The Archive / Fall 2008

THE ARCHIVE FALL/WINTER 2008

THE ARCHIVE Volume 122, Number 2 EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Ryan Brown Aileen Liu ASSOCIATE EDITORS Mariam Diskina Mary Fletcher King Catherine Miller Marie Pantojan SENIOR EDITORS Patrick Baker Julie Mann Katherine Buse Linda Peng Paul Fullerton Ashley Sarpong Braden Hendricks Linda Zhang EDITORIAL STAFF Amanda Auerbach Kimberley Goffe Amy Barrus Kevin Lincoln Chrissy DiNicola Jessica Nicholson Carolin Froelich Maheen Shermohammed Established in 1887, The Archive is one of the oldest continuously published literary magazines in the United States and the oldest student publication at Duke University. The Archive is published twice a year through the Undergraduate Publications Board of Duke University, Durham, N.C., and is printed by The Publishing Place. The Archive welcomes submissions from all undergraduates.

All submissions received are read by the editorial staff, and authors’ names do not appear on manuscripts during the evaluation and selection process. The Archive is printed in 11 point Adobe Garamond and 16 point Rosewood typeface. All material © 2008

by The Archive. All rights revert to the authors upon publication.

Cover Photo: Marissa Bergmann dukearchive@gmail.com www.duke.edu/web/thearchive

CONTENTS 2 You’re Nothing Without Me Kevin Lincoln 9 After the Exploitation Amanda Auerbach 10 Where I’m From Charlotte Mabe 12 Arizona Matthew Boyle 14 Fabricated Boy Charlotte Mabe 16 Where We Are Going Ryan Brown 19 [Walking to Glover Park] Courtney Han 24 credulity MK Pope 26 By the Grace of Quint Hadley Kevin Ylauan 32 Pura Vida Nathan Robert Freeman 48 Universe Kimberley Goffe

PHOTOGRAPHY Marissa Bergmann Karen Chen Ghisly Echezuria Jenna Gates Grace Kohut Aileen Liu Eric Mansfield Tiffany Shao

10, 12, 17, 21, 32 15 8 37 7, 26, 40, 45, 49 2 24 48

You’re NOthing Without Me Kevin Lincoln

T

he room orbited around the fireplace. It was the system’s sun, its anchor, holding the surroundings together, containing within itself domesticated fire—man’s greatest discovery.

Second greatest, maybe. First was chess. Robert took the crown of a queen between his thumb and index finger, lifted it, and set it down four squares diagonally to the right, the first step in an isolated attack on a black bishop idling in the forefront of the board’s other half. The situation was stalemated, and he needed to generate some attacking momentum on white’s part. Black would respond accordingly.

Such deliberation on both sides was characteristic of a solitary game of chess. It was as close a man could come to playing God outside of his own head, more real than pen and paper and livelier than brush and canvas. Robert loved chess. The table sat

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in front of the fireplace, enveloped in warmth and teased by light escaping from the marble rectangular mouth in the wall. The flames were subjugated to a finite area, swallowing the logs as the snake swallows its own tail. Fire had never adapted to containment. The light was sharp and quick in its movements, less steady than the dimmed fluorescent bulbs that hung like bats overhead.

There was scarce illumination outside of the far wall’s windows; it was night, and Robert could picture the room’s brightness as a blemish on the wool of the dark-suited city.

Through the snaps of the fire, which shared the smack but lacked the consistency of leather soles on a cement floor, came a metronome’s tap. The intruding noise seemed to intimidate the previously unchallenged fire, which shuddered and wheezed to an artificially natural death. The ceiling fixtures extinguished themselves as though following the fire’s lead, copycat siblings emulating the wild older brother, as did the faint hint of streetlamps beyond the window.

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Robert took his eyes, now unseeing, from what was ostensibly the location of the patchwork of black and white— more accurate, in a way, than any geographical map’s portrayal of the world’s congregations and boundaries, what with the stark separations and distinct demarcations and the homogeneity of each self-contained individual square—and looked to where the small foot must be rising and falling in a sustained, regular beat. Its sister hung overhead, bare and defined but consciously idle, letting the other move and live for the both of them. The constant rhythm of its activity kicked around in Robert’s skull like a pinball, and he let it bounce from wall to wall. The feet were delicate, surprisingly able to sustain the pounding of an afternoon’s run even when clad in the armor of a shoe. He had seen them first, pistons rising and falling in the interest of propulsion, as he crested the path’s first hill with heaving breaths. They were miniature pink-streaked tanks, and when he approached them to introduce himself they had stopped and pointed out to ten and two. The stance was distinctive.

They were guided by a slender set of thighs, exposed by the scant presence of running shorts. During sex, these thighs would wrap around his waist and envelop him completely, conveying that singular mental security that comes from being recognized as a protector. The glimpse of one through thin, clinging cotton or the slit in a dress would shake up the insides of his stomach and shatter his concentration.

The thighs sprouted from feminine hips, rounded and full.

They were the portal through which his son had entered his universe, and they provided structure and centrality. His son was three years old now. No, SIDS had snuffed him out after a mere few months of crying. A legacy of tears. He wasn’t in the room, regardless. Robert would have named him Samuel Conor Truman, probably still would when the time comes. Six plotted syllables give a name balance, create an appropriate weight and gravity, grant a man detached masculinity. Names are important; they must be able to stand alone.

The neck was as thin and straight as a young tree. He had kissed every inch of its surface, which was soft and salty, often fragrant, rarely covered. One instance of kissing had resulted in an ejection from a theatre; another, catcalls on a park bench. Atop the neck a head, sporting curtains of dark chocolate hair and smatterings of tiny freckles. Inside the head was once adoration,

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but now mostly scorn. He was a fruit that had soured, lost its color, become contemptuous. He spoke to her softly, knowing she was there.

“You know, I never cheated on you.” What had been a room full of schizophrenic flames now only had sound to contend with, in the darkness.

“You remember that one evening last fall? The event at that one art museum uptown? I think it was a gala of some sort.”

Robert teased the stray curls falling over his left ear, tucked them behind it like a pencil.

“There was this woman. She had this impossibly orange hair, just incomprehensibly orange. It redefined the color. It was long, bundled on her head and tied into a choke point right at the back, the rest free-flowing behind her. She was so thin. Just looked like a dyed mop.”

“She kept walking by me and brushing her shoulder up against mine. Always subtle. I would’ve just passed it off as inadvertent if she hadn’t done it time and time again. She’d skim me like a fish hitting the surface and then walk past, and I’d turn to see that massive Cheshire cat on her head gliding away.”

“Lily, if I wanted to murder you, I’d poison your tea with cyanide. I’d get the cyanide in Chinatown somewhere, pirated from a supply ship in the Indian Ocean. I’d pay some poor desperate kids to get rid of your body, and when I met with them I’d wear a mask.”

“Our wedding should’ve been a bigger affair. You only get to do it once, right? Well, that’s the idea. Ours was a little boring.

The minister should’ve worn a costume. Priests are cliché.”

“God, you hate me so much, you really loathe me. That’s understandable. You’re nothing without me. If I depended on someone like that I’d hate them too. I don’t even know how I could make you like me, even though you’re my wife. Probably gratitude, that would be a good place to start. You should be thankful to me.”

Lily was a model. She wasn’t born a model, though. She was born in the Balkans, or Africa. Bangladesh. Robert had rescued her when she was a baby and he was in the Peace Corps, white and righteous. He had swept into her tumultuous village with a few others and carried her out cradled in his arms, a blanketed bundle. Her brother was a child soldier, died clutching an AK47 to his chest in heat and squalor without hope or a future.

