The Morningside Monocle - Winter 2019 by The Morningside Monocle

The Morningside Monocle

front cover

Spiral (Brazil)

Hillary Hubley

Monocle Staff Editor-in-Chief Gabriella Okafor Copy Editor John Finnegan Poetry & Prose Editor Bret Matera Art Editor Liz Levin Layout Editor Connie Wang Treasurer Zachary Barker Editorial Staff Raymond Arroyo Tumise Asebiomo Kyle Chermak Brian Cunningham Mariel Mok Shikha Rawal Wicy Wang

The Morningside Monocle Winter 2019

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Table of Contents photography

2 4 6 7 8 10 12 13 14 15 16 16 18 22 24 iv

madge Joella Jones Sunrise at the Reservoir Doreen Benyamin Waterfall (Brazil-Argentina) Hillary Hubley Man vs. nature Beneel Babaei I see a mansard roof through the trees Beneel Babaei Serendipity Ivane Lin The Furthest Distance in the World Ivane Lin Cambodia Shinn-Yih Ho Happy Man Shinn-Yih Ho Havana Shinn-Yih Ho Stolen Kisses (Brazil) Hillary Hubley Morning Prayer (Japan) Hillary Hubley Clean Up (Brazil) Hillary Hubley The “library” Beneel Babaei Atop (Peru) Hillary Hubley Seasons Change Beneel Babaei

29 32 33 33 34 36 37 38 42 42 43 44 47 48 49

Life Ivane Lin Nature Ivane Lin Lush Life Hillary Hubley Strike a Pose Beneel Babaei Trek Ivane Lin Winter Sunshine Ivane Lin Vintage Yellow Cab Akash Panwar Atlas (Mexico) Hillary Hubley Fly Ivane Lin Flower Market (Thailand) Hillary Hubley River in Cambodia Shinn-Yih Ho Sri Lanka Shinn-Yih-Ho Enjoy the Ride Kaitlyn Karpenko Tainan Shinn-Yih Ho Soft (Thailand) Hillary Hubley Emerson Beneel Babaei Smoke (USA) Hillary Hubley

art 30

Untitled, art, pastel and pastel pencil on paper Alexandra Nasar

poetry 2 3 5 14 17 28 30 44 46

prose Criminal Records Alejandro Awad Cherit Against Humanity Alejandro Awad Cherit Excavate Kobina Quaye To mute it out, that (my) burn Alexandra Nasar plum tuesday Joella Jones The Last Buffet Krystal Vazquez The Web Nestor Almeida The Historian Reed Showalter Inheritance Lydia Turnage

9 19 35

The Mezuzahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Shadow Eitan Arom Dividend Taylor Larson The Airport Problem Samier Saeed

madge

Joella Jones

Criminal Records Alejandro Awad Cherit Ink stains cannot be erased Our mothers said. No stain can ever be erased Moralists and other experts in crimes and sins Swore out loud. In ink’s defense, let’s say That when it stains, it writes. In stains’ defense, That by contrast they define The meaning of things. As if they existed Without literature.

Sunrise at the Reservoir Doreen Benyamin

Against Humanity Alejandro Awad Cherit Neither blood to the stone, nor clemency to the slaughterer, One does not ask for much. But it would certainly be nice Not to find oneself all the time Numbed, downcast, Turned into an interrogation sign In front of the minimum confirmation of that maxim That then one repeats to oneself as a funeral march And that says, or rather that implores: “One should not expect anything, From anybody, Ever.” 3

Waterfall (Brazil-Argentina) Hillary Hubley

Excavate Kobina Quaye It took ages for me to see the fallacy of all they promised me Never seeing the irony of pursuing materiality at the expense of self-fealty. Believing their warnings That I could only dig up despair, no treasures, troves, or reparations. But now I understand the directives they gave Meant only to dispatch me to an early grave The very ones my ancestors dug in the soil sullied by the blood of their ancestors Too. And when I abandoned them After eons of servitude I learned the mediocrity Of aristocracy: Pillaging only the surface In the name of the lie of divine right Never to ask, never to wonder Only to steal... merely to plunder. So, I cast away their castle for a commoner’s existence And their staves for a shovel And began to build a kingdom of which I was the epicenter. And now I am finally happy For through my excavation I found myself, my people, too I found my home, my people, too. 5

