Spring 2008 by The Harvard Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS spring 2008 contest issue CONTEST WINNERS 8 10 20

Aftermath (Poetry) No Red Flags (Fiction) Efface (Art)

Amelia Klein Alexandra Kjuchukova Bea Camacho

ART 17 Whaley is Sent to Poland 29 Got Him 32 A Story 33 Poverish 44 24 1/2 FEATURES 4 34 38 54

Notes from 21 South Street: Almost Lost Not Quite There: The Music of Arthur Russell Deserters from Other Circuses: The Fiction of Bruno Schulz and Ivan Bunin Pygmalionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wife: Maria Callas, YouTube, and the Memory of Film Envoy: In Transit

Amy Lien Lydia Conklin Isidore Bethel Amy Lien Jack McGrath

Richard Beck Marta Figlerowicz Matt Spellberg Greg Scruggs

FICTION 22 43

Freak Out from Against the Grain

Stephen Narain Megan Colleen Harney

Parents from On the Genealogy of Spring Humors

Maria Vassileva Laura Kolbe

POETRY 16 18

Cover design by XX Illustrations by Dana Kase SPRING 2008

Art

Emma Banay*, Nicole Bass, Ruben Davis, Evan Hanlon, Alexandra Hays, Dana Kase*, Paul Katz*, Rebecca Lieberman, Thalassa Raasch, Julia Renaud*, Michael Stynes, Martabel Wasserman.

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James Atlas Louis Begley Douglas McIntyre Susan Morrison Austin Wilkie Charles Atkinson

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Sanders Bernstein, Diane Choi*, Alwa Cooper, Ruben Davis, Eyal Dechter, Liya Eijvertinya, Natalie Evans, Alexandra Gutierrez, Evan Hanlon, Alexandra Hays, Amy Heberle, Catherine Humphreville*, Olivia Jampol, Paul Katz, Taro Kuriyama*, Justine Lescroart*, Erin Miles, Garrett Morgan, Claire-Marie Murphy, Seth Myers, Geraldine Prasuhn, Logan Pritchard, Gregory Scruggs, Mike Segal, Caroline Williams, Emily Walker, Natalie Wong*, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu*.

design

Avis Bohlen, Ekaterina Botchkina, Sabrina Chou*, Alexandra Hays, Dana Kase*, Charleton Lamb*, Rebecca Lieberman, Lauren Packard, LeeAnn Suen, Rachel Whitaker.

features

Anna Barnet, Richard Beck, Brittany Benjamin*, Alexandra Fabry, Marta Figlerowicz, Allison Keeley*, Kim Gittleson, Alexandra Gutierrez, Evan Hanlon, Ryder Kessler, Anna Polonyi*, Gregory Scruggs, Kevin Seitz*, Jessica Sequeira*, Grace Tiao.

fiction

Aliza Aufrichtig, Jesse Barron, Sanders Bernstein, Britt Caputo, Alexis Deane, Marta Figlerowicz, Carolyn Gaebler, Daniel Howell, Justin Keenan*, Laura Kolbe, Charleton Lamb*, Max Larkin, Linda Liu, Teddy Martin*, Ryan Meehan*, Garrett Morgan, Matthew Spellberg, Marya Spence, David Thoreson, April Wang, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino*.

poetry

Nicole Bass, Courtney Bowman, John Davies, Tim Hwang, Carmen James, Olga Kamensky, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla*, James Leaf*, Lauren Nikodemos, Adam Palay*, Joseph Quinn, Gabriel Rocha, Margaret Ross, Caroline Schopp, Gregory Scruggs, Michael Stynes, Ayten Tartici, David Wallace, Chris Van Buren, Maria Vassileva*, Mike Zuckerman. Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. While primarily an undergraduate publication, The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Potential contributors should be aware that submissions policies are set year by year and are subject to change. For current submission policies, please send a query with a self-addressed stamped envelope or consult the website at www.theharvardadvocate.com. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and foreign addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110z for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase, but price and availability varies depending on the issue. Please inquire by writing to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Recent issues and a history of the magazine can be found on our website. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2007 by the Editors and Trustees

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NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET

ALMOST LOST, NOT QUITE THERE: THE MUSIC OF ARTHUR RUSSELL

The nice thing about dance music is that it doesn’t want to know who you are because it already knows how you work. This is alienating for many people, and it is understandably alienating, because for at least a century American music has been dominated by the song. Rock, pop, R&B, soul, and any number of other popular genres have perpetuated themselves in four-minute installments over the course of decades. Jazz draws its standards from the popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century. Even hip-hop, which started out as the soundtrack to block party dance battles, now tells rhyming short stories with a verse and a chorus. Dance music, though – and I mean the kind of music that is made specifically and exclusively for dancing – has no compelling reason to become song. Songs tell stories about themselves. You can listen to a song by yourself, and you can come to feel as though you know a song, that it’s told you something. It is possible to think about a song when it isn’t there. You can hum its melody, or sing its words to yourself, anywhere at any time. Dance tracks are inconceivable unless they’re hurtling through a room. The reaction they provoke is a physical one. Nobody puts a favorite dance lyric below their yearbook photograph. Just think of the stereotypical clubber, helplessly trying to explain his use of leisure time to a friend, pumping his fist and blurting out, “It’s just like, thmp! thmp! thmp! thmp! and it’s just there and you feel it!” Dance music may not know who that guy is, but it knows how he works. Dance music also involves a refreshing kind of artistic anonymity. Dance tracks are not performed by their creators at concerts. Instead, they are played by DJs in clubs, where they are integrated into a fluid mix that facilitates the dionysiac abandon of those on the dance floor. If a track is particularly great, it

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will divert attention from its own status as a creative utterance, something which is largely alien to the workings of rock or pop. If a track is particularly great, audience members will be focusing on their own bodies, smiling at each other, enjoying the intersections of amplified sound and controlled substances. Dance music is made of sounds more than it is made by artists. Except that it is, technically, still made by artists. One of them is named Arthur Russell. In 1979, Russell came to New York City and threw himself headlong into the city’s thriving disco scene. His first single, “Kiss Me Again,” was one of Sire Records’ first important disco releases. He produced one of house music’s foundational anthems, a track called “Is It All Over My Face?” (it is exactly what you think it is). He also recorded experimental solo albums featuring his sublime, watery voice and amplified cello playing. Recently, after some years of obscurity, Russell has been rediscovered by critics and fans. A documentary called Wild Combinations: A Portrait of Arthur Russell premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. The writer Tim Lawrence will publish his biography of Russell in the next few months. They can take care of any biographical details for now. While the critical interest in Russell the man may be at odds with dance music’s suppression of the auteur, it is not entirely detached from Russell’s music. Indeed, in even his most remixable, floorfriendly tracks, Russell scatters his electronic, looped repetition with beguiling hints of personality. One of the best of these tracks is “Tell You Today,” which was released under the name Loose Joints in 1983 on West End Records. The song opens with a steady, cowbell heavy beat. The vocal track that soon enters – a female voice singing “tell you” over and over – is obviously looped rather than sung, but Russell makes use of at least four versions of the same thing, each one slightly different in pitch and timbre. Lurking behind the electronic studio work is a woman who sang a two note phrase at least four different times.

The vocal drops out, and it is quickly replaced by a brass section that undermines its own repetitive funk stuttering by getting a lot of the notes wrong. Again, Russell has posited an anonymous group of live musicians working behind the veil of his track’s endless beat, and this group of musicians cannot get the notes right. His most ingenious trick comes next; somebody starts whistling, a casual rising four note figure that definitively signals a human presence who will not speak, at least not yet. There are a few more hints and half-measures. About thirty seconds of piano riffing introduces the lightest touches of blues inflection and gospel rumbling. The song has had you by the brain and by the feet, but now it’s starting to filter into your gut. That weird “tell you” vocal makes a final appearance, and then from nowhere two descending piano crashes appear which almost magically imbue the track with a new, deeper kind of rhythmic cohesion and momentum. You’re expecting just the one crash, but when it’s the second that finally launches the song into a world where all of Russell’s instrumentation has suddenly clicked, the effect is so disorienting that there’s nothing to do but look around at the new surroundings and wonder how exactly they came to be. Then, just as you think you’ve regained your footing, Russell starts singing. His voice is a little difficult to pin down around the edges, and it tends to resonate somewhere in the back of his mouth, but it has such a strong sense of its own easy clarity that its emotional cargo seems to deliver itself unimpeded by the actual physical demands of singing. Layered on top of itself, as it is here, it’s a kind of rapture. The lyric he sings looks dumb on paper, but then if pop musicians weren’t such terrible poets, pop lyrics might look better on paper. Here it is anyway: On my way to work, I said your name again, again today It was just a quirk, I only feel it when, when I say It makes me come alive, I remember the look of sadness on your face That was before, I want to tell you today. It’s worth mentioning that the way that the edges of Russell’s voice surge over their own sonic borders on the second “again” blurs the line between reiteration and new utterance, and thus effects

a kind of ecstatic flowering of the song’s already ravishing emotional light. It’s also worth noticing the fact that the song’s final three minutes may be described as a short set of words set to music. In other words, “Tell You Today” has turned itself into a song. Russell’s other dance singles do not trace such intelligible paths. Sometimes they don’t seem to be tracing anything at all. “Schoolbell/Treehouse,” released under the name Indian Ocean in 1986, maintains a murky bongo beat but is otherwise perpetually inverting its own sonic landscape, fading rhythmic whispers into disco synthesizer riffs. Russell’s electrified cello figures give way to, of all things, a cloudy French horn solo. Likewise, the clattering beat that grounds “Let’s Go Swimming” is constantly finding new ways to interact with the song’s bass experimentation, synthesized syncopation, and brief spells of gorgeous vocal melody: “I’m banging on your door / Up in the deep blue sky.” Critics have written that Russell’s music sounds like regular dance music gently plunged into a pool, or like regular dance music beginning to float at the very edges of the earth’s atmosphere, but it’s actually even stranger than that. Russell’s music does not sound like it comes from here, but it also does not sound like it comes from somewhere else. This kind of musical diversity makes Russell frustrating because he cannot be genre-fied. Yes, he made important disco singles, but there’s also some house and garage in his dance tracks, and that’s going to be difficult to reconcile with his voice-and-solocello LPs. And then there are those two volumes called Instrumentals, and that almost medievally austere orchestral record, Tower of Meaning. Genres being the endlessly fluid constructs that they are, it’s not terribly surprising that they would sometimes fail to do their job and tell us what this music is. In Russell’s case, however, genre description has failed in a really spectacular way. Perhaps this is why writers, filmmakers, and critics have been trying to reconstruct Russell’s biography with such manic zeal. Matt Wolf’s documentary film is partially titled A Portrait of Arthur Russell. In the trailer – and what better place to look for a film’s true intentions – the music writer David Toop articulates this impulse clearly and succinctly: “Arthur, in a way, was not tied to any of these styles. Arthur was tied to Arthur.” The name, repeated three times, becomes an icon, one which might SPRING 2008

just reveal its innermost secrets if we learn enough about who he was, or where he came from, or what he was like. The word “tied” is also very revealing. If Russell cannot be successfully lashed to disco, or house, or the experimental avant-garde, let him be lashed to himself. Let his name, date, and place make him known. But as Russell’s later music began to move down the more traditional avenues of pop expression – song form, lyrics written and sung by Russell himself: the trappings of singer-songwriterdom -his music also began to fade away. As Russell’s cello moved to the center of his instrumentation, his playing became almost ghostly, the strings touched at their surfaces rather than from the center of some vibrating mass. His voice, too, sounds distracted, as though his music had been turned from its own goals by half-grasped wisps of inspiration. But the idea that Russell’s music has lost focus turns out to be a graceful deception. His rhythms are still locked in, complicated, sure of themselves. For the first thirty seconds of “This Is How We Walk On the Moon,” Russell plays his cello as though he’s on the verge of putting it down and impulsively completing some household task. But then some bongo pattering

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falls into place, and once he starts singing (“Every step is moving me up,” over and over), the song’s own rhythmic structure, shimmering and powerful, reveals itself. With two minutes left, from nowhere, Russell’s voice appears again, only this time routed through a watery synthesizer effect. It repeats, in imposing harmonic towers, “This is how we walk on the moon,” with none of the subtle shading that characterizes his unprocessed vocals. His voice is alienated from itself; it’s abandoned the grainy tangibility that allows us to identify any voice as individual. What initially sounds like a song turns out to be a dance track in the process of forgetting itself. The music writer Matt Ingram has described these solo recordings as “Disco’s bones and ectoplasm.” How wonderful that as Russell gently effaces melody, tone, and lyrical intelligibility – his words frequently recede into the tone of his voice – it’s the beat, hidden in the spaces of his hollow, evaporating notes, that should lend such weight and drive to his late music. Russell’s best work is the 1986 LP World of Echo, on which his largely unaccompanied voice and cello playing move alternately through clouds of fuzzy distortion and open spheres of sonic space.

The album’s second track, “Soon to be Innocent Fun,” is nine and a half minutes long. Its gentle cello patterning and half-mumbled, keening vocals move through a series of loosely organized verses while allowing themselves to be distracted, seduced, or enchanted by some particularly resonant phrase or figure. Like the album itself, which runs well over an hour from start to finish, “Soon to be Innocent Fun” is music to be lost in, which is not to say that it’s any kind of background noise. In fact, probably the opposite. World of Echo has a way of quieting conversations, of compelling and then rewarding a listener’s attention with a procession of inspired notions and half-formed intuitions. It doesn’t dominate a room. It doesn’t raise its voice and say, “Listen to me!” It has a whole revolving constellation of strategies and alchemical inventions at its disposal. Yes, it’s a big, complicated logic at work in World of Echo, one which may be perceived in bits and pieces but never mapped out or arrested in the process of its own perpetual reorganization. This logic drives, for example, “The Name of the Next Song,” in which Russell proposes a series of names for “the next song”- Anti-American, Painted Box, I’m Sorry But This is How I Learn - over the course of eight minutes. The miniature songs which appear in between these proposed names aren’t songs at all, just a few seconds of cello improvisation. Why name something that never actually appears? Why keep changing the name? Maybe, then, it will help to look at the words. This is, after all, an album of songs, and while Russell’s voice intentionally inhabits a zone located somewhere between sound and speech, there are times when his words ring out loud and clear. From “Place I Know / Kid Like You:” “We’re up on some kind of hill / Where we ended up / ‘Cause your friend did something that put me on fire,” and “A kid like you could never understand / A man like me, I never understood that.” On “Hiding Your Present From You,” Russell sings, “I’m putting everything around you / Over by you.” On this LP’s version of “Let’s Go Swimming,” some kind of intimate relationship suggests itself again: “Cause where you go I go / That’s where I’ve always gone.” Russell is singing to someone. There is a vague “you” who understands what Russell is talking about, to whom World of Echo is directly addressed. But this “you” never shows his face. The relationship described on World of Echo is a series of exchanges,

offerings, and dependencies that are suspended without discernable features between Russell and You. What makes its intimacy so convincing is the way that Russell shies away from spelling it all out. He would rather communicate by exactly the kind of pre-verbal intuition that makes his dance tracks so bewitching. After all, the gap between what two people know of their own relationship and what everyone else knows about that relationship is always enormous. Why forfeit a relationship’s value by trying to explain it to an audience that can ultimately choose to walk away, uninterested and unmarked? Better to hide the things that really matter between the two of you. Better keep them off the record. In Russell’s case though, the relationship falls apart. He never says why. The album’s final track is called “Our Last Night Together;” it’s the only title on World of Echo that directly alludes to the song’s subject matter. Russell sings, “Although you’re coming back / It’s our last night together,” again and again, his voice keening, strong, filled with grief. This is not a voluntary separation: “This jump is just a one way street / That’s taken you away from me.” Horribly, it’s only when Russell’s “you” is leaving, dying, gone, that he pronounces every word, as though there’s no one left to know what’s wrapped up in his slurred melodies. One of the most jarring things about the end of a relationship, if it’s been a good one, is the sudden realization that you have to explain yourself to everyone around you. “Our Last Night Together” finds Russell on the brink of losing the one person who didn’t need to hear him speak. So here’s the biographical information, which may still be relevant. Arthur Russell was a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa who moved to a San Francisco Buddhist commune and began to write for his cello at the age of 18. He studied North Indian music at the Ali Akbar College of Music. A year after he moved to New York City, he began a relationship with a man named Tom Lee that would last for twelve years. Russell died of AIDS in 1992. These are facts that position themselves somewhere in the revolving constellation of Russell’s singles, albums, collaborations, and pseudonyms, but they are not the meaning of Russell’s music. They are not what one finds when the music has been sanded off or cleared away. In any case, Russell didn’t make objects or solid things to record events. He started with dance music, and you can’t really think about dance music unless SPRING 2008 i t ’ 7s actually in the air.

