2002

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Current and recent undergraduate Creative Writing students—including nondegree students and students enrolled in other divisions of Columbia University who are taking undergraduate creative writing courses—are encouraged to submit to Quarto. We welcome poetry,fiction,nonfiction, and drama, including excerpts from longer works. Submissions are nonreturnable. Please include your contact information (name, address, telephone number, and an email address) on your manuscript. Manuscripts may be considered elsewhere while under consideration at Quarto. Please notify us of acceptance by another publication. Address all submissions and correspondence to: QUARTO

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Set in Andy and Baskerville Old Face. Cover art Jesse Shapins, Calle Miguel Hidalgo entre Avenida de Mexico y Autostrada 200, Bucerias, Mexico, January 1999. Copyright© Quarto, 2002 All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists on publication. ISSN 0735-6536

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Deuvepv In the package room they handed me a box-shaped box. It was for me! The return address was written in wild Cyrillic! I ran home to my garret and, leaning against the cold iron radiator, opened it! Inside the box was a paper bag, disappointingly tiny. On it, in mysterious English, were written these words: ONE POET JUST ADD WATER

and in the bag was a litde red capsule. Great, I thought, just what I need— a red sponge shaped like Robert Frost Sneering but curious, I dropped the capsule into a bowl of the required liquid and forgot all about itWinter was a-shiver at Autumn's back! There was frost on the fading city flowers! It was night, and time to go out! Oh did I shudder when I returned to find my room stuffed with hulking limbs— the body of a giant! His eyes were spangled like Muscovite cornices!

Special Delivery He exhaled a breath as cold as Kiev! I watched as the ice went galloping over the city! Somewhere among those enormities of limb was a moudi that spoke! "The gold of all the Californias will never satisfy the rapacious horde of my lusts!" roared the giant as he reeled and raised himself to his full height. The roof was nothing but twigs! My companion and I, a pulp of terror! The sky, full of morning glimmers, was spread out before us! "'Listen, mister god!" cried the giant, "Isn't it tedious to dip your puffy eyes every day into a jelly of cloud?" O did he glower! The heavens shivered! He was imperious, and despite his dandyish outfit, made us shake with real terror! All of a sudden he leapt into the gray street! Crushing a cab and the occasional police cruiser, he ran rampant! He was spry as a new leaf, and at least three stories high! We scurried down to follow him. "Hey you! Heaven! Off with your hat! I'm coming!" he roared. But he wasn't headed for Heaven at all. He was headed downtown! What a ruckus he caused, with legs broad as Siberian sycamores! We galloped and galloped behind him, and before we knew it, we were surrounded by T-shirt hawkers and members of the press! "Commemorative Giant Tees!" they howled, waving their wares, "Remember the moment!" 10

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There was no time to stop and chat! There was no time to shop! "Ixiok—my eyes arc stuck with ladies' hatpins!" he boomed. "Not hatpins, Giant, that's the Chrysler Building!" I screamed. He loomed, ferocious as a sickle in the hand of an angry serf! And then he started to climb. He climbed and he climbed up the Chrysler! He twisted off the gargoyles and chewed them and spat them out! He reached the slick point! He wrested it off! He brandished it! "I can't suffer the streets!" he shrieked— Just then, a yellow bus entered the scene and disgorged a slew of doctoral candidates whose specialties, The Frenzy of Modernism and Russian Poetics, had equipped them to deal with just such a circumstance as this one. "Please remain calm," one of them intoned— a tweedy type, quiescent beyond his years, "What you see atop our beloved landmark is not a giant at all..." ...to be continued All text in quotation marks comes from "The Cloud in Trousers" in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry by Vladimir Myakovsky, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.

you once told me we lose die body parts diat we don't use like die albino blinded lobster who adapted to his cave losing bodi eyes entirely because there's nodiing to see in a space so dark in a sea so deep

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you told me waste not what I want to keep don't be like die lobster who suffers from deterioration each generation in his bone white shell and as I looked to you in apprehension for dispensing information on the evolution of crustaceans your right ear fell

12.

L-MJ6.HIN6. AT PA?e

"What I guess you really want," David Black told me the day after my date with Kristin Ibsen, "is to be considered sexy and endearing. I know it sounds creepy, or Oedipal or ungallant or something, but cool is definitely not the way to go. When they're endeared towards you, even the little things—the things that you don't think are worthy of being noticed—make them smile. They want to smile just thinking about you. That's what it seems to me you should be looking for."

The second time I saw Kristin Ibsen, she sat down at the table next to me at Cafe 212 on Columbia University's campus. She glanced towards me as if she recognized me without remembering where we had met last, and I noticed mat she was holding a notebook with her name on it. Her last name was Ibsen. I said, "Oh, like the playwright" and she answered, "No, the playwright was Norwegian; my family is British." I had not been sleeping very much that week, because I went to bed at 2 in the morning and I woke up every night between 4 and 5 AM and was unable to fall back asleep without reading magazine articles until after 6. I had GQ* and Esquires, New York Review of Books and Foreign Affairs in piles all over my room. The lack of sleep, combined with the fact that I had not kissed a girl since the summer, made me anger more quickly than I would have liked. I was flustered that she would bother to take the time to disagree with me. My comment was made in passing, and technically I was correct: her last name was like the playwright's last name. I asked if she liked his work, and she said that she had never read it, because she was pre-med and more interested in the sciences than in literature and theater.

Laughing at F-ape I tliought: "What kind of girl has never read Hedda Gabler when her last name is Ibsen?" but the outline of her breasts was visible through her long sleeve T-shirt, so I invented a sister who was interested in being pre-med at Columbia, and I asked for her email address so my sister could ask her questions about the sciences at Ivy League schools.

In the summer, I kiss girls and tell them that I used to be a ranked tennis player. It isn't true, and they never seem very impressed by it, but I have been telling them that I was ranked 52 in the Northeast for years, and I am not going to change my game now. I have run the junior division of Lake Owego Camp for Boys for the past few summers. The counselors meet up at Cedar Rapids Bar after a long day of work and take each other's shirts off in the backs of Subarus and Chevy trucks. All of us who work at Owego (and the sister camp, Timber Tops) are either Jewish Northeastern Americans there to make money or on vacation from England or Australia to see America. The food is terrible and the foreigners spend their entire salaries on beer, so they can never afford to travel after camp as they plan to. The American girls like The Dave Matthews Band and the guys are liberal and good at Ping-Pong and slightly homophobic. It is an escape from the world of Columbia, and when I can remember my dreams, diey are usually about leading a campfire or teaching a lesson of lacrosse.

j I he first time I met Kristin Ibsen, I was at the Abbey Pub on Broadway near 109th Street, and I was drinking Jack and Cokes with Ben Kliener. Ben Kliener has dirty blond hair and a pretty face, with fine lips. He does not wear a watch, because he picks his nails and is self-conscious about his hands, and he thinks that a watch would draw attention to them. He is involved with student theater, and he knows a lot about Imacs and Irnac products, and everyone who meets him thinks that he is gay. We were talking about his girlfriend, and how, even though they had been dating for more than a year, she was a brunette and he was more attracted to blonds than he was to brunettes. He begged me not to tell anyone about this, and then he told me mat she wanted to have anal sex with him. He thought that it was 14

&rian Ptateer disgusting, but for her, he would do it probably. But then he changed the subject, because I hadn't had a real girlfriend since freshman year in high school, and he thought that I wouldn't be able to handle it if he continued to talk about his relationship. He was correct. Although his girlfriend had a huge nose and the thought of anal sex with anyone repulsed me, I was deeply jealous of someone whose girlfriend would try to convince him to do it. Mid-sentence, perhaps even interrupting the word "lube," a blond girl in a tight shirt with a slightly hooked nose and very good skin stood up out of her booth and hovered over our table. She said, "My friends and I were talking. Wait, sorry, my name's Kristin. My friends and I were talking and . . . sorry if this sounds weird. Are you guys gay? I mean, I said that there were never any decent-looking guys around, and my friend—now she's all embarrassed—she pointed to you two, and I said that you must be gay, and she said 'no way,' so I said that I'd ask. So . . . are you?" 5 The idea was to eventually ask Kristin Ibsen out for a cup of coffee. I was confident that after our first two interactions, I could figure out a way to get at least a cup of coffee with her, so I sent an email, and she responded, asking about my sister. I told her that my sister applied to Yale too and mostly wanted to go there. Columbia was more of her safety school. I ended up making a joke about how we had to go to the movies to prove to her that I was not gay, which I knew to be creepy and ungallant even at the time, but she eventually agreed to see me.

The night before I was to see Kristin Ibsen, I went down to the Village to pick up the Rogaine that had been sent to the family apartment, after Columbia's mail system lost the last shipment. My father had just gotten home from work. He had poured himself a glass of water and lemon juice (to flush out die growing kidney stone) and had collapsed into the chair in front of the television where a repeat of Inside the Actor's Studio, which TiVo had recorded for him, was draining from the television. Gwyneth Paltrow waxed on about the artistic merits of showing off her "femininity" in Shakespeare in Love, and my father's eyes ignited when he saw me come in. He paused the

Laughing at Pape

television and stood up to hug me and ask me how I've been and how school was and that he left the last few issues of The New Yorker on my bed. "I've only been uptown, Dad. Things is good." "Good," he retracted and sat down again to appear less eager. I didn't like mat he was so eager to see me. I didn't like that he couldn't hide the happiness, or mat he felt he had to hide it from me to begin with. I told him a story that was partially true about how a teacher told me diat I enlightened him to a new use of alliteration. When I told him that I had a date for die next night, he said, "But you're going to stay for dinner tonight, right?" My modier came in after I setded on die couch and watched another twenty minutes of Gwyneth, and it made me comfortable in a way mat I am never comfortable at college. Even though there was nobody watching, I was embarrassed about how good it made me feel when she asked me if I had seen Gosford Park and if I loved the part when mat guy from America said, "OK" and the British woman did not understand what he meant. She poured herself a glass of white wine and then poured me one. She said that she had been doing some reading, and she was considering quitting her job at Fortune Magazine to do nonprofit work. She wanted to do some good, she said, and my father said mat he had been doing some reading and since 9/11, there was probably more money in charities dian in Fortune Magazine, anyway, and it was strange that he would respond when the television was on, so we laughed at what we were 75 percent sure was a joke. Alter dinner I went back uptown. 1

One half hour before die time we had arranged to meet, I played an mp3 of Les Neg Marrons, a Marseilles rap group whose every track contributed to an interwoven tale of women, diamonds, and die duty to refraining from eating pork. I wore dark jeans, black shoes, and a slate-gray sweater over a black spread collar shirt. In the mirror, I looked prototypically bridge-and-tunnel-on-his-way-from-the-Island-toChelsea, but die beat in the music was strong, and I had drunk a few cups of coffee before, so my heart was pounding and ready.

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When I picked up Kristin Ibsen, she was stoned. She didn't tell me, but her eyes were dilated and there was a dab of chocolate sauce on the back of her left hand. Her features were sharp, though her liquid black pupils focused behind me. Her nose no longer looked hooked. She told me that I looked good and I said, "But I'm just pretending. You really look great," and I meant it, because she seemed happy with me, and the pot made her laugh at all my jokes, and I was going to kiss her before the end of die night.

We were drinking Amaretto Sours at The Abbey, and a skinny Indian guy came in and kissed Kristin on the cheek and gave us some Vicadin, which I found silly because the only other time I had ever heard Vicadin mentioned as a plausible thing to do was in an Eminem song preceded by a chain-saw sound effect. Kristin and I took the pain medication and drank a lot of vodka (on top of the bowl that she now admitted to smoking). We had nothing to say to each other, because she was from Virginia and blond and a former figure skater, and I was a New York non-Jew who knew a lot about Paul Auster. I pried about former relationships. "I know this sounds weird," she replied, "but, like, I was raped when I was fifteen, and I know that I hardly know you, but that's sort of the point. My psychiatrist told me that a way to get over something like that is to tell people in the beginning and not be embarrassed about it, so things wouldn't be weird when they found out. So, whenever I meet someone new, I tell them that I was raped when I was fifteen." I giggled. She thought that I was laughing at rape, which I guess I might have been, but I told her that it was the painkillers laughing, and I was not used to doing anything harder that pot, and she agreed to give me another chance, and I leaned in to kiss her. 10 It turns out that you shouldn't try to kiss a girl after she tells you that she was raped when she was fifteen. She started to cry, and I tried to hug her, but she did not want that, either. She said, "I'm sorry that I'm such a mess" and I said, "but I'm the one who laughed after you told me that you were raped." She agreed and we both went home.

n

Laughing at Fape II

The problem comes from the fact that I went home and cried. I had not cried for more than a year, and I told myself that so many nights of little sleep, a few Amaretto Sours and some Vicadin was enough to break anyone. But I had laughed when a girl told me that she was raped. I had not dated anyone seriously for years, nor had I kissed a girl since the summer. I was wearing silly clothes, and I wanted to call my mother. I found out later that Ben Kliener first had anal sex that evening, which means that, as my friend David Black pointed out, he is probably considered sexy and endearing. It wasn't as bad as he thought it would be, he said, but then he changed the topic of conversation. He pretended that he wanted to talk about something else because the topic was not suitable over dinner, but in fact, we needed to talk about something else, because he knew that it was all I wanted to talk about.

