dans le no man’s land et suis devenu suspect aux yeux des membres des deux saintes alliances, dont je me trouvais exclu. Pour m’en sortir, j’ai commencé à inventer des obligeances discrètes que l’un aurait manifestées à l’égard de l’autre, de timides appels de phares dont j’aurais été témoin et qu’il me semblait indispensable de transmettre au bénéfice de la paix à retrouver. Je n’ai jamais eu d’imagination : ce que je racontais était crédible, avait l’air réel. Je n’avais qu’à doser ces soi-disant confidences sur le mode du crescendo, à prêter à l’absent ce que j’avais moi-même le goût de dire (que notre ancienne amitié, notre amitié historique m’était chère) : ce n’était plus mes amis que j’avais devant moi, leur querelle avait vicié notre propre relation, je voulais que tout redevienne comme avant et j’ai tout mis sur le compte de l’autre, de son désir inavoué mais profond de tout effacer de cette brouille, de tout recommencer. Je tenais une histoire, pas la mienne, certes, mais une belle histoire de réconciliation dont nous bénéficierions tous. C’est en inventant que je m’en sortirais, que le téléphone se tairait enfin, que nous retrouverions nos soupers d’autrefois au-dessus d’un saumon grillé, au son des toasts et des rires.

Pour m’en sortir, je m’en suis sorti : le téléphone ne sonne plus, les réseaux se sont réconciliés, en me voyant chacun tourne les talons. Blâmes, travers, vilenies, petitesses, on a tout enterré, et moi avec, qui ai tout entendu.

 

Je vous présente Véronique

J’ai apprécié ce que j’ai d’abord attribué à l’humour : on me présentait Véronique – ma propre femme. J’allais établir l’équation entre elle et moi, en essayant d’être le plus diplomate possible, de ne pas faire sentir au type l’incongruité de sa démarche – j’ai horreur, en société, de sentir mes interlocuteurs mal à l’aise, encore plus si j’y suis pour quelque chose. Véro est parfois coquine : elle jouait le jeu. J’ai décidé d’en faire autant, mais avec moins de talent qu’elle, je dois l’avouer, à tel point que de-ci de-là au cours du cocktail, j’ai eu peur de la trahir par un signe de familiarité à son endroit. Je me suis évidemment abstenu de la toucher, ce qui n’était pas le cas de l’autre, encore moins l’embrasser : agirait-on ainsi avec celle qui était encore une inconnue quelques minutes auparavant ? Ce serait d’autant plus déplacé que personne ne me connaissait ni n’avait retenu mes nom et prénom quand j’avais salué les uns et les autres, oubli que je leur rendais bien, d’ailleurs.

L’embrasser, le désir m’en était cependant venu – j’utilise « désir » dans son acception forte –, ce qui m’a troublé : Véronique devenait-elle plus désirable du fait que la situation me la rendait étrangère ? Tantôt, elle était à côté de moi, tantôt elle disparaissait dans la foule, ainsi que dans les rêves la femme convoitée sait se défiler.

Les scénarios, même quand ils surgissent à l’improviste, finissent par se conclure : du coin de l’œil j’ai vu Véronique quitter la salle, saluer les uns et les autres, puis s’engager sur le trottoir en direction de l’auto – notre auto. Elle était venue en voiture de la maison, et moi à pied du travail, comme nous en avions convenu. Le bureau est à deux pas, ce qui au reste me permettait de partir un peu plus tard et de régler dans le calme le dossier qui m’avait occupé depuis quelques jours.

J’ai hâté le pas afin de la rejoindre – je pensais la prendre par le bras, la vouvoyer, lui demander si elle voyait quelque inconvénient à ce que je fasse un bout de chemin avec elle, avant d’y aller avec une proposition plus conséquente – vous êtes libre ce soir ? vous viendriez manger un morceau avec moi ? je connais un bistro plutôt sympathique, avec un éclairage tamisé tout ce qu’il y a de plus chouette. Tamisée, ma voix l’aurait été, mais Véronique s’est retournée brusquement, visage fermé, hostile, « maudit collant », tout de suite le téléphone cellulaire à la main, prête à composer le 9-1-1 qui donne accès à la centrale de police, l’endroit tout indiqué pour appeler à l’aide quand une femme est suivie par un importun qui s’approche d’elle à grands pas, dans le but évident de l’accoster.

 

Page blanche

Je voulais écrire des histoires sur les trains. J’ai acheté un carnet ligné à belle et forte reliure et un assortiment de stylos à encre bleue, plus un à l’encre noire pour les corrections et retouches, que j’espérais mineures tout de même. J’ai attendu que vienne la prose robuste dont je me sentais capable.

Rien. Ni prose ni histoire. Je vis dans une ville oubliée par le chemin de fer à l’époque où l’on en construisait. Qu’à cela ne tienne, j’ai déménagé, me suis installé près d’une gare, d’un Café de la gare comme il y en a cent, mille. J’y allais, carnet et stylo bleu à la main, prêt à capter l’impression brute – il serait toujours temps de faire des retouches, une fois de retour dans la quiétude de la maison. Je buvais lentement, aussi lentement l’autorisait la patience du personnel devant un client aussi parcimonieux. Rien.

J’ai pris l’habitude de prendre le train, d’aller dans la grande ville, observant les voyageurs, attentif au paysage qui défile plus ou moins vite de l’autre côté de la fenêtre. Chez nous le paysage varie peu, surtout que la grande ville est entourée par une plaine interminable, plantée de maïs à perte de vue. Les passagers : pour la moitié ils somnolent ou dorment, les autres racontent au téléphone qu’ils sont dans un train sans savoir où ils sont rendus ni à quelle heure ils vont arriver, certains sont rivés à leur ordi (film, jeu vidéo, film), quelques-uns lisent. Aucune phrase qui vienne à leur propos, surtout les lecteurs – y a-t-il quelque chose de moins littéraire, de plus plat ?

Pourtant je ne voyage pas en vain, attiré par la possibilité de tirer parti des dialogues muets des amoureux. Et là, lumineuse, l’idée : il faudrait épier (c’est déjà un pas plus loin que l’observation passive) ce qui se passe dans les wagons-lits, surprendre les secrets d’alcôve. Exécution : je me suis engagé à la compagnie de chemin de fer, j’arpente les voitures, de nuit ou de jour, au gré de mes quarts de travail. Je poinçonne les billets, les place sous la bande métallique qui court sur le porte-bagages au-dessus des banquettes afin de savoir qui descend où et de réveiller, le cas échéant, le voyageur assoupi.

Hier un passager a passé tout son temps à écrire dans un carnet vert bouteille, les yeux perdus dans le vague. De temps en temps, il refermait le cahier, pour le rouvrir aussitôt, saisi par l’inspiration, esclave heureux obéissant à la voix impérative des pages encore blanches. C’est décidé, demain j’achète un beau carnet vert bouteille comme le sien, à forte reliure, ainsi qu’un crayon bleu. Le noir me paraît désormais superflu.

 

Les drames de l’automne

Il y avait des champs de blé d’Inde près de la maison où j’ai grandi. Et des boisés plongeant vers la rivière, de part et d’autre de la Saint-Maurice. Des amis, nés ailleurs, prétendent que c’est une région faite pour l’automne. Papa, mauricien depuis quatre générations, ne disait rien à ce propos : la nature chamoirée avait toujours fait partie de son univers, même avant sa naissance.

Il m’a fallu partir de la Mauricie et atteindre la quarantaine pour éprouver pleinement (mais peut-être la sensation sera-t-elle encore plus forte dans quarante ans ?) le drame de l’automne. La blondeur du maïs que le vent agite alors que le ciel bas est alourdi de nuages gris-bleu me remplit d’une magnifique et tendre terreur. Petit je n’ai jamais vu pareil spectacle, je n’ai jamais été au cœur de cette scène où l’horizon ressemble à un amoncellement d’édredons fripés prêts à ensevelir des pâturages et des champs duveteux – et moi aussi. La forêt n’est pas encore dégarnie, les ombres se mettent à exister individuellement grâce à leurs coloris distincts, même ceux qui semblent ne pas avoir changé de couleur.

La Mauricie était féconde, mais il aura fallu que je n’y vive plus, que je ne sois plus témoin d’un spectacle que sa permanence même soustrayait à mes yeux, fallu que ma vue se détériore pour que la vue me soit donnée. J’avais de meilleurs yeux en ce temps-là, mais il me semble qu’ils n’ont rien perçu de l’enchevêtrement de mélèzes et de bouleaux dans la plée ni du peuple serré des hêtres à La Gabelle. Je sais aussi, depuis la mort de papa, que je regarde pour lui et pour moi. Son silence nourrit mon langage, son silence devient mon langage.

Je vis à Québec. Parfois, dans ma rue même, j’éprouve la sensation de marcher, d’être à Québec, ce qui relève de la banalité, du truisme le plus agréable qui soit et que j’appellerai le présent de l’indicatif. Impression d’arrêter le temps. Je sais où trouver des mélèzes de rue, domestiques, et m’en contenter. Le présent n’a pas toujours existé pour moi ; maintenant je puis dire « éprouver » en toute connaissance de ce que cela tient de la preuve : je lève les yeux sur le panneau qui confirme le nom de la rue. Je redeviens un bref instant l’enfant que j’ai été, en visite à Québec chez le frère de ma mère, sans cesser d’être un homme circulant dans une ville réconfortante. Les arbres au-dessus de nos têtes, les voitures ondoyant sur les faux plats du chemin Sainte-Foy, l’idée même de chemin à deux pas de la maison où je suis à mon tour un père silencieux quant aux choses essentielles de la vie – peut-être appartient-il à chacun de les reconnaître, sans attendre de l’aide de son père ni de qui que ce soit.

Tout cela me revient parfois exactement comme à l’époque où je n’étais qu’un visiteur. Il se jouait ici une partition qui m’était inconnue, les arbres ne viraient pas au jaune et au rouge de la même manière, un épisode moins intense qu’un drame. En contrepartie, je reconnais mes angoisses d’alors, dans la rue, à bicyclette ou à pied, quand me cernait la lumière trop vive de l’été d’une petite ville de banlieue mauricienne, qu’aucun arbre ne venait filtrer dans notre quartier. Des souvenirs de maisons en construction me reviennent. Elles me faisaient peur, y compris la nôtre, toute neuve, craquant de tous ses os par grand froid, et la forêt à deux pas, noire par contraste avant de prendre feu sous l’effet de l’automne, et les champs de blé d’Inde marchant comme des cohortes sous le vent.

J’habite une vieille maison, je retourne dans les rues trop claires de mon enfance pour le plaisir de laisser remonter les malaises muets.

Je comprends que je n’étais pas fait pour être neuf.

 

Il est venu après moi

Il est venu après moi, mais le résultat est le même : elle s’est sentie à l’étroit, puis elle a pris ses distances, ce contre quoi il a protesté, elle a haussé le ton et ils se sont quittés. « Elle a un de ces caractères. » Venant de lui, de sa voix de crapaud dépressif, avec la mimique qui rejette tout le blâme sur Mireille, le constat m’irrite. Un tempérament bouillant, j’en conviens sans mal, mais on ne parle pas ainsi d’une femme, d’une femme qu’on a fréquentée, pas les côtelettes à l’air sous la douche d’un centre sportif, après une séance de conditionnement physique, en présence d’un type, moi, qui sort du court de badminton. Comme s’il ne savait qui je suis, qui j’ai été pour Mireille.

À l’époque j’ai mis un certain temps à comprendre que c’est pour ce type qu’elle m’a largué. Nous traversions une période de reproches mutuels, nos accrochages se multipliaient même si j’avais l’impression de mettre de l’eau dans mon vin comme jamais auparavant. Elle s’est mise à espacer ses invitations et ses visites chez moi, mais je ne renonçais à rien de ce que j’avais échafaudé pour nous deux. Déjà, en temps de paix, Mimi me résistait comme personne ne m’avait résisté, mais cela contribuait à l’affection que je lui portais – c’est le terme édulcoré qui a fini par s’imposer après qu’elle a décrété que j’avais franchi la ligne de non-retour en lui parlant de mon amour pour elle. Reculer devant pareille affaire de sémantique, j’en étais capable – d’où « affection » –, mais il était trop tard : en fait de non-retour, il s’agissait du sien, elle a claqué la porte, « Si j’oublie du linge, tu en feras un sac que je viendrai chercher un de ces quatre ». Tout un tempérament, oui.

Elle partie, j’ai dressé l’inventaire de ses défauts comme de ses traîneries, jeté le voile sur ses irrésistibles qualités, voulu oublier le gouffre des réconciliations dans lequel nous nous abîmions, rescapés de la mort, prêts pour une renaissance qui n’était jamais que le recommencement du cercle de notre perdition perpétuelle. Dans ces conditions, impossible de parler d’amour ni d’affection, mais de passion – je parle pour moi.

Elle n’est pas venue prendre ses vêtements. Je les ai toujours.

• • •

Je commence par traîner sous le jet d’eau chaude, dans l’espoir qu’il se lasse. Quand j’adopte la tactique inverse, le mouvement subit vers le vestiaire, il me suit. Il reprend la conversation, cette question de caractère, mais dans son application intime : « une sacrée gonzesse » – c’est fou ce que le recours à l’argot français donne du relief à la dimension sexuelle : « une bombe, cette nana ». Et « des seins de compétition », tout juste s’il ne me donne pas la pointure du soutien-gorge. Il me parle d’elle comme si lui et moi avions partagé un même bonheur, un même bien. Évidemment, puisque nous avons partagé du « temps commun ». La crainte me vient, une crainte acide et laide, qu’elle lui ait raconté pour elle et moi, au lit je veux dire : les derniers temps, nous avions la chair triste.

Je n’ai jamais noué une cravate aussi prestement, mais je n’arrive pas à le semer pour autant, il se cramponne, en forme, la mine superbe : « En définitive, je t’ai sorti d’impasse, je t’ai débarrassé d’une harpie. Tu m’en dois une, mon vieux. »

 

Des nouvelles

Il n’était pas sitôt assis à table qu’il m’a demandé des nouvelles de Denise, ce qui est assez normal quand on a été marié une dizaine d’années à la sœur de celui chez qui l’on est reçu.

Je ne me suis pas converti aux usages modernes, j’observe la coutume ancienne de tout faire dans la grande pièce servant à la fois de cuisine et de salle à manger, souvenir d’une époque où le salon était tenu fermé, sauf pour les grandes occasions, ce que ne saurait être la visite de celui qui a jadis été mon beau-frère. Andrée, pour qui l’apéro devrait être pris au salon plutôt que dans la pièce où tantôt on mangera, réprouve ce reliquat de paysannerie, surtout quand on habite comme nous un condo. J’avais cependant besoin de compter devant moi sur la solidité de la table pour raconter à Raymond ce qu’il en était de l’état de santé de son ancienne épouse. C’est tout de même la raison pour laquelle je l’avais invité à venir souper – je tiens aussi au vieux terme – à la maison lorsque nous nous étions croisés au centre commercial plus tôt ce samedi-là : de toute évidence il n’était au courant de rien. Denise et lui ont rompu de façon fracassante, elle est partie vivre à Montréal, loin de lui, loin de tout.

Il m’a été infiniment pénible de faire le récit du cancer qui décharne Denise, comme m’est insupportable la maladie même de ma petite sœur. J’arrive mal à rapporter les événements, je me rends compte que j’ai besoin de les ordonner au nom d’une logique qui me fait défaut : Denise n’a jamais fumé et voilà que les poumons sont atteints, puis tout le reste, jusqu’au cerveau. Une fois, après un traitement de chimio, j’ai cru, voulu croire que ça y était, que la maladie avait rebroussé chemin, qu’elle ne laisserait que le mauvais souvenir d’une tête rasée, que Denise nous revenait. J’ai vite déchanté.

« Combien de temps encore ?

– Quelques semaines, trois mois tout au plus. »

Je me demande s’il la reconnaîtrait. Denise affichait une physionomie de rieuse, ce qu’elle était ; toute rondeur a désormais disparu. Ce jour-là, elle avait trouvé à rigoler des traitements qui avaient mobilisé une équipe complète d’« artilleurs ». De piètres coloristes, à l’en croire, et pires dessinateurs encore. Elle a trouvé le moyen de rire en parlant de son crâne comme d’une œuvre rupestre.

Un temps il m’a semblé que son caractère était assorti à celui de son mari. Lui : bon bougre, parfois naïf d’une naïveté que Denise avait qualifiée de feinte une fois la rupture consommée ; elle : prompte à la colère et tout autant à la réconciliation. Elle lui avait pardonné toutes ses frasques, ses fréquentations peu recommandables, ses lubies pour des entreprises hasardeuses desquelles elle arrivait à l’arracher avant qu’il n’y laisse sa (leur) chemise. Puis, non. Le mur de béton à propos de ce qui ne me semblait pas pire que les autres fois. J’imagine qu’elle avait tracé une frontière que Raymond n’avait pas su respecter. Je ne m’étais jamais tout à fait senti à l’aise en sa présence, mais lui en tenais peu rigueur : un beau-frère peut-il être autre chose qu’une acceptable calamité ? (Le frère d’Andrée est du même avis en ce qui me concerne.)

Le cancer a dénaturé Denise en plus de la rendre méconnaissable. La bête s’emploie à rejeter ma sœur hors du monde en la remplaçant par une fausse Denise, un simulacre. La femme forte n’est plus, celle qui me faisait des blagues au téléphone en se faisant passer pour la préposée d’une société de sondages imbéciles auxquels je me laissais prendre, celle qui amenait ses neveux au cinéma en les cajolant comme les enfants qu’elle n’aurait pas, convaincue qu’elle ne serait pas une bonne mère, la Denise qui se meurt n’a plus la force de rire ni même de regarder la télé.

Je n’ai pas tout rapporté. Il était sans doute inutile de raconter que parfois Denise trouve la force de gueuler contre l’évidente injustice qui la frappe – je ne l’ai vue qu’une fois aussi bouillonnante de colère : quand elle a laissé son médiocre et fourbe mari – à petite queue, hâbleur, brouillon, fourbe, menteur, malpropre, etc.

Raymond ne m’a pas interrompu, il a tout écouté sans broncher. Nous avons soupé en faisant semblant qu’il y avait d’autres sujets de conversation : lui, par exemple. « Que deviens-tu ? – Du pareil au même. » Nous n’en avons pas appris davantage d’un homme que nous n’avions plus vu depuis des années. Je ne me suis pas rendu compte de la vitesse à laquelle défilaient les bouteilles de vin. À la fin de la soirée, il était imprudent, inconvenant de le laisser partir. Quelqu’un à prévenir qu’il coucherait chez nous ? Personne. Il nous a souhaité bonne nuit, s’est couché. Avant d’en faire autant je suis repassé par la crise de larmes qui me perfore régulièrement.

Au matin, je n’étais pas frais. Je prépare le café. L’odeur le tire à son tour du lit. Il n’est pas sitôt assis à table qu’il me demande des nouvelles de Denise.

 — Gilles Pellerin

————————

Depuis 1982, Gilles Pellerin a publié cinq recueils de nouvelles, le plus récent étant ï (i tréma), paru en 2004, dans le prolongement duquel  sera i (i carré). Son travail récent l’a amené du côté de l’essai, conséquence logique de son engagement dans la diversité culturelle et la défense de la langue. Membre de l’Académie des Lettres du Québec et de l’ Ordre des francophones d’Amérique, il a été fait chevalier des Arts et lettres de la République française et reçu le prix du Rayonnement international des lettres de Belgique. Né à Shawinigan, Gilles Pellerin habite Québec depuis près de 40 ans.

