Spring 2011 by The Harvard Advocate

ART Emma Banay, Molly Dektar, Julian Gewirtz, Dana Kase, Kristie La*, Avery Leonard*, Rebecca Levitan, Mary Potter*, Anna Raginskaya, Scott Roben, Madeleine Schwartz, Zoe Weinberg. business Ankur Agrawal, Ben Berman, Sophie Brooks, Skyler Hicks, Benat Idoyaga, Andrew Karn, Temi Lawoyin, David Manella*, Iya Megre, Jaron Mercer, Sasha Mironov, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao, Natalie Wong, Emily Xie, Ge Zhang*.

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Editorial Board President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors Features Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Technology Editor Pegasi Dionysi Circulation & Publicity Managers Librarian Alumni Relations Manager Community Outreach Director

EMILY CHERTOFF JULIAN GEWIRTZ SCOTT ROBEN ANDREW KARN Wendy chang HANNA CHOI MARK CHIUSANO SOFIA GROOPMAN MATT AUCOIN Jeremy FEng MOLLY DEKTAR CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN MADELEINE SCHWARTZ RICHARD FEGELMAN STEPHANIE NEWMAN DAN COLE MICHAEL SEGEL ERIK FREDERICKSEN JOSHUA WILSON SALLY SCOPA

design Charlotte Alter, Lucy Andersen, Isidore Bethel, Wendy Chang, Hanna Choi, Alejandra Dean*, Jessica Henderson, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Joseph Morcos, Lauren Packard, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel, Lila Strominger*. features Victoria Baena*, Eric Brewster, Spencer Burke, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Eva DeLappe, Sophie Duvernoy, Molly Fitzpatrick, Georgina Parfitt*, Madeleine Schwartz, Jessica Sequeira, Georgia Stasinopoulos, My Ngoc To, Alex Wells*. fiction Emily Chertoff, Molly Dektar, Eva Delappe, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Carolyn Gaebler, Sofia Groopman, Seph Kramer, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman. poetry Matthew Aucoin, Hana Bajramovic, Samantha Berstler*, Anne Marie Creighton*, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Frederiksen, Julian Gewirtz, Sarah Hopkinson*, Andrew Klein, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, Stephanie Newman, Adam Palay, Tyler Richard*, David Wallace, Joshua Wilson, Justin Wymer. TECHNOLOGY Eric Arzoian*, Ben Berman, Dan Cole, Jeff Feldman, Jeremy Feng, Mark VanMiddlesworth, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Michael Segel, Scott Zuccarino. * The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.

Board of Trustees Chairman James Atlas Chairman Emeritus Louis Begley Vice-Chairman Douglas McIntyre President Susan Morrison Vice-President Austin Wilkie and Treasurer Secretary Charles Atkinson Peter Brooks John DeStefano LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER A. Whitney Ellsworth jonathan Galassi Lev Grossman Angela Mariani Daniel Max CELIA MCGEE Thomas A. Stewart Jean STROUSE

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions may be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Founded in 1866, the Harvard Advocate is the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oldest continuously published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not the Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to the Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www. theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of the Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2010 by the Editors and Trustees of the Harvard Advocate.

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TABLE OF CON TEN TS FEATURES

4 Sarajevo Rose 31 The Washing Room 48 A Short Discussion of Even Longer Words

FICTION

12 Cuccaro 35 Our Prayer

Cover Illustration by Sally Scopa Illustrations by Lucy Andersen (p.31, p.48, p.54-55), Jessica Henderson (p.4), Dana Kase (p.38), Joseph Morcos (p.52), and Lauren Packard (p.3)

Spencer Burke My Ngoc To Eric Brewster

Molly Dektar Ryan Meehan

9 20 24 29

19 22 23 26 27 30 30

POETRY

Poem [I stiffen: again] Aria (I & II) Locus

ART

Julian Gewirtz Adam Palay David Wallace Justin Wymer

Cross section 3 James Powers jonesing Taylor Davis is he etc. Taylor Davis Portable Table Artemisha Goldfeder, Emma Banay, and Louisa Denison Cosmic Indifference Rachel Libeskind How to Light the Pilot in a Gas Stove – In Search of Lost Know-How Anna Murphy How to Slick Back Hair – In Search of Lost Know-How Anna Murphy

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET

Sarajevo Rose SPENCER BURKE

The call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo than in Istanbul or Beirut. Walking through the old city—a disorder of cobbled lanes, Moorish architecture, and bazaars spilling over with hammered copper pots, communist kitsch, and bright wool Bosnian kilims—the call of the muezzin comes softly at first. A single cry drifts in from the distance, then is joined by another, and another, lapping over each other, building to an eerie harmony, a song sung in round. Minarets scatter the skyline, rising above the corrugated tile roofs like ancient gnarled pines in a forest. The mosques in the old city date back three, four, five hundred years. The muezzins’ calls began at the oldest of these, a short walk away, across the turbid shallow waters of the River Miljacka. The Tsar’s Mosque, as it is called, is squat and unremarkable. Built in 1457, the building is as old as the city itself. It is named for Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror: the man who turned Constantinople into Istanbul and brought much of the Balkans into the expansive fold of the Ottoman Empire. Sarajevo was founded at Mehmet’s orders, to serve as the capital of his new province. This mosque was duly erected. It was a fitting beginning for a city that overbrims with houses of worship. Long before Ellis Island and the multicultural metropolises of the 21st century, Sarajevo was among the most diverse places on the planet. For hundreds of years it was one of the few cities where one could find

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a Catholic cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, and an onion-domed Orthodox church together on a single street. Inside the tchotchke stands and hostel rooms you can still find the old tourism posters from the 60s and 70s that proudly proclaim Sarajevo “The Jerusalem of Europe.” The diversity of this place is, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of history. The Balkans have always existed on the fringe of empires, as a much-fought-over domain at the center of their territorial ambitions. Through the centuries, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians, Turks, and Austro-Hungarians came, saw, conquered, and in time retreated back from whence they came. Each left echoes of their presence: some words from their language, some converts to their religion, some favorite food or drink or art form. The language—called Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian, depending on whom you ask—reflects this tradition of borrowing and lack of cultural consistency. “Tea” (čaj) comes from Turkish, “water” (voda) from Slavic, pronouns from Latin. The Balkans are the great palimpsest of history. *** It’s hard to believe, after years of war and ethnic strife, that the name Balkan once evoked this kind of diversity. The name—derived from the range of mountains that run up the peninsula’s spine—has taken on an altogether different meaning in the Western lexicon, balkanization now signifying an injurious breakup of a whole into small, hostile

parts. All complex entities, from corporations to African states, risk the fate of balkanization: out of one, many. A sense of spoiled potential hangs in the air here. The diversity of this place was once its selling point, a source of pride. But it also proved to be its downfall. When else has a city gone in ten years from Olympic host to war-zone? The wooded, rolling hills that cradle the city were transformed from ski runs for the world’s finest athletes into a shooting gallery for heavy artillery and Serbian snipers. The siege of Sarajevo lasted for nearly four years, longer than any other siege in modern history, three times longer than Stalingrad. When it was all over, ten thousand people were dead and fifty thousand wounded. One in two citizens reported seeing a family member shot and one-third of the population had fled for their lives. The renowned national library was burnt to nothing but ash. There is a famous photograph taken by Annie Leibovitz during the war. It shows a bicycle collapsed on pavement, a crescent of blood smeared against the pale ground like a stroke in Chinese calligraphy. Leibovitz flew into Sarajevo in 1993, a year into the siege. On the drive back from her meeting with the newly crowned Miss Besieged Sarajevo, a mortar crashed to earth ahead of her car. “It hit a teenage boy on a bike,” she wrote, “and ripped a big hole in his back. We put him in the car and rushed him to the hospital, but he died on the way.” *** I didn’t see the photo until after my own visit to Sarajevo. It captured something distinct and plaintive about the place that reflected my own experience. By the time I started poking around the Balkans—fourteen years after the conflict’s end—the stains of war remained everywhere: the spray-painted warnings of mines; the disabled ordnance sold as souvenirs; the colorless blotches left by exploded shells on building fronts, like pox scars on a face. On our last afternoon in Sarajevo, my friend Chelsea and I wandered away from the center of town. We posed for pictures on the Latin Bridge, the spot where Franz Ferdinand met his fateful end in 1914. We clambered around the old Olympic stadium, and rested with a couple of cans of beer in a strikingly green park. We later discovered that the park was a memorial and graveyard to some of the fifteen hundred children who died in the siege. Here again was this incongruity, this friction

between the visible and exterior and an unnerving evil that always seemed to be lurking beneath them. The hills surrounding Sarajevo shelter the city in a cozy embrace, but during the war they made escape impossible, as their vantage enabled Serbian militia to rain death down on the city. The diversity of the Balkans is both its distinction and the root of the war that ripped Yugoslavia apart. This is what I think so many outsiders have found troubling and beguiling, fascinating and repelling about this place. This was the carrion-smell that attracted the vultures of death here in the 90s, and this is what first drew me to the Balkans. *** I spent six weeks in the Balkans. I went to class, traveled on the weekends, became a connoisseur of Croatian brandies, and tried to fathom the place. The Balkans are the Gordian knot of geopolitics, full of divisions so subtle as to seem wholly imperceptible to the outsider. It was not until around week four that I began to get a handle on the ones between Croats and Slovenes, Macedonians and Kosovars, Stokavian and Čakavian dialects, and so on. But just at the point when I hoped coherence would set in, I only grew more confused. As our lectures recounted the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed—the ethnic cleansing, the churches filled with people and set burning—it gradually felt less foreign and perverted. Had I assimilated the Balkan mentality? Was this normal, inevitable, unavoidable? Was it simply the sanitizing gap between experiencing atrocities and learning about them in a classroom? It wasn’t that the war existed in some distant past. My classmates from Serbia and Croatia had all been touched by it. We talked about it a bit: a father gone fighting for years, a brother wounded by snipers, sleepless nights spent huddled in bomb shelters. They seemed to accept it all so matter-offactly. I suppose these things are different when you grow up with them. One Monday I received a call from Matija, a friend of a friend who had offered to show me around. Matija was a man on a mission. “Plan for Thuseday,” he declared. “Take a train to Sisak. We’ll look around. It was important city. Then will drive to Petrinja. That is a city that was devastated during war. After that I’m going to Zagreb, so you’ll be co-driver. OK?” I must have dithered for a moment too long, because before I could answer he was demanding, “When can you take train?”

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“Hold on, was that Tuesday or Thursday?” “Thuseday.” “Thuseday?” “Yes, day after today.” He was getting impatient. “Oh, yes, of course. I’m free at four.” “Mm. Arrival should be in one hour. It is small station, however, it is the only station that looks like one. More or less. Until Thuseday,” he said and hung up. Nothing quite like Slavic hospitality. The day was broiling and the train airless. When I arrived in Sisak, my clothes were soaked and plastered to my body. Matija gave me a quick tight hug and started walking. Sisak is an ugly but tidy industrial city. Smokestacks fill one end of the sky. The streets were empty, and it was silent save for the murmur of cicadas. We walked along the river. A few Roman columns stood uncomfortably between communist-era tenements. We crossed the river and walked up a hill into a neighborhood of small neat suburban houses. He gestured ahead to a house on the right, where his grandparents live. He told me that in 1995, when he was ten, fighting broke out again between Croatia and the breakaway republic of Serbian Krajina, in what now lies within the southern and eastern borders of Croatia. His mother worried that the Serbs would bomb Zagreb, so she drove them out into the country to stay with her parents until things cooled down. Gesturing to an overgrown vacant lot on the left, Matija said that during that night back in Sisak a deafening noise woke everyone up. A bomb meant for the nearby power plants had flattened the house across the street. We went into his grandparents’ house to wait for his friend Helena. His grandmother cooed over me as she force-fed us from a seemingly limitless supply of plum dumplings. His grandfather meanwhile held forth, enumerating Croatia’s contributions to the world: the necktie, the fountain pen, the torpedo. The list went on. Helena arrived an hour later. We drove off to her hometown, Petrinja, which had seen some of the heaviest fighting in the ’95 campaign. We got out to walk around in a few places, stopping to look at an old stone fort and a 16th century battlefield, then drove up out of the city, pulled off onto a gravel road, and stopped. We were surrounded by trees. Below was an idyllic meadow, tall with grass swaying in the breeze. It all looked like something out of a Grimm fairytale. Helena told us, as Matija translated, that Serb paramilitaries marched twenty-two Croats from the town into

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these woods. They shot them, then buried them in a mass grave near this spot. We drove on, stopping again by the side of the road as we neared the outskirts of town. Here there was a simple wooden crucifix in the middle of a field. Helena said that this had once been a church that had been bombed during a service. This was the exact day it had happened, nineteen years ago. She added, almost as an afterthought, that her parents had been killed inside. It was all so sober and unsentimental. She didn’t even change the tone of her voice or run her hand along the cross. Matija and I drove back to Zagreb. He asked me to explain something that he’d been wondering about for years. Of course, I said. “I have tried and I don’t know .... Baseball,” he blurted out, “how does it work?” Matija dropped me off at my hostel and said goodbye. I went up to my room, exhausted from the long day, and got ready for bed. I couldn’t fall asleep, and so finally I went out for a walk, bought some ice cream and brought a tall beer back to the room. Suddenly I was overwhelmed. I started to cry. It was over as soon as it started. But in a way I felt relieved. I don’t know anything about war or hardship or loss or post-traumatic stress, and I still didn’t understand the stoicism of the day, the unfeelingness of the entire place. This was, after all, a people which stereotype faults for volatility. I didn’t know what I had just felt. But in my confusion, tears were confirmation that feeling did still exist. The gesture reassured me, and I was thankful for it. *** Every Yugoslav remembers May 4, 1980: the day Tito died. Though twelve years would pass before the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed under myriad internal pressures, the nation’s decline became inevitable on this day. Yugoslavia was more of an idea than a country anyway. Tito was the prime salesman of this idea. The force of Tito’s personality literally held the nation together. People recognized that he was a dictator, but he gave them a nation based upon grand ideals, a nation that was a player on the world stage, a nation that they could believe in and be proud of. Who cared if your ruler was an autocrat if you had all that? After Tito, the idea of Yugoslavia slowly lost its cachet. As people stopped believing in the idea of the nation, politicians stopped talking about the good of Yugoslavia, and started addressing their local constituencies, Serbs

and Croats and Slovenes. I saw an old Slovenian propaganda poster once in a Ljubljana museum. It showed the growth of an apple from naked limb to fruit, in five panels. The apple represented Yugoslavia and the panels were each labeled with a decade. The 1940s are a bare branch. Over the next three panels, the apple develops into a large ripe fruit. In the last panel, the 1980s, only the core is left, dangling. Slovenia— the most developed, the most homogenous, and the most “Western” of the republics—was the first to withdraw from the federation. Slovenians no longer saw any value in propping up Kosovar villagers with the fruits of their industry, so they removed themselves from the social contract that was Yugoslavia. Now, Slovenia is the only exYugoslav state to have been invited into the EU. To some extent, our sense of ourselves is always filtered through the eyes of others. Yugoslavs once took pride in their country’s complexity and untroubled diversity. But since the wars of the 90s, they have lost the self-assurance of a confident nation, of Americans, Frenchmen and Argentines. Since Yugoslavia splintered into a bloody mess, they have realized the connotation that the word Balkan now holds for Western ears.