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Her father was an infamous Russian expatriate and ideologue.

Robert had attended one of his lectures at Columbia, and listening to his message was like sticking his fingers into a wall socket.

Which he and Lily had done, stoned teenagers in her basement in New Jersey listening to early Pavement and Guided by Voices.

She was a model because he wanted to be married to a model.

She spoke in tongues. No language would isolate from the amalgamation of dialects. It wasn’t happening. There was no reason to stop the wheel. She was playing Russian roulette when he first met her. She was a man in a club in the Ukraine, needed the money for a sex change. All bets were on the table. He took the gun and fired it into the ceiling and paid for the operation. The bullet buried itself deep in the cement.

Lily was sitting on the chessboard in the dark, waiting to finish her assault on the bishop, when Rose walked into the room.

“Robert, what’s going on with the electricity?” Robert was still seated at the table. He tried to remember the placement of the pieces before it had gone dark.

“I don’t know, Rose. Why don’t you go back to bed?” She clutched her robe around her body. Robert hadn’t looked over.

This was true because he knew it to be true.

“No, I think I’ll come sit out here with you for a bit.” He heard her pad along the hardwood floor over to a seat against the wall facing him, between two large windows. She sat with a loud exhalation of air from the cushion, and her fidgeting rustled the fabric of her robe. Robert enjoyed listening to her. She sounded nervous and uncomfortable, and the silence was palpable to the point that he could feel the mechanisms in her head grinding away at something. He kept his mouth closed and sat as still as possible, breathing quietly, at regular intervals.

“Robert, are you still there?”

“Yes, where would I have gone?” He liked not having to look at her. He spent most of his time in silence, and her presence made no difference to him. She used to be so beautiful.

She took a few sharp intakes of air, piercing noises that hurt his ears. “Do you ever get bored, just sitting here all the time?”

“Bored of what?” He kept his responses terse and direct. The shortness of breath continued, however, and she pressed on.

“Bored of everything, maybe? You just sit here all day. You wake up in the morning, you go for a walk, and then you just sit, by yourself, in this chair, all day. And night. It would drive me crazy.”

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She used to be so beautiful. His hands fit around her stomach perfectly, right above the swell of her waist, and he would hold her body to him and burrow his face into her until she laughed or moaned or both. Her belly was smooth and taut like skin pulled over a drum, and he woke up on it most mornings.

“Do you still love me?”

He ignored her. After a few more minutes, she rose from her chair carefully, creaking almost as much as the furniture. She padded back towards the bedroom and had a spasmodic coughing fit, hacking four or five times. The door shut behind her with a crisp click.

The sun began to cast overenthusiastic rays on the wall behind Robert, at first a handful but increasing steadily, as it is wont to do. Fulfilling expectations. He sat and blinked frequently, retraining his eyes after their lengthy respite. The white and black towers slowly emerged, in silhouette at first and then substantiated through sunlit clarity. A black horse had followed its L-shaped path and taken a white pawn, far beyond the tentative line formed by its comrades. Death would have to do better than that. Robert picked up his queen and took the black bishop. •

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After the Exploitation Amanda Auerbach Would you meet me by the dock, Marie?

Be swallowed, taken up by purer things The suffering fish belong in the sea There is no sail to draw from what they see No flower worth a flower of torn strings Would you meet me by the dock, Marie?

To really be, we have to let things be Passing over the dead bird’s bowed-in wings The suffering fish belong in the sea Who’s to say that you’re you and I’m me Once we tear the traps of separate rings Would you meet me by the dock, Marie?

Dropping our hands, we’ve only to agree Our words meant nothing more than water’s stings The suffering fish belong in the sea I would have crept to you behind the tree If here tears could be more than broken springs Would you meet me by the dock, Marie?

The suffering fish belong in the sea

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Where I’m From Charlotte Mabe I used to be the queen of my backyard kingdom: the dogwoods subservient, the daffodils bowing down, bent with the heaviness of seasons.

A surveyor of sands moved ‘neath the waves’ whims washing upon the shores of a dozen weeks by the sea.

We used to climb mountains, infinite specks of dirt compounded beneath footfall and wind’s breath to rise above the mundane.

The memory is painted in watercolor: an impressionist masterpiece drawn and quartered from brushstrokes of fifth birthdays and the sound of my mother’s voice over the phone.

I focus, and yet it slips away mottled by our friend time and forgotten by our enemy heartache.

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The exact words?

I may never recall what was whispered between sisters or spoken softly by fathers torn between love and discipline, but the marrow of my bones remembers their meaning.

Two parts understanding, a dash of wry cynicism and a heaping helping of what was learned before: we mixed these in the kitchen together to make Christmas dinners and Easter Sundays lie dynamic on our taste buds long after the plates were cleared.

You did not ask anything of me other than undevoted attention to the self; I seasoned to taste and still I wonder if I got the recipe right.

These wires, invisible, grow taut with time as the boundaries of my world grow and push against yours.

But the dead magnolia in the front yard need not know my name to welcome me back and the words rest heavy with humidity in the air between us, panting with an action potential strong enough to remind us that you are the parent and I am the child and you only ever fed me with love and homemade casseroles.

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Arizona Matthew Boyle Those vulture eyes accuse me from the red rock ledge so high— where I know the natives danced for rain that never came.

Dead permeates the place, a mighty river torn to a trickle and even that soon dies away.

The slaving sun sucks up the green— now more precious than the gold that drove us here for paper promises.

If only these hardened hands could trade the satin blood of babes to revel in the once-familiar splash of life across this Martian earth, could bargain with Satan to savor the swift slip of liquid down a shrinking throat that long ago gave up the cry of eloi, eloi lama sabachthani.

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Fabricated Boy Charlotte Mabe There are several things: Photographic memories of the peripheral visions of the nights when we dodged puddles.

The soft underbelly of the air between us when we held hands.

And the grains of salt I kissed on your neck scattered and cast across the sky as stars.

The bones of our history are collapsible, the ligaments: weakly sunlit afternoons on trampolines with other boys.

I tore that tendon long ago.

Curl my fingers around the porcelain and sip the French roast of your savory words.

Our youth was quilted square by square and is spread out between us; it covers the distance between arched eyebrows, a common thread in our uncommon journey.

I cannot quite formulate words with my twisted body but if I could, they would scream of silk and satin and the cusp of your hand on my hip.

Your kisses conjure dew on my lips; there are a thousand simulations of canned and tinned adolescent dreams and canvas sails unfurl behind our cars when we speed too fast down two-lane roads.

So when in doubt, breach the velvet of anything between us: your fingerprints have ridges meant to fit in my valleys.

The corners of your smile peel off the paper of your face;

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I could trace the creases of your expression and fold you into origami, a paper plane whispering to the air.

Your eyes the pods that hold the seeds to a soul guarded by see-through lids.

And when the shushed lashes sweep across your cheeks I swear, more has been conveyed to me than words alone have the power to tell.

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Where We Are Going Ryan Brown

“D

on’t look,” my father says, and I know immediately that we have hit something. In the passenger seat beside him, I whip my head around.

“Don’t look at what?” I ask, and that’s when I see it. The cat, mottled black and gray. White ears. From its head to its front paws, it looks fine, like someone’s house pet sprawled listlessly on the warm pavement. But where there should be the jut of a hipbone, there is instead an empty space. My eyes snag there, fixating on the strange shape of the cat’s torso, so that for a minute I do not see that the entire back half of its body is flattened against the pavement, a rubbery contortion of exposed muscle and bloody fur. I turn away but before I do I see the cat staring at me.

