Volume 19 issue 2 spring 2007

17

2et, Far Rockaway, NY

Pony Gunl

The Fat Apostle

Untitled

the First Letter

3

:h Party

Street

cc Silhouettes

Untitled

June,

Old Dime Box,Texas Fitzgerald's Alphabet Untitled

Untitled

40

The Oswego Suggestions

4

Untitled (Landscape)

Love About Hell

itled

Untitled

Pocket Money

Untitled

Henry Ng David Pratt-Robson

36

Sharon Madanes

28

Mei-Lun Xue

Night View

23

Nick Barton

Un-

cover

Old Dime

29

Jacob Eigen

Fitzgerald's

17

Tae-Yeoun Keum

Un-

27

Carolynn Molleur-Hintereggeur

The Os-

9

Pocket

30

Kari Rittenbach

ii.i6.o6 and

14

Ali Van

r T.08.06; New Ha-

22

Nick Barton

Night View from Beach 45th Street, Far Rockaway, NY

12

Adda Birnir

The Fat Apostle

37

Adam Eaker

E is the First Letter

13

Jordan Jacks

Un-

47

Erich Matthes

Love

10

Henry Ng

Three Silhou-

31

Adriane Quinlan

Memoirs

10

Carina del Valle Schorske

.11.23.06, Los An-

2

Sarahi Uribe

June, July

46

Sarahi Uribe

Old Dime Box,

3

noirs from Honk.

Angeles, CA

'1.08.06, New Haven, CT

Beach 45th Street, Far Rockaway, N The Fat Apostle

June,Juiy

E is the First Letter

Texas

Search Party

habeL ?ci

Untitlea

Love About Hell

June, July

Old Dime Box, Texas

itled

Fitzgerald's Alphabet Untitled

cl

Untitled

Xj.j6.o6

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Pony Gunl

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Street

Sea Point, New Year's 2007

Niscape)

itled

Untitled

Pocket Money

and .1.17.0u

Fat Apostle

1

Search Party

The Oswego Suggestions

Dut Hell

CA

Untitled

Memoirsfrom Home

Untitled

as

Untitled

ii.23.06, Los Angeles, CA

17.06

t

Su eel.

Three Silhouettes

Untitled

q

Pony Gunl

Untitled (Landscape)

Untitled

0 Suggestioliz) ney

11.23.06,

ii.i6.o6 and 11.17.06

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

The Oswego Suggestions Pocket Money

Untitled

Party

Eunice Cho

Lauren Ro

Adam Gardner

Untitled

16

Dayo Olopade

Love About

33

Jon Connolly

Three Silhouettes Memoirsfrom Home

Adam Gardner

3

Street

111MPRPr"--, r,

—for my Father

It is night on the street.

Trees darken in each yard like a line of fathers, disappearing more and more fully into the sky.

And at each house, the front door opens and a mother comes out, holding her children like luggage.

And they all walk in the same direction, coming together in the middle of the street and then emptying out toward the river, the water calling to them, like an invitation.

Their houses fade, their children grow quiet, and the women are surprised: how warm the water is, they say, how unlike we imagined it.

•

Untitled aft.

4

David Pratt-Robson

Love About Hell I

II

I wrote for the newspaper that "The difference between having loved and lost and never having loved at all is the difference between hell and purgatory; take your pick— either way you're dead."

I was tempted to add that even loving alone is rather like hell; but I know about as much about love as I do about hell.

Ron Rosenbaum's Essay on United 93 in Slate: in it he says that, "if you want a metaphoric fable, we're all on Flight 93, we're all doomed to crash and burn; whatever we do, the best we can hope for is that the existential rewards of local acts of courage will help us hold on a little longer before the end of enlightenment civilization and the dawn of the dead."

As though 21st century life suddenly has something to do with making a living and falling in love—stabs at stability in what is otherwise chaos—as distractions on the way to the grave.

The way Philip Marlowe would claim to hold it, but didn't: what all those noirs really proclaim is that making a living and staying alive are but the necessary distractions on the way to love.

5

David Pratt-Robson

III

There's a line in Sam Fuller's The Crimson Kimono: "Love can cure a lot, but bourbon— bourbon can cure everything."

Curious for a noir, in which (we like to think) the shadows only fall on those who are stricken by the deadly overdose of love and bourbon both.

V

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times declares to us that the problem of the 20th century was rituals and regulations; the problem of the 21st is, again, chaos.

Internet and cell phones and suicide bombs—a combination as bad as love and bourbon— have set us each, says Hou, loose among technology And the only antidote is, I guess: Doo-wop music.

VI

Noirs have a reputation for being fatalistic but no genre—certainly not Westerns, musicals, or comedies—is as consistently attuned to characters'autonomy; and not only that Everyone has Their Reasons, but also that everyone, or rather, anyone with dignity, hides their reasons too. In most great noirs men and women aren't the playthings of fate, aren't the playthings of machines— they're the playthings of each other.

IX

And here we plug in my love life.

Well, it's in some chaos— I don't know quite where everything is. ("Somewhere," I wrote about The Leopard Man, "The world is going to hell.")

I liked a girl—more than one, but, well, I'd prefer to think of this one— who was always up to something; she looked sort of blank until I touched her and after that I'd be too close to tell.

Just liked, mind you—"love life"

6

David Pratt-Robson

is a joke in two words.

By the end of it I think we each thought the other was trying to frame us.

Like still lives—it's hard to demarcate an end when nearly nothing's changed; "If you want a happy ending," said Orson Welles, "that depends, of course, on where you stop your story," which would have made little difference here, but still— still lives, moving towards hell.

I like love in screwball comedies— literal falls from grace— and in Nicholas Ray, pressurized by the apocalypse and ready to explode.

But most of all I like love in Howard Hawks— merely a best friendship (and the worst rivalry), best because there's sex.

It was my own fault for letting in the seriousness at the edges; but it's why I love Hawks and Ray— men who knew that it takes some steely dedication to navigate through the fun patches exclusively, in love and movies, and friendship, and so on.

XIV

I'm only scared of death when I'm asleep.

But always scared. There's a line in The Brothers Rico: "I'm afraid—I don't know what of." Well it's like that. I am always high up and hostage and about to be whacked by a burly thug (and unless it's a good dream) without ever having known love.

Last night, for instance: a parking garage, one of those asphalt jungle gyms, a bunch of concrete slabs thrown together by some wide empty road, overlooking the ocean, barely moving in the pale dawn, and me, there to shoot a schlocky horror movie while discussing Peckinpah and Welles with the attendant.

Well while the tourists snorkel with the fishes and have bake sales, I'm in this open-top armored vehicle, the cops and criminals all lightly tapping

David Pratt-Robson

7

each other's stubbled necks with baseball bats— we're gunning down the street.

Never mind love, I'm not going to finish this movie, not going to channel Sam Fuller or Seijun Suzuki, not going to live when murderers are the only ones left alive, when my argument to the executives, to let me make movies, was that they let Emilio Estevez make movies, and have a "collection" on DVD. And then, this morning, awake, I think, there, in my dream, I managed one of those cinematic sleight-of-hand schemes Seijun might have loved.

In the garage elevator, going up at dawn, each successive floor looked out onto a different landscape below.

An ocean, a park, a different ocean.

XV

XVI

XVII

Well, I don't care so much about who fucks whom, which I know anyway, but when— when does their cynicism putter out and tenderness or the libido, putter in, and when do they switch back again, to themselves, reemerging from the room as though everything's still the same.

The most chaotic genres— the musical, the screwball comedy— are much safer than the structured genres—the Western, the swashbuckler.

And I could go for either sort of protection: to be safe, or to know what's going on.

"I'm afraid," goes a line in The Brothers Rico, "of what I do not know."

And here's another one, based on a lost true story.

One of those chilly New York nights, when the wind's blown the streets clear, and it's just snowing slowly,

•••••••-_

8

David Pratt-Robson

for the hell of it, since everyone's probably too frozen to notice.

So there I am (as expected), shivering and plodding my way back home when I pass a bar and suddenly doowop music shoots out with the lights over the wind, and inside a big empty room, a couple dances fast, they hold each other tight, like they're not sure that they're there.

Well we could of course ask ourselves: why they left the door open in the cold, why they were listening to doo-wop in an Irish pub, and the old question, just why the hell they felt like this on a godforsaken night like this one— I didn't bother; I'd like to think that scenes like that are so much of what I know and so little of what I understand, but the truth is probably vice-versa.

XVII

One more girl; we're on a bus to get food because it's dark and cold and they don't want to get mugged and we don't see each other much.

A ceremony of innocence.

Well, she asks me if I remember the Camus (of course) quote she emailed me about how we deceive ourselves twice about love ("first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage"—she's using it for a paper) and I say yeah, wait, what was it, yeah about how first we deceive ourselves about ourselves and then about them.

No, she says.

.••••

David Pratt-Robson

Lauren Ro

Yeah, because first we make ourselves think they could love us, and then, I wag my finger, that they do love us.

No, she repeats, maybe laughs along, well, it sounded familiar.

Anyway, we're on this bus to get food, and I can just see her grinning.

December, 2006.

Untitled

9

10

Carina del Valle Schorske

Henry Ng

Pocket Money The bus windows shine up the scene so the hills look like piles of oiled hides, an excess of prehistory We seem always able to find the flat route, a way to hold the hills at a conversational distance.

