Leland Quarterly, Vol. 1 Issue 1, Fall 2006

FALL 2006

GABRIEL

WINANT

takes on cowboy politics

STEVEN

TAGLE

visits an erotic museum

FRANK GUAN

brings Dostoevsky into the age of tv

ANNIE

WYMAN burns a leaf

TONY

TULATHIMUTTE explores a photography of absence

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leland

UARTERLY

leland

QUARTERLY

Volume 1, Issue 1

Copyright © 2006 by Leland Quarterly • Stanford University All Rights Reserved.

Copy America Publishing • Palo Alto Department of English Bldg. 460, Margaret Jacks Hall Stanford, CA 94309

EDITORIAL BOARD, FALL 2006 Editors-In-Chief BOB BOREK, NICK HOY

Managing Editor BECCA JACOBS

Contributing Editors

FRANK GUAN, ANNIE WYMAN

Resident Cartoonist

GEORGE XANDER MORRIS

Layout Editors

TERESA KIM, CHRISTINA CACCIOPO

Advisory Board

ANDREW ALTSCHUL, VALERIE BRELINSKI

Special Thanks

ANDREW ALTSCHUL & VALERIE BRELINSKI for their continuing support

Leland: A Quarterly Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.

Our mission is to tap into the almost incomparably diverse talents of Stanford’s undergraduate student body, soliciting a wide array of poetry and prose, and working closely with authors to achieve a publication of superior content and design. Leland’s statement – from fiction to poetry, essays to reviews – will be enduring, common, recognizable, and extraordinary.

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

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wo hundred million years ago, tectonic conflict forced portions of the Pacific sea floor crust to the surface. Tacked on to present-day Utah and Arizona like a geological afterthought, California has never quite fit in. While states to the East were embroiled in wars of independence and slavery, California was oblivious, independent—free.

It is no accident that the event that populated California (and led to its inclusion as the 31st state) was delivered of an ancient, geological ordination. Millions of years ago, the confluence of water and molten magmas in the Sierra Nevada dissolved stable minerals into large veins of quartz, iron, copper and zinc sulfides—and gold. The California Gold Rush is too often associated with the underpinnings of American greed, or the Death of Industry, or else quite apocalyptically as the Conception of Modern Ills; too often do we ignore its hopeful, egalitarian esprit. The Forty-Niners redeem by an impeccable logic. If there is poverty, find wealth. If there is no wealth to be found, then by all means: Go West, Young Man! But today, California’s logic is confused. There is a moral logic of the innocent and of the corrupt, an economic logic of the poor and of the affluent, and a temporal logic of the established and the establishing. There is another logic altogether of the north and of the south, and of the urban and the suburban. Californians are keen adherents of techno-liberalism, but also preach euphoromoralism—and as we well know, the two cannot be wholly reconciled. Inconsistency and accidental unconformity have become definitive.

It is no secret that California’s geology takes away as it gives. In 1906, near Daly City, CA (and again in 1989, at Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains), we witnessed the massive rupture of the San Andreas Fault. Thousands died in fires that swept San Francisco, turning Golden Gate Park into a refugee encampment; the Cypress Street Viaduct collapsed, crushing dozens of cars; the 1989 World Series was postponed for ten days; even the brilliant minds of Stanford University were twice forced to pause, grab hold of the nearest table, and consider. The geological faults that cleave the state of California are far more powerful—and potentially destructive—than the fault lines which divide us humans above-ground. Amidst our modern confusions, perhaps we can latch onto this instability. It reminds us of the limits of intellectualism, of politics, of culture and wealth and creativity. Above all, it reminds us of the limits of ourselves: of the fragile, quivering geology that governs each of our own little worlds. This is a commendable logic: it is something we should know.

— NICK HOY

& the editors of Leland

contents

POLITICS

When the Going Gets Tough

GABRIEL WINANT From Goldwater to Bush: why masculine rhetoric has become more and more explicit in presidential campaigns over the last fifty years

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FICTION

Composite Body

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TONY TULATHIMUTTE

The Room Without Windows LY CHHENG

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CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Touring the Erotic Museum STEVEN TAGLE

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CRITICISM

In a Manner of Speaking

FRANK GUAN How a generation of Americans raised on television can be expected to engage with Dostoevsky, and an exploration of the work of his modern-day counterpart, David Foster Wallace

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CULTURAL COMMENTARY

On Pseudo-intellectualism & Lens-less Glasses

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BOB BOREK A light-hearted look at undergraduate attitudes toward “a life of the mind”

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COVER PHOTO by Laurel Sydney Gabler UNTITLED (28), Jake Haskill 

POETRY

PHOTOGRAPHY

12 No Chronologer LAUREN CALDWELL

13 Dilution

PAYAM CHERCHIAN

17 Tedious Questions ERIC PHETTEPLACE

23 The Latecomers TAYLOR ALTMAN

25 Earwig

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DUMBARTON BRIDGE (14), Tyler John Gutierrez

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UNTITLED (20), Jake Haskill

JOANNA FIDUCCIA

29 Terra

PAYAM CHERCHIAN

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The Dogpatch Burlesque

BONNIE JOHNSON

35 Ars Poetica

TOM FEULNER

38 This Is How It Should Be Done TYLER GUTIERREZ

45 Burning the Leaf ANNIE WYMAN

UNTITLED (12), Annie Wyman  

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WINDOWS TO CLOUD (8), Tyler John Gutierrez DOOR TO THE GUGGENHEIM (41), Missy Halliday

WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH

BY GABRIEL WINANT

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n the world of politics, masculinity has gone rabid. Machista strongmen flex their muscles on a world stage that increasingly resembles L.A.’s Muscle Beach. While Putin consolidates power in the name of order, Ahmadinejad rattles his scimitar at the corrupt West, Nigerian men threaten to stone to death Nigerian women, Orthodox Jews are infuriated over a gay pride march in Jerusalem and American states can’t preserve the nuclear family fast enough. Everyone is suddenly spoiling for a fight.

Americans think they know what makes a man. The ideal male is actually a pretty recognizable character, and he’s a lot like Johnny Cash. He’s patriotic, unpretentious and blunt, tough and unafraid to fight, and strong-headed and self-reliant. If wronged, he’ll exact revenge; if he commits a misdeed, he will be redeemed. There is another American man who shares these characteristics with the country singer—or at least wants us to think that he does.

Consider George W. Bush in the rubble of the World Trade Center, bullhorn in hand, warning that the world would hear from America. At our most vulnerable, we turned to this incarnation of American manhood, incubated on the ranch in Texas, to land on an aircraft carrier to reassure us that the foe is awed into submission, and that we are safe. Bush pulled off this butch stunt to accolades of his virility from the pundit class. Chris Matthews of “Hardball” heaped praise on the size of the bulge in his pants—his “manly characteristic,” as talk-radio host G. Gordon Liddy described it. Columnist Peggy Noonan proclaimed Bush the resurrected John Wayne. Meanwhile, People Magazine anointed septuagenarian Donald Rumsfeld one of its sexiest men of the year. And all of this seems somehow vaguely unsurprising; our leaders are supposed to be warriors and cowboys.

There is a distinctly American mythology of the up-by-the-bootstraps hero and the brave cowboy taming new

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worlds. In our mental geography, it seems a Western tale, springing from somewhere around Texas. While there are different versions of this story with different characters—the vengeful and righteous white-hat cowboy, the young man gone west on Horatio Alger’s advice, who makes his own way and grows up with the country—they are all masculine, even macho. The gendered nature lends this narrative tremendous rhetorical power in the face of threats to American security.

Modern candidates for president—chiefly Republicans—have largely succeeded in playing to these gender-based caricatures; they are more decisive, rough-and-tumble, and virile. They have portrayed their opponents as unwilling or unable to deal with American foes because they are too much brain and too little brawn, because they are hand-wringing, and generally effeminate. National campaigns, fought on television, transform into Western movies; the presidential aspirant who knows best how to ward off the Indians gets the keys to the White House.

The birth of the modern conservative movement, appropriately enough, can be traced to the cowboy country of the American Southwest with the 1964 presidential campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater retired from the Air Force as a Major General; in the Senate and as a presidential candidate he was a voice shouting in the desert for a confrontational conservatism, against the New Deal and for using nuclear weapons against Vietnam. His cowboy code contrasted very neatly with the perceived communist military threat.

Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in San Francisco was a call to arms against communism, and it shows early telltale signs of individualist machismo: “This nation, whose creative people have enhanced this entire span of history, should again thrive upon the greatness of all those things which we—we as individual citizens—can and should do.” Goldwater painted a picture of

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the polity as a macrocosm of the stateless old West, in which those who succeed are those who get by on their own.

The masculine, individualist ethos translated clearly for Goldwater into a readiness to project military power with a steady hand. He praised the Eisenhower administration for its forceful custody of national security: “And I needn’t remind you that it was the strength and the believable will of the Eisenhower years that kept the peace by using our strength, by using it in the Formosa Strait, and in Lebanon, and by showing it courageously at all times.”

Goldwater eagerly contrasted these decisive actions with what he saw as a cowardly Kennedy-Johnson administration: “During four futile years the Administration which we shall replace has distorted and lost that faith. It has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom but it has failed and failed and failed in the works of freedom. “ How recognizably macho this insult is—that an inadequate opponent is all hat and no cattle. Early attempts to redefine military competence as synonymous with Sun Belt swagger—“believable will”—were underway.

American politics pivoted during the 1960s and 1970s; the Republican Party began building a majority, its ranks swollen by millions of former Democrats who had watched their traditional political home become the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” Nixon’s two successful campaigns for the presidency in 1968 and 1972 capitalized on a Democratic Party unsure of its own position. The Republicans portrayed themselves as the appropriately masculine steady hand to conduct the Vietnam War and wage the Cold War. Nixon studiedly communicated in his 1968 acceptance speech just how much his life was a story of a plucky American man: I see another child tonight. He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of far away places where he’d like to go. It seems like an impossible dream.

But he is helped on his journey through life. A father who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade, sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college.

A gentle, Quaker mother, with a passionate concern for peace, quietly wept when he went to war but she

understood why he had to go. A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister encouraged him on his way. A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and also defeat . . . And tonight he stands before you—nominated for President of the United States of America.

Nixon eagerly conveyed (in sentence fragments; complete sentences seem to be a mark of softness) that he had lived a life in which the people around him were all-American archetypes, filling their traditional gender roles. His father worked hard, his mother was “gentle” and “wept,” his football coach and minister were influential, his wife was loyal, and he had risen on pure Western grit to the top, where he swore, “We will never stain the honor of the United States of America.”

This kind of macho belligerence, evocative of the Marine Corps hymn, “First to fight for right and freedom / And to keep our honor clean,” was particularly effective in the face of a Democratic Party shredding itself over the Vietnam War. The Democratic nominees of 1968 and 1972—Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern—led a fractious party that did not seem tough enough to run itself, much less a war. In 1968, as Humphrey was

handed the nomination, the party imploded on national television as thousands of anti-war protesters flooded its convention in Chicago. The police met them with a shockingly brutal response, later described as a “police riot.” As the police rained down blows, the protesters shouted, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” It turned out that America was watching, but it was rooting for Chicago’s blue-collar police force against the hippies, with their unshaven women and longhaired men. The tear gas left Humphrey weeping in his hotel room that overlooked the protest. Onstage at the convention, liberal Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff accused Chicago Mayor Daley of “Gestapo tactics”; on tape, Richard Daley can be seen shouting, “Fucking kike,” upward at Ribicoff’s podium. The party emerged from the convention devastated by the fight over its identity; Humphrey hobbled out of Chicago the pyrrhic victor.

Left and right alike loathed Humphrey as the spineless creature of Lyndon Johnson, given the nomination without fairly competing for it. Under pressure from Johnson, Humphrey had avoided a compromise with the anti-war elements of the Democratic Party, and by large margins, respondents in Gallup polls indicated that they did not believe he would change from Johnson’s now unpopular

strategy in Vietnam. Perceived as a hostage to the man who made him Vice President, Humphrey was hardly the stuff of Western heroism.

McGovern did not have it any easier.

In fact, McGovern was more explicitly antiwar than Humphrey had been; if Humphrey was seen as the creature of Lyndon Johnson, McGovern was seen as that of the hippie Left, whose members did not abide by traditional gender roles and opposed military intervention.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff asserts that, at least when it comes to politics, we think in metaphors that arise from our understanding of the family: What links strict-father family-based morality to politics is a common metaphor shared by conservatives and liberals alike—the Nation-asFamily metaphor, in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent, and the citizens as children.

This metaphor turns family-based morality into political morality.

If we accept this analysis, then the famous refrain of McGovern’s acceptance speech— “Come home, America”—sounds incredibly maternal. He seems to have done Nixon’s work for him by choosing this particular rhetorical backdrop, rather than claiming the battle-front as his stage. Where Nixon had spoken of protecting national honor, McGovern spoke of healing national wounds. Rather than bursting with pride and courage like Nixon’s, McGovern’s “heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam.” The Democrats emerged from the Nixon era humiliated by the landslide defeat of their nominee, who’d been caricatured as the candidate of surrender in Vietnam, leading his army of indeterminately-gendered supporters; the Richard Daleys of the country were now Republicans.

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hift to 1980: Jimmy Carter ran for re-election amidst two crises—one in Iran, one in the American economy—that exposed his inability to control events. The conditions were perfect for Ronald Reagan, a man intimately familiar with American male archetypes from his career in show business. His filmography includes dozens of roles as cowpokes, football coaches, and

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soldiers in titles like “Death Valley Days,” “The Lawless Have Laws,” and “No Gun Behind His Badge.” The dominant trope of Reagan’s campaign was opposition to what he saw as the intrusive nature of the federal government, a variation on old Western distrust of the power of the state.

The old West came to Washington with Ronald Reagan, who rode into town to save the day from an impotent administration, warning the nation, “The administration which has brought us to this state is seeking your endorsement for four more years of weakness, indecision, mediocrity and incompetence.” Carter’s inadequate mettle yielded military shame, according to Reagan: “We are given weakness when we need strength; vacillation when the times demand firmness.” The elements of the gendered critique are here so clear that one is tempted to wonder what Freud would have made of Reagan’s language; the opposition lacks “resolve,” shows “weakness,” and “vacillates” when “times demand firmness.”

The difference between Reagan and Goldwater, of course, is that Reagan won in a landslide. The important distinction seems to be that while Goldwater was all cowboy tough talk, Reagan also employed the kind of sunny can-do Western rhetoric that seemed to echo the Nixon campaign.

Take, for example, his 1984 acceptance speech: “America is coming back and is more confident than ever about the future.”

Reagan had a consistent scrappiness, sunnier than Goldwater’s dark fury; he was both confrontational and optimistic at once.

During the 1980s, a large gender gap in voting patterns emerged that is still present today. Men followed Reagan to the new countrified Republican Party.

Polls show that men are more likely to be supportive of the use of violence, and opposed to communal —that is, nonindividualist—measures: for example, 45% of men and 30% of women believe that the government should provide fewer services, 61% of men and 37% of women support allowing bombers to strike populated areas, and 28% of men but a full 48% of women support a ban on handguns.

Once the gendered rhetoric became more sophisticated and complete, as it was in Reagan’s campaigns, this difference in

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opinion was tapped into more deeply; the gender gap materialized.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, more or less attempted to reproduce Reagan’s rhetorical strategy in his 1988 RNC speech. Bush established both his plainspoken cowboy and self-made man credentials in the same story: We moved to west Texas 40 years ago.

The war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on our own.

Those were exciting days. Lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us. Worked in the oil business, started my own. In time we had six children. Moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house. Lived the dream—high school football on Friday night, Little League, neighborhood barbecue.

Bush projects an image as a forthright Westerner who has no truck with fancy language or personal pronouns. He said as much moments later: “I may not be the most eloquent, but I learned early that eloquence won’t draw oil from the ground.”

Bush, of course, was not a roughneck from the oil fields, but the Yale-educated millionaire son of a U. S. senator.

In the tradition of his ideological predecessors, Bush’s projection of masculinity extended to foreign policy.

Once again, indecision and weakness seemed to plague those who, rather than being plainspoken or Western, seemed to represent the views of the over-sophisticated Eastern elite: “Strength and clarity lead to peace—weakness and ambivalence lead to war. Weakness and ambivalence lead to war. Weakness tempts aggressors. Strength stops them. I will not allow this country to be made weak again.” And like Reagan and Nixon, George H.W. Bush did not face an opponent who was particularly conscious of the gender image he put forward.

Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988, was a Republican’s dream come true; he steadfastly refused to engage in bluster or braggadocio. Dukakis declared in his convention speech, “This election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.” He was, inadvertently but painstakingly, laying the foundation for the eventual attack on him as a soulless

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technocrat, unwilling to fight for anything.

In the second presidential debate, journalist Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

Dukakis’ infamous response was painfully cold and clinical: “I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.” With no mention of the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife, Dukakis then moved on to discuss a “hemispheric summit” on the drug war.

Dukakis appeared unable to be the nation’s protective father-figure, defending what is dear, and punishing those who threaten it.

To make up for the masculinity gap, Dukakis infamously rode around in an M-1 tank, apparently hoping to perform a kind of reverse-engineering of the Republican strategy; if he could not seem macho enough to appear interested in national security, perhaps he could seem interested enough in national security to appear macho. He ended up looking so awkward that the Bush campaign used the image in its own attack ad. It was what political scientists call an “uncertainty ad”—it devastatingly suggested that Dukakis did not have a steady enough hand to lead America militarily, as evinced by how ridiculous he looked in military getup.

Having triumphed over the champion of the tame Eastern boutique, George H. W. Bush found himself presiding over an event that would damage his own party’s electoral strength: the end of the Cold War. With national security temporarily removed from the political discourse (hence Clinton campaign manager James Carville’s mantra “It’s the economy, stupid!”), Democrats—or at least Clinton— found themselves able to win elections while ignoring the machismo contest.

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eorge W. Bush brought back the old macho rhetoric in 2000, by showing up on his ranch whenever possible, flamboyantly clearing brush and using hay and guns as props. Like Reagan and his father, he grasped for the entire Western macho myth: he is a self-made cowboy who operates his own ranch—a true individualist.

Fortunately for Bush, Clinton himself had already recast his party in a way that made

it vulnerable to Bush’s attack from the West.

That Bush was able to win an election in which his opponent was believed to have every advantage speaks to the profound power of cultural difference in American politics. The combination of Clinton’s constant, pandering reach for the political center and the Lewinsky scandal had cast a pall over the Democratic Party.

Democrats seemed too slick, too refined and ready to parse the meaning of the most basic language (most infamously, Clinton’s “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is”). This was the party that represented those qualities most resented about the university, the cosmopolitan, the essentially blue-state: disrespect for sexual and gender tradition, overintellectuality, and artificiality. Bush was able to portray Gore—notorious not as a suave dissembler, but as an insufferably boring straight arrow—as dishonestly grandiloquent and thus a cultural alien, not an American man.

The plainspoken cowboy stepped in just in time to save the country.

The September 11 attacks put national security squarely back onto the center of the national stage, and with it, the rhetoric of masculinity in politics. In the 2004 election season, the Bush campaign let blaze the guns of the culture war: red state against blue, rural against urban, Southwestern against Northeastern, plainspoken against evasive, ordinary against elite. Perhaps the governing dichotomy of the campaign, though, was that of the steady hand and the limp wrist. Bush made explicit the claims about himself that his predecessors tended to express with their life stories or merely by their style: “You know what I believe and where I stand. You may have noticed I have a few flaws, too. People sometimes have to correct my English ... Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‘walking.’ Now and then I come across as a little too blunt.” The amount of confrontational language in Bush’s RNC speech is extraordinary. He ends eleven paragraphs of his speech with some kind of challenge. He warns three separate times, “Nothing will hold us back.” The other challenges he issues are “This will not happen on my watch,” “We are not turning back,” “I will never

relent in defending America—whatever it takes,” “And we will prevail,” “I will defend America every time,” “America will not forget,” “Freedom is on the march,” and “Our tested and confident nation can achieve anything.” This is the cocky, swaggering Bush we know so well, who challenged Iraqi insurgents to “Bring them on,” and fell back on a cowboy formula when dealing with September 11: “I want justice. There’s an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’”

Here, the line from cowboy swagger to military competence barely needs to be drawn; for Bush, they are synonymous. His bluntness and his capacity as commanderin-chief are the same characteristic.

