Spring 2012

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

SPRING 2012 $8

ART Brad Bolman*, Camille Coppola, Molly Dektar, Julian Gewirtz, Mattie Kahn*, Kristie La, Avery Leonard, Rebecca Levitan, Mary Potter, Scott Roben, Nicolas Schwalbe, Madeleine Schwartz, Zoe Weinberg.

BUSINESS Ben Berman, Sofie Brooks, Ross Ford, Edward de Fouchier, Skyler Hicks, Beñat Idoyaga, Andrew Karn, Temi Lawoyin, Dae Lim, David Manella, Jaron Mercer, Sasha Mironov, Tobi Tikolo*, Caroline Vernick, Emily Xie. DESIGN Charlotte Alter, Lucy Andersen, Wendy Chang, Hanna Choi, Alejandra Dean, Kayla Escobedo, Yuanjian Oliver Luo, Sam Richman*, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel, Lora Stoianova, Lila Strominger, Ned Whitman.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

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

ALEXANDER J.B. WELLS STEPHANIE NEWMAN CAMILLE COPPOLA DAVID MANELLA SALLY SCOPA MICHAEL SEGEL ERIC BREWSTER PATRICK LAUPPE TYLER RICHARD ERIC ARZOIAN WENDY CHEN KEVIN HONG TOBI TIKOLO SARAH HOPKINSON LARA ZYSMAN BRAD BOLMAN INDIANA SERESIN KAYLA ESCOBEDO JULIAN LUCAS ANNE MARIE CREIGHTON

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

JONATHAN GALASSI

LEV GROSSMAN

ANGELA MARIANI

DANIEL MAX

CELIA MCGEE

THOMAS A. STEWART

JEAN STROUSE

FEATURES Victoria Baena, Eric R. Brewster, Spencer Burke, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Katherine Damm, Eva DeLappe, Lily Karlin*, Georgina Parfitt, Madeleine Schwartz, Indiana Seresin, Georgia Stasinopoulos, Ezra Stoller*, My Ngoc To, Alexander Traub*, Alexander J. B. Wells, Warner James Wood*.

FICTION Brad Bolman, Emily Chertoff, Molly Dektar, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Sofia Groopman, Anna Hagen*, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman, Julian Lucas, Joe Masterman, Georgia Stasinopoulos, Kevin Stone*, Alexander J.B. Wells*.

POETRY Matthew Aucoin, Hana Bajramovic, Samantha Berstler, Wendy Chen, Anne Marie Creighton, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Julian Gewirtz, Roxanna Haghighat*, Zoë Hitzig*, Kevin Hong, Sarah Hopkinson, Andrew Klein, Ben Lorenz*, Stephanie Newman, Tyler Richard, Joshua Wilson, Justin Wymer, Lara Zysman.

TECHNOLOGY Eric Arzoian, Ben Berman, Dan Cole, Brian Feldman*, Jeremy Feng, Rafic Melhem*, Michael Segel. * The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.

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 nation’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).

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THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 1

CONTENTS ART 3 8 20 28 29 32

The Twist by Klaus Nomi Bird Balcony Untitled Works

Horsie On His Back Pregnant Women on All Fours Mirrors

Kayla Escobedo Rebecca Levitan Scott Roben Kayla Escobedo Kayla Escobedo Ernesto Gaxha

FEATURES 5 23 34 41

World Peace Hotel MADE Self-Portrait in a Flat Screen The Drop

Georgina Parfitt Alexander J.B. Wells Julian Gewirtz My Ngoc To

FICTION 10 Taxonomy

Naomi Funabashi

POETRY 30 Swallows 33 The last of winter 38 The Piano Lesson

Cover art by Scott Roben; cover design by Michael Segel.

Illustrations by Kayla Escobedo (p.40), Sally Scopa (p.22), and Lora Stoianova (p. 4).

Matt Aucoin Stephanie Newman Matt Aucoin

The Twist by Klaus Nomi Kayla Escobedo Ink on paper 24” x 48” THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 3

4

SPRING 2012

World Peace Hotel GEORGINA PARFITT

I thought I would have something on her, this nun. I thought that being out in the world, spending my time not with my eyes closed, wearing pants, watching television, would give me something that she didn’t have.

But now she’s coming slowly down the hall and I’m smiling already, far too soon, giving myself away.

And now breathe out all negative thoughts in the aspect of thick black smoke, out into the sky, where they will disappear, never to return again. * Droljang lives in the nuns’ residence, while I stay in the Female Dorm. She has been living at Kilnwick Percy Hall for a couple of years, come from Scotland. It has stayed in her accent.

She has a shaven head— “I need to cut my hair again,” she says, rubbing her head with her palm — and trainers with the heels worn down from where she has slipped them off so many times.

She now runs the Bed and Breakfast in the renovated outbuildings. The facilities are clean and well-organized. Every room is named for a tree: Birch, Elm, Gingko. In the laundry room, Droljang stands in the steam, folding occasionally red and yellow robes for the other nuns and the white sheets for the guests.

“Deary me,” she says, and gently waves a fly from the ironing board. * Five minutes until dinner and the little pestle in its bowl will chime up and down the hall.

The smell of rosemary and olives. * Kilnwick Percy Hall was built on a hill in the hamlet of Kilnwick Percy in approximately 1845. Four colossal Georgian columns form the frontispiece. The grounds are wide with woods and a large lake long dried and a chapel, in the Norman style, dedicated to Saint Helen. A mile away is the little town of Pocklington, greengrocers, video rental, pharmacy, and then the hills, purple with mud and bracken. East Riding, the Wolds of Yorkshire.

This particular week in summer, there are four working visitors at Kilnwick Percy Hall: Nick, Mark, Bill and me. There is also a monk from Thailand. He has come with a translator but doesn’t talk much himself. He walks around; he picks up the pamphlets outside the meditation room and looks at the pictures. In the evening,

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 5

when the residents have their puja, he listens and moves his lips to the foreign sounds.

We are Droljang’s charges.

“What kind of thing do you like to do?” she asks us. “Bit of gardening? Or cooking?”

We work for our room, board and free spiritual lessons. Nick, a young student of geography, says he’ll do anything. He’d like to be outdoors. Mark, quiet and tough, has been dropped off by his girlfriend and is waiting for her to turn the car round on the gravel outside. Bill has been here before.

He knows the score. The hall was used by the military in the Second World War, he tells us. As a training headquarters, then for several decades as a family home, and then the Buddhists moved in. On the first floor are the meditation room, a gift shop, a dining room, and offices. The upstairs is bedrooms.

I say I don’t mind cleaning. I fancy cleaning the podium where the nun teaches, and all the little offerings that sit on the shelves around the room. I want to polish the belly of the Buddha in the glass cabinet behind her. * They set me up making beds in the Bed and Breakfast with Droljang.

In the laundry room, she shows me how to arrange the bedside trays. Ten sachets of milk, two butter biscuits to rest on top of the coffee filters, one of each color of fruit tea. And how to fold the towels so the labels don’t show. The Bed and Breakfast is four-star. * The New Kadampa Tradition has become a brand; the original World Peace Hotel has been franchised across the world. And the World Peace Cafe, where Bill sits drinking a cup of tea. Mark, Nick and I stand around him, drinking ours, and he tells us that everything has calmed down here since five years ago when he last visited. Back then, there was a scandal with one of the monks, who in strange moods would take his robes off and go wandering through the grounds, up to the chapel and round the lake.

Bill laughs hard. It was a dilemma for the other monks and nuns to know what to do with their brother. In the end, he was removed. Probably placed in a less popular retreat. They wrestled with their consciences, Bill says, because con6

SPRING 2012

frontation is so frowned upon.

But attachment is a delusion, they say. The teacher compares delusions to dark growing clouds.

And Bill says he owns a scrap yard in Tottenham. He calls himself a lay-Buddhist. Each day, he wakes up early and enjoys his own ritual. He makes a cup of tea and takes it outside to look at the hills, then he reads from the beginners’ guide to the New Tradition that he has bought himself.

He spends all day working in the new kitchen they’re making in Gingko, one of the rooms in the Bed and Breakfast. Since he’s a visitor, they let him have the radio on while he works. The music drifts into the grounds. * I take Kelsang Lekma’s load out of the washing machine, underwear like my mother’s. I pull at the red and yellow parts, the holy things, untangling, then I lay them carefully over the ironing board. I start to iron the different pieces; the nuns’ robes are made of three pieces, one like a tabard, two that drape to make two skirts. More carefully than I have ever ironed, I iron Lekma’s clothes.

And now breathe out all negative thoughts, in the aspect of thick black smoke, and watch them float away, out of sight, and when you breathe in again, you’re breathing in all the positive thoughts, in the aspect of bright, white light.

She is an experienced teacher. She tells us, sitting on the platform with her robes around her big hips: “We all want to be happy.”

Sitting hen-wise and kind, above us in the meditation room, “We all want to be happy.”

I think of Bill. And me.

When I finish the ironing, I fold Kelsang Lekma’s clothes and leave the pile on the washing machine for her to find, and go to Elm to put the finishing touches to the room. There are guests arriving soon for the weekend retreat. * In the female and male dorms for the volunteers, the windows are twice as tall as you and there are white shutters from the carpet to the ceiling. One pigeon beds in the cold end of the pillar outside the window, bleating its old song

into the stone. Others get into the hall. Kelsang Lekma shoos them out, only because of the cat she keeps upstairs. At night, I lay in my little bed, hearing first the men in the Male Dorm next door talking about something, then the pigeons, the gravel in the wind, the hills. It’s not yet ten o’clock. * When Lekma describes desirous attachment, she says it’s like chocolate. She pretends she is one of us. “Sometimes, you just can’t help it,” she says. She compares indulging in desirous attachment to eating too much of your favourite chocolate; it’s so good at first, and then you start to feel guilty.

