1993-Vol29

QUARTO

QUARTO THE LITERARY MAGAZINE OF THE SCHOOL OF GENERAL STUDIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK VOLUME 29

1993

SUBMISSIONS Current and recent General Studies' students—including nondegree students and students in other branches of Columbia University who are enrolled in Writing Program courses—are encouraged to submit to Quarto.

We welcome poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, and plays, including excerpts from longer works.

Each submission should be accompanied by a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. Please include your name, address, and phone number (optional) on your manuscript.

Manuscripts may be submitted elsewhere while under consideration at Quarto; just notify us of acceptance by another publication.

Executive Editor Amy Scheibe Associate Editors Ingrid Aybar Melissa Bell Kelly Boyle Ellen Dowd Joan Obra Poetry Editor Kermit Perlmutter

Address all submissions and correspondence to: Quarto 615 LewisohnHall Columbia University New York, NY 10027

Faculty Advisor Gary Lenhart Director of the Writing Program Alan Ziegler Quarto is edited by students enrolled in Literary Editing and Publishing.

All contents © 1993 by Quarto.

All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists upon publication.

ISSN 0735-6536

The editors wish to thank Mary Ruth Strzeszewski and Joe McCormick.

CONTENTS RED GREEN THE HALO

9

WILLIAMS ROSSA COLE LESSONS FROM PROMETHEUS

SUSAN F. QUIMPO LANTERN PARADE

21

MICHAEL CERVIERI LETTERS NEVER REMAIN SO

PASCALE ROGER FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE LET IT BE KNOWN

27

THE BATHROOM

28

31

39

44

51

59

61

65

67

MELANIE CONTY SUCKER

95

/ DREAM OF FREEDOM FROM THE COUCH

104

THE TEE SHIRT

107

You PAINTED LIPSTICK

117

VEGAS WEDDING

119

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD

127

TING BELL

LARRY REILLY ICE LADY

MOOD OVER MATTER: NOTES ON MTV

JOE CONNELLY

PASCALE ROGER SUICIDE SIR

92

SALLY JONES

REBECCA SHULMAN THE DIG

LOST AND DIIATING IN JUIGALPA, NICARAGUA

ALISSA HEYMAN

CECILIA CALDERON THE POSTCARD

87

M. D. EDWARDS

CHERIE MARGARET BROOKS FANTASIE IMPROMPTU

THE DOGS

JUDY WANG

EDWARD NAPIER MY MOTHER 'S ROOM

NEAL FEINBERG

AMY TALKINGTON

RAUL CORREA CHICKEN

83

WILLIAMS ROSSA COLE

SUSAN KELLY THE ICEBREAKER

81

77

THE VILLAGE

136

ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOS

THE QUARTO PRIZE

PORTIA RACASI

COVER PHOTO

CARL BAMBINA

8, 66, 88

FOR

OUTSTANDING LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT IS AWARDED TO JOE CONNELLY

A. SCHEIBE

20, 38, 94, 126

LINDA GREENE

30, 50, 76, 118

MELA BOLINAO

60

HERBY MATTEI

82, 106

FOR "BRINGING OUT THE DEAD"

CHOSEN BY THE EDITORS

T RED GREEN THE HALO

There was a child born on Horse Island with a halo, but nothing much came of it.

It was a honey-colored halo like what you see in the old paintings, but smaller, only four inches across. Its glow was faint. It floated in the air slightly above the child' s head, and was fixed there as though by invisible bars. The halo was just a ring of dim light, but to the hand it was solid and smooth as a ring of brass.

I was the doctor who delivered the child. I gripped the halo with both hands and told the mother to push as hard as she could. The mother gave a terrible cry, and the baby struggled out on the delivery table trailing the umbilical cord.

The nurse and I cleaned her up. She was a pretty little baby, and her name was Alice-Louise Mitsubishi Baffleman.

Her mother Yasuko was Japanese. Her father, Fred Baffleman, came from Massachusetts. They were hard workers and were well accepted on the island.

Everyone was astonished at the birth. It was as though the floor had dropped out of the world. There was a universe of questions. People went around dumbfounded. They looked at clouds and stars and ordinary objects and at each other in a new way. I myself was extremely perplexed. One of my nurses became hysterical and had a crying fit. She hid in the women's room and tried to cut a hole in the palm of her hand with a scalpel. But it soon healed and she regained her senses.

The town expected to become famous overnight. They expected swarms of reporters and television cameras. But only a few reporters came. This is probably because it is so hard to get to Horse Island. It is such a long ride on the ferry, almost four and a half hours. And the water is so rough, even experienced lobstermen get sick.

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Also, the halo did not photograph very well. And, the baby did not look like what people expected. She looked Asian.

She had very black hair. She was usually solemn. Sometimes she had a kind of cross puzzled look which was not very appealing.

Her mother spoke very little English and did not really seem to understand what a halo meant to most people. And finally, her father did not believe in God. He was an atheist.

The first article reporting the halo appeared in anational newspaper along with other stories about flying saucers and abominable snowmen. Probably very few people who read about the halo believed it. And after that, the more respectable newspapers probably didn 't believe the story either, and wouldn 't send anyone to investigate.

The only other reporter who came was from achildren's magazine. He was interested only in the scientific properties of the halo. He wanted to know how it could hover in midair, and what would happen if you hit it with a spoon. As far as I know, his article was never published.

And so for a while nothing much came of the halo.

Some people in the town seemed to think that Alice-Louise might be a messenger from God, and that she might be able to cure people of various diseases, or even raise people from the dead. Several old and sick people went to visit the parents and asked to place their hands on the halo, hoping to be cured. The mother took pity on them and allowed it. Hopefully, they placed hands on the child, but nothing happened. Before long, people realized that Alice-Louise had no special powers. Except for the glowing halo, she was a completely ordinary and normal baby girl.

Understanding this, the island people respected the family's privacy and did what they could to protect them from curious strangers who occasionally appeared on the island.

a short bout of pneumonia. She had plain brown eyes and a normal curiosity. She nursed contentedly, and was happy riding around town in a stroller or in her mother's backpack. In bright sunlight the halo was nearly invisible, and unless you knew what to look for, you might not have noticed. She received many crib toys and teddy bears and her parents were proud and happy.

Before long, she was standing in her crib. Soon she was able to scoot around the floor in a walker, and after that she was toddling. She was hard on the cats. Her parents fitted out all the electrical sockets with plastic covers, and put special latches on the kitchen cabinets.

She babbled and tried to imitate the sounds her parents were making. Some people in the town thought that when she began to talk, she might have an unusual message of some kind.

Her first word was "cat". Her first sentence was, "Look at Daddy eating french fries." Her parents were astonished and overjoyed to hear this, and tried to get her to say it again. But she only smiled.

At her second birthday party she had a temper tantrum and refused to let anyone have a share of the cake. Her parents could not allow this and removed her howling from the table.

She had other tantrums too.

One day she was seen banging her head on the floor of the grocery store, embarrassing her father. But tantrums are normal in a child of that age.

The father had a strange dream. He dreamed he was building a chain link fence around his yard and woods. The fence kept rising up out of its postholes and floating in the air.

His parents, and a big crowd of old people, sick and crippled, were crawling under the fence, begging the child to heal them.

Alice-Louise sat crying in the mud of the garden. The halo was full of hay. Through the outlying islands, an endless stream of ferries was approaching, carrying thousands of people more.

The child was ordinary. She cried when she was wet and when she wanted to be fed. She had occasional rashes, and

When Alice-Louise was two and a half, the parents had a serious scare. The child was missing from her crib.

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It turned out she had been taken by an off-island woman who wanted to adopt her. The woman was mentally ill but gentle, and was stopped as she tried to board the ferry with Alice-Louise in her arms. The child was unharmed, and the woman gave herup without an argument. The parents chose not to press charges. The woman blessed them, gave Alice-Louise a little gold crucifix from around her neck, and waved from the ferry as it moved away.

This incident caused a stir in town, and made people more aware of how vulnerable the child was.

For several months the town seemed to become more friendly. People became a little nicer. Not too much, but a little.

It was as though everyone were thinking about who this child might really be, and took the opportunity to show themselves at their best. An old man who was considered cold and aloof began to tip his hat to people as he made his way down the sidewalk.

The owner of the hardware store began putting out a tray of butterscotch balls for the children. The library started a story hour once a week. The manager of the fish plant installed a protective guard on the conveyor belt without, being asked, and some of the lobstermen's wives tried to give up smoking.

None of this lasted though.

When Alice-Louise was a little older, she liked to play "peanut butter sandwich" in bed with her friends. Three of them would lie on top of each other in a stack. The first one would cry, "I'm the bread!" The second would cry,"I'm the peanutbutter!" And the third one would cry, "I'm the jam!"

She was a little bossy, but well-liked. Except for a few naughty boys who called her "hoophead" and were punished for trying to pick her up by the halo, she was not teased.

She adored animals, especially cats and her father's horse. She had to be protected from the geese, which would come hissing and knock her in the mud.

The halo made it difficult for Alice-Louise to turn somersaults, but easy for her to stand on her head. Upside down, she would fold her arms and everyone would applaud. The halo also made it easier for her to roll down the hill of her parents'

lawn. It acted as a kind of wheel. She had a great ability to carry things on her head, such as bowls, dolls or what have you. The children tried to toss a rubber basketball onto the halo, but it bounced on her skull and the game did not work well.

The pastor of the Congregational church, as you might expect, took a great interest in Alice-Louise, but was concerned that her parents never attended the religious services. He paid them a friendly visit and asked Yasuko to think about sending the child to Sunday school. Yasuko agreed that it might be good for Alice-Louise because it would acquaint her with what other people were thinking. But she hoped that when the child was older, she would become a Zen student.

When Alice-Louise was five, a woman who claimed to be suffering from "twentieth century disease" appeared on the island. A person with this disease is allergic to almost anything artificial. For example, wallpaper, paint, sheet-rock, shampoo, cooking oil, almost anything. Well, the woman called Yasuko from the ferry, and begged to see Alice-Louise. Yasuko took pity on her, and let her place hands on the child. The next day, the woman pronounced herself cured. She had sat next to an open can of sheet-rock compound all afternoon and had not been affected. This story was broadcast on the radio. The reporter speculated that what seemed to be a miraculous cure might really be due to auto-suggestion or the fresh ocean air.

During the next few months, a dozen or so people with twentieth century disease appeared on Horse Island. There were also several mentally ill people who arrived with their relatives. Everyone in town realized this was an unusual number of visitors for a small island with ferry service only once a week.

The two bed-and-breakfasts in town appreciated the additional guests. The restaurant served a few more meals, and the service station pumped a little more gas.

The town's only realtor was astonished to receive earnest money down on two shore properties in the same morning. Both the buyers were people with twentieth century disease.

The realtor thought he saw a trend.

He called his cousin who was a financier on the

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mainland. Together they put earnest money on half a dozen houses that could easily be converted into bed-and-breakfasts.

The next month, an architect for the financier introduced a wild scheme in the town meeting. He was going to turn Horse Island into an "island of healing." He was very considerate of Alice-Louise. He realized that having thousands of people place their hands on the halo of the little child would not be possible. But since faith was the main factor in the cure, they wouldn't have to. It would be enough just to bring them to Horse Island. They would breathe the air the child breathed and walk where she had walked. He proposed to build a helicopter landing pad on two old granite barges which he had already purchased and would float a little offshore. There would be two Sikorsky troop carriers shuttling between Horse Island and the mainland. He proposed to buy the abandoned quarry back of town, and build a semicircular "Horse Island Halo Hotel" of granite quarried on the site. He offered to pave the roads connecting the landing site, the hotel, and the Congregational Church at his own expense. He would also underwrite the cost of a new sewage system.

Well, the town was just beside itself until the next meeting when people would get their chance to respond.

Fred and Yasuko Baffleman spoke first and said they felt the scheme was exploitive and that it threatened their privacy. Most of all they felt that constant attention from outsiders might affect Alice-Louise psychologically.

Their neighbor from across the road spoke next and said she didn' t like the idea of thousands of noisy people milling around her flowerbeds. She also thought it might put the child' s life in danger. She reminded people of what happened to the last messenger who arrived from God. She said that in her opinion, the last messenger had done more harm than good, and all the wars proved it. In her view, it was best for the outside world to know as little about Alice-Louise as possible.

I spoke next in my capacity as the town doctor. I said that in my professional opinion, the child was completely normal except for the halo, and there was no evidence that the halo had any curative powers. I said that to represent otherwise

would be fraudulent. If false claims led anyone to forego proper medical treatment, it could lead to a worsened condition and even death. Lawsuits might result.

The financier argued back, and the people became angry. They didn't like him. They didn't want a bunch of highpressure outsiders coming in, no matter what they promised.

The financier couldn't get his building permits, and that was the end of that.

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A while afterwards, wishing to express their gratitude for the support of the townspeople, the parents of Alice-Louise allowed her to be interviewed by the woman who writes the Horse Island weekly newsletter.

Alice Louise revealed that her favorite color was pink, and that her favorite game was something she made up called "horses in college." She loved pasta, but would not eat vegetables except broccoli. Sometimes she wore a hat to bed so that the glow of the halo wouldn't keep her awake. When she grew up, she wanted to be a vet. She said that her mom wanted her to meditate, but it was boring.

The interviewer then risked asking Alice-Louise what happens after death. Alice-Louise said, "You get reincarnated.

That means you get reborn as your favorite animal. I want to be a Maine Coon cat. A Maine Coon cat has long fur and is very fuzzy!"

That article was picked up by one of the mainland papers. The parents of Alice-Louise began to receive occasional telephone calls, mostly frivolous. But there were a few from serious scientists. To them, the child was a new phenomenon of nature. They thought the hovering halo might be the key to antigravity devices.

One research team finally persuaded the parents to let someone visit. A man arrived with a briefcase full of brochures showing cat-scan machines and electrical equipment of all sorts. When he spread these materials out on the living room rug, Yasuko was horrified. They wanted to feed the child a form of water with the oxygen molecules altered, and lower a huge

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electromagnet shaped like a doughnut over her head. They wanted to place different thicknesses of lead sheet between her head and the halo. They wanted to scratch the halo with a diamond drill. They wanted to take X-rays, spectrograms, and infrared photographs. They wanted to measure the electrical voltage between her halo and her toes.

Yasuko was dead set against her child being used as a guinea pig. But the scientist argued that the tests might prove the halo to be merely a natural phenomenon, and might save Alice-Louise from harassment by religious fanatics laterin life.

Fred Baffleman was convinced by this argument, and finally persuaded Yasuko to allow a cat-scan. The video monitor showed interior views of the child's skull from every angle. All they discovered was a spiral dimple at the top of the cranium.

Like the curl in a pudding when you take out the spoon.

The sight of her child being fed into the cat-scan cylinder terrified Yasuko, and she refused any further tests.

While on the island, the scientist asked me to show him the medical records of Alice-Louise. We reviewed a sonogram which had been taken before the birth. At four months, the halo had been no bigger than a wedding ring, and showed as a faint white ellipse.

Perhaps the marriage had just worn out, like an old pair of shoes.

When Alice-Louise was seven, her mother filed for divorce. The island was stunned. The reasons were never clear.

Neither of the parents were in the habit of discussing their private life outside the marriage. For a year, they continued living under the same roof. Yasuko looked distraught, and suddenly older. Fred Baffleman remained bland, and proceeded about his business, but drank a little. Her teachers noticed that Alice-Louise seemed withdrawn.

There was a terrible argument in the town parking lot.

Yasuko tried to drag Alice-Louise from her father's arms. The child cried as though her heart would break.

No one could understand why the divorce was occurring.

Both parents had been faithful and appeared to love each other.

It may have been the isolation. Yasuko may have begun to miss her home. Perhaps she was unhappy about the island schools.

When Alice-Louise was losing her baby teeth, the halo began to disintegrate. The glow died, leaving a dry bony ring.

This began to yellow and then to craze with hairline surface cracks like old china.

A piece the size of a tooth loosened, and began to dangle as though on an invisible string. Finally the string snapped and the fragment came off in Alice-Louise's hand. It happened that one of her baby teeth had been wiggling for several weeks and fell out that same afternoon. She took the pieces home, put them under her pillow, and received from the tooth fairy two quarters in exchange. Fred Baffleman then brought the tooth and the halo fragment to me, and I sent them to the scientists to do with what they would.

They broke both samples into three smaller pieces, and sent a tooth fragment and a halo fragment, unmarked, to laboratories at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Three scientific teams subjected the samples to chemical and physical analysis.

The MIT team included some molecular engineers, who went so far as to literally disassemble, molecule by molecule, a portion of each sample, using a scanning stylus and a laser monitor. When all evidence from the three teams was compared, they found that the halo of Alice-Louise was chemically and physically identical to her baby teeth.

Meanwhile, additional tooth-size fragments continued to loosen, dangle, and fall out, an astonishing thing, especially since the intervening parts remained immoveably in place. It was a halo with gaps. The dangling fragments would hang into Alice-Louise'shair, tangling and catching when Yasuko brushed her. The hair would yank miserably and the child would cry. In frustration, Yasuko finally twisted the invisible strings of the dangling fragments around the remaining parts of the halo, and wrapped the whole thing with masking tape.

The lumpy tape halo that resulted drew ridicule from the child's schoolmates.

Alice-Louise was a growing girl and had begun to be conscious of her looks. She complained to her mother that one

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of her toes had a "little belly". She worried that she had "ankles on her elbows". These anxieties were such that after a few months Yasuko brought her to the clinic for my reassurance.

Alice-Louise sat on the examining table swinging her legs.

I tapped her knee and told her she was a very pretty, very strong, very smart, perfectly normal growing girl.

"If I'm so normal, how come I have this thing on my head?"

"Well," I said, "That's special."

"It's ugly!" cried Alice-Louise. "Mommy makes me wear a hot hat in school!"

She was brimming with tears. I suggested we unwrap the tape and have a look.

"I hope it falls apart and falls off!" cried Alice-Louise.

A lot of it did fall off, but not all. Sticking to the tape as I unwound it were seventeen loose fragments. But there were five others still dangling. The front part of the halo was now missing entirely, except for one segment an inch long which was still hovering, fixed as iron, above the child's left eye.

Alice-Louise cried and cried. There was nothing to do but to tape up the rear and side segments and send her home.

the halo fragments belonged in. Finally they were displayed in their own special case near an exhibit comparing the skeleton of a human child to that of a baby gorilla. The pieces lie there arranged in a ring like a necklace some prehistoric savage might have worn. The display behind them shows the sonogram, the cat-scan, and a photograph of Alice-Louise when the halo was whole.

[Q]

In another month, there was nothing left of the halo but the piece above her eye, still there, still hovering, like some maddening insect. The poor child would grab at it and try with all her might to yank it off, but it was futile as trying to dislodge one of her own bones. Finally she looked in the bathroom mirror one morning, and it was gone. She was overjoyed. The fragment was never found, and the parents decided it must have come off in her sleep. Perhaps the cat got it, and dropped it through a crack in the floorboards.

When the school year ended, Alice-Louise and her mother departed from the island.

The remaining pieces of the halo, fifty-one in all, we donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The curators were uncertain at first which collection

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SUSAN F. QUIMPO LANTERN

PARADE

I had to go to school. I clutched thick folders to my chest, wrapping both arms around them. There was no need for my notes that day, but I felt I had to hold on to something, even if it was only folders stuffed with notes for a test I had taken days ago.

It was the last day of school before the three week Christmas break. A few exams were scheduled, but these were the exception. Even the faculty was lenient, for they too were excited about the biggest university event of the year: the evening's Lantern Parade.

The college theater group I belonged to had a good shot at winning first prize. Ramoncito, the group's artist, had designed a six foot lantern. Its thick cardboard frame was to take the shape of a pyramid, or in keeping with the season, a Christmas tree. But as always, the group was bent on making a statement and the well attended Lantern Parade was the perfect venue.

The lantern's black frame would be scored into a template of cutout human figures and red cellophane would be stretched underneath this cardboard scaffold. It was to be mounted on bamboo poles and lit from within, casting crimson shadows of quivering human forms. From top to bottom, the lantern would be covered with faces of society' s underprivileged as if they were trapped in the pyramid cage. The overall effect was meant to be disturbing-weary creases on a farmer's face, gaping mouths uttering silent screams, hate clenched in fists, and eyes gawking, questioning the morality of Yuletide celebrations void of Christian charity. Ramoncito's Christmas tree was to be wrapped in blood and garnished with rebellion.

It was the season for reconciliation, howevcrtemporary.

Employers gave gifts of fruit and honey laced ham to workers they had exploited all year. Seasoned protest m archers refrained 21

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from converging at Malacanang, the presidential palace, to burn the American flag and Marcos effigies. And members of the Communist militia, the New People's Army, came down from the hills to visit kin while the government troops pretended not to notice. Even at the university, differences were dismissed as moneyed sorority girls joined the most militant activists for the Lantern Parade.

