TLR / Machismo: The Field Guide by The Literary Review

MACHISMO: A FIELD GUIDE WINTER 2010

MACH ISMO: A FI E LD G U I DE

WINTER 2010 VOL.53 / NO.2

Contents POETRY

22–28

Kathryn Nuernberger U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524474; The Doubloon in the Cornfield; Prima Donna in Her Heaven; The Visible Spectrum 32–37

Steve Davenport Diminishing Innuendo of Hog Sonnet; National Geographic; The Sestina Has Been Drinking; Travel and Leisure 47–49

John Estes The Male Gaze (Ending with a Sentence by Frank Bidart); Ora Pro Nobis 61–69

R. A. Villanueva Blessing the Animals; Drifting towards the Bottom, Jacques Piccard recalls the sky; Telemachy 75–81

Jay Baron Nicorvo Deadbeat, Ruthless and Brutal, Wants the World; Description; Love Poem

91–98

Peter E. Murphy Material Witness; Mannequin; The Pits; Garry Falling 107–113

George David Clark Thinking about Houdini the Week before Easter; The Fireman’s Son 131

Deena Linett The Man with the Sword 151–154

Michael Bazzett The Operation; The Problem of Measurement; Wind 170–173

Martin Jude Farawell Innocence; The Classics; Beloved Son 191–192

Ricardo Pau-Llosa Bath FICTION

9–21

Duff Brenna Annette’s Work in Progress 29–31

James Tadd Adcox The Judgment; Home Intruders

38–46

U KRAI N E

Svetlana Lavochkina Like a Real Man 50–60

Eric Maroney Avram’s Vineyard 70–74

Lance Olsen Just These Minutes 82–90

Margaux Fragoso Gethsemane 99–106

Karen Regen-Tuero Care 114–130

Glenn Deutsch The Monkey Version of My Father 132–142 I N DIA

B. S. V. Prasad The Morris Minor 143–150

Porter Fox Kingdom 155–169

David Licata There Is Joy before the Angels of God

174–175

Becca Klaver Thank You, Come Again 176–190

T. J. Forrester Quid Pro Quo I NTE RVI EW

210–213

226–235

214–216

CONTR I B UTORS

Mieko Kanai The Word Book By Anne McPeak

193–202

217–219

BOOKS

220–221

Amity Gaige Interview with Adam Haslett

203–206

Sam Lipsyte The Ask By Zachary Lazar 207–209

Laurie Lamon Without Wings By Renée Ashley

TLR

ACADE M E

Jack Ridl Losing Season By Mark Hillringhouse

Janet Frame Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame By Ruth Curry Binnie Kirshenbaum The Scenic Route By John King 222–225

Pamela Spiro Wagner We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders By Renée Ashley

Richard Koffler Pavese in America 236–238

COVE R ARTIST STEPHEN FERRY MARISOL KHALI TAKES HER LUMPS

I first saw photojournalist Stephen Ferry’s photographs in 1999, at the publication of his extraordinary book I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain That Eats Men, about the modern legacy of a notorious labor camp and silver mine in the Andean mountains. The pictures were dramatic—both in terms of the enduring human devastation portrayed and in the artist’s fierce, dark, somehow bloody composition. He brings that muscular sensibility into all of his work, to most remarkable effect in the recent series Macondo: In the Land of Gabriel García Márquez, in which he captures the real world of magical realism and reveals in his pictures the exquisite mystery of the everyday on the lush and cluttered landscape of Colombia’s northern coast. Ferry has photographed all over the world, but is now based in Bogotá and has dedicated himself to an extended coverage of the civil war in Colombia. The kind of conflict-driven subjects that attract Ferry, his fearlessness and sensitivity in the face of difficult and remote stories, and his fascination with Latin America make him a natural fit for our machismo issue. We think we shifted the game a little by selecting women wrestlers from Ferry’s portfolio. But it seems that if there’s any cultural group best situated to transpose the evolving definition of machismo, it’s Bolivian women, as the photographer illuminates. — M. P. In the indigenous city of El Alto, Bolivia, more than 13,000 feet above sea level, a new sport has sprung up: Cholita wrestling. Modeled after Mexican Lucha Libre, Cholita wrestling features Aymara women, popularly called Cholitas, who are known for wearing multiple layers of lace petticoats under their pleated skirts, and for their normally modest and reserved bearing. Marisol Khali, a seventeen-year-old newcomer to the sport, is seen here losing consciousness after “Jennifer” applies a wickedly painful ju-jitsu lock to her leg. Once she regained her senses in the locker room, I asked Marisol if she felt like returning to the ring after this ordeal. She scoffed at the thought of quitting. Ever since she was eight she had dreamed of being a professional freestyle wrestler, even though at that time only men entered the ring. — Stephen Ferry

E DITOR’S NOTE

I had few if any moments of hesitation while selecting work for the Machismo issue—all of the stories and poems included here virtually cried out MAN! to me. And yet, I find myself beset with trepidation at the moment in which I’m called upon to explain what I mean by machismo; it’s not all booze, girls, cars, guns and hard science (though we do have that stuff in here). I am at once in a perfect position to define and appreciate matters of maleness and, of course, completely the wrong person, the wrong gender, the wrong intrinsic sensibility. I am, in this case, the other, that dreadful outpost of the critical perspective that so paralyzed us all in literature classes in the late eighties. From the outside, I can exploit in so many subtle ways aspects of brutality, force, hunger, brazen intelligence, and complicated sensitivity. In less subtle ways I can tick off the caricatures of testosterone. But what do I really know? As a number of intimates have repeatedly informed me in recent years, I know nothing at all about the male ego. True. The male ego is a mystery to me on par with the Resurrection. While musing on this admittedly neurotic dilemma of editorial legitimacy, I was struck by a passage in The Ask, Sam Lipsyte’s bitterly alluring new novel (see Zachary Lazar’s brilliant essay in these pages). From a conversation between the hero, Milo, and his father—who is convinced his son is gay:

“There’s no shame in men loving men,” he said. “There’s only shame if there’s shame. You get me?” “Sure, Dad.” “I don’t go in for all that macho crap,” he said. “In fact, even though your mother goes to all those meetings, I’m a better feminist than she is. You want to know why?” “Why?” “Because I’m objective. I’m not a woman, so I can see it all very clearly. And they are absolutely right. We are pieces of shit.”

Milo’s dad puts his fingers on the attitude I needed to adopt in order to editorialize on manliness—“I can see it all very clearly.” More to the point, Lipsyte’s angry, funny, heretical book perhaps best epitomizes what I mean by machismo. It just takes care of its business and never looks over its shoulder. Which brings me back to this theme. We’re not looking over our shoulders, but I think it’s safe to say that we’re essentially coming at the subject from left field. And so, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, we give you Machismo: A Field Guide. Minna Proctor

SHORT STORY

Duff Brenna Annette’s Work in Progress

When I come out of the house, the cat slips over the fence before I can throw a rock at it. Soothingly I coo to the bird, “You miss Tommy, Tootie? Me too. Poor little thing. Poor tiny Tommy.” I step inside. Close the door. Fill the feeder with seed. The birdbath where I found him still bubbles with innocence. Filtered water circulating. No scum in the bowl. The pump hums invitingly. The water giggles. My movements make Tootie fly to the top of the cage. Clinging upside down, tiny claws wire-meshed, head ticking like a metronome timing my movements below. To calm her I sit on the bench and sing . . . because my heart’s been broken . . . . The bench is surrounded by a nest of flowers. The bird bends her eye on me. Ambiance: unreal. Also thinking: much—too—long. I love Emily Dickinson. I try my best to write like her, though I know I’m not worthy to touch the hem of her dress. I’d kiss her shoe if I could. Call me queer if you want to. I named my children after two of my top ten. Son Keats. Daughter Emily. Emily has my olive complexion, crescent eyes, dark hair. Keats is slim like his father, but has reddish hair. No one on either side of the family has reddish hair. Keats’ father is dishwater blond. The first time he saw his son mummy-wrapped in the infant ward, he said there was no resemblance. Who is this flat-faced gnome? He looks like someone’s nub-nosed-ruddy-cheeked grandpa. And I said, “All infants look like that, silly.” As Keats grew up—now nearly eight—his father claimed he still couldn’t see himself in the boy. I tried not to take offense. Tried to see it as his humor needling me. “Oh, stop it, Danny,” I always tell him. “You’re two beans from the same pod.” TLR

“One a lima, the other a kidney,” he answers, his arching eyebrow telling me he’s serious, sort of. One patented San Diego day, when Jerry and April Fields are over for a barbecue, Dan says, “Look at my son’s ears. Don’t they look like Jerry’s moth wings? And what about that hair?” Pointing at Jerry’s red hair, Dan narrows his eyes suspiciously. But then he laughs and he says, “Come on, only joking.” Jerry Fields laughs, “Heh, heh”—no heart in it, no mirth. “The mailman has red hair,” says impish April. “But Jerry has easier access,” says Dan. “Hop over the fence and he’s in there!” His hips thrusting in my direction. We all laugh. Only a joke. Dan goes back to tonging steaks, flipping them, fat sizzling. Danny is a moody man, a moody general practitioner. He isn’t easy to get along with. He drinks too much and when he drinks he often picks at me. He says I weigh too much and now that I’ve been married so long and feel secure I’m letting myself go. Dumpy Annette turning into her hippo mother. She wants to be a poet. She’s no poet. Wannabe isn’t enough. She’s lazy. She isn’t bright. She has no work ethic. Blah blah. Bash. Best to agree with him. Best to agree with every put-down meanness can muster. I hate to argue. If I don’t defend myself he will talk himself out. But then again he isn’t always a browbeater, not always insufferable, not always a bully. No, Danny can be sweet and thoughtful. He erected the aviary in the backyard and bought me two lovebirds for Valentine’s Day. One morning I found the male bird (poor Tommy) at the bottom of the bath. Maybe a heart attack? Stroke? Do birds have heart attacks? Do they have strokes? I buried him in the rose-garden; the one Danny had planted for me. Red roses. Deep royal red. Danny has gentle hands, doctor hands. He knows how to use those hands. He knows how to do plumbing and electrical repairs and take care of the cars. These things he learned growing up on a farm. The house never has a drippy faucet for more than a day or two; it never has tricky switches. Not long before we were married I had dropped out of college (University of Arizona, Tucson) where I majored in creative writing (emphasis poetry). Wrote my first major paper on “Endymion”: A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Parents far off in San Diego, college freed me, made me bold enough to try something new. No mother hovering, riding herd. I went wild. Dated a boy (half Swede, half African-American) named 10

Hamlin. Hamlin made me feel progressive. Took my virginity. Glad to get rid of it. Six weeks later a pregnancy test turned blue. I was in trouble. The news made me so sick I couldn’t attend classes. I broke up with Hamlin. He didn’t understand. I didn’t tell him why. Days later, while sitting on the toilet cramping, I miscarried. A blob the size of a marble floating beneath me. I flushed it away and took a shower. Padded myself with Kotex and packed my clothes. Caught a Greyhound for home. Independence behind me, I wanted Mommy. I moved back in with my parents. Mommy worked at a dentist’s office a few doors away from Dan’s practice. When he told her that he needed a receptionist, she offered her daughter. For me it was love at first sight. I married him six months later. I was twenty. He was twentynine.

He says I weigh too much and now that I’ve been married so long and feel secure I’m letting myself go. Dumpy Annette turning into her hippo mother. She wants to be a poet.

In the early days of our marriage, we were sexually insatiable. I found myself obsessed with him, so delicious. I was always wondering what new eroticism he would invent to entertain me. He told me that anything goes between adults. As long as they both consent, nothing is perverted. If it feels good, it is good. I believed him. I also believed that if I were always faithful, keeping myself exclusively for his pleasure (Madonna and whore), then everything would be well with our marriage. Mommy had told me I would have to endure a lot from a man, but if I kept our squabbles out of the bedroom, the rest would sort itself out. “Remember, Annette, marriage is always a work in progress. Even after twenty-five years your father and I have to work at it. A work in progress I’m saying.” What I didn’t know was that my willingness to progress beyond “normal” boundaries in the first months of marriage had made my husband distrustful. I was too willing, too easy to train. As the years passed, my eager passion became dangerous. One night the Walkers and the Fields watch porno together, an old movie called BlueYou. We laugh at the bad acting, the absurd camera angles, the overdubbed sounds, the characters flooded in fluids. “Juicy, juicy,” Danny keeps saying. TLR

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When Jerry and April are leaving, we couples hug at the door and Danny sees Jerry pass his hand over my bottom. Just a touch, Jerry’s palm drifting. I am smiling serenely. As soon as the door closes, my husband starts picking on me. “Playing with my wife’s ass,” he says. Still smiling I say, “What’s that?” “Jerry couldn’t keep his hands off your ass.” “He couldn’t?” (Still smiling.) “Come on, woman, don’t tell me you didn’t feel it.” (Not smiling now.) “Feel what?” I reply. “I didn’t feel anything.” (Little white lie.) Dan shakes his head. “You broads,” he says. Eyebrows: inverted commas. “Caught in the act and still deny it.” “What act? What’s the matter with you?” A voice tells me not to question him. Laugh it off, get him in bed and everything will be fine. But the booze has made me slow-witted. Aggressive. “If I walked in on the two of you balling your brains out, you’d probably say I was hallucinating. Don’t give me that offended look. Women aren’t really offended by anything. You can’t offend them, they wrote the book.” “You’re talking about your foul-mouthed mother,” I shoot back. “Yeah, her too,” he agrees. “I just wish you could be honest. That’s all we ask is for some honesty.” “I didn’t feel Jerry!” I tell him. “If I had felt him, I’d say so.” “Right.” He goes to the bar, pours another drink. “Don’t drink anymore,” I say. “Shut up,” he says. This is not how I had expected the night to end. Usually when we watched the sexy movies it was like an hour or more of foreplay and we would fly to bed and make fierce love after. I had expected him to pounce on me as soon as the door closed. I had been ready for that. But now I am angry. “I’ve never done anything to make you not trust me,” I say. His eyes are cruel. “Haven’t you? Haven’t you, really?” “Like what?” I ask. My heart hammering. He suspects me of some terrible treachery! “You tell me,” he says. “There’s nothing to tell, Danny! Will you please stop?” (I think about Hamlin and when I got pregnant. The miscarriage. Flushing the evidence away while blood 12

ran down my legs. There is no way he could know about that! No one knew, not even the baby’s father.) “You’ve always been a bit of a nympho,” he says. “None of you is off-limits to anything. You’d do all the things the whores do in those movies, wouldn’t you. You’d like that. I know you, Annette. I know a gangbang would be right up your many alleys.” I’m flabbergasted. I’m speechless. “What the . . . what the . . . .” Also thinking would I? Also thinking hell no! Keats and Emily hike down the hall. They step between us. “Why you guys yelling?” Emily asks. “You woked us up.” Dan takes Keats by the hair—“Ow, Daddy!”—shaking him and saying, “So what about this little fellow? Whose little trout is this?” I gasp. My head whirling. “Where am I?” I whisper. Also thinking is he crazy? “Let him go, Daddy,” says Emily. She grabs her brother’s hand. “Come to bed, Keats!” Sick to my stomach, I try to talk but can’t. “Look at your face, I finally caught you,” says Dan, his voice acidic. “Did you really think you could keep the truth from me forever?” Keats staring at his father resists the tugging of Emily’s hand. “Mommy?” he squeaks. “Mommy’s been bad,” says Emily. “Come to bed.” Dan lets go of the boy’s hair, bends down, gripping him by his collar. Pulling him close and saying, “Here’s a lesson for you, Keats. Take it from Dan Walker, never trust a woman. Are you listening? Do you understand? Never trust a goddamn broad.” “Okay, Daddy,” says the boy. Inches away, eye to eye, they look at each other and I see the likeness. Keats already getting his father’s arching eyebrows, dimpled chin. The trim body growing toward the same dimensions—six feet, same powerful hands and wrists someday. Recovering my voice, I say, “Will you look at him, Danny?” “I have,” he answers. “I’ve watched this kid turning into Jerry Fields.” “Oh my God!” My hands cover my ears. “I’m having a nightmare!” “Go with your sister,” he orders the boy. On wobbly legs, I stumble to the couch. I expect him to tell me all his suspicions, but he doesn’t. He says, “Stew in it.” TLR

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A moment later I hear the door slam. “Booze talking,” I murmur. “It’s the booze.” Also thinking maybe this isn’t happening. Maybe he comes back smiling and saying “Gotcha! C’mere, you gullible goose!” Maybe we are about to take our showers, brush our teeth, climb nude into bed. Make love. Maybe. Hmm, maybe not. Days pass and we do not talk. At night Dan and Keats and Emily watch their favorite shows as usual, Emily on her daddy’s lap, Keats on the floor. I often fall asleep in front of the TV—nervous exhaustion. I wake uncomfortable and cold in the morning, my hands shaking, my eyes always on the edge of tears. After dressing and feeding the kids, I drive them to school. When I return Dan is always gone. I clean house. Do laundry. Game shows and soaps on TV keeping me company. I tell myself to get a job. Get out of the house. Get a life that doesn’t revolve around him. Also thinking that I have a life. Or thought I had a life. I start smoking again to calm my nerves and lose weight. It amazes me that something so trivial as an accidental caress has driven such a wedge between us. How can this be? It’s insane. Has he not trusted me all these years? Has he always suspected me? When he found out I wasn’t a virgin, I had lied about it, told him I had broken my hymen when I fell on the crossbar of a boy’s bicycle. My feet had slipped on the pedals. This had actually happened to a girl I had known. So maybe he hadn’t believed my story? Thinks I was a whore whoring through high school and college? Doubts brewing inside him all these years. And Jerry’s hand on my butt has been a confirmation of my husband’s fears. These times of promiscuity. Liberated women acting like men. AIDS waiting to take advantage. How can I convince him that I’ve always been faithful? Sure, I’ve looked at Jerry and wondered, but that’s as far as it went. A swift little fantasy, like something in a movie. Passionate bodies, get-it-on music. Afternoon delight—Jerry and I doing the pretzel. * More days pass. When Dan and I talk to each other, it’s superficial. “Where’re my black pants?” “In the laundry.”

“Where’s the TV Guide?” “In the rack under the coffee table.” “While you’re at it, will you make me a drink too?” “Sure.” One night we get drunk and end up in bed. I cry afterwards. I think the torture is over. But the next day he is distant again. I think of offering to take Keats to the clinic for a blood match. But then the very idea outrages me. I let the anger settle in. I stay remote. To hell with him. Also thinking this is how marriages end—with distance distrust jealousy egos insults. Weeks go by. We make love now and then, but it’s not the same. Wham-bam, no cuddling after. I put on more weight. Several new wrinkles appear on my forehead and around my eyes. Fine hairs grow between my brows and at the upper corners of my lips. I pluck them with tweezers. Dan tells me that at thirty-two I already look like an aging crow. He tells me that he always knew I was stupid, but that too much booze has made me an imbecile. Why does he hate me? What did I do? “Booze,” I say, “stealing my brain cells.” Also thinking Dan speaks truth. Annette imbecile. I look in the mirror and see the stupidest woman alive. But I don’t know what to do about it. A job might raise my self-esteem and win his respect. I used to teach aerobics long ago. Maybe I could do that again? Maybe I could go back to school? But no, who would watch the kids? Dan has told me that pretty soon no man will want me if I don’t slim down. He says no man will look at me now, my ass splitting the seam of my pants. I see myself on a diet, exercising hard, getting my figure back. Then will he want me? Will a streamlined body bring him to his senses? One night the Fields come over and coax us into getting a babysitter and going out on the town. April helps me with my hair and makeup. She picks out my silky black dress to enhance my eyes and hair, a string of pearls for contrast. “Come on, let’s have fun,” April tells me. “Are you sure this dress isn’t too tight?” I ask. “Honey, you’re a knockout,” she says. We go to dinner. There is dancing after. In the course of the evening Danny dances with me, a slow dance sweet romantic.

TLR

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Unforgettable, that’s what you are . . . . The air is tinted. He looks young again. The handsome young doctor I worked for a decade ago. I recall the night he first asked me to dinner, and how afterwards we drove to the beach, and I let him make love to me on the front seat of the car with the passenger door open. I was nervous and dry and the sex was painful, until he climaxed and things got easier. He kept going another minute or so and I was starting to feel engaged. Hamlin came to mind, the college dorm, the way he used his succulent mouth, but Danny didn’t go long enough to complete the picture gathering. When he stopped and slid off I was . . . regretful. Later, he told me he had thought sure he would find me a virgin. “No reason why you should be, of course, but for some reason that was how I had imagined you. Weren’t you taught to save yourself for someone special?” He wanted to know how many boys I had slept with. “You’re the first ever,” I told him. And then the bicycle crossbar story became a piece of my history. I added that my parents were Catholic and had taught me that my body was a temple, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself with him. “I’ve been in love with you from the first day I met you,” I said. “God knows I couldn’t deny you anything.” Right answer. We made love again. Lying in each other’s arms after, he said he thought he loved me too. But he wasn’t sure because he didn’t really know what love was. He told me about being raised on a farm. How distant his parents were. How his mother ran off with a Mexican hay-bucker who later dumped her. How his father took her back, but from then on they slept in separate rooms. She dressed in farmeralls and looked like a man. Danny had watched her hair turn gray in a year. Her face aging along with her hair, she looked like her own mother, grumpy Grandma. She cussed the animals. She cursed the world. There was never any affection, nothing but exhausting work and smelly cows and crazy chickens and filthy pigs. Not once had he ever heard the word love when he lived there. When he was seventeen he went into the Marines to get away from it all. He served as a medic. After he got out of the Marines he went to college on the GI Bill and became a general practitioner. He admitted that he had no bedside manner and probably shouldn’t have become a doctor. He knew people inside out, he said. He wanted to love them, but couldn’t find anything to love. He wondered if I could teach him. I said I could show him what real love was. Also thinking this is my reason for being, this is my religion now. Dancing with him, ambience dreamy, the old feelings return. Of course I love him and my love will overcome all obstacles. Things are going to be the way they 16

were. It’s his past (especially that backbreaking farm and mean-spirited mother) that make him so callused, vicious and mean sometimes. I will have to work harder to overcome those bitter years. I will have to be more patient and understanding. He doesn’t really believe that Keats isn’t his son (absurd) or that Jerry and I—. He’s just testing me, like the husband who tested Patient Griselda, waiting for me to prove him wrong. Raising my lips, I kiss his cheek. Put my hand on the back of his neck, whispering, “Isn’t this nice?” He stiffens. His voice entering my ear like an ice pick. “It might be if I was with someone else.” Scarcely able to breathe, I let him lead me back to the table. Jerry stands up, takes my hand. Automatically I follow him. I dance with Jerry. April dances with Danny. “So what’s with you two?” says Jerry. Shaking my head I say, “It’s nothing. I’m sorry if we’re a couple of drags.” He tells me I’m not being a drag. He adds that I look really great in my silky dress and high heels. “I love your pearls.” We dance a second time, while April and Dan sit in the booth and watch us. Underneath the table, I see their legs touching, April’s hand groping. A light goes on in my head. As soon as we get home and the babysitter is gone, Dan asks me if I enjoyed exhibiting myself with my lover. I refuse to answer. Turning on the television I flick from one channel to another. “Answer me!” he commands. “I never know what you’re talking about.” “The world is full of cunts,” he says. “You should know,” I say. “What about you and April? What was that about?” “What the hell are you saying, you stupid bitch!” I turn the volume up on an old war movie and tell him, “I know what I saw.” “You must think I’m so stupid!” he yells. “You must think I’ll swallow anything. Is that what you think? Don’t answer. You’ll only lie. I’ve had enough of women’s lies in my life. Your face is an open book. I see right through you. You’re a chameleon, Annette. Look at me! Tell me something! Hey, look at me!” What is the right answer? What does he want to hear? What will get me out of trouble? On the screen a man is charging a tank. He leaps on the tank, opens the hatch and throws in a grenade. “I’ve never thought you were stupid,” I say. “You’re a smart man. Everybody knows how smart you are. You’re a doctor, after all. Doctors can’t be stupid.” TLR

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“You think sarcasm will work?” he asks, his eyebrow arching in the shape of a scythe. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I didn’t say—” “Shut up! I’ll tell you what you said!” Unwanted tears fill my eyes. “I can’t stand it,” I say. He gazes back mournfully. “Oh, woman,” he says. “Oh, woman!” There is a catch in his throat, almost a sob. And I wonder what’s going on. Is it April? Is it more? Is he having a nervous breakdown? Or am I? Emily pads into the room, fingers twisting her hair. She stands next to her father and frowns at her mother. “Mom’s bad,” she says. “Go to bed,” Dan tells her. Down the hall is Keats. “What you listening to, moth ears?” “Mommy’s bad?” asks Keats. He inches back to the bedroom, repeating over and over the question is Mommy bad? A weekend later it is Keats’ birthday. I throw him a party, inviting all his friends. I bake a chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting. I poke eight red candles into the cake. I put candies into little cups with plastic handles. I make a bowl of fruit punch. The living room is decorated with balloons and streamers and a sign that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEATS! Danny says he can’t stay for the party. He’s going to the office to catch up on paperwork. After he leaves, Jerry comes over with a Charlie Chaplin movie called The Gold Rush. He tells me that April has gone out shopping, so he thought he would give the children some laughs. I know the truth: I know where April really is, but I no longer fret about anything. I have made myself not care. What does it matter? Time flying. Also thinking that what matters is surviving until I can get the hell out of here. We all watch the comedy together. Jerry sitting next to me on the couch, the children on the floor close to the TV laughing at silly Charlie turning into a chicken and being chased by a man with an ax. As the movie continues, Jerry turns to me and asks in a whisper what’s wrong. I look so sad all the time, he tells me. He wishes there were something he could do. His arm is stretched behind me, his hand brushing my hair. “I’m getting so fat,” I whisper back. “You look fine,” he says. “Really, you needed some extra weight. You’ve got a nice hourglass shape now.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” I say, rubbing my finger across my lips to stop them from trembling. “I’m going to do aerobics,” I say. “I used to do a lot of aerobics. I was an instructor for Family Fitness when I was a teenager. Did you know that? He did not know that. “I’d go there in the evenings after school and work everybody’s fanny off. They only paid minimum wage, but it was fun and I’d get all my frustrations out. Maybe I could get a job doing that again.” “It would be good for you,” says Jerry. “Exercise keeps a body sane.” “That’s true. You’re right. God, sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode, spontaneously combust. Boom, where did Annette go?” I wave my hands. “Atoms. It happens, you know.” “I wonder if that’s true,” says Jerry. I shrug. “Aerobics, huh?” “I’m thinking about it. Get my old body back, the petite thing Danny fell in love with. All I ever wanted was for him to love me. He doesn’t love me anymore.” “Of course he loves you. Don’t be silly.” “Not the way he used to. He used to be really hot for me.” Jerry bends over and kisses my cheek. “Lucky Danny.”

What is the right answer? What does he want to hear? What will get me out of trouble?

His moist peck runs like electricity to the true cause. Also thinking vera causa. It has been so long since anyone— I turn my mouth to him, but he is already watching the screen again. I cross my legs, squeeze my thighs. I want him to kiss me hard—harder! I want him to love me. Sweet Jerry. Sweet understanding Jerry. Such kind eyes. Images of myself and Jerry—kisses flashing through my mind. That’s how far I’ve fallen. That’s what life is doing to me. Making my brain as fat as my ass. I’m going on a diet. Also thinking at least I can do that! When the movie is over, Keats opens his presents. The one from me is a baby duck in a box. The children go nuts over the duck, all of them grabbing for it, trying to hold it, trying to pet-it-kiss-it. I have to rescue the tiny thing and warn the children to be careful, for it is a fragile life they must not abuse. Keats takes the long white

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ribbon that had been tied around the box and knots it in a bow around the duck’s neck. Pulling the duck along, Keats says, “Look, he walks like Charlie Chaplin. That’s his name! It’s Charlie Chaplin! Don’t touch him, he’s mine! My duck!” The children run to the back yard to watch Keats walk the duck up and down. “Peep, peep, peep,” it says, sounding like a baby chicken. “Charlie Chaplin! Charlie Chaplin!” chant the boys and girls. Jerry and I stand at the slider watching the children watching the duck. I am very aware of how close he is. Timidly I glance at him over my shoulder and say, “It’s been a lovely day.” Also thinking his smile is egging me on. Turning and impulsively rising on my toes, I put my palm on his cheek and offer myself. He bends forward, his lips brushing my forehead. I catch him and force our mouths together. But feel him recoiling. His hands, instead of pulling me in, grab my waist to push me away. In desperation I kiss him harder, lips and tongue churning. My belly searching for the telltale sign, feeling it happening leaning into it, rising to meet it. “No,” he says, backing away. “Geez, Annette.” His eyes are blinking, his face flushed with confusion. “What’s this? What’re we doing?” Then he laughs (an effeminate titter) and says, “Hey, don’t get dangerous on me, I’m only human.” He pats me on the back like a pal. “Boy, would Danny be shocked, huh?” I say, “Nothing shocks Danny.” Also thinking or your wife. He looks away, looks out the window and says, “I couldn’t do that to April. I love her. I love you too, but not that way. Maybe if things were different I might, you know. But Danny and April, golly, I couldn’t betray them.” His words make me see a terrible truth: Dan has known all along what I am, a chameleon. Had Jerry wanted me, I would have done anything, opened every orifice like one of those sluts in the porns. Jerry’s gestures are gestures of kindness, sympathy. Pity probably. But nothing to do with the lust I feel. At that moment my husband seems as insightful as . . . as God. He looks into souls. He sees me for real. Also thinking what an awful person am I! Pulling away, I go to the bar and mix a martini. I light a cigarette. And for a while I make small talk with Jerry. Something about the drought and the trees needing rain. Always cloudy but never any damn rain. The children shout outside. The plaintive peep of the duck is heard. Jerry goes home. The children go home. Three martinis later, I find myself giggling at what I had done. What he must think of me! I shocked the poor boy! I 20

remember my tongue in his mouth, his tongue pushing back, ejecting mine. I want something moist. I want chocolate. I stuff myself with leftover frosting. Who cares if I get fat as a pig? No one cares. I suck on pieces of hard candy, my cheeks bulging. I drink punch, spiking it with vodka. Stumbling to the sliding door, I tumble outside to see what my son and daughter are doing. Emily is kneeling by the roses, petting April’s cat. Keats is running round the lawn towing the duck. Spitting out the candy I scream at him, “Keats! Keats! Look what you’ve done!” He stops abruptly and looks at the duck. Pointing to it I cry, “Charlie Chaplin is dead, Keats! You killed him!” “My duck!” says the boy, stamping his foot. “My duck!” Sorrowfully I pick up the duck, untie the ribbon and let it drop. I glare at my stupid son and am consumed with hatred. “You little bastard,” I say. “You stupid little bastard! Everything is your fault!” Astonished, Keats backs away. He and his sister scurry to the slider, slamming it behind them. I hear the lock click. A moment later, I see their faces pressing against the glass. “I know, I know,” I say. “Mommy’s bad.” A flash of something dark moves in front of me. I see April’s cat slinking toward the aviary. I see the bird in the fichus flickering. I kick off my shoes, throw them at the cat. He runs to the fence, leaps on top, turning, glaring. Eyes saying, “Fuck you, bitch.” “I might not be able to fix much else,” I tell him, “but I can fix you!” Opening the cage I step inside waving my hands, telling her to run. “Run, Tootie, run!” The bird darts out the doorway. Climbs toward a hole in the sky. Becomes a dot . . . a work in progress . . . vanishes.