With bills gone damp in our fists, we blink in the bare heat of rest stop blacktop.

Even here, we are lucky, we are known.

The vending machine eats a dollar shyly from my hand, a natural way of saying I smell you, I trust you.

At the edge of the gas station I find you kicking gravel as expected. Weedy wildflowers, also expected, gleam like a crop of gum wrappers.

No fragile thing, a flower, a body: we must look elsewhere for our metaphors.

II Inside the vending machine, our sweaty papers are flattened and stacked like mud bricks. Our scent goes stale, looters collect their monthly due, the door hauled off like the lid of a sarcophagus. As in Egypt, where only actual corpses were left for later: both flesh and gold grown black as oil.

)01

Carina del Valle Schorske

11

III Or springtime in the mind, that one man band raucous with its own echoes: river-bottom pebbles, tambourines, Christmas candies.

Clones in the plaza turning coin tricks.

We need nothing new.

IV Between two hills, smoke coils into a question mark: something burned, something signaled.

Aboard the bus, appetites ignite: the smell, at first, like toasted wheat. We are a wagon bound for autumn market.

What is there to barter? Oil for water, paper for fruit, word for symbol. Hunger for other hungers.

V Certain things are lost in aphorism.

Black earth, black sky, blackness in the throat.

Untitled

13

Jordan Jacks

Old Dime Box, Texas I spent most my time deciding if I was awake.

It was July: outside, the grass died its daily death in the garden, the sun kept rising over our fences.

Waking, I could see Robert out waist-high, stroking the weed-tips, looking at empty chicken coops. I spent mornings with that mind, giving names, wars he had fought in, the paper mill where he had roughened his hands, his sons.

It was hard business, and when he slept, in the afternoon, I would gear up his old Chevrolet and drive to town, or what was left.

The weeds lined the road.

And the darkened buildings, housing hardware stores, the odd church—

Night View from Beach 45th Street, Far Rockaway, NY

14

Jordan Jacks

All of them reminded me of glaciers, slowly carving their way across the clay to the forest, falling off of foundations.

I bought cigarettes at the local gas station, sat on the bumper of the truck.

The road, a silent, narrowing wall, propelled shipments behind me; these I called years.

At six I would drive home, find him awake in a chair, with a plate of cheap lunchmeat and pickles for dinner. We would watch the sun set, his television on in the background, the horses I had forgotten to feed hanging their heads over the fence I was too young to repair. Off in the distance, a radio tower would blink red seconds, and the wind, like memory, did its work primarily in the pines, whose push and pull were everything, and left nothing.

Every night I talked about the town— things closing, fights, husbands away in Louisiana on construction jobs.

The old cattle fences were falling on us, pressing the high grass into harvest rows, and in the guilty evenings I promised to repair the drafty shack where he kept his tools.

Then, I didn't do much of anything, and we were silent, and watched the pines.

If it was cool out, we would sleep there.

Later, in dreams, I would sit under a tin frame surrounded by hammers, and he would be pointing, as if to say: It hollows you out, it passes through you and hollows you out.

Ali Van

Memoirs from Home

16

Sea Point, New Year's 2007

Dayo Olopade

......__.,

Tae-Yeoun Keum

17

E is the first letter

and this is exactly what I report, impatient that she'd even bothered with the top row.

18

Tae-Yeoun Keum

FP I read, and tell her I can't read the next row.

"Would you like to try?" she offers.

I squint and consider, but decide it's not worth the effort.

"Well, there it is, I suppose," she says, and starts walking towards me."20/70."

"But I can read the bottom row," I insist, shaking my head.

"Nonsense."

"M, G, Q, R, X, V" She doesn't believe me—she's not looking at the chart.

Hers was the last of the names listed under ophthalmology on the medical directory at the hotel.

I have been to four others, and each tried to prescribe eyeglasses. But the truth of the matter is, of what I am able to see, I see better than ever before. The colours on the periphery are so vivid that sometimes I have to shield the corners of my eyes in order to focus on what's in front of me. My problem is not so much that I've come to see certain things more clearly than other things, but figuring out what these things are, as there seems to be no consistent rule to it.

A shock of red silk pierces my vision; my doctor has taken off her lab coat. She stands now in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips.

"Doctor, I just read you the smallest row on your chart," I inform her.

"You're new to this country, aren't you." She considers my accent. "Australia?" she asks.

"England. Did you hear what I said just now? I can read—" "I have a cousin there. In England."

"Oh," I say, baffled.

"How long are you staying?" she says, gathering her things. It's fairly late in the afternoon, and her hours are probably over. I suppose I should have made

an appointment.

"Just a few more days. I'm here on business," I add.

She looks pointedly at me. "I can give you your prescription now—would you rather wait till you flew home to get your glasses?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, you don't understand—I don't need glasses."

"You can't read past the second line of the chart, you admitted it yourself."

"M, G, Q, R, X, V,' I repeat the last line for her.

"That's the bottom line, go check it."

"Well, it's not correct."

"You didn't even look."

"I have it memorized."

We glare at each other. Her coat still hanging from her arm, she raises my face with her index finger and casts a quick glance into each eye.

"A little dry, is all," she says. "I can give you some drops for that."

I pull away in frustration.

"I don't think you understand my problem at all—" "Oh no, I understand perfectly. You can't see the middle letters."

"Right, but I can see the small letters."

She motions for me to stand up.

"My hours here are over. Follow me and we'll go to my other office."

We begin heading out, and just as she is about to turn out the lights, she asks me if the third row on the eye chart is still illegible.

0 It started with the incident of the diver, I tell Dr. Cruz in her car. I'd flown all the way down to Tamondong island to see him. He'd written us several letters over the past year—God knows how he even knew about

Tae-Yeoun Keum

us—with the claim that he could perform the world's longest free dive. He was particularly insistent on doing it there, in Tamondong. In the end, I was the one dispatched to this region, and had to make this extra stop.

I always hesitate before telling people about my work. The easiest explanation is that I am a researcher of sorts. A few years ago, the Guinness brewery released a book to accompany their beer, to settle pub disputes and such. It is a factbook of records, featuring the world's tallest man, the most married woman, greatest number of hard-boiled eggs swallowed whole in a given time frame. The book was unexpectedly successful, especially after the release of a Christmas issue, and when the company decided to expand on this idea, such people as myself were hired to check the claims people sent in.

It was only on my trip back from Tamondong that I gave a thought to the significance of my work. The diver had shown that to me. His dive, which lasted several minutes, had been duly impressive in its own right, but what I'd found particularly touching was that he would have gone on had we not pulled him out, fearing his life was at risk. It was unfortunate. He'd come somewhat close to setting a record, and a part of me, in that instant, went as far as to think that even death was a chance worth taking, if these few seconds held that kind of meaning for him. Reflecting on this moment, I came to the realization that this little project of ours—created on a whim after what I believe was, indeed, a dispute over beer—had taken on a life of its own. It represented a record of human capacity, that was particular to no individual human but to all of human history, which anyone in the world could aspire to take part in.

I fell asleep in the airplane like this, thinking about the diver. When I woke up, all the seats in the cabin seemed to have disappeared underneath the

19

passengers. I admit it was a wonderful sight—thousands of metres above the surface of the earth, we were sitting on nothing, floating just so in an empty floating vehicle.

0 Most doctors here cannot afford to keep a permanent office, so they take turns keeping hours at an assortment of central-to-less-central locations. This seems to be the case with Dr. Cruz. Her other office is tucked away in the outskirts of the city, down roads lined with aluminum-sheeted fruit stands. An alleyway squeezed between two of such vendors opens up to a small space dominated by a mango tree. A circle of small, neat buildings hugs it like a courtyard; Dr. Cruz spends most of her mornings and late afternoons here.

Her house, she says, is a walking distance away.

In the shade of the mango tree a small crowd of men argue in loud voices. The sun is beginning to set.

"What's the matter here?" I ask.

"Wednesday evenings they hold a cockfight here.

Not a sight many foreigners find pretty."

I stall in the periphery, hoping to catch a glance.

"Not yet," she says. "They're only taking bets now."

Someone from the crowd turns around to acknowledge her.

"On second thought," she says, and shoves me inside the circle. She snaps back at the men who refuse to give way.

Several men crouch around an upside-down basket and a composition notebook. Dr. Cruz nudges me in the side.

"What do you see?"

I step a little to the side to make room for her.

"No,just tell me what you can see."

"A basket—the rooster is inside, yeah?"

20

Tae-Yeoun Keum

"There's another basket," she says."Can you see the roosters?"

"In the basket?"

"Get closer if you have to."

I bend down a little to peer inside.

"Yes." Dr. Cruz is disappointed.

"What colour?" she says.

"White."

"Both of them?"

"One," I answer, relieved that our conversation was finally beginning to make progress. "So there's one more, yeah? It's not brown, is it? I mean, if it's just the colour of the basket, might be just that it's blurring into the shadows."

"No, the other one is white as well."

Dr. Cruz shouts something to the man with the composition notebook and watches him write down a figure. She hands him a couple of folded bills and leads me away.

When we got to her office she shows me the eye chart again. I surrender all misgivings and read obediently.

0

again, the first letter, and in my new joy at having found someone who might understand, the letter carries with it a surge of meanings. What it could stand for. E for empathy. For eyes, or just eye, the evil one, cast out of envy. Extraordinary, most eerie, what I have suffered for the past few days. The last word I catch is England, and I am hit with a pang of homesickness.