They are scared to death that they too will begin to think about themselves in this way. And so they tend to dismiss the war, disregard its causes. It is not consistent with their self-image, so they go to great lengths to try to disprove the negative stereotypes. They try to harbor no grudges, to remain unsentimental. *** Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, before the strident nationalism and petty border wrangling, each republic in the federation could have been personified, with certain character traits. Imagine Yugoslavia as a family in a sitcom, with Tito as the lovable but hard-nosed father. Serbia would have been the stern athletic elder son, tough and devoted. Croatia: the elegant, pretty, popular one. Slovenia was smart, serious, maybe a little socially awkward. And Bosnia was the dysfunctional, jokey class-clown, always making ironic asides, making light of adversity in order to beat it. The Bosnian comedy group Top Lista Nadrealista—“Surrealists’ Top Chart” in English—began producing a popular radio comedy show during the ’84 Sarajevo Olympics, consciously modeling themselves on Monty Python. As the country unraveled, they moved

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from radio to television, and their sketches shifted from silly fun to political burlesque. They kept on producing darkly absurdist humorous sketches through the long siege of Sarajevo. One skit constructs a farce out of the grim reality of life in a city surrounded by snipers. The actors run a relay race that involves collecting buckets of water from a well while prancing back and forth to avoid the sniper shots that ricochet around them. The lunacy of this setup is only amplified by the fact that there are actual snipers firing on them. The bullets whipping past the players are real. But the misfortunes of the 90s eventually dampened this comedic spirit. Two of the original Nadrealistas tried to resurrect the group a few years back, but the new program failed to find an audience. Sarajevo now seems a deeply melancholy place, downcast in spirit and dour in mien. Even the call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo. Something of the old spirit still endures. If you direct your gaze downward while walking Sarajevoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s streets, you will sooner or later spot a bright red rupture blooming in the pavement. These are gashes caused by exploding shells during the siege. Rather than smooth them out and repair the damage of war, the city filled them with red resin. They are meant to commemorate the dead and transform the scars from the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s darkest chapter into things of beauty. There are hundreds of these scattered around Sarajevo, and each is unique. Looked at with a sanguine eye, it resembles a flower. And so it is called a Sarajevo Rose.

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Poem JULIAN GEWIRTZ

My part to play the princess: twenty-four folds of my whitest dress, field of dandelions flowering from my skin, dozen dozing doves to trim. Should they startle, I will be revealed. Where is my cloudy crown, my wreath of cotton? Garlanded body, I am entitled to more than downy dresses filled with seeds. For before the birds nested in my chest, rainwater fell from my face. I was not numinous, I was entirely clear. Now milk runs from me, for the birds to lap with their little tongues, for the weedy dandelions to wash in. Every recess preened: my part to play the princess. Now I am entitled to make a metaphor so white that you could whip through it like wind and fill the air with feathers or flowers.

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Cuccaro MOLLY DEKTAR

Paul’s older brother Christopher died when Christopher was seven and Paul was just a baby. Christopher had gone down to the cellar searching for apricot preserves, the imprudent craving of a young boy who could remember a little too well the delight of a sugar-sticky mouth. But—and he had undoubtedly been warned of this—the wine, fermenting down there in the cool deep and swelling the bellies of its big round tanks, sent out its heavy pockets of flavorless, odorless gas, the secret feelers of the monster that trapped him on the floor. The whole town went searching for Christopher, up to the white church on the tallest hill, through the vine slopes and the slanted pastures, through gardens and kitchens and paddocks and even, presciently, down to the graveyard, but he was not to be found in any of these places. The father, thrashing down the stairs and holding his breath, found Christopher lying on the dank floor, frowning and pale as the dawn. He was not to be revived. Now Paul sat in the kitchen, holding his hurt ankle, and watching the first apricots, delicate orange and swollen, tap against the windowpane. Paul was fourteen, and Christopher would have been in his twenties now, and married, and living in a cold stone building that the family would have built next to theirs. After Christopher’s death his father had put a lock on the cellar door, and his mother had put a small, blurred photograph of Christopher in a little silver frame from the jeweler’s in Alessandria, and Paul, at age four, had seized the frame and with an urge to reach its contents, its vacuous image of a small ghostly boy sunk deep beneath a fall lake, smashed it across the stone floor. Now this morning the ugly sunlight edged through the windows and spilled its milk all over Paul, conveying with it a harmful level of nostalgia. With the girl Margaret here, Paul knew the sun would feel different. With Margaret, his old friend he’d seen again during this Easter break at home, it would feel like light, not failed sun, and so they would dunk themselves in its broad milkiness instead of sitting at the window feeling that the sun was veiled through a veil of memory. Paul felt the separation acutely, and was sick of himself. The sun still felt white and wet like washed cloth from yesterday’s rainstorm. Yesterday a fast and monstrous storm had tackled the hills and scared Paul into running away. He’d tried to race the storm to the white church, that safe place on the highest hill of Cuccaro. He couldn’t escape, of course. But now the storm had vanished, and the morning sunlight slipped through the window and bandaged trapezoidal spaces of the kitchen floor and walls in white. Paul’s mother entered the room, as quietly as she did everything, pressed ground coffee into the coffee maker, and began pounding the air into milk for Paul’s coffee. Paul listened to her and looked out the window, at the first apricots hitting themselves against the glass. He did not want to turn around. He waited. In Paul’s bedroom there was a dead bee on the windowsill which had died a few months ago. During the worst of the winter, Paul had heard the bee buzzing against the pane for four nights, and when he

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looked the fifth day, it had died on the windowsill. It had been something so bright, so firm, so swollen, it seemed impossible that it would ever crumple in on itself, like any dead thing. But crumple it did, after a few months; its legs pinched together, the fine fuzz on its striped back diminished, its gleam rusted over. Two nights ago, the night before the storm, Paul woke up (restless from his hurting ankle, and from thinking about the girl Margaret with whom he’d spoken in the garden that day) and saw the tiny dark bit on the mantelpiece, and in the vibrating dark he thought he saw it moving. The bee had been dead for months, and crumpled, and now Paul was sure it was moving. It seemed to be walking in circles. Paul pulled himself out of bed and ran down into the kitchen. The stone floors were terribly cold. They all wore slippers around the house (perilous not to wear slippers) but it had been too dark for Paul to find his. His whole life he’d never been to the kitchen alone at night, nor without slippers. Now Paul had gone down to the nighttime kitchen to get a drink of water. He wished he could have drunk out of the faucet, but recently the water had gone yellow as urine and filled with black specks, as bad as it had been during the last year of the war, when Paul was ten. The kitchen that night was quiet and cold and barren as a field. Paul’s hands shook as he took a glass from the rack. He felt like he was outside. He could feel the void of the sky inside the kitchen, like the walls were much too thin, like everything was shaking, about to fly apart. His feet stuck to the cold floor and made a wicky pattering against it that he feared someone outside would hear. He could feel the cold beaming up from his feet to his whole body, like lamplight pitched upward into fog. Margaret could have sat on a chair and steadied things, and he imagined her on a chair with him, but when he pulled her up in his mind she was a ghost on the chair, a mercury vapor light, veiled, horrible, and he banished her, because the real Margaret was not like that at all. He drank his water and crept back to his room. The bee was not moving. Paul hoped he was not going blind, like his grandmother, whose eyes were filled with clotted cream, who could not distinguish between dead moving bees and dead still ones, so long as they made no noise. Paul was back home at Cuccaro for Easter, and for the things that happened that week: Margaret, the kittens, the bee, the rainstorm and the next-morning sun. Paul spent most of his time at school at Alessandria, boarding during the week to save gasoline. Paul didn’t care much for his school. There the mattresses were wiry and lower, the conversation louder, the food much poorer. The floors were just as cold as at home. Paul also didn’t care much for his home. And every time he came home, to his mother, his father (childhood polio had kept Paul’s father from dying in the war, though it had not kept him from farming) and his grandmother, he despised himself for feeling such discomfort everywhere. His parents spoiled him the best they could—when he was at home, they didn’t make him do more than feed the animals and water the new vegetables. Only one of his old friends was back in town for Easter—Margaret, who had a face as homely as Cuccaro’s gravel path and languorous square: a short nose, a wide mouth, eyes that squinted up when she smiled, which was rare. She had always been so thin, so glum, making up mountains of lamb-filled pasta or potato dumplings with her older sisters and her mother (her father had died during the war, shot fighting in Dalmatia). One of her eyes had never quite lined up with the other. Paul wanted to see her. It had been months. And many of the families with children his age had moved away, to Turin or Genoa, as the town population veered down to seven hundred from the thousand it had been in his parents’ time. After the war, this was an infertile place. The land robbed itself. The cat bore kittens every year near Easter and every year she didn’t care for them and they died. The chickens made eggs with yolks as orange as the late sun, but only occasionally. The chickens groaned when Paul tried to collect their eggs. Now they were all living under the air’s silent clamoring, this shaking memory of shaking, like after the ringing of a bell. It reverberated over the hills and through the fuzzy radio which recently had quit itself, through the rounded hills topped with small yellow-walled towns, this place to grow up with a distinctly horizontal sky and so many hills to tumble down under it. It was in the land and in the air, a grieving sense of the thing just swallowed now passing through the land’s insides. Paul saw Margaret on the second day of the break, as she walked towards the square and he towards

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home along the gravel path that ran down the spines of the hills. “Margaret!” said Paul. “Hello, Paul,” said Margaret. “How are you?” said Paul. He was happy to pretend no time had passed, though it had been since last summer. She looked different, though, undefinably. She was weightier, taller, but in a way that kept shifting back to how he’d known her before, as if how she looked now was just outlines over how she ought to look. “Walking,” she said. “Walking along.” Her voice, Paul thought, was very smooth and beautiful, even in dialect—a voice which would not be a disappointment to hear coming from over a high fence. “It’s great to be home for Easter, isn’t it?” said Paul. “Yes,” she said. She looked away, down the road. Paul was desperate for her to look back. “How has school been?” “We’re making dumplings,” she said. “I ought to be peeling potatoes. I went for a walk. I didn’t mean to see you.” “Oh,” said Paul. She looked at him. She smiled. “I ran into you, though,” she said. “I’m glad to see you,” said Paul. “We ran into each other,” she said. “Yes, yes!” said Paul. “What a nice day it is, right?” “I have to go do the potatoes, or I’ll be scolded,” she said. Paul took it all as a good sign, even though as she walked away she began to run. Paul couldn’t wait to see her again, he realized, as he walked home along the gravel path. The clotted veins of the grandmother, her cheese-white forearms filled with soft dimples—this was how he knew women. His quiet mother, with dark, gleaming hair, whose hands were always floured (it always seemed intentional), like she was trying to fade away into part ghostliness, like she could touch her son who lived in the other place—the place which Paul defined as the place you see when you carry a mirror around in your hands and navigate your house by looking at the ceiling, the place of broad colors you can see in a reckless way when blindfolded, the wind that blows out from the balcony in a joyful way over the fields like the hugest most invisible bird, the place visible through the sifting flour, through veiled sugar (veiled sugar, they called it, not powdered) falling on cake, a place where Paul thought his mother, with her floury hands, could reach. On the other side his brother Christopher would just see those hands emerging out of brightness and they would stroke his cheek and his hair and hold him and come back to this earth washed clean with tears. Paul’s mother was always crying, in a squawky way, like a dark bird. In the summertime she sometimes sat in a white plastic chair on the patio with no top on, sunning herself, and those dark oblong folds came down low on her concave chest completely unconnected from any thought of nourishment. But everything was like that, even the pasta boiling away in its salted water, that swelled up so delicious sometimes it made Paul cry, though he pretended it was the steam—each piece was always so small, each bowl so close to being finished even at the first bite. Paul dreamed of the thick rich mash of risotto, threaded through with kneaded cheese, pots and pots of it on each burner of each stove in Cuccaro, and of an infinite egg custard and the warm thick grainy sugar of corn semolina pudding, made all with cream, not watered-down milk, things with no pieces. But at home such rich foods, when there were any, went first to Paul’s mother and grandmother. Sick was needier than young, Paul learned, and palliative more important than strengthening. On Easter, though, they ate a high cake shaped like a dove, some before church and some after. Paul’s father gave him the best part, the top all crusty with sugar, and dunked the soft center in sweet wine. There was never a priest at the white church, not even on Easter. Everyone attended services at the orange brick church in the center of town, the church with the flat bell face that Christopher Columbus’s family built. Margaret was there, with her sisters and her mother, and they took up one pew but left room for their father, whose ghost, it could be assumed, had found a way back from the anonymous flowered Dalmatian field where for him the world had shaken a little too hard to keep

