Category: Aquifer

The Strangers

The day of his daughter’s arrival, Daniel cut back the Marilyn Monroes. He’d pruned them every January for the past ten years. The roses were a true victory—he’d been called a gambling man by a horticulturist who warned Daniel he wouldn’t be able to keep Marilyn Monroes alive. They were too finicky, they required a frost in the winter and the temperature didn’t drop low enough in Tampa. But Daniel knew he could keep any plant alive.

 

Daniel wasn’t sure why Hayley was coming home. Hayley’s email had said: “I want to say goodbye to the house.” Why? How was it possible to tell a house goodbye? If his wife, Olivia, had still been alive, she would’ve explained it.

 

The house was packed, and the movers would be there the following week. Daniel had already shipped most of Hayley’s belongings to Los Angeles. Daniel knew never to throw away anything Hayley owned. When she was a little girl, Daniel had made the mistake of throwing away a headless Barbie he found by the pool, and Hayley grieved the loss of the doll for weeks. Olivia had been livid. She’d called him heartless and ordered him to never touch his daughter’s possessions again. For Daniel, objects had little history or future. He couldn’t understand why Hayley and his wife had gotten so upset. But Daniel remembered Barbie when it came time to pack up Hayley’s things. He tossed everything from her room into boxes without examination. Just a few packages remained to be sent to her in California.

 

He finished tidying the roses. There was still enough time for a Gatorade and a shower before Hayley arrived. He’d just stepped into his bedroom when there was a loud knock at the door. He found his daughter on his steps. It was the first time she’d been home since his wife’s death a year back. She smiled up at him.

 

“Hello, Daddy,” she said, shyly.

 

Despite the fact he knew nothing about her—favorite color, movie, food—still, his chest grew warm at her smile. The same smile she’d had all her life. He was shocked by how much he wanted to pull her to him. He remembered the satiny feel of her skin when she was an infant, the way she’d kicked her feet when he said her name.

 

“I got on an earlier flight,” she said. “I tried to call you.”

 

Damn iPhone. Since his retirement, he forgot to even turn it on.

 

“It’s so weird here,” Hayley said, her voice an echo in the cavernous dining room. Olivia had wanted the drafty old house. Daniel couldn’t wait to sell it.

 

“Do you really want to move?” Hayley asked, trailing a finger across the top of the buffet, the only piece of furniture he was keeping because it had been his grandmother’s. When she looked at him again, the smile from the doorway had disappeared. There were dark circles under her eyes, creases on her forehead. How old would she be now? He did the math. Born the year he’d made partner. She’d be forty in June. There were small patches of grey at her temples, her hair the color of chestnuts now instead of purple.

 

“I don’t need the space now that it’s just me,” he said.

 

“It’s so weird without Mom,” she said. “Isn’t it weird?”

 

It had been. For a little while. No rattle of Olivia’s old Mercedes. No smell of lemon in the morning. Now it felt normal. And good. Of course, he couldn’t say he didn’t miss Hayley’s mother, that he realized at sixty-seven he’d never been in love, and probably never would be.

 

He said, “Yes. Very weird.”

 

“I’d like to lie down,” she said. “Long flight.”

 

He’d left her twin bed in her room, and he led her there.

 

“I’ll be up in a few hours,” she said.

—

He ate at the deli for most meals now and his cabinets and fridge were bare. While Hayley slept, Daniel went to the grocery store and stocked up on all the things Olivia kept around: Stouffer’s frozen lasagna, bananas, whole wheat bread, butter, coffee. He remembered Hayley eating a cereal called Lucky Charms, so he bought a couple of boxes, happy that he remembered one thing about his daughter.

 

At just after seven that evening, Daniel knocked on her door. He’d heated up a lasagna, and it was getting cold. Hayley didn’t answer and, when he poked his head in the room, she said she needed to keep sleeping, that she’d had a “rough few weeks.” Should he ask her if anything was wrong? Was sleeping a bad sign?

 

On one of her last days in the hospital, Olivia grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him to her. So close he could see the red veins intersecting the whites of her eyes. This was the closest they’d been in many years.

 

“Promise you’ll talk to Hayley. She’s in a bad way.”

 

Daniel hadn’t been able to tell she was in a bad way. In fact, he hadn’t seen her looking so good in years. No purple hair, no bitten fingernails. The way she looked, it was hard to believe she was mentally ill, though Daniel wrote a check for $2400 every month to pay for her therapy.

 

When had his daughter become bipolar? It made his jaw clench to remember the promise Hayley had possessed—acting lessons, school plays, her declarations that she wanted to be the next Nicole Kidman. And she’d been so pleasant—squealing with laughter when he chased her in the pool, making up dances, using the cabana as her stage.

 

Since Olivia’s death, Hayley had called once a month, always on a Sunday night. They talked about rain. The lack of it in Los Angeles, so much in Tampa. If Olivia were around, she’d ask Hayley questions: Are you taking your meds? Going to bed at a reasonable hour? Working? But she had the right to ask. Daniel didn’t ask questions. What would he do if Hayley gave him answers he didn’t understand? Olivia and Hayley had their own secret language. Olivia bought a ‘best friends’ necklace and gave Hayley the ‘best’ half for her tenth birthday. The one time Daniel wondered if Hayley should have friends her own age, Olivia’s eyes filled with tears.

 

“My daughter is here for me. Which is more than I can say for you. You’re a stranger to us.”

 

No, Daniel would let Hayley sleep. He would leave her alone.

—

Just after eleven the next morning, Daniel heard the click of her doorknob. He was at the sink, rinsing a bowl when she padded into the kitchen. Bare feet, wearing a faded blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her hair stuck out in a million directions. She looked the way she had in high school, after a night dancing, her hair reeking of smoke, making him wonder why he was spending thirty thousand a year on private school when she partied with the public schoolers and brought home Cs.

 

They said “good morning,” and he gestured to the box of cereal on the table.

 

“Your favorite, right?”

 

She smiled. “I don’t eat sugar anymore.”

 

Hayley grabbed a bottle of water from the counter and picked up a banana from the bowl. He waited for her to say something else. She didn’t. She left the room and, a few minutes later, he looked into the backyard to find her sitting beside the drained pool, her legs pulled up against her chest. The half-eaten banana was by her side. Her face was turned away. Was she saying goodbye to the pool?

 

After a few minutes, Hayley stood and went over to the steps. She walked into the empty concrete basin. She walked to the center and then stared up at the sky. Daniel craned his neck and looked up, too. Seagulls, a whole flock of them, flew in a V shape across the sky. A memory: feeding bread to the seagulls with Hayley when Hayley was a child. Hayley loved to chase the birds, and he had laughed and encouraged her to run faster. There had been good times.  A few of them. Daniel considered walking out to the pool, bringing the loaf of bread with him. But Hayley might want to be alone. She might’ve come home for the peace she never got when his wife was around.

 

When Hayley came home for Christmas, Olivia made sure they had a packed calendar: ringing the bell for the Salvation Army outside of Publix, a carol sing-a-long at the nursing home.

 

“The worst thing she can have is quiet,” Olivia always explained. “I must keep her busy so she doesn’t focus on her sadness.”

 

But what if this wasn’t true? What if peace was exactly what Hayley needed? Daniel had been to Los Angeles once, and the traffic and smog had been as much of a shock as the coffee shop where Hayley worked, a den of tattooed and pierced people who huddled over laptops all day. Didn’t people in LA work? Why weren’t they at offices?

 

A few minutes later Hayley came in the house. He walked to her room. She sat on her twin bed, her back to him. He thought he saw her shoulders shaking.

 

“The new people are going to fill the pool in,” he said. “I had to drain it.”

 

“You never used it anyway,” Hayley said. “Mom and I were the only ones who ever went in.”

 

The cold tone of her voice was a shock. Better to give her space. Daniel shut the door.

 

Hayley didn’t come out again until dinner. He heated up another lasagna, and they ate it on paper plates. The only sound was when he blew on the noodles. After they finished, he asked her if she’d like to go for banana splits, a peace offering since she’d sounded angry about the pool.

 

“No sugar,” she said, eyes glued to her plate. “Remember?”

 

She picked up her iPhone and began typing, probably a text about what an idiot he was. Daniel cleared the table.

—

The next day Hayley sat out by the pool again. For hours. When it rained, she sat under the awning. He thought he saw her crying, but he couldn’t be sure. He wished his roses were still blooming. He could’ve shown her each one. She’d liked the garden a long time ago. She’d helped him add just enough aluminum sulfate to the soil to turn the hydrangeas blue. Seagulls, ice cream, flowers. The memories served as proof there’d been times when he knew things about Hayley. If only he’d tried harder, they could’ve been closer. But when Olivia was alive, it was like she and Hayley were the only people in the house. His presence was more like a shadow, lurking, ready to be dismissed, a stranger indeed.

 

Daniel took a nap and woke just before dinnertime. Hayley wasn’t in the backyard and she wasn’t in the kitchen. The door to her room was closed. He heard talking. He walked past, not wanting to disturb her, not wanting to eavesdrop. But what if something was really wrong with his daughter? What if her trip home was a cry for help? Was he being too dramatic?

 

He tiptoed back down the hall and pressed his ear against Hayley’s door. Murmuring.

 

He couldn’t make out words. But then: “I burned all those bridges,” Hayley said, shrill enough that he could make out each word. “I have nothing to go back to in California.” A cry. A moan.

 

Daniel gritted his teeth. He retreated into the darkness of the hallway, to his bedroom. He didn’t sleep for hours. He kept hearing his daughter’s words. “I have nothing to go back to in California,” she’d said.  What did that mean? Had someone broken her heart? Had she lost her job? Who was on the other end of the call? He wished he could contact that person and get the story. Asking Hayley about it felt impossible.

 

He pictured her apartment in Los Angeles, the one time he’d been. The cactus in the windowsill. She explained it bloomed at Christmas. He’d taken her to the local nursery and bought her more cacti. “They don’t need much attention,” she’d explained. “I can always keep them alive.”

 

He’d thought that was weird then, another way they were different, another way he didn’t understand his daughter. Daniel loved that his roses needed him. They depended on him for water and food. They flourished under his care. Hayley and Olivia hadn’t flourished under his care. Olivia told him no amount of money could ever make up for the fact that he never laughed at her jokes, that he didn’t appreciate her thoughtfulness.

 

One Valentine’s Day she bought candy apples etched with hearts for him to bring to the office.  Whoever heard of a grown man, the head of a law firm, bringing in candy apples for his employees, the same employees who were supposed to be terrified of asking him for time off at Christmas? He said he wouldn’t bring them in, and, one by one, over the next few weeks, Olivia ate the apples, crunching loudly, glaring at him.

 

Olivia wasn’t thoughtful. She wasn’t kind. But maybe she was right about their daughter. Maybe Hayley was in a bad way. But what could he do?

—

Sometimes, when clients were in town from far away, he took them to Palm Valley Fish Camp because the restaurant was famous for its fried shrimp. Would Hayley like fried shrimp?

 

He knocked on her door the next morning and, when she opened it, he suggested the dinner nervously. He expected by her swollen eyes that she would say no. But to his surprise, her face lit up the way it had when she saw him the night she arrived.

They decided on seven, and twenty minutes before she walked down the hallway wearing a cherry red dress with a puffy skirt and shiny black high heels. An outfit too fancy for Palm Valley Fish Camp, which was out by the marsh, and a place where the staff looked the other way if you smoked on the porch. Daniel always bought cigars for clients.

 

“Mom bought this for me to wear to prom, but I didn’t go. I chickened out. I never got a chance to wear it. Do I look okay?”

 

The dress was too big—the sleeves drooped off her shoulders and the bodice gaped at the bust and waist. How was she so much smaller at forty than at fifteen? She wore too much red lipstick—there were smudges below her mouth. The white powder on her face made her look like a ghost, reminding him of Olivia in her coffin. He wanted to tell Hayley to change. He didn’t like being embarrassed. But he forced himself to smile. “You look nice,” he said. Then he opened the door, and she followed him outside.

—

Daniel had forgotten it was Friday, and they had to wait a long time for a parking spot. Hayley hummed beside him, tapping her fingertips on her knees. He clutched the steering wheel, wondering if he’d made a mistake by inviting his daughter to dinner. But Olivia’s words reverberated in his head. “Promise me you’ll talk to Hayley. She’s in a bad way.”

—

They had to put their name on a long list and there was nowhere to sit to wait. They stood by the porch, where the air smelled like smoke and beer. Mosquitoes hummed in Daniel’s ears and he smacked the bugs away. Hayley kept curling a lock of hair around her finger, letting it go, and doing it again, a habit from her teen years. Daniel could feel the stares of the other patrons when they noticed Hayley’s dress. He kept a smile on his face, praying no one would comment. It wasn’t likely he would see anyone he worked with at the restaurant. They frequented the places in town or the club, where hush puppies weren’t an option.

 

Finally, their name was called, and they struggled through the knot of people to the hostess stand.

 

A girl in jean shorts smacking gum led them to a table in the middle of the restaurant, beside a table of guys wearing baseball caps. Daniel felt their eyes on them, and he glared at the biggest one, a burly guy in a Gators sweatshirt. Hayley said she needed to use the bathroom as soon as the hostess set their menus on the table.

 

It was so loud that conversation wouldn’t be possible. Daniel was grateful for this because his daughter was acting so strangely and he didn’t know how to find out why. Seeing Hayley twirl her hair brought back bad memories of sitting across from her at the dinner table. A typical night: Olivia chattered about the candlesticks she’d just bought from QVC while their daughter twirled her hair and didn’t say a word.

 

Then there were all the absences in high school. Olivia made excuses. “She’s not like the other girls. She’s sensitive. I can’t make her go when she’s sad.” But why was Hayley sad? He’d never understood. She had everything: diamond stud earrings that matched Olivia’s, an Audi TT when she turned sixteen. But more than material things. Daniel had given his daughter promise. Possibilities. The perfect start to a perfect life. Much more than he ever had, growing up in rural Alabama with a single mother who could barely scrape together enough money to put tuna fish on the table.

 

Hayley could’ve gone to any college in the country if she’d just kept her grades up. But she hadn’t. The only college that accepted her was a tiny one in North Carolina, which she returned from on holidays eager to read them poems she’d written. He remembered one in particular—she said her heart had been attacked by tigers and there were teeth marks in the aorta. The poem was titled: “Mother.”

 

Olivia had started crying when Hayley finished. Daniel’s first impulse was to comfort his wife, but she’d jumped to her feet, clapping her hands. She called Hayley a genius, framed the poem and hung it on the bathroom wall. It looked at him while he brushed his teeth. “She hunts me nightly. She never wants to let me go.” Hayley’s poem seemed to be a negative reflection on his wife. So why did Olivia like it so much? Daniel couldn’t fault his daughter for her feelings—after all he would’ve liked to write mean poems about his wife, too. Daniel didn’t understand poems. And he knew then he would never understand his wife and daughter. He’d always be on the outside, walking by the den where they huddled on the sofa, sharing a bowl of caramel popcorn.

 

Hayley returned to the table, her lips redder, her face paler. She sat down and the waitress appeared, barely glancing at them, scrawling their orders down on a pad. Fried shrimp for both of them. Hayley wanted a glass of white wine. He wanted a scotch and soda.

 

The drinks didn’t take long and thankfully, the food didn’t, either. While they ate, Hayley twirled her hair and stared past him or studied her phone. He played with the dial on his Rolex, watching the time creep past.

 

When the waitress passed by to ask if they wanted key lime pie, Daniel handed her his American Express.

 

He met his daughter’s eyes across the table, and she smiled. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then her smile disappeared and she stared at the half-eaten coleslaw on her plate.

 

“Still making cappuccinos?” he asked, searching for something to say. And then to his horror, Hayley began to cry. So, she had lost her job again. One second she was smiling and now her shoulders shook, quiet sobs wracking her body. Daniel remembered Olivia’s words again: “She’s in a bad way.” What should he do? He thought about client dinners, but no client had ever cried before.

 

Eyes on them. The men at the table nearby. Theirs was not the kind of community where you had a breakdown over coleslaw. “The land of the raised pinky” is what he’d told his wife once and she said: “We’re lucky to live somewhere so beautiful. Don’t complain.” Daniel had to get them out of the restaurant. The waitress returned—thank God—he signed the bill and grabbed his daughter’s arm.

 

He was grateful to be outside again. It meant the night was almost over. He breathed in the chilly air and thought of his roses. The cold would do them good. He hoped the person who bought his house would care for them the way he had. He should probably pass along his tricks: eggshells and tea bags in the soil, olive oil rubbed onto the leaves.

 

They were almost to the car when Hayley’s name was called. Oh no. Who could it be? Had someone seen her crying? The caller was a pregnant blonde woman in a floral dress.

 

“I thought that was you,” she said to Hayley, whose eyes were wet and frightened. “This your father?”

 

She stuck out her hand, and Daniel shook it and introduced himself.

 

“Elizabeth,” the woman said. “Hayley and I went to high school together.”

 

She told them she practiced obstetrics at Baptist Medical, that she was on her way to the hospital because one of her mothers was going into delivery early, much to her husband’s dismay since they’d been celebrating his birthday.

 

“My drunk husband can’t drive me to the hospital, and with my belly I can’t fit behind the steering wheel—could you give me a ride to the hospital? It’s less than a mile away,” Elizabeth asked.