Jul 172012
 

A Partial History of Lost Causes (Dial Press, 2012), Jennifer duBoishighly praised debut novel, is the story of Aleksandr Bezetov, a Russian chess prodigy who comes of age in the late stages of the Brezhnev era and rises to prominence as a world champion before taking up the doomed cause of opposition to Vladimir Putin’s political machine. But Bezetov’s story is braided in with the story of Irina Ellison, a young American woman, doomed to a certain and early death, who has come to Russia trying, for one last time, to find meaning in her truncated existence.

Chess informs this story, not so much directly in its playing, but as a kind of metaphor for the complex and layered relationships and shifting dimensions of the real and the possible her characters, and through them, the readers, experience. The remarkable clarity of duBois’ writing — at all times, the reader is aware of all the pieces in play and their constantly changing situations — further strengthens this connection to the game. And yet, for all the ways in which she makes clear the architectural conception of her story, she still manages to infuse the gritty realities she depicts of Bezetov’s life in St. Petersburg in the late stages of the Soviet Union — the kommunulka with its shared kitchens and its black-clad prostitutes banging on the building super’s door, the furtive dissidents Aleksandr comes to share vodka and plot with in the bar called Saigon – with a luminosity that can fairly be described as magical.

Read my review of the novel at the Washington Independent Review of Books. Author photo by Ilana Panich-Linsman.

—Rimas Blekaitas

§

Q: Vladimir Putin and his political machine figures prominently in the second half of your book. How do you go about including an active and controversial world figure into the fictive logic of your novel? What potential drawbacks did you think you wrestled with in doing this?

A: In my first draft of the book, I didn’t use Putin’s name, even though that was clearly who the character was meant to be, and some people thought this compromised the novel’s universe—the book is located very firmly in the realities of Russian politics and history, so it was pretty jarring for readers to suddenly enter an alternate world where some fictional creation succeeded Yeltsin. What was tricky about using Putin’s actual name is that Irina and Aleksandr basically manage to prove a conspiracy theory about him—a theory that in real life is widely held but absolutely unverified. So that whole plot line is a strange blend of pretty meticulously researched and faithfully reported information about real suspicions surrounding Putin, and then a wholly invented episode in which the characters confirm those suspicions. My worry wasn’t that I would be slandering Putin—it’s a work of fiction and he’s a public figure—but I did worry that some readers might come away from the book with a sense that Putin’s involvement in those bombings was far more certain than it actually is. But I think most readers kind of intuitively make a distinction between a political and historical landscape that’s grounded in reality and the fictional actions of made-up people, or even real people, within that landscape—for example, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Libra right now, which is partly told from the point of view of Lee Harvey Oswald, and that difference is pretty easy to feel.

Q: There are many ways in which you, in keeping with your characters sensibilities, bring chess into the text. Here is one passage that beautifully brings several of your themes together:

“Walking along the river, he is struck again by the nearness of the future. It’s just beyond his vision, but it is there…He can sense it, like the sketched suggestion of an undiscovered country emerging in the mist, or the shape of an endgame materializing somewhere deep in his psyche.”

Although chess is important in your novel, little of the text goes into actual matches or chess situations. Did you, at one point or in earlier drafts, consider including more actual chess action?

A: I wanted very much to write about chess in a way that would feel convincing to a serious chess player but would still be interesting to a non-chess player, so I tried to narrate in detail only those matches that had a lot of emotional resonance for the characters. The match that makes Aleksandr a world champion gets a lot of attention, for example, as does his loss to the Deep Blue computer game; the moves in those games are described carefully, but you don’t need to be following them to understand the enormous amount that’s at stake for Aleksandr in those moments. I also tried to include a few details and in-jokes here and there that only serious chess enthusiasts would really enjoy—incorporating the actual moves from Kasparov’s matches versus Deep Blue and Karpov, putting important turns from other famous games elsewhere in the story (as when Aleksandr beats his instructor at the chess academy)—and I hoped that doing that would provide a layer of subtext for those people without making everyone else run away screaming.

Q: At your website, reader’s groups are invited to explore how your novel is structured like a chess match. In his preface to his own chess novel, “The Defense,” Nabokov calls the reader’s attention to certain moves he makes as an author. Do you find yourself feeling, as an author, that you are engaged in a chess match of sorts with your readers? How might this be true in your novel?

A: I don’t feel like I’m engaged in a chess match with readers, but I do think chess informs the book’s structure. Aleksandr and Irina’s relationship to the Putin regime is adversarial, of course, and there are moments when they make moves—and, at the end, sacrifices—that have a certain chess logic to them. The chapters alternate between Aleksandr and Irina’s points of view, which is a bit like a chess match; I realized after drafting the book that the characters are often doing things that are in some way thematically reactive or responsive to what the other one did in the previous chapter, even before they meet. Hopefully the plot’s unspooling feels like a chess game in that the events are unpredictable and at the same time firmly grounded within the logical parameters of what’s come before. Flannery O’Connor said that the best story endings are both surprising and inevitable, and it occurs to me now that the best chess moves probably are, too.

Q: What is it about chess, or any deeply absorbing and imaginative activity like it, that made you, as a writer, want to hang out with these chess playing characters of yours for the duration of a novel project?

A: I suppose there are some similarities between writing and playing chess—they’re both very solitary pursuits where you just kind of sit there consumed with something that’s essentially not real and anyone watching you would think you’re insane and/or inert—so maybe that’s something that drew me to Aleksandr, or that I understood about him, even though I’m not much of a chess player myself. There’s also something so interesting to me (and to everyone, I think) about people who are truly brilliant at what they do, and brilliant chess players are especially interesting because they often seem marked for brilliance in this way that’s very hard to understand—they often come to it as small children and then shape their rest of their lives around it. Gary Kasparov, for example, saw a chess problem in a newspaper at age four and somehow solved it, and that was it—chess was going to be his life. To me, this is so much weirder than some general athletic or verbal or mathematic aptitude that a child might grow up to develop in a variety of ways. Great chess players don’t just fall in love with the game—they somehow seem to already recognize it when they find it. Which is absolutely fascinating, in part because it makes no sense.

Q: One of the protagonists in your novel, the young American woman Irina, is also a member of a special club of sorts, the club of people who, having been given a diagnosis of an incurable and degenerative disease, know how, and roughly when, they are going to die. This knowledge has rendered her seemingly incapable of committing to deep friendship or love back home in America, even as she is searching for a way to grab some meaning for her life.

In the end, she does commit herself by self-consciously making herself into a sort of piece in a larger political game. In doing this, she is able to preserve, for the most part, her emotional remove.

There is this particularly powerful passage after she has made her big move in the game of Aleksandr’s politics and after she, herself has begun to show unmistakable signs of the onset of her disease:

“I lean back in my seat, and I feel the hoisting of the plane, its resilience against, the whirring cold, the forbidding blue. The pilot banks to the side, and we are casting an improbably detailed shadow on the countryside; we look like the approach of a mythical bird or an avenging god. Beneath us there must by the rifling of grass against soil, the frenzied roiling of pale-edged leaves. But we can’t see those things anymore.

“I think, although I am not sure, that my hands are shaking more than usual, beginning to thread forward of their own account ever more audaciously. I watch. I put my hand on the pullout tray, and they tremble and jump.

“But then again, maybe it’s not pathological. It could just be reverential. It could just be the beauty of the sky and the clouds-the miracle of morning, the heresy of aviation.”

The passage of course is made all the more poignant by what we already feel will inevitably happen to that flight. She has made herself into a chess piece in an endgame, an abstraction and that seems to be her way of mattering in this world. And yet, she does make a connection to another character near the end. Throughout the novel, you seem to play with moving between the real and direct and the abstract. Do you see this movement as one of the thematic elements in this novel?

A: When we meet Irina, she’s unable to find meaning in her life since she knows she’s positive for Huntington’s disease, and your formulation about the tension between the abstract and the concrete is a really great way to frame this problem. Death is a certainty for everyone and yet it’s also this really abstract thing that no one can actually wrap their heads around—really, we’re all just taking everyone’s word for it that this will happen to us. For Irina, this looming abstraction becomes much realer to her than the concrete elements of her actual life. She has terrible difficulty finding emotional connection in anything transitory (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she is too afraid and too stubborn to try)—and since everything is transitory for everyone, not just Irina, she’s got a real problem. But I actually see Irina’s ending as a rejection, or reversal, of this way of thinking; I don’t think she’s throwing herself into the abstract or the theoretical at all. Instead, I see it her actions at the end as her finally wholly investing in, and giving herself completely to, something that is very real, even though it’s nearly certain that what she’s trying to do won’t work (and it’s absolutely certain that, even if it does, she won’t be around to know it). To me, the ending is where Irina stops seeing everything in such abstract terms; the paragraph that you quoted is a moment where she is fully in the world and, finally, fully in her life.

—Rimas Blekaitis & Jennifer duBois

 ——————

Rimas Blekaitis recently completed his MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He works as a software engineer and lives in Washington, DC. Rimas writes poetry and fiction and is currently working on his first novel.

Jennifer duBois, born in 1983, earned an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop after having completed an undergraduate degree in political science and philosophy from Tufts University. She was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford which she has recently completed, staying on at the university as the Nancy Packer Lecturer in Continuing Studies. Her fiction has been, or soon will be, published in Playboy, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, The Northwest Review, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, and FiveChapters.

Jul 162012
 

What is it like to be a brainy woman, lost in a world of books and ideas, pursuing the ineffable and the impossible under the gaze of great men? Herewith a scene from Unfolded, a new novel by my old friend Sheridan Hay, author of The Secret of Lost Things and the short story “Arise and Go Now” which appeared on these pages last year. In this scene we meet Delia Bacon, the gifted and scandalous 19th century American scholar/author who knew the greats of her era and went mad trying to prove that Shakespeare did not write his own plays. She published a 682-page book to explain her theory. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who appears in this scene with Delia, said of her: “no author ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever failed more utterly.”

(The black and white photo above is by Marion Ettlinger.)

dg

 §

As night faded from the front windows, a pallid dawn filled them.  She prepared for his visit.  Leaning over the porcelain bowl to wash her face, she read an indecipherable text in its cracks.

It would take hours to prepare because she must rest after each task.  Moving in increments of will, stars burst beneath her eyelids if she went too quickly.  Her hands seemed independent, taking up a hairbrush, a washcloth, the buttonhook.  Every object in the room seemed far off and yet she saw with utter clarity, as if magnified.

Of her two good dresses, both now fell from her body.  Needing no corset, she set it aside.  Her bosom had flattened and a hollow marked the center of her chest.  She chose the black silk.  Its sheen was dull, like the coal she could not afford to burn, and whale stays gave it shape.

She took half an hour to arrange her hair, combing it through with water.  Straightening her collar, she pinned a paste brooch at its center.  She could not avoid the mirror:  You go not, till I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.  She was so altered as to be wholly unacquainted with who she had become.

Mr. Hawthorne would meet her revenant.

By afternoon she lay on the bed, hands trembling.  She considered calling down to the Walker’s to refuse Mr. Hawthorne entry to the house.  She has enough presence of mind to notice that anxiety makes one stupid. She would need calm in order to impress. Mr. Hawthorne had extended funds and Delia needed more than funds, she needed his good name.

His foot was on the stair.  Mrs. Walker chattered away, breathless from the climb.  He was ushered into the front room.  She listened through the door.

“Mr. Hawthorne to see Miss Bacon,” Mrs. Walker called.  A chair scraped the floor.  Pages turned, he cleared his throat several times, but was otherwise silent.  She felt the nervousness that used to precede her lectures in New York, when close to two hundred faces stared back from the long hall.  Then, she had needed no notes; confidence had been a trick with her, and knowledge — the drumming into her brain of detail, of fact.

He stood as she entered, bowed.  She had kept him waiting for longer than was polite, but no amount of time could have prepared her for his face.

Mr. Hawthorne was beautiful.

She stammered an apology, momentarily disarmed.

He did not speak at first, but motioned, pulling out the chair.  Dark, thick hair was mixed with gray, and a brown moustache extended above a delicate mouth.  He was tall, and wore a black frock coat; at his throat was a knotted scarf of white silk.  She stared at his immaculate neckerchief as if she might disappear into its folds.

She thought it the prerogative of the recluse to be frank and it was with utter guilelessness that she gazed at him.  But she felt that it was in fact mere loneliness that had robbed her of necessary pretense and Delia was suddenly ashamed – of her appearance, of her poor rooms, of what she needed from him.

“I have become picturesque!”  She blurted, sitting down.

He smiled with great gentleness.

“Not at all, not at all.  Thank you for seeing me, Miss Bacon.”

She took the hand extended.  It was warm and soft and enveloped her own.  He gave her back her courage with his touch.

“I have enjoyed our communications.  Your enterprise interests me very much.  But I am surprised.  I had thought you older and not a young woman at all.”

Her eyes filled with tears for she saw he was sincere.  He smiled again and she averted her gaze for fear of dissolving under his consideration.  He drew up the only other chair in the room.

He’d had time to take in the piles of books on the study table – Raleigh’s History of the World, Montaigne’s Essays, Bacon’s Letters, Essays, and Meditations, a volume of the plays, a well used pocket Bible.  More books were stacked on the floor.  A large roll of manuscript lay partially unfurled.  Lists neatly proclaimed their facts.  A paper knife to cut pages lay across notes.  She had the odd sensation of seeing these objects anew, and seeing too that their arrangement appeared theatrical — a stage with pen and ink-glass set aside, mid-composition.

In fact, here was the site of a great battle.  She thought how strange it is when one’s intensions take on the appearance of staginess, as if one’s life is a fiction – oneself an actor.  The scene, even to Delia, was suggestive of Mr. Hawthorne’s own Romances.

The vitality of his presence momentarily confused her and she sat in the chair as if she were the guest – a visitor to her own rooms.

She thanked him for coming and for his notes and told him he had sustained her at a time of great trial.

“I have been looking at your sources, and can only remark on your impressive scholarship,” he began, indicating the books.   “Your reading of Montaigne is particularly fine.”

She nodded.  This was of course the case.

“And the connections you draw between Plutarch and Shakespeare, between Bacon and classical literature are certainly provocative.”

“But you do not share my faith?”  she asked, recovering herself.

 “I do not,” he said.   “I do not share your faith.  But let me say that I think you nobly careless of authority, Miss Bacon.”

 “And yet you offer help.”  She felt encouraged by his interest if not his opinion.

 “When I wrote to you, I expressed a fact which I firmly believe.  Yours is an undertaking that must be valued.  You are a gifted interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays, whoever wrote them.”

 This would not do.

 “Perhaps when you have read more of my philosophy you will feel that you know who did?”

 “I am here at your service, Miss Bacon.  My wife, Sophia, is already an ardent supporter, based upon the chapter you sent.  And it is true that what sometimes seems most far from us is most our own to claim … but I am not of the converting kind.”

 “It is not necessary that I should convey to others at once all the grounds of that absolute certainty on which my proceeding rests,” she told him, gripping the table’s edge.   “It is enough for me to know, past all doubt, that it is as true as I am.  I don’t expect you to follow, but I appreciate that Mrs. Hawthorne is a discerning woman.”

“That she is,” he said, smiling.

“Francis Bacon wrote that an immense ocean surrounds the island of Truth, Mr. Hawthorne,” Delia went on.  “I cannot expect you to arrive on my island without an experience of the sea.”

He almost laughed.

“I would like to send you the chapter on Lear, after I make a fair copy, and after you’ve read that, the chapters on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.  You will see that my work is the discovery of Modern Science, the buried discovery which the necessities of this time have cried to heaven for, and not in vain.”

She brightened as she spoke, and gathered strength, but feared that he held little interest in the vagaries of her philosophy.  Yet something in her manner compelled.  What questions orthodoxy, she knew, was potent to him.  She saw he felt her truth.

“Miss Bacon,” he said.  “I feel that Shakespeare’s work presents so many phases of reality that his symbols admit an inexhaustible variety of interpretation… “

“You mistake the essence of my theory, Mr. Hawthorne.” She corrected him.   “The history plays are a chronicle, a great whole.  I am a teacher of history, you understand.  It is because I have taught history that I was able to see the plays as a school, a school in which the common people would be taught visible history, with illustrations as large as life.  All the world’s a stage was a cliché but not a metaphor.  The plays are a magic lantern that depict and illuminate Bacon’s world.”

“But a magic lantern is called magic for a reason, Miss Bacon.  It enlarges and also distorts; it makes a fairy world of shadows, and the truth is in the spell it casts not the reality it depicts.”

Viola slunk in, tilting her triangle head up at Mr. Hawthorne.  She let out a cry.

“Ah, you disagree, Mr. Cat,” he said, addressing the animal at his feet.  She wailed again and rubbed her face against the edge of his boot.

“That’s Madame Cat,” Delia corrected.   “The mother of many tribes.  I call her Viola, because I too thought her male at first.  She was in disguise to win me.  The landlord calls her something else, of course.”

“You make my point,” Hawthorne said quickly.   “You might have called her Ganymede or Rosalind.  The thing is itself with or without a proper name …”

“Not at all,” she shot back.   “Shakespeare may well have been the name of a cat, but Bacon was the name of the author of these plays.”

For emphasis she placed her hand on the huge volume.

Words are spirit – her father’s admonition.

Mr. Hawthorne was not so ungentlemanly as to continue to correct her.  There is no complacency in the plays, but Delia had found something like it in her certainty.  If he thought her peculiar, he was a man for whom peculiarity was a rare value.  He told her that his years in Liverpool had shown him all manner of strange things, but that he would try to be of assistance.

Delia told him that she needed to travel to Stratford-upon-Avon, that she would find evidence beneath the gravestone.  She said she’d found clues in Bacon’s Letters and wanted to leave for Stratford as soon as she was well.

“Forgive me, my skepticism,” he apologized.   “I mistrust all sudden enthusiasms.”

“There is nothing sudden in this,” Delia said.  “It is the cumulative philosophy of years of study.”

“Sudden for me, I meant.”  He smiled, determined and polite.  “We find thoughts in all great writers, and even small ones, that strike their roots far beneath the surface, and twine themselves with the roots of other writers thoughts.  When we pull up one, we stir the whole, and yet these writers had no conscious society with one another…”

“I know especially how the mind of an age speaks in many,” she told him.  “And there is far more in this than merely that.”

She was becoming impatient, but Mr. Hawthorne’s mildness encouraged her further.

“You will read this manuscript with greater satisfaction and interest if you don’t bolster up your mind beforehand with any such false view as that.  I mean with the idea that it is not true.  It is true,” she said.

He adjusted his neckerchief, but said nothing.

“If the Inquisition were in session now on the question I could not give them a hair’s breadth of concession!”

“I hardly think …” he began, but she cut him off.

“Lord Bacon and these great men were a republic of wits,” she countered.   “They knew and collaborated.  Their goal was political.  In that sense they are, to we Americans, our truest fathers.  Lord Bacon hoped that all rulers would change places with those they governed, and thus become enlightened.  He speaks to us in our freer age and we must follow his lesson.  Even if it means welcoming the rude surgery of civil war … “

Silence fell between them.  Delia suddenly spent, unable to sit up straight, unused to company and the effort required to convince.   She had lost the habit of conversing with real people and insisted too much and without consideration for Mr. Hawthorne’s gentle courtesy.

He changed the subject.  He spoke of Sophia’s illness, of his children, of the strains of working at his consulate tasks, which left him no time or energy for literature.  People claiming to be citizens appeared daily to solicit funds either to return to America, or because they recognized in him a generous nature.  He admitted to having been shrewdly cheated more than once.

“I see I tire you with these personal details.”

“No, no.”

“I came to assist you, and mean to.”

He gave her ten pounds.   She took it with the unuttered acknowledgement that her earnestness had not produced in him even a temporary faith.  He promised to work on her behalf to secure publication and knew English publishers likely to see of the merit of her philosophy.  Perhaps, she thought, she had charmed him, when it was his faith she really wanted.  He promised to consider writing the preface to her finished work, ensuring its serious consideration, and linking the name of Bacon with his own.