-

DO\NN,

Annie was seventeen when she put a suitcase in the back of her family's smaller truck and drove towards the sliver of white morning sun growing over the ragged mountains. From the small farm in Northern California, situated at the western base of the Sierra Nevadas, on land that is dry and rough and warm, there was only one road to take. Its single lane of pounded red dirt headed towards everything—the grocery store, gas station, high school—or anything. Just before she slipped the truck into gear, she said goodbye to her parents, squeezed her mother's hand, kissed her father's cheek. They let her go hoping she would come home again. Annie followed every twist and curve of the road, felt each bump and slide as she rambled past town and county and state signs. Sometimes she would stop for a day or two, walk around, meander away from the road, sit down and press her hands into the ground until the dirt got under her nails and the grass made pleats in her palms and a rock scraped away a layer or two of skin. Sometimes one or two days turned into one or two years. But she kept on the road, looking for that crack of space where the infinite blue sky nearly touched down on the hard, permanent earth, where she could touch the white morning sun seeping through. Driving along from one year to the next she would notice, especially in winter, that around 10 o'clock in the morning the sun striking her windshield would create a glare in which she could see her reflection. Looking into her pale blue eyes, down her nose to the place where her upper lip curled up, she could sometimes imagine wrinkles stemming out from the corners of her lips, around her eyes, across her forehead. She could see her dirty blond hair turn to a stark white like her grandmother's, and she could imagine herself old and happy and settled.

Annie never imagined, diough, diat her left arm would rest across her swollen stomach die way it does as she takes the order for a tempeh burger and bean burrito. The young couple looks up expectandy and Annie watches die worn yellow of die restaurant's fading light bulbs color her little notebook as it rests in her hand, mid-air, just to die right of her protruding stomach. Annie tells herself not to look direcdy in dieir eyes. Not to stare too long at die glimmering wedding bands on dieir windburnt hands. When diey ask, how long till die baby's due, she laughs and says any minute now. She asks if they would like salads or something to drink or an appetizer. After they have ordered dieir chamomile tea, and the man has taken his hand away from his golden beard and placed it on die woman's hand, smiling intendy into her eyes, Annie asks again if they want anything else. When she finally turns away and takes a teetering step towards the back of the restaurant, she finds herself face to face widi her reflection in the glass door. The steely winter air still holds onto beams of pink and orange as die rolling hills beyond die restaurant darken. There is a silky dusting of snow in die parking lot and she notes diankfully diat her truck does not have a flat tire today. She tries to ignore die fact that her whole body no longer fits in the reflection on the door. And she tries not to break her smile when Mattie clamors through the door screaming about her boyfriend who forgot to pick her up at school and that's why she's late, she'll work Annie's shift tomorrow, she promises. Annie just pats her stomach gentiy, has to look at die floor, notice die worn oak boards, the mark her boot left last summer when Jimmy came back and she ran over to get caught up in his arms and instead slipped on some spilled water and hit her head on a table. She remembers diis time fondly; she has not always had reason to trip and fall for a man. When diis happy memory is direatened by tears, Annie waves her notepad in die air, signaling the fact diat there is work to be done, and waddles over to Charlie at the bar. Mattie is clinging to her elbow, pleading forgiveness, cursing her boyfriend, oblivious to the grimace on Annie's face. Charlie can't stand Mattie and will tell her to go away. Or will at least play interference while Annie recovers, passes die order across the counter to Charlie, and eases herself onto a stool at the bar. At this point, Annie stops thinking about Jimmy. She notices die 2-0

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way her hand falls casually onto the railing of the bar, the spot where her thumb has worn away a bit of the brass stain, realizes that she has left her mark, and does not shudder at how small it is, but rather smiles that it is there at all. She looks at her hands and believes that they are as beautiful as her mother's who lived with her father for twenty-five years and never wore a wedding ring. She tries to believe that rings have nothing to do with anything. When Charlie asks how Jimmy's doing, she is honest. She says she hasn't heard from him in two weeks, that she doesn't expect to hear from him until he is done with his ranger shift at the Linville Gorge in March, that she knows the reason he has not called has nothing to do with there being no phone on the mountain where he is stationed. Charlie says, He loves you, Annie, he just needs some time to figure it out. She smiles at Charlie because he still thinks that time will solve everything. She does not tell him exactly how long it has been since she left her parents' house. When he sighs and asks if she would like anything to eat, if she wants a glass of milk or a salad, she does not snap at him for misunderstanding her gray, worn look as hunger. She does not make a joke about how her butt no longer fits entirely on the stool. She does not tell him to make Mattie and her reckless hair his charity case. Annie guesses that the couple's dinner is ready when she can see the moon beginning to come up over Mt. Pleasant. It is a crisp, beautiful night and they are a beautiful couple, with his full beard and her slim, rosy cheeks, and so it is fitting that they will eat their organic dinner with serenity and the waxing moon hanging over their heads. Charlie says "double-up," meaning the food is ready, and Annie does not curse her ability to anticipate this synchronization of moonlight and good food and love. She takes comfort in the way that things line up for this couple. She knows that this kind of happiness is not out of her reach, just that getting there requires a little more than the anticipated return of a tall, muscular man who wears wool sweaters and helps winter hikers in distress. Annie feels a kick in her stomach and thinks of little Hannah—or will it be Martha?—and springtime and walks in the woods with her baby on her back, learning to make sounds like "fir" and "moss." As she slowly lifts herself off the stool, she smiles at Mattie who will calm down one day. When she picks up the hot plates with their tangy spices floating up into her nostrils and making her feel lightheaded, %\

P A L M S DOWN, FiN&egs ?ÂťPFÂŁAD

she remembers that it's okay to put diem down again, to take a deep breath, smile at Charlie, and try again. When she pulls herself together, and is standing up as straight as she can with diosc extra thirty pounds trying desperately to pull her down, to make her lie down, she does not resist. When Mattie's humming takes on a buzzing quality and die lights above the counter that shine down on die food to keep it warm make her see stars, and she has to lean back on the bar with one hand to keep herself from falling, and then she falls anyway and forgets exacdy where she is, she stops. She tikes a deep breath, places her hands, palms down and fingers extended on die floor beside her. She notices the grooves of the wood, the place where die termites dug a home last winter, the dent from the ice cooler falling. She is not afraid to keep her eyes closed. And when Charlie whispers close in front of her and she can feel his warm, garlicky breath on her face, she lets him help her up. She lets Mattie take the plates to the happy couple. She lets the door swing open and Jimmy come in and wait. When Charlie has pulled out a chair from the table and helped her into it, when there is a glass of cold water waiting for her, when Mattie and Charlie and Jimmy have all asked how she is feeling at least twice, she looks out the window. The moon is striking the snow-covered pines, creating a white glow that hovers around the trees, touching down on die frozen earth. Her truck has somehow gotten another flat tire in the last forty-five minutes. And diere is a little girl running in the parking lot, first making snow angels, and now blowing her hot breath on the restaurant window. It is Hannah whose tiny fingers are spread against die glass. Annie waves to her and tells her she is home.

TH6 FipST &F-eATH OF

The moment the first bombs hit I saw your mother's face and it screamed the final line, Khodara Shohki1. It was half past prayer in the morning. 5:48 AM. She died then and peacefully and with God; you have no reason to worry. The moment the first bombs hit I tried to love the worry from your face. "They will do anything to meet their bastard God," you screamed. I pressed my forehead into yours to eclipse the cruel morning light. "In your azulliene eyes I find my prayer." The moment the first bombs hit Maman was kneeling in her prayer "Little man, d o not worryso silly for construction to begin so early in the morning." Maman's face looked so calm I sat and ate my breakfast, but when the doorbell rang she screamed. I told her, "Don't worry; I'll finish your talk with God." The moment the first bombs hit I clutched my tasieff and prayed God would find my children in prayer. We ran to the window and saw fire in the Mayduif where mine live, but when I screamed my dear Colonel said "Woman, worry

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is useless in times like these," and he stood cane quivering, a single tear steering the trenches of his face as I sat, and stared, and cursed the arrival of morning. The moment the first bombs hit she'd just set the table with honey cakes and morning tea for Ahmad. She whispered "May God do us no harm" over and over like she'd lost her mind. Her expression was the devil's own face, I heard. God? She'd not even been in prayer. Her husband, they say, woke to find his wife frantically scrubbing the kitchen floor and in his worry he kicked her hard in the ribs, and only ten minutes later she screamed. The moment the first bombs hit I saw Kliorsheect out my window, she screamed, "This morning, halcyon nassinf breathed in and out like sorties from my window. I was left to lie like a corpse, to worry as die lucid fingers of God found their way to my moudi, His diumbs forcing back my tongue so I could not even gasp a prayer, as I began to fade I saw a vision of your face." The moment the first bombs hit, chai, sweet breads and bows to God in pre-luminary prayers offer only die promise of resumed hunger and glutting worry yet to face.

4

woman's name, meaning sun ' early morning breeze

TFVIN6. TO ?H0N6 So this phone which is black, But also comes in white; And this phone which is mine, But will soon be yours— It's got this screen that tells you who called And this button that makes voices louder. 900 Megaherz. $99. $69 today. Last model too so you get this one, Which is good because you've seen it already. I'll ring it up as one of those $49 phones And you can consider this a lucky day. Phones are like jeans anyway, better broken in. My brother-in-law has the same phone. He's a stand-up comedian that can't tell a joke. They laugh but not enough. My point is He can work this phone. Easy, The whole thing operates by telling it words, It'll make your Christmas ham if you tell it nice. Made in Malaysia interestingly enough. I'm told they make the best. We get pictures of the workers, This one's made by a girl with real focus in her eyes. Sixteen, maybe. Lives with her parents, Fights with her brother. Cute too. I always liked how it has big numbers. And I love the way it looks. It holds your head like a hand And fits in your hand like a bottle.

It's true. That's how it's described In our catalogue by professional writers. We'll put it in diis bag since it's got no box. I'll give it to you for even less too. This card here gets you free batteries. This card her has my name. The phone. It's $19. No, less. It's nothing.

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Mpls., August '95 He fucked his ex-hot-bod-bleached-blond-striptease-dimwit-girlfriend. He fucked her and his conscience told him to tell me, so he did. I played passive, too cool to care and let it roll off the bed from between us, men screwed him just the same. NYC, September '96 " . . . And what's your name?" I asked the blond boy who was busy in the dress-up corner securing a salvaged tablecloth around his neckelevating him to superhero status. "I'm a man like my daddy!" snapped the intolerant tone of a kid with better things to do than be introduced to another grownup. Mpls., August '95 Of course the following night I had a colorful confession of my own. I fucked my ex-hot-blond-box-of-rocks-could-be-bimbo-boyfriend. I fucked him and my ego told me to tell, so I told. He acted like he figured and didn't allow his affected disposition to disrupt another night's romp. NYC, September '96 "Morgan," the preschool's director said as she gendy tugged the boy apart from his friends, "Morgan, this is Abby, she's your new teacher." "Hi, Morgan!" "I'm not Morgan, I'm a man like my daddy!" he stated widi a sneer and ripped himself away from the director to rejoin the rest of me group. Mpls., September '95 On the bed anodier evening of admissions took place as I lifted my yellow Yoo-Hoo T-shirt. Rubbing my belly, I readied myself to reveal to Tim the truth a test would soon prove. "I feel like I'm pregnant." He

THE M*KIN6I OF A MOTHBP.

laughed and said, "God, you're not fat." I crawled from the bed after that, went home, pissed onto plastic, picked up the phone, called to tell him it was positive. "I am pregnant." Tim said he was sorry, as if for an inconvenience, like scooting through an overcrowded aisle during a movie's previews. He hung up with a frustrated "humph." NYC, September '96 "My Abby!" Morgan shrieked as he barreled through the empty halls of the nursery. He was early again. Every day dropped off alone by the nanny or the driver, sometimes the elevator operator. His neglect became my benefit—we spent each morning together. Whether due to my undivided attention or pure exhaustion from the early hour, Morgan let himself become my dear friend. During the classroom's empty hour he would feed die bunny, set up an art project and wait eagerly for me to ask: "Morgan, wanna help me get the room ready for your friends?" He began to notice he was important, necessary—an element an experiment would miss. Mpls., September '95 Off to find my ex, Mark, and tell him, "I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant and I am going to have it." My ex got ecstatic—drenched me in kisses, secured me with his hugs and asked if he could drink from my soon-to-belactating breasts. I responded with a relieved "yes," then quickly diverted my attention to the other. Tim—the boy whose baby this was not. He would shed sweat of gratitude because we'd been nodiing to each other, merely rebounding, rejected lovers. NYC, October '96 "Morgan, you love Abby more than me!" his mother would exclaim, half in jest, half as if to suggest she really wasn't certain. And me and Morgan—kisses and hugs 'cause he would be left late, dropped off early, alone at parents' visiting day, no cake on his birthday. I took Morgan into my house, gave him an alternate home, helped him get a dog so he would never be alone. Mpls., October '95 We, Mark and me, decided we were having a girl. I wrote her poems and imagined her curls drenched wet with saltwater from summers spent on the shore. Mark planned on being die parent who stayed home so

Aei6.NL FPANKFUPT

I could complete school, but I thought of her strapped to my back, an eager replacement for books. We spent afternoons fantasizing a future and evenings editing and rewording how we would tell our parents. I envisioned the presentation of my daughter to my father—the offering that might put us at peace with one another. And the thought of my mother's eyes, glossy with tears of her success, finally seeing me do something she wouldn't regret. I put down cigarettes and picked up prenatal pills, anxiously waiting for my skin to start stretching— wondering if Mark would see this as sexy. I dug up my copy of Runaway Bunny. NYC, October '96 Morgan's Mom came to school one morning, came to my classroom, found me at my desk. Her cheeks were wet. She told me she had cancer and asked, kind of kidding, if I would move into her house if she died. We barely met each other's eyes and I said "I am Morgan's and I will never leave." She called me "the angel" and smiled in belief that there was no competition between her and me, I just simply loved her son, it seemed. Mpls., October '95 Somewhere between house-hunting and daydreaming, Mark disappeared, vanished for over a month. I ate lots of candy, lost tons of sleep, started smoking again, wandered the streets in search of him—the other, the father, Mark. He was gone. Weeks went by. Friends and advice became my guides, not him or my body or the baby. I called the clinic, made an appointment. Tim drove me downtown, 8 AM Saturday morning. He brought me to the seventh floor. NYC, May '97 Morgan stayed with me on Long Island for two months. I became his summer surrogate. When we went to the beach and strangers talked to him or me, Morgan would pull my ear to his mouth and say, "Abby, tell them I came from your tummy, OK." And with an expression of honor, I agreed to play my part in Morgan's mother/child charade. Mpls., October '95 My appointment was six hours long. At noon Mark barged into the waiting room crying and begging and "whying."

