11. I’ve ruined everything.
12. It’s Spring & my flaws are emerging as daffodils.
13. Daffodils bloom from elbow crooks, from my vagina, my head packed with petals, sawdust in a cadaver.
14. A soft & common flower.
15. One mindfulness activity involves clenching my fist, then releasing it to feel the ease. The daffodil grows, blooms, dies & retreats to its bulb stasis, grows, blooms, dies & retreats to its bulb stasis.
16. My clenched fist is made out of daffodils & is crushing daffodils.
17. Fell one daffodil & dozens bud in its place. I scoop dirt and & each bulb’s roots beget another, digging & digging away, a woman’s form reveals itself composed entirely of such fertilized seeds.
18. I have daffodils in my past, daffodils the yellow of caution tape.
19. There is an objective truth about me as a person to which I have no access. There are times I close my eyes & see nothing; others, nothing but daffodils.
20. I’ve been told I take things to extremes & that’s utter bullshit. A female daffodil’s reproductive organ contains what botanists call a stigma.
21. What about the soil, I ask myself, to myself, the daffodils come from something. I hand people dirt, I say understand me by this, & pluck out a worm.
22. What about, I ask, choosing something beautiful to represent that which is ugly within me. What does that say about me.
23. That you’re conceited, my daffodils answer.
24. A word said often enough loses meaning, try saying sorry, & then, this is key, repeating the action for which you are apologizing.
25. The action is being yourself as a person: the daffodil and its constant trumpet.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I’ve not been in the habit of writing, not in a journal, and certainly not poetry. But I do make a lot of lists. This poem started as a casual list I was making of everything going wrong in my life that was my fault, as one does, and there was a 1 through 10 originally. When I got to 11, and wrote “I’ve ruined everything,” I thought it would be funny (not hah-hah) to use that as a starting point. It’s been pointed out to me there are 14 sections and perhaps this is a pseudo-sonnet. What isn’t a pseudo-sonnet these days though? It is a funny (ha ha) thing to submit poetry (an act which takes incredible self-esteem and self-belief) on the subject of self-loathing.
I’m grateful to The Account for publishing this poem, though it’s strange to re-read. I feel exceedingly distant from the person who wrote it, and her internalized rage. I enjoy the paradox of something so delicate and beautiful as a flower as the symbol for this anger, but then again, I’m not sure I’m supposed to praise my own poem—it’s un-demure of me.
Shevaun Brannigan’s work has appeared in such journals as Best New Poets, AGNI, and Slice. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and holds an MFA from Bennington College.
The ocean retches and collects. We have mistaken you, our water
god, for a savior of fallow pastures, your ruling
planet for a fixed star. A message blinks through the ether:
Let’s work on improving this together. But it’s too late
for prayers when salt animals distend heavy
as sodden paperbacks, toxic script penned on every folio.
They cannot hide in their septic shells,
and you cannot return the light
energy you harnessed from the sun. Don’t you remember? I tried to run
from you with hooves and quick reacting
tendons—I transformed myself into a mare.
Neptune, brother, you would not rest until you overpowered
everything that needed blue to breathe.
You plunged your own house into the Great Dark.
You sealed our throats with rocks. Haven’t you always
proved the impossible equation, never seen
with the naked eye, discovered only through ancient math?
I could not escape from you by horse
or will or sheath of grain. The ocean remembers.
The planets remember. My body remembers everything you’ve done.
:: Ceres in the Global Heat Wave ::
Have you ever tried to sleep
as winds thrash a lofted room
the way a god of evil flogs
a wooden ship at sea? You feel
very small. If it weren’t
for cliff gusts and morning
fog, we’d perish like snails
do on this dark and dry land.
They’ve been trying to live
since the era when islands
weren’t yet islands but a part
of seedlings’ collective dream,
white and spiral. I am not
from any country or generation.
This doesn’t take place anywhere
in particular, except for now
maps look like they’re screaming. Too hot
for ruins. Too hot for roads.
Fake popcorn flowers
on real cobs. Butter’s gloss undermines
the ruse, as if we required hyperbole
to prove what went wrong.
I’m rubbing the apocalypse
in your face, I guess, since I don’t get
to be moody otherwise. If men are mad
at me, they hurt me or they leave
with the blue stoneware
of my heart, and I never uncover it again.
Tonight, I’m the hottest I’ve ever been.
I figure if that star
doesn’t move by the next time
I look up at the sky, it must be real.
Art needs an artist, words need a writer,
and stars need to be believed,
but what can I say about faith
when I’ve given the last of my warnings?
I loved you in the marginal
seas and those not defined
by currents. I loved you with salt
on my lips and in small sounds
too numerous to list aloud.
I’ve been trying to live
since the era of your silence, which fills
with trapped air like a gasp
that goes on and on, and I’ll never
be emotionally detached for you
to take me seriously. I can’t save
every slug on ash and asphalt,
but I’ll touch their dank bodies
with hands not clean enough to hold.
Too hot tonight for rain. Too hot for eyes
to close. I lie awake all night
listening as you take the world
from me—little by little, then all at once.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems speak in the voice of the Roman goddess Ceres—whose Greek counterpart is Demeter, mother of the fateful Persephone—the ruler of agriculture, women and girls, fertility, and, randomly, cereal grains. I became compelled by the myths of Ceres because I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between the way that our planet is being treated and the way that vulnerable people, especially women, are being treated in tandem. This “Ceres series” imagines: What if this timeless goddess were plopped down in 2019, what would she be thinking? After all, in their stories, goddesses never escape the violence and pain of the world themselves. Ceres’s feelings of betrayal, rage, desperation, and grief, often caused by those she loves, as well as her insistence on truth-telling and resilience, are familiar navigations for me. Partially, this is because I live in Florida, a beautiful, otherworldly place rife with the horrors of poisonous algae, disappearing species and coastlines, increasingly unbearable heat, and some of the highest reports of cyber attacks and fraud in the country. I ask the unanswerable question in these poems: Can we save ourselves from the hell we have created, or have we already gone too far?
Anne Barngrover’s most recent book of poems, Brazen Creature, was published with University of Akron Press in 2018 and is a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Currently she is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the Low-Residency MA program in Creative Writing. She lives in Tampa, Florida, and you can find her online at annebarngrover.com.
:: “Let’s Make a Movie”: Visualizing Blackness Beyond Trauma Through the Lens of Film and Poetry ::
Black history is full of trauma. Moreover, when examined in relation to the contemporary moment, the timeline of that trauma-filled history defies a narrative of unabated progress. Indeed, one of the deep frustrations of engaging thoughtfully with the reality of the twenty-first century is the feeling that, regardless of how many transitions our world has undergone, Black pain remains consistent. In the effort to use artistic production to give voice to this frustration, Black artists face the challenge of recognizing and representing trauma, in both the past and present, without allowing it to become the defining feature of Blackness. Recognizing pain as a part of the story, which cannot be allowed to represent the totality of Black identity, is particularly important for those artists who seek to articulate an understanding of Blackness through visual means, for whom image and imagery are central to the creative effort.
Films and film-making play a pivotal role in creating images of Blackness, particularly with respect to trauma. In the current moment, when Black trauma is projected across screens of all sizes through viral videos, social media, and ceaseless cable news, there is a powerful sense of immediacy concerning the conditions facing Black bodies. However, it’s vital to recognize that film is but the latest iteration in the evolution of Black image-making. Jacqueline N. Stewart reminds us in her analysis of “the emergence of cinema” that “its early methods of representing Blackness both entered into and reflected a long, complex tradition of Black ‘image’ making in visual and nonvisual media, a tradition that had significant and often quite damaging personal and political ramifications for African American individuals and communities.” [i] This has certainly persisted as Black film has evolved over the course of the past century. Consequently, as Black artists turn to film, both as creatives and critics, to examine how it shapes understandings of Blackness in relation to hurt and pain, they engage not only the history of Black trauma, but also the history of Black image-making. Black artists, in their ongoing effort to produce images of Blackness with greater dimension, must be understood as entering into longstanding and ongoing critical discourses around Black visuality.
In this discussion, I consider the work of three such artists, placing their creative efforts in conversation with scholars who are similarly interested in the visualization of Blackness. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay critically reflects on popularized representations of Blackness and trauma while endeavoring to produce counter-narratives through gripping visual texts. Throughout her body of work, but specifically in her 2019 Netflix series, When They See Us, DuVernay is particularly interested in the consequential relationship between popularized images of Blackness and the lived experience of her films’ subjects. In dialogue with DuVernay, I examine the work of contemporary poets Gabriel Ramirez and Danez Smith, focusing on poems wherein the artists employ film as a metaphor for their commentary on prevalent Black images.
As poets whose filmed performances represent visual forms of artistic expression as well, Ramirez and Smith contribute to a critical understanding of how Blackness becomes visualized through images produced in multiple media, each of which operates in distinction from, and in dialogue with, one another. These artists collectively utilize film, both as metaphor and as medium, to pose powerful questions about the need for Black art to engage trauma with respect to Black history and historical context as well as to re-frame representations of Blackness for their viewers, thereby illuminating not just the trauma of Black life but the fullness of the lives that trauma interrupts.
When They See Us officialtrailer
When Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us was released on Netflix in May 2019, the response from the viewing public was swift and varied. Detailing the events that led to the wrongful arrest of five teenagers—Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana, Jr.—for rape in 1989 and following their lives from incarceration to exoneration, the series immediately catalyzed a robust discourse of reviews, responses, and critically-minded “think pieces.” Critics, scholars, and general viewers found themselves re-examining the case, exploring the biographies of the re-monikered “Exonerated Five,” discussing the performances of the young actors who took on these roles, and consistently drawing parallels to the contemporary moment. The conversation around the film series only grew as Netflix announced that it had been the most watched program on its platform each day in the weeks after its release and that it had been viewed by more than 23 million accounts worldwide within its first month. [ii] In the midst of that conversation, a central concern recurrently rose to the forefront: given the painfully traumatic nature of the series’ storyline and its emotional resonance with ongoing debates about the criminal justice system and the persistent criminalization of Black youth, much of the conversation centered on its “watchability.” Viewers reflected on the emotional work required of them to complete all four episodes, and potential viewers interrogated whether they were fully prepared to sit through the challenging scenes from the discomfort of their living rooms.
Many within this debate felt that the traumatic nature of the viewing experience was critical to the effectiveness of DuVernay’s film. Recognizing that DuVernay herself had arranged for crisis counselors to be on set for the cast and crew during filming, the difficulty of the material was fully acknowledged. [iii]Many insisted that the willingness to embrace that difficulty was necessary, as a show of support not only for the “Exonerated Five,” but also for the film itself and, by extension, for future efforts to tell the stories of the traumatized in order to facilitate healing and to prevent these circumstances from recurring. Ida Harris argues,
[DuVernay’s] work deserves our eyes, collective contemplation, and action … As black people, we must be aware of the aggressive criminalization of black and brown people—which lends a hand to mass incarceration. We must know these stories and be familiar with the entities who benefit from our demise. [iv]
Similarly, Zenobia Jeffries Warfield argues that the emotional heft of the film bears significant historical parallels underlying its necessity. After admitting that she “didn’t make it to the end of part one before [her] chest hurt so badly from anxiety and rage that only an overwhelming wail from deep within brought [her] relief,” she recognized that her pain was communal:
In some Black spaces it may be about affirming our humanity—our experiences, being seen, being heard, being believed, and making the world hear firsthand these stories of hellishness and heartbreak. I would equate the pain of watching the series to seeing the televised images of Black people—including children—being hosed, beaten, and jailed during the civil rights era. [v]
The parallels drawn here are significant, not only for the ways that these writers link historical and contemporary trauma, but also for how they center film—both its making and its viewing—as a critical form of resistance to that trauma and the acts that incite it. Given that one of DuVernay’s previous films, Selma, explored the international impact of televised scenes of violence in the civil rights era, namely the live broadcasting of “Bloody Sunday” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, it would be reasonable to consider how DuVernay engages in similar themes with When They See Us.
While recognizing DuVernay’s intent in producing such a powerful film series, others asserted that the episodes demanded too much of the audience and suggested that potential viewers should absolutely feel free to avoid the series for the sake of their own mental health and as a deliberate act of self-care. KC Ifeanyi, for example, recognized that “public displays of black trauma were an integral catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement” and acknowledged the importance of “televised accounts and portraits of black bodies being hosed and torn by dogs” as well as the “heartbreaking decision to have an open-casket funeral” for Emmett Till. [vi]Yet, Ifeanyi still argued for the need to “opt out” of the viewing and the demand to revisit these boys’ trauma through film. Essays like CNN contributor Doug Criss’s “I’m a Black man with a teenage son. I can’t bring myself to watch When They See Us” and Essence magazine senior entertainment editor Joi-Marie McKenzie’s “I was 7 Months Pregnant Creating a Black Boy While Watching When They See Us” brought into stark relief the emotional tax being drawn from Black parents in particular. These writers saw in their own children the potential fates of the young men whose confessions to a crime that they did not commit were so brutally and strategically coerced in a coordinated effort between police and prosecutors in the series’ first episode. Consistently, the objections raised to the viewing experience were not only about the pain of re-living these moments from 1989, but also about recognizing the very real possibility that such events could repeat today.
Novelist Eisa Nefertari Ulen similarly addressed the pain exacted from parents, doing so with a consciously historical lens that extended even farther than the late 1980s. Ulen writes, “I think about my ancestors, about the trauma of parenting enslaved children. How can my fear compare to the realities my foremothers faced? Children dragged from their love and into pure white terror. Why do I feel so suddenly unable to cope, when they survived far worse?” [vii]Challenging her sense of guilt over an apparent inability to muster the fortitude of her ancestors, Ulen recognizes that her pain is compounded by the recognition that “things have not changed so much after all … this is history. This is now. This is intergenerational trauma.” [viii] Ulen writes, “I am suffering witness trauma. Every time I see a video of police violence, a surveillance tape, a dash cam recording, I am experiencing a kind of psychological torture.” [ix] In making this declaration, Ulen also argues,
The truth in this series shouldn’t be my trauma to bear … It is time for white women and white men and white children to have this experience, to know this story, to confront this reality. White law students, age-old prosecutors and police officers cannot claim to be professionals if they do not witness these truths. Five hundred years is long enough. Black mothers have screamed into the night long enough. It is time for white people to see them—the killers who live in their families—and confront the evil they have done. [x]
In this powerful declaration, Ulen echoes a sentiment that is shared by multiple writers, such as David Dennis, Jr., who wrote “Dear White People: Make Your White Friends Watch When They See Us” for News One. Dennis suggeststhat the triggering nature of the series was a vital element of the viewing process and that the question up for debate should not be whether the series is “watchable,” but who should be watching, in order for the visualization of Black trauma to be presented to greatest effect.
The question of audience and historical-contemporary continuity function as the two central themes in this debate about the “watchability” of Black trauma, as engendered by discussions of DuVernay’s work. While today’s critics take on these questions through social media and public scholarship, these are not new questions with respect to the production of Black art. They have been addressed repeatedly by scholars who examine the place of trauma in representations of Black life through Black art. Saidiya Hartman’s seminal work, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, explores precisely these questions while referencing the pain of enslaved people that similarly inspired Ulen’s response and thoughtful engagement with the trauma of her ancestors. Analyzing the representation of “scenes of subjection” through nineteenth-century literature, theater, and visual arts, Hartman explicitly addresses the question of audience. She writes,
What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the ‘peculiar institution’? Or does the pain of the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reflection? At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. [xi]
DuVernay, in her meticulous attention to the details of the lives of these young men and the ripple effect of these traumatic events on their families, impels her audience to interrogate similar questions of themselves. DuVernay challenges her viewers to consider their own role as spectator and witness in the twenty-first century and to clarify the obligations and indictments that come with the roles.
Building upon and acknowledging her debt to Hartman’s work, Jasmine Nichole Cobb moves beyond the trauma of enslavement to consider how Blacks worked to fashion their public image in the face of what she describes as the “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution” of chattel slavery. Cobb convincingly argues that the institution “utilized an unstable visual logic of race to enslave persons of African descent and to protect Whites from the threat of the gaze,” and she argues for an understanding of “slavery’s visual culture as an impediment to recognizing freedom” and for a critical engagement with “Black visuality as shaped by and resistant to slavery’s visual culture.” [xii] Cobb analyzes how nineteenth-century media, in support of slavery, defined Blackness and enslavement interchangeably to create an immediate association in the minds of white viewers. The work of slaveholders, then, was to maintain the “logical” link between Blackness and enslavement in order to preserve slavery, whose “daily execution thrived in a racio-visual economy that determined ways of seeing and ways of being seen according to racial difference.” [xiii] Conversely, Black activists and anti-slavery advocates of the time worked to refashion public images of Blacks as something other than enslaved in order to reshape public understanding of freedom as a state of being attainable by Black bodies in the nineteenth century.
This essentializing representation of Blackness as synonymous with a particular state of being is precisely what DuVernay challenges in the twenty-first-century context, forcing her own audience to confront the ways that criminality is immediately associated with Blackness. This is evident in the very title of the series, When They See Us, which was notably changed from “The Central Park Five.” As DuVernay explained in the initial announcement, the title change “embraces the humanity of the men and not their politicized moniker.” [xiv] Actress Niecy Nash, who was nominated for an Emmy award for playing Deloris Wise, Korey’s mother, explains the significance of the name while once again echoing the historical import of the work being done by this film:
It is still a story that could have hit the newspapers yesterday. It is telling of America today and yesterday, hence the title When They See Us. I loved that we moved away from calling this the Central Park Five because that was the moniker the media gave these boys—they were called a wolf pack when they didn’t even know each other. What do they see when they see us? They see monsters, a villain. Someone of ill repute, someone nefarious who doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. [xv]
Duvernay explores the immediate association of young Black men with criminality through the interrogation scenes in episode one of the series, as the audience watches the violation of these boys’ innocence through a refusal to see it, all as a precursor to the complete loss of that innocence in the episodes that follow. Moreover, though the police station scenes of the first episode are jarring, it is in the subsequent episodes that DuVernay explores the process by which these young men are vilified in the media through the sensationalized coverage to which Nash refers. In highlighting this process, DuVernay intentionally uses her film to provide counter-images of these young men and to detail how those dominant images were created and reinforced in the first place.
In scenes where DuVernay explores the process of criminalizing these specific boys, she addresses a second aspect of Cobb’s analysis of how Blackness was so narrowly (and similarly) defined in the nineteenth century. Through an examination of “a diverse array of print ephemera, such as auction advertisements, runaway advertisements, and pickup notices,” Cobb argues that,
White viewership became essential to the institutionalization of slavery’s visual culture, as print media undergirded the slave economy. Slaving media, then, normalized Whiteness as a disembodied viewing position by excluding slavers, auctioneers, purchasers, owners, and catchers from the page. Instead, these items announced the arrival of new chattel for sale or called on the White viewing public to assist in the reclamation of enslaved property … A still-burgeoning U.S. media industry became central to the buying and selling of chattel persons with advertisements that invited free White viewers, specifically, to visit auction sites and view scantily clad Black bodies for display and for purchase. [xvi]
DuVernay revisits this in her film series, highlighting the news coverage and the images that bombarded media consumers in the midst of the 1989 “Central Park Jogger” case. DuVernay focuses on newspaper headlines describing the teenagers as “Wildin’” in the park and Donald Trump’s full-page advertisement calling for the return of the death penalty, among other media coverage. In one particularly powerful scene, Yusef Salaam’s mother, as played by Aunjanue Ellis, is seen viewing the coverage on her own television screen, to which she incredulously responds, “they wanna kill my son.” DuVernay highlights how these visual texts incited the viewing public toward universal condemnation while inviting them to participate in the campaign for punishing these young men for their supposed crimes. These scenes echo Cobb’s analysis of runaway advertisements that invited their viewing public to participate in the dispensation of “justice” to fugitive slaves.
While DuVernay depicts this process within the series, she also utilizes her artistic authority to challenge the “disembodied viewing position” of Whites that had characterized earlier depictions of Blackness. As Cobb argues, the nineteenth-century media that sustained slavery “functioned as perceptual documents, as materials that taught Whites how to see Blackness, but also encouraged Whites to believe that Blackness was a thing to see, and that White subjectivity functioned as a domain for looking,” successfully accomplishing this “by focusing attention on Black bodies and away from White bodies, especially away from Whites who were actively involved in the process of enslaving others.” [xviii]In When They See Us, DuVernay deliberately holds white figures accountable for the role that they played in the conviction and incarceration of these five young men. From the moments of the initial arrest through the courtroom scenes, DuVernay is unsparing in her presentation of the active choices and willful collusion that drove police and prosecutors, namely Felicity Huffman’s Linda Fairstein and Vera Farmiga’s Elizabeth Lederer, in their pursuit of conviction. In so doing, DuVernay actively avoids absenting Whites from the narrative of “The Exonerated Five,” whereas their removal from nineteenth-century media depictions of slavery had absolved them from responsibility for the preservation of that institution.
While DuVernay’s engagement with history and historical context is absolutely key to the successful project of this film series, the filmmaker’s purposeful consideration of the question of audience also drove the critical and popular response to her work. As a professional filmmaker utilizing the global platform of Netflix, DuVernay no doubt desired the widest possible audience. Yet, she intentionally de-centers and thereby disempowers the white gaze. Rather than allowing the white gaze to determine how the audience sees its main characters, DuVernay employs important moments where her characters’ humanity is explored within the lens of their own community, opening the series in the home-space, centering family interactions even in the midst of imprisonment through carefully crafted visitation scenes and phone calls, and exploring each man’s effort to reclaim his identity in the period between his release and his formal exoneration. While the lens through which white figures see these boys plays a tremendous role in the narrative, the film nevertheless positions whiteness as the “they” of the series’ title, whereas Black families, communities, churches, and even cellmates regularly constitute the “us” that is constructed and maintained through the episodes.
DuVernay understands, fully, that an audience’s ability to visualize—to create and receive—images of Blackness bears powerful consequences for the treatment of Black people within the world. The relationship between perception and consequential reality is highlighted throughout the trial and convictions of the five young men in When They See Us, and is thoughtfully illuminated in her exploration of the connection between popular images of Black criminality and incarceration rates in her 2016 Netflix documentary 13th. Moreover, she addresses this phenomenon, wherein the public supports a reality that confirms its visualized beliefs, and examines its relationship to film, in a published conversation with cinematographer Bradford Young. She explains,
The image is intimate to me. We use the term our mind’s eye for a reason. The images that we consume, and that we take in, can nourish us, and they can malnourish us. They become a part of our DNA in some way. They become a part of our mind, our memory.… This idea of the image is so much more dense than even using it in a film context. It’s an intimacy inside your own memory, inside your own mind. We see the world and each other in pictures. That’s why I think film is so emotional. It’s re-creating what’s already embedded in our internal process. It’s an artificial rendering of what’s already going on inside. [xix]
Though this conversation was published in 2016 following the release of Selma, on which she and Young collaborated prior to When They See Us, DuVernay’s commitment to the empowering prospect of the image clearly persists within her work on When They See Us, which continues to use the medium of film to challenge what her audiences think they know, and think they see, by charging them to open their “mind’s eye” and see the world anew.
DuVernay, as a filmmaker, is certainly not alone in a tradition of Black artists who seek to engage with the “mind’s eye” as the space in which images are constructed, doing so in a way that recognizes the power of film even while pursuing other mediums of artistic expression. Images of Black criminality continue to shape popular perceptions of Black men and women, which in turn contribute to the proliferation of incidents—often captured on camera—where Black citizens are subjected to life-threatening and life-claiming interactions with the police and their fellow citizens. Social media, in particular, has usefully captured a growing frustration with these incidents, alongside persistently inequitable incarceration rates and policy-backed conditions of hyper-surveillance made manifest in such practices as stop-and-frisk and such phenomena as the preschool-to-prison pipeline. Black artists, then, subsequently use social media and its myriad platforms as a means of articulating their response to the conditions that elicit their artistic examination. In the midst of these responses, contemporary poets, particularly those who embrace traditions of oral performance and thereby make their literary work both visible and visual, have gained particular prominence.
One such young poet is Gabriel Ramirez, who identifies as a “Queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist.” [xx] Ramirez honed his skills as a poet and a performer in poetry slams as a young adult, being the 2012 Knicks Poetry Slam Champion, competing as a member of the 2012 Urban Word NYC slam team, ranking 2nd in the NYC Youth Slam, and winning the 2013 National Poetry Youth Slam Championship in Boston. Ramirez has performed in multiple venues in New York, including Lincoln Center and the Apollo Theatre, and is an in-demand guest at colleges and universities around the nation. [xxi] In addition to published work in several anthologies and online platforms, Ramirez has experienced a tremendous increase in popularity due to videos of his performances, often published in such venues as YouTube, Buzzfeed, and Upworthy. One poem, “Black Boy Auditions for His Own Funeral,” surpassed 100,000 views within three months of being uploaded in July 2019. This poem addresses some of the very same themes as DuVernay with respect to audience, historical continuity, and the visualization of Black trauma through film:
Gabriel Ramirez’s “Black Boy Auditions for His Own Funeral”
Framing his performance as an audition for a role that is more destined than desired, Ramirez immediately draws the audience in, driving them to question their participation in this performance in similar ways to Hartman’s insistence on interrogating the blurred lines between witness and spectator to history’s “scenes of subjection.” Following the poem’s opening 20 seconds of deliberate silence, wherein Ramirez’s closed eyes and crossed arms perform the pose of a dead body in its casket, he looks at the audience with wide-eyed enthusiasm, asking, “How was that?” Ramirez mimics the eagerness of a young child seeking approval for his performance, thereby conjuring a sense of boyhood innocence that is similarly accomplished by DuVernay’s choice to open When They See Us with scenes of the five young men talking with family and flirting with girls, presenting a youthful naivete of the fates that will soon befall them. Moreover, posing the question invites the audience to sanction his fitness “for his own funeral,” and thereby disallows the viewer any distance from the scene unfolding in front of them. Echoing both Hartman’s and Cobb’s analyses of a historical desire to distinguish viewers of Black trauma from participants in the incitement of that trauma, Ramirez enacts a performance wherein his audience must take on the role of casting directors. He reminds those watching that their approval—explicit or implicit through their lack of objection—is the necessary first step that allows him to embody the role for which he is auditioning.
The audience’s opportunities to challenge his fitness for the role continue throughout the poem, as Ramirez asks, “Do I look the part yet?” and seeks to convince them that “you can put as many holes in me as you want / I can dance despite the bullets.” Each time the audience neglects to dismiss him from this “casting call,” the level of complicity and participation in this process grows. By the poem’s conclusion, the audience is no longer simply casting the project but has taken on greater agency through Ramirez’s use of direct address and subtle direction. At points, the audience members become producers—as indicated by Ramirez’s question about the subject of the film’s sequel—and potentially directors. Ramirez’s repeated direction to “Roll the Credits,” followed by the closing lines, “Let my death / be your last take. / And in this final shot, / when you burying me, / make sure you get my good side,” ultimately grants final authority for the audience to yell “cut.” Ramirez, however, allows ample opportunity for the audience to step outside of these roles to which they’re being assigned. They have the opportunities to deny the casting, reject the sequel, refuse to applaud, and to actively “walk out the theater” before waiting for the credits to roll. Though the poem is gripping, it holds no one captive, and the challenge to the audience to act on their ability to effect change is powerfully posed, yet subtly drawn, throughout the performance.