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its pieces. Paul’s family sat on the other side, Paul could feel his pulse or the trembling of the ground through his thighs on the hard pew, the sun made trapezoids on the stone floor and revealed dust in the air, the women wore lace and murmured Ave Maria sixty times (Paul always wondered if they were actually counting; their words blended into a numberless throb, like bees) and then the priest spoke for a time always much shorter than Paul expected, and then they all felt the wine sink deep into their tongues. There were never services at the white church. And it stood on the hill so bright, so firm. It seemed like it would never crumple in on itself, like every dead thing. Up on the hill, it felt like something visiting from a separate place. It was a square moon sunk into the land. Paul had only once been inside. He’d been with his friend Mark, whose family had given up farming and moved to Turin to work on automobiles. Mark had noticed the hinges of the left door were so rusty they were getting pulled down by the doors’ weight, and they were so curious they spent an hour wiggling the left door and forcing against its hinges (each time, it shrieked horribly) until they broke it away and pushed inside. It hadn’t felt like normal air, like the air outside or in other buildings. The air had been heavy and sweet as soil, touched through with glorious light from the high diamond windows, rich with the smell of growing things. Birds flew in and out. Both boys had felt fearful and they hadn’t stayed long. The next week Mark and Paul coaxed Margaret and one of her sisters to come see it too but both doors had new hinges, bright as silver, in which they could see reflections of their stretched-up faces and all the trees collapsed in behind them like an accordion. The doors were locked shut and would not open. They ran back home instead, along the gravel path on the ridge that connected the white church to the rest of the town. Paul had fallen on that gravel path and skinned his knees more times than he could remember. He didn’t mind falling because falling was always preceded by that moment, right when he felt he was running so fast he couldn’t stay up, when he ran so fast he started tipping over, when he felt the beginning of flight. Then he’d fall and smash his knees and sometimes his hands and his face, and if he smashed them hard enough when he walked back the grass would turn white and the sky would fill with black explosions and still things would start to move. It was on the afternoon before the dead-bee night that Paul ran into Margaret again. He’d gone to the store in the square to get bags of ground corn and dry pasta. His mother had gotten him new stiff trousers for the holiday and his legs itched around his knees and ankles. As he went up the gravel road he watched the blue bus walking smoothly up the hills. There used to be two buses, but the war crushed one of them in, so now there was just one. The Alps smoldered quietly far away. The sun came into the dry-goods store and rang off the thin crinkly plastic bags of dry pasta. As he came out of the store, he saw Margaret on the road, holding a piece of red ice on a stick. On the road, she walked, with her hair with its wheat-furrow parted so straight. She blushed delicately, on purpose Paul thought. “Margaret! How are things?” he said. She looked to the side. “Good morning,” she said. “What are you up to?” said Paul. “Do you want this?” she said, holding out the ice. “I don’t like it.” “No, thank you,” said Paul. She let it drop to the gravel ground and laughed. She was wearing a yellow dress and yellow socks folded down over her sandals. Lovely—she was very lovely. Her eyes did not interest Paul as much as the way they crinkled up. “Well,” said Paul. “I have to bring these things home. Would you like to come?” She looked out over the hills, at the blue bus creeping its way to Lu. “I should be helping my sister,” she said. “All right,” said Paul. He stood there for a few minutes hoping she’d change her mind, but she didn’t speak, so he turned to start walking back to his house. She started walking along with him. She hummed a little as they walked. Paul worried about what they would do when they got to his house. He’d show her the kittens, he decided—all four had still been happy and in their box when he’d

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checked on Easter. And he’d offer her coffee. They arrived at the house, unlocked the gate, and went through to the garden, where the apricot trees and cherry trees and new-planted squash and tomatoes met them with their reeling turmoil of color and scent. Paul went around to the shed to check for the kittens, but their cardboard box was empty. “Early apricots this year,” said Margaret. “We need to find the kittens,” Paul said. “Why?” Margaret said. “Because they’re not in their box,” Paul said. “Why not?” Margaret said. “The mother cat never takes care of them,” said Paul, rummaging around the zucchini pots more and more quickly. “Here, help me find them,” he said. “I’m sure they’re fine,” Margaret said, sitting down in the plastic chair and closing her eyes. “I don’t think they are!” said Paul. “Fine,” said Margaret, reaching out to touch one of the apricots. Paul saw a bit of gray next to one of the tomato stakes. His heart beat fast. He reached out and grasped the kitten out of the cold dirt. It was limp and very dead. He held it delicately, then realized he didn’t have to. “Margaret! See?” said Paul, standing up to show her. She wouldn’t look at him—if she wasn’t crying she certainly looked upset enough to be crying. Her eyes were squinted up. “I’m going to leave,” she said. “Stay,” said Paul, hiding the kitten behind his back. “I’ll make you coffee. We’ll put cream in it. And we can take a walk.” “No,” said Margaret. “Well—” said Paul. “I hope to see you soon,” said Margaret, like she meant it. Margaret left and Paul squeezed the kitten and put it behind a tree, then went into the kitchen and took out the sifter and the flour and sifted through the flour and watched it fall. It hissed like a breathing thing. The apricots outside the window were small and firm. He wondered how it was that apricots don’t need to be fed apricots to grow apricots. He wondered how they formed out of the dirt, what was under the dirt, and what was under that. Certainly there were things under it, moving things and buried things and things both at once. Paul got out of his chair, too miserable to stay still. His mother was upstairs sleeping, where she spent most of the day, and his father out in the fields. He felt the freedom of an empty house. So he hit his head and arms and legs against the stone ground and pressed himself into corners and bruised himself pulling the table onto himself but he could not find something that would resist him all the way. He went outside to the garden where the earth was plowed up to receive the zucchini seedlings and he plunged his thin arms into the dirt. He put his face onto the heavy clods. He lapped at it like a cat at milk. He pushed the soil into his mouth. He felt lost in his dread. It was dread, this heavy feeling, that made the sky feel like something he could fall into, too dangerous to look at with a mirror, dread that made things shake as if they were going to fly apart. Nothing was working, so he decided to run down the gravel path to the graveyard. At the graveyard there was a little round photograph of Paul’s brother under glass, on the front of his upright grave. The photo, and the flowers planted in baskets and placed on the stones with no way to root into the actual earth, usually kept Paul far away. But as he ran closer and closer to the graveyard he realized that he wasn’t tired at all, and he wouldn’t get tired, and he could run to Alessandria and back, if he wanted, if it weren’t so boring. So he turned and sprinted back to his house, steady and lost in dread, this monster, like a sky, thickening everything into shaking dimness. He went back into the kitchen (stiff trousers ruined), found a heavy glass and the cellar key. The cellar was safe this time of year; the grapes were still tiny and green. He went down the stairs to the cellar, past the dusty jars of preserves and bottles of wine, avoided looking at the tanks which had watched Christopher die, and went to the winter storage room, where no one would come for months.

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The glass was heavy and sweaty in his hand, and he regretted that it was empty. He threw the glass at the ground and watched it smash. Then he picked up a jagged piece of the glass and dragged it over the soft pits of his ankle, where no one would look. But his skin beckoned the glass painlessly, and the knife embraced back, and everything gave: not what he wanted at all. Paul went back upstairs, neglecting the blood, which would not show on the floor or the steps once it dried. The next day the storm came. The morning after the rainstorm, Paul sat in the kitchen by the window, in a crooked wooden chair with an embroidered seat, and watched the pale gold apricots bounce on and off the windowpane in the wind. They made light meaty thuds against the window, but they wouldn’t break it. They split the sunlight into ghostly shapes on the glass, dirty shapes that, where they caught on the dirty edges of dried raindrops, were bright as the sun. Paul listened to his mother walk softly into the room with her slippers. He smelled the fervid smell of coffee rushing out of the canister in her hands. He listened to her push a whisk through milk to fluff it up for him. He thought of Christopher: how easily his mother would have spent twice as many minutes every day fluffing up milk for both of them. Paul thought again of Margaret. He was sure she would know his shaking dread, if he could explain it to her. He thought over and over the thing that had happened yesterday when the storm had come. He had been next to Margaret and he had felt a heartbeat either in his hand or his neck or in her hand or her neck—a heartbeat. She would say that the earth’s deep, pitless throb was its heartbeat, even if the rhythm was spaced in such a way that they could not feel it, only because they were inside it. A heartbeat with neither heart nor beat, for all things are veiled and unveiled—the sky, shaking from misted to cloudless, the cold stones and the compost heat, the grapes, the floating poison, the boy dead on the ground, his brother. Paul felt his throat. He looked out the window. Past the apricots he could see the hills—steaming up in the early sun, pale green fading in the distance to pale blue, where they blended into the sky like watercolors. He could hear the chickens, and the jangling of the horse’s bridle in the paddock. Paul wondered what it would be like to be everything, both wondering and feeling what it would be like to be everything, hill, beast and sky. The hills swelled up and almost breathed, neither asleep nor awake. This is how it ends: with everything, everything, feeling different to him. Yesterday there had been a terrible sudden storm. Paul had been in front of the house, having found the last kitten dead next to the outdoor sink. He lifted up the kitten, which was soft and wet and only as heavy as an egg, and turned to look down at the garden and the hills to see if he could see his father. He didn’t see his father, but he saw the sky had changed. A curtain of rain quickened across the far hills—immense, gray, trapezoidal. A tin whirligig flapped haplessly on the balcony in vertiginous circles. A crew of black birds rose from a cedar, cawing, and tilted off over the hills. The rain was coming up fast, ghoulish, bigger than any monster Paul had seen before. He gaped at it. Paul watched the rain patter up the gravel road, darkening it bit by bit, more terrifying than the darkest night. He needed to be with someone, to find someone with whom he could turn this horror into wonder. He scrambled backwards, ran out his front gate and to the right, towards the shop and caffe at the dip at the center of town, past the small crooked fountain and up the far hill, towards the small white church that stood on the flatness of the hill’s center, surrounded by lowering layers of narrow black-trunked trees. It was a long run up, past the highest houses. Paul’s left arm ached, and his ankle. He had a jagged stitch in his side. Bits of trees and plants blew over the hills hard enough to knock tiles off roofs or horses to their knees. The church door was locked. Paul sat on the small stoop, the smell of rain hitting dust rising against his limbs and face. He felt terribly alone. Then his eye caught on, or predicted, almost, a young body coming around the corner of the church. Margaret, of course. “Margaret!” he yelled. “We need to get inside!” She didn’t ask why. The branches were about to fly off the trees. His panic inflamed her panic. They needed to get out of the storm. The countryside was blowing in around them, erasing them. They slammed themselves against the doors, which would not open.

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They worked frantically at the doors. They battered against them like their wood was made of longing. They slammed their fists against the heavy dark doors and against the rusty hinges, as if they were going to break into the other space. The rain wet their ankles. They were maniacally terrified of the storm. As they pounded at the doors, cracking one a little, tearing at the splinters, they moved into what they would both consider the best kind of meaninglessness, the meaninglessness of oneness, where nothing else needs to be said. Finally the distance was so thin he broke through and clawed her out. They clawed each other out. They yanked at each other, like wrestling. They yanked each other through the opening they’d made in the door. The splintered door scratched them with its claws. They bled, and they lay on the ground. They waited. The storm ceased—gravel to sugar to nothing but air. As his terror faded, Paul began to look around. The ground was covered with dim moss. Soft things moved in the corners. What stones there had been had mostly rotted away or washed away. It was different from what he remembered. Maybe it was a house, not a church. They’d all always thought it was a church. Maybe it was a house. For a little while, Paul thought, this! This was the other space. Where was Christopher, and his mother’s hands? But of course when he looked around—there was only Margaret. The half-circles of sun, modulated with shadow, rocked delicately across the floor. And soon enough Paul felt discomfort. He hated himself—even here, even now, he could not hold up the sliding cielo of dread. He felt fear dangling all around him, dawdling dark shapes that evaded his blind grasp. He began to know that lying here in this space could not be the solution. They were inside something, and interiors must not be the solution, Paul felt deep down in his heart: interiors and burials, even in the richness of blackness, even in this shut space where the air sank down heavier than water or skin and embraced them, even here engulfed in the mantle of this glorious moon. Meanwhile, the birds flew in and out above them. It was clear when the sunlight struck them that the feathers on their wings were perfect. Their feathers overlapped their feathers gray into milky white, their quills fine as brushstrokes, their bodies firm, their inky black eyes and gnarled feet blooming, their contours elegant and unruined as a pen line on a white page. And Margaret said, “I bet those birds can see the hills.”

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Cross section 3, 2011 James Powers Oil on steel 48” x 48” The Harvard Advocate

[I stiffen: again] ADAM PALAY

I stiffen: again a shift, a shuffle somewhere in the darkness, impenetrable as the guillotine. The scaffold collapses into a bulging jaw sputtering against the shut. The heart is a muscle. Alone, against the drawbridge, my hand, wet with fog, slicks over the steel, and the big bolts resisting rust. Lift, and the rain folds like hands retiring into applause, and your silhouette disappears like a question into a question mark. As if anyone could be lost, and permanently. A candle spills through its wax, as the buildings, slowly, fall into a cloud which appeared as if to catch them, but, in truth, held nothing.