I should have been excited, wanting to help piece together Ramoncito's lantern for the competition. But joining the day's festivities was hardly the reason I left for school that day.

My sister-in-law Tina had visited the family residence the night before. The fact that she came was a surprise. After three raids, it was safe to assume that our apartment was under military surveillance. It was deemed "too hot," taboo to anyone even remotely suspected of having links with the communists, forbidden to Tina so recently released from prison.

"Visiting so soon?" I chided, partly reminding her of the risk she was taking. Tina did not smile. It was unlike her not to exchange the usual greetings. Her voice was calm yet her face was pale with anxiety.

There was news that her husband, my brother Jun, had been killed in a barrio called Kalisitan in Nueva Ecija, a province three hours north of Manila. That was all the "courier" said; even he did not know the details.

Jun had often alluded to his death and half jokingly requested that his wake be held at his alma mater, the University of the Philippines. UP was his refuge; it had become mine too.

It offered an asylum for those weary of the statutes of martial law. Within its walls was freedom-freedom to organize, discuss and protest, at least for a few hours a day. In the milieu of academic autonomy, UP became the breeding ground for activists and soon to be revolutionaries. Jun had thrived here; Jun had changed here. And if he were to die, it was only fitting that he come home.

Early the next day, my sisters made the trip to Nueva Ecija. I stayed in Manila, assigned to go to school and arrange a wake for a brother I wasn't even sure was dead.

The Catholic chapel at UP had always been modest.

Even at Christmas, the star lanterns and paper cutout trimmings hardly changed its homely appearance. The prayer pamphlets from the morning mass lay uncollected on the empty pews. I made my way to the chapel's administrative office not really knowing what to say.

"I'd like to arrange for a wake."

"When will you bring the body?" the clerk asked, her voice crisp, almost uncaring. Secretly I thanked her; I could not have dealt with mock sympathy.

"I don't know.. .you see, I'm not even sure he's dead."

I took a deep breath and fumbled for an explanation. The clerk' s reaction was one of blunt realism. She turned to a colleague and remarked that it was yet "another student killed by the military."

Only a couple of weeks before this same chapel played host to the body of a slain student activist.

I walked to Palma Hall where I knew my friends would be. It was cool, the skies were clear, and the weather was perfect for the night's festivities. I stared at the road, pacing slowly as though counting the spots where the asphalt had caved in, where gravel and dirt basins caught the monsoon rains. In me, there was no room for reconciliation.

The night before, the family tried piecing together a descriptionofJun-scars,moles,birthmarks-anythingthatwould be distinguishable should his corpse be badly bruised or mutilated. It was hard to remember how he looked and even harder to remember who he really was.

For the last seven years I saw little of Jun and my other siblings. It would be simple to blame their absence on their avoidance of military raids, imminent arrests and detention.

But I knew that my family had drifted apart long before the political persecution began. I was the passive observer who for ten years witnessed the heated exchanges at the dinner table.

My parents could not understand why their children would want to organize and join street demonstrations and risk losing scholarships. What was remotely wrong with acquiring a good college education to ensure a comfortable future?

My siblings reasoned that the dictates of the times were

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different. The protest marches were indicative of a national movement demanding significant change. The hopelessness of the common man's poverty, the corruption in government, the monopoly of power by the oligarchy, the effects of neocolonialism, and the age-old conflict over land ownershipthese problems had now come to a head. And though to some the debates were little more than youthful rhetoric, my siblings had spent evenings poring over Marx, Lenin, and Mao in search of answers. For them, to ponder on self, family, and material comfort amidst pressing times was an indulgence they couldn't afford.

The Palma Hall Annex was bustling with activity.

Even the stairwells were teeming with students piecing together oddly shaped lanterns. My friends blocked one of the corridors, littering the floorwith sheets of cellophane and craft paper. Our lantern was far from done.

I managed to pull Ramoncito and a few others from the crowd. Calmly, I excused myself from helping with the lantern and briefly explained my predicament.

"My family received word that my brother was killed.

I still do not know the circumstances." I pretended not to notice their baffled faces and then retreated for a solitary lunch. I did not want to be consoled.

"Hello, Lulu? It's Susan." Lulu was our devoted housekeeper. Constantly aware that ourphone may be bugged, she had the good sense to keep conversations short.

"No news Ate Susan, in fact, no one has called."

Martial law-no two words had such an impact on my life as these. I grew up on a street named Concepcion Aguila, a five minute walk from Malacanang Palace. With the onset of martial law, our neighborhood turned into a garrison. First came the 24-hour shift of palace guards manning wooden roadblocks. Soon the roadblocks were replaced with heavy iron barricades densely wrapped in barbed wire. Then the rickety wooden police outposts at our street corner were torn down, and solid concrete stations complete with toilets and telephones were built. During curfew hours, the army trucks would often come and empty their hulls of soldiers. Police cars with squawk

boxes joined the party. Residents needed special car passes to enter the area. Soldiers randomly checked pedestrians for IDs certifying they lived in the district. Like prisoners, we needed the military's permission to enter our own homes.

Then the military raids began, at first to ensure that the homes around the Palace were stripped of civilian-owned firearms. But as years passed, our apartment was singled out, and this time, the raiding teams were bent on making arrests.

Marcos adamantly denied the existence of detention camps: "We have no political prisoners," he repeated to the foreign press. Yet while my high school peers had spent their weekends attending family picnics, I spent mine packing cooked rice in foil and powdered milk into empty tins and helping Dad deliver these rations to siblings in three cramped "rehabilitation centers." On Monday mornings, my classmates would ask what I did for the weekend. "I stayed home," was my usual reply.

It was ncaring dusk and the students now hauled their lanterns of various shapes and sizes into the street facing Palma Hall. Masked by nervous giggles, they spied their neighbors' lanterns. In hushed tones, comments of awe and ridicule were exchanged. A few sang Christmas jingles, many to the tune of popular TV soap commercials. I decided to momentarily join the crowd to satisfy my curiosity.

"Susan! We're here!" a member of the theater group called above the growing throng. I watched and smiled; in jest, my friends swore as they took turns trying to suspend the lantern from bamboo poles. "It's far too heavy. I warned you, this would never work! Watch the lamp, it'll set the cellophane on fire!" The lantern wasn't perfect, but it was done.

I weaved into the group and took my turn at badgering the lantern bearers. It wasn't long before a few friends called me aside. To my horror, they said in all sincerity, "We heard about your brother, our condolences."

"No, no one said he was dead," I snapped, more upset than angry. I turned away and again retreated.

Martial law had forced the open opposition movement underground. When military repression ensued, the call for

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armed rebellion was justified. Almost overnight, the label "student activist" was no longer apt. The newspapers were quick to christen the members of the underground movement with new names: communist insurgents, terrorists, guerrillas, rebels. Yet my personal lexicon remained unchanged; in my mind, they were simply family.

Though I was baffled by my siblings' continued loyalty to "the revolution," their courage had won my respect. What I could not accept was that this movement, the revolution, had the powerto drawmembers away from theirlives and their families, yet could not care for its own.

Where were the kasamas, their comrades-in-arms, when my brothers Ronald Jan, Nathan, and Norman suffered torture inflicted by their military captors? Where were the kasamas when Ronald Jan's head was repeatedly immersed in acommode filled with urine, when water was injected into his testicles, when his feet were doused and jabbed with a live wire? Our family did not hear from the kasamas when Nathan was stripped naked and clubbed until he was nearly unconscious. No assistance was offered when my sister Lillian was missing for weeks and Dad made the rounds of prisons in search of her.

Does one cease to be a comrade upon his or her capture? This revolutionhad stripped my family of any semblanceof normality.

It had promised victory, yet it only brought separation, torture, and now possibly, Jun's death.

"Lulu, I'll be home in an hour." It was my nth call to Lulu; she still had not heard from my sisters who ventured to Nueva Ecija. I refused to worry about their safety; to do so would only add to the day's futility.

It was nearly ten o'clock when I arrived home. I was exhausted though I had spent most of the day idly walking around the UP campus. As usual, Lulu had dinner waiting for me. She said that my sisters were not back nor had they called with news.

"Did anyone bother to call?" I asked in total resignation.

"Ay Ate, someone did call. I can't recall his name, but he said your group won first prize at the Lantern Parade." [Q]

26

PASCALE ROGER FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE LET IT BE K\OWIV

That while Men work, and Sometimes come home tired and cranky, Women stick fingers, spoons, toothbrushes, toilet paper, You name it, Down their throats, to throw up anything from an ounce of Chocolate to six pints of ice cream, two hamburgers, three Pears, ajar of pickles, and a cheese covered pizza, In that order.

And this, Before serving dinner On a new tablecloth purchased that morning, With candles to flatter complexioas, And jigsaw cantaloupe for decoration, And this, Before love making in bed To put the Man to sleep So the woman can creep back to the refrigerator, Finish the leftovers, Eat the home baked pie, Too bad, she'll make another for her husband's Business meal the day after next.

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Pascale Roger THE BATHROOM

A beige door with a wooden handle Merde. swings open on slanting oakboards.

You' re crazy, you know.

The washbasin's tap, long and thin, Maybe I'll be covering it with blood. curves only towards the top, Who bloody cares. shines, along with its knobs, and plays with a yellow light dangling from a blue wire.

Dangling's not even poetic, you're pathetic. No, wait, capitalize: Pathetic.

The swinging rays mingle with the wooden atmosphere like firelight in a mountain chalet Proud of your travelling?

Framed in polished bamboo a mirror reflects more oak more light Get on with it. while a round tub, covered with a layer of dust, rests in the far corner.

Sorry, I forgot you like to plough on, gives you a sense of 'Everything's okay!'

A plastic plug straggles from a rusting chain, tied to the draining hole, Avoid the word 'tied' at least!

I'M FINE, TIED OR NOT TIED. True, you function perfectly.

Until when?

In the slanting ceiling,

28

a skylight captures half of a brown bathmat on a rust-colored carpet, I'm on my knees with my head in the toilet, and a faraway moon disc on a royal blue background.

29

SUSAN KELLY THE ICEBREAKER

Twinkle was a foul-smelling old poodle, blind and lame, covered with angry, raw patches where pink skin showed through her fur. I was under the impression she had gnawed herself bare on purpose out of sheer self-loathing. She used to gimp around the house all day long, never stopping to rest. Here she would come, hobbling through a room until she smacked into a wall, a chair, or a table. Pausing for a moment in perpetual surprise, she would turn and head off again until she hit something else, and so on around the house.

Twinkle was probably my mother's only true friend, as she was not slow to remind me and my younger brother Pete.

The way she saw it, our father was an asshole, and if we didn't stop behaving like ungrateful little snakes, she'd let us see how much we'd like living out there by the dam with him and his floosies and his marijuana. I can't speak for Pete, but I thought I might actually like this horrible fate pretty much. I couldn't figure out in what way exactly I was an ungrateful little snake, so I hoped that if things just went on as usual, perhaps Mom would eventually get around to banishing me to that evil condominium on the lake. Maybe that made me a snake, though, if I wanted to go where I could have all my friends over to play in the Jacuzzi and watch videos with names like "Emmanuelle Around the World" dug up from the bottom of bureau drawers.

And, of course, we were just a few of the people who left Mom with only Twinkle for a friend. For starters, she didn't like any other men much better than she liked Dad. Once, on one of her first dates after the big divorce, she went out with a producer who travelled all over the South helping Junior League ladies put on fundraising spectaculars. The next day Mom told me that she and Leonard Metcalf, the producer, were drinking in the bar at the Read House Hotel when Leonard 31

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asked her to come upstairs to his room and look at his etchings.

She mentioned, by the by, that her friend Louise had made fun of her when she told her about this on the phone earlier, because supposedly looking at someone' s etchings was a notorious line.

But Mom said she'd be damned if she'd ever heard of it.

Anyhow, this Leonard, who, when I met him, had blow-dried hair and wore a bright green sports coat and a shin with no tie, got her up there to his room, and then he stuck his tongue down her throat. She said it was like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. Not only was she shocked, but she was disgusted too, and she felt like, if he was going to try this with anybody else, she may as well give him some pointers. She might be able to spare his unsuspecting future dates this needless unpleasantness and, anyway, it might give the man a better chance of success. So she let him know she was very outraged and explained to Leonard that it was nasty and unattractive to stick your tongue in someone's mouth that way.

I was only fourteen. I had never been on anything remotely close to a date. True, two boys, on two separate occasions, had asked me to dance, but both times I think it was on a dare. Still, I felt pretty confident that this was another area where Mom's opinion might differ significantly from mine.

For example, my friend Linda Davis told me that when she kissed Roger Griffin once playing Spin the Bottle, he had stuck his tongue in her mouth, and the way she described it, it didn't seem all that nasty. I had seen enough "Emmanuelle" videos to know that it wasn't supposed to be either. So possibly this Leonard Metcalf was just super gross, but on the other hand, maybe Mom just had a problem with everything.

Afterthe date with Leonard Metcalf, my motherworked up a system to deal with men. Before the man came to pick her up, she would make me swear to wait up for her. Then she'd engineer it so the date ended up at our house, where I had strict instructions to sit there in the living room with them until the man got tired and decided to go home.

One night she rolled in around midnight with her escort, a man named Buddy Champion. Buddy was a good ol' boy, the kind of man who wears a plaid shirt and CAT Diesel

Power hat on a first date, which was, in fact, what Buddy had on. My mother went into the kitchen to make martinis, lurching a little to the side once or twice in her high heels. Dressed in my flowered nightgown so I could hit the hay the minute Buddy left, I took my place on one end of the couch with a Seventeen magazine to get me through the next hour or so. Buddy sat on the other end and we ignored each other. I noticed his head wobbled a little as he stared into the empty fireplace.

Mom came back with the drinks and B uddy made room for her to sit at the end of the couch. He started right in with what sounded like a few last-ditch conversational efforts to get his tongue in her mouth, so I stared at the magazine with an elaborate expression of profound interest and tried to get absorbed in low-cost ways to go to the prom. Buddy was certainly having a hard time. He was sitting real close to my mother, wedging her into her corner of the couch, and she was sort of trying to lean away from him, holding her drink arm over the endtable next to her. He put his face up close to hers and gave her a hard look.

"Those mossy things on that fireplace sure do look like the real thing," he said.

My mother said, "Well they look that way because they are the real thing." She giggled and rolled her eyes at him.

Then followed one of several long, awkward silences.

During one of these, I heard Twinkle's long toenails ticking towards us along the parquet with the uneven rhythm of her peculiar, three-legged rolling gait. Twinkle's right hind leg was useless after she one day navigated herself straight through an open door to our third-floor veranda, between the railings, and right over the edge. She miraculously survived with only a broken leg. Afterwards, whenever my mother left the house, Pete would open all three doors to the veranda, hoping that Twinkle would "accidentally" wander out there again and break another leg, or better yet, just outright die.

When Twinkle ran into the couch, my mother noticed her.

"That poor little dog," she said, shaking her head.

Twinkle was now trapped in the tricky formation of the couch,

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the coffee table, a wingback chair and the fireplace, and when she crashed into the coffee table, my mother's eyes started to well with tears.

"Look how pathetic she is, Buddy, just look at her," she said. Buddy looked and shook his head slowly in sympathy.

My mother burst into huge, racking sobs, which gave Buddy the opportunity he'd been waiting for to put his arm around her.

"I just don't know what to do with that poor dog," she sobbed into his plaid-covered pectoral.

"Ssshhh, Mary Margaret," Buddy said, trying to be the comforting protector.

"Every time I look at her, it just tears me up," she said.

She snorted and whuffed a little. She lifted her head to look at Twinkle again, who found a clear path and headed out toward the dining room, and Mom let out a fresh, drunken sob. "You know, Buddy," she said, sniffling, "I just wish somebody'd put her out of her misery, so I wouldn't have to feel so bad about her all the time." She searched his face with her glazed, rheumy eyes, then turned away from him a little and put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook slightly, but no sound emerged.

Eventually, her voice muffled by her hands, she said, "I just can't bring myself to do it."

"Mary Margaret?" Buddy said.

"What?" she said, still crying.

"Don't you worry about a thing now, you hear? You hear?" he said, and shook her a little by the shoulders, which he still had his arm around.

"Yes," she said very meekly and boo-hooed a few more times.

I hoped it was apparent that I was finding Seventeen magazine more and more deeply interesting with every page I turned. Of course, the whole time I was steeling myself in case I got sucked into this drama because I had seen it all before. One of Mom's favorite things to do when there was an audience was to stage histrionic fits of tears about Jesus, various pets (either living orpassed away), my father, orhermother, in pretty much that order. I found that the best thing to do when one of these was underway was to make no sudden movements, avoid eye

34

contact, and pray that I wasn't already written into the script somewhere.

Buddy patted my mother one last time on the shoulder, then extracted himself and stood up.

"Well, I guess I better be going," he said to me, the chaperone. He seemed kind of nervous for such a drunk guy.

"Bye, Buddy," I said, looking up from the magazine and pushing my glasses up where they had slipped down my nose.

Mom fretted at the corners of her eyes with a knuckle.

She gave Buddy one last poignant look. "Thank you," she said in her smallest voice.

"Bye, Mary Margaret," he said.

Since Mom didn't get up from the couch, I followed Buddy to the front door and let him out. I hung around in the dark foyer for a few minutes, until I heard Mom call out "Good night, honey" with a familiar strangulated bathos, followed by her tragic, faltering footsteps as she retreated to her bedroom.

Very early the next morning, at about 6 o'clock, I woke up for no reason. I heard Twinkle barking downstairs in her querulous old poodle way and knew that's what had woken me up. I heard her scrabbling about, and then a door slammed. I lay there thinking, would Pete get up this early? Not unless it was Christmas. Or, along those lines and considering I never locked the door, could the UPS man have brought me a present?

Before I had come to any conclusions, a tremendous blast, maybe even two or three, from the woods behind the house propelled me out of bed and down the stairs.

Pete and I met in the foyer where we stood for a minute, trying to decide if one of us should brave it and look outside, and if so, which one. A shadow loomed up in the smoked glass of the window set into the front door. Pete and I looked at each other in alarm as the doorhandle turned and the door swung open.

"Oh hey, kids." It was Buddy Champion, with a folded-up piece of paper in one hand and a deer rifle in the other.

Buddy propped the gun against the wall and stuck out

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his hand for Pete to shake. "Hi, son," Buddy said, not smiling.

"My name's Buddy Champion."

"Hey," Pete said, looking bewildered.

"Hi, Buddy," I said.

"Hello, Sally," he said solemnly. We waited for more while Buddy cleared his throat. "Y'all just tell your Mama everything's taken care of with the dog."

"What?" Pete said.

"I've taken care of her," Buddy said. "I went on and buried her out in the woods." I must have blanched, if people really do that, because Pete looked at me for clarification.

"Buddy shot Twinkle, Pete," I said.

"No way!" Pete said, a little too eagerly.

Buddy, who had been looking at his feet, didn't seem to want to stay and chat about it.

"Y'all just tell your Mama forme, OK?" he said. "And give her this note. I've got to get goin'."

Pete and I were too worked up to go back to bed, so we just sat around in our pajamas speculating about what would happen when Mom got up. When she finally did, it was a few minutes past noon. We were watching a fishing show on TV when she shuffled through the living room in her ratty old slippers on her way to the kitchen. We got up silently and followed her. We stood in the doorway watching her while she filled a glass with water out of the tap and drank the whole thing, oblivious to our portentous gaze. She had fallen into bed the night before without taking off her makeup, so she had big raccoon splotches of black mascara under her eyes. Her hairdo was squashed straight up on one side so it made a ridge on top of her head.

I said it. "Mom, guess what?"

"What?" she said, not looking up from spooning coffee into the percolator.

"Twinkle's dead."

"Buddy shot her," Pete followed up quickly, trying to sound grave.

"Nuh-unh," my mother said tonelessly, turning around to look at me in level disbelief.

"Remember what you told him last night about putting her out of her misery?" I asked, not meaning to sound so selfrighteous. My mother stared past my shoulder at nothing in particular. I could tell she was desperately trying to retrieve any little scrap of what all she had said and done last night.

I held out the folded-up note, which Pete and I had already read. It was written on a piece of gray notepaper embossed with the logo of Dixie Yarns, below which was printed "From the desk of.. .Buddy Champion." The note read "Dear Mary Margaret, I was sorry to see you so upset last night.

I hope this helps. I hope you enjoyed the rest of the evening, anyhow. I'll give you a call later on in the week."

Mom stared at the note for longer than it must have taken her to read it.

"He didn't," she said. Her lip quivered as she screwed up her face to the utmost verge of real anguish.

"He did, Mom," said Pete.

Without a word she pushed past us and headed back to her bedroom. A little later we could hear her mourning on the phone to Louise.

