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Ghost City: What It’s Like Living Here — Joe Milan in Seoul, Korea

Jan 312013

Herewith Joe Milan’s lovely, ever so slightly melancholy portrait of the Seoul he has come to know teaching at the Catholic University of Korea. This is contemporary Seoul, dominated by a priapic, neon-lit tower, the traditional architecture destroyed by war and rebuilt to resemble someone else’s urban dream. What should be his own world is strange to Joe Milan; his life in the city is punctuated by memories of home in America and rumours of war. His Seoul is a complicated place, riven with memory, tradition, absence and paradox. But sweepers shape the piles of raked leaves to look like hearts and the rice cakes his grandmother serves have the scent of pine.

This is the latest in our growing collection of What It’s Like Living Here essays, the 41st in fact. Think of that.

Concrete

Seoul Tower, a tourist magnet in the heart of the city and the best quick way to see the place, reaches into the sky, perched alone on a forested hill apart from the packed clothing shops, red sauce stained food carts and sterile department stores of Myung-dong. In the shade of trees, you huff your way up the winding road. There are heart shaped piles of leaves raked onto the walkway and every few meters piles of rocks stacked beside the path. A young child, biting his lip, totters toward one of the piles with a rock. His mother cheers him on, “Put it on the top and make a wish.” Years ago you did the same. But unlike this child, you tumbled and fell short before the stack.

The tower stabs the sky, a rocket ready to leave the trees and the ancient rock walls behind. For centuries this hill was a lookout. You imagine bored men with long beards and spears in hand staring out to the ridgelines, waiting for the signal fires of incoming invaders. Today’s soldiers stand watch on hills fifty kilometers north of Seoul. They are mostly eighteen and nineteen-year-old boys doing their military service, cursing their fate, waiting for a different sort of fire that would pop and boom and flash and screech and burn.

When you reach the elevator doors it is dark until the walls burst into blue light from hidden projectors in the ceiling. An image of the tower at night appears on the elevator door, back-dropped by stars that you had never seen in the sky in Korea. Lasers write in English “love n tower.” You wonder if they are going for “lovin tower” or “love in tower.”

At the observation deck you’re greeted by an attendant dressed in white and black like a maître d’. She bows slightly–a nod really–and motions you around the half-wall to the windows that surround you. From up here the city is field of concrete buildings and glass towers rising and falling toward the river: the Han River. You are not sure, but it could mean the “One River,” or the “Korean River,” or even the “Suffering River,” but your Korean isn’t as good as it should be. The river is a bluish crack between the two halves of gray city. Crisscrossing veins of tight alleyways wrinkle the city, hold the city together with backstreets wide enough only for scooters loaded down with TVs and tin boxes of cheap Chinese food. Alleyways walled with brick and concrete branded with random acts of paint that always seem to morph into the same dull gray. This gray, like fog smothering and hiding a hillside, is the Seoul you remember from your childhood visits.

But this isn’t the same city. Speckled in the gray are wide highways and glass towers and miniature red brick boxes that litter the gray field to the base of white stone mountains wrapping the city. Your eyes trace the spine of the mountains where, long ago, tigers cloaked by the black of night, crept down and preyed upon the villages clustered just outside of the city walls. Now on those same peaks blasé hikers dressed in florescent pink and blue Gortex drink rice beer and eat savory pancakes.

You think of the mountains of your life in America, the jagged knife edges of the Cascades and the Olympics: young and bold mountains skirted in a shag of green. These mountains in front of you have spots too ragged for the trees where the naked rock shows white. The new concrete poured over cracks in the alley by your apartment, yet to turn gray from the rains, is white, too. The rains leave trails of gray streaks clinging to the cracked corners of windows and the bars that guard them. You think about the concrete your father taught you to pour. When you rushed, didn’t let it settle right, tiny fissures and wrinkles broke to the surface. He would shake his head as his finger traced the cracks and say, “Haste makes waste, boy.”

Here, in Korea, elderly faces speak of decades of haste.

Have you eaten?

You finger the stenciling on the window in front of you. It reads 9,596.52 Km to Los Angeles. Seattle is in the same direction, though not as distant. You remember the cold damp air coated in the smell of pine and cedar. Below the tower, to your surprise, are green blotches dropped in the gray field: parks. They’re newer, brighter, than the growth on the mountains. This is where old men in Member’s Only jackets, hunched over lacquered wood boards tattooed with black grids, play Go. They argue over where the next white or black game piece should go. Old women gather in the parks, too, chatting while they unpack their foiled rolls of seaweed and rice: Kim Bap.

The other green blotches are the palaces with tree lined parade grounds rebuilt for the umpteenth time after the invasions that came every century or so. Out of the rubble of the last invasion, people rebuilt Seoul anew with brick, glass and concrete. They rebuilt Seoul replicating the buildings of the world outside of Korea. The replicas of itself are the only buildings built with wood.

You try to find your apartment, Block 20. One gray lego block among thirty other blocks flanking the glistening steel bowl of World Cup Stadium. Twenty-five years old and already your apartment looks dilapidated. You’ve considered calling a location scout. You would tell them, “Hey man, I got the perfect place for you to film 1984 and you know remakes are all the rage.”

When you open the creaking cold metal door, walk down the half-wall corridor, step into the dark stairway where the lights flicker to life after a few steps, emerge out of the building into the hazy sunlight, and find your way through the maze of double parked cars jamming the parking lot, you see them. The retirees. Beside the first floor windows they crouch over trashcans and styrofoam packing boxes tending their gardens of verdant life. The old men and women are guerrilla gardeners suited up in dirty white gloves and teal visors. They start early in the morning, planting, weeding, battling the gray one clump of vegetables at a time. No one tells them, “You can’t do that” since, they are old. And here, at least for people, age gets respect.

A vine has snaked up three floors of your building, clinging to your window, offering what could be cucumbers, or some knobby vegetable more bent and rugged than anything you’ve seen at the supermarket. Can you take one for a salad, or will a battle-weary old woman come knocking on the door to ask for her harvest?

From the trashcans and styrofoam boxes along the sidewalks, the gardens grow. On rooftops and huddled in demolished housing lots, these gardens grow. But you know this is no green fad. This is memory that is spoken even now in the elderly’s greetings, “Have you eaten?”

Sirens

Yesterday you pushed and swayed and weaved through the currents of people in the subway station and jammed yourself into the subway car. You let go of your briefcase and it didn’t fall to the ground. It floated, defying gravity, hanging with the friction of bodies dressed in suits.

Youthful figures in black, their headphones jammed in their ears, all silently ignoring the chug of train tracks as if this is part of a pact where everyone pretends not to be clutched by the crowd swaying with the train. The flat-screen monitor above the exit doors loops a video about how to use a smoke hood hidden in padlocked glass boxes at the station. There are at least ten steps and you felt like you should take notes. There had been fires on the trains before.

At lunch you heard the sirens. Wailing loudspeakers erupted from their hiding spots on poles painted like trees. Fake branches and leaves shrouded the speaker horns and square boxes. Radio transmitters? Looking out your office window, you saw the cars stop and the sidewalks cleared. You waited for the flashes from a far off ridgeline, artillery fire booming and shells smashing and battering the buildings, dogs howling, fires exploding and engulfing the city then raging and rioting all the way up to the peaks. The office corridor hummed without pause, and you heard someone laughing. You alone, it seemed, wondered of the possibilities.

English

Everything in Seoul Tower is in English. Everything new is tattooed with it. On neon signs jutting off buildings, on the menus in the Korean dive bars serving “pork intestine,” in catchy commercial slogans, and on K-pop tracks that old expats describe–with derision–as nothing more than “nursery rhymes slapped over euro-techno beats.” English isn’t hidden away in the enclaves of black walled of foreign bars of Itaewon anymore. It was in those kind of places you hid after work, always looking for a blank space of wall to add your name in chalk. You hid there with the other English teachers and American soldiers. Those places are gone like most of the people who wrote their names on walls.

In Itaewon, vendors shout in English “we have clothes in your size.” But outside this little corner of Seoul, you force yourself to speak Korean, hesitantly, trying to spit out phrases while gagged by the rocks of verbs and conjugations. In the beginning you motioned and pointed and people would look at you with confusion and ask, “Mwol?” But now, they understand you and applaud you. You can order yourself a coffee. It is something, although your pronunciation is butchered to the point of another language altogether. Being half-Korean doesn’t help. Nor does that feeling of shame whenever you utter that fact and they search your face for something left behind.

You worry that your English is getting worse. With lightning speed, chopped and spliced with slang, you feel lost with your friends in America on the phone. English is continuing without you as each year passes. You are losing your ear for the only language you have while surrounded by a language you should have had.

The concrete house

As you make your way back to the elevator in Seoul tower, you see through an opposite window a fog of buildings climbing a hill in the distance. That’s where your grandmother lives. You know it; its shade of gray is darker and older than the rest.

Next week is Chuseok, an ancient holiday celebrating the harvest and the dead. Your apartment, like the subways, the streets, all the gray city should be empty and cold except for a few stragglers without a hometown or a family to go to. Almost no one is from Seoul. You’ll buy a box of fruits to give your grandmother and you’ll carry it with you on the abandoned subway on one of the few days you can get a seat.

But the night before Chuseok, you’ll gather with your friends and have a few drinks. Someone’s girlfriend will feel bad for all of you. And before she leaves for her own hometown, deep in a dark corner of a friend’s concrete walled apartment, you and your foreign friends–who each have lost a parent to one disease or another–will solemnly stand as she lays out a table with food and empty plates. She will tell you this is a Jaesa: a way to honor the departed family spirits, something many Koreans don’t do anymore.

There will an empty plate set out for your father. You’ll pour liquor into a shot glass and circle it around the incense smoke three times and pour it out into a bowl. Taking a fork, instead of chopsticks, you’ll clang it down three times against your father’s empty plate and rest it on the fried fish dish. You’ll imagine him tearing apart southern fried catfish, the crumbs littering the plate. He had always missed “real catfish from way back down home.” He would say the same here, but maybe the thought will be good enough. Three times all the way to the floor, resting your forehead against your hands, you’ll kneel and bow and breathe deep. Then you’ll walk out of the room so your father’s spirit can eat. You’ll miss your father as you stare at the web of cracks scarring the wood print linoleum floor.

On Chuseok you’ll go to your grandmother’s apartment. The two of you will eat: glassy japjae noodles, chilly red pork, and damp white and green rice cakes filled with sugar and the smell of pine. Afterward, as the sun sets behind the haze, you’ll walk with her through the grayed alleys on cracked pavement. Soon her neighborhood, built forty years ago, will be torn down and buried in memory for newer apartments that too, will crack and gray with the rains. She will say in Korean to her friends that pass by, “This is my grandson. This is my grandson. He came home for Chuseok.”

When you reach the old house that she lived in years ago, built when the concrete buildings were new and clean, she’ll say, “This is where I lived.”

“I remember,” you’ll say.

—Joe Milan

———————

Joe Milan has spent nearly a third of his life traveling and living outside the borders of the USA, and his most recent landing is in Seoul where he writes and teaches at the Catholic University of Korea. Joe is a recent graduate from the Vermont College of Fine Arts .

Haruspex: Poems — Peter Mishler

Jan 102013

Herewith, poems from Peter Mishler, introduced to me by Emily Pulfer-Terino. Very cunning, deft and graceful poems. In “Demolition” a chance detour (on his way to work) leads the poet by an Econo Lodge which becomes a screen for his imagination and the stage for a dark, alienated story (words like “gurney” and “wrist” implicate the scene with dread). A week later, the detour signs disappear and the poet metaphorically wakes, sort of, from the dream of his imagination. It’s an ancient, haunting plot. Some tiny change in the humdrum routine of the world thrusts the dreamer into another world of darkness and disorder. Then he returns, not himself any longer, but changed. (Think: Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” for example.) He finds the humdrum now inflected with dream (“I walk the darkened, sea-foam hallways”). The poem ends with a lovely whispering repetition (morning, morning), the owl-like assonance (who, whom), and a shade of doubt.

I walk the darkened, sea-foam hallways
to my desk—and when the people
that I pass say, Morning, I say,
Morning, too, so that I can’t
be certain who is waking whom.

DEMOLITION

For a week a detour takes me
past the windows of an Econo Lodge.
I invent what’s on the other side
each morning, beginning
with what I know is there:
an absent clerk, an empty lobby
some dark green carpet
joined in places with duct tape.
I add a chair for myself to sit
and make the smaller arrangements:
a door to a bedroom closed
just enough to hide a figure inside;
open enough to reveal a bed
that looks like a gurney,
a wrist laying face up
on the sterile and steamed
white sheets. What am I
intending to have happen here?
Hard to tell if it’s my wrist
or someone else’s that’s meant
to emerge from that room.
I’m getting a feel for the lobby, though:
within days I learn to fix
a sugar drink from sweetener
packets and sink-water.
I place a styrofoam cupful
in front of the bedroom door
and watch for movement.
But by the end of the week,
the detour signs are pulled
and my car is directed
back to the highway,
granting me another view:
the demolished building
the city was shielding me from.
A crane now sifts through fragments
and debris, sorting them into one pile
or another. As it holds
each piece of metal to the air
to let it flicker for a moment,
for me it is lifting the door,
the bed, the sheets, the wrist,
and the cup that should now be filling
with an early sunlight on the floor
of the motel. I watch in the mirror
as each object hangs, then drops.
My car approaches my building, and work.
I walk the darkened, sea-foam hallways
to my desk—and when the people
that I pass say, Morning, I say,
Morning, too, so that I can’t
be certain who is waking whom.

PERIPHERY

You are evading me.
You are just beyond me.
You are the length
of the hood of a car
away from me—
and thinner
than I remember,
dressed as if undressed
after work.
I reach until
I can meet your hand.
But you are in front of me
like the moon
on one week,
then behind me
like the moon on another.
You are trying
to move toward
the doors of a church
we both know,
and I won’t let you.
I step in front of you
and you step to the side
saying, Stay
on the periphery
and we’ll be in touch
this summer.
But what’s here
that won’t let me
speak to you—
that prevents me
from letting you
go inside,
that makes you
want to go inside?
I tell myself, Yes,
I know I must
stay here and lie
whenever I try
to retell the story.
Once, two friends stood
on opposite banks
of a stream.
Then, they were men
and a river,
and then, two ghosts—
the story becoming
more distant
or strange
the more I fear
the person listening.

HARUSPEX

The office lights chose
to remain half-lit
for the rest of the fall.
I went whistling
the song of two crows
down a hall unknowingly.
Through my phone
an exam room
slipped into my ear
and unfolded
its expanses brightly.
How does one
get to sleep
in a city of snowfields?
My father sent me
an absentee ballot,
and asked did I think
my future was secure?
I day-dreamt throughout,
and my eyes flew doubly
over a man, on a raft,
down-river—
his body, thin;
his liver, a white star
pressed against his skin.
It asked me to extract it
for its portents.
Back in the office,
my xeroxes spilled
through a seam of light.
They handed me
a memory of warmth
from distant fires.

‘

CLOSED LOOP

You try again
to shut your eyes—
rejoin your head
and heart—
afraid of being
called back to the house
and broken from
your little spell.
But no one is home
to call you home.
Nobody stops you
from pausing
in the last days
of August
like you do.
You’ve stepped outside
some nights
and wanted
to get back in.
There were lists
to be made,
glasses of water
to shift from table
to nightstand.
Stay and let yourself
be known
from the vantage
of sky and window—
your body centered
in a sprawl of lawns
that narrows
away from you
into a vanishing point
of smaller
and smaller houses,
where younger
and younger children
sit behind glass
looking out
onto increasingly
darkened streets,
imagining
unreal figures
at play beneath them—
beginning here
where you stand.
From window
to window,
childhood’s rules
are passed above you
endlessly:
all a boy must do
is close his eyes
and you can disappear.

—Peter Mishler

———————

Peter Mishler’s poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, New Ohio Review, and Crazyhorse. He teaches Creative Writing and English at Liverpool High School in Central New York.

Smoke Is Still Rising: Fiction — Taiaiake Alfred

Jan 062013

Taiaiake Alfred and his son Kai Aronhiente. In the distant background are his other two sons, Brandon Skanekohrákson and David Tiorhónko

—————-

Taiaiake Alfred is an old friend, a Kahnawake Mohawk from just outside Montreal, a former Marine, a scholar specializing in indigenous governance at the University of Victoria, a fierce and diligent advocate for native rights in Canada. He has published three scholarly books and any number of essays, polemics and columns, but lately he has turned to fiction to explore the world of his birth. It’s a wonderful opportunity and privilege for Numéro Cinq to offer the first preview of his work in progress which he calls “true” and a lament and which is sad and powerful and, yes, a keen for a lost land.

Some context: the simmering confrontation between natives and the Canadian government in Ottawa has recently boiled up again driven by a passionate hunger-striking native chief, Theresa Spence, and the Idle No More movement. One of the texts being handed out by native activists is a pamphlet written by Taiaiake and Tobold Rollo.

——

Some words on the whole book: It’s the story of a Mohawk man who struggles to stay Onkwehonwe (indigenous) even as his life and the culture of his community changes radically from his childhood growing up on the riverside, seeing that way of life destroyed by the St Lawrence Seaway and pollution of the river, to living in NYC as an ironworker, and the rise of the cigarette trade. Basically, if a lit scholar looked at it he’d probably see a fictionalized oral history of the Mohawk community in Kahnawake and Akwesasne, a meditation on our broken relation to the natural world, and not to sound too academic, an exploration of Indigenous masculinity and sexuality. I create the story, but I am committed to the book being “true” in the sense that everything in it actually happened and exists as my memories or other people’s stories or as traditional stories or legends – all interwoven. I see it as a remembrance or kind of lament, not for a way of life that doesn’t exist but for a collective spirit or soul that has been broken or corrupted – in parts I even attempt the second-person, though I may be pushing my luck with that!

—Taiaiake

I am standing on the shore looking out across the slate gray river at the mountain, my eyes tracing a path to St. Joseph’s oratory on Kawennote Tiohti:ake. An image from many years ago comes to me, that of Mohawk women walking across the black bridge to the city. They are walking across the freezing river to go sell their woven ash baskets and beadwork in Lachine or at the Bonsecours Market or in the Champs des Mars. So many of them had gone over and not come back because the winds in the middle of the river were strong and the steel frosted and slippery under their feet and they’d fallen onto the ice or into the water with their burdens on their backs. Every day is such a challenge when you’re living close to the land and the water. The river would take them and they wouldn’t have lasted more than a minute struggling against the weight of the packs on their backs and their heavy clothes and being pulled by the force of the current. They would be stunned by the cold of the ice studded water and then they would be gone under, joining the flow of the river and of time. Their bodies would be churned by the rapids and the rocks and they would be sent downstream to join with the sea and our memory. This ancestral pathway is the one I took myself as a young man on another cold December morning, and they still remember the day I crossed over from the other side but made my way back to the people again.

I was standing on the shore and I heard the sound of my name. I turned and to look over my shoulder through the skeletal winter bushes, towards the voice. I knew what was there but I was hoping I was wrong. Up on the road Raté was yelling at me and Jen was laughing. They want me to finish my business and get back in the van. I don’t want to leave the shore of the river, but I’m getting really cold standing there in the winter wind in just jeans and a t-shirt. The morning light is shining too bright for my hung over eye balls. So I break from the river and run up the gravel road, tripping on little stones frozen to the ground and jumping over slicks of black ice along the way. I hear my friends and their raunchy laughter above the blaring Back in Black. Standing on the road next to the van, if you hadn’t been there before you’d never be able to tell that the river was right there flowing by on the other side of the brown-fruit sumacs and thin, drooping, saplings of poplar.

Rateninos leaned out of the driver’s side window and said to me, “It’s about time, Cousin. What the hell were you doing over there for so long? You shake that little thing more than once and you’re playing with it!”

“It took me a while to find it, Raté, ‘cause it was hanging way down in my boot again,” I shot back, and we all laughed as I pulled the side door of the van open and climbed in the back where Jen was waiting for me.

I lay back on the bench seat and stretched my legs out. I closed my eyes and right away I was back on the bank. Then I felt Jen moving towards me. She draped her arms around my neck, pulled herself up closer and lifted her leg over mine until the soft inside of her thigh was resting on my lap just perfect. I still had my eyes closed but I knew she was smiling as her hands went under my shirt and she felt my stomach and chest and moved them around to my lower back and then down below my belt. She nuzzled her face into my neck and breathed in deeply and then looked up at me and with her eyes locked on mine she placed small, delicate kisses on my neck, on my mouth, and all over my face. When I felt the sweet sting of her bite on my ear, I breathed in sharply too and held it inside of me like the air perfumed with her scent was a gift, and only let it go when I had to part with it. I felt us together and noticed that we were driving now along the long, straight, gravel road back towards town. The world beyond the riverside just disappeared as I fell asleep with a picture of the river’s flowing water in my mind and the perfect sensation of that young girl’s warm breath and soft knowing hands on the skin under my clothes.

And then all the beauty vanished and I was tumbling down an ugly vortex of noise and pain. My ears were assaulted by ugly sounds of warping steel and snapping plastic, metal on metal scraped, shattered glass, high-pitched screams above and otherworldly groans below. I was upside down and weightless and it was all happening in slow motion, the time lag between what I was experiencing and the thought of it running through my mind making it all the more intense, like it was all happening to me doubly. Then suddenly everything was in real time and I was launched through the air by a huge and irresistible force and I felt the crushing pain of my face being smashed into a solid mass.

Darkness. Laying face down on the floor of the van, I wasn’t in the waking world. How real the sensation of being full of water seemed. Water bathed my eyes, water filled my ears, water rushing down my throat, water in my belly. I was outside of my body watching myself gag on water and I saw it gurgle out from my nose. I coughed up pieces of seaweed and tasted mud. I thought, weirdly, it’s not even unpleasant, it tastes like the river smells. I love that smell – cold fresh water, silky black mud, crawfish, cottonwood tree bark, rotting wood, seed pods, yellow perch, ice. Animal, plant, and fish life and the cold air comingling with moving water and old, old, rocks. This is the taste of the natural world, home, of my life. I dreamed about the river all the time, swimming across it, flying above it, standing in it feeling its swell as it rushed between my legs. But I could not remember ever feeling as if the whole expanse of the river was rushing into me.

I could not stop it. I was becoming the river.

Driving back toward the Saint Catherine locks a couple of miles to the east, where we knew we could cross over the dyke, Rateninos had passed out and we drove off the road at forty miles an hour. We went straight off the twenty-foot dyke and into the water, the van flipping over headlong and doing a barrel-roll in the air before landing right side up on its wheels. The thin December ice held the weight of the van just long enough for Raté and Jen to climb out of the shattered front door windows. They were standing outside of the van screaming and crying because I was still inside when the ice cracked and the van sunk up to its axels and started to take on water.

It was the taste of the river that pulled me back to a waking state and the realization that I was kneeling on a wet carpet floor and then two seconds later the carpet floor was that of a van floating in the water. By the time my mind had cleared from being smashed against the windshield at forty miles an hour the ice had given way and the van was bobbing in the water like a diving submarine with its sail still barely above the surface. I wish I could say that I recognized my predicament and that I acted with grim determination in the face of grave danger, that I knew it was do-or-die time and I took the action that needed to be done in the moment. But that’s not really the way it happened. I wasn’t even fully present in that moment and I can only tell the story because the flash of images, whiffs of smells and tastes and skin sensations of temperature and of bone pain have come back to me over many years of nightmares and willed remembering.

Two small tsunamis rushed through the van’s busted out side windows and seeing that worked up something inside of me. I became fully lucid and recovered my physical being again. Whatever animal, spirit or chemical it was that animates me took over completely. The power came on so strong that my arms and legs started shaking fiercely. I became a beast, screaming and battering the windshield with my bare fists. I felt the weight of a ton of dirty slush hitting me in the face as the windshield caved in from the pounding and the water pressure bearing down on the cracks in the glass. The river came on even stronger and poured into the vehicle. I started to kick wildly and scramble and squeeze my head and then the rest of my body through the broken windshield, desperately pushing and finally getting my body halfway out of the water, breathing in what air I could while trying to keep my hold on the surface ice. But I could not free myself from the sinking van because my jeans had snagged on glass shards that were sticking out from the frame of the broken windshield, and I lay there with my chest and arms and head on the ice for a tortuous minute, not able to free myself from the teeth of the heavy black hulk lurking just below the surface of the water.

The van filled up with water quickly and then it sank, dropping fast and I was drawn down with it, my dug in fingernails dragging across the ice as I dug in and tried desperately to halt my cold descent. The van sunk and I took the deepest breath I could manage before my neck, chin, mouth, nose, and eyes slipped below the surface and I was gone into the blackness.

Under water, I was able to move more freely, and with the strength of desperation I kicked myself out and away from the van as it was coming to rest at the bottom of the Seaway. I started swimming in the direction I figured was up, almost out of air, reaching out, pulling and with each stroke hoping to break the surface but being so disoriented in the utter blackness that I did not know if instead of heading up I was pushing myself further down towards the bottom and the last breath of my life.

I was still deep under water when I could not hold my breath any more. I thought I was dead, that my days on this earth had been all used up. I was just about dead and there was no light at the end of any tunnel, no ghosts walking around in the distance, no kindly father figure, no buckskinned ancestors, no Jesus, no life highlights flashing before my eyes, nothing but darkness and endless solitude. So this is how it feels to be a breath away from dying? It wasn’t what I expected. But it wasn’t painful and it wasn`t fearsome, so when my lungs felt like they were going to burst I just stilled myself. I stopped moving.

Floating with my arms above my head and my hands held open, resigned, peaceful, thoughts started coming into my head again. I don’t want to waste my life like this. I don’t want to do this to my family. I miss my grandmas. I’m hungry for cornbread and steak. I want to taste Jen and feel her belly pressed up against mine one more time. I felt anger rising. What a stupid way to die. Then I heard music. Maybe it was the song that was playing on the radio just before we crashed. The melody and the singer’s voice were clear and ringing in my head as I floated there in the murk. It was that song, Don’t Pay the Ferry Man. “I hate that song,” I said to myself, “There’s no goddamn way this is the soundtrack to my death, I’m not going out to a song about a fairy man!” And then I got pissed off too because my death was going to be cliché, a really unfunny parody of the glorious demise I’d fantasized about so many times, like taking a bullet in the chest on a battlefield. No white skeleton was going to lead this lost soul out of the water to the other side, Chris de goddamn Burgh. No way I was gonna pay that toll, fucking Frenchman. I was going over to the other side like everybody else sometime, but not this morning, not here, and not like this.

Just then I felt ice as first my hands and then my face bumped up against what felt like a rough slab of wet concrete. I’d risen to the surface and was looking up through grey water and I could see the feint overcast light of the new day through the nearly opaque frozen mass. The ice was thick, solid, and unbroken. I had come to the surface again but at a different place then at the hole I’d gone down through.

A scene from an old movie I’d seen about Harry Houdini, the famous magician, flashed in my mind. A trick had gone wrong and he was trapped in chains in some kind of iron lockbox filled with water, and he had survived by pressing his lips right up against the top of the box, breathing from the thin layer of air between the roof of the container and the surface of the water. That is what it was like for me in the Seaway; there were a couple of inches of space, a thin layer of life, between the surface of the water and the bottom of the ice. I was a Mohawk Houdini pressing my face up against the bottom of the ice and when the shifting swell of the water created a little gap, I grabbed air, which would be enough for some more life. I did that a few times, and I was able to crawl upside down along the underside of the ice until I felt my right hand push up and through to the feeling of cold morning.

I pulled myself out of the hole, laid my chest on the ice, and breathed, not quite sure if I was dead or alive. I saw the shore not too far away so I lowered myself back into the water and kicked and crawled and swam my way across the shattered ice and slushy water towards the shore, where I climbed out of the water and onto a piece of jagged shale where I sat down and started shivering fiercely.

—Taiaiake

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Taiaiake is a Kahnawake Mohawk writer and professor of Indigenous governance, knowledge and history. He was born at Tiohtiake, Montreal, was educated by Jesuits, and served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantryman in the 1980s. He later studied history at Concordia University and earned a doctorate in political science at Cornell University. He’s now a Professor of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria and divides his time between Kahnawake and the territory of the Wsanec Nation on Vancouver Island, where he lives with his wife and three sons.

Taiaiake’s writings include three scholarly books and many research and policy documents produced for Indigenous organizations, five years as the leading opinion columnist in Canada’s national Aboriginal newspaper Windspeaker, and essays and humour published in numerous journals including Maisonneuve. He has recently shifted away from scholarly research and essays and has begun working on a book of stories/memoir of life in the Mohawk community of Kahnawake (from which this excerpt is drawn), as well as a work of creative nonfiction on Indigenous masculinity and hunting.

The 19th Century & Milan’s Duomo: A Collage of Impressions and Photographs — Natalia Sarkissian

Jan 052013

On the roof of Milan’s Duomo amidst the spires and gargoyles and saints and angels, it’s noon on a late fall day and I’m here shooting. The sun shines over the city that spreads out like a bristling blanket; new skyscrapers and old bell towers puncture the worn brick and stone fabric of the town. At the edges, the Alps gleam, snowy in the distance. Above, the cathedral glows white against the sky. And all around me, friendly Romanian tourists in black jackets and thigh-high boots jostle, vying for vantage points from which to take pictures. They elbow in, admiring, snapping and clicking. Another group—this time from China—bursts from the stairs. Chattering and hopping about like hungry little sparrows, they freeze the landscape and their trip with hundreds of shots.

I retreat from the crush, thinking of Shelley and Tennyson and Henry James and Mark Twain who traveled here, part of their century’s onslaught: the privileged class that toured Italy, its monuments and museums serving as a finishing school. They climbed here too. Equally ecstatic but without cameras, armed with pens. They wrote letters to friends and poems for periodicals and chapters in books praising the Duomo. And of a different opinion, John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde came. They hated what they saw; their words were scathing.

On the rib of the roof, in the sun but with a brisk breeze stirring, I think of their descriptions and train my lens back on the cathedral, to see what they once saw.

At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the amber sunlight, rose slowly above the pygmy housetops, as one sometimes sees, in the far horizon, a gilded and pinnacled mass of cloud lift itself above the waste of waves, at sea—the Cathedral! We knew it in a moment.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869

This cathedral is a most astonishing work of art. It is built of white marble, and cut into pinnacles of immense height, and the utmost delicacy of workmanship, and loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groups of dazzling spires, relieved by the serene depth of this Italian heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seem gathered among those clustered shapes, is beyond any thing I had imagined architecture capable of producing.

PB Shelley, letter to TLP Esquire, 1818

We wished to go aloft. The sacristan showed us a marble stairway and told us to go up one hundred and eighty-two steps…. We were tired by the time we got there. This was the roof. Here, springing from its broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, looking very tall close at hand, but diminishing in the distance like the pipes of an organ. We could see now that the statue on the top of each was the size of a large man, though they all looked like dolls from the street. We could see, also, that from the inside of each and every one of these hollow spires, from sixteen to thirty-one beautiful marble statues looked out upon the world below.  

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869

………………………………….I climb’d the roofs at break of day;
………………………………….Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.
………………………………….I stood among the silent statues,
………………………………….And statued pinnacles, mute as they.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Daisy,” 1851

Every face is eloquent with expression, and every attitude is full of grace. Away above, on the lofty roof, rank on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond. In their midst the central steeple towers proudly up like the mainmast of some great Indiaman among a fleet of coasters.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869

The cathedral is a mixture of Perpendicular with Flamboyant, the latter being peculiarly barbarous and angular, owing to its being engrafted, not on a pure, but a very early penetrative Gothic … The rest of the architecture among which this curious Flamboyant is set is a Perpendicular with horizontal bars across: and with the most detestable crocketing, utterly vile. Not a ray of invention in a single form… Finally the statues all over are of the worst possible common stonemasons’ yard species, and look pinned on for show. The only redeeming character about the whole being the frequent use of the sharp gable … which gives lightness, and the crowding of the spiry pinnacles into the sky.”

John Ruskin, Notebooks, October 17, 1849

 .The

The Cathedral is an awful failure. Outside the design is monstrous and inartistic. The over-elaborated details stuck high up where no one can see them; everything is vile in it; it is, however, imposing and gigantic as a failure, through its great size and elaborate execution.

Oscar Wilde, letter to his mother, 1875

While I study the roof, the Romanians finish taking pictures and sun themselves, propped against pinnacles. An hour or so later, they get up and file down the stairs, off perhaps to go Christmas shopping at Rinascente department store across the way. I follow them down but enter the cathedral to take pictures of the interior for this essay. Today’s strong sunlight blazing through the stained glass windows has set the somber interior burning.

The interior, though very sublime, is of a more earthly character, and with its stained glass and massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures, and the silver lamps, that burn forever under the canopy of black cloth beside the brazen altar and the marble fretwork of the dome, give it the aspect of some gorgeous sepulchre. There is one solitary spot among those aisles, behind the altar, where the light of day is dim and yellow under the storied window, which I have chosen to visit, and read Dante there.

PB Shelley, letter to TLP Esquire, 1869

.
 .

The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture…. The figure was that of a man without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fiber and tendon and tissue of the human frame represented in minute detail. It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it now. I shall dream of it sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed’s head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869

St. Charles Borromeus lies at his eternal rest in a small but gorgeous sepulchral chapel…and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his shrivelled mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves occur to you…. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendour of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires.

Henry James, “A European Summer, VI.” The Nation, Nov. 21, 1872.

. .

They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter’s at Rome. I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human hands.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869

As I  strolled beside its vast indented base one evening, and felt it,  above me, rear its grey mysteries into the starlight while the  restless human tide on which I floated rose no higher than the  first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted to  believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondary  merit, and that the main point is mass–such mass as may make it  a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way a  great building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More than  any other it represents difficulties mastered, resources  combined, labour, courage and patience.

Henry James, “A European Summer, VI.” The Nation, Nov. 21, 1872.

At the Duomo, I’ve lost track of time. When I finally squeeze onto the metro I realize I’m going to be late picking up my son to take him to the dentist, but strangely, down here in this dark tunnel, I don’t feel pressured. Words and images of the Duomo swirl in front of me and I’m uplifted.

––Natalia Sarkissian

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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.

Dogfights | Short Story — Richard Farrell

Jan 032013

Herewith a miraculous little story by Richard Farrell, a story I adore because it reaches beyond mere morality to what I think of as the higher calling of the heart. The hero is a deserter from the American Navy who is screwing his best friend’s wife. The friend dies, a dog dies, and yet the tone is sweet and sadly happy, infused with love, friendship and a deliciously amoral joie de vivre. The theme is captured beautifully in this wonderfully paradoxical sentence: “My friendship with Goethe—the evolution of it, the unraveling of betrayal and fear toward some grotesque, twisted loyalty—remains as strange a puzzle as anything I’ve ever encountered. And yet I would do anything for him, even stop fucking his wife, if only he’d ask me to.”

Goethe paces the cobby Pomeranian back and forth along a cement seawall overlooking the eastern Aegean until, after three or four passes, Charo settles on a perfect spot and squats. How I hate that dog. I am filled with shameful, violent thoughts toward it. My friend snaps the leash and the dog trots back toward us, leaving a steaming turd in the brown grass.

Goethe’s face appears heavy this morning. Our normally garrulous stroll has passed mostly without words. We scramble up mossy stairs from the seawall toward Isiodou Avenue in what’s become an increasingly awkward silence, as two-stroke mopeds crackle around corners like a hive of honeybees. It’s Tuesday, Port Day, and soon the cruise ships will arrive. A legion of sleepy young Greeks are zooming off to man their stalls for the onslaught of tourists.

The avenue snakes through hilly neighborhoods of the old city of Rhodes, then flattens out toward the park. We are headed for the ancient acropolis, which stands waiting in the shrinking shade of a tall cypress. The mopeds drone off into silence as we crest the hill. Endless sky tumbles toward a perfect blue horizon, a blueness broken only by myrtle shrubs and the Doric columns of the acropolis—half-a-dozen soot-stained columns with fluted shafts jutting into the sky like God’s craggy fingers. Goethe unhooks the dog and she darts off, running between ancient stones and red sage.

“They’ve discovered something in my lungs,” Goethe says. I know instantly it’s the worst news. He wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t.

“Jesus,” I say, uncertain about what follows.

“I’m going back to England,” he says. “I need to know you’ll stay and help Mary-Bell with the hotel.”

Mary-Bell is his wife and I’m fucking her.

Goethe knows about our affair. It’s one of his many charms—the fact that he doesn’t let this interfere with our friendship, our morning walks, our love of the ancient Greek island. I’ve been living with them a year, since abandoning my post as a division officer on the U.S.S. Austin P. Hall, leaving behind a locker full of khakis, half-a-suitcase of civilian clothes, two hundred bucks in cash, and a career of monotonous waves, gray hulls and loose discipline. Charmed by Mary-Bell. Charmed by Goethe. Charmed by Greece, by Rhodes, by the luminous sea. I walked away from that life and stayed.

“How long will you be gone?” I ask.

Goethe smiles. “I suspect I won’t be coming back. I suspect my departure from our island will be permanent.”

Goethe doesn’t look like he’s dying. Sixty-three and a few pounds overweight, he has only streaks of gray in his blond hair, and his skin remains taut and unwrinkled. There’s a sallowness about his face, a certain leathery hue. But then again, we all look a little yellow in the bright Greek sunshine. He walks three miles in the morning every day before coffee, and then walks again with the dog and me. He swims for an hour in the afternoon sea and runs around his hotel with the stamina and energy of a man half his age. It seems utterly absurd that he’s sick, beyond plausibility. But he’s not a joking man.

“When will you leave?” I ask.

“The day after tomorrow,” he says.

“I can’t stay here,” I say. I almost say “without you,” but choke this part back. “Maybe it’s time I faced certain things.”

“I don’t think so,” Goethe says. He lays his palm on my shoulder. “Let’s get a drink,” he says. “We need a drink. Sobriety is overrated at times like this.”

“Times like this,” I say. A beer is the last thing I need, but I won’t refuse his request. He whistles and the scruffy mutt trots back to us, its thin lips mocking me with a smile.

My friendship with Goethe—the evolution of it, the unraveling of betrayal and fear toward some grotesque, twisted loyalty—remains as strange a puzzle as anything I’ve ever encountered. And yet I would do anything for him, even stop fucking his wife, if only he’d ask me to.

Across the sea, a thin fog slowly parts, revealing the distant, purple shoulders of Turkish mountains. A massive cruise ship glides in toward Rhodes’ harbor. Two tugs churn out to meet the incoming ship. Wheezing plumes of sulfurous smoke rise from the tugs’ stacks and bend at right angles in the wind, forming parallel, black sevens against the cloudless sky as they mark time toward the luxury liner. I think about my father, the only man I ever loved the way I love Goethe. I’ve betrayed them both in different but profound ways.

We find an open bar and order beers on the patio. Charo snarls at me, then curls up at Goethe’s feet and falls asleep.

A year ago, when my ship arrived in Rhodes for some much needed liberty, Goethe walked in and found me doubled over his wife behind the reception desk of their hotel, her cigarette still burning in an ashtray next to the guest register. As I scrambled toward the exit, Goethe pumped shells into a shotgun chamber. I heard a crack, then a furnace blast of heat scorched my shoulder as buckshot penetrated my flesh. My skull smashed against the sliding half-door and I passed out.

I woke the next day at dinnertime with a throbbing headache and a flaming shoulder blade. Goethe turned away the shore patrol. He told them he had no idea where I’d gone. From my hotel bed, I watched as the Austin P. Hall weighed anchor and steamed out of port. I bid a silent but overdue farewell to my ship and its crew. The frigate cleared the seawall and disappeared. I was both set free and imprisoned.

While I healed, nibbling croissants and sipping ouzo beneath a sun porch, Mary-Bell delivered food and drinks to me on trays covered with pink hibiscus flowers. Twice a day, she changed the dressing on my shoulder. Twice a day, she nursed me back to health. Twice a day, she slid my boxers below my knees and gave me oral sex.

A week after the Austin P. Hall departed Rhodes—rendering me a fugitive, a deserter in a time of war—Goethe offered me a job at their hotel and I accepted. We were sitting on the patio, overlooking the sea. I was out of bed by then, stronger, though not yet healed. The sun baked against my bandaged shoulder.

He said the hotel needed repairs, and he spoke with humor of his ongoing battle against deleterious sea-air, a battle I was familiar with, a battle that every sailor knows must constantly be fought but can never be won. He said he couldn’t pay much but that I’d be a welcome guest.

“More than a guest,” he said.

I started to protest but he raised a hand.

“We will not speak of the unpleasantness between us,” he said. “A man comes to realize certain things about the ones he loves. There is a price to pay, but there is forgiveness on the other side.”

And though my shoulder burned, and the bruise on my skull had leeched from purple to yellow to green, I accepted his offer, the strangest one I’ve ever received. I had no other choice; going home meant facing disgrace, charges, shame, and quite likely prison. Staying meant something unfamiliar, something wild and new: sunshine, hibiscus flowers and the sound of Mary-Bell’s lips on me. I assumed, I believed deeply, that one day Goethe would kill me. But no one chooses the means, manner and moment of their death. So I shook his hand and accepted his offer. The rest, I told myself, was for the gods to sort out.

Back at the hotel, Mary-Bell lounges on a sofa and sips a fizzy orange drink through a straw. A small pink flower floats atop the slushy ice like a pink lily pad. Red hair hangs in long, ropy curls around her thin face. She is thirty-one but looks to be much older. The Mediterranean sun has raised dense freckles on her face and her breasts bulge from her shirt like whales breeching the sea’s surface. She takes in too much sun, drinks too much coffee and rarely has fewer than three drinks a day.

In a different century and climate, she might have been painted by Pissarro.

Pavlo, the hotel’s Croatian waiter, serves Goethe and me cappuccinos in tiny white mugs.

“She agrees with me,” Goethe says. “That it would be best if you stayed.”

Mary-Bell glances up.

“It’s impossible,” I say. “You’ve known since the beginning that I would eventually have to go.”

Mary-Bell sighs in an exasperated way.

“Nonsense,” Goethe says. “You have a home here. Go back and face what? Prison?”

She holds out a cigarette, which Pavlo lights, hovering over her like some colonial man-servant. I wonder, sometimes, if he’s sleeping with her, too. My own betrayals have made me vigilant for hidden signs: the length of their glances, the way Mary-Bell cups Pavlo’s wrist with her fingers as he leans in to light her cigarette. If she can cheat on Goethe with me, then why not cheat on me with Pavlo?

“I don’t understand why you can’t stay here for treatment,” I say. Mary-Bell is casting her fuck-me-now eyes in my general direction. It’s been over a day, a rare drought for us. She drives me wild, beyond the point of reason or logic.

“The Greeks stopped practicing medicine with Asclepius,” Goethe says. “Their doctors aren’t fit for goats. No, I’ll go home for this. Stewart will stay and help out. It is better all around. I won’t be gone long. A month, maybe two.”

His lies surprise me. But then again it’s all a web of thinly veiled deceit here. Everyone knows the truth but refuses to speak it.

He unscrews the top on a jar of nail polish and begins to paint the toes on Mary-Bell’s left foot. The paint color is tourmaline. I know this because the bottle sits on Mary-Bell’s night stand. I can see up her skirt—leopard print panties.

“I’m going with you, my love,” Mary-Bell says. “I’ve thought it over and I’ll not stay here alone. We’ll close the hotel. We are together in this.”

“You won’t be alone,” he says. “You two will stay and run things.” He nods to me and takes his wife’s other foot. “I’ll be back soon. We need the summer season.”

I object again, but Goethe silences me with a wave as if to say the matter is decided. Mary-Bell opens her legs wider, offering me a more expansive view.

In Goethe’s absence, everything will fly apart. I’m certain of this.

“You are a bad man,” Pavlo says as we walk into the kitchen. He wears a short white coat and a thin black tie. Were I to guess, I’d say he’s twenty-four, but he could be much older or younger. It’s impossible to say. “What will you do when Mr. Goethe is gone?”

“You just keep making the drinks,” I say. “Goethe will be back soon enough.”

“I must leave, too,” Pavlo says. “I need to return to my family.”

He’s never mentioned family before, and in two weeks it will be June. The hotel will be filled to capacity. I hope this is only a dramatic ploy, an attempt to grab my attention. Maybe he’s positioning himself for a raise in salary or an extra day off. Mary-Bell will need him here after Goethe leaves. She can’t run the place alone.

“Who will cover your shifts?” I say. “Don’t do this, Pavlo. Not now. Can’t it wait a month?”

He grins and shrugs his shoulders, and I realize again how much Goethe holds us all together.

That afternoon, when Goethe has gone to the market, Mary-Bell and I run off to their bedroom. She slaps my ass hard. She smells of gin and baby powder. I nibble the puckered blue dolphin tattoo on her ankle. The dolphin looks waterlogged, a time-stamped reminder that all of us, no matter how immortal we may feel on this island, are slipping away.

I kiss up her legs, one ear tuned for the sound of Goethe’s Citroen pulling back into the driveway, the other for the pitchy moans which mark her pleasure.

“You’re an ungrateful little shit,” she says. “You would leave me?”

“What choice do I have?” I ask.

“You’re so full of yourself,” she says.

“I’ve already stayed too long,” I say. “I have things to answer for. I have people who need to know that I’m alive.”

“What about me?” she asks. “Am I just a throwaway?”

I don’t answer, but kiss her harder, my tongue sliding up her leg. Her leopard panties are balled up on the floor.

Mary-Bell fucks like she’s on fire. I begin to understand why Goethe can’t die here. She’d mount his corpse. We collapse on top of each other listen for the sound of Goethe coming home. I won’t miss the fear, the sneaking around, the vigilance, but I will miss such burning passion.

Smitten. That was the word Goethe used to describe the moment he first saw Mary-Bell. She danced on the stages of a cruise ship. She glided on the waves for six months before coming to Rhodes. She must have seduced men by the dozen. Then one day she walked into the hotel and Goethe stood her a drink. The next morning, they married in town.

Goethe bought her one drink. That’s all it took. Me he had to shoot.

I rub my hand across her stomach and I swear she purrs, the heat from her body arousing me anew. Mary-Bell tells me often that she has only loved one man, Goethe, but could never be faithful to him. Goethe tells me he has loved many women but has only been faithful to Mary-Bell. I am their confessor, sinning and absolving in equal measure. I betray them both with every breath I take.

Goethe knows our affair didn’t end with the shotgun blast. He knows we fuck all the time, everywhere, every time he isn’t looking. When he goes for a swim, we do it in the bathroom. When he naps in the afternoon, she masturbates me on the couch. At night, when Goethe falls asleep watching the BBC, Mary-Bell and I sneak out to an empty room and do it again. I’ve never been with a more passionate woman, so constantly aroused. At the same time, I’ve never had a more honest trusting friend than Goethe. And he knows.

For reasons I may never understand, none of it matters to him.

I kiss her forehead and slip out of their bedroom. I need to leave this island. I need to go home and face my crimes. I need to hug my father and to apologize. I need to look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

I’m taking a shower when Goethe enters my cramped bathroom carrying a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. He sits on the toilet as I rinse soap from my eyes and the remnants of his wife from my scrotum.

“Limassol?” he asks. “Let’s hire a guide and go for one last partridge hunt on Cyprus?”

“I can’t stay here,” I say. “You have to know that.”

“A hunting trip will help you decide. Say yes. Don’t deny a dying man’s final wish.”

Goethe and I have hunted partridge many times together on Cyprus, and each time, I expect him to shoot me in the woods. The water runs down my body and into the drain. It’s my body that betrays me, not my heart. I wonder what my father tells his friends. “What’s become of Stewart,” they must ask. “Is he still in the Navy?” “Has he made Commander yet?” His son, a disgrace beyond words, except for the only word that remains: deserter.

“I can’t stay,” I say. “I won’t.”

“Nonsense,” Goethe says. “Where will you go?”

He passes a glass of vodka to me in the shower.

“The morning ferry to Limassol?” I say, rinsing the last drops of soap and sin from me. I sometimes secretly hope that he will shoot me again. “Grilled squab at sunset?”

“Smashing,” he says. “I was hoping you’d agree.”

My heart belongs to Goethe, my body belongs to his wife, and my shame belongs to my father. I drink the bitter vodka and shut off the water.

“I have something to tell you,” I say. From time to time, I’m overcome by a need to confess. I need to tell him why, why I can’t stay away from his wife, even if he already knows.

He hands me a towel and shakes his head.

“No death-bed confessions, Stewart,” Goethe says. “They’re so contrived.”

I grab the towel and he pours more vodka.

“You lied to her,” I say. “You told her you were coming back.”

Goethe grins. His white teeth glow beneath his tan skin.

“Truth should never hurt,” he says. “Not to the ones you love.”

The next morning, my shotgun packed and hunting clothes on, I come downstairs to a maelstrom. Three thousand euro is missing from the hotel safe and Pavlo, the Croatian waiter, has poured out the alcohol from every bottle into the bar sink. The empty bottles are scattered on the floor and counter like some ancient battlefield. Only half a bottle of limoncello remains, standing alone on the long, tile counter like a glowing, yellow joke. Goethe calmly rights the overturned bottles. The entire room smells of stale booze. Mary-Bell is enraged and stomps around the bar, cursing.

“Take the dog out, will you Stewart?” Goethe says to me over her rants.

When a man has no exits, the only way out is to go deeper in. I tell myself that falling in love with Mary-Bell remains the most viable option. Suicide stands a close second. Neither option is as crazy as they sound. At least with Pavlo gone, I no longer fear that Mary-Bell’s affection may be further divided.

I grab the leash but can’t find Charo. I call the dog’s name all around the hotel, but she’s nowhere. I search, in the gardens, in the hallways and in the alley behind the service entrance for the better part of fifteen minutes before giving up. I don’t need this right now.

I return to the lobby and tell them. Pavlo must have forgotten to latch the gate in the midst of his dramatic departure.

“The dog has slipped out,” I say.

Mary-Bell collapses into a sobbing lump. She moans, over and over, that surely she will die. She begs Goethe to call the police. At last he nods to me and I do it. I phone the station to report the theft, the vandalism and the missing dog.

“Looks like the morning ferry is off,” he says softly. “I never anticipated such a scene.”

“What will we do?” I say. “She won’t make it if that damned dog doesn’t return.”

But Goethe offers no solutions. We head out to search for the dog.

We cover the seawall, scanning the eastern shores. Children play in the sand. Waves crash and roll.

“I’ll miss you,” I say. The words tumble awkwardly from my mouth. I’ve never said such a thing to a man before.

He stares out to sea and places his purple-veined hand on my shoulder. I think of my own father, how confused he must be by what I’ve done. I haven’t spoken to him in fourteen months.

“You can be happy here, Stewart,” Goethe says to me. “It’s a good place to spend your days.”

“I’ve been gone too long,” I say. “I have to go back. Surely you understand that?”

“We’re all running from something,” he says. “We run and run until the race ends. In this case,” he points to his chest, “a tumor in the lungs.”

“My father deserves an explanation.”

“He’ll understand,” Goethe says. “Once I’ve gone, you’ll write to him. Invite him here. For a man to see his son living here, that will be enough.”

“He’ll never understand,” I say. “You don’t know him.”

“He’ll understand, Stewart. I know it seems impossible. But you have no reason to leave here.”

I shake my head. “I have even less reason to stay.”

We look through a dozen or more alleys before I finally spot the dog, curled up next to half-opened bags of garbage. Goethe bends down and lifts Charo off the cobblestones.

“Must have been a car,” he says. “Poor little thing.”

He places the dog onto a clean spot in the alley then disappears around the corner. I stand there, unsure where to look. The view is bad all around: trash, graffiti, dead dog. A few minutes later, he returns, carrying two plastic bags. He carefully slips Charo’s body inside the first, then places the first bag inside the second. There is such tenderness in the way he treats the dead animal. For the first time, I realize how his own mortality must weigh on his mind. I glimpse, in his handling of the dog, some gesture of what he must hope for. The act of dying is grotesque, but the handling of the dead is always an act of mercy.

He turns toward me and smiles.

“We will celebrate tonight,” he says. “We need one last night out before I go.”

“But Mary-Bell,” I say. “She’ll need us now.”

“Tut, tut,” Goethe says. “Our job is to live, not to dwell on death.”

We walk off toward a secluded spot on the cliffs. He places the bag on the ground and slips two large stones inside and ties it off. He points to the bag and then to me.

“Why me?” I say. “I want nothing to do with this subterfuge.”

He puts his hand on his back and makes a cranky face. “Bad back.”

So I lift the dog and the stones and heave it into the sea. It splashes below us and floats a moment on the surface, then sinks out of sight.

“One can only hope for a burial at sea,” he says. “She was a good dog, Stewart. A man should have a good dog.”

We don’t tell Mary-Bell about finding the dog. We let her believe that Charo is still missing, let her hope awhile longer. We let her do whatever she wants, just like always.

“I’m worried about Mary-Bell,” I say that night at a bar. I don’t know how we’ll get back to the hotel. We are already too drunk to walk much less drive.

“You have a lot to learn,” Goethe says. “Mary-Bell is tougher than both of us combined.”

“I think you’re wrong,” I say. “I think she puts on a brave face.”

“It’s been a good life,” he says, picking up his beer. “I have few regrets. It’s the goal, my friend. When you get to the end, one shouldn’t be filled with regrets.”

“I was engaged once,” I say. I’ve never told him this before. “She wanted four kids, a dog, a yard with a pool and a picket fence. A midnight blue Grand Cherokee in the driveway.”

“And you didn’t want those things?” Goethe asks.

“I thought I did,” I say. “Who knows what I really wanted.”

“It gets easier,” he says. “When you’re young, life seems endless, full of choices. Then those choices narrow. Things that matter come into focus. It becomes clearer.”

“Do you love her?” I ask him. “Do you love Mary-Bell?”

“With every breath I take,” he says without irony. “And I love you, too. It will be hard to leave you both.”

“She’ll destroy me,” I say.

Goethe smiles. “There are worse ways to go.”

Goethe slides a greasy sardine into his mouth and orders more beer. Though my head throbs already, I don’t object. When have I ever been able to object to him?

“My father flew Spitfires in the war,” he says. “Battle of Britain. ‘Never was so much owed by so many’ — all that good stuff. He shot down a dozen or so Nazi planes. Heroic chap, in his own way. One day, when I was about fourteen, I asked him if he ever felt bad about it. About killing another human being. The war had been over for years, but I wondered if it ever kept him up at night. I remember it quite vividly. We were in Hyde Park and it was raining. He seemed so old to me that day, though of course, he was much younger then than I am now. He looked at me quite seriously, in a way he never had before. A man to man way. He didn’t answer for a spell. Then he said, very simply, that he’d never thought of it before. Not once. He’d always just accepted it, the war, the killing. There was no guilt in it, no shame, no regret.”

“What are you telling me?” I say.

He shrugs. “It’s just a story about my father,” Goethe says. He hands me another beer which I don’t need. Then he adds, “We can never know people, Stewart. The soul is vast, an unknowable cave that opens unto other caves.”

“This is the wisdom you’re leaving me with?”

“No,” he says, smiling. “This is the wisdom I’ll leave with you. Every man needs three things: money enough not to suffer, someone to come home to at night, and a good dog. With those three things, you can lead a happy life. Don’t be greedy for more. Don’t look back so much. You’re smart, Stewart. You’re young and strong. Run the hotel. It might, in the end, be more than you need.”

“What will you tell Mary-Bell about the dog?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.

The next morning, a few hours before Goethe is set to fly off the island, I walk alone beneath the ramparts in Rhodes’ old city, where the Knights Hospitaller once defended the island against the Ottomans. Tourists stroll by, gawking as if these ancient walls were built only for their amusement. My head aches from last night’s booze and from all of this history. Rhodes is an ancient place. It’s been settled and conquered so many times. I sometimes wonder if the island has just grown tired. These days, it seems to yield its history and secrets up without a fight.

Back at the hotel, Goethe’s bags by the lobby door, I hear Mary-Bell on the phone. She’s talking to the police in Athens. They have arrested Pavlo trying to rob the cash register at another hotel. Inexplicably, Pavlo offered up Mary-Bell’s name as a reference and they called. Goethe whispers these details to me while Mary-Bell asks the detective if Pavlo knows about the dog. Pavlo must say, no. Nothing about the dog.

“In that case,” she says. “I’ve never heard of the little prick.”

She hangs up the phone and Goethe begins to laugh. Mary-Bell and I are soon laughing with him, all three of us in the kitchen laughing without restraint.

It is then that Goethe tells Mary-Bell that the dog is dead. He also tells her that there is no treatment for his condition. He delivers the bad news quickly, a one-two punch that I expect will knock her out.

But instead of coming apart, Mary-Bell takes the worst news with a stoic pride.

“I’m not dumb,” she says. “But you could’ve told me last night, before you two ran off to get drunk.”

I leave them together in the lobby. I watch Mary-Bell curl up close to her husband on a couch. He puts his arm around her shoulder and kisses her head. Goethe has refused my offer of a ride to the airport. We have already said our goodbyes and he will endure no further scene. I close the door behind me and leave them alone.

A cold and damp winter passes slowly until at last the rains let up. A crispness remains in the evenings but the days warm quickly now. I light a fire in the lobby and come back to our small apartment behind the front desk.

Mary-Bell wears a long robe and slippers. Her stomach pushes the robe out ever so roundly. The hotel is almost empty. We are still months away from the start of tourist season.

“Why didn’t he care?” I ask Mary-Bell again, for the thousandth time. “Why did he allow us to carry on as we did? Why didn’t he stop us?”

I ask her these questions over and over, but she never answers them. She holds to her secret knowledge the way she holds our child, as if caring for it is a woman’s work. I keep thinking that one time she’ll relent and tell me. But it’s equally possible that she doesn’t know the answers.

“Paint my toenails, Stewy,” she says, thrusting her foot towards my face. “Too many questions. You always ask too many questions.”

I reach for the jar of nail polish and unscrew the lid.

As I paint, Mary-Bell opens her robe and rubs palm oil over her stretched stomach. Her stomach is my favorite part of her body, that smooth shiny skin just below her navel. It never fails to arouse me, even more so since the child inside her has stretched the skin wider and made the surface smoother. The little boy she carries, my son, is due in a few weeks. She was pregnant then, when Goethe asked me to stay. He knew, but didn’t say anything. He wanted me to decide on my own. Mary-Bell said that he would never have told me about the child if I had chosen to leave.

Out in the hotel gardens blood-red anemone poppies have already bloomed over the spot where we buried a third of Goethe’s ashes. Another third stayed in Essex, buried with his mother and father, and the rest remain in a silver urn on the mantle. Mary-Bell has asked me to take the urn away before the baby comes. She says that it’s bad luck to leave the dead around when a baby arrives.

This morning, I wrote my father a letter and invited him to Rhodes to meet his grandson. I have no idea if he’ll accept my invitation, but I felt a great relief when I dropped that letter in the mail.

I finish painting Mary-Bell’s toes and reach for the other foot. I don’t believe her about Goethe’s remains. We both need Goethe close, and I know that when the time comes, she won’t ask me to move him. It would be impossible to erase his presence from our lives. It surrounds us like the sea air.

The puppy trots in from the other room and curls around its tail. We’ve named the dog Pavlo, at Mary-Bell’s insistence. I can only speculate on what secret pleasure this must give her. The dog yawns widely, wags its tail and looks up at me expectantly. It’s time for the dog’s nightly walk. Mary-Bell closes her eyes and drifts off to sleep as I finish painting her last toes. I rub her feet and I try to imagine what it will feel like to be a father. I try to picture my future son, what he will look like, what his interest and passions will be. I try to imagine what I will teach him about life, about love and desire and loyalty. I wonder what I will tell my son about Goethe and about all the many things that happened on this island before his birth. Is it even possible to explain? I pull a blanket over Mary-Bell’s round belly and turn off the light. The room falls quiet. In the distance, the slightest sound of breaking waves. I grab the leash and the dog jumps up, follows me to the door, wagging its tail with wonder at the many the adventures that wait on the other side.

—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 is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including memoir, craft essays, and book reviews, has published at Hunger Mountain and Numéro Cinq. He lives in San Diego.

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The Perfume Trees of Arkansas: Fiction — Garry Craig Powell

Nov 072012

Garry Craig Powell is a transplanted Englishman who seems to have found his Inner Arkansan. Or he has that Nabokovian gift of mimicry coupled with a fascination for Americana. “The Perfume Trees of Arkansas” is a short story about an Iraq War veteran nicknamed Jesus who drinks too much and doesn’t exactly WANT to die but doesn’t care much either which leads him to a stunning act of self-renunciation that is, well, oddly transformative. “The Perfume Trees of Arkansas” is funny without exactly being hilarious; it’s also immensely sad (with the sadness of all that lost, drug-polluted and under-educated underclass America that is yet human and oddly hopeful) without being depressing. The author lavishes much attention on his milieu — you think he must have grown up there, too.