Dr. Cruz instructs me to read the last line now, and I obey, careful not to miss a letter.

PEXQLCFTD

She sweeps a hand over the midsection of the chart.

"You can't see any of the letters here?"

She takes the chart off the wall and brings it toward me.

"Now?" I shake my head. She steps forward.

"And now?"

"No." "When we were leaving my other office," she says, "I asked if you still couldn't read the middle rows, even though you were right next to the eye chart, and you said no, you couldn't. This is not a problem of being unable to see things within certain distances."

She retrieves a tiny bottle from her cabinet and holds its out.

"Here are some drops, for the dryness."

"Will this do it? I'll be normal again?"

I reach for it, but she pulls her hand back.

"The question is," she says,"do you want to be cured?"

Of course, why wouldn't I?" I extend my hand for the bottle but she still doesn't give it to me. She looks into my eyes until I sit back in my chair.

"If what you have is what I think it is," she says, "it's not a bad thing to have. Especially considering what you do for a living."

She regards the bottle of drops, then hands it to me.

"This will help the dryness," she says. "I don't know how to cure it."

0 Her Spanish name hardly gives it away, but Dr. Cruz, as I learn later, spent her childhood in Tamondong, where she knew a man with a similar affliction. She was just a girl then, but these happenings were so strange that the man's story continued to be told on the island for many years after his death.

Agas lived by the sea, Dr. Cruz tells me. He was a fisherman, and his wife did some sewing on the side. In the mornings, while her husband was out at sea, she came around to every house in the village to collect things that needed mending. On several occa-

Tae-Yeoun Keum

sions, Agas's wife sewed up the holes in the T-shirts Dr. Cruz inherited from her siblings.

One day, Agas's wife, who delivered the news when she collected the laundry, came fretting to the village and said her husband had caught a merman in his net.

Strange stories were common then. It had been only a decade or so since the wars ended, and Tamondong was used to sightings of mysterious ships, or the visits of stranded Americans. When the occasional airplane would pass above, the adults would still refer to them as birds. According to the elders, the merman, due to its naturally curious disposition, had probably been attracted to Agas's boat because it was the most brightly coloured of the fishing-boats out on that day.

Dr. Cruz never got to see the merman—like a fish, she heard later, it had gills in its side, and suffocated as soon as Agas pulled it ashore. Those who did witness this told of how the creature screamed a single, high pitched note as it convulsed on the beach, webbed fingers digging into the sand. Its tail flapped this way and that—it looked, they said, like two child's feet joined from the ankles all the way up the legs. But just before it died, it got very still, and raising its torso upright it looked straight at Agas and cursed him with its eyes. That's how they described it, Dr. Cruz tells me, it was a hypnotizing glare, one that sent a unanimous shiver through those present. When it died, foam covered its body, and it melted into the sand.

The curse was, of course, Agas's own death months later, but this merman was a tricky one. The curse was in fact a blessing that hurt too much to part from—he had my disease.

It did not take long for Agas to realize he saw certain things better than he saw other things. But the objects and people that fell within his vision were always without fail the ones that mattered. Agas made a lot of money thanks to his new talent. It had a modest start, of course—he was able to pick out the most shapely stones and seashells in the beach, which he collected and brought to his wife to sew together and sell as jewelry. His wife began taking him along to the weekly markets, as he was always the first to spot the best bargains. She stopped taking him when, her own beauty paling in the crowds of women, he started to look straight through her.

21

Agas found his place in the cockfights. He had a knack for predicting the winner just from looking at the roosters. He often complained of a severe dryness in his eyes, and was unable to weep when his mother died.

0 Dr. Cruz takes me back out into the courtyard in time to catch the end of the cockfight. A larger and noisier crowd has gathered around the mango tree, and the ground is alive with the bustle of electric-blue shadows.

"It's terribly boring, seeing it from beginning to end," she says into my ear, noticing my annoyance.

The eyedrops she'd given me weigh dishearteningly light in my shirt pocket. Cheers erupt all around me. I can't tell if Dr. Cruz has brought me all the way out here just to see if what I have is just what this Agas character had—and if so, what it matters when there is nothing she can do about it.

"Stop sulking, you'll get used to it," Dr. Cruz says, as though she'd read my mind."Come up close and watch the fight, and you'll see what I mean."

I step up to the circle half-heartedly.

"Look," she says, and pulls me in closer.

In the musky hue of the evening the white rooster seems to glow. Radiant, he fans his wings. Bright blood spouts from his neck, and sparks of colour burn the dirt. The other rooster, ever a blurry shadow, is reduced to shapes nipping at this bird of light.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Dr. Cruz coaxes. "That's what they said—he found these cockfights so beautiful.

Most people don't get to see what a beautiful thing it is, bird-dance. They're too absorbed in the speed of it, the blood, and the money at stake."

The rooster swipes at the air with a gleaming talon. They are fighting with metal spurs strapped onto their feet. The crowd holds its breath. Blood soaks his white feathers.

When it is over, Dr. Cruz collects her money from the man with the notebook. She counts out the bills with great satisfaction, and slips them into her purse.

(continued on page 24)

22

Nick Barton

11.23.06, Los Angeles, CA

Nick Barton

1 1.o8.o6, New Haven, CT

23

24

Tae-Yeoun Keum

"Does that mean I don't owe you a consultation fee?" I ask.

"Sure you do," she snaps. "And for the eyedrops."

She takes my money as well.

"Well," she says, and begins to head back.

The crowd is dispersing. A trio of men wrap the dead rooster in cloth.

"Doctor," I call after her.

She turns.

"What now?" I ask.

Dr. Cruz smiles a lipsticked grin, and comes up close to me.

"The best of the best, the things that stand out, will reveal themselves before you," she whispers."The world, in your eyes, will be purged of all its mediocrity."

She pats my cheeks with both hands.

"Now you go on and work that job of yours."

At eight o'clock in the morning in a foreign country, I encounter my first problem. Teachers help elementary school students sort themselves by height, and not a single one of the groups they create add up to twenty. One group comes forward—I count seven children and some moving shadows—and claims to be ready. I smother my eyes with drops, and stare into my stopwatch.

The excited chatter of children clouds the gymnasium. Their teachers desperately hush them when I raise my hand. I glance at the selected children and their blurry peers, velcroed to each other at the legs.

They bend their knees unanimously in ready-position.

"Ready, get set —"the entire line leans forward—"go!"

Now they all blend into the sounds of their sneakers thundering on the parquet.

0 0 0

A quarter past eleven, I'm on the phone trying to reach Dr. Cruz. Upon being redirected from her downtown office to her other office and back again to her downtown office, she finally picks up.

"What do you mean you can't see them?"

"Exactly what I told you. Look, you told me it wouldn't affect my job."

"That's not what I said," her voice is full of static.

"I said it would help your job immensely."

"How am I supposed to work if I can't even see the people I'm dealing with? There's a man out there with a bloody truck in his teeth and I can barely tell his face apart from his fingers."

She chuckles.

"That wasn't supposed to be funny."

"Here's the important part," she begins, once she's done laughing. "Did the kids make it? Did they run the race in time?"

"No. Only one group even made 200 metres without falling."

"There you go," her voice is faint. She says something else that I don't pick up.

"Dr. Cruz, you're going to have to repeat that."

I wipe the sweat off my forehead with a handkerchief. My eyes are dry again, and instinctively I take out the eyedrops.

A full day of work today: 8:00 am — Camacho Gymnasium The schoolchildren of Villareal Elementary will attempt to run the fastest 21-legged 200-metre race (20 people).

Don't forget the stopwatch.

11:00 am — PNS-2 Station Jojo Jison, who claims to have the strongest jaws in the world, will attempt to pull a two-ton truck by his teeth.

3:00 pm — Colonnade Mall Fifteen teenagers

(pj. Cajipe, Lorenzo Chua et al), with

five backups, will attempt to squeeze the greatest number of people into a Volkswagen beetle.

8:00 pm — PM Cultural Center: A performance by local soprano Sofia Soriano; either before or after her recital, she will sing a 4th-octave F#. Remember to bring electronic measuring equipment; wineglasses will be provided.

0

0

e FirstL±fl

1836-2006

"If he had children,/ who would provide for them?"

—Tim Murphy,"A Death," JULY 1971

"The handle was attached to the blade by thick tape tightly wrapped around the juncture"

"A product of the twentieth century, staring up at the night sky with his copy of the latest university-press paperback translation of deGaullard's Stories and Breaks and his harmonica pressing an exergue into his right buttock, will invariably have come to consider himself unique but unimportant."

—David Larsen,"Story," JULY 1971

—Joshua Kamensky,"Travelog of a Postmodern Cowboy," SPRINC; 1995 "That Chinese restaurant was a joke / with its repeating fountains" "The jellied tide comes belching in at five,"

"Terry sat, slouched, in the top row of the physics lecture hall and looked out over the city"

—Adrienne Rich,"The Will to Change," JULY 1971 —Nicky Beer,"Northport," SPRING 1997

—Michael Gecan,"April 28: A Troubled Day for Dreaming," JULY 1971

"There was a leopard walking in my soul" —Alfred M. Lee,"A Maturity," OCTOBER 1958

"This hackneyed distich is most frequently used to convey an idea of that arrogant confidence which attends the first superficial acquisitions in knowledge, and the characteristic diffidence of the profound mind"

"Though the beginning from which I started was humble,'testified Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs, unembarrassed, to a room of Hungarian Dignitaries—among whom was the very much esteemed Istvan Tamas--2I have accomplished more in a single lifetime than most men accomplish in a millennium!"

