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The Gist

Sick Humor feature by AMELIA EARNEST

70 YEARS AFTER D-DAY photo essay by ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

Carnival personal essay by YI-LING LIU

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FORKS ON THE ROAD feature by CALEB MADISON

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Meet me on Baker Street

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Dirt

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small talk by ELIZABETH MILES

observer by ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

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California Dreaminâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; small talk by ISABELLE TAFT

Uncharted Territories

Unfathomable personal essay by ADRIANA MIELE

Mani

fiction by AUBE REY LESCURE

Lost on Climate Change cover story by ABIGAIL CARNEY

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan

Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Douglas Plume

Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner

Copy Staff Adam Mahler Sarah Sutphin

Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg

Design Staff Carter Levin Amra Saric

Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza

Photo Staff Alexandra Schmeling Wa Liu

Associate Editors Yuval Ben-David Jennifer Gersten Anya Grenier Claire Mufson Oliver Preston

Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY EHRENBERG

LAUGHING MATTER

A Retraction

by William Deresiewicz

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n August, I published a book — a manifesto, perhaps — entitled Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Today, I am publishing an admission that Excellent Sheep, and the resulting epistemological fallout, was somewhat misinformed. The current incarnation of the Excellent Sheep dialogue ends not in glory nor martyrdom, but in a bit of embarrassment.

As it turns out, what I thought was

the main Yale campus was instead the Yale Farm. There were some confusing signs that I think the Connecticut Office of Culture and Tourism needs to work on, but I digress. I have come to realize that the sheep about which I wrote were not metaphorical at all.

They were sheep. Like sheep sheep.

With everything on the table now, I want to make it clear that I still stand by my thesis. It does now seem pertinent, however, to reframe my

by Libbie Katsev Anne Cheng is a Professor of English at Princeton University. She gave a talk through the 20/21c Colloquium about her article “Sushi, Otters, Mermaids: Race at the Intersection of Food and Animal.”

ON SUSHI AS A POSTWAR PHENOMENON “Today sushi is very quotidian — you can find it in airports these days — but it remains marked as a very Asian cuisine. It is that way of being at once ubiquitous and alien that makes “sushi” something of an analogue for the ontological and cultural status of being Asian American: simultaneously invisible yet still perpetually foreign.”

ON THE POLITICS OF EATING SUSHI “In Japan there’s this very ancient, almost macho, code around sushi-eating, the epitome of which is the challenge of eating blowfish. In this sense, in Japan, sushi-eating is gendered; here, it is racialized.”

ON LEGISLATION TO PROTECT ANIMAL RIGHTS BY CLASSIFYING THEM AS PERSONS “Legal person4 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

ANNE CHENG

hood has never been about real people. (Consider, for example, how corporations or even money are considered “persons” in the law.) To categorize animals as people at a time when egregious human rights abuses are going on seems peculiar to me.”

ON OPEN-KITCHEN SUSHI RESTAURANTS “It displays a ritual of care that disguises the ritual of violence behind food preparation. We are supposed to enjoy the art of slicing, but we are protected from the more visceral sight of, say, fish-gutting.”

ON SUSHI’S TRANSITION INTO A HIGH-STATUS FOOD “When sushi became this culinary treat in late 18th century Japan, it was so expensive that people were actually paying their taxes in sushi.”

*I didn’t super-actually visit Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford. My experience at the Yale Farm was so moving that I felt comfortable extrapolating my conclusions to the other campuses. I imagine these still hold in regards to Harvard sheep, Princeton sheep, and Stanford sheep.

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efore the petalwaka went extinct, the world was only a few continents. Each petalwaka was by nature a land creature, but, because of the regular floods that filled the caves and covered the mountains, each petalwaka would learn by adulthood how to breathe, feed, and mate underwater.

BIT LIT

REAL TALK

ANNE CHENG

hypothesis to focus on sheep rather than humans*.

Petalwaka could only be birthed on land, which meant that pregnant mothers had to wait until the floods subsided before they’d resurface to build a nest of seaglass and animal hides for their newborns. Before every birthing season, a few mothers-tobe, weak from pregnancy, would die from the exhaustion of living under water, their children still squirming inside them.

For the infants who did emerge, their first weeks of life were carefree, filled with sky, rain, the green of trees, moonlight.

Their mothers would watch their babies roll around in the earth and stretch their limbs in the sunlight. They would fear for the day the floods came.

The first flood was always the worst.

The bodies of the adolescent petalwakas had never needed to hoard oxygen before, so the adults would breathe into the mouths of their young so the children could breathe. Young petalwakas, who had never known the heavy, cold monotony of life underwater, often fell into states of gloom. Some of them, when the floods finally subsided, would refuse to rise to the shore, so deep into themselves they had withdrawn.

FROM THE BEINECKE

Chewing Gum Man

by Oliver Preston

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f the American humorist Gelett Burgess is remembered at all, he’s remembered for composing the 1895 doggerel “Purple Cow”: “I never saw a purple cow, / I never hope to see one; / But I can tell you, anyhow, / I’d rather see than be one!”

He is less known for his other works, which include “Confession” (“Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow— / I’m sorry, now, I wrote it; / But I can tell you anyhow / I’ll kill you if you quote it!”) and The Most Peculiar History of the Chewing Gum Man, a handmade book that currently resides in the Betsy Beinecke Shirley collection of American children’s literature.

In 100 lines of heroic verse, Burgess sings of Willie, Wallie, and Huldy Ann, three children who endeavor to build a Gargantua out of discarded chewing gum. The task is arduous — “IT TOOK ’EM A YEAR TO CHEW THE GUM,” the poet marvels — and ultimately a failure. The Chewing Gum Man, stubbornly inanimate, slowly melts in the sun. His corpse is stretched out by a street car and dismembered by axe-wielding children. In Burgess’s own watercolors, the mass of masticated rubber flops from page to page. At last it face-plants, “THE END” scrawled across its back.

BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY

DESKSIDE WITH JENNIFER MENDELSOHN ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDENT LIFE

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1 Turtle in rock bowl/ elephant on sand/ sand — feng shui tokens for stability and luck

2 Candy/toys — used 1

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to entice students to come in when she worked on the residential life team

3 Poster made by grad student for All Our Kin

4 Etch-a-sketch/ball

in hole game — she referred to them as “original video games”

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his summer, France and the world celebrated the 70th anniversary of D-Day. In the small town of Carentan in Normandy, ALEXANDRA SCHMELING went to a recreation of a WWII camp and a festival with 1940s dress, swing dancing, a military parade, and a reenactment of civilians fleeing the city.

PATIENT X POLYSOMNOGRAPHY REPORT C3-­A2 C4-­A1 ROC-­A1 O1-­A2 ECG

LEG(L) LEG(R)

Abdominal movement

Thoracic movement Pulse (bpm)

Pressure (ASV)

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Sick Humor

A college student recently diagnosed with narcolepsy searches for answers at the annual conference devoted to her disorder. Gathering narratives from within a community of strangers, she explores the stigma surrounding the illness. As she struggles to accept the betrayals of society and her own body, she asks: what can turn disease into a laughing matter?

BY AMELIA EARNEST PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY EHRENBERG

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ike many wars, Lacey’s began with a wo weeks later and 400 miles north of single shot.

Atlanta, the series of events that would In Atlanta, Georgia, in October eventually link me to Lacey began with 2009, Lacey Brady hopped onto her doctor’s a crash. On a November night in 2009, in my exam table to receive a routine vaccination. senior year of high school, I was snaking The vaccination should have provoked her through the back roads of my hometown immune system to create defenses against in a red pickup. The orange harvest moon the weakened virus, but Lacey’s immune had lulled the Virginia countryside into a system misfired, targetin g part of her brain hazy stillness. My mind grew sluggish in and destroying thousands of irreplaceable the thick silence. The double yellow lines neurons in the process. before my headlights blurred, then dimmed.

A high school basketball star and smallA scream jolted me from my stupor. As town social butterfly, Lacey never seemed my tires screeched against the asphalt, the short on energy. But, that fall day, as she truck bucked and spasmed beneath me, the walked out of the doctor’s office and into gnashing of metal grating my ears. the parking lot, Lacey felt overcome with As quickly as the chaos had begun, my sleepiness. She climbed into her mother’s world righted itself. Adrenaline pumping, I car and, moments later, surrendered to the peered through my splintered windshield. waves of exhaustion.

The metal hood was accordioned against a The battle in her body was over, but scarred tree trunk. Warm wetness seeped Lacey’s fight was just beginning. As a through my shirt. I looked down at my left result of her body’s misdirected immune arm. From the raw red pulp coating my response, Lacey had lost 90 percent of her forearm jutted a naked, white bone. body’s only producers of a protein vital to Months later, my wounds were close to the brain’s sleep cycle regulation. In a single healing, but I was no closer to understanding friendly-fire massacre, Lacey had become what had caused the crash. As time passed I narcoleptic. learned to recount a less uncertain version of events to those who asked: “A deer ran into the road.”

There was no deer. That much I knew. yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

feature But the mental fogginess that had come narcoleptic. over me just before the crash had blurred My exhaustion finally had a name, out any other clue as why I had lost which meant that I could learn more. I control. In the year before my accident, learned that I was missing a protein vital these foggy spells had begun happening to maintaining the sleep cycle, which regularly, pitching me headfirst into brief caused my brain to struggle to regulate

His reaction was like a slap across the face. Of all the responses I’d feared — pity, discomfort, skepticism — I had never considered that I might be mocked. but disturbing dreams in the middle of when — or how often — I fell asleep. My the day. I’d nod off for a few seconds in daytime hallucinations, I found out, were class and find myself transported into actually slivers of a dream sandwiched in a nightmarish Salvador Dali painting, between periods of consciousness. The my teacher’s body contorting at the reason these hallucinations felt so real is blackboard, or tongues of flame lapping because I sometimes wouldn’t even be at the room’s walls. These visions would aware that I’d fallen asleep. flit away as quickly as they set in.

As I gained a better understanding of The exhaustion and hallucinations my strange affliction, I began to realize followed me to college. My first few just how little others knew about it. weeks at Yale were a dizzying blur. Did I A few days after I received my want to hear a senator talk about student diagnosis, I was studying with a debt or eat free pizza while learning classmate in a dining hall when I began about how to travel to Istanbul for free? to doze off. Anxious to explain my Should I join a comedy troupe or learn apparent inattention, I told him that I how to code my own website? had narcolepsy.

I filled my schedule to the brim, “Haha — that thing where you fall determined to take advantage of Yale’s asleep all the time?” he laughed. “You’re many possibilities. But by the end of kidding!” freshman year, my fatigue had become His reaction was like a slap across debilitating. Because I could not stay the face. Of all the responses I’d feared alert at night, I began waking up hours — pity, discomfort, skepticism — I had before dawn to study, chugging three, never considered that I might be mocked. four, five cups of coffee at a time.