I look around the room, but everyone has their eyes closed.

The volunteers walk around the dried-up lake, crunching in the grins of old mussels stuck in earth.

At breakfast, on Sunday, waiting for noon when I will leave for my bus, I sit in the dining room with Bill. The doors are open onto the grass outside where the visiting monk from Thailand is taking his tea.

Bill is playing with the little tassel that marks the end and the beginning of his pink prayer beads.

“What do you do? With them?” I ask.

“It’s a mala, isn’t it? It’s like a rosary.”

He describes that counting is a relaxing thing; he tries to say his mantra 108 times, which is traditional. He takes the mala from round his neck and puts it on the table between us. He says: “You keep this one. I’ve got another.” When I refuse, he says: “It’d be wicked to refuse’m.” So I take them.

I play with them as Bill finishes his tea, counting, no mantra yet, other than the sound of him drinking or the sound of the sheep.

Bird Balcony Rebecca Levitan Charcoal on paper

(above) 59” x 50” (opposite top) 30.5” x 29.5” (opposite bottom) 22” x 22”

8

SPRING 2012

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 9

Taxonomy NAOMI FUNABASHI

I want to preface this by saying that scorpions have never really killed anyone. At least, not in Arizona.

Not since the forties. And even then, there were probably other complications. I mean, I don’t know the specifics. I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman. But it’s easy to imagine. Sick, dehydrated. Probably got stung while out hiking. Inexperienced traveler, and all that. The kind that thinks you can climb South Mountain, no sweat, with no training and a small bottle of water. My dad used to call them “hippie climbers,” the ones who say your body is the source of all energy and a man can climb Olympus as soon as a tree in his own backyard.

My sister latches on to this last reference. “Exactly,” she says. “Hippie climbers. How do you know we’re not turning into hippie climbers?”

Because, I say. These scorpions are in your own backyard. I’m a little thrown by her hesitation. We grew up with scorpions. June and July are Scorpion High Season but we’re trained to react any time of the year, really, turn on a dime when we see the tail tucked up like a dog’s and the two wide pincers and the small pinpoint black eyes and the yellow-brown splay of its eight legs (scorpions are arachnids, I have to tell people out East. Not insects. Also, not lizards. I’ve gotten that before. It’s the tail.). I haven’t lived in Arizona for years now but I haven’t lost the instinct; a well-shaped piece of lint or a curl of rubber on the floor of the garage starts me up every time. But not because scorpions are particularly dangerous. I honestly can’t imagine anyone dying by scorpion unless they swallowed the thing and it stung the shit out of their stomach or something. Or maybe if it were a baby. And there were other factors. Lung trouble.

My point is, they aren’t killers and my sister should know that. We just vacuum the suckers up. I’ve used overturned glass jars, slippers, books, a chair, a hammer, pretty much anything to smash scorpions, or to trap them until I can get back with something that will. She’s done the same. It isn’t anything to holler about, because scorpions come with the territory. We grew up with them the way most people grow up with Velcro or Lunchables. And we rarely miss.

There isn’t anything a hospital can really do for scorpion stings, but I say this as a comforting thing.

I mean that most people do just fine without any help at all. A nurse will tell you to drink some fluids and maybe, if you’re elderly, put you on watch, but otherwise they turn you loose right away. Most of the sharper pain that comes with the sting goes away after twenty-four hours. The muscle spasms and tremors stop after about ten, and are more annoying than they are anything else. The rest is an achy soreness that rides itself out in a few days. I’ve heard some people say there are experimental antidotes now, that they’ve administered them in extreme cases. Wimps.

10 SPRING 2012

My sister lives right up against a mountain range. The desert practically spills into her backyard. She’s had snakes, javelinas, raccoons, the works. It’s what happens when your lawn makes up a majority of the greenery within a ten-mile radius. Most folks might be surprised to find that scorpions are the real trouble.

You can keep the rest out with a good fence and wire. She’s getting three, four scorpions a week in the house now. Like I said. High season.

We aren’t that close, to tell the truth. She called me up a few months ago, something about she heard it was a hard winter. It was March, and we were coming out of it, so it’d been a little odd. She said what did I use, antifreeze? Did the street plows make it to my neighborhood? I said my fireplace had crapped out but we’d made it through okay. It was the first time we’d talked in a year. Then she called in April, said that we both knew summer wasn’t the best time but did I want to come home. She called again the week after, said I could come anytime, really, she and Todd didn’t have any plans. I took the hint. What the hell. We’re family.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been back. The airport’s changed a lot. They’ve gotten rid of the old carpet with the pixelated phoenixes and put in a nice tiled vinyl floor. New murals, too, with accents in hard red and blue glass and the typical desert fanfare, pastel sunscapes, that kind of thing. Still, the first thing I notice is the way the air hits you, stepping onto the jetway. It even smells hot, suffocating in that way that you start to feel under your armpits, anywhere where skin touches skin, really. Dry enough that you can look out at any yellow, brittle excuse for a lawn and feel the life withering. Every building, every street, every sign becomes a reflector for the sun, another surface of heat and light. Can’t say I miss it.

The people look washed out, too, even my sister. Her hair and eyes are dull and she’s skinny, not in a good way. She’s always been the skinny one but this, this isn’t a good look for her. I wonder if it was high school when we started being less. When she and her killer legs and her sheer enthusiasm had gotten her any boy she wanted. I had been tall, but that was all, just tall, and occasionally athletic. It hadn’t felt so long ago, but seeing her here now it suddenly does.

She pulls me into a hug and plants a weak kiss on my cheek. I hold her tight, then tighter. She likes hugs, I remember that.

“Todd couldn’t make it,” she says. “Something came up at work. As usual.”

“As usual?”

“You can catch up at dinner.”

“No problem,” I say.

“Luggage?” she says. We make our way down the escalators to the baggage claim. She isn’t talkative. I can’t remember if that’s a new thing.

“So what’s new?”

She shrugs. “Everything’s pretty much the same.” She shoots me a quick look. “I missed you.”

“Love you, too,” I say.

She smiles a little at that. “How long since the last time you were here?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out too. Four years, maybe?”

“Longer than that,” she says. “It was before Todd switched jobs.”

I don’t know what to say to that because I honestly have no idea. I spot my suitcase and haul it off the carousel, and then we head to the parking lot. The air hits me again when the doors slide open. God, it’s hot.

“It’s getting to be bad out,” Jess says apologetically.

“I remember,” I say, even though I don’t feel like I do. I don’t remember having to cope. It just was the way things were. A hundred and fifteen degrees out, and rising. No big. Keep the AC cranked up. Park in the shade. It suddenly hits me that I’ve never invited her East. Not recently. “You should come visit,” I say. “Escape the heat.”

She just nods. I wonder if I’ve offended her somehow. Like she thinks I only offered because she did first. She did choose to stay, after all, all those years ago. Arizona’s always been her home. But seriously. It doesn’t mean she can’t travel.

“Next summer,” I say. “June. July. When it feels like this.”

“That’d be nice. I’ll ask Todd.”

Her car is tan, and a Toyota. She’s so predictable.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 11

“I’ll help you make dinner,” I say.

“Now?” she checks her watch. “It’s four.”

I shrug. “Then we’ll make a big dinner.”

“There are only three of us,” she says, but it’s half-hearted.

“Jess,” I say. “We should celebrate. It’s been four years.”

“Longer,” she says.

She’s a little livelier in the kitchen, which is a relief. Jess got more than just the looks in our family. She got most of the skills. Cooking included.

“Do you remember,” she says, “when you made Mom scrambled eggs in bed for the first time? And you didn’t know how they got scrambled, even though it was the easiest thing ever, so you fried an egg normal and then ripped it up into little pieces?”

I do. Mom had been recovering from strep. She’d laughed so hard she’d practically hacked up a lung.

She said it was like me, to think of a difficult solution to any problem, no matter how easy.

Jessica goes into the pantry, then pauses. “Kate, will you get the vacuum? It’s in the closet by the stairs.”

I feel that familiar twinge of adrenaline. Just enough to get your heart to pick up the pace a little. When I return with the vacuum I peer over her shoulder (I am still tall) at the bent legs and the fat, yellow body.

It moves suddenly, runs along the baseboard with the tail straightened behind it. The vacuum slurps it up.

There was a time when we’d used a modified vacuum, specially designed for this express purpose. It was called the Bug Sucker, and it had a clear, hollow, triangular foot you could use to trap whatever bug you wanted before you switched the suction on. Inside was a tiny mesh cartridge with a one-way door. Once we were good at the trapping and sucking on our own, though, we swapped the Bug Sucker out for a regular vacuum. You didn’t have to change the cartridges as often.

“We don’t get those on the East Coast, you know.”

“Still gets you going, huh?” “’Course. Doesn’t matter how long it’s been.”

Jess puts away the vacuum. “They’re getting worse.”

“It’s July.”

“Still. I think there’s an infestation or something.”

The door opens and Todd comes in, throwing his keys into a crystal bowl by the door. I sent them that bowl for their wedding.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Jess says. “You’re home early.”

“Meeting got cancelled. Hey, Kate. Sorry I couldn’t come meet you.” He comes over and gives me a hug. He smells faintly of cigarettes.

“We’re having a big dinner,” Jess says, putting her hands in a mixing bowl. She kneads, hard.

“Great. I’m gonna get washed up, and then I’ll help.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I can manage.”

“It’s fine.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

Jess watches him go, her hands still in the bowl. She rests her wrists on the edge, her fingers in the dough.

“You didn’t tell me Todd smokes now,” I say, to fill the silence. “Doesn’t that drive you crazy?”

