The Opiate: Spring 2024, Vol. 37

The Opiate Spring 2024, Vol. 37

The Opiate

© The Opiate 2024

Cover art: “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” by William Holman Hunt, 1868

This magazine, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. Contact theopiatemagazine@gmail.com for queries.

“The

ancient harps have said, Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord: If Love impersonate was ever dead, Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d. ‘Twas love; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethroned.”

-John Keats,

Editor-in-Chief

Genna Rivieccio

Editor-at-Large

Malik Crumpler

Editorial Advisor

Anton Bonnici

Contributing Writers:

Michael Washburn, “Reality Is the Beginning”

Joseph Couchet, “Fragments of a Larger Work”

Jim Krusoe, “R. Hood” 41

K. Wallace King, “The Suitcase” 46

Christine Criswell, “Reality Fractured”

Dennis McFadden, “Goodness and Mercy”

Melissa Knox, “Silence, Anti-Racism and Women” 87

Davies, “Swim”

Emilia Ferrante, “Culling the Runts” & “Invertebrate Musings” 98-99

Adrean Bellon, “It will all pass in the end...” 100-101

Dale Champlin, “Come, Lovers of Dark Corners” 102

Jonathan Ukah, “No Longer Yours to Love,” “City of Sleepless Nights,” “Giving,” “London After Exit” & “Anger Management Expert” 103-108

Alan Michael Parker, “Janet and Her Soul,” “The Eight-Point Buck” & “The Plumber” 109-113

Keith Morris, “Confetti” 114

David Estringel, “Bitter Fruit From Suicide Trees*” 115

Raluca Nechita, “No Safer Space” & “Humpty Dumpty” 116-117

Ron Kolm, “The Engineer” 118-119

Ann Pedone, “The Greenland” 120-123

Thomas Wells, “A Solitude in the Shadows,” “Deviant Delirium” & “Performer Behind the Glass” 124-129 Criticism:

Genna Rivieccio, “Joan Didion Is For Grief, Grief Is For People, New York Is For Arrogance & the Publishing Industry Is For No One” 131

Editor’s Note

It’s something of an impossibility to be or feel romantic...anymore. Romance just seems to be one of those things so patently reserved for wankers and young people (these groups oftentimes being interchangeable). I would add the rich into the category of the elite few capable of engaging with romance, except that, as usual, they never know how to use their money for anything meaningful, least of all how to use it to buy thoughtful things for other people. Not that money ultimately has anything to do with romance. Except that, in the end, it has everything to do with it. For who you love--or, more to the point, who you love freely---is a direct consequence of your social status. Even (and perhaps especially) today.

The story of Lisabetta and Lorenzo in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is just such a prime example of all these things (in addition to being a prime example of how to ensure eternal suffering). Something of a precursor to the “forbidden love” type of tragedy that befell Romeo and Juliet, Lisabetta suffers a similar fate to Juliet in that her family really seems to think Lorenzo is much too trashy for her (while in the Romeo and Juliet scenario, both the Montagues and the Capulets think the other’s family is trash for reasons unrelated to finances). Specifically, her brothers make that assessment after the eldest one discovers Lisabetta in flagrante delicto with Lorenzo (in medieval times, this meant one of her brothers simply caught Lisabetta sneaking into Lorenzo’s “bedchamber”---the little trollop!). This after the two thought they had done so well at keeping their relationship a secret (for what grows the seed of “true love” more than knowing full well it’s “taboo”?).

Alas, once Lisabetta’s brothers unearth this “sordid” information about their sister, who had remained single (despite her good looks and affluent status) largely at the fault of her own fratelli for not expediently arranging a marriage in the wake of their father’s death so that she might non-judgmentally unleash her torrent of horniness, they decide Lorenzo must be exterminated. Because, duh, he’s way too low-class to stick it in their sister’s high-class

pussy. And obviously, there’s something very Freudian about their perverse sense of jealousy. What’s more, his status as a mere employee (albeit a managerial one---let’s call him a “director of operations” type) renders Lisabetta’s actions a true disgrace (or disgrazia, as the Italians say). For what could be more shameful to the family name than not only a sister without her virginity, but a sister who fucks the “help”? Plus, privileged men just feel the innate need to constantly undercut those born to less advantageous circumstances yet who still come out “on top”---at least in the boudoir. Thus, the class-related sting of Lorenzo being their servant, so to speak, is enough to incite the logic: murder it is.

Worse still is the brothers’ callousness in the handling of the matter. For they dupe Lorenzo into thinking they’re all going on a jolly good, camaraderie-filled trip together to the countryside when, in fact, the brothers are about to brutally kill the only man Lisabetta will ever love. A love that bonded her so strongly to Lorenzo that he manages to appear to her in a dream to inform her of the following: 1) he’s been killed by her asshole brothers and 2) where she can find his body. Perhaps intuiting the kind of freek-a-leek Lisabetta could be, Lorenzo probably thought his still-undecayed corpse might be of some necrophiliac’s use to her... However, likely to his surprise, it’s the head she goes for when digging him up from the place where her brothers buried him. After all, she’s “just a girl” so she can’t very well carry a whole body by herself. Hence, severing Lorenzo’s testa (not testes) thanks to its oh so convenient portability. So now, in addition to being sort of like a Romeo and Juliet story, it’s also sort of like a “sweet” Salome and John the Baptist story.

While a man pining away for his dead lover might have slightly more knavish plans for a head (and its holes), all Lisabetta wants to do is plant it in a massive pot of basil. (If this were a California story, though, it would have to be a massive pot of marijuana.) And worship at its altar, crying tears of sorrow that only make the basil flourish all the more. As if the tale couldn’t get any sadder/ more macabre (probably ‘cause the Italians always go hard), Lisabetta’s brothers catch on to her bizarre attachment to the basil pot, taking it away from her and digging up the head anew to

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37 confirm their theories.

The sudden disappearance of the “special” plant only causes Lisabetta to weep even more uncontrollably. Her sociopathic brothers, unfortunately, are immune to her tears, instead concerned with getting rid of the pot and fleeing Messina to avoid any comeuppance for their crime (as if the well-to-do are ever punished for such things). In their minds, however, the sin of murder was but a result of Lisabetta’s own “sin” of loving the “wrong person.” A.k.a. someone poor. Because romance always gets tricky when the class of the two individuals involved is not matched (just look at Andie and Blane in Pretty in Pink). That didn’t seem to matter to John Keats when he further immortalized this particular Decameron story with “Isabella” (the Anglicized version of Lisabetta) which argues, in essence, that just because love is dead, literally or figuratively, doesn’t mean that true romantics have to let it die. Even if by any morbid means necessary.

A

hopeless

romantic who also knows romance is propaganda,

Genna Rivieccio April 2024

FICTION

Reality Is the Beginning

Michael Washburn

The scene on the terrace captured everything Julian loved about his job. The tech conference was more than twelve hours off, and he could imagine worse things than hanging out here with his colleagues in this café in a northern capital, sipping wine, laughing, reveling in their status as emissaries of a dynamic firm in a thriving industry. If the people passing below on the streets of this most European of North American cities did not know who Julian Ruskin, Phil Holm and Stephanie Greene were, they would know soon enough, as would the rest of the world, he felt certain. Their firm, Journigan Technologies, was developing some of the most innovative data-sharing tools ever, to the alarm of its rivals. Things were sure to get even better as Journigan conquered the market and Arthur Potts, Julian’s boss, came to respect him all the more.

Overall, the trip was going beautifully. But a recent grad hired to help out with tasks on the admin side had waited a bit too long to book rooms for the three of them. She had no idea how popular the conference was and how fast the nicer hotels would sell out. So the three colleagues had to stay somewhere in an iffy part of town, not far from the conference, but also not so distant from the corners where

Reality Is the Beginning

- Michael Washburn dealers sold crystal meth and ladies of the evening set up shop.

“That’s what I can’t wrap my head around about this city. It’s like: bank, department store, sex shop, bank, pot dispensary, bank, high-end restaurant. Not at all like other places with their respectable areas separated from their red-light district,” Phil remarked before taking another sip of merlot.

“I’d like to come here sometime with no official schedule, no expectations of me, just do as I please for a week,” Stephanie mused.

“To me there’s no such distinction,” Julian countered.

He drank more of the excellent wine, watching the strangers pass on the street, knowing they felt secure in the belief they were on their way to the discreet private spaces where they tended the gardens of their inner lives. Over on the other side of the Place des Arts, an elevator with glittering lights on its top and base began its ascent within a translucent tube on a huge building’s northwest corner.

“It could all change tomorrow,” Phil said.

Julian looked at his colleague in perplexity.

Phil, getting quite drunk, went on. “I mean, you know as well as I do what our rivals are like. They want to be able to steal data from the other side of the world. They’re not going to sit around while we hire the best and brightest. There’s always more money you can make somewhere else. Give them time, they’ll poach people just like they did with Doug Kaminski.”

Julian winced. Phil had raised a delicate issue.

Stephanie was quick to respond, “Well, Phil. Of course there are multiple theories as to why Doug quit.”

“Yeah, I know, Steph, he was the conscience of the industry and he couldn’t accept what we were doing. Are doing.”

“The same reason Stan Forrest left.”

They were tipsy and speaking loosely. Julian wished they would both shut up, but Phil continued, “No, Steph. Stan left because he was dead-set against the merger with Karlsbad Systems, when that was a thing. He said forget it, Journigan and Karlsbad don’t play in the same league. No way do we pool our resources with such a mercenary company. And he got drummed out, poor bastard, and then—go figure—the merger fell through anyway! What a total fuck story.”

Stephanie nodded.

“And now Karlsbad’s German-owned.”

This was too much for Julian to remain silent. “Neither Doug nor Stan understood the industry they worked in. You don’t stay competitive by paring down R&D and avoiding the development of apps that some people out there might find invasive and potentially dangerous. You master them and show people how to use them responsibly, and that’s

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

how what seem like radical innovations become mainstream. We wouldn’t be sitting here now if we’d shied away—”

“Yeah, I get it, Julian. We make the killer apps and put them out there and then they’re not killer anymore. That makes perfect sense, even if it kind of avoids the moral and ethical questions.”

Julian gazed at Phil in annoyance. This had been such a pleasant evening until a minute ago.

“Who just raised the specter of the whole industry getting turned upside down, you or me? It won’t happen through poaching. It’ll occur when Wehrlitech designs a data-copying app that makes twenty years of R&D redundant. They’re moving in all around us and you can bet their German masters won’t tell them to back down anytime soon.”

“...as he watched and brooded, lines from Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ rose up in his mind. He found resonance in lines written at a time when Julian’s livelihood was unheard of, when screens and keypads were eons from becoming a feature of everyday life and the internet was inconceivable. ‘Reality is the beginning, not the end,’ Stevens wrote.”

Wehrlitech, the stateside subsidiary of the Bonn-based corporate tech titan, DataSammler, was a name that Journigan employees whispered with awe and no small amount of fear.

“Does anyone know where Doug ended up?” Stephanie asked.

The question froze Julian and Phil. Of course Julian should know where his ex-colleague and ostensible friend was these days, but he had assumed Doug went freelance indefinitely and withheld his allegiance from all players in a corrupt industry.

Phil gestured at the strangers passing below.

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

“Maybe he’s here. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

Stephanie shrugged. “Doug disparaged these events in the past. They’re so incestuous, aren’t they, Julian?”

“No argument there.”

The point was valid. People at the annual conference acted like members of a family in spite of the intense and bitter rivalries. Stephanie’s observation looked to be all the truer of this year’s event. On the first day, someone would roll out a proposal for a tech equivalent of the Geneva Convention, whereby the leading firms would vow to refrain from all forms of corporate espionage and data pilfering that existed or might come into being in the future. Julian was curious about the details of the proposal.

“I’m totally wasted,” Stephanie slurred.

As if on cue, Julian replied, “All right, see you in the morning.”

Her departure left Julian with only Phil for company and, for this, Julian resented her (unfairly, he knew). Against his better judgment, he ordered a fresh glass of wine and downed it fast, then another and yet another, hoping to recapture the easy confidence he had felt before all the contention was aired. Phil’s own semi-drunkenness did not make him a lot of fun to be with, Julian observed. He sat looking at Julian in a stupor, as if expecting his colleague to make conversation.

Julian got up and hoisted his glass. “To the greatest tech company in the world!”

Phil picked himself up, wobbling, and raised his own glass. A couple of people on the terrace looked over at the drunk men curiously. Julian almost wanted to hit his colleague. Phil had no right to snub Julian, who worked harder, had shown the right instincts about Stan Forrest when that exec voiced doubts about growth and innovation and had the best relationship of anyone with the CEO, Arthur Potts.

After the toast, Julian walked to the rail and looked out at the citizens who had little or no concept of bluesnarfing, bluebugging, bluesniping or any of the other fast-evolving techniques that could make the stuff of their lives the domain of everyone with a phone.

Cupping his hands, he cried out, “Ignorant peons of the city! Kneel before the masters of tech. You have no idea how far we can see and how much we hold your lives in thrall!”

“Julian,” Phil said, trying to rein him in.

Julian hated his prim colleague and snapped, “Shut up” before returning his address to the passersby below. “Peons! Luddites! Innocent men and women! You have no clue which way the world is heading and how power grows concentrated in the hands of the cleverest few. But you will come to know your place in the new dispensation soon

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

enough, oh, I can assure you of that!”

A few strangers looked up to the terrace without much interest as they passed. This might not be the most inspiring address in the history of oration, but Julian didn’t care.

“Julian,” Phil repeated with the same warning tone.

“Relax, Phil, I’m just joking. You have no sense of humor, that’s why you’re not nearly as close to Artie Potts as I am.”

The others on the terrace leaned in close and whispered to one another.

“Julian, come on, let’s get out of here before they kick us out.”

“Okay, okay.”

They exchanged a few words as they ambled through the streets, crowded with people milling around outside the bars, and drunks and panhandlers and women offering “dates” to passersby. These hookers are so unabashed about what they do, he thought, so unafraid to project an identity outward for the world to behold. You have to admire that.

Passing out of the busy area, the two colleagues turned onto the side street where the hotel stood. Down this way, the houses were of modest size; even if not in awful shape, it would be tough to sell these to tech executives looking to start a family.

The hotel was on a street parallel to the one with the bars and cafés and flanked by a pair of narrow alleys. When Julian got back to the office, he would have words with that new kid. He thought of the executives of Wehrlitech and Karlsbad and other firms partying in fivestar digs. Adam Macklin must be having a blast. Then he remembered that Karlsbad had merged with DataSammler, Wehrlitech’s corporate parent. He was still not used to thinking of them as part of the same entity. He was drunk and his thoughts were a mess.

Julian and Phil found their rooms on the ground floor and said good night.

“Sweet dreams, bro. Tomorrow’s a brand new day,” Phil assured.

Julian laughed at this idiotic banality, and found it a little strange, though he could not think of why.

They were in Rooms 108 and 110, respectively, and Stephanie was somewhere upstairs. Julian’s room was located at the very end of the hall and, as he saw now, it was quite small. He thought of asking for an upgrade, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble. There was no way now to get the cost approved, and Arthur Potts, who Julian otherwise liked, could be officious (to say the least) about these things.

He locked the door, stripped to his undies and cracked open the window, at street level but with tough bars. A gust surged through and

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

relieved the stuffiness of the room a bit. He went into the bathroom and drank water out of his cupped hands for several minutes. Then he went to the bed and fell on his back, savoring the breeze, proud that the firm had sent him here to represent it to investors and the media.

Suddenly, an epiphany came. “Tomorrow’s a brand new day” was what Stan Forrest, who got drummed out of Journigan for his opposition to the Karlsbad merger, always recited. Oh well, it’ s a common enough idiocy, way too common, Julian figured.

As he lay there in the bed, thinking of how stimulating the conference would be, he heard a sound that he found faintly amusing...at first.

“...he knew he had fallen prey to a strange kind of prurience. Having passionately defended the data-culling functions of which his firm was a pioneer, Julian began to imagine what they could achieve.”

“Cut that out! Cut that out now!”

It sounded like the voice of a drunk and came from somewhere not too distant, maybe one of the alleys not far from where he lay. Now a second voice made itself heard.

“Gimme that! Give it back now, you ugly bastard!”

“Get away from me. Lemme alone.”

“You owe me a fiver.”

“I said lemme alone.”

“Fuck you!”

Yes, two winos were having a spat. It was kind of funny, he guessed. Julian Ruskin spent so much time in his tech bubble that he forgot how unlike the rest of the world it is.

“You owe me, you cheap bastard.”

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

“Go

fuck your mother.”

The back and forth went on, less animated now. Yes, this was funny, but it was quite late and he had a demanding day ahead.

The voices dwindled further, but then, just as Julian began to drift off, they picked up again.

“Cheap bastard. I hope you die!”

“Lemme alone!”

“Die, you goddamn alkie!”

Julian kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the second voice to make a pointed reply, but instead, he heard only silence again. He began to think that at last they were done for the night and he could rest.

He closed his eyes and felt quite at ease in this strange room in a foreign town.

Then the first voice rose again, with a notably different tone. It did not address the other voice and sounded more serious and focused in its contempt. “You, listenin’ in your bed now. Yeah, you.”

Julian thought he had not heard correctly. But there was more.

“Yeah, you, listenin’ now. We both know what you did.”

This was amusing. The bum must really be wasted, and was speaking to his own shadow, if any light came into that dismal alley, Julian thought.

“Yeah, we know all right. We know damn well. Those bars won’t protect you forever.”

Well, here was a nice touch, Julian thought. Maybe this was a shtick that the wino saved for guests, some of whom just might be gullible enough to think he was speaking to them directly. Barely awake, Julian strained to hear more.

“Yeah, you can’t ride and you can’t hide forever. No, you were horrible to that woman.”

He chuckled. In a world full of people who were horrible to each other, the wino had found an all-purpose colloquy. But the evening’s entertainment was over. A few seconds more and Julian would be fast asleep.

“No, you can’t hide, it all catches up with you in the end. You can’t forget it and you can’t move on, Julian.”

He was sure he had not heard correctly. The wino’s speech was slurred, and this was someone less than coherent at even the best of times.

“No, Julian. You will pay. You will suffer. We know what you did to her. You aren’t much of a gentleman, Julian. ”

All at once, it felt stuffy under the sheets, even with the window

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

ajar, and the room became a strange, hostile place.

“You will pay for everything in time, Julian. You will die.”

He swung his legs off the bed, leapt up and pulled his pants and shirt on. Groping in the dark, it took a maddeningly long time to find his shoes and wallet. Then he dashed out of the room, up the hall, through the lobby and onto the street. Out there in the sweet-smelling air, it seemed so peaceful. A hundred thoughts flashed through his mind as he raced to the corner and turned into the alley, running past his room that somehow led to still other alleys.

This must be some huckster’s idea of a prank. Someone at the conference, like Doug Kaminski or another former colleague or a friend who had found out he would be attending, had put the wino up to this or had done an impersonation. When he got into the perpendicular alley, he would face a group of friends with their sleeves pressed to their mouths. Or maybe, just maybe, this was no prank at all, but a malicious move by a company, perhaps none other than DataSammler, seeking to undermine Journigan.

He turned the corner and moved into the passage between the rear of the hotel and a big building whose façade was on the block below. Here was a dismal space with trash and broken glass under the barred windows in the garish yellow-orange glow from a lamp high up on the other building, and, sure enough, there loomed a reeking figure with a thick beard, in a tattered, filthy jacket and ripped jeans. Sitting with his back against the large building’s rear wall, the bum clutched a bottle in a paper bag in his hairy right hand.

In his fury, Julian felt an urge to kick the wino in the face as hard as he could, or maybe smash that bottle and cut the offender, but even now, he had the presence of mind to remember hearing two voices and to know that it was the kind of situation where people make life-altering mistakes. Julian looked down on this poor slob for drinking without restraint, but one might ask what Julian had spent the last four hours doing.

This had to be the person who had taunted him. No other possibility seemed logical.

“So, who put you up to this? Do you work for DataSammler?”

The question was so absurd, it begged to be said aloud. Maybe he should also ask the drunk for some investment advice. The wino appeared to look at him without quite seeing him, but did not budge. Nonetheless, Julian was going to get an answer.

“You were the one calling my name just now. Thought you were pretty clever, eh? It’s a high school type of prank. Tell me who’s behind this.”

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

His plea invoked a grin, exposing a gap in the stranger’s upper front teeth, but no answer.

“Goddammit, this isn’t funny. You think I won’t do something to you right here because you’re a fucking bum? I’ll hurt you. Tell me who put you up to this!”

The other still stared. Without a verbal response, it was impossible to know whether this was the provocateur.

“Who put you up to it?”

Still no answer. This, too, was a provocation. If the whole thing was a bad actor’s doing, then maybe the idea was to keep Julian up all night and render him unpresentable at the conference or absent from it. But this bastard was not getting off so easy. With a quick look around, he reached for the bottle and snatched it from the wino’s dirty hands. He studied the darkly expressive eyes of the semi-prone man, blood pounding in his ears, then, with a battle cry, hurled the bottle hard against the rear wall of the hotel. It burst into fragments and redamber liquid sprayed his cheeks and his nice shirt, and flecks of glass hit his cheeks. Julian fled.

In the morning, there was just enough time between breakfast and the start of the conference for a meeting with an executive of a local firm, a middle-aged man with jet-black hair who sat on a swivel chair behind a desk so shiny and clean Julian thought that it venerated a certain ethos. Papers sitting idle on your desk are like dirt under your fingernails. Julian wished he could appear a bit more fastidious as he sat with Stephanie on the other side of the desk and listened to her do the work. He had shaved in a hurry and missed some patches. He felt groggy and addled. Stephanie made Journigan sound like the firm to bet on, all right. But as she talked, Julian couldn’t stop thinking about the scene in the alley and wondered whether Phil had heard him rail at the wino.

“...in this market, the investors who seek us out will be those with the most proprietary information to guard. When it comes to sniping and snarfing, they want the best of the best, to achieve equilibrium with their rivals based on the concept of mutually assured destruction.”

This last phrase brought a laugh from the clean-cut executive, and Julian realized too late he should probably also laugh. He still felt horrible. Having made it through the meeting so far without crying or throwing up, he was not out of it yet. When the executive asked why Stan Forrest, who had enjoyed no small respect in the industry, was no longer with Journigan, Julian mumbled and stammered and finally said that Stan was a valued employee who left to pursue other opportunities. It was a non-answer, clarifying nothing. Ten minutes later, in the lobby

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael

Washburn

of the office building, Stephanie gave him a look that made him feel utterly naked.

But there would be more meetings. It was time to join Phil at the conference center three blocks away. On the way over, Stephanie barely spoke. As they reached the entrance, she ditched him with a few curt words about wanting to meet friends and former colleagues

“Nothing was safe anymore, not the minutes of sensitive meetings where executives learned how their perfor- mance fell short and they must improve or else, or the new guidelines for what constituted sexual harassment complaints, or the results, strategies and projections that various divisions of a firm set forth. Nothing at all is safe and no business can operate in an environ- ment where its most closely guarded data and trade secrets are likely to fall into competitors’ hands or go viral.”

of hers in the minutes before the program began. Something in her tone said that if she never saw Julian again, she could live with it. He went inside, flashed his credentials and moved into the hall where Phil sat in one of the scarlet chairs in the twelfth row. His colleague looked at him oddly and mumbled about the strict company rules regarding not missing coffee in the morning for any reason. The weak effort at levity made Julian guess that Stephanie’s reaction to his performance in the interview had gone further than he had imagined and she had texted with Phil when he wasn’t looking. For all the cute jokes and chumminess, they were both jealous of Julian’s cozy relationship with Arthur Potts, or so he had always suspected. Any reason to fire or demote Julian could only help them.

He looked around at the rows full of figures in this huge space and really began to take them in. The men and women in this row and

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

the ones above and below were so sharply dressed that he regretted the business casual choices he had made in the blur of six a.m. His blazer and turtleneck were not a fit for this event. Now all the overheads dimmed, save for those above the stage, which beamed down a fierce light and gave the figure who strode up to the microphone the portentous aura of an actor in a work of experimental theater. He introduced himself as Adam Macklin, Executive Vice President of Wehrlitech, and, after the faux pleasantries about what an honor it was, proceeded to give a ten-minute précis of this era of escalating rivalry among the developers and marketers of tech, and of apps that were increasingly radical in purpose and design that enabled lone actors with bluesniping devices, some shaped like real weapons, to penetrate systems and programs and help themselves to the data inside. One response to the threat was to limit the use of Bluetooth programs and impose internal protocols to shut them down in the face of a threat, but engineers were hard at work devising the means to detect when computers took such steps and to flip over to whatever auxiliary technology might be in place and continue their invasive mission.