John Kerry hardly knew what hit him. Kerry had hedged his bets on the war in Iraq; he seemed to hope to be just left enough to win the Democratic nomination, while still right enough to be what he considered electable in November. It was this incoherent approach that led Kerry to utter his infamous flip-flop, for which Bush did not hesitate to excoriate him in his acceptance speech: “When asked to explain his vote, the Senator said, ‘I actually did vote for the 87 billion dollars before I voted against it.’ Then he said he was ‘proud’ of that vote. Then, when pressed, he said it was a ‘complicated’ matter. There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat.” One would be hardpressed to find a more perfect contrast to Bush’s macho black-and-white style than Kerry’s insistence on shades of gray.

Vice President Dick Cheney was eager to point out in his RNC speech just how effeminate Kerry’s nuance was: “Even in this post-9/11 period, Senator Kerry doesn’t appear to understand how the world has changed. He talks about leading a ‘more sensitive war on terror’—(laughter) —as though al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.” This baldly gendered attack is in keeping with some of the worst tendencies of the Bush campaign, whose operatives coordinated their campaign with the drive to ban gay marriage and preserve the “traditional family,” and nicknamed Democratic candidate John Edwards “the Breck girl,” after a famous shampoo spokeswoman. The message resonates at an almost subconscious level: the candidate

who cares too much about his hair is not man enough to care enough about killing the enemy. Bush rode to triumph in an election in which the electorate was wracked by anxiety—particularly, though not exclusively, about terrorism—that provided an ideal backdrop for a resolute Westerner and brought out the contrast between him and the effeminacies his campaign was eager to point out.

Bush’s swagger and strut are the most recent manifestations of a strategy ever more present in our politics. As the decades since Goldwater have passed, Republican nominees—all but one from the Sun Belt—have relied increasingly on Western individualist bravado. One might have expected that, like other strategies of rhetorical symbolism used in presidential politics—racial appeals, for example—the kind of language used to communicate the masculinity of these candidates would have grown more subtle and refined with time.

Instead, the reverse has happened; while Goldwater merely talked like a cowboy, Bush now feels comfortable referring explicitly and frequently to the old West.

Perhaps this vanishing Republican subtlety is a function of increased uncertainty in general; the world of 2004 is fraught with an array of new and potentially frightening ideological, cultural, political, and economic forces that were not present in 1964. While cowboy rhetoric obviously cannot explain every political development, a certain late twentieth-century erosion of barriers—literal barriers as well as the figurative ones of gender, race, class, and countless others—may have left us hungry for a more authoritarian, macho brand of leadership. One worries that modernity itself is provoking male fury, that threatened masculinity and reactionary politics go together. Thousands of years of male hegemony are suddenly being pushed back, piece by piece. Perhaps all of manhood now finds itself assaulted by a differentseeming world. Cultures rise in arms as offensive images and ideas flood in, or jobs pour out, and men the world over begin to feel newly and strangely powerless. This may be the same uncertainty—a crisis of masculinity, even—that has helped to create the strong-man politics perfectly embodied

by George W. Bush. L

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COMPOSITE BODY

BY TONY TULATHIMUTTE

TYLER JOHN GUTIERREZ

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his photo—it has no title, though now I’ll call it what Lorraine’s father Steve once called me, “Spider.” Because of your long , skinny legs, he’d explained, as if I didn’t already get it. The photo is of a bare-limbed cherry tree and a little house, and both are out of focus. In the tree there are things in the branches and things hanging from the branches, but the film is overexposed and you can’t tell what they are; the cloudy sky presses into the naked limbs of the trees, narrowing and bleeding them out.

The photo was taken just after my mom and I moved into Steve’s house.

My mom had met Steve four or five months earlier at a co-worker’s wedding, where Steve was working as a bartender, or so she told me, anyway—I never saw him mix anything more complicated than orange juice and vodka. She told me that what first attracted her to him was the falcon tattoo on his right bicep; you can always trust a man with a tattoo, she said, because it means he owns his body and not the other way around. And that’s what she blamed my real dad for, after he left—being a slave to his body, his desires and what she called his “sex malfunctions.” (And he didn’t have any tattoos: once he told me that if he ever heard I got one myself, I could expect to see the business end of a potato peeler.)

My mom decided that moving in with the Learys—that’s Steve and Lorraine—would be the best way to set up the groundwork for our new family before the wedding. Steve had a daughter my age, and my mom would be damned if we all didn’t get along like the Brady Bunch from the start, so four months before the wedding, we moved out of our little condo and into the Learys’ place, a blocky one-floor house with sun-faded brown paint, in a cul-de-sac somewhere on the outskirts of Waterbury. I’d never even seen it before I moved in, because Mom kept her romantic life separate from everything else. I didn’t know much about Steve, either, except for what my mom had shown me in a picture they took together at New Year’s Eve. Even in his rented tux you could see he was a

big guy, what you’d call a bruiser, and he wore a gold crucifix pendant the size of a half-dollar that glinted in the camera flash. My mother and I were Jewish, but his religion didn’t matter to either of us; what mattered to my mom was that Steve was a strong man who could support us, and what mattered to me, when we arrived at their house, was that the place didn’t look big enough to fit all four of us unless maybe we all walked around on piggyback.

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ulling into their driveway, the first thing I noticed was the cherry tree, the one in my picture. It was big and covered with fungus, and there were thick clumps of what looked like dried black seaweed caught in the branches, light and flitting in the wind, dangling down like beards of willow—spiders’ nests, maybe. I was fourteen years old, and I shivered a little.

We followed a granite path to the front door, dodging puddles of brown water from the early spring thaw, and we saw that Steve had taped a piece of paper to the door which said, I’ll be back in an hour babe. Hey kid welcome home. The kid, of course, was me.

My mother looked worn out. We were carrying our suitcases, and she told me to put mine down. Our bags sat on the wet landing and my mom pushed the doorbell, which was dead, and then she knocked. Nobody answered. She knocked again, then again, then walked a lap around the house to peer into the windows, and then tried the door again— no answer.

“He’ll be back soon,” my mother said. “Let’s just wait.”

So we waited in the car for an hour, then two, and sometime before Steve’s old Toyota finally clattered into the driveway three hours late, I took my camera out of my backpack, aimed it at the cherry tree, possible home of demon spiders from hell, and clicked.

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teve climbed out of the car; he seemed bigger than he did in the New Year’s Eve photo, had a pink face and long sideburns, and the way he

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swung his arms as he walked was heavy, as if he were carrying pails of water. He slammed the car door shut, strode over to my mom, put his arms around her waist and swayed with her a little. The worry of the last three hours fell out of my mother, and she turned her head and flashed me a smile before accepting a hard kiss from Steve.

He said, “Sorry I’m late, hon, I was out picking this one up from a TV audition,” and he gestured at the car, which was still idling with its headlights on. He let go of my mom but kept his thick arm around her waist and looked at me next, sizing me up.

“How we doing over there, big guy?” he said. His voice was loud and chummy.

I gave him a stupid smile, and he leaned over and shook my hand.

I smelled beer in his sweat and in the cloud of his breath.

“What’s your name?”

“Joe,” I said, and I wondered if my mother had even mentioned me to him.

“Joseph, you look like a real smart guy,” said Steve.

I didn’t know what to say, and I felt warm even though the wind was picking up. I said, “Actually, my full name is Joe.” His smile dampened a little. “Joe. Smart guy.”

The sun had just set, and we were standing in the beams of the car’s headlights, which caught the clouds of engine exhaust that hung around our legs. We became quiet as we realized that the girl in the car hadn’t come out to join us yet, and she didn’t move when we turned to face her. She was Lorraine.

Steve jogged back to the car and opened the passenger’s side door, spoke a few short sentences under the chug of the idling engine, and as he spoke, she stared at me or near me, but in the blaze of the headlights I couldn’t tell for sure. When she finally moved, she got out of the car in no hurry at all; she wrapped her gray winter coat around her body and tossed a pink scarf over her shoulder, then swung the door shut.

Steve opened the door again and killed the engine.

And she didn’t even give me a

10

At school I avoided Lorraine because I was afraid of what she might do at home if I told people I knew her. Already I’d been noticing that my things tended to move when I left them out unattended: they’d move or sometimes vanish altogether, and at times I could swear that the paper screen had inched in on my bed. look as she walked past me, didn’t look at my mother who had raised her arms in greeting, just went up the path to the house, unlocked it and let herself in, letting the door swing shut behind her.

Steve’s eyes tracked her, and after she was out of sight, he looked at me and my mother with half a grimace. My mother asked him, “So, how was the audition?”

Steve shook his head, easing back into his swagger, and said, “What I keep telling her is she needs to keep her eyes on the camera, stop playing so damn coy all the time.”

I

took this next picture in secret, while Lorraine wasn’t in our room.

It’s black-and-white—all of my pictures were—and it’s called “Space.” It’s a survey shot of our room, Lorraine’s and mine, on the night I moved in. The room was maybe seven paces long, five wide. In the corner by the only window is my bed, a twin bed that fit me like a matchbox fits a finger. Around my bed is something Steve had put up before I’d arrived: two Japanese-style rice paper screens—to protect Lorraine’s honor, he explained to my mother, though the thing was nearly transparent anyway.

T hen there’s Lorraine’s unmade bed, alongside the desk we shared.

Lorraine was not happy about sharing; she needed the desk to store her makeup, her stacks of Victoria’s Secret and US Weekly, which were dog-eared and sorted by date. There was a huge mirror on it, one with lights in the frames and a concave side, to emphasize shortcomings.

I sat on my bed as I unpacked my things on the first afternoon, and since the radiator in Lorraine’s room was broken I’d put on an extra sweater.

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Lorraine was in her part of the room, and from behind the screen I could see her silhouette, a murky shadow cast on the rice paper by the yellow light of her desk lamp. I unpacked and folded my clothes, and when I finished, I sat still, strategizing. I didn’t know whether to open the screen and introduce myself to Lorraine, or whether to warn her before I opened it up, or maybe ask her how her audition went, and I was about to do one of these things when I heard her say, in a voice that wanted no response: “Can you please stop breathing so loud?”

I said I was sorry, and waited on my bed, concentrating on nothing more than the air entering and leaving my lungs, until my mother called us for dinner.

L orraine didn’t have anything to eat, didn’t even have a plate, and Steve seemed to be fine with that; I figured out later that Lorraine’s showing up to dinner at all was an event as rare and unpredictable as volcanic eruption. As we sat down, my mom extended her hand to Lorraine, and Lorraine gave my mom a barren smile and crossed her arms. Mom just smiled back and turned to Steve, registering her discomfort by gently smoothing down her bangs. I lowered my eyes to my food and kept them there for the whole dinner.

“How are you two getting on?”

Steve asked, and he waved the point of his fork at me and Lorraine.

For a moment, neither of us spoke until Lorraine said, “Where’s his stuff?”

I felt my mom look at me, and I said to my plate, “It’s mostly in the car.”

“What’d you bring along?” said Steve. “Books?”

“Just my clothes,” I said.

“Just clothes?”

“And some boxes of my photos.

And my ships.”

“Your shit?”

“My model ships,” I said, and my face warmed. I stirred my food.

Steve and Lorraine both gave a short laugh.

“Woo, model ships,” Lorraine said. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

They laughed again. Steve said, “Lorrie, how’s the room? The screen holding up all right?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, he can totally see everything. It’s obscene. He’s going to bust through and molest me in my sleep.”

I sucked on my fork, ran my tongue across the tines, and there was a pause before Steve forced a laugh. “Him?” He reached across the table and chucked me on the arm with the back of his hand. “If this guy tries something, just open the window and let him get sucked out by the wind.”

He laughed again, and my mother gently laughed with him. I slid the fork out of my mouth. There was a faint streak of red on it where it had stabbed into my cheek when Steve hit my arm.

A fter dinner my mother and I washed the dishes, and she helped me bring the rest of my boxes into Lorraine’s room. Before we moved the last of them in, we stood in the hallway outside of the room, and my mother touched my elbow, leaned her face in close to mine.

“Joey, try to get along with Lorraine,” she said in a grave whisper.

“Remember, you’re moving into her room, and we’re moving into their house, so she might be a little chilly to you for the first few days. But she’ll adjust. We’ll all adjust, right, honey?”

I mumbled yes, and she stood on her tiptoes and pecked me on the chin, patted my back and went off to see Steve.

When I went into the room, Lorraine was on her bed, reading a magazine and listening to her Walkman, and when I went behind my screen I saw that she’d penciled a note on one of the paper panels, which said: No snoring.

I wasn’t bothered by how cramped our room was, but the first time I spoke

to Lorraine was that night, when we were figuring out where I was going to put the tugboat. I’d stowed most of my possessions away under my bed, except for the tugboat: a sturdy, unpainted craft the size of a bathroom sink, unsanded and still missing the electronics and decals, weeks from completion. I’d put it on the desk as I packed, and a few times I caught Lorraine eyeing it as if it were a loaded gun. Once I put everything else away, I saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, facing me with her arms crossed tight over her chest.

We negotiated.

“Further. Further. Further. No, all the way,” she said, and I pushed the tugboat to the corner of the desk until the hull teetered.

She scratched her temple with her middle finger. Just as I’d feared, she was beautiful: walnut brown bangs that fell over her forehead in a swoop, two short pigtails looped and pinned against the sides of her head, eyes like catseye marbles—I tried not to notice, darted my eyes between the desk and the floor as she spoke to me.

She sighed through her nose.

“Actually, can you just try to fit it under your bed?”

“There’s no more room,” I said; those were my first words to her.

“Can’t you just throw out one of the old ones?”

I was aghast. Throw out? One of my ships? Which would go? The 1/40 scale Colin Archer with the tan Airfix Gloss, which cost me three months’ allowance and a promise to never ask for a dog? The Karoline, which you could put in the water and rig with remote control and which kept me out of computer camp?

I said, “I can’t do that.”

“Then, your camera stuff,” she said. “Boats, camera, take your pick.

Hell if I care.”

It was getting late, and we had school the next day. Lorraine still believed that the room belonged to her and her alone, that I was just a temporary installation, a potted fern.

When I placed the tugboat in the trash, I gave it a gentle bon voyage, assuring myself that it was headed for greater ports of call.

F

or the first few weeks we lived there, I felt like a guest and acted like one, walking on the balls of my feet and sitting upright in the furniture, making sure I never left a smell in the bathroom. I became numb to the odor of hairspray and fried food that suffocated me when I’d first arrived, and I learned to keep out of Lorraine’s way, moving in and out of the room while she was in the bathroom or in the kitchen making a jelly sandwich, because those were the only times she wasn’t in her side of the room.

My mom checked in with me from time to time, but mostly spent her time with Steve, going to movies and dinners and coming back tipsy, with messedup hair and faded lipstick. It took me a while to realize that she was in love, which was new to me because she had never been in love with my real father, at least not after I’d been born.

“Buggy, are you feeling at home?” my mom asked.

“I guess,” I said. I didn’t like when she called me “Buggy”—she’d always called me that, but now it felt childish and gross, even worse than “Spider.”

My mom asked, “Are you getting along with Lorraine?”

“Lorraine’s alright,” I said. I imagined my tugboat, lying shattered in a junk heap.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” my mom said. “We’re on our way, don’t you think?”

“We sure are, Mom.”

A

week after I’d moved in I started going to the same school as Lorraine, and it was just like my old school: my head still rose a foot above the crowd in the hallways; I still wore glasses, tucked-in shirts, tight corduroy slacks; my lunch table was still empty.

Lorraine wasn’t popular either, but she still pretended not to know me and kept with her small flock of gawky and unfriendly girls who looked like they used to be homely, if not outright fat.

They wore short loose skirts and lots of base to cover the zits on their foreheads and under their ears—the makeup streaked onto the collars of their t-shirts during gym class. At school I avoided Lorraine because I was afraid of what she

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11

might do at home if I told people I knew her. Already I’d been noticing that my things tended to move when I left them out unattended: my Rubik’s cube, my clicky balls, my leopard poster—they’d move or sometimes vanish altogether, and at times I could swear that the paper screen had inched in on my bed. As a guest, I kept my mouth shut about it, but I stayed careful and gave the trash a quick rummaging whenever I took it out.

O

ne evening at dinner, the thought occurred to me that Lorraine messed with my things while I ate; it seemed likely, because I was in our room as much as she was, except I left for dinner and she didn’t. So I cleaned my plate and went to my room, and there Lorraine was, sitting cross-legged

on her bed with a box of my pictures lying open on the floor, the paper screen pushed aside, and the pictures splayed in a messy shuffle in front of her.

In those boxes, there were a few pictures I’d taken for school photography projects, but mostly they contained my gallery of trees and buildings and, at the bottom of one box, some distancezoomed pictures of women sunbathing in bikinis around the pool at our old condo. I didn’t know if Lorraine had gotten to those, and as I stood there at the door while she sifted through the photos, I didn’t know what I would say, but it was going to be angry and loud, and I was sure as hell going to let her have it about screwing with my tugboat.

Before I could open my mouth, she looked at me and said, “Do you do people?”

NO CHRONOLOGER We’d leapt, then—joined a risk. We thought this winter could act a clean edge to nick our sass and lax. (Sequestered, we sharpen our angles on one another.) Haul of boxes, maps, spit-shine & crease—but scratching already at the door of it a small blizzard that we ignored, growing. We have ourselves for warmth and some lamps for reading. Fluid drawn, transferred, dispersed. Organic heat of the drink taken neat: You were in the kitchen when the first flake clung to the pane. The alchemy of electric doesn’t lie: at the center of each is the germ, fleck of glass. You know it’s a poor conductor. Even calm in the drift each falling knows its keen shard of window punched-through, or of a mirror dropped at night, and the waiting after.

— LAUREN CALDWELL

12

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My stomach fluked. “What?”

“Pictures. Do you take pictures of people?”

“Yes,” I said. I was still tense, though judging by the way she spoke it didn’t seem like she’d found anything incriminating.

“I need pictures of myself for something,” Lorraine said, “so if you have some time soon, let’s do that.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes. The thought didn’t occur to me what she might need pictures for, but she told me later that every starlet has to have a headshot.

W e took four rolls of film on Saturday morning while our parents were at work, my mom at the grocery store and Steve at some construction site. Lorraine was nervous all day, stationed in front of her mirror and dusting her cheeks with powder, washing her face and reapplying, smacking her lips as she examined every ridge and fold of her mouth. Her outfit had been laid out on the floor since the previous night, the pieces positioned against one another just as she would wear them: a gold chain circled the space above the dress’s neckline, fake pearl teardrop earrings hung from invisible ears. I took a picture of her clothes like that, flat and clean, suggesting a body.

Lorraine decided to have the shoot inside the house after she worried that wind would mess up her hair, and since the kitchen and living room were always a wreck we just wound up back in our room. She cleared her desk and sat on top of it. Her black dress pooled around her and draped off the edge of the desk, and she kicked her legs and fidgeted as I loaded the first roll of film.

I set the camera on the tripod and trained it on her, put my face to the viewfinder and twisted the barrel of the lens until she came into focus. The crosshairs fixed over her bent knees, and I coaxed the positioning rod to put her torso, shoulders and arms, her whole body into the frame. I moved the crosshairs back and forth, up and down, and in circles around her until she asked me what I was doing, and I replied, “I’m focusing?”

She made a sculling motion with

DILUTION I have pictures of me at the water pictures of me in a pose that I admire.

At the corners of my mirror stand pictures of me by the water.

— PAYAM CHERCHIAN

ANNIE WYMAN

her hands in front of her like a hula dancer and said, “Take one of me like this.” Then, without waiting for me to take the picture, she put one hand on her cheek, turned to show me her good side and said, “Or like this.”

I looked up from the viewfinder and said, “You need to stop moving.”