——–

The night shift is over at Michel’s, and Nordic Jesus sweats in the Chariot of Doom, smoking a joint and wishing he could see real bright colors. Beyond the parking lot, in the lamplight, the brick boutiques, coffee shops and antiques stores of the Heights have the muted hues of a vintage monochrome photograph that has been artily tinted. Nordic Jesus feels that life has become remote, like a movie playing on a cell phone screen. He can see the world but he isn’t in the picture anymore. From the day his HumVee hit an IED on the airport road in Baghdad, it’s as if he never got over the concussion and what happened to Doug and the others. After the explosion his buddies joked that he’d risen from the dead and started calling him Jesus; when the 39^th returned to Arkansas the nickname followed him. Nordic Jesus, his friend Elijah dubbed him, when his orange hair and beard began to look like a Viking’s, and the moniker stuck. Owen has even started calling himself Nordic Jesus now, mainly because he finds blasphemy funny—it’s one in the eye for his dad, a Church of Christ preacher—but also because he’s just superstitious enough to hope that some of the magic of the man from Galilee might rub off on him. He wishes he would just wake up; so far it hasn’t been much of a resurrection.

Yalla, he coaxes himself in Arabic, Come on. When he hears the steel door of the kitchen slamming, he turns his head to see Michel locking it, then stumbling across the lot toward him.

Nordic Jesus likes his boss—Michel doesn’t piss him off, anyway, like most people do—and Michel’s accent and manners amuse him. He’s a genuine French chef, short, fat, dark and alcoholic, and plays the part to the hilt.

“Go home, Jesus,” he says, smacking his employee’s car. It’s an ’89 Chevy pickup with hand painted flames on the sides, the legend ‘Chariot of Doom’ in big black gothic letters across the rear window of the cab, and a bumper sticker that reads Jesus is Lord. “You have enough trouble with the police lately, I think,” Michel adds, pinching his assistant’s cheek and slapping it for good measure.

The hash is taking effect. The Heights are turning into a town in the South of France, the streetlights are Van Gogh fireballs, and Michel’s parting words are imbued with significance. “Sois sage,” Michel says, before staggering away and flopping into his car. Be good, Nordic Jesus thinks, remembering his high school French. But doesn’t sage mean ‘wise,’ too?

The Chariot of Doom starts with a smoker’s cough. Nordic Jesus finishes the joint and wishes he could die. The dogwood trees and crape myrtles that form a canopy over the parking lot are blooming, and their scent reminds him of women, makes him yearn for one again—it’s been months. It’s strange that his sense of smell has remained acute; maybe that’s why cooking is the one thing he still loves. Through the open window he breathes in the air that steams around him like a fragrant gumbo, and the aromas of the evening’s dishes linger in his nostrils: garlic, onion, sour cream, prawns, orange sauce. The lady who called him out tonight to congratulate him on his roast duck was wearing a sweet, tart perfume, as if it were made with oranges, and Nordic Jesus was so overwhelmed that he almost fell on her neck and kissed her.

He doesn’t exactly want to die, he realizes; he’s simply tired of living.

Every night he has the same sensations, the same thoughts. At work, he is absorbed by what Michel teaches him, but then come the long silent hours in his grandmother’s house. He can’t sleep. He watches the cooking channel, tries out new recipes, plays his guitar, drinks bourbon. Most nights he goes for a run to tire himself out, and finally falls asleep, drunk, around dawn. Other nights, when the river runs like the Congo through the jungle and tropical smells are swirling in a crazy cocktail in his skull, he feels the urge to do something reckless. He drives to Stiff Station, where the crack houses are. Elijah, who was in the National Guard with him and now makes the desserts at Michel’s, has warned him about venturing there alone—Don’t be gone where you got no allies or alibis, white boy—but Nordic Jesus reminds him that he’s been in a war zone; he’s seen children’s bodies charred like barbecued chickens, and brains splashed like vomit on the sidewalk. This is Little Rock, for God’s sake. Besides, he is the Son of Man. No one can harm him.

He’s cruising along Kavanaugh, the radio tuned to a jazz station, Coltrane’s saxophone coiling like a dervish in his brain, when he sees a white woman wearing a batik dress and one sandal, limping and looping past homeless men who wave bottles, inviting or threatening her. She’s carrying her other sandal and a denim purse. She has long legs and bare arms, tattoos and dreadlocks. He slows down. Right here a couple of weeks ago Nordic Jesus was passing three junkies shooting up on the sidewalk, when he saw a black boy, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. He offered him a ride; the boy gave him the finger. Tired of playing the Good Samaritan and getting no thanks, Nordic Jesus has made up his mind to drive by, when the woman lurches into the street and freezes like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He stamps on the brake.

The Chariot of Doom comes to a slippery, screaming halt. The woman folds herself over the hood and throws up on it.

Nordic Jesus laughs aloud for the first time in months.

“Feeling indisposed, ma’am?” he calls out the open window.

She looks up, startled or scared. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I truly am.” She has both palms flat on the hood, as if she just pushed it down. She’s dropped her purse and sandal. With her head sagging over her sick, and drool dripping down onto her chest—she’s stacked, he can’t help noticing—she looks like some creature from the netherworld. He recognizes her all the same. He saw her on one of his nocturnal runs, yelling at a man on a lawn in Levy.

Nordic Jesus opens his door, drops out of the cab. “Need a hand?”

“Why, sir, you are a gentleman,” she says, in tones as thick and sweet as molasses, as ladylike as Scarlet O’Hara’s. Pity about the dreadlocks, tattoos and puke-spattered tits, he thinks. She pushes against the hood, but her hands are glued to it.

Nordic Jesus grabs a box of tissues—grandma likes to have some handy when he takes her shopping—and after prying the stranger off his car, dabs her face. Her smile is vacant and her features ordinary, but he finds himself liking her. Or maybe he just feels friendly because of the pot he’s smoked, and the Châteauneuf-du-Pape he’s been drinking at his own expense. He hands her the box so she can swab her chest. And then, though he knows it will mean trouble, and he is being far from sage, he hears himself asking if she could use a ride.

“I could.” The woman sways before him like a slow metronome. “But I don’t know if I should.”

“I don’t mean you any harm.”

“I heard that before,” she snaps. “But to tell you the truth, I’ve always liked men with red hair. And I think I seen you before. Where d’you live?”

“Levy. I’m staying with my grandma over on Texas.”

She opens her mouth as if she’s about to yell ‘oh!’ She takes a step forward; he has to catch her. Nordic Jesus hasn’t touched a woman since Whitney dumped him just after he got back—a year and three months ago now—and it feels real good, or would, if the chick didn’t smell like a Friday night frat-house party.

“I know!” she says. “I seen you running past my house on Arizona. You was near naked.”

“I get hot when I’m running.” He’s hot now, sweat streaming down his neck and back, his boxers damp, the insides of his thighs sore. It was a hundred and fifteen in the kitchen tonight, and it’s ninety-eight or nine now, outside.

She pokes his chest. “You didn’t have nothing on but shorts and sneakers. You’re buff, dude.”

“I lift weights.”

She staggers back, out of his arms, and looks him over. “Yep, I can tell.”

At the end of the street a police cruiser is approaching. They eye it apprehensively, and she says she might as well come with him. She stumbles around the front of the truck, swinging the denim purse and sandal he’s picked up for her, and collapses into the seat beside him. “Thanks, sweetie,” she says, sliding down as if she can’t stay upright. She sits with her legs apart like a little girl. She has rings under her eyes and her breasts sag. Still, when her dress rides up, her long white legs make him swallow.

He pulls away, taking the first turn before the cruiser can reach them.

“So what’s your name?” he asks.

“Honeysuckle. My folks were hippies. Came from Pennsylvania in the sixties. Lived in a tepee in the Ozarks till the locals chased them out.”

“I’m Owen, but they call me Nordic Jesus.”

“I can see that,” she says, cackling. “Well, I guess we both got funny names.”

A liquor store and a pawnshop slide by—GUNS GUNS GUNS, the neon sign blares—and in the sodium light the city looks like tarnished brass. “Where’m I taking you, Honeysuckle?”

“I oughta go home or Dwayne will be mad. Fact he already is mad ’cause we had a argument and he’s kind of psycho. He’s an ex-con. He sees me with you, he’ll kill us.”

“How come you’re on your own, then? What happened to you tonight?”

She explains: They were scoring shit in Stiff Station and Dwayne went off on her on account of he thought she was making eyes at some black dude—Nordic Jesus interrupts to ask if she was, and she giggles and says, maybe—and not long after that she passed out. When she woke up, the sonofabitch was gone.

They are crossing the Arkansas River, a broad band of mercury in the moonlight. When he was a kid, it made Nordic Jesus think of French trappers in deerskins and Davy Crockett hats; it always gave him a pang. Not any more, though. To their right, the girders of the bridge are a metal net and the Clinton Library looks like a doublewide. He wonders if Little Rock is pretty or ugly. In the rearview mirror it’s mostly glass towers, like any other American city.

“Your boyfriend sounds like an asshole,” Nordic Jesus says.

“He’s an asshole, all right, but I ain’t much, either.”

“You’re OK.”

“You don’t know me, Jesus.”

“Jesus know everybody,” he says, imitating Elijah’s accent, which is Little Rock street with Delta undertones.

She gives him a dopey grin that reminds him of how Whitney used to smile in high school. When he came back from Iraq, she still looked like a cheerleader: long blonde hair, heavy makeup, crop-top, low-slung jeans, high heels. But she seemed sillier than ever: all she talked about was movie stars, American Idol, shoes, her Spyder sports car. She was studying at UCA but he never saw her open a book—not that he cared, but it seemed like she was just going through the motions in everything she did. She wasn’t really alive. He thought she’d changed; she said he was the one who had changed. He was no fun anymore and he never brought her flowers or said he loved her. He just wanted to fuck her, not make love like they used to. What the hell was the difference? he wanted to know. He didn’t feel tender. He’d been a sniper in the Sunni suburb of Sadr City and had killed seven men. That was one video game he couldn’t get out of his mind. Draw a bead, hold your breath, squeeze. Jolt, crack, exhale. The guys never screamed. It was only up close, when you saw their faces, that it got to you. He tried to explain it to Whitney once, while she was watching Oprah, but she thought he was being morbid, told him he could leave if he couldn’t talk about something normal. He did just that, got up and strode out. Hasn’t spoken to her since.

“I don’t know as I want to go home just yet,” Honeysuckle says. “You got anything to drink at your place?”

“Just beer and bourbon.”

“That’ll do.”

“We’ll have to be quiet,” Nordic Jesus says, “or we’ll wake Grandma.”

“I’m sorry I’m not as beautiful as usual tonight,” Honeysuckle says out of the blue.

As far as he can tell, she isn’t making a pass. “You look fine,” he tells her.

In fact she looks pretty fucked up. She makes him nostalgic for the world he’s lost, when Arkansas always seemed to beat Texas at football, The Eagles played constantly on the car radio, America fought for freedom, and God was the nation’s CEO. Honeysuckle gives him a coy look.

“I don’t got no makeup on and I ain’t wearing underwear, either.”

A trickle of sweat runs down his back. Is she a tease? He can’t make her out. Hold tight, he tells himself. Pretend you’re on night patrol. Straightaway he is back in Al Sadr City, padding past white villas, his eyes scanning every wall, steel gate, and roof for gunmen. He switches off his feelings. Someone is pounding his heart with a steak mallet, but he’s not scared. It’s like going out to play football and knowing his dad and Whitney and the coach are all watching: you can’t mess up. If you stay alert, you’re more likely to survive. Yalla, he urges himself again.

He’s surprised to find they’re already in Levy. After the burnt ochre, orange and brown of the desert, Arkansas is a hallucination of heaven. The Chariot of Doom rattles past oaks and maples, azaleas, dogwood and hibiscus, magnolias and mimosas, crape myrtles and bougainvillea, all the perfume trees of Arkansas. White blossom, pink blossom, violet blossom—all dull, drained. With his window down Nordic Jesus can smell the feminine scents, although the odors in the car remind him of keg parties at U of A in Fayetteville, where he had a football scholarship for a year.

He draws up outside a nineteen forties brick dwelling, single story, with a porch supported by white wrought-iron ivy. A maple tree stands in the front yard and bougainvillea blooms on the trellis. He feels zingy, the way he used to when he played in an important game.

Nonetheless, although sex is clearly a possibility, the prospect doesn’t thrill him. “I only have a twin bed,” he says as he unlocks the front door and leads her through the cat-scented darkness of the living room. “I guess you can take it and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

He turns on the light in his bedroom. The floor is a swamp of sour clothes, the mattress a sinking raft, its sheets twisted and tangled like cypress roots. A Hogs pennant and posters of nineties grunge bands hang on the walls.

“We could share the bed,” Honeysuckle says, her expression unchanging, “if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.”

He puts some alternative country on the stereo, so low that he can still hear the crickets and katydids through the open window, and Honeysuckle lifts her dress over her head. He turns off the light and takes a long pull on a bottle of Southern Comfort before stepping out of his clothes. In the radioactive glow of the streetlighting, Honeysuckle looks as if she has jaundice. She sits on the bed and stares at him. Not with desire, as far as her blurred features show, or even curiosity—she’s just staring like a cat. Nordic Jesus takes another swig of whiskey and hands the bottle to her.

“I can’t get to sleep if I don’t drink,” he says, lying beside her on the bed.

She takes a long swallow, sighs and leans back on her elbows. They haven’t touched yet. “That’s something else we got in common,” she says.

“Orange is my favorite color,” Nordic Jesus tells her.

“Oh yeah? That because you got orange hair?”

“Yes! How did you know that?”

“I may be dumb but I ain’t blind,” she says, misunderstanding him. He doesn’t try to set her right. She lifts one foot and places it on his leg. He tells her that when he was a kid he used to wear orange clothes and his dad painted his bedroom orange for him; he loved carrots, Cheetos, egg yolks, orange juice, apricot jam. He’d steal the orange pills from the medicine cabinet and eat them. Nearly killed himself once. Honeysuckle laughs, drinks, laughs again.

“I’m kind of drunk,” Nordic Jesus says, taking a good burning swallow, “but don’t you think that blossom in the yard smells kind of like oranges?”

She turns on her side to face him, then sits up with surprising swiftness and agility. “Didn’t see no orange trees outside.” She smells as though she’s made of Cheddar cheese.

The music drips in his ears for a couple of hours or more, but when she finally leans toward him and sucks at his mouth he tastes citrus and his blood stirs. A soft current pulses through him, electric, crackling and popping, and through his thoughts flit bright birds, blue jays, cardinals, orioles, and although his sensations don’t seem to fit or go together—cheese and slide guitar, whiskey and orange, throbbing and sweat and shock and awe and feathers—it’s like a jambalaya; it makes no sense but somehow it works. Yalla, habibi, the blonde whore told him in that stinky hotel in Dubai, come on, baby, hamdulillah, fantastic. Why did she keep speaking to him in Arabic? She was European, Russian or Romanian or something. Honeysuckle straddles him and goes straight into a frenzy, gyrating so fast and hard that he’s immobilized. He just hopes he can hold out. The bed bangs and creaks and Honeysuckle hollers as if Judgment Day has come.

Nordic Jesus doesn’t hear his grandma’s footsteps in the corridor, or the door opening, but there she is all of a sudden, four foot ten and bent like a bush in a storm. Mad as all get-out, too. “Out of my house, you little hussy!”

Honeysuckle freezes.

“You get off of him right now or I’ll flay you alive!” Grandma says, waving a limp claw at Honeysuckle as if she’s batting flies away.

Honeysuckle turns her head but keeps her seat. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“You will be, girl, if you ain’t out of here in ten seconds flat.”

Honeysuckle dismounts, stands, and gapes back at grandma, too dazed to cover her nakedness. She takes her dress and searches for the armholes for about five minutes. Nordic Jesus waits for his grandma to leave—she makes a feeble attempt to slam the door—then he pulls on his checked chef’s pants and greasy T-shirt. Although he didn’t even come, he’s relieved that it’s over.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t matter. Dude, you’re a strong lover,” she says, to his amazement. It was little more than a feat of endurance.

As they step out the front door the fragrance of the trees crashes over him like a wave. “Take a deep breath,” he says. “Smell that blossom.”

“Man, I’m still wasted. I wouldn’t a noticed it if you wouldn’t of said. If you don’t mind,” Honeysuckle goes on, once they’re in the Chariot of Doom and pulling off, “we’ll go by my place and if the truck’s in the drive you better drop me off round the corner.” She sounds as if she’s just coming round after being heavily sedated.

“He got a gun?”

“You kidding? He was inside for armed robbery, only they let him out early on account of he was only sixteen at the time. I never knew a guy didn’t have him a gun, except my dad. But even he got himself one now. Don’t you got one?” Before he can answer that he doesn’t, she gabbles on. “Dwayne ain’t much good with his, though. Other day, during that thunderstorm, there was two copperheads on the porch banging their heads on the glass door, trying to get in. So Dwayne stomps out, drunk as a skunk, and blasts at ’em with his twenty-two. Never did hit the sonsabitches.”

“I hope we don’t run into him, anyway.” Nordic Jesus is out of patience for rednecks—even if he has become one, as his parents seem to think.

Little white frame houses drift through the trees. On a porch, short Latinos pass a bottle. In a driveway, two black dudes in baggy basketball outfits, beer cans in their hands, lounge against an eighties Oldsmobile that looks like it’s been flattened out by a steamroller.

“We’re in luck,” Honeysuckle says, pointing to a surprisingly neat place. “He ain’t home yet.”

Nordic Jesus almost expects to see a Confederate Battle flag, but there isn’t one, or a truck on chocks either. The drive’s empty.

She leans across the bench seat and kisses him. “Well, thank you, Jesus.”

He deadpans the verse: “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

She hoots. “Amen,” she says, and hobbles away, carrying the sandal that had come off. So that’s that. He’s already pulling away when he sees a pickup approaching and Honeysuckle running back toward him. Left her purse on the seat, goddamnit.

He considers driving off; he could always bring it back tomorrow. He hears thrash metal, a rage-filled roaring and guitars that sound like overworked machines. But he brakes and backs up. By the time he’s out of the Chariot of Doom, proffering the purse to Honeysuckle, the white truck has screeched to a halt and out jumps a guy even bigger than he is, with long, thinning hair, and tattoos. He’s wearing a tank-top, camouflage pants, and sneakers. And holding a pistol.

“Who the fuck are you?” Dwayne says, glowering at Nordic Jesus and pointing the gun at him.

“The Son of Man,” Nordic Jesus sniggers, still stoned.

“You laughin’ at me, boy?”

“No sir,” Nordic Jesus answers as if he’s back in Junior High: the more he tries to repress his grin, the more obstinately it asserts itself. He reminds himself that an enormous man—an enormous wronged man—is pointing a gun at his heart. It doesn’t escape Nordic Jesus that he’s been wishing he could die. This is your chance. All you gotta do is wind up boyfriend here a bit more.

“He’s just a friend, Dwayne,” Honeysuckle pleads. “He done give me a ride.”

“I bet he did,” Dwayne replies. “I see you, bitch, whored up like you had a mile of dick run through you.” He turns to Nordic Jesus again. “You screw my woman, asshole?”

Nordic Jesus draws a deep breath, as if he’s sucking on a joint, and his lungs fill with the scent-drenched air: crape myrtles, magnolias, wisterias, hibiscus and honeysuckle vine. For a moment it feels good to be alive. “I sure didn’t,” he says hopefully.

“Was you fixing to?”

“Nope.”

Dwayne frowns. “I bet you’d like to, though, wouldn’t you?”

Nordic Jesus glances at Honeysuckle and grins—his Huck-Finn-Grin, Whitney used to call it. Honeysuckle isn’t in the same class as Whitney, in fact to be honest she looks more like a truck-stop whore than a cheerleader, but she smiles back, kind of embarrassed, and gallantry compels him to say: “I sure would.”

“That right, smartass?” Dwayne cocks the pistol with his thumb; the safety is off. “I might could blow you away.”

I don’t have to lift a finger. “Do it, dude.” Yet even as he speaks it occurs to him how bizarre it is: facing death, all he can think of is perfumes and washed-out colors. Just one more time, he’d like to eat a meal cooked by Michel and see the world in the pure primary colors of the child’s paint-box.

“You don’t think I would, do you?” Dwayne rasps.

“Nope.” And know the love of a good woman. That’s all I’d ask for.

“Oh yeah?” Dwayne holds his pistol arm out straight and shaking, eyes bugging as if he’s seeing the ghost of General Sherman.

“You gutless bastard,” Nordic Jesus hears himself saying. “Why don’t you go ahead and shoot me if you’re going to? You can’t do it, that’s why.”

“I can’t do it?” Dwayne’s voice rises to a squawk. “You think I can’t do it?”

“That’s right. You ain’t got the balls, man.”

“I ain’t got the balls? You saying I ain’t man enough to kill you?”

“You got it.”

Honeysuckle is moaning like a sick dog, but Nordic Jesus is looking right into Dwayne’s eyes. He doesn’t see anything but confusion. The dumb fuck might actually pull the trigger. Dwayne tries to speak but is so worked up he chokes on the words.

“I told you, do it,” Nordic Jesus says. He grabs the barrel and pulls it against his heart. “You can’t miss.”

“Jesus, Jesus,” Honeysuckle groans, and he isn’t sure if she’s invoking him or his heavenly namesake. She makes a sound halfway between a yelp and a squeal.

What the hell, looks like I am going to die after all. He tells himself he doesn’t care, even finds it funny, but his heart is fizzing, blowing fuses, and he can’t kid himself any more. He wants to live.

“You’re nothing but a wife-beater,” he goes on in spite of himself. Dwayne’s eyes are popping and sweat pours down his face. “You ain’t a man,” Nordic Jesus sneers, remembering how his daddy used to look when he whipped his mother.

“Do it!” he roars.

Dwayne’s face twitches like an epileptic’s. This is the last thing I’m ever going to see. Nordic Jesus pictures his mother, her halo of white hair and pursed lips, stout, in a purple skirt-suit, a Church of Christ matron who smells of bleach and banana-bread. He feels the briefest pang of love and remembers what she said last time she saw him, two months ago: You’re bound for hell, Owen boy.

He feels a sharp prod, then nothing.

“Goddamn,” Dwayne says, his gun-arm drooping. “I can’t do it.”

Nordic Jesus’ right fist lashes out of its own accord, cracks against Dwayne’s forehead and sends him sprawling.

“Holy Moses,” Honeysuckle says. “He’s out cold.”

Lights are coming on in the neighborhood and sirens wail in the distance.

“Someone musta called the cops,” Nordic Jesus says. “Let’s get outta here.”

The Chariot of Doom careens around a corner as if they are under mortar fire. “Dude,” Honeysuckle says, “Dwayne coulda killed you back there.”

“Sure, if he’d had the balls.”

“You got balls, though, dontcha? You’re brave, man.”

“Brave? Nah, I just don’t care no more.” He tells her how he joined the National Guard after he lost his football scholarship, not expecting to find himself in Iraq, and describes some of the things he’s seen: women and children screaming and crying when the soldiers burst into their homes in the middle of the night and threw their men on the floors; his friend Doug with a glass dagger in his eye when the IED went off; the little boy hit in the leg, caught in the crossfire. Coming back from Iraq, he was looking forward to being out of harm’s way again, but it seems you can’t escape violence. The world is going nuts. “Hey, where you want to go?”

She looks at the clock on the dash, tells him she’s on the early shift at Shipley’s Donuts on Cantrell, and asks if he could drive her there.

Light is leaking through the leaves, seeping from the sky, soft blue and grey. The Chariot of Doom smells of beer, bourbon, sweat and marijuana. They drive through Burns Park, a fairytale of firs and blue hills, with luminous white cottages, then pick up the freeway and swish past road works, billboards, bougainvillea, fields. Life’s an Irish stew, Nordic Jesus realizes. You can’t just pick out the bits you like.

“Ever think about getting sober?” Honeysuckle asks him.

“Sure.”

It might be sweet to find a woman, settle down and have kids, but he knows he isn’t strong enough yet. One day he’ll have to stop drinking and doing drugs. One day he will face the bullshit on his own. If only there were dazzling colors, like the plumage of the birds in his mind; if only he could see the way he can smell. He feels more like Lazarus than Jesus: brought back from the dead, but already decaying, only half-alive.

The grey sky glows like a hotplate warming up as they cross the I-430 Bridge over the Arkansas River. Nordic Jesus recalls how he used to spring out of bed on Saturday mornings when he was a kid, eager to discover what the world held in store for him. The water shimmers and flickers and flashes, as if the surface is made up of millions of metal lights. Steel, silver, brass and bronze and copper, gleaming, glimmering, glinting as the sun bobs like an orange buoy on the river to their left.

“You think it’s worth it?” he asks Honeysuckle.

“Getting sober?”

“I mean life,” Nordic Jesus says. “Is it worth living?”

“Hell, I don’t know. You just keep on doing it, I reckon.”

“Yeah, you do.” He looks at her and she looks back at him, her face framed by the window and the river and the sunrise, and although she isn’t exactly pretty when she shows her stained teeth, although he doesn’t love her and will not spend another night with her, although or because he’s weary of nights like these—he has been neither good nor wise, he reflects—and sex with her was far from scintillating and he’s still kind of numb, he feels sorry for her, understands she’s in pain and isn’t a bad person, just weak, like him, and he finds himself smiling, with something akin to tenderness. Honeysuckle’s face is lit by a tangerine sky, the river blazes, and if only for a moment, he can see the colors once more.

Nordic Jesus turns onto Cantrell and drives into the sunrise, hoping he will be able to stay awake.

— Garry Craig Powell

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

Angel on Fire: The Gothic World of Sophie’s Choice — Mary Rickert

Oct 182012

Mary Rickert writes: “Gothic literature reaches for transcendence by pushing against the architecture of language. Language is, after all, the dark heart of this story, not simply the structure from which it is hung, but the gallows and the god…” I wish I had written that. Mary is an old friend; she used to live in Saratoga Springs, New York, and once took a class from me at the University at Albany during which she showed me some amazing early stories in which blended myth and fantasy in startling ways. She went off and established herself as an award-winning speculative fiction writer (with two story collections Map of Dreams and Holiday to her credit — she publishes under the name M. Rickert); later she attended Vermont College of Fine Arts — this essay was her critical thesis.

“Angel on Fire: The Gothic World of Sophie’s Choice” is Mary’s summa, her analysis of the Gothic in contemporary literature, the cultural tensions that inform it, and the linguistic (craft) habits that define it. It’s a masterful analysis of an aesthetic that informs much of American literature from the South, but it’s also Mary’s aesthetic, the thing that drives her compositions and tastes.

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The sticky matter of Gothic literature’s standing, the sense that it cannot rise above a certain lowly state, resides in part in the fact that the very word used to define it carries a barbarous connotation.

The Goths were a German tribe who invaded Eastern and Western Europe between the third and fifth centuries. All that remains of this once conquering people is a fourth-century Bible translation, and their poor reputation. The first time the word Gothic was used to describe the architectural form, it was meant as an insult, a way to convey the horror of flying buttresses and turrets so offensive to the notions of good taste that in Oxford, undergraduates and young dons used to stop on their afternoon walks in order to laugh at Keble College, with its Gothic proportions, considered the “ugliest building in the world.” (Clark 2)

Beauty, in all its forms, is not, in fact, a permanent state but a reflection of the society that defines it. In the eighteenth century, critics classified any deviation from conventional proportion and symmetry as “deformities exhibited by the absence of taste of a barbaric age.” (Botting 20)

Yet a building described as Gothic today is not automatically, or universally, considered an eyesore. In the realm of architecture Gothic has risen above the status of insult. What remains is a form appreciated or derided based on its own particular success.

Opera, obviously reliant upon language in a manner architecture is not, turned to classical myth as early inspiration, believing that music was the natural language of the gods. Yet opera, with its stage suicides, man-to-swan metamorphoses, spousal murders and spurned lovers, arguably populated by the same wide expanse of emotions as the Gothic, is held up as high art, a territory of those with refined or sensitive taste, while Gothic literature is routinely deemed a cheap, sentimental expression of the work of the lower classes. Even the terms associated with Gothic fiction – the “dime novel,” or “penny dreadful” – express this class element: inexpensively produced fiction with the “consequent implication that it is merely a literature of surfaces and sensations.” (Thompson 1)

Gothic literature is, by definition, a “writing of excess,” (Botting 2) “attacked throughout the second half of the eighteenth century for encouraging emotions.”(Botting 4)

While it can be argued that all literature is an art of emotion, consideration must be given to the relative value placed on its expression by the gate-keepers of artistic and social acceptance.

The values that gave shape and direction to the Enlightenment, dominated as it was by writings from Greek and Roman culture, privileged forms of cultural or artistic production that attended to the classical rules. Buildings, works of art, gardens, landscapes and written texts had to conform to precepts of uniformity, proportion and order. (Botting 22)

Distressing as this state of affairs is in a society still largely reliant on an order that has produced wars, genocide and a population which seeks meaning in things, it is particularly disappointing to see in the literary community. After all, who is better suited to break the illusion of “reality” than the artisans of the words by which it is defined?

And yet so febrile is the need to maintain accepted standards of what it means to be good that, as G. R. Thompson writes in the introduction to The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism,

classic works of fiction which employ Gothic conventions and subjects… tend not to be critically examined in the tradition of a Gothic mode but in some other, more acceptable tradition of the novel. (1-2)

In other words, if it’s Gothic, how can it be good?

While an exploration of this class divide and its lingering effect on the literary conversation is certainly worthy of attention and inquiry, what I’d like to focus on at this time is an example of the ultimate excellence the Gothic form can achieve. After all, Gothic literature, like all genres (and there are those who consider “literary” another genre) is defined by its content, but that content’s expression has as much opportunity for excellence as any other.

William Stryon’s novel, Sophie’s Choice is narrated by Stingo, remembering the summer when he was twenty-two and rented a Brooklyn apartment in a house painted an “overwhelming pinkness.” (Styron 35) Stingo, a young writer, finds there the source of inspiration for the novel in which we find him: Sophie, a beautiful, intelligent and tragic concentration camp survivor, her charismatic, controlling and dangerous boyfriend, Nathan, and an inheritance of evil that cannot be escaped. This is set, not in some distant era of darkly fantastic origin, but in the twentieth century with its prized rationality. However, Stingo clearly states that his interests and the interests of this novel rest in the Gothic realm:

In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes – suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery. Even at that early time I knew my first work would be flavored by a certain morbidity – I had the feeling in my bones, it may be called the “tragic sense” (118-119)

Stingo doesn’t stop with this general allusion to the now famously dark matter of Sophie’s Choice to incite a Gothic reading, but offers several descriptions of characters and material as explicitly Gothic. When he writes of the Cracow of Sophie’s childhood, Stingo describes it as in “Gothic repose.” (95) Elsewhere, he alludes to his own childhood as being bound up “less with the crazy Gothic side of a Southern upbringing.” (220) The reader is introduced to the character Rudolf Franz Hoss as “a leading villain from Central Casting… a modern Gothic freak” (159) whose speech is described as bearing “clotted Gothic ratiocination.” (242) Near the end of the book, when Stingo reads a letter from Sophie, he notes how the influence of German language has permeated her writing style like “Gothic stone.” (545)

The language of the Gothic tends to be reflective of the excess which defines the form. Gothic language is not tamed into docile sentences that bear little trace of their progenitor. Gothic language, by definition, bares teeth and claws, or as Foucault says in Language to Infinity, “The language of terror is dedicated to an endless expanse…It drives itself out of any possible resting place.” (Botting 1)

The language of Sophie’s Choice moves with liquid grace between the brutal (the first time Stingo meets Nathan he is calling Sophie a cunt) and the beautiful.

Later in the night’s starry hours, chill now with the breath of fall and damp with Atlantic wind, I stood on the beach alone. It was silent here, and save for the blazing stars, enfolding dark; bizarre spires and minarets, Gothic roofs, baroque towers loomed in spidery silhouettes against the city’s afterglow. (Styron 561)

Styron’s use of the poetic resonance created between the words “hours,” “stars,” “spires,” “towers” in conjunction with the flat tonal sounds of “chill,” “fall,” “damp,” “stood,” “dark,” “roofs” energizes this short passage so the reader feels that Gothic reach – grounded by gravity, seeking transcendence.

Styron also uses rhyme with its whimsical notes, for instance, as he does when listing Sophie’s relationship to food. “Bratwurst. Braunschweiger. Some sardines. Hot pastrami. Lox. A bagel, please.” (97) Rhyme is employed as well to direct the reader’s correct pronunciation of two different women’s names while highlighting an attribute of Stingo’s emotional connection with each. “…Maria (rhyming, in Southern fashion with pariah.)” (46) and “Leslie Lapides (rhyming, please, with ‘Ah feed us.’)” (129)

Nathan, Sophie’s troubled boyfriend, has a talent for mimicry used to both charm Stingo and mock his Southern upbringing. “His voice took on the syrupy synthetic tones of deepest Dixieland.” (58) Nathan’s talent is an opportunity to broaden the landscape of the novel, and to engage with the story of Gothic America, the experience of Southern Slavery, a reflective theme throughout. Every time Nathan uses his Southern accent the reader is reminded that Stingo is supporting his modest, yet privileged, lifestyle with old family money acquired from the sale of a slave. In this way Styron uses Nathan’s mimicry to direct the reader to consider that no single nation owns brutality.

Nathan isn’t the only one with a talent for language. Sophie speaks Polish, French, German, Russian, English and Yiddish. Her linguistic skill provides her with the temporary shelter of her own bed at Auschwitz. She keeps the anti-Semitic pamphlet she helped her father produce close to her body in hopes that it can be used as barter of some kind. Later, when she comes to America, Sophie finds a job working in the office of a Chiropractor, where she communicates to his patients in Yiddish. Sophie may have once had dreams of teaching music, but she is relegated to using her talent for sound to provide her with the rudimentary skills that allow her employment as a receptionist. From the work Sophie is able to acquire because of her talent for language, she is paid and from that money she is able to buy food, the rhapsodic source of that earlier cited list. Sophie, essentially, is fed through words; her survival as well as her guilt resides in them.

Sophie meets Nathan, the man whose character acts as both death and life force when he rescues her at the library where she’s come looking for Emily Dickenson and, confronted by the rude Shalom Weiss, faints. “Shalom Weiss may easily have thought that he had slain her with language.” (112) In the midst of this humorous connotation, Styron invokes the bedevilment that lurks on every page of this Holocaust novel; words shape the world, and their power for rejuvenation is measured against their destructive force.

When a Gothic novel fails in its use of language it is often through pushing the boundaries at sentence level alone, words as embroidery, nothing more. What Styron does so well here is make language visible in such a manner that it becomes almost unbound. The word is the stuff of the sentence, the paragraph, the story, but it is also the soundtrack, the landscape, the evil, and the good. Stingo, who bears witness to this tale of suffering, seeks its meaning within the very mechanics of that which induced the suffering – the word.

Why does the Gothic writer seek to make language visible when current fashion insists that to be visible is to be gauche? Well, first it must be said that by definition, to be gauche is not to care about it. More important, though, the Gothic writer believes that the way to move beyond language is not by hiding behind it but by moving through it to the sublime.

Gothic architecture pushed flying buttresses against notions of ideal form, not as an exercise in excess, but in order that, as Abbot Suger said about the intention of his design of St. Denis, “Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine, through the senses.”

Gothic literature reaches for transcendence by pushing against the architecture of language. Language is, after all, the dark heart of this story, not simply the structure from which it is hung, but the gallows and the god: “…for even then I was compelled to search, however inadequately, for the right word and suffered over the rhythms and subtleties of our glorious but unbenevolent tongue.” (Styron 120)

Styron burrows into language by miming its force for generation as well as decimation. He uses language to reveal its beautiful potential as well as its foul. Through Sophie’s talent for languages he explores the mobile foundation of meaning. Through Nathan’s talent for mimicry, Stryon explores the susceptibility of language to corruption. Through his consideration of the Southern dialect, Stryon explores the landscape of evil.

Gothic writers know that no word is as flat as it appears. Every word is a geode. Break it open and there exists inside a small shining gem, like a star. What Styron does is break open language by burrowing into it, moving beyond its limitations to reveal its expansion, finally producing a galaxy of light.

What is now universally understood about the Gothic elements in architecture – that the introduction of flying buttresses, pointed arches, and stained glass windows was meant to introduce height and light in an effort to create a medium between Heaven and earth – is frequently forgotten in consideration of Gothic literature.

In Gothic, Fred Botting sums up Edmund Burke’s APhilosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime by explaining that “while beauty could be contained within the individual’s gaze or comprehension, sublimity presented an excess that could not be processed by a rational mind.” (39) In Gothic literature, where the reach is for the sublime, much depends on the emotions.

While the Gothic form is fungible, responsive to the environment of the time that produces it, its source is rooted in the expansive emotions of Romanticism.

The marvelous incidents and chivalric customs of Romances, the descriptions of wild and elemental natural settings, the gloom of the graveyard and ruin, the scale and permanence of the architecture, the terror and wonder of the sublime, all become important features of the eighteenth century Gothic novel. (Botting 30)

The modern fairy tale is arguably the extreme romance of our time, generally founded on impossible beauty, perfect affection and happy endings. “Fairy tale” is not the term that comes to most readers’ minds when considering Sophie’s Choice. Yet Styron frequently employs fairy-tale imagery, as when Sophie tells Stingo how Nathan saved her life, calling him her “Prince Charming.” (168) Stingo and Sophie are sitting in the park when “clouds like creamy blobs, iridescent Disneyesque confections” float overhead. (169) Later, with much evidence to the contrary, Stingo, too, refers to Nathan as Sophie’s Prince Charming and her “redemptive knight.” (339)

Nathan is drawn as a figure of love and its explosive opposite. The first time Stingo meets Nathan he behaves abysmally to Sophie before abandoning her. While Stingo comforts Sophie, Nathan returns, not as the Prince or the Knight, but in the “phantasmal silence” (53) of a ghost, or at least a creature not entirely of the living. A neighbor tells Stingo that Nathan is a golem. (63) Eventually, Stingo observes that Sophie’s love for Nathan was “like dementia” (159) and Stingo wishes Sophie would choose him instead of Nathan. “The death force is gone,” thinks Stingo. “Love me!” (379)

In the dramatic pushing-the-boundaries fashion of Gothic fiction, Sophie loves Nathan and Stingo loves Sophie in the lusting, yearning, tortured manner of the virgin poet. The first time Stingo meets Sophie he falls “if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her.” (49)

One would expect then that in the language of romance, Stingo would see Sophie cast in the same Disneyesque light in which Sophie has seen Nathan, but this is Gothic romance, after all, and Stingo’s first vision of Sophie is that of “someone hurtling toward death.” (49) Sophie, it turns out, looks very much like a girl Stingo once had a crush on, a young woman who, Stingo has just learned, killed herself.

Stingo’s love for Sophie is realized, not as the idealized vision of a woman made more beautiful than can be possibly true, but as the ghost of a woman who no longer exists. Later, when Stingo enters Sophie’s room as she stands before the mirror, he is shocked when she turns to face him as “an old hag whose entire lower face had crumpled in upon itself.” (142) Stingo has come upon Sophie with her false teeth removed, giving her the appearance of wearing a mask. While Styron does not cite the connection, the reader remembers Sophie, the way Stingo first saw her, as the “simulacrum” (49) of the dead Maria. Now, with Sophie’s face collapsed from its usual beautiful proportions to this frightening one, the effect produces a shudder. Surely this is a death mask, though in the manner of doubling so often a theme in Gothic fiction, it is difficult for the reader to shake the feeling that the mask is the revelation of what is “real” and not its concealment.

Throughout the novel, Sophie reveals herself to be a character who has suffered a cleaving so thorough she will never recover from it. The famous choice she is asked to make, to pick one of her children for death at Auschwitz, remains one of the most terrifying fictional horrors ever written, set against a backdrop of millions of true horrors, the scope of which, while achieved by humans, remains almost unimaginable by them. In this way, Styron’s story enters the dark depths of the Gothic, formed as it is by the monster that most people prefer not to consider, as if, by some mirror alchemy, to look at the monster is to become one. Styron seems aware of this reluctance to go to the mirror when Stingo writes, “the embodiment of evil which Auschwitz has become remains impenetrable so long as we shrink from trying to penetrate it.” (237)

David R. Saliba, Ph.D., the author of A Psychology of Fear, a book of literary criticism about structural developments in Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, maintains a website, ScepticThomas.com, where he cites five characteristics that distinguish Gothic literature from other genres.

1. There is a victim who is helpless against his torturer.

Certainly no one doubts that Sophie, in the concentration

camp, is helpless against the Nazis. What serves the Gothic nature of this story is that even when she is out of the camp, all the way in America, she is still prisoner. Sophie is tormented by brutal, inescapable guilt for having lived.

Sophie has been so thoroughly assaulted by evil that she comes to think of herself as the bearer of it. Near the end of the book, Sophie, in anguish, calls herself the Nazis’ collaborator. Stingo insists she was just a victim.

In Gothic fiction the distinction between opposites becomes uncertain. Just as language is broken open to reveal its reach, boundaries of good and evil are breached to reveal their permeability.

When Sophie first talks about her childhood, she describes storks that looked liked the storks in a book of Brothers Grimm fairy tales, as well as the crooked chimneys and church clock tower with the trumpet-playing men. Stingo tells the reader of his earlier accommodations at the University club, overlooking the “enchanted garden” below. (15) But when Sophie enters Auschwitz and becomes a member of the household staff of Rudolf Hoss, Stingo describes the family garden there as an “enchanted bower” (167) and the reader remembers that fairy tales, before they were co-opted by a cartoon world, were Gothic fictions most of all.

Were it only so easy that the very bad is always bad and the very good only that. Had Styron told the story of Sophie in the concentration camp, then brought her to America to live the wounded life of one who has been victimized and brutalized by the terrible other, it would not be the Gothic story it is. Or, as Stingo muses, “if Sophie had been just a victim, she would have seemed ‘merely pathetic.’” (237)

In Gothic, Botting cites the “loss of the human identity and the alienation of self” (157) as defining elements of the genre. Sophie is the victim who cannot escape the torturer because she is the torturer too. Sophie not only types her father’s anti-Semitic pamphlet in which he calls for the extinction of Jews, but distributes it as well. She doesn’t want to distribute it, and the memory of her father’s assumption that she will arrives with the realization of her hate of him, but she does distribute it. Later, while at Auschwitz, she keeps the pamphlet, hoping she might use it to secure some measure of safety.

The choice Sophie is required to make, where there is no redeeming alternative, creates a literal and mental severing that it is doubtful anyone could survive whole. To refuse to choose was to choose death for both children. It is easy to forget that in the midst of that terrifying scene, Sophie chooses life. Over and over again, Sophie chooses life with the tenacity of one refusing to release the thorned rose, though the grasp wounds.

Within the dark chambers of this Holocaust story it is also easy to forget that Sophie was a Catholic. Her loss of faith is reflective of her loss of self, the sense of abandonment she suffered. It is not at Auschwitz, however, that Sophie feels God turn away from her. She is angry at Him then, but afterwards, when she is freed, she goes to a church to kill herself because she thinks it would be a great sacrilege. At that point, Sophie still thinks there is someone to be angry at. Sophie, as a child, used to play a game she called “Looking for the Shape of God.” She is still playing that game when she goes to the country inn with Nathan and meets his demonic side there. Only then, after everything she has gone through, does Sophie see God leaving her, “turning his back on me like some great beast and go crashing through the leaves.” (375)

Sophie is a woman tormented by what she did for life. There is no redemption for her guilt. Nor is there any escape. Sophie uses Christian imagery to describe what she has become when she points to her heart and pulls away the imaginary veil there. “Only this has changed, I think,” she says. “It has been hurt so much, it has turned to stone.” (540)

Sophie is helpless against her torturer, first at Auschwitz, and then everywhere, because the torment she experienced was an internal corruption as violent as any of the Holocaust medical experiments.

2. There is also a victimizer who is associated with evil and whose powers are immense and supernatural.

What would Sophie’s life have been like had the Nazis never

come to power? Her husband’s minor appearance in the novel reveals him as an unkind man, at best. Her father used her for her talent with language, liked to display her beauty, and had no apparent affection for her at all. Her mother seems an ineffectual person throughout.

Sophie, with her weakness for “getting along,” likely would have done just that. There is nothing to indicate she would have risen above her circumstances to find what we like all our heroines to find, true love and happiness.

Yet didn’t Sophie deserve the opportunity to make a mess of her life? Why couldn’t her poor choices have been relegated to the mundane reality of choosing the wrong man to marry, being loyal to a father that didn’t deserve it, emulating a mother who could not protect her own daughter?

The entire novel offers only a few scenes at Auschwitz. Styron turns to other sources to develop a picture of evil both vast and intimate. He quotes Hoss’s actual account, written in prison while awaiting his own execution: “My invariable answer was that the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.” (166)

The sublime implies humans can, through feelings and language, transcend their condition. In other words, the way to arrive at the spiritual height the Gothic strives for is at least partly through the territory that separates human from beast, the realm of emotions.

Stingo, in his exploration of Holocaust horror through an examination of other texts (this text-within-text style is a frequent Gothic tool), turns to Richard L. Rubenstein’s book, The Cunning of History. The Gothic depravity of Sophie’s choice, the element that defines as well as consumes Sophie, lies in the immense power of the Nazis to siphon emotion so entirely that their victims became, as Rubenstein describes them in a term later used to describe a different fictional horror, the “Living dead.” (Styron 257)

The inclusion of elements of the supernatural is often the primary characteristic used to define Gothic fiction, and Stingo does allude to that realm. In describing the boarding house he writes, “…and had I been able to use a turn of phrase current some years later, I might have said Yetta’s house gave off bad vibrations.” (48) Sophie describes a premonition she had “and was filled with the slowly mounting frightful sensation.” (91) She tells Stingo that seeing two nuns is bad luck. A Russian fortune teller reads Sophie’s palm and tells her that “everything will turn out well.” (331) In fact so prominent is Sophie’s tendency towards belief in what most people consider the supernatural that Stingo writes, “Sophie had a confused and unformed belief in precognition, even of clairvoyance.” (440)

Yet the supernatural elements in Sophie’s Choice don’t rest in the meaning we most often associate with the word, but rather in the secondary definition as cited in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Volume Two: “Beyond the natural or ordinary; unnaturally or extraordinarily great.” (3112)

When Sophie points to her stone heart and says that only it has changed, she is saying everything has changed. What was once a human being is a human dying; the torment she suffers at the hands of the Nazis is not diminished by the removal of those hands. The Nazis are not inhabitants of a realm beyond earth. This does not make them less evil. Evil does not depend on the physical world. Its power, harnessed by the Nazis, went well beyond the natural or ordinary into the realm of super terror. In using Gothic elements to tell this story, Styron asks the reader to remember that the supernatural is not just the territory of phantoms, but humans as well, though its reach is beyond human reach. “Someday,” Stingo says, “I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world.” (560)

3. The setting of the gothic story, at some point within

impenetrable walls (physical or psychological), heightens

the victim’s sense of hopeless isolation.

It is important to remember that when the Gothic fiction of castles and cathedrals was being written, those edifices were a common part of the landscape. Gothic fiction was once considered vital because it engaged with frightening aspects of the real world. The spiritual element of Gothic fiction, the secretive monks and frequent Catholic imagery, was potent because it tapped into the nature of fear in society at that time. What if the spiritual guide was the devil’s helper and not the angel’s? What secrets lived in the dark rooms of the castle on the hill? What if evil was amorphous?

Because of its transgressive nature, Gothic literature was not embraced by the establishment, and over time became associated with the less refined tastes of a lower class. The definition of Gothic literature became bound to the material of its past, and in that way, the Gothic became almost silly.

However, real Gothic literature is really frightening. What could possibly be more frightening than Auschwitz?

In Stingo’s investigation into the turmoil Sophie suffered he comes across a quote by Simone Weill that perfectly describes the guilt Sophie will not be able to survive.

Affliction stamps the soul to its very

depth with the scorn, the disgust and even

the self-hatred and sense of guilt

that crime logically should produce but

actually does not.

(Styron 158)

So it is that Rudolf Hoss, the commandant at Auschwitz, the man who tells Sophie he will let her see her son, and then changes his mind as though it is a matter of little importance, like changing his drink order, is able to write that he was “no longer happy in Auschwitz once the mass extermination had begun” (166) while Sophie, with her love of music, her hungry appetite and her eager sexuality, is left to tap at her breast bone and say that all that is left of her heart is stone.

Sophie’s personal history, that of a Holocaust survivor, heightens her isolation. First, at a very basic, physical level; Sophie is, after all, an immigrant with no surviving family members. During the period Stingo writes about, the atrocities that happened in Auschwitz have been made public. Rudolf Hoss is in prison, charged with war crimes. When Sophie meets a group of Nathan’s friends they comment, out of her hearing, on her tattooed wrist. Nathan, in his dark temper, taunts Sophie with the question of what she did to survive when so many did not.

In this way, Stryon highlights the universal ownership of Sophie’s personal history, how it not only doesn’t decrease her isolation, but increases it. Even though Sophie chooses to tell Stingo what she’s told no one else, there is no sense that the sharing relieves her burden. Even Stingo, who loves Sophie, cannot reach through the dark of her past to place a light there. No one can. It is too dark, and the reach too far. So spectacularly does Stingo fall short of understanding what Sophie’s been through, that when he attempts to bring her south, he insists convention dictates they will have to marry. The reader is left to watch this exchange, knowing what Stingo does not recognize. No marriage can make Sophie less isolated, and in fact, this idea of marrying Stingo only highlights what Sophie realizes: her isolation is total, terrible and inescapable.

4. The atmosphere is pervaded by a sense of mystery, darkness, oppressiveness, fear and doom to recreate the atmosphere of a crypt, a symbol of man’s spiritual death.

It bears repeating that the first time Stingo sees Sophie he is struck by how much she reminds him of his first crush, Maria, who he has learned recently killed herself. Shortly after this, Stingo hears Nathan tell Sophie that they are dying. Stingo describes the gloom hovering around Sophie as “almost visible.” (537) When they are on the train together, heading South, and Stingo loses Sophie, he finds her at the end of the car, “a bleak cage of a vestibule” (498) where Sophie gazes up at him and says she doesn’t think she’s going to make it.

Spiritual death exists here, not merely as symbol but as theme as well. Catholic Sophie has lost her religion so entirely she tells Stingo, “I know that my Redeemer don’t live and my body will be destroyed by worms and my eyes will never again see God.” (93)

Styron tells this horrible story and yet keeps us reading by using Gothic elements with great facility. For instance, much of the present story takes place in Yetta Zimmerman’s boarding house. Where a lesser writer might have made the locale as dark and gloomy as the story inside it, Styron paints the building pink. It glows throughout the novel like a stubborn sunset.

The house should be gloomy, but it is not. When Stingo first sees it, he is reminded of The Wizard of Oz. The reference is both pleasant and unnerving. Clearly, Styron is saying that we are entering a different world. The pink is wrong, but it is not intrinsically frightening. This is what Styron does so well with the Gothic elements. He knows how to use them adroitly. He doesn’t move away from the form to provide relief for the reader from the excess of Gothic, but rather, uses the form to its best advantage to keep the reader uncertain, but reading on.

Another aspect of the Gothic, not mentioned in Saliba’s list, is that of strange or unexpected juxtapositions. While an obvious example of the Gothic is a dark and gloomy castle, the gloom of Sophie’s Choice is no less prevalent without one. Under Stryon’s expert hands, gloom moves like a fog, creeping into unexpected corners, somehow made more pervasive by its uncertain travel.

The fairy-tale imagery and poetic whimsy in the midst of this Holocaust story, beautiful Sophie unmasked as the “old hag” Stingo spies when he sees her without her false teeth, the image Styron chooses to describe Emmi when Sophie collapses in the child’s room as “like that of a swollen fetus” (433) – all create a Gothic sense of disorientation.

In Stingo’s study of other texts as some foundation to explain what happened to Sophie, he refers to George Steiner’s perspective on “time relation.” After describing the brutal deaths of two Jews at Treblinka he writes that at precisely the same hour “the overwhelming plurality of human beings…were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist.” (234)

Stingo, aided by old letters from his father, is able to remember exactly what he was doing on the day Sophie arrived in Auschwitz, “a beautiful day,” she said, when “the forsythia was in bloom.” (509) Stingo was eating bananas in Raleigh, North Carolina, the realization prompting him to note that he became “for the first time in my life aware of the meaning of the Absurd and its conclusive, unrevocable horror.” (509)

The excess of Gothic novels serves to push the boundaries that keep us rooted in our human gravity, to reach beyond the body by exploring its inevitable limitations, to reach beyond language by burrowing into each word in recognition of the meaning that birthed it, to reach the sublime through the weight of being human juxtaposed against what most of us already know: nothing is certain but absurdity.

5. The victim is in some way entranced or fascinated by the

inscrutable power of his victimizer.

Though much of its meaning has been diluted by the Disney-fication of “reality,” the Gothic writer is aware of the darker tonal aspects of the word, “fascinate.” Embedded in the shiny bright thing it has become is the meaning to “put under a spell,” (Oxford Volume 1 932) the territory of witchcraft and serpents.

“I was fascinated by this unbelievable thing that was happening to the Jews,” (Styron 510) Sophie tells Stingo, hastening to add that her fascination was not composed of pleasure.

In the present arc of the story, Sophie displays little interest in the Nazis. Instead, Sophie’s fascination falls on Nathan. Though it is true that Sophie, perhaps infected by her father, married a man, her first husband, who was cruel to her well before the trauma of Auschwitz, it is also true that what she suffered there cleaved her profoundly. It is this woman, struggling, as Stingo says, “with the demon of her own schizoid conscience” (269) who falls in love with Nathan, a man who sings the libretto from Don Giovanni by heart, whose enthusiasm is infectious, who saves Sophie when she faints at the library. As Sophie says to Stingo about Nathan, “he was my savior…and I never had a savior before.” (170)

It is an alluring notion to think that Sophie, who has suffered so much, has been rescued by the grand emotion of love. But what few humans can escape is love’s mirror. The fear that to look at the monster is to become one is rooted in the primal knowledge that who we are fascinated by, or who we love, is fashioned from the material of our lives. In other words, the “other” is often the self.

Another prominent theme in Gothic literature is that of the double, the duality of good and evil usually expressed within a single character. It is easy to love Sophie who is beautiful, smart, and tragic. When she displays an ugly tendency, such as when she tells Stingo that she always did hate the Jews, it is easy to dismiss the sentiment, as Stingo does, as an expression of her distress, and not of her true spirit.

What the reader wants of Sophie is that she be made whole again, in some way, even if it be an imperfect wholeness. Where is such healing wrought but in love?

Sophie’s suffering, her damaged psyche, is manifest in who she loves, Nathan. Where the split in Sophie is a divide she cannot heal, it is made more horrible by her recognition of it. When her Prince Nathan appears, Sophie feels she is being saved, until he reveals his own double, his demon side. Sophie is tormented by what happened to her and what she did at Auschwitz, she cannot escape her self, her guilt, or her past, but the narrative arc of Sophie’s Choice does not rest in what she has done but in what she is doing, and Sophie is loving Nathan, a man who abuses her and then cries in her arms, begging forgiveness.

In Gothic excess, Nathan is the double of Sophie’s divided self. While Sophie is severed by what she has done, Nathan is severed by what he is, a paranoid schizophrenic, the embodiment of the human split.

When Sophie has the opportunity to leave Nathan, she is drawn back to him, as one is always drawn by what fascinates, though she cannot survive the fascination. Nathan is the flame to her moth, the destruction she feels she deserves.

Did Styron know he was writing a Gothic novel? It is difficult to believe he did not. His narrator, Stingo, cites his affection for Faulkner, generally accepted as a Southern Gothic writer. Styron even uses what any writer knows to be precious, the last page of the novel, to describe his “abominable dreams” after Nathan and Sophie’s death, “which seemed to be a compendium of all the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.” (Styron 562) The community of great Gothic literature includes in its oeuvre Moby Dick. Surely Styron knew what he was doing when Stingo introduces himself to the reader with the phrase, “Call me Stingo.” (4) The many references to Gothic as a descriptor also offer in-text confirmation of the author’s intent. In G. R. Thompson’s excellent introduction to The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, he offers a description of the Gothic hero as “ultimately torn apart by demons,” one who “faces a world that he has no hope of comprehending and in which he cannot make the proper moral choices.” (Thompson 6) Minus the pronoun, this is an excellent description of Sophie.

Why is it necessary to locate Sophie’s Choice within the Gothic tradition? After all, doesn’t certain fiction rise above form to occupy that rarefied space reserved for works of genius?
Well, yes, and no. Sophie’s Choice is a great work and deserves to be placed amongst other great works. Yet we do a disservice to the literary conversation by not acknowledging its content. To dismiss the form as insignificant is to relegate all other voices in this conversation to the dark they engage with. To suggest, by censure, that true literature has no place for the Gothic is to propagate the idea that to look at the monster is to become one. It is ironic that Gothic literature, so often ridiculed as the work of superstitious minds, is censored by a lingering fear of looking at what is terrible.

Gothic literature is, by definition, a literature of excess; it can be sloppy, raw, and uncomfortable. The emotional space of Gothic literature is extreme, especially when read by a society that considers extravagant expression a sign of immaturity. Yet Sophie’s Choice, with its wide emotional arcs, carries within it the opposite poles, the life without feeling. Remember Colonel Hoss who wrote that he could only carry out his duties by stifling all emotions? Consider Sophie, who describes how, after the war, she could no longer cry and had no more emotions, equating the emotional life with the spiritual one when she says, “I couldn’t any longer pray to Him or could I cry.” (92)

In her introduction to Best American Mystery Stories 2005, Joyce Carol Oates writes,

I don’t think it’s an irony that as a writer, I am

drawn to such material. There is no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw, and irremediable harm,

but there can be art in the strategies by which

violence is endured, transcended, and transformed

by survivors… (13)

Sometimes people wonder why anyone reads Gothic literature, heavy as it is with doom, dark with the certainty of the hero’s failure. What Gothic literature remembers is that every fiction has a ghost, the unseen reader whose power within the story is limited to watching it unfold. In Gothic literature, the hero falls, but there is always that survivor, the reader, who closes the book or exits the screen, who has engaged with evil without being destroyed by it. All great literature changes the ghosts who’ve read the fiction into the humans who survive and transcend it. The sublime reach of the Gothic is not achieved by the hero, whose fall is often spectacular as an angel on fire. Gothic fiction, such as Sophie’s Choice, works within the space between the gravity of being human and the height of those angels, seeking the numinous the hero will never reach, but the reader might.

—Mary Rickert

Works Cited

Botting, Fred Gothic. Routledge, 1996

Clark, Kenneth The Gothic Revival An Essay in the History of Taste. Icon Editions Harper and Row, 1962

Oates, Joyce Carol (Editor) Best American Mystery Stories, 2005. Houghton Mifflin Company

Thompson, G. R. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Washington State University Press, 1974

Styron, William Sophie’s Choice. Vintage International, 1992

Web sites:

melissaelmes.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-is-gothic-literature.html

ScepticThomas.com

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Mary Rickert’s short fiction, which has been awarded World Fantasy, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson awards, has been collected in Map of Dreams and Holiday.

The Box Does Not Need To Be Square: An Interview with Todd Bartel — Nance Van Winckel

Oct 152012

Todd Bartel is a renowned collagist and conceptual artist, and Nance Van Winckel is a friend and colleague of mine at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a poet, fiction writer and a creator of her own Off-the-Page works called photoems; the two of them combine here in a kind of extravagant show-and-tell operation, part-exhibit and part-interview. Bartel’s work, as you can readily see, is a gorgeous and complex amalgam of old books (in the first instance, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter), old paintings, old photographs and frames, quoted, snipped, and translated, objects and their meanings separated and then reworked, colliding in a metaphoric phantasmagoria which creates yet more meanings and also manipulates the perspective/identity of the viewer/reader.

This is the first in what we hope will be a series of such interviews curated and conducted by Nance.

Nance Van Winckel: I appreciate in Garden Study (“A”merican Sublime: Pioneers of New Eden) how the Hawthorne text itself invites the viewer to be a reader, to lean in and to take in the words themselves. Could you discuss your own ideas about this viewing/reading interplay? How does it happen? What makes it happen?