In addition to Ramirez’s interaction with the audience throughout the poem, he also carefully outlines the role of the “they” who are necessary to complete this metaphorical film. Like DuVernay, Ramirez does not shy away from detailing how he has been prepared for this role by those in power, who see the casket as the inevitable conclusion to his Black boyhood. Ramirez begins the indictment by declaring, “Time of death: when white America opened my auction-block mouth / poured ‘nigger’ down my throat and it became the only language I knew. / Poison so thick you could call it an accent,” thereby invoking the historical context for his contemporary reality and further clarifying the continuity between the circumstances outlined by this poem and the analysis of Hartman and Cobb. Highlighting the “auction-block” and addressing how “a ruined Black boy … be what prisons fill their wallets with,” Ramirez then directly addresses the cop who “told me to get on the ground / Told me to say my lines / with his gun / in my mouth” and then violated the sacredness of his “sometimes church body” with a hail of bullets that ended his life. While the murder leaves Ramirez still trying to prove that he looks the part and is therefore deserving of the role, it is apparently with great ease that the cop (one of many) “made it to the big screen / with their hands too full / of fund-raised retirement money / to carry any kind of accountability.” Ramirez indicts not only the police officer, but also the greater public who funded the officer’s retirement and refused to hold them accountable for the crime of taking the Black boy’s life. The officer is elevated to celebrity status, occupying the privileged space of the “big screen” in full view of an audience that not only accepts the officer’s actions, but approves of them. Meanwhile, Ramirez notes “all the names of the taken from us too soon” scroll on the screen, “ascending into some rushed and forgotten heaven.”
In the midst of a narrative of police brutality—facilitated at turns by public approbation, antipathy, and apathy—Ramirez carefully constructs an emotionally resonant sense of family and community throughout the poem. From the opening lines, wherein he asks, “did my silence break the small mother in your chest?,” to the portraits drawn of his mother “at the hospital / trying to squeeze the rhythm back into my chest” and later “in the courtroom / wailing her way into a settlement of / ‘I was only doing my job’ / and a check to pacify her raging blood,” Ramirez evokes the very same theme of violated motherhood—and, indeed, parenthood—that we see in DuVernay’s film and in the response of parents who were so affected by its visualization of Black trauma. Ramirez moves beyond the description of the mothers’ grief to insist that the audience recognize the transformation of the officer’s bullets into “these seeds police planted to make me a field of blooming things / like activist and protest and hashtags” and that they refuse to allow a settlement check to be the only comfort for mothers in mourning. Rather, Ramirez directs the audience to “take what flowers grow from me. / Make a bouquet for my mother. / For all mothers / who lose children / and are left with shovels / to bury / what they thought would be / the rest of their lives.” This visual, completed by Ramirez’s performed act of shoveling dirt, creates a possibility for mothers to be comforted by more than payments resentfully distributed by the state. Rather, communally collected flowers, reaped from the blooming things created in the wake of their children’s deaths, suggest the possibility of symbols of new life in the aftermath of trauma. Ironically, however, the plucking of those things for the creation of bouquets suggest a renewed finality and a cycle of death that can only be ended if the audience refuses the casting and denies the film’s creation in the first place.
The never-ending cycle that Ramirez engages through his use of the film metaphor is similarly addressed by Danez Smith, a Black, genderqueer, HIV-positive poet, who regularly explores Black trauma in their work, but is deliberate in also exploring themes of joy, love, faith, sex, and humor, among many others. Smith is also a poet who has established themselves, to an even greater extent than Ramirez, through performance and poetry slams as well as multiple publications in various online and print venues, including debut poetry collection [insert] boy, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for poetry, as well as their second collection, National Book Award finalist Don’t Call Us Dead. In addition to these full-length collections, Smith also produced a chapbook of poetry in 2015, titled Black Movie, which explicitly takes on film and film-making as its central motifs.
Smith’s Black Movie thoughtfully employs film as a backdrop to a poetic dialogue regarding Blackness in the twenty-first century, focusing on trauma and death while also exploring dimensions of family, community, and daily ritual that construct a cultural context for contemporary Blackness. As described by Mary Austin Speaker in one of the many reviews for the collection, “Danez Smith’s Black Movie is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America,” explaining that “the book takes an unflinching look at how Black Americans have been portrayed in film, and in doing so posits, initially, film as the ultimate myth-making tool of our era.” [xxii]While Speaker’s review is indicative of much of the positive critical response received by the collection, Smith’s own articulation of their motivations is particularly illuminating as well. In a 2018 interview published in The White Review, Smith described the collection as,
a catalogue of how I was feeling at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. I think of Black Lives Matter as being not only a direct result of police violence but of how black death became an obsession in American mass media. It wasn’t that we hadn’t been being killed or weren’t dying or that police violence had lessened in the years prior, but rather American media decided to turn its attention to police brutality once again in 2013 and 2014. So I really just wanted to capture that moment and what it was like to feel that black death was inescapable both on the TV, via social media, and all these ways in which we were being bombarded by images of black death, while also capturing the depressingness of how that was calling toward a kind of justice that we’d been waiting for for a long time. Because while cases like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown felt very harsh, in our mindset if you are Black American you knew that those stories were not new and that they had been happening since forever. [xxiii]
Smith evokes the sense of historical continuity that pulses through DuVernay and Ramirez’s work while also speaking to the importance of the persistent prominence of images captured on film that gave both the moment, and the collection, its sense of immediacy as well as historical rootedness.
Smith’s description of the inspiration for the collection’s film motif explicitly addresses the challenge inherent in Black artists’ effort to engage with narratives of trauma. Smith explains that, “for any author to be able to delve into depressing or hard topics you need something, and so this idea of films, these sort of mini-movies, this idea of image-making, was a tether that I used to help myself buoy into the work.” [xxiv]More than a “gimmick,” Smith’s use of film allows them an opportunity to explore themes of Black death and pain without making those the central organizing principle of the work. As they explain in another interview, published in The Fourth River in 2017, “we’re always dying or working against dying or in some state of chaos or mourning and violence. Or we’re hyper-sexualized, and dying. Or we’re hyper-athleticisized, and dying. Or hyper-whatever-you-want, and dying. Always dying. Black Movie is attempting to subvert that and engage that too.” [xxv]The effort to both subvert the emphasis on death and trauma, and engage with it, not only fuels the work of Black Movie, but the work of DuVernay, Ramirez, and a bevy of other Black artists as well.
Within Smith’s collection, the poet employs film to varying effect, considering the dimensions of Black life that range from the humorous to the macabre. The collection’s opening poem, “Sleeping Beauty in the Hood,” is one of several that revisit and reimagine fairy tales and children’s stories, yet this poem sets the tone for the collection by directly asking the reader: “You mad? This ain’t no kid flick. There is no magic here.” [xvi]This repeats through additional poems such as “Lion King in the Hood,” which opens with a casting list that recalls Ramirez’s audition exercise, announcing, “Simba played by the first boy you know who died too young,” [xvii]then details opening credits where the film is “brought to you on a tree branch heavy with a tree-colored man,” [xviii] and describes a “Montage: Timon & Pumbaa teach Simba a music other than the blues,” wherein the characters are seen in a series of clips: “clip 1: the boy getting older in spite of everything … clip 10: shot of the boys laughing anyway / clip 11: shot of the boys laughing in the sun / clip 12: shot of the boys laughing in the rain / clip 13: shot of them not being shot.” [xxix]The collection also includes the treatment for films such as “A History of Violence in the Hood,” which “could be a documentary or could be someone’s art school thesis.” [xxx] Smith includes work such as “Short Film,” which refuses to be mired in elegy for such fallen figures as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Renisha McBride, and “Notes for a Film on Black Joy,” which presents vignettes preserved in memory, reflecting on pivotal moments in the poet’s own sexual awakening alongside images of their family, with their mother dancing along when their “auntie ‘nem done finished the wine & put on that Ohio players or whatever album makes them feel blackest” and celebrates their grandmother’s freezer full of food by claiming, “glory be the woman with enough meat to let the world starve but not her family.” [xxxi] For the purposes of this discussion, however, I am most interested in the collection’s concluding poem, “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” which has been recorded in performance on multiple occasions, with film recordings totaling nearly 150,000 views on YouTube:
Danez Smith, “Dinosaurs in the Hood”
As a closing poem, following the various re-castings and re-imaginings of already existing films referenced in the collection, Smith’s “Dinosaurs in the Hood” is distinguished as an ultimate creative act. Not only can this film be completed without another “original” script as its guide, but it is also fueled by the freedom of fantasy, rather than the historical record that serves as the source material for filmmakers like DuVernay. Moreover, from its opening call, “Let’s make a movie,” [xxxii]Smith invites their audience to join in a process whereby the poet and the audience share in complete creative control, unlike the film-already-in-progress for which Ramirez’s Black boy auditions. Here, Smith appeals to no higher authority for decisions about casting or direction, but presents the treatment for a film culled entirely from their own imagination, with only disparate action, comedy, and drama films as its potential inspiration.
Smith engages in a playful spirit throughout the “pitch” for this film, presenting scenarios that range from the hilarious to the profound but never veer into the mainstream or the stereotypical. Each of the standard tropes of action films is skewered and replaced with radical articulations of what a film of this magnitude could possibly be, as Smith describes “a scene where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl,” scenes with “grandmas on the front porch taking out / raptors with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses,” and wanting “Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick through the last dinosaur’s long, cold-blood neck.” [xxxiii]Smith is purposeful in not only the scenarios that they suggest, but also those that get refused, clarifying that this film is not to be manipulated to serve the purposes of the Wayans Brothers, Will Smith, or Sofia Vergara, but that it is, by design, a celebration of “a neighborhood of royal folks – / children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exiles saving their town from real ass Dinosaurs.” [xxxiv]Yet, it is in the poet’s declaration about trauma that the poem, and the filmed performance, speak most powerfully to this discussion and the concerns addressed by artists such as DuVernay and Ramirez. As Smith explains:
. . . But this can’t be a black movie. This can’t be a
black movie. This movie can’t be dismissed because of its cast
or its audience. This movie can’t be a metaphor for black people
& extinction. This movie can’t be about race. This movie can’t be
about black pain or cause black people pain. This movie
can’t be about a long history of having a long history with hurt. [xxxv]
Making a deliberate choice not to center Black trauma and pain, and the history of that pain, Smith does not neglect historical context. Rather, by invoking the presence of extinct dinosaurs within the modern-day neighborhood they describe, history and historical-contemporary continuity permeates the entire poem and is certainly a critical element of the proposed film. Yet, in Smith’s presentation of that history, they draw focus to the battle with a historical threat rather than the damage done by that threat, which reframes how the audience is prepared to view the Black subjects, whose all-encompassing battle drives the imagined film’s plot.
Smith draws this powerfully with an emphasis on a little boy, the focus of the film’s proposed opening scene. Smith describes “a scene where a little black boy is playing / with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window / & sees the T‑Rex.” [xvi]Rejecting the influence of a director like Quentin Tarantino, who has famously employed Black actors in films that problematically engage with race, Smith makes clear that the boy’s playtime is not to be corrupted by any white director’s effort to make some larger statement about the precarity of Black boys’ lives and their own accountability in it. Rather, Smith reinforces the image of the boy playing with “a plastic brontosaurus or triceratops” which functions as “his proof of magic or God or Santa.” [xxxvii]Returning to this scene in the poem’s closing, Smith reiterates its importance, declaring with full authority that there be “no bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy, / & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy,” claiming that “the only reason I want to make this is for that first scene anyway.” [xviii]As poet Lauren Alleyne asserts, much of the power of this poem is held in the fact that “Danez is not asking for a world without the threat. The dinosaurs are still there, and they’re scary. But the threat is not specifically to the boy, and it’s not because he’s Black.” [xxxix]Indeed, though the dinosaurs of the poem are certainly larger-than-life, they are secondary to the narrative that Smith is most concerned with telling. The point of their inclusion is not to focus on the damage that they cause or the trauma left in their wake. Rather, Smith emphasizes the boy’s imagination-fueled playtime, the fullness of which is disrupted by a looming threat that ultimately represents a confirmation and expansion of what the boy had previously believed to be possible. Despite the audience’s impulse to fear for the boy, Smith reminds us that this is not “the foreshadow to his end” and instead encourages us to focus on “his eyes wide & endless / his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.” [xl] In this moment, Black boyhood innocence is not set up to be eventually shattered, but instead remains the central focus and therefore the most important scene in the film.
Smith, throughout “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” offers unfettered possibility for the creation of a film that might also suggest unrestrained possibilities for its subjects, namely the young boy whose wonderment serves as the film’s primary inspiration. Smith does not avoid the complicated questions surrounding audience, history, or the trauma captured in the process of Black image-making. Rather, they provide their audience with potential scenes of Blackness, captured on film, that incorporate all of these concerns while moving beyond them, presenting a community of Black people whose lives are impacted by their circumstances but not ultimately defined by them. Smith’s performance, particularly when viewed alongside the work of Ava DuVernay and Gabriel Ramirez, offers viewers an opportunity to consider how they might actively participate in Black image-making, simply by accepting the poem’s initial invitation to “make a movie” and join in the creative process.
While Smith’s invitation is explicit, DuVernay and Ramirez likewise extend invitations for their audiences to contend with pain and trauma and to recognize the liberating power of embracing visual texts that refuse to be mired in it. Collectively, these artists encourage audiences to consider the potentiality of active resistance through creative effort and to recognize the power of both producers and consumers, not simply to reject images of trauma but to confront the processes which incite that trauma in the first place. Fully recognizing the “long history of having a long history with hurt” requires neither artists nor audiences to make the work be about that long history. Rather, these works create possibilities for other narratives to emerge, wherein Blackness is articulated in greater and more nuanced dimension by Black artists who no longer seek to play roles crafted by a historical narrative that never envisioned they might write their own scripts and who refuse to subscribe to the limited images made available for when they were allowed to be seen.
[i]Jacqueline N. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (U of California Press, 2005), 23. [ii]Anita Bennett, “‘When They See Us’ Watched by More Than 23 Million Netflix Accounts Worldwide,” Deadline (25 June 2019). [iii]Sasha Lekach, “Crisis Counselors Were on Set for ‘When They See Us’ Cast and Crew,” Mashable (1 June 2019). [iv]Ida Harris, “Watching ‘When They See Us’ Is an Act of Social Justice,” Black Enterprise (20 June 2019). [v]Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, “‘When They See Us’ Is Triggering. That’s Why You Should Watch It,” YES! Magazine (5 June 2019). [vi]KC Ifeanyi, “Opting Out of Black Trauma: Why I Couldn’t Finish When They See Us,” Fast Company (31 May 2019). [vii]Eisa Nefertari Ulen, “Why I Can’t Bring Myself to Watch ‘When They See Us,’” Truthout (12 June 2019). [viii]Ibid. [ix]Ibid. [x]Ibid. [xi]Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1997), 3–4. [xii]Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in The Early 19th Century (NYU Press, 2015), 31. [xiii]Cobb, 34. [xiv]Jackie Strause, “Ava DuVernay’s ‘Central Park Five’ Netflix Limited Series Gets New Title, Premiere Date,” The Hollywood Reporter (1 March 2019). [xv]Nadja Sayej, “From ‘Claws’ to ‘When They See Us,’ Niecy Nash Won’t Stay in Her Lane,” Shondaland (31 May 2019). (emphasis added) [xvi]Cobb, 41. [xvii]When They See Us, Episode 2. [xviii]Cobb, 42. [xix]Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young, “Black Lives, SilverScreen: Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young in Conversation,” Aperture (Summer 2016), 37. [xx]Gabriel Ramirez, “About.” [xxi]“Poet Gabriel Ramirez,” Neon Entertainment. [xxii]Mary Austin Speaker, “Black Movie,” Rain Taxi (Summer 2016). [xxiii]Sandeep Parmar, “Interview with Danez Smith,” The White Review (June 2018). [xxiv]Ibid. [xxv]Cedric Rudolph, “Interview with Danez Smith,” The Fourth River (31 October 2017). [xxvi]Danez Smith, Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2015), 3. [xxvii]Smith, 10. [xxviii]Smith, 11. [xxix]Smith, 10–16. [xxx]Smith, 6. [xxxi]Smith, 36–37. [xxxii]Smith, 39. [xxxiii]Ibid. [xxxiv]Ibid. [xxxv]Ibid. [xxxvi]Ibid. [xxxvii]Ibid. [xviii]Smith, 40. [xxxix]Lauren Alleyne, Personal Interview (21 August 2019). [xl]Smith, 40.
Works Cited
Alleyne, Lauren. Personal Interview. 21 August 2019.
Cobb, Jasmine N. Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century. NYU Press, 2015.
DuVernay, Ava, and Bradford Young. “Black Lives, SilverScreen: Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young in Conversation.” Aperture,No. 223, Summer 2016, 34–41.
When They See Us. Directed by Ava DuVernay, Netflix, 2019.
McKinley E. Melton, Associate Professor of English at Gettysburg College, earned his doctorate from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. With the support of an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, he is the 2019/20 Scholar-in-Residence at James Madison University’s Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry, which is dedicated to the visibility, inclusion, and critical consideration of Black poets in American letters. Dr. Melton’s work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Africana literatures, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between literary, social, cultural, and political movements toward social justice. His current project, “Claiming All the World as Our Stage: Contemporary Black Poetry, Performance, and Resistance,” explores spoken word poetry within Black diasporan traditions of orality and performance.
the first time I get double-bass beats it’s two hours the nurses take my pressure tell me don’t stand wheel me in a chair to a bed Mom cowers in the corner by the crash cart they tear off my clothes attach leads ready a 16-gauge needle the doctor says this isn’t going to feel good a feeling floods my right arm my body seizes I sit up they push me back on the bed they do it again my beats relax the EMT says that works 9 times out of 10 and the other time I ask
if I keep count I could control this expensive somersault phantom several false starts no money for follow-up is it fatal or just a condition without coverage I develop distractions codependence on the strength of strings learn to sing at house shows with shitty PAs strain against the squall for years no one can hear me just the Boys on guitar bass and drums turn my back to the crowd when I sing over stimulated vagus I can’t stop performing wish for some assurance I’m going to make it
Los Angeles seeped into my bloodlines when Dad stick-and-poked Mom a fleur-de-lis on her ankle while watching Decline of Western Civ Vol. 1 twenty years later I move to the city in an ancient Buick I dream to be Jeffrey Lee Sable Starr a sea bird over light-dotted hills the Observatory’s formal white gown feel for my pulse during sound check the Boys ask me what language are my lyrics Persephone I say Eurydice rock myself to sleep in double-time cross my heart hope to know which feeling I’m faking
BEQUIETMT. HEARTATTACK!
I stop taking off my hospital bracelet I don’t have insurance so I can’t afford to know why I have some ideas but the Boys keep saying “you’re fine you’re fine” swatting my fingers from the right side of my neck me swallowing blues to keep myself at bay am I still their Wendy Bird they were there all the times they stopped my heart maybe the reason for it too I pingpong the aisles at the Last Bookstore wait for the calm to kick in search out every iteration of sunset
on stage singing grief for each of my past selves in a room sparse with solitary men most nights I dull my pounding with tequila rocks lime another round with the Boys and the Gretsch never get paid to play drag myself home on unlit side streets past boxtop shrines stuffed with sweets and sticky rice in a dream I carry one of the Boys on my back through the Hollywood Farmers’ Market I buy peonies and small cabbages this is this not a dream this is
I gather the handwritten receipts from the mechanic they make a $3000 pile still my Buick bucks stalls it has no AC or heat no defrost have to roll down the windows in a storm the armrest gets streaked with grime drive out to Altadena for a job get $10/hr to survey places people want to film I size up other drivers wonder how they afford it I want my ass sliding on leather interior I want to see the inside of a stranger’s house wonder whether I’ll ever move
DRUMGETS A GLIMPSE
when I’m not onstage I get a job selling things I can’t understand to people I never see I finally go to the doctor he says I’m fine I just have anxiety need to eat more fiber he gives me a non-refillable prescription for Ativan and suppositories tells me buy Metamucil drink that every day I get regular lose a lot of memories start to need a bigger audience almost fight the bouncer after karaoke at the Blue Goose put the tinsel Xmas tree up with no gifts underneath
my boss is a Scorp/Sag cusp he wears tennis shoes nice jeans floral dress shirt top two buttons undone at the Xmas party he puts his hand btwn my legs when he bends down to kiss me hello brings me into his office for my 3‑month- review says he wants to give me a raise thinks I’m smart but not showing it seems like I don’t care I make hourly as much as his maids he tells me they’re stupid always putting things in the wrong place he tells me earn my raise
Tuesday afternoon I have a panic attack at an impromptu audition for a reality series that’s shooting upstairs from my office they like me for the part of Expert on a show about aliens visiting Earth I take a Valium walk around the block go to urgent care the nurse slaps adhesive electrodes to my chest unshaven shins she won’t give me Xanax she says I need a cardiologist when I tell her about the first time how they had to stop my heart
LET’S NOTWRESTLEMT. HEARTATTACK
it’s a catheter-based procedure they’ll make a slit in my leg thread a wire up my vein into my heart they’ll jack up my heart rate until the bad rhythm kicks in they’ll burn those pathways closed I’ll be sedated not asleep I’ll go home the same day never think about it again there are risks perforation stroke I lose my insurance in a week I say how soon can we do it how about in three days the doctor says I shake her hand and ask for one day off work
my first surgery is the day before Thanksgiving I don’t want Mom or Dad to come but they do in pre-op two nurses dryshave my groin joke about filming me talking candid in twilight sleep Dad gets ramen downtown after I’m fine everyone leaves I stain the hospital bed with blood the nurse changes my tampon I go home the same day the next day the Boys come over we drink Wild Turkey and I cook everyone proper dinner with pressure dressing
I can’t leave the city bc my Buick shuts off at every stoplight the record label with interest wants more demos I’m going to write a song a day so far I haven’t written one in months the only constants are always late with rent for the practice space phone bill groceries and fights I don’t remember picking up the Gretsch dampen its strings when someone walks by the Buick catches fire on the 5 the mechanic cuts out the catalytic converter puts in a pipe I keep driving
TOHOLDYOU, DRUM
on my lunch break I talk to the head of the label he has me on speakerphone sitting on a marble memorial bench in Hollywood Forever pretending I can understand everything he says he has to say something to me he doesn’t want to be the stereotypical record label guy but he can’t pronounce all of our song names he loves frontwomen female drummers we talk for 36 minutes he says he will be out in LA later this month we should meet for coffee I wonder if he doesn’t drink
I can’t stop thinking about my heart my windowless office I get an hour off work to see a social worker at Kaiser she says I had no guidance I’ve been drinking that much since I was 16 I should stop playing music it seems too stressful go back to grad school get into debt like everyone else she doesn’t know what I can do with a degree in history I pick a handful of night jasmine on my walk home the only things I think about more than my heart are money the dying car how I don’t feel
the farthest I can run in the city is Teardrop Park where the view is El Chubasco Chinatown and a city disguised my body buzzes badly with want my heart leans out of tempo sometimes it’s inhalation sets it off sometimes the weather not enough water sometimes too much food not enough sometimes it’s being in bed with someone being in bed alone it’s extra beats an electrical problem not something I control what’s the chorus again
YOU, DRUM
on Lou Reed’s birthday I watch porn on my phone in the bathroom before dinner with the Boys we bring our own booze I start to cry about Caetano Veloso in exile singing in English I walk home a man jerks off in a bush outside the corner liquor store eyes rolled back furious pumping I pass Jumbo’s where we went with the Boys for my 21st birthday me sitting close to the stage them sitting against the wall in the shadows beckoning me with dollar bills to give to the girls
Tuesdays are band practice Wednesdays are all night happy hour the bartendress with huge eyes and French braids makes me at least three tequila sodas I think about her naked sit outside on year-round-bougainvillea-shaded patio papier-mâché petals spiked vines I dim the lights in the bar’s pink bathroom take a picture of myself wish for someone to send it to walk home under graying skies one of the men outside 7–11 calls to me hey sloppy girlasks me for a blowjob
I need another surgery it’s forty-thousand dollars but it’s covered if I keep my job Mom comes and Gramma but Dad already had tickets to see John Doe only Mom has a panic attack on my futon so I drive us to Kaiser across the street from the big blue church that took all of Gramma’s money she holds my hand the nurses mistake her for my mom and me for 19 I’m awake again during the doctor says he found the problem he says my heart tricked them last time
IT’S ALLBLOOMINGNOWMT. HEARTATTACK
sometimes I think I like Los Angeles I go downtown to see Television with the Boys walk through a heist scene that doesn’t stop rolling Tom Verlaine gestures to Venus in the western sky I’m in love with all my friends climax in the shower to Roy Orbison falling I’m falling falling in love with heartbeat throb dream one of the Boys has me in public press the wooden spoon handle against myself in my galley kitchen while the rice cooks on the stove
the label doesn’t want to sign us I get weepy at the bar with the Boys I let down my love for the city but I only know one kind it’s killing me sometimes I feel very sad I tell the Boys that the same session band played on every American pop hit of the ’60s no one knows their names I start to lose momentum trust practice sincerity in the bathroom mirror ask for my memories back erased or otherwise find myself among scattered palm fronds and street roaches on the edge of Santa Monica
the doctor says another surgery would risk perforation my heart has two pacemakers sometimes the false one gets the rhythm the real one gets a break after I leave the city I can’t stop dancing at the least appropriate times I come back to the city but don’t make it past Mulholland I stand on a borrowed balcony over behind-the-scenes streets without sidewalks so close to all my landmarks I can taste lemongrass tripas and tarna can see my beating the score is swelling
THEOTHERSIDEOFMT. HEARTATTACK
there is no way to see a city I can’t be anymore at the junction of thickly-traveled boulevards a city invariably comes into existence I dream washing machine amps rubbery guitar strings mics with no input I let myself go slack the tempo evens out I wear the skinniest tuxedo I can find put on lipstick in the hospital bed I allow a place to tame me a heavy quiet settles around me I don’t know what to do with it don’t know how to allow myself this pace worry where will my voice be if not a stage
CONSIDER!
DIFFERENT!
FADING!
SYSTEMS!
grief for me for the part on a dream for somersault phantom sparse with sweets and drums CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! turn my past selves into a chair into a bed they tear off my past selves in a dream I can’t stop drinking that’s shooting upstairs from my Tuesday afternoon I have a panic attach leads reality series that’s shooting in my heart CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! are risks perforation stroke I lose pathways clothes attack to grad school get into debt like Xanax CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! closed I’ll burn those pathways I’ll be sedated I’ll go home the stereotypical record label against my body seizes my beats relax the label has me for one of the Boys on my back CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! he doesn’t want to be again in Hollywood Forever pretending he loves from my body CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! when I sit up they tear off my time I tell her hand and ask for a condition with sweets stuffed with the Boys most nights CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! my clothes attack at an impromptu audition stroke I lose my insurance and they do it can we do it how about they do it CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! fatal or just the Boys on my lunch break I think to my unshaven shitty codependence on the bed I’ve been drinking about aliens visiting Earth I think about LA later another handful go back stressful go back through the Hollywood Farmers’ Market for years no one can say how soon can we be the Gretsch never time how soon can we talk to grad school get double-bass beats ready a 16-gauge needle they’ll make me a slit in a week I say CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! some assurance I’ve been drinking never anything never false stage singing grief CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! never false stage singing grief CONSIDER! DIFFERENT! FADING! SYSTEMS! never false stage singing grief never false stage singing grief never false stage singing grief never false never false never false oh you drum oh you drum my drum my drum my drum
acknowledgments
this contains lyrics/references from the following: Drum’s Not Dead – the Liars ““Falling”” – Roy Orbison ““I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”” – the Beach Boys ““The Strength of Strings”” – Gene Clark Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies card deck
From the writer
:: Account ::
Between 2010 and the present, I’ve lived with an arrythmia called AV-Nodal Reentrant Tachycardia, caused by a congenital heart issue. I’ve had spotty health insurance, multiple doctors, and two surgeries.
Throughout this time, I was the lead singer of a band in Los Angeles. I worked a shitty 9–5, while practicing, recording, and playing shows regularly. I drank a lot. I was in a fiercely codependent, mutually destructive relationship with the guitar player in the band.
