First & Third

First & Third ISSUE ONE | MAY / JUNE 2017

The Intersection of Voice and Narrative

14 The Strange Persistence of First Languages 28 A Question of Corvids 34 How the Blind See the Stars 38 Military Scientists Build a Better Dummy

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In the Margins

A short story response in fiction to a “mesmerizingly vile” 1907 memoir. 42

Ideas inspire ideas.

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Editor’s note First & Third is a curated collection of nonfiction, fiction, and science writing for avid but busy readers. It is for those across belief and value spectrums who love literature and have a desire to understand others. Understanding, itself, is a goal more achievable and socially useful than to persist in brute persuasion.

Though third-person writing can be interesting and useful, first-person narrative is prevalent here. We value a variety of perspectives and approach, through nonfiction, science writing, and fiction articles. We hope you enjoy.

Welcome to the first edition of First & Third.

— Amy Ray

Editor

Authors

Cover Photo

Amy Ray

Tim Henderson

Igor Lepilin

Subscriptions firstandthird.com

Publisher

Mel Jones Julie Sedivy Forrest Stuart

ESA / Hubble

Sheila Webster Boneham

Trevor Ray Hart

Walt Pickut

Stephen Radford

First & Third Press

Mary Roach

Copyright © 2017

Sofia Samatar Neil Gaiman

6 | First & Third

Theme Photos

Nonfiction America’s Shrinking Small Towns See Hope in Refugees 6

Small towns from Montana to Georgia are increasingly considering opening their doors to refugees as they grapple with shrinking and aging populations.

The Second Racial Wealth Gap 10 White Millennials can often rely on their parents for financial assistance. For many black and Hispanic Millennials it’s the other way around.

The Strange Persistence of First Languages 14

A journey of rediscovery and connection beginning with the Czech language.

Science Writing A Question of Corvids 28

Fiction In the Margins 42

With an eye sharper than his pointed bill, a crow pins down your moves and knows you better than you know him.

Somali American educator and author Sofia Samatar responds to an offensive book with meaning ful fiction.

How the Blind See the Stars 34

The Sleeper and the Spindle 50

Everyone, visitors and astronomers alike, saw something inspiring that night through the eye of a blind man.

To Protect Soldiers from Bombs, Military Scientists Build a Better Dummy 38

A young queen casts aside her fine wedding clothes, takes her chain mail and her sword and sets out to rescue a princess from an enchantment.

The gist was this: Get us some combat vehicles that can drive over bombs and keep everyone inside alive.

How Zero Tolerance Policing Pits Poor Against Poor 20

Lessons from Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

CONTENTS | 7

America’s Shrinking Small Towns See Hope in Refugees

By Tim Henderson

8 | First & Third

Mayor Christopher Louras sees trouble ahead for this small city of about 16,000 at the foot of the Green Mountains. “It’s a strong, vibrant community but unless we do something to stem population decline, we’re going to be in big, big trouble,” Louras said. “And it’s not just Rutland. Rutland is a microcosm of the state, and of other small towns around the country.”

But the mayor sees a quick fix. He’s asked Vermont’s resettlement agency to send refugees to Rutland and says they would help fill vacant housing and entry-level jobs to keep the economy moving. It’s an approach small towns from Montana to Georgia are increasingly considering as they grapple with shrinking and aging populations.

The mayors of Central Falls, R.I.; Clarkston, Ga.; and Haledon, N.J. joined big-city mayors last year in signing a letter saying they had accepted Syrian refugees and would take more. And as some governors and members of Congress called for a halt to the arrival of refugees from Syria, the mayors of Normal, Urbana and Evanston in Ill.; Socorro, Texas; and Clearfield City, Utah, signed a letter that noted “the importance of continuing to welcome refugees to our country and to our cities.”

Few refugees have resettled in Montana since 1991. But with Missoula Mayor John Engen’s support, a branch of

the International Rescue Committee opened its doors and the group has arranged to help settle 100 Congolese refugees, who are expected to start arriving this month.

The decision to seek refugees, especially Muslims from Syria, can be a political lightning rod. The mayor of Sandpoint, Idaho, population 7,800, proposed welcoming Syrian refugees in January when he was sworn in, but withdrew the idea the same month after raucous protests. But there’s a growing sense among local officials, especially in small towns, that refugees have something to offer the economy, said Eskinder Negash, a former director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“Every time a refugee rents an apartment, every time a refugee shops for food, there’s some income coming in for the city and going into the tax base,” said Negash, now a senior vice president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a network of groups that help resettle refugees around the country. “There’s a new realization that refugees can be an economic engine for some of these small communities.”

Small towns and rural areas across the U.S. have been losing population since 2010, though the losses have shrunk to 4,000 a year in 2015 from an average of 33,000 a year earlier in the decade, according to a May report from nonfiction | 9

“There’s a desperation as to what’s the next step, how to attract people to this region, how we fill these positions.” the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But in many areas, refugees have helped to offset or reverse the losses.

About 350 refugees settled in Fargo, N.D., last year, mostly from Somalia, Iraq and Bhutan. And they have contributed to strong population and economic growth, said Fargo’s mayor, Dr. Tim Mahoney. “Our refugees have come in and brought a lot to our community,” Mahoney said. “They opened a mosque, and people came in and said, ‘Oh, this is just like a Lutheran social. There’s food.’ ” The refugees also made the city more diverse, Mahoney said, with the nonwhite population growing from 2 to 11 percent since 2002. “Our priority is to be a welcoming city and continue to grow in that manner,” Mahoney said.

In Clarkston, Mayor Ted Terry said you can read the history of world conflict in the city’s refugee population.

There are Vietnamese, many now elderly, who came in the wake of the Vietnam War; Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis, Sudanese, Bosnians, Bhutanese and Burmese, who started arriving in the ‘90s; more recent arrivals from Afghanistan and Iraq; and Syrians, who began to arrive last year. Many of the refugees have found jobs in chicken plants where Mexican immigrants used to work.

Terry, who said he has personally provided one Syrian family with furniture and clothes, said there’s always some controversy about refugees. “One school of thought (among residents) is that we don’t have room for them,” Terry said. “To that I tell people, ‘What if they weren’t here? All these apartments would be vacant, and vacant 10 | First & Third

apartments lead to crime. They’ve been by and large very peaceful, hardworking additions to our community.’”

About 70,000 refugees were resettled in the United States last year. Iraq and Myanmar were the largest sources of refugees, with a combined 31,000 people.

About 1,700 were from Syria; the Obama administration announced last year that it wants to ramp the number up to 10,000 this year.

Across Vermont, a shrinking and aging population, low unemployment, and a struggle to find workers are hindering economic progress, according to a report this year by the Vermont Chamber Foundation’s Vermont Futures initiative. “Vermont will need to find a way to attract and retain qualified workers,” another report found.

Rutland has lost more than 100 people every year this decade, according to census estimates. The median age in Rutland County is 46.2, up from 44.3 in 2010 and more than eight years above the national median age of 37.8 last year. Unemployment was 3.6 percent in the area as of May, which Louras said was too low. (The national rate was 4.7 percent and Vermont’s was 3.1 percent.) And local businesses say they have a hard time recruiting entry-level workers. “We don’t have enough employees,” said Tyler Richardson, an assistant director of the Rutland Economic Development Corporation. Louras says refugee families would help fill vacant housing and entry-level jobs, and provide more diversity that could help attract young families to an aging, overwhelmingly white community.

Photography | Muhammed Muheisen

“Where are the jobs we’re going to give these new people? I have nothing against them, but we should take care of our own first.”

After considering other cities in the state, the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, the local affiliate of the USCRI, recommended that 100 Syrian refugees be sent to Rutland. The group is awaiting approval from the U.S. State Department and the refugees could begin to arrive in November. A volunteer organization, Rutland Welcomes, has sprung up, with more than 700 volunteers who have broken into committees to learn Arabic and plan for welcoming and cultural exchange events, said Marsha Cassel, a high school French teacher who is part of the volunteer group’s informal leadership. But not everyone in town agrees that refugees are the answer.

Seven of the 11 members on the Rutland Board of Aldermen signed a letter asking the State Department not to send refugees. One of them, Edward Larson, said he wants more background checks and thinks the mayor should have asked the board before proceeding on his own.

“I believe the mayor was wrong in his actions, albeit his intentions were good,” Larson said.

Valerie Fusco, 76, has lived in the area since she was nine, and raised three children who did well in Rutland as a barber, a salesman and a nurse. But that was the last generation that stayed here, she said. “The young couples, if they’re lucky, go to college and move on because there’s nothing here for them. Where are the jobs we’re going to give these new people? I have nothing against them, but we should take care of our own first,” Fusco said. But several employers said they’d welcome the new arrivals.

Tim Henderson America’s Shrinking Towns See Hope in Refugees

The area’s largest employer is Rutland Regional Medical Center, with about 1,600 employees. Its president, Tom Huebner, said that of the hospital’s 140 job openings, some could be filled by refugees, especially in housekeeping and food service. Ursula Hirschmann, a German immigrant who owns a fast-growing custom windows business in Rutland, said she would hire refugees in entry-level jobs like sanding and assembly.

Small towns don’t always have to actively seek refugees.

Around 2000, Lewiston, Maine, found itself a preferred destination for Somali Bantu refugees who were initially relocated in more urban areas around the country. “They were searching for something that felt a little smaller and more intimate, a little more manageable,” said Catherine Besteman, an anthropology professor at Colby College who has written about the Lewiston refugees.

Alarmed by the pace of arrivals, then-mayor Laurier Raymond Jr. wrote a letter in 2002 asking Somalis to stop coming, sparking demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. But a subsequent mayor, Larry Gilbert, said at a U.S. Senate hearing in 2011 that the Somalis had brought “new life and energy” to Lewiston. Besteman agreed.

“Lisbon Street (in Lewiston) used to have a lot of empty storefronts, and now it’s full of Somali cafes, translation agencies, a mosque,” Besteman said. “People think of large urban areas when they think of immigration and refugees, but I think small towns are where we should be looking.”

nonfiction | 11

The Second Racial Wealth Gap

By Mel Jones

12 | First & Third

My father left me with things of value: a love of creation, an affinity for literature, a deep sense of integrity, and a penchant for easily making friends out of strangers.

He died on a Saturday. My mother and I had planned to pick my dad up from the hospital for a trip to the park.

He loved to sit and watch families stroll by as we chatted about oak trees, Kona coffee, and the mysteries of God. This time, the park would miss him.

In that next year, I graduated from grad school, got a new job, and looked forward to saving up for a down payment on my first home — a dream I had always had, but found lofty. I pulled up a blank spreadsheet and made a line item called “House Fund.”

That same week I got a call from my mom, who was struggling to pay off my dad’s funeral expenses. I looked at my “House Fund” and sighed. Then I deleted it and typed the words “Funeral Fund” instead.

My father’s passing was unexpected. And so was the financial burden that came with it.

For many Millennials of color, these sorts of trade-offs aren’t an anomaly. During key times in their lives when they should be building assets, they’re spending money on basic necessities and often helping out family. Their financial future is a rocky one, and much of it comes down to how much — or how little — assistance they receive.

A seminal study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on wealth accumulation estimates that as much as 20 percent of wealth can be attributed to formal and informal gifts from family members, especially parents. And it starts early. In college, black and Hispanic Millennials are more likely to have to work one or two jobs to get through, missing out on opportunities to connect with classmates who have time to tinker around in dorm rooms and go on to found multibillion-dollar companies together. Many of them take on much higher levels of student debt than their white peers, often to pay for routine expenses, like textbooks, that their parents are much less likely to subsidize.

“Student debt is the biggest millstone around Millennials, period, and an even larger and heavier one around the necks of black Millennials,” said Tom Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy. “It really hits those doing the right thing. [They’re] going through all the hoops.” Unlike in previous decades, when college tuition was drastically lower, the risks of educational costs are now passed down to the individual.

Recent polls indicate that a large portion of Millennials receive financial help from parents. At least 40 percent of the 1,000 Millennials (ages eighteen to thirty-four) polled in a March USA Today/Bank of America poll get help from parents on everyday expenses. A Clark University poll indicated an even higher number, with almost three-quarters of parents reporting that they provide their Millennial children with financial support.

Another survey saw nearly a third of Baby Boomers paying for Millennials’ medical expenses. A quarter of Boomers subsidized “other expenses” so their Millennial offspring could save money. Black and Hispanic Americans are less likely to be the recipients of this type of support.

Ironically, even though black and Hispanic Millennials are less likely to receive financial support from parents, their parents are more likely than white parents to expect their kids to help financially support them later on. According to the Clark poll, upward of 80 percent of black parents and 70 percent of Hispanic parents expect to be supported. And most studies show that a primary reason why people of color are unable to save as adults is because they give financial support to close family. This is important because when life emergencies happen, many Millennials won’t have the reserve money to cover it.

A Millennial who receives regular financial gifts and support from parents will either have the money to cover an emergency themselves, or (more likely) have a parent nonfiction | 13

or grandparent cover it so there’s no damage to their credit.

They won’t have to borrow from predatory lending institutions, move into unsafe neighborhoods to save on rent, or start from financial scratch each time.

It doesn’t even have to be a life emergency. If you have to decide between paying for a professional networking event or a cell phone bill, the latter is likely to win out.

It should come as no surprise that Millennials who are free to choose career development activities over routine

expenses are likely to benefit more in the long run. When this happens once or twice on a small scale, it’s not a big deal. It’s the collective impact of a series of decisions that matters, the result of which is displayed among ethnic and class lines and grounded in historical privilege.

And the help doesn’t end when Millennials enter the next stage of adulthood. It’s not just young, out-of-work Millennials who get help from parents or family members, according to the USA Today poll: even Millennials making $75,000 or more said they had gotten money from their parents for basic necessities. Twenty percent of parents paid for their children’s groceries, and more than 20 percent contributed money for clothing. Even 20 percent of cohabitating Millennials still had a parent paying for expenses like cell phone bills, according to the poll.

Shapiro said the numbers of Millennials receiving support from family are “absolutely underestimated” because many survey questions are not as methodical and specific as those a sociologist might ask. “As much as 90 percent of what you’ll hear isn’t picked up in the survey,” he said.