On the chance that my classmate’s After years of negative mono tests reaction was abnormal, I tried again and normal blood work, exhaustion — this time, reaching out to a close had become a normal part of life. In the friend. In response, I received a link to winter of my sophomore year, a doctor a YouTube video of narcoleptic goats finally referred me to a sleep study. A few collapsing (one person on the comment months later, a letter arrived: board had posted, “I could watch these goobers all day!”).

Dear Ms. Earnest: Narcolepsy is an incurable disorder Your sleep test results indicate that you as common as Parkinson’s and as suffer from narcolepsy. debilitating as epilepsy. But I began to notice that, whether in the media or in y fatigue and disturbing everyday conversation, references to hallucinations were not narcolepsy would only come up when imaginary. I wasn’t crazy: I was it was part of a joke. Even my favorite

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television series Arrested Development made a good laugh off of a narcoleptic character who, as a stripper, always fell asleep before managing to finish her act. I began to wonder privately about others with narcolepsy — if they, too, felt trapped in the punch line of what everybody else saw as cause for laughter.

I couldn’t stop society from ridiculing narcolepsy, but that didn’t mean I had to expose myself to the laughter. I decided to stop sharing my diagnosis, and, as I completed my sophomore and junior year at Yale, I waited for time to lessen the sting of feeling misunderstood.

A few weeks into my senior year at Yale, my mother called to suggest that I take a weekend away from school to fly 1,000 miles to the Narcolepsy Network’s Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

My reaction over the phone was immediate: “I’m not going to some pity party.”

But after I hung up, my certainty wavered. For the past two years, the enigma of narcolepsy’s humor had inhabited my mind like an unwanted houseguest. I wondered if Atlanta could offer some answers.

I called my mom back. “OK,” I said.

“I’ll go.”

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hen I first met Lacey in October of 2013, she was sitting at the center of a gaggle of girls in the wallpapered lobby of the Buckhead Intercontinental Hotel in Atlanta. All the girls were wearing the same name tag that I was, which meant that they, too, had come here for the narcolepsy conference.

Wearing a flowered sundress and nursing a Red Bull, Lacey, a 19-yearold, looked as relaxed as someone entertaining in her living room. I, on the other hand, remained glued to the periphery of the lobby grasping my suitcase, still bundled in my wooly Connecticut wardrobe. Suddenly shy, I felt as if I were approaching the lunch table of a high school clique. Lacey caught my gaze from across the room and smiled. “Hello,” she called out,

feature gesturing for me to join her group, “Is this your first year?”

Lacey, I learned upon joining the girls’ conversation, hadn’t always been so selfassured. When I asked about her reasons for attending the conference each year, Lacey described a lonely search for a supportive community.

Before being diagnosed, Lacey’s sudden, inexplicable symptoms alienated her from the rest of her small Georgia hometown. After narcolepsy’s onset, Lacey, then 15 years old, began regularly collapsing at school. Her parents had a doctor administer a drug test, even though Lacey promised she wasn’t using drugs. But, unable to explain her behavior any other way, her parents continued to test her routinely.

Although she didn’t know it at the time, Lacey, like 70 percent of all narcoleptics, was experiencing cataplexy: sudden muscle weakness triggered by strong emotion. But because the root cause of cataplexy doesn’t present any visible indication of illness, it wasn’t difficult for others to mistake the clumsiness, slurring, immobility, and loss of muscle tone symptomatic of cataplexy as a signs of drug or alcohol use.

Many of Lacey’s friends began to think she was on drugs while at school. Thinking her behavior was funny, some of her best friends began recording and circulating videos of her collapsing or falling asleep in class. Other students began spreading rumors that Lacey was infected with a contagious disease.

The gossip blazed through her tiny town. “Everyone knows you and everything about you,” Lacey said. “I just stayed home and didn’t talk to anyone freshman year of high school.”

After suffering a cataplexy attack on the court, Lacey had to quit basketball. For her entire life, Lacey had known almost everyone in her community. But, upon losing her ability to exercise or regularly attend school, the only company Lacey had left was her unanswered questions.

for narcolepsy: hough the general public knows Further genotypes/sequencing showed little about narcolepsy, the medical that the DW2 haplotype was characterized as community is not exactly light years HLA DRB1*1501 DQA1*0102. DQB1*0602 ahead. Narcolepsy is under-researched was found in 90 percent of cases. and under-diagnosed. It’s not hard to see His presentation prompted more why. In four years’ worth of curriculum, questions than it answered. I thought the average medical school allots two again about the possible environmental hours to talk about sleep disorders. Even or genetic causes of narcolepsy and for narcoleptics lucky enough to stumble wondered, as I looked at the girls sitting across the right diagnosis, answers next to me, if a cure might exist within to fundamental questions about their our lifetime. disorder remain elusive.

“The best way you can contribute to Evidence strongly suggests that, at research,” the doctor said, coming to the the onset of narcolepsy, a misdirected last slide of his presentation as I shoveled autoimmune response kills around 90 flavorless pasta salad into my mouth, “is percent of the neurons charged with to talk to your families and to get them to making an important sleep regulation donate your brain.” protein. But little is known about why this haywire immune response occurs, or the average narcoleptic, why it causes cataplexy, or if it can be diagnosis takes two decades. Lacey prevented. was lucky in one respect: because On the first day of the conference, I of the severity of her cataplexy, she was decided to attend a luncheon during diagnosed within three months. Without which dozens of sleep specialists would such obvious symptoms, she could have present new advances in sleep medicine. lived under a cloud of fatigue for most of Inside the grand ballroom of the hotel, her life.

I grabbed lunch from the buffet before I Most people with narcolepsy struggle spotted Lacey. She was sitting at a table to convey the experience of pathological next to an athletic teenage girl named exhaustion to not only doctors, but Danielle, another conference regular also loved ones. Without the visible who experiences severe cataplexy attacks. symptoms of severe cataplexy, it can be The attacks, Danielle said as we started hard for people to accept as an illness to eat, paralyze her on the ground for something no objective measure can minutes at a time. When I asked her how describe: tiredness. she copes with such debilitating attacks, Because my exhaustion had been so she told me that she always travels with a hard to verbalize, even to those closest service dog trained to sense an oncoming to me, I had stopped talking about it at collapse. Thrusting out her wrist, she all. But, after lunch, I ended up slipping showed me her other precaution, an through a set of paneled doors flanked by engraved medical ID bracelet. a sign that said: Support Group.

Inside the room, I joined the others in Danielle Brooks the circle of folding chairs. A conference Narcolepsy & Cataplexy veteran named Dustin had been sharing: Google For Symptoms his wife had narcolepsy, but he did not.

Initially, his wife’s only symptom was Onstage, the doctor giving the excessive sleepiness. But recently, severe presentation was gesturing at charts and cataplexy had begun to prevent her from bullet points on a PowerPoint. Dressed driving or working. Despite the added in a starchy white coat, he looked like financial and emotional strain, Dustin he had just emerged from the lab. In credited his wife’s cataplexy attacks with thin white letters in a small font, he saving his marriage. “I used to think she presented science’s latest breakthrough was just lazy, and it drove a stake in our

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feature relationship,” Dustin said, shaking his head “I actually didn’t believe her until the cataplexy hit this year. Now I get it.

It’s real.”

Even when confronted with a conclusive medical diagnosis, some people remain unable, or unwilling, to recognize narcolepsy as a legitimate health problem. Lacey’s father, she shared with the group, is among them.

“I honestly think he will always be in denial, because it happened so fast,” Lacey said. “I went from normal —” Lacey paused, snapping her fingers in the air “— to not.” Lacey said that her father believes she can manage her symptoms with willpower: that, if only she tried hard enough, Lacey could stay awake.

Narcolepsy’s stigma has touched my family, too. When I went home for winter break in my junior year at Yale, my dad took me to dinner at our usual spot, a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. Post-diagnosis, I had become obsessed with figuring out why I had gotten narcolepsy. Because some theories posited a genetic cause, I had combed through my family tree looking for answers. Finding nothing, I, again, asked my father if he knew of any one in the family who could have had narcolepsy.

“Focus on how to move forward,” my dad said. “What does obsessing over this do for you?”

I bit my cheek, unable to explain how often I thought about the origins of my narcolepsy. “If I have no basis for genetic predisposition, I can then consider other… ” I trailed off, noting a strange expression flit across my father’s face.

“So, someone did have it.” My voice fell flat, turning my question into a statement. My dad fiddled with his chopsticks.

“Your grandfather,” he said. “But he made your grandmother promise not to tell anyone.” My grandfather had died three years earlier, just months before I had fallen asleep behind the wheel and crashed my truck.

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“It was a different time,” my father said.

“When your grandfather served in World War II, falling asleep on watch was punishable by death.” My grandfather lived for seven decades before being diagnosed. But even afterwards, his view of sleep, it seemed, had remained what it was to him during wartime: a liability.

his room freezing cold and shone a bright lamp into his eyes. “Studying,” he said sagely, “is just about making yourself as miserable as possible.”

As a child, he was misdiagnosed with ADHD and multiple personality disorder. “People were convinced I was this lazy asshole with ADHD,” Sean said. t was true: my grandfather was of a After being diagnosed, Sean decided different generation. But I had met so to take a medical semester off from his many young people at the conference Ph.D. program. When I spoke with who, like my grandfather, feared being him, he was uncertain about returning viewed as lazy or incompetent. This to finish his degree “Why finish my negative perception is enough to Ph.D. — so I can make $42,000 as an prevent some narcoleptics from seeking academic? Getting tenure as someone treatment. with narcolepsy? That’s not gonna On my last night in Atlanta, I met happen.”

Jackie, a 25-year-old conference rookie, Matt, a 26-year-old, had a similar in the bar at the front of the hotel. Jackie experience. For seven years, he tried diagnosed herself with narcolepsy when to stay alert enough in class to earn she was just 15. But for the next eight his associate’s degree. He finally gave years, she lived in denial. up. Eventually, Matt was diagnosed “I didn’t want to say I have narcolepsy,” with both narcolepsy and sleep apnea, she said. “The little bit that people know a condition in which breathing stops about narcolepsy is that it has to do with periodically during sleep. “I didn’t sleeping all the time — that, if you have know what narcolepsy was,” he it, you’re lazy.” explained, “I thought I was lazy.”