Perhaps Mr. Hawthorne saw her as a genuine scholar in a world of counterfeit.  Had seclusion, single-mindedness and dedication, revealed to her something hidden from those who, like him, must serve the material purposes of the world?  She could have told him that a prophetess must remove herself from ordinary life.

The effort to impress had left her hollow.   She had played her part with enough conviction to leave her blank.  The onset of a neuralgic attack loomed.  Minutes after Mr. Hawthorne left, Delia fled to bed, still wearing her coal black dress, boots buttoned to the ankle.

— Sheridan Hay

———

Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), was a Booksense Pick, A Barnes and Noble Discover selection, short listed for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jul 122012
 

Herewith an excerpt from Edouard Levé‘s Autoportrait, translated by Lorin Stein and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  On first encounter you might feel reluctant toward Levé’s prose since the sentences tend not to work together as in a standard narrative. The rhythm of his “I like,” “I have,” “I would,” I + verb will pull you along, though.  Also I’ve tried to choose a section with some of the more humorous (note: darkly) lines.

A few months ago, when The Paris Review ran a pre-publication excerpt of Autoportrait, I experimented with writing in its style because it looked too easy, too random.  It proved more difficult than expected.  A page or two was all I could muster.  I felt too exposed, too vulnerable. Also, to my surprise, the truthfulness of what I’d written started to feel rather shaky.  It’s extraordinary that Levé extents his self-revealing for 117 pages, and at times it’s painful. He lays out so much about himself that he seems to disappear in the bluster of his statements, a kind of self-erasure through self-exploratory prose perhaps meant to showcase his life. As he writes: “If I look in the mirror for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.”

Author photo via The Balloon Journey.

— Jason DeYoung

I reuse grocery bags as trash bags. I separate my recycling, more or less. Drinking puts me to sleep. In Hong Kong I knew someone who went out three nights a week, no more, no less. I believe that democracy is spreading in the world. The modern man I sing. I feel better lying down than standing up and better standing than seated. I admire the person who thought up the title The Last House on the Left. A friend told me about the “Red Man of the Tuileries,” I don’t remember what he did but the name still gives me shivers. The pediatrician my mother took me to humiliated generations of children, including me, with this riddle: “If Vincent leaves a donkey in one meadow and goes into another meadow, how many donkeys are there?” all said in a measured voice, and then he’d say, “There’s only one donkey—you” to any child, that is, every child, who didn’t answer “One.” I want to write sentences that begin “Ultimately.” I can understand “It’s the end,” “It’s the beginning of the end,” “It’s the beginning of the end of the beginning,” but once we get to “It’s the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning,” all I hear is a bunch of words. I have sometimes annoyed an interlocutor by systematically repeating the last word he said. I never get tired of saying La fifille à son pépère (grandfather’s darling). One of my friends earns the admiration of some and the indifference of others by knowing the name and number of every département in France. My cousin Véronique is amazing. I sometimes think of the witty thing to say an hour later. At the table, I excused myself for splashing food on the spotless shirt of a friend by telling him: “You got in the way of my juice.” I take no pleasure in others’ misfortunes. I do not bow down before a metal idol. I am not horrified by my heritage. I do not till the earth. I do not expect to discover new marvels in classical music, but I’m sure of taking pleasure until I die in the ones I already know. I do not know whether one can improve on the music of Bach, but one can certainly improve on the music of several others who shall remain nameless. I admit to being wrong. I do not fight. I have never punched anyone. I have noticed that, on the keypads of Parisian front doors, the 1 wears out the fastest. I have sometimes turned my interlocutors against me by an excess of argumentation. I do not listen to jazz, I listen to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Chet Baker, Billie Holiday. I sometimes feel like an impostor without knowing why, as if a shadow falls over me and I can’t make it go away. If I travel with someone, I see half as much of the country as if I traveled by myself. One of my friends likes to travel in certain Middle Eastern countries where there is nothing to see but airports, deserts, and roads. I have never regretted traveling by myself, but I have sometimes regretted traveling with someone else. I read the Bible out of order. I do not read Faulkner, because of the translation. I made a series of pictures based on things that came out of my body or grew on it: whiskers, hair, nails, semen, urine, shit, saliva, mucus, tears, sweat, pus, blood. TV interests me more without the sound. Among friends I can laugh hard at certain unfunny TV programs that depress me when I’m alone. I never quite hear what people say who bore me. To me a simple “No” is pleasantly brief and upsettingly harsh. The noise level when it’s turned up too high in a restaurant ruins my meal. If I had to emigrate I would choose Italy or America, but I don’t. When I’m in a foreign country, I dream of having a house in Provence, a project I forget when I get back. I rarely regret a decision and always regret not having made one. I think back on the pain of affairs that never took place. The highway bores me, there’s no life on the side of the road. On the highway the view is too far away for my imagination to bring it to life. I do not see what I lack. I have less desire to change things than to change my perception of them. I take pictures because I have no real desire to change things. I have no desire to change things because I am the youngest in my family. I like meeting new people when I travel: these brief and inconsequential encounters have the thrill of beginnings and the sadness of separations. I wanted to write a book entitled In the Car, made up of remarks recorded while driving. To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up excuses to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Baghdad. When I decide to take a picture of someone I see in the street, I have ten seconds to notice the person, decide to take the picture, and go ask, if I wait it’s too late. I wear glasses. In my mouth, time moves slowly for candy. I have deeper to dig in myself. I see art where others see things. Between the solitude of the womb and the solitude of the tomb I will have hung out with lots of people. While driving a car past some meadows these words came to me: a tractor chicken and an elephant tent. I wish treatises were article- not booklength. In the United States I came across a village called Seneca Falls, which I mistranslated Les Chutes de Seneque (Seneca’s Falls). I have seen an ad for a vegetarian vehicle. I would like to see movies accompanied by inappropriate music, a comedy with goth rock, a children’s movie with music from a funeral, a romance with a brass band, a political film with a musical-comedy sound track, a war movie with acid rock, porn with a choir. I make fewer and fewer excuses. After I lick an envelope I spit. I don’t want to die suddenly but to see death slowly coming. I do not think I will end up in hell. It takes five minutes for my nose to forget a smell, even a very bad one, this doesn’t go for what I perceive with my other senses. I have weapons in my brain. I have read this sentence by Kerouac: “The war must have been getting in my bones.” Although I have always translated Deer Hunter as Chasseur de cerf, I still hear the echo of the mistranslation cher chasseur (dear hunter). I remember what people tell me better than what I said. I expect to die at the age of eighty-five. To drive at night through rolling hills by moonlight in summertime can make me shudder with pleasure. I look more closely at old photographs than contemporary ones, they are smaller, and their details are more precise. If not for religion and sex, I could live like a monk. My last and first names mean nothing to me. If I look in the mirror for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything. I can stand around in several dozen different ways. I have carried women in my arms, I have not been carried by them. I have not hugged a male friend tight. I have not walked hand in hand with a male friend. I have not worn a friend’s clothing. I have not seen the dead body of a friend. I have seen the dead bodies of my grandmother and my uncle. I have not kissed a boy. I used to have sex with women my own age, but as I got older they got younger. I do not buy used shoes. I had an idea for an Amish punk band. Only once was I the first occupant of an apartment. I got into a motorcycle accident that could have cost me my life, but I don’t have any bad memories of it. The present interests me more than the past, and less than the future. I have nothing to confess. I have trouble believing that France will go to war in my lifetime. I like to say thank you. I cannot perceive the delay in mirrors. I don’t like narrative movies any more than I like the novel. “I do not like the novel” doesn’t mean I do not like literature, “I don’t like narrative movies” doesn’t mean I don’t like movies. Art that unfolds over time gives me less pleasure than art that stops it. The second time I walk the same route, I pay less attention to the view and walk faster. I let the phone ring until the answering machine screens the call. I spend two hours talking to one friend, but it only takes five minutes to end my conversation with another. When I’m on the phone, I don’t make any effort with my face. If I put off a phone call where something is at stake, the wait becomes more difficult than the call. I am impatient when waiting for a phone call but not when I have to make one. I have more good memories than bad ones. When I’m sure I like an article of clothing I buy a few of the same one. I do not wish to shine.

— Edouard Levé, translated by Lorin Stein

———-

 

Jul 112012
 

The come-and-go as you please nature of the text, which allows for any entry point, equalizes the information.  There is a sense that it’s all happening at once, and that knowing when Levé hears the English word “god” he thinks of the French word for dildo (godemiché) is as important as his druthers to “paint chewing gum up close than Versailles from far away.” — Jason DeYoung

Autoportrait
Edouard Levé
Translated by Lorin Stein
Dalkey Archive, 2012
117 pages, $12.95

Edouard Levé took his own life ten days after delivering his final novel Suicide to his publisher. Assembled pointillisticly, Suicide is without much narrative, but Levé holds your attention through insights regarding the act of suicide and his patient rendering of a man who takes his own life at the beginning of the book.  There is a lot of guesswork on the part of the author in Suicide, but Levé manages to give a poignant depiction of this young man, his personality, eccentricities, and motivations.  Autoportrait and Suicide resemble each other in style, except the former is about Levé himself, and Autoportrait is without the latter’s lucidity, which is in keeping with Levé’s philosophy, as he writes: “Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them.”  When it was written, Autoportrait was about a living person.

Before Suicide, Levé was better known as a conceptual photographer than a writer.  His photographs were often composed scenes that were not as transparent as their titles would suggest, as in his collection Pornography in which models, fully clothed, contort into sexual positions, or his collection Rugby, a series of photographs of men in business attire playing the titular sport. In both, the photos represent an action but are not the real thing.  As Jan Steyn points out in the Afterward to Suicide: “We cannot see such images and naively believe in the objective realism to which photography all too easily lays claim: we no longer take such photos to show the truth.”

Levé background also includes a degree from the ESSEC, a prestigious Parisian business school, and for several years he painted before giving it up during a trip to India. His writing owes a self-acknowledged debt George Perec, a founding member of the Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle—”workshop of potential literature”—and Levé authored two other books: Oeuvres (2002), an imaginary list of more than 500 books by the author, and Journal (2004), a collection of faux journalism.

As a book, Autoportrait is a radical act of communication, eschewing the complexity of organized thought for the chaos of raw fact.  Written exclusively in declarative sentences, Autoportrait gives an unflinching self-portrait of its author.  In one unadorned assertion after another, Levé creates something personal and individualistic that hints at the multitudes within, while abstaining from narrative (and its attendant techniques): “On the train, facing backward, I don’t see things coming, only going. I am not saving for my retirement. I consider the best part of the sock to be the hole.” Levé own description of “picking marbles out of a bag” aptly describes the apparent order of sentences as they appear over the 117-page, single-paragraph Autoportrait.

If on first encounter Autoportrait seems to be about self-knowledge, it’s not an Apollonian know yourself, find strength within type, but a ridged self-unpacking, brusque and inexplicable.  Page-after-page Levé makes stochastic announcement regarding his life—we find out that he is “happy to be happy,” he likes John Coltrane, and could never “conceive of being altruistic.” Yet, as readers, we are left wondering if these facts get close to self-knowledge, or a complete self-knowledge.  There is no reading into these facts by the author, interpretation being something that bubbles up from the bowels of opinion, which can be rendered untrue. Though precisely written and hewed rigorously to its form, in the end Levé is still oblique, only a phantom of a person has emerged. Levé knows it; he knows his project is a failure of completeness, and throughout the book he drops hints:

“Everything I write is true, but so what?”

“I write fragments.”

“I know how much I’m seen, but not how much I’m understood.”

“Often I think I know nothing about myself.”

“To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.”

Not that he trusts writing anyway: “When I read the descriptions in a guidebook, I compare them to the reality, I’m often disappointed since they are fulsome, otherwise they wouldn’t be there.”

So if the author thinks writing is flawed, why read the book? One reason is for the interests in the formal experiment of its style. Levé has dropped the illusion of narrative to write a frenzy of sentences utterly transparent, crystal-rim-tap clear, yet sentences that do not seem to add up to anything other than lists—likes, dislikes, experiences, wishes, complaints, thoughts, et cetera.  A type of graffiti: I am here, such-and-such date, expletive! Existence proven. But without the typical author manipulation afoot, the experience of reading Autoportrait is profound, the way gazing upon a sobbing nude man walking into church during Sunday service might be profound. Asking what does it mean cannot be helped.  And the lack of connecting tissues creates its own tension—each sentences something wholly new. What bit of sexual exploit will he confess next, what tidbits of triviality will he express, who else bores him, what other banality will he mention—“My fingernails grow for no reason.”  Yes, a genial, yet mordant, whimsy lurks in these sentences.

By taking the book’s title and Levé’s photography into consideration, there is another way to read this book. The come-and-go as you please nature of the text, which allows for any entry point, equalizes the information.  There is a sense that it’s all happening at once, and that knowing when Levé hears the English word “god” he thinks of the French word for dildo (godemiché) is as important as his druthers to “paint chewing gum up close than Versailles from far away.”  Reading it this way makes me wonder if his intention wasn’t a book that gave a complete picture—how could it really?—but that each sentence be a portrait unto itself, as a camera on “auto” would rapidly shoot pictures.  Each sentence a glimpse of a Levé in fixed space and time, a portrait album in sentence form.  Thus the visual appearance of a single paragraph book acts as a kind of compression device to create intriguing relationships. But the relationships are so many or so diffuse that Autoportrait becomes a book without a single solution, and in some ways there’s something to relish in its resistance to interpretation, a kind of aesthetic of incomprehensibly in which Levé escapes a tyranny of meaning or acknowledges the absences thereof. As in his photography, these sentences represent their author, but are not the real thing.

As Levé dabs off facts we see there are common ruminations and patterns, however, to his life that revel depth and elicit emotion. And as a wandering mind often does, the book at times comes together for what could be perceived as sustained thought, as in this passage about Levé’s brother:

My brother had two childhood friends, they were all about five year old, and he met them again when he was forty-five in Nice, where all three of them now live. I have no friends from my childhood.  When I was a child, then a teenager, I had one best friend for two or three years, then another, and so on, I never kept a best friend more than four years, I was almost twenty before I had the friends who lasted longer, and almost thirty before I met the friends I have now. I have been more faithful in friendship than in love, which isn’t to say that I cheated on the women I was with, but that my relations with them lasted a shorter time than relations with my friends.  In every friend I am looking for a brother. I have not found a friend in my brother, but I have not, alas, made the effort to look. My brother was too old for us to be friends.  My brother and I are like night and day, and I may be the night. I have often thought that education had little influence over individuals, since my brother and I had the same education and have pursued divergent paths.  I like my brother, this is probably reciprocal, I write “probably” because of my brother we have never discussed it. It moves me to see photos of my brother when he was little, I see that we have the same complexion, the same eyes, the same hair, but I know these similar envelopes contain minds that have never come into contact.  At night it reassures me to hear a few quiet footfalls on the floor of the apartment above.

This is perhaps my favorite part of the book, since in his comparison with his brother, we glimpse a Levé that isn’t somehow held fast in cool prose, we get something like emotion when he writes, “in every friend I am looking for a brother,” with a second meaning of brother emerging. Levé expresses a desire for reconnection and wholeness. He is “moved” to see pictures of his brother. He wants this relationship.  And, for me, that final sentence is the kicker.  Though it could be seen as a return to the normal course of the book—one unconnected sentence after another—there’s something haunting there with the footfall, the acknowledge, “reassuring” presence of the another.  It heightens the pathos felt in his desire for finding the “aleph of the other” (Suicide).  Yet Levé will not let his desire for oneness overpower his art.  Autoportrait is fragmentary after all. It’s not a machine for producing a so-called reality.  Wholeness, at this point, would be fantasy, and the very next sentence after this passages reads: “I do not eat candy, it makes me sick.”

Dodie Bellamy writes in her Barf Manifesto: “Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it.”  And that’s what Levé has done here, and that’s what makes Autoportrait extraordinary. Levé has opened himself up to kind of psychological vivisection to show us the mess of his living innards.  Yes, some of Levé is exotic—he is an individual after all—but there’s plenty of loneliness and small-heartedness, biases and loves to commiserate with, too. Reading Autoportrait with the same criteria as reading a standard novel built out of plot, character, and setting won’t do.  It has to be approached as innovative art: its subject is one person and its form is just as unique.

— Jason DeYoung

————————————–

Jason DeYoung, a regular contributor to these pages, lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has recently appeared in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, The Fiddleback, New Orleans Review, and Numéro Cinq.

Jul 092012
 

Herewith a rare and exceptional treat for Numéro Cinq readers, two writers — Billie Livingston and Susie Moloney — in conversation; an interview ostensibly, but at a certain point the convention breaks down and they just talk. Both are prize winners, both are too young to be at the peak of their careers but both on the hyper-ascendant. They are from opposite sides of the literary tracks, so to speak, one literary, the other a superb horror novelist, but they respect and like each other. Ebullient, witty, brash and challenging — they take us on a breakneck tour of the relationship between genre and literary faction, on the strange business of writing, and the love of art.

I first met Billie Livingston last year when I was on the jury for the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize. Billie won. And this is what the jury said about her story collection Greedy Little Eyes: “In this collection the writer’s eyes are wide open, taking in the world and then reflecting it in all its strangeness and beauty. She pushes edges, teeters on brinks, creating the exhilaration that comes only with taking risks. Her characters are real people in a real world who achieve break-out velocity and recreate themselves by signal acts of courage and self-definition. Frequently, her plots hinge on a demand for justice in a world clouded with calculation and evasion, resulting in a collection as strong in content as it is in style.” Billie is also a novelist and poet — her third novel One Good Hustle is coming out later this month.

Susie Moloney is the hugely popular author of four best-selling horror novels including The Thirteen: A Novel just out in March, described in the Toronto Globe and Mail as “a gonzo, mirror-universe, occult version of The Stepford Wives, with a dash of Stephen King thrown in.” The reviewer goes on to say the book is “a compellingly uncanny narrative, binding the tropes of small town paranoia and cliquishness with the chokehold of family obligations and religious fervour, and the very real claustrophobia of poverty and desperation” which sounds so uncomfortably close to my own life that I am afraid to pick up a copy (though I will).

It’s a huge pleasure to give these two authors a place to talk on NC.

dg

 

BILLIE: As writers you and I are slotted into different categories in the publishing world. You’re considered a “genre” writer (horror) and I’m a “literary” writer (whatever that means).  We don’t appear in the same festival events, we’re not asked to sit on the same panels—It’s as if we’re different animals at the zoo and we might rip one another’s fur off if we come in close contact.  Meanwhile readers, for the most part, don’t use those terms and don’t give a damn what they mean.  The idea is that literary works are complex and multi-layered (dull and plotless) whereas genre work is about romance and scary capers (shiny and trivial). John Updike said the term “literary fiction” was created to torment people like him who just set out to write books. What do you think? Does this kind of grouping effect you? Please you?  Limit you?

SUSIE: You know, I answered this about three times, and deleted all three responses, because what it comes to is this: I love labels when I’m buying a book, and I hate them when I’m writing one.

There’s something juvenile about ghettoizing storytelling. It’s separation, stereotyping: blondes are dumb, jocks are bigots. As Stephen King said when he was accepting his National Book Award—that’s right, a horror writer won the NBA in 2003—he said, “When readers are deeply entranced by a story, they forget the storyteller completely. The tale is all they care about.” That’s some ninja chastising there. You can hardly tell he was schooling those folks. But he was. In fact, I think his whole speech is somewhat of a canon for how we’d like to be seen, us genre writers.