Garden Study (“A”merican Sublime: Pioneers of New Eden), 2004

Two diptych puzzle-piece collages using 19th century paper and The Scarlet Letter remnants (Nathanial Hawthorne 2nd Edition, Riverside Press Cambridge MA 1978, Illustrated), with 20th Century matte and glossy paper, Filmoplast P90, pencil and lead letter type transfer. Arthur Dimmesdale’s collage (left side of frame) is translated from Ralph Albert Blakelock’s painting entitled The Spirit of Night, 1989. Hester Prynne’s collage (right side of frame) is translated from Fredrick Edwin Church’s painting entitled Twilight Short Arbiter, Twixt Day and Night, 1850. Mustard seeds, glass, etched glass, copper tape with patina, 19th century stereoview postcard (View of Salem and Vicinity), archival matt, in handmade (“bent”) frame that turns 90º in order to reside in both sides of a room corner. Each half of the bent frame measures 20 5/8” x 23 1/4” x 1 5/8”. Photo credit: Todd Bartel

Todd Bartel: In 2004, when I was invited by Lucinda Bliss—a direct descendant of Hawthorne and a strong artist herself—to create a work about The Scarlet Letter for inclusion in an exhibition that celebrated the bicentennial of his birth by focusing on his seminal, early American novel, I jumped at the chance to re-read it and to respond with a creation of my own. I started the book not knowing what I would make, and because I am a slow reader, I was glad for the six month lead time before the exhibition. I had no real idea other than I wanted to make a collage out of white paper, and I wanted to somehow involve an image of a landscape. I read the book in high school and enjoyed it, but I was just not prepared for the depth and the beauty of the book I found as an adult reader. My teacher at that time instructed us to skip the reading of The Custom House because it was not in the first edition. So this time around, I was curious to read it. I read it twice before I started the novel proper. During my first reading, I became interested that Hawthorne foreshadowed the portraits of his two primary characters, Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne, through symbolic descriptions of light and dark, which pervade the text he inserted to his second edition. Despite the fact that neither of their names appear, they are nevertheless thoroughly invoked. As I reread The Custom House the second time around, I took copious quotes in a notebook I dedicate to the project. Once I had collected the quotes, I naturally read the rest of the book looking for connective clues, and I found an abundance. (I must not have been a very attentive high school reader, or perhaps my high school teacher did not appreciate well enough to point out one overwhelming observation I made as a return reader: Hawthorne’s novel is not a typical novel, but is actually a thoroughly haunting, detailed series of character descriptions, punctuated by a handful of key events.) I was astonished to realize that it is his readers who create the plot. And so, my quotes about each of his four characters ended up almost filling an entire notebook! (I also took notes on Hester’s husband, the doctor, and on Pearl, her illegitimate daughter, but those notes will inform a sister project that has yet to be realized.) In fact, as I was creating “A”merican Sublime: Pioneers of New Eden, it would take me an hour or more just to read my own notes on a single character! So deep and so rich are Hawthorne’s observations and descriptions of the human psyche, I decided to create an untypical and odd sort of collage that juxtaposed actual second edition cuttings of his text: key observations about night, darkness, and Dimmesdale with those of day, light, and Prynne. I bought two second editions, one to have and one to cut up. Normally, I juxtapose images as a collagist, but in this case, what is primarily juxtaposed are Hawthorne’s illustrations.

Arthur Dimmesdale’s selected text

Hester Prynne’s selected text

(A note about the term “illustration”: A few years ago I learned that “illustration” originally meant verbal descriptions and “exemplifications.” It wasn’t until 1769, when James Granger added blank pages at the back of his History of England volumes for his readers to supplement the text with “extra illustrations” or “cuttings”—pasted book engravings from other volumes or sources—that the term illustration evolved to mean visual information. See Extending the Book—The Art of Extra-Illustration. Granger had unwittingly invented the scrapbook! And since Granger, the sense of illustration being a visual term has eclipsed the original meaning as a literary term. Did Hawthorne know this, and to some measure was he responding to Granger by devoting his entire novel to illustrations of his main characters?)

Illustrations of dark

Illustrations of light

Selecting certain passages of Hawthorne’s text to juxtapose was like trying to edit Shakespeare! What do you take out? Ultimately, I had to choose quotes that could all live together while pointing to either one character or the other, but which would sadly, not be exhaustive—snippets that together formed an odd sort of paragraph, in the order it originally appeared, with a lot of editing between, but somehow, nevertheless, became page-like in order to illuminate attributes of the each individual’s essence while still referencing the book itself. It was the size and shape of the assembled quotes that altogether determined the dimensions of the shaped frame.

The idea of the shaped frame configuration—which I call a Synterial—came while reading the book, about midway through. Originally, I had set out to make a collage, not a Synterial. However, as it began to occur to me that Arthur and Hester did not live parallel lives—they only ever shared the same space a handful of times throughout the book—the idea of a flat collage was not enough. It seemed to me that their meetings were always events that were far and few between—they met at crossroads, at intersections, at right angles—and understanding that required an altogether different framework. When I realized this, the scope of my initial project expanded and I saw how I could create a shaped frame for the project. Hawthorne’s text had evoked an idea for a frame that could act as a kind of extra illustration of his work. Upon imagining this, it seemed essential for me to create a bent or “cornered frame” to symbolize the choices made by the two main characters. Another way to say this is that I decided to create a frame to house duel portraits by constructing a frame to straddle an actual room corner, which allows for placing one portrait on the left wall and the other on the right. Despite the separateness, both sides of the frame are inextricably bound. Thus, the cornered frame becomes a physical metaphor for Hester’s and Arthur’s choices to back themselves into a place, with nowhere else to move but away from each other.

“A”merican Sublime: Pioneers of New Eden

In addition to collecting and fusing the textual cuttings, I also selected two quintessential pairs of quotes that exemplified each character, and I used them in different ways. I used one set of quotes to impress into the white paper collages of period landscape paintings by Ralph Albert Blakelock (Dimmsdale’s side) and Frederic Edwin Church (Prynne’s side), which flank each text collage. Both painters were alive during Hawthorne’s lifetime, but Blakelock’s painting was created well after the book’s success. Nevertheless, each collage of the selected landscape paintings—which I refer to as white paper translations or blank paper translations—echo the character adjacent to the text collage. Blakelock’s, The Spirit of Night, 1886–95, bears the phrase “joy unutterable,” and Church’s, Twilight, Short Arbiter ‘Twixt Day and Night, 1850, bears the phrase “beneath the open sky.”

Blakelock’s The Spirit of Night, 1886-95

Church’s Twilight, Short Arbiter ‘Twixt Day and Night, 1850

Text impressed into white paper collages using 19th century lead type, rubbed, bone burnished from the back of each respective collage

Dimmesdale refused to publicly share his secret while Prynne wore hers out in the open. Similarly, Church was widely known for his plein-air paintings, while Blakelock’s fame came from his paintings of the night sky, and although sadly appropriate, Blakelock went “mad” by the end of his life, which seemed compelling enough to reference for a portrait of Dimmesdale. The second pair of quotes was etched into the glass and reside over the respective text collages. Each was taken from that moment in the book when late in life they met in the forest and asked each other the following questions:

Dimmesdale: Dost thou yet live?

Prynne: Art thou in life?

Glass etched quotes

Those questions exist as if to say, “Was it worth it?” For me, this attitude of American passion seemed a defining characteristic of our culture. As one of the first widely published American novels, it seemed not a stretch of the imagination to claim this couple as America’s very own Adam and Eve.

NVW: I think the boxes themselves give these pieces such power and resonance. The encapsulated. The crypt-like. The one lifted out of the many. I’m intrigued too with your ideas about “Stynterials” and “coupling particular frames with particular verbal ideas.” Might you say a little about what’s inclined you to the “boxed”?

TB: In a wonderful essay on the boxed sculpture format, Donald Kuspit wrote, “Inner reality will always find a way to act itself out through external reality. This process is what the box sculpture epitomizes.”¹ Kuspit’s observation is what allowed me to stay making boxed constructions when I was in graduate school and was heavily questioned about why I put my work in frames, behind glass. Cornell had epitomized the process and many others had come before me. Such history made it hard for me to find the wherewithal to attempt to contribute to the genre. But it was Kuspit who helped me to realize that whatever I put inside the box would equivocate my existence and my experience, something that is not reproducible. I began the Synterial series when I realized that the box does not need to be square. The first Synterial idea I developed was the notion of a frame with a bridge to another frame—an idea that stayed dormant until the day I took my five-year-old son to the Planetarium in NYC the early winter of 2001. At that marvelous museum in the first vitrine, which has a beautiful display of the elements from the periodic table, I found a quote from Walt Whitman alongside the rocks it contained: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of stars.” In that instance I saw the rationale for what it meant to create a frame with a bridge to another frame. Soon afterward I realized that all the other ideas I had for shaped frames needed to be informed by accompanying texts.

Todd Bartel, Garden Study (Pollination of Devonia), 2002, 55 3/8” x 22 5/8” x 1 1/4”

Computer-cut mat board, etched glass bearing the word “re member,” mustard seeds between three layers of glass and copper tape with patina in constructed wood frame; watercolor, ink, Craypas, tempera, charcoal, and blood on two pages from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, with collage on 19th century engraving; tempera and watercolor over Xerox transfers (text from Genesis 1–3, 26) on 19th century book end pages. Photo credit: Tom Young

First two elements over Genesis 1–3, 26

Mustard seeds over Ovid’s Metamorphosis

Bridge center with etched glass over mustard seeds

Elements of human biology and watercolor interpretation of Charles R. Knight’s rendition of the Devonian Era

NVW: Joseph Cornell. I know you were just part of a show of visual artists following in the Cornell tradition. So many poets have written poems to him or for him. Charles Simic has a whole book of prose poems devoted to his work (Dime Store Alchemy). What is it about Cornell’s work that you think speaks especially to readers and writers? And do you think that same “something” pertains to your own work, and if so, how and/or why?

TB: Cornell once wrote on a scrap of paper, “Nostalgia anyone?”

Cornell’s invocation says so much about his work, my own work, and I think collage in general. The past is rich beyond adequate expressiveness; to rekindle it is to offer another chance to see again. As a collage-based artist, I am always compelled to pull the past back into the present as a way of pointing out we are not done thinking about the thing that reappears. My current work is about landscape and cultural identity. Cornell’s work was always about the subject of wonder. I share an affinity for that aspect of Cornell’s universe, and often my study brings me to the same materials he used, particularly those of the nineteenth century. But my acute fascination surrounds the transition from the industrial age into the one we find ourselves in now and that is where my work separates from the twentieth century master’s.

¹Kuspit, Donald, On Being Boxed In, in Sculpture, Vol.10 # 4 , November–December 1991, p. 37.

— Todd Bartel & Nance Van Winckel

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Todd Bartel received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and studied in Rome at RISD’s European Honors Program between 1984-1985. In 1990, he was a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.). He achieved his MFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993. Todd Bartel’s work assumes the forms of painting, drawing and sculpture in a collage and assemblage format. His work investigates the interconnected histories of collage and landscape and the role of nature and natural resources in Western culture. His work has been exhibited nationally in venues that include Palo Alto Art Center, Katonah Museum, Brockton Art Museum, The Rhode Island Foundation, Zieher Smith, Mills Gallery. He is the gallery director at the Cambridge School of Weston’s (CSW) Thompson Gallery, where he teaches drawing, painting, conceptual art, collage, assemblage and installation art.

Your Dog Makes Me Smile: Fiction — Caroline Adderson

Oct 132012

This is a treat, a gorgeous, frank, lusty, ever so subversively comic (it’s always slightly comic when women take a good look at a man) love story about — no, not that kind of love, but about a woman and her dog. I have known Caroline Adderson since, oh, before 1992 when I included three of her stories in that year’s edition of Coming Attractions (co-edited with Maggie Helwig). I will never forget that experience — I read five lines of a story and KNEW I’d found a writer, not just someone who pushed words around on a page efficiently but someone who ELECTRIFIED the language. And she has never disappointed since. Later I also put her in Best Canadian Stories. So we have an editorial past together, Caroline and I, and a friendship, and that makes it doubly pleasurable to bring her into the Numéro Cinq fold.

The story is gorgeous, yes, I should repeat that. It is stocked with felicities, large and small. One of the loveliest is the way Caroline weaves in a reading and rereading of Chekhov’s classic short story “Lady with a Lapdog” — a tale of a woman, a man and a dog, though as Caroline’s protagonist notices, the dog is not altogether considered as a character and seems to fade out of the story, a shortcoming that is rectified in the present story. (And to nail the point we have, above, a photo of the author and dog.) Caroline further complicates the story by introducing a younger male lover, a former husband and a wonderfully irate new wife (there is an amazing set of scenes around this pair — the author does not make the mistake of hiding the fact that the protagonist and her ex have slept together since the ex married his new wife, the new wife knows, her hatred is dramatic and comic, the scenes are charged with mischief).

And, of course, the dog can read.

BACK IN OCTOBER Matt’s girlfriend had been out of town. Matt, unemployed, had hours (all day in fact) to lie around with Ellen who, living off her savings, was queen of her own life. Queen Ellen spread out in the loft on the hot twisted sheets, inhaling the tang of their exertions, while Matt scampered naked down the ladder to do her bidding. He brought her a glass of water, a wad of tissues to wipe the milty puddle off her belly, a cheese plate from the fridge.

She’d sold her house for a grotesque sum and inherited half of what her father had socked away in the life he cut short himself. Meaning Ellen could quit publicity and rent an old live-work studio in a Kitsilano triplex. One very large room, kitchen, bath, sleeping loft. She took up pottery again, put the kiln outside under an overhang. She took up with a man-boy in his twenties who wore shorts in any weather.

The things Matt said were so funny and sweet. Like the time he fell back on the pillows, his curls fanning out. “I need to ask you something really personal. I’ve never asked anyone before. I need the honest truth. Please.”

“What?” Ellen said. “What?”

“Is my cock too big?”

Now she was back. The girlfriend. Matt brought his cell phone up to the loft and left it turned on. Ellen pretended she didn’t see it tossed onto the clothes he’d so urgently shed. She pulled the sheet up to cover her body. Too much information, she thought.

What choice did she have? Ellen was 48. Too old to be anyone’s girlfriend.

Across the street from the studio was a corner store. This time of year Christmas cacti, poinsettia and little bonsai pines crowded the board and cinderblock shelves out front. Plants were the main business besides cigarettes and lottery tickets. Ellen worried it would go under so once a week she scooted across the street to buy something she didn’t need. Another plant to ignore to death. A can of corn. There was little else. The Frosted Flakes looked archeological.

She ran across in sweats and an old loose t-shirt scabbed with drying flecks of clay. The dog was shivering in a newspaper-lined box beside the till. She couldn’t tell its breed. The black kind with a goatee and plaintive eyes.

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

The owner of the store said, “My brother. Driving from Chilliwack? He saw it on the road. You want it?”

“I just came in for some corn.” Ellen set the can down, leaving fingerprints in the dust on top. “Maybe you should take it to the SPCA.”

He waved his arms back and forth like an air-traffic controller directing a 747 with batons. “Too busy!”

“Oh. Do you want me to take it for you?”

Ellen tucked the Niblets in the box with the small black dog and carried both across the street. Halfway, the dog reached up and licked her face.

“None of that now,” she said.

Hardly anyone got Ellen at first, but this dog did. He beat his feathery tail against the side of the box and smiled. When she shifted the cardboard carrier onto one hip and opened the door, he leapt right down, dashing circles around the studio, sniffing everything—Ellen’s pottery wheel, her dentist’s chair. He jumped onto the couch and tossed the cushions aside with his snout. Then he did what Ellen always did when visiting someone for the first time. He went over to the shelf and read the spines of all the books.

Matt didn’t come that day, or call—well, he never called. Normally this meant long unfocussed hours tied up in knots of hope, then, when Ellen could no longer deny he was a no-show, her dejected release from these self-wound coils. How pathetic to be waiting all day for a man as young as her daughters. Tear-stained, humiliated, she fashioned little monsters out of clay, then flattened them.

Today she put aside these pitiful recreations. She had to get a dog to the SPCA; to do that she needed a collar and leash. One thing led to another and, come evening, the dog was still there sniffing Ellen’s books.

She loved it too, that particular, melancholy odour of old paperbacks. It only followed then that the dog should have a literary name. (She had to call him something before she turned him in.) Tintin? Tintin was the boy, not the dog. What was the dog’s name? She googled it. Snowy.

Snowy would not do.

Lady with a Lapdog was right there on the shelf, perfumed in dust and sadness. The moment Ellen settled in the dentist chair to reread the story, the dog sprang onto the footrest, gingerly walked the double plank of her outstretched legs, then curled into a polite ball and fell asleep. A dog in the lap of a lady reading “Lady with a Lapdog.”

In the story the lapdog makes his appearance in the first paragraph, trotting along the Yalta promenade. No name, just a breed. A white Pomeranian. (This is ironic, for Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks of the women he seduces as of the lower breed.) How many times had Ellen read this story of a passing affair that swells to a grand passion? Many, many times, and every time reminded her of her first reading at seventeen or eighteen, when she’d sobbed. With each subsequent reading, the sob returned, a ghost in her chest lodged too deeply now to release, her own heartaches grown around it, holding it fast. She’d been living with it ever since. Catharsis interruptus.

Tonight though, something was different. Something rang false.

A few days after first noticing Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the lapdog, Gurov seats himself near her and the Pomeranian in an outdoor restaurant. He wags his finger at the dog and, when it growls, he appeases it with a bone off his plate. This way he secures Anna Sergeyevna’s acquaintance – through her dog.

After dinner, Anna and Gurov take a long walk, just as Ellen herself had done that afternoon when she returned home with the leash and collar and a hundred and twenty dollars worth of dog food and paraphernalia. What happened with Ellen was that the dog, the black one, the flesh-and-blood, tongue-and-tail one, made straight for the nearest tree and began to circle it, forcing Ellen to leave the sidewalk and slop around on the saturated verge. It was as though he was searching for something he had lost in the longer grass at the tree’s base, something he was desperate to recover. Finally, he found it, this precious thing invisible to Ellen, and when he did, he lifted a leg and pissed all over it. Then he romped ahead to the next tree where, evidently, he had also left something important in the grass.

After ten minutes of this Ellen grew impatient and tried to pull the dog along. He stiffened his legs, effectively putting on his brakes, and stared at her, ill-done-by. She had to coax and herd him, then pick him up and carry him. In other words, the entire walk had been about getting the dog to walk instead of sniff. More than once she got tangled in the leash, or he did. Yet when Gurov and Anna Sergenyevna go strolling after dinner, talking the whole time, marveling at the way the light falls on the sea, the dog isn’t even mentioned. Presumably he was there, or had they left him tied up back at the restaurant?

A week later, Gurov and Anna Sergenyevna retire to her hotel room to consummate their affair. Again, no reference to the Pomeranian. Does he object to their lovemaking? Is he jealous? Have they shut him in the bathroom? It doesn’t say. In fact, the dog is only mentioned once more in the story. Months after they both leave Yalta, Gurov finds he can’t forget the lady with the lapdog. He travels to her town, loiters in front of her house until, after a miserable hour, an old woman comes out with the Pomeranian.

Gurov was about to call to the dog, but his heart began to beat violently and in his excitement he could not remember its name.

Here Ellen lifted the real nameless dog out of her lap so she could return the book to the shelf. It was the first time the story had failed her.

Her epiphany came an hour later while she was brushing her teeth: the story was in Gurov’s point of view! It wasn’t Chekhov, but Gurov, who was indifferent to the dog beyond the purpose it could serve him in seducing a young woman. Whatever Chekhov may have felt about the canine species, Ellen knew this: if the story had been from Anna Sergeyevna’s point of view the dog would certainly have had a name. And a patronymic. And a diminutive, too.

So she settled on Anton. The resemblance was obvious by then—the longer black chin hairs, the compassionate tilt of the head. Couldn’t she just see him in a pince-nez?

In the studio window her pots flaunted themselves. Passersby could drop in and buy one. That was the idea anyway.

The next day Matt was out front getting rained on when Ellen and Tony returned from their walk. Her heart stuttered at the sight of his bare knees. According to the clock with movable hands on the back of her Come In sign, the sign she’d flipped to Will Return when she’d left with Tony, Ellen was late. This clock had proved useful in their affair, which was being conducted strictly on a drop-in basis; now it had provided Matt with a grievance. She pointed to her goateed excuse, though the goatee was not so obvious with the wet sock hanging down.

Matt asked, “What’s it got in its mouth?”

“A sock. Isn’t that cute?”

Before the door was fully open, Tony bolted in ahead of Matt, who threw back the dripping hood of his Gore-Tex and sampled Ellen, her mouth and neck. Only after they separated and shed their rain gear, did he ask whose dog it was.

“Well,” Ellen said, and she told him the whole story of bringing the dog home and the trip to the pet store. She might have been reading a script. Did he hear it? This was how she lived now, hovering above her own life, watching herself so that later, when she recounted her day to Matt, he would be amused.

“You would not believe what they had in that store. Look. Party balloon poop bags! I can coordinate Tony’s poop bag to my outfit. Or I can say, ‘I’m feeling existential,’ and take a blue one.”

Everything was in the box Tony and the can of corn had come across the street in. Matt reached for the plastic banana, squeaked it, and Tony snapped to attention.

“That’s a lot of stuff to take to the SPCA, Ellen.”

“And I hate shopping! I don’t know what came over me!”

“Let’s go up,” he said, starting for the ladder to the loft, pulling on her sleeve.

Ellen sashayed over to the sign and turned the hands of the clock forward another forty minutes, remembering how, not so long ago, their pleasure hadn’t been so stingily meted out, yet still feeling grateful, so very grateful.

She walked Tony to the vet, paid for shots and deworming, determined he was flealess. Wheaten Terrier, the vet thought, with a dash of Labrador. Maybe even a little Corgi. He lectured her on neutering.

Ellen said, “The thing is, I’m probably not keeping him.”

She should have been churning out Christmas pots, but couldn’t settle at her wheel. So restless! Ever since that debilitating conversation with her daughter Mimi, the one in Toronto, who had casually mentioned her Brazilian wax job.

“Everyone does it, Mom. No one would ever go around all hairy down there.”

Ellen was stunned. Another thing to fret about: her wild bush.

She started training Tony out of library books, glad to have found a use for all that corn. Tony was gaga for Niblets. Within days she had him sitting and lying down for Niblets, though no inducement would endear him to the leash. He was a free spirit and, respecting that, Ellen let him sniff along behind her.

On YouTube, she watched Pumpkin the beagle read. It really seemed that he could. When shown a picture of a cat and offered a selection of words printed on cards, Pumpkin selected C-A-T 100% of the time. Some old competitive streak surfaced in Ellen. She opened another can of Niblets.

Finally, finally, Matt dropped by. “Sorry,” he said.

“What for?” Ellen chirped.

“I couldn’t get away.”

Ellen pictured the girlfriend, not her ineffable face, but her tidy little Chekhov mound, pristinely waxed. All her thinking about the Russians had brought her to this unflattering comparison, that, pubically, Ellen was in the Tolstoy camp.

Matt said, “And I’m going home for the holidays. Did I mention that?”

One of the dog books explained stances, tail positions, barks. Ellen had noticed that, though Matt always said “I”, when he really meant “we” he cast his eyes down and to the right. And if she told him how desperate this news made her, would he ever come back?

“And where is home?” she asked.

“Spruce Grove. Outside of Edmonton.”

“Ah,” she said, feigning nonchalance. “I’m going away myself.”

He asked where, and she told him Cordova Island.

“Where’s that?”

“I used to lived there a long time ago. When I was married. My younger daughter Yolanda lives there now with her partner and their kids. She dropped out of pre-med to relive my life. The weird thing is, then my ex-husband moved back.”

“Oh,” Matt said. “Should I be jealous?”

Ellen laughed, but he didn’t. His face folded up in a way she hadn’t seen. He was always so uncreased, so playful, except when lamenting his penis size. It frightened her into blurting, “Oh! We’ve got something to show you!”

“We?”

It seemed he’d forgotten the dog until Ellen said, “Tony?” and the black head popped up among the couch cushions.

Ellen selected three books from the shelf—Lady with a Lapdog, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina—books the average undergrad couldn’t tell apart. She stood them up on the floor. Tony waited, shifting from side-to-side, licking his lips, which Ellen knew now was a sign of anxiety. She showed Matt the index card with its neatly printed question: Which book did Chekhov write?

“Read,” she commanded, holding the card in front of Tony.

He pranced over to Lady with a Lapdog and brought it back to Ellen. For this, she rewarded him with a palm full of corn. Then she turned to Matt so he might – she hoped – claim his reward, too.

Bus to Horseshoe Bay, ferry to Nanaimo, bus up island to German Creek. Ellen pulled her suitcase—stop-start, stop-start—stones jamming the wheels, through the gravel parking lot to the government wharf where the ramp was angled at eighty degrees. And she remembered how, all those years ago, whenever they left Cordova Island or returned, it had seemed so difficult. Inevitably it would be low tide like this and Ellen would have to negotiate the ramp with all their groceries and bags and Mimi, just a baby. Ellen had needed a sherpa. And where was Larry? Why couldn’t he sherp? She let the suitcase go first, clutching its strap and the railing, inching her way down, thinking of Tony pulling on the leash. She’d left him with her neighbor, Tilda.

It was the same ferry, a metal tub with a covered freight area, rows of wooden benches inside. Ellen loaded her suitcase on. Eventually other passengers began arriving with backpacks and Rubbermaid tubs filled with provisions or the Christmas presents they’d come to the mainland to buy, stacked on foldable dollies. A group of strangers. It used to be that whenever she took the ferry, she knew everyone and they knew her and half of them had slept with Larry.

Last year Ellen had slept with Larry at the Winter Solstice party at Larry and Amber’s house. Amber had gone to bed early with cramps. The island was full of this secretless type of woman, their menstrual cycles public knowledge. Ellen used to be one herself, though last year she took this information to mean that Amber’s body, if not Amber, accepted that these intermittent reunions between Larry and Ellen were, then, Ellen’s only opportunity for sex. That was Ellen’s point of view anyway, that she threatened no one.

And this year? This year Ellen was besotted with Matt, who kept coming around. Whatever his reason, apart from sex, was his secret.

The ferry backed out of its berth. A seal watched, head and shoulders out of the water, then ducked. Gulls screamed in a wheel above the dockside fish store. Ellen had quite forgotten the Solstice Party until now. During Ellen and Larry’s marriage, when she’d learned that friends of hers had slept with him, she’d shrieked, “How could you?” Very easily, it turned out. As easily as Ellen slept with Matt, rationalizing all the way: Ellen didn’t know the girlfriend. She was young. She would pity Ellen if she knew.

But Ellen knew Amber. She was practically related to her.

Tossed in the bag with the Christmas presents, Lady with a Lapdog. During the crossing, Ellen took it out, sniffed it, ran her fingers over the dog-Braille inside the front cover. She’d intended to reread the whole book, but instead found herself back with poor Anna Sergeyevna, stuck in love with Gurov, a man who classifies the women he sleeps with according to three types: Carefree, good-natured women, whom love had made gay and who were grateful to him for the happiness he gave them; those who made love without sincerity, with unnecessary talk, affectedly, hysterically; and two or three very beautiful women whose faces suddenly lit up with a predatory expression, an obstinate desire to take, to snatch from life, more than it could give.

This last type were no longer in their first youth.

And Ellen? Which type was she? Grateful and utterly sincere, yes. But it was true, too, that she was chatty in bed and freely voiced her pleasure. And that in two years she’d be fifty.

Then she felt it, the sob that could never be released, pressing hard behind her ribs. She put both hands over the place at the same time she glanced out the window, glanced at the precise December moment out on the open ocean with the solstice approaching when the colour of the sky and the colour of the water merged and there was no light anywhere to orient her. The great gray middle of her life.

The sob absorbed back inside her body. Next time she looked, it was night.

Her son-in-law, Sean, picked her up in the truck. They drove the main road, companionably, Ellen recovering from the shock of winter darkness. Off the grid, the island shut down on these long, overcast December evenings. They passed the Post Office, the Arts Centre, the Free Store, but Ellen couldn’t see them, only the forest in the headlights. She marveled that Sean knew on which rutted lane to turn. Then they bounced along, cedar boughs brushing against her window, spookily, like the memories of her former life here clawing to get in.

Eli ran out of the cabin when he heard the truck. “Nonny!” He was seven with wild clown hair he’d got from his father, who hid his under a toque. He dragged Ellen inside and when Sean brought in her suitcase and set it down, Eli looked from it to Ellen.

“Did you bring me a present, Nonny?”

Yolanda came over from the stove with baby Fern in a sling on her back, tsking at Eli, her glasses half-fogged from cooking, exhausted and angelic in her half-hearted ponytail.

“Give me that baby right now,” Ellen said in the middle of their hug.

Yolanda loosened the knot on her chest and Ellen waltzed Fern over to the couch lumped with sleeping cats. “Eli, come here,” she called. “I have some news. I have a dog staying at my house. His name is Tony. And you will not believe this, but it’s true. He can read.”

“I thought we were cat people,” Yolanda said, back at the stove.

“Where are our presents?” Eli asked.

“Don’t give in to him. He has to wait.”

“Why should you?” Ellen whispered. “Bring me that bag next to my suitcase.”

In it was Lepus arcticus. Arctic Hare.

At dinner, Ellen told them about her neighbour, Tilda, the fabric artist. “She knits iconic Canadian wildlife. She spins the yarn herself.” The white hare perched on the table dangerously close to Eli’s bowl of chili. “That’s why he’s so soft,” Ellen told him. “He’s got real bunny fur mixed in with the wool.” She didn’t want to say what the hare and the tiny Townsend’s Vole she’d bought for Fern had cost. “They’re not really toys. They’re works of art.”

Yolanda said, “The Solstice Party’s at Mason and Spirit’s place this year. And Amber invited us over tomorrow night. Do you want to go?”

Likely Ellen blushed. She fanned her face, pretending the chili was too hot. If she said no to Amber’s invitation they would wonder why.

Sean was trying to get Fern to eat a bean, washing the sauce off in his mouth, spitting out the bean and feeding it to the baby by hand. At the same time, he glanced at Ellen and smirked.

“What?” Ellen said.

Flapping his hands on either side of his toque, he cawed, “Amber alert! Amber alert!”

Yolanda slapped him on the shoulder.

“What does he mean?” Ellen asked, but Yolanda wouldn’t say.

Before bed Ellen read to the children, then stumbled in the starless dark to the outhouse and back. Calling goodnight to Yo and Sean, she retired to the tiny, frigid room, the one too far from the woodstove, less a bedroom than a pantry lined with dried beans and canned preserves. The cats joined her, bed warmers, slipping out later to kill.

Last year she’d lain in this same rack of a cot listening to the ocean’s restless exhalations, wondering what would happen between her and Larry. This year, the ocean was still exhaling, but the hands that moved over Ellen were young.

“When I say walkies he grabs something that smells like me. A sock. Once he headed out with my panties.”

Yolanda asked, “Are you keeping him or not?”

“I didn’t plan on it. Now I’m in something of a situation. Because I care about him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Like now. Talking about the dog counteracts the pointlessness I feel going for a walk without a dog.”

They were following a rocky trail through the woods down to the beach, Fern in the sling wearing a bright Peruvian cap with ties, twisting her head back to look at Ellen, Eli marching ahead pretending to shoot things while Yolanda intermittently called out, “Cease-fire!”

“I should give him up. I’m not getting any work done. I feel like I’m being dragged around by the hair.”

“Sounds like you’re in love,” Yolanda said.

Ellen halted in the middle of the path with her mouth open, her hand clutching her heart. Was she in love? The other hand reached for the support of a tree. She leaned in, pressing her forehead to the rough bark.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

Yolanda hurried back and slipped an arm around Ellen. Fern’s small hand patted her head. It felt like the touch of a crow’s wing, over and over.

“Are you depressed?”

“No.”

“Last night I thought you looked so beautiful when you came into the cabin. You looked so happy.”

Ellen looked up. “Did I?”

“Yes. Sean even said so. He said you looked hot.”

“I love that man,” Ellen said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I’m—”

No, she was too embarrassed to confess.

“I know,” Yo said. “It’s the holidays. They get me down, too. Maybe we shouldn’t go tonight.” Her lips brushed Ellen’s cheek.

“Go where?” Ellen asked.

Yolanda went ahead with the kids in the truck while Ellen and Sean walked over with flashlights, Ellen hugging the ditch. Any old draft dodger with one headlight and a medicinal marijuana permit could round the bend, but Sean strode fearlessly up the middle of the road the way he would, on any dry day, streak down it in a death-defying crouch. He custom-made longboards and sold them on-line, or bartered with them. Somehow the boards, their Child Tax Benefit payment, and Ellen’s occasional cheques sustained them.

The glowing glass lantern of Larry and Amber’s house appeared through the trees, the opposite of Yolanda and Sean’s cabin. The opposite, too, of the shack where Larry had once lived with Ellen. For over twenty years Larry had written for television. This house, architect-designed, cathedral-ceilinged, powered by the sun, was built on sit-coms. You walked right into the heart of it where Amber was, at the stove talking to Yolanda, but falling silent when she saw Ellen coming over. She’d changed her hair, sheared the sides and beaded the long part on top. “Nice,” Ellen said, smiling and opening her arms.

On Cordova Island the standard greeting was a hug. You hugged the postmistress when she handed over your mail. You hugged the man who filled your propane tank. When Amber turned away, Ellen stood there, bewildered and stung.

She tried again. “What are you making?”

“Latkes.” Amber transferred one out of the pan onto a paper towel-lined plate.

The first thought that came to Ellen: “I have the best latke recipe. Grind the potatoes in the food processor. Then they’re fluffy instead of rubbery and don’t look so grey. Do you have a food processor?”

“No,” Amber said.

“Are we doing Chanukah?”

“No,” Amber said.

“Can I help?” Ellen asked, sincerely.

“No,” again, just as a latke slapped the floor. When Amber bent to pick it up, her thong showed.

“I see London, I see France,” Ellen said and Amber straightened with a look of such undiluted hatred her monotone trio of “nos” sounded furious in retrospect.

Ellen backed up all the way to where Yolanda had escaped to nurse Fern in the big armchair by the fire. She sank down on the hearth. Amber was never really warm with Ellen, understandably. Her best friend’s mother was also her husband’s ex-wife, but they’d always muddled through. Now Ellen, who had only expected to feel, along with the usual awkwardness, the guilt anyone would feel returning to the scene of a crime, was confronted with a hostility whose source she quailed to guess at. Amber was the one who’d invited Ellen. Yolanda had said so. Why would Amber do this if she knew what had happened between Ellen and Larry last year?

“Where’s your father?” Ellen asked Yolanda.

“I don’t know. Sean’s checking on Eli in the bath.”

They came over once a week for this purpose, Ellen remembered, trying not to panic. Because Sean and Yolanda would take a bath, too, probably together, while Larry hid in his study, like now, leaving Ellen alone and defenseless against Amber.

“Sure you’re okay, Mom?” Yolanda asked, touching Ellen’s knee.

Larry didn’t show himself until dinner. Unshaven, in slippers and a stretched-out cable-knit sweater, the kind on offer in the Free Store, covered with pills, he finally appeared. At the sight of Ellen, he drew his head back sharply, which confused her. Also, she didn’t know if she should hug him with Amber right there carrying the plate of latkes over to the table they were all gathering around and, instead of setting it down, letting it drop the last two inches so it clattered.

Ellen decided to behave normally and hug Larry. The sweater was pungent with old wood smoke. Strange how different his once-loved body felt when for all these years it was everyone else’s body that felt strange. All those lovers who weren’t Larry.

Then her second epiphany happened. Her second in as many weeks, when most people don’t experience two in an entire lifetime.

She took her place at the table, beaming.

Last year, and the year before, over the last quarter century, in fact, when she knew she would soon see Larry, she would always be in some kind of state. Excitement sometimes, often rage. At any rate, some form of passion would carry her away. But this year? This year all she felt looking across the table at the delicately made, silvering man who had ruled her heart for decades was a mild irritation that he couldn’t be bothered to put on something presentable.

She raised her wine glass. “Cheers.”

“It’s not you,” Yolanda told Ellen after they had got through the incredibly strained meal made bearable to Ellen by her own inane chatter. No one else would step up to the plate and talk. Except the children. Fern had blatted her few words, then guffawed as though she’d cracked a joke.

Ellen, with much nervous lip-licking, had explained how to teach a dog to read. “Take soap. Rub it on the card with the correct word. Rub the corresponding picture or object. Leave the other pictures unsoaped. What the dog is actually doing is reading the smell. That’s what smelling is for them.”

Eli asked what grade Tony was in.

(Lying with Matt, listening to Tony singing at the bottom of the ladder, she had used Lady with a Lapdog to teasingly fan his face. “Aren’t you curious how I taught him?”

“I know how you did it,” Matt had said. “That’s the book with teeth marks all over it.”)

Amber wouldn’t make eye contact, even when Ellen complimented her on the latkes, which were in fact rubbery and grey. Neither would Amber look at Larry. Instead, she shot secretive glances at Yolanda as though the two of them were teenagers.

Yolanda and Ellen volunteered to do the dishes. In the kitchen, the window ledge above the sink was crowded with driftwood and shells and coloured bits of beach glass. Also two rubber duckies, one with a bowtie, the other in a flowered bonnet. Ellen wondered about the pretty detritus, the shells and glass, things you’d pick up on a beach holiday to take home as mementos. What possessed Amber—it had to be her—to gather and display things so commonplace to island life? Ellen pictured her moping down at the beach, noticing a shell, and stooping. And in her mind’s eye, Ellen saw the thong again, the world’s most uncomfortable undergarment, and was glad, very glad, no longer to be young.

“Dad told Amber—” Yolanda whispered and the plate Ellen was washing very nearly slipped out of her hand, “—that he didn’t find her very interesting.”

Ellen exhaled, relieved. “Why is she so mad at me then?”

Yolanda said, “It’s not you. She’s mad at Dad. See how the boy is facing straight ahead?” She pointed to the duckies. “That means Dad wants to make up. But the girl has her back to him. So Amber is still pissed off.”

“Are you serious?” Ellen asked.

Yolanda picked a dripping plate out of the rack and, covering her face with it, giggled.

When the dishes were done, Yolanda went out to the greenhouse with Amber, ostensibly so Amber could smoke. Sean was in the bath with Fern. This left Ellen and Larry effectively alone, except for Eli, who was walking on Larry’s back.

“Why do you like to get stepped on?” Eli asked.

“It’s what I’m used to,” Larry said.

Ellen snorted. Soon Eli lost interest and scampered off to look for his arctic hare, leaving Larry face down on the rug.

“Those are great kids,” Ellen said. “It’s nice you see so much of them.”

“I’m wanted for my indoor plumbing.”

“More wine?” She went to the kitchen for it, found Eli crouching behind the island counter with the hare that had cost her $350, its face stained with chili now. He’d discovered chopsticks in a drawer and was carefully inserting them between the stitches into the animal’s body.

She returned with a glass for Larry, too. By then he’d resurrected himself and was stoking the fire, stabbing the burning logs with the fresh one. “Did you lose weight?” he asked.

“No,” Ellen lied.

Larry closed the fireplace doors. “You seem happier.”

“You don’t. And your sweater is ugly.”

She felt sorry for him, the way after seven or eight readings she began to feel sorry for Gurov, shackled by bitterness. Every new affair inevitably grew complicated and problematic; love always became an unbearable situation. When Yolanda moved here to be with Sean after Eli was born, Larry visited them. His visits to his own children had been infrequent, but now that he was a grandfather, he came. At some point he decided to move back, possibly when he met Amber. Ellen had never asked, but now she did.

There turned out to be a story. The way Larry offered it up made Ellen think he had been waiting a long time for someone sympathetic to lend an ear, and that no one had until now. Until Ellen. It concerned a play Larry had gone to see in L.A. five years before.

“A play everyone was raving about. By a young playwright.”

“A woman.”

Larry nodded. “It was pretty good. I liked it. The playwright was there so afterward I went over and introduced myself. She didn’t know who I was.”

Ellen sensed what was coming. She disguised her cringe with another sip of wine.

“I told her about Talking Stick and the awards it won and my TV projects.”

“Talking Stick was a great play,” Ellen said. “Your best.”

“I only wrote two plays,” Larry said.

“That was my favourite.”

He looked at her. Larry had a look like a taser. It disabled you with feelings of stupidity and self-doubt, but Ellen had been looked at by Larry so many times over the years she was as desensitized as a lab rat. “And?”

“That’s it,” Larry said. “I told her who I was. She didn’t have a clue. She’d never heard of A Principled Man. It ran two seasons. I was head writer. Curve Ball?”

“That was the baseball show?” Ellen asked.

“Curve Ball drew a blank, too.” He scratched his stubble then admitted that he had asked the young playwright to go for a drink sometime, not necessarily that night. “‘To talk about your play.’ I said I had a few suggestions. Well. She took gross offense. It was unbelievable how she over-reacted. Like I’d just said her play was shit, when I’d said the opposite.”

“Unbelievable,” Ellen said, thinking of Tony in full snorkel mode at the base of a tree. Now that she’d read all those dog books, she knew what he was so desperately seeking there. Some other dog’s three-week-old piss to dilute with his own.

Amber appeared out of nowhere then with Yolanda behind her. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.

“See you,” Ellen sang. “Thanks for dinner.”

Larry looked at Amber and, on her, it had its intended effect. She swung around and stomped off like a little girl, her beads clacking.

Yolanda said, “I’m just taking a quick bath, Mom. Do you want to walk now with Sean and Fern or come later with me and Eli in the truck?”

“We’re talking,” Larry told her.

“Well, don’t talk too much,” she said to Ellen.

“Gotcha,” Ellen said, sitting up straighter.

“The last time I wrote something decent was when we lived here,” Larry said, as though these discomfiting walk-throughs hadn’t happened. “That’s your answer. That’s why I came.”

“So how’s the play?” Ellen asked.

“There’s no play,” Larry said, and he turned and opened the doors of the fireplace and slammed another wood chunk in.

“Did you tell Amber about last year?”

Larry said nothing.

“Larry? You shouldn’t have. She’ll tell Yolanda if she hasn’t already. And now she hates me. Is that why she invited me? To show me that she hates me?”

“It’s a test,” Larry said.

Ellen threw up her hands. “It was nothing.”

“Was it?”

The way Larry looked at her then was entirely unfamiliar. There was a softening in his eyes. She saw his pain, too. His back, and now his play. Larry had always had a tortured process.

“My therapist?” Larry said. “The one in L.A.? He used to say, ‘Larry, you are addicted to Act One.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I like beginnings. When I lived with you? Here? That was the only time I ever finished a play.”

Ellen stared at him. The sweater made him seem shrunken. Both hands pressed the small of his back. Also, now that his legs were stretched out in front of him, she saw two different colour socks, black and brown.

Larry stood. Last year she’d followed him to his office, to his battered leather couch calicoed with the stains of his former conquests. But not then, not during any of the other times through the years that they had coupled up for old time’s sake, or relief, had he ever indicated that she might be his muse. Now he limped out, leaving Ellen by the fire in the lonely cathedral of the room wondering where everyone had got to and how they’d ended up this way, so miserable.

Well, the children were all right, and Sean, too. Yolanda was just tired.

“Nonny!” Eli called.

Ellen went to him, still behind the island. He held up the hare impaled with chopsticks; it resembled a voodoo doll. Laughing, Ellen lifted him and set him on the counter next to the sink.

“Look at these two,” she said, showing him the duckies on the windowsill. She made the girl ducky fight the boy ducky and Eli laughed. It was laughable. Pathetic.

Then she turned the girl ducky so it faced the boy ducky, so it seemed to be nuzzling the boy ducky’s neck.

Something happened just as they were leaving that changed the entire holiday for Ellen. Larry, when summoned by his daughter, shambled out to be hugged by her, then Ellen. Having helped the squirming Eli into his coat, Ellen pulled her gloves from her pocket. And something fluttered to the floor, something orange that Larry bent, wincing, to pick up. To her amazement, and Yolanda’s apparently, he straightened with a smile, his first that evening and, for all Ellen knew, that year.

A poop bag.

“I know what’s different about you, Ellen,” he said. “You got a dog.”

Did it count? Could this be a third epiphany?

She loved that dog! She would forget Matt. Forget Larry. What did they, or any man, ever do for her? She was always giving, giving herself away. No more, she decided. No more. She would get Tony neutered and live with him instead. Long slow walks in the morning, reading together every night. In between, a little bit of squeaky banana and some fetch. The second half of her life unspooled before her like a newsreel, its blazing headline: Contentment! Contentment!

After that Ellen just had to speak to Tony. She called Tilda from the truck.

Tilda said, “Yesterday there was so much corn in his poo. Today he’s better.”

“Have you been practicing with the Henry James?”

“Um,” Tilda said.

“Where is he?”

“Right here. He’s sleeping.”

“Put him on. Tony? Hi, Tony! Whatcha doing? Do you miss me, Tony? I sure miss you. What’s he doing, Tilda? Does he know it’s me?”

“He’s wagging all over the place.”

So who was Ellen’s grand passion? She wondered this after she hung up, in the truck bouncing back to Yolanda and Sean’s. Of course it was Larry. It had always been Larry, her Gurov. (But this was only her point of view. Larry, of course, would have a different opinion. He always did.)

Then this past October she found herself standing in line behind a man whose shirt tag was poking out the back of his collar. She tucked it in. He turned and said, “Your hands are cold.”

Your hands are cold. Your hands are cold. Let me. Warm them. Let’s go up.

She hadn’t told Larry, though she’d planned to. She’d planned to say, “See? I, too, can snatch this from life.”

Then, what with the Winter Solstice party and Christmas and visiting old friends who still lived on Cordova Island, Ellen did forget Matt. She barely thought of him after that night at Larry’s. Things were getting complicated between them anyway, especially now. Now that she had Tony.

When she got home to Vancouver, he was waiting for her. Tilda opened the door and he leapt against her legs and dervished all around her. The whole dog wagged. He wagged for Ellen.

She threw her bags inside and out they went. Tony sniffed and peed, sniffed and peed. Reaching the end of the block she turned; he was far behind. But all she had to do was call his name and he ran right to her, tongue out.

A child’s pink purse lay in the gutter in front of the corner store across the street. Ellen wiped it on the grass and showed it to Tony, who took the handle in his mouth.

In the next block, an elderly woman came along. “What in the world is he carrying?”

“We’re just coming back from Saks,” Ellen said. “Gucci’s on sale.”

“Well, he is cute.”

“Smart too. This dog can read.”

The woman’s face crinkled all over when she smiled in a way Ellen found very beautiful.

Back home, the mail was in a drift behind the door. She unpacked her suitcase first—she had bones for Tony—then checked the beeping phone.

“Ellen? Are you back? It’s Matt. I’ve been calling and calling. I really have to see you. I have to.”

She pressed the phone against her ribs, pressed it hard, but it wasn’t any use. It had been building all this time. And out it came. Out and out and out.

Tony laid back his ears and cocked his head to one side, but both of them knew because both of them had read the story. The end was still a long, long way away and the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

—Caroline Adderson

Caroline Adderson is the author of three novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, The Sky Is Falling), two collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings, Pleased To Meet You) as well as books for young readers. Her work has received numerous prize nominations including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Winner of two Ethel Wilson Fiction Prizes and three CBC Literary Awards, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. She lives in Vancouver.

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Childhood — Tom Bauer

Sep 242012

Tom Bauer, a Montreal writer, pens here a brief, poignant addition to the NC Childhood Series. Bauer’s writing is telegraphic and elliptical, yet he manages with few words to evoke the mind and memory of a child: the inexplicable nature of childhood, the mythic adults, the fear and confusion. The photo at the top seems iconic (the father looming, in focus); the one at the bottom moreso (the author inhabits only a corner of the picture looking dazed and uncertain). Lovely to add this to the collection.

——–

I was born in the Misericordia Hospital in Winnipeg, 1963. We always had animals in the apartment at Roslyn Court: a skunk waddling along the long wooden hall, cats bounding on tables. My father taught animal behavior, my mother worked in a zoo.

My father liked to carry me around on his shoulders. I pulled his hair once so hard he cried. I was standing on the couch in his study. I’m not sure if he was genuinely hurt, or fake-crying, but I was afraid I’d hurt him. I felt sorry about it. I think I remember this because it jolted me with fear at the time.

My father liked to stand at one end of the long hall in the Roslyn apartments and send me to the other. He’d open his arms and shout “Tovarich!” and I’d run down the hall into his arms. It was one of my favorite things.

My father was German and his voice was sharp, his accent rough. In his study was a wooden Afghan stool made of yellow leather, a tripod stool. His chess set, which I still have, contains a roll-up chess mat made of vinyl. The pieces are large and wooden.

His books smell of cigarette smoke. I looked through them all throughout childhood, memories for each: issues of Avant Garde, books of cartoons by Mordillo, the drawings of Heinrich Kley. He had a big record collection with Indian music and spoken word recordings of various poets, and liked to cook curry and burn incense. There were always pungent smells, cooking oil and cigarette smoke, the smell of empty beer bottles.

At night I would sometimes sneak out and eat brown sugar from the bowl on the kitchen table and watch the woman across the way taking a bath. I got in trouble for things like that, getting out of bed, getting into mischief. They tied me in my crib when I was little. I don’t remember that, unless unconsciously, in my limbs, the occasional anxiety passing through. They told me about that later.

I remember looking out the window waiting for my mother to get home. It is getting dark, sunset on the river, an evening view from five floors up. I am anxious for her to get home, the kind of feeling one gets in a dream. It might have been a dream, I don’t know. Sometimes dreams and memories get all mixed up.

I remember riding in a car, must have been a friend of my parents as they didn’t own one, probably going to an Italian place, maybe on Lulu Street, where I snuck wine from my parent’s glasses when they weren’t looking. If I think about it now it must have been a game. They must have seen me take the glasses and sneak the sips.

Apparently I ran along the street afterwards leaping at low-hanging branches, snatching leaves, crying out: “It’s spring! It’s spring!” I don’t remember that, it was one of the stories that get told, but I’ve heard it so often it feels like a memory. I can see the tree, the early evening air, my father calling my name, can hear the sound of my boy voice.

Later memories, after I was five and we moved to Montreal, into a house, are stronger, harsher. My father’s angry face, his belt, and shouting, warning me not to steal again, the forbidden smell of my mothers purse, her wallet, the sick feeling of taking coins and later getting caught and punished. Sometimes he used a bare hand, which hurt too much. I preferred the sting of the belt, less severe. There are many memories like this, vivid, clear, my mother overseeing from the doorway of my room, the bare wooden floor, the window near my bed, books and clothes on the floor, a half-finished plastic tank model, the smell of the glue and not getting the pieces to fit right, watching from the doorway as I’m told to never do it again, promising through tears, begging, the sick feeling in my stomach as I fear the pending spank, and crying.

When we first moved to that house there was a vacant lot on the opposite block. It had been a Pom Bakery factory before we got there, torn down by then. Nothing left but yellow-earth, rubble, stones, some ruins at the far end of the empty lot. The kid next door, whose front door was painted white, was older. He had a basement full of stuff, including a BB gun, and a work area where he made things with tools and a vise. He was always inventing things. Many boys were like that back then, inventors of objects, tinkering with things in basements. Even I did a bit of that whenever we went to the suburbs to visit my mother’s parents, and my grandfather would let me into his basement with hammer and wood and I’d sit down there and bang nails in, smelling the soft odor of pine, the silvery smell of the nails and metal hammerhead.

The kid next door took me across to the field, around in the rubbly parts, digging out odd-shaped bricks of some kind of orange bubbly plastic, deformed, almost molten, like cauliflour billowing out around the basic shape of a brick. He told me it was “Hash man! Hashish!” At that age I didn’t know what hash was, which probably took all the fun out of it for him. He asked me once to stand on the street and wait for a police car to go by, then shout: “Ew, it’s the fuzz!” I did, and he laughed.

—Tom Bauer

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Tom Bauer works in television, researching shows for Discovery and History channel. He has had fiction and poetry published in Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Headlight Anthology, and in the anthology In Other Words: New English Writing from Quebec. His stories have also been short-listed for the CBC Literary Competition and the Quebec Literary Competition. He lives and works in Montreal.

Author photo by Karin Benedict.

The Diplomat: Fiction — Christy Ann Conlin

Aug 302012

Herewith a gorgeous, poignant story about love, loss and translation, about the strange world in which we find ourselves today, a world of exiles, guest workers, refugees, immigrants, and fractured cultures — we all leave home, it seems, but what of identity and love? Christy Ann Conlin is an old friend, dating from when I first read her wonderful first novel, Heave, when I sat on the Governor-General’s Award jury in 2002. I hadn’t met Christy Ann yet, but I was friends with her writing. Later, I put one of her stories in Best Canadian Stories when I edited that estimable annual anthology. Her fiction has lilt, it has swing, and it has heart. Nothing else like it.

—–

Wiedervereinigung, the German teacher said. Viola knew the Chinese student named Henry would translate just as he had since starting the class two weeks ago, always trying to help, but she already knew the word. It was impossible to be in Germany and not know. The teacher, a plump middle-aged woman, told them the fourth anniversary was approaching and she went around the circle and made them repeat, stretching their lips, raising their eyebrows, as though they were warming up for an opera.

Wie-der-ver-ei-ni-gung.

“This means reunification,” Henry said looking at Viola from across the table. In perfect English. With an accent just like hers. His eyes found hers and she blushed. His smile soft and careful.

“I know what it means,” she replied in halting German, her eyes closing. The Berlin Wall had come down four years ago.

Die Berliner Mauer, Viola said slowly. Apparently Henry interpreted this as confusion. “The wall,” he said in his remarkable English, as though he’d grown up down the road from her. “The Berlin Wall.” He stretched his arms out, as though showing her how big it was in case she thought it was a fence for goats like the one on the small salt water farm on Campobello Island, near her parent’s house, the farm where Nolen now was, without her, of course. The teacher clucked and reminded them to speak German. Henry smiled at Viola again as Fiona from Australia giggled as though they were still teenagers.

It was a small class in a small language school in the centre of Frankfurt, Im Zentrum, as the Germans said. Viola had been in the German class for three months. She took the train in every weekday from the small town she lived in with Ralf who she’d met on a trip she’d taken to Vietnam after finishing her history degree. When she spoke German at home Ralf would stroke her hair and say: “You are like a kitchen appliance, macerating every syllable. It’s very cute, Schatzie. You sound like a Turk.”

The director had brought in the new Chinese students that Monday morning. The director was an old German hippie, always winking and telling Viola to eat muesli. During introductions Fiona said Henry had smiled instantly when Viola said she was twenty-three and from Campobello Island. Viola hadn’t noticed–she often shut her eyes when she spoke German, and thought of home. Henry was from Beijing. He had been in Frankfurt for one month. He was thirty-one years old.

Every Monday they began with a new expression or word they had learned on the weekend. This class, Viola offered Heimweh. Fiona had told her on coffee break that Henry had nodded when she said she missed Canada.

“Homesick,” he said, nodding as though he could see the sea urchins and shells she saw behind her eyelids. Viola squinted thinking his name couldn’t actually be Henry. It wasn’t Chinese. He told her later it was a name he had taken for Westerners. His real name was Sun He Peng.

On coffee break Henry was talking with the other two Chinese men as she walked by. Henry smiled and looked down at his feet and then back at her. He was tall. He’d laughed later when she said she thought Chinese men were all short. He told her he used to think Caucasians wore sunglasses so their eyes wouldn’t change colour in the sun. “I didn’t know the colour of your eyes at first,” he said. “Your eyes were always closed when you were speaking. They are green like the ocean.”

Henry had worked at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. He’d worked at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa for one year, part of his training. He’d perfected his English there.

“A translator?” Viola asked.

He smiled back. “A diplomat. At first I thought you didn’t understand the language. You are just shy. Forgive me.”

Viola laughed and closed her eyes and her cheeks were suddenly hot.

After class Fiona had proclaimed them a mini UN. Fiona was an accountant from Sydney and she was living here with her fiancé, Helmut, a banker she’d met at a conference. He had a telescope. They were going to Australia soon to get married.

There was a young couple from Turkey, Gastarbeiter, guest workers doing industrial work there weren’t enough Germans for. They never stayed after class. Sixteen-year old Farzad from Tehran who mourned the fall of the Shah and with his large aqua eyes followed the every move of Kwan-Sun, seventeen and from Korea, a nanny for a wealthy German family. Padma was from Bombay, her husband an English investment banker. It was the second time they’d been married to each other and she anticipated another divorce and possibly a third marriage. They were made for each other, she said, but only incrementally. Padma laughed what Fiona called a deep curried laugh. It was Padma who said the Chinese were refugees. “The riots, you know, the massacre,” she whispered.

And there was Lucien from Burkina Faso, married to a German historian. He and his wife Helga spoke French together, he had told the class. They’d married in Ouagadougou, and now she had a position at the university in Frankfurt. Helga’s last name was von Feldenburg. In the olden days von was a sign of nobility, Lucien stated.

Yes, their teacher had nodded, but German nobility ended with the abolition of the monarchy in 1919.

“Ja ja,” Lucien had said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes sparkling and his skin like espresso against the creamy white wall. “But abolition does not mean the old ideas disappear. Ce n’est jamais si facile que ça, mes amis.” He looked at the teacher and then at Viola and winked. “Ja,” she said, eyes closing and in her mind sitting with Noel on the back porch of his family farm house that had come down five generations to him. They ate chèvre with sun dried tomatoes on homemade brown bread. Don’t go to Saigon, Nolen said, looking out over the beach, crying so quietly. Stay here and marry me. We’ll run your parents’ inn and my family farm, do the summer market for the tourists, go sailing on Saturday afternoons.

Henry would always come to the park after class with the others who would scatter to benches in the late October sun. He sat by the fountain with Viola. She told him she was living with Ralf, that they’d met in Saigon where she’d gone after graduating from university with what Ralf called a useless degree. She’d left Campobello because it as an island, there was nothing there. But her voice had caught then and Henry had nodded his beautiful head, knowing there were some things there. Ralf was a software engineer. He’d been married once before and had a daughter the same age as Viola. She lived in New York and would call sometimes, usually hanging up if Viola answered. I don’t recognize you, the daughter said once. You are just one more. Don’t think you are the only one even now. Ralf would say his daughter was jealous. She was insecure. She refused to grow up. Ralf was doing research on using the internet for telephone calls. It was the way of the future, he said. He travelled frequently so Viola was studying German, something to keep her busy. She had no work papers, no official status.

Henry smiled. “I have a great affinity for Canadians. They’ve been very kind to me.”

Viola told him the Canadian Embassy in Saigon had closed up shop in the night and fled just before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. The Vietnamese who’d worked for the Canadians found an abandoned building in the morning. “That wasn’t very kind,” she said, looking at the sky.

Henry nodded and sipped his coffee. “Viola, no one puts their best foot forward when the army is advancing. Things did not go as Ho Chi Minh planned. He was hopeful after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in the first Indochina War. But the negotiations at the Geneva Conference in 1954 were not what Ho wanted. Zhou Enlai was the Chinese diplomat involved in these negotiations, assisting the Viet Minh. Zhou Enlai was brilliant. ”

Viola nodded. “Is he why you became a diplomat?”

Henry laughed and his coffee spilled on the ground. “Oh, Viola, I was selected and told I would be a diplomat, and like Zhou Enlai, my job would be to think of my people. You know, over a million Chinese died in the Korean Conflict.”

“I can’t imagine so many people,” Viola said, watching the coffee trickle through the dirt.

He closed his eyes. “Zhou’s main concern was keeping the Americans away. A permanent partition of the Vietnamese Peninsula suited China.” Henry paused and then, opened his eyes and looked at the pigeons. “The freedom of my people suited me.”

Viola slapped the coffee puddle with the toe of her shoe and Henry looked at her. “We have a saying: The general sees with only one eye, the diplomat with both. War may be the domain of soldiers but resolutions are always the purview of diplomats.” Henry smiled. “Uncle Ho discovered that even hope must be negotiated. But Vietnam was his home and he would not abandon it after he had returned after so many years in exile.”

Viola slapped the trickle of coffee again. “There is an American photojournalist buried on Campobello Island. He died on a helicopter that was shot down near Danang. He was twenty-nine. He had a baby boy who never knew him and puts flowers on his grave every Sunday afternoon even when it’s snowing. He’ll never know his dad but he tries. He’ll never leave that land.” She squeezed her eyes so she wouldn’t cry.