 

This was the last thing Daniel wanted to do. He needed to get Hayley home, rescue them from the awkwardness of the night. Who was this Elizabeth? Couldn’t she call a cab? He could feel his daughter’s eyes on him.

 

“Okay,” he said.

 

Hayley went back to twirling her hair. She walked behind them. Elizabeth got into the front seat. When he pulled out of the lot, Elizabeth looked over her shoulder and smiled at Hayley.

 

“What are you doing these days?”

 

Daniel glanced in the rearview mirror. Was Hayley crying again? He didn’t want her to answer.  She was a middle-aged woman who’d been hospitalized for bipolar disorder following a suicide attempt. This Elizabeth—she was the kind of woman Daniel had imagined Hayley would turn out to be. A doctor, pregnant, happily married. Assertive enough to ask an old schoolmate for a ride.

 

“I’m so proud of my daughter,” Daniel said, the lie falling out of his mouth so fast he couldn’t keep up. “She’s a brilliant writer. A poet. She lives in Los Angeles now, and I don’t see her enough.”

 

How had he come up with this so quickly? Five minutes ago, he’d been unable to think of a single word to say to his daughter, and now he was expertly lying to a total stranger. Maybe it was all those years convincing juries. He didn’t know but he felt proud of himself for jumping to Hayley’s rescue. He’d saved them both from embarrassment.

 

Elizabeth snapped her fingers. “I remember,” she said slowly. “We were essay partners in American Literature. Your papers were always the best.”

 

Hayley stopped chewing her cheek. “Really?” she asked.

 

“Oh yeah,” Elizabeth said. “I’m not surprised you’re a writer now.”

 

“I wrote a book,” Hayley said proudly. She opened up her purse and pulled out a worn copy. She passed it to Elizabeth. Daniel had never read his daughter’s book.  He’d been too freaked out by the title, which had been the name of a song he wrote in college for a class. The only time he’d ever done something creative. He had no idea how Hayley got her hands on the song—he’d assumed it had ended up in the trash, like all of his college papers.

 

“Broken Nightingale,” Elizabeth said, staring down at the cover. “That sounds good.”

 

“Thank you,” Hayley said.

 

Elizabeth handed the book back and gave Hayley her business card. She suggested they have lunch the next time Hayley was in town.

 

“This is my last trip here,” she said. “My father’s moving to Jacksonville.”

 

“Shame,” Elizabeth said and then: “You look great.”

 

Hayley’s eyes grew wide. Daniel turned into the hospital parking lot and drove to the entrance. Elizabeth thanked him for the ride, and they all said goodbye. Daniel was certain now that the sadness inside of him was written all over his face, and he clenched his jaw as hard as he could. When Elizabeth got out, Hayley didn’t take her place in the front seat. They were quiet on the ride home.

 

When he pulled into the driveway, Hayley said, “I’ll be out of your hair in the morning. I booked an early flight.”

 

She was leaving? But she said she had nothing to go back to? She’d bawled at dinner. For the first time Daniel missed Olivia. She’d do something, even if it was the wrong thing.

 

They went into the house. Hayley went to her room. Daniel stood in the kitchen, staring out at the dark backyard.

—

Daniel got out of bed just as the light in his room turned pink. He went to Hayley’s room. He wanted to look at his daughter one more time before she left. She slept on her side, the covers down by her ankles. She’d slept like that as a little girl. Now her hair was short, but she looked just as peaceful. He wished she could know that peace, that her brain wasn’t so mixed up, that she didn’t get sad enough to want to die. Maybe her brain would’ve been different if he’d been a different father. If Olivia hadn’t been her best friend.

 

Hayley stirred. She opened her eyes.

 

“Daddy,” she said hoarsely.

 

Daniel’s heart pounded. He might never see his daughter again. She’d have no reason to come home now that there was no home to return to. She wouldn’t travel all the way back to Florida just to see him. The yard was beautiful in the morning. Maybe she’d like to see it one last time.

 

“Come outside,” he said.

 

She rubbed her eyes and sat up. She followed him, in bare feet, in her old T shirt and boxers, to the backyard. Now the sun was higher. Dew sparkled on the grass, made the tips of the blades look like diamonds.

 

Hayley turned to him, tears in her eyes. Should he hug her? Maybe she didn’t want to be touched. He tried to choose a word, any word, but his mind had gone blank like it always did with his daughter.

 

“I’ll have a balcony at the condo,” he said. His voice sounded strange to him, far away. “Would you help me pick out plants for it? A cactus maybe?” He wasn’t sure what he was saying, only that he was heading somewhere when a few moments ago he’d been at a dead end. How could he speak to packed courtrooms but not his daughter?

 

Her brow furrowed and she seemed on the verge of saying something. But then she stopped. This was a terrible idea. He should let her go. All of his earlier efforts had been futile. Why did he think he could help her now?

 

Tears coursed down her cheeks, shiny wet ribbons. This time the sight of her crying did a strange thing to him. A lump formed in his throat. He hadn’t cried in years, not even at Olivia’s funeral. He swallowed hard. Hayley moved toward him. She buried her face in his chest. His body tensed—it had been such a long time since he’d been touched—but then he smelled her hair. The same long ago, little-girl scent. Like roses, like baby powder, sweeter even. Daniel closed his eyes. He remembered: chasing her in the pool, tickling her stomach, making her scream with laughter. He’d never felt happier than on those days. Summer was coming. A few months away. This summer he would make her sadness go away. It might take some time, but he’d do it. He’d kept the Marilyn Monroes alive. He could do anything. At least, he could keep trying.

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Forthward: Guy Psycho and the Contemporary Epic

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame by John King

Beating Windward Press, 2019

Paperback, 206 pages, $17

 

Cover of Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame by John King.

 

Epic heroes are traditionally paragons of the societies that invent them, extolling the virtues that those societies find most desirable. Guy Psycho, aging rock star and titular hero of John King’s debut novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame, is no exception in that regard. He’s a hero for the postmodern era, and so he’s somewhat different from his classical counterparts: He’s tall and thin, in black lipstick and eye makeup. He wears Wayfarers and wingtips (size 14). He has a surgically implanted voicebox that occasionally goes on the fritz, causing him to blat certain syllables with a tinny, synthesized version of his otherwise golden pipes. And, far from being the sole agent of fulfilling his quest, he gets through most of his adventure due to the unfailing support of his band mates: from the musicians, to the discretely differentiated backup-dancing Postmodernaires, to the band’s new manager and accountant. Their adventure, like their professional lives, is something that they all do together.

 

The book doesn’t only evoke epic literature stylistically and thematically, but literally. The story itself is a wild romp through the tablets described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, as Guy and the crew are plunged into a dreamlike prehistory in search of the lost thirteenth tablet, which they have to find before an angry Ishtar and the other Sumerian gods destroy the world. King lovingly deconstructs the larger-than-life deeds of the original Gilgamesh and gives us a different, almost surreal reinterpretation—or, really, a reiteration—of them.

 

Along the way, he relies on several distinct elements of each character that quickly become their own sort of nods to traditional heroic epithets: Guy Psycho of the size-14 wingtips and Gaultier gauze, Lulu of the auburn hair and motorcycle boots, Trudy of the black ringlets and silver-ruffled party dress. This also helps further differentiate the various characters (there are eighteen) in a relatively short amount of time, as all of them are far more complex and interesting than they initially appear—the musicians are more than the instruments they play, and every single one of the Postmodernaires has something more than mere dance steps that informs their voices and characterization.

 

Despite the book’s clear love for the classics, the rest of its presentation is a playful, joyful rejection of convention, as King enjoins the text itself to participate in the narrative. Pages go black as characters are plunged into darkness, punctuated on the next page by cones of onomatopoeic flashlight. Lines of narration from characters lost in a maze spiral around the page in neat right angles, helping drive home the sense of uncanny disorientation. Far from seeming distracting or gimmicky, this quintessentially postmodern acknowledgement of the text as an ontologically distinct artifact reminds the reader to enjoy not just the book, but the experience of reading the book. King includes small moments of explicit and implicit intertextuality, as well, that drive home the point that the book doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the astute reader is rewarded for Googling the serial number on the otherwise nondescript crate in Mr. Youngerman’s curio collection, for example, or for noting the title of the book one of the guests at the Bull of Heaven’s party is reading (which, with any luck, is the tacit promise of a sequel).

 

The language, too, at the sentence level, is a melodic free-form jazz of excellent description, fluid and rich in metaphor, that whisks the reader effortlessly along through the book’s two-hundred-or-so pages. For example, during a reminiscence, Lulu, a Postmodernaire with a background in archaeology who helps guide the crew through ancient Mesopotamia, reflects on when she hit rock bottom:

 

Lulu remembered, in a single flash, a time when her face was mashing her nose down against a tabletop, her sweaty, auburn hair crawling with sticky airs, in some murmuring necropolis of a bar in the underside of Tangiers. . . [H]ere she was, across the globe, a cipher in a ledger that no one would ever read, an empty egg cracking in the back of the fridge.

 

The visceral detail, the vibrant verbs, the fresh and interesting figurative language—all are typical of King’s prose throughout the novel.

 

In addition to the quality of the language, the passage above also illustrates one of the things that makes the novel work so well: while it never loses its spirit of fun and adventure, King isn’t afraid to treat his characters seriously, to let the reader in on their doubts and vulnerabilities. The nagging problem with many of the ancient epic heroes is that they were portrayed with precious few real faults, few true weaknesses, save a near-ubiquitous hubris. This worked for the societies who birthed them, who seemed to desire these larger-than-life supermen. Guy Psycho and his coterie, however, are products of the contemporary (or postmodern) age, so a big part of their heroic nature comes from their courage in the face of their own faults and personal tragedies. The result is a story that not only has a harmonic resonance with the ancient adventure tales—in a way, the forebears of the craft of fiction itself—but a story that still has a melody all its own, that doesn’t hesitate to march “Forthward!” in an attempt to excavate a new niche in the bedrock of myth—and turn it into a rock-and-roll stage.

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Two Poems

To My Caring and Worried Mother

There are sliced carrots in the shape of a cowbell,
because I understand
that great food should sing to you.

 

There’s a movie we’ve never seen before
and a Japanese instruction manual.

 

There’s a novel about Alzheimer’s
and some magic memory pills for your mother.
There’s an automatic food dispenser
so you don’t have to bend down to feed the dogs anymore.

 

There’s a travel bag with a Bible
and a plane ticket to Paris.

 

There’s a color-coded flow chart
describing the best way to carry a conversation with Grandma.
In the bottom right hand corner, in fine print, it explains
you may have to adopt new tactics on the fly.

 

I caught Grandma watching
The Hulk in Spanish today.
I just flipped to the English version.

 

To my caring and worried mother:
raising your voice won’t help,
there is no cure.

 

All the Post-It notes
on all the cabinets
should say: open with caution,
eat with intensity,
remember,
we love you
and we’ll help you
find the watch
you stuffed in the cookie jar.

 

Elegy

The horse
nuzzles the back of my hand
as if the damp home of its nose
could stand not one more dark
second of this unfettered freeze.

 

What of it,
she asks after we’ve had our hot
meat and stale versions of drug,
sitting in lotus pose
facing my grandfather’s headstone
where every engraved sentence
curved tinsel of truth
into the steaming mouth of myth.

 

This barrel-bellied man
made a small southern town
seem like a place God had visited
and forgot to bless.
He was that damn bold,
that unforgettable.

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Before & After the Pinnacle of Happiness

The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé by Mario Benedetti
Translated by Harry Morales
Paperback, Penguin UK, 2015

 

 Cover of The Truce by Mario Benedetti.

 

“In only six months and twenty-eight days I’ll be in a position to retire.” So begins Mario Benedetti’s The Truce—a novel that takes the form of the brief and intimate diary of the forty-nine-year-old Martín Santomé, a Uruguayan widower living in Montevideo in the 1960s. Martín’s attention to life’s mundane details, like the shapes of strangers’ legs and his coworkers’ nervous sneezes, combined with his frequent accounts of exhaustion, are what make him feel real and familiar right away. Although his world is small and provincial, his reflections are universal.

 

The novel was originally published in Spanish (Editorial Nueva Imagen, Montevideo, Uruguay ,1960) and was published in English by Penguin UK Modern Classics in Harry Morales’s English translation in 2015. Readers should be grateful to Morales for not only capturing the contradictory nuances of Benedetti’s resigned-yet-open voice so perfectly in English—but also for inviting a wider audience to enjoy this timeless story of love and sorrow. The translation in today’s context gives the novel a fresh, new meaning. The novel is about learning to appreciate the present, but the way in which it approaches the present is charmingly old-fashioned.

 

Early on in the novel the protagonist’s daughter, Blanca, laments to her father, “Sometimes I feel sad, over nothing more than not knowing what I’m missing.” The girl’s sentiment is one that hardly exists today. On the contrary, modern readers tend to be acutely aware of what we are missing; we are inundated with online images and texts that remind us of what-could-be on a daily basis. It’s amusing to think that the very reality we have now is what Blanca might have been yearning for. Yet it’s precisely this feeling of Blanca’s desire—a desire her father also shares—that serves as the emotional premise for the entire novel.

 

The novel embodies the thrill one feels when finding something he never even knew could happen. It’s about the retrospective discovery of a hole—a discovery made only after that hole has been unexpectedly filled. In the case of our protagonist, this hole is romance. Romantic love is the last thing Martín Santomé expects or even wants to find. He is tired. He seeks only leisure and some rest, yet at the same time is depressed by the prospect of a blank agenda. The love affair he begins with his twenty-three-year-old assistant, Laura Avellaneda, just before he enters his retirement, is hardly original. But it’s the way in which this experience moves and reinvigorates him, that is so potent and inexplicably memorable.

 

Martín’s celebration of his own surprising happiness is made all the more intense by his keen acknowledgement and understanding of the fragility of life and its transcendence. In a small moment midway through the novel he narrates:

 

She had got out of bed, just like that, wrapped in a blanket, and was standing near the window watching the rain. I approached, also looking at the rain, and we didn’t say anything for a while. All of a sudden, I realized that that moment, that slice of everyday life, was the highest degree of well-being, it was Happiness. Never before had I been so completely happy than at that moment, but still I had the cutting sensation that I would never feel that way again, at least at that level, with that intensity. The pinnacle of happiness is like that, surely it’s like that.

 

Martín Santomé’s unexpected bliss is poignantly balanced with an underlying fear of loss: “Are we burning?” he asks his lover. The novel beautifully explores the frightening contradictions that are inherent in love, and it’s easy to see why the book still stands as such a revered classic in Latin America, and why it deserves to be read everywhere else. Harry Morales’s translation of La Tregua is a novel you will read without stopping and will never forget. It will be a physical experience that marks you, twists you, and pulls something out of you. It will make you weep and narrow your eyes at details you’d never before noticed: the wood of a table, a dog outside a window. It will make you think about your own emotional life like a chart on paper: where do the peaks and the valleys lie? And, most importantly, what happens in between them?

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Love Like Orange

My father’s love was orange. It could be warm and milky like summer Creamsicles, boisterous and magnetic as a dancing flame, or deep and foreboding as the morning sunrises sailors avoid. Every Saturday morning, he clocked in, arriving at my grandmother’s house at nine in the morning. My brother, Justin, and I waited at the front screen door, fidgeting and rocking in our criss-cross-applesauce positions, my mother standing in another room biting her nails.

 

We only needed our ears to alert us of his arrival: the slow whir of a car driving past the house followed by the crunch of gravel as it made a U-turn. The barely detectable squeak of brakes as a car came to a stop. The slam of a heavy door closing, the clap of footsteps, and, finally, the chirp of the car announcing the locking of its doors.

 

Sometimes he arrived bearing gifts of the stuffed bear variety or a chocolate orange wrapped in bright tinfoil that, to us, was as valuable as real gold. And other times he arrived in ghoulish masks to terrify Justin.

 

“For Christ’s sake, stop being a baby,” he barked in irritation, removing the Alf mask as my brother sobbed and hiccupped from fright.

 

“He’s only three; of course he’s scared,” my mother cried, stroking Justin’s back.

 

“You’re always babying him.”

 

These standoffs between my parents could last for as few as thirty seconds and as long as weeks. Tears could quickly turn to laughter as we climbed the apricot tree, bright green with orange fuzzy polka dots hanging from limbs and littering the grass.

 

In the backyard, Justin giggled while swaying forward and back in a swing fashioned out of a splintered four-by-two plank and manila rope as course as sandpaper.

 

“Higher,” he laughed. Our father obliged.

 

He was ours until sunset when he clocked out just as swiftly as he’d arrived. While walking to his car, we sent him off with a parade of waves, parroting “Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye!” back and forth as if he were leaving for war and we didn’t know when he’d return. The bright orange sky bounced off his car as it pulled out onto the road.

 

We waved with our apricot-stained hands until his car disappeared down the street. These days escaped us in a blur of tickles and laughs and tears and shouts and sweet coos of love. We would forget almost everything except the tang of orange that sat bitterly on our tongues.

—

My father’s love was indigo, as deep and distant as the continental slope we feared would swallow us whole. Sitting on his shoulders, I levitated five feet and nine inches above the ground, scanning the ocean for whales we’d never see this far south.

 

“Be careful,” my mother warned, which only instigated him to run.

 

I bounced on his bony shoulders, and then slipped forward and onto the sand. My mother and Justin screamed, and my father scowled, an electrical current of smoky, rich blue pulsating from his veins. Above me, furrowed brows and wide eyes collided, but all I saw were their indigo shadows wrestling on the sand. My mother surrendered, but my father’s palms were stained electric. He stormed ahead of us at a gait our legs couldn’t match.

