Buffalo Almanack, Issue No. 10 by Buffalo Almanack

I s s u e N o. 10

D e c. 2 0 1 5

Maxine Allison Vande Vaarst

Katie Morrison

John Gummere

Copyright ÂŠ 2015 Buffalo Almanack. All writing and photography property of their respective authors. Cover by Daniel A. Jenks, June 1859. Buffalo Almanack is a non-profit publishing outfit founded in 2013. New issues are released quarterly, on the last day of March, June, September and December. Inquire online for submission guidelines. www.buffaloalmanack.com Like us at facebook.com/buffaloalmanack

For Lauren Vande Vaarst. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re the best mom on the planet, and you always will be.

For this tenth edition of Buffalo Almanack, we’ve decided to get back in touch with our Western roots. Our cover, as you may have noticed, is not the creation of one of our contributors, but is, for the first time, a public domain image: a gorgeous watercolor and crayon illustration of Cherokee Pass, near the present-day city of Fort Collins, Colorado. It was drawn in 1859, by a man named Daniel A. Jenks. Jenks was, according to the Library of Congress, a Fifty-Niner, a seeker of gold in the Pike’s Peak Rush of that year. To find his gold, he drove out from St. Louis, accompanied by a party of fifteen men and one woman. In Kansas, they nearly froze to death. In Colorado, they camped in snow and slush, and his best friend’s wife gave birth to a child named in his honor (“An awfull

honor to be sure,” as Jenks noted). Everything was misery. As admonished Jenks in his diary, “You good people at home, who live a civilized life and have homes to go to when it storms, who probably never in your life knew what it was to have old mother earth of a bed and the heavens for a covering, can form no idea how pleasant it seemed when we first struck a fire in this rude hut...My John Bull [English friend] wants to know if I had any idea before what a devil of a big country this U.S. was.” The history of the U.S. West is great and complicated, filled with colonizing agents, Indian resistances, strange alliances and unexpected points of cultural contact. We include this short passage not so much to honor the supposed ‘pioneer spirit’ of men like Jenks, but to remind our readers of a simple and ever-true fact: The West is wild, oh yes, and it wants to kill us all. (Illustrations and historical information courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Buffalo Almanack

Our Cover: The Story of Daniel A. Jenks

Photography

Sarah Katharina KayĂ&#x;

Forty-two Reasons Haris Durrani

Woodshop Talk Mary Ann Rivers and Ruthie Knox

Photography Julian Jackson

Versus Nathan Lauer

The 2015 Buffalo Almanack Pushcart Prize Nomination

A Few Glimpses of a Witch (Illustration) Laura Kraay

Sad Duppy, Dermis Changeling Cady Vishniac

Photography Marcus Mamourian

Woodshop Talk Marcus Mamourian

Issue No. 10 - Dec. 2015

Rules of the Game Daniel Riddle Rodriguez

THE TAIL END Dispatches from the Artistic Frontier

105

Interview: Rocky Mountain Land Library Jeff Lee

107

Review: In the Body Where I Was Born Sebastian Sarti

117

PAST PERFECT Review: Lust and Other Stories Sara Lippmann

121

CRITS BY KRISTIN: The Best American Short Stories 2015 Kristin D. Urban-Watson

127

Appendix

129

Buffalo Alumni Checking in with #BuffaloNation

137

Panasonic Lumix

Sarah Katharina KayĂ&#x;

Photography

Panasonic Lumix

Sarah Katharina Kayß

Panasonic Lumix

Sarah Katharina KayĂ&#x;

Photography

Panasonic Lumix

Sarah Katharina Kayß

Photography

Sarah Katharina KayĂ&#x;

Panasonic Lumix

Sarah Katharina Kayß

“Call me crazy, but I do love staircases. When other people take majestic

pictures of the tourist attractions in the beautiful cities of this world, I will be in search for my next staircase-shot. Primarily, because I think staircases are beautiful and I’m bored of the “typical photograph”—one that everyone has taken in the same place. I like the idea that most people perceive staircases as functional and simply don’t pay attention to them: small steps, thick steps, old ones, new ones - some used so often, that you can hardly imagine what they once looked like and others, in rather hidden places, hardly ever used. You cannot imagine how often people stop by and ask me: “What are you taken a photograph of?” “The staircase.” “Why? Is it special?”

Yes, it is. Staircases are a construction designed to bridge a large vertical

distance by dividing it into smaller vertical distances which we call steps and which can look very different. Staircases can be used in both ways: up and down. And they all tell a story. If only the story of my personal experience when I visited a particular place and I didn’t take a picture of the Louvre or the White House, but I surely have one of a staircase nearby.

Those four staircases are to be found in the UK and Germany. I took the

one in red-ish in Bremen, a Hanseatic city in the northwest of Germany. The one with the yellow stairs is the staircase at Queensway underground station in Bayswater in London. People hardly see this one, because the vast majority will use the lifts instead—it feels like a never ending exercise to take the staircase at Queensway...126 steps, 19 flat, 107 spiral...I took the picture of the staircase in black and white in an NHS surgery in Camden Town, London and the one with the bluish steps in a park in Potsdam, the capital city of the German federal state of Brandenburg where I moved to from London in summer 2015.”

Haris Durrani

Forty-two Reasons

Listen carefully. I got forty-two reasons your girlfriend works for the FBI, CIA, NSA, ICE, S.H.I.E.L.D., Fringe Division, Men in Black, or Cylon Overlords, so drop this tapped line, find the nearest payphone, and take notes.

Reason Number One

She won’t call you Jihad. No matter how many times you tell her, she can’t get it around her head that

it doesn’t mean you’re going to strap dynamite to your balls, walk into Penn Station, and blow yourself so bad your head pops off your shoulders.

Truth is she doesn’t actually believe that bullshit, but the name does bother

her. So she calls you Joe.

You don’t complain because everyone calls you Joe, including you. You don’t

want to admit you’re experiencing a Black Skin/White Mask cultural inferiority complex, so you assume you’re also a spy sent to rat on your own self. You don’t know all the details yet. You’re like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel. You have no idea which you is the real you. You’re waiting for someone from the Impossible Mission Force to arrive with a secret task delivered in a knickknack that’ll self-destruct in five four three two one—BAM!—because, deep down, you really want to rock hot shades and ride fast cars and scale Burj Khalifas like Tom Cruise.

Jihad means struggle, but you’ve forgotten that.

Reason Number Two

She likes you.

For most people this is a good thing. For someone like you, it’s too good to

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be true. She’s out of your league. You suspect she’s dating you because you’re three birds and one stone. Three more notches on her belt. You’re her first Pakistani, her first Dominican, and her first Muslim boyfriend wrapped in one. You know that. You know you’re her exotic boytoy.

Even that’s too good to be true. Before her, you hardly knew how to talk

to a girl. You hardly knew how to look at a girl. And suddenly in comes Glory Drayer with her freckles and her short-short jeans. She’s crazy about you. Once you hadn’t seen each other for twenty-four hours, and when she caught sight of you from across the school corridor, she ran through the crowd and jumped you like Scooby-Doo.

Too good to be true. You’re a nerd, not a player.

The exotic boytoy thing must be an idea she planted in your head. You know

the truth. She’s here to keep tabs on you, make sure you don’t sneak anthrax to school or plot a revolution or pray too many times a day.

The other girls in your Calculus class hit on you too. You suspect they’re

all in cahoots. Maybe competing agencies. Departmental rivalry is the bane of American national security. You know that for sure.

Reason Number Three

After you make out on your first date, she puts her ear against your chest

and listens. “You’re going wild,” she murmurs. You blush. She grins and says, “You’re gonna get in a whole lot of trouble with me.”

Bad girls don’t exist. There are only girls pretending to be bad girls. These

girls pretending to be bad girls are usually secret agents. QED.

Forty-two Reasons

Reason Number Four

She builds an army of paper robots. It’s taken three months for her to get this far with you because you’re not

very good at identifying that social convention called flirting. Now that you know she’s an agent, you realize why she made those origami animals for you in Calculus. You fear they are tiny paper Transformers that will come alive and slit your throat in your sleep. They sit there, red and pink, like a collection of evil dolls from something out of Stephen King. Foolishly, you keep them by your nightstand.

Reason Number Five She thinks you’re paranoid. It’s a smart move, getting you to question the depth of your insanity. You’re not actually insane. She’s in your head. You need to shut her out.

Reason Number Six She asks why you believe in God. It’s an old informant’s trick. Goad people to say crazy shit. You think about it for a while and you don’t really have an answer, not then, so you tell her something about the Qur’an being historical, that it’s lessons from history, history repeating itself. “But do you believe it?” she repeats. You’ll realize, later, that you can’t rationalize the conviction of your faith. At this point in time, you don’t have much conviction because you don’t know right from wrong. This is because you’re dating Glory. She’s good at her job.

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Reason Number Seven

She tells you she’s okay not having sex.

This is bullshit. Of course she isn’t. Or she wouldn’t be, if she were for real.