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jonesing, 2009 Taylor Davis Cherry plywood, cherry veneer, and wood 35” x 32” x 30” 22

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is he etc., 2009 Taylor Davis Watercolor and color pencil 10â&#x20AC;? x 14â&#x20AC;? The Harvard Advocate

Aria (I) DAVID WALLACE

If I were to drown myself in reckless beauty and make my wings creased lips parting, I would hover in sibilance behind you, my brother making a list of all instruments: our faces are mechanical copies, yours only younger and you make a grid with a pencil while I whistle a jazz song from the 30s (I never knew the words) and the light here is like the movies, defining you with shadows and staining you deep irreparable colors: the way youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve let yourself look is a pleasure from which you can never return. Your mind is perhaps like the movie projector, always behind my head, always humming discretely, and a pyramid of light arrives from that uncharted point and tames the curling smoke with its certainty: or perhaps your mind is not like that at all. Doubtless it is a world of mechanisms nesting inside one another, and a sentence standing for love is hurtling somewhere unknown, but you go on cataloging the trusses and circuits, and I go on whistling. As you describe your count as the span of a cracked idea you begin to shade yourself into darkness, and I have already forgotten how I began, that I promised you a ravaged image to ease your burdens: and this chore blooms as the notes of a distant death passing, a choirâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s light stretching out to the vanishing point to break.

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Aria (II)

If I were to forget that god is not a pulley once more, (and where weariness has thrown me I cannot say) then you could be buried in the frost. I cannot bear for us to remain in heaven and on earth. Because I have stopped severing my body from the mirror to rise like a cloud of heat that distorts only enough to reveal its presence, I am standing halfway up the ladder, helpless. If you have a contract with me, forget it: I have perforated myself, exhausted as the nights I used to cut through strolling through the city where everything is designed for children. But if you must pursue me, I sleep in the woods outside town, waiting for summer to empty to autumn and the community pool to empty out its bodies and return to the self-love of its own stillness. Gravity severs us from the forgotten and until we knot our arteries, making one map, we will have to be patient. While we are in flux we cannot be located. Climbing the panels of corrugated glass, nothing is made for your safety but I am keeping watch, and for beauty I cannot drop like granite wrapped in sackcloth, tied to the corpse that whispered to me the secret of freedom like the Count of Monte Cristo, whose resolution meant nothing, into the odorless green of the Mediterranean.

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Portable Table, 2010 Artemisha Goldfeder, Emma Banay, and Louisa Denison Hemlock, rope, muslin, hitching ring, utensils, and dowels Variable dimensions 26

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Cosmic Indifference, 2011 Rachel Libeskind Toothpaste on scanner bed Variable dimensions The Harvard Advocate

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Locus JUSTIN WYMER

This collection of torches convulsing in ink: it is not what I wanted to give you. All whites look older at night and yet the tapestry has to include them… I wanted you to sip this one swatch of light that stands singly, and the tan peasant wind that catches and fans the thin milk of its undergarment, and how morning blood un-hasps the hatches behind sleep’s cogs, flooding and the blasted furnace that risks ecstasis according to… Is this truly the color of my hands? I wanted to give you the searing first glance again, wanted you to grab and fold into that one swatch of cloth and stay and raise your hands and your children’s hands later when I melt into cadenza and we waft hoarsily past these pinewood rafters, records of starlings—then till chance is at last served raw to stirring gods, till I can’t name the scent of any ripeness and no longer know what cool water means, I will needle my eyes into the position of afterstars. I will make light trip and sift off sandstone in the quarries. We have witnessed too many rutilant past tenses. Now I shall be the saver of pauses. We will need breath later. We erred. Sky should be easier. I thought this would be different, this looking up. I thought there would be a granary.

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How to Light the Pilot in a Gas Stove – In Search of Lost Know-How, 2010 Anna Murphy Video uploaded to YouTube 2 minutes, 54 seconds How to Slick Back Hair – In Search of Lost Know-How, 2010 Anna Murphy Video uploaded to YouTube 2 minutes, 57 seconds 30

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The Washing Room MY NGOC TO

I. I’ve always wondered what kind of lifestyle it takes for someone to grow fungus on their body. I used to think that these people were the exception, but I have touched too many feet with clumps of dirt scrunched up under the nails to continue believing that the majority of the population keeps itself clean. I especially loved thick, yellow toenails hiding years of bacteria between layers of keratin. Heels covered in calluses. Toe hair. Sores. A fine layer of dead, crusted skin running from the heels all the way up to the knees. This is the world of a nail technician: flakes of dead skin and cuticles, bits of nails and hair, dirt squished into balls nudged into the corners of spa chairs. Anything that could get filthy got filthy, and three years of subjugation to this law taught me to wash my hands. II. In the back of the salon, behind the television, nestled in the corner between the heaters and the water fountain, was a small room equipped with a toilet and a sink. There were little decorations as well: a plunger, a scrubber, and a dusty fake plant that had claimed its territory on top of the paper towel dispenser for the past ten years. There was also a mirror above the sink. It was covered with toothpaste, grease, spit: every imaginable form of human matter. There was a sign

above the door that said “Restroom” for all those who desired to use it as such. I never paid much attention to that sign though. To me, it was the washing room. III. Once, when I was in the third grade, I fell asleep on the bus and missed my stop, so my bus driver drove me home last, after she finished dropping off the other kids. It was a long drive and she talked for most of it. Towards the end she asked me what I planned to do when I got home. I wanted to say that I would take a shower. I suddenly thought about how wonderful it felt to be clean after a long day of school. I imagined that there was water pounding on my head and clear blue shampoo that I could pour on my hands and then lather into my hair. I imagined opening the shower curtains and seeing my bathroom mirrors, fogged up from the steam and the heat, and suddenly I wanted to take a shower right then and there. The bus was so hot—and my clothes were dripping with sweat from my hour-long ride. I wanted so badly to tell her everything, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to say “shower.” My cheeks turned red. I hung my head trying to think of the word, but, after a long pause, when it still hadn’t come to me, I lifted my head and said, “I wash myself.”

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IV. It started with two bags. Back then we didn’t have enough money to buy a washing machine for the store, so we just brought all the dirty towels home with us. Every night, my dad hauled these sacks with him. Whenever I heard the garage open, I ran downstairs and waited to see him come through the door. It was always the same order: the buzzing of the door, footsteps, a bang as he kicked the door open, and then the crackle of thin plastic as the bags flew through the door and slid across the linoleum floor. Sometimes I helped him wash them. I would hand him the towels, five at a time, and he would carefully place them in the washer so that the weight was evenly distributed. Most of the towels were only slightly damp. But on occasion, I would pluck out a sopping wet one covered in slimy green mucus—the special aloe vera scrub that we slop over people’s legs in a deluxe pedicure. Other towels had bits of hair—perhaps from the workers—or bits of nail or skin that had latched on during the pedicure. But most of the towels were relatively clean. I was secretly thankful every time I could pick up just the towel itself. After we washed the towels, I washed my hands and then helped my mom cook dinner. My parents always ate quickly. Twenty minutes was more than enough to finish a few bowls of rice, enough time for the towels to wash. Once we finished, I scurried to the laundry room and helped my dad unload the towels into the dryer. In the morning, I would come downstairs to find a pile of fluffy, white cotton towels folded neatly and arranged into piles, already fitted into a bag that was squarely tied at the top. And then it was that same order again, except backwards: when I would hug my dad, watch him pull the bags through the door, and then stare at the door as the garage grumbled onwards and into silence. V. It was inevitable that I work there. All of us had to do it—it was the family business. My mother stopped being my mother and turned into my boss at the nail store. My two older sisters spent their high school days marching back and forth between home and the store. They called it war, and working at the store meant killing off customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. They would be called up for service when the boss didn’t have enough troops to handle the army. We would be

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playing Goldfish on the kitchen table, or stepping out the front door to walk to the park, and then the phone would ring. Sometimes we pretended it hadn’t happened. Sometimes, we waited to see if it would start again, for only then would it be urgent. But the verdict always came, and it was a silent statement. I saw my sisters pick up the phone, drop their smiles, drop the phone, and then drop me—they had to go. Days like this passed by gradually, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly, it was my turn. VI. I eat three times a day: once in the morning before I go to work, once six hours later when I’m at work, and again when I come home. At the store, I eat between customers. I finish with one pedicure, run to the backroom and pop in a bowl of instant noodles, and then run back one pedicure later to slurp down the entire bowl in five minutes. I have to because I have another customer waiting outside. If my boss doesn’t see me in five minutes, she calls the intercom and tells me to run back up to the front because the customers are starting to squirm in their chairs. The moment I finish my last noodle, I sprint to the washing room and wash my bowl. Sometimes I am in such a rush that I accidentally splash the broth or I leave soap marks on the mirror, but I don’t care and I don’t have enough time to wash it off because I have to go. VII. Each of her toenails had to be the exact same length and shape; a millimeter off made her scream in protest. She glowered over me the whole time I was cutting her cuticles, pretending to be in pain and squirming at the lightest suggestion of pain, and, when I scrubbed her feet, she made me scrub them again because a spot on her heel still felt a bit rough. Her legs were fat and heavy. I tried lifting them up to massage her. She saw me struggling and didn’t even make an effort to help. She wanted white tips on her toenails, which meant that I had to paint a thin layer of white at the edge of every nail and then take a brush and meticulously shape them into whatever shape she wanted. She then asked for a design. I gave her the design. She made me change it twice. When I did it for the second time, she bent over, made a face, and said, “Oh whatever I’ll just have to live with it.” The other employees have first pick of custom-

ers; the good customers—the clean, polite, considerate, and generous ones—are given to employees according to their seniority and skill. Not only was I the youngest, but I had no experience with acrylic nails, waxing, or any other service beyond the basic manicure and pedicure. I could only rub feet and squeeze hands. I only knew how to cut people and scrub their parts. This left me with a splendid selection of customers ranging from the dirty to the impolite, the indecisive to the cheap. At times, I found all these traits in a single customer. Like the lady whose nails I labored over for two hours. She ended up not giving me a tip. When my boss came and saw my work, she apologized to the customer, “Please forgive this girl—she is new.” I cleaned up. My boss continued, “I won’t charge you. Tell you what—I’ll redo the pedicure for free.” My boss never looked at me. That was my mom. That was my first pedicure. I finished cleaning. I gathered my basket. Then I went to the washing room, where I washed my face. And then I stayed there until my eyes were dry and white again. VIII. One day my boss told me to do a pedicure at the

first spa chair. I went to the back and grabbed my work basket, two towels, and a pair of gloves. I came back up front to find an old black man, probably in his late fifties, soaking his feet in the tub at the foot of his spa chair. I asked him how he was, and he replied, without looking at me, with a single nod. Trying not to think about his silence—perhaps he couldn’t understand what I said—I put on my gloves. When my boss saw that I was getting ready to start the pedicure, she came over and, without saying a word, gave me a mask to put over my nose. I gave her a quizzical look. She sighed and said, “Just use it.” I put on the mask and asked the man to lift his feet from the now murky water. They rose up from the whirlpool bath like two creatures sprouting from the sea: huge and brown, covered in scales and barnacles and disease. I looked at my boss. She met my gaze firmly, and by the look of her eyes I immediately knew that I was to stay quiet; that, although this pedicure would take me three times as long as usual to finish, it would cost as much as the basic pedicure; that she gave me this pedicure because none of the employees would touch his feet. There are four basic parts to a pedicure: shaping the toenails, cutting the cuticles, scrubbing the calluses, and massaging the leg. His toenails were a quarter-of-an-inch thick. They had the texture and hardness of wood. They had grown to an incredible length and, as they grew, curved inwards. They were infected with fungus, green in some areas and purple in others. The man avoided eye contact. I looked back down and grimly got to work. Even while wearing the mask, I could smell the bacteria on his skin. I had to think of a way to cut the trunks of toenails into stubs. I found my answer in the cuticle cutter, a pair of scissors with short, chubby blades. It was smaller than the nail clipper, but its blades were far enough apart for me to cut down his nails. So I went to work, starting with the little toe. It took me dozens of cuts to whittle each nail down to size. I made sure to cut them as short as possible—right down to the skin, so that no filth could accumulate underneath his nails. As I worked, little pieces of skin would sometimes fly out, and I’d duck as they nearly hit my eyes. Fifteen minutes later, I finished and could move onto the cuticles. Most people clean the cuticles around their nails, which makes it easier to tell what’s cuticle and what’s tender skin. But this man’s cuticles were so thick that they grew in layers, form-