So when people asked about her sleep attacks or cataplexy, Jackie invented omething in the stories of Matt, her own fictitious disorder: “laugh Sean, and Jackie resonated apnea.” Without medication, Jackie was with me. No one at Yale had constantly dozing off. “My dad would ever called me lazy, but, sometimes, I just say ‘Jackie, you need to drink more couldn’t help but feel like I was lagging coffee!’” behind. Each night, after nodding off Looking back, Jackie feels angry at the library table for the umpteenth that, for nearly a decade, her fear of time, I would gather my books and seeming lazy stopped her from getting leave my friends, who’d keep working help. “Now that I’m on meds, it’s for hours after I’d gone to sleep. crazy to me that I did it,” Jackie said, Productivity is Yale’s true patron thinking about the eight years she saint, and that makes sleep a natural spent in denial. “Looking back, I feel enemy. When facing unmanageable like I was never really awake.” demands, rather than sacrificing Every young person I met at the academic or extracurricular conference had, at one point or responsibilities, most Yalies simply another, struggled to distinguish cut back on sleep. But I could not. narcolepsy’s fatigue from laziness. My 8-hour sleep schedule and daily Sean, a 28-year-old from D.C., had been napping felt almost blasphemous. I felt diagnosed only a month before the guilty for squandering so many of the conference. Suffering from symptoms day’s hours unconscious. I felt that my of narcolepsy from a young age, Sean inability to stay awake indicated that I always struggled to stay alert to do his wasn’t as disciplined or hard working class work. To stay awake, Sean made as everyone else. Every day, emails,

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feature posters, and passing conversations fueled a constant and disquieting sense that my time was running out.

When I was a freshman, General Stanley McChrystal came to Yale as a professor. When the news of his arrival broke, I remember hearing a variant of the same, bizarre fact every time his name arose in a conversation “— I hear he doesn’t really sleep or eat.”

Intrigued, I searched the Internet for details about McChrystal and came across an online video that elaborated on the general’s stringent sleeping habits. “Here’s a story that’s inspired many people,” a moderator says to McChrystal in the video. “You sleep less than four hours a day, run over seven miles a day, and eat only one meal a day.” Beaming at McChrystal, the moderator asks, “Is this urban legend?”

The general shakes his head no, affirming his self-discipline, intense drive — sheer superhuman-ness.

When the moderator asks McChrystal why other people can’t keep up with his grueling, sleepless schedule, the General replies with militant consiseness: “You’re weak.”

Only one in 2,000 people have narcolepsy. But at Yale, concealing my pathological exhaustion had always been easy. Dozing off in class never gave me away — looking around the lecture hall, everyone else was, too.

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couldn’t fit my pills for a day!” othing had changed at Yale in Adderall, Venlafaxine, Nuvigil, the two days I was in Atlanta.

Xyrem, Topamax. To me, Lacey’s But, as I settled back into my daily medications sounded like the old routines, everything felt different. names of planets in a sci-fi movie. Her All over the country, there were dependence on so many potent drugs people who shared my inexplicable had disturbed me. “I take medicine challenges and frustrations. I knew to stay awake,” she had said, “and their names and faces. They were I take medicine to fall asleep.” But, studying, working, raising families. considering her daily arsenal of Keeping meds in their desks at work medications, I wondered: compared and watching movies with all the lights to the general population, was her left on bright. For the rest of senior behavior really so outrageous? year, the knowledge of our parallel lives Yale’s work-sleep culture might filled me with a strange new peace. be extreme, but most people I had Freshly graduated, I now live on a ever known artificially controlled leafy street in a strange new city. As I their wakefulness in some way. I begin this next phase of life, society’s had relatives who needed uppers to derision of narcolepsy does not embitter get up in the morning and downers me the way it once did. Narcolepsy to lie down at night. Friends who had stormed into my life suddenly and used Adderall to study and Red Bull destructively, and laughter had prodded to party. A classmate who’d regularly at the wound. Narcolepsy, I felt, had throw down a pot of coffee and a robbed me of so much. couple cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon And it is true: narcolepsy has stolen in quick succession — a recipe for from me. It has taken innumerable alert studying and an easy sleep. moments and memories. In the five The more I thought about it, the years since narcolepsy’s onset, I have only real difference between Lacey’s fallen asleep at weddings, funerals, daily chemical cocktail and that graduations (my own included), first of everybody else I knew was that dates, and taxicabs in six different Lacey’s was prescribed by a doctor. countries. Narcolepsy has struck at I hated taking my medications. inconvenient, sometimes dangerous, Coffee, which I had previously loved times: while I was showering, taking drinking, had become just another the SAT, driving, interviewing for one of my daily tonics. Contriving my first job, and once, in a feat I had my body’s rhythms according to the previously thought possible for only day’s workload or social calendar felt horses, while standing up. he next morning, sitting in a so unnatural. From a 9 a.m. coffee run But, in a small way, narcolepsy plane bound for Connecticut, I until 5 o’clock happy hour, everyone has given, too. Unlike most people thought about the community around me was also trying to defy I know, I cannot buy alertness. But, I was leaving on the ground and the evolution, adapting their bodies to fit consequently, the chance to be work awaiting me at school. Not yet their environment. wholly present in a passing moment back to Yale, I somehow already felt More than ever before, sleep has become infinitely more precious. behind. I opened my backpack to pull has become a choice. Consumers I find now that, when narcolepsy’s out my usual study materials: Pen, can browse the aisle of any corner fog clears, the countless beauties of paper, pills. Pausing, I stared at my convenience store and purchase everyday life are not lost on me. pillbox in the middle of the plastic tray their desired level of wakefulness I cannot ensure the feeling of being table. as casually as they would a pack of truly awake. Like perfect weather, it is “Are those all your meds?” Lacey gum. In a world of commoditized a blessing and, when I feel it, the here had asked me I pulled out the little tin sleep, the idea of someone helpless and now fills me up with wonder. at the conference. I told her that they to control their own consciousness were. seems absurd.

“What?” Lacey had laughed. “That Laughable, almost

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e all knew about Koh Samui. At the beginning of every summer, the graduating seniors of the Chinese International School, all ninetysomething of them, would toss their crimson caps in the air, collect their diplomas and jet off to the gem-shaped island on the Gulf of Thailand. They’d return a week later, dazed and euphoric, and entertain us underclassmen with stories of their week of decadence, stories that all began with, “So this one night, I was so smashed that I…” and ended with an anecdote involving an excursion to a lady boy bar or passing out at a crowded beach-wide fiesta or cows crossing the road at 3 a.m. The island was a carnival, a post-graduation Xanadu for hormonepumped teenagers, the Mecca for all the spoilt under-18s of Southeast Asia. It was all very ridiculous if you thought about it.

And yet, summer after graduation, finally a senior, deciding that I might as well make the pilgrimage, I found myself on a one-hour flight to Samui International Airport.

In Koh Samui, the day started when the sun went down. Started late afternoon, sitting in somebody’s room, cheeks flushed, grooves of earlobes glowing, passing around a bottle of Absolut bought for 200 baht at the roadside store next to the hotel. When the sun had finished its descent, we’d pile into a tuk tuk — an open-air truck covered with Tiger Beer stickers and psychedelic paint — and get off in the streets of Chaweng, the epicenter of Thai 14 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

- L I N G

L

ILLUSTRATIO N BY

ANNELISA LEINBACH

AL

I

U

nightlife, an image cropped straight out of a guidebook entitled Navigating Koh Samui for the Young n’ Wild. Chaweng was exactly what I thought Koh Samui would be, a chaotic world of twinkling neon lights, bars crammed upon bars, and crude symphonies of Avicil and Flo Rida played on repeat. There were no rules here; you did whatever you pleased.

Dinner consisted of freshly caught fish and crabs laid out on slabs of ice; we ate it al fresco and finished off the meal with a row of shots and plastic cups of Long Island iced tea. We smoked shisha in small alleyway bars and passed the smoke around in a circle. When we were bored, we paid a dollar to have little fish in glass tanks chew off the dead skin on the soles of our feet. We wandered into burlesque shows where dancers in silvertassled, rhinestone bikinis lip-synched to Moulin Rouge, and we’d realize at the end of the performance that all the dancers were men. We drank tequila from plastic pails, danced in sweaty, open-air clubs where half the Koh Samui population congregated every night, and, when they shut down, we hailed tuk tuks and haggled over our rides back to the hotel.

When I woke up the next morning, the inside of my mouth coated with the whatever that was on the happy hour menu at Ark Bar the night before, the sunlight, as yellow and vibrant as my kid sister’s Crayolas, poured through the blinds. There was no transition into daytime; when you woke, the world was already ablaze. Other than that simple dichotomy of party at night and sleep

throughout the day, there was never any sense of time and not once did I look at my watch or set an alarm. Mealtimes were entirely spontaneous — we ate when we were hungry. Sometimes, we’d return to the hotel at dawn as the sky embered and the rest of the world stirred in its sleep, and we’d eat breakfast before bed. Breakfasts were feasts — rice noodles made to order with your choice of vegetables or shrimp or chicken, yoghurt with mint and cilantro, morning glory cooked with shallots and dried shrimps. The fruit platters of hairy Rambutans, durians, fist-sized rose apples and freshly sliced papaya a shade of deep, vibrant vermillion that I’d never imagined anything edible could ever have, seemed to disobey the very laws of harvest and nature.

Days tumbled into each other — I cannot distinguish one from the other except for the rare occasions we felt adventurous and decided to go jetskiing or visit the food market. Some of the guys would drive around on the island in their swim trunks on rented mopeds and come back with burns on their shins from falling off their bikes and skidding on the gravel. Otherwise, at daytime, the long stretch between waking up and sunset, we did nothing.

A dozen of us would lie in the same bed, watching the ceiling fan whir, discussing the new Spiderman movie, reminiscing about Year 10 English class, talking about everything and nothing. Back in Hong Kong, Phil and I were acquaintances in the same homeroom. I said “hey what’s

personal essay up” to him at 8:15 a.m. and then another cursory nod of greeting at 3:00 p.m. when school ended. And yet here I was, lying on the floorboards in my swimsuit, with an equally barely dressed friend curled up on my left and a bare-chested Phil snoozing on my right. There was something about the air in Koh Samui — lazy, humid, and rich with the scent of blooming hibiscus — that cultivated a sense of comfort, a transgressive kind of intimacy. Here, we were children again, thrown together in the same playpen, unhindered by the expected ‘hey how are you’s’ and ‘I’m fine’s’ and all the other rules of social decorum. The booze helped. All the time, you could hear it in the conversation and easy laughter — booze talk, booze words, tumbling freely out of our mouths like clumsy toddlers a few weeks after having learned to walk. And all the words that you’ve kept to yourself back home, thoughts that you’ve carefully concealed, little ugly things, hamsters with two heads, crudely cut gems — you could share them here.