Man vs. nature

Beneel Babaei

I see a mansard roof through the trees Beneel Babaei

Serendipity Ivane Lin

The Mezuzah’s Shadow Eitan Arom I often wonder why my father feels such an attachment to the scenes of his youth, a period of his life that he most often describes straightforwardly as “miserable” or “awful.” Nonetheless, every time we travel to Israel together we march through the customary stations in his perennial roots tour: Katsenelson Street, where he grew up; the cemetery where his parents and his older brother, Gideon, are buried; the sand dunes on the coast of Rishon Le’Tzion, where he would bring his sweethearts on sunset trysts; and, most importantly, Neve Shmuel, the synagogue named after his father, my grandfather Shmuel. The story of how Neve Shmuel — “the Abode of Shmuel” — got its name is perhaps the most disheartening of all my father’s stories. Shmuel’s Judaism after his escape from Europe was of a ponderous, nostalgic sort, riddled with torturous questions but still holding the allure of a never-forgotten childhood love. He knew the prayers and the Bible stories by heart, and loved puzzling through the pilpulim, legalistic riddles posed by the rabbinic masters. Yet he remained a skeptic, understanding the Torah as the work of men rather than God. He would go to synagogue every Saturday — before it was named after him, of course — and then come home and roll up his sleeves and tend his garden, in clear violation of the Sabbath laws. And then, one day in 1967, when Shmuel was in his late 60s, he went out to collect alms for the synagogue and was run down by a speeding car, cut down as he toiled to raise up a temple for the Lord from the dust of a strange land. The story always horrified me. I never seemed to be able to make peace with the fact that after managing to flee death and destruction in Europe he died bleeding in the street, struck dead by an accidental collision in the midst of a good deed. It was the ultimate proof of God’s capriciousness. 9

Yet the story had a somewhat happy epilogue: Shmuel’s name lived on in Rishon, attached to the material success of the Zionist enterprise for as long as the synagogue stood. I first visited the musty old place in 2005 for my bar mitzvah, our entire family of seven schlepping over to the other side of the planet so I could come of age in the house of my father’s patrimony. Rishon had grown up around the synagogue, blossoming out from the old part of town where my father grew up until it became Israel’s third largest city, after Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. My dad could point to mini-malls and soaring apartment blocks that had been rolling sand dunes and empty clumps of chaparral when he was a kid. But Neve Shmuel, a round, drab building in a sleepy cul de sac, seemed to have taken little note of the growth and renewal all around it. Most of the floorplan was taken up by a sanctuary that seemed to sport its original, moth-eaten decor. Up front, a narrow antechamber where the sun slants through eddies of dust plays home to piles of old books and plastic tables where elders gather after services to sip schnapps and eat pickled herring. This routine had changed little when we returned in 2016 under the pretense of my dad’s grade school reunion. We parked our rental car a few blocks away, just as we had for my bar mitzvah more than a decade earlier, to avoid being seen driving on a Saturday. Even though most of the congregants would assume we had driven from our hotel, knowing was different from seeing, and it was better not to offend their religious sensibilities. After a speedy service — quick and strict — we repaired to the front hall for cloyingly sweet schnapps and stinking pickled fish. My Hebrew had improved little since my bar mitzvah, so I sat back while my dad chatted animatedly with the regulars, a small group of graying men he had known since childhood, including one old man in a wheelchair who brought along his Filipino caretaker. I wondered glumly how long Neve Shmuel would be able to draw a minyan, the ten men required to chant the holiest parts of the prayer service. It wasn’t looking so good. The following day was the grade school reunion, a luncheon of about a dozen septuagenarians at a French fusion restaurant on the outskirts of old Rishon. Mostly, my father’s classmates seemed hale and vigorous, like him, but some showed their age. A jowly fellow seated across from my dad dribbled his lunch on his sweatshirt, and then dozed off at the table. I could tell my dad was chagrined. Afterwards, he would describe his 10

contemporaries alternately as “half-dead” or “altecockers” — literally, old shitters, in Yiddish. But our day of nostalgia-seeking was not over, and after the lunch, we took to the streets to call on Asher’s childhood friends, each of whom insisted on bringing us into their homes to feed us coffee and cake. Between bartering old memories and new gossip, we wandered the narrow lanes, my father and I both trying in vain to project a half-remembered past onto the present. Finally, we came to Katsenelson Street, where my father spent his childhood. The house his mother had toiled to purchase still stood, but it had been remodeled beyond recognition. Nonetheless, I insisted on taking a picture with him and the house. My dad took his place in the walkway, folding his arms over a prim sweater that was too warm for this unexpectedly bright winter day. In the picture, he’s smiling, but there’s something sad going on. When he took off to the United States almost 50 years ago to build a life, a family, and a fortune, Rishon refused to wait for him, refused to maintain stasis. Nothing stays the same, the house seems to say, rising up behind him with its sunny yellow facade of new paint. The past never stands still. It changes with you. The days of your youth are gone. You can never return. I took the picture and we fled, hopping in our rental car and heading back to Tel Aviv. Our obligation now fulfilled, having travelled halfway across the world to visit my father’s old haunts, we couldn’t seem to get out of there fast enough.