Nothing was safe anymore, not the minutes of sensitive meetings where executives learned how their performance fell short and they must improve or else, or the new guidelines for what constituted sexual harassment complaints, or the results, strategies and projections that various divisions of a firm set forth. Nothing at all is safe and no business can operate in an environment where its most closely guarded data and trade secrets are likely to fall into competitors’ hands or go viral. “Many of you in the audience here know this already,” Macklin said. “What remains is to formulate an industry-wide response.” Macklin had a manifesto in hand, and even though it was the work of a pseudonymous author, much like the inventor of cryptocurrency, he was sure people would appreciate the courage needed to make such a bold proposal. As he listened, Julian guessed (and he thought others in the audience must also entertain the idea) that someone in Macklin’s firm had written the proposal and this was a ruse to make it sound neutral, in line with the industry’s interests. Macklin proceeded to read out the manifesto in full. It called for a pact under which the tech firms would submit to have their systems and computers undergo audits and inspections by a team of experts trained to ferret out the digital residue of bluesniping and kindred technologies. Any firm found to have compromised the data integrity and proprietary information of another, whether this meant the development of a competing product or posting something embarrassing online or sharing the secrets of a competitor, would cede a majority share of its equity to that rival.

For companies not publicly traded, a takeover would proceed by other means. It was all in the proposal, which Macklin clutched in a pudgy hand and waved around as if to make all the executives grasp that here was an answer to some of the scenarios that kept them up at night.

The reaction in the audience was muted; no one got up and cheered as had happened at past conferences during the rollout of a product or app, but there were polite nods and murmurs of interest. One delegate from every company present would cast a vote on it the next day. That allowed enough time for the delegate to confer with the CEO by Zoom, unless of course the delegate was the CEO. Everyone had known it was coming...people had already made decisions.

This was all too much for Julian. Ignoring Phil’s look of concern, he stood straight up and raised his hand. In a proper Q&A, someone would hand him a mic, but he knew his convictions lent his voice strength.

Noticing him from down there, Macklin gazed up expectantly. In the rival executive’s look was a hint of recognition. Julian could barely contain himself.

“You’re basically asking the firms represented here to kneecap themselves. If they’re going to undergo these audits, they’ll have to abandon R&D on everything. Then there’s no way they can hope to stay competitive as startups and state-sponsored tech companies in foreign jurisdictions proceed full throttle with this stuff and come up with ways to invade not only Bluetooth but every online space that ever has been or will be. But it’s an academic question, of course, because they won’t really let any outside team examine what they’re working on, they’ll just offer decoys.”

People murmured and some of them looked around for security to eject this upstart, but he went on. “Plus the proposal, as written, will severely crimp the internal security of firms, in an age when bad actors working for rivals can get themselves hired and get busy on working whatever mischief they like. It will even interfere with routine monitoring and tracking of so-called legitimate employees to make sure they’re not illegally copying files or mining blockchains or pumping and dumping or engaging in any number of behaviors that wreck markets and erode confidence in the new currencies. In short, Adam, I don’t think you have a clue what you’re getting into here. Look all these people in the eye and tell them they should take a haircut on their own talents and livelihoods!”

The analogy was more than a bit maladroit, but it incited a few laughs and scattered applause. Adam Macklin, who gave seven or eight talks like this per year, was unflappable.

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

“You jumped the gun there, friend. I was just getting to the part where I explain one of the stipulations of the pact, which is that firms may still use whatever data analysis and monitoring they deem fit internally. This is a proposal for cooperation among players, not selfdestruction.”

The applause was much louder now. Julian sat down and watched with a rueful look as the next speaker took the floor and began to talk about consumer habits in an evolving industry. Phil did not look

“...the world they grew up in had vanished like mist.

To paraphrase a poet Julian had read in college— not Stevens, but William Bronk—little did they grasp how meaningless the word ‘here’ has become.”

at his colleague until things wrapped up for the day, then said they would catch up at the hotel and vanished. Just now, Julian had no wish to be around Phil or Stephanie or any of these people. He hurried out of the building and up the street toward the plaza with its fancy cafés.

He found a café across from the one where they hung out the night before, with a pleasant, brightly lit terrace. People were eating dinner and conversing in low tones. But when Julian sat down by a rail overlooking a side street, he was not the only solitary patron. He watched the strangers on the terrace, immersed in their banter or in a private hell like himself, and as he watched and brooded, lines from Wallace Stevens’ poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” rose up in his mind. He found resonance in lines written at a time when Julian’s livelihood was unheard of, when screens and keypads were eons from

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

becoming a feature of everyday life and the internet was inconceivable. “Reality is the beginning, not the end,” Stevens wrote. And a bit later came the passage about the man who “kneels always on the edge of space/In the pallid perceptions of its distances.”

Funny that these words should creep back into Julian’s mind right now, after his strange and harrowing experiences. In his present frame of mind, it was hard not to wonder whether one of those welldressed men and women at the tables around him, who seemed to make a show of ignoring him, might have put the wino in the alley up to the harassment of the night before. But he did not recognize any of them and could not know whether one might work for DataSammler or a subsidiary or a rival he had never heard about. Even in a market this interconnected, there were firms in that last category.

But as a waiter brought a glass of wine and sat it down before Julian with a poker face, other thoughts crowded out his suspicions and he knew he had fallen prey to a strange kind of prurience. Having passionately defended the data-culling functions of which his firm was a pioneer, Julian began to imagine what they could achieve.

If reality is the beginning, what secrets from the storied years of these strangers’ experience could apps and algorithms capture and project outward? Consider that man there in a beige blazer, eating a sandwich, nodding at the points made by the other at his table. People these days smile on startups and capital is fluid and terms are flexible and many lenders will hear the siren song of a new firm with a mission to change the world, but you never know. Maybe in a city five thousand miles away, they are arranging the funeral of someone who could not recoup the debts this man owes and who found the financial pressures of the moment too much to bear, and a dozen more funerals are to come as the extent of his betrayals emerges. That woman over there in the copper blouse and the black dress—maybe the bright young Vassar grad who dared compete with this woman lies at home on a couch, lips purple from the poison she took, and tonight is the evening of the next phase of this strikingly articulate exec’s career. And that man over there who keeps braying loudly every few seconds, downing glass after glass of wine, maybe he revels in plans that he and friends have hatched for the murder of the CEO of another firm that dared to ape the innovations on which all his pride rests. It may not be likely, but it’s not impossible either. Julian could think of precedent, all right. The possibilities he read into the faces and voices around him would all come to shining neon prominence on the internet with a bit of carefully aimed bluesniping, daring and willingness to face the legal blowback.

Julian sat drinking wine until he was well on the way to feeling hammered. He looked around some more at the strangers’ faces. Most of them did not speak too loudly because they did not want others

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

to overhear what they were saying. But the world they grew up in had vanished like mist. To paraphrase a poet Julian had read in college—not Stevens, but William Bronk—little did they grasp how meaningless the word “here” has become.

Not quite everyone on the terrace was a stranger, he saw now. One of the guests at a table he had moved past on the way in was a young man in a Brooks Brothers suit, eagerly asserting things and making points to an older man. Julian knew who the young hotshot was. Here was Chris Meadows, who Julian had met at other conferences and talks and who used to be at a tech consultancy before disappearing from sight for a while, as people do.

He half-walked and half-staggered up to the table on the edge of the terrace and placed his hand on the shoulder of the guy he believed to be Chris Meadows. Never in a millennium could he have anticipated the young man’s reaction.

“Hey, Chris, buddy, what’re you up to these days?”

The other said something quietly to the older man across the table without turning his head, then looked frantically around the terrace.

“Hey, security! This man’s drunk and he’s harassing me! HEY!”

Julian thought Chris must not have recognized him. It had been a couple of years. Such things happened. Only when two waiters hurried up and grabbed him by the elbows did the realization sink in that Chris might know exactly who he was. He apologized to the waiters, swore not to make a scene and went to the bar to hang out for a while.

Soon the place was more crowded, with people standing at the bar giving their orders to two harried servers. A community sprang up here every Friday and Saturday night, Julian guessed, as spontaneous and artificial as strangers bunched together in cyberspace in what people continue to dignify as “networks.” Julian milled around wondering whether the memory of Chris could have grown so vague in his mind that he had walked right up and placed a hand on a stranger. But he could not dismiss another possibility.

A pair of young women stood holding drinks and talking near the rail above Saint Catherine. He leaned toward one of them, said something about how busy the place was and waited for her reaction, but she went on talking to her friend as if she had not heard. He thought of leaning in closer, but decided he had suffered enough embarrassment for one night. Then yet another strange thing occurred. A tall, thick-set man in a dark suit passed by and

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

handed Julian a glass of gin, seemingly mistaking him for a member of a party he had come here to meet. Julian tried to thank him, but he was already gone. This didn’t seem like such a bad life, he thought... Unless of course the bad actor responsible for the night before had upped his game and the glass in his hand contained poison. You have to die sometime, he decided, and why not in such bright, interesting company?

Now a vision came of himself lying on his back on the floor of the terrace, vomit and spit and blood caking around his mouth, as all the people pointed and laughed and cheered and clinked their glasses and a fusillade of fireworks shot into the night sky.

But when he took a sip of the cool, tangy liquid, that was at least not the immediate result. He felt relaxed enough to stroll casually to the rail and look out on Saint Catherine and the passersby. The incident earlier was fading in his mind and he began to enjoy himself a tiny bit.

Then he became aware of a pair of eyes gazing directly up at him. For a moment, it was a random thing in his peripheral vision, the kind of trifle that happens every day and you quickly forget. But those eyes did not look away. Someone wanted his attention. He turned to see a man on the street who had clearly known better days, or so we tend to assume about those who wear rags and have not bathed or shaved in weeks. The stranger had filthy, matted hair, a lean frame and a leer suggesting he knew things that Julian needed to remain secret. The disheveled man grinned, baring two rotting rows of teeth with many gaps, and held something up in his right hand. It was a phone, Julian realized. This must have been the wino who taunted him outside the hotel the night before, and he wanted Julian to believe he had some sort of damning, incriminating evidence on that phone.

Julian’s default reaction to upsetting situations kicked in. He would not give the other person the satisfaction of seeing him upset. Instead, he reached into his wallet and seized the nearest arm of a passing waiter in a white blazer. The young man turned around. Julian pointed toward the street and said the weirdo down there had stolen his phone, and if the waiter could get it back, he could have all the bills Julian held in his hand. Seconds later, the server was gone and so, too, was the stranger below. Julian sat there waiting and had three more drinks, letting the faces and chatter blur, but the server never came back.

He decided he had better get indoors before doing something he could not laugh about in the morning. He staggered back to the

hotel, looking every which way for the taunting vagrant, but to no avail. As soon as he reached his room, he swilled gallons of water before crashing out.

Two hours later, he bolted upright on the bed, sweat making his vision blurry, his heart hammering, his ears straining to detect any noise other than the wind moaning and rattling the pane behind the thick bars.

He had thought of the rival firms as suspects in the psychological torture visited on him since his arrival here, and had imagined them to be monoliths, impervious even now to the penetrative and extractive tools his firm developed. But, in truth, he did know someone who was close to the most specialized analysts and scientists at Wehrlitech and other entities under the DataSammler umbrella, and his name was Doug Kaminski. Julian did have Doug’s information somewhere in the depths of his various accounts. He knew he had fallen out of touch through sheer laziness.

Loath to bother anyone after midnight, he dared hope that Doug might understand given all that had happened. He picked up his phone, scrolled through messages from months before, found a number and dialed. To his surpsise, Doug answered.

“Julian. I knew I should wait up just in case someone I haven’t spoken to in two years called me out of the blue after midnight.”

Julian had prepared an introduction, but Doug had spotted him on caller ID and remembered him all too vividly.

“Same old sarcastic saw. How are you, man? I’ve been wanting to call you—”

“Just tell me what you need, okay? You should be shot for calling at this hour.”

“I might have been shot for not calling. Hear me out, all right, Doug?”

“Are you drunk again?”

“Hear me out, man, please. Have you heard anything in your circles, like maybe about someone wanting to get back at me? Anything at all?”

“I’m totally lost.”

“Damn it, Doug. Could I word the question any more clearly?” He heard a coarse, bitter laugh.

“I guess if you live in a bubble long enough, you may cease to know or care what others think and say. Even in your own company, let alone the competitors. What I’m trying to say, Julian, is this: tell me when there aren’t people whispering about you.”

Julian felt anger rise inside him, but kept his tone level.

“Better a bubble than a nursery, Doug. I live in the real world. This is a cutthroat industry. Do people hate me for wanting Stan Forrest out for trying to stop the Karlsbad merger? It would be weird if I didn’t take some flak for that.”

“No, Julian. I’m not even talking about that. It’s more about the way you’ve treated people all your life. There’s stuff you told me that you probably don’t remember ever fessing up to, because you were, as they say, deep in your cups.”

“If reality is the begin- ning, what secrets from the storied years of these strangers’ experience could apps and algorithms capture and project outward?”

“We were friends. Pretty close. Maybe I didn’t always edit myself.”

Doug laughed again. “You sure didn’t, pal. I heard more than I needed to about how you humiliated a nice girl for her lack of sophistication when it comes to tech matters. Clara Hughes, I believe her name was. She’s not doing so well these days, in case you were wondering, not that I imagine you were.”

Clara Hughes. Julian had dated her for a year and they had more than their share of arguments, in which he berated her for not seeing the emperor’s clothes. If she understood tech and what Julian and his firm were up to, she would have given him the respect he deserved, or so he told her. Julian hadn’t thought he was boasting, just showing proper pride in who he was and what he did. He had been

cruel to her, it was true. Lately he had heard something about Clara from a mutual friend, about depression and a suicide attempt.

“I believe Clara’s parents prepared a lawsuit, but someone took a look at the complaint and threw it out. Shot through with unprovable allegations.” Julian groaned. That complaint must still exist somewhere in some form. Trying to get back to the matter at hand, he continued, “I wonder how this is remotely relevant to my standing as a tech entrepreneur.”

“Oh, I know, Julian, it’s the stuff of your private life. How dare anyone dredge it up? Like that time in college when that guy you hated was running for head of the student government, and you surreptitiously taped his girlfriend saying some pretty unbelievable things about what went on between them in private, and you leaked a transcript. Boy, Julian. What a way to kneecap your enemy. No one wants to vote for a guy who can’t get it up!”

The tone at the other end was brutish.

“College isn’t college without some pranks, Doug.”

“Yeah, real funny, I can tell from how hard you’re laughing.”

“So all this feeds in some way into an assessment of my role in the industry, and might motivate someone to want to get back at me?”

“Make of it what you will. Johnny Adams. ‘Facts are stubborn things.’”

“Doug, man. Sometimes I’m deeply sorry we’re not still friends...and this isn’t one of them.”

He went to bed wondering whether he could get any sleep. But tonight there were only bits of conversation from passersby. And the wind rattling the pane behind the sturdy bars.

At the conference the next morning, he did not sit anywhere near his colleagues, to whom he had barely spoken in the last twentyfour hours. He did not need to confer with them. Today the vote on the so-called tech Geneva Convention was to take place. It bothered him that Journigan’s executive vice president and the firm’s in-house counsel had named Phil Holm as the delegate who would vote on behalf of Journigan, but Julian told himself that Arthur Potts, the highest on the totem pole, the one whose voice mattered, loved him like a son.

Down on the stage, a host reminded the attendees of the significance of the pact that those delegates among them were here to approve or shoot down. The room faded into semi-darkness as consoles with screens and dial pads slid out of cases in the armrests of the chairs and extended themselves horizontally in front of the seated delegates. Julian looked around the room at the somber men and women who thought here was an event in the history of the industry. All was quiet and still. Then the voting began.

A tense minute went by, and then the results appeared on the

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

screen at the back of the stage. The resolution won by fifty-five votes to twelve, with three abstentions. People gasped and cheered and applauded until the speaker on the stage got things under control.

Julian stayed until four o’clock, then decided that with the vote over and done, there was nothing of importance going on here. No doubt the vote upset some people, given that the firms had vowed not to spy on one another, but the pact contained an exemption for internal surveillance. Many CEOs were going to learn highly distasteful things about those who worked for them. But Julian knew his boss loved him, he was essential to Journigan’s strategy for global conquest, and he had not a care in the world. He could hear about the rest of the conference from Phil or someone. He doubted it held any surprises.

Making his way through the streets in the pale light, he felt he would miss the Place des Arts, even if the exhilaration of that evening before the conference began seemed gone for good. He felt glad when he saw the terraces up ahead, and picked up his pace, thinking he would live it up on his last evening here, and that was when he saw the vagrant in a tattered denim jacket, whose features mostly hid behind dense, graying facial hair.

Yes, he was sure. There up ahead, wobbling, leering, was the grubby middle-aged stranger who had mocked him twice before. The wino he had confronted in the alley was not the provocateur who had called out Julian’s name. Here, Julian felt certain, was that villain in person.

The vagrant had seen Julian first, but the tech executive would not drop the ball now. He dashed up the street in a fury, not caring that he might be about to commit a life-altering mistake. But the vagrant quickly turned and fled down a perpendicular street leading toward the old part of the city.

Surprised at how fast the middle-aged man could run, Julian pushed himself and galloped down the street, not caring if strangers looked. There weren’t many people around on this part of the street anyway. The wino turned again and cut up a street parallel to the one where the encounter began, and Julian rounded the corner in time to see him turn yet again and dart down a side street leading still deeper into the old port.

As Julian turned onto the side street, cutting between tall stone buildings, his first confused impression was that the vagrant had vanished. Then he saw a door close within the façade of one of the buildings and picked up his pace again, thinking he knew exactly where his tormentor had gone and this was finally the endgame. Julian would find out who had it in for him, who had toyed with and teased him from a distance in so cowardly a manner. He would know who that filthy, stinking man was, and who had sent him. Looking up at the

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

façade, he took in a medley of spires, arches and stained glass. The building was, of all things, a church.

He flung open the door and rushed into the dark space. Only now, as he breathed in the floating dust and nearly tripped on a loose nail, did the reality hit home that this was a disused church. He guessed it was one of those places where homeless squatters set up their roost

“He had thought of the rival firms as suspects in the psychological torture visited on him since his arrival here, and had imagined them to be monoliths, impervious even now to the penetrative and extractive tools his firm developed.”

until complaints grow too loud for the police to ignore. The bad actor who had harassed Julian Ruskin and ruined his trip would not get away with it. Julian rushed through the dismal outer room into the chamber where the devout had once assembled and saw, in the light filtering through the stained glass above, just how decrepit the place was. The rotting pews were empty and heaps of plaster, broken glass and dust lay on the floor and the narrow stage. What light made it in here had a dirty yellowish sheen, the color of God’s disdain.

Julian looked around for that wino, wanting to throttle him until he confessed everything, and then keep at it until the worthless vagrant died. Say what you like about me, but I’m not a coward. I don’t do what you did in that alley, Julian thought, feeling an anger darker and more savage than any he had ever known.

But the man who had lured him in here had vanished, and no one else was around. Panting, cursing, Julian tried to calm down a bit. He lurched over to the pew closest to the stage and sat down. As he

Reality Is the Beginning - Michael Washburn

waited there in the dimness, his anger at last began to ease and he knew he was not the kind of man who kills with his bare hands. Still, he must get even.

At first he thought he was seeing things when a figure shuffled out onto the stage from somewhere in the nether parts of the room. Here was another homeless person, unwashed and unshaven, in a tattered black coat and torn pants. He stood in the middle of the stage without looking at Julian, who sat transfixed with no idea what to do or say. A subtle change occurred in the quality of the light. Maybe a thick cloud had passed over the sun. In the still dimmer space a second figure moved onto the stage. This one wore the remains of a leather bomber jacket and dungarees with myriad stains and splotches. Finally, in the waning light, it was just possible to see a third figure amble onto the stage and mingle with the others. Julian knew exactly who this vagrant was. He had seen him now on a number of streets around the city.

The figures on the stage muttered too low for him to hear, and then began a slow dance of reproach and recrimination. They pointed, gesticulated, asserted, argued as they spun. Then the one in the leather jacket drew a knife and threatened the one in the denim jacket, Julian’s original foil. The affronted wino waved his arms in protest and retreated a step, and then the one in the black coat took something out of a pocket and rammed it into his back. Julian’s provocateur said something to the backstabber and fell to his knees, a grin of spite mingled with agony on his nearly indiscernible features. Then, for the first time since coming onstage, he made eye contact with Julian. Though he wasn’t especially well-read, Julian knew that Shakespeare is a name people are supposed to respect, and he recalled just enough of sophomore-year English to know that Julius Caesar’s unflinching attitudes about who deserved to be a member of the polity, about who it could absorb and maintain its integrity, had been the proximate cause of his murder. As the stranger on the stage stared fiercely in the faded light, Julian knew that he was no stranger at all, that he was looking at Stan Forrest’s grizzled face.

The urge to hurt and kill had left him. No one had put the provocateur up to anything and, at this juncture, there was nothing else Julian needed to find out...or so he thought as he started to walk back to his hotel. Those pathetic excuses for human beings had made their point and thought they were clever.

No doubt Karlsbad Systems and many other firms out there did have a toxic culture and developed apps that eroded privacy. No longer could they turn those insidious inventions on their competitors, at least openly. There were no guarantees as to what secret directives they might pursue. But the only people who really needed to worry now, Julian thought, were those peons at the other firms who did not enjoy a cozy relationship with their boss. Their secrets, their dirt were

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

fair game. Julian Ruskin was the smartest man in the industry and the strangers he passed in the dusk could choke on the stuff of their insignificant lives for all he cared.

At that instant, Julian saw a figure coming toward him, from the direction of the convention center. It was Phil Holm, who was happy to fill his co-worker in on what he had missed. After all, Julian had left the conference just before Adam and Phil had taken the stage to announce something pretty momentous: Julian, Phil, Stephanie and hundreds of others were about to get a new boss.

Fragments of a Larger Work

Joseph Couchet

“

Their jugular’s exposed, now do what I pay you to do!”

With a tap and a huff, the call ended. Bewildered looks on the grass and walking path in front of the park bench lingered as paces slackened. Madelaine regarded them all with a mere tsk and opened her purse. The polished Italian leather attracted almost as many looks as the roar of its owner, who rifled through its contents for a silver cigarette case. A long, luscious drag would really hit the spot.

The mere sight of the slender cigarette in one hand with a flame in the other was enough to scatter the lingering passersby. It always did. With a wry smile, smoke billowed from lavender lips. A sharp crossing of legs that flashed a new pair of shoes came next, followed by another deep inhale. The exhale practically trickled out, wrestling with the slight breeze that toyed with Madelaine’s gilded locks. As she swept them back into place, she remembered that she was overdue to have the roots touched up. A touch of gray was fine for a man, but a touch of death for a woman, particularly in her line of work. Green eyes still focused straight ahead, she darted a hand into the bag that naturally matched the shoes. The little compact mirror had found its usual resting place at an unimaginable depth, but it could never hide

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

for long. That could also be said for the silver streaks in Madelaine’s widow’s peak.

Meanwhile, the phone lay peeping just over the edge of the bag, knowing that it possessed the contact who could once again remove the evidence. Madelaine instead chose to stare directly into its reflection through an exhaled haze. A firm jaw and a sharp nose still cut an impressive profile at any age. Only traces of separation showed in her neck, which she partially blamed on the harsh afternoon sun. She no longer had the youthful sheen of a twenty-five-year-old, and she was not chasing after it, either. Experience had its charms and wiles, too. Still, a visit for a touch of color wouldn’t hurt. Madelaine’s free hand inched its way to the eagerly awaiting cell.

“Oh, honey, stay away from that nasty smoke!”

“Come back over here, sweetie, with Mommy and Daddy.” A little girl in a knee-high skirt and babydoll shoes grinned at Madelaine before scampering away to her preppy parents, who lingered just out of secondhand range. Madelaine responded in kind, then lifted her head and exhaled. Daddy lumbered with a large blanket in his arms for a few more steps from the bench before he dropped the folded mound in the grass.

“Daddy, why so close?” the daughter asked, her eyes widening.

“Maybe Daddy likes to breathe in tar and nicotine,” Mommy answered for him with a sneer. She clutched the basket in her hands a little more tightly as she awaited a reply.

“Of course not,” he said with a crooked smile that he flashed towards Madelaine, who turned her attention towards her phone.

“Call me back now!” the text demanded. The next puff could not wait to escape her pounding chest.

“Excuse me,” Daddy began in a tone that sounded more like a bark than a request, “would you mind putting that thing out?” Madelaine’s eyes did not raise from the plastic screen as she flicked a butt in the direction of the walking path, her thumbs then poised to tap a response. Both parents stood with gaping jaws for a beat while their daughter bounded for the grassy area behind the bench.

“The nerve of you!” Mommy yelled. “Children are here!”

“And other adults who don’t want to breathe in that filth!” Daddy added.

Madelaine raised her head. She needed a reply to silence the demand to make the call. How dare a contractor make such demands! It was all so beneath her. She then focused on the two adamant figures before her. What were these two going on about, anyway?

“Plus, it’s littering,” Mommy sputtered as she regarded Madelaine’s stoic features.

“What’s littering?” Madelaine asked as she tapped on her

Fragments of a Larger Work - Joseph Couchet phone.

No job = no payment. Period.

“That butt. What else?”

“Since when does my anatomy qualify as litter?” She figured that would keep them quiet while her attention returned to her phone.

I will do it but this is it.

Good. Disappear when done.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Daddy finally returned before he looked

“A touch of gray was fine for a man, but a touch of death for a woman, particularly in her line of work.”

to his wife, who continued to size up the indignation before her. “Janis, do you want to get April while I set up here?”

She remained rooted to the spot as the giggles and shouts of April and some other children frolicked through the air. Her husband shook his head and turned his attention to the blanket, slowly unfolding its blue floral pattern.