Twe MNCINC of

NYC, September '97 Another preschool season starts. Morgan is in a new class. He has a new teacher. His mother is losing her hair. Mpls., October '95 Mark said he'd been celebrating, bragging in bars all about our blessing. His eyes were glossed with heroin's high. I rolled up his sleeves—skin revealed to me what he would not say. NYC, October '97 Morgan's mother is in a wheelchair. She has lost all her hair. She hides under oversized hats when she leaves the house. Morgan won't let go of my leg so his new teacher lets him stay with me for the first half of the school day. Mpls., October '95 The nurse asks, "Do you want to see it?" "The fetus. Yes, let me see." And there on the screen I saw my baby in a wad of electric images. My body a video game, baby a pinball. NYC, November '97 So small I didn't see her on the couch when I came in. I got scared when 1 finally did and went straight to Morgan's room. He said, "Abby, I want to go to Heaven so I can see God." I told him, "Some people believe we can see God right here." Morgan opened his empty palms, shook his head, looked at me and said, "No. There's no God, see." Mpls., October '95 2 PM, recovery room, drinking orange juice, watching Jenny Jones—I was well enough to go home. Tim took me to my place, put me into bed, said goodbye, then left. I never saw him again.

NYC, December '97 Morgan's mother died. During the funeral he sat on my lap and tore my arms into briar rose bushes, pinching the skin until they bled. "All these people are here because my mom is dead."

.

Mpls., December, '95 Mark resurfaced with more track marks and new resentments. NYC, March '98 Morgan and me, months later, bunker down beneath his bed. "Abby, my Abby . . ."is what he still says and I love him like slow-motion romance. Mpls., January '96 Mark lost his car, his house, his dog. He sold his Ducati for crack. Blames me and our would-have-been-baby for each catastrophe. NYC, May '98 At Morgan's we blockade his bedroom door. He tells me "shhhh" and "listen." "Do you hear that ghost, do you?" he asks. He says, "Abby, are you scared all the time?" I answer, "Morgan, I am scared when I am all alone, but I have you, you are my very best friend. I love you, do you know that?" "I knowwwww, I knowwwwww!" Morgan moans loud in my ear. I squeeze him and give him a smooch to add to the smile he tries so skillfully to disguise.

MOSTLY ?6P-TMNIN6, TO POETRY D/WID

In each poem a hoard of poems locked behind a word-mesh fence. So you suggest a fractal and I say knowledge is a fractal and us at the center but not so with poetry. Where then with poetry? On top of it, sometimes, and sometimes like a hat, covering our heads.

Tne

KIN6. /^ND

QueeN

OF

Ne\M

The morning is like eveiy other morning. My roommate sits up from where he has been sleeping, awakened by the meaningless quasar-sounds of the television bursting into garbled activity across the room. There is a groan from down the hall. I can't help thinking: the white-and-gray static of the TV looks something like the surface of a great dull ocean, in the middle of the day, as the sun plays randomly and brilliantly upon it. His arm—the silhouette of his arm, extendedcuts the screen precisely in half, horizontally, as he switches it off. His woman, Ijeslie, is in the next room, face down in her pillow. In a fever dream, she imagines die pillow is a very large book, and she is reading it very closely, her half-opened eyes pressed against the letters. The book tells their stoiy. I am in the kitchen eating plain yogurt from a half-liter tub. They are both oblivious to me; they always are, in the mornings. I wash the contents of the sink. It doesn't make me angry, doing things for them. Leslie is sick, and of course I feel pity, but I am tied to them by something more than friendship and furniture. Returning the yogurt to the refrigerator, I announce: I'm going out. There is a grunt from the couch. He doesn't want to join me. Outside, it is still July 18, 2001, a clear, beautiful, mid-summer day. The people, however, are walking bent over with their winter coats partially covering their faces. I have examined a few possible explanations for this. My roommate, who was a scientist, has tried to attack it from a rational perspective. Days are only different from each other, he reasons, because the earth's axis is tilted with respect to the sun. Something has occurred to make the axis change; instead of moving in our orbit like a crooked spike through a phonograph record, the earth now moves like a tetherball around a pole—one hemisphere always pointing in. He has also weighed and discarded the theory that the earth is like the needle on a record, moving ever closer to the sun, and the changeless weather is a combination of changing seasons and

Q

OF

changing distance from the sun, canceling each other out. I find his theory flawed for two reasons—first, he gives a weak account of the curious actions of the multitude (he claims they are merely acting out of habit, that only highly evolved creatures could respond to environmental changes this quickly), and second, he gives no reasoning for such a bizarre astrophysical phenomenon. Which I guess is the problem with the philosophies of my roommate—they do a great job with the whys but are pretty shitty with the wherefores. Leslie, who served for some time as a Roman Catholic priest, has offered a slightly more learned solution—she believes we are graceless souls searching for Augustine's second death. This can happen, she says, when the soul is governed by powers other than God, darker powers. Thus when God departs from the body, taking life with Him, the soul is powered on, and the soul can power the body. She says. She says the second death is eternal and painful but that we can't rest until we find it. I asked her, Why, then, can I talk to these people, if I'm a ghost, then why has only the weather changed? She admitted that he was only speaking in metaphors. She implied that I had a lot to learn from this, so I read Augustine, and found that he has no insight whatsoever on the weather. As I see it, the issue is wholly psychological. One or the other of us is crazy. Either it is still July 18, 2001, and sunny with a high of ninety-one degrees and a small chance of afternoon rain, or it's early winter, coat season, and overcast (people look sometimes warily at die sky). I understand, believe me, that it is much more scientific to conclude that I am the crazy one, and all these other people, because their perception has included a progression more similar to the way the weather has changed in the past, are the sane. But keep in mind that this is a mania I share with two other people, and consider also something else strange that has affected everyone but myself, my roommate, and his woman Leslie. They cannot speak about the present day. I ask them a question, like, How do you like this weather? (I try not to indicate that I like it so that I can remain impartial) and they reply, I hear tomorrow will be lovely, or, They had to cancel the game last night on account of the rain. However I steer the conversation I cannot muster even a clause in the present tense. This is not consistent with how the world was up through July 17, 2001. By mis rationale, I have reasoned that the rest of the world has somehow lost touch with a rather unorthodox reality while the respective sanities of myself, my roommate, and his woman Leslie have somehow remained intact. 34

Alegra is, as we three have begun to term it, a common person. Other people sometimes can see things the way we see it, but she shows no indication of that. This is the morning I meet her. I like to work outside because the weather is so fine. Lately, I have taken work as a gardener in the city parks. They say before I worked for them the flowers never lived so late in the year. They say the annuals should be dead by now. I find her passed out in a flowerbed, her pretty brown curls falling over her face. Her dog is there too, also asleep. She wears mittens but no hat, and a single white petal is stuck to her lower lip. I do not succeed in rousing her. The dog, a black-and-white patched mutt with a long, houndish snout, finally comes to as I lift her in my arms. She mumbles, too, from somewhere deep in sleep, "Is something wrong with me?" Leslie is reading aloud, "They take the granite from the ground in great, gray blocks." She dreams usually of inanimate tilings. She is still lying in bed, her head half-pointed to the floor, sweat gathering on her lower lip. My roommate is sitting up in bed smoking a thin, uneven cigarette with one hand and stroking her hair with the other. He has been looking for a cure now for four months. We know because we counted the nights, the number of times the sun rose and set (the precision in the length of each day was what gave rise to my roommate's Tetherball Theory). The sun has set one hundred twentyone times since Leslie's health began to decline. He hears me come in and lay Alegra on the couch. He can also hear the dog barking excitedly. Then he hears my voice, "Stay. Stay. Easy, now. I'm going to make you some soup. You stay here and sleep if you can." I know he can hear me because eveiyone can hear everything that goes on in any other room of the apartment, let alone when the bedroom door is open. But he doesn't come out; he just keeps smoking. Leslie's left arm, elbow out and palm up, falls lazily across the middle of the bed. He has cupped her fingers and ashes his cigarette into her outstretched hand. He is the first to admit that she is becoming another piece of the furniture. These days it is easy to descend into self-mockery. My roommate, for instance, calls himself the King of New York. He thinks this is funny because it makes Leslie the Queen. I should explain: Leslie has been a woman for a comparatively short amount of time (compared, say, to other women her age). This doesn't make her less of a

THC KINÂŁ, AND QU66N OF New

woman; on the contrary, it gives her an air of impermanence that I consider quite feminine. But it makes her, in my roommate's approximate vernacular, a queen, and, given our separation from the common people of the city, which we judge to be born out of a mental or perceptual superiority, the inclination is to capitalize the Q and crown my roommate King. This makes me, I suppose, some sort of household prince, though I suspect my true standing is somewhat closer to die Fool. Three hours later we are walking down the sidewalk past die park where I found her, Alegra and I, and her dog Charlie. She has fallen in love with me already. I find tiiis understandable, because I might have just saved her life (the cold is so convincing to the common people that prolonged exposure can cause frostbite—say, nose loss— or even death) and I did treat her with an unusual tenderness. Anyways, she is beautiful, so I don't mind. I try to practice quiet understatement at times like these. Best of all she is a total amnesiac. I have been in love with common people four times since Yesterday, and also always with Leslie, which is only natural for me given such close proximity to any halfway beautiful woman, however recent her acquisition of the parts which make her such. But Leslie, of course, is out of my reach, guarded on the one hand by my roommate and on thc other by her illness, and the common women have never lasted long, always comparing me unfavorably with past lovers or losing patience with my lack of ambition for the future. Here, though, is a woman with no past, and, if her eyes speak the truth, I am her future. I play a game wim her: "Do you feel better now?" She smiles, takes my hand, and squeezes it. "You've been so lovely to me all day. I don't know what I would have done widiout you. I'll be as good as new before you know it, and it will be all manks to you." "But your head, is it all right?" "I must have hit it is all. It'll go soon enough. The fresh air will make it better." She continues walking, but keeps my hand in hers. I can feel the dog pulling, through the leash, up through her left arm, across her body, and down her right arm to me. I lend her some of my static force to rein him in. "I think we should go back to the park," I say, "and have a look at that flowerbed. Maybe something there will make you remember."