aftermath 1. Not understanding what I was I took a piece out of my side and smashed it and diffused it through the hole in what had been my side beginning to see myself though faintly still just catching at myself. I was dust. And distance, distance descried by dust. I am no longer together, I said, perhaps I am free. And I ignited then. 2. Some parts I remember. For example, when I drew out from bleared dark alive my shape, alive how it trembled dark to 8

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pieces. Later, how my many bodies swam together, silvering. And I remember the stitch of dusk, the dew that rose to meet my instep arch. The first time I flew. The first time I was afraid. 3. I have given the last of my dreams away to the separate animals. They do not know me, who am them. And I do not recall building this city, its black water blooming on its walls. I must have placed one stone upon a stone, and then another stone upon a stone, the dust motes as I did it crying fool, and crying star, crying let go, let go, and then just go, and then just o. SPRING 2008

NO RED FLAGS

“What about the police?” Erin eyed intently the darkening Notre Dame, found it strangely lacking in tourists and pigeons. “Don't worry, they're cool with it here,” he was already lighting the joint, “Plus, we would see them from a distance.” “Yeah... They'd have to be faster than the local pickpockets to catch us unprepared,” but despite that comment she gauged it was safe, or safe enough not to worry right now, “So, given that pickpockets thrive here notoriously, I guess we're ok.” “I'm glad they bring you a sense of security,” Paul said, smoking with a languidness that she found unbecoming. “You guys don't mix it with tobacco in the US, do you?” “Not usually...at least my friends never did. I was brought up to think that, if you have good weed, mixing it is a kind of unwholesome squandering.” “Here people are not as intense. They talk while they smoke,” he was holding the joint in the air, “they don't rush. I was surprised, too, at first, but I like it that way.” He dragged on the joint in silence, passed it to her with what could be considered an immoderate delay. “I haven’t smoked in a really long time,” she did not want to seem in a hurry, “One could wonder what I’ve been doing this whole semester.” Erin turned her attention, a bit too avidly perhaps, to the joint. As soon as she inhaled, she started coughing with an intensity that she hadn’t invested in any other activity in this city, where she had been wearily located, as of that day, for seventeen and a half unbroken weeks. When she recovered, she summed up the incident, “I told you, I’m out of shape.” “Take it easy,” he said, amused just enough, “take your time.”

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She resumed smoking, but with gentle devotion, filling her lungs in small, patient increments. Suddenly there was light coming from behind them as if the city lamps had just been lit. “Do you know what this is?” he drew her attention to it. “I am assuming it’s not the police,” she created as little circulation of air as possible but turned around to examine the phenomenon, “Oh, ok. It must be a boat,” she let out the smoke. “So charmingly Parisian... Although I went on one of these trips too, so I should refrain from making contemptuous comments. But you should know, I only went out of boredom.” “Who did you go with?” “Just me,” said Erin. “Several of my personalities, though, at once.” The conversation was then interrupted by one of those fleeting Notre Dame incidents which fall upon you like drizzle, inevitable and annoying, and leave you slightly out of your comfort zone, but never enough so to change your plans for the evening. One of the local under the bridge residents, a man who seemed to have no access to a shower, approached them with the conviction that their conversation could make extensive use of a third party. He asked for hash, then for a cigarette, then went through a list of other typical local alms. He made a tactful comment about them being a “lovely couple” and noted that their relationship must be thriving, according to the principle that when a woman pretties herself for you, it’s a sure sign that it’s going well. “We only met a few of hours ago,” Paul specified, unnecessarily, and put out the joint. Such gratuitous disclosure of information to other strangers was disturbing, and she registered it, but focused instead on finding the right time

The subway station was only two blocks away, but the streets were still dark, and he insisted that he walk with her. Soon, they were at the overly illuminated entrance, and she was rummaging through her bag for a Metro card. She didn’t expect a promise, or feel entitled to one, but he said, “Call me when you get back, ok?” and kissed her cheek lightly. *

to interrupt the old man with an emphatically conclusive “bonne nuit.” The bum presented them with his blessing and established that he wasn’t getting anything out of it, so he resumed his round. When the two of them were alone, Erin thought that the charms of the location had already been exhausted. “It’s getting a little chilly here,” she pointed out, “Wanna go for a walk?” * When all the alarm clocks in Paul’s apartment started firing in quick succession, the thrust out of sleep was too jarring, and for a first disorienting moment Erin could not place the scene. Then, the memory of last night flowed into her waking body, and she felt at ease. She had to catch a 7 a.m. train to Lyon – she was finally leaving Paris, if only for a day – and first she had to stop by her house. This had left them under two night hours for sleep, and only a meager fraction of dawn, enough to jump into their clothes, but not to experience the triviality of an early, potentially awkward coffee.

In the mornings they had toast and coffee, or other unimaginative forms of breakfast which he prepared with self-conscious competence that she didn’t take as a sign of culinary expertise but rather as an endearing symptom of mild OCD. He boiled eggs so skillfully that, as he once noted with a pronounced sense of self-worth, there was always a tiny soft dot right in the center of the yolk; then, he sliced them with care and precision that few sources of protein are granted in the average household. It had taken surprisingly little to establish this morning ritual – the lovers had made room for each other with unusually immediate dedication. During the day, Paul painted or went about his business, and Erin studied the city, its overrated monuments and museums, with a newfound patience which lasted until it was time to meet him. They woke up together in his apartment, always, and sifted through the slow, ceremonial pleasure of mornings. When he was not entirely engulfed by an effort at cooking, they recounted what they did in daylight and were getting to know each other inevitably. “I talked to my mom,” Erin said, “she was asking me how I spend my time now that exams are over.” “Did you tell her about me?” Paul was spreading butter intently. “Sure, why wouldn’t I?” she was observing the process as if to learn from it. “Did you tell her how old I am?” he was aligning impeccable slices of egg on the toast. “No, it didn’t come up. We didn’t talk for that long.” “But you would’ve told her if she’d asked?” he insisted, and looked up to examine something above her head. “Of course I would – of course I will. There are only very particular kinds of things that I hide from her, things that I know she wouldn’t come to terms with.” Seeing that he expected her to elaborate, she continued, “For instance, I’d never even come close SPRING 2008

to telling her that I stole a book once. She would be extremely upset about that.” “You stole a book?” He didn’t make much of being initiated into her terrible secret. “Which one?” “A collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy. What prompted me was that there was a poem in it called ‘Stealing.’ It’s quite good, somebody in it steals a snowman. I used to know it by heart, but I’m not going to risk reciting it, I don’t want to butcher a work of art.” “I can try to find it online,” Paul said. “What’s the name of the author again?” “Carol Ann Duffy. I don’t think she’d be upset that I stole the book – as far as I am concerned, the book was practically asking to be stolen, which is partly what made me do it. But mostly I just wanted to see what it’d feel like,” she sipped her tea with a kind of relief. “For example, I wanted to see if it’d make me feel guilty.” “And do you?” “Not really, no. I haven’t told anyone else about it, though. Not one person.” “I’m touched,” he laughed. “But seriously, it’s bothered me quite a bit. Not so much that I stole the book, but that I don’t have a problem with it at all. It’s abstractly clear to me that it’s wrong to steal, or that it should be wrong, but I don’t really feel it. So I hadn’t told anybody. I’m not very comfortable being judged about it when I don’t yet know what I think.” “Well, I shoplifted when I was a teenager. I don’t think it’s a big deal.” Erin reached under the table, laid her hand on his thigh. “But I guess you’re right,” he said, putting his hand on hers, “people will judge you. Unless they have been in the same situation, they’ll judge you.” * At first, Erin considered the sex a pleasant, if disillusioning, preview of that distant stage, maturity. There was none of the inexhaustible, violent energy of guys her age, but instead a tempered, intricate skill. This must be what it’s like to have sex at forty, she thought. The discovery wasn’t disappointing, but she found it not sufficiently foreign. It took her about two weeks to detect that she was falling victim to a restrained but growing

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attachment, a longing to diminish the thin volume of air between the arc of her back and his warm, enveloping skin. One of the sick jokes of evolution, she thought, but turned around and drew her lips to his ear, about to break the quiet with a murmur. “I was wondering…what do you think about being tied up?” he asked, seeing her turn to him, and pressed her close. * Several hours after they met, they had rated each other’s company compelling enough to last through another drink, and possibly even a second encounter, though the incertitude of the latter still hovered, and left both of them less than disconsolate. This was in a café near St. Germain, where their brief walk had been interrupted by an aching thirst, a thirst that marijuana invariably produces, often along with uncontrollable laughter or disoriented longing. They were sitting outside, below an array of heaters – the type that glow somewhat ubiquitously in this city, making it barely warm enough to take off your coat and still be on the street. They were separated from the sidewalk by a transparent curtain which, if one thought about it literally enough, made the scene reminiscent of a gymnasium shower. It was under these circumstances that he had his first non-trivial relapse into divulging autobiographical data: he grew up in Italy, then went to Dartmouth (an Ivy League school, as he found necessary to clarify) and donated sperm twice a week almost unfailingly throughout college. He started off with a job in consulting, which, after a year, he found uninspiring enough to quit in order to teach English to high school kids in Tokyo, where he lived in a tiny studio near Palette Town. Paul described the city as futuristic, freakishly lit up, fast, and alien. He said that his job left him a lot of spare time and that for many months he’d managed to feel utterly lonely, despite the constant shifting of the surrounding crowd. “And then I met this girl, a Brazilian girl, Anita. I was walking down the street, it was a huge street with several lanes and a really broad sidewalk. It was so hot that day I could almost feel the level of the Sumida dropping. And then the strangest thing happened, I heard ringing and laughter, then there was a group of white girls riding bicycles next to me on the road. It was so rare to see white girls, they were so pretty and loud, and laughing, and they were all wearing very little because of the heat, the

sight was surreal. They smiled at me, and I followed them.” The rest of the narrative sounded to her a lot more surreal, and she only believed it because he seemed sufficiently intelligent to make up a more realistic story. He had caught up with the girls at a street light, they’d talked, exchanged numbers, and he had pursued one of them with persistence and success. In three short months he’d quit his job, she’d left her boyfriend of four years, and they had moved together to Amsterdam. He had saved up some money in Japan and started off as an artist; she was a dancer. They’d lived in virtually every European capital, and eventually in Paris, where they had recently separated. “For how long were you together?” she was trying to measure precisely the impact of seeing an underdressed Brazilian dancer riding a bike in a crowded city in Asia. “A long time, really long time,” he wouldn’t say, “We were never married, but you couldn’t tell the difference. We only split up about two years ago...it was really complicated... I got into another relationship right away, and that lasted for about a year, so it was very recently that everything that happened really hit me.” He took a gulp of Long Island Iced Tea, “I’ve been by myself a lot.” Erin couldn’t come up with a considerate response because she was distracted by a calculation. She gave the Anita stage roughly a decade, and estimated how old that’d make him – thirty-five, perhaps thirty-seven. Although he had inquired specifically about her age, she thought that returning the question would be irrelevant, and, at this point, a little insistent. “Have you ever been in love?” he invited her to reciprocate the confession. “Well,” she nibbled on a maraschino cherry, “I don’t know...I think so, yes. In fact, yes, one time.” Her hesitation betrayed that she probably hadn’t had the experience, but realized at least that the word “love” bore some gravity. “I’m judging by how profoundly depressing it was. Let’s not talk about it.” But despite the recoil she found herself bestowing on Paul as much trust as she could possibly afford after a short walk and a light cocktail. At that, her pulse slightly shifted; he finished his drink. “I live just a few blocks from here,” he announced, “do you want to come take a look at my paintings?” She was the one who had chosen the meeting location, so the peculiar proximity of his apartment

legitimately qualified as an accident, rather than a transparent set-up. “Let’s see,” Erin glanced at her watch, “the Metro will be running for another hour and a half,” she looked at him, allowed herself a meditative intermission, “Are you going to kidnap me?” “Kidnap you?” he seemed surprised by the question, “I don’t think so, no.” “Ok then, no red flags. I’ll stop by briefly, but I have to catch the last train.” * The Metro had long stopped running when they lay in bed trying to calculate how many children he must have all over the US. Erin tried to underestimate the number significantly, so she assumed that less than ten percent of his donations resulted in progeny. It then seemed justified to phrase the conclusion with an “at least,” the absurdity of which entertained her perversely. “At least sixteen,” she concluded, “and that’s if we’re skeptical. Wow,” she imagined a little Paul strolling roughly through every third American state, “how does it make you feel?” “I don’t think about it much,” he said, rolled over

SPRING 2008

and put out the light. * Most of what they had in common was always present: a room, a bong, the beginnings and ends of days. They never fought, disagreed at worst. “I think you can drop it already,” she wasn’t irritated as much as bored, “I told you, the age difference does anything but disturb me,” she paused. “Or does it disturb you?” “Not at all,” he raised his voice slightly, “I’m just saying that’s it’s a big difference, that’s all. It would be a problem, say, if we were to have kids.” “This is not exactly on my agenda,” it seemed natural to dismiss his comment, “for the upcoming week. I have yet to see Paris before I go.” Erin decided to steer the discussion away from the purely hypothetical realm, “I meant to tell you by the way, it seems obvious to me that you’ll end up with the Brazilian woman, Anita.” “You think so?” his ears perceptibly perked. “Well, needless to say, I don’t know what went wrong between you, so my guess is not based in reality in the least,” she spared him any comment about the fact that the name ‘Anita Cardoso’ still figured on his doorbell, “but there are only so many people in your life that you really love. I don’t believe you can end up letting them go.” He seemed surprised by something about her argument, which she took to be its validity. “The way I see it,” he disagreed, “is that, if I wanted to get back together, I would have, by now. She was very inclined to get back together with me, until last year at least, and she made it quite clear, but after we split there was nothing. We never even had sex again. Couples that split after such a long time always end up having sex, going back and forth for a while, but we made rules, and we didn’t break them, not once.” This admittedly was a better informed, if less objective, view of the situation. “It’s funny you needed rules for it, though,” she stated the obvious, as unassertively as she could. They acknowledged the firm logical grounds of each other’s opinion, then the irrelevance of the discussion, and went to bed. * “So, party’s over.”