“He doesn’t smoke,” she says, but her brow furrows and she looks faded. Like the art projects we used to make in elementary school out of construction paper. Our teacher would hang them in the window, and in a couple of weeks you could flip them over and see the color the paper used to be. Those windows were tinted, too.

Todd yells from the next room and we both jump.

“Coming,” Jess sighs. She wipes her hands on a towel and heads for the closet.

“You gotta do something about them, Jess,” I say, following. “Call the Terminator.” Our little joke, when

12 SPRING 2012

we were kids.

“You mean the exterminator.” Jess doesn’t remember. “Todd doesn’t want to spend the money. It’s not a big deal, it happens all the time.”

“You said yourself there might be an infestation. And as for the money—” I shrug. “Do it yourself. I’ll help you.”

“With what?” she’s exasperated now. “We’re thinking about getting a puppy. I don’t want poison all over the yard.”

“Jess!” Todd yells, and Jess moves a little faster.

“I’m coming! I’m coming!”

“Too late.” He comes out into the hallway, his tie undone. “I lost it somewhere under the bed. Christ, Jess.”

“Todd’s from Chicago, you know,” Jess says. “I don’t think he’s used to it yet.”

“Can’t you call someone?” Todd yanks on one end of the tie and it slips out of the collar in a whiz of silk.

“What about the dog?”

“Dog?” “The puppy.”

They stare at each other a moment.

“Yeah,” Todd mumbles. “The puppy. Right.” He turns back into his room and closes the door.

Jess lets out a breath, then nudges me gently into the kitchen.

“Todd’s been a little stressed lately,” she says.

“I get it,” I say. She starts to knead again, and I pull up a stool at the island, facing her. It’s silent, except for the smack-smack of the dough against the sides of the bowl and the distant hiss of the shower. Her hands press, press, the tendons standing out, knuckles rising and sinking under her tan skin.

Todd was the reason Jess stayed, and part of the reason I left. Our mom used to worry because I had never been in a relationship longer than a handful of months. “Love will settle her,” she kept saying to our dad. Todd was everything I was afraid of. I’m no rocket scientist or New York exec, but at least I don’t live here.

“Jess, let’s do it,” I say. “The scorpions. It’ll give me something to do.”

Scorpions, as with most desert life, are nocturnal. No surprise there. We go out back after dinner with a flashlight and a couple of slippers, the wine warm in our bellies. The night is a different rendition of heat.

Duller, worn, like a tired argument. I go up to the edge of the dying grass, scan the yard. There’s a bed of gravel in the back, butting up against the low brick wall that runs around the house. Along the top of the wall stands a standard metal fence with vertical bars every five or six inches, and Jess has boarded up or run wire tight through the gaps where it meets the brick. I flash the light down the sides of the house, which are lined with stones, turn it towards the edge of the pool, shine it on the grill. We take a few steps towards the barbecue, crouch down on the concrete. We’ve only been out a few minutes, and already I can feel the sweat pooling in the dips behind my knees.

Jess’s hand flashes out with the slipper and smacks down hard on the cement. She’s almost pulled back before I hear the soft crack, and my light refocuses on the juicy cud, tail twitching, a couple of the legs waving slowly. The tail keeps going even after the rest of the body stops. That’s the thing with the tail.

When I was in middle school my friend’s mom smashed a scorpion with a textbook, and got most of the body, though she missed the stinger. When she lifted the book off, the tail got her in the wrist. She had a numb arm for a week.

I nudge it with my slipper and it flips over, leaving a dark smear. “Nice work, Jess. Got it in one.”

“I wish they weren’t so hard to find,” Jess says, peering around her feet. “They’re never around when you want them. Watch your ankles.”

“I know.”

“Babies, too. They’re everywhere.”

“I know.”

The babies look exactly like adults, only in miniature, and are a lot lighter in color. Some are even orange, the color and translucency of an overripe cantaloupe. They ride in a cluster on the mother’s back,

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 13

ange, the color and translucency of an overripe cantaloupe. They ride in a cluster on the mother’s back, sometimes stacked three deep, and they’re always falling off. Usually you find one, you watch out for more.

I shift uncomfortably on the balls of my feet.

“So you’re thinking of getting a dog, huh?”

“Maybe. Why are you so surprised?”

I shrug. “You didn’t like our dog all that much, when we had one.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like him,” Jess laughs. “It’s that he was always messing up our fun.”

There had been a lot of fun. We looked forward to every spring, however brief, when our mom trimmed the garden. We had huge rose bushes, though most of the flowers died, of course, even as early as April. But when the heavy heads of petals were still soft and full, we stole the pruned branches and cut off the thorns, then shaved the green skin off with a knife. Then we sparred with what was left. Our dog, Bungee, tended to gnaw on the weapons a little, especially when we left them out in the sun. For curing.

Before that, we had played with Legos. We each had our own house. Her people were the Maytrees.

Mine were the Momdads. I could still name the people. The engineering twins, Eugene and Genette.

The ambitious pianist, Eliza, and the Jedi wannabe, Obi-Now. There was the failed robotic experiment and exercise in artificial intelligence, Bozo, and the runt of the family, Wimpy. He’d met his end in an appropriately stupid manner when Jess had taken Wimpy and Obi-Now outside in their van. I’d discovered Wimpy’s shiny yellow head and parts of the van in one of Bungee’s deposits on the lawn the next day. Obi-Now had never been found.

She knows what I’m thinking and gives me a shit-eating grin that I remember from high school. It’s true, what people say about being happy. For that one second, she looks younger.

I find another scorpion on the side of the barbecue and strike at it with the flip-flop. I miss and it falls to the concrete, stunned until I hit again. This time, I feel the sweet press of it under the sole before my hand rises and comes down one more time for good measure. The hand of God, striking it down.

It goes on like this for a few more nights, though we only find a couple each time. Jess looses the bloodlust another night in, and I feel like some kind of soldier general at breakfast trying to get her to agree to one more sweep. Todd is oddly silent on the issue, and though Jess doesn’t say anything I can tell she thinks he isn’t taking our actions seriously. I don’t blame him. At two or three a night we’re hardly wiping out a nest, and we’re still finding ones in the house.

Jess glances at Todd when he comes out for breakfast. His suit is pressed, and his shoes have been buffed. He wants my opinion on the tie he’s chosen.

“You look sharp,” Jess says, then adds, “For someone boarding a plane.”

“Well, it’s San Francisco, they have standards there.” He whistles while he pours himself a cup of coffee and scoops Jess’s famous scrambled eggs onto a plate.

“I don’t see what the point is if you’re just going to change.”

“I’m going straight to the conference.”

“Todd has had a lot of out-of-town conferences recently,” Jess says to me, but her eyes are fixed on Todd. “I hope they realize it. How hard you’re working.”

“Well,” he says, “Maybe I’ll get promoted.”

He shovels the eggs down and goes to retrieve his briefcase.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you?” Jess says.

“No. Thanks,” he brushes past her and gives her a quick kiss. “Don’t bother. I got a cab. See you, Kate.”

It’s Jed, one of our mutual friends from high school, who mentions the blacklight trick when we meet to catch up over lunch and mention we’re becoming proficient in scorpicide. Jess and I head down to a hardware store right after and ask someone in the front. It’s no urban myth, apparently.

I’m surprised you didn’t know,” the store clerk says, and looks over at Jess. “You’ve been living here how long?”

14 SPRING 2012

Jess manages to look appropriately abashed.

“The scorpions light up like a sick Christmas tree. It’ll scare the crap out of you, first couple times you do it. Did me.”

“Blacklight? As in, fly traps? And the eighties?” I envision Jess erecting a neon display in the backyard.

“Yeah. You can get it in a flashlight. Here, we’ve got an easy display. Show you what I mean.”

He leads us towards the back to a counter, where they’ve got a couple of scorpions along with a rock and some sand in a glass jar. One rests uncomfortably up against the curved slope of the wall, like it started on the offensive and lost the will to go on. I’ve never seen the underside of a scorpion before. I feel a little sick looking at the mechanics of the jointed legs, how they plug into the segmented abdomen like piping.

“It’s quite the demo,” he says, reaching for a flashlight. The bulb flashes on, tinting the shelf and the sand in a familiar, boozy glow. Jess leans in closer, the white accents in her shirt standing out. There’s no mistaking it. The scorpions brighten into a low acid green.

“What the hell,” I say.

“Wanna give it a try?” he passes the light to me, and I bring it in. Brighter. Greener. One of the scorpions raises its tail hesitatingly.

“Do they all look like this?” Jess asks.

“Well, living here you’ve got yourself sixty different species, but none of the blue-turning ones. They’re black, normally. Emperor scorps. Whole different classification. We don’t have them in AZ, you know.”

He says the letters, ay-zee. People do that here.

At the checkout counter, he bags the light with a few batteries and a heavy-duty localized-only spray.

“Don’t look into the light,” he winks. “Seriously, though, you’ll go blind. Good luck, ladies. Happy hunting.”

Todd’s still away on business, so I accompany Jess to the mall for a movie and whatever else she feels like. I sip a soda slowly while she runs her hands up and down some dress shirts, trying to decide green or blue for Todd. She says he complains a lot about his clothes, these days. That they’re all old. She doesn’t put in her usual effort and ends up asking the saleslady which men’s shirt is the most popular. When they don’t have Todd’s size, we leave.