After she helps you remove her bra for the first time—yes, she actually

helps you—you tell her you don’t know how far this is going, but you’re not comfortable going all the way. She asks you if it’s a personal or religious decision, and you tell her it’s both. She says something about planning to lose her virginity the summer before college, which is now, but she’s cool with your request. She smiles and squeezes your hand. You want to tell her you love her. You’ve got no idea she’s playing you, do you?

Reason Number Eight

You realize she’s been pursuing you since seventh grade.

About a month and a half into the relationship, you recall her Save the Tigers

project in middle school. You forgot you were in the same class. You remember her years later, asking you questions about your stories in sophomore English Honors.

This is when you truly come to terms with that word. Surveillance. It freaks

you out and you spend a day locked in your room. She bikes to your place, tackles you, and drowns you with kisses. You can’t help but feel light. You can’t help but reinterpret what you’ve remembered. She’s liked you all along, you tell yourself.

Forty-two Reasons

Reason Number Nine

In eighth grade, she traveled the world with her mom and dad.

This is a lie. She was training in Nicaragua. The family pictures are

photoshopped.

By now, at the tender age of eighteen, Glory must be a pro.

Reason Number Ten She calls herself a nerd. Pay no heed to this ploy. She clearly has no idea what it means to be a nerd.

It’s like she’s reading from a script written by a washed-up Pentagon bureaucrat who’s sole research consisted of a Lord of the Rings marathon. For her, nerd translates to novice coding, an obsession with indie films, and enrolling in all the Honors and AP science classes—which basically every self-respecting stuckup does in your town, including you—even if she only gets Bs. She’s never read Isaac Asimov and the only Arthur C. Clarke novel she can name is Childhood’s End, not even 2001, because she had to read it for school. She doesn’t understand basic astrophysics, and quantum mechanics only gets her to tease you about being so smart, which you aren’t really. When you talk to her about black holes and parallel universes, she tunes out, waits for you to finish, says it’s cute, and smothers your lips with hers. You find this endearing and sincere, but really? She calls herself a nerd? Definitely a spy.

Reason Number Eleven

She googles Muslim dating rules and asks, “So if you date me, what am I, a

whore?”

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This is another attempt to trigger a reaction. Ignore it. She probably wants

you to try an honor killing, after which she’ll knock you out cold and violate you in a cell in a shithole like Gitmo or Abu Ghraib.

In fact, this is a clear violation of character. She complains to you constantly

about red tape at her YMCA job, and always questions the validity of your leftist media sources, yet somehow she’ll believe the first result Google spits at her.

You don’t tell her any of this. You say, “Don’t believe everything you read

online,” and lay your head against the cafeteria table. She rubs your back and asks you what’s wrong.

Reason Number Twelve She tells you not to mumble. “Say your mind,” she says. “Speak like you mean it.” Is she trying to make you incriminate yourself? What crime have you

committed? How do you stop yourself from saying the wrong thing? Before you realize it, you’ve assumed your criminality. You don’t notice this. You like what she’s told you. You like that she wants you to be you.

Reason Number Thirteen

She doesn’t think Apartheid is that bad.

You go to the MoMA and there’s an exhibit of Apartheid-era protest art.

You find out her African Studies class didn’t cover Apartheid. You think this is ridiculous, and you tell her so, and she looks away, mumbling quiet apologetics.

On other occasions, she’s been an apologist for everyone from Christopher

Columbus to George Bush the Second to your high school’s westerncentric

Forty-two Reasons

curriculum. She thinks affirmative action is racist and Othello isn’t.

She probably brings up Othello to fuck with you, see if you go into a

breakdown and smother her with a pillow or some shit like that, but you don’t, because you assume she’s stupid.

Of course, no one is actually this stupid. You’re the idiot. Clearly, the only

possible explanation is that she’s a spy.

On the train home from the MoMA, you calm down. You lay your head on

her lap and she strokes the hair from your eyes. You keep looking at her. Her eyes are grey and translucent, reminding you somehow of baby spittle. You have no other way to describe it, that look. It’s like a sedative. It’s probably hypnosis. She brushes her fingers over your eyelids and tells you, “Rest.”

Reason Number Fourteen

She asks if you think she’s dumb and racist.

You don’t have a choice. You have to reassess yourself. You have to become

understanding. You have to tell her that no, it’s cool, she just doesn’t know.

You know that’s bullshit. You know that doesn’t know is no excuse, especially

for a kid who grows up in a ranked school system like yours. Then again all the kids at school think like Glory.

Maybe you can’t blame her. Maybe she’s indoctrinated. Maybe she’s not a

spy.

Although you suppose spies get brainwashed too.

Reason Number Fifteen She has a dream your mom won’t let the two of you get married because

she’s not Muslim.

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It gets you riled up, but you bite your tongue. You know she’s trying to

incite you to violence, entrap you for intent to murder. You’re not a killer.

Reason Number Sixteen You keep dating her. This is because you are delusional and you think you love her, which is

because, again, she’s a damn good agent. She’s got tomboy charm. She’s got long, Celtic hair. She may not be your type, but she’s made you redefine what you think your type is.

Reason Number Seventeen She says she loves you. You’ve told her the same thing about five times already. You’re making out half-naked in the back of her car, parked on the hiking trail behind the high school, when a cop pulls up behind Glory’s Jeep and scares the shit out of you. You sit straight like a meerkat out of its hole. She takes you by the shoulders and draws you down. “It’s nothing,” she says, pressing her hot skin against yours. You hear a car door shut. The cop’s flashlight beam fills the space above you, thick and blue on the roof of her car like the surface of a pool seen from below. The cop screams at the two of you to open the door. He points his flashlight like a scientist peering down his microscope. “Get out of the car!” You both duck onto the floor. Glory covers herself. “Fuck.” She fumbles in the dark. “My bra. My fucking bra.” You hand it over.

Forty-two Reasons

“Fuck fuck fuck.” “What do we do?” you whisper. “What do we do?” “I don’t know.” She wraps her bra around her breasts. “Do something. Fucking do something. Do anything.” She’s shaking. You try to rationalize her fear. You tell yourself this guy must come from a competing agency. You’ve never seen her tremble, never heard her voice falter. She’s no longer the tough girlfriend. Not the tomboy. Not the selfdeclared nerd in ripped short-short jeans. Not the jaded white girl. No longer wears the pants in the family. Not wearing her pants either. “Get outta the fucking car!” You’re both yanking your clothes on. “Whadoido?” It rolls out as one word. The flashlight beam is on top of you, eddies of light whirling across the dank upholstery. “Do something, damnit!” You reach around the front seat, grab your windbreaker, swing it around your bare torso, and launch out the door, jaw clenched. You tighten every muscle in your body, like a Jedi Knight rushing consciously into an ambush. Like Wolverine tensing, bracing himself for the pain of releasing his claws. “Can I help you, Officer?” you ask, looking him in the eye. “Is there something wrong?” “Park’s closed. What’re you doing here?” “Sorry, Officer. We didn’t know.” He takes you aside and questions you. Name, age, address, school. He flashes a light in your eyes to check if you’re tripping. Your bravery dissipates. You stutter and shiver, asking if this is going on your permanent record. The

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repeated answer is “No,” but you know what he really means: Shut it pretty boy. He sends you back and calls for Glory. She returns ten minutes later and drives the two of you off the dirt path. The cop waits behind the wheel of his car, headlights filling the Jeep. He’s watching you. You want to know what he asked her. “He wanted to make sure you weren’t raping me,” she says. You listen to the crickets and the wind in the trees. You find another secluded spot in town, where she parks her car and climbs into the back with you. She slips your finger between her legs and asks you to pleasure her. She makes sounds as if she likes it and she gives you instructions so you don’t bruise her, which you’ll do anyway. It is your first time trying anything like this. She claims it’s hers too. It isn’t sex, not strictly, but it’s close. When you’re done, she asks you to do it again. “Do you know why?” “Why?” you say, looking up. “Because I love you, Joe. I love you.” “I love you too,” you say, believing it in the moment. Obviously, the run-in with the cop is a setup leading to her reveal. That way you’ll believe her. Of course, you don’t believe it’s a setup. You believe you’re in love.

Reason Number Eighteen

Your English teacher hates her.

He says she has a problem with authority. Secret agents planted in high

schools always have problems with authority. They know they’re better than

Forty-two Reasons

this. She must have failed her last mission. You’re her punishment.

She is good at hiding it. If you truly knew what was going down—which

you don’t—you’d decide to believe ignorance is bliss. That’s where you are now. Bliss.

Reason Number Nineteen On her nineteenth birthday she sidles up to you, dancing to the radio. She

crosses her wrists behind your neck and asks you to promise to love her forever.

This is an impossible request. It only happens in movies. It’s not genuine. It

can’t be. You find yourself compelled to say yes.