She stopped, brought her hand down to her lap without an argument. She was silent after that, and I repositioned and adjusted the shades on the desk lamps in the room, closed the blinds, and began issuing commands to her in a faint voice.

“Put your hands and back flat against the wall,” I said. “Good. Now

bring your knee up and tilt your chin down, and keep your eyes on me. And push out your chest,” I added, and she did. I zoomed in on her eyes; they were staring back at me, through the lens. I pressed the trigger down, and tried to hold my breath as the shutter enclosed her.

I exhausted the four rolls of film in a syrupy trance, watched her whole body light up with each pop of the flash, white dots sparking off of her eyes and teeth.

She moved when I told her to, kept still as a mannequin otherwise. When the last roll ended and I took my face away from the camera, I swept my forehead

with my sleeve and it came away with a dark oval stamp of sweat. Lorraine had a red blush spreading across her bare arms, and she was rolling out the strain from her back and shoulders, nearly bashful.

“When can I see the pictures?” she asked me.

“Monday, after I get into the darkroom at school and develop them.”

“Can I be there when you do it?”

“No, Mr. Barney won’t let more than one student in the darkroom,” I said. “There’s chemicals in there.”

Lorraine turned to look at me... continued on p. 24

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13

TO

14 TYLER JOHN GUTIERREZ

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

OURING THE

erotic museum

BY STEVEN TAGLE

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO Speeding down Hollywood Boulevard, I don’t even notice the museum, but my brother sticks his head out the window of my silver Volvo, maybe restless, maybe trying to sniff it out. Just as we’re about to drive by, Jim says, “You wanna go in?”

“What?”

“The Erotic Museum,” he says.

“Wanna go in?”

I try to catch a glimpse of it without crashing. “Right now?”

“It might be interesting.”

“Right now. You wanna go?”

“I’m just saying: might be interesting.”

I’m twenty now, and Jim’s eighteen, but he insists we double back to get his driver’s license, just in case. Tonight he hasn’t shaved and looks as old as me, dark stubble masking any hint of a blush. Well if you really want to, I think, catching his eye. He shoots me a look I know well, light but defensive. Of course, by now, it’s already been decided. We both want to, and this is just formality, us spinning the story, heaving the blame around like a sack of steaming potatoes. My brother’s sex drive is an elusive creature, like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness. He’s playing a risky game,

finally admitting to his teenage angst, his red-blooded curiosity about sex. We never talk about it, just those few times in the car, when after one juicy question, he actually says, This is making me uncomfortable.

THE FREQUENCY OF “IT” “This is making me uncomfortable,” Jim said. He was a freshman then, and as we drove away from his dirty high school friends, I kept an eye on him, hoping he’d share some of their dirt with me.

“You brought it up, dude.”

“Well, Eric said it happened in his sleep. Woke up, and it was everywhere.”

His friends were having a jerk-off contest, the ultimate test of restraint, gunning to see who could hold out the longest. For pampered high schoolers, this was a hip new trend, prelude to losing your virginity at prom.

It was an assent to climax, shedding small things first, your freshman sense of taboo, your shame. They wouldn’t let him play.

“They said, ‘You don’t do it! That’s cheating!’ How is that cheating?”

“Why did they say you don’t do it?”

I asked.

“Because I don’t.” Then, reddening to meet my skepticism: “I don’t.”

Then it was cheating. When I was in high school, discovering that your buddies did “it” too was a strange and exciting relief.

While it was virtually impossible not to do “it,” going out on a limb and sharing secrets that shocking manufactured its own intimacy.

Refusal to do so was not restraint, but a lie so obvious it bordered on betrayal, violating friendship and its expectation. Then again, the possibility that he really didn’t do “it” was even more unnerving, signaling a superhuman strength that squashed my will to putty in comparison. Our parents raised us to accomplish, leaving little room for what they termed “unproductive sexy-sex.”

They sheltered us by accident, minimizing sex to the level of distraction. I still saw Jim as asexual as a cartoon, more naïve than most, and more pure. When we were kids, he mooned over April O’Neil, the cute, yellow-suited reporter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I always thought they’d make a good match.

A few days later, he brought “it” up again, after all his dirty friends had dropped

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out, ending their contest in a series of anticlimactic spurts. We were lying in our bunk beds with the lights out, and this time I got the nerve to follow up, asking bluntly, “So, you really never do it?”

“Well,” he said.

“Never ever?”

“Most of my friends have to do it every day or a few times a week. I … for me—about once a month, maybe?”

About once a month. Not every day or a few times a week, but an occurrence on the order of months. Then Jim said he felt uncomfortable talking about it, and I wondered how red the question had made him. He was an awfully good sport, giving his secret away without asking for anything in return. His admission kept me up late.

Not every day. Not a few times a week.

About once a month. As if somehow, like menstruation, it just happened.

PUTTING OUT A man in a worn leather jacket stands outside the museum handing out coupons.

He looks homeless, a formidable obstacle.

I consider turning back. This homeless man will know we were here.

“Discount on admission,” he says.

“Two bucks off.”

Jim reaches for a coupon.

“Discount’s automatic inside,” the man whispers, pulling his hand up and away.

The lobby of the Erotic Museum seems clean enough, a sparse, intellectual art deco. Here they sell backscratchers and fluorescent dildos, t-shirts that say, “Just Did It,” and “Tough Love.” It lacks a sex shop’s grit, but just beyond that black curtain is who knows what.

The lady at the counter looks bored, an art student, used to this scene.

“Two?” she asks.

Jim nudges me. “Do you have cash?” he asks.

“Are you going to put out?” It’s the first thing to come to mind, gliding out of my mouth with a flourish of male sarcasm.

Though it easily ranks as one of the more unseemly things I’ve ever said to him, I figure, what the hell—we’re in the Erotic Museum. The lady at the counter coughs, and Jim toes a smudge on the floor.

“I’ll pick up dessert with my card,” he says quietly.

“Two,” I nod, sliding a twenty across

16

the display case.

“Your first time?” the lady asks, counting out change. I notice the entwined symbols of Venus on her wrist, peeking out from a severe black cuff.

“Of course not,” I say.

“Just play safe.”

She hands me two tickets and change.

I offer Jim one, but he shrugs it off, so I’m stuck with the dirty evidence. Silence becomes our understanding. I agree to finance this trip knowing it’s something he’ll never tell his girlfriend, never tell our parents, the kind of lesson older brothers are supposed to teach.

LAST KISSES The last time I kissed a girl, I was in the first grade. Her name was Lisa, and she was a year younger than me. She lived right across the street, and after school we often invited each other over to ride bikes and play house. Lisa had a small room, and her bed took up most of the space, positioned diagonal to a corner. One afternoon, we lay in the crawlspace beneath the bed, staring up at the triangle of ceiling where the headboard met the walls. This was our house.

“So I’m your husband,” I said. “I’m coming home from work.”

“What should I do?” she asked.

“I dunno. You’ve been cleaning all day. Just say, ‘Welcome home, honey.’

Greet me at the door.”

“Honey?” she asked. “My mom and dad say ‘sweetheart.’”

“I think ‘honey’ is better,” I said, wriggling around to face her. “And you should probably kiss me.” Kissing struck me as a necessary evil, the hard-won detail that would make our performance memorable for having been endured. Real artists suffered. And after all, what husband and wife didn’t kiss?

“On the cheek?”

“On the lips,” I said, grimacing.

We took a moment to get into the scene.

“Hi honey,” I said. “I’m home from work.”

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” she said.

The kiss, as I remember, was soft and fleeting. Her lips, moist with kindergarten spittle, felt dramatically different from what I had expected. There wasn’t a grand soundtrack or spinning lights. I didn’t feel

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

like a hero. Instead, there was just moist rubber, a part of the body that felt different from skin. Our lips touched briefly, and then we were just two kids again, two kids under the bed, playing house. She never said whether or not she liked it, and in any case, we didn’t do it again. I was too young to know what should follow a kiss, but I expected something comparable to love, and felt vaguely let down when she pulled herself up and out of our triangular house.

As I walked home, I told myself it was just a kiss, wondering if I should have saved it.

Regrettably, the suffering of two young artists made for great neighborhood gossip, and by that evening, my parents, Lisa’s, and all the kids on our block thought that I liked her.

BIG GRANDMA BETTY Converted from an old souvenir tshirt shop, the Erotic Museum covers two floors, but is still smaller than I expected.

It’s a museum that takes itself seriously, with stark white walls and hardwood floors that echo when we tread on them. I suppose an establishment like this needs to take itself seriously so that others will, too.

The world is overrun by righteous parents and snickering teenage boys. Founded in January 2004 by four Russian entrepreneurs, the museum is the only one of its kind on the West Coast. I like the uniqueness of that fact; it’s the only sexual sanctuary for thousands of miles.

Right inside the curtained entrance is “The Human Body Project,” an array of photographs cataloguing every imaginable variation of penis and breast. The exhibit features row after row of naked men and women, the enduring image of mankind, posing as neutrally as action figures on a shelf.

I don’t see any supermodels. The people on the wall have bodies like marshmallows and flat tires, with skin colors as diverse as a multicultural marker set. They are fat and

hairy in all the wrong places. What about this is erotic? I wonder. These people look just like me. Big Grandma Betty once told my brother and me that she makes a point of weighing herself in the nude each night before she showers. Somebody’s grandmother is here, I think. From the corner of my eye, I watch Jim stare at the frumpy, tan-lined nudes, trying to decode the meaning of their terrible ordinariness. Then he turns to me.

“Do you know what this is?” he asks.

I glance at the placard he’s puzzling over: The Erotic Museum is conducting an ongoing research project intent on recording the full breadth of natural and altered human physiology.

Is he joking? What does his question even mean? He stares at me expectantly, and I get the sick feeling that it’s not the exhibit he’s puzzling over, but the whole idea of the Erotic Museum, the public display of private desire. I’m afraid he’ll ask me what this museum’s all about, keep staring me down until I explain why we’ve come to see grandmothers naked. I scan the lines of misshapen nudes, trying to intuit an answer from their sad, concave chests. None of this is what I thought it would be.

“It’s like reality,” I say finally. “People aren’t really like what they’re like on TV.” MERELIN MONROE NAKED, PART I Last year, when Jim came up to visit me at school, I thought I caught him watching porn on my computer. I checked the History Trail on a hunch, and while he showered, found the wayward scent of his secret, primal urges. Jim was a horrible speller, so horrible that he could almost be proud of his unorthodox creativity; Yahoo returned records like “Merelin Monroe naked” and “collage porn stars.” “Merelin Monroe naked” was especially telling, since we had just returned from San Francisco, and he bought a street vendor’s sketch of the actress for his girlfriend, Sarah. The sketch was flattering and generic, but Yahoo infused it with seedier motives. He found Marilyn attractive? And not just celebrityattractive, but attractive enough to get off on? Something sexual drew him to that pencil sketch, pheromones from the canvas persuading him to lay down twenty bucks.

As for “collage porn stars,” Yahoo returned 468,000 sites, and Jim clicked on the second and third. Luckily for him, people in

TEDIOUS QUESTIONS 1. Can you feel each internal organ operating? (a) Streetlights go out over me as I walk under them. (b) Streetlights turn on over me as I walk under them. (c) A sublime abstraction. (d) I won’t tell if you don’t.

2. Are you prepared to be satisfied with a vague immanence? (a) mechanical soliloquy (b) all peaceful on the ocean floor (c) broken bottles reflecting sunlight (d) strange happenings in small towns 3. Will the trains run on time? (a) I will grow up to be my father. (b) I will grow up to be my mother. (c) Crisp money from an ATM. (d) The trains will run on time.

4. Was it worth it? (a) only optically (b) fresh stench of unwashed bodies (c) hours spent inside a windowless office (d) the brilliant minds of the Manhattan Project

– ERIC PHETTEPLACE

porn spell just as badly, I thought. Collage Girls Exposed, free pics!, screamed teenagetits.com.

Sexy Southern Collage Students Having a Hard Foursome Fuck Fest!!!, said southernwhores. com. These were porno sites I hadn’t been to before, some of them surprisingly good. Here, thumbnails linked to full-sized pictures, and the girls actually looked my age. It was hard to imagine that less than ten minutes ago, Jim was looking at the same pictures. The History Trail listed every link he clicked on, so I became the voyeur of his most private thoughts. These were the girls he found attractive enough to fleetingly pursue, the ones who successfully seduced him into clicking their thumbnails. Most of the girls—Vera, Alex, Jules—were brunettes

with curly hair. They intrigued me: Vera with the silver-dollar nipples, Jules with the diamond-haired crotch and spread legs, triggered something in him that I could not fathom. They were his type, and maybe mine. We never discussed type.

OUR BEST DEFENSE On the second floor, Jim holds a cock-shaped magnifying glass up to slides from the “San Fernando Says” exhibit, the Valley’s representative wall of porn. There’s so much skin on these backlit slides that the whole wall radiates an orange glow. Here’s a woman rubbing a cat between her breasts as she masturbates. Here’s a naked man painting a woman’s toenails as she gives

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him head. Why doesn’t this shock me anymore? I wonder. Jim drops the magnifying cock, his face unreadable. It’s not distaste exactly, but maybe embarrassment for me, that I could really be the type of brother who’d bring him here just to win his approval.

We waver at a portal to the exciting and the absurd, and I want to say, Do you think about this stuff too? Yet in the depraved Valley of barebacked porn stars, I feel a growing need to protect him. This is not the innocuous Human Body Project. This is sleazy hardcore stuff that large, hirsute men mass produce and sell at neon XXX joints to Jim’s dirty friends.

“Are these just more pictures of naked people?” he asks.

“Yeah, really,” I scoff.

We peruse erotic art, one room devoted to vibrant portraits of naked women eating. On one canvas, a woman with olive skin and dark nipples sits squeezing a watermelon between her legs. One thin sliver of the fruit has been removed, giving us an illicit peek at its ripe interior. She nibbles on the extracted slice with a smile.

We look at her, then look at each other— Why is sex so random? I feign shock to put him at ease, trying hard to find that part of myself that sex once appalled. Together, we stare at the displays with an objectivity borne of our real and imagined terror, our own particular shame. Anyone else would laugh.

I stop to examine the original Playboy spreads of Marilyn Monroe in her Red Velvet series, Mona Lisa to the Erotic Museum. Beside the spreads play clips from an infamous 1948 porno flick, featuring a woman who may or may not be her. I watch the surprisingly flexible maybe-Marilyn in action and ruminate on the quality of black and white porn. When Jim nudges me on, I can’t help myself.

“Look!” I say, grabbing him by the collar and mimicking her most seductive pose, “it’s Merelin!”

He rolls his eyes, a nod to either his guilt or my stupidity. Maybe Jim’s embarrassed to find himself here, but I’m more disappointed. Some things just don’t belong in museums. In these sparse galleries, sex is sanitized, abstracted into a series of neat, spotlit artifacts. We’re given rumpled sheets in shadow boxes, sex under a microscope, sex without intimacy. Like the framed Peanuts strips in San Francisco’s

18

Cartoon Art Museum, these remote pictures frustrate me. Something messy and essential has been lost.

“This is like that cartoon museum,” I say.

“You’re enjoying this?” he asks.

SUCKER PUNCH The thought formed fleetingly in my mind, like all of my outrageous and repressed desires: If he agrees that his girlfriend’s car is better than mine, I’m going to punch him.

“I don’t know,” Jim said, glancing from me to Sarah. “The Stevemobile is pretty cool.” He lay a hand on my silver Volvo, the car he named, an old friend. It was our car, a symbol worth defending. I carted him around in it for four years, and when he was learning to drive, it was the car I trained him in, just us and an abandoned parking lot. He knew to leave our emblems be, to remain impartial. Weeks earlier, Sarah called the Stevemobile a taxicab for her and Jim. April O’Neil would never have stooped that low.

The thought of Jim having a girlfriend was itself strange and awkward, a nagging reality I tried my best to ignore. Compared to his alleged forays into porn, this new relationship seemed impractical and concrete, an unnecessary burden to bear.

While porn was a pleasant departure into something like sex, this had an unwelcome gravity: dating someone real and kissing her, too. He never consulted me before asking her out, perhaps figuring that in liking and love, he didn’t want protection.

That particular night, Jim, Sarah, and I planned to watch a movie together, but as the previews began, she whispered something to him, and they slipped away.

Half an hour later, unwilling to watch the whole movie alone, I went outside to find him. In the dark, I couldn’t miss them in her green Mustang, making out with the lights on. He and Sarah kissed long and hard, eyes closed, faces pressed together in need. I wavered at the corner of the house, knowing I shouldn’t interrupt, but unwilling to leave them be. Why are they doing this now? I thought. I blamed Jim for his lack of control, trying to convince myself that he hadn’t outgrown Blockbuster movies with his brother. His making out with a girl seemed almost obscene to me, disloyal, grown-up, and dangerous.

When the movie was over, I came

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back outside to join Jim and Sarah on the driveway.

“I know!” Jim announced. “We’ll have a thumb wrestling match to decide.”

And for some reason—maybe to impress him—I submitted to this bizarre trial. After Sarah and I clasped hands, I deftly swung my thumb around and pinned her fair and square, perhaps a little too hard.

“I don’t think you can wrap your thumb around like that,” Sarah said, rubbing her hand. “That’s cheating.”

“I think she’s right,” Jim said.

And that was it. I let my fist fly right into his soft belly. He stumbled backwards, doubling over and grabbing his stomach.

“You dick!” he said.

“I don’t like this,” Sarah said. I could tell she had never heard him curse, and it upset her. I stood there grinning, happy to assert myself, amazed at what I could coax out of him with one lame punch. He had a darker undercurrent that I could tap, sending expletives welling to the surface with the wind I knocked out of him. It felt good, an action required to keep my younger brother in line. I offered him a hand, and with one swift pull, he yanked me off my feet. Not knowing what to do, Sarah retreated to the front seat of her Mustang.

We wrestled playfully on the street, asphalt digging into our backs, and I emerged a minute later with a scratched watch and elbow, all forgiven. Jim and I hugged, and I apologized again for hitting him, wondering if this fight would foreshadow another.

INTERACTION In the interactive section of the museum is the ToyBox, an aquarium of slick sex toys, moisture from the lube condensing on glass. Two pairs of latex gloves allow access, and I notice a tear in the pale vagina, the gaping grin of someone’s excitement.

“You wanna do this?” Jim asks.

We stand on either end of the ToyBox, inserting both arms up to our elbows. The inside of my gloves feel moist and cool. I begin by exploring alone, trying to insert a fleshy penis into the torn vagina.

It’s surprisingly hard to get the penis to penetrate. The dildo’s not as firm as I’d like, and its knobby head keeps slipping away from the gummy orifice. A small squeak announces each failed connection, an irritating reminder of my inexperience.

“Here, let me try,” Jim says. He wields the double headed dildo like a baseball bat, two hot pink penises conjoined at the balls.

I hold the sardonic vagina up to face him, and he uses his fingers to pry open the lips, jamming the Siamese dick at the hole with brute force. It bounces off the impenetrable orifice, smacking me hard on the wrist.

“Hey, watch it, will you?” I’m getting a sense of my brother’s style, and it’s not pretty. The silicone hurts.

After the ToyBox debacle, we find an arcade game from Japan—strip Mahjong with giggling Japanese schoolgirls. The game’s 8-bit graphics make it all the more absurd. Who would get off on this? Who would own this? It reminds me of my old Nintendo set at home. The machine won’t let us play, but we watch it cycle through previews and sample games. A cartoon girl appears on screen. She has the allure of a paper doll: one by one, her clothes magically disappear. Another girl lies naked on her back, legs spread as she touches herself.

She gasps in ecstasy, body a pulse, and out pops a speech bubble with a single Japanese character.

“Fuck,” Jim says in awe. The word slips out softly, without its usual meanness or stupidity. It sounds so foreign that I don’t think to elbow or chide him. Fuck.

This whole time, we should have been learning Japanese.

MERELIN MONROE NAKED PART II The evidence was overwhelming.