Most of this piece comes from diary entries I made on my lunch breaks in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery which was right down the street from where I worked. Soon after the guitar player and I broke up and I moved out of Los Angeles, he made me a playlist based on our relationship. The last song on it was the Liars’ “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack,” from their 2006 album, Drum’s Not Dead. We had a poster from the album hanging in our East Hollywood apartment, but I hadn’t revisited the album in years. When I write, I tend to listen to a single song on repeat for hours, inducing a kind of time-transcending trance state, which is what I did with this song/piece.
After finishing it, I found that the concerns of this piece were very much in conversation with the album. As the band said at the album’s release, it explores the tension between two fictional characters, Drum, “assertive and productive, the spirit of creative confidence,” and Mount Heart Attack, ” the embodiment of stress and self-doubt.” The connection seemed obvious. Even on a literal level—my body has two pacemakers; the album has two drum kits.
I’ve struggled with the correct form for this content. It ends up somewhere between a lyric essay and a narrative long poem. It’s both a love letter and a break-up letter to my favorite city. It’s an attempt to recount and reconcile one of the most dark/difficult and also fun/exciting times in my life.
Tasia Trevino is a writer and musician from California’s Central Coast. Her poems have/will appear(ed) in Fence, Prelude, Yalobusha Review, Dream Pop Press, and Poets.org. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was awarded two Maytag Fellowships and the 2018 Academy of American Poets’ Prize. More at tasiatrevino.com.
Strange what you remember. When I think of my mother the first thing I think of is her feet, her flat duck feet, with their bunions and calluses and size-whatever complaints; with their deep bottom crisscross lines, like dry rivers, lining every which way, as if to tell her fortune. Not that her feet were immediately-looking odd or outsized, only that in her youth she’d tried, like a Cinderella sister, to squeeze them into shoes that didn’t fit, shoes on sale or that had some special claim to beauty. At least this was her story. It was the Depression, she’d say, as if poverty had anything to do with it, which, as I imagine the subtlety of poverty, its depravations and denials, may be partly true.
As she got older her feet took on further distortion—they didn’t seem to belong to the nice legs and mother body above them. They’d sometimes look attached, from another time, peasant feet, field-worker from a painting. I’m probably exaggerating, but they seemed, at times, to trod rather than simply walk the ground. And it’s not as if she didn’t try to correct the disparity, so that the different thing is the degree to which she cared for them: the salt baths, the medicinal creams, the delicate foot files, the inserts to shoes, the high heels relieved with flats.
At home, cooking, doing laundry or housework, she wore slippers that fit like old gloves, which is to say she might as well have been barefoot, except for the fact that the slipper tended to slap the floor while her feet on their own were silent. Once a week she saw what she called her foot doctor, Dr. Schucutt—Shoe-Cut, I called him. I met him once, waiting in the waiting room. He was small and bent a bit—from bending over to perform his examinations, I thought, like a shoe salesman or a cobbler. My mother looked forward to these visits, both because they gave her some relief and because—now that I think about it—they were sensual experiences: the little surgeries, the hand-handling, the ministering of medicines, the mere intimate attentions, the feet as something utterly personal.
I have my mother’s feet, pancake feet. Our feet, after all, are the platforms of our being and the first parts of our bodies the ancients paid caring and public attention to, especially in welcoming visitors. Think of the thousands of years and the millions of miles that our feet have carried us on the footpaths and across the thresholds. No wonder we’ve anointed them with oil and blessed their travel, though it’s unlikely that my mother, on her best day, could have covered a walking mile.
Yet those feet were the most human part of her, the most vulnerable and reassuring. As a small child I loved touching them, particularly the calluses, which were, in imagination, like Grandpappy Lyn’s wen—ugly, otherworldly, magical. I think there were moments when she too loved those feet, loved them the way we come to accept our flaws as essential to our identities. I once compared the warmth and character of my mother’s feet to a “bricklayer’s hands,” and those hands, I realize now, are my father’s hands.
*
That’s the part of his body I remember most, those large hard hands, that could squeeze the juice from an apple. In his prime, my father was six feet, weighed 200 or so pounds, and had a thirty-two-inch waist. He had a laborer’s hands, almost as callused as my mother’s feet. To watch him with an axe or hammer, the way his right hand swallowed the handle, was to be impressed. To watch him lift a tray of bricks and carry it up a ladder or hold a shovel or move an anvil cradled between his arms, his hands in fists…
When he stopped working in the woods he turned to welding, mostly because by then we’d left Virginia for Ohio, and left nature for industry, though the farmer in him never left him. Perhaps he saw some artistry in drawing a seam of soft hot metal in order to heal a rift. He looked ominous in the welder’s mask, though at both French Oil and Dupps he was soon promoted out of the welder’s chair and mask to foreman.
Some of my happiest times with him were helping him build our half-built house and watching him use those hands. For him it was an after-work and weekend job, for me an after-school fantasy. I was nine. He had two workmen from work to fill out with the extras, cheap labor for the least skilled of the digging of foundations and measuring off of rooms and mixing hod and generally holding things together. I sort of carried bits and pieces and stayed out of the way and played the spy. The three of them poured the concrete floors, but it was my father who laid the brick and leveled its flat-face surfaces and angles, sometimes better than other times.
It was my father who shaped the shape of the roof, his big raw hands handling the two-by-sixes as if they were mere lumber, which, of course they were—the helper workmen at each end of the longer pieces, just like those years ago in the woods. We were always working against the clock, which is to say the weather, since our work hours were always up against sunset and the rain and, finally, the snow. The first year the house was enough of a shell we could work inside on walls and windows and doors, none of which seemed quite right, as if my father’s hands lacked the subtlety of the square.
The thing is that my father was a sober house-builder, then a drunk after dark, when he would disappear—as far as I knew—until the next morning, usually late for his regular foreman’s job. He finally lost his position at French Oil for being late at least a hundred too many times, but by then we’d pretty well closed on finishing our half-finished house.
It sat in the countryside on Garbry Road just outside Piqua, Ohio, practically in the middle of a cornfield. It ultimately turned out to be a small farmhouse, with an added small barn and a couple of outbuildings. When I’d come back summer from college I’d find different additions and combinations of domesticity that might include a couple of useless horses, a donkey, chickens, a half-dozen white-faced Herefords, a pen of youngish pigs, whatever. My father always wept sending off the cattle to slaughter. And he seemed just as close to tears each evening talking to his pigs, whom he petted on their pink heads with great care with his great hands.
From the writer
:: Account ::
by David Baker
“Extremities” is a remarkable piece of prose, of remembrance, in the manner of a compressed memoir. It will appear in Stanley Plumly’s posthumous volume, Middle Distance, in August of 2020 (W.W. Norton), and is one of four such prose works in this book of lyric poetry and richness. The present account is a little unusual, since Stan isn’t writing it. I am working with Michael Collier, as we assist Margaret Plumly with Stan’s literary matters, and I am honored to have this chance to say a word about “Extremities.”
What I can account for here, indeed, is the beauty and lapidary precision of the piece. Much like Stan’s poems, this work is sharply focused in its representation of detail—for his mother, her feet; for his father, his hands. Synecdoche is the portrait painter’s not-so-secret secret: let a part speak or stand, as it were, for the personality of the whole person. So here is his mother, standing on her own two feet, standing up to work, standing firm as caretaker for the family. Stan’s early poem from Summer Celestial, “My Mother’s Feet,” is a beautiful family forebear to this half of “Extremities,” which is about love and pain and the easing of pain for the ones we love.
Notice how deftly the metaphor of his mother’s feet, “like a bricklayer’s hands” in that earlier poem, becomes a link to his father, who was indeed at times a bricklayer—and a woodturner, lumberman, welder, and (like Whitman) a housebuilder. He had hard hands, Stan says, hands hardened by so much work but capable of affection, petting the pink heads of those pigs.
A homemaker and a housebuilder, his mother and father, both makers. And they were both dear to Stan, as the tenderness and precision of this piece attests. Memory is what we carry forward of the facts of our lives. It seems to select us as much as we select what to recall, and in “Extremities” Stan creates—as well as recreates—an indelible double portrait of his parents. He is still their dutiful son, two of whose duties have been rapt attention and unmatched stylistic skill. Makers must run in that family.
Stanley Plumly published 10 highly influential books of poetry during his lifetime, as well as four important works of prose on the Romantic poets and painters. His posthumous collection of new poetry and lyric prose, Middle Distance, will appear in August 2020 from W. W. Norton. He was Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland at the time of his death in April 2019.
And it was always our season of peril: Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.
—Janet Frame, Faces in the Water
“Mamma, how was I born?” My four-year-old son asks. He leans against me, one hand around my arm, another on his die-cast Volkswagen Beetle. I put down the bedtime book and glean my mind—recall my son as a squalling bundle, his fists blue-gray as storm clouds.
“You were so small that I felt like I wasn’t holding anything at all,” I began. “When I saw you, I knew that I loved you.” My son giggles, buries his dark head in my lap.
“Keep on reading, beautiful Mamma,” he says, turning the page.
That night, I dream of giving birth to my son. I’m walking in an open field and I’m struck by lightning. Our hearts course with current and he comes surging out of me, singed with fire.
While in the maternity ward, I was entangled in mind-numbing depression. I barely ate and spoke. When I opened my mouth, garbled weeping poured out. I lay paralyzed in the hospital bed, my mind swarming with darkness. Shadows eased tendrils over bedsheets. Blackened iris roots clawed upwards from the linoleum tile.
With the psychiatric medications, the images of the woman swaying from a doorframe and the devoured infant faded into shadowy lattices, then into vapor. Finally, I could hold my son, marvel at his lightness, the arch of his back, his milk-scented cheeks. As he drew draught after draught from the bottle, I gazed down at him, he up at me. Sunlight hemmed us together, silence broken by morning chorus outside the bedroom window.
But now, three years later, the shadows are back again. They flutter around the edges of curtains like moths. While my husband sleeps, I look beyond the boundaries of the backyard, deep into the woods. Pines rake at the winter moon. The gate is unlatched and swings loosely on its hinges. Like a pale arm, it motions to the icy river.
At daybreak, my son rushes into my room and leaps into bed. “You need a hug,” he says. For months my body has been aching, pleading for rest. I drag myself from bed, stumble across the chilly floor. With leaden hands, I heap a bowl full of yogurt for my son. It’s been a week and a half since I’ve showered. I plow my hands through my hair and change my underwear and bra. “Stupid,” I tell the reflection in the mirror. Its feral eyes dart back and forth.
“I’m fine,” I tell my husband. Tears course down my face.
“No, you’re not,” my husband says. When he had returned home, the living room was littered with toys. My son had been watching television for hours. I was sprawled weeping on the bed.
My husband riffles through the pages of the Emergency Mental Health Plan that we’d created. “We have to do something,” he says. I look at my hands, slow spreading of creases, lightning ingrained in flesh—the flesh spiraling down into darkness. I dig into my palm with my nails.
In my dreams, my son is captured by a beast with a million tentacles. While I slash and scream, the beast squeezes tighter and tighter—my son bulges, blackens. He bursts into ash and is swept away by the wind. Weeping, I search for him, gather soot into my arms. I wake up screaming.
My husband, son, and I finally move in with my parents. We lock up our house and leave the front lights on. We pull out of the driveway. I look back. The house wavers, forest bristling with snow. The river stirs, ice grinds along its shale bank—fractured teeth in a black jaw.
Every morning after my husband leaves for work, my mother eases me out of bed. She coaxes me to pull on my left sock, then right. She shows me how to brush my hair and teeth. She places a cup of tea and a bowl of broth in front of me. “Sip,” she says. “Swallow,” she says. “Again,” she says. While my son bounds in the snow, she rocks me as I weep.
Even at my parents’ house, there are days when I can’t get out of bed. I listen to my mother clanging pots in the kitchen downstairs, to the pad-pad of my son’s feet up to my bedroom. “Tell me a story, Mamma,” my son says, hoisting himself up onto the bed. I can barely lift my head from the pillow. He cups his hands around my face, and gazes at me, waiting. I close my eyes again.
“The monsters have stolen my car. You won’t find it,” my son says. His face, pale and solemn. “These monsters have lots of legs. They can squeeze through pipes and go down into the basement.” We find the Volkswagen Beetle smudged and dented, wedged between air vent and desk. “See,” my son says, cradling his car, “they’re everywhere.”
Before tucking him into bed, I tell my son: “There’s a dark forest. In the center of it is a monster with many tentacles. It tries to eat a tree full of baby animals. When you hear the babies screaming, you run into the forest. You’re afraid, but you have a crystal sword. You plunge the sword into the monster’s eye, and it runs away—never to be seen again.”
Burrowing into the comforter, my son smiles. “Tell me another, Mamma,” he says.
One morning, I’m awakened by the tap-tap of ice thawing from the house’s eaves. My son bursts into my room. He wraps his small arms around my neck, nuzzles me. “Are you here forever, momma?” he asks. “Yes—forever,” I say. Light dislodges, glimmers through my body.
The wisteria has finally bloomed, nodding its golden head in time to song sparrows. As I wash and dry the dishes, my son plays near my feet with his Volkswagen Beetle. I tell my mother about the new poems I’ve written, the soup recipes I’d like to try, how my son has grown two inches. She smiles at me, sunlight glossing her graying hair, dark eyes. “It’s almost time for you to go home,” she says, embracing me.
When I come outside to garden the Saturday of my family’s return, my neighbor comes to greet me. “I haven’t seen any of you for four months,” he says. “I thought I would have to call the cops.” Despite my husband’s weekend attempts at lawn maintenance, our home stands in five inches of wild grass, the garden beds choked with weeds. While my son steers his cars in and out of the shriveled tulips, I stab the weeder into roots of dandelion. I fill four yard-waste bags and lug them to the curb.
At night, my wrists and back crackle with pain. I stand at the window again, stare deep into the woods. The moon shines down into the whorl of darkness, down to the river bed. The white stone path and gate pulse with fireflies. I slip into bed next to my husband. I kiss his stubbled cheeks until he rouses; then I take him into my arms.
I pile the shopping cart high with daylily, begonia, and peony bulbs. I’ve selected each one for their hearty blooms, generous foliage. Anything, I think, to keep the weeds from coming up again.
In the cool morning, I empty the bulb packages into dirt with my son. I show him how to plant each bulb upright, lightly cover them all with topsoil. When I unwrap the peony bulbs, my son breaks into giggles. “Look!” he says. “Monsters!” He kisses their gnarled, trailing roots. When we plant them, he sprinkles them with soil and pats them with his small hand.
“How are you doing?” my mother asks. Adjusting the phone, I watch my son run his Beetle over and around my lap. I run my fingers through his hair, making furrow after furrow. His sweet baby scent, giving way to the fragrance of earth and sweat—the wind distilling. “I’m fine,” I say.
I pause from weeding garden beds and look up into the tree line. The tips of pines hiss and crackle under a sheen of static—the garbled voices almost comprehensible. I plunge the trowel deeper, earthworms and pill bugs squirming up from cresting soil. Under my hand, the darkness pulses. Beside me, my son scoops earth into his tin pail, tracing the flower beds his hands. He pets the inky shoots, saying, “Listen—can you hear them sing?”
From the writer
:: Account ::
Before I wrote creative nonfiction, I was a poet. I decided to approach my experiences with illness through the lyric essay because the form allows me to create a sustained narrative. I use my training as a poet to hone tone, rhythm, and conciseness of language. Writing poetry has also helped me incorporate strong imagery in my creative nonfiction pieces like “Surge.”
“Surge” is part of a four-part series that explores my experiences in motherhood, mental illness, and electroconvulsive therapy. After giving birth to my son, I fell into a deep postpartum depression, which was compounded by my existing mental health issues. This essay describes a period of reprieve, when my depression improved. At the same time, “Surge” foreshadows my hospitalization and ECT treatments a few short months later.
In “Surge,” the monsters and earth play a vital role in describing the mother-child relationship. I rely on magical realism to create an environment where myth becomes truth, power, and healing. Readers are encouraged to take leaps in imagination, to fill those gaps with their own voices.
A Kundiman Fellow and Soaring Gardens Resident, Sayuri Ayers is a native of Columbus, Ohio. Her prose and poetry have appeared in Entropy, SWWIM, Hobart, The Pinch, and other literary journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press, 2016) and Mother/Wound (forthcoming from Full/Crescent Press). Her lyric essay manuscript, Beast-Mother, was a finalist in the Paper Nautilus’ 2019 Vella Chapbook Competition. She has also received grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and VSA Ohio. Please visit her at sayuriayers.com.
Claire tells you not to worry, she’d just been making tea. Sarah’s hair falls limply, just past her shoulders, like a sheet of cloth. Liv recites Mayakovsky in a chapel, scattering the night with each unsteady line. Claire sends pictures of her burned palms. Liv smirks at your wide-eyed reverence, says your favorite line compares the stars in the sky to flecks of spit. Sarah sits with arms unspooled, gaze pinned firmly on some distant place. She doesn’t squirm or look away when the teacher lobs a question at her, only shrugs, and that’s that. Sarah—oh, Sarah. You’re nobody but she’s untouched, untouchable. You start to construct a mythology around her: all the kids falling away from her like the sea at low tide, her eyes flickering, how the flame never dies.
You weren’t meant to be frail, you and Claire; as high schoolers you’d netted one grim victory after another, unstoppable, an A here and an accolade there. Displayed such promise, had so little time to feel. Or maybe you’d gotten it all wrong, reversed the direction of causality. Maybe numbness came first and ambition simply followed; ambition, your only rampart in a shapeless world. The thought plagues you like a phantom pain. Claire, guarded but not unkind. Liv, brash but achingly earnest. Sarah, pliant and unafraid. Hadn’t you sensed it all those years ago? It’s always the brittle that break.
*
You orbit Sarah warily at recess, too proud for overtures. The heat is unremitting. A record high, the anchormen say. All the other kids take turns on the wooden slide, its rollers clacking like your mother’s abacus. You kick pebbles around, waiting for the heat to break. But Sarah, she’s something else. Sits cross-legged in the shade, lacing and unlacing the web of yarn between her hands. Sometimes she glances up, quickly, and begins anew. She’s performing for someone, you realize. She’s performing for you. One day you gather your courage and walk up to the ledge on which she’s perched. What is that?
Her gaze flicks to the yarn and then your face. Cat’s cradle, she finally replies, words clipped and clear. Want to play? And so it goes: passing the loop of string back and forth day after day, your small, bony fingers colliding with hers. At first you barely talk. You’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, offending her as yet unknown sensibilities, and so you smile, shyly, whenever your eyes meet. Her first real words to you are an accusation. Why are you here?
Why? Dumbstruck, you find yourself echoing her words.
I can see you looking over at them during recess. After class, too. Her words are matter-of-fact and devoid of contempt. You want to join in when they make their jokes; you open your mouth but never speak.
It’s… You grope for the right words. I don’t know. They go too fast—you cut yourself off, look at her imploringly. She stares, refusing to fill in your blanks. I don’t know, you parrot, painfully aware of the verbal tic cluttering your speech. It’s just that, by the time I think of something clever, they’ve already started on another topic. So I’m always too late.
She shoots you an indecipherable look. In that agonizing moment, it dawns on you that Sarah does not, will not, cannot understand, Sarah with her self-reconciliation and infinite tranquility. How do you do it? You want to ask. How do you stop caring so much all the time? But then she’s saying it’s okay, it’s okay, and you’re exhaling shakily, feeling inexplicably lighter.
*
Sarah is not the humorless girl you thought she was. Your admission strips her of that artificial gravity and you’re girls again, impish and fun. You start taking the bus to her house after school, spend hours in her basement playing make-believe. Yesterday you were sophisticated French girls in a Parisian cafe, sipping wine and nibbling macarons. Tomorrow you’ll be wealthy heiresses, the day after pensive paupers. Sometimes, for no reason at all, you look at her and feel a strange constriction in your chest. Years later, when you start to notice boys, you will call this longing.
You play duets, too, she on the saxophone and you on the flute, middling at best alone, downright terrible together. When you tire of the cacophony, you clamber up the stairs and collaborate on a fantasy novel which becomes more elaborate with each passing week. Your parents, dismissive at first, start to peer over your shoulders. When they read the first draft, a sheaf of papers one-hundred-odd pages long, they exchange glances. Not bad, they say. Not bad at all. Suddenly the parents, both yours and hers, are invested in your partnership. They talk over the possibilities at the dinner table and on the phone. Sarah’s aunt works in the publishing business; her mother said it might be worth a shot to send it over, see what they make of it. Or: the girls could be excellent bridge partners—I’ve never seen two people so in sync. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. It is the summer of 2009. Everyone speaks in hypotheticals, but it all seems so inevitable. And then she’s gone.
*
The tests results have come back normal; the gastroenterologist found no cause for your abdominal pain. In other words, you have a clean bill of health. Claire listens, impassive, as you relay this to her. Are you okay? She asks at last. For a moment you wonder if she heard anything you said, but then you understand. Yeah, thanks for asking. Your eyes burn a little. The truth is that you’re still afraid. You’ve amassed so much fear in the past few months—where can you set it down? And how can you be fine if the pain’s still there? But Claire doesn’t ask again.
The two of you sit in the parked car. You’re not quite sure why you’ve confided in her. You were partners in chem lab, then friends as a matter of course, but conversations had always revolved around exams and after-school clubs, carefully skirting the red zone of your interiorities. You think back to that thawing between you and Sarah, how it had been precipitated by one disclosure, and feel a spark of hope. But your premonition is wrong. You continue to pass each other in the halls, wave, and move onto the next class; continue to quiz each other on limits and synecdoches; continue to labor tirelessly over homework and grades. And so the days pass.
*
Livia calls your name in a girlish voice, names her bike for you. You have her in your contacts as colorblind and conscientious, a jab at her rigid black-and-white sense of morality. She stoops to pick up litter mid-curse, mocks your terrible sense of direction but defends you viciously. Those who’ve handled you like shards of broken glass all your life gape in amazement. Sometimes she pelts her words with too much force, but you never parry. Before, you think, you were untouchable. It was a lonely thing to be. You know Livia’s a real one when you ask her for a picture and she drops to the pavement in the flaming Beijing heat. Won’t let you forget it either. Remember, I’d burn my knees for you, she says, and you know it’s true.
*
You haven’t talked to Sarah in years. She becomes a symbol of your childhood happiness, a standard against which all others are measured and found wanting. When you’re sad, you trace the long course of your friendship to its very end: cat’s cradle, the novel, fighting to the point of laughter, laughing to the point of tears, all those summers playing tag, long legs scissoring in flight and hands outstretched, shameless excuse to touch and be touched, that quickening of possibility, the U‑Haul on her driveway, the solemn goodbye, first love, the hardest break.
*
Claire attends college one thousand miles away. In spite of the physical distance, or perhaps because of it, the distance between you has collapsed. You send songs to each other when words fail; over the months, the concatenated lyrics write a kind of shared history. You tell her about whittling down the hours in a local bookstore, slipping through unlocked campus buildings at night, how the burning in your gut had eased and then vanished altogether. She talks often about being sad; you make all the right noises but seldom worry. The girl is indestructible. Livia, on the other hand, always seems to be on the cusp of splintering. She agonizes over hypotheticals, spams your phone five, ten, twenty times at once.
“I don’t know” becomes your trademark refrain. Of course you have your ideas, but you think of omission as a form of mercy. Easy to forfeit your opinion instead of subjecting it to Livia’s anxious dissection. Hard to stand by mutely as she cuts herself, over and over, on the serrated edge of hope. And yet the alternative is unthinkable. I don’t know, you say when she asks if he’d ever cared. I don’t know. You’ve seen the type, earnest but oh so careless, the type for whom tenderness does not equate to love. If you were a better friend you’d warn her, perhaps. But you don’t know for sure. And, more selfishly: you can’t risk her shooting the messenger, can’t lose your best and dearest friend. It scares you how much you need her. Circling each other on the dance floor, how she pushes the hair from her eyes, her face irradiated by strobe lights streaming down like rain. And then you reach for each other’s hands, two school children playing Ring Around the Rosie, spinning, pocket full of posies, light and sound and time sinking into the ecstatic dark, dismantling you in the best way, ashes, ashes, a continuous descent, but you never fall.
*
It’s over. Heartbroken, Livia wants to put her head in your lap. Sometimes you recoil violently, wonder what it is you’re so afraid of. Other times you acquiesce, pull her in almost violently, whisper the words to a poem you’d once read: I wish I could cut off your pain like hair (but all I really want to do is comb it). You know this is a prosaic pain, one she will emerge from largely unscathed, but you ache with a peculiar tenderness. A few days from now, Claire will scald her hands and call it an accident. You’ll phone Livia, try to beat back the shock waves with questions for which she has no answer. Why do I feel so strangely detached? Shouldn’t I feel more? Shouldn’t I feel less? How can words be so devastatingly impotent?
She’ll receive you, stuttering out your helplessness, as a priest at confession. In the span between your words, the truth you might never say: I needed you, Sarah. Was so, so alone before I met you, Claire. Thought myself unknowable till you knew me, Liv. How I care for you, and you, and you. You close your eyes, hear Livia’s shallow breathing over the line. You know I’d burn my knees for you, she says. You envy her this certainty. Imagine a camera flash, a white-faced Claire, a tub, the Beijing heat. Liv, you say. Liv. The words crack open the soundless night, more promise than revelation.
From the writer
:: Account ::
This piece is a retrospective on my girlhood. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the emotional toll of intimacy—not just the petty spats and well-worn rituals of adolescence (navigating first love and rift, envy, academic stress, the social turbulence of high school, etc.) but also the cost of caring, of taking on burdens that—once assumed—can never again be put down or forgotten; fear of codependency; that peculiar blurring between love and violence; and how, despite all this, there can be no other way of living.
Emily Yin is a junior studying computer science at Princeton University. Her writing has been recognized by the UK Poetry Society and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She currently serves as a poetry editor at Nassau Literary Review. Her work is published in Indiana Review Online, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pithead Chapel, decomP magazinE, and Connotation Press, among others.
In spite of all my efforts, the Doge’s trotters are fit to appear alongside the dwarves and amputees he brings out at court entertainments. There’s a gouty pouch on his left foot that resembles a sixth toe. No matter how I pumice and cauterize, his bunions resemble overripe figs.
“Pierino,” he sighs, “when I’m dead they’ll all gloat: ‘We sure squeezed the last drop out of Doge Grimani.’”
“Do not distress yourself, Most Serene Prince. I’ll prepare a chamomile poultice without delay.” (I might have to rethink those drawstring thongs—maybe invent some kind of toggle.)
Whenever I come up with a new treatment, the Doge pats my head and calls me his “clever young worthy,” which puts me on a rung just below his Persian wolfhounds. Most days he’s easily pleased—a tot of moscato, some rice and peas, relief from those cracked heels and jaundiced toenails, protection from his grasping wife.
Nowadays Her Ladyship has to be ferried around in a sedan chair by four portaseggette till she can walk unaided in her 27-inch cork-platforms—the latest fashion from Moorish Spain. Last week, two ladies-in-waiting came to me with overstretched ankles. “The Dogaressa sends us on bogus errands then fines us for tardiness,” Faustina whispered. “She’s got stumpy legs and a grimy yellow neck under that fancy ruff.” While I made up special heel padding, the ladies took turns swiveling on the fancy new stool with a moveable seat I won at dice.
At least the campaign to erect a statue of the Doge is going well. Guess all his well-placed election gifts didn’t hurt. A goccia a goccia s’incava la pietra. (Drop by drop one wears away the stone.) He was pleased with the long-toed corrective shoes I fashioned for his audience with the Persian Ambassador. I sewed a goatskin upper onto a leather sole, turned it inside out to conceal the seam. Unfortunately the old boy tripped while descending the Giants’ Staircase, the Dogaressa glaring at him from out of those pink slits.