Reason Number Twenty There’s a raccoon on the fence outside her car, watching the two of you make out. You know it’s not a raccoon. It might be an alien. The interstellar community has some vested interest in you, and they’re competing with the government to farm your brain. Or else it’s a mechanized drone. You can tell by the impossibly white eyes and the perfect strips of grey and black fuzz, barely distinguishable in the haze bleeding from the dim streetlamp across the road. Glory is as shocked as you are. Her eyes are large and wet. She has yet to dig up any militant dirt on you, and you bet her boss in D.C. thinks she’s doing a shitty job. He’s probably set aside a small budget so his department can send animatronic drones to keep an extra eye on Glory. Make sure she isn’t doing her job wrong. To you, at that moment, it’s just a pervy raccoon. As far as you’re concerned, she’s doing everything right.

Haris Durrani

Reason Number Twenty-one

You love her. Again.

You’ve fallen out of love for a while. Or maybe it wasn’t real until now. You need to go to a robotics team meeting. The freshmen under your

mentorship have no idea what they’re doing. You have a competition in a few weeks, and you have to be there tonight. But Glory and your friends are going bowling. Glory begs you to come. Her friend Carrey tries to guilt you into it. Carrey’s your How-To-Date-Glory Manual, your human Siri for the labyrinth of young love. She got you to ask Glory out for the first time, after you were holding hands for a week without any real action. You suspect she’s in league with Glory’s agency.

“Joe,” Carrey says, “you need to spend time with your girlfriend. She’s my

best friend. She really likes you. Forget this robotics stuff this one time. Pete’s coming with Moira. He’s not going to your robot stuff, and he’s on the team.” Glory’s in the bathroom. You’ve just seen a movie at her place. “I dunno,” you say, placid, “I need to make sure these kids get their act together.” “Suit yourself.” You decide on bowling. What choice do you have? Glory doesn’t know Carrey has had a talk with you. She stopped begging before you even told her you’d decided to join their night out, and you’re in her car on the way there. You’ve done that thing you do, where you put your hand on the shift and she puts hers on top, guiding the Jeep in and out of gear, left hand on the wheel. She drives stick. “If you really need to go to your robot thing, you should go,” she says.

Forty-two Reasons

Your eyes meander from the road to her. She glances at you and smiles. “Really?” “Really. I won’t mind. Do what you got to do. I’ll drop you off.” You grin and rest your head against the window. “Thanks, Glory.” You exhale slowly. On the shift, she massages the back of your hand with her thumb. “No need to thank me.” It’s as if she’s read you. She probably has read you. She’s a secret agent. They read people for a living. Except in your head you believe she understands that this small decision means something to you. That she cares. She dials up the volume on her CD player. A song is playing. It’s cacophonous with words you can’t hear but have to pretend to understand. The kind of song YouTubers spoof with weird lip-syncs. “Fake Palindromes,” she says. You catch a piece of the lyrics. It’s as if you’ve popped briefly from beneath turbulent waters and caught the interrupted shriek of an onlooker before the waves take you back into muffled, fluid chaos. …Monsters... “What’s that supposed to mean, Fake Palindromes?” …Jesus, don’t you know that you coulda died, you shoulda died with the monsters that talk, monsters that walk the earth… “It’s a song, silly.” She squeezes your hand on the shift. “Listen. This part, here—” All you hear is something close to white noise. “I don’t get it. Sorry, my taste in music sucks—” “Oh, Joe.” She dials it back. “Right…here!”

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You hear it then. The words emerge from the noise somehow melodic, not beautiful but with rhythm. Like a mundane conversation, overheard, echoing down an air duct and imbued gradually with a song not its own. …and she says, “I like long walks and sci-fi movies.” if you’re six foot tall and east coast bred… Glory yelps. “Just like you, Joe! Just like you.” The song finales in a riot of disjointed sound, somehow mellow. You think the song is silly, the science fiction reference included. It’s another thing Glory thinks will tap into your inner nerd. This time you don’t mind. She doesn’t get you, not totally, but she’s trying. She’s tried harder than anyone else you know. She gets you better than anyone else you know. No one really does understand you, including yourself, but she almost does. You hold no suspicions. No conspiracies, no qualms about aliens in your midst, no multiverse theory. None of that. If any of it is true, it’s irrelevant. Her eyes are grey and sparkling. Headlights from the opposite side of the road circle her pupils like neon bytes of data speeding along a racetrack in Tron cyberspace. This is when you know with conviction that you love her. You say the words in your head. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you Glory Abigail Drayer.

Reason Number Twenty-two

You don’t know how to make a secret agent argument anymore.

You’re tired of it. You really like this girl. She’s the best thing that has ever

happened to you. For the first time, you question your doubt. Maybe she is who she says she is.

Forty-two Reasons

Reason Number Twenty-three

She asks if you pray five times a day.

“Yeah,” you say, as if apologizing for something.

You’re not sure if this counts as a good reason to say she’s covert ops. But it

bothers you.

Reason Number Twenty-four

You have another fight, this time over what you’ll watch at your house for

movie night with her friends.

Your fights are always over mindless crap like this. You know it’s deeper.

You know it’s about being flexible and supportive in the little things and that guidance counselor bullshit. She admires your confidence, your adamancy. In fact, this is why she likes you. But sometimes it’s too much, she says.

You make up and make out. It seems too easy. You suspect you may

have slipped from this universe into an overlapping one, where the rules of physics are subtly off-kilter. Glory could be a Fringe agent sent to retrieve you, occupying a doppelgänger as part of the extraction mission. But you can’t seem to read her signals.

Reason Number Twenty-five

She’s not convinced by socialism.

You try to convince her but it’s not her cup of tea. You don’t know if it’s

yours anymore either, but you persist because it’s all you believe anymore. Railing against the system. You hate living in a town that’s ninety-six percent white. It bothers you in a way you won’t admit that your girlfriend is a stereotypical rich white chick who doesn’t think she’s a stereotypical rich white

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chick even though she is. It bothers you that you’re another rich white kid like her, no matter the color of your skin. Snobby and dog-eat-dog and well-meaning and liberal and subconsciously racist.

Reason Number Twenty-six One night when the two of you lie scrunched side by side in the backseat of her Jeep, she looks deep into your soul and asks, “Joe, what are you most afraid of?” “I dunno,” you say. She locks the fingers of one hand with yours. “C’mon, Joe.” “War? Injustice?” “Really?” She laughs. “Yeah,” you say. But that’s a lie. What do you really fear? Spiders? The dark? You’re kind of afraid of the dark. But no. You’re afraid you don’t know yourself. Are you your DNA, the color of your skin? Are you nurture, this hellish verisimilar utopia called the modern state and its mass production of objects and people, like you? Are you history, the Dominican Republic, Hispaniola, Italy, Germany, Corsica— Pakistan, India, the King of the Pashtuns, a nomadic Jewish tribe crossing premodern Afghanistan? Do you belong to any of these? And if you belong to no civilization, do you belong at all? You remember playing on the beach as a kid. Mom asked if you wanted to play with your friend Andrew Chen. You said no. You wanted to play with Jon

Forty-two Reasons

Wyce. “He’s vanilla,” you told her. That is what you fear most, that that kid is lurking around inside of you, whispering in your ear like a symbiotic parasite, latched to your consciousness like a leech, incapable of eradication without obliterating a part of who you are.

Reason Number Twenty-seven

You give her a box of chocolates and she tells you her family calls you “a

keeper.” She says you’re the best boyfriend she’s ever had.

You believe her because you still love her.

Reason Number Twenty-eight

You think you’re unappreciative of her because you still harbor these

feelings about her being in the CIA or NSA or FBI or ICE or S.H.I.E.L.D. or Fringe Division or Men in Black or Cylon Empire.

They bother you, these thoughts. They are very dark and wrought with

conviction. Conspiracy theorists bear no dearth of conviction.

You are deeply troubled. You suspect this is evidence that Glory has

tampered with your brain.

Reason Number Twenty-nine

She calls you baby the morning after prom, when you wake up next to her. You rub noses and sniff each other’s halitosis. Neither of you mind. You like

it like this, without ornament. She’s not the kind of girl who’s into lipstick or nail polish. You dig that. You tell her so, and she appreciates this. In the morning sun, her dirty blonde hair is gold and her light freckles

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disappear. “Do you think the freckles make me less than pretty?” she asks. “No,” you say. “You’re perfect the way you are.” She puts her ear against your chest and listens. She’s as quiet as your heart.

Reason Number Thirty

She stops calling you baby.

Reason Number Thirty-one

When you tell her you love her, she says, “Yeah.”

Reason Number Thirty-two

You start praying that God will end it for you.

You wonder if you can’t end the relationship yourself because you still love

her or because you simply lack the balls.

Either way, if you were going to become a terrorist or a revolutionary or an

enemy of the state or a telekinetic mutant emissary for Earth’s evil alien invaders or the Avengers’ next villain or whatever the feds suspected you’d become, you won’t become that thing. You’ve lost your edge.

She wins. The system wins.

Reason Number Thirty-three

She returns from a weeklong trip with Carrey and the two of you are in the

back of her Jeep within the hour.