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ing a white gelatinous wall around the sides of his toenail, leaving me terrified that I would accidentally prick him. Nevertheless, I started cutting, feeling my way around by judging the softness of what my blade was touching; if it was too elastic, then I knew it was skin. I was working on his big toe when I saw blood—I had cut a small part of his skin, and it was bleeding and spewing blood onto the rims of his toes. I have cut people before, and every time I apply a clotting solution that makes the blood shrivel and dry. What disturbed me was his silence. When I had finished treating the wound, I fearfully looked up at him, but he had not noticed a thing. At first I thought it was because he was very tolerant of pain, but then I realized that he could not feel any pain; the bacteria on his toes had long ago killed the nerves in the skin, so that the cuts and wounds and festers on his toes were completely unknown to him. I was glad that he did not notice my shivers. Now came the part that I dreaded most: the heels. The whole time, his feet had been completely flat down. I asked him to raise his feet up and prop them on their heels. He did, and in doing so revealed an entire topography of canyons, plateaus, and rivers that ran the length of his foot. It was a landscape made completely out of dead skin, dirt, and calluses. By now I was trembling and fighting the urge to cry. I grabbed the callus remover. This is a liquid that, when applied to the bottom of the foot, will dissolve the layers of dead skin and calluses. I smothered his feet in this substance, and then I waited five minutes as it started eating away at his skin. When it had finished soaking, I got the razor and started shaving away his calluses. By the time I finished, there was a small mountain of brown foot flakes on the floor. Scrubbing time followed. I scrubbed, and I scrubbed, and I scrubbed. I lifted his feet into the air and scrubbed every single nook and cranny of his foot. I scrubbed the sides of his toes, I scrubbed around his toes, and I scrubbed between his toes. When I had finished with one foot, I looked down and realized that the dissolved, dead skin that I rubbed off had accumulated into a fine layer of mucus that covered the entire pumice bar. It was so slimy it couldn’t scrub anymore; in order to finish the procedure I had to get a new bar. Thirty minutes later, I could go on to the last part of the pedicure: the foot massage. Before I could

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begin, however, I had to wipe off the chemicals so they wouldn’t keep dissolving his skin. If the chemicals sit on the skin for too long, the customer comes back with a lacerated, bleeding foot and a less than cheery attitude. So I made sure to clean them well. I told him to put his feet back into the water. Something immediately felt strange when my hands touched the water. My fingers were wet, but I was wearing gloves. I pulled my hands out of the water and saw that there was a hole in each glove, and that they were both dripping wet with pedicure broth. I checked the box of gloves, but there were none left. Keeping the ruined gloves on my hands, I winced my way through the rest of the pedicure. The massaging part was not as difficult as it was grueling. I wanted to give this man a good pedicure, but the more I touched him the more I wanted to run away from him. The whole time, I could only think of the filth that was slowly multiplying on my hands. His legs were hairy and his skin so dry that the lotion would not absorb and I had to rub it off with a warm towel afterwards. Usually the massage was only five minutes long, but his lasted half an hour. By the time I finished, the towel was brown. The man was quiet for the entirety of our session. I thought he was mad at me. I thought that, perhaps, any of the other employees would have handled his feet with far more clarity and precision than I had. I waited for him to leave the spa chair so that I could clean up the tub. But he didn’t. Instead, he leaned over and slipped me a five dollar tip. Later on, the boss told me that he never tipped. I slipped the five into my pocket and started to clean up. I got rid of the pumice bars covered in dissolved skin, swept up the piles of callus on the floor, scrubbed away the thin line of brown bubbles that dried to the walls of the tub, threw away the towels, sanitized my tools, picked up pieces of toenail that had flown across the room, and, when all of that had gone in the trash, I went to the washing room and washed my hands again, and again, and again.

Our Prayer RYAN MEEHAN

Were he to open his eyes now, Paul Castor wouldn’t be able to tell whether he’s drifted, or how far. Head dangling off the nose of his board, he can hear the sighs of the water flowing past his ears, sloshing in the space between the rounded fiberglass and the curve of his back; can feel the hair on his scalp swirling out into a shape that, were it viewed from above, would resemble a wreath. A near-digested breakfast of cheerios and orange juice rolls in partial harmony with the tide beneath, and his chin juts upward as he belches vigorously. Castor attends neither the thin pool of water evaporating on his abdomen, nor the faint, almost subconscious pain of unabated exposure to early-morning sunshine. The air is motionless, and he imagines a sensation like perfect stillness. He thinks of a burial at sea, of pre-Columbian tribes interring their dead in huge ocean-faring canoes; half-dreams of himself as interred in one, moving serenely and purposefully among tall ships and glaciers, underground rivers and violent inland seas; dissolved in the bosom of a thundercloud, scattered in snow. Between sleep and wakefulness out here from moment to moment, Castor forces his eyes open and draws breath deeply, turns on his belly and begins paddling back toward the breakwater and the shores of Giacondo Beach—the largest in the town of Comanche, CA—where by now five or six other surfers are queued up for the last scraps of the morning’s meager high tide. Resigned, he slides almost furtively off the board and into the low trench just before the shallows. Eyes open as he dives downward, the water is mud-colored and profoundly cold: darkness free of direction. From his left ankle, Castor feels the tug of his bungee leash pull him back towards the surface. He lifts gradually and emerges, slick and inhaling powerfully, then taking up the board and making his way across the beach toward the lifeguard tower where he’s left a duffel of dry clothes. There’s a spigot near the steps at the edge of the sand, and he washes off the grit caked on the soles of his feet and around his ankles, then walks up the steps onto the boardwalk. From there he recognizes Bill’s pickup and walks gingerly, barefoot, across the pavement to where his friend is parked. Bill is smoking a cigarette with the music turned up, looking impatient and tapping his left wrist when Castor approaches, as if he should have been expected. He turns the music down and leans his head out the driver’s side, and they exchange loose greetings. Castor’s hair is still wet, and he puts his surfboard and his soggy bag into the bed of the truck. Bill wears sunglasses and Castor can’t tell where his friend is looking when he climbs into the cab. He has sun-bleached blonde hair that he wears short, and his face and forearms are covered in freckles. You must be going for the record, Bill says as they pull away, and Castor notices beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. Bill’s shirt, a cream-colored button-down, is already beginning to soak

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through with sweat. What record might that be, asks Castor, but Bill has already turned the music back up, making a quick left to take them downtown. The morning sun has risen well in the sky and the storefronts there roll past in high relief. Loudly, Castor asks where they are going, but there’s no reply, and Bill just squints and leans forward over the steering wheel where the sunlight makes a tonsure on his head. You smell like a dead fish, Bill says. Are you going to wash that off, or are you going to walk around all day like that? Castor ignores him and slumps on the truck’s bench, blowing air gently out from between his lips and watching the sidewalk and the sway of palm trees waving their muted and eternal farewell. Gradually, the volume of the engine erases whatever lingered in his ears of the sound of the ocean. For two weeks now he has been seventeen years old, and the world in that time has seemed changed—magnetized and alive with whispers like promise and he has waited for their words. They come to the other side of town and stop the car on a quiet street that runs along a park and a municipal playground, and walk together down a pathway through the trees towards some buildings on the other side. On the playground they can see two young boys—not yet of school age and oddly unsupervised—pushing one another on the swing set. Castor watches one swinging higher and higher, wheeling upward above the latticework shadows of the tree line. The child laughs at first and then, growing frightened, softly begins to cry. The two men pass without comment, the small amazement at the coolness of such places in the summertime coursing through each of them. On the opposite side of the park is the Sphinx, a refurbished multiplex and the only movie theater in town, whose chalky, sandstone facade and geometric patterning exude something more like a crudelyinterpreted Moorish homage. Inside, there is a new coolness, something closer to that of a museum or a storage facility. The large, windowless atrium has a dingy, vaulted ceiling with violet felt curtains hanging down the walls. Between vending machines and antiquated, box-shaped arcade games are blown-up, high-contrast photographs of studio-era Hollywood stars. The images are all of the same dimensions, and some of them have been distorted or awkwardly cropped in the enlargement process. Their expressions are various and enigmatic: some of rage or surprise, others of anguish, hypnosis, possession, and in a handful—perhaps no more than one—the unmistakable image of supernatural calm. Castor recognizes none of them. The doors are unlocked but there aren’t any screenings at the moment, so no one stops them from walking through the corridor of theaters towards the area at the back of the multiplex, where a girl stands vacantly tending to a long glass case advertising popcorn and concessions. She wears a maroon longsleeved polo shirt that fits too loose and seems to tangle her up like a blanket might a restless sleeper. Near her heart is a pin with the name Nora printed on it. We’re not technically open for another halfhour, she says, surprised but friendly. This popcorn is free if you want some though. It’s from last night. She has straight, sandy blond hair, and her features have the sharp smallness of a bird. There’s a shy deference in her voice, as if she’s reciting from a script. Uh, we’re not here for that, Bill says, stepping closer to the glow of the counter and removing his sunglasses. I work for your boss, remember? Nora laughs and shakes her head, half-rolling her eyes. I didn’t recognize you with your friend, sorry. Yeah he opened up for me about an hour ago. He should be upstairs. Bill starts up again at a hurried clip, offering no thanks, not waiting to dwell on the small embarrassment. Castor follows along a step and a half behind, glancing over at the girl as she sprays blue cleaning solution on the glass countertop and swings a rag across its surface in quick, circular motions. She is pale and looks a little older than him. The image of a beautiful woman on a section of the wall behind her—whose hair is trimmed short and who wears a long fur coat—hangs, ghostlike, in the halflight of the gallery. At the top of the stairs, they find a waiting area and a window into another room where a squat and ancient looking man sits at reception. He wears a look of mild reproach as they walk in that Castor can only guess means he recognizes Bill. Castor begins to remember what Bill has told him about his job working for Mr. Salvatore in the year since his friend quit school, and understands without much thought that his job with this man has been—like the man himself—something of a mystery. Whatever business Bill is involved in—as an errand boy and chauffeur, occasionally a messenger—was never a concern to Castor, but there is a sudden trepidation about the present task. As they reach the office

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door—finished wood centered by yellowed pebble-glass—Bill makes a gesture to his friend as if to say, Let me do the talking and I’m sorry about this, both at the same time. The first rush of natural light since they had come to the Sphinx disorients Castor and he wonders if they haven’t made a mistake and wandered into a forgotten corner of the place where some shrine might be kept. Salvatore is there though, bearded and immutable like a judge, flanked by banners bearing images of grave samurai and monsters from science fiction. He looks first to Castor and his expression transforms, from one void of insight, to that of someone satiated after small discomfort. Ah Bill, I see you’ve brought your friend, fantastic, he says and turns slightly and definitively to the other boy. Bill’s told me only the best things about you, Salvatore speaks as he shuffles through a suddenly conspicuous stack of manila envelopes of varying girth and hands one from the center of the pile to Bill. He pauses, and turns to no one so that when he begins to speak it’s as if to a camera: People have asked me for most of my adult life what the key is to being a successful individual in my line of work. And I tell them that there’s nothing more to it than knowing how to work with people. The truth is that people aren’t complicated; there’s a few things that everyone wants in life—sex, money, entertainment, health. Put yourself in a position where you can give somebody one of those things, or where you can take one of those things away from them, and you’ve figured them out. After that you can make them do anything. I make it a point to say that to every young person such as yourself that comes to my office, and I like to think I’ve taught your friend here something by saying it to him more than once. The mirth trickling out from his voice, he looks up again: It was so nice meeting you Paul. I’m really glad that you’ll be helping us out on this one. Remember that if I like what I hear, there might be more work in it for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to have a word with Bill privately. Castor waits in a sagging fabric chair across the room from the silent, totemic receptionist and hears nothing of the conversation in Mr. Salvatore’s office. Bill opens the door shortly, sunglasses restored, carrying a thick manila envelope of the kind on his boss’s desk. On the way down the stairs, Bill, visibly relaxed now, peels back the metal seal on the envelope and peers inside while he explains what they are meant to do. It’s a hospitality job. We’re supposed to pick a guy up tomorrow night at the Veracruz Airport and take him around the town. Basically, he says, we take the guy out to dinner, then to a couple of bars. We do whatever he wants. If he likes pool, we shoot pool. If he likes cards, we find a game. He’s a client, and he’s in town to negotiate a contract. Mr. Salvatore says if we show him a good time it’ll soften his outlook on things the morning after. He asked me if I knew anyone who could come along and I said you would. And we have plenty of petty cash—there’s a bonus in for us too. What made him ask for me? I don’t even know the guy, either of the guys. It beats me. I mentioned you once or twice, how you like to surf. Maybe the guy we’re meeting likes surfing. Or maybe he’s a queer. Anyway, there’s no way we’ll be able to spend all this, Bill says and plucks an indeed impressive wad of $20 bills. Now hold on, what’s him being queer got to do with me? It’s possible that you’re missing the big picture here, pal, Bill says this time airing himself with a money-fan. Speaking of which, I noticed the exchange between you and the counter girl. Give it a shot, it doesn’t look like a waste of your time. Not exactly my type but you might get something out of it. Bill has successfully changed the subject: Castor is grateful that the glowing of his ears is undetectable in this light, sensitive as he is to his friend’s remark that, without any particular difficulty, has found him out. Bill detects the tightening of his friend’s countenance, and places a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Take your time. I’ll wait in the car. They make their date for later tonight—a few hours after her shift ends, at the same theater where she works. He is relieved when she suggests a crime thriller and not a romance. He tries to look in her eyes the whole time, and when he does he can see no trouble in them. Whether he has caught her by surprise, or whether she is simply being polite, he does not know and feels free of worry. He can hear the blood jumping through his head as he walks back through the park where the children were playing before; can feel a modest sweat trickling at his back where the sun beats down from its position at noon. Bill leans against the hood of the truck, smoking, when Castor returns, and doesn’t ask how it went. They drive around for a while not saying much of anything. In the afternoon they have enchiladas at

