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You searched for into+the+looking+glass | Page 7 of 11 | Numéro Cinq

Cairo: Novel Excerpt — Louis Armand

Dec 022013

ouis Armand’s fiction saunters through the darkest underbelly of society, illuminating the forgotten and the discarded. His recent novel Breakfast at Midnight (2012) reads like a twisted, brilliantly savage acid noir: amid a decaying Prague, rechristened Kafkaville, a quasi-mystery unfurls through the addled mind of a nameless fugitive, a man looking to solve a murder and piece together his own history. Canicule, released this past April, finds purchase through the lens of cinema: a man commits suicide, forcing his friends—failing screenwriter Hess and terrorist-sympathizer Wolf—to reenter each other’s orbit. A narrative revealed in snippets—“I’m not able to put the pieces back together, because I don’t understand them,” Hess confesses. “They’re pieces of an alien life, a completely alien life.”—the novel’s elasticity feels like an experimental film, spliced together on a dusty Steenbeck. Constantly moving forward and backward in time, Armand refuses to coddle his audience, and the result is a tale full of irony, repetition, and alcohol-fueled remorse.

Now comes Cairo. Set for publication in January (Equus Press), the following excerpt fuses themes and beats from Armand’s earlier novels: a murder, followed by a mystery left for men out of their element to decipher. Cinema bubbles throughout, as well, as Armand’s characters employ film tropes to handle their increasingly odd situation. And yet, while these ideas resurface, Cairo’s aura is nothing like that of Breakfast and Canicule, for while those settled on a far more serious plain, Cairo is downright playful. What makes this excerpt so very interesting is that it showcases Armand’s gift for language, both in his wickedly funny character exchanges and in the way he describes locations: senses are explored, filling us in on not only the tangible space, but also its sonic properties, its perfume, truly creating in three dimensions the underbelly of the underbelly.

— Benjamin Woodard

ELEPHANT’S EGG

he East Ham Mortuary off Barking Road was a squat cube of dark brick with a set of blue doors at the entrance. Nicky Cohn was waiting under a yellow CCTV sign, collar up, cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, somehow still alight in the drizzle, when Joblard wheeled up riding the clutch. A naked fluorescent blinked over the doorway, lending the journalist’s features a decidedly funereal cast. The light glistened on the wet chrome of the BSA’s petrol tank, catching the steam as it hissed up from the single cylinder. Then it didn’t. Then it did.

“You’re looking bright and chirpy,” Nicky Cohn said as Joblard yanked off his helmet, face a blur behind frozen breath. “Not half bloody cold.”

“Nice night for it alright,” Joblard said, “though I’d rather be in the back lounge getting intimate with a pint. You been in yet?”

“Nah, just got here. Thought I’d have a fag before trying to blague my way past the Homicide and Serious Crime boys. I recognised two of them when I peeked in through the door. They can be right cunts when it suits them.”

Joblard stuffed his gloves inside his bellstaf jacket, helmet under one arm.

“That’s good, I could fancy a couple of cunts on a night like this.”

“Not like these you wouldn’t. Speaking of which, what’s your Spielberg up to these days?”

“You on the square brother?”

“Eh?”

“Freemasons. Grand Lodge. He’s got some notion about poking a camera into the holy of holies. Ladies of the Illuminati.”

“The what?”

“Yeah, I reckon our mate Johnny Fluoride might’ve been getting him some of the more candid stuff. Kind of spank-and-tell exposé of the secret handshake brigade.”

“Tell me about it after,” Nicky Cohn said, tossing the unsmoked half of his cigarette on the ground. “I’m freezing my balls off out here.”

Behind the blue doors was a corridor and an office with a little window where Nicky Cohn showed his press credentials and signed in. Joblard took in the atmosphere. A couple of plods eyeballed him from where they were sitting beside a pair of swing-doors, like they were on stakeout duty waiting for a corpse to show up and trying to outguess each other about whose it might be. Joblard grinned at them. It was a rule he had with cops: you never break eye contact and always smile, drives the fuckers nuts. Nicky finished with the forms and they waited for a technician in a blue smock to come and give them the grand tour. He was a tall and skinny, with a straggly goatee and hair down past his collar and acne on his neck. Student-type. Taking full advantage of the opportunities society had on offer.

“This way gentlemen,” he said, taking a chit from the receptionist behind the window. “My name’s Zack and I’m your guide for this evening. The main attraction’s just through here and on the left.”

They ran the gauntlet of the two Homicide boys, busy giving Joblard the business with their cop stares, tongues working the backs of their teeth, but not making any more than a show of it.

Joblard jerked his thumb back at the swing-doors, behind them now as their guide steered them left along an underlit tunnel of half-tone green:

“What’s with the local entertainment, Zack?”

“One of our residents has attracted special attention.”

“Zack,” Nicky said, “I have a confession to make. That’s who we’re here to see.”

The technician stopped and scrutinised the chit he was holding.

Joblard, trying to get a look at it over the technician’s shoulder, found himself with an unobstructed view of a dandruff condition on the verge of spiralling out of control. Greenish flakes of dead scalp layered the back and shoulders of Zack-the-mortuary-technician’s smock, sifting down between greasy cords of black hair. Joblard edged back to maintain a safe interpersonal distance. Dandruff always made him think of leprosy. It was an association he’d had ever since childhood and the smell of antidandruff shampoo in the change rooms. Afraid he’d catch the stuff. At least they’d had the decency to wash. Some people, he thought, ogling the back of the technician’s head, lack the very basics of self-respect.

“You’re not here to see 856?”

“No.”

“We’re supposed to report anyone who wants to visit the new guy.”

Nicky slipped a freshly minted portrait of Queen Liz into the pocket of the technician’s smock.

“Put this towards your scholarship fund, Zack. No-one ever need know. You just got the numbers mixed up, that’s all.”

Zack glanced at the bill, which in the light of the corridor was the brown of a freshly minted turd.

“She looks kind of lonely, don’t you think? Got another one of those to keep her company?”

Nicky slipped the technician another royal likeness. The kid grinned.

“Right through here then, gents,” Zack said, leading the way.

Once when he’d been KO’d in the ring by the southpaw Mickey “the Hammer” Mulligan, Joblard had woken up on the floor staring at a light thinking he’d died already and was stretch out on one of those mortuary slabs they have in movies and any minute some geezer in a white labcoat was going to come in and poke a scalpel in his brain and pronounce the cause of death. Telling himself how “Hammer” wasn’t a name Mulligan earned in the ring but operating a protection racket off Brick Lane. But the room Zack the technician ushered them into wasn’t like anything in a film, more like a wholesaler’s stockroom. The far wall was lined with time-warped refrigerator doors you’d expect to find racks of frozen meat behind. Sides of beef, lamb, pork. A whole raffle bonanza.

The technician went straight to the third door down and yanked it open. Behind it there were three more doors, square, one above another, old paint a dozen hues of off-white cracked and flaking. Johnny Fluoride had taken up residence behind the door third from the bottom. Like those Japanese coffin hotels. Zack trundled out the slab. Joblard shivered. Johnny Fluoride’s body, sans head, was wrapped in semi-opaque plastic. The swim hadn’t done him any kindnesses. Even with the plastic on he looked terrible, like he’d been force-fed through the proverbial wringer. But whatever took his head off, that sure as hell hadn’t beaten around the bush.

“Jesus!”

The corpse, Joblard duly noted, had bare feet. Eventually, he supposed, the Coroner’s Office would release a report. He wondered what they’d make of the fact Johnny here had gone swimming without his boots on. Getting a head start, so to speak. The violent crime boys hadn’t made a positive ID yet. Their floater had washed up not only sans head but sans anything in his pockets. According to Nicky’s mate at the yard, Johnny Fluoride’s body had still been zipped into his army surplus when they found him. Which was how he knew it was Johnny Fluoride. The anorak had somehow kept him afloat, otherwise he mightn’t’ve turned up at all till next week, if ever.

Still, Joblard supposed, it’d only be a matter of time now before the Homicide boys rang the old widow’s doorbell over in Greenwich and got themselves an earful. And then from Greenwich to Canvey, which was all they’d need to put him on the spot. A knock on the door in the middle of the night. But at that moment, all Joblard could really think of was how the fuck…?

The three of them stared at the body for a while in silence. Nicky flicked at the chipped paint on the freezer door. The room seemed to Joblard to’ve grown noticeably colder. Nicky pulled a splinter of old paint from under a fingernail and held it up to the light.

“You know,” he said, breaking the silence, “they reckon lead paint’s accountable for half the violent crime on the planet. God’s truth. But just try telling that to the Homicide boys. And the people responsible for the stuff? Why, only the honest-living folk at Innospec, up on the Manchester Ship Canal, flogging tetraethyl lead wherever it hasn’t been banned yet. Fun places like Burma, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea. The fact it’s illegal to sell in good old Blighty doesn’t mean they can’t manufacture and export the stuff. Now if it was anthrax…”

“Somehow I don’t think it was lead paint did that,” Joblard said, pointing at the mess where Johnny Fluoride’s head formerly resided.

“The interesting thing,” the technician said, fingering the tag affixed to the big toe of Johnny Fluoride’s right foot, “is they found river water in your man’s stomach, but not in the lungs. Whoever blew his head off gave him a soaking first. Must’ve had something they wanted. That’s my guess. Held his head under till he talked. Then pop. No further use. Seen it before. The Albanian they found in a suitcase last year? He’d swallowed half a gallon of Thames water too, and not from any tap. Except they used a saw on him instead of a canon. Never found the head, either. Your mate involved in any funny business, then?”

“Nah,” Nicky said. “He ran nostalgia tours for old pub-rock fans. Didn’t know shit from clay. Probably a case of mistaken identity.” Turning to Joblard: “What do you reckon?”

“Yeah, mistaken identity,” Joblard echoed. “Poor sod.”

“Did he have a name?”

“Mmm,” Nicky said. “Can’t remember.” To Joblard: “D’you remember his name?”

“Frank maybe? Don’t rightly think he ever told us.”

“Too bad,” Zack said. “Too bad.”

…

A wedge of lemon floated in the glass of water Nicky Cohn was holding up to the light, eyeballing the citrus bits drifting around in it. He’d watched the waitress closely while she filled the glass straight from the tap.

“That stuff comes direct from the river, you realise?” Joblard said, trying on the tone of voice of someone attempting to be helpful. “If you’re lucky, there might even be a couple of particles of Johnny Fluoride in there. Not to mention all the other crap they dump in the Thames. London’s Pride.”

Nicky Cohn snorted and set his glass down in front of him. The bar they’d retreated to from the East Ham Mortuary was slowly filling up for the evening with what looked like a regular crowd. Joblard counted at least a dozen different types of Adidas tracksuit. The only beer they had on tap wasn’t beer at all but some foreign crap called Carlsberg, so he’d settled for a cup of tea. The publican had given him one of those looks. The de rigeur TV in the corner was running the day’s Ashes highlights. Depressing viewing. They’d’ve done better switching to one of the disaster channels. BSkyB or whatever. Rapping out the small print on why the world was going to shit. Global warming conspiracy nuts. The latest candidate for World War Three.

On cue the box cut from the cricket roundup to the news desk. Some joker in a flash suit talking to himself in a studio with lots of high-tech graphics making up the décor. Lip-syncing to a soundtrack that’d been swapped for the usual pub banter in competition with some sort of Kylie Monogue remix. Text scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Then cut to footage of what looked very much like riots on Wall Street. Archive material on the Twin Towers going down. Joblard registered crowd shots and helicopters. Something brewing on the other side of the pond, he thought. Nicky Cohn was still eyeing his glass in a manner you might describe at pensive.

“Gone to a better place, if you believe that stuff,” Joblard offered, thinking condolences of some sort might be in order. Though exactly what Nicky’s connection with Johnny Fluoride was, he didn’t know. Nicky looked up from his glass at the bulge Joblard’s gloves made inside his jacket.

“Your tea’s getting cold.”

“Don’t really fancy it anyhow.”

“My mum used to say cold tea’s good for piles.”

“That right?”

“She made my old man drink the stuff till the day he died. Sure enough, never did get piles. Fucked his liver good and proper though.”

“Eh?”

“Used to slip rum in the tea to make the stuff drinkable, when the old girl wasn’t watching. She’d keep a pot cooling on the windowsill for all occasions. Earle Grey. By the time he finished his third cup of an evening, the poor bugger could hardly stand up. Which the old girl attributed to the tea’s potent medicinal effect.”

Joblard sniffed his cup then set it back down on its saucer.

“Just regular tea, this. Probably doesn’t work.”

Nicky squinted up at him.

“They put out a call for witnesses. A couple of those lugs might want to have a talk with you. Canvey jetty. How many people saw you together?”

“Just the barman. And maybe this scarecrow character with some sort of skin disease on his face.”

“Mmm. Barman’ll probably just mind his own business, unless they make a point on it. Who’s the scarecrow?”

“Dunno. Followed me, though.”

“Followed you?”

“Yeah, him and a dwarf. They both followed me when I went over to Johnny Fluoride’s gaff. After the shithead decided to take a swim. That’s the bit I can’t figure out.”

“Dwarf?”

“Former associate of our headless friend, I do believe. Seems Johnny accidentally snapped a pic of him and he didn’t like it. Kind of, in flagrante delicto, as they say.”

“You’re not making much sense, old chum. Care to fill in the blanks?”

Joblard, against his better judgement, took a sip of the tea. Grimaced. Resisted the urge to spit it back out.

“Disgusting.”

“Like I said.”

Joblard wiped his mouth on his sleeve, pushed the cup and saucer aside, then folded his arms.

“Bludhorn paid Johhny Fluoride to take some candids. Some geezer getting his jollies being tickled with a riding crop. High class stuff. In the middle of which, this dwarf turns up, blows the geezer’s head off. On film.”

“Kosher?”

“One hundred percent.”

“So Johnny was tied up with Bludhorn, too, eh? And that’s why you were out on Canvey? Because of these pictures?”

“Except I never knew anything about what was in the pictures till after.”

“And I suppose Bludhorn has them safely under lock and key?”

“Curious are you?”

“Curious, old chum, is hardly the word.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re the only one.”

“You think whoever nixed Johnny might be after the pictures?”

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Besides, I spotted scarecrow and his mate hanging around Bludhorn’s club in Soho.”

“Maybe we should give the old bugger a call.”

“Maybe.”

“Got anything better to do for the next five minutes?”

Joblard creased his brow like someone trying hard to think, glanced sidelong at his teacup, then fished his mobile out of his inside pocket. Nicky Cohn looked at him in disgust.

“Knowing how you hate these things…”

“You’re begging for cancer of the brain, you realise that?”

Joblard grinned, fingered the keypad, stared at the screen. The background noise covered the dial tone, but a little icon on the screen indicated that the phone at the other end, Bludhorn’s, was ringing. Joblard had counted to five when the icon was replaced by a message saying his call had been interrupted and please try again later.

“Not answering?”

“Nope.”

“Mmm. You know, this could be one hell of a story.”

“Could be. Could also just be a coincidence.”

“Come off it. Why the heck’d anyone go to the trouble of saving a clown like Johnny Fluoride from drowning just to blow his head off?”

“Beats me. Maybe he washed up all by himself, emptied his own pockets, then blew his head off just for the hell of it. Or maybe he got sucked into another dimension. Dr Who stuff. And his head’s still on the other side, mashed into the vortex. One thing I do know, he was scared shitless of somebody. Said they were out to get him. Thought it was because he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see and they found out about it. Or maybe they wanted to send a message further up the line. Join the dots, you know, so whoever arranged to take the pictures in the first place’d get the connection. So they’d know not to fuck with it. Masonic conspiracy stuff, maybe.”

“Is that what Mr Undertaker says?”

“Bludhorn knows who the geezer is but he’s not saying. In the pictures you can’t really make out his face. There’s just this geezer tied to a chair getting whipped. Stiff upper-lip type. Then there’s a flash. Next thing the dwarf appears out of nowhere and the geezer’s head’s vanished. Just like that.”

“Too bad.”

“Hey, did you hear about that coke-dealer, blew some kid’s head off in Wapping last night?”

“Twelve gauge? Yeah. Sodomised the corpse. Made a real mess of himself afterwards, too. Think there might be a connection?”

“You never know.”

“Nah. It’s too crazy. The lunatic shot himself in the head.”

“What if it only looked that way and someone else shot him in the head?”

“Nah.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Shit. That’d make four. Four headless fucking corpses in one day. One of whom we don’t know anything about. It’s too much.”

“Don’t forget the tart with the whip. If she copped the same treatment, that’d make five.”

“Five? I don’t buy it.”

“Why not ask your mate to scan the register. See if anyone else’s checked into a morgue lately without their head attached.”

“Bodies could’ve ended up anywhere. In a bleedin’ meat factory, for all we know. Fed into a mincer. Bzzzz. Like they keep finding horse DNA in beef paddies. What if it was human DNA instead? Soylent Green stuff. Kid munching on quarter-pounder spits out a couple of fingernails. Not the sort of thing they’d want to see on the six o’clock news. Imagine it. Wozzie the Cannibal Clown! Bad for business.”

“I’ll stick to being vegetarian.”

“You could do far worse, chum. Say, what’re the chances you can actually find this dwarf character?”

“Dunno. All look the fucking same to me. I was figuring they’d probably show up again by themselves. Unfinished business. You know Bludhorn’s got a thing about midgets?”

“Size.”

“Eh?”

“It’s all about size. Midgets. Small.”

“I know what a fucking midget is.”

“Same reason they go for the oriental girls, you know. Little hands.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Nothing, chum. Over your head.”

“There’s a freak running around blowing people’s heads off and you’re on about some slanty tart’s manicure?”

“A dwarf. Blowing people’s head’s off. Apparently connected in some way to your Mr Undertaker. Capische?”

“What’s that mean, then?”

“What’s what mean?”

“Capische?”

“Don’t you watch films?”

“Not those sort of fucking films I don’t. You want to have a conversation with fucking subtitles, go to fucking Poland.”

“Maybe the dwarf’s fucking Polish, you ever consider that?”

Joblard blinked, looked thoughtful, creased his brow. Nicky Cohn shook his head, muttering to himself. He sniffed at his glass of water, took a sip.

“Oh, and I forgot to mention,” Joblard said, “they were driving a smartcar.”

Nicky Cohn peered over the rim of his glass, set it carefully on the table, picking a sliver of lemon seed from is lip.

“What?”

“You know,” Joblard said, “one of those poxy little jobs, like a golf buggy with an M.O.T.…”

Nicky Cohn made a sucking sound with his teeth, poking his tongue up under his lip.

“I’ll tell you something, chum,” Nicky Cohn said, straightening his mouth out. “If I hadn’t just seen Johnny Fluoride’s headless corpse with my own eyes, I’d swear you’re flaming nuts.”

…

Back during what used to be called The Troubles, old Uncle Hugo, ex-Sandhurst, had the good fortune to spend a tour of duty behind eight inches of plate glass in a pillbox in the fair city of Armagh. He’d been standing there one day watching the drizzle slowly mutating from bad to worse when some Fenian fucker, parked on a hillside a mile away, took a pot-shot at him with an elephant gun. He’d seen the shell embed itself three-quarters the way through the glass, big as his thumb. When he told the story afterwards, he’d always joke that if there’d been a tailwind, the bullet would’ve caught him right between the eyes. And taken his whole bleeding head off.

Joblard had been thinking of Uncle Hugo’s story while he watched the helicopters circle the Shard. It looked like the flattened head of an enormous glass prawn, sticking up above the Canada Square towers. Some Mujahadin types had tried to blow it up a week ago and now they had half the RAF up there every night at tax-payers expense, searchlights criss-crossing the rooftops. Every wisearse on the South Bank was probably laying bets on how long it’d be before some trigger-happy Afghan vet in a chopper went bezerk and did the job himself, like the one that smacked into the crane over in Vauxhall. Maybe blame it this time on a meteorite.

What killed Uncle Hugo in the end was a brain tumour. “Size of an elephant’s egg,” he’d say, while the nurse prepared his bed-bath. “Elephants don’t lay eggs, Captain Banks,” the nurse would tell him. “This one did.” And that, as they say, was the end of the matter. Joblard remembered the picture the doctor showed his mum. You could see the skull and what he supposed was brain tissue with a void right in the middle of it. Like that Fenian bullet had a bad karmic vibe that’d lodged in his uncle’s head and grown there for forty years into a knot of dead cell tissue, invading whole swathes of cortex till his motor neurons finally packed it in.

Joblard had tried calling Bludhorn once more after leaving Nicky Cohn, but the proverbial Undertaker still wasn’t picking up. Piss-taker, more like, Joblard thought. If things keep the way they’ve been going. He decided to swing by the Hindu’s hole-in-the-wall for a bucket of soy Vindaloo, papadums and sweet mango. Then back to the Fridge. Upstairs one of the regular parties was in full-swing, sub-sonic bass shaking the windows in their frames. He killed the engine and wheeled around to the service lift, chained the BSA to the grill and hung a tarp over it. The basement lights weren’t on, so he figured Bird Girl probably wasn’t back yet. Decided to go in quietly anyhow, in case she was there asleep. Though how anyone could sleep with that Moby shit playing, he didn’t know.

The basement wasn’t exactly luxurious, but it was big. A single room, about ten yards wide, ran the length of the building, a kitchenette with garret windows at the back. It’d been used once upon a time for storage. Upstairs was where the meat processing had gone on. Some of the residents practiced a type of voodoo to ward of bad spirits, appease the bovine gods. Joblard wasn’t interested in animal karma. The place stank of rat bait. Every other morning he took a bag of dead rats out to the trash. He burned incense. Told Bird Girl there must be some sort of rat disease going around. Had to be careful what he left the bait around in, though, in case one of the resident freaks from upstairs got to scrounging munchies on a comedown.

Joblard left the takeaway by the door, tiptoeing through the basement obstacle course in his boots and trying not to bang his head on any fixtures. The sound of snoring was audible despite the thumping bass. Joblard peered into the bed – a king-size mattress on trestles high enough for a dwarf to camp under. On account of the rats. The bed, though, was empty. The snoring came from the other side of it. Joblard made out something moon-like wrapped in an overcoat, lying on the couch. It didn’t look like Bird Girl. He went over and flipped on the lights. Ol’ Pasty, with his head back, felt hat tipped forward, mouth open, was snoring like a bullfrog. His coat was gathered at the neck in the ball of a skinny fist, blotchy like his face. His other hand was wrapped around the butt of a service issue .45.

By the time the scarecrow got his eyes open, Joblard already had an elasticated ocky strap round his wrists and was in the process of cocooning the bastard with an industrial roll of kitchen wrap. Ol’ Pasty’s eyes bugged. They bugged even more when Joblard shoved the .45 in his mouth and asked him very politely to sit still. Wearing about fifty feet of kitchen wrap, the scarecrow looked like a sick grub. He squirmed when Joblard pulled the gun out of his mouth. It made Joblard think of his first day in school.

“You’re not going to piss on my couch, are you?”

Scarecrow shook his head. His grey felt hat had tipped to one side, revealing a serious case of eczema. It gave Joblard the creeps.

“Where’s your mate?”

Scarecrow just looked at him.

“You’re not fucking Polish, are you? Rozumiesz anglielskiego, ty głupi pizdy?”

Scarecrow glared.

“Suit yourself.”

Joblard tore off a strip of kitchen wrap and somehow got it around the scarecrow’s head without making contact with the eczema.

“Since you’ve got nothing to say,” Joblard pocketed the gun. “Any trouble breathing, just remember to holler.”

Joblard went to the kitchenette and grabbed a six-pack of Guinness from the fridge, then back to collect his vindaloo. He pulled up an armchair by the door and killed the lights, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Maybe, after he’d enjoyed a decent meal, he’d get the jumper leads out and see how the scarecrow responded to a little encouragement. Maybe the fucker was mute, hehe. That’d be a laugh. Better him than me.

Outside, the same Moby track was still echoing in the stairwell. There was the sound of the DLR rattling by. The usual peace and quiet. Joblard grinned to himself, spooned some rice into his curry, popped a can of stout and settled back, munching on a papadum, to see what the remainder of the evening might bring.

…

Nicky Cohn was standing in the middle of the room, toeing an orange-and-brown paisley rug Bird Girl had said blended with the couch. Joblard couldn’t help thinking she was right. He spooned some instant into two give-away Wozzie Burger coffee mugs and snapped off the kettle. Poured. Doused the mix with soy milk.

“Sugar?”

Nicky Cohn pulled a face like the very idea appalled him.

“Nice place you’ve got here. Pity about the stiff.”

Joblard brought over the coffee and stood beside Nicky Cohn. They both sipped their coffee, surveying the couch. The scarecrow’s brains had made a complete mess of it. But there was no denying it had a certain affinity with the rug. Little fractalised blobules of red, black and grey floating in a type of Rorschach amber that continued half-way up the wall, punctured by bone shard. Bits of the scarecrow’s brains were even stuck to the ceiling. Joblard thought he recognised a patch of eczematous scalp glued to the lightshade – a paper globe that’d once been white, but now looked like a sepia pock-marked moon. Sea of Tranquillity and all that.

At some point in the night Joblard had dozed off under a dusting of papadum crumbs and pilau rice. What woke him was a sound like rats trying to burrow out through the walls. He’d been dreaming of a boat, somewhere on a river. A sort of funeral barque. Egyptian. Head of a jackal at stern. Anorexis, or whatever it was called. Dog god. With a gold sarcophagus in the middle of it. Like Bludhorn’s museum. Naked midgets at the oars. Ol’ Pasty there, too, beating a big drum. A sail with billowing Rosicrucian eye. And Joblard himself, trapped inside the sarcophagus, gasping for breath, tangled in mummy wrappings, trying desperately to escape.

He spilled what was left of the vindaloo grabbing for the .45 wedged in his Bellstafs, lucky the safety catch was still on. At first he thought the scarecrow had gotten away. The place was quiet. The party upstairs must’ve ended. And then he saw it, a faint mock of paracelene from the back windows glinting on the kitchen wrap, casting a long shadow up the wall. Only it was no shadow…

“What d’you know,” Nicky Cohn slurped his coffee. “Looks like your pal must’ve wore falsies.”

“Eh?”

“Unless those are yours?”

He poked his mug towards a splotch on the back of the couch. Joblard squinted at it. A pair of dentures was embedded in the muck. They seemed to grin back at him.

“Yikes.”

“Think someone’s trying to finger you, old chum?”

Joblard pulled out the scarecrow’s gun. Sniffed at it. Nicky Cohn glanced at him with a vague look of apprehension.

“Hasn’t been fired. Beside,” he held the gun out for Nicky Cohn to inspect, “no .45 on Earth could’ve done that.”

Nicky Cohn demurred.

“Still, doesn’t exactly look good, does it?”

Joblard stuffed the gun back in his pants.

“What’re we going to do?”

Nicky Cohn held out his empty mug, Wozzie-the-Clown smirking sideways from it.

“I’ll take another one of these, if you’re offering.”

It’d been just after four o’clock when Joblard called Nicky Cohn. Figured he slept in his office. Got the answering machine. Shouted something incomprehensible at it. Rang again. Third go, the answering machine cut-out mid-message and the real-life Nicky Cohn came on.

“D’you know what time it is?”

“Of course I know what fucking time it is!”

“This better be good, old chum.”

“What if I told you there’s a headless fucking corpse sitting on my couch?”

He’d made it there in fifteen minutes. The sort of thing possible in London only around four a.m.

“You weren’t kidding,” Nicky Cohn said, when he saw the scarecrow. “There’s a corpse with no head sitting on your couch. What’s he wrapped in plastic for?”

Joblard spieled it out while Nicky Cohn clicked his tongue, shook his head, toed the rug. Sniffed.

“Rat bait,” Joblard explained.

His visitor appraised the room without moving from the spot, keeping an eye out for stray rodents.

“Nice place…”

Handing Nicky Cohn a fresh mug of coffee, Joblard pondered the situation. Nicky was right. If the cops got hold of this, they’d be all over him. Wouldn’t matter what he said. Wasn’t a single alibi he could think of that’d hold water. So to speak.

“In the films,” Nicky Cohn offered, warming is hands around his coffee, “they always search the body first, get rid of any I.D., then put it – the body, that is – in a bin liner and dump it somewhere. Got any of those housewife gloves? You know, for washing dishes and stuff?”

…

“What about his mate?”

And that’s when Joblard knew he’d have to find the dwarf. But even then, none of it made any sense. He’d spent half-an-hour scrubbing the wall and ceiling, scooping bits of brain matter off the floor, then bundling the stiff into a couple of bright yellow bin-liners – the ones they sold cheep at the local Sainsbury’s. The couch was a goner. He tried getting the stains out with diluted bleach. It only made matters worse. Nicky Cohn sat over by the door and watched, throwing in the odd suggestion from time-to-time. Like why not just toss the carpet over the back of the couch and be done with it?

The only thing Joblard had been able to find on the scarecrow was a roll of tenners and a pawnshop ticket. Castle Square, Brighton. He could dump the stiff and get down there on the bike before the place opened. See what he could find out. But the first thing was where to do the dumping. He’d never been all that conscientious about recycling. And riding about with a couple of bright yellow bin-liners on the back of a vintage BSA wasn’t exactly low-key. But then, nothing he ever did was. He figured the best thing to do was drop the lot into the canal, over by Tequila Warf. It was only a block away. Nicky Cohn didn’t like the idea quite so much. It wasn’t the headless corpse that bothered him. It was being a possible accessory that gave him the heebie-jeebies.

“Don’t tell me you’re suffering from a case of journalistic ethics?”

“Do I work for the Sun?”

“Thought you type were all the same.”

“Listen, chum, some of us have a future to think about.”

“What about the poor fucker with his head blown off. You reckon he didn’t have a future to think about?”

“Not sure I get your point, chum.”

“Nicky. There’s a headless stiff on my couch. If we don’t get it out of here, I’m screwed. You think I popped Johnny Fluoride? There were witnesses.”

“I just want to be able to write the story without calling down any heat. My mate at the Yard already smells a rat. Like where I got the tip-off on the floater. This could end up ruining my expense account.”

“Shut up and give me a hand, will you.”

Joblard bundled the disposal job in Bird Girl’s rug and left the stain on the couch to look after itself. Between the two of them they got the rug out into the yard, along the alley behind the Rajasthan Café. Nicky Cohn huffed and puffed at the back while Joblard shouldered most of the weight up front.

“For a skinny bastard, he sure weighs a bloody tonne.”

Once they’d made it across the parking lot off Brunton Place, it was easy going. Trees lined the canal, shrouding it in shadow. Bits of concrete rubble lay piled hither and yon. Bricks. Steel piping. Coiled wire. A body-disposal paradise. Across the water, a billboard stood up from the wharf, facing the Commercial Road Bridge, as if the plan was to get your average out-bound commuter worked up for the homeward run, and the missus-and-three-veg. Miss Big Tits in the Wonder Bra ad. Hello Pikers! Some local vigilantes had sprayed out the offending bits, adding WHORE across Miss Big Tits’s face. The marketing geniuses had really picked their demographic. It wasn’t called the East End for nothing. Any further east, you’d be in fucking Cairo.

“I heard somewhere,” Joblard said, hoisting the weighted bin-liners across the tow-path to the edge of the canal, “that if you cut the guts open, a body won’t float. On account of the gas. When it decomposes.”

“Not much good when it’s wrapped in a plastic bag, is it?”

“Shit. He’ll blow up like a fucking balloon.”

“Forget it. Your man ever floats, he’ll wash up in the locks. Maybe get pulled down to the river. Means they’ll have company for Johnny boy. Give the fuzz something to think about.”

“Shame about the rug.”

It made less of a splash than either of them expected, swallowed by the dark water. Joblard tossed the gun in after it. There were lights coming on over at the wharf. The six o’clock shift. Time to get a move-on. It was going to be another long day.

— Louis Armand

——————————

Louis Armand is the author of seven collections of poetry and five novels, most recently Breakfast at Midnight (2012) and Canicule (2013), both from Equus (London). His screenplay, Clair Obscur, received honourable mention at the 2009 Alpe Adria Trieste International Film Festival. He is an editor of VLAK magazine and has worked as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. He lives in Prague.

Beauty & the Brothel of Illustration: An Impractical Guide to Making Art | Essay & Paintings — Stephen May

Nov 162013

Self Portrait as a Dead Man, 2011, oil on board, 16 x 13.5 in., collection of the artist.

I am always alert to what artists have to say about their work. They are thoughtful, patient people who spend a lot of time by themselves working with their hands (something that always promotes a kind of detachment — you think with your hands and the rest is a kind of meditation). I first met Stephen May 25 years ago when I was writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick the first time. Stephen, despite the title of the painting above, is manifestly not dead (see the photo below), but still alive, painting and asseverating. When Stephen writes, he writes with passion and a style that rises here and there to the aphoristic; when he paints, his work shimmers with a kind of classic beauty. Herewith a sample of both, painting and text — the measure of the man and artist.

—

This is about how inadequate logic, reason, passion, intelligence and imagination are in art. It’s about how reasonable it is to accept that. It’s about how misleading and misguided the word creativity is. This essay is not meant as a spiritual work, but it necessarily enters territory that sounds spiritual.

I want to make good paintings. Sometimes when I’m painting something good happens. I remember not the first time it happened, but the first time I realized what was happening. The words that came into my head were, “Oh, all I have to do is tell the truth!” or “Oh, all I have to do is put down what I see!” (It was a long time ago).

In the late 1800’s a critic named Albert Aurier reviewed an international exhibition of contemporary art in Brussels that included the work of Van Gogh. He singled out Van Gogh as a leader and praised his work in terms of its form, the way he used colour. Van Gogh wrote letters to friends in response. In one of them he wrote, “Aurier’s article would encourage me if I dared to let myself go, and venture even further, dropping reality and making a kind of music of tones with colour, like some Monticellis. But it is so dear to me, this truth, trying to make it true, after all I think, I think, that I would still rather be a shoemaker than a musician in colours.”

Van Gogh loved truth. He is not famous because he cut off his ear. He is famous because his paintings are good. His paintings are good because of his relationship with truth.

What is truth anyway?

I’ve painted good paintings and bad paintings, which is to say beautiful paintings and banal paintings. I’ve reflected on both experiences. I want to understand what it was that seemed right with me when the paintings were beautiful and what seemed wrong with me when they were banal. My experience has brought me to an understanding of the way my art relates to my life and how what is good in art, what is meant by good art, relates to what is good in life in general.

Beauty is just a word. There are many claims on it. Something is happening, though, in the art of Bach, Tolstoy, or Manet, for example, that is unpredictable and mysteriously complex. I use the word beauty to serve that phenomenon.

Artists sometimes say beauty is truth, and people sometimes say God is truth or truth is God. I tend to say those things now. When John Keats and Emily Dickinson equated beauty with truth, and when Gandhi and Simone Weil said truth is God, I don’t think they were using the words as a slogan for an intellectual position. I believe the words occurred to them the same way they occurred to me. And they occurred to me as a revelation but only after many experiences of the difference between true and false, beauty and banality. It is reasonable to be skeptical about the expression beauty is truth, but, ironically, skepticism led me to the expression.

Simone Weil describes prayer as paying attention. I thought I stopped praying when I was a teenager, but now I think perhaps I’ve continued to pray all along.

Painting is an act. Painting is living. The problems of painting — the problem of whether to paint or not, how to paint, what to paint — are the same problems we all face in just being human. They are the problems we have figuring out what to do with our lives, figuring out what’s possible. A person acts, and we find out what’s possible.

L & A’s Garden with Neighbour’s House, 2010, oil on board, 24 x 24 in, private collection.

Shakespeare wrote plays.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So Shakespeare is possible. How did he do that? We want some explanation for his power and the continued effect it has on us. The only thing we can see and hear is the form, so we look for the secret there. Did Shakespeare have a secret formula? Did Bach and Beethoven? Did Manet and Monet? Did Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?

What allows some people to leave us better off than we would have been without them? Those who do that sort of work are, invariably, un-secretive, and the infinite variety of the forms their actions (art) take suggests that there is something very un-formulaic at the root of their work. The root of whatever it takes to do something good outside the art world might be the same as within it.

Our ego lives behind our eyes and the world pumps it up to blind us. Our bitter disillusionment (those lines of Macbeth’s) steals upon us concealed behind the blind of illusions created for us, within our ego, behind our eyes.

A beautiful painting is never simple. It’s never just some canvas with colours on it, never just the image, what it may or may not symbolize, never just an artist’s diary or an artist’s taste and opinions, and never just a reflection of the artist’s culture either. We all tend to be distracted by the specifics of our lives, our passions, etc. Socrates is supposed to have said the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing. And Einstein once said there are only two ways to look at the world. Either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle.

I need to use the word truth. Like the word God, it is a metaphor. I don’t think you can say God without imagining something like lord or father, something understandable. But if you use metaphor it moves mystery in the direction of non-mystery, and you undermine the significance, you undermine the psychic weight of mystery. You undermine the useful purpose of the word.

The thing about being human that makes me need to use the word truth is the hardest thing to put into words and the thing that if I could put it into words, might be the best use I could ever make of words. I am. I know I am because I experience. I know something else exists because I experience it. It’s a circular knowledge. There is no proving anything about myself, no proving anything about what I experience. One defines the other. There is no going outside that circle to see what’s outside it or to look back and see what that I really is, or what experience really is. It’s not even worth saying I know I experience as I can’t define either of the words I or experience other than in terms of the other. All our acts are acts of faith. Lived experience is normally so consistent it allows for a deep faith in nature and science, but as the Buddhists say, all is illusion.

I could ignore Socrates’ or Buddhist wisdom. I could ignore Keats’ revelation (my own) and call what happens within that circle knowledge. But it would be the first selfish act, the first subjective act that sanctions all subsequent selfish acts. It would be the end of wisdom. It would be the end of loving truth. It would be the end of true love. It would be the beginning of cowboys-and-indians. It would be the beginning of the presumption of knowledge and the sanctioning of all acts of relative good. It would be the end of goodness and love. It would be the end of beautiful action. It would be the end of beauty in my life. I wouldn’t paint anymore, or at least I hope I wouldn’t.

Truth is beauty is God. But I can only say that in the sense that I accept that all three words reflect an understanding that we really don’t know anything, that reason is limited. Beauty is mystical. It can’t be made un-mystical by social science or neuroscience (and yet it accepts those sciences). It accepts everything without judgment or fear or contempt. It isn’t fragile so requires no soldiers to protect it, nor rites to keep it holy.

We’re simply invited to fall on our knees. All our assorted lives and deaths lose all their gravity, they melt into air. We’re released from grasping, striving and collecting. Our fists are opened. We accept the ants on the kitchen counter, the dandelions in the lawn, our own nature, too. Poetry begins where separation between what’s solid and what’s mysterious melts away.

In Grace and Gravity, Simone Weil gives us an apt analogy. She describes a space normally filled up with our self, a space filled up with logic, reason, passion, intelligence and imagination. It’s only if we can remove our self from that space that there will be room for beauty or truth or God to arrive (she used the word grace). When we fill up the space again, there’s no longer any room for beauty. Reason and passion etc. are all manifestations of self love and they leave no room for beauty.

The mystical root of beauty and wisdom is in loving truth. Buddhist wisdom, Christian wisdom, and the wisdom of great art begin there. To love truth means knowing you know nothing. It means only accepting and accepting and accepting. It means being without agenda or prejudice. It means being without pride.

Egocentric taste is what is in the eye of the beholder. That’s not what I mean by beauty. I am not strictly speaking a religious man, but there’s no separation for me now between art and religion, painting and prayer, beauty and truth/God. If you consider aesthetics as philosophy of art, then for me aesthetics and ethics have merged.

View through the Studio Window, 2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 in., collection of the artist

I don’t know

A beautiful painting is not a representation of something you think is beautiful. If you see an image of an attractive and healthy young man or woman, or a sympathetic portrait of a beloved personality, a saint for instance, or an image of some idyllic setting, a place you’d like to be in, you have to be extremely wary. All of us involved in art have to make ourselves aware of the seductive power of imagery. What goes for art often fails to be more than expressions of taste or pandering to taste. Art very often fails to be more than seduction or manipulation.

You see, hear and taste, you feel beauty. How much do we miss though? Two people might be smiling at you, while one wishes you well and the other wishes you ill. Those smiles might look the same but they are different. It is a dangerous misconception that beauty is what something looks like. Beauty is what something is. Ugly, distorted, or plain things reveal themselves to be golden. Glittery things disappoint.

My struggle to come to terms with experience is the same as anyone else’s. We’re raised on illusions and comforted by them. My moments of disillusionment were unpleasant and life changing. We’re all taught by experience (or should be) the danger of mistaking illusion for truth. Some people wear blinkers their whole lives, loving escapism. Some people get cynical and don intellectual armour. Some love truth.

An old commandment, “Thou shalt make no graven image”, doesn’t make much sense to us at first glance. But if we make images of God from imagination, in words or pictures, and then love those images, it is really ourselves that we love. We create God in our image. We get what we want. We enter the brothel of illustration.

This isn’t new, nor will it ever grow old. It is in establishing whatever relationship is possible with truth that we begin to be beautiful, that our actions begin to be beautiful and the results of our actions, the traces we leave in our wake begin to be beautiful. Without that relationship all form is normal, banal. Within that relationship any form is beautiful.

In the pursuits of science, philosophy, theology, art, and in our everyday lives, truth is beautiful. Artists are prone to getting distracted from this no less than others. When I was young I liked art class best. When it came time to choose a career all I wanted was to play for a living, as opposed to work, so I chose art. It wasn’t too long though before I realized the only worthwhile thing an artist can do is love truth. I believe it’s the same for any career. I wonder what it does to a person’s soul if his career is ugly (spin doctors, etc.). In loving truth, the apparent incompatibility between our pursuits, between science and religion for instance, disappears.

I’m not suggesting we forsake intelligence, but beauty is not a strictly intellectual pursuit. You don’t need to be Plato to be beautiful. Being smart can just as easily get in the way. Maybe you need to be smart to realize that or to be able to put it into words (maybe it’s stupid to try to put it into words). A beautiful intellectual argument would be one free of rhetoric in the sense of persuasion. The rhetoric of persuasion is banal. That banality is an invitation for realities much worse than simply banal. We are attracted to intelligence for its own sake, to rhetoric and sophistry. But is leaves no room for love of truth. The rhetoric of persuasion is dangerous. It’s a truly ugly idea that if you’re better at persuasion than anyone else in the room, you win and truth is yours. Intelligence is for safe guarding ourselves against cleverness, distinguishing the difference between truth and rhetoric.

View from Jenn’s House, 2007, oil on board, 28 x 31 in., private collection

Elements of art

We can’t talk about art without talking about form. Art always takes a form, but the form that art takes isn’t what matters in art. The derogatory term academic art is reserved for art where form matters too much. It matters too much if you’re searching for new forms just as much as if you’re trying to conserve old forms. There is something more crucial than innovation. The painters Manet and Picasso are famous for breaking old forms and inventing new ones. That’s the orthodox story of western art. Really though they are famous because they are good, just like Van Gogh. Rembrandt was no breaker of form. All four of them are good in that they take form out of the precinct of words. Those who find refuge in form, the progressive and conservative alike never escape history, never escape their own time. Oscar Wilde asks us to be kind to fashion because it dies so young. I can’t muster much sympathy.

Manet’s contemporaries were offended by his lack of respect for what they considered to be the serious concerns of art. Things don’t change much. We get so caught up in our moment. Manet’s early paintings were designed as signposts, as if to say, “If you want to understand what I’m doing, just look at Velazquez (for example).” Manet’s painting, far from merely being a precursor to the triumphant art that followed, actually makes most subsequent painting look like window dressing and doodles, just as it made most of the painting of his contemporaries look like huge bags of brownish wind.

Sometimes when a person associates himself with the word realism it is meant to reveal their desire to dismantle false hierarchies. It is meant to express a willingness to accept all that is seen even though it may undermine the romantic/idealist notion that we are individually or collectively somehow the figurative center of the universe. It is meant as an acceptance of the fact that we are not the purpose or goal of existence. There have been many painters willing to put us in our place but none who have done it with such gentle humour, intelligence and kind sympathy as Manet.

Manet understood as well as anyone the potential of looking at something and painting a picture of it. He was reported to have said that a painter can say all he needs to say with fruit or flowers or even clouds. We can be moved generation after generation by paintings of nothing in particular, a glass of water, an empty field…by music without words. Manet’s perfect advice to artists: “If it’s there, it’s there. If not, start over.”

Chardin painted a picture of a brioche. He said you use colours but you paint with feeling. There’s a long list of great painters who looked at things and painted pictures of them, a long list of great paintings done that way. If sophistication prevents anyone from doing it today, there’s something wrong with sophistication. Van Gogh stuck candles to his hat so that he could see what he was doing when he painted outside at night. The French artist Marcel Duchamp called that stupid painting. The question of futility is empty. We are and so we do things. We can draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa or we can paint The Night Café, one or the other. The sublime and the ridiculous are Siamese twins. It’s a bit of good fortune if you don’t mind looking ridiculous.

We can’t talk about art without talking about media. There are practical advantages and disadvantages with respect to each medium, degrees of suppleness, degrees of ease of dissemination, etc. Ultimately though, we are the message. It is ourselves who are being delivered. We must tend to ourselves first. Our instinctual egoism is embodied in any new form and delivered by any new medium as naturally as in and by the old ones. That the delivery is increasingly more efficient is no great comfort.

A new medium is not necessarily a better medium. As a medium or technology becomes more complex, McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” becomes truer. Love and empathy disappear within the complexity. We need to be careful that the increasingly complex media we adopt don’t cause this we that’s being delivered to become we-the-machine.

Painting most likely persists as a medium because of its infinite suppleness. It always bends to the force of the person who paints and makes it impossible for that person to hide. Anything that is good about them is plain to see. It’s almost as simple and obvious as singing or dancing. Less machine means less machine. It’s for those who love a person.

Hummel Figurine, 2011, oil on canvas, 56 x 57 in., private collection

We can’t talk about art without talking about content (or substance). The word content is an acceptable word to stand for what matters in art. Whenever something gets formed (by humans or otherwise) all the causes, the obvious and the mysterious, of its being formed are contained within it. Content might be a word that denotes the limits of our understanding of what is there in the form, the limits of our ability to read it, to perceive it, as in, content is what I see, or content is what I know. Content might also be a word to denote all that is contained in form, independent of our ability to perceive it. When we form something we could define content as what we meant by forming it, or we could define content as what we are, as the force that determines the form. We don’t know what we are. We say intellectual content without knowing exactly what a thought is, what consciousness is.

If it’s true that the universe is in a grain of sand, that the content of a grain of sand is the universe, what then distinguishes a beautiful man-made form from a plain or ugly one, or nature from art? If content is what matters, what is the content in Bach’s form that distinguishes it from all other form in his time or before or since? What constitutes its value to us, if all sound, every sound, any sound holds truth in it? I would say that art is a human affair. A communion occurs. The origins of Bach’s music are mysterious. Bach willingly collects us within this mystery. It’s a kindness, a generosity on his part. When the sun shines, or the rain falls, or the volcano erupts, we can’t be sure it’s a kindness. A grain of sand isn’t kind.

We seek knowledge. We seem to be offered it but beauty takes it away again. We are stripped of the urge to be assertive. Maybe the beautiful thing about beauty is that no one knows how to do it, that no one ever has or ever will. We only know little pieces of a puzzle that keeps expanding in unimaginable dimensions beyond our potential and when we look again at that piece of the puzzle we thought we knew, that we so carefully and assuredly put in its place, it’s no longer what we knew it to be. I don’t know why Bach is so good. I don’t know how he so consistently avoids failing when it’s so easy to fail. I borrowed a Maria Callas CD from the library of her first recording when she was in her early twenties. The person who wrote the commentary for the CD ended with, “Listen to it on your knees.” It’s of crucial significance when one of us fails to fail.

There is a potential for art beyond metaphor. It would be better if people would understand that the value of art comes not from the nature of it being about something crucial and important, but from the nature of it actually being something crucial and important. Its value is not as illustration or documentation or story or metaphor, but as the embodiment of what is valuable. Imagery and symbols come naturally to painting which makes it particularly susceptible to this perceived limitation. 20th century painters abandoned the image to declare an understood kinship to music’s intrinsic abstract qualities. The same is true in modern dance and literature when they abandoned plot. There are no formal safeguards against failing to be beautiful, no formulas, but one understands the motivation.

I’m beginning to get angry at images. They seem to have an innate tyranny to mislead. When you see, when you feel with your eyes it happens in colour patches, in light and dark shapes. We respond to it in all the ways we respond to it ever since we’ve been human, by backing away, by approaching, in fear, in wonderment. But culture turns images into symbols that have meaning. The tyranny of the image is that it distractw one from realizing that the paintings aren’t symbols first, they are art first. They are embodiments of the painter, hopefully embodiments of feeling. For every painter who feels as Rembrandt feels, there are 100,000 painters whose symbols are the same as Rembrandt’s. For every painter who feels as Tom Thomson feels (in his plein-air sketches), there are 100000 painters whose symbols are the same as Thomson’s. This is the tyranny of the image.

Vegetable Garden and Phlox, 2010, oil on board, 26 x 26 in., private collection

Critical thinking

My best paintings were done by putting dark paint where it looked darkish, light paint where it looked lightish, like some glorified, faulty camera with two eyes instead of one and self-awareness instead of none. Cézanne said of Monet that he was “only an eye—yet what an eye!” I love Monet’s late paintings of the Japanese footbridge, when his eyes were ruined by cataracts and the operations to fix them.

I want so much to trust somebody. All I have is my eyes, ears and time to find out who I can trust, to discriminate between who might care and who might be looking out for themselves first. I think much of what is admired in the world is admired for being great examples of people overpowering other people. It’s taken it as a license to do the same. Hell is other people.

I’m searching for something and am compelled to walk away when it doesn’t appear to be present. If I can separate the good from the not so good, the difference between them becomes much clearer. The success of this phenomenon might be why there are long line-ups to get into the Musée D’Orsay every day.

There is an idea in vogue right now of artist as critical thinker. There is a relationship between art and philosophy, but they aren’t identical. Matisse said if you decide to be a painter you must cut out your tongue, you give up the right to express yourself by any means other than painting. He didn’t cut out his tongue though, and his art didn’t suffer. It’s good to hear it from the horse’s mouth. It would be even better if the horse could be as articulate as the horse experts. One tries.

Marcel Duchamp was a competent painter with interesting ideas. He stopped painting. He eventually ended his involvement with the art world altogether. He probably noticed the difference. Faithless action is impossible for a sincere person to sustain. Dadaism as it is manifested in his art—great art by function of its influence on later artists—reflects a strange cynicism with respect to the possibility of a person doing anything beautiful. Goodness saves each one of us at every turn. Disillusionment is with ideology. To abandon the cynicism that accompanies disillusionment means abandoning ideology. Icons are ideas. Marcel Duchamp has become an icon of iconoclasm. He’s his own mistake. When you destroy something, unless you arrange otherwise, the vacuum will be filled up again with normal things.

You can’t make anti-art. If you make it, it’s art. If you persist after realizing that, then you kind of need to accept that you’re the type of person who likes a joke at another’s expense. Duchamp kept attempting to present an art without value, anti-art, suggesting that the value we place on art is false. Every time he made something though, he realized he failed. The thing became art. By having been done, it inevitably participated in the phenomenon that is art and was valued as such. He realized that the only way this wouldn’t happen was if a thing remained un-done, un-made, that the idea remained unrealized. An unrealized idea, though, isn’t anti-art, but rather the absence of art.

The term conceptual art is a classic oxymoron. Conceptualism was still born. Art-as-idea has evolved from an absurdity to a concept of art reduced once again to illustration and documentation. Research, the collection of facts, has replaced perception, replaced feeling. Duchamp’s cynical act of pointing at a urinal and calling it art has spawned the current fashion of pointing. The art in this situation is not what is pointed at but rather the act of pointing and the implicit declaration. It is more vapid than the more traditional and self-centered pointing at yourself, drawing attention to yourself when you have nothing to offer, no beautiful intentions.

Duchamp was the first artist to gain a history book kind of success because he had nothing good to offer. The root of his powerful influence on today’s art world lies in the hope he gives to so many artists with ambitions for a similar kind of success, who, despite reasonable intelligence, like Duchamp have nothing good to offer. It is a telling fact to consider that some of the greatest paintings ever made were painted by Monet with his coke-bottle glasses in his garden in Giverny years after Duchamp pointed at a urinal. The history of what matters is more like a pulse than a march.

It’s in the nature of institutions to be conservative. Institutions must hold on to the ideas of themselves to exist. As we are in the era of art-as-idea, there is institutionalized sanctioning of cleverness within the contemporary art world that looks suspiciously like the 19th century Academy. It’s what happens when ideas replace feeling. There is a work of conceptual art that consist of a panel that has the words on it (in French) “Art is useless. Go home.” Without beauty, without feeling this is more or less true.

All artists, great and small, make things that aren’t beautiful. Sometimes some of them make things that are. A thing shouldn’t be held sacred just because Leonardo painted it or Mozart composed it. We’re allowed to walk away from art, even great art, if we find we can’t trust it.

Making beautiful things is beyond me. If it was just a matter of sincerity or intelligence or skill the world would be full of beautiful art. If it happens for me I’m never sure where it came from, or why it happened. It has many of the characteristics of accident. I realize I’m not controlling things. Simone Weil talks about waiting for God. All I can do is wait and hope for the beautiful thing to happen.

There was hope the industrial and technological revolutions would give us the opportunity to become our best selves but we sit in cars at drive-thrus and in chairs staring at screens and allow the means to become the end, the medium to become the message. We never seem to be up to our dreams, our utopias. We always imagine things that need us to be better than we are: Camelot, Star Trek, socialism, democracy. Occasionally a person saves us though, for a while, by disappearing, by being disinterested, by being selfless.

Watermelon Rinds in a Bowl, 2012, oil on board, 19.75 x 20 in., collection of the artist

I have my moments

William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, infinite.”

As the best musicians listen, so the best painters look.

I’ve been trying to figure out the word tactile with an artist friend of mine. It’s one of those words, like beauty, used to denote something crucial in art but difficult to define. My daughter is a performance artist, a dancer. She uses the word presence in a way that I think might stand for a manifestation of the same crucial quality of art. When you stand in front of a painting, often you read the image as a few symbols and that’s all that’s there. You run into the end of the art quickly and moving up close to it or remaining with it for hours is fruitless. If a work is tactile, if a work has presence, you are rewarded by any kind of closeness.

When artists look, when that word means something, they can’t avoid seeing themselves there, present in their art action. Our undeniable and mysterious presence is inseparable from our experience (what we’re seeing when we’re painting) and our action (painting). It is one thing and it is the connection. As E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.” The eternal and universal miracle of realness is what connects us. When I paint a picture, if I’m looking, I am the man in the cave scratching on the wall. I see myself living and already being gone.

When I started out as a painter I emulated my heroes in a superficial way. Eventually I realized their paintings all had something in common that couldn’t be attributed to style or technique. The mechanics of painting never change much. We all use our hands and eyes and some painting supplies. Most artists are happy to share their methods. My method is pretty simple. I put green or red where I see green or red, dark or light where I see dark or light and make lots of corrections as I go. The results are predictably ordinary much of the time. The alchemy that occasionally happens has something to do with looking and feeling. Occasionally an image results that wasn’t imagined. A painting becomes that mysterious truth that is infinitely close and at an infinite distance.

Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, and Lucien Freud all lived in the era of the photograph. The unimagined image is, as are we, embedded in a miracle.

What it feels like when I’m painting is that I’ve gotten into a very small boat by myself and pushed off land out into a vast ocean where there are no fixed points to navigate by and everything’s constantly changing. I’m searching for an island in the middle of that ocean where there’s a spring with regenerative waters. It is only by being quiet that I can see and feel the subtle signs, the quality of the air and light, the push of the currents on the boat in order to sense where the island lies. The clumsiness of a large boat and the distraction of ideas would blind me. I wouldn’t be able to find the island.

I very often fail to find it anyways and return with nothing more than a documentation of facts I encountered on the way (stupid paintings). I can’t take anyone with me and I can only bring a small amount of water back. The only proof that island exists is the water I taste and bring back for others to taste. The water does what it does for those it works on. My responsibility is just to get into the boat and push off away from land and try to be quiet.

But for the water on that island I’d have no reason to get into the boat. I get to taste it too. All I know is how I am different as a result. Once you’ve made a good painting, a beautiful painting you’re driven to do it again. All arguments against beauty carry no weight against experience of it.

My most recent good painting happened this way. I was fearless, which isn’t normal. Usually I’m lucky if I become fearless along the way. Maybe I was fearless because I began by destroying a painting I’d been struggling with for years. I scraped and sanded something mediocre. I had no clue what the new painting would end up being. I didn’t think much about composition, the kinds of marks that I’d make, or the image that would result. I set the easel up facing a window I’ve painted countless times, something handy, and then the painting just sort of fell on to the canvas. I was in a wonderfully submissive state of acceptance of everything. I felt weightless. The ultimate form the painting would take wasn’t my concern. It felt like everything that I did, or might do, would be OK. There were no weighty decisions that were mine to make.

The Oxford dictionary defines grace as (in Christian belief) the unmerited favour of God; a divine saving and strengthening influence. It defines nirvana as perfect bliss and release from karma, attained by the extinction of individuality.

I don’t like to talk about technique. I feel like it would be misleading to talk about technique after realizing that I can make something beautiful with just a fat charcoal stick on a plain piece of paper. Though inferior tools and materials and clumsy and inefficient technique can frustrate an attempt, ultimately we can’t be saved by what colours we have on our palette or what brushes we use.

I have a number of techniques in my bag of tricks, all of them impatient. There are many painting techniques I don’t know, the patient and careful ones. Sometimes I find myself hopping from one technique to another in a short space of time during one painting session. I do that, not because I’m searching for the right one for that particular situation but because I’m trying to trigger the escape from technique. Things aren’t going well. I’m mired in knowledge and I want to get out.

In my bag of tricks there’s only one that matters. It’s not a secret and it’s supremely simple. Stop looking for your voice. Stop trying to distinguish yourself. Give up.

View from Everetts, 2011, oil on board, 12.75 x 21 in., private collection

It’s simple

There is no substitute for feeling in art. Logic, reason, passion, intelligence, imagination, skill, maybe even what we call talent, are all realities of self. There is no beauty without their surrender. Feeling may not be all that’s required to be an artist, but it’s all that required to be beautiful. If you want art to be worth something, you need to know that it’s only beauty that saves the world, grace our reconciliation with gravity, love our relief from futility.

There’s a relationship between creation and destruction and a point at which the two seem to become one. Or perhaps neither exists except as different perspectives on change. In the fearless state of art, things are constantly being “created” and “destroyed,” constantly changing. Sometimes very good art will be perceived as irreverent and destructive, punk. It wasn’t their intention, but Manet and Van Gogh probably seemed like punks at the time. We trust them now. How do you distinguish between the good people and bad people when both ignore the laws? The question can make a conservative soul feel uncomfortable, mistrustful, angry and at sea. Beauty is found in realizing that we’ve never been anywhere other than at sea.

Great creators realize they are merely instruments. We place them on a pedestals and aspire to be there ourselves. Leonard Cohen once said something to the effect that he didn’t write his songs but he’s really glad we think he did. What’s rare is the understanding that none of us are creators. There are countless artists with Rembrandt’s or Manet’s skill but the skill is almost always wasted on inventions and opinion, on presumptions of knowledge. We’re all guilty of such waste. Rembrandt often was. Rubens was especially.

Their ability to find detachment for short periods of time doesn’t make saints of my painting heroes. Humans are clever, aggressive, territorial animals and are driven for the most part by biochemistry and overpowering social and survival instincts. Selfless detachment is difficult to maintain in the everyday world. I feel like I get to take little vacations from myself. Tolstoy said, “The one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.” In life, though we’re all aware of the risks of telling the truth.

The art history books are filled with art that flatters our species, magnificent follies, conceits of the intellect and imagination…pyramids and urinals, but there is no better reason for making art than being able to do for people what beauty does for people. On a number of occasions I’ve ended up weeping at the experience of beauty. I ask myself why I’m crying. It seems to be from some deep and unexpected sense of relief. I feel delivered from banality, from the sense that no-one cares, or from the sense that people’s concerns are exclusively worldly. It ends some kind of loneliness. It is redemption from narrowness and subjectivity.

Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice is a cautionary tale about confusing two types of beauty. At the end of the story he points us in the right direction. Attractiveness-type beauty leaves one with an ache to possess the object, the form. Truth-type beauty is only ever joyful. Whoever owns the object or form is irrelevant as beauty is not the form itself but what is manifested in it. In the experience of beauty, it is yours. It takes possession of you, it breaks your armour, and you expand into it. You participate in the artist’s expansiveness. It is unrestrictedly generous.

I want to do this, I want to make beautiful paintings, but I realize you can’t get there from here. You can’t try and make one. Striving to be great doesn’t help. You just need to do your job and hope for the best. Sometimes, strangely enough in telling yourself you’re going to make a bad work on purpose you can trick yourself into avoiding pretentiousness. The best thing an artist can be is nothing in particular; the best thing an artist can do is disappear. What’s left is infinite.

There’s a category in the thesaurus: artlessness. Under it you find ingenuousness, simpleness, naivety, innocence, unguardedness, unpretentiousness, sincerity, trustfullness, openness… reminds me of that lovely Shaker song.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero the usurped Duke/magician has, in his daughter, one gift to bestow. This gift is “plain and holy innocence”. Prospero’s one great fear is that this gift won’t be received with respect. It is a gift that when respected “will outstrip all praise”, a gift that if held at an impossible distance by disrespect will issue nothing but “barren hate, sour-eyed disdain and discord”. Plain and holy innocence is the sine qua non of good art. With The Tempest Shakespeare passes the torch, and includes instructions.

Though we often reject critics and scholars as popes of culture, they often do what they do out of love and they’ve likely seen things we haven’t yet. But to love something does not necessarily mean you have insight into what makes it possible. Northrop Frye seemed to think that what enabled great art and made it special and valuable was what he called imagination. He also confessed to being unable to write a work of fiction.

I think most people assume that a work of art is a product of imagination, that Bach and Shakespeare had great imaginations. This idea implies that the work of art is generated within. Imagination is but a useful tool. But there’s a force to which it must surrender. It can provide situations but must surrender those situations to the infinite which the imagination can never be. Imagination gives us pictures of where we want to be, mythological gardens, things to strive for. We’re never up to our progressive ideas, our dreams. Everywhere we go, there we are. Without beauty life is nasty, brutish and probably too long.

I’ve condemned imagination’s role in the search for beauty. Perhaps others have a broader understanding of the word. Perhaps I should use the word fancy. Yet the root of imagination is the word image. It’s what our minds are limited to. Cézanne said, “I should like to astonish Paris with an apple.” As with Chardin’s and Manet’s, his paintings of apples continue to be astonishing. It doesn’t take much imagination to put an apple in front of you and paint a picture if it. Simone Weill wrote in Gravity and Grace, “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

We need to acknowledge that our understanding is limited, yet our condition is a consciousness of limitlessness. In loving truth we have to accept paradox. If you acknowledge that agenda, prejudice, preconception and conceit are facts of life and therefore facts of art and then decide that your conceit is an art without agenda, prejudice, preconception and conceit, that’s quite the paradox…sophisticated innocence. No wonder it’s so normal to fail.

Apples in Glass Bowl, 2008, oil on canvas, 43 x 56 in., private collection

All you need is love

We’re proud of artists like Picasso. Some are even proud of people like Napoleon, all that strutting and fretting we do. The history of humans is the history of the failure of ideas. In studying history we hear the haunting refrain “never again,” “never again,” “never again.” The critical stance we adopt with respect to what we perceive as wrong is born of the conceit that we know better, the same conceit that gets us in to trouble in the first place.

The ambition to be beautiful is really an anti-ambition. It is the ambition to de-create the self, using Simone Weil’s expression.

In his play Antigone, Sophocles warns us to beware of hubris and to always hold the gods in awe. John Keats tells us in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” all we need to know on earth is that beauty is truth. The hardest thing an artist can do, the hardest thing a person can do, is act without self-interest. Once you have come to know that beauty is truth, you realize that any step away from beauty is the greatest danger we face. Perhaps this is what Dostoevsky meant when he said that beauty saves the world.

The last lines of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch describe the selfless character Dorothea:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The absence of beauty in a person is the root of callous indifference. The presence of beauty is the proof of love. The presence of it in what we’ve done is the great value of art.

Nobody can be good all the time, but if I can be good while I’m painting, at least that’s something, a few shining moments.

—Stephen May

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Stephen May’s canvases have been collected by prestigious corporate and private collectors for over three decades and are included in the public collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the New Brunswick Museum, the New Brunswick Art Bank, the University of New Brunswick, l’Université de Moncton, the New Brunswick Department of Supply and Services and the Department of External Affairs. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery presented a solo exhibition of May’s work entitled Embodiments in 2006 and the following year he won the Miller Brittain Award for Excellence in Visual Art. May graduated from the fine arts program of Mount Allison University in 1983. He lives in Fredericton.

Everything Happens As It Does: Novel Excerpt — Albena Stambolova

Nov 132013

“Night Vigils” comes in the middle of Albena Stambolova’s new novel, Everything Happens as It Does (Open Letter Books). This chapter is a sample of Stambolova’s idea-rich and scintillating prose. The reader doesn’t need to know much context to make this chapter complete, save that Margarita and her father have not seen a lot of each other lately, and, for the most part, she is a rather odd young woman. I think my favorite aspect of this chapter is the way Stambolova can write about such commonplace scenarios and make them sound surprising and intimate (perhaps even intrusive). Through the eyes of Margarita, Stambolova manages to convey the authentic nature of experience as a surprising and unsettling encounter with otherness.

— Jacob Glover (see NC’s review of the novel here)

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25.

Night Vigils

Margarita tiptoed between tangled legs and arms, tilted lamps, overturned glasses and all kinds of remnants from hours of sitting, smoking, talking and listening to music. She saw a couple kissing, their lips sunk into each other with such riveting force that she could not take her eyes off them. Worn-out desperate things had a strange effect on her. A threadbare blanket, for example, or this hopeless kiss, beautiful like a dead rose’s petals dripping with their scent of hysteria. She decided to walk around them, bumped into a sleeping body and the solid surface of an armchair, finally reached an emptier space with enough room for both her feet and managed to steady her step. Where could she have left her coat, her oversized, long black coat and her gigantic bag? They must be here somewhere. The figure of a man holding a candle appeared out of nowhere. Nothing ever happened the way one anticipated it. Come to think of it, even tonight, earlier in the evening, she had tried to explain that she didn’t have the time, but it turned out that she did have the time, she had lots of time. And what birthday were they talking about, no one had a birthday. At least she couldn’t see anyone who had a birthday.

For the first hour or so, it had been only the three of them—the boy who had brought her and who seemed to know her very well, and the girl she had assumed was the hostess, as she had changed into different clothes at least twice. They had all been sitting around a low coffee table when the girl had stood up and walked away, and just when they had almost forgotten about her, she reappeared wearing something like a transparent nightgown over her naked body. She looked beautiful in the dim light. Then more people came and Margarita lost sight of the girl, only to see her later in a different outfit, which made her doubt for a moment that it was the same person.

Now she was looking for her coat and her bag, and she was starving. Finally she stepped into a room with piles of coats thrown on a bed, and she buried her hands to search for hers. She recognized it by the touch of her fingers, like a blind person, and pulled it out, overcoming the resistance of the soft mass of clothes around it. Her bag was on the floor and she almost tripped over it. She flung it on her shoulder, continuing to tread carefully toward the exit.

Once outside, she could see only machines; there were people, but the people were all inside machines—trams, buses, and cars. She didn’t feel like going home, and decided instead to visit her father. The trams’ jangle and dazzling threaded lights did not seem inviting, so she headed there on foot, her heavy bag on her shoulder.

Walking gave her the satisfaction of work well done. Work that was pleasant and amusing, squeak-squeak-squeaking feet on the snow. Gliding, slaloming between the parked cars, stopping at traffic lights, standing upright like a soldier.

At night the city looked like a picture. Spaces look indistinct, the houses are surprising. At night the city lets you be; it lets you in, in all of its places, which, you then realize, belong to the city and not to you, a passerby. If you are brave enough, it will let you in even deeper, to places invisible in daylight no matter how hard you look for them. Night people in the city know this, they belong to the city, and that’s why they are scary and others are frightened by them.

Margarita was not thinking about these things. She never thought about anything at all. Thinking for her was like floating down a babbling stream, gently propelled by the drift of her unusual perceptions, until someone broke the spell by speaking or asking for something. No one had ever heard Margarita herself ask for anything. If she happened to feel like “asking,” what other people would call “asking,” she just let her feet take her to a place where whatever she needed simply happened to her. If she ever felt scared by something, she would run away and no one could stop her. She had thus gone through a number of schools, special schools and ordinary ones, she had started many classes and abandoned many, until one day Maria decided that she deserved some peace. Margarita read books, children’s stories and other books, she went out with people, to the cinema or elsewhere, but how far her knowledge of things extended was a mystery. She did not seem depressed about not fitting into a normal category, and the doctor, Mr. T., whom she was seeing about once a month, had himself come to a standstill in observing her perpetual state. Valentin would sometimes drag her with him for weekends or holidays with friends, and Margarita would blend in, in her own dazed way. At the same time, she never forgot faces or people in general. Her memory, free as it was from all other things, recorded words, faces, situations—gathering an endlessly abundant material that would make quite a few film directors happy.

Now she strolled about the city and registered no signs of danger. Every once in a while she felt the weight of her bag and moved it to her other shoulder. What was in that bag, only she knew, whatever to know meant for Margarita.

The window of her father’s apartment gleamed like a beacon. He answered the door almost immediately, dumbfounded to see her. So much so, that for a moment he did not invite her to come in, but let the smell of something burning reach her nose in wafts through the open door.

Are you alright?

Margarita smiled at him happily and he stepped back. He knew that she perceived things differently, but all the same he felt uncomfortable that she could see the remains of his lonely midnight dinner in the black frying pan. He chased away the thought of Maria’s ability to prepare something tasty out of anything, her oven turning out unbelievable dishes as if by itself.

Margarita looked at the piano, but her father waved his hand—not now, people are sleeping.

I’m hungry, dad.

Straight away he put a plate and some bread on the table, poured her a soda drink and took a salad out of the fridge. Margarita began to chew heartily, while her father wondered how he could possibly tell her that he was worried about her.

He asked about Valentin, but quickly hit some barrier and concluded that he needed to find out what was happening at his wife’s house.

Margarita finished eating, suddenly looking sad. He shouldn’t have spoken to her about Valentin. He took a sip of his beer and asked her about the baby. Margarita’s reaction was calmer, her mother and the baby were fine. And dear Boris? She hadn’t seen him for a while.

Her father felt anxious, the way he did every time he received news from Maria’s house. Margarita stirred from her seat like a restless bird before a storm. She wanted to go to bed and her father drove her home. He kissed her goodnight, lightly, as if this was something he did every night.

When she climbed into her enormous boat of a bed, her grandmother’s lamp was still lit. She couldn’t tell if there was anyone in the house.

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Excerpted from Everything Happens as it Does by Albena Stambolova

Trans. Olga Nikolova from Bulgarian

Pubished by permission of Open Letter Books

Fame Is A Mask That Eats The Face: A Review of Salinger by David Shields & Shane Salerno — Timothy Dugdale

Nov 022013

Salerno, Salinger & Shields

Fame is a mask that eats the face – John Updike

Salinger
by David Shields and Shane Salerno
Doubleday; 331 pp; $37.50.

I was on YouTube the other night and I happened upon an old video that reminded me of this book and its subject. The clip was from 1969. Hugh Hefner was hosting the British group, Deep Purple, at his mansion in Chicago. Hef had a TV show back then, late night, a very loose piece of broadcasting that nonetheless was suffice with all the vibrations that drew millions of gents to Playboy. It was just before Hefner decamped to LA. Once amongst the palms, Hef traded in his tux for silk pyjamas and withdrew from the public eye almost altogether. He holed up in a mansion that ran on werewolf’s clock and a sybriate’s appetites. Hef built his own space-time continium in that mansion, a swinger’s paradise that gave American what it wanted without the swinger having to give himself up to America.

Perhaps that is what Salinger was after when he retreated to a modest cottage in New Hampshire not long after the publication of Catcher in the Rye. In this massive oral history, cobbled together from an unbelievable variety of sources, Shields and Salerno give us a Salinger who lost himself in an imaginary family, the Glasses, even while his own young family looked on with dismay and bewilderment.

Jerome David Salinger began well in life. His people had money and he had the looks and smarts to make the most of that advantage. Two events, not unrelated, conspired to lay him low. First, he fell for Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona. Salinger wanted her badly and hit her with his best shots, including what would become his preferred method of mashing – love letters. The radiant debuttante was unmoved, however, and cast her lot with Charlie Chaplin who married her a month after she turned eighteen. The thirty six year difference between them proved to be nothing; they had eight children and the marriage flourished for thirty four years until Chaplin departed the limelight for good. For Salinger, the rejection was particularly galling, as he was trapped in Europe fighting WWII when he learned of his defeat at the hands of the old musical hall rascal. Chaplin was everything Salinger would prove not to be – sociable, entertaining, comfortable in fame yet able to best its worst to the benefit of his privacy.

If O’Neill permanently marked Salinger with a lust for nubile flesh, WWII gutted his psyche. Salinger lived through the worst the war had to give a soldier. He survived a number of nasty combat episodes as the Allies moved to finish off the Nazis. Then he participated in the liberation of one of Hitler’s concentration camps.

The biographers state early and often that Salinger understandably cracked up. Jilted and spooked, Salinger came home to America unsuitable for American life. But his madness gave the literary world two bona fide treasures. In 1948, the New Yorker published A Perfect Day for Bananafish, a short story that blew the New York literary scene out of the water. Salinger was no Norman Mailer. He didn’t pride himself on coming out of WWII a hardened existential warrior. And he wasn’t Vonnegut who managed to take his own case of shellshock and transmute it into absurdist literature suffuse with playful, almost childish humanity. To the contrary, Bananafish is a communique from the front lines of untreated and untreatable PTSD. We learn that the first half of the story came in a crucial revision process demanded by The New Yorker editors. The comely young wife of Seymour Glass tries to convince her anxious mother that Seymour, tormented by his war experiences, is getting better. Then the reader joins Seymour on the beach where he is entertaining a little girl with stories about a make-believe fish. Glass returns to his Miami Beach hotel room, takes a look at his napping wife and blows his brains out with a service revolver. Salinger was rubbing something very nasty in the face of America, a war-weary country that didn’t want to think about its brave veterans eating a gun after they’ve covertly ogled little girls on the beach. America was on the make, with flag and Jesus and easy credit on hand to sanctify the ascent and quell the primal doubts of modern existence. Salinger wrote in an authentic voice, deeply troubled yet unyielding in its alienation from American life and fatal disappointment with the world at large.

Catcher in the Rye was Salinger’s moment of truth for that voice. His short stories had bought him enormous goodwill and standing in the publishing world. He had become a staple at The New Yorker. Now he could truly reveal himself, the arrested adolescent who went to war and came home with yet another set of mental handcuffs, a troubled kid who nonetheless found a way to bear witness to the prison life of his mind in edgy prose spiced with profanities. Holden Caulfield was raging against the hypocrisies of his time. And American youth were all ears. They were mad as hell and didn’t want to take it anymore. Fuck the squares and the Russians and the bomb and apple pie. Shields and Salerno do a lovely job of piecing together how the book barely managed to make it to the presses as publisher after publisher balked at Salinger’s aggrieved prep-school dropout. When Catcher came out, the response was sensational. In less than five years, the book was being banned by schools all over the country. What Salinger had started with Bananafish, he finished with Catcher.

And then Salinger escaped New York to Cornish, New Hampshire. Years passed, then decades. While Salinger tried to capture his beloved Glass family under glass, the world tried to capture the elusive Salinger. Where had he gone? Why? Hefner went away to live out the fantasy he sold on the newsstands. Salinger went away to escape the collective fantasy of the successful author, a fantasy that shadowed his writing and weighed heavily on his compromised mind. By removing himself, he hoped, the work was left to speak for him.

But is that really true? As the book moves into its final third, Shields and Salerno provide ample evidence that Salinger was a rabid protector not just of his privacy but also his mythos. Just as Hefner fights to keep his mid-century image frozen in the public mind, so did Salinger. Holden must not grow up. He must not be seen dealing with the awful drudgery of adulthood. He must not be an old man toiling on idiosyncratic oddities. Salinger duked it out with a would-be biographer all the way to Supreme Court and emerged victorious. He took on his own daughter who wanted to air the soiled family laundry. He played footsie with publishers, big and small. And he continued to cultivate young female pen pals.

Old hard-ons die hard. No biography of Salinger would be complete with an appearance by Joyce Maynard, the ambitious literary ingenue who moved in with JD as the Summer of Love was falling apart. Here Shields and Salerno allow Maynard to give a full account of her romance, if you can call it that, with Salinger. We might have heard it all before but never in such a rich context. Looking at pictures of teenage Joyce, you can just imagine what she did for Salinger, eternally on the make for a new and improved Oona. In Bananafish, Salinger shamelessly advertised his addiction to innocence, female innocence, the kind of innocence that didn’t wear a baby doll nightie or get pregnant. And ultimately that is what caused Salinger to send Maynard packing – the realization that her innocence was not only fleeting but in flight, it could cause him the grief of more fatherhood. She wasn’t a real person; she was a place to indulge his delusions. At least Hef invited his ladies into a heated jacuzzi to get the same kicks. The Maynard saga ends with the lamentable Joyce driving up to New Hampshire, looking for closure. By then she had been dining out on her liaison with Salinger for decades. She gets what she came for with a fuselade of expletives and a door slammed in her face.

This is not a standard celebrity biography written by some Fleet Street hack eager to bring his subject down a peg or two. Nor is it a hagiography looking to give us a buffed-up JD Salinger who heroically fought to keep his literary quest pure and unsullied by the machinations and madness of fame. It is a cunningly ramshackle collection of all the source material one expects from a biography lashed together in chronological order but with no singular authorial voice. The authors don’t serve you drinks in a boat; you’re swimming in their water but the current is copacetic. Shields is an old hand at this sort of thing. In works like Reality Manifesto, he outlined a galvanic form of creative non-fiction where the reader and the writer have to do real work on the page, the former providing the potential for a meaningful collage, the latter putting it together, just barely.

Why Salinger now? The authors intimate that posthumous goodies from the Salinger vault are about to be released. No doubt this will excite some in the literary community while others will yawn. Salinger, after all, never fulfilled his promise. To use a term that he liked to use on others, he didn’t really measure up. Neither committed to the Jewish heritage of his father or the Roman Catholic heritage of his mother, Salinger lacked a compelling bassline to his writing unlike Roth, Bellow or Hemingway who all played deep and aggressive notes of an actual ethnic or moral heritage. Perhaps that’s why Alexander Portnoy is far more compelling than Holden Caulfield. Portnoy doesn’t whine that he’s misunderstood; he jacks off on the subway to show he plays by his own rules.

That said, time has proven that Salinger was probably wise to disappear. Fame is a game that has become unbelievably coarse and cruel. If not fame, people will gladly settle for infamy. Just ask Mark David Chapman. Nobody escapes from it, old or young, talented or talentless, the once proud star or the forever pathetic nobody. TMZ has a seemingly bottomless pit of cretinous young paparazzi eager to earn their bones confronting celebrities with inane barbed questions mixed with ingratiating urban patter.

Salinger also is a reminder that at one time America was a society that read, that knew the names of authors and cared deeply about their work. Literary fame was the result of actual accomplishment. Today, middling authors lay their lives bare on social media platforms for fans, setting an ugly standard that better authors feel obligated to oblige. Aren’t the books enough? In the end, perhaps not even the books were enough for Salinger. But they kept him alive long after he pulled the trigger on Seymour Glass, the man he probably was.

—Timothy Dugdale

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Timothy Dugdale is a professional copywriter and brand manager. He writes literary fiction and composes electronic music under the pseudonym Stirling Noh. Visit him at: http://noh.atomicquill.com

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Love at First Sight, or The Problem of Beginnings — R. W. Gray

Oct 182013

If only it were as simple as Julie Andrews would have it and we could just “start at the very beginning” because, of course, “it’s a very good place to start.” But in terms of narrative, there is always for me the pressing question of where to begin. I carry a few principles with me I have learned from various teachers and from trial and much error.

1. Walk in late.

2. The end is in the beginning.

3. Show the audience how to experience (love) the story.

The trick, then, is to keep these things in mind but, as Andrew Horton reminds us in Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, “Remember you wish to draw the viewer into your world, but you don’t want to drown him or her in the first ten minutes” (159). Easy peasy.

The odd thing about beginnings is how often they are forgotten. When I’m teaching and asking students about the first frames of films, they often reference later plot points more than the actual first shots. Roland Barthes, in his A Lover’s Discourse, points out that there is no love at first sight.

I never fall in love unless I have wanted to; the emptiness I produce in myself . . . is nothing but that interval, longer or shorter, when I glance around me, without seeming to, looking for who to love . . . Yet the myth of “love at first sight” is so powerful . . . that we are astonished if we hear of someone deciding to fall in love. (190)

So how we do suggest, provoke, encourage the audience to want to fall in love, firstly. And how do we not falsely advertise, lure the viewer or reader in with the promise of a torrid and lurid affair only to promptly pull out the TV dinners and our sad house coats, narratively speaking?

The question of how to begin has been more recently preoccupying me with a film I shot last may, “zack & luc,” where I planned a beginning but lost it. I shot the film all on super 8 film which in this day and age is an exercise in desperate waiting for a hopeful outcome: you shoot the film, you send it off to the lab in another city, you then wait for the lab to develop it, send it to another place where it is scanned and digitized, and then months later your film footage and its electronic version arrive back and you see what you have (or don’t have). In our case, of the thirty-eight rolls of film, we were rather lucky that only one had some exposure to light and only one didn’t turn out at all. The problem that presented itself was that the footage on the missing roll was intended to be used for the first and last shots in the film. Because I believe the end was in the beginning, I lost both.

In the beginning,

The rain clattering against the windshield of the parked truck, the wipers forgetting then remembering to clear away the water. The lights of the cars driving by become clear then blurry, then clear, then blurry again.

And in the end,

Zack turns and opens the door and then he is gone, the cab filled again with the sound of rain on the glass. Through the windshield the world is dark and impressionistic, sparkled with the red and white lights of passing cars.

Perhaps I would not be so concerned with this lost beginning and ending if I wasn’t acutely aware that the stories I am interested in telling are a little high maintenance and thus a little hard to instantly fall in love with. In my short film scripts I am drawn to stories that are narratively challenging. “alice & huck,’ directed by the wonderful Kaleena Kiff, tells the story of two characters who collide but mostly miss in various scenarios or universes, exploring the question of how timing plays into our possible romances.

“zack & luc” is two versions of the entire story of a relationship, told for the one character on the right chronologically and for the other on the left frame in reverse chronology, so the first and last moment the two lovers are together are juxtaposed.

Among other things, this non-linear story I think gets to explore that beginnings principle (“the end is in the beginning”) and how it pertains to relationships. Once you’ve loved and lost a few times, you look at beginnings a little differently. In writing both stories, I was aware that I had to find some way to coach the audience to watch the films differently than they would a realist or classical (typical Hollywood) piece.

A film that taught me a lot about beginnings was the Belgian film Une Liaison Pornographique (a fantastic title which was then rather confusedly and perfectly translated into the title for the American release as An Affair of Love, which betrays an American confusion around endings or love or both).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPksJ99XhT0

It’s a peculiar film: it tells the story of a man and a woman, both unnamed, who are being interviewed by an unidentified interviewer about a sexual act that the two met for but insist they will not disclose to the interviewer. There are a barrel of monkey questions that could easily undo the “love at first sight” state we might want to experience for this story: who is the interviewer? Why is he making this documentary? Since the two versions of the affair contradict, who is telling the truth? And what the hell were they doing in that hotel room anyway? Here the filmmakers had to create a difficultly achieved balance between building the audience’s desire and not creating so many questions that the viewer might be more attached to the questions than the momentum of the story. How to coach an audience to not over focus on the details? How to get them to go along with an improbable though compelling story?

In the case of Une Liaison, the filmmakers bracket the film with the same crowd footage you see linked above. We begin and end with this out of focus, impressionistically shot, crowd of strangers on the street. If you watch intently I promise you that you can almost see the woman and the man in that crowd; or do you? This is flirting; this is the possibility of love. Regardless, the opening, in the style of an impressionistic painting, coaches us to see what follows in a similar fashion: to see associatively or impressionistically. One could look at a Monet painting and just look at the brush strokes but then one would be kind of missing the point.

Other films embrace the same principle with different methods. Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run has an ominous clock followed by a similar crowd scene that emphasizes and introduces its themes around time and the interconnectedness of people.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s Amelie does a beautiful job of establishing its themes of connection and synchronicity and its tone of absurdity.

When it came to writing “alice & huck” I knew I needed a similar sign post declaring“Watch this way.” It presented itself in the swing and the clouds

That did not seem enough to signify the leaps between the various versions of how the two characters might collide, so I then wrote in a recurring impressionistic montage of body parts saturated in sunlight:

A world out of focus, what look like limbs, a mouth, a throat, 1 all blurry and impressionistic. breath and sighs. these are the moments that bridge time and place, like puzzle pieces each time, but pieces to a puzzle all about the sky — no  one can put this together.

This is what it translates into in the film:

With “zack & luc” I needed a similar sign post so the viewer would be prepared to watch loosely, associatively, patiently. The impressionistic beginning I wanted was that visual through the windshield in the rain. It had partly come to me from Lucrecia Martel’s “Pescados” (presented and written about by Sophie Lavoie right here on Numero Cinq at the Movies).

There when the fish explain their dream where they go driving in the rain, we see footage of the highway through a windshield in the rain. This image stuck with me and seemed a perfect way to bracket the complicated story of “zack & luc.”

So when it no longer existed, when the roll was damaged, I had to decide how important it was. Then when I woke up two weeks later declaring to the ceiling that I needed the shot, I had to go about it. It took until the end of the summer for me to order in the film, book the camera and grab a handful of people to get the shot. I think it was a Tuesday night, in a friend’s driveway with a very long garden hose, but we got it.

It will be months still before an audience sees this beginning / ending and before I can really get a sense of whether these shots create a space for love. But I am hopeful and this is a good ending to the story where I lost my beginning.

— R. W. Gray

Night Work: Fiction — Robert Miner

Oct 122013

For years, I’ve listened to Robert Miner’s stories of his time in Turkey and Greece, when he was young and carefree, if not downright mischievous. Once as a boy, he set fire to a Turkish village by accident and burned half of it down. Once in Greece during the civil war, a servant took him out at night and he saw a tank drive by festooned with human heads. Bob is an old, old friend — we used to be young writers together, skiing at Gore and Stratton or on the backwoods trails behind Lake Desolation in the winter, going on roads trips in the summer, talking, talking about writing.

This is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress called Night Work, a long ongoing project based very loosely on his own and his parents’ experiences in Turkey where his father was a teacher at Robert College (as was Bob, later in life) and then a diplomat (and probably a spy). Bob’s mother came from a distinguished Anglo-Turkish family threaded with exotic businessmen, beautiful women, elegant learning and dashing adventurers. The stuff of legend.

I give you fair warning. This chapter is not for the faint of heart. It wreaks of a kind of evil that exists in places where cynical wealth enables desires we mostly cannot conceive of except in police reports or United Nations exposés of sex trafficking and tourism. It has its literary roots: Justine frantically searching the child brothels of Alexandria for her lost daughter in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (remember the walls decorated with tiny anonymous childish palm prints?) or the amazing porn movie scene in Nathanael West’s great Hollywood novel Day of the Locust. Money, decadence, depravity and the mysterious seductiveness of transgression, of going beyond.

—

At night they look like huge prostrate skeletons, looming for miles at the edge of the old city. Massive stone block walls fifteen feet thick, forty feet high. They’ve been there in one form or another since AD 413 when the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II had them built from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. Behind these walls with their ninety-six towers and triumphal gates, their treasure rooms, torture rooms, and dungeons, the city multiplied, secure.

Definitions of security have changed since. The walls in places have been allowed to sag into ruin by a people more fatalistic, or perhaps merely defeated by manipulations of time that no walls, however formidable, could withstand. Still, in one section of the walls, the most temporary of peoples has found a permanent existence. No one knows how long they have lived in the catacombs and cisterns, deep inside the secret passages between huge walls and ancient dungeons, but huddled against the fortifications of the northwest section of the old city live the gypsies of Istanbul.

It was here I found myself staring at the giant slumbering bones of the city walls late one night in May, 1935. The moon traveled across the battlements under hot, fast-moving clouds. No other light could be seen, though a city of gypsies murmured in the shadow of the Fifth Military Gate, the section of the walls the ancients called Murus Bacchantes.

This night Prescott was dressed in what he called his nocturnal missions costume — his mackintosh, walking stick, monocle and hiking boots. Weekends lately, he had methodically dressed himself in this manner after classes on Friday, then disappeared for two days on solitary ventures into what he called the geology of place.

Ian — and Frau Begus in her vigorous teutonic determination — had been leading us along the moat, now a gentle grassy valley parallel to the walls. We’d passed no one and hadn’t seen a car. Dogs barked, and I remembered Stefan Genotti’s stories of wild dog packs. We passed a silent group of dark bodies curled together in the ditch by a donkey cart. In my agitated state they looked to me like the victims of some casual wartime atrocity, left to rot.

Ian was looking for something as we walked. He kept stopping and studying the walls. We’d walk a bit, feeling nervous and exposed and horribly out of place, as if the hordes who’d been frustrated by these walls a thousand years before might tonight return to wreak their revenge on us.

Ian found what he’d been looking for. He headed across the moat toward a dark space on the wall that soon showed itself to be an arched entrance to the old city. Once it would have had metal doors, but the archway was open now, and as a cloud moved across the night sky above us, I could see moonlight slide across a narrow road inside the walls.

“Now it’s essential that we keep quiet till we get to the house,” whispered Ian. “Not everyone here welcomes such intrusions. And besides,” he said, laughing, “who knows that manner of ancient pestilence you might inhale.”

There were seven of us, not all Americans. There was the Armenian wife of an English teacher from the German girls’ school in Pera. She had dark hair that shone almost blue, like a grackle. She talked in explosive whispers with her husband, grabbing at his sleeve, and she glanced everywhere around as if each look were her last. Prescott walked next to Ian, pointing at parts of the wall with his stick. Frau Begus had her arm around a stocky blond British woman — a nurse from the hospital, from what I had gathered when we met at the bus station earlier in the night. The nurse had said very little and seemed unaccountably somber in the midst of all these nervous talkers.

We walked for five minutes through a series of very narrow alleys between the walls and tall rickety looking wooden houses. In places the houses were built into the orifices of the walls and I could see candlelight flickering through arrow slits and murder holes the architects had built into the masonry. There were no streetlights and the alleys were slippery underfoot.

Once, incredibly — almost as if it were out of time — we heard engine noise and saw the beams of a car light as it squirmed down a nearby alley.

Frau Begus was knocking on a bright green door in a kind of wooden wall over the face of a giant doorway in the walls. I looked up and could see windows fitted into similar wooden barricades over other openings in what I now realized was a large octagonal stone tower, perhaps sixty feet high.

“Buyurunuz. Please come in,” a woman’s voice was saying in Turkish. But there was a strange lilt to the language which made it seem peculiarly foreign. Frau Begus and Ian had gone in first, followed by the English teacher whose name seemed to be Bunny and his black-haired wife. She was still vigorously whispering to him. Next went in the British woman whose name I didn’t know. She was tall and bovine but with long blond hair that the lady of the house ran her hands across, saying something admiring.

Prescott went in ahead of me, carefully stepping over the battered stone block that served as a threshold for the door. I could see the gypsy woman clearly. She had mahogany skin and very curly black hair. Her eyelids had been heavily painted hummingbird green and she was wearing lipstick the color of arterial blood. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were really almond shaped or just painted that way, but the effect either way was unnerving. I wanted just to notice the artifice, but instead I found myself taken in.

She nodded and said something to Prescott. I wondered if they’d met before. Now the woman was smiling at me. It unnerved me again, a smile so genuine, as if I were actually giving her some secret pleasure that very moment.

Inside, the place smelled intoxicating. Onions cooking. Oregano. Fried liver. Hot cheese pastry. Thyme. Sumac. Cinnamon. There were oil lamps on two small wood tables in the corners of a sizable room, whose back walls were the soot-blackened blocks of the fortifications we’d just passed through. The floor was soft underfoot with dark-colored carpets. Lining the walls were huge thick pillows made from camel saddlebags, also of some kind of carpeting.

There were perhaps ten other people seated already, and I selected a pillow in a corner. I was being scrutinized by a thin man whose gold teeth shone like machinery in the lamp light. He was impassive except for his eyes which didn’t seem to blink. Why was he staring at me, I wondered. There were all these other foreigners here. All these other voyeurs.

I wondered if that was what I was, too, simply a voyeur. Is that why I had come? “These things are never the same,” Ian had kept saying when I asked for details. But now, seated in the back of a dark room in an unnerving place, surrounded by strangers, I realized I could not have imagined how I might feel. Maybe, though, that is what he was saying: you can’t have an experience without having the experience. You can’t fake it.

Two girls in long flowing red dresses and noisy earrings came in from another room. They carried trays. One handed us plates from hers, balancing it in one hand and bending effortlessly to set plates on the floor for people who were talking too animatedly to notice her. The second girl carried small glasses of clear liquid. Each of us got one — along with a piercing open look from her. I wondered if she were memorizing our faces for some reason. I wondered why I wondered all these things. Why couldn’t I just enjoy myself as the others seemed to be?

Frau Begus, for example. I saw her reach for the girl’s hand and pull her closer to whisper something. The girl merely grinned and Frau Begus laughed, smiling almost menacingly at Ian. She had been carrying a small case, about the size of a doctor’s bag. She was pointing at it, smiling perfect sharp teeth at Ian, who kept making mock gestures of dismissal with his hands. As if the thought were preposterous. The very idea….

Frau Begus got to her feet and her voice took on a sudden soft edge which silenced all talk. “Gentlemen” (it sounded like “Jentelmen”) “and ladies, of course. We must toast Mademoiselle Nina, our hostess tonight. And a toast to the djinns of the city, the spirits of the underworld. We are in their world tonight — no?” She studied us, daring someone to disagree. In the muted light her skin glistened metallic like antique copper. “Raki,” she said, pronouncing it so it rhymed with “khaki,” the way the British pronounced it. She was pointing to her glass which she held in her right hand at a slight angle. “Let us begin,” she said, and downed her drink.

I, too, downed my drink. It felt like some vast vacuum I’d swallowed, absorbing my tongue and throat into it, sucking them dry. My eyes watered, and I tried to wipe them secretly with my sleeve as I held my glass high in the air for the serving girls. They came around again with trays, one for the empties, one with a new full glass for each of us.

Ian stood, brushing back his long hair and looking slightly crazed. His voice was higher by an octave.

“Welcome to the Inferno, gentle friends. Here we stand outside ourselves. Ex-stasis. We are traveling with no cultural baggage, gypsies tonight of the senses. Deep in this tower there is an inscription from a French ambassador, imprisoned here awaiting torture. It’s neatly scratched on the wall and says: ‘Prisoners, who in your misery groan in this sad place, offer your sorrows with a good heart to God and you will find them lightened.'”

Frau Begus reached for Ian’s arm, signaling him to be quiet. “Ah, forgive me,” Ian said. “My companion here is being exigent. Women are always in a hurry. Though I suppose without that, Eve mightn’t have discovered sin for us.”

He said something in Greek — or it sounded like Greek. We drank again. I noticed the man and woman of the house had joined in that one. A new round of drinks, this time accompanied by a tray of meze — appetizers of crisp hot pastry filled with goat cheese and spices. Lamb liver fried in olive oil, served with freshly washed, nude leeks. Another round of raki. This time no watering of the eyes and I wondered if I were drunk. I didn’t feel drunk. I felt paralyzed, a pillar of salt.

We were sitting in a semicircle in the front half of the room, facing the dark stone walls; on one side, what was once an ornate marble doorway, framed in geometric slabs; on the other, a rough, dark stone entrance, leading, I assumed, into the tower and its adjoining walls. I had a momentary vision of corridors like a ship, like a submarine, populated by generations of gypsies who never saw the light.

The talk was deafening. I’d been shouted at and had shouted back at the Armenian woman, whose name is Annie. We’d been exchanging exclamations about the fried mussels and the kukaretzia. The gypsy woman appeared with an accordion. The man had some small pottery drums, shaped like hourglasses, with skin stretched across one end. Frau Begus and Ian could be heard expostulating. She was embracing him ostentatiously, as if for someone else’s benefit. Not hers or his, certainly.

“Ah, enfin,” said Annie. “Now just you wait, uh—what was your name?”

“Lewis. Lewis Dyer.”

“Well, Lewis. Yes. Just you wait.”

“So you’ve seen this before?” I asked.

“Not exactly. But Bunny — my husband — has. And he’s told me.”

Frau Begus got up and went to the tables to blow out the oil lamps. The gypsy woman lit one to our side and turned it up, so we were in darkness while the empty part of the room, between the doors, turned yellow. Specks of mica sparkled in the stone.

I realized that the drums had begun and were only now becoming loud enough to hear. I had felt them before I could hear them, sound waves bouncing off the stone. The gypsy was seated by the wall to my left and he’d brought a thin long stick with him, decorated with woven ribbons of bright colors.

The drums increased in volume and then the accordion began. One of the serving girls — the taller, older one — returned with a tray of glasses, and we all, I noticed, drank greedily. The anise taste, before somewhat cloying, now seemed merely voluptuous. The music flexed and rippled to the pumping of the drum. Someone was clapping. I found Annie’s hand on my hand, though she was looking the other way. I wanted to be thrilled, but I was embarrassed instead. I didn’t dare move my hand and I didn’t dare respond. My hand felt as if it were going to sleep. Pins and needles.