 

We called for him: “Wait! Wait! Wait!”

 

He was too far ahead and could only hear the waves and seagulls, or so he said later. We lost him among the sea of beach umbrellas and Styrofoam coolers and barbeque smoke and waxed surfboards.

 

On the pier, we had a better view, and we each claimed a direction to survey. We spun around hoping to pinpoint the man with dark hair, dark eyes, and tanned skin. My mother always said he looked like a Greek fisherman, so we looked to the ocean beyond the end of the pier for the dark shadow of a man who’d had enough of life on land and all that comes with it. We felt for his currents of indigo that connected him to us like an invisible leash that tied families together.

 

“Frank!” my mother shouted.

 

“Papa, papa, papa,” Justin and I repeated.

 

And then, as always, he materialized behind us.

 

“I’m right here; you can stop making a goddamn scene with your hysterics.”

 

If there’s one thing my father hated more than life among mortals, it was attention from them. We followed him back to the car, our legs marching in double-time to keep up with his long strides. He fought in Vietnam, but the leave-no-man-behind warrior ethos did not apply here. Our feet sunk as the sand grabbed at our ankles, and we hoped we wouldn’t be left behind.

—

My father’s love was cherry—tart and sweet in the same bite. It was layered with unexpected gestures we loved and hated and from which we ran away only to return and beg for more.

 

On Christmas, we saw life through cherry-stained glasses. Our living room transformed into New York City, with the dozens of crimson-wrapped gifts as its skyscrapers. It took hours to unwrap everything, and when it was over, we hunted for more and painted our father red with tinsel and kisses.

 

With flushed cheeks and dilated pupils, we ran in circles, incapable of exhausting ourselves. We scrambled up couches like Mount Everest and excavated cardboard boxes for buried treasures, stopping only for a bite of chocolate from our stockings.

 

“That’s enough,” my father warned us. He was jubilant until he wasn’t.

 

I always received half a dozen warnings, but Justin was only given two, which was never enough for him.

 

“That’s two,” my father barked, standing from his seat.

 

Justin screamed and ran for shelter. When they returned from the back bedroom minutes later, one of Justin’s wrists matched the scarlet of my father’s right palm; it was what inadvertently linked them, like father-and-son tattoos that faded and then returned weeks later.

 

Justin’s eyes were carmine from crying, and I wondered if everything he saw was the color of Christmas. He rubbed his wrist while I connected the constellation of kisses left behind from my mother’s ruby lipstick that stained his cheek and forehead.

—

My father’s love was white—silent and opaque, hovering in a corner just above our reach. When it wasn’t bright and all-encompassing, it was the very absence of light, siphoning its warm comfort that engulfed us moments ago.

 

While Justin and I lived with our mother and grandmother in a rugged and familiar landscape of chipped paint, peeling wallpaper, and nail polish–stained quilts, my father lived in a glass castle, off limits except for today.

 

His house was a museum with carefully placed breakables that toed the edges of shelves. There were white ceramic vases with silk flowers, bronze elephants that, at the right time of day, sparkled under the skylight. There were hand-painted boxes from Russia, miniature Chinese floral vases, a globe made from rare minerals, and a cream-colored bust of Poseidon. They were untouchables we stared at with open jaws and wide eyes while on tip-toes, stroking the invisible barrier that hovered around each one.

 

We ran in the white glow of this castle until my father’s forty-five-year-old hands caught Justin’s three-year-old neck and forced him to the ground.

 

“How many times have I told you to be careful? You can’t just run around like a goddamn monkey. This isn’t a zoo!”

 

His booming voice had the incredible ability to vibrate through our bodies and cause our bones to shake in fear. Justin’s face turned white and, with wide eyes, looked pleadingly at my mother.

 

Disgust washed over my father’s face.

 

“Go. Run to your mother.”

 

“Go to him. You need to go with him,” my mother whispered to me.

 

I shook my head.

 

“Go, or he’ll just get angrier,” she pleaded.

 

I was the only one who could placate my father, a badge of honor I would have done anything to shed. After my father died, these memories felt traitorous. I would spend years repainting my past, searching for new hues, but I always returned to the same four, ending with this blinding white that would never fade.

 

Refusing to look back at my mother or brother, I stomped toward my father who snarled like a mountain lion in his cave of an office. My brother and mother retreated to a corner, licking their wounds. I cajoled my father with pleas for mercy and, eventually, guided him back to the living room where we lapped up his renewed love like milk.

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Petrichor

Petrichor explores the analogy between the degradation of nature and the experience of helplessness as part of human consciousness. Heavily inspired by experimental documentaries and ethnographic films, I focused on combining images of locations and objects that have been discarded and disregarded with the stories and memories of incarcerated women. The sound design, which incorporates not only the voices of the women but also archibal voicemails and recordings, completes the impression of a removed and haunting filmic reality that encapsulates the notions of loss and hope.

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Two Poems: 2001 & Barbie

2001

There was no space odyssey.
Instead, more than towers fell
in the city where I live.
People were still counting
paper scraps in Florida
for the sake of a flawed process.
People were still dying
in Gujarat’s earthquaked cracks
in Ghana’s stampeded stadiums
and in the summer of the media
calling shark attacks on Santa Rosa
a national security threat.
The Taliban’s advent, McVeigh’s execution
for destroying what seemed an entire city.
I had just turned seven.
For my birthday, my mother
bought me a Beatles CD.
Later that year, George Harrison died—
my favorite one, the one
who sang about how all things must
come to an end. But
how were endings possible
in a new millennium? New
Wikipedia, where we learned
how to summarize. New Nokia,
new Madonna, even language felt
refreshed: A.I., iTunes, OS X, Xbox.
It was the first time I broke my arm
in two separate places. I visited the zoo
and watched the animals roar at each other,
and at themselves. My mother dispelled
Santa Claus, perhaps a year too soon
for my imagination to take. I cried
until I received extra presents
for keeping the secret from my sister.
I saw myself in the Backstreet Boys,
in the highest rated Super Bowl in history,
as Harry Potter, whether philosopher
or sorcerer. Everything still felt possible
to a seven-year-old, who had just
heard about the first tourist in space
and thought it was an odyssey.

 

Barbie

I comb my hair with a small hairbrush.
I no longer walk in nature. And when
I sit on the front porch, sipping
whatever’s left from the mason jar
filled with all that last night, I flick
the maggots from my skin.
The parked car outside the house
sits with its tarped over cover since before
I remember. I remember
playing dolls with my sister
while my father wedged a football
into my hands, and said
you must throw as far as you can.
Open wide, my arms onto the wheel
where I learned how a man
drives five miles above the limit.
It was cold that first Kentucky,
where I first kissed masculine lips,
wet as leather, chapped the way
we hid from what we learned
in locker rooms. We grazed the sides
of our heads against the Cypress bark.
While we leaned against its trunk, I saw
pigs in the distance, wrestling
in the nightmud. They cannot know
how soon they will be separated, then skinned.

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I Wake at Four & Drive to the Mountains

To leave the inner critic on the empty street beneath my windows.

To outride the arrows, or slings at least, of civic life.

To put the forces separating me from my daughter—the moderator

 in elastic-waisted slacks, the decree signed

 by the liver-spotted judge—in the rear-view.

To look ahead and see the world’s impersonal love song again

 lifted from night.

To know the song is about the attention we give the wild,

 unfixable everything we love yet is always already

 indifferent to us.

And yet to see the sun rise, like a couched friend, from blankets of fog

 in the lowland orchards.

To see the fields of our anxieties cut and gathered in silos.

To hear the wind wrap us, undeserving, in the sun’s resolve

 to sustain us another day.

 

To stuff a campsite into my backpack and somehow walk ten miles.

To feel the weight of our basic needs shouldered across streams,

 over hills, up crevices.

To remember having walked the home-forsaken trail before.

To realize I’d compressed memory of all this pain—all but the sacrament

 of red, gold and orange leaves

 above river bluffs.

 

Only here do I realize I must have forgotten just how many uphills,

 just how fucking much elevation hurts.

Here I think such thoughts as our sapiens ancestors ground as many miles

 over mountains each day.

I wake and drive and walk to think: Perhaps the downhill mortar and pestle

 of our patellae almost crushes recall

 of profane elevation.

And to meet the inner critic, somehow already at the top, and

 to accept his message:

You wake at four and drive to the mountains

to accept the body’s pain as the cost of all the beauty there is to see.

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To My Fellow Submitters

A found poem from sample rejections saved in “My Submissions,”
completed in response to a writing prompt given at
the Sandhill Writers Retreat, May 2019

 

Dear

Dear

Dear

Our poets’ community is lucky to have you

Good fortune in all your future writing

Declined

Cannot offer

We enjoyed having the chance to read

Many excellent entries this year

The team wishes you

We wish each of you the best in finding publishers

All the best

Unfortunately

The sweat and the perseverance it takes to put together a submission and send it out, naked

Declined by

Not Selected

A strong and competitive batch

A complimentary copy of this year’s

We regret

We are grateful for your ideas

We encourage you to submit again in the future

We are unable to provide individual feedback

Thanks

Best

Appreciate the dedication to craft

Thank you for choosing us

Hope that you and your work succeed in finding a home

You’re now one step closer to getting that acceptance you’ve been looking for

Sincerely

In peace and poetry

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The Ball Spun

I arrived at the playground with Armin. It was a late afternoon in June; the rays of sunshine broke through the thick white clouds in places, illuminating patches of the tramped grass. Armin’s parents had sent him another package, a brand-new soccer ball in it. It was yellow with blue spots. He held it close to his chest as we sauntered down the street to the playground.

 

Armin and I hung out regularly. He lived in my neighborhood with his grandma. Armin’s parents worked in Austria as guest workers. Most of his life he spent with his grandma, seeing his parents once a year. Armin had toys I’d never seen before: remote-operated cars built of high-quality steel, model planes, and handheld video games. He brought to school all sorts of foreign candy, neatly wrapped, colorful, with pictures of cartoon characters.

 

Armin talked a lot, while I was a quiet type. He talked so much on our way to school that we often ended up being late. When I stopped by his place before school, I’d find him in the bathroom in front of the mirror, looking at himself and combing his blond curls. “What do you think, Edi?” he’d say. “Looking good, man. That schmuck, Sinan, is a goner. Selma is my girl. Hey, let me show you a new thing I got.” He was never ready on time, and the school was three kilometers away—a long walk.

 

The playground was deserted. We started kicking the ball from one rusted goal post to another. A few minutes later, we noticed a group of boys walking towards us. They were in their late teens. As soon as we saw them we knew we were in trouble. After all, two eleven-year-olds stood no chance against a gang of high-schoolers. Their ring leaders were two brothers. The older brother, Kasim, was as dark as the asphalt on the road he’d just crossed. He was skinny and long—all limbs. His round head bobbed on top of his body like a ball with two black eyes perched above a bulbous nose. Kasim’s brother, Vedad, was a year younger. He had long, brown hair he’d always tie into a ponytail. Vedad was notorious for his vicious smile that revealed two long canines. He was short and sturdy, his legs sinewy and fast. He was the best soccer player in town.

 

Kasim intercepted our pass and took the ball. Vedad shouted, “Come on, man! Be nice and share.” Kasim kicked the ball hard to the other three boys trudging behind him.

 

“Give the ball back, assholes!” Armin blurted out, and before finishing the sentence he looked at me, surprised by his own words.

 

“Whoa, man! The kid’s got a foul mouth.” Kasim sniggered. “Isn’t that Aunt Zinka’s grandson?”

 

“Time to teach him a lesson,” Vedad said. He picked up the ball like a pro, bouncing it on his knees, his ponytail prancing up and down. “Tell me, little punk!” he said. “Whose ball is this? It’s damn good. Real leather. Made in Germany.”

 

“It’s mine,” Armin said.

 

“Of course, little chicken shit.” Vedad said. “Did your mama send it from Germany?”

 

“From Austria,” Armin shot back.

 

“Would you, please, give us the ball back?” I interjected.

 

“This one here is a nice boy.” Vedad nodded towards me and balanced the ball between his foot and his shin.

 

“Listen, nice boy,” he said. “I have an idea. You get the ball and we let you play if you two show us your kung fu skills.”

 

“No way,” Armin cried. “You guys will mow the lawn with us.”

 

“Who said we’d do anything?” Kasim said. “We don’t fight little pussycats. We want you to fight each other.”

 

“Why would we do that?” I said.

 

“Because that’s the only way you get the ball back. And if you beat this mama’s boy, the ball is yours. Isn’t that so, mama’s boy?”

 

Armin looked at me, then at Vedad and Kasim. “The ball is mine,” he said.

 

I held my gaze on Kasim and nodded hesitantly. As long as I could remember, the only soccer ball I ever had was a bubamara, which meant ladybug. The bubamaras were often the only choice for the working-class kids in Yugoslavia. They were made of cheap rubber and lasted only for a few weeks. After a couple of good games, bubamaras turned into sad-looking, egg-shaped spheres, their innards dangling through the ripped outer layer.

 

I was bigger than Armin and stronger. Armin was all mouth, that cocky fool. We both knew I could take him out easily. I walked over to where he stood and looked at him up close.

 

“Let’s do this,” Armin said and jumped on me, climbing on my shoulder. He got me in a choke hold and held me down with all his might. Everybody lined up around us, grunting, yelling, and laughing—Kasim and Vedad in the opposite corners. I steadied myself, not letting him push me down on my knees.

 

I wiggled out of Armin’s hold and was about to strike him, but Vedad and Kasim grabbed us and pulled us apart. I felt Kasim’s firm grip on my elbows.

 

“Listen,” he shouted over my head. “You two start when we say.” He shook my whole body as if to reset me and said, “Now you go.”

 

I was fast this time. I tackled Armin to the ground and shoved his face into the grass. Kneeling on his back, I bent one of his arms backwards and held it tight, twisting and bending it towards his shoulder blades. After a few minutes he stopped wriggling.

 

The brothers pulled us apart again. Vedad laughed and said, “Man, that was ugly. But fun.”

 

Gasping for air, I gaped at his wolf teeth. He’d drawn his lips up to his ears.

 

Armin was in tears. “Asshole!” he screamed at me. “You’ll pay for this.” He ran towards home.

 

Kasim took the ball in his hands and spun it on his forefinger. “Get lost, nice boy,” he said.

 

—

 

Three years later, Armin and I were on the playground again when eight-year-old twins, Mirza and Kenan, saw us from across the field and ran over to our side. They were both dark and so skinny that they looked like two roosters—their noses stuck out like two beaks, their small eyes peered from creased, dry skin. The boys looked like two old men trapped in children’s bodies. They were Roma kids. Their mother worked at the textile mill; their father was rarely around, but when he was home he’d wave at me and smile if he saw me walk by their house. We could never tell the twins apart, but this time one of them had scabs all over his head. His brother had only a few on his neck and elbows. The scabby one was Mirza.

 

“We want to play too,” Mirza croaked.

 

“Really, you little toad?” Armin raised his blond brows and smiled. “You want to play with the big boys?”

 

“Yes, of course,” Mirza said. His brother stood by him quietly.

 

“What can you give us for it?” I asked. I knew they had nothing to offer, but I liked to joke with them. The twins were dear to me.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“How about you put on a nice show for us?” said Armin. “You just have to fight a little, like in the movies.”

 

“You’re too big for us.”

 

“No, you chicken shit, you fight each other. The winner gets this ball.”

 

I looked at Armin askance. I couldn’t believe he’d give them the ball.

 

“We’re brothers.”

 

“Brothers fight,” I said.” You sometimes fight, don’t you?”

 

“Yes, we do. But Mama says if she sees us fighting again, she’ll break our arms.”

 

“Your mother is getting off work in an hour,” Armin said. “The ball is yours if you win.”

 

By now, Armin had six soccer balls and counting. His parents had brought him a ball every time they came to visit from Austria. Three years earlier, he had told his grandma about our fight. The day after he told her, I got a whipping from my father. A few months later, after we got over our fight, I asked Armin if he’d gotten his ball back. He shrugged and said he couldn’t care less. He was quiet all the way to school that day.

 

Mirza looked at his brother. Kenan was still silent. “Let’s do this,” Kenan said and

leaped onto Mirza.

 

They alternately held each other in chokeholds at first, squirming around like two hungry worms. We pulled them apart. “We’re taking a break,” I said, restraining Mirza from jumping on his brother again. I held him tight in my arms, his scabs close to my face.

 

“Let them go,” Armin said and pushed his twin into the middle of our circle. I released mine and he lunged ahead. We stepped back and watched them. I glanced at Armin. His lips were stretched into a smile, his foot resting on the ball.

 

The twins battered each other with their bony fists. Their knuckles found their heads and faces. Soon they both were bleeding. Kenan’s lip was cut open. Mirza’s nose was oozing blood. I ran over to Mirza and yanked him away. The scabs on his head were cut open and bloody too. He left red streaks on his brother’s shirt. They both were crying now. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill the bastard,” Mirza hissed through tears and blood.

 

I pulled up the hem of Mirza’s shirt to his face, took his hand, and pressed it on his nose to stop the bleeding. In a calm but threatening tone, I said, “Go home, right away, before I beat the shit out of you.” His brother held his lip and mumbled something about cracking Mirza’s scabby head open. Mirza started running. Kenan scrammed after him. They both ran towards their home, their shirts torn and bloody.