"Did you see anything then?" she asks, "When you found me?" I shake my head no. Charlie, who she let me rename, pauses to pee on a tree. It wasn't a hard thing, renaming him. He came no matter what I called him. She thinks he's amnesiac too, and maybe she's right. After all, she does know him better, in some part of her head. I have a suspicion, though, that he's just a dumb friendly dog. "I remember these colors, how they stood out against the park. The grass was brown and dead, and the sky was this plain, dull curtain so you couldn't even see the sun. These flowers were so bright, die reds like thick blood, like a rose a rose a rose" (like the nail polish on her toes, I think) "and the blues clear like the sun was shining through them, and the whites, not white like the sky was yesterday but like die earth will be one day all year. I remember standing like this, in front of them, and Charlie brushing by my leg. You made these flowers?" "Yeah." I have been watching her from behind the whole time; she has been in a trance of memory. She turns back and looks at me. I ask, "You remember anything else?" "Fire. Smoke, billowing out across the water. And this stink, a stink of people burning." We walk all the way to the north end of the park, to where the land is highest and you can see die sun set over New Jersey. Once every few weeks Ijeslie will put on a fancy dress and insist that my roommate take her out. Today she is in particulaily bad shape for it, and despite her rather dynamic energy—she is flapping around the living room—there is reason to think she is not much better. She keeps calling my roommate Rhett, for instance, which is not his name. She couldn't get up until five this afternoon. Her eyes are still bloodshot, and her machine-enhanced curls are stuck already by sweat to her face. But now that Leslie is only conscious a few hours each day my roommate will do anything for her, and I am eager at the opportunity for a double date, so we are more dian usually receptive. My roommate pulls out a bottle of Captain Morgan that he halffinished last night and we commence on a night of extraordinarily jovial drunkenness. Everyone except my roommate, who is always drunk, is beside themselves, and Alegra looks perfectly gorgeous in one of Leslie's sequined dresses. We start playing CD's and dancing around and spilling our rum and Cokes. Drunkenness makes my thoughts move in waves. Mosdy they go from Leslie to Alegra. I'm in trouble now because I love them both;

TH6 KlN6c AND QU66N Of

I want to sleep with Alegra but I feel that to do so I must not let her see that I love Leslie. So when Leslie dances with me I am rigid and distant, and with Alegra, who unfortunately can't dance, I am smooth and fluid. Leslie is cruel, though, along with being beautiful, and she whisper-sings in my ear, in her dark husky voice, "But will you love me tomorrow..." Her mouth is against my ear; I am looking straight ahead at Alegra as she reads her lips. We go out and we dance. We dance and we dance and we dance. Leslie dances with the bartender, with the bandleader, and with the diva herself. At one point she tells my roommate, "I can feel myself getting better." Near the end of the night Leslie marches up on stage and sloppily demands to be named Prom Queen. The diva obliges and hands over her tiara. Leslie whispers something in her ear and the diva asks Johnny to please come to the stage. She points at my roommate. Johnny is not his name either. I ask him, as he walks away from me, if he knows who Johnny is; I tell him I don't get the reference. He says probably someone from high school. The diva sings Blue Moon for them and they dance together on stage. Halfway through, Leslie collapses. From the bar, Alegra and I watch my roommate shoo the staff away, assuring them that this happens all the time. We watch him take her in his arms like a new bride and kiss her on the forehead and walk her out the door. The band plays flawlessly throughout; it's really a stirring rendition. Alegra and I walk home through the morning fog. The shops are all closed and the lights are all out in this supposedly sleepless city. We walk and talk and wander far out of our way. I have for some time now made it a rule not to tell the common people I meet about their condition, or my condition, depending on how you look at it. Of the four aforementioned common women, I told only the first, and it was disastrous. But I tell Alegra, and she listens, and I tell her my reasoning. "I won't know for sure," she says, "Until I can remember." "But do you feel the cold now?" I ask her. "Yes." But suddenly I can too. At least, I'm shivering. She draws me to her and rubs my arms, and I kiss her. We have wandered now to the edge of a vast quarry. The earth has been dug away, and everywhere is rock and machinery, broken, strewn at random. Not a soul is in sight. She notices it too. "Where did you take me?"

MICHAEL A^P&OTA

I speak, but it is not my voice: "I've been here before. "They take the granite from the ground in great, gray blocks. When the quarries run dry (there is no more rock in the earth), they leave the trucks and trailers and sky-scraping conveyor machines behind them, to be paralyzed by time and the rain. "Sometimes they also leave a manmade lake (cut stone smells sweet in water) where the neighborhood kids had learned to swim, before they told us that to do so was toxic. That same toxicity, though, is what keeps die place whole, nestled, we'll say, between the highway and the train tracks. "And most of die people in the town will never know or think of it, except every twenty years the town will consider and discard the idea of colonizing it to build playing fields for their children. "But some of the people in the town live back there, some of them left trailers full of empty botdes of gin, and some scrawled out graffitied worlds and symbols of hate, paralyzed on those same skeletonized trucks. "And most of die people who had lived back there and any given time are dead, because you don't generally have many years left when you go back there, and some of them are in jail. "The place is invariably full of ghosts, and wild animals, which are preferable, because diey don't brush up against you." A thick mist sits in the hollow; we can only see halfway down. This is the first time she makes me diink she is a native. She says, "I didn't think the city had places like diis." I nod and say, "It doesn't." When we come in my roommate's door is closed and we can hear the bed thumping behind it. My roommate is grunting and Leslie is silent. I have offered Alegra the couch but she follows me into my room and shuts the door behind us. The sexual act we engage in is as tender as it is short. She makes me feel (I am being trite, and honest) like a virgin, and I behave as such. But then, so does she. For all I know she has no memory at all of any experiences to draw on, so she behaves like an excited, frightened, inanimate object. Behind her wet eyes I can see a different sort of excitement, and I know that a part of her has for some time wanted nothing more than to do this for the first time all over again. For me the experience is more abstract but we still act together, each playing our part willingly, with a mutual understanding

TUB KINC AND QueeN OF New You*:

of what we are doing floating somewhere behind our words and gestures. Most of the night we lie awake next to each other. Leslie periodically screams or mumbles incoherently in the next room; my roommate, now, is the silent one, and I assume that he has moved to the couch in the living room to get some sleep as he often does in the middle of the night. We talk about a lot of tilings—who I was, who Alegra might have been, and who we each want to be. She asks me what the first tiling is that I remember, and I tell her I don't know; I've watched too many videotapes of myself as a young child. She asks me what I remember about July 18, 2001. I tell her I don't remember. I kiss her to change the subject. We embark on a second, more generally successful attempt at lovemaking. Halfway through, Leslie's yoice rises through the thin wall. The separateness, the deadness of her monotone sends chills down our spines—we shiver together, into each other. "It was one of those dreamy days when I'd end up in some public park or backyard forest, wandering on tired feet through thornbushes and floral arrangements and swimming in the heavy summer beauty of a manicured lawn. A skinny beech tree grew on a hill with three stone steps cut away to make the slope steeper. The roots showed like a cross-section and crept along the surface of the hillside and back into the ground. Before I saw it I was clear-hearted, talking to my two companions about work and the small happening of our days, but afterwards a moody calm overtook me. I brushed the trunks of trees with my outstretched hands as I passed them by; the sun worked on my dizzy head. There was some moment, perhaps when we stopped to search for a goldfish in a mossy pool and I let the water flow through my widened toes, when I decided against the future. I had found a day, and it was good; I no longer felt the need to go forward. My friends were whispering behind me about how goldfish grow to the size of their bowls, and a mosquito flew in and out of my ear, mumbling just as incoherently. The sky was only pink and orange; the sun was already gone." After a moment, after we are relaxed and sideways in the bed, Alegra says, "That was beautiful. Was that your memory? You should have told me." "I wouldn't have known how, I wouldn't have known how to say it. I'm not even sure that it's mine."

4o

"I like it. I would like to have it. I'm going to take your memory, is that okay?" I lie awake for a while after Alegra has fallen asleep, wondering if tomorrow will be different because I wake up next to a woman. Probably it is the most significant difference between any two days in tliese last four months. Around six in the morning Charlie comes in and climbs on the bed by our feet. I get out of bed and give my spot over to Charlie. I walk through the still apartment. My roommate has fallen asleep watching a video again, and the TV is lighting the living room pale blue. I fix myself a small bowl of yogurt, enter my roommate's room, and sit on the bed next to Leslie. She looks so pretty, totally motionless like this. It crosses my mind every time I see her like this that mis time, she might be actually dead. I don't think she could be now, though, because she looks like she's made out of porcelain. We've discussed, die three of us, whedier or not we could ever actually die, but none of us had the initiative to put it to the test. Absentmindedly, distant from myself, I take my roommate's pillow and hold it over her face. It's like I guessed; she doesn't even struggle. I open my eyes; I see them before me. I can perceive tlieir wracked, open bodies (as everyone else must have seen them all along), meir broken souls, exposed to the winter and die wind. The hideous revelation of Leslie is calling out to me, "Remember!" and then my roommate falls in on himself and they are both a million tiny pieces of dust. In a moment it has passed, and I am on Leslie's bed again, and she is beautiful, and she is die Queen of New York. That man snoring in the next room—he is her King. And I am a fool, a happy, sleepy fool, who imagines, in a half-dream, that he can be pulled from their wreckage alive. Alegra hasn't moved when I get back to bed. She stirs, of course, when I push Charlie away from die bed. "Ssh," I say, "It's just me." I settle into bed next to her. "We were lovers," I say, "in another lifetime." "Maybe," she says, "I would like that." She runs her hand up and down my arm. In diis fashion, with her rubbing me diis way, I am able to fall asleep.

4l

?>He, AT THe DAY 6ONNELL

she, at the waist, bends, a daffodil hanging down the neck of a green pellegrino bottle, heavy with the weight of itself.

Youp.

Math teacher said to me "learn your history" then said blue 2 plus green 4 equals red 5 "What?" said I, that's what I said. Professor of history, in a bald skull this time told me never to make my poetry rhyme and whatever I might hear that blue 2 + green 4 is definitely, but not always, less than yellow 7. "yellow seven?" said I, mat's what I said. Priest serves a turkey feast while drawing perspective drawings and cross-hatching a purple Jesus. "Do you know what purple Jesus is greater than?" he sighed "red 5?" I replied "No!" he denied -red Satan you fool! "red Satan?" said I, that's what I said. Mother drilled me then, on what I'd known that day where did you go whom did you see did you find the way? "The way?" said I that's what I said. purple Jesus is greater than red Satan blue two plus green four equals red five and less than yellow seven.

Learn Your History

"Is that the way?" she tested. "nope, learn your history" said I, that's what I said. and green four plus blue two equals orange 4 and three-fourths.

44

Tne

The observer's choice of what he shall look for has an inescapable consequence for what he shall find.—John Archibald Wheeler One summer day, in 1979, my father called me from his country place and asked if I could help him find the well that supplied a rusty old water spigot located in the middle of his studio garden. His studio, a converted barn, had no interior plumbing of any kind and sat quite some distance from the well next to the main house. With no water pump in or around the studio, this isolated but still-working spigot had long been a family mystery. "It's time we got to it, don't you think?" my father said. "I'll give it a whirl," I told him, and the following weekend I showed up from New York City with the tools for my search in hand: a plastic divining rod, and a stainless-steel pendulum attached to a bit of string. I was, at the time, a thirty-nine-year-old drunk. I made my living as a key grip in the film business, and when not on a movie set, I could usually be found at my local bar on the Upper West Side, drinking Jack Daniels from a beer mug and sucking on Marlboros. Psychiatric literature would probably have it that I was medicating my pain. I prefer to think that I was agitating it. In any case, the pain I was either medicating or agitating was rooted in such profound self-ignorance that getting shit-faced just made things more interesting. At home, I smoked dope and rolled the / Ching, nightly. I snorted large amounts of cocaine, managing to induce periodic nervous breakdowns, from which I would then recover—with the help of Hatha yoga and homegrown alfalfa sprouts—so that I could resume the agitation again. The deeper I wandered into the alcoholic fog, the more convinced I became that I was about to encounter my true self. I poured over books on ESP, astrology, and pyramids. I became obsessed with the possibilities of alchemy and the idea of turning lead into gold. Which is how I began to practice the art of divination.

46

"Cue Pipe

My relationship to the truth was bodi tenuous and self-serving. I knew it even dien, the way all drinkers do. I championed any evidence mat supported the paranormal—and that confirmed my own divinatory powers—and I ignored my many failures, as well as any evidence diat suggested such stuff was pure bunk. I offer this confession as a disclaimer. Almough I long ago gave up booze, drugs and cigarettes, I remain steadfastly unreliable as a scientist. Neither, am I an impartial authority on divination. If you don't already trust that a dowsing (divining) rod is a Y-shaped instrument, which sometimes reacts widi what feels like an otherworldly force, in response, say, to a search for water; or, if you aren't aware that the ageold practice of dowsing is still prevalent in rural and Native America, as well as in Europe, Asia and Africa; or, if you simply cannot buy diat a pendulum, when suspended over a map, can be used to locate objects or minerals buried in die area the map describes, then diere's just no helping it: I'm not the one to be presenting the subject for your consideration. If something happens only once, that's enough for me. If only I have witnessed it, that, too, will do. I'm a big fan of anomalies. That said, let me attest mat before visiting my fadier that weekend, I'd been having some success with die dowsing rod. Which is to say that, while I missed at least fifty percent of die time, I'd been able, occasionally, to find diings widi it. Like the time one of my girlfriends lost an earring at my place and I detected its presence not in the jumble of bed sheets or in die creases of die sofa, but in die hallway stuck to her woolen scarf, which she'd stuffed into die sleeve of her overcoat. Not impressed? How about the time I was sitting at a bar widi a prop man, after a long day filming a commercial? The guy was telling me about his plans to purchase a certain building lot in Brewster, New York. I happened to be idly dangling my pendulum over die bar, at the time, when I felt a shift in the way it swung. Don't buy that land, I said. There's no water on it. This prediction was confirmed a few months later by some unfortunate person who did purchase the land; I never had to buy my own drinks in die prop man's presence again. Still not impressed? How about die time—six-months after this story takes place—when I participated in a search for a young couple that were said to be one