When the first girl emerged it was almost an anticlimax. She looked so young now, more painted up and with fewer clothes on. She was wearing thin, almost transparent pants gathered at the ankles. And a thin blouse gathered at the elbows. I was reminded of Catherine, long-ago, when she’d dress in my mother’s clothes and try to make up her face. The child — and I now saw she was very young, perhaps twelve — had begun to rock her hips and twist her shoulders to the music. It seemed pathetic, a desperate attempt to force her sex too early out of hiding. Now she turned to face away from us and was rocking her hips more, bending slightly so that her buttocks made firm outlines against the loose pants.

Annie was rocking. The pressure from her hand on mine increased rhythmically. She still hadn’t looked at me and she began to work her fingers down between mine, her palm massaging the top of my hand. Still I didn’t move a muscle. For a while I had managed to forget I even had that hand.

There was a quick, violent silence. The girl stopped suddenly, then turned rather too dramatically towards us, unbuttoning the blouse as she did. The drums began again and the girl opened her eyes wide so that the painted eyelids almost disappeared. The dark black lines made her eyes look trapped, something human where there should have only been the votary, the child whore. She was pressing her chest forward, pulling the shirt against it and twisting her shoulders at the same time. I could see small mounds the size perhaps of a cupped hand. A child’s cupped hand. The nipples traced a crease in the material of the blouse. For a moment the audience went quiet and I thought for some reason the girl looked frightened.

The buttons were opened — I noticed how small her hands were — and the girl now turned away from us again opening the blouse and working it off as she rocked her hips. The music became louder, and Annie more insistent. Her fingernails dug between my fingers into my palms. I looked to see if anyone had noticed. Everyone else seemed rooted on the young girl dancing.

Frau Begus moved closer to the dancer. The English lady was sitting bolt upright, her long yellow hair making her look from the back like Alice in Wonderland on her long neck. She didn’t seem to move at all for the long instant I watched her. I wondered idly, if someone next to her, perhaps, had a hand somewhere even more intrusive than Annie’s on mine. Or if maybe that woman, too, had been turned into a pillar of salt.

Prescott was back against the wall to my right by himself. He had removed his monocle but otherwise seemed expressionless and really rather relaxed. He might have been at a faculty tea. That same professionally bored but alert look. I envied him his grasp.

By now the dancing girl had turned again and was holding a hand over each place where her breasts should have been. She was squeezing herself, trying to look aroused. For a moment I was taken — I found myself believing — then the sensation was gone, and I began to wonder what she thought as she looked at me. She seemed to be looking hard at me. Could she see me in this dark?

“Bravo.” It was Ian’s voice. And it sounded like two words. “Bra-vo.” I wanted to think it was ironic, and that I was not the only apostate. But Ian was clearly urging her on because he had begun clapping his hands hard, to the music, holding them way in front, towards her. I saw her smile, then slowly slide her hands off her breasts and towards her thighs. Others began to clap. I stared at her breasts, barely a cupped hand’s worth. Tiny whitish nipples. I remembered stories boys told of how dancers and models had to have their nipples stimulated to make them stand out. Who had done that for her back there? The other girl? I wondered if I was losing my grip, thinking such things.

For a while the drums stopped. The man appeared from the kitchen carrying two large hookahs. They had been primed and lit and as they were set down people began to take eager turns at the nozzle.

Now a great shout broke out, much vehement clapping and talk. The music had slowed to a canter and the girl had turned to the wall, rocking her tight little buttocks in a slow perfect circle. She pulled at the top of her pants and slowly worked them down about half way over her buttocks. The accordion music stopped. The drums began, ever so slowly, again.

Just the drums and the sudden quiet of the audience. The girl’s pants were down at her ankles and she was stepping out of them as she clenched the cheeks together.

I don’t think it was either the raki or the hashish — though they are the most conventional explanation — but only parts of the rest of the evening remain clear to me now. I know there was another dancing girl. I remember her mostly because she seemed older and had more to work with. She didn’t remind me of my sister Catherine. Poor Catherine.

She danced and undressed for a while alongside the first girl. It had been she, I remembered, who smiled when Frau Begus had whispered at her, but it was the younger girl Frau Begus took upstairs with her.

That part I remember clearly. I had been smoking the hookah, sharing it with Annie (who still held my hand impaled, like a hawk with its prey) and concentrating on the apparatus and the fearful lotus sensations I expected.

I heard a rhythmic clapping and looked up to see the accordion player poised near the younger girl, a long colored switch in her hand. She was flicking it at the girl’s body in time to the drums. And the clapping. Now the girl arched and twitched as she was stung by the whip. There was something fascinating about this. It reminded my of the cool businesslike violence of certain hockey players I’d known. Nothing personal, you understand. Just doing my job. Had the woman been angry, or even the girl angry, it would have been different. Instead it was just pure disembodied discomfiture, perhaps a kind of art. The tempo of the drums increased, the whip came faster and left angry marks. The girl yelped and tried to continue her dance. Once she opened her eyes wide and stared at me. I’m sure at me this time, and I was stunned again by that look.

Frau Begus was up and shouting to Ian. At first Ian refused whatever it was she was urging, then people around him took up Frau’s chant. To much hilarity and cheering, Ian found his way to his feet. Frau had her bag in one hand and had taken the younger dancing girl by the forearm, pushing her in front of them as they moved toward the tower door. Several people in the audience were on their feet, clapping and shouting. The three of them disappeared through the door, then I noticed a lull, many of those same people looking strangely somber and tired.

While the other girl danced and flexed herself and the hashish was passed, several more youngsters paraded into the room behind her. Most of them could have been no more than twelve. Two of the boys were quickly spoken for and left with older men from the audience through the stone gateway to the right, accompanied by the gypsy woman.

Annie had unclenched herself from my hand and was quietly holding both her husband’s hands. She seemed subdued. Perhaps it was the hashish.

The gypsy woman brought a girl to me at some point, a somber little girl, older perhaps with beautiful arms and huge brown eyes hiding behind a garish painted face. I shook my head, horrified. Or scared. Maybe they are the same thing, I don’t know. The woman was trying to tell me something complicated. I couldn’t understand. I kept shaking my head, the girl looking more and more frightened. She tried caressing my face, this strange, quiet girl. It was like having your child comfort you, only she seemed also so much older than her body. And she seemed infinitely sad. She tried running her little hands down inside my shirt, fumbling for my nipples. I wondered if maybe it was just a ruse to pick my pocket. Other girls were fondling people in the audience, men and women alike. I imagined little magpie hands running over jewelry and rings and private parts.

Finally the gypsy woman said something to Annie. Annie said something harsh back to her. Then Annie leaned over to me, looking at the girl with new interest. “She wants to sell her to you.”

“Yes. I assumed that. I’m not interested.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

“Oh yes, I do. The youngest member of the oldest profession — correct?” I felt worldly and ashamed at my callousness at the same time.

“Not correct. You forget perhaps where you are. What you are. The gypsy woman is offering the girl, not just her body. She wants you to buy the girl, take her away from here.”

The gypsy woman misread the look of astonishment on my face, for she began talking very fast to Annie, and hissing something at the girl, who stared at me, then caught herself and looked down at her feet.

The girl reached to her knees for the end of her shift and a little two quickly pulled it over her head. She was more voluptuous than the other girls we’d seen, with fuller breasts and pronounced hips. I didn’t look below her waist. The gypsy woman took her by the shoulders and turned her around. Skinny back, very straight, with several distinct rows of small thin scars. She was standing on her toes, I noticed, perhaps trying to make herself more for the money.

“Annie, what’s going on? I’m no white slaver, for Chrissakes. This isn’t ancient Rome — or Byzantium —“

“Oh yes it is. Nothing changes here. But listen: she tells me this is her daughter. Her own daughter. Liane. The others — merchandise. But the woman wants you to take the girl away from this.”

“How, for God’s sake. This is insane–“

“Away from what waits for her here.”

Indeed, just before she said that we had all heard two quick stifled screams from the tower. Then a longer drawn out one. Almost in time to the music, almost drowned out by it.

“You want Frau Begus to doctor this one, too?”

This girl had turned around again, at first covering herself with her hands, then, with a start, uncovering herself, dropping her hands to her sides. I stared at her, appalled even to have to imagine such a choice.

I found the gypsy woman looking at me now. I couldn’t read her face, but it had the same expression I’d noticed when she smiled at me at the door. As if I were special to her. How did she know that? What did she know that I didn’t know?

“Listen.” It was Annie again, sounding tired. “I got carried away. Forget it. This will happen again and again. You must do only what you want in this city. The others here, they’re doing what they want. No one wants girls — except, of course, Frau Begus.”

Annie turned away quickly, clutching at her husband who seemed oblivious to the whole exchange. She stole one more long look at the little girl and seemed to shudder. Her husband put his arm around her.

I didn’t notice how much time had passed when a tall gray-haired man returned with one of the girls, then two men with boys. The children stayed at the doorway looking matter of fact. The men took their places in the audience quietly for the most part. Frau Begus and Ian returned more noisily. More clapping and laughter from their friends. The girl was dressed in a shift and her makeup had run about the eyes. She looked curiously innocent. She tried a brave smile as she entered the room, but her eyes filled with tears that sparkled in the light and she turned away.

“Well, what would you have done with her, dear?” I heard Ian say to a man next to him.

Frau Begus was showing something in her case to a nondescript man with spectacles. “The finest ivory,” she was saying, “perhaps a bit much for a young one, eh? But just right I’m sure for you, if you’d like, my dear?” Her smile seemed genuine, almost solicitous. I wondered if I were mishearing the conversation, inventing it from some unspeakable parts of myself.

We left the house long after midnight. The moon was lower and the walls cast deep shadows over the streets. I was exhausted, barely able to make my legs work right and for a while trailed behind the rest. I tried not to think about the horrors the walls had witnessed, but I kept imagining the anguish, the cleavered limbs and heads falling to the bloody pools at the base of the towers, being washed out to sea.

Pariah dogs slunk across the streets, looking sideways at us. I was reminded of the look the gypsy woman gave me when I left, the look you give someone you think is mean and petty, too righteous to care. I felt sick. The tram station was empty and stayed that way. A taxi passed and we crowded into it. Except, that is, Ian and Frau Begus who elected to stay and try another place.

“It’s almost as if they tempt the fates,” I said to Prescott, “asking to get hurt.”

“For a change, Lewis, you got something right. Not that you would understand, of course. But for them that, too, is a kind of escape from the obligations of what we call civilization.”

—Robert Miner

———————————————-

Robert Miner has published two novels, MOTHERS DAY and EXES , worked at Newsweek, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Esquire, Outside, Adirondack Life, Redbook, Glamour, etc. MOTHERS DAY was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York times called it “relentlessly savage…picaresquely comic,” the Financial Times of London found it “extremely funny…an extraordinary first novel.”

The Dead White Male You Should Read: Three New Books on Borges — Tom Faure

Oct 012013

Photograph: Christopher Pillitz/Getty Images

Borges at 80: Conversations
Edited by Willis Barnstone
New Directions, 192 pages, $18.95

Professor Borges
Edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis
New Directions, 288 pages, $26.50

Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview
Translated by Kit Maude
Melville House, 176 pages, $15.95

Jorge Luis Borges is a dead, white male. But he isn’t European. So he lacks imperialist cred and isn’t taught among the typical classics. As editor and translator James E. Irby remarks in the 1961 New Directions edition of Labyrinths, “Not being French has undoubtedly also relegated Borges to comparative obscurity in the English-speaking countries, where it is rare that a Hispanic writer is ever accorded any major importance at all.”

A lover of contradictions, he would appreciate the paradox of his current position: he is sometimes overlooked, often mislabeled. Some lazily lump him in with Marquez, with magical realism. Others tie him to dadaism, surrealism, modernism, post-modernism. Borges was a dreamer who described himself as constantly puzzled, stuck in a labyrinth, so perhaps he won’t mind being labelled so haphazardly. Probably aware of the futility of the exercise, David Foster Wallace attempted to classify him more accurately, calling him the “great bridge between modernism and post-modernism.”

He was barely even a writer—more a librarian, a professor of literature and philosophy who just happened to translate and write free verse poetry and brilliant experimental stories. His prose is usually short—compact yet expansive, deeply-rooted in a mixture of traditions yet simple in its fascination with time and eternity. A symbolist, Borges thought in metaphor from the beginning, but turned deeper into his imagination when he began losing his eyesight in his fifties. What results are his story-puzzles of infinite regression and infinite possibility.

New Directions was the first to bring Borges to an English-speaking audience when they published Labyrinths in 1961. That same year he and Samuel Beckett shared the Prix International, awarded by the Formentor Group (created by Carlos Barral). This brought more attention to his work. That collection of stories and short essays remains the essential primer to Borges. Now New Directions has released in short succession Borges at Eighty: Conversations and Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature. The former presents the interviews he gave to Willis Barnstone, Dick Cavett, Alastair Reid, and others during a visit to the U.S. in 1980. The latter is a transcription of twenty-five classes Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires. This spate of new material was just barely preceded by Melville House’s Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview, which came out in June, and contains a 1968 dialogue with Richard Burgin, a fantastic discussion with the editors of Artful Dodge, and of course the last interview Borges gave before his death.

In a short meditation written at Borges’ death in 1986, Sven Birkerts called him “the Euclid of the secret orders of time.” Birkerts, writing in the Boston Phoenix, captured the Argentine’s writing in as close to a nutshell as one can: “These are not stories at all. These fanciful narratives are the author’s way of telling us his truth; they are whimsical-looking ciphers in a most serious code.”

Nothing in Borges is superfluous or forgettable. But he was not much interested in character. Borges obliquely addressed this in The Last Interview. Burgin asks about writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald who have (Burgin’s words) “no metaphysical feeling.” Borges says, “They take the universe for granted […] They don’t think it’s strange that they should be living.” His stakes were metaphysical and only somewhat existential. One of his most memorable characters, Pierre Menard, decides to rewrite Don Quixote. To do this he seeks to immerse himself in old Spanish, recover his Catholic faith, and fight some Turks so as to become Cervantes. Menard’s work would be more formidable than the original, because Cervantes had the benefit of living in the sixteenth century. Cervantes had the benefit of being Cervantes. And the story is about identity and authority instead of personality.

In one article-cum-story, Borges invents a world where the spoken language contains no nouns (among other deformities). In the logic of Wittgenstein, the language dominates the world. On Tlön:

…they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

Borges was a poet steeped in Leibniz and Spinoza, with a preference above all for Schopenhauer. He loved Whitman and Stevenson. He admired but also criticized Kafka and was fascinated by Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. He described himself not as an author but rather as an interpreter through which writers of the past were filtered. He found a fascination in mirrors and labyrinths, in the distortions not only of the senses but of the mind. Everywhere he saw tradition, variation, and the fictional hrönir.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. […] Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree […] exaggerated the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical. (Labyrinths)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1899 to a bookish father and a mother whose forefathers were criollo soldiers, Borges was outspoken against Argentina’s support for Mussolini. Early in his life he took firm liberal stances—especially against the ruling Perón family. He became disenchanted by his home country, or at least he became more careful in public proclamations, which lack nuance. He also became less productive in general when he began to lose his sight. As with Milton, blindness did not end Borges’ writing career. But it slowed him down and hampered his reading of contemporaries, which might have contributed to the complaints that he ignored his country, its literature, and its politics.

Meanwhile he was too shy (and, perhaps, too clever) to fully embody a public persona, presenting himself as humble and apologetic for all the fuss made over his work. In his short essay “Borges and I,” he plays with the duality of his life as both a public figure and a quiet, sociable person. Just read this and shudder:

I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. (Labyrinths)

Twenty-seven years after his death, these new books show how much he affected to prefer the non-writing Borges to the controversial, acclaimed writer. That said, whether at the podium or in an interview, it’s not always clear which one is speaking. Though he says he hopes his work will be forgotten, and that he’d like to become Ellison’s “invisible man,” he seems to enjoy these conversations too much to completely disown the public Borges.

Though Borges tells Richard Burgin in The Last Interview that he hates cameras (because “a camera is a kind of mirror”), Borges clearly enjoyed being interviewed, and evidently also loved to teach, to converse about the writers he felt a closest kinship to—not Marquez or Cortazar or Joyce but Whitman, Shaw, and James. In Professor Borges, he covers a selective history of English literature from kennings to Stevenson, for Spanish-speaking students who have never encountered the tradition before. The main pleasure of this collection is to wade into the mind of a lover of books, the one-time head librarian of the National Library of Argentina. Borges again seems more like a curator of tradition than an inventor of fictions.

In Borges at Eighty, the writer comes alive, touring various universities and the New York PEN Center. Of all places, he is most revealing on The Dick Cavett Show. The discussion ranges from the differences between Spanish and English, to Hitler, to Citizen Kane. When Cavett asks about Argentina’s fascist past, Borges sounds resigned:

Look here. I think the Argentine Republic cannot be explained. It is as mysterious as the universe. I do not understand it. I don’t profess to understand my country. I am not politically minded either.

Borges’ literary games were so much more than clever tricks—they were metaphors through which he conveyed as poetically the strange, lonely world he inhabited. Cavett asks whether they are artistic flourishes or “something alive.” Borges replies:

I am always being baffled, perplexed, so a maze is the right symbol. They are not, at least to me, literary devices or tricks. I don’t think of them as tricks. They are part of my destiny, of my way of feeling, of living. I haven’t chosen them.

In other conversations from Borges at Eighty, he explains why free verse is as difficult as prose, and how either is more challenging than structured verse. He describes immortality as a threat, rejects his early work as too baroque, and explains simply that he never wrote novels because he could not do it. He admits, “I am a bit of a prig,” and expounds on the importance of saving humanism. He bemoans his inability to reason, finding in himself instead a preference for dreaming.

In these new books there is much to like about Borges the dreaming librarian, but, oddly, neither the writer nor teacher seems interested in including women in the library. He will say things like, as he tells Burgin, “I think men are more prone to metaphysical wondering than women. I think that women take the world for granted.” When asked to identify significant women in literature, he offers Emily Dickinson. When asked whether there are more, he says, “Yes of course.” He then suggests Silvina Ocampo, “who is translating Emily Dickinson at this moment.” Sometimes his remarks borders on the condescending. In The Last Interview, he tells Burgin:

I have known very intelligent women who are quite incapable of philosophy. One of the most intelligent women I know, she’s one of my pupils; she studies Old English with me, well, she was wild over so many books and poets, then I told her to read Berkeley’s dialogues, three dialogues, and she could make nothing of them.

It can be argued that Borges’ gender gap is also a gap in the tradition he so loved. Borges might have recognized this flaw, though he did not address it very well. As Colm Tóibín notes when discussing the Menard story, Borges is keenly aware of his difficult role as a writer and “the concept of the writer as a force of culture imprisoned by language and time.” Like many of his compatriots, Borges faced a crisis of identity: embrace Western modernism or turn back to the “gaucho” sensibility and poetic style of the earlier Argentina, exemplified by José Hernández’s poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro. But nothing captures better Borges’ conflict with identity—personal, visual, aesthetic, national, gendered—than the short epilogue to Borges at Eighty, from an interview held at the National Library in 1979. The statement touches on a number of problems with the notion of universality:

Reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of ‘obligatory pleasure’? […] I have always advised my students: If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. […] If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”

It is a shame Borges did not recognize his weak position on female writers. His critics either will not forgive him this, or perhaps they do not understand the Argentine’s general appeal to cosmopolitanism. His accepting of an award from Pinochet and professed admiration for Franco did not help either. Such utterances form one contradiction too many for the contradictory universalist.

Of the three new books, The Last Interview stands out in that it brings us the English translation of Borges’ last interview, with journalist Gloria López Lecube. He spoke with her right before his departure for Geneva, where he planned to die. In this “last” interview, he speaks fondly of his mother and describes for López Lecube how he dreams in color. We see a man anticipating his death with the air of a giddy boy who will finally learn how the magic trick worked.

Spinoza says that we all feel immortal, yes, but not as individuals, I assume, rather immortal in a pantheistic way, in a divine way. When I get scared, when things aren’t going well, I think to myself, ‘But why should I care what happens to a South American writer, from a lost country like the Republic of Argentina at the end of the twentieth century? What possible interest could that hold for me when I still have the adventure of death before me, which could be annihilation; that would be best, it could be oblivion…

This is the most interesting thing about these new books, ultimately—not the lectures on Stevenson, but the description of his late solitary walks through Buenos Aires, or the colors of his blindness:

It came like a slow summer twilight. I was head librarian of the National Library and I began to find that I was ringed in by letterless books. Then my friends lost their faces. Then I found out there was nobody in the looking glass. And then things grew dim, and now I can make out white and gray. But two colors are forbidden me: black and red. […] I live in the center of a luminous mist. […] Grayish or bluish, I’m not too sure. It’s far too dim. I would say that now I live in the center of a bluish world. (The Dick Cavett Show)

One of the problems with writing a review of three recent books about Borges is the books do not bring much new attention to Borges’ texts, but rather to his persona. He comes off sounding self-deprecating and amiable, curious and perhaps a bit embarrassed by his fame. Though the books are by no means a definitive take, readers will enjoy immersing themselves in the wandering, conversational writer/non-writer Borges. Professorial dictums and self-deprecating jokes aside, his writing is more important. It must be read, reread, and played with. His work is universal and cosmopolitan in nature, and generally runs shorter than the average New Yorker article. Within a five-page story you will find a new language, a labyrinth, a library.

—Tom Faure

———————

Tom Faure is an MFA in Fiction student at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Splash of Red, Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Journal News, and undergraduate magazines at Columbia University. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York. Contact: tomfaure@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

Small Margins: Review of Pinwheel by Marni Ludwig — A. Anupama

Sep 122013

Pinwheel
Marni Ludwig
New Issues Press, 2013
63 pages, $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-936970-14-8

Pinwheel, selected by Jean Valentine for the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize, is Marni Ludwig’s first full-length collection of poetry. “By what small margin we escape and look up” is Ludwig’s own synopsis of the collection, taken from the last line of her poem “A Reenactment.” Perhaps then it is fitting that I used this slim volume of poetry as my substitute for a sunhat in my poolside chair, simultaneously escaping the summer sun and looking up into this mysterious and effective darkness. And perhaps it’s fortunate that I read Pinwheel in such pleasant environs—Ludwig’s evocation of trauma and addiction builds a powerful empathy. But as difficult as the terrain is, the poems tempt with hints and subversions, with intensifying repetitions and images, with intelligent sound play. The poem “Ceremony for Lying Completely Still” occurs early in the collection and sets the style of Ludwig’s poetic inquiry.

I say I had my accident,

after which two men ran
into the street while I counted

the number of steps it took
to get to where the door hurt.

All drawings are by thieves
with beautiful hands.

All silences are accurate.

I like a mask. I like music.
When I get sick I take my logic
with a spoon.

Did you notice if he was wearing gloves?
I’ve come to trust only questions.

At approximately 2 p.m. I was lying face-down
on the floor, asking nicely for an afternoon.

“Among the Living as Among the Dead,” also appears near the beginning of the collection, and this one reads like a lightly spun ars poetica while highlighting the poetic devices Ludwig uses. “How do you cure memory?” she asks, as though rhetorically. In this poetry, however, nothing is ever rhetorical, and the sound-play attempts to solve the question’s dilemma.

…Choreograph the sky
and the birds all turn to plastic bags

or else they smack the glass.
Say something less true
but with one true face,
like a statue. Say something else.

I sold the future for a second past,
told the snow my name
but it knew. White logic,
black spoon, scare tactic,

nodding out in a hospital bracelet
humming some third harmony
you shouldn’t sing
a kid. You shouldn’t sing.

You should step aside.
The birds hit back here,
where want is an event
visibly breathing in its sling.

You died twice in a lace dress,
in a folding chair,
you didn’t hear the door…

Ludwig’s repetitions act to intensify attention, especially as objects reappear in different poems, like characters do in different acts of a play. In the poem “Confectionary,” which appears at about the two-thirds mark in the collection, the birds and the act of dying twice share a poem again, where the question is “Who cares what flowers are for, / selling jigsaw puzzles door-to-door?” Answer: “Life without relief. / Layer cake mystique / telling secrets to the tongue.” The repetitions intensify even more here by Ludwig’s sound-play and slant rhymes between and within the lines. Following closely: “Life without relief. / Layer cake mystique / telling secrets to the tongue” leads to the word “seek” hidden in the word “secrets,” but very slightly revealed in the heightened sound of these poetic lines. The last poem in the collection is titled “Secret.”

I sought out the repetitions of objects and phrases in the collection, as though they were clues in a mystery novel. But, unlike a mystery novel, this book invited flipping back and forth, looking for the lemons, lakes, canaries, mirrors, and spoons. The repetitions also represent the poet’s process of inquiry, where the images are tested against each other, or in different contexts, or from different points of view.

Ludwig has mentioned Joseph Cornell, famous for his surreal assemblages, as one of her inspirations. One example is the parallel inquiry between the two poems “Cigar Box” and “Refrigerator.” In “Refrigerator,” the box itself speaks: “I am liking you leaning in / for yogurt and morphine.” The sharp humor here is welcome relief from the powerful lyric voice that enacts most of this collection. Still, the brilliance is unabated, as this metaphoric Cornell box speaks to that voice of their shared experience:

—and the eggs hum
to the insect
in your chest—

One is frightened
and spins all night
in its carton.

In “Cigar Box,” the box remains a witness or silent accessory to the voice, which remarks: “In school I was good in death and math. / I practiced your name on yellow scratch paper.”

Another instance of repetitions and their effect on poetic inquiry are the many references to the moon and death. Each of these poems also takes a different twist or theme, as in “Ceremony for a Susie” (moon + death + a doll) and “Ferry” (moon + death + river stones). The poem “Parade,” in the center of the collection and marked off by blank flanking pages, contains four sections, the first and last of which participate in the moon-death arc. The first section begins

All the songs about the electric chair
sound like love songs. Weather

carries our Chevy to sea,
merrily, merrily, merrily.

A mariner with a stand-in moon
can’t quite stomach daybreak.

The reference here to a nursery rhyme set my poetic ears on its own delightful inquiry, as to whether the moon and the spoon would reconcile somewhere. The fourth section heightened my curiosity and seemed to encourage the idea with “blow a birthday / cake into orbit. Moon podium, dead satellite, / the physical feeling of falling back / into favor.” The suggestion is “Hey Diddle Diddle” and Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” as opposed to Walter de la Mare’s “Silver,” or maybe it’s some deft remix of the three childhood rhymes. The moon and spoon do end up together, trysting in the first stanza of “Arrow,” as the collection starts to accelerate toward its end. The very next poem “Everything Is a Hat” declares

The moon,
a chipped tooth
confused
with the room
you died into.

Sleep,
like a black
kite soaring
from your wrist.

Sleep,
lying prone
in the family
position.

She leaves the moon/death motif behind at this point, and sleep takes over. Anesthetists and “muffled white sheep” inhabit the next poem, and the poem after that asks “Are you sleeping?” In “Mermaid Parade,”

I wish you slight misfortune
and a self-prescribed sleep disturbed
by dreams of immaterial lobsters.

Ludwig packs wonderment in the collection so that empathy for the difficult movements of pain and fear can take. In the first lines of “Petite” near the end of the collection, she writes, “The author wants you / to be interested in her nature.” The poem “Parallax” sums up this beautifully dark poetry collection of image and sound and herself.

I can’t swim in my condition.
Say the sand is discarded by the sea,
The flowers you loved were weeds.
It hurts to be right, a slight need satisfied.
The dead kick a ball around the yard.
The living remain wedded to their paths
Like rooks. Once I took a dandelion
For granted, with some sun.
It is possible to be sick with intuition.
I seem to be leaving, but still I am looking.

—A. Anupama

————————————–

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

Let Us Imagine Lost Love: Part One — Robert Day

Sep 082013

Editor’s Note: Herewith, the opening section of Robert Day’s novel Let Us Imagine Lost Love, which we published in its entirety as a serial novel from September, 2013, to April, 2014. The novel remained online until August, 2014, at which point, as per our original agreement with the author, we deleted all the segments except for the first. We have left this opening segment, just as it was published, for your entertainment and to celebrate the amazing experience we had putting this book together. This was a first for Numéro Cinq, our first full length novel, our first serial novel — exciting times, wonderful experience watching the novel unfold month by month.

In the tradition of Charles Dickens and any number of 19th century novelists who wrote those triple-decker novels first published in serial form in magazines, Numéro Cinq today launches Robert Day’s new novel Let Us Imagine Lost Love, which will appear here in seven monthly parts. This is the long awaited follow-up to Day’s wondrous and acclaimed first novel The Last Cattle Drive; it’s not a sequel, but in Let Us Imagine Lost Love, Day returns to his native Kansas, of which he is a wry, witty and affectionate observer. His narrator is a book designer, who loves the jargon and paraphernalia of his profession, a man without a wife but a string of Wednesday lovers, his “Plaza wives,” he calls them. At his back, as we learn in the opening sequence, is a strong-willed Kansas mother who made him memorize three words a day and wouldn’t think of letting him go east to college (he ends up at Emporia State Teachers College). But this is vintage Robert Day: the humor is dry yet generous, the dialogue is laconic but rich with implication. You shouldn’t miss skinny dipping with Melinda or Tina, the narrator’s college girlfriend who would only begin to take her clothes off over the telephone (those innocent days). And stay tuned for the next installment.

—

Part One: My Cosmic Smoke Signal

Since You Asked and I Promised: Here’s How It’s Turned Out

These days I design books. Gutters and “case backs,” “rivers” and “verso,” “quarto,” and “signature” are the nomenclature of my trade. Or were when I started. “Format” and “galley proof.” Pocket Pal and Rookledge’s Type Designers are my codices.

I understand I am un-hip in my patois, as if I were to use “Hi-Fi” instead of “stereo”—which I do. “Mono,” I am told by Lillian, my sister’s late-in-life daughter, is a disease. It used to be music as well: the kind that came from the lid of a forty-five record player: Memories Are Made of This. Scotch and Soda.

At first I worked at Hallmark here in Kansas City. Now I freelance. My Plaza apartment is my office. The Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge’s domain. Calvin Trillin slurping a frosty at Winstead’s. Edward Dahlberg pissing and moaning about the city.

At Hallmark I designed “favorites:” 20 Favorite Poems by Shakespeare. 100 Favorite Love Poems. 50 Favorite Words of Wisdom. 100 Famous Quotations By American Women. I also designed “paths”: 50 Paths to Wisdom. 25 Paths to Bliss. No one suggested 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Or even one.

I was not cynical about such work then, nor am I now. When you grow up with webbed aluminum lawn chairs and a pedestal-mounted blue glass globe in your front yard, an Irish father who talked to himself but not much to anybody else (“I’m talking to a smart man when I’m talking to myself”), and a Polish mother who saved coins in Mogen David wine jars, you gain perspective. If my book buyers want their wisdom flush left in purse-sized octavos, who am I to judge? We all have our paths.

I design address books. I do not design novels. I design recording calendars, sometimes called “agendas.” I do not design memoirs (fictional or not). I do not design auto repair manuals. Or medical texts. I design exhibition catalogues: A Painter’s Room of My Own. Coffee table books: The Stalls of the Seine (into which I cut and pasted some of my own books that were—as far as I know—never there, unless you count them being vicariously there—which I do). More: Joyce’s Paris. Small Hotels of Italy. A Place in the World Called Seville. And once, a tiny duodecimo for autographs.

I win awards. I am well paid. I am praised for my “tailored elegance.” For “combining utility with beauty”: For “fusing” the well-known (a Degas auto point that looks like Allen Ginsberg as Allen Ginsberg got older) with an obscure Franz Beckman auto point.

Among my favorite projects have been two “Abecedarians.” One was about painting: M was for Matisse: with a young woman in an afternoon pose; a second was about writers whose pictures appeared like a water mark behind their letters with their text at the bottom: C was for Chekhov: “It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea front: a lady with a dog.”

But my favorites are “Blanks”— books with empty pages for memoirs to be written or diaries to be kept. Or not. I am Mr. Tabula Rasa of Kansas City. And other cities as well.

Over the years I have spread into various rooms: computers, scanners, light tables, and a recently purchased color copier configured to print and bind books. With that addition I am a one-man, limited edition, publishing firm: Blanche de Blank Books, the bit of French added for a bit of cache, if not for Stella Kowalski’s sister.

This week I am finishing a series of “Artist Blanks,” each with a picture or text as the cover: Van Gogh’s portrait on a sketch book. John Donne (I long to talk to some lover’s ghost who died before the God of love was born) for poets. Notes from Pachebel’s Canon (it’s in fashion again). I am trying to decide if Chekhov should be a short story writer or a playwright.

—Did you do this? my sister Elaine asked when she and her husband Gerhard had me for dinner.

It was a coffee table book that featured paintings of women in New York museums: Madame X from the Metropolitan, a Vermeer from the Frick. Picasso’s Two Nudes from MOMA. Others. I had been inspired by an old Playboy photo series: The Women of Rome (they were riding topless on Vespas); The Women of San Francisco (they were hanging out of both their blouses and the cable cars on which they rode).

—Not that you always “fess up,” she said.

—Yes, I said.

—Lovely, she said. I keep it out.

My sister’s diary, an early Blank of mine (a garden motif with both plants and flowers as a running head and end papers), also in the living room that night was (I took a peek) blank: Hours without alphabets. Days without words. Impatiens without patience. It was sitting next to another book I designed on the gardens in Tuscany, but since Elaine did not ask about either of them, I said nothing.

I like what I do. There is a pleasing philistine sensibility about a well- designed, large-format book that features the flora and fauna from the French impressionist period. The philistine sensibility is not in the book, but in the plush homes and apartments where Monet’s Water Lilies or Fantin LaTour’s Still Lives languish. I test my designs against the horizontal of coffee tables, not the vertical of bookshelves.

At first, I would use an alphabet soup of Bs and Es and Ts and Hs on the page to make sure the design was working, even if the book itself might never find work. For recent projects I have been using authors I am reading: Walker Percy, William Carlos Williams, Anton Chekhov. Today I used Joyce Cary: The Horse’s Mouth. Gully Jimson.

I could scan these texts, but when Chekhov goes up my fingertips to the radial nerve, then through the brachial plexus, he arrives at my temporal lobe with all his faculties in intact. Give me fifty words and I am the doctor in Ward Six. A hundred words later I am Doctor Chekhov. Five hundred (plus a pull of vodka), and I am Mother Russia. The transmigration of texts.

Before I send the final designs to the publisher I “delete” and “expunge” Gulley’s London, Percy’s New Orleans, or Chekhov’s Yalta. I don’t want my editors to know whose verbal masks I wear at work.

Nor do I want the finished book: my contracts specify that I shall not get complimentary copies, nor credited with the design. When I see my books I want it to be by chance, as in my sister asking: Did you do this? Or the other day in Barnes and Noble on the Plaza where I take coffee and browse:

—Lovely, isn’t it? said the elegant blond check-out woman when I bought a copy of my remaindered The Table of Chez Panisse. Then, looking at me, she said:

—You’re somebody, aren’t you?

—Yes, I said. She smiled, took a second look, but could not place me. It might come to her because Picnic is playing at the art theater nearby.

—I thought so, she said.

Serendipity is my favorite royalty. Even if I don’t make use of fortuitous coincidences. In this case the actor she has half in mind is fully dead.

—What are you working on now? Elaine asked.

Gerhard was in the kitchen with Rosetta (a cleaning woman we share) fixing martinis out of Sean Connery movies. I have agreed to come “a few minutes early to talk entre nous.”

About the time the martinis are to be wheeled in, my “date” will arrive—a woman my sister tells me makes her own sweaters. As the day has been surprisingly cool, she might be wearing one. The evening is one of Elaine’s attempts to “hook me up” (my niece’s language). Elaine wants me to “settle down” with someone “solid,” someone with whom we can all travel. I don’t travel.

—I’m designing an agenda for the Nelson-Atkins’s spring show. Also a book for a friend.

— It’s only August, she said.

—They need lead time, I said.

My sister studied me for a moment. She and Gerhard are on the board of the Nelson and she probably knows about the spring show and its featured painter. She is waiting for me to “fess up.” I don’t. I had expected she’d ask about the “friend,” but she seems to have been distracted.

—Anything else?

—Freelance proposals, I said. What would you think of a diary using Tom Lehrer Songs across the top: “It Just Takes a Smidgen to Poison a Pigeon.”

—Too mean, my sister said. Shame on you.

My sister has a “suppressed” smile; she holds her lips together and that makes the rest of her face—eyes, nose, ears—break into a bemused grin. She might have been smiling under her hairdo.

—How about an agenda of Keane women coupled with Rod McKuen’s poetry? I said.

—Very too mean, she said.

I don’t tell her that for my amusement I’ve designed both: The Vatican Rag with Paranisi prints; and The Shadow of Your Smile Meets the Windmill of Your Mind, using the big-eyed Keanes. They were practice for this very Blank which, when done, I will send it to Blanche de Blank Books. I knew I was on the right track when a cosmic high-sign smoke signal curled off my Latin language dialog dashes.

—Steve tells me the Keanes are in fashion again, said my sister just as their dog Precious limped into the room, came over to me, barked once and sat down.

—What’s the matter?

—She got a thorn in her paw this afternoon and we were waiting for you to take it out.

—Let me see, I said and made a rollover motion. It’s not a thorn but a piece of glass.

—Should I haven taken her to the vet? She’s afraid of the vet, she’s not afraid of you. It’s probably in her genes. And you know how to…

—Get me some Neosporin, tweezers, and a paper towel.

When Elaine returned, I took out the glass, cleaned the cut, and filled it with Neosporin—all the while Precious was calm, only barking once from her back at the syncopated chime of the doorbell.

—My hero, my brother, Elaine said as 007’s martinis were wheeled in.

•

The Go-Slow Guide to William Allen White’s Town

I had not been good enough in high school to go “East” for college. My father had hoped for a scholarship to Yale or Harvard: an Ivy League education is to a young man from Kansas what a rich marriage is to a young woman. It went unsaid that the young man in question was thought none-too-bright.

My father’s ambition had been fueled beyond reason because Steve had earned a scholarship to Princeton three years before, and a year later Elaine would win one to Vassar. As for my mother, she discovered that any college in Kansas had to take you if you had graduated from a state high school.

—I think he should stay in our domain, she’d say, using one of the ubiquitous words she was forever trying to teach us.

—He should go East, my father would say without—I would learn later—any sense of history or irony: “Go East,” you could hear him say summer evenings in our front yard as he drank his beer on one of the two folding aluminum lawn chairs he had arranged on either side of the glass globe.

—I think he should stay in our environs, my mother would say from her kitchen window as she did the dishes.

I was often talked about in the third person

The summer after my high school graduation, I lived at home, not being a bother to my parents—in fact being considerable help when not life guarding at the municipal pool.

When my mother had to stay late at the county office where she was a clerk, I worked through her Chore List: “Start potatoes at 350, scrub them smooth”; “wipe kitchen counter, make it sparkle”; “shake throw rugs, make dust flit”). I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I didn’t fret about it. I didn’t hang around my room looking into a tank of goldfish.

I mowed the lawn, painted the basement walls, cleaned out the attic, hung laundry on the clothesline, and ran errands. I picked Elaine up at the airport when she flew back for a visit. Some days I fixed flats, pumped gas and changed oil at my father’s garage and filling station. There were evenings when I would help him restore an old Studebaker Champion convertible in which he had courted my mother.

—I bought it back, he would say routinely as we’d come into the shop.

At the swimming pool, I saved a boy out of the deep end bottom but never said anything about it until my father saw it as a news item in the local paper.

—Was that you? he said, reading the paper in his lawn chair.

—What? said my mother through the open window.

I was the kind of kid who did not explain himself. Apparently I was saving myself.

The evenings I had off from the pool, I ran a movie projector for Al Roster who owned the local theater.

—You see Melinda in the back? he said

—Yes.

—Watch Bones McCall slip his hand into her blouse.

I watched.

—Watch how Melinda takes a breath.

I watched. Melinda tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Bones stared straight ahead. The movie was April Love.

Later that summer I got a few dates with Melinda as she didn’t seem to be going steady with Bones. We’d take in a movie, and afterwards drive to Winstead’s on the Plaza for a hamburger, fries, and a frosty. I had a key to the pool so we’d go for a swim after it had closed.

Melinda wouldn’t skinny dip, but she’d pull down top of her bathing-suit. I watched the way the underwater lights sparkled and bubbled around her breasts; I watched the way the bubbles cleared, and in so doing revealed her.

—When are we going to meet your girlfriend? my mother asked.

—She’s not my girlfriend.

—What is she? asked my mother.

Instead of an answer, I told her I had been accepted at Emporia State Teacher’s College for the fall semester.

—William Allen White’s town, my father would say by way of explaining my fate to his customers. “Emporia,” he would say in the evenings polishing the blue globe with a clean red shop rag. “William Allen White’s town.”

—You’ll need a dictionary, my mother said. Pick three words a day, even if you think you know them. But not in alphabetical order. That way you won’t get bored. Open the dictionary, find a word, learn it, and then write it on a slip of paper. Like a bookmark. Do you know what domain means? Do you know what plethora means? You need to make up for the words you missed.

She was referring to a grade-school year when I was a sickly child with an acute case of tonsillitis (probably misdiagnosed, now that I know better) that resulted in earaches, high fevers and many days absent from class.

—Words make a life, my mother would say, as much a mantra for herself as “go East” was for my father. Words make a life, she’d say washing the evening’s dishes while drinking the last of her Mogen David. Do you know what divined means?

One night toward the end of summer, Al Roster came to the pool. The evening had been chilly and there weren’t many swimmers left. We were about to close. The manager had gone home. Al was waiting at the turnstile. We walked out and stood by my car—a used Ford that had been a family hand-me-down from my father’s garage.

—I’ll pay you a wage, said Al. No more hourly. Full time work.

He wanted to expand. He was going to buy a theater in Overland Park and, after that, one in Roeland Park. Someday I could have a “cut of the net.”

—There’s a future for you in movies, Al said. And plenty of Melindas to watch. What’s an education good for these days? Nothing but trouble.

He made a pair of binoculars with his fists and peered at the ground. —Plus all the popcorn you can eat.

That fall I drove to William Allen White’s town.

—Your grandmother was a teacher in western Kansas, my father said by way of goodbye.

—Teachers and government workers always have employment, my mother said. Don’t forget: three words a day from the dictionary I bought you. It’s just like mine, so we can keep in conjunction.

•

Bottle James

When I got Emporia I took a room with Hulga, an Estonian who lived in a house her contractor son had built with the idea she could rent rooms to college students. There were six of us. I lived in the refurbished garage with Bottle James, whose car was a floating couch of a blue, four-door Hudson Hornet. His real name is John Lee James, but he was called “Bottle” by the time I arrived.

—Hulga started it, he said. It’s because I booze. Want a pull? Vodka.

—No thanks.

Bottle James built sets for the college theater and he had remodeled the garage with bookcases and desks arranged throughout. But he didn’t use them.

—No books, he said.

—How so?

—Library. I have a place in the scene shop where I study. Most of the time I sleep there. I live on air. Air and booze. Want a pull?

—No thanks.

—I’m going to Hollywood, he said. One night I’ll be acting the star role for the set I’m building, and the director will come along with an actress he’s going to ball and hear me. That’s how I’ll get my break. Then I’ll ball the actress. In the meantime, use the place. I built it as a set for somebody who’s into books and desks and pads on desks—and those calendars you flip over for every fucking day in the week of your life. That’s not me. We split the phone bill. What’s that?

—A record player. Plays both thirty-threes and forty-fives. The speaker’s in the lid.

I unfolded it.

—You got forty fives? Don’t tell me you got Dean Martin?

I didn’t tell him I had Dean Martin.

—That your Hudson in the driveway? I asked.

—Yes. The last of its kind. Next year I’m going to take it to Hollywood to scout the place.

I put my mother’s dictionary (Webster’s New World, College Edition) in the middle of the desk by the window. I put out one of those calendars you flip over for every fucking day in the week of your life. I arranged my textbooks in the shelves. I became a student with ease: English, psychology, history, general science, I liked it. Especially History. And three words a day: enigmatic, penultimate, erudition.

•

I Have Never Married

From the balcony that runs the length of my Plaza apartment I can see south across Brush Creek to my sister’s house in the neighborhood of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward—as well as Ernest Hemingway finishing A Farewell to Arms. East is the Nelson-Atkins Museum. West is the Kansas line. I cannot see the ten miles to our old house in Merriam.

To the north is Westport where the Santa Fe Trail started. By leaning over my railing I can see the Westport Inn (now called Kelly’s Tavern), and next to it Jim Bridger’s “historic” outfitting store. I am told that in the late nineteen seventies a cattle drive came in from western Kansas and wound up at Kelly’s. I doubt it. But I like to doubt.

I have never married. I have had—and am having—a series of Wednesday afternoon affairs. My Plaza wives. Nothing solid. No one with whom to travel. All married.

Not long ago, I bought a second apartment in my building. Across and down the hall. It is smaller. No balcony. Still, it is pleasant in its way.

I do not rent it, nor do I intend to. I have made it a showcase (complete with a stylish coffee table and two excellent end tables) for the books I have designed. I also arrange the gifts I get from my Wednesday wives: French jams and Spanish olives and Belgian chocolate truffles they buy me at the Better Cheddar and bring to our assignations. Soaps and body lotions from Williams Sonoma. Bottles of wine if they need aging. Tins of foie gras. Silk flowers. Provençal napkins, Sardinian grappa. What these women give me is their lingua franca for who they are; I know this, they do not.

•

A Guide to Housing, Circa 1960’s

Emporia was my father’s webbed lawn chair. There was an honest earnestness to the town, and to the college. The students were not worldly and not knowing so. The boys talked about cars and girls; the girls talked about boys and lipstick. Our education did not lead to an education. That year I found erudite in my mother’s dictionary (page 494) and thought that is not me (nor “not I,” as I would later learn). Only Bottle James complained of Dean Martin: The rest of us were happy with Ray Coniff and Johnny Mathis. We were provincial and didn’t know it. Nor the word. The Kingston Trio had not yet left the Seine. Joan Baez didn’t yet have a ribbon in her hair.

Tina, Hulga’s daughter, lived in an upstairs room of the main house. There was a rumor that her father was a Professor Humbolt who had died in bed with Hulga the night of Tina’s conception. You could see Professor Humbolt’s portrait in the History Department where each year at graduation a prize was awarded in his name. By the dates on the portrait, Professor Humbolt had been dead long enough to be Tina’s father. I never asked.

—Forget about balling Tina, said Bottle. Everybody’s tried. Me included.

—She dating somebody?

—It’s because her father had a heart attack getting laid by Hulga and she’s afraid.

—She’s afraid she’ll die getting balled?

—You got to be afraid of something.

Tina was tall, had brown hair, a thin-lipped smile, and walked with a slight bump and grind. Her hips seemed to be moving even when she was standing still.

—I’m afraid, Tina said.

—Of what?

—I don’t know.

—I do.

—What?

—You’re afraid of being naked in front of me.

—It’s just not right.

—You’re afraid of being embarrassed of me being naked in front of you.

—What happens if I get a disease? Or pregnant.

—You’re afraid that you don’t know how to do it.

—Do you?

—I have a plan.

—What?

By Thanksgiving, Tina would unbutton her blouse while we were talking on the phone, me in the garage, she in her bedroom a hundred feet away.

—Will you take it off?

—No.

My record player lid was singing “When I Fall in Love.”

—Mother says you have a girlfriend, my sister said when we were back for the summer. From Emporia.

—Not really. Sort of.

—Have you…

—We’re working on it.

—I was about to say: “Have you thought about bringing her home?”

—No.

We were sitting on our mother’s chartreuse couch; she was still at the Water Department; our father was at the garage putting chains on tires. Steve was spending Christmas in Cambridge working at a law firm. I had picked up Elaine from the airport two days before. My sister seemed different, but I didn’t say so.

When you are a young man trying to get used to your body and what it wants, it is difficult to understand how strangely you behave. Tina taking off her clothes at the end of the phone line would not be all that ”kinky” today (as in the bumper sticker I saw on an art student’s car the other day at the Art Institute: “It’s Only Kinky The First Time”). But sitting next to my sister it seemed something I should be ashamed of. Better to go swimming with Melinda. And since “kinky” was not in my mother’s dictionary, nor in the lexicon of the sixties, I could not name the nature of my unease. Nor, given my Wednesday wives, can I now.

—Are you in love? said my sister.

—No.

—I might be, she said.

—Have you…?

—I’m thinking about it, she said.

—Do you know about men? I said.

—I’m learning, she said. From you.

Before she flew back East, Elaine asked me to drive her to Winstead’s for a Frosty; then into the hills behind the Plaza on the south side where the expensive houses are. Our parents did not spend their Sundays “Wish Book” driving. But both Elaine and I had friends whose parents did, and one of Elaine’s high school boyfriends took her for such rides.

—Do you want to live in houses like this? Elaine asked me we curved among the lawn-clipped mansions of Mission Hills, then down toward the Plaza and past the house where one day Precious would need to have a gash cleaned.

—I don’t think about it.

—Really. Don’t you think about what you’ll be like when you are mother and father’s age?

—I don’t.

—How strange, she said. Is it because you boys are always thinking about girls? Not about getting married to them or anything like that. Not about houses where you’ll raise children. Just about girls…well, you know what I mean.

I had never heard my sister talk like this. I wondered if that was what was different about her. She had turned a corner at Vassar and ahead of her was life: a curved driveway sweeping through a manicured lawn. And for her, life was the future with the past going out of view in the rear view mirror of my old Ford as we drove toward home.

Then I said something beyond my years; even as I said it I knew I didn’t fully understand its implications.

—You don’t grow up all at once. It takes a lot of not growing up along the way to get there. I think the trick is…

Then I remember not knowing what to say next.

—Will you let me meet Tina? My sister asked as we turned back onto Johnson Drive toward Lowell.

—No.

—Then it’s not right, she said. For her or for you.

But this was after she had been silent most of the way home, and then said: “Turn here—” just as we reached Lowell, as if somehow I would not have known how to get to our house.

•

Swimming Pools and the Practice of Medicine

I completed my first year at Emporia and came home for the summer to lifeguard. Melinda did not. But there were other girls to take to the movies and then for a late-night swim. I tell my parents I am studying to be a high school history teacher.

—American history? asked my mother.

—Yes.

—Real American history? asked my father. With heroes.

—Yes.

—And your words? Three a day, said my mother. You don’t want to be a rube.

—I left the dictionary in Emporia, I said.

—We can share, my mother said.

—When will we meet your girlfriend? asked my father.

—I don’t have a girlfriend.

—Who do you talk to on the phone? asked my mother.

—A friend from college whose father was in the History Department.

Our words started with alacrity, propensity, and serendipity. A big week for the suffix.

•

Clarence Day and Berkeley: An Introduction to a Memoir

—Your uncle Conroy writes that he has a fellowship if you earned good grades in science, my mother said one day when I came home from the pool for lunch. It pays wages and you get college credit. My mother said this without much enthusiasm. She was holding the letter and reading it a second and third time.

Uncle Conroy was my mother’s older brother, a pediatric researcher of international fame. In the cultural gulf between our linoleum-floor life in Merriam, Kansas, and Doctor Conroy Watkins directing a celebrated pediatric research lab in Berkeley, California, there was a pleasing pride—as if in our small house on Lowell we had a first edition signed by Clarence Day.

—Let me see, my father said, who was home for lunch.

—At the University of California at Berkeley, said my mother.

I have an hour before I have to be back at the pool. After closing I am to take Muff LaRue to the Plaza. It is our first date. We will drive back to the pool for a swim. I am told by Bones she goes all the way.

—That’s what it says, said my father. A fellowship in Conroy’s research lab that could lead to medical school. He should get there as soon as possible for training.

—I don’t know that General Science counts, said my mother.

—Two semesters of A’s, my father said.

—He’ll need some lessons in manners if he goes, said my mother. Aunt Lillian will have more than one fork at dinner. They don’t “just eat” in a society like hers. They bring food to their mouth and not their mouth to the food.

I seem not to be present, even in the third person.

—I am going to be a doctor, I said to Muff LaRue as I unlocked the gates to the pool.

Muff dove in fully clothed and swam to the deep end. When she got there she pulled herself out and said if I’d turn off the lights she’d skinny dip. I flipped switches.

—I’ve never dated a doctor, she said. What kind of doctor?

She walked to the end of the low board. She took off her shorts and tossed them on the deck. Then she pulled her t-shirt over her head and threw it in the pool.

—A surgeon. I am going to Cal-Berkeley to be a surgeon.

I was treading water beneath her.

—I’m going to Sarah Lawrence to study classics. If you have a rubber I’ll do it with you, she said. A rubber and an air float.

She was trying to decide, long before Cybill Shepherd, whether to take off her bra next or her panties. Not that she is shy about it. Just before she dove in she laughed—a deep, throaty laugh.

It took me a few days to quit the pool and pack. I drove to Emporia to pick up the record player, records, clothes, and my dictionary. I told Hulga I would not be back in the fall. Tina had gone to western Kansas to visit her grandmother. Later that week, I parked the car at my father’s garage and took the bus to San Francisco. My uncle met me at the station.

—So you might want to be a doctor? he said.

—I don’t know, I said.

We were driving over the Bay Bridge toward the East Bay. You have to be a young man from a small Kansas town to understand how astonishing it is to see San Francisco Bay for the first time. There is nonchalance about its grandeur.

When I said I didn’t know if I wanted to be a doctor to one of the most famous and accomplished physicians in America, a man who had probably made special arrangements to get me a fellowship I did not deserve, it sounds, even at this distance, something Californian-sixties: Mellow. Really, man. Yeah. Wow. Far out. That’s not what I meant. Perhaps I thought—as we crossed the Bay Bridge to the East Bay—that if I couldn’t be a doctor like Uncle Conroy, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I’d like to think that now.

—I don’t mean. . . I said as we drove up Grove Avenue past the lab where I would be working.

—I understand, he said. Don’t worry about your future. It is always there.

—Thank you, I said.

—That is the hospital with which the lab is associated, my Uncle said as we passed by. And that’s where you can get a cup of coffee.

On the other side of the street was an all-night diner, its neon sign proclaiming: MEL’S.

From Grove we drove into the Berkeley Hills behind the Claremont Hotel to my aunt and uncle’s house overlooking the Bay. It was where I lived until just before the fall semester began when I rented a room on Derby.

•

The Thor: An Owner’s Manual

The other day Elaine and I drove to our home in Merriam. I don’t have a car, so we used hers. The house is twenty minutes west across the state line, 505 Lowell.

On previous trips we noticed the place was vacant; drapes pulled, its lawn not mowed. I am thinking about buying it but I have not told my sister. It might take me awhile to find the owner. There was no “For Sale” sign.

505 Lowell is a small ranch affair with a one-car garage. There is a basement my father refinished so my brother and I could have rooms of our own. They were on either side of the furnace out of which heating ducts ran upstairs. When my mother wanted to talk to us she would speak into one of the floor registers; the one in the kitchen went to my room; the one in the living room worked for Steve. When my mother made a mistake it was our joke to say “wrong number” and beat on the heating ducts. My sister lived upstairs and down the hall from our parents.

Steve and I had small windows onto the lawn. After a few years our father refinished the front part of the basement with brown vinyl paneling, making it into a “rec room.” There was a ping-pong table, a sofa on which Elaine necked with her boyfriends, and the portable forty-five record player that each of us would claim and that I took to Emporia: “Summer Place.” “Misty.”

We sold the house after my mother died; Steve wanted the money; my sister had married and moved to Mission Hills. I wanted to keep it but didn’t say so.

The glass globe is gone, but the Christmas tree my father planted when Elaine was born is still there—now more than forty feet tall. The wooden awnings he made to celebrate Steve’s birth are gone and the gravel driveway has been blacktopped, but as far as I know they are the only changes in all these years. Precious’ great grandmother is buried in the backyard.

Like the apartment, I would not rent the house. I’d furnish it with a chartreuse davenport and matching end tables on either side. Webbed aluminum lawn chairs. Early Ozzie and Harriet. The Thor All Purpose Domestic Appliance. We could probably get most of what we need from yard sales. Or E-Bay, if I did the Internet. Elaine has the record player in her attic.

—What happened to his globe? my sister said as we turned down Lowell from Johnson Drive.

—I don’t know, I said.

—And the Thor?

—It went to the garage when he died, I said. It wasn’t there when mother died. I expect the new owner had it hauled away.

—I got a tree and Steve got awnings, my sister said. She leaves it unsaid that I got nothing.

Elaine and I have gone over all this before. The furniture of memories: familiar roads, familiar talk. The yard sale of our lives. The repetition is pleasing: even the pauses between us have been there before. I should do a Blank: Silences. Use stills from Woody Allen’s Interiors. Or Pakula’s Klute.

The Thor was a combination dishwasher, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and clothes dryer. A round, menacing contraption, it was mounted on four hard rubber wheels that had to be locked before starting it. The lid looked like a submarine hatch; the body a tank turret. It took my father and two neighbors to carry it into the kitchen. It was our mother’s anniversary present. The following Christmas, he bought her a Western Flyer lawn mower.

Elaine and I have come to the end of Lowell and are making a turn down the hill at 52^nd street. Some trips she asks about the Thor, other trips she talks about the glass globe. Because she has brought up both, I wonder if she senses I am thinking of buying the house.

—Do you remember when the Thor attacked us? my sister asked as we took a right turn up Newton to take a left on Johnson Drive past the corner where my father’s filling station had been, but where is now a visitor’s parking lot for our high school across the street. She has said this before.

—Yes, I said.

—Where did he get it?

—A friend of his in the military made them after the war, I said.

I have said this before.

We are a blank of silence the fifteen-minute length of Johnson Drive to Fairway Manor.

—I knew about you and Muff LaRue, my sister said as we crossed State Line road, then down Ward Parkway, along Brush Creek and into the Plaza.

Just as my sister and I repeat ourselves, it is also our routine to add something on our drives. Muff LaRue is what she has added. I am wondering what I should add. Not about buying the house, I decide.

—I’ll walk from here, I said.

Elaine has stopped at the corner of 48^th street and Jefferson near the sitting bronze of Ben Franklin and across from a series of amusing busts atop an apartment building just out of reach of the “building covenant” of the Plaza. In recent days a local rapper of national fame has been chanting up and down the streets, and my sister and I see him heading our way, his spray-dyed red hair bobbing and jerking.

—Did you know I knew about you and Muff? she said.

—I did, I said.

But I did not. It is not that I lie to my sister, it is that. . ..well, what is it? She is literal and I am not. Some of my life needs to be fiction, and my sister is my best reader. I take that back: I am my best reader, but I need someone to doubt me. Present company excluded.

—I don’t believe you, Elaine said.

—Did you know about Melinda? I said.

—I do now, she said.

—Ben Franklin wrote an essay on the virtues of older women, I said as the rapper got closer.

It was what I have decided to add.

—Did he?

—Yes.

—Life comes around, Elaine said as I got out of the car. Muff LaRue has moved back to the Plaza and wants to meet you.

•

Design Proposal for Blanche de Blank Books: One of X

1. Title: My Cosmic Smoke Signal

A. Quarto: Neither paginated nor cut. Acid free paper.

B. Where a Section ends, there is a line drawing of your paintings (or segments of those paintings) mentioned in the text but scrambled so they are not where they are cited.

C. Typeface for text: Bookman (old style). 14 point.

D. Watermark: interlined subliminal text from California when facing text is Kansas, and vice versa.

E. Typeface for watermark: Book (Antiqua, Italics). 10 point.

F. Sample Text: “Clouds all streaming away like ghost fish under ice. Evening sun turning reddish. Trees along the hard like old copper. Old willows leaves shaking up and down in the breeze, making shadows on the ones below, reflections on the ones above. Need a tricky brush to give the effect and what would be the good. Pissarro’s job, not mine.” —Gully Jimson

G. Edition Binding. Title embossed in gold.

—Robert Day

Robert Day’s most recent book is Where I Am Now, a collection of short fiction published by the University of Missouri-Kansas City BookMark Press. Booklist wrote: “Day’s smart and lovely writing effortlessly animates his characters, hinting at their secrets and coyly dangling a glimpse of rich and story-filled lives in front of his readers.” And Publisher’s Weekly observed: “Day’s prose feels fresh and compelling making for warmly appealing stories.”

The novel banners at top and bottom are by Bruce Hiscock.

The Roommate: Vladivostok & the Ghost of Mandelstam — Russell Working

Sep 042013

A copy of “The Stalin Epigram” handwritten by Osip Mandelstam.

As a young man, Russell Working came out of nowhere to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his book Resurrectionists. Then, instead of prudently finding a college creative writing job, he abruptly and romantically packed up and moved to a freezing flat in Vladivostok in the Far East of Russia where he found love and Osip Mandelstam. In this truly masterful essay, memoir laced with love and a passion for art and artists, Russell tells the story of Mandelstam’s fatal defiance during Stalin’s purges and his last days in gulag camp on the outskirts of Russell’s adopted home. I don’t know. I hate the word underrated, but Russell Working really is one of the most underrated writers in America. This essay shows him at his nonfiction best: charming, romantic, his heart full of great writers and his head committed to uncovering the truth, the facts.

1. Pictures in a Bookcase

The tenth-floor hallway was filthy: paint was peeling from the walls, the garbage chute stank, and the elevator, I was warned, tended to break down. But when Tamara Fyodorovna, the landlady, showed me Apartment 81, the interior was spotless, with linoleum floors and wallpaper of alternating vertical brown and yellowish stripes and columns of fleurs-de-lis. Although the kitchen and living room-bedroom were tiny, the place featured a telephone, which many residences in Vladivostok lacked in 1997. The bathroom exhaled a sewerish eau de toilette, but this was not uncommon in Russia. Tamara Fyodorovna closed the door on the smell. “The kitchen’s got all the pots and pans you’ll need for cooking; plates and cutlery, too,” she said.

But in the end it was the bookshelves that made me fall for the place; those and the view of the sea.

The bookcases were glass-fronted and crammed with fiction and poetry and scientific volumes, and I was charmed that my landlady, an oceanographer who had vacated the place to live with her sister, had clipped photographs of writers from the newspapers and taped them up inside the glass. This practice, I would learn, is commonplace in Russia. The eyes of the authors followed me: Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Akhmatova, and someone new to me: the poet Osip Mandelstam.

Tamara Fyodorovna flung open the curtains on the window in the main room, and I said, “Wow.”

Russell Working on a frozen Amursky Bay in 1997.

It was February, and far below, at the foot of the bluff, the sunset had turned the sea ice on Amursky Bay into molten glass. Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan, lies at roughly the latitude of Marseilles, but the salt water had frozen so thick, coal trucks cut across it to the far shore. Antlike fishermen peppered the surface. Some had lit fires in barrels that would smolder and die overnight. Across the bay, the sunset silhouetted the torn-paper mountains, and because this salient of Russia lies east of China, I wondered if the farthest peaks might be across the border, not forty miles away. On this side, prefab concrete apartment blocks stairstepped down the hill to the waterfront, and a smokestack smudged the air below with a printer’s devil’s inky thumbprint. A giant water pipe snaked alongside a road, shedding insulation.

Yes, of course, I said. I wanted the place.

I had quit my job as a reporter on a newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, and moved to the Far East, as Russians call their Pacific maritime (Siberia lies to the west). I was editing a biweekly English-language newspaper for the equivalent of $400 a month, although the crash of the ruble the following year would bring the exchange rate down to $72 a month. But if Russians got by on that, so could I, especially since the newspaper provided an apartment. I had been recruited by the deputy editor, Nonna, whom I had met the previous year when she visited the U.S. on a State Department trip for Russian journalists. She was a former dancer in a contemporary company in Vladivostok, and stood erect, with a ballerina’s grace, in contrast to my writer’s slouch, and had dark hair and a slender figure and green-gray eyes. Sometimes, of their own accord, her body and arms and feet assumed old dance poses. I possess an inner mechanism that surveys non-visible frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum to determine how interlocutors are receiving what I say, but Nonna had a guileless bluntness of speech. She is now my wife, and I would spend more and more nights at the nearby apartment where she lived with her ten-year-old son, Sergei, until I finally moved in with them, but for now my new pied-à-terre had lessons to teach me about Russia.

On my first night with my clip-out roommates, I poured myself a shot of the liqueur known as balsam: sweet, tea-colored, as strong as vodka, distilled with deer antlers. The taste was medicinal, but hell, it was Russian. Chekhov warned that the stuff would kill me; Dostoyevsky suggested a game of cards. No, thanks, friends; I was content to savor the view of the bay.

So I toasted it all: the apartment, the frozen sea, my little newspaper, Russia. I now possessed, at least as a renter, a few square meters of Russia. Rule the East: that’s what Vladivostok’s name means, and even the Bolsheviks had liked it enough not to rename the city when they stripped the regional maps of tsarist, Chinese, Korean, and indigenous names in the 1920s. Russian civilization, stretched 6,000 miles along a railway line, had taken root where its land mass met China and North Korea and the Sea of Japan. Superficially, Vladivostok could have been any Eastern bloc city: pre-fab concrete apartments, citizens in fur hats, Soviet-era slogans on the rooftops (“60 Years!”), people who rhythmically clap in the ballet, streetcars for poet-doctors to die on. Yet the Far East had changed the Russians. The wolf, object of primordial fear, had been replaced in the imagination by beasts more terrible and beautiful: snow leopards and Siberian tigers. These great cats still prowled the Far Eastern taiga, known as the Ussuri jungle. Though hunted nearly to extinction by poachers who sold their skins and penises in China, tigers still avenged themselves on humans, pouncing on stray villagers or woodsmen. In Chinese restaurants, blond Russian waitresses would take your order, then hand the bill to a translator sitting at a desk in the corner, a little Asian man in a dark suit and white socks, who would render the words in Putonghua for the immigrant cooks back in the smoky kitchen. Shuttle traders ventured to China and returned with great duffle bags stuffed with goods to sell in the outdoor markets: Chicago Bulls jerseys, fake Nikes, “Washington Rednecks” jackets, gloves printed with the words “Old School Clothing Co. This garment made to fit so comfortable you ll wafc touveinz.” (Well, who wouldn’t want to wafc touveinz?) TV hinted at the region’s schizophrenia: when they played M*A*S*H reruns, there was the same dubbed translation you would hear anywhere in Russia, speaking over the faintly audible twang of Alan Alda. There were also subtitles, in Korean.

I turned from the landscape to mingle with my writer roommates, to lean in and peer at the captions under their photographs, as if studying nametags at a conference. This circle of writer friends was something new for me, a loner who had never attended an MFA workshop or drunk absinthe with a coterie of fellow authors in Montparnasse or had faculty colleagues to celebrate a new publication with. (A decade earlier, when I told my editor at a small Oregon newspaper that I had won a short fiction award and would have a book published, he said, “Type up a brief,” and as I wrote I had to grin and admit I was lucky to get even this, there being far less interest in my little triumph than in school immunizations or Kiwanis meetings or a string of bicycles thefts.) I had been devouring Russian fiction and drama since discovering Solzhenitsyn at age thirteen, but I seldom read poems in translation and was mostly unfamiliar with Russia’s great poetry. Pushkin, I knew—who didn’t? Towering poet, duelist, great-grandson of an African slave given to Peter the Great. Akhmatova, too, I had read of, and her haunting “Requiem” written after the arrest of her son during the Great Terror. But Mandelstam: wasn’t he some Soviet versifier? Anyway, he was a strange fellow who claimed his poems began as “auditory hallucinations”: inchoate musical phrases, even hums, a wordless ringing in the ears. He would lie on the divan with a cushion over his head so as not to hear the conversation in our crowded room. He said he was composing.^[1] But, hey, I’m a generous guy, and I included him in a toast. You, too, Osip! You’re a writer, man! Down the hatch!

Behind my newsprint roommates, Tamara Fyodorovna’s library drew me, even though I then spoke no Russian beyond the words English has borrowed, such as perestroika, gulag and zek (from Solzhenitsyn), zemstvo and samovar (via Tolstoy), and babushka, which means “grandmother,” not, as Updike and Merriam-Webster had it, “headscarf” (“Ekaterina would bring Bech to his hotel lobby, put a babushka over her bushy orange hair, and head into a blizzard toward this ailing mother”^[2]). I had also picked up fragments of the Russian that gleams on the beaches of Nabokov’s prose, like wave-polished glass: guba (lip), chort (devil) and a phrase that I still hope might prove useful someday: in The Gift, he writes of a large, predatory German woman named Klara Stoboy, “which to a Russian ear sounded with sentimental firmness as ‘Klara is with thee (s toboy).’”^[3] From Nonna I learned sladky and moya radost (“sweet” and “my joy”). And, because she lived on a stairwell like mine, vanyaet: “it stinks.”

I thumbed through my library with a Russian-English dictionary in hand. Case endings morphed the words, which sometimes made it impossible for a novice to look them up. Lyod (ice) became l’da (“some ice” or “of ice”), l’dom (“with ice”), ledyanoi (“icy”), etc. On a shelf above my bed I found a book whose title I recognized: Анна Каренина. Anna Karenina! Painstakingly I worked through the famous opening line about happy and unhappy families, not in some translator’s simulacrum, but the actual words Tolstoy had penned in a cramped cursive that only his wife and amanuensis, Sophia Andreyevna, could decipher:

Все счастливые семьи счастливы одинаково, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

I felt the presence of the sage of Yasnaya Polyana, sweaty from working in the fields, wearing a peasant blouse, with straw in his beard. I had no doubt he would find my urban living arrangements disreputable, but who cared? He was with me as surely as my clip-out roommates. As I translated the sentence, the Cyrillic letters blurred. I wiped my eyes.

My landlady’s books—really, they were mine for now, weren’t they?—revealed that Russian took a Joycean view of quotation marks, so that Chekhov’s short story “Spat’ Hochetsya” (“Want to Sleep,” usually translated as, “Sleepy”) looked like this:

— Ну, что? Что ты это вздумал? — говорит доктор, нагибаясь к нему.

— Эге! Давно ли это у тебя?

— Чего-с? Помирать, ваше благородие, пришло время… Не быть мне в живых…

— Полно вздор говорить… Вылечим!

I would later study Russian at Far Eastern State University, but that first night I had only a pocket dictionary to guide me. Chekhov scowled as I looked up his dialogue word by word. Ну meant “well.” Что was “what.” Ты was the informal “you.” I knew это: “it is” or “this.” Доктор—easy: “doctor.” I fought my way along, but it took the Internet to make sense of it. A 1906 translation had appeared, of all places, in Cosmopolitan, which, before it moved on to covering the eleven ways to have naughty sex in every room of the house, had been a literary magazine.

“Well, what’s the matter with you?” asks the doctor, bending over him.

“Ah! You have been like this long?”

“What’s the matter? The time has come, your honor, to die. I shall not live any longer.”

“Nonsense; we’ll soon cure you.”^[4]

2. Deluge

My apartment was in one of two identical concrete shoeboxes standing on end on the bluff near a clothing factory whose owners brought in Chinese seamstresses to under-price Russians workers, a practice I would later write about for The New York Times. (This was considered newsworthy enough to lead the cover of the Times’ Business Day section, even though the Times editorial board seems to have no problem with the suppression of American working class wages on a far vaster scale by means of corporate-encouraged illegal immigration.) At night Chinese music was piped in, and from outside the building, as the mullioned clerestories began to glow, one could hear the seamstresses singing along. One night shortly after I moved in, during one of the fourteen- to sixteen-hour-a-day blackouts we endured for months, even years, on and off, I trudged up ten flights of stairs in the dark, hoping not to feel the brush of a rat scurrying by or the squish of shit underfoot, for there were neighbors who could not be bothered to walk the dog in winter but instead opened their door to let the wretched thing out to leave little gifts for the rest of us in the stairwell. (And if you have ever wondered why Russians ask you to remove your shoes when you visit, now you know.) I could not see the floor numbers in the dark, so I practiced my Russian by counting off every step and each landing. Odin, dva, chetyre, pyat, shest, sem, vosem… I stayed away from the elevator, afraid the doors might be open and I would stumble into the shaft and fall to my death.

When I arrived at the tenth story (chto pyatdesyat-sem, chto pyatdesyat-vosem…), I groped my way to my steel outer door, but the key did not fit. Had I counted wrong? I hiked up a floor, but where my apartment should have been, the door was of vinyl-covered wood, not steel. Was I too high? Then my mind rewound the video of memory until I was standing out in front, and I realized I had entered the identical building next door to my own.

The apartment was a microcosm of post-Soviet life. In the summer the water could be shut off for up to a week at a time. Sometimes just the hot went out, sometimes the cold, occasionally both. During droughts I learned to keep the bathtub filled with rusty water, so I could scoop out a bucket to flush the toilet or bathe in a washtub. When the water was off, dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen sink. The novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, who knew about Russian plumbing, could have warned me about this, but he was not one of my roommates.

One summer night I was at Nonna’s when the water came back on in my place. Apparently at some point while checking the tap (Nope), I had neglected to turn it back off. Clogged with dishes, the sink overflowed. Tamara Fyodorovna later said that the couple who lived in the apartment downstairs were sitting around the kitchen table enjoying a beer and a smoke when water began dripping through the overhead lamp. I had never met them, but sometimes when I sat out on my balcony, they would lean out the window below in their underwear, trading a beer and a cigarette back and forth. We all watched the sunset together. The night of the deluge, their ceiling began dripping, and this turned into a steady drizzle, the couple would tell my landlady. They banged on the ceiling with a broomstick. The stream became a flood. Rivulets snaked across the ceiling, came down the walls in sheets, gushed through a fissure between the concrete blocks. The husband ran up and rang my doorbell. A jolly throng of neighbors gathered and located Tamara Fyodorovna by telephone, and she ran all the way there and opened the door to my unit. The water was ankle-deep, and my slippers and Russian textbook were floating like little barges. My landlady and a neighbor bailed out my apartment, scooping water out the window.

Nonna mops the floor during a summer typhoon when water was leaking through the ceiling and walls.

The next day my roommates ribbed me about the disaster I’d wreaked. I should have known, they said. Hadn’t I read Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or Heart of a Dog? Sure, but it never occurred to me—. Well, the fleas in the carpet had a good soak, Chekhov said. Bulgakov wrote and revised The Master and Margarita between 1928 and 1940, then hid the manuscript away in his apartment, for it could not conceivably be published in its time. This dreamlike allegory tells of a visit by Satan to Stalinist Moscow in the company of a talking cat named Behemoth. It was repressed for decades, published in a bowdlerized version in 1967, and only issued in its final form in 1989. In it, Margarita, the magical lover of an author repressed by the state, trashes and floods the critic Latunsky’s flat. Downstairs a housekeeper is having tea in the kitchen when a downpour begins falling from the ceiling. She runs up and rings the bell to Latunsky’s flat, and Margarita, naked and invisible, flies out the window.^[5] As if that weren’t enough, in Heart of a Dog (written in 1925 and suppressed until 1987) a professor transforms a stray mutt into a foul-mouthed, Engels-quoting man who floods the apartment after chasing a cat into the bathroom. Now I wondered if Bulgakov (or his upstairs neighbor) had ever left the faucet on during a water outage.

To make amends for my flood, I gave chocolates to my landlady and, through her, paid the couple downstairs 200 rubles ($33). I thought it would be sporting if to drop by and offered them a box of chocolates and that sheepish foreigner’s grin that excuses so much in provincial Russia. But Tamara Fyodorovna said no. “They’ll triple the price of their repairs if they know you’re a foreigner.” After that when the couple appeared in the window below, I went back inside.

3. Luchshe?

Once, early in my five-year stay in Vladivostok, a gypsy-cab driver with prison tattoos on his neck asked me about life in the States: “Is it better there?” When I didn’t at first understand the word “better”— luchshe—he spelled it in the air with his finger. He taught me the meaning by comparing vehicles in the traffic jam around us: “This car is better than that one. This truck is better than that old one.” (He missed his calling as a teacher.) Nonna would have bluntly said, “Yes.” But in halting Russian, I tried to say, sure, some things were better in America, but Russia, too, had its own strengths, and its people and culture had changed the world, and … but he cut me off.

“No! Luchshe, understand? Is it better in America?”

Thwarted by the inaccessibility of subtleties, I just said, “Yes.” Yes, it was better in America, however thrilled I was to live in Russia. Yes, in Los Angeles or Seattle you did not endure water shutoffs for a week at a time. Yes, in America the electricity did not black out all day in the winter, month after month, forcing you to leave the lights on at night, so they would wake you up when the power came on and you could scurry to wash a load of clothes at 2 a.m. Yes, your typical Western male jobholder, returning home after a drink with his friends, did not piss in the elevator but managed to hold on until he could find a toilet to aim at. Yes, middle class reporters and oceanographers back home seldom had to step over drunks sleeping in the hallways of their apartment buildings—and these were not necessarily derelicts; Nonna and I once discovered a vodka-smelling man passed out our stairwell, and he turned out to be a TV journalist who had a program devoted to police chases, so she phoned his wife, who lived in an identical building nearby, and the poor woman came running to fetch her man. Yes, in the bushes outside an American apartment whose residents include a newspaper editor and a city prosecutor, one would not find hypodermic needles, as we did outside Nonna’s. Yes, the only living spaces I ever saw in the States which compared to ours in Russia were in the ghetto; and when, some years later, I entered a Chicago tenement after a gang shooting, I was transported back to Vladivostok, not by the bullet-scarred walls and shattered glass on the floor, but by the graffiti and stink of urine and broken elevator and nailed-up plywood and even the stories I heard, like the one about the South Side pharmaceutical entrepreneur, a stout young man who had hidden his drugs in the garbage chute, and when he leaned in to retrieve them, and leaned a little farther, he fell in and got stuck in the tube seven floors up, and he had to be rescued, people dumping banana peels and coffee grounds and diapers down on him. This sounded like something that would happen in Russia.

“It isn’t like the movies,” I told my ex-con driver, “but yes, in America it’s better. V Amerike luchshe.”

He did not take offense. He seemed pleased at this confirmation. He said, “That’s what I thought.”

Surely all kinds of reasons explain the petty barbarisms of life in a nation of former serfs whom tyrants dating back to Peter the Great had sought to modernize through the use of slave labor, but one factor is communism and its legacy. The system was incapable of allowing people to solve their problems on a local or individual scale. There were no rooftop water tanks to supply the upper floors of hilltop apartments, but central pumping stations that lacked the power to defy gravity and force water up to our faucets when the pressure was low in the summer. Neighborhood boiler houses heated water and pumped it through pipes that snaked through town in the subzero cold and hopped over the streets in squarish arches, to the apartment blocks, where the water trickled out, rusty and lukewarm, in sinks and tubs. In the Soviet Union any accomplishment—writing novels or poems, composing symphonies, designing rockets to Venus, creating the world’s most popular semiautomatic rifle, which would have made Mikhail Kalashnikov a billionaire anywhere else—earned you a tin and plastic medal of Lenin and maybe an apartment or dacha, vouchsafed by the state, which was the owner of everything (assuming, of course, your accomplishment didn’t get you sent to the gulag). In Soviet times, the grocer who had access to sausage held a status higher than a medical doctor like my cousin-in-law, who lived in a tiny studio with a half-sized bathtub. A workaholic could expect a life no better than that of an alcoholic, so why kill yourself to finish that project when you could knock off at 3 p.m. and start drinking on the job with your buddies and go sleep it off in somebody’s stairwell? When the government wanted to collectivize, it went to war against its most successful farmers. It labeled them kulaks, sent in the army, confiscated their pigs and milk cows and barley, deported entire villages to Siberia and Central Asia. When farmers hid food to save their families from starvation, the state rewarded the snitches who ratted them out and seized the caches buried under haystacks. Nothing belonged to you, therefore no one respected property, other than the space within your own apartment, and even that, the government could turn you out of at any moment. Thomas Jefferson, that brilliant, reprehensible, slaveholding genius, was poetically correct that man’s unalienable rights include “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but there is a blunter truth in Locke’s formulation of “life, liberty, and estate.” Ownership is a human right. The selfishness of owning, conversely, creates a greater respect for that which is public. Like a stairwell.

4. “To My Lips I Touch”

Eventually I said good-by to my writers union, whose members wished me well with my fiction—not that they had read me—and told me not to be a stranger. I moved into Nonna’s apartment, which was larger and less cluttered and informed by a more Zen aesthetic. (She is a Buddhist.) Her walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs of half-naked dancers frozen improbably in mid-leap. The view out her window was less spectacular than that of the molten glass of Amursky Bay. Next door was an elementary school and, beyond that, forested hills and an armory, which several years earlier, while a visiting artist from the Martha Graham Dance Company was in town on a U.S. grant, had blown up, rocketing shells across the neighborhood.

Author Russell Working and his wife, Nonna, near a train station in Vladivostok in 1998.

It turned out that in Nonna’s apartment, too, fragments of Russian literature gleamed. These gems might more properly be called manifestations of Russian culture, but this culture had become known to me through its fiction. A benign Domovoi, or household spirit, kept impishly revealing them. As when the Rostovs prepare to flee Moscow, having emptied their wagons of baggage to make room for the wounded, Nonna insisted that we sit at a table silently for a moment before we set out on a journey. We still do this, and I always feel as if Prince Andrei lies outside, dying, as we pause and look each other in the eye and consider the gravity of speeding at seventy miles an hour in a tin-foil box on wheels. As in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Nonna superstitiously will not abide whistling indoors (when Masha, deep in thought, starts to whistle a tune, Olga cries, “Don’t whistle Masha. How could you?”). Like Rodion Raskolnikov’s friend, Dmitri Razumikhin, in Crime and Punishment, Nonna called female friends and loved ones moya lastochka—my little sparrow—although no Russian man today would refer to a buddy this way nowadays. And when the fish in cafeteria smelled off, Russians colleagues jokingly said it was “of the second freshness,” as a bartender does when he served bad sturgeon in The Master and Margarita.

Nonna had something more precious than the Soviet-era editions of classic literature in her bookcases. Among her volumes in Russian and English and French were samizdats, another word bequeathed to the world by Russia. It comes from sam (self) plus izdatelstvo (publishing), but unlike our phrase in English, with its implications of vanity publishing, samizdat bears the sacred aura of the courage of those who risked their lives to preserve forbidden writing. One such book, typed up by Raisa Moroz, a poet friend of Nonna’s, contained page after page of verses, the letters smudged, like lines of smoke from a boiler house, from being typed beneath alternating layers of paper and carbon paper. The book—we still have it—is bound in a blue-gray cover, and the pages are of a cheap, yellowish stock of the sort elementary students use for doodling. The writers are an eclectic mix, from Vadim Shershenevich, who died of tuberculosis in 1942, to the more dangerous (in former times) banned poets, among them the émigré Vladislav Khodasevich. There is a lovely poem by Akhmatova titled “In the Evening.” And on the first page was “To My Lips I Touch,” by my old roommate, Osip Mandelstam. In typing it, Raisa had reversed two of the rhymes, and it was a small victory for my growing Russian that I caught the mistake.

Any poem in translation is an imposter, like Arnaud du Tilh claiming to be Martin Guerre. As José Manuel Prieto writes of translating Mandelstam, “It’s as if the poem were a tree and we could only manage to transplant its trunk and thickest limbs, while leaving all its green and shimmering foliage in the territory of the other language.”^[6] The first poem in our samizdat describes an early spring day with its “sticky oath of leaves,” and talks of the poet’s eyes being blown apart by the exploding trees. In a translation by Christian Hawkley and Nadezhda Randall, it concludes:

And the little frogs, like spheres of mercury,
roll their voices into a ball,
twigs become branches
and steam—a white fiction.^[7]

Good Lord, I had lived with the fellow and his muttering about auditory hallucinations, and had it not been for the respect with which the rest of my writers circle regarded him, I might have thought him a grafoman, a literary pretender. I now blushed remembering my condescending toast. I was taken aback to discover his astonishing imagery, his sticky oaths of leaves, his exploding trees, his froggy spheres of mercury. And it turned out we shared a geographical connection beyond his newsprint avatar in my old apartment: Nonna said he had been held for a time in a gulag camp in our district of Vladivostok: Vtoraya Rechka, or Second River.

Mandelstam was born to a Jewish merchant family in 1891, although he would later bring his father grief when he was baptized an Evangelical Methodist, evidently to gain entry to the University of St. Petersburg at a time of tsarist restrictions on the admission of Jews.^[8] As a boy he studied at the same the democratically oriented Tenishev School in St. Petersburg that Vladimir Nabokov would attend a decade later. Nabokov complains that he was disliked for, among other things, arriving in a chauffeured car, sprinkling his papers with foreign words, and refusing to touch the filthy wet towels in the washroom^[9]; but he was of the caste, if perhaps not the attitudes, of those Mandelstam described as “the children of certain ruling families who had landed here by some strange parental caprice and now lorded it over the flabby intellectuals.”^[10] Biology lessons horrified Mandelstam, involving, as they did, torturing frogs and suffocating mice in an airless glass bell, but his imagination was ignited by the poet and teacher Vladimir Gippius (or Hippius), “who taught the children not only literature but the far more interesting science of literary spite.”^[11] (Gippius would later demonstrate this exquisite science when he brought Nabokov’s first collection of poetry to class, published when the boy was sixteen, and savaged the romantic verses aloud to “the delirious hilarity of the majority of my classmates.”^[12]) Mandelstam’s first collection, Kamen or The Stone, was published in 1913.^[13]

But of the two great writers it was Mandelstam, not the émigré Nabokov, who would later prove dauntless in the face of state terror. He found it increasingly difficult to publish after the mid-1920s, and in the 1930s he and Nadezhda were alarmed at the cattle trains of peasants being shipped to Central Asia and the legions of dirty homeless farmers who had been evicted from their land in Stalin’s collectivization campaigns and were traveling from town to town in search of work, even as their children and elderly died along the way. The poem that led to his arrest in 1934 was “The Stalin Epigram,” which describes the Soviet general secretary’s “sneering cockroach mustache” and his “fat fingers, like worms, greasy.” When Mandelstam recited the poem in private to Boris Pasternak, Pasternak called it a “suicidal act” and begged him never again to speak it to anyone. As Betsy Sholl has noted in Numéro Cinq, Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda (her name means hope), wrote in her memoir, Hope Against Hope, that in reciting the poem, he was “choosing his manner of death.”

Nadezhda Mandelstam chronicled her life with the poet, his arrest and death, and her survival as an “enemy of the people” in her memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned.

When Mandelstam was first arrested, the interrogator had only a description of the poem and a few lines jotted down, Nadezhda writes.^[14] He asked Mandelstam to write out the poem, and the prisoner complied. (The manuscript was later discovered in the KGB archives.) Curiously, given the brazenness of the poetic insults, Stalin seemed to admire the poet, or fear his reputation. After the arrest, a Kremlin aide rang Pasternak on the phone in the hall of his communal apartment and ordered him to call Stalin immediately. Pasternak at first thought it a prank. Stalin assured him that Mandelstam’s case would be favorably reviewed, but he asked why writers’ organizations were not speaking out on the poet’s behalf—a disingenuous question, given the terror of the times, and that Pasternak himself had already intervened on Mandelstam’s behalf with Comintern Chairman Nikolai Bukharin and others.^[15] The man with the cockroach moustaches fretted about Mandelstam’s stature, as if afraid the poem would outlive his own tyranny (as it has).

As Pasternak later recounted, Stalin asked, “But he is a master of his art, a master?”

Pasternak sought to divert the Georgian leader (or Ossetian, as Mandelstam’s poem had it). “But that isn’t the point,” he replied.

“What is the point then?” Stalin said.

“Why do we keep on about Mandelstam? I have long wanted to meet with you for a serious discussion.”

“About what?” Stalin said.

“About life and death.”

The line went dead.^[16]

While some later suggested that Pasternak had refused to vouch for Mandelstam, the Mandelstams believed Pasternak acquitted himself with credit, particularly since Stalin had opened the conversation by offering leniency. Mandelstam said, “He was quite right to say that whether I’m a genius or not is beside the point. … Why is Stalin so afraid of genius? It’s like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him, like shamans.”^[17]

Mandelstam initially received the astonishingly light sentence of internal exile, and the couple were sent first to the northern town of Cherdyn, then to Voronezh in Central Russia. But the stress took its toll: Nadezhda refers to “the severe psychotic state to which M. had been reduced in prison,” and he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself in Cherdyn. The poet’s auditory hallucinations took the form of men’s voices enumerating his crimes in the rhetoric of Stalinist newspapers, cursing him in the foulest language, and blaming him for the ruin he had brought on friends to whom he had read the “Epigram.” When he and Nadezhda took walks, Mandelstam kept looking for Akhmatova’s corpse in the ravines outside town.^[18]

Osip Mandelstam in a 1938 prison mug shot.

His mental stability soon returned, and he began composing at a frenetic pace. In an attempt to save his life, he wrote an “Ode to Stalin.” (Possibly a vague memory of this had colored my earlier, ignorant view of him.) But he was rearrested in 1938, and on September 9 he was sent from Moscow to Vladivostok. Anne Applebaum describes the prisoner transits in terms that recall the cattle trains of the Holocaust, with guards denying the prisoners water and children dying en route.^[19] Mandelstam traveled for more than five weeks on the 6,000-mile journey, arriving October 12.

5. Tranzitka

The gulag camp in our Vtoraya Rechka district of Vladivostok had once occupied a vast swath of territory. In the 1930s, as many as 56,000 prisoners were held at any given time in the transit camp, known as a tranzitka, the historian Valery Markov said in an interview Nonna turned up for me.^[20] The camp was for years the only Pacific port shipping prisoners to the mining camps of the Kolyma River valley, beyond Magadan, 1,300 miles to the northeast. The tranzitka was divided into men’s and women’s sections, with criminals segregated from politicals, intelligentsia, members of Comintern (an international communist association), and Russian workers who had built the section of the Trans-Siberian Railroad which originally cut across the hump of China that extends into the Russian Far East (like many who had been abroad, they were arrested upon their return to the Soviet Union). While some prisoners remained in Vladivostok to construct a navy port and process fish, most were heading north.

Shortly after his arrival, Mandelstam wrote to his family. The letter from Barracks No. 11 informed his brother Alexander (Shura or Shurochka) and his wife Nadezhda (Nadenka or Nadya) that the OSO, or the Special Council of the State Security Ministry, had sentenced him to five years for “counterrevolutionary activities.” There could be no hope of an appeal. Solzhenitsyn writes of the OSO: “There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan.”^[21] Mandelstam’s letter reads:

I left Moscow Butyrka [prison] on September 9, arrived October 12. Health is very weak. Exhausted to the utmost degree. Lost weight. Almost unrecognizable. But I don’t know if it makes sense to send things, food, and money. Still, try. I am very cold without [proper] clothes.

Dear Nadenka, I don’t know if you are alive, my beloved. You, Shura, write to me about Nadya right away. This is a transit point. They didn’t take me to Kolyma. Spending the winter here is possible.

—Osya [Osip]

[P.S.] Shurochka, I’m writing some more. For the last days I went to work, and it improved my mood.

From our transit camp, they send people to permanent camps. I have obviously gotten onto a “substandard” list, and I need to prepare for winter.^[22]

A clearer picture of the Vladivostok camp emerges in the memoir Journey into the Whirlwind by Yevgenia (Eugenia) Ginzburg, who survived eighteen years in the gulag and in Magadan. The daughter of a pharmacist, she taught at Kazan State University, and she was the mother of the novelist Vassily Aksyonov. In Journey she writes of being held for two years in solitary, then traveling to the Pacific Coast in a freight car with seventy-six other women. On the outside was chalked, SPECIAL EQUIPMENT. She thought she might have arrived in Chornaya Rechka, but that distant station outside Vladivostok seems unlikely. Markov says all prisoners disembarked at Vtoraya Rechka, near the tranzitka. The station where millions of doomed zeks disembarked is now a small platform where I have caught the commuter train many times. Ginzburg writes:

It was night when the train stopped. Outside, a reinforced team of guards was waiting to take delivery. The German shepherds, straining at their leads, made a terrific din.

“Everyone out! Form up in ranks of five!”

Suddenly we could smell the sea air. I felt an almost irresistible desire to lie flat on the earth, spread out my arms, and disappear, dissolve into this deep-blue space with its tang of iodine.

Suddenly despairing cries were heard: “I can’t see! I can’t see anything! What’s the matter with my eyes?”

“Girls—please give me a hand. I can’t see a thing! What’s happened?”

“Help, help, I’ve gone blind!”

It was night blindness, by which about a third of us were affected immediately [as] we set foot on Far Eastern soil. From dusk to dawn they could see nothing and would wander about, stretching out their hands and calling to their comrades for help.^[23]

The tranzitka occupied a vast, filthy area surrounded by barbed wire and filled with zeks who resembled “a crowd of beggars, refugees, bombed-out people,” Ginzburg recalls. But the new arrivals, who had spent two years in solitary in Yaroslavl and Suzdal, were so feeble, even the other prisoners looked on them with pity as they trudged through the gates in an interminable gray river. The barracks, filled with three-level bunks, were infested with bedbugs, making it impossible even to sit there. Zeks rushed outside dragging out boards and broken cupboards to sleep on in the summer weather. Some just lay on the ground in their prison uniforms. The air stank of the ammonia and chloride of lime that was dumped in the latrines.

Absurdly convicted under terrorism laws, Ginzburg and the other newcomers constituted the lowest caste of prison society, and were marked for heavy labor, along with the “Trotskyites.” At the top of the social pyramid were “respectable” criminals guilty of transgressions such as embezzlement and accepting bribes, followed in descending order by “babblers” (tellers of political jokes), counterrevolutionaries (like Mandelstam), alleged spies, and accused Trotskyites. Of course, one need not have done anything at all to be imprisoned on any of these charges. Ginzburg and the others from her train had not seen the sunlight for more than two years of solitary, were suffering from scurvy and pellagra, and had barely survived their train journey, but like Mandelstam they had to quarry stone under the July sun, the rocks radiating heat. Grit worked its way between their teeth. At night, under the open sky, it was hard to sleep because of the screams and moans from hundreds of voices. Many descended into a “camp stupor,” Ginzburg writes. Diarrhea reduced people “to their shadows.” Only the dying were admitted to the hospital.

One of the most striking moments in Ginzburg’s account of her time in the tranzitka arrives with a trainload of men with shorn heads, who plodded wearily in prison boots into a yard separated from the women by barbed wire. The men seemed somehow defenseless—they would not know how to sew on a button, to wash their clothes on the sly. “Above all they were our husbands and brothers, deprived of our care in this terrible place,” Ginzburg writes.^[24] One of the men noticed the women and cried out, “Look, the women! Our women!” An electric charge flashed between the two sexes across the barbed wire. Men and women were shouting, reaching out to each other. Nearly everyone was sobbing.

“You poor loves, you poor darlings! Cheer up, be brave, be strong!”

The emotional tension needed an outlet in action, Ginzburg writes, and these men and women in rags began throwing presents to each other across the wire.

“Take my towel! It’s not too badly torn.”

“Girls! Anybody want this pot? I made it from a prison mug I stole.”

“Here, take this bread. You’re so thin after the journey!”

There were also cases of love at first sight, when men and women would stand by the barbed wire and feverishly gaze into each other’s eyes, and talk and talk.

Every day the men would write us long letters—jointly and individually, in verse and prose, on greasy bits of paper and even on rags. They put all their insulted, long-pent-up manhood into the pure vibrant passion of these letters. They were numbed by pain and anguish at the thought that we, “their” women, had undergone the same bestial indignities as had been inflicted on them.

One of the letters began: “Dear ones—our wives, sisters, friends, loved ones! Tell us how we can take your pain upon ourselves!”

6. “When Later?”

In Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, he writes that Mandelstam “seems to have become half-demented, and was rejected from the transports.”^[25] But there was no sign of mental incapacity in the letter to his brother. Despite his ailing health, the poet hauled rocks, and October of 1938, he told his work partner, a physicist named L., “My first book was The Stone, and the last one will be a stone, too.”^[26] In his thin leather coat, he suffered in the camp along the wind-threshed sea, where, in December, milky swirls of salt-water slush condense into heaving skeins of ice that weave together and harden into pavement for coal trucks. The guards seem to have limited his rations, possibly because he was not meeting work quotas.

L. spent twenty years in the gulag, and upon his release he told Nadezhda (believably, she felt) that in Vtoraya Rechka he became friends with a criminal inmate named Arkhangelski, who lived with a handful of fellow thugs in a loft in the barracks. One night Arkhangelski invited L. up for a poetry reading. Curious about what sort of verses the cons favored, L. accepted. As recounted by Nadezhda:

The loft was lit by a candle. In the middle stood a barrel on which there was an opened can of food and some white bread. For the starving camp this was an unheard-of luxury. People lived on thin soup of which there was never enough—what they got for their morning meal would not have filled a glass. …

Sitting with the criminals was a man with a gray stubble of beard, wearing a yellow leather coat. He was reciting verse which L. recognized. It was Mandelstam. The criminals offered him bread and canned stuff, and he calmly helped himself and ate. Evidently he was only afraid to eat food given him by his jailers. He was listened to in complete silence and sometimes asked to repeat a poem.

In his collection of fiction, Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov, who passed through the Vladivostok tranzitka and survived seventeen years in the gulag, imagines the death of Mandelstam. The short story is titled “Cherry Brandy,” from a phrase in one of Mandelstam poems. As Shalamov’s Mandelstam lies dying, he stuffs bits of bread in his bleeding mouth, gnawing with teeth loosened by scurvy. His fellow zeks stop him: “Don’t eat it all. Better eat it later, later.” The poet understands. You’re dying. Leave it for us.

He opened his eyes wide without letting the bloodstained bread slip from his dirty, blue fingers.

“When later?” he uttered distinctly and clearly. And closed his eyes.

He died that evening.

Two days later they “wrote him off.” His resourceful neighbors managed to keep getting the bread for the dead person for two more days during the bread distribution; the dead man would raise his hand like a puppet.^[27]

In spring the dead were hauled out of town for burial, Markov says, but in winter they were dumped in a trench that had been part of the city’s tsarist-era fortifications. This is where Markov thinks Mandelstam was buried, behind a movie theater called Iskra (spark). The cinema stands on the edge of a shabby neighborhood of khrushchevki—the five-story concrete buildings that the eponymous premier built across the Soviet Union. Movie theaters have been renovated all over Russia, with plush seats and posters on the walls, but at that time, at least, Iskra still had fold-down wooden chairs, like those in a school auditorium. Nonna and I once watched the movie Armageddon there, not knowing, as Bruce Willis and a team of wisecracking Yankee misfits saved the world from an asteroid the size of Texas, that a multitude of ghosts quarried rock in the dark, among them Mandelstam’s. An eyewitness in the late 1930s saw zeks on the corpse detail wielding clubs to shatter the skulls of the dead, to ensure that nobody was buried alive. Years later workers digging the foundations of the khrushchevki turned up skeletons, Markov says. A spontaneous soccer game broke out, the workers kicking the skulls about.