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“Yeah,” she agreed a trifle too promptly with his factually accurate observation. “It’s so early, I don’t exactly realize what’s going on.” “Want a smoke?” he wasn’t necessarily kidding. “Yeah, I wish. I really cannot be late. We’re talking about a transatlantic flight here, not a train to Lyon. Besides, I haven’t finished packing quite yet.” “Seriously? You have been packing for days.” “Hey hey. You are a little oblivious of the fact, and I have refrained from bringing it up, but I’m a girl. I have tons of stuff,” she knew he appreciated the logic. “But things look hopeful, I might be able to fit everything in my bags. It’s not certain, but it’s conceivable,” she got up and walked towards the bathroom. “I’m even going to take that toothbrush, there’s a slight chance I may be able to carry it. Do you mind?” She was already putting it in her bag. “Well, frankly, I was going to use it,” he was playing along, “but whether you’ll find room for it is an intriguing question. You have to let me know what happens.” “Ok then, we’ll write,” she was back in her chair, finishing the coffee. It tasted a little off, she would’ve rather had a cappuccino. “My flight is in four hours, I’d better go.” “I’ll walk you to the Metro,” he suggested. “Let’s go to Odeon, then, I want to take a nostalgic stroll.” Odeon was in the opposite direction to her house, but she would’ve walked even further this way – at least to Cluny – if she could have been by herself. It took about six minutes to get there. On the way she played with the loose buttons in her coat pocket, making the habitual mental note to sew them back on, eventually, and they talked. At the entrance to the Metro they hugged like lovers. “Let me look at you, then I’ll go,” she held his face between her palms. Then, she performed her descent into the station, moving at a steady, measured pace and wondering the entire time if it would be polite to look back. * “How often do you do this?” he asked, his body relaxed now, uncovered and still. “You mean smoke up with a stranger and end up at his place?” “That’s one way of putting it.” “Not that often. If you recall, I haven’t smoked all semester.” The question irritated her, and yet she

recognized that Paul had his reasons to conclude that she made a habit of checking out artists’ private apartments. “If you must know,” she resigned, “I have been all alone since I got here in September.” “Completely?” he said, disbelieving, “That’s over four months.” “I know exactly how long it is,” Erin said. “I told you, I didn’t have such a great time here.” Now that the question had been raised, she asked, “And what about you? You surely see more beautiful naked bodies than I do.” “What do you mean?” “I mean the paintings you have in the other room. Those are some gorgeous women. And they’re all different.” “Ha,” he laughed, “some of these paintings are pretty old. Things have been tough, recently, I’ve been by myself a lot.” This he had already said, and one more time she rated it genuine, although not literal. The subject now seemed exhausted, and for a brief while they both were silent; then, Erin abandoned the topic more crisply. “I guess I am not catching that train,” she said, “we have to set an alarm. I wish I carried around a toothbrush.” “Well, that’s easy,” he said, and started to get out of bed, “I’ll give you one.” If he had a stock of emergency toothbrushes, Erin thought, this would give a new, more realistic overtone of the situation. Paul went to the closet, took out a suitcase of the carry-on kind and came back to the bed where she was now sitting, alert with curiosity. “I went to visit my aunt in Italy during the summer,” he put the suitcase in his lap and opened it, “but I haven’t unpacked yet. Here’s a shirt,” he was going through a stack of pedantically folded clothing, “another shirt, pants. And I don’t know why, but my aunt gave me all these toothbrushes,” he pulled out at least a dozen of them and was checking for more. “I have no clue why she had them, but she gave them to me, and some of them look pretty nice.” “That’s really weird.” “I have a strange aunt,” he said. “Here, just choose whichever one you want. I’m very particular about my toothbrushes, I’m not going to use any of them.” He held out a pile of toothbrushes to her. They were all different: some very plain, some fancy and full of promise for better teeth. She SPRING 2008

Parents

They tell the phone not to worry, they lock up the doors. Then, they tape the mouth of the mailbox shut, thinking: who would write? There is nothing to write home about. The address is hard to remember. On weekends, they take walks. It helps them stay young, they say, and they forget what they meant, where they were. The house breathes out, the window rests its head against the mountain they are climbing, opens up, swallows. The nearby church rings its bells for dinner and they eat bread on a bench. She cooks by a dictionary. He watches television, grows a beard like a newspaper pile, he speaks very little. He throws the leftover pages at the cat. It walks away, its steps are stamps on the carpet. They go to sleep still dressed and with the radio on. It plays sad songs, then good ones, then the news, then it listens to the raucous laughter of late guests coming in, sitting on the upturned chairs by the table. After they leave, the window is unhinged and the mountain can leap out again.Â

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maria vassileva

WHALEY IS SENT TO POLAND Amy Lien Rubber, wool

Artist’s Statement: The story about Whaley is that he was left behind in England when Beata moved to Poland. Before Whaley was sent to Poland he was given a sweater for warmth. SPRING 2008

from On the Genealogy of Spring Humors

laura kolbe

I. Fire gives birth to air; air to water; and the sea parts her legs, cased in these sacs that sphere the raindrop on the varnished porch; gives us the dry ribs of earth and the spiced breath of bronze. This from a rotting book. Heraclitus died baking himself to cure his dropsy, and the scribes died young too like everybody. So perhaps air is a misspelled ash. Perhaps it was all code: Meet me by the creek. Plait your hair. Yet. Why should this not be true â&#x20AC;&#x201C; why not be born out from wombs that do not etch their face on our faces but only sand, wind and sodium crust? Freedom of birth. The horseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daughter: a mouse, or a gold zinnia. The son of lemons: a grasshopper. The classical heroes: their girlmothers perched in long August dusk by heaving fields, dipping quills of barley in loops on the faces of irrigation pits as if expecting nothing but to write their invisible gossip, poems, weather reports until past dinner. The girl waits: someone will ask for directions, someone will want a bed. And it will be said that a god slinked by, was thinking, this green and nettled pit is the perfect spot to be a swan. And this is why

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you were born.

II. My mother calls from Tappahannock, but the coins fall through the grated floor drain: the first electrons of nickel are firing the scummy water: we have fifty-four seconds. She tucks her lip in her front tooth’s gable: I hear it: not the gummy flakes of noise bedding down on the phone line somewhere north of Richmond: I hear the small pale air, how we both whistle just before crying. From the aquarium she reports: This cuttlefish the hero for our time You put a chessboard in his tank He sprouts sixty-four little squares He can almost do paisley A few spindly kidneys rise to the skin This beast who cannot even see color The blue hydrangea is the face of acid: lime or wood ashes at its feet restore an alkaline pink. Here in America everybody got a strapping great-grandfather who got told ‘look friend, make this place grow and it’s yours.’ In us some inherited protein says look at the blue hydrangea it used to be pink look at the pink it used to be blue look at the star that was helium loam and shoots of dust Alter, alter. I would be born out from fire.

SPRING 2008

EFFACE

Bea Camacho

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Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Statement: This video documents an eleven-hour performance during which I crocheted myself into a white space with white yarn. The peformance occurred without breaks and this video documents the entire performance in real-time. SPRING 2008

Freak Out

This morning, when his roommate Rodney had just woken up, William had asked him if Gloria likes flowers. Rodney told him that of course, she likes flowers, what girl doesn’t like flowers. And William said that Gloria isn’t like other girls, he should know that. And Rodney said Roses, you can’t go wrong with roses. And so when William walked to the flower shop on Union Square, there was too much to choose from, but a girl with a nose ring and complicated hair, strings of hair all tied together into a massive bun at the back, asked him, Big date, tonight? William didn’t answer her. Just three, please, and he gave her the money. He even wore cologne. William never wore cologne, and this did not belong to him but belonged to Rodney, something that smelled woodsy and musky and to William, lifting his arm and smelling himself, was overwrought. He has a vision of himself standing there at West 4th Street, at the side of the subway stop where there is a large basketball court surrounded by a wire fence. He looks good, even got a hair cut, but he feels out of place watching the tall boys dribbling and bouncing. One boy in particular with an impressive afro, a pick in the whole thing, slides to the floor and thinks nothing of it when the top of his skin peels off. It isn’t a deep cut at all, he wipes it off with the end of his long shirt. His partner, a few inches shorter than him, a white boy with a narrow forehead, puts out a hand, and the boy lifts himself up against one arm like a lever, and he goes back to playing, curling a lay-up as some sign of redemption. “You got dressed up.” Gloria wears a long, white skirt and a brown shirt that fits close to her chest. Her hair is uncombed and the way she sidles up to William is effortless and cozy and when he reaches in to give her a hug, the cologne he is wearing in full effect, all he can think is that Gloria is not wearing any perfume, but she smells like herself, which to him, smells like earth. “I didn’t know what to expect.” “Better to err on the side of snazzy.” “Precisely.” “You look good.” She says this hesitantly, as if it hurts her to say

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stephen narain

something so nice, so delicate. “Oh!” He reaches from behind. “Those for me?” William gives the roses to her with more enthusiasm now. “Wow, you really went all out.” * It was called a Freak-Out. It was in a hog commune. “A hog commune?” “You’ll see.” Gloria told him on the way that the Transcendental Students were searching for a new way, and you had to believe, give them the benefit of the doubt, and that anything this new, on first sight, may take some getting used to. Whatever it was, when the two got to the old abandoned building one block away from the subway stop, behind the library that was made of sandstone, passing a line of fruit stands and convenience stores, owners pulling shutters down, those shutters gleaming in late evening light, William didn’t want to tell Gloria that he wasn’t one for all the mystery. Really, what are we going to? And she laughs it off, saying things like Everybody needs a surprise now and then, and she smiles herself into the bouquet of roses, looking askance at him, and he gives her one of those long looks, a look so intense he could kill a small animal if he stared at it too long. It’s not the brownstone he’s looking at right now, it’s the garbage bin in front of it. There was a blue bin, overflowing now with newspapers and fruit peel, and it smelled putrid and sour, fruit flies buzzing around the lid, so many of them that they congregated next to the stone staircase. When Gloria opens the heavy wood door, she brushes her hand quickly for William to come in, and William stares at the bin for a second, looks down at the shoes he spent fifteen minutes polishing before obliging. She knocks at the door. “GLORIA!” William doesn’t know the young man standing there, peeking his head outside as if to see if any one was looking at them, but as soon as William sees him he thinks that he’s a mess, this man, his entire body smelling of Chianti and sweat, and Gloria has her

hand around his hands now, and the man has one of his hands caressing her bare shoulder, his other hand holding an empty glass. “This was the friend I was telling you about.” Gloria says, struggling on her tiptoes to reach the boy’s ear. “What?” “This was …” But no one’s speech stands a chance against the noise. The drums. Besides the Chianti, the sweat, and the line of lithe and long and mostly half-naked bodies, it is the drums that make William feel most disgusted, and like looking at a bloody wound or a train wreck, William searches for the origin of the noise, and sees that it is a boy in the distance. He seems farther than he is because there is something dirty and hazy about this room, and all William can see is a bushy mass of brown hair, much larger than Gloria’s blonde hair, and the mass of the drummer’s hair kept up in a bandana. William sees the drummer’s head down, and he’s banging the drum with one large hit, one large arc of his flailing arm, and he repeats the same motion with his other arm. Next to him are more drums, regular drums, but performed with a kind of anarchic ritualism that makes these beats music even though there’s no order to anything. The boy, making a space for a girl running between

himself and Gloria and William, cups his right hand around his ear, pressing his eyes. And Gloria mouths, my friend, his name is William. The boy takes the hand that cupped his ear, and he places that hand around the right corner of his mouth, Chuck? Chase? Charles. Charles, he says. He stretches his hand out to William, and for a few seconds the drum noise quiets down, and he uses the opportunity, stretching his hand out, screaming, “GOOD TO MEET YOU, BROTHER!” William stretches his hand too, accepting it, feeling the cold flesh against his. He feels the boy’s eyes on him when he does this, on the collared shirt and the neat pressed pants that William took pride in, the creases on the pants like a knife’s blade and the shoes – William feels something sticky under his shoes. The boy gives him more of a curious look, eyebrows arched when he wipes some sweat from them, that sweat pouring and rolling from his drenched hair, rolling down a bare chest, brown hair making its way against the navel. “Same here,” William says. Charles can’t hear him though. Quiet names, introductions don’t stand a chance in this room, and William cannot decide whether this is a good or a bad

SPRING 2008

thing because these situations – meeting new people, the small talk – this has never been a strong suit of his. The drum beat is starting up again. William decides it’s not worth it, feeling himself, his body, pushed by people entering the house, more people coming in, and he looks out at Gloria for some explanation – wasn’t this supposed to be a quiet evening? – but all she has are her hands in the air, holding up the bouquet of roses, one side of her body pressed against his body, the other side against Charles, moving with the swelling crowd. * This, and the music. When William enters the room with the low ceiling, the wood floors below that are caked with red plastic cups, sheets of paper, and in the distance, what he swears is Woolf’s The Waves, tossed in the corner, abandoned like an orphan, William does not know how to make sense of this place. He tries to decide whether it is a party, but then he looks around at the faces, mouths contorted, arms in the air – the seriousness of it all as if everyone in this place has some manic need to move and dance and jump, forced freedom, desperate freedom – and concludes that this is not a party, this is something else, something more. A woman passes him a big bottle of wine, and he gives her a look that says, I don’t know what to do with this, and she gives him a look that says, Neither do I. So he passes it to Gloria, who is holding one end of her skirt like in the movies, like one of those flamenco dancers, and since the music is so loud, he can only give her another look, something to say, I don’t know what’s going on. She takes the jug of wine from him, and she passes it down the line to another skinny girl, identical to Gloria, who gladly accepts. She puts a pointed, rigid white index finger, that finger containing every resolution in her mind, against his lips. She holds the corner of his waist with dangerous proximity to the backside, and grips his body closer to hers. In his ear, she places her lips, and whispers something he cannot understand, and then she goes one better, sticking a little bit of her tongue inside, so that he can smell her breath from where he’s standing, and it smells like dew, wet grass, and marijuana, and she whispers Dance. Dance. The breathiness of it. The drummer with the mousy brown hair beats louder. Another boy wearing a silk shirt and a dark blue toga bottom comes out with a guitar, plugs it into the necessary amplifier,

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and screeches the strings against his fingers with such brute force that William can only think that he must have cut himself, he might have lost a nail how loud that sound was. But this sound only makes people in this room scream louder, and there’s a strange thing that happens now, a jumping up and down, up and down that William has never experienced before, all these people jumping up and down with an arm in the air, which William only saw a few times during Carnival except this was no time around Lent. He doesn’t see what there was to celebrate in this place. “YOU REAAAAAADDDDYYYYYYYY?????” The voice is soprano but the body is male and short. William turns to Gloria, but has decided that she has nothing to explain right now, because she, like the rest of them, is clapping, clapping as if this little man, five foot three – and to William, six foot four, this is generous at best – is a rockstar. “I DIDN’T HEAR YOU! ARE. YOU. REAAAAADDDDDYYYYYYY?????” Grandly, he says this. Some kind of messiah. They clap louder. And they scream too. It’s the kind of scream that William can only associate with the Pentecostal church he attended once when he was seventeen and wanted to know if there was something beyond the Anglican drone he put up with every Sunday. This is exactly what it was like, up to the man spinning his hands around in circles. “LISTEN! BROTHERS” Men hoot hoot. “SISTERS!!!!” Gloria rubs the back of the girl next to her. She rubs the back of Charles, too, and she pulls William closer to her, moving everyone closer to her body. It’s strange this kind of silence that she gives off right now. William does not know what to make of it, a sly silence, and yet a need in her eyes, a need for him to be next to her. “ARE YOU TIRED OF SPEECHES????” “YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH” “I CAN’T HEAR YOU! ARE YOU TIRED OF SPEECHES????” “This is what I wanted to show you. This is what I wanted you to see.” This was all she tells him now, putting her hand again on his waist, and while usually this is something that William thinks would be the most attractive thing in the world, to see this beautiful girl with her skin blushing and her forehead wet, touching him, wanting him, something about the way she says this puts him off. “I’M HERE TO SAY ONE THING!” “WHAT???”

SPRING 2008

“FUCK SPEECHES!!!” “FUCK SPEECHES!!!” “We’re done speaking, we’re done talking.” “Fuck the WAR!” says one girl, and William sees a look of total dismissal – to the world, to the war, to everything – this look carrying with it every semblance of truth. “YOU HEARD THAT? MY SISTER SAYS FUCK THE WAR!” “YES!” “What are we gonna do about the war, sister?” “Nothing!” “Why?” “We can’t do anything anyway.” She snaps two fingers successively, making a wide circle in the air with her hands. “The draft!” “Fuck it!” “Everything!” “Fuck it!” “WE’RE NOT HERE TO GIVE SPEECHES. AS PRESIDENT ELECT OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL STUDENTS OF NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, I HAVE ONE INSTRUCTION AND ONE INSTRUCTION ONLY!” “What?” “DANCE!” “What?” “DANCE” “WHAT?” ‘DANCE MOTHERFUCKERS, DANCE!” Which is what they do, and William can think of a hundred different ways to interpret this whole thing now. But every interpretation that he can proffer is cut, sliced in half by the drum beat that starts up again. “ENJOY IT!” the little man says. And this is what they all do, Gloria, Charles, they pick up to the drum beat. They begin dancing harder, and William is reluctant at first, but he sees everyone smiling, and instead of trying to decide whether this is real or not, trying to decipher what lies behind, inside, beyond the smiles, he concludes that dancing could not be such a bad thing, and with Gloria pressing him closer to herself, he accepts a cup of the cheap and bitter wine and… * He sips. A full sip. Two sips. Three sips.