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POETRY

y. g nl or O w. e on vi iti re Ed ary nt r ri te P eli in .th e bl ww ila w va ad: .A e nt R te To on w C No ed e ur ib at scr Fe ub S

Kathryn Nuernberger U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474

Gene-splicing the beetle-resistant Basillus Thuringiensis with a potato sounds surgical, but it’s just a matter of firing a .22 shell dipped in DNA solution at the stem straggling out from the russet eye. If you’re lucky the hybrid sticks. Have you seen what can be done with tobacco and fireflies? Just for the hell of it, whole Virginian fields now glow under the passing planes. Salmon-tomatoes clutch their fishy gloss against the pinch of frost. I think I’ll give it a try. I have the gun you gave me. You said I’d feel better if I held it awhile. I feel better, and I’m not giving it back. I’m firing shrimp into pigeons and dipping the de-veined crescents of their wings in cocktail sauce. Thinking of you, I made peppermint termites to sweeten the swarm, and layrinxed the rats with mocking bird calls. I shot scorpion tails into the fighting fish, and now I’ve made a bullet of me to blast into your amber eye. Will you come out simpering? Anxious about your own mortality? Will you 22

FLASH FICTION

James Tadd Adcox The Judgment

We gave our daughter a set of Illustrated Children’s Great Books, which are these comic-strip versions of books by Earnest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Homer, etc. The idea is that she can read these now, so that she can grow up to be cultured without having to read so much literature later. I remember having to read all that literature, piles of it, and all I can say is that I’m glad society has progressed to the point of the Illustrated Children’s Great Books. Our daughter’s current favorite is the Children’s Macbeth. She toddles from room to room with the Children’s Macbeth in one hand, and her doll (blond, missing a leg) in the other. She’s getting pretty damn well cultured, at least as far as Macbeth goes. A few days ago she stared at me and my wife and said, “Out out, damned spot.” I told her that was very nice, that it was a quotation and therefore an acceptable circumstance to use the word damned, a word which she, our daughter, should be careful not to use in other circumstances. I asked her what else she’d learned. “Out out damned spot,” she said. “Out out damned spot.” Something about her tone gave me the creeps. “I don’t like the way she keeps repeating that, staring at us as though pronouncing a judgment,” I told my wife. “Jeffrey, don’t be absurd,” my wife said. “Children have to repeat things. It’s how they learn. There’s no judgment. Children don’t judge. That’s one of the things that makes them marvelous and innocent, as compared to adults.” This was all true, I suppose. But it doesn’t make it any easier for me to get to sleep at night. Beyond the walls of our house the forest rises up against me.

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Home Intruders

I fell asleep on the couch again last night. When I woke up several hours later, someone had turned off the lamp on the table near my head. It terrified me, to think that someone had gotten so close to my head without my noticing. What if it had been a home intruder? I began to search the house for signs of a home intruder. There were no signs in the den, in the hallway, or in the kitchen. In the dining room however someone sat at the table, writing a note. He wore a black hood with holes for his eyes and mouth. He was slightly tubby. His lips were pursed, as though in thought. I was so terrified I couldn’t even run. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Writing you a note,” the man said. “I was planning on stealing your wallet and your wife’s jewelry and perhaps ravishing your wife, but when I came into the den and saw you lying on the couch, well, you looked so peaceful, like an angel. The light played across your features in a way I’m sure I’ll never forget. I was writing you a note to tell you I’d decided not to rob you or ravish your wife, because of that one moment of beauty I experienced, looking at your face in the lamplight.” “But how did you get in here?” He sighed. “Your wife passed me on the street earlier

Someone sat at the table, writing a note. He wore a black hood with holes for his eyes and mouth. He was slightly tubby. His lips were pursed, as though in thought.

today and told me she was going to leave the dining room window open tonight. She told me your address, and she said she hoped I murdered both of you in your sleep.” This distressed me a good deal. I said, “I was hoping it was my wife who’d turned off the lamp near my head. I was hoping it had been a small gesture of kindness on her part. We haven’t talked in days.” “No, it was me,” said the intruder. He picked up the note he’d been writing and studied it. “Well, I don’t suppose I need to leave this,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do,” I said, shaking my head sadly. The intruder opened the dining room window and started to climb out. “I think your wife might be really depressed,” he said, then ran off into the night.

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POETRY

y. g nl or O w. e on vi iti re Ed ary nt r ri te P eli in .th e bl ww ila w va ad: .A e nt R te To on w C No ed e ur ib at scr Fe ub S

Steve Davenport Diminishing Innuendo of Hog Sonnet

Blue-veined junket pumper boner cock pig ding dong dipstick Weapon of mass insertion dangling thing with one hole Doughnut holder firm worm hang down dick hard on knob John Thomas love muscle pork stick member prick Purple-headed trouser snake pecker pole Love truncheon meat whistle trouser trout Willy woody weiner weinie Purple-headed percy rod Salty dog schlong skin flute Pink oboe pork sword Throbbing python Piece of pork Stiffy Hog

SHORT STORY

Svetlana Lavochkina Like a Real Man

Deep into the small hours of the morning was the bedchamber astir. Gossamer swirled, bracelets tinkled, hips swayed, myrrh poured but the sheikh was not amused. Again and again, the toy tower erected for him by deft fingers collapsed. He was already going to shoo the slippery flock away when his eyes fell on a new concubine from far away, whose name no one could pronounce, with hair of amber and thighs of snow, if the sheikh had known what snow looked like. The sheikh beckoned the foreign concubine forward, hadn’t he paid eleven camels for her, after all. Ralf Schweiger, accountant, dabbed his stomach neatly with a frayed blanket. He yawned and turned to the wall. It had taken him long, but now he would doze off at last. The sleeping car reeked of spirit and bad digestion. Ralf ’s co-traveler on the berth opposite was snoring spasmodically against the ragtime of the train. The man had been ranting on the whole evening long without introducing himself or asking for Ralf ’s name. Neither had he inquired whether Ralf liked vodka or spoke Russian. “What are you doing in this train, fine German? No money for the plane ticket? I don’t believe you. I know you are a spy. Drink with me.” Sergey Konovalov, hawker, wiped two smudged glasses on the curtain and poured the vodka out, the glasses full to the brim. “I said, drink with me. It’s not a request, it’s an order. Don’t you squint at me like that, the glass is clean. To us! No, no, you cheat, in a single gulp, as real men drink . . . Here’s a good boy . . . I know your breed. You drink vodka with ice and tomato juice. You drown the spirit in cream and suck it through straws because you 38

are puppets and not men. You are scared of doing bold things, you wear condoms all over, and for your little finger you have a condom, too.” Sergey poured himself another glass. “Why are you in this train, sly German? I will tell you why. You want to take your condom off and haul your canned brains away for dogs to eat. Don’t look at me like that with your blue eyes, smile at me, pretty German, show me your white teeth, you must have fifty of them.” Sergey poured out the third glass. “Look at me,” he said. “I am a man and I live a good life. I don’t wallow in black caviar as you do but I have butter to spread on my bread and the girls are all mine. But I love her and I am coming back to her and she will fucking have me back. I have an offer she will not resist. What, you don’t believe me, fisheye, stop looking at me. You don’t respect me, son of a bitch. We’ll see you on your way back with your pickle all sore in your pants.” Sergey leaned over to Ralf as if to tell him a secret. “You need a piece of mind from a real man,” he whispered. “First thing you do when you arrive, spray yourself with your fine perfume from head to toes and go to Lenin Avenue. Walk slowly and sway your cashmere coat, like this. It doesn’t matter that you are bald, the girls will not care. The waitress will put a bowl with a golden fish on your table, or she will bring you a snake in the bowl, just as you want. Grab her ass and say you’ll fuck her on the table, she will not answer back. Say the coffee was shit and the cakes tasted like monkey’s balls and you will not pay. Then the girls will say, “Pretty German, pretty German, take us, we’re yours forever.” The bottle was now empty. Sergey tried to reach out his arms to embrace Ralf but it seemed too much of an effort, so he thumped down onto his berth and fell asleep at once. Ralf understood that Sergey had been talking about food. He had also recommended Ralf to dress warmly and wear a condom. The train reached Muhosransk on Sunday afternoon. Ralf found himself part of a black-and-white photograph, as if the vodka had bleached the landscape. It was snowing. Sergey, foul-breathed and heavy-gaited, looked at Ralf as if he had never seen him before. The passengers were quickly absorbed by the snow. Ralf was on the platform alone, his cashmere coat clinging between his legs to get warm. Grey creatures skulked up to him to lure him into a taxi, taxi, taxi. Ralf TLR

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wondered if there was a café in the station building but then, if he went there he would miss her. Britta would burst of schadenfreude if she saw Ralf standing like that in the middle of Russia, a monument to stupidity, with little more than “da” and “nyet” at his disposal and obviously chasing a mirage. He remembered an expensive department store of seven floors in Berlin where she used to drag him every month, “Aren’t these thongs hot, Schatz? I know what turns you on, you are only too shy to say, red or black? Just look at him, he is blushing!”

Say the coffee was shit and the cakes tasted like monkey’s balls and you will not pay. Then the girls will say, pretty German, pretty German, take us, we’re yours forever.

Nature had been parsimonious in distributing physical beauty to Britta. It cast her roughly, without particular love to detail or color, but instead endowed her with an elaborate concept of stylish life and a mighty will to live according to it. A partner for such a life was responsible for making Britta happy. He would admire her career advancement. He would buy her roses every week, be her dancing partner in a tango class, vacuum-clean the apartment they shared and cook Italian, French and other invigorating food. He would light a candle on the dinner table to make the tomato sauce glow seductively. Afterwards, when the candle was burnt to the stump he would lick off the leftovers, tongue up, tongue down, a secret domestic mischief. Then the dishwasher would slam closed and an hour later he would be allowed to fall asleep, duly processed and desiccated. Ralf had been single and chaste for a year. He didn’t want to be a supplement for a stylish life any longer. He wanted to be a Husband and have a Wife. Their union was to be stamped, wedding-ringed, family-booked and blessed with posterity. Ralf molded his fair lady in his mind. She is pretty. Her lips are lips, not pale rags. Eyes are wide open, not slits cut in the face. She is a self-sacrificing mistress and a good cook. She is as playful as a kitten but with claws clipped short. Appearance aside, there is a dignity to her, and clear principles. Simplicity and admiration for the partner. Sensuality and eagerness to please. Ralf knew that he would not find her in his everyday life. He had to explore new thoroughfares and fight virtual battles. So he shook his wallet full of eager dimes 40

all over the world wide web, where there was no lack in eagerness to please. Dating agencies unfolded whole carpets of beauties to trade off. He zoomed and dreamed. He appraised and compared the parameters. What he found out was that Malaysian and African faces were for him too remote a species, but Eastern Europeans, being of customary shapes, were more generously endowed with color. In the small hours of the morning Ralf found her. Short glossy bob, skin of a honey tint, big brown eyes, enticing round mouth, half-reclining in leopard pattern bikini, no doubt the whim of the agency photographer, well-tempered figure in the juice of early thirties, bra cup B, and a strained suffering smile, as if she resented being next to naked in public. My marridge was very early, it was my mistake, I was very young and unexperienced, Sasha wrote in her letter of introduction. In due course I have understood that only love is not enough for family life, the love passes and it is nothing if people don’t have any understanding, trust and respect. The importance for me in my life is to love and appreciate simple things. Easy azure sea, cloudless star night sky, singing of birds, pure morning dew—such trifles around us, and this is a life. I’m glad to each moment. I want very much to find the person and divide together these instants. Wounded, experienced, no doubt abused by rough men, she will love noble Ralf with all her heart. But how was Ralf to know that she was sincere? If he invited her to Berlin she would not be her real self. No, he would, despite the ordeals of the journey, go and see the mermaid in her own muddy waters. If she proved fit for the handsome Ralf, he would pull her out by the hair, slit her tail in two and cut out her tongue. He would not descend on her like golden rain but approach her slowly in this train shimmy— this was his egalitarian tribute—and a good bargain too if compared to a plane ticket. Ralf did a Russian crash course, knowing though that languages were not his specialty. She spoke some English anyway. On the Second Advent he took a week’s leave from his office. He took out his suitcase and packed warm things in neat piles. He expanded his traveler’s medicine kit: Baedecker advised to have a cortisone liniment at hand for possible allergies or rashes. Sasha Konovalova, waitress, came forty-two minutes late. She was muffled up in a scruffy fur coat obviously made of tabby cats. Here were the dark guilty eyes and the red round mouth, a beacon in the sea of grayness. “I am so sorry because I came too late, my marshrootka was in a traffic marmalade,” Sasha gasped. “You are not angry that you must wait? Be silent so that people don’t see you are a foreignlander.” A ramshackle vehicle with horns on top opened its mouth to let in the passengers who seemed to be thinking they were using their last chance to get onto a transatlantic ship. TLR

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Sasha elbowed her way through the swearing gray crowd to occupy the last bare wooden seat. “Sit down,” she whispered. “We’ll be home in half an hour.” Ralf was perched beside a person of indistinct sex. Sasha remained looming above Ralf, squeezed by fiercely breathing fur-coats. She was eating him with her nostrils and caressing his black suitcase all the jolting way through. Ralf couldn’t see the streets, the windows were clogged up with fat frost ornaments. Ralf and Sasha were spat out of the trolleybus, he on the verge of throwing up, into a vast area of crumbling blocks of flats with no hope of telling one from another. Their way was hindered by a brass band in wailing cacophony. A dead old man floated by, his blue nose pointed to the sky. Women in black shawls followed the coffin, sobbing in pagan trance. Sasha crossed herself in the Orthodox way, from right to left. At the tail of the funeral procession a hag turned round and looked Sasha in the face. “Good people die but sluts don’t care, fuck is what they care for,” she jibed. “Shut up, old bitch,” Sasha snapped back without a change in her countenance. “We wished each other a nice day,” she explained to Ralf. As far as he vaguely remembered from the crash course, “nice day” sounded differently in Russian, but this was probably a regional dialect. Ralf didn’t care. He was cold and hungry. It was getting dark. After kneading gray snow in the tangle of turns and roundabouts for another quarter of an hour they finally dove into a hallway. “Last floor, tenth heaven,” Sasha said. Pressed to his snow-powdered dream in the elevator cabin, each millimeter carved with local sex lore, Ralf saw her face close-up and Photoshop-free. It was almost as good, only very slightly tickled by time. Sasha took off her hat. Her hair surged up in a fizz, sweeping his chin, and in a second subsided into the strict hairto-hair tranquility Ralf had so often fantasized to in the world wide web. Sasha’s flat was not much bigger than the elevator cabin, a musty warm den in a tight embrace of Father Frost. One room—a table, two chairs and a sofa, a kitchen and a cage of a bathroom. Ralf hurriedly locked himself in. He decided that here and now he would relieve himself standing, like a real man, beyond the fear of missing, beyond the wrath of German Hygiene. If only Britta saw him now! Ralf washed his hands and looked into the rusty mirror. He felt dizzy and formidable at the same time, his crown scratching the ceiling. The master of Heaven Ten he would be, whatever happens, and only the final slippery inches were to be gone through. 42

Ralf walked through the bathroom door into a wonder. Candle lights were pulsating in all signs of the Zodiac. The parlor lined with costly carpets was whispering tales in burgundy and vermilion. A rich burgh of delicacies arose on snow-white damask, its daring spicy fumes dancing up to the ceiling. Velvety stew in varnished pots, a scarlet-and-black chessboard of caviar canapés, with a lemon curl on each, a mound of golden pasties and dreamy sturgeon under a beetroot blanket, circled by dragonbreathing tomato guards. A vodka decanter kremlined in the center. The hostess emerged out of nowhere wearing a long embroidered gown, knolls and valleys well in view. “Sit down, dear guest,” she said bowing and inviting Ralf to sit down on the sofa. She took two small glasses of Bohemian crystal and poured the vodka out, glasses full to the brim. “To our meeting! No, no, in a single gulp, as Russians do . . . Here’s a good boy, smile to me, what fine teeth you have.” The hostess put a silver fork into Ralf ’s left hand and a silver knife into the right. “Taste the stew, dear,” she said, “it is made of the best beef in town, and the mushrooms my granny picked in dark forests. Caviar is good for men’s health, it makes them strong and untiring.” Ralf knew that even one single roe cost a fortune, and there were spoonfuls of them on each canapé. Sasha must have stolen food from the restaurant she worked in. He bit into the juicy legion of beads. “To meet you in dignity I borrowed the beef and the caviar from Zeus,” Sasha said. “It is a restaurant I work in. Drink to me.” “I am the best waitress in the restaurant,” Sasha went on. “I serve the Mayor of the town, and other important people too, in suits and ties. The Mayor likes golden fish in a bowl on his table. He likes to catch the fish with his hands and is very angry if he can’t. Then he pinches me here and here and says he’ll fuck me on the table but he never does. But when the Procurator General comes he wants a snake in a bowl. He teases the snake with his cane and the snake hisses and sticks out her tongue—like this . . . Eat the garlic, dear, don’t worry, I’m eating the garlic, too.” Ralf ate and ate until the delicacies piled up in an incandescent pillar from stomach to throat.

To meet you in dignity I borrowed the beef and the caviar from Zeus. It is a restaurant I work in. Drink to me.

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“Important people are difficult to please,” Sasha said sadly. “Procurator General pours the coffee on the floor and says the cakes taste like monkey’s balls. How does he know what monkey’s balls taste like?” She moved nearer to Ralf. “I love my work,” she said. “I only missed one day in ten years. It was when I had to go for a scrub—the Procurator General gave me a thousand rubles to pay for it.” Ralf drank the last glass in a single gulp. He was well-prepared for the final inches now. His chest swelled with kindness. His heart was now the home for the strange and the lost. Tomorrow he would propose to Sasha. He would take her home to Berlin and rent a nice wedding dress for her. “Tomorrow I’ll show you beautiful places,” Sasha whispered. “We’ll go to the theatre on Lenin Avenue and to the zoo in Gogol Street.” Sasha clung to Ralf. Big eyes, not slits cut in the face, can weep a whole lake. “Will you take me away from here? Will you marry me, nice Ralf? I will cook more delight for you and I will give you a very good love.” Sasha got up and went to the bathroom. When she returned she wore nothing but her honey tint. Baedeker strictly forbids drinking tap water in Russia even for the sake of extinguishing the hangover, but this morning Ralf didn’t care. He had been crowned and survived the fireworks, so a bit of chlorine wouldn’t kill him either. He opened the kitchen tap. Interrupted in the middle of a morning stroll, a cockroach family dashed out of the sink, the father leading the way in a flapping brown mackintosh, the mother lugging a bag full of freshly-laid eggs on her bottom, the little ones in striped overalls hopping after them. They all made it save one toddler who was washed away into the dark hole. “Cockroaches!” Sasha screamed. “I swear by God I’d poisoned them all before you came. They were lying on the floor like a carpet and I swept them all away with a broom.” In his newly-gained right, Ralf opened the cupboard. He saw a green corpse of a bread loaf. Then he allowed himself to open the refrigerator and saw a lonely piece of hairy schmaltz. “I’m so sorry because we have nothing for breakfast,” Sasha confessed. “But I will go to the gastronom now, it’s five minutes only.” She pressed herself to the small of his back and put her hands around him to

make up for the alimental shortage but then she was interrupted by an adenoidal bong of the doorbell. “Oh it’s the neighbor, she maybe wants to borrow some matches,” Sasha put on Ralf ’s tee shirt and flip-flopped to the corridor. “Go back to the room,” she ordered Ralf. The neighbor was apparently male. There was a suppressed murmur at the door, the male voice getting louder. “What, I have returned to start a new life with you, little fool. Here is the chocolate and here are the flowers. Come to me, my goddess! How is it that you are not alone!” Loud steps drummed into the room. The two men stared at each other through bewilderment into a thrilled recognition. “I knew at once you were crooked,” Sergey exclaimed. “I thought you were a spy but you are a thief. You steal other men’s honey.” He looked at the empty dishes on the table and the creased bedclothes. “Now let us all sit down,” Sergey commanded. He took a place on the sofa next to Sasha, forcing Ralf onto a chair, opposite to himself. Half a pack of Spearmints had almost diluted yesterday’s alcohol rainbow oozing from Sergey’s mouth. “Of you,” Sergey pointed at Ralf with his thick finger, “I’m not even jealous. Look at yourself. You don’t exist, you’re a naught, a used condom. I blow—you vanish into thin air. Your Germany is a mirage, you hear me, Sasha, a mirage. Are you really going to marry this gubbins?” Ralf understood that the talk was about condoms again. Indeed, he hadn’t used one. “Listen,” Sergey went on. “I live in Moscow now. I’ve been dry for a year. I don’t wallow in black caviar but there is butter to spread on my bread. I rented a room in a suburb—just two hours by underground—and you are on Red Square.” “Go tell these tales to your sluts,” Sasha said. “Baby, I haven’t told you everything yet. Did you see that restaurant near the Bolshoi Theatre? The chef is my friend now. They need a good waitress. You’ll get tips, we’ll buy a nice flat uptown in no time. Putin, hear me, Putin himself often goes there. Sasha, don’t be a fool.” Sasha went pale. She lowered her head to scrutinize the tablecloth. “How soon do they need a waitress?” she asked. “Tomorrow.” Sergey proudly produced two railway tickets out of his pocket. “You have an hour to pack. Sleeping carriage first class, just you and me.” Sasha slowly raised her eyes from the tablecloth to Ralf. “I will order a taxi for you now,” she sighed.

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The blue velvet seat, second class compartment, feels like a throne. The silver needle of International City Express is stitching the hem of the city with its scarlet thread, along the frills of trade centers, through pre-Christmas mirth. A few more stitches— and Ralf will be in Berlin’s bosom again. His co-travelers are dallying with their laptops or chatting over their mobiles in the train’s self-confident drone. Ralf serenely drifts on the native tongue waves—they are so warm, so breast-milk familiar, not a single obscure splash to mar his bliss. Not even the itching crotch is bothering Ralf any longer—the cortisone liniment has proved effective. A courteous conductor approaches with a reverent bow to scan his ticket. Hips swaying, a blond waitress sweeps past with a coffee tray. Ralf ’s mobile phone tinkles shortly—someone has texted him. “Hello Schatz, I did a belly-dance course. Want me to come over to perform for you on the Christmas Eve?—Your kitty Brittie.” What’s beauty, after all, Ralf thinks. A touch of red lipstick—and here it nearly is. Who measures the length of a thigh if it’s covered in gossamer? Who cares for the size of the eyes if they are closed in languor? Resourcefully, inconspicuously will Ralf reshape their stylish life to be centered around him. Britta won’t yield to rude power—they are not in Russia—but with a gentle push from the real man the belly-dance will flow into a Hoover waltz alternating with a saucepan tango. Then it definitely won’t take her long to learn the nappy foxtrot—and Ralf will lead her ever further . . . . But what if Britta were to spot him at the loo standing?

POETRY

John Estes The Male Gaze (Ending with a Sentence by Frank Bidart) If it’s true, as Longfellow said, that a man must be either anvil or hammer, too much remains unseen to say what a woman is, or a beloved or even the object— agent, actor, act, the scene itself unfolding toward catastrophe—or if this is all as bad as it sounds: to be rapt, or objectified, or if bringing back is the action that connects us to what, together, we perform. And of course it’s not true. Forgive me my unchaste eye. I’d ask to be unfastened from this tyranny of relation, but care of the body is referred (if any) to the soul. We fill pre-existing forms, and when we fill them, change them and are changed. TLR

Ora Pro Nobis

Gestures I can barely stomach— tell me, who lets their dog lick its ass on the good carpet?— meshugass I put a boot to, still (this is what mystery is) jobs worth doing get done. Strung out from shopping I wonder if maturation is less a matter of redaction— after all, what we hunt we rarely stick around to gather— than learning to read our reality tests back on what has coalesced. It’s a precarious procedure, but those who insist on keeping their magical thinking (and vice versa) learn to ask for what they want only after they’ve received it. 48

So if you must pray for us here is what works: Stay ahead of whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bearable so the angels are forced to follow.

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Eric Maroney Avram’s Vineyard

but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.

–micah 4:4

“What is the fuss?” Hillel Yayin asked, running a purple hand, the color and shape of an iris, through his beard. “It is one, possibly two rows of grapes.” “There is a principle involved,” the Jewish Agency man, Goldmann, explained in a low, gruff tone. “Give them a row and they take two. Give them two and they take the vineyard . . . ” “Yes, and from the vineyard it’s on to Dizengoff Center, or the whole of Tel Aviv or King David’s throne.” Hillel Yayin laughed with his eyes, while his lips remained still. His dark pupils ringed with blue peered over his thick black beard, like an animal gazing from the safety of a shrub. “I don’t need this, Comrade Yayin,” the Agency man said, standing up. He wore an open-collared shirt in deference to the heat, and carried a briefcase bulging with documents. Sweat circled his bald head like a wreath. “Those two rows of grapes belong to the Jewish Agency. They cannot be picked without Agency approval. And the Agency does not approve. But that is only the first problem I came to discuss.” “You boys from the Jewish Agency,” Hillel Yayin shook his head in mock disappointment, like a father teasing a son. “You think wine grows on trees.” The Jewish Agency man did not smile, but now Hillel did, amused by the endless round of argu50

POETRY

R. A. Villanueva Blessing the Animals

We have gathered up animals on this feast of St. Francis to be blessed. In a parking lot beside the church, cleared save for bales of hay and traffic horses, the goats and llamas from the petting zoo a town over are chewing at their cords, the camels’ necks hung with scapulae. The Elks and Legion men have leashed border collies to terriers, will garland parakeets with rosaries. They hold housecats in their arms. Our Monsignor crosses himself in front of a statue of Jesus and His Most Sacred Heart, beside the flagpole where I learned to pledge allegiance, where I will later fold the stars and stripes into triangles to lock up in the Headmaster’s desk. Next month, on my dare, Howie will throw a bottle of Wite-Out at Christ’s face, breakoff every finger on the Lord’s right hand except his third.

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Drifting towards the bottom, Jacques Piccard recalls the sky

Hour #4, Hadal zone窶認orgive me. I can only think of chainmaille for a fitting match to this die-cast shade of black outside our porthole. It is far more deep a nothingness than that. So pure a cold that our floodlights appear to burn as stars do. What words can render void, this nova of mercury bulbs through the clear abyss? Our descent was marked by medusae, clouds of shrimp, luminescent matter adrift on ambient currents. No such flares and flashes at these fathoms. Don says we passed the basement of twilight hours ago, likens the dark to a murder of crows. *

Bathyscaphe Trieste, Mariana Trench, 23 Jan.— I have heard how Iceland’s sunlight trickles away by minutes each fall so that, by the solstice, darkness spans 8/10 of the day. I cannot divine living without sight of the sky for so long and here must admit relief that fine fissures now run the face of our window. It means we must cut our stay at the Deep to minutes in case the pressures decide to gnaw at the hull itself. It means we should thank the Good Lord for lime-hydroxide, for Father’s gondola lifted miles above Augsberg, breaching the air, buoyant as doves. *

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13:06, gauges mark seven miles deepâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;To settle here atop the trench floor is to kick up grackles from their perches, to run headlong into rooks on the tor and to watch their wings overcome the sky. All around us seems an empire at the height of its forces, a tuber of night and ooze, bone fog and soot we come to love because we can. Don and I lack the room to embrace. We arrive without cornet or flag. There is something like an anthem in my marrow so let us sound this last fathom out with it. Let us trawl the dark for whale fall, sing of our ballast like larks.

Telemachy

1. Patron of the head freed from the neck, the new yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feasts and burials, martyr of good arms casting their stones, benefactor of scattered wheals like lagoons along the thigh, Saint Telemachus bleed for us into the arena floor, its crushed sand, its lions halved.

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2. After first Communion I pose by the sacristy, beneath a crucifix of unfinished pine. I am wearing a suit which rips at the armpits. My father parts my hair to the left, combs through with pomade, presses down with his palms.

3. My father never heard of the Kill Sparrow War in his provinceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Peking boys each morning, called to the nest-trees with trumpets, their slingshots aimed at the flocks, red banners tied to pots and spits. Knucklebones into eggs, ladles against prayer bells and the birds with nowhere to alight, all falling from the sky with little sound, their hearts damp fireworks going off in their chests.

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4. Thoughtful-Telémakhos knew nothing of scars or the ramping boar, its tusk caught in his father’s leg, above the knee just missing the bone.

What he knows are tremors.

His father’s arms pressed into his before the Test. His father’s voice a black ship sealed with pitch.

5. My father and his classmates liked the air raid drills best and would cheer the sirens while they marched single-file beneath the schoolhouse posts. He imagined pilots passing over the Philippine Sea, scanning the open fields for resistance, checking masks for leaks, unable to read him there in the dirt, flicking anthills with his fingers, pulling up grass by its roots.