There’s not much in the way of fun in Arizona. Most outdoor activities you can scratch right off the list. You could go hiking, though you’d need to be up at the crack of dawn for it not to be a suicide mission. You could listen to the world’s worst city orchestra if you were one of Arizona’s rich. Just imagine a school band gone pro. Halloween, walk a desert trail populated with luminaries. Or luminarias, as the Jo-Ann Etc. crowd call them. And Christmas: lights with the family at the local Mormon temple. Some might be surprised to discover you can ski in Arizona, December through March. That’s right. Flagstaff is just a four-hour drive from Phoenix. Though that might be changing, too, with the new highway they’re setting up. I guess even Phoenix has to start speeding up, like the rest of us.

People visit, they keep saying there’s got to be more. And they’re right. There’s probably a hole-inthe-wall Peruvian restaurant somewhere next to a laundromat. People would probably get up to more crime here, if the heat didn’t sap even the will to live. It’s an exciting day if you run into someone with an unusual name, like Bryan or Siobhan.

Arizona’s genuine, though, even if it is in a backwoods, cowboyin’, rodeo kind of way. I’ll give it that much. They name streets and neighborhoods with the same kind of come-from pride that D.C. does.

Only, instead of district blocks of presidents, we’ve got Hohokam. Ahwatukee. The Superstition Freeway. Some people like the idea of driving around in their air-conditioned cars and looking out over the fenced-off Indian reserves, feeling like maybe some of that tradition still applies. They like the atmosphere. Still, names only go so far, and we haven’t got enough atmosphere to get a plane off a runway.

The scorpion light thing is probably the highlight of Jess’s summer.

When we go out that night, though, even I have to admit that the blacklight is more than I expected.

Jess switches it on way in the back and outright screams. In the dark the effect is the store demo times ten. Each scorpion—and there are twenty, thirty at least—is like a little scurrying light, brighter than a glo-stick. Bright enough to convince you they’re lighting up from the inside. There are whole clusters of

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them with chalky, neon-green tails and pincers, curling up, scuttling left and right in the purple-washed dark. The sand throws up freckles of purple light, and highlights from the flashlight flare in thin reflections along the metal bars, along the shiny hood of Todd’s grill.

“Holy shit.”

“I wish Todd could see this,” Jess whispers.

One crawls a little closer along the wall towards us and she backs into me, so I take the light from her, raise the shoe in my right hand and crush it. It drops to the stones below, bouncing like a rubber imitation. That starts them all up and it’s a sudden free-for-all. There’s a part of me that enjoys this, a twisted game of whack-a-mole that gets Jess a cleaner house, but as I lay into a fourth scorpion I realize my hands are clawed. Fighting off Arizona, one scorpion at a time.

Jess is freaking. Really, truly freaking. “Shine it over here! Shine it over here!” she shrieks, and she raises the spray bottle and starts squeezing off rounds into the oleander bushes, where scorpions hang on the low branches and exposed roots like some kind of alien fruit. “Over here, Kate! I can’t see!”

I wish we had two flashlights. I wish there were about four more people here smashing away.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” Jess keeps saying, her hands fumbling with the spray. “Kate! Kate!”

I feel the drops on my leg and shriek, “What? What is it?”

“It got me! It got me!”

“What?”

Jess is clutching her ankle.

“You need to lie down!” I shout at her. “Go inside!”

“What the hell!” she screams at the ground. She hobbles around, stomping on the scorpions by her feet. I have to grab her arms, and both of us nearly fall over with the effort.

“Inside, Jess! Stop it!”

“You’re not the boss of me!” She lets go, drops the spray, then the slipper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t mean it.” She lets me run an arm under her shoulders and keeps whispering apologies as we stagger across her lawn.

Inside, I lay her down on the floor and run to grab her a glass of water. She’s still whispering apologies, only now it’s so faint I can’t make out the words.

“Shut up,” I grit my teeth, and she stops with a surprised look on her face, like she didn’t know she was still talking. By the time I kneel next to her with the glass, the sweats have already started, and her leg is doing little tremors. The muscles in her neck twitch.

“It’s fast,” she says, almost in awe. “Did you know it was this fast?”

“You’re gonna be fine. Do you want to go to the hospital?”

“What for?” she says.

“Nothing. How’s your breathing?”

“Fine,” she says, calmer now. Her leg jerks up and down. “I’m good.”

I get her another glass, lean up against the island while she downs it. When she’s done I lay down on the floor next to her, put my ear to her chest.

“I’m still fine.” It sounds fuzzy to me, though, and the two of us fall silent, listening to the rasp of her lungs.

“There’s an antidote now,” she says suddenly. “The FDA approved it. It was in the news last week.”

“Do you want it?”

“It’s for extreme cases.”

“Oh.” “Mine’s not extreme,” she clarifies, like I didn’t know.

“Do you want me to call Todd?”

“No. Shut up.” Then she says, “Get me a pen.”

I get on my knees and feel around the countertop for a Bic. Then I crawl back to her. She sits up and draws an uneven line a few inches above her ankle.

“What time is it?”

I tell her. She writes it next to the line. Then she lies back down, still holding the pen.

16 SPRING 2012

Ten minutes later, she asks again. She prods at her leg like it’s some kind of meat and draws another line an inch higher. Marking the numbness. The numbers are backwards, facing her.

“Shut up,” she says, when I open my mouth to speak. We lie there for another ten minutes, then twenty. Her hands are crossed over her stomach, the pen uncapped in them.

“Todd’s not away on business,” she says to the ceiling. “He’s having an affair. What time is it?”

I tell her. She draws another line.

We end up sleeping on the kitchen floor. I wake up every half hour and check her breathing, but it’s relatively smooth. Her leg dances every now and then, but for the most part it lays flat. The lines go halfway up her thigh now, though she lost interest an hour or so in, and the numbness had slowed by then anyway. We try meat tenderizer, the kind with papaya extract it in, and make it into a little paste for the puncture wound, to help break down some of the proteins in the venom. She makes me take pictures, then sniffs at it tenderly.

“My leg smells like a chemical hazard,” she says.

She starts to talk about Todd, how over the course of three months he’d been really attentive and then been sullen and reserved and then been irritable and called her suffocating, and how she should’ve figured it out. How she’d called the office for some reason or another when he was gone once and found out there wasn’t any conference in LA. How much the co-worker on the other end of the line had pitied her. How she’d noticed the cigarette thing, too.

Her breathing gets worse, then, and so instead we talk about how the last time we’d fallen asleep together in our house she’d been four and wet my bed and I’d refused to let her sleep there ever again. How when she was older I still hated sharing a bed with her on family vacations, because she kicked in her sleep. How she was always getting into trouble, how in elementary school she’d hacked into the school server once and found the full names of all her classmates and pulled all three names on anyone who messed with her. How they’d had no idea how she knew these things, were even awed, and the principal had to tell her to stop. He’d also asked her to stop trying to catch birds in the parking lot for class pets.

“You were so smart, Jess,” I say finally. “And so funny. You were snatching birds. And hacking into computers.”

“I told you, it was an accident.”

“You middle-named kids. That’s kind of manipulative.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“You were smart. Really smart.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Not everyone wants the same things,” she says, but it’s half-hearted.

I get it. It’s the difficulty of freedom. The taxonomy of living.

“You know, Arizona isn’t this awful place you make it out to be,” Jess says. “I don’t think you hate Arizona. I think you hate us. The people in it. For not thinking big, like you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Look,” Jess says. “Some things find you. It doesn’t really matter where you are. Look at me and Todd.

I was mad at her, at first. I wanted something bad to happen to her, something really bad, and for a while I thought about finding out who she was. But then I realized it wasn’t about her. It was Todd. The jackass.”

By then she is exhausted and a couple of Advil have dulled the pain enough for her to finally doze off, the sweat drying on her brow. Her eyes spin erratically under the lids. I keep checking her fever, and every time I check I wake her up, until she finally snaps at me to cut it out. We lay there together, drifting in and out. Her leg jerks and she kicks me in my sleep.

In the morning, she makes me take a nap while she showers, her leg mostly under control. I wake up with her bent over me, her hair fresh and her eyes puffy but lucid.

“Before we kill all the scorpions,” she says. “Let’s catch some.”

The ants have carried away most of the dead, though there are a few bodies tossed brokenly in the gravel, like this is some mob dumpsite for scorpion killers. Their bodies have already shriveled in the

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heat; the stringy gristle left behind is testament to a sun that never ends. I remember learning in the third grade that the sun would give out one day like an old man’s back, and thinking at recess while we fought for the shade that my teacher couldn’t have meant our sun, the same one that beat down and first made people restless and then filled them up heavy with its exhaustion. Scorpions can survive minutes in a microwave, hours underwater, even months without food. But Arizona always gets the last say. In the end, all anything ever is here is dead, then dried, then dust. Sometimes before the next sun even rises.

Jess stands in the lawn, keeps weight off her right leg. She watches as I flip the discarded sandals over in the dirt with a nudge of my foot, make sure there’s nothing living underneath. Same with the spray can, which goes flying. Guess Jess used more than we thought. We spend the rest of the day indoors, organizing old photos while watching television. Jess doesn’t even get off the couch for lunch, so I bring her some canned soup heated in a bowl. Todd calls sometime in the afternoon and I turn down the volume on the TV. Jess sounds tired but even. Doesn’t mention last night. She rallies a little at the end, asks him how San Francisco is. If the weather’s nicer. I hear him say something about low seventies and a jacket at night and she rolls her eyes at me, mouths the word jackass.

“I almost asked him to bring me something back,” she says when she hangs up. “But I thought that might be too obvious. God, is television this bad everywhere?”

She’s picked out a jar, drilled some holes in the lid with a spare nail, rummaged in a drawer of kitchen serving spoons and salad tossers and cheese graters until she’s found a couple of tongs. She sees my face and calls me a wuss. It’s not the same, though. Tongs mean prolonged contact. I like the hit and run version better. She gets the light and limps outside and I follow, picking up our old hunting equipment.