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Is it all down, and he counts. He counts each sip that he takes. At communion, you stand in a line and before the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, the Passion is recounted. On the night he was betrayed … Take and eat … Body broken … Take and drink … Blood shed. A line of believers go up to the man in white, the cross across his chest, the same chest that he hit minutes before, arms outstretched to the congregation: Let us proclaim the mystery of our faith: Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again. Not even a syllogism. Not even: Christ has died; Christ has risen; Therefore Christ will come again. There is no therefore. There is no preposition. There is a silver chalice that the pastor wipes with a linen cloth, wiping spit, wiping germs and cells, and you drink. You go back to your pew, and the pew is hard and wooden. The Catholics, at least, have a pad that runs at the base of the pew that one could flip down, and kneel upon. You kneel down in those quiet moments between communion and when the pastor prays for the church, the community, and the world. You pray. Around him, this congregation drinks from the Chianti bottle, and this wine is not as sweet as it is in the church. William looks around, in this sullen light, the kind of light that allows all the particles floating through the air to make themselves known. He sees a girl now in the distance, dressed in a long, brown plaid skirt, emptying the contents of the Chianti bottle into a red cup. She smiles at the other girl that she dances with, and she touches her neck, rubs her neck against that girl’s neck. She’s different from the rest of them in that she tastes her wine. She closes her eyes when the wine slips down her throat, and when she is done she raises her arms with the rest of the pale, white arms, and when William inhales he smells something so bad, so earthy and musty, so much dirt collectively accumulated on skin, that it smells good in this room. Gloria loosens his tie. And he isn’t sure if it is Gloria that unbuttoned his shirt down, one button, two button, three buttons, her long fingers, but his shirt is nearly off, his sleeves rolled up to the his elbows, and every few seconds he feels the muscles

under his skin, the muscles above his stomach and his chest, especially the muscles at the edge of the torso, contract. It is as if the beat of the music makes his insides shiver. Someone kisses him. Gloria kisses him. The wine in his mouth and the weed in hers are a good combination. His hands are on her chest. He didn’t put them there. She did, and she has a vacant look on her face, and William knows that this is not how it should be. If he was this close to Gloria, the closest he has ever been to her, he wants her to be aware of her body, his body, together, and he wants the words that he says, and she hears, to be absorbed. He wants to know that there is understanding. He wants it to be the way it is in his imagination. He looks away, he nods his head, shakes his head. He inhales. He looks at a couple, moving into each other, sliding outward, like pulling a drawer on a chest. Back and forth. He looks at them. Maybe he was being too schematic, he thinks. Maybe he is being too mechanical. And he had not known himself to be this way, but ever since he came to this country, he started to make more lists. He wanted patterns. He wanted to know exactly what he was doing tomorrow because tomorrow always had twenty-four hours, six less than there should have been. He wasn’t one to complain; he wasn’t one to lament. He was not brought up that way. He was Anglican. Someone told him – Professor Franks, the Trinidadian professor – that you must not forget the thing that makes our poetry different from everyone else’s. The pulse. The thing that had no definition how hard you tried. She said, leaning over the paper marked C+, that he need never to forget. It’s what scares them the most. Who? White people. It’s what the white man is always, will always be afraid of, that his poetry has meter, and our meters have poetry. He looked down, looking at her, and she had a cryptic smile on her face. Think about it. She brought the coffee cup closer to her mouth, and her strong jaw clenched. Let it percolate, she said, as if that was it. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE SPEECHES!!!” “WHY???” “SPEECHES ARE COMPOSED OF WORDS!” “AND!!!” “YOU CAN’T GET TO THE WORDS UNLESS…” “UNLESS YOU TRANSCEND THEM…” “AND FIRST YOU MUST THINK…” “AND BEFORE YOU THINK YOU MUST…”

“DANCE!” “DANCE, MOTHERFUCKERS, DANCE!” “DANCE!” “DANCE…” Were they looking at him? It’s a strange question, and William doesn’t like this kind of narcissism that has crept up into himself ever since he came to this country. Always asking if people were looking at him, if people wanted to look at him, when most of the time he was convinced that no one cared. But he could not help but think that put a black man in a room of two hundred… He should be the one leading the dance, the conga line, the electric slide… Closer. William didn’t know how to dance. “Closer,” Gloria whispers. In her eyes, he sees somebody who needs something. She needs to dance. This is his first thought. She needs to move. She needs to move in the same way that the little man on the stage needs to scream. This need to scream so loud that if the world outside didn’t hear the noise, everything in the realm of your corporeality did, every tissue, every ligament, every part of your body could pulse with each beat of your heart. It is romantic, it is romantic and wrong and the only thing these people want to do is dance, and he wonders sometimes if people froze, saw themselves. saw themselves above themselves. (He releases himself from Gloria, who is holding a little too tight now, and William feels as if she is not dancing anymore, but is instead gripping on him, afraid that she will fall.) If people were to stand above this ceiling in a sober state and see themselves move and sweat and think of everything that came before, everything that came after, the things that brought them to this point, the places they were going afterward, to look at circumstance so close it hurt. They grimace. Many of them, this long Chinese girl, the tallest and most gangly Chinese girl he has ever seen, is grimacing, turning up the corner of her lips when she moves, and she sweeps her right hand against the side of her hip, and does the same with her left hand, touching the bottom of her body, pushing her backside with her palms. Her partner stands in euphoric approval. He didn’t like being so theoretical. But now, he thought it would not be horrible to indulge himself. Ever since William left Barbados four years ago, returning, coming back, moving with the easiness of a migratory bird, he decided that this world could be divided into two. At least, here and now. And it wasn’t SPRING 2008

a theoretical thing at all. It was what he saw. It was this need to dance. It was giving up, and it was letting go so much of yourself that you let the world in, and this was a good thing, rubbing off dead skin. And there was his roommate Rodney. Rodney going back to Greensboro. Rodney going back to where it counted. And all he can see right now is Rodney standing in front of his suitcase. He packs his clothes. Underwear, socks. He packs pen, paper. Books. He rolls up a copy of da Vinci’s Anatomy Lesson, and he carefully stretches a rubber band with his five fingers, and he secures the poster. His room is cleared, as clear as he has time to clear it, at least. He’s left some things on his hanger. And he’s folded a pile of old clothes that he has not dropped to the homeless shelter, Waste not, want not, he writes in his bold type. His bed remains unmade. The photographs he brings from home, of his mother, stolid in a black coat, leaning on the edge of a Chevy, one of those wartime black-and-whites blown up as big as they could afford. The photograph of his father leaning on a rock. The picture is all that remains. And the photograph of his brother in a shiny robe and a hat, two brass letters dangling down his eyes, Class of ’62. Rodney zips up his suitcase. The suitcase is light blue, and where there is a tear at the bottom, Rodney has taken duct tape and sealed it tight. He says a prayer and makes a sign of the cross before he exits the door. He leaves a note for William, instructions on forwarding mail, information on selling the books he will not be needing this semester. William will do this. * At some point in all this, a pig was brought in. William did not know when. It was hard to tell, but he sees an entire hog now that he estimates weighs as much as he does. It was set in the middle of the room, and after some debate on whether it should be tied up, it seems that logic won over and it was placed at the side of the room, next to the radiator. The hog stares on at the crowd in regret. Its name was Pigasus. This is what he hears from the girl standing next to him, a girl with mango-colored skin, and deep-set eyes, black eyes, the blackest eyes William has ever seen, made darker with kohl. “Steinbeck’s motto?” William asks. “Ad astra per alia porci.”

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“To the stars on the wings of a pig.” “You got it,” she says, taking another puff, and looking at him as if he was the only man left on earth. He doesn’t know where Gloria went. One minute she was swaying from side to side, a vacant look in her eyes. He is worried for her, worried because even though this is the middle of February, her skin had gone suddenly pale, and when he held her arms asking her if everything was alright, she just gave a silent smile with the right corner of her mouth and said nothing. Her flesh felt cold. He wants to leave. This is not what he came for, and he looks down at his watch, and sees that it is almost midnight. And he nods his head, his eyes squinting, drunk in the night. He looks around, and he wants to have a more complicated feeling, a more poetic feeling than the one he has now, but all his feelings fail him despite his best attempts, and standing there, looking at the pig, and hearing these well-educated people scream, one girl still consuming Chianti, Chianti, more Chianti, he thinks this is stupid, absolutely stupid, really. “Have you seen Gloria?” He taps the shoulder of a white boy, a long, shirtless white boy, whose shoulders feel cold, too, and the white boy asks him, “Yeah, Gloria?” “Gloria.” “No, brother, I don’t know a Gloria.” He pushes these bodies aside, but it is hard to part these bodies. The boy with the mousy brown hair has gone into some virtuosic riff, the chords not all in sync, but screeching, a note that is able to make the dark wood floors below move, vibrating beneath William’s feet as he walks. He pushes past all these dancers. “Excuse me,” “Excuse me,” And they say nothing. He looks at people rush. People are brushing past his skin, hitting him, not consciously but there is something that they all seem to be running to. “WE NEED TO GET BACK TO BASICS.” The same short man on the mic screams louder, and he goes into some diatribe that William does not have the energy or patience to listen to. He just wants to leave. He just wants to find Gloria, and leave. “BECAUSE WE ALL THINK THAT WE’RE TOO GOOD FOR THE BASICS.” There’s water on his skin. Small droplets spurt from above, but what he sees is coming from the stage. What looks like a garden hose, but smaller. He continued on page 30

GOT HIM

22” x 30”

Lydia Conklin Ink on paper SPRING 2008

continued from page 28

brushes the water from his crisp shirt. “WE NEED TO BE CLEANSED!” There is a smaller room that leads out from this one. The room, unlike the other, looks like it has been lived in. There is no emptiness in this room. There is no makeshift stage, and in this room, the noise, the guitar and the brass, the screaming, the vibrations subside, not entirely, but drop a few octaves. There are pictures on the walls. And William walks toward these pictures hung in beautiful order above the fireplace, touching the names etched onto the frames at the bottom. Owners? People who have lived here before? They are all old, etched faces with long, handsome noses and receding hairlines. Women with stone eyes and hair brushed to the side, not leaning into the picture like the men do, but sitting, one old woman in particular with her hands folded into one another. There are all kinds of smaller portraits, smaller portraits stacked onto one another, names like James, Reginald, Caroline, carved into the wood. William brushes his fingers into these grooves. Coughing. He hears light coughing by the large window. And when he walks there, he sees a girl, no older than fifteen, sandwiched in between the side of a couch and the radiator that sits against the wall. Her back is pressed against the sofa, and the flat of her feet pushes against the radiator. “Are you alright?” He doesn’t want to scare her. She looks scared enough. Ha-hm. Ha-hm. That’s all she can manage. She looks at William, and she widens her eyes so wide that he can see the red veins inside them come out in their reddest, the tops of these veins blood red, scarlet, a mad color against the dead white of her eyeballs. She keeps them wide. William kneels on one knee. He looks at her, deep at her. “Can you hear me?” She begins to cry. She coughs when she cries, and at the edge of her mouth saliva, opaque saliva accumulates. “Oh God,” he whispers. She throws up a bit. Pea green. “Oh God!” he puts his hand against her forehead, and feels a film of sweat against his hand. “Are you alright?” He holds up three fingers and he doesn’t know why. “Plea-” Just like that. But she can’t finish the word, closing

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her eyes. She slips a hand into her blouse to feel her heart, to listen to her heart. She takes her free hand, and she rests it on William’s who looks at her, and she brings William’s hand to her chest. Her heart feels like a train approaching, the same kind of steady rush, the same kind of constant intensity, as if the heart cannot keep up with the pulse, as if there is too much going on inside. The organ feels limited. She reaches into her bra. She pulls at it, and then she lifts the top of her shirt and she pulls it back and forth, as if she’s begging for breath. William makes to get up, to find someone. To go outside and find the nearest payphone, to call the ambulance, anyone. He believes he saw a payphone just at the edge of this street. He looks for a quarter in his pocket. When he stands, he is face to face with a boy who has hair on the side of his face. It is the oddest beard William has ever seen, thick patches of brown-red hair at the side of his cheeks, a long braid descending at the chin. This boy strokes this beard and his eyes, the size of beads, dart from one end of his eyesocket to the next, awkward, but he doesn’t seem to know why this is awkward. “Ambulance!… Jesus Christ, look at her, get an ambulance.” “She doesn’t need an ambulance.” And this sureness catches William off guard. It surprises him, but then he sees the girl biting her lip, and pulling at her blouse, and he sees this boy with the beard whisper, not even whisper, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay… “Who are you?” the boy asks. “Will-” “It’s okay,” the boy kneels down and takes something out of her pocket. William makes to answer, but he doesn’t know what to do, seeing this boy now in the praying position, the same position he takes each night before falling asleep. The boy touches his lips, his plump red lips, to hers, pale, a lavender color against her skin. The saliva stretches when they part. “Thanks.” He kisses her again. “Thanks,” she says again louder. William thinks she has a beautiful voice. And he sees her unpack the contents of a small foil. She places the foil close to her nostrils, inhales hard, and when she breathes out, the crown of her head hits the back of the sofa. Her toes curl into the grooves of the radiator.

“It’s no problem…” The boy asks for his name… “William.” “William?” the boy says. And he makes a strange and intimate move, not looking William in his eyes, but in his neck, at his Adam’s apple. He straightens William shirt, and he tugs at it hard. He puts a hand on William’s bare chest. “We’re alright here…just need a party, you know?” He takes a piece of the foil and where William’s hand is suspended in the direction of the window, pointing to the payphone, pointing to the payphone and the ambulance out there, the boy sets the piece of tin foil in William’s free hand. “I don’t want this shit.” William is bigger, far bigger than this boy. When he looks at this boy, his stray hairs, and the easy way he wears his nakedness, William, though not given to violence, wants to punch him in between the eyes. William looks at the girl, still frothing at the mouth, but that mouth carved, curved into a catatonic smile. “Chill out, brother. Chill. What’s your problem?” * Back in the other room, the music has slowed down, just to the drumming, the drumming that backs up the scream of the soprano boy. William sees three boys running past him with something brown and

oozing from their hands. They bury their faces into their hands, and they smother the brown substance all over their faces, their cheeks. There is some at the sides of their eyes. They laugh. “Pudding!” “PUDDING!” The small soprano boy says, and he sings the U in pudding with all the trills of James Brown. “PUDDING!!!” they repeat. “Do you loooove pudding?” “We LOOOOVE Pudding!” William runs through the crowd of people, and he doesn’t stop to see the huge vat of chocolate pudding inside one of those backyard pools that litter the patches of grass in Queens for a few months in the summer, quickly deflated by September. He doesn’t stop to listen to the boy go on about why pudding can save us, why pudding can heal all our problems, all our schisms. “EVERYONE LOOOVES PUDDING!” “Republicans?” “The love it!” “Democrats?” “They love it.” “Communists?” “Communists love pudding the most!” Pudding, the grand unifier, the great healer, the axis at the center of all our lives. William wants to get out of here. He has seen enough. He almost trips when he knocks one boy into another, but he doesn’t stop to say excuse me. He is done with saying excuse me. He wants to find Gloria and leave. He sees a mass of alfalfa, and heads in its direction. But when he looks closer, it isn’t her, it’s another girl. “Gloria?” The girl lets him know that she can’t hear him. … Dat-Dat … … Dat-Dat … … Dat-Dat … The drum beat is getting louder, the boy with the mousy hair beginning his groove with the wide arcs, he just wants to leave. He wants to take her to a nice restaurant somewhere here in the Village, maybe the Lebanese place that looks more expensive than it actually is. It’s the place with the chickpeas and the pita, the lamb roasted and perfect. This is what he planned. She would hold the wine like she holds her coffee, delicately with only three fingers. She’ll sip slowly, and so will he. But this won’t happen. This won’t happen simply because when he gets to the staircase that leads up to the second floor, midway u p SPRING 2008 the stairs, he sees Gloria’s b a 31 ck pressed to the wall, and h e

A STORY

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POVERISH

48” x 57”

Amy Lien Canvas, textile, glue SPRING 2008

deserters from other circuses:

The Fiction of Bruno Schulz and Ivan Bunin

In one of the most famous scenes of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1945 Ivan the Terrible: Part I, the imposing tsar’s figure is made to cast a shadow upon the wall of the royal chamber in which he is issuing orders to one of his followers. Projected hyperbolically onto the wall, Ivan’s sinewy silhouette and the similarly lean, curving contours of the orrery standing on his desk tower above the small spot of darkness projected by the crouched figure of his interlocutor. For some of the most crucial moments of the dialogue, the shadows do much more than merely mark the respective physical positions of the individuals whose discussion we are witnessing: they take on a reality of their own which seems to transcend the immediate realist setting within which they are generated. The human figures to which they belong are, for a moment, made to seem no more than emblems, or underdeveloped versions, of the intense dynamic and emotional expressiveness of their own shadows. The hierarchies of relevance and reality which would normally place these silhouettes below the full three-dimensional vigor of their owners are reversed. Instead of becoming symbolic reductions of the figures they represent, they stand on their own as a pinnacle of emotional and physical expressiveness within the dramatic setting of the film. Rather than use its characters’ shadows as appendages to a single, stable center of physical reality centered on the fullness of the bodies of their owners, the film pushes their mimetic function to a limit at which they become a new, equally powerful form of representation that coexists with these three-dimensional forms on an equal, rather than an inferior footing. Akin to the chessboard mazes of the novels of Vladimir Nabokov or the morosely comic mysticism of Mikhail Bulkgakov, Eisenstein’s switch from realism to the more surreal form of shadow theater functions not as a digression within