“Dad,” I begin frantically, though he already knows what I am about to tell him. “We hit it, we hit that cat.” He doesn’t stop and he doesn’t look at me.

“I know,” he says, “There’s nothing we can do for it, Harper.” He keeps staring forward at the dotted yellow lines slicing beneath his wheels, fast and precise.

I turn back, the pressure spreading through my chest. We are driving so fast, we are already so far away. I never touch my father but now I want to reach out and grab his shoulders and shake him until he looks at me. It doesn’t matter that this cat will die, the moment the tires of our car cracked his spine, he became ours and now we can’t simply leave him here. “Let me out,” I say suddenly. “I want to get out.” My father shakes his head. I put my hand on the metal handle. “I’m going to get out, even if you don’t stop.”

“Okay,” he says absently. I am furious. It doesn’t matter that I am 18, five days removed from my mother’s funeral, to him my pain is always the ridiculous, frantic pain of a child, its threats empty and theoretical.

“I mean it,” I say, though I don’t know if I do. I look back again, and this time my eyes graze the silver urn in the back seat. Her ashes, my mother’s ashes. They sit upright and unbending and suddenly I have to turn away. My father still has his face steady, eyes locked forward. The inside of the car buzzes with a faint static; we’d forgotten

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to re-tune the radio when we lost service back in Kansas City. Outside, a loping tumbleweed rolls in the dust and ahead the Rockies rise up from the plains like shards of bone.

I pull the handle.

B

ut I’m getting ahead of myself. If my mother were still alive, she would tell me I have to start at the beginning, that first impressions are always the most important thing. She’d say to make it clever and to not let her look too bad. But I’m not a clever person and I only know one beginning. So here it is.

It was 1989 and the whole world was being sliced open. That year a wall crumbled and governments dissolved and someone took a razor blade to the globe, a hundred new countries carved into the map with straight, sharp edges. And there in the midst of it all, on an unusually blustery day in April, in the dusty town of Lamar, Colorado, at a hospital called Saint Paul’s Mercy, a scalpel traced a long straight line in my mother’s stomach and I was born.

They gave my mother the c-section because somehow in the womb I had turned myself right side up and the doctor told her that’s no way to come into the world: feet first and completely blind.

So he peeled back her skin like contact paper and pulled me out that way, flecked and purple and greasy.

Later when I was scrubbed to a clean pink someone put me in my mother’s arms and took a photograph of the two of us and my father on the hospital bed. In it, both of them are wearing large, round glasses that make their faces look blurry and oversized. And maybe it’s because of the glasses, or maybe not, but when I look at that photograph I think I can see something ragged in their eyes, something stunned and unbelieving. And I know it is because of me. Me—this thing that not so long ago was just a pitter-patter of cells, just a bulb in my mother’s stomach—I was suddenly real then and they did not know how to believe it.

Three days later we drove home in my parents’ new green Toyota Corolla. My mother held me in the front seat, humming off-key Beatles songs as she rocked me back and forth. All the way home she stayed like this, brightly content. She was still happy as the three of us walked into the apartment, laughing as my father held out his arms and announced boldly to the empty rooms, “Attention everyone, Harper has arrived!”

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[Walking to Glover Park] Courtney Han Walking to Glover Park on a foggy morning A slick of brick, gliding on green bearded cobble streets.

Mist rising, soft as lilac, thick as musk Wafts a.m. haze with delirium Dressed in coats of weariness.

I trot uphill to the citadel, still wearing the memory of your face still tasting the sticky sugar of summer’s first peach bloody at the core, hanging on my morning breath.

••• It was not until later, when she set me down in my crib, when she saw me separated from her, saw how small I was against the white mattress, how the empty space welled and rushed all around me, that she finally broke apart and began to cry.

F

or six years she kept crying. She cried when she held me and when the babysitter held me and when no one was holding me at all. She cried into the eggs she cooked my father for breakfast and the glass of wine he poured for her after dinner. She cried when she saw dead birds in the street and when she saw live ones too, their spindly legs so fragile it broke her heart.

The doctors nodded and took down her family history and wrote out prescriptions on squares of paper. But none of it could touch her sadness. Then one day, she noticed three red cars in a row parked on the street outside her bedroom. Three and not two. Three and not five. It seemed perfect somehow, to be able to count them like that and to know, to just know, how many there were. So she began to count other things. Twenty-four steps from the car to the front porch. Sixteen tiles from the bathroom door to the far wall.

Four cans of tomato soup on the top shelf of the cupboard. On my

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eighth birthday she dropped a bag of rice on the kitchen floor and the two of us spent the afternoon counting all 6591 grains. When it was countable, the world was finite, and when the world was finite, it could never swallow her.

Only, it could and it did. The cancer edged its way in when we were busy figuring out how many bricks there were in our driveway (134) and how far it was to Denver (286 miles). Afterwards, when we’d moved to Boston to be closer to the specialists, when the chemo and the hospital stays began to pile up, I would go back and try to remember the before—not our before but a different one where we had seen this coming. I would paint the foreshadowing into my memories, inventing the idea that she had always complained of stomach pains, that we’d always secretly known something was wrong. This is the trick of fiction, I think, to make us believe we can always see things coming if we just learn how to read the signs. But the truth is, I never knew what was happening to her, not when she was diagnosed or when she lost her hair or even the bright morning when the hospice nurse pulled me awake and told me she had finally stopped breathing. Even then, I thought if somehow I could just get to everything in the world and count it for her, she would open her eyes again and tell me we had won.

S

he has been gone for three days when my father and I pack our 18-year old Toyota Corolla and point it west. She wants her ashes spread in Colorado, in the town where we lived before she got sick.

My father never suggests we take a plane and I never ask, because I do not want to do it that way either. Even now, with her here in the urn, I am beginning to miss her with a sharpness that makes it hard to breathe, and I am afraid that when she is gone completely the missing will be like an undertow, dragging me out beyond where it is safe. So when my father says we will drive I just nod and strap the urn into the backseat like it is a child. And then, as simply as that, we go.

The first day we make it to central Virginia before the sun begins to set. By the time it is completely dark, we are submerged in Kentucky. It has been raining and fog is dragged out like ripped cotton balls over the hills. Here the highway has only two lanes, a frayed rope of road that curls through the mountains and makes me feel

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dizzy when I stare at it too long. For hours the only other vehicles we see are coal trucks, shooting toward us one after another in quick succession. Their wild headlights rip holes in the darkness. As my father drives, I watch the highway signs rattle off a long stream of towns named for coal companies and forgotten pioneers. Whitesburg. Vicco. Harlan. Corbin.

Soon we pass out of the coal-fields and come up for air in Lexington, an oil-spill of lights in the empty farmland. My father stops to buy coffee and I wait in the car. Even near the city, the stars glow fiercely and I can see the splashes of light that are the Little Dipper just to the left of my window. When my father comes back, we switch places and I begin to drive. It is quiet in the car, and through the night we both hoard the silence jealously, like it is something we cannot afford to lose. In the morning the light pressed against our ribs will remind us that we are together in this car, driving west to leave my mother spread in the Colorado desert. But for now, for tonight, we are quiet, letting Kentucky slide beneath our wheels like it will never end.

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T

he next afternoon we stop at a diner outside of St. Louis. My father orders scrambled eggs and I tell the waitress, a slight girl about my age, that I’ll just have a piece of toast with butter. She smiles and leaves and we sit with our hands folded in our laps. I don’t remember when my father and I forgot how to speak to each other, only that we did.

When the food comes he chews mechanically and I think of asking him to tell me the story of how he met my mother, at a diner not unlike this one, when she bummed a cigarette from him under the metal awning outside. It is a story without flourish and I like that.