"It begins in the prepositions, the giveaways."

—Venkat Lakshminarayanan,"Coming to Know About Jozeffs and Istvan: A Peek Between the Covers," SPRING 2.004

—Hilary Hammell,"Translating 1973," SPRING 2004

—attributed to "L,""Prejudice and Skepticism", APRIL 1836 "The late 1960s and early 1970s launched a new religion of disaster as the opiate of the publishing classes."

'The swallows circle, when will they come down?"

—George Gilder,"The Explorer," FALL 1982

"Today—finished The Great Gatsby."

—Nick Danforth,"The Diary of Sebastian Groner," FALL 2003

"Ali yes, I3ertrans, I too / see my with and worth like cobwebs/ brushed aside"

—Michael Schmidt, The Swallows," FALL 1982

"Mother sat in a straight wooden chair like mine but hers must have been softer."

—Louis Mitchell,"Exercise in Awareness," OCTOBER 1958

—Harold S. Gulliver,"In the Days of Thy Youth," 1956 "Summer, with its transforming influence upon all things natural and artificial, has come, and the Coffee Club feels somewhat of its power."

“My sword is sunk in slaughter to the hilt"

"My nose told me that I had come home."

"There is a singing group in this Catholic church today, a singing group which calls itself'Wildflowers."

"He was just so precisely careful"

—Uwe Siemon-Netto,"Homecoming: Leipzig in Our Time," FALL 1982

—Annie Dillard,"An Expedition to the Pole," FALL 1982

—H. Birenbaum,"Conscientiousness," OCTOBER 1958

—"The Coffee Club No. III," JULY 1836

—Henry R. Luce,"Herod the Great," 1919

•. Perhaps a small pearl around that neck which turned her head like a silken periscope, so full of curiosity was she at a static table"

"Dusya, there's a parcel for you from your mom,'said Nina when Dusya came to the dormitory after work.'Look!'

"Poor Creature! Nay, I'll not say poor."

"The General's front door was an entirely unknown country to Darly and me."

—Vladimir Maramzin,"The Marriage of Ivan Petrovich, From a Novella"

—Charles Edward Thomas,"To a Moth (Crushed within the leaves of an Iliad)," 1895

—James Grafton Rogers,"Sun Flowers and Cloisonne," 1903

—Ed Freeman,"Excerpts from Something Deeply Purple," 1960 "awake all night / clutching a pillow / in a tight old man's embrace"

"Van (driving the last nail into the figurehead): There she is."

"The groom and groom are murderers."

—Jonas Zdanys,"Anniversary," JULY 1971

—Thornton Wilder,"The Angel on the Ship," 1917

—Adam Eaker,"The Marriage of Leopold and Loeb," FALL 2003 "Sunlight as Dreamstuff."

"Amazing how the air took shape / around her neck and shoulders/ taking care to drape itself / about the meaning of her frame / so I knew her body's landscape / not her name"

"and-yet an(d)yet—pronounced as one word, not two, as in an eighth-not: followed by a quarter-note, followed by a note of silence."

—Scott Sullivan, "Sunlight is Nightblack," 1957

—Contributing Authors,"A Dictionary," FALL 2003 —Mark Strand,"Painting of a Lady," OCTOBER 1958 "Earvin Joe Hill was a seven-foot five-inch, two-hundred ninety-five pound, hairless, black former NBA player, with muscles that undulated ominously like the Harlem River on Christmas day."

"Now when the gaudy, golden sun is gone" —William Douglas,"White Night," 1917

"This is the purest invention" —Rebecca Givens,"The Early Poem," SPRING 2003

"I keep your virginity locked in a steel box under my bed, he says"

"The bells of London were silent when we came there"

—Lexy Benaim,"Chapter One," FALL 2003 —Meredith Kaffel,"eponymous," FALL 2003

"An upside-down Frisbee floats beneath the 13rooklyn Bridge. It is not a duck."

—Christopher Fry,"Honduras Wharf," 1941

—Sam Grossman,"A Narcissist's Open Window," FALL 2003 "Munal crouches In unlit corners, behind bookshelves, curtains, and between legs of the living room coffee table."

"These are its goosefeet."

"A loop of cayenne around peaches on the counter / shapes a fortress wall to frighten ants"

—Sabrina Sadique,"Munal Waits for the River," FALL 2003

—Adam Farbiarz,"Words for Punctuation, in Yiddish: Gendzen Fislech and Halbe Levanes," FALL 2003

—Megan Pugh,"Poem," FALL 2003

Presented by the editors of the 2007 Yale Literary Magazine

Lines 1836 - 2006 Ihr-_

Editor's Note Yale Literary Magazine Vol. I, Issue 1 February — August 1836

"Gentle Reader— As I am about to have some little converse with thee, I cannot pass this first bright page of our Magazine, without a greeting word, and a 'God's bension'on our acquaintanceship."

E.O. Carter, F.A. Coe, W.M. Evarts, C.S. Lyman, WS. Scarborough

Tae-Yeoun Keum

25

"Dr. Cruz?" I yell into the phone.

"Yes I'm still here."

"Could you please speak into the phone? What was the last thing you said?"

"I said it seems you only see the winners. If you can't see them, they're not worth your time."

"That's ridiculous. What am I going to tell these people?"

"Oh, come now, you know the truck man won't make it, you know it. You don't have to do anything but look at them to do your job. Now, I've got patients coming in, I have to hang up."

0 Yes, it all started with the diver. I can see him now, lying in the speedboat with his eyes wide open. His chest heaved as rough palms pumped air into his lungs. The sunlight fractured against the metal of the boat and framed his head. He wanted to speak—he was shushed each time. I was yelling. The sound of the motor drowned my voice in the wind anyway.

It's the oddest feeling in the world, to regard an empty stage in a full concert hall. One's senses are so much more alive when the lights are dimmed. You come out thinking you know your neighbors, the ones whose faces you barely see when they squeeze past your knees during intermission. You are intimately acquainted with the stink of their perfume, the fabric of their sports coats, the idiosyncrasies of their muffled coughs between pieces.

Sofia Soriano is but a puff of glitter on the lighted stage. Her voice seeps out of nowhere, filling the hall as though it had always been there, frozen, something like spider webs or dandelion seeds, and is only melting now.

Dr. Cruz is right: to some degree, the immensity of what I can't see makes what I do see all the more beautiful. Sharper, focused, things simply make more sense.

I go to use the restroom during intermission.

Washing my hands, I look in the mirror and see nothing.

0

It started with the diver— I told him: it's alright now. I have your time written down here, see? Don't think about it now, we'll just get you to a hospital.

That was a mighty lovely dive you had there—you just walked right in facing the horizon,just like that.

It's alright, don't speak, don't move, the boat's on its way. Just keep breathing, like you are now, no don't close your eyes, keep looking at me, that's right.

You know, they told me to talk to you to calm you down until the boat gets here, but it's not terribly important, what I have to say. It's just—you know, if you are listening, that is, I hope you know that we had to pull you out of there. It's one thing to try something out and see if you can be the best at it, and quite another to put your life on the line like that. Some extra practice, maybe, and you can have another go at it next year, yeah?

I wonder what it was like for you, those five, six minutes down there,just waiting for the time to pass, so you can get your name in a book. It must have seemed a lot longer to you. You wanted to stay. I almost wanted to let you. I suppose we all die, but just like in life, where some people are better at certain things than others, and some people are actually the best at certain things, I think there's a best way to die. Yours might have been it, if you passed away trying to accomplish something, as though you just walked straight into death the way you walked into the sea today.

Actually, we're not allowed to let people die, trying to break records. The higher-ups are afraid of getting sued.

But your dive—the whole while you were down I was trying to imagine what you saw there. Did you even have your eyes open? A vast blue darkness, I presume, but what else? Did you see your dream? Your name in print, and some numbers next to it? Something more, it has to be something more. The entire history of human striving before you, perhaps, closing in on you while your breath seeped away. And when you took in the sum of all human accomplishments and non-accomplishments, and pieced them together in your mind to create a whole being, what sort of a person did you see in that blue void?

26

Tae-Yeoun Keum

I imagine that you saw yourself, and that it was a beautiful sight.

The boat's here now. We'll get you to a hospital— you're going to be all right.

0 0 0

"1 guess so. The thing is, I can't see my own reflection."

"But you can see everything else."

"I think so."

"Do you want to try the next row?"

"What happened that his vision returned to normal?"

"Whose, Agas's?" "

es.

Oy

seems to be the first letter on every eye chart that I've encountered, that I'm almost grateful that the letter alone has consistently proved itself important enough for me to see. They do say it's the most commonly used letter in the language.

"When do you leave?"

"I fly home tomorrow."

"I wish you a safe journey, then. The next row, please."

M

H

"Dr. Cruz, the man from Tamondong—Agas----how did he die?"

"He killed himself."

"Why did he do that?"

"He lost a lot of money at the cockfights."

"And?" "Well, the fact that he lost meant he couldn't see the winning roosters anymore. Why do you ask?"

"It's gone, I think. I can see most everything now."

"Try the next row."