You’re making out topless when you separate your lips from hers and press

your bodies together, tucking your chin over her shoulder and tracing your

Forty-two Reasons

fingers along the chilled, bare ridge of her spine. You’ve missed her. “Thank you,” she says. You keep holding her. “What do you mean?” She pulls away gently and points at the road, where two cars just sped by. “For covering me.” She smiles. You stare at the headlights across the trees as they decelerate near the opposite intersection. “Oh,” you say. You had no idea.

You suggest going one step further that night, doing something she’s wanted

to do for a while. She hesitates. She knows you had no idea about the cars. It’s not like she’s an agent. It’s like she’s actually hurt. This boggles you. She’s gone so undercover that she’s gone native. She’s apparently forgotten her mission, as you never had yours. There’s a kinship in this, that you are both lost.

Reason Number Thirty-four

You’re still waiting for your assignment-declaring knickknack from the

Impossible Mission Force that will self-destruct after five four three two one— BAM! You’re hoping it will tell you who the hell you are and what your mission is, because you have no idea what you’re doing. Not that you’ve ever had any idea what you were doing. You’re spiritually dead, in a no man’s land of the soul. She’s got to be a Cylon, a sexy cybernetic thing from deep space sent to unravel humanity’s darkest secrets from your mind. Nothing else could do this to you, take you apart not to question who you are but to make you realize you never knew who you were. Interrogation at its finest: subtle, alluring, hollow. You’re near the end. You’re a shell, a carcass, a desiccated thing. 30

Haris Durrani

Reason Number Thirty-five

She dumps you.

You see the signs. She doesn’t want to meet at night. When she picks you

up, wearing her dark red tank top and short-cut jeans, she makes sure to say hi to Mom and Dad, like she knows it’s the last time she’ll see them. You go to Subway. She doesn’t let you pay for the two of you. She mentions her first kiss on the ride to the beach. It was during Iron Man; this makes you jealous. You eat in silence beside the shore and stare into the grey clouds.

“Joe,” she says. “We need to talk.”

You two are incompatible, she explains. You have different interests. You’re

heading to college. Long-distance never works.

You nod, remembering your debates over Shakespeare, Conrad, Mandela,

and Marx. “I’ve been a jerk to you,” you admit, not sure if it’s true. “I’ve been meaning to say sorry.”

“No, it’s not that.”

You breathe. “I’ve been meaning to end it myself. I didn’t know how.”

She doesn’t have anything to say. It’s like HQ put her on pause, afraid her

cover’s blown. Why would he consider the idea? HQ is probably thinking. She did such a great job wooing you, understanding you, that it’s hard to comprehend. How you could you have fathomed breaking up with her yourself unless you knew she was an agent?

The reality is you’ve forgotten your paranoia. You no longer think of her that

way. You no longer think of her in any way.

Reason Number Thirty-six Before she drives you home—yes, that happens after all this—you embrace

Forty-two Reasons

one last time.

“I think I loved you,” you say.

“If you loved me, you’d know.”

Reason Number Thirty-seven She wants to meet up after the breakup. Over pizza, you tell her something

about Congress and the left and the right when she stops you to ask, “Wait, which one’s Republican, left-wing or right?”

It’s not possible to be that dumb, is it? She’s playing you. She’s got to be.

You’re not crazy. You know you’re not crazy. She’s got to be a secret agent or an informant or something. This can’t be real.

Reason Number Thirty-eight

She shoots you in the face.

It’s a dream but you’re certain it’s real. It’s a vivid dream, the kind you

won’t forget for years. You’re running through a glass tunnel that winds its way through the canopies of some forest. The town is chasing you, including the Principal. The Principal is a sleezeball, lets the rich white kids do whatever they want and lets their parents pester and sue the teachers dry and rolls around in his open-topped blue corvette like some kind of hotshot, which he is, because your high school is ranked first in the state. You open a door and your best friends are waiting for you. Glory is standing there in front of a big white van under a vast grey dome, like a spaceship hangar in Star Trek. She’s a surprise for some reason. Dream logic indicates she’s not supposed to be there, in your head, but she is. She brings a hot, black thing between the two of you and clicks.

Haris Durrani

You wake up terrified. If you ever had thoughts about overturning this racist piece of shit town, you forget them. You believe this is proof that inception is real.

Reason Number Thirty-nine

She gives you a call from college and says she’s changed. She thinks about

life differently. You’re not sure what that means. You think she’s defected.

Reason Number Forty She is a spy. It’s obvious now. It’s empirical. She got in your head and shot you in the

face and now she’s fallen off the grid. No one knows where she is. This surprises you. You never believed it was true. You thought it was an elaborate game you’ve played in your own head, a fancy of your imagination. You’re bitter. You liked her. You never saw it ending. What is it you miss? Do you miss being in love? Do you miss her? She’s a part of you now. She’s left a piece of herself inside of you, in your convictions, your fears, your desires. You wonder how the Pentagon decided you were such a massive security risk that they were willing to commission someone for six years to tabs on you. The national security budget dwarfs any other. You always wondered where all that money goes. It freaks you out. You don’t trust anyone again.

Reason Number Forty-one

You look up “Fake Palindromes” and play it on loop for hours.

Forty-two Reasons

You believe that Glory programmed your attachment to her, a hypnosis,

and that there’s a sensory trigger that will release you from the neural bond. A sensation that’ll set you free from whatever it is that makes you miss her. You’re pretty sure this trigger is somewhere in “Fake Palindromes.”

If it is, you can’t find it.

Reason Number Forty-two

You’re afraid you’ve never loved and that you never will.

At least you got to date a secret agent. Maybe that will land you a few

numbers down the line. It’s like a scar. Chicks dig scars, don’t they? Or is that just a thing people say? Don’t let the next one pretend to understand your nerdgasms or your racial confusion. Tell her you believe every word of the Qur’an and that you pray five times a day and that Apartheid is real and Shakespeare is a racist pig. Tell her your name is Jihad and it means struggle and that’s what people call you, and if she doesn’t call you that too then she can go to hell. Most importantly, make sure she doesn’t work for the government.

Woodshop Talk

On February 22, Haris Durrani will unveil his debut novella, Technologies of the Self. To commemorate this release, we sat down for a roundtable discussion with Mary Ann Rivers and Ruthie Knox, his publishers at Brain Mill Press. This is Woodshop Talk. 35

An Interview with Brain Mill Press

BRAIN MILL PRESS: The editors of Brain Mill Press, Mary Ann Rivers and

Ruthie Knox, are happy to have the opportunity to discuss the work of Haris Durrani with Maxine Allison Vande Vaarst. Haris Durrani is the Brain Mill Press recipient of the 2015 Driftless Unsolicited Prize for Fiction, and BMP is publishing his book, Technologies of the Self, releasing February 22, 2016. Buffalo Almanack publishes Durrani’s short story “Forty-Two Reasons Your Girlfriend Works for the FBI, CIA, NSA, ICE, SHIELD, Fringe Division, Men in Black, or Cylon Overlords,” in their issue 10.

It was happily discovered that the book and the story are linked by their

protagonist. “Joe”/Jihad, a Dominican-Pakistani American engineering student, recalls his high school relationship with Glory in Technologies of the Self, and in “Forty-Two Reasons Your Girlfriend Works for the FBI, CIA, NSA, ICE, SHIELD, Fringe Division, Men in Black, or Cylon Overlords,” readers experience the complex beginning and end of Jihad and Glory.

The opportunity to discuss fiction about the young American Muslim

experience is particularly timely, important, and revealing. Brain Mill Press and Buffalo Almanack are honored to have this opportunity, especially as Durrani’s work is so engaging, witty, and makes the heart ache in the best way.

BUFFALO ALMANACK: Hi, Mary Ann and Ruthie! Thank you so much

for organizing this roundtable. I fell in love with “Forty-Two Reasons” the moment I first encountered it, and Technologies of the Self has only further convinced me that we have a future star in our midst. In both cases, Durrani’s writing is clever and current, beach reading for the justifiably paranoid. These are stories about colonialism, neoliberalism, conspiracy bullshit, and a Trumped-out America at the gates of hell, which is why I find it such a miracle

Woodshop Talk

that they’ve got so much time for family dinners and high school romances, too. Durrani’s mix of pulp culture, diaspora angst, and world/family history is so precise, I can’t help but think of Junot Díaz. And that’s not a superficial comparison—the writing is there, too. That’s the potential I see.

BMP: Maxine, it’s our pleasure. Ruthie and I (Mary Ann) pulled Technologies

of the Self out of the submissions to our Driftless Unsolicited contest at about the same time, with similar comments about the first several pages—comments that roughly boiled down to “!!!” When we did sit down to read the manuscript seriously, we couldn’t stop talking about the abundant depth of the human elements in a story that still manages to capture politics, sex, race, and identity so completely, possibly because this is an author who has the ability to remind us that politics, sex, race, and identity are human. Like, this isn’t just the stuff of essays and Internet fighting, this stuff is the reason we sit down to family dinners or not, and probably why our high school romance broke up. Or was doomed in the first place.