The Furthest Distance in the World Ivane Lin

Happy Man

Shinn-Yih Ho 12

Cambodia

Shinn-Yih Ho

To mute it out, that (my) burn Alexandra Nasar I have an overactive mind, And a universe inside my chest That deems my tongue unfit. So I breathe in fire extinguisher And Dance around my puffed out words. I Need only lick One more until I mute it out, that burn. 14

syllable

Havana

Shinn-Yih Ho

Stolen Kisses (Brazil) Hillary Hubley

plum tuesday Joella Jones In the yard we are wishing against the house take all my fingers never tell strangers our biz it’s your condition of my hands that they have some weight the subway to you is a whistle grey all the whistling in true north you hug me to tell me what north does – where the sun is did I tell you – when I sleep after a day with you – it’s for the future look at my face drink check the watch I love to wear

Morning Prayer (Japan) Hillary Hubley

Clean Up (Brazil) Hillary Hubley

The "library"

Beneel Babaei

Dividend Taylor Larson Succeeding in business entails never fearing whatever method will make the most money—that has not changed. Yet no more do we demand that the successful businessman abate himself by knowing what will best serve his company. Greed works, but not untempered and ill-considered. Looking back, Dennis Garreth realizes the problem must have begun years before the first signs showed. His kind had directed the boardrooms for so long, and surely it was in one of the prosperous periods during their reign that he and his others missed the start. Now his generation—the kind who came from Harvard and Wharton and Chicago half a lifetime ago, who paced through campuses in precisely patterned steps, with their backs rigid in their black suits (always black), whether vernal flowers unfurled onto the cobbled walkways or an eastern autumnal air as heavy as a blanket blew, studying Friedman and von Hayek over the lengthy, coroner-like tables in the mausoleum libraries each day, and demanding nothing different the next one; while avoiding their polarized and more numerous peers, who knew more about Bob Dylan than business, who sat in the grass and sang their sweet voices like kindergarteners or medieval minstrels, their shorts and bell-bottoms bright beneath the sun, chrysanthemums or carmine leaves crinkled in their heavy hair, asking most days how many kids L.B.J. had killed that day—is gone. So few of Garreth’s kind still attend the boardrooms. Those that do direct nothing, digesting reports and words with the same insouciance and anile detachment as old men eating applesauce. Whenever he attempts to define the time that caused the boardroom change, he invariably ends up on one era. The Nineties. Must have been. Because if the new, young guys silently appeared in the boardrooms in 2004—bringing their algorithmic investment strategies, speculating on the price of a bushel of rice in India, and swapping the derivative through six markets before tying it to a mortgage on a house in San Jose—then they were at the Yales and Whartons and Harvards in the Nineties. They came of age when nothing went wrong. They learned when Gates got the Valley blowing up, when Tech had everything booming, and Clinton was getting blown. Of course, they thought they were too smart to ever mess up the good times, Garreth always concludes. Well, they did have September Eleventh later. They already learned too much by then though. 19

Garreth considers 2004 the year the problem began manifesting, because that was when he first found one of them in his boardroom (they probably got into others earlier). That particular meeting between the BEK board members started as a standard quarterly review. The board had heavily invested in only several companies, covering merely a few markets, but the members knew every enterprise well and held experience with each area, so that the industry’s most sensible would call them safe choices (why I sold the board on them). The review showed revenue growth, and evidenced that if they maintained Garreth’s conservative plan by holding and not selling large stock in these companies, profits would improve next quarter, and consistently through the measurable long-term. Each investment’s earnings had even increased after the firm’s lobbyists convinced one congressman to compel Capitol Hill into lowering capital gains taxes. The results of Garreth’s strategy had also reached down to BEK’s smaller divisions, as reports from individual branches (he demanded that the board review at least four each meeting) displayed higher profits. The members were about to close the meeting when, on the last location that Garreth studied, some non-standard figures pricked him. “Why is this southwest branch approving large home loans with such low and adjustable rates?” “The financial models work out.” Garreth peered above the report in his hands, to the nephew of some other board member (it did not matter enough which member for him to remember). He had not noticed him at the meeting’s start, but appraised the young man opposite him as he spoke, who appeared no older than twenty-six, whose beaming, blond hair and cream-colored suit stuck out from the balding combovers and black jackets in the palely lit room. He disliked the boy’s smirk too. “There have always been certain groups that our industry has chosen not to invest in as committedly as we do others, based on risk. However, since these populations multiply so rapidly, particularly in the southwest markets, the models have changed.” The boy’s smile widened. “We should consider these demographics with potential.” Demographics with potential? Normally people only talked in a direct manner at these meetings, a trait Garreth encouraged. Say what they are. He (Garreth) did not say it though. He watched the other elders in the room, slumping around the board table, smiling like the young man and at him. “Perhaps we should rethink some of our models,” the man next to Garreth said, a man he had known for twenty-six years, and who he had never heard use the term “model.”