Now that the atmosphere of nervous anticipation had evaporated, there was nothing left but vague, insipid sunlight sifting through the curtains we had drawn to see the TV better and heavy whorls of dust cascading where it pooled on the carpet. Pete took off to go reenact the crime by shooting squirrels with his BB gun down on the country-club golf course.

I called my father and begged him to come pick me up.

As I let myself out the front door, I called out halfheartedly, "Bye, Mom." I thought I heard her snuffling and sobbing in her room, and I was pretty sure she hadn't heard me, but I closed the door anyway and walked out into the blinding sun reflected off the driveway. I rode the whole way out to Chickamauga Lake on that summer Saturday afternoon, feeling somehow, though I wasn't sure why, like maybe I was an ungrateful little snake after all.

[Q]

36

37

RAUL CORREA CHICKEN

I pull the checked KOOL out of the fat cuff of my flared baggies, the ones that are frayed from where my Pro-Keds wore them down. 15 years old, smoking and hitch hiking into Providence from St. Andrews School for Boys. The usual deal for a weekend that didn't find me restricted with Friday night study hall and a dozen work hours. I'm one of the court ordered, state kids, ward of the state, so I can usually bum the dollar ten for the bus from a new young teacher who won't be back next year anyway. Shit, dollar ten buys a medium pitcher of Pabst at Lupo's. So here I am with my thumb out, maybe something will happen on my way in and I can really hang out tonight, maybe a girlfriend and everything. Even if it doesn't, I still got that silver, couple a big spoons, bunch of forks and knives, buried over by Brown University, and the bartender at the Abbot Park Hotel which is really just a cool ol' dive will do 'em over for me on the spot. Half the silver is John Black's-I meanI didn't solo that house, I'd feel bad, but JB is up the diagnostic center and Tony Furtado told me that that fuck pinched the last bag of dust he copped for me in Central Falls, but still I'll only do up my half. I'm walking backwards, hitching along Middle Highway in Barrington R.I. They hate St. Andrews kids, call us greasers and shit. I like that-reminds me of all the S.E. Hinton Outsiders books I've read over and over. This preppy town needs us, something's got to stick out.

Coming across the bridge, right at the light by the White Church, a black, I dunno, looks like a Chrysler, big car, it was going straight across but slows down, I think he saw me, caught the light and, yeah, hit his directionals. He's turning onto Middle Highway and if anyone's going to be the guy tonight this is him, even though the guy usually comes straight down Middle Highway. He pulls up and the window comes down all automatic, and there are like four of those Fraternal 39

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Raul Correa

Order of Police stickers on the windshield, now I'm not so sure about him being the guy. I get in and he's all smiling.

Hi, go to St. Andrew's? Going into Providence?

I probably say something like yeah, man, out for the weekend, going into Providence, party, see some girls. Setting him up, seeing if he's the guy or letting him set me up. You see, they all got the same rap and I'd just as soon get it over with. I wonder if these guys have a guide book that tells them how to do this stuff because it's always the same routine.

So, ah, you like girls huh?

Yup, he's the guy. I imagine that a good rule of story telling is that you're supposed to tell the story to yourself first.

I tell him about some Cape Verdean girl that I just make up.

When he asks what I like to do with her, his hand goes to my thigh. Boy, this one is right by the book. Listening to him tell me that he can do those same things for me, that all I have to do is just close my eyes and pretend, I do my bit and act all innocent. I swear his glasses are fogging up, and I figure him for an accountant or lawyer. My dick is hard and he's rubbing more and more, his dick too, and I'm wondering how he's driving.

We pull off into a park, bird sanctuary or something just before you pick up 95. The car goes down a path that it really can't fit down, and this guy is starting to talk to himself, quick and fast. The car stops and is surrounded by brushbulrushes I think they're called. The guy has got my pants down and I think his are down too. He's all jammed in between the seat and the dash. I suggest that he move the seat back and am a little embarrassed about my familiarity with this stuff. He caught me.

Oh, you sweet baby, yeah, good idea.

He does something that kind of hurt so I figured that now is a good time to ask him about the cop stickers on the window and the money. I ask and he's not happy about the interruption because he's talking sort of rough.

I give them money and they give me stickers. You want money from me? For this?

He continues sucking my dick, but now his head moves

funny and fast.

I don't give money for this. I'll do it and drop you off in Providence. But I'll give you twenty bucks for something else.

Let me see the money.

He sits back on the seat and reaches in the back where his shitty looking suit jacket is hanging, and comes back around with a twenty.

Lemme hold it.

O.K. O.K. Know what you gotta do for it, right? Yeah you know, here take it. Yeah, you know, you know it all don't you?

I knew, I mean, I knew what he meant, never had to do it though. I wasn't scared of this guy, this accountant or whatever the fuck he was. I could have ran with the twenty but my pants were down and he was already pulling them over my sneakers, I tried to get brave, he ain't tough man, fuck this guy.

But he had me on my stomach and pulled me up quick by my hips. Some cold shit went on my ass and he's talking to himself again. I check the bill in my fist to make sure it's a twenty and then all I think about is thermometer. Only bigger and this ain't my mom.

Maybe I wasn't scared of this guy before, but I'm scared now. It hurts and everything, but what's not right is what he's saying. I keep trying to look back as if I'll understand more, but he keeps sending my head into the door so I just leave itthere. He's getting louder and I'm biting the thing you roll the window down with.

Oh, yeah whose ass is this? Whose sweet ass is this?

Yes, this ass is mine.

His last push made my black state issued glasses go sideways on my face and the rhythm makes the window-rollerdown-thing go in my mouth and across my teeth.

Fucking this ass.

Words come out of my mouth that only I hear.

Taking your money Oh, yeah, I'm fucking your ass I try not to say the words, I don't want trouble from this

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guy, but through the choked tears and choking on the window thing they come.

Taking your money.

And we go back and forth like the call and response black people church music I learned about in Miss O'Bear's fourth grade music class.

My ass, this is my ass, I'm fucking my little ass Taking your money Fucking your ass Taking your money.

Myhead'sbangingoffthedoorandlliftituptakingmy mouth away from the window thing. The branches of the path must have pushed the side view mirror, because I can see him in its reflection. His head is moving wild with his lips pinned back like an angry dog and he's all sweaty and pale.

Fuck you, shut up what did you say? Shut up. You'll ruin it. I'm just going to fuck this ass.

I yell it this time Taking your money And he yells his part.

And over and over we go, until we are both screaming our parts and he digs his chin into the back of my neck and finishes.

You ruined it you little fuck, piece of shit. Little queer boy, faggot piece of shit. Taking my money, fuck you, you ruined it. Get out, get the fuck out.

He's kicking me and I'm trying to explain that I want the money to go to Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, hear a band, go out, get a girlfriend, and I don't know why I'm in this guy's car curled up trying to get dressed and avoid his kicks, he looks crazy sitting with his pants around his ankles kicking at me like crab soccer, why am I here sobbing, trying to explain and why's he crying?

Get a girlfriend? What? Money to get a girlfriend? Oh, get out, get the fuck out, oh God, little bastard, ruined it, fuck, just go, go!

He stopped kicking and just wept, that's a good word.

I guess I didn't get out of the car fast enough or he got that weird

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kind of pissed again because when I open the door he kicks me out, and he yells some more fast stuff through the fogged up window right before the wheels throw up dirt and he takes off down the path. I come up wondering how I'm going to get a girlfriend with mud on my pants and this wet shit leaking out of my ass.

And holding a twenty.

••• I need to get this straight before I tell the shrink.

Stories. If I could just tell them like stories. That guy's been in my ass for sixteen years pounding away. I just haven't stopped closing my eyes and pretending. So, doc, think I'd get used to this guy in there by now but do you think we could get this guy out once and for all? And if we do, do you think I'll miss him when he's gone?

[Q]

43

Edward Napier

EDWARD NAPIER MY MOTHER'S ROOM

The cracked bedroom door, Afternoon sunlight seeping through a Window blocked by A blind Onto Dark green carpet Which sank like wetted moss.

And roses Of plastic In a ruby glass vase, Others in a little silver basket from a gift shop at White Sulphur, And roses on the wall paper, Roses on the pillows on the chair beside The bed And in the bed with its bolster And the sea of down pillows, So many pillows, My mother lay sleeping Most often; Her dimpled ass jutting out of her pink or white Frilly lace gown Like a giant marshmallow With little red moles.

A television luminating Artificial light into the room Playing soap operas, news, or Dinah Shore Whom my mother loved And pills on her bedside table, Pills in the dresser drawers, Pills in shoeboxes in her closets 44

Which were filled With specially dyed shoes for formals And patent leather shoes for casuals White bucks for workShe was a nurseAnd my father's things.

Mother had a bathroom of her own.

The bathroom was part of her bedroom More roses, Prints of roses, And little soaps in the shape of rosettes And a long white marble vanity And a sink with a brass faucet Which I pretended was gold And rose scented toilet water, Lotions and creams Bottles of Charlie

By Prince Macchiabelli: Smelled like a fragrance shop In a big city Like Lexington or Cincinati.

And powder and jewelry, Countless drawers filled with medical supplies Like enemas Which my Mother loved to administer For anything ranging from constipation to the common cold, And dolls and stuffed animals, a stuffed clown, All had belonged to her six children, Smothered By the sarcophagus of her vanity drawers; Sweet smells and Dead dolls Made up my Mother's vanity.

A black marble topped Victorian occasional table By the toilet Which had belonged to her grandmother With a neat stack of sweet little books: My favorite was Voltaire's PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 45

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Which I read as I shat and felt guilty about it, While periodically looking across the "master bath" Remembering infancy Bathing with my Mother Long breasts No penis And my Father Some breast Penis While out the bathroom window Was the world Which looked gray.

The screen must have been dirty.

I took my Mother's pulse Every day For years Crying And praying to God To deliver me or her As I waited for her to wake From her depressed, drunken, drugged-out state, So I could offer her some tea Or a Coke Or coffee Or something to eat Or anything, And I waited for my sister, Mary, Who came smiling, Loving.

We talked to God. But there was no understanding.

And I would kneel before a Last Right's crucifix Staring into candles Anticipating the stigmata, A Southern Baptist, Hoping to deliver her from her hatred of Herself and 46

Of me, My brothers and sisters, Our dog, Roscoe, Of my Father, Our town, Our state, West Virginia, The world and God! But her mourning was greater than the sky: She mourned the loss of her brother Who went down on the Houston In the South Pacific In World War Two, And her sister, And her mother, And her father, and another brother, And death and decay And loss of life.

She mourned the living as well as the dead, And mourned her inability to understand the brutality of experience.

She didn't know her country.

It was 1970.

She loved music Which my Sister, Mary, played on the piano while I sang, Hymns, To break The long minutes of quiet After she woke.

She never remembered the hours I wrestled her to bed Before I had the strength to lift her, Being eight, The first year of her Addiction, Poor mother!

But we made music.

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In my Mother's room, I possesed the dreams Of a thousand children.

I went to the palaces of kings, And the homes of movie stars!

I fantasized about the creation of the earth, Its primordial past, Cave men, The cave paintings in Spain, I saw them.

I felt there.

Days in Galilee with Christ, When the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed, When Charlemagne defeated the Moors, And Davy Crockett, And Daniel Boone, Lady Godiva, Elizabeth I, I was there with those people.

I was all those people.

I dreamed about all the places I could go in the Encyclopedia Britannica: Venice And Paris And Rome And Iceland And I looked through the pages and stopped to read about things I could not pronounce And would never really know, Waiting for my father to come home, While watching my Mother's gut Expand and retract Like a big bubble fish at the beach, Checking her pulse.

I snooped in the same things Over and over Think it wasn't so bad she was asleep.

To get even with her, I decided to take one of her pillls, I took estrogen.

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All I wanted was to be Pope, Or a medieval saint Or David Cassidy Or anyone else But not just anybody.

49

CHERIE MARGARET BROOKS FANTASIE

IMPROMPTU

The scene takes place in a small room in the 1 lth Precinct in Manhattan in the general vicinity of Union Square. There is a desk with a laminated brown top downstage and three chairs are strategically placed around the table on which there is a legal pad. The chair where Ms. Yannis waits should be placed farthest from the door. She is detached, at times, in spite of the urgency of the circumstances, and her native sensuality creeps in and out of her testimony. She is barely thirty, a writer of poetry and fiction, and very attractive. Detective Roger Hallerman, who waits downstage at the table, is about 28 years old and very passionate about fighting crime. Detective Greg Walsh is nearing forty, married with no children and more relaxed and polite than his partner. He talks quietly to Ms. Yannis upstage.

Walsh Okay, Ms. Yannis, just waithere, everything's gonna be fine. Excuse me for a moment. (He walks downstage quickly to Detective Hallerman and speaks in a low tone of voice with his back to Ms. Yannis, as he guides his partner to do the same. He has her arrest form, i.e., "pedigree" in his hand) All right, Roger, your suspect's here, she's ready to confess. Looks like a ground ball. You wanna carry it? You too beat?

Hallerman

Well, I'm up next anyway, right? This her pedigree info?

Walsh Yeah, (hands him the arrest form) I'll make it up to you at Dywer's later. Ms. Yannis. (escorting her to her assigned seat) This is 51

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Ms. Yannis Hallerman Walsh

Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis Hallerman

Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Hallerman

Detective Hallerman. He'll be taking your statement.

Hello.

How do you do. (He takes his assigned seat.)

Detective Hallerman will be jotting somethings down as we go. Arc you comfortable with that?

Oh, no that's fine. I'm a writer, I take notes all the time.

Good, then. Do you prefer to be called Miss Yannis or Maria?

Ms. Yannis, please. (placing the arrest form on the desk, he picks up his pen and sits) Good, then. Let's begin.

So, 1 should just... what? Do I...shouldl state my name first or...?

Yeah, well, we've got that, your address, vital statistics and whatnot here on the arrest form.

Just tell us what happened in your own words.

Blow by blow?

Well, I wouldn't put it that way. Considering.

Right. Right. I see what you mean. Well, I was sitting on my window sill late in the afternoon, probably about three. (Hallerman jots this down.) I was listening to Chopin, "Fantasic Impromptu" in C sharp minor, Opus 66. I often listen to it when I'm writing, uhm...it's very conducive to creative thinking: so is the "Brandenburg Concerto No. 5" in D minor. I hate MahlcrMiss Yannis. The music you like isn't really what you came here to talk about.

Yes. No. They're just some of my favorite pieces. Uh, my window overlooks 14th Street and it was raining outside. There were lots of yellow cabs swishing below and Chopin lingered in the backgroundUhm. Yeah. Uhm, this isn't a poetry reading,

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Ms. Yannis Walsh Hallerman Walsh Ms. Yannis

Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Hallerman Ms. Yannis Walsh Ms. Yannis Walsh Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Ms. Yannis.

Sorry. I'm trying to be specific. In my own words you said.

That's fine. That's fine. (under his breath) "Lingered in the background." Christ. (aside) Hey, hey, take it easy, Roger. Let her talk, (to Ms. Yannis) Go ahead, Ms. Yannis.

I've lost my train of thought. Uhm. Okay.

Yes. There were... our basil was dying. We had basil planted in some flower boxes on the balcony.

You and the victim?

I have a hard time thinking of him that way.

Yes. Me and Jason. We've lived together for seven years and we'd left them out too long.

The basil. They really can't survive this cold weather and they were all frostbitten and sad.

And so was I. (Throughout her testimony, Detective Hallerman takes notes on all the specifics, i.e., time, place, mood, etc.)

Why was that?

Well, Jason and I bought the plants and these cheap plastic terra-cotta boxes last summer when I had some... well, I was hanging on for dearlife and Jason was so tired of carrying me he could barely stand.

What do you mean?

Exactly what I said.

You were having some trouble?

I was upset.

Can you elaborate on that?

I was depressed, I guess. Apathetic.

Were you under treatment?

No. Were you on any medication?

No.

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Cherie Margaret Brooks

him breathing inside, a raspy kind of breath.

Walsh Jason's?

Hallerman Wait a minute. Are you saying you had a vision or something of standing outside a meat locker?

Ms. Yannis No, I wouldn't call it a vision. That sounds religious. It was just...an...experience that wasn't exactly...uhm, actual.

Walsh Was it Jason's breath you heard, Ms. Yannis?

Ms. Yannis At the time I wasn't sure who it was. Not until I started screaming athim. All sorts of profanity about how I didn't want to let him out, about how he was just a goose of a man, and I finally thought, I don't have to let him out, I don't have to. Who says I have to? I could just leave him there. I have a choice. I have a choice. I was giddy. I was laughing and dancing for maybe-I don't know for how long-but the sound of his breath went on and on and it irritated me, so I gave in and opened the door and he was lying there and I knew he was dying. And I took him by the wrists to lift him up and I said to him, "You know, I don't exactly enjoy this. Saving you. Idon'tlikeit."

And he said, "Go take a piss." He never spoke to me like that before, (she stops, upset) I never imagined him like that.

Walsh (pouring her a glass of water) Here. Why don't you take a moment.

Ms. Yannis No.no. I'm fine. I'm fine. I want to finish this.

(Hallerman has beenfuriously writing, but his pen runs out. He tries to make it work by scribbling while Walsh is talking.)

Walsh Take your time.

Hallerman Shit, my pen ran out. Ya' got one with you, Greg?

Walsh (going through his pockets) Hold on. (aside) You should've brought an extra with you.

Recreational drugs?

No. I used to drink a lot but not so much anymore.

Mmm.hmm. Okay. Good. Goon.

Well, we thought they'd brighten up our apartment, the plants. We thought they'd save us. Hah, hah. And as I was sitting there listening to "Fantasie Impromptu," I was thinking: what? I was worried about something.

There was a little girl on 14th Street carrying an umbrella that was too big for her and she wobbled between the two older women she was with; only she couldn't keep up with them and it reminded me of myself. Then I heard the keys outside the door and the dog got excited and I remember wishing I could melt into some kind of dark mist like there was outside, but the darkness didn't come. But Jason...came in and I heard him, vaguely, in the kitchen going on and on about garbage bags and dog walks and laundry and dishes and I just sat there shivering like a ten-year old trying to come up with an excuse for why I hadn't emptied the garbage and walked the dog and done the laundry and I got up and walked over to the fireplace and.. .(she giggles) It gets all funny here.

Hallerman

(turning away and rolling his eyes, saying under his breath) I doubt it.

Walsh Roger...

Ms. Yannis No, I mean, it was like a flash-forward, or, like I was suddenly thrust into a different environment, I mean, we don't have a meat locker in our kitchen.

Hallerman Excuse me?

Ms. Yannis Well, I was there suddenly, standing outside of a thick, stainless steel door like the door of a meat locker and it was closed but I could hear

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Hallerman Walsh Hallerman

Walsh Hallerman Ms. Yannis Walsh

Hallerman Walsh Ms. Yannis

Hallerman Walsh

Ms. Yannis Hallerman

Ms. Yannis Hallerman

Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Look, I'm sorry.

(finds one and hands it to Hallerman) Here.

Use this. Oops. (He drops the pen.) Goddamn. (looking under the table) Wait a minute. I'll get it. Where'ditgo? (His head is under the table.) (bending down) You see it? (under the table) No. Where the fu-?

I think I see it. (bending under the table) (calm and authoritative) Ms. Yannis. No. Ms. Yannis. Stay in your chair please.

(Hallerman gets up quickly. Ms. Yannis is almost under the table.)

Ms. Yannis, that's okay, don't(quickly guiding Ms. Yannis to her chair) Please sit down. We'll take care of it(finding the pen, she stands) TA, DA! I found it. (Handing the pen to Hallerman, Walsh stays behind her to make sure she sits in her assigned chair.) Here you are.

Thank you.

(Returning to his chair, he lowers his head and partially covers his brow to hide his embarrassment, then looks up in exasperation.)

Excuse us, Ms. Yannis.

No, no, don't worry about it.

For the rest of the interview it's probably best if you remain seated until I, orDetective Walsh, say otherwise, (sighs) Alright, (sitting) Where are we?

Jason said "Go take a piss."

Right. You said he never spoke to you like this before. So would you say it was a good relationship?

Yes, I would, (like a compliment) He's a little dull.

I see. Then what?

And then I started crying and I asked God to

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forgive me for what I was about to do. Even though I don't believe in God. Hallerman Where were you at this time? Were you still outside the meat locker?

Ms. Yannis No. No. I was in the kitchen. Our kitchen.

And then I hit Jason with the fire poker, thing, whatever it's called.

Hallerman You took it from the fireplace? The fire poker?

Ms. Yannis Yes. (giggling) I'm sorry. Fire poker is such a funny term. Fire poker. It's so medieval. I mean, you really can't poke fire, can you? It strikes me as funny.

Hallerman The victim was struck 27 times, Miss Yannis.

Ms. Yannis No, no, no...is that true?

Hallerman Would you like to see the M.E. Report? (He indicates it on the table.)