He was guilty, so guilty, but now that I had him pinned to the wall, I didn’t know what to do. I want to be strong about this, I thought. Not pedantic or parental, but I definitely want to send message. Looking back, I could suddenly remember (or at least convincingly imagine) all the telltale signs that something fishy was afoot: the locked door, the closed laptop, the friendly, preoccupied look on his face. We weren’t allowed to lock our doors at home because locking doors implied keeping secrets. But he locked my dorm room door, and I had to bang on it three times wearing only a towel before he answered. Furthermore, as he opened the door, I caught the strange look about him, a guilty “hand-down-my-pants” look. I knew that look.

How far did he go with Vera and Alex behind my locked door, at my desk, with my laptop? My computer was less than a year old then, and I secretly prided myself on my restraint: in all that time, I managed to keep it completely porn-free.

But I allowed Jim the liberty of brothers and best friends. I let him borrow books and board games knowing that they’d limp back to me with dog-ears, broken spines, and missing pieces. It was just his way, a habit too deeply entrenched for me to even fault him for. Feeling a stab of pity for the misguided kid, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt by erasing the History Trail before he returned from the shower.

Minutes later, Jim burst into the room wearing his same worn pair of jeans, my Polo towel slung over his shoulder. “All right, let’s eat!” he said.

Be strong, but don’t accuse, I thought.

Don’t come off as judgmental.

He slid a rumpled shirt on.

“What?”

“For some reason there seems to be porn on my computer,” I said, meaning, Why are you looking at porn on my computer? I took a breath, rephrased myself. “Why is there porn on my computer?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why is there porn on your computer?”

“Because of you! You did it!”

“I didn’t do it.”

I glared at him, flustered. I didn’t expect him to deny it. He did it. I knew he did it. But by refusing to own up to it, he stubbornly retained immunity, kept the case open, skipping just a step out of reach.

Now I could only say, “I think I caught him,” not, “I know.” But really, it wasn’t about who caught whom or my inherent craftiness. It was him saying that there were things we couldn’t share, a world beyond the scope of brotherhood. He held me at arm’s length—neither of us could deny it.

“Are you angry?” he asked. His tone implied a confession, and I let the moment linger. Am I? I didn’t mean for my curiosity to come off as anger. I just want to know, I thought. If you had caught me looking at Merelin Monroe naked, I’d be able to tell you. Of course, that was unfair—I was much more careful than him. But at least we could have joked about it.

Jim nudged me. “Are you?”

“No.” “I’ve only done it once… Dad caught

me. He got really, really mad. ‘What are you doing?!’ he said. ‘What the hell are you doing?!?’”

He turned to me, wondering if he was really as naked in his emotion as he felt.

“Hey,” I said, “Your secret’s safe with me.”

TRANSLATION When we’ve had our fill of the Erotic Museum, we walk over to the Disney soda fountain on Hollywood and Highland, shaking our heads free from the $6,000 sex robots with the interchangeable dicks, San Fernando’s glowing wall of porn. In the book we kept of our adventures, I already planned to mark this one with a giant X. “I can’t get my head out of the gutter,” I say.

“The Mahjong game was cool,” he says, blushing. “I mean, you know.”

“You said ‘Fuck,’” I say, half regretting it.

“Well, I don’t know. You say it too.”

“The museum was interesting.”

Then, of course, he pegs it on me, saying he can’t believe I dragged him in, jumping at the chance to see boobies and touch myself. I let him project, imagining myself a slate for needs he keeps well hidden. I’m still trying to decipher that part of him that suggests the sexual but is so quickly shamed. Perhaps it’s because we continue to play young for each other, demanding innocence from our childhood days that we can’t help but violate. We’re kids at heart, trying to retain simplicity as we remember it, enforcing each other’s purity with shaky, self-conscious eyes.

Though we both tend toward the insular, brotherhood has been the repository for our most candid shame. It’s to each other that we have pledged lasting innocence, and with each other that we continue to whittle it away. More and more, I’m learning that innocence is expendable, a virtue more imagined than real. Jim and I reprimand each other for sexual lives we haven’t begun, but I suspect it isn’t the sex we’re after so much as the intimacy of secrets shared. Sex is a colorful reminder of all that we long to know about one another, a vast, uncharted terrain that we can sense but not see. Like our cartoon friend, we both speak Japanese, the unreadable language of our curiosity and desire. L

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19

JAKE HASKILL

THE ROOM WITHOUT WINDOWS

BY LY CHHENG

1

P

rior to Tenkuu’s birth, the most famous fortune teller in all of Kanagawa prefecture told Tenkuu’s mother that Tenkuu would die an early death. Shiho, unconvinced, sought a second opinion, then a third, a fourth, and a fifth. It was unanimous, however, for all five men had bet against her unborn child. None gave an exact date or age, but all came to the same conclusion independently.

After the fifth fortune teller predicted the child would die prematurely, Shiho returned home, went to her bedroom, turned off the lights, and cried with her knees on the floor and her face in her hands.

With care, she muffled her moans and whimpers; her firstborn child, Koji, slept in the next room. Her tears seeped through the cracks between her fingers, flowed over her skin, and fell on the floor. She counted to one hundred and decided never to cry for the child ever again. She wiped her hands and face with a dry embroidered cloth and fixed her makeup. She then placed her long straight black hair back into a tight bun.

Shiho told no one what the fortune tellers had told her, not even the women in her close circle of friends, who had been like a second family to her since she’d lost her husband, Toshiro, to tuberculosis.

Toshiro had been a doctor in Yamato and one of the most generous and kind-hearted men Shiho had ever known. Toshiro’s death had come as a surprise to everyone in their neighborhood. He contracted the disease from a patient, a young child from a neighboring village who could not afford to pay the physicians in his own town. Toshiro had learned of the child from his friend Shinobu, a fisherman who lived next door to the child. Toshiro’s kind heart reached out to the child and in the process Toshiro contracted the disease himself. The day Toshiro learned of his disease was the day Shiho learned she was with child.

Although Toshiro lived three months, seven days, and four hours after being

diagnosed, Shiho spent that time apart from him. Toshiro said he would rather die alone, never seeing her again than risk infecting her.

From Tenkuu’s birth, his mother avoided looking him in the eyes. While some mothers whispered sweet words into their children’s ears, Tenkuu’s mother said nothing. She changed his diapers, held him to her chest when he cried, fed him when he was hungry, but did no more than what was necessary to keep him alive and clean.

She refused to smell his smell, and when he reached for her hand, she withdrew it.

As Tenkuu grew older and learned of the world, it was natural to him for his older bother Koji to receive the majority of their mother’s love. Koji was the first born, the first in line, and naturally the first recipient of all forms of love. Tenkuu loved his brother and mother, but accepted early on in life that not everyone came into the world with an equal claim to love.

It wasn’t until the first day of school when Tenkuu was five that he learned that a mother’s affections were not always parceled out unevenly among her children.

“My mother loves me more than she loves watching the sun dance on plum trees,” said one third-born child.

“My mother loves me more than she loves the ocean’s waves at her feet on warm summer mornings,” said a fourth-born child.

Tenkuu listened to the children and searched for words to describe his mother, but none came to mind. After he returned home from school, he didn’t tell his mother about his discovery but instead, went into his room, sat down on his knees, and slowly tried to forget what he had learned.

That night, before bed, as Tenkuu and Koji washed up, Tenkuu stared at Koji through the mirror which hung in front of both of them. Tenkuu’s eyes fumbled over his brother’s reflection, searching for a noticeable mark which made Koji’s reflection different from his own. They were both slim with dark black hair, thin eyes, and tiny noses shaped like the curve of a flattened

grape. Aside from the difference in height— Koji was taller by about an inch—Tenkuu noticed nothing obviously dissimilar.

“Was mother happy when I was born?” asked Tenkuu.

Koji turned to Tenkuu. Their eyes touched. “Of course,” said Koji.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said Koji.

“Can you remember how she looked?” asked Tenkuu.

“No. I was only two years old then.”

“So, you can’t be sure she was happy.”

“No. But she must have been happy.

I can imagine it in my mind. Can’t you?”

Tenkuu did not reply. He wanted to share his brother’s belief, but could not. He decided to ask his mother.

After finishing in the bathroom, Tenkuu walked over to his mother’s bedroom and knocked on her door. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Tenkuu.”

There was silence.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I am okay,” he said. “May I ask you a question?”

Tenkuu heard footsteps. The door opened and his mother looked down at him with wary eyes. A long red silk robe covered her slim, white body, and her hair was tied back in a tight circular bun, fastened together with a piece of white silk. Tenkuu thought she looked beautiful.

“It’s late, Tenkuu,” she whispered.

Tenkuu did not move. It was only then that he noticed his mother’s eyes never met his own.

“How did you feel when I was born?” he asked.

The curves and folds of expression on her face became as flat and mysterious as a white sheet of paper.

“Go to bed, Tenkuu.”

Tenkuu stared at her. She still did not look him in the eyes. He looked at her and hoped she would open up like a flower and envelop him, but instead she stood still.

“Mother?”

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21

“Yes, Tenkuu?”

He moved to the place on the floor where her eyes fell. She softly shifted her eyes away.

“I was very relieved when you were born,” she said.

Tenkuu let the words sink in.

“It’s time for bed now,” she said, then quietly closed the door to her room. After a few seconds, Tenkuu left the hallway and went into his bedroom.

2

O

n the morning of Tenkuu’s sixth birthday, which fell on a Sunday, his mother gave him a notebook with a simple black cover. Tenkuu opened it and counted a hundred unlined white pages inside. After thanking her, Tenkuu thumbed through the empty notebook.

He looked for an inscription but found none, so he picked up a pen and wrote, “To Tenkuu, with love,” and signed his mother’s name.

On the morning of Koji’s seventh birthday, which fell on a Saturday, Tenkuu heard his mother tiptoe into Koji’s room.

Tenkuu heard her soft voice. After several minutes, he heard the door to the apartment open and shut.

Tenkuu walked into the living room and found Miss Tanaka, the oldest woman in the building and also the oldest person Tenkuu knew, sitting on their couch.

“Good morning, Tenkuu,” said Miss Tanaka. “Your mother took Koji to the circus for his birthday. She asked me to look after you.”

Miss Tanaka was a widow and did not have children of her own, but was fond of the children who lived in the building.

“I’ve never been to the circus before,” said Tenkuu.

Miss Tanaka walked over to Tenkuu and placed a hand on his head. The texture of her hand reminded him of thin paper used to wrap presents. She then took out the largest book Tenkuu had ever seen.

“Do you like stories, Tenkuu?” she asked.

He looked up at Miss Tanaka, not sure how to answer. “What kind of stories?”

She flipped through the book and showed Tenkuu all the stories inside.

“Pick one,” she said. “And I’ll read

22

Palm to palm, Tenkuu hoped that what Koji had inside of him, the invisible quality that attracted their mother’s love, would transfer to him through that touch. it to you.”

Tenkuu flipped through the book and picked one about a man who lived in the mountains waiting for the arrival of his lost family. As Miss Tanaka read it to him, he thought of what a circus would be like.

After silence filled the apartment that night, Tenkuu crawled out of bed and tiptoed into Koji’s room. He sat down beside his bed and whispered to him, “Why does mother love you and not me?” He could smell the circus on Koji, a mixture of butter and elephant dung.

“She does love you,” said Koji.

“Do you really believe so?”

His brother was silent.

“Yes,” said Koji.

Tenkuu stood up and grabbed his brother’s hand. Palm to palm, Tenkuu hoped that what Koji had inside of him, the invisible quality that attracted their mother’s love, would transfer to him through that touch.

Tenkuu heard footsteps in the hall.

He ran quickly for his brother’s closet and hid inside.

The door to the room opened and his mother tip-toed in. She sat down next to Koji on the bed. She then leaned in close and kissed him on the forehead. The soft sound of her lips touching Koji’s skin echoed in Tenkuu’s ears. He realized he didn’t know what a kiss from his mother felt like.

The next night, after Tenkuu was done washing up next to Koji in the bathroom, he turned to Koji and poked him. “Do you want to play a game tonight?” he asked.

“What kind of game?”

“Let’s switch beds tonight and pretend to be each other,” said Tenkuu.

“If we pretend hard enough, Koji, maybe we can dream each other’s dreams.”

Koji agreed.

Tenkuu and Koji put their toothbrushes away and walked towards their bedrooms. Whereas Tenkuu usually

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turned right and Koji turned left, tonight they traded paths.

Tenkuu crawled into Koji’s bed and imagined being at the circus and having his mother come in to kiss him on the forehead every night.

After all the lights were turned off and the apartment was still, Tenkuu heard footsteps in the hallway. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. The door opened. The footsteps were light and careful. The room smelled of jasmine.

Tenkuu felt a weight sink into the bed beside him. Like a dream, he wondered if sleep had already seized him. Her soft lips touched the skin above his eyebrow, and her arms wrapped around him. He was lifted from the bed. His own arms came to life and enveloped her. Her skin was warm and her breath smelled sweet, like the flowers she tended to on the windowsill.

Tenkuu knew it wasn’t a dream. A cloud of dust on the brink of being something whole, Tenkuu began to feel solid. Her soft arms molded him, and her breath of flowers breathed life into him.

“I love you,” she whispered. The words peeled away the cold exterior she had always shown to him, and the smell and sound of her breath entered through his nose and ears.

Before he realized his lips were moving, he heard himself say, “I love you, too.” His arms tightened their grip. The silk of her robe felt like the surface of a rose petal.

Her arms released their grip on him and he began to fall back down to the bed.

Her body transformed from soft to stiff. He had not taken his arms away yet.

“Tenkuu, why are you in Koji’s bed?” she asked. Something ruptured. Tenkuu was silent. He let go of her.

“Where is Koji?” she asked.

He tried to find her eyes in the darkness, but could not.

“He is in my bed.”

“Why?”

“He is me tonight.”

Shiho then stood up quietly and left the room. The room was still.

Tenkuu crawled out of the bed and went into Koji’s closet to lie on the floor.

The next morning, before the sun had risen, Tenkuu opened the door of the closet and entered his mother’s room. It was dark, but the blue morning light from the clouds and sun peeked in through the curtains.

She slept on one side of the bed, leaving the other side completely empty; she faced the window. Tenkuu walked over to her. Her eyes were open. She did not look away.

Staring into her eyes, Tenkuu bent down and sat with his legs tucked underneath him.

Shiho was silent. Her eyes did not move and neither did she. Tenkuu felt the touch of her eyes in the pit of his stomach.

And then they vanished. She shut her eyes, but she didn’t turn away.

“Please don’t do that,” said Tenkuu.

“I’m sorry, Tenkuu. The sun is hurting my eyes.”

Tenkuu turned around and saw the sun had risen. He turned back to his mother, her eyes still closed. His hand rose up from his side, almost against his will, and rested softly on his mother’s cheek.

He felt something quiver beneath his palm. Her eyes remained closed and Tenkuu stared at her. Under his hand, he felt the warmth that he had always sensed walking by her in the hallway or sitting across from her at the dinner table. It belonged to him now.

He had it in his palm. Seconds turned into hours and hours turned into days. Then, she slipped her hand underneath his. For a moment her hand covered her cheek and his hand covered hers. She delicately lifted her hand, thereby removing his. Tenkuu felt amputated, as though beyond his hand there’d been a limb which now was severed.

Shiho delicately turned over in her bed.

Tenkuu rose from his sitting position and left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

When Tenkuu returned to his room, he took all the memories he had of his mother and tucked them away in a place only he could ever have access to. He wrapped up all the love he felt for her and crushed it into a tiny ball and hid it away.

For the next eleven years, Tenkuu and his mother would speak less than a sentence to each other.

THE LATECOMERS The party is winding down.

A few guests remain, talking or having a smoke by the back windows. It has begun to rain, a low gray drizzle. Inside, the glasses are spotted with fingerprints. The fan trails blue streamers, nods in its plastic cage. Halfeaten crudités wilt between crumpled napkins.

The latecomers enter through the open door, wander quite unnoticed to the bar, where they help themselves to a couple of drinks and maybe the last of the cashews. They talk in hushed tones about the latest suicide, the silt in the drinking water, the dogs twitching in their sleep.

Drinks in hand, they walk past the knot of smokers, out onto the back porch. The rain has stopped. The pool holds its blue color in the evening light, holds a single, translucent body six feet above the ground.

– TAYLOR ALTMAN

3

T

he summer after Koji’s first year of college and Tenkuu’s sixth year away at boarding school, Tenkuu returned home to find that Koji had met a girl named Midori.

She was from Nagano and shared Koji’s interests in art, literature, and foreign films.

Koji, excited to have Tenkuu home, invited him along whenever he spent time with Midori. The three of them spent many afternoons in the summer months together taking walks in the park, telling stories, and eating in tea houses.

One day, while Koji was away, Midori

showed up at the house and invited Tenkuu to the park alone. Tenkuu was confused, but accepted the invitation.

As time went on, Midori and Tenkuu found themselves alone more and more. A special form of gravity had formed between the two of them. Tenkuu would tell Midori where he would be at certain times without inviting her and then secretly hope she would be there. And she always was. One day, Tenkuu asked Midori why they were not spending time with Koji.

Midori bit her lower lip. A look of distress washed over her face. She said she did not know. Tenkuu didn’t understand

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23

why she wanted to be alone with him. It was Koji that she wanted.

“I like Koji, but you and I fit together more easily,” said Midori.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s the way your eyes look when you read a book or the way you hide your smile when people look directly at you or the way you talk about characters in a book like they are friends who live around the corner.”

“What about Koji?” asked Tenkuu.

“Koji is good, but I cannot help how I feel. I’m sorry.”

Tenkuu felt flattered that someone preferred him to Koji. He did not want to be dishonest, however. Koji was the person he loved most in the world and who he could honestly say loved him in return. Tenkuu told Midori that he could not betray his brother. She said she understood.

After that Midori became less available to see either Koji or Tenkuu. This concerned Koji immensely. He did not understand why Midori would suddenly stop wanting to see him. Koji asked Tenkuu if he could go speak to her for him. Tenkuu told him he did not feel comfortable going to talk to Midori, but Koji insisted and finally Tenkuu obliged.

Midori was staying with an aunt in Kanagawa. The apartment was within walking distance. Midori lived on the fourteenth floor. When Tenkuu knocked on Midori’s door, he could not help feeling that he had already betrayed his brother.

She opened the door and they both smiled.

Before he knew what was happening, she grabbed his hand and they were headed toward the elevator.

They ascended to the top of the building. When the elevator doors opened, Midori tugged on Tenkuu’s hand, took him up a flight of stairs, and introduced him to the view of the world from the top of the building. The sun was just setting. The light blanketed the streets and buildings in an impressionistic mixture of burning yellow, simmering orange, and chaotic red. The buildings sparkled and the cars glowed like fire ants in the streets. He placed a palm on Midori’s cheek and felt a warmth he had not felt in eleven years.

That night, Tenkuu returned home feeling guilty. He found Koji in his room and told him everything. Koji was stunned at first but thanked his brother for his honesty.

24

Tenkuu sensed, however, that Koji could not shake off the slight traces of betrayal entirely. As his relationship with Midori blossomed, he felt his connection with Koji wither. But Tenkuu was so enthralled by the thought of another human finding something in him that he allowed it.

At the end of the summer, Tenkuu did not return to his boarding school in Tokyo. Instead, he moved back in with his mother and Koji. After six months back home, Tenkuu decided to introduce Midori to his mother. He had told Midori about his mother but felt it was time they met. A part of him secretly hoped that maybe Midori could somehow convince his mother of what he himself could not convince her of for seventeen years: that there was something inside of him that could be loved.

The night before Midori was to meet his mother, Tenkuu knocked on his mother’s bedroom door. She asked who it was and he said, “Tenkuu.” It was more than he had said to her in the past six months.

There was silence on the other side.

He heard tiny footsteps and then the door opened. His mother had many gray hairs now, but still had a youthful face. She did not smile, but simply looked at him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes, I am fine.”

She nodded.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m bringing someone over tomorrow and I wanted you to meet her.”

“A girl?” she asked.

“Yes.” His mother’s face was emotionless.

She nodded and Tenkuu headed back to his room.