And the board continued to find the young man fascinating at the next meetings, where they listened, heads dipped over the table, and through the hallway walks to the elevator as they patted his back, and at the cocktail parties where several of them always hunched closely about him and laughed at his jokes that they did not understand, the young man referencing shows and songs they had not heard of, and never would. Yet Garreth kept his thoughts unspoken. Because he believed that the board members of his kind—the Wharton and Princeton alumni from his time, who, for nearly the last thirty years, had only thought of “models” as referring to Bogle and Buffett—were simply letting the young man play around, probably from pure curiosity. All right then. Give the boy a beaker and set of vials and see what he creates. And BEK was doing well, as well as the economy, so let him conduct his financial experiment, because we can afford to let one beaker blow up over a small sample of investors. And when more young men began crowding his boardroom, and all the other boardrooms in the industry, with their bright hair and boyish smiles, promoting more and larger loans to people displaying no potential to pay them back (never passionately protesting for these loans, merely proposing them in soft, sweet, almost falsetto voices), Garreth still believed the board would soon call for their trial’s results, even if the old members kept smiling. But then these boys, these wavy-haired wunderkinds, as if to hide their first test’s effects (which Garreth knew were bad, even if the board would not discuss them) became more creative. They asked to run more experiments, more than their first one and more than one at a time. Besides investing in unpromising populations, they formulated new models, an aggravating abundance of them, increasing in complexity from one to the next at an exponential rate, each incomprehensible to Garreth (and he held no doubt that they perplexed the other members too). Their models relied heavily on speculation, buying and trading quickly, even in the same day, and often swapped derivatives through as many as five different markets and industries, many of them foreign and few that any member felt familiar with. Yet, the equations and algorithms and all the i's always ended up showing positive figures. And the board could never refuse the boys. Garreth looked at the gray heads and sagging, black-suited bodies and wrinkled faces as they said yes to the wondrous wunderkinds and their beautiful models, him neither smiling nor saying no, but at least I am not saying yes. Then, Garreth realized (thought he knew), why the members permitted the young. They are old. They want out. The company means nothing to them anymore, and if they can buy these boys’

models and sell them high before they fail (they will fail), they can get out with the money. And he understood that this could work. That the money would come quicker and more greatly, at least for the short-term, than if the board preserved his plan. “Other companies will call us daring,” he laughed to himself. So Garreth continued quietly at the board meetings as four quarters passed, while the young men rallied the old through their magically profitable models, never immodestly boasting over BEK’s rapidly rising stock like Garreth’s kind, merely smiling and speaking their sweet voices, which nonetheless reveal their arrogance, they believing that they can correctly speculate on corn prices. Ha. I will get out too. But in the hallways and cocktail parties, even with no wunderkinds near, the elders still spoke of them so adoringly. Spoke only of them and their models and never of getting out. Not until the ’05 Christmas party—as the old men laughed at the young ones’ jokes that they could not comprehend, telling the new quips with only their old selves present—did Garreth understand. My god, they actually believe. He nearly dropped his martini. Why the hell does no one see it? He glanced around at the next meeting, saw all the youths that evenly numbered his kind, the wunderkinds wearing white and blue and emerald green and even red suits, so that the boardroom looks like a damn rainbow. And he asked himself, How many other boardrooms look the same? And answered himself almost simultaneously, Enough. He realized then, that it was not that no one else held the sense to distrust the industry’s trends (which had become the whole economy’s trends and were no longer daring), but that those who did were not allowed into the boardrooms anymore. Or invited to the cocktail parties. Damn it. I still enjoy the cocktail parties. For quarters and quarters, Garreth prolonged his silence at meetings, while still fearfully

Atop (Peru)