I think the greater issue with genre v literary, is, who gets to decide if something is literary or not? It should be the reader, and I would bet you’re right, the reader doesn’t give a shit. The Wendigo is one of those horror concepts that comes up in literary fiction. Is that because it’s mythological? So, if I write about the Wendigo, is it still literature if I call it a dead cannibal? What if my Wendigo is succubus?

Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King—they all wrote horror fiction designed at source to make you pull the covers up over your head. They’re also damn good writers. The kinds of writers you “take in school,” as my grandmother used to say. She had great respect for anything you, “take in school.”

I’m curious to hear the other side of this. Do you guys, you smarty pantses, ever peer over the fence at us genre writers and moan while we walk our comically large cheques to the bank? Or is it just us cupping our hands around our eyes and staring through the candy story window at your black-tie galas where you pick up shiny statues (that we immediately believe will make an awesome murder weapon in our next tome)?

BILLIE:  Do we moan?  That’s about all we do.  And rend our garments.  The only people who moan more than the literary fiction crowd are the poets.  We look at your big barrels of genre money and shriek, “Nobody understands me!  Maybe they’ll recognize my artistic genius when I’m dead.”  Then we wonder how hard it would be to fake our own demise.

SUSIE: Ha ha. You poets! Always with the funnies. In any case, I’m with King on this one. The reader doesn’t care. Not when the book is in her hands.

As for literary novels being dull and plotless, you’re being too hard on your own people, and I thank you for that.

The real thing is here, how come you get all the accolades when you’re mining your own backstory, and I get fewer even though I have to go through all the extra work of making it all up? From scratch. What about that? Is it easier to mine your own stories, or is it easier to just go to the therapist and make the rest up?

BILLIE: So, let me get this straight, the way you figure it, I just cut and paste from my diary and call it fiction, whereas you, clever girl, pull from the thin air of your magical mind?

SUSIE: Yes. That’s exactly what I think.

BILLIE: Ha! You’re just yanking my chain.  Any writer who claims that there is no autobiographical component to his or her work is either a liar or an emotional chicken. I think it’s true of fiction and non-fiction writers.  I think it’s true of biographers!  I was struck with that when researching Cease to Blush.  If you read two or three biographies about the same historical figure, each will be very different. People can’t help but see through the lens of their own lives and, because of it, even biographies begin to suggest more about the biographer than their subjects.

SUSIE: Okay, I’ll cop to some autobiographical elements to my work, probably most obviously in The Dwelling. But I leave it to the reader to discover which of the stories is the most autobiographical. Did I have sex with a ghost? Am I dead and living in the walls of a house? Did my computer try to make me kill myself? Or was it all autobiographical? Hmmm.

That first person voice you use gets me every time. It’s so intimate. You can’t read “I” statements and not get personally involved with the character.

Do you think of them as inspired by real life, ripped from your own personal headlines, so to say, not a memoir, but memoir-ish? The memoir has been huge for a few years. If you had a drinking problem or had killed a man in Reno just to watch him die, you would kill with a memoir.

BILLIE: The most autobiographical book I’ve written was, as one would expect, my first. My family was rather disconcerted to recognize bits that mirrored our lives juxtaposed with scenes that bore no resemblance to anything in memory. But it’s a novel not a memoir, and as they say, sticking to “truth” can limit the larger truth that fiction reveals.  Which is why it’s so dreamy and lovely to go into that trance-like state when writing… it’s as though the ghost of Christmas past is being the docent of my own weird story gallery.  The thing too is, you come to a point when you realize that what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.  So why not mine the strangeness and make art out of it, baby.  If I could paint worth a damn, you better believe I wouldn’t be doing landscapes.

I’m fascinated with the way you use the close third person.  Particularly impressive in The Dwelling, as there were different stories within the story, so the voice changed as their particular worlds unfolded.  Each character’s mind is woven through the voice and yet it still allows for a kind of omniscient overview.  I have a hard time writing in the third person. It’s as though I can only feel characters when I can hear them in my head and when I do they always say, “I.”

SUSIE: There also seems to have been a real uptick in novels with a first person narrative. Have you noticed a correlation between memoir, first person narrative and the rise of social media? Do we just want to listen to stories that are about “I”?

BILLIE: Haven’t noticed an uptick in first person narratives— I see more third-person!  (Perhaps we each notice “the other.”) There has definitely been an obsession with memoirs though.  Seems a lot of people have a craving to catch a glimpse of “this all happened.”  And publishers, in a cynical ploy to extract cash from the rubberneckers, have bought lot of vaguely autobiographical novels and repackaged them as memoirs.

SUSIE: That’s probably some of the beauty of writing genre fiction. The truths that the author believes and would like to promote or at least mention in passing are buried under piles of corpses, or bricked up in the walls and allowed to scream. We get to use really broad metaphors, because when there’s a monster, for crying out loud, it’s probably representing something. I mean, it’s a monster. That’s often, however, when the horror fiction genre writer (full title) is underestimated. At first blush, that monster might well be the crushing helplessness of man versus the industrial complex … but it might also be something more human and heartbreaking and universal. Maybe I’m overreaching. This last couple of years I’ve noticed another uptick: the number of dead children in Susie Moloney stories. Maybe you’ve all noticed. I know that it’s because my youngest is mostly grown up now and it’s a loss. I was a single mom for most of his life, and we were pretty tight. It’s been like an amputation (look for the broader “amputation” metaphor in future stories). Anyway, that’s a universal, heartbreaking truth that all mothers understand, and it’s been subtly marked in most of my work. Or so I like to think.

BILLIE: Your recurring themes are hanging out! Ha! I see dead children…. and children in peril, motherhood and the fear of maternal failure, suburbia, isolation and the horror of “you made your bed, now lie in it.”  I think all of those things come to the fore in your most recent novel, The Thirteen.  On its surface it probably has the breeziest feel of your books — I mean it’s fun and playful in its satire of suburbia — but, it’s been compared to The Stepford Wives which has become an iconic shorthand for women who are so desperate to fit in that they become more like obedient pets.  The women in The Thirteen have a more hungry and defiant desperation to be successful wives and mothers.  When you wrote it, did you set out with that theme in mind or did you just tell the story and let the themes fall where they may?

SUSIE: Well, I’ve been a reluctant suburbanite. I was raised in the suburbs mostly, and so when I went back to Manitoba to lick my wounds, I think I subconsciously retreated to a childhood I wanted to remember (never happened) to raise my youngest son. It’s just easier in the ‘burbs. The schools, parks and community centres are all there, everyone is more or less the same. There’s no challenge, really, to living there. Or so that was the great dream when I bought my house.

There is challenge there, turns out. I didn’t really fit in. I had a potty mouth. I kept my wine in a go-cup. I homeschooled for the first two years. I didn’t have a job—not one you could see me coming home from. The thing that saved me from utter insanity, were the women. It might have been some true divine intervention there, but I happened to have great neighbours, each of them just a little different in their way. The woman across the street from me was bat-shit crazy, I swear to god. Up a little from her was a lady who had a monkey. A gay couple lived one house over. My closest neighbour became my best friend. But the story of The Thirteen started out as a short piece about the crazy woman across the street. I started to wonder what would happen if a witch went crazy and was no longer of use to her dark god. It started off a lot of fun, but turned very serious in the end, kind of a “chickens coming home to roost” thing.

At the heart of that story—whether it shows or not—is the feeling of being an inadequate parent. Wanting your child’s life to be smooth and successful, and how little power we have to make that so. Every bad decision–that seemed like a good, well-thought out decision at the time—not working out, and it being All Your Fault. Such power we tiny little mothers have! To ruin whole lives! Oh my. The book started out as a wish-piece, to wave a magic wand, or compact with the Devil, to make our lives flawless whatever the cost.

Also I fucking love the suburbs. So much grass.

BILLIE: One thing I’ve noticed too is that religious faith comes up in your work, but it’s not as the boogieman, the way it often does in a lot of contemporary fiction.  There’s a general sense among those who consider themselves intellectuals that belief in any sort of deity is the hallmark of a moron. Religion definitely comes up in my own work, in part because, like it or not, it is something of a cornerstone of who we are and how we live.  I also tend to write about people who are broke and who are outsiders and the church is often the only community to step up to the plate with the down and out. As a kid on welfare, that was certainly my experience. It was the church-crowd who consistently offered help and who were happy to be a second family–A superstitious, loony family sometimes, but still, their doors were open and they gave a damn. Did you grow up with much in the way of religion?  I get the sense from your writing that you have a soft spot for it.

SUSIE: Oh I love religion. I was raised orthodox heathen and my first exposure to religion was through a Catholic friend. I went to church with her a few times. It all seemed so glamorous and fulfilling. Like you, I appreciated the fact that it was a community and you could be part of it. And there was wine. And the BODY of Christ. You know that old saw, “Home is the place where they have to take you in (sic)?”

BILLIE: Robert Frost!  He’s always good for an aphorism that sums it up nicely. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  Sounds like church to me.  Or at least what the church should be.

SUSIE: It seemed like that sort of thing to me. I wanted to have a place where they had to take me in, just because I was part of it.

When I was a teen mom, I was born again. I lived in Winnipeg Regional Housing at the time, and the born again-s seemed to sweep the whole block, like germ warfare. In retrospect, it was a pseudo-religion, a kind of pop-god era in my life where Jesus was your bud, your boyfriend, the guy who would carry you over the sand so no one knew you skipped work and went to the beach (only one set of footprints, eh?) The soundtrack was Amy Grant and Michael Smith and Petra. It was fun. Mike Warnicke and his “book of do’s,” not “book of don’ts.” I went to a bunch of churches, all my friends were hyping their churches. I was kind of a buffet gal. It was all great until I went so some church in some community centre basement on Edison Avenue and met the minister there. I was carrying my beautiful toddler, the centre of my life. My friend introduced me to the pastor and he looked at my kid and said, “Where is this baby’s father?” Turned out he wasn’t looking for an address. That was kind of the end of religion for me.

BILLIE: Wasn’t it Ghandi who said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.”? The born-again judgment was what ultimately drove me out of that church too. And the theology: very literal, not terribly nuanced. Of course, it’s the parade of those very things that I love when I read Flannery O’Conner’s writing.  She always seems able to get to the heart of the simultaneous impulse toward redemption and revenge.

I still do take a pleasure in church hopping though. Churches, synagogues, temples…I like going to different places of worship, and listening for the poetry that illuminates or challenges in a way that hadn’t occurred to me before.

SUSIE: I know what you mean. God and spirit and the wonders of the possibilities, all of that has hung around.

Telling that story makes me feel naked and 18 again. So, while I hate to belabour this point, but frankly, I love this point: I find that your voice is so real and so intimate that as a reader, I can’t help but feel naked and vulnerable while I’m in that world. Your voice melts into the page and ceases to be a separate voice. It’s my voice. Is that what all writing is supposed to do? All of it doesn’t, but yours does. And I have an example of this, two really, one funny.

I loved, just loved One Good Hustle, which is newly released and I think, my new favourite Billie Livingston novel. It’s about Sammie and her mother Marlene and a tough patch (your PG-13 elevator pitch). There’s a moment when Sammie pulls the drugstore hustle, very cool, very doable. That was the problem, it was so doable. I was reading that section and for the next few hours I just had this feeling that we were going to get caught. You know, me and Sammie. Because we ripped off that drugstore. But of course, “we” didn’t, Sammie did, but that coal of guilt in my belly was real. That’s my funny example, and a true story. Ha.

On a more upsetting note, the night Sammie goes to pick up her mother from that place, with the people—I’m being deliberately cryptic so not to deprive your readers of this, a very glorious/gruesome scene—she’s with a friend, and mortified. The friend claims to be less mortified. That scene was so raw, so human that while reading it, the instinct is to look away. While that never actually happened like that in my life, the discordant feelings of defense, protection, rage and humiliation are so perfectly executed that later when I was thinking about it, for a moment I thought it a part of a story from my own life. With complete acceptance—oh I remember this one time when I had to pick up my dad at …

Except, it didn’t happen to me. But it stabbed into me so thoroughly, the wound so clean, that I was independently humiliated for hours later. (Thanks). I think that is that first person voice, exactly. It’s so intimate and naked, that it must be my own. The power of first person—or maybe that shiv, as wielded by you—is so sharp, so fine, so accurate, that it just becomes the “I” statement that I, the reader, have been too terrified to speak out loud.

BILLIE: I have a compulsion to argue with compliments but I’ll stick a sock in it and say, thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I’m a bit relieved that the scenes you mentioned were made up – ie not ripped from my own personal headlines.  I probably shouldn’t say that. Is there any point to saying what is true? Discerning what “true” means is a bit of a rough hustle in itself.  Is a story “made up” if it comes from the closet where something similar is buried under the dust bunnies? John Irving has come up with story after story that involves Maine, wrestling, teachers, bears and a hirsute woman.  These are such a part of his mental furniture that regardless of how differently he treats them, we know by now that they are a significant part of his personal truth.

I can’t help thinking that labels like genre and literary (and their various sub-categories) mainly give comfort to critics and academics— who love to invent rules. Neither of us went to creative writing school and we are in the minority in that regard. Early on, I used to wonder if there might be some special information that I wasn’t privy to. Were you concerned about formal instruction when you set out to write your first novel? Did you give much thought to “voice” and “structure” or did you just wing it?

SUSIE: My first novel was a complete wing. I had just finished reading a novel that I particularly liked. I believe it was Margaret Lawrence’s A Bird in the House. Do you remember that book? A beautiful family dynamic study. When I was finished, I wanted to continue the feeling of being in the story—and so I wrote my own. No kidding.

The voice, style, structure, all of it was instinctive. I was writing like a reader. For better or worse, that’s still my process. What I read has changed somewhat, it’s probably broader than it was when I was a teenager, and my life experience of course is off the fucking charts—for better or worse—and so it’s getting harder to “wing it.” It certainly takes longer.

What about you? Is it instinct? Your work flows so effortlessly, as I mentioned earlier, it’s like listening to the voice in my head, I always know what you mean. It seems like you must sit down and put the end of the quill in your mouth, give a quick eye roll to acknowledge the muse and then … write a book. Is that it? Has it ever taken you literally years to sort something out to the point where it makes it into a story?

BILLIE:  I do a lot of meandering and babbling before I find anything close to a story. It’s almost like I weave a giant tarp and then I stare at it and wonder if it was really meant to be a dress. Or a skirt. In which case I have to go back and cut away everything that doesn’t look like a skirt.

I hadn’t met any writers before I started my first book. I kept writing in circles for close to four years until I came up with this idea of different POVs – one of them being the voice of authority, which would involve government documents. I did worry a bit. “Are you allowed to do this?  Is this just weird and silly?” I decided to apply to the Banff Centre for the Arts, in part to get over my fear of big institutions and authority and, in part, because I felt a craving to talk to someone who had written a book. When I was accepted into their five-week program I was so sure it was a clerical error that I started bawling at the airport, afraid they’d send me home when I arrived.

SUSIE: And in that vein, we’re both from that unschooled school of writing. So are we outsiders, practicing outsider art? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art

I personally love the label art brut to describe my work, and certainly, my circumstances.

BILLIE:  Art brut. So raw and yet sophisticated! Sure, I’ll go for that. Even if it is French for “finger painting sociopath.” I definitely felt like an outsider at Banff. Most of the other program participants had graduated from a creative writing program and they spoke in a kind of academic patois that I didn’t understand. They often talked about what you should and shouldn’t do in fiction and poetry. I probably used the phrase “Oh yeah? Tough,” a little too often in response.  Halfway through the program I had the great fortune of sitting down with Rachel Wyatt, the program director, and telling her about my idea for a novel, the (to me) crazy structure.  And she said in her sweet English goose of an accent: “Write it. There are no rules!”  She jumped up and plucked novels with unorthodox structures off her shelf to show me. I loved the hell out of Rachel.

SUSIE: I have never been to Banff as an artist. Back in the day I used to apply to things, but I would rarely be accepted, and I suspect it was because I don’t fit the “literary” form, although my partner—a playwright–says that it’s because you have to apply again and again, which appears to be a sort of dues paying thing.

BILLIE:  He’s right. You do have to apply a lot. I think part of it too is learning the type of phrasing and presentation these places like to see.  They are institutional bodies and yet they do act with a kind of human ego. If you squint, they’re almost like petulant lovers asking, “Why do you want to be with me?  What’s so great about me?”  So, if you want to court the Banff Centre or The MacDowell Colony, you tell them how much they mean to you and what you could learn from them.  It also helps to send work that is as polished as you can get it.  Otherwise, it’s as if you’ve come a-courtin’ with a stain on your shirt and spinach in your teeth.

SUSIE: I don’t have the energy to do that, frankly. Rejection sucks, ha ha. I’ve had my own Rachels over the years. People who read my stuff and commented and gave me guidance based on the quality of my writing rather than the subject matter. I also believe that your Rachel is right: there are no rules. You can be sure that if there were, I would be following them. My process is so bizarre and painful that I would love a few rules. Every year I think about applying to some creative writing course and starting from scratch, seeing if there is some kind of magic information that I’m missing. That’s the tragedy of being an outsider, I’m always thinking I’m out of the loop, even if I suspect that by now, I’m in it.   My agent wants me to have another book by end of summer. Some writers are writing TWO books a year. Two!

Seems most agents want their clients to do that, because that’s how books get on the bestsellers list. When you’re reading the list and you go, who the hell is that, chances are it’s somebody who had 27 books to their name. Are you feeling this kind of pressure to produce?

Billie: The “genre” and “literary” difference again.  In the “literary” universe, they don’t want us putting out more than one book every two years. With the lit stuff, publishers rely heavily on press and the potential for awards to drive sales rather than the kind of buyer’s momentum that comes with genre fiction. With literary fiction, there’s a terror that if you saturate the media with someone’s name and picture one year, no one will review another of her books the following year.

I assume writers who churn out semi-annual quickies must have a template in mind and they just rearrange the events and change the names. Which is fine if its easy and fun and all you want is to help people pass time in a crowded airplane. But if doing that leaves you feeling empty and unchallenged and untapped, then I say fuck it, go home to your soul. Otherwise you’ll start to feel like a five-dollar whore. Not that there’s anything wrong with whores — why some of my best friends….

SUSIE: I will include myself in that, if by “whore” you mean someone who will write for cash. For me to write that fast, I think I would give up a lot of what defines my prose, my (ahem) deep characterizations and what I feel are pretty rational motivations, regardless of whatever supernatural backdrop I’m using. I tried to write really fast, pump something out, but I found that I lost my way doing that. It gets to where I have no idea who these people are anymore, and I have no idea what story I wanted to tell.  Turns out, I just can’t pump them out. I’d love to be Stephanie Meyer, or even just the Susie Moloney people think I am, ha ha. I need my downtime, the time it takes to recharge that internal battery that allows us to fall into that beautiful trance state where all the good shit happens. I need to live in their world. Hell, I need to research their world! My current character is an insurance adjuster, and let me tell you, everything I know about insurance burned in the fire.

BILLIE: No kidding. I think one of the biggest surprises to me was that even when I was working with material that was second nature, as I was with Going Down Swinging, I still felt the need to research.  I went to AA meetings (though I’d been dragged to dozens as a kid), went to Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall meetings, (I’d been to many of those as a kid too) and met with social workers to get a sense of things from their prospective (I couldn’t count how many social workers I had growing up).  That kind of personal involvement feels like something I need to do in order to feel any kind of authenticity when I write.  I’ve been working on a story about a woman who turns to spiritualists in her grief and I’ve gone to half a dozen spiritualist services in order to listen to mediums and watch them in action.  Are you that way?  Do you have a need to immerse yourself in the world of your characters?  Your portrayal of Glenn the real estate agent was so believable that I assumed you must have flogged houses at some point in your work history – specific details, and dialog that rang true and helped flesh out the way she dealt with that world and her colleagues.