When I learned the Dogaressa’s coronation will set the old boy back 144,000 ducats, I sent a message to Faustina. “Wouldn’t Her Serenity like a pair of winged platform sandals to complement her towering headdress?” I scraped bronze gilding off an old mirror and blended it with marble dust and sand to resemble wings. The soft padding conforms to the shape of the Dogaressa’s foot, but the genius part is the underlayer. Trace amounts of ground viper, dung, and mercury will slowly leach into her sensitive soles. She won’t be allemanding with her courtiers any time soon. Like we corn-cutters always say, “Pain comes on horseback but goes away on foot.”
I’d best nip over to Manin’s Print Shop before he gets to work on my calling card. My first choice was “Piero Cafisi: Expert in the Eradication of Painful Corns, Stone Bruising, and Cutaneous Excrescences,” but I’ve settled on “Renowned Specialist in Indelicate Foot Conditions.”
From the writer
:: Account ::
Three years ago I became fascinated with the Dogaressa, the Venetian Doge’s official spouse. Out of the thirty-five Dogaressas, I decided to research Dogaressa Morosina Morisini-Grimani, whose extravagant coronation was the last on record in Renaissance Venice. I wondered if she had any political influence.
Meanwhile, my husband and I booked a two-week getaway in New York City. Our guest house (according to their website) contained part of an Italian Renaissance library that once belonged to the Duke of Urbino. I got it in my head that the Duke of Urbino was Morosina Morosini’s husband. At the local reference library I photocopied floor plans of a 14th century ducal palace, including its elaborate ceiling medallion. When we finally checked into the House of the Redeemer, I rushed downstairs to the storied library clutching my photocopies. I gazed up at the vaulted ceiling only to discover that the medallions didn’t match. A historian later clarified that the library actually belonged to Federico da Montefeltro. My bad.
I abandoned my Dogaressa story and began to think about the lives of minions at the Venetian court. I reread Elizabeth Janeway’s Powers of the Weak: “a wise mistrust of the powerful and a willingness to exercise dissent” is necessary if the weak are to rule their own lives. I thought about gossip as a weapon of the weak. The fictional character of Piero Cafisi emerged after I read an orthotics brochure which said that “corn-cutters” predated podiatrists.
Anne McGouran’s stories and essays appear or are forthcoming in Cleaver, Cutbank, The Smart Set, Mslexia, Queen’s Quarterly, Orca, Switchgrass Review, and Gargoyle Magazine. She lives in Collingwood, Ontario where she has developed a fascination with ice huts and orchard ladders.
Severin is a character in a novel. He is a Galician gentleman and landowner. He is thirty years old, a smoker. He is sexually inexperienced. He craves eggs, soft-boiled, and likes to press his face against statues. He likes statues. He loves fur. He dabbles in poetry and science. He collects animal skeletons, stuffed birds, and plastic cats. He does not want to be hanged by a woman, so he trains women. He rests his chin in his hands. His hands are delicately veined. According to his neighbors, Severin is dangerous and odd. He has zero friends, unless you count the narrator of the book. Severin and the narrator are best friends. They smoke cigarettes at Severin’s estate. They talk about literature, domestic violence, and the figure of the cruel woman. The cruel woman ambles roughshod over the grasses in the artworks of wealthy heterosexuals of European descent. Severin confesses to the narrator. Once he used science to bring the cruel woman to life. Like the wife in the blockbuster film Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the cruel woman was ill-suited for love.
For example: The cruel woman chains Severin to a thick wooden rod. Then she orders a man of Greek descent to engage Severin’s body in a whipping without Severin’s consent. In addition, she breaks up with Severin while his body is still attached to the thick wooden rod. She refuses to have penetrative sex with Severin. No, they never have penetrative sex. The absence of penetrative sex is demoralizing to Severin, and yet it helps him to develop a political orientation which positions him favorably on the job market. I will elaborate.
“What doesn’t kill you births a more virulent strain of your kind,” writes Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a German bachelor who rejects the companionship of people, preferring an assortment of hand-held fireworks and domestic tools, such as sparklers and a hammer. He is famous for his virginal mustache. You aren’t allowed to touch it! Oh, Nietzsche. While Severin is attached to the thick wooden rod, he is overwhelmed and close to death on account of the man of Greek descent who is whipping his body. Fast forward a few days, and Severin is on holiday in Rome tapping the virtues of socioeconomic status to process the traumatic romantic experience. In short, Severin endures. He perseveres like Queen Mab and pushes the hazelnut carriage of day laborers through the harrowing tunnel of the absence of maidenhood, dipping into the family coffers to buy himself a ration of the most exquisite cocaine. Later, in the heat of an Italian nightclub, Severin snatches a neon glowstick from a lesbian! Then he is dancing. Severin dances to express his sense of humiliation and loss. It isn’t long before Severin’s dancing draws the attention of a well-connected group. In a quiet velvet corner, nestled in the rear of the nightclub, the group plies Severin with liquor and a flight of hens stuffed with surprising flavor combos like cheese and nuts. Severin swears the group to secrecy. Then he shows them the blueprints for organizing society along strict hierarchical lines. They decide to get brunch after. The morning is dewy and bright, veined with silver torrents. It’s beautiful! My god. It’s beautiful. Severin is crying now. He is slobbering. He’s choking a little. It’s just so. So. Beautiful. He commits right then and there to join the fight for men’s rights. In due time, he inherits his father’s estate. That’s how Severin evolves into the political persona we know and love today.
Severin owns classical paintings. Severin owns important books. Severin owns top-quality cigarettes. There’s also a silk-clad thingy, plump in a bodice, walking on stilted doe’s legs throughout the corridors of Severin’s estate. The silk-clad thingy carries a platter of boiled eggs and meats. As noted above, Severin is an active participant in the men’s rights movement. The author uses plain language to communicate Severin’s identification with the figure of the tyrant on both a personal and political level. For these reasons and others, the naïve reader might be tempted to conclude: “Well, there you have it! Severin’s a tyrant. This is a tyrannical book!” But the complexity of the text threatens otherwise. For example, when the silk-clad thingy presents the platter of boiled eggs and meats, Severin reacts in an unexpected manner. He is overcome by anguish because the eggs are not cooked to his liking. The eggs are hard-boiled, but Severin prefers soft-boiled eggs. His preference for the soft-boiled egg subverts the logic of tyranny.
I will elaborate.
Throughout the history of the West, tyrants have preferred to associate themselves with hard objects. Since there is no reason to assume this preference does not extend to eggs, the reader speculates that it is the natural tendency of the tyrant to choose the hard-boiled egg over the soft-boiled egg. If Severin were actually a tyrant, then he would have welcomed the hard-boiled egg into the sensitive inner-mouth space of his head. Severin does not welcome the hard-boiled egg into the sensitive inner-mouth space of his head.
The author of the book outfits Severin’s sensitive inner-mouth space with the trappings of a bachelor’s boudoir. The boudoir is lined from floor to ceiling in the richest pink velvet. Ever since reading the book, I have caught myself salivating at the thought of spending the afternoon in Severin’s mouth. One day in the future, after I’ve put in my time and ascended some of the rungs, I hope to take an entire weekend. I’ll bring along a novel, plus several of my colleagues and friends! We’ll discourse on literature, ethics, and the necessary exclusion of some groups from the public sphere. Unable to prevent our hands from caressing the walls, we’ll wipe our fingers on the thick pink surface. Then the room will begin to vibrate, and a deep-throated purring will fill up our ears.
In addition, and it goes without saying, the tyrant’s preference for the hardness of hard-boiled eggs, and for hard objects in general, evokes the turgidity of the phallus when it is erect. This thrilling detail connects to a common misconception held by tyrants the world over: the disavowal of castration. The tyrant does not understand that he is castrated. But what about Severin? Does Severin understand that he is castrated? Severin absolutely understands that he is castrated! For example, before Severin realizes he must develop a method for training women in order to prevent women from hanging him, he takes orders from a woman. For this reason and many others, Severin is not your typical tyrant. Severin is a good person.
Granted, this book is a complicated book due to the fascist overtones. Severin openly lays claim to tyranny. Severin supports his claim to tyranny via action. In one scene, for example, Severin threatens the silk-clad thingy with domestic violence because the eggs have not been cooked to his liking, but everybody knows that in the olden days Europe was unseemly. The Sovereign put people to death. He didn’t understand that he was castrated. Before casting judgement, I ask that you consider the following: Has Severin ever tried to conceal his unsavory political commitments from the reader? No, Severin has not. In fact, Severin has always been incredibly open and honest about the most troubling facets of his personality. His forthrightness is commendable in and of itself. In return, we owe Severin a similar debt to honesty.
Let us strive to be honest. It feels good to be honest.
II.
Honestly, my memories of Severin are grim. I didn’t like him. We met as graduate students in a middling creative writing program out west. The school no longer exists. It was cheaply affixed to the side of a mountain. Weakened by drought and fire, it eventually succumbed to gravity and was quietly shed like a scab. Nobody noticed it was gone.
Severin was a terrible writer and an emotionally manipulative personality. High on philosophy and art, he could reorganize the world just by glancing at it. I still remember how much it hurt to get caught up in his line of sight. I had to go and lie down. If I accidentally sat across from him in a seminar or workshop, then I’d be knocked out for days. “Influenza,” I said. I was always saying that. I couldn’t stand him, and yet we were friends. That’s how friendship worked in school. Then it was over. Severin and I fell out of touch. The school fell off the mountain. Yeah, I’ve thought about reaching out. Because I wish I could tell him that the whole time we were friends, I was busy despising, him. Severin, I despised you and everything you stood for. I’m sorry about that. The truth is, and I know this now, I despised myself. I despised the sight of me, and you wouldn’t allow me to turn away, you never allowed me to turn away, and so I was in tremendous pain pretty much all of the time. I was a person caught in the throes of pain. I’m not like that anymore, Severin. I’ve matured. I’ve learned to empathize with your point of view. I’ve even incorporated your publications into my teaching and scholarship. I’ve tapped your book like a keg, Severin, and funneled its life force straight into my career. Thank you, Severin, for giving life to my career! Thank you for giving life to my career! Thank you, Severin! Thank you!
Okay. To be honest. To be totally and completely. Honest. For a minute I thought we could be friends, real friends. Severin and I, we had a lot in common. What happened was he caught me in the act. Past midnight. Starry sky. Dark, dry air. Cold. Out west. High up on the side of a mountain. In the center of campus, on the lawn of the admissions building, there’s a statue of a beautiful woman ringed by evergreens. She’s one of the wives of the founder of the state religion, the first wife or the main wife, and I’d wrapped her, beautiful statue, head to toe, in toilet paper that I stole from the student union.
You have to understand. I’ve always been drawn to the wife in Bride of Frankenstein. But before she’s opened. When her body and her head and her face are wrapped up in gauze. Gift for a monster. I want her or I want to be her or I’m already who she is but I don’t like being me so I’ll wait it out. I’ll just wait and see. What’s underneath.
Yeah, so. I’d wrapped the statue of the founder of the state religion’s wife in toilet paper, and I was, you know. Worshipping her. I was waiting. Waiting to see. Show me. Show me. I pressed my face against the paper covering her skirt. Show me. That’s when Severin intruded, his arms full of furs.
“You like statues,” he said.
Why lie. At a time like this. “I do.”
“You wrap them in toilet paper.”
“Yes.”
“That’s queer.”
“Yes.”
“You’re queer.”
“Yes.”
“I like statues, too,” he said. “I drape them in furs.”
“I see. You’re also queer?”
“I am.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“We must stick together,” he said.
“Okay.”
He took me back to his place.
Kind of a shitty place. There were roommates. Everywhere. But whatever. They were already asleep. Some cats, too. I don’t like cats. It’s okay. We’d worked out a plan. First, we’d both take off our clothes. Next, I’d drape myself in furs and Severin would wrap himself in toilet paper. Then we’d just. I don’t know. See what happened. We had a six-pack. A six-pack. He had some cigarettes. I like cigarettes. So. Let’s see. We’ll just wait and see. Where the night takes us.
Severin handed me an ermine stole and a sheepskin muff. He pushed me into the bathroom. Closed the door. I was alone. Bathroom was a little shitty. No. Yes. Shit streaking the seat of the toilet. Shit rimming the tub. Shit on the mirror. Shit staining the grout of the tile. Hairs collecting along a streak of shit. Poking right up to God like asparagus. Okay. Here I am. What is a stole and what is a muff? I know what I look like. I’ve looked plenty of times. It’s fine. Someone should look like this. Someone should’ve looked like this. What the fuck. Do you want to know? Do you want to know what a person looks like? When they are wearing a stole and a muff? I already told you. I despised the sight. I got low. Then I got low. I was sitting on the floor. Like Barbie. Legs straight out. What did they want? My attention. No, I don’t want to hold them. Severin was talking. He was explaining how to care for his cats.
What?
His cats. He told me to watch his cats. Over Christmas break. Hello. Keep up.
Pay attention.
“Give them food and water,” he said. “More importantly, get to know them. Spend time with them. That’s crucial. Forget to feed them, and they’ll survive. Forget to touch them? They’ll fucking die.”
That can’t be right.
Okay. This is Severin’s bedroom. The window was frosty. Frost is beautiful. Frost is beautiful. I need to throw up. I needed to throw up. Christmas gifts, everywhere. Severin had been shopping. Now he was taking his time. Packing a bag. He was gonna miss his flight. Then there was that cat at my feet. Roosting on an open magazine. Pink. It was pink. I didn’t know you could get them that way.
“Which one is sick? Deleuze?”
I didn’t say that. Please. I didn’t. Is that what he calls his cat? I shouldn’t have come here. I should never have come. I needed to throw up. I needed to throw up. I needed to. I had a knife. Okay, I had a knife. I had a knife. I hated when thinking happened like this and I could see myself on the outside. I hated that. She was holding the knife, and then, I see, she cut a gash in her throat. She stood over the cat, the pink cat, just to bleed on it for a minute. She just bled on it? Yeah. Soon she was gonna drop. She was gonna drop. She was gonna drop. Don’t let her drop on the cat. It was pink. The cat. But why was it pink? I don’t know! Staggered. She staggered. She darted for the bookcase. She was looking for the book he liked the best. Which one did he like the best? The one where they slander the trees. They hated trees, Deleuze and Guattari. Assholes. She tore a page from the book, crumpled it up and fed the blossom to the gash in her neck. She didn’t throw up. I never threw up. It’s like I didn’t get how to do it. Do you understand?
Talking. Severin was talking. He said the cats aren’t called Deleuze and Guattari, not anymore. He renamed them. He renamed his cats. Yeah, he was always doing that. Giving them new names.
“Why?”
Severin shrugged. He sat down on the edge of the bed, crossed one leg over the other. What was he wearing? Indoor soccer shoes? I want a pair. I wanted a pair.
“Just tell me which one gets medicine.”
“The pink one.”
The pink one. The pink one. No.
No, no, no.
“What do you mean, no?” he said.
I mean, who has a pink cat?
I mean, no.
No, no, no, no.
“Look,” said Severin. Then he was up again, orbiting the bedroom. He was collecting the Christmas gifts in a gigantic paper bag. “It’s been a long day. I shopped. I wrapped. I packed. I’m about to fly across the country.” He stopped at the foot of the bed, hoisted a duffel over his shoulder. “And now I need to explain the concept of a joke to you?”
She couldn’t get a read on his face. I couldn’t see it either. The sky was a snake. It sloughed off the skin of the sun. Dark. It was dark.
III.
Now for a review of the literature. Some people argue that this book is a transgressive book because it features Severin. Severin is a castrated member of the ruling class and an aspiring poet with an impossible desire for submission. Other people argue that this book is a subversive book because it features Severin. Severin is a castrated member of the economic elite and an aspiring poet with a paradoxical dream to end capitalism. Plus, there are several persuasive arguments that call for labeling this book a queer book due to the superabundance of fur garments, which are gay. My take on the situation is radical. I believe it is wrong to argue about books. Even though I spend Christmases with conservative colleagues and keep in touch with an elderly mentor who still subscribes to the impossible dream of a white ethnostate, I believe that each and every member of the department is free to choose a literary heritage; I choose to join in the struggle to preserve the rights of the most important books of European civilization.
Ever since the dawn of the birth of the French person Roland Barthes, we have understood the college classroom to be an amphitheater for bearing witness to pleasure. Barthes worked hard in the public sphere to devise a repertoire of gestures for testifying to pleasure without explicating the text. He managed to conduct his life’s work in silence. Total silence. It was important that Barthes stay quiet. He didn’t want to spook the jouissance. The jouissance is skittish. It darts like a doe into berry bushes. Sometimes, at school, we coax the doe to the center of our circle.
Thanks to Barthes’ hard work, we’ve developed a ceremony for gathering ’round, opening our books, and pointing at pleasures that can neither be described nor verified. What does this mean? I will tell you what it means. It means the unspeakable quality of our pedagogy is the condition for a radical, intellectual faith. Studies have shown that TAs of faith lead healthier, happier, more integrated lives. They’re able to make do on their stipends, with a little something leftover for the weekend. They outperform their peers on the job market. When they compose the formation of the sacred circle with their bodies at school, the pleasure touches friends touching books listed on the syllabus, reinforcing the mission of the university.
High up. The sky is a snake: it sloughs off the skin of the sun. Dark. It’s dark. In the once-vibrant city of Chernobyl, the snow is falling. We must be careful, vigilant, and tender. Because there are scholars who set traps in the snow and the berry bushes.
They aren’t really scholars.
They aren’t even readers.
They are bullish fur traders whose thick thighs rub snaggles into off-brand stockings! Ambling roughshod over mass graves of frost-bitten grasses! Spooking the pleasure, which leaps like a doe, to impale its soft, soft self on the crystalline edges of the berry branches—dead! She’s dead! Dead. Dead. Dead.
Severin lights a cigarette.
The narrator lights a cigarette. The narrator peruses Severin’s collection of animal skeletons, military hardware, and plastic cats. Oh, Severin!
According to the details of his biography, Severin belongs to the ruling class. But what about the narrator? Who is the narrator of the book? Well, the narrator’s status is ambiguous. He employs a valet to grab hold of his arm whilst he is sleeping. The valet whispers the word “Hegel” into the narrator’s ears. The intimacy of the gesture suggests that these two men are cut from similar cloths. If they are not, then we are definitely dealing with a class-traitor situation, which is incredibly thrilling and admirable. The narrator and his valet are not biological brothers, and yet they manage to coexist in a quivering jelly dome called “brotherhood.” Therefore, structurally, the narrator and his valet are brothers. They are brothers.
Let us pan out.
Severin, the narrator, the valet, and the reader each occupy different positions along the socioeconomic spectrum. Despite these unfortunate material circumstances, they have all uploaded themselves into the exact same tradition of arts and letters. Theirs is the sort of mixed camaraderie that garners harsh jeers from the members of the older generations. But is it not true that the most important books disrupt the laws of bourgeois decorum?
Severin laughs. He lights the cigarette.
The narrator laughs. He lights the cigarette.
When the silk-clad thingy presents the platter of boiled eggs and meats, Severin discovers that the eggs have not been cooked to his liking, and he subjects the silk-clad thingy to the threat of domestic violence. The silk-clad thingy flees like a freaked robot on bent doe’s legs. That’s the cue for Severin and the narrator to continue their conversation.
Okay. No more pretense.
We are friends, yes?
Then allow me to touch you where you need to be touched.
You are a person deserving of your life.
I’ll say it again.
You are a person deserving of your life.
There was once something sharp and damnable residing in the folds of your personhood, but it’s been lovingly rewritten or redacted at school. Wish it well. Let it go.
Today is the day you submit your dissertation.
You’re doing what’s right, seeking gainful employment. It goes without saying that you’ve suffered and persevered. The struggle was real, but it helped you to develop a political orientation which will grant you a favorable position on the job market.
I will elaborate.
You haven’t hurt anyone.
You haven’t hurt anyone.
You have wanted, and your wanting makes you precious, but you have not taken what you want by force. You haven’t hurt anyone.
You are a peach.
You’re a lamb moseying home on pointy little feet!
Munching clovers.
Moving slowly.
You can afford to move so slowly.
Because it feels good to be you.
You’re homely and hospitable.
You’re inhabitable.
You feel good.
You feel so good.
This feels good.
Come. Now is the time to act. Let us not look back on this day and wonder why our eyes were content to be separated, stuck in their own jellied heads. Lonely.
This feels so good.
Forging thicker bonds.
Building better bodies for whispering the word “Hegel.”
For sharing the word “Hegel.”
Whilst sleeping.
Don’t worry, you haven’t forgotten how to sleep.
You’re sleeping now.
The sky is a snake. It sloughs off the skin of the sun.
Dark.
The way is dark.
Dry air.
High up.
Ringed by evergreens.
Quiet. Be quiet.
Come to us on your hands.
Use your fingers to find it.
The pinhole, the puncture.
Gracing the skin of the birthday balloon.
That rides on the night of the sky tucked deep deep inside, deep inside the fold of your little lonely little lonely life.
Let it go.
The screaming.
It is the sound of the starter.
On its cue, on its cue.
Let us.
Let us let us let us shed our flesh and shed our flesh and and and pool our resources.
Fig. 1. Bride of Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. 1935. Screenshot by the author.
From the writer
:: Account ::
This story is a satire of literary scholarship. A fictional essay about Venus in Furs. I drafted it while I was in grad school because I wanted to figure out why they were asking me to interpret overtly reactionary works of literature through theoretical frameworks that claim (when taken at face value) to subvert, deconstruct, or queer structures of power. Much of the scholarship on Venus in Furs exemplifies that contradiction. Exudes a pathetic energy that’s borderline hagiographic. Casts Severin as the patron saint of subversion. Claims he harbors a radical desire to undermine everything from heteropatriarchy to capitalism itself. Part of my discomfort had to do with the hypocrisy of affirming the anti-capitalist pose of a profession that was actively contributing to my exploitation and immiseration. It’s dishonest. Dumb. I don’t like to be dumb. I don’t like to hurt myself. Hate it more when my willingness to do so is praised. Also, the scholars’ version of Severin is just wrong. It’s nothing like Masoch’s version. You should read Venus in Furs. I read Venus in Furs, obsessively, for the same reason I read Eichmann in Jerusalem. It’s obvious. Why does it have to be so obvious? That’s why it feels humiliating. To adopt the scholarly pose. It’s too obvious. Masoch’s Severin is a proud member of the economic elite. He’s an avowed supporter of men’s rights, a connoisseur of European culture, a disgruntled incel. Throw in the fact that most of Venus in Furs consists of Severin’s manifesto, which fixates on the degraded status of the straight white guy, and there you have it: Severin’s a TERRORIST. And I’m a satirist. I’m a satirist, hardcore. Sometimes I worry that I haven’t spoken genuinely about anything, myself included, in years. But then I banish the thought. Writing this account has been difficult. This is my seventeenth attempt. I’m trying. I am. So. I drafted this stupid story, a grotesque parody of fascist scholarship. Then I didn’t know what to do. With myself. I don’t know what to do with myself. I was disillusioned with it, my fiction. It was dead, lacking in stakes. I needed to revise. I sat down to revise. I had YouTube streaming in the background (academic presentations on masochism) because I was hoping I’d hear something I’d want to lampoon. I heard this one thing. I ended up taking it seriously. How does the philosopher put his body where his pen is? I decided to give it a try, to put my body in the way of the story while I was writing it. It meant taking masochism seriously. Which felt like a big deal. Because I’m a sadist. But I took it seriously. Used my pain to craft a narrative. To fabricate an aesthetic. I gave my stupid story a wound. That’s part II of my story, the wound. The material. I wanted to make it visible. You don’t have to like it. Honestly. You don’t.
Rachel Levy is a founding editor of Dreginald magazine and the author of A Book So Red (Caketrain, 2015). Short fictions appear in Atticus Review, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Western Humanities Review, and others. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Prose, Levy is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The first time I came to his house, it was 1981, late spring. I was selling Girl Scout cookies. Back then, it was acceptable to sell door-to-door, parentless. I and my friend Sarah, who loved to read even more than I did, had covered three blocks of small ranch-style homes before arriving at his house, coral colored with white shutters. The lawn had just been mowed; the grayish, fuzzy chaff of expelled grass streaked the weak green beneath it. Long sprays of grass shot out from the bases of lawn chairs and walkway lights. Weeds littered the planter, the plants overgrown, browning at the edges.
It was Sarah’s turn to ask about the cookies (I’d solicited the previous block), but as soon as the man opened the door, she said, “We’re selling cookies, the mint is the most popular, and can I use your bathroom?”
The man fixed upon her the lightest green eyes I’d ever seen and raised an eyebrow either in hesitation or surprise. “Sure. If you really need to. It’s down the hall.”
I stood at the door, sweating so badly my shirt was stuck to my back. I could feel the chilled air behind him.
“It’s a hot one today,” he said. “Do you want to come in for some water?”
I shook my head. “No, thank you.”
“Maybe juice?”
I denied him again. I might have wondered if, somewhere inside the house, he had a wife, children. It seemed so quiet.
I should have asked him to buy cookies, but I felt inept without Sarah beside me. Plus, I’m an awful salesperson when I have to pawn off a product I don’t believe in. The cookies were nothing special. They were too expensive, some people said. I also took everything personally, so when someone said no to the cookies, I thought it was because I was ugly.
I felt him looking at me as if waiting for me to speak. He had light skin, the kind that burns easily, and his lips were a deep pink, almost as if he were wearing lipstick. He had a mustache so slight it looked like a shadow.
“So, are you going to sell me cookies?” he asked.
“Why? Do you want to buy some?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
I turned to my clipboard, picked up the pen, and started to read the flavors. He stopped me after Do-si-dos. “Just pick out three boxes for me; different flavors,” he said, not impatiently.
“Don’t you have a favorite?” I asked.
“I’m not much for cookies,” he said. “I usually like cake.”
“Me too,” I said. “If we had to sell pound cake, I’d win an award.”
*
I went back a week or so later, alone, to deliver the cookies. I was in charge of two of the blocks where we’d sold them. I had sold so many boxes I made two trips, clattering my brother’s old wagon down the sidewalks, sweating in that Florida heat so stifling it shimmered and crafted mirages on the blacktop. It must have been a hundred degrees that day because when I arrived at his house and he asked me if I wanted water, I said yes.
We sat at his round table in the goldenrod kitchen. The sun was bright and hurt my eyes. He had a pear-shaped crystal suspended from a piece of twine over the sink. The sun shot through it, splashing circular rainbows on the floor.
The air conditioner was heavenly at first, but then I felt too cold.
I drank down the glass of water, packed with ice cubes, quickly; he refilled it.
“You want something to eat?” he asked.
“Like what?” I asked. I wasn’t hungry but was curious about what he’d offer me. He had scrawny arms and legs with a small paunch. His light yellow Izod shirt was tucked into pants with an elastic waistband.
He listed for me all kinds of snacks. He added, “I guess we could have cookies, but you don’t like them.”
His recalling this detail from our first meeting surprised me. He also remembered that I liked pound cake and he told me he had some. “I have this lemon sauce I put on it. I make it myself. It won’t take long.”
I told him I had to go. My Tagalongs were probably melting outside in the heat.
“What do you like to do?” he asked even though I was standing and making my way to the door. “I mean, besides Girl Scouts.”
He stood up, too. His shoes were the kind old people wear with the thick soles and chunky laces. I must’ve wondered how old he was, but I had no sense of people’s ages. Anyone over twenty fit into that amorphous realm of an adult.
“I hate Girl Scouts. My mom makes me go.”
He smiled at that, raising the left corner of his mouth. I noticed his mustache again, so slight a napkin might erase it.
“What do you like, then?”
I liked to play with my dolls, build houses for them with blocks, read and write stories, watch TV, dance alone in my room. I sought anything that took me out of myself. At age eleven, I knew it would be babyish to admit that I played with toys, so I told him I liked to read.