 

I turned to Armin. His mouth was agape, his lips moving, but there was no sound. I looked down at the ball in front of him. It was unblemished, sparkly white with black spots and a large Adidas sign on it. An intense burn welled up from the pit of my stomach. I sprinted towards the ball and kicked it with all my might. The ball soared high into the broad blue sky.

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Melting Among Echoes: The Elusive Narrative Voice of Z213: Exit

Z213: Exit (Poena Damni trilogy) by Dimitris Lyacos
Translated by Shorsha Sullivan
Shoestring Press, 2017
Paperback, 152 pages, $12.00
Please note: the entire trilogy has been re-released by Shoestring Press as a boxed set as of October 2018.

 

Cover of Z213: Exit by Dimitris Lyacos     Boxed set of Poena Damni trilogy by Dimitris Lyacos.

Z213: Exit—the first installment of Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy—eludes a straightforward interpretation and defies easy genre categorization. One of the most striking features of the text, which offers an admixture of poetry, prose, and fractured discourse, is the varied, evanescent nature of the work’s narrative voice. It is at once discretely anonymous and richly polyphonous—a voice that is both an echo of a dying oral tradition and a singular windswept report from future underworlds, or perhaps contemporary nightmares. A voice that wanders a crumbling cerebral maze of déjà vu as it grapples with bouts of pre-cognitive amnesia. This narrative ambiguity, elliptical and serpentine, allows for a wealth of themes and mytho-religious motifs to surface in the text, such as the mercurial relationship between memory and nominal identity and the symbolic resonance between Greek myth, Christianity, and European folklore.

 

The fragmented, wandering narrator of Z213: Exit and the dislocated world (suffused with a sense of impending dread) in which they exist is prominent in the work’s first line: “these names and that’s how they found me.” Immediately, we get the sense that either a bureaucratic body, or perhaps an entity, is cataloguing and in pursuit of some targeted group of people. But the list of names—the “they” —and the “me” never come into focus, and so the narrative trope that we are teased with in the first line—one of straightforward persecution and pursuit—never quite coalesces into a recognizable shape. Instead, over the course of 152 pages, the narrator—the at-first unidentifiable “me”—slides between sensation and memory as it struggles to individuate from the host of shadowy presences that surround it and to identify the pain, suffering, and mystery that the environment itself seems to breathe forth. For example, later in the text, as the narrator (who at this point we can deem an anatomical male) engages in a fleeting sexual encounter, which seems to be more discomfiting than pleasurable, he muses, “Where did I come from? My name? Where was I heading?” Here, the somatic pressure of an erotic experience in a darkened world evokes sharp questions of origin, identity, and purpose. However, as we move toward the conclusion, the narrator seems to find a paradoxical certainty in letting all his questions dissolve into the prevailing sense of ambiguity and in doing so, he offers a contradictory assessment of the circumstances implied in Z213: Exit’s first line: “Nobody is coming after me. Surely they have forgotten about me. Nobody will ever come here to find me. Nobody ever.”

 

As the fragmented narrator of Z213: Exit quests through his broken world in something of an atemporal haze, echoes of Dante, Beckett, and even Proust can be detected in Lyacos’ careful and subtly erudite writing. But we also find rich allusions to ancient Greek myth and Christian ritual, which primarily enter the text through a Bible that the narrator finds in the pocket of a jacket, which he has taken from a partially conscious solider. The Bible proves to be a palimpsest containing erasure marks, blank space among biblical verses, “the words of a stranger,” and the writing of the narrator (perhaps they are all actually the words of the same person), who states “I walk through other names” before he briefly describes the Bible’s contents. In this book within a book, truncated excerpts from the Old and New Testaments float next to fragments from ancient Greek sources and original, darkly lyrical imagery. It is within this intertextual Bible that we encounter Z213: Exit’s most phantasmagoric layer, which Lyacos weaves in a rhythmic, episodic manner through the body of the text. Here we find scenes where Christ’s harrowing of Hell merges with Odysseus’ suffering-rich nostos; the mortification of Christ’s body upon the cross fades into the image of Dionysian sparagmos (or ritual tearing asunder); and the ritual of the mass and the ritual animal slaughter central to the ancient Greek sacrificial rite carry the same numinous weight.

 

A central motif of With the People from the Bridge, the second installment of the Poena Damni trilogy, is the revenant of European folklore. The revenant, which is somewhat akin to the zombie and the vampire, is a reanimated corpse or a revivified spirit who stalks in terror the living. The shadowed presence of a revenant also appears to be active in the text of Z:213 Exit. There are moments when the narrative seems to emanate from the twilit consciousness of a revenant, such as when the multi-voiced wanderer and narrator declares, “You are somebody else, but you are the same, you are him. This is continuity, you travel…” This lends a profound sense of liminality to the text. The reader is not only betwixt and between the pursuer and the pursued, but also the material and the immaterial, the pulse of life and the cold of death. There are also times when the narrator seems to be haunted by a revenant for dimly perceived reasons with the pursuit itself following a non-linear dream-logic. This is most vividly seen on the text’s final page, which we are led to believe is a page from the multi-voiced Bible that the narrator carries with him: “get away always, but feel he is coming, as time goes by he is approaching, and still now that the distance increases, and now that you draw away still the distance decreases.”

 

In noting the spectral influence of the revenant, we are brought back to the polyphonous narrative voice of Z213: Exit. As mentioned above, the page that ends the text is taken from the Bible that the narrator carries, but we are not told if the writing is that of the narrator, the words of a stranger, or even of someone else. Any hope for a unified voice or an integrated protagonist dissolves into uncertainty. What Z213: Exit leaves us with is something of a snapshot from the collective unconscious. An unmoored myth of wandering and suffering as likely to be plucked from the pages of the Western canon as from the dreams and nightmares of strangers in the contemporary world.

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Things You Left in Accra before Moving to the Bronx

Grandma and her weak leg,

your sister at 18, still with one good iris,

 

your mother’s British jewelry hidden under the bed,

the places in the carpet you soiled with urine,

 

all the red dust,

 

your seat at Calvary Methodist Church next to Marie

who’d always chat with you when someone talked

about Jesus and his power to bring you all the things you needed,

 

your gymnastic booty shorts (your mother sent

them from America because the heat in Accra overwhelmed

you but you still wish you’d saved some for America’s winters),

 

warm Tea Bread sold at the YMCA between 6:30 am and 7:30 am,

the scent of air conditioning and ice cream at the SHELL gas station,

 

Grandma with her good English,

 

Mercedes and Pamela, your neighbors who borrowed everything from salt to ladles,

 

Asaana, Yooyi, Aluguntuguin, Nkontomire,

Living Bitters, Mercy Cream, Lion’s Ointment &

 

a Saturday listening to wind turn on pawpaw leaves.

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Two Writers at Alligator Point

Cover of Bob Kunzinger's A Third Place.     Cover of Bob Kunzinger's Blessed Twilight.     Cover of Bob Kunzinger's Penance.

Cover of Rick Campbell's Gunshot, Peacock, Dog     Cover of Rick Campbell's The History of Steel.     Cover of Rick Campbell's Dixmont.

 

Poet, essayist, and publisher Rick Campbell and nonfiction writer Bob Kunzinger have published a combined fourteen books. Campbell’s include The History of Steel, Setting the World in Order, and Dixmont, many poems in countless journals, and for more than twenty years he was the publisher at Anhinga Press in Tallahassee, Florida. Bob Kunzinger’s volumes include Borderline Crazy, Penance, and Fragments as well as hundreds of works in journals and magazines, including several notations by Best American Essays.

 

Now both have new books from Madville Press of Texas. Campbell’s Gunshot, Peacock, Dog premiered last fall, and Kunzinger’s A Third Place: Notes in Nature in August of 2019.

 

These two old friends—both writers and professors with a penchant for sharing their wisdom—sat down for a chat about writing:

 

Kunzinger:

I always found the relationship between poetry and memoir to be closer than either of those and fiction. That’s why I think you find many poets writing essays or other forms of memoir, but not too many fiction writers (though I can suddenly recall many) who bother with nonfiction, or even poetry. I have an easier time reading poetry than fiction because it sends me back into my own senses, and I like that.

 

Ironically, I’m as influenced by poets as I am prose writers. You’re both, so there’s that. In fact, I enjoy your poetry, for which you are known, but I’m especially fond of your essays—the two in History of Steel are among my favorite nonfiction prose. Who influenced you, do you think? Where are you more comfortable?

 

Campbell:

I have no interesting answer, no matter how many times I am asked. In poetry, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Philip Levine.  I’ve read and liked, even loved, hundreds of poems, but those three poets influenced me the most because I read them first, when I was poetically young. It’s possible that I have been more influenced by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and so many song writers than I have poets. I am a listener. For years I have listened to music far more, for far more hours a day, a week, than I read poetry. I hear music and rhythm more than words. I am, I believe, more moved by songs than poems.  I am a poet because I wanted to be a songwriter.

 

Kunzinger:

I think that’s why we are very much the same when it comes to influence, and even a bit with my short prose and your longer poems. We were both musicians at some point—you still are—and the music of our youth was as much our literature as Salinger or Hemingway. For me, early Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Dylan. If I’m screwing around with a longer piece and listen to Neil Young or Browne’s “Sky Blue and Black,” it’s like getting a hit of something that fires me up.

 

Campbell:

I suppose I am more comfortable as a poet, but identity is a strange thing for me. For many years I think I was better known as a publisher than a writer, and I kept wanting to tell people I’m a writer too.  I spend more time thinking about and writing prose than poetry, even though I’ve published six books of poetry and not even one prose collection. I don’t think about poems—I get an inspiration and I write a poem. I never say I’m going to write a poem about ducks or love or something. Poems come quickly, and then it’s over. But I do think about and sketch prose ideas. I have about thirty essays that are finished or nearly so, and it’s taken about twenty years to get this far. If I start a poem, for whatever reason, I write it in a matter of minutes. I don’t bend it or play with it. I don’t even think of it as narrative, as if it’s going somewhere. It’s a bubble that rises over my head like in a cartoon. If I have a prose idea it usually takes longer to be born, but prose ideas go into one box and poetry into another. They don’t get mixed up. Sometimes I might take a finished poem and expand it into an essay, but rarely.

 

Your flash prose pieces and my longer poems often have much in common. I think your work and mine tends to move horizontally—sliding and leaping from subject to subject. I think it’s called accretion. We layer ideas, but more horizontally than vertically. 

 

Kunzinger:

I am not sure the material is horizontal—maybe in as much as there is some recognizable narrative arc in many pieces—but I think of the tangents within a piece as the real work more than the apparent direction. What’d you call it? Accretion? I tend to think of what we both do in writing as “digression.” I like the digressive nature of some of the pieces—“Flip Flops,” for instance, where the direction of the piece turns out to be little more than a vehicle for the deeper purpose. I think Tim O’Brien does that best, but I think he stole the style from Ernie Pyle, or maybe Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal.

 

Campbell:

I think I mean that our subjects are layered in a way that one idea isn’t privileged over the others. No dominant idea with the others subservient. Not much hierarchical structure. Your essay “Sliced Bread” does that. When I still used to workshop my poems, I was often told that I had too many subjects. I think that’s not possible as long as I leap and land properly. You and I think in associations and see lots of connections. This might also be why I have trouble finishing essays. Why or when should I stop leaping? It’s a process of montage. a palimpsest, a highway built over a trail, a road that follows a river. Accretion and digression might be the same thing. Tangents, too, but they go toward the essential subject not away from it.

 

Kunzinger:

I had to look up “palimpsest.” But, yes, exactly. The tangent is the point to begin with. I guess we layer ideas. That’s why I like longer pieces. I can layer it to the point where people will find more to relate to. It is hard for me to do short work. My short prose was developed for the sole purpose of reading to an audience, and some of it has been published, but they were meant to be read in the amount of time it takes to read a two- or three-page narrative poem, so that when I read with poets we’d share the same amount of time. What that did, though, was teach me the art of diction. I reached back to my journalism roots for that and stole from poets like Tim Seibles and Richard Lax. But I’m still way more comfortable in weaving ideas in longer form. That doesn’t mean it always works! Can you tell? I mean, how quickly can you tell if something’s working?

 

Campbell:

If I finish a poem, then it works. If it fades out partway through, then it’s over. I don’t go back to it. We have music in common and probably also that we never intended to be scholars. I saw my college studies more as vocational school, and my vocation was to write poetry.

 

Kunzinger:

My vocation is still to be determined. Our “occupational hazard” being that our occupation’s just not around.

 

Campbell:

Did you ever hear of the JBACC—the Jimmy Buffet Air Conditioning Club? It’s cooler than a fan club.

 

Kunzinger:

Oh, shit.

 

Campbell:

Back to writing. I very much give a shit about being read. I like to publish, and I like to have readers. Maybe I don’t care as much anymore about being famous and making it. Does that make us defensive of our work? As in we might still think we have not received the recognition the work deserves? If any?

 

Kunzinger:

I used to wonder or worry where I fell in the scheme of writers. I’ve published a lot, but I usually feel that is the result of their being not a whole lot of nonfiction writers out there compared to poets and fiction writers. Also, it might be subject-related. I might be the only one writing about Siberia in short form. I don’t know. In the few workshops I have taken, my work was always slammed. I know there are some “subjects” which are going to work and some which I write just for me. But the pieces which get the most attention are the ones that have universal themes buried in some digression. That light went on about twenty years ago when I was at lunch with Tim Seibles and he happened to read something I wrote which I had with me, which is unusual since, like you and me, he and I generally never talk about writing, and he tossed it back to me and said, almost off the cuff, “Don’t show me your pain, Bob. Show me mine.” It was like he flipped on a switch. My writing completely changed then or, I should say, found some new level, and I started not worrying about where I fit in the writing world; I just wrote.

 

But I can’t avoid the comparison thing. Sedaris still pisses me off. We both did an identical themed piece, his about standing in line at Starbucks and his impatience, and mine—written a few years before his, I might add—about standing in line at a grocery store with no ability to make small talk (“Small Talk”). His stays in the impatient mode whereas mine digresses into memory and something else. How can I not look at the success of his and wonder what I can do differently so the work gets more attention? I simply prefer that first thing we talked about—a piece not be the point of the piece—if that makes sense.

 

For instance, I love your idea that it doesn’t matter how many “subjects” are in a piece so long as the leaps from one to the other work and the reader lands with us. For me, though, I’ll hit a dead end about, say, geese, but then a few weeks later—or a few months—I’ll be working on the fifteenth piece since the geese one and stumble upon a concept—say people who follow others without understanding where they are going, or the players on a baseball team who spend the better part of their careers on the bench, making a living but ultimately not doing what they planned to do when they were in Little League, and I’ll remember the geese and somehow marry the two.

 

Campbell:

Richard Hugo wrote about the triggering subject and the true subject; that we need to give up the triggering subject when the true subject shows up. Funny, I think he used geese in his example, too. But as for my insecurities, yes, I still have them. Now that I am older, I tend to worry about the lack of offers I get to headline conferences or compare myself to those who seem to have plum positions in MFA programs.  I’m a working-class late bloomer who “chose” to spend his academic/writing life at a small college in a small town. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself, and then I hope I realize that I am doing that and try to get over it. That’s where music, baseball, and fishing come in handy. A poet friend once wrote that I was the best poet few readers had ever heard of. I guess that’s a compliment. All whiny shit aside, I think a lot of my poems and a few of my essays are as good as any other writer’s. I don’t want to be better than other writers, I just want to be good. At this point I should just say “so it goes.”

 

Kunzinger:

Vincent van Gogh is my inspiration for not worrying about what others think, which can be frustrating when I attend readings where people are paid thousands of dollars, and their work, in my not-humble-enough opinion, is not as good as ours, and our publishing record is so much deeper, and I wonder how the hell do I get gigs like that? Van Gogh painted for himself, completely and unapologetically for himself, to the point where other painters and critics called him a bum and a waste of space in the art world, but he persisted, confident he knew what he wanted to do.

 

But I still wonder if I’m too simplistic, the writing equivalent of knowing the three chords from which you can play any pop song. It is popular, but it has no staying power. And I fear I finish too soon, in the piece I mean, not time-wise.

 

Campbell:

Finished is a weird thing.  I say a poem’s finished when I feel it’s as good as I can make it. Then I might let it sit a little while longer before I think it’s ready to send out. But the essays baffle me; they are harder to finish, maybe just because the more words, the more possibilities. My real problem is that I forget that I have essays to send to journals. Even if I spend the good part of a day sending out poems, I will forget to send out the essays. Is this some Freudian lack of confidence? Did Freud ever talk about this?  My knowledge of Freud is just some shallow pop-culture reading.

 

I was never diligent about sending work out. I also know that I have never worked hard enough, never hustled enough, to garner fame. I don’t work as hard as you do. I respect how much you write.

 

Kunzinger:

Yeah, I am better than you. [Laughs.]

 

Campbell:

This is my virtual porch.

 

Kunzinger:

Seriously, I still hesitate a long time before actually sending something out. I’m always fighting the triteness. I have to go back and “get the trite out,” as I like to think of it. That reminds me of the idea that Rupert Fike told me once that an ending must both be a complete surprise and totally obvious at the same time. I’m okay with ending. No, for me, it’s when I start that I struggle to find something familiar but not at all trite. I can conceive an essay okay. It’s not unusual for me to stumble across one moment in my day, maybe in conversation with someone, or something I overheard in a hallway somewhere. “Flip Flops” started like that. The piece all hangs on one line the doctor said to me at a check-up: “It’s a good thing you whacked your ankle.” I had no idea where I was going in a completely separate piece about 911 until that line, and I joined a stale work with a new direction. Sometimes, though, the direction is so obvious.