But I do not ask him because I do not want to interrupt his meal, so instead I pick at my toast and watch our waitress totter out of the kitchen with a massive tray of food balanced on her shoulder. For a second our eyes meet and she looks at me like we have some kind of understanding, of what I’m not sure, but I like imagining we’re connected somehow, so I nod back at her. She makes a little grimace to show how heavy the tray is and then wrinkles her nose in mock indignation. I smile.

As we get up to leave, I drop a five-dollar bill on top of my father’s tip.

W

e lose the fireflies somewhere in the Midwest. The first evening they are there, splattering in neon gobs against our windshield, and the next they are simply gone. On that second night, I fall asleep watching power-lines tangle over my head like an abandoned game of cat’s cradle.

I don’t know how long I am asleep, but at some point my father pulls over on the shoulder of the highway and the jolt of the car rolling to a stop shakes me momentarily awake. I drag open my eyes and see him unlocking his seatbelt. It is 3:12 a.m. He reaches for his phone and I hear him punch in a number with a quick, practiced motion. As he lifts it to his ear, he pulls open his door and steps out onto the empty road.

“Hey,” he says, and the word shatters me. It is not the clipped, diplomatic ‘hey’ of a business transaction nor the casual ‘hey’ reserved for friends and children. This ‘hey’ is heavy and bright and I know immediately what it means. My father laughs. “No, she’s asleep,” he says. I strain to hear what comes next, but it’s drowned out under the rush of a car going by. “Okay,” my father is saying now, “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Then a pause. “I love you too.”

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If I were someone else I would get out of the car. I would stun him. Yes, I’m awake, I would say breathlessly, and yes, I heard everything you said. I’d demand to know who she was. I would brim with such incredible justified indignation that he would be shamed into confessing everything and he would beg for my forgiveness right there on the dark road.

If I were someone else I would not have done what I did do, which was close my eyes again and pretend I was still asleep. And I would not have sat there in the car, completely still, for the next four hours, while his chest rose and fell beside me in great, rattling breaths that sucked the air straight out of the car.

I

t is 11:01 the next morning when I feel the soft thud and my father tells me not to look. From there, the whole thing plays out like a flip book, a stop-start of disconnected motions, one upon the other in a blur of movement I can barely follow, let alone control. I see the cat, crushed and dying, with its vacant eyes, and my father’s profile, the way he never moves his gaze from the road ahead of us. And by 11:01 and thirty seconds I am yelling in a voice I didn’t know I possessed. I am exhausted and the sky is so big I don’t know what to do with myself, so I let my anger keep rising until it fills my lungs and I can’t breathe. And finally, before 11:01 is even gone, I am pulling open that door.

When I let go of the handle, the door flies forward so fast that for a moment I am actually worried it will snap off its hinges. A gust of dry air rushes into the car and the loose strands of my hair slap back against my face. My father throws on the brakes and I pitch forward until the seatbelt catches me and snags against my chest just in front of the dashboard.

And then everything is still. The car has stopped, the passenger door still gaping open. In the rearview mirror I can see the urn on the seat behind me. It has broken the grips of its seatbelt and tumbled on its side and I don’t know why but seeing it breaks me. Without thinking I reach awkwardly over my father’s arm and take the metal container into my hands.

And then suddenly I am holding it and crying and apologizing over and over—to my father, to my mother, to the cat I could not save. I want them to know how sorry I am, how many times I have wished things could be different than this. But it is an impossible, impenetrable number, and I know I cannot count that high. • The Archive | Fall 2008 23

CREDULITY MK Pope knowing him, Orpheus, and knowing how these melodies would tumble from his ďŹ ngers, explode, how he could not censor grief, storm-chased love and foolish haste alike, knowing all of this: the conditions were unfair. the charade swelled, sweltered hellish underground, his sugared owers, owered notes were singed by glaring torches, sickened souls, and the master of it all, old Hades, old crumbling rotten Hades, whose charity is rented always at impossible cost. and knowing that

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the devil only grants the second chance that will asphyxiate itself with folly, with love for maidens, maidens’ eager feet, with that disappearing touch that bursts feverish like ďŹ reies, the journey down was a mistake. trust has no home in hell, wanders faceless, shrivels sin-drenched to a scarlet prune. but at night he beds his lyre, half-dreaming of snakes or sleepless, strumming lullabies, lessons learned too late. of course Hades let him go. of course he knew he would look back.

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By the Grace of Quint Hadley Kevin Ylauan

Q

uint Hadley was an expensive friend. We were on the subway, where most of these journeys started, as Quint rambled to me about things he’d gleaned from his world travel.

“Amsterdam allows you to carry weapons. So imagine everyone high out of their minds, running through the canals with samurai swords.”

“Thai whores always keep a bit of this fungus under one of their pinky nails. If you disrespect them, they’ll scratch it into your back. You’d better realize you’re infected before you come home, Western medicine doesn’t have shit on those tribal remedies.”

As we hit 49th Street and he was explaining his nuanced approach to the coffee trade in the Côte d’Ivoire, a bum hobbled into the train car and started his spiel. He’d just had a terrible accident involving some bacon grease and a Dominican window washer, and if anyone could just spare a bit of change, he could

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catch a bus to South Jersey where his cousin’s godfather ran an urgent care. Quint’s clenched jaw announced his displeasure, though he would have kept talking had I appeared attentive.

Instead, I practiced my best form of evasion as the bum limped along the aisle.

The others on the car did the same. The girl across from me ran a finger along her iPod to turn up the volume. The tourists with the bags from the gift shop at the Met took an immediate and frantic interest in the subway map. I looked down at a mysterious liquid that snaked nearer to my feet with every drift of the track. But Quint did nothing.

As the bum drew close enough for me to make out the density of his dreadlocks, Quint stared at him, unflinching. Like he was daring him to beg. The bum didn’t speak, he just stared back, confused. By then the visual duel was making my face hot.

I handed the bum a couple of loose singles, and he walked away, pocketing the bills. Quint’s vision moved off the bum and onto his reflection in the subway window.

“Why should it make me uncomfortable? They’re the ones begging.”

The bum left the car with a passing thanks and a “God bless” to all passengers.

“I’ve made it twenty-four years without His blessing,” Quint said with pleasure. “I certainly don’t need it now.”

We came out at a stop a few blocks from some club with a foreign name where a distant relative of Quint’s had a table. It looked like rain, so we’d both brought our long coats, though between the wool and the whiskey I felt flushed. Quint’s coat hung off his lean frame and was probably worth double mine.

He came from a family of means, though it was never clear how much help he received. He was the product of sophisticated breeding and coarse parenting, like a fine slab of marble sculpted with dynamite. And he was all I had. He had about a foot on me and leaned down as he spoke.

“Tomas is supposed to be bringing a few of the girls from that thing in Williamsburg last week. Tonight we legitimately get on the road to recovery and forget all about Alexis.”

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Her name was Alicia. She had asked me to move to New York with her four months earlier and hadn’t anticipated the ways in which her new job would help her grow “into her own woman and apart from me.” Wanting to maintain a relationship, she still teased me with friendly lunch dates at restaurants only she could afford. I always left her feeling worse and I always said yes the next time she asked.

We got in without issue, though the bouncer took more time with my ID because it’s from Ohio and was taken on my sixteenth birthday, my current face retaining only the boyish cheeks. As was often the case with Quint’s clubs, I handed over half the contents of my wallet for cover. Once inside, I followed him through the crowd, a forest of torsos and limbs, slinky black dresses and half-buttoned oxford shirts. Tomas was at a table in the back with three girls. The one closest to Tomas was some exotic mix with a sculpted face that was as beautiful as it was inaccessible. Next to her was a waiflike blonde whose hand was damp from her sweating drink. Closest to me was a cute, if oddly shaped girl named Melanie or Melody, the last syllable lost to a bass line that pounded my sternum.