DUSTIN &6N-L SMITH

month overdue on their sailing honeymoon? Using a world map, a photograph of die couple, a sample of the woman's handwriting, and a pendulum, I concluded (correctly, as it turned out) that their 40-foot sloop had gone down off the coast of Libya, and that the couple had died. I know. The practice of divination does not stand up to rigid examination; it is boneless, slippery stuff. My father's outdoor spigot would be my first field test with the pendulum—a device that can only be used outdoors on a windless day. We knew where the spigot was, and we knew it got water from somewhere—& nice set of givens. If my dowsing efforts failed, I could always dig straight down from the spigot, then follow the feeder pipe out to the source. But that would be a messy, exhausting alternative. With my father standing nearby, I positioned myself at the spigot, dangled the pendulum out in front of me, and said to it, Please point me in the direction of the water pipe. The pendulum, after an erratic start began to swing steadily on a north-soutii axis. Since the studio was located just north of the spigot—at my back—I began walking south, checking my path with the pendulum every ten feet or so, the way one might navigate with a compass in the woods. When I came to a stone retaining wall, I climbed it and continued on. Widiin minutes I was standing at the edge of the small pasture—an acre of fallow land that separated my family's house from adjacent county land. Back in the forties, my younger sister had grazed her pony in that pasture; I'd dug foxholes in it, in imitation of the paintings my father had done in Normandy, during die war. My young buddies and I had fired B-B guns and arrows and sod grenades at each other, out there in the center where a clump of honeysuckle now grew. When I was a teenager, I'd mowed and raked that field with haying equipment borrowed from a neighboring farm. Remember that? I asked my fauier. Remember that beat-up old Allis-Chalmers tractor, and the rusty old hay rake you had to sit on to operate? I do, said my father. Who mows it now? I asked Someone bush-hogs it, he said. I looked toward the main house, the nineteenth-century, flat-roofed dwelling I'd grown up in. My mother stood at the kitchen window, 41

THB Pipe

watching us. You know, I said, this seems an unlikely reach for a simple run of water pipe. But it is downhill from here to the spigot. Gravity fed, you think? asked my father. I shrugged. It felt good to be talking with my father like this. Our relationship had been strained for as long as I'd been drinking and using drugs. I deferred to the pendulum again: Tell me, am I still on the path of the pipe? The pendulum began a very distinct clockwise rotation {yes, in pendulumese). I steadied its swing. The answer is in the question, I told my father, trying to give the process some dignity. I held out the pendulum again and asked: Should I continue in this direction? Oh, yes! said the pendulum. I took small steps now, trying to focus on the water pipe. My childhood memories of the pasture were interfering with my dowsing instincts; I had to fight a growing suspicion that something other than die water pipe was drawing me toward that clump of honeysuckle in the center of the pasture, a hundred feet away. Was this patli I was following a transparently emotional journey? Did I maybe just want to dig in the earth again, get down in it and hide, like a child playing soldier? Was I seeking my innocent self? I stopped, took a deep breath, told myself to focus on the project at hand. I did my best to silence metaphorical thought. The most successful dowsers, I'd learned, were simple folk, uncomplicated by agendas, ulterior motives, financial gain. I began again, having convinced myself that I had nothing invested in this search窶馬ot the approval of my father, not some larger abstract meaning, not even an emotional lift. All I wanted was the simple truth: the source of water in my father's garden. To get there, I told myself, I must locate the water pipe. My search might end right here, or in the next town over; I was open to any answer, without preconception. My father, who'd been standing at a respectable distance, struck a match on his jeans and lit his pipe. I could hear the tobacco sizzle as he sucked the flame toward it. I have no preconceptions, I said, out loud. 43

DUSTIN &eAix SMITH

Think pipe, suggested my father. Shhhh, I said. Every search begins in darkness. I have no preconceptions. I am looking for the water pipe, the water pipe, the water pipe, the water pipe . . . This mantra worked for about fifteen more steps. Then I gave in to die thought that I was about to make a fool of myself in front of my parents; that I'd carried this too far; that I was going to wind up at the honeysuckle—a middle-aged prodigal come home to slobber over his roots. I took a deep breath and started walking again, then, abrupdy I stopped. The pendulum had begun swinging wildly. What? said my father. Wouldn't we have seen some evidence of a well out here, years ago? I said. I was stalling, though, to give myself time to diink. I'd ceased walking because it had suddenly occurred to me that, if water was symbolic of life, men I was out here in this pasture asking for the source of life—specifically for the source of die artist's life. My hidden agenda, then, was not so much to revisit my childhood, as it was to discover a way to begin again, to change the direction of my life. What will it take to begin again? My silent question had provoked the pendulum in a way I'd never felt before. I'd lost all control. Embarrassed, I cupped the device in my fist. My fatiier took a few puffs, his brow furrowed in puzzlement. He was up for this, and I liked him for it. Ask it, he said, pointing at my closed fist. The sun was high and hot, die air as still as in a windowless room. I released the pendulum to dangle from its string. Tell me, I said, my mind struggling unsuccessfully to exclude my silent question, am I still on the path of die pipe? An immediate clockwise rotation. Am I standing direcdy over die pipe? Yes. I mean, seriously, am I standing over die goddarned water pipe right now? Yes. Okay, I said, we'll see about diat. I planted bodi feet on die spot, nodded to my father. He fetched die pickax and spade from die garden.

Tne Pipe

While he watched, I dug. The earth was relatively soft, punctuated with small stones. It felt like heaven to be penetrating this ground. At a depth of about two feet, I began digging more gendy, to protect the pipe from damage, should I hit it. The soil had changed in color from black to brown. The stones were bigger, harder to extract. I removed my T-shirt. My fadier seemed amused at my sweaty labor. You laugh, I said. At a depth of three feet, I took a breadier and asked die pendulum: Are you sure the water pipe is here? Quite sure, came die answer. And again the silent question, unbidden, loomed large in my mind— What will it take to begin again?— and the pendulum swung so hard it nearly flew from my fingers. I'll go down another foot, I said, to get below die frost line. Then, just as the spade rentered the soil, it hit something softer and less resonant dian rock. I lay down on my stomach, reached into the hole and began scooping out loose earth with my bare hands. Working carefully, I exposed an inch or two of corroded water pipe. I could hardly believe it. Then, when I began digging beneath it, it came loose from die dirt—not the imagined feeder pipe, leading from a well to die spigot. Not the logical conclusion to our search. Just a busted-off scrap of water pipe, about five inches long, with an elbow fitting at one end. An old-fashioned hunk of plumbing, attached to nothing at all, out in the middle of nowhere, widi no explanation—or instructions—attached. I lifted the specimen out of the hole for my father to see. Well, how 'bout that! he exclaimed. A pipe! I weighed die pipe in my hand. It's lead, I said. Yep, he said. Lead. Without another word, and without ever referring to the water spigot again, we filled in the hole and joined my modier for lunch.

Ducks, Peking style, hanging in vacant restaurant windows. Necks strung out, their golden honey-glazed, roasted skin without blemish. Swaying in an unseen, unfelt convection. Money for their purchase buried beneath the ruins. Heels silently touching asphalt, concrete. Doors open, close silendy, hinges diat once creaked— now as though finely tuned, oiled silent. Only die voice of Spiritus Mundi echoes in the canyon. Moaning. Men I diought die same.

Seeds sewn millenniums ago wreaking havoc among us. We now sit on park benches. Along asphalt pavement lined with trees gazing towards an azure blue unaffected sky. Fearful of ceilings, our dust and air robbing us of life. Bent and broken steel, the pride of men, riveters welders beam walkers architects, all that remains of the great sentinels. Other than the golden ducks, their fat separated from their skin, swaying on a hook made ol steel.

M0NK6Y I feel like we have a connection like people watching monkey documentaries God we are so alike God we are so alike Bring me your ripe behind and bend it over

FOPIt was Saturday. The '84 Olympics were on and they watched it all afternoon, Rufus in the brown beanbag, his dad on the leather couch. Mostly it was the discus and shotput they wanted to see. Especially the discus. Afterwards, they went out back and tried it with a Frisbee. They spun and hurled away. Ten, maybe twelve feet later the plastic disk would wobble and land. Except once, the last time his father threw it, the Frisbee never came back. He stood there, scratched his crotch, spiraled, and let go. Rufus's eyes followed it. It flew up and over the neighbor's house, never seen again. That was about it. There were no other true memories of him. His mom didn't talk about him anymore. All the business suits and files had been packed away for years. Once Rufus thought he remembered his father wearing a cowboy costume but later realized it was only a false memory sparked by a photo in the back hall. Rufus Lily still lived with his mother in Old Irving Park, but he spent most of his time on Elm St., near Beef Burger, where the railroad tracks ran four across and there were still places to get your hat blocked and you shoes shined by old black men who wore shiny shoes and blocked hats. Really. Afternoons now found Rufus at Don's Pool Hall. He didn't play, just hung out with Booger die cat. Booger slept in a hole in the drywall, above which was written, in red Sharpee, "Booger." That's where he sat, and the clientele, all of whom were middle aged and from die east side of town, looked on little Rufus with a sort of pride. It was as if, without even trying, they had stolen a little living piece of Old Irving Park and placed him in the back of Don's Pool Hall with Booger. Mary Catherine, the cleaning lady, looked after Rufus on days when his mother went to Abbotswood. She rode the bus to and from their big yellow house. In the afternoons, if she had to go downtown, Mary Catherine simply took Rufus with her. Rufus didn't mind. Mary

FDP. BEAUTIFUL 6*IPL%

Catherine cleaned for half the houses along Cornwallis. The Hitchcocks bought her dentures. The Andrews bought her an '84 Country Cruiser. Most of her clothes used to belong to Jane Forbes Price. Every Halloween she brought her kids to the neighborhood where they got the best candy and nobody ever stole it. Mary Catherine's eyesight was going a little, and so sometimes she put things back in the wrong places, or left too much Old English on the dining room table, but she smelled like coconuts and Rufus looked forward to his time with her. Especially when they went downtown. After a while, Rufus went there on his own. His grandmother had grown more sick, and so his mother spent more time with her at Abbotswood. Alone now, in the afternoons, he'd take the bus downtown and everyone said his name when he stepped on. Nobody worried about him. He didn't have many close friends, but he stayed out of trouble. His mom thought it was good for him to learn how to do things for himself. After all, Rufus was fifteen now. Most other kids his age were already hanging out at the Janus or McDonald's parking lots, smoking and dry-humping in the grass until curfew. Even past. Don, the owner of Don's, was Mary Catherine's cousin. He let Rufus spend afternoons there so long as he didn't get in the way or tell his mom what he heard and saw. There was no hustling going on, nobody at Don's was really that good, but there was something happening in the attic. Rufus never asked. Don once asked, "You a Daddy's boy? Gonna run home and tell Daddy about the attic?" Rufus didn't really understand and just said, "No." Mary Catherine must have explained things to Don at some point because it never came up again. Things happened to people and Don knew it as well as anyone. Don wore the best-looking suits. He laughed a lot, but not when you expected, and never just to be polite. He appeared in Rufus's dreams. All the time. Usually he was watching Rufus win basketball games or playing Intelcvision with him, but sometimes he threw the discus. Not a Frisbec discus, but the real thing. Once Rufus awoke remembering that only moments before, Don had thrown an actual discus and then turned around to him and laughed out loud. These were the days Rufus first heard about Gus Milton in stories whispered through the shadows next to Booger in the back of Don's Pool Hall. And everything he heard was true.

54

Gus Milton, Don's only child, lived above the pool hall with Don and his late wife, Bee. He played on the cracked, grassy sidewalks along Elm and Eugene Streets, or behind the pool hall, where the tracks ran. He was known in the neighborhood for his two unrestrained passions: his love of smashing coins on the tracks, and his desperate hatred of squirrels. "Damn squirrels!" was his creed and motto. He was known by the sound of it. It was heard above the rumbling of the Southern freight cars and the commotion of five-adock traffic on Elm Street. He told Andre Allen that when he turned thirteen he was going to get No SQUIRRELS tattooed on his penis. Gus Milton took coins, mostly nickels that he found under the pool tables at night, and placed them on the tracks before bed. He did this every night. When he woke up he went out back and searched. Coins scattered when they got run over. Some glittered, they were easy to find, but others landed in leaves or got stuck in the red clay. He usually found most of them, though. He always had a pocketful for the girls. One night Gus Milton was out back putting nickels on the tracks when a train came by hauling four empty freight cars. Don and Bee heard the sound of it well before it arrived. If it had been on schedule they wouldn't have noticed. Those trains came all day long and no one looked up. But this was off schedule. It was past 10 PM. They knew Gus Milton was out back but they weren't concerned. He'd have known die train was coming before it could even be heard. It roared by. About forty-five minutes passed. It was close to 11. Gus Milton didn't come in. Don and Bee went downstairs and out back. Nickels sparkled everywhere under a small oval moon. It must have been a dollar's worth. They lay across the dirt and between the gravel beside tracks. A few had even made it to the back door. One was still plastered to the track. But mere was no sign of Gus Milton. Of course they called his name and even got the neighbors and the police into it. But they didn't find him. Ever. That was what stuck with Rufus. They never found him. Not a body or blood, not a shoe . . . nothing. Only nickels. It had been fifteen years and they still talked about Gus Milton on Elm Street. "Gus Milton hopped that train. He hopped on and just kept on."