I pictured in my head what Club Green Mango would look like in the day, the speakers silent, and the dance floor empty aside from the broken Singha bottles scattered on the ground. I wondered what they thought of us, the young workers who swept the floors of beer and grime with brooms of straw, the bartender who poured for us and then watched us down twenty shots of Smirnoffs like cups of water, the tuk tuk driver who collected our crumpled baht bills as we piled out of the van. I imagined the chef as he tossed all the ingredients into a wok, thin muscles on his left forearm shifting and contracting — what did he think of us as he rustled up our post-hangover meal to wash down the sins of the night? Did he know how fresh and delicious I thought his noodles were — how much I loved and still yearn for the sweetness of the fish sauce, the unexpected sour tang of the tamarind?

Or the lady who came and cleaned up the room every day and changed our rumpled sheets. I wonder if she knew

that yesterday when we sat on the bed together with our plastic cups and three bottles of vodka that for the first time in years, I felt like I did when I was seven and I took bubble baths with my brother after playing soccer in the garden. I wonder if she knew that in giving us free reign of her beaches, of her home, of her country, in giving us Koh Samui, she was doing an act of charity.

The morning we left Koh Samui, I had had an average of three hours of sleep and ten shots per night; my cheeks were sunburnt, my feet sore from dancing, and my liver, I imagined, had dried and shriveled like a prune. It was all kind of ridiculous if you thought about it. And yet, as I stood in line at the departure gate, I started to cry. Thick, hot tears that tumbled out and simply would not stop. I knew that once I stepped off the plane into the lofty, airconditioned Hong Kong airport, with its Starbucks and mechanical luggage belts that worked with clock-like efficiency, that I’d returned to a world where some things you can only talk about with some people, and some things you just don’t, that tomorrow I’d wake up at dawn alone under the cool sheets of my single bed, that I’d have my muesli like I did every morning with a plate of sliced apples,

skin pale and colorless and that Phil and I were just acquaintances again. I had graduated, and Koh Samui was over.

And yet all I could think about was the man who passed us walking through Chaweng with an armful of groceries, on his way home to his wife and children. As we stumbled by him, arm in arm, belting the lyrics to “I Gotta Good Feeling,” was that pity that I saw in his eyes?

WELL You have six wells at the house back home.

Two at the groin, two at the neck, one in the wood between doorframe and carpet.

And the last: a movable well at the bottom of the stairs.

You may step or fall, you may tug at the rope and skin, but sooner or later thirst becomes you, and you draw upon the well.

At the end of the hallway, a door; behind the door, a library; in each book, six wells.

Who is to tell me I am wrong?

Who may say seven or five?

Not the philosopher. Not the jutting nail.

Only the warm center. Only the stiff cedars, who have learned their timing by whispering among the reeds.

Ruthie Prillaman

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

small talk

Meet Me at Baker Street STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH MILES

“M

ost people think Sherlock Holmes is real. About 60 percent. And we can’t tell them no,” says Carmen, a Victorian maid at 221B Baker St. “So if someone asks, ‘Does he live here?’ I tend to say yes.

Because if you tell them, it’s like breaking their heart.” At the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London, the first ever dedicated to a fictional character, “we often have girls dress up as Benedict, with wigs and all of that. Mainly from Russia?

And China!” Josh, the actor costumed as a Victorian policeman, was once made to hold a three-foot Benedict Cumberbatch doll. I ask Josh, “Have you gotten a lot of these — um, Cumberbitches?” (as the enthusiastic fans of Sherlock’s most recent incarnation have labeled themselves). Josh has. They’re hard to miss. “They’re sort of screaming a lot.”

But Emily, another Victorian maid, says the most excited fan was a man in his 80s. “He’d read the books since he was seven. He wasn’t as … animated, but he was in the museum for hours looking over every detail,” she said. For novel lovers, the museum is more than Benedict posters and “I Am Sherlocked” t-shirts. For “Doylebitches,” the game is afoot — hunting instead for clues from every adventure Dr. Watson ever recorded.

Maps gather dust on dull crimson wallpaper. A brass bedstead glints in the light from a gas lamp illuminating Holmes’s chemistry books. On the bed lies a familiar deerstalker hat, left as if the good detective has just strolled into

16 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

the study — where a parade of teenage girls pout for Instagram, playing with pipes and magnifying glasses. I sit on the couch, assume my best helpless look, and wait for Sherlock to solve my case in his head.

Instead, I meet Dr. Grimesby Roylott upstairs, his head wrapped by a “speckled band” — a malevolent swamp adder. Life-size wax figures of Holmesian villains, just real enough to be unnerving, inhabit the next floor. But selfies ruin the sociopathic chill, as women plant kisses on Professor Moriarty’s cold cheek.

When I ask two elementary-aged boys from Alpedrete, Spain, which is their favorite Sherlock Holmes, the answer is “Iron Man!” A middle school group from Russia responds “everything!” The girls from Taiwan just giggle, “Benedict.”

Sherlock is quite the lady-killer. Letters sent to 221B include “From your woman,” sealed with a lipstick kiss, and “You can run, but you won’t hide! I’ll find you!” from a “PD” in Russia. The museum employees blame it on Benedict. But Sherlock Holmes, Dreamboat Detective, isn’t a new phenomenon. The original 1891 illustrations were based on the artist’s brother, who was then mobbed by the public for the rest of his life.

It’s “Richard the Fourth,” guide of the Holmes in London walking tour, who tells me this. He retells “The Five Orange Pips,” pointing me towards Waterloo Bridge, to imagine a cry and a splash on a dark and stormy night. But it’s easier, watching trains thunder across to the ultra-modern glassy Shard, to

recall “The Great Game,” a BBC episode in which five texts warn Sherlock of riddles he must solve to prevent a series of bombings. I’ve wondered if the original detective stories are fading away, lost somewhere behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s billowing trench coat.

But Richard attributes the detective’s enduring popularity, the constant pilgrimage of fans to Sherlock’s London, precisely to “the stories’ capacity for constant reinvention.”

Sometimes 1891’s grit clamors through to 2014. We funnel into an alleyway leading to the Nell Gwynne, a pub giving off indiscriminate food-andalcohol-and-muddy-brick smells, jostling uncomfortably until I can imagine Holmes, disguised as a sooty beggar, crouching with us, eavesdropping on the carriages of the Victorian Strand.

The tour ends at a pub, once the Northumberland Arms, where Henry Baskerville stays in the novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, but known since 1957 as the Sherlock Holmes. An immense bust of the Hound droops over the bar, next to handcuffs “used

by Scotland Yard.” Watson’s Wallop ale flows. Through modern London — a haze of mass-produced pipes and hats and magnifying glasses — even through Benedict Cumberbatch’s cheekbones, Sherlock survives. If the Reichenbach fall didn’t kill him, time could never do the job.

I ask a fellow tourist, “How do you like the pub?” He responds, “Where’s my pipe?”

dreamin’

BY ISABELLE TAFT

I

t was over 100 degrees in Sacramento, and thousands of California State Fair attendees were fleeing outdoor attractions — fried watermelon, pregnant livestock, Old West horse shows — for the indoor exhibits. For most sweaty fairgoers, the homemade quilts and amateur watercolors offered an excuse to soak in air conditioning.

But inside the concrete buildings of Cal Expo, fairgoers could also find the one thing that made the event a celebration of California in its entirety: the county displays.

The displays are enormous celebrations of each county’s charms, and an advertisement crafted to appeal to potential tourists. Most are built of plywood, roughly the length and depth of a dumpster, carefully painted and rich with detail. Take in a cartoon Yosemite, a Victorian seaside resort, and a family of forest bears. Here there is no glamorous Hollywood, no rebellious San Francisco, hardly anything that shouts California.

D

uring the two weeks of the state fair in July, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper announced that he had obtained enough signatures for his “Six Californias” plan to qualify for the November ballot.

Draper’s plan would institutionalize the enormous divisions already present within the state. He would make San Francisco and its thriving, technologydriven surrounding counties into a state called Silicon Valley. The dusty agricultural counties south of Sacramento would join the state of Central California. There, per capita income would hover just above $30,000 a year — the nation’s lowest.

Most of the counties that send displays to the state fair lie not in Silicon Valley, nor in the state’s prosperous coastal areas. Of California’s 58 counties, the 27 that sent displays to the 2014 state

fair tend to lie in the sun-baked Central Valley or the misty north. They are places that could use some extra tourist dollars — so much so that some will invest $30,000 in their displays.

One of those places is Modoc County, or, as its slogans says, “where the West still lives” and “the last best place.”

Modoc County occupies California’s far northeast corner. With fewer than 10,000 people and vast tracts of wilderness, it’s the least densely populated county in the state. Draper’s proposal was widely ridiculed and would eventually fail to obtain enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. But “Six Californias” may have had some supporters in Modoc: in 2013, the county Board of Supervisors voted (futilely) to secede from California.

T

his year’s county display theme, assigned by fair officials, was “From our farm to your table,” but because Modoc County’s most marketable export is nationalistic nostalgia, they reworked that idea to “Patriotism: from our county to your table.”

The display features a family of sallow-skinned mannequins enjoying a picnic beside a horse-drawn buggy.

They wear cowboy hats and checkered shirts tucked into their clean blue jeans. An American flag droops from the buggy. A small television plays an old documentary about the county.

The audio is lost amidst the din of shuffling steps and hissing deep fryers, but the images are clear: herds of horses stampede across endless plains.

Ranchers gaze at distant mountains.

“Real America” lives.

Fairgoers stroll past. The most common reaction to the display is “What’s Modoc County?” Nobody has been there, not even a woman who lived in neighboring Siskiyou County for several years. Everyone agrees, however,

that they’d like to go sometime.

O

ne family at the fair recently won the “green card lottery” to emigrate from Moldova. The American program awards visas to several thousand randomly selected applicants every year. While most immigrants have wealth, education, or established family members to ease their way here, winners of the “Diversity Immigrant Visa Program” often arrive only, carrying only their dreams of a land of opportunity.

Like many farmers fleeing the plains to escape the Dust Bowl during the 1930s, like the men and women seeking work they couldn’t obtain at home in Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras, the Moldovan family chose to settle in California’s Central Valley. Today, the migrant farmers who travel throughout the Central Valley, from one enormous agricultural operation to the other, are vulnerable to low pay, abuse, and, if they’re undocumented, the threat of deportation. Backbreaking work is a given.

The Moldovan family has been in America only a few months, and California still shines for them. They employ fledgling English to express their joy at being here. Out of all 27 displays in this enormous hall, they choose Modoc County as the backdrop for family photos.

Stephanie Wellemeyer, clerk for the board of supervisors, is proud that Modoc County bears no resemblance to Hollywood. Actors, directors, and producers construct and package realities to consumers across the globe; Modoc’s ranchers toil in anonymity.