Henry took her hand. “In China we prayed to our ancestors. The old ways are slow to pass. My father was sad when I went to Beijing. He said to complete the circle of life one must bury one’s father. I laughed at him, Viola, but I laughed less as I grew older. It is our history with the people we love that binds us together. Being close to the graves of the dead has life in it even if you cannot see this.” He took out a tissue and dabbed her eyes and cheeks, and kept holding her hand.

She moved closer to him and he put his arm around her. “Nolen puts silk flowers there in the winter, not real ones because they’d freeze.” She could feel his body shaking as he laughed, and then she laughed too and felt a lightness then, as she had the first time Nolen had given her daisies when they were fifteen.

After lunch they would walk to the subway, the U-Bahn. It was always Fiona, Viola and Farzad who would walk together but these days Farzad and Kwan-Sun had been walking away in the other direction holding hands. Henry began to wait and walk with Fiona and Viola. He and Fiona would board the train on the left and Viola would take the one on the right to the Hauptbahnhoff , the main train station, taking the S-Bahn, a commuter train to Darmstadt, back to the empty apartment to wait for Ralf. On Fridays, some of the students would lunch at a cheap Yugoslavian restaurant near the school and Henry started to come along with them.

Ralf would be home on the weekends and they’d eat and then ride his motorcycle through the countryside. He knew she was homesick and hoped it would cure her. He would take her to ancient castles in the hills and as they’d climb the turrets he’d tousle her hair and tell her she was beautiful.

Ralf never approved of her housekeeping. He’d unpack his suitcase and then vacuum. It wasn’t a criticism; it was how he relaxed. You had to stay on top of the dust, he’d comment. And then he’d tie her to the bed and take a feather duster to her, from her toes, up her legs, over her breasts, her face, feathers soft on her eyelashes. And he’d be packing again on a Sunday evening, gone, before she awoke alone.

The day she went back to Henry’s apartment they’d been swarmed by an army of pigeons in the park. The pigeons of Frankfurt were nasty creatures and knew no discretion. They didn’t wait quietly for crumbs but hopped and leapt about in a frenzy, even the maimed birds, creatures with one eye, one leg, bald birds.

She wondered about how they got their injuries but Henry had laughed. “What is significant is that they survive them.” He joked they were ancestors of war birds–while the bombed-flattened zentrum of Frankfurt might be nothing more than a replica, the pigeons carried the DNA of the survivors. They would survive an apocalypse now. There were pigeons in China, he told her. But having pets was now considered bourgeois. “They are not in the parks like this,” he said.

Henry always wanted more stories of Campobello Island, and she told him it was near Maine, near Passamaquoddy Bay—it was easier to talk about the geography. Her hands fluttered in front of her face, in front of her breasts, up over her head, as she drew him a map in the air. She told him of Nolen and the goats, and the summer market where they worked together, how Nolen had wanted to marry her. “He thinks if his father had been a farmer and not a combat photographer, he wouldn’t have died, if he had done what his parents wanted. I went away to university but I came home every holiday, every summer. The autumn after I graduated I went to Saigon. I went because I saw his father’s photos. They spoke to me. Nolen said I’d never come back. And I didn’t. The island felt as though it was growing smaller everyday.” Viola asked Henry why he was in Frankfurt. He was so easy to talk to and yet shared so little. He’d been at Tiananmen Square, he told her in a matter-of-fact voice, as he watched the pigeons. He’d been in prison and then under house arrest. The Canadians had negotiated on his behalf, for his safety. His voice became very soft and she had to bend her head close to hear. His father had died during that time.

Could he ever go back, Viola asked, holding her hands up. His eyes followed her fingers as though they were wings in the sky and he reached for them, clasping her cold hands in his as he told her, no, he did not foresee that. And he put his hands on his lap, still holding hers. I can see nothing yet in the tea leaves, he’d smiled at her. He wanted to know again about Campobello and she told him of the beaches, Theodore Roosevelt’s summer place that was now part of a park. Viola’s family home was now an inn. Her father was ill, Alzheimer’s. He would have to be institutionalized. It was easier to be away, she said. Henry had nodded. It is nice you have a choice, Viola. She’d closed her eyes then but there was no judgment in his voice and he had held her hand tighter.

The refugee camp was not what she’d seen in the news, tents and jeeps and aid workers dolling out bowls of rice. Henry laughed. Housing was perhaps a better word than camp, saying her island view of the world was charming. She’d smiled. They had not discussed that she would come with him. It was a Friday but Ralf was away until Saturday evening. After lunch, they walked to the subway. Fiona got off at her stop, winking at Viola as the doors closed. And they’d carried on until his stop. The door opened and he’d held out his hand.

It was a tall generic building. Henry and the two other Chinese classmates shared the small, tidy apartment. Two bedrooms with one of them sleeping in the living room. The roommates had not been in class, away for the weekend, Henry said. Viola did not ask where.

Henry led her by the hand to a little bedroom with a mattress on the floor and a tiny table beside the bed, on it a photo of a smiling young Chinese woman holding a baby, and beside it, a black and white picture of a young boy and his father and mother, standing by a cow. Henry turned to Viola and took her face between his hands and kissed her, sucking her breath inside of him, her fingers all over his flesh, mapping her way to him. They made love on the thin mattress, his long hard body pressed down and in on hers, spreading over her as the shadow from a tree would. Henry was silent and when she cried out he covered her lips with his mouth.

He had asked her, after, as they lay there drinking tea, if she would stay and marry Ralf. Or if she would go home to her young man with the flowers. Frankfurt was not a city for her, he said. There were no beaches. “As the Germans say, Zu Hause ist es am Besten,” he said with a smile. The late afternoon sun tunneled in through the small window. No place like home, he said.

Henry told Viola they’d said his wife and daughter would be safe but only on the condition that he go into exile without them. It was the Canadian Embassy who’d arranged things with Germany. Henry hoped he could one day go to Canada. They were working on that but it would be years, and his life would be only in exile now, he knew this. There would be no visits to his father’s grave.

Henry brought her some noodles for supper and in the early morning he brought her persimmons and tea. Grey sky filled the window and she imagined she was on the shores of Campobello, the traffic outside the surf on the sandy beach. She held up her hand and spread her fingers out. “Did you know the starfish is a symbol for safe travel,” she said. She thought of Nolen and his goats, and his armful of wildflowers for his father on Sundays in July, her father now drooling in a chair.

“Viola,” Henry whispered, taking her hand in his, “Home is something we must sometimes negotiate. But it is always worth the negotiations, no matter how hard. You must not send yourself into exile when you can return and make your way. We Chinese have a saying: Your heart will lead you to a path and if you do not follow it, you will, as the years pass, find that you are still at its beginning.” It was then he glanced at the photo on the small table. He shut his eyes and was quiet for a moment before he took Viola’s hand, kissing the palm, his lips soft and warm on her cold pale skin.

— Christy Ann Conlin

———

Christy Ann Conlin is the author of the novels Heave and Dead Time. She is finishing her next novel, Listening for the Island. She hosts the CBC radio program, Fear Itself, a show that explores the whys, wherefores and what-have-yous of fear www.cbc.ca/fearitself/ You can learn more about the quiet country life of Christy Ann at christyannconlin.com.

Sometimes It Is, Sometimes It Isn’t: Fiction — Robert Day

Aug 292012

Robert Day is the best teacher I ever encountered, also one of the most amiable of men and author of The Last Cattle Drive, a novel I fondly reread every now and then for its rich comedy, its distinctively clipped and forthright voice, its deft and delicate puncturing of the myth of the west, and its humane decency. Bob and I met at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1981 when I was a student and he was a visiting instructor. The first day of class he walked into the room and wrote across the whole front wall of blackboard REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. I have written about this in my essay “The Novel as a Poem” in my book Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. I include the opening paragraphs below (and I wrote about him from memory and no doubt reimagined or even fictionalized details for which sin I hope he will forgive me).

The best writing teacher I ever had was a Kansas cowboy named Robert Day who showed up at the Iowa Writers Workshop as a last minute, one-semester replacement for a sick colleague in January, 1981. The first day of classes he strode into the room wearing Fry boots, jeans and a checked shirt. Without saying a word, he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote across the full length of the blackboard in huge looping letters: “Remember to tell them the novel is a poem.”

At the time, Day had only published one novel, a book called The Last Cattle Drive. He was a tenured English professor at Washington College in Maryland. He had been one of the founders of the Associated Writing Programs. As a young man, he had worked at G. P. Putnam in New York and could recall for us the excitement over the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Summers he went back to western Kansas where friends ran a borderline ranch. He kept a horse there, a horse which at various times had eaten loaves of bread through the kitchen window, or Day’s hat. All summer long he would hang out with his friends, their cattle and his horse.

That semester we read Queneau, Musil, Rulfo, Achebe, Nabokov, Tutuola, Abe and Marquez. Day did not tell us what he meant–“Remember to tell them the novel is a poem.” Maybe he forgot. Half-way through the semester he read the second draft of my novel Precious, three hundred typed pages of plot, dialogue and scene that stubbornly refused to come alive. I still have the notes I made during our conference, fifty-four words. It took less than fifteen minutes. But like a skilled surgeon he had opened the novel up for me and shown me its heart still beating, its bones, nerves and veins.

The bit about AWP needs expansion (and even now I am not sure I have this right). But according to Bob’s friend and colleague Walton Beacham, in 1971 the infant AWP, then being run by its co-founder R. V. Cassill (George Garrett was the other co-founder), was about to go under. Cassill was bowing out and Brown University was withdrawing its support. Bob and Walton arranged a new home and financing for the organization, and Bob made the trip to Providence to retrieve the AWP archives from Cassill. Cassill handed him a shoebox containing some notecards, the full extent of the AWP archives at the time. Bob remained director and/or sometimes president until 1982.

Bob Day and I have not been much in touch since those days in Iowa, a hiatus probably due to the diffidence that exists between a student and an important mentor. But it’s a huge pleasure now to reunite on these pages — one of the best things about publishing Numéro Cinq is the number of friendships it has revived. When he wrote to me a few weeks ago, he reminded me about the last time we were together. “The last time I saw you we were looking a new jeeps as I was to buy one for the ranch where I worked; they had gone up scale and you said: Bob, they’re toys. Right you were.”

Now I am deeply pleased to be able to publish a new Robert Day short story, also to applaud his new book of stories coming out in September: Where I Am Now.

The hunting photo above is by Denise Low.

—–

I had not been a good enough high school student to go “East” for college. My father had hoped for a scholarship to Yale or Harvard: an Ivy League education was to a young man from Kansas as a wealthy marriage was to a young woman. As for my mother, she had 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 in context one of the ubiquitous words she was forever trying to teach me out of her dictionary.

“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 a beer in his webbed aluminum lawn chair.

“I think he should stay in our environs,” my mother said through the open kitchen window as she cleaned up. That spring I was accepted at Emporia State Teachers College.

“William Allen White’s town,” my father said.

“Teachers and government workers are never without a job,” my mother said.

The summer before I left for Emporia, I life guarded at the local pool and helped at home: I mowed the lawn, painted the basement walls, cleaned out the attic, ran errands, and hung the laundry on the backyard clothes line. Some days I fixed flats, pumped gas and changed oil at my father’s repair garage and filling station. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I didn’t sit around looking into a gold fish tank.

At the swimming pool that summer, 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. I was the kind of kid who did not explain himself. It seemed natural. The summer after my first year at Emporia I went back to work at the pool.

“Your uncle Conroy writes that he has a fellowship for you,” my mother said. I was home on lunch break from life guarding. “It pays wages and you get college credit. You need good grades in science.”

My mother has said this without much enthusiasm. She was reading the letter 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 1950’s linoleum-floor kitchen in Merriam, Kansas and Doctor Conroy Watkins directing a medical research lab in Berkeley, California, circa the mid-sixties, there was a pleasing pride–as if in our small house we had a first edition signed by Clarence Day.

“Let me see,” my father said. He had closed the garage for lunch and was also home.

“At the University of California at Berkeley,” said my mother handing him the letter.

I have an hour before I have to be back at work. After closing I am to take Muff LaRue to Winsteads for a Frosty. My plan is to drive back to the pool for a swim.

“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.” My father left the kitchen with the letter in one hand, his meatloaf sandwich in the other, and headed for the front yard to sit in his aluminum lawn chair.

“I don’t know that General Science counts,” said my mother through the kitchen window.

“Two semesters of A’s,” my father said, talking straight ahead.

They were referring to my freshman grades. I seem to be present only in the third person.

“I’m 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, took off her summer 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 pediatric surgeon.”

I was treading water beneath her.

“I’m going to Sarah Lawrence to study Classics,” she said as she dove in.

The next day it was agreed I should accept my uncle’s invitation even though Berkeley might have “agitators” –as my father called them, not unlike Dustin Hoffman’s landlord in The Graduate. On the other hand, my mother feared impertinence among the rich students. She told me to find the word in the dictionary she had given me when I left for college, along with instructions to learn three words a day: aplomb, domain, environs.

It took me a week to quit my job as a lifeguard, say good-bye to Muff, and pack. My uncle met me at the airport.

“So you 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 town in Kansas to understand how astonishing it is to see the 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 no doubt made special arrangements to get me a fellowship, 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.

From Grove we drove into the Berkeley Hills behind the Claremont Hotel to my aunt and uncle’s house overlooking the Bay.

My uncle’s laboratory was the Hansen Pediatric Research Center. My first week at work, I had met Hazen: Hazen Edmond Floren Reynald who was pleased to introduce himself by all or part of his name, just as it pleased him to pick one of his names (including his last) and use it for a week. Or this:

“My name is Hazen Edmond Floren Reynald, and you may pick the name you like and call me that from now on. I will remember. But sometimes I won’t.”

I picked ‘Hazen.’ My uncle and his step-father had picked ‘Edmond.’ His mother used Floren. Aunt Lillian picked ‘Howard,’ and no one had told her that was not one of her choices.

“You may change names as I do,” Hazen said. “This week I am to myself ‘Floren’. But you may call me ‘Edmond’. That’s what my step father calls me.”

Hazen grew up on Russian Hill where he still lived with his mother and stepfather, Doctor Milton Reed. He was a large-nosed, black-haired, stout-chested, short guy four or five years older than I was. He had dropped out of college after his freshman year to travel in Europe: a trust provided him with funds to “poke around the world and among the girls.”

“Hang up medicine unless it can create a Juliet,” he said when I asked him if he was going to be a doctor. “Hang up medicine unless it can create a Juliet,” he’d say as we worked medical experiments for the researchers who used my uncle’s lab.

“Do you have a girl friend back in Kansas?” Hazen asked me one day.

“Muff LaRue,” I said.

“’Rue’ means ‘street’ in French,” Hazen said. “My mother is French. So was my real father. I understand we are all coming to dinner at your aunt and uncle’s house. Very formal. Mother usually brings her favorite hors-d’oeuvres: pâté de canard.”

I must have looked puzzled because Hazen went on, as if to reassure me.

“Just remember, it is impolite to take the last hors-d’oeuvre, which, if you think about it, means you can’t take the second to last piece because you’re being impolite to the poor bastard who is stuck with not being able to take the last piece. And if you think about it from here to eternity, you can’t take anything off the plate. You just starve.”

My mother’s fear of impertinence had come true.

“Doesn’t he look good, Conroy?” said my Aunt Lillian. I was wearing a tuxedo borrowed from my uncle. I had seen myself in a mirror before coming out of my room and thought the same thing: not bad for a rube from Kansas.

“Very good,” said my uncle who, I understood, did not put much stock in the formalities of social life but had come to a routine acceptance of it.

The reason for the dinner party was Hazen’s step father’s Nobel prize for experiments (done a number of years before) in which he had taken the amino acid “package” off proteins, then put it back on. At least that is how I understood it at the time.

Aunt Lillian was wearing what my mother would have called “a cocktail dress.” Not the kind of dress you saw Harriet Nelson wearing on television in those days (and not the kind my mother owned), but the kind that Olivia de Havilland wore in the movies. It was pale green with tiny gold flecks that seemed to have been woven into the fabric. I had never seen anything like it. Later in the evening I would notice that her dress matched in a subtle way the dinner plates, goblets, and even a small glass dinner bell that were put out by Bella, my aunt’s maid.

“Now use your forks from the outside in,” said Aunt Lillian, taking me to the table. “‘Outside’ being the fork all the way to the left. And do not use the spoon or the fork above the plate until the plate has been changed, and then use the outer one first; in this case that will be the spoon for the sorbet, then the ice- cream cake fork for the ice cream cake that they make at the lovely bakery on Shaddock where they make so many fine things. When you are finished with your courses, put your knife and fork at four o’clock on your plate. That way Bella will know you are finished. And hold your wine glass by the stem, although Howard’s mother takes hers by the bowl and puts her—I must say—rather large nose—into it. And sniffs quite loudly.”

By this time my uncle had escaped to stand in the driveway to wait for his friend.

“Hazen,” I said. “His name is Hazen.”

I had never been to a formal dinner party, much less in the presence of a Nobel Prize winner. And I had never worn a tuxedo. My brother rented one for the high school prom. My sister’s boyfriend picked her up in one for the same dance. I wore a dark suit, went without a date, and stood by the record player and watched Muff LaRue dance to Dean Martin’s Memories are Made of This.

Living with my aunt and uncle when I first got there had its pleasures. Even after I moved to an apartment on Derby near the University in the fall, I was always welcome. If they were away (to a medical conference or to a retreat in Mexico in which they owned an interest), I had the run of their house with its splendid view of San Francisco Bay. I was well fed, and when necessary, could use one of their cars. For this, my uncle asked only that I drive Aunt Lillian to the store and on errands in her large green Cadillac, complete with fins and air conditioner scoops.

“Let him drive,” my uncle would say. “That way he can learn his way around Berkeley.”

When he had me aside he said:

“Lillian is many fine things, but while she can set an excellent table for a dinner party she cannot cook a breakfast egg nor drive a car.”

“Your uncle thinks I am a poor driver because I am alert,” my aunt said one day as we left for errands and to drop me off at the lab.

“That is why he wants you to drive. He has told me more than once I am dangerous, but ask him how many tickets I have gotten? None. Or how many accidents I have had that were my fault? None. It is just a prejudice he has about women drivers because we are cautious.”

Aunt Lillian had stopped for a green light on Durant because–as she explained amid the honking of horns behind her–men sometimes run red lights.

“You must be defensive in your driving. Defensive and alert. Not alarmed. But alert to what is coming at you from all sides: front, back, right, left. I am perched high and straight in my seat and I am always alert and defensive.”

She achieved her “perch” by sitting on a folded pillow so that her head was well above the steering wheel, and not all that far below the car’s headliner. From there she could see as well as any present day SUV soccer mom.

“You must be careful of rocks rolling off the mountains,” Aunt Lillian said one day when she came to a full stop in the middle of West View Drive, not far from the end of their lane. I looked up the hill at a large rock protruding from underneath a few scrub trees. It had probably been deposited by an ice age.

“Would you like for me to drive?” I said.

“Not at all. You think that rock has been there a long time and will not roll down. That is what Conroy says. But because it has been there a long time means it is more likely to roll down. Hills flatten into plains because rocks roll off them and grind themselves to dust. That is what happened in Kansas. It can happen in California. We have earthquakes. There was a famous one years and years ago that started a fire. They still talk about it. You must be watchful wherever you are in a car. On the small roads. On the highways. In traffic. In the hills with rocks on them. Just because we are very close to the house doesn’t mean an accident can’t happen. Most car accidents happen close to home.”

“Did she stop at the top of the hill by the rock?” asked my uncle when I told him I had not been able to drive her that day.

“Yes.”

I drove Aunt Lillian very little, and I never understood why some days she was pleased to have me do so, but on most days she was insistent that she drive. Nor could I determine why she stopped at some green lights (and ran red ones), but not at others.

“Has Lillian pulled off the road when a truck is coming?” asked my uncle on another occasion.

“No,” I said.

“She thinks some trucks are too big for the roads so she’ll drive off the shoulder to let them go by. Once I had Triple A pull her out of a ditch, and all she would say was that it was better to be in the ditch than ‘squished like a beetle.’”

A few days later Aunt Lillian veered the Cadillac onto a lawn because a large cement truck was heading our way, very much on its own side of the road.

“Better up on a lawn than squished like a beetle,” she said as we came to a thud of a stop in a well-tended yard. “A wreck involves the police and smashed fenders and a broken windshield and medical bills. Just because your uncle is a doctor doesn’t mean we get hospital care free. “

Aunt Lillian looped back onto Stuart just ahead of a woman dashing across the lawn shaking a vacuum cleaner attachment like a fist. At the next green light we made a full stop. At the next red light we drove through.

“When Bella serves a new course,” my aunt continued, “it is polite to change the direction of your conversation. You will be sitting between Doctor Reed on your left and Madame de Ferney on your right, and if you have been talking to Doctor Reed for the first course, you then talk to Madame de Ferney during the second course, then back to Doctor Reed for the next course. Madame de Ferney may not converse this way. She has a habit of talking to whomever she wants.”

Aunt Lillian paused for a moment and looked at the table, first at one chair, then another, slightly nodding at each, as if more than counting.

“At home we just ate,” I said. I thought I should say something by way of thanking Aunt Lillian for telling me how to behave.

“It is all a bit fussy,” she said. “Conroy doesn’t much like it. He says dinner parties are “fork fetish feasts”. I suppose he’s right, but we women have to keep up standards. Do you see a young lady in Kansas?”

“Muff LaRue,” I said, thinking I didn’t know the meaning of “fetish”.

“When did you last see her?” said my aunt, now circling the table to make some adjustments in napkins and silverware.

“At the swimming pool where I work.”

“How nice.”

“Yes,” I said.

Aunt Lillian stepped back to look the table over at some distance. “Everything is in its place,” she said, more to herself than to me.

Then: “One more thing. Madame de Ferney always brings the hors-d’oeuvres. A duck pâté on toast points. I will put them on a large plate and we will have them in the living room with some white wine before dinner.”

“I know it is not polite to take the last one,” I said.

“Yes,” said my aunt, and seemed pleased. Then, looking past the table and around the dinning room and into the living room where Bella was putting out napkins and wine glasses on the coffee table, she said: “Madame de Ferney has kept her curious name even though she has been married all these years to Doctor Reed, who as you know, is Howard’s father, just as Madame de Ferney is Howard’s mother, even though she doesn’t have the same last name as Doctor Reed. Or maybe Doctor Reed is Howard’s step-father and Madame de Ferney is his mother. I think that’s what Conroy once told me. She came to America when he was very young and brought Howard with her.”

“Hazen,” I said.

“And for some reason I think Howard doesn’t have the same last name as either of them because Madame de Ferney named him for an uncle for whom a French village is named. Or maybe she is named for the village. Howard is an only child so I suppose it is easier to do that when you are an only child. And Madame de Ferney always calls Doctor Reed, “Doctor Reed,” not by Milton as the rest of us do. So we all call her Madame de Ferney and have for so long by now I don’t remember her first name, but I think it’s Mimi. You should ask Howard. Very curious.”

“Here they are,” said my uncle from the doorway.

“There is something else,” Aunt Lillian continued, but in a lower voice. “Madame de Ferney keeps both her hands on the table, sometimes even her elbows. She is French. They have peculiar manners. And her English after all these years is still odd. A bit of French mixed in with English. Very odd.”

“My mother said I should cut my food with my elbows down, not up. And that I should bring my food to my mouth and not my mouth to my food,” I said, again trying to reassure my aunt. But this time she seemed not to hear me and said: “I am thinking maybe I should seat you. . . but no I can’t. . . that would disturb the arrangement.” I could hear my uncle at the door saying come in, now, come in and they all did.

“Is it the case,” Madame de Ferney said as Bella was clearing the table of the second course, “that in Kansas. . .how shall I put it? . . .comment dirais-je? Je ne sais pas…”

She said something else in French to her husband. I saw Hazen frown. I saw Doctor Reed frown. Doctor Reed said something in French. Then Madame de Ferney said to me:

“Is it ‘provincial’ in Kansas? Provincial?”

She pronounced her second “provincial” with a certain prairie flatness, as if to make sure I understood. Not that it mattered: It was not a word I had learned from my mother’s dictionary: Rube. ff.

While it was true that Madame de Ferney had used her forks according to Aunt Lillian’s rules, she had not–as my aunt had predicted—abided by the formalities of conversation; also, her elbows had been on the table repeatedly, and–my mother would have been shocked—Madame de Ferney had removed her bread from the bread-and-butter-plate and put it on the tablecloth where it left crumbs. And she not only stuck her nose into the wine glass, she swirled it around before holding it to the light and said: It is the first duty of a wine to be red.

“Don’t you agree?” said Madame de Ferney to my Aunt.

“Yes, indeed.”

“And also from what you call the environs. Is that the right word Floren?”

“Yes,” I said. Everybody looked at me for a moment and then Madame de Ferney asked me what kind of wine we drank in our environs.

“My mother has a glass of Mogen David as she fixes dinner,” I said. “My father drinks Coors. My mother is Polish. My father Irish.” In the small silence that followed everyone took a sip of wine.

“I ask about Kansas being provincial,” Madame de Ferney said, “because I am told they were provincial ici in San Francisco before the gros earth cake. The gros earth cake and the fire did them a great good because the rebel lost their shanties.”

“Rabble, mother,” said Hazen.

Madame de Ferney paused only to mouth the word rabble silently with what seemed to me impatience toward the English language.

“Mother’s ‘gros’ is French for ‘large’,” Hazen said to me. “The Great Earth Quake.”

“Thank you,” I said. And to show I was going to learn French I repeated ‘gros’ out loud.

“You’ll need to work on your ‘r’,” Hazen said. I had no idea what he meant.

At this point Bella came to serve another course, while Madame de Ferney continued:

“The families whose furniture came “around the Horn” began to assende and that gave the city its culture. Some people who first arrived in San Francisco brought their furniture with them over the prairie ground in wagons. It must have been very hard on chairs. Not to mention desks and tables. All of Doctor Reed’s family furniture came “around the Horn.” Our chairs are very solid. Tres solide.”

Madame de Ferney had been speaking to the table at large, but then she turned to me:

“They have no earth cakes in Kansas to make matters better. C’est tres mal in that regards, don’t we all think so? Maybe a dust storm or a prairie bison fire could do the same thing. Does your family have the particle?”

“’Quakes’, mother,” said Hazen. This time Madame de Ferney did not mouth the word.

“They have tornadoes,” said my aunt. “Tell Madame de Reed about the tornadoes. How Dorothy went to see Mr. Oz on the Yellow Brick Road. That might be just as good as earth quakes.”

I was about to ask “a particle of what?” thinking Madame de Ferney might have wondered if we owned a bit of farm ground when Doctor Reed coughed loudly a number of times to my left and we all looked his way. My uncle patted him on the back and asked if he was all right?

“I was telling our nephew the other day,” Aunt Lillian said when Doctor Reed’s coughing spell stopped, “about that big rock at the top of the road, and how it might fall down if we had another earth quake like the one Madame de Ferney has mentioned.” My aunt stopped and seemed befuddled for a moment.

“You were about to say something about the rock, Lillian,” said Doctor Reed.

“Yes! Well, if it rolled down the hill it would squish that nice bakery on Shaddock where we got the dessert for tonight.”

“Ah oui!” said Madame de Ferney. “It is a lovely bakery and Doctor Reed always get something from it whenever we are coming to the University. There is rien like it even in San Francisco.”

“’Rien’ means ‘nothing,’” said Hazen. I nodded. “‘Rien,’” I said, this time doing no better with my “r” judging by Hazen’s look.

“’Nada’,” in Spanish, said Doctor Reed.

“’Nada’,” I said, thinking at least there wasn’t an‘r’. Again a moment of silence while everyone took another sip of wine and Bella bustled.

“And they probably don’t have a bakery in Kansas like the one on Shaddock that we all like so much,” said Aunt Lillian. “Just like they don’t have hills down from which rocks might fall because they already have fallen down and that’s why it’s flat. And maybe that is why Madame de Ferney has asked about it being provincial. No quakes. No hills. No rocks. No bakery.”

“Ah oui,” said Madame de Ferney, at which point Aunt Lillian rang the bell for Bella who was standing beside her.

“Maybe I should not have asked about Kansas being provincial,” said Madame de Ferney. “It is of no matter, but sometimes those of us who live la vie de chateau cannot imagine remote places in the United States as being other than provincial. That is true in France as well. We have peasants in many places south of Paris. Some of them harvesting their own ‘poulet.’”

“’Chicken’, mother,” said Hazen.

“I know it is “chicken” in English,” said Madame de Ferney. “But I prefer the French. Who can like a word like “chicken” instead of “poulet”? Or “duck” instead of “canard”?

“It is what we had this evening,” said Aunt Lillian. “A recipe right from France. Chicken Cordon Bleu. Not that we raise chickens or ducks here in Berkeley. I expect there is some kind of rule against it. I know there is one about hanging your clothes out to dry, isn’t there Conroy?”

“There is indeed. It is called a ‘covenant’,” my Uncle said to Doctor Reed who smiled. “As if good taste were a religion. No rabbits in cages. No chickens. Or ducks. No horses or goats. It was quite a list they gave us when we moved here. No clothes line, as Lillian says.”

“In Kansas we have a clothes line,” I said. “I do the hanging out when I am home.” Uncle Conroy looked at me and smiled. I was about to say the Simms down the road had both chickens and ducks, as well as pig they fed out but Madame de Ferney said:

“It is our own limitation, I suspect, and I would be pleased to learn otherwise. How did your parents’ furniture come to Kansas?”

“Here is dessert!” Aunt Lillian said, and once again rang the bell, even though Bella had returned to the table.

The arrival of dessert and the clatter of plates and forks and the general talk about the bakery on Shaddock changed the course of the conversation and as we ate Madam de Ferney turned to Hazen and asked:

“Do you remember when you were an adultlesson and we took you to Paris?”

“‘Adolescent’, mother,” said Hazen. “It is the same in French.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Madame de Ferney. “It is just that we were showing you where I was reared—is that the word? You raise cows but rear children. Do I have that right?”

“Yes,” said Doctor Reed to Madame de Ferney, and then to the table: “Edmond was born in Paris as was Mimi, but after her husband died they moved to America and he was reared here.”

“Conroy and I have not reared any children,” said Aunt Lillian. “This is our nephew,” nodding toward me. Aunt Lillian seemed either to have forgotten my name or was continuing my family’s tradition.

“Ah oui,” said Madame de Ferney to Aunt Lillian.

“Ah oui,” said Aunt Lillian. “But do tell us about your rearing in Paris.”

“We lived in the Sixth, but below Saint Germain. The Sixth goes all the way to Boulevard Montparnasse, but my father would not admit that. For him it only went as far as Saint Germain. So I was reared in that domain. Is that the right word?” Madame de Ferney asked me.

“Ah oui,” I said. I saw Hazen smile. “Or you could say ‘environs’,” I said. Madame de Ferney seemed pleased at this information and this time said environs out loud with a peculiar guttural sound on the “r.”

“My father was tres formal and would not even ‘tu’ my mother. Of course he did not ‘tu’ me or my sister.” Madame de Ferney paused for quite awhile and looked away from the table. The only sound was Bella putting out coffee cups in the living room.

For my part, I imagined Madame de Ferney was thinking of her days growing up in Paris; I imagined this because in between the rocks tumbling down and squishing the Shaddock bakery, the tornadoes that might be as good as earth cakes, covenants against chickens and clothes lines, I had been thinking in bits and pieces about home. About my father’s webbed aluminum lawn chair and how he took my uncle’s letter and his meatloaf sandwich outside and read the letter while my mother cleaned the kitchen counter where on summer evenings we “just ate”, my mother having her glass of Mogen David wine while she cooked with no idea about the wine’s duty, my father with his beer in a bottle after dinner as he read the paper or, on Fridays, watched boxing on television.

And it wasn’t when Aunt Lillian asked me about a girl friend that I thought of Muff LaRue. It was when Madame Ferney was talking about chicken and poulet and duck and canard. How, after both Muff and I got dressed, not having gone “all the way”, we sat in two chairs under my life guard stand and talked into the night about our futures: me to California to become a doctor, she going East to Sarah Lawrence to major in Classics–and I thought then that studying classics at a fancy East Coast college for girls and skinny-dipping in a Kansas municipal pool with the life guard whose father had a car garage didn’t go together. But I did not say so. And how later I drove Muff home and we promised we’d meet again over Christmas break—at the swimming pool, cold and snow or not.

“Thank you,” my uncle said to Bella as she began clearing the table of dessert plates, all forks now at four o’clock.

My aunt fingered the spoon on the top of her plate. She picked up her wine glass by the stem and studied the color. She started to ring for Bella even though Bella had just left.

“Maintenant that you are ici in Berkeley,” said Madame de Ferney, “do you think it provincial in Kansas?”

My uncle was about to speak and so were Hazen and Doctor Reed when I said to Madame de Ferney and, with considerable aplomb, to the rest of the table:

“Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.”

“Ah oui!” said Aunt Lillian.

“Did you miss Kansas?” Muff said to me. We are sitting in my father’s lawn chairs that I have taken to the pool and put beneath my old lifeguard stand. It is snowing. The pool has been drained, but not to the bottom. There is a skim of ice on what water remains. “I did not,” said Muff before I could answer.

“I did,” I said.

“Are you going back?” she said. “To Berkeley to be a doctor?”

“Hang up medicine,” I said. “Unless it can create a Juliet. The guy I worked with at the lab used to say that over and over again.” She seemed not to hear me and said:

“I learned that Socrates took up dancing in old age. So I’ve started dancing. Modern dancing.” She got out of her chair and did a small pirouette in the snow in front of me.

“I’ve never dated a dancer,” I said.

And then there was a long silence between us. I took a sideways glace at her. She was looking at the space just in front of us where she had done her pirouette. The snow was falling faster now and it was filling her footprints. I never knew her well enough to guess what she might be thinking. But I was thinking I would not see much of her ever again, and I would be right about that.

“You haven’t said if you are going back.”

“In Berkeley,” I said, “you don’t just eat, and you can’t hang your laundry on the line.” Again she seemed not to hear me and said nothing but got up from her chair and did a second pirouette, this time putting her toes into the same place where they had been before, and in so doing her feet made their marks in the same place where the snow had almost filled in her previous pirouette. And in coming back to her chair she stepped into the same footprints she had made before, and smiled at being able to do so.

When I drove her home Muff asked me if it was true I had once saved a boy from the deep end.

“Yes,” I said.

And it was at the door of her house that she told me where Hazen had gotten his saying, and that was not about medicine, but about philosophy and that when Hazen said it over and over it became his mantra–a word I did not know until I came home that night and I looked it up in my mother’s dictionary.

—Robert Day

——————————

Robert Day’s novel The Last Cattle Drive was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His short fiction has won a number of prizes and citations, including two Seaton Prizes, a Pen Faulkner/NEA prize, and Best American Short Story and Pushcart citations. His fiction has been published by Tri-Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Kansas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and New Letters among other belles-lettres magazines. He is the author of two novellas, In My Stead, and The Four wheel Drive Quartet, as well as Speaking French in Kansas, a collection of short stories.

His nonfiction has been published in the Washington Post Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Forbes FYI, Modern Maturity, World Literature Today, and American Scholar. As a member of the Prairie Writers Circle his essays have been reprinted in numerous newspapers and journals nationwide, and on such inter-net sites as Counterpunch. Recent book publications include We Should Have Come By Water (poems) and The Committee to Save the World (literary non-fiction).

Among his awards and fellowships are a National Endowment to the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Yaddo and McDowell Fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council Award, and the Edgar Wolfe Award for distinguished fiction. His teaching positions include The Iowa Writers Workshop; The University of Kansas; and the Graduate Faculty at Montaigne College, The University of Bordeaux.

He is past President of the Associated Writing Programs; the founder and former director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House; and founder and publisher of the Literary House Press at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland where he is an Adjunct Professor of English Literature.

Where I Am Now, a collection of his short fiction, will be published in September, 2012 by BkMk Press.

Healing Waters: Memoir — Harry Marten

Aug 212012

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

Mohawk River, Niskayuna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Shadows by the River

—Text by Harry Marten & Paintings by Ginit Marten

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

Building the Maddening Dream: Techniques for Constructing & Conveying Fictional Worlds — Jacqueline Kharouf

Aug 132012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False Documents and Double False Documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authoritative Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False Documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Details

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

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

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

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

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

Jekyll describes his ingredients in his letter:

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

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

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

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

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

Literary Reference as Parallel

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

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

Pre-Stories

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

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

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

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

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

Repetition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Text & illustrations by Jacqueline Kharouf

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

What It’s Like Living Here — from Tiara Winter-Schorr in Manhattan

Aug 092012

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

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

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Hudson, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

The Dead

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

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

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

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

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

The Border

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

The Heights

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

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

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

Harlem

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

Columbus Circle

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

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

Times Square

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

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

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

Hudson, part 2

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

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

— Photos & Text by Tiara Winter-Schorr

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Getting Carried Away: Memoir — David Carpenter

Aug 082012

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

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

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

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

———-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I waded in and stripped some line from my reel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Verrrry nice,” someone said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Rots a ruck, buddy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something for the boys.”

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

“Remind you of someone?” she said.

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

“As I live and breathe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bet I know what you was lookin for.”

“What?” said Honor.

“You was lookin for that Jesus big fish.”

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

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

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

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

“Yessir, they’re in here.”

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

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

I asked him where the fish was now.

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

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

— David Carpenter

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

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

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

One Good Hustle: Fiction — Billie Livingston

Jul 302012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marlene often drove us over the border into the States.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How could he do this to me?”

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

“Do you have any friends in town?”

Marlene had answers for everything.

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

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

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

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

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

“I need a partner for that.”

“Call stupid Freddy, then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just let that one lay there.

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

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

Remember? Everyone’s going out on sailboats.”

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

“What the hell are you talking about?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a hole.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marlene laughed.

“Yeah. Hilarious.”

“Just round your shoulders a little.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why the big one?” I whispered.

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

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

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

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

Grizzly Adams motioned the waitress back to him.

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

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

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

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

Marlene and I were in the main lounge before nine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hank grinned and ordered a second drink.

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

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

I pouted and stuffed it back in my purse.

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

“Seven.”

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

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

“Honey!” Marlene sounded genuinely irate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at Marlene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stepped up to the desk.

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

My heart started to bang.

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

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

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

Then I bolted for the elevators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck off,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Home. Take me home.”

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

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

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

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

I called downstairs and asked to have a taxi waiting.

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

“Leave it,” Marlene said.

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

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

We were on the first flight out of Vegas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went into my room and closed the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—-Billie Livingston

——————————-

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

Unfolded: Fiction — Sheridan Hay

Jul 162012

What is it like to be a brainy woman, lost in a world of books and ideas, pursuing the ineffable and the impossible under the gaze of great men? Herewith a scene from Unfolded, a new novel by my old friend Sheridan Hay, author of The Secret of Lost Things and the short story “Arise and Go Now” which appeared on these pages last year. In this scene we meet Delia Bacon, the gifted and scandalous 19th century American scholar/author who knew the greats of her era and went mad trying to prove that Shakespeare did not write his own plays. She published a 682-page book to explain her theory. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who appears in this scene with Delia, said of her: “no author ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever failed more utterly.”

(The black and white photo above is by Marion Ettlinger.)

As night faded from the front windows, a pallid dawn filled them. She prepared for his visit. Leaning over the porcelain bowl to wash her face, she read an indecipherable text in its cracks.

It would take hours to prepare because she must rest after each task. Moving in increments of will, stars burst beneath her eyelids if she went too quickly. Her hands seemed independent, taking up a hairbrush, a washcloth, the buttonhook. Every object in the room seemed far off and yet she saw with utter clarity, as if magnified.

Of her two good dresses, both now fell from her body. Needing no corset, she set it aside. Her bosom had flattened and a hollow marked the center of her chest. She chose the black silk. Its sheen was dull, like the coal she could not afford to burn, and whale stays gave it shape.

She took half an hour to arrange her hair, combing it through with water. Straightening her collar, she pinned a paste brooch at its center. She could not avoid the mirror: You go not, till I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you. She was so altered as to be wholly unacquainted with who she had become.

Mr. Hawthorne would meet her revenant.

By afternoon she lay on the bed, hands trembling. She considered calling down to the Walker’s to refuse Mr. Hawthorne entry to the house. She has enough presence of mind to notice that anxiety makes one stupid. She would need calm in order to impress. Mr. Hawthorne had extended funds and Delia needed more than funds, she needed his good name.

His foot was on the stair. Mrs. Walker chattered away, breathless from the climb. He was ushered into the front room. She listened through the door.

“Mr. Hawthorne to see Miss Bacon,” Mrs. Walker called. A chair scraped the floor. Pages turned, he cleared his throat several times, but was otherwise silent. She felt the nervousness that used to precede her lectures in New York, when close to two hundred faces stared back from the long hall. Then, she had needed no notes; confidence had been a trick with her, and knowledge — the drumming into her brain of detail, of fact.

He stood as she entered, bowed. She had kept him waiting for longer than was polite, but no amount of time could have prepared her for his face.

Mr. Hawthorne was beautiful.

She stammered an apology, momentarily disarmed.

He did not speak at first, but motioned, pulling out the chair. Dark, thick hair was mixed with gray, and a brown moustache extended above a delicate mouth. He was tall, and wore a black frock coat; at his throat was a knotted scarf of white silk. She stared at his immaculate neckerchief as if she might disappear into its folds.

She thought it the prerogative of the recluse to be frank and it was with utter guilelessness that she gazed at him. But she felt that it was in fact mere loneliness that had robbed her of necessary pretense and Delia was suddenly ashamed – of her appearance, of her poor rooms, of what she needed from him.

“I have become picturesque!” She blurted, sitting down.

He smiled with great gentleness.

“Not at all, not at all. Thank you for seeing me, Miss Bacon.”

She took the hand extended. It was warm and soft and enveloped her own. He gave her back her courage with his touch.

“I have enjoyed our communications. Your enterprise interests me very much. But I am surprised. I had thought you older and not a young woman at all.”

Her eyes filled with tears for she saw he was sincere. He smiled again and she averted her gaze for fear of dissolving under his consideration. He drew up the only other chair in the room.

He’d had time to take in the piles of books on the study table – Raleigh’s History of the World, Montaigne’s Essays, Bacon’s Letters, Essays, and Meditations, a volume of the plays, a well used pocket Bible. More books were stacked on the floor. A large roll of manuscript lay partially unfurled. Lists neatly proclaimed their facts. A paper knife to cut pages lay across notes. She had the odd sensation of seeing these objects anew, and seeing too that their arrangement appeared theatrical — a stage with pen and ink-glass set aside, mid-composition.

In fact, here was the site of a great battle. She thought how strange it is when one’s intensions take on the appearance of staginess, as if one’s life is a fiction – oneself an actor. The scene, even to Delia, was suggestive of Mr. Hawthorne’s own Romances.

The vitality of his presence momentarily confused her and she sat in the chair as if she were the guest – a visitor to her own rooms.

She thanked him for coming and for his notes and told him he had sustained her at a time of great trial.

“I have been looking at your sources, and can only remark on your impressive scholarship,” he began, indicating the books. “Your reading of Montaigne is particularly fine.”

She nodded. This was of course the case.

“And the connections you draw between Plutarch and Shakespeare, between Bacon and classical literature are certainly provocative.”

“But you do not share my faith?” she asked, recovering herself.

“I do not,” he said. “I do not share your faith. But let me say that I think you nobly careless of authority, Miss Bacon.”

“And yet you offer help.” She felt encouraged by his interest if not his opinion.

“When I wrote to you, I expressed a fact which I firmly believe. Yours is an undertaking that must be valued. You are a gifted interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays, whoever wrote them.”

This would not do.

“Perhaps when you have read more of my philosophy you will feel that you know who did?”

“I am here at your service, Miss Bacon. My wife, Sophia, is already an ardent supporter, based upon the chapter you sent. And it is true that what sometimes seems most far from us is most our own to claim … but I am not of the converting kind.”

“It is not necessary that I should convey to others at once all the grounds of that absolute certainty on which my proceeding rests,” she told him, gripping the table’s edge. “It is enough for me to know, past all doubt, that it is as true as I am. I don’t expect you to follow, but I appreciate that Mrs. Hawthorne is a discerning woman.”

“That she is,” he said, smiling.

“Francis Bacon wrote that an immense ocean surrounds the island of Truth, Mr. Hawthorne,” Delia went on. “I cannot expect you to arrive on my island without an experience of the sea.”

He almost laughed.

“I would like to send you the chapter on Lear, after I make a fair copy, and after you’ve read that, the chapters on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. You will see that my work is the discovery of Modern Science, the buried discovery which the necessities of this time have cried to heaven for, and not in vain.”

She brightened as she spoke, and gathered strength, but feared that he held little interest in the vagaries of her philosophy. Yet something in her manner compelled. What questions orthodoxy, she knew, was potent to him. She saw he felt her truth.

“Miss Bacon,” he said. “I feel that Shakespeare’s work presents so many phases of reality that his symbols admit an inexhaustible variety of interpretation… “

“You mistake the essence of my theory, Mr. Hawthorne.” She corrected him. “The history plays are a chronicle, a great whole. I am a teacher of history, you understand. It is because I have taught history that I was able to see the plays as a school, a school in which the common people would be taught visible history, with illustrations as large as life. All the world’s a stage was a cliché but not a metaphor. The plays are a magic lantern that depict and illuminate Bacon’s world.”

“But a magic lantern is called magic for a reason, Miss Bacon. It enlarges and also distorts; it makes a fairy world of shadows, and the truth is in the spell it casts not the reality it depicts.”

Viola slunk in, tilting her triangle head up at Mr. Hawthorne. She let out a cry.

“Ah, you disagree, Mr. Cat,” he said, addressing the animal at his feet. She wailed again and rubbed her face against the edge of his boot.

“That’s Madame Cat,” Delia corrected. “The mother of many tribes. I call her Viola, because I too thought her male at first. She was in disguise to win me. The landlord calls her something else, of course.”

“You make my point,” Hawthorne said quickly. “You might have called her Ganymede or Rosalind. The thing is itself with or without a proper name …”

“Not at all,” she shot back. “Shakespeare may well have been the name of a cat, but Bacon was the name of the author of these plays.”

For emphasis she placed her hand on the huge volume.

Words are spirit – her father’s admonition.

Mr. Hawthorne was not so ungentlemanly as to continue to correct her. There is no complacency in the plays, but Delia had found something like it in her certainty. If he thought her peculiar, he was a man for whom peculiarity was a rare value. He told her that his years in Liverpool had shown him all manner of strange things, but that he would try to be of assistance.

Delia told him that she needed to travel to Stratford-upon-Avon, that she would find evidence beneath the gravestone. She said she’d found clues in Bacon’s Letters and wanted to leave for Stratford as soon as she was well.

“Forgive me, my skepticism,” he apologized. “I mistrust all sudden enthusiasms.”

“There is nothing sudden in this,” Delia said. “It is the cumulative philosophy of years of study.”

“Sudden for me, I meant.” He smiled, determined and polite. “We find thoughts in all great writers, and even small ones, that strike their roots far beneath the surface, and twine themselves with the roots of other writers thoughts. When we pull up one, we stir the whole, and yet these writers had no conscious society with one another…”

“I know especially how the mind of an age speaks in many,” she told him. “And there is far more in this than merely that.”

She was becoming impatient, but Mr. Hawthorne’s mildness encouraged her further.

“You will read this manuscript with greater satisfaction and interest if you don’t bolster up your mind beforehand with any such false view as that. I mean with the idea that it is not true. It is true,” she said.

He adjusted his neckerchief, but said nothing.

“If the Inquisition were in session now on the question I could not give them a hair’s breadth of concession!”

“I hardly think …” he began, but she cut him off.

“Lord Bacon and these great men were a republic of wits,” she countered. “They knew and collaborated. Their goal was political. In that sense they are, to we Americans, our truest fathers. Lord Bacon hoped that all rulers would change places with those they governed, and thus become enlightened. He speaks to us in our freer age and we must follow his lesson. Even if it means welcoming the rude surgery of civil war … “

Silence fell between them. Delia suddenly spent, unable to sit up straight, unused to company and the effort required to convince. She had lost the habit of conversing with real people and insisted too much and without consideration for Mr. Hawthorne’s gentle courtesy.

He changed the subject. He spoke of Sophia’s illness, of his children, of the strains of working at his consulate tasks, which left him no time or energy for literature. People claiming to be citizens appeared daily to solicit funds either to return to America, or because they recognized in him a generous nature. He admitted to having been shrewdly cheated more than once.

“I see I tire you with these personal details.”

“No, no.”

“I came to assist you, and mean to.”

He gave her ten pounds. She took it with the unuttered acknowledgement that her earnestness had not produced in him even a temporary faith. He promised to work on her behalf to secure publication and knew English publishers likely to see of the merit of her philosophy. Perhaps, she thought, she had charmed him, when it was his faith she really wanted. He promised to consider writing the preface to her finished work, ensuring its serious consideration, and linking the name of Bacon with his own.

Perhaps Mr. Hawthorne saw her as a genuine scholar in a world of counterfeit. Had seclusion, single-mindedness and dedication, revealed to her something hidden from those who, like him, must serve the material purposes of the world? She could have told him that a prophetess must remove herself from ordinary life.

The effort to impress had left her hollow. She had played her part with enough conviction to leave her blank. The onset of a neuralgic attack loomed. Minutes after Mr. Hawthorne left, Delia fled to bed, still wearing her coal black dress, boots buttoned to the ankle.

— Sheridan Hay

———

Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), was a Booksense Pick, A Barnes and Noble Discover selection, short listed for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries.

Fault Lines: Fiction — Gerard Beirne

Jul 062012

A widow, an Irish wanderer, a house built on a fault line and a mysterious light form the essential furniture of Gerard Beirne’s fine new story “Fault Lines.” Beirne is an Irish writer and you can hear the fierce rhetoric of the Irish in his opening cadences, the insistent lists and parallel constructions. The story is dark, almost noir in its atmosphere of eroticism and constant menace. Gerard Beirne and I don’t know each other except in our email interchange over this story, but we have tread common paths. Beirne was the Writer in Residence at the University of New Brunswick where I also have been Writer in Residence; he is the fiction editor at The Fiddlehead where I published some of earliest stories, yea, these many years ago; and he just published a poetry collection, Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual, with Oberon Press in Ottawa, a publisher with whom I have had a long association including a decade of editing the annual Best Canadian Stories. So he and I exist in almost parallel universes that have somehow flowed together on this page. Read the story.

You could look at it this way. You could say I was the one real beneficiary of his death. Not so much the car as the air conditioning, the house as the pool, the cellar as the wine collection, the lady as his wife.

As a lady she brought with her charm, sophistication, impeccable dress sense, a taste for good food. But as his wife she brought with her everything. His fortune, his lifestyle, his foul mouth, and his filthy mind.

* * *

“We’re all so much better off without him,” Maybelle told me on that first night we ended up in bed together. I was drinking his champagne, eating his caviar, lying passively beneath his gyrating wife. “He was cruel. He was fucking cruel. Cruel to all of his previous wives. Cruel to their children. Cruel to himself. And, worst of all, cruel to me. Irrespective of his ability to increase his fortune we are all so much better off without the bastard.”

She tipped over her champagne glass and poured his 1975 Dom Perignon along my chest, then bent over, extended her tongue, and licked that expensive liquid up in one long sweeping motion. And in that prolonged salivating moment, I knew just how wrong she was. How it was I, and not anyone of his close or distant family, who was the better off.

I fed her with his caviar, and she sucked it from my fingers. I appraised her firm body as it pincered me from above, grateful for the multigym he had purchased on its behalf. Then I thought of the swimming pool outside where earlier we had stripped and swam in the moonlike glow of the veranda spotlight. It was the first time we had seen each other’s bodies. The first time I had seen the naked flesh of a widow of barely forty-eight hours. The yellow glare of the spotlight jaundiced her pale skin. A light breeze blew in from the canyon, that large empty gulch that stretched ahead of us, carrying the smell of creosote bushes. The dry desert dust landed softly on the flagstones and tiles, on the surface of the shimmering water lit from below, on our warm flesh lit from we knew not where. We were exposed not just to each other but to the world if the world had cared to look.

The only lights to be seen were those dotted around the property for security, a row of house lights eighty miles to the east, and the stars they could barely be distinguished from. We scarcely glanced across at one another before diving on in. If I could help it, I was determined never to resurface. But resurface we did, together, in a hardened embrace.

Maybelle’s toes curled against the white sheets. She grasped my shoulder blades tightly with her fingers. Her long manicured fingernails scratched across my skin. “Cruelty is the worst sin of all, don’t you think?” she whispered close to my ear. Then she did something with her body that might not have been thought possible. “This was the only way I could hurt him in return.”

I almost screamed with the excruciating mix of pleasure and pain. The white curtains billowed out from the half-open shutters. A solitary star twinkled within my line of vision. Maybelle shuddered violently. Her strong legs gripped my thighs. Her fingers clawed at my torso. The star plummeted through the black sky. Died before my eyes.

Later as Maybelle showered, I stood by the window in his study and looked up, as he had looked up on so many occasions, at the constellations with his telescope. Orion. Pegasus. Ursa Major. What would happen if one of those stars died? I wondered. What sort of hunter would remain, what sort of winged horse, what sort of furrowing instrument? What would become then of the great design? How would we read the night?

I turned the lens towards the darkened desert, the canyon. That other great void. From deep within the canyon I witnessed an uncertain flash of light shooting upwards for which I had no explanation. To the east, the distant houselights flickered. Outside the glare of the security lights reflected against the lens. In the bathroom a flow of water spread in rivulets down Maybelle’s hard body.

How had I come this far?

* * *

Leaving Ireland had been easy. Leaving a small Donegal town. A small landholding I had no interest in. Leaving home.

I was happy to fill a hold all and empty it on the bed of a YMCA on the other side of the world. Happy to be paranoid on the streets of New York. Happy to work the graveyard shift washing dishes in an all-night cafe. Happy to tire of all that and board a Greyhound for Los Angeles.

Happy to get work with a landscape firm cutting lawns and trimming hedges in Santa Monica. Happy to meet Maybelle in one of his holiday homes by the side of his pool in a pastel orange bikini. Happy to peruse her shapely body. Happy to amicably converse. Happy to return to his secluded mansion in the Mojave Desert to replace his Mexican gardener who had flown the coop with immigration on his tail. Happy to inhabit his property. Happy to rise through his ranks. Happy to become, on his request, her personal assistant. Happy to follow her wherever she might go. Happy to assist in his early demise.

* * *

Maybelle pulled at my shoulder, woke me up. She sat up in bed distraught. The moon shed its light through the shuttered window. “Did you feel that?” Her face was pale. She crossed her hands over her chest like a corpse and held on to herself.

“What?” I looked for my watch on the table next to the bed. It was twelve minutes past three.

She turned angrily. “Didn’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The shaking.”

“No.”

“It was an earthquake.” She pushed her head slightly forward as though listening intently. As if something might be heard that would confirm her suspicion.

“I didn’t feel a thing.” I tried to put my arm around her to comfort her, but she brushed it off. She turned suddenly to the empty champagne bottle on the table beside her. “Look.”

“What is it?”

“It’s vibrating. Can’t you see that?” She got up out of bed, and walked to the window. “We’re on the fault here. Right on the fault. Any moment the Big One could come, and when it does we’ll be swallowed up whole. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“It was nothing,” I said. “A small tremor at the most.” We had talked about this before, but never at such intimate quarters, never so close to death.

“The bastard. The fucking bastard.” She looked out into the dark. In the breeze the light material of the curtain wrapped itself around her naked body. “That’s why he built it here. Goddamn him! Because it was so fucking cheap. His one great ambition in life — to buy up the fucking fault lines!”

“He’s dead now,” I said. “Everything can be undone.” I held my hand out to her. “Come back to bed.”

“Bed,” she repeated. “The great undoing.” She pulled the shutters closed as if they could somehow protect her. She came back over and got in beside me. The shutters rattled. Maybelle heard them and jumped.

“It’s only the wind.”

She glared at me. “Did we really screw?”

“Yes we did,” I assured her. “Like there was no tomorrow.”

* * *

Maybelle honoured his wishes and had him cremated. A simple ceremony had been arranged. Three of his previous wives showed up and six of his children. Maybelle was unclear how many wives there had been before her and was equally unsure about the number of children. She had none by him that much she knew. He had insisted on that. He told her he did not want her destroying her body like all of the others. That she was his last chance.

“His last chance for what?” I asked.

Maybelle shrugged. “I have no idea.”

She did not speak to any of them, but she assured me they would be as glad to see the back of him as she was. He had treated them all despicably. “There are no bruises I can show you,” she told me one time sensing some slight doubt of mine. “Not on this body, but up here,” she said pointing to her head. “There’s where the damage lies.” At his cremation I looked at his array of wives and children and considered the cumulative internal injuries.

Afterwards I drove Maybelle and the urn with his ashes home. Keeping the urn with her, Maybelle went up to lie down. She did not reappear until evening. She ate a light dinner and asked me to send the staff away. She said she needed time alone. They would be paid of course. I asked if her dismissal of the staff included me also, and she told me not to be so foolish.

After dinner she asked me to drive her to the canyon. She held the urn in her lap as we drove. The orange dust swirled up from the wheels past the windows. The hot evening air wafted in shimmering waves distorting all that was visible. I looked out at the wavering yellow sneezeweeds and desert trumpet. A Jackrabbit leaped dangerously across the road in front of us clambering for shade. I put my hand on the urn, our fingers touching accidentally. Maybelle appeared not to notice, although she told me later that her heart for a moment ceased to function. The urn and Maybelle’s fingers were cool to the touch, his air-conditioning keeping all of our temperatures low. I felt the cold waves sweep over me, their calming influence, as our fingers parted.

Maybelle drummed on the lid of the urn impatiently. She glared through the front window. “You never talk about Ireland.” She tightened her lips and brought me under her gaze.

“I’d rather forget it,” I told her. A viscous green and orange sunset soaked through the widening sky.

“Yes,” she agreed pulling the urn in against her stomach, “there are certain things best forgotten.” She glanced through the window at the vast expanse of gleaming desert. “I’m sorry. I’ll never ask you again.”

But Maybelle was right. In the three years I had known her I had never willingly spoken of Ireland. On a few occasions in the beginning she had alluded to it, but I skilfully deflected the conversation. I was living a new life now. Perhaps the first I had ever really lived. At its worst Ireland was a womb, a time pre-birth. At its very best it was a uterine contraction forcing me out into the life I now lived.

A shaft of light speared the road in front of us. I steered his car deliberately towards it. Permitted the light to dissect the metal car, and us within it, like a laser cutting tool. It shone brilliantly through the front windscreen, sparkling on the side of the urn, and leaving a line of gold along Maybelle’s toned body. She shielded her eyes with her hand, stared absently ahead.

“A meteor fell to earth here one time.” I had not heard mention of this before. “Some time in the sixties.”

“A lot of things from outer space were visible in the sixties,” I reminded her.

Maybelle ignored me. “The marks are still visible although the meteor itself was broken up and removed for scientific evaluation. The crater is somewhere around here.” She twisted the lid of the urn in a half-circle. I thought for a moment she was going to take it off to check if he was in there still. “He used to speak about it. He said he wished they had left it where it had fallen. He said he could have made a fucking fortune out of it.” She gritted her teeth as though constraining a further obscenity.

The car bounced on its suspension over a series of ruts in the surface of the road. A plump turkey buzzard swooped low and flew past the front of the car flapping its black wings viciously. We watched it circle the rotting trunk of a lone pinyon tree.

“Vulture.” Maybelle seemed in awe of it. She chewed on the side of her mouth. I looked at her fluffed out hair, her carefully applied eye-shadow, mascara, lipstick, and face powders, her slinky black mourning dress, her high heels. I surveyed the flat expanse of water-starved decay that surrounded us. Maybelle seemed more out of place here than I. More removed. I wondered about her past. She had never spoken openly about that either.

The road turned directly into the blazing sunset. The sky was engulfed in flames before us. We could have been driving into hell itself. A hundred yards or so up ahead a dirt track veered off to the left leading down to the canyon. I slowed down, pulled off the road, and followed along the rough surface until the earth opened up before us.

I got out and opened Maybelle’s door for her. She swung her long shapely legs out, and placed her high heels on the desert soil. I took her arm, and we walked slowly out towards the canyon. Her shoes scuffed on the loose stones. Maybelle twisted on her heel, her left leg buckling beneath her. I supported her weight and helped her to rebalance. Then we walked together right up to the edge. The yellow and red ochre walls of the canyon dropped sharply downwards for thousands of feet. Giant stalagmites of crumbling rock pierced upwards from the canyon sides and floor. Maybelle showed no fear.

“He’s been down there,” Maybelle said. “At least that’s what he told me.”