T

enkuu picked up Midori at noon. His mother prepared rice and seaweed.

Koji went for a walk.

When Tenkuu and Midori arrived, Tenkuu’s mother greeted Midori with a smile. Midori bowed and complimented Tenkuu’s mother on the brooch she was wearing. All three sat down in the living room, which was a neat room with just a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, and a rug underneath.

Tenkuu sat on the couch next to Midori and his mother sat in one of the chairs. His mother poured tea and smiled

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politely at Midori.

“How did you two meet?” asked Tenkuu’s mother.

Midori looked to Tenkuu and smiled.

“Koji introduced us. I met Koji in a class and we started spending time together and he brought Tenkuu along with him.”

“Oh, you met Koji first.”

Shiho began to look around the room, as though she were expecting Koji to appear. She looked back at Tenkuu and Midori. Shiho couldn’t help but feel weighed down by the sight of the two of them. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t ignore the weight. Something built up inside of her stomach.

“We are still very young, but Midori and I are very serious. We do not think that marriage is unlikely,” said Tenkuu.

With those words, Shiho felt something grab hold of her. She felt such pity for the girl sitting before her and then she felt an enormous wave of guilt wash over her. She thought of Toshiro and being unable to see him for the last six months of his life, knowing he would die. It was too cruel.

“Who are you staying with, here?” asked Shiho.

“I’m staying with my aunt, Nanako Shiota,” said Midori.

Shiho smiled graciously. They spoke for a few more minutes and then Midori excused herself and said she had to return home for dinner with her aunt.

Tenkuu and Midori left, closing the door to the apartment behind them. Shiho headed to her bedroom, sat down at her desk, took out two sheets of paper and pen and began writing a letter. It was addressed to Nanako Shiota.

The next day Tenkuu went to knock on Midori’s door and her aunt answered.

Her aunt told him that Midori had left.

She had decided to return to Tokyo to continue her studies.

“Did she leave a letter for me?” asked Tenkuu.

“No,” said her aunt. Her eyes, Tenkuu noticed. They avoided his eyes.

Tenkuu allowed her to shut the door and then quickly ran home.

Once inside the house, he screamed for his mother. The house was silent.

The living room was empty and Koji was nowhere to be heard or seen. The flowers rested in the windowsill and light shone

in. Tenkuu screamed once again. He felt dizzy. The floor beneath him dissolved.

He placed a hand on a wall to steady himself.

Tenkuu found her in the bedroom sitting on her bed. She did not react to his shouts. The room shook. He stared into the back of her head, at the garden of gray hairs. He clenched a hand, but then his knees gave beneath him. The words he had trapped in his mouth weighed him down; his knees buckled. In an attempt to hurl a fist at the back of her head, he collapsed down at her feet. Tears sprouted at the corners of his eyes. He extended a hand to her feet and came within inches of touching them. She remained seated on her bed, eyes dead, staring at the wall.

“Why do you hate me?” Tenkuu screamed. “Why do you turn your eyes away? Why do you not touch me? Why? Why?” His fists pounded the floor. The floor shook with the weight of his fists. The wood seemed to splinter. “Tell me!”

“I don’t hate you,” said his mother.

Her voice was steady and calm.

“You lie!” said Tenkuu. “We’ve lived in this house together for eighteen years and we walk through each other like ghosts!” Shiho remained still.

“What did you say to Midori’s aunt?” yelled Tenkuu. “Tell me!”

Shiho clasped her hands together.

“I told her that loving you would lead to a lifetime of sorrow.”

Tenkuu’s eyes could not see his mother any longer for the water in his eyes distorted his vision.

“You are nothing to me now, like I have been nothing to you,” said Tenkuu.

Shiho’s eyes closed and she felt something inside of her calcify. Paralyzed, she did not move.

Tenkuu turned away and walked out of the room.

That night Tenkuu went into his brother’s room and sat down beside his bed. “She is inhuman, Koji. Her existence is unnatural.”

Koji had never heard Tenkuu speak of their mother in that way. It angered him. He did not want Tenkuu to defile their mother. “You are crazy,” said Koji.

Tenkuu felt something inside of him shrivel up. He thought of when he and Koji pressed their palms together all those years ago.

“I am not crazy,” said Tenkuu.

Silence.

“Go to bed,” said Koji. “You cannot be me tonight.”

Tenkuu walked out of the room and quietly whispered goodbye to his brother.

4

T

he next morning Tenkuu was not in his bed. All of his belongings were in their proper place, nothing was missing.

The bed did not appear to be slept in. His mother, Shiho Watanabe, did not realize he was not in the house until late into the evening. Koji Watanabe suggested that they go look for him, but his mother said it was unnecessary. And the two of them left it at that. Although Koji wondered about his brother, he, even to his own surprise, felt it was the natural course of events.

The next day Tenkuu’s room was cleaned out. All of his belongings were sold. It was unnecessary to get rid of his pictures because no pictures were ever taken of him.

The room Tenkuu slept in—the one room without windows—was left empty for the rest of the time they lived in the house.

K

oji Watanabe died of natural causes in his bed at the age of seventy-five. His mother was by his side, as well as his wife Yoko, two sons, Akio and Toshiro, and daughter, Yukiko. Before his death, Koji thought of his brother Tenkuu, but did not speak of him to anyone. At Koji’s funeral, Shiho wept profusely.

Shiho outlived Koji by twenty years, living to be one hundred and seven years old. From the day of his disappearance to the day prior to her death, which amounted to approximately eighty-nine years, she never uttered the name Tenkuu.

On the day prior to her death, which was a Sunday, a man came to visit her in her home. Her granddaughter Yukiko was taking care of her at the time. Yukiko let the man in and showed him to Shiho’s room. When the man entered the room, he removed his hat to reveal an old leathered face. His eyes were black and glassy, full of a quality that filled the room with light.

He sat down on Shiho’s bed. Shiho could feel his weight. The man said nothing, but simply sat and looked into Shiho’s eyes. L

EARWIG I. Minute horror of scorpion scuttled over clipped grass, your forked tail flicking out dew behind you, staggering over pillows’ white dunes, not fearing the slow-to-waken for you have whispered subtle morse in our ears, slipped like a comma from the soft conch, for you have translated the sea before dawn, then weaved to the ground we cross over, reassured.

II. Or perhaps a semi-colon— contingently, you on the pillow, in the silk flotsam, those threads, my lover’s hair, running-on past fingers, past pincers in the umber path to her scalp.

You are a do-without; you are easily forgotten.

III. Except the initial revulsion for even what makes you lovely: flexion of lacquered torso, clean eyelet of caliper legs.

Awfully agile, you dark naiad, and so calmly minacious, you take your advantage on those not alert enough to close their ears or clap you shut on yourself.

Children roll awake in their sacs and you, despite your cunning, your black grace, stamp dashes on their dreams.

– JOANNA FIDUCCIA

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

.

25

Composite Body, continued from p. 11

L

orraine turned to look at me, and her eyes, free from the viewfinder’s crosshairs, burned into me like coals, so I went about folding up the tripod and stowing my camera away.

“Hey, fuck you, I want to see,” she said. The threat was back in her voice.

“Sorry.”

“After lunch, we’re going. Steal the key from his desk and we’ll do it.”

“It takes a long time,” I said. “Longer than lunch period.”

“God, shut up,” she said, and she left the room, gathering her earrings into her fist, and already I knew I would be missing tomorrow’s afternoon classes.

L orraine was hunched over the table, squinting into the pool of fixer with the red light of the darkroom defining the curve of her hair and shoulders. The smell of the chemicals made my head feel full of air.

“Oh God,” Lorraine said. “I’m gorgeous.”

“It’s not done yet. Keep your face away from that,” I said, and she ignored me.

After I finished tacking the photos up on the drying lines, she moved up and down the row of pictures, smirking privately. I leaned back each time she slid past—the darkroom used to be a supply closet—and a few times I heard her whisper to herself, “So good.” I was glad, though I knew my talent had nothing to do with it.

She just loved seeing her image in stark, enlarged monochrome—it really did make her look adult, especially one picture where she posed like Audrey Hepburn, except without the long black gloves, and instead of a cigarette holder she used a chopstick from the previous night’s Chinese takeout, but other than that it was a pretty good likeness.

We snuck the pictures home from school, and Lorraine covered the desk, floor, and both of our beds with the prints.

She’d folded up the paper screen and stowed it under her bed to make more room, and now she lay on her stomach in the middle of this pile, propped on her elbows and appraising each print inch by inch. She cleared her throat while she browsed, and I sat on my bed and marked the backs of each photo with the date and put them into rank and file.

“You know what the problem is, though,” she said, and I looked up. “Well, there’s two problems. First, if you’re going to

26

be my photographer, you can’t wear glasses.

It’s too dorky.” She got up, leaned over and took my glasses off. “Second of all—” She tiptoed across the photos over to her desk and switched on the border lights of her cosmetic mirror, sat in front of it and pulled her sweater up on the right side. I could see the shimmering pink line of her bra strap, and I half-averted my eyes.

“I’m too big,” she said. “Well, not that big—I’m way thinner than Allison Mendechev and Sarah Steward, anyway, but it’s more like I’m just not thin enough to be, like, famous, you know?”

I didn’t want to disagree with her, but Lord help me if I called her fat.

“I got rejected at my audition,” she said. “I knew they would. The girl who went before me was at least fifteen pounds lighter, and an inch taller, too. So I’ve been on a diet. Have you noticed?”

She pulled her shirt back down, spread her arms and waited for an answer.

“I think you look nice,” I said.

“Nice is not the point.”

S teve didn’t like how tall I was; he said it was unnatural, and that a boy has to be the shrimp and get pushed around when he’s young so that when he grows up, he can make responsible decisions. I was five-ten, two inches taller than Steve.

I have this picture of him yelling at me. He didn’t know I was taking a picture, and I pretended to adjust the lens while he lectured me about spending too much of my allowance on film. He was saying, “A good photographer knows that it’s as much about what you don’t take pictures of as what you do take pictures of. Less is more, ever hear that? You might think I’m full of shit, but I’ve had a lot of experience.”

This was his excuse for a lot of things, experience. I assumed he meant experience with taking surveying photos for the home construction firm where he used to work, pictures of condemned buildings and abandoned lots at every angle imaginable.

The picture I took of him yelling is a little off-center and at a distance. Steve is sitting at the kitchen table across from me, and his forehead is wrinkled with annoyance, his

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

eyes are squinted, and his mouth looks both open and closed at the same time, a trick of slow shutter speed in the indoor lighting.

Finally he told me in a grumbling, matter-of-fact voice that if he caught me wasting any more money on bullshit, he’d slam some fiscal prudence into my head.

I nodded, wondering when Lorraine was expecting to have her next photo shoot. She was one week into her diet, and she said that she had twenty pounds to lose before she looked “professional enough” to go again.

I was glad that she needed me to take more pictures, but I told her that even if she was ready tomorrow, we’d have to wait at least a month.

She said, “What, why? I’ll be down to ninety-five in two weeks, tops.”

“I only have one roll of film left, and it’ll take me a while to save up for a whole shoot’s worth,” I said. “If you want to help pay, we can probably do it earlier, but make sure not to let your dad know you’re spending money on film.”

She asked why that was a problem, and I told her why. She rolled her eyes.

“Pssh. Forget about that. Dad is a DU-S-H. Stay out of his way, and if he insists on talking to you, just play the game.”

“What do you mean, the game?”

“The game is what you play with people who give you shit,” said Lorraine.

“There’s rules. Like, don’t say anything you don’t need to say. Don’t let him teach you anything. If he starts yelling, just be quiet and let your Mom step in for you. And,” she said, catching my eye, “don’t let him touch you.”

“Touch me?”

“Don’t be weird. Come on, you know.”

Did I?

W

ith every passing day Lorraine ate less and less, taking regular swigs of ice water from a converted pickle jar, and at night I would hear her stomach crawling, her turning over and tucking her knees to her chest to smother the noise. Her face, which had been a friendly oval shape, started after three weeks to become drawn, and her cheeks drifted inward as if in permanent

suction. The muscles of her arms defined themselves from the bone by shallow grooves. She was at war, and her strategy was steady and total distraction: she tried on clothes and chewed gum, blared The Eagles and Wham! on her Walkman, drew circles and boxes in the pages of her magazines around her ideal chests, hairstyles, waists, eyes. Every half-hour or so, she lifted her shirt in front of the mirror, turning slowly, admiring how her ribs were beginning to scallop the skin on her chest, sucking her flat stomach in and passing her hands down the inward bend.

“How do I look?” she’d ask me, and I’d answer, “Getting there.”

The paper screen never came back up, and we spent most days just lying in our beds and reading or sometimes doing homework. Lorraine would occasionally toss up whatever ideas or phrases came into her mind, without expecting a response.

Once, she said, “My mother never writes to me,” and I told her that my father never wrote to me either, but that conversation ended there.

Mostly, Lorraine would talk about the future.

“I’m not going to do porno, ever,” she said. “I’ll only do feature films. I wouldn’t do pornos even if they promised me I could star in a feature film with Michael J. Fox for doing it. My movies are going to have names like Murder, or Desire, or God and the Devil, and I’m always going to be the only actress.

In fact, I could play all the girl parts, if they needed me to. But they’ll have to pay me separately for each part.”

Another time, she said, “From the moment you’re born, the world just wants to put things inside you.”

I sensed that she wanted me to ask her what she meant, so I did, and she continued, “Well, food, obviously. They put all this effort into making it look nice and appetizing, but in the end you see what it really is: a bunch of crap.”

I nodded.

“Everything is like that, if you think about it. Air, oxygen. Boys,” she said, pointing a finger upwards, and I nodded again. “They want to put things in you. And all this stuff, all this crap—”she pinched the skin of her arm, “—it builds up, and it covers up the person you really are. The brain, the bones, and the heart, that’s all people are.

“Or better yet,” she said, “it should just look like the back of the photo. Just completely blank, that’s what’s really beautiful. Everyone should be like paper, thin and sharp and pure white. It’s when stuff gets put on the paper that things start to lose their perfection.”

So it’s all about being honest and not hiding behind a lot of crap.”

She stopped, and I thought she was expecting me to applaud. When I was sure that she was done talking, I asked her if it hurt to not eat.

“Sure it does,” she said, without hesitating. “Yeah, jeez, everything hurts.

I can barely stand up without my knees knocking together. And I’m freezing. Feel my fingers, they’re like ice.”

She gave me her hand; it was the color of turned milk, and cold as stone.

“But there’s one good thing, even about that,” she said. “If you’re always cold, and you’re so cold that it shows on the outside of you and you get numb on the inside, then you can make people cold just by looking at them—” she took my hand into hers, “—and nobody can do anything to you, no matter how bad they want to.”

She smiled and let go of my hand. “Just for looky, not for touchy.”

By the end of the day, I joined her cause. We were going to be honest people together, and we were going to keep everybody and every nasty thing the hell out of us.

S o I didn’t worry about wasting film anymore. As I began to avoid meals and instead drank Diet Sprite and tore though packs of spearmint gum with Lorraine, I took thousands of pictures, stealing developing supplies and photo paper from school, lifting money from Steve’s wallet to finance the film, and soon enough I’d thrown out the Karoline, the Colin Archer, the whole fleet of model ships to make room under my bed for new boxes packed with photos.

When Lorraine wasn’t around, I would take pictures of myself, usually parts of my body against a dark background, the exact same parts again and again.

Lorraine said it was good to take pictures of just single parts of the body because it left people wanting more—people

always wanted more than what they saw.

“And if you by mistake give them everything,” she said, “they’ll want more of you than you have.”

So I had portraits of stomachs, ears, wrists, calves, and I charted them inch by inch, memorized the patterns of birthmarks and creases as if they were crime scenes, believed that if you compared them under a microscope, you could see me becoming thinner as the stuff of untruth went out of me minute by minute.

Not that there was much of me to lose.

Steve already gave me constant hell for how skinny I was; as our relationship soured, the nicknames he had for me (spider or twiggy or skinnybones) got shorter and nastier (pee-wee, pinhead, fag, kike). But Lorraine and I played the game, always played. We gave him brief nods when we felt indulgent, firm scowls otherwise, and that kept things peaceful, since he was ready to chew us out whenever either of us spoke.

My mother knew things weren’t taking well between me and Steve, and it made her crazy, but not as crazy as Steve made her all by himself. The wedding was five weeks away, and as the honeymoon polish faded from their relationship and reality crept in, they started flaring up into raging arguments every night. For one thing, he still hadn’t gotten around to actually buying my mom an engagement ring; at first he’d told her that he was still saving up for it but couldn’t wait to propose to her, and he said he’d definitely have it before the wedding, but then he started griping about how it was mostly a stupid symbolic gesture that the ring companies used to get your money—he called them the Jewlers.

And that was another thing. He was planning a Catholic wedding, and I suppose my mother knew all along that he wouldn’t convert to Judaism—I myself couldn’t ever picture him stomping on a glass under a chuppa—but she didn’t expect that he would want her to convert to Catholicism. He

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LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

27

wasn’t going to be married by some conman Justice of the Peace, he told her, and if she was going to convert in time for the wedding then she’d better start looking through the Yellow Pages for priests. As the wedding date got nearer, Steve leaned on her harder, and while they were busy yelling and bargaining (“I’ll get a ring after you go jump in the lake and get your ass baptized!”), Lorraine and I were usually able to lay low and do what we needed to. As long as we played the game, nothing touched us.

And everything turned into a game.

Once Lorraine and I were convinced that eating and drinking and breathing and moving were all things that our creativity

and strength exempted us from, we played around, conspired, had fun. Mealtimes were our chance to show off, and Lorraine came to dinner more often than she did when she was actually eating. We mashed our soft foods around on the plate to make it look like we ate more than we did, that old kids’ trick, but I think my mother noticed, because once when she was clearing the table, she said to me, “Come on, Buggy, there are people starving in Africa.” I saw Lorraine bite her tongue, and I said, “They must have great cheekbones.”

And once I saw Lorraine actually eating huge forkfuls of mashed potatoes and pork chops, and taking slow sips of

JAKE HASKILL

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LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

orange juice. I arched an eyebrow at her as she worked her food around in her mouth.

Usually we’d pick at food, but never stuff our mouths with it, just dab a half-empty spoon or fork to our lips, and drinking anything but ice water was out of the question, but she just tipped her head back at me, smirking.

I took glances now and then, confused and a bit uncomfortable, until she put down her fork, lifted her napkin, and blew her nose, hard.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” she said, after four or five more loud honks into the napkin. “I’m stuffed up.” She looked at me, darted out her tongue for a millisecond, and for a second

I thought food was going to shoot out of my nose, too.

W

e weighed together every half-hour.

I asked my mother if I could move the bathroom scale to my room so I could weigh rocks for a science project, and she said it was fine as long as I put a towel on it to keep from scratching the footpads; after a while she forgot about it. So the scale was on the floor at the foot of my bed, and I set my radio alarm clock to go off quietly when it was time.

One day the alarm went off and I headed for the scale, but Lorraine told me that we were doing it wrong, that we were getting dishonest weighings.

“And do you know why that is?” she said.

I shook my head, no. She told me to close the blinds, and I did. She wore a blouse that draped like a skirt from her shoulders, old jeans crosshatched with wrinkles, and these she took off button by button, turning them inside out as they came off her body, and she stood in her white bra and panties, which looked odd and huge slung over her jagged frame. She untwisted her hair from its braids and flicked the hair-ties away, told me to take my clothes off, and I began unbuttoning my shirt with the detachment of a routine physical. I saw her reach her arms back to unclasp her bra, saw it fall to the ground, saw her panties skim down her ankles to join the mound of our clothes.

My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t swallow. Lorraine stepped on the scale and held still, waited for the seesawing of the meter to slow and fall in line with the needle, then let out a steadying breath.

“Eighty-nine. See, that’s a whole pound,” she said, staring at the needle a little longer, then stepping off.

The meter swung back to zero. She looked at me and said it was my turn, and I told her I could just go on the scale and then weigh my pants later.