 

Campbell:

When we are nonfiction writers, we promise to tell the truth as well as we can, given the limitations of memory and vagaries of time, given the influx of new information. I am thinking about when you found out that you had Italian ancestry and then saw your “new” family name on a building in Tampa. Actually, I think I saw it first. Discoveries like that change what we know and maybe what we have written. But poetry is neither true nor false, not fiction or nonfiction. I mean it is or can be one or the other, but there’s no rule, no category. There’s no nonfiction shelf for poetry.  And yet readers, despite often having a high level of poetic sophistication, assume that a poem is “true.” They want poetry to be autobiographical. Most of my poems are, and I assume that lures readers into thinking that all of my poems are true. I guess that’s the readers’ problem not mine.

 

Kunzinger:

If I’m reading or writing journalism, I expect absolute adherence to some form of objective truth; that is, verifiable information. But as a nonfiction writer—which is such a huge term covering everything from personal memoir to documentaries, and as a term literally means, simply, “What I’m writing is not fiction”—I find a massive gap can exist between “truth” and “accuracy.” In my Siberian essays, I can guarantee—that is prove—the “truth” of the pieces in that I was on the train with my son heading east toward the other side of the country. The people I met are all real, the stories of almost missing the train, as well as the floods on the Amur River, are all real, but I can’t guarantee accuracy. I don’t remember the conversations word for word or if they were in the day or at night or sometimes exactly which station we were at when we bought dried fish, but the essential narrative, a father and son traveling across Siberia together, sharing these experiences, is true, because that is the point of the piece; I’m not writing a guidebook.

 

I was reading some of your unpublished essays and I was not concerned with how accurate you were as to which highway you were on—I’m never going there—or when it was, and even the details of what happened; my focus was on the truth of the “spirit” of the places, and the nonfiction elements of remembering. Poet JT Williams described my work as, “This is a bunch of shit that happened to you and how you best remember it all these years later.” I think that’s an accurate definition of the truth. Tim O’Brien still has the definitive explanation for “truth” in insisting something that “seemed” to happen is often “more true” than what really happened, even though the accuracy might be questionable.

 

Campbell:

What I find interesting is trying to tell the truth, to be honest, in nonfiction.  I write a lot about how what I remember might not be exactly what happened. I try to be honest, try not to lie, but it’s clear to me that capital-T Truth is often not attainable.

 

You are more of a nonfiction writer than I, and you were trained in journalism, so how do you feel when accuracy and truth prove to be elusive?

 

Kunzinger:

I do my homework; I try and unearth the validity of what I’m writing, but if I keep reaching various “truths” because the foundation of what I’m writing is already subjective, I let “accuracy” go and just lean back on personal take.

 

My Siberian work takes place in Siberia, but it is about fathers and sons, about sacrifice and journey. It was the ultimate metaphor—my son and I on the same train going the same distance across an unknown wilderness, and his perspective is different than mine, which I tell through letters to my father. That isn’t a travel essay, I don’t think, nor is my work on the Camino or in St. Petersburg. If someone asks me what I write about, I don’t think of myself as a travel writer—the new book from Madville, A Third Place, is about nature, but it isn’t a guide. Ian Frazier and Colin Thubron both wrote extensively about Siberia and, honestly, their books aren’t guides either. That is why I left journalism. A journalist would write a guide; an essayist such as myself writes about the spirit of place, and a poet, well, they just ride the train into the distance and someone else writes about their death. That’s Russia.

 

Campbell:

I agree completely with your take on your writing: your memoirs are framed by travel. Travel is, metaphorically and spatially, your vehicle.

 

When my essays overlap with my poems, it’s almost always that the poem came first. Sometimes years before the essay. Those poems are often more narrative than lyrical (though I don’t really believe in or understand a hard distinction). The poems are condensed, and the essays are expanded, but the subject is the same. Sometimes it’s a travel topic but more likely it’s about family. Family is such a twisted and complicated subject that the poem, even a series of poems, just sometimes does not allow me to say what I want to say. There’s an essay that was in The History of Steel (and first in Kestrel) about my father’s death that is clearly an expansion, or a gloss, of a shorter poem from some years before.

 

I like to make a distinction between true and honest. I want my work to be honest—either as true as I can make it, or an honest attempt at accuracy. And, yes, the spirit of the work is the most important element. Still, I do like to get the highway numbers right. I have an essay, “On Not Going to Vietnam,” in which I claim this guy I met got #2 in the Vietnam War draft, went to war, and might have died. I accidentally found out twenty years or so later that he did not do any of that. I was being honest, though, it turns out, very, very inaccurate. The last part of my essay explores how I might have come to believe these inaccuracies, but I can’t even explain that.

 

Kunzinger:

When we discuss memoir vs. travel essays, we both seem to lean toward the memoir side, and the sense of place is important, but only in as much as it serves as a foundation for something else we respond to.  A Third Place is a compilation of short essays, mostly in nature, but not about nature; most of the writings—particularly the digressions—were not conceived together. I heard an interview with Billy Joel, and when asked about “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” he said the three different parts to that were written at three different times and none with any thought to being connected to the others. It was only later that he found a common thread and tied them together. I write like that. So if I “finish” a piece about missing a train in Russia, I already know in the back of my mind I’m going to write something else later, or maybe already have written it, that at some point I’ll realize would make a good fit for it, and then go back and tie them together or, sometimes, lace them. Often, I find the “truth” of the piece later, after the bulk of the “narrative” is complete. When you found the truth about the dude who didn’t go to Vietnam, it sounds like you thought you needed to explain yourself to the reader, like some Waltons epilogue—“Mary Ellen eventually moved to Richmond and is living as a prostitute.” I think what really happened to the guy not going to Vietnam is irrelevant—in that essay anyway. Maybe another one later will be solely about that. Tim O’Brien does that. I love reading his essays which later became parts of books—like those in “The Things they Carried.” If you read them carefully you see some significant differences between the original essay and the form it took when complied with other essays which he wanted to somehow connect. I see that in your work too.

 

Campbell:

Did I ever tell you my O’Brien story?  It’s the late 1980s, and my friend and I drove up to Augusta, Georgia, to hear Tim read. We didn’t leave till after noon, so we had to bust through rural Georgia. We got there just as he was being introduced and made a commotion by trying to come in quietly. My friend Judith Ortiz Cofer was hosting the reading, and after Tim was done she took us up to meet him. I was worried about how road ragged I looked, but Tim, as always, looked just as ragged. As we were talking, a man came out of a room behind us, and Tim says, “This is my friend Kiowa.” I just stand there looking dopey and then say, “Man I thought you were dead.” Kiowa shakes his head and says, “It was fiction.”

 

O’Brien intentionally blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, and he certainly twisted me up. We have yet to mention the New Journalism.  As in Norman Mailer quoting the inner thoughts of Gary Gilmore that he could not have possibly known. Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe changed what we can say in nonfiction forever.

 

I used to tell people that I didn’t write fiction because the only character I am interested in is me. Then I blew it and published a short story about a kid nailing his father to a cross. I didn’t like my father, but, God, I never crucified him.

 

Kunzinger:

I have no fiction DNA; it’s that simple. Tim first wrote If I Die in a Combat Zone, which is the nonfiction predecessor to the stories in The Things They Carried, which he wrote about twenty years later. I can’t even pull that off. I was in a fiction seminar once with Sheri Reynolds, and we had to write a fiction story—I wrote about a twenty-four-year-old who worked in an exercise club and the people he met, which is completely me. It sucked. When we went over my piece, the other people in the seminar crucified me!I left and drank something like four margaritas that night.

 

Like now. See, this is why I hate talking about writing. I just remembered just how bad I can be at it. Dammit. Let’s get some oysters. Damn. Let’s get some beer.

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Summer III

Across the forest, we sit

in a deer stand shaped like a heart.

A cry comes from the center of the woods

like wind blowing through a doll’s head.

There are birds that come out at night

just to be devoured by other birds.

I can’t make things happen faster

than they’re going to happen.

I know that now.

If your thick arms come out

of the shadows only to light smokes

or hold my hand expertly in yours,

I need to accept it.

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when I stopped fearing ghosts

I learned about ghost hunting from my mom. When I was in elementary school, she drove me down to Louisiana every summer, and we’d stomp around the boggy summer heat in old cemeteries, reviewing etched tombstones, trying to find the names and death details for her ancestors.

 

We slogged through swamps, heavily forested areas where the heat bugs hissed so loud, I could barely hear when she called to me. We went all over the state—Mansfield, Baton Rouge, Grand Chenier. We stayed with friends in between, drinking sweet tea and eating collard greens, cornbread slathered with slices of cold butter. I was never quite sure what my mom was looking for, or why we needed to find it out there in the heat.

 

My mom was bad at picking up on things. That’s why she didn’t notice at first when a spirit latched onto her one summer in Louisiana. It just slipped out of the gravestone and sunk its claws into her, like a bad smell. The thing held tight to her all the way back to rural Vermont where we lived. I didn’t notice it at first. But then, a month or two later, it made itself known when she and I were alone at her office building one night.

 

The office building where my mom worked was four stories—a first floor, second, an attic, and a basement. I hated the second floor. It was dark and full of offices, crowded and narrow. Whenever I stayed late with my mom, I lingered on the first floor in an open office space, next to a large row of windows.

 

Sometimes she worked upstairs, and that night, she was working out of her boss’s office when I went upstairs to ask her for food money. It was dark, and the lights were off in the hallway. “Mom, can I get food money?”

 

“For what?”

 

“I want to go across the street.”

 

She hesitated, then rustled around, appearing in the doorway at the other end of the hall. There were at least five doors between us—five different offices along the hall. Some were open, some partially, one closed. I stood at one end of them. My mom was at the other. We looked at each other for a moment, and then I got the sense that something was wrong. I remember my skin prickling, like getting goosebumps in the cold, and then one of the open doors slammed shut.

 

My chest tightened. I felt the fear in my chest before my brain could register what happened. A second later, I went running for my mom.

+++

Twenty years later, I move from Vermont down to St. Pete, Florida, seeking the heat of my childhood. I get a tiny studio apartment and a new job working in development at a legal aid firm.

 

My ex-boss from Vermont texts me once a week. I keep the selfies she sends me saved in my phone and look at them when I miss her. I’m still in love with her, even though she’s married now, and I’ve moved two thousand miles away. In her texts, she tells me I’m pretty. She asks about the grants I’m writing at my new job, the beach, my friends. You’re pretty AND smart, she says, when I send her a selfie at my office. Her paragraphs always include winky faces. She doesn’t say much about herself.

 

After settling into my new office at my new job in St. Pete, I decide to decorate my desk. It’s black and chic and empty, so I print out pictures of me with my four best friends and tape them up on one of the monitors. There’s an empty space at the bottom. I leave it for a day, then print one of the selfies Lauren sent me and tape it up.

 

Back when I worked with her, Lauren and I spent eight to ten hours a day together. We went on field trips—to Stowe, to the islands, to happy hours. She told me once, on a longer trip, that things weren’t so easy for her as a child.

 

“But you’re so good with your dad,” I said. “You guys are like best friends.”

 

“It wasn’t always like that.”

 

“What was it like, then?”

 

Her mouth tightened. She was always doing weird things with her mouth – pursing her lips, parting her lips when she concentrated, these uncomfortable, awkward things that I loved watching. Sometimes, I felt her face moved on its own, like something else was guiding her that she couldn’t see or understand. “One time my brother and I were fighting, and Dad came up and,” she gestured with her hands, “wham. Knocked our heads together.”

 

“What was it like with your brother?”

 

“We hated each other,” she said. I asked why. She told me he could never forgive her for something. I waited for her to tell me what. She never did.

 

After two or three days of having her picture up at the office, I take it off the computer monitor and tuck it away inside my desk. I don’t look at it often, but sometimes, when I get out tea to brew, her face will come into view—the blonde hair, the freckles. Every time I see it, I think about those months I spent listening to her plan her wedding, talking about bridesmaids and dinner menus. I think about all the times I cried in the bathroom. How her face tightened when I told her I liked her. How inferior I felt standing next to her fiancé. How she looked at him like I wasn’t even there at all.

 

Yet every time I get close to throwing her picture away, she’ll text again.

 

I miss you, pretty, she’ll say and send a new selfie. I hope you’re enjoying your new life.

+++

The ghost that followed my mom home wasn’t malevolent, but it liked attention. It tapped on the walls at her work when she stayed late with me, large knocks on the plaster, as if someone were stuck in there from the other side. It ran up and down corridors and through the hallways. It smelled like cigarette smoke. The scent would balloon out, linger, then move. I’d sit there alone at night and all of a sudden the scent would creep up, eerie as a cold night wind, slipping its arms around me.

 

The next year, I started staying home alone at night instead of going to work with Mom, and the sounds disappeared. The spirit went away.

 

“You didn’t hear from her?” I’d ask my mom, day after day.

 

“Nothing,” she said. “Must’ve gone home with somebody else.”

 

I thought about the ghost off and on, wondering where it went, but as I grew, my interests diverged outward, and I thought about it less and less. Other things began taking up my time—basketball, grades, friendships.

 

In the seventh grade, I fell in love for the first time. Gina was short with long hair and a crooked smile. She was also my biology teacher. I hung around with her after school every day, and she paid special attention to me. I thought it was because she loved me.

 

It wasn’t until later that I found out she had a sexual relationship with a boy only a year older than me. She was fired immediately and, in the following months, lied to me repeatedly, begging me to help her get her job back, telling me she loved me. She missed me, she said. She asked about school, about sports, like nothing bad had ever happened.

 

After months and months, I stopped emailing her back. It hurt to be in contact with her. I felt creepy and weird, and thought there was something wrong with me for loving someone who’d done something so bad.

 

Still, even after cutting off contact, I thought about her. My thoughts eventually became less about missing her, and more about trying to understand what she had done. Why had she done it? Why did she lie to me? Why did she pretend she cared?

 

That’s the part that haunted me. I thought she loved me like I loved her. But she never really did.

+++

After I finally stop talking to Lauren, I go on my first date in over a year. I walk downtown in a button-up shirt and skinny jeans, sweat pinching under my arms as a cool breeze snakes in through my shirt sleeves. I’m early, so I grab a beer across the street at a local gay bar and watch the crowd around the coffee shop across the street where I’m supposed to meet my date.

 

We’ve been talking for a few weeks now, and I really like her. She’s in her early forties, and a therapist. She communicates well and gives me space when I need it. I like her boundaries and her maturity. I like how she looks and what she does for a job and how giving she can be.

 

I spot her walking in and finish up my beer, then head over. She recognizes me immediately and opens her arms for a hug. We sit at a porcelain bar, and she orders a fancy coffee while I get a beer. We make small talk at first, then ease into a conversation. I try to keep my mind on the present and not the worries burbling in my stomach. Everything seems to go well. After two hours, she heads off to a dinner with her friends. I visit a friend, too, at a bar down the street, and we talk until it’s pitch black outside and the wind gets too cold for sitting outside anymore.

 

It’s on the walk back that I start to panic.

 

This woman is beautiful, successful, and healthy. What could she possibly want from me? I worry about what I said during our date, how I acted. I worry I’m going to end up liking her too much and then she is never going to like me back the same way.

 

After crawling into bed, I start to cry. The wind is strong and cold in a way I never expected Florida to be. I stay huddled in the blankets, my face pressed to the pillow.

 

I didn’t stop dating just because Lauren broke my heart. I stopped dating because it’s just too hard. I can’t like someone without immediately wondering how they will hurt me, like Lauren hurt me, and Gina. It’s been fifteen years now since she was fired, but she still pops up sometimes, slipping out somewhere from the shadows, this little voice telling me that she is going to leave. She is going to hurt you, like all the women you love. I don’t know how to shut it off or make it go away.

+++

After leaving Vermont, I spent five weeks on an “art farm” in rural Nebraska to work on my writing. There, I learned how to install drywall, build survival fires, and cohabitate with field mice. The house I lived in was more than a hundred years old and had been transplanted to Nebraska without its foundation, then built back up into something that could stand alone.

 

The bones of the house had potential. They were wood, weathered and old, but with moments of stark beauty. The house was slightly crooked, too, and with the additions that had been made on the western wall, it looked like it had a face—two eyes, a nose, and a zippered mouth.

 

When I first arrived, I was terribly uncomfortable in the house. There were too many people there, too much going on. But after it started getting cold, and everybody left, I transferred bedrooms and began liking the space much better.

 

I started noticing the phantom noises during the afternoons. I’d sit downstairs in the kitchen drinking tea and writing, and I’d hear footsteps above me. My roommates had work studios elsewhere, and I was alone. I’d call out. Listen to the silence. Then it would start up again. It went away when my roommates were there, but on several occasions when I was nestled in bed, I got the distinct feeling there was something else in the room with me, standing at the edge of my bed.

 

One night, I had a dream that I was a little boy away at a boarding school in Greece. I saw everything from his perspective—the cliffs above the sea, white foam crashing, the old school uniforms, the sunlight. I’d never had a dream from someone else’s perspective before. I told my roommates about it the next morning.

 

“Could’ve been a past life dream,” one of them said.