Hillary Hubley 22

reading all the reviews gleaming with profits, and on his way to work, following the papers’ recklessly encouraging business reports, in which he could read past errors causing the future to collapse inward and onto the present, bubbling off the print as ominously as the housing market. Five-hundred and thirty-five of them. One must see it, have the power to prevent what will come. How can one not do something? I cannot speak, but they can. “All they do is speak!” Walking away from the newspaper stand, he turned toward a TV in a store window, showing a wunderkind speaking before Congress. A few months later, the crash came. Garreth still considers that singular term a misnomer. Because it was not (is not) like a pot falling, which shatters once and fast and you see all the shards instantly. Because everything just kept falling and shattering. The businesses, the banks, the houses. Quickly and sporadically, sometimes one after another and sometimes at the same time in tangled lots, but each one always continuing the next one downward, like a berg breaking off an ice shelf. The breaking was continual and continues. The board did not break though. No member apparently believed anyone present, in BEK’s boardroom or any other in the industry, warranted blame. The old men let the young ones keep their influence, because dismissing them or even softening their voices would have meant the elders admitted they were wrong for trusting the Adoni and their models. It would have signaled their failure to themselves, their industry peers, and the general citizenry, whom they all knew themselves to be smarter than. And none of the wunderkinds could quit the field or leave the company, or even accept lesser say, because the avidity and fear of inferiority and prideful need to prove themselves beyond their youth that impelled them into the industry (that chose them for this field, had chosen and fitted them before they were old enough to choose anything for themselves, as it had the old men before them), would not allow them to make any admission. “The models are correct. Only the demographics underperformed,” the wunderkinds said, smiling. The one thing that changed immediately following the crash (the crashing), was that Garreth started speaking at meetings again. “Quite possibly, perhaps, the greatest current threat to the BEK’s existence is the amount of loans we still hold that, which, have had different returns than what everyone in the industry expected.” He modified his words, but he did speak. “We must cut ourselves from as many as possible.”

And the board listened enough to Garreth, with the wunderkinds still grinning and never disagreeing. Through the throes of the crash’s (the crashing’s) first phase, the industry’s largest companies, including BEK, began publicly decreeing that their girth meant that if they did not survive, many jobs would not either. And Congress heard them more acutely than normal, for it was the fall of an even-numbered year. So following Garreth’s advice and the actions of the other large and still living firms, the board sent a delegation of wunderkinds to Washington to receive (not ask for, but receive) the general citizenry’s generous aid. They used the money to expunge the company and themselves from much of the models’ results and the demographics that had lost potential. Preceding the crashing, BEK made consistent profits for nearly three decades, beginning almost exactly when the board promoted Garreth twenty-five years previously. The company still held a high reserve of this capital (the government had not lowered the capital requirement soon enough before the crashing for it all to go into the models). Combined with the public aid, this ensured that the firm survived the first phase, when many industry brothers did not, and came out better than the ones that did. Profits were even expected the next quarter, an industry first since the recession’s start. Yet, the old men in the boardroom never seemed pleased by reports. For months, when Garreth read aloud during meetings how well projections indicated the company would do at the fourth quarter’s end, grinning while sauntering around the room with an unusual spryness, they turned away or dipped their heads, mumbled if he asked what they thought, appearing the way a little boy does after stealing a pie and having a parent ask him about it. The wunderkinds smiled at the profits though. But they always smile. Then, Garreth came to one meeting late. It was the first meeting Garreth ever arrived late to, having delayed himself on his walk to work because of an urge to find and buy the exact right, bright bouquet from a flower stand (this desire also represented a first). He smelled the nice-smelling flowers in the elevator. He paused at the boardroom’s door, holding both the bunch and the annual report, considering bringing in both. But he laughed, and instead propped the bouquet by the door. He strutted into the room reciting from the roseate review before looking to the old men. And when he did look, and did not see the old men there, he realized how wholly he had misread the figures, the figures he watched and monitored in this room through thirty years, how poorly he had read 24

their postures and portents, and stood reading them posthumously. I thought I was smarter than them. By the meeting’s end, Garreth would learn that the board’s executive retirement packages exactly equaled the company’s annual profits, to the single cent. He expected this as soon as he saw them absent, and understood them for the first time from their truancy. Because the money was their only way out without saying sorry. The proof that not only do they now have nothing, but that there never was something for them to say sorry about. “I have the money, so I was right. I win,” they think, they know. And I do not have that money. He would later kick his flowers after leaving the room.

Seasons Change

But at the moment Garreth understood, he lost all energy for any protest. He stopped speaking, and gazed around the boardroom that held him as the single black color against the rainbow of still smiling wunderkinds, silently smirking at him with the faces of boys expecting gifts. Then he dragged his seat out in a slow screech. And he bent down into the chair slower, before slumping over the long board table, and asking himself if he even likes cocktails. On his sleeve, he noticed a gray hair, statically caught and confined, which he did not bother freeing.