Shapiro’s work pays special attention to the role of intergenerational family support in wealth building. He coined the term “transformative assets” to refer to any money acquired through family that facilitates social mobility beyond what their current income level would allow for.

14 | First & Third

And it’s not that parents and other family members are exceptionally altruistic. “It’s how we all operate,” Shapiro said. “Resources usually flow to those who are more needy.”

Racial disparity in transformative assets became especially striking to Shapiro during interviews with middle-class black Americans. “They almost always talk about financial help they give family members. People come to them,” Shapiro said. But when he asked white interviewees if they were lending financial support to family members, he said, “I almost always get laughter. They’re usually still getting subsidized.”

These small savings add up over time. Commentary often centers on the dire circumstances Millennials inherited (“It’s the recession, stupid!”) or the defective attributes of recipients (“Millennials are too entitled!”). But these oversimplified viewpoints miss the point of how some Millennials and their parents are able to weather tumultuous financial terrain in the first place — and more, how intergenerational financial support contributes to these Millennials’ long-term wealth-building capacity.

To many Millennials, the small influxes of cash from parents are a lifeline, a financial relief they’re hard pressed to find elsewhere. To researchers, however, it’s both a symptom and an exacerbating factor of wealth inequality.

In a 2004 CommonWealthmagazine interview, Shapiro explained that gifts like this are “often not a lot of money, but it’s really important money. It’s a kind of money that allows families to obtain something for themselves and for their children that they couldn’t do on their own.”

To be sure, gift-giving parents see it as a step in helping their Millennial children reach financial independence.

But the bigger picture is that their support acts as a stabilizing factor now, and an inheriting factor later. The Institute on Assets and Social Policy’s “The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap” found that every dollar in financial family support received by a white American yielded 35 cents in wealth growth. For a black individual, family support is much more essential to their financial trajectory: every one dollar received yielded 51 cents in wealth growth. Millennials of all backgrounds would certainly benefit from increased financial family support, but where you end up depends a lot on where you started from.

You can’t discuss wealth inequality without talking about race; within the American context, they are inseparable. So the fact that Millennials of color feel the impact of a precarious financial foundation more acutely is not a surprise. For black Millennials in particular, studies point to a legacy of discrimination over several centuries that contributed to less inherited wealth passed down from previous generations. This financial disparity stems from continuous shortfalls in their parents’ net worth and low Photography | Jones Family

It’s not the difference between a silver spoon and a dirt floor, it’s the one between textbook money and a campus job. homeownership rates among blacks, which works to create an unlevel playing field. As a result, the median wealth of white households is thirteen times the median wealth of black households. In addition, the most recent housing bust is estimated to have wiped out half of the collective wealth of black families — a setback of two generations.

“It was incredible,” Shapiro said. “It hit hardest those groups latest to becoming home buyers.” Homeownership makes up a large amount of black families’ wealth composition, accounting for over 50 percent of wealth for blacks, compared with just 39 percent for whites. He also pointed out that the people impacted by the housing crisis were likely to be the parents of Millennials.

Even with equal advances in income, education, and other factors, wealth grows at far lower rates for black households because they usually need to use financial gains for everyday needs rather than long-term savings and asset building. Each dollar in income increase yields $5.19 in wealth for white American households, but only 69¢ for black American households. In addition, while many Americans don’t have adequate savings, the rate is far higher for families of color: 95 percent of African American and 87 percent of Latino middle-class families do not have enough net assets to meet most of their essential living expenses for even three months if their source of income were to disappear. If Millennials of color aren’t getting as much financial help, it’s because there’s just not as much help for their families to give.

It’s more than just lack of “pocket money” from parents that impacts Millennials of color. The last significant stop on life’s journey is often an economically definitive one as well, when parents and grandparents pass away and perhaps leave an inheritance.

According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, white Americans are five times more likely to inherit than black Americans (36 percent to 7 percent, respectively).

And even when both groups did receive an inheritance, white Americans received about ten times more. “It really Mel Jones The Second Racial Wealth Gap

is a double whammy,” Shapiro said. On the flipside, black Millennials and other low-asset groups are much more likely to go into debt when a family member passes away.

It’s not uncommon for some families to throw bake sales and engage in other fund-raising activities just to be able to bury their relatives.

A 2013 Washington Post article also noted that “black families rarely benefited from inheritances and gifts to help them make down payments on homes. The result was that black families typically bought homes eight years later than whites, giving them less time to build equity.”

“That’s an eight-year window of not paying rent and building equity,” Shapiro said.

And the life cycle of homeownership-related matters is an onerous one for black Americans to begin with. The researchers Kerwin Charles and Erik Hurst found that black mortgage applicants were almost twice as likely to be rejected for a loan in the first place, even when credit profile and household wealth were controlled for.

The same study found that almost half of white Americans got money from a family source for a home down payment, while nine in ten black Americans had to come up with their entire down payment on their own. This had the effect of disincentivizing younger black renters from actually buying. “Even when they were able to buy a home,” the Post article said, “the typical black family did not see that property appreciate as much as did the typical white family.”

It all adds up to a slice of the racial wealth gap that’s hard to grasp because it’s made up of so many smaller inequalities instead of one massive one. It’s not the difference between a silver spoon and a dirt floor, it’s the one between textbook money and a campus job. It’s not the difference between the 1 percent and the destitute, it’s the one between a birthday card from Grandma and paying her hospital bill. The gap in gifts, debts, and inheritances creates a vicious cycle with large ramifications for many black Millennials and their financial future — and when combined with redlining and unequal returns on income and education, the odds are stacked in a terrible way.

My father left me with many things of value: a love of creation, an affinity for literature, a deep sense of integrity, and a penchant for easily making friends out of strangers. He loved America, despite the times it relegated him to the back doors of its restaurants as a “colored man.”

He placed glossy graduation photos of me from high school and college in nooks around the house like prized medallions. They symbolized his version of the “American Dream,” where his children — his Millennials — would accomplish more than he ever could.

For his sake and mine, I hope he’s right. nonfiction | 15

řel můj otec, dělal většinu po celý život: řípravy a bez ace s někým. noduše šel do přivodil svůj ek k obrovské í sraženině a alezen příští žet uprostřed stů jako jeho tní kamenná k.Bylo těžké, bych nezaujal náhlé odchod ýtku. Po léta osil, abych ho štívil v České ice, kde jsem rodil a kde se l v roce 1992. ždým rokem zdržel. Byla té části svého , když se můj elský stupeň, školní dětský ní rozvodový d měřil spolu echovou sací silou a klidný t do otcovské ě se zdála být nověrná, jako avování toku asu. Teď můj na mě pokrčil meny z dálky Vidíte, vy jste pali čas."Jeho mrt podtrhla ztrátu, i když em jemnější: mé rodné řeči. ý jazyk, který al až do dvou moje rodina migrovat na od tehdejšího slovenska po kousko, pak z a nakonec se v kanadském ealu. Po cestě mého života lo nepořádek ů: němčina v kolním věku, lé z italštiny, frankofonní ulice východo Montrealu. tický zážitek mrzel, ačkoli ji sourozenci ali chodit do v angličtině. ako u mnoha stěhovalců to menalo, že se gličtina stala ficiálně a nad rštím rodičů ejména mého ašeho rodinyka - v době, eština začala lu ustupovat o každodenivota.Mnozí nili účinnost, terou jsme se i v angličtině u to, co dělají ní přistěhovle mezi tím a zkum ukázal ubku vztahu, šichni máme imi rodnými y - a jak trauké může být, e tento vztah Povzbuzený rtí mého otce m se vrátil do é republiky a že se k němu u připojí. Při

T he Strange Persistence of First Languages

By Julie Sedivy

16 | First & Third

Several years ago, my father died as he’d done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the next morning lying amidst the sheets like his own stone monument.

It was hard for me not to take my father’s abrupt exit as a rebuke. For years, he’d been begging me to visit him in the Czech Republic, where I’d been born and where he’d gone back to live in 1992. Each year, I delayed. I was in that part of my life when the marriage-grad-school-children-career-divorce current was sweeping me along with breath-sucking force, and a leisurely trip to the fatherland seemed as plausible as pausing the flow of time. Now my dad was shrugging at me from the beyond — “You see, you’ve run out of time.”

His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue. Czech was the only language I knew until the age of 2, when my family began a migration westward, from what was then Czechoslovakia through Austria, then Italy, settling eventually in Montreal, Canada. Along the way, a clutter of languages introduced themselves into my life: German in preschool, Italian-speaking friends, the francophoWne streets of East Montreal. Linguistic experience congealed, though, once my siblings and I started school in English.

As with many immigrants, this marked the time when English became, unofficially and over the grumbling of my parents (especially my father), our family language — the time when Czech began its slow retreat from my daily life.

Many would applaud the efficiency with which we settled into English — it’s what exemplary immigrants do. But between then and now, research has shown the depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues — and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured. Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.

While my father was still alive, I was, like most young people, more intent on hurtling myself into my future than on tending my ancestral roots — and that included speaking the language of my new country rather than my old one. The incentives for adopting the culturally dominant language are undeniable. Proficiency offers clear financial rewards, resulting in wage increases of 15 percent for immigrants who achieve it relative to those who don’t, according to economist Barry Chiswick. A child, who rarely calculates the return on investment for her linguistic efforts, feels the currency of the dominant language in other ways: the approval of teachers and the acceptance of peers. I was mortally offended

Sedivy family photo

when my first-grade teacher asked me on the first day of school if I knew “a little English” — “I don’t know a little English,” was my indignant and heavily accented retort. “I know a lot of English.” In the schoolyard, I quickly learned that my Czech was seen as having little value by my friends, aside from the possibility of swearing in another language — a value I was unable to deliver, given that my parents were cursing teetotalers.

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price.

Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and nonfiction | 17

grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words — and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

Meanwhile, the weaker language is more likely to become swamped; when resources are scarce, as they are during mental exhaustion, the disadvantaged language may become nearly impossible to summon. Over time, neglecting an earlier language makes it harder and harder for it to compete for access.

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled in our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

Psychotherapist Jennifer Schwanberg has seen this firsthand. In a 2010 paper, she describes treating a client who’d lived through a brutal childhood in Mexico before immigrating to the United States. The woman showed little emotion when talking about events from her early life, and Schwanberg at first assumed that her client had made her peace with them. But one day, the woman began the session in Spanish. The therapist followed her lead and discovered that “moving to her first language had opened a floodgate. Memories from childhood, both traumatic and nontraumatic, were recounted with depth and vividness. It became clear that a door to the past was available to her in her first language.”

A first language remains uniquely intertwined with early memories, even for people who fully master another language. In her book The Bilingual Mind, linguist Aneta Pavlenko describes how the author Vladimir Nabokov fled the Russian revolution in 1919, arriving in the United Kingdom when he was 20. By the time he wrote his memoir Conclusive Evidence in 1951, he’d been writing in English for years, yet he struggled writing this particular text in his adopted language, complaining that his memory was tuned to the “musical key” of Russian.

Soon after its publication, he translated the memoir into his native tongue. Working in his first language seems to have prodded his senses awake, leading him to insert new details into the Russian version: A simple anecdote about a stingy old housekeeper becomes perfumed with the scents of coffee and decay, the description of a laundry hamper acquires a creaking sound, the visual details of a celluloid swan and toy boat sprout as he writes about the 18 | First & Third

tub in which he bathed as a child. Some of these details eventually made it into his revised English memoir, which he aptly titled Speak, Memory. Evidently, when memory speaks, it sometimes does so in a particular tongue.

Losing your native tongue unmoors you not only from your own early life but from the entire culture that shaped you. You lose access to the books, films, stories, and songs that articulate the values and norms that you’ve absorbed.

You lose the embrace of an entire community or nation for whom your family’s odd quirks are not quirks all. You lose your context. This disconnection can be devastating.

A 2007 study led by Darcy Hallett found that in British Columbian native communities in which fewer than half of the members could converse in their indigenous language, young people killed themselves six times more often than in communities where the majority spoke the native language. In the Midwestern U.S., psychologist Teresa LaFromboise and her colleagues found that American-Indian adolescents who were heavily involved in activities focused on their traditional language and traditions did better at school and had fewer behavior problems than kids who were less connected to their traditional cultures — in fact, cultural connectedness buffered them against adolescent problems more than having a warm and nurturing mother. Such benefits appear to span continents: In 2011, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that aboriginal youth who spoke their traditional language were less likely to binge drink or use illegal drugs.

Why is a heritage language so conducive to well-being?

Michael Chandler, one of the authors of the suicide study, emphasizes that a sense of cultural continuity makes people resilient by providing them with a cohesive self-concept. Without that continuity, he warns, aboriginal youth, who have typically experienced plenty of turbulence, are in grave existential danger. They risk losing “the thread that tethers together their past, present, and future.”

As my siblings and I distanced ourselves from the Czech language in our youth, a space widened between us and our parents — especially my father, who never wore English with any comfort. Memories of our early family life, along with its small rituals and lessons imparted, receded into a past that drifted ever further out of reach. It was as if my parents’ life in their home country, and the values that defined that life, didn’t translate credibly into another language; it was much easier to rebel against them in English. Even the English names for our parents encouraged dissent: The Czech words we’d used — Maminka, Tatinek — so laden with esteem and affection, impossible to pronounce with contempt, had no corresponding forms. In English, the sweet but childish Mommy and Daddy are soon aban-

Pork with cabbage and dumplings

refers to a concept, but

vepřo-knedlo-zelo

evokes the fragrance of roasting meat, pillowy dumpling loaves, & the clink of the nice china.

Julie Sedivy The Strange Persistence of First Languages

doned for Mom and Dad — words that, we discovered, lend themselves perfectly well to adolescent snark.

I watched as my father grew more and more frustrated at his powerlessness to pass on to his children the legacy he most longed to leave: a burning religious piety, the nurturing of family ties, pleasure in the music and traditions of his region, and an abiding respect for ancestors.

All of these became diluted by the steady flow of new memories narrated in English, laced with Anglophone aspiration and individualism. As we entered adulthood and dispersed all over North America into our self-reliant lives, my father gave up. He moved back home.

For the next two decades, I lived my adult life, fully absorbed into the English-speaking universe, even adding American citizenship to my Canadian one. My dad was the only person with whom I regularly spoke Czech — if phone calls every few months can be described as “regularly,” and if my clumsy sentences patched together with abundant English can be called “speaking Czech.” My Czech heritage began to feel more and more like a vestigial organ.