Ms. Yannis The what???

Walsh Roger, that's not... (guiding Hallerman's hand away from the M.E. Report) Hallerman Pardon me. The Medical Examiner's Report.

Walsh (softly) Roger...

Ms. Yannis No. I don't think I would, Detective Walsh.

Hallerman He's Walsh. I'm Hallerman.

Ms. Yannis Sorry.

Hallerman Exactly where did you strike the victim, Miss Yannis?

Ms. Yannis I don't know, I'm not sure. He tried to fight back butljustkept hitting him. I'mpretty sure I got him behi nd the he ad. I remember thinking that was a smart move. And I hit him in the chest several times. I know that.

(Hallerman checks the Medical Examiner's Report.)

Hallerman So you were fully conscious during this time, right? You were no longer in your "environment," place, whatever you call it, right?

Ms. Yannis Well, no. I mean, yes. I was conscious to a

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Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Walsh Hallerman Walsh Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Hallerman Hallerman Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Walsh Ms. Yannis Hallerman Ms. Yannis Walsh Hallerman Ms. Yannis

Hallerman

degree, I don't know, I'm not a doctor. I certainly don't remember hitting him 27 times.

That's .. .Uhm. The next thing I knew he was on the floor. He'd stopped fighting.

And he was dead?

Yes. I suppose he was... Can I have a glass of water now?

(Hallerman stops taking notes.)

Sure, sure. (He pours her a glass of water.)

How did you know he was dead? Did you check his pulse?

Here you are. (handing her the water) Thank you. (gulping the water) I could tell from his eyes.

What was the position of his body on the floor?

It was...kindof.kindofinafetalposition. But his face was turned upward, I think. I'm not sure.

Okay.

(He checks Medical Examiner' sReportagain.)

Did you call 911 immediately?

No. I took a shower first.

Why did you wait?

I needed to wash my hair. I hadn't washed it in six weeks.

(Hallerman notes this.)

Because . . . ?

It was an experiment.

To find out what?

Well. I learned that once your hair reaches a certain plateau of filth, it doesn't get any filthier.

Oh. I see.

Uh, huh. (He stops writing.)

Yeah. S00000...I guesssss...I just washed that man right outa' my hair. (She giggles.)

Sorry. (disgusted) I guess you did, Miss Yannis. I guess you did.

[Q]

CECILIA CALDERON

THE POSTCARD

In the glossy, red paper bag, the three by five frames The ocean's still waves.

Children playing by the shore wait to be Defined and spend time wading slowly, Staring at their wet figures.

The sky pierced from the other side Releases a forcast of eternal sunshine.

The children know of friendships, secret admirers And future holidays.

One child holds a tiny shell.

Her small hands secure the present from Sea gulls and crashing waves.

A red starfish climbs outside the shell And wraps its arms about her little finger.

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REBECCA SHULMAN THE DIG

Stan stood at the edge of the gaping hole, listening intently to the past. For months his archaeology team had busied themselves digging deeper into the ground, moving further and further back in time. Each new strata revealed another period in history, and with it new sounds that whispered up to Stan. He heard the words emanating from the earth as they were released from their ancient graves-precious sounds and words describing lives and people and places that disappeared long ago. The potsherds whispered to him, and the splinters of glass, the twisted metal and the tiny seeds, and finally even the soil itself.

On this particular dig, in this particular layer, Stan heard the dark, medieval story of families condemned by the plague and saved by the church; lives marked by hardship on a large fiefdom in a rocky and difficult area of Northern England.

The words radiated from the earth along with the decaying tools and the crumbling stones that had formed the ancient houses.

Stan made his crew work in silence, digging, cleaning, sifting and marking artifacts without a waste of words. Letters, sounds and syllables were the precious things he extracted from the earth, and not to be squandered. Through the silence he heard the low murmur of the earth, and smiled at his unique ability.

Stan used short sentences to tell his assistant, Jessica, what the artifacts and the earth revealed, and she in turn wrote it all down carefully. Jessica listened to Stan with great admiration, her eyes intent upon the words as they left his mouth. She was captivated by the stories the earth told Stan, and that he translated to her slowly and cautiously. She strained to hear what Stan did, but she always failed. She could only imagine what a pot once looked like whole, or what use a dented metal circle might have had, as she strenuously pieced together 61

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Rebecca Shulman

clues to reconstruct the past that gave itself so easily to Stan.

Although she could not hear the past, Jessica could feel it. She understood the pleasure a man had taken in sculpting the pot that Stan now held, or the delight of a child in a simple wooden toy, or the grief of a mother whose children all died of the plague. The feelings emanated from the objects she saw and held, warming her, overtaking her. To Jessica they were obvious, unavoidable, so she did not realize that hers, too, was a unique gift. She felt the past distinctly interwoven with the present, a catacomb of lives still reverberating in time.

Stan had hired Jessica before he knew that she could feel the past. Perhaps if he had known he would not have hired her. She sensed the past so intimately; she was there with every smile and cry that marked this little thirteenth century fief. For Jessica the past was an extension of the present; time was an expanse and not a ladder. For her the m iddle ages endured even as the twentieth century uncovered its remains. But Stan, who heard everything, heard most of all the distance. He was aware of every second that had gone into the seven hundred years separating him and the artifacts emerging from the hole, distancing him further from what he loved: these ancient people, this ancient place. He was rooted in the present, and the potsherds in the past. He could never link the two, would never become a part of the past the way Jessica did.

Stan strained harder to catch every echo issuing from the potsherds and the soil. He held a fragment in his hand and it told him about a potter with hands steeped in slip, turning the lump of clay on his wheel until a wide, low pot emerged. He had painted the pot with bright, heroic figures in celebration of a military victory. But the pot was broken before it was used, swept into a corner and thrown away.

He told this to Jessica, and she took the potsherd from him. Holding the fragment between her hands she felt apotter's sadness at a broken pot. Her eyes grew dim and she clutched the remains of her masterpiece closer. Stan saw the desolation in her eyes, and snatched the fragment from her, jealously guarding his past.

More and more fragments emerged from the hole.

62

They arrived in Stan's hands after the digging and sorting and sifting uncovered another splinter of glass or a seed or a stone orclay fragment. Stan slowly reconstructed a world for Jessica, piecing the letters and syllables into words, and the words into paragraphs and stories narrating a part of the past. Stan strained harder and harder to hear the details of the world his team uncovered. The hole got deeper, the artifacts fewer, and with each new story, time, and layer the sounds of the past grew fainter.

As the daylight began to fail the little shovels scraped a new layer of history. The words came quickly, and Stan told Jessica the beginning of a story: a small monastery once occupied this same land, a place of quiet and tradition, until it was burned and pillaged for its gold by Danes caring nothing for quiet or tradition. He dictated carefully, catching and placing each word in order, putting them together like a complicated chain of rusted, intricate loops.

Jessica felt the disruption, the loss and the death, the suddenness of an overturned world. And then she began to hear the words.

They streamed out of the rich soil in thick clumps, black and ravaged, some still burning with the red of the ancient fire. They climbed from the bottom of the hole up to the fading light, to where Jessica and Stan waited. They were old and crumbling, and they struggled out of their graves into a new life. Some leapt out, kicking at the confining earth; others arrived slowly, painfully, tugging sentences behind them, bending under their own weight. They reached the air and whispered their story to the waiting ears, and then escaped into the world. Most of them popped before they got far, bursting like bubbles in a modern time.

Jessica stood absolutely still between a red sun and the words climbing into the air. She closed her eyes and listened to the past, the story of tradition and routine disrupted by a sudden attack, a story of change, and heard the great distance that separated these faded words from her own speech and the new grass that grew above the ancient soil. And she felt it all, felt the sudden terror and pain of the monks and their quiet as they

[

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abandoned ruined tradition and entrusted themselves to their god, felt the rush of an easy victory, simply another type of routine, felt herself as both monk and Dane, no different then herself, with her own routines and conquests and defeats, felt the timelessness of it all.

Stan still spoke the words out loud, telling Jessica about the death of the monks, until he saw her lips moving as he told the story. She knew the words before he spoke; the story was hers now as well as his. He saw his precious sounds escaping from his hole, his past, and saw Jessica's rapt face set against a darkening sky, listening. He sank into acanvaschair, surrounded by the shovels, the sieves, the cameras, the upturned earth.

Tears rolled down his face, but they were silent grief, and no one heard.

[Ql

64

PASCALE ROGER SUICIDE SIR

My wife jumped out t h e window last night the doctors called me at three a.m. my time the kids deep in sleep I didn't know what to say but are you sure are you sure you see sometimes she likes to fool you me all the world and what she docs is is really quite simple she dresses up a dummy from her fashion design years I'm sure you know all about it the trip to Europe she won while still in college how she shook hands with Mr Moi-J'ai-Du-Gout drank red on white and white on red and by all mighty sizzling champagne at O Mieux the doc on the tel said calm down must you wake not your up but kids the I'm who one her and found dummy Sir it was no

LARRY REILLY ICE LADY Phillip hadn't worn his blazer since the ninth grade and now, as he began to sweat, the tight sleeves cut painfully into his armpits. Circulation was gone from one arm, but he could still feel the downward pull of his grandmother on the other. Her hanging varied from touches that were fairly light, considering her thick, ring-encrusted fingers, to sudden downward yanks of considerable force. Although she appeared solidly constructed, she was always on the verge of toppling over.

Phillip was usually able to escape his grandmother and all her annoying offspring. He liked to spend family gatherings hiding in the bathroom until everyone was too drunk to notice him pouring vodka into his soda or putting a few of their cigarettes into his pockets. Phillip had an older, kinder brother who usually took care of Grandma. But today Steve, in his perfect way, was marrying a beautiful bland girl and Phillip, instead of spending the reception convincing the bartender he wasn't sixteen, found himself with this elderly anchor on his arm, unable to escape even the most painful conversations.

He eyes searched for anything entertaining, but his Aunt Judy's huge head was blocking most of the room. He could only see her bulging eyes, her gold skin, and her orange lips smiling as hard as they could, right into his face.

"Oh Phillip," the lips said, "such a lovely reccptionyou must be so happy for your brother-" "Why?" he interrupted. " Because he found a rich girl and didn't have to have the party at the Women's Club with an accordion player for a band?"

His grandmother's weight on his arm doubled. Phillip thought he could make people stay away by being as unpleasant as possible, but Aunt Judy was not listening. She just laughed and re-opened her mouth to speak, but Phillip was determined to wreck her mood.

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"I don't know what you consider lovely, but this babe's about as lovely as flat soda. I don't care how much money her family has-" He stopped speaking as a large clam shell fell into his hand, making him drop the two shells that were already there.

His grandmother had taken a liking to a slimy gray hors d'oeuvre served in a shell with bright orange fish eggs on top.

She had already slurped six of them and left Phillip to deal with the empty shells. Three were clacking in his blazer pocket and three were now at his feet. Trying to pick them up while remaining attached to his grandmother, he was left vulnerable to a sudden assault from his twelve year old cousin. Billy attacked from the left, elbowed him under the ribs, and kneed him in the groin. As Phillip stood up and tried to regain some composure, Billy plunged his hands into Phillip's carefully gelled hair and rubbed his fingers back and forth.

"Slick, very slick." Billy wiped his hand on his jacket with exaggerated motions, laughing loudly. With his free arm, Phillip smoothed back his hair, then hugged his cousin to him.

Using his elbow to hold him tight, he reached into the front of Billy's pants, found his underwear, and pulled up as hard as he could. But Billy squirmed too much and Grandma wouldn't stop tugging. Phillip realized he was sweating noticeably and gave up.

"Billy, stay here while I get rid of these shells. Grandma, would you like another drink?" he asked, prying her fingers from his arm and attaching them to Billy's. The old woman smiled and nodded.

Phillip darted through the throng, meeting no one's eyes and ignoring his name the few times it was called. He dropped the pile of shells at a table of well dressed people he didn't know and pushed his way to the bar.

"Is there a place where my grandmother can lie down if she needs to take a nap?" he asked the bartender before ordering.

"Sure, there's a whole suite back where the bride got ready. She can go in there."

"Thanks. Could you make an apricot sour, very strong-

almost no sour mix-and maybe some triple sec or something?

Thanks a lot."

Phillip took the drink and slurped a large gulp. He grinned when he felt how strong it was. His smile faded when he found Billy standing alone.

"Billy, Where's Grandma?"

"Uh.. .1 think she mentioned something about a limbo contest. You know what a party animal she is."

"It's not funny, I was supposed to watch her."

"Well you messed up, buddy, we may never see her again. I wonder what I get in her will?"

Phillip moved from table to table, quickly scanning the miscellaneous relatives. He thought she may have already gone to lie down and tried to find the suite the bartender told him about. Walking through a door that seemed right, he found himself in a back stairway. He went up the stairs into a long hallway filled with doors, lined with thick carpet and long, gilded mirrors. Steve's wife did have excellent taste-the hotel was one of New York's finest.

The door closest to him flew open to reveal a woman, naked and shouting, "How 'bout that ice-I've called three times-" Phillip couldn't supress the large, audible breath that escaped from him. The woman was deeply tanned and lean with the well defined thigh muscles of a long distance runner and breasts that looked tacked on. Her anger increased.

"Well where the hell is it? What kind of an idiot are you anyway?"

"I'm-I'm not-" Phillip tried to speak, but giggled instead. The woman took a closer look at him and her anger flared. With a parting "Fuck!" she slammed the door.

Phillip backed away until he bumped into the door in the opposite wall. He spun around, almost expecting that one to fly open too. He relaxed and stared at her door, his face growing hot. He went over her image in his mind, but already it was fading. He had to see her again. She may have been enraged, but she was the closest he had ever come to a real naked woman. He tried to stop his hands from shaking and get the

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nerve to knock on the door when it opened again.

She appeared in a loose fitting kimono. Most of her legs were still visible, but this time he noticed her face, attractive in a frowzy sort of way, with a deep tan only beginning to look leathery, which contrasted with her cold blue eyes and frosted hair. With a jerk of her head she called him.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked towards her, grinning sheepishly. Her eyes narrowed.

"What kind of a pervert are you anyway-hanging outside ladies' doors disguised as a bellman?" she hissed through clenched teeth.

"I-I'm-I'm not in disguise." Phillip said, taking a step back. "They made me wear this for my brother's wedding downstairs in the Victorian Room and I lost my grandmother and came up here to find her..."

"Your brother's getting married? Here? How interesting!" She smiled. "Would you excuse me for just a moment?" He didn't answer and she narrowed her eyes again.

"Don't you go away!" She gently closed the door.

Several minutes passed, but Phillip stayed up against the door, wondering if anyone downstairs had noticed he was gone. He stared at the gold numbers and rubbed his cheek along the cool wood, closing his eyes and trying to stay calm. He laughed under his breath, thinking about how Steve was going to react when he told him. Last night, Steve wouldn't let Phillip come to his party-Phillip knew it was because they were renting porno movies and thought he was too young. Steve could keep his porno movies and his sugary new wife-Phillip had met a woman wilder than anyone Steve ever knew. She was a wild one, Phillip could tell. He imagined her changing into some black lace underwear. He tried to picture the room on the other side of the door; maybe she was lighting some candles or incense.

The door suddenly reopened and he stepped back. All leather traces were gone from her face, her hair was pulled back, and her eyes were outlined and brighter.

"You don't want to go back to your party just yet, do you? How 'boutcorninginandhavingadrink with me—please

do! My name's Rosemary. What's yours?" She extended her hand.

"Phillip Adams." He started to say "Pleased to meet you," but stopped himself, trying to stay cool. The room they entered was dimly lit by a small lamp over a mirror. In front of the mirror was a dresser covered with cosmetics and jewelry.

Most of the room was taken up by two beds. One was unmade and the other sagged under a high pile of wrinkled clothes. No candles. No incense. Same old kimono.

Phillip's spirits lifted when he spotted a huge bottle of scotch on the dresser. Rosemary sat on the unmade bed, pushing the clothes aside and readjusting her kimono. When she saw Phillip's stare she gestured towards the bottle.

"Please help yourself. That glass is clean. I'm afraid I have no ice."

"Yea, so I heard."

Rosemary laughed vaguely, pretending not to get the reference. Phillip poured himself a glass and choked on his first sip. Scotch was stronger than vodka and coke or even the apricot sour. He found some loose cigarettes in his breast pocket, lit one and carefully tried to hold it in the same hand as his drink. He realized too late that this made it impossible to bring the cigarette to his mouth without spilling the drink.

He ignored this fact and sat down next to her. The bed sunk under him, scotch spilled and his cigarette came dangerously close to Rosemary's hair. He tried to ignore these events as well, looking meaningfully into her eyes. Phillip knew as a man he should do more than that, but he had only kissed girls a few times before and assumed the older woman would make the first move.

Phillip stared harder, but Rosemary just kept smiling, a smile as tight and fake as Aunt Judy's. As a matter of fact, with all that makeup and her new, unbreakably pleasant manner, Rosemary was beginning to resemble Aunt Judy a little too much. Phillip banished this thought and got up to pour more scotch. When he turned back to her, the smile was unchanged and he sat down on the chair by the mirror.

"So your brother's getting married at the Pierre? How

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dabbed her eyes with a tissue and smiled like a little girl. "Will you do me a favor?"

"Sure, but I have to get back. My grandmother-" "Oh, it'll just take aminute." She reached forthe phone and dialed a number. Then she handed him the receiver. "When someone answers, ask for Matthew Forrester-be really serious and business-like!"

It seemed easy enough. He took the phone and waited.

A soft woman's voice answered.

"Could I speak to Matthew Forrester please?" The voice hardened and asked who was calling.

"Um...Phillip Jones." There was a long pause.

Rosemary grabbed the phone from him. She waited a minute and then started screaming.

"Well I'm gonna keep calling until you let me speak to him-you bitch! I know he wants to speak to me! You will accomplish nothing by keeping him from me! You will lose!

You have already lost!"

Phillip smiled. She hung up and started crying again.

"He still loves me, Phillip, he's just scared to talk to me.

I don't know what's happened, but I've got to talk to him.

You've got to help me!"

He thought a moment, flattered at being asked to help.

He poured a glass of scotch. He'd seen enough detective movies to know how to figure out a simple problem like this. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke thoughtfully.

"Do you know the name of anyone that he would come to the phone for? Business partners or something?"

She stopped crying and took a drink. "I don't know any of his friends, but I do have a letter on his office stationery-it has all his partners' names on it." She rummaged through a drawer in a nightstand crammed with papers, finally extracting a crumpled letter. "Here.. .here-this name sounds good-say that you're Arnold Kott and you have to talk to Matthew right away."

"I can't be someone named Arnold Kott-thcre must be someone cooler on that list."

She laughed. "I'm afraid this is not a list of cool names

nice for him...I want to hear all about it!"

Phillip frowned. "Well I'm not the guy to tell you, I'm afraid. Why don't you just go down and see for yourself, if you're so interested."

She scowled and started to say something, but stopped and resumed smiling. "How many other brothers do you have?

You'll probably be getting married soon—" The next slug of scotch made Phillip especially warm and bold. He blew out a long stream of smoke. "Look lady, if I want to talk about my brother and his marriage and my marriage, I can go back downstairs right now." But he didn't move.

Her smile faded. "Listen, I could call security right now and cause your rich family a lot of embarassment so just have some manners when you talk to me. What kind of a woman do you think I am, anyway? I may not have fancy receptions at this hotel, but I am a paying resident-and you have to respect that." She lit a cigarette and glared at him.

The reception downstairs looked better and better to Phillip. He put out his cigarette and walked to the door, but heard a strange noise behind him that stopped him from opening it. Turning around, he was surprised to see tears running down her face.

"Oh God," he sighed, rolling his eyes and leaning against the wall. He turned to leave, but didn't. He'd seen women cry before. His mother cried when he failed Geometry.

The girl next door cried all the time when they teased her. His grandmother had cried all through Steve's wedding ceremony.

But there was something about this crying he couldn't ignore.

The sadness was so audible in the soft but high pitched wailing.

He walked over to her. "Come on..."

She turned herback to him. He didn't want to touch her now, but he went over and put his hand on her shoulders, trying to stop their shaking.

"Come on-don't be upset. I'm sorry. I just act like a brat sometimes. Please don't cry."

"I just want to have a drink with someone. Stay a few minutes. Please. I haven't spoken to anyone all day." She

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Larry Reilly

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I've got here. How about Arthur Cavendish?"

"Give me that list, I'll find somebody worth impersonating. Here. I can be Gerald Banks. That's respectable.

Give me the phone, let me try again." She let out a giggle as she dialed the number. Phillip waved his hand to quiet her and thought of how his father's friends sounded whenever they called. He took a quick gulp of scotch, gasped, and cleared his throat.