Beneel Babaei

Life

Ivane Lin 26

Nature

Ivane Lin 27

Lush Life (USA) Hillary Hubley

The Last Buffet Krystal Vazquez I have seen you arrange the “chafes” for the buffet too many times. The silver clanging me awake every Saturday at 6am, retrieved shiny from the shelves of our oil-marked garage. When I come down for breakfast you’ve turned all the boxes from Smart & Final into a King’s feast in our suburban kitchen: chicken covered in chipotle crema tri tip lounging with mushrooms in the most luxurious sauce – a party for 500 cooked in a kitchen that shines only sucio enough for five. At the banquet hall I pass you Dasani bottled water to pour into the chafing dishes so that they’re the right sea-level for the buffet and then you light the burners that singe your finger tips, tips you can no longer feel. 28

An hour later, the food stays caliente, With all the party-goers shuffling past Heaping more mashed potatoes than they would if they knew the secret ingredient was cream cheese. Were you thinking of the menu of that weekend’s quinceñera when you sat down the Saturday morning of Memorial Day in your silla favorita? Or the breakfast and lunch You had just packaged and left on the counter for my mami, tu esposa? Because now they shuffle past you, Tears dripping down bolo ties I didn’t know could llorar, Evaporating into Stetson hat brims, Left hands clutching pearl rosary beads And right hands reaching for the Two slabs of your meat frozen in midair – All wanting one last helping. The line thins and I have you to myself: Holding a cold thumb, charred black on its underside I sprinkle your fresh three-piece suit in water From the aspergillum of my eyes Knowing the burners will come later. 29

The Web Nestor Almeida Tangled and Confused We traverse the Web Tattered and Bruised We face what’s ahead The endless intricacy of our collective mind Makes it impossible to know what we’ll find Shattered and Defused We lose all Faith Starved and Used We search for Death Yet Life, in all its splendor and mystery, Perseveres, enveloped in its own history Vulnerable and Jaded We proceed with Fear Convoluted and Mystified We are unaware of what is so near The Truth that never reveals itself The Web is an unravelling of your self ~ ADN

Untitled, art, pastel and pastel pencil on paper Alexandra Nasar

Strike a Pose

Beneel Babaei

Trek

Ivane Lin

Winter Sunshine Ivane Lin

Vintage Yellow Cab Akash Panwar

The Airport Problem Samier Saeed ...again. This will be it, he thinks. These early morning flights, the terminals are sleepy like mosques in between prayers. Mohammed N. Mohammed gets in line to check in behind a newly retired southern couple discussing something trivial with great enthusiasm. He assumes they are racist until proven otherwise. He maintains a posture of quiet defiance, but he is not good at it, and so merely looks gaseous and distended. Though they are facing each other and in profile to Mohammed N. Mohammed, they do not notice him. Several minutes pass, during which Mohammed N. Mohammed has no new thoughts about this couple. He never theorizes as to their story, nor is his mind able to penetrate their conversation, which he assumes to be inane. It is their turn at the counter. They are tortuously polite. When they are finished, and as they turn to leave, the woman smiles at Mohammed N. Mohammed warmly. He is crestfallen. 35

Atlas (Mexico)

Hillary Hubley

The girl behind the check-in counter is mellow and nice, in addition to being possessed of an angelic visage evocative of glassware. She must think him to be some angry Arab misogynist who demands biblical obedience from women, ready to rape when/where/ however. He watches her as she serenely executes the bureaucratic task that devours so much of her pretty little life. She hums and pays no attention to the attention Mohammed N. Mohammed pays her, and he thus feels voyeuristic. She ends their transaction with “there you go, hun, have a nice flight.” “Hun.” He doesn’t need to clarify whether she means “honey” or “you know, kind of like a Mongol.” He disintegrates on the spot. The girl is confused, momentarily, and then forgets he ever was. --Another day, another airport. Agitated, Mohammed N. Mohammed proceeds to the security check-point alongside porters who wheel flatbeds of luggage expertly, maneuvering even the most jank-legged carts through and around throngs of roving passengers, people in a hurry. When it comes to air travel, people’s patience-levels start at zero and only go down. Nobody notices the bearded, bespectacled, pudgy, clumsy, heavy-breathing Mohammed N. Mohammed. 36

Fly

Ivane Lin

Families and groups part naturally to get around him and rejoin seamlessly, de-and-reblobbing bacterially. He is also unnoticed by the people of the floor, those people resting, eating junk food, or rearranging/relinquishing luggage, reduced to a kind of temporary transience, the hobodom of the traveler. Mohammed N. Mohammed hands his boarding pass and driver’s license to a bald and goateed middle-aged guy, white, named Mike, a former middle-manager who was too smart even for that job, now with a new occasion to lament the various turns and disappointments that have characterized his life, though he seems like he might also be possessed of a dark and resigned sense of humor about things, the kind that can pass as substitute grit. Mohammed N. Mohammed feels a sense of expectation as he hands over these documents. He stands up as straight as he can manage. Mike barely looks at the documents before signing where he is supposed to sign. His detachment from the world renders him 100% willing to endorse any travel within it whatsoever. Diminished, Mohammed N. Mohammed gets in line and goes through the usual routine. A TSA agent has the perpetual duty of constantly announcing “shoes off, belts off, nothing in your pockets, not even paper, laptops go in their own bin.” His face looks like he has been doing it for an eternity. His face looks like maybe he isn’t human anymore, 37