In 1998, six decades after Mandelstam’s death, a monument was erected to the poet near where Barracks No. 11 had stood. But vandals expressed their admiration for the great poet by disfiguring the site with graffiti. During the five years I lived in Vladivostok, the topic of erecting an adequate monument was a matter of debate in the papers. Eventually the city raised a statue in a better location, near a university.

One day Nonna I walked out to what is said to be the sole remaining building of the vast tranzitka, on Ulitsa Russkaya, out past a small hospital and the Vietnamese market with its tin-roofed stalls and shuttle traders. It was an unremarkable wooden structure that had served as an administrative building. It now belonged to a private business—I forget what kind—and with journalists’ pushiness we marched in to look around at an office with too many phones and a couple of typewriters on the desks. The ladies of the office were intrigued that a foreigner had popped in. You wondered what papers might have been processed here sixty years earlier, if the administration signed off on transport trains, consigned Ginzburg and Shalamov and the doomed lovers to Kolyma, or decreed that one No. 93145 Mandelstam O.E. was unfit for transport to the Far North.

Several miles south, across the street from Vladivostok’s central train station, a statue of Vladimir Lenin looms, clutching his worker’s cap and thrusting his finger (There!) to guide travelers who have lost their way. But unlike in Magadan, where a giant masklike monument to the dead of Kolyma, two million or more, stands on a mountaintop visible from all over the city, no suitable memorial exists in Vladivostok to the victims of the socialist paradise Lenin bequeathed. No plaque at Vtoraya Rechka station commemorates the millions who arrived to break rocks or build wharves or trudge up the plank into freighters that plied the slaty summer seas to the Far North: poets, historians, bribe-takers, murderers, pregnant women, railroaders who had criminally sojourned in China, children who were kidnapped by the state and raised in orphanages to curse their parents as traitors and scum.

All that remain are khrushchevki—those aging apartment blocks. And a movie theater where an asteroid strike was averted. And skeletons in mass graves that will never be exhumed. And a wooden office building on a busy street that ends at a rocky waterfront glittering with broken vodka- and beer bottles, like fragments of an unknown language. Also poems in samizdats. And photographs of writers taped up in bookcases; these, too, survive.

— Russell Working

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, theDallas Morning News, the South China Morning Post, and the Japan Times. He began his career at dailies in Oregon and Washington.

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Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

There are several descriptions of the poet’s methods of composition in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s powerful memoir, Hope Against Hope, tr. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970). In particular see pages 70 and 180-183.↵
John Updike, Bech: A Book (New York: Random House Trade Paperback Editions), 5.↵
Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, tr. Michael Scammell with Nabokov (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 7.↵
Anton Chekhov, “Sleepy-Eye,” tr. James Preston, Cosmopolitan Vol. 41, (New York, May 1906), 154.↵
Milkhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, tr. Mirra Ginsburg (New York, Grove Press, 1967), 258.↵
José Manuel Prieto, tr. Esther Allen, “Reading Mandelstam on Stalin,” The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010.↵
Osip Mandelstam, tr. Christian Hawkley and Nadezhda Randall, Osip Mandelstam: New Translations, ed. Ilya Bernstein (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse), 33.↵
Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 86.↵
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory from Novels and Memoirs: 1941-1951 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996), 518.↵
Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 93.↵
Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time, 114.↵
Vladimir Nabokov, Novels and Memoirs, 563.↵
The students of Tenishev would also encounter another famous writer of that era. In Russia in the Shadows (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1920, pg. 119), H.G. Wells writes of being taken to the school in 1920, years after Mandelstam and Nabokov had left. He seems unaware of the school’s prerevolutionary reputation, and concluded that it was an ill-disciplined place whose students had been coached to flatter him. This prompted his guide, the Soviet critic K.I. Chukovsky, to write an indignant rebuttal to Vesnik Literatury, later reprinted in the periodical Soviet Russia (New York, Vol. IV, No. 21; May 21, 1921, pg. 498).Whoever is right, it is amusing to think of Wells harrumphing through the halls and scoffing at the children in their English-style uniforms, unaware that two of its former students would be ranked among Russia’s great twentieth-century writers.↵
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 85-86.↵
Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89.↵
Barnes, Boris Pasternak, 91-92.↵
Nadezhda Mandelstam, 148.↵
Nadezhda Mandelstam, 51.↵
On one train on which sixty-five women and sixty-five infants traveled, “There were no special rations, and no hot water to bathe the children or to wash diapers, which subsequently turned ‘green with filth.’ Two women killed themselves, slitting their throats with glass. Another lost her mind. Their three babies were taken over by other women.” From Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 166.↵
Vasily Avchenko, “Prizraki Morgorodka,” Novaya Gazeta vo Vladivostoke No. 138 (Vladivostok), May 31, 2011.↵
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), 285.↵
Osip Mandelstam, Shum Vremeni: Memuarnaya Proza, (Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2003), 186. Letter translated here by Nonna Working.↵
Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, tr. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967), 329-330.↵
Ginzburg, 345-347.↵
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 305.↵
Nadezhda Mandelstam, 395.↵
Varlam Shalamov, Kolymskie Rasskazy (Paris: YMCA-PRESS, 1982), 92-93. Translated here by Nonna Working and Russell Working.↵

The Instructor: Novel Excerpt — Ann Ireland

Aug 182013

Part way through the opening chapter of Ann Ireland‘s novel The Instructor, the narrator remarks that her putative lover (and art teacher) is like “a scout for some enemy camp, logging facts for a future ambush.” To me, this is about as exact a description of love as I have ever come across. La-de-dah romantics tend to ignore the fact that two people are distant countries, speaking foreign tongues, and that the progress of love is a sort of invasion that is always followed by hasty translation, colonization attempts, power struggles, and, often, retreat. Alice Munro, who wrote the jacket blurb for the novel, gets the picture. The Instructor, Ireland’s second novel, has just been reprinted by Dundurn Press, and we have the honour of publishing the first chapter here for the occasion. The novel tells the story of how 19-year-old Simone Paris falls for her much older art teacher, Otto Guest, on the first day of classes — and what ensues. Ann Ireland is a sophisticated observer of human affairs (of all sorts), and she is deceptive: she tells a good story, sure enough, but she also eschews relationship stereotypes by drilling into the complex undercurrents and finds uneasy answers.

—

Chapter One

MY DEAR OTTO:

See my hand shaking like crazy? It’s not because I’m scared, not in the least. Though two hours ago I was so damn nervous and fidgety I scurried to the outhouse every ten minutes, then worried you’d choose that instant to roll up the hill. There I’d be, popping open the door of the little pagoda, while you leaned against the door of your car, grinning.

I jammed crackers in my mouth, thinking I needed the salt.

Why was I in such a state?

After all, you were history.

The phone call had come out of the blue. “Let’s have tea, just the two of us,” you said, your voice so low and intimate I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure you weren’t standing there.

My own voice, when it found itself, was guarded.

“Late afternoon is best. I’ve got meetings.”

That sounded important.

It is important. We’re running through the slate for next year’s program and I’ve been fighting for that New Music trio to be given the residence position.

“Why do you want —” I said, too late, into the dead phone. As was your habit, you’d hung up without warning. I was shaking then too … for this was my chance to show you what I’d become, how I’d devised a life of my own.

To begin with, the vehicle was all wrong. Come on, Otto, a brick-coloured Honda? It had to be a rental.

When you slipped out of the car, legs first like some starlet, I let out a sigh. For it was you, in the flesh and life-size. You strolled up the dirt path jiggedy-jog, legs bent at the knees, hands thrust deep into your pockets, so loose-limbed I swore you were about to keel over. Your face, grinning widely, so sure of its welcome, grew bigger and bigger — and still I didn’t move a muscle. I was nailed to the position I’d decided on since yesterday’s phone call: arms crossed, back sloped against the doorjamb of the cabin, wearing a black tank top that bled into the darkened interior. Like some Walker Evans photo, I decided, most of my hair drawn back with an elastic, the rest sweeping over my face in the lake breeze.

“Very nice, Simone,” you nodded, missing nothing. A cigarette dangled from your lips. I let you come right up until our toes touched.

“Hello, Otto.”

Of course we embraced, though perhaps a little stiffly. My face got buried in the base of your neck and it seemed to me I’d spent a lot of time gazing into the hollow of your throat where the pulse tapped silently. My fingers curled around the cloth of your collar — threadbare, soft denim — and I was whisked without warning to the hill outside San Patricio: hard earth and scrubby cactus, burros grazing. The heat and dryness made our skin crack and fissure, mimicking the landscape. We’d hiked all afternoon toward the peak where the cross stood, passing only gruff men in straw hats tending goats, then, as we neared the top, no one at all. It was your idea that we couldn’t look down till we reached the summit.

“No cheating, Simone.”

You wanted the vista to hit us in one overwhelming stroke — no dribs and drabs, no gradual seeping in. I scrambled up ahead the last few feet and touched the wooden cross, then turned to look. I felt myself teeter toward the land, which rolled out in all directions, a vast tanned skin of parched mountain and plain declining toward the horizon in minute gradations of brown. The town, with its clay roof tiles, sprawled up the walls of the valley. The sounds were more precise in distance, less cluttered by our own noises: dogs yelped and howled in the endless loop of call and response, while ancient buses groaned up the hills. A woman was calling to her children, her voice spinning effortlessly through the miles of open space. For once I forgot you were there until suddenly your arms swooped around my waist and tugged me in: this same shirt, I swear, my eyes batting against this hollow of a throat.

“I would hardly have recognized you.” You reached up and pulled off your cap, regulation New York Yankees model. Your hair, always bushy, had been flattened, and when you ran your hand through it I saw extra streaks of grey.

“Come on, Otto, it hasn’t been that long.”

“Four or five years.”

“Six, actually.”

“Really?” You seem genuinely astonished. “You look fantastic.”

I had to smile.

Of course you’ve got twenty-five years on me — and look it. What’s happened to your eyes that used to be so clear and sharply focused? And I have to say this, Otto, your jawline is starting to ripple toward the neck. You seem thinner, more brittle, though I felt the little pot belly when our bodies pressed together. An unexpected squish.

“I look like hell, I know it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“But you were thinking it, dear.”

Dear. That rankled.

We continued to stare at each other, you jiggling change, me stock-still. And I thought, nothing’s happening. The butterflies that had been charging through my stomach all morning seemed to have been drugged. Do you understand what I’m saying, Otto? You stood a foot away and I felt a big fat zero.

“Going to let me in?”

“Of course. Sorry.”

You pushed past and I let you poke around the cabin, lifting objects off the mantel: the cracked coil pot, an Indian basket, the black-and-white photo of Father digging the outhouse hole. The woodstove received special attention, and you lifted the burner and peeked inside. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d reached in and touched the ashes, but you just looked, as if deciding whether I’d chucked something in there to burn. After, you strolled past the coffee table, picked up the book of feminist film criticism, flipped through, and I got the distinct impression you knew it had been selected for display. My cheeks heated up. Your hand swept over the tops of chairs and bookshelves, leaving streaks of shiny wood. Why did I feel you were a scout for some enemy camp, logging facts for a future ambush? I stiffened; the nervous feeling kicked in again. It was almost a relief; this was how I expected to be with you.

I decided to make tea and handed you the kettle so you could fetch water from the outside pump.

“This place is great!” you enthused on your return. “Your dad made it?”

“With my mother.”

“It’s like …” You tilted your head. “The house where the seven dwarfs lived. A cartoon cabin.” You hunched under the door frame. “Bet your old man is exactly five foot six. Everything’s scaled to that height.”

Right as always.

I found of box of lemon biscuits and tossed them on the table. You began to make short work of them, knocking two at a time into your hand, while crumbs scattered down the front of your shirt.

“Where’s your mother now?” you said, dropping onto a chair.

“She moved into a condo in Etobicoke. Nice view of the lake. She loves it.”

“And your dad?”

“He died three and a half years ago.”

“I’m so sorry.” You winced and briefly shut your eyes. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course not: how could you?” I pulled away from your reaching hand and watched you swing your legs so you could follow my movements around the room. You didn’t speak, and I knew you were hoping I’d say more about him. Your face waited, creased in sympathy. I measured tea into the Brown Betty pot and rinsed out two mugs. I collected the plastic honey jar from the shelf, then poured milk into a tiny pitcher. I would not give you this chance to pry me open. The spoons received a quick wipe on the towel.

You watched each gesture avidly.

“Then will you at least tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself?”

I let out a breath, staring at the back of my own hand as it closed over the teapot handle. You could still do it, make me achingly visible to myself.

“What do you want to know, Otto?”

“Everything. The works — every second since you left me.”

“You think I’ve been writing it all down, waiting for the day you’d turn up again?”

You smiled quickly. “Haven’t you?”

I flushed, because in a way I had. Lived my life and at the same time wondered what you’d make of it, anticipating your comments, your chuckles, and of course, the withering asides that had the effect of turning whatever I was doing — or whoever I was with — into something faintly comical.

“Well?” You leaned forward, following the motion of my fingers as they wrapped around the copper tray. “There must have been plenty of men sniffing around.”

You wanted all the details, fixing me with your eyes until I’d find myself describing the colour of the sheets, the texture of skin and hair. I set down the tea tray, the smell of Earl Grey a consoling presence, and pulled up a chair.

“Anyone serious?” you persisted.

“What’s this all about, Otto?”

“Curiosity.”

“Is that all?”

You hesitated only a second. “Of course.”

I stared into your face looking for signs: irony, amusement … but could read only the wide-eyed innocence you’d chosen for display.

I could tell you about Raymond, the dancer — but stopped just as I saw the edges of your mouth tighten. Already I was turning Raymond into a story, a series of tiny tropes to make you howl with delight and commiseration.

I shook my head, half laughing at my narrow escape, trying to shake that eager stare, at the same time bathing in its intensity.

“No, Otto, it’s my turn.”

“Your turn?”

“That’s right. My turn to ask questions.”

“Ahhh,” you exhaled noisily and pushed your chair away from the table. You lifted your chin toward the window and a glazed look came over your face that I instantly recognized: the Shift. The moment of withdrawal. Suddenly, with the practiced move of an old-time actor, you launched, full-tilt, into a monologue.

Something about light refraction that you’d read in a scientific journal. “Great diagrams, and a nice sequence of time-lapse photos …” Your legs splayed and you crooked an arm over the back of the chair.

The room shrank.

“… This guy’s theory knocks away all our notions of how we see, how our eyes gather and process light.”

I was supposed to lean into every word.

Instead, I gazed at you in amazement; you’d known, hadn’t you, exactly what I’d been about to say? The more you blabbed, underlining every third word with your finger on the tabletop, the sadder I felt.

And I was bored, Otto.

That was a first.

“… So you just change the angle of dispersal.” You hiked a cigarette from the package and positioned it just so on the table. “What appears to be pigment is really nothing more than mirrors!” You giggled with delight.

“Otto —”

“Think what could be done —”

“Ot-to —” singing it now like “Yoo-hoo.” Nervy. You weren’t accustomed to being interrupted in full flight.

Finally you tugged your gaze away from the open window and looked at me.

“I want to know why you’re here.” I was proud of that, the simple declarative statement.

Our stares hooked for an instant, then, incredibly, you drop-ped right back into the soliloquy as if I’d never uttered a word.

“… bombard them with photosensitive materials …”

I saw exactly what was going to happen, how you’d leave with nothing said and that it would drive me crazy and I’d spend the next six months berating myself, reconstructing the scene. So I pushed my chair back and brazenly set my face close to yours.

“Why are you here, Otto? Don’t natter on about goddamn light refraction — mail me the article!”

Your cheek muscles worked up and down. Your stare was flat, as if you were overhearing some foreign language. Then you chuckled, flicked an ash off your cigarette, and said, “You haven’t yet told me what you’ve been up to.”

You weren’t going to be snared by an amateur.

“It’s been six years, Otto.”

“So work backwards.”

Of course. Time is a fluid concept, its direction determined by a tilt of the glass.

“I’m director of the Summer Arts Festival.”

A quick smile. “Good for you.”

“As of two years ago.”

“Still making art?”

“No time.” I made a dismissive gesture but felt the familiar pang.

“Of course not. You have a real job. Someone has to run the country.”

“It’s a big operation,” I heard myself insist. “We cram two months full of chamber music, author readings, dance performances, workshops, and classes. Our budget’s doubled in two years and most of that is local money.” I sounded like the Chamber of Commerce.

You nodded. Smoke drifted from your nostrils and made its languid way toward the ceiling rafters. You were enjoying this. And why not? I was right where I had always been: desperate to please and impress you.

“I’m on a roll,” I declared. “They do everything I want. When Krizanc, chairman of my board, starts to rant about ‘market-driven programming,’ I tell him we have to create our audience. Not let the audience create us. Make them drowsy with something familiar — then kick open the gates. Blow them away!”

Who was this talking?

All these years of careful filtering, reclaiming my voice — and now this: the mimic reborn.

Late-afternoon sun pressed through the window and I leapt to tug the curtain. “It’s all in the presentation. Make them think they’re on the cutting edge right here in Rupert and it becomes a point of pride. They expect art to be tough; they want it to be.”

Your word, as in “tough-minded,” “tough-thinking.”

“Bravo.” You hooked a chair with the toe of your boot. “Sit down, Simone, you’re very flushed.”

I obeyed, hating the way I felt, overheated and sticky, pulse racing.

“My half-dozen years haven’t been nearly so fruitful.”

I forced myself to look straight into your face. “What have you been doing?”

One of your famous pauses.

“I stayed on,” you said at last.

“In San Patricio?”

You nodded.

“What on earth did you do there for six years?” I was shocked; it never occurred to me that you might have stayed on. All this time I’d been walking down Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto every chance I got, glancing up at your studio window, wondering if you were in there with your ripped-up magazines and glue stick.

“Got drunk most days. Made a truckload of bad drawings. Then one morning I got sick of the sun and the smell of rancid cooking oil and started to drive north.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“What about your ex —”

“Wife? Carmen’s out of the picture, except where Kip is concerned.”

Your son. He’d be twenty-one by now. Older than I was when I stepped on the plane to come home. “What’s he up to?” You always loved to talk about your son.

Your fingers wrapped around your teacup, the nails chewed to bits. “I saw him this morning. Not so good, Simone. Not so good.”

I stared.

“They’re adjusting his medication. Makes him screwy, his equilibrium is shot. The kid can hardly walk.”

“Medication? What are you talking about?” My self-consciousness vanished.

“He gets seizures.” Your eyes scanned the room without focusing. “It began five or six years ago. Of course, you’d have no way of knowing.”

“What kind of seizures?”

“He goes months without any problem, then suddenly, keels over wherever he is: the gym, a crowded subway.”

“Jesus, Otto, I had no idea.”

“Of course not.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with” — I struggled to sound casual — “that time he fell off the boat?”

“What?”

You sound genuinely mystified.

“In San Patricio, on the lake.” I prodded, already wishing I hadn’t brought it up.

You stared at me, fully engaged for a few seconds. “I don’t see how. He wasn’t under more than a minute.”

Right.

“The worst of it isn’t the seizures,” you went on. “Which happen maybe three, four times a year. It’s his attitude that stinks. Yesterday, at the hospital, he made his neck go all floppy, then titters, ‘What a shame your kid’s a crip.’ Crip my ass!”

The table shuddered as you smacked it with your hand. “Ninety-five percent of the time he’s perfectly okay. There’s guys a lot worse off than him — blind! Imagine being blind, or deaf! But you don’t see them hanging out on Queen Street, playing skinhead, cadging cigarettes and spare change. He snorts PAM out of a goddamn baggie …” You took a deep breath and snapped open the top of your shirt. “He’s quit three schools, got caught boosting a pair of Doc Martens from the Eaton Centre …”

Had you driven two hours to spout off against your son, ask my forgiveness for being such a lousy father?

“I’m sorry, Otto.”

“So am I.” Your tone was aggressive, as if you were determined I’d know the worst of it. “I thought if I stayed far away in some hill town everyone would be better off, that I was so fucked up it would overwhelm them. Pure ego.” You laughed. “Which I’ve never been short of.”

I didn’t deny this. “He lives with you, or Carmen?”

“He’s in a halfway house for kids who screw up. They huddle out on the sidewalk most of the day, smoking, or they’re taking courses in something called ‘Life Skills.’” You snorted. “He asked after you, just as I was leaving today.”

“Me?” My mind was racing.

“He wondered if you were ‘still on the scene.’”

“What did you say?”

“That I hadn’t seen you for years. That it wasn’t meant to be.” Your knee pressed against mine. “He’s convinced you saved his life, that time he pitched overboard.”

I reddened. “That’s absurd.”

“Even so, he likes the idea that you pulled him from the brink.”

“But it’s not true!”

“He thinks it is.”

First your knee, now your thigh. Uneasy, I shifted, but didn’t move away.

You reached for the cookie box and shook it. Empty.

This wasn’t the scene I’d be picturing, far from it.

Hell, I was feeling sorry for you. I’d been prepared for anger — even desire, but not this.

“Sometimes I used to feel you two were conspiring against me.” You spoke with studied casualness. “When you came in from riding those underfed nags, Kip was so flushed and healthy-looking — I used to wish I had that power.”

Power? I had to laugh. So you were jealous, Otto. This notion would have pleased me once. Now I just felt drained. The numbness crept back. Here we were again, using Kip as our topic, and I was supposed to pretend I cared. I reached for the tea things and scraped cookie crumbs onto a saucer.

A long time ago I was reaching for you to tear the world open. Now, in your presence, I felt hemmed in, claustrophobic.

“I need to live in Toronto again, to be near Kip.”

“That makes sense.” I didn’t hide a yawn.

“Last Saturday I picked up the newspaper and who did I see but you — with this most professional smile planted on your face. Very impressive, Simone.”

“You saw that?” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. The Globe had done a feature in the Arts section, underlining how the Summer Festival had “revitalized” the area and pinning much of the success of its “fresh, young director.”

“I thought, She looks so damn competent — pretty too.”

I crumpled the cookie box and tossed it toward the trash.

“I’m flat broke, Simone. Benny says the art market’s shriveled, nothing’s moving, nothing he can do for me.”

Benny — your dealer.

“There’s a recession, Otto. Even in San Patricio you must have heard about it.”

“I need a job.”

“Right.” I still didn’t get it.

“So —” You followed me to the sink with your saucer and cup. “You’re running this nice little festival. You could fit me in, as a teacher, artist-in-residence. I’m flexible as an old shoe, and more to the point, I’m desperate.” A smoke ring escaped from your mouth and hung in the air.

“As a teacher,” you continued, “I’m the best there is. You, if anyone, should know that.”

I dumped the leaves into the compost bowl. Now I understood why you’d come.

“We always got along well.”

I stared, mouth open.

You were jiggling a set of keys: Budget Rent A Car. At least I was right about that. “Think about it. Drop me a line, or call, as soon as you get a moment. I’ve got my old studio back.”

* * *

The little Honda bucked down the hill until its muffler scraped highway asphalt.

Then you cranked your window down and shouted into the hot still air: “You must feel very safe here!”

I opened my mouth to protest — “Who the hell wants safety?” — then remembered: they were your exact words, uttered years earlier.

•

It was a scruffy copy of Lassie Come Home, borrowed from the Rupert Public Library, and as I turned each page my fingers buffed scabs of peanut butter and petrified snot.

I didn’t even notice the sun was falling and I was losing my light. I simply tilted the book a little more every few minutes — until a word stopped my eye mid-sentence.

What was this word?

She.

Lassie, I’d just discovered, was a “she.”

The book dropped between my knees. Lassie, the hero of the tale, was actually a heroine. That was like those other despised words: poetess, actress, cowgirl — images of women in fringed skirts, riding sidesaddle, squealing with terror. How could I identify with the girl version of the real thing? How can fantasy be populated by underachievers?

—Excerpted from The Instructor

———————-

Ann Ireland is the author of four novels, most recently THE BLUE GUITAR, which has been getting excellent reviews all across Canada. She coordinates the Writing Workshops department at the Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, in Toronto. She teaches on line writing courses and edits novels for other writers from time to time. She also writes profiles of artists for Canadian Art Magazine and Numéro Cinq Magazine (where she is Contributing Editor). Dundurn Press will be re-publishing Ann’s second novel: THE INSTRUCTOR over the summer of 2013.

Squirt: Monologue — John Arthur Sweet

Aug 172013

There is a fine line (if any line at all) between some performance art and plain old standup comedy. John Arthur Sweet is a hugely entertaining, subversively ironic monologuist and, judging from audience reaction in this live show at Banff earlier this year, he is very, very funny. The monologue is called “Squirt,” the subject is love (sort of), Sweet’s acting is delightful. Watch the video; the script is below.

Oh, this is nice, isn’t it? That sun! It’s nice, eh? Nice.

Mmm …. ahhhhh …. (sigh) … oh, yeah.

(Pause.)

(Throat clearing.) You know … um … there was something I wanted to ask you about. Yeah … Look, I’ll just mention this and then we can sorta move on—(Gesture.)—down the road … So I got your email, and that’s great, I’d love to do that … thing … on Saturday. So yeah.

So, like, um, at the end of that email, you inserted something that wasn’t terribly relevant, it seemed to me, to the subject matter. You said—I don’t know if you even remember this—but you typed, “I love you.” So …

Well, it’s not really a problem, it’s just that you wrote, “I love you,” at the end of this otherwise strictly, you know, administrative email about arrangements for Saturday, and I wondered what you meant. In concrete terms.

Yeah, well, okay, great! … but … I think the thing is, we haven’t really arrived at a common definition of basic language.

No, I’m not being overly analytical. I’m just saying, you typed—that is to say, I assume you typed—or did someone else add that line? Yeah, so it was you. So I’m just saying, you must have meant something when you typed that. Or did you mean nothing? You either meant something or you meant nothing. If you didn’t mean anything as you typed “I love you,” then … well, I find that really quite fascinating. You know, that the human brain can conceive language that is utterly meaningless.

(To waiter.) Oh, yeah! Two gin and tonics, please! Thanks.

Like, there’s all these people all over the place all the time, going “I love you” … I love your hair … I love that new song by Rihanna … I just love polar bears … Oh, I love diversity … I love being part of a country with such a rich multicultural fabric … I just love the First Nations peoples, with their rich and authentic this and that … I lub you … Ahh lub ya … You know, and meanwhile we’re, like, killing each other and … and poisoning people’s water supplies … So, what I’m wondering is, where’s the love?

No, I’m not being overly serious, actually. I’m just looking for information. Making conversation. As we wait for our libation. See, I’m a kind of poet, too!

(Pause.)

Wow, it’s so nice. I’m glad we came here.

(Pause.)

(humming “Whistle While You Work”) Dee dee dee dee dee, dee-dee dee dee dee dee dee—gna gna gna gna, gna gna gna gna, gna gna gna gna gnaaaaa—

Let me say just one more thing about that, and then that’ll be it. So last night, when you came in my mouth— No, calm down, calm down— I’m just saying, last night, when you came in my mouth, in that very instant, as I felt this warm, viscous, salty grey liquid oozing all around my teeth, I was thinking, “Is this what he meant when he wrote, ‘I love you’?” … Don’t look at me like that, please!

No, you’re not— … Look, here’s a perfect example of what I’m getting at. When that waiter came over and asked if we’d like anything, I told him, “Two gin and tonics, please.” That’s all I said. Five words. And actually, the “please” on the end was gratuitous, so … four words … And actually, did you know that in French, a gin and tonic is “gin tonic”? Not “gin et tonic.” Yeah, it’s true. So you don’t need the “and” either. So, three words. Just like your “I love you.” Now, when I said those three words to the waiter, he didn’t have to say anything, he didn’t have to interrogate me, because we have an agreed-upon definition of basic terms. He knew to go over to the bar and take two translucent beverage containers, put an agreed-upon amount of gin in each glass— I mean, all I said was “two gin and tonics,” but he’s not going to go and pour, like, half the bottle of gin in one glass and half in the other. He’s going to put a particular amount, which we both more or less know, into each glass, add ice, and then tonic up to the top. And … here’s where it gets almost creepy … I know that he is going to put a little slice of lime, cut down the middle, on the lip of each glass. I didn’t say anything about lime! Did I say anything about lime? But he knows I’m expecting it, and I know he’s going to deliver it. That, my dearest, is what is called communication.

So, what I’m saying is, and I don’t want to be vulgar or anything, but when you say, “I love you,” does that mean that subsequently you get to stick your thing in my mouth and squirt warm liquid into it?

(Pause.)

Hey, you know what? Just forget I said anything. Let’s just enjoy these gin and tonics. Here they come! And I can see the lime wedges from here.

— John Arthur Sweet

———————

John Arthur Sweet is a Montreal-based monologist and book editor/translator. His last full-length monologue, Waiting for André, was performed across Canada and at the Prague Fringe Festival between 2008 and 2011. He is working on a new monologue, entitled Who Waits at the Top of the Stairs, an extended love letter to his adopted hometown. John was a participant in the 2013 Spoken Word residency at the Banff Centre, which inspired him to begin creating shorter pieces, works incorporating elements of poetry, as well as French-language monologues.

Through the Night: Novel Excerpt — Stig Sæterbakken

Aug 152013

Herewith is “Us.” I’ve chosen this excerpt of Through the Night (Dalkey Archive Press), translated by Seán Kinsella, to illustrate the power of Sæterbakken’s prose, particularly his narrative voice and control of the moment. “Us” comes early in the novel, and is perhaps the origins of Karl and Eva’s eventual separation. But as this section makes clear, Karl poses many existential questions on love and fidelity, which are paralyzing, and for him unanswerable. This rather prismatic questioning of life is repeated throughout the novel, adding to the novel’s overall tension and psychological terror.

—Jason DeYoung

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

We’d eaten a late dinner, and I was pouring Eva some wine from a newly opened bottle, after she had, surprisingly enough, asked me to check and see if we had one. I felt a smile cross my face as I stood in the closet with the bottle in my hands, Eva had that carefree air about her, the one she usually had, in fact, when circumstances suited her, and as I stood in the kitchen cutting off the bottle’s seal with the tip of the corkscrew, I couldn’t help but smile again, as if it were our very first night together.

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

The question gave me a start and I tightened my grip on the bottle, anxious about where she wanted to go with this. Why did she ask? Because she figured, no matter which way she looked at it, that the answer had to be yes? Or because she figured, no matter which way you looked at it, that the answer had to be no? And I thought about how often the questions we asked each other were in reality the questions we wanted to be asked ourselves.

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

I looked at her. Her neck, her shoulders. So beautiful, everything! Sometimes in the evenings I massaged her while she watched TV. I felt like a sculptor when I did it. This was what a sculptor must have felt, I imagined, when he had finally gotten a piece just as he wanted it, standing there running his hands over his finished work. And, in fact, she now placed her hand on her own shoulder, there at the table, and began to rub at it, without being aware she was doing so, which was usually an expression of exhaustion, self-pity, of wan despair, but which now seemed more like a self-caress.

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

In order to avoid answering, I raised my glass and clinked it against hers, and asked for her own opinion on the matter. The subject could hardly be coming up out of the blue, it occurred to me, when I actually thought about it: it was only a few days since one of Eva’s old friends, whom she hadn’t heard from for years, had called her up and described in detail—they’d been on the phone for almost three hours—the last few years of her marriage, a marriage that had lasted since the days she and Eva had been at school together, but was now over, as it had turned out that her husband, who had been her childhood sweetheart, was jumping into bed with practically every woman who had come his way, most recently with his sister-in-law, something that of course had come out, by and by, and had in turn triggered an absolute avalanche of confessions. This friend told Eva that she felt that her entire life had been ruined. All those years she’d regarded him as her one and only, believing him to be regarding herself as his . . . She’d said she would have felt better if she’d been the one who had done it, if she’d been the one who had lied and cheated, the one who now had to put up with the accusations, the one racked with shame and regret. She’d embarked on a few reckless escapades after she’d found out, she confided to Eva, as a revenge of sorts. But it was too late. There was nothing to be gained from it, neither for her nor for him. Nothing for her to win, nothing for him to lose. Everything was ruined. And she had never even had any fun of her own!

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

I looked at Eva. I remembered when I had gone back to her place for the first time, how amazed I’d been at how neat and tidy it was. It was like a household already, just as though the apartment was furnished for the life she wanted but had yet to acquire. It was a home, just standing there waiting for its family to arrive. And I remember thinking with horror about my own one-bedroom apartment, which she still hadn’t been to, how hopelessly juvenile and unfinished it would appear to her compared to all the things she kept around her. The chairs she had were comfortable to sit in, in the kitchen she had good quality knives on a magnetic strip above the range. She wasn’t a student! She was a complete person! There was something extremely appealing about it. I’d been filled with admiration as I looked at her standing there with a bottle of wine in each hand, asking me which I’d prefer; I wanted to move in with her right away, abandon everything I had, take nothing along, just advance to the start, her start, and begin there, over again.

So what did I think? Did the fact that I hesitated, that I didn’t have a ready-made answer, mean that the answer was no? Or was it just that I hadn’t formed any particular opinion yet? In which case it must mean that one outcome was just as likely as the other? Why hadn’t I thought it through properly? Was it because I was so certain that nothing would ever happen that could threaten us, our relationship, the vows we’d made?

I looked at her, the lovely renewed Eva. The just right level of tipsy Eva. The slightly nonchalant, amenable Eva. Whenever I dreamed of her, she was wearing the red dress she’d had on the first time we went out, to that Chinese restaurant. Yes, I think the two of us will always be together, I thought. What else could we possibly want? Her hair, which had grown and was long, fell across her face every time she turned her head, but it was as though she wanted this to happen, since she liked to rake her hand through it, gather it, pull it back behind her ear in a fresh futile attempt to fix it in place, the most beautiful of power struggles.

I looked at her and thought: Now it’s turned into the kind of night where anything can happen. Now we can say anything, anything that comes to mind, without either of us being hurt. At this moment we can take anything. And I remembered a film I’d seen, where you could enter another dimension through a hole in the atmosphere that was only open at certain times, and even then only to those who knew the secret formula. It was there now, the wormhole. It was right in front of us, the possibility to say anything we wanted, exactly what we had on our minds, without the need to take anything else into consideration. At this moment we ourselves didn’t need to be taken into consideration, neither of us. Right now we were the opposite of jealous. At this moment we were equally strong and could tolerate everything.

There and then I felt the need to do it, reveal something, confess something, anything at all, in order to affirm the new intimacy that had arisen (and that would soon vanish again), the candor that now existed between us (and that I knew would soon close again, like a flower that only blooms at night, which folds together as soon as the first rays of the sun fall on it). I despaired. Did I really have nothing to say? No, it seemed that I didn’t. No confessions. No admissions. Nothing to answer for. My conscience was clear. I felt ashamed at the thought. Because it was true, there really was nothing. Nothing other than some altogether insignificant episodes, some embraces that perhaps lingered beyond the merely amicable, some too-close dances, some fleeting touches, one or two kisses that were so innocent that I’d only make a fool of myself if I told Eva about them.

I thought: What in the world have I actually gotten up to in all these years?

A thousand thoughts, a thousand possibilities tumbled around in my head—I had to act quickly, our night was in danger, it could collapse at any moment, and if it did, then nothing could save it from the wan abyss, from the greedy maw of everyday life—but none distressing enough to take advantage of this opportunity, this potential for a new sort of relationship between us. No, to my horror, I had to face the fact that I had nothing to say. My God, if only I’d deceived her one single time! And I cursed myself, my honesty, my excessive caution. My sole sin: omission. Time was up, but there was nothing. She was ready, and I had nothing to offer her.

And a new anxiety pierced through me. What if she now came out with something? What if she now felt the same as I did, that the time had come to admit things, and that she, in contrast to me, actually had something on her conscience, something she now wanted to take the opportunity to unburden herself of? How then would I deal with that? I didn’t have anything to offer her in return, nothing of my own to balance the books with. And for a moment I felt helpless, terrified of what I might hear. I looked at her, waited for her mouth to open, for her to say the words, in an oddly toned voice, which would constitute the introduction, accompanied by a somewhat fearful glance, uncertain of exactly how open she could be.

“Why did you fall in love with me?” she asked before I could think of anything to say, and what I initially took as being a tender thought, a romantic invitation, was in reality, I realized, as I was about to answer, a challenge, a provocation, there had been something aggressive about the way she’d posed the question that only sank in afterward, like a delayed sting. And before I had time to answer, she continued, “Why us exactly? Why didn’t we both end up with other people? Why is it the two of us, in particular, sitting here?” And then she made a gesture with her hand: surrounded by all this. “Why you and me exactly? Why did you decide that I was the one? What was it that made you take that decision?” I searched for something to say, something to stay her with. Because I could see where this was going. But I couldn’t think of anything. And why should I? She wasn’t looking for answers anyway. Her eyes had that slightly glassy look about them, as if they weren’t being used to see anymore.

“Why?” she asked again, pausing before she continued, “Why did you marry me? Why didn’t you wait until you met somebody else? What was it that was so special about me? Was it really impossible for it to have been, just as easily, someone else? Did it only just happen to work out that way, that it was me? Was it just that I was at hand, that I was around when you thought the time was right?”

I said her name, but she didn’t hear me. She was far away. How am I going to get her back? I wondered. If I can’t get her back now, the evening will be lost. Then it was as though she came to life, her cheeks were crimson and a flame danced all the way up along her neck, it looked like her collarbone was on fire, the way her skin flushed and tightened over her throbbing veins.

“Am I the love of your life, Karl? The love that only comes along once in a lifetime? Am I?

“And does it only come along once in a lifetime? What do you think? Maybe it comes along a few times? Or is it something you can use up? What do you think?

“What about you, Karl? Could you love more than once? Is there anything left in you? Or have I taken it all?”

I should have stopped her, defended myself. But the way she’d worked herself up, I knew the only way to get her to stop would be to let her exhaust herself. She was like a riverbed in a spring flood. Any obstacles in her path would only increase the pressure.

“Why don’t you answer me? I’m only asking a few simple questions. What else can I do but ask when you don’t give me anything to work with? You never answer! What is it you don’t want to say? Are you hiding something? Are you hiding something from me, Karl? Are you keeping secrets from me? You don’t have any secrets you’re keeping from me, do you, Karl?”

She looked out of her mind, with her flaming red neck and the purple blotches all around her eyes and cheeks.

Then her head tipped forward, her face hidden by her hair. I didn’t know what to do, only that I’d be wise to wait a little longer before doing it. It looked like she was asleep, but I knew that her eyes were open, that she was sitting there struggling to collect her thoughts. Yes, best to wait, I thought. I took her hand, it was freezing. I warmed it up in my own, and after a while I felt it twitch a little. And then, at long last, she lifted her head and looked at me, fixed her eyes on mine, tried to lift herself up using only our eye contact as a prop. And now the glassy look had vanished, now her eyes sparkled, the light deepening, her look of despair finding expression, her lips regaining their color, the person in her returning, all her wrinkles and lines slipping back into place.

I stood up, still holding her hand, got down on my knees in front of her, and stroked her hair. She sat there for a long time just looking at me, smiling, rather contritely, it seemed. Then she grabbed me by the arm and stared into my eyes with an almost parodic over-seriousness: “Whatever you do, Karl,” she whispered, “whatever you do, don’t lie to me! Do you hear me? I think I’d be able to forgive you almost anything. No matter how idiotic. But not if you lied to me. Not if it turns out that you’d lied to me. Will you promise me? Promise me that you’ll never, ever lie to me?”

I promised, swore a solemn oath. Unconditionally, right there and then, I promised. I felt a pang of conscience as I said it. But then it vanished. Does it matter what you say, what you promise? I remembered how scared I used to be, at the time we were first getting to know each other, of her demands. It was as though she wanted us to live in a way the era in which we lived simply wouldn’t allow us. It was as though marriage was one of the antiques she’d collected, one she felt a particular attachment to. We had friends who’d already divorced and remarried, it was like a perpetual round dance, fueled by the same desires and the same disappointments at every point in the circle. They sought out marriage in order to realize their dreams, and they broke out of marriage in order to realize their dreams—which is to say, they married and divorced for the same reason. All the same, it didn’t occur to me to protest against the old-fashioned boundaries Eva set. Maybe she was right? Maybe it needed to be that strict if it was to mean anything at all? What would be left of fidelity once it was broken? All or nothing, wasn’t that how it had to be? If it happened once, what was to prevent it happening again? Was breaking your marriage vows five times any worse than breaking them twice? Is it better or worse to go to bed with ten different people or to do it ten times with the same person? Is the sin made greater when it’s repeated? Does fidelity even have any meaning in cases where it’s not absolute? And what value does it have if it’s going to be violated someday anyway? The smallest crimes are the largest. By perpetrating them you demonstrate that you are capable of anything.

What had bothered Eva’s friend wasn’t that her husband was unfaithful, but that she herself hadn’t been. Since she herself had refrained, when he did not, all of her years of fidelity became an object of shame. Her entire attitude, her devotion, her marital investment were all taken from her in one fell swoop. Her life-choice became a mockery, retroactively. Her outlook held up to ridicule. Her commitment a waste of time, when all was said and done.

Eva sat staring at me, with a look of either joy or despair, it was hard to say which. Then she tossed her head, sighed heavily, and shook off whatever it was that either delighted or distressed her. All at once she seemed completely sober. The transformation was almost uncanny, as if she’d only been pretending to be drunk.

“Does it make any difference,” she asked, watching me from inside that part of her brain she’d managed to keep on dry ground, away from the alcohol that had been flowing through her, “whether you do it or not, if you really want to do it?”

I asked her what she meant.

“If you meet someone you find attractive, someone you’d like to go to bed with, someone you know you could go to bed with, if you wanted, and then you don’t, out of consideration for me, have you been unfaithful to me anyway? What difference does it make, if it leaves you thinking about how nice it would’ve been to do it? Is there any difference? Does it affect our relationship any less, if you don’t go through with it? Is there less damage being done to our marriage if we do it in our heads and not in reality?”

For the umpteenth time that night I was again at a loss for words. All the same, I was aware that I was enjoyed talking to her about this. I liked the danger of it, the delicacy of it, liked the fact she was on a roll, that she was challenging me, I liked the way it all gushed out of her, how months of constantly recycled thoughts were suddenly being given vent, how everything that was usually concealed was now frolicking so openly between us. Oh, darling, why don’t we do this every night? Why don’t we sit like this, night after night, filling the cup till it overflows, talking about ourselves and our relationship, repeat things we’ve said a hundred times before, tell each other stories we both know by heart, let the familiar mill grind down the corn of our solidarity? Why does such a long time have to pass between each time we do it? Why does such a long time have to pass between each time we find our way to one another like this? What’s the point in everything we do if it doesn’t lead us here, the only place worth being? This is what we live for! This is the purpose of everything we do! The nights that make our days pale by comparison, which bathe our intimacy in a glow, the nights when it’s obvious and evident we can sit across from one another and tell each other everything. Why don’t we do this all the time? Why isn’t every night like this? If there’s a price, then let’s pay it: forty days of silence for one voluble night! As though it all runs by clockwork, gears turning us so slowly, impelling us, cogs that have to make a full revolution before their teeth again connect, slip into one another in precisely the right way, falling into the position needed to set the clock striking. And then come the beautiful, delicate sounds. And everything becomes melodious and obvious. Before the cogs move on, beginning the next long, slow revolution.

“Eva?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

—Stig Sæterbakken, Translated by Seán Kinsella

Kissing: Essay — Diana Whitney

Aug 102013

Photo by Julia Sabot

I try not to dread my girls’ adolescence. But I remember how I acted out with bad boys my parents knew nothing about. My mom trusted me; she drove me down to some sketchy party in Pittsfield at Nanci Mahoney’s stepfather’s cabin on the lake. Nanci spelled her name with an “i” and smoked in the girls’ room and wrote death-wish poetry on her hand. She’d taken me under her wing since we were in the same homeroom and both loved Stevie Nicks. Nanci didn’t care that I was an Honors Class nerd, and I saw her as a doorway to experience.

In hindsight there was nothing my mother could have done to stop me. Effortlessly the door opened and I crossed the threshold. Now I have daughters I know it’s only a matter of time.

“Mommy, did you know in ten hundred years the sun will go out?” Carmen speaks carelessly, delivering this Kindergarten fact the way she’d mention the life cycle of a frog.

“Really?” I say. I’m at my post at the sink, loading the breakfast dishes.

“Yes,” she confirms. “All the people will die. And all the animals.”

“Wow. Are you worried about that?” I aim for curious nonchalance, my voice untainted by anxiety. But my daughter has already raced off to join her sister in the playroom, where they have five minutes before school to line up their cow and horse armies for a major offensive.

Ten hundred years seems an eternity for a 5-year-old, but when I do the math it’s only forty generations. Is this slapdash astronomy what Miss Lily— Carmen’s sweet-faced, sassy teacher, she of the brunette mane and the striped tops and the snug Seven jeans— is teaching her charges at Circle Time?

I’m not concerned about misinformation. It’s possible Carmen fabricated the future of the sun from something she read or overheard. My youngest has an active imagination and an uncanny ability to sense the deep currents of adult affairs, even if she can’t understand them.

At bedtime I climb the ladder into her loft bed, pressed up close to the ceiling in a vaguely claustrophobic nest of pillows, blankets, Ducky, Big Duck, Fuzzy, Strawberry, and the rest of the guys. My girl is naked as usual, too warm-blooded for PJs, her smooth, round belly radiating heat. We snuggle under covers and do our nose-rub and eyelash-kiss routine. Given the chance, Carmen will want to touch tongues, then turn this weird, wet intimacy into a full-on French kiss with an ardor that startles me every time. The child is a sensual creature. I don’t fear her passionate nature now, but when my mind fast-forwards a decade to Fifteen, I feel nausea.

Already Carmen can lie without thinking twice. She often sneaks down from her loft after bedtime for gummy bunnies and string cheese, even though I’ve forbidden her to eat up there. She’ll steal her sister’s Halloween candy and stash it under her sheets, or claim she hasn’t broken a glass when there are shards on the floor. Small trespasses, yes— but is she capable of more? One night she asks me what Daddy is doing.

“Watching hockey on the couch,” I reply. “And I’m going for a walk.”

“Okay, Mommy. Good night,” she grins.

“Carmen… “ I warn. “What are you up to?”

With tickling, the truth comes out. The kid is plotting to sneak downstairs and hunt for the leftover cupcakes she suspects are somewhere in the kitchen. “And then I’ll hypnotize Daddy and invite my friends over and we’ll all have a cupcake party!” Her blue eyes widen and she laughs like a baby hyena, adorable but scary. I push back the thought of her in high school descending a ladder of sheets, slipping into a car piled with boys, maybe a rusted-out, extra-cab pick-up. The truck roars off down our dirt road in a trail of pebbles and sweet marijuana smoke. At Fifteen, I wouldn’t have dared this kind of transgression, but Carmen has always been fearless. I was a good girl who asked for a ride.

At Nanci Mahoney’s party, the dank cabin smelled of lakewater and cigarettes, and Nanci danced on the screen porch shaking her smoky copper-colored hair. I sat on a futon while a punk boy in combat boots drew a design in body paint on my shoulder. He pushed up my tee-shirt sleeve and held me still. Then he dipped the brush in black paint and began making delicate strokes on my skin. The brush was a wet feather, more exotic than a fingertip. Neither of us uttered a word until he finished; he’d painted an elaborate Anarchy sign on my deltoid, embellished with whorls and scrolls.

“There,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

In the background, The Church crooned “Under the Milky Way”— as usual, the song lyrics expressed my reality more succinctly than I ever could: “Wish I knew what you were looking for/ Might have known what you would find…”

I didn’t make out with Punk Boy that night, but there were other parties. When my Dad picked me up, I sank into his dark car, feigning exhaustion. The leather seats encased me like a protective skin. I told him no, I didn’t drink any beer, yes, the party was fine… kind of boring. I was skilled at keeping small secrets. I’d learned from my mother, after all, just as my daughter is learning from me.

“Mommy, what’s more important— friendship or kissing?” Carmen springs this question on me one night after a round of nose-rubbing and tongue-touching. My skin prickles. A miniature lightning rod, my child has picked up on sparks between me and a dangerously charming neighbor. The June evening simmers beyond our window; the first fireflies blink find me, find me out in the meadow. I’m restless, ready to clock out of mom duty and go check my email.

“Friendship,” I answer firmly. But sometimes electricity trumps everything, and you find yourself kissing without care of the future, kissing until your mouth aches, kissing as if the sun might go out.

—Diana Whitney

Diana Whitney is a yoga teacher, writer, and mother of two in Brattleboro, VT. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post.com, Pilates Style magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto del Sol, Lyric, and various other publications. Diana has a Masters in English Literature from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and attended the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her irreverent parenting column, Spilt Milk, ran for four years in several Vermont newspapers and is slowly working its way into a memoir. Diana recently completed a book of poems, Wanting It. She blogs at www.spiltmilkvt.com.

On Reverence: Essay — Richard Farrell

Aug 042013

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless
—Philip Larkin, from “High Windows”

It seems to me that reverence, as something intrinsic to an individual’s sense of meaning, as a principle of human communities, has been on the decline, if not under downright assault, in the culture at large. I’m not arguing that there’s a scarcity of people leading reverential lives. From monks to poets, from special-education teachers to astronauts, we live amongst many still capable of being awestruck. Nor is the raw material which inspires reverence eroding, like polar ice caps and old-growth forests, under pressure for mankind’s increased footprint. Just a mile from my front door, a traffic jam occurs each night as hundreds of people crowd along the cliffs to watch the sun drop into the Pacific.

When I was young, I would wake early and head off to serve as an altar boy for the weekday, sunrise mass. The same rag-tag band of true believers filed into the pews at 6:30 every morning. Something about being tired, a whiff of candles, incantations, and carefully articulated rituals always mesmerized me. I’ve yet to encounter a more consistently sacred sight in my life than dawn breaking through the stained-glass windows at Christ the King Church. At twelve, I gave serious consideration to the seminary, and heretically repeated the priest’s gestures in my living room, with Ritz crackers for the body and grape soda for the blood. But I had no calling from God. In time, the rituals themselves lost meaning.

Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that I chose to go to college at the Naval Academy, an institution awash in rituals and codes. Anyone who’s ever witnessed a sunset dress parade along the Severn River—four-thousand midshipmen marching in lock step, bayonets and belt buckles polished, blue and gold spinnakers billowing on the river—and not felt something akin to awe, surely has lost the ability to be stirred by great pageantry. By the time I was 18, I’d traded in the vestments of the altar for the vestments of war but marveled no less at the lore and history of it all, the flag lowered at sunset, the distant bugle call of taps.

During my sophomore year at Annapolis, a plebe committed suicide by stepping out of his fifth-floor window. The young man had wanted to quit the Academy, but was encouraged to stay by well-meaning parents and company officers. I watched as paramedics attempted to resuscitate the broken and bloodied midshipman, his once-pristine, navy-blue uniform suddenly a torn and grisly mess. Later, as fireman sprayed his blood from the brick walkway, I felt a desperate emptiness about the institution I’d committed to. The shame of quitting was certainly not worth that young man’s life.

“Reverence is an ancient virtue,” Paul Woodruff writes in Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. Woodruff, a humanities professor, approaches the subject of reverence with a philosophical lens. Handed down from early cultures, across a variety of religious and secular systems, reverence has less to do with mystery and mysticism and more to do with shaping individuals and societies who can recognize the limitations of what humans can (or should) control. Reverence, according to Woodruff, begins in a capacity for awe and wonder for the world around us. This capacity for awe leads to a deepening respect for fellow human travelers. “This in turns fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flows exceeding the normal human allotment.” Shame arises, in part, when humans fail to remember that each person, whether prince or pauper, is dwarfed by the sheer grandness of existence.

Reverence, Woodruff also argues, is on the decline in contemporary culture.

◊

My children have recently begun their summer vacation and the moments in my day which might let in a little reverence have been few and far between. It’s hard to experience awe amidst battles over television remotes, pop-radio stations and who gets to play on the iPad. At times, it seems that the experience of reverence demands things in short supply these days: silence, stillness, time to think. And in most of my daily life, the once sacred rituals have either lapsed into quaint memory or feel contrived. Perhaps I’ve convinced myself that I’ve outgrown them, like acolyte robes and military uniforms. Perhaps the only solution is to get away from it all for a while.

So at the end of June, I leave California for Massachusetts with my kids—Maggie, almost 12, and Tom, who’ll be 8 in a few weeks. These are transitional times as a parent. Maybe all time and ages are transitional, but these years in particular feel downright seismic. Less and less snuggling, more and more driving, from horse lessons to baseball practice to sleepovers on the other side of town. Because I’ve taken Maggie and Tom to see their grandparents in Massachusetts most summers since they were born, these trips retain something of a ritual in our family. The grandchildren, welcomed as mini-deities, are worshiped with burnt offerings of Cheetos, ice cream bars and endless hours of over-indulgence.

Children make for wonderful case studies of reverence. Anyone who’s ever spent ten minutes waiting for a child to stop staring in wide-eyed wonder at a green caterpillar on a leaf knows that a child’s capacity for awe is without peer. And anyone who’s ever chastened that same child for being distracted certainly knows how deeply a child feels shame. Respect, awe, shame—a child’s life is awash in reverential moments. What child does not, as Annie Dillard says, live in all they seek? If only they could articulate their experience. Because what a child lacks, it seems, is the eloquence to communicate that experience. This comes with maturity, with reading the great books, studying the big ideas, sharing in the human conversation.

This point is driven home most clearly by one of my son’s friends in Massachusetts. John, 6, suffers from significant autism. What might well be a deep, if scattered, concentration and intelligence (John knows all the world’s countries and their capitals, knows all the elements of the periodic table and hears and repeats verbatim anything you say) crashes around him when he encounters other people. While John twirls around on the beach, gathering shells with a naturalist’s curiosity, he also seizes up, clenching his hands into tight fists and his face into a grimace, when given basic commands by an adult. He remains isolated in a room of children, able to make only the slightest contact. The simple, if cruel, reality is that John doesn’t fit into the world as typically constructed. It’s like he hears the music playing in the background but can’t find the rhythm.

And yet it’s hard not to wonder and marvel at his freedom, the absolute and unadulterated pleasure he finds in a vibrating restaurant pager or the garden hose at my mother’s house. For John, it’s as if all the moments in his world were reverent ones, but they remain utterly trapped inside, un-spoken, only thinly connected with those around him, and thus those moments verge on being lost to meaning.

“We live in all we seek,” Annie Dillard writes. “The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”

Dillard reminds us that the sacred surrounds everything, waiting only to be noticed. And intellectually, this makes perfect sense, though it’s another thing entirely to live this way, to actively overcome the obliviousness of daily pursuits, all those small tasks that take up so much time and energy. Reverence, for the most part, always feels set apart, reserved for mountaintops, cathedrals and forest trails. The trick of recognizing the numinous in the mundane, seeing the sacred patterns—the color, as Dillard calls it—in the landscape we walk everyday, seems elusive, frustrating at times, the stuff of dreams.

What Dillard seems to be arguing, and Woodruff no less, is that reverence involves a choice. “We have not lost our capacity for reverence,” Woodruff writes. “The capacity for virtue belongs to all of us as human beings. What we are losing is a language of behavior—a self-conscious sort of ceremony—that best expresses reverence in daily life.” But how to learn that language? Harder still, how to remain fluent in it? In my youth, the rituals of the church or the military helped shape those choices for me, or perhaps they co-opted them, no matter. The priest used the mass to dramatize the crucifixion. What stood behind the dress parade were not just shiny shoes and individuals submitting to the larger unit, but also history, the great battles of the past, the fallen, the horror of war, camaraderie, sacrifice, virtues, regardless of how tenuously political these things may have been. Those rituals always pointed the way for me, like an illuminated highway sign on a dark and lonely road. The destination, the actual feelings of profound mystery and awe, must remain just out of reach, ineffable and abstract. But the road signs reassure, keep us moving on what appears to be a path, however dimly lit and confusing. The stylized and polished constructs become containers for the missing virtue (courage, honor, integrity, deity), for those things that can be felt but not grasped. And in this, the rituals themselves become imbued with meaning and importance.

But most of the rituals are gone now, at least for a large portion of people I know, myself included. Routine has taken over, and routine and ritual are very different creatures. Routine shares none of the symbolism, none of the communal aspects of ritual. Taken to an extreme, routines can become neurotic prisons of obsessive rigidity, closed off from the world at large. Whereas rituals, even the most esoteric and sealed, exist within part of the larger human society.

◊

In the town center of Holden, Massachusetts, just a short walk from my mother’s front door, there is pre-Civil War cemetery. Holden is the quintessential New England town, with flags fluttering, white church spires and sun-dappled maple trees. The granite, moss-mottled headstones, tilting in all directions like teeth in need of braces, want to tell a story, if only I could listen. Many of the markers contain poems chiseled into the face, and many of the graves are for young children. In the cemetery, I think about Robert Bly’s introduction to William Stafford’s poems, in which Bly talks about the golden thread. “I asked Stafford one day, ‘Do you believe that every golden thread will lead us to Jerusalem’s wall, or do you love particular threads?’ He replied, ‘No, every thread.’ He said, ‘Any little impulse is accepted, and enhanced.”

The golden thread is, of course, a form of reverence. The transformation of the objective experience into a poem, into the holiness of Jerusalem’s wall, is precisely what my son’s friend, John, lacks. For children like John, and for many others too, the golden thread is only a piece of string.

Dillard and Bly arrive at similar conclusions. Any little impulse can lead to the sublime. Every detail can become a golden thread, garden hoses, church spires, and headstones. The sacred is all around us. Why travel across the country to look for it? We hear this message again and again, but how to trust it? How to experience it as a real part of the day-to-day?

Instead, we seem perpetually distracted. We cash in on our humanity, and turn our backs to the sacred moments with such a blithe indifference that at times it feels as if life were one giant video game. I indict myself in all of this. As often as not, I am oblivious to awe, wandering around in an over-saturated haze of consumerist fervor, kinetic schedules and endless detachment. How to plug-in to reverence?

It seems easy to do here, in this old cemetery, where the light and the silence are vibrating with possibilities, with a type of sacred energy, with history and stories and the march of time. But reverence depends less on circumstance and more on how we transform what’s offered.

I arrive, at last, not at a conclusion, but perhaps at a bit of understanding. For the more I consider it, the more reverence begins to seem like a type of triangulation. There is, on the first level, the phenomenon itself. The sunset. The caterpillar. The ritual of the mass. The dress parade. The suicide. These things exist independently, whether observed or not, whether intended or attended. If a tree falls in a forest, as Bruce Cockburn and a thousand Zen monks sing, does anyone hear? The event is indifferent to our attention. Barry Lopez can describe the thousand-mile migrations of polar bears with such detailed elegance that I can imagine the journey happening before my eyes, but the bear remains utterly ambivalent about who’s watching.

Enter the observer. The poet, the prophet, the biologist sailing on a brig sloop between the Galapagos, the astronaut hurtling through the heavens. Humankind bears witness as much as anything else we do. As Dillard points out, we uncover what lives captive on the face of the obvious. The witness shuttles forth into the unknown and comes home with a tale to tell, whether that tale is On the Origin of Species, Arctic Dreams, the Upanishads or worn letters carved into the face of granite headstone.

It’s not that Neil Armstrong’s experience of stepping onto the lunar surface was any less personally reverent for him, with or without the world watching on television. But, as Armstrong’s own words remind us, in order for that one small step to live beyond itself, for the unity of experience to become that giant leap for mankind, it needed to be shared. Thus the third side of the triangle, the reception, the acknowledged and expressed substance of what it all might mean.

I am certain that John experiences reverence in his life; I’m certain that in every tactile roll in the grass, in every confusing (to us) choice he makes, John ingests the sensory world with a ravenous hunger and perfect pitch. But the circuit is shorted somehow, and no signal passes from his interior experience to others. This seems the great tragedy of autism. Also the great tragedy of tyranny, suicide, repression, violence and the apathy of tuning out. When we lose the ability to form the connection, the world suffers.

The poem needs the poet, but the poet needs the reader. In this triangular symmetry, the three sides form the whole.

Reverence lives somewhere inside this sacred geometry, somewhere between my ability to be stirred by something greater than myself, my ability to articulate that experience, and my willingness to hear that message when its shared with me. For in the end, aren’t we working out the mystery on our own? Aren’t we all lonely fishermen, perpetually taking in the world through a small hole each of us carves in the ice? And when we get a nibble, or when we get too cold to continue, or when we just get too damn lonely to go it alone any longer, don’t we all yearn to share that experience with others?

And where better to find the sacred than in the sky above and the earth below. “Reverence at home is so familiar to us,” Woodruff writes, “that we are hardly aware that this is what it is, and we may have to visit homes of a different culture before we recognize the places where family pictures hang, or where a grandmother’s unused teacups gather dust, are shrines.”

Somewhere between California and Massachusetts are those shrines. Somewhere between Annie Dillard, William Stafford and an autistic boy trying to make sense of a confusing world, lies reverence. In the epigraph to Dillard’s For the Time Being, she quotes Evan S. Connell, who asks, “Should I mark more than shining hours?” The ambition, if not the answer, as best as I can figure it, is, yes. Mark all the hours as sacred. Many more of them are actually shining than I’ll ever recognize.

“Reverence is all around us,” Woodruff writes, “so there are plenty of starting points.”

And so Maggie, Tom and I come home to California, to the long and restless routines of summer. They hug their mother and rub their dog’s belly and quickly re-acclimate to home. It so happens that we return on the 4^th of July. Fireworks fresco the cloudy sky, booming explosions echoing around us like cannon fire. The dog cowers. The kids ooh and ah. These days, perhaps, will not always feel as sacred as I might wish. Many of the hours that follow will glide past without meaning or context. I’ll wake up, play with my kids, read a little. I’ll clean the house and get dinner ready for my wife. There will be quiet hours, busy days, whole weeks that will blend from one into the next, with little to mark them as shining, except, of course, by their very accumulation, by their unfolding. The only meaning they acquire is that which I attach to them. I’ll only find reverence by seeking it out, by listening to it, by sharing it. This conclusion may lack the certainty of the altar or the parade field, but it is girded with a realization, both terrifying and awesome, that time is fleeting, and that soon, all this will have passed.

—Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including fiction, memoir, essays, interviews and book reviews, has appeared in Hunger Mountain, A Year in Ink, upstreet, New Plains Review, Descant (Canada) and Numéro Cinq. He lives in San Diego.

Shopping While Black: Thoughts after Trayvon Martin — Laura K. Warrell

Aug 012013

Shopping while black — I had never heard the phrase before Laura Warrell mentioned it in a phone conversation and then went on to relate the anecdote that begins this essay. The Trayvon Martin shooting was in both our minds, in the foreground, not the background. I was astonished because I know Laura, who is a bright, intelligent, sophisticated, graceful human being, astonished that in a cosmopolitan city like Boston, the stigma of skin colour, the taint of slavery, could still attach to her. And I was thinking of words like profiling, stereotyping, paternalism, racism — words that describe the ongoing effort to single out, repress, infantilize and criminalize African-Americans. The Stand Your Ground laws and recent voter suppression laws coming on the heels of the Supreme Court decision against the Voting Rights Act are reminiscent of the vagrancy and contract laws the Southern states used to try to reconstitute slavery-in-all-but-name after the Civil War. You are guilty if you are black, and you should be afraid.

This is Laura K. Warrell’s third contribution to Numéro Cinq. She has an edgy, contemporary take on social issues from the ugly manipulation of race in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained to the Boston Bomber.

—

There’s been no mistake. After all, our department, as far as I know, and I only know the lowest level, doesn’t seek out guilt among the general population, but, as the Law states, is attracted by guilt and has to send us guards out. That’s the Law. What mistake could there be? – The Trial, Franz Kafka

It was half past three on a bone-crackling winter afternoon in Boston and I needed a watch. Standing between me and the nearest subway station home was a skywalk leading from a chichi shopping mall to a Lord & Taylor department store. Until then, the upscale chain had not been tops on my list of shopping destinations considering I had been scrounging around on a teacher’s salary for years. But I was freezing and loathe to spend another second outside. And who knew, maybe I would luck out and find a watch I could afford.

I should admit to feeling some apprehension before going into the store. As a black woman, I have suffered my adopted hometown’s notoriously prickly racial climate long enough to know there are some places my movements might be “observed” and deemed worthy of confrontation. Moreover, I have lived in the United States long enough to know that the minor stresses of retail shopping – crowded aisles, greedy customers, ill-mannered counter help – pale in comparison to the traumas black shoppers endure everyday, an experience often referred to as Shopping While Black.

Being followed while shopping has happened so much now I don’t even remember specifics anymore. Every time you turn around there’s the clerk pretending to be folding or rearranging things near you. Sometimes they ask if they can help you. Sometimes they don’t. It’s reached a point that whenever I go shopping I get tense about dealing with the clerks. – Duane, 37, sexual violence educator, email to the author July 24, 2013

Shortly after I entered the store and started poring over a display table of watches, a saleswoman came over and asked, “Can I help you?”

So jazzed was I to have found a watch I both liked and could afford that I hardly noticed my surroundings. But then I looked up and quickly registered two things: first, the clerk, a white woman in her early fifties, was ringing her hands and staring back at me with a panicked expression, and second, there were three other white women looking at the watches yet the clerk was only talking to me.

“No thanks,” I told her. “Just looking.”

Usually when shoppers say, “just looking,” salespeople go off to bother other customers or linger perkily in order to lend a hand. The Lord & Taylor clerk did neither. Instead, she folded her arms and kept an eye on me, hovering by a display case a few steps away from where I was shopping. The woman seemed nervous, afraid, even though I was doing nothing more than browsing the watches. Whenever I glanced up, she would flinch as if her spying had been discovered then feign interest in the items in the display case, shuffling the watches around the shelves and wiping at phantom lines of dust. For several minutes, I tried to ignore her but she kept standing there. She didn’t ask if I was looking for something special, didn’t compliment the watches I held against my wrist, neither smiled nor spoke. She just hovered and watched.

I had no intention of stealing. I do not steal. So, if I’m not a criminal and had no inclination whatsoever of committing a crime, it would seem scientifically impossible that my body language, facial expressions or any other type of behavior could have given off any signal that might suggest I was planning on taking something from the store. True, in my worn winter boots and knock-off designer coat I was clearly not a typical Lord & Taylor customer. But if memory serves, the powers-that-be in this country have yet to pass a bill forbidding shoppers from frequenting retailers whose price tags stretch beyond their salary range. Regardless, the clerk was drawn to me, a near middle-aged woman whose only criminal offense over a lifetime was a speeding ticket in high school.

I had arrived at the second stage of the Shopping While Black experience: responding. Should I confront the woman, speak to her manager or stomp out in a huff? Did I have the energy for a battle or would I let this one go?

Rather than decide, I stalled. I just couldn’t believe this was happening. Almost forty, I thought I had long surpassed the age when I could be seen as a threat. Besides, I was on staff at two universities, was completing work on a Master’s degree and had managed to build a decent life in one of the priciest and most elite cities in the country. Hadn’t I transcended this bullshit?

Just to be sure I wasn’t imagining things, I casually strolled over to a nearby display of sunglasses. Two aisles away, the clerk followed. I went to a case of necklaces. She wasn’t far behind.

Finally, I walked up to her. “You’re not watching me, are you?”

“No,” she answered like a question.

I waited, imagining this would be the moment for her to apologize for the confusion or express outrage for my having accused her of such an offense. But she didn’t say or do anything except glare anxiously at the watch in my hands.

“Good,” I said and went back to shopping. And, surprise, she went back to trailing me.

Later, when I would tell people what happened, white friends and family would say what they often say after such events occur; “maybe you were imagining things, maybe the woman was only trying to help, maybe there was someone who looked like you who’d stolen something earlier in the day.” Black friends and family would only sigh wearily.

Being followed around in retail stores is a common occurrence. It happens so often I don’t often take note of it as much as I should nor am I as enraged as I should be. Not long ago, I was perusing the shoes and clothing at a store. While I shopped, one salesperson followed me to every section of the store. She would pretend to fix something, and when she finished, she would stand in the same section and watch me awkwardly. After about fifteen minutes of this, I left, leaving the dress and two pairs of shoes I wanted on a table in the middle of the store. The same thing happened another time and after following me, the clerk just looked at me and said, ‘the dresses in here are very expensive’ then paused like that would make me leave. – Leandra, 33, journalist, email to the author, July 23, 2013

Which raises the question: what was the Lord & Taylor clerk’s goal? To avoid a robbery she had no sensible reason to believe would occur? Or to just keep people like me out of her store? And by “people like me” I mean people who buy watches and clothes.

Unable to stand it any longer, I walked over and placed the watch on the counter in front of her. “I was going to buy this. But now I’m not going to.”

“Oh,” she said, with an infuriating mix of docility and snottiness.

“You shouldn’t follow people.”

“I know,” she whined like a child.

“I don’t know why you’re watching me but I can assume the reason,” my voice quaked. “And I want you to know it’s offensive…”

I went on with the kind of speech we curse ourselves for having come up with only after we’ve abandoned a situation, but I got lucky and thought of it on the spot. I told the woman how anyone has the right to shop wherever they want and how inexcusable it was for her make assumptions about people. The woman didn’t deny watching me or apologize for any misunderstanding but only kept insisting, “I’m the only one here,” although she clearly wasn’t. As if the defense was relevant anyway.

I left the store soaring with pride having stood up for myself. But it didn’t take long until I sank into a funk. The rest of my day and several days after were ruined, as if in an instant, everything I had ever accomplished had been reduced to nothing. I cringed thinking of the people who fit the “profile” even more than I do, especially young black men, and how taxing their daily lives must be if a fortysomething university instructor can’t even fly under some fool’s radar.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away. There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. – President Barack Obama, address to the nation, July 19, 2013

The list of reasons the Trayvon Martin case gives us to be horrified by modern American society is endless: the purpose of a Neighborhood Watch shifting from folks keeping an eye on things to arming themselves; an adult man deciding for no reason other than race that a seventeen-year-old boy is up to no good; the same adult man, or any human being, feeling surprise when the boy defends himself after being confronted (what else does a person walking alone at night do when a stranger in a goddamn van is following him for several blocks?) Then there’s the law that exists to protect the adult man and the apparent effectiveness of his defense, i.e., to portray the boy as a “thug,” the beloved term of narrow-minded people who seem to want to group all black, inner-city youth – whether or not they’ve ever gotten into any real trouble – into an easily discarded population of violent, parasitic monsters.

“That is exactly what George Zimmerman saw: a trope,” writes UC-Riverside English professor Vorris L. Nunley in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Not Trayvon Martin. Not a person. Not an American or even a human being, just a Black trope – a disruptive figure occupying the anxiety-ridden terrain of his White imagination.”

While the nation prides itself, justifiably, for the phenomenal social strides that have been made, Trayvon Martin stands as a reminder that black citizens continue to suffer the lingering legacy of racism. Black bodies still signify guilt in the eyes of too many Americans: in department stores, on city streets, even in shared community spaces.

As soon as I got in the library the security guard decided I was the only one in the place that needed help. What was that the president was saying about every black man in America knowing what it feels like to be followed? BUT THIS IS A LIBRARY!!! [I guess] everyone knows black people don’t read. – Christopher, 42, poet/educator, Facebook status update, July 22, 2013

Shopping, driving and walking while black happens to young black people.

“My son and his friends were coming from work when they were accosted by the police. They were thrown on the ground, put in the cruiser and made to wait without really knowing what they were being stopped for. They discovered that the police thought they were a group of black males who robbed a store. When the officers realized they were wrong, they dismissed it by saying to my son and his friends, ‘we have the wrong f—g car.’ – Al, 63, teacher, Facebook status update, July 14, 2013

Shopping, driving and walking while black happens to older black people.

I was visiting Salem, Massachusetts with my two teenage daughters. We’d had a nice lunch and I was taking pictures of my girls as they toured an old cemetery. A police officer walked up and asked to see my ID. He said the police were looking for someone who was passing off counterfeit bills and the suspect fit my description. He asked to see my wallet and to look in my backpack. I said not before I know what all this is about. Meanwhile, a large crowd was gathering; to my surprise, many of them stepped up to challenge the officer, saying I was being harassed. My daughters were nervous. After radioing his sergeant, the office was told to take me around to the merchants who had been scammed and see if they could ID me. As my daughters were left to fend for themselves, I was put into a police car and driven to the local mall. Two shop owners claimed to recognize me as the thief. I was put back in the police car and the cop said, ‘For the record, I don’t think you fit the description but I have orders.’ Fortunately, the last shop owner said I wasn’t the guy and I was taken back to my girls. An elderly white couple had brought them ice cream and was keeping an eye on them. The cop dropped me off, apologized for the ‘inconvenience’ and went on his way. I remember thinking, ‘does this ever end? Does being black in America, no matter where you live, always make you a prime suspect to whatever has gone down somewhere? – Rick, 61, public relations professional, email to the author, July 24, 2013

Even leaving the country doesn’t make one immune.

[Since moving to Europe], I hadn’t been back to the States for two years. At U.S. customs, the guy asked if it was true I’d been out of the country for twenty-four consecutive months and I said yes. He asked where is my military I.D. I told him I wasn’t in the military. He then asked which teams I played for in Europe. I had a smirk on my face by this point and said I was too short to be playing basketball. He asked what it was I did in Europe and I told him I teach English. His answer was, ‘They don’t speak English in Europe.’ Then I was in an interview room. They wanted to know how I really made money in Europe and I had to explain in detail. The guy who interviewed me said it’s not often they get black guys who travel that long out of the States without being in the military. Even the ball players come back more than once every two years. He joked I needed to come back more often so as not to arouse suspicion ‘cause only hippie white boys traveled the world for years. Of course, every time I enter the U.S. now, I am stressed. – Carl, 37, English teacher, email to the author, July 24, 2013

That fateful winter day, the Lord & Taylor clerk most certainly was not looking for guilty shoppers in her store but instead was attracted like a magnet to what she identified as guilt: my brown skin. Her unapologetic attitude and apparent conviction that there was nothing wrong with what she was doing suggests that in her mind, she had made no mistake. If I hadn’t yet committed a crime, I imagine her thinking went, inevitably as a black woman I would. I was guilty before I even walked in the door.

After the incident, I contemplated what all this meant for my day-to-day life. Do I assume there are places in my community to which I don’t truly have access and stop going to them to avoid harassment? Or do I continue frequenting those establishments and risk fucking up my week?

Managing people’s fears and assumptions about my race has been a lifelong task; overcompensating in professional situations, being overly polite in social situations, grinning harmlessly to clerks when entering shops. By now, this oppressive style of self-defense is instinctive though I sometimes catch myself doing it and feel shame.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people’s safety and comfort first, before your own. You’re programmed and taught that from the gate. It’s like the opposite of entitlement…My friends know that I hate parking lots and elevators, not because they are places that danger could occur, but it’s a prime place in which someone of my physical size can be seen as a dangerous element. I wait and wait in cars until I feel it’s safe for me to make people feel safe. I know most of y’all are eye-rolling, but if you spent a good three months in these size fourteens, you’d understand why I take that position. – Questlove, 42, musician, writer, record producer, bandleader of The Roots and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, in a New York Magazine essay entitled “Questlove: Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit,” July 16, 2013

In truth, incidents like the one at Lord & Taylor are a rare occurrence in my world. But when something does happen – to me, to a friend, to someone somewhere in the country who looks like me, I’ll remember that I am on trial in perpetuity. American life can feel like a prolonged, Kafka-esque court appearance, as if I’m always being watched and judged, and at the drop of a hat may have to prove my innocence, my worthiness, my normalness. Every confrontation and insult feels like a hearing in which I’m forced to defend myself and then rebuild, to regain a sense of dignity and find comfort again in my own skin. I always recover but move on feeling a bit less trusting, more guarded and cynical.

The emotional aftermath of my confrontation with the Lord & Taylor clerk is negligible compared to the threats young black men in this country face on a daily, hourly, moment-to-moment basis. My now permanent anxiety when I pass the store pales in comparison to the harassment, the sitting in police cars, the prison sentences and murders too many young black men experience. Still, my own run-ins with self-appointed vigilantes and protectors of the common good are reminders that despite my own successes and the progress the country has made, I may always be considered a nuisance to some people. A threat. An eye sore.

How do we alter the nation’s consciousness so that black Americans don’t have to live with this permanent, unshakeable guilt for crimes they have never and will never commit? I wish I knew the answer. But one thing I know for certain is that we can no longer pretend it’s not necessary.

—Laura K. Warrell

——————–

Laura K. Warrell is a freelance writer living in Boston. She teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Northeastern University and is a July, 2013, graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College. She has previously published both fiction and nonfiction in Numéro Cinq.

Birthday Girl: A Story of the Boston Marathon Bombing | Fiction — Laura K. Warrell

Jul 052013

Laura K. Warrell

THE DAY AFTER KOKO’S FIFTEENTH birthday, two bombs went off during the marathon in downtown Boston, eight miles from where Koko lived with her mother. She was at the mall buying a bottle of perfume called “Reckless” with the fifty-dollar bill her grandmother had slid into a Hello Kitty birthday card when her mother phoned to see if Koko had heard from her father and to tell her to come home. Koko bicycled through the streets, her legs – made clumsy by their pubescent lengthening out – now worked effortlessly, spurred on by fear. The television was on when she got home, her mother, Pia, chewing at the palm of her fist and watching the footage play on loop. The crack of the blasts at the finish line made Koko jump, the gush of smoke swelling in the air reminded her of a dream she had had once of ghosts. The shattered glass and wrecked sidewalks, the scramble of people and rupture of screams already began to haunt her until she grabbed hold and pushed the scene firmly away, like so many other awful things. Still, the eeriness of it all made her forget for the moment that her father had forgotten her special day.

[SPACE]

Friday morning, four days after the blasts, Koko untangled herself from her bed sheets and went to the living room to watch the news. A hunt for the suspects – two men, one in a black baseball cap, the other in a white cap – had lasted through the night. The first suspect, the older man, had died in a shootout with police who were still searching for the second suspect. School was cancelled and the city was on lockdown. A manhunt, the news called it. Koko watched the footage of the two suspects crossing the sidewalk near the marathon finish line, backpacks strapped to their shoulders. A photo of the younger man flashed onto the screen as Koko nibbled at her thumbnail, suddenly exhilarated, as if she’d woken up on a movie set. A warm tickle moved through her.

“Have you seen him?” Koko sent a text message to her best friend Bree. “The younger one. He’s beautiful.”

“Just thinking the same thing,” Bree replied.

“No one so beautiful would do this. He must be innocent.”

“He better hope so.”

Koko’s mother blustered into the room, a gust of breathy sobs and wet tissues tumbling from quaking hands. Her tatty silk robe flapped behind her as she sipped an orange juice with a splash of vodka Koko could smell. She hadn’t left the house or changed clothes since the bombings.

“I can’t get hold of your father.” Her bird-ish trill always sounded sharper, more brittle when she was frightened or needed something, which was often. “I keep leaving messages. You try him.”

“He doesn’t answer me either.”

Hovering above the television, her mother pulled the phone from the pocket of her robe and dialed. “Circus,” she whimpered. “We need you here. Goddamn it, look what’s happened. Those guys are out there somewhere. What if they come here, what would we do? Your family needs you.”

Through the screen of her mother’s nightgown, Koko watched the footage of the blast play again on television, the crack of the bomb, the plume of smoke, the bodies rushing. Her mother tossed the phone onto the sofa, let out a raw cry then slunk back through the hall toward her bedroom. Koko tried to take the scene in as something real, as an actual event that had occurred a mere bicycle ride away from where she watched on television. But a bombing couldn’t happen, not in real life. She couldn’t sense it like her mother seemed to.

Only the face of the younger man seemed fathomable, the smooth, pale skin, the slinky mouth and crumble of beard on his chin, the mess of dark hair, shadowy eyes lit with danger. Koko imagined he was looking back at her and blushed, hot inside and skin reddening, as if she had a fever, though this was good. Other boys had made her feel like this – pop singers, movie stars, a boy once or twice at school. But he was different. Something inside of her reached out and grabbed this boy.

Impatient, she texted Bree. “I want to find him.”

“Nuts.”

“I need to meet him.”

“As if.”

“We’re smart, we know people. Someone we know must know him.”

“True dat.”

“Whoever finds him first wins.”

[SPACE]

The suspects were identified hours later – two brothers, nineteen and twenty-six from a town near Russia. Soldiers searched door-to-door for the nineteen-year-old in the town where Koko lived while she looked for him online. There were photos from the boy’s prom and wrestling matches, a picture of his family cat. She found the high school he went to then sent messages to everyone she knew with connections there. No one knew anything. A post on Facebook came up with nothing and a search of the boy’s Twitter feed revealed little more than a fondness for parties, hip hop and weed. The month before the bombing, he had posted a quote that read, “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.” Koko wrote the words in permanent marker on her forearm then quickly covered them with her sleeve just as her mother called from her bedroom.

Koko grumbled and went to her. Lying in bed with her knees at her chest like a sick child, her mother asked, “Sweetheart, will you bring me an aspirin?”

“They know their names,” Koko called on her way to the bathroom where she grabbed the aspirin bottle and a glass of water.

“Monsters.”

“I think he’s beautiful,” she said when she got back to the bedroom.

Her mother lifted her head from the pillow. “Who?”

“The younger one.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“We don’t know if he did anything. And if he did, I’m sure there was a reason.”

“What possible reason could there be?”

“I don’t know. Someone must have hurt him.”

Her mother downed the aspirin with a swig of the vodka orange juice then fell back onto the pillow. “I haven’t slept. I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since yesterday. Where’s your father? Why isn’t he thinking of us? I’m so, so hungry.” She reached out and Koko loosely took her hand. “We’re so alone, you and me, aren’t we? I’m sorry, sweet girl, I didn’t want us to be so alone. This wasn’t how anything was supposed to turn out.”

Koko slid her hand from her mother’s sticky fingers and folded her arms over her chest. Even sick and drunk she was still so pretty, her mother, delicate, her long blonde hair flowing over the silk pillowcase, gold-colored and shimmering like some holy light. “Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

Her mother sniffled.

“Tomato soup from the other night?”

“Would you do that for me? That would be so nice.”

Koko went to the kitchen and took the pot of soup from the fridge as her mother’s phone rang. Hoping it was her father, she ran to the living room to answer.

“Darling!” Her grandmother’s voice always reminded Koko of clucking chickens. “How are you?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“How absolutely terrible.” Koko could hear her grandmother’s exhale of the expensive cigarettes she smoked that smelled like cinnamon. “Darling, there are terrible, terrible people in the world but we mustn’t allow them to frighten us. That’s what they want and we mustn’t give those brutes anything they want.”

“I’m not scared,” she said. “I know one of them.”

“My God, Koko, call the police.”

“Well, I don’t really know him. I just feel like I do. And I don’t think he’s terrible.”

Silence on the other end of the line, an exhalation of smoke. “Put your mother on.”

Koko brought the phone to her mother then went back to the kitchen. “I’ve already called and he’s not answering,” she heard her mother say. “Why do you ask when you know I have no idea where he is, mother, you just want to torture me…he missed Koko’s birthday, you know…no, she’s fine about it, but me, oh, I’m not feeling well about all of this…A woman answered when I called yesterday. She said, ‘Pia, are you okay?’…She’s not concerned about my well-being, Mother, why do you never take my side?”

Koko slid on her headphones and listened to her favorite song of the week, the Foster the People one about kids shooting kids, the one with the easy beat, the one her dad liked to whistle. As she stirred a dollop of cream into the tomato soup, she imagined the younger suspect at the front door. A chill went through her as she thought of him standing there, trembling and afraid. He would look down at her ready to defend himself then see she wasn’t afraid of him. He would sense how she could see he was gentle deep down, that she understood him. She would sneak him into her room and make him something to eat, watch him take a bath, wash his back. If her mother came in, she would hide him under the bed. At night, she would crawl under to sleep beside him.

“Did you see the latest photo?” Bree texted. “Oh my god, wicked hot.”

Koko turned off the burner and ran back to the living room to the television. In the photo, the boy wore a black graduation gown with a red carnation in the lapel, handsome with a smirk on his pout of a mouth. She was slightly sick, slightly thrilled.

“I would so do him,” Bree texted.

“Shut up,” Koko typed. “I love him.”

“Uh-oh,” Bree wrote back.

The next image on the screen was a photo of the blast, so Koko changed the channel. Her mother came down the hallway, went to the front closet and put on a down winter coat.

“Are you cold?”

“No.” Her mother lied on the sofa, shoving her bare feet beneath a cushion. “We should stop watching.”

“Did you hear from dad?”

“Guess.” She used the remote to turn down the volume on the television and groaned watching the footage of the suspects crossing the sidewalk with their bomb-packed backpacks.

“Mom?” Koko started nervously. “Can I tell you something? It’s kinda private but I want to tell someone.”

“Of course, honey,” her mother said with a yawn. “You can tell me anything.”

“You won’t be mad?”

“Tell me, sweet girl.”

“Well,” there was a lump in her throat. “I know I don’t know him but I feel like I miss him. Is that weird? I just miss him.”

“Miss who?”

Koko nodded toward the photo on television.

Her mother tsked. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you feel bad for him? Just a little bit? I mean, he’s only nineteen.”

“He can go to hell for all I care,” her mother said. “He’s evil. You don’t know evil yet, but I can tell you, that’s the face of it.”

Koko’s throat thickened with tears but she swallowed them, covering her wet eyes with her fingers to stop their flow. She’d learned early on, her mother was the crier in the family.

“Sweet girl,” her mother said. “Come sit with me. We can keep each other safe.”

“You don’t know how to protect anyone.”

Tears bloomed in her mother’s eyes. “Why won’t any of you care for me? I try so hard.”

“You don’t understand anything.” Koko was on her feet, yelling instead of crying. “He doesn’t have a voice. He needs people behind him. He needs someone to stand up for him, to believe in him. To fucking love him.”

“Koko, the language.”

“No one’s got his back.”

“Dear God, I hope they get those boys soon.” Her mother pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

Koko’s phone buzzed. She prayed it was her father. He would understand. He knew how complex life could be. But it wasn’t a message from her father. It was Bree.

“I found him.”

[SPACE]

Bree’s message said Jenny Parker lived near the suspects’ uncle in North Cambridge and the rumor was the boy was hiding there. Bree sent the address.

“I’m going.” Koko texted back. “I want to be with him before they catch him. Maybe they won’t catch him.”

“They’ll catch him.”

“I want him to be my first.”

“That would be so rad. You’d be famous.”

“That’s not why I would do it. You don’t know anything about love.”

“Drama queen.”

“It happened around my birthday, it’s a sign.” She stared at the photo of the boy in his graduation grown. “I want to fall asleep in his hair. I want to hold him, to tell him everything will be okay.”

“Well, it won’t,” Bree texted. “He’ll be in jail soon. Or dead.”

Koko switched off her phone.

[SPACE]

She slid into a leather mini skirt and cowboy boots. Bree called it her Fuck Me Gear, a look she cultivated in contrast to her saintly looking mother, who didn’t seem the kind of woman to be since her father barely came around. Her mother’s faint, pretty, harmless looks had eluded her anyway. Koko looked like her father. Brown, thick-bodied, with messy eyebrows and unkempt black hair she let fall over her eye, looking out as if ready to pounce. Boys liked her. She had a quiet, explosive energy they poked at like poachers to a cornered wildcat. She knew she scared them a little with the purple polish on her fingernails bitten to the quick, the witchy black eyeliner around her brown eyes. She smoked cigarettes and drank bourbon in corners at parties, wouldn’t let boys kiss her on the mouth but teased them as they watched her walk through the halls at school in her skirts and cowboy boots.

The word ‘freak’ was scrawled on the front of Koko’s T-shirt, a touch she thought the boy would appreciate. She checked herself in the mirror then went to the kitchen to make him a turkey sandwich, put the sandwich into a paper bag with a serving of tomato soup, a bag of chips and thermos of ice water. She snuck a bottle of bourbon and a box of chocolates her mother gave her as a birthday gift, and put everything into her Hello Kitty backpack along with a map, a sweater and a box of bandages in case the boy was hurt. She saw her mother was asleep on the sofa then went to her room to steal a twenty-dollar bill and credit card from her wallet.

Her mother’s phone rang. Koko stood still in the other room. If it was her father, she would consider it a sign and stay. If not, she would go.

“Hello?” Her mother answered sleepily. “Yes, Mother, I’ve locked all the windows.”

Koko slipped out the back door.

[SPACE]

Koko pedaled her bicycle through the deserted streets, the brilliance of the spring day hollowed out by the stark absence of life. Everyone was inside, she could sense the jangling of nerves behind bolted doors and windows. The silence, punctured every few minutes with the scream of sirens in the distance, rattled her. She focused on the smooth, peaceful grip of her bicycle tires on the road.

Koko stopped to check her map, sipping the bourbon to keep calm. The address was in the next town over. She continued on her bicycle, passing beside a cemetery then through a playground where she was spooked by children’s toys left in mid-play – a pair of badminton rackets, a tricycle, a basketball under a hoop. Further on, an old woman on a cell phone watched her from the window of an apartment, mouth hanging open. Koko’s palms were sweating on the handlebars, her pulse ticking in her neck. But she kept going.

A fleet of police cars rushed toward her on the main road into Watertown, sirens crying. Koko steered her bicycle into an empty lot behind a gas station to wait for them to pass, fearing the boy must have heard the sirens, too. She imagined him trembling in an alleyway praying to God. Imagined him in the tool shed of a stranger’s house. Maybe he was halfway to Canada. Koko climbed onto her bicycle and raced to the address.

[SPACE]

The house was unremarkable, decayed brick and green awnings, a pale yellow door. The porch was teeming with potted trees and plants, strands of green leaves and tangled stems crawled over the rails and banisters like the earth had opened up and sprung through the slatted floor. On the front stoop, a dirty white cat twitched its tail then slinked away. The windows of the house were dark, except for a light in a tiny window on the attic floor. The boy must have been hiding there.

In a schoolyard across the street, Koko lay her bicycle in the shadows of a tree. Her pulse pounded and made her ill as she picked at her lip and drummed up the courage to walk to the door. She took a generous sip of the bourbon, pulled at the hem of her skirt, wishing she could cover her bare knees, then went up the steps and knocked. When no one answered, she knocked again then backed up to see if there was movement in the attic window. The light had been switched off. She knocked one last time, then pulled a pen from her backpack when no one answered and scribbled onto an envelope she found in the mailbox.

‘I’m here,’ she wrote. ‘I believe in you. Flash the light to give me a sign and I’ll come. Love from Koko.’

She opened the screen door and dropped the note inside then went back to her bicycle to wait. The house remained still. Lying in the grass, Koko watched whipped cream colored clouds slowly somersault over the roof of the house and imagined the boy with her. She thought of him in his graduation gown, thought of him pinning his red carnation to her prom dress in a few years, imagined dancing with her head against his shoulder, his arms strung round her waist. What was he thinking? She wondered. Was he thinking of his mother far away in Russia? Was he wishing his friends were around him, wishing he was lying peacefully in his own bed?

Koko closed her eyes, giddy and slowed by the bourbon. She peeked up at the house one last time before drifting, unwillingly, to sleep.

[SPACE]

Hours later, her stomach turned with the taste of bourbon and woke her. Koko rolled over and threw up in the grass, reached for the thermos in her backpack and drank half of the water. The sky was starting to find its pre-dusk blue, dreamy and cold above her. She looked over at the house then down the streets. Everything everywhere was still silent. When she switched on her phone, it read half past six and chimed with messages from her mother and a text sent ninety minutes before from Bree.

“Where are you?” The message asked.

“At the house.”

Several moments later, Bree wrote, “What house?”

“His uncle’s house.”

“Shit, Ko, didn’t you get my text? News says the kid isn’t anywhere near there.”

“Then where is he?”

“Just go home and be safe.”

Koko tossed the phone back into her backpack, her throat swelling with tears. She swallowed them with a sip of water then got back onto her bicycle, slowly making her way through the streets farther away from home. Turning onto a main road, she looked through the windows of a laundromat, a convenience store, an Italian restaurant and pet shop, all of them empty. Even the gas station at the corner was lifeless.

She saw a flickering light ahead and pedaled toward it. A tattoo shop with curtains drawn, a neon sign out front sputtering. A man was sitting in front of a television, she could see him through the glass door. Koko banged on it and the man jumped before clomping over to answer.

“What are you doing out here?” He sounded like a parent even with his hulkish body covered in tattoos and his septum pierced like a bull’s. He pulled her inside, locking the door behind her.

Koko tugged at her earring, glancing past him instead of into his eyes. “I want a tattoo.”

“You shouldn’t be out here. Do your folks know where you are?”

“Yeah.” She caught sight of the television where footage of the bombings played. “So can I get a tattoo?”

“What the hell kinda tattoo do you want so bad to come out in this?”

Koko lifted her sleeve to show him the quotation.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“I’ll ask you again.”

Koko blushed when she saw the boy’s photograph on the screen. “Fifteen.”

“Well, I can’t give you a tattoo without your parents’ permission.”

“They’re alright with it. Please,” her voice cracked. “I need to get it.”

The man followed her stare toward the boy’s photo on the screen, the graduation gown, the carnation. He looked back at Koko, a vein in his temple throbbing. “Tell you what, kid. We don’t need to tell your parents so long as you give me some basic info. Protects me, see. Just your name, your mother’s name, a phone number. That’ll do. Cool?”

He handed her a slip of paper and she wrote down her mother’s name and number. “I’m Koko.”

“Lemme go get the equipment ready.” On his way out of the room, the man took the television remote and flipped to a music station. “You don’t need to see any of that.”

Koko nestled into the waiting room sofa and flipped through a magazine past photos of an Asian women with tigers and flowers inked down the length of their legs and tattooed college girls in fishnet stockings.

“Just gotta give the equipment a chance to heat up.” The man said when he came back several minutes later. With his elbows on his chubby knees, he looked like a bullfrog sitting in the folding chair. “This channel cool with you?”

She nodded and took the sweater from her backpack, draping it across her knees. Absently, she watched the music on the screen, struggling again to keep her eyes open.

“How long will it take ‘til you’re ready?”

“Haven’t used the machinery all day,” he replied. “May be a while.”

The man didn’t say much, only chuckled every so often at text messages on his cell phone and checked a clock that looked like a compass on the wall. Koko pulled up her sleeve and traced her fingers across the quote, picturing red roses laced through the words.

Thirty minutes later, there was a knock at the door and she turned. The shape behind the glass seemed to cast a beam of sunshine into the room and Koko saw the towering body. She saw the mess of dark hair and immense shoulders. She saw a warrior, a titan, saw him as she always had. A king.

The tattooed man unlocked the door and her father stepped into the room.

[SPACE]

The ride in the car started in silence, her father’s jaw pulsing as he kept his gaze fixed firmly, angrily to the road. Koko toyed with the zipper of her sweater, wanting him to speak first.

“Are you mad?” she asked.

“We’re not supposed to be on the roads,” he answered, his voice measured. “We’re breaking the law being out here right now. You know that, don’t you? You’re lucky you weren’t in Watertown where the feds are looking.”

“What’d Mom tell you?”

“Who knows? I couldn’t hear anything through the sobbing. Barely got the address to the tattoo parlor.”

Koko gazed at the houses on the street as they passed, each of them lit with the glare of televisions beaming through windows. “You forgot my birthday, Circus.”

“Huh?”

“My birthday was Sunday.”

“Is that why you did this?” He tsked then cursed himself, guilt washing over his face. “I’m sorry, baby. I’ll make it up to you.”

“Were you worried about me?”

“Shit, of course.”

“Then why didn’t you call? Mom tried to reach you.”

He wrapped his knuckles against the steering wheel. Being around her always seemed to make him nervous, like she had him on a leash he wanted to chew through. “I got a lot going on, Koko. I think about you all the time, baby, but there’s, you know, so much going on.” He glanced over at her. “You’re shaken up, huh?”

“A little.”

“This kinda thing messes with grownups, too.” He put a hand on her knee, squeezed. “I just needed to be some place I could wrap my mind around it, you know. Feel all right.”

“How come that place isn’t home?”

He took a toothpick from his pocket and started gnawing at it. Let several moments of silence pass again between them. “So, what are you, fifteen now?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Fifteen.” He let out a low, crackling chuckle. “I remember fifteen. Wasn’t one of my best years, but I can tell you, it gets easier.”

Koko looked up at him.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, his voice melodious, warm. “There’s still lots that’s hard, but you just start to realize you’re getting closer to when you’re in control of things, you know, you’re gonna be free one day.”

As they drove in silence a bit further, Koko kept her gaze outside the window, realizing she didn’t recognize the streets. “Where are we going?”

“I got a friend in Waltham,” he said. “He’s got a place we can rest ‘til the streets open again. He’s a good guy, you’ll dig him. There’s a pool, you can dip your feet.”

“Cool,” Koko mumbled, looking around inside the old Buick. As always, the car was cluttered with her father’s life – sheet music strewn on the floor, amplifiers and wires crammed into the deck beneath the rear window, suits in a garment bag hanging from a hook, boxes filled with copies of his demo CDs. Only the trumpet case was set apart from the rest of the clutter. Koko always loved to watch her father play his trumpet – she liked the sight more than the sound – imagining the horn made from elephant tusk and her father an ancient hero blowing into it to announce the hunt. The trumpet case, strapped safely behind a seatbelt in the backseat, was like another source of life in the car. She could sense it.

“Does your mother know you were gonna get a tattoo?”

“Not really.”

He shook his head back and forth, a slight smile on his lips. “What were you gonna get?”

Koko pulled up her sleeve.

He stopped at a red light and read the quote. “Where’d you hear that?”

“The second bomber.” She was blushing again. “The younger one. It was on Twitter.”

The smile on her father’s face faded. He cracked the toothpick in half with his teeth and tossed it into the ashtray. Koko got a strange pleasure having shocked him.

“I’m in love with him,” she said, pushing harder.

“The bomber?”

“The younger one,” Koko said. “I love him.”

Her father turned away so that she stared at his face in profile, the crown of tousled black hair, the majestic shoulders and mighty jaw. He was like a character in a comic book, a warrior draped in animal skins and wielding a sword. She imagined crawling over the seat into his lap.