The volume only allowed for close talking and it wasn’t long before Quint had his mouth at the Waif ’s ear. I assumed her toothy smile to be the result of his jokes or tongue. As a courtesy he would look back at me every so often and bob his head to the music before returning to the Waif. I couldn’t blame him. I occupied my time with drinks, various cocktails and shots that oiled my slide into inebriation. At Quint’s urging, I bought a round for everyone and then the exotic girl spilled hers, though it’s probably best we didn’t have to see just how sour the SoCo and Lime made her look. At some point I took a cue from Quint and began to talk up Melanie/Melody. When I leaned in to speak, I noted that she had attractive ears and pondered that the upside of ear allure is really quite low. The prettiest ears in the world were probably only eights out of ten. Hers were sevens.

I know that her and I went to the bar to get beers, but I couldn’t say how her face ended up in my neck, how she nuzzled me like we were old lovers or house cats. I remember that we hovered near the dance floor for a time, while I explained my nuanced approach to the coffee trade in the Côte d’Ivoire,

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butchering the pronunciation because I’d taken Spanish with Alicia and not French like I’d wanted. Then Melanie/Melody moved her body on mine with shocking rhythm and grace, perhaps the first time in her life that her mismatched parts moved in concert. It was she who placed my hand at the small of her back, in the process of which I grazed her underthings through the material of her dress, in the process of which I considered her underthings and what she might look like in them. I fell in love by the second chorus.

At the end of the song she threw her arms in the air and let out a shrill scream, as some girls are wont to do. During all this, her beer bottle, half-full, caught the beam of one of the club’s red lasers. It reflected and refracted through the glass and a halo appeared around it, all starbursts and solar flares. I fell in love with that too.

On my way to the bathroom I ran into Quint, who was somehow strapped for cash and needed a drink for the thirsty Waif. I gave him what I could, though I had the good sense to save enough for a drink for myself. While I washed my hands I appraised my reflection. Drunk, I studied it, really studied it, every line and curve, every follicle and abrasion. I looked tired and sloppy, my eyes rimmed with pink and my face glistening with sweat. Why did it have to be like this, to start the night looking our best in attempt to attract someone who could help us look our worst? But I was not above it. There wasn’t much below me then.

Melanie/Melody said she would wait at the bar. She wasn’t there. It was on the second lap around the club I came to this conclusion. On the first, I still held out for the possibility I misunderstood her or that she had gone to the bathroom or was lost in that forest of people. I went to the bar and ordered a straight whiskey because I wanted to feel it and expose it for what it was and tell it that it couldn’t hide behind Coke any longer. I went back to the table and sat alone. Quint could be seen among the mob, shoulders shifting and dropping to the beat. I caught glimpses of the Waif, albeit fleeting, as gaps opened and closed in my eye line. Occasionally I could see her hair flipped up into view as she twirled around and against him.

He was surprisingly skilled, flowing with the currents of the song

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like some waterborne plant. I watched as he surveyed the crowd and thought for a moment he might catch my eye.

But I really didn’t want him to see me. When you’re a mess and with a girl, they call it having fun. When you’re alone, it’s pitiable. Some part of me pined for the nights with Alicia on my arm, when she’d introduce me to her numerous acquaintances, when she’d lose herself to the booze, when she’d love me carelessly.

Quint glanced down at the Waif, taking in her latest move, though only for a moment. He continued to crane his neck and I knew he wanted to see if anyone was watching. People were always watching. In many ways it was unfathomable. He was not classically attractive in any sense, a hodgepodge of Old World features that ended with a weak chin bordering nonexistence.

Most of what he did was rude and deplorable. And yet he drew people to him. He knew how to have a good time and forgot his indiscretions with an assuredness that caused everyone else to misremember. I watched him with a mixture of envy and annoyance, watched as the Waif snapped a self-shot of him with his head on her shoulder, knowing I had seen that same picture taken at countless other clubs, with countless other girls.

Quint approached every situation like it was his: never a matter of how, only a matter of when. I wanted that, by osmosis or other means.

We left without the Waif a bit later. I peeled myself off the plastic seat while Quint muttered something about an aborted handjob near the DJ booth. It had rained and the City smelled sour, the grime of eight million people bubbling to the surface of everything. We walked across the slick pavement in relative silence. Quint was always quietest when he was most drunk, probably because it was harder to lie then.

We ambled through Midtown. Maybe it was our way of giving the night one last chance at redemption. In a matter of hours, the landscape would be transformed, bankers and traders and taxis would flood the streets, stocks would be bought for millions, souls would be sold for pennies. It was a last gasp for the three of us.

We came across a fountain lit by street lamps and lingering fluorescents from office windows, giving it a restrained glow. The

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water frothed and hummed, bubbles collected in corners along the push of the ripples. Quint lay along the edge, traced a finger through the pool, and stared up at the sky, no care for his coat on the damp concrete. I hated the sky in New York, a pall that hid the glitter of stars. The City didn’t afford anyone the luxury of infinity. I needed that vastness, to leave this prison of 23 square miles, to escape this Island of Everything.

I patted at my pockets for change. I had a penny from 2003 and a nickel from 1985, the last bits of currency on my person. I reflected on their journeys. Metal in the ground. Mined, melted, molded, pressed. Traded for candy and coffee, passed through cup holders and spin cycles. Now to drown here, for a wish I knew the City wouldn’t grant me. Still, I gave Quint the penny, kept the nickel, and considered the purpose of its sacrifice.

I wished for Alicia, that she would take me back. I wished for her prolonged misery, for an unsatisfying life, for adultery and dumb children. I wished to be more successful than her. I wished for peace. I wished for money, for enough to get by, for more than I ever needed, for $2.50 for a slice of pizza. I wished to be like Quint, I wished to be Quint, I wished to never see him again, for the fountain to flood and swallow us both. I wished to see my family. I wished for my parents’ happiness, with each other or otherwise. For my brother’s recovery, for my dog’s worms.

I wished for Melanie/Melody. I wished to see her tomorrow and the next day, to wake up next to her. I wished for one hundred girls as vapid, for a line to form outside my door, for no strings.

I wished for the City, for everyone in it, for it to sink into the Hudson, for its high-rises to scrape the stratosphere. I wished for stars.

I didn’t throw the nickel. I just opened my hand and let gravity finish the job. I knew that five cents, for all those things, for even one of those things, wasn’t enough. Quint sat up and flipped his penny off his thumb and in. I broke the rules and asked what he’d wished for.

“More fountains.”

I thanked him. And then we moved on, to roam among spires of steel and glass, and I did not regret my empty pockets. •

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Pura Vida NATHAN ROBERT FREEMAN

A

nd that’s how it starts—sitting in a Puriscal soda, laddered wooden stools, tiled counter top, smells of empanadas and cigarettes. “Café, por favor.” He scoops the grounds into the filter.