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a cafe a few blocks away from the beach. Someone has left a newspaper at the table before them, and Bill turns to the section with the comics and reads quietly to himself, chuckling from time to time. He points to the page once, shaking his head, but never shows his friend what he is reading. Castor asks him about the man they’ve been hired to look after. He’s a client, like I said. I don’t know anything else. I think he used to be an actor. An actor like in he movies? Yeah, I think he acted in a few of the movies that Mr. Salvatore produced back when he was still doing that. They may have been partners. I don’t know, you can probably ask the guy when you meet him. Bill produces a red pen and amuses himself drawing details on the characters in the comic strips. In one strip, he draws mustaches on all the female characters, and then X’s over the eyes of all the male characters. In another, where the characters are all children, he draws an enormous red penis on each character, regardless of gender. At a certain point the smile drifts from his face and a look of intense concentration overcomes him; he focuses on producing the same curvature of his stroke for each shaft, the same flecks of pubic hair on each inflamed scrotum. In a third strip, he begins drawing new characters in the strips of his own invention; crude, gleeful, and moon-eyed, a part of an alternate universe in the world of the cartoon, invisible to the rest of them, like vampires caught in a mirror. Their friendship is an odd one; since they were children, the closeness between Bill and Paul has always been more that of siblings near to one another in age than of people with much in common. From when they first knew one another, and now more than ever, Bill has always exuded an inflamed sense of ambition, a preexisting need to determine the circumstances of the world around him. Castor has watched his friend for years now, fascinated by the expedience and the animal optimism that for all their time together is still alien and opaque to him. Physically, Castor is the more imposing of the two, but Bill has never been shy about announcing the ease with which he assumed a sexual life. Bill doesn’t object to Castor’s quiet company, and would seem to have become somewhat reliant on it now, were it not for something Castor was certain he wasn’t being told about their assignment. What kind of movies did Mr. Salvatore make when he was in the business? Everything from what I could tell. Comedies, horror movies, westerns. Art house stuff too. It all went

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direct to video though, never even screens it in his own theater. The only thing he mentions a lot about is video distribution—he says that a million suckers every year try to get a movie made, and it’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears getting it done. But the money end is in distribution; if you can put up a little bit of cash up front as a producer, you can make a real killing on video sales. Sounds like a real shit way to make a living. Not if you play the angles right. Don’t get pushed around, what he says. The directors are the ones you can’t take shit from, he says. Even the schlock jocks think they’re Scorcese. Gotta let ‘em know where the money is, who’s the boss. If they short you, leave you in the lurch, you have to come back on them. Hard. Castor can see a look of confused excitement in his friend’s eyes as Bill’s sunglasses slide down his nose, like a young boy watching a transaction between adults whose meaning surpasses his understanding. Bill pays for their meal. Castor takes his things from the back of the truck and they part ways as he heads toward the beach. Later on, he paddles out alone and the afternoon high tide is more consistent. The waves are fickle with him at first; he forgets their delicacy, paddles in too quickly or too tentatively, and they crumble beneath him before his head can climb above the foam. Soon though, he begins to move more freely, more sensitively, as if he could remember the water’s language and suddenly speak. The ride becomes his pattern of thought, and his thoughts take on the colors that he can see now in the water reflecting the variegating light that nevertheless fails to cast the sand any other shade than that of bone. The water is murky and refuses to yield his image as he paddles out again. After a long time his body registers signs of fatigue; the muscles in his shoulders begin to tighten, and his knees feel bruised from where he straddles the board. The day is over. He sits, half-sinking in the water thinking of nothing, and then the image of Nora’s face as it moves across the ghost of the woman in the theater—each one translucent and irradiated as if from behind, by some lantern. His grandparents have gone to dinner early, and the house is deserted when he gets home. He leans his surfboard against the perforated cardboard wall over his grandfather’s workbench in the garage, and leaves his trunks and his undershirt in the basket next to the washing machine. While the shower warms up, Castor walks around the house naked, sipping a glass of milk and stopping to watch the television. His limbs are wiry; narrow, unfinished masses that seem to hang from the fibrous mantle of his upper chest, suspended. This is but one form. The specter of the television fills the room with a pale blue light and unnatural warmth. Mounted above the set and elsewhere in the living room are photographs of his family—his grandparents with him as a baby, their vacation to Disney Land, bodysurfing with his grandpa and later boogie boarding. From an early age, he spent too much time on the beach, in the water. A bright boy, he nevertheless neglected his schoolwork. His grandma never pressed him on the matter, believing that as long as his hair was wet when he came home that he couldn’t have been getting to much mischief. Most of the photos of his grandma are from when she was much younger and, from time to time, she’ll be holding a small baby girl with raven hair. Letting his eyes wander, he meets the gaze of his own mother through the reflective glare of the glass that protects another of her images— young there, not much older than he is now. From the distance between them he cannot feel much for her, not even a curiosity about the question as to her decision; how one chooses to die when it’s their own choice to make, how one dies for the sake of another that they cannot love because they will never know. She was well behaved, her mother tells Castor, the way he was and still is. Never a burden, nohow. The last light of day drains from the room and his eyes don’t resist the loss of the image. Her face is flat; it is not a space. He would plant himself there if he could, stretch out and let it continue through him, but something like a tide is lifting him ever upward and away and there again is the same distance between his face and the other, empty one. There go the thoughts he will not have. They meet beneath the streetlight outside the ice cream parlor, and though they greet one another naturally, a long time passes before he can recognize her. Nora wears a red sundress patterned with small white flowers that appears faded as though it’s been washed too many times. She wears earrings of white gold, long and elliptical. He knows it’s foolish to be surprised that she’s changed clothes, that she isn’t wearing the same smothering maroon shirt. There is a peculiarity, a surprise about her beauty

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that awakens—someplace outside of him—a melancholy, as if he were embarrassed for her. They walk slowly, side by side, her hair taking on different hues as they pass beneath the lights here and there. She talks about her family; a brother in the army, a father whose recent health problems meant her withdrawal after a year and a half from college. Castor focuses on each of her words but cannot prevent them from slipping away from him. When the conversation passes to him, he knows that what there is to understand about him can be said in a few words: he lives with his grandparents, his mother died in childbirth, he has never known his father, his best friend Bill—more of a stranger to him every day—is his only friend, he loves to surf. He worries that what he has to say may sound unsubstantial, vacant. She asks him questions—platitudes, really, but they sound to him as if what he had said needed clarifying, as if some explanation were required. What he’ll only realize later is that she may be nervous too. He answers her—politely, enthusiastically even—but the things he speaks about seem to come from someone else. He feels simultaneously uneasy and bored. Relief comes when the Sphinx appears around the corner, and the two of them can be silent again. The movie is called Ouvert pour cause d’inventaire (though it is in English), wherein a detective arrives at a small coastal town in what appears to be Portugal to solve a string of murders. The bodies are found by fishermen in the shoals, and the victims are dressed immaculately in flowing white robes; the actors and actresses enlisted to play the victims are some of the most beautiful people that Castor has ever seen—young, fair-haired, with the faces of angels. The cause of death is, at first, a mystery, as none of the bodies turn up with water in their lungs, nor do the victims show any sign of struggle. The detective takes up residence in the home of a young widow—the wife of the first victim to be discovered—and begins the meticulous catalog of evidence that, thoroughness notwithstanding, leads him nowhere. He is bewildered at first, then outraged as more bodies begin to wash up along the docks. Paranoia sets in. A chronic stomach ailment sidelines his investigation for a time, and the therapeutic walks he takes along the cliffs overlooking the beach illustrate some of the more moving qualities of the setting; a purgatorial place harried by storms that, despite its desolation, retains the vertiginous beauty of the natural world reaching towards oblivion. The singular image of this series is a solitary tree growing on the rainy beach, its roots extended deeply into the breaking waves. Somewhere in the midst of it all, Nora puts her hand in his. There are scattered details that have the semblance of significant clues: a persistent fog on the shore that only fleetingly discloses a white fortress; the devout, paternalistic and quasi-fascist local police force whose surveillance of the widow verges on obsession; a Nepalese fisherman, gone mad from his time at sea, explaining a belief in the transmigration of souls as if it were a kind of cruel joke. Soon, however, the trail goes cold; the townspeople forget about the killings—even the detective’s commanders in the capital seem anxious to tie up loose ends and file away the murders away, unsolved. The lull in the case marks what the detective can only guess is the beginning of his early retirement, and he takes measures to settle down with the young widow whom, over the course of the investigation, has expanded her role in the detective’s life from hostess to confidante to lover. His stomach condition is slowly deteriorating, and through the detective’s interior monologue it becomes clear that he doesn’t have long to live. The young widow brings him a medicine that she promises him will take away his pain. The viewer is left to understand that the young widow, whose husband was a police officer himself, has been administering the same drug to the detective for much of his time in the village, dulling his forensic skill. In such heavy doses, the drug has the power to induce a euphoric, dream-like state. The local police, prepared to kill both the detective and the widow should the former stray too close to the truth about the murders— which itself remains a mystery—relax their surveillance and diminish into a star-punctured night. The widow has saved the detective’s life by, in so many words, destroying his mind. Throughout the movie Nora moves closer, and at times she directs his hand behind her head, which she then places in the nape of his neck. Her breathing is steady and soft, and he does not remember when they begin to kiss. He would like to feel tenderness for her in this moment, something adult and concrete, a desire for something to change. Instead he feels slightly squeamish, clammy and inert as if grasping something tightly from within the depths of sleep. He mistrusts his body. He cannot fathom the science that could explain how pitiful this all feels to him now. He thinks of Bill, who describes his conquests with such verve, and considers that what was so impressive all along was that his friend had

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the stomach to go through this willingly, endlessly. Shortly, it becomes something rehearsed and mechanical, though not unpleasant. She responds to his hesitancy, careful not to announce with her body language that she senses his inexperience. Nora is curious about this lonely boy, who looks like something fragile and built for life on some other, kinder planet. She is startled by his comportment: simple, unreflective. Still in touch with her boyfriend at school, she’s talked with him from time to time about moving in together, but he doesn’t visit with any regularity. She imagines herself anticipating the visits of this boy—almost a child—at the dreary theater, someone to dress nicely for; someone to displace the persistent, soiled feeling that the Sphinx’s puerile owner leaves after each advance. She hasn’t paid close attention to the movie, but what impression she’s left with of the detective is that of an artist; an artist describing life in its purity, brushing closer and closer to some central fact of that life until the two become indistinguishable. They leave through an emergency exit at the back of the theater that Nora knows will not set off any alarms. The parking lot that curves around the building has no fence to obstruct a course through a cemetery that, for the darkness, seems to stretch unspeakably. In the distance they can see the reservoir, ovoid and still, giving back the luminous, trembling forms cast down by an elevated highway still further out. They think together, woozy with a menacing lustfulness and move stiltedly, like zombies, towards the obscurity’s center. A periodic heat moves through the open in waves, pushing them closer to one another and roaring in a way that seems only to compound the dome-shaped silence all around. There are some briars growing alongside a slender, unadorned mausoleum and they sit down nearby to get out of the wind. They begin to kiss awhile, and his hands move mechanically again to where she doesn’t stop them. A warm gust twists through the briars that bow low and scratch lightly at the flesh on her shoulders and neck. Nora’s hair circulates wildly, dancing in a kind of nimbus around her head. Around the edge of her thigh, she follows his hand with her own. He smiles and relents: We probably shouldn’t. She smiles back, feeling neither frustration nor relief. A shared dizziness passes and, grinning, they begin to talk—conversation turns to the job Castor’s been enlisted for tomorrow night. Nora knows nothing of her boss’s business; the other employees at the Sphinx are mostly geriatrics and substance abusers. With the exception of the weekend crowd, there’s hardly any business; from the outside, the theater looks like a money pit. The proprietor’s associates, however, generally appear dangerous—jackal-eyed men with absent expressions, hungry and hypnotized. She thinks of wild mercenaries packing their cheeks with hallucinogenic grasses that make them dream of different names for themselves and worship death. She thinks of this other man the actor, whom she imagines looks something like the lonely detective in the film, sick and unknowing. She worries at first only hypothetically: Don’t go, she says, to no one in particular at first. He is listening. She thinks to herself that he hardly does anything but listen, really. You don’t work for him, not yet you don’t. You shouldn’t go. Don’t go. They sit quietly for a while, Nora’s head on his chest while Castor runs his hands gently through her hair. Each stroke is made to coordinate with a careful rhythm that he listens for in the faint but discernable sound of the ocean not more than a mile away. He doesn’t know what to make of this sudden concern, this unprecedented closeness. The sound unfolds over the low echo of Nora’s words, recurring to the point of senselessness, or to the point of a movement through one sense towards another sense, a hidden sense. It is a sense like prayer: Don’t go. Don’t go. He imagines that the confluence of these sounds as identical to that of the passage of air through the branches of a tree like the one on the beach in the film he has just seen. It stands, defiant and deeply rooted in poisonous sand, bending beneath a phantasmagoric sky, closer and closer through the passing centuries towards its shimmering, mercurial twin. *** When their first and only son was born in a village outside Asunción, the parents of former actor Agustín Barrios named their boy after his great uncle, the famous Paraguayan classical guitarist Agustín Barrios-Mangoré. Aside from his virtuosity, which was met with the acclaim of all of Europe during the first and only tour he made through the continent near the end of his life, Barrios-Mangoré is remembered as the first solo guitarist to record any of his compositions professionally, which he did first in 1909 and then sporadically as cost would permit up to his death in 1944. In 1912, the guitarist