"Hello, Mrs Forrester? Gerald Banks here. Listen, I just hate myself for disturbing you folks on a Sunday, but I've run into some problems here at the office that just won't sit tight 'till tomorrow. Is Matthew around? Thanks, thanks so much."

Rosemary grabbed the phone from him. "Matthewit's me. I know, but what the hell do you want me to do? What kind of trash do you think I am? What am I going to do? I can't live! Do you even care? You fat, ugly, egotistical son of a bitch bastard! Fuck you! You-" She hung up the phone and started to laugh. "He hung up! I can't imagine why!" She took a swig from the bottle and passed it to Phillip.

Her laugh got higher, reaching the same pitch as the wailing that made him so nervous. Phillip was confused and wanted her to stop. "Why did you go to so much trouble to talk to him if you were just gonna curse him out? " "Idon'tknow-hejustmakesmesomad! What else can I do?"

He didn't know if she really wanted an answer, but she kept staring at him. With her red eyes and smeared makeup, she looked scary and lost. He had trouble understanding the guilty feeling that overcame him. He thought of his brother downstairs and wondered when they would miss him. Steve was such a nice guy, he wondered how he would handle the situation. The scotch made it hard to think at all, he just wanted to leave. But gradually an idea formed.

"Why don't you have a bunch of pizzas delivered to his house or something?"

"What?"

"That's what my brother and I did once to these neighbors we hated. It was a riot!"

The memory made him laugh and Rosemary began to giggle too. She picked up the phone. "I love it! You're just terrible! I love it!" She called information and got a number of a neighborhood pizza place.

"Hello, Ray's Pizza? This is Marjorie Forrester." She looked at Phillip and made her voice high and affected. "My daughter's having some school chums over for supper and I couldn't possibly cook myself! Could I have five-no-better make it seven-pizzas delivered to 1260 Bank Street, apartment 9R? Right away? Thanks so much!" She hung up the phone, laughing hysterically, "I love it! They'll die! I wish I could be there when they get them! Oh, you're the best, Phillip!" She lay back on the bed, laughing harder and harder, her voice getting higher and higher. "Let's call another place! Let's call them all! I want a fleet of pizza trucks at her door! Fill the whole goddamn building with pizzas!" Turning over on her stomach, she started to cry. Phillip picked up the phone.

"Should I get some more numbers?" he asked tentatively, but she only shook her head, her face hidden in a pillow. He put down the phone.

Phillip stood on the other side of the room, looking at all the rumpled clothes thrown everwhere, avoiding the woman lying next to them. He wished he could put at least some of them on hangers for her. He thought about his lost grandmother, wondering if she had turned up yet. He left the room, quietly shutting the door behind him.

When he got back downstairs, he was happy to see that nothing had changed. His grandmother was off to one side, clutching Billy's arm and eating out of a shell. Phillip spotted a waiter. He found a ten dollar bill in his pocket and gave it to him.

"Could you do me a huge favor and get some ice from the bar and take it to Room 4F? There's a woman there who needs some very badly. Thanks a lot."

[Q]

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MELANIE CONTY SUCKER

"Hello?"

"Hi, Mom, what's up? How are you?"

"Molly! I'm fine. It's been a long time, dear. How are you?"

"Okay, I guess. I mean, fine. Oh Mom, I think I did something awful to someone."

"What? Who? Wait, hold on. Lemme get my cigarettes.. .Okay, I'm ready. Spill it, girl."

"Well, remember that guy Andy I was seeing?"

"Yeah! Are you two still together? He seemed really nice."

"He did? I mean, I guess so. Anyway, he broke up with me two months ago. On the telephone."

"With MY baby? Why? What happened?"

"Well, right before that, I couldn't reach him for days.

He's from Hawaii, remember? And you know how naive those Don Juan types are. How street smart could he be? I pictured him dead, slaughtered in his apartment and drug addicts selling his blood for crack. I was so worried! So when he finally decided to answer his phone I freaked and we had an argument.

Then all of a sudden he said, 'Let's just break up. Talk to you later!' And hung up.

"Hello? Mom, are you still there?"

"Oh! Yeah. That's not nice."

"Huh? I know. I was crushed. I couldn't get out of bed forthreedays. Even the cats were depressed. I've never known a man like him. So big, hmmmmm, so strong-he always made me feel safe and loved. You know, like how a real woman is supposed to feel."

"Yeah, baby, I know. A man like that comes along once in a lifetime."

"So when I finally got it together and went back to school,

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"Oh, sweetie. How could you have listened to him say all this? I thought you were in love with him."

"Yes, I was. I still am."

"So have you two talked since?"

"Uh huh. After that he started calling me up all the time and telling me how vulnerable he was. Then he started waiting for me outside of my classes so he could follow me around and talk about how he was over her. He kept saying he would have felt much worse if he had found her in bed with another man."

"So what did you do?"

"Well, do you remember what he looks like?"

"A really big, muscular guy. Very manly. Why?" "Try to picture him in fishnet stockings, high heels, a black miniskirt, and a purple cashmere sweater, with big breasts, long hair, and makeup on his face."

"What!? Oh my God. What arc you telling me, Molly?"

"Well, one night he called me up and was all depressed again, so I told him to come over. He showed up with roses and told me he loved me."

"And?" "I told him if he loved me he would try on my new wig.

He did, but I still wasn't convinced so I took out some clothes, a bra, fishnets and a girdle, handed them to him and said if he really loved me he'd put them on."

"And did he?"

"Yep. His legs looked great."

"Really? Better than yours?"

"Much."

"Then what?"

"I stuffed his bra with socks and put makeup on his face."

"And he let you do this?"

"Yeah, he was still vulnerable, I guess. I took pictures."

"With the camera Mommy bought you?"

"Yep." "Good girl. Molly, did you get them developed yet?"

"Yes. I had eight sets made."

"Eight sets!? Why? Do you have them?" "...I did."

guess who I ran right into on campus?"

"Andy?"

"Yep." "I hope you hauled off and kicked him in the you-knowwhat!"

"No." "Well then, what did you do?"

"We talked for a few minutes and then went back to his place."

"Molly, are you kidding me? Are you NUTS?" "Well, he took me out for a burger first, Mom." "Jesus! A burger! I don't think I want to hear about this.

I've gotta go."

"Mom, just listen. Please."

"Why? So you can tell me that after you satisfied his hormonal urges he admitted that he left you for a younger, more beautiful woman-and she wasn't around that day so that's why he LET you come over to his house?"

"How did you know that?"

"Oh, this is sickening."

"Mom, do you want to hear this or not? I have to tell someone. I feel so awful."

"You should, Molly. Huh! Alright, keep going."

"Well, a couple of weeks later I hadn't heard from him so I called..."

"You what?!" "...and he sounded really depressed."

"Don't tell me."

"He was upset over her. She was dissing him and he didn't know why, so he went to her house to tell her he loved her."

"Great. How nice of him. And what did she say?"

"Nobody said anything. He found her in bed with another woman, and got so upset that he passed out and woke up later in a garbage dumpster outside of her building."

"Oh, boy! Ha ha! Serves him right."

"Well, anyway, after he told me all of this we ended the conversation in a friendly way and hung up. Then I ran to the bathroom and vomited." i

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WILLIAMS ROSSA COLE

"Where are they now?"

"Well, I sent one set to his parents, one to his younger brother, two to the woman he left me for and one to each of his professors. It took a lot of research to find all the addresses, so I'm kind of behind in my classes."

"Oh, dear. But why two to the woman?"

"One for her girlfriend. I thought she might appreciate it."

"My baby girl is so considerate. So...have you heard from him since?"

"Yep. He called right when I got back from sending off the pictures. I told him I couldn't see him anymore because I couldn't get over how he hurt me before-that I loved him too much to even be his friend. Now I feel bad, Mom. I probably hurt him."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. HOW do you think YOU hurt HIM?" "By saying I wouldn't even be his friend. I feel just awful.

How could I have done that to someone?"

"Oh. Maybe you're right-that was a bit harsh."

"I also sent something else that day."

"What did you send, dear? A present for Mommy?"

"No, no. Something for Andy."

"What was it?"

"I don't think I can tell you over the phone."

"Oh...okay. Just tell me this. Will our little Andy boy be seen at school anymore?"

"No. Well, parts of him, maybe. He lived really close by and the package was powerful."

"That's my girl."

[Q]

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LESSONS

FROM PROMETHEUS

The lightning blazed in grainy sky As I remember lightbulbs above beds I have slept in.

I saw a ribbon of ants in the Parque Monsenor Lezcano, Or collecting the dropped rice in the Izalco, They bit me on the ankles.

And that same stream persists With the cockroaches above the sink— Some die sticking to a bar of soap— As I search in patches of dark shadow, And flick that rickety switch.

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MICHAEL CERVIERI LETTERS NEVER REMAIN SO

lovely— sitting in a cafe uptown, it's early, cold, raining, at least black has washed away the day's dismal grey, picked up my first role of film, flip flip i flipped through them, wondering where my lovely was. then i remembered, you're far far away and i sent a tape to you after walking through the rain all morning, house to bank on to stationary store, different aves, different streets, then finally, the post office, i would have mailed it yesterday but i discovered as i stood with fingers gripping iron gates that the 15th is president's day here in the u.s. of a. that means post office closed and couldn't mail tape to you until today when it was grey and rainy and cold, cold so i thought of you because your teeth chatter when its cold and i love you for that. so flip flip i flipped and i couldn't find you until flip went my stomach as your image lay lying on my bed curled in a ball and beautiful and i can see the texture of your skin and my chest contracts because this is what happens and maybe i 'd cry but i'm sitting alone in an uptown cafe looking at pictures and that seems fairly silly...i'm silly. so i sent you a tape and the cover has my picture on it and when i look at it i'm sad because i had long hair and cut it off so i could be old. then i grew a beard and looked older still and this was wrong because i'm silly and young and silly and young people aren't supposed to have beards so i shaved mine down into a goatee and finally off. that's right, off you stupid hair clinging to my face, let me be free and silly and young like i am, let me not be old nor pretend to be old and especially not pretend to be wise, let me not do any of these things, i 'm merely young and naive and innocent and occasionally my heart weighs heavy and i heave sighs and i wish i was maybe younger still and truly innocent or older yet and wise and knew how to t

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badge of courage on his chest, this glory medal and why? why! 'cause he's a fuck that's why with the maturity level of a two year old told no for the first time, and now older each no is still a blow so away he goes locked in some institute with the fiends and the freaks slobbering and wailing and pulling out hair too scared too scared, and no one dares to deal with him so he doesn't have to deal with any of them, that's where peace is. peace is a fucking straitjacket, a ten by twelve sterile white room, and a hundred watt lightbulb slowly swaying back and forth back and forth while you're huddled fetal crouched naked shaking on the floor tempted by the door but knowing no more no more it's time to stay, that's your fucking eden, and for some reason i always wonder why i'm not back there.

deal with innocence lost because i'm mature, that's not the case though, i pace left foot right foot step step step i pace and my mind says, "fuck you" and i say, "fuck you" back and we grip each other and twist in one another's limbs, beg for mercy and lay panting in the grass, lying in each other's arms, "can you scratch that?" "sure" and we make up because grass itches and as long as there's grass and you lie in it you need someone to scratch the itch-it's almost a law of nature. and i sit wrestling in this uptown cafe listening to the pit pit pitter patter of the rain on this grey day thinking that tormented despair's a fucking plague conspired by the world's thought institutes, you read the texts and "think" they say "think real hard" and you're young, you're a harmless 111* fuck and you smile innocently flipping your lips saying, "doi, da o.k." and they smile back knowing they've got you. they've dangled the bait in front of your naivete and you took it hard and fast trying so hard to impress by keeping up. meanwhile, they line up in pairs of twos left arms locked tight tied at the wrist with their rights raised crack leather whips slashing bare backs they flog one another, you're confused and pleading, "what? tell me, tell me, please" and that makes them laugh and lash all the more until someone finally throws open the door booming, "where's your Utopia, what's your eden?" and they stop and drop their whips by their sides looking at one another all collected and serious so you stop and drop your questioning aside deferring to their seriousness, then you leave to chase ideas placed in your head because, "go ahead, go ahead" they said so you tread through your head on a diet of water and bread trying to go onward, trying to get ahead, but when you closed the aged oak door you didn't hear their hunchbacked laughter growing more and more, sick laughter at your expense because they know they have you tweaking and freaking poring over texts. maybe it didn't happen that way, maybe that only happens in the mind of some lil' fuck who can't put it to rest 'cause he's weak so he freaks continually tormenting himself hit hitting his head pounding it with lead hoping that others will notice how much he's bled torment because he wears it like a

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until again, yours

I

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NEAL FEINBERG THE DOGS

Seriously, you can trust me. I don't know why this doctor is always telling the other patients to stay away from me, but probably it's because I can see things that other people can't, and this threatens them. No one ever wants to face the possibility that maybe there's something wrong with the way they see the world.

Like the other day in session, while the doctor and I were talking, the nurse walked in and interrupted us. I've already told him what I saw, but no matter how hard I try to explain what really happened he keeps telling me that she just walked in, smiled at him and combed a few locks of hairbehind her ear, then put some folders on his desk and walked out.

The guy is so blind, just like everyone else in this world.

I've learned to keep my mouth shut most of the time, but with you, maybe you'll believe me, so I can tell you what really happened. The nurse wasn't even a woman, but a dog-a fluffy little Bichon Frise-and as she walked past the doctor she stopped and threw her tail to the side for a moment, then trotted away.

I don't know why it's so hard for anyone else to see all this. People always mistake dogs for humans, and if they'd just learn to tell the difference between the two, there wouldn't be so many problems in this world.

One time my girlfriend and I went to visit my old boss up in Vermont. He's a potter and I was his apprentice one summer. Since I was passing through his part of Vermont-even though he fired me and threw me out of his house that summerI figured what the hell, why not drop in on him?

So we stopped by his studio and walked inside, but he wasn't there. Just his dog was in the studio. He trotted over, eager to see us, and started sniffing my girlfriend and getting

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excited. Then he lifted up his leg and pissed on her, just a quick little shot of his scent, asserting his claim on her, and then we left.

I wanted to shoot that dog, but on the way out my girlfriend said she didn't know why I was acting so strangely.

She thought the potter was a nice guy, and she said it was sweet that he kissed her on the cheek and gave her one of his mugs.

She even showed me the mug. Well, I don't know where she really got that mug, but I tried explaining to her that a dog had just squirted his scent onto her, and that she must have been hallucinating because the potter wasn't even there.

It didn't last between me and her, probably because every time I tried to show her how blind she was it made her mad, sometimes even scared her, and so eventually she stopped hanging around me. (Oh, also, one night I tried to put a leash on her while she was sleeping.)

When she left, it didn't bother me that much because little by little, over a long period of time, all my friends began doing the same, to the point where there really wasn't anyone left, which was fine with me. It's easier to be alone sometimes, especially when people just annoy me most of the time anyway, with all their blindness and distorted perception.

I mean, Jesus Christ, how hard is it to tell the difference between a dog and a person? Really. I'm serious. This seems to be causing problems for a lot of people, which is why it's ironic that I'm in here and they're all out there, walking around still confusing the two animals.

Well, anyway, here's how I finally wound up inside this place, which I have a hunch is really a kennel. I was in New York City one day, just walking down the street minding my own business. Funny, but I didn't see a single person out on the street that day-just dogs, millions of them, everywhere. On the Upper East Side there were basset hounds, golden retrievers, fox terriers, Chihuahuas, and Irish sheepdogs. Later on, as I got closer to Wall Street, there were pit bulls and greyhounds as far as the eye could see, but still no people.

About this time I started crossing a busy intersection.

A huge Doberman pinscher stood in the middle of the street

Neal Feinberg

directing traffic, and I just strolled right past him, because I mean, seriously, I didn't have time to wait for all these dogs to stop panting and trotting all over the place. Then that uppity Doberman started barking at me, so I told him, "Go take a bath, you smelly mutt."

Then he really got ferocious, so I walked away, ignoring him, which is usually the best thing to do when dogs get like that with you: just pretend they're not even there. That's exactly what I did, but I heard him following me, getting closer and closer, barking louder and louder, and then something hit me over the head and that's all I remember.

When I woke up I was in jail, and a cop was standing in the doorway of my cell. I started grinning when I saw him, because man, I was so glad to see another person. It didn't even matter that he put handcuffs on me. I just kept smiling. I couldn't help it, even as he escorted me upstairs into the courtroom.

And then I stopped smiling.

The judge was a big, droopy-looking Saint Bernard with bloodshot eyes. The bailiffs were spry, muscular Dobermans, and alittle court-appointed dachshund was waiting for me at a desk in the front of the room. The cop grabbed me by the arm and dragged me in, and then I noticed that even he wasn't a human any more-he'd turned into a German shepherd.

He pulled me into the courtroom, took the cuffs off, and threw me into the chair next to the little dachshund, who was sitting up on a stack of books so he could see over the desk. He leaned toward me, panting with his little pink tongue hanging out, and he yapped into my ear. Then he pulled a candy bar out of his briefcase and started munching away at it. I noticed though, that when he peeled the wrapper off, it wasn't a Snickers like the wrapper said, but a Milkbone. He wasn't fooling me.

The Saint Bernard looked down at me from his bench.

A string of gummy saliva drooled out of the corner of his mouth to his black robe, hung there, and jiggled when he turned one way or the other. He stared at me solemnly for a long while, and then he shook his head, the drool swinging from side to side.

A hush filled the courtroom as everyone watched him

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and waited for his verdict. Finally, he cleared his throat, leaned forward on his front paws, and spoke: "Woof woof. Wo-wo woof...woof."

Several dogs behind me gasped and one fainted, as all heads in the courtroom turned to me. The dachshund hopped up onto the desk and started yapping away at the Saint Bernard.

"Raf! Raf-raf! Raf!" The judge closed his eyes and shrugged, throwing his paws up.

In the benches behind me the dogs began barking louder and a few wolves in the back row howled. Two black labradors, who had been throwing a frisbee in the aisle, leaping in the air and catching it in their mouths, now dropped it on the floor and joined in barking.

I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I was scared. As I stood up, three stump-tailed Dobermans surrounded me and began growling in a deep, low voice. They were closing in on me, and I realized that if I was going to bolt for the door it was now or never. I might make it, I thought, since there weren't any guards at the back of the room.

I jumped up on the desk and punted the dachshund across the room, into the crowd. As I leapt over the first bench, running toward the back of the room, jumping over the benches like hurdles, two more Dobermans opened the back door and stood there, waiting for me.

I looked behind me and saw the bailiffs coming. As one of them dove through the air at me, his open jaws bound for my face, I punched deep into his mouth, all the way down his throat, into his stomach. He gagged and whimpered for a second, hanging there on my arm, but I pushed my fist further inside him, through his intestines, all the way to the inside of his tail, and grabbed hold. Then, in one quick motion, I yanked with all my strength and pulled him inside out.

The bailiffs stopped. Everyone in the courtroom watched the dog stumble around on his fleshy stumps, his organs and entrails glistening on the outside of his body. He yelped a horrible shriek, muffled since his larynx was dangling on the outside of his throat, and then his pink and varicose little

knobs gave out and he collapsed.

I expected this to scare off the rest of them, since the oozing hound was flopping and slithering on the floor, but instead, four Dobermans leapt on me and held me down. I felt something prick my arm and then I blacked out.

When I came to, it was in this place, which now that I think about it, is more like a dog pound than a kennel. They had a strange kind of white cloth leash on me, wrapping my arms tightly aroundmyself, and I was feeling groggy when a dalmatian came into my room and led me to the doctor's office. As you can imagine, I felt relieved just to see a human. And that was when we started these therapy sessions.

I don't know how long they plan on keeping me here, but I figure it's probably better that I hang out in a place like this for a while-at least until the public starts recognizing and admitting what's going on out there. Acceptance of the problem, I'm learning in here, is the first step toward recovery. So maybe by telling people like you I can help the outside world understand the situation better, and just maybe, through my experience, I can help everyone else break through their denial. \Q\

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91

Williams Rossa Cole

WILLIAMS ROSS A COLE He wants us to drink more Paid for with the currency That his winking and motherless Five-year-old daughter carries In a bag on her back.

LOST AND DILATING IN JUIGALPA, NICARAGUA

I take the fork and plunge it into The greasy, crumbling chicken Brought to me by an old woman Smiling with lips parted and cheeks hollow, A glimpse of lacey black garter Under her oilcloth apron.

In every movement is a faint absurdity, As if a script was lurking somewhere.

But I am the actor, Here for a day, Drunk on rum and happy to eat watermelon.

He lives here With a daughter and wounds, Under the subtle noises in the sky And the flashes in the mountains, With crows of roosters And howling specters of change.

Little glasses of rum passed From hand to hand.

And the man I sit with Points to indented skin: His bullet wound.

Swedes are with us too, Awry and eardumb.