There are still about thirty scorpions, two or three clustered around the grill, which we dispatch from the get, the rest scattered along the back wall. Jess pinches with the tongs, picks up the fibrous pulp of the leftovers in the gravel and drops them into the jar. You can see the shriveled tails flopping when she bounces the jar on the palm of her hand, the wrinkled segments worse than raisins.

Even the dried scorpion mush lights up under the blacklight. That and some of the withered oleander flowers that have dropped, though the reflection’s dimmer. Doesn’t stop us from reacting, though.

Anything glowing out here is suspect. Jess gets in the fray, baring her teeth with disgust. The tongs might be a foot long but you can feel the teeth grip the scorpion wriggling at the end from the pressure. Like spearing crawdads. We get maybe fifteen and then she can’t take it and screws the lid shut and rolls it away into the grass, scorpions whirling like hell inside. We knock out the rest of them with the slippers and spray, smacking hard to stomp out the feeling that’s crawled up inside our throats.

The jar sits in the kitchen next to the toaster for two days. At first she put it in the middle of the island like a jar for change until breakfast, when I refused to eat with her if she didn’t move it. Her display has a time limit, though. Turns out, scorpions love eating other scorpions.

Jess doesn’t want to talk about confrontation or divorce, or counseling. She just sits with the jar, keeps tapping the glass, trying to figure out how many of the scorpions are still alive. She works from home, but now she brings her laptop and all the papers and spreadsheets out into the kitchen and uses the jar as a paperweight. Every few minutes, her eyes drift over.

She starts to bring it everywhere. Into the bedroom with her at night, when she leaves it on the nightstand by Todd’s side of the bed. Into her study, when she has to make work-related calls. She leaves it on the floor by her feet when she watches television in the living room, by the sink when she does the dishes, on top of the ironing board when she folds her clothes. Sometimes, she shines the blacklight on them, which turns the whole thing into a lamp a twelve-year-old boy would probably trade his right arm for. She gets an almost zoned-out look on her face when she studies it, the kind a kid has when he watches a fish tank. Not that the scorpions move much. They get restless when she takes them someplace else, but once she’s set them down they settle in, too.

The morning Todd comes home I wake up and the jar is gone. I guess Jess finally realized how morbid it is, keeping them around like that. For one thing, it’s like cockfighting, but with scorpions. There was one big one that had been dominating for a few days, enough that she’d named him Champ. He was

18 SPRING 2012

missing a leg but that didn’t stop him. For another thing, the jar is glass, which means that visually, they aren’t caged at all. It’s hard to relax when you can see them all rolling over one another smushed together a couple feet away.

Jess comes in, hair wet, looking for her keys. “I gotta pick Todd up,” she says, digging through her purse. She fishes out her sunglasses and snaps them on. “Can you mail some things for me before I get back? They need to get out before the truck comes to pick them up. You can take Todd’s car. The mailbox’s still at that place. Across from the gym.”

There’s a stack of letters on the table by the door: a couple of bills, from the look of it, plus a package in one of those standard USPS boxes. Jess gives me a quick kiss in thanks as she darts past, then I hear the slam of the car door and the rumble of the garage.

After a shower and breakfast, I gather up the mail, tucking the letters into my purse and balancing the package under my arm. The weight inside isn’t even; I can feel something rolling around and the shift of sparse, Styrofoam peanuts. I freeze in the doorway and lift the package, press my ear to it.

I can almost hear the sudden scratch and rustle of something moving on glass, panicked, disturbed, the shredded scramble of legs. The soft, juicy thickness of bodies tumbling up against the sides. The sounds of hunger and consumption.

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20 SPRING 2012

(opposite) Untitled Scott Roben 102’’ x 72’’ Oil on canvas

(above) Untitled Scott Roben 30’’ x 30” Oil on canvas

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22 SPRING 2012

MADE ALEXANDER J.B. WELLS

There is a popular myth about the birth of modern film, which goes something like this. It is late in December of 1895, and it is Paris, and the brothers Lumière are showing their films at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café. Tonight is the first public film screening in history. The audience is cosmopolitan, well-to-do, and well-educated. It is not a large Salon, after all. The movies are all actualités of about forty seconds, but for each little clip the brothers feed in seventeen meters of film.

This does not detract from the spectacle, not at all.

These films show scenes from daily life. They are demonstrative in nature and their appeal lies in the simple joy of being able to look at things. One Lumière film is called “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”; it shows a train pulling up to a country town platform using one continuous shot.

The camera was positioned right next to the tracks, so as the train comes in it runs diagonally across the screen. It is distant at first but then larger and larger until it is huge in the center and heading right for us. And then the train stops, of course, and lets the people out onto the platform—but by now it is too late, as the legend would have it, because everyone in the Salon is jumping up or shouting or running away to the back of the room where they think they will be safe. The little wooden chairs have all been knocked down to the ground, and

the Lumières are standing there cross or perplexed or maybe even gleeful.

In this chaotic moment, the film audience was born. It was a dotted line before the modern, a call to play the skeptic in the face of illusion. In A Short History of the Movies, Gerald Mast described it with appropriate smugness: “Audiences,” he said, “would have to learn to watch movies.”

Today, we are almost entirely certain that this never really happened. Martin Loiperdinger, Tom Gunning, and other film historians have made a variety of convincing cases against it. (For example: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station was not part of the original ten-film program; it was first screened in 1896. For example: the film was flickering, grainy, all black and white, and projected onto a fairly small screen at the front of the room.)

But the myth has stuck regardless, and the Grand Café anecdote is now part of the lore of modern film culture. Plus, the fact of its ubiquity may show us more about ourselves than its truth or falsehood.

Here is a thing that definitely did happen. In 1902, Edison Studios released a short film called “Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show.” It was quite clearly a knock-off of a movie made in England just a year before, “The Countryman and the Cinematographe,” and it featured an excerpt from

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an Edison film called “New Diamond Express” (1900)—itself quite clearly a knock-off of the Lumière Brothers’ wildly successful “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” (1896).

“Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show” is a fairly simple movie. It stars an unsophisticated rube from the country called “Uncle Josh,” a character who showed up in many films and audio monologs at the time. Here, Uncle Josh has booked himself a box at the cinema. He is off to one side of the frame, sitting in his box and watching the screen that takes up the other half of the shot. “The Edison Projecting Kinetoscope” comes up on the screen, and then a “Parisian Dancer” begins to do the can-can in a sultry, fin-de-siècle sort of way.

Uncle Josh is so moved that he jumps out of his box and starts trying to dance with her. But then the film changes to “New Diamond Express”, and poor Josh is still there in front of the screen as the train starts to come, so he leaps with a fright and throws himself right back into his booth. When the third film comes on, it is a country couple fighting, and when Uncle Josh goes to intervene he knocks over the screen. The understandably cranky projectionist wrestles Josh to the ground, and the film ends there.

This Uncle Josh is hairy, and proud, and melodramatic. It is the dancer who first lures him out from his box—lures him from the left side, the safe side, of the film’s single shot—but the second time he ventures out, it is to intervene in what looks like domestic abuse. He does not seem like a bad sort of man at all: his bantam posturing makes him ridiculous because he does not understand that it is all an illusion. The lust, fear, and moral insistence that would otherwise make him normal are discredited in the moment that he gets out of his box and walks out past the curtain. When he steps in front of the screen, he disappears in the projection, and when he tries to enter into the world of the film, everything comes crashing down around him—and Uncle Josh is the one to blame.

“Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show” is a funny little film, but in moments, it can start to feel surprisingly sad.

At the start of the twentieth century, Uncle Josh and other rube stories gave the early film audience a reflection of their own viewing experience and, moreover, trained them against the wrong way to respond to illusions. By the 1920s, these films were no longer popular. They were replaced, in a way, by the urban legend of the Lumière Brothers and

24 SPRING 2012

“The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.” Anthropologists around this time also wrote about the terror of “primitive” tribes when they encountered film technology. The naïve country bumpkin had been replaced by whole audiences of the past, and by a colonial Other, in the popular imagination.

The modern spectator, when confronted with illusion, undergoes the uncanny excitement of being both skeptical and vulnerable, of succumbing to an illusion at the same time as realizing that the illusion is false. As Cécile Whiting has noted, an audience can watch a documentary about the special effects used in Jurassic Park and then still jump in fear when the virtual dinosaurs lurch from the screen. Yet it seems as if modern viewers need something else as well, some familiar way to deflect their insecurity onto the credulous, the uninitiated, or the weak. *

*

*

“Reality television,” Germaine Greer said once, “is not the end of civilization as we know it: it is civilization as we know it. It is popular culture at its most popular, soap opera come to life.” The heady world of reality TV is no place for the skeptic. Just this year, there were numerous accusations that Kourtney & Kim Take New York had been “backfilled” with scenes that were faked later on. The finale of The Hills in 2010 was essentially a confession that the show had been scripted from the start: after a last sentimental scene, the camera zoomed out to show Brody Jenner standing in an outdoor set in a Hollywood studio. Said Kristen Cavallari, one of the protagonists: “Fans need to understand it’s all entertainment. It’s all in fun. I would never actually put my close friends or a real relationship on a show.”

It is hard to get a grip on the status of fact and fiction in contemporary visual culture, and it is hard to understand how skeptical or susceptible we are all supposed to be. Since the Blair Witch Project in 1999, found-footage style has become a horror movie staple. Comedies like The Office take on the appearance of documentaries, while factual documentaries mix in dramatic re-enactments and performative interventions. As basic ontological categories blur, and as nothing comes without self-conscious mediation, reality begins to assume all the values and demands of the spectacle.