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SHORT STORY

Lance Olsen Just These Minutes

Then little Nathan reaches over at the breakfast island and starts wailing on little Caleb and little Caleb goes down like a sack of cement and them only two years old with Crispix and milk everywhere. It’s Sunday and I’m sitting here working at my bacon and sunny-side-ups trying to enjoy myself a little on my day off with the Cowboys game on in the living room and my two little ones been going at each other all week and I’ve been telling them to goddamn cut it but sometimes they “got a mind of their own” and Nathan is all over Caleb punching and kicking and slapping. Johnny Junior he’s six just stares into his Froot Loops bowl like they maybe got an important announcement to share with him but Ella she’s four my “beautiful angel” she’s been picking at her Cinnamon Toast Crunch like the very idea of chow bores her but when that first squeal goes high in the kitchen her head pops up and she’s all smack him on the head! smack him on the head! and off her chair in no time. Caleb does that thing you see stunned people sometimes do after they been ninjaed which they sort of just wobble in place on their knees wondering what the fuck just happened to them instead of fighting back which Nathan is on him in a flash and already has him in this headlock which I think it surprises Nathan how fast he gets the upper hand which he don’t know quite what to do with once he got it. Like I say I’m sitting here working at my bacon and sunny-side-ups trying to listen to the game thinking about how this parenting thing is a lot harder than everybody lets on and about the time you believe you maybe have stuff vaguely figured out someone throws a wrench right in the middle in it. But I’m also thinking “out of the mouth of babes” you know what I’m saying and maybe my sweet pea has a point after all because I’ve pretty 70

much had it with my two little ones and I’m here to tell you the SOP for parenting is exactly what they never teach you about in the big television so I nip off half a stick of bacon which I’m holding kind of daydreamy between my thumb and forefinger like maybe I forgot it was there and reach over for my camcorder and settle back to get down what’s going to happen next. Nice little Canon PowerShot TX1 that I carry with me over in the sandbox comes with a 10x optical zoom and optical image stabilizer technology DIGIC III and image processor and face-detection technology and red-eye correction. I’m thinking well maybe it’s about time just to let ’em have at it and “get it out of their system” because hell if I know what else to try and so I suggest to little Caleb who little Nathan has in the headlock and is now punching kind of in the neck and kind of on the side of the face he started it son now you hit him back go on man up don’t be such a goddamn pussy only Caleb’s being a goddamn pussy and can’t even I don’t think hear me because he’s screaming so loud like a little girl and Ella is like I say out of her chair and around the island and two feet away from them shouting encouragement with the tiny blood vessels on her forehead sticking out and her tiny face all pink and purple and she’s so cute you gotta love that child’s spunk. Johnny Junior though he’s still trying to hypnotize his Froot Loops and Nathan is sort of paralyzed in the sense that he’s still attempting to work through what to do now and so I recommend to him considering each of his limbs as a weapon because you don’t want to leave “any stone unturned” because each can prove to be a valuable asset in hand-to-hand combat which is when Caleb all wimpery begins trying to sort of turtle out from under his brother’s grip which isn’t such a terrific idea because Nathan’s on him like hot gum on a cold sneaker and so I suggest to Caleb not wanting in my dad role to start playing favorites get the fuck up you goddamn pansy Jesus H. Christ you’re not even TRYING which Ella who is always one to keep focused on a mission returns to her initial proposal shrieking six inches from Nathan’s ear smack him on the head Nate! smack him on the head! which information Nathan apparently finally begins to digest because he gives it “the old college try” with some admittedly limited success and it don’t get no cuter than a couple of blue-eyed towheads working out their differences in the kitchen. Of course at moments like this my ex who in all fairness loved a good ruckus as much as the next guy would always start going all liberal on me telling me I shouldn’t be so hard on the kids blah blah blah which is when I would using my most diplomatic of voices offer up to her that she didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about per usual because she lives in a fucking bubble on this base and why the hell doesn’t she try one of these days to beg off her gaggle of knitting parties or however she wastes her time and take a nice weekend in TLR

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Fallujah in full battle rattle because then you can get back to me about the world being all peace and love and granola and shit which I’m guessing the judge seemed to agree with me because who has custody of the kids now and who’s a lardass with a drinking problem who lives with her momma in East Orange and can barely use a seatbelt because her lardassishness prevents her from cramming chunks of herself into what used to be the family Kia? Plus in all honesty what we got ourselves here is an educaWhy the hell tional opportunity which any good parent is going doesn’t she try take advantage of by “making lemons into lemonone of these ade” by turning it into a lesson for everybody concerned which even as this idea strikes me I’m days to beg off somehow already out of my chair picturing how her gaggle of this evening we’ll gather around the TV during knitting parFamily Time to study the resulting video to glean a ties or however few pointers about human interrelationships like she wastes her slapping will get you exactly zip in a real fight plus note what happens when you turn into an instant time and take twink and try crawling away from your opponent a nice weekfor godsakes you might as well just say hey look at end in Fallujah me I’m a toad-sucking retard or something. So in full battle quit—trying—to give—UP I go to Caleb because it’s rattle because getting a little embarrassing for me what with my own son attempting to pussappear but then bam then you can Caleb all shrieky and snuffling sort of just shrugs get back to me off Nathan in this huge burst of determination and about the world regains his footing while wiping his nose while being all peace being all stoop-shouldered and drooly and snotand love and thready per usual and so I give him some support going good job now turn the fuck AROUND and granola and face your adversary only the little guy still doesn’t shit? seem to quite get it because Ella from the sidelines counsels Nathan not unwisely push him down! push him down! which Nathan immediately does which Caleb regains his footing once more and all shrieky and snuffling tries shuffle-weeping away which I go to Nathan every time he tries to run you beat him up you hear? because in all honesty it’s not like Caleb has been some sort of little saint lately or anything. For the last couple 72

of days in fact he’s been sneaking up on his brother when Nathan’s asleep on the couch in front of the TV and noogieing him or knuckling him in the arm really hard and laughing and scurrying away to lock himself in the bathroom before Nathan even knows what’s what or like last night when him and Nathan got into it and Caleb goes rapidly faggot on us and grabs his brother’s wrists and dances him around throwing him off balance and then hauls off and kicks him directly in the nads which I’m just saying “what goes around comes around” which is a good example for us all plus I’m starting to worry about that boy because you know what I’m saying I love him so much and only want the best for him. Of course at moments like this I can hear my ex starting to give me grief because blah blah blah but I ask you who precisely is recording this scene and who precisely is curled up at her momma’s duplex in East Orange stuffing her face with say all the mini Snickers in one of those largesize bags meant to last a family for a year while getting intimate with a bottle of bum wine? Plus these hit-and-run things just got to stop because sometimes you got to take off the dress you know what I’m saying is what you got to do. Not that we didn’t have our good times her and me back in high school before she started fuglying up like those nights we drove out to the Oradell reservoir and slipped out of our clothes and into the black lake with the pickup’s radio playing back on the shore and the sound of our breathing side by side and our arms lapping the water only then she started I don’t know what doing more and more nothing while stirring up drama with her girlfriends while hogging out and getting pregnant and hogging out and getting pregnant and you could literally see the cellulite collecting under her skin and pretty soon her thighs looked like they’d been peppered by a fucking buckshot blast plus one day she just seemed all of a sudden so dumb like every thought she ever might have had just kind of spilled out of her head while she was taking a shit or whatever which is when I open my eyes again and there Caleb is back on the floor snivel-screeching and covering up and it’s just so pathetic that my own son can miss the point like that so I hear myself going how do YOU like it huh? come on get up! get up! egging him on and my older one Johnny Junior steps into the frame pushing past Ella and sort of squats and tries to pull Nathan off Caleb’s back and I’m like where did he come from? and then NO YOU DON’T! which I lunge forward and grab him around the waist and yank him out of the scene going your brothers’ve been itching for this cock fight for days and now you just let ’em turn up the volume all they want and Ella is shouting keep going! keep going! and pretty soon the door to Johnny Junior’s room slams shut up the hall and Nathan and Caleb are already at it again and it’s really something how much energy you have when you’re that age you gotta cherish TLR

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these sorts of moments. Then Caleb does one of those things where he kind of explodes a second time but he’s facing the wrong direction and so only gets a glancing smack off Nathan’s ear which simply pisses Nathan off more who starts with the kicking again which when you’re winning isn’t called for in the least so I tell him to cut it. The Cowboys pull off what must be this sweet play because in the living room the crowd goes crazy but I can’t see anything from where I’m standing and somehow one of Nathan’s fingers pokes up Caleb’s nose briefly which doesn’t exactly quiet things down any. I don’t believe I’ve ever taken in the full extent of a room shrill with kid shrieks it’s really something and next thing Caleb is sort of pressing himself into a corner over by the fridge while covering his face with his hands while attaining this remarkable perpetual high note of pure anguish and Nathan is karateing him in the back and the sides and Ella is standing maybe one inch away from Nathan’s ear sort of leaning into it squealing harder! harder! harder! and I’m just starting to remember my breakfast back on the breakfast island because the whole kitchen is beautiful with the smell of bacon. Then I catch a glimpse of the blood on Caleb’s upper lip that theoretically maybe comes from his nose and theoretically maybe comes from his mouth and I’m struck by how much can actually occur in two minutes. I’m both picturing how great this will look on YouTube because you always want to share educative exchanges with others plus it’s simply goddamn hilarious and how every father “worth his salt” needs to know when to hold it and when to fold it which when I see the blood and it isn’t a lot or anything don’t get me wrong it’s just kids being kids I figure it’s most likely time to pull the plug which is what I do letting the camcorder roll for just a little bit longer and then I go okay boys okay that’s it no more we’re done and dusted pack it up and I’m guessing they probably had enough for now and I’m feeling good and feeling like if a day can start this well you just don’t know where it’s gonna lead from here.

POETRY

Jay Baron Nicorvo Deadbeat, Ruthless and Brutal, Wants the World

Deadbeat and his wife are on the phone long-distance, and he’s looking up a word at his desk, listening to the excitement in her voice, not shrill, as she drives haphazardly home from the hospital. She observed the excision of a thymus gland like a goldfish. When she describes the bloodless procedure, Deadbeat sees sweetbreads harvested from young animals —calves, lambs—sautéed and served as hors d’oeuvres. Deadbeat, vegan, wants to mention his recent drive cross-state, how flora and fauna split by the sun-bleached asphalt somehow came together for him, there, on the two-lane road. The name Florida made sense! As she talks

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in the present, he drives through the past and pictures a map of the U.S. Lake Okeechobee â&#x20AC;&#x201D;shallow, vastâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;becomes the blue eye of a turtle stretching its head into the Atlantic. Deadbeat cruised with the air on, windows down, blatantly wasteful, the sun setting ahead of him. In front of the diminishing star, a large bird nothing like a goldfish swooped down, and he hit it head-on. Wild, at-the-ready, he pulled over, wondering what the hell had happened to them, how she ended up in nursing school witnessing the most intimate openings while he, estranged, killed a bird of prey on State Road 70. At his feet, in the mix of headlights and dusk, a barred owl

splayed its wings, dead, and he, ruthless, brutal, sought a keepsake from the beautiful creature still hot with life, flight, and the hunt. He wanted to make the owl, the turtle, the goldfish—he wanted the world for a totem. Jackknife, glove box— he found the first joint and cut off the feathered foot —padded yellow soles, black talons—with certain precision gained from years of carving the turkey.

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Description

Deadbeat followed a ladder underground. On his head, he wore a stocking that pushed his nose and lips against his skull. The way he went was damp. Through the manhole overhead, the moon made a face. His job was to hide his description. A womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s undergarments did the job. He put his boot in water and followed the passage south. Rats scurried in the runoff. He greeted a community of folks. He tipped his hose to those

who lived where he had decided to dream. On their heads, they, too, wore stockings matting-down their features. Excess nylon ponytailed the lengths of their backs. When the subterraneans made a sudden move toward him, hundreds of empty feet kicked the air behind them.

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Love Poem

She takes Deadbeat’s pulse and tells him his heart is unusually slow. Over a plastic bedspread, they lie naked; the heat would have them no other way. Outside, the noon air is as white as new teeth. She’s forgotten his name, only knows him by smell. Truth is, he’s yet to introduce himself.

Over her shoulder, a window fan hums like an idiot. They’ve been together for a year, today. They celebrate. Sometimes, he’s her patient. Sometimes, she’s his.

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SHORT STORY

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Margaux Fragoso Gethsemane

Slowly, memories of being dead came back to Lazarus, and had the effect on his mind of a black hole devouring a star. First, there was a perception of darkness, not the stiff, flat, walled-in dark of an empty courtyard or a window eyeing a star-pricked sky—it was a wild, hot, agitated dark. Lazarus could hear birds: sparrowhawks and starlings, sylvia warblers and goldcrests, their wild notes harmonizing lucidly, and making the most striking music. Even the tamarisks and eucalyptus, the cyclamen and daisies hummed and pulsed, so near and tender. If he considered the sea, he was instantly among the coral reefs, cold and exhilarated, the world a phantasmagoric blue; if he thought of the desert, he was there in the bark of an acacia or, from the inside of a sabra cactus, watching the sun immolate itself. He marveled at the visual openness; he delighted in the clear, naked, otherworldly feeling, his senses as wide-open as those of an infant. At one point he inhabited the inside of an egg hatching; he was a new, downy chick whose thin, slick legs pushed and throbbed against its carapace until steadily, the shell gave way. He was within a hive; he was a jackrabbit fleeing its first bobcat; he was a night crawler twisting blindly through fists of earth. There was, woven through these impressions, the memory of a man’s openmouthed kiss and the pump of hands against his chest. “Beat, beat, beat!” Within those words were rings of air like the wake vortices hummingbirds create with their too-rapid wings. Lazarus knew if he jumped into any of these mini tornados, it would suck him in, yet the surge was impossible to resist. “You can stand,” said the voice and he found that he could, though his legs were unstable. The cave was cold and his grave clothes insufficient. His bones, all two 82

POETRY

Peter E. Murphy Material Witness

Listen. Garry Morgan doesn’t know we’re watching everything he does. He thinks he’s alone, the poor bugger, and he is. He really is. He doesn’t know he is an allusion to a life discarded decades ago. He is make-believe, a figment with just a glint of self-awareness. Watch him try to pee after a night of drinking Brains. He doesn’t have the balls to face a wall with other men who stream into the head. He sneaks outside the pub instead to pee against a tree or a fence post, but nothing comes out. He has no penis. He is a cutout who fingers a gap in his anatomy. Garry thinks he can drink and drink. The dark grain of the warm beer is also a fiction, as is the glass that appears to hold it, the mahogany bar. The whole damn countryside and country. The imaginary vowels in the unpronounceable language. The grey air. TLR

The disappeared sheep. The closed mines. None of this exists now or in the future or in the past. But Shhhhh! donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell Garry. Watch him. Look at him try to go.

Mannequin

Garry Morgan walks the Cardiff streets looking for art. The night before he got tapped out at a dive on Tiger Bay when the onion breath next to him knocked him off his bar stool and took his change. Garry longs for renaissance but knows his chances are not good. He’s not sure he exists. If he does, he believes he will die soon. Art lives. Garry would like to become art. Barred from the National Museum after he tries to enter a huge landscape— It was so realistic. Apple trees. Soft grass. A stream he could sink his feet into— But the guard stops him as he climbs onto the frame, escorts him to the exit. Poor Garry. He reaches a studio where he will remove his clothes for cash so the blokes who paint him will not have to imagine. On another gig, he is covered in wax TLR

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for a show called Pyrotechnicality. At the opening and closingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; there can only be one performanceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the artist waves a blowtorch over his body parts, making them move. One limb drops slowly from waving hello. His back bends when the master-hand points to it with fire. Garry feels nothing, even as the audience applauds when his knees melt away, even as the floor of the gallery rises up to meet him in one helluva sloppy kiss.

The Pits

Garry Morgan decides to look for his person in one of the Thatcher closed mines. Trouble is, getting out of Cardiff, choosing the right road up the right valley to a pit that will let him have a search. Trouble is, the whole country is shut down, walked out on. Garry crosses Manic Street to avoid the redundant miners who shout “Coal, Not Dole!” at the bobbies and their brawny sticks. Trouble is, he’s almost out of time. Too bad, Garry. You have a good way. He hears metal music blast from a basement and descends the shaft to a club called Stranger where the kids of Cymru slam their bodies into the mosh, punch themselves up and down, shake their dark heads before ramming them like wild goats into the last decade of the last millennium. Colliery casualties. TLR

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Lost children. Collaterally damaged. From the stage a punk band shouts, “It’s no good to be good anymore” and “What this country needs is a new country.” There is so much noise, Garry has to exit but is jammed between the Irish Sea and Offa’s Dyke. He climbs into the challenge of daylight which breaks over the pavement like a dropped glass. He is so afraid of what’s next, all he can do is cover his eyes, start walking, try to not let it in.

Garry Falling

Garry Morgan wakes from restless sleep in the underbrush clinging to grass, to roots. He feels the earth open its mouth to swallow him. This is trouble, thinks he, and reaches for weeds and refuse, anything to hold on to. He has trod this bloody country from coal to slate, from dyke to sea, and all he owns is a tea cosy and a fear of going under. He wishes he were a curlew sweeping above the dingles. He wishes he were a merlin bird shrieking Ki Ki Ki at an exaltation of larks. He aspires to exist but remains virtual. Instead, he is sinking. Purify yourself, Garry. That door is opening soon. Perhaps he should knock up Evans the Death and ask to be buried near sheep and water. Maybe all he needs is a system update. He has heard of the internet but doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what it catches, so he trudges to the Church of Noise where a setup assistant preaches the future of high speed over dial up, mobile over landline. What are attachments? TLR

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Garry asks the flickering screen, and why canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t I open one? A lot of people died last night, the screen replies. You are not authorized to save anything.

SHORT STORY

Karen Regen-Tuero Care

Gustavo was behind the dresser, one of the last pieces in the room, unplugging the CD player when she noticed the small cedar box. It was one of those homely keepsake boxes from high school graduation, something that clashed with all the room’s Mexican touches, but which she’d hung onto, probably because it was good for things with nowhere else to go. She cleaned it out: two used-up colored markers; the stubs from the three off-Broadway shows she’d been able to afford since moving to the city; her mother’s clippings from the Milwaukee paper warning her about the harm of too much computer use, on the job or otherwise. When she got to the bottom, she found, wedged inside, a folded piece of white paper. She didn’t recognize what it was until she opened it and saw her own careless handwriting. “A ver,” Gustavo said, seeing her shoulder’s stiffen. He plucked the paper from her just as she was understanding what it was: a list of loans including rent, Con Ed, a lawyer’s fee for a green card. This last item was the biggest—$3,447. The total came to $5,200. “What are these numbers?” Gustavo asked as the words at the bottom of the paper were sinking into her head: WAYNE CHAN AGREES TO PAY BACK FAITH B. AT RATE OF $26O/MO. FOR 20 MOS. Beneath it, in the hand of someone not accustomed to writing in the English alphabet, was Wayne’s signature, with the date—what she recognized as the day she moved out of their place together four years ago. “Nothing.” She got it away from him, stuffing it into the hip pocket of her cutoffs, but not soon enough to prevent him from inferring what it was all about. TLR

Gustavo eyed her out of the corner of his eye. “Nothing, my ass.” She packed the scarf covering the dresser, remembering how the first month had passed without any payment. The second month. “I’ll call him when we’re done,” she said, tossing Garcia Marquez and Fuentes into one of the boxes with secondhand paperbacks sprawled across the studio floor. Gustavo helped her by tying twine around the finished boxes on the floor and labeling everything; more than she would have done. “When are you going to call? It’s getting late,” he said, the whole thing obviously more on his mind than hers. She glanced up from the blue sweater she was adding to a new box. “Soon.” Her phone was already disconnected, she’d never believed in cell phones, which was a good thing because she couldn’t afford one. She’d have to go across the street and use the pay phone. Gustavo banged his fist on the dresser. “How can you be so nonchalant! Carajo! You were living with a thief! You gave him over five thousand bucks. How come you never noticed that paper before?” he asked, his face coloring. She liked this about him; this was what she’d found so fascinating when they met six months earlier— that he was interested in her life; what appeared to her as just a series of things that had happened was something that made his blood dance. “You don’t get it,” she tried. “He said he’d pay me back. As soon as he could. I asked. I did. But he was always between jobs. I moved out. He never mentioned it. I guess I forgot.” “How convenient! That was your hard-earned money. Doesn’t it bother you?” “Of course it does.” He helped tuck a pair of mittens in next to the sweater, then closed the box, the packing tape making a decisive sound she liked. He looked over at her. “You’re too used to letting things slide. You let the divorce slide. Four years ago you move out and never once think to divorce him!” Faith closed her eyes. She knew what was coming. “How come you never divorced him?” he said, putting another strip of tape across the top of the box then marking it “Winter Clothes.” He moved it to the area by the door where the other boxes were piled. “Afraid you wouldn’t meet anyone else? Right? Wanted to stay married to him, just in case. Right?” She turned away, but he spun her by the shoulder so they were eye to eye. “You thought you might go back someday. You’re still in love with him, Faith. Is that it?” He was a large man, much larger than Wayne. But they both had the same dark

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eyes that showed no pupils. She took his hand, hoping to comfort him. “I told you—” “Oh, please!” He let go of her hand. “Don’t give me that mierda about thinking he’d kill himself. You think that cabrón cared that much! All he cared about was his green card. Now he’s sitting pretty, that Chino, probably a citizen by now. That’s all he ever cared about was the card.” “He didn’t marry me just for that.” She

This was what she’d found so fascinating when they met—he was interested in her life; what appeared to her as just a series of things that had happened made his blood dance.

assembled another box, Gustavo carefully sealing the bottom for her so it wouldn’t split open under pressure. “It was me. I never loved him. I just felt bad for him.” All alone in a foreign country, she thought, no way of getting a job, no one to love him. “It was even my idea to get him the card,” she found herself saying, as she folded a pair of jeans and packed them into the box. “I thought it would help him.” “God—” he handed her another pair he’d just folded—“you’re stupider than I thought.” She narrowed her eyes at him. He tried to win her back by tousling her hair and saying he was kidding. Still, she felt she had to explain, to make him understand. “It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time. He was good to me.” Gustavo stopped helping. “Why don’t you tell me all about how sweet he was. How good he was to you in bed.” Then his tone dropped. “Jesus, it kills me thinking you’re still his wife.” His lower lip shook. “The problem is you’re too weak. You want to stay that way, Faith? Always being manipulated, by pity; getting chummy with the weak ones and getting pulled down. Until you’re one of them! Is that what you want?” Faith fitted the last pair of pants in the box, then closed her hands over her face. What if he was right? “I want to be able to have some respect for my wife,” he added, putting the box with the others. She went over to where he was by the door. “I’ll go call him now.” “Thatta girl!” He grasped her narrow shoulders. “Now, you know what you’re going to tell him? You want every last penny of that money back. And not sometime

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next year. You want it now, this week. Listen, he’s a man. He has to start acting like one. If he gives you any trouble, you threaten to sue him. Financial abuse. That’s the way things work in this country,” he added, as if he were an expert, someone who’d lived here his whole life, not someone who’d come just a few years earlier than Wayne, with the benefit of relatives to sponsor him. “It’s not Hong Kong. Understand?” She nodded her head.

“You’re going to get furious with him, right? You’re going to rage like a storm.” She managed a smile. Gustavo grinned and slapped her on the back.

She returned to the apartment and dropped the paper onto the dresser, now the only piece of furniture left in the room. “What happened?” Gustavo asked, seeing her face—flushed but quiet. “I don’t believe the bastard. He says he doesn’t remember any paper.” “I’ll make him remember. I’ll go over there. You want me to?” Faith shook her head. “You have a picture of the bastard?” he asked all of a sudden. “I want one.” “What for?” she asked, but she knew why: he wanted something to revile. “Oh, stop,” she said, thinking how childish he was. “You want to handle this?” She nodded. “I know I should.” Wayne’s face was swollen and pale. He had the blinds closed even though the sun hadn’t set yet. The apartment was stuffy and smelled of stale cat litter. Faith’s heart beat quickly. She wanted to get the conversation over with. Once, when she and Wayne were still together, she had dreamt that she’d shouted at him, then heard a funny sound, a gurgling on the stove. She’d found his head stewing in a pot, like an octopus boiling, his thick Chinese hair covered in a purple soup. She told herself she was thinking too much. He’d survive. He looked childlike, despite his graying hair. He seemed even skinnier and smaller than before. He was five years older than she was, but she’d always felt older than he was. She noticed his face was puffier on the right side than on the left. His almond, lidless eyes were glassy, as if he’d been drinking steadily, the Tsingtao he loved, since her call. Since moving out, they used to go out for drinks and talk on the phone about everyday things—until she met Gustavo.

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For four years she’d been avoiding the scene before her now: Wayne, the same as always in his washed-out jeans and light yellow tee shirt, sitting in the room that also hadn’t changed over so much time. Only his hair and his skin—a matching grey, the pallor of the dead—seemed different. The messy apartment was still full of things that were hers, but which she’d let him keep. Much of them were from her old apartment before she moved in with him. Her painted dresser with the smooth round knobs, her books by Tan and Hong Kingston, her framed symbols of life and longevity in Chinese calligraphy on the walls. In the medicine chest, she soon discovered, her cover-up makeup; and her tiny pots and jars of potions from Mott Street for pimples. A couple of outfits for work still hanging in the closet, too. (Had he deliberately left the closet ajar?) Her photo, from when her hair was longer and her eyes brighter, taken in front of a rice-cake vendor, was even on the nightstand. Had anything in Wayne’s life changed since their break up? The room was an untended museum—no, a shrine—to their former life. She thought of all the help she’d given him. Offering to marry him so he could stay in the country and work, then paying the lawyer’s fee out of her own pocket, plus all the other expenses she’d footed in their entirety. She tried to work up anger toward this small gray man. She tried to remember her fury just a while ago on the phone. “I’ve got the paper right here,” she’d shrieked as passersby eyed her warily. “You’ll see it and you’ll remember!” But the anger wasn’t there. She showed him the paper. He looked at it and after a short silence said, “I know.” He walked over into the kitchen. She heard him open up what sounded like the silverware drawer. She pictured a knife. He was bringing it out to use on himself. But when he returned, she saw it was just a bottle opener for a beer. “It’s all too much for me,” he said. “I thought I’d be able to pay you back. But it’s taking a lot of time. I thought you’d give me more time.” His tone wasn’t one of accusation. It was more a whimpering sound. “It was all so sudden. You’ve never been serious with anyone since me. Then one day I call you up to talk and you tell me you met someone, don’t call anymore. You’ll call me. But you never call. Until today. I’m sorry I lied about not remembering the paper.” She told him she’d given him time, but that he knew she was trying to start over. He knew she’d met someone. When she saw his eyes, she wished she hadn’t said it. “I know.” He shut his eyes.

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“I wish you’d meet someone too,” she said softly. He set the bottle of beer to his lips and drank steadily. She remembered what Gustavo had said: “Don’t let him manipulate you. He’s smarter than you think.” “Can I pay you back monthly? I don’t have that kind of money—to pay everything now.” “You’ll have to get it. You told me four years ago you’d pay me monthly.” She waved the paper. “And you left me with this and not a cent.” She opened her mouth and out came Gustavo’s words: “It’s time you started acting like a man.” He was staring at her, unable to believe it was her talking. “You’ve really changed.” “Maybe,” she said. In an uncertain voice she added, “But maybe it’s for the good.” “Look, you’re my benefactor for life,” he said. “I was going to pay you back over and above what you lent me. I’m not talking about any small sum. I was going to pay you $20,000, quadruple the money.” “I know,” she said quietly. “I remember you told me that.” As he put the bottle to his lips she noticed it was shaking from his hands. “It’s just that I feel taken advantage of. I was a fool. I mean, paying the lawyer’s fee for your green card!” She turned her head so that she wouldn’t have to see his eyes. “My boyfriend thinks you’re a thief.” Wayne fell silent. “And do you think that?” he asked in a small voice. “Is that what you think?” He had a desperate, wild look in his swollen eyes. “I haven’t gone out with a soul since you left. I think of you all the time. Is that what you really think? That I’m a thief?” “No,” Faith said with a sigh. She noticed again her old photo on the nightstand. She was younger then and stupid—look at her yellow rain coat, her big smile—but soon this would be over and she could go home to Gustavo. “So what do you think? Is monthly all right? That’s the only way I can manage that sum.” “No. I need the money, all of it, this week.” “You won’t trust me on this? If I don’t come through this time, Faith, I’ll—” He stammered. “I’ll lose all my self-respect.” She shook her head. “By the end of this week.” Wayne began to sob. He blotted the tears with a paper towel. She could guess he had no tissues. “So, what happened?” Gustavo stopped sweeping when Faith came in. “Did he give you the money?” 104

He had brought down all of the boxes and loaded them into his van, taken even the dresser. She was surprised. She thought he’d wait until the morning. “He said he would, by the end of the week.” Gustavo pushed the dust and dirt into the dustbin and threw it into the giant trash bag, which was almost full. “You sure?” She nodded her head. “You know, I can’t stand the way you treat him!” He shut the trash bag by tightening the tab. “You treat him with child gloves. What is it with you?” His nostrils flared. Then, after carrying the trash bag to the door, he apparently noticed her grim expression and his mood brightened at what it might mean. “You really shook him up, didn’t you?” Faith gave another nod, leaning back against the wall. “The enemy’s dead, all right. Happy now?” And soon she’d have Wayne’s money. She felt no joy though, only a numbness weaving through her, stumbling like a drunkard or a boxer after a jab to the jaw. “Well, if he doesn’t pay you,” Gustavo said after bringing down the trash, “you’ll sue him for all he’s worth. You’ll let a lawyer handle it. All right?” “Hmm,” she said vaguely from her seat on the floor, her knees to her chest. “Aren’t you as sick of this as I am?” Gustavo said, obviously unhappy with her response. “How can you stand it? Letting him run with your money. You’re barely making ends meet! And still being married to a guy you say you never loved in the first place. Years later! Why do I get the feeling I’m the only one who cares?” “I do too care,” she said evenly. But she didn’t. The marriage never legally dissolved, the money never returned. It bothered Gustavo because he’d just found out. She’d gotten used to it so she could avoid seeing Wayne as she’d seen him today. Gustavo sat down next to her, he too with his knees tucked toward him. “You want to divorce him, don’t you?” “Of course I do. I told you I do. I’m going to have the lawyer take care of it. It’s just a question of time.” And this will all be over, she thought. “He was a thief. You know that.” She nodded wearily. She felt Gustavo’s eyes on her, wanting her to curse Wayne.

She opened her mouth and out came Gustavo’s words: “It’s time you started acting like a man.”

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But she said nothing. She’d have her $5,200, all right. But in return Wayne had thrown her his corpse: the fresh memory of his face and mouth, the scent rising from their old room. She stood up. Gustavo did too, pinning her lightly to the wall. He cupped one hand to the side of her neck, then cupped the other hand. She could feel his hands trembling. “You know you’ve gotten yourself into an awful mess. I’m here to help you get out of it. You know that.” Faith looked into his eyes. Usually they looked adoringly at her, but now they were larger and even blacker, his face even more flushed than when she first found the paper. “Why doesn’t any of this bother you?” “Of course it bothers me.” She tried to get herself free, but he pressed her back to the wall, his hands gripping her wrists tightly. She noticed how shiny his muscles were with sweat; how a vein pulsed at the side of his neck. He looked a lot like a bull whenever he was angry. He’d never let anyone humiliate him like Wayne did. “I’m the only one you’ve ever loved, aren’t I?” Gustavo said, drawing close enough for her to feel his breath against her skin. “Of course,” she said. It was true. “You like everything about me, don’t you?” How foolish men were to carry on like this, she thought, trying to break away from him without luck. “Of course,” she said. Not true. “There’s just one thing.” She was so used to keeping thoughts to herself after living alone so long that her voice sounded distant. It was someone else speaking. Oh how she wished she could hear herself speak again! “I’m afraid sometimes. Afraid you’re . . .” Gustavo smiled, drawing back his hand, perceiving the truth even before she did.

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POETRY

George David Clark Thinking about Houdini the Week before Easter

When Houdini had been bound and lowered headfirst into the tank of water to perform the challenge he liked to call The Chinese Water Torture or The Upside Down, a curtain was drawn around the phonebooth-sized device and, as the orchestra played â&#x20AC;&#x153;Alone in the Deep,â&#x20AC;? audience members were encouraged to hold their breath also for as long as they could.

Even empty in the filthy, backstage half-light the cell was an instrument of spontaneous awe, a rude marriage of glass to mahogany, a sleight of steel and nightmare, but filled, with applause falling in a storm of earned love on the stage, it stood like a brilliant machine for the pausing of clocks, the eclipse of time by a single courage. To know the seconds by their weights and flaws, an audience paid to have their own lungs broken, and, near a minute, one would hear them snap along the aisles in little gasps while the gauzy curtains hung unruffled. It could provoke men against their watches, that waiting for the trap to open, for someone to overturn the natural law.

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The Fireman’s Son

He, at three am, from the old, four-poster bed that was his parents’, rises, brought awake by some odd hum or flux of rhythm in the nightpulse of the house. Their room is scuttled in an almost-perfect umbra, but even from the door he knows the tilt of his wife’s sleep, feels the clench and swell of dream-weight in her lungs. The beginning and the end of history condense in such darkness. Condense and are wholly true. Yet something breaks, has woken him, compels him now out into the hallway where a soft blue glow, like fractured sunlight on the bottom of a pool, is washed along the ceiling, and from behind the half-bath’s door: the froth and churn of unleashed liquid. The carpet there is soaked.