“Con leche?” “Negro,” I say. The boiling waters seeps through the filter, turns to dirt-colored coffee, falls into the mug. “Quieres más?” “No, no más.” A Tico boy—fresh-faced, young, maybe fifteen, grease-spiked hair, a smirk—mumbles at the man behind the counter. It’s nine in the morning in Costa Rica. I’m taking a break from teaching English at the high school in town. I burn my tongue on the coffee. The owner speaks to the fidgeting boy, speaking to him in a foreign Spanish. As the boy hops away the man looks back at me, stone-faced, sweeping the counter. “Niño,” he says, “Niño quiere papel”—he puts his fingers to his mouth in a V-shape and sucks in, fast—“para las drogas.” He keeps on sweeping. “No futuro,” he whispers. “No futuro.” I nod, eyes turned down toward the steaming coffee. It’s like the end of those books I hate, the ones with their morals tacked on to the last page.

I look around. This story has written itself.

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Back to class.

Teach my students how to use the verb To Be. Go back to the house.

She is gone.

So is he.

No futuro.

And that’s how it starts. ....

Without much say on his part James leaves school and jet sets to Puriscal, a small town in Costa Rica, to volunteer himself for ten weeks. He likes to think that to the outside world, he is the paradigm of altruistic piety because of his dedication to the job of teaching English. Just look at him at the front of the class—sleeves rolled up, voice wavering, chalk screeching across the chalkboard.

He is spreading the greatest of all American doctrines—the English Language, the Lingua Franca of these high-flying times.

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He lives in a house near the top of the hill, a stone’s throw from the New Church. It was built to replace the Old Church—its frame decaying, its windows cracked by stone-hurling delinquents, its façade crumbled from age and acid rain. The Old Church towers like a deathly specter over the quiet town; the New Church is fresh, welcoming—it lures bearers of the faith, music and incense wafting from its doors. James—bored, listening—hears the bells four times a day, sees girls in dresses on their way to mass, smiling.

In Costa Rica, to say hello to someone you say “Pura Vida!”

And with him are a mixed bag: two old Canadian women, a headscratchingly anal 28-year-old infant named Callie, a chubby and jolly lesbian who sports an ever-present purple visor—and five kids his age. Two have been there earlier; they went to boarding school together, and graduated in December. Odd. (He finds out later that these two boys—one a David Cassidy blonde, the other a bookreading laxer—came from a therapeutic boarding school for addicts and fuck-ups; they were snatched from their beds by escorts in the middle of the night, Elian-style, and taken to a middle-of-nowhere campus where they were on lock-down (no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes) for two years. Their parents had arranged it—one (John) had a developing ecstasy habit when they sent him away; the other (Michael) tried to kill himself by jumping out of a car on the highway). The other boy in his room, his name is Allen, from Texas, played football in high school, is overweight, got arrested for possession a week before he left for the trip, wants to be president someday. James thinks him a bit unsavory, but no matter.)

There are two girls his age: one a true-blood Irish, C.S. Lewis-reading Catholic from Vermont named Catherine; the other, Rosalind, is a real trip. She’s British and has an English accent that has somehow survived a stint in L.A. and a pack-a-day smoking habit—Reds and Lucky Strikes, mostly. She has two tattoos; she has her dead father’s ashes sprinkled at the end of the Road to Hana in Maui—his passing caused her to leave her California home for her old home, Daddy’s London, where her hot-spotted friends bum around her flat, borrow her clothes and coke and connections and keep her occupied. She wears amber-and-brown Wayfarers (sunglasses which James later borrows for an immortal Facebook profile picture) and

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at all times around her neck a Che Guevara necklace hung carelessly enough to suggest that she doesn’t know that irony exists. James runs out of cigarettes on his second day; it’s a Sunday and the corner stores are closed and the churches are open. He sees the English girl outside smoking, and he bums graciously. They talk many times a day outside—she tells him about London, its clubs, its characters, its fakes, its nights. James is addicted after just one puff.

And there are rules in The House: No volunteer is to imbibe alcohol in the town of Puriscal. No volunteer is to have in his or her possession illicit substances of any kind. No volunteer is to develop any degree of a romantic relationship with another volunteer. This includes hand-holding, embracing while walking, kissing, and overtly flirtatious behavior. Any violation of these rules will result in immediate expulsion from The House.

It is the Rules that define the Lives. The Rules that define how they are disobeyed. The Rules, like all rules, were made to be broken— created to be destroyed.

The first week passes like a Caribbean breeze that stretches across the tiny county’s feeble frame, tickling its west coast, licking the Atlantic, blowing sand into the eyes and beers of red-skinned bodies on black-sand beaches—and on that first weekend James joins in with the six-person gang in a trip to Puerto Viejo, a beach on the Caribbean Sea. A teacher at the school tells him about the town: “Many drugs. Many—eh, eh—negros. Many hate Americans. Like blond American girls.” James nods and realizes that this probably applies to blond British girls as well.

The bus to Puerto Viejo takes four hours and James and his five friends sit in the aisle and the driver speeds through poverty-stricken wastelands and runs over a dog splat and three or four women emit screams and James is three beers in by the time they get to the beach and it’s dark outside and the other now-here travelers lug backpacks around confused and the bellhop at the beach-side hotel offers Allen an ounce of weed as he carries in the bags. Dinner is wild and drunken but the Brit is sedate, way high, turning James a bit off and so him and John the blonde ex-addict order drink after drink.

Michael, the ex-suicidist, is much more rational than James and

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John, and keeps watch on an unraveling scene. After dinner Allen is very pleased with himself so he peruses the bowls being sold in a hut next store like an expert and buys one, a small one, and is even more pleased with himself. The next bar has a reggae band and a drink called a “Fourth of July” and James orders it because he thinks that ordering a drink with bourbon in it, regardless of how girly the cocktail is, will make him American and somehow superior. Michael points out the irony, James quotes “Independence Day” and lights a cigarette as Rosalind bums one, looking into his eyes with a stare like she doesn’t know what eyes are as she pulls one out of the pack.

Hooked. Then she orders a vodka-tonic and pops a Xanax that she got from Callie, the insane girl who lives in The House, and is totally zonked out of her mind. A dreaded Rastafarian on a bicycle offers Rosalind and Fat Allen a hit and tells them that “Joohnneee’s plahace, mohn” is happening. It’s all happening—the streets smell like weed and jerk chicken, homeless drunks wander into James, but he’s drunk too and laughs like it’s a joke or something.

Rosalind’s stopped by a stenching hippie and she decides to get dreadlocks.

At Johnny’s Place the gang orders shots of Jack Daniels and Rosalind smokes another blunt on the beach. James talks to John, wanders drunk, stubs his toe on a palm tree and wades his ankles in the rippling tide with the moon and asks a black guy with no shirt if he can bum a cigarette and the guy naoh-prablam-mohns him and hands him a joint and James takes a hit and lights the Costa Rican cigarette and smokes it on the rocks that poke out of the surf and finds Rosalind and bums another cigarette off her and tells her that she’s one of the most amazing girls he’s ever met and she makes a face as if she’s on Mars and mumbles something about how James is one of the smartest people she’s ever met. James cringes. That’s probably that last thing James wants to be at that moment, smart. The rest of them come back and he leaves wordlessly for a beer at the bar and comes back to find Rosalind being groped or something by some big Costa Rican guy and shoves him off her and gets popped in the nose. He tells her it doesn’t hurt, but of course it fucking hurts!

James is convinced it’s broken; Michael, who’s more or less sober, assures him it’s not, and James clenches his jaw and goes off to find the guy. Rosalind stops him, tells him his cousin is here, tells him he will

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probably die or something. James splits for another beer and passes grease-haired kids, the speakers rumbling with the noise of a rapper howling over bass-snare Reggaeton. James is spinning, staring at the fog, the light-flecked disco ball, the dancing Ticos, and blacks out.