I steadied myself and looked down into the dry gulch. In all the time I had lived here I had never been this close to the canyon before. Obscure trails wound their way along narrow switchbacks making me feel dizzy.

“He’d stay overnight,” she said kicking some loose soil over the edge. I watched it fall lightly through the air. “He said it felt good to be sleeping in the bowels of the earth. Of course he might have been anywhere fucking any one of his lady fucking friends.”

Maybelle smiled and swiftly drew back her arm with the urn. She swung it through a wide arc and, letting out a grunt like a hammer or discus-thrower, she flung it as hard as she could out into the ravine. The urn soared through the air then dropped swiftly downwards. It struck a ridge a few hundred feet below and bounced outwards.

“MIND YOUR BIG FUCKING HEAD!” Maybelle’s shrill voice echoed through the walls of the canyon before returning to haunt her. She laughed hysterically. The urn fell deeper into the gulch crashing into one of the sharp peaks. A dull thud like broken bone sounded upwards. Pieces of ceramic splintered and showered. Heat hardened clay shattered against the earth it had been raised from. His ashes gusted outwards. A cloud puffed up past our faces and over our heads. A mixture of sobs and laughter bellowed from Maybelle’s open mouth and ricocheted back out of the throat of the canyon. Her make-up was smudged with tears, and her black dress was covered in red dust. She rocked on her high heels. I held onto her fast, afraid she would topple over the edge, and it was then we kissed for the first time, even as his ashes continued to swirl about us. We may have tasted them, him, on our pressed together lips, our pro-offered tongues. I was aroused and repulsed at once. Our mouths separated, and we clung together at the edge of the great divide.

We drove home in the dimming light. Maybelle’s fingers trailed across the back of my neck. The tyres churned over the dirt road. I observed the silhouette of the buzzard atop the decaying tree. I knew that Maybelle had been watching out for it too. I drove on quickly. Miles of road disappeared behind us. We approached the huge outcrop of his mansion. I pressed the remote control and the heavy metal gates opened at my fingertips. Maybelle watched them shut securely behind us in the rear-view mirror. Inside the house she reached immediately for the champagne and brought it out to the pool. She popped open the cork. A gush of champagne spurted into the air. The veranda spotlight switched on automatically. Maybelle filled our glasses. Frantic bubbles spewed over the edges. “To life,” she said raising her glass. We tipped their fragile edges together and drank thirstily washing the dust down. Then Maybelle turned her back to me and instructed me to unzip her dress.

I pulled the zip downwards along the ridge of her spine. I was still in her employment, still serving as her personal assistant. My assistance in his death could even have been construed as a part of my service. Likewise our trip to the canyon. But surely the kiss had changed all that. Unless the provision of comfort and release for a grieving wife was a part of my duty too. For yes, despite her relief at his demise and despite her contribution to it, Maybelle was grieving, grieving for something as yet unclear.

She flicked her shoes off her feet into the swimming pool and slipped her dress off her shoulders. I watched the shoes sink heel-down into the warm water. She cocked a glance at me, and I knew that I was expected to undress too. The low howl of a distant coyote lingered in the dense air. We teetered for a moment unclothed on the edge of the pool, then dived in.

* * *

Until the very end I had little contact with him. He was hardly ever there, always jetting around on one business concern or another. Whenever he was present, I was usually too busy with his wife’s life to intervene in his. We nodded from distances, exchanged casual remarks.

“You take care of her,” he told me early on establishing the nature of our relationship, “like you took care of my gardens. Trimming, pruning, watering. Keep her neat. Keep her beautiful. It’s what she wants. Pay attention to her whims, but be wary. There’s a certain wildness in any good garden that ought to be cultivated but contained.” He held my wrist firmly. “I don’t need to tell you this, you do your job and I’ll pay you well, you don’t, and I’ll kick your fucking ass all the way back to Ireland.”

I took no offence in these latter remarks. He was a business man adopting a sensible economic position. He was paying me good money after all. Incredible money. He had a right to certain expectations, and I was not an unwilling party to all of this. As for comparing his wife to a garden, it could easily be interpreted as the stuff of poetry, love even.

Whatever about the first kiss, or the first glimpse of Maybelle’s naked body, the instance of our coition, I knew, should have represented a moment of catharsis in my life. But just as my departure from Ireland was welcomed but left me none the wiser, this moment too escaped me. Nothing could ever be the same again, and yet beyond the champagne, the caviar, the sex, the selfish indulgences, the difference eluded me.

Our first night together became two, became three, became four. I slept in his bed, I ate his food and drank his drink. And, yes, I fucked his wife.

His phone was disconnected, his staff were excused from their duties, and his guard dogs prowled the perimeters. Maybelle was raucous, crude, and undisciplined. She was burdened with grief. But I, I was free to savour the delights. The champagne, the caviar, the grinding of our bodies. Although I barely knew him, he bequeathed me all of that.

The remaining dispersal of his fortune had still to be determined however. Maybelle was not ready for lawyers just yet she said. Nor the relatives. Not ready to face the swarm that would descend to pick over his bones. She felt certain she would come into the most of it, but the others would surely contest. Apart from his unnumbered previous wives there were any number of women out there who may have borne his children she said. Any number of individuals who would lay claim to his past. For now she didn’t want to have to deal with that. She wanted a few private moments of dignity.

We awoke hot and clammy at four in the morning after a fiery night of cavorted passion. My limbs ached. Maybelle tossed and turned. Flipped her pillow over, beat it flat. She turned on her back and kicked the remaining sheet off of us.

“He hated nights like this,” she said. “They were somehow my fault.” A trickle of sweat ran down the side swell of her freckled breast. Maybelle started to cry.

“Maybelle.” I reached over and curled up against her. Our bodies meshed stickily. I stroked her tear-stained cheek. The heat between us was unbearable, and yet we clung on. Over her shoulder through the open window, the sky was filled with burning stars. The light breeze swished through the palm leaves. Maybelle convulsed in my arms, sobbing heavily. She began to curse him loudly. All manner of crudities slipped off her tender lips.

“Shh!” I brushed the hair off her forehead. I took her hand and helped her from the bed. I led her into his study and brought her to the telescope by the window. I positioned the eyepiece on Venus. I stood behind Maybelle and clasped my arms about her waist. Her body trembled against me as she leaned in to look.

“It’s startling,” she whispered.

“Venus, the most brilliant of all.”

“In all our years together he never once let me look through this instrument.” She swung the telescope through the heavens. Took it all in. Then she lowered it down to the black horizon. “My God! Look!”

I lifted my head from her neck which I had been gently kissing. Even with my naked eye the flame of light was visible flaring brightly upwards. The guard dogs began to whine. The padded beat of their paws as they ran in circles around the compound punctuated the stillness.

She pulled her head back from the telescope. “It’s coming from the canyon,” she said. in that moment it died away. It was the same light I had seen a few nights previous. Maybelle looked at me horrified. “What is it?”

“It could be anything,” I said. “Anything at all.”

I knew she was thinking of the urn arcing through the air, of its body shattering against the rock, and his ashy remains scattering in the winds. The whining of the dogs lowered in pitch and volume until it disappeared, and the rhythmic beat of their paws came to a standstill. Maybelle turned in my arms. She pressed her bristling goose pimpled flesh against me.

We would go back to the bed now I knew, and she would hurt me. Harder than ever before. Doling out her vengeance in the only way she knew how.

The following afternoon we sat out by the pool on the veranda eating a late breakfast. We drank the orange juice I had freshly prepared and ate a mix of dates and figs. A full pot of Colombian coffee waited beside two white cups and saucers. We looked across the flat desert to the canyon. The sun shone down, and a light breeze trickled through the scattered low brush. A green and yellow lizard slipped over the balcony. Maybelle bit lusciously into a fig and spoke as she chewed.

“Do you think we should check the canyon?” She looked at me seriously.

I laughed. “It’s too vast, Maybelle. There would be no point.”

Maybelle stared at me, annoyed by my laughter. She deliberated on something. “The telescope is pointed directly at the spot.” She shrugged. “It was only a thought. It would ease my mind.”

Her response intimidated me. We were not on equal footing yet. An element of authority persisted in her tone. I would have to proceed more cautiously.

She took a drink of orange juice and peered over the balcony. I saw something give way within her. “I was scared last night, that’s all.” She smiled back at me. “The light was unusual, don’t you think?”

“It was curious,” I replied.

“But you’re right,” she said. “It could have been anything. It would be pointless to investigate.”

The empty cups rattled in their saucers. Maybelle looked to them and then to me. The tremor ran through both of our bodies. Maybelle gripped my hand. The water sloshed in the pool, broke in waves against its sides, and splashed over the edge. Then the tremor subsided as quickly as it began.

“It’s alright,” I said. “It has passed.”

Maybelle looked terrified. We sat there waiting for more, for the aftershocks, but nothing more came. “In all my time here, I’ve never got used to it.”

I looked across the flat country, followed the line of weakness with my eyes. “It’s the earth coming together,” I told her, “not renting apart. That’s its saving feature.”

“It will be the death of us,” she said. “Believe you me.”

The water continued to ebb in the pool. For the first time since his death Maybelle mentioned what had occurred.

“We did no wrong, did we?”

I shook my head. “We administered his medicine, that’s all.” And that was all we had done. I had no regrets about that. “Irrespective of what you thought of him, he was in great pain. We did him a service. A final act of loving generosity.”

In the end all we did was hasten up his dying. People did it all of the time. The dose was greater than the recommended one, but his passage out of this life was eased considerably.

“It was the least we could do. If you had left him in pain, if you had deliberately done that and had taken pleasure from it, that would be something else. That might give you something to trouble your conscience with. And even then who is to say whether you would have been right or wrong?”

Maybelle ran her finger across the table top. She disturbed a light covering of dust. She held out the coated tip of her finger. “A part of him? It has to be possible.”

I didn’t answer. She looked hard at her finger then ever so slowly pushed it into her mouth and sucked on it suggestively.

I looked away as though I had caught her engaged in a personal act. I firmly believed we had done the right thing, but it was true our motives had to be questioned. When Maybelle initially discussed it with me I had felt it a part of my duty. But did I also hope that we would end up together like this? Did I conspire to partake in his fortune? And yet he was going to die anyway within a matter of days or weeks, a month or two at the outside the doctor had said. So what had I altered? But of course what I had altered was the nature of our relationship. Together, we had plotted the taking of a life. Conspirators. Implicated by each other’s actions.

As for hoping we would end up like this or that I would partake in his fortune, I honestly could not say. I could not remember consciously aspiring to any of that, still can’t, and yet a part of me pleaded guilty on this behalf.

“Depending on how this turns out I intend to sell this property,” she said.

I nodded.

“In some ways I will hate to see it go.” She got up and leaned over the balcony where the lizard had earlier crawled. The bright blue cloudy sky sloped to meet the seared horizon. Maybelle turned to face me. The front of her white silk dressing gown flapped open. Her pale lightly freckled flesh, as if the scorching Californian sun was incapable of touching it, was exposed above and below the knotted belt.

“What do you see?” she asked.

I responded with a puzzled look.

“In me? When you look at me what do you see?”

I poured myself a coffee, tasted it. “A strong woman. Someone capable of surviving out here. Like the odd rare plant that intrudes into the desert, that has no place belonging here, but somehow makes it this far. Survives against the odds. And with a fresh fall of rain blooms magnificently, beautifully, brightening up the dullness in a way unimaginable to the natural habitat.”

Maybelle laughed harshly. “My god! You do have the gift of the gab, no doubt about it. You’re a rare bloom yourself.” She turned back to the dry expanse and spoke quietly, almost to herself. “If I asked you to take me back to Ireland with you, would you? For me, would you return?”

“That would depend,” I said considering my reply, “in which capacity you were asking me to return. As staff or as something else?”

Maybelle brushed out her hair with her fingers. “What would be your choice?” .

“As staff I would return, for a while at least. But I would not remain indefinitely.”

“And as something else?”

“I suppose it would depend on the something else.”

The lower half of her gown had slipped open further and her muscular right thigh was now exposed to the hip. The inner curves of her firm breasts were clearly visible.

“What have you got in mind?”

I took another drink of coffee. Maybelle’s collar bone protruded like a primitive neck adornment. “That is up to you,” I said. “I have no mind of my own.”

Maybelle quickly pulled her gown in around her. “That’s where you are so wrong.” She was agitated, upset. “He did not buy that. He was never able to buy minds. He could bruise them, but he could not own them. That was his mistake. That was always his mistake. He thought he could recognise something flawed, something imperfect that would be available for less, and then work on it, renovate it, pretty it up to be admired by all and make a handsome profit. But the trouble was the flaw would always be there, could not be painted away, and as sure as God the weakness would finally break through to the surface bringing him and everything around him down with it.”

She clutched the lapels of her gown tightly about her chest. The knuckles of her clenched fists showed through as white as weather exposed bone.

“You are right,” I said. “Right about it all except for in one respect. What you say he recognised as flaws were not flaws at all. They were not weaknesses but strengths. Not to be hidden away but to be revealed and revered.”

A sharp wind gusted across the veranda. Maybelle braced herself against it. Out above the horizon the blue sky darkened upwards to grey as a wall of swirling particles rose like a curtain of gauze.

“Dust storm,” I said. “We better get inside quickly.”

Maybelle steadied herself. I reached across, took her arm, and led her indoors.

The storm lasted throughout the afternoon. Maybelle and I watched it from the bedroom window. The pale particles of dust repulsed and attracted one another. We could see nothing outside of ourselves. As though we too were swirling somewhere out in the universe at some point in its infinite existence where something, a planet or a star, some heavenly body, was either being created or destroyed. We held on to one another. From time to time Maybelle wept.

The storm blew over. Lifted like a fog departing. Maybelle kissed me on the cheek as if something had lifted within her also. Something that had caused her to wonder if the storm would ever pass on, if we would not be lost within it forever. She took my hand and we walked outside.

The figs, the dates, the white cups and saucers, the empty jug of orange juice, the table and chairs were covered in a shroud of yellow and red dust. The veranda, the trees, the shrubs, the carefully watered lawns. Particles floated on the pool water, dispersed beneath the surface in a murky haze. Maybelle looked at me, and in a single movement shrugged off her dressing gown. This time we understood each other perfectly. I nodded my assent and undressed. I took her hand and together we jumped into the dust-filled water.

That night Maybelle and I withdrew silently to his study. We stood either side of his telescope watching the night sky. I listened to Maybelle’s heavy breathing, and she listened to mine. The stars flickered on and off. We waited patiently until we finally saw what we had come to see. Like a meteorite burning upwards, returning to bring order to the cosmos. Maybelle bent her head into the telescope where it was trained. She raised her head and nodded her confirmation. The light extinguished. She led me back into the bedroom and made angry love.

* * *

I set out alone the following morning while Maybelle slept. I took his car and drove down to the canyon. The morning haze clung lightly above the desert. The yellow sun had begun its upwards curve. Already the day was hot. I had decided the previous night after our rough lovemaking to go out and take a look at the canyon. To see, for Maybelle’s sake, if I could find anything that would explain the light.

I looked through the telescope before leaving to where it was pointed. I observed the prominences, the distinguishing features that might help identify the exact location later.

As I drove I turned the air-conditioning off and rolled down the side window. The hot air wafted through. The skyline was tinged in pink. The soil all around warmed to an orange gleam. A kangaroo rat hopped out from a clump of sagebrush across the road in front of me. I felt the soft bump of its body beneath the front wheel. I looked back and saw its innards spewed across the road. I recalled the turkey buzzard Maybelle and I had seen the time we had been out here together.

I reached the canyon about three quarters of an hour later. I went over to the edge and looked down into the canyon where Maybelle had previously cast the urn. There was no sign of its fragments anywhere. I glanced along the canyon floor and tried to gauge the location the light had flared from. I looked back to identify the position of his house. Although the house itself was not visible, I recognised the landmarks around it. I turned again to the canyon and took my directions from the features I had observed through the telescope. I estimated that I’d need to travel another two or three miles along the canyon rim.

I drove as far as I could in the car, about another mile and a half, before the track ran out. I pulled in, turned off the engine, and began to walk through the dry dirt and brush. The gouged out gulch fell sharply to my right. The large gaseous sphere of the sun ignited high in the sky. Perspiration broke out from the pores on my forehead and underarms. My throat was already dry. I should have set out earlier. I was crazy to have come without water. It was a basic rule in the desert to always carry an extra two days food and water. The body could lose up to a gallon a day. Even when you are not thirsty you need to keep drinking. I knew this only too well, and yet I ignored this ingrained knowledge. I hadn’t even bothered to take his emergency pack from the car. Flares, first-aid and snakebite kit, matches, compass.

I walked labouriously across the baked earth. I wiped my brow and scanned back across the flat desolation to where Maybelle lay in bed sipping, no doubt, from the remainder of his champagne. We had drunk fourteen bottles between us in the last few days. Maybelle told me she was developing a taste for it, that it was becoming an obvious part of her future.

The sudden buzz of a rattlesnake stopped me dead in my tracks. A number of rocks were scattered out to my left-hand side. It could well have been hiding there in the shade. I listened keenly to trace the sound, but the rattle abruptly stopped. For a while I stayed where I was watching and listening. Then I cautiously pushed on.

I finally made it out to where I believed the light had come from. The muscles in the backs of my legs ached. My shirt sleeves were soaked with sweat. It clung to my back. I wondered if Maybelle could possibly be watching me. Looking, from his study, through the great lens seeking out my human form.

The sun scorched downwards relentlessly from high in the sky. I was exhausted by the energy I had expended walking in its heat. I rested on my hunkers and looked down into the wide gulf where the earth had once been cut through by a surging flow of water. Layer upon layer of rocks receded downwards, through time, to the oldest strata at the dried out river bed. I thought of the flash floods that could sweep through in a moment, higher than a person, careening destructively through the gullies.

I stood up and walked to the rim. I viewed the crags and razor-back ridges eroded by wind, water, and extreme cycles of heat and cold. The sun caught on the phosphorescent tint of mineral deposits and flashed back a myriad of minute glinting rainbows.

I ought to have taken binoculars along to bring the bone-dry gullies and washes closer. To look for anything out of the ordinary. Staring down this distance scared me though. I felt genuinely fearful that I would be drawn over the edge to fall helplessly like the urn which held his ashes.

I walked along the rim for over an hour forcing myself to look between the buttes and ridges, but I could see nothing unusual. I knew I would have to go down. I would have to overcome my fears and find a trail winding over the switchbacks down into the heart of the canyon.

It was approaching noon, and without water it would be reckless to attempt it. And yet I didn’t want to go back to Maybelle without having tried. It would be the death of whatever we had between us to do otherwise. To lie, to pretend I had been down there and had seen nothing that would give any explanation, was not something I would have been capable of doing, was not something she would have believed.

I searched for another fifteen minutes and found the beginnings of a trail along the side of the canyon. It could have been formed by the feet of a past nomadic tribe or by miners seeking out the minerals stored beneath the earth’s surface. It might not even have been a trail at all but the basic lie of the land.

I inhaled steeply and stepped cautiously out onto the pathway. I tried not to look down. I walked as far away from the edge as possible, clinging to the rough canyon wall, shuffling each foot along. My throat contracted with thirst and fear. A gust of wind caused me to teeter momentarily. I leaned in against the canyon wall for protection. My heart pounded deep within my skeletal frame. I felt the hard rock pressing into my spine. No more than five feet away the sheer drop below veered up to meet me. I caught my breath and held it. I stood erect, my body straightening away from the angled wall. I exhaled slowly and began to move again.

I had only come a few hundred yards. The top of the canyon was not far above my head. I had a long way to go. I eased my way along, looking straight ahead of me, until I reached the first switchback. The trail curved steeply through a sharp U-turn, narrowing at the point of curvature to less than three feet. The dry soil and loose fragments of rock scattered beneath the soles of my shoes. The worn grips of my light footwear slid dangerously over them. Particles of grit and dust trickled over the edge. I had come completely unprepared for this. The temperature was rising into the nineties. I had no water, no headwear, no decent footwear, and not enough nerve. I was weak and sweating profusely. I stopped at the curve of the trail and leaned once more against the hard jutting wall. Against my better instincts I looked down. The vast depth of the gulch was fearsome. I felt dizzy and nauseous, parched with thirst. My sense of balance wavered. I could hardly believe how irresponsible I had been. I knew the dangers of desert country as much as anyone.

The sun flashed in my eyes and dazzled me. My body swayed lightly. I tensed with the overwhelming terror of my mortality. The buzz of the rattlesnake shook loudly in my ears. The dark wide span of the vulture’s wings cast its shadow across the whole of the canyon as the vicious trembling began.

The ground shook violently beneath me. It shook its way through the base of my feet up through my spine to my skull. I thought of Maybelle lying in bed gripped with fear. I heard the loud rumble of earth and rock as it loosened and fell away. I watched it shower down around me. Then I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms tightly around myself, and listened to the catastrophe of my quaking body.

* * *

I drove back to Maybelle wondering where it would go from here. Although I could always try again, I knew I wouldn’t. Even with the right equipment, even taking the necessary precautions, I would not descend again into the canyon. His fortune, his air-conditioning, his pool, his wife were not worth that to me. Had I finally reached a moment of catharsis in my life? Had something of magnitude about my existence finally been revealed to me? Would everything be different from here on out?

But deep within me I knew that this was no different from my decision to leave Ireland. That there too I had forsaken a livelihood people would kill for. There too I had forsaken the people closest to me.

I drove along the winding desert road realising that nothing had changed, that my life would go on as it always had done in a way I would never comprehend, that the mysterious flame from the canyon was as deep as any mystery got and that understanding left you nothing but the flat logical explanations.

I looked out my side window at the solitary tree where the buzzard had been, and whether it was a trick of the light, a desert mirage, or not, I believed I saw an enormous crater just beyond it, one I had not noticed before. I would take Maybelle out to that in the early morning, I decided. Before the sun came up. And whether the crater existed or not, we would make love there and watch together the fiery dawning of a new day. I would tell her of my decision to leave and allow her, in her lovemaking, to hurt me as she had never hurt me before. Not by any act of violence, but by an unprovoked act of tenderness. Assuming we were permitted that final grace.

— Gerard Beirne

————

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer who moved to Norway House, a Cree community in Northern Manitoba, in 1999 where he lived for three years. While living there, he interviewed Elders in the community and edited for publication an anthology of those interviews. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick 2008-2009 and is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead.

His novel The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2003) was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 for the best book of Irish fiction and was selected as Book of the Year 2004 by The Daily Express. His most recent novel Turtle was published by Oberon Press, 2009.

His short story “Sightings of Bono” was adapted into a short film featuring Bono (U2) by Parallel Productions, Ireland in 2001 and released on DVD in 2004.

His poetry collection Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual has just been published by Oberon Press- Fall 2011. His collection of poetry Digging My Own Grave was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin. An earlier version won second place in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

The Hit, The Film & The Novel — Russell Working (Writer, Actor, Director, Producer)

Jul 032012

This is a hoot. My old pal Russell Working has written a novel called The Hit, a portion of which was printed in Narrative. Now Russell has produced a brilliantly self-ironic book trailer in which he, his wife and his son act as characters from the book insisting that the book NOT be published. Russell, who worked as a journalist in Vladivostok and has first hand knowledge of the Russian underworld of which he writes, does a turn as a heavy with a thick Hollywood/Russian accent.

Russell Working is a terrific writer, a winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, an intrepid journalist, also a former colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

For your delectation I include also below a short excerpt from the novel, which is not comical at all, but a richly detailed and suspenseful story of memory and revenge reminiscent of Martin Cruz Smith’s great Russia-based thrillers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cywr00EjsVY&feature=plcp

———–

MAMA ALWAYS said it was a sin to throw away bread, a sacrilege to destroy a book. But one day when the tornado sirens were howling on Devon Avenue, Alexei Kuznetsov found three boxes of orphaned books under the awning in front of the Cherry Orchard Deli & Productery, where he worked, and he was unable to save any of them.

He did not know why anyone would leave literature outside a business that dealt in Baltika beer and loops of sausage and jars of slick, pickled mushrooms. Perhaps they had mistaken the deli for the Russian Oasis bookstore down the street and thought the books could be resold. One had to admit the name Cherry Orchard lent itself to confusion.

The sky was boiling, dirty, Jovian, with flashes of lightning in the clouds and distant gray deluges slanting to the south. A pervert wind was molesting two Indian girls, flinging grit and chip packages and attempting to strip them of their saris. The radio said tornadoes had skipped around someplace called Minooka, wrapping a trampoline around a telephone pole and peeling the roof off a strip mall, but the danger had passed here in Chicago. Still, the sirens bayed, their legs snapped in wolf traps.

The abandoned books all concerned Russia and the Soviet Union, but they were mostly nonfiction by Western journalists and translations of classics. Lermontov, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky. The spines were broken, the pages mold-speckled, as spotty as sparrow eggs; besides, everything was in English. When Alexei consulted his boss, Yakov Isayevich told him to trash the books.

“Maybe an American would like them,” Alexei said. “They might learn something about Russia.”

“Such as yourself, you mean? You’re all Yankees, you kids. Pants, hair. You want to compound your ignorance, take them home.” Yakov Isayevich had lived his adult life in Leningrad and Chicago, but the Odessa accent of his youth lent his harangues a comic air. He was bald and mustachioed, and dewlaps hung beneath his veiny chin. “Russia is a thousand-year-long train wreck, that’s all anybody needs to know. Go dump them in back and clear out some space in the freezer, we’ve got a delivery coming.”

Alexei had walked to work. Any books he saved he would have to carry home, along with the groceries Mama had asked him to pick up, and then she would probably make him take the literature to the Goodwill. He stacked the boxes and hauled them all in one trip to the alley in back.

Overnight, somebody had dumped a dead pit bull in the trash, its ears trimmed to ridges of scar so they would not be ripped from its head in a fight. Clearly, it had lost anyway. Its muzzle was gashed and throat torn, but the creature had died clenching a piece of hide in its teeth. The dog lay in a heap of onion peels from a pickled herring dish the girls had made yesterday. On a muggy July day the stench was overpowering: garbage, onions, dog. Alexei began tossing the books in. When one tome on Ivan the Terrible hit the pit bull’s freckled abdomen, the monster gasped, “Huh?” and gave up the ghost, exhaling a whiff of vomit and meat.

As he crouched there, flipping literature up into the trash, a black Hummer H2 with temporary plates pulled up and parked in a tow-away zone, blocking the alley by the refrigerated container that hunkered beside the door. He stood to wave the vehicle on, but the driver set the flashers and got out–whereupon a colony of fire ants spilled down Alexei’s spine and nested, stinging, in his armpits and groin.

A beefy man, mid-forties. Hair grayer than before, mouth drooping, cheeks roughened to chicken flesh by hard drinking. Wearing not a tracksuit anymore, but business attire, with gold cufflinks and a watchband that dangled like a bracelet on his wrist. His buzz cut was receding, leaving an islet of mown stubble where the widow’s peak had once been. His head was narrow, and there was a bump on his brow, the defining characteristic in an otherwise plain and ruddy face.

Alexei had noticed the lump when had last seen the man, eleven years ago in Vladivostok, on a night he and his parents had been heading out to a party. The light was out in the lift, and the doors opened up on a blinding lobby where two men waited. In their hands were bulky black things that began firing bullets into the Kuznetsovs. After killing Papa and wounding Mama, the taller one, this one, leveled his machine pistol at Alexei. His partner grabbed his arm, apparently some kind of wimp who was squeamish about murdering children. “Come on, Garik,” he said, “who gives a fuck about the kid?” That was how Alexei learned the man’s name.

The bump on his brow made you think he must have been knocked on the head. But now, after all these years, it was still there–a cyst or abnormality of the forehead boss. A vestigial horn, almost.

From the Hummer emerged a blonde in low pants that revealed a tattoo of the sun on her sacrum when she knelt to straighten her sandal. Gold bangles, gold earrings with flecks of emerald, a diamond on her wedding ring, worn, in the Russian style, on the right hand. A jewel in her navel like an odalisque.

Alexei half expected Garik to say, “Jesus Christ, kid, what the devil are you doing here?” But he didn’t–why should he, who would associate a teenager in Chicago with the seven-year-old screaming on the floor in Vladivostok eleven years ago?

“Can we get in through this door?” the blonde said.

Garik grabbed a book from Alexei’s hand. “What are you doing?”

“My boss told me to.”

“No, no, no!” Garik cried with an anguished look on his face. “A Russian trashing books? Ignorance!”

“They’re in English,” Alexei managed to say.

“Young man, books are precious,” Garik said. “Leave them, for God’s sake. I’ll find a home for them. So, can we get in this door, or do we have to go around front?”

Alexei said, “If–I don’t–”

“It’s an either-or question,” said Garik.

“You can get in, but customers are supposed to go around. My boss–”

The face silenced him. Garik’s forehead was furrowed except for the skin over the bump, like a hummock left unplowed in a field. Green eyes, the sclera yellowed. A cirrhotic symptom.

“So, you like my face, or what?” Garik said.

“No. I mean, not ‘no,’ I just–”

“I’m flattered, but I’m afraid I’m taken.”

“Oh, Garik, he doesn’t mean anything,” said the blonde. And then to Alexei: “He’s just teasing.” She was in her mid-thirties, perhaps, and had a beautiful face that was flawed by odd, oval nostrils. Her gold necklace had a name on it: MAYA.

Garik shrugged, as if concluding that this simpleton boy was merely tongue-tied in the presence of a businessman of such self-evident success. Deeming this reaction acceptable, he pushed past Alexei and entered the stockroom and kitchen, stinking of vodka and bile. Maya followed, her perfume cloying and chemical, like a Syrian peach cordial.

By the time Yakov Isayevich came out to check on Alexei, his panic attack was spinning to pieces like a lump of watery clay on a pottery wheel.

“Alyosha, how come you’re letting customers in through the back?” Yakov Isayevich said. “Hey, what are you, cataloging a library? Just dump the books and be done with it.” He grabbed two books Alexei had set aside, the Bulgakov and Dostoyevsky, and trashed them before Alexei managed to say that the customer wanted them. Yakov Isayevich shrugged. “What in hell’s hounds is that?” he added, looking in the Dumpster.

“I don’t know, a pit bull,” Alexei said. “Somebody–.”

“Were they fighting it? What’s wrong with people these days?”

Alexei felt a wave of dizziness and grabbed the Dumpster for support.

“Whoa, there,” Yakov Isayevich said. “Are you dizzy?”

“I was in too much of a rush this morning for–”

Amid the aftershocks of the panic attack he could not access the word, starts with a B, the thing with eggs and sausage and toast; and in its place was a blank, like a swearword bleeped out on TV.

“Your mama lets you head out to work without breakfast?” Yakov Isayevich said.

Breakfast. “She’d already left for work.”

“Oi, the poor woman. So you don’t know how to fry yourself an egg? Listen, son, when you get a minute, grab yourself a pastry. So, is this their Hummer? Well, I suppose they’ll be gone soon. Get inside and make yourself useful mopping the floor. Some lady dropped a jar of beets, and everybody’s tracking it all over like a murder scene.”

The Cherry Orchard was an old Chicago storefront, long and high-ceilinged, and the odor of salted fish and chicken fat hung so thick in the air it permeated the paint on the walls. The only cherries came in jars, sweet and tart, with pits, the kind Russians spooned into tea. As one entered the main room from the back kitchen and office, a refrigerated counter on the right extended almost out to the front window. To the left was a wall of shelves, interrupted by a doorway into a second room, also facing Devon Avenue. Along the ceiling were posters advertising beer and pelmeni, alternating with American flags. (Unlike Polish or Ukrainian grocers, Yakov Isayevich never posted the colors of his homeland.) The women at the deli counter wore aprons and white hats, and behind the glass were hams, dried salmon, fatback, whitefish, redfish, salads, cakes. Loops of sausage and the carcasses of smoked chickens hung along a mirror on the wall, amid signs that read, “mimosa salad” and “Telephone cards: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland.” Opposite, the shelves were laden with canned pâté and fish in tomato sauce; bottles of nectar, kvas, vodka, and Moldavian wines; boxes of tea; black rye bread; jars of pickled mushrooms and cucumbers; packages of dried macaroni, barley, and baby food; shrink-wrapped slabs of glazed gingerbread from Tula; and boxes of meringue cookies. Yakov Isayevich had labeled them, in English, “marshmallows.”

The first time Alexei had entered the Cherry Orchard, he must have been eleven, their first winter in Chicago. Mama bought him a slab of Tula bread, and the smell of jam and gingerbread had sucked him in through a puncture in spacetime into a singularity containing a store outside the redbrick kremlin in Tula, where he and his parents had bought picnic supplies for a trip to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Nowadays, he knew nostalgia was commonplace at the Cherry Orchard, you saw it in the faces of everyone who wandered in. That’s what Yakov Isayevich dealt in: longing for a land everyone had spent their lives trying to escape. You could survive for a month in Russia on what it cost you to load up on groceries at the deli, and even by American standards it was pricy (three dollars for a liter of kvas, four for a package of cookies), but for homesick immigrants, the taste of the motherland was worth it. In any event, when one spent eight hours a day in a workplace, the nostalgia disappeared, and the store had long since lost the associations with Alexei’s own vanquished Russia.

He wheeled in a yellow plastic bucket and wringer, steering it with a mop drowned headfirst in the muddy water. Garik was nowhere to be seen, he must have drifted to the other room. A shambles of sugar beets, reeking of vinegar, had been trampled all over, and gory tributaries flowed into the deli counter. Yakov Isayevich had set up a yellow plastic marker with an icon of a man slipping and flying into the air, and there was a warning whose multilingual fluency seemed irrelevant to the Urdu and Malayalam and Russian of Devon Avenue: “CAUTION CUIDADO ACHTUNG ATTENTION.” Alexei knelt to shovel up the beets in a dust pan. As he worked, he maintained a peripheral awareness of the shoppers, mostly women in jeans or skirts he could see through against the light from the window, and when Maya nearly stepped on him, he duckwalked out of her way. “Oi, sorry,” she said, and touched his head. A pair of men’s shoes shuffled in. The left foot detached itself from the floor and scratched the right ankle. Alexei glanced up to see Garik surveying the liquor.

He stood and sloshed the mop on the floor and then in the bucket. A feeding frenzy in a blood-muddied sea.

Garik beckoned Darya Vanderkloot, a cook who sometimes lent a hand at the counter, and sought her counsel on some point concerning the vodka, ignoring her pleas that really, she knew nothing about the subject, she only drank beer and that rarely, Yakov Isayevich was the one to ask. She was in her mid-twenties and dressed to show off her plump, sexy figure, wearing jeans that she apparently applied with a paint brush, yet she was aloof toward the mere males who took notice of her. They were all horny pigs, apparently, for lowering their gaze the cleft that swallowed her zipper in front. Garik nodded as she spoke, his brows compressed, as if seeking, within the fine print of the vodka label, the wisdom of the kabbalah.

Irrationally, Alexei was annoyed at Darya. She shouldn’t flounce about like that for some mafik. She was no supermodel, with her Russo-Mongolian features, but her eyes, grant her that: long-lashed, brown, slightly bugged, their shape emphasized with a mascara brush. Even in summer she was pale as kefir. She said she never tanned because she was afraid of skin cancer. Alexei supposed she was vain about her hair, lush and black.

Garik removed a bottle from the shelf. “Genghis Khan Vodka. The guys would get a kick out of that. Where did you get this stuff?”

“Yakov Isayevich, our boss, sometimes he finds these deals on the Internet,” she said.

“But Genghis Khan!” Garik said. “Why not Attila the Hun cognac or Hitler schnapps?”

“It’s a Mongolian brand,” she said. “They revere Genghis as the Greeks do Alexander. Conqueror of empires. Some people say he was born in Russia, in Chitinskaya oblast. A village called Balei.”

“So, do you have any of those little sampler bottles I could try, to make sure it’s drinkable? Ah, well, it couldn’t be too awful, could it? We taught them how to drink, Mongolians. Surely they’ve learned how to distill vodka properly.”

He decided to buy a bottle, no, three. And a case of the Finlandia, too, in case the Genghis proved execrable.

Hearing the size of the order, Yakov Isayevich, who had been arranging cans on a shelf, moved closer with an expression that said he did not wish to intrude but was at hand, if need be, to assist. But Garik’s stare remained fixed on Darya. He grabbed her upper arm, slipping his fingers between her bicep and breast, as he murmured something to her. Alexei caught the word, “ty”–the informal you–as if she were his girlfriend or daughter. He was old enough, the freaking satyr.

Darya glanced at Alexei pleadingly, but he thought, That’s what you get. If you don’t like it, tell him to take his paws off of you.

Releasing Darya, Garik hummed to himself and shuffled toward the window. He glanced over the shelves, the stand containing magazines and postcards, the refrigerator packed with frozen pelmeni, then returned toward the cash register. Something occurred to him. For the first time he looked Yakov Isayevich in the eye. “Do you cater?”

“Certainly,” Yakov Isayevich said. “We’ve done parties of up to fifty people. With enough notice we could do more.”

Garik called over his shoulder, “Mayechka, did you hear that?” and then realized the blonde was right behind him. On the counter beside his booze she set a basket containing pelmeni, a bag of ginger cookies, and several boxes of tea.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be that big,” Maya said. “Just a few friends.”

“We prefer at least a week’s notice,” Yakov Isayevich said. “More, if it’s a complicated menu.”

Garik turned to the deli case. “‘Israeli salad.’ Why Israeli?”

“It’s just a variety of salad,” said Yakov Isayevich. “If you would like a sample–?”

“No samples for the products of our old allies in Mongolia, but for the ‘Zionist entity’–”

“We make it here in the store. It’s just a name.”

“So how did your authentic Russians of Chicago become so enamored of Jewish cuisine?” Garik said.

Yakov Isayevich hesitated, surprised, perhaps, yet still open to an inoffensive interpretation of the remark, because if something anti-Semitic was implied, it had been so gratuitous. “Perhaps,” he said at last, “because many of them are Jews.”

A dollar coin appeared in Garik’s hand, and he began flipping and catching it. “That’s very interesting, my friend,” he said. “It would explain all the synagogues. I’m not complaining. I used to work for a Jew, and he was the best boss I ever had–a great guy.”

Yakov Isayevich’s ears flushed and a look of alarm flashed in his eyes, as if he was considering how to redirect the topic of conversation without confronting a customer. Removing a towel from his shoulder, he absently bound his right hand in it. Then noticing what he was doing, he blushed and pulled it off.

But Garik himself changed the subject. “So tell me: do you offer any discounts for volume?”

“I can offer ten percent if the order’s over two hundred dollars,” Yakov Isayevich said. “I’m just a small businessman, there’s no profit for me if I go any lower. America isn’t the gold mine people expect when they arrive here, I think you’ll discover that. I’m assuming you’re new here?”

Garik ignored this. He raised the Genghis and examined it against the window, perhaps looking for the sediment found in bad vodka. “What if I just take it?” he said. “A luxury tax.”

Garik smiled at his own little joke but Yakov Isayevich did not join in the merriment. He indicated Alexei with a glance. “I wouldn’t advise that.”

Garik looked at the young man who stood gripping the mop handle. It surprised Alexei to discover that he was taller that the hit man.

“Yes, I’ve met your ferocious young bouncer,” Garik said. “An intimidating youngster, clearly.” There was a touch of benevolent amusement in his tone. “So you’ll, what, mop me to death if I try anything?” Garik aimed his forefinger at Alexei. He cocked his thumb. He said, “Bang.”

“Oh, Garik, pay the man and stop fooling around,” Maya said. Then to Alexei: “Sometimes people don’t get his humor.”

“I don’t know when to shut my trap, she means. No, no, no, no, don’t deny it, Mayechka, it’s true, I’m the first to admit it.”

Garik fished a zippered men’s purse from his suit coat, fumbled about in it, and handed Darya a credit card. He glanced around, as if to make sure everyone had noticed. Perhaps he did not know that every small-time gangbanger on the West Side possesses a credit card. Darya handed it to Yakov Isayevich, who had gone around behind the counter. Leaving his mop leaning in the bucket, Alexei moved a step closer, trying to glimpse the last name on the card, but Yakov Isayevich’s hand closed around it.

“All right, then, make that three bottles of the Genghis,” Garik said. “A case of the Finlandia. A case, no, two of Hennessy. And a couple bottles of this Armenian wine, semisweet. Some Moldavian, too–why not? Some of this Zolotoi Rog: oh, let’s say four bottles. And of course, we can’t ignore the beer drinkers. The Baltika Number 6: how many bottles are in a case? Only twelve? Four cases, then.”

Garik turned to Alexei. “Hey, tough guy, are those Kara-Kums I see on the shelf behind you?”

“We’re out today, but we have other candies, Russian candies,” Yakov Isayevich answered. “Alyosha, can’t you find somewhere else to stand? See, we have–”

Garik silenced Yakov Isayevich by tossing him his keys. “Listen, Gramps,” he said, “maybe you and the boy could start organizing the cases while the girl here rings us up.”

Yakov Isayevich set the keys by the cash register. “Let’s make sure your card goes through. Then Alyosha will help you.”

Genghis, Finlandia, Hennessy: he named off the items as he rang them up. He swiped the credit card, and everyone, Garik included, stared at the cash register, as if in suspense, until it began spitting out a receipt.

Now Yakov Isayevich handed Alexei the keys. “Go carry everything out for the comrade while we finish up.”

Out in back, Maya supervised the loading of the vehicle, standing close enough to brush Alexei’s arm with her breasts as she told him how to set boxes just so. When he finished the groceries, he glanced at the books, then at Maya. She rolled her eyes but nodded, so he loaded them in the Hummer as well. When Garik emerged, biting his cuticles, she rushed over and kissed him, lest there be any doubt that he was the bull elephant here. An old Honda with a plastic sheet in place of the rear window puttered up the alley, and the driver, an unshaven man in a striped Russian navy T-shirt, raised his fist to punch the horn. But as he looked over the scene–Garik, the bejeweled blonde, the burly kid loading boxes, the Hummer itself–some assembly line in his head seemed to start up and send down the conveyer belt a conclusion: Mafia. His hand opened into gesture that said, No problem, friends, you carry on, and he backed up the length of the block and around the corner onto North Washtenaw. Alexei went inside for the last box, and when he returned Maya was sitting in the Hummer.

“You’re a strong guy,” Garik said. “You wrestle?”

“Box a little. I’m training for a tournament in a few weeks. In high school I played American football, but I graduated in June.”

“A Russian footballer! Well done, of course. I’ll bet you taught those pansy-assed Yankees a lesson or two. What kind of–how do you say it? What position? I don’t know anything about football except they all dress like cosmonauts. Did you wear one of those helmets?”

“Everyone wears a helmet. I was what they call a linebacker, also tight end on offense, but they hardly ever played me.” Alexei said the words in English–leinbekker, teit end— although they could mean nothing to a Russian; the act of summoning an explanation was beyond him as he stood face-to-face with the killer. “All I did was work my ass off in practice.”

“Well, excellent, nonetheless,” Garik said. “What’s your name?”

“Kuznetsov, Alexei.”

The family name did not register with Garik. It was as commonplace in Russia as Smith.

Garik shook Alexei’s hand, one was unable to avoid it. “Pleased to meet you, Alyosha. Igor Andreyevich. Call me Garik. Been in the States long?”

“A while,” Alexei said.

“Are you a citizen, then?” Garik asked.

“I have a green card.”

“How convenient. Listen, if we do have you guys cater a party, make sure you work that night.” Garik closed the hatch of the Hummer and lowered his voice. “Darya, too, she’s hot. An Internet bride, am I right? Fuck the husband, we’ll show her a good time. As for you, you might meet some people who can help you out in life, if you ever want to do anything other than mop floors for a Jew.”

Garik pulled a dollar bill from his purse and tucked it into Alexei’s shirt pocket, then slapped him on the back. Alexei removed the cash and tried to hand it back.

“I can’t accept tips,” he said.

“Sure, you can, boss doesn’t have to know,” Garik said. “Well, I like this little deli of yours. Like it very much. I’ll be seeing you.”

As Garik drove off, Alexei noted the license number: a temporary Illinois plate, 909F911. Easy to remember. Nine-eleven. He committed it to memory.

He recalled the dollar in his hand. Except it wasn’t a one, it was a one hundred. The bill stank of gasoline. Somebody had stamped Benjamin Franklin’s face with a Web address: wheresgeorge.com.

Alexei tossed the bill in the trash, along with the dead dog, and went inside to wash his hands.

So, Garik, again. Short for Igor, patronymic of Andreyevich. But what Alexei needed was a last name. The Beast: as a boy he had seized onto this name during a scripture reading in the church he and Mama attended in Cyprus after they had fled Vladivostok, during that period when she had abandoned her atheism and converted to Orthodoxy. Who is like unto the beast, who is able to make war with him? It had made an impression on him as a, what, seven- or eight-year-old? Seven heads and ten horns. Diadems, and on his head were blasphemous names. They worshiped the dragon because he gave his authority to the beast. And so it had now come to pass that God or fate, having tested the faithfulness of their servant Alexei Kuznetsov, had vouchsafed him a chance encounter with the man whose face had haunted him for eleven years. Were there public records of temporary license plates that would help him locate Garik’s last name? It hit him that he could still find a way to look at the credit card receipt.

Easier said than done. When the deli was busy, there was no way he could crowd in as the cash register rang open and banged shut, and when it quieted down, he did not have access to the drawer. And if he asked somebody to open it, he would have to explain why. But that night, as the end of his shift approached, he sought Darya’s help. There was a lull in customers, and she stood at the front window, her back to the room as she faced the street. One by one, she extended each arm parallel to the floor, and rotated it in a motion that concluded with a graceful twist of the wrist as she brought her splayed fingertips and thumb together, like a lotus folding inward at night. She was wearing a wedding ring on her left hand, American-style, he noticed. He really knew nothing about her.

Noticing Alexei’s stare, she stopped and returned to the counter. “An old dance move,” she said.

“You’re a dancer?” he said.

“Oh, no. There was a student company when I was in university.”

“Listen, Darya, I have a question: did you catch that customer’s surname?”

“Which customer’s?” she said.

“The guy who bought all the booze. Expensive suit, bump on his forehead. Igor Andreyevich, he called himself.”

“Garik the mafik?” Darya said. “No, he didn’t say.”

Somehow it surprised Alexei that she had recognized Garik as Mafia, he had imagined she had been taken in by his airs as a businessman. “Could you sneak a look at the credit card receipt?”

“How come?” she said.

“Just curious.”

“I doubt Yakov Isayevich would want me divulging a customer’s personal information.”

Alexei stared at her for a moment, then walked off.

A few minutes later Darya found him wheeling a hand truck stacked with boxes of ground beef into the refrigerated container; the delivery that had been promised all day had finally arrived just as he was preparing to leave.

“Voskresensky,” she said.

He looked at her blankly.

“That’s the name on the credit card. Igor A. Voskresensky.”

Voskresensky. How simple it had been to obtain the name after all these years. He almost felt the receipt had been there in the drawer from the day he started work here, if only he had thought to look.

“What’s the matter, Alyosha?” she said. “You look so dark.”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just remembering something.”

Yakov Isayevich came humming in through the door. “Well, if it isn’t the two coconspirators, whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears. I knew I’d find you lovebirds huddled up back here, all kissy-faced and–”

Darya walked out on him mid-sentence and slammed the steel door behind her.

That evening as Alexei walked home just after eight, the air everywhere, from the store to the street to the apartment, was dense with dark matter that seemed to warp the buildings and trees, boiling up gusts of gaseous brick and bark were drawn back into the source like solar prominences. The afternoon storm had blown off and the sky was clearing. The moon had risen at an altitude of forty-eight degrees, a distorted sliver of it orbited four hundred thousand kilometers out. It had reached first quarter just over an hour and a half ago, he recalled with some surprise, as if the appearance of Garik would have interfered with the waxing and waning of the moon.

The third-floor hallway of his apartment held a confluence of odors: of somebody’s curry dinner, of the shoes (sixteen of them) outside a Jordanian cabdriver’s door, of the dinner Mama had baked–beef and potatoes and sour cream and cheese. She liked cooking this dish because she alone could prepare it to Alexei’s satisfaction, and it pleased her to watch him devour a full casserole pan in two sittings. When he entered the apartment, Mama laid aside her copy of Inostrannaya Literatura and rushed over to relieve him of his grocery bags as he stepped out of his shoes.

“Rabbit, I was calling you, why didn’t you answer?” she said. “Well, how was I supposed to know you’re on your way home if you don’t set down the bags and take my call? Come on, dinner’s ready.”

Objectively speaking, forty-one wasn’t that old, but Vera Anatolyevna lived like an elderly widow for whom the world was a trial best avoided. She hennaed her hair, and only snorted when he told her that in America such clown-red hues are affected primarily by artists, anarchists, and spiky-haired lesbians. In Chicago, where the heating always works, she dressed in a babushka’s summer housecoat year-round. Once slender and beautiful, she had thickened and aged beyond her years. She worked as a cleaning lady and cook in a women’s shelter, but otherwise she seldom left the apartment except for forays to the bookstore or church, where, after kissing the icons, she always hid herself behind a pillar back in the saint-crowded gloom. She insisted her disfigurement was so horrific that it caused passersby to gape and skateboarders to stumble into lampposts and strangers in banks to blurt out, “What happened to your face?” but in truth her scars were hardly noticeable. There was a dent in the right temple where the bullet had entered, and it had left through her left eye without touching her brain, thank God, so there was no exit wound, only a glass eye that could pass for the real thing except when her socket began weeping. On such days she left the incredulous orb in a tumbler on her nightstand, and she wore a flesh-colored eye patch to cover the collapsed lid. He had given up trying to convince her that she could lead a normal life if she would just forget about other people’s reactions. Yes, easy for him to say. But if one wished to talk about appearance, the real problem was the increasing hardness of her face, and that was self-inflicted: the bags under her eyes, the violet tinge to her nose, the spider veins creeping across her cheeks. A drinker’s face. No doubt she was unaware of the worsening of her looks. The only mirrors in the apartment had been on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, but Mama had made Alexei remove the reflective triptych, exposing shelves cluttered with toothbrushes and razors and a tube of triple antibiotic cream. He kept a mirror in his backpack so he could comb his hair or check for bleeding zits after shaving blind in the shower.

Mama touched the skin between his eyebrows. “I wish you wouldn’t scowl all the time, you’re getting permanent frown lines at eighteen years old.”

He flashed an insipid smile, and she laughed. They lugged the grocery bags back to the kitchen and sorted everything into the refrigerator and cupboards.

“I know I annoy you with my calls,” Mama said, “but it’s just that there are gangs out there and I worry. I saw a program on TV. Black Gangster Disciple Nation, Mafia Insane Vicelords: who comes up with these names? Conservative Vicelords, it sounds like an Italian political party. Listen, a babushka was raped in a home invasion last week, six blocks from here.”

“I’m sure that had nothing to do with gangs, Mama, it was just some maniac,” he said.

“That’s supposed to comfort me? The point is, I can never relax when you’re out.”

He dumped a bag of flour into a plastic container where the mice couldn’t get to it. “Mamul, listen,” he said, “I need to tell you something. Today–”

“Here, open this, would you? My wrists are hurting again.”

Mama handed him a brandy bottle, and he twisted off the cap. She splashed two hundred milliliters into a crystal carafe and added a shot into a dainty liqueur glass with a stem. Despite Alexei’s age, Yakov Isayevich let him take home whatever spirits Mama requested. A tab was kept, but whenever Alexei brought a payment from his mother, however paltry, Yakov Isayevich would mutter in embarrassment and write off the rest of the bill. Mama was the only person to whom he showed such generosity, for reasons unknown to Alexei. Yakov Isayevich seemed to think he was staying within the limits of the law if no cash exchanged hands at the time a teenager walked out of the store with a bottle of Georgian cognac or a case of strong beer. But at the Cherry Orchard they were contemporary Russians, not Soviet citizens of a former generation, and nobody would dream of informing the Liquor Control Commission.

“It’s good you don’t drink,” she said.

Since Alexei had graduated in June, Mama had taken to commenting on his abstinence, often neutrally and sometimes even praising it, but her demeanor contradicted her words. You’re a man, already, join me in a nightcap if you wish.

“I just don’t see the point of alcohol, that’s all,” he said.

“You should join the Mormons. Soon you’ll be wearing a white shirt and tie and that special underwear. I’m teasing, sonny, you’re right. Once you do see the point of alcohol, it’s too late.”

With her glass she clinked Alexei’s mug of water and threw down her cognac à la russe.

“It’s never too late, Mama,” he said.

“Oi, Alyosha, don’t start. So, are you hungry? Good, sit down.”

Mama had eaten earlier, but after bringing him a plate, she served herself a “symbolic portion, for company” and joined him at the kitchen table.

“You were starting to say something,” she said.

At once he knew he could not tell her about Garik. He could not say why, but he needed to sort this through on his own. “Did you hear the sirens this afternoon?” he said.

“What sirens?”

“Are you kidding, it sounded like an air raid at Stalingrad. Were you at the shelter?”

“No, I told you I’d only be working a half-day,” she said. “They need me Saturday. I was home all afternoon.”

“Yakov Isayevich tried to get us to take refuge in the basement, but then we heard the tornado warning was limited to Will and Kendall counties.”

“Maybe I slept through it,” she said.

You always do. Mama refilled her glass from her carafe and fixed her cockeyed, teary gaze on Alexei. She had been in this state for weeks after they had fled Russia for their second home in Limassol, Cyprus. She spent her days in the twilight of the master bedroom, the exterior shutters rolled down to cover the sliding glass doors. Alexei would lie next to her on the bed as a fan on a tall stand sent a ticklish breeze back and forth over them, and they would remain there in silence for hours, holding hands, as her warm cognac breath came and went. It was a fortnight before she even thought to ask a Russian friend to enroll him in an English school. One day he came home with a pocket full of candy and a Japanese comic Ruslan had lent him, but when he arrived, Mama was missing. He took the elevator down and searched the neighborhood for hours, checking back frequently in case she’d come home. Finally long after dark, he curled up on the Persian carpet under the baby grand piano and cried. An orphan now. Oh, Mama! A persistent knocking roused him. He did not think he had slept but there was drool on the carpet, hair on his tongue. At the door, a Cypriot woman with hirsute hands said in English, “Russian lady, Russian lady!” and a great deal more in Greek. She took him by the hand and led him down the stairway. Mama lay passed out on the landing three flights down, her housecoat hitched up to reveal a tuft of pubic hair coiling from her flowered panties. Together, he and the woman got Mama to the lift, dragged her back home, toppled her into bed.

“Sirens, I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “You can’t get tornadoes in a city because of the skyscrapers.”

“Mama, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Besides, there are no skyscrapers on Devon.”

“Perhaps, but I’m still here, along with the rest of Chicago. So what else happened today?”

“Oh, nothing,” Alexei said. “Really, it’s boring to talk about. Stocking shelves. Breaking down boxes. Some idiot shoplifted a bottle of whiskey, but I ran him down while Yakov Isayevich called the cops. No, he was not a gang member, just a stupid kid. For awhile this morning the scanner was acting up so we could only accept cash. Customers become so rude when this happens, they announce they’re going to go to Jewel-Osco from now on. I guess you can’t blame them, but why is it our fault? We’re just employees. Also there was some idiot mafik who came in, kept pawing Darya. Apparently she’s incapable of telling him to keep his hands off her. I’m not going to chaperone her if she can’t even speak up for herself. I wanted to stave his head in.”

“Alyosha, must you speak so violently?” she said. “I won’t have that in my house.”

He gulped a forkful of beef and potatoes. “How was your day?”

“Oh, you know me, focus on the positive,” she said. “There’s hope the clients will escape the abuse the longer they’re with us. Although, sometimes–. That Bengali went back to her husband. Also, there was a Russian, I had to interpret for her, she barely speaks English. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it before! Enough, I don’t like dwelling on bad things. Did you meet anyone interesting?”

Alexei sawed the heel from the loaf of bread she had baked. “Mama, there are always girls in the store, and all of them are married. I don’t think there is a single Russian girl my age in Chicago. Pretty ones, anyway, I’m not talking about Masha.”

“Nonsense, she’s a lovely girl,” Mama said. “Anyway, a mother has to ask.”

Alexei twirled his mug of water on the table.

“Don’t, you’ll spill it. Was Yakov Isayevich yelling at you again? You’re so gloomy.”

“Yakov Isayevich doesn’t bother me,” Alexei said. “If he wants to stress out about everything and drop dead of a heart attack at sixty-five, that’s his problem. I’m just tired, is all. I slept badly again. Five and a half hours. It doesn’t matter, I can get by on that if I snooze on my lunch break.”

“Maybe you should go back on Zoloft,” she said.

“I haven’t had a panic attack in years.”

Then the dizziness and fire ants returned, and Alexei excused himself–“Urgent need”–and hurried to the bathroom, where he sat on the toilet with the lids down, fisting his eyes as he rode out a hurricane of black locusts and burnt straw.

— Russell Working

An excerpt of an earlier version of this novel first appeared in Narrative magazine.

——————

Russell Working is a journalist and short story writer whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The TriQuarterly Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story.

His collection, The Irish Martyr, won the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award. He was the youngest winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, for his book Resurrectionists. He is a staff writer for Ragan Communications in Chicago and has taught in Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA program in creative writing.

Russell’s journalism has often informed his fiction. His Pushcart Prize-winning The Irish Martyr,written after an assignment in Sinai, tells of an Egyptian girl’s obsession with an Irish sniper who has enlisted in the Palestinian cause. After reporting on the trafficking in North Korean women as wives and prostitutes in China, he wrote the short story Dear Leader, about a refugee from the North who is sold to a Chinese peasant.

Russell formerly worked as a staff reporter at the Chicago Tribune. There he exposed cops and a Navy surgeon general who padded their résumés with diploma mill degrees, and covered the international trade in cadavers for museum exhibitions.

He lived for nearly eight years abroad in Australia, the Russian Far East, and Cyprus, reporting from the former Soviet Union, China, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, and aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. His byline has appeared dozens of newspapers and magazines around the world, including BusinessWeek, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the South China Morning Post, and the Japan Times. He began his career at dailies in Oregon and Washington.

Women Who Smoke: Fiction — Sybil Baker

Jun 172012

Here’s a dark, laconic, mesmerizing story of alcohol and infidelity in the expatriate demimonde of Seoul. A kind of free-floating rage drives the story; music on the juke box insists; motifs (music, a lover’s infidelity, smoking, the Seoul sewage system — yes!) recur with a maddening rhythm, the whole thing driving toward a climactic violence. Sybil Baker writes the darker side of betrayal, writes about vengeance and ugliness (on the inside). It’s a gorgeous, tough-minded story. Sybil is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, edits fiction for Drunken Boat, and is also the author of a new novel — Into This World (Engine Books, 2012). This story originally appeared in print in Prime Mincer, Summer, 2011.

—-

I was at this bar with Neal trying to remember songs. He sat across from me, just like Steve had those first few months here in Seoul. Outside, the street was gradually darkening. I stared at a blank square of paper on the table and brought the tip of the pen to my lips, hoping that something would to come to me.

The last time I’d been here was six months ago. Steve and I had been sitting in this same booth next to the same window that looked out at the same man tending the fire. That was when I told him I knew about the Korean girl. What was her name, I asked him. Steve said, it didn’t matter, her name. That it was a mistake. That we never should have moved here together. He never should have invited me. And I said, who do you think you are, the fucking president of the country? I don’t need your invitation. I can live wherever the fuck I want. I can go back to Atlanta or move to LA or New Orleans. But guess what, I’d told him, I’m not going to make your life that easy. I’m not going anywhere. And then I poured a full mug of beer from our pitcher and drank it slowly, just to prove it.

Now I took a drink of beer for music inspiration. I wrote down “The Logical Song,” by Super Tramp. Barry Manilow, “Copacabana.” Olivia Newton John, “Have You Never Been Mellow?”

“Where do you come up with those?” Neal lit a cigarette, abandoning his own blank slip of paper. He was British and didn’t get the sad beauty of those songs.

“Steve,” I said. “He was good with that stuff.” I closed my eyes to remember. Then I wrote down a few more songs and creased the paper in half.

“No more Steve. Remember?” Neal blew smoke at the window even though it was closed.

“You asked.” I scooted out of the bench and walked across the bar to give the bartender my requests. Behind him, three shelves of albums were stacked like books, old faded things with fraying spines. I tried to make eye contact with the bartender, a cute guy with shaggy hair and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, but he acted busy with the computer. I reached over the counter and put the list in front of him. He smoothed it on the counter and nodded.

Back at our table, Neal had refilled my glass.

“You Brits are so well-mannered,” I said. I batted my eyes at him and turned up the dial on my Southern accent.