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marta figlerowicz

a single narrative universe, or as an additional level of symbolic abstraction latent in an otherwise linear plot, but as a polyphonic, decentering alternative form of representation that momentarily reconfigures the hierarchies of reality and codes of meaningfulness through which his film operates. The word “polyphony” was famously introduced into the study of Russian literature by Mikhail Bakhtin, in his analyses of discourse in the novels of Dostoyevsky. In Bakhtin’s original essays, it was used to refer to the many subjective sources from which any given word uttered within these novels obtained its meaningfulness. Dostoyevsky’s characters do not communicate within a single, stable linguistic universe, with fixed, universally agreed upon connotations of the words they are using. The meanings of their statements, as well as the phenomenological universes with which they interact, are determined by their particular intentions, backgrounds, and knowledge. Taking on radically different forms, each of these subjective worlds has a mythology and a symbolic code of its own making. As a result, rather than coalesce into a sturdy realist landscape, the narrative universe which emerges from these interwoven viewpoints resembles a concerto of several interlocking melodic lines, or a cubist mosaic of planes of thought that unfold each element of the narrative landscape through many possible angles of vision. What are robust presences for one individual are shadows for another; one person’s center of reality plays but a surrogate, inferior role in the personal linguistic and symbolic landscape constructed by another. Explored by Eisenstein through juxtapositions of various visual perspectives, rather than various linguistic codes, this narrative polyphony constitutes one of the defining elements of much of nineteenth and twentieth-century Slavic narrative and visual art. An awareness of these polyphonic devices as not only functioning, as remarked upon by Bakhtin, in

the representation of subjective consciousnesses, but also constituting a fundamental condition of any stylistic and formal movements of a narrative piece, is perhaps the most vital prerequisite for understanding Slavic fiction writing of the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. As a series of important short story writers – among them, the recently retranslated Ivan Bunin and the gradually appreciated Bruno Schulz – are gaining an increasingly visible presence in the Englishspeaking literary world, it becomes important to devote greater attention to the specificities of their narrative techniques. The modernist short story is a particularly interesting medium in which to examine the development of this evolving trend towards polyphony. In emulating this technique, these short stories seems to have found a series of curious and otherwise relatively unexplored paths of representation that bridge the gap between the mid-nineteenth-century interlocking subjectivities of Dostoyevsky and the mid-twentieth-century abstract modal juxtapositions of Eisenstein. Even as they imitate the earlier, more realist uses of this technique, they also showcase the manners in which it gradually acquired the surrealist, abstract quality which makes itself manifest in Russian film and in later Slavic fiction. By examining early modernist Slavic fiction, we come to a better understanding both of the continuity of the literary development of the region’s writers and of the particular manners in which the psychological fiction of Dostoyevsky could have been transformed into the polyphonic formalism of later artists such as Eisenstein, Nabokov, or Bulkhakov. Tragically killed during the Second World War, Bruno Schulz left posterity with only two slim volumes of short stories. Still, the vast originality of his writing was so great as to have rendered this slim collection one of the foundational works of Polish modernism. The loss of the manuscript of his novel, mysteriously displaced or destroyed shortly after his death, led a whole generation of Yiddish writers to attempt hypothetical recreations of the lost composition. The peculiar feature of Schulz’s fiction which seems to have rendered it so memorable and so appealing in spite of the drastically short span of his artistic career lies in the fluctuating way he fragments the narrative of his stories into networks of surreal lyric universes. Hovering on the verge of

the stream of consciousness and of magical realism, the language of his stories refuses to found itself in any stable definition of reality, be it a metaphysical or a physical one. Profoundly sensual in its focus, it dislocates the immediate realist impact of its sensory descriptions into sudden metaphysical epiphanies whose richness and power stems not from a departure from the sensory universe, but from a momentary intoxication with a single esthetic observation: A tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, and thistles crackled in the fire of the afternoon. The sleeping garden was resonant with flies. The golden field of stubble shouted in the sun like a tawny cloud of locusts; in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed; seed pods exploded softly like grasshoppers. And over by the fence the sheepskin of grass lifted in a hump, as if the garden had turned over in its sleep, its broad, peasant back rising and falling as it breathed on the stillness of the earth. Led into a shop with exotic spices, we become immersed in a universe composed of no more than an overwhelming network of scents. Viewing a rumpled carpet, we are led to obsessively engage with the particular structure of its folds until we perceive the wavelike movements of the material as the fundamental principle organizing the entire space within which the carpet is contained. Guiding us from one such explosive sensory epiphany to another, Schulz subdivides his narrative universe into pockets of scent-worlds, sound-worlds, color-worlds, touch-worlds, and taste-worlds, at every point leading us to believe that each of these sensory centers of representation is as valid, and as universally overwhelming, as any adjacent one. As we are continually thrown from a strong identification with one of our senses to an equally great amazement at our acuity in another, the various sensory impressions we are given cease to add up to a single coherent version of the represented universe. Rather, each of the senses comes to be enveloped with a separate mythology of its own making, one which inflates or contracts particular elements of the speaker’s surroundings in a unique manner which is not complementary to any of the other sensory worlds the novel depicts. In Schulz’s rendition, the polyphonic structure of the narrative is rendered apparent not in its subdivision SPRING 2008

into a set of individual subjectivities, or into a set of successive literary genres, but, on a far more basic level, in a fragmentation of the speaker’s self into five hypersensitive centers of perception, each of which weaves the sensations it receives into its own pantheistically spiritualized universe. He thus supersaturates the realist novel’s obsessive focus on subjective introspection and shifts its main source of attention away from the mind and towards the disunited sensations of the physical body. This introduces into his works a formal and conceptual fluidity and bravado which begin to tip them towards the flamboyant, irreverent modal shifts and stylistic self-intoxication which won later artists such as Eisenstein and Nabokov both their greatest praise and their greatest blame. Ivan Bunin, Schulz’s Russian near-contemporary, takes polyphonic narration to the other possible extreme. Rather than use the subjective emotions and sensations of his protagonists, as Schulz does, to amplify and connect the inner and the outer universes which he depicts, Bunin uses an imploded version of narrative polyphony to present the alienation and mutual incomprehension of his characters. Writing in the final years before the Russian Revolution and during the development of the Soviet state, Bunin was aware of the decay and estrangement of the gentrified, country-based social circles whose fates and troubles fill the pages of his short stories. Both immensely sensual and profoundly chilling, his stories make use of a curiously inverted version of Dostoyevsky’s famous choruses of intertwined subjective voices and viewpoints. Even as he makes us aware of the deep subjectivity and intense emotional and visceral engagement of his characters with the rural universe he represents, Bunin continually keeps our perception of them at a scientific-like distance. Rather than resonate with one another, his many subjective consciousnesses make themselves manifest through their constant inability to communicate, either to those around them or to us as readers, the deeper significance and reality of the obviously tense, dramatic actions which they undertake. Bunin’s short stories encompass a strange spectrum of themes. Some show a near-naturalistic, morbid fascination with his rural characters’ cruelty towards, and closeness to, the animal world. Others

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depart on rampant chronicles of generations of fantastically eventful family lives of one or two neighboring houses. Still others stake out, stage after stage, the gradual development and tragic finale of a juvenile love affair strongly mirroring the Romantic plights and flights of fancy of Goethe’s young Werther. A considerable number detachedly observe the process of rapid seduction and equally rapid abandonment through which the gentlemen he depicts abuse their poorer female acquaintances and servants. Retaining a remarkably neutral, unempathetic attitude towards the emotional outbreaks of his characters, Bunin’s narrator forces us to see them as both highly emotional beings and as ones whose inner selves can never be communicated to others in a persuasive, faithful manner. In this universe of radically incommunicable emotions, the persons he describes are made to seem pitiful in the puppetlike, helpless manner which will later find more overt development in the theater of the absurd; existing as a set of remarkably isolated idiosyncratic voices linked together by a shared, cumbersome physicality: A settlement on the outskirts of Russia. An endless summer day. And all day a bootmaker sitting barefoot on a rotting bench near a tumbledown shack, his belt unbuckled and his long shirt hanging loose, the sun beating down on his shaggy head. He sits there killing time with a red dog. “Shake!” The dog doesn’t know the command. “I said ‘shake’!” Still the dog doesn’t offer his paw. The bootmaker slaps his muzzle. The dog bats his eyes in shock and disgust, turns away, bares his teeth – a bittersweet smile. Then he lifts one paw uncertainly, drops it back to the ground. Another blow to the face. And again— “I told you to shake, you son of a bitch!” This stylistically terse paragraph – in itself, a complete story entitled “Summer Day” – gradually brings the dog it presents to a status of personification, and near-equality, with the man who is unable to communicate with it. Yet, even as we are aware of both the dog and the bootmaker as two separate voices and consciousnesses attempting to communicate within the confines of the story,

their encounters and attempts at communication always proceed through violence and mutual objectification, rendering what could have been a fruitful exchange a tragicomic display of physical violence and theatrical verbal insults. Rather than present us with a polyphony of voices, as in the case of Dostoyevsky’s prose, Bunin constructs what could be called a polyphony of silences. He thus approaches the formality of Eisenstein’s and Nabokov’s prose from an angle exactly opposite to that of Schulz’s – rather than through a supersaturation with wildly overblown, sensual subjectivity, he achieves his esthetic effects through the establishment of a drastic, suffocating divide between his chorus of manifestly subjective consciousnesses and the disjointed, artificial attempts they make at expressing themselves in an external medium. Perceived as a continuation of the logic of Bunin’s and Schultz’s prose, Eisenstein’s polyphonic structural shifts become easier to account for both in terms of their origins and in terms of their eerily powerful emotional effect. Scenes such as Ivan the Terrible’s sudden transition into shadow theater are gripping due to their inherent ties to what Bunin and Schultz perceived as the irreducible multiplicity of our subjective perceptions, as well as to the

brusqueness with which they exteriorize these shifts of perspective and dissociate them from any single human presence depicted in the film. We are thus made to intuit that the director’s formal games serve to express profoundly intimate interior states, but are rendered unable to connect these states to only one of his characters. Deprived of such a unique point of convergence, the emotions aroused by such shifts of perspective ripple out pantheistically onto the entire space of Ivan’s actions, giving the film its famed aura of self-consciousness and expressionist theatricality. Joined together by the shared decentered nature of their narratives and their shared – though methodically divergent – departure from the realist use of narrative polyphony, the fiction of Schulz and Bunin forms a revealing bridge between the psychological novel of Dostoyevsky and the more abstract, surrealist quality of the writings of later novelists and film-makers such as Bulgakov, Nabokov, or Eisenstein. As an important point of transition between these seemingly disparate literary modes, the writings of this generation are fascinating examples of a supersaturation and a breaking in the belief in the possibility of any stable manner of character drawing. They allow us to see

SPRING 2008

Pygmalion’s Wife:

Maria Callas, YouTube, and the Memory of Film

Usually we remember the dead by solidifying them. Fixity is the preferred method of public and private remembrance – in statues, in paintings, in family photographs. At the price of forgetting their capacity for movement, we freeze the dead in stone, in oil and canvas, and in the glossy paper of snapshots. The great poet of this kind of static remembering is Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, princesses and nymphs pass into eternity by physical transformation: they become reeds, trees, heavenly bodies. The nymph Daphne, for example, enters this unmoving immortality when her father changes her into a laurel tree as a final attempt to escape the searing love of Apollo, her divine pursuer: Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves; Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast In numb stiff roots, her face and head became The crown of a green tree; all that remained Of Daphne was her shining loveliness.1 Daphne’s survival in the literary imagination – much like the survival of George Washington in public monuments, or like the continued presence of my great-grandparents, whose stiff photographs gild the walls of my mother’s house – depends upon her relinquishment of movement. Ovid associates immortality with the plastic arts: like a sculptor working in bronze, he re-moulds Daphne’s body, and casts it into a tree. The moment where Daphne becomes a memorial to Daphne is the moment at which her capacity to move is transformed into her capacity to endure. The kinetic energy of living is reshaped into the potential energy required to last through the ages. This transformation, when considered merely as a 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville, 17.

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memorial, is in many ways an inadequate one. For, at best, all that remains of the subject is her “shining loveliness,” the aura that has somehow survived the transformation from being to thing, and from person to representation. The static memorial makes a major and – to us – a familiar mimetic compromise: the first thing that Daphne surrenders when she becomes Apollo’s sacred laurel is her own animation. It is a “languor” that first alerts us to her transformation; a certain entropy propels her toward the unmoving world of things. Her feet, “but now so swift,” drop into and join with the earth. This is the compromise made by public statues and private snapshots, of token mementos and famous portraits. And it seems it can only be redeemed by a certain power (whether real or imagined is unclear both in Ovid and in life) to believe that the residue of the animate might persist within the inanimate. “And still Apollo loved her,” Ovid tells us; and, perhaps seeking that animate core, “He placed his hand and felt beneath the bark / Her heart still beating.” But Ovid – being in fact the great poet of all memorials – has another way of immortalizing mortals, this time based not on a principle of stasis, but on the principle of motion. The strange story of Pygmalion – the talented sculptor who falls in love with the lifelike wife he has carved from ivory – is the model for this dynamic immortality. For Pygmalion’s wife passes into immortality not when she is frozen, but rather when she is called to life by the artist’s prayer to Venus: “Vouchsafe, O Gods, if all things you can grant, my bride Shall be” – he dared not say my ivory girl – “The living likeness of my ivory girl.” And golden Venus (for her presence graced Her feast) knew well the purpose of his prayer… And he went home to his heart’s delight, And kissed her as she lay, and she seemed warm; Again he kissed her and with marveling touch Caressed her breast; beneath his touch the flesh Grew soft, its ivory hardness vanishing

And yielded to his hands, as in the sun Wax of Hymettus softens and is shaped By practiced fingers into many forms, And usefulness acquires by being used.2 Pygmalion’s wife passes into cultural eternity not as a thing frozen and preserved – like Daphne, or like Jupiter in his temples, or even like the dramatic torso Nike perched on the main staircase of the Louvre – but as an embodiment of animation itself, a form that yields to the pressure of a lover’s touch. The physics of Pygmalion’s wife counters intuition: the moving and the ephemeral endure, while the stone and ivory vanish. But what sort of endurance is this? On the one hand, it is a liberating immortality. The ivory woman escapes Daphne’s dilemma – rather than bearing the marks of her transformation forever, she seems to carry no trace of the chisel and prayer that together brought her to life. Within the space of each footstep, we must imagine that she undoes the carefully placed ivory pleats of her dress and the pose of her hands, which Pygmalion must have so carefully carved. But on the other hand, this is an elusive immortality. It is hard to pin down what image or representation remains of this woman. The movement from solid ivory to animate flesh poses in this way the question: how do we understand a work of art whose appearance and posture is constantly in the process of changing? Statues, paintings and photographs offer fixed points of reference to the past; they allow us to remember individuals and events in a distilled, unchanging way. Like Daphne transformed into the sacred laurel tree, they now posses the gravity of the immutable. Not so for Pygmalion’s wife, who has traded this gravity for living grace. Might the tradeoff of animation be a loss of essence? For most of history, the problems presented by Pygmalion were hypothetical, as his situation was only barely approximated by the wind-up automata of princes and children. But the twentieth century has sprung on us something remarkably close to the “living likeness” of the sculptor’s transformed creation, in the form of recording technology. The poet Frank Bidart, like Pygmalion, takes great pleasure in seeing and hearing this likeness-through-motion, as he writes in “For the Twentieth Century:” Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand Technologies of ecstasy Boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water 2. Ovid, 233-234.