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Pausing at the threshold, he marks the chill of it through his socks, sees the choked and steady seeping— up nearly to his hip—from that space around the frame. The doors on earth into the other world appear like this one: familiar, nondescript, leaking back our better fathers in the graduated night. Still, he turns the handle and, as the door comes open, he’s knocked down by a saturated rush of air, the sodden bulk and roiling. He sees the toilet, a volcano of water, streaming sheets of fluent cobalt up the walls. The pedestal sink, even as he watches, disintegrates under sheer force of the wide-open faucet, and pipes burst hissing through the drywall like beheaded metal serpents, spurting solvent from their necks. Against that outpouring

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he struggles to his feet and, slogging, staggers back toward the bedroom, shouting all profanity and panic to his wife. And so, she startles. From reluctant ligatures of dream she wakes to find him hurried to their window, fighting the blasted clasps, the water thighâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s-depth and rising. There passes a moment then, as he collects her, in which she feels the pressure of some question holding her to the house: not what? or how? but a question the shape of her own body, some unparsable hesitation, postulated me? or is? Together they stumble out on the sloped front lawn: he in doused pajamas, she with hair hurricaned about her face. And there, in the crabgrass, as the house begins a kind of weeping around the kitchen windows,

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through the front door’s mail slot, he curses this earth and feels it curse him back. Lights now, in the near homes, kindled, swelter of dog-voices raised against reason, some neighbor in a bathrobe comes running up the drive, then just stands there gaping. Man’s loss is the world’s awe, and the night, raw at three am and clean of cloud, seems so intent on this place that the pines lean in and the many stars. Men and women gather here around the fireman’s son and his wife, are consoling her already when the windows finally shatter and release twin cataracts on the azaleas, spilling miscellany from the front rooms (couch pillows, books, picture frames, coasters) out over the grass and into the flooding gutter. Worse yet, as people try

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to pick things clear before theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re borne off down the sewer, the chimney emits this wet tornado that climbs into the sky, slinging droplets as it goes, so hard they leave welts on bare skin, drive everyone back to the far curb. The chimney itself, like struck sand, crumbles. Crumbles and comes down in a wreck of red brick, the whole house warped and wasted. Out of the incomprehensible distance the sirens Doppler in, and the firemanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son collapses, suddenly certain his father has died, has died again, this time entirely. He remembers the singular pride of his whole body burning with the old manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s praise, remembers the way

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his father, even incensed, was a man of water. He might have become such a man himself, or he might have refused to. He canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell now what heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inherited on this waterlogged lawn, in this house like a busted aquarium.

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SHORT STORY

y. g nl or O w. e on vi iti re Ed ary nt r ri te P eli in .th e bl ww ila w va ad: .A e nt R te To on w C No ed e ur ib at scr Fe ub S

Glenn Deutsch The Monkey Version of My Father

I’d never been inside Uncle Melvin’s apartment before, but this Sunday afternoon my cousin Joan and I were fetching him while my parents waited in the car. Three deadbolts thumped and a chain jiggled, but he didn’t open up. We waited, then I pushed the door open, and Melvin was walking away from us down a hallway. He went into a room, shut that door, and a thin slat of light escaped over the sill. “Madman,” Joan said as we walked in. I glanced at her frizzy red ponytail, at the loose rubber band nesting halfway down. Takes one to know one, I thought but did not say. We were on our annual pilgrimage to the mental hospital to see my grandmother for the day, and now here my parents had stuck me with a couple of her warm-up acts. A half wall separated Joan and me from Melvin’s living room. The ledge was grimy and held piles of mail, a few matchbooks, a pack of cigarettes and a green glass ashtray from Casa Bianca Ristorante. The living room was as starved for sunlight and cluttered with boxes as an odd lots store on Orchard Street. It was a sunny September day, but only a fine spray of light passed through Melvin’s dark drapes. A tower of cigarette cartons, various brands, stood like the back side of a chimney in a far corner of the room, and three tall gray metal shelves lined the longest wall. The shelving held nothing personal, just a dozen boxes of what appeared to be the same brand of new toasters and blenders and transistor radios. Panasonic clock radios, four sealed boxes, again all the same kind, lay near our feet. “Shut the door already, there’s ladybugs,” Melvin yelled from the room he’d gone into. He reappeared gripping a windbreaker, pulling out a crumpled cigarette 114

POETRY

Deena Linett The Man with the Sword

We want to know how he can do it. We want him to suffer, we want his limbs to fail, his hands. We want him soft and weeping.

Apparently we were designed for this.

Whether heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shaken, in the hours before, by dread whether he prickles and sweats, whether afterward he dreams dead sheep and children, beats his wife, silent through everything: she dare not utter, sing or weep. In childbirth alone she canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be stifled.

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B. S. V. Prasad The Morris Minor

Dr. Murti defied easy classification, even by the relaxed standards of the 1950s. He practiced Western Medicine but had no recognizable degree in the Western or any other medical system. He wore cheap drill coats without necktie over Indian-style, half-sleeved shirt and dhoti, and half-shoes of his own manufacture, made by cutting the backs off regular black shoes. The nameplate on the gate of the small bungalow in which he had his practice said “Ramana Hospital,” even though the bungalow had only three rooms, and the only time there was a bed in it was when the owner lived in it, more than a decade back. However, Dr. Murti did have an excellent practice. The bungalow sat on a sizeable piece of land on the main road of our small, bustling town. It was the kind of house that clerks and minor officials built in the ’50s, when land was cheap but construction expensive. The verandah was set up with a few benches and served as the waiting room. Dr. Murti saw his patients in the hall. His compounder Baazi practiced his black art in the long back room. His job was to deliver the prescribed mixtures and powders, neatly packed and in the right quantities, to Dr. Murti on demand. A good part of the practice, of course, came from believers like my grandfather. They considered Dr. Murti a better bet than the two or three doctors with MBBS degrees who had set up shop in the town by then. The rest came from the villagers who came into town every day for myriad reasons. Between buying fertilizer and seeds, attending to litigation, and taking in a movie at one of the town’s three cinema halls, many of them also thought it a good idea to park their bullock carts in the sizeable lot opposite Dr. Murti’s clinic and come visit. 132

SHORT STORY

Porter Fox Kingdom

Are you a bad man? she asked. I don’t know. You say one thing, then you say another. I have a lot to think about. We stood on the patio. Birds fussed in the yard. I threw the thing in my hand at them. They scattered. What was that? she asked. I don’t know. The birds didn’t do anything. I didn’t say they did. You don’t say anything. I got lost on the way to work that morning. And it was a small town. Everyone sat around thinking about everyone else. I’d been thinking about castles. Heidelberg, Luxembourg. What would it be like to live in medieval times? Cold, probably. Dangerous. You had to walk a fine line back then. I stopped at a Burger King near the highway. I’d seen an ad for a new breakfast sandwich. It was a good ad. It seemed exciting the sandwiches were finally here. I ordered a breakfast value meal. When it arrived, the cashier handed me a paper crown with a picture of the sandwich on it. Is this free? I asked. It’s a promotion, she said. Shouldn’t we place it on my head? TLR

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Do what you want with it. I guess it’d be disrespectful to refuse. I picked up the crown and inspected the gold tines. I need to speak to the king about this, I said. He’s out back. Where?

Behind the carwash. I took my sandwich behind the building. It was a quiet morning, big sun in the east, sweeping spring air, three goofy clouds scudding in from the north. The sandwich wasn’t any good. It tasted like fish. I threw it in a dumpster and kept on across the lot. Behind the carwash was a bright yellow trailer. I knocked on the door and a bearded man in a robe answered. Are you the king? I asked. Who’s asking? I just bought the new breakfast sandwich at your store. Tasted like fish. Not my store. I was given a crown. For free? It came with the sandwich. Good deal, he said. You don’t know anything about it? Not yet. Sorry to have bothered you. Doesn’t mean I’m not the king. He invited me in and poured coffee for two. We sat in the living room and he showed me pictures from all over the world. Belgium, Dakar, Gainesville. He’d flown reconnaissance jets for the Air Force and had friends on three continents. He said one was a Saudi prince he met during Desert Storm. Taught him how to fly, he said. Jets? Apache. In the war? I’m not sure what you’d call what we were doing over there. There was a stack of travel magazines on the kitchen table. A Snap-On Tools calendar over the sink. Postcard of a pyramid taped to the fridge. What exactly are you king of? I asked. 144

This. And the carwash. You own it? It was given to me, he said. The king turned on a radio in the kitchen and explained the intricacies of his monarchy. Big incentives, low wages, high turnover. The key to a successful reign, he said, keep the little ones busy. What about marriage? I asked. That’s harder. Why? There’s a contract. So it’s inflexible? Ineffective, he said. How so? People don’t like to be told how to feel. Give an example. Communism. The king gave me a token for a free wash and I continued to the office. Everything seemed far away that day. Like I had to unfold a forty-foot arm to reach my coffee. Or grow an ear the size of Iowa to hear the phone. When I got home that night, everyone was gone. Wife, cat, dog. The birds on the patio acted like they owned the place. I threw a frying pan at them and they flitted into an elm tree. A few minutes later they came back. I fixed a drink and sat on the couch. The coffee table was covered with women’s magazines. Empty boxes sat on the floor. One was enormous. I didn’t know they made things that big. You could have parked a car in it. Fit half the town in it. It was dark when I woke. The house was cold and quiet. I went into the bathroom and looked at some old things. Pictures, hairbrushes, towels. I made another drink, sat on a stool in the kitchen, warmed up a pizza and tried to watch TV. Then I got into the car. Back so soon? the king asked. I’ve lost something. I know. How? I don’t get a lot of visitors. He poured me a cup of tea and I sat on the couch. Then he put two TV dinners in the oven. TLR

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I thought about driving the car through the kitchen the other night, I said. Renovation? Revelation. What was revealed? Over-stability. It’s in the contract, the king said.

I might need a lawyer. That’s the last thing you need. Take my advice. What’s that? Don’t think every little thing means something. The king walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. He peered into the parking lot and dimmed the lights. People want what they want, he said. I want freedom. And it’s never the same thing. Or maybe a hobby. So you have to make a choice. A vacation, I said. Fight or flight. Ireland. And don’t be afraid of either. Old Romania. I want to show you something. The king hobbled to the last room in the trailer. He’d installed a massive picture window in the end wall. It was curved and looked out on the carwash and the Burger King. There was a La-Z-Boy in the middle of the room, gun racks on the wall, a British WWII helmet hanging from a pair of deer antlers. He gestured for me to sit, then handed me a small wooden box. What’s the window for? I asked. Keep an eye on things. What’s in the box? It might help. I opened it and saw two Chinese medicine balls. They were stainless steel and chimed when I moved them in my hand. The name of a hotel was printed on each. Where’d you get these? I asked. Vegas. 146

What are they for? Not luck. How do they work? Roll them around in your hand. I am. Keep doing it.

For how long? Not sure. He left to check on the food and I read the instructions on the box. I rotated the balls in my hand like they said. They tinkled and clicked. The sound was soothing. Things became clear for a minute. I realized that at least some of my unhappiness had increased substantially after a recent vacation. Key Largo, sunburn, too much vodka. Followed by unreasonable openness, resentment and an insincere phone conversation. The king brought dinner and set it on two TV trays. He sat in a folding chair and told me about the war while we ate—friendly fire, double agents, spicy food. Before he went to bed he told me to stay in the chair until I knew what to do. What should I think about? I asked. Camelot. What? Arthur, Guinevere. How will that help? They faced a similar problem. How will I know when to stop? They’ll tell you. He left and I rotated the balls and tried to stay awake. I could see most of Main Street through the big window. The carwash and Burger King closed and the little ones drove home. A red light blinked in the wash bay and I dozed off. When I woke I was lying in a wide meadow. I could hear shouting in the distance. There was a castle on a hill and some kind of contest nearby. Are you nervous? asked a beautiful woman standing over me. Yes, of course, I answered, getting to my feet. The air was warm and smelled like lavender. Tall grass blew around our ankles. The woman had pale blue eyes and fair skin and wore a white wimple. She looked toward a tent where a crowd had gathered to watch the contest. What are they doing? I asked. It’s the tournament. TLR

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Shall we watch? We have a lot to do. Like what? You’re holding court today. I swallowed hard, straightened my tunic and checked to see if my shoes were polished. You look fine, she said. I don’t feel fine. Everyone is looking forward to it. She took my hand and we walked slowly up the hill. Cheers erupted from the tent as we went by. At the outer parapet of the castle, guards lowered a small bridge over a moat. We crossed it and went through a wooden gate into the courtyard. Here’s Aldfrid, the woman whispered. A man in a fur cloak approached. Sire, he said, dropping to one knee. Rise, I said in a voice not my own. I noticed an enormous gold ring on my finger and held it out for Aldfrid to kiss. Then we were sitting in sling-back chairs by a fire. The council is waiting, my liege, Aldfrid said. Is that why I’m here? You tell me. I’m sitting in a chair, I said, smiling. As am I. So you can help me? That’s up to the council. I’m not a real king, you know. Then why did I kiss your ring? Maybe you’ve always wanted to, I said, and we both laughed. He’s traveled a long way to reach us, said the woman in the wimple. What does that mean? Aldfrid asked. I’d better be going, I said. What am I supposed to be looking for again? That’s what we’ve been debating, the woman answered. The sun glared through the picture window. I got out of the La-Z-Boy with an aching back, shaded my eyes and stumbled through the trailer. The king wasn’t there so I scribbled him a note with my number and left. 148

It was still early and the Burger King and carwash were closed. I wasn’t ready to go home yet. I drove through two towns until I found a little park. Then I pulled over and walked to a bench overlooking a long meadow and a pond. It was quiet and peaceful. A few geese swam in circles and a little girl walked her dog. She came over and sat on the bench next to me. Her dog lay beside her and sniffed a candy wrapper on the ground. I’ve never seen you here, she said. I’ve never been here. Where are you from? Ellington, I said. Is it close to here? Very close. How do you get there? That way, I pointed. Are you a doctor? No. Most people around here are doctors, she said. The dog nuzzled the girl’s leg and she pulled out a bag of treats. The dog snatched one from her hand and she put the bag back in her pocket. Are you going to school today? I asked. Every day. What are you studying? Shaken-spear. You like him? I like the princesses. What about everything else? What else is there? The battles. No. Kings. Boooring. Why? They talk too much. Doesn’t everyone? Just the kings, she said. About what? TLR

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Ruining everything. The kings run everything. Roo-in. You think so? I know so. Why do you like the princesses?

Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re beautiful. They ruin things too. Only by accident. They talk. No. How can someone be in a play and not talk? By being a princess. Which means? They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to. The dog got up and nudged the girl. She stood and waved and walked away down the middle of the street. A few blocks away she picked up a stick and held it in the air. Every couple of steps the dog jumped for it and the girl lifted it out of reach. Then she let him have it and he trotted off in front of her.

150

POETRY

Michael Bazzett The Operation

The children stood in line outside the office, pressing their small bodies into doorways when the rain began. More a mist than a rain, really. It was the soft whiteness of a low cloud. At regular intervals—every four minutes, say—the blue door opened and another child was admitted. For a flickering moment a face would lift in silhouette toward an unseen voice, then two damp shoes would busily wipe themselves on the mat. It must have been a part of the routine, reminding them. With a touch on the shoulder, the assistant guided them down the hallway and into a room with two slatted wooden chairs. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating a point midway between the two. If they chose the correct chair, the doctor came in, with his gold-rimmed spectacles and a smile deepening the lines around his eyes. If they chose the wrong chair, the operation was performed. This was monitored through the two-way mirror. Once it was removed, it was placed on a tray using a pair of ivory-handled tongs: the imagination, stripped of its fancy, no bigger than a seed. If it is placed between the back molars and cracked open, it is astonishingly bitter—the bitterness of almond husks, used in the tanning of leather. The taste lingers. Visions supposedly occur. TLR

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The Problem of Measurement

Escaping the collective delusion of precise measurement proved easier than anticipated. Bicycles, candlesticks, coins, bars of soap—they began simply by cutting most things in half, using pruning shears and kitchen knives. Or whatever else was handy. When absolutists asserted that a theoretical whole still existed—complete and inviolate— they cut everything in half again. Then they cut everything in half again. Once the pattern was established, it was hard to stop. The benefits were many. Halving allowed even the uneducated classes to see the prospect of infinity in a glass of milk—which, halved once for every decimal place in π, still held nourishment for a bevy of paramecium. Knowing that postage stamps contained a limitless universe was reassuring for many. People began measuring distances by standing on hilltops and using their hands. Rulers weren’t destroyed but found new uses as garden stakes or fence pickets. Out in the countryside, in the old stone chapels, you could overhear the parishioners whispering to one another: The essence of God is no more or less divisible than a woolen sock.

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Wind

They decided to inject the wind with dye, so they could follow its circulation. Folding chairs were set up on a hillside, so the group could witness it ravel and unwind. A bin full of clipboards was placed nearby. Their first observation was that wind crossed open fields in broad sheets. These sheets frayed, bit by bit, into threads of wind, and then into tiny hairs of wind that were softer than cottonwood down, or milkweed once it has burst from the pod. These shavings seemed content to curl away into nothingness. The observers leaned forward in their chairs, noting the occasional playful cuff as the wind moved across water, pressing it with a million hands. You could hear a distinct scratching of pencils. One witness was moved to write: It dipped and lifted away, then dipped again, like a porpoise. The author was pleased enough with this description that she shared it with a colleague, who smiled and nodded. On the mountain, there was a strong and constant encircling. It was like viewing a rock through the branches of thicket. It was a licking in the shape of flames, wreathing the rock with snow. Occasionally one gauzy finger pulled away and then collapsed back with a shudder, but this was unusual. Mostly, the wind hugged granite.

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This constancy led to raised eyebrows among some of the observers. There was even a coarse double-entendre that was only half-whispered. We have concluded, however, that these insinuations are more a reflection upon the scientific community, and its impoverished mindset, than any sort of valid commentary upon the current state of wind/rock relations.

154

SHORT STORY

David Licata There Is Joy before the Angels of God

I love my mother more than anyone in the world. I only love God more but He’s not in this world or of this world. My mother feeds me and buys me clothes to wear and toys to play with. At night we watch TV together and a lot of times I fall asleep on her and then she puts me to bed. When she scolds me or hits me I know it’s because she loves me and I’ve done something bad and deserve it. Like the time Mr. Kim caught me stealing a KitKat, which I never did before and never did again. I don’t know why I did it that time. All I can think is that the devil got in me. God works in mysterious ways, but Satan works in sly ways. He convinces you stealing the candy bar will be free and easy to do and fun too and it will taste good. He convinces you no one would ever know and if no one knows how can you get in trouble? But God knows. And Mr. Kim knew too because he stopped me before I got out of his store and he knows Mom because Mom buys her cigarettes there so he took me by the hand and Mr. Kim has rough and strong hands and brought me home and told my mom he caught me stealing. My mom thanked Mr. Kim and told him I wouldn’t do it again. Then he left and then Mom beat my behind so bad it hurt to sit for two full days. I cried and cried, but my tears were tears of sorrow and guilt because I knew what I did was wrong and that it made my mom and God very angry with me. That night I wasn’t allowed to watch TV but I did come out of my room and I told my mom that I made a vow to God that I’d never steal again.

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“It’s not just stealing,” my mom said, “you’ve got to make a vow to live a good Christian life. No stealing. No lying. No drugging. No disrespecting. Can you do that? Can you make that vow to Christ?” I told her I could because I knew I could. She asked me to recite the ten commandments and I did and Mom hugged me and told me she hated hitting me and did it for my own good and I told her I knew that and then she kissed me and told me to go to sleep. I went to bed and prayed to God to give me the strength and courage to live a good Christian life. I also prayed for my mother and my brother Kevin.

Yesterday there were six Rolling Rocks in my refrigerator, today there are four Rolling Rocks in my refrigerator. That’s a fact. What happened to the other two beers?

There are facts, and they spawn questions, and sometimes those questions have answers and sometimes only suspicions and sometimes things remain a mystery. For example, yesterday there were six Rolling Rocks in my refrigerator, today there are four Rolling Rocks in my refrigerator. That’s a fact. What happened to the other two beers? That’s a question spawned by the facts.

Kevin came home after being away for a long time and Mom was angry. I think she was happy too, though I don’t know how you can be happy and angry at the same time. She was happy because she loves Kevin because he’s her son and you always love your family no matter what. But she was angry too because when Kevin left he left and didn’t tell her where he was or he didn’t call or anything like that. And now, even though I say he came home he didn’t really. One school day he came home in the morning before I left and he ate some of my cereal and he and Mom got into a fight. Mom and Kevin fought a lot when he lived home. They were always yelling and there was no place for me to go where I couldn’t hear them yelling, even if I went into my closet which is the quietest place in our home. If I wanted to find out what happened to those two beers, if the answer to the question isn’t immediately known (i.e., the wife and I drank them at dinner), I’d need to do some detective work. Now suppose I caught Ben sneaking a beer into his room 156

one day not so long ago, I might have a suspicion that Ben drank the beer. I’d act on the suspicion and go into Ben’s room—I wouldn’t need a warrant because this is my house and Ben is my son and a minor and he’s not supposed to be drinking alcohol. Maybe I’d search his room, look in his trash can, look under the bed, on the bookshelf behind the books, whatever. If those two beers were moderately important to me I’d turn his room upside down. If they were very important I’d extend my search to other rooms in the house. If they were of the utmost importance I would look everywhere and never stop looking until I found them; I’d enlist help. If I’m on my game and the gods of detective work are looking down on me favorably, I’ll find what I’m looking for. Sometimes though it doesn’t work out and you have to accept that and move on. Kevin could be mean to me but most of the time he was nice. Sometimes, before he went away, Kevin and his friends would watch TV in our house when Mom was still at work. Kevin’s friends were bullies and they tried to tell me what to do, but Kevin wouldn’t let them. They’d tell me to get them a soda or get them some chips and Kevin would say, “He ain’t your—” and he’d use a curse word. And then Kevin would tell me to get him a soda or some chips and I would, because it was Kevin asking and I liked it when Kevin asked me to do things for him because then I felt like he liked me. When Kevin came back Mom told him he wasn’t welcome in the house. She told him to stay away from me. I asked Mom why and she said because he needed to embrace Jesus and she didn’t want him near me until he did because until he did he was a bad influence on me. I didn’t really understand this because Kevin protected me. Once I got in a fight with Allen Armstrong and he was on top of me and punching me and Kevin came and pulled Allen off me and pushed him against a wall and I guess Allen hit his arm funny because he broke it. Kevin really did just push him once and not that hard. I saw it. Mom was really upset at Kevin that day. That was before he went away and even though he was gone and everybody knew it, nobody ever got in a fight with me again. It’s really very simple, and you have to remember that. Facts, questions, suspects. Motive? That falls in the question section. I was on a case once, it was my first year in homicide, and the victim was this obese woman in her forties. “Obese.” I’m being nice. She was a sow, a real porker. She had been dismembered; arms, legs and head removed from the torso with a handsaw, fingers removed from her hands with a TLR

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bolt cutter. We found her all over Jersey City and Elizabeth, though I don’t think we ever found her fingers, or at least not all of them. There are three things you have to remember about dismemberment: 1. The criminal wants the victim to disappear. 2. Dismembering a body is rough business, so you really have to want to do it, or you have to be in an altered state of mind to be able to do it. 3. There’s usually a lot of rage involved. This is obvious but detective work is about keeping the obvious in the forefront. The obvious in this case was the husband, clear as sin, guilty as day, as my partner Tony Amato would say. Tony Amato liked saying stuff like that. Anyway, it was a no brainer and we found the evidence we needed (the saw and the bolt cutter, among other things) and he’s in prison forever, but early in the case Tony Amato asked me something I’ll never forget. “Why do you think the fingers were cut off?” “He cut off a lot of stuff,” I said. “But he didn’t cut off her toes. That’s funny, isn’t it?” Tony Amato was baiting me. He knew the answer and I didn’t and he knew I didn’t. “The guy’s a fucking wacko, Tony.” “The guy’s an idiot, but he’s not a wacko. He bought the bolt cutters first, and then he bought the saw later that day.” We knew this because the idiot in question had the receipts still. From the same hardware store. In his wallet. No shit! “He cut off her fingers first. I’ll bet anything he cut off her ring finger first to get her wedding band, maybe an engagement ring too.” “Why didn’t he just slide them off?” “They couldn’t slide off. She was heavy, and all that weight came on after the wedding. So he kills her and then lops off that one finger. He’s looking at her body and he thinks, Shit, that’s kind of obvious. So he takes the bolt cutter to the other fingers. But that’s still kind of obvious, because who just cuts off a person’s fingers, right? That’s just weird. But a lot of people get dismembered. You read about it everyday. So he buys the saw and hacks her up.” Though this was just a detail and not instrumental to the case, it was a lesson in keeping the obvious in the forefront. Keep the obvious in the forefront. On a later case I turned this into a pun that made Tony Amato proud—keep the obvious in the storefront. In addition to being a bad pun, this is probably good advice for anyone in retail. *

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I asked Kevin why he went away and he said he couldn’t tell me. I asked him if he did something bad and he said not really, maybe. I asked him if he embraced Jesus and he said Jesus wasn’t real, like Spiderman, and he didn’t need to embrace Jesus or Mom or no one. Then he told me to shut up about Jesus. I told Mom about what Kevin said about Jesus and Spiderman and she told me to pay no heed to Kevin. “Is Kevin bad?” I asked her. “No. He’s not bad. But he’s misguided. We need to pray for him. Pray that he finds the right path and does the right thing.” “But he did a bad thing?” “Did he tell you what he did?” I was going to lie. I was going to say yes, and see if I could trick Mom into telling me what Kevin did. I saw someone do that on TV once. But then I remembered my promise not to lie or steal or be bad. “No.” “What’s done is done. We need to pray for him. We need to pray that he finds Jesus.” I knew then Kevin had done a bad thing, but I didn’t know what. I can live with an unsolved case that goes cold. The world is full of them. Some things you’ll just never know and that’s all there is to it. You have to accept that, it’s part of the job. But knowing and having enough evidence to convict and not being able to find the criminal? The worst. They burn. And like so many other things, it’s the first time that burns the hottest. Two guys walk into a convenience store—sounds like the beginning of a joke, right?—and hold it up, then two customers walk into the convenience store and everything becomes a mess. One of them gets shot in the head and dies. Who you gonna call? Me. After all, I have nothing better to do on a winter afternoon. That, and it’s my job. We kept the obvious in the storefront, in this case, literally. There were three potential immediate sources of information: the clerk, who also turned out to be the manager, the customer who didn’t die, who turned out to be the deceased’s brother, and the surveillance tape. There was also a stock boy who was in the back and hid in the closet when he heard the hold up going down. Initially we suspected he was involved, but he turned out to be clean and useless. The brother was in shock and he was useless, too. What we got from the manager and the tape was gold. TLR

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The bad guys are masked and one, I’ll call him Slim, knows exactly where the safe is and thinks he knows how to open it. The other, Shorty, stays up front and keeps a gun on the clerk. The two customers walk in and Shorty directs them behind the counter so they stand next to the clerk. This was smart and cool. He’s done this before. Slim returns from the back empty-handed. He tells Shorty the combination must have been changed. Shorty tells the clerk to empty the register, and the clerk refuses. Shorty starts yelling at the clerk to open the motherfucking register or else he’s going to blow his motherfucking head off and the victim says something like, “Easy,” and Shorty loses his cool and tells him to shut the fuck up and shoots the cash register to show he means business. Except now the register won’t open because the moron put a bullet through the mechanism and jammed it. Shorty has to see for himself and leans over the counter and tries to open the register. He starts smacking the shit out of the thing, but it won’t open. He might have held up before, but his skills as a professional needed some polish. Slim says something like, “Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” but Shorty is a terrier. You see this a lot. Criminals, especially amateurs, don’t know when to cut their losses. He puts a gun to the clerk’s head and says something like, “This motherfucker is going to open the safe or he’s going to die. Watch them.” Their playbook has been thrown out the window and Slim is not happy about this and they begin to argue. The suspects are more engaged with each other than with the clerk and customers. Shorty is no longer pointing his gun at the clerk, but at Slim. What follows happens in about three seconds. The clerk reaches for a gun that was concealed under the counter. Shorty shoots the clerk in the shoulder. Slim just starts unloading, hitting Peppermint Patties, cough drops, cigarettes, condoms, god know what else. The clerk is on the ground and the victim starts to bend down to help him when he catches a bullet in the side of the head. Slim and Shorty flee. The clerk is on the floor, the victim is on top of him, blood pulsing out of his head. The other customer is frozen. Eventually he bends down and lifts his brother off the clerk. The clerk calls 911. During recess Allen Armstrong sat next to me and said he saw Kevin and he was going to go to jail. I called Allen a liar and Allen said Kevin killed a man and the police were going to arrest him and he was going to go to jail. I called him a liar again and then I punched him a lot of times and with all my might. I don’t think I hurt 160

Allen though because he’s really big and fat. Miss Burkhart grabbed me and brought me to Mr. Gregg’s office. Mr. Gregg asked me why I hit Allen and I told him. He told me I was going to have to stay after school and he was going call my mother to come pick me up. Then he sent me back to class and Miss Burkhart had me sit in the front of the room far away from Allen, which was OK with me. Mom and I walked home that afternoon and she was very quiet the whole way, which meant she was really really mad and that scared me so I told her I was sorry. “What are you sorry about?” she yelled. I stopped walking and started to cry. Mom didn’t stop walking. “Come on. None of that now.” I caught up to her. “What are you sorry about?” she asked me again. “For hitting Allen.” “That’s okay. Tomorrow Miss Burkhart is going to make you shake hands with him and apologize and you do it and you mean it and be proper about it and that’s it, it’s over. Don’t talk to that boy no more. If he says something to you that makes you mad you turn the other cheek. Understand?” “What if he says those things about Kevin again?” “You ignore him.” “But he’s spreading lies.” Mom grabbed me by the arm and it hurt. “We’re not talking about Kevin, we’re talking about you! Listen to me! You ignore him, understand?” I was hot mad. I could feel my face hot. But when we got home I wasn’t mad anymore and I started thinking about Mom and Kevin. I know enough about my mom to know that even though she said, “We’re not talking about Kevin,” Kevin was the reason she was mad. I wondered if Kevin could have done what Allen said he did and I tried to picture it in my head but I couldn’t. Then I thought about Kevin in jail, in a little room with bars on it and it didn’t seem so bad because sometimes I like to sit in my closet which is small and dark but it makes me feel peaceful and close to Christ. Then I thought about Kevin in hell, and that was the worst, because I could picture him suffering eternal damnation. I prayed for Kevin and asked God to help him find the right path. Then I thought about Mr. Riggs who goes to my church and testified how he’s a living example of Christ’s love because he was a drug-taking, thieving sinner and every person on earth gave up on him and wished him dead and it was only Christ that loved him and how he only realized that and embraced Him when he was in prison. * TLR