“If you were a parent...” Janis finally hissed.

“But I am a parent,” Madelaine informed her and reached for another smoke.

The soles of the shoes were so thin that the ground’s every nook and cranny felt like Arthur’s feet were reading blistering Braille.

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

Walking on the asphalt path in this heat was unthinkable, though. A jacket and long pants didn’t raise the comfort level, even with the drafts wafting in from the holes, while the bags slung over his shoulder ensured a measured pace. It was the cost of carrying everything Arthur owned wherever he went. Today it was the park. A little patch of shade would be a blessing, not to mention the ideal location for an afternoon nap.

As he trudged along, the circus of families, dogs and joggers romped around him. Occasionally, a set of eyes flitted in his direction, only to dart away if even a remote chance of contact with Arthur’s arose. Arthur responded enthusiastically to the sight of sustenance. He snickered a bit as he pressed onward with his route. A patch of trees away from the noise might be best, he reckoned. On the other hand, being tagged again as a creeper in the woods would be no picnic. At least a ride in the back of a squad car meant air conditioning on the way to a bed for the night. How long had it been since he slept in one of those? He couldn’t recall offhand and let the number remain uncounted.

“Look!” shouted a little boy with muddy knees who was suddenly beside Arthur. He managed a smile, but not too much of one. He didn’t want to be taken for one of those.

“Yes, I see,” an older boy carrying two tennis rackets said as he protectively grabbed the hand of the younger one.

“Are we going to say hi?” He waved at Arthur, who smiled more broadly and waved his free hand in return.

“Hello,” the bigger boy said without looking up.

“Bye!” The two scampered off, leaving Arthur alone to continue his quest for shade.

He only managed about twenty yards, however, before the weight of the bags and aching of the bunions brought a halt to his progress. Arthur wiped his brow with his sleeve and held it over his eyes as a temporary visor. If he could just get off his feet for a while! That shouldn’t be too much to ask, even on a busy summer day. Lowering his arm, he saw the outline of a bench just a little ways ahead. It had to be taken. He just wasn’t seeing the shapes or motions of people because of the combination of glare and cover. After a moment that also allowed Arthur to catch more of his breath, he decided that he really was looking at an opportunity to have a bench to himself. That is, unless it was a mirage in the grass. Hoisting the bags back on his shoulders, he decided to find out before someone else did.

“Hup, two, three, four, hup, two, three, four,” he muttered with each aching step. It was not worth revisiting such thoughts, however.

Fragments of a Larger Work - Joseph Couchet

Moving forward was what mattered.

The bench emitted a long series of creaks for several seconds after the landing thud of Arthur’s frame. Compared to sidewalks and alleys, it was like the welcoming embrace of a waterbed. He couldn’t recall that last time he felt such acceptance, but his joints and muscles reacted with a cozy familiarity. Like that time he and Gwen found an abandoned mattress that was perfectly good except for a few stains. That was a good night’s sleep. Even though this particular rest was in the middle of the afternoon, it was shaping up pretty well. He was soon drifting so far off that the clanking of a few of his only possessions dropping from the now neglected bags to the ground didn’t open his shuttered eyelids.

“Leave him alone, Luther. The boy’s asleep.”

“I have work for him to do!” Eyes still shut, Arthur crossed his fingers in support of his mother in this domestic squabble. He had worked the fields until dark and could barely touch his supper. Now Pa was up in time to awaken the sun and determined that no one else in the ramshackle homestead slept more than a wink longer than he did.

“You always have work for everybody,” Ma muttered, but her maternal voice had the unique ability to make its way through every crack and hole, and right into one’s eardrum. The proceeding thud and sob didn’t require such qualities to be heard. Arthur reached for the mangy blanket to pull over his eyes. It would only be seconds before the rampage into the children’s room would commence, but he nonetheless wanted to claim every last second of relative solitude. His hands felt nothing but his rumpled pajamas. Someone had better not have taken them off him again!

“I think that bench is free, Jesse,” he heard a young woman’s voice say. “Oh, wait, someone’s already on it.”

Jesse scoffed, “Him? Who cares? We’ll make him move, Tina.” Arthur’s eyes sprang open to see the two of them in jogging getups, phones in one hand and water bottles in the other.

“Why would he do that?” Tina asked.

“Because...”

“Because nothing,” Arthur growled, partly due to his irritation and partly due to still being half-departed. “I’m not budging.”

“Look, Mister,” Jesse glowered while maintaining a subdued tone. Arthur found himself bolting up from his prone position, his reddened eyes wide open. Jesse and Tina started a bit, which caused Tina’s water bottle to drop to the ground.

“You two can go back to your overpriced condo or wherever you’re from. This bench is my bed for now.” The words alternately

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

sputtered and fired from Arthur’s mouth. As he heard them in the air, it was as if he were listening to someone else speaking rather than himself. A red trail emerged behind the words and caught his eye. He hadn’t seen one of those in a while.

“Fine. You can have your bench condo,” Jesse quipped, then turned on his heel and marched away from Arthur in a puff of blue smoke. He’d never seen one of those. It might be fun to watch. He lay

“After a moment that also allowed Arthur to catch more of his breath, he decided that he really was looking at an opportunity to have a bench to himself. That is, unless it was a mirage in the grass.”

motionless, oblivious to Tina retrieving the bottle from among Arthur’s scattered possessions.

“Sorry,” she winced to Arthur, “but you know how some guys are.”

“Yeah, some guys,” Arthur repeated in almost a whisper as he watched the smoke clear while Tina made her exit.

As she dashed off, her feet clattered against something, which prompted Arthur to peer at the patchy grass in front of the bench littered with what had fallen from his bags. A quick brush below the bench allowed him to scoop up the odds and ends, among them a cigarette butt. Yes, there was still plenty of tobacco for when he could find a light. He placed the other items on top of the bags. Putting them away could wait until after the nap. One item felt smooth and

Fragments of a Larger Work - Joseph Couchet thin. Arthur furrowed his brow as he brought it close to his face. It looked like a woman’s mirror. He opened it just enough to make sure the glass wasn’t broken and didn’t catch a glimpse of his appearance.

“Gwen would like this, wherever she is,” he mused before dozing off again. ***

“Do you have to walk so fast? We aren’t kids anymore, you know,” Susan reprimanded Andy. The swooshing of their pants rubbing together had started to sync into an almost danceable rhythm.

“Speak for yourself.” He trotted a bit ahead of Susan while still holding her hand like a tugboat performing a tow. “I needed a break from our group.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” she chuckled in agreement. “We have to catch up to them soon.”

“They won’t leave us. After all, we’re paying them.” He lightened his pace a bit, and the pair were again side-by-side.

“Someone explain that to them...or have Medicare do it.” This time it was Andy’s turn to chuckle.

“Don’t say that too loud, honey. I don’t want the public to know our ages.”

“Oh, please.”

Andy said nothing, but the cramps forming in his legs were loud and clear. Susan’s coarse hands clenched his a little more tightly. He didn’t even want to consider what his rusty hands must have felt like to Susan, who was thinking the same thing about hers.

They labored along in silence for a bit, letting the chirping birds and chattering people provide the soundtrack for this bit of hooky. Andy’s mind wandered to another day back in high school when an attempt at eloquence was unable to persuade a girl to explore a path through the woods. All Andy had to show for that was the slap mark on his face, which he now rubbed with his free hand at the thought of it. Susan noticed the odd gesture but remained silent. He was always up to something in that boyish mind of his. Tom Chadwick hadn’t been like that. Tom always had his mind and sights set on what was right in front of him. Unfortunately, that meant moving out of state for college and out of Susan’s life.

“Why don’t we take a load off for a while?” Andy suggested right as Susan stumbled over a rock in the path. At this, he added, “See what I mean?”

“About what?” Her voice trailed off and her eyes found the

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37 bench.

Andy pointed to it. “That looks good. We’ll catch our breath and then cut through to meet up with the others.”

“I see some trash under the bench—sounds great,” Susan retorted.

He glanced at her sideways with his slitted eyes. “Here we go. The look.” Andy stopped, which caused her to bump into and bounce off him. “Any port in a storm. Don’t start again,” he warned and let go of her hand.

“I never stop,” she snapped. Each one scowling, they headed to the bench, with Susan bounding ahead of Andy this time. She plopped down in the middle of the long seat, leaned back and spread her arms across the back of it.

“Do you want me to sit on your lap?” he jibed.

“No, my sciatica is bad enough.”

“Well, here’s to your health.” He sat right next to her as his scowl gave way to a grin. The two then briefly jostled around for a position until she continued to occupy at least half of the creaking space.

“Typical. You never grew up.”

“Speak for yourself.” Susan abruptly planted her feet and leaned forward.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Andy said as he gently placed his arm around her shoulders. She flung it aside but did lean back.

Each stared away from the other, although they saw little of what was before them. Their sighs and puffs went up and down, forcefully at first, but then slowly subsiding like worn pistons. He reached for her hand, and she moved it just out of reach. His hand followed. She allowed it to touch hers, keeping her fingers flat. He slowly worked his way around and underneath. Hers remained rigid. Andy glanced at her sideways. She didn’t turn her head to meet his look. Instead, she stared at the path that made its way up the hill and disappeared. Susan felt him lightly clutch her hand, which lay limp. After a few minutes, she turned her head and looked down. Through her misty eyes, their hands appeared smooth, rather than dry and veiny.

“I guess we better get going,” Andy eventually whispered. “No,” Susan said. “Let’s stay a little longer.”

R. Hood

Jim Krusoe

IWhen

she got to her grandmother’s house, her grandmother was lying on the threshold of the front door, somewhere between life and death she thought, kind of catty-corner across the entrance to the inside of the house so that a person couldn’t enter without stepping over her, or at least asking her permission. Her grandmother’s skin was paper-thin, the way old people’s skin gets, her breath shallow, her eyes fixed somewhere, not on her granddaughter but maybe at one of the lower hinges of the door, heavy and brass, and when the old woman spoke she made a sound that could have been, “Hello, honey” but could also have been something else entirely.

Plus, there was a stag, standing off to one side, not moving a muscle, the kind of animal you see in pictures with a noble stance and branching antlers filled with a whole variety of woodland creatures, including a baby raccoon that had climbed to the top of one of the antlers and various birds that had built nests there. And, it practically goes without saying, none of the creatures who had made their homes there were moving at that moment either, though they obviously must

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

have moved at one time or another in order to have gotten themselves into that situation.

Looking past her grandmother to the inside of the house, she could see a checkered tablecloth, a vase of flowers (wilted), cobwebs at the ceilings and the doorways and a plate of sugar cookies. The radio was on, as always, turned to the talk station her grandmother liked to listen to “for company,” as she used to put it, and though it was dark she could see lines of ants crawling to and coming from the plate of cookies (or maybe they were not cookies, but pancakes...it was too dark to be sure) her grandmother might have made for this visit, or possibly the visit of someone else. Next to the plate was a pair of eyeglasses her grandmother must have forgotten to put on, or just didn’t feel like wearing because there was nothing much for her to see except the hinges of the door as she waited for her granddaughter to arrive because, as the old woman used to say, back when she could talk in something besides just a croak, “One day all this will be yours.”

And so her granddaughter wondered: what did her grandmother mean by “this”?

Did “this” include not only the actual mold-ridden house together with its vermin (and not just ordinary vermin, but rats the size of burritos and roaches the size of rats), but also a backyard built over what used to be a toxic dump and a second mortgage that her grandmother had unwisely taken out a couple years ago that rendered the whole place a liability? Maybe it did. And maybe if that was the case, she should take out an insurance policy and then burn the whole place to the ground. She knew that she would have to let some time pass, of course, between the time she took out the policy and when she burned the house down, but time did pass quickly when a person was patient. Look how fast she had arrived there that day, for example, with no traffic at all.

II“So, honey,” she heard her grandmother say, “it sure looks to me as if you are going nowhere,” which surprised her because, suddenly, the old woman’s voice had become loud and clear, whereas, up until then, their only conversation had been limited to what might or might not have been “hello.” But surprised or not, she couldn’t disagree. She had been traveling nearly the speed of light to her grandmother’s house, and had arrived, too, but where had it gotten her? To the doorway of a rundown piece of real estate with an old woman blocking the entrance.

As grandmothers went, hers was a skinny one who favored long, dark dresses with patterns so small they looked more like flecks of dirt, or maybe crumbs for breading fish. Her grandmother usually

R. Hood - Jim Krusoe

wore tennis shoes (“for traction” she used to say, back when she was talking on a regular basis) and kept her gray hair in a neat bun, in the middle of which she used to stick a ballpoint pen for jotting notes.

“But what are you doing there,” she asked her grandmother, “lying in the doorway the way you are, and how long have you been here anyway?”

“Fresh air,” her grandmother replied. “I thought I would get a little fresh air. And, speaking of which, do you remember when your parents sent you to that summer camp in the mountains, the one that, years later, you claimed you had been abused at? Well, I was the one who paid for that, and I’ve always felt guilty about it.”

“Everything is quiet. Has the old woman crawled back inside to bring some of those cookies or pancakes the way she used to when she would go on and on about the farm as she watched her granddaughter eat? Does her grandmother need help?”

She did remember, but didn’t know what to say. The camp had been a terrible experience, and she didn’t appreciate her grandmother bringing it up. As she thought about that camp, she looked up to where a spider had built a web over the top of the doorway. The individual strands of the web—surely one of nature’s miracles—shone in the porchlight, which must have been on the whole time her grandmother and she had been talking. She wondered if her grandmother ever turned it off.

It was a huge web, and so she reasoned that the door must have been left open like that for days, even weeks. Had her grandmother been lying there all that time? On the other hand, the old woman could

have lain down and then gotten up to go back inside to do something, maybe make a few pancakes, or cookies, or to fry some fish, and then come back outside again. Who knew how long she had been there? The web had at least a dozen flies trapped in it, wrapped in silk to be eaten later by a spider who, at that moment, was not presenting itself to view.

“But the fact is,” her grandmother had started up again, “you were always in a hurry as a girl, too, and many was the afternoon I offered you a chance to sit down with me over a plate of cookies and listen to my stories about the farm where I was raised. But were you interested? No. Instead you were always running off to play with some friend or another, and where are those nasty girls and boys now? Where are those so-called pals of yours that you couldn’t stand to be away from even for a minute, let alone for a few weeks at summer camp? They are nowhere, that’s where they are.”

Her grandmother was right. They were nowhere and she was with her grandmother, and even the farm her grandmother had so liked to tell her about was long gone by that time. The farm the grandmother liked to recall had been turned into a golf course or a discount shopping outlet—possibly a golf course with a discount shopping outlet attached to the clubhouse—but the fact that it no longer existed except in her grandmother’s mind seemed to make it only more precious to her.

“The barn,” the old woman said. “The crib for corn. The stall for the cow. The weathervane with its head snapped off by the big ice storm. The pond with ducks.” And, to clinch her argument: “A nanny goat and chickens.”

IIIAt the camp her grandmother had paid for, for breakfast they gave her and the other campers oatmeal with raisins every single morning. Also, orange juice and whole wheat toast with grape jelly. After breakfast came crafts, where she learned to make a leather purse for holding spare change. Other children knitted holders to carry around hot pans and pots so they wouldn’t burn themselves, and one of them (not her) made a scarf. At the camp, one counselor’s name was Wally. Wally wore Hawaiian shirts and told her he had a different shirt for every day of the week. Until then, she had never even seen one Hawaiian shirt, and now there were a lot of them, at least seven. Wally said that the best ones in the world were the ones he owned, although you could find others less good than his in department stores. He taught her and the other campers how to tie a fish hook onto a line so that if a fish bit it, the hook would not come untied in the struggle. “There is nothing like the feel of a fish on the other end of your line. You have all the power and that fish has none, but doesn’t know it,” he used to say,

and then he would cough. “Don’t ever take up smoking,” he would tell everyone.

For lunch, they would have sandwiches, either cheese or bologna, and Kool-Aid. And then after that would be Quiet Time. After that came swimming. Once, they even brought over some horses for the campers to ride. Hers was brown and bit her leg. One day at Quiet Time, Wally said he had a special job for her.

“What kind of job?” she asked.

“It will be a surprise,” he said.

IVSomehow, in between her remembering the old farm and looking at the spiderweb overhead, her grandmother must have dragged herself back inside the house without her noticing. In any case, her grandmother is gone.

She calls into the house, “Are you all right?”

Everything is quiet. Has the old woman crawled back inside to bring some of those cookies or pancakes the way she used to when she would go on and on about the farm as she watched her granddaughter eat? Does her grandmother need help? She calls again. There is no answer, but she knows the grandmother is a little hard of hearing, so she thinks she might not have heard her. Also, she thinks she should wait a little longer before barging in on her, just in case her grandmother is using the bathroom. She knows from past experience that the old woman likes her privacy.

By that time, it had gotten completely dark. The moon is out and so are the stars. The porchlight is lighting up the web and all the bugs that had been trapped in it, making them look beautiful, like planets in a tiny solar system that has the porchlight as its sun. There is a little roof over the front door entrance where the grandmother had been lying, which kept the place where the granddaughter is still waiting, not moving, dry and surprisingly comfortable.

Every so often, she can hear a noise from inside the house, but she can’t be sure if it is one of the large rats or her grandmother. And then she turns to see in the moonlight—standing in the driveway, which had pieces of concrete missing from it and clumps of grass growing here and there—the old stag watching her, with everything in his antlers, including all those animals that have made their homes there, who are watching her as well, not in any hurry to go anywhere.

The Suitcase

K. Wallace King

Thesingle window faced the brick wall of the neighboring building, and an ancient air conditioner occupied the lower portion. The exterior surface of the air conditioner was caked with bird shit. Face pressed against the window, Michelle watched light dissolve as it fell into the air shaft between the buildings. A pigeon landed outside on the air conditioner and strutted back and forth, pausing to examine Michelle’s squashed profile with a red iris. She tapped the glass, but the bird only burbled a coo and recommenced its abbreviated march.

Taking two steps to the center of the bedroom, Michelle pulled a string hanging from the ceiling. A light bulb spotlighted a dead cockroach, tiny legs upraised. There was a water stain in the corner suggesting the imprint of an alien face.

“What do you think?” called the realtor from the kitchen. “There’s no closet in here.”

“These cabinets are brand new,” deflected the realtor. “Practically.”

Michelle edged past the refrigerator back into the kitchen. She paused. “There’s no stove.”

“You said you don’t cook, just need a microwave. I have to

The Suitcase

- K. Wallace King

take this.” The realtor turned her back and began whispering into her phone.

Michelle opened one of the particle board cabinets. A lone soup can sat inside, its label hanging loose as old skin.

Looking out the window, Michelle imagined putting on running shoes, sprinting across the avenue and losing herself in the park. She watched the progress of a young woman rolling a carryon pink suitcase behind her as she wove between umbrella-carrying pedestrians. The woman wore no coat and her filmy dress looked more appropriate for a summer day than a chilly October afternoon. A gust blew the dress into a froth and tossed the woman’s hair into a tangle. Vacant taxis passed, but the woman kept walking, the pink suitcase rolling behind her. She must be freezing, thought Michelle.

“You need to decide, dear,” the realtor urged, still on her phone. “I have to be downtown at four and getting a car all the way up here is...” She waved a hand toward an imagined irritation. “You’ll be taking the subway mostly though.” Without looking up, the realtor began typing on her phone.

If Michelle extended her arms in the kitchen she would touch both walls. She walked to one of the two front windows. Raindrops slithered down the glass. Michelle watched the tops of taxis and trucks pass on the wide avenue below. Beyond, treetops tossed orange and yellow leaves in the wind. The sun broke through the clouds and the autumn trees glistened. Michelle turned to the realtor, “There’s a lot of stairs.”

The realtor looked her up and down. “You’re probably still young enough...”

Michelle felt herself flush. She knew what the woman really meant was: bit old for the starving artist routine. So she wasn’t twenty-three. Or four. This realtor would die shriveled as the bedroom cockroach, never knowing the glory of bursting bright upon a stage. Anyway, who cared what the old bitch thought? Michelle revolved in a slow circle, watching sunlight begin to speckle the small room’s walls. What difference did five flights matter? She spent so much time between work, her vocal coach and auditions...she’d really only be here to sleep.

“Once this hits online, it’ll be gone like—” The realtor snapped fingers with nails manicured to emphasize their impressive uselessness. Michelle turned away from the window. The realtor was right. Even if dark and tiny, the apartment was across from the park. And renting an apartment on her own would prove Michelle was staying the course. She wouldn’t be one who gave up and moved home with parents or desperately married.

“I’ll take it.”

The realtor feigned a smile. She was doing Michelle’s uncle

a favor. Michelle sensed this apartment was the limit of whatever the woman might owe him.

The realtor walked to the window, her distaste clear. “Up here you still have the old mom-and-pop shops, don’t you?”

They’d passed a bodega with a ripped, sagging awning. When Michelle bent down to pet the fat, one-eyed cat in the doorway, it clawed her hand.

“You’re lucky your uncle called me.” The realtor ushered Michelle out of the apartment ahead of her, face pointed at her phone. “My car’s here. Take the key. Just make sure you sign the rental agreement before the end of the day.”

The key was attached to an elasticized red wristlet. It fit tightly when Michelle put it on, the rubber coils biting into her skin.

Inside the apartment, Michelle stood in the small living room and sang. The notes circled the walls, an echoed chorus, wrapping her up in a musical cocoon. Her head rang with imagined applause as she bowed to her phantom audience.

Two weeks later, Michelle opened the door and her former roommate breezed past with a bottle of wine in a brown bag and a box from a well-known patisserie. “Oh wow, Meesh. It’s goddamn adorable!”

Michelle smiled. It was true. The fresh white walls, the ebony gleam of the little table with turned wooden legs like braids of hair, the two graceful matching chairs she’d found at an antique store and her grandmother’s blue majolica vase full of just opening yellow tulips. There was a soft rug underfoot to cover the uneven floorboards and hanging above the couch was the large vintage poster.

When Michelle bought the poster at the shop downtown, she’d been so absorbed by the artwork that she hadn’t noticed the little man standing behind her.

“She performed as Madam Theoris, but her real name was Eleanor Dye.”

Michelle stepped closer, examining the elegant woman in an evening gown holding a wand. She appeared to be conjuring a female spirit from an old-fashioned traveling trunk. A white dove fluttered over her head. “Goddess of Mystery” was printed in fancy gold script below the feet of the magician.

“Like it?”

Michelle nodded, leaning in to peer at three little horned imps

The Suitcase - K. Wallace King

peeking from a thorny rosebush. They were watching the Goddess of Mystery summon the spirit from the trunk.

“Not many female magicians working back then. On the stage, I mean. Some say she was just as good as Harry Kellar, but she never made it big.”

The man standing beside Michelle only came up to her waist. “She was an illusionist. Made you think you saw something that wasn’t there. Or...” The little man grinned, leaning toward Michelle, his pale

“She had come so close to that big show a few months back. Lately though, she’d been batting away a creeping reali- zation that another year was nearly gone and she was no nearer to the footlights where songs became so famous even ordinary people sang along.”

eyes magnified by his spectacles. “She died just a few years ago in a nursing home in Scarsdale, well over a hundred. They did a local news piece on her. She sounded bitter about never making it in show business, but she was still doing magic.”

“She was still doing shows at that age?”

“Darling, you don’t need a show for magic.”

Michelle half-listened as he continued talking about conjurations and illusions. She had to have the colorful poster for her new apartment, it would make all the difference. She’d live on ramen to afford it.

She was right. With Madame Theoris on the wall, you didn’t notice the uneven floor, the shadow that was likely mold or the scrambling sounds she heard sometimes outside her door. With the poster, the shabby tenement apartment seemed charming.

Michelle’s former roommate put one knee on the couch as she took a closer look at the poster. “Kind of creepy, Meesh.”

“Creepy? What do you mean?”

“Magicians, ventriloquist’s dummies, they’ve always freaked me out. And what about these devil things in the roses? But hey, it’s arty, Meesh, like you. Just perfect for your...pied-à-terre.” This word reduced them to snorts of laughter.

Sitting on the couch, they exchanged dating war stories, ate the profiteroles from the fancy box and drank the bottle of wine. Her friend agreed the view of the park made up for the lack of hip restaurants and the corner bodega with its nasty cat and too-soft fruit.

Looking out the window, Michelle’s friend pointed. “Where do you think she’s going?”

Michelle joined her, watching the young woman in a chiffon dress with a pink carry-on suitcase rolling behind her.

“Jesus. It’s freezing out there. Is she waiting for a car?”

Michelle frowned, “I think I’ve seen her before.”

The woman’s flimsy dress fluttered behind her in the breeze as she pulled the rolling suitcase farther down the sidewalk adjacent to the park. The trees were beginning to lose their leaves; the upthrust naked branches reminded Michelle of pleading hands. What the hell was that woman doing? Where was she going?

“We need more wine. Come on, girl, the night’s young!”

Michelle turned away from the window, “Right. Let’s get out of here.”

They decided to take the train downtown, where they had dinner and several drinks. A young man with whom Michelle had exchanged glances, along with his lanky friend in an expensive hoodie, joined them. Much later, after a sloppy kiss on the sidewalk with the lanky one, Michelle tapped his number into her phone and walked away, giggly, fully aware she was drunk.