SUSIE: Spiritualists! I’m terribly impressed. I love a good medium. I went to see the Antiques Psychic in Calgary a few years ago to find my mother. She died when I was very young then I wrote about it and tried to sell it to The Walrus. They never got back to me. I bet they get back to you (and that right there is the difference between literary writers and genre writers).

By the time I was writing The Dwelling, I had bought my first house, sold it and then was buying another. When I was looking for what would be my second house, I really knew what I wanted and so I spent about 3,475,987 hours with my realtor, walking through other people’s houses. It was sad after awhile, all these people selling their houses. I tend to get very attached to places, and leaving them is always sad. After awhile I just saw all these people leaving their homes and offering them to me. I think that came out in The Dwelling.

BILLIE: It did.  One gets the sense that the Dwelling feels lonesome, dejected, and misunderstood, that it wants people to embrace it.  Of course, in this situation, the only way to be one-with-the-house is death. Just one character was capable of loving that house in the way it needed to be loved.

SUSIE: Few people ever mention the underlying sadness in Dwelling, but I think it’s there because of that. As for my realtor, she was terrific about showing me the game. I hung out with her at her agency, I went on open houses with her. I pretended to be her assistant on a couple of calls.

Right now I’m writing about demons, “literal” and personal. It’s a metaphor. (I hope.) And it takes place is a very large city, hmm, like New York. I’ve tried to get a sense of the undercity here, there’s a lot of steel and concrete, a lot of isolation and abandonment of whole areas, and there can be hopelessness, at least to the person passing through. I’m calling that research. And I’m claiming my Metrocard on my taxes next year.

BILLIE:  Demons— That could be really fascinating in a big city. One of the things I’ve learned, being married to a former seminarian, is the origin of some of these old words like Satan.  In Hebrew Ha-Satan translates as “The Accuser,” which, for a fiction writer, is much more interesting than a red guy with horns and a pitchfork.  More frightening is the idea of an insidious voice that says, “You’re a loser. You’re incapable of anything worthwhile so why don’t you just lie down and never get up again.”  Those thoughts, if left unchecked can be really monstrous –especially in the strange isolation of a megacity like New York.

It occurs to me that the house in the Dwelling uses the sadness of its inhabitants in order to coax them more deeply into itself.  The lonely accuser!  In The Thirteen, your most recent book, there is a more overtly Satanic figure – the Accuser is the dark beastly man who encourages the belief in these women that on their own, they aren’t good enough.

That’s what I love about theology and mythology— hours of amusement! They help me tap into the basics of who we are though. We’ve told these stories for thousands of years, trying to make sense of our fears and madness and we keep dreaming up new ways to tell them.

SUSIE: Exactly! It’s all demons. They might be less obviously demonic in the literary world, more shaded in grey. Your characters from Going Down Swinging, Cease to Blush, One Good Hustle, Marlene, Sammie, Eilleen, and Vivian are all running from, and running into demons. Alcohol, isolation, despair, abuse, neglect, all universal demons.

OMG. Billie. I’m you.

(Cue music by John Williams)

— Susie Moloney & Billie Livingston

———————–

Susie Moloney is the author of the award-winning humour column, Funny Girl. She is also the author of four novels, including the 2011 Globe and Mail Best Book, and winner of 2012 The Michael Van Rooy Memorial Award for Fiction, The Thirteen. She lives in Winnipeg and New York City.

Billie Livingston published her critically acclaimed first novel, Going Down Swinging, in 2000. Her book of poetry, The Chick at the Back of the Church, was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her novel, Cease to Blush was a Globe and Mail Best Book as was her story collection, Greedy Little Eyes, which went on to win the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the CBC’s Bookie Prize. One Good Hustle will be published July 24, 2012

 

 

Jul 062012
 

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It’s difficult to hang out with Carol (Margo Martindale), the awkward protagonist of Alexander Payne’s short film “14e Arrondissement.” An American postal carrier on vacation in Paris, she narrates what happened on her trip in a broken and poorly pronounced French delivered to an unseen French class in Denver, Colorado. Her desire to fully explore Paris, to really experince what she imagines is a French experience is troubled by her insistence on doing so with a fanny pack . . . we are, at least at first, meant to see this as a satire of American tourists abroad.

But what I like about Payne’s satire is how his characters are clowns (themselves the somestimes desperate object of ridicule) and also buffoons (who ridicule the audience). Of course, this double aspect may be only apparent in any discomfort we feel listening to Carol’s poorly pronounced travelogue, watching her awkward interactions with the locals, and seeing her trying to pop her ears in an elevator like a deep sea bass coming up from the depths (while she, in voice over, talks about death and dying). We don’t want to identify with Carol, particularly if we own fanny packs.

But Carol’s frank and clear narrative counterposes the poor French and her so-very-un-Parisian travels as she confesses a litany of loss, failed dreams, and a little bare-bone loneliness. She perhaps shares too much with this well of pathos, and yet there is a brutal honesty to the confession, partly a product of the directness of the form, a dramatic monologue that is her French class report, but also part of the clarity with which she sees her losses and reports them. There is no sense that she seeks sympathy. In case we’re confused, she explains that she is a happy person. Her story isn’t a plea for sympathy. It’s about her trip to Paris. And in the conclusion of the report and the short film, a conclusion we may feel teeter on the edge of all that disappointment and loss she has experienced, her real journey breaks through.

Carol has an absolute outsider’s view of the city and with her awkward perspective, her struggle to find her way through her expectations and hopes, she at first seems to be the quintessential tourist. In the opening shots of her in the hotel she reports that “the food wasn’t as good as [she] expected” over a shot of a half-eaten burger and a bottle of diet coke she has obviously ordered through room service in her hotel. But Carol is complex and confesses she did not sign up for a tour because she “wanted to live an adventure in a foreign place.” Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky argues that an “important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” Carol refuses to be exclusively a tourist because she resists becoming a victim to her expectations, her homesickness for her dogs, or her jet lag. She does intrepidly seek what Paris has to offer, despite her desire for familiar narratives like when she imagines what it would be like to deliver mail there.

It was with great fear that I watched the last scenes of this short though, as it reminded in a terrible way of Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Mrs Brill,” a story I read in my youth and that, thereafter, filled me with foreboding whenever I imagined I was part of some great musical theatre moment of belonging on trains or in public parks. Who hasn’t wanted to feel what Mrs Brill feels when she imagines all the people in the park with their chorus of “We understand.” Carol is thankfully not Mrs Brill, though.  For Carol does  not desire to be accepted or to be drawn into the beloved arms of a throng of strangers. Carol’s ending is about her own experience, her own insistence on happiness and her own ability to appreciate the moment, on the bench, with the sandwich, in Paris.

“14e Arrondissement” is the last of the eighteen short films by well-known filmmakers that make up the anthology film Paris Je’ Taime. Richard Brody in his New Yorker review argues that “this mixed bag [Paris Je T’Aime]. . . is mandatory viewing for its one absolute masterpiece, by Alexander Payne.” Numero Cinq at the Movies has featured one of the other Paris Je T’Aime shorts, Tom Tykwer’s “Faubourg Saint-Denis.”

Payne apparently first resisted this story when he was challenged to make a short film set in the 14e Arrondisement. In an interview with David Stratton, he admits, “the last thing in the world I wanted to do was make a film about an American tourist, and I thought this would be an excuse to hire some really beautiful European actress, you know, and like, you know, have some fun that way.” But the place inspired him to move away from his own Francophile desire and this idea occurred to him. “After I spent time walking around that Ahondes mall and brainstorming as to what the idea could be, I just thought the idea I came up with was one that would give me an excuse, basically, to make a documentary about that. 
I wanted to show as much of it as possible, and the idea of a woman having a lamo tourist day walking around that strange Ahondes mall . . . somehow the idea of an American tourist and hiring Margo Martindale came to me.”
 And yet Carol allows Payne to represent the sublime she finds in the lamo.

Alexander Payne is an American writer and director known for such compelling and fascinating films as Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways, all four co-written with his frequent writing partner Jim Taylor They were nominated for an Oscar for their adaptation of Tom Peyrotta’s novel Election, won both the Golden Globe and Oscar for their adaptation of Sideways, and, Payne and two other writers recently won an Oscar for their adaptation of The Descendants. He is in pre-production to direct a film called Nebraska.

— R. W. Gray

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Jul 062012
 

 

A widow, an Irish wanderer, a house built on a fault line and a mysterious light form the essential furniture of Gerard Beirne’s fine new story “Fault Lines.” Beirne is an Irish writer and you can hear the fierce rhetoric of the Irish in his opening cadences, the insistent lists and parallel constructions. The story is dark, almost noir in its atmosphere of eroticism and constant menace. Gerard Beirne and I don’t know each other except in our email interchange over this story, but we have tread common paths. Beirne was the Writer in Residence at the University of New Brunswick where I also have been Writer in Residence; he is the fiction editor at The Fiddlehead where I published some of earliest stories, yea, these many years ago; and he just published a poetry collection, Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual, with Oberon Press in Ottawa, a publisher with whom I have had a long association including a decade of editing the annual Best Canadian Stories. So he and I exist in almost parallel universes that have somehow flowed together on this page. Read the story.

dg

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You could look at it this way. You could say I was the one real beneficiary of his death. Not so much the car as the air conditioning, the house as the pool, the cellar as the wine collection, the lady as his wife.

As a lady she brought with her charm, sophistication, impeccable dress sense, a taste for good food. But as his wife she brought with her everything. His fortune, his lifestyle, his foul mouth, and his filthy mind.

* * *

“We’re all so much better off without him,” Maybelle told me on that first night we ended up in bed together. I was drinking his champagne, eating his caviar, lying passively beneath his gyrating wife. “He was cruel. He was fucking cruel. Cruel to all of his previous wives. Cruel to their children. Cruel to himself. And, worst of all, cruel to me. Irrespective of his ability to increase his fortune we are all so much better off without the bastard.”

She tipped over her champagne glass and poured his 1975 Dom Perignon along my chest, then bent over, extended her tongue, and licked that expensive liquid up in one long sweeping motion. And in that prolonged salivating moment, I knew just how wrong she was. How it was I, and not anyone of his close or distant family, who was the better off.

I fed her with his caviar, and she sucked it from my fingers. I appraised her firm body as it pincered me from above, grateful for the multigym he had purchased on its behalf. Then I thought of the swimming pool outside where earlier we had stripped and swam in the moonlike glow of the veranda spotlight. It was the first time we had seen each other’s bodies. The first time I had seen the naked flesh of a widow of barely forty-eight hours. The yellow glare of the spotlight jaundiced her pale skin. A light breeze blew in from the canyon, that large empty gulch that stretched ahead of us, carrying the smell of creosote bushes. The dry desert dust landed softly on the flagstones and tiles, on the surface of the shimmering water lit from below, on our warm flesh lit from we knew not where. We were exposed not just to each other but to the world if the world had cared to look.

The only lights to be seen were those dotted around the property for security, a row of house lights eighty miles to the east, and the stars they could barely be distinguished from. We scarcely glanced across at one another before diving on in. If I could help it, I was determined never to resurface. But resurface we did, together, in a hardened embrace.

Maybelle’s toes curled against the white sheets. She grasped my shoulder blades tightly with her fingers. Her long manicured fingernails scratched across my skin. “Cruelty is the worst sin of all, don’t you think?” she whispered close to my ear. Then she did something with her body that might not have been thought possible. “This was the only way I could hurt him in return.”

I almost screamed with the excruciating mix of pleasure and pain. The white curtains billowed out from the half-open shutters. A solitary star twinkled within my line of vision. Maybelle shuddered violently. Her strong legs gripped my thighs. Her fingers clawed at my torso. The star plummeted through the black sky. Died before my eyes.

Later as Maybelle showered, I stood by the window in his study and looked up, as he had looked up on so many occasions, at the constellations with his telescope. Orion. Pegasus. Ursa Major. What would happen if one of those stars died? I wondered. What sort of hunter would remain, what sort of winged horse, what sort of furrowing instrument? What would become then of the great design? How would we read the night?

I turned the lens towards the darkened desert, the canyon. That other great void. From deep within the canyon I witnessed an uncertain flash of light shooting upwards for which I had no explanation. To the east, the distant houselights flickered. Outside the glare of the security lights reflected against the lens. In the bathroom a flow of water spread in rivulets down Maybelle’s hard body.

How had I come this far?

* * *

Leaving Ireland had been easy. Leaving a small Donegal town. A small landholding I had no interest in. Leaving home.

I was happy to fill a hold all and empty it on the bed of a YMCA on the other side of the world. Happy to be paranoid on the streets of New York. Happy to work the graveyard shift washing dishes in an all-night cafe. Happy to tire of all that and board a Greyhound for Los Angeles.

Happy to get work with a landscape firm cutting lawns and trimming hedges in Santa Monica. Happy to meet Maybelle in one of his holiday homes by the side of his pool in a pastel orange bikini. Happy to peruse her shapely body. Happy to amicably converse. Happy to return to his secluded mansion in the Mojave Desert to replace his Mexican gardener who had flown the coop with immigration on his tail. Happy to inhabit his property. Happy to rise through his ranks. Happy to become, on his request, her personal assistant. Happy to follow her wherever she might go. Happy to assist in his early demise.

* * *

Maybelle pulled at my shoulder, woke me up. She sat up in bed distraught. The moon shed its light through the shuttered window. “Did you feel that?” Her face was pale. She crossed her hands over her chest like a corpse and held on to herself.

“What?” I looked for my watch on the table next to the bed. It was twelve minutes past three.

She turned angrily. “Didn’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The shaking.”

“No.”

“It was an earthquake.” She pushed her head slightly forward as though listening intently. As if something might be heard that would confirm her suspicion.

“I didn’t feel a thing.” I tried to put my arm around her to comfort her, but she brushed it off. She turned suddenly to the empty champagne bottle on the table beside her. “Look.”

“What is it?”

“It’s vibrating. Can’t you see that?” She got up out of bed, and walked to the window. “We’re on the fault here. Right on the fault. Any moment the Big One could come, and when it does we’ll be swallowed up whole. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“It was nothing,” I said. “A small tremor at the most.” We had talked about this before, but never at such intimate quarters, never so close to death.

“The bastard. The fucking bastard.” She looked out into the dark. In the breeze the light material of the curtain wrapped itself around her naked body. “That’s why he built it here. Goddamn him! Because it was so fucking cheap. His one great ambition in life — to buy up the fucking fault lines!”

“He’s dead now,” I said. “Everything can be undone.” I held my hand out to her. “Come back to bed.”

“Bed,” she repeated. “The great undoing.” She pulled the shutters closed as if they could somehow protect her. She came back over and got in beside me. The shutters rattled. Maybelle heard them and jumped.

“It’s only the wind.”

She glared at me. “Did we really screw?”

“Yes we did,” I assured her. “Like there was no tomorrow.”

* * *

Maybelle honoured his wishes and had him cremated. A simple ceremony had been arranged. Three of his previous wives showed up and six of his children. Maybelle was unclear how many wives there had been before her and was equally unsure about the number of children. She had none by him that much she knew. He had insisted on that. He told her he did not want her destroying her body like all of the others. That she was his last chance.

“His last chance for what?” I asked.

Maybelle shrugged. “I have no idea.”

She did not speak to any of them, but she assured me they would be as glad to see the back of him as she was. He had treated them all despicably.  “There are no bruises I can show you,” she told me one time sensing some slight doubt of mine. “Not on this body, but up here,” she said pointing to her head. “There’s where the damage lies.” At his cremation I looked at his array of wives and children and considered the cumulative internal injuries.

Afterwards I drove Maybelle and the urn with his ashes home. Keeping the urn with her, Maybelle went up to lie down. She did not reappear until evening. She ate a light dinner and asked me to send the staff away. She said she needed time alone. They would be paid of course. I asked if her dismissal of the staff included me also, and she told me not to be so foolish.

After dinner she asked me to drive her to the canyon. She held the urn in her lap as we drove. The orange dust swirled up from the wheels past the windows. The hot evening air wafted in shimmering waves distorting all that was visible. I looked out at the wavering yellow sneezeweeds and desert trumpet. A Jackrabbit leaped dangerously across the road in front of us clambering for shade. I put my hand on the urn, our fingers touching accidentally. Maybelle appeared not to notice, although she told me later that her heart for a moment ceased to function. The urn and Maybelle’s fingers were cool to the touch, his air-conditioning keeping all of our temperatures low. I felt the cold waves sweep over me, their calming influence, as our fingers parted.

Maybelle drummed on the lid of the urn impatiently. She glared through the front window. “You never talk about Ireland.”  She tightened her lips and brought me under her gaze.

“I’d rather forget it,” I told her. A viscous green and orange sunset soaked through the widening sky.

“Yes,” she agreed pulling the urn in against her stomach, “there are certain things best forgotten.” She glanced through the window at the vast expanse of gleaming desert. “I’m sorry. I’ll never ask you again.”

But Maybelle was right. In the three years I had known her I had never willingly spoken of Ireland. On a few occasions in the beginning she had alluded to it, but I skilfully deflected the conversation. I was living a new life now. Perhaps the first I had ever really lived. At its worst Ireland was a womb, a time pre-birth. At its very best it was a uterine contraction forcing me out into the life I now lived.

A shaft of light speared the road in front of us. I steered his car deliberately towards it. Permitted the light to dissect the metal car, and us within it, like a laser cutting tool. It shone brilliantly through the front windscreen, sparkling on the side of the urn, and leaving a line of gold along Maybelle’s toned body. She shielded her eyes with her hand, stared absently ahead.

“A meteor fell to earth here one time.” I had not heard mention of this before. “Some time in the sixties.”

“A lot of things from outer space were visible in the sixties,” I reminded her.

Maybelle ignored me. “The marks are still visible although the meteor itself was broken up and removed for scientific evaluation. The crater is somewhere around here.” She twisted the lid of the urn in a half-circle. I thought for a moment she was going to take it off to check if he was in there still. “He used to speak about it. He said he wished they had left it where it had fallen. He said he could have made a fucking fortune out of it.” She gritted her teeth as though constraining a further obscenity.

The car bounced on its suspension over a series of ruts in the surface of the road. A plump turkey buzzard swooped low and flew past the front of the car flapping its black wings viciously. We watched it circle the rotting trunk of a lone pinyon tree.

“Vulture.” Maybelle seemed in awe of it. She chewed on the side of her mouth. I looked at her fluffed out hair, her carefully applied eye-shadow, mascara, lipstick, and face powders, her slinky black mourning dress, her high heels. I surveyed the flat expanse of water-starved decay that surrounded us. Maybelle seemed more out of place here than I. More removed. I wondered about her past. She had never spoken openly about that either.

The road turned directly into the blazing sunset. The sky was engulfed in flames before us. We could have been driving into hell itself. A hundred yards or so up ahead a dirt track veered off to the left leading down to the canyon. I slowed down, pulled off the road, and followed along the rough surface until the earth opened up before us.

I got out and opened Maybelle’s door for her. She swung her long shapely legs out, and placed her high heels on the desert soil. I took her arm, and we walked slowly out towards the canyon. Her shoes scuffed on the loose stones. Maybelle twisted on her heel, her left leg buckling beneath her. I supported her weight and helped her to rebalance. Then we walked together right up to the edge. The yellow and red ochre walls of the canyon dropped sharply downwards for thousands of feet. Giant stalagmites of crumbling rock pierced upwards from the canyon sides and floor. Maybelle showed no fear.

“He’s been down there,” Maybelle said. “At least that’s what he told me.”

I steadied myself and looked down into the dry gulch. In all the time I had lived here I had never been this close to the canyon before. Obscure trails wound their way along narrow switchbacks making me feel dizzy.

“He’d stay overnight,” she said kicking some loose soil over the edge. I watched it fall lightly through the air. “He said it felt good to be sleeping in the bowels of the earth. Of course he might have been anywhere fucking any one of his lady fucking friends.”