“Well,” her father said quietly. “I’m sure he’d love you, too.”

Koko turned away to look through the window into the dark houses on the street, settling back into her seat as the tears gently and finally came.

—Laura K. Warrell

The Personal Essay and the Pain of Experience: Communicating to the Broadest Possible Audience | Craft Essay — Sophfronia Scott

Jul 022013

Photo by Tain Gregory

Sophfronia Scott offers here a thoughtful, provocative and pragmatic account of the ways a nonfiction writer can use reflection to engage the reader. She talks specifically about the use of techniques such as metaphor, direct appeal, shared experience and the right voice to engage the reader’s heart and imagination. Especially helpful are Scott’s explorations of particular texts to illustrate her technical points: Elie Wiesel’s Night, Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.

———

Introduction

In the past I rarely embarked on a personal essay unless specifically asked for one by an editor because it never immediately occurred to me anyone would have any interest in what I had to say about a particular topic, especially if the action involved happened only to me. I have also had a distaste for the trend towards memoir in the publishing world. When the writer Douglas Goetsch, a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, said to me in conversation that he thought the United States was suffering “from an epidemic of memoir,” I, having read my share of melodramatic manuscripts flooding the marketplace in recent years, was inclined to agree. There are, it seems, millions of keyboards where writers are too enthusiastically tapping out their tales of child abuse, alcohol abuse, road trips, adoption secrets, illness, injury, divorce, you name it. I saw no reason to add my words to this particular multitude.

However in August 2012 I found myself deeply engaged in the writing of a personal essay inspired by a series of tweets I had posted to a friend on Twitter describing a talk I’d had with the singer Lena Horne about learning to iron my father’s shirts. The previous day I had been ironing my husband’s shirts and I posted on Twitter:

I’m going to combine my housework with my literary love and pretend I’m a Tillie Olsen character: I stand here ironing…

The next morning I saw my friend had re-tweeted the post and as I tweeted my thanks for some reason the memory of my Lena Horne talk came to mind. I wanted to tell my friend about it; he enjoys a good story and I thought he would appreciate it, especially since it included a celebrity. I sent the following in quick succession:

1.) Thanks for the RT! I once had a conversation with Lena Horne about ironing—we both learned as girls…

2.) …She said she could never get it right. “I used to weep over my daddy’s shirts.” I said, “And they were all white shirts,

3.) …right?” My father’s shirts were all white too. She said yes. I was in my 30s. She was in her 80s. But we walked through…

4.) …Central Park together as girls ironing our father’s shirts.

5.) I’m in tears now remembering that day.

And I really was in tears. I embarked on the writing of an essay with no ambition other than to explore the source of those tears. This walk with Lena Horne was still in my heart and at the forefront of my mind over ten years later for a reason and, as I discovered as I wrote, those reasons had little to do with her. As the paragraphs of the essay came together I realized that walk had crystallized an important personal moment for me in which I recognized how much love and forgiveness had replaced the anger I once held for my difficult, demanding father.

“Such forgiveness is possible, I believe, not because he is long dead, but because of these unexpected moments of grace reaching across generations reminding me of this: the reason I hurt so much then was because I cared so much then—and still do. As I look back on that autumn afternoon and how Lena took my arm again as we continued our stroll through Central Park, I can see how in that moment I was in my 30s, Lena was in her 80s, but we were both girls ironing the shirts of the first men we ever cared for, and hoping they could feel our love pressed hard into every crease.”

The completed essay, “White Shirts,” when published in the September 2012 issue of Numéro Cinq Magazine, received favorable written responses. What surprised me about the posted comments was how many of the readers saw themselves and their own memories in my essay:

I recall my Aunt Virginia showing me how to iron a shirt when she was doing them for her husband and family of 5 boys after a morning of working in the fields. Yours are exactly the same instructions I recall her demonstrating. Thanks for sharing this evocative memory.

You’ve taken me back to my childhood, ironing the handkerchiefs and pillowcases while I watched my mother and grandmother iron starched white shirts. Thank you.

This is precious, pulls you into the story, and encouraging to me as a young housewife finding I have grossly undercooked the potatoes in a casserole, and realizing just how quickly a cleaned bathroom collects new hair and dirt- I can get better!

This brings back my own ironing memories. My grandmother, who would be 120 if she were still alive, taught me how to iron. I don’t remember what she had me iron, but I do remember burning my fingers. If I look hard enough, I can still see the tiny scars.

This excited me as a writer—it was as though the essay had become bigger, more vital, because it had struck a chord for so many people. We were all, at once, at the ironing board with our mothers, aunts and grandmothers. I found myself thinking, if this is what creative nonfiction can do, this is the creative nonfiction I want to continue writing.

But how? I felt I had created this shared experience, a kind of universal appeal, by accident. I know the best essayists must be able to make such connections consistently. I decided to begin an exploration of the techniques these writers use to help them communicate their very personal experiences to the broadest possible audience. I believe this is a necessary exploration because, as Richard Todd says in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, “In the family of writers, essayists play poor cousins to writers of fiction or narrative nonfiction.” Indeed their medium, the personal essay, is an unusual form because its existence defies the fact that the reader, at first blush, has no reason to read it. What is the essay’s purpose? Fiction offers entertainment as an essay can, but on a different level: fiction can also present escape, perhaps even a fantasy in which the reader can place him or herself as the main character. Journalistic nonfiction serves the purpose of educating the reader or providing desired information. Poetry can charm with its rhythms and imagery. These forms answer upfront the reader’s ongoing question of “What’s in it for me?” In a society where words and phrases such as “So what?” and “navel-gazing” and “whatever” demonstrate a less than supportive environment in which to offer one’s story, the essay is immediately at a disadvantage. In everyday conversation we don’t always listen to the stories of strangers, or if we do it’s done with half an ear because the listener is more interested in hearing a moment where they can interject what they have to say, which they believe will be more interesting or more important. Douglas Glover, in his book Attack of the Copula Spiders, warns against “bathtub” narratives which he defines as “a story which takes place almost completely as backfill in the mind of a single character (who often spends the whole narrative sitting in a bathtub—I am only being slightly facetious).” He notes the form for its lack of drama and movement. But what is a personal essay if not a long form “bathtub” narrative completely crafted from the writer’s thoughts being turned over and over in her mind?

Since I’ve been able to focus on creative nonfiction in my studies, I’m learning this type of focused reflection is not the problem with the personal essay. I realize the essays and memoirs that bother me the most are ones where deep thought and reflection are nonexistent. On top of this the author has not taken the pains to write in a way that would allow the reader access to her personal experience. The writer, either through neglect or inexperience, has produced a work in which she is so caught up in telling her story, usually a traumatic event, that she has not made the thoughtful reflection required to instill the event with meaning. It’s not enough that a person has experienced something horrible such as the death of a loved one, physical abuse, divorce or illness. The person must be able to step back and look at the whole tapestry and contemplate the placement of the event and its effects on her whole being. Once that piece is understood, this gives the writer the foundation to craft and revise a piece with the intention of highlighting this insight.

In many cases the writer has not stepped back at all. Such writers are, in my opinion, still caught up in the event, even if many years have passed. For them writing down the story is the big accomplishment, and that’s because the pain of finding the words has them reliving the event and “surviving” it again. They are too much in it to be above it, so there is no reflection. Thus the event is still too personal for the writer and hence out of reach for the reader. If anything this type of writing does a certain violence to the reader because it subjects them to raw, naked details very similar to a news report from a crime scene. We, as readers, endure the pain, the harsh visuals, and the terror of the event. Then the author thinks it is enough just to explain they got through it, and they’re okay. But how can we believe that when we’re still ourselves in that place of fear and trembling, exactly where they left us?

And yet there are essays and books of essays describing terrible events that, despite their personal nature, manage to capture the reader’s heart and imagination, engaging both the ear and the heart. In order to gain such credibility with the reader a writer’s work should demonstrate that the author has done some focused thinking, first about herself, and then for the reader. For herself the writer wants to do the mental work and reflection that shows she is ready to discover and understand the deeper meaning of the events of her life—to take the step that truly turns life into art. Next, the writer makes choices with the reader in mind—choices of imagery, language and voice with the intent of making a connection with the person reading the words. I will detail here how this process can work using as examples authors who have written engaging, yet deeply personally essays that succeed because the writers have brought to bear the powers of both inner work and conscious attention to craft.

Reflection as Foundation

First of all, reflection is necessary. Dinty W. Moore in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, points out that while everyone loves a well-told story, “the…reason people care relates to what the writer has made of the experience and how the author’s discovery often rings true for a wide readership.” This reflection can happen before, during, and after the writing of the essay’s initial draft, but it must happen because the writer must be open to new ideas at each level. Otherwise writers may find themselves unwilling to begin because they fear what will come of the writing, stuck partway through because they get mired in the trauma of re-telling their story, or unwilling to revise because they’re still not ready to think about the event at a higher level. I admit this involves mental and emotional issues and maturity as well. As Phillip Lopate notes in the introduction of The Art of the Personal Essay, “It is difficult to write analytically from the middle of confusion, and youth is a confusion in which the self and its desires have not yet sorted themselves out.”

The “how-to” aspect of reflection is difficult because any technique would be contingent on the author’s awareness of the necessity of thinking deeply about the circumstances of her life being examined in the essay, and her willingness to make the conscious decision to do it. These aspects are not always present in a personality. However I would like to venture forward with a few questions a writer may ask if she does want to begin the process of reflection even if she doesn’t know what the answers are or what to make of them. These questions are:

Why do I want to write about this particular topic/event/circumstance in my life?
Who was I before this event happened to me?
Who am I as a result of it? In other words, how do I see the world through the lens of what happened to me?
How do I feel about the people I’m writing about? Have these feelings changed over time? Have they not? Why?
What are my physical/emotional reactions around my topic? How fresh is the “wound?”

I would also suggest a writer begin a mental practice of consistently asking these questions during the writing process and whenever a memory or past reference presents itself for consideration. On a positive note, this kind of thinking is open to all, young and old, so younger authors need not despair even if the writing results in musings for which they have no clear answer just yet. The fact that they are questioning and making that apparent may be enough to engage the reader. Many readers appreciate the vulnerability of a writer who is willing to admit she doesn’t know the answers. The fact that she is daring to ask the questions that could reflect the reader’s own silent struggle builds credibility for the writer and will eventually help to create stronger work.

The Four Techniques

This paper will focus on four techniques that can be used by writers who can reflect, have reflected, and want to make their writing connect with as many readers as possible. These craft points can help the writer to open the door for readers, to allow them to more easily share in the emotions, thoughts and events the writer is laying before them.

The first technique involves the use of metaphor. As defined in the Google search dictionary, a metaphor is:

1.) A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

2.) A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.

In Elie Wiesel’s memoir of the Holocaust, Night, he tells the horrifying story of his year as a teenager in concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald, in which he suffers the deaths of his family members, his friends and, eventually, his own faith. The title Night evokes the metaphor that is the foundation of the whole book. The traumatic material within the covers requires a powerful metaphor. How else can he help the reader grasp the incredible terror and darkness felt by himself and by his people except by connecting it to the darkness we experience regularly and, as children, even fear? It seems every time night falls in the book there is no rest, only fear and concern for what the next day will bring. Night becomes the representation of the darkness cast over Wiesel and his people. He refers to the “nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.” In this section Wiesel combines the metaphor of night with fire to represent the furnaces of the concentration camps:Since in personal essays we deal in the abstract continually, especially when it comes to the writer’s emotions, metaphor becomes essential. Sue William Silverman, in her Vermont College of Fine Arts lecture “Metaphor Boot Camp,” notes the use of metaphor in personal essays allows the writer to make abstract terms or emotions such as the words “love,” “hate,” or “misery,” accessible and tangible for the reader through the use of imagery. This is the answer to the question of how else can the reader relate to a story that only happened to you. It also aids in this question of reflection: “Metaphor helps us to understand what this experience in the past actually meant.”

“No one was praying for the night pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.”

There is a haunting elegance and beauty in Wiesel’s writing that comes through even in translation. His imagery doesn’t sugarcoat events. If anything it makes them more alive and, though horrifying, accessible. This works because, as Sue Silverman points out in her lecture, “Once you have developed metaphor, you’ve transformed your life into art and all art is universal.”

The second technique involves the direct appeal, in other words, the writer brings the reader directly into the essay with the use of “we” or “society.” The idea is that what the writer is talking about leads us to question or examine the bigger picture and how it affects all of us. The direct appeal assumes a certain kind of reader—a concerned citizen, a reader engaged with the world and who wants to know about actions and their consequences on society at large. It also assumes the writer has set herself up in a certain way: she establishes her authority to validate why she can speak to the bigger picture. Richard Todd would argue this isn’t necessary. “What gives you license to write essays?” he asks in The Art of Nonfiction. “Only the presence of an idea and the ability to make it your own.” But he does acknowledge the importance of training a discerning writer’s eye on the issues of our time and the essay being the right vehicle in which to do so: “An essay both allows and requires you to say something more than you are entitled to say by virtue of your resume alone.”

Eula Biss in her collection of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land, travels back and forth between personal experience and issues such as racism, immigration and education. She lays the foundation of her authority by presenting research she has done. In her essay “Time and Distance Overcome” she connects the innovation of the telephone to another more disturbing American innovation: lynchings. In stating statistics, and quoting newspapers and reports of documented lynchings, Biss creates the framework through which to discuss racism. The facts she presents are aimed to evoke our outrage and disbelief:

“More than two hundred antilynching bills were introduced to the U.S. Congress during the twentieth century, but none were passed. Seven presidents lobbied for antilynching legislation, and the House of Representatives passed three separate measures, each of which was blocked by the Senate.”

This mode of universality is more often used in essays of a journalistic type, but a a personal essay may actually be the better forum. There is less distance between the reader and the concepts discussed because the writer provides the human connection through their personal experiences and observations. The writer can say “I know this is true because it affected my home/my health/my town/my family/my job.” Her observations are not conjecture, but a living example of the concepts she is pondering in the written word. The concepts alone in such essays are big and difficult: racism, immigration, politics, ecology, religion. When the writer offers as a starting point her own experience, it is an easier way for the reader to wade into the waters of discussion. Several times in her book Biss mentions her own reaction to her discoveries—in one instance watching a documentary has her in tears:

“The point at which I began to cry during the documentary about Buxton was the interview with Marjorie Brown, who moved from Buxton to the mostly white town of Cedar Rapids when she was twelve. ‘And then all at once, with no warning, I no longer existed…The shock of my life was to go to Cedar Rapids and find out that I didn’t exist…I had to unlearn that Marjorie was an important part of a community.”

Biss lays the foundation of her argument with such emotion, then walks us backwards to show how she came to this reaction so that we might understand and possibly even feel the same way.

When a writer appeals to the reader to connect to his or her own experience in relation to the author’s, the writer is utilizing the third technique to communicate to a broad audience. The writer can do this by referencing events or actions that most people have experienced such as having children or eating a satisfying meal. Dinty W. Moore writes in The Truth of the Matter, “We all know grief, fear, longing, fairness, and unfairness. We all worry about losing someone dear to us. We crave attention, from everyone, or from certain people. We love our families, yet sometimes those families greatly disappoint us…These basic human worries and emotions will always resonate when brought clearly to life on the page.” In my essay “White Shirts,” I invoke the pain of touching a hot iron: “A burn rises quickly, a living red capsule on the surface of your skin. You think it will never heal because that’s how much it hurts when it happens.” I also conjure the feel of a shirt as it is being ironed: “the shirt large and voluminous in Lena’s small hands, the white cotton hopelessly scorched…” and “Sleeves are tricky because of their roundness. They don’t lie flat well so I will usually iron a sleeve and turn it over to find a funky crease I didn’t mean to create running like a new slash down the arm.” I chose these details because my memories of ironing trigger my senses of touch, sight and smell. This is how I made the words I wrote alive for the reader and myself.

The use of detail with this technique is key. The right details can spark the reader’s memory and cause them to, in the moment, relive their own experience even as they are reading about the author’s. Henry Louis Gates does this successfully in his piece “Sunday,” in which he describes the traditional dinner served weekly in his family home. Dinty Moore points out:

“Much of the intimacy here is in the family secrets Gates chooses to share, and the generous description of the table laden with food: ‘fried chicken, mashed potatoes, baked corn (corn pudding), green beans and potatoes (with lots of onions and bacon drippings and a hunk of ham), gravy, rolls, and a salad of iceberg lettuce, fresh tomatoes (grown in Uncle Jim’s garden), a sliced boiled egg, scallions, and Wishbone’s Italian dressing.’ Instead of a weak line like ‘you can’t imagine how much food there was,’ Gates puts us right at the table.”

I should note this technique is different from the use of metaphor because the detail doesn’t have to represent something else. It can stand on its own representing nothing more than the experience itself—it is the experience that connects the reader. In Night such details are found in the descriptions of thirst and heat as the neighborhood is gathered and made to march without water under the heat of a summer sun: “People must have thought there could be no greater torment in God’s hell than that of being stranded here, on the sidewalk, among the bundles, in the middle of the street under a blazing sun.”

The fourth technique involves the writer hitting upon the right voice in the telling of the story. A reader will react to a writer’s voice with the same discernment anyone would use at a cocktail party—if you don’t like the tone or attitude of the voice talking to you, you’re more likely to move away and speak to someone else. In experiencing a personal essay, a reader will not stay at the “party” if they encounter a voice they feel is arrogant, bossy, pedantic, whiny, annoying or anything else that makes them uncomfortable. The writer’s goal is to establish authority and a likeable voice at the same time. For myself, I deem a voice likeable if it is confident, knowledgeable and, if appropriate, has a good sense of humor. This doesn’t mean the writer has to bend over backwards to make her voice likeable. Some writers do this to the detriment of the work, relying too much on colloquialisms or self-deprecation. Even in the real world, trying to be everyone’s best friend simply doesn’t work and usually results in the person transmitting a bland, false persona. In writing this would translate as beige, uninteresting prose. In developing and considering voice the writer would do well to remember that in doing so, she is also establishing her narrative presence, the person in the room she wants to be. Mimi Schwartz, in her essay, “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” says if the writer’s voice is “savvy and appealing enough to make the reader say, ‘Yes, I’ve been there. I know what you mean!—you have something good. But if the voice you adopt annoys, embarrasses or bores because of lack of insight, then beware. The reader will say, ‘So what? I don’t care about you!’ often in anger.”

Having the right voice also gives the writer more leeway in sidestepping the common essay obstacles of egotism and navel-gazing. The nineteenth-century writer Alexander Smith discusses how much can be forgiven a writer if the work is engaging: “The speaking about oneself is not necessarily offensive. A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than about anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to be more profitable to his hearers…If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge home.”

A writer develops voice through the discerning use of vocabulary, colloquialism, and a general overall sense of camaraderie and shared confidence. When the writer has achieved this, she relates to the reader regardless of age, race, or culture background. James Baldwin, in his reflections on race and his young adult life in Harlem in Notes of a Native Son, develops a voice that is both mature and youthful as he looks back at how certain discoveries and experiences have shaped him and caused him to lose the innocence he once held about his place in society. At his essence, Baldwin’s voice is his connection, authority and narrative rolled into one: I am a human being. And he is most shocked when he finds himself in situations where that simple fact is not acknowledged or respected. “…there must never in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.”

Such vulnerability and bareness allows the reader to relate to the writer to the point of oneness. “The essayist can also appear as a figure who boasts of little in the way of heightened emotion or peculiarity of feeling,” says Richard Todd in Good Prose. “This sort of writer’s whole claim on the reader is the claim of the norm: I am but a distillation of you.” Indeed, this has been one of the most admired aspects of Baldwin’s book—his ability to reach out beyond his very specific experience to touch, intimately, readers who are nothing like him. In 2012, in an essay published in recognition of the 25^th anniversary of Baldwin’s death, the writer Robert Vivian recalls how as a young white man first reading Notes of a Native Son, he felt Baldwin’s voice spoke directly to him:

“…there was something about his voice and how he wrote that felt intimate and familiar and deeply personal, almost as if he were writing in my voice, my skin, my way of looking at the world, which must be why some writing is so capable of addressing the universality of human experience regardless of the very real and limiting facts of people’s lives through the mysterious, sympathetic alchemy of prose that can, in its greatest practitioners, so deeply strum the common chords that make us all one.”

Communicating from No Man’s Land

Eula Biss’s award-winning nonfiction collection, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, is a challenging read because the author takes on some of the most difficult subject matter of our time: race, the loss of self, sociopolitics, immigration and education. But her use of the four techniques described here makes the material easier for the reader to digest. It’s as though Biss is taking readers by the hand and gently leading them on her expedition through No Man’s Land.

The book is organized around Biss’s experiences of different parts of the United States beginning with her time spent in New York, then moving on to California and later the Midwest. It opens with “Time and Distance Overcome,” an essay on racism that sets the tone for the ensuing pieces. It ends with “All Apologies,” a reflection on whether apologies can truly be made and whether real forgiveness is possible when the perpetrators of a wrong are long deceased or apt to commit the wrong again and again.

In her essay “Letter to Mexico” Biss uses the metaphor of the ocean and its tides to communicate the sense of the city of Ensenada being overwhelmed by ever surging numbers of ugly Americans who have, courtesy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), relieved Mexicans of a good chunk of their wages and manufacturing businesses. The Mexicans are powerless against the influx of Americans just as any person would be powerless against the enormity of the ocean.

“I was confined to the shore there, even when I was not in the tourist district, where the cruise ships unloaded and middle-aged Americans periodically swarmed the bars and souvenir stands then receded like a tide.”

Biss also uses metaphor in her essay “Three Songs of Salvage” to communicate how the ever present rhythm of drums from her childhood when her mother practiced the Yoruba faith still mark time for her today. “I fell asleep to the distant sound of drums, which I was not always entirely sure was the distant sound of drums. Rain, blood in the body, explosions in the quarry, and frogs are all drums…I know now that I left home and I left the drums but I didn’t leave home and I didn’t leave the drums. Sewer plates, jackhammers, subway trains, cars on the bridge, and basketballs are all drums.”

Biss frequently uses the direct appeal in “Is This Kansas” to challenge the reader to question how we view the behavior of college students and the connection of that thinking to what our society looks like. There is a chiding nature to her comments as she presents her observations. The reader might feel she’s being called out by Biss because the reader may very well have one of views the writer highlights. If the reader does have such a view then a crack has been opened and Biss has the opportunity to make the reader see things in a different light.

“I would often wonder, during my time in that town, why, of all the subcultures in the United States that are feared and hated, of all the subcultures that are singled out as morally reprehensible or un-American or criminal, student culture is so pardoned. Illinois home owners propose ordinances against shared housing among immigrants, while their sons are at college sharing one-bedroom apartments with five other boys. Courts send black teenagers to jail for possession of marijuana, while white college kids are sentenced with community service for driving while intoxicated, a considerably more deadly offense. And Evangelicals editorialize about the sexual abominations of consenting adults, while very little is said about the plague of date rapes in college towns.”

In using details to connect the reader to their own experiences, Biss helps the reader experience with new eyes a place such as New York City that the reader may only know through movies or television show myths. She appeals to their sense of loneliness, alienation, and even fear because that was so much her own experience of the city. Biss anchors all of this with details that engage the reader’s senses.

“I could see barges silhouetted against the hazy pink horizon at dusk. I tried to walk down to the water and promptly dead-ended at a huge, windowless building labeled Terminal Warehouse.”

“The station at Coney Island was half-charred form a fire decades ago and packed with giant inflatable pink seals for sale…Caramel apples were seventy-five cents and the din of the fair games was intolerable. One freak-show announcer screamed, ‘If you love your family, you will take them to see the two-headed baby!’ It was gross and crazy and base…The beach was packed with naked flesh and smelled like beer and mango. And the Wonder Wheel inspired real wonder as I rose up over Brooklyn in a swinging metal cage.”

The voice Biss develops in her book has an intriguing mix of vulnerability and authority. From a writer’s standpoint such a voice puts you exactly where you want to be with the reader: the vulnerability helps to establish trust and rapport; the authority seals your credibility. The reader will listen to what you have to say. We feel for Biss in her youthful questioning of her guilt, her feelings about her race, her fear. But she is fearless when it comes to delving into research to support her marked disturbance and indignation over attitudes, traditions and social norms. In “Land Mines” she discusses the failures of the education system, first establishing herself as a participant in that system, and then examining policies she has directly read or experienced. Her indignation sometimes seems close to bubbling over when she describes the University of Iowa’s considerations for how to make their school more diverse in ways that do not consider the well-being for their diverse students.

“One didn’t need to spend very long at that institution before realizing that the interests of everyone else—the funders, the administrators, the professors, the graduate students—came before the interests of the undergraduate students. And as in any feudal system, the people on whom the entire system depended were robbed, as completely as possible, of their power.”

Her essay “No Man’s Land” has a voice presenting Biss’s views with wide-eyed clarity. She puts herself, as well as society, under the microscope as she compares her experiences in the slowly gentrifying Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park with the observations of Laura Ingalls Wilder of how the white man usurped the lands of the native Americans. Biss establishes her voice with direct rhetoric, using her research and her strong point of view to ground her statements about “pioneering” in America and what that really means—in one example it means unjustified fears:

“This is our inheritance, for those of us who imagine ourselves pioneers. We don’t seem to have retained the frugality of the original pioneers, or their resourcefulness, but we have inherited a ring of wolves around a door covered only by a quilt. And we have inherited padlocks on our pantries. That we carry with us a residue of the pioneer experience is my best explanation for the fact that my white neighbors seem to feel besieged in this neighborhood. Because that feeling cannot be explained by anything else that I know to be true about our lives here.”

Biss’s voice also makes it easier for readers who may be longtime fans of Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books to look at the series in a different way. If Biss had been too harsh the reader could have been led to misinterpret the essay as a criticism of the books. Instead Biss shows respect for the author and, in turn, her own readers as she follows through with her observations.

Mining the Night

As mentioned earlier, Elie Wiesel in his memoir Night uses the night as a long-form metaphor to invoke the darkness and horror of his experience as a teenager in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust. But he also uses other metaphors and the rhetorical techniques discussed here to draw as many people as possible into the intimate nature of his pain and despair.

The book opens in 1941 with Wiesel as an eager 13-year-old student of the Talmud. When the “foreign Jews” including his own Kabbalah teacher, Moishe the Beadle, are removed from their town of Sighet, Transylvania, few members of Wiesel’s community read the action as the precursor of the horrors to come, even after Moishe escapes and returns with his eyewitness account of the killings of the deported Jews. Wiesel details the downward spiral of his people’s condition and their continued hope that things will get better until, sealed in rail cars, they can no longer ascribe to the delusion.

The powerful emotions related in Night require metaphor to help the reader access the book’s hard moments of despair and desolation. “Not far from us, prisoners were at work,” he writes, “Some were digging holes, others were carrying sand. None as much as glanced at us. We were withered trees in the heart of the desert.” Pain on such a scale can only be abstract to the outside observer. But metaphor, as noted from Sue Silverman’s lecture, allows Wiesel, in beautiful language, to turn his experience, though terrible, into art that the reader can take in and be in.

Wiesel uses the direct appeal technique in a different way. Instead of speaking directly to or challenging his readers, he is making the appeal by telling his story. It is an implied appeal: Wiesel is telling his story so he can bear witness to these atrocities to the world. In turn the readers learn from his testimony and the appeal is that we don’t allow such atrocities to happen again. He says this directly in the book’s introduction. It is the whole reason for the book’s existence and the reason Wiesel does his best to help the reader look, not look away.

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory.”

There’s also, I believe, an appeal present in the undercurrent when Wiesel and the people around him more than once wonder at how and why the rest of the world didn’t know the extermination of the Jewish people was in progress. And if they did know, why wasn’t anyone saying or doing something about it? “How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real.” This, to me, feels like Wiesel’s call to all readers to be awake to the occurrences of the world, no matter what country.

In terms of details, Wiesel frequently activates the reader’s senses through his descriptions of pain, heat, cold, smells, colors, and more. In early parts of the book, his descriptions of spring recall the normal aspects of the season: brilliant skies, beautiful blossoms, delicate smells and bright green grass. This is the part the reader can relate to. Then he overlays the fear of the Germans and the transfer into the ghettos. He also uses the details of home, the trappings of home, to communicate to the reader what is being left behind. When he and his family enter the home of family members who have been transported away, they find “the chaos was even greater here than in the large ghetto. Its inhabitants evidently had been caught by surprise…On the table, a half-finished bowl of soup. A platter of dough waiting to be baked. Everywhere on the floor there were books. Had my uncle meant to take them along?”

When describing the camp’s horrors Wiesel’s descriptions become more physical:

“We whispered. Perhaps because of the thick smoke that poisoned the air and stung the throat.”

“An SS officer had come in and, with him, the smell of the Angel of Death. We stared at his fleshy lips.”

“ ‘It doesn’t hurt.’ His cheek still bore the red mark of the hand.”

The voice Wiesel uses often sounds like that of a witness giving testimony, which is exactly what he is doing. In fact, one reviewer refers to the book not as a memoir or essay, but as a “human document.” But Wiesel also has a poetic rhythm in much of the work that mesmerizes the reader with the beautiful depth of his dark musings. There is a natural vulnerability that comes through because of the youth of Wiesel’s narrative character during the events. He is at once sympathetic and authoritative with being strident, accusatory or vengeful. This makes Wiesel all the more believable, because he has created a voice that doesn’t seem prone to exaggeration or puffed up with hyperbole. Even when an observation could seem outsized, the words are presented with such gentle calmness that the reader can’t help but take them seriously. This happens, for example, when he conjures the image of he and his campmates as lost souls condemned to a kind of purgatory from which they can never escape.

“In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”

At times Wiesel’s rhetoric is straightforward such as in instances when he uses repetition to evoke emotion. The repetition of the word “never” in the following passage, for example, has the heaviness of a hammer driving home the losses Wiesel knows he must live with for the rest of his life.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.”

The Voice of Inclusion

James Baldwin’s 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son is described on the cover of the 1979 paperback edition as “the moving chronicle of Baldwin’s search for identity as a writer, as an American, and as a Negro.” At the time of its writing, a time in America where segregated bathrooms, restaurants, hotels and transportation still existed, such subject matter could easily be considered singularly personal and exclusive. However, Baldwin’s work succeeded in accessing an audience so broad that the work is still considered relevant both to society as a whole and to each individual reader who experiences it.

The first part of the book features Baldwin’s unflinching assessment of creative works including the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the film Carmen Jones, and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, and his examination of what they have to tell us about current views on the mythical perceptions of Negros especially concerning issues of skin tone, sexuality, and cleanliness. Baldwin then moves into personal reflection regarding his life in Harlem, memories of his father, and his frustration with the realization that racism will affect him regardless of how clean, educated or well spoken he is. These reflections go deeper as Baldwin’s insecurities are laid bare in Paris where he is arrested for a menial crime and incarcerated in a system that cares little for his rights or personal comfort.

Baldwin uses his most powerful metaphor in the opening paragraphs of the book’s title essay. He describes the race riots in Harlem that took place after his father’s funeral and the smashed glass in the streets become, for Baldwin, a representation of the apocalypse—a destruction of a world he has known and a harbinger of the unknown world he is entering.

“A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3^rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass…And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.”

At the end of the section, this metaphor returns when Baldwin hurls a water glass at a restaurant waitress who refuses to serve him. The glass hits a mirror behind the bar and shatters. This gives rise to another metaphor, this time evoking the cycle of freezing and thawing, and how in this moment, Baldwin “thaws” and is freed from a frozen state of anger and boldness which then moves him to a state of fear.

“She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed, I returned from wherever I had been, I saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths, open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was frightened.”

Baldwin does not make direct appeals so much as direct observations of America as a whole or large, significant groups within it such as the “Progressive Party” or the “optimistic American liberal.” These observations challenge the status quo, with Baldwin unafraid of declaring when he feels a situation is unacceptable. At the time of his writing this fearless tone would have made Baldwin’s readers uncomfortable about their own commitment. They also might feel concern over the risk of a Black writer speaking so plainly when he could still suffer the consequences of his words.

“Finally, we are confronted with the psychology and tradition of the country; if the Negro voter is so easily bought and sold, it is because it has been treated with so little respect; since no Negro dares seriously assume that any politician is concerned with the fate of Negroes, or would do much about it if he had the power, the vote must be bartered for what it will get…The American commonwealth chooses to overlook what Negroes are never able to forget: they are not really considered a part of it.”

In his essay “Equal in Paris” Baldwin uses detail to convey the fear and alienation of his days-long incarceration in a French prison. It’s interesting how a few of these details are not all that different from the ones Wiesel chose to describe the cells at the concentration camps. Baldwin allows the cold, the hole that served as a common toilet, the narrow cubicles, and the very fact that he begins to cry, to communicate to the reader the dire nature of his situation and his emotional condition. At one point, during his transport to another facility, “I remember there was a small vent just above my head which let in a little light. The door of my cubicle was locked from the outside. I had no idea where this wagon was taking me and, as it began to move, I began to cry. I suppose I cried all the way to prison…”

As mentioned earlier, Baldwin’s voice has served to connect to readers who find his voice so familiar that they identify with him, even across the wide canyon of time. It’s interesting that readers react to him this way because I didn’t find the voice particularly friendly or appealing. Baldwin has a formality about his phrasing and choice of words that, to me, make me feel he wasn’t an easy person to get to know in real life.

“But it is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.”

Perhaps he felt this formality was necessary for the time and his subject matter. I can respect this choice. He was, after all, still a young man when Notes of a Native Son was published. He wanted to write about his thoughts on serious matters and in order to be taken seriously he had to establish his sound of gravitas. This is his business as a writer. However, I believe he also understood the importance of letting the reader know he is a real person and he does that effectively as well. In his “Autobiographical Notes” at the beginning of the book there is some hint of warmth as Baldwin notes how he loves to laugh and talks about his commitment to his writing.

“…I love to eat and drink—it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat…and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I do love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything…I consider I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

Maybe that’s the Baldwin readers connected with first, and that is the voice they carried with them as they read the ensuing essays. He has introduced himself as a respectably amiable person. There’s no reason for the reader not to want to accompany Baldwin on his musings.

Conclusion

Though the focus of this exploration has been how to reach the broadest possible audience, I believe every piece of writing, at its heart, is an author’s attempt at conversation with just one reader. In many cases the writer knows at the outset the communication will be a difficult one, akin to two people speaking different languages. The writer, in order for her endeavor (which is to tell a story or relate an experience) to be successful, must try as many ways as possible to bridge the gap of understanding. If she can manage to do that, the happy result may be a bridge that more than one reader can utilize. In fact it can be used again and again, with readers crossing from all angles. In this way the writer achieves the broader audience.

The techniques described here can hopefully be the building materials a writer uses to build this bridge, keeping in mind that even the use of just one can bring a reader closer to relating to the writing than if she attempted none of them.

—Sophfronia Scott

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Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Toronto [u.a.]: Bantam, 1979. Print.

Biss, Eula. Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2009. Print.

Glover, Douglas “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise.” Attack of the Copula Spiders: And Other Essays on Writing. Emeryville, Ont.: Biblioasis, 2012. 23-42. Print.

Kidder, Tracy, and Richard Todd. Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. New York: Random House, 2013. Print.

Lopate, Phillip. “Introduction.” Introduction. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor, 1994. Xxiii-Liv. Print.

Moore, Dinty W. The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. Print.

Scott, Sophfronia. “White Shirts: Essay — Sophfronia Scott.” Numero Cinq. N.p., Sept. 2012. Web. 03 Apr. 2013.

Scott, Sophfronia. “Writing Your Heart Open.” Hunger Mountain: The VCFA Journal of the Arts. Hunger Mountain, 20 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.

Vivian, Robert. “Baldwin in Omaha.” Hunger Mountain: The VCFA Journal of the Arts. Hunger Mountain, 6 Dec. 2012. Web. 03 Apr. 2013.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print.

William Silverman, Sue. “Metaphor Boot Camp.” Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing Residency. College Hall Chapel, Montpelier, VT. 4 Jan. 2013. Lecture.

End Notes

INTRODUCTION

Glover, Douglas H. “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise.” Attack of the Copula Spiders: And Other Essays on Writing. Emeryville, Ont.: Biblioasis, 2012. 23-42. Print

Kidder, Tracy, and Richard Todd. Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. New York: Random House, 2013. Print.

Lopate, Phillip. “Introduction.” Introduction. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor, 1994. Xxiii-Liv. Print.

Moore, Dinty W. The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. Print.

Scott, Sophfronia. “White Shirts: Essay — Sophfronia Scott.” Numero Cinq. N.p., Sept. 2012. Web. 03 Apr. 2013.

Scott, Sophfronia. “Writing Your Heart Open.” Hunger Mountain: The VCFA Journal of the Arts. Hunger Mountain, 20 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.

THE FOUR TECHNIQUES

Gates, Henry Louis. “Sunday.” As published in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. Print.

Moore, Dinty W. The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. Print.

Lopate, Phillip. “Introduction.” Introduction. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor, 1994. Xxiii-Liv. Print.

Schwartz, Mimi. “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” As published in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. Print.

Vivian, Robert. “Baldwin in Omaha.” Hunger Mountain: The VCFA Journal of the Arts. Hunger Mountain, 6 Dec. 2012. Web. 03 Apr. 2013.

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Sophfronia Scott recently completed her second novel, Lady of the Lavender Mist, and has essays in two new Chicken Soup for the Soul books: Inspiration for Writers (May 2013) and Reader’s Choice 20th Anniversary Edition (June 2013). She published her first novel, All I Need To Get By, with St. Martin’s Press in 2004. Her work has appeared in Time, People, More, NewYorkTimes.com, Sleet Magazine, Gently Read Literature, The Mid-American Review, The Newtowner, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Sophfronia is currently a masters candidate in fiction and creative nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her short story, “Murder Will Not Be Tolerated,” will be in the Fall 2013 issue of The Saranac Review. She blogs at www.Sophfronia.com.

Where’s Bob? | Novel Excerpt — Ann Ireland

Jun 152013

Iris and Lydia are watching a divinely tasteless tourist wedding on a beach in Mexic0, the ceremony punctuated by the recorded voice of the groom singing “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Ominously, the word “narcotraficantes” floats into the conversation, not given another thought, except that the reader knows, the READER KNOWS! Something will come of this. Iris is 78 and charges through life with a certain comic grandeur, tossing off Spanish phrases. Lydia, her daughter, is cautious, middleclass — her husband has “escaped” her. The air is one of golden sand and indolence. Attentive, amenable Mexican waiters humor the gringos with money; the wedding counterpoints Lydia’s anxious memories of a lost husband; a delightful irony suffuses the entire scene, coupled with threat. And, yes, we’ve only just begun.

This a section plucked from the opening of Contributing Editor Ann Ireland‘s novel-in-progress Where’s Bob. Her fourth novel The Blue Guitar was just published this spring.

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‘That’s for us,’ Iris said, pointing to the final item on the activity menu. ‘Archery is excellent for balance and concentration. I always thought I might be good at it. But you must join me, in case I start to tip over.’

Squeals of laughter rose from the swimming pool where a member of the Star Team was conducting an aerobics class, though not very vigorously, judging by the unmanaged hopping up and down as salsa music blared from the speaker.

Lydia, Iris’s middle aged daughter, frowned, and not at the noise. ‘Not such a good idea, Mama, considering your fragile bits.’

‘I have no fragile bits,’ Iris insisted and gave her thigh a hearty slap. ‘You might say that I’m better than ever.’ The left hip had been replaced two years ago, an arduous couple of months, but well worth it. ‘I am perfectly intact in limb and joint, probably tougher than you, given the fact that there’s titanium in there.’ She paused and added in a softer tone: ‘We may as well have it out now on day one of our vacation: You are not to fuss about me.’

‘I don’t fuss,’ Lydia objected. But she sounded cross.

‘Tipping over refers to a slight tendency to vertigo. As your father might have said – ‘Expect the unexpected’ – and should a rescue be required, I’ll let you know, loud and clear.’ Iris smiled at the anticipated drama of such a moment, where her daughter, no spring chicken herself, might race across the beach to catch her teetering mother.

‘Got that?’

‘Do I have a choice?’ Lydia said.

‘You do not.’

The two women, one tall and majestic (Iris), the other shorter and thin with sparse hair (Lydia) sloughed past the beach volleyball court where girls in bikinis lunged for the ball aided by bare-chested men, not all them young. Long-limbed, the girls neighed like thoroughbreds, tossing blonde hair over shoulders. Iris and Lydia treaded in their sandaled feet through the fine-grained sand of the Yucatan coast. To one side, the shore sloped to the turquoise sea which was scattered with bathers, who, for the most part, stood in place and let gentle surf wash over them. To the other side was La Piramide, a five star sprawling resort whose main building was shaped in the form of a Mayan pyramid. Their room was in the Toucan wing where public areas were painted cheerful tropical colors, as opposed to the Colonial wing with its tasteful dark wood and murals of the conquistadores. Everyone wore plastic wristbands indicating where they could dine and drink without having to worry about carrying money – Iris’s idea of heaven. Money, anywhere, in any manifestation, was a pain in the neck.

She stopped beside the end of the meandering swimming pool with its tiered series of waterfalls.

‘Have you ever imagined such a place?’ Iris said, taking in a long breath of sea air, tinged with coconut oil.

‘Not in my wildest dreams,’ Lydia said.

In her tone Iris detected a certain contempt, an easy disregard for the sort of people who demanded artificial waterfalls and non-stop entertainment when they left home, not to mention five restaurants, six bars, two buffets and a snack bar that was open 24/7. The sort of places Lydia and Charlie took the kids, when Lydia and Charlie were still a team, were proudly shabby, tiles missing in the bathroom, a toilet that didn’t quite flush, iffy water flow and air conditioning, a simple hostel in some off the beaten path, perhaps in Cuba. They would bring toothpaste and underwear to the chambermaids, if there were chambermaids, and a parcel of magic markers and exercise books for local school children.

The two women threaded between loungers laden with oiled-up vacationers, their eyes now fixed on the rustic hut where a trio of blenders scoured fruit into luridly colored cocktails.

Discreetly, Lydia tucked an arm under her mother’s elbow as the sand shifted and Iris had begun to sway. She was 78 and had suffered her share of surgeries in recent years.

‘Shoot me if I get like that,’ she spoke into in her daughter’s ear.

She indicated with a nod a hefty woman of advanced years (though not as advanced as Iris) lying on a cot – a woman who had peeled down the top of her bathing suit to reveal the upper portion of two massive freckled breasts. A fanned out copy of a Harry Potter novel rose and fell on her impressive belly.

‘No one has the right to let herself go to that degree,’ Iris continued, sotto voce. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

‘To womankind?’ Lydia supplied.

‘Exactly!’ Iris nodded, pleased that they were in agreement.

Iris held herself well and had retained a defined waistline that she was proud of; her silver bathing suit featured a braided belt around the midriff and her feet were encased by strappy sandals– a pointed contrast to her daughter’s sensible espadrilles.

‘Ah, there’s my lad,’ Iris declared, arriving at the palapa, slightly breathless from the effort of crossing the beach. ‘Miguel!’ she hailed the young man in a crisp checked shirt who was operating a blender with one hand and pouring beer with the other. She fully expected him to remember her from last night when she and Lydia had arrived, hot, dirty, and fed up from the airline journey and the hour-long bus ride to the resort. Miguel had fortified them with jolts of tequila.

Today he greeted her with a wide smile, for of course he remembered the gringa who spoke Spanish.

‘Por favor, toss us a couple of margaritas, con limon fresco,’ Iris said.

The small crowd around the bar parted to make way for Iris, who didn’t seem to notice that she’d slipped to the head of the line: a prerogative of age. Iris looked so delighted that no one wanted to spoil her moment.

Her daughter offered an apologetic smile while Miguel set two foaming margaritas in plastic glasses on the sticky counter.

‘You got pesos for a tip?’ Iris whispered back to her daughter. Like the queen, she rarely carried money.

Lydia dug a coin from her beach bag and flipped it into the jar.

‘Now where shall we position ourselves?’ Iris said, spinning around, holding both drinks.

Lydia pointed to a shady area near the infinity pool. ‘I’ll take the booze over then come back for you.’

Iris frowned, as if she hadn’t heard. Soon she was beetling across the hot sand, making her way to a pair of loungers at the end of a row on the beach.

‘Mum!’ Lydia called sharply. ‘There are towels on them. They are occupied.’

Her mother called over her shoulder. ‘I see no occupants.’

As Iris pressed forward she thought it would have been wise to give the drinks to Lydia. But now she was stuck with them and crossing ridged sand that had been meticulously raked by staff in the morning, cigarette butts and other detritus collected into bags, not to mention the horse manure that cascaded from the rear ends of the sorry beasts that paraded up and down the beach at dusk. Iris set a grin firmly in place: this would not be the time to pitch forward and bust a limb, sticking Lydia with the task of carting her off to some dubious hospital. She tossed back her blonde-and silver tinted hair, noting that people were watching her progress. Well hell’s bells, she was used to a certain amount of attention, and not just from geezers. She did not cater to the commonly held belief that women of a certain age couldn’t hope to attract notice. A person creates her own visibility, insists on it.

She stood alone, wavering, barely keeping the margaritas upside. The sun was fierce. She felt her lips under crimson lipstick pucker in the salty air and she squinted, light bouncing off the water.

Lydia scampered to her side, grabbed the drinks, and said in an exasperated tone: ‘I’m doing my best.’

‘You are dear, I can see that.’

‘Just don’t go running off like that.’

Iris took advantage of the moment to gather her equilibrium. Time to slather on lotion, throw back a drink and get on with the business of relaxation. You could tell where one one hotel property stopped and the next began by the color of the pillows on the loungers. Blue striped (theirs) became salmon pink at Mission de La Rosa.

‘I’m sorry, dear. Hard for me to slow down,’ Iris said, conciliatory. She’d raised such an earnest, well meaning sort of girl.

Lydia lifted her arm like a wing so that her mother could cling to it, and she wasn’t too proud to do so. Glancing down, Iris noted that Lydia had neglected to shave her legs; it was some sort of feminist thing, and Iris almost remarked on it – then decided not to. It was sometimes wise to keep one’s counsel. Lydia had been a sparky child, prone to singing and dancing about the house and inventing imaginary friends; in other words, promising. I want an interesting child, not an obedient one, Iris used to say while other mothers cast disapproving glances. Perhaps most mothers felt this about their grown up children, a sad realization that they had become ordinary. Iris herself had never felt ordinary and no one had ever mistaken her as such.

They reached the cots, webbed plastic with gaily striped vinyl cushions, and a pair of damp towels – so Lydia was right about that: clear evidence of being claimed. Could be that young couple bobbing in the water close to shore.

‘Need help?’ Lydia said. She’d noted her mother staring, like an engineer, at the low slung pieces of furniture.

Whoever designed these loungers didn’t take into account that a segment of the population needed something to grab onto while dropping themselves to shin level.

Lydia wedged the drinks in the sand, giving each a half-turn so it screwed in, then offered her hand for Iris to clasp.

After a few scary seconds of hovering in no man’s land, followed by an alarming thud and a wheeze of vinyl –Iris was settled. In every way except flexibility the new hip was grand. Beside her, Lydia glided effortlessly onto the other lounger, draping the wet towel over its end. People must not claim turf that they didn’t need; if the world paid attention to this basic principle they’d all be in less trouble. Iris shut her eyes against the sun. She could hear the rustling of her daughter as she fetched a crossword puzzle book from her beach bag and set to work. Behind them a Mexican family, mother and father and two small children, chattered in Spanish, something about their aunt who would, or would not, be joining them this weekend. A slap of a card game to one side. A thrilled shriek as an unexpectedly big wave rolled in.

‘Mum? Your drink. I’ll set it on the table next to you.’

Noises retreated; the body stretched into languor, muscles cramped from air travel released and it was like drowning in new air, giving up, limb by limb. Iris fell asleep for perhaps twenty minutes. When her eyes fluttered open, the Mexican family had disappeared, leaving cameras, books, towels and beach toys behind. Her drink, what was left of it, was baking in the sun, ice cubes long since dissolved. Lydia was sitting cross-legged on her cot, reading intently with a pen in hand, ready to underline pertinent passages.

Iris said in a lazy tone: ‘Are we allowed to mention Charlie?’

‘Of course,’ her daughter replied.

‘Because, no matter how this unfolds, he remains the father of your children.’

Lydia cast those huge brown eyes towards the glistening sea, as if the obvious had been spoken, as indeed it had. Cliches popped out of Iris’s mouth around Lydia. It was because she was trying to act ‘motherly’, a role she’d never taken to in a natural way. It was Lydia’s father, Richard, Iris’s first husband, who used to point this out, saying – ‘Not everyone is cut out to be Old Mother Hubbard.’

‘When you share kids, you share for good,’ Iris added.

This unoriginal comment warranted no reply.

Lydia continued to stare out to sea, a widow searching the horizon for her husband’s vessel. Charlie did disappear on water, though hardly in a whaling boat; he heaved off from the dock in his carefully restored Chestnut canoe, storm clouds bundling overhead, while Lydia stood barefoot on shore in her hippie dress, fretting about lifejackets and lightening strikes, worry escalating into pleas, then anger. Iris could imagine this scene all too easily.

Charlie was escaping.

That’s how Iris saw it, because she was a champion escaper herself – and who could blame the poor man? Lydia made it out to be a spontaneous gesture, but Charles Kingsley had never been a man to act recklessly: his disappearance was most certainly plotted. By profession, he was vice principal at Danforth Technical and Vocational Collegiate in east end Toronto – hardly a pirate. He’d sent his mother in law a crisp email after the fact, a cryptic message that Iris had never shared with her daughter. It read simply: ‘Sorry.’

‘Have you heard from him lately?’ Iris asked.

‘We’re on speaking terms. Things to do with the kids.’

Well, that was something.

Iris would tread carefully. ‘How are Doug and Annie doing?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘I suppose they are angry.’

‘Of course they’re angry, Mum. A parent disappears one summer afternoon; it’s pretty traumatic.’

The arrow hit its mark, for Iris had done a similar bunk when her children were young, though you could hardly compare the two episodes: she had never claimed to be stable. She was as restless as a cat and it taught Lydia and her brother to expect the unexpected.

This sky was intensely blue, a color reflected in the sea, and these poor winter eyes creased into slits, to accommodate. Iris had left behind the enveloping fog of the Bay area, Lydia, her modest house in east end Toronto in the depths of winter, Doug not much use in the snow shoveling department or other manly tasks. According to his mother, he spent hours in his room with the door closed, eyes glued to the monitor of his computer. One could venture a guess as to what he was up to. She wondered if Lydia had a clue.

Lydia sipped blithely at her margarita. This was her first; Iris reached for her second: Gracias Miguel. Or was it Pedro?

‘Another couple of suckers enter marital hellfire,’ Lydia said, tucking her feet under her, letting the book slide off her lap. The crossword puzzle magazine had fallen to the sand.

A pair of young men in sharply pressed safari suits were hauling two Roman columns, each easily eight feet tall, off a dolly. With odd ease, for these props were made of styrofoam, they planted the columns upright in the sand. When this task was done, they unrolled a strip of red carpet leading up to a dais then set up rows of folding chairs, clicking them open with one foot. Destination weddings were all the rage.

‘Shall I warn the happy couple what they’re getting into?’ Lydia said.

The caustic tone didn’t suit her.

The sun was beginning to swell directly overhead, casting a shadowless heat over the proceedings. Then the wedding party began to arrive, women in breezy cocktail dresses and high heels picked their way over the stone walkway and onto the carpet, laughing and clinging to the elbows of male escorts who wore neat shorts and tropical shirts. Some of these shirts were monogramed with the name of the resort and sported a graphic of a pyramid.

Iris propped herself up up to see better. Lydia, despite her sneering, couldn’t keep her eyes off the ceremony and she shifted her lounger so that she had an unobstructed view. She wasn’t the only one to do this. All around them, scores of sunbathers tilted their visors for an unfettered gaze.

‘Senora, you are finished?’ The young waiter hovered, one hand ready to grab the empty plastic cups.

Yes, estoy terminada. Iris used the opportunity to practice her Spanish: What is your name?

Patricio.

And where is your hometown?

‘Patzucaro, Michoacan.’

Unlike waiters at home in the United States, he didn’t feel the need to speed off to the next task.

‘Patzcuaro!’ She’d spent time there, many years ago– ‘hace mucho anos’, had rented a house with – her memory failed her for a moment – with Jake the sculptor. It had been her second extended trip to this country. Such a beautiful mountain town with views over a reedy lake, though there had been word in recent years of goings-on due to the drug trade.

‘Muy bonito!’ she declared and she and Patricio exchanged nods of agreement. Back home in Berkeley, she always spoke to her Salvadorian cleaning lady in her native tongue.

Patricio’s smooth brow suddenly furrowed and he rattled off a sentence just as the wedding party began to blast that ballad from Titanic.

Iris cupped one hand by her ear, the universal symbol.

There were ‘problemitas’ in Michoacan, Patricio confided as he dropped the empty cups into his trash bag. Bad people. ‘Narcotraficantes.’

Mexico was plagued with violence from the drug cartels; she didn’t live in a cave. She’d read about the beheadings, assassinations, and dismembered bodies dropped into pails of acid. These ghastly events were mostly clotted along the border – but wasn’t the state of Michoacan noted for growing marijuana in the hills? Now there were meth labs. Tourists flocked to this beach in the Yucatan, under the illusion that resorts were immune from trouble – Iris knew better. The country had always been lawless. She and Jake were drinking mezcal in a cantina in Chiapas one evening when a borracho barreled through the louvered doors and pulled out an antique gun and started firing at the bartender – everyone hit the floor, the terrified gringos included. No one was hurt, and the police eventually came along, piled in the back of a pick up truck, holding rifles and looking excited. The drunk had long since vanished.

Many gringos would have high-tailed back to the States at that point, but Iris’s opinion was –why travel if you want things to be the same as back home?

She fixed her gaze on Patricio, shielding her eyes with one hand. ‘What a difficult time for your country,’ she said.

The lad revived his tourist-friendly smile, even while nodding ‘yes’. Behind that smile, Iris decided, lurked a possible family catastrophe, perhaps a murder or kidnapping, or an uncle lost to meta-amphetamines. One did not know what hid behind the happy expressions that staff were obliged to wear, along with their crisply laundered uniforms. She glanced around at the other tourists – they didn’t have a clue. The knowledge swelled inside her: she had a bond with this country. She’d knocked around its mountains and deserts and beaches for many months, so long ago. She was about to say this to the young waiter, but he was suddenly gone and the little table was bare.

As Celine Dion’s voice crested towards the chorus, the wedding party continued to assemble, observed by the audience of oil-slicked, leathery tourists humped on loungers, dazed by sun and too many pina coladas. The bride and groom hadn’t anticipated onlookers when they’d pored over the brochures back home, photographs showing Romanesque columns and acres of empty sand and the glistening Caribbean sea. Brochures wouldn’t show that fat man with hairy shoulders emerging from the water, snorkel mask in hand, shorts dragging off his rear end, nor would they illustrate the squalling children tossing sand at each other at water’s edge. A member of staff carrying a clipboard positioned herself to the side of the proceedings and politely fended off the curious in their drooping bathing suits, asking them to please not interfere with the photographers’ sight lines. These tourists in flip flops seemed to want to stride into the middle of the event, one reality colliding with another. It reminded Iris of those Shakespeare productions back in the 1970’s, where the audience was obliged to take part in the action, shouting encouragement to Hamlet, or handing Lady Macbeth her dagger.

‘Maybe we’ll end up at the margins of their photos,’ Lydia said. As if preparing for this eventuality, she slipped into her crinkly blouse and fluffed up her hair. A photographer was busily snapping pictures as the party made their way to the folding chairs which balanced precariously on carpet laid over sand. A trickle of applause, and at last the bride appeared, click-clacking down the stone pathway, wearing a fairy dress of white chiffon, a camilla in her hair. That must be her father, a surprisingly young looking fellow in tropical shirt and khakis, sporting a formidable handlebar mustache. He was beaming even more than his daughter who was intent on not stumbling.

‘What a remarkable garment,’ Lydia said, referring to the dress. ‘Do you think it’s made of surgical gauze?’

‘Shhh,’ Iris cautioned.

Everyone crooned an appreciative ‘Ahh’ as father and daughter stepped cautiously onto the red carpet. The bride was pale-skinned and dark haired, possibly Irish, and very slender, showing off toned arms, a nervous smile careening off her face. Not wanting to wear sunglasses, she squinted, an expression caught for posterity by the young man who might be her brother, snapping wildly with his point and shoot.

Iris was starting to tear up, as was her more cynical daughter. They didn’t dare exchange glances, in case the floodgates were unleashed. For once, Lydia made no snotty remarks and merely watched as a light breeze coasted across the beach, fluttering the pages of novels and magazines then catching the hem of the bride’s dress in a provocative way. The father, surely no more than forty-five, helped his daughter negotiate the transition from cobblestone to carpet, clutching her elbow firmly. His face gleamed with health and happiness, though he seemed self-conscious: who wouldn’t be with all these strangers watching –and with his free hand he patted down his lanky hair that didn’t quite manage to cover his bald spot. The younger men all had shaved heads and looked like marines on furlough. The bride’s dark hair didn’t come from her Dad’s side of the family. That would be her mother sitting in the front row, also slender, wearing a pink top and silk trousers, twisting on her seat to watch the pair walk up the makeshift aisle. The bride gave a little squeak of alarm as her heel caught in the threads of carpet but Father expertly kept her aloft. The groom would be that stocky man standing at the front watching his bride’s approach. He wore a tropical shirt decorated with a pattern of shells. His face was pink, his head shiny. Iris leaned forward to see better: he was already puffy around the cheeks and neck– a man who liked his liquor. Should the girl be warned?

Iris knew enough about drinkers to last a lifetime.

Someone had turned down the music and now they could hear the relentless salsa beats coming from the activity pool and the Star girl urging all swimmers to clap their hands and ‘Dance! Dance!’ The bride reached the groom and was handed off by her father who retreated, one suspected with relief, to the empty chair by his wife. This wife didn’t squeeze his hand or pat his knee, and Iris decided that they were estranged, brought together for this event.

‘I know him!’ Lydia whispered loudly. She looked excited and was pointing to a small neat man standing next to the groom. ‘We met in the Internet room. He’s a Unitarian minister who goes up and down the coast marrying people.’

The dark-skinned Mexican in a white shirt with pleats had flipped open a folder and began to read from a set piece as bride and groom held hands and listened. Iris could hear just enough to note that there was no hint of religiosity in the text and no Khalil Gibran drivel.

The breeze ratcheted up a notch and now the bride was having to fight her dress as the photographer snapped away. The minister hesitated while the groom murmured something that made people laugh, then he plucked a ring from his pocket and slipped it onto his bride’s finger. At this photogenic moment, a child carrying an inflatable whale darted behind the couple, forever captured in the event.

Lydia let out a giggle. The alcohol was finally getting to her and that tense face had begun to relax, the hatch of lines smoothing between her eyebrows. In baby pictures, Lydia always looked anxious; she was born with a furrowed brow and the weight of the ages. They used to think it was cute, because, of course, what did a baby know of the trials of the world?

By the end of the week, if Iris had her way, Lydia would lose half a dozen years and they’d be a couple of dizzy females making their way to the bar in the evening. Lydia was apt to give up on future romance; just because Charlie had blown off didn’t mean nobody else would come sniffing around. Where on earth did she ever get such a defeatist attitude? Certainly not from her mother.

The minister had the high sloping forehead of the Mayans, indigenous to these parts. He gazed over the wedding party, eyes indicating a level of boredom, as for a moment, he forgot where he was and who these people were gathered before him.

Cheers erupted from the volleyball court and a ball coasted skyward, narrowly missing the bride’s head. It landed on the makeshift dais, where it stayed, no one nervy enough to fetch it.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the minister craned his neck and stared straight at Lydia and Iris, and he waved discreetly. Iris felt herself pinken at being singled out, then realized that it was her daughter’s presence that had caught his attention. Let Lydia claim her due. She was still an attractive woman, ‘still’ being one of those qualifying words that signaled anyone pushing fifty who was managing to hold onto her looks.

If Lydia would just relax that perpetual frown that made her look so fierce and hard to get along with. Her posture could use a little work too; an erect spine and tilted chin took years off a woman’s age.

The recorded music switched to jazz piano, one of those innocuous modern pieces, as the bride and groom remained standing in front of the small party, clasping hands. Finished his recitation, the minister dropped back. Everyone seemed to be waiting, then suddenly a booming recorded voice filled the speakers, startling the onlookers: ‘We’ve only Just Begun’ rang out in a pleasant although amateur baritone voice, rough around the edges but in tune.

The bride tipped her head against the groom’s broad shoulder, her eyes glassy.

So the groom was a singer, and this recorded performance was his surprise.

The voice sketched out the song with moderate accuracy, running out of breath here and there, yet this was what made the song so moving. When a note caught in his throat, Iris felt it catch in her own and she unabashedly let tears run down her cheeks. Lydia rummaged around in her beach bag, pulled out a bunched up tissue and began to blow her nose. Weren’t they a sentimental pair? Lydia caught her eye and began to laugh and soon they were both laughing as they wept.

Iris reached out and touched her daughter’s forearm, and for a moment Lydia was a little girl, wounded from some playground accident, racing home for consolation and finding fresh tears the moment she spotted her mother. Perhaps Iris hadn’t been as patient as she might have been with these episodes: the girl was melodramatic, craving attention long after the crisis was over and the wound bandaged – not an appealing quality in a child.

Iris stroked her daughter’s forearm again and gave it a squeeze, but not without a sensation of being artificial.

Lydia drew her arm away.

All of this happened in a moment and Iris felt disturbed, as if she’d been found wanting. One tried to do right, but mothers were doomed to fail. Surely Lydia knew that by now, having two nearly grown children of her own.

As if recalling this fact, her daughter swung her legs over the side of the lounger.

‘It’s 2 o’clock Toronto time,’ she announced before slipping her feet into her espadrilles and taking off towards the pathway that led to the Internet room. Lydia bustled in there every few hours.

She was going to Skype Annie, who’d enrolled at a second rate University in northern Ontario, majoring in something called Environmental Studies, a profession that didn’t exist when Iris went to school. Annie and her mother communicated every day. Lydia would comment more often than necessary that she and Annie were ‘great good friends’; this always sounded like a judgement, for didn’t she and Iris go for weeks, even months, on end without communicating?

Suddenly alone, Iris set herself as upright as possible on the lounger. The marriage ceremony was winding down, the compact group making its way towards one of the private event rooms.

—Ann Ireland

——————————-

Stratum & Substratum: Poems — John B. Lee

Jun 132013

In John B. Lee’s study, there are piles of stones, cobbles to pebbles. He’s a collector, no doubt mystifying endless airport security agents monitoring his luggage. One wonders about this, except that stones are mnemonic devices (this one means a day on the beach in Korea with my son and his son). And words are like stones, bearing the same trace mineral flecks, striations, layers, conglomerates and evidence of former life. You put them together and a mysterious meaning radiates (call it a poem). John is a frequent contributor to these pages. He’s the poet laureate of Norfolk County where I was born. He lives in Port Dover on Lake Erie, home of what was once the world’s largest freshwater fishing fleet (oddly shaped boats made of steel, called turtlebacks). He hosted the the April Extravaganza on the Lake, when NC Contributing Editor Sydney Lea and myself journeyed thither and read and grown men were heard to use the word “beauty” as if it were a real thing like a Porsche or an Audemars Piguet wristwatch. After which we drove down the lake to Highgate for a second reading, gossiping about the loves and suicides of famous southwestern Ontario writers, stopping to look a graves or the farm where John grew up. Reading John’s poems like a similar marvelous adventure.

——-

Suseuk — Viewing Stones

my son, my grandson and I
were walking
the gravelly shores
of the Yellow Sea
on Daebun Island
looking west through amber sky
west to the entirely imaginary far-away
coast of mainland China
the sun
shining like a dulled brass gong
hung in soundless heaven
over the low-tide mudflats of Korea
and we were
looking to gather up
the most interesting stones
and only recently empty shells
the small cochlear conches
that hold the ocean winds of the world
as poems might hold
a meaningful breath
at the moment of deep-breath knowing

and I have gathered
my own little tea bowl
of chalk and silvery anthracite
carrying home the light of hope
brought here from these broken mountains
and that scaling off of iron oxide
from the water-loud coves
with their coming in and going away
of moon-drawn amplitudes
that swallow the road and drown the ankles
where the beach turns to vanish under
the afternoon drop-shadows
of the great engines of the sea
and as I hold council here
with silent beauty of granite
and pink rock
cobbled with dead creatures
who cling, barnacled
to the underbelly of a time-crushed
stratum and substratum
of cold vermillion

I think back
to the finding
when our three shades crossed
like the slow dampness of dragged black cloth

and there is this consolation to loss
the way memory
brightens
the shades and hues of meaning
like wave wash on dry rock
and tomorrow’s freeze
that set the coast
in hard-white unwalkable shards of dropped ice

what we’d seen
beneath the heavy burden of winter
unpacking its load
on the threshold of a second morning
made everything
unavailable to the hands

but there
the heart reached through

Timmy’s Down the Well

as I am conscious
of the perils
of living in a world
that is bellum
and full with the falsity
of the fierce and terrible yawp of war
I send out
the kinder dog
of my most beautiful thought
and I am
wagging memory at important windows
I am barking
at the scriptoriums
of mad leaders
where oak drawers slide shut
on the keepsakes of life
I am howling
at the Lupercalia of a romantic moon
where light
and the mirror of light
are drawing in the muddy skirts
of my hometown waters
while the deeper ambitions of love
arrive and leave in waves
like the bridal bed
evenings and mornings
of warmed dreamers
who wake and sleep
in the swan tuck of angels

my son
who works and thrives
in the government regions of Seoul
tells me
his school is at the epicenter
of the animosity of big guns
training their dark zeroes
at the soul of the city
and I know—
any sunrise
has its own Gallipoli
all moonsets in yellow air
might break the shining glass
with a seismic whump of a great shattering noise
where we are all bad hammers
we are all
the pelt and pummel
of red stone and sharp sticks
on soft flesh

Mr. President
you with the burning tongue
take your crimson axe away
from my broken brain
I am here
singing from the common tree
among the magpies
among the crows
I come
palm line open to the blue ceiling
give the greater graves
the balm of a short shadow
I cast my longer darkness
onto the green recline
of an out-of-reach light
where we both breathe
we all breathe

and into this lasting language
of even the most ancient poets
I say, let Caesar weep
on the senate stair
let him weep at the river
I refuse
the map lines of his desire
I bark
at the buoyant well holes
of my body
and am dangerous with a different
and far more powerfully resonant echolalia
of the resounding voice of a father’s love

—John B. Lee

———————————

John B. Lee is the author of over sixty published books. In February he won the Winston Collins / Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem for the second time. Inducted as Poet Laureate of the city of Brantford in perpetuity, he was also recently appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County where he now lives in Port Dover, a fishing town located on the south coast of Lake Erie.

Wildest Dreams: Play — Don Druick

Jun 122013

Structure is almost everything, says Peter Handke, in an epigraph to this wildly whimsical, often hilarious (“aversion” one character puns on “a virgin”), mid-life, existential love drama between a husband and a wife. Don Druick is a master of musicality. Watch the repetitions: words like scars, quagmire, diminished, love. Jack comically gathers scars as he keeps reasserting that he will not be diminished. The text shimmers. Moments of horror: Jack dropping his hands into a cooking pot full of boiling water. Moments of intense comedy: Audrey misplaces a medallion in a patient’s rectum (the patient is her neighbour, perhaps a lover; the patient gave her the medallion; the medallion bears the words “The fear of everything is love”). To communicate Jack calls his wife’s cell from bed; his wife answers; she is in bed with him. Regularly, the characters revert to speaking in the voices of animals, caws and moos; and just as regularly there are moments of trembling beauty, line after line, poignant and true.

AUDREY Did you say: kyomu?

HUMPHREY Nothingness. The Japanese have four hundred words for it.

AUDREY Really? That many?

HUMPHREY It seems necessary

Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
– W H Auden

A human being is a genius while dreaming, fearless and brave….
– Akira Kurosawa

For a work of art, material is almost nothing, structure almost everything.
– Peter Handke

•

A play in eighteen scenes and two acts for six actors.

•

to Jane Phillips, whose own dreams fill a lifetime of shelves.

CHARACTERS

Jack, 60’s

Audrey, 50’s

Jack and Audrey are married; these actors do not double.

Four actors play the following ten characters:

ACTOR 01

Delores – Audrey’s personal assistant
Natalie – a next door neighbor; Humphrey’s wife
Curly – a bad bad dude

ACTOR 02

The Prince Mithroth – Audrey’s dearest friend
Horst – a frightening man
Old Bill – Jack and Sandy’s dead father

ACTOR 03

Humphrey – a next door neighbor; Natalie’s husband
Shlomo – a Hassidic jew

ACTOR 04

Sandy – Jack’s sister
Baby Jack – Shlomo’s precocious son

As well:

Offstage Characters

Pooky, Natalie’s dog
Talking Newspaper
Another Soldier

Chorus, as required

Note: NATALIE has a French accent; HUMPHREY has an English accent.

A visual development: JACK is progressively more scarred as the play proceeds (except: scene 18 where he is scar-free).

•

ACT ONE

SCENE SET 01 – A PROLOGUE

scene one

Jack, at home, paces the kitchen. The air is ripe with the heady odour of baking bread.

JACK I will not be diminished

JACK at his chopping block, the knife fast and furious. He cuts himself.

JACK Jesus, boys, that’ll be another scar. Drat.

The sink is chock-a-block full of simpering wet socks. JACK wrestles with the sodden mass, water spilling everywhere.

JACK Shit.

Suddenly, the lentils on the stove boil over.

JACK turns; the wet socks sloosh to the floor.

JACK Shit.

Smoke cascades from the oven.

JACK Amazing shit, a whole bloody package of it. Drat. It’ll never be as good again. What? Yes. A package of shite. That’s it, boys, that’s it exactly.

PAUSE, as JACK ponders.

JACK But what exactly? Man O man, I don’t understand myself….

JACK goes to the phone. Dials.

JACK (on phone) Delores? Let me talk to Herself.

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) My wife, Audrey….

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) Delores, it’s me, Jack. Jesus….

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) I’m not trying to be funny. Or arrogant. I’m not feeling funny. Or arrogant. Nothing’s funny anymore.

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) I don’t know. A glimmer of something but I don’t get it.

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) I don’t care if you don’t. Understand. Nevermind – too late, too late. There’s no more time, boy O boy, you can’t go backwards.

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) Because time does not move backwards. Everybody knows that. Hey, maybe it doesn’t even move forward. Have you ever considered that?

BEAT.

JACK Tell Herself I’m coming right down.

BEAT.

JACK (on phone) I don’t care.

JACK hangs up the phone.

JACK Drat, another scar.

JACK exits, slamming the door.

SFX: The sound of a car engine starting up. The screeching of tires.

A sudden vicious crash, horrendous.

SFX: Car crash, long and frightening. Shattering glass falling; a blizzard of tiny tinkles.

Silence.

END OF SCENE.

TO BLACK.

•

SCENE SET 02 – OLD BILL GONE

scene two

AUDREY’s medical office. Day.

The blinds are drawn; phone conversations are quietly everywhere.

Prominent: a large collection of colourful Eiffel Tower models.

SFX: The continuous sound of animals.

These two speeches together:

AUDREY (on phone) A leopard, a leopard seen? No…. No no, impossible. Not in my operating room. I mean it makes no sense….. Maybe from a zoo? Maybe a pet?…. Impossible…. Well, don’t go in there – especially if you hear loud growling.

DELORES (on phone) The book of crows? Book of crows? Book of crows? Book of crows?…. No…. No…. No no no. What can it mean? Radical surgery? It worries me. Is it about crows or just a really really good title?

AUDREY and DELORES laugh.

AUDREY (on phone) Anyway, I’m not a vet.

DELORES (on phone) Do you need an appointment?

JACK enters.

JACK Audrey. Audrey. I need to talk.

AUDREY sees JACK; she winks and waves – it’s very friendly.

DELORES I told you, Jack, Jack, on the phone I told you, Jack – she’s busy.

JACK You can be as jealous as you want, Delores – she’s still my wife.

Another phone rings.

DELORES (on phone) Just a mo – the other line.

JACK I was out underwear shopping – I made a call – you’ll never guess what happened. Never. Horrible…. horrible….

DELORES (to AUDREY) It’s for you.

AUDREY (to JACK) Just a minute, darling – I’ll be right with you.

JACK Promise?

AUDREY Promise promise.

DELORES scoffs.

JACK sneers at DELORES.

DELORES She’s working….

These two speeches together:

AUDREY (on phone) Ya…. Ya ya…. She’s pissed off? So? What? Hurt?…. Why? She’s weird. I was home – she could have called…. Hey, I’m not a mind reader, just a doctor…. I’m not even sure I know who she is…. I already did that. I searched a large pile of newspapers looking for someone who might actually have her number….

DELORES (on phone) No…. No…. really?…. Simply, I push the wrong button and the x-ray thing hassles itself apart. Whirring whirring all the time. Wow…. The patients get really nervous…. Ya but now I have no idea how to put it all back together again…. Well what do I care?…. No, really…. Really….

JACK Can I speak now?

DELORES She’s busy.

JACK Drat.

These two speeches together:

DELORES (on phone) Do you think so? Do you? I’m really happy here. Really really happy really really really happy….

AUDREY (on phone) I’m going to read it right now…. Right right now…. Promise promise. Promise promise promise….

AUDREY hangs up the phone.

AUDREY Delores….

DELORES (on phone) I’ve got to go.

DELORES hangs up the phone.

AUDREY (to DELORES) Listen to this.

JACK Am I invisible?

JACK is shushed.

JACK Jesus, what a quagmire.

AUDREY You too, Jack. Listen….

JACK So unkind.

AUDREY Please please please – it’ll be fun.

JACK Nobody cares about me.

AUDREY, making an impatient sound, opens a magazine.

AUDREY Jack…. Jack. Look at me. Stop it. Please wait. I’m working.

JACK Drat.

AUDREY (to DELORES) Here. Here it is. You read this. I’ll start. (reading) OK OK OK, you the patient, right here downstage.

DELORES (reading) Here?

AUDREY (reading) No, right on the lip.

DELORES (reading) Up your moo.

AUDREY (reading, shouting) Up your moo.

DELORES (reading) Moo up you.

AUDREY (reading) You too moo.

DELORES (reading) Too moo you.

AUDREY (reading) Fuck you moo moo.

DELORES (reading) You fuck moo moo.

AUDREY and DELORES laugh – especially AUDREY.

AUDREY It’s hysterical.

DELORES I just love it, I love it.

AUDREY I knew you would. The wise doctor in the world. Ta-taaaaa.

JACK (crow-like, loudly) Caw.

AUDREY (calf-like) Mmuuh.

JACK (crow-like) Kraa caw caw.

AUDREY (calf-like) Mmuuh mmuuh möö.

JACK (crow-like) Kraa caw caw caw kraa….

Suddenly the sun, large very large, large very large as it sets.

AUDREY & DELORES turn to admire it.

AUDREY & DELORES Beautiful.

JACK (quietly) My dad died. Poor old Bill. Poor old Bill is dead. Stroke. Such a quiet word, stroke. Another scar.

END OF SCENE.

•

scene three

Night. JACK and AUDREY in bed; asleep.

JACK is snoring, and somewhat reasonable and gentle it is. He wakes up with a start. In a panic, he opens the light. He flaps around the night table until he finds his cellphone; he dials a number.

The cell phone on AUDREY’s night table rings.

AUDREY (very sleepy, on phone) Hello

JACK (on phone) It’s me.

AUDREY (on phone) Jack? Where are you?

JACK (on phone) What a laugh, eh? I’m right here.

AUDREY turns to see him.

AUDREY What?

JACK (on phone) I woke up and there were a million little red flies swarming all over me and you too. Fucking Mithroth was there too.

AUDREY The Prince Mithroth?

JACK (on phone) My heart’s pounding – I wish you could touch it. I feel very lonely.

AUDREY puts down her phone, and reaches out to JACK.

AUDREY O, you poor thing.

JACK is restless.

JACK (on phone) I feel…. I don’t know…. edgy like….

AUDREY O relax relax relax.

JACK (on phone) Like a wild child.

AUDREY And get off the phone – it’s crazy. I’m right here.

JACK (on phone) O I have a good plan – it doesn’t cost anything.

JACK starts to fondle her.

AUDREY What are you doing?

JACK (on phone) I feel lightheaded and very…. very horny.

AUDREY O for god’s sake – stop it. Stop it.

AUDREY pushes him away.

JACK gets up; wanders about the room.

JACK (on phone) No no no. No no not now. I have a headache. My poor little head aches. What about me what about little lonely me? – I’m horny. So bloody horny. Nothing’s working anymore. Nevermind. What if I can’t write any more novels?

AUDREY sighs.

AUDREY You don’t write novels.

JACK (on phone) I can’t hear you – the connection’s bad.

AUDREY That’s cause I’m not on the bloody phone.

JACK (on phone) What did you say?

AUDREY (shouting) I said: you don’t write novels.

JACK (on phone) But I could if I wanted to. If I had any decent stories. Which I don’t. Drat. What a quagmire. What if I’ve just squandered – wasted – my talent? What if I’m just a fucking old fucking old fuck fuck fucking old sad old has been?

JACK has a penknife.

AUDREY Where did you get that?

JACK (on phone) It’s mine.

AUDREY It looks like mine.

JACK (on phone) It’s mine.

AUDREY What are you doing?

JACK (on phone) Keeping it warm. Useful little scar machine.

AUDREY O, for god’s sake, we don’t need any more scars.

AUDREY takes the penknife from JACK.

JACK Fuck that. I will not be diminished.

AUDREY Relax, for god’s sake. Relax. Please relax. Come back to bed.

JACK (on phone) Why? Are you offering any…. comfort.

AUDREY Yes, I am.

JACK (on phone) Sex would be nice. Ya, sex. Ya. Full throttled, passionate, wild and wet and horribly illegal.

AUDREY Well, I’m not offering that.

JACK (on phone) You’re so hard. Drat drat drat, I’m just a slave to my hormones and desires. And here I thought I was a Buddhist. Maybe I am a Buddhist? Anyway – and I’ve just figured this one out …. or not – something about a package. A package? You’re not listening you’re not listening to a single word I say.

AUDREY picks up her phone.

AUDREY (on phone) I’m here I’m here. I hear you. Yes yes yes, I hear you.

AUDREY gets out of bed.

AUDREY (on phone) Come back to bed.

JACK (on phone) I don’t know. I don’t know.

AUDREY There there, that’s enough telephoning for tonight.

AUDREY takes his cellphone. She tenderly takes him back to bed. She fixes the bed clothes and tucks him in.

AUDREY There there.

JACK I had a dream you had died. Horrible.

AUDREY I had a dream we had never met.

JACK & AUDREY Nightmares.

AUDREY laughs, warm and full.

They kiss. They kiss again.

JACK (crow-like) Caw…

AUDREY (calf-like) Mmuuh mmuuh….

JACK (crow-like) Caw caw….

AUDREY (calf-like) Möö mmuuh möö….

AUDREY laughs with pleasure and anticipation.

JACK & AUDREY Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.

SFX: Moans and building sexual groans.

JACK & AUDREY CLANG CLANG CLANG.

Fireworks.

JACK & AUDREY (quietly) Went the trolley.

BEAT.

END OF SCENE

•

scene four

Temple Beth Shalom, a synagogue. A Friday evening in summer. Services are in progress – we hear Jewish liturgical chanting off.

JACK enters the foyer of the temple. There is a bazaar in progress. Its very active. People are dancing.

JACK looks around.

JACK People people everywhere – everywhere I look there’s new people – and I don’t know any of them.

A Hassidic Jew is sitting on a strange bench – stone and rough wood; decorated with colourful eiffel towers.

SHLOMO Are you looking for something you can’t find?

JACK I am.

SHLOMO The truth?

JACK Ha. Good. Possibly.

SHLOMO Thus you are a philosopher?

JACK But am I really actually looking?

SHLOMO Some do.

JACK Or just mumbling within myself?

SHLOMO That might be the same thing. Jewish? You’re jewish?

JACK Half.

SHLOMO Half jewish? How can this be?

JACK My father was jewish. He went here for services. Prayers.

JACK is a bit unsteady on his feet.

SHLOMO Sit sit – I made this bench myself.

JACK sits.

SHLOMO So, what do you think? Isn’t it beautiful?

JACK I love the Eiffel Towers.

SHLOMO Thank you. It was my son’s idea.

JACK You know, you remind me of my late father.

SHLOMO Is that a good thing?

JACK Eventually it was.

The BABY gurgles.

JACK Your baby?

SHLOMO My son.

SHLOMO beams.

BABY JACK I am the perfect reason to always to be happy.

JACK He talks.

SHLOMO Yes.

JACK But he’s a baby.

BABY JACK Thus, I have the perfect reason for superannuated contentment.

JACK And smart.

SHLOMO Thank you. We are a good team, he and I.

JACK (to BABY) Hello, you dear little thing.

BABY JACK Hello yourself, strange troubled sad man.

SHLOMO We call him: Jack.

JACK Well, isn’t that just something else – that’s my name too. (to BABY) We have the same name, little thing. I must tell my dear darling nephew about that. His name is Bob – he’s a baby too.

BABY JACK Is that relevant here? One must not be too cloying or pathetic with respect to one’s overly rated sentimentality.

JACK O?

SHLOMO No no no, child, don’t abuse the man.

BABY JACK To speak the truth to a penitent, dearest father – as our great talmudic teachers say – is not without the bounds of decorum. (to JACK) You seem out of sorts, if I may be so bold as to pronounce an opinion on your obvious demeanor.

JACK I do feel disoriented – the town seems somehow different. And nothing in my life seems to make sense.

BABY JACK I know what you feel.

SHLOMO But can you know this, my darling son? These same great talmudic teachers – who are our guides in all things – preclude the knowledge of another’s suffering.

BABY JACK But do they, my father? As is said: a person is only a person when and only when she or he is known to all. (to JACK) I do know what you feel, and not just in the indisputably mystical though culturally exhausted kabbalistic connotation.

BABY JACK shrugs.

BABY JACK Change is deep within us. Yet, there are troubles.

JACK There are more mountains than there used to be.

BABY JACK That is indeed terrible.

SHLOMO And challenging.

JACK And more snow on the mountains.

SHLOMO Mountains are the same as love.

BABY JACK Yes, they are, dear father. As is death.

JACK O?

BABY JACK I think, I believe, please please listen to me, that you will require…. a timeshare in these mountains. It will ease your anxiety and erase your sadness.

JACK What?

BABY JACK When I grow up and I am big and wonderful, I will want to work for the Northern Winter Real Estate Association. Perhaps even as their chairman of the board.

SHLOMO Now now, child, don’t overstate your ambition.

BABY JACK But I must, my dearest father – its my destiny. Under my leadership, our product line will be extensive: chalets, time-shares, winter getaways of all sorts….

JACK Ha. Well, I’m sorry – I know that’s not what I need.

BABY JACK Ah well, yes, no, no no, you are right. I have a flash, I’m getting a clear signal. Yes yes, that’s it that’s it – you’d be much better off as a chef.

JACK O? I was – how did you know that?

BABY JACK Once a chef, always a chef.

BABY JACK smiles.

SHLOMO And why – please tell us if its not too problematic for you – so why did you stop?

BABY JACK Too too much indescribable gluttony, I would imagine.

SHLOMO Now now, let the man speak.

JACK Crazy. You wouldn’t believe the yelling, noise, chaos. Just a kitchen, you say. But…. the endless crux of my life. I had a large and succulent tendrons de veau à la provençale in the oven and twenty tarts and farts in the dining room starving for it. Its time its time, yelled my souschef, its time. Alright, fuck you, alright. I shoved my hands into that seething cauldron of an oven – and forgot the mitts.

BABY JACK Your description is startling.

SHLOMO And vivid too.

BABY JACK I actually smell your searing burning flesh.

BABY JACK gags.

JACK I froze, just stood there, debating quite clearly in my mind while my hands burned. White pain intense and banal. What a quagmire. I just gave it all up after I left the hospital. Haven’t worked since. Drat drat drat drat.

BABY JACK Your hands are all scared.

JACK So many scars in a life.

BABY JACK So ugly.

SHLOMO Now now, child.

JACK I’m so confused. Can you help, help me?

SHLOMO But yes, of course. We will sing an opera.

JACK Opera?

SHLOMO We like to sing. We have found, over the centuries – we jews – that it is a good cure for sadness.

BABY JACK But, dearest and beloved father, we need a woman’s voice.

SHLOMO Yes, we do.

SHLOMO looks about.

JACK My dad – old Bill – used to sing a mean countertenor. But he’s dead.

SHLOMO Hmmmmm….

JACK And there’s Audrey – my wife – she used to sing quite well back when we were young.

AUDREY appears.

AUDREY I have no time for this, Jack. I have three surgeries scheduled. And anyway, you know I hate opera.

JACK I don’t think I did.

BABY JACK Frustration and incontinent busyness – surely that will be seen – in the centuries to come – as the principle reasons for the tragic demise of our civilization, so-called.

AUDREY laughs, robust and sexy.

AUDREY You’re a funny little thing. A pity I cannot abide babies.

BABY JACK Do it, dear beauteous hostile lady, sing our opera – how much time can it take?

AUDREY laughs.

BABY JACK The story will be about you.

AUDREY O?

BABY JACK And him.

AUDREY O?

SHLOMO Do it. It will make him feel alive.

AUDREY laughs.

AUDREY O well, for old Jack, the purported love of my life.

SHLOMO Attention, everyone. Attention.

BABY JACK Please listen to my dear and much beloved father.

SHLOMO Now, we do an opera by the wondrous Giacomo Antonio Domenico Puccini….

BABY JACK Amore Abbandonato. And what can ever be wrong with the twin and harmonious notions of love and destiny?

SHLOMO It is the day after Yom Kippur. Maria, the goat girl from the village meets Feivel, the chief rabbi of Riga….

BABY JACK Who is traveling to the great rabbinical court of Torino.

SHLOMO They fall in love….

BABY JACK She with him despite his many unsightly and disfiguring scars.

SHLOMO And he with her despite the fact that she is not jewish.

BABY JACK They spend an extremely meaningful- though chaste – night together under the dining room table.

SHLOMO Locked in each other’s arms

BABY JACK But chaste.

JACK I love this opera.

AUDREY I don’t care for the story.

JACK But its marvelous.

AUDREY Is it?

JACK And somehow familiar. It seems…. perfect.

AUDREY No.

JACK I’m sorry you don’t like it. The opera makes me feel hopeful – I don’t know why.

AUDREY shrugs.

SHLOMO Come come, we start. This is the chorus at the beginning.

CHORUS (singing)

Now the crow may be singing
Singing singing singing
Singing
Singing singing
Instead of the calf
Calf calf calf calf

BEAT.

CHORUS (singing) Instead of the calf.

JACK (singing) Instead of the calf.

JACK stops singing.

BABY JACK But the chorus isn’t finished.

JACK I’m getting a bad feeling. I can’t go on.

SHLOMO But you must.

JACK I was wrong to be so hopeful. The crow and the calf, that’s what I really have. Brutality and conflict. Its the package I’m left with. Drat. Almost nothing – but I guess that’s better then absolutely nothing.

END OF SCENE.

•

scene five

Outdoors. JACK’s building a fire.

SFX The sounds of a Georgian Bay summer night. Loons.

JACK looks up.

JACK Who’s that? (calling) Hello. Hello. I can see you. You’d better come out – I have a gun. (to himself) What a quirky quagmire. O god, is it Mithroth? Drat. Fuck. Fucking Mithroth.

MITHROTH emerges from the shadows.

JACK What the fuck are you doing here?

MITHROTH Don’t let’s quarrel, Jack.

JACK Not a week goes by when I’m not forced to remember you exist. Drat, scars everywhere I look.

MITHROTH O Jack – you’re always mumbling.

JACK – impatient gesture.

MITHROTH Well, then…. Jack, I wonder if you could enhance my thinking on you and Audrey? Is there a problem here?

JACK Fucking Mithroth – what the fuck do you care?

MITHROTH Very funny, Jack. Always witty is our Jack. Ha ha.

JACK Fortunately – there’s an easy answer….

MITHROTH And that would be?

JACK None of your business.

MITHROTH Ah. Yes, of course. Still, I continue. You and Audrey seem – so it always appeared to me and I have known you both a long long time….

JACK Too long.

MITHROTH What was that, Jack? Yes…. but…. you and Audrey seem more than ever burdened by the breath of experience.

JACK Yes. Good. Not bad. Exactly right.

MITHROTH There is a flavour – a hint – of melancholy. The past as an unbearable burden….

JACK Scars.

MITHROTH Dear O dear. As from the wing no scar the sky retains. So what happens?

JACK She denies it. She denies it but she lies.

MITHROTH puts his hand to his ear.

MITHROTH What was that?

JACK Jesus… what a quagmire.

JACK and MITHROTH are on a street.

JACK My bike is gone. Drat. I’ve had that bike since I was a kid.

MITHROTH throws garbage on the street.

JACK Stop that.

MITHROTH It’s my right. My right and privilege.

JACK It’s always about you, Mithroth….

MITHROTH It’s always me, Jack. Nevermind…. look at this….

MITHROTH points to a boat on a trailer.

MITHROTH Give us a hand. This bloody quixotic thing keeps slipping off. I’ve been at it for a week.

JACK Well the…. hmmmmm?…. we could…. hmmmmmm…. we’ll just wrap this rope around here.

JACK and MITHROTH tie and fuss.

JACK Nice little outboard.

MITHROTH Listen to it sing….

SFX: The outboard engine springs to life.

The boat starts to move.

MITHROTH O look – there’s Audrey. Grab her, will you?

AUDREY I can’t reach.

JACK Lean…. foreword…. more…. more….

AUDREY is hoisted onboard.

AUDREY Have I gained that much weight?

MITHROTH You look trim and lovely.

AUDREY Thanks, dearest.

As if an old habit, AUDREY nuzzles MITHROTH.

AUDREY O look at Jack – Jack loves boats.

JACK Those summers, ya, on Schroon Lake, had a lovely little boat. Five horsepower.

AUDREY (to JACK) You can be so sweet. Look, I’ve got some time – we could be in Paris. We always had a good time in Paris.

JACK Seems a long way.

AUDREY Jack, come on. Jack Jack Jack Jack.

MITHROTH The Bistro Papillon….

AUDREY Or Chez François – I used to go there all the time when I was at the Sorbonne.

MITHROTH Those were salad days. Lovely days.

JACK I love François. He taught me how to cook, you know.

AUDREY I think we all knew that.

They laugh.

JACK O look who’s there. It’s Sandy. (calling) Sandy…. Sandy….

The boat stops.

SANDY Jack. And also Audrey. This is a quality moment.

AUDREY Hello, Sandy. This is The Prince Mithroth.

SANDY O?

MITHROTH Hello.

SANDY Audrey, and prince person, this is Bob.

MITHROTH & AUDREY Bob?

SANDY My baby. Bob the beloved baby Bob. Bob Bob Bobber Bobby Bob Bob Boo. He’s just so new, the dear little thing.

AUDREY We’re going to Paris.

SANDY O they all do at your age. And for the same reasons….

JACK is nuzzling BOB.

JACK O, he’s so sweet. My nephew. My darling little nephew. He looks just like you.

SANDY Really? I though he looked just like Terry.

JACK Actually he looks like Dad.

SANDY I know. I miss Dad.

JACK Me too.

AUDREY is reading a newspaper.

AUDREY Your baby thing is in the newspaper.

SANDY O let me see.

NEWSPAPER (loudly) Desperation! Poverty! Blood! Greed! Death!

AUDREY You know you’re in deep trouble when the newspaper you’re reading starts talking to you.

AUDREY and MITHROTH laugh.

JACK Audrey…. Audrey, come nuzzle Bob, Audrey.

END OF SCENE

•

scene six

Summer evening. A lovely light. Birds chirping. JACK and AUDREY are sitting on their porch.

AUDREY Hot.

JACK Very hot.

AUDREY Much hot.

JACK Hot hot hot.

AUDREY What?

JACK What?

AUDREY What’s that?

JACK What’s what?

AUDREY That.

JACK Where?

AUDREY There.

SFX: Aircraft engines.

AUDREY It’s a plane. A very low plane.

JACK Right, I see it. Much too low. Wait a minute wait a minute – that’s a, that’s a Lancaster bomber. What year is this? They haven’t flown those since that war.

AUDREY They’re circling around, coming back….

JACK O my god….

AUDREY O my god….

JACK O my god….

AUDREY O my god….

SFX: A big crash.

OFF: POOKY starts barking.

AUDREY Who’s got a dog? I hate dogs.

SANDY (off) What’s the emergency number?

AUDREY O my god…. It cartwheeled, O my god….

JACK (calling off) What?

SANDY (off) The emergency number.

JACK (calling off) Nine one one.

SANDY enters, clutching BOB and joins them on the porch.

SANDY Are you sure?

AUDREY It cartwheeled. O my god….

SFX: Sirens in the distance.

JACK Somebody called it already.

SANDY Do you think they’re hurt?

SFX: another explosion

AUDREY O my god.

JACK protects BOB. BOB cries.

JACK O wait. Wait. Wait, there’s somebody.

AUDREY Jack, don’t….

SANDY We should call Terry.

JACK Wait here with Audrey. I’ve got to help….

JACK rushes off.

AUDREY & SANDY (calling off) Be careful, Jack.

AUDREY Bad, very bad.

SANDY Do you think they’re dead?

AUDREY Very very bad.

JACK enters with HUMPHREY and BILL. HUMPHREY wears a bombardier jacket; he has a beard, but only on one side of his face. BILL, very old and frail, is quite natty in a corduroy suit.

JACK They’re alive. There’ll be scars, there’ll be scars for sure.

HUMPHREY What happened?

JACK I’d better see if there’s anyone else.

AUDREY Jack….

JACK exits.

SANDY You crashed on our street.

HUMPHREY I crashed? Who are you?

SANDY I’m Sandy, Jack’s sister.

AUDREY And cartwheeled.

HUMPHREY I cartwheeled? What a mess. I’m so sorry.

SANDY Just as long as you’re OK. And him….

SANDY gestures to the silent BILL.

HUMPHREY Who?

SANDY Him. He looks familiar somehow.

HUMPHREY Never saw the chap before.

SANDY (to BILL) Are you alright?

BILL is silent.

SANDY (to AUDREY) He looks a lot like Jack, do you think?

AUDREY What?

SANDY The same charming bits.

AUDREY Would you, mmmm?, would you – what? – would you like a drink?

HUMPHREY That would be tasty right now. I’d better not – no no, I’d better not – they’ll think I’d been drinking. And I would have been, you see? The manifold pressure just went. Just like that….

HUMPHREY snaps his fingers.

HUMPHREY And what does it mean? What can it all mean? Does it mean anything? Other than death, certain death raining down upon you. I could’ve crashed right on your house, right on you, right down on you. Right straight down right here on you. And you know, I’m not sure I would’ve cared. I’m not sure I would’ve cared at all.

BILL falters.

SANDY (to BILL) Here you’d better sit down. Why does he seem so familiar?

HUMPHREY I’m so happy to be alive.

AUDREY I’m glad. O my…. I’m still so shocked. Are you alight? I’m a doctor.

AUDREY fans herself with her hand.

HUMPHREY You’re so beautiful. You know, I can see your dialogue written right there – right in your eyes.

AUDREY O, everybody can do that.

HUMPHREY I knew you were going to say that.

AUDREY You sure know how to sweet talk a gal.

HUMPHREY There, there, I knew you were going to say that too.

AUDREY What a party. Yikes, I need a drink.

HUMPHREY And I knew that too….

AUDREY exits. BILL starts to follow her.

AUDREY (to BILL) You stay here.

SANDY I’ll take him. He seems just like Jack. Here…. sit sit….

BILL Gazu gazu wabaza. Gazu. Za zu zee. Wugada. Wugada. Toto was wugada. Yabugu dugubu dugada. Gaga zee zu zee za zu.

SANDY What?

JACK enters.

JACK There’s nobody else.

JACK sees BILL.

JACK Wait. O wait wait wait. O my god, Sandy – its Bill, its Bill. Sandy, its Dad.

SANDY Dad?

JACK Dad. Bill…. its me, Jack. And Sandy.

BILL Towns I’ve never heard of but feel as if I do. Or have.

SANDY I thought he seemed familiar. But didn’t he, you know, die?

BILL (singing) I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair.

SANDY Hi, Dad. This is Bob. Your grandson.

AUDREY enters with a tray.

AUDREY Who wants drinks?

SFX: Loud car crash.

JACK turns, terrified, towards the sound.

END OF SCENE.

TO BLACK.

•

SCENE SET 03 – LOVE LEAVING

scene seven

Early evening. JACK is puttering in his kitchen.

We hear barking offstage.

AUDREY (off) Shut that bloody hound up.

JACK (calling off) We don’t have a bloody hound.

AUDREY (off) Then what the fuck is that?

JACK She’s in a foul quagmire.

JACK pokes about looking for the dog.

JACK (calling off) Its definitely inside.

AUDREY (off) Kill it.

JACK shakes his head. He opens the door to the basement and goes down.

BEAT.

Knocking at the kitchen door.

BEAT.

More knocking. JACK enters from the basement and answers the door. Its the new neighbors – HUMPHREY and NATALIE.

HUMPHREY Hello. Hello. We’re the new neighbors.

JACK Neighbors?

HUMPHREY Right over there.

JACK peers – it’s the house next door.

JACK O yes, right ya, there. The old Crowe place. Hi, I’m Jack.

HUMPHREY I’m Humphrey and this is my wife, Natalie.

JACK Natalie Natalie…. and Humphrey – please come in.

NATALIE We’re not disturbing you?

JACK No. No no no no. I was just thinking about making a supper.

NATALIE Then we are disturbing you.

JACK No no. Mostly all prepped – a little fun cassoulet.

JACK smiles.

Dog barks off.

NATALIE That’s Pooky.

JACK You know that hound?

HUMPHREY It’s our dog. I thought I recognized his happy bark. (calling off) Bark. Bark bark.

POOKY (off) Bark bark.