Then my father died. Loss inevitably reveals that which is gone. It was as if the string section of the orchestra had fallen silent — not carrying the melody, it had gone unnoticed, but its absence announced how much depth and texture it had supplied, how its rhythms had lent coherence to the music. In grieving my father, I became aware of how much I also mourned the silencing of Czech in my life. There was a part of me, I realized, that only Czech could speak to, a way of being that was hard to settle into, even with my own siblings and mother when we spoke in English.

After my father’s death, my siblings and I inherited a sweet little apartment in a large compound that has been occupied by the Sedivy family since the 1600s, and where my uncle still lives with his sprawling family. This past spring, I finally cleared two months of my schedule and went for a long visit, sleeping on the very same bed where my father and his brothers had been born.

I discovered that, while I may have run out of time to visit my father in his homeland, there was still time for me to reunite with my native tongue. On my first day there, the long drive with my uncle between the airport and our place in the countryside was accompanied by a conversation that lurched along awkwardly, filled with dead ends and misunderstandings. Over the next few days, I had trouble excavating everyday words like stamp and fork, and I made grammar mistakes that would (and did) cause a 4-year-old to snicker. But within weeks, fluency began to unspool. Words that I’m sure I hadn’t used in decades leapt out of my mouth, astounding me. nonfiction | 19

(Often they were correct. Sometimes not: I startled a man who asked about my occupation by claiming to be a savior — spasitelka. Sadly, I am a mere writer — spisovatelka.) The complicated inflections of Czech, described as “character-building” by an acquaintance who’d learned the language in college, began to assemble into somewhat orderly rows in my mind, and I quickly ventured onto

Even though it’s more effortful

for both of us than speaking in English, our conversation feels softer, more tender this way.

more and more adventurous grammatical terrain. Just a few weeks into my visit, I briefly passed as a real Czech speaker in a conversation with a stranger. Relearning Czech so quickly felt like having linguistic superpowers.

Surprised by the speed of my progress, I began to look for studies of heritage speakers relearning childhood languages that had fallen into disuse. A number of scientific papers reported evidence of cognitive remnants of “forgotten” languages, remnants visible mostly in the process of relearning. In some cases, even when initial testing hinted at language decay, people who’d been exposed to a language earlier in life showed accelerated relearning of grammar, vocabulary, and most of all, of control over the sounds of the language.

One of the most remarkable examples involved a group of Indian adoptees who’d been raised from a young age (starting between 6 and 60 months) in English-speaking families, having no significant contact with their language of origin. The psychologist Leher Singh tested the children when they were between the ages of 8 and 16.

Initially, neither group could hear a difference between dental and retroflex consonants, a distinction that’s exploited by many Indian languages. After listening to the contrasting sounds over a period of mere minutes, the adoptees, but not the American-born children, were able to discriminate between the two classes of consonants.

This is revealing because a language’s phonology, or sound structure, is one of the greatest challenges for people who start learning a language in adulthood. Long after they’ve mastered its syntax and vocabulary, a lifelong accent may mark them as latecomers to the language.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was the star of many American movies and the governor of the country’s biggest state, but 20 | First & Third

his Austrian accent is a constant reminder that he could never run for president. The crucial timing of exposure for native-like speech is evident in my own family: I can pronounce the notoriously difficult “ř” sound in Czech — as in the name of the composer Dvořák — but my brother, born three years after me, in Vienna, cannot.

Phonology’s resistance to both attrition and later learning may be due to the fact that the sound structure of a language is fixed in a child’s mind very early. Before 6 months of age, infants can distinguish most subtle differences in speech sounds, whether their language makes use of those distinctions or not. But over the second half of their first year, they gradually tune their perception to just the sounds of the language they hear around them. Children who hear only English lose the ability to distinguish between dental and retroflex sounds. Children learning Japanese begin to hear “r” and “l” as variants of the same sound. Linguist Pat Kuhl, who has studied this phenomenon for decades, describes the process as one of perceptual narrowing and increasing neural commitment, eventually excluding native-like perception of other languages.

One of the most striking examples of the brain’s attunement to native sounds is apparent in languages such as Mandarin, where varying the tone of an utterance can produce entirely different words. (For instance, the syllable ma can mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “scold,” depending on the pitch contour you lay over it.)

When Mandarin speakers hear nonsense syllables that are identical except for their tones, they show heightened activity in the left hemisphere of the brain, where people normally process sounds that signal differences in meaning — like the difference between the syllables “pa” and “ba.” But speakers of non-tonal languages like English have more activity in the right hemisphere, showing that the brain doesn’t treat tone as relevant for distinguishing words. A recent study found that Chinese-born babies adopted into French homes showed brain activity that matched Chinese speakers and was clearly distinct from monolingual French speakers — even after being separated from their birth language for more than 12 years.

Those of us who received more than one language before the valves of our attention closed may find, to our surprise, that our earliest language lingers on in our soul’s select society, long after we thought it had faded.

I’ve become aware of the deep sense in which I belong to the Czech language, as well as the extent to which my formative memories are tinged by its “musical key.” For me, the English phrase “pork with cabbage and dumplings” refers to a concept, the national dish of the Czechs.

But hearing the Czech phrase vepřo-knedlo-zelo evokes Photography | Wojtek Witkowski + Sedivy Family

the fragrance of roasting meat, pillowy dumpling loaves being pulled steaming out of a tall pot and sliced with sewing thread, and the clink of the nice china as the table is dressed for Sunday dinner, the fulcrum of every week.

Since coming back from the Czech Republic, I’ve insisted on speaking Czech with my mother. Even though it’s more effortful for both of us than speaking in English, our conversation feels softer, more tender this way. English was the language in which I forged my independence, the language of my individuation — but it was in Czech that I was nurtured, comforted, and sung to.

It has also gotten easier to hear the timbre of my father’s voice in my mind’s ear, especially when working in my garden. It’s no accident that many of my conversations with him, and more recently with my uncle, have been on the subject of horticulture. My father’s family has lived for centuries in the fertile wine and orchard region of Moravia, and on my recent visit, I saw my relatives gaze out at their land with an expression usually reserved for a beloved spouse or child. Throughout my own life, I’ve given into the compulsion to fasten myself to whatever patch of land I happened to be living on by growing things on it, an impulse that has often conflicted with the upwardly and physically mobile trajectory of my life. It’s an impulse I submit to once again, living now in the lee of the Rocky Mountains; neither grapes nor apricots will thrive in the brittle mountain air, but I raise sour cherries and saskatoons, small fruits native to western Canada. As I mulch and weed and prune, I sometimes find myself murmuring to my plants in Czech as my father did, and the Moravian homestead doesn’t seem very far away.

My newly vocal native tongue, and along with it, the heightened memory of my father’s voice, does more than connect me to my past: It is proving to be an unexpected guide in my present work. I’ve recently left my job as an academic linguist to devote more time to writing, and I often find myself these days conjuring my father’s voice by reading a passage in Czech. Like many Czechs I’ve met, my father treated his language like a lovely object to be turned over, admired, stroked with a fingertip, deserving of deliberate and leisurely attention. He spoke less often than most people, but was more often eloquent. I may never regain enough of my first language to write anything in it worth reading, but when I struggle to write prose that not only informs but transcends, I find myself steering my inner monologue toward Czech. It reminds me of what it feels like to sink into language, to be startled by the aptness of a word or the twist of a phrase, to be delighted by arrangements of its sounds, and lulled by its rhythms. I’ve discovered that my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time.

Julie Sedivy The Strange Persistence of First Languages

slyším tlume hlasu mého o v uších mé m zvláště když v mé zahradě náhodou, že z mých rozho s ním, a v pos době se mým cem, bylo na zahradnictví na mého otce staletí v úrod vinném a sad regionu Mor a při mé nedá návštěvě jsem jak se moji př dívají na svou výrazem, kte obvykle vyhr pro milované manžela neb Během svého ního života js se přinutil k abych se přip jakékoliv náp na které jsem náhodou žil, jsem na něm věci, což je im který často o oval vzestup fyzicky pohy trajektorii m života. Je to impuls, který znovu podříd žijícím nyní v Skalistých ho Ani hrozny a meruňky se n dařit v křehk horském vzd ale já zvedu v saskatoony, d ovoce pocház ze západní K Protože jsem mulčovat a b a prořezávat, se mi mrká n rostliny v češ jako můj otec moravská use nezdá příliš d Můj nově vok rodný jazyk a s ním vzrůsta vzpomínka n hlas mého ot více než spoj mou minulos to neočekáva průvodce v m současné prá Nedávno jsem opustil svou jako akadem lingvista, aby věnoval více psaní, a často se ocitl v dne době, když js tatínku v češ Stejně jako m Češi, se který jsem se setka můj otec zach s jeho jazyke jako s krásný předmětem, měl být obrá obdivován, p en špičkou pr zaslouženě z a klidné pozo Mluvil méně než většina li byl častěji vý Možná bych nezískala dos mého prvníh ka, abych čet co by stálo za ale když se sn psát prózu, k nejen inform ale i přesahu

22 | First & Third

Jackson moved with his typical nervous energy as he set up his “sidewalk shop” on the corner of Fifth and San Pedro Streets. The late afternoon light gave a sense of urgency to his motions as he unloaded his wares from his battered shopping cart onto the worn blue tarp he spread across the sidewalk. Six dented cans of chili, a bundle of women’s cosmetics, a stack of college textbooks. The scavenged inventory looked remarkably similar to those of the three other street vendors who had set up only feet away. He grabbed a splintered broom that hung from the chainlink fence behind him and began to sweep cigarette butts,

soiled paper napkins, and other small debris into tight piles. He squatted low to better grip the broom’s broken stub of a handle, muttering in annoyance as pedestrians passing by disrupted his tidying.

Jackson’s complaints grew audible as he glanced up and noticed that a group of four visibly drunk men had assembled on the corner, pulling tall cans of Old English malt liquor out of brown paper bags. Jackson jogged in their direction, veering slightly from his path to tug the shirt of another vendor, a clean-shaven, bald man called Larry, who followed without question.

nonfiction | 23

It meant he was able to separate himself, if only for the duration of the day, from the dealers and addicts that were fixtures at his SRO building.

“Hey y’all,” Jackson said forcefully as he pushed his way through the perimeter of the group. “You gotta get your drink on somewhere else. Y’all can’t be partying over here.”

While startled, the men appeared undeterred. Jackson was hardly an intimidating guy; his high-pitched voice matched his five-foot, five-inch frame. One of the men swallowed a mouthful of malt liquor, teetered slightly, and leaned in to offer a slurred response. But just as the words formed on his lips, Larry’s deep voice suddenly boomed from above. Standing almost a foot taller than Jackson and outweighing him by at least a hundred pounds, Larry stared down at the group through his dark sunglasses.

“Time to leave, fellas, and I’m only gonna tell you once.

I’m really not playing, so don’t test your luck.” …Silence.

The four men exchanged defeated looks with bloodshot eyes. Putting up no further fight, they rewrapped their 24 | First & Third

cans in brown paper bags and vacated the corner. Hands on his hips, Jackson watched with satisfaction as the four staggered their way up San Pedro Street.

I spent roughly two and a half years alongside Jackson, Larry, and 14 other street vendors as they conducted their business along Fifth Street, one of Skid Row’s main thoroughfares. These men devoted their time on the block to far more than simply hawking their wares. Tidying the sidewalk, quelling arguments, and, most notably, intercepting alcohol and drug consumption, these men maintained a vigilant system of informal social control.

Since the 1990s, American cities have embraced aggressive zero-tolerance policing policies. Police officers fan out across the country’s poorest minority neighborhoods to detain and search pedestrians, and to issue citations and make arrests for things as trivial as jaywalking, blocking Photography | Robyn Beck + Elizabeth Daniels + David McNew

the sidewalk, and loitering. An overlooked effect of these policies: Residents often feel pressured to step outside of their routine activities to regulate the actions of their fellow citizens before the police arrive on the scene and make matters worse. In Skid Row this “third-party policing” now extends all the way down, forcing even onlookers to become accountable for the behaviors of others.

Before moving into Skid Row, Jackson spent much of his adult life employed as a machinist in LA’s once-booming aerospace sector. But for decades, Southern California was losing aerospace jobs, and plenty of the region’s semiskilled black workers bore the brunt. Facing a string of downsizings, layoffs, and evictions, Jackson and his wife Leticia reluctantly moved into a dilapidated SRO hotel room on Skid Row’s western border.

“That’s when we got into crack,” Jackson recounted matter-of-factly one afternoon as we shared a basket of fries in a noisy downtown diner. While the couple had frequented bars after work and occasionally smoked marijuana on the

weekends, they didn’t try harder drugs until they moved into Skid Row. “At that place, you got people knocking at your door at all times of the day. It’s easy to fall into it.”

To pay for their mounting habit, Jackson began peddling “knickknacks” he scavenged from downtown alleyways.

Jackson was at the height of his addiction, smoking crack at least once a day, when he and I first met. I sold cigarettes nearby, but eventually Jackson invited me to set up shop next to his tarp and volunteered to “show me the ropes.” He insisted that it would be mutually beneficial: When pedestrians stopped to buy my cigarettes they Forrest Stuart Lessons from Los Angeles’ Skid Row

might be enticed to buy one of his products, and vice versa.

And so it was that our partnership began.

Throughout my time on the corner, I marveled at the rigorous order the vendors maintained along the sidewalk.

Of all the nearby activities they stepped in to regulate, none received a more concerted reproach than drug-related behavior. The vendors had become a powerful example of what urbanist Jane Jacobs famously called “eyes on the street.” One afternoon, Jackson was sifting through a mound of wrinkled clothes in his baby stroller. I noticed that a small glass crack pipe had slid out of the pocket of a jacket that had been resting atop the other items. Keith, a vendor whom I had only met minutes earlier, saw me staring at the pipe and called Jackson over in a quiet voice: “You know you can’t have that out here,” he reprimanded in a hushed tone, gesturing behind Jackson toward the pipe. “Ain’t no room for that out here.” For the past year, Keith had tried to help Jackson. He occasionally held onto Jackson’s cash while they worked and constantly forbade him from “mixing business with pleasure.”