She took a car home, ignoring the expense. You had to live a little.

When Michelle opened the door to the apartment, just before turning on the light, she thought she saw a shadow skitter across the opposite wall. “You better not be a rat,” she muttered. After hesitating a moment longer, she flipped on the light, rolling her eyes at her boozy imagination. The white-walled room practically smiled a welcome, even the tulips in the blue vase had opened.

“Hello, pied-à-terre, hello, Goddess of Mystery.” She peered at the poster. “Hi, you sneaky little devils in the roses! What are you doing down there?”

Michelle plopped down on the couch and pulled off her boots. Her feet were throbbing. Yawning, she limped to the sink, poured

a glass of water and fished some ibuprofen out of her purse. She took four, hoping to mitigate the inevitable hangover. She had to be at work on time in the morning: there was a dreaded staff meeting. She saluted the poster with her water glass, but paused. The magician was no longer conjuring a female spirit from the traveling trunk. Instead, it was a filmy man in what looked like baggy green pajamas. Her head pounding, she went over to the couch, hitting her knee on the coffee table. Cursing, she gazed at the poster. Ha! It wasn’t a man. She must have sex on the brain. But wait. Was the female spirit always wearing that green dress?

“I’m drunk,” she announced to Madame Theoris, switching off the light. The corners of the room filled with shadows cast from moonlight rippling through the old glass panes of the windows. The light in the room was so bright that Michelle found herself drawn to look at the moon.

“What the hell...” Michelle couldn’t believe it, but the woman in the chiffon dress was still on the corner across from the park, her hand clasped on the handle of her pink rolling suitcase. The traffic light changed from yellow to red and the woman crossed the avenue toward the park, passing a lone taxi at the intersection. Michelle watched the woman bump the suitcase over the curb and continue, rolling it behind her. The young woman seemed to disappear between streetlights, as if only existing in their glow. Wind blew her dress around her legs and the bony treetops in the park swayed under the moonlit sky.

Michelle shut her eyes, shaking her head, wondering why she hadn’t realized it before. Because the woman looked clean, even pretty, and the dress, although wrong for the season, was clearly expensive. She looked nothing like the poor souls sleeping on subway grates or in crevices between buildings. When Michelle opened her eyes, the woman had disappeared into the park. “Poor thing,” she mumbled. “What happened to you?”

She set the alarm on her phone and went to bed. She was almost asleep when it started—a rolling coo that ended and began again without stopping. A ceaseless loop. Michelle pulled her pillow over her head, but the sound was only slightly muted. Groaning, she stumbled out of bed. Pulling aside the curtain, she looked out the window. For a second, she thought it was a tiny fat man with his arms clasped behind his back, pacing back and forth across the air conditioner. But of course it was just a pigeon.

Michelle tapped the glass and the pigeon’s burbly call intensified. She banged an open palm against the window and, with a flap of wings, it flew upward, disappearing. She could still hear the whip of wings though, sounding like something much larger than a pigeon. Michelle stood there a moment, cheek pressed against the

glass, eyes upturned to the blank darkness of the air shaft. “Dumb bird.”

She crumpled back into bed and pulled the blankets tautly under her chin. She finally felt herself falling into a blessed blankness when a voice began nasally warbling, “Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll.”

Michelle blindly patted the blankets for her phone. “I want to hug you but I fear you’d break/Oh, oh, oh.”

“The little man grinned, leaning toward Michelle, his pale eyes magnified by his spectacles. ‘She died just a few years ago in a nursing home in Scarsdale, well over a hundred. They did a local news piece on her. She sounded bitter about never making it in show business, but she was still doing magic.’”

Michelle wrestled the phone free of her covers. The alarm concluded, only to be replaced by more cooing outside the window. Michelle dragged herself from bed, sore-limbed and soup-headed.

Hair still damp from the shower, Michelle rushed out of the apartment. Heavy clouds threatened to unleash a torrent of rain and she walked quickly past the park, toward the subway.

Michelle was supposed to pick up the bagels and start the coffee for the staff meeting. Her boss, an elderly attorney whose clients were even older, wasn’t a bad sort. He sometimes allowed her to leave early

The Suitcase - K. Wallace King

if she had an audition. He called her a prima donna, though she’d long given up hope of an opera career. At nineteen, her coach had told her she’d never have more than a musical theater voice.

Still, Michelle had talent and, maybe even as important, she wasn’t a quitter. She had come so close to that big show a few months back. Lately though, she’d been batting away a creeping realization that another year was nearly gone and she was no nearer to the footlights where songs became so famous even ordinary people sang along.

She picked up the bagels at the deli on the same block as the office. The narrow street was lined with parked cars and delivery trucks. Buildings loomed over the pavement, obscuring any sunlight. Even on the brightest days, Michelle felt a low-level gloom descend once she entered the street’s perpetual shadow.

The din of traffic receded as Michelle pushed the revolving glass door and entered the building. It had been built before the Depression in an Art Deco style. If you paid attention, you could see the cracks in the linoleum where the carpet didn’t cover it, and the women’s bathroom could only be described as eerie with its bubble glass door and tomblike echoes bouncing off the marble walls.

On the eleventh floor, she unlocked the door to the office announcing “Morton, Weinstein & Keener” in flaking gold letters on the exterior. She was relieved to find that she was the first one there. Ignoring her pounding skull, she turned on the lights, brewed the coffee and laid out bagels, cream cheese and packaged jellies on the scarred conference table.

Michelle nodded mechanically at the staff meeting, wishing the bagels were greasy eggs and bacon. Mr. Keener droned on and on about Mrs. Epstein’s estate and her gift to the Philharmonic. Michelle closed her eyes a moment and caught herself just before falling asleep. When she opened them again, Dan Fogarty, the new attorney, was staring at her. The lenses of his glasses were smudged and he needed a shave. When he smiled at her, Michelle felt herself blush and she scribbled something nonsensical on the copy paper package in front of her, as if taking notes. Next to Michelle, the bookkeeper was drawing angry faces on her own notepad. There was also the temp—Michelle kept forgetting her name—a woman with bright orange hair who dressed in provocative vinyl clothing and was clearly listening to music on her earbuds.

When the meeting ended, everyone fled the conference room

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

and Michelle was left to clean up. The rest of the day was an interminable torture. In the greenish glow of the windowless bathroom, the cold of the marble floor seeping into the soles of her shoes, Michelle looked at her bloodshot eyes in the mirror. In that moment, she recalled she had an audition at four-forty-five.

“Shit shit shit,” she chanted shrilly to her dead-eyed reflection. Shit shit shit, echoed the tiled chamber. She wiped her face with cold water on paper towels, almost hoping Mr. Keener would say he couldn’t spare her. She felt so rotten and looked like hell, but the old man nodded when Michelle asked if she could leave early.

The audition was at a well-respected downtown theater; its last show had moved uptown to Theatre Row. Michelle pulled it together when she walked out onstage. She knew she sang perfectly because she felt herself vibrating like a tuning fork. When others were dismissed, Michelle was asked to stay and sing a duet with the male lead. When they finished, someone beyond the stage lights clapped.

Michelle didn’t leave the audition until almost six, her hangover forgotten, a new, bright hope fueling a burst of energy. The rain had stopped, but a thin fog muted the city, softening the edges while puddles reflected lights like colored jewels. Michelle turned her face up to the cool mistiness. Smiling, she wove in a private choreography between raincoats and umbrellas to the subway.

In her neighborhood, the crowd thinned and, by the time she was within a block of her apartment, Michelle walked alone beside the park in the phosphorescent glow of the streetlights. She hummed the melody of the song she’d sung at the audition, hands thrust in her pockets, barely conscious of anything but the applause in her imagination. It was a loud, scraping clatter that brought her back to the city sidewalk.

The sound was irritating, mind-grating, in the way of nails dragged across a chalkboard. Michelle looked over her shoulder and saw a man, his back to her, walking in the opposite direction. He pulled a carry-on suitcase behind him, but he pulled it upside down so that its wheels pointed skyward. The hard shell of the case scraping the asphalt produced the abrasive sound. What horrified Michelle was that the suitcase was pink.

She stood stock-still on the sidewalk, staring as the man dragged the suitcase past another man walking a small dog. Michelle was barely aware that the man and dog had passed and disappeared as the one with the suitcase abruptly stopped in his tracks. In the glow of a streetlight, he turned his head so that Michelle could see his profile. He wore a baseball cap and she caught the glint of his eyeglass lens. He

The Suitcase - K. Wallace King

didn’t move. Just stood there with the upside down suitcase. Something told Michelle to run.

At the outer door to her building, Michelle fumbled with the key, pulse pounding and a roar in her ears. She didn’t want to turn around. If the man was at the bottom of the stairs, she might drop in a dead faint. The key turned and Michelle yanked the front door open, then shoved it closed, hearing it lock automatically. Only then did she look out the glass door. She scanned the avenue, the park. Cars drove by, but otherwise there was no one in sight.

Inside the apartment, Madame Theoris was still conjuring when Michelle turned on the light and a spirit continued rising from the travel trunk, although Michelle could have sworn her hair was blonde, not red. In the bed of roses, one of the three little horned imps seemed to have turned a head from watching the magician to watching Michelle, but, even if this were true, she didn’t notice because she was debating whether to call the police.

But what would she say? There was a woman with a pink suitcase and now a man had a pink suitcase? Michelle went to the window. In the bright light of the room, all she saw in the glass was her own reflected face.

Michelle didn’t even get a callback for the part she’d been sure was hers. She couldn’t understand it. Really though, she could, and the comprehension was bitter. So many factors, but ultimately? You could do everything right, be absolutely perfect, yet it just wasn’t your time. Maybe, and this was the most desolate, the most calamitous thought she could ever allow to seep into her consciousness, maybe it never would be

Michelle continued auditioning, going to work and on hopeless dates. She forgot about the woman, the man, the pink suitcase. It snowed in December and the only people she saw entering or exiting the bare-limbed, sky-imploring trees in the park were dog walkers, joggers and other hardy souls.

She went home to her parents’ house in the suburbs for Christmas. Her mother bemoaned that she had cut off her beautiful hair. Her father, before the insurance business an amateur musician, sang carols with her for the assembled relatives, as they always did on Christmas Day. But Michelle couldn’t shake the feeling that she was participating in her own future failure.

Michelle kept this to herself, cheerfully lying about an upcoming

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

role in a show that was maybe Broadway bound. She left on the train back to the city, weighted down with bags filled with leftover turkey and stuffing, a turtleneck she’d never wear and a toaster oven. The latter she forgot on the back floor of the cab. A shame, because it was something she could have actually used.

In April, Mr. Keener died at his desk at the law firm. The funeral was on a Monday. It was a sunny day and warm. Michelle sweated in her wool jacket. The sky was flecked with little clouds and the trees were filled in with green. Daffodils and tulips poked up everywhere. People planted bulbs for departed loved ones and spring in the cemetery was so lovely that people came just to picnic. Mrs. Keener, the widow, was in a wheelchair and seemed confused as to what was happening. She overheard the old woman say to the attendant beside her, “I wanted French toast, not this crap!”

Michelle nodded to herself. She wanted something besides this crap, too.

The law firm closed and Michelle began to temp. If the money wasn’t as reliable, being able to make her own schedule allowed more time for auditions. She began studying with a new vocal coach. Days leaked into one another. She rarely filled her grandmother’s blue vase. Flowers were expensive. She still got together with her old roommate, but less frequently now that she had become engaged to a man who worked at a hedge fund. Michelle pretended to be happy for her. The pigeon kept cooing on the air conditioner, rain, shine or snow. Michelle fantasized about buying a gun.

In July, nearly broke, Michelle decided to throw a party. What the hell. She invited her theater friends and a few other temps she once commiserated with on various jobs. The weather had continued to be beautiful all spring and into summer. The Saturday of the party, it was hot and humid and it rained all afternoon. Michelle had planned to barbeque on her fire escape. That plan scrapped, she rushed out and spent too much at a fancy deli. It was worrisome, this expense. If she didn’t book another temp job soon, she wouldn’t make rent.

She couldn’t think about it. She needed people around her, people who still had hope that the world was waiting just for them. The expense was an investment in a different future than the one that terrified her. She needed to silence the whispering that seemed to come from the water stain on the ceiling of the bedroom: why fight it why fight it why fight it? It rang in her head, a monotonous chorus, as she lined her eyes with a sparkly pencil and glossed her lips red.

People started showing up around four. It stopped raining soon after and the sun came out. Michelle opened the front windows and a breeze scented with the wild honeysuckle in the park filled the little

The Suitcase - K. Wallace King

apartment. Michelle’s old roommate’s fiancé acted as the DJ; he was good at it, and got people moving. After a few beers and a shot of tequila, Michelle was dancing with the boy who worked in the mailroom at a big firm where she’d temped. She didn’t recall inviting him, but it didn’t matter. He was cute and fun. He was also gay, so there was no hope for her there, but he was funny as hell, and later, when everyone was thoroughly buzzed, the two of them sang pop songs and everyone loved it. Michelle was sorry when he said he had to leave. As soon as he was gone, it was as if the life had been sucked out of the apartment. Everyone began saying their goodbyes. Michelle nodded and smiled, half-drunk.

“You could do everything right, be absolutely perfect, yet it just wasn’t your time. Maybe, and this was the most desolate, the most calamitous thought she could ever allow to seep into her consciousness, maybe it never would be.”

A man (wasn’t he an attorney?) still lingered. Michelle couldn’t remember his name. He was over forty.

“I like that poster. You into magic?”

Michelle picked up a saucer someone had used as an ashtray and began to dump it into a trash bag.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said the lingerer. He grabbed something off the saucer and, grinning, held it up. “You don’t want to throw this out.” He fished a lighter from his pants pocket and lit the crushed joint. He put it to his lips, inhaled, blew smoke. “Here.”

Michelle shook her head. “I don’t smoke.”

But the man still held out the roach. Michelle clipped it with her nails and took a drag. She immediately began coughing. Her voice would be scorched. She handed the pot back to the attorney. “I can’t.”

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

“You already did. Only need one hit these days. This stuff is so hybridized. Whoo.” He grinned at her from the couch. The breeze from the opened front windows no longer smelled like honeysuckle; there was an odor of something rotting, as if someone had opened a garbage can right under her windows.

A pale rose hue creased the sky above the green treetops in the park. Birds flapped into the boughs to sleep. She felt dizzy standing before the open window. A woman walked two deerhounds beside the park. A boy on a skateboard passed her and the dogs went into frenzied barking mode. Two men, arms around each other’s shoulders, were having an animated conversation. Each in their own dreams, each in their own skins. But what about me?

It occurred to her that the attorney hadn’t left yet. She was about to turn to tell him to go when she froze. A woman with a carryon suitcase rolling behind her was walking beside the park, directly in front of Michelle’s apartment building. The suitcase was pink, but the woman was different. She was older, maybe Michelle’s mother’s age, and dressed as if going to a yoga class in leggings and flip-flops. “Oh my god,” said Michelle out loud.

“What is it?”

“There’s a woman with a suitcase,” began Michelle. “What?”

“It feels like I’m breaking into pieces.” “You’re just high.”

Michelle kept trying to tell him about the woman and the pink suitcase, that man with the same suitcase and now—she was pointing to the window. Only then did Michelle realize she was alone. Maybe the attorney hadn’t even been there when she saw the woman with the pink suitcase. It had grown dark outside the window, daylight gone. In the apartment only a few candles flickered. Maybe, looking at the poster on the wall above the couch, she had only conjured the attorney, created the party in her head. Hell, maybe her whole life. What if, she thought, staring at Madame Theoris and her magic wand, it’s all an illusion?

“Fuck it, lady,” Michelle declared, not quite sure if it was directed at the magician or herself, and polished off the bottle of tequila.

All through September, Michelle had the hardest time waking up. She slept a lot. The cooing pigeon no longer bothered her, it had become ambient noise. She walked somnambulantly through the small rooms, ignoring the ants crawling on the countertops, or whatever it was that lived under the sink. She lived on bags of chips and tuna fish

The Suitcase - K. Wallace King

stirred with hot dog relish and mayonnaise that came in the plastic economy size. She had tucked the letter from the building management company under the rest of the mail and catalogues from places that she couldn’t afford even when she was working.

By October, Michelle no longer went into the bedroom. She slept on the couch beneath the Goddess of Mystery and her attendant imps. Sometimes, she sat on the hardwood floor and leaned her chin on the windowsill of the opened front window and watched the people going in and out of the park. Wasn’t it funny? The park was the selling point of the apartment and she had never ventured into it. Not even for a walk.

Someone knocked on the door while she was staring out the window. She didn’t move, even when they knocked harder, even when she heard something slide under the door behind her. She knew what it was, so why turn around? Out the window, pigeons bobbed and cooed on the window ledge of the next apartment over. Her phone rang and wouldn’t stop. Finally, just to shut it up, she answered. It was her mother again.

“Yes,” she replied. “Alright.”

Her father was coming to pick her up in the morning. No shame, her mother said. No one could have tried harder. Michelle turned the phone off. There would never be another callback. She turned to the window again and gasped. An old man. He wore a striped shirt and cargo pants as he pulled a pink suitcase behind him.

She pulled on the red rubber bracelet with the apartment key, feeling the sting of it snap against the skin of her wrist.

It was late at night, but in a city it’s never really dark. Light spills from thousands of windows, seeps upward through subway gratings. The old man was turning onto a path leading into the park by the time Michelle reached the corner. Without waiting for the light to change, she ran across the avenue on the yellow, barely missed by a truck. By the time she reached the path into the park, the old man had disappeared, though she could still hear the wheels of the suitcase as it rolled along on the paved footpath ahead of her.

It was much darker in the park than on the city streets. The only light source were the streetlights spaced at wide intervals. Michelle grew aware of rustling bushes and things that only come out at night. But she wasn’t frightened. She cocked her head, listening for the roll of the suitcase. An owl sounded. Or was it a pigeon?

She pushed on farther, deeper into the park, following the footpath until she came to where it branched, left and right. She paused, hearing nothing but the wind in the trees. She sighed and her shoulders slumped. She looked up at the sprinkle of stars. There was

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

heaven.

And here am I. Something squeaked like a wheel that needed oiling. Encouraged, Michelle followed the sound until, just ahead, in the streetlight’s gleam, the pink suitcase was disappearing into a tall, leafy hedge.

“Wait!”

Michelle ran toward the hedge. The interwoven branches stabbed every bit of exposed flesh, scratching her face, nearly poking out an eye, before she pulled herself through to a small clearing. The pink suitcase was there, color faded to a glowing blush in the moonlight.

“Hello?”

Something squirmed in her brain—all alone in the park, in the dark—she rubbed her wrist where the rubber keyholder bit into her skin. But there was the suitcase. If she opened it, maybe she could find out who it belonged to. Get to the bottom of it. Proof.

Proof of what?

Overhead, a single streetlight flickered as Michelle knelt before the pink suitcase. The thick plastic shell was hard, protective. Maybe it was locked. But the silver clasps slid open easily and Michelle lifted the case open. The top half fell with a dull thunk onto the ground. Her mouth opened, closed and opened again. She was trying to say something, but words wouldn’t come.

She stared, confused, befuddled by the pile of little arms and legs packed inside, at the many tiny faces looking up at Michelle, so incredibly realistically painted. Male and female. Long hair, short hair, black, blonde, red, inside the suitcase. Michelle lifted one out by a little flesh-colored arm. Ugh, she grunted. The arm was soft and squishy between her finger and thumb. Warm as living flesh. Repulsed, Michelle dropped it. In the anemic glow of the streetlight, it wriggled in the dead grass like a pale grub. Behind her, the hedge rustled. Turning, Michelle thought she glimpsed a horned face, but a moment later realized it was only the wind trembling the leaves. She turned back to the opened suitcase and it was empty, no doll-size people inside, only a shimmery pink lining with side nettings for incidentals, socks and underwear.

Standing in the pallid glow of the single streetlight, Michelle thought she heard someone talking in the distance. No. They were singing, that’s what it was, as with a moan. Michelle fell onto her hands and knees in the grass. She wanted to sing too, but she couldn’t get up. She felt quivery as jelly, as if her bones were dissolving.

Somewhere, a pigeon cooed...or was it a dove? Michelle barely heard it as she collapsed face-first onto the grass, not registering the rich rot of October earth. She began humping, worming her way inside the opened pink suitcase.

Reality Fractured

Christine Criswell

When

I walked in, Elliot was standing on his tiptoes, shoulders shrugged to the maximum, hands drawn up tightly to his chest, fingers pinched together and pointing downward as if they were holding something he’d rather not touch. Then he slowly turned his head all the way to the left, and this is when we made eye contact. I figured he’d laugh, or at least smile at me over getting caught in such a pose, but his face was completely serious. And he continued to move in this manner, despite my being there, his head swiveling left to right and then back to the left, his body rising and falling, his hands contracting and relaxing. Throughout, he maintained a solemn, even reverential, expression. Other than the swishing noise his scrubs made as he performed this maneuver, he was silent.

Finally, he finished and turned to me. The radiology reading room was dark, stuffy and austere, but his smile, as usual, seemed to brighten everything around him. “Christine! How are you? Are you ready for our overnight?” He then looked over to one of our resident colleagues. “Andy says it’s been pretty brutal so far tonight.”

I didn’t answer him right away. I hoped that he’d go on to explain what I’d seen without me needing to ask and potentially embar-

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

rass him. But he just stood there, as if nothing unusual had transpired. So, I told him I was not looking forward to the night ahead and then, trying to sound as respectful and nonchalant as possible, said, “Elliot, what was it you were doing just now?

His smile broadened. “That was monkey qigong. I do it to help get my heart ready for being on call. It’s the best thing for you, Christine. Helps unblock the meridian channels, cultivate qi, nourish the heart, circulate healing energy—all sorts of great stuff. You should

“As I was relaying my location, I saw, in my peripheral vision, Elliot clawing at his skin while muttering about bugs crawling on his arms and legs. I closed my eyes and pressed the phone receiver hard against my ear, trying to keep my focus on the conversation.”

really try it. If you want, I can teach you when we’re back on days.”

“Qi? Meridians?”

He clasped his hands together and leaned toward me. “Yes, qi. It is the life force that binds everything in the universe. It is energy itself. And meridians are the pathways qi travels, the way it moves through the body. The meridians can get blocked, you know, and qigong exercises help open them again and balance the body’s yin and yang.” A look of awe came over his face. “Would you believe that experts in qigong can cure themselves of disease with healing energy? Some say even cancer!”

I must have looked somewhat skeptical, for he started nodding his head in a dramatic way with wide-open eyes. I managed to assume a neutral expression and replied, “Oh wow. That’s really interesting. Where did you learn about all of this?”

He did not answer. Instead, he spun ninety degrees to his

Reality Fractured - Christine Criswell

left, bolted over to the opposite side of the room and yanked a large textbook from the reading room bookcase. He began to rifle through the pages with his right hand, his left hand tearing through his blonde hair. His face was tense, even anguished. After a minute or so, he struck the page with his index finger and shouted, “Tuberculosis! That patient had tuberculosis. I thought so, I really did, but I wasn’t sure. But now I am. It had to have been TB. Tuberculosis! Yes!” Next, he jogged around the room until he was out of breath. Only then did he return to me. I suppressed the urge to stare at him in total stupefaction.

“Christine! Sorry! I haven’t forgotten your question. I just had to go check on something. Anyway, you asked me where I learned about qi. The answer is tai chi. I’ve been taking lessons for about three years now. My teacher is amazing. I can’t tell you how much it’s improved my life. I’m calmer, more focused, more balanced. I’m sure it will help with my recent insomnia. This healing energy, I’m telling you, it’s flowing through me all the time now.”

He looked so happy. I couldn’t help but smile. Still, I found myself questioning if all of this enthusiasm was just the latest in what had been a string of short-lived passions of his. During the brief period I’d known Elliot, he’d jumped from basketball to building rockets to cooking lessons to playing guitar—each time declaring that this was the best hobby of all, that it had completely changed his life, that he would become a master at it. My colleagues and I would joke about it—in a good-natured way, of course. We called him “3E” (Excitable, Energetic Elliot) and tried to guess what he’d do next. But, of course, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I held my tongue.

The early evening crew said their goodbyes, and we got ready to work our overnight shift. It was Elliot, Meredith and me, but Meredith was working in the musculoskeletal reading room, handling procedures and ultrasounds, while Elliot and I were in the ER reading room, Elliot reading CTs and I reading X-rays.

No sooner had I unpacked my things than the telephone rang. Elliot told me he’d get it, so I busied myself locating a fresh cassette tape for my dictations and hanging the films on the rotating light board.

“Look, I just got here. If you give me a minute, I can call you back and... Yes, I know it’s urgent, but I need just... Yes, I understand, sir. Yes, of course. Okay, hold on. Just give me a second to locate the study. I’m setting the phone down for a moment. I’ll be right back...”

He covered the receiver, looked at me, sighed and lamented, “I haven’t even had a chance to sit down yet, and it’s already started. It’s the pit boss—of course.”

I sent him a look of compassion. The “pit boss” was the doctor in charge of trauma cases in the ER. He was notoriously difficult for us radiology residents to deal with, pestering us to look at his cases before anyone else’s, and instantly.