“And all you Southern girls are so charming.” He offered me a cigarette but I shook my head. Too early.

Except for the bartender, the only other people there were two young women at the booth behind Neal. Under the bar’s dim lights their hair looked like velvet. The girl whose back was to me wore a fitted turtleneck and butterfly clips in her hair while the other had bangs cut straight across and fistfuls of bracelets on her bare arms. In between sips from their bottled beers, the girls chatted rapidly. Their cell phones were displayed on the wooden table, and every few minutes they pounced on the phones to scrutinize new text messages. Between the cell phones was a white pack of cigarettes decorated with pink butterflies. The two girls inhaled the ultra slim cigarettes at the same time and occasionally waved them dramatically in the air when they wanted to emphasize a point. They reminded me of the girl Steve had left me for.

“Such poseurs,” I said. “Acting like they’re Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Neal didn’t bother turning around. “When I first got here I saw a man slap a woman for smoking in the street,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer. Ugly. That’s what my mother called women who smoked. Ugly.

Neal tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. “Women weren’t supposed to smoke in public.”

“Remember what you told me about Zen masters?” I said. “How they would strike people meditating with a stick to help them become enlightened? Maybe that’s what he was doing.”

Neal smiled his sexy half smile. “Maybe.” “Riders in the Storm” was playing. “This place is brilliant,” he said. “Why didn’t you show it to me before?”

“You mean like in the whole month we’ve been together?”

Neal shrugged and sang along with Jim Morrison. I looked out the steamed window onto the street. People were coming into the restaurant below, their scarves wrapped around their necks, arms hanging on each other. I felt a pang of hunger and picked a few of the squid-flavored chips out of the basket.

“The other thing that drives me crazy is the bathroom,” I said after I’d chewed my squid ring. “They have this little metal ledge above the roll of toilet paper and a wet folded tissue for women to put their cigarettes out in. I mean they encourage it, smoking in the toilet, just to keep the image of the pure Korean girl. What a joke. After a few drinks they’re running back to the bathroom to sneak a smoke. Pisses me off because I usually have to go really bad, and these women are taking their time puffing away in the stall. Just so they can pretend to be innocent.”

“You’ll see an end to it soon enough,” Neal said. “You Americans started this whole nonsmoking farce.”

“That’s just the beginning,” I said “In Seattle we have strip clubs where you can’t drink.”

“And no trans fat for your chips in New York,” Neal said. “Pardon, French fries.”

“Fried taters.”

“Damn Southerner.”

“Fucking Brit.” I grabbed his hand and smiled stupidly at him.

The Doors had ended, and Neil Young’s “Expecting to Fly,” scratched from the LP player. The song was warped and faded; in other words, perfect.

Four Western guys walked in, taking a table near the skinny cigarette girls but away from the windows. They wore baseball caps that hid most of their buzz cuts, pressed shirts and jeans with bright running shoes. U.S. military, enlisted. This bar was about thirty minutes away from the closest base, making it easier to dodge the military’s midnight curfew. And here, in a bar like this, they could meet pretty girls.

“Do you know that Alaska has the highest ratio of men to women in the States?” I said. “Women there have their pick.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ears, which were large for my face and stuck out. I kept my hair long to hide my them, but sometimes I forgot or didn’t care, and I’d expose my elephant ears to the world. “They sell T-shirts in Anchorage that say ‘Baby when you leave here you’ll be ugly again.’” I paused, waiting until Neal smirked to show he got the joke. “If it weren’t so damn cold there I’d go to Alaska someday, just to see what it feels like to be those military guys at that table,” I said.

“Who cares about them anyway?” Neal closed his eyes. He was handsome in that slightly pale British thespian way. “They’re just generating negative energy, and if you think about them you’ll do the same.”

“Sounds like more of that Buddhist stuff,” I said.

Neal opened his eyes and straightened his back so that he suddenly seemed much taller. “As a matter of fact yes. It’s really helping me.”

“How’s that?” I leaned toward him, hoping that he would meet me across the table and kiss me.

“Well, I’m learning to detach from daily annoyances,” he said. “I’m learning that violence does not solve problems. I’m learning that your irrational, emotional outbursts have nothing to do with me.” He pronounced the words clearly and distinctly, like he was reading a diagnosis from a textbook.

I traced the edge of the ashtray with my index finger. Still too early in the evening to throw it at him. “Well excuse me for feeling,” I said. I slid out of the bench and stomped to the bathroom. On the way, I stopped by the bar and scribbled a hasty request and slipped in a folded five-thousand won note with it to make sure it was played.

The women’s bathroom opened to a bare sink and a single stall door, which was locked. A thin wisp of smoke trailed up to the ceiling above the stall. The toilet flushed and the turtleneck girl emerged. She was wearing tight black pencil pants and spiky heels. She ignored me as she left the room, not even washing her hands. In the stall, a lipstick-ringed cigarette butt in the metal tray glowed its dying embers.

Next to the toilet, the trashcan was empty except for a few wadded tissues. By the end of the night it would be overflowing. Toilet paper clogged the ancient city pipes, so it was forbidden to flush it. While I peed, I perused the graffiti and found my contribution: “Jasmine & Steve TLA” scrawled in the middle of a big heart. I took out the pen in my pocket and tried to scribble over Steve’s name, but the tip wouldn’t write on the concrete wall. So I spat on it.

When I emerged from the bathroom, the turtleneck girl and her friend had transported their cell phones, cigarettes, and bottle beers to the table with the military guys. I sat back down and refused to look at Neal, who was singing, “And so Sally can wait, she knows it’s too late as we’re walking by, her soul slides away, but don’t look back in anger.” Oasis. His request, no doubt.

Outside the city was too bright for stars. On the street below people were walking arm-in-arm, bundled in groups of threes and fours, steaming the air with their laughter. A man on the side of the street was busy bringing the large hot coals from the fire he’d been tending into the bulgogi restaurant. Finally I faced Neal.

“See that girl with the bangs and the bracelets?” I asked.

Neal twisted his head.

“Don’t be too obvious. They were sitting behind us, but they’re with those military guys now.”

“And?”

“I think that’s the girl Steve left me for,” I said.

“So?”

“Well, it pisses me off.”

“Maybe it’s not her,” he said.

“It is.” But I wasn’t sure. I had only seen Steve with the girl once when I’d stumbled upon them one night in another bar down the street from this one. I’d seen bangs, though, and bracelets, before I ran out.

I drained my beer, thinking that there never seemed to be enough in my glass. My request came on then, the one I’d slipped the bill for: “Both Sides Now.” I sang, “It’s love’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know love at all.” Neal just shook his head, wrote something on a piece of paper and went up to the bar. He sat back down across from me, his eyes narrowed. When his song came on, he gave a satisfied smile.

“American Woman, stay away from me, American Woman, mama let me be,” he bellowed out of key. I laughed and joined in, singing even louder than him. When the song was over, I moved to Neal’s side of the table and kissed his neck. He filled my glass, leaving an inch of foam at the top. I felt his knee rub mine, and I wanted to go back to his place and have sex right then.

The bar was getting more crowded. A few tables of Koreans, college-age, thin with glasses were air-guitaring to Bon Jovi. The girls with them were dressed up in heels and held tiny purses in the crook of their arms. They looked like they’d much rather be somewhere not so dark and dingy, a place that served colored cocktails. They were biding their time.

All the tables were full now, which meant the time for me and my song requests was over. We were having territory problems. Cigarettes were borrowed. Neal’s lighter was appropriated. Beers were poured, empty glasses abandoned on our table. More and more people were hovering over our table. Prime real estate.

“Love Shack” was on and the small clearing that passed for the dance floor was packed with revelers grinding under the newly installed strobe lights. The two girls had disappeared, and the Westerner’s table had been taken over by a group of Korean salary men, their ties loosened, their drinking furious. Four Korean girls sat where the original two had, behind Neal. I danced near them so I could watch them. They were scheming. After the song was over, I scooted in next to Neal and waited.

One of the military guys I recognized from earlier, dark skinned, Hispanic probably, shoulders twice the width of Neal’s, sat himself and his beer down across from us and ground his cigarette out in our ashtray.

“Excuse me, this seat is taken,” Neal said.

“I don’t see anyone here,” the guy said.

“This is our table. Someone is sitting here.”

“Who?” The man turned around dramatically and surveyed the bar. While he wasn’t looking, Neal flicked the ash of his cigarette into the guy’s beer. “I don’t see anyone sitting in this chair except me,” the man said.

“He’s in the loo.” Neal blew smoke in the guy’s direction.

“You’re a very rude guy.” The military man shook his head and took a long swig of his beer. He smiled at me, all fake polite. “What about you? Do you mind if I sit here?” The man’s ears looked like they belonged to an elf.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “It’s twelve thirty. Past military curfew.”

He looked around, shrugged.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I’m Ron from New Mexico. There’s nothing there.”

“Ron from New Mexico, how can you justify those wars?” I leaned forward and touched the gold cross he wore on a chain around his neck. “How, Ron, how?”

Ron’s smile disappeared. He looked at the table. “I’m not a bad guy,” he said. Then he stood and left.

“Well done,” Neal said, giving my thigh a squeeze.

It wasn’t over, though. I watched Ron watching me from the other end of the bar. He towered over the Koreans. He lit his cigarette with a Zippo, then began chatting with some nearby girls.

Neal’s back was to me as he was busy lighting the slim delicate cigarettes of the girls behind us. He spoke to them in semi-fluent Korean. The bar had long stopped playing our songs. I had to go to the bathroom again. I held on to the table for support as I stood. Neal didn’t even see me go.

The bathroom door was locked. I sighed and leaned against the wall. The door in the men’s bathroom was open slightly, and no one was waiting so I walked in. Ron from New Mexico was zipping his pants at the urinal.

I backed away slowly into the hall. When he came out he brushed my shoulder. “Can I have a cigarette?” I asked.

Wordlessly he tapped out one of his Marlboro Reds and placed it between my lips. Then he lit it with his Zippo. The girl’s bathroom door was open now. Once inside, I locked the stall door and peed, tossed my used toilet paper into the now overflowing trashcan. After I flushed, I stayed in the stall and smoked next to the tiny window that looked out into the alley. The ashtray was stuffed with half-smoked cigarettes, so I flushed my butt down the toilet. When I came out Ron was still there.

I fell into him. He smelled like one of the boys in my high school I dated a long time ago. “So,” I whispered into his ear. “How dangerous is North Korea? Really?”

He had his hand on the back of my neck so that his lips grazed my earlobe. “I don’t know. I just do what they tell me. I’m not a bad guy. Really.”

“Me neither. Not really,” I said.

We were kissing then, the Marlboro Red fresh on my tongue and the scruff of his military haircut rough on my cheek.

Then there was a hand on my shoulder pulling us apart. Neal’s eyes looked red and tired. His free hand gripped his half-full mug of beer. He dropped his hand from my shoulder, shook his head, and turned away. Then, he spun around and tossed his beer on Ron’s chest. I grabbed for Neal, but my hands came up with air.

Before I ran out the bar, I bummed another Marlboro Red from Ron. After he lit it, he told me to disappear. It was that time of night. Halfway down the stairs, I slipped and tumbled to the bottom. People on the street, drunk themselves, stepped over me, delicately. The fire man walked past, carrying hot coals in his tongs for the groups of people in the restaurant. I stood up, shaking, and brought the cigarette, miraculously still lit and in my hand, to my lips.

Neal appeared from around the corner then, his body coiled tight. He walked straight up to me and slapped me, knocking my cigarette out of my mouth into a puddle on the street. And even though I knew Neal was gone for good, I called his name as he disappeared into the drunken crowds, then Ron’s name, then Steve’s, then all the names I could remember, one after the other, words from a song I still didn’t know.

— Sybil Baker

———————————

Sybil Baker’s latest novel Into This World was recently published by Engine Books. She is also the author of The Life Plan, a comic novel, and a linked short story collection, Talismans. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications including The Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and The Nervous Breakdown. She spent twelve years teaching in South Korea before returning to the States in 2007. She is an Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she serves as the Assistant Director of the Meacham Writers’ Workshop. She is currently on the visiting faculty of the low-residency MFA program at City University of Hong Kong and the Yale Writers’ Conference. Her MFA is from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she is the Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat. You can read more about her at www.sybilbaker.com.

What It’s Like Living Here — From Lisa Roney in Orlando

Jun 152012

Herewith a delightful What It’s Like Living Here piece from Lisa Roney in Orlando. This is our second contribution from Florida in recent weeks, a sign that all the writers are moving there (well, maybe not). Lisa Roney teaches writing at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of a memoir, Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes (Henry Holt, 1999), as well as poems, essays and stories. She had the eminent good sense to marry a Canadian.

Pelicans against Sunset

PPelicP.

Birds

I live in the sky. Though it is crisscrossed with wires and impeded by billboards that sell big-breasted waitresses at the Wing House, it still dips its bruises in gold, not brass, then blushes at its own riches before waving good night. As I drive from yet another late neurology appointment along one of many six-lane roads that traverse the city, I search above it all, let the fading light guide me home.

Beyond the billboards, the barbequed chicken wings give way to the wings of hawks, eagles, herons, egrets. This evening eight ibis circle stunningly white against the blue, blue sky over the roadway, catching the last light of the day. Last week two bald eagles swooped ten feet above my head as I strolled my neighborhood. Cardinals and titmice flutter around the feeder in front of the kitchen window at morning and dusk, while the barred owls show themselves after midnight in their hilarious song. My husband and I lie in bed sometimes and mimic their “whoo, whoo, hah, whoo-who-oo-ahhh.” It helps my insomnia when my heart is lightened this way at bedtime.

The anhingas even bring sky to the ground, as they sit lakeside with their wings outspread to dry, as if flying on earth. The birds are my favorite thing about Florida..

Bromeliads with Red Blossoms

Winter Park

The first summer it rained and rained. In between the thunderstorms, I waited for my new job to begin and went on rambling, hours-long, solitary walks in the chic neighborhood near my homely concrete-block rental. One morning as I typed at my computer, I glanced to the right out the front window and faced a four-foot-long snake wending its way through the bromeliads under the orange tree.

At the time I didn’t know the name of bromeliads. I said to myself, “It’s only a black snake. Cool.” But it might have been an omen of the unpredictable. I find later on that it is indeed adaptive here to enjoy the same creatures that you fear since you can’t get away from them.

Hospital Heart Monitor

Medicine

Orlando is home to two of the ten largest hospitals in the country, and one of the three Mayo Clinic sites sits on the coast an hour north in Jacksonville. This does not assure anyone’s good health—probably CEOs chose our locale for the aging (and dying) population of retirees that Florida is famous for. I myself came here young and immediately hit the wall of numerous health problems, as though crossing the border into the land of retirement infected me with oldness.

I came here with thirty years of Type 1 diabetes under my belt already, but my list of ailments has blossomed like a bougainvillea, taken flight like an enormous eagle: carpal tunnel syndrome, adhesive capsulitis, irritable bowel syndrome, rosacea, arthritis of the right foot, lumbago (only one letter different from the purple-blooming plumbago that I had never seen before coming here). The human body is part of nature, though certainly denatured by all the machines now engaged in being sick. In the past two years, I have endured a benign perimescenphalic sub-arachnoid brain hemorrhage and, supposedly in a completely unrelated set of incidents, inflammation of my brain pathways that may indicate M.S. After six months of testing, they don’t really know.

Even though I don’t really want to talk about them, I cannot separate these things from what it is like to live here. The uncertainty seeps out of my skin like the constant sweat of summer.

Everywhere you go in Florida, there is a stark contrast between young and old—the stooped and graying alongside the tanned and buff, the slowest drivers in the world alongside the Daytona 500, the shops for orthopedic shoes alongside the surfin’ bikini boutiques.

For most of us, living in Orlando is like living somewhere in between.

Green Anole

Heat

Our summer is our winter. Not that summer’s cold, as in the northern-southern hemisphere switch, but in that we, too, have a season where we stay indoors, protected from brutal weather by our air conditioning. According to the National Weather Service, more people die from heat than from any other weather-related phenomenon, including floods, lightning, tornadoes, and hurricanes. More than three times as many die of heat than cold.

One of the big differences between people who visit here and people who live here is that we are aware of the nastiness of the heat. Everyone stays outside a lot in December, January, and February. But we hide in June, July, and August, and we sweat profusely nine months out of the year.

Earlier this afternoon, as I walked into the doctor’s office, a woman made a face and said, “I fear the spring is over.” We bask in spring, but dread the oppression of summer and fall, the threat of hurricane season.

Everyone in Florida carries a bottle of water. I first came to realize the Floridian devotion to hydration when I noticed that my students would sometimes get up during classes to go out and use the restroom. That is as accepted here as students blowing their noses in class in the north.

In fact, most of the people who die of heat exposure do so in milder climates where so many of the elderly still believe they can live without air conditioning. Down here, we know we can’t. If this makes me wonder why it is that people insist on living in such inhospitable places, I put it out of my mind. If I wonder, as I idle in traffic on my way home from the doctor’s office, why humans have designed their world to be such an ugly and hostile place, I remind myself that the black lady standing at the bus stop on Route 434 with her umbrella up against the sun probably doesn’t have the luxury to worry about it and neither do I, really, not these days.

Sunlight on Wall with Euphorbia

Winter Springs

Six years after coming here, I got married and moved to the suburbs, not necessarily in that order. Both of these facts surprise me, and I feel guilty for liking everything about the suburbs but the political tenor and the car-time. Besides, everyone in Orlando drives a lot, no matter where they live. When Men’s Health magazine reported that Orlando is one of the angriest cities in the country because of the traffic, I just nodded.

My new husband cackled. A Canadian, he declares America barbaric. “In Canada,” he often reminds me when we’re together in traffic, “we understand the concept of merging for mutual benefit. Here everyone races to the front and tries to jam their way in.” I assure him that the entire country is not like this, but I feel the shame of American greed.

My own backyard reeks of stereotyped paradise, yet I love it almost as though it were my very own forever home. I was broke for a long time. Now the fountain bubbles, the cats roll on a bricked lanai, tall palms and pines line the fence, and two Adirondack chairs sit by the pool. I swim almost daily, though I did not want a pool and I am a terrible swimmer.

“Why else would anyone live in Florida?” my husband asked when I protested. I am not sorry I acquiesced.

I like being married after 49 single years and hope I still have plenty of years to enjoy it. I find it freeing to be tied. Once I thought I came here for the job at the big school over the previous small one, the moderate-sized city over the small town. Once I thought I would seek perfection until I found it and that excitement would always be mine. What a delight that I was so wrong.

Agave Stalk and Telephone Pole

Plants

Because flowers bloom year round here, and because there are few cemeteries, it can be easy to forget that the life cycle ends in death. When I get home, I pull my car into the garage and stand in the driveway, breathing in the aroma of the confederate jasmine I planted along the fence last year. I check on the new herb garden that is spreading exponentially, the way things do here. Finally, I am growing things.

It took nearly three years for me to plant the gardenia that a friend brought to our wedding, and it now has buds nearing bloom. All the other gardenias on the street parade massive, fragrant flowers, but I am thrilled simply that ours is still alive, gardenia and marriage both surviving overwork and hospital stays. The staghorn fern that another friend brought as a wedding gift hangs from a tree in the front yard. On cold nights, the neighbors down the street wrap their huge staghorn in blankets, whereas ours is still small enough to drag in the front door. I wonder if the enormous one down the street testifies to a long marriage and whether ours will get that big.

I have also put into the ground three offsets from an agave that grew in my Winter Park yard. These are an exception to the ever-blooming of most tropical plants. They bloom only once—on a stalk that appears overnight as tall as a telephone pole—and then wither into a heavy stump.

Finally, after the agave amazed me with its theatrics, I started to learn the names of more common plants: saw palmetto, sago palm, bougainvillea, bromeliad, bald cypress, mangrove, ligustrum. We have plumbago, shrimp plants, lorapetalum, and camellias growing in our yard. Knowing the names is almost as important to me as growing them, but I am glad to have reduced the amount of evil St. Augustine grass by half. St. Augustine grass is another one of those peculiar Florida phenomena—a non-native plant ubiquitous for lawns, it tolerates the heat but soaks up ridiculous amounts of water.

The hummingbirds will come to our new fire bushes and spicy jatropha. My newlywed husband will be here tomorrow in spite of my surprise brain hemorrhage and the lesions that could render me crippled or dopey. I will still be able to walk around and deadhead the flowers for some time. That is enough, along with the jasmine, for today.

Why I Live in the Sky

Whorelando

The corporate tagline for Orlando is “the city beautiful,” but we have coined the moniker Whorelando, or, in a more Spanish spelling, Jorlandó.

Though it still asserts itself over and over, the beauty of Whorelando is for sale and disappearing fast. I have never seen more strip malls anywhere. When I originally looked for a house to rent, I clicked excitedly on an online ad for an “historic” home, only to find that it was built in 1950. Whorelando is full of concrete block and bulldozers.

I moved here nine years ago and have lived here longer than nearly anywhere in my adult life, yet it still feels alien. Like the narrator of William Gass’s short story, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” I am not of the people, not of the place. Like that narrator, I’ve had my disappointments.

On one of my first drives to work here I watched a man, a bag of McDonald’s on his handlebars, a case of Coke strapped behind his seat, cycling alongside the traffic, his long, grey hippie’s beard and locks flowing in the warm breeze, his pale face grizzled with dirt. Weird is everywhere I look. Sometimes it is the weird that is ultranormal—the made-up housewives with pink sweat suits and boob jobs, the nurse that says my survival is a gift from God, the sleepy kids lining up for the school bus.

I am in the heart of the heart of the heart of the peninsula, land-locked in a state full of beaches. We should get out to the coast more often.

Bougainvillia

Disney

Friends and family fly in and stay with us while they visit the “attractions.” Everyone thinks that if you live in Orlando, you live close to Disney, so they are always surprised that we live an hour’s drive away.

I have not been to Disney World since 1972, although I have had Pluto in class, and my husband, Cinderella.

Gator in Pond

Sanford

A few weeks ago, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed on a street in the town just across Lake Jesup from where we live. Orlando boasts tourists from all over the world, but just over the lake, whichever lake, there is a dense scrub of raw lawlessness and backwoods sensibility. Trayvon Martin’s death by vigilante is the tragic other side of Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mr. Watson, in which an Everglades community bands together to murder a greedy bully. Something constantly threatens to be out of control here—the crime, the law, the lawless order, the construction development, the real estate boom and the real estate crash, the bougainvillea vines, the wind, the rain, the heat, the humidity, the drought, the Cuban tree frogs, the alligators.

Lake Jesup is full of alligators, and sometimes during mating season they come down through the creeks and end up in the retention pond across the street from our house. An eight-foot one took up residence the week before we got married in the backyard. “That just makes it a Florida wedding,” my vet’s receptionist told me.

My friends warned me before I took this job—about the fundamentalist Christians who objected to any mention of Halloween, about the hurricanes, about the gators and the palmetto bugs, even about rampant entrepreneurialism, capitalism gone jungle-feral. Some of them have cut me off because I came here. Some others have kept in touch for the vacations. I understand both impulses.

Hawk

Rain Storms

After I come in from breathing jasmine air, I find an email informing me that my teaching schedule for next year is in disarray. I spend a moment furious, but it’s the usual way of things in a state with a legislature intent on destroying educational institutions that have only ever had a toehold anyway. The governor just approved creation of a brand new state technical university, with the budget coming out of those of existing schools. Rumor has it that the legislator who sponsored this new school stands to make a killing on nearby real estate. All that valueless swampland once sold to unwitting northerners is now valuable after all.

The next morning, clouds finally move in after more than a month with no rain. We’ve reveled in the sunshine, but the splatting drops on my morning walk break the tension. By afternoon, it will be pouring off and on, and the smell of ozone will waft in through the open sliding glass door as I sit at the computer. I will stay home cozy with my husband in the evening because going out during rain here means getting soaked. We will watch for the neighborhood red-shouldered hawk, who often comes down to the low branches in the rain.

A friend down in Tampa says that she hopes the rain will come their way, though she hopes she doesn’t regret wishing for it once the rainy season socks itself in for the duration.

“Sunshine State” is another misnomer around here. It rains constantly most of the summer.

My first year, I ruined six pairs of shoes by getting caught in unexpected storms. Now I just take my shoes off and smile when I walk barefoot into class or a meeting. Bare-assed, barefoot—I’ve learned to live with both conditions in my professional life.

The second year I was here, three hurricanes marched through Orlando. “They never come this far inland,” a Florida native friend had said. I lay in the hallway of my rental and listened all night as the huge live oaks thundered to the ground in pieces. I thought, this is what the apocalypse will feel like.

Raccoon in Humane Trap

Winter Springs Redux

A neighbor told me that her family had installed a new security system for fear of home invasion. Later, after Trayvon, she mentioned that her mother warned her son not to wear a hoodie. I don’t know how to feel about that. Orlando has one of the highest murder rates in the country, but violent crime is concentrated far from where we live, and I find suburban fear rather silly, a little racist. As a white teenager, our neighbor’s son is in little danger. But I am glad that the grandmother sees the absurdity of Trayvon’s death enough to feel the fear herself.

For me, the more salient neighborhood concern is the possibility that I might run over an animal. Though the plants seem to bloom forever, the area is strewn with road-kill. Squirrels feed in the right-of-way, jerking their tails and dashing, often right into the street, when I pass. When one is killed in the street in front of our house, I am glad that the bald eagle that flies in to rip it apart first pulls it into the yard across the street, where it will be safer from cars.

The residential hawk, grabbing an anole, swoops down and pulls out the neighbors’ window screen. My husband tells them so they won’t think it’s a robbery attempt. Anoles dash across the sidewalks, but their squashed bodies are nearly as common as their flickering live ones.

The raccoons take to tearing the screen out of the lanai, pooping in the pool, letting the cats out. We catch a raccoon swinging from the squirrel-proof birdfeeder, back and forth, unhooking it and dumping the contents. We humanely trap and relocate two and an opossum in three days, but more come back. We install a raccoon baffle on the bird-feeder. We install super-strong screens. Then we glue them in.

The armadillos dig up the front grass looking for worms and grubs. When I drive home after dark, four or five cross the street in front of my car. I know they are ready to leap straight up into my bumper.

Maybe living in more urban areas allows other people to forget that they are supplanting so many other forms of life. Here in the suburbs, we can never forget. An uneasy cohabitation prevails. I love the critters, and perform the sign of the cross as I drive by their corpses, but we also battle them.

Over dinner after the clarifying rain, I admit to my husband that maybe Orlando is indeed the quintessential American place—teeming, insane, unstoppable. For better and for worse, I tell him and wink. Probably the future doesn’t look too good, but I have seen amazing turn-arounds happen in my own departure from spinsterhood and my survival of my brain ailments. I have some hope that, after all the people are gone, Florida, if it dies by flame and not by drowning, will rise from the ashes. It seems at least the most likely place for resurrection.

—Lisa Roney

Magnolia Blossom

The Battleship of Maine: Nonfiction — Jordan Smith

Jun 132012

“The Battleship of Maine” is a sweetly elegiac memoir of a father, a family genealogy, an homage to old American folk music, and a glimpse of a forgotten upstate New York universe. Jordan Smith is a fine poet and an old friend (see a selection of his poems published earlier on these pages) also a musician and a story writer. He teaches at Union College in Schenectady, has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has published six books of poetry including An Apology for Loving the Old Hymns (Princeton University Press) and Lucky Seven (Wesleyan University Press). His newest book, just out, is The Light in the Film (University of Tampa Press). It’s wonderful to have him back.

Author photo credit/copyright to Charlotte Lehman (lehmanc@garnet.union.edu)

I was driving on the New York Thruway from Rochester to Schenectady, and I was listening on the iPod to a compilation by The New Lost City Ramblers, which may already tell you more than you want to know about me. The song was “The Battleship of Maine,” about the Spanish American War, originally recorded by Red Patterson’s Piedmont Log Rollers, and it reminded me, for the first time in years, that my great-uncle Harry St. John had been a doctor in the army during that war. He had lived on South Avenue in Rochester, a few blocks from Highland Hospital, where I had just been arranging hospice care for my father, about to be discharged with what would surely become respiratory failure, although no one knew when. My father was ninety-three. Great-uncle Harry had also lived into his nineties. I hadn’t managed to spot his house on my drives to and from the hospital, but I remembered the oak floors and frames around the doors, the window seat, the hair-drier chairs in the back room he rented to a beauty salon, a chest of toys. Best of all, I remember that he and my great-aunt gave me the run of the place, although I was only seven or so, talked to me as if I were an intelligent and responsible person, and always gave me books for my birthday. I couldn’t have loved them more. And I remember, or think I do, seeing his uniform, a cap and a dress sword and maybe a jacket. I wasn’t old enough to know the questions I should have asked.

I’ve traveled—hitching, in my college years; driving cars, from a ’68 Rambler American to a Prius—across western and central New York over and over, on the Thruway, on Route 31 (“Pray for Me, I Drive Route 31” was a bumper-sticker I spotted on a truck once), or the pretty roads, farther south, that make up New York Routes 5 and 20. Whatever road I’ve been on, it has always seemed more like a journey through history than like driving to a destination. There were the yellow and blue historical markers that the state put up, and where my father would sometimes stop for a quick lesson in what had happened here. There were old locks from the Erie Canal, the decorated mansions of the solid nineteenth century and the equally distinctive plain houses of the canal towns, there were parking lots where battlefields had been and a tree at the site of a massacre. Though my father was the only son of an only son, there were branches and side-branches of his family all through the Catskills, where they had worked on the New York Ontario and Western Railroad (the “Old and Weary,” known for poor maintenance, sloppy management, and train crashes, some featuring my ancestors), taught school, farmed, joined the DAR, ran a country store, played the mandolin. I didn’t have much of this in narrative form, only in brief anecdotes, so recalling it was like looking at the box of nineteenth-century photographs in the cellar and wishing someone had thought to write the names on the backs.

The next song on the cd was “We’ve Got Franklin D. Roosevelt Back Again.” My father would have approved of its anti-prohibition sentiment, but he never, to put it mildly, approved of Roosevelt, and I learned better than to speak highly of the New Deal in his presence. My politics came from what we’ve come to call in my family “the big red history book,” a pictorial history of America with cartoons by Nast, maps and woodcuts, Hearst’s front page announcing the explosion of the Maine, photographs of the American invasion of the Philippines, Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick, FDR at Yalta. It also had, I realized when I reread it later and when the ideological work had already been irredeemably done, a distinctly leftist, or at least liberal Democratic cast, and reading it set me at variance with my father, probably for good. My mother had bought the book, but I think it pleased her because a family friend had once met the author (or was it his father?), and because it was printed on the thin, going-to-yellow paper of the years after the world war. I am not sure what her politics were, exactly. Like my father, she always voted Republican, but she entirely repudiated the prejudices that were part of his heritage. Over his strong objections, she worked as a volunteer at the Baden Street Settlement House in the Joseph Avenue neighborhood. Once the home of her German family, and then Jewish, it had become the heart of the African-American community, and it would explode, like similar neighborhoods in other cities in the long hot summer of 1964, events that fired my father’s racial anxieties. She took me there once, along with an older boy, to play trumpet duets for her preschoolers, and she enrolled me for music lessons in the Hochstein School a few blocks away. When my father drove me there on Saturday mornings his tension was palpable.

It would not be fair to talk about my father’s reactions to the black faces on the sidewalks and in the newspapers without saying how much of this was due to his upbringing and how much to the combination of anxiety and depression that sent him to the state hospital on Elmwood Avenue, that cost him his job as a test engineer working on sophisticated vacuum coating devices, and that left him nearly immobilized for much of the next decade when he wasn’t working on grounds crews or as a high school janitor. When effective antidepressants became available, and when he got out of the guilt-driven therapy of the Freudians and into the care of a doctor who knew how to help him, he calmed down about many things, race and politics included, and he came to realize that the time when such attitudes had seemed normal was long gone. But he didn’t ever mellow about Roosevelt, and I never understood why. My father’s family was not wealthy, and they never stood to lose anything from the New Deal. They weren’t likely to benefit from repeal of the estate tax or to suffer from regulation of the banks. They were charitable and sympathetic to those in need; my great-grandfather, a trainmaster on the O&W, insisted that his wife feed any tramp who stopped by their back door, and he was known for generosity to the men who worked for him. But, on a tour of Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, I found a clue. One of the last stops was the servants’ quarters. I recognized the furniture there immediately. Dark brown stained wood cabinets, with drawers and little doors, and marble tops, it was the furniture from my parents’ spare bedroom. What my family had used and saved and savored, the Roosevelts had cast aside or bought as second-rate in the first place. The Roosevelts were patroons, as far as my father was concerned, and they had assumed authority as some kind of family right. That they might wish to appear benevolent in their use of it meant nothing. He had no objection to the wealth of others, but he had no tolerance for noblesse oblige. Its moral imperatives were too close to taxation without representation; its protestations of concern and understanding too close to condescension.

The mp3 player had shuffled to an anthology of classic American folk tunes from the Smithsonian, and the song was called “Policeman.” Shoot your dice and roll ’em in the sand, says the singer, who earlier had bragged of getting the drop on a cop with his .44, I ain’t going to work for no damn man. My father worked most of his life for one damn man or another, and he took pride in doing his work right whether he was an engineer or a janitor, but I don’t think it was in his nature to have any master but himself, or to feel himself measured by any standard other than his own. When he retired, when his depression had receded, and when it no longer mattered what he had been, but only what he had done or would do, he was able to be free of almost everything except his affections.

History was one of these, especially the history of the Hudson Valley or of railroads. Before reading became too difficult, he was working his way through a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. If anything, he preferred a scoundrel. Though he liked what Charles Ives could do with a hymn tune and always loved Sousa, he didn’t share my taste for old-time country, and I don’t think he’d have much enjoyed hearing “Battleship of Maine,” unless I told him that it made me remember Great-uncle Harry and our visits to South Avenue. I wish, before they started him on the morphine, that I’d asked if he remembered the dress sword and cap, or if that was my memory making it up. Either way, it would have pleased him that I cared to remember this, when there was a good deal worse to recall between us.

School kids learn now that there was nothing glorious about the Spanish American War, a trumped-up colonial power grab with a first-rate publicity machine, that led to appalling cruelties in the Philippines, and from which we’ve apparently learned nothing. That’s history, the gift that keeps on giving. So why am I so pleased to have visited, all of seven years old, in the parlor of a tall, thin, white-haired man, a doctor and a soldier, in wire-rimmed glasses who paid me the almost frightening compliment of looking at me with the kind of intelligent appraisal, frank and welcoming and discerning, that, now that I think of it, seems as rare as a just war. I didn’t know anything about how or why he fought. I didn’t know anything about how hard my father, sitting beside we, would have to struggle to find himself changed in a world whose authorities he had every reason to distrust. I didn’t know that I’d grow up by way of books, and my mother’s absolute refusal to discriminate between those who might benefit from her kindness, and my father’s purgatory, to remember the awe I felt, without understanding, in the presence of history, suffering, and healing.

— Jordan Smith

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Jordan Smith‘s sixth full-length collection, The Light in the Film, recently appeared from the University of Tampa Press. His story, “A Morning,” will be in the forthcoming issue of Big Fiction. He lives in eastern New York and teaches at Union College.

The Valley of the Shadow: Fiction — dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Jun 032012

dee Hobsbawn-Smith is a curious being, poet, chef, chef-author, newspaper columnist (about food), eminent food person, and farm girl from Saskatchewan (she now lives on the family farm outside Saskatoon). Her latest book is called Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, just out, yes, and you can read an early and most complimentary review here (I particularly like the Raymond Carver references). But dee also a fiction writer, about to launch herself into an MFA program. And for your delight and delectation, we offer a foretaste (smallish pun) of that new career, a short story about a girl who takes a job as prep-cook (there is a chef, too) in a ski town to escape a murky past. (NC multiple contributor Dave Margoshes took the photo.)

“I’m lookin’ for work. Know of anything?”

The guy behind the motel counter hands over my key with shaking hands. He looks twice my age, stained skin under hazel eyes, a few grey strands in tangled auburn hair. The sweet reek of stale booze permeates the office. “The ski hill’s always hiring.”

“Can’t ski. How ‘bout supper, then? Is there a restaurant in the motel?”

“It closed last year. Try the lodge up the ski hill. You can’t miss the signs.”

I’m dubious. ‘Can’t miss the signs’ usually means the exact opposite. “Nothing closer?”

“You can get a decent steak or grilled cheese at the Night Hawk, they’re open late. On the east edge of town.”

“Thanks.” I lug my backpack upstairs and look longingly at the bed. My eyes ache. I’ve been driving through a blizzard since Cranbrook, not many road lights and the pavement hard to see, haven’t eaten since my bitter breakfast in Vancouver. I turn up the thermostat and head back to my car.

Hank Williams is sighing through the sound system at the Night Hawk. The cook grins and says, “Sure, why not?” when the waitress slaps my order through the window. I slide into the back booth and ask for a Johnnie Walker.

I’m halfway through a rare rib-eye when the motel clerk walks in and swings onto a bar stool. His hoarse voice carries above ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ “I sent some girl here. Kinda cute, short black hair.” At the waitress’s jerk of her head, he spins the stool around. “Hey, you made it. Rowena takin’ good care of you?”

I nod, my mouth full of meat.

“Buy you a drink?” The glass lands on my table with a clatter.

“Thanks.”

He talks sporadically to Rowena as she polishes tumblers, but I feel his gaze sliding off me. When I sigh and push my plate away, he pats the stool beside him.

“Andrew James.”

“Constance da Silva. Call me Connie.”

“A drink for my friend Connie, please, Rowena.”

“How long you been in Fernie, Andrew?”

“Forever.”

Up close, crevasses run from his hairline to shaggy eyebrows, from his nose to the corners of his mouth. Under the rubble of whiskers, his cheeks look like crepe paper. The sleeves of a tattered sweater hang over his knuckles, but his fingernails are smooth and clean.

Rowena keeps his glass topped up, and raises her eyebrows at me with each visit to our end of the bar. He catches me studying him and blushes. I’m charmed. What kind of man blushes? “So…who is Andrew Brown? You single?” He nods. “Why you still here?”

“Got no desire to travel.”

Rowena turns off the stereo as we leave. Andrew holds his car door open. “A drink? I have a room in the motel. Just a drink.”

The narrow slice of sky above me is wheeling much too rapidly. “Long day. Thanks, but no.”

“Welcome to Fernie. See ya ‘round.”

The road is black velvet. I’m grateful to follow his taillights through the falling snow to the motel, and topple onto my bed fully clothed.

I land a job at the ski hill as a prep cook, no experience needed. No cooking, even, just peeling potatoes and carrots by the case, chopping sacks of onions. I keep my turtleneck on, wrap the huge white cook’s jacket around me and cut myself within an hour. The chef clucks as he wraps gauze around my thumb. We’re in his office and I concentrate on his tidy desk to counteract the wooziness. He watches my eyes find the photos. Two girls, teenagers, dark as a magpie, one frowning.

“Mes petites filles,” he says proudly as he pulls the tape snug. “Bien sur, Connie, you pay attention, eh? No more hack-cidents.” His silver moustache rises with his grin. “Maybe this keep you off the ski hill, eh?”

“I don’t ski,” I mutter, my face turned away from the seeping blood. “I paint.” The kitchen window is filled with grey clouds.

“Merde. Everybody ski here. You learn right quick, you’ll see, young miss like you. Some ‘andsome boy, and you be ‘otshot ski, tres vite. Best you bring him to me first, eh, I tell you if he is good boy.”

Laughing, I go back to work, feeling warmer.

There’s not much to this town. This is Snow Valley— the snow is famous— and everyone skis. There’s not much light either. The valley, almost a gorge, is defined by mountains, the Rockies on one side, the Purcells on the other. The grey rock-faces towering above the valley floor eat what little light there is, and the pale sun vanishes over the horizon by mid-afternoon. The clouds are a weight, leaking dampness that permeates everything.

I work evenings, two ‘til eleven, long hours on my feet, and Chef winces when I drag a chair across the tiles to the counter. “Cooks stand, ma belle,” he says, but he forbears saying anything stronger. There’s no name embroidered on his jacket, just his title. Chef. He pats the shoulders of all the cooks, male and female. No one seems to mind. He likes me, I can tell. He regularly strays past my station with his coffee, watching my hands clutching a knife, and finally says, exasperated, “Voilà, there is a better way, ma fille.” With a few quick motions, he shows me how an onion falls apart under the right strokes.

When he asks for the sixth time what brings a good girl like me so far from the bright city life, I nearly laugh. “A man and a dog,” I say. It’s the truth, but I don’t think he believes me.

Anywhere would have done. Leaving Vancouver was easy— no mortgage, no house, no kid— all those ropes that tie you down rather than guide you. I left a throw-away job as an office temp and an interminable waiting list into art school, my pockets empty, just heaved my easel, my paints and my backpack in my Chevy, and drove out of the rain without looking back. It was impulsive, and I ended up in winter.

To distract Chef, I point through the window, to the cordons on the mountainside, thin nylon ropes strung along a succession of metal spikes. “What’re those, Chef?”

He waves over a redhead whose jeans cling to muscled legs. She looks sixteen. “Sadie fais du ski, she explain, eh, Sadie?”

Sadie looks me up and down. “You the new cook? Rowena said she met you at the Hawk. Ya don’t ski? You’ll learn, there’s nothin’ else to do in this shithole town?” Every second sentence ends on an up-tilt, as if she’s unsure of herself. “Those ropes? They’re s’posed to keep newbies like you safe.”

I’m not reassured. The ropes won’t actually stop a skier, especially if she’s tumbling at any speed. But they give the illusion of safety.

Sadie grins impishly at me. “Where you stayin’?”

I drive to the Night Hawk each night after work, hoping to see Andrew. Something about him makes my fingers itch and tingle. I want to stroke the pale skin on his hands and smooth the lines etched in his cheeks. I want to paint the life back into his face. There’s a smart man beneath the sodden exterior. What’s kept him in Fernie?

He’s slumped on a barstool when I arrive. When I slide onto the stool beside him, his back straightens.“Hey, Con.” His hand, lightly brushing my upper arm, is quickly withdrawn.

One night, I recount how I left Vancouver. My lover, drunk, speeding along the tree-lined road past Second Beach. Some faceless woman, out walking her dog, the wet leash slipping though her fingers. Spinning car wheels and rain.

“It was an accident. He’d never kill a dog deliberately. I know that.”

“Wait a minute. That’s why you left? Because your guy had an accident? And killed someone else’s dog?”

“No, not really. We were done already, the accident was just the last straw. I just didn’t know how to let go. Thought I had to leave the city instead of just leaving him.”

He sighs and briefly rests his hand on my shoulder. “Did you forgive the guy?”

“He didn’t mean to. Dunno.”

“But he was drunk. That’s the hard part, hmm?”

When I sniffle, Andrew pulls a tissue from his pocket and offers it, then rubs his forearms, his arms forming a cradle across his chest.

“I’ve never had a dog. I used to want one. Grew up here in the valley, I told you that. My mom married a miner when she was sixteen.”

I have my voice under control again. “So young. A kid, hmm?”

He nods. “Yeah, knocked up. He burnt the place down when he was drunk one night, his cigarette fell outta his hand.”

“Oh no!”

He shrugs. “I was still a baby. We all got out alive. Mighta been better if we hadn’t, though. She died later anyhow, she was twenty-nine. If I’d been there, she mighta had a chance.” He finished his drink. “And my dad, well–” He lifts his hand to waggle two fingers at Rowena.

I’m silenced. Later in the women’s room, Rowena fills in the missing bits. Andrew’s dad died three years after his wife. “Silicosis. Lots of miners buried up behind the old coalmine,” she says, examining me in the mirror. “Did he tell you how his mom died?”

I shake my head, feeling ghoulish. “I don’t want to know.”

Rowena doesn’t pay any attention. “It was a big scandal. Andrew was taken away from them when he was twelve, he was gone for nearly a year. His dad had been beating him. And worse. He’s got burn scars all over his arms.”

“Oh no!” I picture Andrew, his arms embracing each other through his sweater. Rowena passes me a paper towel, then relentlessly continues.

“His mom was tiny, couldn’t have stopped a mouse. While he was away, she died. A broken neck. His dad claimed she fell from the balcony trying to change a light bulb. There was an inquest, but never any charges, the guy was already pretty sick. Andrew’s always blamed himself.” She looks at me sideways in the mirror. “You know, he never talks to anyone. Just drinks. Plays Hank all night. You’re the first one who’s heard him say boo.”

I go back to the bar, pity and revulsion two-stepping in my gut. When we leave at midnight, I try not to gawk at his forearms as he pulls on his gloves. In the parking lot, he brusquely declines my offer of a lift. “No. I need the walk.”

“Andrew, don’t be an ass, it’s twenty below. Just get in, will you?” I drop him at the motel. He reaches out and touches my hair where it juts out under my toque.

“Thanks, Con.” He scrambles out of the Chevy without looking at me.

I move my car to the parking lot behind a row of dun-coloured apartments, and leave my easel folded on the back seat. Rowena and Sadie, the two waitresses, adopt me. I’m only three years older than either of them, but they seem like gum-chewing kids, talking nonstop about boys, movies, clothes, but mostly about when they will leave the valley. They’re completely baffled that I left Vancouver and ended up here. A man, I say again, a man and a dog. They look at me disbelievingly.

“No one wants to be here, Connie,” Rowena says over spaghetti and beer. “This place is the armpit of the world.”

I tilt my head, considering. Each day, I drive over the bridge and through downtown Fernie on my way to work. En route, I pass a drug store, a post office, the Night Hawk, a realtor’s office flogging unbuilt condos on the ski hill, and a grocery store. Nothing to disprove Rowena’s claim. Nothing I want to commit to canvas. I shrug. “It’s enough. For now.”

Sadie’s head bobs, her mouth full. Rowena keeps talking. “When I have enough money saved, I’m moving to Calgary. That’s where the real livin’ is… Hey, we’re going skiing tomorrow, why don’t you come? Sadie’s a crackerjack teacher, she’ll get you started, won’t you, Sade?”

“I’m still working evenings,” I say, and nod to Chef as he makes his way to the exit. He grins at me and makes ski-pole-like gestures with his hands.

Sadie wipes her chin. “Perfect? We’ll go at nine? You’ll be off the hill by two. Chef won’t mind if you’re a bit late, he likes you? And those cute lifties from Australia are working on the back slope? We’ll go over there after the bunny hill.” She giggles and glances at the corner table where the lifties are hoisting beer glasses.

Wait a minute. My mouth shapes the words, but I can’t get them past my roommates’ enthusiastic planning. “But what about skis? Boots? Poles? I don’t have any of that stuff.”

“Rent it all at the hill, Connie. Staff rates. No worries.”

The sky is a black ruin when I walk to my car, leaving the other two flirting with the Aussies. The drive down the mountainside unnerves me, two miles, narrow turns like a jackknife. No lights, just the eerie reflection of headlights off the walls of snow. I edge down the ice and brake abruptly when a deer shoots across the road. As my car swerves, all I can focus on is the white flag of the deer’s tail.

By the time my front bumper comes to rest against the hard-packed snow, the deer is nowhere in sight. I get out of my car and peer at my fender.

A car comes around the corner and slides to a shuddering halt at the toes of my boots.

“Jeez, Connie! Are you crazy?” Andrew leans out of the open window.I can barely see his face. “This is a terrible spot to stop. What are you doing?”

“I think I hit a deer. There’s blood on my fender.”

“There’s dozens of deer around. You okay?” I’m shaking, but I nod. “Get back in your car before someone broadsides you. Here, I’ll turn around and lead you down.”

We creep down the slope, my hands trembling on the wheel, the nose of my Chevy almost nudging his Dodge so I can benefit from his high beams. At the turn to town, he pulls over, gets out and walks back to me. “Let’s have a drink. It’ll calm you down. Meet me at the motel. I have some rye in my room.”

I’m still shaking. “Yeah.”

I’m sprawled on the cold tile floor in Andrew’s cramped bathroom, fully dressed. I hobble to my feet, my head clanging, my mouth lined with spiked fuzz. I wash my face and use my fingers to smear Andrew’s toothpaste over my gums. When I stagger into the bedroom, Andrew is nowhere in sight.

I’m late getting to work. “Sorry, Chef.” His knife blade on the wooden chopping block pounds a tattoo.

Chef watches me for a minute, then tilts his head at the back wall. “Eh, ma fille, aspirin in the cupboard.”

The afternoon drags and clatters. Chef sends me home early. “You better tomorrow, oui? This, this not so good, hmm?”

I grimace and wonder vaguely about his daughters. Surely he’s seen hung-over girls before. “Sorry, Chef.” His knife is making short work of my onions as I swing the door closed.

The morning’s forgotten ski lesson surfaces as I enter the apartment. My roommates look daggers at me. Sadie’s voice is one long exhale. “We waited ‘til nearly noon, we missed half the day, all the gorbies got there before us, the snow was ruined?”

“I hit a deer last night coming down the hill. Andrew invited me for a drink and I slept in.” I surprise myself when I hear what comes out of my mouth–apologizing as if I’m twelve. I haven’t felt so defensive in years. What is it about this valley?

“Andrew. He’s pathetic. Why’d you want to hang out with him?”

“Sadie, how can you say that? You know what he’s–”

She steamrollers me. “You know how old Andrew James is?”

I think briefly of Andrew’s lined face. His dead mother who couldn’t protect him. “Sadie, what does it matter? Thirty-five?”

“Twenty-two.”

My knife skills are progressing. No bandages for at least a week. Chef teases me about my long fingernails until I capitulate, trim them short and strip off the nail polish. As reward, he sets a work table beside the window so I can peel carrots in sunlight. But the pale rays don’t help my mood, nor does realizing that no one else seems glum. Line cooks chatter as they flip steaks and burgers, the salad girl flirts with the servers as she chops anchovies for the Caesar dressing, and the baker whistles nonchalantly over the oven’s hum.

A week passes without a sign of Andrew. When I drive to the motel, the day manager is irate. “He hasn’t been around for days. You tell that sod to get his ass back to work, will ya?”

I contemplate asking Chef to help with a search. But Sadie sticks her head into the kitchen during dinner service.

“All right, pouty-face. Let’s try this ski lesson thing again? Tomorrow morning? Get your lift pass from the office.”

The bunny hill is glazed with ice. Sadie, a nimble jack rabbit on her skis, orders me around like a born leader. Up the rope tow, snowplow down the hill, up the rope tow, snowplow down. “Lean forward, Connie! If you can stop, if you can snowplow a turn, you can go anywhere?” I stop counting the falls and try to ignore the bruises coagulating on my left hip. After I make my first decent run without falling, Sadie crows with triumph and leads me to the T-bar.

Side by side in the load-up zone, the T-bar comes up behind us, scary-fast. The lifty steps back, glances at Sadie, still chattering, and winks at me. The knot in my gut loosens a little.

“Squat? Don’t look down!” At the top of the lift — “Lift your toes?” — too late. My ski tips catch and I pitch off the T-bar. I struggle to my feet and my skis immediately slide out from under me. “Snowplow! Point your toes down the hill. Lean forward?”

I’m exhausted when we return to the lodge. My thighs ache, and the bruises feel like bone chips. At work my hands are so shaky that I cut myself again.

Chef, exasperated, sets a slice of chocolate pecan pie beside me and ruffles my hair. “You go ski today? First time? Before you go work? You crazy girl. Next time, eat first.” I don’t have the energy for a rejoinder.

I sprawl my bruised body on the couch after work while Rowena eats popcorn and watches the news. She wakes me to rant. Paul Bernardo has been arrested. “How can a man look like a human being and abuse helpless kids like that?” I have no answer, fall asleep and dream of Andrew’s arms seething, raw with open burns.

I hardly make a dent in the endless sacks of onions, but their pungent bite clings to my clothes and follows me home. After more falls on the bunny hill, I collapse on the couch, a glass of scotch balanced on my ribcage. Rowena calls to report Andrew has surfaced. “He’s been AWOL before, Connie, this isn’t the first time.”

“Why’s he do it? Where does he go?”

“Dunno. But I hear he holed up with a couple old miners, guys who don’t have families.”

“What about work? Will they give him back his job?”

“Yeah. The manager knew his dad. They worked together in the mine.”

Sadie meets me at the hill, flat light barely illuminating the morning. “No bunny hill,” she says sternly. “Let’s just get to the T-bar?” I get on and off without mishap, and we start slowly down the slope. “Down there,” she says, pointing with her ski pole, “I’m going on ahead. Follow the green run? It’s nice and level. Keep out of the trees. I’ll meet you at the bottom?”

I nod without looking up, trying to remember my turning mantra. Weight down, turn, shift to other leg, straighten. Or is it reversed? I can’t keep it straight.

Sadie vanishes, a sleek shadow sprinting down the hill. A breath of fog blows across the hillside. I lose my rhythm. Fall. Get up and lock my legs into snowplow, chug down the track.

At the fork, the signs are fallen, fresh ski tracks running in both directions. I hesitate, then choose the flat track to the left. A few hundred yards along, it drops steeply beneath my skis, the trees closing in. I stop, Sadie’s thin voice in my head. Point your skis down the hill, keep your weight forward. Surely not down this monster of a slope. But I can’t see any other way down. Twenty minutes crawl past while I hesitate on the brink, hoping someone will come down the hill behind me. The cold trickles under my jacket where snow has lodged. My toes are numb when I aim my skis across the incline and descend a few feet on the oblique. At the far side, I shift my weight, begin the turn and hesitate, my skis slipping out from under me.

I roll, bump, crash, poles flying loose, skis unhinging. “Damn it!”

When I sit up and wipe the snow from my face, I spot my poles, jammed against a tree trunk, my skis at the bottom of the slope, tangled in the ropes. I grab the poles and slide down the ice on my butt to my skis. I stamp my boots into my bindings and snowplow through the flattened meadow to the lodge, ignoring the lifties at the T-bar when they wave. My gear clatters onto the counter of the rental shop.

I’m in the lounge, on my second hot chocolate and brandy when Sadie shows up, pink-cheeked and bright. I glower at her. “Never again, Sadie. Not after you ditched me like that.”

“All right, sorry? The lifties said you looked pissed off.” She wriggles, puppy-like, but draws back when I shake her hand free of my arm.

“Pissed off? I damn near broke my neck.” I wave at the waitress.

“All right. Be a bitch.”

The light is fading when she returns. “I just took my last run, Connie. I gotta start work. You still mad?”

“Give it up, Sadie.” She snorts and stomps away. Andrew comes in later, his parka dusted with snow.

“Hey, Con. It’s late. Rowena told me you hit the hill again.” He appraises my face. “Didn’t go so good, eh?”

“Have a drink with me?”

I lean on him on the way to the parking lot. My keys fall into the snow.

“That Sadie, she ditched me.” I crawl along the ground, find my keys. “Don’t think I’ll—” Find my blue car, find the ignition. “Can I come home with you, Andrew?” He puts an arm around my neck, his cheek tight against me. The steep road falls into the darkness.

At noon, I get up and look in Andrew’s mirror. Red-rimmed eyes gaze back at me. Hands shaking, I pull on my turtleneck. Beyond the window, greyness. Bits and flashes surface—Andrew flaccid and limp, his face fallen, kisses that go nowhere and taste of despair. His muttered voice. “Forgive me, Con.”

He’s still sleeping. Halfway through my second cup of coffee, something stirs in my memory. I plunge outside without gloves or hat or jacket. The Chevy sits in the parking lot, its block heater cord dangling loose, the right front fender dented so deeply the wheel is immovable. I have no memory of driving down the mountainside.

I leave Andrew sleeping and walk home. Above me, the sky telegraphs bad weather. The phone jangles as soon as I walk into the apartment. Rowena, on the couch under a quilt, lifts her head. “Get it, will ya, Con. Sadie has whats-his name, Chad, the Aussie—” A languid arm waves at the bedroom down the hall, then vanishes under the covers.

I catch the phone on the fifth ring. “Connie? You work today early. Banquet tonight.”

“I can’t drive, Chef. My car—”

“I pick you up, oui?”

I sit at the kitchen table, head pounding. My stomach heaves. When the door buzzes, I jab the entry button. It buzzes again, and Chef stands in the doorway. His face tightens as he looks around the apartment, taking in my half-empty scotch bottle and its galaxy of glasses on the television. Empty beer cans on every surface, table and sink stacked high with dirty dishes. Heaps of newspapers and takeout boxes. A laundry basket by the kitchen door. Rowena tangled in the quilt, snoring on the couch.

The place looks tawdry. I stare at my feet, too embarrassed to bring up my car’s dented fender.

Chef is silent on the drive to the lodge. In the parking lot, he turns to me. “Connie. What happen, hmm?” His capable hands, palms up. “You one smart cookie. You need help?”

I shake my head, blink away the tears. “No, Chef. No help needed. Thanks.”

On Friday night after work, Andrew is propped on the Night Hawk bar. He won’t look at me and drinks his rye in silence. I buy a mickey of Johnnie Walker and slip back to the apartment.

The clock-face reads noon when I wake in pain, unable to move, my belly shrieking.

“Rowena, wake up, there’s something wrong.”

“What is it?” Her voice fades. “Go back to sleep.”

I grab my remaining safety line and dial the ski hill’s kitchen. “Chef, Chef, I need to go to the hospital.”

The bearded young doctor perched on the edge of my bed is unequivocal and kind. “Nothing showed up in the gastroscopy, Constance. Nothing is physically wrong with you. So. What’s going on in your life?”

I mutter answers. Work, yes. Exercise, sporadic. Drink? Uh huh. Every day? Yeah. How much? Hmm. Happy? Silence. Hobbies?

I think of my easel, ignored in my car, shake my head.

He stands up and sighs. “There’s nothing happening in your body that a good dose of sunshine and happiness won’t cure. You need to get yourself a life, Constance. And quit drinking. I’ll check on you later.”

Chef appears, bearing chocolate tarts and thick meaty stew. He pats my hand, rubs his moustache until he finds his voice. “Your car, I fix ‘er. You take better care, ma belle. Oui?” I squint, rub my nose so I won’t cry again.

Sadie and Rowena arrive together. Sadie’s face is pale, her mouth pursed. I hug her. “Sadie, eat this tart, Chef brought too much. Rowena, how’s Andrew?”

Rowena shrugs, her face impassive.

I have lots of time in between the nurses’ coming and going. I’ve never been much for praying, but I try. All I see are grey mountains and grey sky, closing in.

Andrew doesn’t stop by. I make one long distance call, to Vancouver, and wipe away my tears as I hang up.

My belongings are jammed into my backpack. I embrace Rowena, then Sadie.

“Here’s my cell number. Call me, both of you, when you’re ready to get outta here, okay?”

In the parking lot, I walk around my car. No dents. Chef has kept his word, and more. He’s found me a job peeling vegetables at a private club in Calgary until I get into art school. At the ski hill, I hug him when he gives me a brown lunch bag.

“Smoke boeuf, remember to eat it!” I peek inside and spot a roll of twenties tucked inside the plastic wrap encasing a clutch of cookies. He scribbles his email on a card. “In case you change your mind, ma belle. Or if the job is no good.”

I stop at the motel. Andrew isn’t at the counter. I make my way down the dim corridor and knock. I don’t waste any time when the door opens.

“I’m packed, Andrew. I’m leaving. You should go too. This place—it’s killing you.”

“Connie, I can’t leave, it’s all I know. And I’d never forgive myself if I drag you down. Sorry. I can’t come.”

“You don’t have to come with me, Andrew. You just have to get out. To anywhere.” He’s wearing a t-shirt, the first time I’ve seen his bare arms in daylight. I stare at the evidence, scars like silver moons on his pale skin, then at his face. “Rowena told me about your dad. None of what happened back then was your fault, you were just a kid. You couldn’t have saved her, and you don’t have to forgive him. But forgive yourself!”

“I can’t, Con.”

I draw in a breath, but my gut still trembles. “I can’t stay.”

“So you’re going back?”

I grimace. “I called him, yeah. I’m not going back. I’m going to Calgary. If I’m lucky, I’ll start at art school in the fall. But I’m leaving—this.”

Andrew gently touches my cheek. “Connie. I’m not much to leave behind.”

I head east through the pass toward the high mountains, the Chevy’s tires whining on the ice. My easel rattles on the back seat. For the first time in months, as a flicker of sun chases across the snow-packed highway, I wonder about how to translate shadows into paint.

—-dee Hobsbawn-Smith

————

dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s poetry, fiction and food writing has appeared in magazines, newspapers, anthologies and literary journals in Canada and the USA. She is an award-winning freelance journalist, a retired chef and culinary educator. After 27 years in Calgary, she now lives in the family farmhouse west of Saskatoon with her partner, the writer and poet Dave Margoshes, and their pets. A four-time alumna of Sage Hill Writing Experience, dee begins studies in September, 2012, in the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in writing program. Her fifth book, Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, has just been published by TouchWood Editions.