As Keith lectured on, Jackson finally noticed the pipe. “Aw, shit,” he said, clearly ashamed. He tried to reassure Keith. “I know, I know. It’s just, yeah, okay…I’ll take care of it right now. Don’t you worry. I got this.”

Jackson quickly walked back to the stroller, where he put on the jacket, shoved the pipe back in the pocket, and turned to me. “I've gotta run home right quick,” he said. “Watch my stuff.” Before I had a chance to respond, Jackson started walking in the direction of his SRO. He returned a half hour later without his jacket and, I assumed, without the pipe. Thus began a regular pattern in which Jackson would “run home” to “talk to Leticia” or “check on something” most days. In the lead-up to excusing himself, Jackson tended to grow irritable toward me and his fellow vendors and customers. He always returned noticeably energized and talkative.

But in a few months Jackson began to curb his addiction, and I realized that returning to the corner meant that he had to leave his stash and pipe back home. It also meant that he was able to separate himself, if only for the duration of the day, from the dealers and addicts he complained were fixtures at his SRO building. It meant surrounding himself with vendors who not only demanded abstinence on the job, but who stepped in at the first glimpse of drug paraphernalia.

As conflicted as I felt about possibly enabling his addiction, I also realized that holding Jackson’s place on the nonfiction | 25

As if zero-tolerance policing hadn’t done enough harm, vendors had introduced their own brand of anxiety, fear, violence, and marginalization.

26 | First & Third

corner also helped maintain his exposure to what Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier, in his ethnography of street vendors in New York’s City’s Greenwich Village, calls the “rehabilitative forces of the sidewalk.” According to Duneier, vending allows even the most impoverished, addicted, and otherwise defeatist individuals the opportunity to “become innovators — earning a living, striving for self-respect, establishing good relations with fellow citizens, providing support for each other.”

On the other hand, what people are really trying to do is avoid the police. And that means that support and community and providing for each other can only go so far. Fearing harmful and potentially deadly police encounters, the vendors acted like surrogate cops. Although they sometimes protected certain of their peers from detrimental police encounters, they mercilessly punished others for attracting too much law enforcement attention.

Knowing that the cops tend to target homeless people, addicts, and idle groups of “suspicious looking” pedestrians, the vendors took it upon themselves to forcibly purge these people from the vicinity. Their attempts to cool off the block ended up exposing fellow Skid Row denizens to even more miseries. As if zero-tolerance policing hadn’t done enough harm, the vendors had introduced their own brand of anxiety, fear, violence, and marginalization.

Leticia spent very little time on the corner. When she did stop by to bring Jackson lunch or money or to pass on a message, she seldom stayed longer than a brief conversation. But that changed. Jackson had been arrested a few months back while trying to steal textbooks from the bookstore at a nearby community college. For this crime, he served just over 90 days in county jail, where he suffered debilitating withdrawal symptoms. But by the end of his sentence he had sobered up.

When he got out, Jackson was determined to get his and Leticia’s lives back on track. Without the income provided by his hustles, Leticia was unable to pay the rent on their SRO room and building management had forcibly removed her from the unit and marked their rental history with the note “abandonment” — a stain that would make it even harder for them to secure housing in the future.

With nowhere to turn, Leticia followed her addiction out into Skid Row’s streets. At first, Jackson couldn’t find her.

He spent a month scouring the neighborhood, spending a few hours a day scraping together cash on the corner. Finally, he heard from friends that she'd been spotted at the Union Rescue Mission. He was overjoyed to reunite with his partner of 17 years, and the two became inseparable.

His fellow vendors, however, were less than enthusiastic about the reunion. Their discontent came to a head one afternoon. Larry, Craig, and Terrance had all set up their Forrest Stuart Lessons from Los Angeles’ Skid Row

shops a noticeable distance from Jackson’s. “What are you looking at?” Craig called out as Jackson glanced their way.

“Not much, apparently,” Jackson shot back, avoiding eye contact.

“What’s that, little man?” Terrance yelled. “Did you say something?”

Jackson turned his back on the two. “These assholes,” he said under his breath.

“What’s going on?” I whispered.

“They’re just being assholes,” Jackson replied, trying to appear unconcerned. “They’re pissed off that I got Leticia out here helping me out, trying to say she’s the reason we all got tickets a couple days back.”

Over Jackson’s shoulder, I saw Craig walking toward us, with Terrance in tow. “You talking more shit? You got something to say to my face?” Craig peered down at Jackson, fists clenched.

I tried my best to intervene. “It’s all good, man. Nobody’s talking shit. It’s all good.”

“No, man,” he scolded me. “It ain’t all good. He’s fucking it up for every one of us. He knows he can’t have her hanging around all damn day.” Craig turned back to address Jackson. “We told you that last time. Or don’t you remember?”

Jackson stood tall. “I can have anybody I…” Craig’s fist caught Jackson mid-sentence, thudding into his stomach. Jackson buckled over. Leticia ran to his side.

Craig took a step back and turned toward me, as though expecting me to attack. Instead, I froze, at a loss.

Craig continued to lecture, almost reluctantly, as if surprised at his own punch. “I done warned you. I’m done playing with y’all. You need to take this bitch and dip.”

“Who you calling bitch?” Leticia screamed, taking a step toward Craig, raising her fist.

Jackson grabbed her arm, pulling her back. “Naw, baby.”

Craig stood staring at us for a moment, then turned away. He and Terrance walked back to their shops. I reached down and began gathering Jackson’s inventory, loading it back into his duffel bag. Leticia helped me as Jackson caught his breath. The three of us headed toward their friend’s SRO room, where they had been spending their nights, sleeping on the floor. This was a violation of the building’s rules, but Leticia had been barred from the mission for showing up high.

I pieced together the motive for Craig’s attack as Leticia ranted for two blocks. She flailed one arm in explanation, keeping the other arm tight around Jackson’s waist as she huddled close to his body. This was, apparently, precisely the kind of behavior that had been catching the officers’ attention. Over the past week, Leticia and Jackson had been detained twice while they stood on Fifth Street. nonfiction | 27

“We was just standing here minding our own business,” Leticia complained, “when two of them came up and asked me if I was ‘working.’ At first I didn’t know what they meant. I thought they was asking if I needed a job or something. But then I realized these assholes was asking if I was trickin’! I said, ‘This is my husband right here.’ But they didn’t even believe me. They made us take out our IDs and show them we had the same last name. Then they

Trying to make a living down here, getting done the way Craig and those guys did me, you know what it's like? It’s like hustling backward. asked us if we were on probation or parole, if we had any warrants on us. Just for standing here talking. After all that, they still told me to take off.”

“Not before they wrote us all up,” Jackson added. “Craig too.” Jackson’s sobriety made him seem reserved next to Leticia’s constant fidgeting.

We arrived at the SRO building, where Leticia ran in to use the bathroom and Jackson and I leaned against the wall. “Those guys really fucked me,” he said after a short lapse in the conversation. He gazed out at the street, deep in thought. “I know she makes it harder for me, and for them. I understand. But I don’t have a choice, man. That’s my wife.” His voice quieted. “Next week, I’m fucked.”

“Why? What’s up?” I asked.

“It’s Mother’s Day,” he replied.

“Mother’s Day already happened.”

“No. The other Mother’s Day. That’s what they call it when the checks come in. The GR [General Relief] checks. Her pick-up date’s on the fourth, but I can’t leave her alone at all that week. Last time she damn near smoked up her whole check before I could get her to give me her money. And she fought me on it. When I got out, she was using even worse. I can’t make her stop completely.

She ain’t strong enough to go cold turkey like me. It kills me, man. That’s my wife. That’s the mother of my child.”

He sighed, and continued. “I gotta make sure she don’t kill herself, or up and disappear or something. We’re Forrest Stuart Lessons from Los Angeles’ Skid Row

broke, Forrest. How am I supposed to keep my wife alive and keep saving enough money to get a place? We can’t be in the mission no more!”

I offered what I assumed to be the most obvious solution. “Dude, why don’t you just move? Set up somewhere else and you won’t have to worry about Craig or anybody, and it won't matter if she's with you.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna have to. That’s the only way I can have her out there with me. But that was the first place all my regular customers go when they get paid. Nobody wants to go nowhere else for movies ‘cause they don’t wanna spend their money on a disc that don’t work. Ain’t no refunds and returns in this business.” Jackson sometimes proved to his customers that a DVD was good by previewing it on one of the other vendors’ portable DVD players — one of the resources they readily shared. “Customers don’t wanna take a risk on a movie that don’t work. That means I gotta sell them for less. Probably half price! That three-dollar movie I got is gonna end up going for a buck, probably, if I’m lucky.”

The two of us stood in silence. We both understood Jackson’s predicament. Returning to Fifth Street would require leaving Leticia unsupervised. Abandoning Fifth Street to support his wife through her recovery would immediately reduce the couple’s already meager income.

This would mean they wouldn’t be able to move off the streets and into their own room for the foreseeable future.

As research on homelessness consistently demonstrates, Jackson’s chances of keeping Leticia (and himself) away from crack and crack-addicted peers would be extremely low if the two couldn’t find housing.

Down on Skid Row, the intensification of policing does more than just crack down on minor neighborhood problems and disturbances. It alters the equation that determines how residents view each other — and whom they consider a problem or disturbance in the first place. When they act on these views, they sometimes end up hurting the most marginalized among them — people desperate for help. With hyper-policing, neighbors may help keep a watch on crime and bad behavior, do so to the detriment of the larger community. We get eyes on the street, but they’re not the kind of eyes we want.

A week after the altercation with Craig, I stood with Jackson and his wife on Seventh Street, on the opposite side of Skid Row. I watched as he sold one of his DVDs at half price, just as he had predicted. He turned to me, defeat in his eyes. “You wanna know what living in Skid Row’s really like?” he asked, referring back to our very first conversation over a year earlier. “Trying to make a living down here, getting done the way Craig and those guys did me, you know what it’s like? It’s like hustling backward.” nonfiction | 29

A Question of Corvids

By Sheila Webster Boneham

1

Corvidae Corvus brachyrhynchos If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows. — Henry Ward Beecher

Birds are everywhere here on the Carolina coast. Pelicans skim the blue-bellied rollers, bank for advantage, plummet and rise. Sanderlings and stilts drill for morsels in the sand while egrets stalk the marshes. Birds are everywhere.

They are hungry, and they come to dine on the veranda of this inn on the beach. Flocks of gulls hang heavy-bodied over the tables long enough to check for an unguarded bit of fish or bread or meat, and the bold ones find the thing they all want. I watched a herring gull last October pluck a fillet from between two halves of a tourist’s bun and rise on the same wing beat. Laughing gulls, with their black bonnets and chuckling calls, are less common, but they do come, mostly in Spring. Other birds, too. Pigeons, of course. Grackles and cowbirds. Dozens of the hard-toname wee guys that birders call LBJs – “little brown jobs” – flit here and scurry there for crumbs and handouts.

Crows. If gulls are the berserkers of birdkind, swooping and screaming and plundering, then corvids, including crows, are the strategists. They watch. Face a crow at close quarters and you see that you are the one under study.

With an eye sharper than his pointed bill, the crow pins down your moves and knows you better than you know him. Scientists have documented what farmers have said through the ages: crows can count. They communicate.

Consummate mimics, they even copy human speech.

Picture this: you're sitting on the hotel verandah with a friend, tucked under a huge red umbrella, gazing through dark lenses across dunes and beach to the glittering blue Atlantic. You chatter, you listen. Your lunch arrives. And a big black bird. He, or perhaps she, perches on the back the chair directly across the table and tilts his head. “Hello,” you say. You smile at the bird. You fancy that he smiles back. You and your friend watch him and laugh. He hops onto the table, tilts his head and eyes you again. You ask, in your clever human way, “Are you hungry?”

And the bird says Yeeees. His voice scrapes your eardrum, and his enunciation could use some work, but there’s no mistaking the word. Just to be sure, you ask, “Would you like something to eat?” and again he says, Yeeees. Who could say no to that?

Still, we have to be cautious when we interpret animal behaviors, especially when we want a behavior to mean something in particular. Wanting is a drug, a hallucinogen. Even scientists trained to be cautious can be duped by their own desires. In the 1960s and ‘70s, much was made of attempts to teach apes to communicate with their

handlers through American Sign Language. The researchers believed they had succeeded. They cited examples of clever, grammatical constructions produced by the apes, and their scientific articles were soon published in plain English to overwhelming public delight. The scientists genuinely wanted to believe, and we the public wanted to believe, but later attempts to replicate the results of those studies failed. The apes had learned something, but it was not actually human language.

The crow who sat down to lunch with me and my friend said yes. I doubt that he understood my question, or the meaning of the word he uttered, but he knew that if he made that sound we were likely to give him some food.

Someone, perhaps a long line of someones, taught him the rising tones of a question, taught him to mimic human speech in response. Taught him that saying yeees in his gravely way might cause someone to share a bit of lunch.

He delighted us enough that we repeated our behavior six, seven times, handing over bits of turkey and fruit, bread and tomato. If we looked on from another angle, we might suspect that our black-feathered friend trained us. As in all good training, in the end it doesn’t much matter who trained whom; we all got what we wanted. Crow ate, we laughed. We tell the story for years.

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Family Corvidae Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore. — Edgar Allen Poe

Corvids, or more properly Corvidae, are a diverse bunch.

Commonly known as “the crow family,” they count among their number some one hundred twenty species of crows and choughs, jays and jackdaws, ravens and rooks, magpies, nutcrackers, treepies. Most corvids have voices a bit like well-amplified, well-rusted hinges, but they are still considered to be the largest of the so-called “songbirds.”

They are more accurately “perching birds,” or passerines.

More than a third of corvid species are crows, ravens, and jackdaws, members all of the genus Corvus.

With brain-to-body-mass ratios that match those of the cetaceans and apes (and lag only slightly behind our own), corvids are considered by many people to be among the most intelligent animals. They certainly top the avian honor roll. Ravens and crows in particular have been seen in many traditions as divine messengers, tricksters, mediums, and omens. Tinglit, Haida, and other Native American traditions honor Raven as both Trickster and Creator. Many other traditions link corvids to war, death, and the underworld, perhaps due to their dark plumage SCIENCE | 31

and fondness for carrion. These associations remain alive in contemporary literature and popular culture.