We are fascinated, and we are vulnerable. In this sort of landscape, there is not even a screen

for Uncle Josh to rip down. You are not supposed to watch The Hills and then think it is true. But if you do not watch The Hills because you think it is false, then it seems that you too are missing the point somehow.

When the UK’s Channel 4 aired the reality show Space Cadets in December of 2005, the Sunday Mirror said it lay “somewhere between completely hilarious and incredibly cruel.” According to the promotional blurb: “Channel 4 is blasting a group of adventurers, ordinary members of the public, off into space to spend five days orbiting the earth. It’s thrilling, it’s exciting, and it’s totally bogus.” These would-be reality stars were hand-picked for their boldness and credulity. They were taken to a disused military base in Suffolk and then told that it was Russia, told that two of them would be chosen to go up into space (along with three professional actors who had been planted there to help guide the illusion).

The cadets were trained by a former KGB agent and their base was decked out in exclusively Russian products. (The production team at Suffolk smoked Russian cigarettes in case one of the contestants found a butt somewhere.) When they finally went up in the shuttle, which was a hand-medown from Space Cowboys and Armageddon, they saw a distant earth out the window thanks to Hollywood-standard visual effects. All told, the show cost Channel 4 more than four million pounds.

The cadets were put through their paces. They saluted a Russian “poem,” which was actually a translated recipe for English sausage pudding.

They memorized planet names, made balloon animals, acted out Alice in Wonderland. They wrote poems about their youth and they hugged it all out. Just before the show ended, they held a space funeral for a celebrity dog called “Mr. Bimby.”

At the grand finale, the host opened up the shuttle and showed the contestants that they were not in space but in a studio surrounded by their family and friends. Keri said she was “heartbroken,” said she had been planning a speech about her childhood dreams of going into space. Paul from Bristol said, “Aw, man. We’re not astronauts. We’re just asses.” And Billy Jackson said, “This is the biggest wind-up ever. This is wicked.” Each of them was given £25,000 and a trip to the real Space City near Moscow. The host’s relief was visible: the number of viewers had dwindled rather quickly, but the hoax had been pulled off without a major hitch.

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The reality-twist genre was nothing new when Space Cadets came around. Shows like Average Joe and Joe Millionaire had already applied a twist to the dating show format, as did the spectacular There’s Something About Miriam in 2003. The latter program, which was subtitled Find Me A Man, showed a group of English lads as they fought for the heart of a beautiful Mexican model named Miriam. It is an awfully tiresome show, but the finale is interesting enough. Here, Miriam stands on a balcony next to a cactus: she coyly announces her winner, who jumps forward and hugs her with a smug little smile. But the host intervenes and says that, before they can get on the boat full of money, there is something that Miriam has to say to Tom (23, lifeguard and ex-ski instructor). “I really love spending time with you, and kissing you. You see, I love men, and I love being a woman.” Tom is completely blank; the other contestants start to giggle arm-in-arm in the background. And then, of course, we find out that Miriam has a penis, and the joke is all on Tom—get it? Now the losers start to laugh, start to dance up in front of him—“I knew it, I told you, I knew it”—and Tom is looking faint then the host calls them all to order. Tom agrees to go on the boat anyway, because he and Miriam are “good friends” after all, and the host declares that a round of applause is in order.

And then Tom sues the show for defamation and sexual assault and personal injury through emotional and psychological damage. Some of the production team backs him up, and the show does not get released until the next season. It still goes to air, however, and—horrible treatment of transgendered life aside—There’s Something About Miriam proved to be a high (or low) point in the life of “reality-twist.”

Reality TV demands a certain degree of credulity from its stars and its audience. Yet to appeal to a media-savvy and generally skeptical audience, it becomes necessary to turn the viewers into producers: to draw a line in power between the two different sides of the screen.

It is hard to ignore the moralistic edge that comes with this form of spectatorship, especially when reality shows put participants through some ostensible test of character. Adam Mesh, who was adorable when he lost Average Joe to a pretty boy, went from hero to villain when he starred in his own dating show and chose a socialite over a schoolteacher. Viewers are always encouraged to try and pick out who is being sincere, who is be-

ing fake. (Often this choice determines who can stay on the show, as in the proudly panoptical Big Brother.) And when programs hold up the wrong kind of behavior—think I Love Money 3, for example—they can always hide behind the defense: look, this is just real life we are showing.

The “reality twist” pulls the rug out from under its stars, like “Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show” does to its fictional protagonist. And yet: if credulity is what these shows demand from their participants, then the space cadets and Tom (23, life guard and ex-ski instructor) are not really like Uncle Josh, because they are responding in precisely the right way to the illusion on the screen.

Reality television does not make its contestants into fools because they are doing it wrong—it makes them into fools for obeying, fools for living out the spectacle, as the audience must, in whatever way will sustain the illusion. The skeptical position is no defense, because the very concept of “reality shows” presupposes the deepest kind of skepticism. Those who are more vulnerable are simply those who are on air, those who are desperate to be seen: those who are lured to step out of their box. The only safe space is right here on the coach: here on on this side of the screen.

Unless. As the Space Cadets hoax wore on, the audience got bored and began to speculate on the internet. One of the show’s non-actor participants was seen in an ad for the National Blood Service; this, and the unbelievable credulity of the contestants, led to a “double hoax” theory—a suggestion that the joke might instead be on the gullible public, because in fact everyone on the show was an actor. The theory was dispelled by the end of the show, but it commanded a considerable following and seemed, for a time, rather convincing.

There were other theories posited as well.

“Maybe it’s a triple hoax,” one commenter wrote.

“They’re all actors, but they’re ACTUALLY going to get sent into space. The fame hungry twats.”

Another one wrote: “Producers, you really need to get everybody dressed up in monkey suits for when the ‘Cadets’ ‘Return to Earth’ for a comedy ending.”

A stranger thing that happened was the confessional that Charlie Skelton, one of the show’s professional actors, submitted to The Guardian after the big reveal. Skelton said he found it hard not to believe that he was actually in space, even while he knew he was running an experiment in groupthink. He described the poems that he wrote, based on a past full of lies, and the hugs that the group exchanged at moments when he shared them. “I enjoyed the poems,” he wrote. “I also—it has to be said—enjoyed the lies. I lied about my father being a violent wannabe jockey. I lied about my fear of Christmas trees. I lied about not believing that Albert Einstein existed. But always the truth outweighed the lies.” In the end, the joke was not on Charlie Skelton or the British viewing public.

But it just as well could have been.

The founding myths of early film paved the way for a visual culture that meets illusions with a mix of the skeptical and the credulous. The country rube figure and the Grand Café myth have long nourished the vanity of the modern watching audience: an audience that is increasingly sophisticated, but astonished nevertheless. Now, however, in the unstable world of reality programming, it is hard to be sure that the fool of the hoax can provide such catharsis. And as for Uncle Josh, well, he was nothing but an actor all along.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 27

Horsie On His Back Kayla Escobedo Ink on paper 30” x 24” 28 SPRING 2012

Pregnant Women on All Fours Kayla Escobedo Ink on paper 11’’ x 14’’ THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 29

Swallows MATT AUCOIN

Shards of exact memory, masters of local magnitude, keepers of untranslating logic where eternity is a wandering here — these twining parallel blindnesses in future-outpacing angles spelling disintegration of great intelligence: carefullest madness, black on blue, black on clear, memory everywhere proving life whose will still they scrawl still they carve this easiest element with fleet illegibles in circleshaming

30 SPRING 2012

precision — brightblack eyes — and at evening by the cathedral rouse thick air as if around vanished scaffoldings and night expands the gaps they are: lost arrows halftracing a sphere: all clockwise: yet some hover: yet some wander over what border: and hourly unities inarguable as breath shift the frame, smooth the canvas: here an absent entirety flickers: will they sing

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 31

Mirrors Ernesto Gaxha Charcoal and graphite on newspaper and paper 30” x 20”

32 SPRING 2012

The last of winter STEPHANIE NEWMAN

Sometimes, to avoid sadness, I ask what I will think when I know I am dying.

There, an orchid blooms and wilts. I wish I had loved more people.

Winds, preserve the shape of me, turns I make in the dark. I steer thoughts through forests, leave freight behind that warehouse where my friend lives— drawn into pages of directions, his light-pencil. In his eyes, traces of words: gray, faint, edgeless.

They are for me.

Lay them out on the motionless river, walk with blue flame in mind and give my friend my hand.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 33

Self-Portrait in a Flat Screen JULIAN GEWIRTZ

I. In the myth of Narcissus, the boy returns to his room late at night. He has had a few drinks and is alone. At the party, a silent man followed him around and wouldn’t shake. Narcissus wonders what his famous face looks like tonight, through the sweat and smoke of the party. He opens his laptop, still logged into PhotoBooth. The webcam’s green light shocks back on. His face fills the display. It is as if the screen remembered him.

II. Late one afternoon in January, a boy sat in my dorm room loading a movie he had brought with him. Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses flickered full-screen on my laptop.

“There’s only one good scene,” he said, like it was the best swing at the playground. Fastforward: Truffaut’s character Antoine Doinel is standing in a bathrobe in front of his mirror.

He is looking at himself in the glass and spitting out the names of his two lovers and then his own name, over and over.

“Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel...”

“My film TF told me about this movie,” the boy said, pausing it. Antoine Doinel’s lips froze,

34 SPRING 2012

pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss his mother, or his own mirrored face.

“I think I’m going to write my paper on it,” he said. “Talk about Lacan, throw in a little Rorty, mention Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror” in a footnote, and call it a day. Even has a title already—‘The Mirrored Stage.’ Get it?”

“Nice,” I said, looking at his hands, curled on the keyboard.

“I actually made my own version of this bit last night,” he laughed. “I don’t think I’m going to upload it to my YouTube account or anything, but you want to see?”