He smiled, both corners of his mouth raised. He had a slight dimple on one cheek. His teeth were all uneven and one was darker than the others.
“I love to read,” he said. “I have hundreds of books. You want to see?”
I did, but I told him I really had to go. My cookies were melting, and my parents would be worried about me.
He said okay; before I left, he said, “We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m James, but my friends call me Jim. Call me Jim.”
“I’m Jenny.” He reached out his hand and I shook it. He had a tight grip, a quick clutch that held me and quickly let go.
*
Not long after that, just before school let out for the summer, I ended up at his house again. I hadn’t intended to go there, but my aunt forgot to pick me up at my bus stop. I stood at the corner for almost an hour, fearful she’d show up and I wouldn’t be there. I was going to walk the six blocks back to my house when a car pulled up, big and brown, long as a boat.
The passenger window rolled down and Jim leaned over. “Hey,” he said. “Jenny. What are you doing here?”
I told him what had happened. He told me he’d take me home; I said I could walk, but he insisted. I got inside the car, its welcoming coolness, and put on my seatbelt.
“It’s smart you wear your seatbelt,” he said. “Though I assure you I’m a safe driver.”
“My mom works with lawyers,” I said. “They have court cases with people in car crashes. She tells me stories that scare me.”
“Well, that’s not very nice.”
I’d never thought of my mother as being anything but nice. I was a little annoyed at him then.
“I’ve just been to the library,” he said, gesturing toward the backseat where three thick books were stacked on one seat like a passenger. “You sure you don’t want to come and see my books? Maybe have a snack?”
For some reason I don’t understand even today, I said yes.
He had an entire room filled with books, stuffed in those wall-to-wall bookshelves with very little space for more. A love seat in the middle of the room made me feel small, sitting in the center of all that majesty: the palette of colors, font shapes and sizes on the thick or thin, new or worn spines. The plastic blinds on the tall, narrow window emitted a weak light. He turned the wand on the blinds and dust-flecked light entered the room. The carpet was pea-green with gray balls of dust gathered at the edges of the bookshelves. It smelled like an old library and I loved that.
“Take whatever you want,” he said. He turned to one shelf. “Let’s see. You might like this one.”
He handed me a book with a grouping of girls gathered around a piano on the cover. The black spine read: Little Women.
“Take it with you,” he said. “Let me know what you think.”
Within a few pages, I recognized that I was in the presence of genius. Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume books, my usual fare, were a snack compared to the meal Alcott spread before me. I read the book over Memorial Day weekend. My mother made me come out of my room, and I resented her for it. “Come up for air,” she said. “You’re like a hermit.”
She asked what I was reading, and I showed it to her.
“For school?” she asked.
I told her yes. Even though I didn’t feel odd about going to Jim’s house, I knew she wouldn’t approve of it.
I went there again after I finished the book, knocked brazenly on the door one day after school.
“Do you have anything else for me to read?” I asked. “I loved this one.”
We sat at his kitchen table eating pound cake with lemon sauce, the perfect combination of tang and sweet. He’d just given me another book, To Kill a Mockingbird. I wanted to go home and read it but didn’t want to be rude, so I sat with him, squirming a little in my chair as I finished my cake.
“You probably do well in school,” he said.
“Math’s a killer. I’m good in English.”
“I’m good in math,” he said. “I could help you.”
I considered this. We had a math final the following week. I had a C in the class. I was hoping for honor roll, but it wasn’t looking good.
“I’m also fluent in Spanish,” he said. “I bet you didn’t expect that. I used to translate for the FBI.”
I didn’t know what the FBI was but pretended to be impressed.
“You want me to say something in Spanish?” he asked as if I’d never heard Spanish before. We lived in South Florida not Wyoming.
“Sure.”
“Tu eres muy bonita y inteligente y simpática.”
The fixity of his gaze confirmed that he was speaking about me. I told him I had to go home; he told me to come by Tuesday after three if I wanted help with tutoring. My parents told me I could get the Nikes with the rainbow swoosh if I made honor roll, so I went back. He helped me with long division. We ate Ring Dings and shared an orange to make our snack healthy.
At five o’clock, he told me I should probably get home, that my parents would be worried about me. I told him that they came home late. My older brother was in high school and stayed after school every day for sports, so I was only responsible for myself. No one arrived home until after six, usually.
“You must get lonesome,” he said, trying to catch my eye. I wouldn’t look at him. “I know I get lonesome.”
“I like to read,” I said. “That passes the time.”
He didn’t ask me if I had friends, and I was grateful not to have to report that I only had two: Sarah and Michelle.
“Do you want to see something?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure and told him so.
“It’s okay,” he said, reaching for my hand. “Come with me.”
It didn’t occur to me not to take his hand. One action seemed to follow the other in a natural progression. I was not scared.
I followed him to the part of the house I’d never been in, a hallway off the living room. In one of the rooms in that hallway, two couches of dark fabric cluttered the space, ensconced with side tables covered with doilies and matching flowered lamps. It smelled vaguely of oranges in the early stage of rot.
He disappeared into a closet and returned with a dress, white lace with a shiny belt adorned with a cluster of three tiny roses.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
I did. It looked like my size.
“You can have it if you want. Try it on first.”
I had no idea how I’d explain such a gift to my parents. Last week, he’d given me a rhinestone bracelet my mother asked about. I lied and told her Sarah gave it to me.
“For no reason?” she asked.
I said not really.
“Well, that’s a fancy gift for no reason.”
In the dark room, I held the dress up to my torso and asked, “You bought this for me?”
“Not exactly. It was my daughter’s.”
“You have a daughter?”
He nodded, a quick shake. “She’s gone now. That’s all I want to say about her, okay?”
I agreed by nodding.
“Why don’t you try it on?” he asked.
I couldn’t deny him. The bathroom was pink everything except for the toilet, which was white. I imagined that he’d once lived in this house with his daughter and maybe a wife, too.
The dress wasn’t as white as it had seemed in the room’s dull light. A slight yellow patch stained the dress just below the belt, and it smelled musty. It fit, though, and when I came out of the bathroom his eyes widened.
“You look so pretty,” he said. “You should take it home, wear it to one of your school dances.”
I didn’t tell him that the dress was more of a First Communion variety and that we didn’t have school dances.
He came toward me and touched me on the shoulder.
I stood there, my underarms starting to itch—the dress wasn’t as good a fit as I thought—and to sweat. The room was warmer than the rest of the house.
“Are you okay?” he asked, removing his hand from my shoulder and staring at me.
I told him I needed to get home and thanked him for the dress. I wore it home, the sweat making it more and more itchy. I hid it in my closet toward the back so my mother wouldn’t find it.
*
I somehow got a B in math and made the honor roll. I wore my new Nikes to Jim’s house. I visited him once a week or so once school let out. I went to summer camp for a few weeks, which I hated except the days we went to the movies. I tried to convince my mother that I was too old to attend camp, but she told me I needed structure to my day and to “get out and enjoy the weather,” but the weather was so hot we nearly wilted on the playground and couldn’t take much more than an hour outdoors.
At Jim’s house, I would practice my math for at least a half hour. He convinced me that it would help me make honor roll next year, seventh grade, and that meant gifts.
Jim bought me gifts, too, those that I could easily hide or pass off as bequeathed from a friend. I even made up a friend, Leslie, inspired by Bridge to Terabithia, who liked giving me things. I told my mother that she gave me the tiny hoop earrings with the dangly hearts and the Guess t‑shirt with the interwoven hearts. I asked Jim how he knew Guess was “in.” He squinted his eyes—his expression of confusion—and said that he hadn’t looked at the brand at all. He just thought I’d like the hearts.
And all the books he loaned me? I got them from the library of course. My parents didn’t notice that the call numbers weren’t taped onto their spines and they weren’t covered in plastic.
I didn’t tell anyone about Jim since there was no reason to, and I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to go over there if I did. He was my secret friend, someone who I didn’t have to talk to very much. Some days, I’d just sit in his library room and read. I’d take a break for cake or Creamsicles. We ate a lot of strawberries, too, to be healthy. He said I needed my vitamins.
*
And then in July, Adam Walsh, six years old, went missing from a Sears not ten miles from my house. My mother didn’t like that mall, so we didn’t go there often, but my Grammie took me there sometimes; she liked the Woolworth’s, which she called the “five-and-dime.”
They found Adam’s body in a canal. Headless.
My parents barely watched the news but did so on this occasion, careless that I took in the gruesomeness of this reality. A reporter claimed that most children are abducted not by strangers but by someone they know.
“Great,” my mother said, near tears. “Now we can’t trust our neighbors.”
*
The next time I went to Jim’s, he presented me with another gift: a bathing suit, electric blue with one neon pink stripe from shoulder-to-hip.
“Try it on,” he said. “See if it fits. This looks like your size.”
It was a perfect fit. I wanted to change back into my clothes, but knew he’d want to see me in the suit.
I put on my shorts over the suit and came out of the bathroom.
“It fits,” I said.
“Take off the shorts,” he said. “I want to see how it looks on you.”
I felt dizzy. “I need to go home,” I said.
He came toward me and put his hand on my head. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”
“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked, snot dripping from my nose. “You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
I imagined myself in a canal: bloated like a dead frog; headless.
He looked at me, squinting as if to see me better, to understand this new girl I’d become. “No, Jenny, I’m not going to hurt you. Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice thick. “I just need to go.” I pushed past him and ran out of his house. I ran the three blocks home, my sandals smacking against the concrete.
*
That was the last time I saw Jim. I threw out the bathing suit and the dress, pushed them to the bottom of the garbage bin. I still wore the Guess t‑shirt and jewelry he gave me, though. After all, they came from Leslie, my invisible friend.
Today, fifteen years later, all of the gifts Jim gave me are gone save the rhinestone bracelet whose stones have fallen out. I keep the bracelet and loose stones in a baggie in my jewelry armoire. The medley of colored gems reminds me of the suspended crystal in his kitchen, how it caught the afternoon light, the dots of rainbow splayed across the floor like confetti. He turned the crystal for me, spinning it, so I could see the spangles dance.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I came to this story through a reflection upon the violence against children and young adults that occurred at different points in my life. I am a Florida native and grew up in the aftermath of Adam Walsh’s murder, which occurred less than ten miles from my home. I also attended the University of Florida a year after serial killer Danny Rolling claimed five students’ lives. In writing this story, I wanted to consider how the media’s publicity of violence affects the psyche of a child, exacerbating her fear of attack and death at the hands of someone she once considered an ally.
Christine C. Heuner has been teaching high school English for over 19 years. She lives with her husband, in-laws, and two children in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, The Write Launch, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. In 2011, she self-published Confessions, a book of short stories.
Postcards from Uncle Renato to Lola and Lolo; 2019; oil and beeswax on canvas over panel; 20 X 24 inches
Confluence; 2019; oil and beeswax on canvas; 36 X 44 inches
7 Train Blues; 2019; oil and beeswax on canvas; 12 X 15 inches
From the artist
:: Account ::
Each gradient is a vignette of an experience or place in my Passing Memories series. I attempt to commit important events in my life to memory via painting. I mine color from memory and photos I’ve taken/have been tagged in on social media. Cold wax and oil paint are swiped across the canvas to conceal extraneous possibilities and to limit sentimentality. A thin trace of landscape is revealed. Skin tones, days at the beach, climbing a mountain with a lover, my parents’ backyard, a city sidewalk, the bayous in Louisiana where my ancestors once lived: color triggers these recollections.
Re: Postcards from Uncle Renato to Lola and Lolo
I am not a religious person but feel most spiritual when I paint about my family or the Filipinx diaspora — trying to make a connection with the past. While making this piece I tried to conjure the ancestors, specifically my Lola (grandmother), Lolo (grandfather), and Uncle Renato: he was the first of my dad’s siblings to immigrate to the US. I never met him or Lolo because they died several years before I was born. In 2010, I was at an artist residency in Quezon City, Philippines and took a trip to my dad’s ancestral home in Sorsogon, Bicol. My cousin Michael found a bag of photos/postcards/letters that my Lola (my grandmother who had passed away in 2005) hid in the family storehouse next to sacks of rice. I scanned as many of the photos as I could at the university Michael taught at. I wasn’t sure what I would do with the newfound historical documents of my family until recently, but realized that these photos are some of my only visual connections to my family’s past. The gradients in this work are from Uncle Renato’s postcards and photos of Lola and Lolo. The layer on top is the skin tones from aged photos (hence the pinkish violet/ochre sepia tones) of my Lola, Lolo, Uncle Renato, and my own skin tone.
Roberto Jamora (b. 1987, Annapolis, MD) holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Purchase College, State University of New York. He lives and works in Richmond, VA and is an Adjunct Professor at VCU School of the Arts. He was awarded a 2018 Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation for his project “An Inventory of Traces,” a series of abstract paintings inspired by stories of immigrants in NYC. He has participated in residencies at Joan Mitchell Center, Ragdale, and Sambalikhaan. This summer, he will be a Fellow at Virginia Center for Creative Arts. His work has been in exhibitions at Frost Art Museum, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, Topaz Arts, Page Bond Gallery, ADA Gallery, JuiceBox Art Space, Norte Maar, Shockoe Artspace, Good Enough Projects, Quality Gallery, Scott Charmin Gallery, Fouladi Projects, Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, Open Space, and Outlet Fine Art.
The red text in the first half of this essay sparked the whole thing. My boyfriend inadvertently offended me with pornstars’ pictures, which set off my existential crisis about being unable to accept a hypersexualized society/being frustrated at my asexuality. What really freaked me out was that once we started doing sexual stuff, I lost the sexuality I had always labeled myself as. Writing helps me confront the issues I’m confused about. Going through three layers—the text, my previous publications about asexuality, the present realization of a past self—of one subject further disorders the process of sorting through this heavy personal issue. I borrowed the form of John D’Agata’s The Lifespan of a Fact for the columns, and used the previous publications as a means of communication between the text and the self I was before I met my boyfriend. I was a scared, lonely college student, yearning for a relationship, yet I never wanted to be touched. So when I got a boyfriend, I knew I’d have to deal with physical intimacy eventually. Going back to how I reacted to touch when I was nineteen versus now, 23 and accepting touch, was a weird bridge of liminality—how did I ever become comfortable with what I once could never handle? Change is inevitable; however, change is rarely received in the same manner every time. I despise change, but this transformation was surprisingly accepted.
Emily Townsend is a graduate student in English at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her works have appeared in cream city review, Superstition Review, Thoughtful Dog, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Santa Clara Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and others. A nominee for a Pushcart Prize and 2019 AWP Intro Journals Award, she is currently working on a second collection of essays in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Fragments from a Psychogeography of the Sixth Borough of New York ::
On nights when I was young and later as an adult I would follow Ohio Avenue as it sloped toward the Hudson. Years before, at the beginning of the last century, the street was lined with vast, sprawling homes, the homes of executives, shipping magnates, men with buildings bearing their family name at Choate and Yale. Massive alders blocked the sun setting over the river. The spaces surrounding these homes—spaces that could be legitimately called “grounds”—were expansive enough to actually be forbidding. That much space in the city, privately held, was bewildering and a warning, a brute oddity whose vastness demanded one keep away (remembering here that bewilder is a linguistic relative of wilderness, of which these spaces were a very particular sort).
My parents jokingly called Ohio “Fifth Avenue Squared.” When my wife and I moved here from the Upper West Side, she said we might as well be in Ohio the state, it felt so removed from the rest of the city.
I don’t ever recall seeing anyone on these grounds when I’d make this walk in my teens, though that’s probably memory slandering reality. I must have seen a game of touch football or a dinner party between the branches or even a solitary person taking a walk like me. I’m sure one of these things must have happened. But for whatever reason the evidence, the memory, has been purged.
Today, the mansions along Ohio, as well as Rotterdam and Bremerhaven and Southampton, and their grounds are gone. In their place are apartment blocks, too unremarkable to carry the merits of brutalism. Every hundred yards or so an alder remains, though in their solitude they are the ones who seem bewildered, who seem to have wandered into a landscape they have no business being a part of. Whatever bush-league Robert Moses oversaw the rethinking of Ohio Avenue from gilded to glutted did make one curious choice: at the very end of the road, at the last bit of arching land before the river, a serene crescent of woodland was left untouched.
It’s mainly oak and catalpa; rows of phlox and baby’s breath. It’s a place I find endlessly humble. It makes no assumptions and does not demand anything of you. It is not imposing or inspiring, makes no reach toward the sublime. As a park it is like a well-designed post office and I say that in the most affectionate way possible for I believe that’s what drew me there almost every night as certain aspects of my life were collapsing or curdling or stalling out. The simplicity was dependable and comforting. This little collection of trees and shade is actually a real park with a real name, overseen by the Department of Parks, just like Prospect and Central and Union Square. It’s called Lie Park.
*
Lie Park. It’s fun to imagine a few bureaucrats sitting down and deciding that this tightly hemmed wedge of greenery was insignificant enough that it was actually a fiction. The monument of the Hudson before you, the dinosaur skeleton of the Morgenthau Bridge off to the right, the fullness of all time and space captured in the western sky above everything: where you are is not real. This place is not here. It only exists because you need it to.
*
I rarely encountered anyone else in the park. If I did it was either elderly couples or young parents, laboring to get their babies to sleep. It was strange that such a peaceful place would go unused. One night I stopped at a bodega on the way down the hill to ask if there was something keeping people away from the park, ghost stories or unreported sexual assaults, anything, but the guy behind the counter just shook his head. He was older than me, Ethiopian or Eritrean, with bright, blistering eyes. Nothing wrong with it, he said. It’s just so small. I guess you could say that’s the problem.
I bought a tall boy of Miller High Life and thanked him for his time. It was late in the summer. I knew that by the time I reached the park, drank my beer, engaged in whatever contemplation I arrived upon (this seemed to be the park’s price of admission) and walked back home, it would be well past dark. My wife would ask if I’d gone on another walk and I would say yes. She would ask why I never invited her to come with. I would make a face and say something like, I’m not sure.
*
Trygve Lie was a Norwegian diplomat and the first secretary general of the United Nations, before it had its permanent home in Manhattan. From all I can tell he was a middling figure, unremarkable enough that this half-extant park was deemed a sufficient memorial to him. I have come across an account of his life in New York that mentions his fondness for the area. “[W]hen there, one imagines that a city is not only a welter. It hums, but softly,” he wrote to a Norwegian friend.
*
I poured out the last few ounces of my beer at the base of a catalpa for poor Mr. Lie. The lights from the apartments up the hill were beginning to feel oppressive. The presences of Riverdale and Co-Op City in the distance were almost too much to bear. I needed to go back home. Instead of going up Ohio, I followed the walking path north, where it eventually dropped me into Armistice Boulevard.
Everything about Armistice Boulevard seems to serve as a reminder of our own impending deaths.
Not a thought was given to sleeping policemen, actual policemen, crossing guards, brighter signage, more stoplights. The Boulevard was fully formed and immutable. You don’t move among traffic without an acute awareness that time is gaining on you. Overlay speed on place and you know your term here is fixed. But even in spite of its parade of pathologies, I knew that Armistice Boulevard was just as much a part of my experience as Lie Park.
*
One evening, when my wife said she was staying in Midtown for dinner with a friend who I know now wasn’t just that, I walked back to the Arm. In a very real sort of way I felt cleaved, that there was a part of me taking this walk because the idea of wandering the borough had started to coalesce from pointless strolling impulses into a thing with form and teeth; and another part that needed to be out of the house. These were two entirely different motives heading toward their own objectives. To walk as an observer was sound enough to lead me, open-eyed, someplace I hadn’t intended to go. I might have started on Armistice (it was only two blocks from our own house) and paid attention to the rocket-propelled traffic, the preponderance of big box stores, from diaper emporia to coffin dealerships but sooner or later something would have pulled me aside. Or someone. A voice, a memory, an undefined urge. To walk through the city without purpose is to leave yourself susceptible to hidden gravities. We’ve aged out the flaneur. There are too many large bodies and singularities.
But if I’d gone simply to go, to remove myself from a place that I’d already polluted with bad feeling and was well on its way to becoming a spiritual brownfield, then I could have set off for the Arm knowing my course was not in any danger of deviating. Grief makes precise navigators. We run cold and true. Which would it be then, the observer or the escapee? To be both was impossible. I stood between the Astral 17 Stadium Multiplex and a school bus wholesaler and had to assume a role. The air around me feels brittle and I’m slightly nauseous. I’m not good at decisions.
From the writer
:: Account ::
In February of 2001 I was laid off from my dot-com job in Manhattan. I was given an obscenely large severance package. A week later I got a phone call telling me I’d been accepted to grad school.
I had money and nowhere to be and a date of departure. So I started walking. I walked from the West Village to Coney Island. I walked up Broadway to the Cloisters. If there is one thing New York is good for it’s that its unceasing human friction is a strong way of getting you moving.
In an “Art of Nonfiction” interview in The Paris Review, Geoff Dyer makes the claim that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction isn’t about facts but form. There obviously is no sixth borough of New York, but moving through that or any city—and the psychic imprint left by movement and place—is a form fitted to truth. The invention of street names or topographic details does not make the act of emotional observation as evoked by place less real. (Tryvge Lie was real, if that matters.) The New York here is my New York: a hectic and bewildering and surprising place, and a terrible one for the lonely. It does not matter what that feeling is laid over. If the form carries the expectation and feeling of truth, then there is no reason not to call it true.
Pete Segall is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, Matchbook, Joyland, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in The Literary Review. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
A young woman bolts out of her house; she appears to be chased by something invisible. As she zigzags around the street, her focus shifts from something following to what is in front of her. She gazes at the camera. Her face is both terrified and desperate. She looks simultaneously at the viewer and her invisible chaser because, for a moment, they are the same. She jukes and darts back into her house, and the camera pans to follow her. Almost immediately, she reemerges and runs to a car. She peels out and down the block.
This is the first scene of It Follows—a movie that follows a young woman, Jay, and her friends as they are terrorized by an invisible monster whose bloodlust seeks the newest person added to a long chain of sexual encounters. The monster is slow and relentless. It can impersonate anyone, but often it takes the appearance of those familiar to its target. Throughout the film, characters subtly break the fourth wall—both in the presence and absence of the imposter that follows.
In the film’s next scene, the camera is perched in the backseat as the young woman drives down a highway. She white-knuckles the steering wheel. As if by twitch, she turns to look behind her.
*
S-O-S
she’s in disguise.
S-O-S
she’s in disguise.
There’s a
she-wolf
in
disguise.
*
One night, after crashing my bicycle, I booked an Uber to drive me from Westport, the swiftly gentrified bar district of South Kansas City, to where I lived in the Historic Northeast. My apartment lurked behind the intersection of Gladstone Boulevard and Independence Avenue, which put it very east of Troost (the street that the Nichols family used to redline Kansas City in order to keep African Americans and Jews pinned between highways and separate from the WASP‑y population they desired) and a smidge east of Prospect, which was often cited, despite the intermittent opulence and poverty east and west of the street, as the boundary between those who had and those who had not.
I loaded my bike into the Uber’s van and got into the front seat. The driver cruised down Paseo, inching closer and closer to my neighborhood. We drove under a highway; the driver looked around as gourmet donut shops were replaced by payday loans, as bars disappeared and convenience stores filled their places. He looked at me. He said, This is not you.
Yes, I responded. He pushed further, repeating this-is-not-you like a hook. At first, I tried to explain that I did in fact live in this part of town. Unable to convince him, I quieted, trying instead to convince myself—a situation made more difficult by my recent acceptance into a graduate program, a return to the institution that I had fled years before.
Is this me? I asked myself as I wheeled my bicycle into my apartment. Is this me? I asked my students when I lectured about “the thesis.” Is this me? I asked my planner, its days filled with “assignments.” Is this me? I asked my school email address, its seams splitting with the uncategorized waves of announcements, questions, advertisements, and surveys.
*
“Even Brian has been published!” I overheard one PhD student say to another. It was at night. We were at a bar. My first year of the program and fresh from a string of manuscript rejections, I already had a bad case of Imposter Syndrome. Approaching 30, I was often embarrassed by it—I thought I should have grown out of the feeling by now, but here it was like a sheepish child peering out from behind me.
I continue to socialize with this man. He is a poet I admire. Our conversations are slightly awkward, but no more so than any two people who have only a vague connection—a baseball fan and a beach volleyball fan bonding over their love of “sport.” He is neither hostile nor resentful; I never hear him say anything similar about me or anyone else again.
Sometimes, I wonder if that was what was said at all or just what I heard. Other times, I wonder if that distinction matters.
*
Baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, baby, baby, no. I whisper-sing on a friend’s balcony. These are the lyrics to Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” a song that lands relatively early in Bieber’s oeuvre. I have never heard the song: not on the internet, not on the radio, not at parties. Yet, the hook, which I’ve taken to whisper-sing when I need to vocalize but have nothing to say, is somehow ingrained in my mind. My friend says that I’m singing it wrong and pulls out her phone to find a video of the song on YouTube.
Please, don’t do that, I plead. Baby, baby, baby, no, baby, baby, baby, oh. I continue to say the words out of sync as the song’s first bars twinkle through her iPhone. A man sticks his head out of the apartment and calls for her. She leaves. I stay on the balcony, saying again Baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, baby, baby, no.
I think about the moment’s uncanniness. What is more similar to Justin Bieber, his recorded voice, digitized and squeezed through the air, some circuitry, the almost molecular sized iPhone speaker, or Brian Clifton whisper-singing the hook to a song Bieber had sung nearly a decade ago when puberty had not yet carved away his boyishness? Which entity is the imposter?
*
Between my first and second year of my PhD studies, I had two jobs. I was a teaching assistant for a literature class. I washed dishes to make ends meet over the summer. My schedule was Friday through Monday 5:00pm to 2:00am. The work was short, repetitious, and grueling. Often, I found it hard to grip things during my days off because my hands were so sore. My feet shriveled from being constantly wet. Because I lived in a college town, most of my coworkers attended the university I attended. One of the servers, Francie, I knew from the literature class I taught directly before I washed dishes.
When Francie came back to the dish pit, we would talk about literature, her imminent graduation, and the other students in the class. At first, we orchestrate this show each shift we have together. Slowly, our words become clipped. Slowly, there ceases to be a need to express ourselves.
*
In seventh grade, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) enthralled my friends. We chatted online; we made away messages from the lyrics of our favorite songs; we sent each other the screen names of strangers. One evening an AIM window popped up on my computer, “hey.” “hey. whos this?”
The generic screen name, bedazzled with punctuation marks, responded—it belonged to a girl (was her name Maddie?). We chatted for weeks. We divulged secrets. We developed something akin to feelings. We agreed that we were dating. We had never met each other. We were text bouncing through circuit boards.
*
Anatomy of a Ghost was also a screamo band from the early aughts. The group never achieved widespread success, disbanding after their first album in 2004. A couple members went on to start Portugal. The Man, an indie pop outfit that now crafts commercial-ready licks. Their fourth album, The Satanic Satanist, is a collection of down-tempo soulful indie pop.
One day after driving my car, my dad runs into our house and demands I burn him a copy of whatever CD was playing in the dash. As I do, he raves about the band’s sound, about how it is music. I give him the Memorex disc, “Portugal. The Man – The Satanic Satanist,” written in Sharpie on it.
My dad never speaks of this album or them again, and so, in our brains, the band returns to its previous other-life: a dismembered specter, a diagram of a memory.
*
We hear
the night
watchman
click his
flashlight,
ask if it’s
him or
them
that’s
insane.
*
After Jay and her paramour have sex in an abandoned parking lot, he drugs her, ties her to a wheelchair, and brings her into a dilapidated building. Jay questions her lover, who explains the monster’s motive and the simple rules by which it abides, namely that it follows whoever had sex with the most recently cursed person. The two then see an approaching figure. As the boy wheels Jay around, the two face directly into the camera. Jay screams, “What do you want?”