As is the case with much folklore, truth lives in tales and beliefs. Ravens, crows, and magpies hunt and scavenge in life as in tradition. Hunters report that ravens and crows are quick to arrive after gunfire, adapting millenia-old symbioses between these birds and large predators, particularly wolves, to modern realities. Beyond that, corvids are messengers of death, not in some prescient other-worldly way but for practical reasons. Field studies have shown that ravens “call” wolves to large animals they find dead. Why invite wolves to dinner? Because, unlike birds of prey, the raven lacks a bill or talons designed to open a carcass. Someone else – wolf or human hunter or motor vehicle – needs to do the job. Magpies have been observed working with coyotes in much the same way as ravens work with wolves, and the canine hunters have learned to listen when corvids call.

Corvids aren’t entirely dependent, though, on the kindness of other hunters. For one thing, they are omnivorous; they eat everything from insects and meat to seeds and fruits to garbage and animal feeds. Many corvids are fond (in a dietary sense) of small mammals and other birds.

They prey on eggs and nestlings, and are not exempt from their own cousins’ raids; ravens have been seen to take apart the elaborate nests of magpies stick by carefully woven stick to get at the nestlings. We can hardly fault them (although traditionally we do); we too kill to eat. So do the raptors that commonly prey on corvids. So do many birds. Still, in Western traditions and beyond, people have both respected the cleverness of corvids and feared their presence. In Cornwall and other parts of the Celtic world, we are advised to greet any magpie we meet politely and loudly. This is, I think, good advice.

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Corvidae Pica hudsonia I have a magpie mind. I like anything that glitters. — Lord Thomson of Fleet

Something glitters in the bright spring light on the far side of Evans Creek. Something moves, and I stop. Watch.

A black-billed magpie stands at the top of the far bank, wings open wide and slightly drooped, head down, tail feathers spread like a Spanish fan, back feathers raised and fluffed. Three more magpies flutter in the cottonwood to my right. I sidle into the shade of the tree. The bird on the ground shudders, steps toward a desiccated clump of rabbit brush, goes still. We think of these birds as black and white, but the sun on outstretched feathers reveals startling blue, at least three shades of violet, a teasing of 32 | First & Third

green and orange and gold. Paiute fancy-shawl dancers come to mind, their embroidered finery outspread like wings. I watch the bird, utterly bedazzled, enthralled.

This is the first time I have seen this behavior, but I have read descriptions and know that this magpie is not dancing, but “anting.” Many birds do this – crows, babblers, weavers, owls, turkeys, waxbills, pheasants, more.

Magpies. They pick up ants and place them on their own bodies, let them walk around or squish them like little sponges against their feathers, showering themselves in formic acid, the ant’s chemical defense. The birds won’t say why they do it, but scientists have several theories.

The formic acid may serve as an insecticide, fending off parasitic mites, or it may help control fungal or bacterial infections. Why not? We use formic acid to fight off mites in honey-bee colonies, to slow fungal growth in animal feeds, and to battle deadly E.coli bacteria. Other researchers suggest formic-acid-as-grooming-product or perhaps ant-as-vitamin-supplement because it does contain significant levels of Vitamin D. My bird shudders again, and I remember reading that anting appears to intoxicate some birds. Again, why not?

Shamans of south-central California ingest harvester ants to induce religious visions. All functional explanations aside, perhaps some birds just like to get wasted. My magpie lifts his wings a shade, lowers them, lifts them again. He bobs his head, shakes it, stretches his neck forward, lifts his gleaming black bill skyward, says grrrk grrrk. As I watch him fold his wings and turn his profile to me, I don’t care what moves this bird. I care only that I was witness, and that I will never again see magpies in black and white.

4

Corvidae Corvus cornix Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to th' rooky wood. — Shakespeare

New Year’s Eve on Balscadden Bay. It is late afternoon, and a pale sun hangs on the horizon as if hesitant to plunge down into the cold Irish Sea. Gray is all around. I sit on a gray concrete wall above a beach strewn with gray rocks. A heron stands at the surf line, not the Great Blue or the White I know from home, but Ardea cinerea, the Grey. A flock of gulls swoops and screams over the bay; another group hunches on a trio of boulders now high above the outgoing tide.

A bird I have only just met works among the pebbles and pools, and I am enthralled. She pulls a length of seaweed from the surf and hauls it away from the sea.

This brings her closer to me, so I have a good view. She

drops her treasure into a small tidal pool in the bowl of a gray hunk of rock I take to be limestone. She picks it up again a few inches from one end, works it in her bill for just the right grip. The bird swings the short end around and whacks it against the rock side of the bowl. Repeats.

Again. She drops the length of seaweed and pecks around in the shallow water. I watch for twenty minutes as the gray-and-black bird repeats the process, working her way to the other end of the soggy vegetable. She flies back to the surf and I walk to her pool. The remains of the seaweed are a raggedy mess, but I can see what she was after.

Tiny crustaceans. She hasn’t left many, but a few little shells are still caught in the fibers.

This is the hooded crow, the hoodie. She goes by many other names as well, and I discover that not many people share my enchanted view of her here in Ireland. My landlady tells me they frighten her, but she can’t give me a solid reason why that is so. Perhaps, she says, it is from seeing The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic. Or perhaps her fear has been handed down from mother to daughter, a thread woven into the cultural fabric. For this is the corbie of ballads; a loose translation of one perches a pair of corbies on the dead hero’s white breast-bone to peck out his bonny blue eyes. Depending which source we believe, the hooded crow or the raven embodied the Morrigan, Celtic goddess of war and death; when the Irish mythic Sheila Webster Boneham A Question of Corvids

hero Cú Chulainn is dying, the hooded crow perches on his shoulder. Hoodies have been variously thought to be in league with fairies, to attack livestock, and to herald death.

Perhaps what puts people off is the hoodie’s somber dress, black and dull brownish-gray, as much as her fondness for carrion. Perhaps it is her intelligence.

The last light leaves the horizon and my hooded crow on the beach beats one last length of seaweed. I have resumed my watch from this chilly concrete perch, reluctant to leave even as evening cold seeps into my bones. Whatever legend and local opinion make of this bird, I want to know the hoodie better. The crow snatches a few last bites from the limestone bowl before her and then, with a parting caw-caw, she opens her wings and is gone.

5

Corvidae Pica hudsonia What I am interested in with birds ... is what they do and why they do it. — David Attenborough

Bartley Ranch Regional Park lies south of Reno in the shadow of Mount Rose and her sister peaks of the eastern Sierras. On a good day, the park’s population includes walkers and dogs, trail runners, horses and riders, jackrabbits and cottontails. Coyotes, although they are wary. In the year I have lived here, I have only ever seen one coyote SCIENCE | 33

in the park, and that one was a long way off. Horned lizards live here, and snakes – gopher snakes mostly, despite widespread fear of rattlers. Ground squirrels, marmots, many other furry things. Birds.

Golden Eagles ride the thermals over Bartley, and vultures, too. Red-tailed and Cooper’s Hawks are common, and owls – Great Horned and Burrowing and Barred.

California Quail are everywhere, strutting and chattering in the brush, or hollering ne-VA-da ne-VA-da at everyone, no matter the birds’ common name. Jet-black crows and songbirds of all sorts. Magpies.

At first I think the bird is injured. I am walking along the edge of a parking lot, headed for the trail that climbs up and back down Windy Hill, when a wild fluttering catches my eye. A wing tip and tail’s long feathers wave and shake at me from behind a hassock-sized boulder.

Magpie, I think, and a vision of the anting magpie dances across my memory. Magpie in trouble. I will check the bird and, if necessary, call for a ranger. Then a scream from behind the rock clutches at me. Not a magpie scream.

Before I see it, I know.

The magpie is not in trouble, and even as I rush toward them, she pecks at the little rabbit. Another scream. New from the nest, smaller than my fist, covered with downy gray-brown fur and, now, a spattering of blood. Get off, I yell, waving my arms at the bird, feeling a surge of adrenaline and something else, something that makes me want to hold that baby, save him, stop the hurt and fear.

The magpie slowly lifts her body into the air and sinks like a hovercraft onto a branch just over my head. I could reach out and touch the long tail from where I stand. A hard black eye bores into me. As I turn back to the baby rabbit, the magpie rasps mag-mag-mag-mag, and I wonder vaguely whether she might not come for me. The bunny is still, but its eyes are alive. I shoo it from the open space behind the boulder into a thick tangle of sage. It moves quickly and disappears. Safe for the moment, I think.

The bird on the branch is still glaring when I look up again. I am no coward about the facts of nature. This is what animals do, all of us, and even as I wave my arms to drive the bird away, knowing she will be back, I ponder my right to do such a thing. I think about these things a lot when I walk. Part of the path I meant to take this morning lies between two pastures where feeder calves graze the summer away, and because I walk there, and because they are no longer visions in a distant field but individuals who come to the fence to watch me, whose faces I know – the red steer with the question mark on his brow, the black one with the punky topnot that stands between his ears – I've recently been grappling with my own conflicted habits and realities.

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My heart slows and I turn away from the sage brush, away from the birdless branch. I halt. The sand and high-desert plants around me are in wild motion. Magpies everywhere, thirty or more, swooping, pecking, chasing baby rabbits. My ears fill with the screaming of the bunnies, the raucous whoops and caws of the birds. Two adult rabbits — the mothers, I know in my heart — run in wild hopeless loops across the open spaces. I begin to run, too, yelling at birds and waving my arms, and stopping to herd the terrified babies into sage and rabbitbrush and spaces beneath rocks. I know it will all start again when I leave.

6

Corvidae Pica hudsonia The great and flashing magpie, he flies as poets might. — T. P. Cameron Wilson

Lewis and Clark met their first magpies in South Dakota in 1804. They wrote that the birds were bold and gregarious, willing to walk right into the men’s tents and take food from their hands. When bison roamed the Great Plains, magpies went along, picking ticks off the great beasts and eating insects the herds stirred up. The birds scavenged as well, cleaning up carcasses left by people, wolves, and other death-dealers. The Bald Eagle may be the avian symbol of the West, but it's the black-billed magpie who dances on creek banks and calls mag mag mag as you walk the riparian strands.

Smart and adaptable, magpies switched to other livestock when men with rifles wiped out the great herds of bison in the 1870’s. They are supreme opportunists. I have watched flocks of magpies hunting on creek banks and picking insects and bits of grain from manure in horse paddocks. Adaptability to human-dominated environments has advantages. It also brings new dangers. Campaigns to eradicate these “pests” have caused thousands of magpie deaths; 1,033 black-billed magpies were shot in the Okanogan Valley of Washington in one “hunt” in 1933, and in Idaho an estimated 150,000 magpies were systematically killed around the same time for a few pennies in bounty per bird. Thousands more have died from eating poisons set out for coyotes and other predators.

A modified war on magpies continues today. As is the case in wars, hatreds often rest on false beliefs. Magpies don’t peck livestock open for the blood; they pull off and devour ticks. Magpies don’t decimate “desirable” songbird populations; they all thrive together. Facts take a long time, though, to overshadow falsehoods, and while magpies are partially protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and some state and local statutes, judgment-call exceptions are written into the law.

Photography | Joel Sartore + Trevor Ray Hart

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Corvidae Corvus brachyrhynchos I'd hate to miss an important message because it came dressed in feathered black and spoke a different language. — Lynn Samsel

The new issue of National Wildlife has arrived, and in it is a story ostensibly about crows. Really, though, it is a story about people, or more to the point, scientists, and about their “discovery” that crows recognize human faces. Not as a class of things, or some similarities, but individual faces. That crow who seems to know you, well, she knows you. This, apparently, is a surprise. At least that’s the impression the researchers give in their comments, which seem crafted to fit a rhetoric of objective distancing. Their surprise at their findings implies instead a disconnection with the creatures being studied. Perhaps the question should not be whether the crows are able to recognize individual faces, but why, in the first place.

Scientists are wary of anthropomorphizing. We all should be. But sometimes researchers seem to be even more wary of being accused of the act than they are of the act itself. It gets plain silly at times. Eight pages after the article about crows is another that asks, “Are Other Animals Aware of Death?” Have you ever watched an encounter between a predator and its prey? Or seen a mother animal with a dead or dying baby? I have seen Sheila Webster Boneham A Question of Corvids

these things, and would readily say that they know at least as much about death as we do.

Elephants are the focus of the piece. They often are when non-human awareness of death comes up, because they are known to linger over and handle the bones of their own dead. Corvids are mentioned as well. A recent study at the University of California-Davis reported that scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) will gather around the remains of other scrub jays and scream for up to thirty minutes. Initially the ruckus was thought to be a warning, but jays, and sometimes ravens and crows, respond to the uproar by flocking to the sites. Still, so goes the report, the gatherings “don’t necessarily mean the birds understand death.” Whether they understand death seems to me as silly as asking a crow at table “are you hungry?” After all, our own species has been debating what death is, biologically and philosophically, for thousands of years. How far ahead of the jays does that put us in coming to terms with mortality, with comprehending it?

“Would you like something to eat?” I asked the crow at the beach. Why else would he bother with me? I need to reform my questions. The sharp-eyed corvids may be clever enough to help if I can manage to listen beyond what I want to hear. Or perhaps they are clever enough to know that some answers are entirely avian and beyond our reach.

SCIENCE | 35

How the Blind See the Stars

By Walt Pickut

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The new moon night was dark and rich in stars. The line at the bottom of the steps was 200 deep and growing. This was a busy public night at the Martz / Kohl Observatory atop Robin Hill, in Frewsburg, New York, and the rickety old ladder up to the eyepiece of our biggest telescope was getting a workout. When nothing more than space itself and a telescope separates an eye from the open sky, it’s inspiring — a direct view to the heavens cannot be matched by pixels on a screen. On clear nights, that’s our promise to the public.

We gave everybody one full minute atop our makeshift staircase to take their own unforgettable trip into space.

Our stargazers were almost always patient. But there was one man who would not come down. His minute stretched into two. “Please, sir,” one of us called. “Come down. The next person would like to look.” A long moment passed.

“I saw… a star,” he called down, his voice halting and cracked with emotion. Then again, “I saw a star!” The waiting line began to murmur.

“That’s not a star, buddy,” a voice answered from somewhere back in the line. “We are looking at Jupiter tonight.”