55

"Caught by his pants. Caught by his pants and got pulled to Winston." "You've got to listen when He calls." "Gus Milton's still around. Seen him seven times. Once, he was scraping a dog off Wendover. Next time he was buying combs. Where? Hop-In. No, wait . . . U-Save-It." "Squirrels got him. Had it coming, too." Fifteen years and this still went on every day. But never around Don. There weren't even that many squirrels downtown. Rufus didn't understand this part of the story. His own mother said squirrels were cute, she left hardened corn cobs out for them. He asked Don about it once. Out loud, in front of everyone. "Don, why'd Gus Milton hate squirrels so much?" Pete stopped shooting and looked up from the red Brunswick table. "Don?" Rufus said. Marilyn, the cashier from Blumenthal's, grabbed him and said, "How about you go pet Booger." She left red fingerprints on his shoulder. Don never answered. If he took his time, and sometimes he did, sweating through his T-shirt in the humidity behind the pool hall, Rufus might find an old flattened nickel pointing out of the clay. When she was out in her garden, Rufus's mom would say it was the hardest earth in the USA and everyone knew it. There were women downtown who still carried old flattened nickels in their pocketbooks. Rufus carried one that he found by the tracks. Rufus himself secretly began placing nickels on the tracks. He even used quarters. He took them off the chopping block at night. He never let anyone from Don's know. He would go out back before he went inside the pool hall, place the coins on the tracks, and pick them up the following day. He kept them hidden in his pockets and made sure that Marilyn and Pete weren't smoking by the dumpster when he went back there. Once, at the pool, he showed a couple flattened nickels to Walter Spitzer. Walter said "Damn." The window sills of his bedroom were lined with them. He had one in the heel of his left shoe. At Page, where he was in ninth grade, he gave a few to some girls who smiled and said thanks. They were beautiful but didn't know what his name was and after class he found

the flattened coins beneath empty desks, sparkling and lonely on the orange linoleum floor. Whenever a train went by, Rums looked close at its open, empty cars. Gus Milton. He knew he wouldn't see him, that it just wouldn't happen, but he always looked for Gus Milton. Of course he never saw anything. Who jumped trains? Even in 1985, when Gus Milton disappeared, no one jumped trains. At least Rufus had never heard of anyone jumping a train. Hell, nobody even rode trains anymore. It was late spring that first year of high school. Rufus took the bus downtown. Everyone said his name. He got out on the corner of Elm and Greene. Before he went into Don's, he went around back. He had some pennies, seven nickels, and a few dollars in quarters that he'd taken off the chopping block the night before. Nickels and quarters came out the smoothest, but it was nice to have some pennies because with them you could never tell. Sometimes they came out flat and other times they wouldn't. They could pop up, twirl around, and land rolled up in into a copper tube. Sometimes they even came out with corners. It was good to have a few. He put out penniesfirst.They went on the closest track. He crossed to the next and laid out nickels. Then he reached into his pocket for die quarters when he saw a squirrel scurry across the tracks. It hopped over one rail and landed on the one with his pennies. They scattered everywhere. "God damn . . . squirrel!" he said. He started to throw a quarter at it. A voice called out. "Rufus?" Rufus stopped short. He knew that voice. He looked over his shoulder. Don was standing at the dumpster with a trash bag in one hand. He had on his blue suit. Rufus didn't answer. He didn't know how long he'd been there. He didn't know what he'd seen. "Well, who you yelling at?" Don said. Rufus was frozen. "Yelling about something." Rufus didn't answer. He could hear the radio on in Blumenthal's. He looked at Don. Don's eyes went to the tracks. He saw the pennies. He saw the sunlight off the nickels. He saw the quarter in Rufus's hand. He didn't look back up. He only looked at the coins and then down to the 57

FiArreNBD Nittceus f on &6WJTIFUU 6IIPLS

gravel. Now they were both silent. Seconds passed. Don turned his massive body towards die dumpster. He tossed the trash in. "Get on out of here now." Rufus's face felt like it was swelling. He began to walk east on the tracks. He could still hear the radio from Blumendial's. Behind him the dumpster clattered shut. Then he turned around and screamed, "Damn squirrels! God damn squirrels!" Don, his back turned to him, stopped outside the back door and froze. Rufus saw him there, still and wide in that perfect blue suit. He looked at that lifeless image of Don and then ran. He made it to Beef Burger and went in. He was breathless. He ordered a beef burger with tater tots. Immediately he got diarrhea. He cried a little in the wrecked bathroom and told himself it was because of the special sauce. More than one train passed him as he walked home down Elm Street. They were all on schedule. The freight cars were covered in graffiti from across the country, and on one red Southern freight car that passed him on the far side of the tracks, he swore he saw DAMN SQUIRRELS painted in blue on its corrugated side. He swore it, but afterwards, when he thought back about mat year, he could never remember seeing it. He had a perfect memory of Don, though, a perfect memory of Don that he kept throughout the years. It was an image, a lucid little sequence, of Don, in die afternoon behind the pool hall, dressed in his blue suit, standing beside Gus Milton, hurling a discus over those tracks and into die silent trees.

TÂŤe

Already, it is gone. There was a thought somewhere, a silly idea that this was the day, this would be the one where it got better. Perhaps it was the cloudy Twenty-third Street corner" where the city air smelled oddly of tea leaves; perhaps it was the blue awning of the Tex-Mex restaurant that served as a hovel from a mid-morning shower; perhaps it was leaning over the subway backs, the first train lights appearing down the dark, ashy tunnel; perhaps it was here, the flowers, the novel on the table, the white lace and the quiet, before Noah, before Brenda. But now the apartment is full of hushed voices, the workday over, quiet no more. There is talking coming from their bedroom; talking, then laughing. Courtney skates the kitchen with her eyes, blue, a glide to the left, again to die right. The room empty, she brings her ear to the wall, a patch of plaster covered in the scraps of an old cookbook. She will listen in. Her ear settles over die spot where several skins of contact paper cover a photo of an apple pie and a cheese blintz. She hears Brenda on die phone. "My fadier was quite the Romeo," Brenda says. The wall blurs die words, but she catches most of them. "Before," she hears Brenda say. Before what? Courtney pushes her ear closer to the wall. "In die other box," Brenda begins. Courtney hears something about chocolate, and letters. To Courtney, Brenda sounds filtered, manipulated somehow, like a loudspeaker in some distant country, blaring to an empty city beneath a milky blue sky. Today, Courtney thinks, she does not sound like my girlfriend. "He took her to the top of the Mark," Brenda says. Courtney hears something about a hairbrush, and a diamond ring. That's what it is. It's the engagement story, Courtney decides, the love story of Brenda's parents she's heard a million times over. Why are you always talking about love? It's a Wednesday afternoon in November, five-thirty, the middle of the week, and even now, you're transfixed

51

by the idea of your father proposing to your mother on a foggy hill in San Francisco in 1965. Courtney takes her ear away from the wall, but still hears Brenda, who is louder and more emphatic than before. "Show me, show me, show me!" Brenda says, brimming, overflowing through the wall. There is a long, full-body laugh that runs over everything in the apartment, the furniture, the flowers, the lace curtains folding in the twilight. Immediately, Courtney is skeptical. This radiating, beaming source of enthusiasm, where does this come from? This is not Brenda. Inside, Courtney thinks, you are sullen, craving, somber. You are the innocent one, the kind that nesdes in my chest in die morning, and will not let go. The laughing, this is not you. Courtney walks across the kitchen, to the counter, and takes the violets out of dieir vase. She pours out die water, dirty, six days brown, its cocoa-colored sand, migrant ant bodies, fallen flower petals. The violets, still pretty, are perhaps too worn. She will replace them with the lilies that have been rinsing in the sink in the minutes since she came home. No one else buys flowers, Courtney thinks. She turns on die sink, and lets die water run down on her hands. The water quiets Brenda's voice in die other room, and die lily stems turn bright green as diey are washed. She moves die metal dial to the left, and die water turns warmer. It feels good, die heat of die water, and the faint, almost-citrus scent of the lilies, bled out through warm air. She turns off the sink, and reaches for a dishtowel. Courtney fills the vase, and sets the lilies inside. It is better now, she thinks. The flowers, the vase, clean water, a quiet apartment. Perhaps Brenda is off the phone. Courtney brings her hand to her face. A touch of skin right above the cheekbone somehow feels electric, tingling, so she gives it a pinch, a baby twist. I want to kiss Brenda, she thinks. Courtney remembers the hum of the coffeemaker, slow drips, the spicy burnt smell of coffee beans; right, this morning, a kiss. But it was bad, short, somehow off to die left; it missed. Yesterday perhaps. Courtney remembers the bed, Brenda and a novel, a heavy head, a premonition of a migraine. But no, there was no kiss. Perhaps yesterday morning. Courtney tries to remember, but she is distracted, and keeps smelling the lilies, which are fragrant like limes or lemongrass, not lilies. Two nights ago mere was something, a grasp, a pull, a finger that touched a moment before sleep, faint like dragonfly wings touch(#0

DA.VID t>U$MAN

ing in air. When was the last kiss, Courtney wonders, when was it? The novel on the table, finally, is opened. One glance is given to the page and the other to the window. The apartment's true jewel is its round, corner window, the partial view of the river, the twilight glare that flits in through the canary colored trees. Eleven months, and just now Courtney realizes that the best view is here from the kitchen. The living room itself is tiny, less a room than a tollboothsized egg between the two bedrooms, Noah's to die right, hers and Brenda's to the left. A page is turned, perhaps two; the sun, an electric pink wafer, drops a centimeter or two over the river; and there are hands on Courtney's shoulders. "Didn't you see?" Brenda asks, moving her hands off Courtney to the pile of mail on die center of die table. "What? I wasn't looking," Courtney says. "Dinner. What's wrong with you? I brought home dinner. It's in the bag on the table," Brenda says, round cheeks and commanding cheekbones. She looks like she did when I first met her, Courtney thinks, when her features took a long time to settle into. A smile too large, a sculpted nose, big, Broadway eyes mat grow softer, even irresistible, with time. "I diought we were going to cook," Courtney says. "No time. Got to be at Lucy's in an hour." Lucy, goddamn Lucy. Prada bags, finger snap attention span, Soho. Of course it was Lucy. "I picked up your dry cleaning. It's hanging from the bedroom door," Courtney says. "I saw. Nothing I can wear to Lucy's," Brenda says, sitting down. She sorts the mail, hers, Courtney's, Noah's. "Is that who you were on the phone widi?" "Yes." Courtney takes the take-out bag from Brenda, a stapled, brown paper bag sitting inside a white plastic bag widi the I LOVE NY logo on either side. She begins to dig for dinner in the bag, discovering its contents: yellow soups, noodles that will taste better than they smell, and a big salad, endive, miner's lettuce, blood-colored beets. "I don't hate her," Courtney says. She lifts the back corner of a placemat, pulls out a matchbox, strikes a match and lights the candles, one mauve, one white. "Where's Noah?" Courtney asks. "I diink he's back from work. Why do you ask?"

"His dinner's getting cold." Courtney takes a rubber band from her pocket, ties a blond ponytail in back, and delves her eyes on Brenda, silent, blinking quickly, reading a bank statement. She is tall and mahogany-haired, clenching her forehead, creating diagonal wrinkles that disappear when she blinks. Today, her cream-colored turtleneck makes her look more irritable man she really is. Today, she matches the candles. Brenda stands and walks out of the kitchen, her gaunt figure making quick, small strides. Courtney closes her eyes, and finds that she has memorized Brenda's profile. She is pretty, Courtney thinks. She just looks older today. It is at this moment that Courtney decides that Brenda will age faster than she will. Eyes open, Courtney sees the picture window, the dimming light. Eyes closed, she sees another version of herself, twenty, thirty years ahead. Her skin is still soft, but is lined with straight, flight-like wrinkles that remind her of farm fields seen from a fast-moving car. Her hair is still gold, if worn by die sun, and her slivery blue eyes hold much the same. She tries to see Brenda, but she just sees the gaunt profile, withdrawing to die bedroom. This is all, Courtney minks. A blue tableclodi, small November gourds, a clean and quiet kitchen. The six second ghost of Brenda, and die white lace drapes, a filter for the burnt orange threads of a quarter-to-five sunset. What else is there? Fresh lilies, chipped plates, smelly noodles, and a slight from Lucy Fonville. It's no big deal, Courtney thinks. Lucy Fonville is someone you have to hate if you're going to be a self-respecting person. She loves the critic, hates die artist; she'll sell dressed-up pornography if mat's the art that will bring in die money. But still. Lucy Fonville is lost. And to Brenda, she is won. Courtney knows to think better, but some corner still wonders why Lucy is friends with Brenda, and not her. Tonight, Lucy will have her all to herself. But now, Courtney is alone, and again, it might be all right. She wants to turn on the sink again, run warm water on her hands, smell the lilies and not die food. Perhaps, though, it is not working. Perhaps, it is already gone. What is wrong with me today? she asks. It is wonderful here, she reminds herself. Twenty-five years old, books, a job reviewing diem, evenings to write tiiem, an address on Riverside Drive. Brenda, six years of Brenda, friend first, lover second, and then Noah, quiet, talented, strange Noah. A small, two-bedroom apartment widi the rent split diree ways, and somehow, just barely afford-

able. But might there be somewhere else? A view of tenements, factories? The other river, other windows? Brenda returns with Noah, her right hand and his left wrapped together like an imperfect velvet bow. There is some comfort as the three gather around the blue, candlelit table, taking the same seats they always do; Brenda's eyes catch the glare off the kitchen window, Noah's bleach-white face clashes with the off-white refrigerator. Even Noah's expression offers a touch of comfort in its peculiarity. The angle and gape of his eyes, die torque of his neck, the stacking of his lips are not quite the same today, or any day, as they were before. Today, it is blank and serious, narrow eyes, slight downward gaze, fastened lips that show no signs of breaking into words. It looks like he might be contemplating the life story of an ant just crushed beneath his sneakers. What was its name? Did it have a family? Would someone miss it? Courtney looks at Brenda, still blowing steam off the top of her soup. It mixes with the smoke of the candles, mixing and wafting in white hot sheaths. "Well, I hope you'll say hello to Lucy for me tonight," she says. "I thought you didn't like Lucy," Brenda says. "Well, you can still say hello." "What don't you like about Lucy?" "Do we have to get into this?" Courtney asks, directing her question more at Noah dian at Brenda. She wants to plead with him, for him to say something, to stop her. She wants Noah Walker to do something. "It's the show. Everything's a goddamn show with her," Courtney says. "She's an art dealer. Of course she's going to be all show. It's her business." "But the accents. Belgian this week. French next week. None of it's real. None of it ever is with Lucy." "She has a wonderful side, a side you'd love, a quiet, brooding side," Brenda says, opening the noodles, taking a sniff, and setting the plastic lid back on the tray. Courtney looks at the lilies in the vase, the water still bubbling from the tap. "What about the time she threw the fishbowl out the window?" Courtney asks. "Come on, Court. She just found out Waldo cheated on her.