PQJ "And the next?"

TYFB "Well, congratulations, I guess that's it then."

"No idea. Just something that happened. Are you going to try the next row?"

"How do you know it was because of this that he died? Maybe he was just despairing over the money he lost.

"Oh no, he talked about it a great deal. The world suddenly felt—what was the word he used—bleached, I think. Oh no, it wasn't about the money. It might have been a factor, but it was his eyesight that he couldn't bear. He said it was like being blind. I don't know about the reflections, he didn't talk about it."

TO ZLP "Is that the next row?"

"That's right. But this ailment, you didn't have it long enough to get so attached, did you?"

"Well, I must admit I had just gotten used to it."

"Don't let it get to you—forget it happened. You're going home now, aren't you?"

"I suppose so."

"Can you do the next rows?"

"Dr. Cruz, you don't think I'll have any side effects? I mean, other than what I have now with my—" "I don't know. Try the next rows."

EF F

DC

EL

OP

ZL ZD

DEPFOTEC

then the letters get so small that they are completely illegible.

Carolynn Molleur-Hintereggeur

27

Search Party Nights when the house pools with talk and laughter jumps and flashes like a school of salmon kissed by sun, I turn away the quiet guest standing nervously at the front door and slip with nods through the crowded rooms, unsure of how many will die on the way up the dam. I can count on half an hour or so before they discover a tray of melted ice cubes in the kitchen and my empty glass winking beside it like a single scale lost on the counter.

I search for something appropriate to call to the shadows and follow the streets aimlessly, joint to joint, her name escaping me.

The knotted stomach of downtown rumbles with the night freights packed full of fruits and fish rolling toward a store whose shoppers sleep.

Without checking the time, I drop my watch into a gutter as evidence of a struggle. I try not to think of them pouring from the house after me,since I cannot go back unable to explain where I've been.

The dawn will wake, hours too early, one eye at a time in the windows of the streets where the search party calls out, knocking her subtle name from my head. I walk to the fingertips of town, to the widely spaced barns, the cornstalks sheered off and sharp with November, sCraping along the shins of wanderers like handless wrists.

I've come after her to explain myself: the cure cannot be more loneliness.

But I stop short amidst the stalks that can't hold on, where, suddenly, she is again.

l)9

Jacob Eigen

The Fat Apostle In those days, Jesus and I fought about who he should kill himself for.

I said: "Jesus! Isn't there a woman we don't know about?"

The axe strokes at the door sounded like coughing. I sat with Mary Magdalene that night, crying, eating apricots. I wanted his death to be a dedication, a song. She didn't understand.

I rigged a cross from beams in the basement on the first day of the new calendar, made a crown from brambles that climbed the side of the house. I stood on that ancient lawn, bleeding from the head: doesn't blood ever convince a woman? I climbed the cross and nailed the left hand.

She heard my scream before I got the right. When she ran out, I was dangling by one bloody stump, hammer in hand—for you!

The cross split with my weight.

After that she bandaged me, both of us by the stream, watching the blood flow far, farther, toward Nazareth.

'1.16.06 and 11.17.06

30

,

Three Silhouettes

Karl Rittenbach

31

Adriane Quinlan

The

Oswego

Suggestions

The studio has hired a maid service to come in on the Thursday before shooting is set to start.

I am still asleep—drooling into the rumpled duvet—when "Maid-4-U!" parallel parks its van alongside the koi pond, huffing exhaust into the puckered-up mouths of whiskered, gentlemanly goldfish.

Al

Ammimm.

32

Adriane Quinlan

In my dream the muffled footsteps of maids treading the carpets register as rainstorms; their Ecuadorian banter ricocheting off the bath tile comes across as the clacking of Morse code; and the long, slow sighs of the vacuums sound like the breathy skirting of subway trains braking into underground stations.

It isn't until 1:37 p.m.—when a sliver of buttery afternoon light crawls across my wall-to-wall charcoal carpet and hits me square in the face—that I sense that the house is occupied by a second level of presence. When I first open my eyes it is to the doorframe silhouette of a uniformed maid, holding forth a SwifferSweeper as if it were a trident. For a tense moment, we both say nothing. Then, simultaneously, we mumble faint apologies. And then the door closes (she closes the door) and she is gone. And I am in the dark again.

A half hour later mom comes in. She has a svelte way of walking that I can recognize by ear—a specific rhythm to the swish-boom boom of her hips. She throws open the door.

"Really, Jareth. It's two o' clock. Children are leaving school." And then she pulls her neck back into the lit hallway. A dream later and I can hear Cynthia out in the hallway on her cell. "Yes, pages forty-two and forty-three--one through thirty-one, just the odds." She must be back from school.

I lie starfished on the bed for a moment longer.

The prospect of awakening holds little to no joy. Even in the near darkness I have seen what mom was wearing; it is the first indication that she is strung tight today, that things are bad. She is in her lipstick-pink double-breasted Azzedine Alaia shoulder-padded 1987 power suit, speckled with buttons of brass, each button holding the imprinted seal of a rope-wrapped anchor. Meant to invoke the splendor of multi-million

Jon Connolly

dollar yachts, they seem to me to be only images of sinking, of being sunk.

Forget the suit. There's nothing to do but go downstairs, and I walk down in my pajamas (Halloween-print boxers, Bart Simpson tee) past a chorus-girl row of maids wiping the stairwell posts. Amy and Cynthia lie splayed out on the couch, clicking through channels. In the kitchen, the SubZero holds only the asparagus en croutte left by the caterers two nights ago, the dregs of a Chardonnay I am sure Mom has been sucking, and two shelves of diet sodas in prim, airplane-sized mini cans. I close the fridge and immediately notice two things.

1. All of the carpets in the house (perceivable to me over the kitchen's granite island) have been vacuumed in neat, straight rows, so that the blank carpet retains the sort of tessellating pattern mowed in to baseball stadium lawns.

2. On the exterior of the SubZero refrigerator door, a sheet of paper has been hastily taped (the wood-paneling expels magnets, so we keep a roll of 3M beside the fridge) and at the top of the sheet, mom's over-worked, over-wrought all-caps reads,"OSWEGO FAMILY NOTICE" below which is written: "Things we don't want camera men to see / things to HIDE": French Muzzy "learning tapes"(Cynthia's writing) Diet Nestle Quick—pantry (Cynthia) Computer guides for dummies (Cynthia) MY closet (Cynthia) Madame Alexander Dolls (Dad) DVDs,family room (Dad's hand) Mess in the garage (Dad) Rock&Gem Magazine Collection (Dad again) ME & MY LIFE!!(Amy) Mom has not written anything. I suspect she has already hidden whatever it is that she is going to be

Untitled

.V11.111PI

34

Adriane Quinlan

hiding. I look at the carpet again, at the lines in the carpet the maids are writing with the suck-mouthed vacuums. Over the white-noise, I yell out,"Hey Amy," and pop open a Diet Dr. Pepper (mini-size). "What's with this list?"

Amy does not look away from the television (Will & Grace, Season 6, Episode 9: "Strangers with Candice"), but I hear her just fine, as in one gutsy, dorky breath she says, "We're going to be on a reality TV show that's basically just about our family and the cameramen come tomorrow so you need to hide what you don't want them to see and no one told us until today because they thought we wouldn't approve."

All I can say is,"What, really?" and smirk over at her with a sort of stupefied smile. I set down my Diet Dr. Pepper on the speckled granite of the central island.

"No, that was a lie."

"Wait, was it?"

"No, it was true."

"So we really are going to be on TV" "You got it."

So we really are going to be on TV. Huh. I look at the mini soda can, sitting lonesome on the precipice of the kitchen's solitary island, and I am not looking at the can, I am seeing myself. I am made newly aware of how I would look to a television audience. Perhaps this outfit would incite the whoops and hollers of an afternoon special laughtrack: I'm wearing Halloween print boxers, the faces of ghouls plummeting down to the hem in a factory-mistake diagonal, and I'm drinking Diet Dr. Pepper, a B-list soda in second-rate form.

This is breakfast, no less, and it's 2:39 p.m. So it's understandable that the first thing to come to mind is not what I will hide (the cliché litany including my gay porn and my grandmother's ashes—which ended up in my room on the NordicTrac). The first thing I think is

how all time will divide into two eras: the era wherein I walked downstairs in boxers whose easy-access fly often made my flaccid penis momentarily viewable, and the coming era of history—the era in which I will don Diesel jeans and get recognized by thirteen-year olds in New Jersey malls. Oh, god.

Cynthia, Amy and I spend the rest of the day sitting in front of the big TV, staring blankly, shifting routinely like patients with bed-sores, quieting the volume on Antiques Roadshow when a lone maid enters the scene in search of dust around the curios on the end-tables. The maids have come,Amy explains, because reality TV necessitates that the house be pristinely clean. I have never even really noticed the curios around which the maids are dusting. Now I take note of them as objects that a camera would locate in the foreground of an establishing shot, to lend the unfolding scene a hint of irony. I imagine, behind the tiny porcelain figurine of a maiden towing a drunk-looking lamb, how Cynthia's mascara would look as it runs through her tears during just another break up scene. I see Mom and Dad fighting behind the foreground placement of a framed photograph of them in sixties wedding outfits(mom in a white mini, dad with a tuxedo tee) holding hands and smiling blindly into the flash.

At one point Cynthia's cell rings(Gwen Stefani ft.