The image in the eyepiece would have been sharply focused, a nearly sun-bright, faintly striped disk flanked by its four famous Galilean moons hanging against the velvety black of interplanetary space. “He’s blind,” a woman on the bottom step said. “I’m his wife. I know. He’s barely seen anything all his life, just lights and shadows. But for him, tonight he saw a star.”

SCIENCE | 37

“Let him alone,” someone said. “Let him look as long as he wants.” Everyone, visitors and astronomers alike, saw something inspiring that night through the eye of a blind man. But there are many like him, and NASA is among their most avid supporters and employers.

Consider Tim Doucette, of Quinan, Nova Scotia, who was diagnosed as a child with congenital cataracts.

Surgery, starting at age one and through his 20s, allowed doctors to excise his damaged lenses and widen his pupils.

The “cure” left him legally blind with a mere 10 percent of his eyesight but also with an unexpected boon. Daylight is blindingly bright to Tim’s unshielded eyes, but nobody can see the night sky quite like Doucette.

So, as one does, he built himself an observatory. His surgically enlarged iris allows the telescope to focus images directly onto his retina, sensitive to ultraviolet and infrared frequencies that normal lenses would filter out.

He has exploited that gift in astrophotography since 2004.

His newest observatory, the Deep Sky Eye, saw first light on the night of November 15, 2015, in North America’s first certified UNESCO-Starlight Tourist Destination.

People who are blind miss a mere sliver of “light” in the electromagnetic spectrum’s 20 orders of magnitude, from the 1 kiloHertz photons emitted by electrons, which meander through interstellar space, all the way up to 2.4 × 1023 Hertz gamma ray photons, which pack enough energy to create matter and antimatter. With their naked eyes, humans see only this thin middle slice of the 1 × 1014 Hertz range, and call it colorful. What we can see is no more than just a hint of all the universe has to show.

In 1948 Edwin Hubble said, “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.” Today, that’s true in a sense he didn’t intend. Astronomers now convert all the information arriving in photons of every frequency into digital data and, for people with no or low vision, into sound, touch and more in a myriad of ways.

Astrophysicist Wanda Diaz Merced, for example, became blind in her twenties. She investigates the staggering energy and light released by gamma-ray bursts, the most violent events in the universe, by the newest techniques of radio astronomy. She converts data into

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Photography | esa / Hubble

the music of the spheres by “sonification” at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This technique transforms visual light curves and huge data sets into sound. By listening to variations in pitch, duration, and other sound qualities, she decodes crucial patterns to be found in burst-like interstellar light and radio signals.

Sebastián Musso, at the Center for Astronomical Studies in Mar del Plata, Argentina says, “Los ciegos pueden oír” — the blind can hear. He has proposed an acoustic planetarium employing musical pitch, color, texture, and duration to depict celestial objects and events for blind persons or those with amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” For a person who is blind, space produces music.

In 1826, a blind 12-year-old boy in France named Louis Braille invented a revolutionary system of reading and writing by touch. Today, a distant cousin of Braille’s system has been developed by educators in conjunction with NASA and National Braille Press to publish astronomy books with tactile illustrations employing varied textures, elevated points, shapes, line drawings, and graphs. Ben L. Wentworth, a science teacher at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, created an entirely tactile planetarium for visually impaired students.

Astronomy for the blind is now poised to move beyond static, braille-like representations to active haptics. A group at Stanford University is developing a haptic, table-like “screen” with a grid of thousands of flat, square dowels that rapidly rise and fall to various heights as a substitute for images and videos. One can now imagine a haptic computer screen with small enough tactile pixels to represent changing astronomical events like solar flares or moving satellites for the hands of blind astronomers.

At the Martz/Kohl Observatory, a blind young visitor asked, “What does the solar system look like?” One of the observatory’s volunteer astronomers explained, “All you need is arms and hands, fingers and feet.” The boy’s arms could span a yard-wide picture of the sun; one hand held a scaled orange-sized Jupiter, and he pinched a blueberry-sized Earth in his fingers. Then his feet took him more than a football field down the road for the 93,000,000 mile trip from his blueberry to the sun. He knew he’d need a fast car to reach Pluto by suppertime.

Walt Pickut How the Blind See the Stars

Science | 39

To protect soldiers from bombs

Military Scientists Build a Better Dummy

By Mary Roach

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Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland

Someone has shot up a road sign. Given the gape of the hole and the fact that the road traverses Aberdeen Proving Ground, there’s a good chance it wasn’t made by a bullet.

A proving ground is a spread of high-security acreage set aside for testing weapons and the vehicles meant to withstand them. I’m headed for Aberdeen’s Building 336, where combat vehicles come to be up-armored, as the military likes to up-say, against the latest threats.

Mark Roman, my host this morning, oversees the Stryker “family” of armored combat vehicles. He’ll be using them for an impromptu tutorial in personnel vulnerability: the art and science of keeping people safe in a vehicle that other people are trying to blow up. My extremely uneducated guess is that some sort of shaped charge hit that sign. A shaped charge is an explosive double whammy used for breaching the hulls of vehicles and harming the people inside them.

R.P.G.s (rocket-propelled grenades) are the shaped charges most people have heard of, though there are ever bigger, deadlier iterations. Iran is said to have one that can push through 14 inches of steel. For years now, military scientists have been looking for ways to defend soldiers in armored vehicles from explosives like R.P.G.s and, more recently, improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s.

The work is extraordinarily difficult — an alchemy of physics and medicine that has begun to yield insights into the human body under the great duress of battle.

By and large, an army shows up to a war with the gear it has on hand from the last one. In 2003, the

Marines arrived in Iraq with Humvees. “Some of the older ones had canvas doors,” says Mr. Roman, who was one of those Marines. They were no match for the R.P.G.s trained upon them. So the Army tried plating vehicles with armor panels, which work well against heavy machine-gun fire. “We were like, ‘Crap, this does not stop an R.P.G.,’” said Roman.

Something cheaper and simpler eventually was found to work. This morning, Mr. Roman leads the way to a Stryker in a hoopskirt of heavy-duty steel grating called slat armor. The nose of an incoming R.P.G. gets pinched between two slats, which duds it.

It’s like squeezing your nose to stop a sneeze: It either prevents the explosion from happening or blocks the expulsion of nasty stuff. Either way, it proved effective. In Iraq, Strykers would lumber back to base like up-armored hedgehogs, bristling with R.P.G.s. Slat armor worked so well that Iraqi insurgents largely gave up on R.P.G.s. And switched to making bombs.

Early in the Iraq war, improvised explosive devices were hidden on sides of roads. Since these I.E.D. blasts hit vehicles broadside, the Army responded by flanking them with armor plates and replacing windows with two-inch-thick “Pope glass” of the type that keeps His Holiness whole on his own tours of duty. In Afghanistan, land of the 100-pound I.E.D., insurgents took a new tack. To get around the up-armoring, they came at vehicles from below, burying the explosives in the middle of the road rather than on the sides of it.

As on most trucks, the chassis or base frames of American combat vehicles at that time were flat.

Newer generations of vehicles have V-shaped or double-V-shaped chassis to deflect the energy unleashed in a blast, but flat ones took it head-on. And because the seats were bolted to the passenger compartment floor, the energy would transmit directly to passengers’ feet, spines, and pelvises, often leading to casualties.

Newer vehicles have higher clearances, and the force of a blast diminishes rapidly as it radiates outward.

Still, energy at one or two feet is so condensed that it can act like a solid projectile and break through vehicle floors. Once the hull is breached, any loose piece of vehicle or gear becomes a projectile. Soldiers and Marines would pile sandbags on the floors of Humvees for the same reason aviators used to sit on their body armor instead of wearing it: Because death came up from below. The underbody blast scenario was soon dire enough that United States Central Command rolled out a Joint Urgent Operational Need statement.

The gist was this: Get us some combat vehicles that can drive over bombs and keep everyone inside alive.

SCIENCE | 41

A Dummy of Their Own

At the same time that the Army was working to make vehicles like the Stryker safer, they were scrambling to evaluate the new MRAPs (em-raps): mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles. When Dr. Nicole Brockhoff joined the Army Research Laboratory, her colleagues were using the crash test dummy that the auto industry uses: the Hybrid III. Both a car crash and an underbody blast cause blunt-force trauma: the sorts of injuries you get from slamming into pieces of a vehicle’s interior.

(As opposed to injuries caused by a blast pressure wave passing through you — rupturing organs and eardrums and the like — which a vehicle largely protects against.)

Here’s the problem. Automotive crash-test dummies were designed for measuring force mainly along two axes: front to back (for head-on impact), and side to side (for “T-bone” crashes). But with a blast coming up from below, the axis of impact runs vertically through the body: heels to head. To see the difference, a Hybrid III was filmed alongside a cadaver in a controlled blast.

It is clear, from the slow-motion footage, that the dummy wasn’t built for this. It’s like watching an elderly, arthritic man try to follow along in a Zumba class.

“We were missing a lot of nuance about the severity of the injury,” Dr. Brockhoff said. “We needed to know, at what point do you go from a treatable injury that’s recoverable to something life-altering and incapacitating and potentially fatal?” So the Army began building a dummy of its own. WIAMan — the Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin — will be specifically tailored to assess the impact of underbody explosions.

The scientists creating the WIAMan are starting the way the automotive crash-test dummy people started: with cadavers and controlled impacts of varying magnitudes, followed by autopsies to document the injuries.

But before military researchers could start any of that, they had to build a “blast rig,” something robust enough to withstand an explosion directly below it. By setting off blasts in the rig and recording the effects on cadavers, scientists simulate the effects of I.E.D.s on soldiers in armored vehicles. Data from the cadavers is used to calibrate the WIAMan. The tower, as it is conversationally known, is a single-story platform with a set of rollaway stairs undergirded by a lot of complex machinery. It stands in a meadow near what the mapmakers call Bear Point and the Aberdeen Explosive Effects Branch calls Experimental Facility 13. On the day I visited, the cadavers were there already, sitting in seats on the tower platform. They had arrived a day earlier from bioengineering labs at three universities. Some made the trip 42 | First & Third

Who’d sign such a thing?

Plenty of people. Patriots, vets, family members — anybody, really, glad to see their corpses put to use protecting the living.

in a modified horse trailer, disappointing the children in passing cars craning their necks for a glimpse of tail or rump. The cadavers, one in an orange Lycra bodysuit and one in yellow, sit slumped in their seats on the rig, chins on their chests like dozing subway commuters. Because the setup takes two days, the dead men spent the night in the meadow with a pair of guards.

Under the platform is a plot of simulated Middle East, with engineered soil that ’s been heated and moistened.

At around 2:30 p.m., a pickup truck arrived with a few pounds of the explosive C-4, which everyone here refers to as “the threat.” Around 2:45, the bioengineers and investigators and hangers-on like me were escorted to a nearby bunker while the threat was buried in the special dirt and a detonating wire was attached.

The cadavers had their connectivity rechecked: Data will be gathered from sensors mounted on their bones and then transmitted along wires laid down along the insides of their limbs and spines, a sort of man-made nervous system. A bundle of wires exits at the back of each cadaver’s neck and feeds into the system.

After the blast, the cadavers will be autopsied and the injuries documented. This is the information that will allow vehicle evaluators to interpret the G-forces and strains and accelerations that WIAMan’s sensors will register. Because of the cadavers’ contributions, Illustration | LincolN Agnew

WIAMan will be able to predict what kind and what degree of injury these different magnitudes of force would be likely to cause in an actual explosion. WIAMan won’t be ready for routine use until 2021, but in the meantime, the cadaver injury data can be used to create a sort of auto-translate program for the Hybrid III, making it better able to predict underbody blast injuries.

The cadavers are coaxed into a straight-backed dinner-table posture, some duct tape keeping them from slumping. A bioengineer strings thin wires to hold the head in that eyes-right position, though not so firmly that it interferes with its movements, which will be captured on video cameras set up in bunkers on all four sides. There’s a protocol for everything: the angle of the cadavers’ knees, the position of their hands on their thighs, the newtons of force with which their boots are laced. The hover and fuss of the scientists exaggerates the abiding stillness of the bodies. They’re like anchormen sitting for their makeup. How nice, I find myself thinking, to be in the company of people who long ago agreed to this strange job that only they, as dead people, are qualified to do.

Body donors are required to have given specific consent for research or testing that may involve, as the document lays it out, “impacts, blasts, ballistics testing, crash testing and other destructive forces.” Who would sign such a thing? Plenty of people. Patriots, vets, their family members — anybody, really, glad to see their corpses put to use protecting the living.

If you’re fine with a medical student dissecting every inch of you to learn anatomy, or with a surgeon practicing a new procedure or trying out a new device on you, then you are probably fine riding the blast rig.

The Shock From Beneath

In World War II they called it deck-slap. Explosions from underwater mines and torpedoes would propel a ship’s decks upward, smashing sailors’ heel bones.

Like “combat fatigue” for post-traumatic stress disorder, it was a cavalier toss-off of a name for what would often turn out to be a life-altering condition.

The calcaneus (the heel) is tough to break, tougher still to repair. By one early paper’s count, 84 different approaches had been tried and discussed in medical journals. Few statistics from the era exist, but one paper cites a foot amputation rate of 25 percent. Underbody blasts have brought heels back to the attention of military surgeons. These days, the amputation rate for deck-slap injuries is higher than ever: 45 percent, in one recent review of 40 cases.

Part of the problem has to do with fat, not bone. The calcaneal fat pad keeps the bone from abrading skin on mary roach Military Scientists Build a Better Dummy

the underside of the heel. It’s an extremely dense, fibrous fat found nowhere else in the body. (There’s enough squish there to merit the cobbler’s term “breast of the heel.”)

Fat pads are frequently damaged in underbody blasts, sometimes badly enough that they have to be removed.

Without the padding, the pain of walking is acute.

In the bunker, we stand and stare at the video feed, waiting to see this deck-slap in real time. A slight breeze moves the trees beyond the tower. Eventually someone begins a countdown. The explosion, half a mile away, is muffled. On the monitors, the cadavers appear to be thrown by the blast, but not in an action-movie way. More a took-a-speed-bump-too-fast way. The cadavers in an underbody blast test are blown up, as in upward, not apart.