“Sure.”

He double-clicked on a file on his desktop. His background was a picture of him swimming in a lake, probably near his home in Connecticut.

QuickTime opened, and the video began to play.

In the video, the boy stood shirtless in front of his computer. He looked startled at the sight of his own chest. He moved in close to the display— he must have been using PhotoBooth—and his face glowed pale. Very quickly, in a bad French accent, he began to chant “Antoine Doinel.” His eyes were very still, looking straight back out at me as he looked into the webcam. After about fifteen seconds, he backed away and began to say his own name instead.

The space where I was sitting reappeared. I imagined him saying: “Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz...”

A minute in, the image froze where the playback ended. His face became a million pixels suspended mid-moment, lips pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss—anyone. I was not sure that he ever had before. The back of my neck was slick with cold sweat. He put his real hand to it, and my real skin flushed. We did not turn our faces from the screen.

III. At age thirteen, I made a Xanga, then a LiveJournal. I wrote my heart out and shelved the contents online: my secret book of lowercase i’s and emoticons, my pitiable self-pity. Sometimes I even made up cool-kid tales about my digital alter ego, “julian gewirtz,” who faced problems I’d heard about on the radio or in books. No one could tell the difference. My friends commented, droll as robots. The more vivid, the better— and I admired the most exciting diarists among them, like my friend Aviva, who was in the year above me in school.

Years later, on the second day of 2009, I moved to Beijing to study Chinese. I knew no one there and was terrified to be going. Aviva was the last person I said goodbye to. After we hugged, she called back from her car, “Skype me!”

At the end of my second week in China, I was as friendless and forlorn as I’d worried I would be. Aviva and I exchanged emails about finding a time to talk. After dinner in China, just after Aviva woke up in New York, I climbed into bed with my computer and logged onto Skype. A bubble popped up on my display: Aviva’s call.

I hadn’t used Skype much before. When videochatting on Skype, a large box takes up most of the screen—let’s call it the thou-box—showing the person you’ve called. A smaller box, the Ibox, shows you your own image. In this way, you can see what the other person sees in his thoubox, and your faces appear together, as if you’re in the same room. My friends had been on Skype long before I’d even heard of it.

Aviva’s voice came through sounding like a present packed with tissue-paper. “Let’s try the video?” she asked.

The thou-box holding her face sputtered onto my screen. As I searched for the button to turn

my webcam on, my I-box was still dark. Aviva’s face froze, and her voice went out.

“What’s going on?” she typed in the chat box.

“No clue,” I responded.

“Oy. What should we do?”

“Want to try again?”

We did. No luck.

“Another time, then?”

“Too bad. Sure. Just let me know.”

“Alright.”

“All right.”

“I thought either one was fine.”

“Maybe.”

“Bye!” “Bye.” I stopped typing and closed the chat box. My laptop hummed hot against my thighs. Inside the machine, its binary heart whirring, could the home I missed be processed? Oh, one— IV. Last month, E. was sick at home and thought up an experiment.

She set her laptop and her brother’s side by side. She opened Skype on both computers and called her brother on Skype from her computer.

From his computer, she picked up. She accepted her request to video chat. Both screens glowed more brightly. In the I-box, she saw herself. In the thou-box, she saw herself. Then she turned the screens toward each other and lowered her face between them. In each I-box, a small thoubox appeared, and a smaller I-box within, and a smaller thou-box within again.

You can get lost between the screens, if you let yourself.

V. On one Friday morning, I had a very clear story in my head when I woke up. I’m still not sure about it.

It was a Friday night, the last time we were together. The hallway at 21 South Street was very dark. No lights were turned on in the office. We sat in old wood chairs and were not speaking. My computer rested on the desk beside him, its pale plastic logo undulating. Upstairs, a few people were dancing to The Supremes. “Reflections” came on. In the mirror of my mind, I see reflections of you and me, reflections of the way life used to be, reflections of the love you took from me. It’s all in the voice.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 35

I wondered which room was darker, down here or up there. I wondered whether having more people in a room added any light, or took any away. There were three feet of room between us, three feet of silence, and then he stood up and walked out the front door.

I didn’t move to follow. The only thing I could think to do was open my laptop. The room became much brighter. I went to Facebook, typed in his name, and looked at pictures of his face.

I could not get through to it. I don’t remember what song the people upstairs danced to next.

Since that night, I have searched online for his last name so many times that those letters are working their order into my fingers. Have the small muscles in my right hand actually reorganized, rearranged to spell it out?

I have been trying to get him back from the screen, and the screen has gotten back at me.

VI. I took my first computer class in third grade.

The teacher, Mr. Peters, was about sixty, as old as Hewlett-Packard. He was deeply tanned, with a crew cut that sat unnaturally on his big head, like a too-tight silver helmet. In class, he held speed-typing competitions and showed us how to use the internet. My parents were delighted that I was getting a true twenty-first century education even in 1999.

One morning, Mr. Peters was explaining to the class the way that computer processors worked. I was bored. My gaze wandered to the bulky monitor, which we hadn’t been allowed to turn on yet, though below the desk the processor was already on. I saw my face reflected in the monitor’s dark, convex glass.

A few weeks before, Mr. Peters had given us an old computer to “dissect.” The machine was on a table in the middle of the room: the girls held back, but the boys swarmed it. We clawed at the box, ripping off the hard black plastic, tearing through the wires, pushing our fingers hard against the sharp metal shapes of the motherboard. The other boys in my class—one would not exactly call them my friends—pushed me to the side with an accidental elbow to my ribcage.

I spent the rest of the period watching the action.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was no blood.

Mr. Peters was still talking. Suddenly he was pointing triumphantly in my direction. “Just like

36 SPRING 2012

how your brain works!”

I began to blush, but the head-rush didn’t stop with my cheeks. I felt a hundred wires—red, yellow, blue—quivering inside my skull. Copper plates, cool to the touch, pressed against bone.

My eyes widened, screens opening onto a world of glimmers and beautyless bits. The classroom around me, the students at their desks, even Mr. Peters, were all flickering furiously. I was surrounded by holograms.

And then it stopped. No one had noticed. My chair was hard beneath me. The monitor was still dark. I do not have a computer in my head.

VII. When I boarded my flight to Paris, I checked my email on my phone. Rachel, one of my oldest friends, had sent me a picture she’d taken of herself, a “selfie,” with a tray of fresh-made croissants: Self-Portrait with Baked Goods. She was living in Paris, studying patisserie on a lark before starting at Yale. She wrote, “I’ll keep them warm until you get here!”

It was the November after we’d graduated from high school, the November of our gap year, and we were going to travel together. When I got off the Metro by Rachel’s apartment in the 4th, the sun had just crept over the horizon. A pinkish light filled the city’s bare trees, as if they were loaded with cherry blossoms. I felt tired and dirty.

Few people were up yet. I noticed a woman walk past me. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and white wedges, but I couldn’t see her face. She paused quickly to fix her hair in the screen of her smartphone, then hurried on.

I dropped my bags at Rachel’s. She gave me a cold chocolate croissant and bad coffee and ran off to class. The croissant was delicious.

I spent the day around the Marais. I went to a well-lit parfumerie and dabbed a half-dozen scents on my arms. I became a waft of lemongrass, vervier, clove, drifting through the city. I ate an omelette at Café Beaubourg, next to the Pompidou. I sat out in the Place Igor Stravinsky staring at strangers—cruising or people-watching, the difference is hard to remember—but didn’t meet anyone new.

The next day, Rachel was still busy with school.

I went out to Versailles for the afternoon. The sky was one white cloud. I dawdled through the perfect gardens and the empty palace. I walked through the Hall of Mirrors. It must have been

more impressive when Louis XIV built it, back when mirrors were rare and marvelous, like a wall of man-made diamonds. But now? The room was very chilly, and the pale sunlight glaring on the polished floor startled my eyelids closed. Shielding my face, I walked up to one of the mirrors and gave myself a looking-over. I noticed that the skin on my left forearm was red and raised. It didn’t look good.

I hurried back to Paris. Maybe I’d been allergic to one of the colognes, had contracted a horrible skin infection in transit, had an STD, had scarlet fever. What I didn’t have in Paris was a doctor, and Rachel was at school until the evening.

I got on my laptop and searched the Internet for pictures of something that looked like whatever was breaking out on my arm. I didn’t find anything that matched, so I decided to crowdsource. I pulled out my iPhone, took a picture, and uploaded it to an online medical message board. The caption on the photograph: “Does anyone know what this is?”

The next morning, I woke up early to re-pack.

Rachel and I were heading off to Vienna. I was happy to notice that the rash had disappeared. I never checked to see if my post had gotten any replies.

In Vienna, Rachel and I went to the opera and the museums. She brought her sketchbook to the vast Kunsthistorisches Museum. I left her in a

room of statues.

The first time I read John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” too early in high school, I wasn’t sure whether the painting that the poem reflects on really existed. “The portrait / Is the reflection once removed.” But there it was, Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, a small, dark circle framed on the museum’s wall. The sheen of the oil paints really did make its surface look like glass. I spent a few minutes watching it.

I don’t normally like to take tourist photographs, but—perhaps because I had been rereading Ashbery—I decided to take a selfie with the Parmigianino painting. All I had with me was my iPhone. I held it in front of me, my rash-free arm crooked so that I could position the painting in the frame. I saw my face in the screen, and Parmigianino’s behind. My thumb pressed a silver button, and the shutter clicked.