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

After finding the case, Elliot quickly examined the images, leaving the receiver on the desk. Without warning, he slammed his hand down, shouted out a profanity and announced, “My first case of the night, and it’s a train wreck! What luck.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time I’d heard him swear. He’d always been the quintessential gentleman with me and the other women in our residency program, opening doors, helping to carry heavy boxes of reference books, offering up his seat at the front of the conference room. As he composed himself again, I puzzled over this until I remembered a rumor I’d heard. Apparently, he’d recently gone through a breakup with a longtime girlfriend. Thinking back, I remembered how he’d been arriving late to department meetings, dressing in a sloppy manner and sporting dark circles under his eyes.

I noticed that, before picking up the receiver, he glared at it in silence. But when he started talking to the pit boss again, there was no trace of irritation in his voice. His eyes sweeping over the CT, he calmly described the lung contusions, the rib fractures, the pneumothorax, the incidentally discovered kidney stones. “Fortunately, there was no evidence of trauma in the abdomen or pelvis,” he noted, “but please understand, this is a preliminary read, and I will issue a more thorough report later.”

After he hung up, he muttered something to himself before initiating his dictation.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. I took it this time and, just as before, it was the pit boss. He demanded to talk to Elliot again, saying something about how could Elliot miss the liver laceration, that the patient could bleed out, that it would be Elliot’s fault if the patient died, all sorts of things like that. I tried to calm him down, but he remained enraged and insisted on talking to Elliot.

I mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to Elliot, then slowly handed him the phone.

The ensuing conversation was hard to listen to. I was sitting on the other side of the room, but I could hear the pit boss yelling at him through the phone. As before, Elliot remained civil, but this time, his voice was strained, and he spoke faster than he usually did. I glanced over at him and noticed that he was shaking a bit.

Somehow, he managed to end the call and return to dictating the case. He’d gotten to the description of the liver, just minutes after hanging up with the pit boss, when the on-call pager went off. And then the phone began to ring—again.

He told me he’d handle the pager if I took the call. Fortunately, this time it was from a pleasant internal medicine resident who wanted to know if I’d seen a fracture on her patient’s foot X-ray.

While I was talking to her, a large team of surgeons entered the room, led by the highly esteemed but intimidating Dr. Marks. In a booming, authoritative voice, he told us that he wanted to review the

Reality Fractured - Christine Criswell

abdomen/pelvis CT for a patient with suspected appendicitis. Elliot, who was about to return the pager call, looked up at Dr. Marks with a frazzled expression and explained that he hadn’t had time to check the case yet, that there’d been an urgent trauma and that he’d get to it as soon as possible. Then he asked him if the team could please come back in about ten minutes.

Dr. Marks looked incredulous. He spoke very slowly. “Dr. Brooks. This patient is critical. Don’t you understand that?”

Elliot exhaled, located the study from the pile of CTs on his desk and hung it up on his light board. Dr. Marks and his team crowded around him and, as they closed in, I noticed that Elliot had started fidgeting. He was pumping his right leg up and down, tapping his fingers on the desk, pulling his shoulders back and then pushing them forward, over and over again.

I suddenly remembered that he hadn’t answered the pager yet, so I approached the group and asked him to hand it to me. At this, he jumped way up in his chair and looked at me in a way I’d never seen before. I told myself I would ask him if he was okay as soon as the surgeons left.

But I never had a chance. The phone kept ringing, the pager kept going off, there were several additional interruptions from clinicians coming to the reading room and, of course, during all of this, I was trying my best to keep up with reading and dictating my own cases. At one point, I thought I heard him say something odd, something about a “mean voice,” but I didn’t have a chance to stand up and stretch my legs, much less check on him.

I was finishing up some dictations on a complex trauma case when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elliot bolt out of his chair and start stomping around the room. I was about to make a joke about how I, too, felt like having a temper tantrum, but then I caught sight of him punching, kicking, swatting and slicing his arms through the air. He was speaking as well, but instead of directing his words at me, he was looking out into space.

I stood up, alarmed. “Elliot! What are you doing?”

This caught his attention and, for a moment, he quieted, held still and gazed at me. Then, all of a sudden, he whipped his body around to face the door and resumed his frantic stomping and kicking and punching and slicing. And speaking. In a panicked, pressured voice that came out of him so rapidly I had a hard time keeping up with it, he said, “I’m fighting them off. They need to be fought off, and I’m here, I can do it. I know tai chi... Three years... Qigong energy healing... Get away from me! What are you saying? Don’t make me do that. I can’t do that! They’re draining my healing energy, but... Is that Jesus? Jesus, please help me fight them off. Please help! Help! They will kill the patient. They will kill me! Help! My healing energy is going... What are those? Yes, I will, yes, I know, I will try, I will try... Jesus, those

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

shapes, why are they changing? They’re changing, right there. Why? And the demons are now there. Am I dead now? Are you God? Are you an angel? Am I dead?”

His face was one of pure terror.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It crossed my mind, once again, that he was just goofing off.

I tried approaching him. “Elliot, calm down. It’ll be alright. I’ll help you. We’ll—”

All at once, his flailing arm cut through the air and struck the left side of my forehead—hard. I staggered back.

That’s when I knew.

Psychosis. I’d seen this before. Back on my psychiatry rotation in medical school a few years earlier, in a patient in the psych ER. Hallucinations, disorganized thinking, fragmented speech, paranoia. Elliot? But it was true. He was psychotic.

My heart now racing, I backed away, moving to the closest telephone. He needed to go to the ER, but I couldn’t get him there on my own. I’m a small person, even for a woman. Elliot was taller than me, and considerably more muscular. I dialed our in-hospital emergency line. They answered immediately and said they’d send someone right away.

As I was relaying my location, I saw, in my peripheral vision, Elliot clawing at his skin while muttering about bugs crawling on his arms and legs. I closed my eyes and pressed the phone receiver hard against my ear, trying to keep my focus on the conversation. Next, I called Meredith. She was shocked, of course, but told me, without hesitation, not to worry, that she’d handle the on-call obligations by herself, that we should do whatever it took to get Elliot help. I took a deep breath and turned back to Elliot.

He was up against the back wall looking at the door opposite him. I heard him say something jumbled about being dead and how it was now time for him to leave, to go to heaven. I realized that he might try to flee the reading room. I couldn’t let that happen.

So I grabbed the nearest chair, rolled it in front of me and barricaded myself in front of the entrance. I began to feel somehow detached from the situation, almost as though I were watching a movie or a play, and Elliot was acting out his role.

He began to approach me. But then he stopped and a hysterical look came over his face. He rushed to the other side of the room. There, he dropped to the floor and began to sob. I dared not leave the door, so I tried to pacify him with my words. I told him once again that he was not dead, that he would be all right once help arrived. But he took no notice of me.

I felt a push from the door behind me. I moved aside, and in walked the ER team. There were three of them, all men, one of them rolling an empty wheelchair. The oldest and most distinguished-looking

Reality Fractured - Christine Criswell

of them introduced himself to me as Dr. Berry, the on-call psychiatrist. The other two, I presumed, were residents or nurses.

They approached him. By this point, he had stood up again and started meandering around the room, first at a slow pace, but then faster and faster until he was speed walking. Dr. Berry and the other two men managed to surround and stop him, but when they tried to subdue him, Elliot resisted.

“I need to move. I can’t stop. Everything’s going so fast. I need to move!” He attempted to dart between them, but they grabbed him

“Walking by his side, I felt his fear. It was viscous and dark, percolating through his blood, seeping out of him, saturating all of us. I wondered how long before the medication would take effect, how long before my colleague—my friend— would be lost to us.”

and forced him down into the wheelchair.

While one of the two younger men held Elliot in place and fastened a restraint around his waist, Dr. Berry squatted down in front of him and looked him in the eyes. “Hello, Elliot. I’m Dr. Berry. I’m going to give you some olanzapine to make you feel better, to help you calm down.”

Elliot continued to squirm and fidget, saying nothing. One of the men stepped forward and secured Elliot’s arm. Dr. Berry quickly retrieved a syringe from his pocket, swabbed Elliot’s skin with alcohol and jammed the needle into Elliot’s deltoid muscle.

Dr. Berry turned to me and told me they were going to take him down to the ER and that he would like me to go with them as a witness.

They wheeled Elliot out into the hallway. As he moved from the cave-like reading room into the brightly lit corridor, an astonished

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

look came over his face, as though he were seeing light for the first time. He continued to squirm and call out as we approached the elevator, but thankfully, given the late hour, the floor was empty. Walking by his side, I felt his fear. It was viscous and dark, percolating through his blood, seeping out of him, saturating all of us. I wondered how long before the medication would take effect, how long before my colleague—my friend—would be lost to us.

The ER was busy, loud. We passed multiple patients on the way to the room they’d prepared for Elliot, and I heard one moaning in pain, one shouting at a nurse about the long wait to see a doctor, one detailing his bowel habits at top volume. Nurses and medical students and residents and attending physicians were darting from one end of the large room to the other, their pockets bulging with stethoscopes, pen lights, reference manuals, laminated flashcards and other medical paraphernalia. There was a strong antiseptic scent in the air, but also the faint yet unmistakable smell of vomit. I looked at Elliot. He was still in his own world, oblivious.

When we got to his room, a team of nurses transferred him to a bed, once again using restraints. Elliot had stopped fighting. As nurses and the phlebotomist came to tend to him, Dr. Berry led me into an empty room and asked me to tell him what had happened.

I relayed the events of the evening, but Dr. Berry also wanted to know how Elliot had been acting the past few weeks and months. I told him everything I could think of: how we called him “3E” on account of his excitability and high energy, his tendency to jump from hobby to hobby, the recent breakup with his girlfriend, how he mentioned a lack of sleep. Dr. Berry seemed intrigued. As he asked questions, thoughts about Elliot’s mental health diagnosis began to formulate in my head. Was it bipolar disorder? Schizophrenia? Schizoaffective disorder? I wasn’t sure. But the main thing was that he was going to get help, starting today.

Elliot was alone when I entered his room. I said hello to him and pulled up a chair next to his bed. At first, he seemed agitated. But as the olanzapine continued to spread through him, finally, finally, the panic faded from his eyes, his speech slowed, his body settled. Soon, he was asleep. As I watched him breathe, a feeling I can only describe as love came over me. A love for his being human, for needing me at his most vulnerable, for having fought this grave illness so privately. And then, in opposition to my usual code of conduct with colleagues, certainly in violation of our hospital’s policy, I bent down, wrapped my arms around him and, doing my best to give him the healing energy he so often talked about, softly kissed his forehead.

Goodness and Mercy

Dennis McFadden

By the time Mr. Fenstemaker got around to loving Miss Wallace, it was too little too late; Miss Wallace had already gone around the bend. They’d had their fling forty years before, when they both taught—they were the only two teachers—at the little country schoolhouse in Coolbrook Township. It hadn’t ended well when she’d gotten pregnant and he’d persuaded her to give up the baby. What other choice did she have, really? An unwed mother back in those days—the fifties—and not a kid either, but a teacher, would surely be ruined by the scandal, Mr. Fenstemaker assured her, and him leaving his wife, Carolyn, was out of the question. She was a sickly thing who would never survive without him.

Sickly Miss Wallace was not. A big-boned woman, she had a plain but pleasant face, a wide forehead, generous jaw, a face that often wore an expression of suspicious uncertainty. She believed in Santa Claus until she was twelve, and for most of the rest of her life she still blushed at the memory of her stout defenses of the jolly old mythical man in the face of her mocking classmates. Her parents had done nothing but encourage the misbelief, leaving cookies and milk, carrots for the reindeer, every Christmas Eve. Listening for prancing paws on

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

the rooftop. Her mama and daddy loved her innocence, watering it, feeding it, nourishing it until it blossomed into gullibility. But Helen was no dummy. She began to take notice, began to have doubts. Take, for example, the notion of an invisible almighty being in the sky who created Heaven and Earth, who was privy to her innermost longings and desires, in whom her Baptist parents so devoutly believed and tried their best to make her believe as well.

Exactly who was kidding whom?

She grew into an intelligent but easily deceived woman, having been teased, tricked and lied to so often that she couldn’t trust a truth when it looked her in the eye.

Miss Wallace was restless. She lived alone in a cabin, a converted hunting camp in the woods off a dirt road a few miles north of Hartsgrove. She seldom watched television—only two channels came in—there was nothing but talk and static on the radio and she couldn’t get into the book she was trying to read, an Amanda Quick romance. She’d given up on more serious fare, her classics, her Faulkners and Steinbecks; she found she simply could not concentrate anymore. She’d gone to bed early, but couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, dozed a little and woke again, trying to remember something, but she grew more and more frustrated because she couldn’t think of what it was that needed remembering. She suspected there might be nothing at all, but she couldn’t be sure.

Finally, she got out of bed and walked into the kitchen in the dim early hush. Dawn was still a good hour away. From the light of a high, hidden moon, the plain cotton curtain in the kitchen window glowed like a ghost. The air smelled burnt, the lingering scent of the toasted cheese sandwich she’d scorched for her supper.

She went to the window, pulled aside the curtain and looked out. From the darkness inside the house, a light fog seemed to be imprisoned in the woods, a pale gray luminescence held captive behind the nearest trees.

In the pre-dawn light, she could make out what appeared to be her cast-iron skillet sitting on top of her rusty lawnmower halfway across the yard. How in the world had it ended up there? She’d been looking everywhere for it. Over by the road, movement caught her eye. A deer? Only a faint impression, like a vague notion of something trying to be recalled, too vague by far. There was so little light. She thought she heard something, a voice maybe, then maybe the snap of a pop-top can being opened. Then—there! Did she see a glint off what might have been a car parked just down the road, just beyond her car in the driveway? Someone—something—was out there. There were plenty of deer, and lots of other large woodland creatures, but deer—

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

and this she knew from bitter experience—didn’t drive cars any more than they pulled sleighs. Nor did they drink beer from cans.

It was them. Again. It was Goodness and Mercy.

Two men had been following her. She’d noticed them a few times in the past few weeks, but they seemed to materialize more and more often lately. One was stocky and unkempt, an ugly man with an orange nose, patchy, uneven stubble on his face, a complexion like dirty sandpaper. The other was younger and had eyes like a weasel. Nearly bald, that one was. She’d spotted them once following her in the meat aisle in the Golden Dawn, and another time coming out of the five-and-ten store on Main Street where she’d just bought a new spatula. Up by the library too, and on a few other occasions. She’d seen them following her in a rusty old bullet-nose car. A Studebaker, she thought.

When she’d told Mr. Fenstemaker about them, he’d tried at first to convince her they were just two men she happened to bump into, by coincidence, that they weren’t following her at all. That she was being paranoid. But when she kept seeing them again and again, and she told him again and again, he humored her. Maybe they were Goodness and Mercy, he said. Maybe Goodness and Mercy would follow her all the days of her life.

Miss Wallace was not amused. But she did begin to think of them that way, as Goodness and Mercy, having no other names to call them. Of course she couldn’t be sure they were really following her. She couldn’t even be sure they were really real.

When he’d known her best, before they’d gotten old—he was eighty-three now, ten years older than her—Miss Wallace had been a teacher, a molder of little minds, so Mr. Fenstemaker thought it was very much a pity, and more than a little ironic, when her own raveled mind headed south.

They’d taught together at Coolbrook Township, a few miles north of Hartsgrove, a small country schoolhouse with only two classrooms and two playrooms. Miss Wallace taught grades one, two, three and four in one room, while Mr. Fenstemaker taught the older kids, grades five through eight, in the other. He’d been there several years before she arrived, and they taught together right up until the school district consolidated in the late fifties, when the school closed and the children began riding the bus into town for their education. Mr. Fenstemaker had gone with them, teaching seventh-grade geography at Hartsgrove Junior High School, but Miss Wallace had been unable to continue her teaching career—he held himself partly to blame— and had moved away altogether, away from the gossip and talk, the malignant rumors, to Harmony Mills, where she’d found a job in the

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

public library.

They’d become close at the little schoolhouse, the only two adults in a swarm of often misbehaved, often dirty and mostly intellectually challenged little country bumpkins. It was not his fault, in his mind. It was mutual. She was an attractive woman, he was a lonely man. Carolyn had turned inward and sickly by then, following in her mother’s spiteful footsteps.

After she retired from the library, Miss Wallace moved back to

“...when she kept seeing them again and again, and she told him again and again, he humored her. Maybe they were Goodness and Mercy, he said. Maybe Goodness and Mercy would follow her all the days of her life.”

Hartsgrove, to the little cabin out toward Coolbrook, a few miles north of town. She never married. By then, Mr. Fenstemaker had retired. Carolyn had passed away. He was lonely.

Miss Wallace made the first move. How many years ago was it now? Ten? Twenty? All the years were rolling together, gathering momentum like a snowball rolling downhill. One afternoon, a chilly, windy afternoon in March, he sat working on his jigsaw puzzle, an afghan over his lap, an electric heater glowing at his feet. The parlor was cold, on the windy side of his house on Rebecca Street, and curlicues of frost etched the windowpanes. He heard a quiet knock at his door and a shy yoo-hoo. It was Miss Wallace.

The irony, he’d thought. Time. There’d been a time when he’d have shooed her away like a dog that followed him home, but that time had passed. The passing time had eroded the rough edges of the memories, smoothing them in the tricky way that time adjusts

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

perspective. Mr. Fenstemaker was lonely again. And Miss Wallace, even in her fifties or sixties—he couldn’t remember exactly when it had been—was still lovely. Still lovely enough to a lonely old man. This was before it was evident what time was doing to her mind.

Miss Wallace, on that long ago afternoon, carried with her, of all things, a casserole. It was still warm from the oven, steaming, and she carried it cradled in a towel. She asked Mr. Fenstemaker if it wasn’t customary for folks to bring comfort food to the home of someone whose loved one had passed away. Mr. Fenstemaker raised his bushy eyebrows, mostly gray by now, scratched his head, mostly bald and freckled with age spots, and looked down his nose that was beleaguered by the heavy frames of his glasses. He said yes, he supposed it was customary, adding, “But, you know, Carolyn passed away several years ago.”

“Oh, I know. I was so sorry to hear it.” But her face did not reflect sorrow. Her eyes, brown and plain, were bright. “It’s western baked beans,” she said, smiling down at the dish. “I remembered how much you liked them.”

When Miss Wallace saw or sensed or heard—or imagined— Goodness and Mercy outside her house on the morning the fog was trapped in the trees, she pulled down her window shades, locked her doors and crawled back into her bed, pulling the covers up, clenching her eyes shut. She began to hum “Oh! Susanna” to the clattering of her teeth as she shivered, which she often did when her nerves were threatening to fray. She fell into a dreamless sleep and was surprised when she awoke an hour or two later oddly refreshed. It was quiet. She thought she could hear the porcupine waddling across her yard, the porcupine she’d named Bart that kept coming to her stoop for the dried apples she fed him. She made her way tremulously to the window, raised the shade, pulled aside the curtain and looked out at the bright August morning, not a wisp of fog remaining, only dew sparkling on the blades of the weeds. No sign of Bart. No sign of the two men or of the bullet-nose Studebaker, although her skillet was still on the lawnmower.

She took her pills—hoping she hadn’t taken them yet, as she sometimes forgot and took them twice—put water on for her tea and ate a cookie. She enjoyed the quiet, listening to the grumble of the boiling water. She did not turn on the radio to hear the jabber on KDKA. Had she seen them, had they really been here, she wondered, Goodness and Mercy?

She decided to see what Mr. Fenstemaker had to say.

Later the same morning, Miss Wallace found herself on the side of a hill.

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

She looked around, utterly bewildered, having no idea where she was. She felt a hot numbness in her head, like smothered panic. Through the trees, she could make out down below a creek beyond the roofs of some houses and, across from that, halfway up another hill, a white dome. Tears welled up in her eyes as it slowly came to her. The white dome: the courthouse on Main. She was in town. How had she gotten here? What was she doing here? The part of the creek she could see—the Sandy Lick Creek—was just down from the ballfields. The clouds in her head began to lift and part. On the street just below, she spotted her car. She took a deep breath, wiped at the tears with the back of her hand. Sighed in relief. It was creeping back to her. It always came back. If only she could remember when she woke up in a fugue that eventually it would come back to her, she wouldn’t need to panic, but she could never remember that. She supposed if she could, she wouldn’t find herself in such a state in the first place.

She’d parked down on Hiawatha Street to climb the hill the back way to Mr. Fenstemaker’s house on Rebecca. It took her another moment to remember why: because of the men. The two men, Goodness and Mercy. If they were following her, she thought it best not to lead them to Mr. Fenstemaker if she could help it. The dew hadn’t dried despite the hot August sun, and her sensible shoes and pantlegs were wet. She was sweating.

When he came to the door, he eyed her up and down. “My gracious. Look what the cat dragged in.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You look like hell, Helen. You’re sweating like a pig. No offense.”

Miss Wallace took offense. “I do not sweat. I perspire.”

“You’re perspiring like a pig.”

“Fine then. I’ll just turn around. I don’t care if they get you. I don’t care if they get me.” She turned on her heel and started to walk away.

He sighed. “Fine, Helen. Who? You don’t care if who gets who?”

She turned, facing him down. “Goodness and Mercy. That’s who.” Against her will she began to cry. Sometimes she couldn’t help it.

“Oh my heavens,” Mr. Fenstemaker said, a very sad look overcoming his suddenly age-weary face. “Not them again.” He pushed open the screen door and held out his arms into which she stumbled, elbows pressed to her sides to conceal her sweaty armpits, smearing her tears with the heels of her hands.

Seizing the opportunity, Mr. Fenstemaker’s cat, Dixon, a gray tiger, burst out of the house and into the freedom of the glorious August morning, his last morning on Earth.

Mr. Fenstemaker by no means considered himself a cruel man, despite his reputation—earned in the old days at Coolbrook Township, in the days before corporal punishment fell into disfavor—for being a

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

strict disciplinarian eager to take down his mighty wooden paddle at the drop of a cuss word or guffaw or other gesture of disrespect, and apply it liberally to the backside of the deserving young miscreant. Spare the rod, spoil the child—cliches don’t earn their keep for nothing. Not being a cruel man, he took it upon himself to pity wounded creatures. Took it upon himself to comfort Miss Wallace, and offer her succor. He invited her in to fix his breakfast. It was his belief that women were happiest when their hands and minds were occupied with domesticities. He poured them each a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table by the window where the pale blue curtains his wife had hung there years before drooped a bit forlornly. They were dusty and frayed, but he couldn’t bring himself to take them down, in loving memory of Carolyn, who was constantly lifting and shifting them aside to peek out and see what that old rubbernecked biddy, Mrs. Ferraro, might be up to. In the wooded hillside neighborhood, she was the only neighbor in sight. He watched Miss Wallace putter about, taking out the eggs and butter and bacon, taking down a bowl and plates and a whisk, cracking and pouring and splashing, frying and sizzling. Her coffee remained untouched on the faded formica counter beside her. He remembered then she didn’t drink coffee. When she seemed to be on her evenest keel, he brought them up again, Goodness and Mercy.

He saw her shudder. “You know, Harold, they don’t seem to me like Goodness and Mercy at all.” She placed four slices of white bread into the toaster. “They seem more like Meanness and Cruelty.”

“Meanness and Cruelty shall follow you all the days of your life?” he asked. She didn’t answer. Whipping the eggs, she glanced his way with a worried look, the look of a scolded puppy seeking forgiveness. Mr. Fenstemaker felt he should tread lightly. He’d heard that telling her she was being silly, being paranoid, that the two men were all in her mind, was not the right approach; it would only lead to more confusion, fear and resentment in an unbalanced mind—besides which there might actually be some basis in fact, two real men she might have bumped into on a few coincidental occasions. But he didn’t want to encourage her possible delusion either. “That’s an awfully harsh assessment. What have you ever done to deserve meanness and cruelty?”

The wrong thing to say, he realized right away. Her thoughts would naturally alight on the baby she gave up as being more than reason enough to be deserving of meanness. And cruelty. Miss Wallace didn’t respond. Nor did she glance his way again. He saw a new tear roll out of her eye. “What I meant was, you’re a good person. A kind person.”

“Thank you, Harold. So are you. Most of the time.”

He ignored the unflattering addendum. “Why do you think these two men, Goodness and Mercy—or Meanness and Cruelty, whoever they may be—are following you?”

She placed the fork by the skillet, lifted the curtain and looked out the window. “I keep seeing them. They were at my house last night. In the middle of the night.”

“Did you speak to them?”

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

She hadn’t spoken to them. But she could almost swear she’d seen them, heard them laughing and drinking, heard the snap of their beer cans opening, saw the moonlight glint off their car just beyond hers through the morning fog. And this morning, she spotted their car following her all the way into town, though they veered off just before she got to the light by Blake’s Hardware. She could almost swear to it.

“Almost?” Mr. Fenstemaker clarified.

“Definitely almost,” she assured him. She’d most surely seen them three days ago as she was coming out of the library. And not for the first time. She could describe them. One was ugly and the other was uglier; then she described them in slightly more detail. Mr. Fenstemaker marveled at the mysterious workings of the wounded mind.

He made a show of lifting the blue curtain and peering intently about the yard, into the trees as far as he could see, across to Mrs. Ferraro’s house and shed, and up and down Rebecca Street. Then he got up and went to the other window and looked out, then to the living room and all the windows, the front door and the back door. “No sign of them,” he said.