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found himself the subject of no small scandal when, on a tour through Brazil that included stops in rural parts of the country (where ostensibly Christian residents instead worshipped a plethora of minor ancestral gods and spirits, the most potent and wicked of which were believed to command spells meant to control or destroy the ability to speak) he began to perform with accompaniment by a recording of himself playing and occasionally singing. The skill and the speed of his hands, combined with the incorporeal nature of his assistance—an idea originally proposed by his manager as a way to save money and, ironically, to attract publicity—compelled a particularly stunned audience to presume that he was an emissary of one of their more powerfully malevolent gods. The duration of Barrios-Mangoré’s tour through Brazil was beleaguered by the infamy of his ‘heathen music’ as it spread through the countryside, and the combination of poor concert sales and a number of death threats was sufficient for the guitarist to cancel the remainder of the tour and return to Asunción, opting out of his contract with his promoter under the terms of a provision regarding ill health. What is regularly overlooked of Agustín Barrios-Mangoré in contemporary scholarship (to the extent that it exists to any respectable degree) is that he was an avid mountaineer and topographer, and would often bring his guitar into the more remote villages and outposts of the Andes on expeditions. There, he learned traditional folk compositions from the locals that had survived the earliest colonial conquests by the Spanish. Accepting from time to time the hospitality of his Andean counterparts, Barrios-Mangoré— who rarely managed to get to sleep because of the scarcity of oxygen at such altitudes—would look for prolonged periods of time from his window or (if he could manage it without disturbing the people who had taken him in for the night, many of whom were poor scrub farmers or goat herders and rose before the sun was up) from the grassy edge of a precipice at the milky contours of snow-covered mountains as they were framed by the yawning firmament. It is known that he enjoyed a brief acquaintance with the English occultist Aleister Crowley, himself a mountaineering enthusiast; apparently the latter was on a climbing trip in Peru during the guitarist’s tour through Brazil and decided to travel to meet the man after his last summit. In his private journal (confiscated by government police during the dictatorship of Paraguayan military dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who maintained power between 1954 and 1989) Barrios-Mangoré describes his admiration for Crowley, and details an encounter in which the renowned magician offered an introduction to the teachings of the Golden Dawn, which the guitarist—deferring to his Christian faith—politely declined. Elsewhere in this same notebook are his topographical sketches—remarkable for their meticulousness, displaying an almost primordial understanding of the Andes on a local level that is unaccounted for by what historians know about his educational background (he studied as a physician in Ascunción for two years before withdrawing into music full-time)—which predate aerial photography in the region, and were of considerable use to Stroessner’s air force, several decades later, for the purposes of scanning small valleys in search of resistance strongholds, in strikes led by the dictator’s son Gustavo, an alleged homosexual. Early in his air campaigns, Gustavo was baffled by these drawings, stemming from the fact that—the pilot’s gross incompetence notwithstanding—each sketch had been, in effect, made twice. The guitarist, perhaps anticipating that nearly twenty years after his death, his labor of love would be put to the most evil of purposes, had made identically-labeled sketches on facing pages with radically different features. Gustavo eventually discovered (not without taking losses in his squadron, initially) that one sketch from each set was the ‘correct’ one, though from among the hundreds of pairings he could never detect a coherent pattern or any clue as to which one was to be trusted. Later on, after the fall of the dictatorship and the brief resurgence in popularity that Barrios-Mangoré’s music enjoyed in Paraguay, it was postulated by historians and speculative fiction writers that the ‘incorrect’ sketches were not incorrect at all, but instead actually constituted acoustical topographies of the ranges in question, as if during the course of his adventures—perfectionist that he was—Agustín Barrios-Mangoré were planning every last detail of a tremendous concert event, searching the mountains for a place where his music would echo off the surfaces of the cliffs in perfect resonance with the natural world, for eternity or as long as anyone could be expected to listen. His was the great misfortune of being a better impersonator than actor, or such was the diagnosis of his director on the set of his first film. Consequently, the actor Agustín Barrios has always lead a life

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somehow not quite his own. His aspirations as a screen actor in Hollywood are best forgotten: at the time, and more or less to this day, it was virtually impossible for a non-Caucasian to find consistent work in American film. Barrios’ complexion is the color of caramelized sugar, the faint but irrefutable sign of a Mestizo in North America. At first, he contented himself with a modest salary as a recurring character in a soap opera syndicated by most of the Spanish-language networks in the Southwest, and enjoyed a minor celebrity in the immigrant communities of California, Arizona and New Mexico for three or four years before the show was finally cancelled. Strapped for cash and unwilling to return home, he began working on the set of non-union productions as a sound engineer and cameraman (he had little or no idea how to do either, but the video equipment functioned mostly intuitively and no one seemed to notice even the most major indications of ineptitude). He knew that some of the people struggling like him made a quick buck starring in pornographic films; still others turned to hustling on the street. Most of the latter were supporting drug habits, and he was cautious not to fall into a pattern of behavior that he worried would affect his future. On a whim and nearing the end of his rope, he spent $15.50—no small sum for him at the time—on a bus ticket to Grapevine to attend a free actors’ workshop. It was there that Barrios was discovered by the filmmaker Anton Kotz—the man who offered that first bit of advice—and his producer at the time, Ronald Salvatore. Over the next two years, Barrios became one of a string of consistent collaborators in the films made by Kotz and the handful of other directors associated with Salvatore’s studio, best known under the name Passive Radar. Among the seven films he starred in, Barrios had leading roles in Engine Falls and Patterns of Speech playing roughly the same stoic and vaguely mystical character. When Passive Radar fell apart, Barrios went into the production business with Salvatore. Their estrangement as business partners a few years later was the reason for his visit today, his first to the West Coast in nearly five years. Specifically, Barrios, who fell out with Salvatore shortly after accepting a loan of several thousand dollars from the man, returned now to make amends, and to ask for more money. On the curb outside the airport, Barrios sits on his suitcase with a paperback, looking up occasionally for a sign of his retrievers, and watching for the wobbling glow of a departing aircraft’s fuselage as it catches the light of buildings from below. Even if his plane landed in Veracruz ahead of schedule, they’re still late, and when they arrive it’s as if they’ve appeared from a cloud of smoke. If he hadn’t seen it run, Barrios would have guessed the pickup truck they drove up in had been dragged from the bottom of a lake. Two men are inside—they’re boys, really; wispy things with dark visages and a look of slouched cruelty like child soldiers—and when they stop, one helps him inside while the other puts the bag in the truck’s bed. Ron hadn’t mentioned there’d be two of them. As they set out, the one that introduced himself as Bill asks if he’d like to get a drink before they go to the hotel. How about some dinner? he asks. Bill mentions a diner a few towns over, and without waiting for his guest’s response, hangs a U-turn at the light outside the parking lot and thunders northward. At the diner, Barrios orders a stack of pancakes, a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. It’ll be morning in New York soon, he jokes limply, and unfolds the paperback from his pocket again. Bill and the other one, named Paul, begin to talk: mostly the former, who is apparently the more accommodating of the two—jovial, loquacious, and immature. In a wrinkled green blazer and the only moth hole-free button-down he owns, Barrios feels (and looks) as if he were the father of these two boys, divorced and with partial custody, taking them out for a weekly dinner. Bill is goading Paul, asking him about some girl. As the latter clams up, a small affection for the boy wells in Barrios not unlike the mixture of emotions he would concoct for himself as an actor in order to manipulate his performance. There is something about him that he recognizes; not just a likeness, but a sort latent nobility that Barrios has encountered only a few times before in his life. Vague shapes and the faces of loved ones, both real and fictional, drift through the field of his consciousness and align over the image of Paul Castor, and the former actor is overwhelmed in a moment out of which he must wake himself. Refreshed from the coffee, Barrios acquiesces to Bill’s insistence that they get a drink of something stronger. They take the highway through a desolate patch of inland desert where all along the western edge of the road, the placid skeletons of oil derricks rise up in rows highlighted by red and orange lights, looking like the ruins of some robot world. No more than an hour in this place and Barrios is already

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feeling the gravity of his return, as if he were passing through sacred ground or the realm of some past life; the sense of a constantly-renewed destiny, of ceaseless forward motion and palpable trajectory. He realizes that it is something close to sadness, and here now with these young men he wonders why it has taken him so long to understand that he is not like them anymore. The place where they are headed is an old biker bar, a roadhouse with a sawdust floor and an anachronistic showcase stage at the back. A five-piece country ensemble collects there, milling through one song after another, each dirge-like and indistinguishable from the one before. The regulars are indifferent, drinking and playing pool not just casually but emphatically. The band’s fondness for blues affect edges, Barrios notes, towards a terminal depression. He thinks of his great uncle, and of listening to his records at family gatherings but, drinking now and more exhausted from his flight than he realized, the emotions are adrift and beyond his recall. Bill plays darts with a few young women on the other side of the bar. Paul sits nearby but says nothing. Alone, Barrios grows uneasy. He thinks of tomorrow’s meeting with Ron; he wonders if he can manage a dignified apology, leaving aside the new loan he must insist upon if he’s to keep his own small company afloat. They parted ways under no uncertain terms, but Barrios knows he could’ve been flatly refused or been offered a buyout over the phone. That he agreed to the meeting has to mean something. Still, he’s heard the rumors; of a rapid degradation of empathy or mercy in the business dealings of Ronald Salvatore; of that degradation’s inverse relation to coercion, intimidation, violence. Reaching for the cigarettes in his inside blazer pocket, his hand brushes across the leather holster of the .38 he keeps strapped along his ribs—a mixture of occupational hazard and old habit that he has carried since bandits robbed the set of The Parts of Speech at gunpoint and even shot a lighting engineer (though he lived). The thing is decades old, and he has grown accustomed to its feel such that sometimes he forgets he’s wearing it. The time spent with his handlers and the erosion of his suspicions through imbibing leaves him in the mind that at least these idlers are not his assassins. The bartender corrects him as he moves to light one up: it seems this place has changed along with the rest of the world. Alone in the parking lot he holds the smoke in his lungs and glances at the amorphous light reflected from car to car. He walks aimlessly away and down the road for a minute or two. In the distance, from the side of the road, is a moment in space where the desert changes to low bluffs that bristle with row upon row of mountainous trees. He wonders how far out of their way they have gone, if—should he need to—he could find his way back to the city. The glassy twilight has no revelation for him. Describing his experience after the incident, the lightning engineer noted that the noise of the shot was what startled him first—that the pain came later. For Agustín Barrios, instead, the sound and the pain occur together and within one another as apart of the same incandescent phenomenon, spinning outward from a center somewhere near his right shoulder blade. He buckles, reeling from its gravity, and does not cry out. He hears another shot, and another, but they are apart of a different world than the one he remembers—a world in which it seems he has always lived, of asymptotic pain rushing closer and closer towards abstraction. A third finds the flesh of his upper groin and what to him is the certainty of waking from a dream is actually the mind abandoning itself, of the seizure of his body by another, more profound twilight. When Bill moves to follow Mr. Barrios out of the bar, Castor trails his friend from a distance. When he rounds a curve in the darkness, Paul loses sight of him, after which time he hears the shots. Castor is careful not to run, understanding nothing of who has shot whom or why. Presuming an accident, he begins to shout his own name; uncertainly, at first, and then with more force. When he arrives in the clearing where the two figures have stopped, he finds Bill squatting on his haunches and tracing his finger along the chrome of a handgun Castor at first thinks can’t possibly be his. Somehow, he is totally calm, and can think only of taking the situation’s inventory: Is that his gun? Are you hurt? Do I look hurt? Bill sneers. Who shot him? I did, I guess. Unless he just had a heart attack from all the noise. I couldn’t really see where I was aiming.

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Castor walks over to the second form, more discretely prostrate: Barrios is half-sprawled over himself, unconscious but breathing. He cannot see the blood collecting in the bound fibers of his shirt or his slacks, but Castor can imagine it and winces as he leans to check the man’s vitals. He’s still breathing. I think we should call an ambulance. He’ll be dead by the time they come for him. You sure about that? Castor doesn’t know yet that he’s fighting a sort of indignation, and will soon have forgotten it. Sure am. I hit him in the gut, didn’t I? I’ve seen the movies. You die from that. You said you didn’t know if you had hit him at all. Well didn’t I? I’m not sure. It’s too dark for me to tell. Shit, well I’d shoot him again but I think I’m out of bullets. I’m going for an ambulance. But Bill isn’t paying attention anymore, moving his eyes back to the article dazzling in his hand and throwing open the cylinder and spinning it before his eyes. You’d better get rid of that thing, Castor says as he begins to jog back to the roadhouse, noticing only then that he is coated in sweat. In such pain—severe, life ending—the body reorganizes itself. Lying in the clearing, unconscious, in clothes growing heavy and matted with the weight of his own coagulated blood, Agustín Barrios no longer has a mind. That mind has been replaced by the unconcealed fact of death. Illuminated, the fact’s light inscribes its code upon the fibers of his body—each inscription in its totality—so that what was once an organism is now a golem, a thanatotropic machine of a different order from what the two boys might call life if you were to ask them. It is this inscription that moves Barrios’ right arm around his side towards the undisturbed, fully loaded .38 caliber pistol, that manipulates the fingers that remove the safety, that extends the arm and instructs the thumb to cock the gun’s hammer, and finally to let the dead man’s eyes fly wide open. By now Bill has wiped his own gun down and pitched it into the woods, and stands not close to the body but near enough and in the cone of light that delineates what can only be called the dead man’s field of vision, so that when the golem raises up its weapon there isn’t even the time he would have had to defend himself. The single bullet describes a long parabola through the leftmost corner of Bill’s forehead, and had a sole witness been there they’d have taken an oath that they saw the life jump from the boy in the blossom of smoke that lingered there for an instant and was gone. *** The sky over Comanche, CA gleams in its emptiness near dusk. All along the pier, the sunlight makes a canyon of the shops and stands and the shadows they cast, and the painted polyurethane moldings over the steel chassis of amusement rides all take on an aura of red gold. From the spaces between the planks on the boardwalk, the noise of the tide drifts upward sustaining a sound in the air above like flight. Splayed out among the sand, leaning on elbows or squatting on the balls of their feet, damp and panting, the surfers of Giacondo Beach dwell for the last hour of sufficient sunlight along the shore in vigil. It is the same on every beach in this part of the world, and every other part where time passes easily for the worshipper that is most willing. This is what they share; many would never know one another but for this devotional cord that seems to penetrate and bind them all, as sure as there has always been an expression of childhood which is primordial and outside of time. So they sit and they wait for sunset, for the light of this life to shine elsewhere, for the lantern to pass them by and the spell to break, to return to their families or their jobs or their obsessions or their solitude or their sadness. For them the beach will always be here: here in Comanche, here in Libertad, here in Byblos, here in Kilwa Kisiwani. Amidst a wing of constantly turning blue, they watch the last of their number collude, repel and fall slowly away from one another. Some crouch low on their boards like shipwrecked sailors. Others, further out, toss themselves high over the foam fringes of prematurely cresting waves. Expressionless faces flash with an elemental joy, a laying-bare of sentiments in reverence of the grandeur and the shape of this: a renewed encounter with the transfixing strange. The darkness grows, and to the last