Maybelle smiled and swiftly drew back her arm with the urn. She swung it through a wide arc and, letting out a grunt like a hammer or discus-thrower, she flung it as hard as she could out into the ravine. The urn soared through the air then dropped swiftly downwards. It struck a ridge a few hundred feet below and bounced outwards.

“MIND YOUR BIG FUCKING HEAD!” Maybelle’s shrill voice echoed through the walls of the canyon before returning to haunt her. She laughed hysterically. The urn fell deeper into the gulch crashing into one of the sharp peaks. A dull thud like broken bone sounded upwards. Pieces of ceramic splintered and showered. Heat hardened clay shattered against the earth it had been raised from. His ashes gusted outwards. A cloud puffed up past our faces and over our heads. A mixture of sobs and laughter bellowed from Maybelle’s open mouth and ricocheted back out of the throat of the canyon. Her make-up was smudged with tears, and her black dress was covered in red dust. She rocked on her high heels. I held onto her fast, afraid she would topple over the edge, and it was then we kissed for the first time, even as his ashes continued to swirl about us. We may have tasted them, him, on our pressed together lips, our pro-offered tongues. I was aroused and repulsed at once. Our mouths separated, and we clung together at the edge of the great divide.

We drove home in the dimming light. Maybelle’s fingers trailed across the back of my neck. The tyres churned over the dirt road. I observed the silhouette of the buzzard atop the decaying tree. I knew that Maybelle had been watching out for it too. I drove on quickly. Miles of road disappeared behind us. We approached the huge outcrop of his mansion. I pressed the remote control and the heavy metal gates opened at my fingertips. Maybelle watched them shut securely behind us in the rear-view mirror. Inside the house she reached immediately for the champagne and brought it out to the pool. She popped open the cork. A gush of champagne spurted into the air. The veranda spotlight switched on automatically. Maybelle filled our glasses. Frantic bubbles spewed over the edges. “To life,” she said raising her glass. We tipped their fragile edges together and drank thirstily washing the dust down. Then Maybelle turned her back to me and instructed me to unzip her dress.

I pulled the zip downwards along the ridge of her spine. I was still in her employment, still serving as her personal assistant. My assistance in his death could even have been construed as a part of my service. Likewise our trip to the canyon. But surely the kiss had changed all that. Unless the provision of comfort and release for a grieving wife was a part of my duty too. For yes, despite her relief at his demise and despite her contribution to it, Maybelle was grieving, grieving for something as yet unclear.

She flicked her shoes off her feet into the swimming pool and slipped her dress off her shoulders. I watched the shoes sink heel-down into the warm water. She cocked a glance at me, and I knew that I was expected to undress too. The low howl of a distant coyote lingered in the dense air. We teetered for a moment unclothed on the edge of the pool, then dived in.

* * *

Until the very end I had little contact with him. He was hardly ever there, always jetting around on one business concern or another. Whenever he was present, I was usually too busy with his wife’s life to intervene in his. We nodded from distances, exchanged casual remarks.

“You take care of her,” he told me early on establishing the nature of our relationship, “like you took care of my gardens. Trimming, pruning, watering. Keep her neat. Keep her beautiful. It’s what she wants. Pay attention to her whims, but be wary. There’s a certain wildness in any good garden that ought to be cultivated but contained.” He held my wrist firmly. “I don’t need to tell you this, you do your job and I’ll pay you well, you don’t, and I’ll kick your fucking ass all the way back to Ireland.”

I took no offence in these latter remarks. He was a business man adopting a sensible economic position. He was paying me good money after all. Incredible money. He had a right to certain expectations, and I was not an unwilling party to all of this. As for comparing his wife to a garden, it could easily be interpreted as the stuff of poetry, love even.

Whatever about the first kiss, or the first glimpse of Maybelle’s naked body, the instance of our coition, I knew, should have represented a moment of catharsis in my life. But just as my departure from Ireland was welcomed but left me none the wiser, this moment too escaped me. Nothing could ever be the same again, and yet beyond the champagne, the caviar, the sex, the selfish indulgences, the difference eluded me.

Our first night together became two, became three, became four. I slept in his bed, I ate his food and drank his drink. And, yes, I fucked his wife.

His phone was disconnected, his staff were excused from their duties, and his guard dogs prowled the perimeters. Maybelle was raucous, crude, and undisciplined. She was burdened with grief. But I, I was free to savour the delights. The champagne, the caviar, the grinding of our bodies. Although I barely knew him, he bequeathed me all of that.

The remaining dispersal of his fortune had still to be determined however. Maybelle was not ready for lawyers just yet she said. Nor the relatives. Not ready to face the swarm that would descend to pick over his bones. She felt certain she would come into the most of it, but the others would surely contest. Apart from his unnumbered previous wives there were any number of women out there who may have borne his children she said. Any number of individuals who would lay claim to his past. For now she didn’t want to have to deal with that. She wanted a few private moments of dignity.

We awoke hot and clammy at four in the morning  after a fiery night of cavorted passion. My limbs ached. Maybelle tossed and turned. Flipped her pillow over, beat it flat. She turned on her back and kicked the remaining sheet off of us.

“He hated nights like this,” she said. “They were somehow my fault.” A trickle of sweat ran down the side swell of her freckled breast. Maybelle started to cry.

“Maybelle.” I reached over and curled up against her. Our bodies meshed stickily. I stroked her tear-stained cheek. The heat between us was unbearable, and yet we clung on. Over her shoulder through the open window, the sky was filled with burning stars. The light breeze swished through the palm leaves. Maybelle convulsed in my arms, sobbing heavily. She began to curse him loudly. All manner of crudities slipped off her tender lips.

“Shh!” I brushed the hair off her forehead. I took her hand and helped her from the bed. I led her into his study and brought her to the telescope by the window. I positioned the eyepiece on Venus. I stood behind Maybelle and clasped my arms about her waist. Her body trembled against me as she leaned in to look.

“It’s startling,” she whispered.

 “Venus, the most brilliant of all.”

 “In all our years together he never once let me look through this instrument.” She swung the telescope through the heavens. Took it all in. Then she lowered it down to the black horizon. “My God! Look!”

I lifted my head from her neck which I had been gently kissing. Even with my naked eye the flame of light was visible flaring brightly upwards. The guard dogs began to whine. The padded beat of their paws as they ran in circles around the compound punctuated the stillness.

She pulled her head back from the telescope. “It’s coming from the canyon,” she said. in that moment it died away. It was the same light I had seen a few nights previous. Maybelle looked at me horrified. “What is it?”

“It could be anything,” I said. “Anything at all.”

I knew she was thinking of the urn arcing through the air, of its body shattering against the rock, and his ashy remains scattering in the winds. The whining of the dogs lowered in pitch and volume until it disappeared, and the rhythmic beat of their paws came to a standstill. Maybelle turned in my arms. She pressed her bristling goose pimpled flesh against me.

We would go back to the bed now I knew, and she would hurt me. Harder than ever before. Doling out her vengeance in the only way she knew how.

The following afternoon we sat out by the pool on the veranda eating a late breakfast. We drank the orange juice I had freshly prepared and ate a mix of dates and figs. A full pot of Colombian coffee waited beside two white cups and saucers. We looked across the flat desert to the canyon. The sun shone down, and a light breeze trickled through the scattered low brush. A green and yellow lizard slipped over the balcony. Maybelle bit lusciously into a fig and spoke as she chewed.

“Do you think we should check the canyon?” She looked at me seriously.

I laughed. “It’s too vast, Maybelle. There would be no point.”

Maybelle stared at me, annoyed by my laughter. She deliberated on something. “The telescope is pointed directly at the spot.” She shrugged. “It was only a thought. It would ease my mind.”

Her response intimidated me. We were not on equal footing yet. An element of authority persisted in her tone. I would have to proceed more cautiously.

She took a drink of orange juice and peered over the balcony. I saw something give way within her. “I was scared last night, that’s all.” She smiled back at me. “The light was unusual, don’t you think?”

“It was curious,” I replied.

“But you’re right,” she said. “It could have been anything. It would be pointless to investigate.”

The empty cups rattled in their saucers. Maybelle looked to them and then to me. The tremor ran through both of our bodies. Maybelle gripped my hand. The water sloshed in the pool, broke in waves against its sides, and splashed over the edge. Then the tremor subsided as quickly as it began.

“It’s alright,” I said. “It has passed.”

Maybelle looked terrified. We sat there waiting for more, for the aftershocks, but nothing more came.  “In all my time here, I’ve never got used to it.”

I looked across the flat country, followed the line of weakness with my eyes. “It’s the earth coming together,” I told her, “not renting apart. That’s its saving feature.”

“It will be the death of us,” she said. “Believe you me.”

The water continued to ebb in the pool. For the first time since his death Maybelle mentioned what had occurred.

“We did no wrong, did we?”

I shook my head. “We administered his medicine, that’s all.” And that was all we had done. I had no regrets about that. “Irrespective of what you thought of him, he was in great pain. We did him a service. A final act of loving generosity.”

In the end all we did was hasten up his dying. People did it all of the time. The dose was greater than the recommended one, but his passage out of this life was eased considerably.

“It was the least we could do. If you had left him in pain, if you had deliberately done that and had taken pleasure from it, that would be something else. That might give you something to trouble your conscience with. And even then who is to say whether you would have been right or wrong?”

Maybelle ran her finger across the table top. She disturbed a light covering of dust. She held out the coated tip of her finger. “A part of him? It has to be possible.”

I didn’t answer. She looked hard at her finger then ever so slowly pushed it into her mouth and sucked on it suggestively.

I looked away as though I had caught her engaged in a personal act. I firmly believed we had done the right thing, but it was true our motives had to be questioned. When Maybelle initially discussed it with me I had felt it a part of my duty. But did I also hope that we would end up together like this? Did I conspire to partake in his fortune? And yet he was going to die anyway within a matter of days or weeks, a month or two at the outside the doctor had said. So what had I altered? But of course what I had altered was the nature of our relationship. Together,  we had plotted the taking of a life. Conspirators. Implicated by each other’s actions.

As for hoping we would end up like this or that I would partake in his fortune, I honestly could not say. I could not remember consciously aspiring to any of that, still can’t, and yet a part of me pleaded guilty on this behalf.

“Depending on how this turns out I intend to sell this property,” she said.

I nodded.

“In some ways I will hate to see it go.” She got up and leaned over the balcony where the lizard had earlier crawled. The bright blue cloudy sky sloped to meet the seared horizon. Maybelle turned to face me. The front of her white silk dressing gown flapped open. Her pale lightly freckled flesh, as if the scorching Californian sun was incapable of touching it, was exposed above and below the knotted belt.

“What do you see?” she asked.

I responded with a puzzled look.

“In me? When you look at me what do you see?”

I poured myself a coffee, tasted it. “A strong woman. Someone capable of surviving out here. Like the odd rare plant that intrudes into the desert, that has no place belonging here, but somehow makes it this far. Survives against the odds. And with a fresh fall of rain blooms magnificently, beautifully, brightening up the dullness in a way unimaginable to the natural habitat.”

Maybelle laughed harshly. “My god! You do have the gift of the gab, no doubt about it. You’re a rare bloom yourself.” She turned back to the dry expanse and spoke quietly, almost to herself. “If I asked you to take me back to Ireland with you, would you? For me, would you return?”

“That would depend,” I said considering my reply, “in which capacity you were asking me to return. As staff or as something else?”

Maybelle brushed out her hair with her fingers. “What would be your choice?” .

“As staff I would return, for a while at least. But I would not remain indefinitely.”

“And as something else?”

“I suppose it would depend on the something else.”

The lower half of her gown had slipped open further and her muscular right thigh was now exposed to the hip. The inner curves of her firm breasts were clearly visible.

“What have you got in mind?”

I took another drink of coffee. Maybelle’s collar bone protruded like a primitive neck adornment. “That is up to you,” I said. “I have no mind of my own.”

Maybelle quickly pulled her gown in around her. “That’s where you are so wrong.” She was agitated, upset. “He did not buy that. He was never able to buy minds. He could bruise them, but he could not own them. That was his mistake. That was always his mistake. He thought he could recognise something flawed, something imperfect that would be available for less, and then work on it, renovate it, pretty it up to be admired by all and make a handsome profit. But the trouble was the flaw would always be there, could not be painted away, and as sure as God the weakness would finally break through to the surface bringing him and everything around him down with it.”

She clutched the lapels of her gown tightly about her chest. The knuckles of her clenched fists showed through as white as weather exposed bone.

“You are right,” I said. “Right about it all except for in one respect. What you say he recognised as flaws were not flaws at all. They were not weaknesses but strengths. Not to be hidden away but to be revealed and revered.”

A sharp wind gusted across the veranda. Maybelle braced herself against it. Out above the horizon the blue sky darkened upwards to grey as a wall of swirling particles rose like a curtain of gauze.

“Dust storm,” I said. “We better get inside quickly.”

Maybelle steadied herself. I reached across, took her arm, and led her indoors.

The storm lasted throughout the afternoon. Maybelle and I watched it from the bedroom window. The pale particles of dust repulsed and attracted one another. We could see nothing outside of ourselves. As though we too were swirling somewhere out in the universe at some point in its infinite existence where something, a planet or a star, some heavenly body, was either being created or destroyed. We held on to one another. From time to time Maybelle wept.

The storm blew over. Lifted like a fog departing. Maybelle kissed me on the cheek as if something had lifted within her also. Something that had caused her to wonder if the storm would ever pass on, if we would not be lost within it forever. She took my hand and we walked outside.

The figs, the dates, the white cups and saucers, the empty jug of orange juice, the table and chairs were covered in a shroud of yellow and red dust. The veranda, the trees, the shrubs, the carefully watered lawns. Particles floated on the pool water, dispersed beneath the surface in a murky haze. Maybelle looked at me, and in a single movement shrugged off her dressing gown. This time we understood each other perfectly. I nodded my assent and undressed. I took her hand and together we jumped into the dust-filled water.

That night Maybelle and I withdrew silently to his study. We stood either side of his telescope watching the night sky. I listened to Maybelle’s heavy breathing, and she listened to mine. The stars flickered on and off. We waited patiently until we finally saw what we had come to see. Like a meteorite burning upwards, returning to bring order to the cosmos. Maybelle bent her head into the telescope where it was trained. She raised her head and nodded her confirmation. The light extinguished. She led me back into the bedroom and made angry love.

* * *

I set out alone the following morning while Maybelle slept. I took his car and drove down to the canyon. The morning haze clung lightly above the desert. The yellow sun had begun its upwards curve. Already the day was hot. I had decided the previous night after our rough lovemaking to go out and take a look at the canyon. To see, for Maybelle’s sake, if I could find anything that would explain the light.

I looked through the telescope before leaving to where it was pointed. I observed the prominences, the distinguishing features that might help identify the exact location later.

As I drove I turned the air-conditioning off and rolled down the side window. The hot air wafted through. The skyline was tinged in pink. The soil all around warmed to an orange gleam. A kangaroo rat hopped out from a clump of sagebrush across the road in front of me. I felt the soft bump of its body beneath the front wheel. I looked back and saw its innards spewed across the road. I recalled the turkey buzzard Maybelle and I had seen the time we had been out here together.

I reached the canyon about three quarters of an hour later. I went over to the edge and looked down into the canyon where Maybelle had previously cast the urn. There was no sign of its fragments anywhere. I glanced along the canyon floor and tried to gauge the location the light had flared from. I looked back to identify the position of his house. Although the house itself was not visible, I recognised the landmarks around it. I turned again to the canyon and took my directions from the features I had observed through the telescope. I estimated that I’d need to travel another two or three miles along the canyon rim.

I drove as far as I could in the car, about another mile and a half, before the track ran out. I pulled in, turned off the engine, and began to walk through the dry dirt and brush. The gouged out gulch fell sharply to my right. The large gaseous sphere of the sun ignited high in the sky. Perspiration broke out from the pores on my forehead and underarms. My throat was already dry. I should have set out earlier. I was crazy to have come without water. It was a basic rule in the desert to always carry an extra two days food and water. The body could lose up to a gallon a day. Even when you are not thirsty you need to keep drinking. I knew this only too well, and yet I ignored this ingrained knowledge. I hadn’t even bothered to take his emergency pack from the car. Flares, first-aid and snakebite kit, matches, compass.

I walked labouriously across the baked earth. I wiped my brow and scanned back across the flat desolation to where Maybelle lay in bed sipping, no doubt, from the remainder of his champagne. We had drunk fourteen bottles between us in the last few days. Maybelle told me she was developing a taste for it, that it was becoming an obvious part of her future.

The sudden buzz of a rattlesnake stopped me dead in my tracks. A number of rocks were scattered out to my left-hand side. It could well have been hiding there in the shade. I listened keenly to trace the sound, but the rattle abruptly stopped. For a while I stayed where I was watching and listening. Then I cautiously pushed on.

I finally made it out to where I believed the light had come from. The muscles in the backs of my legs ached. My shirt sleeves were soaked with sweat. It clung to my back. I wondered if Maybelle could possibly be watching me. Looking, from his study, through the great lens seeking out my human form.

The sun scorched downwards relentlessly from high in the sky. I was exhausted by the energy I had expended walking in its heat. I rested on my hunkers and looked down into the wide gulf where the earth had once been cut through by a surging flow of water. Layer upon layer of rocks receded downwards, through time, to the oldest strata at the dried out river bed. I thought of the flash floods that could sweep through in a moment, higher than a person, careening destructively through the gullies.

I stood up and walked to the rim. I viewed the crags and razor-back ridges eroded by wind, water, and extreme cycles of heat and cold. The sun caught on the phosphorescent tint of mineral deposits and flashed back a myriad of minute glinting rainbows.

I ought to have taken binoculars along to bring the bone-dry gullies and washes closer. To look for anything out of the ordinary. Staring down this distance scared me though. I felt genuinely fearful that I would be drawn over the edge to fall helplessly like the urn which held his ashes.

I walked along the rim for over an hour forcing myself to look between the buttes and ridges, but I could see nothing unusual. I knew I would have to go down. I would have to overcome my fears and find a trail winding over the switchbacks down into the heart of the canyon.

It was approaching noon, and without water it would be reckless to attempt it. And yet I didn’t want to go back to Maybelle without having tried. It would be the death of whatever we had between us to do otherwise. To lie, to pretend I had been down there and had seen nothing that would give any explanation, was not something I would have been capable of doing, was not something she would have believed.

I searched for another fifteen minutes and found the beginnings of a trail along the side of the canyon. It could have been formed by the feet of a past nomadic tribe or by miners seeking out the minerals stored beneath the earth’s surface. It might not even have been a trail at all but the basic lie of the land.

I inhaled steeply and stepped cautiously out onto the pathway. I tried not to look down. I walked as far away from the edge as possible, clinging to the rough canyon wall, shuffling each foot along. My throat contracted with thirst and fear. A gust of wind caused me to teeter momentarily. I leaned in against the canyon wall for protection. My heart pounded deep within my skeletal frame. I felt the hard rock pressing into my spine. No more than five feet away the sheer drop below veered up to meet me. I caught my breath and held it. I stood erect, my body straightening away from the angled wall. I exhaled slowly and began to move again.

I had only come a few hundred yards. The top of the canyon was not far above my head. I had a long way to go. I eased my way along, looking straight ahead of me, until I reached the first switchback. The trail curved steeply through a sharp U-turn, narrowing at the point of curvature to less than three feet. The dry soil and loose fragments of rock scattered beneath the soles of my shoes. The worn grips of my light footwear slid dangerously over them. Particles of grit and dust trickled over the edge. I had come completely unprepared for this. The temperature was rising into the nineties. I had no water, no headwear, no decent footwear, and not enough nerve. I was weak and sweating profusely. I stopped at the curve of the trail and leaned once more against the hard jutting wall. Against my better instincts I looked down. The vast depth of the gulch was fearsome. I felt dizzy and nauseous, parched with thirst. My sense of balance wavered. I could hardly believe how irresponsible I had been. I knew the dangers of desert country as much as anyone.