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The smart money said Slim, the guy who went in the back for the safe, was a former employee. He was probably disgruntled, probably fired within the last month, maybe even sooner. That left us with a very short list: three names. Two of them had solid work alibis, the other not so much. We went to the address Kevin Lewis wrote on his job application. Brunswick Estates. New Jersey is like that Indian god with all those arms, and therefore just as many armpits, of which Jersey City is certainly one, along with Camden, Newark, Elizabeth. Anyway, Brunswick Estates, despite its sweet-sounding name, is the armpit’s stinking center. It doesn’t look like a slummy project, there aren’t people hanging around dealing drugs on the street, it looks like a kind of nice, urban garden apartment. But the whole shebang is full of lowlife car thieves and drug dealers. Mrs. Lewis, single mother, let us in the apartment, which she doesn’t have to do and anyone with something to hide who knows better, wouldn’t do. Her house is clean and nice, her couch is covered in plastic. The décor was a little Jesus-heavy for my taste, but that’s me. I went to Catholic school as a kid. I still believe in Christ, but I don’t have to have his picture hanging in my living room. We sat at the kitchen table. Mrs. Lewis was rail thin and smoking. A young boy of about seven or eight sat at a coffee table in the living doing homework in front of a TV which wasn’t on. “Andrew, go to your room,” she said to the boy and he grabbed his books and disappeared into a room down a dark hallway. He obeyed his mother, good kid, and I wondered if Kevin was the same way when he was seven or eight. I didn’t dwell on this, though. That’s not my field. I was there to find Kevin. No, she didn’t know where Kevin was, he hadn’t been home, but that’s not unusual, he often stays with friends. “Is he okay?” she asked. “We’re just looking for him, that’s all,” Tony said. “You don’t just look for people.” She’s right, of course, we don’t. “Is he in trouble?” “We’re trying to make sure he isn’t.” She didn’t know what I meant by this. Neither did Tony, and I’m not sure I did either. “I haven’t seen Kevin in a week,” she said. “Like I said, he often stays with friends.” We were through here, even though we kept asking questions. His friends’ names? James something or other was one of them. Another one was Edward, didn’t know his last name. Addresses? She didn’t know where they lived, why would she know where they lived? No, she didn’t have a recent photo of Kevin. We pushed her 162

on this and she finally gave one up, his high school graduation photo. Mrs. Lewis was god-fearing and decent, but she was not going to roll over on her son. Neither would I. I gave her my card and told her to call me when Kevin came back, for his own good, but I knew she never would. I might as well have put the card directly in the trash myself. I kept thinking of Kevin in prison and in hell and I asked God, “What should I do so that Kevin doesn’t go there?” but I didn’t get an answer. When you ask a question of God and you don’t hear an answer it doesn’t mean He’s mad at you or ignoring you the way it is with people sometimes. It means you are not in His grace. You have to be in His grace before you can hear the answer. So I prayed twice as much as I usually do, I went to two services a week, I made sacrifices, like I didn’t wear socks and that made my feet cold and gave me some blisters and I stopped eating chocolate. If I did this I knew I would be in His grace and ready to hear His answer. I was right. Because God is God, He can’t just talk to you the way your friend talks to you or your mother or brother or even the way Reverend Hamilton talks to you. God works in mysterious ways and that’s how He talks too. Not in a crazy language or anything like that. But He’ll do things like talk through someone, like Reverend Hamilton at service but sometimes also through ordinary people and that’s how it was with me. I was in the supermarket with Mom and she stopped and talked to Mrs. Goodings and I don’t know what they were talking about at all because I was bored and just pushing the cart in circles when I heard Mrs. Goodings say, “What’s right is right,” and those words made me stop pushing the cart and I knew that was God’s answer to me. I had to do what was right. I had been confused because there is the right thing to do and there is what I’m supposed to do and a lot of times they aren’t the same. When I heard Mrs. Goodings say “right” I knew that meant the Christian thing, the thing Christ would have done, so I asked myself, “What would Christ have done?” because Christ is my role model and we should all try to act the way He would. If we did, there would be no crime and no war and we’d all love each other the way brothers and sisters are supposed to. That day I went to Mr. Kim’s store to buy Mom cigarettes and in the store was a policeman and I went up to him and told him my brother had done a bad thing. “What did he do?” he asked me. “Something bad.” The policeman looked at Mr. Kim and Mr. Kim shrugged his shoulders and said he didn’t know my brother. Mr. Kim wasn’t lying when he said this. I’m sure TLR

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Kevin went to Mr. Kim’s store all the time. But Mr. Kim probably didn’t know Kevin was my brother. That could be. “What did he do?” the policeman asked me. “I don’t know for sure.” “Did he hit you, call you a bad name, something like that?” “No. Kevin protects me.” “He sounds like a good guy to me, then.” “Do good guys sometimes do bad things?” I asked him. “No. Good guys do good things and bad guys do bad things,” the policeman said. “That’s what makes you good or bad, the things you do. Right?” I left the store without the cigarettes because Mr. Kim said he couldn’t sell cigarettes to a minor because it was against the law and my mother would have to come buy them. I didn’t say that he sold me cigarettes before because I figured Mr. Kim was saying that because the policeman was there. What the policeman said made sense to me. But as I walked home I remembered the parable of the lost son and even though he spent time dishonoring his father and living a riotous life, his father forgave him and welcomed him home because he was lost but found his way. So people could do bad things but still find their way to God’s grace. They could do bad things but still turn out good. And I knew this was true, truer than what the policeman said because what the policeman said was the word of a man but the parable was the word of Christ. The little prick disappeared. We suspected he went to Florida, where his father lived, so we contacted the FBI and a nationwide warrant for his arrest was issued. But he never turned up. We didn’t know who the other suspect was but we had a pretty good idea it was someone named Billy Bones—that was his god-given name, no shit. Kevin had a small history, shoplifting, nothing major, nothing with a weapon. Billy had a good long one and was possibly a psychopath. Kevin finished high school, Billy was in a JD center by age twelve. Kevin and Billy knew each other since kindergarten, lived in the Estates together. By all accounts, they weren’t inseparable, but they did hang out together, get high together. Billy disappeared too. The friends and family of both gave us nothing. The guns didn’t surface either. So that’s where we were. You learn to live with the helplessness, but you don’t give up hope. There were several things going against us—these kids were young and it’s easier to live on the fringes when you’re young. You’re strong, you can tolerate crappy living and working conditions, you can work jobs off the books, you can pick 164

up and relocate at the drop of a hat. Especially these kids. They had no wives, no kids, no real girlfriends. What did we have going for us? They had no money, and life is hard any place with no money, but especially in a new place when you’re trying to start over. They might be desperate enough to try another hold up and if they did they’d probably be sloppier than the first time. Desperation does that. They had mothers, and this was no small thing for eighteen-year-old boys. We hoped they were that breed of tough guy/Mamma’s boy and kept an eye on the neighborhood as long as we could. But life goes on and other cases come up. Jersey City has about one murder every two weeks, and they need to be investigated and solved, other families need to see justice done. In the first week we’d done everything we could and we pretty much knew who did what, but there was nothing else we could do. So Kevin Lewis and Billy Bones and their families and the victim and his family receded further and further out of our view. Until a year later when we got an anonymous tip saying Kevin Lewis was back in town, then the case rushed into everyone’s life again. One fucking year. In that time Tony Amato retired, my Uncle Willy’s heart crapped out on him for good, and Ben went from middle school to high school. It was a Saturday morning when the police came and took Kevin. I was watching cartoons and Mom called me into the kitchen. She put her arm around me, opened the door and then she stood back. She held me close as three men with guns came in, looked at me and moved on to where Kevin was sleeping. I had seen one of the men before because he came to the house a long time ago looking for Kevin. They went into the room and one of them said, “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” only he put a really bad curse word between “sleeping” and “beauty.” In no time they all came out of the room and Kevin’s arms were behind his back and he had handcuffs on. He was wearing a hoodie and his fly was open and his sneakers were untied. When they got to the kitchen Mom asked one of the men, “Where are you taking him?” “The West District. 576 Communipaw Avenue,” the man I had seen before said. “I’ll pray for you,” Mom said. “Me too,” I said. And Kevin said, “It’s going to take more than that,” and they all walked out the door. “He’s right,” Mom said, “that boy’s going to have to start praying for himself.” * TLR

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There are anonymous tips and there are anonymous tips. This one was truly anonymous. The tip hotline got a call and the caller said Kevin Lewis was in town staying with his mother. That’s it. They hung up. I listened to the call and it gave up nothing, not even the gender of the caller. Could have been a man imitating a woman’s voice or vice-a-versa. Could even have been a boy or girl putting on a fake voice. It didn’t matter. The who, what, where and why of the tip isn’t important. And they are anonymous, after all. What’s important is the tip. You check it out. If it leads to something, great, if not, you have the satisfaction of knowing you did your job and you move on. We put a plain-clothes man near the house and eventually he saw Kevin exit. We were golden. The pick-up car nabbed him and we found the gun, with Kevin’s prints on the cartridge, stashed on the roof of his building. I never really understand the logic behind holding on to the gun. You’ve got a hot gun, ditch it! It’s not like you’re trying to get rid of a tractor trailer. But for some reason, a lot of these knuckleheads hold on to them. The only thing I can come up with is they feel like as long as it’s with them, it can’t hurt them, it can’t turn up and bite them in the ass. It’s a control thing, maybe. But it’s stupid. Look, I’m not complaining, finding a gun makes our case much stronger, and if the gun has a past, as a lot of them do, as Kevin’s did, all the better. When we interrogated Kevin we tried to get him to roll over on Billy Bones. We told Kevin it was his bullet that landed in the victim’s head and if he cooperated and told us where Billy was, we might be able to do something good for him, get a manslaughter charge instead of a felony murder charge. If he remained close-mouthed, the prosecutor was looking to send him to his maker. This was bullshit, of course. 1. It wasn’t Kevin’s bullet that laid the guy out. Kevin’s bullets hit nothing but inanimate objects. We counted on Kevin not knowing that. 2. Even if it was his bullet, a jury would never sentence this kid to death. I know I wouldn’t. 3. New Jersey ain’t Texas; though the death penalty is on the books, we haven’t had an execution since 1963. But Kevin thought he was a thug. He had nothing to do with the robbery and he didn’t know any Billy Bones. We reminded him that he knew Billy since kindergarten and suddenly, oh, that Billy Bones. So what, he knew Billy. What did that mean? He didn’t hold up any store, so how could he say Billy was there doing something with him that he didn’t do in the first place? Can’t argue with the logic. But we did argue with the facts. We told Kevin that ballistics put Kevin’s gun in that store on that night. Ballistics also put a bullet that came out of that gun that killed a drug dealer in Newark the previous September, and 166

a bullet that came out of that gun that killed a liquor store owner in Philly the previous July. We didn’t say anything after we said that and Kevin didn’t initially grasp what we were telling him, so we spelled it out for him: we were going to charge him with three counts of murder one. That’s a lot of heat. Was he ready to go down big time for some douche like Billy Bones? No, he wasn’t. So he started talking. They

It wasn’t Kevin’s bullet that laid the guy out. Kevin’s bullets hit nothing but inanimate objects. We counted on Kevin not knowing that.

all act all tough and street, but when you turn up the heat, they talk. He never had possession of the gun before that night. It was all Billy’s idea and they were Billy’s guns. Billy was crazy, ask anybody. After the hold up they went to Atlanta where Billy’s stepfather lived. He was crazier than Billy even. Kevin earned some money working construction with Billy’s crazy stepfather and left Atlanta and Billy as soon as he could. He went to Miami because he didn’t know why. Maybe to see his old man, but he couldn’t find him. He came home because he wanted to see his mother and little brother. As far as he knew, Billy was still in Atlanta. He gave us names and addresses, but Billy wasn’t around. His stepfather, needless to say, didn’t know where he was either. To this day Billy still burns me. But Billy will turn up. Pieces of shit like him always float to the top sooner or later, alive or dead. It’s inevitable. I never feel sorry for the criminals and I don’t buy into the liberal bullshit about them not having no choice but to resort to crime. We all have choices, that’s a fact. No one put a gun to Kevin’s head and made him go into that store with a gun with a bad dude with a gun. Having said that, I don’t think Kevin was a bad kid, he just did a really stupid thing. He didn’t have the stuff of a career criminal, not at this point anyway. He went off-track and got out of his depth. He pleaded and was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, conspiracy to commit a crime, and unlawful possession of a weapon. Now he’s in Rahway, or East Jersey State Prison as it’s officially referred to but never actually called; everyone still calls it Rahway. If he’s smart, he’ll stay out of trouble in prison and learn a trade. He could get out when he’s twenty-five or so. He’ll still be young. He can still get a job, go to school, find a woman, have a family, have a life. Prison is a hard place to get back on track. Usually it doesn’t happen. TLR

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When it does, it comes wrapped up in religion. There are worse things in the world, I suppose. Will it happen with Kevin? Here’s why it won’t. 1. Kevin is a follower. He followed Billy Bones’ plan and got in over his head. In prison, he’ll most likely follow the baddest clown he can latch on to. 2. He’s going to be released into a world that doesn’t want anything to do with him, even if he stays clean in prison. 3. With no prospects, what are his reasons to go straight? His family? I don’t think that’s much incentive, not where he’s at. He’ll get out, become desperate, meet up with some other bad dude and follow his plan right back into prison. It happens most of the time. I do feel sorry for the family of the suspects if they deserve sympathy, and many don’t. Kevin’s family deserved some sympathy. Mrs. Lewis was trying her hardest, you could see that from the way she kept her house, from the way she held on to her young son when we dragged Kevin away. Kevin went to prison and I felt bad because Mom was very upset, even though she was acting like she wasn’t. But mostly I felt bad because it was because of me that Kevin went to prison. I was praying every day that Kevin would find his path. It didn’t matter what earthly way he found it, that didn’t matter at all. Mr. Morrow at my church is in a wheelchair and he’ll tell anyone and everyone that if it wasn’t for his accident he would never have embraced Christ and so he has to laugh when he sees people feeling sorry for him because getting in that accident and being in that wheelchair was the best thing that ever happened to him. And when Kevin went to prison I thought of Mr. Riggs and how that was where he embraced Christ. But I still felt bad because Kevin being in prison made Mom sad. And I started to get upset at making my mom sad so I went up to her one day and told her I was sorry about Kevin and I didn’t mean to make him go to prison. “What are you saying, ‘mean to make him go to prison’?” she said. And I told her about all my prayers and thoughts and how God answered them and made it happen that Kevin got caught and sent to prison. “Are you telling me you prayed for him to go to prison?” And I told her I did. Because when he was here he was making her sad, and because Mr. Riggs embraced Jesus when he was in prison and so I thought the same would happen with Kevin. And Mom told me all I did was pray for the best for Kevin’s soul and that was nothing to be upset about and that we should continue to pray for him and that’s all we can do. 168

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“It’s now up to Kevin,” she said. And I understood this because I know the parable of the lost son.

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POETRY

Martin Jude Farawell Innocence

It is an unexpected gift that leaves you almost giddy this realization you could be the one who throws the stone

and when you make him cry cry right there in front of everyone you ride so fast that when you stand upon the pedals of your bike and look straight up it is like flying 170

The Classics

The classics scholar fucking yet another college sophomore—you’ve seen him (actually, you’ve probably heard him first, these guys always have those resonating voices that rattle every cup and saucer and loose filling) in those college-town cafés, where you always find them, and always with a younger woman who leans in so intently you have to wonder, where do women learn to listen like that? Especially to assholes? Maybe it’s only your jealousy talking. Then again, you know if he could hear your thoughts he’d criticize your diction: The word you mean is envy. All attacks on him, especially from that bitch they made department chair, are fueled by envy. Lilliputian is his favorite word. He knows he’s not some narcissistic little prick, abusing his authority, and she’s no insecure, neglected child, desperate for approval. She’s Circe, Calypso, and he’s bewitched, blown back from destiny by nineteen years of grading freshman essays. His life is mythic stuff. Those nights in grad school, TLR

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all the TAs stoned on hash and Carlo Rossi wine: his sojourn—oh, what a time that was!—among the Lotus Eaters. His begging off his promise to toss a ball with Telemachus: The kid’s a man now. Nothing to be done. Hell, if all he suffered was finding out he’s not the center of the universe— everyone is disappointed. Disappointing. Hell is merciful. There, a ghost forgets the living. And his wife? The one he thinks he’s sailing home to? Spends all day weaving reasons to leave him.

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Beloved Son

A father tortures and murders his only son. Insists itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s out of love. Tabloid fodder. Impossible to believe in basements we walk past, children in soiled underwear are led, sobbing, by the hand, and nailed to the beams of their fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s houses. We forget thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s where we learned something is aroused by human suffering, by watching this specific revelation reach the eyes: no amount of begging will make this stop, that being made to beg until that revelation is the point. How else to beat such helplessness except to beat it into someone else?

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FLASH FICTION

Becca Klaver Thank You, Come Again

An aproned, modern girl went into the woods, or what had become of the woods. Her apron read le haut stuff and it made her hold her belly and laugh so round that she wore it every day over a series of simple black dresses, as a less modern girl might have worn a pinafore. The woods incorporated silly sayings, too. This was the only way to get people into the woods anymore. Placards dangling from sap stubs shouted things like sandwiches so speedy you’ll startle! Messages stick-scratched into the dirt read hot peppers 0¢. A modern boy had told the girl to enter by the three birches, then walk north ten paces, then west twelve paces, then south a pace or two: there she could find a place to eat her peanut butter sandwich and read her little pamphlet in peace. The girl was just about to turn south when a wide oak stump caught her eye. She figured this would work just as well—the stump was her size and perhaps the modern boy had overlooked it. She took off le haut stuff and set it down on the splintered surface. She took out her pamphlet and her peanut butter sandwich and set them down. She gulped in the green noise and stayed for a long while. When she got up to go home, she picked up her apron and noticed that the stump’s surface was now lacquered. That’s strange, the girl thought, but went on her way. Filled with a new serenity, the modern girl did not feel at all bothered by the dozen modern men in white sailor hats who leaned out from behind trees to call out, “Thank you, come again!”—at least not until from out behind a pine trunk peeked 174

the modern boy, red-cheeked under his sailor hat. “Thank you, come again!” he called out, but with less gusto than the others. “You’re one of them!” the modern girl cried, stepping closer to inspect him. “I w-wasn’t until just a m-moment ago,” the modern boy replied, his gaze drifting over her shoulder. “It’s not so bad, really.” Then he whispered, “Did you find the place?” “I found a spot of my own,” the girl replied, straightening her shoulders. She ran her hands over her belly, feeling the raised paint of the stencil on her apron. “What did it look like?” “It was an oak stump in a clearing, near a lilac bush.” “That’s the spot. That’s my spot.” The modern girl and the modern boy watched each other with some doubt. It was starting to grow dark, and from all corners of the vast woods men in sailor caps were converging on the modern girl and the modern boy. “I guess there was only room for one of us,” the boy sighed. The girl turned to face the encroaching circle of white. It was solid; there were no cracks. She removed her apron and shook it, like letting air into a kitchen garbage bag, then began calling out “Thank you, come again!” at a pitch so piercing that the birds, or what had become of the birds, swooped from tree to tree in a panic, allowing the girl to run out from beneath the specter of le haut stuff and flee east, then south, and finally home.

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SHORT STORY

T. J. Forrester Quid Pro Quo

In a snit over Pike’s choice of color for the downstairs bathroom, Giuseppe says good riddance and moves out of the B&B into the garden. Instead of digging in the weeds in the shadow of the tall poplar, a patch he and Pike save for fall cabbage planting, Giuseppe plunges a shovel into a tilled row and scoops out dirt, worms and broccoli plants. He digs toward the tomatoes, yanks an Early Girl upward, tosses it into the corn. The uprooted plant falls through the leaves and topples in a slow roll onto its side. He slaps his palms together, a satisfactory noise in an otherwise still morning, sniffs coffee smells seeping out of an open kitchen window. The property’s epicenter is a two-story Victorian, white with tin roof, shutters blue as sky after a cleansing rain. On the far end of a sprawling lawn, Appalachian Trail thru-hikers pitch their tents on ten-dollar-a-night campsites. Giuseppe wishes the hikers stayed elsewhere— more trouble for him is the way he sees it—but they spice up the ambiance, and regular guests, gays from surrounding cities, enjoy the company. Giuseppe bends to his work, and after two hours of steady digging, widens the hole into a smooth-sided hollow. He sculpts a crumbly pillow on one end, a gritty table on the other, flings the shovel into the air and watches it stick point down in the grass halfway between house and garden. He doubts Pike, the original literal man, will understand the symbolism. The rear door opens . . . closes on a set of raspy hinges Giuseppe should have oiled months ago. He crouches on his haunches and watches his lover walk through the garden carrying a plate of blueberry muffins. All arms and legs, head bobbing to an arrhythmical gait, Pike exudes an innocent awkwardness, and the impression of 176

those meeting him for the first time is docile ineptitude. A false assumption. Pike is a retired attorney, a raider who dismantled companies with all the abandon of a child playing in the sandbox. “I brought you breakfast.” Pike places the plate on the ground. He wears a robe the color of his eyes—butterscotch brown—an iris tint that causes Giuseppe to speak in sentences that end in the middle of nowhere. He forces his gaze on Pike’s legs, at the scar below his left knee, a wound he received in a minor car accident a few years back. Giuseppe knows every inch of that body—moles, blemishes, arthritic knuckles, how the aging spine, once so straight, bows between the shoulders—he knows it all. Pike steps close to the hole and soil falls over the edge and puddles at the bottom. “I can’t believe you are so riled up. Over such a little thing.” “I’ve told you before, chartreuse nauseates me. I cannot abide the idea of sitting on the toilet surrounded by puke-green walls.” Two women come outside and adjust their floppy hats and look toward the garden. It’s Monday morning in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, a town that began rusting soon after the steel mills closed, and it’s time for Wendy and Josselyn to leave the mountains and head to Baltimore. Pike’s goodbye hugs are a B&B tradition, and he turns and walks toward the women. Giuseppe recedes into the hole. His world has shrunk to a dirt floor, four walls, a blue rectangle overhead. He paws the edge until his fingers grasp the muffin plate. He rests the plate on his chest and nibbles sweet dough. One thing about Pike, the man can cook. Giuseppe eats the last muffin and works his mouth for saliva, wonders if Pike forgot to bring something to drink on purpose. Probably so. Anything to get Giuseppe out of the hole. The sun climbs a high arc and slips behind a thin cloud layer. He stretches out his tightening back, coils and uncoils his fingers and wishes he were thirty years younger, still sporting a ridged abdomen and the accompanying youthful impudence. Pike prefers lovers on the younger side, that’s no secret, and Giuseppe shows wear, wrinkles that look like ditches when light hits his forehead just right. He’s dyed his hair, camouflaged gray threads above his temples, but has been unable to avoid the feeling he’s deteriorating one cell at a time. That afternoon, Pike places a pitcher on the porch rail. The setting sun illuminates the water and ice cubes swirl in amber light. Pike the temptress, Giuseppe thinks, the corporate pirate who offers drink while secretly plotting to cut your throat. “I’d rather dry up and blow away than drink your water,” Giuseppe yells, and instantly regrets his outburst. He has spent many evenings listening to Pike explain TLR

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the ins and outs of negotiating. The secret is to never let them see you scratch . . . even if your ass itches so bad you can’t stand it. The afternoon recedes into dusk, dusk into darkness. Lights switch on inside the Victorian and shadows move across curtained windows. Doors open and close, laughter and muffled conversation escape guests who mingle on the porch. The moon is out, a pumpkin splash above a tendriled cloud, and stars track the sky. Tents light up like glowing orbs. Giuseppe flings a dirt clod, grins through dry lips when it smacks siding. He throws another clod, another smack. Pike’s voice flows through the darkness, a quiet apology and a request that everyone spend their night inside. In the next hour, windows darken one by one, and when the last light blinks out, Giuseppe hurls a rock onto the roof. The rock clatters down the tin slope, bangs the gutter. He wraps his fingers around a heavy chunk and hurls it like a grenadier. Clatter bang. The rear door opens, followed by the squeak of a turning valve and the rush of water through a hose. The sprinkler sweeps over the garden, rattles the broad-leafed squash, what’s left of the tomato plants. Spray hits Giuseppe’s face and he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, licks moisture from his lips. “Are you there?” Giuseppe says, seeing only shadows at the rear of the house. “I’m here.” The sprinkler comes around again, and Giuseppe takes the spray on his back. “I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the water, I truly do—” “I hired a houseboy,” Pike says. “How young?” Giuseppe, eight years younger than Pike’s sixty, feels eighty at the moment. “Younger than you.” They are quiet for a long time and Giuseppe feels such a cold emptiness it’s like his blood has drained from his body. “You still there?” After what seems forever, Pike’s voice comes through the night. “I’m still here.” “I wish you wouldn’t’ve done that. We really don’t need a houseboy.” “It’s only until you come to your senses.” The sprinkler stops, the rear door opens and closes, and Giuseppe removes his clothes and wipes water off his face. The breeze chills his slicked skin and he wraps shivering arms around his torso. He and Pike have been together for thirty-two years, met outside a Philadelphia convenience store where Giuseppe panhandled for his supper. Back then, he lived in an abandoned car on a dead end street, rummaged 178

through dumpsters when panhandling didn’t pay off. After a brief courtship, mostly sex in the back seat of a silver Cadillac, Pike said he had room for two in his king sized bed and Giuseppe took his offer. In the ensuing years, they lived in a series of rentals that grew pricier and higher off the ground as Pike advanced in a prestigious law firm. Because they were queers before queers were fashionable—those were the dangerous days—they never ate in a restaurant together, never sat side by side in a theater, never went to the firm’s Christmas parties. Whenever they packed up and moved from apartment to apartment, Giuseppe felt like they were starting anew and suggested they adopt a pet. He didn’t care if it was a bird or slab-sided iguana, long as it required shared written commitment. Each time Pike said no. Giuseppe blamed the corporate life for his lover’s reticence, believed desire to get somewhere enticed ladder climbers to seek unfettered relationships. At times, he felt like a throwaway, a trinket so cheap Pike wouldn’t hesitate to toss it in the garbage. The affairs started when Pike turned forty, male voices calling in the middle of the night, hanging up when Giuseppe answered the phone, but he dug his heels in and refused to turn his lover loose. To his amazement—he couldn’t believe they had been together that long—Pike retired and started shopping for a B&B. Giuseppe dreamed about the contract, imagined how they would sit around a mahogany desk and sip champagne, contract spread like a tantalizing siren across the glossy surface. He dreamed of the pen in his hand, of broad strokes on the bottom line—Pike Orwell and Giuseppe Stephanopoulos—tying the knot forever. It didn’t happen. Pike purchased the house alone, and Giuseppe moved in without arguing the point. Now, he faces the moon, a jaundiced eye that peers at him with a reproachful stare. Giuseppe thinks he might be too hard on Pike. It isn’t easy managing the B&B. Pike writes and places advertisements in gay magazines, does the accounting and taxes, designs and cooks gourmet meals. He handles the customers, makes them feel comfortable coming and going. Giuseppe washes linen and makes up the beds. He also mows, but he enjoys riding the John Deere and doesn’t count that as work. They share the gardening. Giuseppe stands fully erect, not an easy thing after moving so much dirt, and howls a mournful sound. Pike isn’t the only one who can up the ante. Tomorrow, if Giuseppe can work it into the conversation, he will ask to put his name on the title. “Joining us for breakfast?” Pike says, and motions toward the dining room table. He’s in his brown robe, sash knotted below his belly button. Mud-caked and unclothed in the hallway, Giuseppe raises a foot and scrapes TLR

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the adjacent ankle with his big toe. He likes mornings in the B&B, the way house and guests wake up together, neither in a rush to greet the day. A toilet flushes upstairs and lazy footsteps sound on the ceiling. “I wouldn’t want to be a bother.” “No trouble,” Pike says. “I’ll set another plate and—” “I just came in to get a few things, maybe a book and an umbrella.” “The umbrella is a good idea. The weatherman said it’s going to be a scorcher today. Much hotter than yesterday.” “I was thinking about reading a little Cheever.” “You can’t go wrong with Cheever,” Pike says. Giuseppe follows Pike to the kitchen and watches him flip batter that bubbles in the skillet on the stove. The pancake somersaults and lands dead center. For years Pike has performed this trick to entertain Giuseppe, who always reciprocated with an appropriately awed sound. Today, he holds his tongue. Pike cuts him a glance, and Giuseppe shrugs and looks away. A frail boy pads into the kitchen, pecks Pike on the cheek, opens the refrigerator and comes away with a carton of orange juice. The boy wears tattered shorts and shirt, bandanna tied in a scarf over yellow hair. He has a lean face, sores on his cheeks—most likely, Giuseppe thinks—the worst case of acne on a scarecrow he’s ever seen. “Say hello to Dobbs Amherst,” Pike says, “our new houseboy.” “I’m only staying for the summer.” Dobbs opens the carton and takes an enthusiastic swallow. Giuseppe extends his hand and the boy reciprocates. His handshake is limp and unimpressive, his expression impassive. “He just got word he’s been accepted at Dartmouth,” Pike says. “Says he wouldn’t be able to finish his thru-hike so he’s stopping here to earn play money for his first semester.” Giuseppe presses his fingertip, a grubby spear point, against the boy’s chest. He pushes Dobbs against the wall, then walks outside, to the black gash in the green garden, where he deposits himself with an abrupt sinking of the legs. He bakes in the heat, cursing his cowardice. *

He has no pedestal to mount while he sits in judgment. He is a house bitch, not exactly a respected station in life.