Rises without boundaries, I push the PLAY button: --…Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti3 For Bidart at least, the world of modern recording technology – both audio and visual – is the descendent of Pygmalion’s dream. It offers to its listeners a way to remember not simply through time, but in time – to hear Joseph Szigeti’s cadenza on a Mozart violin concerto as it occurs across each individual second. And as we move further away in time from the invention of the phonograph and the film reel, more and more recorded artists are no longer our contemporaries. Pushing the PLAY button is often an act of remembering; with it, w e call up the dead and make them move in time again. Up until now, the dead have only been able to come to life in art one moment at a time – taking one pose in a painting, then another in a statue. The miracle of Bidart’s PLAY button is that it allows the dead to inhabit a string of moments one after the other, to live again in sequence, as they once did. This is a peculiar form of remembrance. If the photograph and the statue and the laurel tree aim for a kind of crystallization of the person remembered – Ovid’s “shining loveliness,” distilled and emanating from Daphne’s trunk – then the technology of recording aims somehow for a marvelous diffusion, stretching what remains of someone across twenty seconds or across two hours. Film’s strange capacity to animate the dead plays no small role in the history of the medium. The first true horror film, Georges Méliès’ 1896 The Devil’s Castle, is a vampire film, and Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 story of the animate dead is by far the most adapted book in the history of cinema.4 Nosferatu’s eerie shadow passing across the rigging of a ship in Friedrich Murnau’s 1922 vampire masterpiece could easily be a bringing to life of the art of filming itself. The undead villain comes to life not so much by his own volition as through the interplay of light and dark, through camera angles and jagged editing. But what is most interesting is not so much the expression of animation that film performs as an art form, but rather the almost accidental power of animation that recording technology – both audio 3. Frank Bidart, Music Like Dirt, 7-8. My thanks to Elaine Scarry for pointing me to this poem, and thus inspiring the final structure of this essay. 4. John L. Flynn, Cinematic Vampires: The Living Dead on Film and Television, from The Devil’s Castle (1896) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

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and visual – confers on other art forms. Bidart intuits something fundamental about technology’s recording power when he strings together Callas, Laurel and Hardy, and Szigeti. These are four artists who happened to be immortalized by recordings. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, or Greta Garbo, or the voice actors of 1930s radio plays, whose art depended on recording, these artists’ actual talents expressed themselves elsewhere. Maria Callas was an opera singer; her domain was the opera house. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were first vaudeville showmen before a film studio brought them together as collaborators. Joseph Szigeti was a particularly sensitive and scholarly violinist; unlike other showier virtuosos, he belonged very much to the world of the polite recital hall. And yet these artists have been trapped in a time loop that captures the immediate quality of their own art. The ephemeral work of the performer is somehow made immortal, almost as fragile and unpredictable – even though digitized and infinitely re-playable – as the performances Callas and Szigeti used to give. It is the dilemma of Pygmalion’s statue reborn into the era of mass reproduction: recorded artists endure in a state of impermanence, captured not as consummate individuals, but as partial fragments of their own careers. There is no essential, statuesque identity to someone memorialized on film and record. Singers, violinists and comedians come to life; but that life is limited to what transpired (in or out of tune, tempos slower than usual or faster) on one or two evenings in the concert hall, or during a half-dozen sessions in the recording studio. Recorded remembrance denies the illusion of totality, of summing-up, that a statue might confer. But the tradeoff, of course, is the gift of posthumous vivacity. * The first time I ever saw Maria Callas sing was on YouTube. Look her up; there are dozens of listed videos. Among my favorites is a brief, grainy clip from a recital benefit she gave at the Paris opera house in 1959. Callas was a notoriously unpredictable singer: among the greatest of the twentieth century, but only on good nights. This performance was already late in what was a remarkably short career. Callas had put immense strain on her voice by singing practically the entire range of soprano roles within the standard repertoire, and suffered for it early. An intense dieting regime in the early ‘50s, which had changed her from a recognizably fat opera singer into a dark-eyed sylph, had also put a major strain on the physical apparatus

of her instrument. But if there is any tension in this YouTube clip – pirated from an EMI Classics Home Video of the concert – it belongs squarely within the world of the performance, and carries nothing from backstage. Callas is wearing a flamboyant dress, and a cascade of diamonds on her neck ($5 million worth, to be precise; a security guard was standing in the wings to make sure that the borrowed jewels didn’t go anywhere). But what marks itself far more deeply into the celluloid strips of film than this extravagance is the diva’s face. Each feature projects itself outward like a bas-relief, intended to be seen from far away and below, like a cult idol. Her eyes are darkened with stage makeup, and when she is not singing, her wide mouth is pursed shut like an oracle withholding a prophecy. This is not a face meant to be seen in a rolling close-up, but one meant to be deployed, almost like a set design, in the vast space of an opera house. Film is at odds with the opera singer and with the operatic stage: from one particularly awkward angle, the chorus members standing behind her look like the cardboard cut-outs of a set piece. But somehow this struggle between performance and recording – even as it plays out for the hundredth time within the narrow frame of the YouTube window – is thrilling. When Callas opens her mouth to sing, her body tightens, and the folds of her dress go slack near the waist as her chest arches up for a breath. The image outstrips its own constraints; like Pygmalion’s statue, Callas undoes the static illusion of the folds of her dress and the sculptural poses of her arms. Watching from the camera’s close, uncomfortable angle, the viewer has the uncanny experience of seeing past the careful stage performance into the vulnerable physical motion that underpins it. Callas, caught on film, could easily be a statue brought to life. The curve separating each cheek from her mouth is inhumanly deep; the angle of her nose belongs to a bird of prey more than to a woman. Lucchino Visconti, Callas’ favorite director, taught her a vocabulary of gesture taken from Jacques-Louis David’s severe Classicist paintings, and in these concert clips, it shows.5 Her performance passes from one frozen pose to another. She throws out her arm, then retracts it and bunches up her shawl, then slides the shawl down her shoulders and firmly grabs her hips with her hands. Opera is an art form that relies on the unnatural and the stylized. Its greatest strength lies in its ability to convince an audience that the unnatural is somehow truer than its realistic counterpart. Callas 5. Stelios Galatopoulos, Maria Callas: Sacred Monster, 177.

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Lucchino Visconti teaches Callas a dramatic gesture during rehearsals for a production of Spontini’s “La Vestale.”

is the ultimate embodiment of this stylization – or at least she would be, were it not for the camera’s dogged insistence on preserving the veins that bulge out of her neck, or the barely-perceptible moments when the shawl slips unexpectedly from her shoulders and she pulls it jerkily up before bringing her hand to rest like stone on her chest, as if she were intending that motion all along. Callas-on-film is Callas-on-the-stage laid inside-out. The internal force of her charisma is foregrounded, while the stylized exterior meant to be seen by the audience fades ever so slightly into the background. The remarkable effort and control required to produce the illusion of effortlessness betrays itself to the camera. Where she must have appeared to the audience as purely ethereal, as free from external concerns as a painting, to us she appears both unearthly and, at the same time, completely practical, even cunning. Every motion and every movement is carefully executed; quick thinking combines with serious planning. During her performance of Bellini’s Casta Diva, for example, the Chorus enters late, right in the middle of the aria. Just as they do, Callas drops another gesture that seems as aesthetic as the others. But in fact, as she swings her arm out and then up, she is beating time for the tuneless chorus, miming the conductor’s baton. For Walter Benjamin, the difference between

technically reproducible art and technically unreproducible art is that while the former can be everywhere and always, the latter hinges on “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place it happens to be.”6 What the gramophone record and, to an even greater extent, film permit, however, is a reproduction not only of the place something happened to be in, but how precisely it happened to be in that place. How big a breath must one take to fill an opera house? How venomous a glance does the chorus need before it starts singing properly again? (The answer: extremely venomous.) The shoddy digital transfer of Callas films on YouTube is the record not so much of her performing career itself as of the underlying physical and mental exertion that went into producing it. If a performing artist must inevitably use her own body to transmit art from the mind to the stage, then film is a record of the body’s multiple strategies to make effective that transmission. Hence the rich vocabulary of muscle twitches, vocal glitches, deep breaths, quickly thought-out poses. Film demonstrates art’s effort to be seen and heard second-by-second, strategy-by-strategy. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans., 220. 7. Image taken from Stelios Galatopoulos, Maria Callas: Sacred Monster.

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Time in this kind of film takes on the vividness of representation; the dead share with us the state of their own becoming, the second-by-second internal workshop that produced with more or less success every day, every hour, but especially during every performance – Callas, Szigeti, and every other stage artist. In this way, film makes a claim about the dead that Ovid might have found familiar: the dead do not live in the past-perfect; it is not merely the case that they were and are no longer, except as a kind of completed factual occurrence (i.e. Maria Callas, 1923-1977, opera singer). Rather, film reminds us that they lived in the world of becoming, going through the metamorphoses required to produce any static sense of identity. Even when an artist does become essential and immortal in death, film makes a record of the remarkable work (twitching, singing, training, gesturing) that ultimately moulds the enduring image in which these figures survive for posterity. * Nipper, the original RCA Victor dog who helped usher in the recording age as he listened for “His Master’s Voice” coming from a horn, was first painted in 1893 by Francis Barraud (who originally depicted him listening to a phonograph, not the more familiar gramophone). Nipper belonged to Barraud’s brother Mark, who had died young, before the painting was executed. The original painting depicts the animal sitting on what cultural historian Jonathan Sterne calls “a shiny surface that reflects both the dog’s body and the gramophone, wider at one end than the other, with an edge and sides.”87 For Sterne and for an early twentieth-century audience, this oblong surface bears an uncanny resemblance to the burnished lid of a coffin. Nipper, by extension, is listening to all that remains of his master. Death and technical reproduction have an old and ambivalent relationship. In Nipper’s case, one literally rests on the polished casket of the other. The Reverend Thomas Allen Horne gave his own funeral sermon in 1892 by recording his voice on a phonograph; not surprisingly, it “caused a shudder of horror among those who were present.”98 But of course, the shudder of horror can be surprisingly close to the thrill of these out-of-time 8. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, 302-3. I am indebted to Brian Hochman for this anecdote about Nippers’ morbid origins, and the early association between recording technology and death (detailed in Sterne’s chapter entitled “A Resonant Tomb”). 9. Sterne, 303.

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encounters. I am lucky to be able to fall back on Bidart in order to describe the peculiar pleasure of a Callas or a Szigeti re-animated: Therefore you and I and Mozart must thank the Twentieth Century, for It made you pattern, form whose infinite repeatability within matter defies matter Matter outlives matter; animation outlives the body’s capacity to animate itself. When I call up the ghost of Callas in a digital frame, I call up the physiological rarity that produced the ghost, the pulsing veins, grotesque nose and freakish vocal chords that projected outward the voice and the illusion that you might recognize from your grandfather’s record collection. It is the same illusion, maybe slightly more diluted, that comes across in old photographs of this pouting Greek opera star in pearl earrings, hobnobbing with Aristotle Onassis. There is a high pianissimo from this same Paris performance, at the end of the recitative before Casta Diva, that is so quiet and ethereal that it drops almost below the recording device’s own threshold of recognition. On camera, you can just make out the quivering of muscles in her neck. The sound and

from Against the GraIn

a novel

Even after the bell sounded for the start of first period, students were still milling in the hallway. Alex Jaroncyk, the woodshop teacher and an eleven year veteran of Wells Street Senior High, stepped outside his classroom to hurry them along. He stood just over six feet tall and was muscled, with a paunch. He wore bifocals, wire-rimmed. Grizzled beard graded from his balding head, and sometimes little children called him Santa. But he could be imposing when he wanted to be. “Inside!” he shouted. His voice carried. He had been an MP in Vietnam, and when he finished his two year stint, he began policing a classroom instead of a compound. If these kids knew half of what he had seen in Vietnam, but never mind. It was the third day of the new semester, and it was important that he lay down the law early, before the kids got any ideas. Several students looked up. A few slammed their lockers and turned tails for the stairs to wander other, less supervised hallways. His eyes fell on the knot of six fourteen-year-old boys standing directly across from his room, and he swept toward them. “Inside! Inside!” he bellowed. He had fought with Kate that morning because he had emptied one of her bags of spices into the sink. The ginger teriyaki rub had smelled terrible. How was he supposed to know she had just bought it? She had been out of teaching so long, she didn’t remember what he had to face every day. A tall, lanky boy objected. “We’re coming, ain’t we?” “Not fast enough, Tyrone. Move it.” The boys broke apart and headed for his classroom. They couldn’t just walk. No, they had to jump, hop, glide, and stomp. Like a bunch of damned jackrabbits and kangaroos. A boy named Carl Howe bounced an invisible basketball, spinning from one side to the other, while Leon Jones jumped, arms outstretched, defending an imaginary hoop. “Woohoo!” Carl hollered when he jumped and touched the lights,

megan colleen harney

apparently scoring. Two other boys ahead of them swung from the doorframe, hanging, blocking the entrance. “Down!” Alex shouted, and they dropped to the floor and bounded into the room. The greater part of his students was inside now, clustered in small groups near the front of the classroom around the desks. Behind them, the rows of workbenches, machines, and tool cabinets spanned half a city block. His shop was three times the size of a normal classroom. It was shaped like a backwards L, and his office jutted from the back wall into the long arm. Around the perimeter, there were one hundred and twelve steel tubs, nine cubic feet a piece, filled with debris. Alex knew how many there were because he had filled and stacked every last one of them himself, and he had hurt his back doing it. It had taken him a week to collect all the wood scraps, PVC piping, steel fittings, discarded textbooks, busted desks, chemistry beakers and hoses, and broken computer monitors that had been strewn on the floor when Krueger had dumped him in this shop. That was just in September, after the basement shops—his and Dave Gunderson’s—flooded in August. When all was said and done, the flood had destroyed nearly twenty-five thousand dollars worth of tools and equipment, and the Technical Education Department, which Alex chaired, was hamstrung. He wouldn’t be able to order much of anything for the next several years. It was fortunate that the Trades Department had tools, poor as they were. Even after Alex’s attempts to purge this new shop, there were still four broken file cabinets in the aisles, acetylene tanks and asbestos tiles pushed up against the walls under the windows, and heavy steel pipes balanced across workbenches. Alex was a neat person; at home, he alphabetized the soup cans in the pantry. Here, there was no order at all, and still, he had to make sure one hundred fifty kids a day could find what they needed and could work without hurting themselves.

continued on page 46 SPRING 2008

24 1/2

Jack McGrath Wood, sand, magazine, cinderblock, mulch, television, chair, steel, lamp, houseplant, stringed lights, padlock 96 x 159 x 103 44

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Artist’s Statement: The little house at this address is snuggled up in the armpit of Harvard University’s Carpenter Center. Its exterior architecture of four unpainted plywood walls uses construction site vernacular to discourage notions of its existence as a place. The interior of 24½ consists of two rooms. Inside it is very much a home for someone, but temporal specificity is obscured by a disintegrating floor, an old magazine, a worn-out television, etc. The first room is semi-furnished and contains the October 1995 issue of Playboy Magazine with a feature on “The Women of the Ivy League,” a television monitor displaying color bars, and a potted plant. The second room has walls made of corrugated steel and opens onto a plate glass window of the indoor main gallery. As a living space carved out from a

marginalized location, the piece takes on a nature particular to its situation within but also outside of the university art building. From the corridor off of the main room, for instance, you can watch what goes on inside the gallery, but there’s no available way to get in. The door to the structure is locked. The key is located in the Visual and Environmental Studies department main office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, and at the security guard’s post during other gallery hours. Visitors can obtain the key by leaving identification. They are welcome to stay as long as they like and the heating and lighting is adjustable. These photos are crummy low resolution images from a cell phone camera. They are murkily historical, scrappily nonexistent. SPRING 2008

continued from page 43

* The bell sounded for third period, and the halls filled once again. Fuck. Here come the fuck-ups. A couple of them he loved; Tony Childs and Ben Greene were sweet kids. Adam Ross scared him when he got that manic look in his eyes; Alex worried that he might be off his meds. And goddamn, he felt sorry for the one in the wheelchair, but they took forever to get settled. Ben Greene wandered in looking at the ceiling. Alex didn’t know how he managed to find the room on his own. Tony was somewhat heavier than most kids his age, and he moved awkwardly. He plodded to a desk and put his head down. Clifton was standing at the door telling the retarded kids that they needed to pay to come in, and a couple of them willingly handed over their lunch money as they came through the door. “Enough of that. Turn out your pockets,” Alex said. Clifton scowled and handed over eight dollars. Alex returned the money. His seven advanced cabinetry students settled in quickly. They would each work on independent projects this semester. He took attendance. Twenty-nine students were present, including Joe Morgan, who had been out the past two

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days. Alex had been pleased to see Joe’s name on his roster of advanced students, and when he was absent the first two days, Alex feared it was perhaps a mistake. He had taught Joe both his freshman and junior years. He would be a senior now. “Joe Morgan?” he asked. “Hey Mr. Jaroncyk! How ya doin?” he called out over the side conversations. He was in the third row, sitting on the top of a desk with one foot on the seat, his arms crossed. He was as tall as Alex and wideshouldered, and it would have been a tight squeeze for him to fit into one of the tiny desks. Alex didn’t mind that he wasn’t in a seat. He was a neat kid all around, took pride in his appearance. He kept his hair trimmed short and a pencil behind his ear, and he wore a button-down shirt and nice jeans, no holes, and a belt. The crotch of his pants was where it was supposed to be, not at his knees. “Not so good, Joe. Getting old and tired. Yourself?” Joe was a big guy with a big smile. “I’m FANtastic! I was boxing in Madison, and now I’m going to regionals. Going to win my college tuition, I am.” Alex couldn’t help but smile. “What are you doing back in my classroom?”