HUMPHREY (calling off) Bark.

NATALIE (calling) Pooky. Pooky Pooky Pooky….

HUMPHREY (calling off) Bark.

BEAT.

JACK Come, we’ll go look see.

JACK and HUMPHREY exit to the basement.

NATALIE looks about the kitchen.

AUDREY (off) Did you kill the bloody thing?

BEAT.

AUDREY (off) Jack?

NATALIE (calling off) He’ll, he’ll be back in just a minute.

We hear JACK and HUMPHREY fussing in the basement.

HUMPHREY (off) Pooky…. Pooky Pooky….

AUDREY (off) What the hell’s going on?

NATALIE (calling off) I don’t know.

JACK and HUMPHREY enter from the basement.

JACK There’s a tunnel.

NATALIE What?

HUMPHREY Yes, from our place to theirs.

AUDREY enters from upstairs.

AUDREY What the bloody hell is going on?

JACK It’s the bloody new neighbors dropped by for a look see. And guess what?

AUDREY What?

JACK Their dog’s found a tunnel between our houses.

AUDREY A tunnel? A tunnel?

JACK In the furnace room. The hound popped right through it.

NATALIE Clever little Pooky. Such a hero. Is he downstairs? Let’s bring him up.

JACK He’s run back.

HUMPHREY He must been looking for rats.

AUDREY Rats.

AUDREY shudders.

NATALIE Pooky loves rats.

HUMPHREY Rat meat is a delicacy in China, you know.

JACK I heard that. I wonder if if there’s a recipe?

JACK goes to his cookbook library.

AUDREY Jack, I will not live in a house with rats.

JACK Well, Pooky will kill them, dear little beast, and then we can eat them. Hey look at this. (reading) rat with chestnut and duck – this is good. Black pepper rat shoulders hot pot.

JACK looks up, beaming.

JACK This is a whole new thing. (reading) And the ultimate signature tour de force: mushu steamed rat.

AUDREY Fuck the world of culinary delights. I need a drink.

JACK O I think we can manage something for you, darling….

JACK opens a large wooden cabinet – its filled with bottles.

AUDREY All grappa, all the time.

JACK Each a special sweet and succulent kiss – bocchino francoli marolo brunello candolini….

AUDREY It’s Jack’s hobby.

JACK Hard to know what to choose….

AUDREY Serve the drinks for god’s sake, Jack

AUDREY scoffs.

JACK examines a glass; he scowls.

JACK This glass has a scar.

JACK bangs about in the kitchen.

HUMPHREY So, ah…. what is it you do?

AUDREY What the fuck do you care?

HUMPHREY O?….

NATALIE and HUMPHREY whisper and play with their noses.

AUDREY What are you doing?

HUMPHREY Nose calisthenics – we always do them when we feel stressed.

NATALIE You push the tip up and down, back and forth.

AUDREY O god.

NATALIE It’s quite refreshing – let me show you.

NATALIE reaches towards AUDREY’s nose.

AUDREY Don’t touch my nose.

A painful silence.

NATALIE Perhaps it is time we go.

AUDREY Well, if you must.

AUDREY looks into HUMPHREY’s eyes.

AUDREY Wait a minute. I know you.

HUMPHREY You do?

AUDREY Wait a minute wait a minute I know you, I do I do. You’re the pilot. (calling to JACK) He’s the pilot.

JACK Which pilot?

AUDREY The one who crashed on the street.

HUMPHREY Point in fact, I rather liked the neighborhood.

AUDREY laughs delightedly.

HUMPHREY (to JACK) How’s your father?

JACK He’s still dead.

HUMPHREY We all live by such selected fictions.

AUDREY What?

HUMPHREY Shall I explain? I feel I’d like to.

AUDREY And I’d like you to.

SANDY enters.

AUDREY O my god, not now.

JACK Hey, sissy.

SANDY Just popping by.

JACK Is Terry here?

SANDY He’s working on the car. Bob’s helping him.

JACK That’s sweet. Come meet our new neighbors. Humphrey and…. ah…. and…. ah….

NATALIE Natalie.

JACK Natalie. My sister, Sandy. (to SANDY) He’s the pilot.

SANDY is sniffing.

SANDY What’s that? Smoke. I smell smoke.

They all sniff.

HUMPHREY It’s true – smoke.

SANDY looks out the window.

SANDY The house next door is on fire.

HUMPHREY What?

They all rush to the windows.

SANDY Whose house is it? O goodness…. a raging inferno.

HUMPHREY It’s our house.

SANDY What?

HUMPHREY Just moved in, point of fact.

NATALIE Our house is burning.

HUMPHREY and NATALIE exit in a panic.

SANDY Bob? I‘d better go find Terry and Bob.

SANDY exits in a rush.

SFX: Noise, shouting, melee, sirens. The roof collapses.

The room is illuminated as the flames grow larger, flare. Sparks.

AUDREY is overcome.

AUDREY O my god.

JACK puts his arms around her. AUDREY sobs.

JACK So fast.

Disheveled, covered in soot, HUMPHREY and NATALIE return.

NATALIE Horrible horrible…. we’ve lost everything.

HUMPHREY Everything.

JACK Might be a good time for grappa. Ya….

END OF SCENE

•

scene eight

HUMPHREY and AUDREY walk in an art museum. Bright and white. Large canvases of sublime and simple gestures.

A CHORUS sings softly in the background.

HUMPHREY I’ve fallen in love with you.

AUDREY laughs – a ripe Anna Magnani laugh.

HUMPHREY O? I didn’t want to….

AUDREY Thanks for that.

HUMPHREY Yes, but there it is. I love you, Audrey.

AUDREY Maudlin.

HUMPHREY I hope not.

AUDREY Ummmmmmm….

They stand in front of a large canvas. (JACK is the canvas.)

HUMPHREY This one means: kyomu.

AUDREY Did you say: kyomu?

HUMPHREY Nothingness. The Japanese have four hundred words for it.

AUDREY Really? That many?

HUMPHREY It seems necessary

AUDREY Well, we have ten thousand words for: dysfunctional human endeavor including body parts so I guess I understand.

HUMPHREY Give me an example.

AUDREY O? Almost anything. Oufffff. Ah…. good intentions, loyalty, betrayal, killed with a kissing knife, love….

HUMPHREY That’s very complex. You are very complex.

AUDREY I find it comforting.

HUMPHREY You’re smashing. That means: attractive.

They move to another canvas.

AUDREY This one has a faded quality…. more attractive than the last, anyway….

HUMPHREY Yes, I suppose.

AUDREY (imitating HUMPHREY) Yes, I suppose. (normal) You always seem reticent to commit yourself.

HUMPHREY Do I? I said I loved you.

AUDREY Do you say it to Natalie?

HUMPHREY Do you say it to Jack?

AUDREY Shush.

HUMPHREY Now you seem reticent.

AUDREY So? And?

HUMPHREY Yes yes yes. That’s it. Right. Exactly. You are so attractive. More than that. Beautiful. Its why I love you.

AUDREY You don’t love me. You don’t know me.

HUMPHREY I want to. Would you like to sit? You seem to be limping.

They sit.

HUMPHREY What’s, what’s this bandage?

AUDREY This old thing? I cut myself.

HUMPHREY How?

AUDREY Stupid.

HUMPHREY Me?

AUDREY No, me.

AUDREY takes out her penknife.

AUDREY With this.

HUMPHREY Whittling again, were you? O, there’s a scar. Is it serious?

AUDREY O, for god’s sake, I am a doctor. I should be working now – I cancelled a surgery for this, you know.

HUMPHREY gets down on his knees; he kisses the bandage.

AUDREY Stop that.

HUMPHREY I want to make it better.

AUDREY Thank you. Now, get up.

HUMPHREY Tell me something….

AUDREY Well, I love you too.

HUMPHREY makes a face.

AUDREY What?

HUMPHREY “I love you too” is passive. “I love you” is active.

AUDREY So?

HUMPHREY More attractive.

AUDREY I…. I don’t want to be attractive.

HUMPHREY Alive and in the moment? A strong core? Compassionate above all? It seems good.

AUDREY Hmmmmm? What I want to be – alright I’ll tell you: fragile as paper, bold as the north wind. The Queen of all the demons.

HUMPHREY Well, I think you’ve succeeded admirably. And then some.

AUDREY Can I tell you what I really want? – intimacy and…. vulnerability. Can you offer me that?

HUMPHREY What about Jack?

AUDREY I never found Jack attractive. No intimacy with Jack, no vulnerability.

HUMPHREY But love?

AUDREY Of a sort. Some sort. I don’t know. I don’t want to be with Jack. He brings out the worst in me.

HUMPHREY Why did you marry?

AUDREY Stupid.

HUMPHREY Me?

AUDREY This time – yes. At the start, who knows anything?

HUMPHREY I loved Natalie from the start.

AUDREY You keep bringing her up. Don’t. And don’t underestimate Jack, just because he seems like nothing.

HUMPHREY He does, doesn’t he. Very kyomu.

AUDREY Ha. Jack was a great chef. His restaurant was always packed. Always. Three stars, all of that. He gave it up.

HUMPHREY Why?

AUDREY A long story. An old story. Our story, more interesting to me now. Nevermind Jack. What’s the one single thing you would change in your life if you could?

HUMPHREY I’d have you as my wife.

AUDREY That’s sweet. Me, I wish I could have more – a bigger dollop – of the kindness gene.

JACK, the painting, sighs.

HUMPHREY The kindness gene?….

HUMPHREY laughs.

AUDREY Well, I don’t have it.

HUMPHREY Are you kind to your patients?

AUDREY Am I kind to them? I take care of their problems as best I can. Some of them survive. Is that kindness? I don’t think so.

HUMPHREY Do you mean “nice”?

AUDREY snorts.

AUDREY Do you think I’m nice?

AUDREY throws apples at HUMPHREY. She laughs – full throated and sexy.

HUMPHREY Hey, stop that.

AUDREY See?

HUMPHREY Jesus, what a bloody thing.

AUDREY laughs and poses.

HUMPHREY You are impressive.

HUMPHREY gives AUDREY a brass chain with a medallion attached.

AUDREY What’s this?

AUDREY reads the medallion.

AUDREY (reading) The fear of everything is love.

HUMPHREY Put it on.

AUDREY I don’t think so.

HUMPHREY Please.

AUDREY No.

JACK, the canvas, falls off the wall.

END OF SCENE

•

scene nine

Evening. JACK and AUDREY in Chez Zuzu, a restaurant. They’ve finished dining, and wend their way to the coatcheck.

JACK Goulash? What’s suddenly so wrong with goulash? Chez Zuzu makes the best goulash in the accessible world. Fluffy, it is.

AUDREY What?

JACK Jesus, boys, I wish my goulash was that fluffy.

AUDREY O stop it.

AUDREY burps; JACK chuckles.

At the cloakroom. DELORES is helping SHLOMO on with his coat.

SHLOMO Thank you, thank you very much. You are very kind. Very kind.

SHLOMO smiles at JACK as he exits.

SHLOMO Good yom tov, good yom tov….

JACK I know him. I’m sure I know him. God, I can’t remember where. Or when. I feel so disoriented. I’m leaving my coat.

AUDREY What?

JACK I’m leaving my coat.

AUDREY snorts.

AUDREY I’m taking mine.

AUDREY hands the ticket to DELORES (She doesn’t notice DELORES).

JACK It’s not that cold out.

AUDREY It’s bloody winter.

JACK I don’t want to be dragging it around all night.

DELORES So what are you saying, Jack – you don’t want your coat?

AUDREY Delores?

DELORES Audrey?

AUDREY What are you doing here?

DELORES Making ends meet. So…. Jack, you want your coat?

JACK No, I’m leaving it for the evening.

DELORES That’s real dumb.

JACK Shut up.

DELORES You shut up.

JACK Or what? You’ll take me down?

DELORES I don’t want any trouble, Jack.

AUDREY So what are you saying?: I don’t pay you enough?

DELORES No one is ever paid enough.

AUDREY I could pay you more.

DELORES But would you?

JACK Hey, handle that coat carefully – do you hear me? – its cashmere.

DELORES sighs.

DELORES I don’t want any trouble, Jack – my hands are tied. If the coat stays, you pay.

JACK More money?

DELORES It’s all about money, Jack.

JACK God, that’s depressing.

DELORES It’s the way it works.

AUDREY You are crazy.

DELORES (to AUDREY) Who?

JACK Alright alright alright.

DELORES A hundred and twenty-seven dollars.

JACK A hundred and twenty-seven? Jesus, I could buy another coat for that.

DELORES The price would be optimistic, if you wished (imitating JACK) genuine cashmere.

AUDREY laughs.

JACK Please don’t laugh.

AUDREY Don’t tell me what to do.

JACK (to DELORES) What time do you close?

SANDY enters.

SANDY Jack.

JACK Hey, sissy. Did you have the goulash? Good, eh?

SANDY I’m a vegetarian now.

AUDREY laughs.

JACK (to AUDREY) Please don’t laugh.

SANDY Have you seen Terry?

AUDREY Not in a rat’s age.

SANDY Is that a no?

JACK Ha.

SANDY Anyway, I think he’s in the can puking his guts out. Hey I had a nice chat with Dad today.

JACK Dad?

SANDY He sounded great. Well, you know Dad.

AUDREY But he’s dead.

SANDY shrugs.

JACK Where’s Bob?

SANDY He’s on the table.

JACK peers.

SANDY See you….

SANDY exits.

AUDREY Your sister gets on my nerves.

AUDREY rolls her eyes.

JACK Do not roll your eyes at me. I will not be diminished. Look at that, look at that.

AUDREY What?

JACK She’s dragging my coat on the floor. (calling) Stop that. Delores, stop that.

DELORES Don’t do anything, Jack…. please don’t do anything.

AUDREY Jack, take your bloody fucking coat and let’s go.

JACK I don’t want to take my coat.

AUDREY You’re driving me crazy.

DELORES Is it my turn yet?

JACK laughs.

AUDREY (to DELORES) Its embarrassing to me that you’re here. I only do what I can. We have fun.

DELORES snorts.

AUDREY We do. We laugh

DELORES You laugh – I laugh with you

JACK Is nobody listening to me? Drat.

DELORES (to AUDREY) You used to give more.

JACK (crow-like) Caw kraa caw. Caw. Caw.

AUDREY (calf-like) Mmuuh möö. Möö.

JACK (crow-like) Caw. Caw.

AUDREY (calf-like) Möö. Mmuuh.

JACK (crow-like) Kraa.

These two speeches together:

AUDREY (calf-like) Möö. Möö. Möö. Möö. Mmuuuuuuuuuuuh.

JACK (crow-like) Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Kraaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

BEAT.

JACK I can’t do this anymore.

AUDREY What?

JACK Möö möö caw caw möööööö caaaaaaaw. That.

AUDREY You’re crazy.

JACK Be that as it may.

HORST comes over.

HORST Is there a problem here?

JACK You’re fucking right there is. Nobody’s listening to me: I resent being diminished. That coupled with a general pervasive debilitating sense of disorientation. I’d say that was a problem – wouldn’t you?

HORST I’m generally not interested – generally – in your problems.

DELORES laughs.

JACK Who are you? Wait. Wait. I know you. See? This is exactly what I’m saying.

AUDREY You’re raving.

JACK Again? What a quagmire.

DELORES I know these people, boss – they’re trouble. Scary trouble.

JACK All scarred up and nowhere to go.

DELORES whispers in HORST’s ear.

HORST O? (to AUDREY & JACK) I presume you’ve come to dine….

AUDREY We’ve already eaten. It was very fluffy.

AUDREY laughs.

JACK It was.

HORST Good. So now you wish to retrieve your coat?

JACK No, I wish to leave it here.

HORST O I see, a joke. Very funny.

HORST does something very very frightening.

JACK Jesus, stop that. You’re scaring me.

HORST Yes, exactly.

DELORES laughs.

JACK I want merely to continue leaving my coat here – and later – at some other moment – to retrieve it.

AUDREY Take the bloody coat. Let’s just go.

JACK (to HORST) You render me speechless – as you’ll all agree: a rare occurrence. Would that generally register as a concern with you?

HORST Perhaps. Perhaps not.

JACK And your sudden and imminent death?

HORST Perhaps. Perhaps not.

AUDREY Jack! You’re mad.

JACK O, I’m sorry, was I speaking out loud?

HORST Delores, give this gentleman his coat and the freedom of the street.

JACK (to AUDREY) Do you love me now?

END OF SCENE.

•

scene ten

AUDREY’s office. AUDREY is examining HUMPHREY. He is wearing a split hospital gown.

Bending over the examination table, AUDREY is looking up HUMPHREY’s rectum with a flashlight. She is wearing the medallion he gave her in the previous scene.

Meanwhile, outside the frame, a watching JACK….

AUDREY Bend a little lower please. Lower….

HUMPHREY Is this good. Ow.

AUDREY’S robust laugh.

AUDREY Just relax. Lower please…. O?

HUMPHREY Is it bad?

AUDREY Very complex.

HUMPHREY Is that bad?

As AUDREY pokes and prods, the medallion catches in his rectum.

AUDREY Oops.

HUMPHREY Ow.

AUDREY Watch a minute….

HUMPHREY Ow ow ow….

AUDREY Don’t move – the bloody medallion’s gotten stuck….

HUMPHREY I gave you that medallion.

AUDREY Well, I’m taking it back….

She pulls the medallion out.

CHORUS SFX (Pop).

AUDREY There.

The watching JACK suddenly exits only to immediately reappear. A ruckus, as JACK breaks in, with DELORES on his back.

JACK Stop hitting me.

DELORES You can’t come in here.

JACK You’re always blocking the door.

DELORES That’s my job, honey.

JACK Don’t you dare “honey” me.

AUDREY Jack?

HUMPHREY tries to hide his semi-nakedness.

JACK I have to talk to you.

DELORES I could take you down. I could take you down right now.

JACK I really really doubt it.

AUDREY Jack….

JACK We have to talk.

AUDREY At home? Later?

JACK Ha ha. That’s cute. You’re never home. Never. And I know you’re having an affair – a dreary word and a dreary world, the two – with him.

HUMPHREY What?

JACK (to HUMPHREY) Don’t dare deny it, you sleazy shitey scumbag. All protests are futile.

DELORES That’s crazy talk.

JACK Sad sad sad. I’m having a bad year and even singing doesn’t work anymore. And meanwhile you’re doing what with this – tacky tacky tacky – this….

JACK sneers.

JACK This…. person.

HUMPHREY I am a person.

JACK Shit up your ass. Ha. (to AUDREY) Admit it. Admit it admit it admit it.

AUDREY and HUMPHREY, a long look. Is it true?

JACK (to DELORES) What are you looking at?

DELORES Shut up.

JACK You shut up.

DELORES You shut up.

JACK Ha.

DELORES I’m taking you down. Right now.

JACK and DELORES fight.

SFX: More crashes and bangs.

DELORES renders JACK immobile.

JACK (to DELORES) Brute.

JACK picks himself up.

JACK Jesus, my head hurts. Please, please O don’t concern yourself – I’m alright, Jack. Whatever happened to kindness?

MITHROTH enters.

AUDREY & DELORES & HUMPHREY The Prince Mithroth.

JACK Drat. Fucking Mithroth.

MITHROTH O, Jack…. I am only myself.

A vulnerable AUDREY goes to MITHROTH.

AUDREY Daddy, I’m having such a hard time

MITHROTH There, there, I’m here now.

JACK (to MITHROTH) Why is it you’re everywhere I look?….

JACK pirouettes.

JACK He’s always here? Its Paris all over again. Its never stopped, never stopped. You two living together….

MITHROTH In Paris, Jack? Do you mean in Paris? Merely friends sharing a kitchen.

JACK And a bedroom.

MITHROTH Two bedrooms.

JACK Scars.

MITHROTH I am a Prince, Jack – and a virgin as well. If that’s any consolation….

JACK Aversion?

JACK’s pun is ignored by all.

JACK Nevermind this. You want to know something? It turns out I had had a dream. So what Audrey just said to me was just exactly what I had dreamt. Amazing? It goes on. Finally, naturally, we’re in a fussy mood, she and I and self-inflict damage on ourselves.

DELORES Audrey is fabulous. Fabulous.

AUDREY smiles winningly at DELORES.

DELORES Jack is nothing. Washed up has-been. Not just my opinion – her’s too.

JACK (to AUDREY) Is that true?

AUDREY nods.

JACK Blood. Misery. Pain. Degradation. Humiliation. Misery – O I said that already.

MITHROTH I am so so sorry it has all come to this impasse. A pity. It was better at the beginning. I need more delectable and delicious detail.

JACK No.

MITHROTH Please, Jack, please please please. Please please please please….

JACK (to AUDREY) This has to be told. (to MITHROTH) Audrey slashes her ankle. I stick my blade into my arm – lucky me, I hit an artery. The paramedic is forthcoming and less than sympathetic. You stupid stupid people, she said. I had to agree. Scar poxed.

DELORES This is all wrong. He’s telling the story wrong.

JACK You weren’t there.

DELORES If I had been, I’d have taken you down.

JACK But you weren’t there, were you? And you didn’t, did you? You know what? It’ll never be as good again. I remember you when you were less…. unkind. We used to be friends, you and I. (to MITHROTH) Anyway, enough detail?

MITHROTH Not bad. You know, Jack, I’ve come to think despite all your ravings – this has to be said – I suspect you know nothing of truth.

JACK Ya? When I look into your eyes I can see what you’re going to say next.

MITHROTH What?

JACK I can see your dialogue written right there. (as MITHROTH) You mean – what do you mean?

MITHROTH You mean – what do you mean?

AUDREY I am having an affair with Humphrey.

JACK Aha.

AUDREY I love him.

HUMPHREY You do?

AUDREY Madly.

HUMPHREY I’m so so…. moved. You dear sweet person.

AUDREY You dear sweet person.

HUMPHREY O, I say.

JACK What confused consternated crap. What is it?

AUDREY Humphrey is sensitive.

JACK I’m sensitive.

AUDREY He’s considerate.

JACK I’m considerate.

AUDREY He’s caring.

JACK I’m caring.

AUDREY He’s passionate.

JACK This is stupid. Don’t, for god sake, don’t. Don’t do this. Why? Tell me that at least. Stay. I’ll cook only Italian all the time. Just Italian. Classic mezzogiorno. No more experiments.

AUDREY I hate your cooking.

MITHROTH Never explain, Audrey.

JACK is beside himself.

JACK I’ll get lawyers. You’ll wish you’d never been born.

AUDREY I already do.

JACK sighs.

AUDREY We wanted too much of each other

JACK But that’s what love is. That’s exactly what love is. Its a whole package…. That’s it, a whole package. A whole bloody package. What a quagmire.

JACK silently leaves.

END OF SCENE.

•

scene eleven

AUDREY’s office. A discrete collection of model Eiffel Towers. AUDREY stands, contemplating a large medical drawing, a cutaway of a rectum.

JACK enters.

AUDREY Jack.

JACK Audrey.

AUDREY How surprising to see you.

JACK Why not?

AUDREY Why not indeed.

JACK looks at the medical drawing.

JACK Interesting….

AUDREY A trifling post-conceptual rendering.

JACK But large.

AUDREY Yes. So goes the scale, so goes the mind.

JACK looks out the window.

JACK I feel so disoriented – I’ve lost my way – the town seems different somehow.

AUDREY Demonstrate, please.

JACK More mountains. And more scars on said mountains. Drat. And why is this? I am distressed, again anxious. A veritable quagmire.

AUDREY Poor dear thing.

JACK picks up an Eiffel model.

JACK This one?

AUDREY Yes?

JACK I believe it was the first.

AUDREY Was it?

JACK Yes. Bought on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques.

AUDREY The day François promoted you to souschef.

JACK Yes. We had such a lovely time.

AUDREY In Paris?

JACK Yes.

AUDREY Yes. My work at the Sorbonne. Life was powerful then.

JACK Yes. Now sad.

AUDREY Why?

JACK I will not be diminished by anything less that the truth. I wish to be loved.

AUDREY You dear mad thing.

JACK I will hardly accept such rendering of my fragile social persona.

AUDREY is wearing the HUMPHREY medallion; JACK notices it.

JACK What is that, pray tell?

AUDREY What, dearest?

JACK That medallion – I do not recall it.

AUDREY This? It’s nothing.

JACK O?

JACK sighs.

JACK I know you don’t love me anymore – what am I to do?

SFX: Loud car crash.

JACK turns, terrified, towards the sound.

Suddenly, AUDREY is in great pain. She clutches her midriff.

JACK What’s this? What’s this?

AUDREY Pain.

JACK Digestion?

AUDREY Not. A possibility has been suggested by The Prince Mithroth…. I wish you liked The Prince Mithroth.

JACK His diagnosis, please.

AUDREY Inflamed gall bladder.

JACK Where is this gall bladder? Demonstrate please.

AUDREY Attached to the liver.

JACK How dark and confusing.

AUDREY There. There…. its passed.

JACK Good. Still….

AUDREY What?

JACK Dust, nothing but dust.

AUDREY How nice – you remember Mr Eliot. I must, I must go. A surgery to perform.

AUDREY exits.

JACK weeps.

JACK Bitter tears

SANDY appears, carrying a swaddled BOB.

SANDY You did good, Jack. You stood up to her.

JACK I will not be diminished, Sandy.

SANDY I know. Here, hold Bob.

JACK nuzzles Bob.

JACK I love this.

SANDY It’s Terry’s favourite thing too.

JACK You think I did good?

SANDY nods.

JACK Then why do I feel so bad? Poor me, poor me, ever the jealous brooder. A sink full of wet socks. What to do but wring them out and hang them to dry? Spilling the lentils. The sound of it. O fuck, I say. Well, wouldn’t you?

SANDY Jack. Dear Jack. Jack Jack Jack – I know I would.

JACK smiles.

JACK Would you?

SANDY Of course.

JACK, a sigh, a moan.

JACK I’m fading fast, sissy. Dear Jack says you, poor Jack says I, but, hey, a life definitely on the wane. O man. O man. I go to her office, I confront her, I express my pain. All the time I’ve wasted. Always Audrey. (as AUDREY) After all these years, Jack, you poor slob, what can be left between us? (as HIMSELF) Always Audrey. Only Audrey.

JACK, a small sob. BOB joins in. SANDY tries to take BOB – JACK gently but firmly holds onto the child.

JACK (to BOB) You dear little thing.

JACK looks at BOB; hugs him.

JACK (to SANDY) And I am, yes I am a poor slob – and that’s what’s left and that’s the very point. It’ll never be as good again, Sandy. Never. A package of shite. That’s it, that’s it exactly…. a package of shite.

BEAT.

JACK Drat.

END OF ACT

TO BLACK

•

ACT TWO

SCENE SET 04 – DARKNESS AND BLACKNESS

scene twelve

A prison camp. JACK, AUDREY and HUMPHREY in the yard. Is it raining? Or just a mean and bitter drizzle?

HORST, the commandant, and CURLY, a soldier, enter.

CURLY Attention, attention prisoners. Line up for inspection. Now now now – you can do better than that mealy slugged-faced fucking moronic shit for brains beasts of the rectum fucking shites.

JACK groans.

AUDREY Shush.

HORST (to HUMPHREY) You.

HUMPHREY Yes, Doctor.

HORST (to HUMPHREY) Your personal hygiene is disgusting.

HUMPHREY Yes, Doctor.

HORST No food for this man for two days.

CURLY Sir.

HORST (to JACK) You. I don’t like the glint in your eyes.

JACK Ha.

CURLY What?

HORST Beat this man.

AUDREY No, Doctor, don’t.

HORST What?

JACK What she means is – ah….

HORST What?

JACK I know what – there’s been a small error.

HORST An error?

AUDREY We shouldn’t actually be here.

CURLY laughs.

HORST (to CURLY) Shut up.

CURLY Sir.

HORST indicates AUDREY’s medallion.

HORST What is that?

HORST tears the medallion from her neck.

AUDREY Ow….

HORST (reading) The fear of everything is love.

HORST scoffs.

HORST I don’t think so. Pathetic.

HORST slaps AUDREY.

HORST No, less than pathetic – pathetic would be an achievement for you.

HORST spits in AUDREY’s face.

HORST Where did you get this?

AUDREY He gave it to me.

HORST indicates JACK.

HORST This one?

AUDREY indicates HUMPHREY.

AUDREY No…. him.

HORST No food – three days.

CURLY Sir.

AUDREY We are not the people you think we are.

HORST No? Aha….

AUDREY We’re Audrey and Jack.

JACK Harmless.

AUDREY Perfectly harmless.

JACK A smidge complicated.

AUDREY But who isn’t.

HUMPHREY That’s so very interesting. I was thinking that very same thing earlier today. Your hospitality, Doctor, allows me much and plenty time to think. I’ve discovered my life isn’t always what I thought it was. Can you believe it?

HORST Beat this man.

CURLY beats HUMPHREY.

JACK I hate this.

AUDREY Shush.

JACK And there’s always new people – everywhere I look I see new people – and I don’t know them and I don’t want to know them. Does that make me a bad person?

AUDREY If only we could get a message to The Prince Mithroth.

JACK I can’t bear this anymore. I feel so disoriented. I can’t wait, I don’t want to wait, I’d rather die. Drat. This, this is a quagmire.

The sun is large as it suddenly sets. Very large. Very stunning.

HORST and CURLY turn to admire the setting sun; they are captivated by the sight.

HORST Beautiful, simply beautiful.

CURLY So so beautiful.

JACK Here’s our chance to escape.

HUMPHREY Take me with you.

BABY JACK appears.

BABY JACK And me. Please take me – please – if you would be so gracious and forever kind.

JACK It’s Baby Jack.

BABY JACK How are you, my dear benevolent generous sir.

JACK (to HUMPHREY) Scoop up the kid and let’s boot it.

HUMPHREY scoops up little BABY JACK; they run fast and far. Eventually they are on a city street.

AUDREY Which way should we go?

JACK I don’t know. I don’t know this place. I feel so disoriented.

HUMPHREY I’m going to wait at that bus stop.

BABY JACK A most excellent plan; I agree completely.

AUDREY Bus stop?

HUMPHREY The two of us, we’ll just blend right in. What could be more natural than a man and a baby?

AUDREY A bad idea.

JACK Very bad.

BABY JACK We simply don’t concur – surely a most reasonable product of discourse? – and that is that. A pity but regrets, ah yes, regrets, I’ve had some few. Still, one must go on….

HUMPHREY The bus stop is a perfectly sensible idea.

AUDREY Jack, do something.

JACK shrugs.

Suddenly a truck screeching to a halt. SFX: truck breaks, noisy.

JACK and AUDREY hide behind a potted plant.

CURLY and HORST jump out. HUMPHREY panics, drops BABY JACK, and runs.

CURLY Hey, stop. Stop.

HORST Nevermind – kill him.

SFX: Machine gun fire.

CURLY shoots the fleeing HUMPHREY who falls horribly dead.

AUDREY & JACK O my god.

BABY JACK And me? What of me? What of poor dear little innocent me? Am I to die in the street as if a impoverished persecuted plague ridden god-forsaken rodent?

HORST (to CURLY) This one, this one I want to keep.

AUDREY & JACK O my god.

JACK and AUDREY turn and run.

JACK Which way?

AUDREY What about those woods?

JACK Where?

AUDREY There.

JACK O you are clever.

AUDREY Act natural.

JACK O ya, like I’m feeling really natural.

AUDREY Let’s not run.

JACK But I want to run.

AUDREY Put your arm around me.

JACK I’ve forgotten how.

AUDREY Shush….

JACK and AUDREY reach the woods and hide.

JACK O my god – look.

HORST is lurking about at the fringes of the woods.

JACK This was a stupid place to hide.

AUDREY O ya, right – and we had a whole lot of choice.

JACK Paris would’ve been a better choice.

AUDREY smiles.

AUDREY Shush….

HORST is just in front of JACK and AUDREY – he doesn’t see them.

JACK jumps out and tackles HORST. They struggle.

HORST You…. will regret…. this….

JACK Audrey…. Audrey…. kick him in the balls.

AUDREY Jack, what a horrible thought.

JACK O I’m sorry, was I speaking out loud?

AUDREY laughs as she attacks HORST. HORST falls back, gasping in pain. JACK kills him with a large rock.

JACK Wow….

JACK falls over.

AUDREY Jack, what’s wrong?

JACK He cut me. Here….

JACK points to his thigh.

JACK Is it bad?

AUDREY Pretty bad.

JACK Drat, disorientation suddenly seems a nothing problem compared to this.

AUDREY Rest.

JACK You are kind to me

AUDREY No I’m not. Now be quiet.

JACK Tell me a story.

AUDREY Do you remember when we met?

JACK No. Yes. No.

JACK winces in pain.

AUDREY At that party. After finals. You came up to me and said: you’re the only one here I don’t know.

JACK I did, didn’t I?

AUDREY And then we spent the night under the dining room table.

JACK Ya.

AUDREY So many years ago.

JACK A lifetime ago.

AUDREY I’ve never loved anyone else.

AUDREY & JACK (singing softly) Clang, clang, clang went the trolley
Ding, ding, ding went the bell
Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings
From the moment I saw you I fell….

CURLY enters.

CURLY (calling off) Where’s the Commandant?

ANOTHER SOLDIER (off) I saw him go into the woods.

CURLY (calling) Hello…. Hello…. (calling off) Cover me….

CURLY enters the woods.

CURLY Hey, I see them….

JACK covers his face as explosions firestorms shrapnel as well as general impaling and uncontrollable spasms engulf the stage.

END OF SCENE.

•

scene thirteen

JACK’s kitchen. Early morning – the sun is just about coming up.

JACK enters, carrying a goldfish bowl.

The lights go out.

JACK Drat – what happened to the lights?

JACK, flashlight in hand, looks about the kitchen.

The kitchen is filled with various and many goldfish bowls; some of the fish are quite large though this may be a distortion due to the extreme curvature of the glass.

JACK (shouting) We have to protect the fish from the cat. If we had a cat….

Suddenly JACK rushes to gently pick up a fish.

JACK How did this get here?

A tear from JACK. Is it still alive?

AUDREY enters, dressed in a power suit.

AUDREY What happens?

JACK I don’t know.

JACK puts the fish in the water – it floats on the top.

AUDREY Dead?

JACK I don’t think so. O wait – its mouth is moving.

AUDREY Ha.

JACK looks at AUDREY – a pained look.

AUDREY Good. Well, I’m off.

AUDREY exits.

JACK (quietly) Will you be home for dinner?

SFX: A slashing whirling noise off.

AUDREY laughs, off.

JACK What?

AUDREY (off) You’re going to want to deal with this.

In a flap and a flurry, JACK exits to the garden. One of the salient features: layers of giant hedges. HORST and CURLY are cutting and slashing the hedges.

JACK Excuse me.

BEAT.

JACK (shouting) Excuse me.

BEAT.

JACK (shouting) Hey….

CURLY and HORST stop.

JACK What the fuck?

HORST Please refrain from foul language, sir.

JACK I’ll say exactly what I fucking well want to.

HORST I would advise you not.

HORST advances on JACK.

JACK This is my property. I advise you to shove your tongue up you rectum.

CURLY What did he say?

HORST I won’t repeat it.

CURLY Hey, was that the wife? What a peach.

JACK is aghast; he is about to speak when SANDY enters (pulling BOB behind her in a little red wagon).

SANDY What are they doing, Jack?

JACK Just a minute – wait – I don’t know.

HORST These types of hedges, they’ll be trouble latter on.

CURLY Lovely specimens….

HORST But frankly planted too close.

CURLY Much too close together.

HORST Later this will be a problem.

CURLY A big problem.

HORST You’ll thank us for this.

CURLY They always do.

HORST You’ll thank us.

CURLY And you’ll pay us.

SANDY What should we do?

JACK shakes his head.

SANDY A hedge as old as the hills. Ugly, now. Pity….

CURLY It needed to be done.

SANDY We should do something. Should we call Audrey?

JACK No god no.

HORST and CURLY laugh and laugh.

SANDY We should do something.

JACK Stop stop stop stop what you’re doing.

CURLY Or what?

JACK pulls out his penknife.

JACK Or this.

HORST and CURLY laugh, the tears steaming down their faces.

SANDY Wait a minute. Terry has something better.

SANDY exits, with BOB.

HORST Is that the knife she stabbed you with?

JACK Who?

HORST and CURLY laugh.

CURLY That Audrey person.

JACK No.

HORST Its not what we heard.

JACK I stabbed myself. Jesus….

CURLY While we’re talking we’re still on the clock.

HORST Paid by the hour.

JACK Not by me.

HORST Every second of your life that passes is gone – lost – forever.

CURLY The bill keeps getting bigger and bigger.

HORST An understanding will be required.

JACK Go. Go away. I don’t like you.

CURLY Boo hoo.

HORST Someone named The Prince Mithroth asked us to do this.

CURLY Or maybe it was the wife, eh?

JACK groans.

HORST You know this said The Prince Mithroth, do you, sir?

CURLY He told us to do this job.

HORST Then he run away.

CURLY He run far away.

HORST He run away into the night.

CURLY The deepest darkest night.

HORST Run run run run run away.

JACK I’m…. I’m I’m….

HORST sneers.

SANDY enters with a massive automatic weapon. A bazooka?

CURLY and HORST laugh.

SANDY I’ll take care of this, Jack. Stand back….

HORST More trouble, eh, Curly.

CURLY Always trouble, Horst.

HORST It follows us wherever we go.

SANDY cocks the weapon.

JACK O for god’s sake, Sandy, be careful.

HORST Yes, be careful, little woman.

SANDY Get out. Now.

SFX: SANDY fires off a burst.

CURLY The woman’s crazy.

HORST But I like her style.

CURLY We’re not finished.

HORST Not even close.

CURLY First, we’re going to do the work here.

HORST Then we’re going to do this little woman’s house.

CURLY Take it right down to the ground?

HORST That’s it – take it right down to the ground.

CURLY I’d like that. I’d really like that. I’d really really really really really like that.

HORST And then let’s crush that little baby Bob while we’re at it.

CURLY Ya, Let’s get rid of that Bob.

CURLY & HORST Oink oink oink.

CURLY and HORST laugh.

SANDY Take that…. and that….

SANDY shoots CURLY and HORST. SFX: Many gunshots. CURLY and HORST scream and fall dead. A messy affair.

SANDY You did good, Jack. You stood up to them.

JACK I don’t know.

SANDY You’re a brave man, Jack.

JACK I suppose….

SANDY I love you for it.

Police sirens in the distance.

SANDY Ugly, now. Poor hedge.

The lights come on.

JACK O, the power’s back.

The lights go out.

JACK Drat. What happened to the lights?

SFX: Loud car crash.

JACK turns, terrified, towards the sound.

END OF SCENE.

TO BLACK.

•

SCENE SET 05 – THE DEATH OF AUDREY

scene fourteen

JACK (off) Forget it, just forget it, Sandy.

Daytime. JACK’s large sunny kitchen. A large collection of colourful Eiffel Tower models squirreled here and there.

Bowls of goldfish – there are many such now in the kitchen.

JACK enters with a goldfish bowl. He puts down the bowl, opens a window and yells outside.

JACK (calling off) OK, I’m listening.

SANDY (off) Terry took the message.

JACK (calling off) What did she want? Her freedom?

SANDY (off) The message was: no message.

BOB cries.

SANDY (off) There there, you dear little piggy poo.

JACK & SANDY Oink oink.

JACK (calling off) Is she coming back, you dear old thing?

SANDY (off) O I’m sure I don’t know, you dear old thing. That’s too complicated for me. (singing) I will not languish.

JACK joins her.

JACK & SANDY (singing) I will not laaaaaaang-guish.

BOB joins in.

JACK (calling off) Just a minute, just a minute…. when did Terry take the message?

SANDY (off) Was there a message?….

JACK (calling off) Just a minute….

JACK exits outside.

BEAT.

AUDREY enters with a few suitcases and a large package.

BEAT.

JACK enters with goldfish.

JACK Ah. You. Well. Well well – this is a surprise.

AUDREY Look what I brought you.

JACK For me?

JACK opens the package – it’s a very large skillet.

JACK O? And will it fit on the cooktop?

AUDREY I wonder….

JACK gets into the skillet. He washes the salad greens. AUDREY laughs her big laugh.

AUDREY What are you doing?

JACK I’m making a salad for dinys.

AUDREY Like that?

JACK I always make my salads like this.

JACK sighs.

JACK When I do anything. Mostly nothing I do nothing.

AUDREY O what are you talking about?

JACK And where have you been? You used to live here. Its all running down. To nothing much. Drat. What if its all like…. like a bloody uncooked haggis. I will not be diminished. (doing a Scottish voice) You lie to me, you lie to me all the time.

AUDREY O my god, you sound just like my father.

JACK (Scottish voice) You’ve been gone for months. Or is it days? I might have wanted to go with you.

AUDREY There’s my freedom to consider.

JACK Freedom…. freedom. There’s a punchline to that…. I forget it. Drat. O I remember – you used to be honest. I loved you for it. Now the crow may be singing instead of the calf.

AUDREY O shut up. If you’re looking for a reason, honey, this is it.

JACK Don’t call me “honey” if you don’t mean it.

AUDREY snorts.

JACK You used to….

AUDREY What now?

JACK Mean it. I felt that anyway.

AUDREY You used to be someone who wasn’t knock kneed crazy.

JACK O stop it. Look – my opinion….

AUDREY scoffs.

JACK Wait wait, I’m having an idea….

JACK picks up an Eiffel Tower.

JACK My opinion: Paris was a package.

AUDREY What?

JACK We were all together, of a thing, you and I and the rue Rivoli. And the metro and Chez François and everything. Every breath was a laugh.

AUDREY I don’t remember it like that.

JACK At least a chuckle? Work with me. Even fucking Mithroth had it right. Salad days. Lovely days. Paris was a package – that’s why we loved it. Its all about Paris. And the package, the whole package. That’s it – the whole package, you got to take the whole package. That’s it that’s it. There’s no substitution. The whole package. No. No no. No no no no. Don’t say anything – hear me out. I’ll lose my thread. Its like at a country auction. You bid a box, you bid on a box – its a lot. You bid on a lot – three bucks – and you take the whole box – lock stock and box. That’s it, mama. You have to take the whole package.

AUDREY I hated Paris.

JACK How could you? Paris was kindness.

AUDREY wavers, uncertain on her feet.

AUDREY What do you mean? Kindness? What do you mean?

JACK Kindness? Its the opposite of – what? – fear. What, what are you afraid of? It all started in Paris. Don’t you remember?

AUDREY I was never in Paris.

JACK The scar capital of France?….

AUDREY laughs. Suddenly, she collapses, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth.

JACK What? What?

JACK takes AUDREY in his arms.

AUDREY mumbles.

AUDREY Kindness….

JACK What?

AUDREY All those times I said I loved you…. all those times…. was I lying?

BEAT.

AUDREY You should’ve be kinder.

JACK Me? You, you’ve never been kind enough. No no, I can’t do this anymore.

AUDREY Dear O dear, its too late.

JACK It’s never too late.

AUDREY I think I meant it.

JACK About love?

AUDREY Or did I?

AUDREY dies.

SFX: Car crash, far in the distance.

JACK is in shock; he feeds the fish.

END OF SCENE

TO BLACK

•

SCENE SET 06 – LIVING ALONE

scene fifteen

JACK is standing in the foyer of a large art museum. We see a sign: THE LIFE OF AUDREY.

HUMPHREY and NATALIE enter. JACK rubs his hands gleefully.

JACK Humphrey and Natalie, thanks so much for coming by. I wanted you to be the first to see the exhibition.

NATALIE It’s not open yet?

JACK Not yet. Soon, though, and a jovial time it’ll be – I’m already having a good time.

HUMPHREY Well then I’m honoured. We both are….

JACK I thought it was important you see it. Give me your opinion….

NATALIE I’m sure we’ll love it – just as we loved Audrey.

JACK Thank you. (to HUMPHREY) You’ve been here before, haven’t you?

HUMPHREY Here? Yes, of course. An important art museum, this.

JACK Yes, I thought you’d say that. Come….

They enter the first room. Large photographs of a young AUDREY.

NATALIE O, she’s so young.

HUMPHREY Is it all arranged chronologically?

JACK It might be.

NATALIE So sweet…. especially this one is so sweet.

They stand in front of a photo of AUDREY; her first communion. She is dressed in white.

JACK Her first communion.

SFX: Liturgical music.

HUMPHREY Yet there is something – what is it? – something in the eyes.

JACK Excellent of you to notice. The glint. Hard light, the bride of Christ.

HUMPHREY Yes, quite….

JACK Yes, quite.

NATALIE Is that a scar under her eye?

JACK That? Just some dirt

JACK wipes the photo.

NATALIE It’s still there. It looks like a cut.

JACK Naw, it’s just a blemish on the photo. Nevermind. And this one….

They stand in front of an another photo – A teenaged AUDREY on a railroad bridge.

JACK She was obsessed with bridges.

NATALIE Was she?

JACK Yes. Afraid to be on them – afraid to ignore them. Something about juxtaposition.

HUMPHREY O? Interesting.

NATALIE Is that why she’s hanging – O my god can you believe it? – by one hand.

HUMPHREY Did she fall?

JACK Fall?

HUMPHREY After the picture was snapped.

JACK O? No. She let herself down slowly with just one arm.

HUMPHREY Impressive.

JACK A human being is a genius while truly engaged, fearless strong and brave.

NATALIE Her legs are all scared.

JACK Yes, so many scars in this life.

NATALIE Did she fall…. some other time?

JACK She never said. Well, enough of that. Come to the next room – there’s still much more.

They enter the next room. They stand in front of a picture of AUDREY and MITHROTH.

NATALIE Who’s that?

JACK Ah yes – Audrey’s long mysterious connection with Mithroth.

NATALIE The Prince Mithroth?

JACK Fucking Mithroth. She was always on about him. The Prince Mithroth wouldn’t like that. The Prince Mithroth couldn’t justify this. The Prince Mithroth always buttered his bread on the left side. The Prince Mithroth never jumped if he could hop. The Prince Mithroth was a friend of the poor and lonely. Especially the lonely.

HUMPHREY Was he an old lover of her’s? The first perhaps?

JACK I never knew for sure. I never asked. When she was working at the Sorbonne, she lived with him. Shared a flat. All I remember is tea, of course. Tea, bloody tea. Tea all the time tea. Here he’s looking for paper to write her phone number. But everything there was already used – not even a scrap available. They were so upset. Eventually he wrote it on his hand. You can just see it if you look closely.

HUMPHREY and NATALIE peer at the photo.

NATALIE Right…. you can just make it out. Regent seven, three something something two. The scar seems bigger here. From her communion, the same scar only bigger. See that penknife.

JACK Where?

NATALIE On the table. Is that what caused the scar?

JACK I don’t know. Yes. Yes, they’re over here – her’s and mine.

They move to the penknife case.

HUMPHREY And beautiful objects they are too.

JACK Not bad. They’re Croatian army issue.

NATALIE You mean: Swiss.

JACK No, we couldn’t afford those. I’m sick of this room – let’s move on. Coming, Humphrey?….

HUMPHREY O yes.

They enter the next room. They stand in front of a picture of naked AUDREY and naked HUMPHREY routinely rutting.

NATALIE is shocked.

NATALIE O….

JACK I thought you’d find it interesting. Not really porno. More like cheesecake.

JACK laughs.

JACK In and out in and out. Groaning and moaning. I love you I love you I love you. Humpty Dumpty humping Humphrey.

JACK laughs.

HUMPHREY How how did you get this picture?

NATALIE glares at HUMPHREY.

JACK Being invisible can be very very advantageous.

NATALIE Invisible?

JACK I’ll teach you sometime. Old Tibetan technique. Ha.

JACK laughs.

NATALIE This is horrible.

JACK Quite right. (to HUMPHREY) Every bloody ejaculation you had scarred me. Me.

NATALIE sobs.

JACK And you too. Sure, why not? Why should you be exempt? All we do is give each other scars. The realization, horrible that it is, that she is lying, lies, was lying to me all all the time.

AUDREY IN MEMORY I said I was at the office, but I was at a conference.

JACK IN MEMORY And you didn’t tell me. I might have wanted to go.

AUDREY IN MEMORY I don’t have to be everywhere with you.

JACK IN MEMORY There’s a punchline somewhere here, but I forget it.

JACK turns to HUMPHREY and NATALIE

JACK What good is it?

HUMPHREY Is that the punchline?

JACK Not yet. I wanted her to accept my scars but I never would accept her’s. Drat. Unkind of me.

HUMPHREY Is that the punchline?

JACK You have to take the whole package, take your fictions – match your fantasies. That’s the punchline. God, you know, I just thought of something. I always wanted her to take the whole package – but I never did myself. What was I thinking? The whole package, taking the whole package, that thing, that thing works both ways. Its a two way street, brother. And it never occurred to me – imagine. Drat. Too late now, eh? Let’s move on, shall we?

NATALIE Is there?…. more?….

JACK Cheesecake? No, that’s done.

HUMPHREY But maybe we’ve had enough…. of this.

JACK Apparently you never do.

HUMPHREY What?

JACK Have enough. Ha.

NATALIE I don’t feel well.

JACK No no, finish the tour – please please please. I promise you’ll love the last room.

They enter the last room. A large photo of dead AUDREY.

JACK Just moments after.

NATALIE It’s horrible. The blood….

NATALIE falters.

JACK Death – the final scar.

AUDREY IN PHOTO Is that about kindness? About being kind? Is that what you mean?

JACK IN PHOTO Kindness? What? What are you afraid of?

Suddenly, AUDREY IN PHOTO collapses, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth.

AUDREY IN PHOTO Dear O dear. It’s too late.

AUDREY IN PHOTO dies.

JACK So…. the final question: is it worth the tour?

HUMPHREY Is any life ever worth it?

NATALIE cries.

JACK O dear. I’m so sorry, Natalie. Inadvertent scars are the worst. The very worst. I’m so sorry. Here, take my hand….

END OF SCENE.

•

scene sixteen

In a large supermarket; everywhere lovely piles of colourful foods – parsnips, oranges, tomatoes, kale.

JACK, holding a sleeping BOB, is raving at SANDY.

JACK Who was it who always said: she’s looking for you?

SANDY That was me, Jack, me – your sister.

JACK Yes, that’s right. She was pissed off. Hurt. Why? I was at home, always at home. She knew where to reach me. She could have called. I’m not even sure I now know who she was. After all those years. And for what? Dear O dear. Regret, nothing but regret now. I feel so disoriented.

SANDY Poor Jack.

SANDY takes his hand.

JACK What I thought I would do. Books I would read. The War and Peace syndrome. Books I would write.

SANDY Cookbooks?

JACK Gushy fiction.

SANDY How clever you are. Terry thinks so too.

JACK My life is like being on the beach. Waves pounding in on me. The singing crow instead of the calf. If you could change one thing from your past, one single thing? What would you choose? Me, I’d be smarter about who I marry.

SANDY Everybody says that.

JACK shrugs.

Suddenly, across the supermarket JACK sees MITHROTH arm in arm with HUMPHREY.

JACK O my god – it’s him. And that other guy….

SANDY Who, Jack, who?

JACK Fucking Mithroth…. and bloody Humpty-Dumpty. What a quagmire.

SANDY You mean over there in front of the zucchinis?

JACK is speechless – he nods.

SANDY Didn’t I meet them somewhere?

SANDY starts to peer – JACK pulls her down behind the oranges.

JACK Don’t look, don’t look – I don’t want them to see me.

SANDY That’s so sad.

BOB wakes up; starts to cry. JACK is startled; he knocks over the oranges which roll everywhere.

JACK O god, we have to keep him quiet – I don’t want them to come over. (to BOB) There there, you dear little piggy – Uncle Jack is here.

BOB stops crying.

JACK Fucking Mithroth. I wish he would get Heartgohighhigh and be really sick and puke all over himself and bleed from his eyes. And Humphrey too, why not?

SANDY O, Jack….

JACK I am horrible.

BEAT.

JACK But I will not be diminished. I used to be a chef.

SANDY And a great chef.

JACK And a great chef – I’ll give you that – and then – suddenly – nothing.

BEAT.

JACK Audrey.

SANDY She was always difficult.

JACK Well it works both ways – I wanted her to take me as I was but did I accept everything she was? No. O my god. Wait a minute wait a minute I get it I get it. What was I thinking? I am diminished. Totally bloody fucking diminished. Drat drat drat drat drat. Diminished and scarred as bloody hell – and scary to boot. And nobody to blame but me.

END OF SCENE

•

scene seventeen

On a busy city street. Afternoon. A hint of snow in the air.

JACK, dressed like a conquistador, waits at a bus stop.

JACK (singing) I will not languish. I will not laaaaaaang-guish.

HUMPHREY – driving by in his car – stops when he sees JACK.

HUMPHREY Hey, great…. It’s you, right?

JACK What?

HUMPHREY That’s it – well put – what’s up? Like it, like it a lot. What’s up, Jack, what’s up? What’s up? What’s up what’s up?

JACK Do I know you?

JACK knows darn well who he is.

HUMPHREY It’s me…. Humphrey.

JACK Humphrey?

HUMPHREY The pilot. The one who crashed on your street.

JACK Right. The pilot. Right. Humping Humphrey. Humpty Dumpty Hamster Wamster Humphrey. Why should I talk to you?

HUMPHREY Saw a fellow by the side of the road – thought I’d stop.

HUMPHREY cries.

HUMPHREY I’m sorry I’m sorry…. I am bad. I am. Bad bad bad. Nobody likes me. My life has fallen apart. Everything I touch, dies.

JACK Ya, right, well, ya, we all have problems.

HUMPHREY (between the tears) Going somewhere?

JACK What?

HUMPHREY (between the tears) You’re at a bus stop. So I figured….

JACK Got to catch a plane. If ever there was a bus, which there isn’t and anyway, got to catch a plane.

HUMPHREY Where to?

JACK Paris.

HUMPHREY Paris?

JACK Someone I was. Want to be again. Or something.

HUMPHREY I’ve been feeling like that too.

JACK Everyone does – it’s the curse.

HUMPHREY (tears) Except I don’t know where to go.

JACK I learnt how to cook in Paris. God, that was good. Those were great times.

HUMPHREY Always got to help a man get to Paris. Article of faith. Pop on in – I’ll give you a lift.

JACK Beyond salvage.

HUMPHREY Why, when’s the flight?

JACK looks at his watch.

JACK Three minutes ago. Drat. What a quagmire.

HUMPHREY O?

JACK You know, you can never start out too early. Man O man O man – my enthusiasm is running way down.

HUMPHREY Ha. Well then – why not? – let’s go for a coffee. Have a chat.

JACK sighs.

JACK May as well – life is shorter by the minute.

JACK gets in the car.

They drive around.

HUMPHREY You seem quiet.

JACK You don’t really know me.

HUMPHREY But I’d like to.

JACK Truth, old Humphrey, I’m feeling distracted.

HUMPHREY As if your life has become a very particular sort of unrecognizable fiction?

JACK Pretty darn accurate – how did you know that?

HUMPHREY Just lucky. Here’s a good place.

They park in front of a big complex housing a number of restaurants.

HUMPHREY That place up there.

JACK It’s a bar.

HUMPHREY Too early for you?

JACK Sure. Why not? Wait, I know this place. Its Chez Zuzu. I thought it was somewhere else.

DELORES bars the entrance.

DELORES Private party.

JACK Delores – hey it’s me, Jack.

DELORES I know it’s you, Jack. Chez Zuzu is now forever closed to you. No trouble, Jack. Please, no trouble.

HUMPHREY Bloody hell.

DELORES I’ll thank you not to be abusive.

HUMPHREY You don’t know who I am, do you?

DELORES And I’m darn sure not interested.

HUMPHREY God, you sound just like me. We could be friends.

DELORES I have more than enough friends already.

JACK laughs.

JACK Please, Delores – for old time sake? I could use a little pick-me-up this morning. Its cold – I could use my coat.

DELORES laughs.

DELORES Sorry, Jack. I wish I could.

HUMPHREY Do you? Do you? I don’t think so. You’re a bitch queen, that’s what you are – a bloody bitch queen.

DELORES cries.

JACK Jesus, Humpy – take it easy.

HUMPHREY Women and their tears – can’t take it. Never could. Reminds me too much of old Mum.

SANDY enters.

SANDY (to DELORES) O you poor thing.

SANDY puts her arm around DELORES.

JACK What’s happening, Jack?

JACK Where’s Bob?

SANDY Terry’s got him.

HUMPHREY I’ll tell you what’s happening – she won’t let us in – that’s what. Quite nasty about it.

SANDY Who are you?

JACK Humphrey, this is my sister, Sandy.

HUMPHREY But we’ve met.

SANDY I doubt it.

HUMPHREY Just like Old Mum. Buggers….

SANDY (to HUMPHREY) Be quiet. (to JACK) Is this about that damned penknife?

JACK Drat. How do you know about that?

HUMPHREY O we all know about that.

SANDY How could you, Jack?

JACK I didn’t do anything to Audrey.

HUMPHREY That’s not what I heard. I saw the scars.

SANDY You did it to yourself – its the same as doing it to her.

JACK She did it too.

HUMPHREY But did she?

SANDY Audrey can be very difficult but you all loved her. Anyway, loving isn’t owning. Look, I’ve got to go – got a date with Dad.

SANDY exits.

We see OLD BILL in the distance; BILL waves and is gone.

DELORES She’s nice, your sister.

HUMPHREY I can’t say I care much for her.

JACK Shut up.

DELORES Ya, shut up.

JACK takes DELORES’ hand

JACK It’s good to see you.

DELORES You too.

JACK We used to be good friends.

DELORES Ya.

JACK What happened?

DELORES Life got in the way.

HUMPHREY It always does.

JACK and DELORES ignore HUMPHREY.

HUMPHREY I said: it always does.

They continue to ignore HUMPHREY.

DELORES I miss her. That laugh…. I loved that laugh.

JACK Ya.

JACK nods.

JACK Ya.

DELORES Sometimes I hear it on the wind.

JACK That’s sweet.

HUMPHREY Isn’t it interesting you say that. I was thinking….

DELORES: a hard look at HUMPHREY.

DELORES (to JACK) Be careful.

JACK Why?

DELORES indicates HUMPHREY.

DELORES I don’t trust him.

HUMPHREY Me? How can you say that about me?

DELORES I got a bad feeling.

JACK Thanks, Delores. Thanks.

DELORES and JACK hug.

HUMPHREY and JACK exit to the car.

JACK Well, that was sort of good.

HUMPHREY Merely mundane. You see a lot of that these days.

JACK Look Humphrey, I’ve had just about enough of you. I’m going….

HUMPHREY O no don’t – we’re getting on so well.

JACK looks at HUMPHREY.

JACK I don’t think so.

HUMPHREY I’m famished. We could go to L’Express. The poulet au citron is utterly fabulous these days.

JACK It’s Jean-Jacques’ secret saffron source.

HUMPHREY So I’ve been told. Uses grappa to marinate the bird….

JACK Alright, let’s go. But I have to drive.

HUMPHREY O? Can’t do that, I’m afraid. Can’t do that. This is a prototype, this is a special – a very special – automobile. I’ve promised my mechanic chap I would be the only one who drove it. Sort of a family heirloom in waiting if you get my drift. Sorry….

JACK I have to drive.

HUMPHREY But its left hand drive. You know, the opposite of the right hand drive. Which – if your stop to consider it – is dashed confusing. Cause left hand drive is on the…. right hand side of the car. Which is rum and confusing also. Dashed confusing. And then there’s the question of pedals. Because they don’t seem to be reversed. They’re the same whether they’re on the right or on the left. Or are they?

JACK I have to drive.

HUMPHREY sighs; he tosses the keys to JACK.

JACK Which one is the break pedal again?

HUMPHREY grimaces. They drive.

JACK This is fun. I can see why everybody does it. I’ll tell you something for nothing, old Humph. Revenge is never never sweet. Never never sweet. Somehow, now, there’s no point to it. All I can feel is everything I’ve lost. Drat. Could I ever get it back again?, that’s the question. That’s why I was going to Paris. And the answer is….

HUMPHREY Hey wait – can’t concentrate – this is the wrong direction to L’Express.

JACK O? No problem. Easy to fix. Today, everything’s easy to fix.

JACK does an illegal U-turn.

HUMPHREY Are you crazy?

JACK Relax…. (singing) I will not languish. I will not laaaaaaang-guish.

SFX: Screeching of breaks; a speeding car hits in the middle of the turn; an ugly nasty noisy crash.

JACK is killed; he is covered in scars and blood.

HUMPHREY O my god – he’s dead. And they’re all going to blame me. You’re all going to blame me. I didn’t cause these scars. And the blood. Blood. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t even driving. I wasn’t even driving. Dear O dear O god O god.

END OF SCENE

TO BLACK

•

SCENE SET 07 – A REDEMPTION OF SORTS

scene eighteen

Evening. Chez Zuzu.

Bustle and noise. The occasional snatch of singing. Its all very familiar.

JACK and AUDREY enter.

JACK I don’t like this place any more.

AUDREY laughs, full and rich.

AUDREY We always come here.

JACK But now I only see its flaws: vast disconglomerated nothingness, lacking in true variety.

AUDREY Disconglomerated?

AUDREY chuckles.

JACK And brutal management and bloody hot.

AUDREY Take off your bloody coat.

JACK Ya? No. Once they almost destroyed it – I won’t give them the satisfaction.

AUDREY It’s summer, Jack.

JACK I love this coat.

AUDREY sighs.

JACK O well, it’s just a coat.

JACK takes off his coat, throws it on the floor.

AUDREY is surprised, then impressed.

They sit at a table.

A folksinger, off, croons through an early Bob Dylan song.

FOLKSINGER (HUMPHREY) (off) How many roads must a man go down
Before you call him a man?
How many roads?
How many roads?
How many roads?

AUDREY O my god – that folksinger….

JACK I hate folk music.

AUDREY It’s Humphrey.

JACK No….

AUDREY Look.

JACK laughs.

JACK The evening is definitely picking up.

AUDREY Be nice. It’s my birthday.

JACK Don’t worry – I don’t mind if he’s out of tune.

AUDREY You’re acting strangely tonight.

JACK O, I don’t think so. Just same old bloody Jack.

JACK laughs.

AUDREY Ummmm?….

SANDY enters. She struggles to the table carrying a tray of tiny succulents and baby BOB in a carrier.

SANDY (calling) Hi there….

SANDY gives AUDREY the succulents.

SANDY Happy birthday, you dear old thing.

JACK And you brought Bob.

SANDY I brought Bob.

JACK Where’s Terry?

SANDY The poor thing – he feels crazy. (to AUDREY) He sends his love.

AUDREY That’s sweet.

JACK nuzzles BOB.

JACK Baby baby Bob, you’re such a baby baby darling.

SANDY Audrey? Would you like to nuzzle Bob?

AUDREY Ah…. ummmm….

MITHROTH enters.

AUDREY It’s The Prince Mithroth….

JACK Fu….fu…..fu….fu….

AUDREY Jack….

JACK Fu…. fu…. Fabulous Mithroth.

JACK laughs.

JACK Ha.

AUDREY Ha indeed. (calling) Prince Mithroth, Prince Mithroth. We’re over here.

MITHROTH waves and comes to the table.

MITHROTH Hello, hello all…. I’ve brought no gift. See? No gift. Why?, you ask. I’ll tell….

JACK Looking forward to it.

AUDREY glares at JACK.

JACK (to AUDREY) No I mean it.

MITHROTH Thank you, dear boy. First, I thought: only emeralds would do. But alas, the emerald market is deplorably depressed. Only pathetic, though admittedly greenish pebbles remain. So – instead – I brought you myself to do with as you will….

MITHROTH and AUDREY laugh.

AUDREY How charming you are.

SANDY rolls her eyes and JACK laughs.

AUDREY Sit over here by me.

JACK Do you know my sister, Mithroth?

AUDREY (sotto voce to JACK) The Prince Mithroth.

JACK How could I have ever forgotten? Its The Prince Mithroth, Sandy.

MITHROTH I have not had the pleasure. O wait. O wait. I have had the pleasure. Both you and your Bob. I trust you’re both well.

SANDY I seem to remember, prince person, that you were in a boat?

MITHROTH O? Perhaps. Yes. Now, what’s the cuisine here?, might one ask.

MITHROTH raises his eyebrows.

MITHROTH Vitally continental?

SANDY I would call the menu here at Zuzu exactly standard plebeian bistro fare, prince person. Tasty…. if you’re hungry.

SANDY smiles at JACK.

MITHROTH O? Well said….

MITHROTH looks into SANDY’s eyes.

MITHROTH You know, I can see what you’re going to say next.

SANDY You mean – what do you mean?

MITHROTH I can see your dialogue written right there in your eyes.

SANDY O?

MITHROTH I knew you were going to say that.

SANDY Did you now?

MITHROTH And that too.

SANDY Well then, in that case, apparently now the calf may be singing instead of the crow.

MITHROTH O? Wait. No. I didn’t see that.

MITHROTH peers into SANDY’s eyes.

MITHROTH No, it’s not there. Strange. What does it mean?- the crow thing what what what the singing calf.

SANDY I think Bob said it first, prince person. (to BOB) Didn’t you, little piggy.

MITHROTH Oink oink.

MITHROTH and AUDREY laugh.

JACK glares at audrey.

JACK Let’s not have too many Bob jokes tonight, shall we?

MITHROTH Quite right. Now this crow thing, is it – perhaps? – the victory of violence? Better yet: the violence of hegemony?

JACK That’s very interesting, Mithroth – the crows over the calfs.

MITHROTH Exactly, dear Jack.

JACK Otherwise – dear O dear – and this becomes a revolution, it would mean it could mean: no more veal scaloppini.

MITHROTH Is that a tragedy?

SANDY Not if you’re a calf, prince person.

AUDREY laughs till tears come.

AUDREY That’s very funny, Sandy.

HUMPHREY enters, dressed in bell bottoms and carrying a guitar.

AUDREY Whatever are you wearing?

HUMPHREY Do you like it? Do you? You do, don’t you. I can tell.

JACK Humphrey, this is my sister, Sandy.

HUMPHREY We’ve already met – at your place. It was the day our house burnt down. (musing) Might have been the actual beginning of the end….

SANDY O yes…. did you rebuild?

HUMPHREY No, we just continued living in the rubble.

LAUGHTER.

AUDREY And this is The Prince Mithroth.

JACK They’ve already met.

HUMPHREY The Prince Mithroth? O my goodness. This is…. so special.

JACK You’ve already met him.

MITHROTH And why not do it again, dear Jack, why not do it again? (to HUMPHREY) Now tell me – be honest now – did anything every come of that rectal business?

AUDREY Shush.

HUMPHREY (stammering) O, I say….

JACK O, leave him alone, you two. Let’s not have too many Humphrey jokes either.

HUMPHREY Ah, yes, thanks. Birthday time, birthday. (to AUDREY) A little birthday something.

HUMPHREY hands AUDREY a book.

HUMPHREY An autographed copy of the erotic stories of Anais Nin. Very lovely…. very – well, it must be said – erotic.

AUDREY Ah….

MITHROTH I knew her, of course.

HUMPHREY Did you?

SANDY What was she like?

MITHROTH Very stylish. Very vain. Very secretive. I believe one of those stories is about me.

LAUGHTER.

JACK Very impressive.

MITHROTH – a little bow by way of reply.

HUMPHREY Do you like it? Is it just what you always wanted?

AUDREY’s fulsome laugh.

HUMPHREY Ah yes, funny, yes. But do you like it? Say you do.

BEAT.

MITHROTH So what exactly are you up to, Humphrey?

HUMPHREY I know this will sound strange, but I’ve had this vision – quite frightening really – and so I’ve decided to run away and embrace the bardic lifestyle.

SANDY What a fun idea.

AUDREY The bardic lifestyle? O, I see.

JACK Perfect. Just perfect.

MITHROTH I myself am not interested in such things. Anyway, I no longer have the voice for it.

SANDY Voice?

MITHROTH It’s all about singing, isn’t it, this bardic lifestyle? It always was when I was a lad.

MITHROTH sings Puccini, and quite good it is.

MITHROTH Best of luck, my dear fellow.

MITHROTH snaps his fingers. NATALIE comes over with champagne.

AUDREY Natalie?

NATALIE Hi everyone.

HUMPHREY Hello, Natalie.

NATALIE ignores him.

HUMPHREY Hello, Natalie.

NATALIE cries.

JACK O you poor thing. Here, sit down….

NATALIE Not only content to destroy my life and its innocent pleasures, this…. horny salacious lecherous…. hippy has given away all our money.

NATALIE glares at HUMPHREY.

HUMPHREY It seemed wrong, suddenly – do you know what I mean? – to own things.

MITHROTH Dear girl, I can see we need our champagne now more than ever. I have ordered the Pol Roger – 1990. A dark vintage.

NATALIE pours the champagne.

MITHROTH Does everyone have a glass? You too, dear Natalie.

NATALIE Merci.

MITHROTH A toast to the Goddess – Audrey – you are more beautiful with each passing year. And also – I feel genuinely inspired to do this – also to little baby Bob – may he grow up to be worthy of his name.

SANDY (to BOB) Did you hear that, piggy-poo? Piggy-poo piggy-poo.

JACK That’s kind, Mithroth.

MITHROTH, a slight bow to JACK. They all clink and drink.

JACK & AUDREY Yummy.

JACK and AUDREY laugh.

NATALIE And perhaps a book while you wait?….

NATALIE has a wagon filled with books. SANDY touches a few books.

SANDY I’m getting very hungry.

AUDREY Me too.

JACK Soon…. soon….

AUDREY But I’m hungry now.

JACK Wait a minute, can’t you?

AUDREY You never could plate up on time.

JACK If it’s worth waiting for….

MITHROTH Quite right, Jack.

JACK (to AUDREY) See?

MITHROTH Let’s have more of this fabulous champagne. Make it two more bottles, please, dear Natalie.

NATALIE Of course, Prince Mithroth….

Brushing HUMPHREY aside, NATALIE sets off.

JACK examines the books.

JACK Ah. Ha. This is a library full of scars.

AUDREY O shut up.

JACK Wait wait. I’ll show you a scar. All these books are by Anais Nin.

AUDREY Really?

MITHROTH Let me see that book.

MITHROTH examines the gift book.

MITHROTH Wait wait wait. This is decidedly not the Nin signature. I know her signature. This simply isn’t it. Wait wait wait. I know what our sly Humphrey’s done – he’s autographed the book himself, haven’t you, Humphrey?

HUMPHREY stammers.

JACK Well, when you’ve given away all your money what else can you do? (to AUDREY) That’s what I’m talking about – that’s a scar. (to HUMPHREY) You silly fool.

An embarrassed HUMPHREY looks out of the window.

HUMPHREY That big black cloud does seems rather large, doesn’t it? Or is it just me? Wait. Its…. crashed into that house. What? People running screaming. I feel very vulnerable at this moment. Very vulnerable. Its not a cloud at all. How could I have been so mistaken? Its…. its a giant fir tree and its fallen over. Now there’s fire. Flames. I shall never now never never survive.

NATALIE arrives with more champagne.

HUMPHREY That can’t be good.

NATALIE You’re a stupid stupid man.

NATALIE spits on HUMPHREY, who sobs quietly; BOB joins in.

JACK And that’s another scar….

SANDY There there, little piggy poo.

JACK Poor old Humpty-Dumpty.

JACK helps HUMPHREY to a chair.

JACK Humphrey, stop sniveling and sit down and join the party. I promise you – it’ll all be better.

HUMPHREY (between the tears) Will it?

JACK nods.

JACK Scars heal.

AUDREY rolls her eyes. In response: JACK rolls his eyes.

AUDREY Don’t you dare roll your eyes at me. I too – I too have genuine wounds and scars to show for it all.

AUDREY pulls up her pant leg.

JACK O ya, that one. Ya ya, that one – I’ve seen that one before.

AUDREY It bled.

JACK Ya, but not as much as mine.

JACK rips off his sleeve.

JACK I hit an artery – this one bled like a slaughtered bunny. The paramedic was less than sympathetic.

AUDREY I think she called us stupid.

JACK I had to agree.

AUDREY Maybe, I did too. Now this one….

AUDREY swivels to show her back.

AUDREY I did this one for you. Hard to reach….

JACK So, does that make it more important?

JACK takes off his shoe; shows the bottom of his foot.

JACK I did this one for you. Didn’t even use a mirror.

AUDREY hikes up her shirt.

AUDREY Now this – this – this one is a really ugly one.

SANDY Oooooo….

JACK What’s that?

AUDREY I fell out of a tree when I was seven.

JACK Yikes.

JACK lowers his pants.

JACK Me, this is the creme de la creme.

AUDREY That’s ugly. That’s really ugly.

JACK Is it the ugliest?

AUDREY Could be. So what is it?

JACK Can’t remember.

JACK and AUDREY laugh.

SANDY That was a Christmas scar, Jack. The tree fell on you.

JACK O goodness, I do remember. OK now, now its my turn.

JACK looks around the table, pleased. This is his place, his life.

MITHROTH More scars, Jack? Dear me, I don’t know if we’re up for it.

LAUGHTER.

JACK No more scars. I propose a toast to my darling wife and her whole package – the good the bad and the ugly – you have to darn well take it all. Which is probably on a good day the kindest thing we can do. To Audrey and all that you are.

ALL To Audrey.

They clink and drink.

NATALIE Tried my best, I tried my best to be kind to the people I love…. or thought I loved.

SANDY puts her arm around NATALIE.

SANDY I’m always kind to the people I love. (to BOB) Aren’t I, little piggy poo?

BOB coos. JACK kisses SANDY on the forehead.

JACK Yes, you are.

MITHROTH Kindness is often overlooked in the fracas of our lives but it is worth something.

AUDREY I always wanted to be kinder. I did.

MITHROTH Never too late, my dear.

AUDREY No?

JACK No. Never too late.

AUDREY (to JACK) All those times I said I loved you…. all those times…. I thought I meant it – was I lying?

JACK About love?

AUDREY Or was I?

JACK Do it for me? Do it for me.

AUDREY Be kinder?

JACK Yes. It is a birthday after all – a new beginning.

AUDREY A birthday.

JACK Happy birthday.

AUDREY Thank you.

AUDREY’s full passionate laugh.

AUDREY Alright, now where’s that Bob. Give me that Bob. I’m going to nuzzle Bob.

JACK My my….

SANDY Did you hear that, little piggy? Aunt Audrey now loves you.

MITHROTH I’m – dare I say it? – I’m pleased. Can those be tears in my eyes?

JACK Prince Mithroth, you are a true hombre and a half. How could I have not seen it? Have a glass, you old thing, and let me tell you all about the life of the mind.

MITHROTH Delighted, dear boy.

AUDREY Can we eat now?….

JACK catches NATALIE’s eye; he nods.

NATALIE The menu for tonight: Oysters à la florentine, épigramme of mutton, and for dolce – our specialty – coquilles Saint-Jacques de François.

AUDREY claps her hands in delight.

AUDREY My absolute three favourite dishes. Jack. Memories of Paris…. and dear young sweet love.

JACK Happy Birthday.

AUDREY O Jack. I take it.

JACK The whole package, eh?

AUDREY Still sweet.

JACK and AUDREY kiss.

Applause.

AUDREY takes JACK’s hand. Chez Zuzu to black; JACK and AUDREY to light.

JACK Look at you….

AUDREY Look at you….

SFX: Dance music. JACK and AUDREY dance.

Their waltz ends with hostilities – they pull viciously at each other’s noses.

AUDREY & JACK Ow.

AUDREY Stop that.

JACK You stop that.

AUDREY O shut up, and dance.

Again and again they dance.

AUDREY Zing zing.

JACK Zing zing zing zing zing….

AUDREY Went my heartstrings.

JACK & AUDREY I love you.

JACK Yes. Yes.

Falling in a heap, they laugh and laugh.

Till tears.

LONG FADE TO BLACK.

•

END OF PLAY

— Don Druick

————————

DON DRUICK is an award winning playwright, translator & librettist, a baroque musician, and a gardener and chef. In a career spanning more than 40 years, Don Druick’s plays have been produced on stage, radio and television in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the USA. His publications include playtexts, translations and critical writings. Publications of his plays, WHERE IS KABUKI? and THROUGH THE EYES, have both been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. His current plays are: GEORGEVILLE (passion and poetry in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, 1816; the darkest night of Lord Byron), WILDEST DREAMS (a deconstructed narrative; something close to love amongst the elders), and a translation of Emmanuelle Roy’s play, LAZETTE. Druick lives in Elmira, a small Mennonite farming town near Waterloo Ontario, with artist Jane Buyers.

Ottawa Confidential: Fiction — Greg Hollingshead

Jun 082013

Canadian politics has always been ripe for satire, perhaps never more than at this very moment. Two fat men dominate the situation: Senator Mike Duffy nailed for fiddling his expenses (currently under investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto famous for a video that appears to show him smoking crack cocaine. The Duffy scandal has reached into Prime Minister’s Office; his chief of staff has resigned, and the smoke cloud only grows (a criminal trial is currently on hiatus).

Enter Governor-General’s Award-winning short story writer and novelist Greg Hollingshead with a cunning literary instinct for the jugular. “Ottawa Confidential” is an absolutely hilarious satire on a certain unnamed Prime Minister and Canadian politics in general written from the point of view of the Prime Minister’s “intimate confidant,” his righthand man, a failed novelist (had to be) turned political hack (with a dog named Wags). This story really is brilliant, seething with dry wit. I have a list of quotable lines as long as my arm. “Of course, the Prime Minister was not exactly an old man, or even an adult, but something more along the lines of an enlarged boy.” “The Prime Minister further confided that as a child he had an imaginary friend, but when his parents found out about it they forced him to put it to death.” “Politicians tend to be human to a fault, which is to say they are first and foremost animals, whereas the Prime Minister, with his unreadable demeanour and that funny little smile, if that’s what it was, and his one-brick-at-a-time approach, had the personality of an algorithm…”

My favourite (it’s long but I can’t resist) is when Hollingshead draws an analogy between the rise of the Prime Minister (yes, yes, unnamed) and his party (also unnamed, wink) to the behaviour of slime mold. “Dynamic system theorists tell us we should not be surprised by the behaviour of slime mold, but what are they thinking? In good times, slime mold consists of an aggregation of cells, each going about its individual life. But when the going gets tough, these cells cohere into a slug, which proceeds, trailing slime, to a prominent location. There it grows a stalk with a head, which explodes, releasing spores, after which the mold reverts to a loose collection of cells with no apparent common interest, until the next time. It was the combination of tough times for the FPMC’s [Future Prime Minister of Canada] party and his rapid rise to dominance within it that would turn a desultory collection of politicians into a slime-trailing slug juggernaut with an exploding head.”

Where on Earth Did He Come From?

According to his wife, with whom I have conducted a series of interviews in an attempt to arrive at a working sense of what the heck goes through her mind, it happened like this:

She was crossing what remains of the Columbia Icefield, just out of hearing of a small party of other guests from Jasper Park Lodge. Directly in front of her, walking backwards, was her fiancé at the time, Lt. Wayne McLeod, who was looking deep into her eyes as he verbally abused her for what he had detected over lunch back at the Lodge as a liberal view of Afghani cultural practices. Oh that’s very nice, he was saying, so you would willingly sell your firstborn daughter to the highest bidder even before she was born? Why, that’s extremely enlightened of you. I’m sure you’d make an excellent Afghani mother. The only problem, which even a dumb cluck like me might think would have occurred to someone as highly intelligent as yourself, but it just so happens we live in a civilized—

And so on.

The rest of the party had slowed their pace so as not to have to listen to this or to her saying over and over Wayne keep your voice down. It was possible that as a four-year veteran of our peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, Lt. Wayne McLeod had once been a fine young man and was not to be held responsible for his current behaviour as a dull-normal abuser. Only the woman who loved him could hope to know the real Wayne McLeod, but how much more could she take?

Anyway, as McLeod was walking backwards in front of her, with his face so close to hers that she could smell the garlic on his breath from lunch, he suddenly dropped out of sight. When she saw the hole in the snow crust and screamed, the others came running, led by their guide, who had a rope. The rope was lowered into the hole, and when the tug came, everybody heaved, but imagine their surprise when it wasn’t Wayne McLeod they hauled up but the future Prime Minister of Canada (FPMC).

What an astonishing story! I cried. What happened to Wayne?

At first the FPMC’s wife didn’t answer, and then she shook her head slowly, holding my eyes.

And the FPMC? I cried. What was he doing down there?

Wedged, she said. It was a crevasse. And she explained that the FPMC had been staying at the Rimrock Hotel, near Banff, taking a weekend in the mountains to decide whether or not to go into politics.

A momentous mountain weekend for Canada, I pointed out.

Ignoring this, the FPMC’s wife continued her story. Familiar with the theory that cool air promotes effective decision-making and inspired by a brochure in a rack by the Rimrock check-in desk, the FPMC had gone for a walk on the Columbia Icefield. He started out long enough ahead of the Jasper Park Lodge party that they didn’t see him but not so long that he was wedged down there for more than a few hours. He reported that McLeod had passed him falling. Slighter of build than the FPMC, McLeod had longer to fall before wedging.

If he wedged, the FPMC’s wife added, with a significant look that I could do no more than mentally file before she’d resumed her story. So we stood around, she said, shouting down the hole and listening for an answer from Wayne. Nothing.

He must have been unconscious, I said.

Or playing possum.

Why would he do that?

A survival reflex. He was a mess of them. You should have tried to sleep through the night in the same room.

Hardly a useful survival reflex in this case, I pointed out.

Listen, she said. One went down, the other came up. What more do you want from me?

The one who came up—

I know. I married. Not as soon as I’d have married Wayne, but I’d known Wayne longer. With the FPMC it was a conventional courtship, a traditional wedding. Nothing unusual or untoward about any of it. Boy, was there nothing unusual or untoward.

And the marriage?

She threw back her head and laughed. The marriage? Are you kidding me? Where have you been? That’s when the circus came to town! Are you the only one in the country who doesn’t know this?

SPACE

Slime Mold Homology

Dynamic system theorists tell us we should not be surprised by the behaviour of slime mold, but what are they thinking? In good times, slime mold consists of an aggregation of cells, each going about its individual life. But when the going gets tough, these cells cohere into a slug, which proceeds, trailing slime, to a prominent location. There it grows a stalk with a head, which explodes, releasing spores, after which the mold reverts to a loose collection of cells with no apparent common interest, until the next time.

It was the combination of tough times for the FPMC’s party and his rapid rise to dominance within it that would turn a desultory collection of politicians into a slime-trailing slug juggernaut with an exploding head. And while this transformation required that the range of behaviours of individual politicians be radically reconfigured and restrained, in fact the higher-level behaviours enabled by their universal submission to top-down management so vastly outperformed anything they could have accomplished individually that even the mouth-breathers among them sensed the wisdom of their entrainment. If the FPMC cramped their style, never in the political life of this country has there been a concatenation of styles more in need of cramping. In fact so thoroughly were they cramped, so comprehensively under their leader’s control, that it was evident from early on that were this party ever given a chance to form a government, Watch out, Nellie!

SPACE

Early Losses

Long before I became the Prime Minister’s trusted confidant, I was living with my dog on a small, remote lake in a rock tract of bush and muskeg equidistant between Sudbury and Timmins. Wags and I were all that remained of a three-couples-plus-chickens-and-pets quasi-commune that had lasted less than a year, owing to the close quarters, the same faces day in and day out, the constant physical work just to keep a fire in the stove and food on the table, and the endless grey winter skies. The only reason Wags and I stayed on was I had a novel to finish.

In those days I was the quintessential political bystander, but at the dump the day after a national election I asked the custodian who had won, and he told me the Opposition, by a landslide.

Really? I said. Wow. That wasn’t in the cards.

No, it wasn’t, he agreed.

That same day, conscious of history in the making and here I was living out in the middle of nowhere but what did the world care about that and why should I? I canoed to the village for a paper and was further surprised to see, on an inside page, a picture of the FPMC sitting in the back seat of a limousine looking ill. The picture reminded me that information from the custodian of the dump, although readily provided, usually had something the matter with it or was dead wrong.

Why do you even talk to him? my then-partner used to ask me. He’s an idiot.

I talk to him because I happen to believe that you can learn from anybody.

Another point on which you and I fundamentally disagree.

One day the dump custodian and I fell into conversation, and he revealed that as a young man he had gone out to Alberta, where he worked for several years as a cowboy. He told me that he loved the life and everything about it: the country, the living rough, the hard work. In fact, he had never been happier. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

But you came back, I said.

Why, that’s true, he said, as if he hadn’t quite thought of it that way.

Why? I asked.

He said he didn’t know.

Anyway, you had a good time, I said.

I sure did. The best time of my life. Bar none.

Sounds like the name of a ranch.

What?

Bar None. The name of a ranch.

Is that so, now?

Later the same day that I read about the Opposition’s devastating loss, I was in the liquor store. There I got caught up in a game of peekaboo across the Crown Royal display with a mad-eyed geek, hyper-alert with bush fever. It wasn’t until I noticed that the display was ranged along a mirror that I knew my novel had never been any good and it was time to return to the city and make a lasting contribution to society.

SPACE

His Man Friday

One of the more dubious strategies employed by the human male to justify his routinely sleazy behaviour is the appeal to Darwin. As a young man, I certainly wasn’t proud of the rage I inwardly experienced in the presence of an older man, particularly a kinder, gentler one. It was a blinding compulsion to take the old boy down, and it felt pretty Darwinian to me, but you didn’t catch me going around implying that that made it OK. By the same token, I think it said something about the Prime Minister that in all my years as his confidant these feelings never once surfaced. Even before I knew him, as I rolled and tumbled, inexorably as it seemed at time—though it was sheer luck, I swear—through the hoops and red tape that landed me the position, ultimately, of his intimate confidant, I was conscious of no hostility toward him whatsoever.

Of course, the Prime Minister was not exactly an old man, or even an adult, but something more along the lines of an enlarged boy. Also, he played the game on a whole other level. Politicians tend to be human to a fault, which is to say they are first and foremost animals, whereas the Prime Minister, with his unreadable demeanour and that funny little smile, if that’s what it was, and his one-brick-at-a-time approach, had the personality of an algorithm, a boy’s-own Turing machine, or a Crusoe, on his desert island. Because here’s the thing about Crusoe: he’s king, but of what? There’s a poignancy there. Not a figure you necessarily feel driven to bring down. Besides, I was there when one or two tried, and it was horrible to watch. They didn’t have a clue what they were getting into. Nothing in their political training had prepared them for this. The depth and range, the sheer anticipatory power, of the Crusoe method, was beyond their abilities. They were squawking gulls struck down by a brickbat tossed by a tall stout boy in goatskin, they were dead in the water.

SPACE

Election Day

On the day the FPMC would become the Prime Minister, I was standing by his side at the Plexiglass window of the press box high above the Ottawa Convention Centre, gazing down at a sea of waving placards. Chants and songs with lyrics rejigged to be topical were sweeping through the crowd that waited for him to go down there and restate what they already believed so memorably that they would be able to smell it and taste it and carry it home under their arm like a giant panda or Naugahyde ottoman.

How does it feel, I asked him, to know that every person down there is waiting to hear what you have to tell them?

The FPMC’s reply was enigmatic. I think what he said was it felt like every day from now on would be Pajama Day.

I nodded, thinking confusedly of the festive atmosphere of the classic Broadway musical The Pajama Game, but weeks later he would let fall a detail from his early life that revealed his true meaning here. (See below.)

Meanwhile, as we continued to gaze down at the swaying throng, he murmured, Isn’t that the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen.

Yes, it is! I cried, but reaching across to seize his right hand in both mine, I found it unavailable, and so I pretended I was gripping a baseball bat to knock one out of the park but on second thought made it a hockey stick, which I used to drive the puck deep into the net.

SPACE

Early Life

Transferring power over an entire country into your own hands is a complex, thankless task, and not surprisingly the Prime Minister found himself with little time or inclination for emotional excavation. But that was not my style, and every once in a while I’d toss him a random question. Don’t try this at home. Sometimes his head was so packed with data that a question out of nowhere caused it to explode, most often, fortunately for me, in a contained way, and he would fade to smiling bemusement and from there sink into a quasi-narcoleptic stupor. But soon enough he’d rouse himself and resume his deliberations. On other occasions he’d return a thoughtful answer, sometimes stunning in its candour, as when he cleared up my earlier confusion concerning his Pajama Day comment by casually mentioning that as a child he attended Grades Two to Five in his pajamas. In response to my surprise, first that he had done this, and second that his parents and the school had allowed it, he assured me there was nothing in the schoolboard dress code to prevent it, as he knew because when he first got the idea he had checked. As for his parents, they considered it a phase he would soon outgrow.

I guess you showed them, I said with a smirk.

Let’s be clear, he said. All I wanted to do was stay in my pajamas.

Would he characterize his parents as liberals?

When her son pees in the teacher’s wastebasket, he inquired by way of an answer, does a liberal mother drive him to the gates of the local penitentiary and tell him that’s where he’ll end up if he fails to mend his course?

Good Lord, I said. That is hardball. How old were you?

Seven.

The Prime Minister further confided that as a child he had an imaginary friend, but when his parents found out about it they forced him to put it to death.

Why, that’s terrible! I cried. What were they—?

Good parents. It was a talking snake. Unlimbed Evil. Any child in his right mind would be grateful to get that thing off his neck. You know how on a plane you’ll sometimes hear Beatles songs in the roar of the engines? As I used my hockey stick to bash in its head, with each blow I heard my father say Good job. I can hear dad now. G’dj’b! G’dj’b! G’dj’b!

The Prime Minister also told me that as a child, on board ship once, he caught a glimpse of himself on the crowded foredeck.

In a mirror—? I said, thinking of my experience in the liquor store.

No, from behind. I recognized the haircut. I tried to push forward through the crowd but was lost to myself.

After a pause, I respectfully asked how being lost to himself had felt.

How do you think it felt? he replied irritably. Frustrating. Annoying. Disappointing. How would it feel to you?

Uncanny?

OK, fine. Uncanny. It felt uncanny. Woo-woo.

The Prime Minister’s favourite story as a child was the one about the master stonemason of Rosslyn Chapel, who set out on a ten-year journey in search of inspiration for the primary pillar, and when he returned with a first-rate idea for how to do it, his apprentice had already carved it exactly that way, so he killed him.

What do you think it is about this story that speaks to you? I asked, with a chill.

Its palpable unlikelihood, the Prime Minister replied. What obviously happened was, when the master stonemason saw the apprentice’s pillar, he knew right away it was far better than anything he himself could do. This was a guy who hadn’t lifted a chisel in ten years. Thinking fast, he told everybody that the pillar was exactly the way he’d have done it. It didn’t matter that people gave each other looks and thought, Yeah right, and pigs fly. The pillar problem was solved. Now there was only the apprentice to be punished, for the insubordination. That’s where the stonemason made his mistake: doing it himself. He’d almost certainly underestimate the amount of bottled-up energy he was carrying around, not just from being pumped to carve a primary pillar after such a prolonged build-up but from finding the job already done better than he could ever do it. I’m sure the unanticipated relief mixed up with the disappointment of a lost opportunity for a career-capping achievement, not to mention understandable intimations of inadequacy, failure, and mortality, made for a perfect cocktail of energy in need of an outlet, and though a perfunctory, face-saving, appearance-sake sort of beating was what was called for, he got a little carried away.

I never thought of the Rosslyn Chapel story that way, I admitted.

It’s the only way that crazy story makes any sense, the Prime Minister said. Unless the apprentice had a weak heart and keeled over dead at the first tap, but fly that one past the Occam’s Razor people and see how long you last.

When I asked the Prime Minister if there was any one thing he’d done as a child that he particularly regretted, his bottom lip wobbled as he confessed that he had once forced three kittens to swim back and forth across the neighbours’ pond, for over an hour. I don’t know what I was thinking, he said. The water was freezing. I still have nightmares.

Were they OK?

They didn’t drown, if that’s what you mean. For those kittens my fun game was a living hell.

Was there a moral in that for you?

A moral? In what? Shivering little kitty bodies?

Do unto others?

I was doing that! I love swimming, it’s the chlorine that gets to me, and this was a freshwater pond, with minnows! When I saw the consequences of my actions, I scooped out a couple for the kitties, but they were shivering too violently to focus.

Here the Prime Minister took his face in his hands and appeared to sob. Smoothly, with the tact he would come to know me for, I changed the subject. Let me ask you something, I said. Is a minnow a developmental stage of any number of kinds of fish or is it a piscine variety in its own right?

The Prime Minister lowered his hands from his face and gave me a look that was arguably grateful and yet, when all was said and done, utterly inscrutable.

Minnows don’t have rights, he said.

SPACE

Recreational Suspension

I’d worked closely with the Prime Minister for some time before I discovered his practice of relaxing, when he could make the time, by hanging in the doorway between his inner and outer office wearing nothing but his black dress socks and women’s underwear. The first time I blundered in on him like this, we both pretended he was “hanging” in the doorway in the usual, metaphorical sense of the term. But the third or fourth time I came upon him like this, despite the fact that I had never seen him hanging from anything except his ankles, I ventured an autoerotic asphyxiation comment.

It’s interesting, I said, that the root of the word embarrassment should be the old Portuguese for noose, baraça. Presumably the flush of embarrassment resembles the look on the face of a man being strangled. It’s always seemed to me that there can be few activities more embarrassing to be discovered engaged in than autoerotically asphyxiating oneself. And yet etymologically the act could be said to presuppose, if not actually render redundant, the embarrassment of being discovered at it.

Instead of considering my point, the Prime Minister brusquely informed me that any flush I saw down there was due to gravity, and I reflected how it’s funny but also a little bit sad when the Great, in their vigilance against being misunderstood, run roughshod over an observation however acute.

The whole idea, he added, is I’m upside-down. To increase blood flow to the brain while I connect with my feminine side.

Women are voters too, I verified.

He seemed to reflect for a moment. But you’ve probably wondered why you’ve never seen me even slightly embarrassed. I mean, considering everything.

I said I had noticed but never wondered. I’d always assumed he had nothing to be embarrassed about.

Oh, get off it. I weaned myself. I consciously set about to ensure that nothing can embarrass me. Too much depends.

You do, I shot back wittily. But his mind was on other things. So how did you do it? I prompted him.

Inoculation. I placed myself in one disgraceful and humiliating situation after another. Gradually I became inured. Literally free of shame.

This inspired me to tell him the story of my first summer in the bush, when I was so badly bug-bitten that I developed encephalitis and nearly died but ever since have been immune to insect bites.

A good analogy, the Prime Minister confirmed.

What kinds of disgraceful and humiliating situations? I asked.

You have been following this? I went into politics.

Sometimes a confidant to Greatness will be afforded a glimpse of the extraordinary dedication required of the one who would be Great. Those of us who have abandoned the quest for Mastery, let alone Greatness, will especially appreciate a reminder of how much harder and longer we would have needed to work, and even then it would have been a crapshoot. In this way we assure ourselves we made the right decision, for the truth is that the reason we are not Great is not because we lack potential for Greatness but because we are not made of stern enough stuff.

On the subject of transvestite autoerotic asphyxiation, I remarked that the notorious pirate Calico Jack had a fondness for wearing women’s underwear. I added that he and his all-female crew were finally captured in 1702, in Negril, I believed it was.

This Calico character was probably a woman, the Prime Minister said.

Gosh, I never thought of that.

Could you give me a hand down here, the Prime Minister said.

SPACE

In the Trenches

Before my relocation from deeper in the bush, like most people I thought of Ottawa as a dull city, a poor man’s Edmonton-in-Ontario sort of place, and yet too much a Shield town to be a feasible home for so many people wearing jackets and ties, or jackets and skirts, or pantsuits with blouses, or even turtlenecks some of them. But the town soon revealed itself as a go-for-broke playground of pomp and high-jinks, of wonder and intrigue.

That said, a little of the politicians went a long way. With the exception of the Prime Minister and a handful of others of assorted political persuasions, the politicians were the weak link. Specious, untrustworthy, expendable. Outsiders clamouring to be insiders. Incontinent talkers, broadcasting seamless flows so inchoate that the seamlessness was the seamlessness of no distinguishable parts. Not listeners. Their strategy was talk so incessant as to prevent a word in, and if one did get in and it wasn’t short and graspable by a non-thinker then it would be as if it hadn’t got in at all, and when you wearied of being talked at by someone incapable of listening and tried to move away, he’d follow you, still talking, until an aide appeared from a doorway to lead him away to his next meeting, and even as he disappeared down the corridor he would still be talking.

Fortunately, with the Prime Minister at the helm, even the members of his own party knew nothing and to that extent were powerless. Their briefing notes, in the form of loose-leaf pamphlets in 28-point font, children’s picture books without pictures, were tossed to them in their offices like bones to animals in their cages. All they knew, and all they needed to know, was the tops of the waves. Meanwhile the Prime Minister worked full-time to ensure a calm sea. This way, if anything happened, they found out about it no sooner than everybody else. This way, they could talk all they wanted and nothing would get out. Their noise was white noise. It provided necessary insulation as the Prime Minister worked away to remake the country in an image of Greatness entirely his own.

When the Prime Minister did meet with members of his caucus, nobody was left with any doubt who was boss, and this was just as well because they were morons. They assumed because the Prime Minister wanted them in shirtsleeves and always placed his hand on their back as they left the meeting that it had been an intense session of camaraderie and hard work. But the Prime Minister was not naturally a toucher, and when I asked about the hand on the back, he explained that he was making sure he could see his entire handprint. The ones who failed to sweat enough were soon out, the ones who regularly went so far as also to wet their pants he promoted, and those who found it necessary to wear brown pants became his closest “advisors.”

The politicians could have been, and often had been, insurance salesmen, mortgage brokers, petty thieves, outpatients. The bureaucrats were a cut above. The real shame of Ottawa was that the Prime Minister was never able to extract unquestioning cooperation from this remarkable pool of ability. Some civil servants were amenable, of course, on principle or because they had none, but not enough of them. Privately the Prime Minister said they were worse than Jews: too intelligent to be counted on, too likely to have a working moral compass. Even amongst those bureaucrats who did their best to be team players, as soon as a Prime Ministerial initiative entered a legal or parliamentary grey area, invariably somebody would suffer a failure of nerve or an attack of conscience, and a plan the Prime Minister had been working on for years would go sideways. Nothing caused the Prime Minister’s head to explode like being foiled by the foolish compunction of some latté-guzzling nonentity. We’d all duck for cover and wait for the relative calm that came with detumescence.