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Later that day, as the sun begins a downward slide, Dobbs comes out and hands Giuseppe an apple, gallon jug of ice water, umbrella and a novel, Falconer, one of Cheever’s best. “Pike said to bring you this stuff,” Dobbs says. “He said you like to eat a late lunch.” Giuseppe arranges the items on the dirt table, pops open the umbrella, and stands in its shadow. His shoulders cool, and, wanting to quench his thirst, he fumbles with the jug. The boy jumps in the hole, unscrews the lid, and climbs back out. Giuseppe drinks long and hard. Between guzzles he eats the apple to the core. “Compost,” Giuseppe says, and tosses the core over his shoulder. “Huh?” “Never mind. . . . You don’t know much about gardening, do you?” The boy tugs at the yellow wisps over his ears and his voice grows defensive. “Least I don’t live in a hole in the ground.” “It’s quite comfortable, actually.” Giuseppe lies on his back and looks up at the boy, whose face looks vaguely familiar from this angle. “Do we know each other?” Giuseppe says. “I’m Dobbs. We met about four hours ago.” “No, I mean before. Have you come through here before?” It’s not unusual for thru-hikers to walk the Appalachian Trail multiple times. Giuseppe thinks they waste their lives isolated for such long periods but keeps his opinion to himself. He has no pedestal to mount while he sits in judgment. He is a house bitch, not exactly a respected station in life. “I might have come through here,” Dobbs says. “You never know about me. I get around.” “I’ll bet.” “You don’t have to be an asshole. I never done anything to you.” “I never did anything to you. . . . Pike won’t tolerate anything less than perfect grammar. He’s a stickler about it.” The boy clutches a wilted tomato plant and breaks off leaves one at a time. “You’ll like me when you get to know me. If you can get that fat dick up, I’ll give you the best blow job on the east coast.” “Don’t you worry about what’s between my legs.” Giuseppe suddenly feels naked, a dirtiness that makes him reach for his clothes. “A man with a cock as pretty as that one should get some love once in a while. God knows that old man in there isn’t doing it for you.” TLR

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“He’s confused.” Giuseppe steps into his underwear, tugs on the filthy cotton. “I grew up with an uncle like him; bastard had me sucking dick when I was nine.” “Pike isn’t like that.” “No?” Dobbs says. “He’s a good man.” “He says you’re eccentric, he says one time he came home from a big case and found his entire bedroom set on the street. Said cars were honking and people were stealing pillows. He said to watch out for you because you’re unpredictable.” A car comes down the lane in front of the B&B, parks in the shaded lot out front. Giuseppe doesn’t need to look at the plates to know they are government issue. A man gets out and strides across the yard to the tents. FBI. They’ve been regular visitors ever since searchers found a dead boy at the base of an Appalachian cliff a hundred trail miles to the south. They come from Philadelphia headquarters, each with that impatient big city walk, like they are so busy they can never get anywhere fast enough. Giuseppe thinks they waste their time talking to these northbounders. Hikers are gentle people, more prone to avoid violence than cause it. “What if?” Giuseppe says. . . . “What if I got up from this hole and went over to that FBI man and told him I know a little something about that dead boy? What if I told him I heard it was you who did the pushing?” “Go ahead.” The boy’s nonchalant attitude surprises Giuseppe. “I’ll do it,” Giuseppe says. “You’ll look like a fool,” the boy says. “I’m not really a hiker. I been hitchhiking from town to town. I got all the gear but I’m what they call a Yellow Blazer. Screw walking those mountains, I’m taking the easy way north. I’m going to find me a dancer in New York City and smoke weed until it’s coming out of my ears.” “I thought you were attending Dartmouth.” The scarecrow laughs and clears his throat. “Sounded good, didn’t it?” “You’re not worried about me telling Pike?” “You won’t tell him.” “I might,” Giuseppe says. “I might do even worse things.” “No,” Dobbs says. “You’re scared; I can see it in your eyes. You’re worried because you’ve been scamming that old man for a long time—” “He was young when we met.” “You know what I mean. You, me, we’re the same.” 182

“We’re different,” Giuseppe says. The words sound made up, like a parent telling a skeptical child Santa climbed down the chimney. Giuseppe, underwear sagging at his crotch, corners Pike when he comes back from his daily co-op expedition. Pike believes they should look professional when interacting with the community and always wears designer clothes during town trips. Today, he’s in a dress shirt and single pleated pants; his sunglasses, most expensive Gucci on the market, have a reflective sheen. Pike hands Giuseppe a burlap sack filled with groceries, and he follows his lover onto the porch, through the front door, and past the reading room. Jerry and Danny Culbertson sit on the sofa. Jerry is a year older than Danny and works as a pharmacist in Philadelphia. Danny has a PhD and studies things like quantum theory. They have on matching ball caps and claim the two of them haven’t stopped smiling since they voiced their vows two weeks ago up in Vermont. The smiles are a quarter inch away from turning smug and Giuseppe hates the men equally. Jerry and Danny say hello, a cheesy duet, and Giuseppe nods in return. He follows his lover to the kitchen and plops the burlap sack on the counter. “I do wish you’d get cleaned up and put some clothes on,” Pike says. “Running around like a Neanderthal is bad for business.” “I’ll fill that hole in and take a shower when you tell me you’ve changed your mind about the bathroom.” “No can do,” Pike says. “Dobbs already painted it, a real pretty green.” “What?” “Turned out nice, if you ask me.” “Fuck you, Pike.” “Giuseppe—” “No, fuck you and that damn house boy.” Pike softens his voice. “I won’t have you talk like that, not here, where the guests can hear you.” “Fuck, fuck and fuck.” “What do you want?” Pike says. “Tell me what you want me to do.” “I want my share of the B&B. I want my share of the bank accounts and stock options. I want my share of everything.” “What’s mine is yours. It’s been that way ever since we met.” Pike gets a bowl of asparagus stalks out of the refrigerator, pushes the bowl toward Giuseppe. “Cut them into one inch pieces,” Pike says. “I’m making yellow sour curry paste tonight.” TLR

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“You need salmon with that.” “I have salmon.” Giuseppe concentrates on the asparagus, cuts each piece in identical lengths. Pike is a perfectionist when it comes to cooking and Giuseppe knows he’ll hear about it if he doesn’t do things right. “Can you believe those two faggots?” Giuseppe says. “They’ve been married for less than a month and Jerry’s already putting on weight.” “I hadn’t noticed.” Pike takes off his sunglasses and cuts pineapple into tiny cubes. The knife slices are precise and fast, almost too fast to see. “He’ll be a regular porker inside of three months.” Giuseppe makes an oinking sound and they both laugh. Pike asks if Giuseppe’s seen the tamarind concentrate, and he says it’s in the fridge, on the second shelf behind the olive jar. “Thanks,” Pike says. “Prep always goes easier when you’re around.” “Glad to help, but I’m not changing my mind. I want what’s coming to me and that’s final.” Pike turns away in search of a wok and Giuseppe uses the temporary distraction to head to the bathroom and check out the paint job. No drip marks on the floor, but the green walls clash with the blue bath towels, blue bath mat, and blue toilet cover. Giuseppe clucks disapproval. Whoever said green is the new blue needs a visit to the optometrist. They’ll have to replace everything, no doubt a job left to Giuseppe. He goes back into the kitchen and Pike puts down his knife, crosses his arms. “We’re not going to run up to Vermont just to get married.” “I’m not talking about marriage.” “It amounts to the same thing.” “Depends on how you look at it,” Giuseppe says. “I could get my half and vanish.” “So you could.” “Which I would never do.” “No, I don’t believe you would,” Pike says. “We’ve been together this long, we might as well see it out.” “Might as well.” Dobbs comes in and looks at Pike, then at Giuseppe. Dobbs wears matching shirt and pants—Armani—a gift for Pike that Giuseppe purchased with his allowance two years earlier. Six inches too long, the pants bunch at the ankles. “Talking about me?” Dobbs says. “Leave us,” Pike says, and the boy retreats to the dining room. Giuseppe and

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Pike stare at each other, neither looks away until Pike blinks and uncrosses his arms. “Quid pro quo. You give, you get.” “I’ve been giving to you more than half of my—” “It will only take an hour of your time.” “Yeah?” “I want a threesome,” Pike says. “It’s a simple equation; you fulfill my fantasy and I’ll fulfill yours.” “You’d do that?” Giuseppe, facing the only lover he’s ever bedded, takes a step backward. “You’re my one and only, Love. I’ve been telling you that for years.” The bedroom has a defunct fireplace, and on the mantle are framed photos of past vacations. Giuseppe’s favorite memories come from a cruise down to the Virgin Islands, where they spent their days in ports like Frederiksted and Christiansted, sampling local dishes. Pike preferred conch over white rice, although, in typical Pike fashion, he complained the seasoning wasn’t balanced. Giuseppe favored red snapper basted in garlic butter and washed everything down with rum. He remembers thinking rum was so cheap, if they lived in the islands he’d wake up with a hangover every morning. At night, he left his small berth and walked up two decks to Pike’s suite, where he waited until the hall was clear before entering. Sex was brief but spectacular and afterward they cuddled on silk sheets and ate caviar and crackers. Giuseppe now grasps a photo and brings it close to his eyes, moves it away and Pike’s face comes into focus. He wears a beige tee shirt and white shorts, and his hair is tangled from the wind. Behind him, a rippled inlet reflects the sun. Giuseppe puts the photo back and walks over to the window. They were so young back then, each concealing their sexuality, a shared secret that wrapped around them like an invisible cocoon. Times have changed, and now the whole world seems different. They live in a town full of beer drinking, gun toting, church going, tolerant rednecks. Pike and Giuseppe go where they want, when they want, and no one cares. Giuseppe misses the covert glance, the thrill of the secret rendezvous. When their relationship was new, Pike didn’t need another to feel completion, certainly not some acne-faced hustler trying to make a buck. Giuseppe parts the curtains, looks down at tents huddled in a rainbow circle. Hikers are an ever changing group, here today, gone tomorrow. Some days he wants to put on a backpack and follow them down the trail. North, south, the direction

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doesn’t matter, so long as it’s anywhere but here. Giuseppe watches a woman take down a tent and a wish to meet her comes over him. He sends good karma her way, hopes she has a successful journey, a wonderful life. Dobbs and Pike walk into the bedroom and nausea comes over Giuseppe, a lightheadedness that threatens to topple him to the floor. Dobbs takes off his clothes and hops in bed. He has a tattoo of a snake on his chest; venom drips from pink fangs. “Come over here,” the boy says, and giggles. “Let me make a man out of you.” Giuseppe kisses his lover roughly on the lips. Pike returns the kiss and in a scramble of creaky arms and legs, they join the boy. For the next hour, Giuseppe exists in a timeless fog, moans and whispered words too dispersed to comprehend. He dreams of the bottom line, thinks of the papers he will sign. In the utility shed, Dobbs at his side, Giuseppe pours gas from a red can into the John Deere. The shed smells like grease and gas and dusty corners, and is the only room on the property Pike never visits. Auto parts, left over from the previous owner, sit on yellowed newspapers with dates as far back as the 1960s. Jars and tin cans on the workbench hold random assortments of nails, screws, nuts and bolts, fasteners, assorted extension cords and electrical sockets. Garden tools hang on the walls. The effect, so many things in so many places, reminds Giuseppe of controlled chaos, and he supposes the shed is fitting locale for the conversation he’s been having with the boy. “You should have asked before we hit the sack,” Dobbs says. He tilts a half empty bottle of Chablis from the collection in the cellar, swallows, and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “You should have asked for my ID. Hell, I’m not but fourteen.” “What do you mean you’re ‘not but fourteen’?” Giuseppe says. He entwines his fingers in the boy’s hair, yanks his head upwards. His breath, so close to Giuseppe’s face, smells like fermented bubblegum. Dobbs’ eyes are glassy, open but seeing nothing. “Let me go.” “What do you mean you’re ‘not but fourteen’?” “Fuck damn,” Dobbs says. “Be fifteen March.” “You little shit.” Giuseppe turns the boy loose and sets down the gas can. “I ain’t nobody’s fool. You homos fucked me in the ass and came in my mouth and made me do things no child should bear. That’s what I’ll tell the FBI next time they come to visit. I’ll tell them you raped me in the bedroom. I’ll describe both your dicks and that little mole on your balls and you’ll both get twenty years.” Cold creeps into Giuseppe’s bones. He spent the morning waiting for Pike to 186

come back from the bank, hoping his lover, no, that’s not right, knowing his lover will honor his word. Pike has money, and plenty of it, which means Giuseppe will soon be rich. He can afford to buy off the boy. “I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” Giuseppe says. “You go away and never come back.” “Shit.”

“Pow,” the boy says, and points his finger at Giuseppe’s chest. “Pow! Pow! Pow! Was your job; your wrinkled ass is packing up and leaving.”

“Pike fired you first thing this morning.” The boy does a strange hopping dance, a wobbly skeleton in designer clothes. “He needs someone to take care of the house.” “That’s my job.” “Pow,” the boy says, and points his finger at Giuseppe’s chest. “Pow! Pow! Pow! Was your job; your wrinkled ass is packing up and leaving.” “I’ll give you fifty thousand.” The boy stumbles and grabs the workbench, knocks a jar to the floor. Shattered glass and screws scatter across concrete. He rights himself, brushes off his clothes. “Me and Pike will get married and I’ll fuck him to death. I will fuck your sugar daddy so hard he’ll be dead inside a year.” “He’s got a million in the garden, in a safe buried under the broccoli. You leave us alone and it’s yours.” “A million?” The boy’s eyes clear, but only for a moment, and the glaze returns. “Cash, some jewelry—” “I always wanted one of them gold necklaces like those pimps in those music videos.” He takes another swallow. “That’s what I’m talking about.” “He has gold necklaces and rings and a diamond bracelet so shiny it’ll make your eyes hurt.” “Bullshit.” “Suit yourself.” Giuseppe picks up a shovel and walks out of the shade into the sun. He blinks blindness from his eyes, steps over the carrot row, and walks around the fast-growing zucchini. A ladybug lands on his hand and he flicks the bug away and walks deeper into the garden, pauses when he comes to the hole. It seems so long ago he lay at the TLR

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bottom staring up at the sky. Dobbs stands ten feet away, wine bottle at his feet. He looks lost, a tourist at an intersection without a map. “I think I drank too fast.” A stain starts at the bottom of the boy’s zipper, spreads outward. “I think I should have slowed down.” “Hey,” Giuseppe says, “ever see a praying mantis?” “A what?” “It’s a bug that eats other bugs, rips their guts out and everything.” The boy looks interested. “It rips out their guts?” “They sort of remind me of you,” Giuseppe says. “They sneak up on you, then move in for the kill.” The boy thrashes through the corn and stops short of the hole. “I can’t see him.” “He’s about a foot from the ground. See, he’s on the stem, stalking that caterpillar.” The boy sags to his knees, clutches dirt in both hands. The praying mantis, a twig with matchstick legs and bulbous eyes, closes in on its prey. Giuseppe always feels sorry when he sees a bug about to die, but he never interferes with nature. In the garden, the strong survive. “Look,” the boy says. “That’s me and you.” “So it is.” “You’re the caterpillar,” the boy says. “You sucked yourself right in with Pike and now you’re fat and happy and about to die.” “You got me to a tee, Dobbs, you nailed me to the wall.” Giuseppe studies the house, looking for open curtains, a patron on the porch, then looks over at the campsites and sees only trees and tents. He grips the shovel handle, nails digging into the wood, and raises the blade high. He stares at the boy’s neck, at the spine at the base of the skull, slowly lowers the shovel and kicks Dobbs into the hole. “Oh,” the boy says, and falls on his back. Giuseppe clambers down and presses the shovel point against the quivering throat. The boy squirms and mouths words that don’t come. “What?” Giuseppe says. “What did you say?” “I was fucking with you.” The boy turns his head and vomits into the dirt. “I’m a month over eighteen. Are you crazy or what?” Giuseppe grabs the boy’s head, drives it into the earth. “Eighteen or fourteen, I don’t give a shit. You hurt Pike and bad things will happen. Do you understand me? Something very bad will happen.” *

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Candles flicker on the dining room table, turn the champagne glasses into shimmering orange mirages. Pike’s cologne drifts through the air. The aroma is rich and sweet and reminds Giuseppe of summer walks in meadows thick with flowers. Pike wears his robe, but Giuseppe chose something more formal for the occasion: shirt and tie, black pants, and a pair of brown loafers one size too small. He wore the toe squeezers for a reason. They are his pinch on the arm, the self-invoked pain that reminds him this is really happening. Pike removes papers from a briefcase, and he and Giuseppe lean forward. “This one,” Pike says, and hands Giuseppe a gold pen, “is a mutual fund account I opened around the time I was offered senior partner. Remember the party we had afterward? You and me drinking all those martinis? I had such a hangover the next day.” Giuseppe starts the ballpoint rolling with a downward curve, signs first and last name, and ends with a triumphant swoop. The fund is worth 1.2 million. Pike hands over another paper and Giuseppe signs again, half interest in an office building in Philadelphia, an investment Pike says is paid off and worth 3.5 million last time he had it appraised, which was back in the late nineties so it’s worth a lot more now. “I knew you had money,” Giuseppe says, “but I really had no idea.” “We had money.” “I knew we had money but this is crazy.” “You were going to get it all, sooner or later,” Pike says. “You are the sole beneficiary in my will.” “I don’t even have a will.” Giuseppe loosens his tie and works his toes, eases the pain shooting through his feet. “We’ll need to draw one up for you. Or maybe you’ll want to go to another attorney and have it done. That’s a very private occasion.” “You can do it, Pike. It’s not like I have anything to hide.” Giuseppe signs his name on nineteen more pieces of paper—various stocks, insurance funds, and savings accounts—then drops the pen to the table and leans back in his chair. “Listen,” Pike says, “Feel free to paint the bathroom back the way it was. I guess you really don’t like chartreuse.” “I’ll get used to it.” “Dobbs did a nice job.” “Yes, he did,” Giuseppe says.

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“Do you know what he said to me after I fired him?” “That boy was liable to say anything.” Pike sips champagne and stacks papers into a neat pile. “He tried to extort money, said he was only fourteen years old. Said by the time he was done with us he’d own the B&B.” “Well, he’s gone now.” Giuseppe rolls the pen across the table, one way, then the other. “You took care of the problem?” “Let’s just say he decided to hike north.” Pike pours champagne, a swirl of silver bubbles. “He reminded me of you, you know? When you were young.” “Yeah?” “Take away the acne, dye his hair black, and you could have been twins.” One of the candles goes out and Giuseppe holds a match to the wick. It won’t relight and he gives up. “I was a hustler.” “Yes, you were.” “I hustled you into giving me a place to stay.” “Yes, you did.” Pike says. Giuseppe closes his eyes and tilts his head back. “Have any regrets? Anything you wish you could take back?” “About us?” “Anything, anything at all.” Pike waits awhile before answering. “None I’m aware. You?” Giuseppe takes off his loafers and studies Pike’s face, wonders how he would have reacted if roles had been reversed in the garden. Would he kill for his lover? For the second time today, Giuseppe feels the cold invade his bones. A loneliness comes over him, a roaring sound across a wind-swept glacier. He braces against relentless wind, welcomes the glittering blue ice.

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POETRY

Ricardo Pau-Llosa Bath

Save the luxury of flicks or a commercial in which a siren scales with suds to sell beer, we are alien to bathing as spectacle. Gone are the Venuses staged in white globules of linen, a putto angling a mirror, toiletted in air and drying oils. Their open stares question our buttoned caves. Or this liquid proscenium where ancients cool to unfurl, got talky in the limpid and, elbowed into busy flesh, splashed thoughtless as numbers in a ledger. TLR

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Now the vaults and leaden pools of dank aquaria host tickets and cameras coursing the clothed and somber curious, recreating with an audio guide’s help the marble animal casual of these origins. The roamers stop dutifully at a numbered cue to study a capital’s blurred nymph, then float on, absorbing the stony wreck of erstwhile brisk loin and cackle. In history’s tireless farm the plough and the soil cannot forgive each other.

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I NTE RVI EW

Amity Gaige Interview with Adam Haslett

I have known Adam Haslett for over half of my life. He’s not the first person I thought of for Machismo. But as Norman Mailer is no longer with us . . . Adam was the second person. He’s been thinking about issues of masculinity for as long as I’ve known him, and writing about them as long. Masculinity, and mental illness. Which subjects—and exquisite writing—earned his debut story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, accolades including a National Book Award nomination, a Guggenheim, and the PEN/Malamud Award. Not straying from his core themes, Adam’s new book, Union Atlantic, is about the atomic failure of an outsized bank, the war-hardened financier responsible, a brilliant but borderline retired schoolteacher, and a grieving gay teenager. Finance and militarism in sum, which Adam explains are contiguous aspects of machismo. Amity Gaige, also an old friend of Adam’s, a fellow and spectacular writer in arms, probes him for details on his latest foray into these matters that we New Englanders consider (shhh!) taboo.—M. P. AMITY GAIGE: I’d like to start by talking about “The Volunteer,” the final story in your collection You Are Not A Stranger Here. The story has so many resonances with Union Atlantic. There’s an elderly woman, visited by a teenage boy who is volunteering at her structured living facility as a means of shaking off his own recent trauma. I see Nate in that story. I see Charlotte. I hear the voices. I also see the gaudy mansion that functions as such a freighted setting for the conflict in the

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novel. What was it like to recognize a novel in a story? And what was it about the short story, if you can remember, that felt like the seed of Union Atlantic? ADAM HASLETT: I'd actually begun writing the first character in the novel before I wrote “The Volunteer,” so it wasn't so much that the story was a seed for the later book as it was a matter of material that had begun to preoccupy me. That said, it was also the longest story—the one where I think I finally felt there could be scenes or sections, where the pleasure was sideways—not always directly narrative. Also, most of the stories were from one point of view, whereas in “The Volunteer” I was writing from two totally distinct points of view. There was something about writing two whole consciousnesses whose development and arc was important—as was the movement between them.The idea of writing a novel at that point seemed natural enough. AG: You recently said that the drive to elaborate what it’s like to be alone with your own mind is what made you write in the first place. Is the writing mind its own unique mind state? AH: One way I think of it, which can seem too precious, is that it’s like your entire life is about creating mental focus for the five or six hours that you’re going to write each day—everything else in your life is organized around that. Frankly, that can make you a little neurotic. . . . It’s like you’re curating your own mind. AG: You remind me of something you once said to me, I think I was griping about my own struggles to keep my novel on track and you said that “writing a novel requires a psychotically consistent persona on the part of the novelist.” This seemed woefully true, and I find myself repeating it to other writers when they complain about the same thing. By saying it takes a psychotically consistent persona you mean that it’s somehow odd and at the very least unnatural to succeed in sustaining a consistent tone and attitude throughout the number of years it takes to write a novel. We change daily, because life requires it of us. So is this writing of novels over the course of a decade a perverse thing to do? Is there something to be said for the rare novel that reveals its inconsistent process? Can you at least bring the dynamism of writing a story to a novel? AH: I’ve never been a fast writer so even short stories require their own sort of miniature psychotic consistency. But the question remains—is the case for writing any book on some level simply about having the discipline over a length of time? To concentrate over that length of time is just an exceptionally difficult thing to do. 194

I’m reading Robert Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which is this shaggy, multiform novel; there are tens of different voices, and practically everything is tangential. I envy that looseness and I think that when I make the comment about psychotic consistency, it’s that I have tended to write in a very controlled manner. I am obsessed with the reader’s attention. The reader’s mind. Being able to structure a moment of consciousness within the reader. It’s one of the reasons I love to read aloud because I can then deliver the rhythm in addition to the sequence. I feel like I have even more control over their experience. There are benefits to this, but it’s also a personal and aesthetic matter. And it seems that it has costs too. Personally, because the selfexcoriation can be a little much, and aesthetically, because there are all sorts of things that Bolaño gets to do, or Roth, or Bellow or other people who are unhinged in some ways. One of the things I feel after having finished this book, is that I’d like to become more unhinged over time. AG: It seems that we’re often trying to smooth over the novel to make it seem as if it were written in as short a time as it takes to read it. Which is difficult. And inaccurate. Yet, I wonder if there are ways in which the novel can reveal the constantly changing persona? AH: True. Well, I’m easily bored when I read and often ascribe that to the writing— the writer hasn’t been sufficiently captivating. There are a hundred different ways to be captivating, but it's always about a very close attention to taking a reader into some compelling and particular rather than generalized world. The interesting thing is that you could see Bolaño as very shaggy, or as an incredibly controlled performance of a certain sort of shagginess. There’s a way in which there is real consistency across these voices and their habits of mind. The Savage Detectives is deeply nostalgic in some ways without being maudlin; he creates this sense of innocence in the beginning of the book and the rest of it is all a falling away from that. AG: Henry James once disparaged the novels of Tolstoy by calling them “loose, baggy monsters.” John Gardner took the idea further by sayng that a novel cannot “be too loose, too baggy or monstrous; but a novel built as prettily as a teacup is not of much use.” The choice, given these terms, seems to be either to let a novel be loose—of course James also uses the word monster—or neaten it into obsolescence. AH: Well James did both! I suppose I’m closer to the teacup and I would like to at least work towards the baggy monster. One of the reasons I may have needed to exercise that kind of control is that in a way the genre of the novel intimitated me. I wasn't TLR

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raised on the grand narrative of the development of the short story, and so I didn't feel the need to justify myself in writing stories. Whereas I had been taught literature in the grand tradition of the novel and so stepping up to that plate, justifying making a contribution to that genre was intimidating. AG: So maybe next you'll write a loose, baggy monster, but after your story collection, what was your ambition for this novel? AH: About ten years ago I became interested in the Federal Reserve and got excited about the idea of placing a character there because of the breadth of vision such a person could have over our entire economy. That’s where it began. At the same time, I didn’t want to let go of what was happening in the stories, such as the intensity of individual consciousness. So if there was a guiding ambition, it was to combine the social scope of the nineteenth century novel with a modernist intensity of consciousness and interiority. Those are two things I love in literature and you always write the book you want to read. AG: You have said that one inspiration for Union Atlantic was your urge to explore “the consequences of militarism and finance capitalism and their effect on the old humanist tradition.” Can you expand on that, especially as it pertains to your feelings about the old humanist tradition? Union Atlantic feels like kind of a love song for this tradition. AH: Well, a lot of people went into making the character of Charlotte. One of those people is my aunt, who has been very influential in my life. She is a museum curator and taught me everything I know about art history; she also has an incredible sense of cultural history and the idea of a tradition as a living thing composed of books and ideas and philosophy and the humanities. She lives in New York—not surprisingly. So, on 9/11, once I finally reached her and found her safe but upset, she said to me: “You know what they’re doing? They’re bombing the last city of the Renaissance.” I borrowed that line from her to give to Charlotte. It was so striking to me that in this emergency, this moment of physical violence her first reaction was based on five hundred years of history. The image of New York as the last city in America on the European model, that’s still based on banking and art, in which art was still a romance. Hearing in her that level of passion and directness—about something immaterial. Well that’s obviously just one point. But I also feel that it’s increasingly an act of resistance to insist upon the relevance of past achievements. Achievements in concentration, you might say, to go back to what we were saying earlier. In a world of the dying concentration . . . 196

AG: Dying concentration? AH: The dying ability to concentrate. I’ve got this idea at the moment that the future will belong to the slow. It’s probably totally wrong—a recipe to be unemployed, but that’s how a novel is done. This stretching out of concentration we were talking about, to attend to the day-to-day consciousness and detail of the physical world. That’s the pleasure of reading, to think—Ah, yes . . . I recognize something in this vision, fragments of it already existed in my head but I’ve never slowed down to take it in. That’s what a novel can provide: the space in which to contemplate. AG: There’s a part where Charlotte says to her brother Henry, who is the President of the New York Federal Reserve: “such an anonymous sort of power you wield. So far from the madding crowd. It’s always intrigued me. Thinking about the people affected by what you do. The fact that they’ll never know you [ . . . ] It’s not a criticism. It's just I wonder sometimes what it does to you. What it’s already done to you. The abstraction. Lives as numbers.” AH: I think a lot of us grew up with the vague sense that there was “a system,” a kind of omnipresent force of convention that authentic people spent their lives resisting. Obviously as you get older and dig deeper, everything looks a little more complicated and you become implicated in various systems and you can’t really think in those black and white terms. But this is a case where there actually is a system. People in Washington meet to decide where to set the interest rate and depending on what number they chose, they are determining a kind of misery index. What is the acceptable level of unemployment? What is the acceptable level of inflation? We’ve given Economics the status of natural science, and the Federal Reserve is not elected, so we as citizens don’t have direct control over it and yet it’s arguably far more important to the day to day life of the economy than most of what congress does. I wanted to explore the life of a man who made those decisions. AG: You made Henry a very moral and thoughtful man. AH: He’s a New Deal Democrat. He’s old enough to have grown up in the shadow of Roosevelt and the notion that a public servant serves the public good. In the book, he is sort of between Charlotte, who is a more extreme advocate for art and literature and history as religion, and Doug, who is the unfettered Capitalist. AG: In an overt way, the character of Doug Fanning is Henry's contrast—a banker who takes incredible financial risks but no emotional risks. And he’s invulnerable. TLR

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AH: Seemingly . . . AG: He represents himself as invulnerable, and creates a lot of damage. I don’t want to necessarily ask if Doug is a symbolic character? But there seems to be an implied comparison between the old guard and the new. AH: Your question is about whether, if I have ideas that I’m interested in elucidating or investigating—do I have the idea and then find the character? Do I work in a sense from the top down, where the character is the expression of the idea? I found Doug through the other private banker in the novel, Jeffrey Holland, who is the head of Union Atlantic. I started writing about him and he just wasn’t that interesting. The person who was political enough and bland enough to get to that position, just didn’t have an interesting interior. Then, I wrote a scene in which his second in command comes in the door and suddenly this guy is doing all these strange things. And that guy was much more interesting to me, and he became Doug. But I always wanted to get at the character’s interior life, not so much to editorialize about any of what I might think about finance capitalism or liberal humanism, as to explore the consequences of believing in either. This is pretty central to the book: What are the consequences of living strongly with your ideas? Ideas as entities that press on you. It’s not as if Charlotte’s embrace of liberal humanism and the fervor in which she advocates it is some panacea. That has harsh consequences as well. In that sense, I think they are in dialogue with each other, but I was trying not to choose sides. AG: Charlotte is an incredibly beautifully complex character. I love when she says to Nate: “Tell me, why is the world a problem for you?” And he asks her what she means and she explains, “For some people the world is a more or less obvious place. It’s transparent to them. It isn’t, in itself, a conundrum to be overcome. Which means their interests are simply tastes or preferences. But if the world is a problem to you your interests are different. You’re conscripted by them.” . . . So, do you have a book of believers? AH: Yes AG: Are the characters conscripted by these beliefs? AH: They are all in a sense conscripted by a felt necessity to behave or be true to certain ideals. Except for characters like Jeffery Holland, who I was uninterested in because he’s the ultimate chameleon. And I think that has been one of my frustra198

tions about contemporary fiction. One of the reasons I love your work is that the intellectual life doesn’t get left out of the equation. Sometimes it’s as though we’re afraid to have characters who might have read as much as the writer. And there is a way in which especially younger writers can end up condescending to their characters, because you want control—A leads to C leads to D. In order to do that, the characters have got to be kind of simple. Those formulas don’t work on real people. AG: You write about extreme mind states and in some cases, insanity, without denying those states their reasonable content. It would be easy at times to dismiss the mania of someone like the father in your heartbreaking story “Notes to my Biographer,” but his speeches are totally engaging and emotional. And I feel that way about Charlotte in the novel. I suppose she’s insane—she does hear the voices of her dogs talking, but I believe what she says. So, what do you think has made her “insane,” and what does she refuse to accept about reality? Was it the loss of the beautiful young man she loved, or more about her attachment to her beliefs? AH: I think it’s the ferocity of her attachment to her beliefs. When you first meet her, she’s alone, as are most of the characters in the book. In some way what I’m suggesting is that her solitude is so well populated by her imagination and her interior monologue that at some point the latter takes over. I imagine it as the decay of a mind. When the boundaries between what should be kept inside as interior voice begins to slip out into the world. I don’t make any clinical claim or decision about it. I suppose it’s a sort of senility, but that makes it sound like a loss of capacity. It’s more as if her mind is expanding into the world. And that of course at some point becomes deeply impractical and creates the problems. AG: She’s tired of limiting her thoughts. AH: And they’re coming back to her with a kind of force. The force of her own beliefs is coming back to bite her—through the voices of the dogs. AG: I do love the dogs. There’s a mastiff that speaks in the voice of Cotton Mather and a Doberman that talks like Malcolm X. It sounds whimsical when I say it, but these are serious and righteous voices. Charlotte was a history teacher for many years so it’s plausible that she’d have these historical voices in her head. But why did you choose a Puritan preacher and a radical Black activist as the voices of consciousness here? AH: Well, I’m glad you ask that! Part of that decay I was just talking about—what’s TLR

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decaying along with Charlotte’s mind is what I think of as the liberal conscience. The postwar American, left-of-center liberalism that I think has been routed since Reagan and I don’t think the Obama administration really so far has represented much of a return to that. I feel the continuity of living in a more conservative world since 1980. This may have a New England tinge to it, but I think of that liberal conscience as having two building blocks: one is this originally religious but now secular self-excoriation, an edict to work harder to help the sick and the poor and the down trodden and there’s a noblesse oblige associated with that—but it’s a punishment of or a denial of pleasures for yourself in order for other people to benefit somehow. Along with a belief that everybody should act exactly like that too; and they’re horribly reprehensible if they don’t. On the other hand there is this primary guilt about America for the original sin of slavery. Something about the idea of a Puritan preacher and Black radical seemed like two foundational ingredients of this liberal conscience. They don’t fit in a neat philosophical way, but they are the id of that liberal conscience. The dogs are like the explosion of an intellectual id. AG: I love the moment where the mastiff, Sam, is chiding Charlotte for her grief over her long ago lover, Eric, by talking about how he lost thirteen of his fifteen children and you mourn “one loss of a man not your husband?” AH: Mather did lose thirteen children. AG: Those are direct quotes? AH: It’s a mix. Some are lifted from actual sermons by both of them but then it’s obvious that when they’re directly addressing Charlotte—I made that part up. AG: You make a bold and wonderful gesture by beginning the novel with a key piece of one character’s dark history—Doug Fanning’s complicity in shooting down a civilian airplane when he was a soldier. You open the novel with that. Why? AH: I didn’t know if I would use that. It wasn’t the first thing I wrote and it’s the only thing that takes place outside of the one-year span of the book. I think I wanted to give the reader a way of seeing him with some depth of field. He’s a banker, but the fact that he comes from the military is very relevant—how, why, he got into the military. His experience, not as an officer, but as an enlisted sailor. The resentments he has in life that follow out from that experience. In some sense it was just context. But his overall character has a certain kind of machismo, which seems contiguous from the military to the financial world. Two forces that over the last decade of American 200

life have been most empowered domestically and internationally. The emotion that seems to vivify both fields is a certain kind of male anger. It’s better disguised in finance, but very much there. So the opening scene in the gulf was both context and a connection. AG: You’ve been doing some nonfiction writing lately. Is that a nice break from solitary writing days? AH: It’s been good. So incredibly different. What you call upon to be a good disciplined writer has nothing to do with being able to be out in the world. Especially in this current environment where there’s an apocalyptic feeling hanging over so many things including the publishing industry. One of the effects of this on writers is to intensify their focus on publicity. Writers have to be so much more knowledgeable about the business of writing than thirty or forty years ago. That can easily be distorting; and disturb the writing process. How do you create contexts of meaning and meaningfulness in reading and writing that survive the vicissitudes of all these market values? It’s not a matter of retreating into some high romantic vision. You write to communicate, so of course you want people to get the communication. But if you’re writing as a profession you can’t ignore the world. So how do you concentrate on writing, and still somehow work as a professional in the world? Maybe it’s having some camaraderie with people who are confronting the same dilemmas and share the same values. I'm thinking of A Moveable Feast, which I read recently for the first time and expected more warmth from—F. Scott Fitzgerald in a café yakking it up—but it was altogether more scathing. AG: Of course A Moveable Feast was the last book Hemingway wrote before he died, and he was looking back at this time and his first marriage and his life before fame, though not before ambition. What I love about the book is how much he seems to be calling for that spirit of play and shameless sincerity that one has when one is starting out as a writer and still has hope in the process for its own sake. AH: And absorption. That full absorption in writing, reading and conversation. The writer sitting in a Paris café has obviously gone on to become a clichéd vision. But that quality of absorption is hard to achieve in our world. And it seems to me worth fighting for, making some space for. It is also about granting, or creating for yourself a renewable resource, or font. It’s only then that you actually connect to the pleasure. One of the great satisfactions of Union Atlantic came in the last eighteen months. I actually did get to the point where there was a lot of pleasure in the writing and I TLR

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allowed myself to enjoy that part. I was awake to myself, able to think: “this is the good part.” Don’t breeze past, because this is the moment. AG: I was just going to ask you to tell me one reason why you’re grateful that you're a writer. AH: It’s the absorption. The self forgetting that comes at the best moments when you’re transported into what you’re doing. There’s a line in the novel where Doug is imagining himself as an artist of the consequential world instead of this effete writer that his secretary is trying to become. I often put into a character a kind of writerly consciousness in a different context. Doug is always trying to control the world and that’s obviously one impulse of the writer, to control by narrating. But in the most satisfying moments you’ve done all that work. The satisfaction and gratitude is in that limpid peaceful absorption. AG: Can I finish off with one quote that seems related? It’s my favorite line in the whole book. Henry is thinking about observing his daughter, Linda, when she was little—she’s grown now, she’s not really in the book—but he’s remembering her as a child: “Maybe it was just that Henry, as an adult banished from the kingdom of mystery, could never fully credit its existence for his daughter, and could only fake a belief in it for her sake in the hope that somehow, on the far side of that impenetrable divide, the garden was still damp and lush and time had yet to be invented.”