The Goodtime Girl: Fiction — Tess Fragoulis

May 252012

Herewith a strange and lurid scene from the bar life — gangsters, music, and a quasi-ritual violence — in Piraeus, after the ravaging of Smyrna during the 1922 Greco-Turkish war (one of the many Greco-Turkish wars) in Tess Fragoulis’s brand new novel The Goodtime Girl (Cormorant Books). The scene is foreign, surprising because it lets the reader see, in its details, the mix of cultural history in the land that is often called the cradle of Western civilization while, at the same time, letting us know that gangsters are kind of like gangsters wherever they are — strutting cockerels with a peculiar sense of social harmony — whether they inhabit Isaac Babel’s Odessa or Mario Puzo’s Las Vegas. Tess Fragoulis, the author of two previous books, the novel Ariadne’s Dream and a story collection called Stories to Hide from Your Mother, writes and teaches teaches in Montreal.

10.

You strut up to me
with a double-edged blade
Who’s your business with wise-guy,
what debts must be paid?

It was early evening and the taverna was empty except for a few members of the band escaping their wives, and a gang of codgers who wouldn’t last past eleven. They were playing endless hands of kseri, drinking retsina and reminiscing about the good old days when the taverna was their territory and no one came in without a brick of hashish as an offering. Now they were harmless granddads, coughing with every inhale of the narghile and gossiping about the preening young manghites with as much indulgence as disdain. Kivelli liked the taverna at this time of day, before the atmosphere was choked with grudges and bravado. She sat by herself, drinking coffee and waiting for the air to shift, for the old men to cede their places to the young.

To pass the time, she turned her little white cup onto its saucer and watched the muddy grounds ooze out the side while her future was being etched on the inner walls in lacy patterns. Barba Yannis claimed he could read palms, though everyone knew it was just an excuse to hold women’s hands and make predictions that gave him some sort of advantage. He’d already taken turns with Kiki and Lola, as well as several of the other girls because they liked what he saw in their future. He didn’t read cups, however, which was the territory of old ladies with black dresses and headscarves, their evil eyes usually aimed in his direction. As Kivelli peered into the cup’s miniature abyss at something that might have been a flower or a fallen sun, she sensed someone behind her and looked over her shoulder.

A short, skinny man Kivelli hadn’t seen before stood there, erect as a post, his nervous blinking the only sign he was alive. He wore an impeccable grey serge suit with a burgundy bow tie, and a black fedora pulled down over his forehead and ears, which made him look as if he had something to hide. He smelled familiar, however, of lemon verbena and fine tobacco, like her sleek-haired suitors in Smyrna, though he was nowhere near as handsome with his flaccid skin and thin, pale lips. When his mouth began to move, Kivelli couldn’t hear his words over the din of old men nattering and musicians fooling around with their instruments. She narrowed her eyes and cupped a hand by her ear.

“I am the Smyrniot,” the man repeated testily and paused a moment, waiting for a reaction. So many guys had adopted that nickname since the Catastrophe — whether they’d come from the city or a nearby village — it had become meaningless. Kivelli studied his grim face, but it told her nothing. He wasn’t distinct enough to be remembered. Even now, standing before her, her memory resisted him.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, not impolitely, but not graciously either. He threw her a sharp look that in the past might have frightened her, but now only made her more defiant. She compressed her lips and folded her arms over her chest, her eyes hard as diamonds. If he really wanted trouble, she could call the Cucumber. For a few uncomfortable seconds, they looked each other over with equal doubt. But before either could make a move, Barba Yannis rushed over and slapped the Smyrniot on the back, then shook his hand vigorously. Kivelli had seen that happy dog look on her boss’s face before: he was both impressed and slightly unnerved by the presence of the man he called Panayotis.

“What brings you here, my friend?” he asked Panayotis the Smyrniot, who pulled on the brim of his hat until his eyes all but disappeared. With an almost imperceptible tilt of his chin, he pointed in Kivelli’s direction. Barba Yannis looked as thrilled as Kyria Effie had on the day he’d arrived with his proposition. “You should be very flattered, girlie.” He then winked at the Smyrniot. “Don’t ask about the hole I found her in …” And with that he left, blissfully unaware that his taverna was just a different type of hole.

The Smyrniot looked left and right, as if plotting his escape. He was becoming more agitated by the minute; he fiddled with something in his pocket Kivelli hoped was neither a wedding ring nor a pistol. Barba Yannis was sitting with the old men, whispering and staring and whispering some more. There was a rumble of laughter, and someone began plucking a baglama, yowling between notes.

When the Smyrniot spoke again, he lowered his voice as if he feared being caught in an indiscretion. “Miss Kivelli,” he began, his words tentative, forced. “I have a song for you. Come to my house tomorrow afternoon if you want to try it on for size.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her, then scurried out of the taverna without waiting for her reply, or pulling on the narghile, or talking to anyone else — not even Barba Yannis. His address was outside the neighbourhood, over the bridge and up Castella Hill, in a better part of Piraeus. Kivelli stared at the piece of paper in her hand, then crumpled it and stuffed it in her coffee cup. The place was starting to fill up, and it was time for her to disappear into the storeroom so she could later make her entrance. Barba Yannis hurried over, his eyebrows twitching eagerly.

“What did he say, what did he want from you?” He wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief edged with pink embroidery.

“Who knows … something about a song … to each his own.” Barba Yannis looked at her as if she’d fallen on her head.

“Are you crazy? The Smyrniot wants to give you a song and you flick him off like lice? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know who he is?” This was the first time he’d ever scolded her, and the strain soaked his handkerchief with sweat.

Kivelli admitted she didn’t know, and she didn’t care either. As far as she was concerned, he was one of a dozen newborn Smyrniots, and nobody to her. Barba Yannis plucked the crumpled, coffee-stained paper out of the cup, smoothed its wrinkles against the table. He held it at arm’s length to read it, then pressed it into her hand. “You go there and apologize, Miss Kivelli, or don’t bother showing up tomorrow night. I have no room here for women who live on the moon.” He then spelled it out for her and walked off to tell the other musicians, who had a good laugh at her expense.

This Smyrniot was Panayotis “The Smyrniot” Doukas, one of the most renowned musicians in Smyrna. Kivelli had heard his name and had danced to his music at balls and private functions where his orchestra played, but had certainly never met him. His were not the circles she travelled in, neither there nor here. The band hardly ever played his songs at the taverna; they weren’t raw or hard enough for the regular crowd, even when the lyrics were about hashish and prison and heartbreak. The music raised a different spirit — too happy, too romantic, even in its melancholy. Kivelli knew a few of his hits — “Maria, Stop Your Nagging,” and “Someone’s Stolen the Wine” — and sang them on request when one of her compatriots who could afford it was in the audience, which was not very often. They had their own clubs where they tried to recreate what they had lost, places named after Smyrna’s richest neighbourhoods — Bella Vista, Cordelio, Bournova. The mere thought of going there made Kivelli as sick as bad wine.

But now that she knew who the Smyrniot was, she was curious to hear what kind of song he thought was cut to her measure, and to find out how he knew, since she’d never seen him at the taverna. Though, admittedly, he could have been lurking in a smoky corner all along, testing and assessing her, or standing right under her nose, unremarkable and easily forgotten.

There was still this night to live through, however, and tomorrow seemed a thousand years away, during which the sun might be extinguished once and for all, if not for her, then for someone else. This had become a given since the Cucumber’s gang had taken up residence at the taverna. Notoriety had to be fed with flesh and blood, or it went somewhere else. So incidents of the kind that were never reported to the police escalated, and it was left to the manghes to sort things out, using their own code, imposing their own sentence.

At around two in the morning, a young swag from the neighbourhood sauntered in, high as Jupiter. Crazy Manos dropped in on most nights to flirt with the girls, exchange barbs with the guys. He was lean-faced and handsome, with dark blond hair and the green eyes of a wildcat, wary and always halfway shut. Rumour had it that he slept with ten women a day and stole from them all, which was how he could afford his fine suits and enough hashish to keep him flying most of the time. He collected his allowance throughout the day in exchange for a kiss on the forehead, and blew it all by dawn. Kivelli hoped it was worth it, but she had her doubts.

Crazy Manos was a bit of a show-off. He strutted around the room, glass of wine in hand, laughing uncontrollably and flashing his new double-edged dagger with the polished deer stag handle. He slid it through his fingers, ran it over the insides of his wrists and hefted it between his hands. He was also throwing his weight around with the girls in the corner, but from their scowls and waving hands, Kivelli could tell they were not enjoying his attentions. Narella left the table and went to speak with Barba Yannis, who consulted a few of his buddies and then called over Mortis, the taverna’s only waiter.

The older manghes had nothing against Crazy Manos. They admired his looks, his luck with the ladies and his fancy blade. They’d all been young and high and crazy once. He was one of them, but there was no bigger anathema than a guy who called attention to himself for no good reason. If you took out your sword, you’d better be ready to use it. They tried to ignore him at first, but this only encouraged his strutting. When Mortis refused to bring him more wine, Crazy Manos stood on a chair and smashed the empty glass on the floor, then began laughing like a maniac. One by one the instruments stopped playing, Kivelli stopped singing, the men stopped talking and even the girls’ gasps were soundless. A group of Barba Yannis’s tightest friends surrounded Crazy Manos, who cursed and spat like the devil as they dragged him outside. Barba Yannis signalled the band to start playing again, but Kivelli could still hear the shouting and swearing through the thick wooden door.

After two or three songs the manghes returned, wiping their hands on their trousers, tucking in their shirttails, looking neither happy nor angry nor proud. They had done what was necessary because they’d been provoked. They took their places at their tables as if nothing had happened, resumed their conversations as if they’d never been interrupted. That was that, Kivelli thought, and after a few more songs she too had forgotten the scuffle, though the broken glass still lay on the floor, twinkling like ice that would never melt.

Then Crazy Manos stumbled back in. Blood running from his nose and mouth stained his white shirt, both his eyes were blackened, swollen, his jacket was ripped and his hat had been crushed. This did not make him look ugly, just wilder. Before anyone could stop him, he ran to the front of the room with his dagger between his teeth and began dancing like a woman, clapping his hands above his head and shimmying his hips. He waggled his tongue at Kivelli as the same group of manghes carried him out again. But within two or three songs, Crazy Manos was back, as defiant as ever, blowing kisses and offering wine to everyone in the house. Those must have been powerful drugs coursing through his body. Corpse-raising drugs. A lesser mangha would have crawled home to die in his mother’s lap.

The rest of the night was punctuated by this back and forth, this in and out and in again. When Crazy Manos did not crawl back on his hands and knees after the final bout, Kivelli was sure they’d killed him, and she felt bad for a moment. He was a young guy trying to have some fun, a handsome mangha, just a little bit reckless.

After the taverna closed and the broken glass was swept up, Kivelli searched for Barba Yannis, but he was nowhere to be found. All she wanted was to get paid so she could go home and consider the Smyrniot’s invitation, the memory of which had been almost entirely wiped out by the night’s main event. If it disappeared by morning, she would be relieved of the decision, though she was not certain how much longer she could bear the brutishness of the taverna. Narella walked over and said she’d seen Barba Yannis leave by himself, and that she too was waiting for him because they had their own bills to settle. “He read my palm and paid me a visit at Kyria Effie’s,” she confessed sheepishly. She’d hoped to make Crazy Manos jealous, to get back at him for his philandering, but things had gone too far. She wiped away a tear. Narella had a soft spot for that little butcher.

Just then Barba Yannis returned. He and Mortis were holding Crazy Manos up by the armpits, helping him to a table near the back. Narella ran to him, threw her arms around his neck. Crazy Manos cursed, but didn’t push her away. He was a sorry sight, his pretty face puffed up like that of a drowned man, his fine threads dark with blood and dirt. But there he sat, holding hands with Narella and drinking the cup of coffee Barba Yannis himself had brought him, while Mortis dusted off his jacket with a white cloth.

— Tess Fragoulis

——————————-

Tess Fragoulis is the author of Stories to Hide from Your Mother (Arsenal Pulp, 1997), which was nominated for the QWF First Book Prize; Ariadne’s Dream (Thistledown, 2001), which was long-listed for the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award; and is the editor of Musings, an anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature (Vehicule, 2004). Her latest novel, The Goodtime Girl, is published by Cormorant Books in Canada, and will be published in Greek by Psichogios Publications in Greece in 2013. She has also written for newspapers, magazines and television. She lives in Montreal and teaches writing part-time at Concordia University.

Heidegger, Floss, Elfride, and the Cat: Fiction — Leon Rooke

May 072012

I spent the summer of 1968 in Freiburg. Martin Heidegger was still alive, living in a retreat in the Black Forest in an odor of disrepute on account of his Nazi sympathies during the war. I had a fantasy that I would meet him hiking in the woods. I never met him. I did meet Friedrich Von Hayek, the great economist, but he was easy; he had an office at the university and I walked in one day with a mutual acquaintance and shook his hand. My brush with history, my personal relationship with the god of Paul Ryan and the austerity-cats of the Republican right.

Heidegger is a particularly difficult philosopher to read because he thought he was inventing a new language to talk about the thing he couldn’t talk about. You can’t tell sometimes if he is being mysteriously impenetrable or just impenetrable as in opaque. He had a vast nostalgia for Being which he thought of as something we couldn’t access by perception or thought. This vast nostalgia seems sometimes to have been more felt than reasoned; he was of that generation who still mourned the passing of the Greek gods. He also slept around a lot and had a more or less open marriage with his wife, Elfride. Somehow his nostalgia for a thing you can’t reach and his many love affairs seem comically and humanly self-contradictory. He is ripe for literature.

Enter Leon Rooke.

Leon Rooke is an old and dear friend. He was in my head long before I met him because of his books, Shakespeare’s Dog in particular in those days, a novel that has stuck with me as a license and an inspiration — William Shakespeare as observed by his dog (who is telling the story), a brilliant book, a tour de force of point of view construction, an example of how literature thrives by making things strange. I put Leon in Best Canadian Stories regularly (as often as Alice Munro) over the decade I edited that anthology. I’ve reviewed his books at least a half-dozen times. I wrote an essay about his (also brilliant, eerie, and wonderful) novel, A Good Baby, which you can find in my book of essays, Attack of the Copula Spiders. Rooke was born in North Carolina but lives in Toronto. He has an actor’s voice and presence and is an amazing performer of his own work. He’s also a painter — we have been lucky enough to publish images of four of his paintings on NC.

In “Heidegger, Floss, Elfride, and the Cat” Leon Rooke gives us Heidegger with his pants down (metaphorically), straining to compose the impenetrable prose of Being and Time while shuttling to and from his lover’s house and fending off the jealous and passive-aggressive intrusions of his long-suffering wife (I have inserted photographs of the real Heidegger and Elfride below). All this is relayed through someone named Floss, another one of those odd point of view inventions Rooke is so good at. In this case, Floss might be a philosophy student reading Being and Time in a library or he might be Heidegger, or rather, I think, Heidegger’s Being (which we might have called his Soul in the old days). Heidegger, of course, can’t know Floss, but Floss knows everything about Heidegger. And when the story is done, Floss trundles home to his wife and kids (being Heidegger’s Being is like a job). And, of course, it’s very late and I might have got this wrong.

As far as I know, no animals were harmed during the composition of this story (despite what happens to the poor cat).

Lights that flickered, curtain at a certain pitch in the summoning, the rendezvous with Frau Blochmann now concluded, Heidegger clamps his trouser legs and bicycles home.

Floss withholds opinion on the Master’s affair with the eminent colleague, which he knows will continue another few decades. What he wonders is what Elfride will say when the philosopher king comes through the door. That Jewish bitch again? Or will she say nothing, having just dispatched her doctor friend through that very door. This love business is a bit tiring, is Floss’s thought. Get back to work, he tells Heidegger. Not that such is required. After swallowing a bit of Elfride’s tasty stew Heidegger will be at his desk. Being and Time, thinks Floss, page 355. Quote, Resoluteness, by its ontological essence, is always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time.

Floss, in his cramped library carrel, has no argument with that. Well and good. Floss and resoluteness and Heidegger, Floss believes, are one and the same.

They are together, he and the Freiburg sage, working the deep trench.

Heidegger now writes, quote, The essence of Dasein as an entity is its existence.

Without entity, no essence: well and good, remarks Floss to himself. Particles afloat in space, what purpose they?

Quote, The existential indefiniteness of resoluteness never makes itself definite except in a resolution. Page 346.

Here Floss wants to say Hold the phone. Floss wants to put his foot down.

Floss’s mind is rapidly scribbling notes to himself. These notes are scratching like a dog inside Floss’s brain. Hold the phone is but one of the dog’s bones.

Floss’s index finger is rapidly scanning the lines, speed-reading Heidegger as the master composes. Are not he and Heidegger that close? Are they not twinned with respect to Being and Time? Are they not brothers?

Floss can quote aloud, at any time, Floss can, any one of Heidegger’s current or future thoughts. The text is spread open on the desk for company only.

Photographic. That’s what Floss’s mind is.

Never mind that he has scribbled into his notebook the erroneous page reference. His hand did. Floss’s mind knows the difference.

Not 346. 355. Floss has jumped ahead. He always knows where Heidegger is going; often he arrives at the destination while the King of Thought is still clearing his throat.

Quote, Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another.

Ah! Floss thinks. Let’s not get too, you know, personal. Like.

In Floss’s view this statement is another Hold the phone. This is Heidegger fighting a headwind.

That someone has just this moment walked into Heidegger’s study is radiantly clear to Floss. Being with one another is an untypical Heidegger sentiment. The Master has been thwarted in his goals. Ergo, the line’s impurity.

Who is the culprit this time?

Excited, Floss thumps his knees.

Elfride, of course.

This is Heidegger being influenced by Elfride. This is the wife calling the tune. It is Elfride saying, If you are going to be with me, then be…with me.

Floss can see Elfride hovering over the great man’s shoulders. He can see her whisking dandruff from the great man’s shoulder with a tough whisk broom.

—Don’t mind me, Elfride is saying.

Heidegger doesn’t like any of this. Naturally, he doesn’t. Her very presence fills him with distaste. She has destroyed his flow of pure thought. Be with one another? How has that monstrous phrasing got onto his page?

Four a.m. Heidegger never sleeps, that explains him. But must Elfride do her dusting at this hour?

Floss thinks not. Floss thinks Elfride must have something up her sleeve.

—Dearest soul, the great man says — can’t you go away? Can’t you leave the room and quietly close the door?

—You know what happens if I don’t dust, don’t you? Elfride says.

Heidegger doesn’t know what happens if Elfride doesn’t dust. He is pretty certain Elfride means to tell him.

—Can’t you make a guess. Oh, go ahead. Go out on a limb.

Heidegger is thinking he has always been out on that limb. He was out there first on the limb with the Jesuits when he was a boy, then with Husserl, the so-called father of phenomenology; he was out on the limb with Elfride, then with Hannah, then with Elfride and Hannah jointly. And don’t forget colleague Blochmann. Occasionally the Stray Other. Now he is back on the limb with Elfride. Elfride is dusting the limb.

—I do not intend to engage in your theatrics, dearest soul, he says. I intend to sit here and work on this passage on page 355 until I get it right.

—It’s right, dear one, Elfride says. I’m here to tell you it is already right. You get it any righter, then I won’t know what to do with myself.

Floss, hearing this exchange, leans back in his tight carrel chair. He crosses his arms over his chest. He closes his eyes.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” Floss says.

Heidegger spins his head. Elfride ignores Floss. Floss is a pest; he pops in at inconvenient times; otherwise, he is nothing to Elfride.

—Keep out of this, Floss, she says.

Heidegger sighs. These sighs are magnificent. They express his full contempt of those who would make the philosopher’s already impossible task that much more difficult.

Elfride, normally the most anchored of women, is subject to flights of fancy. Now she’s whisking her broom at vacant air. She has even given that vacancy a name: Time Being. There was a time, Floss recalls, when Elfride was more besotted with Heidegger than some now assert is the case. It is all that Hannah’s work. Months before Elfride and her future husband met Elfride had carried in her pockets notes destined for the magician of Frieburg. Don’t deny it. Yesterday I saw you looking at me. Or: Last week I blocked the doorway and without a word you swept by me. Or: I beseech you. Love me. She still retains these undelivered disintegrating missives under lock and key in a wooden chest buried beneath the floor. They prove her love. They prove her love existed prior to his. This makes her proud. Not even the great can be first in every regard. These notes will be published after her death. The instructions are contained in a sealed envelope affixed with her granddaughter’s name. Not in this envelope or in the locked chest is the narrative describing the gypsy fortune teller’s role in their haunted lives. Well, are not all lives haunted, Floss, who has never loved, reminds himself.The gypsy said to Elfride, On the first rainy afternoon, following your economics class, stand beneath the first blooming tree your steps venture upon. The lover meant for you will appear. Cold rain dripped, afterwards she caught a cold that endured through many weeks, and periodically through each wheeling year, this existing as nothing because love’s astonishing light penetrated the drooping boughs and stormed her heart. Heidegger, under a black umbrella, indeed appeared. Through wet lashes he imagined he saw a dying tree where nothing had stood days before.

—You. What is your name?

—Elfride Petrie.

—Why are you standing in the rain?

—Waiting for you. I am your fate.

Heidegger believed in fate as he did in Plato, with suspicion, particularly with regard to the monumentally salient question What is truth, but he was impressed. She was also pretty, though with rain pouring over her face he would reserve opinion on that. Yet when this schoolgirl fitted her body against his, his heart which was three quarters stone fragmented and certain sounds issued from his mouth never until that moment heard by himself or by any other. Fortunately only children on a dilapidated school bus, there to witness ancient Marburg splendours, were present, and they were too distracted to absorb any image of the historic coupling. This was because rain had become sleet, sleet had become snow, which in minutes had blanketed the lovers, flakes ascending and descending a second and third time, and then repeatedly, in abstract harmony with their movement. Floss, who was there and could have sought the better view had he been that kind of person, was mostly concerned with Heidegger’s black umbrella which gusting wind ripped into sundry pieces, the cloth flitting hither and yon like unruly crows, if crows were ever to attempt flight in such weather.

Heidegger has put down his writing pen. He is leaning back in his chair. He is crossing his arms over his chest. He fits his tongue beneath the upper lip; he can see clearly his thick Fuhrer’s moustache. The sighting gives him strength, although he distinctly prefers his own. He is reminded that theirs is a nation-building task. The moustache renews him in the impossible goal.

He sighs anew, leaning further back. He closes his eyes.

His sighs now, however, are obviously feigned. They exist merely as an admonishment to his wife. Feigned, they express his resignation. His disappointment with married–the assailed– life. The sighs are meant to convey to Elfride that he has given up. How can he work with a loudmouth duster in the room, chattering non-stop?

Gone from his head is that trail he was tracking re resoluteness.

But that quickly does his mind seize again upon the trail. His shoe soles hit the floor. His burden has lifted. The pen flies into his hand. Once more he is at work. He is already scribbling again.

He is scribbling, Floss thinks, quote, The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time.

Hold the phone, Floss is thinking. The projection is termed disclosive only because the thought has just this second revealed itself to the sage. Ditto, factically.

But Heidegger is breaking his pen’s point underlining this significant line. It is imperative that the line be printed in the italic. If the line is not set in the italic then readers fifty years from now, speedreaders like that dunderhead Floss, will fly right by it. They will be blind to its pertinence, as he himself is blind to the dust, the dandruff–as he would wish to be blind to Elfride’s galling presence.

—That’s good, Martin, Elfride says. I love that factically possible line. It makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Indeed one of them in the room is sweating, though it isn’t Elfride. Heidegger is sweating because writing a new philosophy, bringing the axe to old traditional philosophical walls — that, mein Fuhrer, is hard work. Plus, there’s the other problem: the window, the cat. How hot and stuffy this room is. If he raises the window, he will be wasting heat. Heat the Volk must not waste. Only a Jew saboteur would waste the nation’s heat. So he is stymied on that front. Yet — and now he is getting to the essence of the situation — yet if he raises the window, the simple solution sans heat, the loathsome cat which always plops itself down on the sill, will come in. Thus, he keeps the window shut. He sweats.

Architects, he thinks, truly are a repellent tribe. They can get nothing right.

Floss swings in his chair. His shoe soles strike the floor. He sees Elfride poised. Resolute Elfride is ever on the job.

—Were you saying something, darling? says Elfride. It isn’t the architects, it’s me. Don’t blame the architects for your stinginess. Blame the war. Or better yet, yes, blame me.

She parades curvaceously around the sage’s desk.

—Although of course, she says, you would be perfectly justified if you blamed the cat. I’m with you there. I hate that cat. That cat is the ugliest creature I, for one, have ever seen. Are you for two — if I may phrase the question so? — in thinking that cat is the most frightful creature ever to walk on four legs?

—Three, Heidegger says. If we are to speak of the cat, then let’s speak precisely. The cat has but three legitimate legs. The fourth, as you can distinctly see, is so foreshortened as to scarcely exist.

—Foreshortened? says Elfride. Do you mean to say the leg in question existed that way in the womb? Perhaps in the very exchange of seed? Oh, I think surely not foreshortened, because I clearly remember that leg was perfectly normal until you crushed it when you caught the cat coming through your window.

Heidegger lowers his head. He kneads his brow. He is thinking, I have stayed up all night for this?

He is thinking, Hannah, thank God, was not a chatterbox. Her head was on my chest whenever I spoke.

—Yes, darling, Elfride is saying. As much as I despise the creature, it is criminal what you have done to that cat. You all but pressed that cat flat. Martin, I hardly know what to say. I hardly do. I am speechless, listening to your infirmity on the subject of that cat.

Floss sees the philosopher’s eyes narrowing. He sees him looking with utter hatred at this wholesome, proud, meandering wife. Heidegger’s defence collapses. Elfride has described the scene exactly as it occurred.

—It was an accident, Floss says.

—It was purely accidental, Heidegger says.

Elfride snubs this excuse. She whisks it away with her broom.

Floss has his attention elsewhere. He is focusing on the sleeping cat. The cat, to his eyes, has altered itself somehow. That the cat suffers deformity is true enough. But it is no longer the bony, undernourished cat. The cat has been eating. It has found food somewhere. The cat is fat.

As for Heidegger, already he is scribbling again. Quote, When what we call “accidents” befall from the with-world and the environment, they can be-fall only from resoluteness.

Floss forsakes his study of the cat. Hold the phone, he says. Hold the phone. Hello, hello. Bravo, my friend.

But Elfride’s broom is stabbing the air.

—You could kill the cat, Elfride is saying. Yes, my lamb, you could finish the job. Then you could raise your window, if only for a moment. Surely not a great deal of our precious heat would escape if you raised your window for one mere moment. Our war resources would not be sorely depleted. Fresh air, Martin! Glorious health! With the window open, even so little as a tidge, you would not be forced to wrestle there in heavy sweat. You could be comfortable. Surely your work would go better if you were comfortable. Kill the cat, my good soul. With the cat dead, your Being and Time will be concluded in nothing flat.

—Enough, Elfride. Enough!

—Shall I kill the cat for you, Martin? I would be happy to kill the atrocious cat if you tell me you believe I should, and can morally justify my performing the act. Issue the cleansing command. Think! She is only a cat.

—She? That cat is female?

—Oh master, groans Floss.

—Yes, and rather resolute, by the look of her.

Heidegger sinks low into his chair. He hoods his eyes.

—Are you done, Elfride? Dearest soul.

—Done?

—Yes, done. If you are not done, Elfride, then I am leaving my desk. I am leaving my house. I will walk this night all the way to my cabin in Todtnauberg, if that is what it takes to be quit of your tongue.

Floss, at his desk gnawing a fingernail, allows himself a smile. The sage is tempting fate with this mention of the cabin, of Todtnauberg. He has stepped with both feet into Elfride’s trap.

—Todtnauberg? Elfride says. Your cabin? But, darling, the cabin is mine. True. I gave it to you. But quit my tongue? Oh, heavens, you can’t mean I have disturbed you. I rattle on, certainly, but only because I know how much my rattling improves your mood. If I did not rattle, you would go about eternally under your famous black cloud. You would never be able to look anyone in the eye. Your students would hardly hang on to your every word. Oh, I think it is fair to say, Martin, that without me and my tongue, and my Nazi boots, and just possibly the cat’s presence at your window, you would never get your work done. You would never write a line. Most assuredly your opus would never be completed. Fame would elude you. Not a person outside Frieburg would ever have the pleasure of hearing your name. You can admit that to yourself and to me, can you not? I’ll not hold it against you. You do not have to prove yourself to me, not ever. Certainly not the way you had to prove yourself to that schoolgirl, Hannah Arendt. And to take her to my cabin in Todtnauberg to prove it, well, my word!

—So that’s it, is it? That’s what this eternal dusting is all about. This mouth disease. So you can harp night and day on my little Hannah fling.

—Little, darling? What would poor Hannah think if I repeated to her what you have just said? Did you not write to her that she was your life? Did she not reply that you were her every heartbeat? That your paths would haunt each other until the death? Oh, I think so, darling. I believe those were the two sweethearts’ very words. ‘My homeland of pure joy.’ Was that not your latest encomium?

Floss applies a handkerchief to his eyes. His eyes are wet. They ever get so each time he sees Hannah and Heidegger together in the cabin at Todtnauberg. Strolling together after class under the singing trees. The decades of love to come. How thrilling it must be, Floss thinks, to possess these loves.

Still. Still, Floss altogether shares Jasper’s view when it comes to that Hannah relationship. Resolute, yes, but messy, messy. Cataclysmic love: Hannah defending him at the French de-Nazification committee hearings: scrambling to hawk his manuscripts to Columbia: through the years never one syllable from the master’s mouth as to the beloved’s own work which he read in secret and secretly believed ephemeral if not deliquescent. Her head ever lowered to his chest.

Elfride is thorough. Not all has been said:

—Or perhaps the precipitation in your eyes has as cause your forthcoming tart Princess Margot of Saxony-Meiningen. Will your rendezvous signal this time be flashing lights or will it be your shades hanging at a certain depth, as was the case with banal Hannah? Which? Will she hand-copy your every hour’s text, as I do?

Floss is astounded. He is giddy with excitement. He has not heretofore perceived that Elfride’s capacity to see into the future matches his own. He sees her now, as one day she doubtlessly will, hands clasped in an unrecognized lap, confused by the vague sense of warfare between aching joints, an old woman of 92 awaiting death in a caretaker home. Will she see her two sons on Russian soil, prisoners of war? Has she yet seen the Delphic oracle rescuing from rubble manuscripts housed in what previously was a Messkirch bank? Hiding them in a cave?

Not at the moment, in any case. At the moment what both Elfride and Floss are seeing is the Master frantically bicycling 16 miles to Todtnauburg, flinging off his clothes, now dressed only in an absurd Tyrolean cap, Elfride, Hannah, the Princess, and scores of other women panting in pursuit, flinging off theirs. For Floss, madness promotes the vision. For Elfride, a confirmation of enduring love.

A thousand letters, cards, over the decades, informing Elfride where his Divineship is, not one suggesting who he is with. What a challenge this marital devotion, these conjugal splits. Send in your party membership, dearest soul, thinks Floss. In resoluteness is strength.

“Get back to the cat,” Floss tells Elfride. Forget Hannah. The cat, after all, has meaning; it is both a real and a symbolic cat. In light of the great man’s post-war silence on the issue of certain atrocities, personal betrayals, I could tolerate additional intimate details re his treatment of the cat.”

—Shoo, shoo, says Elfride. Stop harassing me.

Heidegger is distracted. Once more, Elfride is communicating with vacant air. But perhaps this is good. Perhaps her nasty obsession with Hannah has for the moment exhausted itself. Elfride, he thinks, with her everlasting can of worms. Essence of spite. Why can’t my two great loves, my sprites, be friends? I must see to that, however imbecilic it may appear.

He looks at the cat, asleep on the window sill. Even curved like that, one can see the leg’s deformity. The crippled spine. The cat should be killed. It is doing that cat no favor to let it live.

He would give Elfride the order. He would say to her, Elfride, kill the cat! Do it now.

But he and she are locked in this struggle. They are irresolute. The cat, if it is to die, must die under Elfride’s own initiative. If he were to give the order, the cat would ever survive intact in his memory. Whereas, if she killed it outright, slicing its throat with a knife from the kitchen or beheading it with the hatchet on a woodblock in the back yard or merely trampling it to death, then the cat would be gone forever. It would disappear totally and entirely from his mind and from the world. Its essence would have been annihilated, its entity denied.

He thinks: what Elfride is hoping is that the weather will get extremely cold this winter — Frieburg under ice, the cat stiff as a rock in the freeze. Certainly there is not the remotest chance that she will allow the cat inside the house.

Unless she does so in punishment of me. Unless she does so out of revenge for my taking Hannah to Todtnauberg. Such a stupid impulse, despite its having led to excruciating reward.

One, it had led Hannah out of drabness. It had transformed her overnight into a bewildered passionate vehicle of sex. Wrought, her mind had unloosened, her brain cells uncoiled.

God forgive me the moments I even have wondered she wasn’t the better thinker than me.

Heidegger is close to tears. The shame of this.

—Oh, she’s bright, Martin, Elfride says. I have never denied you her brightness. But — she snaps her fingers — she isn’t you.

Floss leans back in his chair. He removes his glasses, polishes them. Elfride’s face is flushed. Always, with that flushed face, any wild remark is apt to burst from her mouth. He wants his glasses clean, that he may see her clean, when next she speaks.

“Tip the scales, Elfride,” Floss says. “Show the great man how bright you are.”

—Martin, darling, Elfride says. She is laughing. —Look what I am doing!

Martin has been cleaning his glasses.

Floss, putting on his glasses, sees Heidegger putting on his.

As for Elfride, Elfride is at the study window. She is poking the cat with a stick. Heidegger keeps the stick there for that very purpose. Enter a line in Being and Time, then jump up and poke the cat. Enter another, poke the cat. Day after day, poke the perfectly stupid, ever returning cat. That is how his opus is being written: Elfride’s dusting, Eflride’s interventions — but whenever alone he has been poking the cat.

So Floss figures. Floss has figured it out. Just as he has figured out — flipping the pages, speed-reading the familiar text — the nature of the breeze. He must wipe his fingertips of glycerine, that’s how much speed he needs. He has learned the dark secrets of this book. Floss knows precisely each line, each phrase, where Heidegger has got up, flung himself across the room, picked up his stick — tortured the cat.

But today, to Floss’s mind, there is something different about this cat.

“A moment, Elfride. Consider. In my view, that’s a pregnant cat.”

But Elfride is in action. Elfride has the stick. She is poking the cat.

—-Da!(poke) Da!(poke) Da!(poke) Da!

The cat is squalling; it is meowing, hissing. Clawing the glass. It can’t get in, it can’t get out.

Heidegger, cannot, will not, look. He turns his back to this scene. He claps hands over his ears. Elfride is capable, reliable. When the deed is done she will dispose of the corpse. He need never be appraised of the how or where. Philosophy need not concern itself with a being’s single specific fate. It has steered fathomless circles since the Greeks established the course. Well done, Greeks. Now those old walls must crumble. With certain exceptions, work to date has been rubbish in the wind. The ground is soggy, diseased, repellent: it releases a fetid odour. Original thought is now required. Already the cat’s presence, Elfride’s resoluteness, is slipping from his mind. The pen flies into his hand; it flies across the page. Quote, ‘Irresoluteness’ merely expresses that phenomenon which we have interpreted as a Being-surrendered to the way in which things have been prevalently interpreted by the “they”. Sweat pours down his cheeks. He pauses. He wonders if he may permit himself a footnote excluding Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche from this “they”. Probably so. Why promote their cause?

He works on. He is unaware that Elfride’s Da! Da! Da! has catapulted into shrieks. Something about the cat. Something about something inside the cat. Let her deal with the matter. The cat is a household problem. That’s what marriage is for. For wives to deal with them.

Floss isn’t fooled. He knows Heidegger’s deeper thought: This wife, this hellcat, distorts the providence of being.

“Do you wish to whack the cat, Martin.” Elfride is whacking with each shriek.

Floss cannot sit still in his chair. His every nerve is shot. He cannot witness any more of this. He is shouting at Elfride, “Put down the stick! Filthy Hun, put down the stick!“

Already she has dropped the stick. Blood has splattered on the carpet, on her lovely night-dress. Her hands are covering her face. On the sill the dying cat is wrenching its body one way and another. Gore is leaking from the torn fur. Blood pools on the window sill. A slimy wedge of kitten protrudes beneath the crooked tail.

Never mind. Soon, reaching towards sixty, Heidegger will be out on the hinterlands with young and old, digging trenches to delay the advancing enemy. Floss hurriedly assembles his books. He hitches the backpack over one arm. Rushes down the stairs. The library is exceptionally well lit. Fluorescent tubes quiver and spit. In the entire building no other individual is stirring. The universe is silent. Dawn has arrived, an ascending quilt. His own cat will be crying. His cat will be saying, Why have you not been here to let me purr in your lap? What have you been doing? His wife and children will be in tears. Where have you been? Who are you? (Dearest soul), resolute being, explain yourself.

— Leon Rooke

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Leon Rooke has published more than 30 books, including novels, short story collections, plays, anthologies, and “oddities,” and more than three hundred short stories. Rooke’s many awards include the Governor General’s Award for Fiction (for Shakespeare’s Dog, 1985), the Periodical Association of Canada Award for the English-Language Paperback Novel of the Year (for Fat Woman, 1982), a Pushcart Prize (1988), the North Carolina Award for Literature (1990), and the Canada/Australia Literary Prize in 1981, for his body of work. Also the W. O. Mitchell Literary Award, for his writing and his mentoring, and the ReLit Short Fiction Award. Rooke has taught at more than a dozen Canadian and U.S. universities. He lives in Toronto.

What It’s Like Living Here — Wendy Voorsanger in San Mateo

May 012012

I live halfway between the Road of the Kings and the Avenue of the Fleas in San Mateo, California. Situated on a peninsula seventeen miles south of San Francisco, San Mateo isn’t a young town at all—it was settled by the Spanish long before many other places in America. In 1776 Captain Juan Bautista de Anza came from Spain searching for the inlet to the San Francisco Bay; for nearly 200 years it had remained hidden to European explorers sailing up and down the Pacific coast in summer fog. Anza and his scouting party camped here along a river, naming it San Mateo (after Saint Matthew, the Jewish tax collector-turned-apostle who later spread the word of God in far-flung nations). Anza befriended the native Ohlone Indians living here.

“I found in our camp nearly all the men of the village, very friendly, content, and joyful, putting themselves out to serve us in every way, a circumstance which I have noted in all the natives seen [in California] up to now.” —Captain Juan Bautista de Anza’s Journal, March 29, 1776.

California State Registered Historical Landmark No. 47, DeAnza Camp. Photo Credit: Wendy Voorsanger

My neighborhood, just two blocks from that original Anza camp, would no longer be recognizable to those early Spanish settlers or Ohlone Indians. What was once a hilly serpentine grassland dappled with stately oak and bay laurel trees, is now organized into wide streets named after Spanish locales (Castillian, Sevilla, Avila, Aragon) and prestigious eastern colleges (Harvard, Cornell, Fordham). The grizzly bear, elk, and pronghorn antelope no longer roam, the wide-open space covered with rows of Spanish and Mexican revival houses. The oaks and their meaty acorns, once prized by the Ohlone, now feed only the black squirrels skittering between the yards. The San Mateo Creek where Anza made camp is no longer wide and flowing with salmon and trout, but slowed and stunted by a large dam three miles upstream. The dam holds back the water from the Crystal Springs Reservoir filled with Yosemite snowmelt delivered via a sophisticated system of pipes originating 176 miles to the east.

Crystal Springs Reservoir at low level. Photo Credit: Wendy Voorsanger

The front yards in my neighborhood aren’t fussy or fancy but welcoming. Small green lawns are edged symmetrically and blown neat. Plenty of perfectly placed native grasses sit alongside drought-tolerant plants such as yucca palm, flowering sage, rosemary, and fruit trees (lemon, orange, fig) designed to look as casual and natural as California itself.

Spanish and Mexican influences in San Mateo. Photo Credit: Wendy Voorsanger

I find the people here in San Mateo friendly and open, much like Anza found the Ohlone back in 1776. Perhaps it’s because of the mild climate, warm sunshine and blue sky. Or maybe it’s the boundless ocean nearby, 12 miles west over the ridge. Or the delicious evening fog that rolls in at night; nobody has air conditioning—we just open our windows. Whatever the reason, the town exudes a convivial energy. Neighbors smile and wave and take in my trashcan without asking. They put my paper on our porch and ask about my day. I often find myself on the sidewalk long after the sun goes down chatting with neighbors while the kids kick balls in the middle of the street. San Mateo has a trusting sort of warmth that doesn’t require years to earn.

I like to think the Ohlone spirits inhabit us, teach us how to live, appreciate our land and each other. I imagine their bones scattered deep beneath my home. I imagine them wandering the hills in the midnight fog wraithlike, their pacific whisperings coming through my window as a sea breeze as I sleep. But then I also imagine the ghosts of the Spanish buried alongside the Ohlone and figure they have something to say, too. And I wonder how much of our culture is simply a lingering imprint of those who came before.

“Indian Maidens” at the San Mateo post office. Relief sculpture carved in wood by Zygmund Sazevitch, 1935 Treasury Relief Art Project. Photo credit: Wendy Voorsanger

To outsiders, San Mateo might seem like an irritatingly superficial, “laid back” place. I’ll admit, I enjoy my superficial pleasantries, not always taking the time to dig beyond surface connections with people. And I do often hang out in nature; our Bay Ridge and Peninsula open space district encompasses over 60,000 acres in 26 wilderness preserves. But most people in San Mateo don’t really fit into that familiar “laid back” Californian caricature. Being relaxed is just an image we carefully cultivated, consciously or subconsciously. In fact, on the contrary, San Mateo is a diverse mix of locals and transplants from around the country (and the world), mixed together into an insanely intense stew of over-achievers and perfectionists.

A Reconstitution

I grew up in Sacramento and came to the Bay Area twenty-five years ago looking for opportunity among the numerous Silicon Valley start-ups. I clung to the culture of achievement here because of my deep-seated need to repair the fabric fraying around me growing up amidst the crazy 1970’s California counter-culture of dissolving structures (family and society), mind-altering substances, and latch-key responsibilities. My plan was to do better than my parents, harness all that freedom and possibility, not squander it. Perhaps others came here to escape the confining strictures and suffocating class-based impediments in the places they left. In San Mateo we all seem to be trying to build and rebuild our lives into something more meaningful through intense work, innovation, over-achievement.

Here in San Mateo, it doesn’t matter where you come from. What matters here are your ideas. Your intelligence. Your work ethic. What do you bring to the table? What is your value add? Did you start a company? Launch an IPO? Get your PHD? Fund a mind-blowing technology? Volunteer with an indigenous tribe in a remote location? Invent a life-saving drug? Run a marathon? Start a non-profit? Living in San Mateo offers an extraordinary geographical opportunity for innovation—it’s equidistant between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. We’re ideally situated to work in any one of the high-tech companies nearby (Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Yelp, Pixar, Yahoo, Genentech, Apple, etc.) or in other industries that serve the technology industry like venture capital and merger and acquisition law.

Our Statistics

According to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the area has:

The highest economic productivity in the nation—almost twice the U.S. average
The most highly educated workforce in the nation, with the highest percentage of residents with graduate and professional degrees
The nation’s largest concentration of national laboratories, corporate and independent research laboratories, and leading research universities
The largest number of top-ten ranked graduate programs in business, law, medicine and engineering in the nation
The highest density of venture capital firms in the world
The most technology Fortune 500 companies
The highest internet penetration of any U.S. region
The highest level of patent generation in the nation, with more patents generated per employee than any other major metropolitan area.

Living In a Culture on Steroids

To me, living in San Mateo feels like living in an achievement culture on steroids. There’s a drive for perfection, or a drive to get as close to it as possible. It’s the common denominator among us—this drive for perfection—whether or not we admit it to ourselves. Or to each other.

Our local schools offer parent education lectures entitled: “Inspiring Innovating Thinkers,” “Sports Parenting: Inspiring a Win-Win Attitude,” “Resilience and Optimism in Your Child,” and “The Art of Imperfect Parenting.” Moms and Dads attend these lectures equally. We read books like Making Marriage Meaningful and The Secrets to a Dynamic and Fulfilling Marriage to ensure that we don’t fall short like our parents. We’re trying to become our better selves. We’re striving for perfection, while juggling parenting, marriages, and careers. When we blunder, we call it “a learning opportunity.”

San Mateo is a town catering to people who live healthy; there are six gyms and four yoga studios within a four-block radius from my house offering yoga, the Bar Method, Pilates, Zumba, Interval Cycling and Skinny Jeans classes. There’s also Junior Gym to get the little ones started early. Here in San Mateo, we hike, run, swim, road bike, mountain bike, kite board, paddleboard, and surf. We complete marathons and 48-hour team relays for charity. We drink SuperFood, do seasonal cleanses, cut out carbs, and eat organic goji berries, flax seed, and dried seaweed. Most people I know don’t spend hours on the golf course each weekend talking business over scotch (too old-school exclusive and slow). Instead, after hours networking is done while biking up Crystal Springs Road in tight pelotons on custom bikes wearing coordinated bibs and jerseys; cyclists then track and compare achievements (route, distance, speed, elevation, power, time) using a Strava iPhone APP and celebrating their King of the Mountain (KOM) wins with Racer 5 microbrews.

Craig Chinn and Conrad Voorsanger chat in the neighborhood before a ride. Photo Credit: Wendy Voorsanger

Our children are swept up into the achievement culture around them. They play soccer, lacrosse, basketball, and volleyball. They fence, rock climb, dance, swim and dive. They play the trumpet, harp, guitar, and drums. They sing and attend chess club, art class, and robotics clubs. They learn Mandarin, Spanish, and French. They take extra classes outside of school in math and writing at places like Kumon, Sylvan, The Reading Clinic, Academic Springboard and The Tutoring Center. They enter in math competitions, spelling bees, geography bees, and science fairs. They’ve mastered all things computer science and gadget-related, and have moved on to App programming and hacking. We keep them on task with family-coordinated online calendars updated from our Smartphones.

We’re obsessively concerned about the environment, driving hybrid cars and using canvas bags at the grocery store. We walk, ride bikes, and use the carpool lane or public transit (CalTrain or Bart). We conserve water, use compact fluorescent light bulbs; incandescents will be illegal in California by 2013. We recycle and compost nearly everything with a sophisticated stream recycling system. Everyone has three garbage cans: green for compost, blue for all recyclables, black for trash. The black can is seldom full.

A Haunting Echo

It feels as if we’re all striving to create a New World utopia in San Mateo, much like the Spanish missionaries did two hundred years ago. Perhaps that’s the long-dead Spanish influencing us from beyond; their zealous drive a haunting echo from the past.

Father Junipero Serra followed Anza, with the hopes of building a perfect utopian society. He and his padres worked fervently (using Ohlone slave labor) to create a network of 21 missions exactly one-day walk apart along El Camino Real (the Road of the Kings). Serra was an exacting and determined perfectionist, much like the people in San Mateo today. But, most people here aren’t looking for Serra’s pietistic existence. We’re on a fast-paced, never-ending quest for a particular type of utopia that takes our constitutional “pursuit of happiness” literally. We’re pursuing that right with intense fervor, all the while portraying the cool substance of a calm demeanor.

Defining Diversity

San Mateo is a multi-cultural and socio-economically diverse town that’s walkable and welcoming. People talk to each other the street. Many languages are heard: Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi. Flower boxes with impatiens dangle from light posts. Public benches with matching iron trashcans are evenly spaced along the sidewalks. Littering is a misdemeanor in San Mateo, punishable by a $1000 fine.

There’s an impressive collection of restaurants: Mexican cantinas, Korean noodle houses, Irish pubs, Italian eateries, and Brazilian Steakhouses. There are countless Sushi and Chinese restaurants, Indian buffets, all-American diners, healthy cafes, coffee stores, and juice bars. Draegers Grocery has organic fruits and vegetables, free-range meat, and sustainable fish. There’s also a Japanese Grocery (Suruki Supermarket) and several Mexican Markets (Market Fiesta Latina, El Azteca Market, and El Faro’s Mexican).

There are more Mexican restaurants in San Mateo than any other; Spanish tapas or native Ohlone fare (acorn bread, deer, mussels, fish) aren’t found anywhere. Perhaps this reflects the Mexican victory of independence from Spain in 1822, when Mexican Generals set about secularizing the California missions and distributing large land grants throughout California.

So what of the Mexican influence in San Mateo? It extends beyond margaritas and enchiladas to the rich Mexican heritage of industrious land labor (cattle ranching, tanning, logging). In addition, historian Robert Glass Cleland said of the Mexican Californians (Californios) in 1833: “They are free from the pressure of economic competition, ignorant of the wretchedness and poverty indigenous to other lands, amply supplied with the means of satisfying their simple wants, devoted to the grand and primary business of the enjoyment of life, they enjoyed a pastoral, almost Arcadian existence.”

Untitled glass tesserae mosaic on exterior Bank of America building in San Mateo; Louis Macouillard, designer and Alfonso Pardiñas mosaicist (Five mosaic panels 25 ft. high, approx. 90’ across).

The Mexican culture also introduced liberalized divorce, custody, and property laws for women in California long before the rest of America recognized gender equality. In fact, in 1844 one of the largest ranchos on the Peninsula (4400 acres) was run by a Mexican woman named Juana Briones. Juana fled her drunken husband in San Francisco with her eight children to buy her own ranch on the Peninsula, where she began raising cattle and farming. Historical accounts say she prospered, acquiring five other ranches over her lifetime and living a fulfilled existence with her large family around her.

As a native Californian, I can’t help but see Juana as some sort of standard-bearer I should emulate. After all, she seemed to find opportunity and achieve happiness, all while juggling the pressures of a demanding career and raising children. Living in San Mateo, I feel as if Juana’s endowment fills me like a deep, resonant well of possibility. Perhaps her lasting legacy is stored inside me, simply because I live here.

At the Center

America took control of California upon winning the Mexican-American war in 1847 and broke up (“redistributing”) the large Mexican ranches. This slice of history is seen in Central Park, 16-acres bordering the north part of San Mateo. The oaks and bay trees have stood here since the Ohlone, but the pine, cedar, redwood, and fig trees were planted for the estate of Charles. B. Polhemus, director of the San Francisco-San Jose Railroad. Polhemus grabbed the land from the Mexicans, and built a grand estate where Central Park now sits, with a 13-room Victorian mansion and lush landscaping. He later sold the estate to a sea captain named William Kohl, who then passed the property on to the city of San Mateo in 1922. The mansion was torn down long ago, replaced by a large circular grassy area in the center of the park. It’s a vibrant public space where the whole town congregates: parents bring small children to romp in the playground and ride the miniature train for a dollar, older kids around on bicycles and skateboards, seniors practice Tai Chi under the shade of a pine tree. A drummer sits on a bench thumping out a mesmerizing, visceral beat. There are also a baseball field, tennis courts, a community center, rose garden, and formal Japanese tea garden with a granite pagoda, koi pond and bamboo grove.

“Library Lane” mural depicting American expansion in San Mateo, by muralist, Norine Nicolson, 1989.

The black squirrels live here in Central Park too, fed by older folks who come for daily walks with nuts stuffed in their pockets. There are no more quail or great horned owls as in the days of the Ohlone. They’ve diminished in numbers and headed up to the ridge with the falcons and condors, but there are still plenty of finches, doves, warblers, and jays to liven up the park with song. Lining the park are several senior apartments, upscale and subsidized side by side.

Two blocks east of the park—across the train tracks—men eager for work gather on street corners hoping for day labor. No one asks for documentation. Sometimes the men congregate in the parking lot of the Worker’s Resource Center where a County Mobile Health Van offers free health assistance.

The Strong Current of History

Sometimes living amidst all this sunshine and happiness can be difficult, the pressure and pace crushing, the competition daunting. Opportunity isn’t ubiquitous, and luck is often elusive. Amongst the intense rush, the quiet contemplation and reflection that our forebears enjoyed is often fleeting. When I catch a slow moment, not originating from evaluation and measurement or leading toward any admirable achievement and success, I think of those who came before and how deeply they influence what it’s like living here. Walking along San Mateo Creek, I think of the Ohlone catching fish. Sitting on the patio listening to my son playing a malaguena on his guitar, I think of the Spaniards. Watching a hummingbird from my window suck on lemon blossoms, I think of the Mexicans who brought those trees here. I delight in these simple moments, circling around like an eddy in a river, slowing me into a reflection of swirls and ripples and the glassy texture of the water itself. Then the strong history of my town grabs hold and pulls me along once again, throwing me like a pebble into the single fast moving cultural current that is San Mateo.

— Wendy Voorsanger

Wendy Voorsanger is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a shadow contributor to NC, writing on the arts and creating art (see her gorgeous Burning Man novel skin) without actually appearing on the masthead. She lives in San Mateo with her husband and children and is at work on a historical novel about California.

See also our growing list of What It’s Like Living Here essays, a staple of the NC economy.

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The Resurrection of Experience: A Review of Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla — Jason DeYoung

Apr 222012

“There’ll be no plot,” Andrzej Stasiuk writes in Dukla, “with its promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of day. Darkness or blindness give things meaning, when the mind has to seek out a way in the shadows, providing its own light.”

Andrzej Stasiuk
Dukla, $13.95
Dalkey Archive, 2011
184 pages
Translated by Bill Johnston

“There’ll be no plot,” Andrzej Stasiuk writes in Dukla, “with its promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of day. Darkness or blindness give things meaning, when the mind has to seek out a way in the shadows, providing its own light.” Rigorous and striving in his efforts to communicate a personal and complex vision, Stasiuk’s doesn’t dither with plots in the traditional sense. Read slowly and taken intimately, however, Dukla teaches one how to see. With delicate and precise prose, Stasiuk’s narrator seeks a “resurrection” of his experiences, experiences that at once seem universal but all take place on a small stage—in a small town, in a creek bed, in a roadside ditch. With a narrator drawn to light and with just about every paragraph brimming with glowing descriptions of things high and low, I often thought of Allen Ginsburg’s “Footnote to Howl” while reading Dukla and wondered if its narrator knew it—“Holy… everything is holy.”

One of Poland most acclaimed writers and winner of the NIKE, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, Andrzej Stasiuk is best known for his travel essays, but he has also written fiction, literary criticism, and journalism. After Stasiuk was dismissed from secondary school, he got involved with a pacifist movement and then spent time in the Polish military, from which he deserted. For leaving his military post, Stasiuk spent one and a half years in prison, where he wrote his first book The Walls of Hebron (1992), a collection of short stories. Dukla was published in Poland in 1997, and Dalkey Archive Press published Bill Johnson’s translation of it in 2011.

Dukla is broken into three sections. The first is a ten-page, predawn travelogue across central Poland; second is the title novella; and the third is a collection of eighteen sketches related predominately to nature. Because of its genre-defying mixture and lingering, lyrical prose which edges often into poetry, Dukla reminds me of William Vollmann’s The Atlas or Péter Nádas’s Fire & Knowledge. The title novella, Dukla, is one part modern travel piece to Dukla, a small Polish resort town on the Hel Peninsula of the Carpathians, describing its sights and its people. The other parts are cobbled philosophical and metaphysical insights regarding the workings of the mind, time and space; and the narrator’s memoir of childhood experiences in Dukla. The narrator seems particularly driven to revisit his past—as it relates to a first love he had in Dukla—and to visit the tomb of Maria Amalia, an eighteenth-century ruler of Poland, perhaps because it’s Dukla’s centerpiece of culture.

As in the quotation I open with, Dukla’s makes no effort at standard narrative structure. Stasiuk reconfirms multiple times that “there won’t be any plot.” For Stasiuk common plot is for the middle mind, terror given a name, it “offers protection from madness.” His writing seeks perception without artificiality, which in turn creates the delight in reading Dukla. He as thrown off the artifices that protects from madness, and in achingly sincere and hyper-lucid prose Stasiuk’s lays bare his thoughts and perceptions. The guiding structure in Dukla rests with his metaphysical ideas, repeated insights, and a desire to write, notably about light:

I always wanted to write a book about light. I never could find anything else more reminiscent of eternity. I never was able to imagine things that don’t exist. That always seemed a waste of time to me, just like the stubborn search for the Unknown, when only ever ends up looking like an assemblage of old, familiar things in slightly souped-up form. Events and objects either come to an end, or perish, or collapse under their own weight, and if I observe them and describe them it’s only because they refract the brightness, shape it, and give it a form that we’re capable of comprehending.

The narrator never explicitly says that Dukla is the book he “always wanted to write,” but given the attentiveness to light and darkness throughout the book, one can guess that writing about light is what he’s doing.

The tension in Dukla is between the narrator’s imagination and reality. Reality is very messy for the narrator, which leads him to want to write about light, as he says elsewhere in the book:

For a long time now it’s seemed to me that the only thing worth describing is light, its variations and its eternal nature. Actions interest me to a much lesser degree. I don’t remember them very well. They arrange themselves in random sequences that break off without reason and begin without cause, only to snap unexpectedly once again. The mind is skilled at patching up, tacking, putting things in order, but I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I don’t trust the mind, just like a country bumpkin doesn’t trust city folks, because for them everything always arranges itself in neat, deft, illusory series of deductions and proofs. So, light.

He derides the imagination saying that “the imagination is incapable of inventing anything,” it’s “powerless,” and “doesn’t actually exist.” Yet there is an unresolved contradiction in the book. As the narrator lets slip early on: “Light can’t be described, all that can be done is to keep imagining it afresh.” This tension between Stasiuk perceived reality and imagination textures the book, distorting the text into a fata morgana of the narrator’s devotion to the image—that is, of what he actually sees—and the spiritual imagining of what he experiences. An example of this is best captured in the novella’s most memorable scene, a moment when “the imagined mingled with the real.” The narrator remembers when he was a child visiting Dukla in the summertime and falling in love with a very tan girl. At a party he watches her dance and then begins to “feel” himself entering her:

I felt myself entering into her body, not in the banal, sexual sense, but literally slipping into her taut brown skin; my hands filled her arms all the say to the fingertips, which I wiggled as if putting on gloves, and my face moved in the warmth of her smooth insides and became her face, and eventually my tongue became the inside of her tongue, and the same happened with everything else, with the red kingdom of tendons and muscles and white strips of fat, and in the end she was entirely pulled over me, and I was wearing her to the furthest recesses of fingernails and hair.

Another important instant such as this occurs toward the end of the novella, in which the narrator imagines a resurrection of Maria Amalia from her tomb only to have this vision vanish as another woman (a real person, not a phantom) enters the church. These magical, imagined(?) events are then put into juxtaposition with the clear observations of reality, sights which seem remarkable in their fidelity, as in his observation of this family:

In the dark shelter that resembled a ruined arcade there was a family sitting and waiting for their bus. No one was talking. The children copied the stoical gravity of their parents. The only thing moving were the little girl’s legs, which swung rhythmically above the ground in their white stockings and shiny red shoes with golden buckles. In the emptiness of the Sunday afternoon, in the stillness of the bus station, this motion brought to mind the helpless pendulum of a toy clock unable to cope with the burden of time. The girl had slipped her hands under her thighs and was sitting on the. The glistening red weights of her feet were rocking in an absolute vacuum. Nothing was added or taken away by the swinging. It was pure movement in an ideal, purified space. Her mother was staring emptily ahead. A yellow frill bubbled under her dark blue top. The father was leaning forward, his arms resting on his spread knees, and he too was peering into the depths of the day, toward the meeting point of all human gazes that have encountered no resistance on their path. The woman straightened her hands where they lay in her lap and said, “Sit still.” The girl froze immediately. Now all of them were gazing into the navel of the afternoon emptiness, and it was all I could do to tear myself from that motionless slumber.

Dukla’s meditative quality lends itself to quoting large chunks, and I want to share another favorite image from the book. Here the narrator, now a 36-year-old man, has found the shower he watched the tan girl bathe in twenty years before when he was a child:

I went into the last stall and closed the plastic shower curtain behind me. Just like before, the sun was shining through the narrow horizontal window. The cracked tiles gleamed like semitransparent gold. It looked as though something lay behind them, that another world began there. The place smelled of wet wall and of the sadness of somewhere where so many strangers had stood naked….Greasy water had pooled in the drain, with a white flake of soap and a clump of hair.