The reality is that when the rubber hits the road, every slime mold cell is either a component of the slug or it’s not. And every cell not a component is a potential enemy. Why didn’t it surrender its autonomy when it had the chance? The Prime Minister’s method for dealing with non-aligned cells was twofold, a double refusal: of money and of information. By cutting off funding to the civil service and keeping it in the dark, he reduced its capacity for creating impediments. How else do you get things done in a place so hide-bound? Fail to cut off renegades at the knees and you had a government at the mercy of precedent and what the Prime Minister during in camera sessions with his “advisors” would put on a droll face and use a God voice to designate as the democratic process. When he was in a good mood he’d sometimes insert this phrase with increasing frequency, until he had us falling about in our seats, weeping with laughter.

On the surface, for the most part, things proceeded smoothly: that calm sea. But every once in a while something would hit home vis-à-vis how things actually were. I remember on one occasion the Office of the Assistant to the Acting Assistant to the Deputy Minister of _________—which consisted, I later learned, of the Assistant himself in a poorly lit, badly ventilated temporary cubicle in a Ministry basement hallway—was given twenty-four hours to produce two substantive reports, which it did, right on time. Not widely available, the two reports were the sort of thing people would prefer to know existed than actually read. But somehow they both landed on my desk, simultaneously, and while I was leafing through them over lunch one day, it came to my attention that they were identical. Word for word. Different titles, same content.

When I called the Office of the Assistant to the Acting Assistant to let them know about this clerical glitch, the Assistant himself answered. When I told him there had been a glitch, he informed me there was no glitch. They were different reports because they had different subjects. Different referent, he said, enunciating clearly, as to a child, different meaning. Anyway, he added, what are the odds anybody’s going to read either one of these works of deathless fucking prose, never mind closely enough and close enough in time to notice any similarities?

I read both just now, at lunch, I said. Well, not read—

I was going to say.

Checked through. The two texts are identical.

Yes, but who are you? Who listens to you?

The Prime Minister listens to me.

Give me a break.

On another occasion, when a respected member of the Opposition was making hay out of a claim that the Prime Minister’s party was guilty of some sort of mismanagement of party funds, the national press, at a loss for anything on this Government capable of holding the public’s attention for longer than a day, played up the story. It was clearly a let’s throw this one at the wall and see if it sticks tactic, but an unfortunate succession of leaks, gaffes, revelations, whatever, followed, and soon we were headed straight for a non-confidence vote in the House. (Let me just say here that whoever said a week is a year in politics got it right. How can nothing ever seem to get done and yet everything change in a day? In the morning you wake up a god, that night you pass out dead drunk a Muppet. Or vice versa. By the end of the week you’ve gone from god to Muppet and back again so many times you’re ready to say or do anything for anybody who can guarantee you’ll remain a god. But it doesn’t work that way. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Not for anybody. This is politics.)

So with a non-confidence vote barreling down the track toward us, I accosted the Prime Minister, practically wringing my hands, crying, What are we going to do?

His reply was worthy of Socrates. Has something somebody once said ever come back to you later, he asked me, and you were struck by its profundity, and then you remembered who said it, and suddenly it didn’t even seem especially true?

Why, yes. That has happened to me.

It’s happened to all of us. It’s why you so often hear the phrase Consider the source. Nobody likes the truth, so we put a human face on it and that way minimize it, making it easy to dismiss. With any luck it’ll be forgotten completely, until the next time it comes out of the mouth of some flawed individual and it becomes necessary to go through the process again.

Discredit the Honourable Member? I asked, shocked at how far we were prepared to go when push came to shove.

A human life is rarely pretty in the details, the Prime Minister affirmed quietly, with a smile, though perhaps only baring his teeth.

They speak like angels, I murmured, but they live like men.

Who said that?

Dr. Johnson.

Did he? Good. We’ll use it.

SPACE

The Stash

Unlike his wife, who told me herself that she would stay in one every single night of the year if she could, the Prime Minister wasn’t fussy one way or another about hotels—with one exception, the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, but then it had to be Suite 1203. There were better suites than 1203 at the Ritz-Carlton , far better, but the Prime Minister always insisted on having that particular one. In fact, if for some reason Suite 1203 at the Ritz-Carlton proved unavailable, he would sometimes even choose to stay at the Four Seasons.

When this quirk became known beyond the PMO, some of the younger staffers were rumoured to be offering wagers on what exactly it was about 1203. These ranged from a weight-reducing mirror to a hole drilled through to the next room. One day, checking into the Ritz-Carlton to prepare for the Prime Minister’s arrival later that evening, I found the staffers in a giddy state. By informing the front desk that the Prime Minister needed certain files in place before his arrival, they had got hold of the key to 1203. The plan was to search the room for what it was about it that made it the Prime Minister’s suite of choice at the Ritz-Carlton. When my own preparations were complete, I went along to see what turned up.

Since three of us had stayed or were now staying in rooms identical to 1203, only on different floors, it was easy to discount extraordinary features. The view, of Sherbrooke Street, was unexceptional. Nothing advantageous about the bathroom fixtures, no extra force from the shower head. Standard closet space. After half an hour of fruitless searching, all we could think was that something of sentimental value must have happened to the Prime Minister in 1203: news of the shaming or suicide of an opponent, or perhaps the number itself spoke to him in some Christian or Masonic way. When one of the staffers drew a Robinson screwdriver from his pocket, slipped off his shoes, climbed onto the desk, and set about unscrewing the grate over a ventilation duct, we quietly stood and watched. By that point, none of us had much hope. After lowering the grate to us, the staffer reached into the duct and finding nothing, reached deeper and drew out a pair of beat-up old Size-13, moccasin-style Sperry Top-Siders.

These, after examining closely, he handed down to us. When we too had finished turning these articles over in our hands, we passed them back to him and watched in silence as he replaced them deep inside the duct and rescrewed the grate. And then, like whipped hounds, we got out of there.

Nobody talked much afterward about what we had found. Some of us were pretty badly shaken, though I suspect most were simply disappointed not to have won the bet, or to have come anywhere close. For myself, I was left with the sober reflection that the discovery of a person’s deepest secret can leave you knowing far less about them than you knew before, not because it has opened up a whole new set of questions but because what you have found, this enigmatic object, or objects, that you may even have held in your hands and gazed at in queasy wonder, have tipped you into an aporia of absolute unknowing.

SPACE

Arts and Sciences

Two years into the Prime Minister’s second term, it was my great honour to be invited to attend a teepee handover ceremony on a grassy margin at the Delta Lodge at Kananaskis. Strictly speaking, only the Prime Minister and the Heritage Minister were allowed to join the Blackfoot elders inside the teepee, but the ceremony was held next door to a high-power, two-day conference entitled “Whither the Arts?” hosted by the Heritage Minister himself, and so I passed the time at that. But I found that despite being handpicked and not so much artists as arts administrators and lobbyists, the attendees’ general tone was surly and intemperate, as exemplified by the raucous laughter that erupted when somebody remarked that the h in “Whither” had surely been a misprint. This was beggar-on-horseback stuff. Rarely has this country been under the direct personal control of a Prime Minister so devoted to the arts. What people fail to realize is that Greatness is not just a quality you have, it’s a full-time job. Its unacknowledged cost to the Great One is the foregoing of every last glittering night at the opera and sleepy afternoon curled up with a tome penned by one of our army of international-household-name authors. These extraordinary pastimes, whose galvanizing effects on the Canadian soul have been well documented, are simply not in the cards when your creative energies are dedicated to remaking a country from the ground up.

At any rate, the teepee handover ceremony was held in the late morning of the second day of the conference, a day that began in a literally auspicious way. First, at dawn, a hawk swooped from the sky to carry off a prairie dog from the mouth of its burrow close to the door of the teepee. Not half an hour later, a passing coyote entered the (empty) teepee and sniffed around before continuing on its way. Finally, after the elders and the Heritage Minister had gathered inside and the Prime Minister was about to step in himself, a raven alighted at the tip of one of the teepee support poles. As the ceremony started up inside, with the Heritage Minister thus engaged, the rest of us broke from our conference, which had been taking place in a meeting room a few steps away, and stood around in the sun outside the teepee, cooling our heels.

It was nobody’s fault that we waited out there over three hours, and when the Prime Minister and the Heritage Minister emerged from the tent, their faces painted in celebration of the native titles that they had been awarded along with the teepee (the Prime Minister was The Grey One Who Toils in Secret, while the Heritage Minister was simply [unprintable]), they were visibly elated, but the Prime Minister, with a flight out of Calgary to catch, had to dash, and when the Heritage Minister rejoined our conference and the discussion resumed, you could see the elation draining out of him, and before we knew it he was pacing up and down, berating his aides for interrupting this crucial conference on the arts for a ceremony that had gone on far too long and chastising us for having achieved so little the day before and earlier today and now here we were with hardly any time left at all to continue to drill down on the question of whither the arts. After delivering himself of this senseless tirade, he shouted, And if you don’t think I know this is churlish behaviour on my part, you’re dead wrong, but that’s the kind of person I am, and then he stormed out and we never saw him again. We were forced to pass on our conclusions concerning whither the arts in the form of an email attachment and never did receive from his Office an acknowledgment of our efforts.

Later, when I mentioned this unprofessional outburst to the Prime Minister, he said,

Hal can be a bit of a hothead sometimes.

Hal? I thought his name was Bob.

It might not be Hal, the Prime Minister admitted, but I don’t believe it’s Bob. I think I might have heard him answer to Bill once or twice, but never Bob. Not that I couldn’t get him to answer to Bob, if I felt like it . . . .

The only other noteworthy exchange at the conference had occurred earlier, when the Prime Minister looked in on us. As it happened, the attendees, though all from the arts community and explicitly charged with talking about the arts, had got themselves into a lather about global warming—I know; go figure—and in response to a speech disguised as a question from a young native woman, the Prime Minister replied native-style, with a story from India. In a rice-processing facility, an employee comes running into the boss’s office with a cockroach he’s found in the rice. Here! he cries. Conclusive evidence, sir, that we have roaches! The boss says, Let’s see that. He pops the roach into his mouth, swallows it, and says, That was not a roach, it was a betel leaf!

The sheer, blinding wisdom of this story caused a hush to descend upon the attendees. You could practically see its ramifications causing them to reevaluate everything they had ever assumed about global warming. Finally the young native woman said,

But that’s completely dishonest.

Dishonest? the Prime Minister wondered. Or quick thinking in the name of an overriding economic reality? Who shuts down a rice facility in India because one problem employee starts running around crying Roach? Honest, dishonest, who’s what? Employee? Boss? Who can say? In China or Russia, a troublemaker like that would be jailed, or shot. In the West we do things differently. In Canada, for example, he’d be fired, and if not he should be, and once some of these laws we’ve been working on take effect, also fined, and if possible, deported.

This was something to think about, but before the native woman could continue to dominate the mic, the Prime Minister was obliged to step away to attend the teepee handover ceremony.

SPACE

First Trip Abroad

Though one or two commentators were on it right away, and several took to carping on it weekly, it didn’t seem to matter to the general public that the Prime Minister was in office for some time before he ventured abroad. The reason was simple: he needed control, and because he didn’t know what abroad was like, he couldn’t be sure that he would have it there. I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday the afternoon of the day he was scheduled to take his first trip outside the country—an early evening flight to South America. I had never seen him in such a state. He was like a drunk who does everything with overscrupulous care because he is too drunk to admit to himself how drunk he is.

He packed and unpacked and packed again. He chose and discarded reading material for his carry-on. At the last possible moment he took a bath, of all things. He’d just had his hair cut specially for this trip, but he’d decided it was uneven at the back, and I remember at one point him sitting on a dining room chair in the garden of 24 Sussex and me with a pair of kitchen scissors trimming his hair, while he held up a mirror that kept flashing the sun in my eyes, until I took it out of his hand. Now that I think of it, he was sitting there with his pant cuffs pinned up with safety pins. He’d convinced himself they were too long, but he hadn’t been able to get them the same length, whereas all I could think was who at this late hour we could possibly get to re-hem them. As I snipped, to take his mind off his anxiety and at the same time yank his chain a little, I described the classic Sid Caesar routine in which Sid tries to get his sideburns even and ends up taking his entire hairline back an inch, but the Prime Minister wasn’t listening. Already his thoughts were deep inside the jungle-green and beige-walled labyrinth that is South America.

Probably the reason we humans feel compelled on no evidence whatsoever to distinguish ourselves from the other animals is that 99% of what we do is pure animal routine: rote, unconscious, we’ve done it all so many times before we’re on automatic. Only when we move out into unaccustomed territory do we become what we think of ourselves as being all the time, “human,” because only out there do we become conscious and need to think about everything we do. Only out there is life arbitrary and fearsome, as well it should be. Out there is where the other animals wisely fear to tread, because out there is where the big mistakes are made. This was the place the Prime Minister was in that day, but what I would see in South America was a man who quickly made himself right at home. Once he’d met a few world leaders and witnessed for himself that they were only human, perhaps brighter or more assertive or more charismatic than the rest of us, though not, in the Prime Minister’s view, than himself, and certainly shorter and slighter, most of them anyway, he relaxed, and before long he was stepping on a plane and flying off to South-east Asia as casually as you or I would hop on a bus to Arnprior.

SPACE

Law and Order

The Halloween of my second year in Ottawa, my sister’s boy, who was eight, wanted to go trick-or-treating as a terrorist, and so my sister, who shares the family’s artistic bent even though she lives in Vancouver (joking!), spent the day with him and a friend, making pretend pipe bombs out of toilet paper rolls and sewing camouflage fatigues and headscarves. Once she had the boys kitted out as terrorists, she took a few pictures, which she dropped off at Costco, and on Halloween the boys in their gear were a big hit around the neighbourhood. But two weeks later, in the middle of the night, a SWAT team kicked down my sister’s front door and pulled the family from their beds and went through the house for weapons and ammunition. The last thing the officer in charge of the operation told my sister and brother-in-law as his team was packing up to leave was,

There’s something you people need to understand. This is the world we live in. From now on, what happened here tonight is how it’s going to be.

I thought of my sister and her unnerving experience when I recently found myself standing in the street, trying to snap a picture of the Prime Minister as he rode in a motorcade along Spring Garden Road in Halifax. It was a sunny day, and the people if they weren’t exactly cheering were trying, as people will, to register a glimpse of Greatness. Unfortunately, the group I happened to be standing with found itself on the wrong side of a police cordon. One minute everybody was straining to see, the next we were being unceremoniously pushed backward. When people objected and even tried to resist physically, truncheons started flying, and one must have caught me across the side of the head.

The next thing I knew I was sitting on the curb with the worst headache of my life. I tried to tell the officers who I was and that I needed a doctor because my brain seemed to be filling with blood, but they had people with injuries far worse than mine to deny assistance to. In all we were held for just under ten hours. During that time and for the next three weeks I kept passing in and out of self-awareness. At the end of the day I’d be missing entire blocks of time. But once the swelling went down and the headaches grew less severe and more infrequent, I gratefully put the incident behind me. Now I simply avoid crowds and arrange to be out of town on parade days.

When I told the Prime Minister about my experience, he proposed a thought experiment: A. Assume I’m a terrorist. B. Ask myself: Did this treatment meet with my approval as a law-abiding citizen?

Not really, I said.

You’ve assumed you’re a terrorist, he reminded me.

Assumed, until proven guilty, I countered.

There’s no proven, the Prime Minister said, eerily reifying the sentiment expressed by the SWAT team leader. Not any more. It’s too late for proven.

To explain where I was coming from, I assured him that few people had ever felt more warmly disposed toward the police than I used to. All my life I’d found them almost painfully polite and considerate. To take just one example, when I lived in the bush, two of them crossed the lake to our dock in a motorized canoe. The one in the bow, a beefy fellow, got out and, after ascertaining who I was, snapped to attention, stood at ease, placed his hat on his heart, and said,

I regret to inform you that your grandfather has died.

And had he? the Prime Minister asked.

Yes. What a civilized country this is, where the police provide a service like that for a citizen. I wasn’t even on the grid!

If you’d been on the grid, the Prime Minister observed, they wouldn’t have needed to go out there. You could have saved the taxpayer a hefty chunk o’ change.

Still, I said.

Did you thank them?

Not at first. I laughed nervously, the way one does.

From the grief, the Prime Minister said.

Not really. Bamp was a hundred and two. He was ready to go. I tried to explain this, but it came out as Hey, no worries, the guy was incredibly old. I should have kept that to myself. They must have wondered why they’d gone to the trouble of putting a boat in the water.

Did you get any good pictures? the Prime Minister asked.

What? Of the police on our dock?

No, of the motorcade.

I told him I got one or two, but they were blurry with flying truncheons.

SPACE

Last Days

Talk of slime mold is all well and good, but every slug has its day, prominence is achieved, the stalk grows a head, the head explodes, and sooner or later the time comes for a return to its constituent parts. To put this another way, not even a Great Man can keep a lid screwed tight forever on a cauldron of monkeys. The Prime Minister saw the end coming long before I did. One day he told me a story that let me know without letting me know.

The Prime Minister’s father had supported his little family on the income from a car-refurbishing business. One summer he came into the possession of a mint-green ’56 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, for next to nothing because someone had died in it. Several days must have passed before the body was discovered, because the car had a smell to it that the seller had been unable to mask. But as a skilled renovator of automobile interiors, the Prime Minister’s father replaced the floor mats and took out the seats and recovered them and essentially recreated the car’s interior. For two summers he drove it with the top down, but when the cold weather returned and the top went up, the smell was still there, and eventually he too had to sell it.

Why am I telling you this? the Prime Minister asked me.

I don’t know, I said.

I’ve been driving that mint green Cadillac Eldorado for seven years, the Prime Minister said. Summer and winter.

Who died? I said.

I don’t know, he said. All I know is it stinks and the stink isn’t going to go away.

That should have been my first clue that the Prime Minister had entered that late stage of an endeavour when, as we prepare psychologically to step away, all the dreadful things that, in our eagerness to be here, doing this, we’ve chosen not to see, rise to the surface and stare us in the face. The thrill has died, the bloom has gone off. Nothing is what it was. Peers and superiors, once gods to be emulated, to rebel against, are now Muppets, not worth the bother.

It’s at a time like this, when youth has fled, a time of disillusion and decline, that fissures form in the structure of reality, and the Lt. Wayne McLeods and their ilk crawl out and walk backwards among us, their faces thrust into ours. One thing that can’t be appreciated enough about the Prime Minister’s immigration policy was its friendliness to multicultural diversity. No one saw more clearly than he did the vote-generating potential of a platform designed to assuage newcomer fears of social instability while silencing any conceivable charge of structural governmental racism. McLeod’s party, with its Great White North bombast, was a knuckle-dragging throwback. If this was exactly what the country didn’t need, it was also the only kind of political challenge that could have at the same time unseated the Prime Minister and made him, and everything he had accomplished, appear to be—depending on your politics—either the step that had taken us closer to the world according to McLeod or the last great flowering of effective one-man government.

A tell-tale characteristic of Greatness is that no one, not even his closest confidant, can hope to possess the scope of mind necessary to grasp the larger picture. But then somebody will always come along with a story that seizes the imagination of the people, who will all of a sudden tire of the ineffable leader who served them with such unswerving devotion, and in their fickle way they will hitch their wagon to a little man who has told them a story they can hold in their minds. It doesn’t even need to be his own story, it can be a story he’s picked up somewhere, that happened to somebody else. All it needs to be is a story that will stick to him through the thick and thin of all the empty promises he will make and the lies he will tell. A master narrative, in other words, and thanks to the tour of duty and the row of medals on the chest and the nasty hectoring speeches and the crazy eyes and the crooked arm, this one stuck.

It was the Prime Minister’s wife, appropriately, who filled me in, some months before McLeod’s people put it out there for public consumption. The story went like this.

McLeod did eventually wedge in the crevasse, upside down, with a wall of clear ice between him and the melting face of the glacier. Requiring an implement to chip his way through, he snapped off his left arm just above the wrist and used the sharp end of the compound fracture to dig himself out. His account of this ordeal always ended with the passionate declaration that human life can offer no greater thrill than the one experienced by a man as he plunges from glacial entrapment into freezing water. McLeod’s promise to the Canadian people was that his election would result in an experience for each of us not unlike plunging into a glacial lake while cradling an arm we’d just used our free hand to break off.

This was heady stuff. It also left the impression that the Prime Minister had somehow kept us encased in ice, even though it was hardly like that at all, as anyone can tell you who ever ran for cover when his head exploded or luxuriated in the halflight of his smile, if that’s what it was. But the Canadian people, knowing even less about the Prime Minister and what he was up to than the politicians did, were hungry for a story, preferably, in this age of darkness and decline, something heroic, or its imitation, as we swim for our lives.

SPACE

Coda

The last time I saw the Prime Minister I was standing in the press box of the Ottawa Convention Centre, gazing down at that vast, lonely space, and there he was in his grey suit, moving heavily up and down the floor with an air hockey stick, and when he reached one end he’d take a hard shot on goal, pick up the rebound, stickhandle his way to the other end, and take another hard shot, and watching him down there I understood that after we hauled him up out of the ice like a Colossus, this was what his life had been, and in a vision I saw that it will be a cold day in Hell before we are again bestridden as the Prime Minister bestrode us in the full majesty of his Greatness.

–Greg Hollingshead

——————————

Greg Hollingshead has published six books of fiction, including The Roaring Girl, The Healer, and Bedlam. He has won the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Giller Prize. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and director of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre. In 2011-12 he served as Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2012 he received the Order of Canada. He now lives in Toronto.

Drenched in Venice: Text & Photographs — Natalia Sarkissian

Jun 032013

“You should choose the finest day of the month and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon….”

—Henry James, Italian Hours, 1909

It’s five a.m. in Milan and my alarm rings. Outside I hear rain beating on my windows. I mute the clock and sling a leg out of bed. I’m going to Venice on the 6:30 train even though the entire Italian peninsula sloshes like an overflowing bathtub.

I stumble for the shower—some hot water to wake me up. And then for the espresso maker. Soon I’m ready and out the door. Dark clouds spit raindrops like shrill warnings. The wind upends my umbrella.

On the train, map open, I review my Venetian attack. So many have been to Venice, photographed Venice, written about Venice—from Michel de Montaigne to Byron and Dickens and Browning and Ruskin and Henry James and Mark Twain and Hemingway (and many in between and afterward) and I’m following in their footsteps.

Cà d’Oro — “A noble pile of very quaint Gothic, once superb in general effect.”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

Santa Maria della Salute — “…the grace of the whole building being chiefly dependent on the inequality of size in its cupolas, and pretty grouping of the two campaniles behind them….”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

Today I’m on the trail of Henry James and John Ruskin. Both men loved Venice and visited it often. Ruskin documented his passion for the city in several tomes, most notably the Stones of Venice, a three-volume best-seller when it was published mid-century (1851-1853). In the later part of the 19^th century, James wrote a series of essays for journals about his stays in Venice (as well as other Italian cities) which were compiled into the 1909 Italian Hours.

I plan to take pictures of the palaces and churches and squares both men loved as well as those they abhorred, and accompany the photos with their words. I locate the Cà d’Oro, a palazzo Ruskin liked, and circle it on the map for easy reference later. I find Santa Maria Formosa, a church whose architectural flights disgusted him, and circle that too. And I star the location of the Ducal Palace, a building both men loved. I plan to chug along the Grand Canal in a vaporetto, not an elegant vessel, but serviceable and cheap when compared to the eternally classic gondola. From a perch in the prow I’ll take photos. I’ll have more than ten hours; I arrive in Venice at 9:30 am and my return won’t be until 7:50 pm. With so much time at my disposal I’ll be sure to get my shots right. And while I’m shooting, I’ll spend a marvelous day like others I’ve spent in the city. I’ll revel in the light, the merging of sea and sky, the shining domes, the golden lions glinting from columns, from lintels, from façades.

Although. From the sound of the reverb on the roof of the train—fortissimo like Ligeti’s The Devil’s Staircase—the rain doesn’t seem to be abating. And we’re in Padua with just one more stop to Venice. But I won’t worry yet. A lot can happen in a few kilometers. And no doubt the rain won’t hold too long in Venice. After all, this is the city that James said was mutable “like a nervous woman whom you know only when you know all aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan….” [Italian Hours.] So if flighty, changeable Venice starts out wet, she’ll soon turn dry. Right?

Just as I’m quitting the train station the storm worsens. I fling myself onto a vaporetto for cover without paying attention to which one. And so, instead of threading through the Grand Canal that snakes through the city’s protective embankments like I planned, the boat I’m on veers wide, toward the wind-tossed sea. Waves soon blast over the bow. Water drums in at a slant. My hair is soaking but at least my camera’s (relatively) dry; I thought to wrap it in a plastic shopping bag before leaving the train.

Like an ungainly walrus, the boat plows onward through the swell, past the fish market, some cranes, a garbage vessel. It carves a leftward swathe in the green sea near smokestacks, circles the city’s outskirts and finally, approaches those genteel structures that have entranced visitors for centuries. I spot the onion-shaped outlines of St. Mark’s five domes, off in the soggy distance. No inimitable views in my viewfinder quite yet, but as soon as I’m in the vicinity I’ll nab some. That is, rain permitting. Right now it’s lashing those of us foolhardy enough to stand in the prow. I see that droplets now splotch my lens; I need to clean it, pronto, but have nothing dry at hand.

The Ducal Palace — “the central building of the world….”

— John Ruskin, Stones of Venice

The boat rounds the Isola della Giudecca. St. Mark’s Basin churns with waves and whizzing motor boats. There I spot the mouth of the Grand Canal, gaping like a toothy eel. There’s Santa Maria della Salute with her stately steps, a large white pearl gleaming in the mist. And San Giorgio Maggiore with its Palladian façade and soaring campanile, a gushing brick and marble proclamation. And on the opposite shore, the Ducal Palace, Ruskin’s model of all perfection in architecture, “the central building of the world.” [Ruskin, Stones of Venice] But I’m not immortalizing anything with my camera yet. I’ve got the water-splotched lens twisted off and, in spite of the downpour, am switching it for one that’s clean.

View of the Piazzetta — “We pass into the Piazzetta to look down the great  throat, as it were, of Venice …”

—Henry James, The Grand Canal

When the boat stops at San Zaccaria, not far from St. Mark’s, I hop off and flick my umbrella open. I navigate slick alleys to the Campo Bandiera e Moro where I find the Palazzo Badoer, “a magnificent example of 14^th century Gothic, circa 1310-1320, anterior to the Ducal Palace showing beautiful ranges of the fifth-order window….” [Ruskin, Stones of Venice].

A magnificent example of 14th-century Gothic….

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

But a tour group stands between me and my picture. Like me, they were caught ill-prepared for the weather and have bought bright raincoats from a street vendor. Unfortunately their plastic wrappings seem to keep them dry because they continue to stand listening to their guide with rapt attention. While I wait I find myself agreeing with James who wrote: “The  sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his Venice is that he has  too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original;  to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. The  Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that  admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march  through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers.” (Italian Hours).

Riva degli Schiavoni — [From his rooms here] “the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me…”

—Henry James, Italian Hours.

Then I head down the glistening Riva degli Schiavoni toward the center of the universe—the Ducal Palace and St. Mark’s. As I go, my shoes squelch—not rainproof after all—and my coat flaps like wet wash on the line. My camera’s dry inside my shirt but then, in a rush of air, my umbrella flips its underbelly and entrails up. Flapping, I grab at the nylon and wrench it down but not before I douse myself.

Dripping, I decide to abandon my plan—at least temporarily—of tracing Ruskin’s and James’s footsteps through the city. Under the loggia ringing the Palazzo Ducale, I merge with a horde of fellow Venice-gazers standing in line for the Manet exhibition: a way to stay dry and warm. No photographs are allowed of the interiors of the sumptuous rooms of the Ducal Palace themselves, but the courtyard is fair game.

Courtyard view — “Within the square formed by the building is seen its interior court (with one of its wells)….”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

A dome and pinnacles of St. Mark’s from the Ducal Palace courtyard — “All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is derived from Greece through Rome, and coloured and perfected from the East. The history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the various modes and directions of this derivation.”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

After an elbow-to-elbow tour of the small show and a bit of yellowed mozzarella and wilted lettuce in the teeming cafeteria, three hours later I emerge into St. Mark’s Square. The rain has stopped. With the reprieve from the wet grimness of the morning, a charge of excitement pulses through the crowd outside, a jumped up beat, verging on hysteria. And I see that many of the hooting visitors are stripping themselves of their shoes. Because now the square is filling with the sea.

St. Mark’s lion and St. Theodore atop columns in the Piazzetta — “Whether St. Mark was first bishop of Aquileia or not, St. Theodore was the first patron of the city; nor can he yet be considered as having entirely abdicated his early right as his statue, standing on a crocodile, still companions the winged lion on the opposing pillar of the piazzetta.”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

Wind whips water over the embankment fronting the lagoon. Water bubbles up from holes in paving stones. I dodge the deepening rivulets, looking for higher ground while people around me dance and splash in the greening stuff that smells like rotting mackerel.

It starts to rain again. On the raised platform of the Library, under the loggia there, I find refuge from the flood. Protected by the arcade that’s higher than the level of the water, I skirt around one side of the square marveling at the show of people prancing through the water. And when I’ve had my fill, an hour later, I decide to catch that vaporetto I’d missed in the morning. I’ll go back to my original plan and take photos of palazzi along the Grand Canal. But there’s no way off the Library’s plinth. It has turned into an island. Rising water maroons me.

View with the Pillars of the Piazzetta — “The two magnificent blocks of marble … [that] form one of the principal ornaments of the Piazzetta, are Greek sculpture of the sixth century.”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

A shopkeeper in a fancy jewelry store says the water will still keep rising. “Forecasts vary,” she says, “but we could get another 10 or 20 centimeters.” I can’t tell if she’s serious. She tells me to take my shoes off, roll up my pants and brave it. “This is nothing. In November the water rose to my waist,” she says, scoffing. “Bidet level,” she adds, batting her waist with her palm.

But I don’t want to wade through stinky deluge even if it is only ankle-deep. The water’s cold too. I’m cold. I want my boots. Why didn’t I wear my boots?

“Where can I buy some cheap rain boots?” I ask.

“I told you,” she says, rolling her eyes. “We’re cut off. Cheap boots are at the Rialto. And the way to the Rialto is flooded.”

Florian’s café — “I sat in front of Florian’s café, eating ices, listening to music…. The traveler will remember how the immense cluster of tables and chairs stretches like a promontory …. The whole place … under the stars and with all the lamps, all the voices and light footsteps on marble … is like an open-air saloon.”

— Henry James, Italian Hours.

I wander away, wondering what I should do. At Florian’s—where James and Hemingway and who knows who else once sat—I pause to listen to a quartet under a white canopy play the Titanic theme song. The bandleader has a sense of humor. I linger, reading the menu but nix a warming cup of cappuccino (over $10) as too expensive. Traipsing on, I watch people wade through water that is now over their ankles. The shopkeeper was right. The water’s still coming in. I’ll never get off my island unless I take my shoes off.

But then I overhear a couple in new blue boots telling another couple with plastic bags tied around their feet that a boot sellers is a stone’s throw away. “Round the square,” they say, “cut through that glass shop at the end of the arcade. Go out the back door,” they say. “The alley beyond was still dry moments ago.” They stick their feet out so that their boots can be admired. “Only 12 Euros each.”

Having listened to their directions, I dash off—ahead of the bag-clad duo.

I find the glass shop. The owner frowns as I cut through to the back door and out into the alley behind. The alley’s puddling, but still traversable. It flanks a canal. In the canal water is rising. And in the canal there’s a gondola jam—gondoliers clog a passage under a bridge racing to bring tourists and boats back in. But they must lean and tilt their craft: 40 degrees, 50 degrees, 60 degrees. They risk spilling occupants and belongings. Tourists on board scream with glee, as if they are at a museum-cum-amusement park, which, as James noted over 100 years ago, they are. And I suddenly realize that for most of the day most of the gondolas have stayed lashed at their moorings; only the audacious have been out and about.

Leaving the stream of paddling boatmen, rounding the corner, I find the store with blue boots in the window. The price has gone up to 16 Euros. I stand in line, and, when it’s my turn I pay the extra without complaint. I’m just glad they have my size.

Newly booted, I splash to the embarcadero where I wait for my vaporetto. When the boat comes, I check my watch. It’s almost 7 pm. The hours have slipped by too fast. I’ll have time for just a one-way ride down the Grand Canal and a few shots of some of the palaces and churches I set out early this morning to admire.

The Grand Canal – “The noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement at the railway station.”

—Henry James, Italian Hours.

I sink into a wet seat—it’s sprinkling. I think how this day’s touring of the city has been different from others I’ve spent. Drenched in Venice by Venice. Inundated. With James and Ruskin for company.

The boat groans forward. Foam flies over the bow. We leave Santa Maria della Salute behind and wind our way down the Grand Canal. Beautiful old palaces rise up, their lacy windows turning luminous with evening lights. Venice always inundates I think as we surge past. One way or another.

Palazzo Pisani Moretta — “[the] capitals of the first-floor windows are … singularly spirited and graceful, very daringly undercut, and worth careful examination….”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

Palazzo Contarini delle Figure — “I must warn [the traveler] to observe most carefully the peculiar feebleness and want of soul in the conception of their ornament which mark them as belonging to a period of decline….”

—John Ruskin, Stones of Venice.

I spy a Renaissance building with fanciful decoration coming up–the Palazzo Contarini delle Figure. I hoist my camera and click.

I would endeavour to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the stones of Venice.

— John Ruskin, Stones of Venice

There is nothing new to be said  about Venice certainly [.…] I write these lines with the full consciousness of having  no information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten  the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory [of Venice]; and I  hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love  with his theme.”

—Henry James, Italian Hours.

—Natalia Sarkissian

———————————————————

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

Character Gradation and Coherence: An Examination of Novels by Jane Austen, Anne Tyler and Mark Haddon — Robin Oliveira

Jun 022013

Herewith a cogent, revelatory, insightful essay on the inner complexities of novel construction, to be precise, the often ignored (unthought, unimagined) techniques of character gradation and grouping. Don’t scratch your heads and ask what character gradation is. It never fails to amaze me how few people who want to be writers have the vaguest idea of how a novel is put together. Plot and subplot, for example. How are they related, how is the subplot introduced through the text? Too many proto-novelists naively assume that a novel is just a 300-page story (um, without having thought much about what a story is either). Character gradation and grouping is related to subplotting; it’s a technique for deploying other characters (plots) as devices that reflect the concerns and themes of the main plot characters. It’s a form that helps the novelist invent content and also create a consistence and cohesive thematic whole. It is an old technique (though few readers actually notice it).

Robin Oliveira has thought long and hard about the structure of novels. She is a former student of mine, a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, who rocketed into the ranks of published novelists with her well-received Civil War novel My Name is Mary Sutter. Her second novel, based on the painters Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, is due out with Viking next year. She has contributed to Numéro Cinq from the outset. And it is always wonderful to have her back.

For the most part characterization in novels has not been discussed in terms of coherence, that is, in the scientific meaning of the word as the intermolecular attraction that holds molecules and masses together. Coherence is important because a novelist must corral the differing, wayward elements of a novel into a whole, making associations and connections between characters and events. An efficient way to do this is through character gradation and grouping.

Character gradation is a cousin of the tried and true literary device of comparing and contrasting characters, but it is more than that. In his book The Enamoured Knight, Douglas Glover explains that parallel and contrasting characters do not just share traits, but that “traits are varied, diminished or intensified from one character to another, that is, they are graded.”^[1] I like to think of gradation as a spectrum, with the full shade of a trait, from fully realized to fully opposed, deliberately manifested in the population of a novel. This spectrum is crafted by the careful writer in order to flesh out the themes and story question presented. Grading ensures that the novel’s central issues reappear again and again in a number of guises. In essence, grading does the difficult work of achieving the coherence necessary to reinforce the meaning of the book. In addition, groupings and cross-groupings have a kind of cascading effect that helps to build momentum. As Glover explains, “The effect of character grouping and gradation is…to create a thematic and structural cohesiveness, a critical intensity of focus which prevents the long story (with all those extra characters) from sprawling and dissipating its energy.”^[2] These gradations cause echoes, reminding the reader of how the characters are connected and also what they have at stake, what emotional issue is tantamount, and ultimately what the story is about.

Character gradation is the child of echoing and repetition, which E.K. Brown discusses in his book, Rhythm in the Novel. In his first chapter, “Phrase, Character and Incident,” he comes to the conclusion that repetition, combined with variation of action or character trait or even phrasing, establishes the “rhythmic process, the combination of the repeated and the variable with the repeated as the ruling factor.”^[3]In his discussion of James and Thackeray, he makes another point, which is that “flexibility” and the use of “antithesis” “irradiates the characters.”^[4] Therefore, variation of character traits combined with alternating groupings of characters achieves a sense of connectedness that is a powerful tool when devising a novel’s population. This coherence not only solidifies theme, as Glover says, but these variations and repetitions graded on a spectrum amplify the story, which gives the novel vibrancy and the sense of a larger world.

With these principles in mind, I begin my discussion of gradation and cohesion as manifested in novels by Jane Austen, Anne Tyler and Mark Haddon with assertions fundamental to my thinking on characterization. They are: that a novel is a story about people, and people act in such a way as to secure that which they desire. They desire something because of who they are, where they have been, who they love, of what they have been deprived, what they perceive they need, and what they do not consciously understand about themselves (though the author does, or will come to, as the characters develop). That a novel by design is a cohesive entity. That nothing is inserted into a novel by accident. That each element of the story serves the larger whole. That a novel or story is built, brick by brick, rather than spilled onto the page, and each brick is the result of who the characters are and what they want; their desire dictates plot.

With these assertions in mind, I will argue that in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, character gradation is a fundamental and indispensable tool.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen populates her novel about the Bennet family daughters’ romantic fortunes with neighbors, family friends and extended family. But it is how she characterizes them that gives the novel its cohesive feel of being about one thing. The story revolves around the question that if one wishes to marry for love, as Elizabeth and Jane Bennet do, how does one choose a marriage partner when faced with class and financial obstacles?

The principal characters in this story are the two eldest daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Jane and Elizabeth, and the two men with whom they will fall in love, Mr. Bingley and his friend Mr. Darcy. Again, if we think of gradation as a spectrum, diminished to heightened, or opposite to opposite, we see how Austen crafted her principal characters. Notice how alike Jane and Bingley are, and how singular Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth are; how opposite Jane and Elizabeth are, how dissimilar the two male friends are. Elizabeth is lively, playful, witty and can easily see peoples’ base motivations, though she fails to perceive, at first, Mr. Wickham’s base character. She is a more vibrant character than Jane, who is sweet, kind, never finds fault in anyone, and would never ascribe dishonorable reasons for anyone’s actions. Mr. Bingley, who will eventually marry Jane, is described in terms similar to Jane: he is gentlemanlike with a pleasant countenance and excellent manners. Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth’s opponent and future husband, is deemed by all to be proud, class-conscious and disdainful of those beneath him; different from Bingley, but like the vivacious, independent-thinking Elizabeth in that both share the trait of pride, causing them each to prejudge the other, resulting in dual, unfavorable impressions that are not easily unseated.

Austen uses these principal characters’ gradations to craft a spectrum of attitudes toward the story question. She employs this method by setting off Bingley and Darcy as opposites, though they are also grouped as friends. This opposition is interesting, since they are not opponents in this story. They are parallels. Bingley’s courtship of Jane runs a very close second plot to the Darcy/Elizabeth romance. But from the beginning, Austen writes: “Between him and Darcy was a very steady friendship, in spite of a great opposition of character.”^[5] They act out this opposition of character in a variety of ways: Darcy refuses to dance at a party where Bingley dances every dance; Bingley falls in love with Jane immediately despite her poor family connections while Darcy must overcome his pride; Bingley yields to his friends’ and sisters’ opinions, while Darcy defies them.

Jane and Elizabeth are at odds as well, though they are grouped as sisters. Jane quickly falls in love with Bingley, while Elizabeth initially despises Mr. Darcy before comprehending his true character and falling into love. Jane pines away for Bingley in London, accepting her fate, while Elizabeth visits Darcy’s home, Pemberley, accepts dinner invitations from him, and fights his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, even when Elizabeth has no evidence that Darcy is in love with her. These articulate variations are a type of repetition. Both the sisters are in love, they are in love with two friends, yet their personalities and actions are dissimilar. Furthermore, Austen groups each pair of lovers. Jane and Bingley are parallels. As Mr. Bennet says to Jane, “Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved upon; so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income.”^[6] Elizabeth and Darcy, however, remain in opposition, and everyone is amazed when they are engaged—sisters, father, mother, friends, relations. But the careful reader knows that they acted in the same way, just as Jane and Bingley did: they each disliked the other at first. This variation of action and intention in groups has a wonderful, dynamic effect on the novel as the reader experiences all the permutations of love and desire.

How does this pair of lovers feel about marrying despite class and financial obstacles, the story question at hand? Again, they are graded. Jane and Bingley provide the calm backwater to the more tempestuous love affair between Darcy and Elizabeth. For Bingley and Jane there is no obstacle. Jane wishes to marry for love, falls in love and remains true despite the class and financial obstacles in her path. Bingley perceives neither class nor financial obstacles, and is only persuaded not to marry Jane because his sisters and Darcy, who are very conscious of the issue, persuade him that Jane is not in love with him. Elizabeth and Darcy, however, confront the issue and each other. When Darcy proposes the first time, and Elizabeth wisely but pridefully turns him down, Darcy verbalizes the class and financial differences between them, saying he is proposing in spite of them.

Reinforcing the central question of how to choose whom to marry, Austen presents a series of couples to echo the two main couples. Elizabeth’s dear friend Charlotte Lucas, who eventually marries Mr. Collins—Elizabeth’s second cousin who proposes first to Elizabeth and then, when refused, applies to the acquiescent Charlotte—is drawn in opposition to Elizabeth by a differing perspective on marriage. Charlotte believes that “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance…It is better to know as little of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.” Elizabeth counters, “It is not sound. You know it is not sound, and that you would never act this way yourself.”^[7] But Elizabeth is wrong. Charlotte will and does act exactly in this way, marrying Mr. Collins, a man invariably described as absurd, conceited and obsequious. This direct opposition of Charlotte to Elizabeth, though they are friends, serves to dramatize the story conflict and further illuminates Elizabeth’s desire to marry for affection, not money or class associations. Were Charlotte merely a friend who did not wish to marry, she would have no parallel plot, and Charlotte as a character would neither resonate nor reflect on the story question. But she is constructed in such a way that she serves as an antithesis to Elizabeth’s desire to marry for love, then enters into a marriage that will serve as the antithesis to her marriage to Mr. Darcy, all the while being grouped with Elizabeth as a dear friend.

Furthermore, Austen inversely mirrors the Charlotte/Mr. Collins marriage to the coupling of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. In the elder Bennet marriage, it is Mrs. Bennet who is universally considered absurd, and Mr. Bennet the man who chose poorly. Mr. Bennet, however, upon learning that Collins and Charlotte were about to be married, thinks “Charlotte Lucas, whom he had been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife….”^[8] But while Mr. Bennet believes himself to be sensible, he is as foolish as Charlotte, a sober person marrying for the wrong reasons. Elizabeth contemplates her parents’ marriage thusly: “Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence, had vanished for ever.”^[9] So, ultimately, Mr. Bennet was the foolish one, not his wife. This question of who exactly is the foolish one again reinforces the story question of how to choose a desirable marriage partner. This inverse mirror reinforces the theme and aspiration of both Jane and Elizabeth that choosing well in marriage will provide the only possibility of future happiness, and fattens the peoplescape, or population, of Austen’s novel.

Yet another iteration of a poor coupling is that of Lydia, Elizabeth’s youngest sister, with the officer George Wickham, a dissipated fortune hunter who preyed first on the young Miss Darcy, the very minor character Miss King, and finally Lydia, who was deluded and silly enough to behave without any deliberation, on the basis of flirtation alone. Lydia’s actions serve as the brightest opposite to the more sober method of obtaining a husband adopted by both Jane and Elizabeth, and Wickham and Lydia as a couple are the stunning opposites of both Bingley and Jane and Darcy and Elizabeth.

The Gardiners, Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle, are yet another couple echoing the main couples, serving as an example of a fine partnership to which Elizabeth and Jane aspire. They are also relatives. Darcy has an aunt, too, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Note the symmetry here, another kind of grouping. But here is where the similarity ends. While the Gardiners are egalitarian and helpful, Lady Catherine is autocratic and obstructive. Where the Gardiners hope for the union of Darcy and Elizabeth, Lady Catherine campaigns against it. Where the Gardiners cooperate in helping Darcy mend the miserable connection of Wickham and Lydia, thereby tacitly agreeing to a union between the two families, Lady Catherine visits Elizabeth to sunder the possibility of her marriage to Darcy and to decry the poor family connections that Darcy also once disdained. At the close of the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner are grouped with the Darcys as representative of the happiest of couples, as well as Jane and Bingley.

These couples populate the novel as echoes of the main characters, providing numerous contrasts to the way Jane and Elizabeth are going about their romantic affairs, showcasing imprudence and resignation (Charlotte) and foolishness (her mother and Lydia) in order to highlight Jane’s and Elizabeth’s more prudent approaches. Their stories of course are subplots, but they are subplots because of how they mirror and magnify the main characters’ plots, and they mirror and magnify those plots because their desires and character traits are grades of the main characters and their conflict. These multiplications not only populate the novel but also give it coherence, imparting that sense of a whole world with teeming inner connections.

Austen also groups individual characters. Elizabeth’s three younger sisters are all shades of Mrs. Bennet. Austen echoes Mrs. Bennet’s character in the headstrong, silly Lydia. Lydia is a younger variation of Mrs. Bennet, who also once loved a redcoat: “I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well—and indeed so I do still at my heart; and if a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year, should want one of my girls, I shall not say nay to him.”^[10] When the regiment leaves Meryton and Lydia is pining for the loss of the officers’ society, Mrs. Bennet says, “I cried for two days together when Colonel Millar’s regiment went away. I thought I should have broke my heart.”^[11]

Kitty is first grouped with Lydia—considered by their father to be “two of the silliest girls in the country.”^[12] —but toward the end of the novel, when she is “removed from the influence of Lydia’s example, she became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant and less insipid.”^[13]

Mrs. Bennet has lesser echoes in her sister Mrs. Phillips, whose behavior is likewise “vulgar”^[14], and in Lady Lucas, who echoes Mrs. Bennet in her singular desire that her daughter Charlotte be married, no matter what the cost.

The other sister, Mary, is a minor echo of Mr. Collins and, though it is never directly stated, is the obvious marriage partner choice for her double. She sounds like Mr. Collins when she speaks: “ [Lydia’s elopement] is a most unfortunate affair; and will probably be much talked of. But we must stem the tide of malice…loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable—that one false step involves her in endless ruin….”^[15] He stupidly ignores her, underpinning the theme that most people make foolish marriage choices.

I think it is important to note that the techniques of grouping need not be as obvious as those previously discussed. Notice that Austen makes Mary seem the best choice for Mr. Collins only by inference. Mary’s opinions are his opinions; when she speaks, she mimics his self-righteousness. Never are the two described as being alike, yet every reader knows that Mr. Collins should have chosen Mary, an association achieved merely by this more subtle method of grouping.

Elizabeth’s suitors are also graded. Mr. Collins appears at first to be primary on the least desirable. However, Mr. Wickham, at first grouped with Bingley in appearing to be the best choice for Elizabeth, is revealed instead to be the worst when Darcy reveals Wickham’s attempted elopement with his younger, vulnerable sister. And when Wickham instead succeeds in eloping with Lydia and extorting a fortune from Darcy, Mr. Bennet has this to say of him: “He is as fine a fellow…as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks and makes love to us all. I am prodigiously proud of him. I defy even Sir William Lucas himself, to produce a more valuable son-in-law.”^[16] This reevaluation regroups Mr. Wickham at Mr. Collins’ end of the spectrum. A fainter echo is Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is presented and grouped with Mr. Bingley as a better alternative to the proud, disagreeable Darcy. In Charlotte’s mind, Fitzwilliam was “beyond comparison the pleasantest man,”^[17] but in the end, he remains nothing but a faint echo of Mr. Bingley and yet another contrast to the incomparable Darcy.

The lesser characters of Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst serve as opposites to Elizabeth. Miss Bingley wishes to marry Darcy and goes about it all the wrong way, using teasing and jealousy in an attempt to alter his emerging affection for Elizabeth. Mrs. Hurst is an echo of her sister, and her marriage to the frequently drunken Mr. Hurst echoes the ill-advised marriages of other couples in the novel.

In summary, in Pride and Prejudice, grouping and regrouping of the characters magnifies the theme of the novel and coheres the whole.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler,is the multi-generational story of the Tull family: Pearl, the matriarch, her husband Beck and their three children, Cody, Ezra and Jenny. Like Austen, Tyler uses character gradation to enhance, emphasize and reinforce her novel’s essential question, which is: Can a family, divided by a history of pain, come together? Like Pride and Prejudice, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is populated by family members, their spouses and friends. But Tyler’s novel employs a more interior POV and hence the characterization is less firm. The reader’s view of the characters in Dinner shifts as the characters regard themselves and each other at different points in their lives. Memories are unreliable, conflicting; assessments change, not in the way that Elizabeth’s opinion of Mr. Wickham and Mr. Darcy changes, but in a more complex, unstable way. Therefore, the characters can be viewed only in their shifting relations to one another. But this shifting characterization still provides its own kind of cohesiveness, because the shifting groupings further link each of the characters one to the other. In effect, Tyler has taken this technique to its most articulate expression, further enhancing her story of this unstable, troubled family. It is important to note that Tyler tells the story in third person, shifting from one character’s view point to another as the novel progresses, a perfect approach in this instance since Dinner is the story of a broken family. Still, Tyler’s employment of character gradation works in much the same way that Austen’s does. The foundational principle is the same: repetition and variation of character traits in order to group the characters to reinforce theme and story.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant begins with Pearl’s story. The matriarch is on her deathbed, having willed herself to die by deliberately catching pneumonia through self-induced immobility. Intermittently conscious, she reviews her life: her relationship with the husband who deserted her, and her life with their three children, Ezra, Cody and Jenny. We learn that Pearl experienced moments of explosive anger, that she was never very happily married, that she considered herself unreliable, at times, as a mother. She wonders why her children did not find themselves a substitute mother: “You should have got an extra mother, was what she meant to say.”^[18] Before she dies, she instructs Ezra to call everyone in her address book, knowing full well that the only one left alive is Beck, the absent husband. It is this dual wish/act—dying and having Ezra call her estranged husband—that will ultimately unite this sundered family.

The characters in this novel shift associations as in a kaleidoscope of literary Venn diagrams, in which character traits and associations are grouped and regrouped again and again. The shifting and regrouping, both of desire to reunite and the characters’ assessments of one another, are so fluid that they are difficult to outline. As in Pride and Prejudice, the groupings in this novel are based on desire. In this case, the groups shift on the basis of whether or not reunion is desirable. In the first grouping, Pearl and Ezra want the same thing, for the family to be reunited. Pearl wants the family to be together so much that she does not tell the children that their father has left, and pretends to them and the neighborhood that someday Beck will return. Ezra spends the novel trying to unite the family over meals, adopting the traditional mother role and thereby becoming the substitute that Pearl insists her children need. He is also grouped with her by both her and his siblings. We’re told that “Ezra was her favorite, her pet…The entire family knew it. ”^[19] And Pearl thinks Ezra will stay with her, “the two of them bumping down the driveway, loyal and responsible, together forever.”^[20]

But the novel’s Venn diagrams constantly shift as the characters make associations with the other characters. At various times, Ezra is grouped with Luke, (Cody’s son) and Ruth, the woman Cody will steal from Ezra. However, as soon as Cody marries Ruth, his regard for her, and therefore the way he associates her, changes. Where once he grouped her with Ezra, he now groups her with his mother, using the same description he used to describe Pearl. Later, Cody reassociates Ruth with Ezra because she, too, tries to feed him. But just after Cody steals Ruth from Ezra and marries her, he encounters an old girlfriend whom he had dropped because he thought she preferred Ezra instead of him. As soon as she relates that she had always considered Ezra “a motherly man,” Cody develops an heretofore unheard-of affinity for Ezra because “she really hadn’t understood Ezra; she hadn’t appreciated what he was all about.”^[21] You see the cascade effect here, the kaleidoscope. One character is grouped to another, is grouped to another, then is regrouped again. These subtle cascading impressions link Cody to Ezra, enhancing in the end the plausibility of this damaged family being able to reunite. Gradation, therefore, serves to cohere and reinforce the story question.

Pearl is grouped with others beside Ezra and Ruth. Pearl and her daughter Jenny are both characterized as tidy, though later Jenny will abandon that trait when she becomes a substitute mother to her third husband’s brood of children, whose mother abandoned them, an act which creates two more groupings: one of abandoned children and another of parents who abandoned their families. To further reinforce the theme, Becky becomes a substitute mother to all of Joe’s children, a split off from Pearl thinking they all should have found a substitute. Also, Jenny leaves her first husband Harley and never tells the family, just as her mother did when Beck left. And Jenny loses her temper with her daughter just as Pearl did with her: “’No,’ said Becky, and Jenny hauled off and slapped her hand across the mouth, then shook her till her head lolled, then flung her aside and ran out of the apartment…All of her childhood returned to her: her mother’s blows and slaps and curses, her mother’s pointed fingernails digging into Jenny’s arm, her mother shrieking, ‘Guttersnipe! Ugly little rodent!'”^[22]In another cascade, Jenny’s daughter Becky later develops anorexia, as Jenny had as a child—Jenny was once referred to as looking as if she had come from Auschwitz. And to further illustrate how complex the groupings are, in an even more convoluted reflection, Jenny thinks Cody perceives that everything she says “carries the echo of their mother.”^[23]

The men, too, are linked in this cascading fashion. Previously, we observed the cascade from Ezra to Luke and Ezra to Ruth. Tyler groups Cody with Beck—the father he could never please—in that he takes a traveling job like his father and ends up living the life he lived as a child, unconnected to his neighborhood. Unlike his father, however, Cody takes his family with him wherever he goes, echoing Ezra’s desire that the larger family be reunited. Note here the subtle method of grouping by action. While Darcy and Bingley acted in opposite ways, Cody and Beck act alike. Yet Cody would never be able to consciously admit that he is anything like his father. Indeed, he prides himself on being the exact opposite. But he is the same. While Ezra takes on motherly qualities, Cody takes on paternal characteristics. It is a way for the reader to see the grouping without the character ever being aware of it; indeed, if Cody ever admitted to being like his father, I am not certain he could survive the psychological blow. Toward the end, when Ezra has invited Beck to the restaurant for the funeral meal just as Pearl wanted and Beck, feeling out of place, leaves, it is Cody who ultimately finds his father and, more importantly perhaps, recognizes his son in his father: “There was Luke, as if conjured up, sitting for some reason on the stoop of a boarded-over building. Cody started toward him, walking fast. Luke heard his footsteps and raised his head as Cody arrived. But it wasn’t Luke. It was Beck. His silver hair appeared yellow in the sunlight, and he had taken off his suit coat to expose his white shirt and his sharp, cocked shoulders so oddly like Luke’s.”^[24] This grouping has, again, the effect of delineating the associations between characters and answering the story question of whether or not a family can reunite after pain. And the answer is, Yes. Cody, the one who feels most responsible for the breakup of the family, the one who develops the paternal qualities, the one who thinks, “Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Was it something I didn’t do, that made [Beck] go away?,”^[25]and the one regarded by his mother as “Always cheating, tormenting, causing trouble…”^[26] is the one who ultimately invites Beck back into the family circle.

Other characters’ situations reflect and comment on the Tull family situation. Echoing the abandoned children plot are Joe’s children, most specifically embodied in Slevin: Slevin is Jenny’s stepson, whose mother walked out on them, an inversion of Jenny’s history. Mrs. Scarlatti is portrayed as Ezra’s substitute mother because she is also husbandless and had a deceased son who was a soldier, as Ezra is about to become at one point. She also acts as Ezra’s mother, calls him her dear boy, and upon her death leaves him her restaurant, supporting his dreams in a way that Pearl could not. And Ezra attends Mrs. Scarlatti in the hospital (as he will later tend his mother on her deathbed). Mrs. Payson is also presented as a surrogate: “[Ezra] has been like a son to me.”^[27]In a further iteration of the substitute mother idea, Ezra replaces the waiters in the restaurant with “cheery, motherly waitresses.”^[28]

These connections, Venn Diagrams, and shifting groupings have the effect of, again, “reinforcing theme,” as Glover says. These groupings are wrapped up with desire: Ezra wants the family to stay together, as does Cody, as does Jenny, as does Pearl. Tyler sets her characters to act as one whole as they stumble about trying to achieve this. Again, it is character associations and gradation that accomplish the task of coherence most successfully.

We even find this device of character gradation in Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which would at first seem impossible, because this story is narrated by an autistic, savant teenager, whose disability is distinguished in part by an inability to discern character. To illustrate how deep a challenge the use of gradation is in this instance, when Christopher, the narrator, describes his two teachers, he writes, “Siobhan has long blond hair and wears glasses which are made of green plastic. And Mr. Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes that have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them.”^[29] This characterization is not even characterization. It is merely a description, telling us nothing of who these people are. As Christopher tells us at the beginning of the narrative, he cannot read any other emotion than happy or sad, that all others are far too complex, lead to confusion and cause him to resort to screaming and groaning as coping methods, or to retreat by going outside at night to pretend that he is the only one in the world. Therefore, it would seem impossible that character gradation could be used as a literary device to convey theme and enhance cohesion in this novel. But character gradation is nonetheless a significant element in the book and Haddon uses it seamlessly, without ever unraveling the autistic cocoon. Haddon employs this device to answer the story question in this novel, just as Austen and Tyler did. The story question in this case at first appears to be Who killed Wellington?, the neighbor’s dog, but percolating underneath is the question of which even the narrator is unaware, though the reader is made aware of it immediately. It is the question of whether or not Christopher is going to survive emotionally in a world in which he is handicapped.

Because Christopher’s disability prevents him from being able to speculate about the other characters’ thoughts, feelings and motivations, Haddon must resort to subtler ways of grading and grouping characters. Though Christopher is unable to grade himself, he can, however, grade himself against someone who is not a fully developed, three-dimensional character. Throughout the book, Christopher compares himself to Sherlock Holmes, a two-dimensional character in another story in which a dog gets killed, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

He says,

I also like the Hound of the Baskervilles because I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves mysteries and he says

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

But he notices them, like I do. And it says in the book

Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will.

And this is like me, too, because if I get really interested in something, like practicing maths, or reading a book about the Apollo missions or great white sharks, I don’t notice anything else.^[30]

Christopher not only compares himself to Sherlock Holmes, he compares the act of writing his book to Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery:

Also Doctor Watson says about Sherlock Holmes

His mind…was busy in endeavouring to frame some scheme into which all these strange and apparently disconnected episodes could be fitted.

And that is what I am trying to do by writing this book.^[31]

He can also grade himself in relation to characters he himself imagines. He fantasizes about the kind of people he wishes populated the world. In his dream, “there is no one left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces and don’t know what these pictures mean [in the text there is an illustration of complex facial patterns indicating shades of emotion] and these are all special people like me. And they like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they are like okapi in the jungle in the Congo, which are a kind of antelope and very shy and rare.”^[32] Christopher is saying that he is special like these imagined people and that they are shy and rare. It is an indirect way for Christopher to state that he is shy and rare. It is the most intimate thing he will say about himself, but he expresses it in a dream.

When it comes to real people, not literary characters, Christopher ungroups himself. He is never like anyone else. For instance, he might be going to school at a Special Needs school, but he is unlike any of the other students. “All the other children at my school are stupid.”^[33] But while Christopher doesn’t grade or group characters, Haddon does, and he does this by making us aware of parallels and contrasts Christopher is not aware of. For example, at another point in the book, Christopher says that he does do stupid things: “Stupid things are things like emptying a jar of peanut butter onto the table in the kitchen and making it level with a knife so it covers all the table right to the edges, or burning things on the gas stove to see what happened to them, like my shoes or silver foil or sugar.”^[34] Here, Christopher is unaware of himself, but Haddon deftly uses this list to group Christopher with the classmates he scorns and to convey how Christopher is seen not only by society, but by his parents, too. Christopher knows he is not stupid, because he plans to sit for “A Level maths” and pass them, yet society regards him as stupid. He may not be willing to make the association himself, though he does without fully expressing it—he says, “I’m going to prove I’m not stupid”^[35]—yet Haddon groups Christopher with his Special Needs classmates to make us reflect on the essential question of whether or not Christopher will survive in a society which regards him as incapable and odd. Haddon also groups Christopher with other characters in the book. Christopher says he is different from others because “the pictures in my head are all pictures of things which really happened. But other people have pictures in their heads of things which are real and didn’t happen….”^[36]

But as Christopher’s dream about the okapi-like people suggests, Haddon is grouping Christopher with those Christopher is ungrouping himself from. This is most clear when Christopher reports, as an example of how “others” think, a fantasy very like his own: “And Siobhan once said that when she felt depressed or sad she would close her eyes and she would imagine that she was staying in a house on Cape Cod with her friend Elly, and they would take a trip on a boat from Provincetown and go out into the bay to watch the humpback whales and that made her feel calm and peaceful and happy….”^[37]

Through these fantasies, both of which involve rarely seen animals, Haddon subtly groups Siobhan with Christopher. This grouping reinforces the story question yet again, because one of the reasons Christopher begins to come out of his autism is that Siobhan encourages him to investigate the death of Wellington, an investigation that forces him at first only minimally out of his shell—talking to the neighbors—but ultimately leads him to the previously impossible solitary train trip to London to find his mother. By encouraging him to investigate and write the book we are reading, Siobhan enables Christopher to believe in the end that he can move away to a university in another town. She has helped him to survive. They are a team. Siobhan and Christopher act in the same way, dream the same things, work toward the similar goal of solving both the small mystery of the death of Wellington and the larger mystery of his survival.

All of these groupings are indirect—implied rather than stated—but there is one direct instance of grouping in the novel, that of Christopher and his father. But Christopher does not make this connection, his father does. When Christopher is unable to control other people, when they cross the bubble of his self-protection, he becomes angry and hits. He hits a policeman, he hits his father, he hits a girl at school. When his father is revealed as the murderer of Wellington, and the two get into a fight, his father says: “But, shit, Christopher, when that red mist comes down…Christ, you know how it is. I mean, we’re not that different, me and you.”^[38] Not only does this passage reveal that his father and Christopher are alike, it reinforces the subtler meaning that although Christopher is shy and rare, he is not as unlike others as he thinks he might be.

Through Christopher’s efforts to place himself in the world by comparing himself first to the two-dimensional Sherlock Holmes and then to okapi, the reader understands that Christopher will always be isolated; however, we also believe that Christopher will survive because in the end he is able to face the future and make plans and hope: “And then I will get a First Class honors degree and I will become a scientist. And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.”^[39] There is a tension in the novel between what Christopher understands about himself—that he is different and always will be—and the possibility of being able to make his way in the world. At the beginning, we fear he will be unable to. But by the end, the possibility exists that he will have a bright future. This change in Christopher and in our attitude toward his future is because of the shifting and grouping of characters.

Therefore, even in a novel narrated by an autistic savant, character gradation exists,not as densely, perhaps, as in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Pride and Prejudice, but in all three of these novels, grouping and gradation serve to cohere the theme and answer the story question.

To what end, all this? What does it matter if a character is grouped, graded or opposed? Just this: in our daily lives we meet people randomly. The important and the unimportant pop in and out, at important and unimportant times. We begin our days with the letter carrier or the clerk at the grocery store, or our spouses after a quarrel or our teenagers sullen over some unrevealed irritation (as teenagers have). Our daily lives have only the cohesion we assign it. But whereas we have little or no control over the people in our lives, a novelist has all the control over all the lives in a novel, and this constitutes an obligation to the reader that the world in which she immerses herself will be one of cohesion and import; that the author will not introduce characters willy-nilly; that the author will have something to say, a story to tell, and that the fictional world will be contrived in such a way that it will make sense of the story dilemma presented.

Novelists promise the reader something that real life rarely yields: the illusion that a reader can make sense of her own life. And an effective tool for accomplishing this magic trick is by constructing subtle associations and connections between characters that reinforce meaning and intent, that help solve the characters’ problems, that yields light on the confusion and tumult of everyday life and helps the reader understand what drives mankind to weep, love, adore, disdain, despair, abandon and sometimes yield to the hope that life matters in some shimmering way. But a writer cannot achieve this mystical, ephemeral thing without precise craft. I submit that character grouping and gradation, as daughters of echo and repetition, underpin our fiction with a sturdy backbone that will achieve the goal not only of illumination, but of coherence.

—Robin Oliveira

Robin Oliveira is the author of My Name is Mary Sutter, winner of the 2007 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the 2011 Michael Shaara Prize for Excellence in Civil War Fiction and the 2010 Honorable Mention from the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction. A Registered Nurse, she also holds a B.A. in Russian, and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, Drew, but longs to live in Paris where she recently traveled to do research for her historical novel on Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, just published by VIKING.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Glover, Douglas, The Enamoured Knight (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 2004), 128.↵
Ibid., 130.↵
Brown, E.K., Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 17.↵
Ibid., 27.↵
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice Ed. Donald Gray. 3^rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 2000. 11-12.↵
Ibid., 227.↵
Ibid., 16.↵
Ibid., 7.↵
Ibid., 155.↵
Ibid., 21.↵
Ibid., 150.↵
Ibid., 20.↵
Ibid., 252.↵
Ibid., 251.↵
Ibid., 187-188.↵
Ibid., 214.↵
Ibid., 120.↵
Tyler, Anne, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (New York: Fawcett Books, 1996), 2.↵
Ibid., 37.↵
Ibid., 186.↵
Ibid., 166.↵
Ibid., 209.↵
Ibid., 84.↵
Ibid., 299.↵
Ibid., 47.↵
Ibid., 65.↵
Ibid., 78.↵
Ibid., 122.↵
Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 5.↵
Ibid., 73.↵
Ibid., 73-74.↵
Ibid., 198-199.↵
Ibid., 43.↵
Ibid., 47.↵
Ibid., 44.↵
Ibid., 78.↵
Ibid., 79.↵
Ibid., 121-122.↵
Ibid., 221.↵

Zola’s Horse: Using a Reporter’s Techniques to Strengthen Fiction and Creative Nonfiction — Russell Working

May 172013

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, here’s a practical look at the utility and felicities of research from a former journalist and Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, Russell Working. I met Russell years ago when he was staying the Yaddo, the art residency in Saratoga Springs. I wasn’t at Yaddo, but I live about six minutes away and am always going over there to visit (or rescue) friends. Russell won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his first book The Resurrectionists and then spent six years as a freelance reporter in the Russian Far East and the Middle East. His fiction and humor have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly Review, Zoetrope and Narrative. Of his 2006 collection The Irish Martyr (the title story won a Pushcart Prize) I wrote: The Irish Martyr is a powerful, brave and dangerous book that takes us to the borderlands where religion and geopolitics rip apart the lives of ordinary people. These are stories about torture, decapitation, rape, kidnapping and trafficking in women and babies. They are about men and women caught in the meat-grinder of history, caught between trying to survive as human beings and the vicious tools of dogma, ideology and greed. Russell Working knows the dark corners of the world, he knows the personal underside of the news stories we have become all too accustomed to seeing on our TV screens. He writes straight from the heart, with a moral indignation that is palpable.

—

Many years ago, I was working on a novel that involves a husband who is searching for his missing wife. In it my protagonist, Paul, goes into a morgue with a cop and a coroner to identify a body that might be hers. The question was, how to describe the morgue? No problem! I knew all about that. I had never been in a morgue, but I had seen them on TV and the movies. Good enough.

Plus, I am a fiction writer. That means I can just use my imagination, right? And unlike in journalism, nobody gets to demand a correction. So I wrote it just like on TV, the walls were lined with stainless steel drawers. The coroner pulls one open. And there’s the body, covered by a sheet.

But wait a minute. Dead bodies: it must smell bad. So I had my coroner light up a cigar to cover the odor. He offers cigars to the detective and poor Paul, who thinks he is about to see the corpse of his murdered wife.

“Smoke, gentlemen?” the coroner says.

“He smokes the good stuff,” the detective says. “Cuban seed.”

Needless to say, I never sold that novel. And as for that scene, it bogged down in the writing. It was lifeless. I was stuck. I fought my way through it, but the description never stopped smelling dead. The trouble was, I needed to report my story, in the way that a journalist might, to pick up the phone, make an appointment with a coroner, and head out to the morgue with a notebook in hand.

I needed to go to take in the sounds and smells. To interview a staff. To investigate. To research. Scribble notes. Record the interview. Look around the crypt where the bodies are kept. Did it have a high vaulted ceiling or a low one? Were there bare light bulbs or phosphorescent track lighting? Were the walls tile or plaster? Then take it all back to my computer, throw out the dross, and turn the key elements into fiction.

I was a newspaper reporter, yet I had never taken that basic step, at least for this particular scene.

Now, wait a minute, you may say. Why do we need to do this? If we’re fiction writers, don’t we get to make things up? And if the fiction is autobiographical, can’t we just rely on our own memories? We lived it, after all. What if we’re magical realists? What if my protagonist is a centaur or a flying squirrel who thinks he’s Batman? And as for creative nonfiction, aren’t many of us writing memoirs, which means the topic is subjective? Who needs research, to say nothing of shoe-leather reporting?

Well, when we write a scene, whether it is magical realism or a noir tale of murder, we strive to imagine a narrative world that is vivid and believable within the rules it agrees to play by. In one way or another, we seek to establish a sense of verisimilitude. Beyond that, we want our construction of events to seem plausible within the universe of writing. We wish to speak with authority. Reporting and hands-on research will inspire stories and suggest images and characters and the plotline itself.

When a reader takes up a book, he and the author are engaged in a joint act of creation, and he must reconstruct that world in his mind based on the details the author presents in words.

Think of the reader as Hellen Keller: she is blind and deaf and, for that matter, let us imagine that she doesn’t even have a sense of smell. All she relies on is touch: the touch of our words. We sign into her palm, telling her what is out there. She must trust us. We as authors are all she has to experience this created world. She clings to our arm, eager to know what we see and hear, forming pictures of her own within her mind. Thus she, too, participates in a joint creative act by envisioning the scenes and the characters that we sketch with words.

But when we hit a false note, Ms. Keller perceives the author behind the artifice of fiction, dressed in sweats, unshaven, unshowered, slouching in a chair with a cup of microwaved coffee, trying to think of some event to move the story along.

There are days when we all may feel we’re staring at a screen going nowhere. Perhaps these, most of all, are the days that could stand the help of reporting. The writer who thinks his job is confined to his desk at home is much more likely to trip up readers with phony descriptions or outlandish turns of plot. He yanks Ms. Keller out of the joint act of dreaming and thrusts her into the role of skeptic.

In 1989, Harpers Magazine published an essay by Tom Wolfe titled, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a manifesto that was as bombastic and full of itself as its title. Wolfe quoted his own fiction approvingly and at length, and took it upon himself to denounce many of his contemporaries, who were angered and bewildered by his tone. The New Yorker described him as crashing a cocktail party and throwing writers around like a professional wrestler. A literary brawl ensued (always a fun thing), with some of America’s leading writers weighing in in the letters to the editor. But amid the uproar, Wolfe outlined some important lessons for writers, and I would argue that these apply both to fiction and creative non-fiction. He stated:

[The] task, as I see it, inevitably involves reporting, which I regard as the most valuable and least understood resource available to any writer with exalted ambitions, whether the medium is print, film, tape, or the stage.

He goes on:

Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, and Sinclair Lewis assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter. Zola called it documentation, and his documenting expeditions to the slums, the coal mines, the races, the folies, department stores, wholesale food markets, newspaper offices, barnyards, railroad yards, and engine decks, notebook and pen in hand, became legendary. To write Elmer Gantry, the great portrait of … a corrupt evangelist … Lewis left his home in New England and moved to Kansas City. He organized Bible study groups for clergymen, delivered sermons from the pulpits of preachers on summer vacation, attended tent meetings and Chatauqua lectures and church conferences and classes at the seminaries, all the while doggedly taking notes on five-by-eight cards.

Fine, you may say. That was Tom Wolfe, the guy in the white suits and high-collared shirts. The showman. Sure, he writes novels, such as Bonfire of the Vanities, but he cut his teeth on nonfiction like The Right Stuff. Of course he would recommend playing the reporter.

And as for me, I am a newspaper reporter by profession. Of course I am going to plug the skills of my dying medium, which is going the way of the town crier.

So how about a literary figure who is more in tune with the spirit of our times?

As it happens, not everyone agrees with Wolfe. Consider Jonathan Franzen, author, Freedom, which propelled him onto the cover of Time magazine. He argues that these days research doesn’t matter much—including, presumably, the reporting, notebook in hand, that I recommend.

In February he was asked to contribute a list of rules of writing to the Guardian. Number 5 was this: “When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.” Likewise, in an interview, he says, “I avoid [research] as much as possible. It gets in the way of invention.”

So is Wolfe wrong, or embarrassingly passé? Are we at our best when we discipline ourselves to remain at the desk and just pound the words out, unleashing the magical forces of our creativity?

In the age of Google, are we just wasting our time when we go out and scribble notes about the slaughtered lambs hanging in a halal butcher shop or the Chicago ex-cons selling jars of organic honey at a farmers market? If we are out jotting impressions in notebooks, aren’t guys like Franzen racing ahead by sitting at his desk and applying himself to the actual writing of books?

Time magazine hailed Franzen as “A Great American Novelist,” and nobody has called me up to sit for a cover portrait. No doubt his greatness contains such multitudes that he could write just as well from a padded cell. Perhaps only we hacks need to actually look at the things we are describing, the way minor artists like Michelangelo and Da Vinci looked at live models when they drew the human form.

But I shall let you in on a secret: even Franzen doesn’t really believe what he is telling you. It strikes me as so unhelpful, I almost wonder if he is trying to winnow the competition by sending young writers up the wrong path.

Ha! They believed me, the suckers!

Here is why I know he isn’t being entirely straight with us. In the very next sentence of that interview I just cited, he admits that he traveled to West Virginia for four days to investigate coal mining communities for Freedom. He also said he had the help of others in researching Minneapolis neighborhoods, even though he himself is from Minnesota.

The research shows. He writes of the “matchstick Appalachian woods and the mining-ravaged districts.” He describes an hourglass-shaped vein of coal that lies under the mountains, at the center of which lives a clan headed by a man named Coyle Mathis, who is refusing to sell his ancestral home to a company that plans to remove the mountaintop, mine the coal, and create a nature reserve. When Mathis receives an offer to buy his property, Franzen writes, he “didn’t even wait to hear the details. He said, ‘No, N-O,’ and added that he intended to be buried in the family cemetery and no one was going to stop him.” When Mathis threatens to sick his dogs on the man making the offer, even shoot him, the scene has an authenticity that surely owes something to Franzen’s reporting in West Virginia.

So how do we use research and reporting to enhance, rather than obstruct, creativity? Here are some recommendations:

1. Get out.

As writers, we tend to feel that the only work that matters is that spent in front of the computer, pushing up the word count displayed at the bottom of the page. But simply getting up and getting out into the world can make the words flow afterwards, whether we’re heading to an A&P, like John Updike, or a scrap metal yard or a foreign country.

In Michelle Huneven’s novel Blame, an alcoholic history professor with a wild streak, Patsy MacLemoore, wakes up in jail after blackout. Patsy’s story begins thus:

Patsy MacLemoore came to on a concrete shelf in a cell in the basement of the Altadena Sheriff’s department. Her hair had woken her up. It stank.

She had said she would rather die than come back here. She’d said that both times she’d been here before.

The little jail had no windows. Fluorescent tubes quivered night and day. A fan clattered, off-kilter. Each of the three connected cells contained a seatless stainless-steel toilet and a tiny, one-faucet sink.

Lurching to the undersized sink, she drank from it sideways, cheek anchored against the greasy spout. The dribble was tepid and tasted of mold. In the next cell over, June’s haughty face loomed. Did she fuckin live here? Every time Patsy’d been in, she was, too. June’s top lip was like two paisleys touching. What’d you do this time, Professor? said the lips.

Don’t know, Patsy said. …

Not what I heard, June said. And lookit your face.

Patsy’s fingers went to a ridge of scab crystallizing along her cheekbone. No wonder her head hurt.

Returning to the shelf, she noted the itchy rasp of the prison gown. Lead-blue, unrippable, it was made of 45 percent stainless-steel, according to the label. She was naked beneath, not even panties.

I hear you’re in deep shit, Professor, [June said].

It is not until Patsy is sitting opposite two cops and her own lawyer does she begin to comprehend what she has done. She is tossing out flippant remarks—“We have to stop meeting like this”—when she sees a file in front of the detective. On it is written, HOMICIDE.

She learns she has been accused of running over and killing a mother and daughter while driving drunk. Her whole life as she knew it is over and she is heading for prison.

In an email, I asked Huneven how she was able to portray so convincingly the events including Patsy’s time in jail and a prison firefighting camp. Her discussion of how she researches illustrates my point. Huneven interviewed widely. She talked to everyone she knew, male and female, who had been in prison or jail. She unearthed subplots and storylines in real life.

She wrote me, “One woman in particular—she’s essentially Gloria in the book—talked to me at length; she’d been sober forever, but was manic depressive. With twenty years sober, she got off her meds, stole a hundred thousand bucks from her boss and drove across country delivering it to poor people she met at McDonalds and the like. She was sentenced to 4 years, served two, part of it in fire camp. For the firefighting details I interviewed a young woman I know who recently spent two summers fighting fires in the Sierra.”

Equally important, she visited the scene. Lacking Franzen’s mystical abilities as a seer, she was forced to trudge on down to a courtroom in person and spend a day observing what went on.

She writes:

“I interviewed prosecutors, who in turn did research for me about how much time a drunk driving/ criminal negligence charge would get you in the early 1980’s. I was momentarily stumped when I found out that they couldn’t prosecute for drunk driving because the accident happened on [private] property, but that ended being up a rather interesting part of the narrative, I thought. I interviewed a probation officer, I actually made my husband, who is a lawyer, write the declaration that frees Patsy from responsibility in the end. He gave me SUCH a dull document my agent made me slice it back to the few salient sentences.”

In my own writing, getting out of the office has inspired some of my best-received stories. I used to live in the Russian Far East, and I made five reporting trips to China. On one trip I encountered a couple whose lives would inspire a short story in my collection, The Irish Martyr.

In China when a freelance reporter such as myself asks around in a hotel for an interpreter, an uncomfortably friendly middle-aged man with hair dyed shoe-polish-black will show up in a white sedan with a soldier at the wheel and red flags flapping from the bumpers. Because I usually did business reporting, this never was a problem.

But on one visit I wanted to write about a highly sensitive topic, North Korean refugees. I couldn’t rely on the official story. Through friends I found an interpreter, and by sheer luck he knew of a refugee.

She had escaped North Korean, her hair thinning from malnutrition, and was sold as a wife to a Chinese peasant. In my story, “Dear Leader,” I described the day she is taken to meet her new husband. Let me do a Tom Wolfe and approvingly quote my own fiction:

An ethnic Korean marriage broker named Bong-il drove her to her new home near Yanji, rasping dire warnings all the way in the back seat of his smoky Land Cruiser while his driver adjusted the music on the stereo. “If you run away, we will find you, understand? He is paying good money for you, and we are men of our word. We will return you, and you’ll discover what an angry husband can do to a girl. I know this one guy, he chained his wife to the bed and gouged her eyes out the third time she tried to run away. If we don’t find you, the police will, and you know what that means: back to North Korea. Stay put. Even if he beats you, you’ll be fed, unlike in Hongwan, right? You will live. Seems like a fair bargain.” He threw his cigarette butt out the window and asked, “Are you listening?” She was. “Good,” he said, “because I’m not trying to scare you, I hope you’re happy, I truly do, you are such a pretty girl, or you will be when you fatten up and your hair grows back. … Incidentally, it’s his prerogative to resell you if he wishes. Maybe that isn’t so bad. Think of it this way: if you don’t get along, maybe you’ll end up with someone more compatible.”

This monologue was inspired by the refugee’s description of the conditions under which she arrived. In fact her very predicament is drawn from my interviews with the real-life refugee woman and the husband who had bought her.

We mere scribblers cannot invent such situations. We go out and sift through the infinite range of stories the world offers us. And it amazes us.

2. Find a Guide.

Dante had Virgil to guide him in his pilgrimage through hell, purgatory, and heaven. If you are overwhelmed in an unfamiliar area or topic, find a guide.

By way of example let us consider George Packer, a reporter for the New Yorker. In a 2007 nonfiction piece, Packer described meeting two young Iraqis in Baghdad. Othman was Sunni, Laith was Shiite.

Packer met them at the Palestine Hotel, where, two years earlier, a suicide bomber driving a cement mixer had triggered an explosion that nearly brought down the hotel’s eighteen-story tower. He writes:

It had taken Othman three days to get to the hotel from his house, in western Baghdad. On the way, he was trapped for two nights at his sister’s house, which was in an ethnically mixed neighborhood: gun battles had broken out between Sunni and Shiite militiamen. Othman watched the home of his sister’s neighbor, a Sunni, burn to the ground. Shiite militiamen scrawled the words “Leave or else” on the doors of Sunni houses. Othman was able to leave the house only because his sister’s husband—a Shiite, who was known to the local Shia militias—escorted him out. Othman took a taxi to the house of Laith’s grandfather; from there, he and Laith went to the Palestine, where they enjoyed their first hot water in several weeks.

These two men became his guides. Packer says in an interview with the Poynter Institute that this is his general practice. “I need someone who can provide me with the introduction to the place and give me sense of the landscape,” he says.

For a story on the U.S. Senate, Packer relied on the insights of beat reporters who knew the ins and outs of the institution, along with the staffers familiar with its obscure rules. When he decided to investigate the roots of the financial meltdown, he chose Tampa in part because a friend there could show him around. The two canvassed the Tampa Bay area, driving through subdivisions and taking to people randomly. What he learned in those interviews became the core of the story.

“Once I get there, I’m constantly saying, ‘Who else should I talk to?’ ‘Do you know anyone in this situation?’ ” Packer says. “And people tend to be quite generous with that information, and most people want to tell their story.”

Fiction writers also may find a guide helpful in unfamiliar territory. In interviews, Colum McCann has talked about how he lived with homeless people in the subway tunnels and traveled to Russia to research another novel. But the book I wish to discuss is Zoli, is about a Roma, or Gypsy, singer and poet born in Slovakia in the 1930s during the height of fascist power in Europe.

In it, the six-year-old Zoli, who will become an acclaimed singer and poet, learns from her grandfather that fascist militiamen have driven her clan and its wagons and horses out onto the winter ice and encircled the shore with fires. The ice collapses and the people drown. Zoli tells us, “My mother was gone, my father, my brothers, my sister and cousins, too.”

The book has been praised for its realistic portrayal of the life of Roma, a society that has long been persecuted and also closed to outsiders. Its descriptions struck me as deeply authentic. Consider this description of a visitor enters a Roma settlement:

Doorframes used as tables. Sackcloth for curtains. Empty çuçu bottles strung up as wind chimes. At his feet, bits of wood and porridge containers, lollipop sticks and shattered glass, the ground-down bones of some dead animal. He catches glimpses of babies hammocked from ceilings, flies buzzing around them as they sleep. He reaches for his camera but is pushed on in the swell of children. Open doorways are quickly closed. Bare bulbs switched off. He notices carpets on the walls, and pictures of Christ, and pictures of Lenin, and pictures of Mary Magdalene, and pictures of Saint Jude lit by small red candles high above empty shelves. From everywhere comes the swell of music, no accordions, no harps, no violins, but every shack with a TV or a radio on full volume, an endless thump. …

He is led around a sharp corner to the largest shanty of all. A satellite dish sits new and shiny on the roof. He knocks on the plywood door. It swings open a little further with each knuckle rap. Inside there is a contingent of eight, nine, maybe ten men. They raise their heads like a parliament of ravens. A few of them nod, but they continue their hand, and he knows the game is nonchalance—he has played it himself in other parts of the country, the flats of Bratislava, the ghettos of Presov, the slums of Letanovce.

In an interview McCann discusses his research methods. He says his guides, Martin and Laco, introduced him to writers, musicians, ethnographers, sociologists and Roma activists. He went to the most notorious Slovakian settlements to see the conditions of life there: the mud and wattle huts, the poverty, the desolation. No electricity, he says. No running water. He sang old Irish songs, hung out and watched what they did. He was an outsider, dependent on others to show him around, but he showed empathy and tried not to intrude.

He adds:

[O]ne day I was in Svinia … [and] a big group of kids and I went down to the local soccer pitch to play football together. We were playing away happily, quietly. But then these “white” women started shouting at us from a distance. Before we knew it we were hounded out by the mayor and the local policemen who called us “fucking Gypsies.” Except they were a bit puzzled by me. They kept staring at me. As if to say, Who’s the white boy? … We got kicked out. They locked the gates behind us. I tried to protest in English and apparently they were calling me another bleeding heart, another European sentimentalist. We walked away, back to the settlement. A half-mile along this country road. Quietly. No fuss. No fights. There was lots of broken glass at the field near the settlement. That’s why we couldn’t play there and had to go to town.

But therein lies the dilemma. I could make this a story about being treated terribly by the local authorities. That’s true, but it’s also true that nobody smashed glass on that field other than the Roma themselves. The kids had ruined their own field. That’s the heartbreak. That’s the contradiction that fiction, too, has to find.

Moments like that are hard to create from an office chair in front of your laptop.

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3. Talk to sources who have lived the life you’re writing about.

Interview taxi drivers, garbage men, street preachers, beauticians, aldermen, astrophysicists, the homeless Poles who sleep in dumpsters in Chicago—whomever you’re writing about.

In November 1959, two ex-cons entered a farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas, and murdered the owner, his wife, and their two children. It was a horrific, senseless, random crime of the sort that makes headlines nationwide and then vanishes into the criminal system. But Truman Capote saw behind the headlines a powerful story worthy of a great writer’s attention, and he decided to pursue it for his so-called “non-fiction novel,” In Cold Blood. He and his assistant, Harper Lee, traveled to Kansas. At the courthouse they tracked down the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents who were handling the case.

In 1997 George Plimpton wrote an oral history on the writing of the book for the New Yorker. He recounts how Capote left a singular impression with the people he spoke to.

One agent tells Plimpton, “Al Dewey [a KBI agent], invited me to come up and meet this gentleman who’d come to town to write a book. So the four of us, KBI agents, went up to his room that evening after dinner. And here [Truman] is in kind of a new pink negligee, silk with lace, and he’s strutting across the floor with his hands on his hips telling us all about how he’s going to write this book.”

My point is not that we all need to wear pink negligees when we’re interviewing cops. Rather, is that Capote, a gay New Yorker, was bold enough to go into an alien milieu, that of homicide detectives, and win their cooperation, despite some outrageous behavior. He obtained extensive interviews with nearly every major person in the book, including the murderers themselves.

KBI agent Alvin Dewey said, “He got information nobody else got, not even us.”

(Truman’s breach of ethics in achieving this scoop are a matter of discussion for another day.)

Last year I dug up that old novel of mine—the one with the cigar-smoking coroner—and I blushed when I read some of the scenes. But still, I thought it was worth another go, and after a revision, so did my agent.

When I first dove into the manuscript again, I decided to research every major element of the plot. I interviewed cops and day laborers and a guy who paints houses for a living. I found two University of Chicago surgeons who treat bullet wounds, and I sat in on the class of an Aikido instructor.

A cult plays a central role in the novel so I interviewed a woman who had spent two decades in Tony Alamo Christian Ministries; its leader is now serving a 175-year sentence in federal penitentiary for taking girls as young as nine across state lines to have sex with them. I listened to sermons by the Rev. Jim Jones, who led 900 of his followers to their deaths. I interviewed the CEO of a nonprofit dedicated to the rescue of big cats such as lions and tigers.

Since writing the original draft I had visited a morgue in Russia, but I still sought out an investigator at the coroner’s office in Los Angeles. That, after all, was where the book was set. She agreed to talk to me, but she said we could not under any circumstances, see the crypt—the area where they store the bodies—or the rooms where the autopsies are done. All we could do is meet in her office.

I was a little disappointed, but it was better than nothing.

We looked at all kinds of grisly photos. As I described the situation in my novel, she would show me pictures. She saw that I wasn’t going to throw up on her desk when we saw the grim images. When I asked about the layout of the crypt, she said, “Oh, hell. Let’s just go look at it.”

And suddenly we were trotting downstairs, donning surgeon’s masks—which kind of hindered our cigar-smoking—and marching in to see the room where several hundred bodies were stored.

Now, I’m not going to give away all my hard-earned research to other writers. Needless to say that in this particular morgue, at least, was nothing like what you see on TV.

There is no substitute for seeking out sources. If your character is a high school football coach, call one up and ask if you can drop by practice some afternoon. If she is a lawyer or a foot masseuse or a Ukrainian baker, go find one to talk to. If you want to write about a journalist, talk to one.

If you are writing a memoir, be willing to interview your family or friends or others who lived the experience you are writing about.

All right, but how do you reach the people you need to talk to? Admittedly, it is harder for a fiction writer than a newspaper reporter, but it is not impossible.

For the LA County Coroner’s Office, I dug up a story that quoted a woman extensively, and called her directly. I simply told her I am a writer working on a novel, and I wanted to get things right. She seemed pleased at my diligence. To talk to a cop, I called the LAPD public affairs office. The spokeswoman told me she doubted any detective would talk to me, but she said she would ask. It turned out the head of the department was intrigued by my project and was willing to help.

If the official sources say no, try a back door. Talk to friends and put out feelers to reach people.

Record your interviews. Interestingly, Capote didn’t do this, but he claimed to have had near perfect recall. He said that when he was a boy, he would memorize pages of the New York telephone book. Then he would have somebody quiz him: “On line so-and-so, what’s the name there and what’s the telephone number.” He didn’t even take notes; he and Lee would return to their rooms and write down their recollections of conversations afterwards.

For mere mortals, a good recorder is essential. In writing Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer and his collaborator Lawrence Schiller said they recorded hundreds of hours of interviews amounting to thousands of pages of transcripts. This is why the voice so closely parallels those of the characters whose lives it recounts. I have a little Sony digital recorder that you can plug it into your computer when you get home, so you can download the audio file and transcribe it later. As you do, this will help you accurately recall what they said. It gives you a sense of your source’s voice, character, thought patterns, and manerisms.

Once you have talked to your sources, something interesting happens. They become a Council of the Wise whom you can consult with further questions. Ask them for their email address. You need to use them judiciously, but they are great for checking out details. Don’t send lists of 20 questions or they won’t reply, but use them.

I did this with the coroner’s investigator. The missing persons detective had told me a rather amazing story about how a cadaver dog sniffed up a homicide victim. But I needed to know who would respond to a scene where a body is found in a backyard. I emailed my source in the coroner’s department, asking how many personnel would show up, and she sent me a long email in reply. Here is just a small part:

Shallow Grave in a backyard: Personnel present: Police Department Homicide Detectives & Photographer, Coroner Special Operations response team (Handling Investigator, Criminalist, Forensic Anthropolgist, Photographer and Cadaver Dog & Handler -remaining team members consisting of other Investigators, Forensic Attendants and Criminalists).

4. Do your homework.

Fine, but how do we know what sources to seek out? Of course, this is often plain from the work itself. But it also helps to do your homework. Before McCann traveled to Europe to research the Roma, he spent a year in the New York Public Library. Huneven had done a major investigative piece on the California Youth Authority years ago, and she drew off of the contacts she made them.

Doug Glover has a novel named Elle, about a lusty young French girl whose shipmates abandon her on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during an early expedition to colonize Canada. She is found by a native hunter, who becomes her lover and helps her survive, and she is drawn into what has been called “a bear-haunted dream world.” She even shape-shifts into a bear.

The novel makes heavy use of aboriginal mythology and magic. And yet what also interested me was the vivid realism in its portrayal of 16^th century France and native life in its newly established colonies. It feels grounded in reality. The myths it describes are convincing. In his acknowledgments Doug, says he plundered many books to come up with a compelling vision of life that era. But he also tells me that in researching the novel, he talked to a librarian at a reservation who had archived tapes of interviews with old Indians.

Doug also hunts through bibliographies looking for papers published in journals, especially old ones. He would find a paper, and from its bibliography and get even more sources.

“The key to research is that you’re looking for the fact that is not commonly known,” he told me. “It infuses your writing with authenticity, if it’s real yet somewhat surprising.”

He also offers a hint for those who are uncomfortable with the idea of interviewing. Doug says he would never go up to an Indian and ask him about anything directly. But if you hang around, you start to get a feel for things such as way they name and nickname people and the kind of humor they have.

Thus he gives his characters names like Comes Winter, an Indian girl who was kidnapped and taken to France and is dying of consumption. One little boy is named Old Man, while an old man is named Gets Close to Caribou.

Gets Close to Caribou earned his name one winter when a panicky caribou spooked in the wrong direction and almost trampled him to death. Gets Close was unconscious for a week—he dreamed the caribou lifted him in its mouth and carried him to Caribou Mountain, north of the Land of Nothing. He stayed with the king of the caribou, a former hunter who had fallen in love with a caribou-woman. All present-day caribou are descended from this hunter and his caribou girlfriend.

In my own case, in reporting for my fiction, I have gone to the federal courthouse in Chicago and pulled records on an ongoing Russian mafia trial, including indictments and transcripts of FBI wiretaps. This gave me the chance to read about the father-son team of money launderers Lev and Boris Stratievsky. The father was nicknamed Dollar, the son Half-Dollar. Great names! I didn’t use those in my fiction, but they set my imagination running.

The two were laundering millions of dollars as a part of a broader criminal network of Eastern Europeans. They were shipping stolen cars and heavy machinery abroad, peddling drugs and guns to Chicago street gangs, committing mortgage fraud, and trafficking in young women. These reports provided a rich background that allowed me to think more expansively about the mobster at the center of my story. For one thing, I moved my mobster out of a Chicago two-flat into a mansion on Lake Michigan.

Think creatively. You can also request military records to find out if that veteran you are writing about is telling the truth about the Navy Cross he claims he won or whether he even was in Vietnam, let alone butchered all those women and children he butchered there.

You are all familiar with the Internet, but I will say two things.

1. It can be a marvelous research tool for original documents, even if you don’t have access to legal databases. For example, there is a web site that has extensive documentation, including original court records, on American jihadists who have been convicted on terror charges.

Elsewhere, you can find FBI transcripts of Jim Jones urging his followers to commit suicide in Guyana, and one woman arguing, futilely, that the children should be spared.

2. But the Internet can be a deadly trap. It keeps you at your desk, rather than getting you out into the world. It’s tempting to check out Google street view rather than drive to that neighborhood with a notebook in hand. It is also a distraction. Franzen warns about this with his usual hyperbole: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

Let me conclude by returning to Tom Wolfe. His point is not merely that on-scene research and reporting create verisimilitude and make a novel gripping or absorbing, although these are important. Rather, he states, this kind of reporting is essential for the very greatest effects literature can achieve. Wolf writes:

In 1884 Zola went down into the mines at Anzin to do the documentation for what was to become the novel Germinal. Posing as a secretary for a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, he descended into the pits wearing his city clothes, his frock coat, high stiff collar, and high stiff hat … and carrying a notebook and pen. One day Zola and the miners who were serving as his guides were 150 feet below the ground when Zola noticed an enormous workhorse … pulling a sled piled with coal through a tunnel. Zola asked, “How do you get that animal in and out of the mine every day?” At first the miners thought he was joking. Then they realized he was serious, and one of them said, “Mr. Zola, don’t you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he’s a colt, barely more than a foal, and still able to fit into the buckets that bring us down here. That horse grows up down here. He grows blind down here after a year or two, from the lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can’t haul it anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.” When Zola transfers this revelation from the pages of his documentation notebook to the pages of Germinal, it makes the hair on your arms stand on end. You realize, without the need of amplification, that the horse is the miners themselves, who descend below the face of the earth as children and dig coal down in the pit until they can dig no more and then are buried, often literally, down there.

The moment of The Horse in Germinal is one of the supreme moments in French literature—and it would have been impossible without that peculiar drudgery that Zola called documentation.

— Russell Working

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Russell Working is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of two collections of short fiction: Resurrectionists, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Irish Martyr, winner of the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award. His stories and humor have appeared in publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly Review, Narrative, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A writer living in Oak Park, Ill., he spent five years as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. His byline has appeared in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the South China Morning Post,the Japan Times, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines around the world.

The Dark Speech of Silence Laboring: Osip Mandelstam’s Poems & Translations — Betsy Sholl

May 152013

Herewith Betsy Sholl’s diffident, respectful and intensely thoughtful essay on Osip Mandelstam, his life, poetry, and translations. Betsy is a dear friend and colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts where she teaches poetry and I teach prose and we meet and catch up every six months at the residencies in Montpelier. At once an essay about poetry and about the art of translation, “The Dark Speech of Silence Laboring” plays on the oscillation between intimacy and distance involved in reading poems in translation and ends by celebrating that distance. She writes: “Maybe the sense of lifting one veil only to find another describes all reading, describes our human condition.”

When I ask myself why, for the last several years, I have gone back to the work Osip Mandelstam more than any other poet, the answer seems to involve some combination of the man and his work, or perhaps the man in his work. There is an intimacy in his voice that carries a quality of purity, as if the poems welled up from within and were first whispered to himself as provisional stays against the chaos around him. The words are like boulders allowing him to cross a difficult river, one bank being his own interior life, the other the outside world of Soviet life. Even in translation the intensity of his language comes through, a sense of the physicality of his words, an almost palpable voice. His genius for metaphor is clear: in the rapidity of association images have that quality of transformability or convertibility, which he admires in Dante, whose “similes that are,” he says, “never descriptive, that is, purely representational. They always pursue the concrete goal of giving the inner image of the structure or the force… (Conversation about Dante).” To suggest something of the original quality of his mind, here is a prose description from Journey to Armenia:

I managed to observe the clouds performing their devotions to Ararat.