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few in the water their fellows on the beach watch as if from within the threshold of an expansive natural amphitheater or beyond the membrane of a cloud. As a new crest emerges, the rider at the top of the order begins to paddle—a crawling motion evoking the earliest land-reptiles—and finally feels the water disappear from beneath the nose of his board. Mounting clumsily, he is nevertheless in the hands of the laws of physics, and drops into the curl with drunken abandon, letting the board’s seaward edge tear at the quivering, translucent skin that sprays brine up into his eyes. A thought—that the world could breathe and change beneath him—vanished as it appeared. Riding it to the shore, it is his only wave of the day. The next wave fails to break—merely a low hill that rushes across the sandbar and moves across Paul Castor’s line of sight. From the shore, his bare back is visible, a thing glossy with the seawater that tumbles over him and the others like him with a relentlessness and atavistic fury that passes unnoticed among their kind. Hunched, his ribcage and the long bands of muscle across his back take on the definition of an anatomical illustration. Hair that the sun has turned nearly white hangs, uncut, in limp tendrils the consistency of seaweed. He positions himself six inches from the board’s stern, causing the nose to bob gently upward; now grabbing the water’s surface, now releasing it. His hands are placed preemptively in the water on either side of him, as he senses a new swell almost before he could see it appear about twenty meters out, growing in speed and slope. His motion does not break the rhythm of what is beneath him when he paddles in, snapping his body sideways and fishtailing to a 45° angle and rising up all as apart of the same physical event. When he takes the wave he is hardly visible to anyone on the shore. In that series of endlessly recurring moments Castor might live whole other lives. Nothing leaves him, but even these have decayed: their forms share images and parts, augmenting and fusing into terrifying composites flush with inscrutable meaning and power. The wave is already closing, cradling him, and he feels the rush of air escaping the narrowing chamber where he hopes to remain. The men and women on shore forget what they have seen and dissipate. Tumbling downward towards the trench, his eyes are accustomed to the darkness and they search out its bottom. A procession of features, faces, names—all disappeared—turn towards him, void of content like Attic masks, or perhaps like the elaborate and grotesque features of the same mask, as it is viewed from afar and then draws nearer. He dives deeper, where its gaze cannot reach, and where the music of its voice—a sound not unlike the music of Agustín Barrios-Mangoré—at length grew silent. The weight of Castor’s body and the velocity of his plunge has capsized his board and brought it down with him by the leash: a bungee threaded through surgical tubing, that hesitates to break the fidelity of the Velcro cuff around his ankle. Undaunted, Castor senses a moment at hand still hidden, that waits in the bosom of the earth. Surrounding him are the things in their bareness for which he has become the conduit, and he sees them clearly. The cuff that will open or not open, the bungee that will tear or not tear, are apart of that face and its emptiness—forgotten. Hands extended, he lingers streamlined, wanting to reach down and dig his fingers into the icy, clay-like floor, to take root and await transformation into a strange submarine tree, to listen intently and in peace to the vast silence, until some spirit awakes him.

SPRING 2011

ENVOY

A Short Discussion of Even Longer Words ERIC BREWSTER

Most sentences concerning pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis—like this one— are less occupied with the lung disease caused by inhalation of ultra-fine particles of silica volcanic dust than with the effort lungs must make to pronounce it. At 45 letters, it is indisputably the longest word in the English language—depending on whom you ask. The English lexicon is a treasure trove of curios and perplexities. Some one million words strong by the standard of many dictionaries, most speakers know only ten to 60 thousand of them. Half of all speech and literature is comprised of just ten words and their derivatives: the, be, to, of, a, in, that, have and I, in order of frequency. The average number of unique words used daily by speakers is less than one thousand. What remains is an often confounding and occasionally laughable consortium of obscurities. Most of these entries almost never see the light of day. But a lucky few are glorified for their peculiarity: strange combinations of consonants and vowels, offbeat phonetic renderings, arcane definitions with obscene double meanings in modernity. And then there is the tongue-tied title of the English language’s longest word, a crown that has managed to bypass the desks of lexicographers and enter mainstream interest as the simultaneous epitome of the absurd and wondrous nature of the second-most spoken language in the world. But searching for the winning word

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unlocks the Pandora’s box of lexicography and a debate at the core of language itself: what constitutes a word? Determining the longest word becomes a trek through linguistic philosophy that zigzags from Plato to the editorial board of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). There is no one-word answer. But pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is as good of a word as any with which to begin. The entry was born February 3, 1935 in New York at the annual meeting of the National Puzzlers’ League, an organization devoted to word play and word games. Self-described as “The National Intellectual Pastime of America,” the League, founded in 1883, predates crossword puzzles and does not recognize such mainstream wordplay as an important puzzling experience. It does, however, recognize pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which its president Everett M. Smith invented for the sole purpose of laying claim to the longest word. It was unveiled at the 1935 gathering and the members present ratified its creation. The next day The New York Herald Tribune published an article declaring that electrophotomicrographically had been triumphed over. By 1939 the name for the lung disease could be found in a Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word remains the longest in a dictionary, and on this merit it is often granted the title of longest word. But this gives rise to another prob-

lem: which dictionary is definitive? The OED is less kind to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, branding it as “an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust,” without including it in print editions. At 29 letters, the longest entry lurking in the OED is floccinaucinihilipilification, “the estimation of something as worthless.” If that seems to be a convenient description for an exceedingly clunky word, the definition is no coincidence. Frustrated Latin students at Eton College, tired of having to learn seemingly endless lists of word stems with nearly identical meanings, strung together four stems—floccus, a wisp; naucum, a trifle; nihil, nothing; pilus, insignificance—to create a word that begrudgingly defines itself. That was in 1714. But the coinage of purposefully long words can be traced back to 390 BCE, when the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes introduced the 171-letter Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon, a meal—and word—comprised of seventeen different Greek delicacies. It is a word that even Google does not care to handle, advising that the search term “is too long a word. Try using a shorter word.” Writers have devoted ink to cumbersome length ever since. James Joyce offers Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbr-onntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk, a 101-letter word on the first page of Finnegan’s Wake that is often defined as “the symbolic thunderclap caused by the fall of Adam and Eve.” Even Shakespeare chimed in with a 27-letter contestant in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”: “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.” The literary title goes to Nigel Tomm, a neoDadaist of sorts who in 2008 self-published a 3,609,750-letter word spanning 812 pages in “The Blah Story, Volume 19” which he defines as the “current day or date between the real and

imagined today.” The word contains within it all the aforementioned longest-word contenders. If Tomm’s first word is accepted, then the secondlongest word can be found in “The Blah Story, Volume 10” at 2,403,109 letters. That word means “something like a girl or a bitch.” Large amounts of both words are comprised of the repeated use of blah. Tomm’s mockery of the longest-word debate illuminates the problem faced by lexicographers who differentiate between authenticity and artificiality. The phrase “nonsense word” appears to be inherently hypocritical; a nonsense word must still be a word. Any utterance is then justifiably acceptable. What makes Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock any less legitimate than the Loch Ness Monster? Several things, according to the OED. An official word should have permanent and measurable social significance in terms of both meaning and popularity. To the OED, the slang word of the week is not a word, but the slang word of the decade very much is. There is no timetable for existence or usage required to slip inside the OED’s hallowed covers. Some words build momentum slowly over many years. Others gain the necessary traction in months. The OED oversees such progress with its Oxford English Corpus, a growing electronic collection of over two billion words that contains “sentences or short extracts drawn from a huge variety of writing, from song lyrics and popular fiction to scientific journals,” according to the OED. Emerging words can be tracked for ubiquity and standardization with the Corpus, giving lexicographers a measuring stick for which words should be stamped with an official seal of approval. Words that fail to make the cut are entered into a word vault, a filing system of rejected words containing entries stretching back to the time J.R.R. Tolkien was an editor of the OED. The OED leaves the unofficial words for the linguistic philosophers to trouble over. Plato believed in a degree of naturalness to phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound. Disputing complete conventionalism, he argued that the sounds in a word like love describe the feeling of love for an inherent natural reason, and not “the neck of a giraffe” or “Chapter Eleven bankruptcy” or an infinite number of other possible things. While many popular sources still echo this belief in inherent meaning, no linguist

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would support it today—even Plato eventually came around to the idea that social conventions influenced the creation of words and their attached meanings. One of the most important features of a language system is that its signs are arbitrary. If the legitimacy of various words were not already in question, Tomm might have never found reason to construct his anti-art behemoth. If blah were not socially viewed as a construct of apathy, it might have never become a dominating set of phonemes in his “longest word.” Another aspect of the debate circles around morphemes--the smallest components of a word with semantic meaning. Unreadable, for example, has three morphemes: the stem read and the affixes un and able. Combined together, they form a word with practical social meaning. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is comprised of far more than three morphemes, but it is still created with the same fundamental building blocks. The only qualification the word lacks is the dignified stamp of authenticity. It was created for the deliberate purpose of being the longest word. But is one purpose any more worthy than another? All words are formed for some purpose; to discriminate against artificial words suggests that the creator of a word must be selfless. Words must be formed, then, for the sole purpose of describing a concept or entity, and have no intentional auxiliary ramifications. This divide of structure and function in language taps into an ongoing debate among linguists. Why do we have language? How did it begin and how does it evolve? How does human planning and conscious decision shape this evolution? And when crowning the longest word, should we care? What happens when a scholarly discovery or invention produces a new word that is remarkably long? Should the word’s inventor undergo a lie detector test to ensure there were no ulterior motives? Incidentally, lie detector tests have been proven to be accurate only when subjects use “real” words. Would the pre-baptized word need to be banned, or does its creator’s belief in its realness give it all the validity it needs? One simple measure to gauge authenticity is to analyze the contexts in which social publications utilize such words, pitting actual usage against attempted codification. Many “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” words (which, at 34 letters, is defined in Mary Poppins as “something to say when you have nothing to say”) are discussed

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more often in reference to length than meaning, indicating artificiality. Of course, even authentic words will at times be written about in the context of unwieldy length due to popular intrigue. The National Puzzler’s League might argue that simply more people are interested in big words than obscure lung diseases. But for some words, like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the imbalance is overwhelming. Tomm’s monsters have never appeared outside of their original publications. A blissfully self-aware entry at 35 letters is hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, “the fear of extremely long words.” Floccinaucinihilipilification, though deliberately manufactured, has come nearest to authentic use, achieving a life beyond tongue-in-cheek discussions of its size. Other causes, however, have also been found for dismissal. One potential contender is the 189,819-letter chemical name for titin, the largest known protein with an empirical formula of C132983H211861N36149O40883S693. Lexicographers disqualify the names for chemical compounds as verbal formulae that relate physical chemical compositions and are thus not actual English words. But verbal formulae still describe entities; they are built of phonemes. A chair can be broken down into trillions of molecules that can each be broken down into verbal formulae. If the chair is nothing more than the proper combination of these trillions of non-words, what qualifies chair as a word? The line might at times be drawn blurry, but for the lexicographer, it must still be drawn. One place that has fallen on the wrong side of that line is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, New Zealand, an otherwise inconspicuous hill that stands a mere 1,001 feet high. Its name, which roughly means “The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one,” is the longest of any location in an English-speaking country at 85 letters. It is usually thrown out of contention for either being a proper noun or of questionable authenticity as a place name. So what word remains standing amongst the linguistic carnage? Amazingly, the one that every eight-year-old can recite: antidisestablishmentarianism, “the political opposition to the disestab-

lishment of the Church of England in 19th-century Britain.â&#x20AC;? At 28 letters, it remains the longest non-technical, authentic and undisputed entry that can be found in almost all major dictionaries and is popularly known as the English languageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s longest word. Unless, that is, one could be a pseudoantidisestablishmentarianist. But that matter will be left to politics. Lexicographers deserve a chance to catch their breaths.

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CO N TRIBUTO R S ’ NOTE S EMMA BANAY is aqua-blue. ERIC BREWSTER once saw a cloud that looked like art. SPENCER BURKE will take a gin and tonic, please. TAYLOR DAVIS buys more books than she can read. MOLLY DEKTAR thanks Kiley McLaughlin for the use of her camera. LOUISA DENISON is aquabird. JULIAN GEWIRTZ is precipitate and pragmatical. RACHEL D. LIBESKIND loves to study the end. RYAN MEEHAN beforehand, as if he already had you in mind. ANNA MURPHY is reelin’ in the years. ADAM PALAY has elegant elbows. JAMES A. POWERS is graduating with an MFA in Painting and Terrorism from the School of the Art Institute. MY NGOC TO really likes brushing her teeth. DAVID WALLACE will try to make good. JUSTIN WYMER is pursuing Lorca through the melting alleys of his morning breath.