 

We all sat downstairs, sipping tea and coffee as the sun burned in through the windows. The smell of buttered toast hung in the air. “Or it could’ve been a memory from someone who died in here,” the other said.

 

I went about the remainder of my time in Nebraska believing there was a lonely child ghost in that house, just looking for a friend. I played music in the afternoons to cover up his stomping. Before I went to bed, I said goodnight to him. I told him to rest while we were all asleep.

 

Nebraska was where I stopped fearing ghosts. Nebraska was also where I unfriended Lauren on Facebook because I couldn’t stand to see any more of her wedding pictures. It was where I cried in my sleep, and dreamed about her, and tortured myself wondering what I had done wrong, what I could’ve done better to make her love me.

 

Most days, I woke up scared she would text me something about her new life with her new husband and I’d have to pretend, like I’d already done for a year, that everything was fine, and it didn’t tear me to shreds. Most nights, I went to bed afraid I would keep Lauren inside of me forever.

+++

A week after my date in St. Pete, I dream I’m living in a haunted house. It’s a large mansion with thinly made plywood on the outside, but with grandiose, Victorian-style decor on the inside. I go from room to room in the house with a feeling of dread at the back of my neck. I know something’s behind me, but I don’t want to turn around to look. The entire mansion is riddled with shadows, and I keep throwing open the curtains only to have them fall shut again when I move away.

 

Finally, I realize I have to go. I can’t stand it anymore. I pack up my car with all my things. I place some stuff on top of the car, twining rope around the door handles to keep everything in place. I hurry. I can feel the thing behind me, to the side of me, all around me.

 

After getting in the car and starting to drive away, my tension begins to ease. I look around at the trees. The pines hang low, their needles brushing the windshield as I drive.

 

Suddenly, the car engine sputters. I know then that the ghost is still with me, even though I’ve driven away. It’s hanging onto the car, trying to keep me from getting away. I fight with the stick shift, but the car slows. I’m driving downhill and hope the momentum will keep me going, but then I lose control of the steering. The car fishtails. I take a turn into some bushes and then for a second, it’s all green and moss and branches scraping at glass. At the end of the underbrush, my view clears. I’m at the edge of a cliff. Rocks kick up under the car. Panic grips my chest, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.

 

I open my mouth to cry out and then I’m airborne, soaring over a hundred-foot fall, a rush of rapids waiting to devour me below.

+++

I wake up in the morning with that familiar feeling—that something else is in the room with me. It’s never happened in the St. Pete studio before, and the sensation is slightly different than it was in Nebraska. This morning, it’s more like this thing was with me and, as I woke, it slipped away.

 

I rise and make the bed. Shower. I bustle around in the tiny space, heating tea and stir-frying potatoes and eggs with onion and pepper. It’s cool out, and the sun peeks in through the blinds, falling in strips across the kitchen tile. I don’t have the sense of anything lingering anymore. It all faded as the sleep washed away from me.

 

My childhood was all about finding ghosts, about hunting them, and understanding them. I never learned how to get rid of them, though. It seemed like they were always just there, until they decided to go away, or I left wherever they were haunting. I want it to be like that with Lauren and Gina. I want to just wake up one day and they’ll both be gone from me.

 

That morning, I think a lot about my time in Nebraska. I think about how calm I was in that house, even knowing something else was there with me. I remember the cold mornings and the afternoons when the sun shined in, warming my cold feet. I remember turning the light off at night and looking at the outline of the room, my vision blurred without my glasses, dipping over rounded spots and shadows. “Good night,” I’d say to the room. “Rest now, so we can all get some sleep.”

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The Funhouse Mirror of Humanity

The Internet Is for Real

Chris Campanioni

C&R Press, 2019

534 pages, Paper, $25.90

 

Cover of The Internet Is for Real by Chris Campanioni

 

Imagine the internet told your life story and fucked it up. That is the unspoken thesis behind Chris Campanioni’s The Internet Is for Real. Although it becomes clear early on that, while Chris will spend time discussing his family history and other autobiographical details, the life story he is really telling is that of the modern world, as filtered via internet culture. His work views the internet as humanity’s id: sometimes charming, sometimes profound, but mostly idiotic, vain, and vapid. While large portions of the book are dedicated to celebrity worship and the distracted nature of internet communication, he also turns his attention to the way our political past and present has been affected by this new technology. A winding discussion with his father about his relationship to his native Cuba after fifty years melds into a meditation on dreams versus reality versus nostalgia, the distance between his father’s recollection of his youth becoming a cipher for Campanioni’s own distance from his father’s homeland.

 

My father dreams in Spanish. I am writing this down in English.

Where are the gaps and slips, I wonder, as I hold the tape recorder with

my left hand, and with my right, scrawl the notes that will eventually

re-constitute this story.

 

Where are the gaps and how can I make them wider, instead of trying to

fill them; how can I make them wider so I can breathe within them, in

and out, out and in, and make song from all those unknowable breaths?

 

He recognizes that the memories and dreams he uses to feel a connection to his ethnic heritage are for a place that no longer exists, that may have never existed, but one which he cannot escape. This could very well describe social media, where we hold on to, document, and obsess over memories and the image of ourselves those memories conjure. The way people communicate with us on social media is through a manipulated, nostalgic view of ourselves that polishes the rough edges of our personalities. In turn, complete strangers come to relate to us in the same way the child of an immigrant relates to the memories of their parents’ homeland—we know it is a myth, but we can’t bring ourselves to ask the tougher questions that arise from that myth.

 

Another instance where Campanioni uses the internet to make larger statements about world affairs is his chapter on ISIS as an online creation. The piece is a tour de force that demonstrates the way that terrorist groups can promote themselves using the same sort of branding and merchandising as a clothing line or television show. A new video of a beheading, for instance, is treated the way the new trailer for a Marvel movie might be. The violence is a show, and, for people seeking meaning, a global conflict is incredibly appealing, as is the hierarchical society offered by ISIS. This impulse for meaning and fighting for a cause is as old as humanity itself, but because of the internet a cause can reach an unprecedented scale by utilizing the tools of consumerism.

 

YOU

Senior media operatives are treated as if they’re emirs.

 

ME

Emirs?

 

YOU

(sharply)

More important than soldiers. Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers, and editors … they form a privileged, professional class with salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of every soldier.

 

ME

Isn’t ISIS concerned about the fall-out? A drop in the soldiers actually willing to fight its war?

 

YOU

(shakes head)

The overriding goal of the Islamic State is not only to inflict terror on an adversary.

(beat)

Now it wants to command a global audience.

 

The ISIS section may seem like Campanioni’s most damning statement about the world, but it is really just the most explicit and sensational example of a theme that runs throughout the book—the internet is, above all else, a tool that compounds loneliness and despair by promising to eradicate those very things. The desire to connect with a celebrity, with one’s father, with a cause, all arise from a sense of missing something in one’s life (again, this is not new behavior, but the reach and scope is). Making friends with stranger’s online image instead of in person is a symptom of a greater disease—humanity is retreating into its id, disconnecting from interaction and empathy with others, creating entire lives in a fictional platform—and we are miserable. That misery manifests in a number of ways, from extremism across the political spectrum, to blocking people and ideas we don’t agree with, to outrage culture, to an increasing lack of complexity in the way we approach problems, ideas, and policies. The internet is the most powerful technology in history, and it is winning by holding up an ever-uglier mirror at humanity.

 

If the internet is the antagonist of Campanioni’s book, it is still a charming one. One with endless diversions, humor, and charm. It is the abusive boyfriend made digital, and our world has yet to find a way to either take the relationship to therapy or cut all ties. Campanioni’s book is wise enough to not try to answer those questions, and is instead interested in asking questions that grow increasingly profound. The book offers a visceral thrill that feels more like a great song or movie than a written text. It is a bold statement in the age of Tweets to release an almost 600-page novel that is in large part about Twitter and the culture it has cultivated, and Campanioni uses every page to excite the mind, cleanse the palate, and ignite your imagination. The next time you find yourself wanting a break from the internet, I highly recommend you pick up The Internet Is for Real. You get the same addictive experience, minus the dirty aftertaste, and you’ll feel better about yourself in the morning.

 

Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the formatting of the second quoted passage due to readability of the web page on the internet. A little irony there.

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Analysis

At the diner, I sit with Freud

open on the table before me.

 

It’s rude to say clueless, but

clueless, the waiter won’t let

 

me sit with my book and coffee

half-filled. He brims it. Chimes,

 

A velociraptor stubbed its foot.

Pauses. Now it’s dino-sore.

 

I’m bored of Freud, it’s true,

but not bored enough to flirt

 

with you, I think, but don’t say.

Ha. Can I have my check?

 

which he brings with his number,

You’ll want to keep that receipt.

 

Freud on the sooty bus, I can

say that I have made many

 

beginnings and thrown out

many suggestions. The receipt

 

stuck between two pages,

bookmarking desire and lack.

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Father Tongue

Our embargo lifted its hands

off my eyes yanked my chin towards
the colorful architecture of your face

and left me alone with you, strange courier

of my DNA you, an almost-familiar place.
Hello, Cuba, hello father, may I call you that?

 

If a homeland offers no house or apartment,

if there is no familiar front door acting as a veil
between day in and day out,

if there is not enough monotony
from kissing the same faces goodbye,

 if every family has its scent
and I can smell ours

 

then I am still an outsider your hija Americana

sitting finally at your table

cradling a cup of coffee like an egg in my palm.
Do not speak directly towards me
Do not be silent let me bask in your accent—

 

my first words were pale, vast land and highway,
mouth dry with Tennessee cornbread, Mom’s
bleached wooden spoon stirred in shug-uhr

 but at school I liked the feel of Spanish

 in my mouth, en mi boca like ripe black-skinned sweet plantain,
 butter-soft and fried, r’s rolling in a hot pan of my saliva.

 

 Before you called me daughter, I had proof

 tuyo es mío I am not yours            but what’s yours is mine

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This is what it looks like, son,

so stop stabbing the heron’s belly,
as if repeated stabs will wake it from the flies.

 

I mean what I say,
when I talk of permanence like permafrost

 

or ancient arteries of the earth’s underbelly,
spilling from volcanic pores. A woman, did you hear?

 

Crated homing pigeons
and biked them to a Tokyo market,

 

when her tire hit a rut in the road
and the cage fell loose. Nine birds died on impact,

 

while her most treasured, still alive
but blinded by headlights,

 

hit a fender and blew open—
feathers falling like snow. For months,

 

the poor woman wore grief like a wet wool coat
and wept through the deadwind of winter. She’d set the table
each evening for two. Wait for the backdoor to swing

 

and shut
and the sulfuric smell of sorrow to come in the kitchen to eat.

 

Tristessa, she’d whisper,
and the ghostly girl locked behind thick black bangs
would look to her left and say nothing.

 

—

 

When I was a boy
I had a habit of carelessly sloughing bark
from a Eucalyptus. I loved its salve and

 

layered it like glue
over every burn left by my father’s lighter.

 

And though that tree numbed each wound,
resulting in an able-bodied boy, one who’d go on
to live like most other boys,

 

I carried with me two things:
scars without witness and the tree’s sick tinder.

 

Many moons chafed into years of dissolution
and worms hollowed its core. Violent winds blew.
The old tree tilted, fell loose from soil, then split in half.

 

For months, it ghosted an aroma so thick
the fallow fields became places to pray, rub wounds
and feel cleansed. I felt cleansed. Opened my mouth

 

and ran nude in the rain. Its fading ointment
coating my throat and my tongue.

 

—

 

Which leads me here with you, son.

 

This heron, no different
than the three dozen floating out over the estuary,
was once a winged creature maneuvering winds

 

with precision. It was effortless. Swooping
soft beach for sand dabs then arrowing back toward light.

 

It’s sick, I know, how Man manipulates beauty.
But listen, son, listen: I’m asking you
to set the weapon down and look toward ocean.

 

That storm coming close
is big enough to rip this beach from coastline and swallow it.

 

High tide will swell and splash over the barriers
built to guard the street. Perch will fill medians like manna.

 

The poor will come collect their rations.

Wave hands toward thunder and praise it.

 

I’m asking whether you’d like to keep gazing at records of lost time,
or undress and wade these choppy waters,
our bodies weightless as breath.

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Empty Suitcases

Inside Oma’s farmhouse it was as if panicked thieves had found everyday objects instead of treasure: closets, cupboards, the antique sideboard emptied into piles and strewn across the floors. “Kinkerlitzchen just gets broken, or stolen to fill up suitcases,” my grandmother always said about knick-knacks. But when questioned about the suitcases, Oma had refused to elaborate. “Enkelin, be glad that we are here and together,” she’d say to me, using her native tongue for granddaughter.

 

“Oma, what’s going on?” I asked.

 

She shook her head and urged me to the attic ladder, which she had managed to pull down, probably by standing on the stepladder she had used to clear off the top pantry shelves.

 

“You will look for my mutter’s trunk?” Oma said.

 

I’d never been in Oma’s attic. The dark entrance conjured up images of spiders, bats, and rotten floorboards with rusty nails. “What do you need so badly? Did you ask my dad if he could get it?”

 

“Your father is a good boy, but tender. You are different, like me but much smarter. We can take in these things and they do not destroy us.”

 

“Destroy us?”

 

“Please, Mäuschen, Oma will not always be here, and it sits like a big stone on my chest.” She crossed her hands over her heart.

 

I took a deep breath, climbed the ladder, flipped the light switch. In the attic: boxes, insulation, cobwebs, and a black steamer trunk. A plank served as a bridge to the trunk. When I lifted a yellowed wedding dress out of the trunk, tiny moths erupted in a flutter. A tin box contained old photographs, letters, and documents, written in German. I recognized Oma’s face in the sepia photo of a curly-blonde girl with her parents and a small boy. Did Oma have a brother?

 

I carried the box to the entrance and yelled down to see if this was it. Oma was sitting on the stepladder, talking to herself. “Oma!”

 

“Christina! You frightened me!”

 

“I found the box. With photos and papers. I’m coming down.”

 

“No, not the box. I mean, you keep the box. What else?”

 

“An old wedding dress.”

 

“We must find it. Go look harder,” she said.

 

“It would help if you told me what to look for.”

 

“Ja. That’s right.” Oma scrunched her face in scorn, spit out the words. “A fancy porcelain mantel clock.”

 

—

 

Oma hustled the clock into the kitchen like she held a blanket infected with smallpox.

 

I washed off my face in the sink, while my grandmother stared at the clock. I picked it up, checked for a maker’s mark. “A Limoges. It’s exquisite.”

 

Oma started crying, her shoulders rolling like turbulent ocean waves. “You know how my parents, a simple tailor and his wife, came by this clock?”

 

“No?”

 

“Sit, I will tell you.”

 

“The foolish Nazis thought things could be made right for the German people by compensating them for the losses they incurred during the war. One day, my papa and mutter went to an immense warehouse filled with furniture, dishes, candlesticks, rugs, Kinkerlitzchen. Papa wanted nothing— it would not bring little Frederick back—but Mutter wanted compensation. They’d lost everything—reduced to rubble. Why should they not take what the Jews left behind, Mutter said. The soldiers glared at Papa. He said, ‘Go then, Hedy, take what will make this better for you.’ The clock appeared on our mantel, without discussion, as if by elves. But, your Oma knew it was tainted. When my mutter passed, I packed it away.” Oma placed her hands upon mine. “The Jews did not willingly leave those things behind, Christina.”

 

“I know.” Oma had always claimed that her family left Germany before the war. Now I was afraid to hear that we were Nazis. Something else troubled me. “Did you go to the warehouse?”

 

She shook her head without conviction and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

 

“But if your parents never talked about it, how do you know all those details?”

 

“Is this an interrogation?” Oma abruptly rose. “What is it you want from me?”

 

She rushed to the sink then slammed dirty dishes around, muttering in German. Finally, she inhaled, and her shoulders fell.

 

“You were there,” I said.

 

She nodded but stared out the window. “Mutter stayed in bed, always crying. We could not refuse them.”

 

“The Nazis?”

 

“The soldiers were laughing, carrying on, undressing me with their eyes. Papa stood there, useless. He had slinked through the war while our neighbors disappeared. ‘Go on,’ he said to me. Past the bedroom sets, the pots and pans, the necklaces, the toys. I thought of little Frederick playing with his train and I became so … angry.” She faced me. “Then I saw it.”

 

“The clock?”

 

“Ja. So beautiful. Pink roses. Gold trim. A couple on a picnic, in love. I took a suitcase, from a pile that reached the ceiling, and put the clock inside.” Oma sighed. “I am a bad person.”

 

Yes. No, I thought. We weren’t who I’d thought we were.

 

She shuffled over, stroked my hair. “This is my big stone.”

 

It felt like my stone now, too. “We should sell it.”

 

“The clock does not belong to us.”

 

The clock was probably worth one year’s tuition.

 

Oma said, “We will return it to the family. This is your job, Mäuschen.”

 

The clock sat there, glinting in the warm light cast by the setting sun outside Oma’s kitchen window. Oma’s breaths were labored in a way I had not noticed before. A squirrel chattered upon the feeder my grandfather had built beneath an ancient maple tree. I wanted thunder and lightning to tear through the sky, a torrential rainfall to pound upon the steel roof, a tornado to whirl in the near-distance. Instead, a gentle wind simply rustled through the leaves of that tree as if the suitcases had never been emptied.