“Of course they’re hiding.”

He changed the subject. “Shall we eat?”

Instead of sitting across the table, as usual, she came and sat close beside him, too close, crimping his elbow on his fork side, which he found a bit of a bother. But he kept it to himself. He was not a cruel man. He tolerated her proximity, even encouraged it, to some degree. They ate in silence. Miss Wallace’s trepidation did nothing to curb her appetite. She ate rather as if she were trying to bury her delusions beneath an avalanche of eggs.

When they finished, Mr. Fenstemaker retired to the living room, sat down at the card table where his puzzle pieces lay in neat array, clicked on the gooseneck lamp and began poring over pieces under his magnifying glass, searching for the next small fit. He listened to Miss Wallace happily washing dishes. When she was finished, she came in and pulled a chair close (too close) beside him. He got up, gave a spin to the old globe standing on the pedestal in the corner, went window to window again—peering out of each—and then returned, patting her neck reassuringly. After a while, after he adjudged that their breakfasts had sufficiently settled, he led her upstairs to the bedroom.

Sex, passion, were mostly memories, but Mr. Fenstemaker liked having a woman in his bed nevertheless. Was it simply the alleviation of loneliness? Or was it the memories, not only of the sex and the passion, but of the man he used to be? Whatever the reason, the presence of Miss Wallace in his bed brought him comfort. He was not averse to a modicum of cuddling. And he knew that she was comforted as well, wanting the warmth of his bed, his arms, needing his protection. A quiet, secure place could only be good for her mental well-being.

They napped.

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

When they awoke, it was mid-afternoon, judging by the light slanting in through the curtain in the bedroom. He looked over at her blurry face—his spectacles were still on the nightstand amid the clutter—and smiled. She returned a blurry smile, a fragile smile. He hoped that Goodness and Mercy might have been vanquished by now, but he feared they were only in hiding.

Miss Wallace sighed and looked up at the ceiling. There were cobwebs there, but Mr. Fenstemaker seldom took notice, inasmuch as normally the only time he looked at the ceiling was when his glasses

“It was creeping back to her. It always came back. If only she could remember when she woke up in a fugue that eventually it would come back to her, she wouldn’t need to panic, but she could never remember that. She supposed if she could, she wouldn’t find herself in such a state in the first place.”

were off, and he couldn’t see them then.

Out of nowhere, Miss Wallace remarked, “I hope he went to college.”

That was the thing of it. There she went again. Mr. Fenstemaker knew who the “he” was, even though that was not always the case. One of the things that had always annoyed him about Miss Wallace was her penchant for employing unattributed references, leaving him to have to ask who she was talking about. Which he usually did, even though he could often put it together through educated guesswork and the context of her remark. He thought that asking her anyhow might cure her of the habit. But it didn’t.

I hope she’s not a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr. Fenstemaker thought, but was not cruel enough to say aloud. What he offered instead was, “Who? Goodness or Mercy?”

She gave him a cross, albeit blurry, look. “You know who.” At

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

that moment, the look on her face faltered and her eyes gave a worried quiver. “Don’t you?”

He nodded begrudgingly. “I hope he can tie his shoes all by himself.”

Miss Wallace rolled away, showing him her back. She felt she ought to be miffed by Mr. Fenstemaker’s remark, but she couldn’t be bothered to think it through. From outside in the yard came the highpitched yowl of a cat, Dixon probably, followed by a cacophony of bird cries and wings beating air. Then a curious hush, punctuated by the rude caw of a crow.

“How would you like a cat?” Mr. Fenstemaker grumbled.

“I have a porcupine,” said Miss Wallace. They were quiet, listening to the hush. “Did something just happen to Dixon?”

“I can only hope,” he riposted.

Miss Wallace wondered why he had a cat in the first place. There seemed to be no affection between them, Mr. Fenstemaker and Dixon. He would not tolerate the cat on his lap—where cats belonged, purring, where they earned their keep, in Miss Wallace’s opinion. When Dixon tried to rub around his ankles, Mr. Fenstemaker tended to kick him away, and when he jumped up on a table, he tended to sweep him off roughly, sending him sailing across the room. Once, the cat had made the mistake of jumping onto the wrong table, disturbing Mr. Fenstemaker’s carefully arrayed puzzle pieces, and for that crime Mr. Fenstemaker had seized him by the scruff of the neck and winged him through the door out into the yard. Dixon landed on all fours and walked away haughtily, as though the flight had been his idea.

The bedroom was dim, the curtains closed, the sun on the other side of the house. When she opened her eyes again, she noticed the paddle leaning in the shadows of the corner by the head of the bed, the mighty wooden paddle, a cobweb clinging to its handle. Surely she’d seen it there before. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember.

Back at Coolbrook, the paddle had been displayed much more prominently, hanging by its leather strap between the long blackboard that covered most of the front wall of his classroom and the flag standing in the corner to which they pledged their allegiance every morning. Hung there to instill fear, to keep order, she recalled the many times she’d heard it at work—seldom did she bear witness, being in her own classroom across the hall. The resounding thwacks were loud and unmistakable, like thunder on a clear blue day, fixing looks of wideeyed anguish across the faces of her younger pupils, the sounds of the paddle striking the backside of the guilty student, usually an older boy, his occasional whimpers and cries—they tried not to cry out, but seldom succeeded. And the grunts.

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

The grunts were Mr. Fenstemaker’s, as he wielded the paddle with a fury, a dedication and grim enthusiasm that belied the nobility of his purported purpose.

The memories made her wonder: what kind of a father would Mr. Fenstemaker have been? She gave an uneasy shiver. Surely she’d considered the question before. She must have. Surely she’d pictured him changing the baby’s diaper, teaching him to catch a ball, ride a bike, but she couldn’t remember if she’d actually ever properly worried over the question.

Miss Wallace shivered again and inched back toward Mr. Fenstemaker, her heart thumping in her hollow chest. So sick to death of meanness and cruelty. Make it all go away. His arm drooped sleepily around her. “Harold,” she whispered, “did you ever wish you and her had had a child?”

“Who, her?” he grumbled. “Me and Marilyn Monroe? Me and Mamie Eisenhower?”

Though she wasn’t altogether sure why it struck her as so funny, Miss Wallace had to giggle. The very notion of Mr. Fenstemaker and Mamie Eisenhower arm-in-arm, strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue in their Sunday best, dancing a tango at The Savoy.

“Me and Minnie Mouse?” He sounded drowsy.

She didn’t giggle this time; the giggles were gone, and she wasn’t quite sure it had been her who’d done the giggling only moments before. Minnie Mouse was over the line. It seemed a cruel remark. She took his hand that was resting on her breast, holding it out to study it as though she were examining fabric she was considering buying. It was an ugly hand. Blue-veined and gnarled, wrapped in dry chicken skin, rough as burlap. This is how we die, she thought: we shrink, dry up, blow away. She realized Mr. Fenstemaker was dying. Now. She pressed the hand to her bosom. Mr. Fenstemaker never stirred. He might as well have been groping a cantaloupe.

She whispered again. “Harold—do you love me?”

He squeezed her, which meant yes. He grunted and murmured again, an affirmative response, um-hmm, and Miss Wallace felt her muscles tense and the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. He was a dirty liar.

Under her breath she began to hum “Oh! Susanna.” She heard the distant sound of a lawnmower somewhere down the hill, the far-off whoop of a child at play. Mr. Fenstemaker went limp, but he had not died, not yet—she could hear his breathing, the grumbling undertone of a snore.

She felt herself drifting back into a yawning nap as well. Heat passed through her head, her cheeks and forehead flushing in embarrassment as she recalled the morning she’d gone to work at the library in Harmony Mills wearing two different shoes. Unaware of it until Mrs. Jeffers pointed it out. Completely at a loss. That was the first

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

time.

One loafer, one sneaker. One black, one red. Now, drifting back toward sleep, she knew, even then, that when she next awoke she would not know where she was, or who was beside her. Not know who she was. For a few minutes she would not remember, and the quiet, suffocating panic would overcome her.

***

Mr. Fenstemaker woke up groggy. He’d gone from never

“Mr. Fenstemaker did not consider her preoccupa- tion natural. Curiosity he could understand, but at what point does a healthy, natural curiosity cross the border into unreasonable obsession, a symptom of serious mental issues?”

napping to now, here he was, two naps in one day. Maybe they would simply keep expanding, longer and deeper and darker and more enveloping until there was nothing left but napping. Maybe that would be his passing. A pleasant enough way to go, he supposed, if go he must. Mr. Fenstemaker, at eighty-three, thought much about death and dying. He’d hoped by now he wouldn’t fear it so, but he was afraid he was still afraid. It made no sense, intellectually; either he’d be in a pleasant place (he believed if there was any afterlife at all it might be like a heaven; no hell, at least not for the likes of him), or he’d be in a state of deep, dreamless sleep. And hadn’t he already experienced that? Didn’t he experience that every day? But it was that very oblivion that he feared. The not waking up from the sleep. Although he couldn’t rationalize how being nothing was something to fear, he feared it nonetheless.

He was clammy, a light sweat clinging to his skin, dampening his pajamas. The air in the room was still and hot. Had he awoken on

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

his own? Or had there been a noise downstairs, or from the yard, from Dixon maybe?

It was quiet, the silence airless and heavy. Miss Wallace lay next to him on her side, her back curled toward him, soft and lumpy, so familiar to him after all these years, so comfortable. Carolyn, though he’d loved her a good deal, he supposed, had not been as comfortable a fit. Bony and barren, forever trying to exude a warm flicker in her hazel eyes, but the pilot light was constantly dying out. He stared at Miss Wallace for some time, until he was sure he could see life, the rise and fall of her breathing.

He couldn’t recall how long it was after the western baked beans casserole—it might have been the same afternoon—before she first brought up the baby. Their baby. He’d wondered how long it would take. After she’d given it up, while they were still teaching together—it was another year and a half before the school consolidation—the topic was never discussed, the question never asked, not in words—although in so many other ways, it was. Mr. Fenstemaker often saw the question etched on her brow, being rolled like a pill in her fingers, assailing him out of her injured eyes. Though never did he acknowledge it.

And he knew, years later, after they were together again, that it would be only a matter of time until the question tumbled out of her heart and into their lives.

One day, it came: “Do you ever think about him?”

Another damned unattributed reference. “Who? Do I ever think about who?”

Miss Wallace’s lips tightened into a grim line. “The baby we gave up.”

“No. I can’t really say I do. It’s all water under the bridge.” He couldn’t recall exactly when the conversation took place, but he remembered quite clearly Dixon, a kitten then, on the back of the sofa sparring with the cord on the blind, before he broke him of the habit. “But obviously you do.”

“Yes. All the time.”

“What does that profit you? You did the best thing you could have done for the child at the time. Now he’s living his life— presumably—in his world, and you in yours. And never the twain shall meet.”

“He’d be thirty-seven years old now.”

“Maybe not,” Mr. Fenstemaker countered. “He might be dead.”

He’d meant to be intentionally harsh, like shaking a hysterical student, like slapping a drowning person whose panic was endangering them both. A new tear rolled down her cheek.

“I would still want to know. I want to know what kind of a man he became.”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

She wished plenty. Over the years, Miss Wallace tried to find out what had become of the baby she’d given up for adoption. The family court records were sealed, and the caseworker who’d handled the adoption, a brash young woman named Millie Lockett, was herself

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

gone by now.

Miss Wallace had developed a lifelong habit of taking in and sizing up every man who was remotely the same age her son would be, and studying him closely—as closely as etiquette and propriety would allow, sometimes closer—to see if he bore any family resemblance at all. Did he have Mr. Fenstemaker’s eyes, the color of cigarette ash? Her broad forehead? His smallish humped nose, her wide shoulders, his bushy eyebrows? Was this man her son?

Sometimes, when she could, she pointed them out to Mr. Fenstemaker. Now and then, she thought one bore such close resemblances to the characteristics of the family she and Mr. Fenstemaker would have been that she was certain he was the one. Those were the ones she took steps to find out more about, to find out their names, find out whatever she could—particularly about their parentage. Never, alas, to any satisfactory conclusion. One, an especially likely candidate, came to her house when she called Atomic Pest Control about the family of skunks that had taken up residence in the crawl space under her cabin. He was a dead ringer for Mr. Fenstemaker, his very height, weight, shape and demeanor, the same narrow shoulders held back proudly, the same barrel chest, the same large ears, the way his hands held his traps and cages. His name was Gary Knapp, but when she told Mr. Fenstemaker about him, it turned out he’d known the Knapps for years, including their boy, Gary. He’d been born in Ohio two years after Miss Wallace had given birth.

Still Miss Wallace persisted.

Mr. Fenstemaker did not consider her preoccupation natural. Curiosity he could understand, but at what point does a healthy, natural curiosity cross the border into unreasonable obsession, a symptom of serious mental issues?

She’d gone around the bend. It was too late to bring her back. Something would have to be done—how long would she be able to care for herself on her own?—but he was not at all certain what course of action should be taken, or if he should be the one to take it. Her immediate family was gone. She had relatives in the area, though they weren’t particularly close. Mr. Fenstemaker lived it one day at a time. His days, after all, were numbered. If he passed away first, the problem would expire along with him. Some consolation.

He touched her shoulder lightly. He heard a noise downstairs.

Miss Wallace awoke with a start, though not from Mr. Fenstemaker’s touch. She sat upright, gaping wide-eyed about the shadowy bedroom. Though she wasn’t sure where she was or why, she knew she knew this man lying beside her in the bed, staring up at her warily. She knew also that the sanctuary had been breached. She seized

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

the mighty wooden paddle from the corner, brushing the cobwebs aside, ready to do battle. “It’s them. They’re inside the house!”

Damned unattributed references. “Who? Who’s inside the house?” He knew perfectly well who, but he thought that asking anyhow might cure her of the habit.

“Goodness and Mercy!” she whispered, this time more angry than frightened. She remembered who Mr. Fenstemaker was. “Whoever they are!”

“Stuff and nonsense,” Mr. Fenstemaker muttered. He was fond of employing the old colloquialisms, proud of having his feet planted firmly in the past.

“Now they’re Stuff and Nonsense?”

Mr. Fenstemaker wriggled up, struggling to gain the edge of the bed, shaking his spotted old head in frustration. “No, no, no,” he said. “They’re not Stuff and Nonsense. Well, they are, but... They’re not Goodness and Mercy either. They’re nothing. They don’t exist. It’s time you got over this Goodness and Mercy business.” A dose of reality. A slap to a drowning woman.

“You’re the one who called them Goodness and Mercy, not me.”

“I was naming figments of your imagination,” he explained. “Helen, listen to me.”

“I will not!” She set off for the stairway, paddle gripped in both hands. “You wait here if you want,” she called back to him. “I’m sick of it! I’ll do what I have to.”

At the bottom of the stairs she stopped, blinking in wonder. Two men were standing in the kitchen, smiling broadly at her with teeth that were none too pretty. Mr. Fenstemaker stopped too, clinging to the banister a step above her.

The uglier one with the orange nose, the one she’d come to think of as Goodness, held his arms up high, wide and open, as if to embrace Miss Wallace. “Hello, Ma,” he greeted.

Miss Wallace blinked her eyes rapidly, squinted them narrowly, trying to drive a wedge into the puzzle. “Who are you?”

The man, Goodness, shook his head and tsked. He turned to the other one, the balder, less ugly one she knew as Mercy, and said, “What do you make of a mama can’t even remember her own boy she brung into the world?”

“Not much, Ernest,” replied Mercy, and Miss Wallace couldn’t say if that was the real name of the ugly man, Ernest, or if Mercy was simply bemoaning a lack of sincerity. “Hell, my mom don’t want to remember me neither, but she ain’t got no choice.”

Mr. Fenstemaker stood on the stairway behind Miss Wallace beneath a cluster of pictures of him and his family, in younger days, before he’d become decrepit. She saw storm clouds gathering on his flushed old face.

“I did have a dream. I dreamed I found my boy. Was it you? I

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

dreamed the thunder split the sky open and light poured down out of it, and there was my baby boy, all bathed in glowing light and pointing up at the sky.”

Goodness, or Ernest, nodded in eager agreement. “I had a dream, too, Ma. I dreamed I was eating mashed potatoes out of the glove compartment of my car.”

“The Studebaker?”

He nodded, his smile beaming anew. Mercy seemed to find the exchange quite funny, and he sat at the table, laughing and slapping his knee.

“Back at Coolbrook, the paddle had been displayed much more prominently, hanging by its leath- er strap between the long black- board that covered most of the front wall of his classroom and the flag standing in the corner to which they pledged their allegiance every morning.”

Goodness aimed his beaming smile at Mr. Fenstemaker. “So this here’s my pappy,” he said. “The apple don’t fall far from the tree, right, Pappy?”

Mr. Fenstemaker had had enough. “Get thee gone!” he cried, seizing the paddle from Miss Wallace’s hand, jostling her in the process, bumping her into the wall where she dropped heavily onto the steps, watching what took place next as though from a distance.

The first thing she saw from her new perspective was Dixon the cat, dead, in a crumpled, bloody heap by the door.

She watched Mr. Fenstemaker charge in a proud, rickety gait, storming across the worn linoleum of the kitchen floor and swinging the paddle at Goodness—and not at the seat of his pants, either, but at his head. Goodness ducked. Mr. Fenstemaker missed. She saw the other man, Mercy, stand and clap and giggle in delight and say whoee, whoee, as Mr. Fenstemaker stumbled to his knees, and Goodness reached down to pick up the paddle from where it had fallen.

Goodness and Mercy - Dennis McFadden

As Miss Wallace watched, the distance seemed to grow greater until she was watching as if through the wrong end of a telescope, through a tunnel, dark around the edges, flickering dimly in the middle where all the fury was taking place. The sound, too, seemed further off, muffled and echoed until all the sense was gone out of it, the braying, howling laughter of Goodness and Mercy, the awful, impotent squeals of Mr. Fenstemaker as they picked up the old man and bent him over the kitchen table, yanking down his pajama pants and paddling his bare bottom, Mr. Fenstemaker howling in humiliation, pain and rage, his bottom and his face blossoming deep scarlet. At last, the curtain seemed to drop before the scene was over, and Miss Wallace didn’t come around until some time later, after the play had ended. Mr. Fenstemaker lay face down on the floor, the paddle beside him.

Men. The mess. The sugar bowl was spilled, the oilcloth halfway off the table, blood and a dead cat on the floor, a chair tipped over, another askew. Someone had to clean this up. The two men, Goodness and Mercy, were gone. Mr. Fenstemaker just lay there. She was sick of it. Why should it always fall to the woman to set things right again? What if she just threw up her hands and went home?

Men.

Mr. Fenstemaker was dead where he lay. When they came to her cabin in the woods to question her, when they brought her to police headquarters, Miss Wallace was able to piece together what had taken place, what she thought had taken place, and was able to provide a description of the two men, Goodness and Mercy. Although, she explained, those were not their real names. The name of one of them might have been Ernest, but she couldn’t be sure.

She couldn’t be sure about anything.

The police were not able to find Goodness and Mercy. (In a rare moment of clarity, Miss Wallace considered whether or not to relish the irony in that metaphor.) There were no corroborating accounts. No physical evidence. The paddle was clean. They were unable to find a single witness, not only to the crime itself, but to the two alleged stalkers in particular.

What’s more, they were no longer stalking her. They seemed to have gone away. Now she was alone. Mr. Fenstemaker was gone. Goodness and Mercy were gone.

The authorities grew suspicious. Miss Wallace began to wonder. She began to doubt herself.

Everyone thought it was her. That Miss Wallace was the one who’d taken his mighty wooden paddle and beaten Mr. Fenstemaker to death with it. Clearly, she remembered cleaning up the mess, wiping the sugar from the table, wiping the blood from the paddle. But Goodness and Mercy were, she had to admit, less clear, almost like a dream. Surely, she thought, “Oh! Susanna” chattering like a jackhammer in her mind, surely she was not strong enough. Not cruel enough to have done this thing.

NONFICTION

Silence, Anti-Racism and Women

Melissa Knox

My mother never had an indoor voice. Now she’s deaf and pushing a hundred and three. In the dining room of her assisted living community, retired professors and school principals converse in hushed tones about climate change and politicians. Not Mom. If the server doesn’t materialize within a nanosecond, she yells, “Help!” When I can’t distract her—when she stops conversation with a loud “HELP!”—I admire her energy, if not her method. She wants help, and she’ll damn well get some. Despite or because of her dementia, she’s more aware of time, of not wasting it. “I’m breathing,” is her go-to answer whenever anyone asks how she’s feeling. Her scowl conveys the most basic wisdom: cut to the chase! Why not ask what I’m reading? Watching? Doing?

On a recent visit, our similarity dawned on me. Like her, I annoy or distress people by speaking out. I started doing so several months after George Floyd’s death, when my former school held a Zoom dedicated to shaming white women, asking us to work in teams of two to unearth our presumed racism. Greatly to my shock, I seemed to be the only one finding the Zoom session abusive. I emailed one of my best friends who’d been there and said, “Can you believe this?” She chided

me with the assurance that it was just “one talk.” It wasn’t “one”—the woman leading it was a full-time employee. My friend added, “I can’t take this deep dive with you.” I said, “But—” and she snapped, “I won’t discuss racism!”

The Zoom’s title, “Black Students at Historically White Schools,” led me to believe we’d actually be exploring the difficulties that Black students encounter at historically white schools. The vigorous exchange of ideas I’d anticipated didn’t occur. I watched with increasing disbelief as sensitive, educated women’s faces fell into confusion and guilt. It was the height of the pandemic, and Zoom was the closest we got to a social life. The look on everyone’s face indicated a fear of being tossed into the flames. These women had thought of “flesh-colored” Band-Aids as “normal.” They miserably acknowledged their lack of awareness about shopping in stores where they were the majority race. Living in neighborhoods mostly consisting of people sharing the same shade of skin. Told they were unwitting creators of systemic racism, they appeared to believe without question. They wept or looked downcast. One asked, “How did we get here?” As if they’d strangled George Floyd themselves.

The leader instructed us to ask no questions, but to feel lucky if a Black person expressed a wish to tell any one of us what had hurt her. Like most schools, mine now has mandatory “anti-racist” training, whose perverse tactics, described above, are grounded in the increasingly discredited Ibram X. Kendi’s bestselling books, as well as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, the latter characterized by John McWhorter as a volume whose best use is “to keep tables from wobbling.” It’s easy to see the appeal of DiAngelo and Kendi: both offer impossibly simple solutions to very complex problems. If “all” white people were racist, as DiAngelo insists, then lifelong penance would at least punish the guilty. If “all” inequality were caused by racism, as Kendi asserts, racism would be easier to banish.

Alas, when the head of the school murmured, “Dr. Kendi,” her eyes shone and her voice shook. She looked like a groupie waiting to be hugged by her favorite pop star. Or a 700 Club congregant. What showed on her face was rapture.

If I’d had a chance to speak up, to raise my voice more like my mother, I would have expressed my disgust—but all participants were muted. I spoke up afterwards, and heard the familiar retorts: I should check my privilege, I should confront my unconscious racism, I need to decolonize my way of thinking and I don’t know what’s going on because I live outside of the U.S. As if I would automatically understand things differently if I’d been standing on the sidewalk in Minneapolis witnessing the murder of George Floyd. Still, the comments keep coming: “You’re of course older, you don’t know what the last few years have been like, you’re unaware...” But I haven’t missed out on Kendi

Silence, Anti-Racism and Women - Melissa Knox

and DiAngelo. Or the vast disagreements among public intellectuals: Coleman Hughes, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Douglas Murray, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Heather Mac Donald, John McWhorter, Ijeoma Oluo, Helen Pluckrose, Thomas Sowell, Isabel Wilkerson, Peter W. Wood, Rafia Zakaria and others. I look around me and I listen. Every one of these writers leads me back to Martin Luther King Jr.

You should see the eyes glaze over when I say that King knew best how to combat racism. People edge away when I add, “Color blindness is the real anti-racism. Color blindness is a means of treating

“If I’d had a chance to speak up, to raise my voice more like my mother, I would have expressed my disgust—but all participants were muted. I spoke up afterwards, and heard the familiar retorts: I should check my privilege, I should confront my unconscious racism, I need to decolonize my way of thinking and I don’t know what’s going on because I live outside of the U.S.”

one another decently.” They don’t want to be seen with me.

The topics about which my friends don’t speak—race, gender, class, the difference between equality and so-called equity, the meaning of the term “diversity” when what we used to call “merit” becomes a dirty word, police violence, groupthink, brainwashing, the butchering of children and teenage girls in the name of gender affirmation—are all the topics I feel should be shouted from rooftops. When people don’t listen, my impulse (like Mom!) is to yell, to force them to engage in discussion. The formulaic language my friends use, the vocabulary of “privileging,” of “colonizing,” of “systemic” racism, the hesitant, “I think we should just listen” reveals just how deeply hypnotized they already are. The hypnotist won’t snap his fingers and wake them up. If they can’t or won’t do so themselves, persuasion becomes the only way. But when they won’t allow me to speak, I have little chance of

attempting to persuade anyone of anything.