Akon — "Sweet Escape") and she jumps up and slides the glass door closed behind her, and fifteen minutes later her boyfriend's face is pressed up against the same glass door, peering in past the glare to look for Cynthia. She hops up and then they're gone, and it's me and Amy. When it's just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with "emotional problems"("Namely," Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask,"the emo-

Adriane Quinlan

tional problem of Harvard itself"). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says,"What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?" Or, during The Simpsons(my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation:"Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks." It's completely exhausting.

But before The Simpsons has even ended (it goes until 6:30), Mom is throwing open the door from the garage to the kitchen, and asking,"Did TakeoutTaxi come yet?"

"Nope," Amy says."Where were you?"

"They're bringing General Tso's for you. Where's Cynthia?"

"Hospital. Brothel. Cemetery." Pause."Boyfriend's."

"Right," Mom says, slipping out of her pumps and hurling them on the granite kitchen counter, alongside three slurped-out diet sodas and the crumbs of the asparagus frittata crusty quiche thing. "Family meeting at seven. Where's your father?"

"Haven't seen 'im," Amy says. Then The Simpsons is back on for the final few bars until 6:30, and then there's a re-run of Seinfeld ("Big Hands") which we quietly watch as the sun sets over the lima-bean shaped pool. The pool is now barely visible through the plate glass sliding doors, as in the growing darkness, the broad expanse of glass reflects more and more clearly an image of ourselves. I look tired. I've only been awake for four hours but I am completely exhausted. The whizzing sighs of the vacuums are dying down, and at about 6:53 according to the digital

clock on the face of the DVD player, I can hear the maids'van start up and buzz off.

A few minutes later we hear Dad's Miata parallel parking in the now-vacant spot adjacent to the koi pond. He walks straight in, throws his keys into a bowl by the door (ping!) and enters the living room."You fat, lazy bums," he says, speaking of us on the bedraggled couch."I work all day to keep you in business." By the time we look up he's already halfway in the refrigerator. "Nothing here but bean curd," he says. "Cranberry Snapple—grrrrrrhhhh!"

"It's not tofu. It's quiche or something," Amy says.

"Pretty good."

"Chinese for dinner, though," I chime in. "It's supposed to be here."

"Where's your mother?" Dad asks, as he extracts the quiche and closes the fridge door. And then there's what's on the door."Fuck," Dad says. "This goddamm list gives me a headfuck."

After "family-meeting dinner," wherein we discuss the General Tso chicken (too sweet) and mom calls Cynthia four times on the girl's cell before giving up, there is a bzzzzzz at the security doorbell outside the gate, and mom trots up to the beige intercom, and buzzes someone in. There's shuffling on the walk.

Mom strides out to the foyer to get the door, and her voice plashes over from the other room.

"Cynthia's not here," she says, cheery. "But otherwise they're ready."

"You look lovely Mrs. Oswego," relays the confident voice of an MTV VJ. "Is that an Alaia?"

The man whom mother ushers in to the dining room has the trim, petite physique of a Wimbledon ball-boy. Arrayed behind him like a "V" of trailing (continued on page 38)

Adam Eaker

37

June, July At the time, I led a rather elegant life— a large sunlit room, a dark gray suit.

Nor could I claim that physical pleasures were entirely denied to me—a quick kiss in the old part of town, the lights across the inlet, a smell of salt in the sheets.

I went on walks late at night, looking almost tall in that gray suit. It framed my hands so beautifully, I held one uplifted at all times, like a cigarette.

One night, a pair of drunk boys called to me from their car—All alone? Yeah, you like it.

I didn't mind them, it was true.

I thought nothing would happen in the world again.

Months passed like old film footage of my grandparents'lives, unspooling one half century of summer.

Just smells of beer and garlic among the passengers on a train. The lights of New London harbor looking like the lights of any harbor. And all of this coiled together somehow, in expectancy.

Pack my good shoes, my grandmother said, when the war began.

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38

Adriane Quinlan

geese is a team of five dudes, universally assembled in blazers, polos, distressed jeans, five-o'-clock shadows, and miniature beer bellies surging over the precipices of cinched leather belts. They nod toward the table, and mom seats them down one-by-one around us, making small-talk: "Great watch, Gregory. Cartier?"

"For Christmas," Gregory says, tapping the watchface. "It ticks."

Mom giggles, sighs, looks around.

Amy says,"In cinema, clocks are symbolic of tension."

There's a pause.

Dad says,"Who the fuck are these men," and pushes his chair back from the table. "Are you fellows the camera boys?"

"I'm the producer," says the trim ballboy, extending a hand. "Leslie." Mom introduces the other men: Gregory, Carl, Karl, Mike, Carl II. Then she introduces us:"My son Jareth. My daughter Amy who goes to Harvard. My husband, Rudy Oswego. And Cynthia's up to no good somewhere." She chuckles lightly at her own exaggeration.

"Well, Cynthia's the star, so we can't go t00000 long without her," Leslie says, beaming.

"How long has Cynthia known about this?" I ask.

But it's unclear whether I have asked this question of my mother or of the man just introduced as Leslie.

From the motion in the room—it cannot be discerned.

Both ignore me. Carl One takes the opportunity to extend a fatty hand towards dad saying, shyly, "It's an honor...an honor to meet you Mr. Oswego."

"Call me Rudy," dad says. An hour later they'll probably be talking about the new Shure57 mics in dad's basement studio but for now we listen, glum, as the producers explain the concept: Wealthy family, famous father, party-animal kids. And Amy says, "Doesn't this all sound a little bit like The Ozzbournes

but less Goth?" and Mom bursts into muffled tears that she keeps contained from her mascara with a gloved hand, and Dad says,"Well, fuck it, because we ran out of money." And I say,"Maybe if you had like, spent a single hour at the office and bought one less Miata for—" and Dad says,"Shut it you scrawny lazy gay—" and Leslie says,"Hold it right there." And we stop. We look upward.

Leslie is standing at the side of the table, the frosted spikes of his haircut illumined like a halo by the track lighting, and he is holding his hands up frozen around each other with the palms facing us, making in the negative space at the center of his hands a tenebrous, round-edged rectangle of proportion similar to a 35mm film frame. And he says,"Wow, this is great TV" Amy backs away from the General Tso, pushes away from the table, and says,"Well, I refuse to be on it."

"Oh,Amy," Mom says, twisting an anchor on her blazer.

"Oh,Amy," Dad says,"how unpredictable. How bold."

Dad has prided himself on being bold. And on sarcastically commenting on the predictable behavior of others. He's equally insufferable to watch television with ("If Maury Povich were alive in '69, we'd have led him to the guillotine") and he does not get along with Amy because they are too similar. In 1963 Dad founded a band that made music. He liked making music, and people liked listening to him, and people bought his records and he toured the country and the world and he keeps the pictures he took then in un-albumed boxes that teeter in the closet on the third floor. But in 1983 he and mom moved semi-permanently to LA— Roy from the band lived out here, and so did Shirley, so they would do gigs every once in a while, but could more-or-less live on what they had already made.

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Mom loved just having a house. She bought curtains (the wrong size, actually, all eventually replaced by a ballsy interior decorator), she "raised us kids" as any other private-school pick-up-line SUV mom raises her children, and Dad tried to "keep things stable."

He saw the diets that mom was always on, and so he invested the bulk of his estate in those little baby blue packets of fake sugar (Equal: dextrose with maltodextrin, aspartame). But this was right around the advent of another little packet—a little yellow packet called Splenda (sucralose) and within four months Dad had lost over 75 percent of his estate and five pounds by replacing his sugared coffee with "that mutherfucking chemical sludge."

Yes, Dad swore a lot for the first couple of days.

He went bowling with Larry, the loud caterer mom had once fired after baking too fatty a Lobster Soup.

Dad went out and came home wasted, then fell asleep face-down on the couch to the mournful tune of late-nite Ren & Stinipy reruns. Cynthia gave an oral presentation in school on the topic "What my parents do," and concluded with a one-liner:"Some days," she said, choking back (a laugh? a tear?)"we can only try for sweetness, and we can only taste pure shit." It was a line the thirteen-year-old had heard her father say while, from a second-floor balcony outside the master bedroom, he pissed into the lima-bean-shaped pool below in a flawless arc.

Cynthia's maxim rang in through the ears of one boy sitting at that classroom who later that night would repeat it over the dinner table to his sputtering, laughing father—the president of ABC-TV, LA, who was at that moment looking for something to kick the pants off CBS's now lame-ass Survivor, something a little more Ozzbournes and a little more old-school.

The show, Leslie explains over General Tso's, will solve dad's financial crises with a $250 million

payoff for the first season, which would focus on how Dad deals with the fame of his past and the family of his present. The show would also follow dad on his newest business venture—the production and fiscal support of a new brand of calorie-free sugar-substitute sweetener. Would the product succeed? Find out next week. In the pilot, Carl One says, huffing excitedly, we will see him pacing the factory floor, smelling everything and sweetly.

But at 7 a.m. the next morning nothing seems so sweet.

Wimbledon ball-boy Leslie is tugging at my Achilles tendons while I moan,"It's not fair, Amy gets to—" The duvet is a crumpled croissant of pure warmth. My bedroom is a batcave of pure darkness.

Leslie tugs me up and walks me straight to the shower.

"I don't shower in the morning," I say. "I shower at night."