He comes to covered in sand, sprawled on the beach and finds a bent cigarette behind his ear and runs in to John and Catherine and puts it out half done. Catherine has a coconut, but John doesn’t. The cops stop James a few minutes later when they discover that under his shirt is a store-front sign, which he stole minutes earlier: “You will be go to the jail. Your friends and you go to jail.” Catherine pouts and hands over the coconut, but the cops just stare. James mumbles a gracias pero no gracias and the three of them duck under the fence and run through sandy yards into the hotel.

There’s blood on the sheets in the morning. Allen snores in spastic violent grunts and wakes up and they head to breakfast, James wearing Wayfarers to hide his swollen nose and darkening black eyes. At the table Rosalind giggles every now and then and forks her salad. Her dreads are tied up in a handkerchief and there’s dirt under her fingernails. Mumbles something about getting bloody marys.

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Michael regales James of the conversation they had at the bar about Transcendentalism and Michael laughs reminding James of how he was so insistent that the word “deliberately” in Thoreau’s “I went to the woods to live deliberately” is the best use of a word in English outside of The Bible and Shakespeare and James gives him a blank look. James is convinced this never happened. It doesn’t make sense (James hates adverbs). Two bloody marys and a pina colada at a bar.

James glances at Rosalind, who’s chain smoking and having another vodka tonic and talking to Allen, who leans his smiling fat face into her and James is being ignored and leaves. It’s 1000 Colones for a pack of Reds and a Corona at the beachview corner store (ed. note: It’s 500 Colones to the dollar. And dropping fast) and that’s how much James pays for them before walking to the sand.

The sun peeks in and out of clouds and the clouds cast foreboding shadows on the negro beach. Waves curl, touch the beach, touch its walkers, its bathers, its seekers.

James and Rosalind lie alone together on the sand.

(Black & White; in French with subtitles) Sorry What For last night The what I shouldnta shoved that guy Why not Didnt do nothing Yeah Yeah You okay Yeah sure Okay Can I bum a cigarette Theyre yours Yeah I think its broken Its swollen Blood came out when I blow my nose

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Yeah Its probably broken You didnt have to do that Yeah I can take care of myself I coulda taken him Are they getting me a piña coloda Did you ask them to get you a piña colada Yeah Then yeah No What I see Allen walking with them and he doesnt have it Cant see That fat fucking fag boy he doesnt have the piña colada Can I have that cigarette What And a light (Exit Rosalind) (James closes his eyes beneath his Wayfarer sunglasses) (Exeunt) In a shack: James gets high with Allen and walks up the stairs and is convinced he’s walking on sunshine and starts dancing and looking at himself dance in the murky reflection of the hotel room window and tells Catherine that life is just an extended episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and starts talking about Reaganomics and passes out.

At dinner James smiles as he sips his Tico Sour and doesn’t care that the same group of Americans from the night before is sitting at the table beside the six of them. Rosalind’s smoking so James lights a cigarette too and three rail-skinny dark-skinned Ticos sit down behind them. One plays a warped, dirtied banjo. One plays bongos. One plays a gutbucket bass—“Que rico es Puerto Limon, Que rico es Puerto Limon, Que rico es Puerto Limon....” The song is about the city of Limon. James knows that Limon is the city on the Caribbean coast where Columbus first landed in Costa Rica. He

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knows that in Spanish his name is Cristobal Colon. He knows that in Costa Rica the currency is Colones, named for the person who first named the country. He knows that there is a statue of Christopher Columbus in Wilmington, Delaware, a few blocks away from the Hotel du Pont. He knows all this and stays silent.

No one talks of Christopher Columbus in Costa Rica, the country where his influence—the gift of the world’s conception, the wonder and science of European diffusion to the New World—is like the silent “h” in “hola”: ever-present but never articulated.

James and John pick up a case of Imperial brand beer—the national beer of Costa Rica—and then the six of them listen to Zeppelin in the hotel room and James reminds everyone that the solo in Communication Breakdown is the greatest solo of all time and bounces on the bed while saying this. Johnny’s Place is more crowded than the night before and the six of them take tequila shots for James’s birthday (he turns twenty in three days, on Tuesday). Catherine’s mashed after an hour, more than she should be.

Allen and Rosalind away toward the dark water with weed and get

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stopped by the cops but Allen keeps the weed in his pocket when they search him. Rosalind doesn’t bat an eyelash; this is who she is and she rolls blunts with her mother when she’s in LA (James hates LA; he told that to Rosalind and she shrugged and dragged on her cigarette and said something about getting the four Led Zeppelin symbols tattooed on her ankle).

James is sitting at a table with the other three and Catherine tells us that Rosalind was popping the Xanax before they left for Johnny’s Place and asked Catherine if she wanted one. What’s it do, Catherine asked in a voice as naïve as a schoolchild asking what a spanking is. Makes you feel cool, Rosalind had said. Michael flips at Catherine for taking the pill and walks off. Allen and Rosalind come back high. Allen is sweating profusely. Rosalind smiles like a cartoon.

Michael’s speakers are notched to full blast in the hotel room at four in the morning and Rosalind’s burning through a pack of shitty Costa Rican cigarettes and she tells James to put on TV On The Radio, put on Playhouses. James does and a wall of ambient noise guitar fills the room. Rosalind’s dreads have frayed and she dances wildly to the jagged sound, plugging rhythm into the cacophony, singing. James is hearing echoes of Reggaeton from the clubs. Echoes of the beach.

James is getting hammered before the bus ride back to San Jose on Sunday. Skies overcast. James goes to the corner store and gets the same things as the day before—beer, Reds—and, as he sits on the log with his eyes cast toward the waters and the red big sun is draped in reflection across the ocean and he can see out to the world’s bend at the horizon, James is convinced he’s entered a Corona commercial. Or that the Corona commercial has entered him.

At the bus station a filthy beggar staggers in front of James— “BOO!” James stares at him, stares at the bearded dirty man, the mind-gone hobo who yells at tourists, yells at them like a demon.

James smiles and places his Wayfarers on his head, looking at the man’s filthy hair, peering into his life of tropical squalor. “Pura Vida!” James screams.

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The bus leaves at four and James has the spins and caresses the iPod to turn up the volume on the blasting LCD Soundsystem.

The song is “All My Friends,” and it’s about hedonistic youthloving New York. He looks out and sees two palm trees (there’s really only one; he’s seeing double), sees blues becoming whites in the sky, sees the bending miles of ancient Caribbean ocean, the priceless sand dollars littering the surf, and asks himself why he’s even thinking about New York at a time like this. It’s dumb. Dumb because as far as James knows, New York doesn’t even exist.

There’s a passport checkpoint a half-hour away from Puerto Viejo.

It’s getting a bit dark but James two-fingers the Wayfarers across his face, to cover the still-swollen nose and two black eyes. For some reason the immigration officers can’t find the stamp on James’ passport; they claim the kid (James is wearing an orange Polo shirt, jeans, a sunburn, a dumb-ass American flashy grin) never went through customs. Everyone who goes through customs gets stamped, he’s barked at in Spanish. They pull him out of the line. A bulky woman pounds numbers into a phone. A man with an assault rifle is sent for, and he stands next to James on the platform by the office. The tip comes a few inches from James’ head. James’ face drops as he watches the bus load up again, all its passengers getting back on save for the other five of them, who are in shock. James puts his hand to the rim of his sunglasses, then puts it down again.

Tired third-world highway. Present day Enter man with assault rifle, James (Thick Spanish accent) Who you (Voice a bit quavering) James Nete No James You come to Costa Rica when Nete Week ago Why no stamp No sé Hablas español Un poco

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Americano Sí This is problem Sí We no let you go without stamp My bus is leaving I have to go You no go What You stay here and friends go We came together Friends have passport They want to stay Can’t What You go with us What You go to Limon mañana por la inmigración Limon Sí And where do I go Elongated pause. Man with the assault rifle takes steps toward James.