So yes, for sure, Junot Díaz, which is so great because we need more authors

like Díaz and Durrani, or ZZ Packer and Roxane Gay, and more characters like Jihad and for that matter, Pakistani-American Kamala Khan, aka comic-book heroine Ms Marvel. There are all these stories that readers have so far, because of too many invisible Trump walls, been completely fucking denied.

It’s really exciting to produce and publish Technologies of the Self because

it’s not just important, it’s fun. It’s a good story. It has great food and awkward conversations with ex-girlfriends and a crazy uncle sending his nephew on an actual spirit quest. And in the end, Joe from Washington Heights transforms into Jihad of the whole world, and that’s hope. That’s what Durrani offers.

An Interview with Brain Mill Press

BA: Oh yeah, Kamala Khan. You’re right—one of her creators, G. Willow

Wilson, is another good comparison. Many of her stories, and especially her novel Alif the Unseen, draw on these same issues: the challenges to love and compassion in an age of surveillance. For both Durrani and Wilson, the gap between lived political transgression and the sort of hero vs. villain showdowns we expect from comics are allowed to blur, because at this point our political worldviews are equally muddled.

Something I’ve noticed about superhero media is that the bad guys

tend to be analogues for our real-world ills, such as Kilgrave standing in for rape culture in Jessica Jones. The heroes, however, are never metaphors. That would be weak writing. The heroes are ordinary people, with powers exceeding those allotted to them by the government, by society, and by their own human bodies.

Díaz opens The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with a brilliant

epigraph, borrowed from an issue of Fantastic Four: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives...to Galactus??” At first it seems like a non-sequitur, but as you read, you realize that Galactus is a lot of things. Galactus is the dictator Trujillo, Galactus is the United States, Galactus is capitalism, Galactus is privilege. Galactus, or “Santiago,” as Durrani calls him in Technologies, is any system by which some lives are discarded to favor others, and so we need to be superheroes to defeat him. We need to be better than ourselves. Joe, to me, is the great superhero Jihad, still searching for his powers.

Woodshop Talk

BMP: Yes, that’s exactly right. Neither of the Durrani pieces we’re discussing

positions the protagonist as any kind of metaphor. In fact, the Joe of “FortyTwo Reasons” is as slogged down with the same sexist paradigms, homework, passive decision-making, and overfocus as any nineteen-year-old dude. His worldview is both sharpened and, as you say, muddled, but what he can see well is different than what his suburban white girlfriend sees well. His potential superpower isn’t accessible to him when he looks at himself as he imagines his girlfriend, Glory, looks at him, and so she keeps all the glory to herself. He can’t know how she actually sees him. How he sees himself is alternately as powerful and as prey in the crosshairs of American surveillance.

No wonder simply sitting in a car and making out is so impossible. Sex is

out of the question. Penetration. What I mean is, every one of these actions is impossible to ordinary Joe—to any ordinary nineteen-year-old Joe who doesn’t quite yet know what he wants—and these are equally impossible actions when viewed as political and spiritual metaphors.

Facing down Santiago in Technologies of the Self is a Joe who has been found

too powerless to be surveilled in “Forty-Two Reasons,” but too powerful to walk away from the fight. I keep thinking of the classic superhero trope, where once the superpowers are identified but not yet understood or under the hero’s control, the major impulse of the newly minted hero is to be “normal.” To have never borne witness to some secret war. To be made ignorant, and to have safety, to have a life granted by that ignorance. Once Joe calls himself Jihad, he is clear-eyed, powerful, and has a cape, yes, but his life isn’t anonymous or his own.

An Interview with Brain Mill Press

BA: It’s the classic Campbell call to action/refusal of the call/OK fuck it

let’s go story structure. I find it interesting, however, that you frame the call to action as the very experience of growing up as a person of color in white spaces. Believers are always speaking in terms of sight and consciousness (“Wake up, America! Have you opened your eyes to the truth yet?”). It doesn’t really matter whether what you believe in is God, a political ideology, or conspiracies. Even Díaz uses the Matrix “red pill” analogy to set up the “true account” of Oscar Wao. We’re all awake to some things and sleeping through others.

So for a brown kid like Jihad, there’s no snoozing past Apartheid. He

has no choice but to be awake to systemic racism, whereas 43 percent of the U.S. white population is living in some kind of daydream state, where “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”1 But, as you point out, he’s just as likely to ignore (or even produce) gendered missives against women. The challenge for Jihad and all of us is learning to be as awake to the world as possible. He’s closer to that goal following his encounter with Santiago in Technologies, but he’s still not quite there yet.

BMP: Yeah, I think understanding that racism isn’t theoretical, that it

is a imposition on an individual’s identity, an evil that forces its way into developing, personal consciousness and tries to crowd out native gifts and desires, is an understanding that Durrani is particularly good at showing his readers, and in his stories, that call to action is very much married to the inescapable imposition and insistence of racism. Which means there is no 1

, Jones, Robert P., Daniel Cox, Betsy Cooper and Rachel Lienesch, “Anxiety, Nostalgia, and Mistrust: Findings from the 2015 American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute (November, 2015), http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/PRRI-AVS-2015-Web.pdf.

Woodshop Talk

“be normal.” Which creates such intense, incredible, fucking tension in the storytelling that manages to blow apart and expose the steaming guts of colonialism with his stuff like a short scene of a Pakistani-Dominican kid having a conversation over a meal with a woman he wonders if should be his girlfriend.

Santiago is terrifying, mysterious, thrilling, terrible, and we aren’t even sure

if he’s real, but we know he has to be defeated. How hard is that for a writer, an artist, to pull off? That punch in our belly of motivation and power and interest to a worthy quest? That’s why Durrani’s work is, first, page-turning. It appeals to our best and strongest impulses, and before we know it, we are getting awakened to all kinds of things that, before, were sleeping and unlit.

The stakes—they are freaking high.

BA: Now, I think, would be a good idea to explain Santiago to Buffalo

Almanack readers, who are of course coming at this conversation knowing only the plot to “Forty-Two Reasons.” In the universe Durrani has created, Santiago is indeed St. James the Moor-Slayer, who lends his name to cities throughout Latin America (most notably in Chile). He is the same James/ Santiago at the center of the conquistador cry, “¡Santiago y cierra, España!” (“Santiago and at them, Spain!”). He is the very personification of colonialism, and he is also, it happens, the Devil. Like, actually the Devil. And he comes after Jihad’s uncle Tomás again and again, often wearing a time-traveling suit of armor. There are a lot of fight scenes. It’s pretty awesome. Colonial history underwrites every page of Technologies, which is stocked with references to figures like democratic freedom fighter Pasquale Paoli. But these references are never purely historical. Paoli (good) and Santiago (bad) are alive in Durrani’s world, and you never know when some eighteenth-

An Interview with Brain Mill Press

century conqueror worm is going to jump through a time vortex and kill you. It’s alarming in the best way, and a fine representation of our relationship to the past. When you’re awake to oppression, Santiago ceases to be a name on a page. You are obligated to feel his power across time.

BMP: I have such a clear sense in my imagination of Joe/Jihad, and reading

“Forty-Two Reasons” made the Joe of my imagination terrifically palpable. Brain Mill Press readers have the unique chance to run over to Buffalo Almanack’s issue 10 and devour what is the prequel to Durrani’s book that Brain Mill Press will put out late winter. “Forty-Two Reasons” is one of those postmodern stories that is very “po-mo for the average Jo,” that is, entertaining, funny, and heartbreaking in a human way while stretching the short story medium’s possibilities. Joe of the “Forty-Two Reasons” story grapples with how the entire world others him while conflating those feelings and realities with feelings and realities that are familiar to so many nineteen-year-old guys trying to figure out a romantic relationship. I wish it meant more, nowadays, to apply the word “genius,” though John Crowley just told us that Technologies of the Self “presages a great career for a young writer with lavish gifts,” so genius probably isn’t overstating Durrani’s work.

I know I am stumping for issue 10 and the book, at this point, but such is my

excitement that everyone read this stuff.

Woodshop Talk

BA: Hey, no worries. Stump away. And readers, check out Technologies of the Self whenever you can. Haris Durrani. Brain Mill Press. Coming out February 22, 2016. It’s a quick read, but it will stick with you.

Mary Ann, Ruthie, thank you so much for this lovely conversation. Best

of luck to you both in the future, and please keep Buffalo Almanack readers abreast of any other big releases you might put out in the future! Happy 2016, everyone.

BMP: Thank you, Maxine! It was our pleasure. We encourage our readers to

check out Buffalo Almanack for excellent short fiction, and especially issue 10 to read the prequel to Haris Durrani’s Technologies of the Self, “Forty-Two Reasons Your Girlfriend Works for the FBI, CIA, NSA, ICE, SHIELD, Fringe Division, Men in Black, or Cylon Overlords.”