Soon, Jay realizes that the boy was not lying. The monster enters her home, causing her to flee to a park on a bicycle. Her friends and her neighbor, Greg, run after her. They tell Greg someone had broken into her house. Sobbing in close-up, Jay says, “I need to find him.” The camera shows Jay and her friends facing the viewer while Greg’s right torso fills the left side of the frame. It is as if the characters are huddled, deliberating, in a circle under a streetlight and the camera hangs in the space between being occluded from the group and completing the huddle. Responding to Jay’s demand, Greg says, “The person who broke into your house.” His inflection makes his words both a statement and a question. He removes his hand from the pocket of his denim jacket and gestures behind him. His thumb points into the camera.
The group finds the boy who had cursed Jay with the monster. Realizing the monster is real, they drive to Greg’s family’s lake house. When the monster arrives, it chases Jay and her friends into a boat shed. It busts a circular hole into the shed’s door. The group looks through it as if through a viewfinder at the beach where they had just been. The only difference between what the group sees and what the viewer had just seen is the absence of themselves.
*
“No Brainer” features Justin Bieber—his voice being more important than his lyrics, which anyone can find online. Dusted by post-production magic, Bieber’s vocal track is otherworldly—simultaneously straining to sound confident and sexual while remaining lock-step and mechanized. Lifeless yet relentless, Bieber’s vocals are a mall populated by replicants.
The uncanniness that envelopes Bieber’s voice increases throughout “No Brainer,” culminating in an intricate warren of Bieber’s hook with a slew of falsetto harmonies and trilling whoas. The tangled melodies ghost multiple Bieber’s and multiple, fragmented moments within Bieber’s serenade.
Listening to the song is to understand that its message doesn’t come directly from one (or many) human beings but instead is a string of sounds produced to imitate human connection via language. “No Brainer” is a love song sung by no one to no one.
*
I read a book of garish sentences. I do not bring up my judgment in class (or I do). Even I roll my eyes at this type of performance.
*
In morning traffic between Dallas and Denton, I sit at a standstill in the left-most lane. I am alone. The sun has come up (I know by the time I get back home it will have gone down). On the shoulder, near the concrete barrier between I‑35 North and I‑35 south, is a dead pitbull. Its body is rigid but not bloated. Its fur is gore-stained. I think, because it was hit on the highway, it must have died near instantaneously; I do not know how these things work.
The dog corpse is next to me. We hover near each other for what seems to be an eternity. The dog’s pelt does not appear broken, though its insides jut angularly, suggesting the chaos that the collision must have initiated within the pitbull’s body. As I stare at the dead body, I bring my hand to my mouth and my eyes water—my mind still stinging from, weeks before, believing my own pet was about to die.
Traffic lurches forward, dissipates. I speed off to drop off rent and then to teach freshmen the necessity of a thesis. I hear myself say, Why did you cover your mouth? Go through the performance of tears and then not cry?
*
Francie was not the only student I worked with. As I would find out in the fall, Clarissa would also be a student of mine. Over the summer, Clarissa watched me dance to songs about how sex on a sofa can be a type of yoga, about wanting men in Timb’s, about basic bitches thinking I’m a head case.
On the first day of class, I walked into class and see Clarissa in her black, cat-eyed glasses. She sat near the back. I told her specifically hello. I immediately became a dishwasher masquerading as a professor. I tried to restart my performance of a “laid back” prof. I stumbled. I got through class. Afterward, I asked Clarissa if she is alright being in my class. She said she was. Great, I said.
*
In my early twenties, I saw Portugal. The Man play a small venue in Lawrence. I had driven there from Kansas City with an ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend who was a friend of mine. We smoked weed in the car. I was unsure what to say, so I drove faster, hoping soon the venue would be so full of music I could feel safely alone. When the band struck up, I snuck into the crowd and twitched like a sad virus.
*
After work, I drive an hour home. My car’s check engine light flashes at me (indicating misfires). Another light on the dash informs me my airbag system is malfunctioning. For the past fourteen miles, a small orange gas pump has shone next to my fuel gage. When I pull off the highway, my car strains and rattles; things grate against each other; metal squeaks when I stop. My car is its own imposter, and a poor one at that.
*
I am that
bitch,
I'm-a,
I'm-a that
bih, yeah
You know
I'm that
bih, can't
get off of
this dih,
yeah
*
I tilted my head and bobbed it back and forth. I said with a smile, “Nice.” I let my body go slack. I repeated this action, saying various positive phrases: fuck yeah, sick, that’s rad. It was dark. Dallas unfurled into bits of halogen. I continued to imitate the friends I believed supported everyone.
*
It Follows ends with Jay and Paul holding hands and walking down a neighborhood street. The monster that followed had not been defeated so much as rerouted; scenes earlier Paul drives to a seedy and industrial part of Detroit to visit a sex worker. It is implied the plan was to pass the creature to someone who routinely had sex with a vast array of people.
One of the most compelling ambiguities of the film, for me, is its message. Is It Follows anti-sex? There are plenty of indications that this is the case—a monster that is sent to punish the sexually active, the reduction of human sexuality to a transaction for survival (the sex scenes in the film play out self-serious and dutiful with more desperation than passion). Yet the sexual content of It Follows is shown neutrally. Neither Jay nor Paul are shamed for their sexuality once becoming sexually active. And in one scene the two characters reminisce about finding pornography and looking at it as a group on one of their lawns. Paul says, “We had no idea how bad it was.”
This sentiment, coupled with how often the fourth wall is broken, seems to push the film’s message away from being anti-sex into being a more nuanced critique of socialized shaming. Maybe the film’s monster then becomes not a punishment for sex but an embodiment of the insecurities Jay and Paul project onto individuals of their repressed and repressing society—what would my neighbors/mother/cousins/friends think if they knew I had had sex? Or maybe it is the insecurities these people have of performing sexually—did I enjoy this encounter enough or was my pleasure a show?
*
I pulled into our driveway around 2:45am. I had finished a closing shift washing dishes. The radio’s rapid twitches—extreme metal-click-Vietnamese lounge-click-bubblegum pop-click-neo-libertarian conspiracy theories-click-trap-click-advertisement—wafted like dust around my still and silent hatchback.
I showered and drank a Topo Chico. I sat, my hair wrapped in a towel. I refreshed my email. I checked my bank account. I stumbled into the dark bedroom; Rowen, my partner, was curled on her side, already asleep. We spooned in the way longtime lovers must on a full mattress.
My body still vibrated from the quick succession of repetitive tasks I had done for the past eight and a half hours. I wondered if, even while sleeping, Rowen could know I was the one in the dark with her. Was there an essential aspect to me, my touch that let her know I was there and not another? Was this the case with everyone? If so, why did my eyes watch the door ready for a terror to waltz through whenever Rowen left to use the bathroom, why did I imperceptibly jump when she clutched my body in the dark?
As I thought and thought, I sat up and craned my head over so I could see around her shoulders, her hair. In the dark, I squinted at her, finding what made this sleeping face hers. Yes, the body next to me was Rowen. Yes, I am myself. I fell asleep.
*
A few days before a middle school mixer, I messaged Maddie, “we should meet at the dance.”
“…”
“… ☺”
“ok”
I waited, but Maddie didn’t show. Our parents arrived. Maddie disappeared from AIM. A few weeks later, a friend told me Maddie was really Justin, a boy in our class, the whole thing was a joke, and many people were aware of it.
I looked at Justin, at the other kids in the class—aware of the difference between how they saw me and how I had seen myself in the past weeks, aware of the difference between how I had seen them before and how I saw them after.
*
Years after first seeing Portugal. The Man, I rode my bicycle around Kansas City and came across a free concert series on top of hill that rises between I‑35 and Broadway Boulevard. Headlining the event was Portugal. The Man. I locked up my bike and made my way to the front of the stage. I hardly recognized the band—the singer, who used to position his mic sideways so he wouldn’t have to look at the crowd, directly addressed us, his hair recently cut short, his lips accentuated with a neat moustache.
Portugal. The Man played songs I did not recognize. All around me were people I did not know bopping along in flip-flops, cut-offs, tank tops, and ungodly fluorescent rimmed sunglasses. I drifted back, watching the space I had occupied in the crowd slowly disperse, like a ghost into the stained walls of a haunted house.
*
A man messages me on Facebook. He tells me Rick Barot sent him a personal rejection for a group of poems he submitted to the New England Review. He, this man, mentored me during my first stint in graduate school.
In a previous message, he asked, “Do you know an editor there? Or is it just that your poem was THAT good?” A year previous, he told me that it was great that I was using my personal connections to get published.
I congratulate this man. I say good things are coming.
*
For a time during my commute, I repeat, Why did you cover your mouth? Go through the performance of tears and then not cry? It is true: there was no one else in my car and I doubt anyone in traffic was monitoring me, I felt no connection to this animal other than the one all animals feel, I will not be bothered by this experience a year from now. As if by twitch, I look behind me. I switch lanes. I look in the mirror and see myself looking back. Maybe everyone performs a little for themselves, for the microscopic feedback loop between the synapse and the eye, the ear, the hand, the nose. Maybe this performance is necessary, but why? And for whom do we bring our hands to our mouths—the future self or the past? Are they so distinct?
*
I’m
different.
Yeah, I’m
different
—pull up
to the
scene with
my ceiling
missing.
*
A professor posts a question in an online discussion board. I answer his question with a series of questions. In class he references Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s game of questions. I don’t get the reference, but I laugh and say I hadn’t thought of it that way.
*
Moving up an ontological level, It Follows unspools like a dream, a projection of the viewer’s insecurities onto the succession of digital images. The soundtrack aids this effect. Crystalline and distorted synths dissolve into ethereal amorphous swells; it is simultaneously a product of a Vaseline-smeared 80s aesthetic and distinctly separate from it (a ghost of the future the 80s predicted that never came). The soundtrack becomes most hauntingly poignant in the film’s final scene. Its synthetic textures fade into crisp renditions of birds and yard work—close yet uncannily distant from sounding natural like how a voice in a dream booms within the dream-self’s mind rather than emanates from the mouth of its speaker.
Jay and Paul walk, holding hands. Their heads casually rotate from each other to the camera, to the sidewalk, to the houses around them as does ours—another instance of the broken fourth wall. Like the soundtrack, they become immersed in the naturalistic sounds. Jay’s sexual history is known to us, the viewer, and to Paul. Paul’s sexual history is known to Jay and to us. We exist, the three us—Jay, Paul, and viewer—aware of each other, conclusively ourselves as we gaze as if there were nothing before our eyes—absences ready to be filled.
*
One night during closing, I put on Dead in the Dirt’s The Blind Hole. The songs pummel their feedback-laced riffs and snare-heavy blast beats into everything 50 seconds at a time. I towel melted ice cream from the dish rack. I hose bits of bacon and grilled chicken clinging to the side of the dishwasher. I squeegee a grey-white liquid from where the walls meet the floor to the drains in the center of the room. Dead in the Dirt grinds. Dead in the Dirt screams. “I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.”
From the writer
:: Account ::
Between semesters of the PhD program I was a dishwasher at a restaurant where two of my students also worked. I had been feeling like I didn’t belong in academia and this, to me, further insinuated that. I wanted to show a mind wrestling with the constantly mutating performance of self that is asked of a person in public no matter where that is. Who am I in the car? Who am I at my job? Who am I at the grocery store? Are all these selves compatible?
I also thought using song lyrics from musicians that had gone through dramatic persona shifts—Shakira’s move from Spanish-language to English-language pop star, Bob Dylan’s chameleon-like identity, Qveen Herby’s move from Disney star to raunch rap, 2Chainz’s move from Tity Boi to trap star—would trouble the idea of performance and authenticity. What does it mean when the people whose words infiltrate a lot of my day are play acting as someone other than themselves?
Brian Clifton is a PhD student at the University of North Texas. His work can be found in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. He is an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.
for Jude Walters, operator at Rome Cotton Compress Company
Not another one like it for a hundred-odd miles
This cotton compress’s so efficient it needs only one operator
No spider men darting around iron legs losing fingers
The oldest one still in operation also owned by the same man
Whose customary reticence shortened threads we have left
Jude who runs the big machine while its owner hunts in Nova Scotia
Selling bale by bale in Boston bale by bale 500 lbs a bale
Stated commission: 50 cents per bale when local sourcing
These bales the preference of the surrounding mills
Prices shift per telegram: 5 1/8, 5 5/8 4s you don’t care
Top crop or small fruit which makes the grade
Even disinterested experts confirm the plant’s superior
Whether or not the cotton’s injured or will have a bad showing
Harbor (meaning wait and do nothing) as spots don’t respond
To decline in futures
Jude you are full of care moving under the belly
The machine like a ladder too high to picture with its bell dome
Crushing the cotton you confirmed was of quality not slipping
In thinning gradients these distinctions to you the most clear
The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 20: Almighty God will answer well for all those who choose not to give up their devotion to loving him in order to justify themselves.
:: Buckshot ::
from Anecdotes and Reminiscences in A History of Rome and Floyd County by George Macruder Battey Jr. (1922)
The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 53: Various kinds of unseemly behaviour that attend those who disregard the work discussed in this book.
:: Irradiation ::
Harbin Clinic, Rome, Georgia
I.
The cotton broker could afford 100 grams of radium, which he purchased, in consultation with his doctor, in the summer of 1919. Two facilities produced a quantity enough to be considered for philanthropic acquisition: one in Pittsburgh, another Denver. Because the one out west was cheaper, perhaps speculatively, the broker placed his order there. It arrived to Rome’s medical clinic intended for the treatment of those who could not otherwise afford it. Some side effects were beginning to be charted: laceration, reddening of skin, small burns, deterioration & weakness overall, but the cotton broker pressed his business. The cotton broker named himself, a record shows, a capitalist, & in Boston mediated sales of bales grown from the upland soil tilled by pennied Reconstruction labor. He was overcompensated handsomely. He built schools. He upheld codes. He owned a textile mill himself, through his wife’s family’s tragedy: one brother shot a fiancé, but that’s another angle—a mark way down a barrel. Or is it, as the deep therapy X‑ray machine the broker bought for the emanation of irradiate luminous metal into superficial dermis shows otherwise developing cells, discolorations, protrusions, tumors? The excrescence of a body willed mysteriously away. The X‑ray is a vehicle for sight into tissue, for secrets kept by bodies until cut, or split, whose cracks or seepages would self-expire. They activated radium into an idea so they’d contact the insides of themselves, & blast through killing parts.
II.
The results reported back to the broker justified expense: During the month of March, we had nine cases for Radium. These cases,
with one exception, were small localized carcinomas, which usually respond quite readily to Radium treatment, and several
of these have disappeared already. One was an extensive carcinoma of the breast in which Radium was post-operative, and in which
operation itself would not have been attempted, had not possessed Radium to follow it up. Four were carcinomas about the head and face
in which surgical measures would have been impossible and where the only relief lay in the use of Radium. The doctor, cautious
with the application of his source, the Radium Fund, added on, appreciatively: You may be interested to know that one of the
first cases upon which we used the Radium, in a fibroid tumor, returned several days ago and the tumor has entirely disappeared.
III.
The broker & the doctor understood each other, understood the fragility & impact, the work of local use. Two knowledge
systems overlay, begin to blur to one action: a funded fund, a store of possibility. The possibility itself makes bodies glow,
brains glow imagining their work: direct a tube conducting voltage, at low wattage—& point the brain toward the body, watch
no, feel the work begin. The necessary burning through, though internal tumors could not be reached without irrecoverable sear,
& if the X‑ray’s effects were not enough, poison radium drops beading from a metal tube tip would be touched to tumor, to affected area.
The capital of skin condensed by their formal dialogue. The capital of who’s attritional—some bodies, say the blasting tubes, inflaming
brains, are to be seen in terms of use, disuse. Languages of care & capital mutate, brokering, raying out from the limits of what
could be known, of what the two men could & would be willing to be shown. The story here is not an elegy, attending to a death,
though some patients did die despite treatment: Dead, four; cured, twenty-six; under treatment, twenty-four; and hopeless, seven, wrote the
doctor some months later. There are quite a number of these who are now under treatment who I feel sure we will be able to transfer to the group
of cured. Those which I have classified as hopeless are ones which presented an impossible condition when they first came and for whom we used
the radium with the hope of relief. What grows from living bodies helps us measure distance? What then when a body’s dead?
Care’s capital displaced into outcome, professionally detached— how if we care to determine good from bad, bad from worse,
& good from better shapes into, from history’s lens, narrative abscesses. From external beam what can be seen, which samples
ought be held to light? Letters & accounts come radiating selves— archival resonance—through contact, brought to sight, illumined
structures, the damage in material, a body’s segment layered into shapes & scanned for meaning. To look at someone like a ray. To see
their body stark, backlit, holding self, curvatures of messages distended, how healing is a silhouette of power in technology applied
to voices—past this half life each one a separate sound, a sanctity. The question of who speaks, and if one speaks, one must attune
through laying self aside, let work work its way to heal or recombine. The question’s if these, their forms, have been, will be benign.
From the writer
:: Account ::
Compress Pastoral
The relationship between the writer and the archive is, in a sense, a constant, as is the idea of having interacted with that archival material that changes both the writer and the extant information reshaped into the poem’s present. Or, I saw a picture, which exists within my family’s archive, of a man identified as Jude, standing before this massive, monstrous machine called a cotton compress, which compacted bales of cotton into incredibly dense segments of material. I want to memorialize Jude’s skill and labor, and think about the meaning of his skill in relation to poetic form, while also considering the impact that industrial farm equipment—strange, now esoteric, then-new, cutting-edge technology—was beginning to have on labor, skill, and whether and how this reoriented or attenuated our relationship both to landscape and to action itself. Rather than sentimentalize the past and those who lived in it, I try to think about conditions, distributions, autonomy, refusals, and enactments through both form and content.
Buckshot
So often when I’m working with historical material from my hometown, a small town in the U.S. South, it’s as though I’m working through the past’s dirt and detritus, trying to get my hands into the root systems of thinking, trying to find the rhizomes of violence and violent thinking, to uproot them, pull them apart. One text cluster at a time. As a poet I’m not beyond satire, nor humor, and the attendant fears that undergird them. Form, here, always, being taken deadly seriously.
Irradiation
What would it mean for a narrative poem to consider that very perspective it occupies? What does it mean to [be honest] look, continually, at history, with the double vision of objectivity and hermeneutic instinct, working through accounts and information, inevitably, as a poet? Can one have X ray vision, really, the fantasy of true objectivity, and from which temporal position would this be the most accurate method of seeing—and, what happens, really, to local thinking, local stories, once they’re situated in narrative? Can topographical poetry—lyric, in a sense—and topological poetry—narrative, by contrast—work in tandem, and would that very practice itself pose risk? In a way, this is my foray into writing into questions that a poet I learn from and admire, Robyn Schiff, poses in her work and teaching.
Alicia Wright is originally from Rome, Georgia, and she has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Ecotone, West Branch, The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Flag + Void, and The Southeast Review, among others. The winner of the 2017 Wabash Prize from Sycamore Review, Indiana Review’s 2016 Poetry Prize, and of New South’s 2015 New Writing Contest, she is at present working toward a PhD in Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as conversations editor for Denver Quarterly.
In the spring of 2018, the fiction writer Danielle Evans visited the small, midwestern liberal arts college where I teach in the English department. Evans read her recently published short story, “Boys Go to Jupiter,” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Clearly, I’m not the only one to have felt its power. Roxane Gay recently selected the story for the 2018 edition of the iconic Best American Short Stories series.
“Boys Go to Jupiter” tells the story of Claire, a white, first-year student at fictional Dennis College in New England, who finds herself at the center of escalating controversy after a photograph of her wearing a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. She’s goaded into wearing the swimsuit by a temporary boyfriend, and she goes along with it, hoping the “trashy” bikini will piss off her new stepmother. Claire barely registers the significance of her clothing choice, until the boyfriend posts the photo to Facebook. It doesn’t take long for the photo to become a subject of intense debate and controversy. Claire’s African-American hall mate promptly sees the photo and tweets her outrage. Claire’s photo is reposted and re-tweeted in various contexts. The locally trending topic #clairewilliamsvacationideas includes the suggestions “Auschwitz, My Lai,” and “Wounded Knee.” [i]An organization named the Heritage Defenders takes up what they imagine to be Claire’s cause (though Claire, a recent resident of the northern Virginia suburbs, can hardly claim southern identity). Claire’s email address is made public, and hundreds of angry, supportive, and pornographic messages find their way to her inbox. Within a few days, the Dennis College campus has erupted in tension. Claire herself doubles down in the midst of this controversy, printing a Confederate flag postcard for the hall mate and posting another to her dorm door. Claire’s adviser and the Vice Dean of Diversity ask Claire to apologize for her behavior. At the campus town hall held to help students process the anger and fear the bikini photo has inspired, Claire remains unrepentant. In this moment, surrounded by angry peers, Claire persists in telling herself “she can still be anybody she wants to.” [ii]
For those of us who work and live in the world of the small liberal arts college, the story’s events ring true. Over the past four years, our small school has witnessed assorted incidents: the tearing down of Black Lives Matter posters and the defacing of Muslim Student Association posters, the scrawling of the n‑word across the “Aspiration Fountain” where orientation leaders encourage first-year students to chalk their hopes and dreams. We’ve watched the university respond to each incident in its institutional manner, with forums held and forceful yet vague promises made to meet student demands for a better, more inclusive, campus climate. Students have organized and requested that faculty receive mandatory diversity training each year, and the faculty have assented. Evans’s story suggests that these kinds of institutional responses are inadequate; they barely scratch the surface of the modern problems such events manifest: the ways that social media determine the truths within which we must live, the ways that privilege has co-opted the language of resistance, the complexity of individual culpability in a systemically racist society. But for those of us who work in this world, something else resonates here as well. The story asserts that the idea of college—as a space of transformation and reinvention—is mere fiction. When Claire tells herself in the midst of this chaos that, “she can still be anybody she wants to,” we know she is wrong.
Like Claire, I believed that in college I would be able to become anybody I wanted to. This was the mid-1990s, and my pile of college brochures, each thick and glossy, full of beautifully casual people walking past lush, ancient trees in their sweatshirts, was a treasured stash. I studied these images, trying to determine the perfect place to go, the place where I would become myself, someone wholly new and still unthinkable. Shirley Marchalonis compares this ideal of college to the “green world” described by Shakespeare scholars. [iii]In this view, college is a space “away from the ‘real world’’’ that has “its own reality,” a space that is “beautiful, mysterious, and magical.” [iv]This college is a “place of transformation,” where “temporary inhabitants grow, change, seek identities and find solutions.” [v]This college was the one I assumed was waiting for me. The impression in my mind was vague but palpable. Much like the title character of Owen Johnson’s 1912 novel Stover at Yale, I anticipated the freedom that college seemed to promise. I, too, imagined that the freedom “to venture and to experience” would lead me to the knowledge of “that strange, guarded mystery—life.” [vi]
For the past few years, I have been studying the stories we tell about college. Perhaps because I keep hearing the refrain that higher education is in “crisis” (a cursory search for “crisis” on The Chronicle of Higher Education website will yield more than 230 articles published in the past year alone), or perhaps because my students’ experience of college life appears so different from my own, I’ve felt drawn to thinking about the ways that college has been understood and imagined. The stories we tell about college are changing. Are they changing because college itself has changed? A number of scholars have asserted that recent decades have witnessed the “financialization” of the university and that the university’s assimilation of corporate ideals has fundamentally altered education. [vii]The past two decades have also seen the advent and ascension of social media. Can college no longer make itself a “world apart” in this digital environment? Or, are the stories we tell about college changing to reflect a reality that has always existed? Was my fantasy of college transformation only ever fantasy, the product of some amount of privilege and blindness? I’ll admit there is nostalgia motivating me in this pursuit, some imprecise sense that things used to be better in some way. Like most nostalgia, the reality turns out to be more complex than the contours of my fuzzy, sepia-toned memories would lead me to believe.
In the United States, stories about college life began to be told in the 1830s, and they gained popularity as the nineteenth century wore on. Perhaps what is most surprising about the popularity of such stories is that it outpaced the actual popularity of college itself. By 1900, only about 4 percent of the school-age population attended college. [viii]At the same time, the subject of the college man or college girl appeared regularly in popular magazines, and books about campus life enjoyed healthy sales. Despite the paucity of actual college students in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of college circulated widely and seems to have occupied an outsized role in the way readers imagined the maturation of the individual in democratic society.
The earliest of these published college stories suggest that transformation and growth were central to the story of college. The few scholars who analyze college fiction inevitably refer to stories and books about campus life as bildungsroman, stories of a young person’s development and emergence into society. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1828 novel Fanshawe traces the maturation of the fictional Harley College students Edward Walcott and Fanshawe as they compete with each other over the college president’s young ward Ellen Langton and later rescue her from kidnapping. Walcott and Fanshawe, one a rather superficial young man and the other a serious and sickly scholar, each change, becoming thoughtful men of action through their interactions with each other. [ix]Still, Fanshawe offers a rather slight portrait of its characters’ development.
By the end of the nineteenth century, we can read about more substantive college transformations. The handsome and carefree title character of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s 1893 novel Donald Marcy “finds everything has always come easily to him,” until a hazing incident gone terribly wrong causes introspection. [x]Before he even understands it, Marcy begins to see the “educated life” as connected to “the honor and the preciousness of all those intangible values which come to a man.” [xi]Marcy turns away from the capitalism and materialism of his Wall Street father and the hijinks of his early college friends, finding self-realization in studying and helping others. Marcy’s maturity is due in large part to the influence of his friendship with the Smith College student Fay, whose formidable intellect and accomplishments set a model for him to emulate.
College women too could expect to leave school with a new sense of self in addition to their ironically named bachelor’s degrees. In Helen Dawes Brown’s Two College Girls (1886), the effervescent, superficial Rosamund gains a seriousness of purpose through her college experience while her intellectual and prim roommate Edna emerges as a more compassionate and socially adept woman. What Edna treasures as the most “real” experience of her life, she states, is “the finding out of new ideas—the seeing of old things in a new light” that has transpired in college. [xii]Speaking at commencement, Edna’s roommate Rosamund fondly recounts the “colleging”—the pranks, holidays, friendships, and scholarly triumphs—that have led to her own and her fellow graduates’ considerable personal development. [xiii]For these young women, as for countless other undergraduates imagined in the college fiction of the era, college is a space in which individuals tend to discover themselves, developing their nascent talents and strengths and discarding their careless behaviors and poor manners.
In Two College Girls, Edna and Rosamund’s teachers explain that college inevitably leads to transformation, because it puts students “in the way of influencing each other.” [ivx]Genuine friendship, forged unexpectedly across the social borders of popularity, temperament, regional affiliation, and class, provides the catalyst for most of the collegiate transformation that takes place in college stories. Studying matters, but the knowledge gained from experience, and in particular the experience of others, matters more. In seeming to bring together diverse individuals in this way, college has often occupied a symbolic place in U.S. culture. It stands as a particularly democratic institution, a meritocracy in which individuals pursue achievement on a level playing field and gain valuable training as citizens. As the cultured Monsieur Darcy informs the young Armory Blaine in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 college novel This Side of Paradise, “democracy” is something he will “find plenty of … in college.” [xv]
However, the few scholarly studies of college fiction that have been published suggest that our ideals of college democracy and the transformation it engenders have only ever been myth. Examining representations of friendship in postbellum U.S. college fiction, Travis M. Foster concludes that the affectionate bonds depicted in these novels exist to consolidate white supremacy and to mend sectional tensions in the wake of national division. Reaching similar conclusions, Christopher Findeisen explores issues of class addressed in college fiction, showing how college has always been imagined as a space for the upper class to play and develop. What has changed over time, Findeisen asserts, is that colleges and universities have “evolved to become institutions that produced economic differences rather than institutions that merely reflected them” [xvi]Both scholars have illuminated the function of not only the university but also college fiction in producing and reproducing an American elite. As our stories about college emphasize individual transformation and achievement, they direct attention away from what yet remains visible, that “the university is largely a site for the upper class to compete with itself in games that have essentially no economic meaning because their outcomes are more or less assured.” [xvii]Transformation, or at least the illusion of transformation, is a mark of privilege.