“Come on. You’ve got to be honest,” Lorraine said, and her voice didn’t have the edge it usually had. I didn’t move or respond, and she stepped toward me, moved closer until our toes met, and I smelled peach shampoo in her hair, rotting fruit in her breath.

“Look at me,” she said, and I looked down at her face and she was looking down at her body, a tiny skeleton. “You can see

everything there is to me.”

And I was afraid of what she’d see in me, the galloping in my chest. She unbuttoned my slacks and those went down, hooked her fingers in the elastic of my briefs and they went down too, and in the expansion between us there was a release of heat. She closed my hand between hers, and in her grip I felt her dry skin and the strings of her tendons.

“I know you can’t help it,” Lorraine said, keeping her eyes on mine. “But try to stay cool, Joe. The scale can smell weakness.”

T

wo weeks before the wedding, the house was full of combat. Not only did my mother refuse to convert, but my Aunt Mishka found out about the whole ordeal and arranged for a rabbi to come to our house and intervene. That ended with Steve grabbing the poor man by his scarf and flinging him into one of the standing

puddles in our lawn—I remember seeing him stumble back to his car with milky brown water dripping from the hem of his jacket. Mom, still without an engagement ring and at her wits’ end, took me aside one night and asked me if I liked living at the Leary’s house, if I really wanted to stay and become a Leary. I kept my eyes down and shrugged, eh. My mother’s eyes were teary and red, and she said, come here and hug your mother. I started to tell her that I was coming down with something, but she had wrapped me in her arms and she let out a wet heavy sob, telling me she was sorry that any of this ever happened. After a while, she let me go and said, “No wonder you’re coming down with something, you’re freezing cold.

Go lie down and drink lots of water.”

I didn’t tell her that that was all I’d been doing for the past month.

Lorraine was turning serious and quiet, spending a lot of time in bed under heavy blankets, the shades drawn and the

TERRA last night when you left me for a minute to go and talk to your friends who don’t know my name, I gave up on you and I fucked this girl at random by just thinking of her as she danced with one hand at the nape of her neck, with dark hair and Persian eyes—saying ma’shAllah, bold and backed under a light that made her real, and physical, and there for me, dancing like she knew I was watching her, like she was ready for me to take her hand and place it at my back, as I walked away with her, as I pretended that it wasn’t you in the back room, it wasn’t me, that I never wanted to be here, never wanted to be hurt.

—PAYAM CHERCHIAN

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lights off, her head nested in the pillows like an oyster on lettuce. She squinted at magazines in the low light, comparing each famous face to pictures of her own, which had become pale and skulled, almost ideal.

She gave a dry laugh with each feature article on eating disorders: beats the alternative, she said. While she occupied herself in reading, I would take my camera apart and put it together again, fiddling with the heap of camera parts in front of me, the lens and the shutter release and the flash cube keeping my cold fingers working in rhythm. I was lightheaded and it felt like I was being pulled down by magnets, but it felt good, like I was on my way.

I was brainstorming the next photo project: a stitched montage, a sort of cross between my body and Lorraine’s, the best we each had to offer, somehow combining us—it made me shiver. I asked Lorraine when she would be ready to pose, but she told me that if she got her way, she wouldn’t have to. I asked her what she meant.

“I mean that eventually, it won’t matter how I pose. You should be able to point the camera straight at me, take the picture, and when you develop it, it should just look like this—” She reached down into one of my older boxes of photos and rifled the stacks until she found what she was looking for, and she slipped it out and threw it to me. I squinted: an old picture of the backyard in the daytime, overcast sky, tufts of crabgrass speckling the ground. Nobody was in it.

“Or better yet,” she said, “it should just look like the back of the photo. Just completely blank, that’s what’s really beautiful. Everyone should be like paper, thin and sharp and pure white. It’s when stuff gets put on the paper that things start to lose their perfection.”

“You don’t want to pose anymore?”

She took a while to respond, breathing in and out in a string of sighs. “You’re not getting it. We can’t just rely on pictures forever; they’re not honest. I mean, the camera adds ten pounds. Who needs it.”

I put the my camera down, in pieces.

Lorraine was done with photos, finished with preserving herself. The radio alarm went off. We shed our clothes apathetically, and when we stood together, her body gave a fierce shudder.

“It’s so cold,” she said. Her teeth, clicking.

30

I put my arms around her, tried to convey my heat to her in the confining darkness of our room, but there was no heat, just our touching and unsteady shivering.

Our hips and ribs and collarbones clacked together, and it hurt.

When we finished weighing and started to dress again, the doorknob of our room wrenched, and through the door I heard Steve say, “Lorrie, open up, I want to talk to the fag. He’s been stealing my shit.”

We moved as fast as we could, stumbling over tangles of our clothing. A few seconds passed and Steve asked us what we were doing in a voice thick with menace.

I’d only pulled my pants on when I heard a thud, a lurch of the hinges, the sound of splintering timber in the door frame. Steve burst in and yellow light from the hallway poured over us. I squinted and looked at Lorraine, who had her blouse open, her ridged chest exposed and tense.

There was a moment where Steve swung to face me and I tried running past him into the hallway, but he caught my collar, punched me once on my open mouth and again in the cheek, and I felt a wet crunch in my face. I tried to close my mouth but my muscles only twitched, disconnected from the bones. My mother came in and ran to me, swore at Steve and he grabbed her neck, I saw his arm flex, and Lorraine’s scream, a high broken note wrenched with panic, is what saved us.

I

don’t know how she got our new address, but yesterday my mom gave me a small package from Lorraine, with an L.A. postmark. Inside the package there were yellow document envelopes and a few blank postcards with pictures—the Hollywood Hills, Sunset Boulevard, the Walk of Fame.

Bundled in the document envelopes were eight-by-ten prints in sets of fifteen, and a few loose rolls of film. The photo on the top of the first set was a black-and-white closeup of Lorraine’s face in razor focus, smiling.

It’s a real headshot, the professional kind you pay eighty dollars apiece for. Lorraine’s hair is shiny and it crests in a wave above her forehead before it comes down the left side of her face, which is about the same as I remember it: sharp-boned, socketed at the eyes and cheeks and temples. In black marker across the lower-right corner, there is a message in wide looping cursive that says,

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

Stay cool, Joe— XOXO, Lorraine Leary The rest of the photos are the ones I took, newly developed; here’s “Spider,” “Space,” Steve’s mouth, open and closed.

She must have taken the negatives with her, whenever she left. I never got to retrieve my things after I got out of the hospital, wasn’t able to bring my photo boxes or my camera, couldn’t save anything.

But here’s something. I have these pictures in front of me; I’m holding them, I’m cutting through them, and they go limp as pieces of them fall away, grayscale pieces of my body and Lorraine’s. When I’m finished, the photos have rectangular holes in them where faces, mouths, and arms used to be, and I have our limbs in a senseless and disjointed heap, me and Lorraine.

I begin to compose us on a blank sheet of paper, with her postcards as the backdrop: sunny palms and the low-rises and hot dry weather of L.A. swarming to welcome us. In the center is Lorraine’s bare torso, emerging from the flare of her hips and ending just above her ribs, ridged like stairs, and there are dark crescents at the top where the flash had cast down the shadows of her breasts.

My chest rises from where the torso cuts off, with collarbones that spread like handlebars to each shoulder and a black groove where my ribcage funnels in. The two spindly legs are also mine, stretching down and hanging limp off the bottom of the page.

From the chest and torso come four arms jutting from the sides, bent at gentle angles, one pair mine and one hers, each shrugging a little. The top two come down and their hands meet and grasp; the other pair crisscrosses and enfolds the body in a self-loving embrace, settling around the waist in a huddle to keep warm.

And it’s my neck supporting Lorraine’s head and face and hair; across her chin is a loop of her handwriting, the S in “Stay.” I’ve put on different eyes, still hers, but enlarged, zoomed-in—the corners perk up and graze the sides of her face, there’s pepper in the irises, and I’m looking into them now, staring; something is blooming in my face and I’m breathing hard, my face is wet, and I can’t look anymore, nothing is left, nothing, except for this one thing I’ve finished, this hideous composite, the only body I want.

L

in a

MANNER of SPEAKING

BY FRANK GUAN “At once the idea was voiced of having a look at the suicide. The idea met with support: our ladies had never seen a suicide. I remember one of them saying aloud right then that ‘everything has become so boring that there’s no need to be punctilious about entertainment, as long as it’s diverting.’ Only a few stood and waited by the porch; the rest went trooping down the dirty corridor...”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

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The quote above eschews dry theory. It does not congratulate itself or pretend to be beyond the phenomenon it describes: the words come from an anonymous character who certainly is not a standin for the author. And what is left out means just as much as what is said. For not a word of condemnation rises from either Dostoevsky or his characters. We recognize our silence in theirs and become immediately, pathetically, empathetically, complicit: the guilt and the relevance are one.

And all this by the way.

The events that enframe the little quote seem far from the high point of Demons: it seems to be mentioned as a sort of afterthought, and style and craft explain only part of its magic.

Dostoevsky is never content to sift through the symptoms of a sick society, and the easy cynicism embedded in the quote is just that.

Dostoevsky wants the disease, the demons.

And he knows where to dive. However far he carries his explorations of ideology and society, he never loses sight of the human lives these concepts surround, pervade, and oscillate between. The degradation is always human degradation, the grace always human grace.

It is common to imagine the artist as somewhat removed from the web of little humiliations that comprise the social life of humanity. The odd, slightly filthy pleasure of reading biographies of great writers lies in the pull between this impulse to deification and the surfeit of evidence indicting the master as just another petty, indolent human being. The biographer experiences this tension most acutely: one doesn’t choose to narrate the lives of authors that one hates. The task would be unbearable. Demagogue, compulsive gambler, revolutionary, atheist, reactionary, racist, inveterate moocher: Dostoevsky’s life was politically incorrect even to himself.

But while during the 19th century most, maybe all Russians felt at some level a gap between their lives and their ideologies, only a handful of them succeeded in dramatizing the dissonance. If Dostoevsky was the Rush Limbaugh of Saint Petersburg, he was also

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THE DOGPATCH BURLESQUE This is one of your tricks: lying between two nail-studded boards underneath piled up sandbags. Many magicians rely on illusions; you count on yourself to tolerate pain.

Safe from the mirrors and their troubling effects inside of your scourging, immovable shell, you wait for the salve of a pleased crowd – and Saturday nights in a waterfront warehouse, snake charmers and fire-eaters surround you and cheer.

Now you have plans to jazz up your act with an eye-catching, spine-tingling, spellbinding treat: you’ve been looking for someone to tap dance on top of you, you and your coffin of nails. I’ve never had those Cyd Charisse feet, but I’ll work on your terms if you’ll work on mine: I can do a shimmy, a slow, seductive grind, tossing off clothing with winks and one-liners one piece at a time. You’ll feel the weight of my body pressed in delicate points on your eyelids, the backs of your ankles, the top of your spine. I’ll get closer to you with your each gasp and tremble, while the crowd stomps and whistles and cries out for more. This will be how we make love from now on.

– BONNIE JOHNSON

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its Shakespeare. His art depended on the draining task of empathizing with men and ideologies that he opposed, indeed even despised; the enduring, palpable presences of Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, and Shigaylov are proof of the incredible dedication that the man displayed in the pursuit of his art. It takes immense bravery to interrogate one’s own beliefs with the same ruthlessness with which one attacks those of one’s enemies.

Most authors stack the deck against those they despise. Even great talents like Dante or Tolstoy are prone to eviscerating their enemies with great gusto, and we read them and laugh: how fitting that the social climber Ivan Ilych is mortally wounded falling off a ladder as he decorates his new home! It makes sense, though life is not quite like that. But to bestow freedom upon your creations requires that you grant them the freedom to fail, to choose to fail, to hurt each other, to kill one another, to suffer alone. Like Shakespeare, even the lowest of Dostoevsky’s characters is imbued with the freedom to choose. Their poverty but not their will consents. Broke people refusing money, starving people refusing food, pained people refusing pity, homeless people refusing shelter, sinners who will not be forgiven. People who will not give their selves up, even if it kills them. For Dostoevsky, one can never underestimate the morbid tenacity of the self, or the diabolical will that can animate it in the presence of despair. Having witnessed such anguish among the inmates and within himself in Siberia, he gave it unprecedented voice. So long as people wound themselves to prove they have free will, people will read Dostoevsky. Which is the same as saying that we will always read him.

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Literary genealogy is a thankless and complex task. But Dostoevsky is clearly a spiritual ancestor to nearly all the great modern geniuses in Europe. The “novel of ideas” where ideas and characters promiscuously merge, divide, and dance between themselves did not exist in its current form until Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov laid its foundation. Hamsun, Kafka, Beckett, Freud, Nietzsche, and Camus all owe sizable debts to him, even Proust: in literature and psychology, in theology and ideology, he is the godfather of the past century: it begins again with him.

Yet paradoxically, Dostoevsky leaves very few footprints in a culture that thoroughly enacts his vision of the self as free agent or negator. Perhaps Dostoevsky has only a marginal appeal in America precisely because Americans are too busy pursuing their own aims to read. Reading is intrinsically opposed to hustling, and Americans hustle like nobody’s business.

But this is not news. For over a century American writers have bemoaned the lack of respect given the written word from sea to shining sea. They have whined eloquently of their marginal prestige relative to authors of the European (that is, civilized) continent. With anger and scorn they have wept of being distanced from the grossness of the reality they claimed to depict. Henry James, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, whoever the next winner of the literary lottery will be: each feels that there is something paradoxical in being an American author. Supposedly, as the capacity for being one goes up, the capacity for being the other goes down. A writer writes about other people, the best writers evoke empathy, but how will one create empathy for characters so venal, so self-centered, so tasteless as to preclude its possibility? How to deploy the refined tools of style and structure, inevitably of foreign manufacture, upon a soft, viscous, and endlessly fluctuating manscape? And how to avoid misjudging one’s characters, of subjugating them to the author’s opinions and tastes? Americans feel very strongly that they’re free to choose what’s good and what’s bad: whatever floats your boat, we say. Think of the philosophical underpinnings of the phrase Who’s better than me? The novelist, in creating characters, implicitly engages in judgment: he wouldn’t have taken up novel-writing if he didn’t think he had something important to say, would he? But if he himself is an American, then he implicitly accepts that all men, all voices, all opinions, are created equal. The only way people will read literature after high school is because they choose to: if it doesn’t speak to me, then why should I waste my precious leisure time?

One solution is for the author to reinforce what a large portion of potential readers already believe, or believe they believe. Usually, these are beliefs that the author shares just as unreflectingly as their readers. Please note that I’m not pointing

my finger only at the best-seller lists. Authors of considerable intellect are equally prone to unconsciously writing genre fiction for a target market. You don’t have to sell a million copies to make a living, ten thousand and a teaching job will do quite comfortably. Actually, all writers write for a certain audience to some extent. The difference between them lies in whether they explore the implications. Does this conflict with some unspoken belief that one is writing for all people? How can the feedback loop between readers and writers (since one naturally chooses to speak to people who share your opinions and read your books) result in one’s opinions slowly becoming indistinguishable from that of one’s audience? Even, if one’s not careful, becoming unknowingly trapped in a community bound by shared preconceptions, which, over time, leads to a solipsistic group mentality, as well as endless ideological wars with anyone outside the circle? To paraphrase a Karamazov, come and worship our gods, else death to you and your gods! Writing fails when it unconsciously and unconditionally espouses anything. Most of the works of literature that have been written are now unreadable because everything they refer to has been superseded many times over by equally perishable events, movements, fashions. Whether the life expectancy of a trend is 50 years or 15 minutes, it doesn’t last: as the movement collapses, so do the fictions built upon it.

Thankfully, the set of subcommunities that compose the larger sub-community of American belles lettres are tribes notorious for largely restricting their arguments to pen and paper, with the occasional punch being the exception that proves the rule. Maybe the world of US belles lettres might be better off if the subsets “realists” and “anti-‘realists’” would play a friendly game of dodge ball. Or had some sort of war with origami swords and sharpened ballpoints, a modernized version of Swift’s battle of the books, but with the word made flesh. Ford versus Whitehead!

Saunders versus Tyler! Franzen, slicing and stabbing himself! But probably there would just be more vendettas, paper cuts, blue or black rimmed stab wounds, and ill will. Still, it might be interesting to see if they can feel the root of open war within them.

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In 1995, the fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank’s titanic biography of Dostoevsky (The Mantle of the Prophet: 1871-1880) was finally released to the acclaim of the miniscule percentage of Americans who concerned themselves with Dostoevsky. Most of the reviews published were digested and, as reviews, and kind reviews especially, forgotten.

Somewhat incongruous amongst the gentle applause was a review in the Village Voice. The author was a white male in his early thirties who happened to enjoy writing; furthermore he was not unskilled amongst the statistically insignificant, but relatively vociferous, section of the population who not only wrote, but wrote “literary” or “serious” fiction, having been labeled as such by the organs of the literary world that liked to pronounce such judgments. He had published one novel and a collection of short stories, the relative success of which may not have been the same kind of blessing as one would have imagined from the outside. His output was self-nominated as postmodern. Indeed, he had published a rather long essay on the current (that is, early 1990s) state of American fiction, published not in Harpers, for which it had been originally commissioned, but in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, a publication with a rather smaller audience, an essay which displayed a keen sense of the anxieties of his literary heritage, which ran largely from a certain branch or movement in US literature known primarily for writing that went on and on about its metafictional or “made” quality, about the fact that one was not really engaging with human beings, but with like a text, composed of words and letters, a branch whose epistemological foundations the young writer, having been something of a prodigy in philosophy before burning out, as prodigies often do, and switching to fiction writing, which most prodigies don’t do, found sound. Sound enough indeed to base his own fiction upon said foundations, or un- or anti-foundations as it were.

The young writer believed that he recognized a tendency within his chosen branch of fiction. The aesthetic that he by and large subscribed to no longer seemed edgy; the forms his progenitors had pioneered were now anyone’s to use, even hacks who didn’t really have talent but could still be recognized as talented through

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a kind of “This story isn’t working and these characters, which aren’t actually people, being a construct made up of LANGUAGE, and are badly written and irrelevant, but at least I’m being up front about it and privileging you, Dear Reader, etc.” exit strategy. Perhaps the forms even invited “getting away” or escaping; it was hard to say with certainty. The aesthetic that Barth and Barthelme and Gass had pioneered and that young writer David Foster Wallace championed was being used irresponsibly to parody American mass culture, a mass culture that the essay clearly demonstrated could take its own temperature: in fact, the culture powered itself through its own parody, it knew itself to be self-referential, and much of its seduction lay precisely in this kind of hip knowingness or cynicism about consumption, an awareness that however enticing, the writer felt to be sort of, so to speak, kind of, you know, toxic to the scare quoted soul, having undergone years of literally indescribable war with himself and having learned, in the only way modern prodigies learn, the hard way, that certain aspects of human life just did not jive with the light-hearted or let’s be honest plain insubstantial stuff that this Image Fiction in general seemed capable of now that its patent on keen self-reflexivity had expired and was available to just about any Joe Briefcase who watched TV. The young writer had been composing a second novel.

Fiction about TV just was not bringing the news anymore, that coherent (okay, maybe now not so coherent) but larger picture of self and society that made up much of what was magical about literature, the remainder being devoted to a love of cold structural or conceptual stuff that Wallace had carried over from his logic days, stuff that by now made up a not insignificant portion of the writer’s psyche. If TV could do it, it wasn’t news anymore. He had been performing for a long time.

The second novel had many pages, a fact that its reviewers would later comment upon to no end. The writer’s review of the biography of the great novelist Dostoevsky was not without a share of self-promotion.

The review contained stuff that was rather bracing and constructive. It threw down a gauntlet, which went unrecognized as such, the novel still being in the late stages of publication. Why, asked Wallace, was so much of U.S. fiction devoid of the

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weighty moral seriousness that Dostoevsky was renowned for? What if it was possible (wink, nudge) that fiction could be written that was not only page-turning, but also piercingly personal, and also, yes, brought the deep news? For we all knew, said David Foster Wallace, that Dostoevsky still brings the news like nobody else.