Photography

“We had been living in Thailand for over a month when we went to Cambodia to tour the Angkor Archaeological Park. During the month in Thailand I had taken several dozen photos of Buddhist monks in and around several temples. At Ta Prahm, walking among the mazes of fallen pillars, we found three young monks with the sun behind their backs. The sun gave them a glow that my camera couldn’t ignore. I’d already taken dozens of photos of monks in and around the ruins, but these three stood out. After taking the photos we went our separate ways among the ruins and I continued to amass a large count of photos of the Angkor ruins. Months later, after working on a couple of large projects, I came across the beatific smile of one of the boy monks. A halo seemed to emanate from behind his head, which made the photo perfect. The smile brought me back to those special days exploring the ruins of the Khmer civilization of Cambodia.” – Julian Jackson

Julian Jackson

Nikon D7100 with 28-105mm Nikon and Lensbaby lenses

Photography

Julian Jackson

Nikon D7100 with 28-105mm Nikon and Lensbaby lenses

Julian Jackson

Nikon D7100 with 28-105mm Nikon and Lensbaby lenses

Nathan Lauer

Versus

Last night I dreamt I was a plagiarist. I was in graduate school in a U.S.

university that was, you know, like my high school but not my high school. It was the end of the semester, I realized I hadn’t been attending my classes, I hadn’t even begun the major project that was due that day, and I didn’t actually know anything about postcolonial voices in contemporary English literature, because, you know, I don’t. I knew that I had to plagiarize an entire paper, like that was the natural thing to do. And that’s the weird part: it was like that was normal, the logical and correct thing. That’s who I was. In this dream I wasn’t me, I was this other guy who plagiarized as a matter of course. I was in my room, kind of like my room that one semester at Antioch but, you know, not like that room. If I think about it, I wasn’t aware of being married, and I had that weird thing where, probably because I dropped out of high school, it was like, if I fail this semester I’ll lose my real job and lose the house, like that real panic-dream stuff. There was no internet, but then I thought that it was better to copy out of a book anyway, and I had the perfect book to copy from but that thing happened that always happens when I try to read in my dreams where I can’t: like it’s blurry, or the page is like blindingly luminous, or the letters make no sense even though they should, like it must be after a stroke. And then I heard a British voice, calm and soothing; enveloping, like headphones. I looked and I saw Salman Rushdie, and he told me not to worry, he was a friend.

I was about to tell him how much I enjoyed his work, but then I remembered

that I couldn’t get into Midnight’s Children and never even opened any of his other books even though they’ve been on the shelf for years now. (I guess I must have remembered being married at this point, right? They’re your books.) I don’t

Nathan Lauer

know, somehow it felt wrong if I’d only read that one, like, it would be bad to tell him that I’d only read that one, even though I’d really loved it. Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter because pretty much right away he set about trying to help me with my problem. He said he’d tell me what to` write.

So he started dictating to me. It was again that soothing perfect post-colonial

accent of his filling my ears, and the words were so fluid that I quickly lost the ability to follow what he was saying. It became something other than English but with the same phonemes of English, like Dutch TV when you’re high, and the words coming off of my pen came out in strange new letters and markings. I lost control of my hand and it continued writing on its own. I don’t know how long that all went on for, but at some point I became aware of a strange feeling in my throat, like a numbness or a vibration or a fullness, and I looked down and saw that this like snakelike I don’t know tube or tunnel or I don’t know like a long strand of transparent goo was coming out of my mouth from deep inside of me. It distorted and diffracted the light and the stuff in the background, like those time arrow things in Donnie Darko. That’s what it was like: like a movie 3d computer graphic of like a snaking tube made out of water. Like that movie Sphere or Deep Star Six or whichever, the one about underwater aliens and one of them had a human face. But without the face. What I was feeling, though, was the movement of the thing being pulled out of my throat. It was weird but it wasn’t actually unpleasant. And I thought like, hey, if it’s not supposed to be inside of me I’m glad it’s getting out. I followed the length of the thing with my eyes and I saw that it was going right around to the back of Rushdie’s head and sort of phasing itself through his skull and into his brain. And then I thought he’s just taking my words. The vibration in my throat, the thing coming out of my mouth: that’s words, he was just dictating my own words back to me.

Versus

And it felt like some really important revelation, you know, the way things in dreams can, and as I was noticing all of this and realizing what it meant, I was feeling this building excitement and lightness and like almost sexual sense of impending I don’t know something (which I think might have been an episode of apnea because this was all before you woke me up to put my snore machine on). Then afterwards, in the next part that I remember, everything had changed. It was like I was watching Salman Rushdie as like an omniscient observer, but then other times I was Salman Rushdie, or at least I was the protagonist in these events which were featuring Salman Rushdie whenever I wasn’t the protagonist.

Salman Rushdie’s best friend is a thirtysomething mixed-race lesbian

graduate student with a weak grasp of postmodern literary theory belied by her mastery of the relevant terminology. Her name is Suzie. Suzie and Salman were having brunch in a sidewalk café just off the high street. Salman was having a fry-up. Suzie was having vegan buckwheat pancakes with jam. She was telling him about her half-finished dissertation on the subject of Pan-Asian and AsianAmerican appropriation of African-American cultural memes. “I’ve decided to take that article that got rejected last year on hip-hop appropriations of Hong Kong cinema tropes and rework it into a sixth chapter. I know it technically runs towards the opposite position to the rest of my theoretical framework,” She took a bite and chewed into her cheek as she continued to speak, “but I think I can make it work.” She swallowed with some difficulty, the pancakes were dry. “Oh!” washed it down with coffee, “I came up with the perfect title.”

The silence lasted long enough to draw Salman’s attention up from his plate

to meet Suzie’s enthusiastic eyes. He spoke with his mouth full, “Um? What’s that?”

Nathan Lauer

She smiled and theatrically extended her hands in front of her as if unfurling

a banner reading the words “A Chink in the Black Knight’s Armour colon Pan-Asian and Asian-American Appropriation of African-American Cultural Memes.” She hung her mouth open as if gobsmacked by her own words. “I mean, do you love it or do you love it?”

Salman sat, rolled the title over in his mind for a moment. “That’s good,”

he said flatly, “That’s really good.” As if from a great distance, the Adhan, as delivered by the artist formally known as Cat Stevens on his The Life Of The Last Prophet spoken word cd, softly sounded. “Sorry,” Salman said, as he pulled out his phone and the sound of the call became louder, “I’ve got to take this.” He snapped the phone open. “Hello, Saul, how are you?” His literary agent had called to press him into making some difficult decisions that both men knew he would, left to his own devices, put off. Since leaving protective custody he found himself having trouble taking care of the day to day minutia of choice and action. Depression, they called it, but he knew it was something more. Depression was what he had experienced those first years in custody. God, what a nightmare that had been. It had taken the new book, The Moor’s Last Sigh, to pull him out. He owed everything to that one. It had saved his life as surely as the last book had tried to end it. Saul was trying to get him to commit, and he was being evasive. The conversation was setting him on edge and he couldn’t place why.

Salman rolled his eyes towards Suzie, pointed at the phone, and shook his

head, smiling. Like most successful artists, Salman affected the performance of a love/hate relationship with the businesspeople who managed the financial aspects of his career. He was far from alone among his fellows in frequently joking, when they had a disagreement, that he had “no idea why (he had) hired

Versus

that man.” In fact, Salman did not know that he actually did not know why he had hired that man. Saul Mandelbaum, of the Mandelbaum Literary Agency, was a highly skilled and sought after negotiator and deal-maker. He knew, had worked with, and was respected by all of the right people in literary fiction, historical fiction, biography, and highly specific niche history publications for general audiences. He made money for his clients, a lot of money. He had sought Salman out, given a pitch which included several well thought-out ideas for the future, and he was entirely understanding that he would have to wait for Salman’s existing obligations to expire. This was not the reason why Salman Rushdie contracted Saul Mandelbaum to be his agent at the earliest opportunity.

Saul was eminently successful, top of his field. Born in Queens but moved

with his family to Los Angeles at the age of 14. Solidly middle-class, father a grocer turned logistic systems manager for California’s second-largest asparagus distributor, mother an elementary school music teacher, now retired. History B.A., Berkley, minor in Comp. Lit.; M.B.A., U.C.L.A. A few false starts in the intellectual property acquisitions end of the movie business were followed by a steady and well-earned rise through the publishing world. He incorporated as his own limited liability entity at the age of 30.

He was a thoroughly secular, firmly leftist thinker, like his parents. Read

The Guardian online and The New York Times Sunday Edition on paper. Voted and donated democrat nationally, and did so by his well-informed conscience locally. One time he made a point of putting a glass down and telling the host why he did it when he found out that the delicious moscato had been produced in the Golan Heights. His daughters were both Bat Mitzvahed at the unconventionally orthodox age of twelve in the (very) Reform temple he and

Nathan Lauer

his wife were loosely attached to, really as more of a social and charitable club. He was especially proud of the fact that Rachel had chosen to deliver, in lieu of the Torah reading, an oral report on Talmudic values and ethics as they relate to the concept of collective punishment, but had to admit Minh had outdone her two years later with her flawless Hebrew recitation of The Law of The Plague, Leviticus 13, in its entirety. Little fucking wiseasses.