“I want to learn to build, want to build big, man!” He spread his arms to emphasize big. Joe had the nicest smile of any student he had ever taught. He was a boxer all right, and he carried himself like one, head held high. Kid knew where he was going. Alex finished taking roll and thought he noticed Joe watching Imani Abdalla, one of two girls among the advanced students. She was a pretty girl, tall, slender, and very dark. Her family was African; they had emigrated from Kenya when Imani was in middle school. Though there were not many African students at the school, Alex liked them a great deal. He had always found them quiet and respectful. While he went over the usual safety contracts, some students had their heads on their desks, sleeping, and he walked up and down the rows nudging their shoulders, telling them to sit up in between reading off the rules. As he started in about wearing safety goggles, Ben Greene yelped in pain, and Jerry Hough, DeShane Williams, and Lenny Davis snickered. “You three! Move over there,” Alex said. He pointed to three empty stools behind the nearest workbench, putting plenty of room between them and the other students. “Why are you picking on us?” Jerry asked. “He’s picking on us cause we’re black!” said DeShane. More than ninety percent of the class was black. “No. I’m picking on you because you’re bothering the other students. Move. Now.” They did, but slowly. The three of them were in league with Clifton Harris, who sat in the corner wearing a leather jacket and glaring at the Mexicans, trying to look tough. The threesome of Orlando and Roberto Morales, twins, and Miguel Ramos sat in the opposite corner, glaring back. He continued. “If you understand the rules we’ve gone over, I need you to sign the contracts…” A few minutes later, he collected them from the students who were able to sign. Ben Greene doodled a design at the space for his signature, and John Reed was clearly incapable of signing his name. “Some of you are going to design your own projects this term. You know who you are. The rest of you are going to make toys like these,” he said, holding up a truck and a duck that flapped its wings when its wheels turned. There were several other toys ranged on the desk in front of him. “I’m going to break you into groups of four or five. You’ll each take a toy to your own workbench and play with it and try to see how it works. All the toys have moving parts, so you’ll want to think about how the parts move. Once you have an idea, draw a

picture of what you think the inside of the toy looks like, and over the next couple of classes, I’ll help you cut the pieces you need.” He split them up into groups, taking care to keep the Mexicans together and anyone he thought one of the Gangland Disciples apart. Then he assigned each group to a workbench and handed them a toy and a piece of drafting paper. He handed out descriptions of the project requirements to his advanced students, and they sat reading while he worked with the rest of the class. The toys were too complicated for any of the students in this class to make by themselves, but he’d already prepared boards and had traced many of the oddly-shaped pieces of wood for easy cutting with the jigsaw. Later, he would mark them so that the students would spend most of their time drilling holes for wooden pegs, sanding, painting, and playing. Then he could simply assemble them one afternoon, or perhaps let his advanced students help the others assemble them for fun, and they’d have something to take home. The groups moved to their assigned workbenches, and Alex pushed John Reed up alongside the nearest one. Tony Childs remained in his desk with his head down. “Tony,” he said and nudged the boy. He looked up at Alex, a blank expression on his face. His lips were thick, his mouth slightly open, and his eyelids had the characteristic epicanthic fold. “Do you know what we’re trying to do here?” Alex asked him. Tony nodded exaggeratedly. “Can you tell me?” “Look at the toys,” he said. “That’s right. Good. Why don’t you go over to that workbench, join the group that’s working there, and think about how the duck’s wings move, okay? Give it a try, and I’ll come by in a bit, alright?” “Okay,” he said and stood. Clifton was away from his assigned group talking to Jerry and DeShane and Lenny. They were all standing too close to the Morales twins. Alex prodded them back to work, and they went. Alex turned to his advanced cabinetry students. “I know most of you are missing at least a few tools,” he said, “but I’m going to try my best to make sure you all have the tools you need to do your projects. Finish reading the project requirements, and I’ll be back shortly.” He headed towards the Mexicans, whom he’d grouped with Ben Greene, despite his being black. In his classes, it was usually the blacks who picked fights with the Mexicans, not the other way around. Perhaps it was because they were outnumbered, but SPRING 2008

at any rate, Ben Greene wasn’t capable of picking a fight with anyone, and Orlando, Roberto, and Miguel ignored him and talked about how much money they could make off construction work. Hector Morales, the twins’ father, and their two older brothers—both of whom Alex had had in class several years back— worked for a building crew. The twins helped out with roofing on the weekends. Alex had set them up with a toy whale, but the toy lay in the middle of the table untouched. The whale, like the truck and the flapping duck, was also on wheels, and its spout of water revolved as it was pulled along, controlled by a vertical axle that ran up through a shaft in the whale’s body. Ben Greene was leaning over his group’s piece of drafting paper drawing a beautifully detailed picture of the whale, taken at a cross-section, showing the gears and vertical axle inside. His picture sprawled large over the drafting paper, with other whales and varied sea life—jellyfish, porpoises, and rays—swimming around it. Alex had been about to ask the boys about the whale, but instead, he stopped and watched Ben draw. He was surprised by the beauty and detail of the drawing and stood watching for a minute or two. Kate would appreciate his skill. When she was in the schools she had taught art. By all appearances, Ben had not taken the toy apart, but had imagined its inner workings perfectly. “That’s really beautiful, Ben,” he said. “Can you tell me about what you’ve drawn?” Ben jerked up at the sound of his name, looked at Alex, and then threw his pencil across the bench. The boy’s sudden, spastic movements made Alex stumble back; Ben was like a hidden bomb, and he could be detonated at any time by the wrong word, the wrong touch. It reminded him of creeping through the jungle, taking care where he stepped, watching just beyond the bend. Ben dropped to the floor and curled up under the workbench, where he started rocking and humming to himself. Jesus. Alex had not been told how to handle autistic students. He didn’t know what to do. The explosion, it seemed, was over. He bent down beside the boy and cautiously touched his shoulder. “Ben. It’s okay. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.” The boy stopped rocking and humming and just sat there under the workbench curled in a tight little ball. “Okay,” Alex said. “You just stay there, and when you’re ready, you let me know. I won’t bother you.” The boy remained curled, so Alex stood and addressed the other three boys in the group, still talking as though one of their classmates throwing a pencil and curling up into a

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ball on the floor was a daily occurrence. Perhaps it was. “Orlando, can you explain Ben’s drawing? He’s drawn exactly how this toy works so you can just look at the drawing and tell me.” “Harris isn’t where he’s supposed to be,” the boy said, narrowing his eyes. “And my name’s Roberto.” “Right. Sorry, Roberto. I’ll be right back.” He approached Clifton, who was again talking with his three companions, gathered near one of the drill presses at the back of the room. Tony Childs was in their midst as well. Clifton, three years older than Tony, towered over him. Despite his school failures, Clifton was sharp; he knew how to handle himself on the streets, how to bully other students, and especially, how not to get caught. Alex saw a flash of money as Clifton stuffed his hands in his pockets, and he had a bad feeling about it. The special students were always the butt of cruel jokes, and he didn’t think that Clifton’s gang was interested in helping Tony with his assignment. He expected them to introduce some new card game to cheat him out of his lunch money. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “Nothing, Mr. Jaroncyk.” “Don’t lie, Lenny. It’s not becoming.” Lenny looked over his shoulder. Clifton answered for him. “Just a little bet, Mr. Jaroncyk. We’re not doing anything.” Alex considered the boys. They looked guilty. “Betting is not allowed in this school. I don’t want to see any more money exchanging hands. And I want the cards, too. Who has them?” Clifton reached into his pocket and pulled out a deck of cards. “Can I get them back after school?” he asked. “Not today. Maybe at the end of the week.” His gut told him they all deserved pink slips, but as they’d been quick to hand over the cards, he decided a warning would do and instead escorted the boys to different workbenches. Detentions often made matters worse. He didn’t want the kids to hate him. At home, Kate was the disciplinarian. He was the game-player; he would let Maggie get away with anything, Kate said. He knew she was right. She said that was part of his problem at school—that if he were harder on the kids, they would behave. He could hear her telling him, you can’t be friends with your students. He knew that, too. He handed out his share of detentions; he just wished that the students would behave because they respected him and cared about the work, not because he yelled at them or threw them out of class. Though he had to raise his voice now and then, most of his students did as they were told.

He checked over the boys’ drawings. They were sparse—no more than boxy sketches of the toys in front of them that made no attempt to show the inner workings. He gave a few instructions, explaining what he wanted to see. When Lenny and DeShane were working, he swung back to check on Clifton and Jerry to make sure that they had not lapsed. As long as they left Tony out of it, he didn’t much care if they gambled. He remembered having spent a good deal more time gambling than diagramming sentences when he was in high school, but he objected to their playing tricks on someone disadvantaged. When he turned the corner, he caught a glimpse of the boys scrambling back to their tables and heard a few whispers, as though they had something to hide, but did not see any trace of cards or money. “I’m going to start handing out detentions if there isn’t a little less talk and a little more work,” he cautioned. “Yes, Mr. Jaroncyk,” Clifton said. “We’re working. We’re working. See?” said Jerry, holding up his sheet of paper. “Uh-huh. Let’s make sure it stays that way.” They were trying too hard. Clifton was up to something, but he couldn’t stand there all day watching them when twenty-five others needed him. They were working, so he moved on.

He tried to remember where he had been before he had to deal with Clifton and circled back to the Morales twins and Miguel Ramos. As he approached, he was happy to see that Ben Greene had crawled back out from under the workbench and was hunched over, drawing again. The picture had progressed, and there was even more varied sea life floating around the whale, in addition to plants growing out of the ocean floor, waving far below the whale, its head poking out of the sea, spraying water into the air. Everything was highly detailed and exacting, right down to the leaves on the kelp and the tentacles on the jellyfish. He wanted to ask Ben where he had seen these creatures, whether in a book or on the Discovery Channel or at an aquarium, but he didn’t want to risk his having another fit. He wondered if Betsy Klein, the art teacher, had him in class. He had a real gift, whether he was willing to talk or not. Alex turned to the other boys. “Miguel, can you tell me about Ben’s drawing here? Does it help you see how the spout of water turns?” “It’s a real pretty picture, Mr. Jaroncyk.” “What do you think this is?” Alex asked, pointing to the two gears and the vertical axle. “Well, those there are gears, and that’s a spoke or something that turns the whirlybird on the whale’s

SPRING 2008

head.” “Right. That’s good. Now,” he said, handing the toy to Orlando, “you can take apart the toy into halves. Can you show me where this is inside and explain how it works?” Orlando rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Can’t you let us go a little early? We’ve got study hall next period. Be good, we promise.” “Clock’s right there. It’s ten minutes to. Why don’t you—” Suddenly, there was a lot of yelling and chanting, though he only caught a few words. He heard: “Do it! Do it! Do it!” And then, the roar of a machine—a drill or a saw—though he couldn’t be sure which and the crash of something heavy to the floor. He had forbidden the use of any machines and to make sure, had removed the blades and bits from all the saws and drills, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t accessible from the cabinets like any other tool. He ran back to see what had happened and knocked several boxes of PVC sideways in his hurry to reach the back of the classroom. Most of the workbenches were empty, the toys and drafting paper left behind. He had only been talking with Miguel and Orlando for a few minutes, but he had been sandwiched behind a file cabinet and some stacked boxes, and he had not noticed students leaving their workbenches. He saw the knot

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of students who were yelling, the roar of a machine emanating from their center. They were crammed tightly against one another and seemed to draw other students towards them. He was not sure what was happening at the center, but he saw several students pounding the air with their fists. He rushed forward, pushing students roughly aside. When he finally reached the center, he froze for a second. Tony was leaning backward with his head on the table of the drill press. The table had been ratcheted up, so it was about even with Tony’s chest. He was stooping, leaning backwards and looking at the ceiling, just resting his head there beneath the drill. So much for drill presses being safer. With one hand, Tony had grabbed onto the column at the back of the machine for balance; his other hand was on the handle, and he was trying to pull the spinning bit down into his forehead. Clifton and Lenny were standing nearest the drill press; Clifton was laughing. Laughing. After his moment’s shock, Alex pushed two cheering students aside and dove under the workbench to pull the plug. The students circling the drill press were still shouting and clapping. He grasped the cord and pulled. The drill made a sickening sound as it whined to a halt. With the plug in his hand, there was no excuse to stay there under the bench, but he didn’t want to come out. He knew what he

was going to see. If, by some miracle, Tony wasn’t dead, he would be limp, his forehead ripped open, bleeding. He had once seen a soldier blown to bits. He was just a regular guy, eighteen, like him. Alex barely knew him. He was thirty yards back on the trail when the bouncing Betty exploded, but he heard the guy’s screams. They all did. He saw the shrapnel fly and the soldier’s fatigues and skin and muscle tear from his body and spew into the brush. It would be like that—Tony’s skin ripped from the bone, the bit wedged in his skull, brains oozing. A few students had begun screaming; a few were still shouting. There was too much noise to make out any particular reaction. He knew he had to look. As he stood, he smashed his head on the bench. Tony was alive. Blood was streaming down his face, but he was alive. He was even standing. It ran into this eyes, down his cheeks, into his mouth, and he was crying and choking. He had probably jerked away when the bit got close. The drill had torn the skin from his forehead, but Alex did not think the bit had gone deep. Tony was ready to topple over. Alex grabbed him by the arms and helped him to stand upright again, supporting him with a hand behind his neck. He just wanted to get Tony out of there as fast as he could and call for help. As he started to lead Tony away, Lenny came at Alex, swinging. He put a hand up to block the punches, but was thrown off balance. “You just lost me ten dollars!” Lenny shouted, still swinging. “Is that what this is all about? You made a bet on this boy’s life?” he asked. It was like coming up on that boy on the trail all over again, seeing him lying there, crying and gasping and his legs gone while the medic tied a tourniquet and the RTO radioed for a medevac. He knew then that the mother who fed them rice the night before had lied. And he felt the same hatred for Lenny that he had for that sweet old lady who would have sent them all to their deaths. He didn’t understand how they had convinced Tony to cooperate. The drill was long quiet, but he could still hear its screeching. Every term, he warned his students about accidents if they were not careful, but in twenty-one years, he had never imagined warning them that someone might try to commit murder with a drill. Lenny came at him again, and Alex pushed him back. Then, Clifton intercepted and pushed Lenny, yelling at him. “You stupid bastard! Can’t you keep your mouth shut?” Clifton shoved Lenny again and pinned him against the wall, his hands around his neck. Lenny kicked and freed himself, and the two were rolling on the ground. Alex yelled for them to stop, but didn’t