I wrote a letter to the head of the school protesting the message that all white people had unconsciously absorbed and upheld a racist culture. I requested a reply and received none, although a pleasant board member contacted me and tried to convince me things hadn’t changed as much as I thought. I asked about Ibram X. Kendi’s central statement, namely, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Did the school agree? The board member did not answer.

When I sent the letter to my classmates, I saw how much past personal experiences defined their responses. One woman, so painfully shy when we were schoolmates that she never looked anyone in the eye, never spoke unless forced to do so in class, wrote back asking whether it was “really unfair” to ask us “white people” to “just be quiet and listen for a few sessions—isn’t that what anyone would want in a mediation or counseling or other context—to be heard out?”

This woman spent her entire adolescence just being quiet. Wasn’t “being heard out” what she wanted when we were all trying to make her acquaintance, urging her, sometimes teasing her, to get her to talk? How well I remember her hiding behind her hair, looking down or away whenever anyone tried to make eye contact. Someone read aloud a sensitive, brilliant poem she’d written, which the class praised. After this, she became, if possible, even more withdrawn. I believe she wanted the courage to speak, and to be listened to and heard out.

The rest of her email harped on familiar themes: American Black people “have been and still are victims of egregious, horrendous and systemic racism.”

If you want “to be heard,” you couldn’t voice a safer sentence! Her notions of anti-racism provide to “Black people” what she desperately needed as a lonely teenager—someone who could have listened to her mute cues of distress. Enough to make her feel accepted. Someone who could have helped her to speak.

Each classmate’s past, I began to think, revealed her personal version of woke. Here is Joan’s (as I shall call her) story. Every morning, when her family breakfasted in their kitchen, the man across the way stayed naked from the waist down, his hand moving fast. Joan was eight.

“Just ignore him!” her mother, a proper New Englander, said. Joan’s father consumed his poached eggs; her thirteen-year-old sister and eighteen-year-old brother drank their tea. Maybe they reddened, glancing toward the man or the part you weren’t supposed to see.

“Look the other way!” the mother repeated.

When I bring up our former school’s censorship—no more reading the third-grade standard, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories,

Silence, Anti-Racism and Women - Melissa Knox

because Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden”—and my perplexity (why wouldn’t we just explain why we don’t go along with Kipling’s politics?), Joan replies, “I would prefer to refrain from these discussions.” Nevertheless, she continues to speak, and as she does, I think of that eight-yearold, every morning of third grade, and fourth grade, and possibly fifth, trying to obey her mother’s outrageous demand to “just ignore” the local onanist. Joan’s reasoning is that of a child schooled to disregard the elephant in the room. There was a lot, she told me, that she didn’t particularly like, but she tolerated it as a “righting of the boat back to an even keel.” The boat had been listing too long in one direction, so would have to dip too far to the other side. She was confident that if it did so, and we all acknowledged our past failures as white people, we could move ahead, “evenly balanced.”

Ships do occasionally right themselves. The nearest maritime website tells me a “self-righting boat” can get back to upright even “up to a one-hundred-eighty-degree inclination.” But I doubt we’re riding this pleasant yacht; it’s more like we’re on a destroyer in a storm, the kind that capsizes even when the sailors get very busy.

Joan’s guilt hangs around her like a fog, and I trace some of it back to her childhood exposure to the mentally ill neighbor and her mother’s inability to protect her. In an email responding to the Zoom shaming white women, she mentions by name an ancestor who brought over a large number of “enslaved human beings” to work on his land, and how terrible she feels about this.

When you’re eight, you might blame yourself. But now? When my ancestors weren’t lynching people, fighting generational feuds or stealing livestock, they spent a good deal of their time fighting “rough”— biting off the other guy’s nose or tearing off his ears. Joan’s notion that she must humiliate herself by acknowledging the “past failures” of her ancestor is sad. None of us are our ancestors. She worked at an antebellum mansion, whose architectural style thrilled her, but now says she sees only the labor of enslaved people. Why not both? What about the pyramids? The torture that went into building them does not detract from their beauty. The Qatar football stadium was erected by migrant workers, 6,500 of whom perished in terrible heat. Football fans remain unfazed. I think Joan’s version of anti-racism distracts her: worrying about her slaveholding ancestor, she blames herself less for the feelings forced upon her when her eight-year-old eyes were pried open and she couldn’t unsee what she’d seen.

When Joan tells me she hopes I understand, I say I do. I say so because I do want to comprehend why she thinks as she does. She volunteers her gratitude to her “wonderful” parents. But I think of the breakfast table, the man across the way, the silence every morning as the show goes on.

Pushing my luck, I requested a Zoom with another close friend

I’ll call Carla, who agreed to chat about that Zoom and other worrisome changes, but strongly warned: “Trust me. This is for a lunch with girlfriends. Not for talking about in public, ever.”

I said I couldn’t avoid talking about these things. Immediately, Carla whirled—she was in her kitchen—and began making coffee and banging pots around. I could still hear her, but she never sat still. Much of the time, she kept her back to me. She moved into the living room, sitting at some distance from her computer, which she’d placed on a table several feet from where she was sitting. A large dog’s loud breathing, thumping tail and collisions with wastebaskets further

“I wrote a letter to the head of the school protesting the message that all white people had unconsciously absorbed and upheld a racist culture. I requested a reply and received none, although a pleasant board member contacted me and tried to convince me things hadn’t changed as much as I thought.”

obscured our conversation.

“I’m trying to figure out how to be a better ally,” Carla declared. “You’ve been a good ally all your life!” I replied. We spoke a few moments about books on anti-racism before the dog’s paw flopped forward, turning the Zoom off.

When Carla was in fifth and sixth grade, the elevator man in her building started to molest her. Every day when she came home from school, he cornered her, sticking his fingers into her underpants. She told him to please stop. She tried to get away. She stood as far from him as possible, but no matter how fast she moved from one corner of the elevator to another, he won. She couldn’t take the stairs—they were locked, and like many a girl, she did not dare tell anyone; she thought she’d get in trouble with her mother. She thought it was up to her to

Silence, Anti-Racism and Women - Melissa Knox

solve the problem by moving quickly around the elevator, and I guess she blamed herself. She described to me her frantic attempts to escape, and I thought of that as I watched her fidgety moves around her own apartment, where she could—and with the accidental paw of her dog, did—escape from my ideas, which made her so uncomfortable.

The silence of these women is characteristic of imploded families barely held together on the surface by the refusal of members to say anything risking disagreement. Until the point where every topic becomes the forbidden one—why did we agree to these crazy ideas about race? What if some of these complaints from “@Black” Instagram accounts are real grievances, but some are just silly? Why, when we insist on identifying people by skin color or other immutable ethnic characteristics, do we not remember the disasters such practices have led to historically? Why would you ignore diversity among “white” people as well as diversity among people of color? Why am I so wrought up about all of this, to the point where I want to yell, “Help!” even louder than my demented mother? The bigger question, harder to answer: why are women as a class so damn eager to feel guilty? Why can’t I raise these questions without getting canceled?

Naturally, my past life dictates my attitudes toward anti-racist propaganda. I wasted a good twenty-five years, starting at age fourteen, being brainwashed by an authoritarian psychoanalyst. He told me I was psychotic, scaring the life out of me, since my brother was schizophrenic. He said, “I am the only one who can help you,” meaning I’d better stay with him or I’d end up like my brother, talking to people no one else could see or hear. He said I would never, ever be able to develop a relationship with a boy unless I had a good relationship with my mother—from whom I wanted to escape. At fourteen, desperate to develop relationships with people outside my family, especially boys, I believed him. I look back on my desperation but also my complacency: comfort—a comfort akin to that offered by religious belief—came from going along with the analyst’s idea that he knew everything. If I let slip something he said to any friend, I’d get an earful about how unprofessional the guy sounded, but I never took such comments seriously. There was something reassuring in my belief: if I just went along with his pronouncements, his loutish interruptions of my teenage worries, then I’d be cured. Insisting I was psychotic and narcissistic, he made me feel that I could never live without him. Luckily, he died, or I would have stayed even longer. In the end, I deprogrammed myself by accident. I happened to pick up my old journals from my teens and twenties, in which, like a little tape deck, I’d recorded what he said, what I replied, and what he thought of my replies. When I read these long-forgotten conversations, I felt horrified—how could he have spoken to a teenage girl like that? To a young woman? To anyone? How on Earth could I have gone along with this man’s cracked notion

of reality? I suppose I was too young to know better. Or, being a girl, I was primed to feel bad just because some man told me I was bad?

When I try to shake the anti-racist beliefs of my former classmates, I think I’m hoping to rescue them from the awfulness of discovering, after years, a tragic mistake: you’ve latched onto, devoted your soul to, something that’s a lie—a bizarre lie. Thoughtful, insightful grown women, so often women in highly responsible leadership positions, are motivated not just by their intelligence and drive, but by a wish to control the past as well as the future. Bad, even traumatic childhood experiences—being molested, exposed to adult sexuality in disturbing ways, feeling terrified by the demands of teachers and classmates to speak and, in my case, coming to school with the sole thought: I can get away from my parents’ fighting, drinking, my father’s nighttime visits—these things have a lifelong impact. For many of my classmates, the ones terrified into “I’ve learned a lot about myself” and “I think we should just listen,” the answer seems to be: “I always knew I was guilty and now I’ve been given a reason to feel guilt,” namely racism—but that’s not the real reason. For me, the urge to set the record straight is overwhelming. Silenced throughout their childhoods, many women feeling the demand to just shut up and listen is reasonable; their guilt for long-forgotten or buried, unhappy events comes into play; they react with strong feeling, but not with understanding. Silenced as children, they now feel silence is the answer.

Then again, my motives are selfish: I want our conversations. I miss talking with my friends so very much. When I tried one last time to discuss that dreadful Zoom and the censorship of so many good writers with the friend who’d been there, she reacted as if I’d asked how much money she had in her bank account or what kind of masturbatory fantasies she enjoyed. She blew up: “I told you! I don’t want to talk about that!” Not having seen her since the pandemic, I wrote to suggest we meet, agreeing not to mention any topic she didn’t wish to discuss. And what a devil’s bargain that was.

When my mother irritates the other old people in the dining room with her loud eruptions, she’s not just interrupting conversations and making a nuisance of herself, although she is doing both. She’s also a living symbol of their fears: someday, if they live as long, they could end up remembering just one word, “HELP!,” and yelling it at five-minute intervals, the way she does. She reminds them of the end none wish to face; she reminds them of their vulnerability. They, too, could end up vacant of mind and loud of mouth, just like her. She’s telling a truth none want to hear, but maybe they should. Maybe they’d live better too, knowing how bad things get at the end.

Silence, Anti-Racism and Women - Melissa Knox

Meanwhile, my classmates—like me—probably have years to live. I don’t want them to continue to have their minds, their thoughts vacuumed away by the current ideologies. I want us all to be able to speak together again.

HELP!

POETRY

Swim

Lillian Davies

Could I swim? Him?

Like now, you mean, in this, Miss?

“In the abundance of recovery,” We La Seine, she says, for summer, her But it’s winter, so now, how? Look, listen, those ferns, sperms? Eggs, gametophyte, right?

Each swam here, surely, free.

And a purple iris, this. Let us jump in, then

See you reflect twice, ice

Water and mirror #maisouituesbelle, well?

Letter shaped like a heart. Art. You splash like a stone. Lone.

Descends in mineral weight, hate I dive as a wish to take flight. Night I try at haiku, you

Impossible green

Winter pink like my son’s cheeks

Fiddlehead cracked lips

Underwater her ink bleeds. Needs paper to dissolve, disappear fear. Flow now North, to sea, he. Swim, I could!

Culling the Runts

Emilia Ferrante

culling the runts:

the process by which one eliminates, when breeding snails in captivity, genetically weak offspring from a clutch of snails. the runts need to be culled, otherwise they suffer, in pain, their whole lives. this isn’t a metaphor: the runts, doomed, grow slower than the organs inside of themselves. that’s what a runt is: organs growing faster than a malformed shell every two weeks for the first six weeks of their lives, the snails from the clutch of eggs must be culled. the best way to do it, I have learned, is to crush them. freezing them makes their death slow and painful. crushing them takes one tenth of a second. is the runt grateful? does it think thank god when the bottom of the mason jar looms in the sky lowering to swiftly and efficiently crush its body? do runts go to snail heaven? is the snail god a merciful one? gastropods don’t have brains, but they have nervous systems. this means they can feel pain. this means they have the feeling that made us make up a god in the first place. over two million results come up when i search “can snails feel pain?” i learn that snails have the biochemical capacity for love, but no evolutionary reason to feel it. i’ve never loved a snail, but i think i could be the merciful mason jar god of the runts, crushing a shell never made to be lived in.

Invertebrate Musings

Emilia Ferrante

I want to talk about abyssal gigantism: the way animals in the deep sea take up more space, make themselves larger.

It’s right there in the name: abyssal, meaning of the abyss, gigantism, meaning preternaturally large.

You probably know about the giant squid— I did too. But what I didn’t know was that the giant squid is just one of many enormous sea creatures.

There’s the giant oarfish, the seven-arm octopus, and, to my vocabularic chagrin and amusement, the colossal squid.

Like most things having to do with the deep sea, no one actually knows for sure why these invertebrates get so big: maybe lower temperature, maybe the need to get food that is scarce, maybe fewer predators, maybe more dissolved oxygen.

You or I could read the requisite papers, talk to the marine biologists who are experts in the field.

We could do this together, even. But at the end of it all, the answer would be that there are huge creatures that live further down in the ocean than you or I or those experts can or will ever go and so we know nothing. I know that thought terrifies you in equal measure as it thrills you, because I get the same shiver all over when I look at pictures of the Japanese spider crab. An irrational fear equal to an irrational excitement, like being stranded in space or falling out of love.

It will all pass in the end

Adrean Bellon

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Breathe in. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Breathe out. Another round. Another cycle. This feeling again. Don’t make any noise. Don’t bother anyone. It will all pass in the end.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Breathe in. You’re taking control of your heart. Another image. Another memory. Don’t cry. Don’t complain. Your knees on your chest. Your arms around your legs. It will all pass in the end.

Breathe slowly. Neutral thoughts. Things you know. The color of your eyes. The color of his eyes. No. Don’t think. Don’t try to remember. Breathe again. It will all pass in the end.

Tears on your cheeks. Blurred vision. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Breathe out. Nails on your skin. Itchy. You scrap it. Burned sensation. You did it again. It will all pass in the end.

Count it. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Breathe in. Again. One, two, three, four, five, six. Breathe out. Again. One two three four five six. Breathe in. Again. Onetwothreefourfivesixbreathout. Againonetwothreefourfivesixbreathinagainonetwothreefourfivesixbreathoutagain.

Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. AgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagainagain-

AgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgainAgain. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. It will all pass in the end.

Come, Lovers of Dark Corners

Dale Champlin

The stars know everything—how we toiled over every piece of furniture we own— the mohair sofa with its button tufts, the dining room table sweat-polished smooth as glass, your dad’s easy-glide Barcalounger. We thought the bed too tame—mundane as white-on-rice.

That was before we did it on the lawn at four a.m., the boat dock when the tide was out, the army hammock and the diving board. We worked over the meadow, the hayloft, the back seat of the Buick. The tumble dryer at the laundromat was a natural go-to; we even ventured to try horseback and skydiving.

In all honesty, the local library was a cakewalk, the bowling alley too noisy, but the eclipse was ideal, the sudden drop in temperature, heightened burst of starlight, birds roosting and quiet in the middle of the day, people preoccupied with the spectacle, as if the sky were falling. There we colluded, lovers in our dark corner.

after two lines from Charles Simic

No Longer Yours to Love

Jonathan Ukah

We have travelled on this rocky road before Because we didn’t want to live here alone, Loneliness is a deep pain to the core That tears the heart and keeps life undone.

I packed myself and handed it over to you, I felt I loved you as I love my growing body; All that I said to you had always been true; I gave you what I had never given anybody.

I came to you clean like a new needle, Sharp as the wind, straight as the sun; I have never treated you as second fiddle, Always my best, with whom I had much fun.

Now old injuries have resurfaced on my skin, Bruises and blisters, headaches and heartburn; Living with you has been painful and mean, When you treated me with lies and scorn;

Before I met you, I had a dream of love, Tender and kind, caring with a touch of truth, Not necessarily as the paradise of the above, But not this brutally bullish and rude brute.

So I took my heart slowly and stowed it away, To where your unkindness would never reach, Yet you swagger about, and all heard you say, How you would skin me alive like bleach.

Yet you say that I am forever yours to love, When the sun on your head will send massive piss; I still find pieces of you as I mourn and move, I will never be yours again to touch and kiss.

City of Sleepless Nights Jonathan Ukah

Everybody thinks this beautiful city does not sleep;

At night they rush to the trees at the centre of the market,

They embrace and climb them, their eyes closed, their mouth open,

They are mumbling, chanting incantations, words only the trees can understand;

They are not the language of men, not the language we speak to our neighbours;

They are spirit words, deep, like songs rendered to their gods;

They cannot sleep; they cannot rest until they drive away their killers.

The waves resonate in their throats the loud stampede of the leopards;

Wolves, antelopes, lions and tigers, patrol their streets, and kill their young ones.

Now they have nowhere to run to, they run to the trees, to the forests;

They would rather be in the wilderness, their destiny is in their hands.

They don’t want to die in their homes, slaughtered, not in their sleep, not in their dreams.

What is then their life without dreams, what dreams come without sleep?

Some run deeper into the forest, where the wolves will not appear;

They have taken their destiny into their hands, ramped up their gloom with the shadows.

Now they exhume their beloved ones, weep at their graves, and caress the grass.

They do this every night, sneaking hope into their stranded bosoms.

The wind rustles, lashes at them, its whipping tongue blurred in the night;

And the sky is silent; the moon grimaces, watches them embrace the dark trees every night.

Every night the wind brushes their wrists, every night the wind follows them to the trees.

They are not afraid of going to war against leopards, they only want to sleep at home;

They want to eat their dinner in peace, drink palm wine with their children;

They want to break kola nuts with their friends, celebrate their grandparents at the city centre;

They want to stare at the blossoming dandelions, love the sprouting roses and hibiscuses;

They want to sing to their God, rejoice for Grace without fearing the slash of swords.

Now they fear they are the soul of midnight, where their heroes die in a city of sleepless nights.

Giving Jonathan Ukah

When November arrives it’s time to step away from myself, and offer it to the needy; the sky turns slick, ready to please like naked breasts, like a field of sunflowers, attractive like dark, rainy clouds. Maybe a rainbow, like desire, will turn up in my waking hours, and touch off my grasping. I watch the silence of previous days, grow into my last-minute miracle as my giving swells like pregnancy. I’m like looking at my eleventh hour miracle past, the compass is gone, the trees witnessing my last sacrifice. I’m stepping away from the light, northwards into the sea, from where I grow into a tide rising into a wave, a storm, a turbulence. Every day, I wake up with a dream of a miracle trailing my steps as the unseen of my giving; though I never give with expectations, time and time make this wary. When I watch the drops of rain on the grass, disappear before the barrage of the sun, how quickly the air sucks it up, how freely the air gives its gift away. I know I must let myself go.

London After Exit

Jonathan Ukah

I blinked for two minutes into the empty air, and suddenly, three years had scuttled by, since the exit bell tolled exuberantly through the cluster of doors and windows; the hum of the Thames was a metal gong but louder, Big Ben groaned; I heard the splash of the angry waves from the balcony of my distant home; and each time a ship whistled across, trees cracked and blocked the streets.

A soft murmur echoed from the shores, like the tender buzzing of a sleepy butterfly, a quiet, calm and peaceful sea, irrigated the fields and made homes restful; the wind learned to whisper at noon, when it flew over our quiet terraces, travelling from the North to the South, without borders and hindrances. The loneliness of the London Eye is now the song of the Pyrenees and Alps

For those who live a life of indecision, knowing that tomorrow will be a toxic touch; precious for the sake of posterity, is that wisdom must guide every footfall, where the passing of dreams of the night before must not wither the freshness of tomorrow; looking inward must not outweigh the outward, a disposition at the constant edges of reason, where calm, peace, love and hope triumph over fear, and London will sleep again even after exit.

Anger Management Expert Jonathan

Ukah

She must be an anger management expert, with the way she screeches her right foot on the flat back of the brown cockroach, squeezing the blood out of the menace right into the plush rug of her moonlight room; who cares how much less blood the anarchy has, when it spills and splits into a million drops, carrying fluid to the edges of her vanity room, desecration is undeserved, stalling unnecessarily; how the other day, on a hot afternoon, she smashed a bottle of hot red liquid against the white wall of her northern home, where a pedestrian insect crawled, a mosquito, as though it were climbing an innocent body; such a bite would have spelt grave nonetheless, having smeared her freshly-tanned body with ivy; the way she stomped on the head of the ant crouching towards her white pillow with venom; the silky cover was a bargain from the flea market she snaked out of the wet merchant soaked in nakedness. Strange that such things still happen with much grace, that she could raise her hands to the redeeming sky, her tears for mercy flowed down her mascara cheeks like red palm oil overflowing the rim of its black bottle; how in the middle of the night, she kept vigil to catch the source of the creaking noises in her toilet, when she had given up playing the muse to the only man she met in her nightmares, hoping that one day he would love to surprise her, by surviving the hectic turbulence of her loo. She did go to church; she did tithe with faith, hence, God showers her mercy by giving her this job of the management expert on people’s feral feelings, And for the sake of posterity, I’ll leave issues here.

Janet and Her Soul

Alan Michael Parker

Some people are beasts, Janet thinks, jealously, at the mall. They’re in their lairs and then they come out into their hunting grounds, and they feed, and they send a scout ahead of the horde, and the other beasts on the other side of the river (the mall has a moat) make beast noises, and the hordes eye each other from either side of the river. Migrating is like shopping, she thinks. Picking up stuff for the journey ahead.

Janet is here to get a pair of earrings for her soul, to accessorize. Because a soul has moods, and times of day it wants to be outside, and colors, and needs to be kissed, and to kiss. Janet’s soul is a spring: those are its colors. Janet believes in the soul, being the great Greek philosopher she is, what Ms. Daniels called her the other day in language arts class.

Who’s more lonely, she thinks, a soul, a Greek philosopher, or Ms. Daniels? It’s like Fuck, Marry, Kill…only it’s not.

A roving band of beasts have reached The Gap, and they’re turning around, all eleventh graders, most she knows. She should have picked an exit strategy, not just Starbucks, as a goal.

The mall is also a racetrack, Janet thinks. Starbucks is a pit stop. Everyone’s driving around with ads on them, too. Like Elsa said in biology the other day, “What’s The Gap, like in life?”

But a soul knows, and sometimes it just needs to go shopping, so watch out, Western civilization. All of the feelings in her own body can be freed, all of the peoples around the world can be freed, her ship will be waiting for her at the end of the day, Janet its queen.

But first Janet needs to be unseen, to get past the invaders and the beasts and the haters, the older kids. She hides in the bathroom, feet up on the toilet in case anyone peeks under. Her soul in a tight, tight ball. Tighter.

The Eight-Point Buck

Alan Michael Parker

A poacher shot an eight-point buck. The deer “lived fifty yards” before dying, I learned too late online, later. The weather was changeable. The TC Omega muzzleloader “shot true.” The eight-point buck did a herky-jerky death stumble into the clearing where Darlene and I could see, leaned against a truck from the post office, righted himself, dundered further, leaned against the plate glass window of the diner, slid down quick-slow on the front steps near the Auto Supplies wholesaler—all in only a mall, a nothing place.

Darlene and I had melted cheese, tomato soup, sundaes. By the register, the bubblegum in the bubblegum machine was “brightly colored in fruit flavors.”

Darlene and I had yet to date for real, but we were getting somewhere, probably. We were at a shiny table in the different kinds of glowing and reflected lights: the sugar dispenser, the pie case, the heat lamp, the bowl of mints.

The deer, Darlene, the deer.

Darlene was scrawling smiley faces on the backs of our separate checks, she and I going Dutch. Darlene had her raingear. The muffins were “baked right on premises.”

I believe in the rights of diners to dine. I know about guns, but not so much I want to know personally, not really.

I couldn’t handle the smiley faces, one each.

I excused myself. There was the bathroom, there was the kitchen. I chose: I slipped away, through the kitchen, smiling to the people smoking by the back door, more people I don’t know. If I smile, they won’t ask. That’s my policy, or maybe my life.

The Plumber

Alan Michael Parker

If only to be a member of the secret society, to know the handshake, to understand what the double knots in the bandana meant, to understand the personalized license plates. Lewis Jr. had never been in the In Club, and this was the innest. According to Lewis Sr., the club had a newsletter that arrived by email and then erased itself when read. They had distinct arrangements of flowers—one saggy tulip facing east. According to Uncle Ray, the hand gestures of the dispatch clerk were in code, and the preacher’s sermon was always about something else.

Regular people couldn’t tell, but the men in the family knew. That made them members of a different kind of In Club, right?

Was there a centralized shadow organization, a leader? A list would be a list someone could read, no one safe. They don’t make simple mistakes, Lewis Sr. said. But there would certainly be a gatekeeper, so chill and anonymous that non-members would never guess. The key might be to identify that person, and then make an approach. That’s what Lewis Jr. thought.