His wife, the radiologist, was a beautiful woman of Saigon Chinese

descent. He wasn’t the type to run such numbers, but a review of his romantic history would reveal a greater than 60% skew towards an Asian-American demographic. His work car, the BMW Z series, had an automatic transmission, because what are we, cavemen? He was a sharp dresser, but never flashy. He looked a bit like that actor who always plays the stylish L.A. lawyer. He said things like “Salman, baby” on the telephone. He spoke like a normal person outside of his work environment. Unbeknownst to himself, Salman had hired Mandelbaum to function in his life as a living Jewish stereotype. Not toxic like the blood-drinking Hasid with his claws and his payots and his hooknose or the yarmulked cartoon shylock sucking the life out of an emaciated goyim family, but he was, in Salman’s unconscious estimation, just as thorough of a caricature: an embodiment of a generic mental image invoked by the word “Jew,” and for some reason Salman had sought out this thing and kept it close. “Salman, baby,” his agent said, “this is unquestionably a ‘while the iron’s hot’ kind of situation. I know that this is going to be the first time in public since that thing with the guy, but that’s over now, you need to put that behind you.” He paused. He would have accepted a response from Salman but he didn’t require one. He continued. “We contained that shit. With the royalty agreement he’s got no reason to start anything and a whole pile of reasons not to. What are

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you afraid of? Nothing, that’s what. You’re Salman Fucking Rushdie. Author of the year, ninety-six. Whose book was the Booker of Bookers? Your brother buckin’ book was Booker of Bookers. Do I even need to start on the fatwa?” “No. No you do not need to start on the fatwa. Yes, you’re right of course. My life is in your able hands. Schedule away, and just tell me where and when to show up.” These conversations almost always ended this way. “You’re beautiful, Salman. Don’t ever change. Bu-bye. Click.” Did anyone actually talk like that? The man defied belief. “Sorry about that,” Salman said to Suzie, flipping his phone shut and dipping back into his eggs, which already were getting cold. “Don’t know why I hired that man.” Salman knew that Saul was absolutely right, was always absolutely right in these cases. He needed to get his face back out there. He needed to do readings. He needed to remind the world that he was still here, he was still writing, he was the source of the literature. It was the literature that mattered. The rest was sideshow. He forked a piece of turkey bacon. “Hmmm?” Suzie began through a mouthful of food, pointing at the meat with her fork. “When did you go back on the flesh? I thought you were keeping it green.” “I tried. I failed. This isn’t even the worst of it. For a month now, beef and lamb too, if the truth be told.” Almost a year ago, after a serious discussion with his GP over his serum triglycerides, Salman had resolved to limit his red meat intake. In the manner of addicts and compulsives, he found that his allowances for small quantities here and there were inevitably used as excuses and springboards for overindulgence, and so he found the best solution to be to cut meat entirely from his diet. Six month follow-up, his HDL still too low and his LDL too high, he began taking daily statins, but kept off the meat anyway.

Nathan Lauer

Slowly, in the customary sequence of fallen vegetarians, meat had worked its way back into his life. Fish and poultry were eased back in, at first just to be polite at other people’s dinner parties, then, he thought, well, that line’s been crossed, may as well keep at it. He was able to maintain for some months, but his will was weak. He was at a food counter one evening and, outside of his control, found his mouth forming the words “Doner kabob, please”, and it was over. The very next time he was at the Swiss Cottage Market with every intention of buying a boneless chicken breast, his hand reached towards a sirloin wrapped in waxed paper. Eventually, all pretense was gone and he resumed unashamed meat consumption. “Beef, lamb? No swine, though?” “A concession to my more vociferous critics,” he joked. Pork had somehow failed to find its way back onto his menu, still with the stated excuse of reducing corruptions in his vital humours. On the rare occasion a friend would call him out on this matter, he played it off with this same joke. Suzie was just as uncomfortable with the joke as his other friends. He tended to avoid the fatwa talk when he could. Saul was the only one who could be trusted to joke about it freely. Most everyone else avoided the subject, both, he believed, out of concern for reawakening bad memories, as well as wanting to avoid giving the sense that they had a prurient interest in the matter. Which, of course, they had. Salman was used to discussing it at this point. He knew he’d even have to write the whole damn thing down some day. As long as he was in control of the story he was comfortable telling it, some details at least. Whenever the subject did come up, he would put on a cheerful or serious face, as the situation required, and candidly discuss his protective captivity. He especially hated the

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idea that someone would know the extent to which thinking about it made him uncomfortable. He didn’t want his friends and acquaintances to know of his fear and weakness, however understandable they were in the context. At the heart of it was his shame. It was so predictable, so common, so trite. To even call it cliché was cliché. The oppressed immigrant voices he defended wanted him dead, the police bullyboys he had vilified were his saviors. It was the eternal cartoon Marxist intellectual inevitably, deservedly, and laughably punched in the face on his first visit to a working class pub. And then he had capitulated so completely and so ineffectually, not just to the pigs, that he could have handled. The game has always been rigged, and when push comes to shove the State holds the highest power: of course he had to go to the pigs. But he gave in on the one point he should have held onto the strongest. He went and told them he had renewed his faith and renounced his blasphemy. He told them he loved Big Brother and it still didn’t help. And even that was cliché. Because of course he capitulated. It was the reasonable thing to do. Of course you tell a crazy person with a gun what he wants to hear rather than letting him shoot you. Of course you do. The nights were the worst. As much as he hated the days with policemen his only company, the nights alone were so much worse. On the bad nights, he would spend hours clutching the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror. He was a vicious self-critic, but not a particularly creative or original one. It was the same old tired attacks over and over. “What kind of idea are you?” he spat out at the pudgy old paki in the looking glass. He hated the pedestrian irony of the words, of the moment, of the whole scene staged for no one’s benefit but his own. He hated that he wrote those words. He hated that he has failed to live up to those words. He hated that it was the inevitable outcome that he should

Nathan Lauer

fail to live up to those words, that those who write noble and true words are of a different class of humanity entirely from those who would die for them, that in fact the class of men who readily die for ideas are for a large part incapable of forming too many ideas of their own, that anyone who has ever said “while I disagree with your words, I will fight to the death for your right to say them” was talking bollocks because fighting to the death is an activity better suited to bigoted young men than to middle-aged intellectuals who think a great deal about free expression. But he hated more than anything that he would stand there looking into the mirror and remember that he hated those words, and that he wrote those words, and that he would say them, that he would stand there and say them as if to an audience, and there he was alone performing for himself. He hated that most of all. Not all of his abuse and anger was self-directed. Salman began, after a couple of years under police protection, usually while drunk, to engage in acts of petty blasphemy. It began during a late night whiskey-sodden mirror monologue. His clouded mind was awash with images of the mindless faithful millions, and he spoke aloud, as if to them. “La ilaha.” A simple statement. A negation of faith. Not every night, but many nights, he would repeat this, as something of a ritual. After a time, he expanded this statement to his own partial Shahada: the Word of God, edited by Salman Rushdie to form a creed he could live by: “Ashadu an la ilaha.” I testify that there is no God. Sometimes he even said the full Shahada, spoken in the snarky overblown style typical of late 1980’s countercultural artifacts, that of the David Lynches, the Lydia Lunches, the brief period when sarcastic mockery had been mistaken for dramatic irony. Despite managing to put on a brave face for his protective detail most days, he very nearly went mad for a time. In retrospect, he considered, perhaps he had gone a

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bit mad, perhaps that would explain the terrible thing he had done. The lieutenant in charge, not a bad sort, really, had been the one to contrive a change to Salman’s circumstances and routine. He’d seen the nervous ticks growing in frequency and amplitude. He’d received the daily reports of emotional outbursts and irritability. He’d counted whiskey bottles going in and out of inventory. Upon the move to the next safe house, budget cuts were cited and terribly sorry but we’ve got to consolidate operations here is your new roommate Giovanni Giraldi don’t worry it’s only temporary hey you two have something in common mister Giraldi is from India too innit. Telly’s not working? We’ll get right on that, sir. As the lieutenant had predicted, Salman’s mother had raised too polite a man to allow him to remain in his brooding state. Giovanni was a fascinating man, with a fascinating story to tell. Born in Madras just after the second world war, he was the son of a local woman and an Italian father. Signor Giraldi senior was part of a small group of P.O.W.s brought over from North Africa who preferred to remain behind rather than potentially face war crimes proceedings or lynching if they were repatriated with their fellows. Using the same skills which had ensured his meteoric rise through Il Duce’s ranks, Signor Giraldi quickly established with these men one of the most brutal and efficient criminal enterprises in the city. Taking full advantage of the chaos surrounding Independence, the so-called Mafiosi di Madras expanded their small operation to major international drugs, arms, and human trafficking. Young Giovanni grew up in this environment. After a tragic and irreparable falling out with the family and the prison time which had resulted, Giovanni had gone on to work for the Hindu-fundamentalist Shiv Shena Party. He had stories, and the two men had nothing but time on their hands. Just as the lieutenant had hoped, the