"Today you shower in the morning," Leslie says, slamming the bathroom door behind me.

I stand in the bay of the shower with my clothes on—same Halloween boxers, different tee ("Mixology") and I think that if there's one time to take a shower with your clothes on, this is that time. It is an experience we should all have before we die, right? I turn the water on and the clothes cling to me like an extra, thicker layer of skin. When I exit the bathroom Leslie is sitting up straight on the lip of my bed, giving me a once-over. I'm still in my sopping PJs with a towel thrown around my shoulders—like a coat thrown over the body of a local teen saved from a fall through the ice. Straight-faced, Leslie says,"You took a shower with your clothes on."

"I took a shower with my clothes on."

Leslie only looks at me and sighs. Then he looks down at my feet, at the dripping water that is spreading out to soak the carpet. When I think back on the

40

Henry Ng

Adriane Quinlan

Untitled (Landscape) McMansion we lived in then it is this I think of—there is the vague feeling of being strangely watched, and the distinct sensual memory of the synesthetic residue of air-conditioned carpet, felt beneath squishing toes.

Despite my naturally showy nature (inherited genetically, natch), the prospect of starring in my very own reality drama becomes a lot less glorious when I consider that I will be seen only in terms of my relationship to my family. Amy is the lucky one—backing out completely, refusing to "ruin an academic career that exists solely through the denial of this family."

And so though her body drifts through various epi-

sodes, ghost-like, her head remains obscured by the muffled clouds of an editor's dodged blurring. In a later episode, her ghost-head drifts above the very Bart Simpson tee I never again wore, for I have exchanged that rumpled, sleepy outfit for what the wardrobe girl, calls "a signature look"—jewel tone tees and velvet blazers, plum-wine Barneys Co-Op sweaters of cashmere, all topped with golden, silk cravats.

Cynthia wears what she has always worn."Cynthia's the perfect child," Mom says, as she shuffles around the spare bedroom that Leslie's people have converted into a green room, rifling through racks

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of baby-doll dresses. "She'd look great in any of this stuff."

"Stop it, Ma," Cynthia says in a mocking country drawl,"You done too much good by me." Cynthia sits in a swiveling chair, puckering her lips before the illumined mirror, and I become aware watching her that I know nothing of Cynthia. That she is a girl to me like a girl on TV Being on the show—I mean, really, being the character on the show—is like being at a coffeeshop with your friends and seeing someone cute or cool or whatever, who is quietly studying and also quietly listening in on your conversation, and at some point you and your friends—I mean, the friends at the table sitting right by you—you all almost unconsciously begin to talk louder, to tell the stories that make you look good, look daring, look grown up. Your gestures toward each other—elbow jabbing, shoulder-shrugging—become pronounced and play-acted. Yet the presence of that person is nearly unnoticeable.

The analogy is almost too similar to even be an analogy Actually, both situations are exactly the same.

Clearly, the camera is the quiet stranger, sipping a skim latte and brooding over their Tristram Shandy as you and your cohorts loudly replay last night's brawl in the line outside Sirkus. "Did you see those guys doing coke on the windowsill?!?"

"Naaaaaah."

For instance, Jerry—one of my favorite cameramen, whose beat forces him to stay in the kitchen— will be standing by the island, chewing on a sandwich and suddenly I'll walk in the room, and he'll pace toward the refrigerator, snaking to follow my everyday path, to film me as I look inside. I must now choose between the Rutabega Squash salad or drawers of

41

sandwich meat and yellow American cheese. And though normally, I might have just grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper, I find myself making elaborate, inedible sandwiches formed of layers and layers of meats and cheeses. It isn't dishonesty—I want the sandwich, I really do—it is a dishonesty of effort. Who cares about an added layer of flavorless lettuce unless it is to be eaten before millions of viewers, Rachael Ray-style— chewed through a smiley grin?

Leslie is supervising my wardrobe change after a fellow teen's local birthday party (I need an effortless transition from swim trunks to cocktail attire), and he starts giving me notes. They're written on a list, like the kind we had taped to the fridge, but his list reads "The Suggestions." For instance, the producers don't like it when I talk to Amy. She's not even supposed to be seen, Leslie explains to me, so each time I approach her is a moment they cannot show on camera at all. They also don't like it when I sit around all day and watch TV "You don't watch TV" Leslie says "You are TV" "Leslie," I say. "Cynthia can watch TV" "Cynthia is Cynthia," he says.

"I am me," I say. "I fish therefore I am."

"Look, Jareth," Leslie says, leaning down over the greenroom chair, like Santa over the lap of some idiot kid. "In all of the good, true movies, there is a misanthrope—a jaded, cynical soothsayer type who hobbles around spreading bad omens. He goes 'blagh bleugh, you're all gonna die and get fucked."

"Yes?" I say.

"This is what we want you to be."

"Oh," I say. "So that's what's with the cravat."

"Yes,' Leslie says. "That is what is with the cravat."

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Adriane Quinlan

It's easier to be the jaded, cynical misanthrope than someone actually involved in the action. In most scenes, I am standing off to one side, eating a gourmet, many-layered sandwich as my parents yell across the room, as Cynthia gets punched out by her boyfriend and cries herself to sleep, as Dad does shrooms in the basement with the bass player from the Moody Blues and Larry, caterer extraordinaire, man of steaks and seasonings. I learn to lean against a countertop suggestively, in the sixteen-year-old imitatio of the James Dean slouch.

On my half-birthday (February 2nd), Dad and I drive to a theater in the valley to see a screening of Dayfor Night(my pick). On the way we stop at a 7-11 on so Dad can buy cigarettes to smoke out of the window on our way down there and back.(He'll have to hide them—they don't fit with his new, cleaned up, Moby-esque Vegan rocker image). And in the 7-11, I see a picture of my face in the lower right hand corner of an issue of CosmoGirl, an orange-y magazine with a model hoola-hooping on the glossy cover. I steal it, and in the car I rifle through to the article about me. The article takes up a single page.

"Meet Jareth Oswego," it reads."Why, hello Jareth Oswego," I say."How are you doing?" I show the copy to Dad. He throws it out the window.

"You littered," I say, craning my deck like a windhungry dog to see the magazine, fluttering 200 yards behind on the 405.

"Good riddance," Dad says. "Let's just have a nice six hours away from your mom's damn bullshit."

"So the show is mom's bullshit," I say, looking out the window faking a forlorn angst I'm not sure I really feel. Sure, the houses and trees and cars are passing by, and sure they're unknown to me—separate spaces reigned by strangers, separate worlds to which I can never go, to which I will never escape. Sure, I feel

misunderstood, but it's also fun to toy with Dad, to make him think I'm some idiot teen who really feels this angsty.

"The show is everyone's bullshit," is Dad's reply. It's impossible to know,just looking at Dad's profile against the Hollywood Hills, what he is really thinking when he thinks of me or of mom. I want to watch the show to learn about him. I want to see some sidelong glance of his at Cynthia or at me, to see him in a moment where he isn't sure I'm watching. But I'm afraid of what he'd think of me,the scrawny son with the—what is that, a cravat?—the scrawny son with the cravat, who is watching a bright spot hundreds of feet back on the highway, from which the pages are still unfurling.

It is fourteen months since they started shooting when mom finds Cynthia in the pantry with one of the cameramen. I am sitting on the couch reading the funnies when mom says "This sandwich needs Dijon" and then the next thing I hear is mom saying "You're fourteen."

Over the crinkling of the newspaper I hear Cynthia say, "I'm sixteen" and I hear the cameraman say, "Weren't you supposed to be eighteen?"

I put down the paper to see Cynthia stomping out of the pantry and up the stairs, the cameramen in tow trailing black electrical cords, whose snaking movements rewrite the lines of the carpet. They are all serpents.

The cameramen are all gone now except for one, who is doing exterior establishing shots through the double doors by the lip of the pool, who must not have heard the commotion through the glass. Mom's sandwich rests before me on grandmother's Frescaware. I pick it up and start eating. Sure, it's dry. Sure it needs some Dijon, maybe, but I am lazy and it is a Sunday and I am reading the funnies so I just sit there, soaking it all in: Cynthia's cries upstairs; the

Adriane Quinlan

deliberate misspelling of the noun "lasagna" in this week's Garfield strip ("Lasan-YA"); the dry sandwich, sans lettuce, sans Dijon.

I am made painfully aware by the absence of cameras here, and by the shrill noises coming from upstairs, that I am not the main character of my own life. That the main character perhaps, of all of our lives, is Cynthia or Mom or Dad. Yes, perhaps Dad, who just entered the Cynthia scene from stage left, carrying the prop of an elaborate juicer I recognize from infommercials, and delivers a line lifted from the last ten minutes of any hour-long TV office drama: "Why's everyone so quiet in here?" He stops in front of the stairs, where he runs in to mom, who is barreling down with two cameras towing her as she slips out of each pump, walks through the double-glass doors, sees Bo, Cynthia's boyfriend, on a longchaise, waves toward him, and dives swiftly into the pool with all of her clothes on. Bobbing back up, keeping her nose above the water, she shakes her head with the cold. "That was fun, Jareth. You were right."

Pretty soon we're all in the pool, our clothes on, the water streaming everywhere in our shoes, in our ears, in our limp and sagging underwear. I can see in Cynthia's upstairs bedroom, how the four cameras swing from her to gather, clumped, at the window that looks over the pool, to aim down on us.