As Foster notes, some voices questioned the story of college even as it was being written. In the short story “Of the Coming of John,” W. E. B. Du Bois writes of a young man from Altamaha, Georgia, who departs for college as the great pride of his rural black community. At the Wells Institute, John grows “in body and soul”; he gains “dignity” and “thoughtfulness.” [xviii]His professor remarks, “all the world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he builded slow and hard.” [ixx]Drawn away from home into a “world of thought,” John discovers himself and utterly transforms at college—in manner, perspective, skill, and understanding. [xx]However, when John returns home to southeastern Georgia, he finds his intellectual and personal growth have put him at odds with his family and community, and, worse, they have provoked the town’s anxious white community. Another John, the white son of the town’s judge, has also returned from college. When this white John attempts to assault John’s sister, John kills him and is lynched by a white mob. In Du Bois’s hands, we see the story of college masks the story of systemic racism and power. Neither John transforms. The white John does not want to nor does he need to; the world is designed for him. The black John is not permitted such transformation.
The story of college that Du Bois tells here has been told again and again in African American literature. A beautiful world of learning provides an oasis and a path to achievement and uplift. This place promises the improvement of the individual, promises that here the individual can be remade and in turn can remake the world. Yet, this promise proves illusory. From Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903–4) to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947), college becomes visible as a space that exists not for individual transformation but for the reproduction of the status quo.
The story of college as transformation meets this critique of college in “Boys Go to Jupiter.” Claire’s fantasy of reinvention at Dennis College is manifestly symptomatic of the white privilege Du Bois exposes as tacitly underpinning assumptions about higher education’s transformative potential. Like “Of the Coming of John,” Evans’s story exposes the fantasy of transformation by juxtaposing the intertwined fates of its black and white characters. As the consequences of Claire’s unthinking mistake unfold, flashbacks inform the reader of a darker, more intimate story of race and racism, the story of Claire’s best friendship with Angela Hall. After Claire and Angela meet as six-year-old neighbors, the girls are inseparable, sharing a special affection as they taunt Angela’s brother Aaron with the nonsense rhyme, “girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider” (643). The girls grow into adolescents together and even endure their mothers’ respective cancers together. Claire plans that they will someday “go to college together,” where “the world will unravel for them, fall at their feet.” [xxi]Only Claire’s mother’s death and Angela’s mother’s recovery severs the girls’ bond. And race, Angela’s blackness, is only ever incidental. That is, incidental to Claire.
If the girls’ shared experience of their mothers’ illnesses seems like evidence of the kind of universal experience and human connection that underlies some appeals to building a post-racial U.S. society, further tragedy underscores how unrealistic such a vision remains. One year after Claire’s mom’s death, Aaron drives a drunk, grieving Claire home from a party and is killed when a pack of white teenage boys run him off the road. The boys, who imagine they are rescuing Claire from this young black man she has known all her life, are found not responsible, and Aaron’s death is ruled an accident, though the Hall family understands the events through different terms. As Aaron’s fate makes clear, even in the twenty-first century and even among educated and privileged suburban neighbors, not everyone can expect the world to fall at her feet.
As a child, Aaron points out the logical fallacy of the girls’ rhyme. It doesn’t make sense that boys would go to Jupiter to get “more stupider,” Aaron quite rationally explains, since, in order to reach Jupiter, one would have to be incredibly intelligent. Evans’s story seems to suggest that it is no more sensible to believe that “college” is the place to get “more knowledge.” This is the stuff of child’s games.
After I listened to Evans read this story before an audience of alternately eager, anxious, and bored undergraduates in the richly wood-paneled auditorium of our college library, I felt disheartened. This story is about the end of college, I thought. There is no reinvention, no transformation, only stasis and spin. The narrative that the campus is fixated on, whether one young woman’s stupid choice to wear a hateful symbol should be condemned as racist or celebrated for its self-expression of southern “heritage,” is not even the real story here. Neither of these interpretations of Claire is true, exactly. The deeper story of Claire’s relationship to Angela and Aaron causes us to ask complex questions—what culpability does Claire have for what happens to Aaron? Is she a different kind of victim, one of the racist and sexist ideology that imagines her as the white woman ever vulnerable to the predatory black male? Is ignorance as bad as racism? How can love and racism coexist?—that are only flattened in this campus environment. Dennis College is not a world apart in which the freedom of experience and the pursuit of knowledge lead to reinvention and personal growth. But for all the ways that Evans’s story signals the end of the story of college, it suggests that there might be another story to tell.
In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in May 2018, Lisi Schoenbach cautions readers against engaging in too spirited a critique of the university, lest we undermine the credibility of an institution we need now more than ever. Schoenbach writes, “it can be true that the university is implicated in neoliberalism while also being true that universities are often the defenders of free speech, anti-instrumentality, and dissent.” [xxii]Maybe college is not and has never been truly a space of transformation, but it can be a space of reckoning, at least of a kind. College can be a space in which systemic injustice and the myths that ease its functioning are observed and named. It can be a space of dialogue, confrontation, and expression. In our current world, college may be the only space where this is possible.
The college town hall event that concludes Evans’s story is not an opportunity to pose difficult questions. Still, in this space, even as Claire’s story is misunderstood, we see an exchange of perspectives, and we see Claire begin to become aware of her privileged place in the world. One white student stands at the microphone and offers an apology for racism, another recites the song “Sweet Home Alabama,” though no one can tell whether this performance is an earnest endorsement or a critique of the song’s glorification of the U.S. South. Claire watches as various speakers—all white—file on to and off of the stage. Carmen, the hall mate who first tweeted her outrage at Claire’s bikini photo, sits in the audience, “surrounded by two full rows of black students, more black people than Claire has ever seen on campus before—maybe, it occurs to her, more black people than Claire has ever seen at once in her life.” The group sits silently. They wait. Eventually, after the stage has been empty for ten minutes, the black students stand and leave the room, intentionally, one at a time. No one has spoken, but it would be wrong to say that these students have not made themselves heard. At the end, Claire finds herself unable to resist the deafening quiet. She approaches the microphone, as Evans tells us, still telling herself that reinvention and transformation remain possible. We know this is the wrong story for Claire to tell herself, but we can also see that college has precipitated some self-awareness, however modest, for Claire. When it “occurs to her” that she has come face to face with “more black people than” she “has ever seen at once,” Claire has been brought to account in some small way. Evans also suggests here that Claire’s is not the only story of college that warrants telling. In their performance of purposeful silence, Carmen and her fellow black students not only call into question the stories that many of us have persisted in telling ourselves about college. They also intimate the existence of other college stories that still remain to be told.
[i]Danielle Evans, “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Sewanee Review (Fall 2017), 646. [ii]Evans, 661. [iii]Shirley Marchalonis, College Girls: A Century in Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 1995), 25. [iv] Ibid. [v] Ibid. [vi]Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale (Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), 5. [vii]Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (Verso, 2017). [viii]Colin B. Burke, American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York Univ. Press, 1982), 55. [ix]It is worth noting that Hawthorne was so embarrassed of this book, his first novel, that he later attempted to buy up all the existing copies and burn them. [x]Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Donald Marcy (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1983), 64. [xi] Ibid., 72. [xii]Helen Dawes Brown, Two College Girls (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886), 144. [xiii]Ibid., 314. [xiv]Ibid., 112. [xv]F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (Scribner, 1920), 32. [xvi]Christopher Findeisen, “‘The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference’: The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding,” American Literature 88. 1 (March 2016), 77. [xvii]Ibid., 82. [xviii] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Coming of John,” The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 166. [xix]Ibid., 163. [xx]Ibid., 163. [xxi]Evans, 648. [xxii]Lisi Schoenbach, “Enough with the Crisis Talk!: To Salvage the University, Explain Why It’s Worth Saving,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (16 May 2018).
Works Cited
Brown, Helen Dawes. Two College Girls. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886.
Burke, Colin B. American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View. New York Univ. Press, 1982.
Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
Du Bois, W. E. B. “Of the Coming of John.” The Souls of Black Folk. 1903; Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003, 162–176.
Findeisen, Christopher. “‘The One Place Where Money Makes No Difference’: The Campus Novel from Stover at Yale through The Art of Fielding,” American Literature, 88.1, March 2016, 67–91.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. Scribner, 1920.
Foster, Travis M. “Campus Novels and the Nation of Peers,” American Literary History, 26.3, Fall 2014, 462–483.
Gay, Roxane, ed. The Best American Short Stories 2018. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Schoenbach, Lisi. “Enough with the Crisis Talk!: To Salvage the University, Explain Why It’s Worth Saving,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 May 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Enough-With-the-Crisis-Talk-/243423
Molly K. Robey is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. She has published articles in American Literature, Legacy, Studies in American Fiction, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Most recently, she has been researching the origins of the College Girl in U.S. culture.
Clay’s second cousin hiked the trail from the band office, where he had to deal with some kind of bureaucratic red tape and bull over his white girlfriend living on the reserve without band permission, even if she lived in town weekdays, when she wasn’t flying to reservations north of Sioux Lookout, where she worked as a social worker with the First Nations social services agency. After he cursed Clay and blamed him for letting his leg hold traps sit to rust in the shed when he asked him to oil them, and showed him his broken leg was healing slowly from the snowmobile accident he had while ice fishing on Lac Seul, he said Clay inherited a condo in Toronto from his nephew. In disbelief and distraction, Clay returned to reading the Reader’s Digest large-print condensed book, Gone with the Wind, beside the dim light from the lantern.
Then, at the reservation gas station and convenience store, Clay thought he was starting to go completely deaf, but, over the din and noise of the announcer shouting excitedly during the live telecast of the playoff hockey game from the television on the refrigerator beside the microwave oven, the lawyer confirmed the bequest in a long-distance telephone call. Clay still didn’t believe his nephew had left him a condominium; the nature of the accommodation was ultramodern, exotic, to him; the location was foreign, faraway. Later, the chief explained to him at the reservation band office a condo or condominium was a fancy city name for an apartment. His nephew, a lawyer, specializing in law for indigenous people, was killed in a fiery car crash on Highway 401 after he drove from the Six Nations reserve to help negotiate settlements for residential school and Sixties Scoop claims.
His nephew’s lawyer partner said Nodin had no other living relatives he held in high esteem, aside from his uncle Clay, who he remembered fondly. Nodin remembered the times Clay insisted on taking him on his snowmobile, all-terrain vehicle, and dog sled along the trails through the bush around Lac Seul and patiently taught him hunting, fishing, and trapping skills on the bush and lake around Tobacco Lodge reserve and the surrounding waterways, which, after the construction of the hydroelectric dam at Ears Falls, one could argue, turned into a reservoir. His nephew especially loved the skills he learned snowshoeing through the bush, along the lakeshore, and across the lakes, and fur trapping, ice fishing for walleye and lake trout, commercial fishing whitefish, setting snares and leg hold traps on the trap line in the snowy bush for snowshoe hare, fox, lynx muskrat, beaver, mink, marten, fisher, and wolves.
Nodin also respected the fact Clay never smoked or drank, or took advantage of women, or friends, or, for that matter, judged him. The lawyer called him several more times long distance. Again, he had to snowmobile or snowshoe to the reservation convenience store to use the payphone or hike to the reservation band office to borrow their landline to listen to the lawyer explain he should simply sell the condominium. The apartment was probably worth a million dollars. The lawyer, his nephew’s partner, reassured him he would help him invest the funds, purchase an annuity, set up an investment portfolio of income earning stocks and bonds, or set up a trust fund, which would provide him with a pension or monthly income.
The chief agreed with the Toronto lawyer he should sell the condo. The chief claimed he had gotten too used to, too acclimatized, to life on the reservation, and the culture shock of Toronto might kill him. She said he’d hate life in the city, especially a big city like Toronto, since he better appreciated the traditional way of life on the reserve and the surrounding nature.
Clay never liked the chief much and was mystified by her claim to speak for him. Who said he hated life in the city? he demanded. He never said he didn’t like life in the city, or preferred living in Sioux Lookout or Tobacco Lodge to the city of Toronto. He was seventy years old, and, in his mind, he felt fit and well, but he was afflicted with old age conditions like arthritis. He was suffering from gout and ankylosing spondylitis, and, short of breath, he worried about the effects of heart disease. He didn’t feel like he was in any physical or psychological condition to hunt and fish, and he was actually tired of living on the reserve. At his age, seventy, he felt like he could no longer tolerate the cold to snowshoe the trap line, or even fish or guide tourists for walleye, musky, or northern pike on Lac Seul, or hunt for moose, whitetail deer, or ruffed grouse. The chief was incredulous and so was his nephew’s lawyer, both of whom continued to try to persuade him to sell the condo. Exasperated and frustrated, they raised their voices and gesticulated as they tried to persuade him to sell the condominium, but he couldn’t possibly think of what he could do with a million dollars.
“It’s a million dollars before taxes, but after taxes and fees,” the lawyer said, starting to sound officious, like an accountant, “the bequest will be far less.”
Even after taxes, the chief said, how could he possibly spend a million dollars when he lived on a reservation like Tobacco Lodge, if he didn’t smoke, or drink, or chase women. If he lived in the city of Toronto, though, Clay argued, he would be close to medical specialists like rheumatologists and cardiologists who would be able to help him with the aches and inflammation of his rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis and the shortness of breath and chest pains associated with angina pectoris. He didn’t really have any close friends or relatives on the reserve, or even in the town of Sioux Lookout, nearby, anyway. He always enjoyed his visits to the city of Toronto and staying with his nephew. He liked visiting the gay bars and strip clubs, and he especially loved the coffee in the exotic variety of cafes, full-bodied, strong flavoured, not water-downed or diluted like in the local café, in Sioux Lookout. At the Roundhouse Café in Sioux Lookout, if you lingered a little too long, or said the wrong thing, or talked a little too loud, or didn’t smell like eau de cologne, the owner, who hovered above customers like a stage mom, might kick you out and ban you.
Once again, the lawyer and the chief tried to persuade him not to live in the condo in Toronto, warning him about the high cost of living in Toronto and the high cost of property taxes. When he compared the property taxes for the house he owned in Sioux Lookout with those in the city of Toronto, though, he noticed the property taxes weren’t that much higher, even though the Sioux Lookout house was worth much less. You could buy several houses in Toronto for the price of that condominium, and then you would have a real property tax problem on your hands. So, he reassured them he had squirreled away sufficient savings, from the money he earned on the trapline, from his full-time job on the green chain and the planer and as a filer for the huge saw blades in the Northwestern Ontario Forest Products sawmill in Hudson, and from the summers he worked as a fishing guide on Lac Seul and the autumns he moonlighted as a hunting guide for Americans anxious to shoot a moose or black bear.
Likewise, he could sell the small house he owned in Sioux Lookout, where he lived for a decade while he worked as a night watchman at the Department of Indian Affairs Zone hospital for indigenous patients from the northern reserves. Besides, he didn’t even own the cabin he lived in on the reserve in Tobacco Lodge. He didn’t even feel like shoveling the snow on the walkway—he didn’t want visitors and, if anyone was intent on visiting him, they could trudge through the snow—or fixing up and doing maintenance work on the cabin.
Beginning to think a condo might suit him after all, the lawyer reassured him fees would cover maintenance and upkeep for the condominium. The lawyer explained he was a close friend of his nephew and would do what he could to help him when he flew to Toronto.
“Fly to Toronto? I’m not flying to Toronto. I don’t need to be hassled by metal detectors and security guards.”
Clay preferred to take the passenger train, which was slow by modern standards, taking over a day in travel across the Canadian Shield of Northern Ontario before the train even started travelling south to Toronto. The Via Rail passenger train was often late, falling behind the right of way of freight trains, but the travel was hassle free and the dome car and large window seats allowed him to sight see the Canadian Shield landscape, the lakes, the forests, the rivers, creeks, muskeg, swamps, rock outcrops, and small towns and camps and outposts along the northern route.
Before he left, the chief called him to the band office and his office for one last meeting. He said he just wanted to make certain that there was no hard feelings. He tried to reassure him he wasn’t trying to tell him or order him what to do, especially with his own personal life, but he was only thinking about his best interests and what he thought might make him happiest. He still didn’t think he would be happy over the long term living in Toronto, especially compared to life on the reserve of Tobacco Lodge. That judgement, she said, was based on her own personal experience with fellow band members, particularly younger people, who moved to the city and became addicted to opioids, intravenous drugs, and pills, or resorted to the sex trade or found themselves victims of human trafficking or trapped in a criminal lifestyle, drug trafficking, smuggling, robbery, because of poverty or addiction, or got caught up in the wrong crowd in urban centres like Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, or Toronto. Still, she understood he had a life and mind of his own, and he was free to learn through experience how hard life could be in the city, particularly in Toronto, and he would always be a member of the band. He didn’t tell her he wouldn’t allow her to decide what was good for him, but he thanked her, even though he thought she was overeducated and a bit too condescending and overbearing.
When he arrived in Toronto, the lawyer friend of his nephew met him at Union Station, hired a limousine to drive him the short distance downtown home, and helped him set up house in Aura, the condo high-rise at Gerard and Yonge Street. He told him the Aura Building, where his nephew owned a condominium, which he now owned, was stacked seventy-nine stories high, with more floors than any building in Canada, and was taller than any residential building in Canada.
Then the lawyer friend of his nephew said he was gay. The reason Nodin’s father or none of his brothers or sisters inherited the condominium: Nodin was gay. No one in Nodin’s family accepted his sexual orientation or lifestyle. Born-again Christians, Nodin’s family had difficulty accepting their sibling’s and son’s homosexuality and disowned him.
His nephew said Clay never had an issue with his sexual orientation. Live and let live, Clay said, and he didn’t know what to add because he still thought the fact his nephew was gay wasn’t his business, and he couldn’t pass judgement. He was family and another person, no more, no less, except he was smart and talented and had special skills as a lawyer, all of which he admired. Then Josh told him that Nodin actually died from AIDS.
“AIDS? I thought you told me twice over the telephone he died from a car crash on the freeway.”
“After he was diagnosed with an HIV infection, Nodin started drinking, and he stopped taking his medications, which were also making him sick. Eventually, he contracted pneumonia caused by the HIV virus, and he died a painful death. But I couldn’t say he died from pneumonia related to AIDS to the people on the reservation. Then the gossip and rumour mill would go crazy, and his brother might drive all the way down to Toronto to shoot me.”
“I don’t think they care.”
“Possibly because they already know.”
“They know he’s gay, but Nodin doesn’t exist for them anymore. Nodin was already dead to his closest family before he actually died. He’s been dead to them since they discovered he was gay, when he was caught by an OPP officer with a teacher from Queen Elizabeth High School, in a car parked overnight in Ojibway Park. The teacher was fired, but Nodin was expelled from high school and went to Pelican Falls Residential School when it reopened.”
But, Clay said, he knew he couldn’t mention Nodin’s name around his family because immediately his mother flew into a fury or his father threatened to drive a thousand miles to Toronto to shoot him. Or his brothers joked about taking him to downtown Sioux Lookout to the Fifth Avenue Club or Fathead’s sports bar and tying him to a tree or utility pole and allowing a loose woman from the rez or trailer park or living on the streets have her way with him. They even joked about driving to Dryden and the strip club and locking him up in a motel room with a stripper who would give him more than a lap dance.
“You should have an easy time living in Toronto,” the friend said.
Clay said he hoped he would. The first several months he busied himself with adapting to the city environment and setting up house. He kept the television and the computer his nephew had in the condo, but he barely used them, except to watch a few movies and videos online and fishing and hunting shows on the outdoor television channels. In fact, he found the living quarters so empty and bereft he spent as much time as he possibly could away from the high-rise apartment, with its spectacular view of the city, especially at night, and its amenities and luxuries, including the weight room, the swimming pool, and the gymnasium. He busied himself with medical appointments with the cardiologists and rheumatologists, and diagnostic tests at the hospital, but once he was placed on suitable medication at the proper doses, he was stable and required little medical attention. As he settled into city life, he busied himself with visiting the library to read the newspapers from around the world or large-print bestseller books. Then, in the evenings, he visited the restaurants and coffee shops and the odd time adult video shops and strip clubs sprawled across the city, but what he found peculiar and more interesting were the buses, subways, and streetcar rides across the city to visit different establishments, including a few art galleries and museums. He felt, in fact, he had become what subway riders called a straphanger.
He enjoyed taking the buses, subway rides, on expeditions across the city. He enjoyed people watching, amazed at the wide variety of people who commuted and travelled across the vast city of Toronto. What amazed him even more, though, was the way the transit commission police followed him across the city.
The transit enforcement officers seemed forever interested in where Clay was travelling, what he was reading, usually the Toronto Sun, the Toronto Star, or the Toronto edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper, left over by another commuter, and they were usually interested in what or who he was looking at. When they stopped him and asked him where he was going, he was a bit embarrassed to say he wanted to go to a flea market sale and see if he could find videotapes and DVDs of Marlon Brandon movies on sale cheap at his favorite video store before it went out of business. He decided to tell them he was visiting The House of Lancaster on the Queensway and observed with bemusement how they reacted.
The officers tried to persuade him not to take the bus from the Keele subway station platform to the Queensway. They told him he was too old for a titty bar. Another time they called him a dirty old man and tried to order him to go home. Once they followed him because they thought he was a fare jumper and didn’t believe that he could afford a transit pass. They even double and triple checked his identification and monthly transit pass because they said he looked too young to be a senior and worried he might be an illegal immigrant. Another pair of transit enforcement officers told him they thought he was suffering from dementia and prone to wandering aimlessly and dangerously. The transit officer, whose turban he admired, said, if Clay was from an Indian reservation, maybe he should return to the north and live there again.
An officer said there had been complaints about him, and that he might be happier on the reserve. “Traditional and ancestral lands is where it’s at, eh?”
He asked him to tell him about the complaints, but the officer shrugged, shook his head, rolled his eyes, and crossed his beefy arms. “You don’t understand women in the city,” he said. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?”
Later, Clay even decided to buy a smartphone, from the electronic retailer in the Eaton’s Centre, and, even though he didn’t learn how to completely use the phone, he liked to read books, newspapers, and magazines on the screen because he could enlarge the text to a size large enough to suit his blurred and failing vision. Once, when he put down his smartphone and forgot to pick up the device when he rose for his stop at College Station, a transit supervisor seized the cellphone, and, when he tried to take it back from him, he said it was lost or stolen. He said he was turning the smartphone to the fare collector, who would turn it in to the lost and found if no one claimed it by the end of his shift. Since Clay didn’t use the phone that often, anyway, and even then the calls to the reservation were costly and depressing, he decided why bother complaining and attempt to have the smartphone returned when his nephew had left him e‑book readers, full of books, which only needed to be recharged every second or third week, instead of everyday like the smartphone.
Then, one evening, when he returned from a visit to a Starbucks in the suburbs, and he entered through the automatic gate, the burly pair of security guards insisted on seeing his identification and his transit pass, insistent that he was fare jumping. When he showed them his transit pass, they insisted it was stolen. When they asked to see his identification, to confirm the name on his transit pass matched my ID, he realized he forgot his wallet with his identification in the strip club. No worries, though, the doorman and security guards in the men’s club knew him and would hold his wallet for him until his next visit. The big burly bald security guard insisted on seeing his identification, immediately, and put him in a headlock, which turned into a chokehold grip, when he tried to pull and twist away. He decided to test the strength of his new dentures on the man’s hands, biting the flabby fold of flesh between his thumb and fingers. He didn’t see what choice he had since the man was choking him, suffocating him. He knew the man was a security guard and not a police officer, so he didn’t see how the man was justified in using such force, but, after he bit him, the point was moot since the second security guard, initially anxious his buddy was using excessive force, pounded his head with a baton.
So it came to pass Clay was hospitalized with a head injury in the intensive care unit of Toronto Hospital, and then he, in a coma, was transferred to the neurology and the neurosurgery ward. The neurosurgeon operated, drilling holes in his skull and removing a sawn segment of the cranium to relieve the intracranial pressure and stem the bleeding in his brain. After multiple surgeries, the doctors didn’t expect him to recover: he was taken off the respirators and feeding tubes.
He was returned to Sioux Lookout in a hardwood casket in the cargo hold and luggage compartment of the passenger train, which, delayed and forced into rail ridings by an early winter blizzard, arrived sixteen hours late. Their breath turning to clouds of smoke, the conductor and engineer cursed in the cold as they unloaded him from the baggage and luggage car, behind the locomotive, at the site of the abandoned train station in Hudson. Clay lay in the coffin alongside a piece of lost and misplaced luggage on the broken cement platform near the railroad crossing in Hudson, at the intersection with the road to the sawmill, until the chief sent his cousins to pick him up in the blowing snow and freezing cold. The chief reassured his cousins they needn’t worry, his estate and the sale of the condo would provide more than enough money to compensate them and to provide funds to bury him in the reserve cemetery in Tobacco Lodge, if no one wanted him buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Hudson, or the cemetery in Sioux Lookout.
An empty brown beer bottle and a few stubbed cigarette butts on the freshly packed soil marked the plot on the snowy landscape in the chilly cemetery where he was buried. With a few days, the late leafless autumn turned harsh, winter grew dark and frigid and froze the lakes and the Canadian Shield rocks, and the earth turned hard and the snow heaped high.
From the writer
:: Account ::
“Toronto Life” is, in a sense, a narrative realization and actualization of my own skewed observations of individuals’ personal experiences of life in public spaces in the city of Toronto, including my own as a mature student. Toronto is a wonderful, vibrant, cosmopolitan city, but at the same time there is a certain pressure to conform to what I’ll call Metro norms, ideals, and standards. If a person, particularly an outsider, finds they don’t adhere to these social codes and conventions, they may be profiled and targeted, or become ostracized and outcast, not necessarily overtly or blatantly, since oftentimes the bias is subtle. (A few media pundits, including beloved Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski, have noted that racism tends to be polite in Canada.) Outliers in a sense, or those considered The Other, these same persons may also find themselves intimidated and bullied by authorities, the gatekeepers of the city. Of course, some more independent minded, self-reliant, and individualistic persons who reject these conventional ideals or subscribe to different beliefs may be content or happy to occupy positions at the fringe. However, what I find fascinating about life in a big city like Toronto is that sometimes those who have led the most successful and at the same time the most transgressive of careers and existences, harming people in the process, are those who tend to blend in best with the crowd, say, behaving in precisely the most socially acceptable manner, wearing what is fashionable at the time, outwardly adhering to social convention. Three former Torontonians come to mind in this context: David Russell Williams, Paul Bernardo, Bruce McArthur. In any event, “Toronto Life” is an attempt at contrast and juxtaposition—dramatizing a cultural gap and divide between north and south, skyscrapers and forests, rural and urban, indigenous and expatriate or non-native, and how these contrasts may clash with less than ideal outcomes. A city like Toronto may be most fascinating and appreciated by an individual who arrives from a place which is in many aspects, its exact opposite. The title, and indeed the story, is also a bit of an ironic play on the title of the leading magazine in Toronto, whose readers might be forgiven for thinking all Torontonians are extremely wealthy, well-dressed, well-educated, and members of high society, a very different vision of everyday life than that provided during, say, a walk through a town or a reservation in the middle of winter in Northwestern Ontario.
John Tavares was born and raised in Sioux Lookout, in northwestern Ontario, but his parents immigrated from Sao Miguel, Azores. He graduated from Humber College (General Arts and Science), Centennial College (journalism), and York University (Specialized Honors BA). His journalism was printed in various local news outlets in Toronto, mainly trade and community newspapers. His short fiction has been published in a wide variety of magazines and literary journals, online and in print, in Canada and the United States.