The picture came out passably: not too blurry, with decent lighting for a smartphone photo. A piece of my hand holding the phone intruded at the bottom of the frame, bigger than my head— I’d kept it there too long after clicking the camera button. I looked a bit confused, but that was all right. I was a bit confused. I wandered back to find Rachel. And I deleted both the photos from my iPhone. I didn’t need to look at them again.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 37

The Piano Lesson MATT AUCOIN

after Henri Matisse I. Hope of the boy’s hidden hands that they meet at the final triangle’s point, the key II. The twice-painted women are strung silent.

The boy sits in air’s clear fire between wrought music stand, wrought railing. The scene orients around the unseen bodiless dancer the women are bodies of.

III. The wrought railing strains for the world of green the world of time – in this house sheer cliffs, the window’s slice of green a slice of time, a sharp absent point on the burnt piano-top where the metronome mocks the candle, taps its own candlelife out in unlovely coughs

38 SPRING 2012

as the candle lost in its shining locks is too much song, is not hope IV. The two mothers guard the depthless walls of the past he purges now in song: with the rest of the brightened dead they inhabit hope – V. And now his fierce eye confounds its shape in a shadow honing into evening, narrowing, lengthening into nothing VI. Must I misshape time?

To another canyon, another imagined point?

O say the boy’s hands, strong with gathered gaze, meet that backwards eye

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 39

40 SPRING 2012

The Drop MY NGOC TO

I. I had expected my first bike accident to be much more loud and drawn-out. But it happened in less than one second. There was no glory. There was no sound. I had simply ridden my bike and fallen off, landing twisted among the sand and metal juts.

I felt no pain, only a tingling in my left knee.

I looked down and saw a large gash at the center of my knee. This porous stretch of skin contained little pink craters, each one containing a grain of sand, surrounded by multiple walls of flaking skin.

I stared at attention, fascinated at the transformation of my body, when something began to happen.

A thick, bright red liquid seeped out from underneath, coming out from all the pores. Once it reached skin level, it bubbled out in the form of tiny flowers, which I intertwined until that hole in my knee turned red. It poured over the sides and trickled down my leg. The tingling turned into a sting.

I started to limp quietly towards the front door of my house, whimpering as I went, for I had just gone through the experience that every little girl must go through, of witnessing her own blood for the first time.

II. Since then, I have watched blood flow from my body countless times. I am consistently taken aback by its color, its silent movement across my skin, its slight saltiness against my tongue. Most of the time, I am not expecting it or the events causing it, unless I need to have it drawn. Even then, my own blood remains quarantined inside tubes and I am not called to interact with it.

But once I was, in my sophomore year in college, in a basic science class in which we studied the structure and nature of certain molecules essential to life. We often studied associated diseases, so when we reached insulin, we turned our heads to diabetes.

In a class lab, we had to measure our bloodsugar levels before and after eating a glucose tablet. To do this we would have to prick our fingers with a tiny needle, wait for the blood to come out, and then insert that droplet onto the test strip of a machine for measurement. It was quite simple, really.

There were only a few pricking machines, so I had to wait my turn. I sat at my desk and watched ten other students play with their blood. The class, which generally stayed apathetically silent, had suddenly erupted into giggles and shouts of delight. I watched a tall lean boy next to me grin

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 41

and stare cross-eyed at his finger as the blood came out. Another girl in the back yelled to the class that she had a lot of blood in her finger.

I prayed that I could get a lot of blood too.

The machine finally came to me. With the needle poised and ready to shoot, I counted to three and then pressed down hard on the release button. Before I could make sense of the pain, it was gone. I looked down, and to my delight, a small drop had already formed at the side of my finger. The drop swelled to twice its size and turned slightly darker in hue. I let it drip onto the testing strip of the machine, and once the machine was finished reading, I handed it to my friend.

Barely anything came out from his fingers. I watched him scrape the side of his finger against the plastic strip in order to get any few drops in, but it was not enough, and the machine showed a failed reading. He tried again, pricking himself from a different finger, but only a scant amount went out. The machine revealed the same result: FAIL. I stared more than I should have—I found myself pitying him. Not because he couldn’t draw blood, but because it seemed as though his body did not hold any blood, as if his body had failed to keep itself running.

In the meantime, a giant drop of blood had already swelled on my skin and was threatening to slide down my finger. It wouldn’t stop coming out, and I continually wiped the drops away only to find them quickly replaced by another.

I was amazed at how much blood I had. More so, I was surprised at the vividness of its color. I stretched out my hands and imagined my hand without its cover, just a contained current of gushing blood. I felt pride.

III. Human skin is not very thick—just two to three millimeters—and yet it manages to hide the color of our bodies. If we peeled off our skins and threw them in the corner, all that would be left would be piles of meat and bone, complete with a set of eyeballs and spilling organs. And surrounding that would be blood, expanses of blood in all directions. Each human body contains up to five quarts of blood, enough to cover and stain the hardwood floor of any kitchen.

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IV. The next time I pricked a finger it was not my own. I’d taken up a part-time job as a research assistant in a geriatric clinic. I first started out dealing with just paperwork, but as I finished my trainings, I began to run the patient visits.

For a particular study about atrial fibrilation, we were required to measure the thickness of their blood by giving an INR, short for international normalized ratio, blood test.

A sweet old lady dressed in pastel floral patterns sat smiling at me from her chair. I fumbled around, gathering my necessary tools for my first real operation.

I slowly put on gloves and sat down on the stool in front of her. Everything happened very quickly. I sanitized her hands, took out the gauze and a Band-Aid in preparation, removed the stinger from its packet, and before I could think, I had already punctured a hole in her—the sweet red nectar was seeping out of her body.

My nervousness vanished the moment I saw the blood. It grew from her finger, forming a perfect round droplet. As I milked her finger for more, collecting it into the cup as I went, it began to spread to different parts of her finger, collecting in the small rivets of her skin, and it left behind the same familiar crimson stain. I no longer felt like I was dealing with a foreign object. Her skin became my skin, her blood my blood.

Once the cup was properly filled I inserted it into the cuvette, which drained the blood and simmered it inside the machine. The blood was boiling when I took it out.

I thought that her blood looked normal, but when the test results came back, we learned her INR had climbed up to almost five, while the normal range was two to three. I didn’t know what that meant at the time—her blood could have either been too thick or too thin. If it was too thin, I thought, there would be blood running like liquid through her body and seeping out of every little hole—through her eyes, her ears, her pores. If it was too thick, it would clot and stick to the vessels. Perhaps her high body temperature would have warmed up the blood, just like the machine did to the sample, and simmer it softly, just until it was cooked and brown like the coagulated pork blood that gets sold in Vietnamese grocery stores. I could not believe she was so close to death.

V. Whenever one of our patients had a bleed event or was hospitalized for any reason, we would receive pages and pages of lab results measuring almost every imaginable chemical in their blood. I had to enter each value into the computer: the time and date the blood was collected, the chemical being measured, and its normal range.

This took hours and hours to finish. Once, when an event came up, I sat in front of the computer for two days entering almost three hundred labs.

That was my first time looking closely at any medical terms. Some terms I could understand, such as uric acid, glucose, or sodium, but I also encountered combinations of letters I had never seen before. Gradually, I came to understand that rbc stood for red blood cells, wbc for white blood cells, and hgb for hemoglobin. But there were still others that, even today, I do not know, only that the values recorded were almost all out of range.

One patient was in the hospital for one week, from December 28 to January 6. When I paid attention to the dates, I saw that his levels were mostly normal in December, but come January 2, almost half of his lymph%s and MCVs and MPVs were slightly abnormal, and then by January 6 his glucose levels had jumped to five times the normal amount.

But I was finally done, and I thought no more about it. I simply assumed that everyone was off in some way or another.

Later on, as I handed the paperwork back to my boss, I mentioned how a lot of this patient’s labs were abnormal. She paused for a second, and then explained that this patient had been in the hospital for quite some time for a serious bleeding event. She had been quietly watching him die.

I realized then what I had just done. I had documented the slow death of a man by watching his blood go berserk.

Blood holds within it the history of an entire life, and as long as we live, it flows through our bodies carrying evidence of our past, making us bleed and clot and cry until that history dissipates, and blood withers away with the life it once carried. Like how the lights on a switchboard go out one by one in a crashing plane with increasing speed until all the lights suddenly vanish, I was watching the levels of each vital fluid in his body shoot off in dangerous directions—until one day, when his entire blood system completely loses its balance, the last light will turn black, and he will have hit the end.

And I would sit in front of the computer with no more blood to enter. And a few days after, we would receive a safety notification letter from the International Review Board, saying that the cause of concern was, in cold, bold letters, DEATH. I would punch holes in that document and file it away in the binder used specifically for study correspondence, and then put that stark white paper away until it was time to move on to the next life.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 43

SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2011-2012 academic year. They have made possible the Advocate’s commitment to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus offers, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but also our mission to promote the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street hosted a wide array of literary and artistic events. Daniel Bosch, John Lithgow, and Ben Loory—to name only a few—visited, spoke, and read; local musicians played the blues in the Sanctum. Our new Community Outreach Program has helped expand the Advocate’s presence in our neighborhood and the broader Cambridge and Boston area. Our members have continued to faciliate the creative writing curriculum of a second and third grade classroom at the William Blackstone Elementary School in the South End in Boston.

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CONTRIBUtors' notes

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES Stephanie Newman says, “Caramel.” Matt Aucoin is and is. Rebecca Levitan is working on a series of paintings.

Scott Roben is cleaning a squeegee. Kayla Escobedo is working on a new series of comics. www.kaylaescobedo. com. “Alexander J.B. Wells,” he spoke, and drank rapidly a glass of water. I see Julian Gewirtz’s point. Georgina Parfitt is making a boat with Sam. My Ngoc To has her pet cactus back. Ernesto Gaxha really wants your toothbrush.

Naomi Funabashi wishes more people used fountain pens.