The sun flashed in my eyes and dazzled me. My body swayed lightly. I tensed with the overwhelming terror of my mortality. The buzz of the rattlesnake shook loudly in my ears. The dark wide span of the vulture’s wings cast its shadow across the whole of the canyon as the vicious trembling began.

The ground shook violently beneath me. It shook its way through the base of my feet up through my spine to my skull. I thought of Maybelle lying in bed gripped with fear. I heard the loud rumble of earth and rock as it loosened and fell away. I watched it shower down around me. Then I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms tightly around myself, and listened to the catastrophe of my quaking body.

* * *

I drove back to Maybelle wondering where it would go from here. Although I could always try again, I knew I wouldn’t. Even with the right equipment, even taking the necessary precautions, I would not descend again into the canyon. His fortune, his air-conditioning, his pool, his wife were not worth that to me. Had I finally reached a moment of catharsis in my life? Had something of magnitude about my existence finally been revealed to me? Would everything be different from here on out?

But deep within me I knew that this was no different from my decision to leave Ireland. That there too I had forsaken a livelihood people would kill for. There too I had forsaken the people closest to me.

I drove along the winding desert road realising that nothing had changed, that my life would go on as it always had done in a way I would never comprehend, that the mysterious flame from the canyon was as deep as any mystery got and that understanding left you nothing but the flat logical explanations.

I looked out my side window at the solitary tree where the buzzard had been, and whether it was a trick of the light, a desert mirage, or not, I believed I saw an enormous crater just beyond it, one I had not noticed before. I would take Maybelle out to that in the early morning, I decided. Before the sun came up. And whether the crater existed or not, we would make love there and watch together the fiery dawning of a new day. I would tell her of my decision to leave and allow her, in her lovemaking, to hurt me as she had never hurt me before. Not by any act of violence, but by an unprovoked act of tenderness. Assuming we were permitted that final grace.

— Gerard Beirne

————

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer who moved to Norway House, a Cree community in Northern Manitoba, in 1999 where he lived for three years. While living there, he interviewed Elders in the community and edited for publication an anthology of those interviews. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick 2008-2009 and is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead.

His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2003) was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 for the best book of Irish fiction and was selected as Book of the Year 2004 by The Daily Express. His most recent novel Turtle was published by Oberon Press, 2009.

His short story “Sightings of Bono” was adapted into a short film featuring Bono (U2) by Parallel Productions, Ireland in 2001 and released on DVD in 2004.

His poetry collection Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual has just been published by Oberon Press- Fall 2011. His collection of poetry Digging My Own Grave was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin. An earlier version won second place in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

Jul 032012
 

This is a hoot. My old pal Russell Working has written a novel called The Hit, a portion of which was printed in Narrative. Now Russell has produced a brilliantly self-ironic book trailer in which he, his wife and his son act as characters from the book insisting that the book NOT be published. Russell, who worked as a journalist in Vladivostok and has first hand knowledge of the Russian underworld of which he writes, does a turn as a heavy with a thick Hollywood/Russian accent.

Russell Working is a terrific writer, a winner of the Iowa  Short Fiction Prize, an intrepid journalist, also a former colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

For your delectation I include also below a short excerpt from the novel, which is not comical at all, but a richly detailed and suspenseful story of memory and revenge reminiscent of Martin Cruz Smith’s great Russia-based thrillers.

dg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cywr00EjsVY&feature=plcp

———–

1

MAMA ALWAYS said it was a sin to throw away bread, a sacrilege to destroy a book.  But one day when the tornado sirens were howling on Devon Avenue, Alexei Kuznetsov found three boxes of orphaned books under the awning in front of the Cherry Orchard Deli & Productery, where he worked, and he was unable to save any of them.

He did not know why anyone would leave literature outside a business that dealt in Baltika beer and loops of sausage and jars of slick, pickled mushrooms.  Perhaps they had mistaken the deli for the Russian Oasis bookstore down the street and thought the books could be resold.  One had to admit the name Cherry Orchard lent itself to confusion.

The sky was boiling, dirty, Jovian, with flashes of lightning in the clouds and distant gray deluges slanting to the south.  A pervert wind was molesting two Indian girls, flinging grit and chip packages and attempting to strip them of their saris.  The radio said tornadoes had skipped around someplace called Minooka, wrapping a trampoline around a telephone pole and peeling the roof off a strip mall, but the danger had passed here in Chicago.  Still, the sirens bayed, their legs snapped in wolf traps.

The abandoned books all concerned Russia and the Soviet Union, but they were mostly nonfiction by Western journalists and translations of classics.  Lermontov, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky.  The spines were broken, the pages mold-speckled, as spotty as sparrow eggs; besides, everything was in English.  When Alexei consulted his boss, Yakov Isayevich told him to trash the books.

“Maybe an American would like them,” Alexei said.  “They might learn something about Russia.”

“Such as yourself, you mean?  You’re all Yankees, you kids.  Pants, hair.  You want to compound your ignorance, take them home.”  Yakov Isayevich had lived his adult life in Leningrad and Chicago, but the Odessa accent of his youth lent his harangues a comic air.  He was bald and mustachioed, and dewlaps hung beneath his veiny chin.  “Russia is a thousand-year-long train wreck, that’s all anybody needs to know.  Go dump them in back and clear out some space in the freezer, we’ve got a delivery coming.”

Alexei had walked to work.  Any books he saved he would have to carry home, along with the groceries Mama had asked him to pick up, and then she would probably make him take the literature to the Goodwill.  He stacked the boxes and hauled them all in one trip to the alley in back.

Overnight, somebody had dumped a dead pit bull in the trash, its ears trimmed to ridges of scar so they would not be ripped from its head in a fight.  Clearly, it had lost anyway.  Its muzzle was gashed and throat torn, but the creature had died clenching a piece of hide in its teeth.  The dog lay in a heap of onion peels from a pickled herring dish the girls had made yesterday.  On a muggy July day the stench was overpowering: garbage, onions, dog.  Alexei began tossing the books in.  When one tome on Ivan the Terrible hit the pit bull’s freckled abdomen, the monster gasped, “Huh?” and gave up the ghost, exhaling a whiff of vomit and meat.

As he crouched there, flipping literature up into the trash, a black Hummer H2 with temporary plates pulled up and parked in a tow-away zone, blocking the alley by the refrigerated container that hunkered beside the door.  He stood to wave the vehicle on, but the driver set the flashers and got out–whereupon a colony of fire ants spilled down Alexei’s spine and nested, stinging, in his armpits and groin.

A beefy man, mid-forties.  Hair grayer than before, mouth drooping, cheeks roughened to chicken flesh by hard drinking.  Wearing not a tracksuit anymore, but business attire, with gold cufflinks and a watchband that dangled like a bracelet on his wrist.  His buzz cut was receding, leaving an islet of mown stubble where the widow’s peak had once been.  His head was narrow, and there was a bump on his brow, the defining characteristic in an otherwise plain and ruddy face.

Alexei had noticed the lump when had last seen the man, eleven years ago in Vladivostok, on a night he and his parents had been heading out to a party.  The light was out in the lift, and the doors opened up on a blinding lobby where two men waited.  In their hands were bulky black things that began firing bullets into the Kuznetsovs.  After killing Papa and wounding Mama, the taller one, this one, leveled his machine pistol at Alexei.  His partner grabbed his arm, apparently some kind of wimp who was squeamish about murdering children.  “Come on, Garik,” he said, “who gives a fuck about the kid?”  That was how Alexei learned the man’s name.

The bump on his brow made you think he must have been knocked on the head.  But now, after all these years, it was still there–a cyst or abnormality of the forehead boss.  A vestigial horn, almost.

From the Hummer emerged a blonde in low pants that revealed a tattoo of the sun on her sacrum when she knelt to straighten her sandal.  Gold bangles, gold earrings with flecks of emerald, a diamond on her wedding ring, worn, in the Russian style, on the right hand.  A jewel in her navel like an odalisque.

Alexei half expected Garik to say, “Jesus Christ, kid, what the devil are you doing here?”  But he didn’t–why should he, who would associate a teenager in Chicago with the seven-year-old screaming on the floor in Vladivostok eleven years ago?

“Can we get in through this door?” the blonde said.

Garik grabbed a book from Alexei’s hand.  “What are you doing?”

“My boss told me to.”

“No, no, no!” Garik cried with an anguished look on his face.  “A Russian trashing books?  Ignorance!”

“They’re in English,” Alexei managed to say.

“Young man, books are precious,” Garik said.  “Leave them, for God’s sake.  I’ll find a home for them.  So, can we get in this door, or do we have to go around front?”

Alexei said, “If–I don’t–”

“It’s an either-or question,” said Garik.

“You can get in, but customers are supposed to go around.  My boss–”

The face silenced him.  Garik’s forehead was furrowed except for the skin over the bump, like a hummock left unplowed in a field.  Green eyes, the sclera yellowed.  A cirrhotic symptom.

“So, you like my face, or what?” Garik said.

“No.  I mean, not ‘no,’ I just–”

“I’m flattered, but I’m afraid I’m taken.”

“Oh, Garik, he doesn’t mean anything,” said the blonde.  And then to Alexei: “He’s just teasing.”  She was in her mid-thirties, perhaps, and had a beautiful face that was flawed by odd, oval nostrils.  Her gold necklace had a name on it: MAYA.

Garik shrugged, as if concluding that this simpleton boy was merely tongue-tied in the presence of a businessman of such self-evident success.  Deeming this reaction acceptable, he pushed past Alexei and entered the stockroom and kitchen, stinking of vodka and bile.  Maya followed, her perfume cloying and chemical, like a Syrian peach cordial.

By the time Yakov Isayevich came out to check on Alexei, his panic attack was spinning to pieces like a lump of watery clay on a pottery wheel.

“Alyosha, how come you’re letting customers in through the back?” Yakov Isayevich said.  “Hey, what are you, cataloging a library?  Just dump the books and be done with it.”  He grabbed two books Alexei had set aside, the Bulgakov and Dostoyevsky, and trashed them before Alexei managed to say that the customer wanted them.  Yakov Isayevich shrugged.  “What in hell’s hounds is that?” he added, looking in the Dumpster.

“I don’t know, a pit bull,” Alexei said.  “Somebody–.”

“Were they fighting it?  What’s wrong with people these days?”

Alexei felt a wave of dizziness and grabbed the Dumpster for support.

“Whoa, there,” Yakov Isayevich said.  “Are you dizzy?”

“I was in too much of a rush this morning for–”

Amid the aftershocks of the panic attack he could not access the word, starts with a B, the thing with eggs and sausage and toast; and in its place was a blank, like a swearword bleeped out on TV.

“Your mama lets you head out to work without breakfast?” Yakov Isayevich said.

Breakfast.  “She’d already left for work.”

“Oi, the poor woman.  So you don’t know how to fry yourself an egg?  Listen, son, when you get a minute, grab yourself a pastry.  So, is this their Hummer?  Well, I suppose they’ll be gone soon.  Get inside and make yourself useful mopping the floor.  Some lady dropped a jar of beets, and everybody’s tracking it all over like a murder scene.”

2

The Cherry Orchard was an old Chicago storefront, long and high-ceilinged, and the odor of salted fish and chicken fat hung so thick in the air it permeated the paint on the walls.  The only cherries came in jars, sweet and tart, with pits, the kind Russians spooned into tea.  As one entered the main room from the back kitchen and office, a refrigerated counter on the right extended almost out to the front window.  To the left was a wall of shelves, interrupted by a doorway into a second room, also facing Devon Avenue.  Along the ceiling were posters advertising beer and pelmeni, alternating with American flags.  (Unlike Polish or Ukrainian grocers, Yakov Isayevich never posted the colors of his homeland.)  The women at the deli counter wore aprons and white hats, and behind the glass were hams, dried salmon, fatback, whitefish, redfish, salads, cakes.  Loops of sausage and the carcasses of smoked chickens hung along a mirror on the wall, amid signs that read, “mimosa salad” and “Telephone cards: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland.”  Opposite, the shelves were laden with canned pâté and fish in tomato sauce; bottles of nectar, kvas, vodka, and Moldavian wines; boxes of tea; black rye bread; jars of pickled mushrooms and cucumbers; packages of dried macaroni, barley, and baby food; shrink-wrapped slabs of glazed gingerbread from Tula; and boxes of meringue cookies.  Yakov Isayevich had labeled them, in English, “marshmallows.”

The first time Alexei had entered the Cherry Orchard, he must have been eleven, their first winter in Chicago.  Mama bought him a slab of Tula bread, and the smell of jam and gingerbread had sucked him in through a puncture in spacetime into a singularity containing a store outside the redbrick kremlin in Tula, where he and his parents had bought picnic supplies for a trip to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana.  Nowadays, he knew nostalgia was commonplace at the Cherry Orchard, you saw it in the faces of everyone who wandered in.  That’s what Yakov Isayevich dealt in: longing for a land everyone had spent their lives trying to escape.  You could survive for a month in Russia on what it cost you to load up on groceries at the deli, and even by American standards it was pricy (three dollars for a liter of kvas, four for a package of cookies), but for homesick immigrants, the taste of the motherland was worth it.  In any event, when one spent eight hours a day in a workplace, the nostalgia disappeared, and the store had long since lost the associations with Alexei’s own vanquished Russia.

He wheeled in a yellow plastic bucket and wringer, steering it with a mop drowned headfirst in the muddy water.  Garik was nowhere to be seen, he must have drifted to the other room.  A shambles of sugar beets, reeking of vinegar, had been trampled all over, and gory tributaries flowed into the deli counter.  Yakov Isayevich had set up a yellow plastic marker with an icon of a man slipping and flying into the air, and there was a warning whose multilingual fluency seemed irrelevant to the Urdu and Malayalam and Russian of Devon Avenue: “CAUTION CUIDADO ACHTUNG ATTENTION.”  Alexei knelt to shovel up the beets in a dust pan.  As he worked, he maintained a peripheral awareness of the shoppers, mostly women in jeans or skirts he could see through against the light from the window, and when Maya nearly stepped on him, he duckwalked out of her way.  “Oi, sorry,” she said, and touched his head.  A pair of men’s shoes shuffled in.  The left foot detached itself from the floor and scratched the right ankle.  Alexei glanced up to see Garik surveying the liquor.

He stood and sloshed the mop on the floor and then in the bucket.  A feeding frenzy in a blood-muddied sea.

Garik beckoned Darya Vanderkloot, a cook who sometimes lent a hand at the counter, and sought her counsel on some point concerning the vodka, ignoring her pleas that really, she knew nothing about the subject, she only drank beer and that rarely, Yakov Isayevich was the one to ask.  She was in her mid-twenties and dressed to show off her plump, sexy figure, wearing jeans that she apparently applied with a paint brush, yet she was aloof toward the mere males who took notice of her.  They were all horny pigs, apparently, for lowering their gaze the cleft that swallowed her zipper in front.  Garik nodded as she spoke, his brows compressed, as if seeking, within the fine print of the vodka label, the wisdom of the kabbalah.

Irrationally, Alexei was annoyed at Darya.  She shouldn’t flounce about like that for some mafik.  She was no supermodel, with her Russo-Mongolian features, but her eyes, grant her that: long-lashed, brown, slightly bugged, their shape emphasized with a mascara brush.  Even in summer she was pale as kefir.  She said she never tanned because she was afraid of skin cancer.  Alexei supposed she was vain about her hair, lush and black.

Garik removed a bottle from the shelf.  “Genghis Khan Vodka.  The guys would get a kick out of that.  Where did you get this stuff?”

“Yakov Isayevich, our boss, sometimes he finds these deals on the Internet,” she said.

“But Genghis Khan!” Garik said.  “Why not Attila the Hun cognac or Hitler schnapps?”

“It’s a Mongolian brand,” she said.  “They revere Genghis as the Greeks do Alexander.  Conqueror of empires.  Some people say he was born in Russia, in Chitinskaya oblast.  A village called Balei.”

“So, do you have any of those little sampler bottles I could try, to make sure it’s drinkable?  Ah, well, it couldn’t be too awful, could it?  We taught them how to drink, Mongolians.  Surely they’ve learned how to distill vodka properly.”

He decided to buy a bottle, no, three.  And a case of the Finlandia, too, in case the Genghis proved execrable.

Hearing the size of the order, Yakov Isayevich, who had been arranging cans on a shelf, moved closer with an expression that said he did not wish to intrude but was at hand, if need be, to assist.  But Garik’s stare remained fixed on Darya.  He grabbed her upper arm, slipping his fingers between her bicep and breast, as he murmured something to her.  Alexei caught the word, “ty”–the informal you–as if she were his girlfriend or daughter.  He was old enough, the freaking satyr.

Darya glanced at Alexei pleadingly, but he thought, That’s what you get.  If you don’t like it, tell him to take his paws off of you.

Releasing Darya, Garik hummed to himself and shuffled toward the window.  He glanced over the shelves, the stand containing magazines and postcards, the refrigerator packed with frozen pelmeni, then returned toward the cash register.  Something occurred to him.  For the first time he looked Yakov Isayevich in the eye.  “Do you cater?”

“Certainly,” Yakov Isayevich said. “We’ve done parties of up to fifty people.  With enough notice we could do more.”

Garik called over his shoulder, “Mayechka, did you hear that?” and then realized the blonde was right behind him.  On the counter beside his booze she set a basket containing pelmeni, a bag of ginger cookies, and several boxes of tea.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be that big,” Maya said.  “Just a few friends.”

“We prefer at least a week’s notice,” Yakov Isayevich said.  “More, if it’s a complicated menu.”

Garik turned to the deli case.  “‘Israeli salad.’  Why Israeli?”

“It’s just a variety of salad,” said Yakov Isayevich.  “If you would like a sample–?”

“No samples for the products of our old allies in Mongolia, but for the ‘Zionist entity’–”

“We make it here in the store.  It’s just a name.”

“So how did your authentic Russians of Chicago become so enamored of Jewish cuisine?” Garik said.

Yakov Isayevich hesitated, surprised, perhaps, yet still open to an inoffensive interpretation of the remark, because if something anti-Semitic was implied, it had been so gratuitous.  “Perhaps,” he said at last, “because many of them are Jews.”

A dollar coin appeared in Garik’s hand, and he began flipping and catching it.  “That’s very interesting, my friend,” he said.  “It would explain all the synagogues.  I’m not complaining.  I used to work for a Jew, and he was the best boss I ever had–a great guy.”

Yakov Isayevich’s ears flushed and a look of alarm flashed in his eyes, as if he was considering how to redirect the topic of conversation without confronting a customer.  Removing a towel from his shoulder, he absently bound his right hand in it.  Then noticing what he was doing, he blushed and pulled it off.

But Garik himself changed the subject.  “So tell me: do you offer any discounts for volume?”

“I can offer ten percent if the order’s over two hundred dollars,” Yakov Isayevich said.  “I’m just a small businessman, there’s no profit for me if I go any lower.  America isn’t the gold mine people expect when they arrive here, I think you’ll discover that.  I’m assuming you’re new here?”

Garik ignored this.  He raised the Genghis and examined it against the window, perhaps looking for the sediment found in bad vodka.  “What if I just take it?” he said.  “A luxury tax.”

Garik smiled at his own little joke but Yakov Isayevich did not join in the merriment.  He indicated Alexei with a glance.  “I wouldn’t advise that.”

Garik looked at the young man who stood gripping the mop handle.  It surprised Alexei to discover that he was taller that the hit man.