Heather arrives just before seven. She peeks into the tent where I am adjusting the antenna on the old TV from Gary’s room. If he were home, instead of at his new dishwashing job, he’d never let me borrow it.
“Neat,” Heather says. She uses the toe of her right foot, clad in a dirty white sneaker, a Keds knock-off that her mother bought her at the beginning of summer, to poke at the boxy TV. “Where’s it plugged in?”
“Garage,” I say. “It took two extension cords.”
“Where’s Gary?” Heather asks. She uses both hands to fluff out her hair. “Should we invite him out here?”
“Gross,” I say. The flicker of disappointment on Heather’s face comes and goes so fast that I almost miss it. But I don’t. I try to imagine Gary as a person other than my brother. Would I too have a crush on him?
We eat Cool Ranch Doritos while we watch Beverly Hills, 90210. “I’m such a Kelly,” I say during a commercial.
“You totally are,” Heather says. “I’m more of a Brenda.”
Neither of us are either of them. We are us. Knobby-kneed with mild acne. Dry hair with chlorine damage. Long feet, pointy shoulder blades, concave stomachs, tan lines. We are girls of summer. We are too young for jobs, but we are old enough to sleep in a tent in my backyard. To watch TV outdoors with a bag of Doritos and two cold Cokes.
After the show, we bring the cordless phone out to the tent, and it’s just close enough to the house to work. We call Todd first. Heather dials *67 to block caller ID. “Who do you like-like?” Heather asks in a low voice. She has a faded yellow pillowcase placed over the phone receiver, a sure method, she claims, to disguise her voice. “This is a friend,” she insists to Todd. “I just want to know who you like.”
“Damn,” she says to me. “He hung up.”
“Call again,” I urge her.
She shakes her head. “Let’s call Brad Stockton and ask him if he really did it with Tracey Lauren.” I flip open the worn phone book. “He’s unlisted,” I tell her and throw the slim book on Heather’s lap.
“Hot damn,” Heather says.
She’s taken to saying that this summer. Hot damn. It works for everything.
We open the phone book and dial whatever number we see first. We leave Dorito stains on the flimsy pages. We ask strangers if a Mr. Dong is available. Everyone hangs up on us except an old woman who tells us to quit playing with the phone or she’ll call the police and have us taken to the jail in a paddy wagon. I laugh so hard I almost pee my pants. Instead, Heather and I go behind the garage and pee on the rhubarb. “This stuff is poison,” I tell Heather about the plants. “If you eat the leaves, you’ll die.”
“Why would you eat the leaves?” she asks.
“If I were going to kill someone,” I tell her, “I’d sit on them and force rhubarb leaves down their throat.”
“Not me. I’d get the person to walk across the street with me and go on the path by the river. Then I’d tell them there was something on the river bank, something they had to see. Then I’d push them in.”
“What if they could swim?” I asked. “Everyone over the age of five can swim. They would just climb out.”
“They couldn’t swim if they were, like, high on rhubarb leaves.” It was a good point. “Also,” Heather adds, “I can’t swim.”
“Well, I hope nobody pushes you in the river.”
“Why would anybody push me in the river?” she asks and strikes a pose. “I’m too cute to die young.”
In the tent, we call strangers. Mostly they hang up. One guy talks a lot. Heather keeps asking him questions. They talk about cassettes and how lame New Kids on the Block are and how people in high school are so bogus. Heather whispers to him with her back to me, and I can’t hear what she’s saying for a long time. I strain and make out words: Come. Over. Soon. I grab the phone from her and hang up. “He can’t come over. My parents will freak. And you don’t know if this guy is old.”
“He sounds young,” she says.
“He sounds thirty.”
Heather grabs for the phone, but I quickly dial my own number so she can’t hit re-dial. I hang up when I hear the busy signal.
“Fine,” she shrugs. “Let’s do something else.” And so we go inside and get my yearbook and draw mustaches on all the girls we don’t like and poke pin-holes in the eyes of the boys we like but don’t want to like .
At eleven my dad comes outside and tells us to be quiet for god’s sake. And my mom comes out behind him and tells us to come inside if it rains or if we get scared. She says they will lock the door, but use the key if we need to get inside. The key is on a green stretchy bracelet around my wrist.
“My parents never lock their doors,” Heather tells my mom.
“Well, we do.”
“My mom is paranoid,” I tell Heather after my parents go back inside the house. “She always thinks someone is going to murder us in our sleep.”
“Is it better to be murdered while you are awake?”
It’s a good question. I make a point to ask my mother, in the same tone Heather used, next time she yells at one of us for forgetting to close our windows at night.
Heather does my hair in a French braid. I plug in rollers using the extension cord from the TV. “You could be in a pageant,” I tell Heather when I’m done. She is prettier than I am, but she has only recently figured it out. She doesn’t hold it against me, nor I her. It’s just a fact.
At quarter to one, Heather suggests we get dressed and walk to Village Inn to say hi to Gary. “We can get pie.”
Then we get into an argument because I don’t want to go. I don’t want to walk the five blocks. I don’t want to get in trouble if I get caught. I don’t want to see Gary. I don’t want to be murdered. Mostly, I don’t want my best friend in the whole world to have a crush on my brother.
I am too young to explain what it is I feel for Heather. It’s not romantic, but it’s a cousin to romance. It’s a feeling endemic to being thirteen and being a girl and having a best friend. I don’t want to kiss her or touch her, but what I do want is to feel so close to her that I will never feel alone again. What happens to me will happen to her. We’ll be connected to each other always, like twins in a womb. We will be so similar that when we die, they will have to identify us by our moles, our scars.
Heather gets mad and refuses to talk to me. But she won’t go without me. I know that. I listen to a George Michael cassette on my Walkman and cry softly. Finally, Heather softens. She scoots her sleeping bag closer and snuggles next to me. “Did you know that rhubarb is another word for a fight?” Heather whispers to me.
I don’t answer.
“We had a rhubarb, you and me,” she says.
I feign sleep.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
I don’t forgive her, but then I do. We sleep butt-to-butt, and I pretend it will always be like this.
It’s light outside when I wake up again. My dad is outside the tent. “Steffy, open up,” my dad is saying. I rub my eyes and unzip the flap. “Heather’s dad is here to pick her up.” My dad’s face is red and puffy. He’s wearing an undershirt and grey sweatpants. My mom will not come outside without her makeup, without having first rolled her hair around hot rollers. “Didn’t you hear us calling?”
I roll over and throw an arm on the sleeping bag next to me. It’s empty. “Where is Heather?” I ask.
~
I spend hours in the police station. They let me rest. They give me hot chocolate even though it is blazing hot outside. They buy Funyuns from the vending machine for my snack. They let my mom in the interview room with me. Then they send her out, and she protests, but she gives up because the detectives are very reassuring. I am not being blamed, they say. I am not being accused of anything, they say. They just have questions.
They ask me if Heather had a boyfriend. I tell them no, but I know she kissed Matt Vanyo at the top of the covered slide at Lyndon Street Elementary just last week. He put his tongue in her mouth and she described it as a big fat hairy caterpillar.
They ask me what happened to Heather that night. And I start to cry. They pat me on the back and call me sweetheart. “I can’t remember,” I say. And I can’t. It all runs together, a massive blob of colors, words, and movements that cannot be separated into discrete pieces. The blob is unblobbable.
They finally send me home to sleep, and I come back early the next morning. I still haven’t showered since before that night. My hair is matted and my eyes feel crusty. The detectives tell me to relax and to think carefully. Did I miss anything? Did I forget anything?
I start from the beginning of the night when I brought the TV outside. I tell them what happened on Beverly Hills, 90210, about Brandon at the beach club and Kelly and Dylan getting together behind Brenda’s back while she is in Paris with Donna. I tell them about the prank phone calls and about the chips, the French braids, the rhubarb we had over Gary. My parents sit on either side of me. My mom cries and sniffles loudly.
“Were you very angry?” one of the detectives asks me. He is tall and thin with bushy dark hair and a skinny mustache.
“I was very sad,” I tell him.
The detective with the mustache pats my forearm. “Don’t worry. You’ll remember more later. I promise. It’ll come back to you. It always does.”
When I sleep, I dream about the rhubarb patch.
~
School starts in September. I am not allowed to walk by myself, so my dad drops me off at the door, even though the school is only three blocks from home. “Gary will pick you up,” he tells me. “Don’t walk home.”
There’s a kidnapper on the loose, but the posters with Heather’s face are already starting to fade and fray. I think they should be refreshed, reprinted on clean white paper. I am somewhat famous because I was the last one to see her. Reporters call our house. My picture is shown on the news and my mom is horrified. “What if he comes back for Steffy?” she hisses at my dad when she thinks I’m out of earshot.
I think that being Heather’s best friend will make the first day of eighth grade easier. It does not. Nobody talks to me. Nobody even comes near me. It’s as if I’m tainted. I carry all their fear and mine inside my Esprit shoulder bag, my GUESS jeans, my Benneton crew-neck t‑shirt. It’s also inside me, mingling with my guts and my bones. Nobody wants to breathe it in when I exhale.
I am falling asleep in Geography, halfway between conscious and not, and it happens: I am no longer in a stale classroom surrounded by people who do not know me. I am back in the tent. It’s that night. I am there. Heather is there. A rush of love, warm and pleasant, sweeps over me. It’s like a breeze on the first sunny day of the year, when you hold your face up to sun and exhale. You won’t remember winter for much longer.
When I open my eyes, I am on the dusty floor. Mr. Griffin is standing over me. “Martin,” he calls, “you get the nurse. Shelby, you go get Mrs. Adamson.”
“Ew,” someone whispers, “I think she peed her pants.”
~
I stay home from school for weeks. I do none of the work Mrs. Adamson arranges to have sent to me each week. Sometimes Gary brings it to me. Sometimes Mrs. Adamson herself comes to the door, and when she does, I pretend to be sleeping. During the day, I watch TV for hours. I’m watching a re-run of Alice when it happens again. One minute Mel is verbally abusing Vera, who is so willfully stupid that it’s hard to side with her, then the next minute I’m back in the tent. My mosquito bites itch. Sweat drips from my hairline. Dorito dust coats my fingertips. I can smell Cool Ranch.
“Are you here?” I ask Heather.
“Of course. Where else would I be?”
“Are you going to see Gary?”
“Gary?” Heather scoffs. “Why would I want to see Gary?” She pulls out a deck of cards. “I have tarot cards,” she says.
“Will we stay here all night?” I ask her. “Can we stay in this tent?”
“Of course,” she says. “Don’t be a ding-bat.”
~
I go back to school after Christmas break, and I join the jazz band. I am third-chair flute, along with eleven other third-string flutists who do not know how to play well. We blow hard and chirp like a flock of chaotic birds. Mr. Douglas is patient and tells us to regulate our air.
In the coatroom after class, I am putting my flute case back in my cubby hole, safe for tomorrow, when it happens. Nobody is near me, so I let myself sink down on the floor on a pile of soft downy coats.
In the tent, I am awake and Heather is asleep. I watch her. She breathes in and out in syncopated jazz rhythms. She purses her lips on the exhale. I find myself mirroring her movements. She opens her eyes. “Why are you being a total spaz?” she asks.
“I need to know what’s going to happen tonight,” I say.
Heather sits up and scratches her head. Her braid is half-undone and strands of hair stick up like a crown of thorns. “Did you hear that?” she asks.
I strain, but I hear nothing. “It’s a boy,” she says. “There’s a boy out there.” She points to the flap of the tent. We sit still for so long I worry we will freeze like that and never move again.
And then he is in the tent. “How did he get in—” I start, but Heather cuts me off. She gets on her knees. The tent is too short for her to stand. The boy is kneeling, too.
“Have you come for us?” Heather asks.
“If you would like to go with me,” the boy says. His cheeks are pink. His hair is thick and combed into a style from ages ago. Slicked back on the sides. Floofy in the front. Kind of like Brandon’s on 90210. He is our age, I think. Maybe older. Maybe much older.
Heather says, “He wants us to go with him.”
“Where?” I ask. I am scrambling for my shoes because I already assume she will assent, and I can’t let her out of my sight.
“Just me,” she says. “You have to stay here.”
“I won’t let you go alone.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
~
They correct me when I call it a hospital, but that is what it is. I’m here for a rest, my mom tells me. I sleep and wake, wake and sleep, for what feels like forever but is really only a week or two. Then I’m back at home. Our priest, Father Hanson, comes to visit me. He asks me to say a rosary with him, so I do, but I’d rather watch TV. Father Hanson tells me God has a plan. It will all work out according to the plan. “Why would God want Heather to be kidnapped?” I ask. Father Hanson doesn’t answer; instead, he tells me to pray. He gives me the words to say, and I know that there are other words I can never say. I remember that I’ve only ever seen him without his collar once. He’s wearing it now. Without it, he looks like someone who looks like someone I know.
I go back to school, but I’m too far behind in band to play. Instead, I sit outside the door with my knees tucked up under my chin and listen for the third chairs. The din rises above the real notes and it’s kind of beautiful, the way they are all doing something different together.
After school, I go to counseling. Gary drives me and waits outside. He smokes in the car, and I worry that the therapist will think it’s me. She never asks about it. Maybe she assumes that anyone who comes to counseling is also a smoker.
Her name is Judy and she wears large painted necklaces made out of wood and broomstick skirts. Her hair is very short, and she runs her fingers through the front three times per every five minutes. “You don’t have to talk about Heather,” she tells me on my third visit. “That seems hard for you. Let’s talk about your parents instead.”
I tell her my mom makes delicious potato salad and likes to play tennis on weekends. She falls asleep when she watches TV, and she stays up late to read news magazines and drink Mr. Pibb. I tell Judy my dad is loud and loves to argue. He puts together model planes for fun. He is an engineer and reads books about bridges. He met my mother on a double-date, but she was not his date. The other girl, my father’s date, was the maid of honor in their wedding. She died of cancer when she was only twenty-six, and my mom lights a candle on the anniversary of her death every year. My parents believe in God and the Catholic Church. By extension, so do I.
Judy nods and writes notes on a small notepad in green ink. “I see,” she says. She pauses occasionally to look through half-track glasses that she keeps on a red string around her neck. I worry that her large wooden earrings will tear through her lobes and leave a bloody mess like the bottom of a package of raw hamburger.
“Breathe in,” Judy tells me. I do.
“Breathe out,” she orders. I do.
On the way home, in Gary’s car, the window rolled down, I inhale his smoke until my lungs are full. Then I let it out the window and pretend that I am smoking too. Gary plays a Metallica tape and my ears throb. It doesn’t take long for me to disappear.
In the tent, Heather is talking to the boy. The man. “I feel like I know you,” she says.
“I have that effect on people,” he responds.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?” I say.
The boy sits down and crosses his legs like the statue of Buddha I saw in my World History textbook. He breathes slowly. Inhale. Exhale. “It doesn’t matter who I am. I’m here for Heather.”
“I don’t want her to go,” I say.
“Steffy, don’t be a baby,” Heather says. “It’s not like I’m picking him over you. This is, like, a separate thing. Separate from us, you know?”
I didn’t know. “Do you even know him?”
“I don’t have to know him,” Heather says. “The point is that he’s come for me.”
The boy smiles. He reminds me of the glowing figures in the stained-glass windows, the cherub faces that are not human but aren’t inhuman either. “How old are you?” I ask.
The boy laughs. He has grooves in his forehead, crinkles at his eyes. He is not glowing so much as he is radiating something, something that feels hot and insistent and permanent.
~
After supper one night, when I’m already in my pajamas with my teeth brushed and flossed, my mom and dad come to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. Gary hovers in the doorway. It is almost a year since Heather vanished.
I yell for my parents. “I know what happened to Heather!” I shout. The story appeared to me. Not in a dream. Not like a film. But like a thing that I always knew, like the color of my mother’s eyes and the smell of my sheets.
“What? What have you remembered?” my dad asks. He shushes my mom who has gasped, who has begun to cry.
“You’ve remembered?” my mom says. She grabs the cordless phone from my bedside table. “I’m calling the police.”
My dad takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. He motions for my mom to sit. She sets the phone back in its cradle. “Why don’t you tell us, sweetheart, before we involve the police,” he says, and I already know he doesn’t believe.
I tell them everything, including the bits that don’t matter. I piece it all together, patchworks of memories that have come back when I let them. I tell them about all the times I’ve gone away and come back with a new old memory.
“Who is this boy?” my mom interrupts. “We have to find him. We have to call the police.”
“Sharon,” my dad says, “let her finish.” He pats my leg, “Go ahead, Steffy. Finish the story. We’re listening.”
“He came to us. He was inside the tent with us. He was sent for Heather. He said just her. Not me. She was the one who was meant to go.”
My mom is crying so hard that Gary must step into the room and prop her up. She is a scarecrow. He is a post.
“Then they exited the tent together?”
“No, they didn’t exit. They disappeared.”
“What does that even mean?” my dad asks.
Now I am annoyed because I know this story and now they are ruining it with their questions. “It means, one second they are there, the next they are not. I am alone in the tent.”
“Poof,” my dad says.
“Exactly. Poof. Gone. Now you are getting it.”
“That’s not possible.”
I shrug. “The boy, the man, said it is all possible. Everything is.”
“But I don’t understand,” my mother says. “Why didn’t you come get us? Why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you tell the police? And who is this man? What did he look like?”
“What does God look like?” I ask her. “You can’t say. It’s the same thing. I can’t say.”
My mother falls to her knees and wails. My dad tells her to stop. He tells Gary to take her to the kitchen, to leave us be for a minute or two. When they are gone, he picks up one of my hands. His palm is clammy, but mine is soft and dry. “Steffy, how do you feel? You can be honest with me. I can help you. We can all help you.”
“I don’t know. It was her time. It was meant to be. It was part of the plan. God will never give you more than you can handle.” My cadence sounds familiar. I sound like Father Hanson mid-sermon. I think about the times Father Hanson picked me to help him in the rectory. He picked me more than any other girl. I paid attention. I thought about my hands in soapy water in the rectory sink, washing dessert plates, and listening to Father Hanson tell me all the things God wants for me. I never told him that when I was five, I thought he was God and I was happy that God lived in my church, not anyone else’s.
My mom returns with a cup of water in her hand, and I’m not sure if it’s meant for her or me. “He had pale skin, yellow hair, red cheeks. He glowed, like a lightning bug. He was human but not.”
“Oh, my poor baby,” my mother whispers.
“What do you mean?” my father asks.
“He came to take Heather. And then they disappeared.” I snap my fingers to demonstrate how fast it was.
“Steffy,” my father says, “people don’t just disappear like that. They don’t get taken from tents by men who are like God but not God. That’s just not reality.
I shrug. “He works in mysterious ways.”
“The man or God?” Gary asks, and now I’m starting to feel confused.
“But this man,” my father persists. “Who is the man?”
“I told you. He takes the form of a human, but he is from the spirit world—or whatever. I suppose you might call him an angel, but he didn’t really say. It was Heather’s time to go, and he took her to be in a better place. She is where she’s meant to be, so we should all be happy for her. She’s been called home.” I feel relieved now. It’s all so clear, like the surface of glass tabletop, that I marvel there was ever a time when I could not say these words, the words the man himself told me. And only now does it all make sense. It all fits together perfectly. I lay back and smile, for perhaps the first time since Heather left this world.
“Oh, my baby,” my mother says again. She is shaking and sobbing and Gary is back trying to pull her off of me. “None of this makes sense,” my father says, “it’s simply not logical.”
“Heather floated up, up, up. Out of the tent, up in the air. She dissipated. Like smoke. I could see it all through the canvas. We can tell the police to stop looking,” I say. “If she comes back, it will be because the man brings her back from the sky. When it is time.” I smile at the three of them: Mom and Dad and Gary. See? I’m trying to say. It all works out.
“She’s crazy,” Gary says, as if I cannot hear him. “She’s pure batshit.”
“That can’t happen,” my dad says again. “It just can’t.”
“Why?” I ask, marveling at all he doesn’t know yet.
“Because the universe has rules!” my father shouts at me. For one brief moment, he looks at me as if I am someone else. Then he is holding both of my hands. “I’m sorry, Steffy. I’m sorry I yelled.” I giggle because his cheeks are too red, his hair messed up, his glasses crooked.
My father stands up. “I’ll call the doctor,” he tells my mother.
I find myself drifting into sleep, deep and restful. God gives. God takes away.
From the writer
:: Account ::
History
I am originally from Fargo, North Dakota, which is probably why I gravitate toward dark and cold stories set in the upper midwest. I love characters who are torn by what they want and what they *ought* to want. I’m intrigued by characters who surprise me, who confuse or repel me, and who underestimate the ripple effect of any one decision (or indecision). I like stories that hint at the outlandish and the other-worldly, but also demonstrate the terror of reality. I want readers to decide what’s worse: the realm of the supernatural or the Tuesday we’re living right now.
Sketch
In this story, the main character, Steffy, is traumatized after her best friend disappears while camping in their backyard. As the community searches for the missing girl, Steffy experiences flashbacks to that night. Does she know what really happened? Or is her memory of Heather’s disappearance colored by a previous trauma, one that is buried below a glossy surface?
Marker
All of my work gravitates around one idea persistent question: Are we ever in control of our own lives? What if it’s all a sham, I wonder. Maybe that’s the point of literature—or any kind of art: We all want to pretend we’re in control of something. Steffy thinks she’s in control of her own memories. And yet nobody believes that she has a grasp on reality. After all, she seems to think Heather has been kidnapped by God.
Repository of Influences
Like many writers, and probably like you, I’m a voracious reader. I’m cynical and irreverent and curious and confused and doubtful. The stories I love most are the ones that strike those chords and rattle my brain. I will never forget the line of sweat, the hair dye, running down Arnold Friend’s face in Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been?” as Connie realizes what she’s just done, the way she’s sealed her own fate. Steffy is an homage to Connie, but her Arnold Friend is hidden in the depths of her own mind.
Christine Seifert is the author of one novel published in three languages: The Predicteds (2011); two nonfiction books for young readers: Whoppers: History’s Most Outrageous Lies and Liars (2015) and The Factory Girls: A Kaleidoscopic Account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (2017); and one academic book: Virginity in Young Adult Literature after Twilight (2015.) She’s also written for The Atavist, Bitch Magazine, and Inside Higher Ed, among other publications. Born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota, Christine is now a Professor of Communication at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where winter lasts a reasonable period of time.
The streets seem young to her. Vegas was built overnight with poor plumbing . She is wandering the streets again.
Over orange chicken at Panda Express, he tells her that the white professor needs to return to the United States. He needs to exercise a medical absence. He is white and he is having sex with his Korean students. He has been in Korea for about 1/5th of his life. His white dick hasn’t touched the vaginal sewage system of North America for about a decade now. And, although modern Western plumping doesn’t miss him, apple pies donate a large part of their de-tarted, but not re-tarted, pastry life to craving him. His grandmother’s nickname is PP (for Peach Pie), and his aunt’s name is Rhubarb. He works for Bulgogi University, one of the best universities in Korea. It’s where a female-dominated, English-curriculum-based education teaches female students how to learn English from sick, perverted, white faculty. It’s not an expensive education. But there is no psychotherapy there.
Professor Strawberry asks his young Korean student if she would have sex with him. She says, “No.” As if “no” were a stage 4 cancer that doesn’t know what lymph nodes or metastatic mean. The bold young Korean student doesn’t like strawberries in big batches. She prefers persimmons in boxes as gifts.
Professor Strawberry doesn’t want to leave Bulgogi. At Bulgogi he has vocational and sexual power and prowess. Here, he has a grip on the upper echelon of South Korea’s English literacy world. He is important. He is known. He has power. Certain female Korean students would want to have sex with him. If he returns to the United States, he will need to develop a new hobby for internet porn, the pedophiliac kind—not related to lilacs—and may have to attend the same school, perhaps downgraded, as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.
He leans over to tell her that although he has power, it’s sort of fake. Like Professor Strawberry is technically powerful, but his power is borrowed or lent to him because he has blue eyes and white skin. True power is raceless or faceless, she discovers. Or color-deaf. In her mind, she doesn’t think any of this is true. True power requires one to be dick-deaf. Is she dick-deaf? she asks herself while she tries to stuff broccoli and beef into her mouth. She isn’t hungry, but she is eating because it is easier to listen when one’s mouth is full.
Meanwhile, about 6,000 miles away, in Las Vegas, eight Korean women in their late fifties all huddle in a Starbucks franchise to discuss the importance of eating meat while reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. One woman turns to another woman, asking if it would be okay if she brought japchae to their next book club meeting.
“Ribeye fillet goes so well with glass noodle!” “Of course!” “Yes, of course!”
Literature is predominately a female vocation in Korea. Writing would make men effeminate and Korean culture, like all other cultures, thrives on masculinity or bibimbap.
They walk to Ben and Jerry’s. After working at a law office accomplishing nothing, or so he tells her, he wants to treat himself to something sweet. She doesn’t want ice cream but she gives in. The last time, she watched him lick his ice cream and it was like watching a white man giving a blowjob to another white man and although blowing isn’t her thing, climate change, especially on the tongue, is her thing. She has a thing for licking things over. She reconsiders his offer to buy her ice cream. Maybe through the ice cream thing, he is offering her a free blowjob. Anyone would take it up, right? Thinking things over is her thing.
Her father’s girlfriend is bisexual.
Her bisexuality consists of two grapefruits and one rainbow trout. Frying fish is her thing. She likes her relationship with oil to be around 350 to 375 degrees.
She walks into Trader Joe’s. It’s a Saturday. It’s crowded. Walking there led her to 7,342 steps. Everyone looks like they are wearing diapers and holding each other’s hands and saying hello and kissing goodbye while waving their gluten-free potato chips at each other. Whenever they fart, the cushions on their diapers absorb the sound and smell and thus everyone at Trader’s Joe is happy with each other. Diapers make everyone socially safe. When she exited Smith’s just an hour ago, no adults were wearing diapers and they didn’t even know who they were shopping with, let alone waving expensive organic cocoa at another. Whenever a shopper farts at Smith’s, everyone knows who it is and if their last meal was at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box. But at Trader Joe’s, all pollution or inadvertent acts of social transgression are family-accepted and family-owned.
Before falling asleep, she tells herself: although she can’t commit suicide now, her biggest revenge on God is the ability to do it later, when she can. When she is permitted to.
When the barks of tall palm trees fall on the streets of Vegas by the heavy zephyr or breaths of tumbleweeds, they look like the backs of armadillos. When she saw the barks for the very first time, walking to Walmart late one night, they startled her. She thought the wind was so strong that even the hard shells of the nine-banded nocturnal omnivorous mammals were not impervious to the brutal dessert wind. But, upon closer inspection, she discovered that the bony plates of these evergreens were not capable of giving her leprosy. Walking to Walmart has a greater chance of giving her nerve damage.
From the writer
:: Account ::
As shown in my prose, I wrote this during a very desolate time in my life. I had begun a friendship with a kind fiction writer in Vegas who wanted to remove the isolation which has imbued my soul like the bony garment of an armadillo. During that friendship, I knew more about Korea than I ever did from all the books I was reading. It was interesting to me to hear what non-expatriate white men in the States thought of white men living abroad in Asia and Korean women residing in their native homeland, Korea. Some of the conversations between us were captured near verbatim. My perception of Korea altered after my hiking visits with him. I wrote this during the time in which Harvey Weinstein & the men who committed sexual crimes against women were ousted . We like fiction to not capture reality so much, but sometimes due to its heightened depth of form and its shameless realism, we are, as a culture, doomed to state the obvious. We think we can dress reality in deception or falsehood, but it’s really impossible to.
Vi Khi Nao is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), and the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, and BOMB, among others. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.