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When David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest in 1996, it received, from what one can discern today, rapturous and somewhat confused applause. The page count, the ambition, the humor, the satire, the page count: book reviews are not meant to be incisive. Cleverer reviewers could discern a certain aura of sadness beneath the non-stop verbal hijinks. Years later, one dissenting reviewer, for unknown and personal reasons, ended his review with a heartfelt wish that Wallace be anally penetrated. Being famous is not a reversible process.

Since then, Wallace has published two collections of short stories and two collections of essays.

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As sure as the day follows the night, so too does the hype around an object precede, and, all too often, preclude, the object itself. The preconceptions surrounding David Foster Wallace and his work are sufficiently distorting as to hamper a reader’s opinion of the man’s work even if distortion was not one of Wallace’s dominant themes, which it manifestly is. And since this phenomenon (as Wallace points out so often) is for our place and time what fluoridated water was for the 50’s, a little theorem would save us much critical vertigo. Let the sensational fallacy be defined as judging a work of art by either the hype or the fans that it (the work of art) attracts. Like other rhetorical fallacies, it’s a necessary and natural short-cut, it’s a natural coping mechanism in a world flooded by art (of whatever quality or lack thereof), but it’s misguiding, and pernicious, and a literary critic would do well to steer wide of it.

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Metafiction is an oppressive form, and the oppression of form is its subject. Kierkegaard, discussing boredom, notes that pantheism and atheism are twins: if everything matters, then nothing matters on its own, which is to say that nothing matters. The stories of Borges

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enact this metaphysical paradox: over and over his characters find their individuality challenged and dissolved in the greater whole of human experience, which in its turn is an element of the greater whole of the universe. All is wholly holy. Art is holy; all is art. Art is form; all is form. Content is all; all is form; all is content, all is form, all is art, all is God, one is all, one is God...one is nothing. Nothing is God, all is God, all is all ... et cetera. Kierkegaard’s point being that it gets boring.

Such philosophical gymnastics neatly sideline certain unpleasant aspects of the world. Sadness, pain, and death: what are these compared to the wholeness of infinity?

This is the crucial difference between Borges and Beckett, the other metafictionist avant la lettre. Both Borges and Beckett bear the mark of Schopenhauer, but Borges only absorbs Schopenhauer’s abstract aspect, the mathematics of the finite and infinite. John Barth, currently the professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and a founding father of American metafiction, deeply admires the work of Borges. David Foster Wallace deeply admires the work of Borges. He both respects and resents John Barth, to the point of writing a short story of novella length (“Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” from his first collection Girl With Curious Hair) built around (literally around, as the draft was written in the margins of a copy of Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse) Barth’s fictional aesthetics, featuring one Professor Ambrose, who teaches creative writing at a Maryland college and has published a book titled Lost in the Funhouse, as well as other characters, none of whom are particularly sympathetic, as the narrator of the story points out. Nor is the story metafiction, the narrator also notes, though this reader would note in passing that he, the reader, certainly felt curiously hollow, a specific and peculiar feeling that only lavish praise, pornography and metafiction can create, by the story’s (much-delayed) end.

Lavish praise devalues real praise.

Pornography devalues real film. And metafiction devalues “real” fiction. Each overwhelms a natural hunger by satisfying it beyond excess: for flattery, for stimulation, for a human presence that is not one’s own.

As a prodigy, Wallace is all too accustomed to glowing and empty compliments, which so often serve as a form of veiled envy. As an

American, he is familiar with pornography.

For Wallace, pornography is the genre that negates all other genres, the genre of genres: fundamentally, the purpose for which one goes to see Seagal break jaws or Meg Ryan grin is the same as the motives with which one subscribes to Cinemax or orders “Barely Legal Bitches 5” in the comfort and isolation of a Tampa-area Holiday Inn while on a business trip selling Budweiser advertisements for the sides of the local NASCAR track. If you know precisely what you’re getting before it even starts, it’s porn.

And what does it mean, for Wallace, to be a writer? “Oglers ... born watchers ... viewers ... watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses ... terribly self-conscious.” What concerns him is that in an age of images, reading and watching begin to blur into one another: to Wallace, the postmodern reader feels distanced from the characters in a written story because they’ve spent so much time engaging with hammy stories and cheesy dialogue in television. Subverting this false sense of dissociation, which manifests itself in daily untelevised life as a hypertrophied self-consciousness (all that watching is going to affect how you “see” yourself) as well as a atrophied sense of other-consciousness (the more time spent watching TV, the less time spent actually talking with and becoming aware of flesh-and-blood humans, and the less ease around others, the less desire to be around others, rinse and repeat), has been Wallace’s project from the flailing, abstract work of his youth through the breakthrough Infinite Jest to the lapidary and exceptionally involving tales published since then.

Infinite Jest: on pages 945-46 of the paperback version, a film titled “Accomplice!” features an aging pederast anally penetrating, without protection, a young male prostitute infected with HIV, in spite (literally: the pederast thinks the prostitute suspects him, the pederast, of having the Virus) of the prostitute’s demand that the pederast wear a condom.

The prostitute, upon discovering what has happened (the pederast had removed the condom he had originally worn—don’t ask how), shrieks to the pederast that he (the pederast) has made him (the prostitute) a murderer, and goes on screaming the word “Murderer!” at the camera for 500 seconds.

The film operates as a sort of attack on

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ARS POETICA The hiss of a bottle opening, and the groan of the couch giving way. I flip on the basketball game, and my daughter bounces to the floor at my feet.

Watch my beer, kiddo, I tell her. She doesn’t really get basketball yet, but she understands when the best time to be around her father is. Kathy comes out of the bedroom with her hair pinned up and her flannel shirt rolled past her elbows. She slaps my legs off the coffee table, kisses our child on the forehead, settles down in the rocking chair.

There’s half a poem on the computer in the den, and a bag of weed in a drawer in the kitchen, but other than that, you’d have never guessed I’m a poet at all.

My doctors tell me I’m too normal to ever be a poet. Can’t you act a bit more insane, they ask, or at least attempt a suicide from time to time? You don’t have to go through with it, Tom, just give us something to work with—domestic abuse could help, they think.

I enjoy my booze a great deal, I offer. That’s a start, they say. But then I admit I prefer beer and cheap cigarettes to wine and expensive cigarettes. What about sexually-transmitted diseases, they want to know, do you have any potential there?

I prefer the love of one woman to the sex of many, I explain. They shake their heads.

A white, middle-class, heterosexual male, not oppressed, depressed, no incest a modest and loving family—two parents, three siblings, churchgoers, they accuse.

I played little league, even. I frown.

I want a faithful wife, loyal children, a playful dog, fucking white picket fence.

You’re just not a poet, they say, we’re very sorry, but there’s simply nothing we can do for you.

– TOM FEULNER

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its viewers. It accuses them of being, well, accomplices, implying that the onscreen misery would not even exist if viewers didn’t want to watch it. “Adult World,” a story in Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” is divided into two parts: part one is delivered in a straighton “realist” narration, and part two comprises

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a synopsis of the remainder of the story written in authorial shorthand. The story concerns a young wife who fears that she is not pleasing her husband during intercourse, but eventually understands (in the second part’s summary), in an epiphany, that her husband is a secret compulsive masturbator, after which she “realizes that true wellsprings of love, security, gratification must originate within [her]self {N.B.: narr tone here mxmly flat/affectless/distant/dry -> no discernible endorsement of cliche...}” and, joining the “rest of adult hmn race, no longer ‘full of herself’/‘immature’/‘irrational’/ ‘young,’” purchases several dildos of increasing cost, length, and girth to pleasure her newly mature self with. “Adult World” is a meta-“realist” story: the subject matter becomes a subtle and vicious commentary on the effaced narration, paint-bynumbers minimalism, and selfcontained (read: masturbatory) epiphanies (read: climaxes) of the “realist” or “workshop” short story. Writers, who spring from readers, who in turn hail largely from the millioneyed regular studio

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audience, are taught to distance themselves (first through TV, and then through adolescence and maybe drugs) from what they experience well before they begin to write. Television triggers a mutation in the reader, and thus also in the writer: And I think it’s impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittlechinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to “entertain,” give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I’ll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it’s serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader “Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me! ... And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being “liked,” so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: “I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.” This dynamic isn’t exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and

in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. (interview with L. McCaffery, “Review of Contemporary Fiction,” summer 1993) The writer (person) who stakes his art (the part of himself that he makes public to the world) on the entertaining of an audience potentially traps himself in a self-recursive, hellacious, and comic bind between the logic behind his public actions (that value and identity are created by others) and the logic of the private self (that one creates one’s own value and identity). What Wallace seems to do better than anyone else is to uncover, with terrifying exactitude and an ever-increasing subtlety, the sources and ramifications of this logic. Both microcosmically and macrocosmically, one not only can’t live within this logic, one can’t even locate one’s self: Neal, the amateur logician, posthumous narrator, and protagonist of 2004’s Oblivion’s “Good Old Neon,” can only admit to himself while he’s writing his suicide note that I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s [his suicide note’s] quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it into a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me.

Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it quick.

(Oblivion, 176) Caught between his public image of a charming, successful young man and his

private image of being a manipulative and selfish fraud, Neal is so dizzy from spinning his mind in circles that he can’t tell which is real. And he can’t express his private feelings of fraudulence to others without making himself look charming and successful, confirming the very fraudulence he would have expressed and driving him back to where he began over and over until the only way out appears as death.

Analysis won’t help: his therapist’s thesis that American society fosters a competitive environment in which being recognized as a winner is paramount to securing an identity, however true, is null and void to him because Neal, having cataloged the behaviors of Dr. Gustafson, has deduced that Dr. Gustafson is a closeted homosexual and thus is projecting his masculine insecurities onto his patients with the above thesis: the notion that a statement can be subjectively motivated and objectively true is invalid within the systems Wallace’s protagonists set up. Deconstruction becomes anesthetic, and anesthetics become addictive. The narrator of the second “The Devil is a Busy Man” in Brief Interviews assists a family in need anonymously to prove to himself that he can be a generous person. When the parents of the family call, he denies that he has anything to do with it, but adds, without knowing why at the time, that he could imagine that the person who did help them would “be enthusiastic to know how the needed money, which they had received, was going to be utilized,” thus proving (to him) that I showed an unconscious and, seeming, natural, automatic ability to both deceive myself and other people, which, on the “motivational level,” not only completely emptied the generous thing I tried to do of any true value, and caused me to fail, again, in my attempts to sincerely be what someone would classify as truly a “nice” or “good” person, but, despairingly, cast me in a light to myself which could only be classified as “dark,” “evil,” or “beyond hope of ever sincerely becoming good. (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 193) The narrator is incapable of comprehending that his act might be genuine because in his mind, genuine acts are done with zero

thought to one’s own benefit; the idea that his unconscious impulse to be known as the giver might be at once natural, selfish, and “good” is for him unfathomable, out of bounds. Selfishness is strongly associated with being known and recognized and selflessness and anonymity are conversely linked. The devil in “The Devil is a Busy Man” is a cousin of Dostoevsky’s demons: think of Ivan Karamazov’s devil, whom Ivan cannot disentangle from himself, or the ghost in the corner that shakes her finger at Stavrogin. They too have painted themselves into a psychic corner. Wallace and his more introspective characters (Neal, the depressed person of “The Depressed Person,” the “author” of “Octet”) are intimately familiar with these psychic inward spirals, but only Wallace is wise enough to use narcissism as a conduit into other humans’ minds.

For him, it’s precisely this conviction of universal selfishness that binds Americans together, makes them known: the generically atomized individual that television has nurtured, the part that watches and wonders who’s watching: the voyeur, the one who locates significance in the screen, in being seen, who feels desperately inadequate being on the wrong side of the glass. Think of the depressed person curled up on the floor of her workstation, or the giant, unaging feral infants in Infinite Jest ravaging what was once Quebec. Metaphysically, the only thing an infant does is believe unconditionally in what it perceives. Over time, he learns, through pain, to believe conditionally. What, asks, Wallace, happens when humans are educated more by television than by real people?

Television, for very solid economic reasons, seeks only to pleasure and stimulate the viewer. Like all modern media, its true product is people, whom it delivers to its market, advertisers, who then proceed, through extremely devious and intensive rhetoric, to embed the product which they have been hired to sell into the minds of viewers by whatever means necessary. And statistically, psychologically, economically, logically (by simple reason of the proximity between TV show and TV ad [and also meta-logically: viewers, being averse to ads, generally zip away during the commercial break, meaning that in the course of channel flipping, they’ll come across other ads, other shows, which, because any viewer, based on personal preferences, have certain set

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interests and channel-preferences, which, statistically, are most predictable, for cultural, historical and metahistorical reasons, as demographic, which means that vendors, which of course know well how viewers like to dodge ads, salt their advertisements over a set of networks over which demographically, statistically...this is tiresome, but you see the kind of sordid, autistic and complex statisticopsychosociohistoricoeconomic logic that enframes all of Wallace’s work, logic that’s becoming even more involuted and absurd with Google’s ability to sell extremely precise micro-markets to advertisers based on search terms and makes their whole Don’t Be Evil slogan seem on their part {the people who comprise Google’s brain trust} either heartbreakingly naive or insanely diabolical {which, as Wallace is fond of reminding his readers, are actually not mutually exclusive categories (indeed, they’re almost mutually inclusive for reasons which are just as insanely self-referential and sad and, when one bothers to sift through it all human, for buyers and sellers and novelists and alike, as the reasons nested beyond this parenthesis)}]), the best way to sell people things is to stimulate them pleasurably in precisely the same way programs stimulate viewers, which, over time, as young viewers become tomorrow’s cynical comedians, that TV will in fact be precisely about the logic underpinning TV, which, over the next generation of young viewers and cynical comedians, that is, people born during Reagan-Bush and Bush-Quayle, will lead to time will tell what kind of terrifying and blackly humorous entertainment, the kind of self-centered entertainment logic which Dostoevsky had diagnosed long, long ago in Demons as leading to suicide and murder, as it generates a weary general conviction that people care only about tricking me out of my money. To quote a seduced and abandoned Dubliner: The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

7

Joyce was himself something of a burnt-out prodigy, having parted ways with the theology of the Jesuits before taking up literature: “The Dead,” from which the above quote derives, was completed in 1907, when Joyce was only 25.

Exiting a system never implies exiting

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THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE This is how it should be done with twenty-seven minute phone calls, words and meaning completely.

With forty-two minutes on the asphalt and with it being enough.

But what good is can’t when want strings together words, which should never be spelled out for anyone else, to anyone who matters. When routine gives way to agitation. To selfish giving and taking what’s yours.

This is how it should be done with words to some other nape, shifting focus and no remorse.

With lies and with lying down. With things being mutual.

– TYLER GUTIERREZ

the forms of the system. Joyce, being Irish and not American, was well aware of this.

Dubliners is studded with Catholic symbology (not to mention being written in the native language of the people who ruled Ireland as a colony), and the ever-more ambitious work that follows it is no different: in its scope and complexity, Joyce’s oeuvre can truly be described as Catholic, even though in content it remains defiantly earthly. Or remember Proust and his beloved cathedrals: the form persists, but the content, the object that is venerated, is changed. Or in the present, read the stern and excellent criticism of James Wood, with its constant hectoring, grudging approvals, and humorless demands, its vast, inhuman, compelling, and ultimately mysterious authority from on high that practically

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demands to be resented.

Recall that Wallace was something of a genius in the philosophy of logic before making the jump to literature. Logic isn’t just any form, it’s the form of form. Or the philosophy that language can refer only to language. Metafiction isn’t just any fiction, it’s the fiction of fiction. American media since the 1960s has been all about American media since the 1960s. And Americans aren’t just any selfish people, they’re the people who believe that there are no people but selfish people. Assume that Wallace wants to escape the nets and snares of all these self-enclosed systems: for all the obvious reasons. But assume that Wallace, being intelligent, has discovered that you can’t escape solipsism by yourself.

Now what?

Most writers choose sides in the real/ experimental divide in American fiction rather early. Either you choose to efface yourself and ignore the big picture and sketch tiny characters with no significance beyond their own tiny epiphanies or you dive headlong into the glass, kicking the carcass of convention, sowing sterile pop references and self-references and in general fucking with the reader’s trust, all the while deploying copious quantities of black humor to evade charges of sentimentality and naïveté. Wallace’s solution is at once classically postmodern and absurdly simple.

Expose both sides (sub-communities?) as solipsistic, systematically ignoring the aspects of reality they can’t handle (for the former, any society beyond the family unit, for the latter, principles and emotions other than disgust), of enslaving content to form, and ask, deviously and plaintively, “Why not let the content determine the form?”

Granted, that’s what any lasting artist does, whether he’s aware in this way or not: great writers like Pynchon, Delillo, Carver, and Wolff tend to get shoehorned into categories that deny certain aspects of their talent. Pynchon and Delillo are actually acutely concerned with people: I’m thinking of Mother Oswald’s monologue near the conclusion of Libra and the complex anguish fused into the narration of Gravity’s Rainbow, and Carver and Wolff actually have a concern with not only with society beyond Mom, Dad, and Sis but with the text as something written by a person: read Wolff’s Old School or Carver’s story in epistle form, “Please, Tell Me.” Wallace’s particular genius lies in the creation of his language, a powerful and marvelously adaptable instrument that mimics the wrestlings of self with society in its very syntax: he’s more Joycean than Dostoevskian. Since at least Infinite Jest, Wallace’s writing has been approaching the linguistic analog of a Seurat painting, commenting on its illusions quietly and unobtrusively while at the same time referring to the world beyond itself. For all the commentary on Wallace’s loquaciousness, precious little has been said about his abrupt and calculated perspectival shifts, his skill at hiding symbols in plain sight, or, maybe most importantly, his dead silences: just as there’s a lot of blank space between Seurat’s pinpoints, there’s a lot of white space in Wallace’s words, spaces void of meaning that a reader has to fill

in on his own. Like Who is telling the story? or Why is this story worth the time spent reading it? or What is this story even about? and What makes the answers to these questions true: are they just given to me as True, or are they true because I believe them to be true? Wallace is deeply concerned (meaning honestly confused) with how meaning is transmitted, and all of his narratives do their best to induce the same sort of epistemological moorlessness in their readers.

8

Reader beware: section 9 of this essay gives away most of what makes David Foster Wallace’s story “Mister Squishy” tragic and human.

There’s no other way to prove that the above seven sections aren’t just an intricate array of academic smoke and mirrors. Sensational fallacy aside, the reputation of Wallace’s work as intimidating is true. It’s dense, it’s difficult, it’s sticky, and it demands a high degree of trust on the reader’s part.

Hopefully, the summary and analysis in section 9 will serve the function of training wheels with regards to riding a bicycle.

9

What does it mean to be called a piece of shit? Discarded? Worthless?

Waste? Unneeded? Repellent?

Insignificant? Stinky? Terry Schmidt, the protagonist of “Mister Squishy,” is in a room with fourteen other men on the nineteenth floor of an unnamed office building in a major American metropolis. He has been explaining for some twenty minutes the statistical procedures involved behind the group product evaluation survey that the other fourteen men will collectively fill once he leaves the room. The said product is a newly developed chocolate snack cake marketed as Felonies!, produced by the Mister Squishy Corporation. The year is 1995.

Schmidt works for an auxillary marketing research firm, Team Delta-Y, which generally services the needs of the advertising firm of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, which is engaged in servicing the needs of Mister Squishy.

Team Delta-Y is run by Alan S. Britton, though Schmidt’s immediate overseer is Robert Awad, whose subordinate, protégé and probable successor A. Ronald Mounce regularly condenses water cooler chitchat onto on #302 Field Concerns and Morale forms.

Schmidt is secretly obsessed and/or in love with his big and tall colleague Darlene Lilley.

He masturbates himself to sleep every night

over fantasies of “moist slapping intercourse” with Lilley.