dare try to break up the fight until he had Tony out of harm’s way. Most of the students scattered, jumping over fallen boxes and cascading books and fittings and headed for the doors. And then two of his cabinetry students— Phil Thiens and Dewey Lewandowsi—were directing the younger students, keeping them from knocking into him. Joe Morgan, who was built like a bull and as strong as one, picked up steel tubs that had toppled over and tossed them aside, clearing the way for Alex as he guided Tony to a seat. Tony’s head lolled and fell onto his arms on his desk. His blood seeped into his sleeves and puddled on the laminate desktop. Alex tore off his shirt without unbuttoning it and lifted Tony’s head. The wound did not look deep, but he shuddered to think what would have happened had he noticed the ruckus just a few seconds later. When he looked up for a moment, he saw that his four other cabinetry students were still there, and Imani Abdalla was using his desk phone. She hung up and said, “I have called for security, Mr. Jaroncyk.” He thanked her and heard Phil and Dewey yelling at the other students to be quiet and enforcing his mandate that no one leave the room. He was thankful now that his cabinetry students were in this class. Many of the regular third-hour students had stopped when the older students told them to, or changed direction and circled around the new point of interest that was Clifton and Lenny rolling on the floor throwing punches. They began shouting again. A few students slipped out the door. Alex looked up and saw Dave Gunderson, the electronics teacher and his best friend at Wells, striding towards him. They’d taught next door to each other for eight years, ever since Dave had come to Wells. He was a few inches shorter than Alex and younger and fitter, too. He had a dark, full head of hair and was clean-shaven. “I heard the screaming,” he said. He took hold of Tony’s head while Alex wrapped his shirt around and tied it in place with the sleeves. Alex wiped Tony’s face with the material that hung down. A few of Dave’s students had followed him into the room and stood staring at Tony. The rest stood clustered outside the door, looking in, curious. Alex pointed at another of his students, Lamont Marshall, standing with nothing to do. “Keep his head up, and hold this shirt in place.” Lamont came and took hold of Tony’s head. He moaned. “Imani—go out in the hall. Keep watch for security. Tell those kids to make way when you see SPRING 2008

them,” Alex said. He turned to Dave. “Let’s go.” They ran back to Clifton and Lenny. When they reached the fight, DeShane and Jerry had both joined in and were kicking Lenny in the side. The students had formed another circle and were chanting again, despite Dewey and Joe and Phil’s best efforts to get their attention and keep them quiet. The three seniors were on the inside of the circle, nearest the fight. They were pushing outwards, trying, without much success, to keep the rest of the students away from the four who were fighting in the center. “Beat HIM! Beat HIM!” “Go Cliff! Go Cliff!” No one was cheering for Lenny. Alex pushed through the crowd. Lenny sported a bloodied nose and a swollen eye. He was curled in the fetal position, trying to protect his head and his side as Clifton continued to clock him and DeShane and Jerry kicked. Cliff’s jaw was smashed, and his knuckles were skinned raw, no doubt from throwing one punch after another. DeShane picked up a screwdriver and raised it over his head like a dagger. Alex reached up and disarmed him, and Dave pulled Clifton off Lenny and held him while he writhed and swung. Alex was relieved to see the three uniformed officers who were regularly stationed at the school appear in the midst of the shouting kids. Another couple security guards were behind them. At the sight of the officers, more students scattered. And as the officers fought through, using their batons to restore order, Alex saw Bill Krueger, the principal, trailing behind. The officers cuffed Clifton, Lenny, DeShane, and Jerry and told the other students to stay put. There had been more students fighting than just those four. Noses were bloody. Faces were scratched. As the police dragged the offenders out and down to the office, the chanting and shouting tapered off. Alex sank back onto one of the steel tubs. He was suddenly struck by the loudness of his own breathing. Krueger stepped forward. He was sixty and due to retire in two years. Once upon a time, he had taught woodshop himself, but he had been an administrator for the last twenty years, and though Alex liked the man well enough, he thought Krueger had forgotten what it was like to be in the classroom day in and day out. Alex heard the bell sound for the next period, but no one seemed to notice. Krueger watched as the police and security guards escorted nearly half the class out of the room—those who had fought and those who had watched. Everyone was being questioned. Krueger was looking around at the

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cascading piles. Alex saw the principal’s eyes fall on the students with blackened eyes and blood-spattered shirts. Then Krueger turned to him. “What in the hell happened here?” he asked. “I don’t know,” Alex panted. “But Tony needs a doctor.” When he looked around, Alex saw Dave was tending to Tony, and he heaved himself up and followed Krueger to see how Tony was doing. “Doesn’t look too deep,” Dave said. “You’ll take over from here? I’ve got to get back to my class.” Krueger dismissed him. Then together, Krueger and Alex supported Tony, one on each side, and escorted him to the freight elevator. The elevator took a long time to reach the fourth floor. When it got there, Alex pulled open the gate. The freight elevator was for transporting wood and supplies, not people; it was a cage. Alex pulled the gate shut, trapping himself in there with Tony and Krueger. When the elevator started down, he faltered, and he felt Tony’s weight shift. He was leaning heavily on Alex’s shoulder. “You must have some idea what happened, Alex,” Krueger said. “I do. I mean, I don’t understand how it happened. But I know those fuckers made a ten-dollar bet on whether or not Tony would drill into his head.” “You knew that kid Harris has a reputation. Why weren’t you watching him?” “I was! You saw my shop. It’s impossible to watch everyone when I can’t see half of them around the boxes and buckets.” “Why’s it like that?” “Jack. He doesn’t want it cleaned.” “The hell with Jack.” “I’d agree except he keeps interfering with the custodians.” “Call them again. You didn’t see this coming?” “I saw cards. I saw money. I separated them several times, took their cards. I thought they were gambling. I never thought they’d try to murder a kid.” He was surprised when Krueger agreed. “No. I guess that wouldn’t have been the first thing I would have thought of either,” he said. The elevator bounced on its cables as it settled to the first floor. They stepped off the elevator, still supporting Tony between them. The boy could hardly stand, and Alex felt like he was supporting most of Tony’s weight. “Still,” Krueger continued. “There’s going to be a lot of paperwork and questions to answer over this. You’d better be ready.” As they walked Tony to the nurse’s office, Alex felt his heart in his throat. He thought of Kate at home, and he wanted to talk to her and tell her what had

happened. He knew she would understand. She had taught in Milwaukee schools for a year when they were first married before she left to start her own business. One of her students who blamed her for his suspension had hit her so hard, he cracked a tooth. He knocked her down, and she hit her head and had to be hospitalized overnight. Even if she had forgotten what it was like day to day, she would remember that, and she’d know what he was up against. The administration, particularly Krueger, had no idea. They stayed in their offices and pointed fingers whenever anything happened. The boy was heavy on his shoulder. His head kept lolling from side to side. He would pick it up and look around and then let his chin drop to his chest again. He was really out of it. When they finally reached the nurse’s office, Alex lowered Tony to sit on the little cot and waited while she cleaned away the blood and looked at his head. Alex watched. Krueger stayed, too. The nurse was in her early thirties, maybe, black with light skin, soft-spoken, but direct. She wore latex gloves and a coat peppered with little moons and stars. There was a flap of skin just hanging where it had been sliced away by the drill. The nurse peeled it back and cleaned the wound with antiseptic solution. “The drill didn’t touch the bone,” she said. “But he

does need stitches.” She called an ambulance. Alex looked down at his hands. They were visibly shaking. His undershirt was drenched with sweat, and his face was flushed. The nurse turned to him and touched his head. He started and pulled away. “Just a minute,” the nurse said. He gripped the edge of the counter and held himself steady. She touched his head again, pushed gently at the spot where he had hit it. “Nasty bump you’ve got there. That’s going to swell. How’d it happen?” “Hit my head on a bench.” “I’ll get you some ice. And let me call someone who can get you something to calm down. You’re a wreck.” “No. No.” Alex shook his head and followed Krueger out of the little room. “I hope the kid’s all right.” “You heard the nurse,” Krueger said. “Good thing you managed to pull the plug when you did. She’s right. You don’t look so good. What do you know about Tony’s parents?” “Nothing. I’ve only had him in class two days.” “Right. Well, I’ll let you know when I hear anything.” He sent Alex back to his room with paperwork and said that he should be ready to make a statement to the DA at some point. The nurse handed

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SPRING 2008

ENVOY

IN TRANSIT

Dubai, Miami, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Madrid, Tokyo, Mexico City. The glittering display of possibility flickered across the monitor in São Paulo’s Aeroporto de Guarulhos, Southern hub and hive of the transcontinental. But I could barely catch a fleeting glance, as I was being brusquely escorted by a stocky woman in uniform. We marched past the gleaming displays at the tax-free emporium, where yellow-clad and smiling attendants assist you in finding the perfect vodka to be dutifully carted home as gift or souvenir. A heavily made-up hostess stood motionless at the travelers’ spa, not noticing my anxious face and tensed shoulders. The international transit lounge, like the sleeping pills many travelers take, is an opiate designed to soothe the disorienting haze of moving from one flight to another. Its momentary pleasures are open to all who bear a passport and boarding pass. I was lacking both. The trip began innocently enough, as I admired yet another stamp in my wonderfully battered passport, fingering the fresh ink certifying another voyage. The little blue book had gotten so full that I had to send it in for extra pages a few months prior. I stared excitedly at the in-flight magazine, the world map organized by flight itineraries, pondering the dizzying arcs. It was already evening when the first leg had left, and I was getting drowsy. I slipped my passport back into the black zip-up document holder I’ve had for years, a relic from a trip to Greece with my grandparents. It was a packaged tour, the guide asininely instructing us, “Have your cameras ready as you look to the left,” while we stared through the bus window with guides and tour busses and photo stops. I’d been meaning to get a new document holder, as the company name emblazoned on the front has reminded me of this

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greg scruggs

canned travel experience every time I have set off since, thankfully on my own terms. The connection was an exercise in bureaucratic inanity. It was a continuing flight – same airplane, same flight number, same seat – but all passengers still had to deplane, pass through security (as though we’d acquired some new threat on our hour flight), and linger in the transit lounge before reboarding. In the security line, I continued chatting with my neighbor, a young Brazilian law student heading to New York to visit his father. While complaining about the new restrictions on visas and travel between our countries, he asked out of curiosity if he could see what my tourist visa looked like. The question sent ice through my veins. Several frantic searches through my bag later, it was confirmed: the document holder was missing. I raced back along the corridor in confusion, the odd semiotics of airline logos directing me – no, not the maple leaf, I’m not going to Canada, the blue and gold crane must be on its way to Frankfurt – when I was stopped dead at a row of identical planes. They were cued up along the tarmac, tailfins ablaze with twin blue and red “American” streaked across silver fuselages. The featureless white corridor was empty, and I ducked hesitantly down the jetway of each looking for signs of life. At the third or fourth one, I stumbled across an airline employee. After explaining what had happened, my panicstricken Portuguese full of errors, she radioed the cleaning crew. I stood impatiently, working out every nervous tic I had. When the crackling “nada” came through the walkie-talkie, it deflated me like a sucker punch. The passport had to be there. I pushed to be let on the plane – a big violation of the rules, she said – to search myself. The empty vessel was awash with women in pale blue uniforms, multinational logo across the breast, busying themselves with disposable pillows and blankets, a

systematic sweep of the airplane, one of countless preparations for another overnight in a cramped of hotel room. I walked swiftly and determinedly down the right aisle, then dove into seat 42A. When the seat back pocket, the holder’s last known hiding place, yielded nothing, I began contorting myself underneath and around, trying to get angles on this rigid seat that it wasn’t designed for, exploring its greasy metal crevices with my hands. But I came up empty. Part of me wanted to just sit down in that seat and not move – if all went as planned, I was supposed to be back in it merely an hour later. It would have been a Kafkaesque tragedy, hauled away by the police for refusing to yield a seat to which I had some strange notion of temporary ownership. I had paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege to park myself in this swath of cushion while the engines roared around me for nine hours. But with no boarding pass, no itinerary, no passport, I had no proof. Besides, my temporary window wasn’t mine until after this behind-the-scenes cleaning was complete. It was like piercing the fourth wall of the theater – passengers were not supposed to see past the illusion of a clean, well-maintained machine. My eyes darted to every seat as I slowly made my way out with the vain hope a black corner of vinyl would appear in a shadow. Back in the corridor, I retraced my steps, eyes cast to the ground, but the object never appeared. How could it? So plain itself, mired in the kaleidoscopic duplication of the terminal. An airline employee escorted me to the front of the line at the security checkpoint, where after the usual fumbling ritual of emptying pockets onto conveyer belts, I was unceremoniously deposited on the other side of the metal detector and into the arms of the gruff, uniformed woman who led me through the terminal. At the gate, I spied my seatmate whose question had sparked my unfortunate discovery. He looked at me inquisitively and I gestured that it was still missing. The gaggle of airline employees huddled around their computer and conferred about my situation. They requested another form of identification and I produced my driver’s license, which allows me free transit throughout all fifty states, but seemed so pale and inadequate in the face of what came next. They were going to radio the immigration authorities, plead my case, and ask if I could still get on the plane. It was becoming a Kafkaesque struggle after all – the shadowy

arbiters of immigration, hiding somewhere in the dark underbelly of Guarulhos airport, deciding the fate of a traveler who slipped through the cracks. I glumly leaned on the counter and watched the long line of passengers slowly file through, passports in hand. The law student passed by and said he’d look for it as soon as he got back on. As the plane was nearly done boarding, the word came through that I had been cleared. Like a condemned man redeemed, I relished my freedom. Grabbing my reprinted boarding pass, I marveled at the absurdity of the automatic glass door separating the counter from the anonymous corridor: when it was closed just an hour before, I had been on the outside looking in at the relaxed passengers as I anxiously waited for word of the little scrap of paper that would decide whether I could be on the inside looking out. I nearly skipped onto the plane and settled back into 42A, scowling at the possibility that my documents were lost in some forgotten crack of this infernal machine. Lodged in the undercarriage, perhaps? Somewhere us passengers had no right to tread. I mentioned something to the flight attendant in the still flickering hope that it might appear,

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somturbulence jarring it loose – what if it slid down the aisle during take-off and bumped up against my foot? – but she alerted me to another scenario. “The cleaning crew probably stole it, you know how valuable an American passport is?” It was not something that had occurred to me in the mute faces of the women who had stared at me when I crossed over into their domain. The crew manager had assured me that they’d already cleaned the back of the plane and hadn’t found anything, but what was hiding under the ruffles of their uniforms, pressed up against a stomach or hiding along a waistband? By the time American Airlines flight 950 thundered off into the night, my passport was already being spirited down the highway and into the vast unknowns of São Paulo, this metropolis where Manhattan highrises sprawl like Los Angeles, notions of vertical and horizontal extend to untenable extremes. On the black market, the naïve face of a 17-year-old was going to be clipped out and the hard features of someone seeking a better life were going to be pasted in. They would memorize my name and date of birth, come up with alibis for why I was in France for four months, what I was doing in Montreal last

The Harvard Advocate

year, where exactly that stamp with the Arabic was from. It would change hands another dozen times, perhaps studied by counterfeiters, and acquire a new battering outside the protective confines of the zip-up document holder that reminded me of being an American tourist in Greece, everything I had assiduously avoided ever since – especially in my visits to Brazil. My identity was being sold on the black market, a fact that I regarded with a strange disconnect. There would be forms to fill out, some hassle at JFK in the morning, a call placed to the U.S. consulate in São Paulo. I would get a new passport soon enough, maybe endure some extra questioning at the border for the next couple years, but my citizenship was not in doubt. I was more fascinated that out there in that terrifying megalopolis – highest per capita helicopter ownership in the world, where the rich ferry themselves from rooftop to rooftop because the ground is poisoned with people – somebody was going to spend their life savings to clutch my passport in a sweaty palm, grit their teeth, and get turned away.

contributors’ notes

RICHARD BECK ‘09 doesn’t want fans with good taste. He wants fans that taste good. Isidore Bethel ‘11 knows that rich people march on Washington every day. Bea Camacho ‘06 is wondering where to draw the line between art and management consulting. Marta Figlerowicz ‘09 has a polyphony of alternative selves. One of them is disliked by the rest of the group, and so she stays outside as much as she can talking to other people. Megan Colleen Harney is a member of Wauwatosa’s only Monster Repair Fix-It Team. Alexandra Kjuchukova ‘08 (Sashka) is a car thief and cheese smuggler. She indulges in relentless experimental cooking and reciting otherwise good English poems with an abrasive Bulgarian accent. Amelia Klein saw a lynx. Laura Kolbe ‘08 is the auto salesman and loves you. Maria Vassileva ‘10 got a matlab platypus for her birthday. Amy Lien ‘09 found a pair of woolen knickers in Berlin. Jack McGrath is a technician in the Widener Library Conservation Lab. Stephen Narain ‘08 is gonna keep on keepin’ on. Greg Scruggs ‘08 is routinely stopped at the border. Matthew Spellberg ’09 loves ducks.

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