The event is filmed at 10,000 frames a second. Playing back the footage at 15 or 30 frames a second allows the researchers to step inside the half-second life span of the event. Now we can see what in real time we could not. First the boots flatten, their sides bulging noticeably. An index finger rises from where it was resting on a thigh, as though the cadaver were about to make a point. The lower legs extend and rise. The head comes down and the arms shoot out in the manner of a hurdler midleap. The camera zooms in on one of the cadavers. As the energy of the blast moves to the seat pan, the dead man’s pelvis rises, shortening his torso and expanding his paunch. Underbody blast can compress a seated soldier’s spine by as much as two inches.

Played at this speed, there’s grace and beauty to the limbs’ extensions, nothing brutish or violent. In real time, the forces that move the limbs pass too quickly for the tissue to accommodate. Muscles strain, ligaments tear, bones may break. Imagine pulling apart a wad of Silly Putty. Pull slowly, and it will stretch across the room. Yank it fast and it snaps in two. Likewise, different types of body tissue have different strain rates. For the forces of any given blast, one type may stretch, say, a fifth of its length without tearing, while another may manage just 5 percent. WIAMan will be calibrated to reflect these differences and predict the consequences.

The long-term quality of a soldier or Marine’s life is a relatively new consideration. In the past, military decision makers concerned themselves more with go/no-go: Do the injuries keep a soldier from completing the mission?

WIAMan will answer that question, but it will answer others, too. Following a vehicle blast, is this soldier likely to have back pain for the rest of his life? Will she limp?

Will his heel hurt so much that he’d rather lose the foot?

The answers may or may not affect the decisions that are made in the preparations for war, but at least they’ll be part of the equation for those inclined to do the math.

SCIENCE | 43

In the Margins

By Sofia Samatar

Author’s Introduction: “In the library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as a graduate student, I came across a book called A Picnic Party in Wildest Africa by C.W.L. Bulpett, published in 1907. It’s an account of a hunting trip, full of admiration for the animals and loathing for the people of East Africa. I found it almost mesmerizingly vile.

The hunter in my story, ‘In the Margins’ is loosely based on the author of that memoir.”

— Sofia Samatar

fiction | 45

February 1907, Kenya Catalogued by Alibhai M. Moosajee of Mombasa DAY 1

Apul Apul A male ogre of the Great Lakes region. A melancholy character, he eats crickets to sweeten his voice. His house burned down with all of his children

inside. His enemy is the Hare.

Apul Apul [ My informant, a woman of the highlands who calls herself only "Mary," adds that Apul Apul can be heard on windy nights, crying for his lost progeny. She claims that he has been sighted far from his native country, even on the coast, and that an Arab trader once shot and wounded him from the battlements of Fort Jesus. It happened in a famine year, the “Year of Fever.” A great deal of research would be required in order to match this year, when, according to Mary, the cattle

perished in droves, to one of the Years of Our Lord by which my employer reckons the passage of time; I append this note, therefore, in fine print, and in the margins. “Always read the fine print, Alibhai!” my employer reminds me when I draw up his contracts. He is unable to read it himself; his eyes are not good. “The African sun has spoilt them, Alibhai!” Apul Apul, Mary says, bears a festering sore where the bullet pierced him.

He is allergic to lead. ]

DAY 2

Ba’ati A grave-dweller from the environs of the ancient capital of Kush. The ba’ati

possesses a skeletal figure and a morbid sense of humor. Its great pleasure is to impersonate human beings: if your dearest friend wears a cloak and claims to suffer from a

cold, he may be a ba’ati in disguise.

Ba’ati [ Mary arrives every day precisely at the second hour after dawn. I am curious about this reserved and encyclopedic woman. It amuses me to write these reflections concerning her in the margins of the catalogue I am composing for my employer. He will think this writing is fly-tracks, or smudges from my dirty hands (he persists in his opinion that I am always dirty). As I write I see Mary before me as she presents herself each morning, in her calico dress, seated on an overturned crate. I believe she is not very old, though she must be

46 | First & Third

several years older than I (but I am very young: “Too young to walk like an old man, Alibhai! Show some spirit! Ha!”). As she talks, she works at a bit of scarlet thread, plaiting something, perhaps a necklace. The tips of her fingers seem permanently stained with color. “Where did you learn so much about ogres, Mary?” “Anyone may learn. You need only listen.” “What is your full name?” She stops plaiting and looks up. Her eyes drop their veil of calm and flash at me — in annoyance, in warning?

“I told you,” she says. “Mary. Only Mary.” ]

DAY 3

Dhegdheer A female ogre of Somaliland. Her name means “Long Ear.” She is described as a large, heavy woman, a very fast runner. One of her ears is said to be

much longer than the other, in fact so long that it trails upon the ground. With this

ear she can hear her enemies approaching from a great distance. She lives in a ruined

hovel with her daughter. The daughter is beautiful and would like to be married.

Eventually she will murder Dhegdheer by filling her ear with boiling water.

Dhegdheer [ My employer is so pleased with the information we have received from Mary that he has decided to camp here for another week. “Milk her, Alibhai!” he says, leering. “Eh? Squeeze her! Get as much out of her as you can. Ha! Ha!” My employer always shouts, as the report of his gun has made him rather deaf. In the evenings he invites me into his tent, where, closed in by walls, a roof, and a floor of Willesden canvas, I am afforded a brief respite from the mosquitoes. A lamp hangs from the central pole, and beneath it my employer sits with

his legs stretched out and his red hands crossed on his stomach.

“Very good, Alibhai!” he says. “Excellent!” Having shot every type of animal in the Protectorate, he is now determined to try his hand at ogre. I will be required to record his kills, as I keep track of all his accounts. It would be “ damn fine,” he opines, to acquire the ear of Dhegdheer. Mary tells me that one day Dhegdheer’s daughter, racked with remorse, will walk into the sea and give herself up to the sharks. ]

DAY 3

Limu L imu transports his victims across a vast body of water in a ferryboat. His country, which lies on the other side, is inaccessible to all creatures save ogres and

weaverbirds. If you are trapped there, your only recourse is to beg the weaverbirds for sticks. You will need seven sticks in order to get away. The first two sticks will allow

you to turn yourself into a stone, thereby escaping notice. The remaining five sticks enable the following transformations: thorns, a pit, darkness, sand, a river.

Limu [ “Stand up straight, Alibhai! Look lively, man!” My employer is of the opinion that I do not show a young man’s proper spirit. This, he tells me, is a racial defect, and therefore not my fault, but I may improve myself by following his example. My employer thrusts out his chest. “Look, Alibhai!”

He says that if I walk about stooped over like a dotard, people will get the impression that I am shiftless and craven, and this

Sofia Samatar In the Margins

will quite naturally make them want to kick me. He himself has kicked me on occasion. It is true that my back is often stiff, and I find it difficult to extend my limbs to their full length.

Perhaps, as my employer suspects, I am growing old before my time. These nights of full moon are so bright, I can see my shadow on the grass. It writhes like a snake when I make an effort to straighten my back. ]

fiction | 47

DAY 4

Katandabaliko While most ogres are large, Katandabaliko is small, the size of a child. He arrives with a sound of galloping just as the food is ready. “There is

sunshine for you!” he cries. This causes everyone to faint, and Katandabaliko devours

the food at his leisure. Katandabaliko cannot himself be cooked: cut up and boiled,

he knits himself back together and bounces out of the pot. Those who attempt to

cook and eat him may eat their own wives by mistake. When not tormenting human

beings, he prefers to dwell among cliffs.

Katandabaliko [ I myself prefer to dwell in Mombasa, at the back of my uncle’s shop, Moosajee and Co. I cannot pretend to enjoy nights spent in the open, under what my employer calls the splendor of the African sky. Mosquitoes whine, and something, probably a dangerous animal, rustles in the grass. The Somali cook and headman sit up late, exchanging stories, while the Kavirondo porters sleep in a corral constructed of baggage.

I am uncomfortable, but at least I am not lonely. My employer is pleased to think that I suffer terribly from loneliness. “It’s no

picnic for you, eh, Alibhai?” He thinks me too prejudiced to tolerate the society of the porters and too frightened to go near the Somalis, who, to his mind, being devout Sunnis, must be plotting the removal of my Shi’a head. In fact, we all pray together.

We are tired and far from home. We are here for money, and when we talk, we talk about money. We discuss calculations for hours: what we expect to buy, where we expect to invest. Our languages are different but we count in Swahili. ]

DAY 5

Kibugi A male ogre who haunts the foothills of Mount Kenya. He carries knives,

machetes, hoes, and other objects made of metal. If you can manage to make a cut in

his little finger, all the people he has devoured will come streaming out.

Kibugi [ Mary has had, I suspect, a mission education. This would explain the name and the calico dress. Such an education is nothing to be ashamed of — why, then, did she stand up in such a rage when I inquired about it? Mary’s rage is cold; she kept her voice low. “I have told you not to ask me these types of questions! I have only come to tell you about ogres! Give me the money!” She held out her hand, and I doled out her daily fee in rupees, although she had not stayed for the agreed amount of time. She seized the money and secreted it in her dress. Her contempt burned me; my hands trembled as I wrote her fee in my

48 | First & Third

record book. “No questions!” she repeated, seething with anger.

“If I went to a mission school, I’d burn it down! I have always been a free woman!” I was silent, although I might have reminded her that we are both my employer’s servants: like me, she has come here for money. I watched her stride off down the path to the village. At a certain distance, she began to waver gently in the sun. My face still burns from the sting of her regard. Before she left, I felt compelled to inform her that though my father was born at Karachi, I was born at Mombasa. I, too, am an African. Mary’s mouth twisted. “So is Kibugi.” ]

DAY 6

Kipteoonguryon A fearsome yet curiously domestic ogre of the Rift Valley.

He collects human skulls, which he once used to decorate his spacious dwelling. He

made the skulls so clean, it is said, and arranged them so prettily, that from a distance

his house resembled a palace of salt. His human wife bore them two sons: one which looked human like its mother, and one, called Kiptegen, which resembled its father.

When the wife was taken by her human kin, they took the human-looking child as well, but Kiptegen was burnt alive.

Kipteoonguryon [ I am pleased to say that Mary returned this morning, perfectly calm and apparently resolved to forget our quarrel. She tells me that Kiptegen’s brother will never be able to forget the screams of his sibling perishing in the flames. The mother, too, is scarred by the loss. She had to be held back, or she would have dashed into the fire to rescue her ogre­child.

This information does not seem appropriate for my employer’s catalogue; still, I find myself adding it in the margins. There is a strange pleasure in this writing and not-writing, these letters

that hang between revelation and oblivion. If my employer discovered these notes, he would call them impudence, cunning, a trick. What would I say in my defense? “Sir, I was unable to tell you. Sir, I was unable to speak of the weeping mother of Kiptegen.” He would laugh: he believes that all words are found in his language. I ask myself if there are words contained in Mary’s margins: stories of ogres she cannot tell to me.

Kiptebanguryon, she says, is homeless now. A modern creature, he roams the Protectorate clinging to the undersides of trains. ]

DAY 7

Kisirimu K isirimu dwells on the shores of Lake Albert. Bathed, dressed in barkcloth, carrying his bow and arrows, he glitters like a bridegroom. His purpose is to

trick gullible young women. He will be betrayed by song.

Kirisimu [ In the evenings, under the light of the lamp, I read the day’s inventory from my record book, informing my employer of precisely what has been spent and eaten. As a representative of Moosajee and Co., Superior Traders, Stevedores and Dubashes, I am responsible for ensuring that nothing has been stolen. My employer stretches, closes his eyes, and smiles as I inform him of the amount of sugar, coffee, and tea in his possession. Tinned bacon, tinned milk, oat porridge, salt, ghee. The dates, he reminds me, are strictly for the Somalis, who grow sullen in the absence of this treat. My employer is full of opinions. The Somalis, he tells me, are an excitable nation. “Don’t offend them, Alibhai! Ha, ha!” The Kavirondo, by contrast,

Sofia Samatar In the Margins

are merry and tractable, excellent for manual work. My own people are cowardly, but clever at figures. There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world’s most beautiful music.

My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward he makes me read to him from the Bible.

He believes I will find this painful: “Heresy, Alibhai! Ha, ha!

You’ll have to scrub your mouth out, eh? Extra ablutions?”

Fortunately, God does not share his prejudices. I read: There were giants in the earth in those days. I read: For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron. ]

fiction | 49

DAY 8

Konyek Konyek is a skilled hunter. His bulging eyes can perceive movement far

across the plains. Human beings are his prey. He runs with great loping strides, kills, sleeps underneath the boughs of a leafy tree. Konyek's favorite question is “Mother,

whose footprints are these?”

Konyek [ Mary tells me that Konyek passed through her village in the Year of Amber. The whirlwind of his running loosened the roofs. A wise woman had predicted his arrival, and the young men, including Mary’s brother, had set up a net between trees to catch him. But Konyek only laughed and tore down the net and disappeared with a sound of thunder. He is now, Mary believes, in the region of Eldoret. She tells me that her brother

and the other young men who devised the trap have not been seen since the disappearance of Konyek. Mary’s gaze is quite peculiar. It draws me in. I find it strange that just a few days ago I described her as a cold person. When she tells me of her brother she winds her scarlet thread so tightly about her finger I am afraid she will cut it off. ]

DAY 9

Mbiti M biti hides in the berry bushes. When you reach in, she says: “Oh, don’t

pluck my eye out!” She asks you: “Shall I eat you, or shall I make you my child?” You agree to become Mbiti’s child. She pricks you with a needle. She is betrayed by the

cowrie shell at the end of her tail.

Mbiti [ “My brother,” Mary says. She describes the forest. She says we will go there to hunt ogres. Her face is filled with a subdued yet urgent glow. I find myself leaning closer to her. The sounds of the others, their voices, the smack of an ax into wood, recede until they are thin as the buzzing of flies. The world is composed of Mary and myself and the sky about Mary and the trees about Mary. She asks me if I understand what she is saying. She tells me about her brother in the forest. I realize that the glow she exudes comes not from some supernatural

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power but from fear. She speaks to me carefully, as if to a child.