These fantasies disturb Schmidt because in the fantasy he can’t stop telling her thank you over and over again while Lilley’s face wears an annoyed expression throughout the fantasy. This is dismaying to Schmidt, “his apparent inability to enforce his preferences even in fantasy.” It makes him wonder if he even had what convention called a Free Will at all, deep down. Lilley is married and has a son. Her phone number is on Schmidt’s phone’s speeddial, which phone Schmidt watches every evening, trying to summon up the courage to call her. Schmidt’s job is statistics, and statistics is largely about sorting significant data from insignificant data, of determining what “makes a difference.” He lives alone in a condominium. In his spare time he collects rare and uncirculated United States metal currency. Such as say a 1916 Flowing Liberty Quarter, the volume of which is roughly equivalent to the volume of the bitter pocket of castor-bean distillate and chocolate sludge that would result from injecting a Felony! with a hypodermic needle full of ricin, or castor bean distillate, which can be prepared, given proper attention to laboratory procedures, very easily and costeffectively. Hypothetically speaking.

Castor beans are either scarlet colored or a lustrous brown. In the conference room of the office building whose exterior a mysterious figure equipped with an as yet unrevealed-to-the-public M16 automatic rifle among a complex and numerous array of other apparati, most of which are for climbing, is climbing up in a competent and experienced manner, Schmidt continues to speak while rotating his cocoa-brown cordovan in a roughly 120-degree arc. I have an emetic prosthesis equipped upon my body containing the contents of six Felonies! and my own bile, which I harvested this morning using an over-the-counter emetic. The windows of the room, which are inoperable by city law, are tinted dark brown. Samples of Felonies! rotate slowly in the center of the conference table. Terry Schmidt favors beige, rust, and cocoabrown in his professional wardrobe. He can find less and less within himself that makes him special or unique. Therapy has revealed to him that his younger dreams of making a difference in the advertising industry by forming his own company and

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convincing corporate execs to Trust Me You Will Not Be Sorry to reveal certain facts about their products, such as the fact that antacids are useless after a few weeks because the digestive system of the human body begins to secrete more hydrochloric acid to compensate for the antacids, or that tobacco products are addictive, or that the instruction to ‘Repeat’ written on shampoo bottles was hygienically unnecessary, et cetera, were, objectively, statistically, not that different from the beliefs of other young people in their twenties who are entering the job market, that they were delusions, mirages. Botulism exotoxin being therefore much more preferable, as it is tasteless and requires very small concentrations and is just as easy, if not easier, to create. So long as one ensures that no oxygen is trapped in the jar, ten days and darkness will make for a small tan-to-brown colony of Clostridium awash in a green-to-tan penumbra of botulinus exotoxin, which is, to put it delicately, a byproduct of the mold’s digestive process, and can be removed in very small amounts with the same hypodermic used for administration. Botulinus had also the advantage of directing attention to defects in manufacturing and/ or packaging rather than product tampering, which would of course heighten the overall industry impact.

(Oblivion, 58) Hypothetically speaking, of course.

The other side of “Mister Squishy” describes the convoluted office politics between Britton and his treacherous mentee Scott Laleman, as well as between Britton and Awad/Mounce, who in fine individualistic tradition plan to set out on their own soon and start their own ad firm. Unbeknownst to Awad, Britton is maneuvering him in such a way so as to ease him out of his job in favor of Darlene Lilley, who, when Britton had ordered Awad to sexually harass her earlier, had been so diplomatic and cool-headed as to merit a promotion in Britton’s eyes. This and more all conspire to place the Mister Squishy mascot one floor and a brown pane of most likely non-bulletproof glass from the 19th floor conference room and the emetic prosthesis under the arm of the first-person narrator of “Mister Squishy,” another loaded gun of sorts. Not to mention the

40

little game of find-the-narrator using various wads of statistical data embedded in the narration that may well require more than one sheet of paper, or the reason for this seemingly pointless game, or the very subtle web of criminal-related imagery which never quite comes together in the events of the story, or the set of perfectly uneven details such as “A small child in the crowd began to cry because someone had stepped on its foot” or even just the artfully artless diction involved in saying that “the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his whole being” [my italics].

Remember the colors that Schmidt prefers to dress in. Remember the rich color of the chocolate snack cakes. Remember the tint of the windows on the nineteenth floor, and the color of the castor beans, and the color of the botulinus mold. Remember Schmidt’s last name, and its near homophone shit. These details are all just waiting to be put together, not just by the reader, but by Schmidt himself, in the aftermath of the hilarious and terrifying Mister Squishy mascot’s shooting through the windows of the 19th floor as the “I” character activates the emetic prosthesis, spewing its wet brown contents all over the table, triggering perhaps other, real expulsions of Felonies! from the 12 real members of the ad-caucus. All so Alan S. Britton can fire Awad and have Scott Laleman indicted on felony-type charges for planning the whole stunt. Whether Schmidt is fired or not, it’s virtually impossible that he won’t realize the similarity between his own impulses to make a difference by poisoning the Felonies! when they reached the market and the seeming murderous intent in the action of a brown mascot firing an M-16 through the windows of the Chicago skyscraper. The Felonies! are not going to be released on the market after this stunt, safe to say. Schmidt cannot not come to the epiphany that even his dark dreams of individuation by murder are absolutely un-unique, and given the sheer brownness of the crucial event, it will be difficult indeed for him not to see himself, with his brown wardrobe, with his red or lustrous brown castor beans, with his tan-brown botulinus and his green-brown botulinus toxin, as a piece of shit, something processed and voided without a second thought, undifferentiated, commonplace, and repellent.

Analysis won’t help him. It’s how Schmidt discovered in the first place that

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his positive dreams of making a difference were ubiquitous among his demographic.

He has no close family. Darlene Lilley will have been promoted to Awad’s supervisory position, putting her even further out of Schmidt’s reach. With or without a job, he’ll be alone and lonely, utterly convinced of his worthlessness. He may kill himself. Many do. He may kill others. A few do. Or he may do nothing, the likeliest option, statistically speaking. No matter what, from the only remaining point of view he has, his own, the chances of him living anything approaching a worthwhile life will approach zero. No matter what, he will be dead inside.

There’s more, but that’s the center of the story. There are plenty of peripheral connections to discover, both within the story and in relation to the other stories in Oblivion, should you be so inclined. In a 1993 interview, Wallace said he did 5 to 8 rewrites of everything he ever published. It wouldn’t kill an affluent and overeducated reader to do 2 or 3 rereads of his stories or to do a bit of note-taking. What looks like haphazard and unnecessary writing is actually a very complex and tightly calibrated apparatus designed for one thing: empathy. Trust me, you will not be sorry. At the very least, you could save yourself some shampoo and Tums.

10

So: what now? The stories in Oblivion (with one exception, the limp “Another Pioneer”) prove Wallace’s talent goes well beyond the abstract or technical. So many American heavyweights have confused literary selfexpression with ranting, but Oblivion is blissfully free of superfluous tirades. The thematic range of these wrenching, deadpan tragedies demonstrates the depth of Wallace’s commitment: not just to art, but to other human beings. Like Pynchon, like Joyce, like Dostoevsky, there’s an altruistic bent to his writing, a profound concern for the travails of the unfortunate that illuminates his most wretched characters. Call it grace.

Not that the future of US prose is going to be pandemic with polysyllables or syntactically unstable. Style is too personal a matter, and American humans too numerous and contrary, for that. But I do believe that Wallace’s achievement proves that great literature can be written by someone from a generation raised by television, which, as far as I can tell, is unprecedented. L

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41 MISSY HALLIDAY

on pseudo-intellectualism.

&LENS-LE

AND 3

My father during the college application process: “There are so many qualified people out there. To some extent it’s just a CRAP SHOOT.” My father upon hearing that I was accepted to Stanford: “That’s incredible. You’re going to love it so much. It’s like it was MEANT TO BE.” The transition from a chaotic to a deterministic view of the universe can take place very quickly.

4

Many of us never thought of ourselves as intellectuals until we came here. Being the smart kid in high school is being the kid who gets the grades regardless of interest in the material. Rare is the student who attempts to untangle his motivation: Is it four parts grade and one part curiosity or two parts grade and three parts curiosity? We arrive at Stanford and are pleased to learn that some time over the summer we became intellectuals. Simple as that—our motivations are sorted out as if by peer pressure. Idealism is in; grade grubbing is out. From the faculty’s perspective, the democratic usage of the term is a way of helping freshman build confidence in the value of their ideas [i.e., speak out in IHUM section] and, as such, hopes to foster the intense scholarship to which those ideas would eventually lead. The problem is that, satisfied with our de facto intellectualism, many of us are content, and the premature application of the title can actually serve as an impediment to learning.

5

If this essay were written in French, this misunderstanding would not be possible.

BOB: What did you say?

NICK: I said intellectualism is dead.

BOB: Who’s dead?

NICK: Intellectualism.

BOB: What are the symptoms?

NICK: There are no symptoms. It’s completely and utterly dead.

BOB: When did it die?

NICK: Sunday, while I was in the bathroom.

BOB: What were you doing in the bathroom?

NICK: I was using it.

BOB: The bathroom?

NICK: Yes, the bathroom. I was reading one of the footnotes to one of the footnotes to The Waste Land when someone else entered and started talking to me through the stall door. This was our conversation: OTHER: Damn It Nick.

ME: Sorry.

OTHER: Why do you have to shit in the first stall?

ME: I like the first stall. It’s my stall.

OTHER: I like the third stall.

ME: I don’t like having people on both sides of me.

OTHER: What?

ME: I don’t like having people on both sides of me.

OTHER: That barely ever happens. When it does, I just lift my feet up.

And so forth. By the time we were done talking, I realized that intellectualism was dead.

BOB: Why don’t you like having people on both sides of you?

NICK: The whole thing is just a fad.

BOB: Well, I think it sounds like a genuine neurosis.

NICK: Just because we go to Stanford,3 it’s now in vogue to go out for coffee and talk about books or cutting edge research or Zambia.4 BOB: Zambia sounds like intellectualism to me.

NICK: And yet you can’t point to it on a map.

BOB: Maybe you’re just looking at the wrong map. 5 NICK: You know where the footnote of a footnote leads?

BOB: When are we going to start drinking?

NICK: Exactly! As an undergraduate, the footnote of a footnote always leads to the end of the book and the beginning of the weekend. 6 BOB: May I tell you something frankly?

ESS GLASSES

1, 2

BY BOB BOREK NICK: You may, Bob. BOB: Your desire to be an intellectual is what I like least about you. I think that 1 It is my belief that monolithic essays by pretentious intellectuals are an enormous drag. I think that they are uptight, high brow, selfundergraduates on the state of intellectualism at John absorbed and that the reason John F. Kennedy is one of their favorite American Doe University go largely unread and unappreciated. presidents is because they think he’s “hot.”

Please note that this essay is on pseudo-intellectualism 7 and allow it to be an exception.

NICK: That’s a stereotype. (ā’-pîr-ē-ә-dĭs’ĭ-tē) Or something like that.

BOB: Is it? I thought it was a compliment.

2 At the risk of seeming overly clever, I have written my NICK: I recently heard an English major attempt to lecture a Physics major. He essay in the classical Socratic style. For a justification of any irregularities in the approach keep this idea in mind: mispronounced aperiodicity7 seven times and concluded by telling his “dear You begin to listen to THE REPUBLIC book-on-tape and Physician” that what he thought about how the world worked was an overshortly into the dialogue between Plato and Glaucon, Lil’ simplified model.

Jon screams: IT’S THE MOTHER-FUCKING REMIX!!!

BOB: I would never be so forthright with my physician. Especially while he has his 8 hand on my...

This is, in fact, the case. The point is that 8 undergraduates are too ready to renounce the NICK: Perhaps you are missing the point. merits of categorical thinking. Science may or may BOB: Well, it is over-simplified. Isn’t it? not be able to portray the world more accurately NICK: Yes, but the alternative is despair or apathy: “I can’t even understand how this than the Humanities [see Sir Philip Sidney’s A doesn’t work so how am I ever going to understand how it does work.”

DEFENSE OF POESIE], but one can not skip over the introductory models and feign understanding of BOB: What you don’t seem to understand Nick is that college is nothing more than a the far more complicated concept. In the growing pre-game for real life or graduate school. process, there is knowledge that supplements what NICK: People might interpret that idea different ways.9 was there before and knowledge that refutes it.

BOB: I’m becoming suspicious that you’re making an argument.

However, growth is a process that requires patience and requires a movement through each of its stages NICK: You’ve found me out. Almost thought I could keep it implicit: We have even if that stage will be undone at a later time. learned to talk more than we think.

The only way that one can get away with this BOB: Where does Leland fit into this? superficially is if they are not held responsible for NICK: Sorry, what did you say Bob? their understanding. Consider the fact that it has 9 In my experience, there are two main factions of been proved many times over that it is possible to BOB: I said where does Leland fit into this? pre-gamers. One believes that the best way to lower fail a Physics exam, but one can smoke a crack their social inhibitions before going out to a party is NICK: Who’s Leland? rock at 2 a.m., gloss over the cliff-notes of a text alcohol. The other believes that it is marijuana. If Bob 6 and commence a paper due the next day at the The OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY offers two definitions actually applies this idea to the rest of his life then my beginning of class with a strong assurance that they of intellectualism. First is the philosophical: “The doctrine experience tells me that he will have a great time until will not fail the paper [this may or may not be that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from the he is about forty, at which point he will awake one action of the intellect, i.e. from pure reason.” Second: morning to find himself in a strange bed with a woman true]. In both cases, there is responsibility for the “The exercise of the intellect alone; devotion to merely material but on different scales. that he does not know. intellectual culture or pursuits.” The first definition implies a belief and the latter implies an action. Most of us *Lens-less glasses can be taken as the central metaphor of pseudo-intellectualism. Wearing glasses without regard for subscribe to the first definition in some variant or another, their utility is a performative act, the goal of the performance being that others will regard the individual as shortbasically treating intellectualism as an attitude. In the sighted, far-sighted or smart. Through a somewhat paradoxical correlation, glasses have developed this association with latter case, however, intellectualism implies hard work. intelligence [i.e., above average clear-sightedness]. Consider the seemingly omniscient “Owl-Eyes” in THE GREAT GATSBY. It means that one has a rigorous interest in a subject.

More specifically, glasses have been taken as a metaphor for awareness of the subjective nature of one’s view of the One’s curiosity can’t help but tug on every loose thread world. Everyone is tethered to one’s point of view, but intelligent people know that they are tethered whereas everyone and as a result he learns to love the library. Pseudoelse runs in circles until their cheek is up tight against the pole. Joyce’s imperative: “Wipe your glosses with what you intellectualism is the attitude without the action. It is know.” The pseudo-intellectual performs his intelligence without regard for the intensive study that might justify it. He not the footnote of a footnote. It is reading an excerpt goes about perpetually wiping his glosses with what he knows but never cracks the cover of FINNEGAN’S WAKE. from ON GRAMMATOLOGY and then putting on our lensless glasses* and sitting around discussing the disconnect between signifier and signified. It is the duck syndrome, but in this unique variant, the duck’s mother and father have actually purchased a large propeller and have had it surgically implanted in its underbelly. The duck goes about constantly acting like it’s fine eagerly waiting for someone to ask it earnestly: “How are you doing?” so that it can talk about just how hard it’s working, long enough to delude itself into believing this is true. In this particular variant, fortunate students see hard work as an option—not as a necessity.

Without the action, the call to pure reason’s the result of a pretty paycheck.

BURNING THE LEAF Some idiot Left a box of matches On an ovoid charcoal barbeque.

I stole it.

I wandered, flicking them Crimson and dropping them, But the color was Empty in the bodily sun.

Every seven steps there was the plink Of balsa sticks on sandstone and asphalt And other kinds of pavement, And people were watching.

It was a box of matches. A box That read STRIKE EVERYWHERE. That was agreeable as I walked.

I didn’t bother to blow out Each flame Because I figured The rush of flight was enough To end the burn.

One of them, thrown off rightways Landed and held itself in the Splitting of a twig—a flowered shrub No higher than my careful navel.

My waist, which was in denim And wishing for nudity.

A leaf burned, The green becoming black.

The leaf curled inward in the end I made The red lick and the juicy smoke.

– ANNIE WYMAN

44

LELAND QUARTERLY FALL 2006

TAYLOR ALTMAN is a member of the Class of 2006 from Las Vegas, NV. BOB BOREK is a junior from Cincinnati, OH. LAUREN CALDWELL is a senior from Grass Valley, CA. PAYAM CHERCHIAN is a member of the Class of 2006 from Los Angeles, CA. LY CHHENG is a senior from Hyattsville, MD. TOM FEULNER is a member of the Class of 2006 from Spokane, WA. JOANNA FIDUCCIA is a member of the Class of 2006 from Washington, DC. FRANK GUAN is a junior from Prospect, KY. TYLER GUTIERREZ is a member of the Class of 2006 from Bedford, NH. BONNIE JOHNSON is a member of the Class of 2006 from…

ERIC PHETTEPLACE is a senior from Lyme, NH. STEVEN TAGLE is a senior from Yorba Linda, CA. He has been published in Mind’s Eye and Cornell University’s Rainy Day. TONY TULATHIMUTTE is a member of the Class of 2006 from South Hadley, MA. GABRIEL WINANT is a junior from Philadelphia, PA. ANNIE WYMAN is a junior from Dallas, TX. Her editorial work and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Threepenny Review, Black Ink Review, the Stanford Chaparral, the San Francisco Chronicle, and n+1. Her fiction has received recognition from Glimmertrain Stories.

Q: HOW CAN I SUBMIT TO LELAND? – Leland publishes three times per year. We accept submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year. Submissions will be reviewed September through June, and we will do our best to respond within six to eight weeks.

– All submissions to Leland must be original, unpublished work. Please mention if you are submitting to other magazines simultaneously or if your work has received or is being considered for an award.

– Leland accepts and encourages submissions in a wide range of disciplines, including: fiction, poetry, art, creative nonfiction (e.g. memoir, campus culture, student life), reviews (books, movies, music) and political essays (full-length investigative pieces).

– The editors of Leland are concerned first and foremost with the quality of expression exhibited in a work, and not in the genre of work itself. Our goal is to have quality content across a breadth of disciplines, so please do not be afraid to innovate in your submissions.

– There is no expectation in terms of length of essays, poems, or fiction.

– Leland accepts submissions exclusively from current Stanford undergraduates.

– We encourage multiple submissions for as many issues to which you would like to contribute. That said, we request that you send in no more than six poems at a time and a maximum of four longer pieces.

– All submissions are judged anonymously by the editors.

Submissions can be sent to LelandQuarterly@gmail.com Check out leland.stanford.edu for more details.

THECAMPUS LOOP

W H AT ?

WHERE? WHEN?

A NOTE ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Tuesday, September 26, 2006 to Tuesday, October 29, 2006 Studio Access: Leo Holub · Holub (1916 – ) is a local photographer who has photographed Stanford life for 45 years. ·10:00 AM – 5:00 PM ·Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery

Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Borderlands of Culture Book Discussion ·Featuring: Michael Hames-Garcia, Kirsten Silva Greusz, Professor Ramon Saldivar ·5:00 PM – 7:00 PM ·Margaret Jacks Hall, Terrace Room

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 Lane Lecture Series: Roddy Doyle ·Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter. He will be reading from his work. ·8:00 PM – 9:30 PM ·Kresge Auditorium

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 Roddy Doyle: Colloquium ·Doyle will be holding an informal colloquium. Light lunch will be served after. ·11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ·Margaret Jacks Hall, Terrace Room

Friday, December 1, 2006 Kronos Quartet ·Energetic string quartet probably best known for the soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream. ·8:00 PM ·Diskelspiel Auditorium ·$44/$40 for adults, $22/$20 for Stanford students

Monday, January 15, 2007 Ian McEwan: Colloquium ·McEwan is an English novelist most famous for Atonement. His latest book is Saturday. ·11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ·Margaret Jacks Hall, Terrace Room

Monday, January 15, 2007 Lane Lecture Series: Ian McEwan ·McEwan, still an English novelist, will be reading from his work. ·8:00 PM – 9:30 PM ·Kresge Auditorium

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Volume 1, Issue 1 Copyright Š 2006 by Leland Quarterly Stanford University http://leland.stanford.edu/