Wellemeyer says Modoc’s people are happy where they are, miles and miles away from the harsh light of Los Angeles. Still, they know how to sell a lifestyle.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

DIRT

BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH ECKINGER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY AMRA SARIC

D

irt doesn’t fit into Yale’s strategic plan. Bells and towers, arched gates and flagstone walkways — these fit. But none of it, not even Harkness Tower or Phelps Gate, arrives ready-made. Even the prettiest parts of campus were once nothing but smut, dross, and refuse.

One area of campus is still more smut than sparkle. Up Prospect Street from the Woolsey rotunda, just below Ingalls Rink, across from the Political Science building and old School of Management headquarters, is the site of one of the most expensive capital projects in the state. In three years, two new residential colleges will stand here — here, where I’m standing now, against the wishes of a construction manager, kicking rocks around in the dirt and peering into stone caverns in the earth.

In the dirt and weeds lie the fortunes of an unknowable number of future students at this school. Hundreds of new minds will sleep and eat here,

18 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

study here and sip beer here. They’ll realize they love it here, and sometimes they’ll hate it here. All in a space whose prevailing feature, right now, is dirt.

After walking the perimeter of the half-dozen acres bounded by Prospect, Canal, and Sachem — “Prospect Triangle,” as the site’s been called — I find my way in through an opening in the chain-link fence, marked as “Construction Access.” A tattooed woman with cropped blond hair and teardrop earrings, a supervisor for the Turner Construction Company, emerges from a trailer to enforce the rules.

I slow my pace. I know I’ve met my match.

“You can’t be here,” she tells me, putting up both hands like she’s directing traffic on a street corner. I yield to her, still at the periphery of the site, in a small gravel parking lot across the street from the Political Science Department.

Away from the dirt.

I start rattling off questions, wondering about the steam pipes and the dirt piles. Who’s authorized to be on the site now, I ask her.

“And you can’t have my name,” she adds as I fold over a page in my notebook.

Strict orders from the company’s boss.

There is nothing to supervise here, just reinforced concrete and steam lines that rise from the soil but go nowhere — more than 10 hooked, black-andwhite tubes, like monochrome candy canes fixed in the Earth. Instead she supervises me.

My supervisor-turned-docent describes the “make-ready work” that makes the site closed to visitors.

Rerouting the subterranean piping will ensure there’s running water in three years, when the colleges open to the Class of 2021. When plans began for these lodgings in 2001, the residentsto-be were still learning to walk. Now they’re sophomores in high school. If they were to come here now, they’d see

observer

C bare land. If they wait till they’re juniors to visit, the shell of their home could greet them. The year after, perhaps a ribbon-cutting.

It’s a long period of gestation.

Electrical generators and a storage unit inhabit the triangle’s western corner, adjacent to the student health building. All they do is lie there, like sessile creatures of the dirt. Along Canal Street, which divides this plot from the cemetery where the bodies of 13 Yale presidents lie, maple trees offer a thin canopy. Right in the middle of the triangle, several rubber-tired excavators — the sine qua non of construction — rest their outstretched bionic arms in the dirt.

Why is one pile covered with plastic, and the other open to the elements? The covered dirt will stay on this site, my supervisor answers; “it’s not dirty dirt” but rather “clean fill dirt,” a distinction you can’t mess up when you’re working on a project that’s costing Yale an arm

and a leg.

Uncertainty clouds the other pile’s future. This dirt was taken from somewhere else — maybe the president’s house on Hillhouse Avenue, a block over, she ventures — and could go back there, or to another construction site. “This is sort of an interim place for Yale,” she says.

I thank the supervisor for her time and continue to wind my way around the edges of the site.

A lot was cleared from the site to make it shovel-ready. Roughly a dozen buildings that once stood here have been demolished. One was an administrative office building that, for whatever reason, attracted honeybees; the insects lurked above a bay window facing Prospect Street. One summer, in the 1980s, honey dripped slowly down the window, and secretaries put out paper cups to catch the sweet goo. The building is now dust.

Also razed: a law office where undergraduates in trouble with the law — “the actual law, not ExComm,” as Lloyd Suttle, a deputy provost, later clarifies for me — went for legal counsel. Nearby stood the home of an economics professor with a taste for modern architecture. When he died and left the property to his widow, she planted a garden on the roof, its vibrant colors discernible from Ingalls Rink due north. Both dust.

Gone, too, are Hammond Hall, a red brick building with limestone trim that housed sculptors displaced from Rudolph Hall by a fire, and Mudd Library, where government documents and social sciences books were stored.

These materials are now held at Yale’s Library Storage Facility in Hamden, Conn., where you can check out a Report of the Committee on Lamps and Gas in Favor of Permitting the New York Mutual Saving Gaslight Company to Lay Pipes Through the Streets and Avenues of the City. Dust, too, and a diaspora of books and documents.

Just as construction preparation shuffled the layout of these holdings, the

colleges themselves are bound to shuffle the geography of campus. What seems remote will feel closer. What seems intimate will feel removed, segmented.

Will students living here still hear the toll of the Harkness bells?

Prospect Street won’t just be the route to Science Hill or the farm, but the way home.

“It will no longer seem like the end of a long march on the Ho Chi Minh trail,” Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the architecture school and the architect for the colleges, tells me. The colleges will permanently alter the ebbs and flows of life here.

The trail I take back onto the site used to be a public roadway — Mansfield Street now ends at its intersection with Sachem. From behind the chain-link barrier, I see the Turner supervisor leave in her Volkswagen Beetle before I slip through the fence.

I’ll be gone when the colleges open. I won’t live out the changes they produce in life here. What’s before me is dirt.

Just raw material.

It’s the dirt that draws me back in, the brown heaps of it. It’s the reinforced concrete, strong and tall, that draws me past the no trespassing signs. I’m carried in by the steam from a rusted pyramidal boiler. It stands watch over shrubs and woodchips, which lie in a hollowedout section of the site set off by cement pillars left over from the, which are remnants of the site’s former lives.

Back up the woodchip-covered incline, I go straight for the central mound of dirt, which is naked of plastic covering. I’m halfway to the top before I slide back down, kicking up dust that settles on my tongue and between my teeth.

Because I’m grinning. Here I’ve touched (perhaps trespassed on) something grainy and true, something different from the bells and the towers, the smooth keys of computers and the shiny tops of seminar tables — of which the new colleges will offer a clutch.

But fret not: all of that is on its way.

Three short years.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

Uncharted Richard Brooks, an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, is interested in documenting people’s behavior in public spaces — in particular, how factors like gender, race, and location affect people’s claims over territory. One of his spaces of interest has been a public beach on Martha’s Vineyard.

Brooks wanted to measure the comfort areas of regular beachgoers — that is, the area in a public space that a group would consider “their space,” such that, if a stranger entered, the group would feel intruded upon.

Brooks was interested in approximating the size and shape of these comfort areas To conduct the study, two of Brooks’s assistants would approach groups of people sitting on the beach.

To calibrate the size and shape of their comfort area, one of the assistants would back away from the cluster at different angles while holding a GPS unit, and the beachgoer would say when that assistant had stepped out of their comfort area.

This is a map of the comfort areas of different beachgoers.

MAPPING COMFORT AREAS

MAPPING PHOTO HISTORY

20 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

I

n the pilot episode of the cult television series Arrested Development, Buster, the manchild of the Bluth family with a reputation for dabbling in useless disciplines, tells his brother Michael about his newest interest: cartography, or, “the mapping of uncharted territories.”

“Sure,” Michael responds. Then, “Hasn’t everything already sort of been discovered, though? By, like, Magellan and Cortés? NASA, you know?”

Though Michael is the family’s voice of reason in the show, Buster is right in this case. When we look at the travel atlas in our car, or the Google Maps app on

our phone, we assume that what we see is an accurate representation of physical reality. This is because we associate maps with science and measurement, and, as a consequence, verisimilitude and determinedness.

But maps, like the physical structures they represent, are constantly shifting objects. They change to reflect the ideologies of the mapmakers and the mysteries that become solved with time. And, in the case of the three examples below, a map can be a novel melding of disciplines — a marriage of psychology, history, art, and science that can offer us a new way of understanding the world we inhabit.

MAPPING TREES // RICHARD BROOKS

A few years ago, a graduate student in Laura Wexler’s class “Photography & Memory” set out to write a paper about the collection of photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Dust Bowl: 170,000 photographs of farmers, families, towns, and used-to-be-towns taken between 1935-1945. The LOC had digitized and tagged these photographs, but the student, Lauren Tilton, found that the online archives were nearly impenetrable, preventing this national treasure from being appreciated by scholars and lay people alike.

Wexler, Tilton, and a diverse assemblage of people specializing in statistics, digital humanities, and cartography have transformed the swath of photographs into an interactive map. The Photogrammar website displays a map of the United States divided by county, and viewers click on a county to see the

Territories

photographs taken there. The map also has a “dot” display, allowing viewers to visualize all the locations their favorite photographer travelled.

By visualizing the collection geographically, Wexler and other

scholars gain the ability to ask a whole new set of questions of the archive, including where the photographers travelled and what places they avoided as they set out to show America to its people.

//PHOTOGRAMMAR

For many sidewalk pedestrians, trees are something we only appreciate unconsciously. We enjoy their shade, kick up their fallen leaves, and listen to the birds that live on their branches, but the trees themselves often lie on the periphery of our gaze, especially in the urban landscape of New Haven.

Through the Street Tree Inventory Map, created by the Urban Resources Initiative (URI), users can type in their address and look at a map with information about all the street trees in their area.

URI has collaborated with the New Haven Police Department on a project comparing its tree map with a map of crime in New Haven.

Because the Street Tree Inventory Map includes data on when trees were planted, it’s possible to analyze how tree density influences street

// STACEY MAPLES

crime.

Trees provide measurable economic benefits to the city by reducing storm-water runoff, insulating homes in the winter and shading them in the summer, improving air

quality and mental health, and increasing property values.

The tree map provides a way to quantify these benefits.

New Haven is called the Elm City, though most of its elm trees were felled by

Dutch Elm Disease in the id20th century. This dynamic map allows URI to monitor species diversity and ensure that New Haven’s trees, elms included, will be healthy for many years to come.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

Uncharted Richard Brooks, an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, is interested in documenting people’s behavior in public spaces — in particular, how factors like gender, race, and location affect people’s claims over territory. One of his spaces of interest has been a public beach on Martha’s Vineyard.

Brooks wanted to measure the comfort areas of regular beachgoers — that is, the area in a public space that a group would consider “their space,” such that, if a stranger entered, the group would feel intruded upon.

Brooks was interested in approximating the size and shape of these comfort areas To conduct the study, two of Brooks’s assistants would approach groups of people sitting on the beach.

To calibrate the size and shape of their comfort area, one of the assistants would back away from the cluster at different angles while holding a GPS unit, and the beachgoer would say when that assistant had stepped out of their comfort area.

This is a map of the comfort areas of different beachgoers.