She gives me a bundle of scarlet threads. She says: “When the child goes into the forest, it wears a red necklace. And when the ogre sees the necklace, it spares the child.” She says: “I think you and my brother are exactly the same age.” My voice is reduced to a whisper. “What of Mbiti?” Mary gives me a deep glance, fiercely bright. She says: “Mbiti is lucky. She has not been caught. Until she is caught, she will be one of the guardians of the forest. She is always an ogre and always the sister of ogres.” ]

Photography | Igor Lepilin

DAY 10

Ntemelua N temelua, a newborn baby, already has teeth. He sings: “Draw near,

little pot, draw near, little spoon!” He replaces the meat in the pot with balls of dried dung. Filthy and clever, he crawls into a cow’s anus to hide in its stomach. Ntemelua

is weak and he lives by fear, which is a supernatural power. He rides a hyena. His back

will never be quite straight, but this signifies little to him, for he can still stretch his limbs with pleasure. The only way to escape him is to abandon his country.

Netemelua [ Tomorrow we depart. I am to give the red necklaces only to those I trust. “You know them,” Mary explained, “as I know you.” “Do you know me?” I asked, moved and surprised. She smiled. “It is easy to know someone in a week.

You need only listen.” Two paths lie before me now. One leads to the forest; the other leads home. How easily I might return to Mombasa! I could steal some food and rupees and begin walking. I have a letter of contract affirming that I am employed and not a vagrant. How simple to claim that my employer has dispatched me back to the coast to order supplies, or to Abyssinia to purchase donkeys! But these scarlet threads burn in my pocket.

I want to draw nearer to the source of their heat. I want to meet the ogres. “You were right,” Mary told me before she left.

“I did go to a mission school. And I didn’t burn it down.” She smiled, a smile of mingled defiance and shame. One of her eyes

shone brighter than the other, kindled by a tear. I wanted to cast myself at her feet and beg her forgiveness. Yes, to beg her forgiveness for having pried into her past, for having stirred up the memory of her humiliation. Instead I said clumsily: “Even Ntemelua spent some time in a cow’s anus.” Mary laughed.

“Thank you, brother,” she said. She walked away down the path, sedate and upright, and I do not know if I will ever see her again. I imagine meeting a young man in the forest, a man with a necklace of scarlet thread who stands with Mary’s slight bearing and regards me with Mary’s direct and trenchant glance. I look forward to this meeting as if to the sight of a long-lost friend. I imagine clasping the hand of this young man, who is like Mary and like myself. Beneath our joined hands, my employer lies slain. The ogres tear open the tins and enjoy a prodigious feast among the darkling trees. ]

DAY 11

Rakakabe Rakakabe, how beautiful he is, Rakakabe! A Malagasy demon, he

has been sighted as far north as Kismaayo. He skims the waves, he eats mosquitoes, his face gleams, his hair gleams. Rakakabe’s favorite question is “Are you sleeping?”

Rakakabe of the gleaming tail! No, we are wide awake.

Rakakabe [ This morning we depart on our expedition. My employer sings: “Green grow the rushes, o!” — but we, his servants, are even more cheerful. We are prepared to meet the ogres. We catch one another’s eyes and smile. All of us sport necklaces of red thread: signs that we belong to the party of the ogres, that we are prepared to hide and fight and die with those who live in the forest, those who are dirty and crooked and resolute. “Tell my brother his house is waiting for him,” Mary whispered to me at the end — such an honor, to be the one to deliver her message! While she continues walking, Sofia Samatar In the Margins

meeting others, passing into other hands the blood-red necklaces by which the ogres are known. There will be no end to this catalogue. The ogres are everywhere. Number thirteen: Alibha M. Moosajee of Mombasa. The porters lift their loads with unaccustomed verve. They set off, singing. “See, Alibhai!” my employer exclaims in delight. “They’re made for it! Natural workers!” “Oh, yes sir! Indeed, sir!” The sky is tranquil, the dust saturated with light. Everything conspires to make me glad.

Soon, I believe, I shall enter into the mansion of the ogres, and stretch my limbs on the doorstep of Rakakabe. ] fiction | 51

The Sleeper and the Spindle

Neil Gaiman

Illustrated by Chris Riddell An excerpt

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I

t was the closest kingdom to the queen’s, as the crow flies, but not even the crows flew it. The high mountain range that served as the border between the two kingdoms discouraged crows as much as it discouraged people, and it was considered unpassable.

More than one enterprising merchant, on each side of the mountains, had commissioned folk to hunt for the mountain pass that would, if it were there, have made a rich man or woman of anyone who controlled it. The silks of Dorimar could have been in Kanselaire in weeks, in months, not years. But there was no such pass to be found, and so, although the two kingdoms shared a common border, nobody crossed from one kingdom to the next.

Even the dwarfs, who were tough, and hardy, and composed of magic as much as of flesh and blood, could not go over the mountain range.

This was not a problem for the dwarfs. They did not go over the mountain range. They went under it.

Three dwarfs, travelling as swiftly as one through the dark paths beneath the mountains: “Hurry! Hurry!” said the dwarf at the rear. “We have to buy her the finest silken cloth in Dorimar. If we do not

hurry, perhaps it will be sold, and we will be forced to buy her the second finest cloth.”

“We know! We know!” said the dwarf at the front. “And we shall buy her a case to carry it back in, so it will remain perfectly clean and untouched by dust.”

The dwarf in the middle said nothing. He was holding his stone tightly, not dropping it or losing it, and was concentrating on nothing else but this. The stone was a ruby, rough-hewn from the rock and the size of a hen’s egg. It was worth a kingdom when cut and set, and would be easily exchanged for the finest silks of Dorimar.

It would not have occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It’s the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.

The queen woke early that morning. “A week from today,” she said aloud. “A week from today, I shall be married.”

It seemed both unlikely and extremely final. She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices. In a week from now, she would have no choices.

She would reign over her people. She would have children.

Perhaps she would die in childbirth, perhaps she would die as an old woman, or in battle. But the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable.

She could hear the carpenters in the meadows beneath the castle, building the seats that would allow her people to watch her marry. Each and every hammer blow sounded like a heartbeat.

The three dwarfs scrambled out of a hole in the side of the riverbank, and clambered up into the meadow, one, two, three. They climbed to the top of a granite outcrop, stretched, kicked, jumped and stretched themselves once more. Then they sprinted north, towards the cluster of low buildings that made the village of Giff, and in particular to the village inn.

The innkeeper was their friend: they had brought him a bottle of Kanselaire wine — deep red, sweet and rich, and nothing like the sharp, pale wines of those parts — as they always did. He would feed them, and send them on their way, and advise them.

The innkeeper, chest as huge as his barrels, beard as bushy and as orange as a fox’s brush, was in the taproom.

It was early in the morning, and on the dwarfs’ previous visits at that time of day the room had been empty, but now there must have been thirty people in that place, and not one of them looked happy.

The dwarfs, who had expected to sidle into an empty taproom, found all eyes upon them. “Goodmaster Foxen,” fiction | 53

said the tallest dwarf to the innkeeper.

“Lads,” said the innkeeper, who thought that the dwarfs were boys, for all that they were four, perhaps five times his age, “I know you travel the mountain passes. We need to get out of here straightaway.”

“What’s happening?” said the smallest of the dwarfs.

“Sleep!” said the sot by the window.

“Plague!” said a finely dressed woman.

“Doom!” exclaimed a tinker, his saucepans rattling as he spoke. “Doom is coming!”

“We travel to the capital,” said the tallest dwarf, who was no bigger than a child. “Is there plague in the capital?”

“It is not plague,” said the sot by the window, whose beard was long and grey, and stained yellow with beer and wine. “It is sleep, I tell you.” “How can sleep be a plague?” asked the smallest dwarf, who was beardless.

“A witch!” said the sot.

“A bad fairy,” corrected a fat-faced man.

“She was an enchantress, as I heard it,” interposed the pot-girl.

“Whatever she was,” said the sot, “she was not invited to a birthing celebration.”

“That’s all tosh,” said the tinker. “She would have cursed the princess whether she’d been invited to the naming-day party or not. She was one of those forest witches, driven to the margins a thousand years ago, and a bad lot. She cursed the babe at birth, such that when the girl was eighteen she would prick her finger and sleep forever.” The fatfaced man wiped his forehead. He was sweating, although it was not warm. “As I heard it, she was going to die, but another fairy, a good one this time, commuted her magical death sentence to one of sleep. Magical sleep,” he added.

“So,” said the sot. “She pricked her finger on something-or-other. And she fell asleep. And the other people in the castle – the lord and the lady, the butcher, baker, milkmaid, lady-in-waiting — all of them slept, as she slept. None of them has aged a day since they closed their eyes.”

“There were roses,” said the pot-girl. “Roses that grew up around the castle. And the forest grew thicker, until it became impassable. This was, what, a hundred years ago?”

“Sixty. Perhaps eighty,” said a woman who had not spoken until now. “I know, because my Aunt Letitia remembered it happening, when she was a girl, and she was no more than seventy when she died of the bloody flux, and that was only five years ago come Summer’s End.” “…And brave men,” continued the pot-girl. “Aye, and brave women too, they say, have attempted to travel to the Forest of Acaire, to the castle at its heart, to wake the princess, and, in waking her, to wake all the sleepers, but each and every one of those heroes ended their lives lost 54 | First & Third

in the forest, murdered by bandits, or impaled upon the thorns of the rose bushes that encircle the castle — ” “Wake her how?” asked the middle-sized dwarf, hand still clutching his rock, for he thought in essentials.

“The usual method,” said the pot-girl, and she blushed.

“Or so the tales have it.”

“Right,” said the tallest dwarf. “So, bowl of cold water poured on the face and a cry of ‘Wakey!Wakey!’?”

“A kiss,” said the sot. “But nobody has ever got that close. They’ve been trying for sixty years or more. They say that the witch — ” “Fairy,” said the fat man.

“Enchantress,” corrected the pot-girl.

“Whatever she is,” said the sot. “She’s still there. That’s what they say. If you get that close. If you make it through the roses, she’ll be waiting for you. She’s old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.”

The smallest dwarf tipped his head on one side. “So, there’s a sleeping woman in a castle, and perhaps a witch or fairy there with her. Why is there also a plague?”

“Over the last year,” said the fat-faced man. “It started in the north, beyond the capital. I heard about it first from travellers coming from Stede, near the Forest of Acaire.”

“People fell asleep in the towns,” said the pot-girl.

“Lots of people fall asleep,” said the tallest dwarf.

Dwarfs sleep rarely: twice a year at most, for several weeks at a time, but he had slept enough in his long lifetime that he did not regard sleep as anything special or unusual.

“They fall asleep whatever they are doing, and they do not wake up,” said the sot. “Look at us. We fled the towns to come here. We have brothers and sisters, wives and children, sleeping now in their houses or cowsheds, at their workbenches. All of us.”

“It is moving faster and faster,” said the thin, red-haired woman who had not spoken previously. “Now it covers a mile, perhaps two miles, each day.”

“It will be here tomorrow,” said the sot, and he drained his flagon, gestured to the innkeeper to fill it once more.

“There is nowhere for us to go to escape it. Tomorrow, everything here will be asleep. Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.”

“What is there to be afraid of in sleep?” asked the smallest dwarf. “It’s just sleep. We all do it.”

“Go and look,” said the sot. He threw back his head, and drank as much as he could from his flagon. Then he looked back at them, with eyes unfocused, as if he were surprised to still see them there. “Well, go on. Go and look for yourselves.” He swallowed the remaining drink, then he lay his head upon the table.

They went and looked.

Illustration | Chris Riddell

A

s leep?” asked the queen. “Explain yourselves.

How so, asleep?” The dwarf stood upon the table so he could look her in the eye. “Asleep,” he repeated. “Sometimes crumpled upon the ground.

Sometimes standing. They sleep in their smithies, at their awls, on milking stools. The animals sleep in the fields.

Birds too, slept, and we saw them in trees or dead and broken in fields where they had fallen from the sky.”

The queen wore a wedding gown, whiter than the snow.

Around her, attendants, maids of honour, dressmakers and milliners clustered and fussed.

“And why did you three also not fall asleep?”

The dwarf shrugged. He had a russet-brown beard that had always made the queen think of an angry hedgehog attached to the lower portion of his face. “Dwarfs are magical things. This sleep is a magical thing also. I felt somewhat sleepy, mind.”

“And then?”

She was the queen, and she was questioning him as if they were alone. Her attendants began removing her gown, taking it away, folding and wrapping it, so the final laces and ribbons could be attached, so it would be perfect.

Tomorrow was the queen’s wedding day. Everything needed to be perfect. “By the time we returned to Foxen’s Inn they were all asleep, every man jack-and-jill of them.

The zone of the spell is expanding, a few miles every day.”

The mountains that separated the two lands were impossibly high, but not wide. The queen could count the miles. She pushed one pale hand through her raven-black hair, and she looked most serious.

“What do you think, then?” she asked the dwarf. “If I went there. Would I sleep, as they did?”He scratched his arse, unselfconsciously. “You slept for a year,” he said.

“And then you woke again, none the worse for it. If any of you big people can stay awake there, it’s you.”

Outside, the townsfolk were hanging bunting in the streets and decorating their doors and windows with white flowers. Silverware had been polished and protesting children had been forced into tubs of lukewarm water (the oldest child got the first dunk and the hottest water) and scrubbed with rough flannels until their faces were raw and red. They were then ducked under the water, and the backs of their ears were washed as well.

“I am afraid,” said the queen, “that there will be no wedding tomorrow.”

She called for a map of the kingdom, identified villages closest to the mountains, sent messengers to tell inhabitants to evacuate to the coast or risk royal displeasure.

She called for her first minister and informed him he would be responsible for the kingdom in her absence, and that he should do his best neither to lose it nor to break it.

She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still be married, even if he was but a prince and she a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled.

She called for her mail shirt.

She called for her sword.

She called for provisions, and for her horse, and then she rode out of the palace, towards the east.

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I

t was a full day’s ride before she saw, ghostly and distant, like clouds against the sky, the shape of the mountains that bordered the edge of her kingdom.

The dwarfs were waiting for her, at the last inn in the foothills of the mountains, and they led her down deep

56 | First & Third

into the tunnels, the way that the dwarfs travel. She had lived with them, when she was little more than a child, and she was not afraid. The dwarfs did not speak as they walked the deep paths, except, on more than one occasion, to say, “Mind your head.”

Neil Gaiman The Sleeper and the Spindle

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