Smiling men appear, They hug the Swedes, They hug me, Get close to our faces, Dramatic gestures Stirring congested air.

What was that my friend?

He is saying that his wife was captured Tortured, murdered, raped, etc.

His hand flaps under his olive-green shirt, Over his heart, his eyes wide, As he looks at the Swedish woman among us.

He is coy, Charleychaplin-like, And though he is missing a pinkie He still has a pointer.

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AMY TALKINGTON MOOD OVER MATTER: NOTES ON MTV

People who knew my step-sister Martine as a child didn't expect what happened because, of all us kids, she was the best in school and sports. Some of them didn't find out until years later and if they asked me when it happened I liked to say, "Somewhere between Duran Duran and Jane's Addiction." My parents would probably say around July 1986. And my brother Carty might say that Martine went crazier than a road lizard around the time that everyone was afraid Quadafi was going to blow up the world.

Martine had a psychotic breakdown. It happened in Paris: hallucinations involving some strategy of encountering Andy Warhol, Libyan spies, and SimonLe Bon. Later, I figured out that because she had a hard time making friends, she tried to be friends with the impossible, like Warhol or Axl Rose, in order to have an excuse for being alone.

Carty, Martine and I were all very interested in rock music, and it's not that Carty and I didn't take that fascination to some extremes, but that Martine took it too far. Or else she was already too far and attached her psychosis to music.

I always dreaded when Martine would come from her mother's house to stay at ours (the house of my mother, her father, my brother and myself)- She would walk straight to her room, which was connected to mine by a long bathroom, and I only knew she had arrived by the sound of the music. Through the two thin doors I'd hear one side of a record repeated again and again on her cheap old-fashioned turntable. Nights were timed by those six songs and the jerk of the stereo clucking in between. I would try to draw pictures or do math to the faint rhythms until the repetition drove me out of my room. Spandeau Ballet. Duran Duran. Whatever. I don't know how she picked her bands because they varied in style, success, and sex appeal.

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I was happy when Martine discovered MTV because it took her out of her room and my hearing distance. The routine changed. She would go straight to the TV room, close the door and insert her Duran Duran 'best of video collection into the VCR. She would sit right next to the VCR so when she heard someone opening the door, she could push "Stop." She tried to hide that she was watching the videos, but the VCR made a buzzing noise as it ejected and I always knew what she was watching. By the time I was in the room, MTV was on the screen.

I came to hate MTV. To watch it was to be passive. I wanted to meet the people she silently idolized. She just looked at the videos of Jane's Addiction and Guns n' Roses with a glazed-over gaze, but I thought I understood what Jane's Addiction was all about. We had the same basic obsessions, but I had the interest to pursue them beyond the TV screen.

A month after the breakdown, back in our hometown of Dallas, Martine was diagnosed as 'manic depressive' and a doctor prescribed large doses of medicine that made her face swell and her skin break out but did not stop the rock n' roll obsession.

"You know how she used to play those same songs over and over?" my mother asked me a few years later.

"Jesus Christ, yes, it drove me out of my mind."

"Well, she told her doctor that she used to play the music like that to drown out the rhyming voices in her head."

I wished I had been less annoyed by the clicking and buzzing.

••••*•

According to its "Fact Sheet," MTV strives to embody irreverence and calculated re-invention. In order to remain the object of teenage whimsy, MTV deems it necessary to perpetually self-mutate. But still, throughout its eleven years of frequent face-lifts, the network has maintained its original concept: to be a calculated fantasy, an endless 24-hour a day refuge community for teenagers, or, as critic Pat Aufderheide

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calls it, a "ready-made alternative to social life."

Consumer research and testing made MTV what it is today. Its methods arc very scientific for a channel that characterizes itself as unpredictable. Before youseeitonMTV each show, each video, each artist is wrung through the wringer of a consumer test in order to determine that it will be well received. Before you even saw MTV it too was researched. In his 1983 essay for Rolling Stone, Stephen Levy reported: "First, 600 fourteen to thirty-four year-olds were interviewed to determine if there was interest in such a channel.

An astounding eighty-five percent responded positively. [MTV] thenembarkedona'market-segmentation' study: thenamesof over 150 musical artists were floated to see who would be the superstars and pariahs of MTV. This study also probed the lifestyle of potential rock-video consumers to find out 'the way the channel should feel, the image, the style, what the veejays should wear.'"

Supply for demand. MTV made itself a suburban teen's fantasy-a world in which to ground the sporadic and sometimes senseless music videos. The original set was designed to look like some kid's rec-basement, or the rec-basement he wished he had: complete with video games, a jukebox, and even a built-in friend who is always around to play: the veejay.

While the specific faces have changed along with the styles and the characters, MTV upholds this image. It looks natural, but it didn't come that way.

When MTV aired at 12:01 pm on August 31, 1981, their desired look had not yet been polished, or rather, it was too polished: too polished to give that moonshine-basement feeling that MTV discovered people wanted. Levy continues: "Drastic steps were taken. 'Get rid of those phony lights!' the MTV people said, ordering 'shitty' lighting instead.

The teleprompters went as well. Veejays were instructed to adlib from basic scripts, to relax more and stop worrying about mistakes. Mistakes would look real. It took a while but MTV finally got what it wanted-a well-designed studio that looked like something casually thrown together, scripted patter that sounded like it was made up on the spot, an ironclad format that

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proceeded like a random chain of events, well-trained actors who came on like folks you'd meet at a campus mixer, and a generally perfectionist attitude in bringing about a what-thehell-let's-boogic mood."

MTV is mood over matter. It appeals to feelings and not to minds. As Bob Pittman, the creator of MTV, once boasted to Esquire Magazine, "We sell environment."

••• One night I made a pilgrimage from Vassar to see the art-rock band Jane's Addiction play at Sag Harbour. A friend and I drove the length of Long Island at ten miles per hour in the worst snow storm of '89. After the show, we drove farther to find their motel. We found the bass and guitar players in a room off the second-floor outdoor balcony. I told them that I wanted to talk to lead singer Perry Farrell to tell him that he reminded me of Marcel Duchamp.

"We're not fucking intellectuals," said the bass player, "We're just drug addicts. Show'em." The guitar player took a bag of heroin from the bedside table drawer to show me.

He takes the recommendation of his good friend, MTV. Also, these specifically adolescent appeals might explain why most of MTV's viewers are between the ages of eleven and twenty-four, as opposed to their original target ages of fourteen to thirty-four. One glitch is that it cannot capture the thirty-somethings.

"MTV goes through cycles," says Michael Dugan who has written for the network for nearly ten years. "Every once in a while, they panic and think that the advertising money is in the twenty-four year olds instead of the sixteen year-olds, so they try to gear to twenty-four. But every time they try, it doesn't work. They can't get the olderpeople and they can't get rid of the younger ones."

•••

The music videos played on MTV evoke mood. In her essay "The Look Of The Sound," television critic Pat Aufderheidc names these moods: "nostalgia, regret, anxiety, confusion, dread, envy, admiration, pity, titillation . . . The moods often express a lack, an incompletion, an instability, a searching for location."

She continues, "In appealing to and playing on these sensations, music videos have animated and set to music a tension basic to American youth culture. It is that feeling of instability that fuels the search to buy-and-belong."

Thus, the success of MTV is that its viewer, the potential customer, consumes. He buys the album or the concert ticket that he saw on MTV in order to belong to the hip youth culture. After all, everyone on MTV seems 'to belong.'

The Christmas before last, my family went to Los Angeles to visit Carty. Martine was dying to go to L. A. in order to find Guns n' Roses, or at least to go to the places they had been, places she had read about in metal magazines.

When Martine arrived at the Dallas airport, I looked at her large pale face splotched with acne and one blue spot that had been there since she had a pencil stuck in her face in grade school. I wondered why, if she was so excited about this trip, she hadn't washed her hair. I wondered why she even had her hair cut in such a gross way, curving around her bloated face, framing it with baby-short red bangs. I think she must have looked at me and wondered at which site we would run into Axl Rose.

Martine and I shared a hotel room in L. A. One morning I woke up to a picture of Slash shoved into my face-Martine woke up early to buy the new Rolling Stone. Later that day I was dragged to Sunset Tattoos, Whiskey A Go-Go, and other places that Martine had read about in various magazines. But what surprised me most was her passivity. She didn't want to stay out late in search of Axl Rose, she wanted to go back to the hotel to see Iggy Pop interviewed on MTV. When Iggy mentioned that he had stayed in the very hotel we were staying

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in, it seemed to make Martine's visit to L.A. worthwhile. She stretched out on the bed, re-attached her Walkman headphones, and stared at the ceiling while MTV continued to play.

••• Grunge is supposed to be non-topical, uncalculated, thrown together for lack of care and money...in the name of disinterest and irreverence. Disgusted with yuppies, money and networking, but not political. Snorting heroin. It is also grunge to not articulate what grunge is.

Grunge on MTV is, at best, a contradiction. Although it is their greatest desire, MTV has difficulty appearing truly uncalculated. Steve Isaacs, who is MTV's supposed grunge veejay, is really a grunge-poser. The best MTV can do to appropriate grunge is to place the 'real' grungesters, like Nirvana, on its stage.

When Nirvana played last year's 'live' Video Music Awards, they caused difficulties before and throughout the awards show. First they refused to play their hit song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to open the show. Instead they wanted to play a song called "Rape Me" and wouldn't budge. At the last minute the order of the entire VMA's was shuffled. Finally, when Nirvana hit stage at mid-show with "Lithium," lead singer Kurt Cobain, who was reportedly commuting from a drug-treatment program at an L.A. hospital, was surly, while bassist Chris Novoselic accidentally slammed himself in the head with his own bass. Then, instead of accepting their first award, they sent a Michael Jackson impersonator to accept it.

When I asked Michael Dugan, a VMA's writer who was backstage throughout, if this scared MTV, he said, "Ohno... they loved it. It's the real rock n' roll spirit."

Grunge was a reaction to MTV, but grunge was then made by MTV. What arc irreverence and unpredictability when they're calculated and commodificd?

• • • Once, when a musician friend of mine heard that my 100

brother was trying to pull a band together, he told me Carty should be an actor who plays a rock star instead of actually being one. That stuck in my head because it was so true-he never was a brilliant musician, but he looked like one.

Carty did write beautiful lyrics, mostly autobiographical ones about his infidelities or science fiction.. .orboth: "Automatic Teller, she's so fine. She tells me that she loves me on the screen all the time."

"It's all about sex," he told me once some time ago.

"Everything! Everything is about sex and video communication." I think he proved this theory with a girl he met at the video store where he was clerk. After helping her to choose a video, Carty courted her with a love letter that he programmed into the video store' s computer so that it printed out on her next rental receipt.

Carty had a hard time holding a band together, so at 26, he wavered in between wanting to be a rock star and the desire to direct films. My father couldn't understand this indecision and irresponsibility. Sometimes I feel sorry for him. He is a doctor and says that he never doubted what he wanted to do. He says that when he was Carty's age he already had one son, one daughter on the way, and was working 18 hour days as a medical intern.

I told him that I don't know one honest person who really knows what they want to do with their life.

"Bon Jovi's 'Keeping The Faith'.. .Your only worry will be checking out the band while memorizing their new lyrics."

A deep voice promises us that everything will be O.K. if we can just win that MTV contest. Our only homework would be to memorize their lyrics? And, maybe we could have sex with Bon Jovi in the back of their limo on the way to the show.

A life without worries, a happy life, is inextricably linked to meeting our favorite band.

Fantasy packages are one of MTV's specialties. An MTV executive told Rolling Stone in 1983: "Any station can 101

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give a trip to Hawaii, but we offered a luau with Pat Benetar."

Pat Benetar is no longer a profitable attraction, but fantasies are forever and MTV continues to capitalize on them.

Isn't the opportunity to meet Jon Bon Jovi worth a $2.00 phone call? If not, then at least finding out who else got to meet Jon Bon Jovi, or whoever won 24 hours with the Rolling Stones, or who won the prize of painting a pink house with John Mcllcncamp is one more excuse for us to keep watching MTV.

then I'd go to the 7-clcvcn and I'd go 'Oh my God, this guy could be molesting his kid,' 'cause everyone on TV looks like everybody else at 7-elcven."

We all have some difficulty distinguishing what is real.

I guess Perry Farrcll's not such a drug addict now. My step-sister is hoping to move to L.A. My brother has finished a script, sold it, and will begin directing the two-million dollar film this fall. And I am working at MTV, in the department that designs fantasy packages and identity ads.

[Q]

••• In New York last fall there was a new trend in lipstick color. I saw it around the East Village for a while, but when I went to the Matisse exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art I noticed that these lips were everywhere. More interesting than the brilliantly colorful paintings were the browned lips of so many viewers. A matte shade of taupe, this lip color makes its model look cold and lifeless, but intriguing. The brown varies in relation to the skin tone as i fa veil has been cast over the face.

A waitress on Avenue A told me to go to M.A.C. Cosmetics to get one for myself. In a special display case marked "1992 Black and Whites" were the browns I had seen.

M.A.C. 's "Black and Whites" were inspired by the glamorous Forties' ideal of "contour and shading without a lot of color." Noting that we can only see the glamour of the Forties by looking at black and white photographs and film, M.A.C. has created these shades of brown which, in the context of real skin tones, make a human face look like a black and white film.

We will sacrifice looking alive inordcrto look like Her, which Her doesn't really matter, just 'Her' in that film.

••••>•!•

Just recently, I read an article about Perry Farrcll and his new band. He explained some of his past: "If I saw Oprah or Sally Jessy or the news—I'd freak out. I was like a really bad drug addict once, I'd hang out all afternoon and watch this shit, and I'd start freaking out. And

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Judy Wang

JUDY WANG / DREAM OF FREEDOM FROM THE COUCH

Last night the darkness swam, images of death. This time, not my own.

I went in a taxi through the rain to the office I so familiarly know, sitting on the edge of the black sofa, twiddling my thumbs, fidgeting with my shirt or a sheet of klccncx, looking across a shelf of books and crying, oh, please, Doctor, hold me.

And he did.

I was late for the appointment.

My lover and I had woken up late.

I was far away in another city, surrounded by the breath of someone asleep.

I was alone when I got off the train.

Back in New York City, back in the doctor's office, babbling, babbling, believing, though my memories, dark, though the mind, violent and hidden, I have never been so fine.

I talk about sex, not reality, but fantasy.

I want to fuck my father I want to fuck my Brother I want to fuck you. Though I don't say, I want to fuck you because I can't or because I think the doctor's mind-fucking me anyways, just as well.

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Somewhere in my bones, I have always been fearful of doctors, the way they always want your secrets, never confessing their own.

It was a feel-good session all hush-hush from his wife, dressed in purple. We could see her through the office window.

The next time I took the same taxi but got lost. I ended up on the wrong street, in the wrong building.

I opened the door, and there was my doctor, laughing at me.

I looked him in the eye. I said, Come close. His arms around me, I drew him down and gave him a spike through the chest.

A feel-good session.

I wiped my hands la dee dah.

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M. D. EDWARDS THE TEE SHIRT

What could Boxer get Mr. Ashby? He'd been a Jim Dandy boss, helping Boxer with the down payment on his first car by giving him a bonus, letting him have the day off when each of his kids graduated from high school, paying for his wife's funeral expenses when she died after their retirement.

The poor old guy, laid up with a case of advanced emphysemahe sure needed something to jazz up his day.

Boxer stood in the thrift shop looking from the shelf to the table to the cartons marked "Bargains," unable to decide what to buy.

"Who exactly arc you getting something for?" asked the saleslady. "Your wife?"

"No, no. My boss. Ex-boss, I mean to say."

"What sort of, uh, person?"

"Classy. Rich. But a real gentleman."

"Occupation?"

"Teaches Latin. Or use' to-when he wasn't counting his money." Boxer winked.

"I have a marvelous set of Caesar, all leather bound!"

She worked her way around a table covered with stacks of white china dishes and pulled a book from the shelf. "The Gallic Wars. One volume in English, the other in Latin."

"The Garlic Wars?" Boxer took the book in his hands and looked at the fancy design on the cover, all curlicues in gold, like the permanent wave on some tart with peroxided hair. Then he wiped the dust from the book onto the leg of his overalls and opened it up.

Locus erat castrorum editus et Paulatim ah...

"Well, it's all Greek tome!" He winked again. "How much?"

"Twenty the set."

Boxer snapped the book closed and set it down on the 107

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table next to the china ware. "Out of my range."

"Well, let me see now..." The saleslady turned her back and studied the titles of all the other books on the shelf.

She had a nice bottom. Broad. Fleshy. It had been a long time since Boxer had placed his hands on a bottom like that.

"He wouldn't want a grammar, I don't suppose. But with his refined mind, maybe one of the Classics..."

Boxer tugged at his ear lobe. "Ma'am? I dunno as another book is what he needs. He's got a whole private library full of them."

"Well, does he have a hobby?" She tilted her head forward,lookingathim over the top of her glasses. "Gardening, for instance?"

Boxer shoved his fists into his pockets and stared down at the toes of his boots. "He's, you know, in the hospital, Ma'am. Don't look like he'll be doing no gardening anymore."

She nodded solemnly and went to the cartons, the loose heel of one of her shoes clapping against the floor with each step. Bending over, she clawed through the first two, tossing out items without even looking at them. It made Boxer think of his old hound dog Sassafras, who used to dig up piles of dirt in the yard out in Suffolk County just for the exercise. But when she came to the third carton, she straightened up and smiled.

Then, her fat bottom jiggling, she trotted into the back room and returned with a rumpled, green tee shirt.

"Just the trick!" she said, now so close that Boxer could smell her perfume. "And the price is right-three dollars!" She flipped the shirt onto the counter with a snap of her wrists. It was the way Boxer's wife used to lay the tablecloth onto the kitchen table at the Ashbys' when the two of them would sit down to eat after the dining room had cleared out.

In the middle of the shirt was a man at his desk reading a book. Underneath was a string of words, all in capital letters.

"Tarn multi..." Boxer hesitated. More of that Greek!

"Tell me, now. What's it mean, Ma'am?"

"Can't say, exactly. My language in high school was French." She brushed a stray curl off of her forehead. "But I

guarantee it's Latin."

"Uh-huh."

"If you really want a translation, take it to the library and ask the librarian to help you. Or ask a Catholic friend."

Boxer nodded and pulled out his wallet.

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••• After Boxer had gotten up and eaten breakfast the next morning, he called his Italian buddy, Joey, to ask him what the words on the tee shirt meant.

"If it's part of the Mass, it'll be no problem," said Joey.

"Shoot!"

Boxer picked up the scrap of paper he'd written the slogan on to avoid dirtying the shirt from too much handling.

But when he read it out loud, Joey only laughed. "That ain't no prayer, Boxer. And it ain't no chant."

When Boxer called up the library the woman who answered the phone wasn't much help, either. "We can't provide that sort of assistance over the telephone," she said.

"You'll have to bring your inscription to us in person."

Tucking the scrap of paper into the phone book, Boxer shuffled off to the bathroom. "A nice ten minute shower for you, Mr. Ashby," he chuckled. "And a shave with Old Spice shaving cream."

Half an hour later, Boxer was standing by his closet debating over which of his three ties to wear: the blue and white polka dot, the grey and tan stripe, or the solid green with his new girlfriend, Luscious Louise, on it.

"Now, that'd give the old fellow a good guffaw," he said, looking down at the naked redhead wriggling on the front of the tie. Boxer's poker buddies always liked to see Louise when their Saturday night game rolled around. No reason why a Latin teacher wouldn't appreciate her.

"But then, the family might be there." Shaking his head, Boxer reached for the polka dot tie.

It took five different tries to get the knot to sit between the points of his collar right. Then came the suit (navy pin

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"Boxer! I'm so glad you could come!" whispered Josephine Ashby, reaching out to hug him. "Daddy has been talking all week about you."

Boxer deposited his shopping bag and hat on a chair and eased into her arms. "Good to see you, Miss Josephine."

The smell of lipstick and powder invaded his nostrils, momentarily overpowering the hospital odors.

"Dad's asleep, so we can't talk out loud."

Mr. Ashby was lying face up. He had lost at least forty pounds since Boxer saw him a year ago. And he was as pale as the belly of a wall eyed pike. Worst of all, he looked too weak to even move his limbs. He reminded Boxer of the starving North Africans he saw limping about on TV awhile back, their skeletons jutting through their flesh, making knees and elbows as thick as the surrounding muscles.

Boxer shook his head. It would be a long, slow wasting away for him, same as it had been for Boxer's wife Midge with her lung cancer. Too bad they all couldn't go fast like Mrs. Ashby. A burst vein in the head and in five minutes she was free.

"How many grandchildren do you have now, Boxer?"

Josephine Ashby asked, her whisper rasping like a dry wind.

"Five."

"That's a big increase from three. Who gave you the new ones?"