but just a symbol of something terrifying. Mohammed N. Mohammed feels he should of course be of some general interest in this scenario, with his baggy garments and somewhat shoddily-kept beard and general Muslim-ness. Sideways, furtive glances should come his way. Heads should turn, and some of the people to whom the heads belong might feel a little guilty for turning them. Nothing. Until it is time for him to gather his effects from the conveyor belt, and to be shooed away elsewhere to redress like a tramp. Whereupon he is informed his bag requires a hand-search. Oho! He would love to think, but he knows it could happen to anybody. It’s more a matter of the limits of x-ray machinery, not a comment upon him as a person. Mohammed N. Mohammed’s bag is quotidian, a messily organized flurry of garments and toiletries. “What a boring sonnofabitch,” the TSA agent must be thinking, Mohammed N. Mohammed thinks. This turns out indeed to be the only offense rendered by the bag, which is soon returned. After collecting it, Mohammed N. Mohammed wanders over to the food court, selecting at random the “Asian fusion” place, a slightly more upscale Panda Express, essentially, branded to falsely convey healthiness. He is way too early for his flight. He thinks he will take out his laptop and see where it takes him. But what! his laptop is nowhere to be found. He rifles through his bag like the plot of a movie is on the line. Hastily slinging the Styrofoam, paper, and food scraps on his cafeteria tray into the trash, he hoofs it back to the security checkpoint in full expectation that now something would finally happen in his life. His heart strains to meet the moment. There are booths behind the security checkpoints, on the safe-side—you probably haven’t noticed them before if you haven’t snooped, like Mohammed N. Mohammed, around 38

Flower Market (Thailand) Hillary Hubley

the perimeter of the security checkpoint wondering what the protocol was for claiming a lost item. In the booth, there is a short and tomboyish Latina, and to her he explains the situation. She retrieves his laptop from somewhere in the dark recesses of that booth as if it was the only thing on the only shelf in there, and as if she had been waiting for him this whole time. “Here you go,” she commands. “Don’t you need me to like log in or something to prove my identity?” “Sure.” He does so. “Cool.” “So... that’s it?” “Yes.” “I don’t have to like sign anything or something?” “It’s your laptop, it’s not like you’re buying a car.” “It’s not considered suspicious I left it here?” “Don’t worry. Mistakes happen. Most people are human.” He figures he should elucidate the scenario further, and puffing up his chest makes the revelation: “My name is Mohammed N. Mohammed”. She looks at him as if he had insulted her. “Sorry kiddo; you’re not my type.” To confirm this was truly the end, she, from the same abyss of things from which she had retrieved his laptop, withdraws a 2-week old copy of People magazine and begins to flip through its pages impatiently. “God, I wish the bimbo who left this here would pick it up so I could stop reading it already,” he hears her mutter, as he clutches his chest and stumbles away. 39

He slumps to the floor. Small children dressed like they are going somewhere cold cheerfully run over to kick his body. --From older Arab men, uncles and family friends whose hands were bigger than Mohammed N. Mohammed’s face and whose skin looked like it was meant for something, he had heard stories when he sat among them at gatherings at which he was still addressed in the diminutive even though his younger cousins—athletic, spoiled, and good for nothing but great deals of bad of the sort Mohammed N. Mohammed disdained and yearned for--were afforded the courtesy of being deprecated like adults. Airport stories of dirty looks, bags always hand-emptied, extra-intimate pat-downs (“more than I’ve gotten from my wife since the last kid was born” added Mohammed N. Mohammed’s older cousin humorlessly). All the men seemed to have at least one; some several. Even the genteel and smooth faced Dr. Nasser Mohammed (no rel.) once had a passenger request to be moved away from him on an airplane (as if distance would save him if the good doctor was indeed a terrorist), which passenger later had a heart attack (presumably no rel.), and was doctored by Dr. N. Mohammed until landing. Gemaal el-Halawi, the Egyptian married to Mohammed N. Mohammed’s aunt, had once been detained for 2 hours upon arrival in France—and this with an American passport! His “interrogation” (a word he didn’t like to use, for it over-dramatized what was a fairly banal and routine, though undoubtedly discriminatory and immoral, procedure) was presided over by a mustachioed French detective, who interspersed bouts of grave-toned questioning and allusions to his dutie moral et patriotique to protect France with sequences of lighting a cigarette, leaning back in his chair, and musing philosophically on/about the situation, as if they were actors in a play, riffing on his role’s need for skepticism and suspicion and on el-Halawi’s need to remain calm in the face of this accostement, which was inconvenient and possibly offensive, a wry and thoughtful perspective el-Halawi found it difficult to share in the circumstances, but which he was able to dialogue about, in French no less, with grounded reference to various French philosophers and writers (some of whom were quite obscure), which, in the opinion of el-Halawi, led in no small part to his being released in good standing, with a handshake and warm smile from the French detective. These stories opened up new possibilities for Mohammed N. Mohammed. Though he had grown up under 9/11’s shadow, he had never until now been worried about people hating him because was a Muslim. He had always been sure that once they got to know him, they would find a much a better reason to hate him. And it had certainly never ever occurred to him that anyone anywhere could ever think him capable of violence of any kind whatsoever ever. ... Could they? The possibility tantalized him. 40