You no understand I am your friends I want help you but you no understand I Will Arrest You I Take You To Jail. ...at which point allen and michael get back on the bus as it hums away from the deadland...rosalind catherine john staying with James...chainsmoking on gravel streets...shaking...then the bulging woman at the desk cries like an evangelical who done sawd the christ lawd jesus...“la luz! la luz! la luz! la luz! la luz!”...she points

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to the faint stamp as she holds the passport up to the light...la luz! la luz! la luz! la luz! la luz!”...watermarked as if from miles away... she tells James he’s free to go....a bus takes the four back to puerto viejo where they go back to the hotel with a bottle of bacardi and beers and rosalind smokes herself into catatonia James passes out john and catherine go dancing and the sand-swept tiny town with its the thatch roofs, its thick-wrapped cigars, its night-black muscled men, its rats, its hobos, its stray fur-matted dogs—these fuzz-addled near-truths haunt the minds of back-thinking men like James. The dreams overcome the realities. The realities morph into remembered dreams. The world melts as if it’s a glacier seeping somehow into the Caribbean. And when he thinks back days later, months later, years later, on the dreams that create a life, he recalls the miracle of what saved him from Costa Rican jail-time purgatory: la luz!

On the morning of James’ birthday Callie tries to kill herself. They find her unconscious in her bed. They find a near-empty bottle of Xanax that had been full the day before. They find a suicide note detailing her journey to the Kingdom of Heaven. She goes to the hospital and they never hear of her again. The staff tries to cover it up but everybody knows what happened. There’s no reason to whisper—all words fly fast in the quiet of The House.

Two of James’ students bring him birthday cards. One says that God will make all of his wildest dreams come true and James smiles. Another student brings him a cupcake. They sing: “Cumpleaños feliz, cumpleaños feliz, cumpleaños feliz...”

Rosalind and James have a cigarette after work. She mentions that the piece Allen and her used to smoke weed out of the night before is gone. She left it on her nightstand and it is gone. Allen says he doesn’t have it. She fidgets and puts out the cigarette after just one puff and goes inside.

The director of the volunteer program had found Allen’s piece when she was snooping around Callie’s stuff after the pill overdose and she kicks Rosalind out of the program, out of The House, for bringing drugs into the house. James plays a Radiohead song on the guitar, and sings along:

44 The Archive | Fall 2008

“So don’t get any, big ideas, they’re not, gonna happen...”

Rosalind comes and sits down next to him. He knows he can’t hold her hand but still he graces it, softly, and at its touch she grabs it, squeezes it. Someone enters the room and she pulls away, storms out. James follows her to the empty bottom of the stairwell, her face contracting, her eyes welling up. James hugs her and she bawls into his shoulder.

Allen decides he won’t confess that it was his weed, his bowl, and will make Rosalind take the fall instead.

Puriscal sidewalk. Present day Enter James, Michael, John, Allen John: If you have any honor whatsoever, there’s only one option.

Allen: I’ve made my decision.

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Michael: To refuse to take responsibility for your actions?

Allen: If I get thrown out, my father will disown me. He’ll refuse to pay for my college.

John: You wanna go into politics, right?

Allen: I want to be a lawyer, then a judge, then go into politics.

John: Well this is a perfect example of why politicians are all liars.

You are lying if you don’t own up to your mistakes.

Michael: It’s true.

John: Back at boarding school, we’d see bad drug addicts who’d avoid facing the facts. But that never works. You have to come to terms with what you did—in this case, smoked weed at The House and then put the blame on someone else.

Allen looking down, face distorted, folded in anger Allen: I’m doing the right thing because I’m doing the right thing for me. And because of that, I’m not going to feel guilty.

Michael looking at John John: Don’t kid yourself. You’re gonna feel guilty. You feel guilty already. And believe me, it only gets worse. That guilt is going to eat you alive.

James averting his eyes, Allen jabbing him in his chest hard, cackling, laughing the kind of laugh that comes when no other sound makes sense Allen: And what about you, James? You gonna confess too? You smoked too, remember? Should I rat you out too? Should I? Huh? Should I? Allen laughing loud, demonically Allen: No, no; I wouldn’t do that (looking at John and Michael).

I’ll let you feel the worst guilt of all—the guilt you have to keep with you no matter what.

James with his head buried toward the sidewalk, silent (Exeunt)

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Wrought-iron fence around The House. Green trees, flowers fuchsia, salamander blue. Kids boxing in the middle of the street.

Man drinking Coke out of a plastic bag. Stray dog. Fútbol game.

Church bells.

In Costa Rica, to say goodbye to someone you say “Pura Vida!”

Later in the Day: Allen confesses not because of a change of heart but because Rosalind blackmails him. They both get kicked out.

They’re to leave in the morning. Allen sits in his bed and doesn’t speak to anyone. Rosalind is on the phone, with her mother.

James scrubs his plate after dinner. Happy birthday, Rosalind says.

There’s one last cigarette for them that night.

Puriscal Night. Lit only by stars and a streetlight.

Enter James and Rosalind Don’t leave We’ll meet in New York City There is no New York City (Exeunt) They watch the first half of Almost Famous. They stop around the part where Penny Lane and William Miller are talking, him telling her that band members traded her for two cases of beer, and then William says: “WHEN AND WHERE DOES THIS REAL WORLD OCCUR?” James goes to her room. Walks downstairs. Walks outside. The House is empty.

She is gone.

So is he.

No futuro.

And that’s how it starts. •

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Universe Kimberley Goffe She looks up and is surprised to find stars like salt on a plate, as if she could stick a finger into the sky then lick the stars off her fingernail, run her tongue over her teeth to clean them of residual cosmic matter.

The moon was stuck between her molars and despite her gum ball training, she almost choked on the sun.

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CONTRIBUTORS Amanda Auerbach (“After the Exploitation,” p. 9), 2012 Marissa Bergmann (Photography, pp. 10, 12, 17, 21, 32), 2011 Matthew Boyle (“Arizona,” p. 12), 2011 Ryan Brown (“Where We Are Going,” p. 16), 2011 Karen Chen (Photography, p. 15), 2011 Ghisly Echezuria (Photography, p. 8), 2011 Nathan Robert Freeman (“Pura Vida,” p. 32), 2010 Jenna Gates (Photography, p. 37), 2012 Kimberley Goffe (“Universe,” p. 48), 2012 Courtney Han (“[Walking to Glover Park],” p. 19), 2010 Grace Kohut (Photography, pp. 7, 26, 40, 45, 49), 2012 Kevin Lincoln (“You’re Nothing Without Me,” p. 2), 2011 Aileen Liu (Photography, p. 2), 2009 Charlotte Mabe (“Where I’m From,” p. 10; “Fabricated Boy,” p. 14), 2012 Eric Mansfield (Photography, p. 24), 2009 MK Pope (“credulity,” p. 24), 2009 Tiffany Shao (Art, p. 48), 2012 Kevin Ylauan (“By the Grace of Quint Hadley,” p. 26), 2009

The Archive Fall/Winter 2008 The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Mark Twain

In this issue

Amanda Auerbach Marissa Bergmann Matthew Boyle Ryan Brown Karen Chen Ghisly Echezuria Nathan Robert Freeman Jenna Gates Kimberley Goffe

Courtney Han Grace Kohut Kevin Lincoln Aileen Liu Charlotte Mabe Eric Mansfield MK Pope Tiffany Shao Kevin Ylauan