TH6 C0PN6P- AjWTMCNT

You have to forgive her." "But it was sick. And you laughed." "Come on. She hangs up the phone, walks straight to the fishbowl, and hurls it out on Greene Street. What else am I going to do?" Brenda asks. Courtney opens die salad, and fills her mouth with beets. They eat. Brenda her soup, Courtney her salad, Noah a nectarine from the wooden bowl at die center of the table that Courtney fills twice a week. Courtney puts one hand on Noah's arm, fingering the mesh of hairs between his wrist and his elbow. His arm hairs are hazel browrr and disorganized, not all traveling in the same direction like she would expect them to. "You have more arm freckles than I do," Courtney says. Noah pulls his arm back, shyly, awkwardly, as if he were a stranger and diis kind of touching was inappropriate. Drawing his hands around the edge of die table, he blinks slowly. "I diink arm freckles are sexy," Courtney says. Brenda sets a paper napkin down on top of the surface of her soup. The white napkin turns the color of a menacing sky, soaking up the oil coalesced on top. She does the same with six different napkins, leaving them in a small, messy pile on the side of the table. Noah fetches die wastebasket. She's trying to be Lucy again, Courtney minks. This is not Brenda Gibbons, the same woman who just the Saturday prior ordered double cheeseburgers at die bar on Jane Street after a night of beers. But tonight, the night she is going to see Lucy Fonville, she is now possessed by die bedsheet-diick layer of oil on top of her chicken soup. "I'm not hungry anymore," Brenda says, reattaching the plastic lid on her soup, not checking to see if she's left holes where soup might drip out. The soup, still two-thirds full, falls into die wastebasket, landing sideways on the pile of greasy napkins, die weary violets beneath them. Brenda drops a quick kiss in the middle of Courtney's forehead, the litde valley about an inch above her nose. Courtney imagines little dewdrops of chicken soup oil collecting on her brow. Brenda always loved that spot, Courtney thinks. It was a summer, five, maybe six years earlier, on the shores of Lake Michigan, near Brenda's parents' house. It was just past twilight, though the hazy, purple sky was bright enough to extend an eight-thirty Frisbee game or a late walk along the water almost to ten, or maybe later. Once, at die end of die long cape about a mile down from the house, Brenda

DM/IP t>lfi>MAN

told her she could find a third eye on her forehead. They both went silent, as Brenda spent about twenty minutes pressing her finger on different points of her forehead, until she found one that made Courtney want to boil over and scream. "Noah, stay here with me," Courtney says as she reaches for Noah's arm again. "Okay." "You're not hungry, are you?" Noah pauses, and pulls at the ends of his puffy, unkempt hair. Courtney wonders if somewhere, they sell chocolate cotton candy. "Don't worry about it. I can put your soup in the fridge for later. And the noodles," Courtney says. "Sure, okay," Noah says, disappearing back into his corner of the corner apartment, his little mystery world. Brenda passes in front of the picture window, carrying a black dress on a hanger. Courtney opens die cupboard beneadi die sink, and takes out die watering can. She sets it down in the sink, flips the dial to the right, and fills it with water. She puts her right hand in, a few degrees too cold for lukewarm. She closes her eyes. We privately settle our differences by having crushes on Noah, Courtney thinks. No, that's not true, she tells herself. She knows Brenda doesn't love Noah. It is just her. It is mild, harmless, but it is there. Courtney enters the round tollbooth, and waters the plant by the window. How is it possible? How could I, though only flittingly and faindy, love shaggy, underconfident Noah? Eternally single, Noah wears ugly flannels, has little dimples forming beneath his eyes from hours of programming computer music, and asymmetrical cowlicks in his dark hair in the morning. But something in his face is so childlike, soft, young, perfect. His freckles are so close to his mouth it looks as if he might eat diem. Courtney enters her bedroom, and waters the bonsai plants on the nightstands. Brenda puts her hair up, clips it in the back. Courtney pours too much water in one plant, and reaches for die business section of the New York Times off the floor to soak up the excess water. "Noah's never going to find someone, is he?" Courtney asks. "He loves short, skinny girls," Brenda says, pulling gendy on the end of her dress. The girls Noah loves rarely love him back, so he never really has to explain sharing the apartment with two women in a long-term relationship.

T U B C0FM6F. AJW-TMCNT

"Maybe he just needs to think about other women," Courtney says. Noah insists that he, like all Pisces, only love other Pisces. And he prefers first names that begin with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet. Of course, both rules come quite directly from his only girlfriend, Adrienne Colangelo, the Pisces, the Jersey princess, his one and only. They dated for two months, four Augusts ago. Courtney sits on the bed, and watches Brenda paint her face in the mirror. Tonight, as usual, there is nothing extraordinary about the process-the same brushes, the same mascara, the lavender around the eyes. With her makeup, Brenda looks like an entirely different person. But there is not time to look; a coat comes on over the dress, and she makes her way to the bedroom door, painted, stunning, and fast. "Are you all right?" Brenda asks. "You're going to be late. You better run," Courtney says. "I'll see you later?" "Have a good time with Lucy." "I love you." "Be careful; don't get yourself hurt downtown." "Don't do anything stupid here either." The footsteps are fast, but then slow, and the click of the door, and the circular crunch of the lock comes later than Courtney would have anticipated. The apartment is dark now. She thinks of turning on a light, but instead, waits it out, at least for now. Courtney takes the watering can back to the sink, its metal clicking against the aluminum of the sink, and fills it again with water. As the can fills, she tries to read a recipe on the kitchen wall, in the dark. It's for cheese blintzes with marmalade; that's all she can see. She rums off the water, pauses a moment to breathe, dries her hands on the sides of her jeans, and lifts the watering can. She brings it out into the round tollbooth, and knocks on Noah's door. He answers. "Noah." "What is it, Courtney?" "Can I water the plant in your room?" "Oh, sure," Noah says. His pale skin glows, like a white peach. I should distrust this attraction, Courtney thinks. He is not really beautiful. "Do you think you'll be here long?" Courtney asks. "I was just reading a comic book. Archie. Maybe I'll compose

later," Noah says. Courtney waters the fern in die back of his room. She is careful not to spill on his green messenger bag, its envelopes, corn nuts and free postcards dropping out on all sides of die potted fern. "No, I mean, in general," Courtney says. "I would not ever leave you ladies without my third of the rent." "So you don't see yourself going anywhere anytime soon." "You want the check earlier this month? I think I have the cash." "You don't ever think about leaving?" Noah is silent, and widi his silence, comes die knowledge diat he understands. He lastens his eyes on the computer screen, turning around from Courtney. He probably doesn't understand. I'm just telling myself diat, Courtney thinks. He is still, not typing, just staring at the computer screen. He will say nothing and continue to say nodiing. He never meddles, never conquers. He wouldn't let an eyelash be confrontational. No gesture, no movement, yet alone a word could ever betray the perfect, quiet, untouched dream at the center of his world. She knew he would even die peacefully. Courtney reaches down, takes Noah's hands, soft and clammy, and pulls him up into an embrace. He falls in awkwardly, turned partially to die side, looking different ways around die room. The hug is a cross of a handshake with a clumsy uncle who isn't sure if he's allowed to touch you, and a seventh grade slow dance where boy and girl sway back and fordi, two feet apart from one another. How did Noah come this far without ever learning how to give a good hug? What would happen if I kissed him? Would he collapse? Courtney relishes die split-second idea of dieir lips entwined, but figures Noah couldn't bear it. He would crumble. She lets him go, warm, confused, sleepy, and walks out of die room to the picture window. Setting the watering can down next to her, Courtney presses her face up against the window, the city night turned soft in the thin, bronze light of the street. Outside, she sees a belated dog walker, a few fast cars, the yellow leaves that carpet the concrete expanse of Riverside Drive. She thinks of Brenda. What became of us? Courtney wonders. All of a sudden, die good college friends are here, in a kitchen with glass cupboards, a pile of mail next to the gourds, a blue tablecloth. Courtney starts to hear Noah hum, a chord or two on the electric syndiesizer, a tapping of something against his desk, a pencil, a water V7

bottle, a knuckle. With his rhythm, Courtney taps her forehead, and remembers again that night in Michigan, the one where Brenda found her third eye. She can't help but think that this night somehow feels like that one, though there is no good reason for it. The Michigan night was warm, full July; tonight was cold, encroaching November. That night the sky was the color of grape juice; tonight, indigo, dark, black aquamarine. Tonight, Brenda was gone to Lucy's. That night, they walked up to a gazebo a few miles out on the beach, and Courtney wondered if she should kiss her. And she did. She kissed her best friend, for the first time, in an old, white gazebo on a beach on Lake Michigan. Tonight, something floats outside the window, a dandelion fragment, a pigeon feather, a crumb of pollution impersonating a snowflake. Perhaps it is just a corner of what could have been, Courtney thinks, but this is what is. Perhaps there will be a day, one that somehow gets better, one that makes the others on the calendar shiver, maybe dance. Perhaps it will not be here. Courtney wonders back to that gazebo, if somewhere, in the white Crosshatch of the beach house walls, in the papercut crease on the bottom of Brenda's chin, or in the lilac shimmer of newborn stars, there was some hunch, some suspicion, some clairvoyance of this Wednesday kitchen, the white lace, the imperfection of the day.

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She was born in a field of asters near the city of Shanghai, not far from the sassafras shores of the Great Salt Lake. On the day of her birth, her mother woke to the scattered sound of fiddles playing Dvorak in cadence with the tidepools that lapped by the jambs of her bedroom window. There was just time to escape before the waters slopped over the sill and the house went underwater, its oak rafters groaning. In her womb the girl kicked, dancing maybe. At six she was no longer a dancer. Thick-veined and sullen, she stood out like a briar among violets. Her hands grasped at anything dainty, crushing wings, quashing buds, with the terrible urgency of a freight train in winter. Yowling, she reached up for a skyful of chalk stars and shuddered to notice the pale shortness of her limbs. When she was eighteen, the earth split and gobbled up her hometown. She moved to Jordan then, and met a boy who loved her— Cerberus, they called him, U1

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with a house near the Vatican. He wore bandages on his wrists and bore the stigmata, but night-times he was Baby to her, and she loved him back. Under a paper lantern, the steel drums hammered lullabies and the roof went a-tremble with passion. Soon enough, they conceived. The moon glowered down like a big, unhatched egg, withering her yolk with its stare. She felt sorry for losing the child, but still sorrier when Cerberus wilted under a bower of honeysuckle, addled by love and sick with pneumonia. It was dusk when they buried him, stretched long by the riverbed. The folk hung their flags at half-mast, and their hearts that way also. She ate dirt and sat quietly, hoping for rain. It was only later, after Mass, after the silence of August, the late-summer's cool and the coming of rain, it was later she learned how her mother had lived for the day she was born, that high holiday of floods. Running frightened from death, heaving a little, she'd squatted right there in the asters beside the salt lake, looking out at Shanghai and giving birth to a daughter.

ALAN

Venus is on my back and 1 cannot shake her no matter how far I stretch she is heavier than one would expect and she is always humming nonetheless she smells like fresh lavender soap pheromones and yellow leaves so I cannot help but laugh when she whispers something unintelligible in my ear because I know she means well even though her heel is digging into my hip

11

Sou? ADAM

NELLY PINT DRIP DEXTER

female, early-30s male, early-to-mid 30s female, early-30s male, late-30s to early-40s

SETTING: A kitchen in a lower-middle-class household. A table, an oven, a refrigerator. The door to die left leads outside. The odier leads to the bedroom.