--The American Airlines check-in area is popping. The angel-faced girl is there. Some passengers try to argue with her about something, some try to flirt. She is oblivious either way, or so it seems. Who knows what kind of cruft accumulates on her inside. Someone is trying to rebalance luggage across three suitcases in order to make weight limits and wields a TI-83. Mohammed N. Mohammed has a headache. He is barely alive through the security process. He tries to hope some TSA person would take a look at him and ask him to step outside the line because he had been chosen at random for extra-vigorous and intimate security checking. That they would pat him down like they had just doused him in baby powder, and have him turn out his pockets like a cartoon character indicating financial destitution. He cannot hope any longer, and it doesn’t happen. He sits at the gate in a kind of detached stupor, eating donut holes from Dunkin. Once upon a time he paid attention to his diet, but when doing so for a week didn’t seem to render him any more intimidating, he gave up. He barely tastes or enjoys the donut holes, and he barely remembers what made him enter this karmic cycle in the first place. That decision was made too long ago to review. He has been in airports for the better part of the past few years. Earlier on, occasionally, friends would ping him on Facebook to chat, and would ask why he keeps going back to the airport. Why not just live life? Mohammed N. Mohammed would offer depressing explanations that nobody understood. Eventually he could only tell them that they couldn’t understand because they had never spent so much time in airports. Eventually they all gave up. They have all forgotten him now. Time to board. For some this means excitement. For some this means dread. For Mohammed N. Mohammed, it means a kind of existential failure. The gate agent scanning the boarding passes is tall and business-like and could be a hair model. He scans Mohammed N. Mohammed’s. A red light. “Hmm.” Mohammed N. Mohammed can’t believe it. His soul and mind scramble to catch up to this scenario. It’s finally happening. Oho! The gate agent shrugs, and hands the boarding pass back. “You are scarcely passable as a person, but luckily the threshold for being a passenger is much lower.” Mohammed N. Mohammed’s face is terror. Reality will go on without him. Maybe there is a different version of himself in an alternate dimension. There is no hope; the story, sadly, does not end. It merely begins... 41

Enjoy the Ride

Kaitlyn Karpenko

River in Cambodia Shinn-Yih Ho

Sri Lanka

Shinn-Yih Ho 43

Tainan

Shinn-Yih Ho

The Historian Reed Showalter Strong-shouldered, firm-gripped, the young walk along, and their ears feel the tickle of giggling songs, and fresh spices and sewage slip by on the breeze. But one sees his street shades go stale in a scene dusted over by a film like a pale earl-grey screen. Like others before he bore thick chains for poor ghosts with undone endeavors. A soldier still jailed in old wars forever. Each new sound with each step pulls anchors along from the past. So evâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ry new gesture weighs heavy with hopes to enact. Bearing the echoes of long-since-passed lives, humming the old tune with lost downcast eyes, brows wrinkled and clenched by some othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; time he throws a hand out to a neighbor who wrenches him free from the lives that etched his world with trenches.

Soft (Thailand) Hillary Hubley

Inheritance Lydia Turnage They say I am too much like my mother. Do I carry cruelty in my bones? Does it travel between our towered bodies like some low-blow hum in need of a sign? Danger! High Voltage: Do not touch me if you are grounded, Do not touch me unless you are ready to hang with both feet in the air. They say Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll learn from her mistakes. Who can ever be so sure? We are all hurtling toward our own man-made disasters. We all want so much more, and more than that,

We want life to be everything, all at once. How many lives could you live, and only be kind? Someday, I might want to leave a footprint on the dark side of the moon. They say Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have to let it go. But there is risk in sinking too much in the sea. Maybe, like sail boats or ships, we all need some heavy heart-bottom weight to counter the capsize, keep us upright and even-keeled on the endless looping currents we travel, that we may never know how to map.

Emerson

Beneel Babaei

Smoke (USA)

Hillary Hubley