More thinking: in what profession would Lewis Jr. meet a lot of people, have access to their homes and ultimately be able to figure out an approach? Flight attendant, manager at Starbucks, police officer, nurse… The access wasn’t enough. So Lewis Jr. became a plumber, with access to people and their houses.

Lewis Jr. was confident that he would be able to tell. Naturally, there was always the promise of an invitation, or even someone simply slipping up. So he had to stay ready.

And when it came to staying ready, love was always the danger, of course. That’s why he didn’t fall in love with Allison when it seemed possible. A man had to be free.

Nine years as a plumber, Lewis Jr. is still waiting. Lewis Jr., who’s

here, his dad gone, fixing the leak in the Magnerson’s bathroom. Not in the club, Lewis Jr. Was it ever possible, he wonders, reaching for his pipe threader. Maybe not, and maybe that’s okay.

Confetti

Keith Morris

A big handful of confetti into the void so pretty as it falls a r o you u n

Bitter Fruit From Suicide Trees*

David Estringel

Come, hear us now sing you songs of truth (and woe) ‘cross the seventh divide, the salves and stirrers of blood and breasts that ride the flaming cold of void and harpies’ breath, wrapping icy tongues ‘round gnarl and knot of stiff, blackened fingertips. Take hold of hands (and ponderances upon lips) thorny in their grip and snap the bones (How the warmth of flesh brings longing for days of Summer— a sweet ache) and listen to the symphony bleed. Seize these rings (of mettle and fire) and attend to the rattle and hum of imprisoned shells (and shadows), separate but a part, with dirges and prophecies— hot and fecund— that disturb the white silence of Oblivion’s hellish sleep. How sweet— ephemeral— the melody (the melancholy) until the breaks—and words—run dry.

*inspired by Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno

No Safer Space

Raluca Nechita

A talk about new loves

Between old lovers

On nights when they still fall asleep

In the same air

Before the slightest jealousy floats up

Like bubbles in a thick slow swamp

Where corpses drop

There is no safer space in nature

It is so safe critters come up

Like fireflies to change their candlesticks

And eels to charge their tails.

Humpty Dumpty

Raluca Nechita

Humpty Dumpty was a girl.

Her parents’ marriage was a swirl.

Her mommy always called her “Humpty”

Her daddy always called her “Dumpty”

One day when she crossed the street

While only looking at her feet—

“Watch out, Humpty!” yelled her mother;

“Look out, Dumpty!” screamed her father.

And before the car could hit her

(she was hit first by the fact that she had been so confused throughout her entire life by this crack in her identity caused by her parents using her as a battleground to settle their nasty divorce issues—they couldn’t even agree on her name, God!)

Her eggshell cracked

Her yolk divided

She filled the cobblestone lopsided.

The Engineer

Ron Kolm

During World War Two

My father worked for Boeing, In Seattle, helping to design The B-29 Superfortress, The plane that would later drop Atomic bombs on Japan. He ended the war

Working for Dravo Corporation, in Pittsburgh, Where landing crafts were built That deposited tanks

On Omaha Beach

During D-Day.

After the war

He taught at Lehigh University And then finally got a job In Philly, where he became The Chief Engineer of the Delaware River Port Authority. Whenever there were problems

On the Benjamin Franklin or Walt Whitman suspension bridges, Old man Kolm, wearing a white Hard hat, would check them out And then decide on what Should be done to fix them.

He

was

important

enough

To be invited to meetings

In the World Trade Center, In New York City. I was living in the city then And I’d eat lunch with him, Then we’d walk to the entrance way, Where armed security always

Barred me from entering. I’d say goodbye to him As he disappeared Inside the towering building

Years later, when his health Was failing, he was admitted To a hospital in New Jersey, Not too far from the Hudson River. He could see the Trade Center From his window.

He was still in the hospital, Suffering from dementia, When 9/11 happened. That was the final nail In his coffin, and he died soon after. He will be remembered.

The Greenland

Ann Pedone

The violence of language is telling me I have very glossy lips and perfect glass skin

The violence of language is telling me it’s only a matter of time before I’ve become my own fake Italian wife

My own history of the national debt

My own spare rib

Last night I got drunk on the outskirts of Los Angeles

The Cold War had just ended and the guy I blew in the backseat of my car texted me afterwards that he loves poetry because it’s “like a tool”

Which of course was my opening

But I didn’t take it

I know what the common cause of language costs us

I once taught a man I was fucking how to play a game I called “prairie woman”

It involved the before and after of my last three orgasms and everything of the little bit I know about the French barricades

But after one or two rounds, he quit, saying sex with me was like a housefly he really wanted to swat

And then from the other side of the room screams, “Crash course!’

And the plastic speculum, the one I ordered from Amazon. It’s still sitting there in the mailbox, desperate to crystallize into a narrative

How many people can you name who fuck as though the lyric “I” really does exist?

I’ve never actually read any Virgil I’ve always loved all forms of easy punishment

The Opiate, Spring Vol. 37

Other things will be true tomorrow, but today my cycle wants to fuck me

It’s been in the break room on the phone with my mother for the last hour telling her I’m no longer a virgin

Say “unbodied” and another egg drops

Tell me again about Whitman and his boys down at the docks and my cervix is a lion’s mouth I convince the first man I see to pry open and step right into

Because metaphor is just another worn-out power dynamic

A cable newscaster who needs to be reminded again that Detroit is not the capital of Wisconsin

I go into the bathroom but can’t pee which is its own kind of etymology

A somewhere that is not so much a between-the-legs, but closer to the mind

I made a mistake in a hotel room once It had something to do with a series of small porcelain bowls and a woman who told me she owned a real antique Chinese bed

It’s hard to face what looks you square in the eye

Like a husband who tells you he has no working theory of language

Or a tube of fake blood that’s been in your bathroom drawer for three years and you still can’t figure out what to do with it

*note: this is an excerpt from a larger work by Ann Pedone entitled “The Greenland”

A Solitude in the Shadows

Thomas Wells

In the shadows, there’s a certain clarity, A taste of downcast darkness, A truthful distillation.

In the shadows, there’s a granularity, A note of deep resignation, A smoky reverie.

In the shadows, there’s a drowsy gauze, A placid, pensive surrender, A tranquil, hushed balm.

There’s a solitude in the shadows On the edges of our survival.

In the shadows, there’s a roving phantasm, A secret summoning presence, A holy reckoning.

In the shadows, there’s a biting wind, A polar pivot between life and death, A dark reaper beckoning.

In the shadows, there’s a waiting epiphany, A shred of universal mind, A being and becoming.

There’s a solitude in the shadows On the edges of our survival.

In the shadows, there’s a quantum inkling, A blink of teleportation, A ghostly comprehension.

In the shadows, there’s a whisper bodhi, A glint of mindful rapture, A quiet, private lumen.

In the shadows, there’s a bead holding all, A speck of every thought, A trace of every entanglement, A solitude in the shadows.

Deviant Delirium

Thomas Wells

I can’t tell you how it all started, That night when manic moon Probed and punctured the pall. I awoke hurtling through space, Somewhere between ideation and shellshock, Somewhere between vertigo and inchoate phrases.

I remember redundant circularity, Premises tumbled into conclusions, collapsing onto premises, A colliding kaleidoscope of real and demonic terrors. I pieced together feeble fragments of form, careening, cringing, crying out muted, screaming out silently in suffocation. For decades or a day, I was unable to say. Faces swirled by, studying me like a lab rat. All their labels flew, but no one really knew.

Dumped at asylum’s door, I was an indentured servant to delirium, Where old drooling men were fed in bibs, Where a nameless woman always danced with me, Where another kept clicking a TV remote, and a transgender angel spoke the sanest words. The staff dispensed neural elixirs in Dixie cups, Switching most of my socks and underwear With strangers.

Then, one random Tuesday, it all reconstructed. Everywhere permeating petrichor, Everything erected like Elysium, lush and dripping. Speaking softly, I offered sensible, sentient sentences, Words assembled the way mental doctors liked. I walked in consistent, persistent directions, They sent me home, my muscles still Quaking from all the meds.

In the end, no expert dared speculate on these events, The how or why no one really understood. My normality now suits everyone’s comfort zone. But to those who shun my type, beware! Deviant delirium always languishes hidden in every heart.

Performer Behind the Glass

Thomas Wells

Echo world behind the glass, I make the same faces I did at twelve. The grinning Cheshire Cat with teeth like piano keys, mendacious and coy because viewing my portrait with sobriety forces me to march with familiar frailties. I’m certain my gravitas is a forgery. I am sure my laments and torments are play-acted animation.

Their drama is loathsome.

Instead, I turn my left eye toward my nose while keeping the right straight. This contortion masks multiple blemishes. I summon my childhood buffoon, making self-mockery hide all my impairments.

Concealing them by exposing them, I become the object of my own joke. What guise can be greater?

I am Charlie Chaplin getting kicked in the butt. I am Soupy Sales hit by a sloppy pie. With this impression, I never need to try.

Flashbacks on the wall. They all die like Curly Howard. Laughter is short-lived glee, after which the spirit secretly craves.

My life is made of printed images on a carnival tent.

Memory fragments are all I hold,

each enlisting some particle of my journey. Yet with this, I find another way to fit into a clown car, another way to do my pratfalls, another way to get my pants pulled down.

CRITICISM

Joan Didion Is For Grief, Grief Is For People, New York Is For Arrogance & the Publishing Industry Is For No One

Genna Rivieccio

In what marks Sloane Crosley’s sixth book (her first in the style of full-on memoir), she explores, well, what else: grief. With a title like Grief Is For People, the subject is built right in. Though not just grief for people, but also things. And while we’re constantly told throughout our life that being materialistic or having an attachment to possessions is “bad,” most of us are aware that society conditions us to feel quite the opposite. Which is why, when Crosley’s apartment is burglarized in June of 2019 and her jewelry “cabinet” (an antique Dutch spice rack picked out by her best friend, Russell Perreault, at a flea market) is summarily pillaged, she finds herself somewhat shocked that there are no grief support groups for people who have lost things.

That would be, of course, “weird”—right? Even if many people do have a strong emotional attachment to objects. As Crosley

puts it, “...when I look for a place to go, I can’t find one. There are spaces, some literal and some virtual, for those left behind by cancer, heart attacks, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. But there are no bereavement groups for stuff. They don’t exist. I’m sorry your house blew up but it was only a house. Grief is for people, not things.” And so, a book title was born. Not to mention a harbinger of the grief that was to come exactly one month later, when Russell would kill himself. This just three days after his last supper with Crosley. Described as her “favorite person” and the only fellow adult she actually looked up to,

“’Holding on,‘ indeed, seems to be the name of the coping game throughout Grief Is For People. Not just to the idea of getting her jewelry back and to the memory of Russell, but to the very concept of what New York once meant. Naturally, it means different things to different people, but this notion of constantly trying to recapture the way it ’used to be‘ is generally tied to the first few years one spends there.”

the pain of this loss, for Crosley, somehow feels tied up in the theft of the jewelry as well. Especially since, as she comes to realize, “People like Russell, and people like me now, we don’t know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won’t judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in this tangible way.”

“Holding on,” indeed, seems to be the name of the coping game throughout Grief Is For People. Not just to the idea of getting her jewelry back and to the memory of Russell, but to the very concept of what New York once meant. Naturally, it means different things to

Joan Didion

different people, but this notion of constantly trying to recapture the way it “used to be” is generally tied to the first few years one spends there. To recapture that “lightning in a bottle.” To tell yourself that the worst of times were, as Dickens said, the best of times. Whereas, in the present, they’re just full-stop the worst. These “navel-gazing” days of one’s “early period” in the city are, in large part, what keeps them clinging to the foolish idea that they must stay “forever.” In novels like Sweetbitter, which romanticizes the same years Crosley discusses so fondly—the early to mid-00s—such people often go on about how they “can’t imagine” living anywhere else. That, for as bad as New York is, it’s still “the only place” for them. This is often reiterated by people like Fran Lebowitz. And even those who make a big production about how they’re leaving the city for good can’t seem to stay true to their word.

There was never a more glaring example of that than Joan Didion. Who is perhaps more well-known for her “kiss-off” essay about leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That,” than she is for any of her numerous works centered on her home state of California. And one also brings up Didion because it is impossible to talk about a grief memoir without also mentioning 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Crosley is meta and well-read enough to bring it up a few times in her own memoir, along with Didion herself, who once served as practical joke fodder for Russell when he forwarded her a fake email from the author that read: “Dear Russell: What a pleasure it was to meet with you and Sloane today. Please don’t say anything, but she seems a bit young to be handling my publicity campaign. Is there a way you can oversee her more closely?” Crosley quickly realizes the trick and calls him an asshole. But, in what will be one of many forewarnings of Russell’s “unfit-ness” to work in a post-woke landscape, Crosley also writes, “It dawned on us both that I could forward the email to Human Resources.” Only a few pages later, she also remarks, “Russell had zero facility for office politics.”

And yet, Crosley being a more “jocular sort” and this still being the 2000s, the duo merely gets into a good-natured tussle. Just one of many fond memories Crosley will have of working at Knopf (specifically, Vintage) as a press agent. Or, more accurately, the Associate Director of Publicity working for Russell, the Executive Director of Publicity. As Crosley attests, “At the turn of the century, Knopf was the most soughtafter publishing house in America, both to be published by and to work for.” With this timeline in mind, whatever book the two might have met Didion about could have easily been The Year of Magical Thinking. A tome that is so clearly the blueprint for Grief Is For People. For, in the same way that Didion tries to make sense of the unfathomable,

to solve an unsolvable mystery, so, too, does Crosley do the same with the suicide of her best friend. In addition to interlinking the tragedy with the loss of her jewelry. While this might read as “offensive” to some, it is a rather “by-the-book” reaction to a loved one’s death. Making correlations that aren’t there, “begging” and bargaining. The latter two acts are implied in the title of Didion’s grief memoir, wherein, like Crosley years later, she’s convinced that there must be some amount of hope, “positive vibes” or as-of-yet unearthed action that can bring back the deceased in question.

The parallels between Crosley and Didion’s “grief writing style” are further emphasized by the former’s repeated mention of the inefficacy of the average book about grief. At the time of The Year of Magical Thinking’s release, Didion would note, “Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it, which was the interesting aspect of it to me—how really tenuous our sanity is.” So one must forgive Crosley any “unusual” behavior in the period that followed Russell’s death. Including regularly sitting outside the restaurant on her block where the two, unbeknownst to Crosley at the time, would share their last hours together. Or traveling all the way to Australia in the hope of somehow “communing with” his lost spirit there. Then, of course, there is the tried-and-true staple of replaying conversations in your head that once seemed innocuous, but now feel ripe with meaning. Particularly in the aftermath of someone’s suicide. For example, when Crosley speaks to Russell about her stolen jewelry, figuring he would be the most sympathetic about it, he responds, “If it’s any consolation, you can’t take it with you when you go.” These words seem, undeniably, like a retroactive warning bell. She also recalls him offering her the riddle: “What gets old but never ages?” Jewelry. This, too, feels telling to Crosley later, when she speculates on the unique brand of “feeling old” that befalls gay men. A community well-known for having Peter Pan syndrome in part because youth is so coveted—a quality that puts you at the front of the line, fuckability-wise.

Crosley’s own year of magical thinking (defined as “the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them”) is something she is able to distill into words early on in the book. Words that sound a lot like they could have been written by Didion when she assesses, “It’s hard to know the size of things. To manage the size of things. Am I making our friendship bigger than it was to keep it from getting any smaller? Making the robbery smaller than it was to keep it from getting any bigger? Am I projecting shared meaning onto completely unassociated events?” She continues, “Right now, every time I try to separate these losses, to keep

Joan Didion Is For Grief, Grief Is For People... - Genna Rivieccio

the first from contaminating the second, they come back together like magnets. Hideous sisters, they are keeping each other company in the dark. They are in conversation with each other.” It is at this point that she also unveils, “The author I admired, the one whose email Russell forged, was Joan Didion. The day I learn he’s dead, a detail from The Year of Magical Thinking comes rushing back to me. Shortly after Didion’s husband dies, Julia Child dies. Didion expresses relief. She has a ‘sense that this was finally working out’ because Julia and John could have dinner together.” Crosley describes how, at the time of reading that passage, she had difficulty believing Didion could have possibly thought that, or rather, thought like that. And yet, she says, “...I now find myself in the throes of a similar fantasy. In this fantasy, Russell is the one who finds the jewelry. Because in this fantasy, there’s a lost-and-found section of heaven where the dead can sift through missing objects and take what they want.”

Such fantasies are also in line with Crosley’s rich dreamscape about Russell in the aftermath of his death. For, beyond just replaying scenes from their friendship in her waking life, he also invades her sleeping one, too. As for the memories that are real, Crosley incorporates the Didion method of designing The Year of Magical Thinking to mimic “the way in which you obsessively go over the same scenes again and again and again trying to make them end differently.” And then there is her inability to reconcile how “fine” he seemed at the time. As though everything were normal, business as usual. This, too, is something Didion comments on with regard to her husband’s death: “It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.” She adds, “...confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred...”

Perhaps if Russell’s suicide had occurred the following year, in 2020, it would have made more sense to Crosley. The loss and calamity of that year was, after all, so much more aligned with the double tragedy she experienced in the summer of 2019. And yes, Crosley is building up to that moment, when all the tragedy comes even more full-circle with the advent of the pandemic and the effective shuttering of New York. These threads of horror all finely woven together by her own deft form of magical thinking. And that’s when Crosley ties the end of Russell to, for all intents and purposes, the end of New York.

Funnily enough, the times she most romanticizes with Russell were in the 00s, when she spent so many weekends not in New York, but at his Connecticut abode. She says it was in the summer of 2005

that their (her and a collection of Russell’s other “protégés”/city orphans) “bucolic bubble” started to burst at the hands of someone among the group who began sticking his hooks (among other likely appendages) into Russell’s husband. It wasn’t the affair itself that was the offense (Russell had dalliances of his own), so much as the person’s casual discarding of Russell’s partner afterward. Suddenly, Crosley and the others weren’t being invited up to the house anymore. Russell’s other half had seemingly put a moratorium on ever having any “interlopers” over again. This loss of his “karass,” as Kurt Vonnegut would call it, seemed to coincide with a period when it was becoming clearer and clearer that the publishing industry was a dying animal. A dinosaur on life support. Thus, Russell’s own one-two punch of loss appeared to arrive at that moment in time.

Per Crosley’s account, Russell had a similar relationship with the publishing industry that many people do with New York. He knew it was toxic, over, a losing battle, etc., but he stayed and stayed...even as massive chunks of the sky kept falling on his head. As a director of PR, in fact, it was Russell’s job to ensure as few people as possible noticed the sky was falling. That was more than slightly challenging during the James Frey debacle of 2006. After already publishing a sequel (My Friend Leonard) to his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, the truth was starting to catch up to Frey, and it all manifested in an 18,000-word article on The Smoking Gun.

In quoting “Goodbye to All That” at one point (namely, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends”), Crosley doesn’t seem to notice the irony of wielding an essay about leaving New York. Instead, she uses it to reframe the context as being about clearly remembering her first weekend at Russell’s, but not recalling the details of her last one. Then she relates that phenomenon to how people are always trying to pin down “their” New York. The one they’re nostalgic for before it all went to shit (newsflash: it has been since at least the Gangs of New York era). Crosley is able to not only cite the change in her “romantic version” of NYC as being after the exile from Russell’s Connecticut home, but also her awareness of the emperor having no clothes vis-à-vis publishing. It happened around the same time as the exile, with that exposé on Frey’s “memoir.” Which Crosley and Perreault were tasked with handling the PR on, especially after it became a PR nightmare. Worst of all, Oprah was breathing down their necks, shifting blame for her recommendation on the publisher’s inability to correctly edit and fact-check a goddamn manuscript. Suddenly, it had never been more apparent “how little people knew or cared about book publishing.” And that, once upon a

Joan Didion Is For Grief, Grief Is For People... - Genna Rivieccio

time, being “inconsequential” at least meant not getting caught in the eye of a media shitstorm.

As Russell continues to soldier on in a world made of smoke and mirrors, Crosley escapes to the other side—the writing side. Releasing her first memoir, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, in 2008, she has the epiphany

“Crosley’s own year of magical thinking (defined as ’the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the ab- sence of any plausible causal link between them’) is something she is able to distill into words early on in the book. Words that sound a lot like they could have been writ- ten by Didion when she assesses, ’It’s hard to know the size of things. To manage the size of things. Am I making our friendship bigger than it was to keep it from getting any smaller? Making the robbery smaller than it was to keep it from getting any big- ger? Am I projecting shared meaning onto completely unassociated events?’”

that she never considered that she was leaving her best friend to the wolves. For, as time wore on, Russell’s sense of humor became less and less “kosher” in a post-woke climate. Crosley delineates, “Russell’s teasing had lost its sugar coating at the exact wrong moment in history, when little infractions got swallowed down the same pipe as big ones, when his boundless energy read as aggression.” In other words, what a time to not be alive. To opt out, as it were. To this point, Crosley can’t help but think there was a kismet timing to Russell punching his own ticket before the pandemic, something she doubted he could bear any more than the demise of the publishing industry. Watching his mood shift over the years as he, in turn, watched the medium crumble from

within, it starts to click for Crosley: he was very unhappy for a long time.

Worst of all, he appeared to be pretending that time hadn’t changed anything whatsoever, leading Crosley to ruminate, “The catch with book publishing is that, despite manufacturing the product with the richest history of inciting incendiary behavior, it remains deeply antiquated... the entire machinery is driven by the one art form that takes longest to produce, release, consume and profit from.” If breaking even or not at all can be called profit.

In the end, it seemed that Russell needed to cut his losses in more ways than one. Throwing in the towel on continuing to try or care within a profession for which few people have any genuine regard, appreciation or empathy. And even his “beloved” New York no longer felt worth sticking around for. In the last few pages of the book, Crosley demands to know why, then, didn’t he just pack his bags, drain his bank account and start a new life elsewhere, Paul Gaugin-style? If he felt that suffocated, that despondent. This particular reader’s fear is that, like so many convinced of the “New York or Nowhere” (even if by way of having one’s address just a stone’s throw from the city) “philosophy,” he believed there was nowhere else he really could go. Regardless of NYC being among the most miserable places on Earth.

On that note, in an earlier part of her grieving process, Crosley reflects, “Because New York is home to the largest population of narcissists outside Los Angeles, most of us have a contingency of acquaintances who are entertaining but impervious to empathy. These are the people I choose to stay out with until four a.m. The quicker they reveal how their father’s law partner’s wife killed herself, the better I feel. More, more, more... Their stories distract me. I am a vampire, sucking on the necks of other vampires.” Being that this is the core clientele in New York, it’s no wonder Crosley is so crushed about losing a real friend. Even if, as she hints at on more than one occasion, becoming truly close to a gay man is a rather impossible feat. The other dark side of this realization is: why are people so committed to a city so devoid of empathy? All while hiding behind the over glorified “community spirit” spiel that emerges solely in moments of crisis (though those moments are becoming more and more frequent). And, in the present landscape of the “literary scene,” there is even less of a compelling reason to stay. Publishing is dead, the intelligent literary community is dead. That’s not to say corpses can’t still be dragged about, which they very much are in that city. People will still parade/rest on the laurels that once made New York “the place to be” for writers and editors alike. But maybe more are becoming attuned to this being a danse macabre Many others still will keep telling themselves the usual story:

Joan Didion Is For Grief, Grief Is For People... - Genna Rivieccio

the publishing industry is fine, New York is the greatest city in the world and Joan Didion wasn’t a bit of a sociopath. Or, as Crosley chooses to remind, using Didion’s words: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide.”

If you like The Opiate magazine, you’ll love The Opiate Books. Find our current roster of titles (featured below) online or at your favorite bookstore. Visit theopiatebooks.com for more information.

Brontosaurus Illustrated by Leanne Grabel

Released: June 2022

List price: $34.99

The PornME Trinity (2nd Edition) by David Leo Rice

Released: October 2022

List price: $12.99

Released: July 2023

List price: $15.99

Megalodon by Donna Dallas

Released: April 2023

List price: $10.99

(A Tate Carmichael

by

Genna Rivieccio

Released: April 2023

List price: $18.99

Quasar Love: A Reenactment in Three Acts by Anton Bonnici

Released: December 2021

List price: $10.99

Released: September 2023

List price: $10.99

Released: August 2022

List price: $10.99

Released: April 2024

List price: $18.99

Lindsay Lohan Stole My Life

Novel)

Yet So As By Fire: A Passion Play in Two Acts by Anton Bonnici

I Love Paris by Rufo Quintavalle

Atlas, Bound by Victor Marrero

This Rescue Thing by Penny Allen

With spring comes the promise of flourishing potted plants. Hopefully, none with heads buried in them as well (unless, of course, you’re as “romantic” as Isabella). Either way, The Opiate, Vol. 37 has plenty to offer in the way of tending to the garden of your mind with fiction, nonfiction and poetry from Michael Washburn, Joseph Couchet, Jim Krusoe, K. Wallace King, Christine Criswell, Dennis McFadden, Melissa Knox, Lillian Davies, Emilia Ferrante, Adrean Bellon, Dale Champlin, Jonathan Ukah, Alan Michael Parker, Keith Morris, David Estringel, Raluca Nechita, Ron Kolm, Ann Pedone and Thomas Wells.