"Jerry." Knees creaking, Boxer sat down. "A boy and a girl-twins."

A nurse came in to replace the empty IV pouch suspended from the chromium rack on the far side of the bed.

When the new pouch was in place, she inspected the needle taped to Mr. Ashby's arm. Boxer had watched this process a hundred times while Midge was dying. The nurses always reminded him of gas station attendants checking the parts of a car.

"What are the twins' names?"

"Patrick and Colleen."

Josephine smiled, but only briefly. Then sadness seeped into her face. She never married, never had children of her own. That always depressed Boxer. As a child she had nurtured dozens of kittens, hamsters, and ducklings, both in the apartment in Manhattan and the house in Hunlington. Why didn't she move onto the next logical phase when she grew up?

Interlocking his fingers, Boxer pried his eyes from her and took refuge in the tan linoleum floor.

Finally, Mr. Ashby stirred in the bed-his leg altering the contours of the covers, his head rolling across the pillow, his

no

ill

stripe), the suspenders (red wool) and the cufflinks (mother of pearl). When he finally achieved the style of a lieutenant in the Mafia, Boxer blew himself a kiss into his mirror and strutted to the kitchen to wrap up the tee shirt.

"I can't use Santa Gaus," he muttered, tossing aside the holiday tissue paper that the work gloves his grandson gave him for Christmas came in. "And valentines won't do, neither...But this one, yes."

Whistling through his dentures, he snatched up the piece of gold and red paper that had covered the box of maple sugar candy he'd bought himself on his seventieth birthday, the first he 'd spent alone. Then he spread the tee shirt out, admiring how well he'd washed and ironed it.

"Latin! That'll give him something to brag about to them nurses when they get too bossy. And if he wears this in the TV room, he can give lessons to the ladies."

After Boxer wrapped his present, he slipped it into a shopping bag and went to get his good hat from the closet.

Knocking the dust off the underside of the brim, he lowered the fedora onto his wavy grey hair at what he imagined was a cocky angle.

"Oh, dam. Just when I was leaving!" He set down the shopping bag and scurried into the bathroom to empty his bladder. "Another hour, another half pint," he sighed as the golden stream kicked up the water in the toilet bowl. "And how many gasoline truck fulls in a life time?" Smiling, he pictured a convoy of trucks crossing the nation, all filled with his urine.

•••

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eyelids fluttering. In response to his movements, Boxer rose from his chair, as though to open the door to a limousine or to receive orders for the grooming of the grounds at the country house.

"Boxer..." wheezed the old man.

"Morning, Mr. Ashby, Sir." Boxer stared into the old man's eyes, trembling in their sockets as precariously as two cigarette lighter flames in the wind.

"No need to stand."

But Boxer remained on his feet, not just out of training but out of fear that his very movements would snuff the life out of Mr. Ashby.

"Good to see you, Sir," he said, his face contorting because he could not bring himself to lie and add that the old man looked well.

"Tell me, how are you spending your time these days, Boxer?"

"Oh, bowling a bit. Fishing."

"And how are the boys?"

"Well, Jerry-he's working at a hardware store in Far Rockaway. And, as I was telling Miss Josephine here, he had twins-Pat and Colleen."

"That makes five for you, doesn't it?"

"Yessir."

"Well, you have out stripped me. Roland stopped at four, you know." Mr. Ashby's eyes drifted away from Boxer, and his voice slid back into his throat, like water back into an upright hose when the faucet is turned off.

"Uh-huh." Boxer shifted his weight from one foot to the other, trying to redistribute the pressure of his dress shoes on his corns. "And what's Mister Roland doing with himself?"

"What's that? Oh, Roland... Well, he's Vice President at the bank, now." A smile played across the old man's face.

Then he nodded toward the bedside table. "Just sent me those books, via Chase Manhattan courier."

Boxer glanced at the books nervously. Maybe he should have gotten The Garlic War after all. Maybe a tee shirt with Latin on it wasn't the right kind of present.

"Five different titles. One from him and one from each of the children."

"That's a lot of reading."

"Oh, yes. And when those are done, a dozen more from people in the apartment building."

"Uh-huh." Boxer pulled his lower lip under his front teeth to prevent himself from releasing a belch that was rumbling behind his Adam's apple.

"Gracious, Boxer. Do sit down."

"Yes, Boxer," echoed Josephine. "Sit!" Boxer backed up to his chair and lowered himself into it as smoothly as a machine receiving an electronic command.

At that point, the belch escaped despite himself, but no one seemed to notice.

"And how is Dick, Boxer?"

"Oh, he's doing fine, Sir. He's still working at that nursery in Suffolk County."

"Learned those skills from you, didn't he?" His eyes softened. "Out at the place."

"Sure did. Followed me around the grounds every summer, begging me to let him hoe. Had his own pumpkin patch out by our cottage one year."

Mr. Ashby lifted the cuff of his pajama shirt to scratch his forearm. When he did, Boxer saw a pulse monitor strapped to his wrist.

"I remember the pumpkin patch!" laughed Josephine.

"Dickie and I found a big twenty-five pound pumpkin one day and carved a jack-o'-lantern that looked like Joseph Stalin. Or so we thought."

"With a mustache made of the dried tassels from ears of com!" Boxer slapped his thigh with the palm of one hand.

"Oh, yes." Mr. Ashby's eyes sparkled.

The three of them chuckled, then fell silent one by one.

When the pause grew heavy, Boxer realized he had nothing more to say. His gaze idled on the window ledge awhile. Then it gravitated to the overhead light, a cold neon rod behind an aluminum reflector that looked like a tray for making ice cubes.

Suddenly restless, Boxer peered over at the old man,

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then down into his shopping bag. Pretty soon his bladder would be demanding his full attention, so he had to think about leaving.

"Well, now," he said, taking hold of the handle of the bag and rising to his feet, "I brought a little something for you, Mr. Ashby."

"Did you, Boxer?"

"Yessirree." Boxer took the lumpy bundle from the bag and held it out toward the old man.

"He can't, uh, open it alone, Boxer," Josephine whispered, joining him at the bedside and taking charge.

"Oh, my," said Mr. Ashby, as his daughter tore at the gold and red covering. "What could it be?"

"A tee shirt." Josephine smiled crookedly and freed the present from the shreds of paper.

"What a pretty shade of green," said Mr. Ashby.

"And it has a slogan," Boxer added. "In Latin."

"Now, let the expert translate! Holditup,Josie,soIcan see!" The old man struggled forward and squinted at the big, white letters. "Tam..." he intoned with a gravelly wheeze.

"Tarn multi... Ahhh." He lifted a trembling hand to his throat and fell back into the pillow, coughing long and hard.

"Careful, Dad," Josephine said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. But the coughing continued, now coming from deep within the lungs. Boxer stepped closer and took the old man by the arm. As if in reaction to Boxer's grip, the coughing subsided.

With slow deliberation Mr. Ashby lifted his head.

"Tam.. .multi.. .libri..." Then there was a pause as he scanned the lower line in silence. "Oh, Boxer..." he groaned, his lips quivering. "Oh, Boxer-no..." Huge, watery tears welled up in his eyes, and he began to whimper, his arm shaking beneath his weight.

"What's the matter, Sir?" Without answering, the old man slumped back into his pillow a second time. The tears spilled over his lower eyelids and slid across his withered cheeks. He started to sob, then cough and gag intermittently, his bony chest heaving.

"Oh my God!" cried Josephine, reaching for the emergency bell.

Boxer snatched up the tee shirt and looked at the picture of the man reading the book with the strange words stencilled beneath him. Then he looked at Mr. Ashby whose eyes were rolling in his head, directionless and unseeing. As he watched, the urgent squeak of crepe soles against linoleum swooped up from behind, then shot past on either side-a forked wave of starched white cloth.

"Call CodeBlue-forClark316!"barked the firstnurse, as she took Mr. Ashby's wrist in her hand. "And clear the room!"

"Oh, Daddy!" shrieked Josephine, throwing herself across the bed and pressing her face against her father's rib cage.

"Get back, Miss Ashby!" commanded the second nurse, telephone in hand.

Now the cough had a rattling sound-the sound that Boxer had heard come from the throats of horses and cows out in Suffolk county dozens of times, just before they expired.

"And you, Sir," the first nurse fixed her eyes on Boxer.

Boxer tensed, dropped the tee shirt, then wheeled around and ran from the room.

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••• Three days later, Boxer slowly climbed the steps of the public library and went inside. As he headed for the woman at the information desk, he reached into his pocket and separated the smooth scrap of paper from the obituary torn out of The New York Times.

"Ma'am, if I could bo theryou?"he whispered, nudging the piece of paper across the desk mat.

The woman studied it a moment. "You'll have to take this to Mr. Ponsonby in the next room."

Mr. Ponsonby was seated by a window, in a white shirt and tie. "Oh, what fun!" he cried, running his eyes along the inscription. "Tam multi libri-so many books; tam breve

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tempus-so little time!"

"Pardon me?"

"So many books, so little time." The young man smiled up at him, pink cheeks glistening.

"Oh, no," gasped Boxer, covering his face with his hands and slowly turning around. Then, seeing only the black backs of his eyelids, he stepped over to the nearest wall, pressed his forehead and belly against the rows of bricks and stood there in silence, his whole body shivering.

[Q]

ALISSA HEYMAN You PAINTED LIPSTICK

You painted lipstick on your face You painted lipstick on your mouth You painted lipstick on your tongue in red and angry strokes You painted lipstick in the shape of words that read— "This is a piece of meat and this is a piece of skin This is a piece of flesh and this is where the blood comes in" You drew it sharp into your skin You drew it red and angry And you dribbled lipstick down your chin.

You painted lipstick on a mirror In jagged letters, bright and red That formed the words, "This is me and this is me and this is me, And this is all I've ever said" You wrote that on the mirror In jagged letters, bright and red And then you took the plastic lipstick in your hand And you threw it at the mirror It splintered into thousands of pieces, all bleeding and red And you took your lipstick And painted on the jagged shards the words "You are dead."

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SALLY JONES VEGAS WEDDING

I coulda told you that marriage wasn't gonna work.

Things started falling apart right at the beginning. First it was the engagement ring. Drew said they couldn't afford the Rock of Gibraltar, but Sara had to have the best. Made him sell his old pickup-my Kenny bought it off him for an even five hundred, not much to look at, but it gets you where you're going. Drew took it pretty well. He had this running joke: we could take my truck, he'd say, but I don't think we'd all fit.

Then he'd lift up Sara's hand to show us all the ring. See, he was saying that as he'd sold the truck to get the ring, Sara was wearing his truck! That's another thing, she never did laugh at his jokes. A couple's got to have a sense of humor if they're gonna make it work.

As I see it, the problem was in her expectations. She had this fantasy—her in a white gown coming down the aisle-the biggest day of her life. Can't no man live up to that, my Kenny says, and he's right. Not even Drew, and you couldn't find a better man if you combed the whole fifty states. She had her dead mother's people coming from up east, and even some old boyfriend she was still trying to impress. And Drew let her have her way in just about everything, even his gray tuxedo with the long tails. Boy, Kenny and the boys gave him a ribbing over that one. But he shrugged it off in typical Drew fashion: that's how much he loved her. Anyone could see they was headed for a fall.

As for Sara and me, we didn't hit it off right away-not like all them fairytales you hear about people knowing they was meant to be best friends. See, our trailer kinda sets at an angle across the Parkses ranch, but 01' Jim Parks, that's Sara's dad, was real nice about it from the day he moved in. Said it wasn't hurting nothing and, being newly widowed and all, and alone, with his daughter finishing high school up cast, it would do him good to have some neighbors close by. Kenny did say to Jim as 119

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how we should be paying something for the land, but Jim said it wasn't necessary. Well, me and Kenny talked it over and figured we'd take it out in trade. Sec, I run my own business from the home, cutting hair and doing nails. But what with Jim's hair thinning on top and all, it never was an even trade.

That's why I offered Sara a perm or a frost free of charge-well, just a small fee for supplies-her hair tending towards flatness on the top, a perm woulda fluffed it up some. Well, she refused my offer straight out, but it must have planted the seed in her mind, so that when Jim got to threatening to kick her out if she didn't do something with her life she remembered how old Tandy was studying to get a beauty license, and Bakersfield Beauty College just seemed the natural choice.

I guess it was her snubbing my offer that sorta set in my craw. I got to talking with the girls and found they felt the same: that little girl could use some bringing down. So we fixed her real good-played a practical joke on her that she wasn't likely to ever forget. On the day of our big colorizing exam, we switched her neutralizer with hair gel. You got to get to know us girls to understand our ways. We can be real fun. Have an open mind, that's what I always say.

Now, the BBC ain't like some of these shoddy fly-bynight operations you see on TV. It's a real-life situation and we practice on real people. Sara just happened to be having her color and spiral test on none other than Darcy Hernandez, Mayor Pepe's girlfriend. We almost didn't go through with it when we found out the nature of the clientele, but we decided that fair was fair, and, Mayor's girlfriend or no, it wasn't time for us to start discriminating. Well you can guess what that perm did to Darcy's hair-turned it the texture of cotton candy, what didn't fall out in handfuls. To thisday she's got abald spot that she has to hide by back-combing. In the end old Pepe had the BBC's license revoked, whichis just as well forme-starting up my own business and all, I don't need the competition. Well, Sara had her a good cry, broke down right there on the cutting floor and managed to bungle a perm as well. She failed the exam, but it turned into a bonding moment for us when I stepped in with my trusty neutralizer and put the fire out. Yeah, I seen

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her through some highs and lows-there when she won Miss Bakersfield, I'll be there when they ship her off to detox.

That's Tandy Tara Thomson for you. I always saysure I can be a bitch, but who do you want standing by your side when the chips fall?

Speaking of chips, wasn't it the damdest thing what happened up there in Vegas. The Chapel of Love ceremony went without a hitch and we was all partying back at The Sands.

Kenny and Tommy Schuster was collecting money to go get some booze-there was plenty of beer, 01' Jim Parks saw to that.

But the boys had a hankering for some hard stuff. Well, Kriste" Jonston, that's Rob-the-shop-foreman's wife, ups and fires on Tommy. That's Kriste' for you-you'll know her when you see her, a pear in tight blue jeans. Can't be the bride, but she sure is gonna get herself some attention. When Tommy headed off to the liquor store, Kriste" was right behind him. We figured Rob would have just let her go-everyone knows what's been going on between those two and for how long-but seeing as it was a special occasion and all, I guess Rob felt moved to make a comment on the situation. And being a man of few words, he upped and popped Tommy one to the jaw. Well Tommy just stood there a minute and shook it off, then he slammed one back at Rob and before you know it we had a brawl on our hands that didn' t look like it was gonna end any too soon. Probably would have done some real damage if it hadn't been for the casino bouncer.

We tried to explain how it was just a disagreement between friends and no hard feelings. Rob and Tommy even shook hands, though their eyes didn't meet. But that bouncer stood firm. Paid for or not, we had to vacate that banquet room.

Drew's father stepped in and tried to mediate, said he'd be sure and personally keep out the rougher element, but that bouncer just shook his head. Seems he had taken a dislike to us all. And on top of all that, the Bride disappeared.

Course, none of us realized it at the time. It was only when Drew had run out of money at the blackjack table that he went looking for her, planning to sweet-talk her into letting him dip into the honeymoon fund. And he would have done it too.

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That boy's got a way about him. He bummed my last roll of coins-not a minute after I'd run Kenny off for trying to pull the same stunt. I left Drew at the nickel slots and me and some of the girls went off to look for Sara. We figured she 'd just got sick again and gone off to find the Ladies'. See, what we did was kind of poor planning on our part. That is, we had the surprise bachelorette party the night before the wedding, forgetting we'd have to drive all the way to Vegas the next morning. It was the men's fault really. They had rented out the backroom at the Oasis-that's that new strip bar in Barstow-for the night. Being as we ain't the kind of girls to sit at home wondering what our fellas are doing, we decided we'd do them one better.

We ran around and picked up Sara in a rented limousine.

Didn't even give her a chance to change clothes, just said we had a surprise. Well, she seemed real happy for once. She popped the champagne, turned on the TV and began opening her presents. She got some great lingerie, you know, seethrough teddies and edible underpants.

Well, Sara always was a moody one, and for no reason at all she just took it into her mind that she didn't want to go to no male strip show-said it was embarrassing. Ain't you taking off your clothes, I says, no reason for you to be embarrassed.

Besides, I says, this ain't no Hooters up the hill, it's Chippendale's in L. A., home of the West Coast' s hottest-looking male strippers.

She didn't have no smart answer to that so she just opened up another bottle of champagne and gave us all hard looks-she wasn't too good to drink our liquor I noticed.

Didn't she just sit there in that limousine the whole night-you know she did-and refuse to come into the bar where we had pre-paid for the special bachelorette show. Well the joke was on her, because we got our money's worth anyway.

We weren't about to let her spoil ournight out. Good ol'Cherry slipped off her wedding band and pretended to be the blushing bride. Them dancers like the shy types, gives 'em something to work with. Being a married woman and all, I couldn't really get down and dirty, but I did kiss every one of them boys.

Well I guess we all had ourselves a good time that night, and we paid for it the next day. Man or woman, there

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wasn't a single one of us that wasn't hungover sick as a dog.

You could tell the out-of-towner guests from the locals by the amount of color in their faces. Weren't we a sorry sight on the way to Vegas: a wagon train of cars-must have been about twenty of 'em-driving up the old interstate. If you looked behind, you'd notice that every once in a while one of our guys would pull off to the shoulder for a vomiting passenger. The smarter ones didn't even try to sober up, just popped themselves a beer for breakfast and carried the party over to the next day.

Drew was his same crazy old self, flirting with the women and joking with the men, but Sara wasn't talking. She rode up in a car with her visitors and spread it around that we was all suffering from some flu virus. Them uppity-ups appeared to be at the root of Sara's problem. Seems someone mentioned something to one of them about Drew's shenanigans with one of the strippers in the harem room of the Oasis, and that so-and-so up and told Sara. As usual, she overreacted. A boy's got to sow his oats, says Kenny, and I agree.

So you see what I was facing when I went looking for little Miss Sara, tom between smacking her sassy face and just walking away from it. I didn't get it. It was her wedding day.

She should of been the happiest woman alive. Thinking about it was enough to make me violent. Just what was it she wanted anyway?

I found her sitting in a booth at a restaurant in CircusCircus, still in her wedding gown, tucking into the fifty-cent shrimp cocktail like there was no tomorrow. Them yards of lace and tulle was taking up the whole of a horseshoe booth-you know, that big one that seats six. She looked like a princess sitting on a cloud, like something right out of the pages of Modern Bride, not a hair or fingernail out of place-never you mind the cocktail sauce. There was four empty shrimp cocktail cups in front of her, and six more she hadn't even started on yet.

She nabbed a shrimp out of one of these as I was walking through the door, and as she brought it to her mouth she saw me.

She looked right into my face and stuffed that shrimp into her mouth, tail and all, like she didn't even know me. I tell you, it was kind of scary.

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Well, I know the silent treatment when I see it, and I didn't let it get to me. I pushed aside some gown and took myself a seat and waited for her to crack. But she just kept on eating, one shrimp cocktail after another. Finally I couldn't take it no more. Hon, I says to her, what are you doing here.

There's fifty people over there waiting on you to cut the cake.

She just licked the sauce off her fingertips and started in on the last shrimp cup. Up close she didn 't look all that great.

You could see where her mascara had started to run and her pinky nail was hanging loose. And, if you ask me, that last perm and frost was a mistake-didn't leave enough time in between treatments, so it came out a brassy gold instead of a white gold.

Made you realize how much of her good looks is just cosmetics.

Well, I waited patiently while she fished around forthat last shrimp. And when she had it, I intercepted her. I grabbed her wrist and shook it hard, splattering red sauce all over her white gown. That shrimp went slipping across the table, but I scooped it up in my fist and held it there.

She shot up out of that booth and up on the seat. She stood there like a Viking goddess and held out her hand. She didn't even give me time to think. She kicked me in the stomach and screamed give me that shrimp!

The whole room went dead silent. She was trying to embarrass me. But I had news for her: Tandy Tara Thomson can not be embarrassed. I jumped up there with her. I held that shrimp above her head, but out of her reach, wanting to watch herpawatit. I'm gonna give it to you alright, I said. I'mgonna give it to you when I'm good an' ready. But first, you gotta explain something to me, Missy. You gotta tell me just what it is you want from us around here. You got to tell me, or you ain't ever getting your stinking shrimp.

Well, that sure took the wind out of her sails. She slid down into her scat and folded her hands in her lap like the little Miss Priss she is. I sat down too, and I held that shrimp, cradled in my hands while I waited for the answer that had been plaguing Tandy's sleepy time hours.