It was the descending and ascending motion of cream when it is poured into a glass of ruddy tea and roils in all directions like cumulous tubers.

The sky in the land of Ararat gives little pleasure, however, to the Lord of Sabaoth; it was dreamed by the blue titmouse in the spirit of the most ancient atheism.

There is in the passage, of course, the delicious metaphor of clouds like cream in tea. But there is so much more. Ararat is the mountain where Noah’s Ark is said to have landed, which suggests a world in dubious straits—some element of survival surrounded by vast destruction. If the Jewish God is one of justice and order, then the roiling clouds suggest a kind of airily chaotic movement in contrast to the rest commanded by the “Lord of Sabaoth.” I don’t fully understand the blue titmouse, but it seems that this resting place, this starting place for the new order of life is still in tension with something older, wilder, not to be easily subdued. Clouds like tubers, descending and ascending, atheism and the blue titmouse—God seems hardly able to control the world he has been trying to get right!

Though Mandelstam conveys a kind of interior landscape that can seem very private, nevertheless the poems are deeply engaged with culture and history, registering the rapid changes in the world around him. The poems work with interior images, like much lyric poetry of our current time, but Mandelstam does not merely depict his own sensibility; he takes all the resources of lyricism and uses them to address the world around him.

For several reasons the poems can be difficult. Some have to do with our ignorance of Russian culture and history: we miss the lines of other poets embedded in his own, and many subtle allusions a Russian reader would recognize. Other references and associative leaps come from such a deeply personal place, the best we can do is catch the resonance, the dust flying off his boot soles. His widow Nadezhda Mandelstam sometimes argues against accepted interpretations of certain poems, as though even Russian scholars have missed private allusions. In his “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam himself compares the rapidity of poetic association to running across a river, “jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing at various directions.” He continues, “This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interviewing the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.” So we make our way, leaping, stumbling. Despite the difficulties and the problems of translation, Mandelstam’s emotional openness and vulnerability clearly come across.

And that brings me to the life. Mandelstam was born in 1891, and came of age during the revolution with its various conflicting parties, its terrorism and deprivations. I won’t spend time here on biography or Russian history—those things are easy enough to find. Suffice it to say the aftermath of revolution was chaotic with various leaders in and out of power, endless atrocities. In the mid ‘20s Stalin rose to the top. By 1930 he had published a letter announcing that “nothing should be published that was at variance with the official point of view.” In 1933, as if silent acquiescence had become intolerable, Mandelstam composed his famous “Stalin Epigram” and read it to at least two different gatherings, clearly aware someone would probably turn him in. Nadezhda Mandelstam, in her memoir Hope Against Hope, says in doing this, he was “choosing his manner of death.” Perhaps the real crime, and for Mandelstam the real necessity, was what she calls “the usurpation of the right to words and thoughts that the ruling powers reserved exclusively for themselves….” At any rate, it was like signing his own death sentence, which Mandelstam himself suggested in a kind of recklessly sanguine moment when he said to her, “Why do you complain? Poetry is respected only in this country—people kill for it. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” In Mandelstam’s case, he was jailed, interrogated and eventually exiled for three years, from 1934 to May of 1937, then arrested again in May of 1938, and sentenced to hard labor. He died in a transit camp in Eastern Siberia that December. Here’s the poem in Merwin’s translation:

THE STALIN EPIGRAM

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms of his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
one for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

[November, 1933]

W.S. Merwin

This poem is more accessible than most of Mandelstam’s poems, which suggests he felt his fate closing in, and wanted to make his position clear, leaving nothing to ambiguity. Certain lines of Merwin’s version are burned into my mind, and I hate to even look at other versions: “the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,” “Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses,” “He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.” However, if we look at the Hayward translation, which is the one printed in Hope Against Hope, there is “the broad-chested Ossette,” and that reference is clearly in the original. Apparently there was some question about whether Stalin was actually from Georgian or Ossetia, the small republic next door. Ossetians were viewed as less refined and more violent, so Stalin officially claimed to be Georgian. It’s telling to consider that even as Mandelstam recited the poem, knowing the dangers, he was concerned with its artistic quality, and said he wanted to get rid of those last lines, they were no good. Perhaps Merwin was wise to avoid a reference the poet himself questioned, and that wouldn’t mean much to English readers anyway. The “berries” in Merwin are raspberries in the original, which apparently is gangster-speak for the criminal underworld. It is clear from just these little points how compacted a Mandelstam poem is, even one of his most accessible. Joseph Brodsky has said that this “overloaded” quality of his verse is what makes Mandelstam unique. (For the most part he worked in traditional forms—rhyme and iambic meter.)

Joseph Brodsky

Given our experience in America, where poems, cartoons, rants on just about everything go into the blogosphere with no repercussions, it may be good to stop a moment and realize the nature of Soviet life. The closest parallel in our times might be the fundamentalist extremism of certain theocracies. In Soviet Russia the state controlled everything—work, housing, food. Arrests, sentences of hard labor or exile, executions were ongoing. Currying favor was basically the only way to have any kind of bearable life—a place to stay, enough work to survive, ration books for food. Many intellectuals and artists caved, turned in fellow writers, wrote what would get them the few benefits available, or else they sat out the terror in silence. So, what made it possible for Mandelstam to speak out? He chose to respond to Stalin as a poet, in a poem read to other poets, so I wonder if there is something in his concept of poetry that contributed to his ability to resist what Nadezhda calls “a rationalist program of social change [that] demanded blind faith and obedience to authority.” Of course there are many factors separate from poetry involving background, education, character, a whole complex belief system. But there must have been something in his understanding of poetry and its place in the world that contributed as well.

For one thing, with his fellow Acmeists he rejected the Russian Symbolist emphasis on a form of subjectivity that considered the poet a superior being, whose poem was significant only in so far as it was the vehicle for the poet’s statements. For the more extreme Symbolists, the world was insignificant and the spirit all; they were happy to mix and match spiritual doctrines for their own ends. That kind of individualism and subjectivity can easily lead to an emphasis on self-preservation at any cost, a willingness to reinvent one’s frame of reference to suit that end. In contrast, the Acmeists valued craft, the poem in itself, and they valued the phenomenal world. Mandelstam once defined Acmeism as “nostalgia for world culture.” Nadezhda says, it was “also an affirmation of life on earth and social concern.” In “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam says, “The earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace.” That implies attention and awe, and also a belief system that looks beyond the utilitarian. As to nostalgia for world culture, that implies an awareness of history, the classical world, a larger frame of reference and sensibility than his own moment. Along with this was his personal sense of identification with his fellow humans, among whom he lived and shared a fate, and his sense of not speaking for them, but with them.

Because Mandelstam valued craft, attended to the roots and origins of words, to tradition, nothing in his understanding of himself or poetry would allow him to write propaganda. Identifying with the people, with the earth, and a larger world perhaps reinforced his own innate sense of responsibility. As a Jew in Tsarist Russia, he was used to being on the edge of admission, which may have helped him remain clear eyed and skeptical of mass indoctrination.

Finally, there was his sense of poetry as a calling, not a profession. He once pushed a fellow poet down the stairs for complaining about not getting published, and shouted at him, “What Jesus Christ published?” He lived a literary life, writing essays while traveling by boxcar and crashing at various places. But he didn’t will poems into being. Either they came or they didn’t. When they came, they often began physically as a ringing in the ears before the formation of words, a process he described as “the recollection of something that has never before been said, and the search for lost words….” He didn’t sit at a desk. He paced, or walked through the streets, muttering, concentrating so hard, sometimes he’d get lost. He never wrote down the “Stalin Epigram.” Whoever turned him in remembered it well enough to recite it for the police to write down. If Mandelstam had been less overwhelmed by his interrogator, he’d have known from the version shown him, which reading his betrayer had attended. At any rate, such a view of art and such a mode of composition suggest that poetry was too essential to his very being to be transgressed. The one time he composed at a desk it was his “Ode to Stalin,” written in the hope of gaining his freedom, but written with such contradictions embedded in the language, it couldn’t possibly have worked. He simply couldn’t conceal his attitude toward tyranny, murder, blind obedience and self-interest.

I used to think Mandelstam was harassed for being a personal poet, for maintaining belief in the individual spirit, in independence and privacy, against the tyranny of the collective. You might see that in this poem, “Leningrad,” as translated by Merwin.

I’ve come back to my city. These are my own old tears,
my own little veins, the swollen glands of childhood.

So you’re back. Open wide. Swallow
the fish-oil from the river lamps of Leningrad.

Open your eyes. Do you know this December day,
the egg-yolk with the deadly tar beaten into it?

Petersburg! I don’t want to die yet!
You know my telephone numbers.

Petersburg! I’ve still got the addresses:
I can look up dead voices.

I live on back stairs, and the bell,
torn out nerves and all, jangles in my temples.

And I wait till morning for guests that I love,
and rattle the door in its chains.

Leningrad, née St. Petersburg, is where Mandelstam grew up. And where like Dante he was never able to live again. This was composed in 1930, during Mandelstam’s final unsuccessful attempt to settle in Leningrad. I love the way he evokes childhood in the first couplet, and then moves from the swollen glands to the second couplet, which seems to superimpose onto that childhood with its fish-oil tonic the darker experience. “Open wide. Swallow,” a mother or doctor might say to a child. But now he is swallowing the new city of Leningrad, no longer Petersburg, no longer the capital or the most Western city in Russia. Now he is swallowing the oily river. “Open your eyes” the speaker says to himself, and raises the question of “this December day,” the deadly tar in the egg—as if everything now is dangerous. December evokes the Petersburg worker strikes, which could be called the start of the revolution in 1904.

“Petersburg!” he cries out, addressing the old life. “Petersburg!”—the city where his friend and Akhmatova’s husband Nicolai Gumilev was executed, the city that evokes his desire to live and his fear of dying. Tapped wires, death threats, the old addresses of those who have been arrested or killed. Apartments split up so people live in just one room, or less. Internal and external disharmony—the bell’s torn wires, the frayed nerves. And the speaker waits all night for “the guests that I love,” some remaining fragment of humanity, perhaps. He rattles his own door, as if it’s been locked from outside—an image of the individual trying to break out of the imposed restriction.

But is this what Mandelstam wrote? Bernard Meares’ translation, apparently approved by Joseph Brodsky, ends with these two couplets:

I live on the backstairs and the doorbell buzz
Strikes me in the temple and tears at my flesh.

And all night long I await those dear guests of yours,
Rattling, like manacles, the chains on the doors.

“Dear guests,” according to Meares, is a euphemism for the political police. Tony Brinkley, who also translates Mandelstam, says that “gostei dorogikh (‘dear guests’) might also be translated as ‘special visitors.’ Dorogik apparently means ‘dear’ as in expensive, i.e. you pay dearly. Gostei can also mean ‘visitors’. In any case these guests, I think, are the Cheka, the GPU, the political police.” So in Meares’ version, it’s the speaker who has chained the door, though the need for those chains makes them feel like manacles, and also suggests a fear of future imprisonment. But the guests clearly are not loved ones; those “dear guests of yours” suggests the beloved city is now in collusion with the police, the old city of his childhood, the cultural capital, is gone, and the place now is associated with danger, betrayal, arrest

Meares gives us a different poem, maybe even a different poet from Merwin’s, and a significant filling in of our understanding. Still, the Merwin to my mind is a better poem. Compare the first 3 couplets:

I’ve come back to my city. These are my own old tears,
my own little veins, the swollen glands of childhood.

So you’re back. Open wide. Swallow
the fish-oil from the river lamps of Leningrad.

Open your eyes. Do you know this December day,
the egg-yolk with the deadly tar beaten into it?

to Meares:

I returned to my city, familiar as tears,
As veins, as mumps from childhood years.

You’ve returned here, so swallow as quick as you can
The cod-liver oil of Leningrad’s riverside lamps.

Recognize when you can December’s brief day:
Egg yolk folded into its ominous tar.

The Meares has little of Merwin’s fluidity, Merwin’s music, swollen glands to swallow, the use of “Open wide” and “Swallow” to evoke childhood, which then shifts to the poet’s self injunction to be to open his own eyes, a move from the old nurture to the current need for vigilance. Merwin in general is more concrete and more colloquial.

But did Merwin read a softer, less political Mandelstam, one for whom nostalgia was stronger than anxiety, one less willing to define the nature of experience in Soviet Russia?

The Meares translation in particular suggests that for Mandelstam the political and the personal were never separate, that he responded to the world around him with all of his interior resources. Here is a poem (Merwin translation) written during the last six months of his exile in Voronezh, # 355:

Now I’m in the spider-web of light.
The people with all the shadows of their hair
need light and the pale blue air
and bread, and snow from the peak of Elbrus.

And there’s no one I can ask about it.
Alone, where would I look?
These clear stones weeping themselves
come from no mountains of ours.

The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave
of its breathing.

Richard and Elizabeth McKane say, “The people need a poem that is both mysterious and familiar.” I guess we can see this poem as a model—the spider web of light, the shadow of hair, juxtaposed with Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. There’s something mysterious in those images, at least to my mind. What does it mean to be in the “spider-web of light?” Is the poet caught, a fly entangled in the web? Yes. But it’s a web of light, and the people need light. So perhaps it’s not only an image of entrapment, but also one of being at the center of an act of making. There’s an old myth that has Prometheus shackled to Mt. Elbrus, so perhaps Mandelstam is imagining a new Prometheus who would meet his people’s needs, not stealing fire, but language from the gods of the state.

Then there’s the poet’s isolation. As the McKanes have it, “There’s no one to give me advice, and I don’t think I can work it out on my own.” Mandelstam is literally isolated, having set out on a course of resistance. Beyond that, questions of what the people need, what the poet can give, what the light exposes, are bigger than anyone can fully answer. There’s both vulnerability and resolve in these lines. The weeping stones—perhaps in snow melt, or a stream from that mountain—also combine something hard with something vulnerable, a lament perhaps for the distance the current age has moved from its cultural heights. The poem itself is a mix of strength and weakness, assertion and secrecy. Poetry becomes a means of awakening, but secret, as opposed to corrupted by public speech. Whatever translation we look to for the end, we see that quality of transformability that Mandelstam praises in Dante, as poetry in its cleansing power becomes water, wind, voice and breath. In the McKane’s translation the connection to earth is more prominent, but in either case there’s an immersion, poetry as a form of cleansing.

Late Mandelstam poems are very compressed, and often combine a sense of pleasure or beauty with a sense of doom. Here’s a short poem from March 1937, not too divergent in its translations, Merwin’s translation of “Winejug”:

Bad debtor to an endless thirst,
wise pander of wine and water,
the young goats jump up around you
and the fruits are swelling to music.

The flutes shrill, they rail and shriek
because the black and red all around you
tell of ruin to come
and no one there to change it.

In a museum in Voronezh Mandelstam had seen a Greek urn on which satyrs are playing flutes, and apparently angry at the chipped condition of the jug. But of course we can’t help reading as well the state of the country, and situation of the Mandelstams in particular. I think of Mandelstam visiting the museum in Voronezh, and no matter what pressure he is under—broke, spied upon, unable to get work, having to change apartments constantly—still he celebrates these artifacts of world culture—celebrates and mourns. In the same month he writes “The Last Supper”:

The heaven of the supper fell in love with the wall.
It filled it with cracks. It fills them with light.
It fell into the wall. It shines out there
in the form of thirteen heads.

And that’s my night sky, before me,
and I’m the child standing under it,
my back getting cold, an ache in my eyes,
and the wall-battering heaven battering me.

At every blow of the battering ram
stars without eyes rain down,
new wounds in the last supper,
the unfinished mist on the wall.

[Merwin’s translation]

We begin with a sort of allegory. The heaven of the supper fell in love with the wall. The intensity of heaven both cracks the weak vessel of the wall and fills it with light, which suggests an incarnation, the divine breaking into the human, and also perhaps something about how inspiration works. We’re looking at Da Vinci’s painting, of course, so this light manifests itself through the thirteen heads of the disciples and Christ—as if illumination needs concrete vessels. Thoughts of the painting move him to recognize another form of illumination, the night sky, before which he becomes a child—in memory and in the experience of awe. But if he feels the awe of a child, under the whole night sky, there is also a chill—the cold is at his back, the ache in his eyes. This heaven has something of violence in it—wall-battering and battering him. A more positive reading of this image suggests the way any spiritual or aesthetic experience breaks down walls, knocks us out of our habitual slumber, out of the familiar and into the strange ache of revelation.

But then the poem turns to a different kind of battering for sure: the battering ram, stars without eyes—headless stars, the McKanes say—whatever they are, they are no longer the disciples bearing a message of forgiveness and peace. New wounds in the last supper, suggest new betrayals, new deaths. Christ on the cross said, “It is finished,” but here nothing is finished, the battering goes on. I don’t know what that “mist” is about. The McKanes translate that as “the gloom of an unfinished eternity…,” so maybe it alludes to the mist and chaos at the beginning of creation. The painting Mandelstam would have seen in was severely damaged in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In the last verse, according to the McKanes, the word “ram” in Russian is “tarana,” one vowel away from “tirana,” which means tyrant.

Here’s one more poem, this one from Mandelstam’s early days in Voronezh. It’s the second poem recorded in the notebooks he kept there. From Voronezh, April, 1935:

Manured, blackened, worked to a fine tilth, combed
like a stallion’s mane, stroked under the wide air,
all the loosened ridges cast up in a single choir,
the damp crumbs of my earth and my freedom!

In the first days of plowing it’s so black it looks blue.
Here the labor without tools begins.
A thousand mounds of rumor plowed open—I see
the limits of this have no limits.

Yet the earth’s a mistake, the back of an axe;
fall at her feet, she won’t notice.
She pricks up our ears with her rotting flute,
freezes them with the wood-winds of her morning.

How good the fat earth feels on the plowshare.
How still the steppe, turned up to April.
Salutations, black earth. Courage. Keep the eye wide.
Be the dark speech of silence laboring.

Merwin gives the suggestion of a horse more emphasis than other translators, who just say “well groomed,” or “everything groomed withers.” I’d like to think Merwin here is closer to the way Mandelstam works, with the same convertibility or transformability of Dante. There is an associative logic in going from manured earth, to that “fine tilth combed like a horse’s mane,” and then to let the horse move on pulling its plough, while the speaker remains looking at the turned-up earth like rows in a choir loft. Already a connection between earth and language is suggested, as well as earth and freedom, as if there is liberty in being grounded, in earth as a physical counter-weight to abstraction and deceit, the entire Bolshevik collective machinery. Merwin’s “labor without tools” suggests the earth’s own work of germination, separate from what its workers might will. While other translators speak of “unwarlike labor” or render the phrase as “ploughing is pacifist work,” Merwin’s “the labor without tools” hints more at Mandelstam’s way of composition—the labor of language beginning to emerge first without language. I don’t know what Russian word “rumor “ is translating, but it’s interesting that the Latin root of our “rumor” means “noise.” We tend to read it as pejorative, but it could also hint at something else, the incipient word coming from a distance (literal or psychic), not yet fully heard or realized. In “The Word and Culture” Mandelstam writes “Poetry is a plough, turning up time so that its deep layers, its black earth appear on top.” Clearly, earth and language are intimately connected here. And yet earth is a mistake. Is it a mistake to the Soviets who can’t control it they way they can control human beings? Or is it a mistake for us to expect consolation from the earth? No answered prayers, no protection in nature. But there is a kind of music that is mixed with its own demise, its own vulnerability. Earth pricks our ears with her rotting flute, or her mildewed flute, she sharpens our hearing with her dying flute. What moves, what quickens us in the natural world is its very temporal nature. Our ears are ploughed (in Greene) or frozen—big difference—with morning sounds: the wood-winds of morning, a chilly morning clarinet. The music is not permanent, but it sharpens or whets our hearing. How clearly Merwin goes for the more physical: “pricks up our ears,” which hints at the horse in those opening lines.

There’s a celebration in the final quatrain. The silence is fruitful, a germination.

Salutations, black earth. Courage. Keep the eye wide.
Be the dark speech of silence laboring.

I love Merwin’s continuation of the direct address, a kind of simpatico here, a little shared and benign conspiracy. The McKanes break that sense with, “There is a fertile black silence in work.” Greene: “A black-voiced silence is at work.” In any case, the silence is fruitful, there’s a germination going on, something stirring—perhaps Mandelstam’s hope that there in Voronezh language will come back to him, an unwarlike work. But the place isn’t without danger. He is still under surveillance. Even the earth needs courage, needs to keep the eye wide, and the speech that comes may be dark. Later, in fact, he will write a darker poem, which reduces the earth to the size of his grave:

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

Mandelstam found other things left to him, even in exile. “You’re still alive,” he tells himself, and lists those great oxymorons: “Opulent poverty, regal indigence!” If we ask how a poet can survive under deprivation and oppression, perhaps the ability to live in contradictions, to accept paradox has something to do with it. Mandelstam uses the word “blessed,” and speaks of his work as innocent, “the labor’s singing sweetness,” or in the McKane, “the sweet-voiced work…without sin.” So, his own integrity is a comfort.

Perhaps no better example of that integrity comes from the translation work of Tony Brinkley and Raina Kostova. Here is their translation of the fourth section of “Lines on the Unknown Soldier,” complete with some Russian words left in the text to illustrate their point:

An Arabian medley, muddled, tangled, crumbling,
World-light of velocities, ground to a beam—
On my retina the beam pauses
In my eye on squinted feet.

Millions of dead men cheaply killed
Have walked a path through emptiness—
Good night! Best wishes to them all!
From the façade, the face of these earth-fortresses.

Sky of the trenches, incorruptible,
The sky of mass, of wholesale deaths,
Beyond, behind—away from you—entirely—
I am moving with my lips in darkness.

Beyond the craters, the voronki, behind embankments,
Scree, osypi—where he lingered, darkened,
Overturning—gloomy, pockmarked, ospennyi
The unsettled graves’ belittled genius.

In the final stanza the translators show us how carefully Mandelstam worked, nesting words within words, drawing on roots and origins, using echo and innuendo—much as Dante does, whom Mandelstam read in the original Italian. Brinkley and Kostova include some of the Russian words here, along with notes to explain the way meanings are embedded. They point out that voronki means “craters,” but also names Voronezh, and more than that it is also the name for the “ ‘little ravens,’ the black vans that roamed city streets at night and that the police used to transport prisoners.” Mandelstam’s name, Osip, appears in osypi (scree) and ospennyi (pockmarked), but those words also suggest Stalin’s pockmarked face and his given name, which is also Joseph or Osip. Just this brief excerpt shows us how carefully Mandelstam worked, his ear always to the language, hearing echoes, roots, reverberations. Language was something almost sacred, it seems, far beyond a tool for manipulation. The language becomes co-creator with the poet, suggesting a little more concretely what Mandelstam means when he describes his process as “the recollection of something that has never before been said, and the search for lost words…”—words lost within words, or buried there.

I was reluctant to write about Mandelstam for fear of a kind of desecration, my words dimming, rather than illuminating his work. I am equally reluctant to conclude, perhaps for a similar reason. One realization I’ve come to is that it would be an error to mistake intimacy with a translation for intimacy with the original. But I would actually like to celebrate that distance. When I first read Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante,” it was in winter. I was sitting in the window with the whole vast black night behind me, and on my lap? –an English translation of that twentieth century post-revolution Russian writer discussing his reading of a medieval poet in the original Italian. It seemed miraculous to be there, holding such vast distances in my hands. Perhaps the enormous gap in time, language, history, culture makes what we have all the more precious. Still, that gap is certainly real: between the text and what we can absorb, between Mandelstam and us, us and Dante, you and me. Maybe the sense of lifting one veil only to find another describes all reading, describes our human condition.

A final reflection for me has to do with how we translate from Mandelstam’s life into our own. Perhaps in any age artists face the possibility of corruption, involving self-preservation, careerism, lesser ambitions, attitudes of superiority to fellow citizens. Perhaps it’s always hard to see our own temptations. For me, across the distance of time and culture and extremity, Mandelstam becomes a model of integrity, a reminder of a larger world culture, perhaps now many world cultures; he challenges me to sharpen my craft, to both broaden my engagement with the world and be more interior—and not to assume there’s a divide between the two. However limited our own audiences might be, those who find us still need a poetry that is “both mysterious and familiar,” that will be a shared secret to keep us awake: because even one reader counts in a world where nobody is expendable, which is the world Mandelstam loved and died for.

—Betsy Sholl

WORKS CITED

Brinkley, Tony and Kostova, Raina, “ ‘The Road to Stalin’: Mandelstam’s Ode to Stalin and ‘Lines on the Unknown Soldier,’’ Shofar, Summer 2003, Vol 21, N0. 4.

Mandelatam, Nadezhda, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (New York: The Modern Library,1999).

Mandelstam, Osip, The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004).

Mandelstam, Osip. Selected Poems, trans. James Greene (London: Penguin, 2004).

Mandelstam, Osip, The Voronezh Notebooks, trans. Richard and Elizabeth McKane,(Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, Ltd., 1996).

Mandelstam, Osip. 50 Poems, trans. Bernard Meares (New York: Persea Books, 1977).

Mandelstam, Osip, Complete Critical Prose, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Dana Point, California: Ardis, 1997).

Mandelstam, Osip, The Noise of Time, trans. Clarence Brown (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).

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Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Rough Cradle (Alice James Books), Late Psalm, Don’t Explain,and The Red Line. A new book is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Maine Individual Artists Grants. Recent poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Image, Field, Brilliant Corners, Best American Poetry, 2009, Best Spiritual Writing, 2012. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Underground Man Revisited | Review of My Struggle: Book Two, A Man In Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard — Eric Foley

May 072013

What ultimately matters is the magnitude of Knausgaard’s investment in his project, the sense that here is a man writing to save himself, writing to survive, writing because these things mean so much to him. Somehow, he is able to make them mean almost as much to us. Like all great art, whatever the genre, one leaves these books with a renewed feeling for what life and art can be.
—Eric Foley

My Struggle: Book Two
A Man in Love
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Archipelago Books, trade cloth
576 pages, $26.00

A Story of the Struggle to Tell a Story

“Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard

The year is 2007. For the past four years, Karl Ove Knausgaard has been trying to write about his troubled relationship with his deceased father. Though the 38-year-old author has two previously acclaimed novels under his belt (Out of the World, 1998, and 2004’s A Time For Everything), this time around the attempt to cast his material into fiction isn’t working:

Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced . . . I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value.

Finally, after returning home from a visit to the region of southern Norway where he grew up, Knausgaard stumbles upon a new strategy: to alter the distance between the work and the world by getting “as close as possible to my life.” That evening, after his family has gone to bed, he sits down at his desk and describes what he sees in front of him:

In the window before me I can vaguely see the image of my face. Apart from the eyes, which are shining, and the part directly beneath, which dimly reflects light, the whole of the left side lies in shade. Two deep furrows run down the forehead, one deep furrow runs down each cheek, all filled as it were with darkness, and when the eyes are staring and serious, and the mouth turned down at the corners it is impossible not to think of this face as somber.

What is it that has etched itself into you?

This mini-scene repeats itself in My Struggle. Its first appearance is on page 28 of Book One. There, we read it as a description of the book’s brooding central character, an isolated, conflicted man. In Then, Again: The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts writes that the genre “begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” 962 pages later, near the end of Book Two, Knausgaard’s mini-scene reappears verbatim. Only at this point do we learn the scene’s greater significance: that it is the turning point in Knausgaard’s attempt to write about his father’s impact on his life, the kernel that contains the six volume autobiographical saga to come.

While the above passage is a good example of how Knausgaard employs repetition across time to build meaning in his work, it also neatly enacts, in miniature, another type of movement the author utilizes in the My Struggle books to powerful effect: a quietly intense attendance to visual phenomenon, always linked to the act of perception/self-perception, with a particular emphasis on the perceiving apparatus (the eyes), will suddenly be followed by a shift to a larger, abstract question. (Indeed, Knausgaard’s epic, relentless attempt to answer the question that ends the passage – “What is it that has etched itself into you? – could rightfully be said to form the true subject of these remarkable books.)

But let’s go back to February, 2007: Knausgaard has just begun his new method. He seeks to “dramatize the inner self” by uncovering his past: first five pages a day, then ten, and near the end as many as twenty pages; he writes as quickly as possible in an attempt to escape his conscious notions of what the form should be, trying to move beyond the desire (amply exhibited in his previous novels) to produce aesthetically beautiful prose. By 2009, Knausgaard has accumulated 3600 pages. That same year, the first part of his novelistic “autobiography,” entitled Min Kamp (“My Struggle”), appears in Norway to equal amounts of praise and controversy. The controversy is not so much over the title, with its echoes of Hitler’s memoir (Mein Kampf in German, Min Kamp in Norwegian), but has rather to do with the people the author has “exposed.” In a northern European nation that prefers to keep family trauma private, Knausgaard has written directly about the most personal aspects of his family experiences without any attempt to disguise or change the names of his ex-wife, his father, his grandmother, and other friends and family. When the second volume of My Struggle appears, Knausgaard’s mother calls him and begs him to stop. An uncle threatens to sue. Ultimately, author and publisher agree to change a few of the names in subsequent editions, but the media storm grows, first spreading through Scandinavia, and then across Europe. Most agree about the power of the work, but at what cost has it been achieved? The books become a national obsession, selling 450,000 copies in a country of less than five million people. Norway’s culture minister declares the work the “the greatest account of our generation.” On a national radio program, Knausgaard will go on to say that he feels he has made a “pact with the devil.”

Last August, a few weeks before Archipelago Press released Don Bartlett’s excellent translation of My Struggle: Book One in North America, the book received the “James Wood treatment.” Writing in The New Yorker, Wood praised the work as “intense and vital,” stating that it contained “what Walter Benjamin called ‘the epic side of truth, wisdom.” The first volume of My Struggle is indeed a rarity in contemporary literature; part memoir, part unhinged bildungsroman, it ploughs through and ultimately transcends both genres with a driving seriousness of intent, delving more deeply into the human experience than anything I’ve read in a long time. Fixated on the shadow Knausgaard’s father cast over his childhood and teenage years, and ending with the thirty year-old Karl Ove confronting the horrible death of that father from alcoholism, the 430 page book alternates between extended, minutely detailed descriptive passages and essayistic meditations on death. The result is a kind of crackling slow-burn, a fearless examination of, as Carlos Fuentes once said of Frida Kahlo: “internal darkness under midday lights.”

This month, My Struggle: Book Two makes its North American debut. If Book One centered on death (in order to downplay potential controversy over Knausgaard’s Hitlerian title, the work was published as To Die in Germany and A Death in the Family in the U.K.) then Book Two is loosely organized around the concept of love (and has already been published across the pond under its subtitle A Man in Love). While it is possible to read Book Two on its own and still get something out of it, to do so would be like opening up Remembrance of Things Past for the first time at Within a Budding Grove. Much of the power of Proust and Knausgaard’s projects comes from their length and breadth, which allows for a gradual accumulation of patterned detail, as specific themes and moments repeat themselves in subtle and not-so-subtle variations. In both works, repetition is key.

My Struggle: Book Two primarily covers 2003-2008, years when Knausgaard left behind his old life and partner in Norway and moved to Stockholm. For readers of Book One, Knausgaard’s escape to Sweden possesses added significance: it was after Karl Ove’s own father moved away from his family that he began the drinking and isolation that fourteen years later would leave him dead. Knausgaard does plenty of drinking in Stockholm, but rather than fall apart, he falls in love – with the poet Linda Bostrom.

Linda Bostrom

Knausgaard imbues these scenes with the nostalgic power of true love glimpsed in retrospect. He vividly captures the feel of early love, the uncertainty and vulnerability at the beginning, when things could still go either way, as well as the ecstatic heights:

The town sparkled around us as we walked home, Linda in the white jacket I had given her as a present that morning, and walking there, hand in hand with her, in the midst of this beautiful and, for me, still foreign town, sent wave after wave of pleasure through me. We were still full of ardor and desire, for our lives had turned, not just on the breath of a passing wind, but fundamentally. We planned to have children. We had no sense of anything awaiting us except happiness.

Over the course of My Struggle: Book Two, Karl Ove and Linda become parents to three children. One of the pleasures of the work is the associative, non-chronological way Knausgaard unfolds his story, shifting in and out of different periods according to the movement of thought and memory. Because of this, Book Two begins with all three children already born and the early stages of infatuation between Karl Ove and Linda a relic of the distant past.

The first thing one notices about My Struggle: Book Two (other than the fact that it is a hefty 146 pages longer than its predecessor) is a decrease in the level of intensity that filled Book One. With the father figure dead and buried, the sense of dread behind each sentence is palpably lessened. E.M. Forster once remarked that “mystery creates a pocket in time.” Book One utilizes the mystery of Knausgaard’s father (why is he such a cruel, tortured man? How exactly will he meet his end?) to mesmerizing effect. Throughout that first volume, wherever young Karl Ove goes, the father’s shadow follows; there is always the sense of movement towards further revelation. Many of the scenes in Book One possess an aura of somnambulant terror, as if anything could occur at any moment, which provides a momentum that propels the reader through some of the lengthier descriptive passages. A roughly 60-page description of young Karl Ove trying to secure alcohol for New Year’s Eve, for example, unfolds in painfully slow fashion beneath the constant apprehension over whether the father will find out what the son is up to. The tension builds until, at the end of Book One, Karl Ove pays a second visit to his father’s corpse (again, repetition). Here, something opens up in him, and he begins to see the intertwining elements of death, life, and time in a different way:

. . . there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

With this conclusion to My Struggle: Book One, the last two sentences of which rhythmically and thematically echo the final sentences of the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past,^[*] the great tension is released. A new point of realization has been reached.

Initially then, Book Two lacks both the momentum and the mystery of Book One. Certainly love can be a mystery, but at the outset of Book Two it seems more like a daily slog, as we are confronted with scenes of Knausgaard’s new family life. Only in the light of what has come before do these scenes gradually accrue a resonant force. The still fearful, still internally isolated Underground Man persona that Knausgaard continues to develop here—picture a 21^st century Raskolnikov schlepping a stroller, a diaper bag, and two toddlers up a hill while his wife stands at the top in a foul mood, a third wailing infant in her arms—is understandable precisely because we know what he has come out of. Although the hated father is dead and Karl Ove has escaped to a new country, Knausgaard still struggles to relate his internal and external worlds, and to be around others. Most moving, in these early scenes, is Knausgaard’s depiction of his own quest to be a decent father, as he attempts to raise his young children without duplicating the paternal coldness, cruelty and occasional rage he was treated to during his own upbringing. We come to see that for the adult Karl Ove Knausgaard, love means following through on one’s commitments, regardless of how fucked up one feels inside.

So it goes for 67 pages, with little of what contemporary publishing would call “narrative tension” or “drive.” As with certain sections of Book One, we begin to suspect that the day-in-day-out nature of these scenes, the very mundaneness of their details, is the point; these scenes need to be long for the same reason that the infamous sermon on hell in the third chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man needs to be long: to enact, rather than simply describe the interminable, real-time duration of certain life moments. And yet, after a while, we begin to wonder if this is all Book Two has to offer.

Then, on page 68, Knausgaard returns home from the birthday party of one of his young daughter’s friends. He steps out alone onto the balcony, has a smoke, drinks some stale diet coke:

I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me . . . Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

It is difficult to convey the full force of this passage without also including what preceded it: a forty-plus page description of a middle-class Swedish child’s birthday party, where a Norwegian father remains intensely within himself, unable to connect with the others, even those he likes. This struggle is made more poignant by the fact that we see how Knausgaard’s three-year old daughter Vanya already exhibits these same social tendencies, this same furious need to be accepted by others, coupled with the inability, on a bodily level, to figure out how to join in the other children at play. For Knausgaard and his daughter, a routine social occasion is a source of fear, shame, and longing.

A Few Words About Titles

Given that Hitler’s memoir is often published in North America, even in translation, under its original German title, for some the English “My Struggle” will not have the same resonance it does in Norwegian. The above passage from page 68 of Book Two is the first time we get a direct reference to, and partial explication of, the work’s title. Here, the emphasis is on the struggle to balance being in the world for others versus being in the world for oneself—the struggle to exist, on a moment-to-moment basis. In a recent interview, Knausgaard said that he chose the title Min Kamp on something of a lark. He liked the friction it carried between the daily, personal struggles of the individual and the larger structures of ideology and politics that function in opposition to private life. My Struggle: Book Six reportedly contains an essay that delves further into this issue, focusing on a comparison between Knausgaard and Hitler’s books, but English readers will have to wait a few more years for this.

If nothing else, Knausgaard’s series does foreground, in immense detail, the struggles of everyday life. By placing this struggle in the background, as the UK version does on its cover, the emphasis becomes reversed. Whether this retitling was done in order to avoid controversy or to more easily market the volume-by-volume content of Knausgaard’s work makes little difference; it interposes a too-large distinction between each book in the sextet, as if there were no significant overlap. The throughline of struggle is downplayed, the totality of the whole sacrificed for an emphasis on each volume as an individual marketable product.

For make no mistake, struggle, in conception and reality, runs through everything Karl Ove does, everything he thinks. Happy or sad, in joy or despair, he suffers apart from the rest, alone. In this, he is a true Underground Man.

Notes From Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“All the same, if we take into consideration the conditions that have shaped our society, people like the writer not only may, but must, exist inthat society.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The above words (or rather, their Russian equivalent) were written in 1864 as a description the original Underground Man. Dostoevsky’s name appears 16 times in My Struggle: Book Two. Like Karl Ove in My Struggle, that main character of Notes From Underground is also a writer composing a sort of memoir: “I, however, am writing for myself alone, and let me declare once and for all that if I write as if I were addressing an audience, it is only for show and because it makes it easier for me to write. It is a form, nothing else; I shall never have any readers. I have already made that clear . . .” Interestingly, Knausgaard has said in interviews that he too “didn’t believe that anyone would be interested in this writing, because it’s so personal, so private.” This thought set him free at his desk, to write “for myself, by myself.”

As Dostoyevsky writes in a passage that applies equally to My Struggle’s central character, the Underground Man’s dilemma, “lies in his consciousness of his own deformity . . . the tragedy of the underground [is] made up of suffering, self-torture, the consciousness of what is best and the impossibility of attaining it, and above all else the firm belief of these unhappy creatures that everybody else is the same and that consequently it is not worth while trying to reform.”

While the Underground Man feels isolated from the rest of society, he is also a product of it, and perhaps, in the end, not quite so hideously unique as he imagines. Knausgaard realizes that his is as much a problem of perception as anything else, but does not know how to change:

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, how stupid I was. I couldn’t find any peace in a café; within a second I had taken in everyone there, and I continued to do so, and every glance that came my way penetrated into my innermost self, jangled about inside me, and every movement I made, even if only flicking through a book, was likewise transmitted outwards to them, as a sign of my stupidity, every movement I made said: “This is an idiot sitting here.” So it was better to walk, for then the looks disappeared one by one, admittedly they were replaced by others, but they never had time to establish themselves, they just glided past, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot.

This paradox of the Underground Man, painfully separate from society, while at the same time yoked to and created by it, is presumably what allows Karl Ove to see himself as outside, different from the rest, and still write “the definitive portrait” of his generation, a work that has resonated so deeply for so many others.

The other reference point for the Underground Man, particularly from a Norwegian perspective, is Knut Hamson’s Hunger. In the course of My Struggle: Book Two, Hamsun’s name is mentioned 11 times. In one scene, a Swedish filmmaker begins jokingly calling Knausgaard “Hamsun,” for his reactionary Norwegian views.

Knut Hamson

In Hunger, we are again presented with a writer struggling to maintain his dignity in an urban setting. Hamsun’s Underground Man is defined by his extreme refusal to partake in the pleasures of everyday life, to join the crowd by accepting help in the form of food or money. Knausgaard too is interested in refusal. Late in Book Two, Knausgaard’s friend Geir Gullickson informs him that: “Not to strive for a happy life is the provocative thing you can do.” A page or so later, Knausgaard responds: “All I know is that success is not to be trusted. I notice that I get angry just talking about it.”

Style

The prose of Book Two is similar to Book One: the long sentences and paragraphs do not induce anxiety in the way that Thomas Bernhard or László Krasznahorkai’s writing can, but rather project a certain detached calm. A typical Knausgaardian sentence piles independent clause upon independent clause, linking these with comma splices where grammatical convention would seem to call for a period, semicolon or coordinating conjunction. 800 pages into the My Struggle saga, these splices were still tripping me up. I began to wonder if it was a function of the translation; perhaps Norwegian possessed different conventions with regards to sentence structure?

A perusal of Knausgaard’s previous novel, “A Time for Everything,” revealed that the author does indeed know how to “properly” punctuate. A typical passage from that work reads: “Cain felt the gaze of the crowd at his back, but he didn’t turn; in a strange way their exit felt like a victory: it was just the two of them. In a few minutes the festivities would continue, and the wonder would dissipate itself in them.”

47 words in total. The varied punctuation helps to regulate the flow of the two sentences. We stop at the periods. And pause at the semi-colon and colon. Each of the two commas is followed by a coordinating conjunction (but, and). Now, compare this to the writing in My Struggle:

Later that autumn the temperature plummeted, all the water and the canals in Stockholm froze, we walked on the ice from Soder to Stockholm’s Old Town, I hobbled along like the hunchback of Notre Dame, she laughed and took photos of me, I took photos of her, everything was sharp and clear, including my feelings for her.”

One sentence, 57 words: one period, seven commas. My guess is that the run-ons in My Struggle are the result of Knausgaard’s compositional method, and that he decided to leave many of them untouched as a statement about the formal constraints of his project. As he recently told Eleanor Wachtel, length and speed were crucial: “It had to be long, and I had to write very quickly, so I could be ahead of my thoughts all the time.” By consistently eschewing the aesthetics of a properly punctuated sentence, Knausgaard allows data and detail to pile up without the emphasis that more varied punctuation would provide. At one level, the My Struggle books seem to be about getting as much of the world’s content as possible onto the page, rather than arranging this content for artful effect. Knausgaard will sometimes leave a sentence deliberately clunky to enhance this impression. Listen to the repetition of the word “mind” in the final clause here: “The boxer incident, when I hadn’t dared kick in the door, and the boat incident, when I hadn’t dared to ask Arvid to slow down, as well as Linda’s concern about my failure to act, had played on my mind so much that now there was no doubt in my mind.”

Eyes Within a Face

“What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two

Which is not to say that there aren’t still beautiful passages and artful effects, but rather that these are not the point of the work. In particular, Knausgaard has a knack for describing eyes, getting at the essential individuality and emotion they convey. Knausgaard is obsessed, in a conflicting way, with how he sees the world and how others see him. It is little wonder, then, that painting is his favourite art (Book One contains a beautiful passage describing the eyes in a late Rembrandt self-portrait), or that the most frightening creature he can imagine, from a childhood dream, is a lizard-like figure without any eyes.

How Knausgaard perceives his own eyes often provides a clue to his relationship with the world. When he first arrives in Stockholm:

I studied myself in the mirror for a few seconds. My face was pale and slightly bloated, hair unkempt and eye . . . yes, my eyes . . . Staring but not in an active, outward-facing fashion, as though they were looking for something, more as if what they saw was drawn into them, as if they sucked everything in.

Since when had I had such eyes?

There is only one scene in Book Two where Knausgaard’s mother is remotely critical of him: after he moves to Stockholm, she lashes out at how he left his wife and then fell in love again so quickly: “I couldn’t see other people,” Knausgaard summarizes, “I was completely blind. I saw only myself everywhere. Your father, she said, he looked straight into people. He saw immediately who they were. You’ve never done that. No, I said. Maybe I haven’t.”

Later, his love for Linda changes the way he sees by bringing him into closer proximity to reality: “Before, I had always been deep inside myself, observing people from there, like from the back of a garden. Linda brought me out, right to the edge of myself, where everything was near and everything seemed stronger.”

Struggle with Form/Struggle as Form

“ . . . I could counter that Dante, for example, had written just fiction, that Cervantes had written just fiction, and that Melville had written just fiction. It was irrefutable that being human would not be the same if these three works had not existed, So why not just write fiction? . . . Good arguments, but that didn’t help, just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me nauseous, I reacted in a physical way.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Two

In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields describes being overtaken by a similar feeling: “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” It is worth noting that very few of the writers of recent works of reality-based fiction are as wholeheartedly against the traditional novel in the way that Shields can sometimes appear to be (e.g. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station). It is tempting to add My Struggle to the list of contemporary fiction/nonfiction hybrids, the most epic version yet of the novel-from-life.

But somehow Knausgaard’s work displays a less playful attitude towards the division between fiction and reality, as if he is off working in his own mad dimension that paradoxically feels closer to the real. Though Knausgaard’s series was originally published in Norway and other European countries with the word roman on the cover, in Britain and North America it is more often referred to as an epic memoir. In many ways, My Struggle perfectly enact Birkerts’ definition of the genre. While “this really happened is the baseline contention of the memoir,” Birkerts writes, the true “fascination of the work . . . is in tracking the artistic transformation of the actual via the alchemy of psychological insight, pattern recognition, and lyrical evocation in a contained saga.”

Archipelago has wisely decided to publish My Struggle without a genre label. What ultimately matters is the magnitude of Knausgaard’s investment in his project, the sense that here is a man writing to save himself, writing to survive, writing because these things mean so much to him. Somehow, he is able to make them mean almost as much to us. Like all great art, whatever the genre, one leaves these books with a renewed feeling for what life and art can be.

Birkerts also stresses that it is the juxtaposition of multiple timelines, “the now and the then (the many thens) . . . that creates the quasi-spatial illusion most approximating the sensations of lived experience, of recollection merging into the ongoing business of living.” Knausgaard has taken this technique to new heights, returning again and again to his themes, with new insight:

Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty . . . Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

The overall effect of the first two My Struggle books, despite the seriousness of the subject matter, is both liberating and exhilarating. In any one book, so much has, of necessity, to be pared away. The magnitude of Knausgaard’s project allows him to shine a light on hitherto unknown aspects of being, indulging in immense, 234 page-long digressions into the past. But when we return to the present, it is with a renewed knowledge and understanding of the characters and their situations.

And yet, despite its allegiance to reality, Knausgaard’s art is still an art: it still employs form and illusion. For all its breadth, the writing still only seems to include everything. In reality, it casts its net only over what has come through the author’s mind in the process of writing. Gradually, as Book Two progresses, we move back round to the subjects and questions of Book One: alcoholism, death, paternity. We come to see that death and love are bound up together in myriad ways. But perhaps, with his particular brand of intuitive energy, Knausgaard was setting us up for this all along, right from the very first sentence of Book One:

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.”

—Eric Foley

——————————————-

Eric Foley holds an Honours BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Guelph University. He has been a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award, the Hart House Literary Contest, and the winner of Geist Magazine and the White Wall Review’s postcard story contests. His writing can be found online at Numéro Cinq and Influencysalon.ca. He lives in Toronto and divides his time between his writing and teaching at Humber College.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

In the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation: “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”↵

A Little Mysterious Bleeding: Play — Robert Vivian

Mar 032013

Author photo: Tina Vivian

Numéro Cinq publishes plays; hardly any other magazine does. I suppose people imagine that it’s a kind of travesty to fix in print something that should be alive, incarnate on the stage with actors and actresses, gesture and expression. But when the play closes, the words lie dormant, unseen, unheard, inaccessible. On top of that, I think there is an audience of would-be dramatists and even ordinary readers who want to know what a play looks like written down, to get some idea of the mysterious process that runs through author to page to director to actor to stage to audience. To me plays really are mysterious, strange, stripped-down pieces of writing, for the most part minus the character thought that drives narrative fiction, often highly and obviously constructed; and with a play, one is always aware, haunted even, by the vast difference between the words on the page and the final product on the stage, re-imagined, enacted, through the minds and gestures of the actors, all those theatrical things that are not and can never be written down on the page.

So once again I am really pleased to offer NC readers a piece of theater, this time from Robert Vivian, a Nebraska boy who once played baseball in college and then turned to writing (a lot like baseball) and has produced a huge and growing oeuvre of novels, essays, and, yes, plays (actually, a lot of plays). A Little Mysterious Bleeding is a monologue and shares much with Vivian’s fiction and nonfiction prose in that he has a predilection for meditation, for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, for large questions about existence, human nature and the puzzles of the heart. Vivian has a modernist bent; he seems to be writing about real people, but everything he writes tends to turn around a pattern of imagery. In this case, Chloe’s metonymic bleeding becomes the central image (symbol) of her struggle with the word “love.” It would be reductive to say that A Little Mysterious Bleeding is just the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a disappointed Harvard grad; rather, Vivian takes that premise and turns it inside-out like a sock and renders it mythic. But symbol and myth are equally grounded in deft characterization and precise psychological perception; the play flickers between the real and the symbolic. And the writing is mesmerizing: quotable line after quotable line.

—

Well, life as a playwright: Before I moved to Michigan 11 years ago, I was primarily working on plays, over 20 of which were performed in NYC. I also had several monologues in the 90s published in The Best American Monologue Series for men and women. Since moving to Michigan, though, I’ve focused primarily on creative prose in cnf and fiction. I’ve always loved theater but at a remove: I’ve never had any real interest in directing or acting. But to this day there’s nothing quite as electric as hearing one’s words spoken on stage with trained actors; it’s a kind of alchemy and music that I’ve never experienced in any other genre. I love the monologue as a form, and it has been the focal points in first three novels that are largely driven by a revolving cast of first person narrators, so I guess you could see I’ve taken what I learned from the stage and transferred it to the page. And for this I’m ineffably grateful.

— Robert Vivian

Cast Of Characters

CHLOE

A tiny old woman of indeterminate age. SHE could be anywhere from 70-100. Her small, even diminutive stature gives her a quality of elusiveness, her age hard to pin down. SHE wears rather drab, gender-neutral clothes: brown or green corduroy pants, a sweater of similar design, comfortable walking shoes. Her hair is very short, cropped close. SHE probably wears glasses, wire rimmed. Because SHE doesn’t wear makeup or accentuate her femininity in any way, SHE could almost be mistaken for a man.

Throughout the course of the play, CHLOE holds a clear glass mug of hot water from which SHE sips periodically. When SHE’S done drinking the water, the play is over.

Scene

A bare stage.

Time

Any time.

Act I

SCENE:

A bare stage.

AT RISE:

CHLOE comes out eventually, smiling to the audience and cupping her hands around the clear mug of hot water. A long pause in which SHE surveys the people SHE’S going to address.

CHLOE

Every morning before the sun comes up I light a candle and sit in a bare empty room on the second floor of my house. I sit down Indian-style on a rug three by four feet, of paisley design. I bought it at K-Mart. Outside I can see a stark, bare Maple tree in my neighbor’s backyard, like a map against the sky. I sit there for awhile in this position, looking at the flame and then looking out the window, and I wonder to myself how I have made it through all the days, the months, the years, pages from the calendar falling like leaves. It’s a very peaceful time, the best part of the day.

Most of the people I’ve known or cared for have gone away or are dead. They all just went away, one by one, without much fanfare. Sometimes remembering them makes me sad, and sometimes it fills me with a tranquil feeling, like I really didn’t lose them at all.

(Holds out her hand, inspecting it.)

When I look at my hands I feel like they should belong to someone else. I can imagine what they’ll look like when I’m dead, and the thought isn’t as morbid as you think, just curious.

Have you ever wondered why people are so agitated all the time, why they’re so restless? I think about it a great deal. But I don’t have an answer.

I have an ordinary life, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. I’ve really never had to work for a living. When my husband Kenneth died, I inherited his pension and life insurance. And now I work three hours a day at a junior high school cafeteria—not because I have to, but because I like the work. We have our menu set up for the week and it’s very satisfying to make hot food for growing children, though I’ve never had any of my own.

I’ve become what people tend to dismiss or overlook, not out of malice, mind you, but because our stature makes us insignificant. Someone to take for granted. Not threatening in any way. An old woman. An ancient old woman with short white hair who lives alone, by herself, with three cats, one of whom is blind.

(Pause. SHE sips.)

You see, I haven’t done anything extraordinary with my life. I didn’t have children and I didn’t write books. I didn’t travel to distant places or ride on the back of an elephant, though I did get stranded in Nebraska once. I never thought of myself as exceptional in any way, different, or really worth remarking on. And this wasn’t because I felt worthless or lacked self-esteem—wasn’t because I suffered some terrible trauma in childhood. Nothing like that at all. In fact, about the only think people have consistently remarked on about me is the small size of my hands and fingers, almost like those of a child.

But you can’t take credit for that, can you, the size of your hands or the color of your hair or the sculpture of your cheekbones. No. None of that seems to matter too much, or really at all. So I live in a small house in central Michigan and my husband’s been dead for almost thirty years now. I have a few friends, not many. I don’t want a lot of friends because then they cease to be friends. My wants are few. I listen to the radio for two hours every morning. I work in the kitchen at the junior high school. I walk. I shop. I peer over the steering wheel like other old ladies, though I’d like to believe I’m a better driver at most, more alert, someone who actually drives the speed limit. So my life is in no way remarkable, or really worth dwelling on because it’s so, well, interior, private, regular.

(Sip. Pause.)

But I do have a story to tell you. And I do have memories. They are the sum and total of a person’s life, and for that reason they probably should be mentioned. That’s why it’s so shocking for me to mention that I’ve been bleeding in my private parts for almost fifty years. Every time someone uses the word love I start to bleed. And I have a strange confession to make that I’m not too proud of related to this. Or rather that puzzles me. I do not love my fellow man. I do not love him. I have never loved him and I probably never will. I respect him, I can even work up some sympathy for him from time to time, but I do not love him. Love him. How could I, you see? The every day world with its sights and colors is far more interesting and more beautiful than my fellow man, or woman for that matter.

Did I love my husband? Did I love Kenneth all those years we were together? In the beginning, yes, maybe I did love him. It’s difficult to say now. When we were having sex, the way he would hold me very tightly. He liked to pin me down, you see. He liked to grab hold of my hair. And I went along with it. For the most part, I even enjoyed it to a point. But love? I think we should be very careful about using that word. We must approach it with dark goggles on or welding masks because the very use of it could melt us like chocolate on hot cement. Love. The word is like racing toward the sun at the speed of light, and when we get there, there will be nothing left of any of us because all of us will be consumed.

When I hear people using that word, in the supermarket, at the checkout line, I have this strange physical reaction that makes me shudder. I start to hemorrhage in my private place. I start to bleed. I can only use the word love when I’m speaking to someone like you, when I’m standing up in front of a group of people and I’m thinking out loud. But when I hear it in the mouths of others. When I read it in magazines and novels, I have the same reaction every time. First, a shudder like a cold wind passes through me, and then I get a sharp pain just beneath my abdomen. And then I start to bleed. Just a little trickle, a little clotting, usually nothing too severe. A few paw prints of blood. A little smear. And then I simply have to stop what I’m doing and go home, and close the door to the outside world. I have to get under the covers and breathe slowly, like an army of God’s angels is on its way from a distant, far-away place, coming to get me. Coming to snatch me away. Then I can start feeling normal again.

(Pause. Sip.)

This is just hot water, by the way. I don’t drink coffee or tea. Once in a great while I will have a glass of wine, but it goes right to my head and fogs my thinking. I don’t like to be befogged. From my screened-in porch I like to watch people and cars pass by.

In the morning I can hear the rending of metal of metal coming from the scrap yard eight blocks away. Great iron cranes picking up old refrigerators and cars, dumping them from one pile to the other. I see these in my mind. No one has ever said the town I live in is beautiful. The sound is horrible, of course, the smashing and breaking of worlds, so when it stops, when the scrap yard isn’t in operation for whatever reason—snow or rain—the most wonderful silence descends. It makes the sounds of crashing metal almost worth it somehow.

(Sip. Pause.)

When people use the word love, they should be very, very careful. They should be half-starved or beaten, whipped by suffering, on their knees trembling, naked and about to fall over. They must have to utter it almost despite themselves, because no other word in the world will do. They should be allotted the use of this word maybe three or four times in their whole lives. For some people, they should never use it. It should be absolutely forbidden them. If they do use it, one of their fingers should be cut off. I truly believe that.

(Pause. Sip.)

When Kenneth was alive he was only vaguely abusive, and then in a dismissive kind of way. He never actually tried to hurt or harm me physically. More than anything, I think he was just disappointed. He carried his disappointment wherever he went, like an invisible hunchback. He took out his disappointment on me in different way. Now the real problem with Kenneth’s disappointment as far as I could tell is that he could never locate the source of it, could never pin it down. It was just there with him, and he dragged it into every room he ever entered. His disappointment was elusive but all consuming.

One day he came home from work and I was preparing vegetables for dinner, Brussel sprouts of all things, which we almost never had. Kenneth looked very tired, and angry in a sullen kind of way. And I asked him, How was your day, dear? And he was a long time in answering. In fact, I don’t think he heard me so I repeated the question. But he was no more interested in answering my question than he was before. I stood there with a strainer in one hand, trying to smile through lipstick I didn’t really believe in, and after a long time, a great long time while we stood looking at each other with no other sound but boiling water and the pungent smell of Brussel sprouts, he suddenly said, Bloody. Fucking. Cunt.

(Sip. Pause. Sip.)

Naturally, in a situation like that, you wonder what you did wrong. You play back the events of the day and the recent past and the past before that and try to figure it all out, how A led to B led to C and so on. Kenneth knew perfectly well that the C-word was my least favorite word in the whole English language. I didn’t like to hear it as a girl and I never got over my repugnance. I certainly didn’t like to hear coming from my husband’s mouth.

For my part, I neither cried or asked him just why he used that language with me. Later, long after the bleeding started, I thought back to his hateful language in the kitchen and all the little details that comprised that moment. The steam and pungent odor of the sprouts. The cats slinking in and out of the kitchen. The peeling wallpaper, the burnished teakettle. The feeling of desolation, of being in some way or another in touch with the vastness of hell. The clock seemed to be smiling at me with a certain satisfied grin, and I never said, I never even thought, I will not have this. I will not tolerate this. Instead I noticed the patterns of tile on the floor from my aerial view, and I remember thinking back to my mother, whom I once discovered in a fit of hysterical weeping that seemed to come out of nowhere. And I suddenly thought I understood exactly how she felt.

(Sip. Pause.)

The problem with the word love is that it tends to spin out of control like a gyroscope, it starts to expand and rise up into the air leaving the person behind who said it anchored to the ground. Nailed down almost. And there was never any specific moment that made me feel that way about love. First came the bleeding, and then some kind of rationale lagging behind it.

Kenneth always wore black dress socks no matter what the weather or occasion and I wanted to tell him that this didn’t attract me to him in any way, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He went to Harvard College and I don’t think he ever got over the experience. He told me many times that the four years he spent at Harvard were the best years of his life, and he couldn’t hope to bring back their glory in anything he did after graduating, certainly not at the bank where he worked in the middle of Michigan. I kept hoping and looking for evidence of his intelligence that made him smarter than other people, but I’m afraid to report that after living with him for decades I didn’t really see any. Oh, he was intelligent, don’t get me wrong, he was a smart man, but he was also kind of petty in a way. Harvard made Kenneth feel special, apart from most other people, and I could never tell him, I could never say, I know it’s a fine school and it’s enjoyed a very good reputation for a long time, but there are other good schools too and they don’t, well, they don’t create the same kind of wistful longing and even snobbery that Harvard does. I’m sorry but they don’t.

But in other ways my life with Kenneth was special. Even though he wore black dress socks every day of his life and he was very disappointed, he insisted that we have sex almost every day we lived together. Our routine developed into a very familiar and predictable pattern: Kenneth would come home at 6:00, we would talk for maybe twenty minutes, after a suitable period of silence, of course; and then he would gently push me in the direction of the staircase, his hands on my rear end, and we’d go up to the bedroom where we’d take off all our clothes. I don’t have to tell you what happened after that. None of these daily rendezvous’ ever produced children, but that didn’t bother Kenneth and it didn’t bother me.

Sometimes Kenneth would weep in bed, holding up my hands and saying, Look at them—they’re so small. And then he would nibble on my fingertips. And with my free hand I would stroke his balding head and notice the crystals of dandruff that had accumulated over the course of the day.

(Pause. Sip.)

But back to the word love. It’s a slippery slope, you see, a street widening out into eternity. I’ve heard stories of love, we all have, and they are properly called love stories, but I can honestly say that not one of them has ever measured up to that one word love. The stories really weren’t about love at all but something else. Maybe affection. Maybe revenge. Maybe a kind of fatalism.

When I hear the word love and start to bleed it’s very much like a small, gentle trickle in a dark, moist cave and the pain is very slight, almost like a shiver. No doctor has ever been able to explain why this happens to me, and I gave up trying to find a rational explanation almost right away. And I’m sorry, I don’t believe in therapists and people who make their living listening to the pain and misery of others. If it were up to me, the people who call themselves therapists would have to work hard labor digging tunnels or working out on highways. I just don’t have any patience or sympathy for therapists at all.

The thing you must do when you hear the word love is to stop what you’re doing and slowly, very slowly stand up as straight as you can. You must believe with your whole, entire heart that your very life is about to end in a few moments. And then you must very, very diligently go over the course of your life and honestly ask yourself when love was really in your heart. When it was more than a feeling and was the only reality there was. If you don’t do that when you hear the word love, then, I’m sorry, you’re fooling yourself and making a mockery of the only thing that matters.

(Sip. Pause.)

Kenneth liked to throw dinner parties every other week, and so I got very used to having guests in our small, lovely house. Kenneth was even more attracted to me in the midst of a group of people than when we were alone. I was always bustling about, laughing and interacting with them and filling up their glasses.

Some times the way he looked at me reminded me of certain nature shows I had watched, like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, for instance, and the predators, the lions and the cheetahs and the leopards before they moved in for the kill. He was so focused on my every move. I’ve heard from other women that some men take them for granted and even ignore them in groups of people, but I have to say that Kenneth grew very conscious of me, his pupils almost dilating. It was a ritual, a dance, a ceremony. Kenneth had a long, craggy forehead and rapidly receding hair-line that could make him look formidable on occasion. One of our friends even remarked that his head resembled a bust of Gustave Mahler, whom I had never heard of before the comparison was made.

Who is Mahler? I asked, and the way that Kenneth glared at me when I asked this question was something I’ll never forget. He looked shocked, hurt, even outraged. Some times Kenneth didn’t like the guilelessness of my questions—and then other times he really seemed to find them funny, almost cute. It depended what kind of a mood he was in.

(Pause. Sip. Sip.)

Now when I get up in the morning, I sit for a time at the end of my bed. Usually the cats are on the bed covers, perked up and listening. They’re waiting for me to make the first move. I say to myself very quietly, Today I will discover what love is. Today I will discover what love is. Today I will discover what love is. Saying these words never fails to make me aware of my ignorance and failings, my own fumblings. I feel ready for a brand new day. And even though for a long time now each day resembles the next very closely, I have grown so sensitive to the slightest nuance of change that it’s quite enough for me. A patch of sunlight on the wooden floor. The dust motes floating just above it. The cats and the tiny thousands and thousands of filaments of hair that make up their fur. The sounds of the house, a squirrel running across the roof. The way my mug feels when I pick it up in the morning, solid and smooth, like something has fallen into place.

Then no single day is exactly like any other day, and then I’m glad to be alive because I’m here. And that’s all. There’s nothing else I can do or say about it because I’m a very limited creature. Do I talk to God? Sure, I do. In my own special way. But mostly it feels like I’m just waiting, I’m just sitting or standing here for something to come and collect me. Of course, I have no idea when that time will be or what it will look like, but I welcome it all the same.

(Sip. Pause.)

When Kenneth died, I wore the brightest dress I had. I didn’t cry and I didn’t try to look somber. His death came after a long battle with cancer and I was there with him every step of the way, sleeping at the hospital toward the very end, washing him, changing his clothes, helping him to go to the bathroom. I wore bright colors because I was actually happy for him, as anyone would be after all the pain and anguish.

One night when he was still at home I went out to get some groceries and when I came back there was this terrible stench in the house. I knew just what it was, of course. I put the food away very deliberately, and for some reason I’ll never understand, I started whistling as I walked up the stairs. I knew Kenneth would be waiting for me, that his intense gray eyes would burn into mine. I whistled and I found on those stairs that, under those conditions, that I was actually a very good whistler.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw the light on at the end of the hallway and Kenneth was looking at me. Fiery tears burned in his eyes. And then I let him tell me what I knew he was going to say, because he had to say it and it was very, very holy. I beshat myself, he said. And I went over and kneeled by the side of the bed, took his hand in mind, and kissed it on the knuckles. I beshat myself. I know it, dear. I don’t want to live this way anymore. I know that, sweetheart.

Then I started to clean him up, wiping between his legs with a warm wet cloth, going over his anus, his penis, his testicles he liked me to fondle so much when we were having sex.

(Sip. Pause.)

Even though the real issue before us was his act of soiling himself, and then being unable to do anything about it. To have to wait for me to return, lying there in his own feces, his bowels a part of himself he could no longer control. But I’ll never forget the way he said, I beshat myself, for it was the most remarkable and dignified thing he ever told me, nobler and truer than the few times he said, I love you. I felt closer to him in cleaning up his waste then I had at any other time in all the years we were together, and I’m fairly confident in believing he shared those same feelings. I don’t often use the word awe in every day experience, but I felt a sense of awe in cleaning him up. And I’ve some times thought that all those precious years were just a preparation for that one night in the bedroom, when I cleaned up his shit and we didn’t say a word to each other the whole time.

(Pause. Sip.)

You’ll want to know more about the house and how I live, why it is I’m standing in front of you and saying these rather bold things. Why it matters. How one thing leads to another and how the connections between them are some times hard to decipher.

Where I grew up, there was a field behind the back of the house. I spent a lot of time in that field, walking among the tall grass and the wild flowers. My parents encouraged me to play outside as much as I could. They wanted me to breathe the open air. As an only child I had to learn how to entertain myself, and this I learned to do quite nicely. I’m not saying that I didn’t have friends my age or that I didn’t like to be around people because I did, I did like to be around people. But just as often I preferred to be by myself, exploring the world on my own.

Something very strange happened to me when I was about twelve years old. I supposed that’s an age when a lot of strange things occur. There was a slightly retarded man who lived in the neighborhood. His name was Pat. Pat drooled a little, and when he walked he a sloping kind of gait. He must have been in his thirties when I knew him. I always thought he was interested in me, that he wanted to talk to me alone. He liked to memorize bus schedules and other numerical facts. And one it happened. I was out in the field in the late afternoon. The house looked like it was a long ways away, but it couldn’t have been. I was never more than an acre from home. When it was dinner time my mother would come out and call my name, or, even better, she would ring the dinner bell. Then I would race home, pretending that the shadows were chasing me like a tide, about to overcome me.

At the far edge of this field was a stand of trees where I some times went to be by myself. Sometimes I brought my rag doll Molly with me. Other times I just went there and sat in the lower branch of a sycamore tree. I was playing jacks in a circle in the dirt. I remember my yellow dress was dusty. I had taken off my sandals. I knew very well that my mother could see from the kitchen window, though I couldn’t see her. It was reassuring for both of us. The prospect of her watching me changed the way I played. I was a good girl and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

Well, one day Pat came out to where I was playing, and I saw him coming from a distance. I thought my mother must have seen him too. The locusts were crying out from dry, dark hiding places. I saw Pat and I wondered if my mother was watching the two of us. In retrospect, I don’t think she did. But for the life of me, I can’t say why. Pat came up to me and quickly said, Want to show you something, want to show you something. What is it, Pat, I said, what do you want to show me? Then he grabbed my hand and we started walking very quickly toward the trees. He was pulling me along. I kept looking back at the house, wondering if my mother was seeing all of this. Pat was trembling and he was very excited and I started to feel a little scared. I didn’t think he would hurt me, but Pat was much stronger than I was so pretended nothing was wrong. So we went into the trees. What do you want to show me, Pat? Then he dropped his pants and started to masturbate in front of me. I was only about five feet away. He was uncircumcised and had the largest penis I have ever seen. Then he ejaculated and his semen landed just a few inches short of my bare feet, like tiny studs of liquid pearl. And the air between us was filled with the smell of his sex.

Then Pat was crying and he was very upset. He kept saying sorry over and over again. I didn’t say anything to him and I slowly backed out of the woods and ran home as fast I could. He was a retarded man and there were some things he had no control over. But whenever I saw him after that, I did my best to stay away from him. If I saw him coming down the road, I was gone. I never let him get within ten feet of me again. Yet I felt sorry for him, and I have to say now that he taught me a valuable lesson, especially about men in particular. And that is they many of them, perhaps even the majority, are constantly looking for an opportunity to drop their pants. I have to say that his desperate act in the woods was one of the most honest and straightforward acts I have ever come across in all my years of living. He showed me a human being truly is, even though at the time I didn’t understand it. And now I’m just a little ashamed that I was so afraid of him.

(Sip. Pause.)

It does make me wonder what makes a life. And who lives it exactly, never mind why. How do you balance the terrible tension between what you truly are and what you want to be. How do you balance that. Weigh the scales. Not to mention how you want others to look at you, the worst obstacle of all. What do you shut out. How do you remember. What do you remember. What does it all add up to. Why bleed at the mention of the word love. Why do people say things they do not mean—and then fool themselves into believing their own false intensions. Famine. War. The unimaginable misery and despair of millions of people across the globe. Cruelty. Basic, every day cruelty that goes undetected, unreported, but felt all the same. Then the moments of compassion, real empathy, tenderness even. The birth of an act of love. The small, precious seedling of it. An old woman cannot tell you these. Can an old woman tell you about these? I do not know. I have my doubts. Still. Something compels. Impels us. I am not the woman I used to be.

But was she, that other woman, that other woman I used to be, was she somehow not allowed to be who and what she truly was? Or did she not allow herself? And what does it matter either way? I can only tell you that I wanted Kenneth to be strong. I only wanted him to be what he was made to be—the way he was at the very end. Not all of this dilly-dallying. That small-time despair. His Harvard degree. His general fog of disappointment. Because death is not a possibility but a certainty it would be very helpful to act as though whatever time you have been given is not truly yours but a precious loan of some kind, each one very specific to the individual. If you should waste it. That really should be unthinkable, don’t you think?

I have always had this strange feeling of the unreality of so much around me, billboards and salt shakers, advertisements in magazines, television shows, polished fingernails. And I find myself constantly asking, What is the real nature of things? And am I sound enough in heart and mind to see it? A branch against the sky. That is real. The sounds coming from the scrap yard, like the fallout from another world. That is real. Mangled and twisted metal. A child’s cry coming from the alley. A child who has hurt himself. Can I, would I say my dreams are real?

(Pause. Sip.)

Kenneth used to tell me stories about his childhood, but only under certain conditions. His story-telling followed a strange ritual, you see. First it seemed to come out of a vague sense of anger or uneasiness, like when he came home after work. He’d sit in his chair with a drink in his hand and stare off into space. Or he listened to classical music. He looked so tragic sitting in his overstuffed chair with a glass of scotch in his hand.

I learned very early on in our marriage not to talk to him too much when he first got home. He thought the bank where he worked and the people he worked with were somehow beneath him. He used to say over and over again how he had no idea how he ended up in a small town in the middle of Michigan. He used to say that quite a lot. I don’t know how I ended up here. I don’t know how I ended up here. He must have said this at least five hundred times over the years. The effect of this one sentence on me was something I could never communicate to him. Whenever he said, I don’t know how I ended up here, I would have to stifle this terrible desire to laugh out loud, laugh right in front of him and keep on laughing. Not because I thought it was funny and not to make fun of him. But because to me his saying that was just so preposterous. I don’t know how I ended up here. Maybe I should have said to him, Kenneth, I don’t think anyone know exactly why they end up in the place they do, doing a particular kind of work in a particular environment. There were many, many times in the course of our time together when I felt like laughing, but didn’t because I didn’t want to hurt him to get the wrong impression. And you know what an awful feeling that is, to try to keep from laughing. I don’t know how I ended up here. I don’t know how I ended up here.

(Laughs heartily and warmly.)

Said in the proper spirit or frame of mind, it can sound like the most amazing thing ever, the most mysterious, the most unexpected. You could learn to appreciate that one sentence more than anything else in your life.

Because I always felt that Kenneth was a riding a fence. On one side of the fence was a quiet astonishment and joy and on the other side was the most dismal and appalling sense of failure and inadequacy. And it was nothing I could ever tell him. I wanted to tell him, You’re disappointed so much because only see what you want to see and not what is. In this respect, Harvard really screwed him up because he felt at the age of twenty that he was entitled to certain things, that he was assured a certain way of life. And the odd thing is he really did have the way of life he wanted but not where he wanted to have it.

Often when Kenneth was on top of me I wondered how this lion-headed man who simply had to be inside of me at least once a day could be so witless, could be so far off the mark in terms of his own life. And when he groaned and came inside of me I wanted to hold him against the darkness of his own ignorance, the trembling flicker of my body like some small flame for him to see by. Then he really was like a little boy, a spent, exhausted little boy. And then I could protect him almost until the next time. He even said to me once, Chloe, I have to have sex with you so much because I’m basically in despair, and that was one of the few times when I did laugh out loud because I really couldn’t help it. My own husband didn’t realize how happy he was because he was so busy worrying about what he should have had rather than what he did have. He was very stupid that way. Maybe I didn’t give him enough credit because he wasn’t at all offended when I did laugh that time.

But now I’m of the opinion that you can’t tell people how stupid they are, they must realize it for themselves. They must come to it very slowly and carefully and clearly. There’s no rushing this absolutely crucial process. The light either gets brighter or it gets darker and darker, but the important thing to remember is that it’s still always there.

(Pause. Sip.)

We’re all living according to some symptoms or other. Mine just happens to be a little mysterious bleeding that happens at the mention of the word love. When I’m long past the age of menopause, when I should be, to put it quite crudely, all dried up. The trickling sensation when this occurs is just a very slight chill and tremor, like a shiver of cold wind passing through me. I never told this to Kenneth because I didn’t want to upset him.

At some point in my life or other I had heard or read about people, the vast majority of them women, who bled at certain crucial times or for religious reasons, who bled out of their palms because they loved Christ, for instance. And although I did grow up in the Presbyterian Church, I never had any mystical visions or union with God’s son. I was religious but there are limits to these things. No, my bleeding started in the second year of my marriage to Kenneth, when I was twenty-three years old. I remember it very clearly the first time it happened. My period had just ended two days before because I remember saying that to myself as a kind of reminder. Unlike some women I have never suffered particularly badly at the outset of menstruation, almost never had cramps. But this was different. This was a very personal kind of bleeding beyond the ticking of my biological clock. It had its own time zone entirely.

It was one of those rare occasions that Kenneth and I went out for dinner. Something bad had happened at the office and he just had to get out of the house, he said. We had traveled about half an hour to find a decent restaurant. Kenneth looked morose as usual, hunched over his cocktail like some kind of very intelligent ape. His eyes took in everything, but they rarely settled on me. I was chatting away amicably. The waitress finally came around to get our orders. I pointed to the menu and I said, I would love this avocado soup, and I’d love this penne pasta dish. And that’s when I felt this chill run through me, the shiver I would come to know so well.

Can a pain be sharp and dull at the same time? This one was. I excused myself from the table and went to the ladies’ room because I had white panties on. And I walked as fast as I could, like I was standing over a dam that was ready to break.

(Sip. Pause.)

Now, the question was, did I really love avocado soup? Did I really love penne pasta? Or was I just so excited to be out of the house myself that I gave over to a far-fetched exaggeration? There was no question that I liked them very much—even craved them in a way. But did I love them? No, I could honestly say I did not love them.

I remember sitting in the stall, examining myself, and suddenly it came to me how I had used to word love. If tissue paper was ever a sign of deliverance, this time it was. I saw the blood inside my panties, and it was just a paw print, a filigree almost, the stamp of my genetic code. Spotting, as it is commonly called. But it was a warning, some might even say a revelation. A herald of things to come. Suddenly I was very ashamed of myself. I knew what I had done and how I had erred. I knelt down on the cold tile as muzak flooded the room. I whispered to the toilet seat, to the water in the toilet bowl, I do not love avocado soup. I do not love penne pasta. I am sorry for how I said you.

Then I got up and my head felt like it was full of peculiar, light air, Helium almost, tinged with the fragrance of something vaguely metallic. Pennies, most likely. My own blood, my own iron. I thought my head was about to float off of my shoulders. Some people are slow learners and some people learn very quickly. I learned very quickly because my body was the proof. Without a formal education, without a mystical vision, I swore in that bathroom never to use the word love again until I felt it flood throughout my whole body, and I have been faithful to that vow ever since. But the problem was and continues to be how the word is used by others. At first it was bewildering and very upsetting. Kenneth always complained about how I was always running off to the bathroom. If a neighbor stopped by, I love your curtains, I love your blouse, then I was off to the bathroom.

If we were hosting a dinner party and someone said, I love Mexico or I love New York or I love the soprano voice, then I was gone three times, I was bleeding, I wouldn’t stop, the blood came trickling out of me, even on those rare occasions when they actually meant what they were saying. And after a few experiences like this, Kenneth began to notice, but not to the point that he actually took a real interest. He just frowned in a very disapproving way. When our guests had all left, he might ask, What was all that running around about? And I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t tell him what was happening to me.

(Pause. Sip.)

And you, dear children, dear people, what symptoms are you living with? What bodily signs of disaffection? The only way I could make sure that blood wasn’t coming out of me in a more or less steady stream was to be home a lot or with Kenneth. This was compounded over time. Wars came and went. Assassinations. New inventions, vaccines. Riots. I heard all about them in due time, but as a kind of after-echo. But none of these were any more real than the trickle of blood between my legs when someone used the word love.

Did I suffer from loneliness? Did I become more and more of a recluse. I would like to think not, that my life just took a different but inevitable direction and that I went with it. Hysterical bleeding. Outbursts of sorrow for the whole human condition. But no. It wasn’t like that. It was much more personal, close-fitting, like a destiny that had been waiting for me to walk into it and fill it up. Would you believe Kenneth never caught on, never once discovered me in the act of bleeding? Even if he did call that ugly word in the kitchen. Maybe a part of him knew. Maybe he understood in a way he couldn’t explain, even to himself. That didn’t make rational sense. My body became a weather vane, a lightening rod. And I remember trying to look back over my life and isolate some moment when this peculiar sensitivity was born in me, when I realized my body was meant for strange things. But I could never think of any single defining moment when such a space and sorrow were created.

The one thing I have always regretted in my years with Kenneth was pretending to be less intelligent than I was. I didn’t want to shock him too much. Or worse, let him know what I truly thought of most things. Kenneth was a history major in college and he always wanted things to be in neat little categories, stacked like crates, or he just chose to ignore them. He spent most of his life thinking about the past, his own past and what he thought of as the more glorious past before that. How could I confront him with the fact that the past he loved so much didn’t actually exist, that it was only his sentimental imagination replaying what could have been? Kenneth was well-spoken and he read a great many books and knew how to dress, and he had the most elegant handwriting of anyone I have ever seen, but beneath these, my poor dear husband was just a boy playing with sand castles, with motes he dug up with his own manicured hands. He thought he was a tragic figure, but the truth was he was only slightly ridiculous and very self-absorbed.

Did he love me? Did the word that caused me so much grief and consternation make it magically out of his mouth to find a resting place in my heart? Well, the truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know if he did love me. Or if I really loved him, for that matter. On the whole I think not. But I never strayed from him, not once in all those years.

(Sip. Pause. SHE hesitates to speak. SHE speaks.)

On the other hand, just because a little old woman with a haircut like a man bleeds at the mention of the word love doesn’t mean love doesn’t exist. Look into your lives. Look into your minds. What actual place does love have in these places? You are alive, aren’t you? Breathing, wondering about the next thing or the last thing, checking your wallet to see how much money you have, looking at your watch. Maybe you grind your teeth at night. The mirrors keep fogging up in the bathroom. And where is the love in all these places? Where is it? Not can you touch it and hold it. But where is it? Is it a property of the earth, or do we graduate to it when we die? Because I have to say I don’t see much evidence of it here. So where does it properly belong? Are you in the midst of it? Are you lashed back and forth by its invisible flames?

(Pause. Sip.)

At three o’clock every day of the week the school buses drive by my front porch. Children walk by on the sidewalk in front of my house. There’s quite a fleet of them. They’re so carefree, almost reckless. I study them. I memorize their faces, postures, the way some of the boys swing their back packs. They’ll never be this carefree again, this in-tune with the present moment. The touches, the sounds, their own impressions. They are delirious with joy, all because a bell rang in the hallway and they were free to go. And they walk out of red brick building into the sun, and they are free in that moment wherever they are gong or whatever their home life is like. Now, quickly, tell me: is that love? I think the single best thing I have done with my life is to keep the secret of my bleeding. To be in a close marriage all those years and never let on what was happening to me. I really don’t know how I did it. Was I made for this, a little mysterious bleeding I kept to myself? I think I would have to say yes.

In the morning when I sit in front of the candle, certain images come to me. I think about Kenneth and our time together. But beyond those my childhood sometimes returns to me in vivid shards and pieces, teasing me to complete a bigger picture. At the cafeteria I see these rows and rows of children lined up for food, food that I have a small part in preparing. My apron is smeared and stained. Jesus is in the back, feverishly washing dishes. There’s a general clatter and commotion like there’s no way we’ll feed all of them, that the whole endeavor day after day is held together by a single piece of invisible twine. It can be cut at any moment. To feed five hundred growing bodies is no easy task. The tiles in the kitchen are lime green, and we’re all required to wear hair nets. Three hours a day I give them.

There’s a little boy named Sean—I don’t know his last name—who walks with a terrible, rocking limp. I think one leg is shorter than the other. He wears very thick glasses. And when you look at the food we prepare, where quantity is elevated above quality, the rumors of cafeteria food and mystery meat not unfounded—you see that the portions of the food are almost identical. If you have a wedge of green jello with a slice of pear on top, you can be sure each dish is almost exactly the same. Same with the apple crisp and so on down the line. Uniformity is important because it’s one of the few things we can control.

When Sean enters the line—I can see him from my corner in the kitchen—I wait for him to make it up to the serving line. I even get a little nervous, if you can believe that. I so want him to be happy. To like his meal. I don’t know why exactly. It’s important that I see him make his way among the heating plates and bright lamps. Some times I can’t see his eyes for the glare off his glasses. People live like this all the time. More private secrets. If I could make his food anything other than what it actually is, mediocre, full of starch, heavily processed, heavily sugared, I would do it all for him. I would change our menu and prepare him something extraordinary. Mussels over pasta. Risotto. But the reality is, I can only do my part in this vast preparation. I can only oversee the preparation of the vegetables, usually some anemic beans or carrots. If I had a choice though, if I controlled the whole process, things would be different. If only for him.

(Sip. Pause.)

But is this love? Some times Kenneth liked to take me for long drives out on the highway. Let’s go for a drive, he’d say. And usually we’d travel two, three hours without saying a word to each other. I didn’t mind. There was never an awkward silence between us. He would reach over and put his right hand on my thigh. He had very strong hands and he would squeeze my leg just above the kneecap. We would travel at 60 mph this way, his hand on my leg, watching the patchwork design of the dismal farms pass by.

If Kenneth could have had a job where he drove most days, I think he would have been happier. Not much, but a little. There was something about the open road that appealed to him, that made his heart expand with possibility. He relaxed his normally grave expression, became almost serene in his thoughtfulness. I never asked him, Are you happy with me? I didn’t ask him questions like that at all. With Kenneth I had great confidence that he needed me, needed something only I give him. And I never had to worry too much about bleeding when it was just the two of us. I had ways to manage it.

With his hands on the steering wheel, looking out over the horizon, Kenneth was as happy as he could possibly ever be. And that was enough for me. As I came to discover the problem with my bleeding was that it was rooted in a sense of injustice that ran through me like a river. You grow up believing that there are simple truths, right and wrong. But when they break down, something else more troubling and more real must take their place. I have never wanted to take my own life, but there have been times when I wished I were dead. Slowly bleeding to death if necessary. I love your hair. I love your dress. I love my country. (beat) No. No. I’m afraid not. It doesn’t work that way. People have been saying such things since the birth of language. But you know, it’s almost never true. It can’t be true. Because of the bleeding I was forced to examine these things, to live them out in a sense. I never had the luxury of dismissing them either way. I just bled. I had to ask myself difficult questions, cosmic questions, and I couldn’t just stop there. With accepted truths and facts. My body would not let me. It forced me to keep on going. It put the pressure on. My body did not let me ease into these things.

(Sip. Pause.)

Some times I would watch Kenneth sleeping. I would go to the bathroom and relieve myself or drink a glass of water. Then I would come back and stand in the doorway, often silvered in the moonlight. Where we live in Michigan the night is often gray so everything takes on a somber tone, like a black and white movie. The first thing you need to know about Kenneth’s sleeping was that it was very deep and peaceful—his sleep seeped into the woodwork, into the covers of the bed. In the moonlight sleeping with his noble forehead he looked very impressive.

I had hoped on a few occasions that this was how he would look on his deathbed. I was rehearsing for his death, counting the days, marking its far-off approach. I remember reading somewhere that only drama without movement was truly beautiful. Here it was. And I would think how strange it was that he had to be inside me once or twice a day, and if that was at all related to the quality of his slumber. On the whole I didn’t think so. His deep sleep was a fluke, a gift from God. And watching someone sleep when you yourself are wide awake can lead to strange thoughts and feelings. I would stand in the dark and I would whisper the same thing over and over again, I’m bleeding, Kenneth. I’m bleeding. I wanted him to hear it, to know it in a subconscious way. The burden of a secret is that some times makes you feel unreal, unsubstantial, like a ghost passing through walls. I’m bleeding, Kenneth. I thought if I could share even a small part of this mystery with him, then I would not be alone to struggle with it myself.

You get up in the middle of the night, your husband is off in a profound sleep, and you say these things. You utter them with perfect clarity just below a whisper. I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding. To make the bleeding real. And if you press a warm washcloth between your legs to staunch the flow when it isn’t your time, you want to tell at least one person in the world about it.

(Pause. Sip.)

I never regretted not having children. But that lack of regret can come up and bite you. If you are trying to figure out why your body behaves in a certain way that no one can really explain, the last thing in the world you think about is having children. It simply doesn’t occur to you. If you yourself don’t quite work properly, why would you want to pass that on to someone else? Besides, Kenneth wanted me all to himself. He cornered me in every room I ever entered with him, like a knee-jerk reaction.

If you start bleeding and you cannot stop it in any way other than removing yourself from a certain situation, then, why, that’s exactly what you do. You take yourself out of the equation. And if in addition to that your husband hovers over your every move in mixed company, then you are fleeing almost all the time, trying to get away from the thing you can’t, yourself and the strange vessel your own body has become. My own quiet life therefore had a feverish intensity to it, it glowed and burned me whenever I tried to touch it myself. My life. My life. The one that was give to me by so many complex factors it beggars the imagination.

To stand outside of your life and watch it happening, while at the same time being right in the middle of it is a condition that only suggests to me that my life, my precious, personal life, isn’t even mine. It’s somebody else’s. Otherwise, why would I bleed at the mention of the word love? And this singular, burning question has never left me alone. I either bled because love was misused, or it was the only thing there is and I was pouring myself out to meet it. Or love is only blood. Can only be blood. Unmixed and problematic. Or it’s all of these things. Oh, I talked to God on numerous occasions. I asked him questions and I didn’t mince my words. I was direct and I was hurting and I was bewildered. Only later did peace come, flooding me in the morning. Opening up inside of me in front of the candle, watching the world come awake.

(Pause. Sip.)

Bleeding was the most mysterious, unaccountable thing that ever happened to me. In all other areas of my life, I was normal. Normal house. Normal upbringing. Middle-class all the way. Even Kenneth’s passion for me my body, his insatiable need of it, was normal. How could it not be? But the bleeding. Ah, that was special. And I’d read the papers. I’d watch the news. I’d hear of people getting killed in car accidents, fires, murders. Incurable diseases. I would watch people come and go in the neighborhood, friends who stopped being friends, though nothing really happened to bring about the end of friendship. They just stopped being friends. And I’d hear of catastrophes in far-off lands, places I had never been, earthquakes, genocide, mass starvation. Was my bleeding connected to any of it? Was my bleeding the world and the world was my bleeding? And I came to a remarkable answer in response to that question, which was, yes, it must be. Because when you really think about, if you are really alive, it can’t be any other way, though the circumstances of my exterior life were perfectly normal.

You are going along in your life, and you are dissatisfied or miserable—and you want to be somewhere, anywhere else, and you everything you do or say is just dust, it’s all just dust. Then that gray period suddenly changes and you realize, no, I’ve known real joy, real happiness, and it’s not anywhere else because there is nowhere else. It’s here. It’s right here, like looking for spare change under the sofa cushions only to realize you have a twenty dollar bill in your pocket. I mean, why all the fuss? If you want to change, stay where you are. Observe what’s going on around you. Listen. Pay attention. And you will change. Change will run its course through you.

(Sip. Pause.)

I only saw one act of violence in my life. I pulled into the parking lot at the supermarket. I think we were out of eggs. I was a very inefficient shopper, always having to go back because I had forgotten something. It used to aggravate Kenneth very much. Anyway, I pulled into the parking lot and I noticed a man in another car. His wife or girlfriend was with him. I could tell they were having an argument just by their body language. People were coming in and out of the store, walking by their car, pushing their shopping carts. I think it was two o’clock in the afternoon, a rare sunny day. And he suddenly just lashes out and hits her with the back of his hand. Her head snapped back, and then she bowed her head and leaned it against the dash board.

I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed what I had just seen, but nobody seemed to notice. It was inconceivable that I had been the only one to witness this violent abuse. By this time the man had seen me watching him. We locked eyes. He knew I had watched him. A small, almost undetectable smile came across his face. What should I do? Should I go into the supermarket and act like nothing had happened? Should I call the police, Kenneth, someone? Instead I found myself walking toward his car on legs that were really not my own. Scraps of bright litter like confetti were blowing by my ankles, and I sincerely wished I could be one of them. The truth was in that instant that I did not really want to be alive. But I walked toward him anyway and he watched me come on, waiting for me.

I went to her side of the car. I leaned in. I touched her on the shoulder, and when she looked up at me I could see that she had a bloody nose. Leave him, I said. Just leave him. And his hand shot out across her body and held my arm. Like a steel cable. It was a very tense moment. Then she breathed out and cried, I got no place to go. The man let go of me. He was laughing. I wanted her to listen to me. To hear my voice. My voice was high and raspy, like a kite stuck in a tree. Then the man peeled out of the parking lot, and I could see that he didn’t even have license plats. So she was gone, and I never saw her again. Though I still wonder about her from time to time. I wonder if she’s still alive.

(Sip. Pause.)

My bleeding took on different shapes over the years, in slightly different colors and moods and degrees of intensity. Some times it came on like a slow movement in music. Other times the pangs were quite sharp, and I doubled over. I tried different herbs and remedies. I went out of my way to consult obscure, even esoteric sources. For the symptoms. For the bleeding that was mine. The slow undertow of it was pulling me outward, sweeping me away. My body was like a life raft or a piece of floating Styrofoam, riding down an invisible current. Kenneth clamored for my body, he wanted to be inside of me as much as he possibly could. Between my bleeding and our intercourse I was very busy, beset even.

I wanted to be a good wife. I thought I was. But the bleeding proved to me that I had other responses, other things that made their way through me. Some times you just want to be left alone, but I couldn’t tell Kenneth that. At the very worst of it I was bleeding almost continuously, a slow stream that made its way through the dark center of my body. I stayed inside the house more and more. I didn’t want to see any body. There was no one’s face I felt I had to see. Please don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t that I disliked people. I didn’t turn my back on humanity, only if I heard the word love, if they said it in a certain way, the river would break in me. That’s all I have to tell you. All this time Kenneth did not know. It was fine for him that I stayed at home, that I pass the majority of my days in a deep silence. His catastrophic disappointment blinded him to anything else that was going on. And I was thankful for that, deeply and truly thankful because it gave me the space and time to keep asking, What is happening to me?

I didn’t fear death because unlike some people I have never for a second considered that it would not happen to me or that I could delay its arrival. The house grew around me like a warm animal. I developed a routine. After Kenneth left in the morning, I would light a candle and sit in the empty room. Waiting in a way. Beyond violence. Beyond redemption. Just watching. Listening. Some times I said a few words, Some day the bleeding will stop. Some day the bleeding will stop. And some times I rocked back and forth, keening to some grief that ran throughout my body. And if I ever came across the word love in a magazine or a book, I was careful to cut it and burn it over the candle. I didn’t want it to come back and haunt me.

I had most of the day to myself, or some times I went for a walk. I thought of running away once or twice, leaving a note tapped to the refrigerator door. But I knew in my heart that I would never leave him, my dear husband who had become the embodiment of evil.

What did he ever do, you say? What did he ever take? Did he ever beat me? Some people walk through doorways, and they fill up the space with something that’s not very wholesome. When you get to be my age, you no longer feel the need to explain or justify your deepest convictions, because they’re only there. They are only just there. I don’t want to be young again. I don’t want to live forever. Maybe once in a while I wish I could move the way I used to, but even that fades in and out. What I’m really interested in is the next phase of this strange journey, the aftermath of living these many years.

Do you understand that? Do you? There are the vows you make, and then there are the vows you grow into, that become you. If I could have stopped the bleeding, if I could have made it go away, if it had been within my power, then everything could have been different. I would be different. I wouldn’t regard this world and my life in the same way. I might have been more optimistic, more light-hearted in a way. I would have believed the things that people tell themselves, that I control this or that, that this is my choice, that I hold my own destiny in my hands, that I can make anything of my life that I want it to be. But I couldn’t stop the bleeding and I couldn’t understand it so all of those self-empowering notions just flew away—or were out into darkest space.

What did my bleeding teach me, other than the terrible and trembling power of the word love? Well, I learned that how I am made and what I respond to isn’t a question of choice. I didn’t choose it. And I learned endurance, or as a famous poet once said, Endurance only comes from enduring. The world is beautiful, but I could never experience it directly. I could never grab hold of my life and say, Yes, this is what I want, and I will go out and get it.

Some nights I would dream that the stream of my blood was rising all around me like a dark lake and I was not sinking but rising with it while everything else, the house, Kenneth’s noble forehead in sleep, became slowly submerged. Covered up by a pool of this darkness.

(Pause. Sip. Sip.)

Then one day, miraculously, the bleeding just stopped. I felt the pain of that dark river just suddenly leave my body, as mysteriously as it had come. Two years after the day Kenneth died, the bleeding completely stopped. In its place I felt a great cleansing barrenness, like grains of sand sweeping throughout a desert. Was I happy? Elated? Afraid that it would come back? I suppose all of these—or none of them. I really don’t remember. I had lived for so long with this strange affliction that I no longer had any hope of curing it. And though I don’t remember exactly how I felt when the bleeding left me—Happy? Sad? Full of misgivings?—I do remember quite clearly the arrangement of things around me and where I was.

—Robert Vivian
—————–

ROBERT VIVIAN’s first book, Cold Snap As Yearning, won the Society of Midland Authors Award in Nonfiction and the Nebraska Center for the Book in 2002. His first novel, The Mover Of Bones, was published in 2006 and is Part I of The Tall Grass Trilogy. The second part of the trilogy was the novel Lamb Bright Saviors; and Part III, Another Burning Kingdom, was published in 2011. His collection of essays, The Least Cricket Of Evening, was also published in 2011. Vivian’s most recent novel, Water And Abandon, appeared in 2012; and he’s just completed another novel, The Long Fall To Dirt Heaven. He also writes plays, over twenty of which have been produced in NYC. Many of his monologues have been published in Best Men’s Stage Monologues and Best Women’s Stage Monologues. His most recent foray into playwriting was an adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts that premiered at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo in 2006. His stories, poems, and essays have been published in Harper’s, Georgia Review, Ecotone, Numéro Cinq, Creative Non!fiction, Glimmer Train, and dozens of others. He is Associate Professor of English at Alma College in Michigan and a member of the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

You can also read Robert Vivian’s earlier contributions to NC, two essays on essays: “Thoughts on the Meditative Essay” and “The Essay as an Open Field.”

Marty and Ed: Fiction — Edward Maitino

Feb 152013

The author and his wife Michele and daughters Sophia and Isabella in a cafe just off rue de Seine in Paris

Edward Maitino is one of those unsung, mostly unpublished, really interesting writers who should be known more than he is. He was a student in a graduate writing class I led at the University at Albany-SUNY, either in 1999 or 2000, I can’t remember, earnest, dressed for the office, slightly out of place, but also the best pure writer in the class, with a Raymond Carver-ish instinct for capturing the epic solitude of alcoholism. Whenever I get a chance, I publish him. He was in an issue of Hunger Mountain (Fall, 2003, the print edition, not online) for which I co-edited the fiction with Mary Grimm. And now, once again, I have tracked him down and winkled a story out of him. Read it. You’ll see. He has a unique style, deceptively laconic and stoic. But the story has shape and mystery. It starts, jumps forward, then loops back before the beginning and tells you the story of the story. And the two stories, the two armatures, are psychological and structural parallels, the whole thing as intricate as clockwork.

—

Part One

I met Marty Sutherland in a hospital emergency room on the night my father died. He was brought in on a stretcher under a pile of blankets. It was Christmastime and the place was mobbed. The ambulance driver left him in a hallway across from where I was sitting with my sister.

Marty wasn’t moving. His arms were at his side under the blankets and his eyes were closed. But I could hear him moaning. Someone had taken off his boots and placed them at the foot of the stretcher. Nurses kept bringing over warm blankets to cover him. He must of had ten blankets covering his body.

It was almost like he knew I was staring at him because he opened his eyes and looked right at me. He whispered that he was thirsty and asked for water. I jumped up out of my chair. I was only eleven-years old. I ran down the hallway to get the nurse.

Marty had this crushed look on his face and his eyes were sunken deep in his sockets. I had never seen a man so close to death until a few minutes later when I saw my father. The whole mood that night was grim. The doctors and nurses were trading anxious looks or avoiding looking at anyone at all. At the time I couldn’t understand why. It just made my stomach sick.

Marty was rushed through these huge metal doors. The doors swung open and closed automatically, which made it seem—to an eleven-year old boy—like Marty got swallowed up. Later the same set of doors ate my father.

I saw Marty again about ten years later during another low point in my life. It was my last semester of college and a few weeks after my girlfriend threw me out of the apartment we shared.