MAPPING COMFORT AREAS

// RICHARD BROOKS

MAPPING PHOTO HISTORY A few years ago, a graduate student in Laura Wexler’s class “Photography & Memory” set out to write a paper about the collection of photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Dust Bowl: 170,000 photographs of farmers, families, towns, and used-to-be-towns taken between 1935-1945. The LOC had digitized and tagged these photographs, but the student, Lauren Tilton, found that the online archives were nearly impenetrable, preventing this national treasure from being appreciated by scholars and lay people alike.

Wexler, Tilton, and a diverse assemblage of people specializing in statistics, digital humanities, and cartography have transformed the swath of photographs into an interactive map. The Photogrammar website displays a map of the United States divided by county, and viewers click on a county to see the 20 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

photographs taken there. The map also has a “dot” display, allowing viewers to visualize all the locations their favorite photographer travelled.

By visualizing the collection geographically, Wexler and other

scholars gain the ability to ask a whole new set of questions of the archive, including where the photographers travelled and what places they avoided as they set out to show America to its people.

//PHOTOGRAMMAR

Territories I

n the pilot episode of the cult television series Arrested Development, Buster, the manchild of the Bluth family with a reputation for dabbling in useless disciplines, tells his brother Michael about his newest interest: cartography, or, “the mapping of uncharted territories.”

“Sure,” Michael responds. Then, “Hasn’t everything already sort of been discovered, though? By, like, Magellan and Cortés? NASA, you know?”

Though Michael is the family’s voice of reason in the show, Buster is right in this case. When we look at the travel atlas in our car, or the Google Maps app on

our phone, we assume that what we see is an accurate representation of physical reality. This is because we associate maps with science and measurement, and, as a consequence, verisimilitude and determinedness.

But maps, like the physical structures they represent, are constantly shifting objects. They change to reflect the ideologies of the mapmakers and the mysteries that become solved with time. And, in the case of the three examples below, a map can be a novel melding of disciplines — a marriage of psychology, history, art, and science that can offer us a new way of understanding the world we inhabit.

MAPPING TREES For many sidewalk pedestrians, trees are something we only appreciate unconsciously. We enjoy their shade, kick up their fallen leaves, and listen to the birds that live on their branches, but the trees themselves often lie on the periphery of our gaze, especially in the urban landscape of New Haven.

Through the Street Tree Inventory Map, created by the Urban Resources Initiative (URI), users can type in their address and look at a map with information about all the street trees in their area.

URI has collaborated with the New Haven Police Department on a project comparing its tree map with a map of crime in New Haven.

Because the Street Tree Inventory Map includes data on when trees were planted, it’s possible to analyze how tree density influences street

// STACEY MAPLES

crime.

Trees provide measurable economic benefits to the city by reducing storm-water runoff, insulating homes in the winter and shading them in the summer, improving air

quality and mental health, and increasing property values.

The tree map provides a way to quantify these benefits.

New Haven is called the Elm City, though most of its elm trees were felled by

Dutch Elm Disease in the id20th century. This dynamic map allows URI to monitor species diversity and ensure that New Haven’s trees, elms included, will be healthy for many years to come.

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personal essay

UNFATHOMABLE ESSAY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIANA MIELE

I

met Christian on the first day of high school in our newspaper class. At our public charter school in the Miami suburbs, we were part of an academically driven crew who took AP classes and filled the ranks of the National Honor Society.

Chris was a brilliant artist who wanted to be a doctor. He was the friend I called at 11 p.m. on a Sunday when I had no idea how trigonometry worked because I was brain dead, and he’d tell me how trigonometry worked and then assure me that I wasn’t brain dead. When he got his car junior year, I was a common fixture in the passenger seat: to the mall, to the movies, to the occasional football game.

Chris was in a rough spot during our last two years of high school. He called me sometimes almost in tears

22 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

and said he didn’t know how to believe in God anymore. I never really knew what to say. I think I said that faith was something I just felt. He would be quiet on the other end. Mumbled thanks.

Graduation arrived, a blur of photographs and flashes and family members tugging at our limbs. I don’t remember saying goodbye, but I knew that I’d see him again: at Thanksgiving, over Christmas, next summer.

A

few weeks into my freshman year of college, I saw a Facebook post that said that Chris had been missing in Gainesville, Fla., for over 24 hours. He had moved to Gainesville a couple months earlier to start his first year at the University of Florida.

It was a Friday night. One of my suitemates was ironing her hair; the

other two were running between our suite and the bathroom in the hallway, the door slamming every couple minutes. Can I borrow your red lipstick?

Does this skirt look okay? Should I wear a different bra?

The destination was a party on the fifth floor: freshmen with solo cups, texting and shrieking and pouring each other shots of cheap vodka. I went for a few minutes, which was enough time to wish happy birthday to the host and get dragged into the edge of a group selfie.

A few people asked why I was leaving.

“I’m heading to bed early.”

Surrounded by wanderers in slacks and mini skirts, I started walking in circles around Old Campus, calling any person who had ever known Chris or could have spoken to him in the past couple days. I recalled the Facebook

personal essay message he had sent me ten days before.

I never answered.

I stood outside Battell Chapel, leaned against the flowerpots near the doors, and called his phone repeatedly though it went straight to voicemail. I left messages crying, “Chris, please, please, please, come home.”

Chris was gone. He was lost. Check the hospitals. Check the jails. There were search parties, rescue teams, dogs, police, friends, strangers, his extended family — everyone in Gainesville, trying to find him. He was last seen with a high school friend of ours, who said they’d gotten into a fight and that he’d dropped off Chris on the side of a road. Every night, I’d go online and see pictures and articles, tweets, and status updates.

After a few days, I knew that the odds were that if Chris were found, he wouldn’t be alive. We weren’t looking for Chris; we were looking for his body.

That semester, I was taking Intro to Black and White Photography. Each week, we had to take two to three rolls of photographs. While Chris was missing, I couldn’t do most of my work because that required sitting still. So I’d grab my camera and go on walks. One evening at the beginning of October, almost two weeks since I’d seen the first Facebook post, I headed toward East Rock and walked among the Victorian homes just beyond the School of Management.

I took photographs of trash cans lining the sidewalk. The sharp shadows of buildings at sunset. I kicked up piles of fallen leaves and took shot after shot — kicking — shooting — kicking — trying to demolish the pile, to see what was below. I was trying to find him.

Three weeks after Chris went missing, his body was found in a wooden area 60 miles south of his University of Florida dorm. That high school classmate and close friend, the one who’d said he’d fought with Chris, had murdered him

after he learned that Chris was dating his ex-girlfriend. They were both 18 years old.

M

y first month at Yale started out as it does for many freshmen: walking around campus in temporary cliques, figuring out where to go by following other people who didn’t know where to go. Friday nights in dirty frat houses I never revisited, trying to find at least one person that I knew — the girl I spoke to after the class I shopped on the first Wednesday or the guy who sat across from me in that seminar.

The beginning was auditioning for performance groups and developing crushes on boys with long-distance girlfriends and North Face backpacks. I got tapped for WORD, my spoken word group, and gained the audacity to call myself a poet.

In that first glorious month, my neck was always tilted up to admire the gothic architecture and the magic of it all. I wanted to be a beat reporter for the Yale Daily News and write plays and act and design sets for the Dramat and be an art major and participate in environmental activism and move off-campus junior year and become a vegan.

I knew that I wouldn’t do all of those things, but I was so eager to find my place.

At the end of September, I saw an article that said that our close friend had been charged with first-degree murder after they found Christian’s backpack inside of a suitcase in the back of that friend’s bedroom closet. After I read this, I threw on a sweater, walked in circles around Cross Campus, and then had a panic attack on the floor of a bathroom stall in the Berkeley South Court basement.

I don’t remember much about the days following the murder charge. I remember the New Haven rain. The trees were green. I remember crossing Elm Street without realizing that cars were coming, and that I had to run to the sidewalk before I got hit, and I thought about how close I was to such a messy thing, how I kept myself alive and here.

I was at Yale, but I was also calling my friends from home, where everyone had begun driving up to Gainesville on weekends. Nobody knew what to do, but they were there. I told my dean, my FroCo, my spoken word group, and my therapist at Yale Health. I found comfort from some friends and endless support from professors, but I didn’t know how to be present at dinner. I didn’t know how to spend more than an hour working on anything.

I just knew that I needed to write.

Even now, I don’t know what else to

Opposite: Hallway of Christina’s public charter high school in Doral, Fla. Right: Christian’s bedroom closet yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

personal essay do with this but write about it. Looking back on my journal entries from the days following the murder charge, I see an entire page that reads “How could he kill? How could he die?”.

When I write for myself, I don’t try to come up with some sense of finality because there is no closure from a thing like this. All I can do is keep trying.

S

ometimes I imagine my sister life: what Yale would’ve been like if this hadn’t happened. Would I be more involved with theater? Would I be a beat reporter? A vegan activist? Who would I love? What would define me?

I’ve since set these questions aside. To deal with trauma, you learn to manage, to get by. For me, that meant taking photographs of Christian’s room and our high school when I went home over Thanksgiving break. It meant spending time doing whatever made me happy.

Distraction can be useful, and Yale is full of them: plays, improv shows, coffeeshops, funny people, attractive people, kind hearts.

Still, nobody knows what to say when I tell them about this, and I don’t blame them. When I went home for the funeral, I realized that I wouldn’t have known, either. Someone we loved had been mercilessly killed, and killed by someone we all knew. What can you say?

At the church service before the burial, I went up to hug Christian’s parents. “I can’t believe you came!” his mother said.

Christian had his mother’s eyebrows: beautiful and pointed. The way they frame the face made both their faces look perpetually worried. I remember seeing those sad eyebrows of hers and saying, “I’m sorry. I am so, so, so sorry.”

W

e talk about violence all the time at Yale, and, if Chris hadn’t been murdered one month into my time here, I probably wouldn’t have given it much thought.

One day in my section of Major English Poets, we were discussing Wordsworth.

Our professor had initiated a discussion

24 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

of the unexplainable, sudden death of one of Wordsworth’s elementary school teachers. I couldn’t feel my hands. I put them in my lap and started clicking my pen so furiously that the boy to my right kept looking at me, but I didn’t care.

How does the sense of unfathomable loss contribute to the text?

Everyone else was taking notes, trying to find the lines, thinking about a response. I was remembering the rain and crossing Elm Street and those sad eyebrows.

“How does Wordsworth allow his proximity to violence illuminate his life and experiences?” my professor posed.

Someone in the class chimed in about trauma. He said that, from his understanding, it was possible that someone who came from an inner-city background and was exposed to a great deal of violence could, perhaps, become desensitized to it.