The following Sunday we go to church."What do they want us to go to church for," I ask. "It's Easter," Amy says. "Cynthia's narrative needed an element of rebirth, re-awakening."

We drive up to a little church I've never seen before, with a stone tower and a plastic lamb nailed into the sidewalk like a trailer park flamingo. Men and women are gathered on the lawn outside the church, wearing the colors of springtime M&Ms and shifting from leg

13

to leg like horses rubbing up against the fences.

This is so not our scene," Amy says, slouching.

"Look, Cynthia, there are cute Christian boys standing around everywhere," Mom says."And they're bored to tears."

"Aren't we Jewish?" Amy asks.

"We're Irish Catholic," I correct.

"We're atheists," Dad says, and Dad's word is final.

The church, it turns out, is Protestant. The minister talks about the saviour being reborn within each of us, as though an epic drama is being played en loop before us all on miniature TV sets, like the type affixed to the backs of airplane seats. I look down the row of my family, barricaded on four sides by "civilians" in the pews, holding bread-box sized cameras and grunting with the heft of them. At the end of the row is Cynthia, with flaxen gold hair, and I can see her as the camera would see her—an innocent, a Paris Hilton circa Simple Life, a girl we see in "reality" before the bad things have been done to her. And then there's Amy and then there's me. I realize that if I were watching, I would not choose to love myself.

Cynthia. She is mother's favorite because of the way, I think, that she lies in chairs. She has a certain rigidity to her expressions: her face is tight and glowering, her nose upturned, her hair swept in a certain sine-wave around the heart-shaped head. But her body sprawls, lollygags over chaises. When we do not know where Cynthia is she can be found in a longchair by the pool, a glass of half orange-juice/half seltzer set down on the concrete beside her, an Oprah's book club novel in her lap, permanently opened to page 43 (for she'll read no further).

Mom comes out and often makes small talk. She asks re: schoolwork. Re: boyfriend. But Cynthia's replies are cryptic and badly managed."Oh, it's good,"

44

Adriane Quinlan

she'll say, then come home with a C+."Oh, we're fine," she'll say and come home crying, sobbing into a Barney's sweater he bought for her in the wrong shade—plum wine. The excuses and re-explanations take twice the time-lapse as the original lies, and Amy sighs with the sighs of a beleaguered twenty something who may not have found happiness, but has better achieved a way to cover it up. Cynthia's inability to cover up has perhaps made her the star of the show.

We, as a family, have professed to having never watched a single episode(Mom was on The View last week saying as much). But secretly we've all seen snippets of the program—it would be an absolute denial of the universal human condition (narcissism) to say otherwise. I hug my knees to my chest the first time I see myself on the unavoidable promos, and say, to Amy:"Do I really have that big of pores?" and Amy says, "Is my head really so blurry?" And we both laugh, good naturedly, but laughter still that is tinged with a certain darkness—a darkness that suggests yes, you really do have large pores as it simultaneously suggests yes, Amy, you really are so empty. Cynthia, however, seems to leave the show unscathed. When she arrives in Episode 1 after a trip to the mall with her boyfriend, and appears somewhat upset, and is shown (as I have earlier alluded) crying into a sweater box, the camera seems to neigh closer, pitying her. The sweater is shown to be the wrong color—the shot zooms in and out, in and out, to the tune of a sort of jack-in-thebox "Blaaaaayng" of absolute comic error. Cynthia is shown, everywhere, to be in the right.

Amy and I have seen the show, but not en totale.

We decide to watch the entire first season on the main living room television, when Mom and Dad are out (mother is at lunch, Dad at "work," and Cynthia somewhere upstairs with Bo, the BF). At the first bar of the theme music, I can hear cameramen in the other

rooms start to hum. The song is catchy—it's one of Dad's band's old songs—"Saving Grace"—whose lyrics are about a female nurse who sleeps with dying patients. But the tempo has been sped up and re-hashed with a sort of jangly banjo to serve as an interlude between our awkward "reality" scenes, and on hearing the song the cameramen begin to wander over.

"We can't work with the music," one of them explains to the questioning, upturned snarl of Amy. "Even in the establishing shots they'll hear it," says Argento—the 23 year old film student someone hired to do only establishings (He's responsible for those long shots of leaves in the pool, of unmade beds, of the exterior of the house and the koi pond).

"Isn't this Meta," says Jerry, my sandwich filmer.

"I wonder what would happen if I filmed you watching yourselves being filmed."

"Psychedelic, man," Argento says. "Goes on and on forever..."

Jerry says: "Anyone else want a sandwich?"

When mom comes home from Fred Segal's at 6:37, her grand entrance goes un-filmed. "I'm home," she toots. "I'm home!" She wants someone to see her new Derek Lim platforms, her new oversized Proenza Schoeler tote. It's the money from the show that's fueling these purchases and by god, it's these purchases that are fueling the show. She's working here, people.

By the time she's said "I'm home" the third time she's already in the living room, a mute witness to the sight of me and Amy occupying the couch amid a minefield of cameramen and sandwiches (sans Dijon, a faux-pas in this house) spread about the turf around us. On the screen ahead she sees her own haggard face, the lines drawn around her eyes as if drawn by a stick in the sand.

"It's on DVD now," I explain, as if explaining.

Adriane Quinlan

"There's Diet Dr. Pepper in the fridge."

Mom puts down her bags."Why isn't Cynthia here for this?"

A: Because Cynthia is still outside by the pool, an unread copy of Sojourner Truth spread spine-up beside her, as she enjoys sex with her boyfriend, Bo, who is completely nude. Leslie walks in, his headset fuzzing with a lot of static. "Let's just not cover it," he says.

"Tasteless."

"Taste?" Argento asks. "I need a paycheck."

"This isn't about you," Leslie says. "I'm in love with her."

Then everyone starts laughing.

"Cynthia," mom yells out at her daughter, over the lip of the chardonnay bottle she's tugging at."Come in soon for dinner."

We all eat dinner beneath the halogen lights, the umbrellas of reflected fluorescents beaming down on the catered porkchops stranded on beds of wilted lettuce.

The sneering cameramen scan Cynthia's face for guilt and my father's face for amusement, but find nothing registered on either. It is Amy whose blurred face perhaps reveals the most: she is sipping her wine, or biting her lip, or stifling back a chuckle. I am too type-cast to be an effective force of comic relief: here I am in a plum cravat, trying to spear a pea with a single fork tine.

It's dark enough for the windows to have turned into mirrors, reflecting back to me only myself, only Amy, only Dad, Cynthia, Mom. Staring over our dinners, we look like bottom-feeders, like koi sucking pond edges for algae, like the suck-mouths of vacuums squeezing over the bright carpet, eeking out illegible lines to mark our travel.

I give one of the cameramen a long stare and loosen my cravat, a gesture that seems to ask the ques-

45

tion, Do you have everything that you want?

The recording light flickers off. The other cameras leave. But as they turn away, they seem to force another question, the central question burning beneath the clothes at the bottom of the pool, beneath the wilted magazine on the 405, beneath Cynthia's hands, folded in her lap in the gesture of a prim shepherdess. The cameras seem to ask the question lovers ask: What do you see when you see me?

,AP.IM

46

Sarahi Uribe

Untitled r

.1•••.-_

Erich Matthes

Fitzgerald's Alphabet after Robert Pinsky

After being called deficient, even flaccid, genitals heal.

If justice kills, little more needs operating.

Perhaps, quite rightly, something touched us, violence, wetly xerotic. yes, Zelda.

47

Editors-in-Chief Publisher Designer Managing Editor Literary Editors Senior Editors Art Editor Public Relations Manager Events Coordinators

Dayo Olopade & Joanna Zdanys Erich Matthes Iris Shih Russell Brandom Elizabeth Gumport & Alexandre Lessard-Pilon Annie Galvin & David Chernicoff Laura Adler Carina del Valle Schorske Gordon Jenkins, Diana Mellon & Caroline Smith

Circulation and Distribution Associate Publisher Associate Editors Selections

Tyler Theofilos & Jordan Jacks Tess Dearing Tae-Yeoun Keum & S. Zelda Roland Russell Brandom, Tess Dearing, Adam Gardner, Elizabeth Gumport, Lauren Henry,Jordan Jacks, Melanie Langer, Amy Lee, Alexandre Lessard-Pilon, Erich Mattlies, Dayo Olopade, Adriane Quinlan, S. Zelda Roland, Caroline Smith, Meredith Startz, Tyler Theofilos & Joanna Zdanys

The editors would like to thank Ruben

Poetry was judged by Elizabeth Alexander.

Roman in the English Department, the Elizabethan Club, and Branford and JE

Fiction was judged by John Crowley.

Colleges. The designer would like to thank George Guman at RIS.

The text face is Fairfield. Headings are set in Caecilia.

The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Poetry is "Street" by Adam Gardner

The contents of the Yale Literary Maga-

The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Fiction is "E is the First Letter" by Tae-Yoewn Keum

zine are copyright 2007. No portions of the contents may be reprinted without permission. All rights reserved.

Subscriptions to the Yale Literary Magazine are available for $15 (for individuals) and $35 (for institutions). Contributions to The Lit are welcome and tax-deductible. Please make all checks payable to the YLM Publishing Fund, and mail them to: The Yale Literary Magazine PO Box 209087 New Haven CT 06520

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