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two weeks the men had spent together had a lasting effect on Salman. They seemed to have formed a real bond between them, and all the talk of subcontinental politics had awakened something in Salman. He was sad to see his new friend go off to testify and earn his allotment from the Crown Witness Relocation Scheme (somewhere in the North of Italy, Giovanni was praying), but the very same day Salman got out pen and paper and began creating something new. It was the one that would come to mean the most to him, the one that saved him, the one that brought him back. Still, at night, the emptiness had remained. Although he had quit the whiskey at this point, Salman continued his practice of reciting for himself the sarcastic Shahada. He would twist his face into a childish sneer and say the words with a mocking sing-songy tone. Later, as the days and weeks of fear and uncertainty wore on him, these layers of vanity and performance fell away. So it was that one evening last year he looked in the bathroom mirror and into his own tired, puffy eyes, and realized as he spoke the words that there was no god but Allah, and that Mohammed was his prophet. It was fucking terrible. The spirit of God moved in him and he was otherwise unchanged. It was like some horrible locked-in-syndrome of the soul. He remained fully aware of the absurdity of faith, yet was helplessly in its thrall. It would have been better, it would have been simpler, if it had come upon him like madness or rabies; if the God that had come had been the life-consuming God of Impotence, who needed Man to defend him. But that was not to be. The God that came was the Reasonable God. It was the multifaceted jewel of the Dervish, and the facet that sparkled his way just happened to be the one called Allah. It was the God of The Lower East Side and Tin Pan Alley, who solved The Problem of Evil with a smile

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and a wry shrug and whose auto da fé was “Thou shall not eat lobster, why not?” It was the God of the Jesuit Scholar, who thoughtfully weighed each and every philosophical argument and just as thoughtfully disregarded them as irrelevant to the choice between the Grail and the Teapot. It was the God of California, who made no demands, who really didn’t know about quote organized religion unquote but still just felt really into spirituality right now. It was the God of White People that had filled the emptiness in Salman Rushdie’s soul. That was the worst part. He didn’t talk about it. Ever. He knew God didn’t mind, because He is so fucking reasonable. Soon after his brunch with Suzie, courtesy of Saul, Salman was back on the festival circuit. After his first reading and meet-and-greet he had practically forgotten what it was he had been afraid of in the first place. These were his people. They loved him, hung on his every word, and no matter how long of a reading they had booked him for he always left them wanting more. He was riding high and nothing could stop him until he stepped up on the stage at the University of Exeter and his heart crashed as he saw him in the audience. Catching Salman’s eye, the man raised his crippled right hand, more Johnny Tremain than Moraes Zogoiby, and waved. Salman never could figure out if Giovanni had planned the whole thing out. He had been perfectly pleasant five months earlier sitting across the table at Salman’s solicitors’ office. He claimed that it was all simple precautions he had read about in some “how-to-publish-your-novel” guide, his airtight legal evidence: a meticulous writer’s diary of the time they had spent together as well as the time spent working on the project which, if the diary was to be believed, was already in the form of an early completed draft at the time they met; several old drafts showing progressive revisions; multiple sealed copies of the final

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manuscript time-stamped by various government and private entities, one of which was presently unsealed and slid across the table for Salman’s solicitors to review. Giovanni had said he was really sorry about the way that things had turned out. He had been too embarrassed to talk to The Salman Rushdie about his own modest literary ambitions. He claimed he never even knew that Salman had used his stories. It was only when one of many rejection letters had congratulated him on the size of his bollocks for attempting to plagiarize the most recent work of the winner of last year’s Nibbie for Author of the Year that he had realized what must have happened. Of course his version was a pale shadow of only part of the narrative of the The Moor’s Last Sigh, but it was still his story to tell. Salman had stolen his story. It didn’t take long to determine that what Salman had done was not defensible. Giovanni’s solicitors leveraged a flat payout with a handsome percentage of the royalties. The publishers were kept in the dark but Salman had wanted Mandelbaum involved in damage control from the word go. Of course Giovanni submitted to a confidentiality clause. No one would ever know. Salman finished his reading at Exeter with some difficulty, and was for the very first time grateful that he was one of the few people in the world who was immediately and unconditionally excused for appearing flustered or anxious in public. It was not even commented upon, except in empathetic whispers. He canceled his next several appearances and went into seclusion at his flat. And my dream left him there, writing for months in a gratuitously contrarian tone.

Salman dreamed up a strange new work, one attacking the sitting King of Siam as, among other things, a serial rapist and Machiavellian puppet-master of

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all of Southeast Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s atrocities. Naming names, he detailed violations of entire female family lines of Bangkok-Chinese restaurateurs. He painted heartrending pictures of trembling second daughters clutching paper sacks filled with takeaway soups and curries, walking flanked by dead-eyed palace guards through golden doorways into chambers they only knew to be the places from which their once-giant Mothers returned forever changed: bent, meek, quieter except for the frequent jags of weeping. In increasingly poisonous prose, he laid forth a battery of charges against the now elderly monarch, culminating in the claim that His Majesty was in fact the highest authority behind the Red Khmer insurgency, all part of an elaborate plan to demonize international Maoism/ Marxism. The work became evermore complex. Pages were filled with detailed reports listing times, dates, and locations of in-person and proxy meetings and phone calls between His Majesty and high level Anka officials. Anecdotes suggesting possible code names of key figures, places, and events were cited, and seemingly innocuous documents were presented in light of these with sinister doublemeanings laid bare. Conversations in jungle tents were transcribed. As Saul Mandelbaum skimmed over page after page from the large couriered envelope he had the distinct mental image of the author working from a psychotically elaborate half-wall corkboard covered with innumerable thumb-tacked photos and large words scrawled in magic marker on torn-off sheets of A4, all connected to one another in elaborate webs of at least three colors of string, such as are used in television to depict the mental work of master detectives or archparanoids. Through Saulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office window high above downtown Los Angeles, I looked out over the Hollywood Hills. I dreamt I saw a rising of two great powers in

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opposition, armies poised upon opposite sides of a narrow valley. On the one side were arrayed the proud forces of science and reason, and on the other stood a vast matrix of candyfloss and bile. The cords of candyfloss spread high up over the horizon like airplane contrails and traced patterns in the complex geometries of crop circles. And amongst the cacophony of voices blowing in on the sweet and sour wind I heard people speaking of airplane contrails and crop circles. And as the candyfloss grew and spread in evermore complex configurations, I saw that everyone in the vicinity was drawn inside the web. Some were snared by kittensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; barbed claws, while others were stuck fast by inflamed clots of insoluble gluten, for the sweet ropey strands held all manner of traps and sucked with a false gravity which bent time and space. Once inside, they would submerge themselves in great brass tubs of bitter emulsifying humours. I saw that, on the opposite hilltop, those who had been numbered amongst the armies of reason, too, had run or been pulled across the no-manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s-land and were now enmeshed in the sticky web. Only as I narrowed my dreaming eyes was I able to see a single mid-sized open-plan office space on the now lonely hillcrest where a small group of men and women were frantically producing ropes of spun sugar, stopping only to vomit into large funnels. And then I woke up, or something. That was the dream I had last night and everything is fiction in a dream and all likenesses of actual public figures were dreamt in a parodic manner, I guess. Except for King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand. Seriously, fuck that guy. Every word is true.

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Buffalo Almanack

How to decide the ‘best’ story of 2015? It’s a challenging question. Every year, Buffalo Almanack publishes sixteen original works of fiction—sixteen out of the several thousand that we receive in our submissions inbox. These are the crème de la crème, signifying only the most provocative, only the most moving, only the most humorous and only the most well-crafted stories to land on our desk. This year that meant black comedies like Eric Boehling Lewis’s “Pressure Flaking,” and dreams of escape, like Jessica Barksdale’s “Caught.” It meant half-drunk vignettes of summer sadness, like Anna Schott’s “North Fork of the Yuba River,” and junior detective adventures like Dan Moore’s “The Big Sleep Together.” In all, we published sixteen stories this year, and every one of them was its own kind of masterpiece.

Yet Pushcart Press has come calling once more, and we must choose.

Issue No. 10 - Dec. 2015

Unique among literary magazines, it is the policy of Buffalo Almanack to

select only one story each year for Pushcart nomination, rather than use all six nominations allotted to us. This is in part because of the small candidate pool, and in part because we want this honor to mean as much as it can. We want our nominee to know that their work truly stood above the others, and ranks conclusively as our “Story of the Year.”

This time around, that story is “Collaboration Horizontale,” by Erica X

Eisen. Those of you who have read it will know that this is a greatly deserved prize, for Eisen’s story expertly imagines the great injustices committed against women in post-Liberation France. It is a hard and moving invention of historical fiction, and yet the piece is wholly Eisen’s, and everywhere she is in strong command of her language and powers. Those of you who have not read it...go. Do it now. It’s in Issue No. 9 (Sept. 2015). Trust us, it’s worth your time.

Congratulations, Erica! We’ll see you in 2017, when you are due to appear in our first quadrennial Issue of Champions!

Laura Kraay