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Sam Lipsyte The Ask By Zachary Lazar

In his introduction to the advance reader copy of Sam Lipsyte’s new novel The Ask, Lipsyte’s editor offers the opinion that the comic novel is currently out of favor. I would argue that the exact opposite is true, that it’s the un-comic novel that is out of favor. Comedy is so ubiquitous in American fiction now that we can easily forget that other modes—writing of the kind produced by the likes of James Salter, say, in the vein of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, or Joan Didion in the vein of Nathanael West—are increasingly hard to find among younger writers. Seriousness seems to be a stance difficult to maintain for very long without sliding into cloying sincerity. Bleakness of any kind unleavened by humor comes off as pretentious or even ridiculous. The trend in literary fiction now is anti-Romantic, which makes sense in a time as politically conservative as the one we have been living in for many years now. I think this holds especially true for writers who came of age any time after the Seventies. I agree: turkey wraps are funny—maybe the dullest food since Schopenhauer sat down in resignation to his bowl of pasta—but a few pages into Lipsyte’s The Ask I was relieved to find that in this book turkey wraps also become something more than just funny. Wraps are what Milo, Lipsyte’s fortyish protagonist, eats for lunch every day, mostly out of habit but not entirely. The wrap has also become a small enticement in a life enriched by his young son Bernie but so diminished by his dying marriage and his absurd job that Milo scarcely recognizes that life as his own. Years Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010

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before, his father sent him off to college with a Spanish dueling knife and louche advice about carousing with “girls who know how to fuck.” Like the father who gives it, the advice comes across as roguishly charming, as opposed to crassly chauvinistic, because it evokes so obviously the color and style of another era. Between Milo’s generation and his father’s lies the great demographic slump of an American era when anyone who is not a millionaire begins to feel poor and the right to swagger has devolved to a handful of jerks in certain parts of Manhattan. Let the others eat turkey wraps and live in little cages—sometimes literally cages in Lipsyte’s novel—across the river somewhere in Queens or the ever farther reaches of Brooklyn. It’s a situation we’re deeply familiar with, and writing about this situation seems to require an emphasis not on anguish or heartbreak but on satire and absurdism. Any other stance would be an embarrassment—somehow marred by a lack of perspective that fails to acknowledge how many other, worse plights there are on this earth. But as I was thinking about this, I remembered something Louise Glück wrote in her introduction to Jay Hopler’s recent collection of poems, Green Squall: Irony has become less part of a whole tonal range than a scrupulous inhibiting armor, the disguise by which one modern soul recognizes another. In contemporary practice, it is characterized by acute self-consciousness without analytic detachment, a frozen position as opposed to a means of inquiry. Essential, at every moment, to signal that one knows one is not the first to think or feel what one thinks or feels. This stance is absolutely at odds with the actual sensations of feeling, certainly, as well with the sensations of making—the sense, immediate and absolute, of unprecedented being, the exalted intensification of that fundamental isolation which marks all things mortal.

The problem with many funny novels is that they are only funny—they skimp on psychology and nuance, which is difficult to render, and instead invest all their energy in out-absurding the already absurd. This can be a joyful relief at times, but it can also begin to yield diminishing returns, perhaps because of comedy’s inherent view that people are slightly ridiculous (if not outright buffoons) and our unfortunate knowledge that this is not really the case—people in real life are complicated, and those who are buffoons are frequently dangerous. To say this is to sound like a humorless bore, I know, and yet even a humorless bore like me recognizes that the way out of irony is not naïve sincerity. The way out is an intensity of powerful and surprising feeling. The Ask, like Geoff Dyer’s recent Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, made me laugh but it also made me think about the times we live in and what those times exact 204

from us. It never coasts and though it knows when to steer towards pathos it never lurches there stupidly. This to me is an example of real, earned pathos in a book like Lipsyte’s: Maura and I had already found each other. The desperate, emboldening quest for love, the beautiful, electrifying unknowingness of it all, was forever gone. (Unless we divorced, started over, which would surely be disastrous. She’d find happiness with some curt, sporty banker. I’d live in the laminated basement of a Cypriot retiree near the airport, never talk to a woman under seventy-five again.)

One lyrical sentence about love—not so different in its cadences from Glück’s language about poetry—then the devastatingly specific rebuttal, the laminated basement that Milo knows is the most likely alternative to the failing marriage he wants to revive. So much for the Spanish dueling knife. Milo, through Lipsyte, sees the glory of the knife, and also sees through the glory of it, and also sees what’s been lost in the exchange. Something to do with masculinity? But in the world of The Ask even the word “masculinity” sounds slightly preposterous. Loss upon loss is what we’re talking about, and the book knows this and insists on it, even though it also the funniest book you could ask for. “I had always been bitter, was still bitter, bitter about the bitterness,” Milo reflects toward the book’s end. But I didn’t really think of Milo as bitter. I saw him more as a supplicant in a Bush-ian world of buffoons and the people they damage. At one extreme is the spoiled heir Purdy Stuart, infantile in his candy addiction but Machiavellian in every other way, and at the other is Don Charboneau, an Iraq War veteran with prosthetic legs he calls his “girls.” Is it any wonder that when Milo is forced to mediate between these two very different American lives he botches the job? Lipsyte is so delicate in the way he handles all this that I didn’t read the book as a creaky, didactic critique of America in the ’00s. But when I looked back I remembered that from its very first pages it signals this ambition in the “actual sensations” of the wisecracks about our waning empire made over those turkey wraps. It will be clear by now that I am a strange reader for Lipsyte’s book. As I get older, I am drawn more and more to the austere, the pared-down, the craggy, the laconic—hardly the mode du jour and hardly the mode of The Ask. But the surprise is that The Ask, for all its wild comic imagining, is not just a satire but a howl of disbelief at how things really are. It is a late addition to the American canon of rollicking male failure that includes the Rabbit books, Richard Ford’s Independence Day and David Gates’s wonderful Jernigan and Preston Falls. What’s new here is how low TLR

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things already are at the beginning of the book. Milo is a character who has never even had the opportunity to fuck things up in the way men used to fuck them up. He is a loving father who does not abandon wife and son but who is kicked to the curb. How is it that Lipsyte never once let me think of him as a sadsack? On every page, I laughed. But on every page, I also witnessed something more serious. Louise Glück calls it the “intensification of that fundamental isolation which marks all things mortal.” Lipsyte would never have put it this way himself, but then you would be hard-pressed now to find an American novelist who would.

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BOOKS

Laurie Lamon Without Wings By Renée Ashley

Laurie Lamon’s second collection, Without Wings—the title phrase taken from the only outright elegy in the book, an elegy for her father—continues the magical work she began in her first volume, Fork Without Hunger. In both collections, her voice and tone are surprisingly of-a-piece, and in both, too, Lamon demonstrates an ability to vary her style and still maintain the integrity of that distinctive voice: she writes poems that hover as well as pieces that insistently hunker down. What Lamon does not do is write poems that lie docilely on the page. The subject of absence, as both titles would have us know, is the ballast of these poems; yet they are, for the most part, pensive rather than mournful. The titles’ Withouts are loaded, and point not only to the status-aftermath of death or ruin or loss, but to absence as a place thought resides, a locus, from which the poet speaks. Though neither book feels incomplete without the other, each is enhanced when they’re read sequentially—they are even unified structurally and Lamon’s marvelous “Pain Thinks . . .” series bridges both volumes. Fork Without Hunger’s first section begins with three poems from the series; section two begins with three more; section three, three again; and section four, entitled “Coda,” consists only of three of the series, a total of a dozen. Without Wings, the new volume, begins with an untitled forward-section consisting of four of the series’ poems. Section one ends with four of the poems, as does section two. In section three there are none. Twelve poems from the series in each book but differently CavanKerry Press Ltd., Fort Lee, N.J., 2009

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grouped and placed: they lead in the first volume, follow in the second, with the obvious exclusion of the final section which leaves the “Pain Thinks . . .” pieces behind as if the cycle were now complete. My favorite of the “Pain Thinks . . .” in Without Wings is this short, virtuosic piece, “Pain Thinks of the Angel,” which seems to rise above the page like the angel it speaks of: without waiting without memory of waiting without history closing its eyes Pain thinks of the angel without fluency & hunger nothing of rapture nothing of the table

The poem’s lack of punctuation, use of ampersand, and absence of capital letters (with the exception of Pain personified), its resonant ambiguities, its negatives (two withouts in the first line! and two more to follow; then two nothings) and its catalog of abstractions take you to the place of absence. And just when you think you’re going to float away from the lightness of it all, Lamon nails the poem down with the hard trump of the final “table.” It’s startling and effective. A poem that hovers over the page. Her ability to make a poem hunker down on the page—a technique of a different nature, yet still true to her remarkable voice—is demonstrated beautifully by the splendid balancing of grounding and abstraction in the first stanza of “Prime Number,” its complex and compound mobius involution, its solidity, and the lack of terminal punctuation, which lets it roll down the page. It looks like a man wearing a shawl whose body is another shawl wrapped around a man who has already gone to his death in a subway, an office building, a chair beside a hospital bed—a man leaning against a lectern, or rising from a seat on a train that is leaving a city for another city; it looks like sunrise or midnight; it looks like prayer or hunger whose table and chair is without company, without the forgiveness of bread and meat;

It’s a stanza from which it’s difficult to escape (though who would want to?) and, despite its repetitions and density, it is spare, without excess of any kind—wonderful writing that unwinds both seductively and elegantly. All Lamon’s poems appear to be made of a dynamic stuff, a contained energy, 208

a hard beauty honed from both craft and contemplation. The place of absence from which she writes is a place with which we’re all, no doubt, woefully familiar—and yet we go eagerly with her into poem after poem, without resistance, to experience her thoughtful turns and perceptions. She helps us see better, see larger, and gives us the elegant evocations so that we understand what we find there. I’m eager to see where she, with her intelligence and craft, her control, concision, and decorum, will take me next. But, for now, and even after her third volume, I’ll be going back to Without Wings and its precursor with anticipation and a longing for more and, again more, of her beautiful same.

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BOOKS

Jack Ridl Losing Season By Mark Hillringhouse

You can almost taste the Gatorade, smell the sweat of young flesh, and hear the metal bang of locker doors in this book of poems by Michigan poet Jack Ridl. You can hear the coach swear, hear him lead the team prayer before each game, hear him yell at his second rate talent at a third rate school, while he dreams of a championship. The psychology of losing is more interesting than winning. It reopens the old narcissistic wounds, the insatiable need for love and attention. Ridl paints his Oedipal struggle with a certain tenderness, with a careful eye for the smallest domestic detail as in this passage from the poem titled “Scrub”: “You get in tonight?” my father asks when I come in after the game. I knock the snow from my boots. “No.” “Close game?” “No, we lost by twenty-three.” I listen to the empty air, see the slow shake of my father’s head, know he’s been sitting with a beer letting one sitcom roll into the next, [. . .]

Ridl places the reader inside to witness the drama about how hard it is confessing loss. It is the frozen fear of all children who played sports to win the love of a demanding parent. Ridl takes the reader on this journey. CavanKerry Press Ltd., Fort Lee, N.J., 2009

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Ridl, whose own father was the legendary “Buzz” Ridl of Pennsylvania’s Westminster College, and later the University of Pittsburgh, and whose winning season got his team to the NCAA final eight one year, claims that these poems are not confessional, but all poetry is confession on some level. The fictional team in Ridl’s poems is called the Comets and we follow Ridl’s fictional Coach in poem after poem through an entire losing season. The reader watches what he goes through at home, at practice with players, managers, assistant coaches; and it is a small town where everyone knows you’re a loser. You sense the coach’s career on the line as he puts together his team—all the players who sign up, try out, make the list, or get cut. The coach vents his frustration with his players, with his job, with his life at home, and the world he lives in. In the series of poems beginning with “Opening Game: Halftime” one of the players dreams of his girlfriend’s breasts while the coach chalks a desperation play on the board. And in the next poem, “Scrub,” the dreaming player, is still fantasizing as the clock runs out and we never get to know if the shot goes in before the buzzer sounds. As a reader, I felt out of breath following the action. But by the next poem, we’re already undressed and heading to the showers, that male sweathouse ritual of naked bodies in a place of male eroticism, butt slapping, suds cleansing catharsis. We are taken under the hot water as the coach showers and meditates on the strangeness of who he is, of what he has turned into—a water-logged and wrinkled middle-aged man who wishes he could just shed his former self the way a lizard sheds its skin. The coach is a sort of an Everyman father figure, a macho stoic with a crew cut. You can smell the chlorine in this poem, feel the textural imagery of mold slime and soap scum and feel your wet feet on the cold, tile floor. There’s even a poem about a pep rally. But when the noise dies down there’s a lot of silence in Ridl’s poems. The cheerleaders who come to life in their short skirts and knee socks, the Nordic blond fantasy of players, are all part of the game, as are the background characters, the refs, the equipment man, the band director, the ticket seller, the custodian. Even the hangers-on, the odd kid who wants to be a player but can’t, and Ridl captures this ostracized creature in “He Sits on The End of The Bench”: He sat there every game since Coach took over. He lives at home with his father. Sometimes someone gives

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Him a job to do: clean out the pavilion in the park, rake some leaves, shovel some snow [. . .]

Snow is the recurrent image. It symbolizes the hush after the last buzzer, the loud silence on the basketball court as the losing team watches the last seconds of the game run out, and the sullen, silent ride home, and suggests nature’s blank indifference to putting points up on a scoreboard. One of the strangest poems in the book is a poem about a fatal car accident involving a student as the becalmed coach serenely watches from the side of the road. The snow is falling and the coach meditates on the moonlight and the emergency strobe lights. In Ridl’s poems, there are frequent references to lights shining through the dark, as if there might be hope from a distance, as the coach looks up at the sky. In the “Third Quarter” the reader is taken deep into winter. It rains, sleets and snows and days are spent gazing out windows. In the poem “Insomnia” the snow symbolizes loss, recriminations, self doubt, guilt. In the poem, “Barber” you get the town’s hate gossip while the coach ever stoically watches the snow being plowed. Amid the snowy silence in the background of each poem there are two distinct voices competing for attention—the voice of the coach, and the voice of Scrub, one of the players. In “Walking Home Late after Practice” the snow returns as Scrub, the dejected player, kicks the snow in the moonlight. [. . .] his feet slide softly over the layers of snow, piled and trampled hard by school kids, teachers, people heading to a friend’s house. Scrub, the dancer, whirling himself into the soft night, into the wild applause of the falling snow.

In the “Fourth Quarter,” there’s a poem about an effigy of the coach hanging in the coach’s front yard from the point of view of the coach’s daughter. The symbolic lynching of the losing coach leads to the coach’s sleepless night in the next poem, “Can’t Sleep.” It never stops snowing in these final poems where the coach tries to get to the heart of his estranged state, and of where time goes, and the realization that this really is his life. The last image in the poem’s last three lines conveys this sense of 212

otherness, of someone else living inside the speaker’s body—“it’s a world as strange / as the snowflake / melting on his hand.” The final note of the book is played out in the last poem, “Night Gym,” in a haunting scene, in a chiaroscuro of shadows and lamp light falling across the dark corners of the coach’s desk and trophies. This poem acts as a coda and leaves the reader with the forces of nature, the snow and its backdrop of loneliness and isolation against the warmth of a womb-like gym. Ridl makes this inhospitable climate reflect the coach’s state of mind at the end of a losing season. It is so silent that mice can be heard nibbling crumbs off the floor. The only other noise is the old furnace kicking in and the cold wind rattling the doors—the book ends with this understated and mysterious quality that gives all of Ridl’s poems their power.

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BOOKS

Mieko Kanai The Word Book By Anne McPeak

Sometimes it’s only a whisper. Didn’t we just see that man? Weren’t they just talking about a missed train? And veins on a rock . . . where else did we just see veins? In one story, a man still feels guilty years later for not having met his lover at a train station to depart for a new life together. In the next, the tables have been reversed, or set askew: a man goes every day to a train station to wait for an unidentified woman who never arrives. Images are stitched across the stories that make up Mieko Kanai’s The Word Book, nagging at the reader, making her wonder whether this is one long, shifting tale rather than a collection of stories that explore rotating questions through the lenses of a few, usually unnamed characters. Time and situations shift without warning and characters mutate, as in dreams, from parents to lovers to strangers, leaving their counterparts little choice but to adapt. These whispers finally become explicit in the dream trilogy that closes the book. In “Kitchen Plays,” a man remembers the many, many times he had to fetch milk for his mother as a child because the milkman forgot to deliver it. There is a large stone that juts out of the ground in front of his house, on which he often trips when returning with the bottles of milk, and has sometimes even broken the bottles on. Remembering all of this, the man thinks of his mother’s death, then feels uncertain about whether it really happened, so calls home; his mother answers, and asks him to go buy milk since the milkman has forgotten to deliver it. The story closes with the narrator remembering a train ride with his father and sister and his Translated by Paul McCarthy, Dalkey Archive Press, Urbana-Champaign, Ill., 2009

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mother’s ashes. Who, then, is he bringing milk to? The next story, “Picnic,” opens with the narrator on the way to see his lover after having just delivered the milk to his mother—a clear continuation of the last story, although the horrible moment when the man delivers milk to a house that either contains his mother or doesn’t is left to the reader’s imagination. This thwarted anticipation takes another shape, that of the “kitchen play.” We never really learn what these evocatively named events are, though they are referenced prominently in two of the stories. They aren’t plays, exactly, and they don’t happen in kitchens, or not real kitchens, anyway. There’s a feeling of excitement as the narrator and his lover walk down the steps into a basement theater, but water from the canal next to the building immediately smashes the windows in the room, and the two have to run, like in a dream, up the stairs and through labyrinthine corridors of the building to get to safety. And in “The Voice of Spring,” two men discuss kitchen plays over hamburgers and beer, and then enter a theater in the basement of an abandoned hotel, apparently in pursuit of a kitchen play, but the story ends before the play begins. Surely, like in a prose adaptation of a villanelle or an OuLiPo experiment, there must be a pattern or logic here. These stories demand attentive reading, although as with a David Lynch film, it seems the solution to the puzzle will always be just beyond reach; but also like in Lynch’s films, the payoff is in trying to unravel the mystery, and in the beauty of the journey. Kanai’s delicate and spare language—and Paul McCarthy’s superb rendering of it—make up for the lack of coherence. One thing is for certain: Kanai is deeply invested in exploring the mutability of the self. And why wouldn’t she be? It is her profession to inhabit the minds and bodies of others. The narrator of the opening story, “Rivals,” falls into conversation with a traveling salesman who recounts a romance he had when he was younger, in which he came to realize that his lover was seeing another man. This other man, it turns out, was a rival in more ways than one: he would leave his diary lying around, and it mirrored the salesman’s diary word for word. “The notebook contained passages I myself had written, but that does not mean that the unknown man deliberately copied each word and phrase from my book. His notebook was exactly identical to my own.” The salesman has lived his life with the knowledge that somebody out there mimics his every move, thinks his every thought, feels his every emotion. “And since,” the story ends, “there is no one anywhere who can accurately gauge our numbers, instead of ‘rival,’ let us speak of ‘rivals.’”

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The narrator of this story speaks in first person, as does the traveling salesman, without quotation marks or italics, so that the reader has to keep close track of whose story is being told at all times. Naturally there is an expectation that this is the narrator’s story, since he is the one who invited us in—so it takes a few pages before we realize that this is not his story at all. But why nest the salesman’s tale within the narrator’s, when the narrator ultimately melts into the background? The narrator is a mask the writer wears; Kanai is allowing herself a tangible presence in the story, perhaps to remind us that without her, there would be no story. In “Windows,” the authorial voice interrupts again, with a description of where she is while she’s writing the story, deliberations about what to name her character, and even a prickly exchange with her character, who says: “I’m sure you realize this, of course, but what you wrote about was only one small part, and what you didn’t write of was much, much larger. And I feel that I’m living my life within the flow of the time you didn’t write about. Besides, you don’t know anything about me, and I bet you never really cared about me at all.” Rivals indeed. These are strange, unnerving little tales, serious, surreal, incredibly complex yet told simply, with detachment. “I know which corner it is, but I don’t know how to explain how you would distinguish it from the other countless corners of the same kind, without drawing a map,” says the narrator of “The Voice of Spring” to his lunch companion. This could serve as a metaphor for the book—we recognize these experiences and emotions as real and crucial, but to relay them coherently to another person seems unfathomable.

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BOOKS

Janet Frame Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame By Ruth Curry

I own a black tee shirt, comfortable and cut perfectly, that I never wear. Near the hemline, it’s decorated with the image of New Zealand, but in a design quirk, the picture is composed of green letters spelling out some particularly Kiwi things— haka, Aotearoa, rugby, beaches. I bought it near the end of my stay in that country. To me, it’s not only a souvenir; it’s imbued with the melancholy I can’t untangle from the time I spent there. I know I’m not alone in making emotional and contextual associations with rather mundane physical objects. I did think I was of a small camp, though, in feeling these connections with the landscape and particulars of New Zealand, a place of stunning beauty and even more disorienting isolation, until I read the stories of New Zealander Janet Frame. Frame’s stories, in her new collection Prizes, are deceptive treasures, unadorned but absorbing in their depth and lucidity of observation. Her understated descriptions of the color, texture and shape of the physical world—the clothes, cups, plants and animals that comprise it—grant her work sharp insight into the distinctly human dramas of identity, loneliness, and loss. The collection is organized chronologically, concluding with five previously unpublished pieces. From very brief sketches to more myth-like tales to full-blown interior portraiture, these stories explore a wide range of perspectives and genres. Her early work is often told from the point of view of a child, full of candor and curiosity. The fables and sketches at times employ animals as narrators; at other times, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, Calif., 2009

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they examine more abstract concepts (arithmetic, for one). But most are characterized by a devotion to repetition as a stylistic tool. This is transporting, giving her work a haunting emotional profundity. In “Teacup,” a lonely spinster desperate for companionship prepares a cup “with gold, dark-blue, and light-green decorations” for her unappreciative bachelor housemate. The cup becomes invested with the purpose this one relationship offers the woman, its colors, always repeated, the only colors in her life. When the teacup goes missing, the lodger leaves as well. “Swans,” the story of two girls’ day trip to the beach with their mother, begins with a list of miscellaneous items: a train, colored pictures, bottles of fizzy drink, stale ham sandwiches, rabbits, cows, bulls, sheep, wheels, a rubber hose. But on this particular journey, there will be no fizzy drinks or sandwiches; without their father, the girls’ mother, flustered, can’t manage to procure them. Without the father, too, the family alights at the wrong train stop and the “wrong sea,” a sea without the things the girls had so looked forward to—merry-go-rounds and swings and slides. “Oh, things are never like you think, they’re different and sad,” cries the mother. This sea, though, has whales, sharks, seals and shells; the shells resemble a cat’s eye, the same cat the family has left sick at home. This new sea, “the right kind of sea,” as one of the girls later calls it, transforms with the passing of the day into something unsettling yet comforting. By repeating words like “dark,” “secret,” “sad,” and “quiet,” Frame connects the sea with the coming night and then with the swans that move about it like “secret sad ships,” bringing with them peace, warmth and security. “Everything found” is how one of the girls describes it, on the way back home, an observation that makes the blow of loss at the story’s end—the beloved cat’s death—all the more stark. Amidst the quiet sadness Frame’s work investigates, her stories also wonder, as in “The Triumph of Poetry,” “how will you keep yourself?” Among the answers probed, several threads emerge, a devotion to the beauty and satisfaction of the material world being one of them. But more often that not, Frame’s characters cannot keep themselves; they fall into dismal solitude, the children mature and lose the fresh happiness of youth, animals die, fledgling artists settle for a life of mediocrity. The necessity of persevering, of preserving, nonetheless remains. “One needs to be kept, swept, turned inside out, shaken free of insects, polished, pleated, trimmed, preserved in brine which is collected in opaque green bottles from the sea or from tears which fall in the intervals between each death,” she writes in that same story. It’s telling, here, how the concrete elements and actions of being alive—the sweeping and dusting, the polish and insects—give way, via those arresting bottles, to a vision of a 218

windswept sea and at last the intangible but no less real realms of sadness and death. Frame’s uncanny understanding of this liminal territory, the flitting ease with which she dances between the matter-bound and the spiritual, perhaps shows one way in which this ‘keeping ourselves’ may be possible.

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BOOKS

Binnie Kirshenbaum The Scenic Route By John King

Binnie Kirshenbaum’s novels are intimate, incantatory literary experiences: confessional, companionable and so masterful that her craft is virtually invisible. The Scenic Route, her sixth novel, is her finest, most ambitious yet. Early on, the plot seems simple enough: an American woman traveling alone through Europe meets an American man and has an affair with him while they roam over the continent supported by his wife’s money. Kirshenbaum treats this morally ambiguous love story with much tenderness, without resorting to sentimentality. Rather, the novel functions as a picturesque travelogue that, for all its romance, is both psychologically evasive and self-recriminating. Kirshenbaum shows us in fine, ineffable detail what it is like when a woman meets the love of her life, the true love of her life, years after meeting who she thought was merely the love of her life. Henry is an expatriate American who spends portions of the year traveling away from his well-to-do English wife. Permanently unemployed, Henry is trying to disprove the cliché that money cannot buy happiness. His charming personality conceals the desperation behind this way of life. The story of Henry and Sylvia is the compelling vehicle by which Silvia comes to understand her own desperation, a desperation tacitly linked to Henry, a desperation that is clothed in wit and charm. Sylvia’s voice is like a magnetic current that makes it difficult to put this book down. Part of the charm resides in her delicious bathos, a continuous counterbalance of high and low registers. Kirshenbaum employs relatively ordinary words Harper Perennial, New York, 2009

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with an immense amount of care, concealing deeply subversive ideas in prose that flows along so effortlessly that you hardly notice that you’ve just absorbed a radically uncertain idea of what it means to be alive, of what it means to be human: I loved Vincent and he loved me in the abiding way most couples in good marriages love each other, that way in which every once in a while there is a longing for someone you haven’t met. A longing that comes upon you while you are loading the dishwasher or weeding the garden or sitting in front of the television or turning out the light to go to sleep, and you don’t even know what it is, this longing, and you think maybe you’re in need of a vacation or maybe you are dying because the ache of it hurts so fucking much.

Understated even at its most revelatory, Sylvia’s voice has a poetic rhythm, a calm dignity that simultaneously reveals the ugliness and the beauty of life as she interlaces her romantic travels with Henry with her troubled relationship with her best friend, with stories about her family, and with quirky narratives from the margins of history. Kirshenbaum’s craft is criminally good. The Scenic Route puts you on several ineffable journeys all at once, without ever noticing how confoundingly complex all this ought to be.