Well, wouldn't you just know that what she had to say was about the dumbest thing I'd ever heard in a lifetime of dumb

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things. What I want, says Miss Sara, is to have a thing the way I want it. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It gets smaller every day. So small in fact, that I thought I was finally going to get it. You are ruining everything. The thing I want now is to eat ten fifty-cent shrimp cocktail. This is the thing I want. It is all I want. Now, may I please have my shrimp. Please.

Well, I could sec I wasn't ever gonna get an answer, so I took that sweaty old shrimp and I stuffed it right into my mouth and chewed and chewed. If you think she woulda screamed, if you think she woulda jumped up in the booth and kicked me in the stomach again, you woulda been disappointed. What she did was brace her dainty princess hands against the tabletop and squeak: I think I'm gonna be sick.

Like I said to Drew later, if it hadn't been for that little fat man winning the jackpot and distracting me, we'd all know where Sara Beth Parks is today. Last I saw, she was barfing up her shrimp on the shoes of a blackjack dealer.

[Q]

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JOE CONNELLY BRINGING OUT THE DEAD

I parked the ambulance in front of Hell's Kitchen walkup #475 and Larry and I pulled the equipment from the back.

The full moon lit the street like a saint's festival and on the stoop the April evening revelers cleared a lane and crowded together for the bad news. "Which apartment? Which apartment?" they asked, as if they were all holding lottery tickets no one wanted to win. "Lord Jesus, it's Mr. Burke," the oldest woman said and the group quickly sat down to collect the stories of the man from 5A and his drunk spiteful son, his crazy daughter, his wife the saint, and his bad heart.

A young boy held open the front door. He was crying and inside the screams reached me on the ground floor and I knew them like I knew the patched rolling steps, the gray yellow paint, and the red steel doors with three locks in every building I've climbed through to get to the screams at the top, always at the top. I knew Mr. Burke was dead and what a strange and terrible thing it was to know and to have learned it through time and still climb.

Five flights. The grief-stricken ushered us into a small front room crowded with velvet chairs and porcelain. An older woman stood in the center surrounded by neighbors and when we entered their screams became choked voices and the old woman's eyes had run dry and she squeezed them tightly. A son stood guard in the hall and led us past the kitchen and bedroom into the large back room dominated by the king-size bed upon which lay the tiny figure of Mr. Burke. The daughter was kneeling over the old man. She looked up as we came in, then bent down and pressed her lips against the already colder, flaccid mouth of the father. The son grabbed my arm.

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call you guys but he swore us not to. He was crying and I never once heard the old man cry and after a while we couldn't hear anything so I broke the door down and he was barely breathing.

I put him on the bed there and he just stopped."

Larry and I moved the body to the floor. "How long ago did he stop breathing?"

"Maybe ten minutes. The woman on the phone was telling us how to do CPR. Please, you gotta do something. This is gonna kill my mother."

"We'll do the best we can," I said and tried to sound confident, but ten minutes was too long and CPR on a bed is useless. Even as I pulled out the ventilator I wanted to put it back, to pack up all our machines sit in the living room with the family pour a few drinks and toast the life they remembered for there was no life left to celebrate in the body whose heart I was working to start. Patrick Burke's time had come. He probably knew that when he locked himself in the bathroom.

His spirit was leaving. I opened his mouth and felt him pass through my fingers like the morning breath of heavy snow and he was in the room filling it circling through the folds of blankets pulled from the bed and under past the dirty socks, the twice-worn dress shoes and the old blue bathrobe he had refused to throw away moving up into the closet through the wool suit and tic they'd soon be dressing his body in then whirling around the dusty corners of the room he found his daughter and embraced her then his son trying to pull them together but he was leaving into the hallway over the worn oriental into the front room he kicked the cat off his favorite chair pushed down on the old springs and then up and gathering himself before his wife of 33 years he kissed her once and held her face until she stopped crying. He was ready. He moved to the window and looked though the room's yellow light caught by the glass out over the tar paper plots and gray ditches of his birthplace to the silver peaks of midtown where he was a printer for 40 years. He was ready but he could not leave.

I put the mask over his face and squeezed the ambubag, pushing air into his lungs, but my heart was not in it and neither was Mr. Burke's whose EKG rhythm on the monitor

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was a flat green line. I knew that if we did manage to jump start his heart there would be nothing to fill it with except blood.

After seven years on the job I always had a feeling when there was a chance of someone coming back but on that night I felt nothing but the same emptiness that had trailed me for months.

My hands took over, though, as they always did; trained on hundreds of cardiac arrests they were automatic. I pulled out the long steel laryngoscope blade and inserted it into his mouth.

Using it like a lever I lifted the tongue up until I found the white vocal cords like Roman columns and I grabbed those gates through the dark cartilage of the trachea and into the branched entrance of the lungs. I secured it, hooked the bag up to the tube, and pumped it hard.

I called for abackup. The dispatcher said first available, which meant we would be on our own for at least thirty minutes; and, although I didn't want to involve the man's daughter, I needed more hands. She knelt by her father's head and I showed her how and when to squeeze the bag. She tried very hard but was lost looking into his eyes and her mind was falling back.

"Squeeze," I had to keep saying.

Larry was violently crunching down on the man' s chest trying to push the blood from heart to brain. As I fit into the slim space between the bed and the man's right arm, I heard one of his ribs crack like deep ice in a winter lake. I turned the arm over, found a trace of blue vein and plunged the needle in. I hooked up the IV and watched the bubbles ride the salt water into his arm.

Epinephrine first, one milligram pure adrenaline, a liquid scream in the vein to make the heart feel it's trapped in a burning shirt factory. Followed by Atropine, a more subtle agent, it rings an alarm and tells the heart it's not dead only sleeping. The heart wasn't fooled. The line on our monitor ran as straight and flat as a desert highway. I popped another Epi but the line only shivered a moment before straightening. Then I gave him my best. I shot in an amp of Calcium to give the heart a little Joe Louis. I drew up a vial of Isuprel, stuck it into the IV bag, and let it run. Isuprel scorched everything in its path. It set the heart on fire and the heart could either come back to life to

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beat the flames out or lie there and bum like old wood. I topped off that cocktail with another Epi and Atropine and I sat back to see what would happen.

The flat line on the monitor ran untouched seemingly infinite and perfect like the axis of the universe then it flexed and sawed and in one minute it was exploding into one thousand shaking points. I could see the vibration in the chest under Larry's hands as every muscle in the man's heart began firing wildly in different directions. I charged up the paddles and placed them on his chest twelve inches apart. "Clear," I yelled.

"Clear." The daughterlet go and then screamed when the man's frail body left the pinewood floor. The EKG line continued to dance so I shocked him again. This time the man's face reared up to mine as if to challenge. His daughter groaned and rubbed the head which had thumped heavily upon her knee.

The shock of defibrillation is like a slap in the face to the hysterical heart. Sometimes the shock alone gets the heart to pull itself together and start beating regularly but often the soft voice and soothing hands of Lidocaine is needed. "Just relax," the Lidocaine says, "everything will be all right." I gave him eighty milligrams and prepared to shock again but the daughter would not let go.

"No more," she said and she was crying. "Please don't do that again."

Larry pulled her arms away from her father's face and I hit him again at full power. This time the body hardly moved.

There was nothing left. The line on the monitor stopped dancing. It ran straight and smooth and showed no intentions of rising. Larry returned to the man's chest, grunting with every compression. I heard another rib snap.

Larry was exhausted. Sweat dripped from his nose onto the man's blue shoulders and with every breath he wheezed like a broken kettle. Larry had trouble mowing his suburban quarter-acre without a substantial nap and ten minutes of CPR was more than his well-rested body could bear. There were a number of reasons why Larry should have become a plumber or a lawyer-anything except a paramedic-but chief among them was the way his body moved during CPR. He had a heavy gut

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stretched by years of lying supine on the green convertible, his head tilted forward just enough to swallow the king of beers without choking. When Larry knelt over the dead, his belly would swing like a bowling ball in a shopping bag. The force of this gyration met the force of gravity somewhere in his lower lumbar and inspired a number of unfortunate reflexes. With each compression Larry's heels kicked up, his pelvis shot forward, and his head jerked back, giving for all present, the impression that his work stimulated him far more than most would consider to be the limits of professional behavior.

"Why don't you let me take over," I said to Larry, "while you call the doctor and ask for an 83." The code number for DOA is 83. After starting CPR and delivering a regulated set of treatments, all medics are required to call a designated physician in order to receive orders for further treatment or, in the case of Mr. Burke, to call a dead man dead. He had been flatline for over twenty minutes and by the time Larry woke up the doctor and explained the situation it would be thirty. All first line drugs had been used with little success. The man was dead and we were tired. It was time to pull out the tubes and catheters, unplug the monitor, put the man back on the bed, cover him, and leave this poor family to their grief. It was time to get a cup of coffee and park the ambulance by the river for a few minutes of rest.

Larry had busted up Burke's chest. I could almost reach through the cracked ribs and squeeze his heart with my hand. I apologized to him for both of us and gently built up to a soft steady rhythm. I looked around for the first time thinking of all the hours I must have spent kneeling on hardwood floors, crunching the chests of dead strangers, and putting together stories about their lives from the pieces left on the bedroom walls.

Burke's wedding picture sat on top of the far nightstand.

He wore a black tuxedo and smiled like an idiot standing with his young bride on the church steps. Private Burke stood naive and confident atop the tall walnut dresser. He was trying to look tough and ready to fight the communists but he only succeeded in looking young. On one side of him was a purple heart in a

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brown velvet case and on the other was a smaller photo showing three GIs arm in arm standing at a muddy crossroads before a signpost that listed the distances to various cities: New York, 10,761 miles; Seoul, 40 miles. On the wall above was a plaque from The New York Times to Patrick Burke in recognition of forty years of service, 1952-1992. Next to that was a photo of the man in blue work clothes, hands and feet dark with newsprint, looking small before the dark metal girth of the printer.

At the foot of the bed, above Mrs. Burke's low, wide bureau, was a mirror as big as a bay window. In its glass a dark portrait of Christ stared down from somewhere behind and above. He was pointing at his chest to where the red robe opened showing the heart wrapped in thorns and crowned by flames.

Across the bed and left of the window that overlooked a wall of windows, the Burke family was born and raised. In its center were three collections of bald, smiling babies. Around them the two older sons became boys in baseball uniforms then graduated high school, married, and had sons of their own. But their youth seemed stunted, as if they had been rushed into adulthood to make room for their sister, the blonde-haired freckled-face favorite, whose life filled more of the wall than the window. I watched her climb out of diapers, start walking, and go to school. She prayedforall of us athcr First Communion.

She loved to paint and play the violin. She won swimming medals and dancing awards and she always smiled, a smile that grew brighter as her body grew taller until her life reached the top of the wall, Queen of the Prom, the most beautiful daughter in the world, her place as sacred as the Christ looming behind me.

The girl's life on the wall ended there; no wedding photos or smiling bald babies followed, nothing was allowed to supersede that smile and when I looked at the woman kneeling next to me I understood why. Her face was sharply lined, almost anorexic, still beautiful but harsh and pale as raw quartz.

Her blonde hair was dyed black and chopped into short straight bangs. Black makeup ran down her cheek past a silver pin pierced through her nose. She wore a loose-fitting black tank

dress that showed the bleached points of her shoulders. It seemed as if she hadn't smiled since that night at the prom, as if she had spent the last ten years fighting her way off that wall and there, on the floor, holding her dead father's head between her knees, it seemed she had succeeded miserably.

"Squeeze," I said. I wanted to give some poignant lasting consolation but there was no such thing. "Maybe you should take a break. Your brother could come in for a few minutes and then my partner will be back."

"No," she shook her head, "he couldn't handle it."

I felt bad for bringing her into this but she was right; it was a job best done by the already fallen and, inmy case, the still falling. I tried to imagine sitting like that on the Great Lawn in Central Park a picnic lunch between us on a bright blue and green spring afternoon. I opened the wine and she smiled and stretched her back on a cool breeze. Two young people.

"Do you have any music?" I said.

"What?"

"Music, I think it helps if you play something he liked."

I was already using the past tense for her father.

"Pat," she yelled, "put on the Sinatra."

"What?" Pat came in. He was crying.

"Play the Sinatra," she whispered.

The opening stringsof'Septcmberofmy Years' drifted through the room. Not salsa, I thought, not a good rhythm for CPR, but what music to leave with. Unconsciously I picked up my pace and concentrated on my hands. There was a time when I believed music could make a dead heartbeat again, and I once believed my hands were electric, and bringing someone back to life was the greatest thing one could do.

I have done CPR in the grand ballrooms of Park Avenue and in the third floor dance halls uptown. On Park Avenue they stand tall black panels around you to protect the dancers from an unpleasant view and the band always tries to lift up the living with songs like 'Put on a Happy Face.'

Uptown, the band never stops and the dancers' legs whirl around you like a carnival ride. I have worked on the floors of some of the finest East Side restaurants, serenaded by violins,

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while the man at the table next to me cut into his prime rib and I have worked under the gory fluorescence of basement diners where the taxi drivers can order, eat, and be back on the road in fifteen minutes. I have watched Broadway shows from the front row and stared at kung-fu pornography from Times Square balconies. I once brought a bartender back to life on the top of his bar while Irish dance music played. The patrons moved over for us but no one stopped drinking.

One of my first cardiac arrests was in the Roseland Ballroom. I had been there the Friday night before to pick up a young man shot in the head but this was Sunday afternoon, a day when families come from all over the city to talk and dance.

A salsa band was playing and the crowd of dancers made a path for us without losing a beat. The man lay dead in the middle of the floor, dead but not lifeless, for nothing could be lifeless in a room so full of laughter and dancing and music that sounded off your heart. We had a backup unit behind us and my partner and I moved perfectly-intubated with an Epinephrine on board in twenty seconds. I took over CPR, my hands rising and falling into the rhythm of the music and the dancers' feet nimbly stepping around us to the salsa beat, a pulse of life. On the monitor I watched my compressions become perfect beats and when I took my hands away the beats continued. "He has a pulse," I shouted and stuck my thumb up in the air. The man started breathing on his own then and as we pulled the stretcher out the crowd cheered and slapped us on the back and the dancers filled in behind.

Walking from that room I felt blessed by life. I had purpose for the first time and it carried me through those early wild years. Only much later did that beat begin to fade and only recently did it disappear leaving a cold stone in its place.

Larry had been on the phone ten minutes and my knees were beginning to feel like they did after a confessional grilling

by Father Kerrigan. I had to admit that Burke looked better than he had all night. The blue was gone from his cheeks and the broken vessels in his nose had turned a familiar red. I noticed beats on the monitor, too wide to carry a pulse but they were gathering speed. I pumped on and listened to Frank sing of the

brown leaves falling down. When I looked up again the beats had tightened. I stopped and found a weak pulse in his neck which soon became a strong pulse at the wrist. I sat on the bed surprised at something for the first time in a long while. His brain was dead; I was pretty sure of that. I had checked his pupils and they were fixed in place but his heart was beating like a young man's. Larry came in.

"It's okay. We can call it. 83."

"No we can't," I said. "He's got a pulse."

"No shit."

The daughter looked up, "Is he going to be all right?"

"His heart's beating," I said. I didn't say that he would never wake up and that his heart would beat on as long as machines pumped in food and oxygen. I was just taking orders.

The news of Mr. Burke's recovery spread quickly and soon the room was full of crying smiling faces. They watched as the backup unit arrived and we strapped the old man to a longboard and gave him one more Lidocaine for the trip.

It took some time to get down. The stairs were tight and it was all I could do to keep the airway in place. The daughter led our procession glaring at the faces that peered out from every open door. When we reached the bottom, she waved her arms at the crowd still sitting on the stoop.

"Get out. Get out," she screamed, pushing the ones on the top until the crowd moved and split gathering on each side of the front gate to watch us bear Mr. Burke down the last six steps. When I looked up the clouds had come to cover the moon and one of the first drops stung my eye. The daughter covered her father's face with her arm.

From the top window Burke's spirit watched us raise his body into the ambulance. He saw us leave and then he followed his wife to the bedroom where she packed up a pair of pants, a shirt, jacket, and shoes. He watched her go out the door and lock it then he returned to the window to see her walk up the street out of sight. He waited there, his spirit pressed against the glass, until long after the Sinatra had ended and the last of the crowd had wandered home.

(Qj

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———•~"SB£gaj

Quarto

TING BELL THE VILLAGE

Once I lived in a village, Every morning the sun embraced me in the fields; Yellow leaves of wheat, corn, and sunflower Caressed my hands, and Black soil massaged my bare feet; The moon walked me home with her tight hugs; Frogs and crickets sang their lullabies In my sweet dreams.

Once I lived in a village, In spring, the melting water vibrated in the air; In summer, green vegetables wrestled in each backyard; In autumn, chickens, pigs, cows, and children Competed with their songs; In winter, snow flakes whispered to the thatched roofs.

Once I lived in a village, Locks became homeless; Hot tea, toasted corn, and steamed bread of every house Always smiled at me; The mud beds and walls echoed laughs of the elderly; The window panes of thick brown paper Exhaled gentle hums.

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CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

Ting Bell is currently a senior at the School of General Studies.

She emigrated from China to the United States in 1988. This is her first poem. She plans to write more about China and Chinese people.

Cherie Margaret Brooks, a graduate of New York University with a BFA in Drama, studies playwriting with Eduardo Machado at Columbia University. Her workhas been produced at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Union Square Theatre, and Alice's Fourth Floor. She is an actress and lives in Manhattan.

Cecilia Calderon is currently doing post graduate work in Spanish literature. She is also compiling her first book of poems and lives in New York City.

Michael Cervieri was bom at a very young age outside of Boston. He is now a junior at Columbia College majoring in Philosophy. He spends most of his days walking around confounded that 2+2=4 and astounded that he's even thinking about it.

Williams Rossa Cole is a graduating senior at General Studies.

Williams has traveled extensively in Central America and is interested in media analysis and social criticism.

Joe Connelly has been a paramedic for five years. He currently works in the Times Square area for the hospital in which he was bom. "Bringing Out the Dead" is part of a novel in progress.

Raul Correa has tended alotofbar, washed alotof dishes, built concrete foundations, sanded floors, constructed theatrical sets, attended Trinity Square Repertory Conservatory, and served as a Recon Sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division. He is an English major at G.S. and the co-recipient of the 1993 Bennett Cerf Award.

M.D. Edwards, a Woolrich Fellow in the Writing Program for 1992-93, teaches Art History at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. Four of her plays, Quality of Life, Dirty Tricks, Elevator, and Rodney, have been produced as stage readings by Columbia Dramatists. She thanks all her teachers at the Writing Program for their support.

Neal Feinberg has the greatest father and brother ever on this earth. He thanks Harbor Island for its support and spiritual guidance. He has finished the first draft of his first novel Sam's Hill, something he thought he could never do.

Red Green Alissa Heyman is a sophomore at Barnard Collge and has studied with Nicholas Christopher. She has been creating her own stories and poetry since she first learned to write, and even before that. Her recent inspirations are Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot.

Sally Jones is a post-graduate senior fellow in the Writing Program. Her play She-Wolf debuted at Shapiro Theatre this Spring. She is currently writing a screenplay.

Susan Kelly graduated from Harvard in 1987 and is currently a General Studies student. After working four years as an assistant editor with various publishing houses, she decided to write something herself.

Melanie Conty majors in Literature/Writing at General Studies and plans to attend journalism school after her '94 graduation.

She was born and raised in Manhattan; however, due to the advantageous ratio of 4 men per woman, she wants to live in Alaska, where she intends to gather material for her future book Heartbreak Your Way to Health.

Edward Napier's first play Junior Prom was directed by his acting teacher Herbert Berghof at the HB Playwright's Foundation. His work can be seen at such theatres as Trocadero

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Cabaret, Theatre Nada, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Alice's Fourth Floor, and the West Bank Cafe.

Susan F. Quimpo was born and raised in Manila, Philippines.

In 1987, she came to the U.S. for graduate studies. She wishes to thank Patricia Westfall and Nora Sayre for their encouragement.

Larry Reilly graduated from Columbia College in 1988. He lives in New York City and continues taking writing classes through the Writing Program.

Pascale Roger is a Senior at the School Of General Of Studies.

She has been writing Fiction and Poetry for three years. Pascale is grateful to Alan Ziegler and David Ignatow for their support, help, and insight.

Rebecca Shulman is a senior at Columbia College. She is the recipient of the 1993 Philolexian Prize for fiction. This is her second story to appear in Quarto.

Amy Talkington has written about music and pop culture for Seventeen, Spin, Rockpool, and Reflex magazines. She began working at MTV shortly after writing Mood Over Matter.

Judy Wang, from Kent, Ohio, is a senior at Columbia College.

She was a co-winner of the Alfred E. Ford Poetry Prize.

Produced at The Print Center, Inc., 225 Varick St., New York, NY 10014, a non-profit facility for literary and arts-related publications. (212) 206-8465

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