TIME. Noon. (NELLY is at the stove making soup as die lights come up. Enter PINT from outside. He takes off his coat, hat, gloves.) PINT. Machine's on the fritz. NELLY. Which? PINT. Damn kegin machine. Rabbit stuck in it or somethin'. NELLY. That's too bad. You want some soup? PINT. What? NELLY. You want some soup? PINT. What? NELLY. Soup. PINT. Nelly. NELLY. What? PINT. Never mind. NELLY. What? PINT. Nothin'. NELLY. No, what? PINT. I said nothin'. OK? Is there any bread? NELLY. What do you want? I'll do it. PINT. Naw. Forget it. I got it. NELLY. I'll do it. What do you want? I'll make it. PINT. Shit, Nelly. NELLY. What? You want soup? 1%

1

PINT. I'm going in the other room. NELLY. Pint! {rhymes with mind Where are you going? PINT. Nowhere. NELLY. I'm making you soup. PINT. Fine. NELLY. What's wrong? PINT. Nothin'. It's just. . . Nothin'. NELLY. You want some bread and butter? PINT. I'll have a beer. NELLY. We ran out yesterday. You said you was gonna get some more, remember? (pause) Remember, Pint? PINT. Shit. You coulda gone to the store. NELLY. You said you were gonna. PINT. I didn't know there was gonna be a storm today. NELLY. It doesn't matter. It's nice and warm in here, right? PINT. Yeah. NELLY, (trying to make a joke) Well, don't sound too enthusiastic. PINT. Yeah. NELLY. I mean really. PINT. Nelly, you still got that organ upstairs? NELLY. Yeah. Why? PINT. No reason. (Jongpause) You wanna fuck? NELLY. I'm making soup. PINT. I said you wanna fuck? NELLY. Pint, my mother's coming over. PINT. In this storm? Fucking kegin machine broke. NELLY. So. PINT. Fucking kegin machine broke 'cause of the storm and your mother's coming over in it? NELLY. She don't care. PINT. She's not coming. NELLY. She said she was. PINT. I say she ain't. Now go in the bedroom. NELLY. I'm making soup. PINT. Shit. NELLY. I'm making soup. PINT. Go to the bedroom. NELLY. I'm making soup, (pause) I said I'm making soup. PINT. I heard you. (knock at the door) NELLY. See, there's my mother.

SOUP

PINT. S'not your mother. NELLY. Yes it is. PINT. Like hell. NELLY. Get the door, Pint. PINT. It's not your mother. NELLY. Get the door. (PINT opens tlie door.) PINT. Who are you? NELLY. Let her in, Pint. PINT. I am. NELLY. Who is it? PINT. Come in. {Enter DRIP, wrapped up in a hat and scarves and carrying a covered bowl.) DRIP. Hello. PINT. Hi. NELLY. Hello. DRIP. Hello. PINT. Hi. NELLY, {closing the door and leading DRIP in) Can we help you? DRIP, {taking off scarves) Hi. I'm selling soup door to door. NELLY. Soup. I'm sorry but. . . PINT. Why don't you take off your coat. DRIP. Thank you. It's so cold out there. NELLY. Really, Pint, we don't need soup. PINT. What? NELLY. My mother's sure to be here and . . . PINT. Your mother's not coming. NELLY. I say she is. PINT. Shit, (to DRIP) What's your name? DRIP. Drip. NELLY. That fits. DRIP. What? PINT. What kind of soup is it? DRIP. What kind do you want? NELLY. Pint, we don't need . . . PINT. What kind is it? DRIP. It's warm. PINT. Yeah? NELLY. We don't need her soup. PINT. I'm just askin' what kinda soup it is. That's all. 14

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NELLY. You got all the soup you want. PINT. Shit. NELLY. You got all you need Pint. I know what you need. PINT. Maybe she wants to fuck. Huh, Nelly? NELLY. Shut up, Pint. PINT. Maybe she wants to fuck me. NELLY. That's not funny, Pint. My mother's gonna be here any minute and she— PINT. Your mother's not coming. NELLY. Yes she is. PINT. She ain't. NELLY. Yes she is! She was never afraid of a little storm. PINT. Your mother ain't comin'. NELLY. Pint. PINT. Your mother ain't comin' 'cause she's dead, (to DRIP) Wanna fuck? DRIP. OK. (DRIP and'PINT exit to the bedroom, DRIP takes the soup with her) NELLY. That's not funny. Pint, that's not funny. My mother's gonna be here any minute, Pint. Pint! I said that's not funny. I'm making you soup, Pint. I'm making soup. You like my soup, Pint. You like it. (silence) Wait till my mother gets here. (a knock at the door) NELLY. I'll get it. (opens dooi) Hello. (DEXTER enters pushing afive-foot-tallpackage on a handtruck, he is dressed as a policeman.) DEXTER. Miss Bloomingworth-Dale? NELLY. Yes. DEXTER. My name is Officer Dexter Cob. NELLY. Would you like some soup, Officer? DEXTER. Are you Miss Bloomingworth-Dale? NELLY. Please call me Nelly. DEXTER. Certainly, Nelly. NELLY. What is this all about? DEXTER. Did you say you had some soup? NELLY, (getting the soup) Oh, yes. Would you like some bread with that? DEXTER. That would be divine. It's not often I get good soup. (tasting id Mmrnm. Scrumptious. NELLY. Can I get you anything else? A beer? 15

SOUP

DEXTER. A beer would be great. NELLY, {opens a beer and hands it to him) Do you like the soup? DEXTER. Very much. My wife makes soup all the time, but it's never like this. NELLY. Oh, you're married. DEXTER. Afraid so. Not that my wife's ever at home, mind you. NELLY. Oh, dear. DEXTER. But enough about me. Let me come right to the point. (pause) Nelly, you have very beautiful eyes. NELLY. Thank you, officer. DEXTER. Not at all. You have very nice breasts as well. NELLY. You're too kind. They're just breasts. DEXTER. Nonsense. It's not often I see such nice breasts. They • must have cost you a fortune. NELLY. They're real. DEXTER. No. NELLY. Yes. DEXTER. Beautiful. NELLY. Thank you. DEXTER. I wish I could have come on better circumstances. You see, I have this package for you. NELLY. You brought a present? DEXTER. This soup is excellent. I hate to waste it. NELLY. You brought me a present? DEXTER. Well, not exactly. Today, while I was walking my rounds, I came across a group of people and I thought there was a fight so I called for backup. NELLY. There was afight?Was my husband in a fight? DEXTER. You're married? NELLY. Yes. My husband's in the other room. Pint! Pint! Come in here. PINT, {off) Shit. What do you want? I'm almost finished. DEXTER. You're married? What a shame. NELLY. Did my husband kill someone? DEXTER. Not that I know of. There wasn't afight.Just a lot of people gathered around this frozen body. NELLY. That's too bad. An out-of-towner, no doubt. DEXTER. She'd been beaten up pretty badly too. NELLY. That's terrible. DEXTER. And someone said it was your mother. NELLY. No. (hysterical) lit

ADAM SZ.YMKOVMIÂŁI

DEXTER. I'd never seen her before, mind you. NELLY. Pint! Pint! My mother's dead. PINT, (ofij I know. I heard. DEXTER, (gesturing to the package) I brought the body with me so you could identify her. NELLY, {sobbing) It's not her. She can't be dead. (PINT enters.) PINT. Now that was some good soup. Who are you? DEXTER. I'm Officer Cob. PINT. What're you doin' here? DEXTER. Eating your wife's soup. PINT. You can have it. {gesturing to the package) What's that? DEXTER. Your wife's mother. PINT. Ugly, ain't she? DEXTER. Yes, she is. PINT. There ain't no woman I hate more than her. DEXTER. No? My wife's pretty bad. PINT. Yeah? DEXTER. An absolute slut. But you know how women are. PINT. Do I ever. I just fucked some girl who came selling soup. DEXTER. Hmm? PINT. I just fucked some soup salesgirl. Cute too. DEXTER. My wife sells soup. PINT. She was an animal. DEXTER. You sure? PINT. I got nail marks on my back. Soup girl ripped me all up. It was great. DEXTER. That can't be my wife then. PINT. Probably some other soup-sellin' woman. DEXTER. Probably. NELLY. She was so young! PINT. An animal. NELLY. Shut up, Pint. My mother is dead. PINT. I'm sorry. But I told you so. (DRIP enters.) DRIP. Hello, (seeingDEXTER, playfully Hello, Officer. DEXTER. Drip! What are you doing here? DRIP. Did I do something wrong, Officer? DEXTER. What are you doing here? DRIP. Selling soup. NELLY. She had so much to live for.

n

SOUP

DEXTER. Go home! Get home right now, Drip. DRIP. I was just selling soup. DEXTER. I know what you were selling, you soup slut. Now, we're going home. DRIP. I don't wanna go. I wanna stay here with Pint. DEXTER. You're my wife and you're coming home with me right now. DRIP. I better go, Pint. PINT. OK. DRIP. I'll come back when I make more soup. DEXTER. No you won't. DRIP. Bye, Pint. PINT. Yup. DEXTER. Good day, Nelly. I'll be back later to get this body tiling cleared up. NELLY. I just talked to her on the phone. She was so alive then. (DEXTER pushes DRIP to the door. Silence. NELLY begins to unwrap the package.) PINT. I'm goin' in the other room. NELLY, {opening tlie package) Wait, Pint. This isn't my mother. It's yours. {BLACKOUT)

QUARTO 2002 CONTRIBUTORS Michael Avgresta, is in Columbia College 2004. This is his first time being officially published. He thanks you for reading but wants to remind you that you liked him first. Maleh Afchavan, Columbia College 2002, is a political science major, also in the Creative Writing Program. She plans to work in magazine publishing in New York after graduation. Dave Au&terweil is the winner of the Whitest Man on the Beach Award for the past three years. Nit. &rown is a Columbia College student from Greensboro, North Carolina. As a musician, he has recorded for such companies as Atlantic Records, MCA Records, and EMI Publishing. This is his first published story. Phoebe Da^ Connell, Columbia College 2005, is a Women's & GenderStudies major, and is in the Creative Writing Program. She is also a photographer. Wan Denniberg, Columbia College 2002, has recently been inspired by the game of hearts. After graduation you may see him as a writer, actor, designer, journalist, DJ, dancer, bum, Buddhist, or man in a chicken suit. Abigail FranKfurt graduated from the School of General Studies in 2001. Her writing has appeared in Quarto 1998, as well as Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and she has also read her work on National Public Radio. D. 3. Kallenberg is a senior in General Studies, majoring in Writing/Literature. "None of us at Columbia will ever forget that day, September 11, 2001. I am honored that 'Peking Duck,' relating to that event, is appearing in Quarto 2002.'" Me* de Lutena teaches comparative literature at Medgar Evars College. As a Brooklyn native and a fixture at the Lower East Side's famous Surf Reality Open Mic and bassist for the band Asparagus Forest, his readings are legendary.

Margaret McKenna is a senior at Columbia College. She hopes to spend her postcollegiate years climbing mountains. &rian Platter is a member ol the Columbia College class of 2004, double majoring in English and French literature. Born and raised in Greenwich Village, he plans to spend his time writing novels about New York City private school life, reading novels about artistic melodrama, and eating Junior Mints. Gabriel Fabin is a senior in Columbia College. He was raised by mountain lions in the green hills of Vermont. After sailing the world, climbing die seven summits, and walking on the moon, he hopes someday to return to the den. Ariana Peinea was born on a dark and stormy night. That's all we know. Tesse Shapins graduates with a degree in Urban Studies, specializing in Architecture and Comparative Literature and Society. He has had various showings of his photography in Berlin and New York, and his portfolio can be seen at www.jshapins.pulsate.org. Du&tin E>eall Smith plans to receive his MFA from Columbia's School of the Arts in Spring 2003. His essays, some of them prize-winning, have appealed in the New York Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Quarto, Back Stage, and the Atlantajournal/Constitunon, among others. David Susman is making his second splash in Quarto. David was forced to leave Columbia University in May, graduating with a degree in Visual Arts and American Studies. He thanks the Columbia College Creative Writing Program for allowing his unruly imagination to have a place at the table. Special thanks to Leslie Woodard and Victoria Redel. Mam Sifirifcoviicz. is in Columbia's MFA playwriting program. As the author of the first play ever published in Quarto, he counts himself among history's great pioneers. Lara VJeibgen admits that life has been good to her. If she weren't so busy smiling, she would say why.

MICHAEL ACRESTA ALALEH AKHAVAN DAVID AUSTERWEIL Nic.

BROWN

PHOEBE DAY CONNELL ALAN DENNIBERC ABIOAIL FRANKFURT JEFFREY D. J. KALLENBERCALEX DE LUCENA MARCARET M C K E N N A BRIAN PLATZER GABRIEL RABIN A R I A N A REINES JESSE SHAPINS DUSTIN BEALL SMITH DAVID SUSMAN A D A M SZYMKOWICZ LARA WEIBGEN

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