“Yes, I’ve met your ferocious young bouncer,” Garik said.  “An intimidating youngster, clearly.”  There was a touch of benevolent amusement in his tone.  “So you’ll, what, mop me to death if I try anything?”  Garik aimed his forefinger at Alexei.  He cocked his thumb.  He said, “Bang.”

“Oh, Garik, pay the man and stop fooling around,” Maya said.  Then to Alexei: “Sometimes people don’t get his humor.”

“I don’t know when to shut my trap, she means.  No, no, no, no, don’t deny it, Mayechka, it’s true, I’m the first to admit it.”

Garik fished a zippered men’s purse from his suit coat, fumbled about in it, and handed Darya a credit card.  He glanced around, as if to make sure everyone had noticed.  Perhaps he did not know that every small-time gangbanger on the West Side possesses a credit card.  Darya handed it to Yakov Isayevich, who had gone around behind the counter.  Leaving his mop leaning in the bucket, Alexei moved a step closer, trying to glimpse the last name on the card, but Yakov Isayevich’s hand closed around it.

“All right, then, make that three bottles of the Genghis,” Garik said.  “A case of the Finlandia.  A case, no, two of Hennessy.  And a couple bottles of this Armenian wine, semisweet.  Some Moldavian, too–why not?  Some of this Zolotoi Rog: oh, let’s say four bottles.  And of course, we can’t ignore the beer drinkers.  The Baltika Number 6: how many bottles are in a case?  Only twelve?  Four cases, then.”

Garik turned to Alexei.  “Hey, tough guy, are those Kara-Kums I see on the shelf behind you?”

“We’re out today, but we have other candies, Russian candies,” Yakov Isayevich answered.  “Alyosha, can’t you find somewhere else to stand?  See, we have–”

Garik silenced Yakov Isayevich by tossing him his keys.  “Listen, Gramps,” he said, “maybe you and the boy could start organizing the cases while the girl here rings us up.”

Yakov Isayevich set the keys by the cash register.  “Let’s make sure your card goes through.  Then Alyosha will help you.”

Genghis, Finlandia, Hennessy: he named off the items as he rang them up.  He swiped the credit card, and everyone, Garik included, stared at the cash register, as if in suspense, until it began spitting out a receipt.

Now Yakov Isayevich handed Alexei the keys.  “Go carry everything out for the comrade while we finish up.”

#

Out in back, Maya supervised the loading of the vehicle, standing close enough to brush Alexei’s arm with her breasts as she told him how to set boxes just so.  When he finished the groceries, he glanced at the books, then at Maya.  She rolled her eyes but nodded, so he loaded them in the Hummer as well.  When Garik emerged, biting his cuticles, she rushed over and kissed him, lest there be any doubt that he was the bull elephant here.  An old Honda with a plastic sheet in place of the rear window puttered up the alley, and the driver, an unshaven man in a striped Russian navy T-shirt, raised his fist to punch the horn.  But as he looked over the scene–Garik, the bejeweled blonde, the burly kid loading boxes, the Hummer itself–some assembly line in his head seemed to start up and send down the conveyer belt a conclusion: Mafia.  His hand opened into gesture that said, No problem, friends, you carry on, and he backed up the length of the block and around the corner onto North Washtenaw.  Alexei went inside for the last box, and when he returned Maya was sitting in the Hummer.

“You’re a strong guy,” Garik said.  “You wrestle?”

“Box a little.  I’m training for a tournament in a few weeks.  In high school I played American football, but I graduated in June.”

“A Russian footballer!  Well done, of course.  I’ll bet you taught those pansy-assed Yankees a lesson or two.  What kind of–how do you say it?  What position?  I don’t know anything about football except they all dress like cosmonauts.  Did you wear one of those helmets?”

“Everyone wears a helmet.  I was what they call a linebacker, also tight end on offense, but they hardly ever played me.”  Alexei said the words in English–leinbekker, teit end— although they could mean nothing to a Russian; the act of summoning an explanation was beyond him as he stood face-to-face with the killer.  “All I did was work my ass off in practice.”

“Well, excellent, nonetheless,” Garik said.  “What’s your name?”

“Kuznetsov, Alexei.”

The family name did not register with Garik.  It was as commonplace in Russia as Smith.

Garik shook Alexei’s hand, one was unable to avoid it.  “Pleased to meet you, Alyosha.  Igor Andreyevich.  Call me Garik.  Been in the States long?”

“A while,” Alexei said.

“Are you a citizen, then?” Garik asked.

“I have a green card.”

“How convenient.  Listen, if we do have you guys cater a party, make sure you work that night.”  Garik closed the hatch of the Hummer and lowered his voice.  “Darya, too, she’s hot.  An Internet bride, am I right?  Fuck the husband, we’ll show her a good time.  As for you, you might meet some people who can help you out in life, if you ever want to do anything other than mop floors for a Jew.”

Garik pulled a dollar bill from his purse and tucked it into Alexei’s shirt pocket, then slapped him on the back.  Alexei removed the cash and tried to hand it back.

“I can’t accept tips,” he said.

“Sure, you can, boss doesn’t have to know,” Garik said.  “Well, I like this little deli of yours.  Like it very much.  I’ll be seeing you.”

As Garik drove off, Alexei noted the license number: a temporary Illinois plate, 909F911.  Easy to remember.  Nine-eleven.  He committed it to memory.

He recalled the dollar in his hand.  Except it wasn’t a one, it was a one hundred.  The bill stank of gasoline.  Somebody had stamped Benjamin Franklin’s face with a Web address: wheresgeorge.com.

Alexei tossed the bill in the trash, along with the dead dog, and went inside to wash his hands.

#

So, Garik, again.  Short for Igor, patronymic of Andreyevich.  But what Alexei needed was a last name.  The Beast: as a boy he had seized onto this name during a scripture reading in the church he and Mama attended in Cyprus after they had fled Vladivostok, during that period when she had abandoned her atheism and converted to Orthodoxy.  Who is like unto the beast, who is able to make war with him?  It had made an impression on him as a, what, seven- or eight-year-old?  Seven heads and ten horns.  Diadems, and on his head were blasphemous names.  They worshiped the dragon because he gave his authority to the beast.  And so it had now come to pass that God or fate, having tested the faithfulness of their servant Alexei Kuznetsov, had vouchsafed him a chance encounter with the man whose face had haunted him for eleven years.  Were there public records of temporary license plates that would help him locate Garik’s last name?  It hit him that he could still find a way to look at the credit card receipt.

Easier said than done.  When the deli was busy, there was no way he could crowd in as the cash register rang open and banged shut, and when it quieted down, he did not have access to the drawer.  And if he asked somebody to open it, he would have to explain why.  But that night, as the end of his shift approached, he sought Darya’s help.  There was a lull in customers, and she stood at the front window, her back to the room as she faced the street.  One by one, she extended each arm parallel to the floor, and rotated it in a motion that concluded with a graceful twist of the wrist as she brought her splayed fingertips and thumb together, like a lotus folding inward at night.  She was wearing a wedding ring on her left hand, American-style, he noticed.  He really knew nothing about her.

Noticing Alexei’s stare, she stopped and returned to the counter.  “An old dance move,” she said.

“You’re a dancer?” he said.

“Oh, no.  There was a student company when I was in university.”

“Listen, Darya, I have a question: did you catch that customer’s surname?”

“Which customer’s?” she said.

“The guy who bought all the booze.  Expensive suit, bump on his forehead.  Igor Andreyevich, he called himself.”

“Garik the mafik?” Darya said.  “No, he didn’t say.”

Somehow it surprised Alexei that she had recognized Garik as Mafia, he had imagined she had been taken in by his airs as a businessman.  “Could you sneak a look at the credit card receipt?”

“How come?” she said.

“Just curious.”

“I doubt Yakov Isayevich would want me divulging a customer’s personal information.”

Alexei stared at her for a moment, then walked off.

A few minutes later Darya found him wheeling a hand truck stacked with boxes of ground beef into the refrigerated container; the delivery that had been promised all day had finally arrived just as he was preparing to leave.

“Voskresensky,” she said.

He looked at her blankly.

“That’s the name on the credit card.  Igor A. Voskresensky.”

Voskresensky.  How simple it had been to obtain the name after all these years.  He almost felt the receipt had been there in the drawer from the day he started work here, if only he had thought to look.

“What’s the matter, Alyosha?” she said.  “You look so dark.”

“Nothing,” he said.  “Just remembering something.”

Yakov Isayevich came humming in through the door.  “Well, if it isn’t the two coconspirators, whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears.  I knew I’d find you lovebirds huddled up back here, all kissy-faced and–”

Darya walked out on him mid-sentence and slammed the steel door behind her.

3

That evening as Alexei walked home just after eight, the air everywhere, from the store to the street to the apartment, was dense with dark matter that seemed to warp the buildings and trees, boiling up gusts of gaseous brick and bark were drawn back into the source like solar prominences.  The afternoon storm had blown off and the sky was clearing.  The moon had risen at an altitude of forty-eight degrees, a distorted sliver of it orbited four hundred thousand kilometers out.  It had reached first quarter just over an hour and a half ago, he recalled with some surprise, as if the appearance of Garik would have interfered with the waxing and waning of the moon.

The third-floor hallway of his apartment held a confluence of odors: of somebody’s curry dinner, of the shoes (sixteen of them) outside a Jordanian cabdriver’s door, of the dinner Mama had baked–beef and potatoes and sour cream and cheese.  She liked cooking this dish because she alone could prepare it to Alexei’s satisfaction, and it pleased her to watch him devour a full casserole pan in two sittings.  When he entered the apartment, Mama laid aside her copy of Inostrannaya Literatura and rushed over to relieve him of his grocery bags as he stepped out of his shoes.

“Rabbit, I was calling you, why didn’t you answer?” she said.  “Well, how was I supposed to know you’re on your way home if you don’t set down the bags and take my call?  Come on, dinner’s ready.”

Objectively speaking, forty-one wasn’t that old, but Vera Anatolyevna lived like an elderly widow for whom the world was a trial best avoided.  She hennaed her hair, and only snorted when he told her that in America such clown-red hues are affected primarily by artists, anarchists, and spiky-haired lesbians.  In Chicago, where the heating always works, she dressed in a babushka’s summer housecoat year-round.  Once slender and beautiful, she had thickened and aged beyond her years.  She worked as a cleaning lady and cook in a women’s shelter, but otherwise she seldom left the apartment except for forays to the bookstore or church, where, after kissing the icons, she always hid herself behind a pillar back in the saint-crowded gloom.  She insisted her disfigurement was so horrific that it caused passersby to gape and skateboarders to stumble into lampposts and strangers in banks to blurt out, “What happened to your face?” but in truth her scars were hardly noticeable.  There was a dent in the right temple where the bullet had entered, and it had left through her left eye without touching her brain, thank God, so there was no exit wound, only a glass eye that could pass for the real thing except when her socket began weeping.  On such days she left the incredulous orb in a tumbler on her nightstand, and she wore a flesh-colored eye patch to cover the collapsed lid.  He had given up trying to convince her that she could lead a normal life if she would just forget about other people’s reactions.  Yes, easy for him to say.  But if one wished to talk about appearance, the real problem was the increasing hardness of her face, and that was self-inflicted: the bags under her eyes, the violet tinge to her nose, the spider veins creeping across her cheeks.  A drinker’s face.  No doubt she was unaware of the worsening of her looks.  The only mirrors in the apartment had been on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, but Mama had made Alexei remove the reflective triptych, exposing shelves cluttered with toothbrushes and razors and a tube of triple antibiotic cream.  He kept a mirror in his backpack so he could comb his hair or check for bleeding zits after shaving blind in the shower.

Mama touched the skin between his eyebrows.  “I wish you wouldn’t scowl all the time, you’re getting permanent frown lines at eighteen years old.”

He flashed an insipid smile, and she laughed.  They lugged the grocery bags back to the kitchen and sorted everything into the refrigerator and cupboards.

“I know I annoy you with my calls,” Mama said, “but it’s just that there are gangs out there and I worry.  I saw a program on TV.  Black Gangster Disciple Nation, Mafia Insane Vicelords: who comes up with these names?  Conservative Vicelords, it sounds like an Italian political party.  Listen, a babushka was raped in a home invasion last week, six blocks from here.”

“I’m sure that had nothing to do with gangs, Mama, it was just some maniac,” he said.

“That’s supposed to comfort me?  The point is, I can never relax when you’re out.”

He dumped a bag of flour into a plastic container where the mice couldn’t get to it.  “Mamul, listen,” he said, “I need to tell you something.  Today–”

“Here, open this, would you?  My wrists are hurting again.”

Mama handed him a brandy bottle, and he twisted off the cap.  She splashed two hundred milliliters into a crystal carafe and added a shot into a dainty liqueur glass with a stem.  Despite Alexei’s age, Yakov Isayevich let him take home whatever spirits Mama requested.  A tab was kept, but whenever Alexei brought a payment from his mother, however paltry, Yakov Isayevich would mutter in embarrassment and write off the rest of the bill.  Mama was the only person to whom he showed such generosity, for reasons unknown to Alexei.  Yakov Isayevich seemed to think he was staying within the limits of the law if no cash exchanged hands at the time a teenager walked out of the store with a bottle of Georgian cognac or a case of strong beer.  But at the Cherry Orchard they were contemporary Russians, not Soviet citizens of a former generation, and nobody would dream of informing the Liquor Control Commission.

“It’s good you don’t drink,” she said.

Since Alexei had graduated in June, Mama had taken to commenting on his abstinence, often neutrally and sometimes even praising it, but her demeanor contradicted her words.  You’re a man, already, join me in a nightcap if you wish.

“I just don’t see the point of alcohol, that’s all,” he said.

“You should join the Mormons.  Soon you’ll be wearing a white shirt and tie and that special underwear.  I’m teasing, sonny, you’re right.  Once you do see the point of alcohol, it’s too late.”

With her glass she clinked Alexei’s mug of water and threw down her cognac à la russe.

“It’s never too late, Mama,” he said.

“Oi, Alyosha, don’t start.  So, are you hungry?  Good, sit down.”

Mama had eaten earlier, but after bringing him a plate, she served herself a “symbolic portion, for company” and joined him at the kitchen table.

“You were starting to say something,” she said.

At once he knew he could not tell her about Garik.  He could not say why, but he needed to sort this through on his own.  “Did you hear the sirens this afternoon?” he said.

“What sirens?”

“Are you kidding, it sounded like an air raid at Stalingrad.  Were you at the shelter?”

“No, I told you I’d only be working a half-day,” she said.  “They need me Saturday.  I was home all afternoon.”

“Yakov Isayevich tried to get us to take refuge in the basement, but then we heard the tornado warning was limited to Will and Kendall counties.”

“Maybe I slept through it,” she said.

You always do.  Mama refilled her glass from her carafe and fixed her cockeyed, teary gaze on Alexei.  She had been in this state for weeks after they had fled Russia for their second home in Limassol, Cyprus.  She spent her days in the twilight of the master bedroom, the exterior shutters rolled down to cover the sliding glass doors.  Alexei would lie next to her on the bed as a fan on a tall stand sent a ticklish breeze back and forth over them, and they would remain there in silence for hours, holding hands, as her warm cognac breath came and went.  It was a fortnight before she even thought to ask a Russian friend to enroll him in an English school.  One day he came home with a pocket full of candy and a Japanese comic Ruslan had lent him, but when he arrived, Mama was missing.  He took the elevator down and searched the neighborhood for hours, checking back frequently in case she’d come home.  Finally long after dark, he curled up on the Persian carpet under the baby grand piano and cried.  An orphan now.  Oh, Mama!  A persistent knocking roused him.  He did not think he had slept but there was drool on the carpet, hair on his tongue.  At the door, a Cypriot woman with hirsute hands said in English, “Russian lady, Russian lady!” and a great deal more in Greek.  She took him by the hand and led him down the stairway.  Mama lay passed out on the landing three flights down, her housecoat hitched up to reveal a tuft of pubic hair coiling from her flowered panties.  Together, he and the woman got Mama to the lift, dragged her back home, toppled her into bed.

“Sirens, I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said.  “You can’t get tornadoes in a city because of the skyscrapers.”

“Mama, that’s ridiculous,” he said.  “Besides, there are no skyscrapers on Devon.”

“Perhaps, but I’m still here, along with the rest of Chicago.  So what else happened today?”

“Oh, nothing,” Alexei said.  “Really, it’s boring to talk about.  Stocking shelves.  Breaking down boxes.  Some idiot shoplifted a bottle of whiskey, but I ran him down while Yakov Isayevich called the cops.  No, he was not a gang member, just a stupid kid.  For awhile this morning the scanner was acting up so we could only accept cash.  Customers become so rude when this happens, they announce they’re going to go to Jewel-Osco from now on.  I guess you can’t blame them, but why is it our fault?  We’re just employees.  Also there was some idiot mafik who came in, kept pawing Darya.  Apparently she’s incapable of telling him to keep his hands off her.  I’m not going to chaperone her if she can’t even speak up for herself.  I wanted to stave his head in.”

“Alyosha, must you speak so violently?” she said.  “I won’t have that in my house.”

He gulped a forkful of beef and potatoes.  “How was your day?”

“Oh, you know me, focus on the positive,” she said.  “There’s hope the clients will escape the abuse the longer they’re with us.  Although, sometimes–.  That Bengali went back to her husband.  Also, there was a Russian, I had to interpret for her, she barely speaks English.  Don’t laugh, I’ve done it before!  Enough, I don’t like dwelling on bad things.  Did you meet anyone interesting?”

Alexei sawed the heel from the loaf of bread she had baked.  “Mama, there are always girls in the store, and all of them are married.  I don’t think there is a single Russian girl my age in Chicago.  Pretty ones, anyway, I’m not talking about Masha.”

“Nonsense, she’s a lovely girl,” Mama said.  “Anyway, a mother has to ask.”

Alexei twirled his mug of water on the table.

“Don’t, you’ll spill it.  Was Yakov Isayevich yelling at you again?  You’re so gloomy.”

“Yakov Isayevich doesn’t bother me,” Alexei said.  “If he wants to stress out about everything and drop dead of a heart attack at sixty-five, that’s his problem.  I’m just tired, is all.  I slept badly again.  Five and a half hours.  It doesn’t matter, I can get by on that if I snooze on my lunch break.”

“Maybe you should go back on Zoloft,” she said.

“I haven’t had a panic attack in years.”

Then the dizziness and fire ants returned, and Alexei excused himself–“Urgent need”–and hurried to the bathroom, where he sat on the toilet with the lids down, fisting his eyes as he rode out a hurricane of black locusts and burnt straw.

— Russell Working

An excerpt of an earlier version of this novel first appeared in Narrative magazine.

——————

Russell Working is a journalist and short story writer whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The TriQuarterly Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story.

His collection, The Irish Martyr, won the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award. He was the youngest winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, for his book Resurrectionists. He is a staff writer for Ragan Communications in Chicago and has taught in Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA program in creative writing.

Russell’s journalism has often informed his fiction. His Pushcart Prize-winning The Irish Martyr,written after an assignment in Sinai, tells of an Egyptian girl’s obsession with an Irish sniper who has enlisted in the Palestinian cause. After reporting on the trafficking in North Korean women as wives and prostitutes in China, he wrote the short story Dear Leader, about a refugee from the North who is sold to a Chinese peasant.

Russell formerly worked as a staff reporter at the Chicago Tribune. There he exposed cops and a Navy surgeon general who padded their résumés with diploma mill degrees, and covered the international trade in cadavers for museum exhibitions.

He lived for nearly eight years abroad in Australia, the Russian Far East, and Cyprus, reporting from the former Soviet Union, China, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, and aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. His byline has appeared dozens of newspapers and magazines around the world, including BusinessWeek, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the South China Morning Post, and the Japan Times. He began his career at dailies in Oregon and Washington.