I thought about the town where my family lives and its golf courses. Doral, Fla., is beautiful with palm trees and backyard pools and country clubs. Chris is buried there. When was the last time I asked mom to stop by and leave him sunflowers? I was covering my face with my hand. I stopped clicking the pen.

I remember getting angry. I didn’t raise my hand. I just started talking. I remember trying to keep my voice level and saying something about how this loss was real, and it was haunting, and Wordsworth was probably trying to make sense of this loss in any way that he could. I kept saying that this stuff happened to real people from all sorts of places and Wordsworth was probably trying to make meaning because what kind of meaning can you make from things like this? The room was quiet for a moment before my professor said, “Adri, you make a good point…”

A

fter they lowered the casket, people began to throw things onto it: flowers and cards and even whole notebooks. Before leaving the house that morning, I, on an

Page from Christian’s sketchbook, 2012. impulse I didn’t understand, grabbed a few sheets of paper. Standing in the cemetery, I took out the paper and gave sheets to two other close friends so we could write something. Our chance to say one last thing.

All I could think to write was, “I love you. I promise I’ll write for you.”

I never figured out how to tell people about how Chris died. I still don’t know why I even try when it’s impossible to convey everything that happened. I can’t explain our suffering and loss in a poem or a photograph or an essay. When I try to tell people about this — even my family — many of them try their best to make it go away. They remind me that Chris would have wanted me to be happy. They remind me that at least we found him, or at least it’s over, or that I can’t let this ruin my life. Time heals all wounds.

I know I will get better at handling this trauma, but time doesn’t feel linear to me anymore. It’s been two years, but my friend is still dead, and my other friend is now in prison after ruining his life and altering so many others. I don’t know what meaning to make from this, or how to talk about this, or how to get better. I only know that it is hard to talk about this, and I can’t pretend that it’s easy. I only ask for patience. I can only promise that I’ll try.

Forks

on the Road STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

BY CALEB MADISON

O

ften when I tell people that I spent the summer as a Twilight tour guide in Forks, Wash., they think I’m joking. I half thought I was joking, too, until I pulled into the driveway of Charlene Leppell, owner and sole tour guide of Team Forks, the last surviving Twilight tour company in the town.

I met her grandchildren, Finn and Leone, who Charlene had told me would be staying with her while their mother dealt with some medical issues. This situation displaced me to the Fleetwood Mallard RV in Charlene’s parking lot, which would remain my home for my time in Forks. After leading a few tours, my unfamiliarity with the Twilight series made me feel condescending and smarmy towards the genuine passion of the town and tourists. So I decided instead to assume the role of a tourist, going on every tour and taking pictures of what interested me.

I went to Forks to explore its surreal coincidence of multi-billion-dollar international media phenomenon and smalltown America. “People do not want to just read Meyer’s books,” novelist Lev Grossman wrote in Time Magazine. “They want to climb inside them and live there.” Though this experience is echoed in almost every popular young adult

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

feature series, the fact that the imaginative space of Twilight is directly linked to a real one — unlike that of Hogwarts or Panem — allows the emotional journey of the book to be translated into the physical realm. The geographical reality of Forks allows for the intrusion of Hollywood’s synthetic glamour into the economic realities of a small Pacific Northwest logging community, so that the town itself uncannily reflects many of the contradictions and idiosyncrasies within the American entertainment-industrial complex — of the relationships among idols, idolaters, and people who don’t give a shit. Many of the people in Forks represent a fourth category: people who don’t give a shit except for the fact that the confluence of idols and idolaters brought unprecedented attention to their working-class community.

26 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

For the residents of Forks, town pride is not at all contingent on the Twilight series. The intense natural beauty of the Olympic Peninsula — the national parks, lush mountains, and cool forests — is utilized in the books and film but also exists independently of them.

Forks, which is, according to Charlene, the farthest-northwest incorporated town in the contiguous United States, has a population of about 3,500 and sits 56 miles from the nearest major city, Port Angeles (which the locals call “PA”). The people who live there are mainly loggers and correctional officers from the nearby state penitentiaries.

Although most citizens make a monthly trip to PA for Safeway or a movie, Forks’s isolation begets a selfreliance that bonds the community.

There are no chain stores. Stephenie Meyer Day, the yearly weeklong fête

that serves as the climactic event for Twilight tourism in Forks, is organized and executed entirely by volunteers.

All of the Twilight merchandise in Charlene’s flower shop is homemade; Richard, Charlene’s only employee in the flower shop and on the tours, is unpaid. “He’s had to have most of his teeth removed,” Charlene explains, “and I pay for those.”

Without ever having visited the town, Stephenie Meyer chose to set the Twilight series in Forks because, according to Google, it was the coldest, wettest town in America. This overcast setting allows the teenage vampires the freedom to gad about town in the daytime incognito — direct sunlight outs vampires by making their skin sparkle, as Edward famously reveals to Bella in the first book. Meyer only ever visited Forks after the

feature

books were published, retroactively fitting places in the actual town to the fictional geography of the Forks she had invented, so that fans could have a physical space to visit. The movies, which have attracted to Forks more Twilight tourism than the books, have a similarly tenuous relationship to the town. Charlene stresses that the tours are based on the books, not the movies. Forks was initially scouted as a location for the first movie, she explains, but the producers canceled two days before they were set to begin shooting because of Washington state union regulations. “If anyone was angry,” she said on one of her tours, “it was the school kids. They were going to be extras. How do you explain to them politics? I’m an adult, and I don’t even understand it.”

Team Forks offers three different types of tours. The standard “Forks Twilight Tour” runs around an hour and a half at $30 per seat. Charlene narrates a tour of the Twilight-related places in the town of Forks, ranging from the house on which Stephenie Meyer based her description of Bella’s house (using a picture on a real-estate website) to the “Welcome to Forks”

sign (“At one time, the third-most photographed sign in America”). For $15 more, you can extend the tour another hour and a half to La Push,

the Quileute Indian Reservation community whose members, in the series, can turn into werewolves.

This second tour brings you to Jacob Black’s house and the werewolfvampire treaty line at the Three Rivers Resort, on the border between Forks and the reservation. The “Bella Tour,” meanwhile, costs $60 and runs late into the night. It continues the tour past La Push to Rialto Beach, a rocky shore strewn densely with white petrified logs washed up by storms. While the sun sets, Charlene roasts hot dogs and marshmallows for the group. The tour bus fits a maximum of 12 people, but Charlene sometimes tours as few as two.

I went on the tours with Charlene, helping by carrying the cardboard cutouts and placing them for pictures.

I took pictures of the town, the tour, and the tourists in an effort to capture this particular and peculiar place which, although it is sometimes funny, is never a joke.

THE OLD BONDAGE OF NEWPORT Commons.

But who do you think poured orange juice and plated eggs today?

White guilt doesn’t keep me away. These words do.

But fear of missing out wraps me, like Lost’s smoke Monster The school inaugurated its twenty-third president at two in the afternoon— an occasion we’ve heard about for weeks.

Tweet this hashtag.

Tag that instagram handle.

Win a lunch with the new president at a mutually agreed upon date.

My roommate returns with an invitation.

Looks like a Visa Black Card, huh?

The Reverend Ezra Stiles might have hired more slaves instead of paying for brunch and bluegrass in the , and carries me downtown.

At dusk I run up Hillhouse, once Twain’s and Dickens’ beautiful street.

The workers shine under lights.

They wash the sidewalks and pick up the trash to resurrect the beauty and bounty still chained to a block not far from the Reverend’s College.

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fiction

MANI STORY AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUBE REY LESCURE 28 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

fiction 1. Get out of my way, bitch, Mani thinks as he honks away a jaywalking teenage girl and screeches left onto Parkwood Ave. He’s got the windows of his truck rolled all the way down and the AC on full blast. Feelin’ fine today, sí señor, the way he always does when he sleeps in until ten, squeezes in some lifting and sprays on Ocean Mist after an ice-cold, pore-tightening shower.

It’s been hot as hell recently, but not without some perks. The engine of one of the John Deere scrapers started fuming around 2 p.m. yesterday and they had to call in a repair specialist to check all the equipment in the morning, so Mani only has to go in for a half day.

Some of the guys on the team went on a bender last night and tried to drag Mani out but Mani said no way man, there is this fine-ass blanquita whose boyfriend is out of town tonight and homeboy needs go see if some of her pipes need fixing, if you know what I mean.

“Alright, Mani,” they snickered, “but remind us to lock our wives up next time you come over.”

“What you saying? You’re saying I’m like that?” Mani asked, puffing out his chest like a fighting cock.

They laughed and slapped him on the back and headed toward their cars.

Mani dropped José off by Cross Grove and cruised straight on to Little Italy and proceeded to fuck Julia silly for the next three hours. They had fooled around in high school way back when and she had private-messaged him in February asking about him being back in town. The next thing you know, here she was again kneeling in the front seat of his Chevy Silverado, her blonde head bobbing up and down as he dug his fingers into her scalp. Julia was all right.

But today is a new day. Today Mani is feelin’ fine, smelling fresh as a daisy, and when he pulls into the Denny’s parking lot Sasha is already leaning there with her back against the wall, her hair pulled into a neat ponytail. He admires the curves of her thighs and the indent of her waist; there’s something damn sexy about the way she tied her apron against

her black Denny’s server’s button-down shirt. Mani loves the black because it’s a color waitresses at fancy restaurants also wear, and he can imagine Sasha pouring chilled white wine into suited businessmen’s glasses with an elegant twist of the wrist. He sees them smiling into her dark eyes, lusting after her swan-like neck and heavy breasts. Sasha used to dance ballet in school, and even today she retains a kind of carnal grace that sometimes gives Mani goose bumps. He’s always had, he thinks, a fine eye for nuances; he notices auras and not just ass and tits. He knows how to appreciate things like women.

“Come here,” he growls out of the window to Sasha as she comes forward to greet him.

She climbs into the car and he pulls her into his arms, his fingers quickly working their way up the back of her shirt to undo the hooks of her bra.

They met at a beach bar back in March when Mani and his buddies had gone to see if they could pick up some drunk spring-breakers, and instead he could not take his eyes off this mujerón with the long-ass neck and leopard stilettos.

He’d grinded up against her and she hadn’t protested, and after they were done fooling around on the beach (not that she had given in then or even now; bitch’s thighs clamped so tight you’d need pliers), he combed the sand out of her hair and they just sat there watching the waves crash.

He doesn’t know why she just won’t let him fuck her, not even give him some head. At first he thought she was just that kind of girl, playing coy and hard to get until you gave her enough attention that she could brag to her friends about having a novio without feeling like a total psycho. So he complied: always texted her first, took her out for drinks, and even pulled a risky move and brought her home one evening when Abuela was there. But it’s been five months and the furthest he’s gotten is giving her head. He’s still determined. It’s that neck, those eyes. The prance in her step on the dance floor, because unlike other

bitches she knows what she’s doing. Mi gacela, he tells her. One day you’ll award me that pussy. And she throws back her tender white throat and laughs.