One of the gifts of Dukla is that it contains multitudes—often times you start to wonder what it is you’re actually reading—and this review could have been easily crafted to highlight its philosophical aspects or its lyricism or the narrator’s obsession with time—“the present is weakest of all, it spoils and disintegrates faster than anything.” But Stasiuk’s precise use of images and sensory details, his eye for “clumps” of hair in the drain, these specific and well-defined observations for the things in the world, and how he makes them glow with their “own light,” is what seems strongest in the collection. Read slowly, his prose gives measured respect to space and genuine witness. He allocates as much attention to the image of the tanned girl—who “among the famer’s daughters [of Dukla] this barefoot vagabond looked like the child of kings”—as to the detritus in the public bathroom—“dust, cobwebs, scraps of newspaper, broken glass, disintegrating red oddments of iron, rubble, and dried shit.” Isn’t what we value almost as interesting as what we throw away? Stasuik thinks so. Holy. Everything is holy.

As with the novella, the eighteen sketches that conclude the book overflow with a preponderance of captivating images. These sketches, however, take a clear-eyed view of nature both its allure and—most often—its moments of cruelty. Stasiuk always makes note of the kind of light and the time of day or year that illuminates these “landscapes [that] breath death.” In the “Rite of Spring,” Stasiuk narrates the epic struggle of spawning frogs—a sign spring has arrived. In “Crayfish,” Stasiuk and his friend save crayfish from a drying creek-bed under a sky that had “burned itself a mirror.” Moving them is in vain because later the second stream eventually dries up, too. And in my favorite of these short pieces, “Green Lacewings,” Stasiuk describes “gold-bugs,” which “in the evening, when we lit candles, these scarcely visible [bugs] would flutter from dark corners, from crevices in the wooden walls, and speed toward the flames, till in a final flare even their outline was lost.” Taken together these short pieces written in radiant prose tally a zero sum, silhouetting the pointlessness to life, that even we (humans) cannot escape nature. A dusky point of view to be sure, but somehow Stasiuk conveys beauty, whether it’s in the pale hue of an upturn frog’s belly—its choked-up guts “unraveling” from its mouth; or the “luciferous shimmer” of frost. (And now I hear Wordsworth’s admonition about “getting and spending.”)

Dukla is a communion. Throughout the book there is a theme of the narrator trying to enter things, or become part of something, whether it’s ingesting sand or entering the flesh of another person or stumbling into an area where wolves killed a doe. Over and over we read that the narrator is trying to reconcile and become one with his world through words. As the narrator says while walking though Dukla, “I decided to describe everything.” The resort town of Dukla and the ditch where the frogs are spawning and the early morning drive through Poland is everything, and “everything suggests that the soul is a fiction of the mind, which is trying to use it to equal the visible world.” The word dukla in Polish means an exploratory mineshaft, and Stasiuk has gone deep into his own thoughts and memories, and tried to communicate what is real in light and dark. It is a wondrous and mysterious vision, and represents one author’s serious effort to enter his world—hallowed, real and imagined.

–Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Corium, The Los Angles Review, The Fiddleback, and New Orleans Review. His story “The Funeral Bill” will appear in the 2012 edition of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories. He is an assistant fiction editor for upstreet.

The Artist: Short Story — Lindsay Norville

Apr 142012

Lindsay Norville was out with her family for Chinese food one night when she snapped open a fortune cookie and read the words “One day you will write a book.” She says she knew she was going to be writer when she was ten. She wrote and self-published her first novel — Cracked Up — when she was thirteen. She’s a woman in a hurry. She is from Albany, NY, just down the road from me, where she has been studying creative writing privately with my friend Gene Garber who brought her work to my attention. This fall she plans to start in the MFA program at Syracuse University. But the plot thickens, as they say. Lindsay suffers from sickle cell anemia, she’s already had a liver transplant. You can read about this on her web site. I’m not revealing secrets. It makes my heart sore to read about this and yet see that smile on her face (look at her site — she smiles a lot) and to think of the struggle she has been through to get her words out. It’s a deep pleasure to publish her here. “The Artist” is a painfully real story of a child/girl/woman lapped in the doubtful bliss of a nuclear family from hell. The word “artist” is meant to be both true and ironic: the artist is the girl’s father, a musician who murders his wife in a spasm of long accumulated love-hate, a dramatic, intimate dance macabre of obsession. Victim and unwilling co-conspirator, the girl, as is the nature of such children, is a minute observer of her parents’ faults. Her telling is chilling and courageous — in our politically correct era you rarely see a woman’s self-obsessed evil dissected so carefully. We’re in Mommy Dearest country here. But the mother is a dream compared to the father who does his best to enlist his daughter’s sympathy and complicity, undermining her sense of self and reality from the padded cell where he lives, really and metaphorically.

———

When they questioned him, my father only said things like, “The first time I saw her there was a smile in her eyes.” Of course this frustrated the authorities, and later the doctors, but that was how my father talked. He was an artist.

They kept him in seclusion. He had padded white walls with a thin metal cot and a twelve-by-ten floor space to pace hour after hour, day after day. He could only leave to go to the bathroom down the hall, flanked by an attendant the nurses on the ward called Big T.

I smiled a little when I imagined my slim father taking on someone named Big T. My father didn’t even kill insects. He was the gentlest person I knew. “Violence is for animals and the unloved,” he would say whenever he caught me in my room punching pillows and stuffed dolls, picturing the girls at school who made fun of my brown skin and knobby knees.

He never fought them. He let them take him away. He let them lock him up. He never had to be sedated or tied down when they pointed their fingers and made their allegations. The lawyers said my father couldn’t even manage an eye twitch or an agitated tone when responding to the bailiff. It was his perpetual calm, his unwavering refusal to testify, the way he regarded his cuffed wrists and my mother’s weepy relatives with a slightly irritated indifference that convinced the members of the jury he belonged with the criminally insane. In their estimation, only a psychopath could methodically clean his reading glasses while blown-up photographs of my mother’s body were displayed and discussed at length.

During the trial, one of my favorite fantasies involved watching understanding ignite in each juror’s eyes as I stood before the court with my own evidence. I would pass around the blue bow tie my father wore to the spring formal his sophomore year of high school. As a shy and introverted musical prodigy, he disliked school dances, but he took Patricia Himmel that year because she had just lost her father to cancer, she wanted desperately to go, and the fact that she had Down Syndrome discouraged other boys from asking her. He paid for her dress, called her a princess, and didn’t skip out on any slow songs. How could such a gentleman be anything but cooperative and composed when confronting his accusers? He was ashamed when he found out I spit on Nurse Mason, the head attendant of the ward.

Nurse Mason was a massive woman with big, blonde, teased hair and a smile with many meanings behind it. She acted sympathetic toward me at first, patting my shoulders and slipping me cellophane-wrapped sweets from her pockets. She held my hand in the halls so I wouldn’t be afraid of the other prisoners and the bars that clanged shut behind us. Then one day, while she talked to another attendant behind the desk where the medications were kept, I heard her refer to my father as “that ape.” She said it softly and meanly, sliding the words out with disgust. I could tell by her tone that it was something she said often. The next time she came to take me to him she received a mouthful of saliva in thanks.

My father shook his head, looked at his idle hands and said, “Corinne, you are fighting the wrong people.” He never stopped talking in riddles, even when our situation became desperate.

I say “our” situation because I believed then we were one person. Whenever I visited I would find him sitting on the cot, body limp, looking as black as night against the backdrop of his white prison. He would be right where I left him the previous visit. I tried to savor that hour and took in everything about him. I noted the new lines in his face and how much weight he had failed to keep on his already thin frame. I studied the stubble on his chin and the slope of his shoulders when he heaved sighs of resignation. I watched how he absently shifted his wire-rimmed glasses and the way his empty hands shook. He was used to holding a guitar or a saxophone and plunking away on a piano, his fingers moving with such speed and agility my eyeballs grew tired trying to keep up.

When they weren’t making art, his hands had always been busy taking care of me. He practiced perfecting recipes for chicken piccata and beef stroganoff. He carefully shampooed my kinky hair during bath time, lining up his rings on the edge of the tub so they wouldn’t catch in the tangles and make me cry out. He remembered to surround me with pillows to keep away the boogies when he tucked me in at night. He taught me how to strum his favorite acoustic, promising my sore fingertips would harden over time. He used both thumbs to squeeze playground splinters out of my palms, wincing whenever I whimpered.

It was torture for me, watching his fingers twitch from lack of use. My skin felt each tremor and broke out in goose bumps, as if his hands were grazing the sensitive spot on the nape of my neck instead of tapping his knees.

I wondered all the time if musicians could lose their gift. I was too afraid to ask. I didn’t want to remind him. Instead I would go home and touch my lips to his mouthpieces, letting the pulpy taste of his wooden reeds linger on my tongue. I would run my fingers over the black and ivory keys of his ancient upright, memorizing the scars cut into the wooden sides by time and use. I willed him to fly out of the hospital and momentarily possess my body.

He was in everything I did, everything I felt. I talked to him in my head, believing if I concentrated hard enough, the message would reach him. That way he was the first to know my eleventh birthday wish was to kiss Ollie Coulsen on the lips. Even though I couldn’t explain it to the school psychologist, my father knew why I slapped Hannah Malone after her prosecutor father did a presentation in front of the class during career week. When I stuck a tampon in the wrong hole during my first period he was the only person I told. He agreed that I looked best in black or purple in dressing room mirrors, and he didn’t care that I failed freshman biology. I knew he understood when I took a scalpel to dissect the frogs and rats and how the memory of my mother’s smooth sandalwood coffin in the funeral parlor paralyzed me.

I only excluded him from my mind when I thought about my mother. If my father knew how much I thought about her, it would have killed him. When I wasn’t worrying about him in his blanched cell, I remembered the way she would smile at nothing, as if her happiness floated in empty air. If I closed my eyes, images of her dancing in our kitchen filled the spotted darkness. She wore loose linen pants, long skirts, and flowing dresses; anything that billowed out when she moved, giving her a majestic quality. She had the kind of beauty that hurt. The kind that made people stare after her in the street. The kind that is too rare for a daughter to inherit. She kept her cinnamon brown shoulders bare and rolled back. She loved to laugh and did often, even when things were serious. Even when my father caught her slinking in during the quietest hours of the night, his mouth stern, but his eyes melting.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Reginald,” she would say, fluttering her hand in mild annoyance, dispersing faint traces of a stranger’s cologne into the air. Then she would beam at him and saunter over. “Come kiss your wife hello. Or good morning. Whichever you prefer.” And he would. He always obliged.

Standing at the top of the stairs in my cotton nightgown, watching this scene play out over and over, I learned to take my cues from my father and kept my distance, at least as much as a needy child could but, “Come brush Mama’s hair” or, “Watch Mama sew this shawl” were words I craved. Though most of the time she would send me away. “You’re cramping my style, kid.”

One of her favorite games was copycat. “Do like this, Corinne. Watch Mama and be a copycat.” I would be eating breakfast or watching cartoons when suddenly my mother would call me over to perform with her. She would strike some elegant pose from her brief modeling career or break out a complicated move from her childhood dance training. She made it impossible for me to mirror her, but I was never allowed to give up until she was thoroughly amused. She criticized my form and my inflexibility. She pointed out how hard I strained in my clumsy efforts while her movements came naturally. “What an ugly face you’re making. You look constipated, Corinne.”

My mother would assess me with one long finger prodding her pouting bottom lip. “How did I end up with her? Would you guess she’s mine? If there’s a god, I must be on punishment—Ma always said my wild teenage years would come back to bite me in the ass.” She took special pleasure in making my father agree with her comments.

“She’s mostly me,” he would say, keeping his gaze on my mother. “That’s not so bad.”

“And what man wants you?” was a typical response my father couldn’t get around. But he was always there when I dissolved into tears later on, away from her scornful smile. He never explained her behavior or tried to make excuses, but the shoulder I leaned on was solid and the hand that rubbed my back felt sure. I was grateful for these things.

My father’s older sister, my Aunt Flo, moved in right before his arraignment. She took it upon herself to rid the house of my mother’s presence. After the detectives swept through for evidence everything went into cardboard boxes, sealed and stored in the basement. I couldn’t tell Aunt Flo that I longed for just one picture of my mother.

One day, when I should have been fretting over pimples and my first homecoming dance, Aunt Flo showed me an exercise one of the doctors had assigned my father. On a yellow legal pad, his doctor had written “Sacrifices” at the top in ink. Using a blue crayon, my father crossed out the doctor’s title and replaced it with “Tradeoffs.” Directly below it he had scrawled “1.) Freedom.” Number two read, “Sanity.” Then there was a rough sketch of a dancing figure, more a flame than a person.

Aunt Flo shook her head. “He’s delusional.”

I bit back the reply my father would have given: “Love goes with delusion. Love welcomes delusion. It helps make it effective.” Instead I tried to match my aunt’s disgust with indignation. “They could’ve trusted him with a pen.”

But as always Aunt Flo saw through my attempt. I made it clear from the beginning whose side I was on. The day after my mother’s funeral, when my maternal grandparents tried to coax me into a hug, Aunt Flo watched with an open mouth as I pulled away. I said I never wanted to see them again because they looked and sounded just like her. Before that, I had always been Aunt Flo’s Corinne-baby-doll. After, Aunt Flo started to watch me out of the corners of her eyes.

“I’m waiting for his kind of crazy to come out. I know it’s in her. I’ve seen it,” Aunt Flo confessed to a friend over the phone. Aunt Flo thought she was being discreet shut up in the spare bedroom, but I was accustomed to listening through doors.

Once, my mother had pinched my arm until she drew blood, attempting to scare me onto my tip toes to practice pointe with her. My father sat me on the lid of the toilet, my heels not quite touching the floor, and handed me a Band-Aid covered with Big Bird’s face. Sighing into his cupped hands, he frowned at his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink.

“She was the first thing I ever really worshipped. She isn’t even human. Your mama’s a…a creature. How can I tame that? How can I muzzle her spirit? I’m just so blessed to be a part of her world.” There was a longing in his voice I mistook for sadness at the time. I wanted to believe he was sorry for our fate—that he knew he cleared the way that led my mother’s path of destruction straight towards us.

“Our first date she asked me how I planned on making her happy—that day and every day after. She said I would need to come up with something new every morning if I wanted to wake up beside her. I was dazzled. We were in a coffee shop and she asked me this. Didn’t even know my last name. Her words were too big for that place. She was too big for everything. Always has been. If we’re snowflakes, Corinne, she’s blizzard. You’ve got to remember that.”

The way she treated my father served as a constant reminder. She called him “my little drummer boy” in front of his students who came to the house for private lessons. Whenever he hosted struggling colleagues for weekend long stays, she would interrupt their jam sessions, drinking too much wine and saying things that made my father cough and clench his teeth. If he was receiving an honor, she was impossible. When they couldn’t find a babysitter, I would become a spectator alongside my father. It would start with my mother leaving me alone, scared and shaking, among strangers while she filled up at the bar. My father would follow the sound of my sobs and come and gather me in his arms. He always knew.

“Don’t cry. Salt is for the sea, not little girls in pretty dresses. Did she leave you again? She must be off misbehaving.”

That’s what he called it: misbehaving. He made it sound so simple, but I was always confused by what ensued. Usually, as my shy and modest father did his best to work the room, my mother would find a man or two to spend the evening with. Pins and needles were in her voice when she told me to wipe my mouth or not to wrinkle my outfit, but her words were syrupy sweet with the men. Suddenly, her feet couldn’t support her. Instead of her usual poise, she swayed into them and clasped their arms. Everything they said was funny. If she wasn’t laughing, she was telling secrets, her mouth dangerously close to their earlobes. My father pretended not to notice, but once we were trapped together inside the walls of our home my mother became, “loose” and “a disgrace” and “a bad influence.”

“Why do you insist on sabotaging our happiness?” he would ask after his short-lived rage melted down to anguish.

“You say it with such feeling, as if our happiness was more than a myth. Cry a little next time and maybe I’ll believe there’s something for me to sabotage.”

Later, he would interrupt a bedtime story to insist her cold response was the effect of alcohol. “She only sounded sober,” he would say as if the Berenstain Bears needed convincing.

She was careless about who called the house when my father was home. If it was a strange man my father would confront her, sometimes with tears in his eyes and sometimes with a raised hand that she confidently ignored. More than once, I witnessed my mother crying and pleading, her lithe body collapsing into him in such a way that he had to hold her in his arms to keep her off the floor. She clutched at his neck and pushed her lips against his collarbone, talking into his shoulder. “I’ll go. Say you don’t love me and I’m not worth it and I’ll go. Say it, Reginald. Say it just once and I’m gone. No more wife for you, no more mother for Corinne. Either you say it or we move on from this right now.”

My mother rewarded my father’s silence by leading him to their bedroom. If he held back or flat-out refused, asking for time and space to think over her latest betrayal, he was irresistible. “Jesus, not in front of Corinne. How can you be thinking about that right now? How can you expect me to with all this sitting in our laps, weighing us down?” As my father scolded, she would start to undress, limbs playful, prancing out of arm’s reach if he attempted to cover her. To preserve my innocence my father ended up in the bedroom before too much skin was revealed.

Everything my mother attempted, she mastered. The first time she picked up a tennis racket she managed to play with the same amount of style and moxie that she put into posing for a picture. Her vintage sewing machine was a Christmas present and by Valentine’s Day of that same season she was putting the finishing touches on my Christening gown. When she decided she wanted to sing, only an award-winning opera singer would do for a vocal coach. My father was in constant awe of my mother’s inclination towards perfection, but she wielded it like a weapon against him. “Golf is not rocket science. I’m the one with the bad shoulder and look at my swing. You’re such an embarrassment, I almost want to tell people you have a defect.”

All the ways in which my mother was superior replaced nursery rhymes and bedtime stories and hand games. Instead of cookie recipes and the secret of where babies come from, my mother shared my father’s shortcomings with me. “Six years of Spanish in high school and college and that’s how he pronounced it! The first time I walked in France, the natives thought I was one of their own. And I picked up the language in the dressing and work rooms of designers.”

Her honey-do lists were usually composed late in the evenings after she had drained her fifth gin and tonic and filled an ashtray with butts. While brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror the next morning, my father faced post-it notes with tasks like “Grow a pair” or “Ditch the nerdy tweeds” written in an angry scrawl.

If he had to travel for performances, my mother suddenly forgot how to take care of herself and a child. “You’re leaving me, again? How can you do this, Reginald? What do I do? What do you expect me to do?” During those trips, neglecting me served as his punishment for choosing to go. My mother didn’t seem to care that she was punishing me as well, but what bothered me more was that my father never ceased to be surprised when he came home to empty pantry shelves and the rank smell that wafted from my unwashed armpits.

If he needed to be alone with her—if he needed just one kind word or glance or touch to get him through the day—she became as frigid and dense as a statue. She pretended not to know how to read his body language or his thoughts. He became a stranger. “Don’t look at me like that, Reginald. You’re like a creepy old man at a dark bus terminal or something. If those are bedroom eyes then I’m the Virgin Mary.”

Everything he was passionate about she found fault with. “Reginald composed a piece the other day. It’s cute, I guess. Kinda long and drawn out.” A shrug and a smirk. “He tries.” This was her small talk when asked about her husband and his life’s work. If someone praised him she would tilt her head to the side and furrow her brow in mild perplexity until the person grew doubtful and trailed off. If they talked about his awards and titles and recognition, she looked away like she was listening to a buzzing in her ear until the subject changed.

Slowly and painfully, my father became as dull as she wanted him to be. The lively jazz compilations he was known for were replaced by somber marches and overtures suited more for high school bands than dance clubs. His friends dwindled and he spent his weekends shuffling through files that didn’t need organizing or using a good portion of the kitchen table for games of solitaire. His jokes became ordinary and obvious and when Aunt Flo came to visit she would say things like, “Are you taking your vitamins, Reginald? You look so flat.”

At the time, I didn’t see any danger in his deliberate retreat. Like an obedient daughter, I followed in his footsteps. We became mundane to make room for my mother’s brilliance. Our lives revolved around my mother and we accepted this. We accepted this because she would dish out her cruelty with a smile and a laugh. She made light of every pain she inflicted on us with a kiss and a broken promise. This was what my father chose for us. She was what he wanted, and I wanted everything he wanted. I would have lived out my life and perished in her shadow, but one day she never came out of her bedroom to make her morning espresso.

Instead, my father shook me awake when the light on my bedroom floor was still gray. As he helped me dress, his gaze kept trailing over to rest on the wall separating my room from the one he shared with my mother. After my sandals were strapped on, we stood by my window, taking turns imitating the early morning birdsong. Our whistles filled the air, replacing the heavy silence of new death. When the sun was higher in the sky my father sent me over to the next-door neighbor’s to play with their dog. The next thing I knew, I was attending my mother’s funeral. I was only nine and she would have been thirty the next month. Now I lie awake in bed at night—guilt strangling the deep breaths I struggle to take—wondering why I chose not to hear the sirens over the wooden fence as I let my hands become sticky with canine kisses.

My first therapist once asked if I missed my mother and I considered my last visit to see my father. I kept probing for details about the progress of his trial that I wasn’t allowed to sit in on. The adults that made the decisions in my life—Aunt Flo and the lawyers—felt it was too traumatizing for a ten year old. All my father wanted to talk about was juror number seven’s habit of smoothing the edges of her hair with the flats of her palms just like she used to. “It’s mesmerizing. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”

“Missing her would be a treat.” I tried to make my voice as deadpan as possible but the therapist told me not to resort to passive aggressiveness in our sessions. Then, remembering my age, she explained what passive aggressive meant. I told her I needed a new therapist.

“Your mother ages me,” he would say whenever she failed to come home in the evening. He was much older than her. At the time of her death he was in his late fifties. Even in my earliest memories, my father’s hair was pepper gray. He preferred expensive Italian loafers over sneakers and shaved with an old fashioned blade.

He was too old to put up with it all. He was too goddamn gentle. Every week I would visit my father. His eyes would lose their fear when they locked on mine. “Hello, cupcake,” he would say with gravel in his voice. It was probably the first thing he uttered on those days. Those two words and those eyes that he softened just for me left me speechless sometimes. I just stared as the unshed tears backed up in my throat. Several visits ended with me straining against the arms of the attendants. I considered myself more useful than the lawyers and so I welcomed the feeling of my muscles growing tired. I measured our success by how many bruises I collected from firm handgrips. On bad days they threatened to have me banned from the ward. I later found out he wouldn’t eat if they didn’t let me come. That was his only rebellion over the years.

I fought for him in so many ways. After he opted out of the appeal process I believed for a while the incident with the fire was a part of our crusade to clear his name. The thing with my wrists was harder to explain to my psychiatrists. When I told them I had to spill enough blood for my father to feel my love for him despite the distance, they suggested time apart. They considered keeping me away from him beneficial to my mental stability, but I saw it as another test.

“I did it, cupcake. I did it and nothing you do can undo it. We are all guilty of something in life and this is my guilt to live with. Stop trying to prove my innocence.”

His voice was even and steady, yet I had to clutch the cold metal of his cell door as the floor pitched beneath me. I couldn’t get over the shock of this contradiction. It distracted me as he searched my face, trying to gauge my reaction, as if it mattered anymore.

I was seventeen by then and my father was becoming frail. Aunt Flo and my doctors had kept us apart for almost a year. In preparation for the time of our reunion I chopped off my hair, using a razor blade so it sat on my head in nappy tufts. I spent hours in the sun, darkening my skin to a burnt black. I skipped meals to keep my hips and chest from filling out to match my mother’s curves, feeding my hunger with sugarless gum and cotton balls. My father would not find any traces of my mother in me.

“I would have believed in you forever,” I said. I would have believed you were innocent until I died,” I whispered, looking at my bandaged wrists. The gauze wasn’t necessary anymore, but I wore it like a name tag. Hello, my name is Reginald’s damaged goods. I forgot who I was without it.

“Well, now you can move on. We can move on.”

I touched the thick sleeve of his hospital robe with my fingertips and resisted the urge to ask him where he thought we could possibly go. I had learned long ago to synchronize my breathing with the hum of the radiator beneath his barred window.

On the long car ride to outpatient therapy later that day, Aunt Flo felt like trying to understand us. Occasionally, she would get homesick for a healthy family. “How did it happen? How did they happen? How did you happen, Corinne?”

I thought puzzling out reasons and searching for meanings was pointless. I still embraced my self-abasement like a swooning lover. Accepting that everything was partially my fault made it easier to bear the weight of his hand covering mine.

I could’ve told Aunt Flo about how my mother and father met. He spotted her in a crowded bar after his set and when he finally approached she gave him a once-over and said around her cigarette, “I’d ruin you.”

My father proposed eight times before she said yes. She was a year and a half into her modeling career and was already tired of the competition. She confessed matrimony was a way to pass time.

“Everybody had high cheekbones,” she used to say. “Everybody had a dancer’s body. Everybody, everybody, everybody—it got so that they were looking for the freaks among us. Who had the twiggy legs, the androgynous face structure, the fish lips? Plain old stunning wasn’t enough for those pricks.”

But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe these intricacies were created by time and for the love of my father.

I was eight and a half the day my mother decided she wanted to color with me. It must have been the middle of winter because more than anything, I remember the sound of her thick wool socks sliding across the wood floors. She ordered me to bring out my markers and crayons and set my father’s newest composition in front of me. It was one he had struggled over for months and his only full copy. My mother gave me her best and brightest smile but I smelled the trap. The excitement that lit up her face had a disturbing sheen to it. I refused and we argued until her sharp reproaches produced tears. Scoffing, she took up a marker and scribbled by herself.

When my mother grew bored with coloring she rooted in my toy chest until she found glitter, glue, and stickers. As the stiff black marks dotting the bars of music disappeared beneath her work, she hummed over the sound of my sniffles. When she had destroyed all fifteen sheets of music she placed them back on the piano bench where my father quickly found them.

She let him scream and rage at me for what seemed like an eternity before stealing into my bedroom and putting her color-stained fingers between me and his fury. “What do you think? Am I the next Matisse? Or maybe it reminds you more of a Picasso?”

My father said nothing. His chest heaved from trying to catch his breath and his eyes rolled everywhere around my room but in her direction. My mother’s presence used to captivate my father so much that watching her had been an occupation that absorbed him completely. Yet that afternoon he couldn’t study her collarbone and her calves to dodge the messy reality she threw in his face. The idea of her no longer served as his own personal oasis.

“Well, Reginald, what’s next? Are you going to punish me? Make me sorry?” She laughed. “You won’t be able to. You can’t make me feel responsible for your hurt feelings. You came to me with your internal weaknesses—batteries not included.”

I knew even then by the way she squared off in front of my father—her shoulders stanch while his sagged—that they had reached someplace beyond the damaged music.

The next week when I went to the hospital, I could tell he wasn’t present. I caught him standing by his window, looking over the grounds.

“I had a dream,” he said, “that your mother forgave me and you were better. You were better and it was beautiful.”

I didn’t respond. The suffering that usually tumbled from his slumped shoulders to sprawl across the space between us was missing.

“They let me out to use the piano in the rec room sometimes. It needs some tuning, but it’ll do. It’s going to get better. We’ll be okay. You’ll see, cupcake.” He smiled her smile—full of broken promises.

I donated his instruments to a local middle school and dumped his Oxford ties at a Goodwill. Now I dream of gangly boys with braces blowing spit into his trumpets and homeless men on corners causing the pedestrians to wonder why someone in designer loafers would need their spare change.

I have learned to converse with myself, think comforting thoughts when I can’t stop tugging at my earlobes, or after I realize I laughed too loud at something that wasn’t funny. When I remember to eat three solid meals a day my therapist smiles and says the equation is working: me + distance from the white cell = progress. But my heart throws up the word progress and grasps the memory of that day when he told me about the piano in the rec room with the same tenderness and need that dripped from his mouth whenever he uttered “cupcake.”

I never went back. I don’t know how to live with his truths. If people ask after him, I say, “My father is dead.” If people who read the papers and followed the news updates ask about what he did, I remember how important it is to look them in the eye as I say, “My father was an artist.”

—Lindsay Norville

——————–

Lindsay Norville received her B.A. from Emerson College with a concentration in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and a psychology minor. She graduated magna cum laude within three years. During her freshman year of undergrad, she self-published a novel entitled Cracked Up with a small local press, The Troy Book Makers. She wrote Cracked Up when she was thirteen. She recently had a short story published in PANK. This fall she will start in the MFA program in fiction at Syracuse University.

The End of the Story: Fiction — Liliana Heker

Apr 132012

Liliana Heker’s novel The End of the Story begins with a description of a woman “born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass” and then leaps back over the decades to the beginning of the Argentinian Dirty War when youth and History collided in a spasm of hope and political violence and civil cannibalism. Heker is a woman engaged with History and Memory. But her History and the Memories are different, are at the antipodes, as it were, of the North American cultural experience. Her school girl revolutionaries sing rousing songs from the Spanish Civil War and join the Communist Party to fight fascism. Try to get your minds around the difference between Madonna singing the faux heroic, sentimental “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Spy3Nd2D6w and Joe Strumm singing “AY CARMELA!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1eEW5VTqNM (the song referred to here as “The Army of the Ebro”). The chapter here presented begins with storytelling, loops back to school girl friends laughing innocently together, then knots in a Judas like moment of betrayal. The End of the Story was translated by Andrea Labinger and will be published later this month by Biblioasis. Wonderful to find this book and have it here on NC.

One

Anyone watching the olive-skinned woman walk along Montes de Oca that October afternoon would have thought that she had been born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass. It had to be true. Even those who would disparage her years later would have noticed it somehow, seeing her advance towards Suárez like someone who has always known exactly where she was going. Diana Glass herself, who at that very moment was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her balcony – eyes closed, face upturned to the sun like an offering – must have thought so because sometime later she would jot down in her notebook with the yellow pages: She was born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass. Although a certain ironic expression (or was it just wisdom enough to soften the expression, to de-emphasize it) crossed her mind like a bolt of malice: Is that necessarily a virtue?

She was tormented by these distractions, which, from her very first notation on a paper napkin at Café Tiziano, kept diverting the course of the story. Not to mention the reality that, from that napkin to this haven on the balcony, had flung her – one might say – from hope to horror, and which (though neither one of them knew it), at that moment when the olive-skinned woman unhesitatingly turned off Suárez, heading towards Isabel La Católica, would once again begin to unravel her tale.

Strictly speaking, Diana Glass, who now opened her eyes and gazed admiringly at a bougainvillea blooming on the opposite balcony, hadn’t even decided where to begin: with the spring morning when a tree fell on her head and the two of them – or at least she – thought about death for the first time, or with a freezing, dusty July afternoon fourteen years later – when death had already begun to be a less remote eventuality, although it hadn’t yet become that chill on the back of the neck every time one turned the key in the lock to enter one’s house – as she waited nearly a half-hour for her at the entrance of the school, staring insistently towards the corner of Díaz Vélez and Cangallo so not to miss the elation – or the relief? – of seeing her arrive.

The name she was going to give her, on the other hand, was something she had decided right away. Leonora. Not because it had anything to do with her real name (less melodious), but rather because it went well with that face, with its high cheekbones and olive skin, still smiling at me from the last photo, and it suited that jaunty girl who, if Diana Glass had simply begun with that unpleasant July afternoon in 1971, would by now have burst out of Díaz Vélez onto the page, waving with such an old, familiar gesture that it would have made Diana forget her fear for a few seconds.

Later, it was different. The other woman had barely finished waving her arm, her features hazily coming into focus, when the relief would be replaced by a premonition of catastrophe.

It should be pointed out that Diana Glass is nearsighted and that, at the time of that meeting with Leonora, she refused to wear glasses. Her explanation was that the few things worth seeing in detail usually end up moving closer to you (or you to them) and besides, a nearsighted person’s view doesn’t just have the advantage of being polysemic: it is also incomparably more beautiful than a normal person’s. “Just think about the sky after dark,” she once said. “I swear, the first night I went out on the balcony wearing glasses, I almost cried. The real moon has no resemblance to that enormous, mystical halo I see.” And, she added, the diffuse forms allow a limitless range of imagination, as if the world had been created by some over-the-top impressionist.

These are the sort of interruptions that disturbed her. (Absurdity has invaded the story, she wrote, though not in the notebook with yellow pages, which she reserved for episodes that were more or less relevant, but rather on the back of one of those printed ledger sheets that she haphazardly filled: papers with a predetermined function exempted her from assigning one to them herself and allowed her madness to spill out unrestrained. Absurdity has invaded the story, has invaded History. Nothing could be truer. She was plunging into History; perversely, doing so prevented her from dealing with the purely historical, despite her belief that history was the only thing that made any sense.) For example, she was unable to assess the exact quality of her fear at the school doorway (assuming, of course, that the fear was historical) without noting her surprise at the fact that the closer the woman got, the more unfamiliar she became, and how could she explain that phenomenon without mentioning her myopia? But if the beginning was hesitant, the ending was alarmingly blank. Nothing. Just a little faith and a few old photographs. And a very immediate fear lodging at the back of her head as she turned the key in the lock of her front door – and at this very moment – and didn’t go with the light of this October afternoon in 1976, a light that illuminated the bougainvillea, adorned Buenos Aires, and mercilessly enhanced the olive skin of the woman who has now turned off Suárez and is heading towards Isabel La Católica.

The trees on Plaza Colombia catch her by surprise. It’s as if something dangerously vital – more suitable to a jungle than to this grey street with its stone church – as if an unscrupulous thirst for life had forced them to overflow the plaza, invade the sidewalk of Isabel La Católica and bury the unfortunate Church of Santa Felícitas beneath an avalanche of joy.

She has one desire: not to go to the meeting at the house with the white door where Fernando, the Thrush, and two others must already be waiting for her, not suspecting the contents of one of the two letters she hides in the false bottom of her purse. To run away towards Plaza Colombia, that’s her precise desire. This, however, doesn’t disturb her, as the purple explosion of bougainvillea has disturbed Diana Glass to the point of forcing her to leave the balcony and walk to the library. Both of them loved the sun, she thinks, like someone who’s writing it down (or like someone making excuses for herself) – as she did so often in those days – and she takes out the box with the photos of the trip to Mendoza.

There they are, the two of them. Among vineyards, on top of a stone block, on the shoulders of a couple of drunks, on a suspension bridge, thumbing their noses, in wide-brimmed hats, always laughing and embracing and a bit outrageous among the group of brand-new – and slightly foolish – schoolteachers.

The woman who at this moment is walking through the imitation jungle that spills out of Plaza Colombia lifts her head for a moment, allowing the sun filtering through the leaves to flicker on her face without thinking: I was born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass.

It might not displease her if someone else thought it for her. That’s true! she would exclaim if she knew about this assessment of her person that Diana Glass is about to make. She knows how to delight in other people’s words and put them at her service when necessary.

But she doesn’t need to define herself in order to confirm her existence. Accustomed to action and to charging headlong at everything in her way, she knows she exists because her body (and what’s a brain but a part of that body?) displaces the air as she moves, leaving an exact impression on the world. And if she hasn’t slowed her pace, if she hasn’t gone running towards Plaza Colombia, following her heart’s song, if she’s left the trees behind, guiltlessly abandoning this fleeting, intoxicating desire, if now, without a speck of desire, she’s about to head proudly and resolutely towards Wenceslao Villafañe, it’s because, even now when her world seems to be tumbling down, she’s still capable of brushing aside all trivialities in the name of what she’s convinced she needs to do.

But with Celina Blech’s arrival (when vacation ended, in the time of the tree), something began to change. Celina, too, had read Captains of the Sands and had sung “The Army of the Ebro,” but she possessed a quality Leonora and I lacked: she could unhesitatingly state who was a revolutionary and who was a counter-revolutionary. Heraclitus? she said. Heraclitus was a revolutionary, and Berkeley was, without a doubt, a reactionary. Listening to her was amazing: standing beside the bench, flanked by girls who crossed themselves before class and went to dances at the club with their mothers every Saturday, and by girls who neither crossed themselves nor took their mothers along to dances but who didn’t seem too impressed by Heraclitus’s revolutionary powers either, she had the guts, in front of the philosophy teacher, an active member of Catholic Action, to obliterate Berkeley with a swipe of her pen for his notorious inability to start a revolution. The daughter of a poetic Communist shoemaker of the old guard, she behaved with the confidence of someone who has always known where the world is going and who moves it. It was she who taught us to read Marx. How could anyone forget the leap of the heart, the jubilant certainty (for me, too) that the world was marching along a happy course, when reading for the first time that a spectre is haunting Europe ? And every week, concealed in an innocent-looking package, she brought us a copy of CommunistYouth magazine.

She never flaunted her superiority before Leonora or me – she was good-natured, a comrade, and she had little patience for the rock and roll that, despite “The Army of the Ebro” with its rumbalabumbalabumbambá and its Ay, Carmela, Leonora and I kept dancing to frenetically during our Saturday assaults – but that latent superiority was there, nonetheless, and soon it would become apparent. In all other respects we were similar: all three of us loved the Romantic poet Esteban Echeverría and despised Cornelio Saavedra, the head of Argentina’s first junta; all three of us resonated to the verses of Nicolás Guillén; all three declared, with the élan of Spanish Republicans at the very moment of victory, that the invading troops rumbalabumbalabumbambá got a well-deserved trouncing, Ay, Carmela. So we sang and so we were that winter of 1958 when History invaded our peaceful Teachers’ Prep School in the Almagro District.

Later we would learn that it had been there all along, that, without realizing it, we had noticed it among the small events woven by our personal memories. Chaotically and without any sign – or with some fortuitous sign – I preserved the memory of that morning in grade two when they made us leave school early because some general had tried to oust Perón (whom I imagined as eternal and omnipresent, since he had been in the world when I was born and since my mother had forbidden me to pronounce his name in vain); the slogan Free the Rosenbergs, read on the walls of forgotten streets; the outrage of some older cousins at the phrase “Boots, Yes; Books, No”; the hoarse voice of a news hawker shouting War in Korea; and a secret, incommunicable envy when, in the movie newsreel children who weren’t me travelled through the Children’s City by bus like fortunate dwarves; a certain initial disbelief in the face of death the day the Air Force bombed the Plaza de Mayo; an almost literary emotion when a group of men, in a hidden place called Sierra Maestra, prepared to free Cuba – a remote country about which only “The Peanut Vendor” and Blanquita Amaro’s ebullient thighs were familiar to me; the bitter or dejected faces of some bricklayers one late September morning in 1955. Random fragments jumbled together in my memory, with the German acrobats around the Obelisk, with a butcher named Burgos who had scattered pieces of his girlfriend throughout Buenos Aires, with a nine-year-old girl who had drowned in Campana and who could be seen, brutally depicted at the moment she went under, on a page of La Razón. Scraps of something whose ultimate shape seemed – continues to seem – impossible.

And we would also come to know the dizzying sensation of imagining ourselves submerged in History. Because one day soon, reality would be shaped so that everything – I mean everything – that occurred on earth would be happening to us. The Cuban Revolution and the war in Vietnam would be ours; the antagonism between China and the Soviet Union and the distant echoes of men who, in the Americas or in Africa or in every oppressed corner of the planet, lifted their heads: all of it would be our business. We fleetingly attempted to figure out the meaning of our lives. And we would live with the startling revelation – and the strange reassurance – of understanding that the world could not do without our deeds.

But that was the end of the winter of 1958 when, as proper young students, we recited the lesson from Astolfi’s History and sang that bombs are powerless rumbalabumbalabumbambá if you just have heart, ay Carmela; that September of 1958 when History came to Mohammed. It awakened the universities, shook the entire nation, invaded classrooms for the first time, and at the peaceful Teachers’ Prep with its wisteria-covered patio, it left no stone unturned.

I wonder now if it might have been a gift, a blessing whose uniqueness we were unaware of: to be fifteen years old and to have a compelling cause. Everything seemed so clear that late winter and the following spring: on one side were the people, behind a goal as incontrovertible as universal education; on the other side, the government, allied with the power of the church in order to impose its dogmatic, elitist lesson. It didn’t matter if the motives of either side were less than transparent. At fifteen, beneath the budding wisteria and with a motto that seemed to condense all possible good and evil for the species – secular and free, we said, confident that we were encompassing the universe – we believed we could confirm forever those words we read as though they were anointed: the people’s cause is a righteous cause; all righteous causes lead to victory; we have a role to play in that road to victory.

The headiness of the struggle, combined with the golden wine of adolescence – wasn’t that our touchstone, the stamp that marked us? I look around me on this particularly dark night in 1976 and can see only death and ravaged flesh, and yet I keep on stubbornly typing these words, perhaps because I can’t tear hope from my heart. Because once you’ve tasted that early wine, you cannot, do not want to give it up.

I see I’ve gotten mired in melancholy, but that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about certain domestic problems.

We’ve already established that there were three of us muses, three of us in the vanguard, and that our task was nothing less than to rouse a group of nice, future schoolteachers who hadn’t asked to be roused and who, more than anything else, aspired to matrimony. It wasn’t easy. Personally, I can say that I killed myself haranguing those young hordes, prodding them to organize and strike. I closed the eyes of my soul and hurled myself headlong into the jumble of my prose. Only in this way could I fulfill my mission. Because if I stopped for one second to reflect, I risked reaching a conclusion that would render me silent: I had no faith that my words could change a single one of those heads turned towards me with detached curiosity. In other words, my political career was in doubt. Leonora, on the other hand . . . That September, dressed in her white school smock, she revealed herself to us like a Pasionaria. She spoke, and Argentina became a burning rose, crying out for justice. How could we not follow her? Behind her magnetic words, the holier-than-thou declaimers of Astolfi and the blasphemers, the virginal and the deflowered, agreed to join the strike. Even the holdouts showed their mettle: ignited with reactionary passion, they brandished their faith in the Church and their disgust with the popular cause like a banner. No one remained indifferent when Leonora spoke. In the classrooms where small, private dreams had nestled for years, a political conscience began to grow like a new flower.

Not only did she defy the school authorities (they expelled her at the end of the year, despite her excellent average): her father, whom she loved (and whom I secretly wished was my own father), the brilliant Professor Ordaz, an old-school idealist, loquacious defender of public education and friend of writers, was a government official who therefore (and in other ways) betrayed the dreams of his constituency. To oppose a government plan was to defy her father. But I was the only one who knew that. The others saw whatever they saw: a tall adolescent with a gypsy’s face. And perhaps they believed less in her words – acquired words that she effortlessly made her own – than in the uncompromising, vibrant voice that pronounced them.

So it was that Leonora became the architect of that unusual thing that was becoming apparent in the prep school of the wisterias. But the one who pulled the strings was Celina. In secret meetings with the few Communist youths at the school, she formulated policies that came (as we later learned) from a higher authority. We two were her allies in the field, her confidantes and friends. It wasn’t for nothing that she taught us a secret, last stanza that we sang quietly, savouring the nectar of rebellion: and if Franco doesn’t like the tricolour flag (rumbalabumbalabumbambá, ay, Carmela), we’ll give him a red one with a hammer and sickle (ay, Carmela). But we didn’t interfere in her decisions.

I can’t say that being left out bothered me. I’ve already stated that early on – and not without some conflict – I had accepted the fact that politics wasn’t my destiny. Besides, on the wall of my room I had a poster of Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” and in my soul was the melancholy of being “the grey beret and the peaceful heart.” I loved the rustic nobility of Maciste the blacksmith and Raúl González Tuñón’s verses; I was rocked in the cradle of Communism and didn’t mind having decisions made for me.

Leonora, on the other hand, wasn’t one to let herself be rocked. Shortly after that September, she told me she had a secret to share with me. It must have still been springtime because the memory of it blends with a certain perfume and with an almost painfully intense awareness of being alive.

She had slipped her arm around my shoulder and, as on so many other occasions, we started walking along Plaza Almagro. A habitual gesture, that embrace, clearly required by the four inches she had on me and by a certain matriarchal attitude she always assumed. We both liked – or now I think we both liked – to walk like that, as though feeling the other’s body made us strong enough to sustain the universal laws we invented right then and there as we walked along, which were designed to eradicate stupidity, injustice, and unhappiness from the earth. I was the lawmaker, quite adept at inventing theories for everything, though too shy or carried away to convince anyone who didn’t know me as well as Leonora did; so it was she, not I, who was in charge of using those arguments whenever the time came.

But that afternoon there were no arguments or theories. There was a revelation that shook me. I’ve thought a lot about her decision that spring. Maybe I still think about it, and maybe that’s the real reason I’m writing these words.

“I have to tell you a secret,” Leonora said as we walked arm in arm. “I’ve joined the Communist Youth.”

Her activism didn’t change things between us, at least not until she met Fernando. We told each other more secrets, and on our graduation trip (in spite of her expulsion, everyone, even her enemies, wanted her to come along), we scandalized the other newly credentialed teachers, as one can see in the photos. But without a doubt, something seemed to change in Celina Blech, whose knowledge of Berkeley now dazzled me somewhat less. Leonora had loaned me Politzer’s The Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and there they all were: Berkeley and Heraclitus and Locke and Aristotle and Descartes, fixing their positions definitively for or against the revolution.

I ran into Celina last year. She told me she had an important position in a multinational company – she’s a chemical engineer – and that she was about to go to Canada to work. I can’t stand this violence, she told me, and we talked about the violence of the Argentine Anti-Communist Association and about the madness that the rebel group, the Montoneros, was committing in their desperation. The worst part isn’t the fear of death, she said; the worst part is that now I don’t even know which side the bullet might hit me from. I asked her if she was still a Party member. She smiled condescendingly, like someone who had long ago forgiven the girl she once was. She asked me about Leonora. I told her I didn’t know where she was, and I wasn’t lying. How could I know her whereabouts that threatening winter of 1975?

She’s no longer thinking about trees. She’s walking along Wenceslao Villafañe, heading towards Montes de Oca. This might seem baffling to a spectator following behind her: why take such a roundabout route to go a single block? What the spectator wouldn’t understand is that, except for a deceptive interval containing an embrace that Diana Glass categorized as triumphant and belonging to the realm of hope, for some five years now the mere act of moving from one place to another has obliged her to undertake some disorienting manoeuvres. She knows – she is, or has been, a more than competent physicist – that in Euclidean terms, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but it isn’t always the safest. And a leader, above all, must always have her own security in mind, as Diana thought five years earlier, beneath a dusty sky.

She’s late because she couldn’t risk waiting for me. The thought doesn’t comfort Diana: for the last few minutes, she’s done nothing but gaze towards Díaz Vélez and towards Cangallo with little spastic turns. A waste of time, useless, since it’s unlikely she’ll be able to recognize her from so far away, as she used to do at the time the tree fell on her head. Not only because on this July afternoon, she’s much more nearsighted than she was that spring (a surprisingly early spring, or so it seemed to me because never before – and never since – did I feel so intensely the fragrance of the wisterias at the Prep School or the pleasure of walking down the street bare-armed. Everything was happening for the first time that spring when I was fourteen. Life, I said to myself, is something formidable that knocks you over like a wave and which not everyone can feel in its total splendour. “The two of us, you understand, we really do know how to feel life, the transformation of life, in our own bodies.” I liked those words: transformation, life, bodies; I loved words because they were capable of preserving each thing in its perfection. Leonora needed them less than I did because Leonora was her dark body, and she especially was her hair, long and coppery, heavily undulating to the rhythm of that body. And yet, during that spring of 1957, words and things were inseparable for me, as well. Wisteria was a melody and a perfume and a shade of blue, as if everything around me had conspired to make me happy), not only, as I say, because on this July day she’s more nearsighted than she was that spring, but also because she can’t even be very sure of recognizing her from a distance.

They’ve seen one another only three times in the last ten years, under precarious conditions: the first time, at the Ordaz home, among old pots and pans, dying of laughter at age nineteen because they understood – or cared – very little about such chores, but nostalgic in spite of their laughter, or at least Diana was nostalgic, watching, a bit mystified, as Leonora put together an outlandish trousseau because she was going to marry the most beautiful – and the purest, Diana would think one night at a party – militant Communist in the College of Sciences: Fernando Kosac, with his grey eyes and transparent gaze. They seemed like a lovely adolescent couple from some Russian film, she would think nine years later as she read the police reports in the paper. The second time was also at the Ordaz place – Fernando was on a trip, she explained without further clarification – when their daughter Violeta was born, and Leonora, always knowing her place in the world, was all bosom, milk, and opulence. The third time was during an encounter so fleeting that she didn’t even have time to look at her friend carefully. Diana walked through the Ordazes’ front door at the exact moment when Leonora was rushing out, so they bumped into each other. They exchanged a kiss, and Leonora, one second before shooting out the door, said, “They killed Vandor.”

It was surprising, but not so much the death itself. At that time, history still seemed logical to Diana, as did death. And a traitor was a traitor. Stumbling unmethodically, history marched irrevocably forward. That’s the way it was. Only she, always so speculative, didn’t have the time or the desire to stop and think that “forward” was as perfectly opaque an expression as “yonder” or “in the olden days,” capable of obscuring more than just history.

It was surprising because the tone didn’t match the meaning. As if she really had said Violeta has a fever. They killed Vandor: that’s why I have to leave in a hurry.

“We’ll talk another day, when there’s more time.”

But there was no time. Because, as always, ever since their return from the trip to Mendoza, life carried them along divergent paths.

And so they hadn’t met again since the day before that dusty afternoon, if you can call something that happened in the intersection of two incompatible dimensions a “meeting.” Diana, lying in bed, reading the paper and drinking mate, and Leonora fleeing to who knows where, from an announcement on the police report page.

What the report said:

That a highly dangerous terrorist cell had been uncovered. That the boldness of its constituents was immeasurable. That the subversives had been planning to blow up the official booth on July 9, when the Argentine and Uruguayan presidents and their entire retinues would be watching the parade. That to that end they had planned to use a fuel truck they had stolen in Nueva Pompeya, loaded with ten thousand litres of gasoline.

The question that crossed Diana’s mind (momentarily interrupting her reading): How do you steal a fuel truck? And this query generated what threatened to become an unending chain of thoughts, starting with the initial question: how do you steal a fuel truck? This chain led nowhere and was destined merely to chase its own tail, to spin meaninglessly around the woman lying in bed, thinking (there’s a sort of action that’s totally alien to someone accustomed to thinking in bed while drinking mate, she wrote, embarrassed or melancholic, that same afternoon on the back of a deposit slip) and indirectly wondering: Would I be capable of stealing one? And even more incisive: Do I have any right to speak of revolution, to want a revolution, when I can’t even steal a fuel truck? This precipitated a conflict that threatened to degenerate into another, indirect question leading to unforeseeable conclusions, specifically: If I were certain that stealing the fuel truck would lead unfailingly to revolution, would I steal it? This, in turn, seemed to hide the corollary: it isn’t certain that stealing the fuel truck would lead to revolution. Suddenly, a name, casually noticed on the newspaper page, yanked her abruptly from those Byzantine musings.

What was that name? Kosac.

What she did next: she turned back and read: It all began at dawn on Wednesday, when police personnel armed with rifles raided an apartment at the intersection of Juan B. Justo and San Martín. The police managed to collect a large quantity of subversive data and materials that led to further measures being taken. The place was vacant, but neighbours informed this newspaper that it had been occupied by a young couple named Kosac and their approximately five-year-old daughter. These two subjects were among those individuals most actively sought by the police. “They were very friendly,” affirmed a neighbour who refused to give her name. “Very nice; they always greeted me in the elevator.”

She didn’t steal a fuel truck, but she did take action in her own way: got up, got dressed, grabbed a taxi, and fifteen minutes later was standing before the Ordazes. I’m here for whatever Leonora needs, brave little soldier raised on the Maid of Orléans and Tacuari’s Drum. Which led her to receive an anonymous call the next day: My dad said you wanted to see me, and even before recognizing the caller’s voice, she recognized the turn of phrase, crystallized in her childhood like a school snapshot.

For which reason she’s been waiting for half an hour at the entrance of the school, looking first towards one corner and then another with a not altogether unwarranted fear, since something more suited to a morbid imagination than to the realm of possibilities was happening that winter of 1971. Not long before, a lawyer had disappeared, and just a few days earlier, they took away a young couple. The man’s bullet-riddled body had been found in a ditch, but no one knew anything about the girl, and that was more terrible than the fear of torture or death; it was a black hole containing all possible horrors, something they hadn’t been prepared for, she thought, referring to herself and Leonora one specific summer night, singing their hearts out by the river, as though the joy of being adolescents and the need to change the world and the heroic ballad of a defeat were one and the same thing (Mother, don’t stop me for even one minute / for my life’s of no value if Franco is in it), not realizing, or not realizing entirely, that they were beginning to become impassioned with death.

No, not impassioned: familiar (as the olive-skinned woman who was about to reach Montes de Oca might have corrected her). And once you become familiar with death, nothing is ever the same.

But the one who waited for her at the entrance of the school five years earlier wouldn’t have understood her, since, even though she’s beginning to fear death, she’s hasn’t yet passed through a time of death that the one about to turn onto Montes de Oca knows quite well, since she’s seen death at close range, has planned deaths, and, with a firm hand and even firmer resolve, has killed a man.

The one who waits tries to forget about death. She thinks – has thought: she’s late because a leader must think about her own safety above all; she couldn’t risk waiting for me there. Which very feebly minimizes an unbearable idea: something has happened to Leonora, and another, even more miserable thought: the phone call was tapped; the man at the kiosk who hasn’t taken his eyes off me for a while now is there to take us both away, and what if Leonora doesn’t come? A thought that remains happily incomplete because in the distance, on Díaz Vélez, waving with her arm in the air just as she did during the spring of the fallen tree, Diana sees – or thinks she sees – that person who, now, five years later, with a haughty gait and a haphazard detour, is entering the same street she left ten minutes ago.

Only this time the detour proves useless: in the first place because the house with the white door is empty, and in the second because no one is following her: they’re waiting for her.

A certain breakdown in her contacts – something she paradoxically had noted in one of the two letters hidden in the false bottom of her purse – doesn’t allow her to know the first fact. And for five years she’s been accustomed to avoiding thinking about the possibility of the second: a warrior is obliged to take all precautions to avoid falling, as she teaches the novices; but once taken, she mustn’t think about danger: that would only weaken her in battle. For that reason, she’s concerned only about what she will say in the meeting of the Secretaries General. She knows it won’t be easy to justify what she wrote in the letter. Not in the one where she mentions the lack of contacts, which is strictly a technical problem that doesn’t require justification – the military government, carrying out kidnappings with impunity, is destroying the network of contacts, so that she cannot locate the Montonero presses in the capital, if, indeed, there are any left; in order to keep functioning as Press Liaison, she needs to make new connections in La Plata . . . (The prose is deplorable, Diana thinks, reading the back of a photo where Leonora appears by a window, radiant, rubbing her beatific eight-months-pregnant belly. Dear Friend: This letter is to inform you . . . What makes Leonora, a revolutionary from head to toe, write like an old Spanish teacher? She decides to omit the transcription of letters and dedications from her story; it would give the wrong impression.) It’s justifying the other letter that’s going to be difficult. And not because there haven’t been enough resignations in her life – from the Party to join the splinter group, from the splinter group to join the Revolutionary Armed Forces, from the Revolutionary Armed Forces to join the Montoneros – but she always knew how to make those resignations seem like a leap forward. This one, on the other hand, doesn’t seem a leap in any direction; it’s not even exactly a resignation, but rather the rejection of an offer. What to call it?

(Existential problems, Fernando, the most implacable of the four, would say, bourgeois scruples.

She wouldn’t respond to the insult. With authority she would point out that so many desperate deaths were hardly political.

“They’re killing us,” Fernando might say. “Our response must be to kill them.”

Would she have the courage to say she didn’t like any of it, that the people were now rejecting them and she didn’t like that?

“It’s not a question of what you like,” Fernando would say at that point. “It’s a matter of following strategy, and strategy is decided at the Commander level” – pause, eloquent look – “and by the Secretaries General.” Without intending to, he would see her as he had seen her for the first time, with her flaming hair and her haughty expression, entering the College of Science, and then he would resort to the only method he knew of swaying her. “Accept the post of Secretary General we’re offering you, and then you can discuss strategies with us. As an equal.”)

What would she reply to that? For the moment, she doesn’t care: she’s confident of finding the right response when the time comes. She’s not used to losing, and an unwary observer watching her walk along Montes de Oca would agree.

But the five men observing her are not unwary: they’ve been waiting for her for a half-hour, two of them from inside a car on the corner of Wenceslao Villafañe, and three others a few yards away, pretending to chat on the sidewalk. And it’s likely that at least four of them haven’t acquired the habit of reflecting on something like this: the rhythm of a gait can encode the secret of a man or a woman. One must love life, Diana will jot down days after this event, as the Bechofen woman observes her from another table, thinking: she has too much passion to give shape to what she’s writing. And yet, isn’t that where the seed of all creativity lies, in passion? One must revere life in order to form even an inkling of how much is sacred within a woman walking down the street.

Those four seem only to spy a possible prey that the fifth man, sitting next to the driver, hasn’t even noticed yet. Perhaps, against his will, he’s dazzled by the élan vital emanating from the woman who has burst into view on Montes de Oca. Or maybe a certain thread, about to break, still links him to that man who, intoxicated with the spirit of the times, once said that it was necessary to join the struggle, to become the struggle in the name of the dignity of the people. Who knows? (Diana Glass will ask herself one day). Who knows at what moment or under what circumstances a man becomes a life-hater? Or is he born that way? And she’ll ask herself this question, turning herself inside out to see if she can discover in herself how a chain of events, a singular combination of received words, can sculpt one in a unique, immutable way. Or is it that a saviour or a criminal or a traitor nests within each of us, just waiting for the right opportunity to leap out?

The man in the passenger seat still hasn’t made a move: he’s facing a new situation, and this, naturally, slows his action. It’s not that he’s the type to hesitate: two days before, he had no problem telling the Chief of Intelligence, known as the Falcon: “The meeting is going to be in a house with a white door on Montes de Oca and Wenceslao Villafañe.” But to point out a woman who, like the Pasionaria, addressed students at university assemblies – she was addressing him, an implacable and enthusiastic science student – to move his mouth or his hand and communicate, “That’s the one,” is something else entirely. He’s watching the woman walk along, confident, jaunty, self-assured, unaware that in a few seconds she will be subdued. And that power seduces him, but it also paralyzes him. For that reason he doesn’t speak: it’s the man sitting at the wheel who says:

“Is that the one?”

He just nods. Then he leans his head back against the headrest. It was easier than he thought: he simply let himself be, ceded gently in the name of life itself, barely confirming something that someone else like him would have confirmed sooner or later. He or someone else, what difference did it make? He closes his eyes for a moment, so that he doesn’t see the signal the man at the wheel makes to the ones waiting on the sidewalk. Nor does he see – someone has removed him from the car in order to carry out the task from a different place – how those men advance and, so swiftly that a pedestrian on sun-filled Montes de Oca Street couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) tell if this was happening in the real world or in a dream, force the olive-skinned woman’s arms behind her back.

The Thrush, thinks the woman, who knows the Thrush’s propensity for sick jokes. She feels fleetingly protected by that joke, as if by a bell that protects her in some ancient territory of camaraderie, so much so that she admits what she never would have otherwise admitted: that, in spite of her haughty gait, now that so many others around her are falling, in a certain part of her heart she feels afraid. Because she truly and intensely loves life. Even though there is no unwary observer of this scene to note that the hooded woman shouting, “They’re taking me away!” and yelling out a telephone number that no one remembers was born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass.

—Liliana Heker

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Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is the author of two novels and many books of short stories and essays, in addition to being a founder of two important Argentine literary magazines. Her collected short stories were published in Spanish in 2004 and translated into Hebrew; her stories have been included in anthologies in many countries and languages. Her collection, The Stolen Party and Other Stories, is available in English. The End of the Story was not only a literary success, but a cultural event that provoked controversy and avid discussion of how best to remember the years of the Argentine dictatorship.

Andrea Labinger received her BA degree in Spanish from Hunter College, and her MA and Ph.D. degrees in Latin American Literature from Harvard University. She is Professor of Spanish Emerita at the University of La Verne, California. Labinger specializes in translating Latin American prose fiction. Among the many authors she has translated are Sabina Berman, Carlos Cerda, Daína Chaviano, Mempo Giardinelli, Ana María Shua, Alicia Steimberg, and Luisa Valenzuela. Call Me Magdalena, Labinger’s translation of Steimberg’s Cuando digo Magdalena (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), received Honorable Mention in the PEN International-California competition. The Rainforest, her translation of Steimberg’s La selva, and Casablanca and Other Stories, an anthology of Edgar Brau’s short stories, translated in collaboration with Donald and Joanne Yates, were both finalists in the PEN-USA competition for 2007. Her Web site is Trans/Latino Trans/Lation.

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Hudson, Part 1