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Strawberries

Let us pretend there is no mystery in strawberries,
that we know precisely what floods the flesh so enticingly red,
coloring summer with a crimson flush, a violent bloom
amid the cool earth greens.
Let us knowingly say the unabashed hue comes
from ripeness for eating, and there is no more meaning
to the deep red so like our hidden internalities,
which we feign ignorance of while complacently stroking
the shield of our outer flesh.
Let us declare the finger-stains of picking are superficial,
and are washed away when our hands are clean;
that the strawberry juice has not already penetrated below the dermis
so that our own blood runs redder,
intoxicated and giddy with the inbred sugar of fruit;
let us feign that we see no connection
in the perfect way a single strawberry nestles in the human mouth,
to bring memories of feeding lovers and butter light,
romances that never were, and cool saucers in the evening.
And lastly, let us make believe
while the fields are still heavy with the lush season of ripeness
that the bruises on the tender skin do not hurt us, too,
that we don’t notice time playing decay on that succulent red.
Let us insist to ourselves, assuredly, continuously,
that our own hearts are not already burst
as the short-lived strawberry loses its firmness on the earth.

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Griefs Spun to Gold

Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley

Burrow Press, 2019

Hardcover, 123 pages, $20.00

Cover of Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley.

In his essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland asserts that many contemporary poets are leery of the narrative mode because such poems require commitment to development and continuity. Those holding that view, he says, are drawn to the poem that is “skittery,” that “would prefer to remain skeptical,” and that “prefers knowing to feeling.”

 

Susan Lilley’s collection Venus in Retrograde is an elegant example of the reasons narrative poems still deserve a place in our contemporary poetic cosmos. Her poems diligently interrogate the past while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and self-indulgence that are often associated with narrative (“confessional”) poetry. Lilley’s poems also demonstrate that “knowing” and “feeling” are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.

 

In “Champagne Road,” the second poem in the book, is this couplet: “There must be an easier way to quit a house / than to touch everything in it.” Those lines encapsulate both the primary thematic concerns of the book—love, loss (and its corollary, new beginnings)—and the ways in which Lilley’s poems reach out to touch (and to clarify and animate) the “kitchen laughter, / hallway recriminations, [and] shower singing” that are the accompaniment of a life richly lived.

 

The book is arranged along more or less chronological lines, and some of the most endearing poems are those addressing the foibles and joys of puberty and sexual awakening. Lilley’s sure eye for the telling detail is evident in “Experienced: Jacksonville, 1967,” in which the speaker and her cousin attend a rock concert as an adjunct to church camp. In the bus on the way, a boy “stood up and burped the alphabet;” when a “boy way too old” showed an interest in the speaker at the concert, her cousin “grabbed my arm and close-mouth screamed,” and when he asked how old the speaker was, “I said, I don’t know.” And the result of these transgressions? “We had to write extra Ten Commandments / for not staying with the group.” Lilley maintains an affectionate distance from the stories the poems relate, relying on a wry tone to provide the commentary.

 

In a similar, if more reflective vein, is “Song for a Lost Cousin,” which nicely illustrates the ways in which these poems strike lyric notes as a complement to their narrative intent. The middle of the poem finds the girls “powdering our faces / geisha white, love potions / in the blender with nectarines / and stolen Cointreau.” And later,

 

 Even the peacocks I love

 are shadows of my first, a bird

 now dead for decades, once

 opulent and princely on a dirt road,

 

 calling for love against black

 storybook trees and a moon cut

 from tracing paper.

 

The rich imagery makes implicit the importance of the experience and its indelible place in the speaker’s memory.

 

Lilley is a mature enough poet to have lived through the deaths of parents, and several poems focus on the circumstances of those losses. “A Man in a Hurry” chronicles the sudden death of her father, how “On the Sunday we now know was his last” “he fell / into a long moment and stayed there, / stayed no matter how we called him back.”

 

“Palm Court,” one of the strongest poems in the book, begins as an elegy for the speaker’s mother but expands to become a meditation on memory itself. Standing with her own daughter near her mother’s childhood home, the speaker wants “to ransack the air itself / for evidence of afternoon / piano lessons, dark braids / flying behind a rope swing, / hopscotch songs in the street.” But then comes the honest and moving truth:

 

 But our faces are not

 yet dreamed of,

 here at the very place

 her girl laughter might still

 be trapped in the trees.

 

That lovely and unexpected juxtaposition of past, present, and future exemplifies just one way in which these poems often push beyond mere narrative to reach for the transcendent.

 

Anyone who is a Florida native, as is Lilley, or who has lived long in the state, will appreciate the elegiac allusions to mid-century Florida that appear throughout the book, the “burnt cake / perfume that citrus refineries blew,” the beach houses “at the end of two-track driveways / soft with sand and flanked by / crowds of hissing palmettos / and sea grape.” Nostalgia is an inevitable adjunct to such imagery but also there is the stamp of authenticity in it, that the reader is taken by the hand and led by a credible guide through a rich landscape that has vanished or is disappearing.

 

One of the greatest strengths of Susan Lilley’s poems is that they present the reader with a bifurcated subject. As the poems recall the physical and emotional landscapes through which they pass, what is also being discovered and described are the paths the self must navigate toward awareness. It is not enough for Lilley to remember and describe what happened. It is also important to discover the courage and the means to let things go. Venus in Retrograde succeeds at both tasks.

 

Please make sure to see Susan Lilley’s poem “Wedding Season,” included in Venus in Retrograde and previously published here in Aquifer.

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Delivery

All year I avoided the square where Sam got knocked down. But that winter I found myself making pilgrimages to the shrine someone made up. The ghost bike was painted white and chained to a pole.

 

It was the winter I started to start early. I got pretty good at riding drunk. Pavement glittered and winked at me, sick with black ice. I ate sweet exhaust, crushed dinosaur bones. Nothing could touch me on these salt roads. Grit and ice clung to my face. I looked like any street I was rolling on.

 

One day under that carbon atmosphere I finished a delivery—five stars, no tip—and went to Sam’s bike. I was feeling good. Earlier I got IDed at Liquor Planet though it was my third time there today. It made me feel faceless.

 

There used to be a sign and there used to be flowers, but the world had a way of taking things away. These days, people were always leaving trash on Sam’s shrine. Sam would have found it funny—people littering on the shrine memorializing where he was run over by a garbage truck. He loved all the weird little circles of the world. But it made me sick.

 

There was no litter on his ghost bike that day. But there was a young man in the saddle. He looked familiar. Sam, I thought, but of course it wasn’t. The young man wore a vintage army jacket and pretended to peddle while someone filmed.

 

I rolled the red light. A cab stopped short, horn blaring.

 

“Look, I’m Lance Armstrong,” the man in the vintage army jacket said, laughing with his friends.

 

Even I barely saw me coming. I hauled him off Sam’s bike, and we fell into the black crust of gutter snow. An elbow filled my mouth with the hot taste of copper. I was punching anything I could lay hands on. A blow to the helmet, felt it crack. Stars and little birds flying around. It was all happening so fast, and then it was over.

 

Armstrong’s friends peeled me off him. They pushed me away, calling me an asshole, calling me a drunk, calling me a psychopath, calling out “WorldStar.” My head echoed. I couldn’t think of anything to call them back.

 

“We should call the cops,” one said, stammering. He dropped his phone as he took it out of his pocket. “Bet he escaped from the mental hospital.”

 

“Or the zoo,” another guy said. He frantically rubbed white sneakers. Blood was streaking.

 

“That’s not what tonight is about,” Armstrong said. “Goddammit. We’re supposed to be getting trashed, not cleaning up the city. Let’s get out of here.”

 

I shucked off the bloody tube scarf and watched them go, shaking. That’s when it clicked—Armstrong was a regular, one of the college guys that always got Chipotle delivered to the row of old brick houses on Seminary Hill.

 

I stomped around Sam’s bike, feeling deflated. I felt I had to explain myself, explain how the world was. But he knew. Probably better than me. I adjusted how the bike leaned against the pole. Tried to make it seem like a real memorial, not one more abandoned thing in a city full of them. There were several ghost bikes around town, appearing overnight after a messenger was killed. I didn’t notice them until I started riding. Then I started seeing them everywhere.

 

The old-school messengers said there was a ghost bike for everyone.

 

I rolled around, but I couldn’t bring myself to take another delivery. I couldn’t show up at a customer’s door with a mouth full of blood.

 

The cold wind blew through me. Winter was a preservative. I went back to Liquor Planet. I asked if they had free refills. Big laugh, small shake of the head. Five stars, no tip, I was thinking.

 

—

 

Stuck on standby. Algorithmic detention for not accepting enough deliveries the day before. I held a white van and let it move me through the falling light. Cars were honking to each other, saying hello, swapping stories. I was the car whisperer, I knew. The van slowed. I let go, filtering through traffic. I hoped someone would hit me so I could get up swinging. I thought about the time Sam U-locked someone’s mirror after they almost doored him. I laughed and my chest hurt. Like someone U-locked my ribs.

 

I had nowhere else to go so I went to the plaza where messengers drank away standby. When I arrived, messengers were doing track stands, motionless on their bikes.

 

A messenger tilted wildly and a yell rose from the crowd. The messenger recovered, but soon overbalanced. Maria was the last one upright. She sat easy in the saddle.

 

“Did we start yet? I could do this all night,” Maria said, shielding her eyes as she caught sight of me. “And out of the dusk, a challenger.”

 

My hands were trembling, from cold or something else entirely. I shook my head and leaned my bike against a tree bundled against the winter.

 

“Nah, my man’s too old,” a messenger said.

 

“You’ve never ridden a penny-farthing,” Maria said.

 

I sat on a cold bench. The plaza overlooked a brown field where yellow machines ate the city. The sun was between buildings. Maria rolled over, held out a beer.

 

“You used to come around more. Now when you show, it’s like you’re someplace else,” she said.

 

Maria was the closest thing I had to a friend among messengers, now that Sam was gone. Like me, she was older than most other messengers in the plaza. Unlike me, she worked for the courier collective—not an algorithm. The radio strapped to her shoulder crackled as if it heard me thinking about how she got regular hours. She leaned her bike against mine, sat beside.

 

“How long are you on standby for?”

 

“They change the rules every day,” I said, shrugged. “Could be all night, could be five minutes.”

 

“You should come to the office tonight after delivery hours are over. I’ll put in a good word for you. Turnover is so high, nobody remembers why they fired you. You can drop the foodie gigs for real shifts.”

 

“I can’t take Sam’s old job,” I said.

 

“It’s not,” Maria said. “It was Greta’s, then Ulysses’s. And they both left, same as everyone. Look around. It’s all new faces all the time. They’re not long for it anyway. Not like us dinosaurs.”

 

“The dinosaurs weren’t long for it either,” I said.

 

Below, machines with tires the size of people moved earth around. It was hard to wrap my head around the scale of it all.

 

“What about you,” I said. “When are you leaving?”

 

“I’ll never leave. Those trucks will have to pave me over,” Maria said.

 

When I laughed she tossed me the beer. It twisted in the air, and I had to catch it.

 

Another messenger clicked over the brick plaza. She asked Maria if she was signing up for the race this weekend, and handed over a clipboard. Maria signed her name and passed it to me. I looked at the names, recognizing only a handful.

 

“I’m rusty,” I said and shook my head.

 

“Steel is real,” Maria said. She patted her bike frame.

 

A light snow was beginning to fall. I thought about telling her about Sam’s bike, the drunks, the guy in the vintage army jacket. But I didn’t want to drag her down with me. I was only just keeping above water myself.

 

—

 

My phone woke me. I was off standby. Back online. Jacking in, I thought. The app promised a bonus if I completed ten deliveries during the blizzard. I unlocked my apartment door and walked through the dark basement. The world was a void beyond the glass lobby door. I didn’t know the storm was approaching, and now it was here. I never checked the weather. Whatever happens happens, I figured. I stowed a fifth in my jacket, rolled airplane bottles into my socks, feeling like an operator suiting up.

 

Outside, snow whispered against snow. The wind gusted up, the snow rushing like someone shook the world. But it always settled. I felt I was cycling through empty rooms. There was no sound beside the low crush of tires against the piste of the road.

 

There were bikes left out in the blizzard. Now every bike was a ghost bike. Every house and streetlight was its ghost, too. You only really knew a place when you saw ghosts everywhere.

 

A snowplow emerged from behind a snowbank. I stopped short, skidding. The wall of air hit me and held me. The pan of its yellow lights splashed across the white world. Salt leaped down the hill after it.

 

I brought coffee to a snowbound office. “Cold out there, huh?” the man said as I brushed snow out of jacket creases. Five stars, no tip.

 

Each delivery was a window into a life being lived. Doors opened and showed me a sliver of a world that I knew nothing about. Once, I had an order for a bunch of balloons. When I tied them to my handlebars, I pictured them pulling me into the sky.

 

The cold bit the tip of my nose. Wind like knives through my jacket. I had my lights on but could only see a few feet ahead.

 

I grinded through the morning. Before long, I only needed one more drop before I made the bonus. The slush, salt, and sand alchemized into a thick paste. I had to kick my tires free.

 

Eventually they seized entirely. I locked my bike to a pole. Figured I’d walk.

 

Then I remembered Sam’s ghost bike. It wasn’t far. The big, meat-eating tires, the heavy frame only a little twisted from the collision. When he built it, he wanted to make sure he could go anywhere. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself.

 

At the square where Sam died, I picked some garbage out of the front rack. I brushed snow off the seat. The cheap cable lock was brittle with cold, snapped without a fight. I promised Sam a real chain when I was done.

 

I cranked through the storm, slush rooster-tailing behind me. It snowed like it was the end of the world. I felt good, leaning into skids and turns, falling into snowbanks. I finished the airplane bottles and spiked them into the ghost of a trashcan.

 

While I picked up the order at the restaurant, the customer messaged me. They asked if I could pick up Advil on the way to their place on the hill behind the university. Chipotle and ibuprofen. Breakfast of champions. They said they’d tip extra.

 

I wound through snowy streets and bridges over empty highways. People sculpted cars out of snowbanks. Beach chairs, cathode-ray televisions, sawhorses stood in empty spaces.

 

I fought up the hill. I leaned Sam’s bike against a snowbank, hiked over it to the brick triple-decker. When the door opened, I knew him immediately. He was wearing a sweatshirt, but it was Armstrong. The man in the vintage green army jacket.

 

I thought about going for his throat and wondered why he didn’t do the same. Didn’t he recognize me?

 

The tube scarf, I remembered.

 

“Morning,” he said, stepping into the threshold, winced, held his forehead.

 

His eyes were glassy, and there was a video game controller in his hand. Behind him was a living room that looked like the scene of a bombing. Cans of beer stood like soldiers on every surface, guarding against the world. It seemed familiar, didn’t seem worth it. Everyone was their own little tragedies. All standing on top each other and wearing a trench coat, walking around and trying to blend in. I handed over the delivery, turned to crunch back down the steps.

 

“Wait,” he said.

 

Here it comes, I thought.

 

“Oh, you got the ibuprofen. Thanks,” he said. He flashed me a smile and a thumbs up. “Had a few too many last night. You’re a lifesaver.”

 

I showed him a thumbs up with my thick glove.

 

I got on the ghost bike as the door crashed shut behind me. I looked around at the big snowy world and shivered. Five stars, no tip.

 

A plow went by, salting the land. It sounded like rain falling softly. The streets were empty, woolly with snow. The city seemed like it was under glass.

 

Maybe I had a shot at the race this weekend, I was thinking. None of the rookie messengers could ride like this in the snow.

 

I coasted down the hill. The plow turned a corner and the wind died down and the world was quiet. The falling snow streaked past, and I felt I was at the bridge of a spaceship, jumping to hyperspace.

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Rupture

Rupture

Story by Eileen Herbert-Goodall
Images and accompanying text by Joe Maccarone
Sound Track by Lhasa Mencur

 

Outside the window, rain obscured everything except the towering eucalypt. The tree was home to a pair of hawks and Janelle hoped they weren’t getting pummeled by the storm. At times, she wished she could be like them, that she could sprout wings and fly away, if only for a while. She sipped her tea and struggled to collect her thoughts; lately, her psyche seemed split, her entire being ungrounded. She longed for answers that proved elusive. Sometimes, bad things happened and there could be no explaining why.

 

Janelle drained her cup and placed it in the sink along with last night’s dishes. Evidently, if she didn’t do them, then they didn’t get done. But there was no point raising the issue with Brian; she needed to pick her battles, to save energy.

Almost a year had passed since the incident that marked their son’s drastic and seemingly irrevocable changes, and still the doctors had no idea what was going on. Various terms had been mentioned in an attempt to identify his condition—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Altered Mental Status, Elective Mutism. They could call it whatever they liked, it made no difference—so far nobody had managed to get Jeffery to speak again.

Not even her, his mother.

Shards of rain continued to strike the window. Outside, the eucalypt swayed; leaf litter scurried across the ground, hurled about by the wind, without free will. Was she any different?

Janelle’s husband entered the kitchen and she turned to see him making coffee.

‘You taking Jeffery to the psychiatrist today?’ Brian asked.

‘No, I thought I’d palm that job off to my assistant.’

He looked at her, teaspoon held in mid-air. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Not really. I’d like you to come with us for a change.’

‘I can’t, got a huge day at work. Two open houses and a couple of contracts on the table.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more involved.’

‘Involved?’

A flush of pink crept up Brian’s neck and Janelle experienced a jab of satisfaction upon realising her words had wounded him.