It’s the end of her lunch break and Sasha runs back into Denny’s, furtively blowing him a kiss before disappearing around the corner. He knows that’s he’s scored some points today with the visit; she wasn’t expecting it. When he used to work at a car wash in high school the junior and senior girls would drive by and giggle and tell him to take off his shirt for them. He’d barely grown fuzz at that point but was jacked like a Marvel villain, all veins and bulges and enraged like a bull on the inside, too. But the thought that bitches made motorized pilgrimages to come flirt with him prickled him pleasantly, and he’d rest his forearm on their car and point his hose at them and say, “Wouldn’t want to get you too wet, ladies,” and they’d shriek delightedly and speed away as he waved goodbye with an idiotic grin on his face.

When he exits the lot Mani tries to catch a glimpse of Sasha through the Denny’s window, but against the sun’s glare he only sees his beat-up truck and the asphalt road.

2. It’s past eight when Mani finally gets home from the construction site.

He throws the keys on the kitchen table, not even bothering to reply when Abuela’s faint voice calls out “¿Mani? ¿Tan tarde, hijo?” from her bedroom.

He’s starving but also queasy from the heat and the mortar, and his ears are still buzzing with shrill drilling noises and the humming and hissing of cranes.

Abuela emerges from the bedroom, her dyed-brown hair done up in sections with plastic curlers, and Mani wants to tell her in that instant that the dye job draws attention to the fact that she is fucking ancient and that it looks fucking pathetic. Instead he sits down wordlessly at the table and fishes his phone out of his pocket, furiously checking all of his apps and barely waiting for them to load before punching the home button

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

fiction to close them. She totters towards the fridge, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “¿No has comido, hijo?”

Mani shakes his head.

“Pues que quieres. ¿Spaghetti, pollo, hamburgesa?” She takes out a plate of leftover pasta from the fridge, her hand slightly shaky under the weight of it, and holds it midair until Mani looks up.

“That’s fine,” he says. There are trails of sweat down his temples. She microwaves the pasta for a minute and pours him a glass of water. She does not ask how his day went. He shoves his phone away and starts scooping big forkfuls of food into his mouth, too exhausted to even make a real effort to chew. Abuela bends down to take out a plastic bag of sunflower seeds from the cupboard, slowly makes her way to the living room and sits down at

30 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

the edge of the couch. She is so skinny that she barely makes an indent. The Spanish-language news channel she puts on is showing an interview with some C-listed telenovela starlet and she watches fixedly, her beady eyes glued to the screen. Her hand reaches into the bag every few seconds with mechanical rhythm as she crunches the sunflower seeds and spits out the shells; it’s like she’s been a fucking rodent for her past seven lives. Mani stands up, the metal stool scratching the kitchen tiles shrilly as he straightens his legs. Abuela doesn’t seem to hear. He slams the bathroom door behind him to shut out the gooey voice of the starlet as she comments on how she has adapted to a life of fame.

The TV is still on but Abuela and the dirty dishes are gone when Mani reemerges wearing clean jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt, a cloud of Ocean Mist wafting after him. After his second cold shower of the day he feels a little better. He sinks down into the couch and stares into space for a few seconds, listening to the muffled noise emitted from the radio in Abuela’s room oddly harmonizing with the TV’s chatter. Then, startled by the program’s sudden switch to advertisements, he takes out his phone and starts scrolling

through his list of contacts.

3. He is gazing up at the same ceiling again. It’s dotted with little fluorescent stars that Sasha once pasted in the shape of constellations, and they shine with a soft, milky glow. Her head is resting against his chest and the thin curtains of the open window right behind her bed graze his face whenever a gust of wind blows. Their skin is cold with remnants of earlier sweat, and she is asking Mani about his childhood, his family, the trips he’s taken, her voice sleepy and her intonation slow. She’s told him before about growing up just two towns over, working hard in school but never managing more than average grades, sobbing into her fist when she got only rejection letters from her dream colleges. She’s told him about the bleak white light of large underground auditoriums, the fights with her mother and four sisters when she’d hog the one bathroom to drink and get ready with her girlfriends, all of them with flasks of vodka in their handbags. She’s told him about discovering ballet, about falling in love, about her co-workers at Denny’s and, very quietly, about her longing to dance seriously one day, when she has enough money.

Now he tells her about the same little crammed apartment he’s lived in for twenty-five years, the lace and relics his mother used to collect on every imaginable surface; shrines everywhere, about all the Italianthemed Saturday night dinners the four of them — his mother, Abuela, Dom, and Mani — would have because his mother dreamed of going to Italy, of climbing the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, of showing her boys what lied beyond the highways and strip malls they’d known all their lives.

He tells Sasha about his mother dying giving birth to a baby who stopped breathing in the womb when Dom was eighteen and he was twelve, about Abuela going to all of their PTA meetings and pretending that she was not failing to understand every single

fiction

word that was spoken, about Dom’s high school girlfriend Christie, a strong, quiet Salvadoran girl who Dom dated for five years and would come by and help Abuela with taxes and classified ads and Mani’s tenth-grade geometry. He does not tell Sasha about jerking off to Christie every night but he does tell her about the hollowness left behind when Dom and Christie broke up their junior year of college and just like that, from one day to another, Mani never saw her again. Now Dom has two young kids with a woman called Sonia who he met at church, and at the wedding Mani could not help but wish that it were Christie’s face that broke out in radiance when Dom lifted the veil. Mani tells Sasha about going to Hampstead every holiday season to spend Christmas at Dom and Sonia’s little one-story suburban house, a three-hour trip with just Abuela in the passenger seat and both of them silent for the entire car ride.

Sasha kisses him lightly on his left pectoral and closes her eyes, her breath slowly becoming regular and warm in

her slumber.

4. Mani grabs his phone from the nightstand and it reads 10:46 a.m. There are only a couple drunk messages from his friends that came through in the pre-dawn hours; Abuela stopped calling long ago when he did not come home for the night. Sasha moans in her sleep.

He starts stroking her back lightly, up and down along her spine and slowly looping around to her breasts, and he knows she’s awake because she starts shuffling her ass towards his pelvis inch by inch, rubbing it against his hard-on.

This time when he slides two fingers into her she says nothing but instead wriggles out of her underwear, and they kiss a little frantically.

“You want it,” he whispers into her ear, and she nods and Mani springs up to take off his boxers, crazed out of his mind but still a little incredulous that it ‘s finally happening. He finds his jeans on the floor, wipes his fingers on the denim and scourges out his wallet. But fuck, fuck, fuck, the two condoms he thought he had in here are nowhere to

be seen, and suddenly he remembers that he used them both when he was over at Julia’s two nights before.

Mani looks over to Sasha, who is lying in bed staring at him expectantly, and says: “Gacela, you’re on the pill, right?”

She props herself up on her elbows.

“Yeah.”

He lies back down next to her and starts kissing her neck. “I want you so badly, baby, it’s just that I don’t have a condom. But if you’re on the pill …”

He feels Sasha freeze up. “Mani,” she says, “I’d rather not.”

“But what’s the matter?” he pushes, his voice cajoling. “You know you can’t get pregnant if you’re on it, right?”

She shuffles away from him a little, lifting up the sheet to cover her tits. “I know, Mani, but I don’t want to do it without a condom.”

They duel with their eyes, his still playful and begging and trying to melt away her conviction but hers are dead serious. “It’s not about getting pregnant,” she says. “There are other things. I don’t want to get any … any … you know.”

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fiction For half a second he stares at her blankly, not understanding. Then he stands up wordlessly and puts on his boxers and jeans and T-shirt. She says nothing either. He does not even bother to look back at her once before closing the door behind him with a dead clunk.

5. She texts three times in the afternoon, hesitant messages like “hey, Mani,” and he ignores them. Sasha does not insist. At the club that night he sees her out with her friends, all dolled up and exploding out of a red dress, sipping a rum-coke by the bar and watching the entrance from which he did not come in. When she finally catches sight of him she nudges her way through the crowd, coming straight for him, and he pities her uneasiness with how to act — sincere and eager, or casual and nonchalant? — her expression recomposing itself every few seconds.

But when she speaks her tone is unmistakably apologetic, scouring, testing the depths of his offense: “Mani, this morning, I didn’t mean to w…”

She’s shouting over the music, but he does not bother. He raises his eyebrows, eyes glazed over with indifference. “It’s fine,” he says plainly.

“Do you want to go outside and talk?

I’m really sorry, I…” Just think you’re a filthy useless bastard. He feels a surge of rage well up inside of him, a strong, white-hot one that he hasn’t felt for years, so crippling that he only manages to let out a “bye, Sasha” through his gritted teeth before turning around and grabbing the fat, gyrating ass of a red-faced bitch in a cheap-looking dress with glitter smeared across her chest. She doddles her head and bats her false lashes as he grinds hard against her and bends her over, right there in front of Sasha who stands as if stupefied, and he takes this fat chick’s hand and drags her right past Sasha towards the bathroom, where he props her up on the sink and starts kissing — more like, biting — her so aggressively that she starts groaning 32 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

as she sticks her hand right down his pants, and seconds later her legs are spread open and her dress is pulled up to her waist and Mani is fucking her and watching her saggy arms jiggle around his neck in the mirror, fucking her hard and without a condom, because in the end he’s nothing more than a dirty lowlife and a motherfucking sucio, right? — and the bitch cums so loudly she’s practically screaming “Yes! Yes! Yes!” 6. Mani sits at the kitchen table in his boxers and pours half a box of Cocoa Puffs into a bowl of skim milk and whey protein powder. He’s plugged in the fan and set it right across from him on the table, where his mother always used to sit. Now there’s a piece of plastic that blows cold air in your face. Mani eats with downcast eyes and no appetite, and he knows he fucked up, he knows Sasha’s gone for good now. He smudges the globs of protein powder against the

walls of his bowl to try to break them up. Abuela walks out of her room in chunky black leather heels and a tailored flower dress suit. She also has her pearls on, those that her own Abuela had given her and that had turned a light tinge of yellow with the passing of years. Mani likes her like this, as she often looks on Sundays before mass, with lipstick and a white hat over her too-brown hair. As she’s about to leave the house, he tells her: “You look beautiful today, Abuela.”

Her eyes crinkle when she smiles and she walks from the door to the kitchen table where Mani is slumped. There must be voodoo magic about having the same blood flow in your veins, because Abuela takes his hand and puts it on the left side of his chest and presses it there.

She looks into Mani’s sad eyes and, with care to pronounce each syllable right, says: “She will stay here one day, cariño.”

A SHAN, LU, PLUME, CHIEM, EHRENBERG & ROZA PRODUCTION