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BOOKS

Pamela Spiro Wagner We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders By Renée Ashley

Pamela Spiro Wagner’s surprising collection of poems defies the common fiat that a reader must not assume the speaker of a poem is the author. The poem is the poem and the life is the life, the mandate asserts, and assumptions about the twain meeting are made only by beginners and the generally naïve. We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders, however, is constructed to compel its readers to make use of the background information that accompanies the poems, to enter the work informed. This is a hybrid collection by design, document as well as art: there is a forward by the poet Baron Wormser, in addition to the enlightening Introduction by Dr. O’Malley, the poet’s psychiatrist, who also provides commentaries throughout on the poems themselves. Here is what we learn: the poems in this collection were written over a twentyfive year period by an intelligent woman who has, since the onset of mental illness in adolescence, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia as well as narcolepsy, and whose brain has suffered “erosions” from Lyme disease spirochetes—these plus the many side-effects of treatment (electroconvulsive therapies, psychoactive drugs), the various and potholed byways of serious mental disturbance. We learn, too, that Spiro Wagner believes she is evil, believes that her eye contact can and has caused others harm, that the world itself is menacing, riddled with threat and follow-through. We learn that her psychiatrist is able to assess her mental state during a given visit by just how much eye contact Spiro Wagner is willing to make, and that voices only she We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders, CavanKerry Press Ltd., Fort Lee, N.J., 2009. Also discussed here: Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey through Schizophrenia by Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn Spiro, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005. 222

can hear lead her to harm herself and that she deeply fears harming others; that she attended medical school for a year and a half, but because of her illness, was forced to drop out. And that she has an identical twin sister, Carolyn Spiro, a psychiatrist, and that together they wrote Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey through Schizophrenia. The background and contextual information provided deepens the power of the poems. The reader, after taking in the initial prose amendments, has something like a steady-state awareness of Spiro Wagner’s wavering mental condition and the tenor of her life, the constant precarious nature of her hours. So behind every unit of meaning in the poems there’s a background hum of understanding, an at least approximate comprehension of the intensity and fear and confusion with which the poet’s experience is laden. Every morpheme, then, in a given poem is played out against that backdrop of understanding and is emotionally contextualized. Meaning is augmented, its emotional edges amplified and sharpened. Spiro Wagner is a talented poet whose craft, if her health allows—and I certainly hope it does—will sharpen as well, will allow her gift to unfold further. Most often, in the poems themselves, there is some beautiful transparency made even more vibrant by our having the knowledge exterior to the poems. “Poem That Can Forget But Not Forgive,” a great phrase-of-a-title, begins “This poem is afraid/because I am afraid” and the reader who is convinced by the speaker’s circumstances is persuaded that her fear is justified. The poem ends: “This poem is sad as water, poor as sand. / This poem wants to live well / but it doesn’t know how.” Lovely and powerful in itself, but when you know the writer’s circumstances, you can imagine just how sad water can be, just how poor sand. It’s a marvelous dual image, and the history we are given magnifies our experience of it. Interestingly, the note provided by Dr. O’Malley before this poem reads: “The next poem explores a voice that Pam did not have as a child and still feels is beyond her authority.” How smart of the poet to give that voice to the poem! How cleanly and well she articulates her need! She made her way to a crystalline clarity and was able to take the reader with her. One step removed from her own voice, she was able to voice her heartbreak—and exquisitely. And we understand even more fully her fear: fear that’s strong and palpable enough to lodge in a reader’s own chest and formidable enough to render her mute until the recognition of that terror fades just enough to let her get past it. When she relives it, rereads it, she’ll own it all over again. And she will read it again—because this is painfully effective work that functions on its own terms: within a context that demands attention

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and, using the reader’s own emotional knowledge, her own ability to recognize and balance the measure of human pain therein. Are all the poems as transparent, as artful as the lines quoted above? No. Nor is every line in any given poem. Sometimes a poem will go off on a small prosy spree; sometimes, though seldom, it will just go off. But when Spiro Wagner hits, she really hits. Lines like “I knew then all the sharp vowels of fear” (“Fusion”) and the collection’s title, the brilliant sentence that drew me to the book in the first place, We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders, are apt and dazzling tropes and rich in the mouth. One of my favorite pieces in the collection is “Word Salad,” a strong, self-contained poem that does break away from the pattern of hybrid dependency and uses a definition in the epigraph position to help the reader comprehend the context and explain the dynamic of the language: WORD SALAD “Word salad,” a term used for the completely disjointed, incomprehensible language sometimes seen in schizophrenia. Unpinned, words scatter, moths in the night. The sense of things loses hold, demurs. Everything means. Numbers soldier with colors and directions, four by four in a pinwheel: this is the secret wisdom. I inscribe it on sacred sheets of paper. The Oxford dictionary holds not a candle. The self reduced to a cipher, a scribble, the Eye is all, with a Freemason’s lash, and twenty-six runic hieroglyphs to share how a stitch in time saved the cat and if a messy rock gathers no stones, clams must surely be lifted higher by the same rising boats. Why, why not throw glass tomes at grass huts? It is a question of propriety: grass is too dignified to lie down before gloss. Whirligig! How to pull the center back into the world? It would take all the OED to recapture the moths, all Harcourt’s English Grammar to pin them again.

The poem stands strong on its own, yes, but Dr. O’Malley’s notes, again, enhance the degree of its emotional resonance. The random feels not so random to the person in the midst of disorganized thought. Important meaning melts into mental chaos, but each word still carries 224

a feeling of deep impact: “Everything means.” What is interesting is again that the emotions carry the words. Meaning comes first and meaning continues despite the fact that the words fail.

This is exactly what I sensed as I read the poem. The doctor, who knows the poem’s core, helped me know its matter even more deeply. What one experiences in this book is a vision of a fine poet determined to flower in poisoned soil. It’s a document of both psychological and artistic poignancy and fascination. And though I see potential for this poetry being picked up out of mere curiosity or the equivalent of rubbernecking, I believe the good reader will be both challenged and changed by the art and the experience it embodies. This isn’t a book to read for its chronicle of madness; it’s a book to read for the art of humanity amidst it.

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ACADE M E

Richard Koffler Pavese and America A Review of Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature by Lawrence Smith

Seeing that there is talk of my love affairs from the Alps to Cape Passero, I’ll only tell you that, like Cortez, I’ve burned my ships behind me. I don’t know if I’ll find the treasure of Montezuma, but I know that in the altiplano of Tenochtitlán human sacrifices are performed. For many years I no longer thought about such things, I was writing. Now I will write no more! With that very stubbornness, with that stoic will of the Langhe, I’ll make my voyage to the kingdom of the dead. . . . —from a letter to Davide Lajolo, written two days before Pavese’s death in 1950

Writers who lend themselves ideally to literary biographies are those who have consciously lived out their own self-destructive myths. That narrows the field. The task devolves on their biographers, if their subjects are large enough and their skills up to the task, to restore their subjects to critical appraisal, for better or worse. Such was the case with Arthur Mizener’s biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, dead and almost forgotten at the age of forty-four, a biography that blazed the way to a Fitzgerald revival, crack-up and all, in the fifties. By contrast, such was also the case with Mark Schorer’s biography of Sinclair Lewis, who had outlived his Nobel prize and whatever was left of his reputation as a regional satirist and chronicler by the time that he died at sixty-five. The case of Cesare Pavese, the Piedmontese poet and novelist, is of that kind and importance, and makes many demands on his would-be biographer. In this new life study, a portrait of the writer and his era and milieu, Lawrence Smith has performed the task admirably, despite the additional difficulty that his subject, unlike Mizener’s and Schorer’s, still requires an introducUniversity of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Mass., 2008 226

tion on this side of the Atlantic, nearly sixty years after his suicide at the peak of his literary career. Like my friend Smith—a friendship I mention by way of full disclosure, as I am cited in the book—I have been a torchbearer for Pavese for many years. A long time ago, while teaching literature at MIT, I completed a critical translation of Pavese’s diary. At that same time, unbeknownst to me, at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge—the Widener Library end—Lawrence Smith, then a teaching assistant at Harvard, was writing his own dissertation on the young Pavese’s American explorations in the thirties. We did not meet then, though we would correspond later. Smith’s book, Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature, appears in the centenary of his subject’s birth. The initiated will recognize Pavese as the Italian poet and novelist who precociously translated Moby-Dick and held up Whitman and Melville as counterexemplars to the Italian literary culture of the 1930s—a culture he looked on as “Alexandrian,” marked by evasion and hermeticism. What those Alexandrians evaded and insulated themselves from was, of course, the stifling official culture of the Fascist regime, with its denunciation of “plutocratic democracy” across the Atlantic and its forced internal exile of intellectual dissenters, which for the young Pavese meant confinement for a year in a remote village in Calabria. Smith’s elegantly written study, as readable as it is knowledgeable, will serve once and for all to reintroduce Pavese’s work and also acquaint the reader with his life and particularly the procession of women he would fatally pursue: Tina Pizzardo, Fernanda Pivano, Bianca Garufi and Constance Dowling. Thanks in part to New York Review Books, most of Pavese’s major works are once again in print in English; the exception remains the diary (to which I will return). They first appeared in English in the fifties and sixties. D. D. Paige and R. W. Flint translated the novels. William Arrowsmith translated his early poems as well as his sui generis book, Dialogues with Leucò. Recently, Geoffrey Brock published a new translation, Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950. In Italy, Pavese’s emergence as an important novelist took place only in the half-decade before his suicide in 1950. Nevertheless, his output was astonishing by any measure. Between 1946 and 1950, he brought out a collection of stories, seven novels, and the Dialogues, all with Einaudi—the publisher for whom he spent many of his working hours as an editor. He won late recognition that final year, in the form of the Strega Prize, the most coveted literary prize in Italy. And then, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of August, two weeks after the national holiday that furnished one TLR

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of his books with a title, Feria d’agosto, he took an overdose of barbiturates in a hotel room in his city of Turin, nearly deserted for the holiday. The last entry he had written in his diary on the eighteenth was: “I will write no more.” Though he did not live to see the first of his novels appear in English in the mid-fifties, Pavese’s work has not suffered from lack of good translators. Nor from lack of critical appreciation here, early and on a very high level. Both Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag wrote about his work, as well as Stanley Edgar Hyman and, later but importantly, Richard Ellmann. In certain specific ways, however, as Smith’s extensive research bears out and his book fully recounts, America broke Pavese’s heart. He came very close to joining Italian culture in exile at the Casa Italiana of Columbia University in 1930, writing a letter of application to its presiding master of ceremonies, the benevolent, covertly pro-Fascist Giuseppe Prezzolini, who informed him that he had missed the deadline. In Italy, his translations of American writing were largely ignored in the important anthology Americana, published in 1942 and edited by Pavese’s chief rival and occasional Einaudi colleague, Elio Vittorini. At what Smith identifies as a critically important moment in Pavese’s own relationship to America, to say nothing of the parabola of that relationship among other Italian intellectuals, he offered Vittorini the use of one of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, “Melanchtha,” from the full book he had earlier translated for Einaudi, and also sent Vittorini an amazingly perspicacious letter in May of 1942. Smith has the good sense to quote that letter in its entirety, because paraphrase could not do it justice. “[T]he American century and a half,” he told Vittorini, “is there reduced to the essential evidence of a myth that we all have lived [my emphasis] and which you have recounted.” Pavese would watch with envy in 1949—a miraculously fertile year, as we have noted, for his own work—while Hemingway launched the literary career of Vittorini in America by contributing a foreword to In Sicily. Pavese even wrote imaginary letters to Hemingway in his diary, connecting the green hills of Africa with the green hills of his native Langhe, the region in Piedmont where he was born. The books Hemingway ignored were Among Women Only, The Devil in the Hills and The House on the Hill, the last a classic of modern writing and arguably the best book to emerge from the civil war in northern Italy. What followed was much worse: a story recounted by Smith in poignant detail of a failed love affair with an American movie starlet and demimondaine, Constance Dowling, the “C.” to whom his last and most ambitious novel, The Moon and the Bonfires, is dedicated. That novel is a work of literary alchemy, transmuting the sor-

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did year-long chronicle of disillusionment, impotence and betrayal into the tragic narrative of an exile’s return—not unlike the return of Edgar in King Lear, to which Pavese alludes several times. It is Edgar’s summary reflection that Pavese uses as his epigraph as well as in his 1946 essay on F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, a book he esteemed (and in fact planned to translate): “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all.” Ripeness, Pavese understood, meant “readiness for death,” rather than “maturity.” The implications are dark: Pavese was still months away from his suicide. I have called Smith’s book a portrait—a literary biography, always judicious and nuanced, but also properly appreciative. In many ways Smith has succeeded where earlier biographical portraiture has failed. The most egregious earlier instance was An Absurd Vice by Davide Lajolo, published in English in 1960, before most of the good translations of Pavese’s work were yet available. To explain the inadequacies of Lajolo’s book, I must detour from the life, and take up two of his works, his diaries (available only in a corrupt English version) and Dialogues with Leucò. Both illustrate those aspects of Pavese’s writing that set it apart and make their author worthy of a biography that illuminates the interior life rather than imposing a rhetorical one driven by the will of the biographer. It was unbelievable that such people who lived in my veins and memory should have suffered the war, they too; the tornado, the world’s terror. I couldn’t take in the fact that fire, politics, and death had overwhelmed my own past. —The House on the Hill

Lajolo, Pavese’s first biographer, was a partisan commander, who used the nom de guerre “Ulisse.” Unlike Pavese, he participated in the Italian resistance—the two-year civil war to the bitter end in the north of the country between partisan bands on one side and Nazi occupiers and diehard troops loyal to the Duce on the other. The partisans consisted of Communists like Lajolo, Socialists of various stripes, and left liberals of the “Action Party,” nicknamed the Giellisti, a play on the Italian initials for Justice and Liberty—not simply the abstractions of an anti-Fascist movement but political and cultural principles for which they staked their very lives. The small ranks of the Giellisti included many in Pavese’s confraternity in Turin, including his best friend, Leone Ginzburg, the brilliant Russian scholar and first husband of the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, who was captured and tortured to death by the Gestapo in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison in 1944. Rather than join the Giellisti or partisans of any persuasion, for complicated

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reasons that never assuaged his sense of guilt to the end of his life, Pavese took refuge elsewhere in the hills of Piedmont, where he spent the better part of the civil war under an assumed name, teaching at a Catholic boarding school and steeping himself in new studies of myth, religion and Jacobean tragedies. Pavese was no more a hero than a resistance fighter. True, he was rounded up with his friends among the Giellisti—the charge was possession of a letter from an imprisoned underground agitator—for anti-Fascist activities in Turin in May 1935. Also arrested was the intended recipient of the letter, Tina Pizzardo, the politically committed older woman with whom he fell into a love that consumed him for the better part of the 1930s. He was sentenced to three years of political confinement in the village of Brancaleone in Calabria, at the opposite end of the peninsula, and served his confino until March 1936. (One of his early poems, “Lo Steddazzu,” which means in the particular dialect of Brancaleone “the morning star,” has to be translated into Italian to be understood: “This is the hour,” the narrator tells us, “when nothing can happen.”) When he returned to Turin, Tina rejected him, and chose instead a Polish comrade, Henek Rieser, who she married in April of that year. Out of his ultimately unhappy relationship with Tina he managed to salvage some distinctive poetry in his first book, the fused narrative-lyric poems of Lavorare stanca (Arrowsmith translated it “Hard Labor”). The fourth “Landscape” in that book is dedicated to Tina, but he never uses her surname, referring to her recurrently instead as “the woman with the hoarse voice.” She is undoubtedly, as Smith comments, the prototype for Cate, the partisan woman arrested in The House on the Hill, with whom the narrator has had an affair before the narrative begins: I recognized the voice. Now, thinking back, I am sure I did. I recognized it but didn’t ask myself whose it was—a somewhat hoarse, abrupt, and challenging voice, the typical voice, I thought, of the women of this region.

The House on the Hill, confronting both the civil war and the narrator’s withdrawal from it and subsequent guilt, is a more sustained fictional performance than that of Pavese’s last novel, The Moon and the Bonfires. But then, Gatsby is tauter and more sustained than Tender is the Night. Must we choose between the two? Smith hedges somewhat, opting for The House on the Hill as Pavese’s classic achievement, and pointing to some flaws of plot and character in the final novel while acknowledging its strengths, particularly in its handling of symbolic landscape: specifically California, settled by Piedmontese immigrants, as both an imagined earthly paradise (as in Among Women Only) and an ultima Thule and a land of unlikeness—California 230

as an ambivalent mythic substructure. Both of these narrative strata place Moon well beyond the reach of ideology. Lajolo, in contrast, seeks ideological purity in Pavese, along with class-conscious values, progressive populism, and perfect grades throughout his academic career. He is certainly no critic, and the lack of a critical sensibility, along with a tendency to reinvent his subject’s life, badly mars the literary biography he attempted. I am not in accord with some of Smith’s judgments. To put the matter more exactly, I do not entirely share his perspective. Although he persuades me that Pavese detached himself from his early passion for American writers, I think that Whitman, and particularly Melville, inform his oeuvre thematically and to some extent syntactically from the early poems of Hard Labor to the moon-haunted devastation of the American desert and the human sacrifices associated with the bonfires. Beyond the whiteness of the whale there is, in the background of apocalypse and “long illusion,” the Melville of Benito Cereno and even of Bartleby and Billy Budd. There is even a Faulknerian aspect, if we read Faulkner as in part a Southern inheritor of Melville’s preoccupations. Smith notes that Pavese wrote a negative review of Sanctuary in 1934, but that was not his final judgment, and he does hint at reconsidering Faulkner more positively in the diary. (The Florentine critic Gianfranco Contini went so far as to call Pavese “almost a Faulkner of the Langhe.”) The vernacular American literature Smith rightly finds Pavese responding to as a model and a source of inspiration runs deeply and ambivalently in much of his work. Although that vernacular tradition only constitutes a single strand in his mature work, it does not have a cutoff point, either in the mid-thirties or the midforties or under the promptings of L’unità, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, edited by Lajolo, to which Pavese contributed after the war. (One of his contributions was an essay entitled “Yesterday and Today,” in which he wrote, memorably, that “the times are over in which we discovered America.”) In the young men who encounter the cocaine-addicted and tubercular Count Poli in his villa in The Devil in the Hills, and in certain aspects of tone and plot in Among Women Only, I sense the presence of Fitzgerald. Smith finds little interest in either author, Faulkner or Fitzgerald, in Pavese’s American studies, which were gathered in a book posthumously published in 1951. Although it’s hard to detect an awareness in Pavese of Eliot’s The Waste Land, his immersion in Frazer, explicit in the Dialogues, furnished the late novels with a mythic substructure. One could therefore find at least an elective affinity with Eliot. Some sly critics have read Nabokov’s Lolita as a parodic allegory, a love affair between European experience and American innocence, Henry TLR

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James stood on his head. Pavese’s pursuit of American literature, and of America beyond its literature, with his subsequent disillusionment and recoil, is the course of a rather different love affair, one that always tempts and will always be doomed. Then, too, there is the fact of the suicide, and the troubling question of what motivated it. Far more authoritatively and plausibly than Pavese’s French biographer, the Freudian evangelist Dominique Fernandez (in L’Echec de Pavese), Smith seeks the answer in the series of failed amours that culminate in the last fatal one. Undoubtedly so, but I suspect there is more to it than that. For one thing, Pavese was, like Kierkegaard (whom he read during the time of the civil war), a self-destroying intellectual for whom suicide had always been a prospect and a temptation. He analyzes this tendency frequently in the diary. Pavese may not have acted rationally, but he acted consistently. Pavese was also racked by doubts about the political commitments he felt obligated to make, and under pressure that might have buckled a far stronger will to live. That he produced, after all, the poems and novels that he did is a testament to his strength of spirit, at least as an author. Toward the end, and ironically in the same year, 1950, that he was to receive the Strega, he felt that his powers were waning, and that his best work had already been done. He privately referred to the prize ceremony in Rome as a stregheria—a pun on the name of the liqueur distillery that sponsored the prize and a witches’ Sabbath of the sort he found in The Golden Bough.

Literature is a defense against the offenses of life. —Il mestiere di vivere, entry for 10 November 1938

The most salient aspect of Pavese’s prose writing is that, first and last, his is a poet’s prose, indirect, understated, lyrical at times but modulated in its lyricism. It is leavened throughout by wit, which is infused in the dialogue, and bolstered by gnomic phrases and clauses that serve to evoke the hidden world toward which the surface always points, a mode Pavese himself calls “symbolic realism.” The events recounted in his pages strike the reader not as isolated occurrences but as ritual reenactments. Pavese has learned profoundly from his study of mythical encounters, and embodied them in his works of fiction. His preferred narrator is not the protagonist but rather “an onlooker who is watching while things greater than himself are taking place” (diary entry, 21 February 1942). His stories are full of cultivated vices, sadly achieved wisdom, a disenchantment, far from baroque, with life. Critics, Smith and myself among them, have noted an enigmatic quality to Pavese’s writing: undertones and overtones that are sensed between the lines but 232

never fully revealed, negative narrative spaces here and there, apocalyptic portents that are not spelled out. These aspects, glimpsed in the novels, can be seen more explicitly in a late work that stands out as a departure from his fictions, Dialogues with Leucò. Originally published in 1947 and translated into English in 1965 by William Arrowsmith in collaboration with D.S. Carne-Ross, Dialogues consists of a genre-breaking mélange of ethnologically reimagined Greek myths in dialogue form. The Leucò of the title is a nickname for Leucothea, the White Goddess, a sea goddess—“You always come from the sea / and you have the sea’s hoarse voice,” he writes in a poem of 1946, the same period—who rescues Odysseus from drowning in The Odyssey. She is one of the principal interlocutors in the Dialogues, and as Smith notes, the character draws on his love interest of that time, Bianca Garufi, with whom he collaborated on a novel, A Great Fire. (Bianca, in Italian, of course means “white.”) Far from being simple retellings of ancient legends, the Dialogues are steeped in Pavese’s readings in ethnology and folklore from Frazer to Eliade, which are also part of the implicit substructure of the later novels, particularly The Moon and the Bonfires. Whatever else one can say of the Dialogues, and much could be said, they go against the grain of Pavese’s postwar commitments to the Italian Communist Party. Even the timing of their composition and publication, between the best of his novels and before the last cycle of lyric poems, Death will come and will have your eyes, published after his death, is instructive. These enigmatic qualities also inform the diary he kept between 1935 and 1950, which he certainly intended for posthumous publication. Entitled Il mestiere di vivere, which means both the “job” or “task” and the “craft” of living. The diary allows Pavese to shift the narrative voice to the second person, and replaces the imagined experience of the novels with the erlebte Zeit, the psychological and actual experience of his life as he lives and recreates it. Of all of Pavese’s major works, only his diary has lacked until now a translation that begins to convey the claim on our attention that we find in the rest of his oeuvre. The version originally published in 1961—abridged in England and longer in America—is full of gaps and misunderstood passages. That version was the work of A. E. Murch with additions by Jeanne Molli.* Part of the difficulty with the diary was that the original Italian editions, published by Einaudi in 1952, was marred by omissions represented by ellipses. These were inserted with minimal explanation for legal reasons, having to do with protecting the privacy of Tina Pizzardo and others mentioned who were still living. *Unfortunately, the American text has just been reprinted, without ascription or a proper copyright notice, and evidently without authorization to reprint it by Einaudi or the rights holders for the translation.

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The Italian editors had furthermore themselves misread the manuscript left among Pavese’s carefully preserved papers. All of that changed in 1990, when Einaudi published a new, expanded edition based on a careful rereading of the autograph in the archive at the University of Turin and a restoration of the omitted sections (no longer scandalous). The work of translating must begin with the new edition, and must be done all over again. Like the best pages of Pavese’s own narratives, poems and dialogues, his diary, with its loose ends, is as good as anything else he wrote, and in some cases, even more satisfying. Its entries, its aphorisms and critical judgments and painful self analysis, gleam and unsettle and provoke. Here are some instances, drawn from the full chronological span of the diary: From the entry for September 13, 1936, after his return from Calabria, the first year in which he kept the diary: Among the warning signs that my youth is over, the greatest is realizing that literature no longer really interests me. I mean that I no longer open books with that quickened and anxious hope of spiritual sustenance which despite all, I once felt. I read and want to read more and more, but I don’t welcome enthusiastically now, as I once did, different sorts of experience; I don’t blend them any more into a calm uproar that precedes poetry. The same thing happens to me in taking walks through Turin; I no longer experience the city as an emotional and symbolic spur to creation. Done it already, I feel myself responding every time. . . .

From the entry for September 26, 1942, an aphorism repeated elsewhere with variants: There doesn’t exist a “seeing things for the first time.” That which we recollect, when we notice, is always a second time. . . .

From the entry for October 27, 1946, when the Dialogues were being conceived: By now I know that these diary entries don’t matter for their explicit discovery, but for the glimmering they reveal of my unconscious mode of being. What I say isn’t true, but betrays, solely by the fact that I say it, my being.

The entire entry of March 25, 1950, after Constance Dowling has left him: We don’t kill ourselves for love of a woman. We kill ourselves because a love, any sort of love, reveals us in our nakedness, misery, defenselessness, nothingness.

More than the Dialogues (though they do furnish clues), and more than his voluminous correspondence (invaluable as it is), the diary remains the key to the 234

most enigmatic aspects of Paveseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s writing that I have noted here. Smith had the advantage, which most Anglo-American readers do not, of being able to read the good Italian text rather than depend on the corrupt existing English text. The few reservations I have expressed here amount to little more than quibbling with Lawrence Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conclusions, in most of which I concur wholeheartedly. His research and writing outstrip most academic literary biography, on either side of the Atlantic, at least to my acquaintance. He manages to shift deftly from cultural history to close reading and stylistics to psychological analysis. He has contributed in his own right to the best of the tradition he found in our Cambridge, the line descending from Perry Miller and F.O. Matthiessen. For someone who has not been part of any academic coterie, this is no mean achievement.

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MACH ISMO: A FI E LD G U I DE

Contributors

James Tadd Adcox (flash fiction 29) lives in Chicago. He is originally from North Carolina, and has lived in Spain, Germany and Indiana. He is the editor of Artifice Magazine. Renée Ashley (Books 207, 222) is the Poetry Editor of The Literary Review. Michael Bazzett (poems 151) has published widely in the small press. His work was recently chosen for inclusion in Best New Poets 2008, and he was the winner of the 2008 Bechtel Prize, from Teachers & Writers Collaborative. New poems are forthcoming from Free Verse, 32 Poems, Diagram, and The National Poetry Review. Duff Brenna (“Annette’s Work in Progress” 9) is a former AWP Best Novel winner, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship. His novel, Too Cool, was a 1999 New York Times Noteworthy Book. His most recent novel, The Law of Falling Bodies, was published September 2007. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Agni, The Nebraska Review, The Madison Review, New Letters, and numerous other venues. George David Clark (poems 107). Recent work appears in Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry, New Ohio Review, Quarterly West, and online at Verse Daily and Linebreak. Ruth Curry (Books 217) is a writer living in Brooklyn. She still occasionally watches rugby. Steve Davenport (poems 32) is the author of two books: Uncontainable Noise, winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award; and Murder on Gasoline Lake, winner of the New American Press Spring 2007 Chapbook Contest. Glenn Deutsch (“The Monkey Version of My Father” 114) is finishing his first novel. He has been published in Notre Dame Review, New Delta Review, River City, Controlled Burn, Iodine Poetry Journal, Memoir (and) and elsewhere. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his wife and son.

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John Estes (poems 47) teaches at the University of Missouri and lives with his family in Columbia. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, West Branch, Southern Review, New Orleans Review, and Tin House. He is author of Kingdom Come and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön and Swerve, which won a National Chapbook Fellowship. Martin Jude Farawell (poems 170) is author of the chapbook Genesis: a Sequence of Poems. His work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Paintbrush, Poetry East, The Southern Review, Tiferet Journal, and others, as well as a number of anthologies. He directs the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program. T. J. Forrester (“Quid Pro Quo” 176) has a collection and a novel forthcoming with Simon & Schuster. His stories have appeared in Harpur Palate, The MacGuffin, The Mississippi Review, and Potomac Review, among others. He edits Five Star Literary Stories, an online site that celebrates story. Porter Fox (“Kingdom” 143) writes and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Narrative, Northwest Review, and Third Coast, among others. This story is from his recently completed collection, Kingdom. Margaux Fragoso’s (“Gethsemane” 82) work appears in Margie, Barrow Street, Paddlefish, Other Voices, Karamu, and Pennsylvania English, among other literary journals. She has completed a Ph.D. in English and her memoir, Tiger, Tiger, will debut in winter 2011. Amity Gaige (Interview 193) is the author of two novels, O My Darling and The Folded World. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Mark Hillringhouse (Books 210) has an MFA in creative writing from FDU; his new book of poetry and photography titled Between Frames is being published by Serving House Books. John King (Books 220), literary rock star, has just wrapped up his MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, and earned his PhD in English literature from Purdue in 2003. His fiction has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Turnrow, Pearl, and Gargoyle. Watch the sky for his next move. Becca Klaver (flash fiction 174) is a founding editor of Switchback Books, author of the poetry collection LA Liminal, and a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers University. Richard Koffler (Books 226), who teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University, was editorial director at Aldine de Gruyter. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Novel, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and The Spectator, among others. Svetlana Lavochkina (“Like a Real Man” 38) was born and educated in Ukraine. She currently resides in Leipzig and teaches English at a Waldorf School. Her fiction has appeared in Eclectica, Textualities.com and Chapman.

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Zachary Lazar (Books 203) is the author of the novel Sway and the non-fiction novel Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. David Licata (“There Is Joy before the Angels of God” 155) is currently working on a collection of interconnected stories—including the one that appears here. He lives in New York City. Deena Linett’s (poem 131) second poetry collection, Woman Crossing a Field, came out in 2006. Recent poems have appeared in The Same, Shofar and Barrow Street. She is at work on a novel. Anne McPeak (Books 214) is the managing editor of A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn. Eric Maroney (“Avram’s Vineyard” 50) is the author of Religious Syncretism and The Other Zions: The Lost Histories of Jewish Nations. His fiction has appeared in Our Stories, The MacGuffin, Arch and Segue. Peter E. Murphy (poems 91) received a 2009 Poetry Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts. He is the author of two books of poems, Stubborn Child and Thorough & Efficient. Jay Baron Nicorvo (poems 75). His poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Subtropics, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Believer and elsewhere. He divides his time between Manhattan and Saugerties, where he and his wife, Thisbe Nissen, have a dozen chickens, among them a Jersey Giant named Monsanto. Kathryn Nuernberger (poems 22) teaches writing and literature at Ohio University, where she also serves as the assistant editor for New Ohio Review. Her poems have appeared previously in Mid-American Review, RHINO, Smartish Pace, Cream City Review, Versedaily.com and other literary journals. Lance Olsen (“Just These Minutes” 70) is author of nineteen books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novel Head in Flames. He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two. Ricardo Pau-Llosa (poem 191). His sixth collection of poems, Parable Hunter, was published in 2008. He was featured last February in The Writer’s Chronicle and has new work appearing in Ambit, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, among other magazines. B. S. V. Prasad (“The Morris Minor” 132) is an engineer working in the software industry in Hyderabad, India. Karen Regen-Tuero (“Care” 99). Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, the North American Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Queens College/CUNY and has just completed a novel. R. A. Villanueva (poems 61). His poetry has appeared in AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and DIAGRAM, among other journals. A Kundiman fellow, he is presently a Language Lecturer at New York University. 238

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176: “Quid Pro Quo” is from the collection Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, Spring 2012. Reprinted here with permission.