‘Is that what you think? That I’m not involved?’

‘Even Doctor Berwick said she hasn’t seen you in a while.’

‘When did she say that?’

‘Last time we saw her—a couple of weeks ago.’

He took a mouthful of coffee. ‘Well, somebody has to go to work around here.’

‘Excuse me?’

Brian held up a hand. ‘That came out wrong.’

‘It’s impossible for me to work right now.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why bring it up?’

He put down his cup. ‘We need an income, Janelle.’

‘I’d just like you to come to an appointment every now and then. Is that so much to ask?’

They stared at one another.

‘Sorry, but I’ve got to go.’ He retrieved his keys from the hook beside the pantry and disappeared into the hallway.

‘Of course you do,’ she called. ‘And go to hell while you’re at it.’

The front door slammed and she soon heard his car rumbling down the road.

Janelle turned to look outside once more. From where it stood battling the elements, the eucalypt appeared to observe her.

‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

Its branches swirled on with admirable forbearance. Or was it disappointment?

 

At first, he simply drew around the sides of a piece of paper—a wolf’s face here, a doodle there—but after a while, he began to write.

 

He read over the letter, then screwed it up and threw it into the little bin beside his desk. It was baby-ish to write about the noise inside his head. Stupid.

Jeffery stood, walked to the window and looked outside. He wanted to run around in the rain and let it wash the bad memories away. If only the wolf-men would leave him alone.

Doctor Berwick had brought a colleague into their session—one Professor Lycan from the Institute of Psychological Studies, who was apparently researching “unusual” psychological childhood conditions. Janelle wished Doctor Berwick had sought her permission to have this man present. Even a little warning would have been nice. She didn’t like the idea of Jeffery being observed by someone she didn’t know.

The professor’s hair, along with his neat beard, was gray-white. He wore round, steel-framed spectacles and sat scribbling in a notebook that rested against his legs. The sound of his pen running across paper seemed to fill the room. So far, he had said very little.

Jeffery stared at his shoes. Janelle could feel the tension emanating from his little body. She wondered if the doctors felt it too. Probably not. They weren’t attuned to him the way she was.

‘And there’s been no change in his behaviour?’ Doctor Berwick was saying. ‘No indication he’d like to interact more?’

‘Not particularly,’ Janelle said.

‘He’s still doing his drawings?’

‘Yes. ’

‘That’s good.’ Doctor Berwick glanced at Professor Lycan, who continued to write with feverish intensity. ‘It’s vital that he has a creative outlet, somewhere to express his feelings, so to speak.’

The professor looked up from his notebook. ‘Mrs Watson—’

‘Please, call me Janelle.’

‘Alright, Janelle—Jeffery is twelve years old, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how would you describe your relationship?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Would you describe Jeffery’s attachment to you as positive?’

She tilted her head. ‘Of course.’

‘What about the relationship with his father?’

‘Brian works full-time, but when he’s home they get along well. Why do you ask?’

The professor placed his writing materials on a nearby desk. ‘Studies have shown that parents of behaviourally inhibited children often perceive them as vulnerable. Such perceptions can influence how they engage with their children.’

‘How so?’

‘For instance, parents who regard their children as socially withdrawn often endorse practices that discourage independence and exploration.’

Janelle held the professor’s spectacled gaze.

A clock on the wall ticked.

‘Are you suggesting my husband and I are overprotective?’ she asked finally.

‘I’m sure the professor is simply trying to get an idea of Jeffery’s life at home,’ Doctor Berwick said.

‘His life at home is fine. I take it, Professor, you’re aware of the incident my son and I witnessed around a year ago?’

‘Doctor Berwick has filled me in on that history, yes.’

‘That history, as you call it, is where the problem lies,’ Janelle said. ‘Before then, he was a content, happy boy. He attended school, enjoyed play-dates with friends. He spoke. But after that day, everything changed.’

‘No doubt there’s significant traumatic residue associated with that event,’ the professor said. ‘But Jeffery needs to realise that what happened is in the past. He needs to make peace with the bogeyman.’

‘The bogeyman?’ Janelle was at a loss as to why the professor would refer to the stuff of folklore and scary night-time stories when discussing her son’s condition. It was 1987, not the Dark Ages. Surely he understood that what Jeffery had seen was terrifyingly real.

‘I think Professor Lycan means we want to create a safe environment in which Jeffery is encouraged to face his fears,’ said Doctor Berwick, ‘to understand that what happened was an extremely unfortunate, one-off event.’

Wasn’t that what she’d been trying to do? To make sure he felt safe? To make sure the goddamn bogeyman didn’t, once again, come in and blow up his world.

 

 

‘May I ask Jeffery to do something?’ the professor said.

Janelle crossed her arms. What was she supposed to say? ‘Okay.’

The professor grabbed his pen and notebook and passed them to Jeffery. ‘I believe you like to draw.’

Jeffery nodded.

‘How about you draw whatever comes to mind when you think of that day at the bank. You remember that day, don’t you?’

Another nod and then Jeffery opened the notebook. No one spoke as he tended to the task at hand. Janelle shifted in her seat as the clock on the wall continued to tick.

A few minutes later, Jeffery placed the notebook on the desk and dropped his gaze to the floor.

The professor retrieved his notebook and studied the image. He then handed the notebook to Dr Berwick, who examined it briefly before passing it to Janelle.

 

 

There had been two of them: they’d burst into the building screaming orders, shotguns raised, their faces hidden behind strange wolf masks. The first man had hurried towards the counter and started yelling: ‘Everyone get down and don’t move.’

Janelle kept still, her face pressed to the floor. Jeffery lay nearby, eyes pinned open by toothpicks of terror.

‘Open your drawer,’ the first man said. ‘Get the money out. Come on. Put it in the bag. Now.’

‘Okay, okay,’ the attendant said.

‘Come on. Money in. Move it.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Shut up and move.’

‘I’m going as fast as I can…’ the attendant said, fumbling with the bag, ‘…doing my best.’

‘Christ, shut up. Or you’ll get a bullet in the brain.’

It occurred to Janelle that perhaps she was having a nightmare, that her psyche was drawing upon some movie she’d seen, or a story she’d once read. Maybe it was all just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream.

‘Sorry,’ the attendant said. ‘This has never happened to me before. I—’

‘You wanna die?’

‘No, no, I don’t.’

‘Then stop talking.’

‘Sure, okay. I just—’

The sound of a gunshot bounced off the walls, reverberating in what was otherwise a terrible and gaping silence.

‘What the hell?’ The second man strode towards the counter. ‘We said nobody shoots.’

The first man answered: ‘You heard him—he wouldn’t shut up.’

‘Jesus! Grab the bag and let’s go.’

Janelle watched Jeffery, who now had his eyes squeezed shut. She would do anything—anything—if only he were kept safe.

The second man began shouting orders: ‘Everybody stay down and no one else gets hurt.’

Before long the men had fled through the building’s front doors, and the horror was over. Or so Janelle thought.

She glanced from Doctor Berwick to the professor and back again. Janelle felt somehow responsible for what she was looking at, for the memory that had scarred Jeffery’s mind. But what could she have done? How could she have possibly foreseen events set to unfold that day?

The professor took the notebook from Janelle and turned to Jeffery. ‘You must have been very scared.’

Jeffery shrugged.

‘Do you see such wolf-men very often?’

He nodded.

‘In your mind?’ The professor pointed to his temple. ‘In your dreams?’

Another nod.

‘Sometimes I have bad dreams, too—everyone does.’

‘It’s not from a dream,’ Janelle said. ‘The men were wearing wolf masks.’

The professor continued to focus on Jeffery. ‘Well, you know what?’

Naturally, Jeffery didn’t answer.

‘Those bad men aren’t coming back,’ the professor said. ‘They’re in prison and they’ll be there for a very long time.’

Janelle was certain the offenders had never been apprehended. What, exactly, was the professor up to? ‘I think Jeffery’s had enough for today.’

 

 

The professor stared at her. For a moment, she thought he would insist upon having them stay, so he could continue studying them as he might have studied curiosities at a freak show.

Instead, he said, ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you both. I hope we can talk again.’

She rose to her feet. ‘Come on, Jeffery. It’s time to go.’

‘Thanks for coming in.’ Doctor Berwick stood and clasped her hands together. ‘Be sure to make another appointment, won’t you.’

Janelle kept quiet as she led her son from the room. Who would they turn to now?

By the time they arrived home, the day had cleared. After lunch, Janelle took Jeffery outside. There was a pond in the back garden and he enjoyed playing near its edges. As they approached the eucalypt, she spotted something on the ground—a nest, and beside it an empty egg. She wondered about the baby bird and scanned the tree, but saw only leaves and branches. Jeffery squatted down to survey the damage.

 

 

After a while, he looked up at her. He seemed neither upset, nor surprised, by what they’d found. Janelle took him by the hand and they continued on.

When they reached the lake’s edge, Jeffery crouched to inspect the water. He’d linger there for hours given the chance, and Janelle would have been happy to let him. Truth be told, she dreaded her husband’s return from work every day, the forced conversation, the awkward silences. She only ever managed to relax when he wasn’t around. Then again, maybe she really had become selfish and difficult, as Brian claimed the other night.

She sat on the garden seat facing the pond. Shafts of golden light shifted upon the water.

As was often the case when she had time to think, Janelle began to mentally list the potential reasons as to why she and Brian had grown apart. To begin with, they hardly had any common interests. Years ago, they’d enjoyed sailing—that was how they’d met—but the hobby fell by the wayside after Jeffery came along. Their financial situation certainly didn’t help; the real estate agency had been struggling for months and money was tight. Then there was Jeffery’s refusal to speak, which had been a tremendous strain on them both. And yet, he wasn’t to blame for their problems; he was just a scared, young boy who’d been damaged by the world.

In any event, it seemed neither she nor Brian had the courage to voice the truth: their marriage was in trouble. It was easier, she suspected, for them to pretend that the benefits of their relationship outweighed the drawbacks. Besides, they needed to consider Jeffery; keeping their homelife on a relatively even keel was essential to his wellbeing. She watched as he skimmed stones across the lake’s glassy surface. She had failed once to protect him, but wouldn’t do so again. Not if she could help it.

Later, as they walked to the house, Janelle again inspected the eucalypt. There was still no sign of the hawks.

Janelle placed their meals on the dining table before pouring them each a glass of water. Jeffery gave a smile, which she knew was his way of saying thank you. Brian continued to scan the real estate section of the newspaper. She sighed, but he gave no sign of having noticed.

She sat and began to eat. Janelle had experimented with a new casserole. The recipe promised to deliver “a knock-out punch of flavor”, but she thought it tasted bland. Then again, maybe the problem rested with her. Perhaps she had lost the capacity to enjoy anything.

At last, Brian put down his newspaper. ‘How did it go today?’

For some reason that she couldn’t identify, Janelle felt the need to make her husband work to deliver meaning. ‘How did what go?’

‘Jeffery’s appointment?’

‘It went smashingly well. Thanks for asking.’

Brian thumped the table, making Jeffery flinch. ‘What’s gotten into you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes you do. I can’t do a thing right these days. It’s as if my very presence offends you.’

Janelle realised this was quite possibly true—maybe she couldn’t stand being around her husband anymore. She began to clear their plates. ‘Actually, your presence would have been very much appreciated today.’

He leant back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I want you to be happy—I want us to be happy—but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix things.’

Janelle couldn’t think of a response. She knew Brian was trying to move forward, to take a step in terms of bridging the yawning rift that stretched between them, yet her instinctive reaction had been to freeze. She seemed unable to reconnect on any level. Perhaps she’d become accustomed to their dysfunction, maybe even addicted to it.

In any event, the moment passed.

‘I work hard to pay the bills,’ he said, ‘to keep a roof over our heads—’

Janelle returned to the table. ‘Oh, that’s right, I don’t work.’

And there it was—the relentless merry-go-round of hurtful misunderstandings and accusations that swept them up in its momentum, again and again.

 

 

‘I never said that.’

‘But it’s what you meant,’ she said.

‘Why do you always twist my words?’

Jeffery jumped up. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Just stop.’

Janelle stared at him, transfixed. It was as if Jeffery were the only person in the room, the only person in the world. His expression, pleading and distraught, swamped her vision. She knew she should say something. Anything. But the shock of hearing him speak had struck her dumb. Slowly, she rose to her feet.

‘Son?’ Brian said.

Jeffery turned and walked away.

Janelle watched his receding form, then met her husband’s gaze. His face was filled with pain…and something else. Relief? Hope?

Moments later, Brian trailed after their son.

She started to follow, then stopped. She needed time to process what had happened.

Janelle crossed the kitchen and peered out the window. Silent and watchful, the eucalypt stood looking in. Upon one of its branches, two small shapes sat huddled together. She watched them for a while and then returned to the table once more.

 

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Thousands and Thousands of Thousand Oaks

When I’m watching the street fill up with leaves when dusk morphs
to a waxy flickering to a phone pinging dad I’m inside this bar
I’m line dancing I’m filled with holes for the man with the Glock
releasing the safety must be orgasmic and a background check
equals emasculate one day is like another and then it’s another
school café yoga studio church another concert hall another
outdoor space for cold bodies quiet like a pile of unlucky armadillos
when a friend arrived two days before the one at the synagogue
when he said I have a right to carry to sleep with it to fuck it
the pasta went from hearty to heart riot though I wanted to handshake
a civil understanding on the footprints leading to a glowworm cave
of mourners to the police officers’ eyes the line dance toward
the hearse that my pain string was taut that our country’s pain string
is taut that our country is electric like a frying pan with a frayed cord
always a fray away from fire

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Two Poems with Parents

Sleeping in My Childhood Bedroom as an Adult

Glow in the dark stars tumble

into black, their light hanging

 

like the feet

of a man tied to death. I trace

 

the outlines of memories and pull them

to my nose, they smell like

patchouli and my father’s

velvet coat. Gray shapes

 

dance to the window. Are they

the ghosts of my dead dogs

or the angels I overheard

my mother asking for help? Or maybe just

teenage headlights, sneaking back into their parents’

driveway. The laundry

room moans and shakes

 

behind a poster

of New York City’s face. The dryer thumps

against my wall. Round

round round. Clothes rise

and fall

like the air lifting up my chest. My mother’s

Elvis T-shirt. My father’s white

 

briefs. The noise goes

in circles. Up

and down. Taped on the fridge

is a photo dated two

days after my birth. My mother is holding

my head to her chest, my feet swing above

 

Elvis’s bleached teeth. And I still remember

my father

getting nervous and shouting

and shutting

 

the door when my brother and I found

him in his white briefs. Rise

and fall. I focus on the dark

and the noise and the clothes

that make the

dark warm. Up

 

and down.

Rise

and fall. Round

round round.

 

Sitting in a Classroom Where Everyone Is Smarter Than Me (Except Maybe That Guy with the Taco Tattoo)

I want to pull my knees to my chest

and make myself small and see

through like the balled-up sheets

of cling wrap I find in the drawers of my mother’s

kitchen. But I don’t do that

because I wouldn’t be small

or see through to the people

sitting across the table. They would still see

a girl with uncombed hair

wearing a baggy t-shirt she got free from a bank

because she never learned

how to not be ashamed

of her breasts. And they might find it strange

if this girl slipped her feet from

the mud-painted rainboots

that keep her weighted

to the government-bought linoleum,

and then if she pulled

her feet and the hand-knit socks

that held them up to the seat of her chair,

and what if her neck let go

so that her forehead sat balanced between

the tops of her knees.

Yes, that would look strange.

Instead I move my left thigh

over my right and tie my calves

into a knot. I can’t see

my legs beneath the table

but I imagine them as the twisted strings

of green and pink

taffy my father pulled from his suitcase

whenever he was afraid

that he’d been gone

for too long. Throw away

your wrappers, he told me. My mother yelled

when she found them

rolled into worlds

and tucked inside

the corners of kitchen drawers.

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Two Poems

Once when I was eight

and my sister seven, tensions boiled over

 in a game of hide & seek

& I slapped her. Thwack.

 Her head shook while streams on her cheek

loamed into deepening red.

 She didn’t talk to me for a week.

No chocolates, no sorry, no nothing.

 I even did her homework for a day. Still nothing.

She finally spoke when she found me

 crying in a corner after India had lost a cricket match.

Today, years later she isn’t picking up my calls

 & I’m here wondering if she’s busy

or simply pissed with me.

 I haven’t seen her in long & in this hour of prolonged dusk,

I’m trying to summon facts on her.

 But as I pace on my balcony, phone in hand,

watched by a sun rasping blood across a browning sky

 all I gather is the colour of her slapped cheek.

And how on reconciliation after a week, she had said

 I just wanted to see you cry.

 

Sambar on my shoes

I spot you in the cafeteria sitting with a faceless stranger

while I await my dosa at the desolate counter

you sip what seems like watermelon juice although

I’m sure my blood is just as gruesome and thick

that must be how your cheeks are so red and faint

like blushes of sky at dawn attracting birds of fury

and strangeness unknown I see some wrens beak you playfully

the crimson spreads through your neck like a field of clover

the stranger inundated with anticipation he crosses his legs

underneath the table when you let out a laugh

I head back to work my appetite punctured my spirit flensed

my dosa tray trembles in the tremors of discovery

buried fears don’t nibble they swallow

I try to tell myself it was probably someone else

but I find incriminating evidence when my colleague points out

continents of sambar on my white converse shoes

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