I was living in this dreary basement apartment that I was lucky and unlucky enough to find. There was a reason it was available half way through the semester. I was eating a lot of junk food, cutting classes, and watching TV in the dark. I guess the apartment suited my mood.

It was late in the day and I was sitting alone in a diner near my mom’s house when Marty walked in on crutches. He sat in a booth by the window and when his pants hiked up I noticed two prosthetic legs above his socks.

After I finished eating I walked up to Marty’s booth. I’m not sure what I was hoping to accomplish.

I said, “Do you remember me?”

He looked up and shook his head.

“I met you at the hospital the night you were brought into the emergency room.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Marty went back to his plate, cutting a piece of grey meat, mixing instant mashed potatoes with canned peas, slurping a cup of coffee.

“I was a kid then, so you’d have to picture me a lot younger. I was sitting across from you in the hallway. You asked me for a glass of water.”

Then I said, “It was December 17th, 1982. I remember the date because it was the night my father died.”

Marty pushed his plate away. He lit a cigarette. I took out a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket. Marty handed me matches. He moved the ashtray to the middle of the table. I sat down across from him.

I found out Marty had lived on Florida’s gulf coast for several years before moving back to Schenectady after his mother died. He survived on a monthly disability check and small inheritance. Besides his prosthetic legs, he had a heart murmur and the onset of diabetes.

He didn’t say much about the night we met other than he’d lost his legs from frostbite after leaving a Christmas party drunk and passing out in his car in the bitter cold. He sued the owners of the house who hosted the party and the city where he parked his car, but his lawyer filed the papers too late and the case got dismissed.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “The system’s stacked against a guy like me.”

We paid for our meals separately and walked outside. He showed me how his car was rigged for him to drive using his hands. It had the throttle and the brakes on the steering wheel.

He pulled two cans of beer out of a cooler in the back seat. We drank the beer and smoked cigarettes under the streetlight. It was one of those warm spring nights that you appreciate after a long winter.

Marty said the next time he saw me at the diner he was going to buy me dinner.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I want to,” he said. “You got me water, right?”

“Well, I told the nurse.”

“It’s the same thing.”

I watched Marty drive his car out of the parking lot, working the controls from the steering wheel. He had this wild-eyed look on his face, as if he was half-expecting the car to lift off the ground and disappear into the night sky.

I went home that night and sat in a chair in front of the TV with the volume turned down. The apartment had this horrible odor I was trying to ignore. I think it was in the carpeting. I was thinking about my father and how much I missed him. I wished he could have seen me grow up and graduate college. I was about to be the first person in my family to get a college degree. I think that would have made him proud.

I remembered how my mother would take us to visit my father’s grave on every holiday, his birthday, and the anniversary of his death. Those first few years were tough for everyone. Then my sister stopped going to the cemetery with us around the time she turned sixteen. On the next occasion—I think it was Memorial Day—my mom and I skipped visiting the grave. We never went together after that or seldom talked about my father. I don’t know why. I suppose grief has its own rhythm.

My mother started dating a salesman she met through her work. I was happy for her. They lived together in the house where I grew up. They were able to deny living together because he still paid rent on his apartment. But he was there almost every night. I told my mother to have her boyfriend give up his place and not worry about what other people think. But she was old-fashioned when it came to couples living together, especially a widow with children.

That summer I ran into Marty at the diner. I’d been over my mom’s dropping off laundry. I was looking for a full-time job and living in the same lousy apartment. My ex-girlfriend had moved back to Long Island and wasn’t too keen about me coming down to visit. I was putting a lot of pressure on her to get back together. I wanted to get married. I think she moved back home to get away from from me.

Then on my way to the diner I remembered Marty and wondered if I would see him. Sure enough Marty was sitting in the same booth, almost like he was waiting for me to walk in. And he bought me dinner, just like he promised. Being out of work, I was happy to oblige. But I didn’t take advantage of him. I ordered the daily special and nothing else, not even a soda.

He began talking about the experience of losing his legs. He said it had been years since he talked to anyone about it. I told him a little about my father’s accident.

Marty said it was stupid and reckless to leave the party as drunk as he was that night. But he often wondered why the owners of the house didn’t try to stop him from driving home. There were people milling around outside who had watched him stumble down the front steps and skin his knee.

Before the accident Marty figured he’d get married and have children. But after all these years he was comfortable being on his own and couldn’t imagine having a wife or the responsibility of raising a family.

“Life suits me just fine,” he said. “I realized long ago this was the way things were supposed to be.”

After we finished eating Marty asked if I wanted to go out for a few beers. I hesitated for a moment, not wanting to encourage him. He was too old a guy to be hanging out with. Then I remembered that I was the one who approached Marty in the first place. I kind of felt sorry for him.

“Okay,” I said.

I put his cooler and crutches in the back seat of my car and drove to a bar that he suggested. We sat in the back room near the pool table and took turns buying drinks.

After a while Marty asked the waitress to clear the empty beer bottles off the table. She wasn’t very friendly toward us. I watched the girl stack the bottles on the tray and put down a clean ashtray.

“No reason we have to look like drunks,” Marty said to her.

The waitress forced a smile.

While we were talking I noticed how Marty would tip his chair back on two legs and stare down at the floor as if his thoughts were somewhere else.

Marty talked about being in the hospital for several weeks, enduring multiple infections and surgeries, losing one leg the night he was brought in and the other leg the next day.

“Nowadays I bet they’d be able to save my legs,” he said.

“Today, sure,” I said.

He seemed to think about this for a moment.

“When I woke up from surgery, the first one, I told the nurse I wanted to see my leg.”

I moved around in my seat.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “But I felt like it was still mine. Attached or not, it belonged to me.”

“What’d the nurse say?”

“She called in the doctor, who said I was in shock. ‘Wait a while,’ he said, ‘and see how you feel.’ ‘I know how I feel,’ I said. ‘I want to see my leg.’”

Marty took a long drink of beer. I watched him close his eyes and tilt the bottle.

“Did you ever get to see it?” I asked.

“Never did,” he said. “The doctor told me there were health laws that had to be followed. Then the next day they took off my other leg and I thought, what the hell, who cares anymore?”

I looked at him closely. Unlike the first time I saw Marty at the diner, he was clean-shaven and his hair was washed and combed. He had a flat face, queer lips he kept wiping with his sleeve, and a wide nose like you’d see on a black man.

“I don’t think I could look at my leg cut off like that,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“For months I kept having these awful dreams. I never spoke to anyone about them. They’re the most personal thing in my life. We all have those secrets.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

Then he said, “I was too ashamed to even look my mom in the eyes when she’d visit the hospital.”

We finished our drinks and left the bar. On the way back to the diner I stopped at a market so Marty could buy beer to put in his cooler. I felt uncomfortable—sort of exposed—under the bright lights in the market. The idea of people walking around filling shopping carts with food seemed brilliant. I was like, “Who invented this system of carts and conveyer belts?” That’s when I knew I was drunk.

I stood in the checkout line with a candy bar. Marty walked up struggling to hold onto a carton of beer and a bouquet of plastic flowers. I realized I should have offered to help him shop. He paid for a bag of ice, which we picked up on the way out. I had no idea why he wanted to buy the flowers, but it made me nervous thinking he was planning to give them to me. The woman ahead of us had coupons, which took time for the girl at the register to scan.

When we got back to my car Marty stocked the cooler. He put the beer in first and then emptied the ice on top of it. He opened a can of beer and handed it to me. The flowers were on the floor between his feet. He was looking straight ahead.

“You ever drive out to where your father had his accident?” Marty said.

“I used to go there when I first got my license. I’d drive by out of curiosity I guess. But I haven’t been there for a long time.”

“You think you could find it?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I could.”

“Let’s go put these flowers down,” he said. “I keep seeing these little shrines popping up along the road where someone’s died in an accident.”

“I’ve seen them too,” I said. “Sometimes there’ll be flowers or a wreathe. A lot of times you’ll just see a cross in the ground.”

We drove for miles on dark country roads. The sky was overcast and I couldn’t see much of anything beyond the shone of the headlights.

We began climbing up a long, slow-rising hill. On the other side of the hill the drop was much steeper. I noticed a sign near the top of the hill. There was a picture of a car dropping over a steep hill. I wondered if my father’s accident had something to do with the sign being put there.

“This is the spot,” I said. “Right here at the bottom of the hill.”

I pulled onto the shoulder of the road and cut the engine. We got out of the car. The road was built up several feet above the fields. There was a wire fence with wood posts at the bottom of the embankment on each side of the road.

I pictured my father speeding over the hill, his eyelids heavy, his jaw slack, a cigarette between his lips. I considered how much time he had to react before losing control of his car, the long-hooded sedan flying off the embankment and slamming into the ground, steam whistling out of the radiator.

I saw my father sitting passively behind the wheel, a gash opened on his forehead.

Marty was leaning against the side of my car without his crutches. Seeing him standing on his own two feet startled me.

I leaned into the driver’s side window and switched on the high-beams, flooding the dark field with light. Hundreds of bugs swarmed into the beams of light.

I grabbed two beers from the cooler. My hand went numb when I reached into the icy water.

Marty said he felt no pain tumbling down the stairs, tearing open his pants, blood trickling down his knee. “I should’ve realized right then and there how drunk I was,” he said. He tried driving home, but only made it as far as the city park. He managed to pull over on the perimeter road before passing out. Temperatures dropped into the single digits. A fresh snow fell that morning, covering his car. When he woke he was still drunk. He heard a snow plow pass by, the heavy metal blade rumbling on the pavement. Marty tried turning over the engine, but the battery was dead. He laid on the horn, but no one came to help. Hours later when the plow came by a second time to salt the road, he heard the pellets pinging against the side of the car.

“I wasn’t cold anymore,” he said. “I could’t feel a thing. When I tried to lift my arm, it felt like someone was holding it down.”

“I gave up,” he said. “I was done caring.”

That night an old man walking his dog through the park heard what he described later as “a human sound,” a whimper perhaps or a soft groan. He brushed the snow off the driver side window of Marty’s car and there in the dark interior he saw a man slumped behind the wheel.

I looked at Marty. His eyes were blinking fast. We stood a few feet apart. He lit a cigarette. When he struck the match, I could see his eyes shining.

I reached into the passenger side window and grabbed the bouquet of flowers. I set down my beer on the pavement and stepped in front of the headlights. I walked sideways down the embankment. I unlaced my boot, took off the shoelace, and tied the flowers to the fence post. I tied them tight so they wouldn’t blow away.

“How’s that look?” I said.

“Real fine,” Marty said.

“Can you see it from the road?”

“You sure can.”

I slipped coming up the bank. I could feel my foot moving around in the untied boot. I turned and looked at the bouquet of flowers. Marty was sitting in the car, leaning back in the seat smoking a cigarette. I got behind the wheel and sat for a moment.

I put the car in gear and drove until I found a spot to turn around. Coming back toward the hill I noticed the can of beer I set down on the shoulder of the road. I considered opening the door and reaching down to pick up the can, but I was finished drinking beer.

I slowed down and looked at the flowers tied to the fence post.

“I’d like to come back and see what it looks like tomorrow,” Marty said.

“Me too,” I said. “Things look different in the daylight.”

Marty seemed satisfied. He didn’t say another word driving back into town. He cleared his throat once. His face was turned toward the window most of the time. I noticed his legs stretched out on the floor. You could tell they weren’t real by the way his ankles were bent.

There was a beer can next to his crotch. When he finished his cigarette he dropped the filter into the can and swished it around. I pulled into the parking lot next to his car. Inside the diner I could see people sitting in booths by the window.

“I’m kind of hungry,” he said. “You hungry?”

“Not really,” I said. “I ate a candy bar.”

Marty wanted to give me his telephone number. I turned on the light inside the car so he could write it down. He folded the piece of paper and handed it to me. I tucked it in my visor. But I knew I wouldn’t be calling Marty or coming back to this diner. I had already decided that. I took the cooler out of the back seat and put it in his car.

“Give me a call tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

Marty was going into the diner for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. I tooted the horn as he crossed the parking lot. Instead of turning around, he picked up a crutch as if to wave goodbye.

I opened the window and lit a cigarette. The cool air rushing into the car woke me up. Driving back to my apartment I thought about the flowers tied to the fence post. I hoped every so often someone passing by would notice them and say a little prayer.

I realized it wasn’t much, just a handful of plastic flowers tied to a post on a road less travelled than most. But maybe people seeing it would wonder what happened down there. Maybe they’d ask themselves who was lost and who was left behind.

I drove slowly on the highway, making sure to stay between the lines. I kept my eyes on the speedometer. When a car came up behind me and flashed its high beams, I stuck my arm out the window and waved for it to pass.

Part Two

Ed was late picking up his children from school. The plan was to drop them off to their mother and go back to work. As a salesman, Ed was often out on the road making calls, which allowed him to drive his children to school and back. But he always seemed to be late picking them up. He was late so often that when the last bell rang his children reported directly to Mother Superior’s office where they sat by the window facing the street waiting for Ed’s car to turn the corner.

The nuns reminded Ed more than once that it was school policy to have all children out of the building at dismissal. They even went so far as to write him a letter, which was sent home with his son.

Mother Superior, in particular, disliked Ed. He wasn’t the kind of man a nun would admire.

When Ed’s car pulled up to the curb that afternoon, Sister Catherine took the boy and the girl by the hand and walked them out the front door. She stood under the portico staring at Ed through the snow flurries falling on the street.

Ed reached across the seat and opened the passenger side door. The girl, the younger of the two, ran toward the car and climbed in the back seat. Big white snowflakes stuck to her hair. The boy sat in the front seat next to his father.

The boy could see right away that his father had been drinking. His eyes were red and the car smelled of alcohol. The boy’s stomach began to churn, but he made an effort not to show any concern on his face. As they breathed inside the car the windshield began to fog. Ed rubbed the glass with his hand and rolled down the window. The boy looked back at his sister as they drove away. There was a book in the girl’s lap and her head was down. The wind was whipping her hair.

On the highway Ed got behind a slow-moving car. He tried to pass the car twice, but was stopped by oncoming traffic. Agitated, he threw his hands up in the air. He began tailgating the car, leaving about a foot of space between the two bumpers. In response, the car in front of Ed began speeding up and slowing down. Ed could see two young “punks” in the back seat turning their heads and laughing.

At that point something changed in Ed. He straightened up in his seat, gripping the steering wheel. The boy noticed the lazy look on his father’s face had disappeared. The crease running down Ed’s forehead seemed more pronounced.

The car in front of Ed accelerated again. The boy could hear the engine rev as the car moved away from them. But instead of letting the car drive away, Ed pushed down on the gas pedal. He got close behind the car again, but this time at a much faster speed. That’s when the driver put on his brakes. He just tapped them, but it forced Ed to react by stepping on his brakes hard enough for the children to be thrown forward.

Instinctively, Ed reached over and put his hand against his son’s chest. But the boy’s momentum carried him forward and he hit his forehead on the windshield. A bump instantly appeared above his left eye. The girl in the backseat landed on the floor and started to cry.

“You’re okay,” Ed said to the girl.

She nodded, but looked frightened. Ed reached back with one arm and lifted her back into the seat. She pulled the hair away from her face and wiped tears off her cheek. The boy smiled at his sister. He didn’t want her to be afraid.

At the next stoplight Ed shoved the handle on the steering wheel into the park position so hard the boy thought it had broken off. The boy grabbed his father’s arm and begged him not to leave. But Ed turned and got out of the car as if the boy wasn’t there.

Ed walked up to the car and leaned into the driver’s side window. The boy could see his father’s head and shoulders disappear into the car. Ed turned off the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. The boy heard voices inside the car. The voices were muffled, but full of emotion. Ed grabbed the driver by his shirt. The young man sitting in the passenger seat opened the door and sprung to his feet on the pavement. Ed stood up and pointed his finger at the young man across the roof.

The boy watched in disbelief. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. He pushed on the horn, but his father wouldn’t look in his direction. When Ed grabbed the car door handle with both hands, the driver started kicking his feet out the window. Then Ed grabbed the young man’s legs and one of his shoes fell off. He dragged the driver out of the car through the window and the young man fell hard on the pavement. Ed stood with his hands clenched in fists, waiting for him to get on his feet and fight. But the young man was too afraid to get up.

By now the stoplight turned green and traffic was backed up at the intersection. Several people stuck their heads out the window or beeped their car horns. Snow began to fall—big, heavy, wet flakes. As snow covered the windshield it grew dark inside the car. The boy turned on the windshield wipers. When the wipers cleared the snow he saw that his father was gone. He watched the young man’s car pull away. Just then the car door opened. Ed got in breathing heavy. His shoulders and hair were covered with snow.

The boy could see that his father was no longer drunk. Ed lit a cigarette and took a long drag. He put the car in gear and drove off. The girl settled back in her seat, relieved to be going home. The boy stared at his father. He noticed the knuckles on his right hand were scraped and bloody.

No one said a word on the way home. Ed pulled into the driveway and left the motor running. He kept his hands on the steering wheel.

“You two go in the house,” he said. “I’ve got a few more stops to make.”

The girl grabbed her books and ran inside. But the boy, sitting next to his father, didn’t move. The bump on his forehead tingled. He touched it with his finger. He asked his father to come inside the house.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

Ed looked down at his hand. He took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and cleaned off the blood.

“It’s nothing,” Ed said. “Now go inside and get your homework done.”

The boy opened the car door and got out. He could see his sister’s footprints in the snow. The tracks led to the garage. Snow was falling steadily. An inch or more already covered the ground. From the breezeway the boy watched his father’s car back out of the driveway. All he could make out were the red brake lights shining in the dark snowfall.

That evening, while his mother cooked dinner, the boy sat at the kitchen table watching television. The console television in the living room had a blown picture tube and while his parents saved to get it repaired, the little black and white television on the countertop was the only one there was to watch. The boy didn’t mind. He liked being in the kitchen with his mother. He liked the smell of the food she cooked and watching her prepare it. The girl was in her bedroom reading a book about horses that she had brought home from school.

Ed’s wife was on the telephone with a neighbor when the operator interrupted the call. They were talking about getting together one night the following week to bake Christmas cookies. Ed’s wife suddenly heard a terrible clicking sound and then a woman’s voice come on the line. The hospital had been trying to call this number regarding an accident her husband had been involved in, the woman said. When the neighbor heard the operator she hung up the receiver without saying goodbye.

“How bad is he hurt?” Ed’s wife asked.

The woman on the telephone said the only information she had was that the accident was serious and that Ed’s wife should come to the hospital immediately.

Ed’s wife hung up the receiver on the wall phone and stared at the boy.

“Get your pants on,” she said.

The boy was wearing pajama bottoms with a pattern of baseball gloves and bats that he had put on after his pants got wet shoveling the driveway. His cheeks were still flush from being outside in the cold. The boy turned off the television and stood by the counter. For a reason he couldn’t understand he felt foolish wearing the pajamas.

“What’s the matter?” The boy asked.

“Just do what I say,” the mother said. “And tell your sister to get ready to leave.”

The boy took his pants off the radiator where he had left them to dry and stepped into the legs. Parts of the pants were warm and other parts were still cold and wet.

Ed’s wife called for a taxi and explained it was an emergency. She took off her apron. She turned off the stove and moved the pots and pans off the burners. She helped the girl on with her boots. She went through this mental list of things she needed to do. The list made her feel more in control of things.

Then she stood at the front window waiting for the taxi, smoking a cigarette with an ashtray in her hand. When the taxi pulled in the driveway, they piled in the back seat and drove to the hospital.

Ed was on a gurney in a small, brightly lit examination room. When the family arrived there was a nurse standing next to Ed reading something off a monitor screen. Ed’s wife sat the children down on plastic chairs in the hallway before stepping through the curtain. The policeman who followed the ambulance carrying Ed to the hospital stood with his elbow resting on the nurses’ station.

When the nurse came out of the room the policeman straightened up. He said he was going to need her to draw blood to measure Ed’s alcohol level. The nurse’s face tightened. She stared at the policeman. When the nurse opened the curtain to wheel a machine in the room, the boy saw his father lying on the gurney. There was a gash across his forehead and blood on the front of his shirt.

Ed suddenly moved to get up. The nurse tried to get him to lie back down, pushing her hands on his chest. She was caught off guard by Ed’s strength and his ability to move around given his injuries. Then again, working in the emergency room for as long as she had, the nurse had seen many strange things possess the injured. She knew how desperate a wounded man could be.

For the first time in his life the boy saw fear in his father’s eyes. It gave him the goosebumps. Ed had fought in the war and told the boy stories. The boy thought his father would live forever.

Ed was larger than life in comparison to the other fathers the boy knew. He had never seen his father miss a day of work or stay home sick in bed. Many a morning Ed would come home from a night of drinking and playing poker to shave and change his clothes before going off to work.

The boy knew that if his father could just get on his feet everything would be okay. The doctor could stitch his cut and they could all go home.

He thought of the food his mother had left on the stove and imagined his family eating dinner. He pictured his father sitting at the table in a clean shirt and a bandage wrapped around his forehead like you see the wounded wear in the movies. His mother was there in this image too, standing over her husband in her apron holding a frying pan and filling his plate.

An orderly rushed into the room to help keep Ed on the gurney. His mother was off to one side. She was saying something to her husband. The boy could recognize but not understand the complex emotions on her face—concern, disappointment, anger.

Then all at once Ed stopped trying to get up. He let out a loud breath the boy could hear from the hallway. The doctor was called in to exam him. When the nurse saw the boy looking in the room, she closed the curtain.

A short time later Ed was wheeled into surgery by the orderly. The boy saw how grey and drawn his father’s face looked as he passed by.

The orderly was bent over the gurney, pushing it down the hallway in long, powerful strides. But what drew the boy’s attention—what he remembered all those years later—were the quick, little steps made by the nurse holding the IV bottle alongside the gurney.

There was something about the commotion in her steps that filled the boy with dread. He was so terrified he held his breath as the gurney went by. Then the nurse, the orderly and Ed passed through these huge double doors and the hallway was empty again.

—Edward Maitino

————–

Edward Maitino’s work has appeared in Hunger Mountain and Event. His short story “Blackbird” won the Eugene Garber Prize for Best Short Fiction at the State University of New York at Albany. He has taught at Hudson Valley Community College.

Triptych: Fiction — Rosalie Morales Kearns

Feb 022013

Rosalie Morales Kearns is a writer of Puerto Rican and Pennsylvania Dutch descent. She identifies three major childhood influences on her writing: fairy tales (unexpurgated) from all over the world; Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; and her parents’ well-intentioned efforts to raise her a Catholic, all of which gave her a deep appreciation of, and respect for, absurdity.

That special appreciation is much in abundance in her first book, the story collection Virgins & Tricksters (Aqueous Books, 2012), which contains an ecumenical cast of spiritual characters (gods from all over the world), and a diverse collection of humans (a psychologist, a biology student, and the wives of a pirate, a revolutionary, and a priest, to name only a few), all of whom range about a wide field of history. And throughout these stories Kearns offers equal opportunity to realism and its cousin, magical realism.

“Triptych” is the only story in Virgins and Tricksters without magic-realist elements, though it shares with the other stories a deep sympathy with misfits and a celebration of the potential for human connection. Many stories in contemporary fiction begin with a version of normal and then slowly break it to pieces; “Triptych” reverses this familiar plot pattern and instead offers the reader, brilliantly and with sweet empathy, three lonely souls who slowly find their way to each other. The writer Katherine Vaz calls this story “a little masterpiece of carefully observed lives–Larry with breathtakingly long hair emerges as one of the most memorable characters a reader can hope to find–and when divergent paths merge, the book concludes with a satisfying upsweep. Solitary beings settle inside mystery.”

—Philip Graham

Larry

Saturday midmorning Larry wakes up, enough to turn off the muted TV and worry that he’s forgetting something important, not enough to keep from falling asleep again. Hours later when the screen door opens, shuts, and he hears his daughter’s voice, it all seems part of the same long, pleasant daze. He keeps his eyes closed, can hear Molly in the kitchen. She’ll be unloading her school books, her laptop onto the table. Now she’s leaning over him.

“Dad.”

“Hey, baby.” He looks at his watch. Almost noon. He’s on afternoon shift now, and still hasn’t managed to adjust.

“You fell asleep on the couch again.”

He sits up, gives her a kiss on the forehead, lets her steer him into the kitchen.

“No offense or anything, Dad, but it’s kind of an old-man thing to do. Even Grandpa doesn’t fall asleep in front of the TV.”

Larry opens the refrigerator, considers his options.

“You want a sandwich, Moll? Eggs?”

“I ate already, I’ll just have coffee.”

Slowly he starts thinking straight, finding what he needs—spatula, frying pan, oil. As he feels more alert the nagging thought from the early morning comes back. Something he needs to remember. He almost has it.

It’s gone.

He opens the fridge again, takes out eggs, Canadian bacon, a package of shredded cheese.

“How’s your mom?” he says.

“Fine.” Molly switches the coffee maker on, takes two mugs from the dish rack.

“She says hi.”

Larry tries to picture Cynthia saying this, Cynthia at the wheel of her Mercedes. Have a nice weekend, honey. Tell Larry I said hi. He tries it different ways. Tell your dad I said hi. Say hello for me. None of them work. His imagination stalls right after Have a nice weekend.

Cynthia wishes him well. When she thinks about him.

She’s planning on taking Molly to Italy with her for a few weeks this summer. Time when, normally, Molly would be staying with Larry. But okay, he can hardly begrudge her. Italy instead of Globe Mills, Pennsylvania, population 316. Adjacent to Meiser, population about the same. And beyond that the livestock auction, open Wednesdays and Saturdays, and beyond that Route 522 will take you to Kreamer with its grain elevators to the east, and Middleburg the county seat to the west.

Molly lives with her mother and stepdad in the next county. Lewisburg’s a college town, but even that’s boring for Molly. She asks Larry sometimes, what he did at her age, and he doesn’t feel right telling her. Larry at sixteen was drinking beer, getting laid. Not taking SAT prep classes, drinking coffee at bookstores with her friends, volunteering on environmental projects to clean up the Susquehanna River. Not going to Europe.

Larry sits down at the table with his plate. “Well,” he says, “you tell your mom I said hi too.”

Molly nods, takes his fork, and picks out bites of scrambled eggs, avoiding the Canadian bacon.

He looks at her textbooks. Chemistry, pre-calculus. Another thing he wasn’t doing at her age.

“How’s it going with those?”

“Fine. I’m getting all A’s.”

Molly hands him his fork and he starts eating.

Just the other day he’d been sixteen himself. Back then he couldn’t imagine anyone more different from him than a sixteen-year-old girl, especially a smart one. Now here he is almost thirty-eight and one of them is sitting across from him at his own kitchen table.

“I never could figure out math,” he says, and the memory from the morning, the nagging thought, comes back to him now. The synapses have made their necessary connections. Perhaps his subconscious was counting up all the other things that are mysteries to him, and now he’s grabbed his keys and is rushing out the back door.

The truck.

He gets behind the wheel, pats the dashboard. “Okay, honey?” he says, and slides the key into the ignition.

The “service engine” light comes on, as bright and alarming as it looked last night.

Last night. When he’d decided, if he paid attention to her first thing in the morning, everything would be okay. No need for repairs that he couldn’t afford. And here it is noon.

“I take you in for maintenance regular as clockwork. Get your oil changed, your tires rotated.”

He pops the hood and goes round to inspect the engine, making sure to pull his hair back first. Ever since he let it grow long he’s been wary of anything that throws off sparks. He frowns, tries to convince himself he understands what he’s seeing. People expect him to know about cars, he expects himself to, isn’t sure where he was or what he was doing when other boys were learning about this stuff.

He gets back into the driver’s seat, tries to relax. He and the truck, they’ll relax together. “You’re going to change your mind,” he says. “I’m a patient man.”

He flinches, but only a little, when he hears a fist pound on the roof of the truck. The arrival of his neighbor, Dirk, is usually punctuated by loud noises: a door crashing open, stomping feet. Dirk leans down to the open window and bellows, “Got a cordless power drill I could borrow? Mine broke.”

“Sorry.”

“How about a Yankee screwdriver?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Shi-ii-it. My kitchen window, hinges on the shutters’ve rusted off. If I ever buy another fixer-upper, take a two-by-four and beat me.”

Everything about Dirk, including his voice, is outsized. He’s six-four and two-forty, heavy beard and a full head of hair even though he’s over fifty. A man like this, Larry figures, has to know about car engines.

“Hey,” Dirk says, “they’re hiring at the UPS on Rt. 15. Pays more, I bet, than driving that ambulance. Plus benefits.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” He might have to work two jobs, to get the truck fixed. “Can I ask you—”

“What’s on your face, man?”

Larry runs his hand over his cheeks, remembers the sofa and its burlap-like upholstery. “Couch pattern.”

“That’s sad.”

“Dirk, what would you do if you saw this light on your dashboard?”

“Service engine? Hell, I’d take it to a mechanic.”

“Should have checked her this morning,” he says to Molly later. “I knew there was something I had to do when I woke up.”

“How would that have made a difference? I mean, it’s not like the truck felt neglected, right? Dad. Right?”

“Okay, well. I thought maybe, if the engine, I don’t know, had a chance to rest overnight.” Or change its mind. He doesn’t say that out loud.

“That’s magical thinking,” she says. “We learned about it in social studies. Seeing connections between unrelated events. People have been doing it since prehistoric times. Like if there’s mist in the morning and you have a successful wooly mammoth hunt later on, you think the mist is the reason for it.”

Wooly mammoth—that would taste gamey. They sell bison burgers at the concession stand at Penn’s Cave and Larry hasn’t been able to bring himself to try one.

“Or if there’s a certain constellation of stars on a day when something good happens, you think it happened because of the stars.”

“How do we know it ain’t connected?”

“Dad.”

She stands behind his chair, kisses him on the top of his head. She runs her hands through his long hair, something she’s been doing since she was small. That, at least, hasn’t changed with the years.

“There’s no cause and effect relationship,” she says, slowly and carefully, “no connection between your attitude toward the truck and whether or not it has engine trouble.”

She saw the connection when she was little. If the yolk don’t break when I crack this egg, he would say, we’ll have perfect weather to go swimming down at the Middle Creek. Or If we spot the Big Dipper tonight, we’ll see a bear tomorrow when we drive over Shade Mountain. She played along enthusiastically, checking the night sky, or reminding him not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. Cheering when the yolk didn’t break, or the engine started on the first try.

Patrice

Monday afternoons Patrice is allowed to close the fabric shop early. That way she can get to Lewisburg in time for the memoir writing class she’s taking at the YMCA. She doesn’t know what today’s assignment will be but she’s nervous about it already. She’s sure she didn’t do it right last time and the teacher seems like she’s losing patience with her.

“To explore a memory,” the teacher is saying when Patrice arrives, “it helps to start by focusing on something ordinary. Small, concrete, vivid details.”

Patrice lingers in the doorway. She doesn’t want to interrupt, and she feels shy around the others here though she’s normally outgoing. There’s a retired chemistry professor in his late sixties, but other than him Patrice, at 52, is the oldest person in the room. Also the plumpest. And from what the others have said about themselves, she knows she’s the only one there who hasn’t gone to college. One of the women is a full-time mom, another works as a personal trainer, and there’s also one who works at the college with an impressive-sounding title, dean of something or other. There’s only one other man, the owner of a café in town.

They’re clustered together along one side of a cafeteria-style table, listening to the teacher as she paces in front of them. They turn when they sense Patrice behind them, smile, make room for her. People used to do this for her in high school and on lunch break at the factory.

“We live our lives in our bodies, we touch things, we see things. It’s that ‘thing-ness’ that you want to always be aware of. Try to bring that into your writing, and it’ll lead you to more profound, interesting realizations. That’s what we want to do here, write honestly about ourselves, our lives.”

The teacher is wearing a flowing skirt and blouse, both black, with flashes of deep color, turquoise, forest green. Her bangle and bead bracelets make bright clinking sounds when she moves. She’s in her mid-forties and wears her long hair proudly undyed. The silver streaks against her dark hair look dramatic, sophisticated, unlike Patrice’s random swirls of gray, hidden somewhat with the help of Clairol’s Golden Medium Brown.

Patrice catches the teacher’s eye, but she responds with an overly bright smile that she holds up like a shield, and Patrice knows what the teacher is seeing: frumpy middle-aged woman in relaxed-fit jeans, lavender sweater. She’s probably particularly annoyed, Patrice thinks, with the appliquéd flowers at the collar. But why not wear flowers on your clothing, Patrice thinks. It’s spring.

The assignment today is to write about something they did over the weekend. “Concentrate on the sensory details,” the teacher reiterates. “What things looked like, sounded like, smelled like. Make the reader experience what you experienced.”

On Sunday Patrice had gone with some friends to a cemetery off Rt. 522, out toward McClure. Mildred and Gerri are old friends of hers from the bottling plant; they and her other former coworkers are still Patrice’s closest friends. You make connections with people you see every day for such a long time. Patrice had been there seventeen years before it closed and everyone scattered, squeezing themselves into other jobs here and there: convenience store, hair salon. Gerri got a file clerk job at the car dealership. Now that Mildred’s retired she’s thrown herself into family history. That day she was trying to track down the dates for some great-uncle. Patrice had gone along—her friends had gone with her to one museum after another over the years and never complained, no matter how bored they were. So while Mildred was taking notes, she and Gerri tromped around, looking at headstones and yelling to each other out of old habit, as if there were loud machinery they had to shout over instead of the headstones and neatly mown grass, so peaceful. One headstone in particular had interested Patrice, and she writes about it now:

“The last name, Huttner, is in big letters at the top of the stone, then beneath it on the left, John, 1918- and next to that, Blondine, 1918-. No death dates. I like to think they’re still alive, going strong at ninety-four. They bought the burial plot when they turned seventy, sat down with the funeral home director, a nice boy. They picked out the caskets and decided on a memorial service, chose a design for the headstone. I like to think they visit that stone now and then, John and Blondine, that they look at it and link hands and smile at each other, but they’re a little sad, too. So many friends, even the funeral director, have passed on in those intervening years.”

She stops writing when they run out of time, and when she reads her exercise out loud, another woman in the class says, “I think John and Blondine got divorced. John was probably unfaithful and Blondine kicked him out. They regretted it the rest of their lives, and they’re both buried somewhere else. Neither one could stand the idea of lying there alone underneath that marker.”

Patrice likes that version too, though it’s sadder than hers. The teacher gives them a strained smile and says something about Patrice’s writing being “speculative,” but then it’s time to go and she doesn’t say anything more about it, and Patrice is too embarrassed to ask. It’s clear to her she should have written about something else.

Later, since she skipped supper, she stops at the convenience store for an egg and cheese biscuit sandwich. The girl at the counter is talking to another girl who’s come in.

“I thought high school was boring,” the girl says to her friend. “I come in here every day and I feel dead from the neck up. I can’t believe this is my life.”

Patrice wonders, listening to them, whether she’d felt that way when she was nineteen or twenty, and if she hadn’t, and if she doesn’t feel that way now, is there something wrong with her?

She should write about things like that for her writing exercises, things that really happened. She could describe the sound of the girl’s voice, the dusting cloth she holds bunched in her hand, the way the glass and metal case where the hot dogs are roasting feels warm when you lean against it. The teacher likes details like that.

JulieAnne

JulieAnne feels like she’s been moving in slow motion ever since she opened the latest batch of photos. She’s only looked at the first one. It’s still in her hand, a picture of Amanda in black and white.

She has a color photo of Amanda in the same pose and right now she’s looking at the real Amanda in the same pose as in both pictures: sitting crosslegged on her bed, a mirror in one hand, mascara applicator in the other.

“So Mom and Dad said they’d try this low-carb diet with me,” Amanda says. “Isn’t that cute? And we’ve all gained, like, five pounds since we started.”

JulieAnne is only half listening. She has been in Amanda’s bedroom practically every day since they were seven years old. She knows it as well as her own: the dresser, made of some kind of quilted material glued over plywood, jammed up against the bed, the bedspread in shades of maroon with metallic gold threads running through it, the nightstand lamp with the mustard-gold shade that Amanda found at a yard sale. Amanda with her dark eyes, quick, businesslike movements of her hand as she applies eyeshadow, blush, lip gloss.

JulieAnne sees the real Amanda doing all this. She looks at the Amanda in the color photo doing the same thing. She raises her camera and looks through the lens at the real Amanda. She lowers the camera and looks at the black and white Amanda.

“I’m ready for the reality shows,” Amanda is saying. “All my life I’ve been having conversations with a girl who’s got a Minolta auto-focus stuck to her face. I know how to act natural in front of the cameras.”

JulieAnne hasn’t shown Amanda her black and white image. She knows she won’t be able to explain the difference in words. She wants to keep looking at the picture, studying the light and dark, the sharp edges and blurry shadows.

It was an accident, the black and white film. Amanda had bought it for her by mistake. People are telling her she should get a digital camera, how easy it is, how convenient, but her dad grumbles that he can’t afford a digital camera and JulieAnne doesn’t want one anyway.

She walks around Amanda’s house, looks at the rest of the pictures slowly, rationing them. When she stands in front of the real thing she pulls out a photo of it: laundry on the clothesline, pot of soup on the stove.

Color had always seemed so important. Why look at a photo of laundry if not for the bright sky behind the clothing, the contrast of a dark blue work shirt and a quilt patched with pinks and golds, and next to that a T-shirt faded to pale green? But in black and white she notices how they hang on the line, or curve and flap in a breeze, notices a splash of cloud and how much brighter it is than the clear sky around it.

She wonders if she should send some of these to her mother, or whether she’d find them boring. JulieAnne has never been good at letter writing. For years now, it’s been so much easier to send her mom photos. She tries to pick interesting images—a view of the Susquehanna River from the top of the bluffs at Shikellamy State Park, the small black bear she’d seen wandering through Mrs. Aumiller’s garden. Not the everyday stuff.

When Amanda is finally finished with her makeup they drive to Lewisburg for their after-school jobs, JulieAnne at a café and Amanda at the sporting goods store across the street. JulieAnne takes the photos with her. When things are slow she looks at the black-and-whites she’s taken here, shots of the customers, the cappuccino machine, the pastries in the lighted glass case.

The light is what fascinates her. It flashes off the ceramic mugs and varnished wooden tables like a live thing, like it should be dazzling the people sitting there sipping coffee, reaching for sugar. Instead they talk to each other or stare into nowhere; they look like they’re from a foreign country, another century. They seem kind. They’re used to shimmering light. That’s how their world is.

Larry

Tuesday afternoon is a slow day at work. They have only a few calls. A sprained ankle at the mall. A little later a possible concussion over at the high school soccer field. Mostly Larry plays cards in the dispatcher’s office with Kevin.

He asks Kevin about the truck, what the problem could be, how much it might cost.

Kevin says he doesn’t know. This is his response to almost everything Larry says.

Larry can’t decide whether to apply for the UPS driver job. He’s not sure how good he would be at it. If no one’s there to accept delivery you have to decide whether to leave a package, whether there’s enough overhang over the front door to protect it from rain, or go around to the side and risk running straight into an angry dog. Or you open the door to a screened-in porch and a jumpy homeowner opens fire on you. It’s harder than it looks.

He tries to hold onto a job as long as possible, no matter how bad it is, because he hates job interviews. They always ask you about the meaning and direction of your life. Where do you see yourself in five years? in ten years? and he can tell they’re asking because they’ve seen the questions in some management textbook. They don’t care how you respond. It’s just, they’re the boss and you’re a worker and that gives them the power to ask you a personal question and sit back and watch you squirm while you try to think up an answer that’ll sound good. Just once he would like to be able to be honest about those questions.

So, Larry, why did you leave your last job?

I didn’t actually leave. I’m a nice person, and I try, but I’m kind of scatterbrained.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Well, in five years Molly will be 21, and finishing college, that’s how I figure time, ever since she was born. She’ll probably keep on with her schooling, become a professor or a rocket scientist or something. And I’ll be 43 and that’s a pretty good age, I think. It’s not the age when men have a midlife crisis, but that’s relative, isn’t it, midlife. And Molly’s mother will be 43, and still married, and still beautiful and we won’t have any reason to say anything to each other until Molly graduates from whatever, and then I guess there’ll be a wedding at some point, maybe baptisms and such. Oh, I guess you’re asking me about my job, what kind of work I see myself doing. Let’s see, I drive an ambulance now, so I guess the next step is EMT and then after that nurse, and then doctor. So yeah, I guess in five years I’d like to be a surgeon.

In the early evening a call comes in for an elderly woman with chest pains. They pick her up at one of those huge new houses over at what used to be Middleswarth Dairy Farm. Enormous picture windows, cathedral ceilings, heating bills alone that must be more than Larry’s rent. Cynthia has a house like that.

The place is in an uproar, everyone talking at once—the woman with the chest pains, her daughter, son-in-law, grandkids, dogs. The daughter’s yelling, she wants to go with her in the ambulance and the mother’s saying no, she wants to go alone, leave her in peace.

As soon as Larry backs out of the driveway, she says she feels better.

“We’ll just check your vital signs, ma’am,” Kevin says. He’s sitting in the back with her. “And we’ll have—”

“—Call me Virginia. It makes me feel like a fossil to be called ‘ma’am.'”

“Okay, uh, we’ll have the doctors look you over to be sure nothing’s going on.”

“I always feel better after I get out of my daughter’s house.”

“Virginia?” Larry says.

“Yes, young man?”

“Maybe it was a panic attack.”

In the rearview mirror he can see Kevin give him a look to remind him that he, Kevin, is an EMT and Larry is merely a driver and should keep his opinions to himself. Kevin had been a driver too, until he took the EMT training.

“Considering the patient is eighty-one,” Kevin says coldly, as if “the patient” can’t hear, “we’d better let the doctors decide.”

“I’m not too old to have anxiety, you know.”

Larry sees a slight movement by the side of the road. There’s no time to respond. A doe shoots out in front of them. Larry brakes, swerves hard to the right to miss her.

They careen onto the shoulder as the front tire hits something sharp and makes a loud hissing noise. They bump to a gentle stop.

“Jesus God,” Kevin says.

“I’m all right,” Virginia says. “Don’t have a heart attack on me.”

Kevin is out the back door of the ambulance and into the passenger seat next to Larry, sweeping his hands under the seat.

“Where are the goddamned flares?”

“Can we watch our language here?” Larry says.

“I would, but I don’t know a polite word for fuck-up.”

Larry and Virginia sit at the open back of the ambulance, legs dangling out, while Kevin rushes around setting flares and talking to dispatch. “Right,” he says into the cell phone. “Keep the patient calm.” He gives Larry another meaningful look.

“Well,” Larry says slowly, “I guess we should put things into perspective.”

“That’s an excellent idea.”

All kinds of ways it could be worse. One alternative is the ambulance flipping upside-down, spilling its contents of driver, EMT, and old lady all over the road, probably a dead deer somewhere in the picture too. And him fired. That could happen even without any injured humans or deer. For puncturing the tire with a patient on board. For being someone the supervisor doesn’t like.

He starts to tell that to Virginia, but changes his mind. She could be really stressed right now; she could get overexcited and her old, fragile heart would flutter to a stop.

“Why don’t I go first?” she says. “It’s a beautiful summer evening, and we’re sitting here on a country road surrounded by these lovely old oaks and maples and hickories. Your turn.”

“Okay. It’s almost the end of my shift.”

He decides there’s nothing quite like the sound of an old-lady laugh, dry and delicate. Impossible not to laugh yourself when you hear it.

“And do you always puncture a tire at quitting time?”

“Only every so often.”

“He also dents the fender,” Kevin says. “Leaves the windows down in the rain. Runs out of gas.”

That last isn’t quite true, but before he can argue, Virginia turns to Larry as if Kevin weren’t even there.

“I can’t help but notice,” she says, “you’ve got your hair tucked into the back of your shirt. Is it very long?”

“Yeah, pretty long.”

“You don’t see that so much these days. How interesting.”

He pulls his ponytail out and undoes it, without waiting for her to ask.

“Young man. My goodness.”

Some women love his hair, can’t wait to get their hands on it. It’s long, down to his waist almost, as thick and healthy-looking as when he was eighteen. His buddies hate him for it, the ones his age are already starting to thin out on top.

“It’s kind of a pain, takes forever to dry,” he starts to say, but she’s already reaching out, asking if she can touch.

“Go ahead.”

The old-lady tremor in her hands isn’t so noticeable while she runs her fingers through his hair. In fact she’s surprisingly strong.

Behind Virginia’s back, Kevin gives him a disgusted look. Larry grins. It feels good. He always likes to have his hair stroked.

“How daring,” she says, “to let it grow this long. When I was young it was considered quite bold. And getting a tattoo, that was the other thing no one did. Now all the young people get them.”

“Well that’s a funny story,” he says.

Suddenly he doesn’t have the heart to tell it. Back when he was with Cynthia she wouldn’t let him get a tattoo, said it was something only white trash did. Then when she dumped him, he went to a tattoo artist, feeling somehow he was declaring independence, he was starting over as his own self. Turned out he couldn’t decide what kind of tattoo to get.

Later his supervisor, Richard, asks him what he’s learned from “this incident.” Larry is thinking about tattoos, which pattern to get if he ever gets around to it. Maybe a leaping deer, or the letters MT for Magical Thinking. Also he’s feeling sleepy, which always happens when someone’s been stroking his hair. He makes a stab at answering Richard.

“You’re never too old for a panic attack?”

Richard looks tired. He likes “teachable moments.” He’s that kind of supervisor.

Larry tries again. “I shouldn’t swerve to avoid a deer?”

“Try to pay more attention when you’re behind the wheel,” Richard says. “That’s all. Just try.”

All told, the day went well, Larry decides as he heads for the parking lot. It could have gone badly, very badly, but it didn’t. He turns the key in the ignition, feels a surge of optimism.

The “service engine” light flashes on.

Patrice

It’s a slow morning in the fabric shop. An older couple comes in needing yarn. The husband took up knitting when he retired, jokes that it’s an excuse to socialize with his wife’s lady friends, but Patrice can see the artistry in his work, sweaters in intricate patterns of soft silvery grays, muted browns, grayish blues. She wonders what things would have been like if he’d been given art classes when he was young.

Margaret comes in, the owner of the bookstore around the corner. She’s a Civil War reenactor and needs blue wool cloth for a new uniform jacket.

People expect Patrice to know all about knitting and sewing. She kind of expects it herself, that somehow she would have absorbed this knowledge just by being female and living in Union County for five decades. When she first started working here, if customers had questions they would go to her rather than Tanya, her young coworker. Patrice would smile a lot, exude helpfulness. The regular customers soon caught on. Between them and Tanya and old issues of Fabric Trends and Quilter’s Newsletter, Patrice has learned all kinds of things. She knows exactly what weight and weave Margaret needs for her Union Army uniform, but she can’t resist pointing to another flannel nearby. “This plum color goes so much better with your complexion,” which makes Margaret laugh so hard she’s almost in tears.

“Nobody fought in plum,” she manages to say finally. She’s still chuckling over it later when she leaves the shop.

Patrice pictures a battlefield, infantrymen showing up in bright yellows and oranges, in polka dots, in macramé and feathers. They would cancel the war, naturally.

She writes up an order for rug-making kits, restocks the knitting needles. Tanya is straightening up quilt patterns on the sale table, and since no customers have come in, Patrice takes the opportunity to pull the hymnal out from beneath the counter and bring it over to her. She opens the book and sets it on a stack of embroidery kits.

“Tanya, honey, can you try this one?”

“Now what?” Tanya says, but she smiles. She reads the hymn through quietly, Patrice looking over her shoulder.

“It has a nice limited range,” Patrice says. “I can sing most of it except for the high notes here, and here.”

“Don’t—”

“I won’t, don’t worry.”

Tanya starts singing softly.

“What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul…”

Patrice has to close her eyes to imagine the way it would sound if a hundred people were singing it, and if those voices weren’t being absorbed by piles and bolts of fabric but were bouncing off a polished wooden floor and stained glass windows on a Sunday morning.

Being Unitarian Universalists, of course, they’ve changed the lyrics: there’s no reference to God at all, let alone his righteous frown, or cursed souls, or death. The UU version has blissful hearts, friends gathered round.

She knows that Tanya doesn’t much care for church music; most girls her age don’t, but she sang in her high school choir and she can sight read music.

“Thanks, hon.”

“Where are you going to put it?”

“I’m thinking of using it for the ‘greeting your neighbor’ part. That’s the part where everyone says hello, you introduce yourself if you haven’t met the person before. Only instead of speaking, everyone would just be shaking hands while we’re singing this.” Patrice still isn’t sure about this particular song. Beautiful as it is, she’s worried that it sounds melancholy.

Patrice is trying to imagine a church service that’s conducted entirely in song. She’s been giving it a lot of thought and outlining alternatives in her notebook. She hasn’t brought it up with her minister, but as she’s told Tanya, that’s the joy of being a Unitarian Universalist. Ministers there try pretty much everything.

The chimes ring as the mail carrier leans in and waves at them and puts the mail on the counter. Patrice bought those chimes herself and put them up, thin pieces of white quartz crystal that clink against each other with every movement of the door. They make Patrice think of the factory where she worked all those years, a bottling company that did specialty soft drinks like sarsaparilla that only gourmet stores and such wanted anymore. The workers were gentle with the bottles, but there was always something that set them to vibrating, rounding a curve on the assembly line or when they were hoisted in their wooden crates onto hand trucks, and bottle touching bottle made sounds like small glass voices. She likes having an echo of that old life in this new one.

JulieAnne

JulieAnne is in her bedroom, door closed, but it’s a flimsy door—the whole place is poorly constructed—and she can clearly hear her father on the phone shouting, something he hardly ever does.

She’s trying to distract herself by looking through a book of black and white photos, a pictorial history of Union and Snyder Counties that Tracy, her stepmother, gave her. You’re not going to cry, she tells herself, ignoring the tears she’s already wiping away. She wants to climb into this book, into the black and white world of fifty years ago, a hundred years ago. Color is for high drama. Yelling. Slamming doors. Black and white is quiet, undemanding. Over and done with.

“After twelve fucking years.”

Another thing her father hardly ever does: swear.

Not that people didn’t yell and slam doors back then, she’s sure, but you can see that people in this book stopped what they were doing to look at the camera. For a minute they let go of whatever momentary thing was bothering them—bills, injuries, ex-wives. As if they knew that someone would look at this picture long after they were dead.

“You think she’s a dog, she’ll just come when you call?”

JulieAnne’s mother, Kath, has asked her to visit her out in California. She can afford the airfare now, she told JulieAnne on the phone this evening. She’s got a guest bedroom in the place she’s staying.

JulieAnne looks at the framed photo of her mother on the dresser. She vaguely remembers her as enormous, probably because she wasn’t quite four when Kath took off, minutes ahead of the county sheriff, who swept in just hours before the federal agents arrived. Still she imagines her mother as towering over her father, a short, morose man, permanently stooped as if no matter what, he’s always ready to lean over a car engine and start taking it apart.

In her vague memory, her mother is not only large but also soft and warm, with long brown hair. In the photo Kath’s hair is now short and graying, and she’s wiry and fit, kneeling in front of a kayak by a mountain river.

I’m getting my act together, her letters would often say, when the letters started arriving after five years. I want to come see you honey, and then no word for months at a time.

Her father is still shouting, but not as loud. He’s running out of steam.

“Should’ve called the DEA when I had the chance, you hippie freak.” And then: “Leave my family out of it. Moonshine’s a different story. If pot were legal you’da had no interest in growing it.”

By the time she started getting in touch with JulieAnne, Kath was living on the West Coast, running a mail order business of hemp products and healing crystals. Soon she had a website (Harness the Healing Power of the Earth). Now she seems to be running a wilderness survival program. “Rich people pay good money for this,” she told JulieAnne. “It’s all those Survivor shows. People want to have that experience themselves.”

“Don’t talk to me about no statute of limitations. Is there a statute of limitations on abandoning your child?”

JulieAnne considers sending Kath a photo of Neil, so she has an image of something other than the angry man who’s shouting at her long-distance. JulieAnne’s favorite is one where her father has a big grin; he’s listening to Amanda reading the headlines from Weekly World News. “‘Moon to Explode in Six Months,’ Mr. K, what do you think of that?” “It could happen.” “What about ‘Hikers Find 20-Foot-Tall Gingerbread House’?” “You never know.”

Amanda moved in next door nine years ago, when she and JulieAnne were seven. She was there when Kath started sending letters. By then she was fiercely protective of JulieAnne. There she’d be, ten years old, eleven, sitting at the kitchen table with Neil, each one outdoing the other in indignation. Who does she think she is? What kind of mother would leave a kid like JulieAnne? They’ve bonded over their outrage at Kath.

Her father has hung up the phone. Now she hears him, almost shouting at her stepmother.

“Why now all of a sudden? Is she between boyfriends?”

“Neil, you hush this very second.”

JulieAnne realizes she has something much more immediate and practical to consider than abstract things like whether Neil will let her go, how she’ll feel, whether to be angry, what to say.

Her mother has no photograph of JulieAnne. Not a real photograph. Or rather, she has photographs of real people, but they’re not JulieAnne.

She doesn’t think of it as lying, precisely. It began as an accident. When her mother started writing to her she’d asked for a photograph, and JulieAnne wanted to send her one of a pretty, happy little girl. Her father and stepmother didn’t take many photos, and in the ones of JulieAnne she was usually in the picture by accident. She showed up in the margins, blurred, part of her face cut off by the edge of the picture, or else looking startled, called in from someplace else to pose for a family shot without having any time to comb her hair or arrange her face with the right expression, so that a faraway mother she’d never seen could look at it and admire the image of an intelligent, interesting child.

Back then Amanda looked kind of like her, except with shorter, more reddish hair, and her face a bit plumper. JulieAnne ended up sending her mother a picture of Amanda that Amanda’s mom had taken, curled up in her bed grinning up at the camera through a crowd of pillows and stuffed animals. It was close enough.

She knew that after that, her mother would expect more pictures. For her tenth birthday she asked her father for a camera and he got her one, to her surprise, that was sleek and silvery and easy to use. She started photographing her friends: Amanda on the swingset at the height of an arc, hair flying, face upturned; or Tiffany turned three-quarters away from the camera. They were prettier than JulieAnne anyway, and more photogenic, and the little differences would be easy to explain: her hair grew fast, or she had just cut her hair, or had tried a henna shampoo for highlights, or had gained a little weight recently, or lost it, and yes, wasn’t she getting tall fast? Her mother never pinned her down with pointblank questions, but every once in a while in her letters she would mention in an offhand way, “You know, honey, somehow you look different in every photo.”

JulieAnne has tried to put off sending her a recent shot. In the last couple of years Amanda has gained a lot of weight. Anyone else would get teased and called a fat girl. Not Amanda. She takes over a room when she walks in. Her low-pitched musical voice is loud and unapologetic. She’s a force of nature, too overwhelming a presence to be a fat girl. Meanwhile Tiffany has stayed as skinny as they all were when they were eleven. Even at odd angles, the two of them look too dramatically different from each other. JulieAnne could claim to have drastic fluctuations in her weight, but that would make Kath worry for no reason.

You have to be grown-up about this, she tells herself.

She has to tell Amanda and Tiffany what she’s done. She has to get a real photo of herself to send to her mother.

She looks in the mirror, tries to picture herself in black and white.

.

Larry

On his free afternoon Larry stops at Cynthia’s house. Hank, her husband, answers the door. His hair has been getting shorter over the years. It’s almost a crewcut now; it makes his receding hairline harder to notice. He’s a tall guy with a puffed-out chest like a gym teacher, a guy who’s used to giving orders. He’s bigger and stronger than Larry. If he tried to punch him Larry’s only advantage would be his quickness. He could sway and dodge out of the way of those stone fists and succeed only in looking ridiculous in front of Cynthia.

“Hi, Larry,” he says with a tired voice and carefully prepared smile. He goes back in, and Cynthia comes out with the same smile as Hank. She’s wearing a beige tank top and blue jeans, more like a college student than the VP of a bank.

“I…” He never knows how to start when he talks to Cynthia. “Molly says you’ve got all these plans for the summer.”

“I told her to let you know. She’s going to Italy with me for two weeks in July. In August she’s taking an intensive SAT prep course, Monday through Thursday all day for three weeks.”

“I won’t hardly see her.”

“Larry. This is important. If she’s going to do early decision at Harvard she needs to take the September SATs.”

“Harvard. That’s over in…”

“Boston.”

She steps out onto the flagstone-paved front patio. There’s a teak bench next to a stone planter, but she sits down on the step that leads down to the sidewalk. She motions for him to sit next to her.

“It’s not like you’ll never see her. You’ll have her on weekends, just like you do during the school year.”

He looks at Cynthia’s bare feet, the graceful arches and polished toenails. He can hear Hank’s lawn mower out back, coming closer, fading, coming closer. The two of them were doing yard work together after supper. Hank mowing, Cynthia probably planting some annuals.

Hank has a job Larry doesn’t understand, something to do with finance. He likes to give everyone, including Larry, a hearty handshake and a clap on the shoulder. No reason we can’t be friends, he’d told Larry right off. They’d even invited him to their wedding. And the weird thing about it is, Hank could be sincere. Larry has been watching him for years, waiting for some sign of hypocrisy.

Hank likes to give brief motivational speeches. He’s given Larry one every time Larry gets fired. He even gave a speech at his wedding, to some men Larry presumed were other businessmen: something along the lines of, When I get married, it’s for life. I’m in this for the long haul and so on. You don’t walk away if there’s a problem, you make it work out.

Larry still wonders how Hank would solve the “problem” if Cynthia sat him down one day and calmly, politely wrote him out of her life. You’re a nice guy. You’re a good person. But I don’t love you. The way Larry sees it, you have no choice but to walk away from a problem like that. But not before you beg and plead and cry. At which point you stagger away, or crawl. There’s no question of actually walking.

He tries to picture giving Hank a motivational speech after Cynthia dumps him. What’s more probable is him, Larry, comforting Cynthia a decent interval after Hank’s funeral. He’s a hard-driving man; guys like that get cardiac problems.

“How far away is Boston?”

“From here? About twelve hours by car.”

“Do you know how old my truck is? It’ll never make it.”

“Larry, maybe we could talk this over by phone.”

“What’s the matter with the colleges we have here? They’re expensive enough.”

“What kind of message would I be sending her if I don’t expect her to try for the best? Think what that would do to her self-esteem.”

Hank comes around the front of the house with a pair of hedge clippers. He starts working on a yew near the bay window, and says to Larry in his jokey voice, “She’s hired me as gardener. Keeps me out of trouble.”

One of Larry’s best jobs was working with a groundskeeping crew at the golf course. Things got complicated only after the Canada geese showed up. They wandered around in packs, left droppings everywhere. More geese arrived every day. Management wanted to get rid of the geese, didn’t care how—shoot them, poison them. Larry refused. It felt wrong to kill them, and what’s more, there wasn’t any logic to it. They had to live somewhere. “We should try to understand them,” he’d said. He meant they should try to figure out what the geese liked about the golf course, how the grounds crew could change that, or find a place the geese liked better. But they laughed before he could explain. “Great idea,” a supervisor said. “How do you say ‘Take me to your leader?’ in goose? How do you say, ‘We come in peace’?”

This was the same supervisor who’d told him another time, “You’re damn close to the border of mental defective, Larry. You’re barely on this side of the line.” Larry doesn’t even remember what he did to provoke that. “You ain’t stupid, son,” his dad tells him sometimes. “You just don’t pay attention.” They’ll be sitting in the living room and his mom will go stand behind Larry’s chair and drape her arms around his shoulders, kiss him on the top of the head. “He’s easily distracted, is all.”

All of which makes him forget what he wanted to say to Cynthia, and he doesn’t think about it until he’s in his truck.

Larry: This don’t have nothing to do with Molly’s self-confidence. Your family’s richer than God. She knows she can have the best of whatever she wants.

Cynthia: What are you going to do, Larry, guilt her out so she doesn’t leave?

The real Cynthia wouldn’t put it that way. This is all he can come up with.

Larry: I’m not going to guilt her out. She shouldn’t stay around here if she doesn’t want to.

She should see the world. Italy, Boston. Cynthia, as always, is right.

Patrice

That evening, the exercise for the memoirs class is to write about yourself in the third person.

“Patrice loves museums,” she writes, and it makes her want to chuckle to write about herself as if she were someone else. “Especially the furniture part. Not that she doesn’t like paintings, she does, but what she loves are the ‘period rooms’ with the authentic furniture that real people used in earlier times.” Patrice knows she’s supposed to focus on concrete details. “For instance,” she writes, “a parlor, with dark hardwood floors and plaster walls painted a warm rose color, and the ornate trim around doors and windows painted in a gleaming white for contrast. The mantelpiece is made of white marble. On it are fresh flowers in a crystal vase changed every day (the flowers, not the vase). There are floor-to-ceiling windows with gauzy white curtains that I, that she could pull aside every morning to enjoy the view of the gardens.

“Patrice dreams that she lives in a museum like this. She is allowed past the velvet rope keeping people out of the rooms. She can relax in the wingchair upholstered in maroon silk, or sit at a desk and write thank-you notes on linen stationery. She gets a little annoyed at the endless stream of visitors during museum hours, but she’s grateful for all the cleaning done by the custodial staff. And at night when everyone is gone the people in the paintings climb down from their canvasses, and stretch and smile, and serve her pastry and give her foot rubs. Sometimes she agrees to change places with them, and will climb into a painting and stand in the background, and then the next day they all watch to see whether any of the visitors notice. She feels most comfortable in the medieval paintings, the ones done in oil on wooden panels. The women are solid and sensible-looking, like she is, and she feels much more at home with them than with the skinny ballerinas, although she notices that some of the nudes are large and fleshy like her, and she wonders when she’ll have the nerve to show up in one of those paintings.”

The teacher obviously disapproves, but all she says, with that tight little smile, is, “Try and remember, everyone, this is a memoir-writing class, not fiction. We write about our real lives.”

“Patrice is confused,” Patrice writes in her notebook. If she wrote fiction she would give all the nice characters a happy ending, and every overweight woman would have delicate wrists and ankles and have artists begging to paint her portrait.

JulieAnne

The guidance counselor looks exhausted with boredom, as usual, and JulieAnne doesn’t blame him. She can never think of anything to say in these meetings. What do you want to do after high school? What are your interests? She shrugs, manages an occasional “I don’t know.” Now he’s telling her he doesn’t think she should sign up for Honors English next year; she’s been making only average grades with the non-honors track, and she wouldn’t want her grades to get any lower, would she? No, she wouldn’t.

She’s also thought about learning Italian. It sounds so musical. She doesn’t mention that.

He’s filling out her class registration form. “You’re doing well with your word processing and your business math,” he says. “That’s what they’ll want to see on your record. If you decide to go ahead and get that associate’s degree.”

“I like to take pictures,” she says, surprising herself. The counselor looks surprised too. His eyes just brush the surface of her and then flicker away. Like my camera, she thinks. But no, that’s unfair. She reaches for it where it rests against her, hanging from its vinyl strap around her neck. Her camera sees much more.

As she leaves the building she shows Mr. Giacinto, the maintenance man, the photo of the west corridor, afternoon sun shining through the large window at the end, lockers shut, floor gleaming.

“Look how clean it is,” he says. “No students around, that’s why. Ha! No offense, kid.”

She wants to take a picture of the same place but with him in it, with his mop and cleaning station. He lets her talk him into it though he complains a lot and she can’t make him understand that the picture is more true with him there, if that makes sense. That the mop and the angle of his stooping body make it perfect.

By the time JulieAnne gets home there’s a family meeting going on in the kitchen: her father, her stepmother, Amanda. They acknowledge JulieAnne, go back to talking among themselves.

JulieAnne leans in the doorway, watching them.

I’ve handled this all wrong, Kath said to her last night on the phone. Neil’s so sensitive, he’s like a walking bruise.

No one has ever used the word “sensitive” to describe her father.

“So her mother wants to see her,” Amanda says. “It’s about friggin’ time.”

“Too damn late, is what it is.”

“I’m not defending her, Mr. K.”

The three of them sip their coffee. Amanda is the only sixteen-year-old JulieAnne knows who likes Maxwell House instant, with hazelnut nondairy creamer, the drink of choice in Neil and Tracy’s kitchen.

Her father lights a cigarette, takes a few drags, then passes it down to Tracy, who takes one puff and then stubs it out. They’ve been doing this for six years now, it’s their attempt at quitting smoking. One of these days Amanda will grab the cigarette and puff on it and they’ll let her do it; she’ll be completely one of them.

“It’ll happen sooner or later,” Tracy says gently but firmly. “She’ll want to meet her mother, it’s only natural.”

Amanda breathes a long, drawn-out sigh, then a prolonged hmm, meaning she has pondered this, she concedes that Tracy has a point.

Neil looks down at his coffee. The three women have learned to interpret his silences. They lean in, listen to it, breathe it in. This one feels, if not relaxed, at least not too tense.

“She talks about my family being hillbillies,” he says after a while, “like her family ain’t every bit the same. Don’t give me none of that peace, love, and understanding crap.

“Mr. K,” Amanda says, delighted, “that’s Elvis Costello.”

Larry

One night Larry goes out on a date, sort of. A nurse at the Selinsgrove clinic has invited him for coffee at a place in Lewisburg. There’s a poetry reading going on that evening at the café, and Larry’s afraid he’ll be bored and confused, but it turns out people are reciting poems they like, real poems from books, not stuff they’ve written themselves. The only rule is you have to recite from memory, not read. People are standing up who didn’t plan to, they get brave and say stuff they memorized years ago and never forgot. “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” stuff from Alice in Wonderland. Everyone’s laughing and clapping. Yelling lines when a reciter hesitates. And then other people have prepared. They say stuff by Robert Frost or poets Larry’s never heard of, but good ones. He wonders if it’s easier to understand when you listen to someone saying it than when you read it quietly to yourself.

The nurse runs into an ex-boyfriend at the café and ends up going home with him. She apologizes to Larry, gives him a kiss on the cheek. Larry understands. He wonders whether Cynthia would be tempted, if she ran into him after not seeing him for a long time. She’s never had a chance to miss him. Maybe that’s the problem.

When Cynthia broke up with him he showed up at his parents’ house with a few cardboard boxes. He managed to get himself to work and back, but otherwise he stayed in his old bedroom, now the sewing room. He showered only when his mom reminded him, stopped shaving, stopped getting haircuts, even though his mom offered to cut his hair herself. What he mostly remembers from that time is long fits of weeping, staring into space.

The hair started growing. He’d kept it short all his life, but soon it hung down past his ears, grew down his neck, grazed his shoulders. He didn’t notice it except to sweep it back out of his eyes, but his mom started commenting on it. She’d convince him to let her wash it in the bathroom sink, and it felt good to close his eyes and feel the warm water and her strong fingers working the suds around. The shampoo was girly-smelling but he didn’t want to offend her by saying so. “You were born with an adorable head of hair,” she told him. “But first your dad and then you, kept it short ever since.”

Molly was twenty months old at the time of the breakup. Cynthia’s parents brought her over every weekend. At first the sight of her made him cry more. He was supposed to see his baby girl every day of her life, not just on visits.

“Honey,” his mom said, “You can grieve over her the rest of the week. Sunday through Thursday, cry all you like. But are you still going to cry when she’s right there in front of you?”

“Mom, you’ve never had this. You don’t know what it’s like to be a divorced parent.”

“You were never married.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, and you were never married.”

He started to understand what everyone else had figured out from the start. Most likely his buddies and relatives had been making side bets over how long it would be until Cynthia threw him out.

He lay on the couch, watching his parents play with Molly on the living room rug. They’d bought her some little dinosaurs and there was this set of dominoes they had that she liked, and the three of them would make the dinosaurs talk to each other and move around and build caves out of the dominoes. Then there was this complicated situation where the dominos were standing up in a line and the dinosaurs pushed them over so that the toppled dominos formed a road that one group of dinosaurs needed to travel to another group. Why the dominos had to be stood up in the first place, Larry didn’t understand.

Molly would scamper over to the couch sometimes, gently take hold of a strand of his long hair. “Daddy pretty,” she would say.

“Molly pretty.”

He picked himself up, started walking upright, showering regularly. He started shaving again, but he never did cut that hair.

Molly continued to be impressed. “Look, Dad, your hair’s almost as long as my Barbie dolls.”

“Let’s call this one Larry.”

“That’s a boy’s name!”

“You know how your mom gets mad at me if I bring you home late? This is what she’s gonna do to me next time.” He picked up Larry and swung it around by its hair, its rigid plastic smile the only thing they could see as it whirled around faster and faster. Molly laughed so hard she started hiccupping.

People saw that hair and made all kinds of decisions about him. He was gay. He took drugs. He was a hippie. And here and there a woman who loved it. He couldn’t tell what Cynthia thought of it, though once when he’d dropped Molly off after a weekend visit, it was late and Cynthia had had some wine. She backed him up against the wall, pressed up close to him. “I’m confused,” Larry had said, and she’d laughed and shaken her head as if she’d come to her senses just that moment.

Confused was not sexy. Women didn’t want confused.

Patrice

The writing assignment is something the teacher calls an “inventory of the self.”

“Interpret it however you want, but try for rich description, close attention to detail. I want you to dig deep, write honestly and fearlessly. Remember, you don’t have to read it out loud if you don’t want to.”

Patrice begins to write. “On Nittany Mountain the rain seeps through crevices in the ground, drips through limestone and lands in Penn’s Cave. You take a boat through it, riding on all that accumulated rain. It carries your boat out through a little opening so you have to duck down, and then you shoot out into the open. It’s the beginning of Penns Creek that goes on for miles until it empties into the Susquehanna, but there at the cave opening, it looks like a pond. There are swans, beautiful and bad-tempered; they blare at you or ignore you with elegant scorn. Then you get out of the boat and go through the animal preserve. Elk, bison, white-tailed deer. Some of the deer are albino or recessive or something—all white. If you came across one of those alone in a forest you’d think you’d seen a ghost. Wolves, timber and gray, they point out which is the alpha male and the alpha female as if you couldn’t tell just by looking. And the black bears. One of them is a black-bear version of albino, they call him a cinnamon bear and that’s exactly the color of his fur. They tumble all over each other; they like people but you wouldn’t want them playing with you. They could snap your neck without even meaning to—oops, the toy’s not moving anymore. And then a mountain lion, just one can bring down a deer, where it takes a whole pack of wolves to do the same thing, and she comes right over to the chain link fence and you’re inches from those cool feline eyes looking into yours”—and time is up.

“Yes, but this is an inventory of the self,” the teacher says. “Where is the self in this piece?”

At first Patrice’s instinct is to back down, apologize, but she’s tired of backing down.

“The self is what’s looking at the animals,” she says. Polite but firm.

I’ve been on this planet longer than you, she thinks. That should count for something.

The teacher looks stunned. “We writers,” she says after a pause, “we’re artists, you know, we takes things in all different directions. That’s something I’m learning from you, Patrice.”

Sometimes, Patrice realizes, all it takes to stop a bully is to tell them they’re being a bully.

After class she meets three of her friends at the mall. Mildred needs something at the Dress Barn and Ruth and Gerri want to look at baking dishes at Boscov’s, and then they follow Patrice to the bookstore, their last stop. They’re tired by now. Mildred, Ruth, and Gerri settle heavily into armchairs near the religion section, where Patrice looks for the next title they’ve decided on for the book discussion group at church, something by the Dalai Lama. Gerri scans the titles she can see from where she’s sitting.

“When God Was a Woman. What’s with the was? Heck, she still is.”

“The title should be, God Is a Woman.”

“With gray hair.”

“And blisters on her feet.”

“And cellulite.”

The cellulite part makes them laugh. Patrice didn’t even know the word when she was growing up, none of them did. They still don’t care.

Later Patrice smiles at the memory, Gerri’s laugh like a loud hoot that she’s never self-conscious about, no matter how many people stare. Mildred does a kind of hee hee hee, a devilish cackle that makes the rest of them laugh more.

They can’t sing any better than Patrice. They’ve threatened to come to the UU church the day of her musical service “and join in the heehawing,” as Ruth put it.

It’s after nine when she gets home. She turns on the armchair lamp in the living room, then the kitchen lights and the little TV she keeps on the counter. No husband there to welcome her, never has been one. Then again, no husband to demand to know where she was, no husband to ignore her or criticize her for getting fat. Her friends have the whole range of husbands, and they leave them at home in the evenings, eat out together after work, and then go shopping or to a movie.

Patrice finds her notebook and writes down more ideas. For Joys and Concerns, they could divide it up. People who wanted to light a candle of concern could sing “There Is More Love Somewhere.” The line “I’m gonna keep on till I find it” is perfect for it. She hasn’t figured out what to have for people lighting candles of joy. But she’s decided she wants “Come Come Whoever You Are” for the opening hymn. They could even start it up while people are still coming in and taking their seats. It’s a round, so people could keep it going. She especially likes the line, “Ours is no caravan of despair.” It makes her imagine the early days when Universalism was getting started, back when all you heard from your preacher was hell and damnation, only a few predestined to be saved, the Devil lurking everywhere. If you took a sip of ale after a long day working in the fields, the Devil was there. He was there if you wanted to dance a few steps to the sound of a fiddle, if you wanted to lean against a split rail fence for a moment, put down the bucket of water you were hauling and enjoy a breeze or a sunset. Patrice imagines some circuit riding preacher showing up one day, riding from village to village, stopping at farms and mills, calling out, “Salvation is universal, brothers and sisters! God has saved us all!” and people cheering, tossing hats and babies into the air.

She gets up to make a cup of tea. The television is still on in the kitchen. There’s an interview, an old man with an English accent, and as far as Patrice can tell, he’s famous for being eccentric. He doesn’t look too good, his voice is shaking, and he seems to have on garish makeup. The interviewer asks him what he thinks about sex change operations. “Good heavens, I’m much too old for surgery. Now if they’d had that procedure when I was young…”

The kettle starts to boil. Patrice is looking for a lemon and when she closes the refrigerator door she hears him say, “I certainly shouldn’t tell anyone about it, you know! One sees interviews with people who have had it done. There was that famous tennis player, and a pianist fellow, rather recently, too, and it amazes me that they tell the world about it. If I’d had that operation I shouldn’t have told a soul. I should have changed my name, got a whole new identity. I’d have moved to some small town and worked in a fabric shop and lived a nice peaceful life, and no one would know I’d ever been a man.”

Patrice adds honey to her tea and laughs. While she’s been imagining so many other lives, someone is out there imagining hers. She feels sorry for the old man, wanting so badly the things she takes for granted, the simple fact of being born female and never having to think about it. Being able to paint her nails without getting disapproving stares, being able to wear flower-print dresses and a delicate gold chain bracelet and have a soft, high-pitched voice. Actually her voice isn’t that soft and she realizes the old man probably isn’t imagining someone quite as loud as Patrice. Tomorrow morning she’ll look through the hymnbook for a song of thanksgiving; they should be sure to have one in the service. Maybe she’ll send the old man a postcard, Greetings from the fabric shop. Enjoying the life you’ve dreamed up for me. Thanks.

JulieAnne

Amanda sits behind the counter, trying to stay out of JulieAnne’s way while she waits on customers. They’re hoping for a lull so they can take some photos.

“So I tell my parents I’m thinking of going to a service over at the Unitarian church. You know the one in Northumberland?”

“Mmm hm,” JulieAnne says. She pours mocha syrup into a latte. Checks on the milk steamer.

“And they’re fine with it. So I ask, What are we, in terms of what church or whatever, and they say we’re UCC. And I say, So what does that mean? And they go, Well, it means we don’t burn anyone at the stake for believing differently than we do. And I’m like, Well, that’s good to know.”

The last person in line takes forever to make up his mind. Finally he decides on green tea and a maple pecan scone.

“So that was it. They’ll talk about anything else. Drugs they told me about long ago. Sex too. But religion?”

The customer walks away and JulieAnne hands Amanda the camera.

“Go over by that pillar and focus over here. What do you see? Zoom in so it’s just my shoulders up. Now what do you see? No, don’t take it when I’m looking straight at you.”

They waste a lot of time before JulieAnne gets the idea to stand Amanda in her place while she figures out things like angle, distance, degree of zoom.

“Okay, stand right here and take the camera. On this spot.”
“I love it. This is the most you’ve talked in years.”

“Wait till I get back to the counter. Okay, now what’s the light doing?”

“What’s the light doing? Do you expect me to understand that?”

Also she’s not sure whether she wants the background to be blurry or sharp. She likes the idea of glass behind her, the tumblers for iced coffee, bottles of syrup. Glass is hard and shiny and beautiful and she’s hoping it will make her look sophisticated, artistic. Something. She tries to imagine her mother looking at the picture.

Amanda’s got the hang of it. She’s moving around, ordering JulieAnne to turn this way, look in that direction. Mr. Graybill doesn’t even ask what she’s doing. Amanda has worked across the street at the sporting goods store for two years and she refuses to quit there and come work for him, but she gives him advice and he always takes it, like painting the walls deep colors and putting a quartz candle holder on each table.

He asks Amanda what she thinks about holding the poetry recitals out by the river during the summer months. She’s skeptical.

“Traffic from the bridge,” she says. “Too much noise.”

“How about Selinsgrove?”

“Isle of Que in the summer? Do you know what the mosquitoes are like?”

He stands near Amanda as if supervising the photo shoot. Now two sets of eyes and the camera are looking at JulieAnne.

Mr. Graybill tells Amanda, “I’ve been trying to get your friend here to sign up to recite something, but she claims she’s too shy.”

“I happen to know that JulieAnne likes poetry.”

“Amanda!“

Amanda ignores her. “Me, I have no patience for it.”

“Neither do I,” Mr. Graybill says.

She must have been watching them, she thinks, in the picture she ends up choosing to send to her mother. She looks amused and affectionate. She’s figured out just before the shutter clicked that the approving smiles they’re sending her way are meant for each other.

Larry

Larry sits at his kitchen table with a cold bottle of beer and a stack of poetry books that Molly has brought over. It’s hard to concentrate. He feels giddy with relief and gratitude.

Nothing’s wrong with his truck. She’s fine.

Turned out the gas cap was loose, that was all. No engine damage. No big repairs that would require Larry to get a second job.

He’d been on a back road he hardly ever drove, and on an impulse he’d turned in at a sign for Neil Kerstetter, Auto Repairs. The mechanic was an odd guy, said maybe a total of ten words. He was short and skinny, hunched over, never looked directly at him but Larry could tell he was thinking all the time. He knows the look: the guy has too much time to think. Wouldn’t even accept any money. Larry had tried to insist: “You took the time to check it out, you did your job.” The mechanic walked away, raised a hand briefly, gesture of goodbye or dismissal or both.

Larry leafs through a poetry book.

Molly, out in the living room, yells over to him above the noise of her TV show.

“How’s it going, Dad?”

“Fine, no problem.”

He starts at the front but quickly decides to flip to the back, figures the newer ones won’t be so hard to understand.

“What makes it poetry if it don’t rhyme?”

She mutes the TV.

“Dad, it’s not a rule. Lots of people write poetry that doesn’t rhyme.”

From the sound of her voice he can tell that people have known this for centuries, probably, and she must be thinking what an ignorant hick he is.

She never comes right out and says it, though. Cynthia never did either; he has to give her credit. Her family, though, different story. When he and Cynthia were together, her brothers and father kept referring to Larry as a high-school dropout even after he showed them his diploma. And then what a scandal, what a disgrace that this redneck had gone and got their daughter pregnant.

What they didn’t know was that Cynthia was the one who had chased after him. She didn’t mind his lack of education when his body was young and lean. We fit together so well, she used to say. He’s begun to understand what a novelty he was back then, how rebellious she must have felt to sneak off to his apartment at midnight after being at some fancy charity event with her parents. In the morning he’d find the jewels and designer dress draped over his jeans and work shirt.

Never a personal insult. No sarcasm or deceit or mind games. I just don’t love you.

He turns pages. Anything with sunsets or flowers makes his eyes glaze over. He remembers “The Highwayman,” some awful story about people tying up a girl and shooting her. He wonders if they still make kids read that.

“How about Robert Frost?” Molly calls out. “‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep’—no, I can’t picture you saying that with a straight face.”

I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. He has no idea what it means but he likes the sound of it.

Something catches his eye. When you are old and grey and full of sleep…

“I like this Yeets person.”

“I know it looks like that, Dad, but it’s pronounced Yates.”

Yates. But one man loved… This can’t mean what he thinks it means. He tries to picture Cynthia in a bonnet and severe gray clothing, baking pumpkin pies, sewing by firelight.

“Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“What, Dad?”

“What’s a pilgrim soul?”

She turns off the TV and comes into the kitchen and explains that pilgrims are people who go on pilgrimages, like in the Canterbury Tales. They travel a long way to get to a holy place.

It doesn’t really describe Cynthia, but it’s a cool poem anyway and he’s proud of his kid. She knows this type of thing, she’ll be comfortable at a place like Harvard. And that makes him think about how she’s leaving in another year. Even this summer it won’t be the way it used to be. The day she leaves for college a huge expanse of time, the rest of his life, is going to open up in the space where she used to be, and he’s going to curl up on the couch and cry. You could call it a time-honored method by now. A tradition.

And she’s a trouper, this kid; she’s already been trying to cheer him up. I’ll be back for Thanksgiving, she’d said the other day, a whole month at Christmas, spring break, almost four months for summer. You’ll hardly know I’m gone.

In the backyard Larry starts up the grill—veggie burger for Molly, ground beef patties for him. While he waits for the charcoals to get going he walks over to talk to Dirk, tell him the good news about the truck.

The only thing separating their backyards is the small parking lot behind the gun shop, but while Larry rents a ranch house on a small plot, Dirk lives in a farmhouse that’s been there for more than a hundred years. The house was decrepit when Dirk bought it and he’s been working on renovating it ever since, evenings and weekends, plus he built a summer kitchen out back and always has a huge vegetable garden.

Like most big guys, he moves slow, but somehow he’s always moving, and Larry follows him around as he breaks up a wooden crate into narrow shards, carries armfuls back to the garden to stake up the tomato plants.

“Soil looks good,” Larry says.

“Rototilled it late, though. And I tell you what—” Dirk’s voice gets loud as he pounds in each stake with a mallet. “There better not be no damn woodchuck in my broccoli this year.”

The more time Dirk spends on his garden and other projects, the less actual work he gets done in his house, which is fine with Larry and Molly, though they don’t tell Dirk that. They like the farmhouse the way it is, the tilted floor in the front parlor and the low, crooked threshold into the kitchen.

Larry’s not crazy about the bearskin rug and the dead animals mounted all over the place, but he likes Dirk’s stories, like the time he was out hunting and got tired and climbed up a tall pine to take a nap, and when he woke he looked down and saw a bear and her two cubs moving past the tree, not making a sound. Larry was relieved to hear he didn’t shoot them; maybe it was deer season or turkey or whatever, but it does seem to Larry that after Dirk met him and Molly he hasn’t done as much actual killing as he used to. Then there was the story of the peacocks escaping from the livestock auction out on Rt. 522—there’s Dirk at home minding his own business and he looks out the window and there’s peacocks perched in his trees.

“Have to run chicken wire all around here,” Dirk says, but he seems to be talking to himself, or maybe the woodchuck. He sounds irritable. “Do you know Trent Heimbach, buddy of mine?”

“I don’t think so,” Larry says.

“Had a stroke couple of weeks ago. Still in the hospital. And two days ago a guy at work, his wife had a heart attack, died instantly. She weren’t much older than me. No, I lie. She was my age, 52.”

“That’s awful.”

“What the hell, we ain’t even old yet.” He straightens up, rubs his lower back. “Used to be I had these cookouts on that property my folks got on Shade Mountain, back behind Paxtonville. We had picnic tables up there, barbecue pits. I ain’t talking no burgers and hot dog thing. I threw parties that lasted for days—we had roast pig, ribs, kettles of chili, I don’t know how many kegs of beer. We’d easily have eighty, a hundred people there at any one time. And I don’t know when that all stopped. Suddenly we was all too busy. Jobs, kids, I guess.”

“Wait a minute,” Larry says. “I think I went to some of those parties. They were yours?” He remembers sleeping on the ground, waking up to yet another friendly stranger handing him yet another beer. Women would pick the pine needles out of his hair and laugh.

“I must have been in high school.”

“Shi-i-it,” Dirk says, but he’s laughing. He throws an arm around Larry’s shoulder. “I don’t remember you from back then, man. But I guess we was both pretty fucked at the time.”

“We can do one now,” Larry says. “How about Fourth of July weekend? I’ll help you, I know how to grill. Between now and then, we’ll invite everyone we know. Or even anyone who looks familiar.”

“Hell, anyone who looks fun.”

Molly yells over to them. “Dad, I’m putting the burgers on before the charcoals burn out.”

“You should make some of those, what do you call, caramelized onions,” Dirk says. “Put ’em on the burgers. I saw it on that food channel.”

Larry brings over the food. He’s made enough for all three, and they eat their burgers and sliced tomatoes from Dirk’s garden at the picnic table. Soon it’s twilight, and the bats that nest in Dirk’s barn come flying out, like planes taking off one by one. This always creeps Molly out, but Larry loves to watch them. He and Dirk stand downhill from the barn, directly in the bats’ flight path. They’ve been doing this so long they don’t even cringe any more as the bats swoop down at them. They stand there and grin when they feel the breeze from the bats’ wings ruffle their hair.

∞

It’s starting to fill up already for the poetry recital. Three college guys come to the counter and JulieAnne puts her book down to take their orders: mochaccino with no whipped cream, double cappuccino but go easy on the foamed milk. The last one orders plain black tea and JulieAnne feels like thanking him.

One of the college boys has noticed the book and asks, “Are you going to read something too? What is it, Emily Dickinson?” They smirk and JulieAnne can feel her face getting red. “Look at her, it is Emily Dickinson!” and the way they’re trying not to laugh is worse than if they came right out and laughed in her face.

“Let me guess: ‘I’m nobody, who are you’?”

“No offense,” another one says, “we’re not making fun of you. Really.” With his elbow he jabs at his friend. “It’s just that, every high school kid on earth picks that poem. It’s been done to death.”

JulieAnne feels so stupid she can hardly look at them, but she hears another voice, someone waiting in line behind them.

“Did you like that poem when you were in high school?” he says to the college boys, but friendly, in a making-conversation way. One of them says yes, and this other man says, “It probably meant something to you then, probably explained how you felt about things. So why not let her feel that way, too, the way you used to feel?”

When she finally looks at the man, JulieAnne’s first thought is that, much as she loves black and white film, she’d have to use color film to do him justice, not only for that amazing long hair but those eyes, the kindness in them.

As he drinks his coffee Larry thinks about who he’ll invite for the Fourth of July party at Dirk’s property on Shade Mountain. He’ll ask that shy girl at the counter, he’ll ask anyone whose poem he likes tonight. Tomorrow he’ll walk around town grinning like a fool and whoever smiles back instead of looking away, he’ll invite them too.

Last time they had this kind of recital thing, they’d had a flyer talking about the poetry collection at the college library, for people looking for stuff to recite. The librarian had been so proud of it. “We’ve got anthologies,” she’d said, “organized by theme, organized by time period, you name it. We have collected works. Poetry journals. We have little obscure books by people no one’s ever heard of,” and Larry smiled but didn’t tell her he hadn’t heard of anyone anyway. He pulled things off the shelf at random, figured he’d relax and see if anything grabbed him.

I stand in the cathedral of your house / humbled by your perfection. It should make him sad, it’s so hopeless, but he relishes having the lines in his head where he can get at them anytime, words someone else wrote, a stranger, feeling exactly like he does. I leave with my questions / still crumpled in my pocket.

The women at the next table are laughing, loud, and he recognizes one of them, a mom-looking type, though now he realizes he’s seen her at the last recital and at the library, and never seen her with kids. “I’m not nervous,” she’s saying to one of her friends, “I can’t wait to get up there.” Larry smiles at her and she smiles back, and he makes a mental note to add her to his invitation list. He wonders why he was so sure she was a mom, not that he noticed her much except in the background. Maybe because she was overweight and friendly and older than him, and he’s annoyed at himself for making assumptions.

Two of her friends are practicing their lines, from different poems, at the exact same time: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” “I’ll tell thee everything I can.” “His house is in the village though.” “There’s little to relate.”

What’s funny, Larry thinks, is that there are lots of couples that look like this woman and him. She doesn’t have many wrinkles, meanwhile Larry’s face is lined already and he walks bowlegged and slow like an old man. Town people would think of them as one of those hillbilly couples you see from way out in the country: dimwitted skinny guy with fat wife, stunned-looking red-faced kids straggling along behind them.

And then what he notices most, when she walks up to the little stage and starts to read, are her odd, greenish cat’s eyes, her heart-shaped face, her musical voice. Time wants to show you a different country.

He sits up to listen, and JulieAnne has the same reaction, these lines, she wants to grab them and hold on to them, You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness. When the poem is over JulieAnne leans against the counter, fights the urge to close her eyes, and Patrice is feeling energized; she’s done something she’d never imagined doing and her friends are congratulating her and she knows, clearly and all at once, that she should take up kayaking next, her and her friends squeezed into tiny boats paddling away on the Susquehanna and laughing whenever one of them capsizes, which is often.

She doesn’t really understand the poem she recited if she takes it apart line by line, but you shouldn’t do that anyway. It’s like breaking up a vase so you can pick up the pretty pieces and play with them. She notices the girl serving coffee, wide shoulders, like a swimmer’s—not fat, but clearly not comfortable in that big, strong body. She probably thinks she looks like a cow instead of realizing how lovely she is with that high forehead and those enormous hazel eyes, how beautiful especially when she’s listening to poetry with all her soul.

They won’t remember those first impressions, the three of them, soon they won’t even be able to imagine a time when they hadn’t known each other. But tonight they listen to more poems, drift into and out of their own thoughts.

Patrice is getting sleepy. The voices around her, rising and falling, finding a rhythm and then dispersing, make her think of her church service all in song. She imagines the soloist, the adults’ choir, the rounds that move from one side of the aisle to the other.

Larry daydreams about Cynthia. Hank’s out of the picture somehow: she’s sad and Larry’s comforting her, and he shakes out his long hair and she reaches for it and says, I’ve always wanted to do this.

JulieAnne remembers a dream she had this morning and forgot till just now. In the dream she’s playing with one of those magnetic poetry kits. She can hear somewhere, though she can’t see, small children on a playground. Their voices are an indistinct hum except that sometimes they rise into “they all fall down” and then their voices subside and she wonders whether they do fall down, they sound so weak and tired when they get to the word “down.” She sees that word, down, among the ones spread out before her and she picks it up, and it turns into a photograph of a star-pattern quilt. She picks up another word, rust, and that turns into a photograph of shutters on an old house. She’s trying to make a poem but the words, peach, fingernail, topaz, all turn into images and she wonders whether, if she tries to arrange the pictures into a collage, they’ll form a poem instead.

∞

“Can you sing?” Patrice calls over to Larry the next time they’re at a reading.

“Not hardly,” he answers, and soon he’s moved over to her table and he’s singing “Wreck on the Highway,” off-key, and she applauds boisterously.

“My dad loved Roy Acuff,” she says.

“So’d my granddad.”

They both applaud JulieAnne when she recites a different Dickinson poem. She’s flawless, and when she finishes she walks past the college boys like she doesn’t see them.

On her breaks she sits with Larry and Patrice. Soon she brings in her photos to show them, and then she’s bringing in her camera. They talk about camera angles and lighting and places they’d like to photograph. They listen to Patrice read her writing exercises, they talk over her plans for the church service in song. They hear Larry’s stories about the patients he meets driving the ambulance, ponder whether he should look for another job. JulieAnne would like to take a photograph of Cynthia, but she and Patrice worry that Larry might brood over it. They’ve never seen her but they’re sure of her unattainable beauty.

Amanda and Tiffany help JulieAnne get her photograph ready to send to her mother. It’s blown up to 8″ x 10″, protected by cardboard and bubble wrap. Her friends feel they’re Kath’s daughters too, in a way, now they know Kath’s been getting photos of them all these years, and that feels right somehow to JulieAnne; the two of them are like her sisters. She feels she hasn’t been hiding herself from her mother, her self is the one doing the looking, and the girl-daughters in the photos, after all, have been looking at her, JulieAnne, while she’s taking the picture. The smiles are for her, the expression in their eyes is something she’s earned.

The girls feel there should be some kind of ritual send-off of the picture, the True and Authentic Portrait, as Amanda calls it. It should go off in its own little boat, set loose on Penns Creek, or its own little propeller plane rigged up with popsicle sticks and rubber bands. The best they can do is accompany it to the post office, stand at attention while it goes into the “Out-of-Town” mail slot.

Something unblocks after that. She wants to make a portrait of everyone she knows, as themselves, not posing as JulieAnne or someone else’s long-lost daughter or anyone else they’re pretending to be in their ordinary lives before JulieAnne’s camera tells them, It’s all right, don’t be afraid, it’ll feel so good.

She and Patrice walk around town together, and Patrice drives her around the countryside. They look for interesting scenes, faces. Patrice has no shyness; she’ll ask total strangers whether JulieAnne can take their picture.

They go to Larry’s place, and he takes them over to Dirk’s to take pictures of the farmhouse. At twilight the bats come streaming out from under the barn’s eaves. If you stand downhill from them they look like they’re flying right at you, like they’re going to crash into your forehead, but at the last minute they pull up and fly over your head, just inches above. You can even feel your hairs stirring in their wingbeat. JulieAnne and Patrice love the bats as much as Larry does. They shriek and laugh and shiver but keep standing there, keep watching. JulieAnne eventually calms down enough to aim her camera at them. It occurs to her one day to turn to her left, and the picture she takes then of Larry, bracing for the next wave of bats, ends up in a juried photography show at the university art gallery.

Another photo of JulieAnne’s winds up at the Boalsburg arts festival. She takes it at the musical service Patrice arranges at the Unitarian Universalist church. You just barely see the tops of people’s heads in one corner of the photo, and the rest is the rafters, hanging lamps, stained glass windows.

Everyone attends the service: Larry, JulieAnne, Amanda, Dirk, the people from Patrice’s writing class, including the teacher, Patrice’s friends from old jobs and new, her landlady. Her fellow congregants, being less reverent than the visitors, make jokes about “UU-ism: The Opera,” and using charades rather than hymns next time, but the Drum Circle folks want to work with Patrice on designing a service, and the pastor asks her to be on the ministry committee.

Most of the people at the service end up coming to Dirk and Larry’s party the next weekend. When he sees the carfuls of Unitarian Universalists, Dirk sings in a surprisingly good baritone, “There is more beer somewhere,” and they get the joke, start singing other hymns with substituted lyrics that get raunchier as the night goes on.

Larry has also invited Virginia and other patients he’s met while driving the ambulance, his many coworkers from every job he’s been fired from, JulieAnne’s dad Neil, the mechanic who diagnosed Larry’s truck, half the audience from the last poetry reading, total strangers who smiled at him on the street in the last few weeks.

He and Dirk let Molly invite all her friends, also Cynthia and Hank and Cynthia’s parents, brothers, extended family. Some of them even come. Some of those even shake Larry’s hand.

After a while, people at the Shade Mountain Inn hear something’s going on further down the mountain, and so do customers over at the Moose and the Vets, the Country Tavern, the Middleburg Hotel. They all show up, as does anyone else who’s wandering around looking for something to do and just follows the noise and the smell of food cooked in the open air.

JulieAnne shows up early, bless her, to help with the food. She’s getting ready for the trip out to California. Her mom has sent her more photos and she’s brought them along, shows them to Patrice and Larry and Dirk while they slice onions, chop tomatoes, open cans of beans. “Here’s my mom at the lodge where she runs those wilderness trips. Here she is in her garden.”

Later that night Dirk gets to thinking about those photos. Larry too. It’s not only the beer that lubricates their memory, it’s Bob Seeger and Jeff Healy on the CD player, it’s being in the forest at night, and it should be feeling cool by now but there’s all these warm, contented bodies all around.

“I think I…met her,” Dirk says.

“I think I might have…met her too.”

“Picture her with long hair,” Dirk says. “Weren’t gray back then. Brown, kind of curly?”

“I… uh…I mean, what are the odds?”

“She was real friendly,” Dirk says. “A real…warm person.”

Dirk remembers that she’d shown up at parties with some quiet little guy whose face he can’t recall. Probably just as well, now.

She loved how big Dirk was, wanted to climb him, she said, like a bear up a tree.

Girl was on the run long before the federal agents came chasing her.

Larry remembers how fragrant she was, a potent combination of sandalwood and pot. Life is too short, sweetie, she’d said, strong warm hands caressing his hair, his face. Life is too damn short.

“I don’t recall a wedding ring.”

“Neither do I.”

They hadn’t been looking hard, though.

Maybe too many years have passed for them to feel like the wrong or the right of it matters much. You see someone running like that, flying past you, all you can do is hope she makes it safe to wherever she’s going.

“JulieAnne’s what, sixteen?” Dirk says.

“Yeah.”

“How good’s your math, boy?”

They strain to remember what year, what month. They do the math. They feel relieved.

∞

Patrice takes out her notebook and pen. The light from the campfire is enough to write by. Larry has fallen asleep next to his daughter’s sleeping bag. Patrice is afraid his long hair, fanned out on the ground, will catch a spark when a log shifts on the fire. She pushes him and he rolls further away, grumbling.

You should write a novel, her writing teacher told her on the last day of class. Patrice is flattered, but she’s not much good at making things up. She likes to write about what she observes, people she knows, the things they tell her about their lives.

She doesn’t know what they stand for. She’s not sure she can make meaning out of all these random fragments of people’s experiences; she knows only that she wants to weave their lives together, make good things happen to them.

It’s naïve and sentimental, she knows, to want this, as it is to get so much joy out of appliqué flowers, strong fingers stroking your hair, bats winging straight toward you at twilight.

It’s her life, their life.

She makes no apologies. She keeps writing.

—Rosalie Morales Kearns

———————————

Rosalie Morales Kearns has an MFA from the University of Illinois and has taught writing at the University of Illinois and the University at Albany. She is the founder of the Lake House Collective, a group of feminist writers dedicated to reviewing books by women. The story “Associated Virgins” from Virgins and Tricksters earned a Special Mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize volume.

Our guest introducer, Philip Graham, is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, his latest being The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon and the newly released Braided Worlds, co-authored with his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Washington Post Magazine, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a co-founder of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter and currently serves as the nonfiction editor. Graham teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His continuing series of short essays on the craft of writing can be read at www.philipgraham.net.

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